‘Echoes from Home’: The Personalist Ground of Newman’s Ecclesiology. Affection as the Key to Newman’s Intellectual Discernment on the Issue of Church

Abstract

Newman's majestic work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (October, 1845), explicated a logical argument for the Roman communion as the rightful heir of the Apostolic church, culminating in an ecclesiastical odyssey that began almost thirty years earlier in his religious conversion of 1816. I suggest that in addition to the intellectual import of the Essay, at least of equal significance is the principle underlying Newman's analysis, which is that intellectual discernment through affection is the ground of faith. For more than two decades, Newman's journey traveled along these two parallel tracks-that of religious epistemology grounded in the affections, and that of ecclesiastical discernment-ultimately arriving in the Roman Catholic Church. groundwork for the Essay was laid in Newman's final University Sermon written almost two years earlier (February 2, 1843). Here we discover a major clue in a metaphor Newman used to describe his sense of dogma: They are the echoes from our Home. Home is the window through which we see the vision that inspired Newman's theology of Church. Home, synonymous with affection for Newman, was not a mere literary device, but rather the source of his first and lasting experiences of deep affection. Thus Newman forged a religious epistemology whereby affection grounded intellect, an insight he described in Oxford University Sermon XII. Affectivity propelled his search for God through Evangelicalism and the Church of England, and then to the hope for a reformed Anglican communion, as he sought a complementarity between his intellect and his affections. This search, guided by Newman's two tracks of religious epistemology grounded in the affections and that of ecclesiastical discernment, threaded its way through important documents and relationships: his correspondence with his brother Charles in the 1820's; a major series of sermons in 1825; his theological analysis of the Arian heresy in the early 1830's; the little-studied Liturgy Sermon series of 1830; one of his most pointed sermons on the subject, entitled The Love of Relations and Friends; the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church on ecclesiastical theory; and the Lectures on Justification, with substantial attention to affectivity. Newman harmonized intellect and affection in the Essay, wherein home and Church became one and the same. I will review the documents cited above, as well as Newman's relationships with family and friends, and additional documents to substantiate the thesis that affectivity, or personalism, was the ground of Newman's ecclesiology. Upon identifying the Roman community as the for his spirit, he synthesized his ecclesiological search with his affectively-driven epistemology, concluding his voyage and coming into port after a rough sea (Apologia, ed. Ker, 214).