John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition: Convergences in Contribution to Development Theory

Abstract

John Henry Newman and the Thomistic Tradition:Convergences in Contribution to Development Theory Andrew Meszaros Thomist Difficulties: Certain Difficulties Felt by Thomists in John Henry Newman's Teaching Considered Briefly It is no secret that Catholic theology in the twentieth century, permeated as it was by the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, struggled at times to embrace John Henry Newman's. Now that Catholic theology is more diverse (and fragmented), Newman's thought has succeeded in capturing the minds of post-conciliar theologians without scruple. But for Thomists, the difficulty of assimilating Newman's thought persists. At a symposium at the Angelicum in Rome, I gave voice to this struggle, but in a style more anecdotal than academic. For its colloquialisms, hyperbole, and length, I apologize: In certain provinces such as religion and those closely related to it, such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, Newman claims that "egotism is true modesty."1 By this he means that he is happy to speak for himself on these matters, and he has a right to do so; but he does not feel the right to "lay down the law," as it were, for others. He can but speak from his own experiences with the conviction that it might [End Page 423] very well resonate with others. One provides his own account, and the serious and honest listener considers it: egotism is true modesty. Speaking both egotistically and modestly, then, I confess that, as someone who came to know Aristotle before Newman, and whose philosophical and theological inclinations, in grosso modo, follow Saint Thomas, there are some passages in Newman's writings which I find puzzling and in need of explanation. And I will admit that, if I am in a particularly grumpy mood, there are other famous Newman phrases that I find not only over-quoted, but quite frankly annoying. What is this business about man not being a reasoning animal, but a seeing and feeling one? Or logic being a sorry rhetoric with the multitude?2 What is Newman's problem with universals? And why do the notional and the abstract receive such derision?3 Why is the imagination so important?4 And it is one thing for Newman to arrive at God differently from, say, the five ways, but whence the uncertainty of the reality of this world?5 And [End Page 424] in my more desperate moments, when I speculate about alternative universes, I wonder what Newman's Essay on Development would look like were it not contaminated with the empiricist grammar of ideas and impressions.6 Thankfully, as I indicated to the symposium participants, I am rarely in a bad mood and I am even more rarely contemplating alternative universes. Though the above consternating Newmanisms can be explained and contextualized to make Newman more palatable for the Thomist, we would do well to entertain the possibility that it is precisely his own [End Page 425] non-Thomistic, non-Scholastic context that is responsible for some of his greatest contributions. His religious apologetic focuses more on the subjective dispositions of the heart than it does on the metaphysics of causality or the "evidences" of true religion. His reflections on conscience move them far beyond the realm of morals, and into the arena of Christian apologetics and fundamental theology. These are some of the key insights that made Newman so influential in the twentieth century. For more than one hundred years now Newman scholars have been explaining, documenting, contextualizing, and historically reconstructing Newman's ideas precisely because they could be so easily misunderstood, given their idiosyncrasy. The time of Newman's own writing coincided with the great retrieval of Scholastic philosophy and theology among Roman Catholics. And the time of Newman's reception coincided with an ecclesiastical consolidation, sanction, and prescription of this Scholastic tradition. Newman's writings were altogether different. They were unique in both style and substance.7 For this reason, one seminal part of Newman reception in the twentieth century has been the attempt to reconcile or show the compatibility—and perhaps even complementarity—between Newman and Thomism or the Scholastic tradition more generally.8 This work has been undertaken by figures such as Erich Przywara...