Page 21 - The Portal magazine - March 2025

THE P RTAL March 2025 Page 21

Unfolding Newman’s

hedgehog

Fr Peter Conley

R STEPHEN Dessain reminds us that: There are lessons Newman must teach us. We so easily forget
Fthat the aim of all our work should be the spread of God’s kingdom on earth, through His church, and
when we study Newman’s philosophy we sometimes forget that this was the motive underlying every part of
his activity. (Newman Studiem, 3 (1957) p.13).

Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent when I came home, I began in earnest, and I have
(1870) represents a detailed travelog for evangelisation slowly got through it. (JHN, Letters and Diaries
in action. The Grammar opens with ‘Modes of XXV, p.199).
Holding Propositions’ and, at length, moves into the
imaginative contemplation of ‘Revealed Religion’. Fr Edward Caswell, in the fly-leaf of his copy of the
Grammar, summarises it as “being part philosophical,
The final paragraph of the text culminates with an and part theological”. We see both of these aspects
encounter with Jesus who says to us: “I am the Good blending when, in light of the critical response to his
Shepherd, and I know mine and they know me. My work, Newman with scholarly humility, remarks to
sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow Coleridge that:
me.”
“It may be full of defects, certainly
In this communion, through prayer and the characterised by incompleteness and crudeness –
sacraments, we learn to know, love and serve Jesus not but it is something to have started a problem, and
by an ‘abstract notion’, but rather ‘real assent’. Cor ad mapped in part a country, if I have done nothing
Cor Loquitur. more.”
(JHN, Letters and Diaries XXV, p.280).
Newman shares his sense of being a fulfilled
missionary disciple, in response to Christ, with Fr Newman has left us a Michelin-like route planner
Henry James Coleridge when he states: to a deeper faith experience which needs opening,
spreading out on the surface of our thought processes
“I have no further call on me, I have done my and read with care and reflection. Its original societal
best, and given my all – and I leave it to Him to context has many Apologia ‘Arabian Tales’ echoes for
prosper or not, as He thinks fit, for whom I have us today. As John Paul II notes:
done it.”
(JHN, Letters and Diaries XXV, p.51). Newman was born in troubled times which
knew not only political and military upheaval
Newman, as a weary traveller, in what he considered of people, but also turbulence of soul. Old
as his twilight, shares with candid humour his certitudes were shaken…In such a world,
struggles to capture the essence of his Essay on Assent Newman came eventually to a remarkable
with Aubrey de Vere: synthesis of faith and reason which were for him
“like two wings on which the human spirit rises
It is on the subject, which has teased me for to the contemplation of the truth.”
this 20 or 30 years. I felt I had something to say (Fides et Ratio). (Address on the
upon it, yet, whenever I attempted, the sight Bicentennial of Newman’s Death).
I saw vanished, plunged into a thicket, curled
itself up like a hedgehog or changed colours like As Fr Stephen Dessain concludes: The Grammar
a chameleon. At last, four years ago, when I was was ‘meditated and premeditated upon”. May we do
up at Glion over the Lake of Geneva, a thought the same as we write the living Gospel of our own
came into my head as the clue, the ‘Open Sesame’, daily voyage into the hands of, as Newman puts it to
of the whole subject, and I at once wrote it down, Marianne Bowden, our “loving Father and Redeemer”.
and I pursued it about the Lake of Lucerne. Then, (JHN, Letters and Diaries XXII, p.247-8).