Page 21 - The Portal magazine - March 2025
P. 21

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).
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