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S i d e b a r
Newman's Value For Us
By David J. DeLaura
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IT is precisely because of these two qualities his profound sense of the always vulnerable inwardness of the highest human awareness and his openness to the inviolable otherness of the holy as it impinges on human life and human history that Newman joins Kierkegaard as a great searcher and scrutinizer of the modern soul. Both men speak with some of the power possessed by the Old Testament prophets.
During the last two centuries when most religious thought has been distinctively dissolving, destructive, the dwindling confession of a loosening hold on traditional religious certainties and modes of feeling, Newman's distinction is to stand with Kierkegaard, with Dostoyevsky, with T. S. Eliot, and with the great French religious writers of the twentieth century, Claudel, Pguy, Bloy, Bernanos, as a permanent standard of judgment against the complacent secularism of the modern world. Within the English tradition, he is the unrivaled master in modern letters especially in the unduly neglected sermons, masterpieces of religious insight and psychological discernment. . . .
It should be noted how deeply and daringly Newman acknowledged the subjective side of religious conversion and commitment. . . . In effect, Newman's answer was to prove the validity of religious experience (or at least his own) in the only way possible, by giving the fullest intellectual, imaginative, and emotional account of himself. . . .
We simply have nothing like Newman in modern letters: a profoundly evangelical religious visionary, at the same time an extraordinarily comprehensive personality, a supreme stylist and theorist of style, even a great wit these are only a few of his roles which claim our attention.
Despite his undeniable limitations, despite the occasional tortuosities of his special pleading, despite his Victorian provinciality, Newman can stimulate and challenge the reader on more sides than almost any other figure in modern letters. Newman's is not simply the supreme modern attempt in English to make orthodox and historic Christianity a living option for the psychologically and historically oriented modern mind and imagination: for in him we have rich and still largely unexploited resources both religious and humanistic. . . .
Newman, like the grimmer T. S. Eliot after him, insists that man cannot even be man without God, that (in the words of the Apologia) human nature can only be rescued from its misery, not simply by restoring it on its own level, but by lifting it up to a higher level than its own. This perspective, the literally unspeakable demand in the eyes of the modern secular humanist, Newman insists is integral to a unified view of human life.
David J. DeLaura Newman's Apologia as Prophecy in John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New York: Norton, 1968), 498, 503
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