Free Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint by John Cornwell

 
A friend of the Oxford days, Mark Pattison, wrote to Newman in their latter years: ‘However remote my intellectual standpoint may now be from that which I may presume to be your own, I can still truly say that I have learnt more from you than from any one else with whom I have ever been in contact.’ 1 Newman, as I suggested at the outset of this narrative, was, and is, for his time, and for subsequent generations, one of those rare individuals who answers a variety of needs in the souls of many – however remote his own standpoint from theirs, or theirs from his. It is an appropriate juncture, then, to ask how Newman speaks today to all manner of Christians, peoples of different Faiths, and indeed no Faith at all.
Newman’s broadest lesson is contained in the narrative of his life, and points to a powerful basis for religious freedom and respect for all religions. Each, he believed, will find God in the act of searching. Life is a pilgrimage, every personal history unique. ‘The religious history of each individual’, he once said, ‘is as solitary and complete as the history of the world.’ 2 Writing in 1850 of the ‘process by which a soul is led from falsehood to truth’, he asks:
Is every one born in a true system? is it not undeniable that, if there be a truth, the majority of men have to change? Can they change without doubt and inquiry? Do you think that those who have become Catholics, have done so to their own gratification ? Was truth forced on them, or a change passionately and greedily sought for? 3
     
Having travelled through early scepticism, to Evangelicalism, to High Anglicanism, to Tractarianism, before finally coming to rest in the Catholic Church, Newman of all people recognised the responsibility of each individual to be a seeker after the truth: wherever it might lead. As he wrote in his poem ‘The Pilgrim’, of himself, he ‘kept safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim-lot’. 4 And this is a pilgrim who not only finds himself, early in the journey, wandering by night across rough terrain without roads, without maps, but climbing mountains.
We make progress, Newman wrote, ‘not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not
himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule’. 5 He warns against blind leaps of faith, or acquiescence in unquestioned authority. The ‘pledged pilgrim’ accepts nevertheless without question the universal reality of individual conscience, and freedom of the will. None is spared, he is saying, the promptings of the voice of conscience; we are moral agents with the capacity and the obligation to make moral choices. While he encountered from his youth intimations of a personal Moral Judge within the voice of conscience, he was nevertheless seeking a religious truth that had a reality beyond himself. He was utterly opposed to the modern tendency to relegate religion to the realms of the private, the purely subjective. From the Early Fathers he adopted the notion that ‘seeds of the Word’ were spread throughout the great religions of the world, with salvic potential for those who had not been exposed to Christianity; the same idea would surface in the Second Vatican Council. 6
The search for truth, he insisted, engages the whole person: ‘The heart is commonly reached not through the reason, but through the imagination …’ And the power of imagination was for Newman dialectical, playing on polarities that were familiar in the poetry of the preceding generation. Coleridge had anticipated Newman’s dialectical ‘saying and unsaying’ in a vivid metaphor in the Biographia Literaria : like an insect caught in the eddies of a stream: ‘… the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no