Newman at prayer, according to von Speyr

Adrienne von Speyr relates the following account of Newman’s prayer-life and personality in one of her numerous visions, dictated to her friend and co-worker, Hans Urs von Balthasar. These accounts are collected in The Book of All Saints (Ignatius, 2008), which includes a wide variety of persons, mostly canonized saints but also a few surprises (e.g., Joseph Haydn, Kierkegaard). Her description of Newman is, thankfully, far more kind and sympathetic than her less-than-flattering estimation of Thomas Aquinas. I thought this was a wonderful account of Newman.

I see him in prayer. He prays so carefully, with a fastidious, good love, a love that has no patience for anything that is not entirely pure and entirely righteous [rechtschaffen]. He brings everything that is troubling and occupying him into prayer with him. At first, it is all unsorted; he sorts it out in prayer. And in prayer, he receives a certainty concerning whether what he brought is really worthwhile, whether God can use it, whether God can bless it. If God blesses it, he contemplates it once again in prayer and looks to see whether God’s light is now reflecting from it. His thoughts, his concerns, his recommendations are like diamonds that were not initially polished, stones he was not entirely sure were in fact really diamonds. Then the expert, that is, God, inspects them and gives them a true polish, and in the end Newman also sees that they were in fact precious stones. But one would have to say that almost everything he brings to God is really a diamond and that he already made the selection in a holy way.

…

(And his work?) He loves it. He loves it, because it is God’s work. …It is often the case that he writes, as it were, with his blood and attains to insights with the last of his strength. There is much that is demanded of him personally. In fact, he stands in relation to his work the way a founder of an Order stands in relation to that which he founds.

(And people?) He loves them. It is a bit odd. He sees them as God’s creatures, but in a way that somewhat resembles an entomologist who loves his insects. He often has difficulty making the first human contact. He receives it first through the translation of God.

…

Adrienne von Speyr, The Book of All Saints (Ignatius, 2008), pp. 261-262.

On being a shy theologian

Excerpt from Newman the Theologian by J.-H. Walgrave, O.P. (Sheed & Ward 1960), pp. 18-20.

This Platonism deeply affected Newman’s spiritual outlook in his Anglican days. It inspired many of his sublimest sermons at Oxford, sermons penetrated with poetic feeling. It was never to be absent from either his sensibility or his thought, but it became increasingy tempored, balanced by another typically English trait: the taste for the “given,” a clear sense of empirical reality. There we have, as it were, the obverse, the counterpoise, of his Platonism. In fact, an extreme tension pervades Newman’s thought, drawn as it was by two opposing tendencies of the English mind, namely, a Platonic longing for immaterial ideas and invisible realities, and the need for facts precisely perceived, recorded and verified. This latter tendency holds in check the possible extravagance of the other. Aided by a similar influence — his study of Aristotle, the “great master” he venerated as “the oracle of nature and of truth,” and the Aristotelianism traditional for seven centuries in Catholic philosophy — it succeeded in gradually detaching Newman from certain extreme conclusions drawn from the Platonist, or rather Platonising, standpoint so congenial to him. For example, for many years he held it not impossible that the physical qualitites we perceive by our senses are not genuine properties of the real world, but purely subjective impressions, relative to the structure of our bodies and corresponding to a divine “economy” which uses them as signs giving us a hint of a higher, invisible world.

…It might be of interest to study Newman in the light of modern characterology, were it not that its findings are still so tentative and provisional. None the less, it is very tempting to see in Newman one of Jung’s introverted types.

Newman, in fact, exhibits strikingly the characteristic of this type: the Platonic tendency to substitute for the realist, commonsense view of the world, an introverted conception, adapted to the needs of the interior life; a vivid sense of the strangeness of the world, in which the soul feels itself an alien: finally, in his reactions to the external world, a constant hesitancy, a perpetual uncertainty. Consider his ambiguous attitude towards the beauties of nature. When he encounters them directly by the contact of sense, he invariably feels ill at ease, unresponsive; but no sooner are they presented indirectly, interiorly, in memory, than they move him to ecstacy. Consider, too, his seeming “egocentricity,” because of which his heart, so sensitive and hungry for friendship, could never give itself completely; whence his continual, painful sense of isolation. All this is characteristic of the introverted type described by Jung.