THE
P RTAL
March 2016
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Newman on “Hope”
Dr Stephen Morgan
In the
first of his Catholic Letters St Peter gives us a text that could almost be the method statement
for the New Evangelisation. (I’m neither interested in nor, for the purposes of this article, am I going to
entertain the question of whether the first Bishop of Rome, the first Pope, actually wrote it, or for that matter
whether he was in any sense recognisable to us today - Bishop of Rome or Pope, I’m content to side with what
has been handed down to us from the Fathers.) He wrote, “But sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being
ready always to satisfy everyone that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you.”
By the way, I’m using the
Douai-Rhiems translation in
the vain hope of weaning my
readers off an attachment
to the Authorised Version.
(Authorised by whom, we might
now ask; not the Pope, that’s for
sure).
Elsewhere, in my sermon at
Warwick
Street
for
JHN’s feast, which may be found
on the web site of the Ordinariate
of Our Lady of Walsingham www.ordinariate.
org.uk) I’ve written of how Newman’s theology of
friendship offers a way of manifesting that hope and
thereby giving cause for the question to be asked. As
we approach Easter, the feast of hope sans pareil, it is
hope itself that I think it would be helpful to consider.
At first encounter – like all too many Victorians (as
he was for the whole of his life as a Catholic) – Blessed
John Henry Newman can come across as being what a
friend of mine calls a “glum cove”: there’s a lot of death,
sin and error in his writings, but then there was in the
world around him, and still is.
There are even those who have started a small
cottage industry publishing articles and monographs
seeking to advance the thesis that his conversion
was motivated by, and much of his Catholic life
marred with, periods of profound depression. I
suppose the authors of these pieces have bills to pay,
like the rest of us.
Nevertheless, apart from the fact that it is simply
impossible to reach a safe diagnosis about anybody’s
mental health at a distance of 150 years, still less if
it is based on a few examples of his works carefully
chosen to support the hypothesis, the general tenor of
contents page
his writings – not just the works
he published but his sermons
and his letters and diaries – when
taken as a whole, at almost any
period in his long, long life reveal
a man imbued with a deep, almost
irrepressible joy, firmly founded
on the theological virtue of hope.
But hope – neither for Newman
nor in reality – is not optimism.
Since
the
so-called
Enlightenment, our civilisation
has been under the spell of “progress”, the notion that,
through human endeavour, things are just getting
better. Despite the evidence to the contrary, which
Newman saw only too well, this spell manifests itself
in a Pollyanna-ish optimism: things will all turn out
right because they always do.
This can all too quickly flip into unconscionable
despair when people finally realise that “it ain’t
so”. Hope, for Newman, grounded in his reading of
the Greek Fathers, is a different beast altogether. It is
different because, far from being based on an idea,
Hope is based on a relationship: our relationship with
God, made Man in Jesus Christ.
Hope is the well-founded belief that, whatever
present sufferings we are to endure, God has shown
us, in the Scriptures but most particularly in the Life,
Death and Resurrection of Christ Jesus, His Son, that
He is to be trusted. We can have hope because we know
in whom we trust.
Go back to any work of Newman’s on which you
can lay your hands and read it through that lens. You
will see then why he had more than a little euphoria
each year when Alleluia made its reappearance in the
lexicon of the liturgy.