THE
P RTAL
January 2016
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
The Jubilee of Mercy
What would Blessed John Henry Newman have to say
about the Jubilee Year of Mercy?
The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan points us in the right direction
T
he 2016th Year of our Salvation is one with powerful resonances for those who seek to further
the cause of Blessed John Henry Newman, for it is the bicentenary of what he referred to as his “first
conversion”. That it is also a jubilee year dedicated to the theme of God’s mercy is one of those happy
conjunctions that our non-believing neighbours and fri ends might call a co-incidence but which we can
rejoice in as an out working of the mysterious providence of our loving Father.
In the autumn of 1816, the young
Newman was unwell and spent the
season reading, amongst other things,
Calvinist devotional books to which
his tutor, Walter Mayers, had directed
his attention. The effect of this
reading is recorded in forensic detail
in his great spiritual autobiography,
the Apologia pro vita sua of 1864:
When I was fifteen, ... a great
change of thought took place in
me. I fell under the influences
of a definite Creed, and received
into my intellect impressions of
dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never
been effaced or obscured. ... and making me
rest in the thought of two and two only absolute
and luminously self-evident beings, myself and
my Creator; — for while I considered myself
predestined to salvation, my mind did not dwell
upon others, as fancying them simply passed
over, not predestined to eternal death. I only
thought of the mercy to myself. (Apologia, p3)
detestable doctrine
Whilst later coming to see his own predestination to
salvation and the consequent indifference to the eternal
fate of others as a “detestable doctrine”, it is interesting
to note that it is in the context of an explicitly dogmatic
conception of the faith that Newman encounters
divine mercy.
antinomian chaos
Our own age is even more given to religious
liberalism than the nineteenth century and it would,
no doubt, have greatly exercised Newman that the
Catholic Church seems quite as much prey to the antidogmatic principle in our time as did the Church of
contents page
England in his own. He saw where
that led: to an antinomian chaos in
doctrine and morals, incapable of
making the elementary distinction
between licence and mercy. His own
meditations and devotions, written
more than half-a-century after his
first conversion, were often aimed
at evoking a lively sense of the need
for God’s mercy - available, then as
now - primarily through the great
Sacrament of Reconciliation.
What Newman saw, with startling
clarity, is that the starting point for
coming to understand our need for God’s mercy lies
in the staggering truth of God’s existence.
He expresses it best in a devotion entitled “Against
you alone have I sinned” - a prayer we might usefully
make our own in this Year of Mercy:
...beg Thee, O my dear Saviour, to recover
me! Thy grace alone can do it. I cannot save
myself. I cannot recover my lost ground. I
cannot turn to Thee, I cannot please Thee, or
save my soul without Thee. I shall go from
bad to worse, I shall fall from Thee entirely, I
shall quite harden myself against my neglect of
duty, if I rely on my own strength. I shall make
myself my centre instead of making Thee. I shall
worship some idol of my own framing instead
of Thee, the only true God and my Maker,
unless Thou hinder it by Thy grace. O my dear
Lord, hear me! I have lived long enough in this
undecided, wavering, unsatisfactory state. I
wish to be Thy good servant. I wish to sin no
more. Be gracious to me, and enable me to be
what I know I ought to be.