THE
P RTAL
May 2019
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Newman and
the Chinese scholar,
Ma Xiangbo
Dr Stephen Morgan
S everal of
Newman’s friends – Gladstone and Pusey, to name but two (although John Keble is a
monument to what can be achieved by home-schooling!) – were products of that school by the Thames
near Windsor founded by that most pious of medieval English Kings, Henry VI, for the education of twenty-
four poor scholars and in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The Chapel Choir of Eton College came to visit us
in Macau during Lent and brought with them to the
Chapel of St Joseph’s Seminary that sound unique to
the English, the Anglican Choral tradition. Singing
the prayers from the Customary of the Ordinariate of
Our Lady of Walsingham was a personal delight and
invoking the Reformation Martyr of that School, St
Ralph Sherwin was perhaps a little un-ecumenical
of me: I hope I am forgiven. Conversation with
the charming Conduct of the Chapel, the Revd
Stephen Gray, turned to the predicted canonisation
of Blessed John Henry Newman and what it might
mean here in China.
theology of revelation and of the Church and his
notion of the Christian Conscience point clearly to an,
as yet, underappreciated reputation as a theologian.
As far as I am able to establish, of Newman’s
extensive oeuvre only the Apologia and the Grammar
of Assent have been translated into Chinese and
published, together with a few of his Parochial and
Plain Sermons – that is, until now. On Good Friday,
of all days, we were blessed with a new translation of
Newman’s Meditations on the Stations of the Cross.
The translation was made by one of our seminarians
here, a man with a degree in English Literature and
as thoughtful and serious a student for the priesthood
One of my colleagues here, Fr Cyril Law – known as you will come across. Later this year, we hope to
to many of you in London, where he lived whilst publish translations of some introductory essays to
working on his doctoral thesis – has made it his own mark Newman’s canonisation and to whet the appetite
intellectual quest to compare and contrast Newman’s of Chinese Christians for a more systematic and
theology with that of a similarly long-lived Chinese thoroughgoing project.
scholar, Ma Xiangbo.
Newman’s singular capacity to combine the personal
Ma lived from 1840-1939 and, like Newman, wrote sensibilities of a man of profound prayer and culture
in response to expediencies rather than in a systematic with theological insight will surely appeal to the
manner. To be sure there are significant differences religious sensibilities of a people whose own spiritual
between the two men, both in their thought and in tradition has historically expected its sages to exhibit
the trajectories of their lives, but there are astonishing both cultural sophistication and personal integrity as a
similarities too.
precondition for being considered to have something
to say that is worth listening to: indeed, Ma Xiangbo’s
Indeed, so much so that Fr Law’s thesis went by the appeal comes from precisely such a combination.
title “Two minds of one faith”. Immediate post-mortem
reputations often take several generations to shake
To publish all of Newman in Chinese would be a
off and, in Newman’s case, Lytton Strachey’s waspish massive task and the resources required so to do, both
Victorians prolonged that process. Ma’s opposition human and financial, would be a huge undertaking.
to both the weak and corrupt Qing Dynasty and, in Nevertheless, as the ancient Chinese mystic Lao Tzu
later life, to the Japanese attempt at subjugating China reputedly wrote, the journey of a thousand miles
has led many to think only of his political thought. begins with a single step: the Stations of the Cross, is
Nonetheless, Ma’s record as an educationalist, his one such step.