John Henry Newman: a personal debt

Tomorrow, John Henry Newman is to be canonised in a ceremony at the Vatican. He will be the first English man or woman to be pronounced a saint since the seventeenth century. So this is an event of major significance to Christians in this country as well as worldwide.

And I mean Christians in an ecumenical sense, not just Catholics. For Newman was the most famous (some said notorious) Catholic convert of the nineteenth century. He was brought up as an Anglican with evangelical tendencies. But his studies of the Christian fathers and the medieval church led him progressively to contemplate a vision of the church that was larger in its embrace and more profound in its theological and spiritual reach than the protestantism in which he had been reared. As one of the leading Tractarians of the Oxford Movement launched in 1833, he preached and wrote energetically in defence of the Church of England as an organic part of the ancient catholic church, for the time being divided but always yearning for ultimate union.

That theological position proved unsustainable for Newman. Always a man of conscience and integrity, he came to realise that the logic of his developing convictions was pointing him away from Anglicanism and towards Roman Catholicism. He crossed the threshold in October 1845. It’s not correct to say that “the rest is history”. His was a questing, searching pilgrim soul, so beautifully and accurately described in his famous hymn Lead, kindly Light. Perhaps he was always too much of an Anglican to regard his conversion as any kind of terminus. Books like The Development of Doctrine articulated his belief that revelation, illumination, “faith seeking understanding” as Anselm said, never stops. “To live is to change” said Newman, “and to live long is to have changed much”. Even a cardinal of the Catholic Church!

On the eve of his canonisation, I want to recall the influence of John Henry Newman on my own formation as a Christian and a priest. In my teenage and student years, I was a fervent evangelical of the most conservative kind. I embraced Calvinism to a degree that was thought extreme even by Christian Union mentors. As an ordinand I inevitably chose to train at what was then regarded as the most reformed and protestant of all the Anglican evangelical theological colleges. (It amuses me now that some colleagues conjecture that I must have studied at Westcott House or Cuddesdon! Let the reader understand.)

In those days, nearly five decades ago, if you had a degree in theology, your training for ministry could be improvised around the Bishops’ modest academic requirements alongside gaining practical experience in pastoral ministry. My tutor sat down with me and asked what I thought I needed to do by way of study during my final year before ordination. I replied that my theology degree had given me a rigorous grounding in the Bible and the Fathers. But my knowledge of church history more or less stopped at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Perhaps I needed to dip my toe into modernity? My tutor’s response was immediate. “Your experience of church has been limited to protestantism. But there’s a bigger world out there. Have you ever read John Henry Newman’s Apologia?”

It’s one of those questions I’ll always be grateful for. Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua was published in 1864. It is his “defence of his own life” in response to Charles Kingsley’s attack on him for lacking honour and integrity in abandoning his Anglicanism. It’s one of the classics of spiritual autobiography of the Victorian or any other age. I found a copy in a secondhand bookshop and paid, I think, 20 pence for it. I don’t want to dramatise things, but it’s not too much to say that it changed my life.

As I began to read, I found I was struggling somewhat. Not with Newman’s limpid writing (he was an acknowledged master of English prose). It was his intellectual and spiritual thought-world. I almost said sound-world, an interesting comment on the almost aural effect of reading him. It was so different from, even alien to, what I was used to. This was a different kind of journey, or at least a differently described quest for holiness from what was familiar to me. We didn’t use the tiresome language of comfort-zones (being out of) in those innocent days, but this was where I was finding myself. Thank God for discomfort!

What changed everything were three insights in particular. The first was the realisation that Christian belief and the church's experience walk hand in hand. What we call “the tradition” isn’t a fixed immutable body of biblical texts or formal dogma so much as a living memory of how the church has reflected on its faith across the centuries. This is what Newman had come to call “the development of doctrine”. It echoed a saying of one of the Scottish Covenanters that I’d come to love: “God has more light and truth to shine out from his holy word”. I glimpsed how the formulation of Christian thought - any thought - was a dynamic process. Tradition means that which is “ handed on”. Newman’s reverence for tradition as a process recognised how each generation cherishes what it has received in order to pass it on to the next. It shouldn’t have been a startling discovery (not if I’d been paying attention to St Paul in 1 Corinthians).  But for me, a light had been switched on.

The second insight from the Apologia was about the place of conscience. For Newman, conscience was crucial in the forming of Christian mind and character. The externals of belief could never stand on their own, disconnected from their inner reception and embrace by the believer’s conscience. That’s about integrity and honour, "truth in the inward parts" as the Prayer Book version of Psalm 51 puts it, the very qualities Kingsley had accused Newman of lacking. And quite suddenly I realised that this was a personal dilemma for me too. It dawned on me that my evangelicalism was not going to survive this Tractarian scrutiny unchanged. And that would mean a serious renegotiation of my faith and my relationship with what I was coming to speak about as my own tradition. Again, I won’t dramatise by speaking of a “Here I stand” moment. But this profoundly disturbing yet liberating discovery of the role of conscience did, I think, prove life-changing.

Newman’s final gift to me was the spirituality with which his writing was imbued. Quite simply, I found it irresistible. Possibly for aesthetic reasons that bear closer  examination (how easy it is to be seduced by Newman!) I was becoming catholic not only in my thinking but also in my praying and feeling. I found myself increasingly at odds with evangelical worship, especially its relentless stream of words, its extraverted busyness and its lack of feeling for the numinous. I can see that this probably sounds like a caricature, but it’s what I was experiencing at the time. No doubt personality type, temperament, comes into liturgy and spirituality. If so, I owe to Newman the instinct to take it more seriously. Eventually I came to serve as a curate in what we would now call an affirming catholic parish where they wore eucharistic vestments, swung the censer from time to time, preached a socially inclusive intelligent Christianity and reserved the sacrament. How much I learned there! It set the direction of my entire ministry.

So it seemed fitting to include a hymn by Newman in our marriage service, “Praise to the Holiest in the height”. A year later my wife sang Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius with the local choral society and I heard that great work for the first time. Newman’s poem, from which the hymn is drawn, is not without its flaws. But somehow that performance in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre set the seal on a personal journey I knew would be lifelong.

Decades later I found myself in the company of - well, I won’t name him because he is a well-known church leader. Without any preamble, as if he’d been saving up for this moment, he looked me in the eye: “Michael, back in the seventies we were looking to you as a future leader of evangelicals in the Church of England. It all looked so promising. What happened to you?” It was hardly the question I’d been expecting as we sat over a cup of tea enjoying Belgian biscuits. But I didn’t hesitate with my answer. “I read John Henry Newman” I replied. “That’s all.” “Ah. I see now” he said and smiled. And changed the subject.

After all these years, how better to acknowledge the debt than to echo Newman’s own praise to his Creator and Redeemer, the Holiest in the height: “in all his words most wonderful, most sure in all his ways!”

** There are many Newmans. Like all great men and women, he encounters us in different ways. Here's another blog about him on the Laudable Practice website. It's a somewhat different take on him, but well worth reading. This week's edition of The Tablet also has a number of thought-provoking articles.

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 8: Churches of Bulgaria

Saturday 1 June
After last night’s storm, it is cool and overcast on the river today. We have said goodbye to Romania and are berthed back at Rousse in Bulgaria where we were last week. We drive for a couple of hours to Arbanassi, a village in the foothills of the mountains that straddle the central part of the Balkan Peninsula.

Our guide is a young man who combines seriousness of purpose with a light touch, just right for the job. He tells us more about Bulgaria, a country I’ve always regarded as somewhat mysterious, as if it keeps itself hidden away on the south bank of the Danube. Once again I’m struck by the deeply rural character of these rolling landscapes. As we saw before, there are hardly any buildings between the villages - no farm buildings like you see in Western Europe, or Romania for that matter. Here, villages have clear boundaries. Outside them, the countryside is deep, tranquil, remote, “one of the most peaceful areas to live in the w 
hole of Europe” he says. He speaks about the depredations of the communist era, how long it is taking for the country to recover. This is a refrain we have grown used to: every guide has told the same story. But it’s been illuminating to hear it from the personal perspective of each of them, whether in Hungary, Serbia, Romania or here in Bulgaria. Part of that story is also the persistence of Christianity in these eastern European countries. And Peter our guide speaks about both of these with particular intelligence.  

We arrive at Arbanassi as a folk festival is in full swing. Pretty girls and young men in native costumes are dancing to pipe and accordion music. All round are stalls selling food, drink and souvenirs including an enticing collection of mugs with Soviet heroes ironically depicted on them. My heart sinks at the thought of an hour of nostalgic Bulgarian folklorique.

But this is not the plan. We walk through this showpiece village with its display of pantile roofs till we get to the little church. It is a revelation. It was built at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in what was then a Greek speaking Christian enclave in Ottoman Bulgaria. Outside, it is nothing special, though I notice the unusual presence of the Star of David engraved in a stone immediately above the west door. Peter takes this as a sign that the church may have provided shelter for the Jewish community during times of persecution, though the church guide who takes us round the building interprets it as a reminder that Jesus was himself a Jew. I wonder.

What is remarkable about this this church is its interior decoration. (I have no images to share: photography is not allowed inside.) Every inch of it is covered with paintings - the two narthexes, one on the north side and one on the west, and the nave itself. Walls and vault are, to resort to cliché, a riot of colour. Can there be a single Bible story that is not depicted somewhere in this extraordinary church? It would take detailed study to work out the narrative scheme, and time to linger is what you never have on these group visits. But the guide does her work well. She points out the Tree of Jesse, Moses and the prophets, and scenes from the nativity, passion and resurrection. Pilate washing his hands is memorable because Jesus is depicted as immersed in the water basin as if to say, Pilate washes his hands not only of a dilemma but of the very Lord himself.

On the east wall of the central narthex is the last judgment, with a river of fire emanating from Christ’s throne, and immersed in it, an archbishop in full regalia. The guide, clearly a devout believer, finds this amusing. To me, most thought-provoking of all is a line of twelve Greek philosophers, among them Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Homer (yes, not just a poet but a purveyor of wisdom) haloed just like the saints and angels all around. It speaks of a sophisticated world view that is brave enough to see the presence of the divine even in the writings of pagans. There’s a world of insight here about grace and culture, and how the church should be doing theology and mission in the market-place where many faiths, ideas and world views clamour to be heard. I sense that these powerful paintings we have seen have had an effect on some members of our group. Is awe the right word to describe it?

After lunch we stop at the nearby university city of Veliko Tarnovo, “the city of Tsars” that is spread out across a remarkable site where four steep-sided valleys meet. We gaze from afar at the remarkable monastic citadel with its walls and towers (why isn’t there an opportunity to visit it?) before walking the old town and climbing up some steep steps to visit the beautiful eighteenth century church.  Inside, an elderly woman is selling candles. Our guide buys one.  

Before our next port of call there is time for me to ask our guide about something he has said to us earlier. He's told us that he was brought up as a Catholic but had turned to Orthodoxy in adulthood. He explains that he went to Germany to study economics. There he embraced atheism until he realised that life without faith was unrewarding and empty. He recognised that his upbringing had not given him the mystical or liturgical richness of Orthodoxy, and that as a Bulgarian, this was the native faith of his people. So he decided to convert. I ask him if he has studied theology, for his account of his spiritual tradition is lucid and convincing. He says he hasn’t, apart from his own reading. "Are you an ordinand then?" I persist. He laughs and says I’m not the first person to ask him. “Who knows what God may intend?” he says. And he asks me to pray for him.

I’ve mentioned the visceral hatred eastern Europeans have for the years of communism, but I've also sensed a similar if less explicit aversion for the centuries of Ottoman rule that coloured so much of their medieval and modern history. At the beginning of May Pope Francis paid a pastoral visit to Bulgaria. It proved problematic. He had requested a meeting with the Orthodox Church's leaders, and asked to pray with them. However, the Bulgarians would not receive him as a fellow faith leader, only as a head of state to whom political, but not spiritual, courtesies were due. On the other hand Pope Francis did meet Muslim leaders and, I understand, took part in a shared act of prayer with them.

Peter supported the stance of the Bulgarian Church leaders both in not recognising the Pope's spiritual authority (because of the Great Schism between the eastern and western church), and in their insistence that Islam is incompatible with Christianity. They believe that Pope Francis was compromised by meeting the imams and this justifies the Bulgarian church leaders’ resistance to welcoming him as their spiritual peer. “But Judaism, Christianity and Islam are Abrahamic sister faiths” I remonstrate. "Allah is the God whom Jesus called Father, whom all three faiths worship because of Abraham.” “Yes, but Allah is not a Trinity of three Persons” comes the response. “How can there be any sharing of holy things if you can’t agree about the Trinity?” The spectre of Ottoman Islam seems to haunt this exchange. So this response is not only typical of Orthodox theology but of a particular historic expression of it that is so coloured by its former subservient relationship with Islam. 

My own Christianity feels very different, so western is it, so influenced by the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and with a very different religious history behind it. Yes, his faith is more ancient than mine, and I honour that. Maybe I envy the certainty with which he practises it. I hope I am not less passionate about my faith than he is. We would gladly recite the creeds together. But in other respects we inhabit worlds that are very different and have been for centuries. Yet it is a fascinating conversation not only for its warmth and candour, but for how it helps me understand religion in Eastern Europe.

We detour and sink down from the green plateau into a deep gorge. The yellow limestone cliffs rise up sheer from the valley bottom, an arresting sight in its own right. But this is the land of the famous Ivanovo rock churches, created in these cliffs by monks who sought solitude here in the thirteenth century. We walk up to the top of the cliffs by a steep path. There is a profusion of colourful wild flowers. The tree canopy, as we climb clear of it, shows every possible shade of green. It’s marvellously fresh, vivid and vibrant, this holy and verdant landscape we find ourselves walking in on this first day of summer. As we walk, Peter talks to us about the monastic life. I was not expecting to learn about hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer on a Riviera cruise. There can't be many guides who can speak about mystical spirituality and prayer from the standpoint of a practitioner and do it so genuinely, without a trace of self-consciousness.

We contour along a pretty path until we reach some caves in the rocks. Here the monks lived in their solitariness. The low roofs are darkened by smoke from their fires or, equally probably, their candles. These primitive dwellings precisely echo their forebears, the desert fathers of Egypt a thousand years earlier who set the pattern for monasticism and whose rules of life proved such an  inspiration in the formation of monasticism in both the east and the west. Presumably this was a conscious harking back to a more primitive way of life. Did they know about the Irish monks who followed these patterns too in isolated locations like Skellig Michael? You’d be tempted to doubt it, yet Irish monasticism had well-travelled origins across Central Europe. I think of Cuthbert on the Inner Farne finding seclusion not to get away from the business of everyday life but to immerse himself more deeply in its challenges, choices and contradictions. And to fight evil in the name of his Lord - the world’s demons, his own. “Go into your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” 

A little further on we come to the rock church itself, dedicated to Saint Michael, the guardian of these high places. There are more than twenty of them hidden among these cliffs and crabs; this is the finest, and the most visited. Like Arbanassi (but tiny, no larger than a monk’s cave), its walls are covered with frescoes of Jesus, Mary and the saints. They take you back to the devotion of these holy men, their willingness to forsake everything for the sake of the gospel that called them into this life of poverty and prayer. There is a little platform outside the cave (thoughtfully supplied in modern times with a railing) on the cliff edge, with a sheer drop below to the valley floor that it’s not good to look down on for too long. I imagine a monk, stylite-like, perched on this space where there is barely room for a human being to stand safely, totally still and silent in prayer, rapt in  contemplative communion with God.

Then I look down at the ground. A metal rail has been inserted across the cave’s opening in modern times, maybe to contain a door or window of some kind. I look more closely at the lettering on the side. The message is unmistakeable, announcing its place of origin. Middlesbrough. The North East has come to Bulgaria. This calls for a photograph.

In the car park an elderly man is selling icons he has created (that's to say, "written") himself. I wish I could l could linger to buy one. But icons are prayers, windows on to heaven, and choosing one will not be hurried. It takes time because in truth, we do not choose the icon: the icon chooses us.  And the coach and the ship will not wait.

But what a remarkable day it has been.