By Subhasis Chattopadhyay –
When John Henry Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church, he caused a scandal for the High Anglicans whom he had led earlier during the Oxford Movement. Later, when he was elevated to the rank of a Cardinal, we have evidence that many Roman Catholic clerics were unhappy over his elevation and made life miserable for him. Yet through all these trials, Newman managed to write a lot. And read more than he wrote. More importantly, he responded to God’s mysterious call and chose to be a saint. God calls each of us to be holy, but only the likes of Newman bother to exert themselves to become saints. Ordinary folks are happy to be themselves. They settle for the riches of this world. John Henry Newman will be remembered as a Saint of the Roman Catholic Church and also as, one of the greatest litterateurs of the Victorian period.
One fears for his literary reputation. The greatest philosopher of the last century, Edith Stein who was an expert on the technical domain of the ‘problem of empathy’, that is, the problem of other minds; is today forgotten as a philosopher more original than the Nazi-sympathiser, Martin Heidegger. She continues to be overlooked as a philosopher since she became a Doctor, Martyr and Saint of the Roman Catholic Church. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross became known as the patron saint of Europe, and through Marxist and anti-Catholic sentiments she has become well nigh forgotten as a philosopher even within Catholic academia. I am afraid that John Henry Newman’s contributions to literature will be similarly forgotten because of anti-religious and Roman Catholic phobia.
Apologia Pro Vita Sua and the Idea of a University are literary masterpieces. They are not merely Roman Catholic tracts. Newman did not just write them for a limited audience. The defence of his own decision to convert to Roman Catholicism in the first book is no less rhetorical in force than John Milton’s Areopagitica. Newman’s thoughts on what a University should be is a continuation of both Renaissance ideas of education and the ideas of the Counter-reformation.
One other aspect of Newman’s life needs to be discussed. Newman had a huge personal library. He was a man who read voraciously. It is through his own library that we get to know the man. His interests ranged from philosophy to poetry. This Lectio Divina sustained him through slanders and the low points in his life. It is not for nothing that Hinduism, earlier than Christianity, stressed on holy reading. Without the self-fashioning of the mind, the soul can never be nourished.
John Henry Newman is a Saint today for many reasons. But the most significant reason is that he studied a lot. Like Saint Kuriakose Chavara and St. Edith Stein; Saint Newman knew that the path of knowledge is one of the best and fastest ways to sanctity. Generally, as the Bhagavad Gita points out, one does not know the difference between the eternal and the ephemeral without constant introspection arising from proper discrimination, which is consequent to a proper epistemic foundation built through swadhyaya.
Subhasis Chattopadhyay is a blogger and an Assistant Professor in English (UG & PG Departments of English) at Narasinha Dutt College affiliated to the University of Calcutta. He has additional qualifications in Biblical Studies and separately, Spiritual Psychology. He also studied the Minor Upanishads separately. He remains a staunch Hindu. He had written extensively for the Catholic Herald published from Calcutta. From 2010 he reviews books for the Ramakrishna Mission and his reviews have been showcased in Ivy League Press-websites.