EXTRACT
In this age of science, when science is being turned into the sole avenue to truth and reality, Newman's excoriation of a science-based education should seem offensive, though very timely. Today even more than in his time, he would look askance at efforts to take scientists as a body for unbiased spokesmen of objective truth. Today, he would lash out as much as he did in his own time at conspicuous gatherings of scientists that sound increasingly like platforms for declarations of secularist dogmas. And just as he turned his back on the British Association for the Advancement of Science from its first meeting in Oxford, in 1833, so he would warn his fellow-Catholics about the anti-supernatural propaganda that blares forth from the big annual gatherings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and from the pages of magazines that popularize science.

Although he would not tolerate even for a moment the irresponsible supernaturalism of creationists, he would protest against being ranked as one of Darwin's soul-mates.

What he told Baron von Hugel about the failure of the Darwinian mechanism of evolution to explain a mere blossom in a rhododendron tree, should refute all those who take Newman for an evolutionist and do so with no stark qualifications. He disagreed with Darwin on precisely the basic issue, the issue of the adequacy or inadequacy of the merely natural. He saw the supernatural at work everywhere, without slighting the role of purely natural forces and agencies. He was no mystic though, in spite of being a saint, a point one does well to ponder nowadays when so many fancy that they are engaged in "contemplation" in the midst of their feverish social and pastoral activities, if not activism.

He knew how to distinguish, as befitted a master of logic, who time and again made feel desperate, at times furious, his ecclesiastical and secular antagonists by advancing conceptual nuances they could grasp but were unable to match. Like many other masters of logic, he could have easily gone astray. In his major philosophical work, the Grammar of Assent, he came time and again to the edge of an epistemological abyss, with sheer subjectivism and egocentric personalism at its bottom. If he drew back again and again, as if at the last moment, it was only because the supernatural realities remained his chief guiding lights and inspiration even in the midst of what could appear on his part to be a most naturalistic logic-chopping. One wonders whether such caution was at work with the spokesmen of that most dangerous Trojan horse, Aquikantism (or transcendental Thomism), lately spirited into the Church.

It was his unlimited trust in the supernatural as deposited in the Church that saved him from becoming another Dollinger in connection with debates on the advisability on the definition of papal infallibility. A man of "imperial" or universal intellect, he remained forever an Oxford man, with a distinct touch of insularity. He never fully mastered a major foreign language. He failed to perceive that there were considerations far more weighty in support of defining that dogma than that one against it, namely, that one should not cause further aggravation to former Tractarians who did not follow him to Rome. As one who had such a profound faith in the divine Providence assisting the one in the chair of Peter, he failed to see that the same Providence would certainly prevent the definition of "maximalist" views on infallibility. If he ever lost his theological nerve, it was in 1870. In fact it took an Anglican to make him realize that in his opposition to the definition of the dogma, he had unwittingly taken the Gallican position, for which he had only contempt.

Only Newman's infatuation with Oxonian insularity can explain that someone so conscious of the unique contributions of the Church to human history could be so mistaken in his strategy toward an act of the Church without which, as history was soon to show, the Church would have become as paralyzed as she was at the height of the Gallican crisis. In this age, when Catholics are caught in heedless acts of begging forgiveness for the Church's failures, real and imaginary, it may come as a shock to find Newman roundly rejecting this policy. Newman, who took special delight in evoking the past of the Church as a pattern to follow, spoke from the depths of his mind and from the bottom of his heart when setting forth in several long letters his thematic apologetics of Church history. It was an apologetics with no essential concession to
anyone, because the supernatural at work in the Church had to be unfailing if it was supernatural and therefore patently productive in benefits which the World could not match at all.

At the basis of Newman's attachment to the supernatural, which is his chief challenge to Catholics today, there lay his conviction that natural man's fallenness was something empirically most evident. To be sure, Newman was no Puritan, no Calvinist. However emphatic he was on the empirical obviousness of man's fallenness and on its dire particulars, he held that even fallen man could recognize the existence of God and the voice of a conscience aware of an absolute difference between moral evil and good. Newman's supernaturalism was sound because it rested on the natural. The rest was a logic strengthened by the supernatural: If there is God, and obviously there is one, then it follows that divine mercy could not leave man a ruined being. Hence a divine plan of salvation, a plan not offered as a convenience but as a sole means of rescue in the midst of a moral deluge. To seek entry into the Church was for him equivalent to finding the sole ark of Noah, the search for which was a most serious moral obligation.

A convert he was, who all his life had as his chief mission the making of converts. Nothing else can better convey the gist of his challenge in this age of often misguided and mistaken ecumenism and of rampant naturalism. His challenge is the challenge of the supernatural in its full and pristine strength, a supernatural to which he never failed to show a commitment with no reservations whatsoever.

Herein lies his achievement, the achievement of a saint. He was not a saint who practiced virtues "heroically in an unheroic way," whatever such a phrase may mean. Many Newman fanciers today still have to discover that as a saint he too was a "peculiar being," as he once characterized saints. Peculiar as this may sound, he was no mystic, in mspite of having practiced the virtues heroically. At a time when it passes for theological enlightenment to push for the marriage of priests, Newman would appear very peculiar for his defense of priestly celibacy.

Nobody can disagree, however, that he was peculiarly good at articulating, at verbalizing God's appeal to man and man's all too often fumbling responses to it. Yet he would never have taken that articulation for an end in itself. He knew with Thomas Aquinas that all sins consist in taking means for an end. The end he never put so charmingly and strikingly as when he spoke, in his last years, of his approaching death as something to which he looked forward as schoolboys wait eagerly for the moment of going home for Christmas. Heaven was his home which, he knew, could be anticipated only supernaturally here below.

Most of us, who are admirers of Newman, fall far short of having a similar attitude. But all true admirers of his must keep in focus that supernatural heaven because it was his focus. It was the motive force, the steady reference point, and ultimate objective of his vast achievement. To weigh Newman according to whether he was a liberal or a conservative, a progressive or a traditionalist is a thoroughly misplaced approach to him, because he was all this, provided those terms are carefully defined. His real stature emerges only in the perspective of seeing him as the giant spokesman of the supernatural.

The supernatural was his focal point where everything came together in his burning zeal for God's cause on earth. To be his true admirer is to keep that focal point in view when speaking of what Newman did and wrote, so as to live up to the challenge of doing justice to him. For he was one who largely ignored all challenges of a purely natural sort, however appealing and promising they might be, but he never shirked any challenge that served the supernatural.