O inglês John Henry Newman (1801-1890) foi um anglicano convertido ao catolicismo e feito cardeal pelo Papa Leão XIII (em 1879) e santo pelo Papa Francisco (em 2019). O Cardeal Newman (ou São João Henrique Newman, como pode agora ser chamado) foi «the most significant Roman Catholic theologian of the nineteenth century», segundo o seu biógrafo Ian Ker (citado no prefácio do livro de Chadwick, p. vi). Uma figura ímpar, cujo pensamento e atitude de vida me interessam muito. Eis alguns excertos do livro Newman: A Short Introduction, de Owen Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1983).
1 Introduction
(p. 3) «In this difficult world for the Christian intelligence, Newman set himself the life-work of maintaining the forces of apostolic Christianity.»
(p. 3) «Can you prove that God exists? Yes, said the eighteenth century; therefore all wise men have faith. But suppose that new discoveries make it harder to prove that God exists (...), do all wise men lose their faith? Evidently not. Then faith cannot be overturned by argument? What is faith?»
(p. 3) «Science and history must be freed from the leading strings of dogma.»
2 Newman's mind
(p. 7) «(...) [He was] a man for whom heaven is next door (...); for whom the day just before him suffices for his duty; and so he does his chores, and prays, and meditates, and studies, and writes, and teaches, and looks again at the Scriptures, where the truths about God come in a divine disorder (...).»
(p. 9) «He was conscious of being alone, not lonely. He was far more aware of being separate from his fellow-men than of being a member of human society. (...) When he looked down at a baby, he saw it as dependent, and yet with-drawn from its fellow-humans, unable to understand or communicate (...).»
(p. 9) «Though this was a great churchman, who revived men's understanding of the essence of the Church, he was solitary by intelligence; a friend but not sociable; one who had compassion for the people and yet was no man for the multitude. 'If we be in a crowd,' he once said, 'still be we as hermits in the wilderness' (P 5.115). The truest life is alone. He would think of the solitary man, able to bear his own company, and to take pleasure in it, for that is the grace of God within him. He would quote the old saying Never less alone than when alone (P 5.70). He was aware of a deep peace in the life of faith; never on the surface; unseen by the world, 'like some well in a retired and shaby place, difficult of acess' (P 5.69).»
(pp. 9-10) «He saw society as full of pomp; its ritual forms, its empty ceremonies. He had a sympathy for the young, who react against the conventions of the world, and once compared true Christians to such rebels. (...)»
(p. 10) «He thougth of his room or cell as a nest from which he disliked to come. He devoted much of his day to writing ― hence the vast collection of private letters. He thought on paper.»
3 Christian life
(pp. 17-18) «(...) The sternest of the [Calvinist] school supposed that from all eternity God destined some men to eternal torment. Newman had too broad an education, and neither his home nor his books accepted a doctrine which made God cruel. But he grew up a puritan (...)»
(p. 19) «[In his Parochial Sermons,] He sees through everything. You feel penitent ― you are at least half pretending before God. You say you have repented ― empty word, repentance is a life-long growth. You look back with gratitude, but if you were aware of God, you would look back with fear. You love hymns and delude youself that this makes you religious, and perhaps you are a man of sentiments and not of religion. § The power in the sermons is at bottom the quest for reality in religion.»
(p. 20) «He realised that a creed was not to be apprehended by intellectual surgery, but was part of a way of worship, and to be seized within the immeasurable mysteries of the universe (...).»
(p. 21) «[His preaching] was warmth rather than fire. Always there was restraint. The language was moderate, the mood calm; he never sought to convert by excitement. He never sparkled. He never ceased to appeal to the head in his probing of the heart.»
(p. 23) «He was a true reformer. § Once he drew a portrait of a true reformer. To be a reformer you need zeal, even aggression. Yet you are never to lose gentleness. You are not to identify the movement with God's cause in the sense of believing that all opponents must be wicked. You must have a single eye set upon the goal. You must never despise, either the people who attack or the people whom you try to reform.»
(p. 25) «Mostly we choose not between two right acts but whichever is less wrong. 'We walk to heaven backward; we drive our arrows at a mark, and think him most skilful whose shortcomings are the least' (P 5.108).»
(p. 25) «He is an intelligent man who knows that the conscience does more for truth than the intelligence; an eloquent man who fears oratory; a subtle logician with the lowest opinion of logic; a fertile mind with small regard for originality; a thinker who despises the idea of speculation; a reasoner who wants reason valued in its proper place but that place lowly in the order of creation.»
4 Faith
(p. 27) «(...) 'there are but two beings in the whole universe, our own soul, and the God who made it' (P 1.20).»
(p. 28) «Conventional wisdom in the first half of the nineteenth century said that wonderful designs in nature proved a Designer; that we need only look upon the beetle's wing or the human retina to see design; that if we look upward to sun and moon and stars, we see the mathematical beauty of an infinite design. Newman believed none of this. Experience shows that the only way [to find God] is to look within. 'I believe in design because I believe in God, not in a God because I see design.' (...) (L 25.97, 324) § For if we look inward we find conscience.»
(p. 30) «We do not go to the Bible and there learn a creed. We come into the Christian community, learn the simplest truths of the creed, and so are led to the Bible. § (...) Let the soul grow in grace, and in sensitivity of conscience; then the mind will be able to receive more.»
(p. 33) «The total thrust of all such words is reserved for a future, the sight of God in heaven. We are not given total truth. We are given enough light by which to live.»
(pp. 34-35) «Can you argue a man into faith? If you can argue him in you can argue him out. The faith of the simple is as certain as the faith of the educated. Therefore the grounds of faith cannot just be argument. (...) § But here enters philosophic doubt. Faith is certain of its object. Evidence can produce answers which are never more than probable. By what leap (if it is a leap) does the religious mind pass from the probable to the certain? § (...) § This was Newman's supreme intellectual difficulty. Officialdom said that everyone who doubted, doubted because of sin. Newman knew that this sweeping condemnation was preposterous. (...)»
(p. 35) «The human race cannot live in universal doubt. Not even philosophers are capable fo this feat. We have to act. We cannot wait for a long chain of arguments before we act. The food may be poisoned. We know it is not, we trust the people, we have certainty based on trust. We are certain that we know which two persons are our parents. This certainty is based only on trust in people. We know not only that an act is right but why it is right. We see that the rightness of the act depends upon a far wider moral context [i. e. not by reasoning the act, but by seeing other people acting]. (...)»
(p. 35) «Some truth is certain, though to the philosopher only probable. A man who has never been to India would be a fool to doubt that India exists though strictly speaking he has only probability. (...) In the same way only a corrupt mind could believe that all the religious experience reported by the human race is nothing but buzzing in the ears. Objective truth is presented to the intelligence. Faith is not mere feeling.»
(p. 36) «When Newman wrote of certitude, he did not mean certain knowledge. He meant the conviction in a man's mind that he has certain knowledge.»
(p. 37) «The world is easy for philosophers so long as they ask none of the questions that count. If they confine themselves to matter they are only in difficulty if they manufacture difficulty. (...) At the moment when they begin to ask great questions of traditional philosophy ― of free will, and predestination, and providence, and purpose, and evil, and God ― they are in darkness.»
(p. 37) «If you doubt God, the answer is not to debate whether He exists. It is to go and try to live according to that conscience which responds to the ultimate law which is found to be God's.»
(p. 40) «By the nature of the theory [of faith], ordinary scientific reasoning can have nothing to say, because science can never pass beyond the veil of sense [i. e. dos sentidos].»
(pp. 42-43) «To know the mind of the Church, teachers in the Church must look to the ordinary faith, ordinary practice, of ordinary Christian men. In many individual cases that will be wrong, or superstitious, or superficial. But these people are the Church, and deep in their corporate mind is a true intuition of what the Church is about. Therefore the teachers must 'consult' the lay Church, in two senses: passive, as one consults a barometer, to see how it behaves; and active, to take notice of its opinion. This is not the absurd idea that we must conduct polls into people's preferences. It is the conviction that within the body of Christian men and women is the experience of truth, and that this experience has something to say about new creeds or new ways of prayer. (...) He quoted a phrase of St Hilary of Poitiers: 'the ears of the common people are holier then the hearts of the priests' (C 77, 85).»
(p. 45) «And Newman never thought much of logic as a way of reaching truth.»
5 Knowledge
(p. 49) «In this philosophy of faith, it is obvious, science can never conflict with religion. The scientific finding of reason can never contradict the religious findings of conscience or vice versa.» [Non-overlapping magisteria]
(p. 49) «Of course this world is one, whether of matter or spirit. What is true this side of the veil cannot be untrue on the other. What is true on the other cannot be untrue on this side. All is God's world.»
(p. 50) «Therefore, apparent conflict. Then (says Newman) we must not try to judge between the two given 'truths'. We must remember our nothingness. We are shut in by the material world and cannot reach to things as they are. So we recognise that these two 'truths' are useful so far as they go ― useful each in its own sphere, useful to act upon, useful as two separated approximations to a Truth which is greater than either.»
(p. 50) «If you pack knowledge into a lot of young heads in schools, will adult society later be more virtuous? § Newman was scornful of this idea. (...) The error lies in the belief that excellence comes from without. Excellence comes from within. It cannot come if a child sits passive and receiving. It comes only through personal struggle and suffering. (...) Science or knowledge are powerless to heal the soul. (...) Knowledge leaves us morally where we were before.»
(p. 51) «(...) Newman's scepticism about the argument from the design of nature to a Designer. Peel thought that if his readers studied science, they would learn more about the world and therefore would know more about the creator of this world; that physics led towards belief in God.»
(p. 52) «Education is lowered if it is turned into the training of a man or a woman for a career.»
(p. 52) «Newman was an Englishman; a convert; a mind with unconventional ideas; an Oxford don with notions that the university should be free [from interference]; a teacher with the idea that undergraduates should think for themselves ― all these were reasons why the Archbishop [of Dublin] distrusted Newman.»
(p. 53) «A young man has not only to learn information or ideas. He must see information or ideas in a context where others may see them in a different light; so that although education in a university starts by being an amassing of information, the university soon ceases to be only a place where young is taught by old, and becomes a place where the young start to contribute.»
(p. 54) «You must be 'above' your knowledge, not sitting beneath its weight.»
(p. 56) «'Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and pride of man' (I 111).»
6 Church of Rome
(p. 58) «(...) faith in God is always more real and more certain than the language which seeks to describe faith in God.»
(p. 65) «Tourists went into a church in Naples and found an old crone superstitious and credulous before a crucifix or a statue. (...) § (...) 'errors of fact may do no harm, and their removal may do much'. 'We may surely concede a little superstition, as not the worst of evils, if it be the price of making sure of faith' (V 1.lxv-lxix).»
(p. 66) « He did not want the bishops to define the Pope as infallible. He thought that the Church needed to do a lot more thinking before it cleared its own mind on what precisely it meant. History showed that Popes had erred. Newman was sure that the Pope was not infallible if he opened his mouth in casual conversation.»
(p. 67) «'(...) still to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards' (Diff 261). If authority interferes in secular matters of philosophy or science or literature or history, it may demand silence. (...) It cannot demand internal submission, only external silence.»
(p. 68) «The professional theologians, whose minds were as closed as oysters, were unhappy to be told, by his idea of development, that the Church must respect the findings of historians; or that common people sometimes had a deeper idea of faith than clergymen, or even the Pope; or that devotional practices ought to be quiet and restrained. The most unpleasing of Roman Monsignori wrote to the Archbishop of Westminster, that 'Dr Newman is the most dangerous man in England.'»
(p. 68) «Long ago he denounced as depraved appetite the desire to be praised by a multitude whom we have never seen; deeply criminal, he said, an odious superfluous wanton sin (P 8.178). He found it more agreeable to the Christian temper to know and be known by a few and to grow in their esteem and affection.»
(p. 69) «The old Roman Cato said that he preferred people to ask why there was no statue to his memory than why there was a statue.»
(p. 70) « To make a man a cardinal was not to approve all his ideas or clear all his utterances of heresy. But it acclaimed the general work; and that work included friendliness to Protestants, assent to the place of history in the development of Christian thought, recognition of the free rights of critical enquiry, recognition that scientists are free to follow their arguments wherever they lead, antipathy to extremist forms of doctrine or devotion, confession that the great secret body or lay Christians was also the Church and not slaves of a hierarchy.»
7 Liberalism?
(p. 72) «Even if all the members of the society were Christians, the society would still be in part unjust. Newman could not abide the doctrine of inevitable advance in human society. He was violent against the idea of progress.»
(p. 73) «Evidently, when he professed himself to have spent his life fighting liberalism, it was not political liberalism that he fought, except in the hectic years 1829-33. § But liberalism had a religious meaning. (...)»
(p. 74) «He was sure that, though the teaching authority of the Church is infallible, it could never make decrees on physical subjects, because on physical subjects it had no power to decree.»
(pp. 75-76) «The Bible is not necessarily true as science or history, only in what it says on faith and morals ― though some statements of history may be intimately connected with faith. (...) And we are not bound to believe what is said 'in passing' but has nothing to do with faith or morals. St Paul says he left a cloak at Troas. It is no part of Christian doctrine to suppose that St Paul might not be mistaken about the place where he forgot his cloak.»
8 Newman
(p. 78) «(...) ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem; that is, coming out of the shadows and the reflexions into the truth.»
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