The Influence of John Henry Newman on Benedict XVI By Tracey Rowland

Later today {9/16/10, ed.}, Pope Benedict XVI begins his Apostolic Journey to the United Kingdom, the main purpose of which is the beatification of John Henry Newman on Sunday, 19 September. But few English speakers seem to realise the extent to which Newman influenced German Catholic thought in the first half of the twentieth century, and particularly the theology of Joseph Ratzinger.

The Munich-based Jesuit, Erich Przywara (1889-1972), editor of the theology journal Stimmen der Zeit, had developed an interest in Newman as early as the 1920s and had encouraged Edith Stein (now St Teresa-Benedicta of the Cross) to translate Newman's pre-conversion letters and his Idea of a University into German.

The cultural critic Theodor Haecker, who had converted to Catholicism in 1921, had also translated works of Newman into German and is one of those specifically cited by Ratzinger as a popular author for seminarians of his time.

Haecker is also credited with introducing Sophie Scholl, martyr of the White Rose movement, and others in her circle to the works of Newman. During the Advent of 1943, Haecker quoted from his translation of Newman's Advent sermon on the Antichrist (Tract 83) to members of the anti-Nazi student group.



Haecker believed Newman was especially valuable for demonstrating the legitimate role of reason in the act of faith and for explaining conscience in relation to other acts of the mind, thus making conscience an organ and mediator of knowledge.

He praised Newman for his clear perception of the intellectual difficulties which exist for the faith in the modern world, and in particular for his understanding that these difficulties could not be overcome with "a naked syllogism."

The latter comment was a criticism of the tendency in pre-Conciliar theology to present the faith with reference to Latin maxims and syllogistic "proofs." In all Haecker published some seven books on Newman, mainly translations into German.

When Ratzinger joined the seminary in Freising in 1946, his Prefect of Studies, Alfred Laepple, was working on a dissertation on conscience in the work of Newman. Ratzinger has since reflected that for seminarians of his generation, "Newman's teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway. Our image of the human being as well as our image of the Church was permeated by this point of departure."

Ratzinger was to take from Newman his understanding of papal authority as a power that comes from revelation to complete natural conscience and Newman's rejection of the popularist interpretations of papal authority as something akin to absolute monarchy.

Ratzinger has written that the pope is not an absolute monarch, but more of a constitutional monarch - that is, someone whose powers are circumscribed by conventions or constitutions, or in the case of the Pope, by revelation itself.

But it was not only Laepple that was immersed in the works of Newman, so too was Gottlieb Soehngen (1892-1971), Ratzinger's teacher in fundamental theology and the director of both of Ratzinger's theses.

It was under Soehngen that Ratzinger studied Newman's Grammar of Assent. Soehngen had also worked on the topics of the convertibility of truth and being, on sacramentality, and on the border issues between theology and philosophy, all of which reappear as perennial themes in Ratzinger's publications.

In an address delivered to mark the centenary of Newman's death, Ratzinger remarked that even deeper for him than the contribution of Soehngen for his appreciation of Newman was the contribution which Heinrich Fries published in connection with the Jubilee of Chalcedon.

Here he found access to Newman's teaching on the development of doctrine, which he regards, along with Newman's doctrine on conscience, as Newman's decisive contribution to the renewal of theology. Newman's work "placed the key in our hand to build historical thought into theology, or much more, [Newman] taught us to think historically in theology and so to recognize the identity of faith in all developments."

This was a reference to what Ratzinger would later identify as the most significant issue for Catholic theology in the twentieth century - that of coming to an understanding of what he termed "the mediation of history in the realm of ontology."

In short hand terms, one might call this the Heideggerian "being in time" problem. Whereas the theological establishment prior to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s prided itself on being "ahistorical" or "above history," the effect of Heidegger's philosophy was to push to the front of theological speculation the issue of the significance of time and history for the development of tradition.

The different responses to the documents of the Second Vatican Council often revolve around different understandings of the role that history plays in theological speculation.

Here it is highly significant that Ratzinger's understanding of the development of doctrine comes from the convergence of the works of Newman and those of scholars of the nineteenth century Tuebingen school, who were working on parallel themes to those of Newman.

Newman was introduced to a French audience by Henri Bremond whose work in turn influenced that of Maurice Blondel, author of the seminal History and Dogma (1903). Blondel then influenced the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac, who, along with his student Hans Urs von Balthasar, ultimately became friends and mentors of Ratzinger.

In his introduction to the English translation of Blondel's The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, Alexander Dru (a close friend of Theodor Haecker) noted that the very first edition of Annales de Philosophie Chretienne (a journal owned by Blondel and to which he was a frequent contributor) "pointed to the need to break away from the narrow Latin, Roman and Mediterranean conception of Catholicism by pointing to the relevance of the German Catholic writers of the Romantic period." Dru also noted that Blondel and Bremond - among others - were "carrying on (unbeknown, at first, to themselves) the tradition of Tuebingen (and in some respects therefore of Newman)."

While Newman's teaching on the development of doctrine opened a pathway for history in theological thought, the doctrine of conscience gave weight to the emerging body of mid-twentieth century scholarship presented as Christian personalism.

Both John Paul II and Ratzinger were heavily influenced by personalist currents in their early academic years.

Whereas the young Karl Wojtyla was in contact with the French sources of the movement, and with the work of the Munich-born philosopher Max Scheler, the young Ratzinger came to personalism primarily through the Saarland philosopher Peter Wust (1884-1940) and the Austrian born Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber (1878-1965).

In the nineteenth century, Newman was working on theological topics that ran parallel to those of the Catholic theologians at the University of Tuebingen and which could be described as a Catholic engagement with themes of interest to the Romantic movement.

Although Germany, France, England and Scotland all had their own particular Romantic movements, a common theme running through all of them was an interest in history, tradition, memory and the motions of the human heart.

These topics were absent from the neo-scholastic theology of the same period. They were to enter into the theological tradition in the twentieth century by way of a number of authors, including the scholarship of Przywara, Soehngen and Haecker in Germany, Blondel and de Lubac in France, and von Balthasar in Switzerland.

Newman is linked to all three of these tributaries. One might say that at the Second Vatican Council it wasn't merely the Rhine that flowed into the Tiber, but the Cherwell and Isis were there too.

It is therefore particularly fitting that it should be Benedict XVI - the student of Soehngen and colleague of de Lubac and von Balthasar - who finally beatifies Newman. As Alfred Laepple once remarked, when he and Ratzinger were seminarians, Newman was their hero.

Tracey Rowland is the Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, and the author of Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2010).

This ran originally here on September 16, 2010.