Elusive Matterhorn

Newman is one of those authors who has described himself with such penetration that all biographers and commentators have been baffled by the mysterious personality intensely present, realized yet elusive, in every word he wrote. The clarity of his thought and style, his carefully explained position, his public stance, paradoxically compound the mystery: light increasing, by contrast, the darkness of the depths no one will ever chart. In Newman the Theologian, though he embarks on an ambitious codifying of Newman’s thought, the Belgian Dominican Jan Hendrik Walgrave is aware of the difficulties this involves. In an unfortunate moment, he ventures that “it might be of interest to study Newman in the light of modern charaaterology” (and appends a note on what Jung has been up to recently) .

One cannot type or explain mystery, though one can isolate it. In that sense we can “place” Newman, not under an abstract classification, but in the company of real men, whose mysteries correspond in part to Newman’s own. Born orator seeking an audience, yet a recluse afraid of natural gratifications; incisive logician, yet writing the richest kind of romantic prose, he is one of a distinguished company—Jerome torn between Cicero and the cave; Augustine oscillating between puns and pessimism; Johnson roaring by day and praying by night; Ronald Knox, a wit and something of a dandy, yet with it all monastic. Of these the most interesting parallel is that between Newman and Johnson, no doubt because of the English character they both triumphantly typify. Both men read their Cicero with reverence second only to that which Scripture demanded of them. Both fought with vigor those who knew no piety toward the past—Newman living in the Church of Ambrose and Athanasius, Johnson in the England of the Stuarts. Each saw, behind the shallow sallies of the Liberal or the Whig, the marshaled battalions of the devil.

GW

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Garry Wills

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Newman is one of those authors who has described himself with such penetration that all biographers and commentators have been baffled by the mysterious personality intensely present, realized yet elusive, in every word he wrote. The clarity of his thought and style, his carefully explained position, his public stance, paradoxically compound the mystery: light increasing, by contrast, the darkness of the depths no one will ever chart. In Newman the Theologian, though he embarks on an ambitious codifying of Newman’s thought, the Belgian Dominican Jan Hendrik Walgrave is aware of the difficulties this involves. In an unfortunate moment, he ventures that “it might be of interest to study Newman in the light of modern charaaterology” (and appends a note on what Jung has been up to recently) .

One cannot type or explain mystery, though one can isolate it. In that sense we can “place” Newman, not under an abstract classification, but in the company of real men, whose mysteries correspond in part to Newman’s own. Born orator seeking an audience, yet a recluse afraid of natural gratifications; incisive logician, yet writing the richest kind of romantic prose, he is one of a distinguished company—Jerome torn between Cicero and the cave; Augustine oscillating between puns and pessimism; Johnson roaring by day and praying by night; Ronald Knox, a wit and something of a dandy, yet with it all monastic. Of these the most interesting parallel is that between Newman and Johnson, no doubt because of the English character they both triumphantly typify. Both men read their Cicero with reverence second only to that which Scripture demanded of them. Both fought with vigor those who knew no piety toward the past—Newman living in the Church of Ambrose and Athanasius, Johnson in the England of the Stuarts. Each saw, behind the shallow sallies of the Liberal or the Whig, the marshaled battalions of the devil.