Newsletter 2007 – At Prayer with John Henry Newman

Dr. Philip Boyce O.C.D.
Bishop of Raphoe, Ireland

A widespread interest in prayer has been noticeable over the past few decades. As Western society has progressed at an unprecedented rate in science and technology, giving modern man an abundance of material welfare and comfort, it has increasingly felt the incapacity of these things to afford lasting happiness or fulfil the desires of the spirit or solve the deeper problems of life. Consequently, many sincere souls have turned again to prayer. In their search for meaning and for high- er realities, they have sought the solitude of silent and lonely places or, in the busy city, they have formed prayer and study groups, and have read what spiritual authors can tell them about contemplation and union with God. At times, misguided and disillusioned in the West, they have gone to Eastern masters in search of natural wisdom and ancient techniques. Their searching and their hopes bear witness to man’s constant need and unquenchable thirst for God and union with Him.

Philip Boyce was ordained Bishop of Raphoe, Ireland in1995. A Discalced Carmelite, he earned his doctorate in theologywith a dissertation on Christian perfection in the writings of John Henry Newman at the Teresianum in Rome, where he subsequently taught spirituality and dogmatic theology for twenty years. He has published numerous articles on Newman, as well as on Carmelite spirituality. His last publication: The Virgin Mary in the Life and Writings of John Henry Newman (Leominster, Gracewing, 2001).

Unfortunately, the sincere searchers of the present age, in which faith for many has grown cold, have for the most part found few genuine guides to lead them along the ways of the spirit, according to the teaching of the Gospels. They come up against the difficulties that inevitably beset men of prayer in all ages. Being unaware of the rules of this ‘royal road’ of prayer, they run into many difficulties and failures, and often place the blame at the doorstep of institutional bodies, while they turn to groups and methods that seem to offer greater experiential success. Consequently, they pass from group to group, from method to method, from one experience to another, in a constantly changing pattern, without ever settling down to a stable and fixed way of prayer.

The magnetic force that attracts and gives hope today is the love of experiences. Experiences of all kinds: in groups large and small, experiences of collective enthusiasm, experiences of Eastern meditation and so-called Celtic spirituality. Yet the purification, renunciation and constancy, demanded by a life of genuine prayerful union with God have not changed throughout the centuries. The Saints continue to repeat the message of always; while many explorers of prayer today continue to make the mistakes of old, and either give up the struggle or content themselves with being knowledgeable and speaking about prayer, or wander aimlessly along paths that are only preparatory to the grace and light of Christian revelation.

Since many people then are eager and searching for light and guidance, it is profitable to examine the practice and teaching of some of the masters of the spiritual life and learn from their experience and example.

Therefore, the following pages give a brief presentation of some aspects of the prayer life of one of the outstanding religious figures of the nineteenth century -John Henry Newman. Born in 1801 into an Anglican household in London, he was to become one of the eminent leaders of the Oxford Movement which aimed at a spiritual and doctrinal renewal of the Church of England. He took Anglican Orders and became a renowned preacher and teacher of Oxford University. Then in 1845, after years of intense prayer and study, he became a Roman Catholic. Ordained a priest in Rome two years later, he founded the first English Oratory of St Philip Neri in Birmingham. His life as a Catholic was not an easy one for he was not fully understood and appreciated in ecclesiastical circles. However, his moment of triumph came in 1879 when Pope Leo XIII made him a Cardinal. As well as being an eminent philosopher, theologian and educationalist, Newman was what we call ‘a man of prayer’, who was revered for his dedicated and unworldly life by the English-speaking Catholic laity who looked to him as their spiritual father and their guide in the paths of holiness.[1]

1. Prayer, the Texture of Newman’s Life

We can truly say that prayer constituted the spiritual texture of Newman’s life. He was without doubt a man endowed with brilliant intellectual gifts. His philosophical investigations have contributed to the history of thought and culture. His theological and spiritual writings, conspicuous for their clarity of thought, purity of doctrine and beauty of language, have earned for him a place of honour among ecclesiastical writers. Yet side by side with this poetical and scholarly trait, there was in him a religious and spiritual dimension, animating and guiding the former, keeping it from error and conferring on his writings their power of attraction and persuasion. This spiritual core was simply Newman’s own personal life; a life of faith, of virtue, of dedication, sustained and enlivened by constant prayer.

For Newman, prayer is simply man’s conversations with his God and Creator. It is the voice of faith, the ‘wings of the soul’, a reality found at the heart of all religion. It puts a person into communion with a higher world, and enables the Christian to exercise his citizenship with heaven. “Our conversation is in heaven” affirms St Paul (Phil 3:20). Prayer and praise are simply the words and phrases of this our heavenly conversation. It is the expression of the typical Christian attitude of watching and waiting for the coming of Christ, the Sursum corda that puts the believer in contact with heaven while he lives in the present world (cf. SVO, “Waiting for Christ”, esp. pp. 38-39).

With Newman, prayer was a lifelong habit. It originated from a keen awareness which he had from an early age of God’s presence and holiness. Even as a child he acutely felt the ‘unreality’ of material and visible things, and the underlying realness of invisible and spiritual beings -angels, his immortal soul, God. When he was only six years old he used to ask himself why he was and what he was (cf. AW 223). At the age of fifteen he speaks of himself and of his Creator as of “two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings” (Apo 4).

From his awareness of God’s presence and holiness, and of his own complete dependence on Him, there arose the need to pray and to give praise. In fact, any person who realises in more than words who God is and what he himself is, will spontaneously sing praises, revere the Majesty, adore the Holy, love the Divine Lover, humbly ask for help while giving thanks for graces received. This is prayer.

Newman’s faith in God was vibrant and certain. It was not simply a probability, the precaution of a fearful man, or the strategy of a shrewd one. It was the absolute certainty of an honest lover of truth. On this firm faith his prayer was grounded. Genuine devotion cannot flourish on doubt; if the truths of faith were merely probable or doubtful, “then the celebrated saying, ‘O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul’ would be the highest measure of devotion: -but who can really pray to a Being, about whose existence he is seriously in doubt?” (Apo 19).

We constantly come across these truths of God’s reality and holiness, his love and care for the individual soul and man’s total dependence on his sustaining and providential power, reflected in Newman’s own prayers. To give but a few examples:

“O my great God, from eternity Thou wast sufficient for Thyself! The Father was sufficient for the Son, and the Son for the Father; art Thou not then sufficient for me, a poor creature, Thou so great, I so little! I have a double all-sufficiency in the Father and the Son … O mighty God, strengthen me with Thy strength, console me with Thy everlasting peace, soothe me with the beauty of Thy countenance; enlighten me with Thy uncreated brightness; purify me with the fragrance of Thy ineffable holiness. Bathe me in Thyself, and give me to drink, as far as mortal man may ask, of the rivers of grace which flow from the Father and the Son, the grace of Thy consubstantial, co-eternal Love…

“O my God, my whole life has been a course of mercies and blessings shown to one who has been most unworthy of them. I require no faith, for I have had a long experience, as to Thy providence towards me. Year after year Thou hast carried me on – removed dangers from my path -recovered me, recruited me, refreshed me, borne with me, directed me, sustained me. O forsake me not when my strength faileth me. And Thou never wilt forsake me. I may securely repose upon Thee. Sinner as I am, nevertheless, while I am true to Thee, Thou wilt still and to the end, be superabundantly true to me” (MD 367. 421).

It is not surprising then that Newman prayed at all periods of his life. We have already alluded to the birth of prayer in his childhood days, springing from his awareness of God’s presence and holiness. In his private journals we come across lists of prayers and petitions written down and used by him from his teenage days. The Fathers of the Oratory in Birmingham still have three small notebooks, thumb-soiled and worn, which were constantly used by him and which contain prayers he said and the intentions and names of people he prayed for. The earliest prayer dates from 1817 when Newman was sixteen years old. It was composed for his first Holy Communion in the Anglican Church. The last entry is dated seventy-two years later -the year before his death.[2] Few people preserve and use their prayers over a period of seven decades! These humble pages bear eloquent witness to Newman’s inner life of communion with God, and show us the unassuming and simple soul that lay hidden beneath the outward distinction of this famous Oxford convert. His intellectual and his devotional life were not separated compartments: they went together.

The same intentions for which he prayed as an Anglican deacon were later copied down in one of these notebooks which he then used as a Catholic priest in his prayers before and after Mass. When he came into the Church of Rome he did not have to learn how to pray. That habit he had already acquired: it was merely modified by Catholic doctrine, and became more joyous, more tender, more Eucharistic.

Roman Catholicism added the intercession of saints and of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Rosary, prayer before the Blessed Sacrament and a tone of deeper familiarity and intimacy. However it was not a new art. Even in his preaching we can see how prayer penetrated his life. In the pulpit, he gave the impression of meditating with his God and of drawing his audience along with him. One of his companions at Littlemore (William Lockhart) said that the effect of his preaching on Oxford scholars came from his “power of raising the mind to God.”[3] Newman’s sermons, in other words, tended to become a prayer for himself and for those who listened to him with faith. He lifted up his listeners to the contemplation of the mysteries of divine revelation. Elucidated in his simple and penetrating words, abstract truths became concrete, plain and personal. Each sermon became an encounter with the living God, which made men dissatisfied with their own self-absorbed and worldly ways, and led them to be captured by the charm of God’s truth and beauty.

One writer describes what we may call the ‘prayerfulness’ of Newman’s preaching as follows: “The look and bearing of the preacher were as of one who dwelt apart, who, though he knew his age well, did not live in it. From his seclusion of study, and abstinence, and prayer, from habitual dwelling in the unseen, he seemed to come forth that one day of the week (Sunday) to speak to others of the things he had seen and known.”[4] We might add: he brought the realities of faith and of the unseen closer to the soul.

At times, his preaching even turned spontaneously into personal prayer and colloquy between the preacher and his Saviour. This fact can be clearly seen in the prayers woven into many of his sermons. The following tender prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is from one of his Catholic Sermons:

“O Heart of Jesus, ,, all Love, I offer Thee these humble prayers for myself, and for all those who unite themselves with me in Spirit to adore Thee. O holiest Heart of Jesus most lovely, I intend to renew and to offer to Thee these acts of adoration and these prayers, for myself a wretched sinner, and for all those who are associated with me in Thy adoration, through all moments while I breathe, even to the end of my life. I recommend to Thee, O my Jesus, Holy Church, Thy dear spouse and our true Mother, all just souls and all poor sinners, the afflicted, the dying, and all mankind. Let not Thy Blood be shed for them in vain. Finally, deign to apply it in relief of the souls in Purgatory, of those in particular who have practised in the course of their life this holy devotion of adoring Thee” (Mix 341).

Similarly, the following beautiful prayer for a happy death was first spoken in the pulpit:

“O my Lord and Saviour, support me in that hour in the strong arms of Thy Sacraments, and by the fresh fragrance of Thy consolations. Let the absolving words be said over me, and the holy oil sign and seal me, and Thy own Body be my food, and Thy Blood my sprinkling; and let my sweet Mother Mary breathe on me, and my Angel whisper peace to me, and my glorious Saints, and my own dear Father, Philip, smile on me; that in them all and through them all, I may receive the gift of perseverance, and die, as I desire to live, in Thy faith, in Thy Church, in Thy service, and in Thy love” (Mix 123).

Indeed all of Newman’s work bore the stamp of a prayerful and deeply religious man.

2. Simplicity and Sincerity of Newman’s prayer

It may seem strange that a man of such intellectual ability should pray in such a simple and natural fashion that any of us could make his prayers our own. Yet such is the case. We find him writing out long lists of people for whom he has to pray; struggling against distractions and dryness; finding devotion in litanies; having confidence in novenas and in the traditional prayer-formulas of the Church; assiduous with his Rosary and devoted to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.

Newman could have formulated prayers that would have given the impression of higher graces. Instead he shunned mystical eloquence and preferred to let the words he penned be the expression of what he genuinely felt. In this we have a note of authenticity: those who seek the singular deceive themselves; those who labour for beautiful words or thoughts, speak to themselves more often than to God; those who despise the prayers formulated by the Church in her liturgy run the risk of juggling with words; those who look for an emotional experience will never attain to a life of genuine prayer.

Newman, however, was a lover of unfeigned and simple things. He preferred real words, real sentiments, real decisions, humble and commonplace as they might be, to the apparently rapturous but artificial language of insincerity. He was wary of sentimental devotion and condemned those who, in order to pray, thought they had to stimulate their feelings and work themselves into a state of raised emotions. It is significant that he preferred English piety to the more effusive and sentimental devotions and melodies which Faber introduced from the Continent.

Faith, not feeling, Newman claimed, was the simple and sure means of contacting Christ. It may not always be an easy and self-satisfying path, but to think that we can improve it by the introduction of feelings and ideas of our own is a great yet common mistake. For true faith which is “colourless, like air or water” many are tempted (Newman claims) to substitute “a feeling notion, sentiment, conviction or act of reason, which they may hang over, and doat upon. They rather aim at experiences (as they are called) within them, than at Him that is without them” (Jfc 336), that is, at subjective feeling rather than objective reality.

Newman, on the other hand, perseveres patiently and painstakingly at his prayer of faith. He did not find it easy at all times, but then he did not expect to. He once asked while still a young Anglican curate: “Is it an easy thing to pray?”, and then replied: “It is easy to wait for a rush of feelings, and then to let our petitions be borne upon them; and never to attempt the duty till then; but it is not at all easy to be in the habit day after day and hour after hour, in all frames of mind, and under all outward circumstances, to bring before God a calm, collected, awakened soul. It is not at all easy to keep the mind from wandering in prayer, to keep out all intrusive thoughts about other things. It is not at all easy to realise what we are about, who is before us, what we are seeking, and what our state is. It is not at all easy to throw off the world and to understand that God and Christ hear us, that Saints and Angels are standing by us, and the Devil desiring to have us… Where is the really serious mind that will say it is easy to take delight in stated prayer, to attend to it duly? Is not at the best our delight in it transient, and our attention irregular? Is all this satisfactory and elating?”(PS IV 75-76).

This great man was under no illusion as to the difficulty of persevering in prayer and the challenge it presented to any person. He himself suffered at times from dryness and lack of devotion, and did not disdain to ask God for genuine love and fervour. Feelings, of course, had their place in his prayer: he calls them the ‘beauty’ of holiness and claims that they keep us young in spirit as we grow old in body. But they lie not in our power and cannot be the test of our prayer. Therefore, in asking for ‘fervour’, he does not intend a passing and unprofitable emotion, but a share in God’s own eternal love poured into our souls by the Holy Sprit:

“In asking for fervour, I am asking for effectual strength, consistency, and perseverance; I am asking for deadness to every human motive, and simplicity of intention to please Thee: I am asking for faith, hope, and charity in their most heavenly exercise. In asking for fervour I am asking to be rid of the fear of man and the desire of his praise; I am asking for the gift of prayer, because it will be so sweet; I am asking for that loyal perception of duty, which follows on yearning affection; I am asking for sanctity, peace, and joy all at once… Lord, in asking for fervour, I am asking for Thyself, for nothing short of Thee, O my God, who hast given Thyself wholly to us. Enter my heart substantially and personally, and fill it with fervour by filling it with Thee. Thou alone canst fill the soul of man, and Thou hast promised to do so. Thou art the living Flame, and ever burnest with love of man: enter into me and set me on fire after Thy pattern and likeness” (MD 431).

As we can see from these quotations, prayer for Newman was very much bound up with how a person lived day by day. The criterion of prayer was not the good feelings one had at the hour of formal devotion, but rather the improvement it had on one’s daily conduct. If prayer led a person to obey more readily, to carry the Cross more willingly, to advance on the road of conversion and virtue, then it was genuine. “The works of every day, these are the tests of our glorious contemplations” (PS I 270). St. Teresa of Avila, recognised mistress of prayer and of the ways of the sprit, gives exactly the same advice: “Works are what the Lord wants… the most potent and acceptable prayer is the prayer that leaves the best effects… I should describe the best effects as those that are followed up by actions -when the soul not only desires the honour of God, but really strives for it, and employs the memory and understanding in considering how it may please Him and show its love for Him more and more … Oh, that is real prayer which cannot be said of a handful of consolations that do nothing but console ourselves… I should never want any prayer that would not make the virtues grow within me.”[5]

Above all, Newman recognized that prayer was a challenge to the believing soul and that, if persevered in, it would bring its moments of trial and purification. He did not pretend to have a special method that guaranteed instant success and facility. Achievement would come only through persevering practice and would be the outcome of a life of faith and of obedience to the Divine Will. Like any other habit it is acquired by practice. He gives the following piece of sound advice: “In order at length to pray well, we must begin by praying ill, since ill is all we can do. Is not this plain? Who, in the case of any other work, would wait till he could do it perfectly, before he tried it?”(PS I 264). We seem to hear this advice echoed, unconsciously perhaps, in the words of Pope Paul VI: “If you have lost the taste for prayer, you will regain the desire for it by returning humbly to its practice.”[6] Or as St Francisde Sales used to say: “If you cannot pray, pray”.

Finally, prayer that is sincere is also persistent. Success is promised not to a selfish petition in time of need, nor to a sporadic effort, but to a persevering attempt. We “ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Lk 18:1) is the Gospel teaching, and Newman comments: “We are expressly told to pray again and again, to continue constantly in prayer, in order to succeed … it is not one act of prayer, then, or two, but a course and continuance of prayer, which entitle us to God’s mercy” (PS VI 162-163).

3. The Prayer of Intercession

The type of prayer that came most spontaneously to Newman was that of intercession. It seemed to him to be the kind most specifically recommended by Sacred Scripture. It is moreover not a selfish petition for things we need: it is essentially prayer for others, or as Newman says “for ourselves with others, for the Church, and for the world, that it may be brought into the Church” (PS III 350-351). Intercession arises from the social nature of man and from his total dependence on God for everything he has. In a sense, it is the typical prayer of those who are joined together in love and faith within Christ’s Church: “Intercession is the characteristic of Christian worship, the privilege of the heavenly adoption, the exercise of the perfect and spiritual mind…

If Christians are to live together, they will pray together; and united prayer is necessarily of an intercessory character, as being offered for each other and for the world, and for self as one of the whole. In proportion, then, as unity is an especial Gospel-duty, so does Gospelprayer partake of a social character and Intercession becomes a token of the existence of a Church Catholic” (PS III 350-353).

Newman himself was a man who easily made friends and who united them all in a chain of intercessory prayer that remained constant throughout his life. We have already referred to the long lists of intentions and names of people he copied into his notebook, for remembrance on the various days of the week. These lists became familiar to him with regular usage. Among those who found a place in his petitions were: Godchildren, Those dear to me, Those cold to me, Benefactors, Converts, Irish friends, the dead, etc. We have examples of how persevering he was and how faithful to these mementos. His friend, the Revd Walter Mayers, an Evangelical clergyman who had been instrumental in turning Newman to God at the age of fifteen, died prematurely in 1828. Newman was never to forget a prayer for him. In fact, 42 years later he still prayed for him at Mass on the anniversary of his death (cf. LD XXV 38).

For all his greatness, Newman did not disdain to use the traditional prayer so dear to simple and faithful souls. In his Meditations and Devotions we have the purest manifestation of his prayer and spirituality. In this book, we find a litany and a novena he composed in honour of St. Philip Neri, a triduum to St. Joseph, meditations on the Stations of the Cross, prayers and meditations for a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, for the light of truth, for a happy death, for the faithful departed. We get a glimpse in these pages of the earnestness and simplicity of his soul at prayer. We come away with the conviction that prayer is not to be valued solely for its sublime thoughts and striking expressions, but rather for the faith and love of the soul that prays. As he himself once said, how can we complain of personal difficulties, the evil state of the world and the loss of souls, “if we have but lightly used the intercessions offered up in the Litany, the Psalms, and in the Holy Communion?” (PS III 365). He esteemed the prayer of the Church and had confidence in its power.

4. The Breviary and the Psalms

Newman loved the Roman Breviary and used it assiduously from the time he first received a copy -a keepsake of his departed friend Hurrell Froude -in 1836. In that same year he wrote Tract 75, consisting of a brief history of the Breviary and a translation of various Offices and Hours. He regarded it of such “excellence and beauty” that it could well “raise a prejudice” in favour of the Roman Catholic Church for an unwary Anglican. Being at the time in the Church of England himself, he tried “to wrest a weapon out of our adversaries’ hands.”[7] He proposed it to his readers not only as material for the Anglican daily Service but also for their own private devotions. And in fact, the Tract on the Breviary sold extremely well and some of his disciples recited the Divine Office every day after that.

The prayers of the Breviary and its arrangement of readings, intercessions and psalms throughout the hours of the day appealed very much to Newman. It helped him to sanctify the various parts of the day and the fleeting passage of time, of which he was keenly aware.[8] The abundance of inspired writings it contained delighted him although he did regret that the Roman usage had curtailed the use of Scripture as originally read in the monastic Office. He would have been happy with the new Liturgy of the Hours, with its more abundant biblical and patristic readings, published after the Second Vatican Council.

In particular, Newman relished the Psalter -“that wonderful manual of prayer and praise, which, from the time when its various portions were first composed down to the last few centuries, has been the most precious viaticum of the Christian mind in its journey through the wilderness” (HS II 459). Like the Fathers of the Church, he studied the spiritual and Christian meaning of the Psalms, applying them to the Church and to actual conditions of Christian life in his own day. For him, those originally Jewish prayers of the Old Testament “abound in edifying lessons and breathe of Christ” (SSD 258).

During the years of suffering and search before his entry into the Roman Catholic Church, Newman recited the Breviary in his semimonastic community at Littlemore. It was a period of trial and testing. He turned to the inspired words of the Psalms for consolation and strength, applying to himself their lamentations and supplications, their hoping and rejoicing. “Great want of matter,” he observed in his journal after one of his meditations, “took to repeating the Great Antiphons of Advent” (AW 233; December 23, 1843). A year later, in the depth of his distress, he wrote: “I had for days a literal ache all about my heart; and from time to time all the complaints of the Psalmist seemed to belong to me” (Apo 319; November 16, 1844). And again, six months before his conversion: “You can understand how painful this doubt is; so I have waited, hoping for light, and using the words of the Psalmist, ‘Show some token upon me’” (Apo 322; March 30, 1845). The book of Psalms with its two main ideas of the defeat of God’s enemies and the suffering of God’s people,[9] seemed to him to portray exactly the perennial state of the Church and of its loyal members: ever weak in themselves, yet strong in the Lord; ever persecuted and despised, yet prospering and loved by God. On a number of significant occasions he found relief and renewed confidence (e.g., when ill in Sicily in 1833) in praying the following inspired lines: “I lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved, he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in From this time forth and for evermore” Ps 121 (120).

On the wall above his prie-dieu in his private room at the Birmingham Oratory, Newman pasted two passages from the psalms. They must have been very dear to him and have expressed a dominant attitude of his soul at prayer. They describe the sufferings of the just man, who refused the company of the wicked. Consolation is found in the thought of the transient nature of this life: in repentance for past infidelities and firm confidence in God’s assistance for the future:

“Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is!… Deliver me from all my transgressions. Make me not the scorn of the fool! I am dumb, I do not open my mouth: for it is thou who hast done it… Trust in the Lord, and do good; so you will dwell in the land, and enjoy security. Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” Ps 39 (38), 4.8-9; Ps 37 (36), 3-4.

These words draw aside the veil that screened his interior communion with God. And it is significant that it was not in one of his many books of devotion and theology that he found the words to express his innermost self before God, but in the inspired text of the Psalms, the greatest prayers of all times.

The daily recital of the Divine Office was not simply a rule for him that as a priest he had to observe, but much more a source of spiritual joy and support. As a Catholic, his love for the Roman Breviary -“the solemn prayer of the clergy, the united prayer” (LD XXV 79) -and for its inspired psalms increased. Private devotions were good in their place but the Breviary and the Eucharistic liturgy “have a grace and tenderness, which are not to be found in the mass of devotional books” in popular use (LD XXV 16). One of Newman’s Oratorian friends who had lived with him for years has left us the following testimony: “He had always been greatly attached to the recital of the Office, and he rejoiced especially in the recurrence of the Sunday and other longer offices; his favourite parts of which never palled upon him as subjects for conversation.”[10] 10 When in old age, declining eyesight forced him to discontinue the daily recital of the Divine Office, he found it a severe trial. He then substituted the Rosary in its stead.

5. The Rosary

Newman’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is well known. Jean Guitton has even claimed that Newman is par excellence the Doctor Marianus of the nineteenth century.[11] Even as an Anglican, he revered the Mother of the Saviour. Of course, before his conversion he did not approve of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the invocation of Saints, but he did recognise the Virgin Mary as an eminent intercessor on our behalf. He contemplated her above all as a model of faith and of true wisdom. If we are to believe in the integral mystery of the Incarnation of God’s Son, then we must respect and have trust in the intercession of the Mother of the Redeemer.

As a Roman Catholic, Newman made his own the traditional Catholic devotions in honour of Our Lady. His trust in her sprang from his belief that she was the intercessor on our behalf on account of the part she played in the Redemption, as the Second Eve. This doctrine Newman based on the teaching of St. Justin and St. Irenaeus. He writes: “Whereas all the Saints intercede for us, through the merits and in the grace of Christ, she is the Intercessor or Helper-that this is her distinct part in the economy of human salvation -so that, knowing the will of our Lord most intimately, she prays according to His will, or thus is the ordained means or channel by which that will is carried out. Therefore ‘every thing goes through the hands of Mary’ -and this is a great reason for our asking her prayers” (LD XXII 68). In this sense her intercession is called “omnipotent”, “as being able to gain from God what she desires by the medium of prayer” (Prepos 344).

Among the many Marian devotions cultivated by Newman, the Rosary was the one he preferred. It seemed to him to be the most beautiful, simple and efficacious of all private devotions, to contain a ‘soothing sweetness’ that there is in nothing else.[12] Although he was careful not to impose particular acts of piety on prospective converts or on the recently converted, he did not scruple to recommend to them the recitation of the Rosary in preparation for the gift of faith or in gratitude for having received it (cf. LD XII 217-219. 263). Newman found that in his daily prayer, the Rosary helped him to contemplate the great dogmatic truths of faith in a simple and familiar manner. His own religious and spiritual life had a sound doctrinal foundation. Dogma and doctrine however did not remain for him abstract truths of an intellectual order. They were personal and real values embodied above all in the person and teaching of Christ. The Rosary helped him to make these truths more concrete and to transform dogmatic investigation into an act of worship and adoration. To the boys of Oscott College he explained that “the great power of the Rosary lies in this, that it makes the Creed into a prayer; of course, the Creed is in some sense a prayer and a great act of homage to God; but the Rosary gives us the great truths of His life and death to meditate upon, and brings them nearer to our hearts. And so we contemplate all the great mysteries of His life; in His birth in the manger; and so too in the mysteries of Among the many Marian devotions cultivated by Newman, the Rosary was the one he preferred. It seemed to him to be the most beautiful, simple and efficacious of all private devotions, to contain a ‘soothing sweetness’ that there is in nothing else.12 Although he was careful not to impose particular acts of piety on prospective converts or on the recently converted, he did not scruple to recommend to them the recitation of the Rosary in preparation for the gift of faith or in gratitude for having received it (cf. LD XII 217-219. 263).

Newman found that in his daily prayer, the Rosary helped him to contemplate the great dogmatic truths of faith in a simple and familiar manner. His own religious and spiritual life had a sound doctrinal foundation. Dogma and doctrine however did not remain for him abstract truths of an intellectual order. They were personal and real values embodied above all in the person and teaching of Christ. The Rosary helped him to make these truths more concrete and to transform dogmatic investigation into an act of worship and adoration.

To the boys of Oscott College he explained that “the great power of the Rosary lies in this, that it makes the Creed into a prayer; of course, the Creed is in some sense a prayer and a great act of homage to God; but the Rosary gives us the great truths of His life and death to meditate upon, and brings them nearer to our hearts. And so we contemplate all the great mysteries of His life; in His birth in the manger; and so too in the mysteries of His suffering and his glorified life.”[13] Moreover, it enables us to live and contemplate these mysteries almost through the eyes of Mary, the Mother of our Saviour, and in union with her, thus giving them a touch of maternal fragrance and impressing them more deeply on our hearts. Newman himself was fond of his beads: “to my own feelings nothing is more delightful” (LD XII 217). For him it was not a matter of a mechanical repetition, but a meditation and contemplation of the mysteries of Our Lord’s life in the company of His Mother. He has not told us expressly how he said the Rosary, but the following advice which he gave to a recent convert whom he directed probably reflects Newman’s own procedure: “Try it thus, if you don’t so use it at present, but perhaps you do; -viz. before each mystery, set before you a picture of it, and fix your mind upon that picture, (e.g. the Annunciation, the Agony, etc.) while you say the Pater and 10 Aves, not thinking of the words, only saying them correctly. Let the exercise be hardly more than a meditation. Perhaps this will overcome any sense of tedium” (LD XII 263). Needless to say the material repetition of Paters and Aves has then reached its scope and becomes genuine prayer. Members of his Oratorian Community at Edgbaston, Birmingham, remembered him throughout the years absorbed in reading or writing or, if not so engaged, then in silent prayer with a Rosary in his hands. The sight of this humble man, of outstanding accomplishments, of extraordinary talent and surpassing intelligence, turning spontaneously to his Rosary beads and finding unfailing help in them for prayer and union with God, is surely a reminder to us to reconsider the hidden value of the treasures we possess, nowadays fallen into disuse, before abandoning them for strange and uncharted ways of experiencing the Triune God.

His suffering and his glorified life.”13 Moreover, it enables us to live and contemplate these mysteries almost through the eyes of Mary, the Mother of our Saviour, and in union with her, thus giving them a touch of maternal fragrance and impressing them more deeply on our hearts. Newman himself was fond of his beads: “to my own feelings nothing is more delightful” (LD XII 217). For him it was not a matter of a mechanical repetition, but a meditation and contemplation of the mysteries of Our Lord’s life in the company of His Mother. He has not told us expressly how he said the Rosary, but the following advice which he gave to a recent convert whom he directed probably reflects Newman’s own procedure: “Try it thus, if you don’t so use it at present, but perhaps you do; -viz. before each mystery, set before you a picture of it, and fix your mind upon that picture, (e.g. the Annunciation, the Agony, etc.) while you say the Pater and 10 Aves, not thinking of the words, only saying them correctly. Let the exercise be hardly more than a meditation. Perhaps this will overcome any sense of tedium” (LD XII 263). Needless to say the material repetition of Paters and Aves has then reached its scope and becomes genuine prayer.

Members of his Oratorian Community at Edgbaston, Birmingham, remembered him throughout the years absorbed in reading or writing or, if not so engaged, then in silent prayer with a Rosary in his hands. The sight of this humble man, of outstanding accomplishments, of extraordinary talent and surpassing intelligence, turning spontaneously to his Rosary beads and finding unfailing help in them for prayer and union with God, is surely a reminder to us to reconsider the hidden value of the treasures we possess, nowadays fallen into disuse, before abandoning them for strange and uncharted ways of experiencing the Triune God.

6. “Consider into Whose Presence you enter”

The following three kinds of divine presence were often pondered by Newman and he found them a significant help in his private prayer. If we bear them in mind, they will be of assistance to us in this sublime task of communion with God.

The first presence is that of the Indwelling Trinity in our souls. Any person in grace can turn to this divine presence within him: his converse and adoration and praise are not directed to an abstract Being, but to a personal Lord and Friend: to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. To become aware of this divine presence in our lives is in itself a prayer and a sure means of communion with God. “Let us consider for a few moments before we pray” -Newman exhorts -“into whose presence we are entering, -the presence of God. What need have we of humble, sober, and subdued thoughts! As becomes creatures… as becomes lost sinners… and still more, as grateful servants of Him who bought us from ruin at the price of His own blood!” (PS I 260).

Advice that echoes, almost in the very words used, that given by St Teresa of Avila, although Newman never read her works: “Who can say that it is wrong if, before we begin reciting the Hours or the Rosary, we think Whom we are going to address, and who we are that are addressing Him, so that we may do so in the way we should?… We need no wings to go in search of Him but have only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us.”[14]

Secondly, Newman turned for assistance to the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. In particular, as a Catholic, he found in the Eucharistic Presence a sustaining source of comfort and courage during the many years of trial and suspicion he had to face. The more he was misunderstood and rejected by men, the more he felt that in the Blessed Sacrament he had a friend who understood and consoled him. In this presence, he was no longer solitary or lonely. To anyone who suffers from the seeming absence of God or the real lack of human companions, Newman would give the advice to turn to the Blessed Sacrament and to speak to Him with whom we are not solitary. Although prayer is possible everywhere, he regarded that the privileged place of praise and intercession was before the Tabernacle, thus repeating the inner conviction of all souls who are led by faith and love to friendship with Christ (cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Homily at the Marian Vespers with the Religious and Seminarians of Bavaria, Altötting, 11 September 2006).

The third kind of divine presence in which Newman found help and inspiration for prayer was that of Christ in Sacred Scripture. He tells us that his imagination helped him but very little: what he never saw or read about, did not influence him. Moreover, his fertile mind would have tempted him to spend time at prayer in forming beautiful thoughts and expressing them to himself in elegant words. Yet he realized that this was a mere intellectual exercise, related to religious subjects it is true, but not prayer in the strict sense. The presence of Christ in his inspired word in the Scriptures was therefore of great benefit to him: “I gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo. I gain more from three verses of St. John than from the three points of a meditation” (HS II 217). The Gospels placed him in the presence of a living Person, and made the abstract points of theology and dogma living images within his soul. This thought may remind you of another, perhaps more familiar, testimony: “It is especially the Gospels which sustain me during my hours of prayer, for in them I find what is necessary for my little soul. I am constantly discovering in them new lights, hidden and mysterious meanings.”[15]

Conclusion

Newman’s long life was one of constant prayer and communion with the unseen world. It was not a mystical journey with extraordinary phenomena, but a persevering effort in the weakness and darkness of our human condition. He tasted hours of extreme bitterness and distress, but also moments of peaceful adoration and joyful praise. His method was simple in its form, intercessory in character, Eucharistic and devotional by personal preference, nourished by the Psalms and the Gospel. As he grew older, his prayerfulness and spiritual refinement increased, until he reached the point of full maturity of spirit. In the end, he himself, his very life, was a prayer. Like many other great friends of Christ, John Henry Newman is an example and an inspiration to us in the simple but demanding course of daily prayer.

Abbreviations

Apo Apologia pro vita sua, edited by I. Ker, London, Penguin Books, 1994.

AW Autobiographical Writings, edited by H. Tristram, London and New York, Sheed and Ward, 1956.HS Historical Sketches. vol. II, Westminster, Md., Christian Classics, 1970.

LD The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, edited by Ch. St. Dessain et al., vols. I-VIII, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978-1999; vols. IX-X, Oxford,Oxford University Press, 2006; vols. XI-XXII, London, Thomas Nelson,1961-1972; vols. XXIII-XXXI, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973-1977.

Jfc Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, Westminster, Md., Christian Classics, 1966.MD Meditations and Devotions of the Late Cardinal Newman, edited by W. Neville, London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1893.

Mix Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, London, Longmans, Green,and Co., 1906.

PS Parochial and Plain Sermons, vols. I-VIII, Westminster, Md., ChristianClassics, 1966-1968.

PresPos Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, Herefordshire – Notre Dame, IN, Gracewing -University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.

SSD Sermons bearing on Subjects of the Day, Westminster, Md., Christian Classics, 1968.

SVO Sermons preached on Various Occasions, Westminster, Md., Christian Classics, 1968.

[2] Cf. Newman the Oratorian, edited with an Introductory Study on the Continuity between hisAnglican and his Catholic Ministry by P. MURRAY O.S.B., Dublin, Gill and Macmillan Ltd,1969, pp. 59-69. For further studies on Newman’s prayer life: cf. T. R. IVORY, When you Pray… The Way of Newman, in: The Way 17 (1977) 145-155; J. HONORÉ, Itinéraire spirituel deNewman. Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 1964; Ch. St. DESSAIN, Why Pray? A Defence of Prayer largely drawn from the writings of Cardinal Newman, Langley, Bucks., St. Paul Publications, 1969;H. TRISTRAM, With Newman at Prayer, in: John Henry Newman. Centenary Essays, London, Burns and Oates, 1945, pp. 101-125.

[3] Cf. Ch. St. DESSAIN, Newman’s Spirituality: its Value Today, in: English Spiritual Writers,edited by Ch. Davis, London, Burns and Oates, 1961, pp. 157-158.

[4] J. C. SHAIRP, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, Edinburgh, David Douglas, 1886, pp. 247-248.

[5] The Interior Castle V, 3, 11, in: The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila, translated by K.KAVANAUGH O.C.D. and O. RODRIGUEZ O.C.D., Washington, D.C., ICS Publications, 1980,vol. II, p. 352; Letter of October 23, 1576, to J. Gracián, in: The Letters of Saint Teresaof Jesus, translated by E. A. PEERS, London, Burns, Oates and Washbourne Ltd., 1951, vol. I, p. 316.

[6] Apostolic Exhortation Evangelica testificatio, n. 42.

[7] Tract 75, p. 1, in: Tracts for the Times, vol. III, London, Rivington, 1840.

[8] Cf. D. H. MOSELEY, Newman and the Roman Breviary, in: Worship 34 (1960) 75-79.

[9] L. F. BARMANN, Newman on the Psalms as Christian Prayer, in: Worship 38 (1964) 207-214.

[10] W. WARD The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, vol. II, London, Longmans, Green andCo.,1912, p. 533.

[11] Cf. Newman Studien, vol. III, edited by H. FRIES and W. BECKER, Nürnberg, Glock und Lutz,1957, pp. 84-85, footnote 7.

[12] Cf. Sayings of Cardinal Newman, Dublin, Carraig Books (Reprints 3), 1976, p. 44.

[13] Ibid., pp. 44-45.

[14] Way of Perfection, c. 22,3; c.28,2.

[15] ST. THÉRÈSE OF THE CHILD JESUS, Story of A Soul, ch. 8, Clarke Trans., p. 179.