Newman - True Conversion

As British Catholics celebrate John Henry Cardinal Newman’s 207th birthday, I offer a few observations from Fr Oakes from a recent First Things article on this saintly person's theological insights. First, regarding the difference between Newman's understanding of exclusive and legitimate truth claims of the Catholic Church and, if you will, "exterritorial grace" -- that is, recognition of the grace of God at work outside her boundaries. From his Essays Critical and Historical:

[T]he doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian [Zoroastrian]; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin [Burmese and Cambodian Buddhists]; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusianian [pagan Greek]; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honors to the dead are a polytheism.

But, as Oakes points out, "far from threatening him or leading him to a shopworn and lazy relativism (never his sin!), Newman saw these assorted proto-revelations as themselves signs, not just of the presence of God's logoi spermatikoi (Gr. 'seeds of the Word') in all of human society but also as pathmarkers for the Church's evangelizing pilgrimage through salvation history, a journey he describes in one of the most magnificent passages in his Essay on Development":

What man is amid the brute creation, such is the Church among the schools of the world; and as Adam gave names to the animals about him, so has the Church from the first looked round upon the earth, noting and visiting the doctrines she found there. She began in chaldea, and then sojourned among the Canaanites, and went down into Egypt, and thence passed into Arabia, till she rested in her own land. Next she encountered the merchants of Tyre, and the wisdom of the East country, and the luxury of Sheba. Then she was carried away to Babylon, and wandered to the schools of Greece. And wherever she went, in trouble or in triumph, still she was a living spirit, the mind and voice of the Most High, "sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions," claiming to herself what they said rightly, correcting their errors, supplying their defects, completing their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus gradually by means of them enlarging the range and refining the sense of her own teaching. So far from her creed being of doubtful credit because it resembled foreign theologies, we even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world.

Fr Oakes concludes by sharing one last quotation from Development that shows the grace and providence of God's ways in human history, and in each of our histories.

True religion is the summit and perfection of false religions; it combines in one whatever there is of good and true separately remaining in each ... So that, in matter of fact, if a religious mind were educated in and sincerely attached to some form of heathenism or heresy, and then were brought under the light of truth, it would be drawn off from error into the truth, not by losing what it had, but by gaining what it had not, not by being unclothed, but by being "clothed upon." True conversion is ever of a positive, not a negative character.

Remember that when and if you ever reach for C. S. Lewis's final book of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle.