Bishop Barron Q&A on St. John Henry Newman’s Life, Theology, and Books (from Oxford, England)

you welcome everybody I'm Matt Nelson the assistant director of the board on fire institute and I'm here live on location in the examination schools at Oxford University in Oxford England and I'm here with Bishop Robert Barron in just a few moments I'm gonna be asking Bishop bearing questions submitted from our word on Fire Institute members about the life thought and ministry of st. John Henry Newman but first I want to invite you if you're not a word on fire an institute member to go to word on fire dot Institute and sign up right now when you become a member of the Institute you'll have access to courses from top experts on disciplines like theology philosophy sociology apologetics evangelization literature and other fields of expertise but most importantly you'll have access to Bishop Byrd's brand-new 12 lesson course on st. John Henry Newman so go to word on fire dot Institute and sign up now and with that let's jump into questions Bishop Baron how are you today I'm good great to be with you man good so the first question I want to ask you was just about your experience just a couple days ago you were in Rome for the canonization of now Saint John Henry Newman what was that like for you it was a thrill right there in st. Peter's Square and I've admired Newman for so many years when I used to teach courses in Newman I would tell the students I'll mark my words he'll be a saint one day and a doctor of the church so I kept thinking to read them asked well we're halfway there Newman's now a saint I was struck to by just that all the historical and spiritual resonances in that place there's the successor of Peter celebrating the mass we're right near the grave of st. Peter we chanted the gospel that day in Latin and Greek and I thought how Newman would have loved that because it evokes the Church Fathers so all those wonderful resonances and then during the mass I was right up in the front there near the altar and looking up on the facade of the Basilica was this magnificent tapestry of John Henry Newman and I just kept thinking boy that he ever in his wildest imaginings when he arrived in Rome as a as a you know middle-aged man in about 1846 that he'd be declared a saint of the Catholic Church and it just struck me over and over again the wonderful kind of ironies and connections and resonances so it was a it was a beautiful thing yeah I caught some of it and it was it was a beautiful mass it was really moving to see all five of the new Saints canonized that day and and yeah so really exciting and so now we're here in Oxford you've been here before and you know it was this is an exciting thing for the world on fire Institute members because they got to contribute to this very event that we're engaging in right now they submitted questions that they wanted you to address while we're here and so based on those questions I've got those here for you today some questions that I've put together so the first question that I want to ask you and I think this is fitting with us sitting here in the oldest english-speaking University in the world maybe even the most renowned university in the world to ask you what did st. John Henry Newman have to say about universities yeah first year right in suggesting that this is this is Newman's town in many ways he was an Oxford man it defined him his whole life long even after he became a Catholic and and left his formal teaching and fellowship here he remained an Oxford man it was in his blood and his bones and of course he writes the magnificent idea of a university one of his great texts still of enormous influence today I think what Newman saw so many things but one is the importance of a truly liberal education so we're obsessed especially now with practicality with mechanics with how to get things done to be practical even our higher disciplines think of you know engineering and so on are usually geared toward something pragmatic Newman insisted upon the value of a properly liberal education liberal from the word in Latin for free and that means free of of practicality in other words something which is not subordinated to a good outside of itself but it's sought for its own sink so that's Aristotle's famous definition that the liberal Sciences are those that are the highest because there good in themselves just like playing baseball is something liberal meaning you don't do it for some other purpose you do it because it's good well philosophy is like that and Neumann felt that the purpose of a university ultimately is to produce the philosophical habit so studying all the various disciplines yes but the overall purpose was to give this sort of universal view of things the the interrelationship among the various disciplines and to see them as as good in themselves as beautiful and valuable in themselves and then I think remains to this day an extremely important and valuable contribution what did st. now st. John Henry Newman sounds good what did what did he have to say about the university in terms of helping somebody become a gentleman that was that was the word he used when he talked about the purpose of a liberal arts education in developing this philosophical hell yeah and that's it that's shorthand for what I was just describing the person that has the philosophical hobby to us would be a gentleman and and as an Englishman he raided gentlemen Louis is a very high level but the interesting thing is Newman said that's the purpose of a university the purpose of a church is to make not the gentleman but the saint and he defined the same really over and against the gentleman in some ways gentleman he said make you feel comfortable and at ease there like a fine fire or a comfortable chair Saints last time I checked and last time I checked were often anything but comfortable figures they were edgy and challenging and disturbing figures think of everyone from you know Jeremiah the Prophet through jerome and francis of assisi and in our time mother theresa they're not really comfortable figures so that was an important distinction yes the University which inculcate the philosophical habit produces gentlemen but the church is meant to produce something else namely the saint so could we see a university as a sort of precursor to then the church in the sense that becoming a gentleman is becoming gentlemanly as in a way preparing somebody but not getting them the whole way - yeah there's something of a nature grace distinction there so Newman affirmed being a gentleman he wasn't against it at all on the contrary but being a saint was something beyond it so it's not as shoeing nature or denigrating it but then also insisting there's something more than that so that was the that was the tension built into those essays on the university he loved the university love what it was about love what was meant to produce but he didn't want to reduce sanctity to being a gentleman he didn't want to reduce the purpose of the church to the purpose of a university so he kept I would say a healthy tension between nature and grace good good let's stick with this conversation about the University for for another question I'm interested to know do you think that st. John Henry Newman would have thought that theology belonged in even the secular universities and how do you personally feel about that no he clearly did you know and by theology there he wouldn't have meant so much the the formal theology of the church he would have meant what they called in those days natural theology so theology based upon reason for a philosophical reason and Newman felt yeah if it's a university that means it has to include all the disciplines why wouldn't you include the discipline that speaks of God because God impinges upon all things is God operative in history yes obviously does God inspire much of the literature of the world obviously is God implicated in the sciences well sure in the measure that all the sciences depend upon the intelligibility of the world which in turn is a result of creation etc etc yeah and so how could you be a university in good faith if you didn't have a discipline dedicated to that which impinges upon everything else mm-hmm furthermore and I think it's a very important part of his argument is theology belongs in the center of the university disciplines and there Newman echoes someone like Bonaventure in the Middle Ages when do you extricate theology from the position in the center nature abhors a vacuum something else will move into that central position and Newman saw that very clearly mid 19th century do we see it today I would say in spades precisely in the scientism that dominates our intellectual life what's moved into the center of all the disciplines but science I can't tell you how many times in my work you know on the internet people say some version of well science is what you mean by reason to be reasonable to be scientific right and I say well wrong science is indeed a form of reasonability but not the only one and what's happened there is is the supplanted theology has now been replaced by science when I was coming of age psychology maybe had that central you know all defining position be where said Newman in the mid 19th century when that happens you have a distortion of all the disciplines when theology is as the Middle Ages saw it the Regina sense erm right it was the queen of the sciences when it was in the properly central position the other sciences maintained their integrity I think that observation remains enormous Lee important today in your course on st. John Henry Newman you talk about this you go into greater depth and as I was contemplating what you teach in that course and then thinking about the questions I'd be asking you today as I was thinking about theology in the secular university I thought of a comment once made by Paul Davies he's a renowned physicist and he's an agnostic but he commented once on modern science and the advancements in science what it now tells us almost forces us now into a sort of theological position and so that's another thing I think to consider when we talk about theology and in the secular university is he the one in fact who said it would challenged his scientific colleagues where do the laws of nature come from so I mean all of science rests upon this fundamental assumption of intelligibility and we put that in terms of the laws of science call them even patterns of probability if you want but all of science upon that it wasn't a he who in a famous article challenges colleagues to say okay where'd that come from he has I'm not sure but he has been a voice in the scientific community that has challenged his colleagues and as an agnostic he's he's written a couple books and his right he's an agnostic but that he thought that was a fair question to to tease out yeah alright well give me your best account of it yeah why should the world be structured in such a way that it corresponds to the most complex type of mathematics mm-hmm you look at the highest level physics always involves very complex mathematics why should it be the case that reality is describable in that way yeah but we would say the intelligibility of the world is grounded in something like an intelligence that is thought and into being so that every active of science is rotzinger one set is a recog knit Co right it's a recognition it's a rethinking of what's already been thought that's how I would answer that question yeah and why I think something like theology or call it natural theology belongs in the circle of university discipline yeah and something that he's doing that I think Newman would have respected is the fact that he he sees that faith in a reason have a sort of compatibility between the two and so he's agnostic but he's not he's not resting easily in agnosticism yeah he's open to the conversation and that's a salutary thing today when you've got a lot of a scientistic point of view the new atheists are dripping with scientism and they'll they'll play that card over and over again but it's it's such a self refuting card in a way sian the scientists can't explain their own ground they can't articulate on their own terms the ground upon which they stand you need a higher discipline to do that the the classical authors understood that and we go back to Aristotle understood that Aquinas would have understood that Newman understood it and that's something needed today yeah we can keep going on that topic for a long time but let's I know this is a question that our weird unfair Institute members will be waiting for and that's basically for book recommendations now let's talk about Newman's books for a moment two questions one is what do you think objectively speaking is the most important book that Newman wrote for us today the second part of the question is for you personally what's been the most significant book he wrote for you yeah your first question I guess I would say the grammar of ascent that magnificent late career masterpiece of Newman's it's full of so many important distinctions and clarifications and insights in fact that Bernhard Lonergan who wrote his great book insight in the mid 20th century said he read Newman's grammar something like 12 times before he sat down to write in sight you know I think what we're getting from the grammar the importance of probability rather than certitude as the best epistemic guide and here's what I mean now you can trace some of this back to people like Plato but in the modern period descartes bequeathed to the West I would say a certain obsession with safety - do you know how can you be certain of something and so Descartes as we know famously doubts all the can be doubted coming up finding with the coach Ito the one thing you can't doubt is that you're a doubter so I think therefore I am but now watch all the great modern thinkers that follow him they're too obsessed with this question of certitude Newman said the grammar came from an insight namely don't start with certitude start with assent why do we give assent to propositions we say yes that's true now why don't we do that and Newman said we hardly ever do it because we have epideictic inferential support for it so I ascend to that because I've got an absolutely convincing argument that no one could deny it's hardly ever the case rather as he famously says it's typically from a whole con juries of arguments indeed but also you know insights and hunches and examples and experiences that all converge the same place and that leads me by this inner sense he called the illative sense it leads me to say finally yes that's true his famous example being how do you know Great Britain's an island we don't have an epic syllogistic argument to come to that conclusion but it's based as he says in all sorts of insights examples histories your own personal experience all coming together around the the conclusion that Great Britain's in Ireland that's the way the mind typically functions and see I like that a lot it gets you out of the Cartesian obsession with certitude and it aligns you more toward understanding you know come into a deeper understanding of things by a process both intellectual and experiential emotional etc I think that epistemic move is of extraordinary importance for our own time I want to get back to grammar to the grammar of a sentence who doesn't want to get well maybe we need to read a fourteen times doesn't really have a conversation about it like honor again but but but let's before we go to go back to that book talk a little bit about your personal choice which is be a significant well for me it's the apologia for vita sua it's his autobiography and the reason for that is when I was a kid at the University of Notre Dame and I was just thinking about the priesthood at that point and I met with this wonderful priest father Tomic now he's still alive in his mid 90s now and we were talking away and he sensed that I had intellectual interests he said I think a book you should read his John Henry Newman 'he's apologia pro-v to Suez and he described it as his autobiography well I had heard of neither Newman nor the book at that point but I went to the Notre Dame bookstore and I found it and I still have it it said I bought this little red covered paperback about this big now it's all wrinkled and dog-eared I think I glanced at it when I was 18 and it meant so little to me I didn't really understand and I put it aside but many years later I came back to that book and as you know it's its Newman sort of telling of the story of his of his conversion how he moves you know from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism but there's something so compelling about that story and so rich and so beautifully told it's being written around the same time as Dickens's novels and all that and it came out the same way Dickens novels came out like in installations and people would stand in line to wait for the next installment you know of the apologia it's had that impact on me as I read it over the years I've taught it Newman's story it's a bit like a Gustin story you know that his own life becomes a template that a lot of people follow and and fit their own lives into so that book has been a lot to me and as I say that little red paperback I still have it how many years later is that you know 40 some years later and it means a lot to me and that book was it was autobiographical but it was a defense yeah and apologia talked a little bit about that well he was accused by a fellow named Charles Kingsley who was an Anglican controversial at the time and he accused Newman of being indifferent to the truth and it was based on an earlier sermon the Bremen well that was like waving a red you know tape before a ball and make his Newman was dedicated hyper dedicated to the truth but he answered Kingsley Kingsley answered back and Newman thought okay to to answer this sufficiently I need to tell my whole story right and so the book comes out of that experience yeah well and the fact that he give that it's being written with that kind of a tone a tone of answering somebody who has challenged him it was the book a really a really interesting feel when you're oh yeah and see Newman Newman was not so much a pure intellectual meaning someone that looked at ideas for their own sake he was always a controversial Asst what have embraced that description more than theologian he often said I'm not a theologian I'm not like Agustin or Aquinas he was more of an apologist or a controversial estelle actual kind of street fighter meaning he was always engaged with someone and and I say his purpose was to bring people to conversion you know he himself had undergone this conversion and he wanted everyone else to as well he wanted to bring people to what he felt was the fullness of the faith yeah so there was always kind of a write a fighting edge and man was he a good satirist and and he had a bit of a poison pen I mean if you got a Newman's wrong side he'll let you have it literally speaking right ya know and and but yet there is always a tone of charity even though he's he's at times in a sort of appropriate and balanced way coming on strong yeah he's political yeah but I mean so is a Gustin so it's wrong so his Chrysostom readin most of the fathers and they're very polemical compelling i think he would have gotten it from them more than from his own time he would have gotten it from reading the church father yeah well when we were talking about key in fluid key influencers in his conversion who did you say were the key influencers for his conversion from Anglicanism to catholicism I would say the fathers and it's it's not and there were some people in his own time some Catholics that he was reading but I would say the prime influence were the church fathers it his area of great interest was the controversies of the 4th century and it was this study of those controversies that led him finally to say I see a disturbing analogy between the Anglicanism of my own time and the heretical positions of the ancient world and so I think it was a careful reading of the fathers that led him finally to his conversion to Catholicism yeah well let's um let's jump back now to the grammar of ascent because what I'd like you to do for our viewers is could you draw the distinction between real and notional ascent those are two terms that Newman discusses a lot nap in that book and I think they're very applicable to our time now can you talk about number one what he meant by those terms but also then in your method of evangelization which usually involves beauty as the arrowhead of the whole the whole program talk about how Newman's thought on real emotional ascent ultimately eat leads then to your strategy for evangelization today yeah the distinction really is a simple one a notional ascent is one that I give to an abstraction or a proposition an idea and Newman loved propositions and abstractions and ideas and he realized that notional cent always has a role to play and are coming to know things correctly so that's the first type but it's sharply to be distinguished from real ascent which is the ascent I give to particulars to this experience to this image it's always correlated to something very factual in front of me nuts and bolts and see there I would see the influence of another important oxford figure namely Duns Scotus go right back to the Middle Ages Duns Scotus felt that the epistemology he inherited from the classical world and the Thomas Aquinas represented was still way too abstract and so SCOTUS has this idea of takes a toss which is particularity he coined the term it means this miss so I can abstract the form of you know glass from this object but he thought the mind didn't want just that it wanted what's this thing this particular that what's the Hakes a times the former particularity there's a lot of that in Newman I think and that corresponds to what he called real ascent now both are involved in the process of coming to know he did not have a contempt for the first and it wasn't a simple mind distinction but he did feel that it's real ascent that moves us to action that if you want to move people to change to do something you'd appeal more to the real than to the notional we the privilege today of going out to Blenheim Palace and visiting the tomb of Churchill and I always felt Churchill got this in his bones let me search him with someone obviously knew how to use propositions and ideas but when Churchill wanted to move this country to action you know all I've got to give you is blood toil tears and sweat you know we're gonna fight on the beaches we're gonna fight on the landing grounds we're gonna fight you know with increasing strength in the air we're gonna fight Minoo tiss there Newman would have appreciated this he's using very anglo-saxon words there because in English we have that wonderful confluence of two streams there's the more Latinate stream that came from France and then there's the more anglo-saxon stream and we associate the Latinate words with propositions the anglo-saxon words with the real right so Churchill was giving us blood toil tears sweat fight beaches it's all anglo-saxon words real assent language moves people to action so Newman wanted to move people to action why because he was a Catholic apologist he wanted to bring people to the Catholic faith to undergo a conversion and therefore you need it he thought primarily real ascent to make that happen so talk a little bit then about before we get into the beauty portion of the question talk about now illative sense and the illative sense and how that applies to these ideas well the illative sense is the epistemic correlate to to something like like conscience okay so I mean conscience is able to assess the situation and take things in and then say this is the direction I should go in morally speaking think of like prudence you know now put in the epistemic context as I assess this hunch this insight this experience this idea this argument this witness and I and I assess all of it and I see them all converging in one at one point it's the illative sense Newman felt that that leads me to a scent that says yes it brings together it assesses it it correlates all of these influences and then moves the mind to assent so it's a Sensibility okay you know would you would you say that the illative sense in a way brings together the notional and the real yeah sure right it would it would help to bring all of it together and that's the way he hears where the rubber meets the road because that's how we in fact 99% of the time make decisions why we say yes that's true we can hardly ever say oh here's let me show you the argument as a premise B conclusion got it that's why we hardly ever operate that way that might be part of it there might be an argument I could I could you know conjure up but usually it's by this whole complex process and the illative senses that feel you know it's like when people he will ask me you know how come he became a priest I mean I can never give them an answer right or someone how come you married your wife I mean you you can't just come up with uh here-here's major premise minor premise conclusion there's a whole variety in my case is becoming a priest of reasons why the illative sense you know is what assesses all of that and leads me to say yes yes I'm gonna make this change in my life and become a priest or in your case I'm gonna marry this woman and I think Newman had great psychological insight he was not a in the clouds philosopher when it came to the act of knowing he was a psychologically perceptive man so yeah a Newman was interested not just in saying yes but then acting upon that yes and you talk about how beauty has this power to move us into action essentially so then what's the relationship between how Beauty acts on us and how we experience real ascent yeah well that's a good example of us because you know I can because he moving in the direction of believing God but then I walk into Chartres Cathedral and I see the Rose window and I see that place and it has that weird almost alchemical influence on me it starts changing me you know I think of the famous Cardinal Luce TJ who was Archbishop of Paris when I was a student there many years ago a Jew his parents mother died in the Shoah and he was sent to a Catholic family for kind of safekeeping during the Holocaust and he wanders one day into one of the great Gothic cathedrals and that changed him or the the famous example of Paul Claudel the great French playwright right standing at a certain I know exactly where was at Notre Dame in Paris looking up at the Rose window and that's when it came together it was the beautiful that Jews Newman's language now I think prompted this real assent to the proposition that God is real God exists my life has to change and I'm sure both lose TJ and Claudell new arguments and and I wouldn't discount for a minute that they played a role I think in my own life you know an argument for God's existence when I was a kid played a big role in moving me to a deeper appreciation of religion but I would never say oh that's that's it it's this argument that's why you know now that was the beginning of a process it was it was a magnet around which a lot of things gathered you know but I think Newman is especially sensitive to the complexity of this psychological and epistemic process by which we come to a cent yeah and he had a he had a real gift for seeing the complexity but then writing in a really engaging way as as profound and sometimes as careful as you have to be reading him theologically speaking he's had great influence and you talk about his influence at the Second Vatican Council the ironic thing is he was dead by the time the Second Vatican Council came around right but I've said he's maybe the most important dead person at Vatican two there were a lot of important players at the council the Peretti the theological experts but among the heavenly players I'd put Newman near the front rank because think of so many of the Buriti at Vatican to do luboc and Pouilly and Danny Aiello and rotzinger Baltar wasn't there but he was very influenced by Newman all these people carried a very newman esque influence anyone it was man I think it was the importance of the Church Fathers Newman is a he's a proto nouvelle Taylor G figure in this way you know the nouvelle Taylor she figures mid 20th century tended to leap over the Middle Ages and the Reformation and those debates and they went back on purpose to the Church Fathers and they found a time when Christianity was United so before the great splits you know whether it's the 1054 split or the 1517 split they went back before those and they found this sort of compelling Christian space of a church fathers well who anticipated all that a hundred years before the nouvelle T led John Henry Newman he had he had nothing but respect for Thomas Aquinas but Thomas Aquinas in the Scholastic method are conspicuous by their absence in Newman what do you find a Newman and said the father's the father's the father's and I think that's what influenced that your dilutes in buiiets in Baltazar zijn and rot singers and they in turn massively influenced the Vatican Council Thomas is gonna have nothing but reverence for Thomas myself but he's also relatively absent from the Vatican two documents but they are redolent of the Church Fathers that's very much of a Newman impact I think at Vatican two but he's certainly a major player what what was it that John Tracy Ellis said about Newman oh yeah I caught your attention this was many years ago I was a first-year philosophy student at Catholic University getting my master's degree my first year in the master's program and I was at the Theological College and to our house for daily Mass this one night came the famous John Tracy Ellis who at the time was about 80 maybe and he was generally regarded as as the Dean of American Catholic Church historians he was the great figure we're at the great biography of Cardinal Gibbons he was Cardinal Dolan's thesis director very major player you know and he gave this wonderful it was a typical the time believe me this wonderful classic stem winding sort of sermon in the course of which he said as a kind of you know obiter dictum he said John Henry Newman the greatest Catholic theologian since Thomas Aquinas and I was a kid and I knew Newman from father time McNally telling you about this book but you know I knew almost nothing about him but I tucked that away Wow this very weighty figure has just said that the greatest theologian since time Aquinas is John Henry Newland and I took that away thinking boy I've got to read this fellow someday with greater carrot which I did but Ellis played a role in my own you know appreciation of Newman it's been interesting to see how st. John Henry Newman and Saint Thomas Aquinas have both influenced you yeah it's you know I don't know maybe in a way it's reminiscent of Herbert McCabe who many people call the Thomas but himself didn't like that label and he was influenced by so many so many different people oh yeah but McCabe is I think a wonderful Thomas but Reid's Thomas in a very fresh way yeah an airline I'm happy to say both Aquinas and Newman have influenced me even though Newman as I say wasn't really very Thomas and didn't have a lot in common with Thomas but for me they're very complementary figures I say you know the great Catholic both and is on display there bring them both on it you know I like both Newman and Thomas yeah you've kind of been a master of finding the best of what everybody has to offer and then and then making something of that and I think that really is something for all of us to learn in this in this time in this culture when we're setting out to evangelize do apologetics there's so much to learn about this from so many different angles so many different inferences oh it's always I've always hated that I'm glad you bring that up because I've always hated that way of reading the tradition as though there's okay is one voice who's just got it right and then with everybody else all I'm gonna do is notice how they disagree with the one voice I think it's really right it's such an ungenerous and finally on Catholic way to read and I'll take his exhibit a Thomas Aquinas himself how did he read the great intellectual tradition with a tremendous generosity of spirit Thomas wasn't dwelling on the mistakes of those that came before him I'm a comfort he tends to say he's just wonderful and Aristotle he's just wonderful in Plato here's what's really worthwhile in Cicero here by the way so it's really worthwhile in Moses Maimonides my my rabbi you know colleague intellectually hears this really interesting and important in a very wheeze in Avicenna Navis Iran my Islamic colleagues did he disagree with all those people yes very clearly but it's it's a generous way of reading the intellectual tradition what I don't like is that sort of cramped defensive very uncatted read the tradition whereby I choose one figure who is dead he's it that's the person and everyone else I'm gonna snipe at them and show how wrong they are where's that gay knows I would say why don't we benefit from all these great figures look I'm a Thomas I disagree with with key elements of Duns Scotus but I just sang the praises of Duns Scotus yeah 20 minutes ago because I think there are wonderful things in Duns Scotus yeah it's anyway I just think that's a that's a sort of meta point but don't read the Catholic tradition in that cramped offensive way it doesn't help read it as generously as Aquinas did and be open to any where you hear the truth yeah and that's what time is that what time is it yeah wherever the truth is found God has spoken there Thomas is that so you hear the truth from an Islamic scholar good good God spoke in there and who would ever accuse Thomas Aquinas up being some somehow a religious relativist but he had that generous way of approaching the intellectual tradition and Newman was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and even with Darwin's thought there you know Newman wasn't outright opposed to what darman had to Darwin had to say what what did Newman say about Darwin's theory of evolution was he open he he was and rather unusually for the time he was a Christian who said I don't think this poses any sort of threat to authentic Catholic orthodoxy and there were Christians who were deeply concerned about Darwin I think Newman was very much ahead of his time he was also very interested in mathematics and the sciences and I think that's very hopeful I'd also say this about Newman and Darwin as you say writing right around the same time they were both part of this Laban philosophy movement so think of a figure like Hegel in in Germany Laban suppose mamie's philosophy of life you know life philosophy the stress was on how things develop and unfold and how how events and ideas and so on are five across history they're not simply statically given right right so much of classical philosophy is predicated upon the assumption that you've got static essences and forms that are simply given now Newman didn't deny essences and forms but he tended to see how they unfold themselves across space and time so think of Newman's essay on the development of doctrine as a kind of parallel text in a way to the Origin of Species so Darwin showing how our species in fact unfold over space and time so ideas unfold over space and time controversial and it's at its time yeah it sure was Newman's theory generally accepted at Vatican two absolutely something I find intriguing is is that Vatican 2 itself is a sort of ratification of Newman's theory what do you find at Vatican 2 when you read those documents carefully is not a repudiation of anything that came before but rather a development of doctrine how can you read lumen gentium for example and not see real development in regard to ecclesiology how can you read Ignotus humanity and that seed development in regard to the kind of church state relationship question newman insisted every legitimate development has a conservative action upon its past so he's no relativist he's not in favor of radical ruptures but development you bet and Vatican 2 by its very nature in a way ratifies that that point of view that brings him close to Darwin it seems to me in sort of a layman's philosophy context so then on the on that topic of interacting with people who we would not perhaps agree much with who we wouldn't hold faith in common with interacting with non-believers today in the world of popular apologetics I mean the popular arguments are usually cosmological arguments or design arguments which are great they have a place but Newman took a unique approach because he began with the conscience didn't he when it came to the existence of God yeah and you know he knew of course the the tradition of the more cosmological arguments he knew in his own time you know Paley who proposed the famous you know watchmaker it's kind of a design argument Newman was very impatient with those he didn't exactly repudiate them but he was he was impatient with them one reason is they dealt so much of the notional level and he felt that they wouldn't move people to real of change and also relatedly they didn't come to the particularity of the God of the Bible now what did he searched for a real access to God is there a possibility of giving real assent and his answer was young through conscience because the conscience gives me he felt a void the sural experience of a moral judge someone that's why we speak of the voice of the conscience as opposed to like my aesthetic sensibility let's say or even like the illative sense but conscience we say it's the voice I heard the voice of my conscience now why because it puts us in the presence he felt of a judge who sees my interior life and and determines the you know you're acting rightly or wrongly what does it give me not just a sense of Oh some distant first cause but of a living person who's present to me in the sort of intimacy of my interior life who is a moral judge who rewards and punishes who is of providential import all of that Newman felt brought you much more in line with a biblical understanding of God and it made the experience of God unavoidable and it pushed you to action so his approach to apologetics is precisely that begin with the conscience and you'll get to the biblical idea of God good well I mean apologetics properly understood as part of is part of our task of increasing Christian unity throughout the world and I wish we could sit here for another hour and go through so many more questions because there were so many more good question we got one more left for today so I'm gonna go right to the last question I wanted to ask you before we wrap this up and and that is what does st. John Henry Newman have to teach us especially Catholics and Anglicans about moving towards greater unity among us you know it's a good question and there's a number of ways to answer it what comes to my mind though is this especially today the distinctions and fights among ourselves maybe aren't as important as our common fight against a common enemy and what I mean is all biblical people all people of faith are standing against right now a very aggressive secularism denies existence of God denies the existence of objective moral values denies much of the of the classical you know biblical view of things Anglicans and Catholics could sort of fight and fuss about what still divides us or we could make common cause as as biblical people and say we got to enter into the lists against this very aggressive secularism and that might be a way to find real unity in a common shared battle something I often say in ecumenical conversations when I have them now is look we could fight about the 16th century till the cows come home we've been doing it for 500 years or we can make common cause you know and I think that might be an instinct that Newman would have had and we've made some advances I mean especially with the with the Church of England and indeed no quite right and we could we could explore that line you're quite right but I just wonder it it might be the best way to find real unity today is is make common cause against this you know rather rather threatening enemy well thanks so much Bishop Baron I wish we could go through so you know more questions we've definitely got more questions to look at but maybe for a future time love it so for all of you watching go to word on fire Don Institute join the word on fire Institute where you can become a member and take in Bishop Barron's brand new course go to word on fire dot Institute we'd love to have aboard and Bishop Baron would you want to give us some last words and maybe a final blessing sir last word just be a gratitude Matt to you and all the viewers I'm so happy Newman now canonized we can we pray to Newman and I hope this Cannes agent Rose a greater attention to him and it was writing and I think he remains for people today very much of a pivotal player so I'm pleased about that let me give a final blessing to our viewers may the blessing of Almighty God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit come down upon you and remain with you forever and ever amen amen you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Length: 44min 49sec (2689 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019