Full interview: Scott Hahn on The Apostle of Friendship, St. John Henry Newman

This interview took place on July 21st at Dr Hahn’s home in Steubenville, Ohio. You can watch the film which encompasses some of this conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntVaeEIU3-E

I am grateful for the opportunity that we have today to talk about, soon to be Saint John Henry Newman, a man who had so much influence not only on my conversion but countless others. The thing I want to emphasise is something that he himself emphasised very early in his career. In 1821, in university sermon number five he addressed the subject of the importance of personal influence in spreading the faith. He pointed out that there were other systems of thought besides Christianity like stoicism, but Christianity spread primarily not as a system, not through books, not through argument, not through temporal power, but primarily through personal influence, teachers who not only taught the truth but who embodied the truth of the good news as what he called a pattern of truth.

It is so interesting to reflect on that sermon very early in his career because he not only identified the principle cause of the spread of Christian faith, he then went on to embody that in his own conversion process so that by 1845 he enters the Church and he delivers the Apologia which had such a huge influence on me and so many others. You can find in his writings thirty one volumes, you find his correspondence thirty-two bulging books! Twenty-one thousand letters! And these aren’t just perfunctory, they are personal. And so you can see that he is not just a profound thinker, he is not just an eloquent preacher, he is not just a gifted writer – he had a gift of friendship. It was through the apostolate of friendship, through all of these letters, through all of these that he ended up wielding an influence of love that brought so many people in.

It is really almost impossible to assess how instrumental he was the conversion of others, but Fr Rutler did a good job, I think, in identifying Newman as the instrument for the conversion of approximately six hundred and thirty-six noblemen, over seven hundred clergymen, over eleven hundred of their children and wives, and then seven hundred professionals, eight hundred artists and writers and then approximately six hundred and twelve young men who became Catholic priests and a hundred and sixty four young ladies who became nuns – and these were his partners and correspondents. But they weren’t just writing back and forth, they were experiencing this gift of friendship and so for me he really has become a role model, a pattern, a paradigm. He is the apostle of friendship. If he ever is declared a doctor of the Church I suspect that he will have earned the title of Doctor of Friendship because friendship is not only the message of the gospel, it is also the best medium for conveying it. As our Lord says, ‘I no longer call you servants, I call you friends.’ Friendship with God is almost unthinkable apart from the fact that he becomes man in order to extend friendship to us and then he calls his apostles to do the same. That’s what I think makes Saint John Henry Newman a true apostle of friendship.

Again, I treasure his writings, I treasure his sermons especially, but I look at him and I realise that most of what he did is sort of intangible, precisely because of the inter-personal communication and friendship that he maintained. My only regret is that I didn’t have a correspondence with him!

He is one of history’s great converts and this is a big part of his identity, this pursuit for truth. You have spoken before of his spiritual autobiography the Apologia as the ‘guiding light’ in your conversion to Catholicism – what did you mean by that and how is it that Newman brought so many others to convert with him? What was it about who he was that made people feel that they could trust and follow him?

Well you might say that conversion literature is a distinctively Christian genre. You go back to St. Paul and you discover that he gave his conversion talk three times in the book of Acts, in Acts 9, 22 and again in Acts 26 and then Augustine took it to the next level with his confessions. You have many other examples of conversion accounts, but there is something singular about John Henry Newman’s Apologia, along with An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Because, it is not simply a testimony of his own personal experience, it is not simply a reflection back on all of the profound topics – it really shows us the wrestling of a non-Catholic, who wasn’t just Jewish the way Saul the Pharisee was … he was an Evangelical Protestant who probably had a deep anti-Catholic background.

And yet, going deeper into scripture, reading the Early Church Fathers, he wrestles with all of these issues at one of the most decisive moments in Catholic history, right before Vatican I with the definition of Papal infallibility. He is wrestling with all of these things and showing through the seven notes he traces in the Development of Doctrine how doctrinal conversion is something utterly reasonable and it shows the dynamism of the organism of the Christian faith. That an acorn doesn’t look anything like an oak tree and yet over time this organic growth and development leads to a full-flowering of the truth of the faith. And so this view of doctrinal development that is organic and not mutative, it is not some sort of evolutionary mutation from a primitive simple gospel to something that is horribly complicated by sacraments, saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary, it really is something that, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, takes place over time in a supernaturally organic way. That just captured my heart as much as my mind and not just me but so many other Evangelical converts who have wrestled with the same issues.

It seems that even today Newman’s ideas in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine are really relevant. There is what appears to be a very binary conversation inside the Church between the traditional and the progressive – whereas that idea of being rooted in tradition and organic growth taking place is not a simple idea to grasp. Was Newman ahead of his time in what he was talking about here and how has this effected the Church?

Well the split within Christendom that occurred in 1054 with the Eastern Christians and then also in 1517 with Protestantism brings history to the fore in a way that you don’t find in the first Christian millennium. So how do we understand history? How do we make sense of history when it comes to our faith as Catholics and to the development of doctrine? This is precisely what has emerged with such force in the last few centuries and to be honest I don’t know anybody who addressed it with the singular insight and penetrating wisdom as Newman. And I mean, this is everybody’s account, even those who disagree with him recognise that in the Essay on the Development of Doctrine – here is a very profound and penetrating account of how Christian faith is a living organism, and you don’t expect an organism just to remain static.

And so the dynamism of its own organic development has to be traced, but at the same time you have to give an account for it so that it is not mutation, it is not deviation. And so what he does in identifying these seven notes, enabled me to really see, ‘ok, the faith of the apostles in the first century is not the same as the faith of the Nicene Council or the Nicene Creed in the fourth century.’ But what happens when you trace that trajectory even further? Well that’s what he did, that’s what opened my eyes and so many others too.

So on the one hand the Apologia shows me a path to becoming a Catholic, on the other hand the Essay on the Development of Doctrine shows me how to clear that path from his day into my own. To recognise that when it comes to Marian doctrine and devotion, these things do indeed make a lot of supernatural sense.

In the Apologia Newman speaks very honestly about how he loses so much of his social circle and his standing in pursuit of truth, that this comes at a huge personal cost. Can you personally relate to the difficulty of moving from one church to another and the emotional nature of that experience?

I mean on one level I can’t relate to it because I was barely thirty when I became a Catholic whereas he was leading the Oxford Movement like nobody else! He was at the forefront of this profound renewal and his university sermons represented something that was exemplary, past everybody else’s preaching and writing. And so for him to convert was not only a professional act of suicide, it was also to move into a culture which in England was much more backwards than the Anglican. So to become a Catholic under those circumstances, in a certain sense was a career killer for him, and yet, out of the ashes comes so much more.

I do think that the correspondence that he conducts in the last forty-five years of his life, all of which is as a Catholic, is the richest material of all. This is what exemplifies that fact that even if he was not as famous as he was, he was just as personal and in certain ways even more accessible through friendship. When you read his letters you get a sense of his wit, a sense of his transparency, you even get a sense of his sarcasm at times, but he communicates so much warmth and respect with so much eloquence. And at the same time you can see that the people who are on the receiving end of these letters must have felt beyond blessed. And this is again why I think ‘the apostle of friendship’ is what really fits him and most especially in his own Catholic era as it were.

In that time of his leading the Oxford Movement, Newman referred to it as a second reformation as a ‘better reformation’. Then after his conversion he continued to be a figure pursuing a renewal of the Church, for it to be truly authentic and holy. How do you view him as a figure of church renewal?

I see in Newman this Catholicism that goes beyond the Roman of the nineteenth century which explains why his influence was so pervasive in England in the eighteen hundreds but even more why there was a great renewal in Newman scholarship in Germany in the nineteen twenties and thirties. This would influence Von Balthasar - and many, many others too – he was influenced deeply by his discovery of Newman. Then in America, I would say especially in the seventies, eighties and nineties there was an explosion of interest in Newman’s work. Why? It’s biblical, it’s patristic, it draws from the medieval, it draws from the liturgy, it draws from the saints but there is something profoundly personalistic about it. It is pastoral, it isn’t reducible to the biblical languages, it isn’t reducible to a scholastic system, it breathes all that is authentically human – for Americans, for Germans, for England as well and I’m convinced that the best is yet to come.

When Pope Benedict XVI visited the UK in 2010, he said of Newman that he was, ‘a modern man, who took on all of the problems of modernity’. What is the significance of a modern saint? And why do we need saints of our times who can speak to us now?

Well, I think it’s important to recognise that Newman lived in a period of scepticism when there was an emphasis on intelligence but an approach to intelligence that was highly sophisticated and somewhat cynical towards any claims of faith when it comes to divine revelation and the traditional notions of salvation through the sacraments and the saints – all of that seemed quaint and unscientific. When I read him I began to sense that if you take one of the greatest minds of a period that is characterised by scepticism and you go beyond that scepticism you become as Pope Benedict would say, critical of criticism, especially hyper criticism. And suddenly you re-appropriate, you rediscover the faith in a way that makes more sense in this post critical period, in post-modernity if you will.

One of John Henry Newman’s most famous and powerful phrases is, ‘God has created me to do Him some definite service’. This idea is championed later with the Second Vatican Council and the universal call to holiness, the challenge that we are all called to sainthood individually. How can we communicate this more effectively in our day?

I think that Newman serves as a guiding light for unpacking practically, what does it mean to have this universal call to holiness? Not just for the clergy but also for the laity, not just for the consecrated but for people in the middle of the world, not just for the pious but also for the professors, for the professionals, for those who are out there in the secular environment. I think what you’ve got to recognise is the value of friendship but also the task that we face to win the right to be heard, to engage people on their own terms, to extend bridges to others. Not just to reach ‘them’ as outsiders because we are ‘them’ – we’re outside and Christ has come to us.

And so conversion in a certain sense isn’t just what happened to Newman in 1845, it isn’t what just happened to me in 1986, it’s ongoing, it’s ever deepening and not just for persons but also for cultures. And I say, the Church as well is called to a conversion that is ongoing, ever deepening, lifelong but daily! You’ve got to take up your cross every day and that’s not going to start getting easy and at the same time it is going to show us that we’ve got work to do and that we can sanctify our work in the context of our co-workers who might be unbelievers. But Newman shows how to use that apostolate of friendship to bring the grace of conversion without really preaching at anybody but just sharing the joy of the gospel.

Newman was very unsettled by liberalism in religion and so much of his journey was a pursuit of the truth. Today we have seen an even greater erosion of the idea of objective truths and the treatment of religion as a personal taste or opinion. So how do we communicate meaning and purpose and truth to that society?

Ok, two thoughts. On the one hand we are created for a specific purpose as a person because God has a plan for me as his beloved child. I’ve got to discover that, I’ve got to respond to it and in the process I’ve got to recognise that everybody else has a purpose too and they are all part of this plan, that this divine script includes us all. What I think Newman adds though is this second insight into the problematic of liberalism, the idea that you don’t know it if you can’t show it, when in fact so much more truth is caught than taught or proven. And so, to recognise that liberalism is reducing truth to scepticism and logical demonstration when in fact tradition is, humanly speaking, the principle way that most of us arrive at life, at love, at truth, goodness and beauty.

Well there’s human tradition within culture which shows us the communal aspects of the pursuit of meaning, but there is also a capital ‘t’ tradition that Newman showed me and that this is where the church is alive. Not just on the printed page but in the person of Jesus Christ and in all of the other persons who make up the members of his mystical body.

That idea of authentic community is really key to journeying in faith together and is very much something that Jesus lived and taught. You see this in Newman’s life too, when he describes his friends in the Apologia it is often a full page of positivity about these people and what they brought to his life and faith journey. How can we draw each other closer to the Lord like that?

In reading the Apologia as well as his letters, you get the sense that he could find the best in other people and that in becoming a Catholic he wasn’t just rejecting his past. I think back to my own formation as an Evangelical, to my own ordination as a Presbyterian minister – I am more grateful for my Evangelical roots and Protestant formation now than on the day I was ordained a pastor because I can see how those roots are continually renewing me now and how all of that was part of a plan and a purpose for me as a person. And so I not only can reach others who come from that same past, but I can also cultivate in them an appreciation, encourage them to be grateful and not reactionary against what it is they are coming from.

Conversion for us is really addition not subtraction – the good news gets better! It’s like multiplying and not merely adding, exponential multiplication – the good news is almost too good to be true. We are called to believe the unbelievable, to contain the uncontainable, but God gives us that capacity just like he gave it to Saint John Henry Newman.