ecclesiology 13 (2017) 239-288 ECCLESIOLOGY

brill.com/ecso

Book Reviews ∵ John F. Crosby The Personalism of John Henry Newman (Washington, d.c: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), xxv + 227 pp. isbn 978-0-8132-2689-7 (hbk). $59.95.

John F. Crosby brings a professional philosopher’s insight and skill to this ­exposition of the personalist dimension of Newman’s thought and writing. As a philosopher, Crosby is not particularly interested in the origins and develop- ment of Newman’s personalism – the genetic aspect – nor in its contemporary, nineteenth-century context, nor in comparing him with other theologians and philosophers of his own time. In particular, there is no mention of the massive influence of the Romantic Movement, especially of novelists like Sir Walter Scott and of the English Romantic poets, on Newman and his fellow Tractarians. What Crosby does, and does very well, is to draw out, collate and foreground the personalist element in Newman and to claim him as one of the pre-eminent personalist thinkers of the ‘turn to the subject’ that personalists such as himself regard as an ‘awakening’ and an ‘epochal event’ in the history of human consciousness. Crosby regards Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul ii) as possibly the greatest personalist philosopher of all. He is a senior fellow at the Dietrich von Hildebrand Project and comparisons are made with von Hildeb- rand. Other Roman Catholic personalist thinkers whom he invokes include ­Romano Guardini, Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel. Max Scheler, who was of Lutheran and Jewish parentage, was drawn to Catholicism but ultimately rejected it, also makes a frequent appearance (he was a profound influence on Wojtyla and von Hildebrand). The Lutheran Kierkegaard and the Jew Martin Buber also appear, but there is no mention of other notable personalist phi- losophers, such as the Jewish Emmanuel Levinas or the originally Presbyterian, later Quaker, John Macmurray. Thus Crosby treads quite a narrow path, but treads it elegantly. Crosby’s main Newman sources are the Anglican Parochial and Plain Sermons­ and Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford; and the Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent from Newman’s Roman Catholic maturity; though naturally he also refers to the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua and other works. Surprisingly, Crosby does

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/17455316-01302008

240 book reviews not use the modern critical editions of the Apologia, the Via Media, The Idea of a University or the Grammar of Assent. He does not make it clear that (as it seems) he is quoting from the original (1845) version of the Essay on Develop- ment, rather than Newman’s Roman Catholic rearrangement and textual revi- sion of 1878. Crosby soundly finds the seeds of Newman’s later thought in his Anglican period and (unlike Frank Turner in his massive study of Newman’s relation to Evangelicalism of 2002) finds strong continuity between the two periods of Newman’s life. This is more of a conceptual than a hermeneutical study. The heart of Newman’s personalism lies in his privileging of affectivity, of the affections, without which the exercise of the mere intellect is arid. It is above all the heart that seeks for truth and reality and knows when it has found it. The ‘religious imagination’ is the path of insight. We move forward in under- standing as an holistic act, a ‘spontaneous living intelligence’ that is the work of the whole person. (Here it would have been useful to note the correspon- dences with the post-critical philosopher of science Michael Polanyi). There is a sustained exposition of Newman’s distinction in the Grammar of Assent between ‘notional’ and ‘real’ apprehension and assent, the abstract and the concrete, the formal and the existential. But the religious imagination is not simply aesthetic or poetical; it is also ethical. It is ‘my moral being’ that needs to be touched by the truth of divine revelation. For Newman, conscience is ‘the creative principle in religion’. We grow over time into moral truth and moral integrity, into holiness in fact. The depths of personhood are mysterious: what I find within myself is ‘an infinite abyss of existence’ which calls out for God. The heart is also the key to personal relationships – Newman’s motto as a Cardinal was Cor ad cor loquitur: Heart speaks to heart – and personal influence is the key to forming true religion in others. Crosby points out that N­ ewman’s power of empathy was admired by contemporaries (it approximates at times to Keat’s ‘negative capability’, the ability to enter into the ­existence of others). But it had limits that Crosby does not acknowledge, especially when Newman refers to the sixteenth-century Reformers and the Low Church ­Protestants of his own day. Newman speaks disdainfully and spitefully of both, as well as ­contemptuously of the worldly and Erastian clergy and laity of the Church of England – a failure of charity as well as of empathy. In connection with ­Newman’s stress on the cultivation of personal influence, it is surprising to find no mention of James Pereiro’s key study Ethos and the Oxford Movement (2008). How does Newman’s privileging of the heart, of subjectivity and the sov- ereignty of conscience, square with his insistence, as a Roman Catholic, on the objectivity of dogma and obedience to the magisterium, what Crosby calls

ecclesiology 13 (2017) 239-288