Newman: Saint and Modern Doctor of the Church?

Today, in Rome, John Henry Newman is proclaimed a Saint. This essay was written in March of 1957, just over a year after his Cause was introduced, already predicting his canonisation and possible elevation to the title 'Doctor of the Church'.

From Church Life Journal

By Erich Przywara

I.

This past year (1955) Rome opened the cause for the canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman, 65 years after his death at the age of nearly ninety.[1] If he is canonized, we can expect that the question of his designation as a Doctor of the Church will also come up, because he alone could be considered a Doctor of the Church of the Modern Era in the way that Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure are the particular Doctors of the Middle Ages, and Peter Canisius, John of the Cross, Bellarmine and Alphonsus Liguori are the particular Doctors of the Counter-Reformation. In contrast to the Doctors of the Middle Ages, as well as those of the Counter Reformation, Newman (as a potential Doctor of the Church) would renew the particular teaching of the fathers of Christian antiquity, with their emphatic scriptural theology of the unity of the Old and New Testaments; at the same time, however, this scriptural theology (which is evident throughout Newman's sermons) arises in Newman essentially out of an encounter with the Reformation and the European Idealism of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel—as indeed the only theology in which the positive answer to the Reformation and European Idealism is given. This confrontation with the Reformation and European Idealism then leads to the final aspect for which Newman stands to be considered as a Doctor of the Modern Era: Newman’s unique status as a counterpart to Augustine, the greatest of the Doctors of the Church. For both the Reformation and European Idealism saw themselves as Augustinian: in the way that Luther, as an Augustinian monk, regarded his Reformation essentially as the resurrection of Augustinianism—and in the way that Descartes, as the first Idealist philosopher, and Husserl, as the last Idealist philosopher, claimed Augustine for themselves. 

Over and against these Reformed and Idealist Augustinianisms, Newman provides the only intrinsically positive answer: in that in him alone the whole (and thus the Catholic) Augustine is resurrected. Concretely, to speak of Newman as a potential Doctor of the Modern Era is to say: he is the Augustine of today.

The most peculiar feature of such an "Augustine of today," however, is that Newman himself is the strongest "advocatus diaboli" [devil’s advocate] against his own canonization—the "Advocate of No", as he is specially employed in Roman canonization processes to raise any and all possible objections to a canonization. Against a possible canonization Newman raises his vigorous Veto from February 1850:

I have nothing of a saint about me as every one knows, and it is a severe (and salutary) mortification to be thought next door to one. […] It is enough for me to black the saints' shoes—if St. Philip uses blacking in heaven.[2]

A possible elevation as a Doctor of the Church was also vetoed when he declined to be called as a theologian to the [First] Vatican Council because he was "not a theologian". Above all, it was because he felt sentenced by the Church to an "otium cum indignitate"—to a “dishonoured ease”[3]—until "all the stories which have gone about of my being a half Catholic, a Liberal Catholic, under a cloud, not to be trusted,”[4] found a late end as a result of his appointment to the cardinalate (as he writes to Dean Church on March 11th 1879). And just as he could only see himself as a “shoeshiner of saints,” rather than a saint himself, so too he could only see himself in the position of “teaching little boys nonsense verses” and no longer “writing books" (as he writes to Father Neville on March 27th 1862), instead of being a potential Doctor of the Church.[5]

This veto reveals, however, how much of a saint and Doctor of the Church he is, in the true spirit of his father, St. Philip Neri. In Italy, Goethe learned to revere Philip Neri as the only true saint because he "had sought to unite the sacred with the profane, the aspirations of virtue with the common every-day concerns of life"[6] (as he writes in his "Italian Journey"). This particular charism of Newman’s saintly father, which goes against the historical Reformation’s sharp antithesis between God and man, between God and the world, was “similarly preparing a Reformation"[7] (as Goethe says), but in "the thought of connecting the spiritual, nay, the sacred, with the profane, introducing the celestial into the secular"[8] (ibid.), and all this, Goethe says, as a “humorous saint".[9] This primordial Catholicism,[10] in which stands the genuine Oratory of St. Philip Neri (in sharp contrast to any "problematic seriousness”)—this Oratorian primordial Catholicism, in which heaven and earth meet one another in achingly-sunlit laughter,[11] is what became, in Philip Neri's greatest son and disciple, the theology of a true Doctor of the Church. Yes, it is in the end a “singing humour” from which the theology of this potential Doctor of the Church springs—in a most authentic discipleship of the “one master Christ,” who, in Matthew (11:18f.)[12] announces Himself in the parable as the “flute-playing Wisdom in the marketplace” of the world. It is in this Oratorian spirit, as the true spirit of Christ Himself, that precisely as a theologian, Newman is able to say in a letter to Dean Church on 11th July 1865 (in his own idiosyncratic way):

I never wrote more than when I played the fiddle. [I always sleep better after music.[13]] There must be some electric current passing from the strings through the fingers into the brain and down the spinal marrow. Perhaps thought is music.[14]

But this “thinking” as “music” is, in the end (and especially with Newman) that music about which the saint sings—the saint who was born in Newman’s old age (1873) and entered the Carmel two years before his death (1888): St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. Between 1833 and 1838, about fifty years before Thérèse’s entry into the Carmel, Newman, whilst still an Anglican, announced from the pulpit of St Mary’s in Oxford—practically word for word—the message that the great Carmelite saint saw as her own message: the message of the “way of the little child”:

And thus it is that a child is a pledge of immortality; for he bears upon him in figure those high and eternal excellences in which the joy of heaven consists”, “Childhood is the perfect image of Christianity.[15]

II.

Through this tradition of Philip Neri as the "humorous saint” and through this innermost affinity with Thérèse of the Child Jesus as the "singing child” saint, Newman not only becomes an "Augustinus redivivus"—the reemergence of St. Augustine in the Modern Era—but also emerges as the “resolved and redeemed Augustine." Resolved and redeemed, that is, from all that remained unresolved and unredeemed in the struggle of the historical Augustine. That remnant struggle became the excessive breeding ground for the “Augustinianisms” which, from the Reformation and Jansenism through to the Augustinianism of the period after the First World War, rose against the Church in the name of the "purity" of an Augustine-inflected early Christianity.

Augustine is the Doctor of the Church both for a Christianity of the "Head and Body, One Christ" and a Christianity of "God and soul." A community-focused Christianity of the liturgy, as much as a personal-focused Christianity of interior subjectivity, took and claim him as "their" Doctor of the Church: in German mysticism’s “spark of the soul” [Meister Eckhart], as much as the Reformation’s “little harlot soul” as the “Bride of Christ” [Luther], as well as in Jansenism’s purely organic "mystical Body of Christ,” a Christianity of a sovereign conscience as much as a Christianity of a sovereign love. Newman stands alone as inwardly opposed to this rift between the various Augustinianisms. On the one hand there is for Newman only a dogmatic and institutional Christianity: "From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion";[16] “[Christianity is] an authoritative teaching,...as one doctrine, discipline, and devotion directly given from above."[17] On the other hand, however, conscience is for Newman the “first principle" because, as he says in the Grammar of Assent, “[it] does not repose on itself, but […on] something beyond self and dimly discerns a sanction higher than self for its decisions."[18] This interior characteristic of conscience does not mean to repose psychologically in oneself, nor does it mean an ethic resulting from an "ethical predisposition" (in the way that, for Thomas, conscience’s “syllogism" comes from "synderesis" as the "first, ethical principle"). Instead, this interior characteristic of conscience means, as it were, to transcend through oneself to a personal God, as the “creative principle of religion."[19] For Newman, this makes conscience an "anticipation" of the authority of God in an authoritative Church, as he adamantly expressed in the Development of Christian Doctrine:

Revelation consists in the manifestation of the [Invisible] Divine Power, or in the substitution of the voice of a Lawgiver for the voice of conscience. The supremacy of conscience is the essence of natural religion; the supremacy of Apostle, or Pope, or Church, or Bishop, is the essence of revealed.[20]

Whilst, on the one hand, for Newman a religious introspection has the essential form of conscience; on the other hand, however, conscience is still the essential manifestation of a living, sovereign and authoritative God. This is to say that the "principle of conscience" and the "principle of dogma" are found to be one living principle: the dawning and consummate manifestation of the One God—from the beginnings of His appearance in conscience, through to the fullness of His appearance in an authoritatively infallible Church. Thus this great synthesiser of interiority and Church boldly confesses in his Apologia:

I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in a God...for I feel it impossible to believe in my own existence... without believing also in the existence of Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being in my conscience.[21]

And this is why, as he expresses in the same part of the Apologia: "there was no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity."[22]

This leads to the second way in which Newman can appear as the "resolved and redeemed Augustine." The historical Augustine is both the Augustine of the City of God, in which the Church appears almost as a state-organisation; and the Augustine of the Expositions on the Psalms, in which the Church is given as an organic and living organism in the synergy between its living members. This interpretation of the City of God historically led to the extreme of the all-powerful papal state, as Boniface VIII had himself purported. The interpretation of the Expositions on the Psalms (that is, the idea of a purely organic "Corpus Christi mysticum") was absolutized in Jansenism through a purely communitarian Christianity, devoid of any form of authority. Newman stands alone in intrinsic opposition to this rift between the two Augustinianisms. In the Development of Christian Doctrine he created an authentic theology of the organic historicity of the Church, such that the Church in its present form is the genuine fruit springing from the seed of its primal history.[23] In parallel with this, Newman then developed in the Grammar of Assent the corresponding theology of organic development of the individual Christian life—in that it is a truly real and concrete life, yet manifests a surreally "pure truth." From the genuine "notional" aspect of a conceptually clear truth, in the development both of the Church and of the soul, the full "real" aspect alone springs forth—a thoroughgoing, fully real and concrete life. Christianity is not a flight from the world into an "ideal religion," but an increasing immersion in the real world. "[W]e become real in our view of what is spiritual," Newman preaches in his Oxford Sermons of the 1830s, "by the contact of things temporal and earthly" (Newman, Christentum VII, 43f.).[24] For this "Augustine of the Modern Era" therefore, all of Christianity hangs on the "realisation"—the "real-partaking"[25]—of God incarnate in a real human body made of flesh and blood, in a real Church, in a real world.—

This Newman synthesis therefore adjudicates between ideal organisation and real organism in the third and final synthesis, which he accomplishes as the "resolved and redeemed Augustine" of the Modern Era: between the spiritually "invisible world" and the fleshly "visible world"; between spirit and flesh. It is in the historical Augustine that we see the rift between the anti-Manichaean Augustine, and the anti-Donatist Augustine. The anti-Manichean Augustine confesses God as the ideative "pure truth" (in an emphatic rejection of everything "carnal"—even music), only for it to resurface in the anti-Pelagian Augustine, for whom erotic love between a man and a woman is "carnal concupiscence"—almost to the point of being the essence of original sin itself. Halfway between the anti-Manichaean and the anti-Pelagian Augustine is the anti-Donatist Augustine, who, contrary to the Donatists' "spirituality of the elect," emphasises humanity—even the all-too-human humanity of a Church of flesh and blood—which is just a "disfigured deformity" (deformis) of the body- and blood-like presence of the "disfigured deformity of Christ" (Christus deformis)[26] (Sermon 27;6). This sharpest rift in Augustine, which continues even now to arouse as "spiritual [a] Christianity" as possible, dreams of glorified spiritualization in a kind of semi-Plotinianism; or wants, in a kind of semi-Buddhism, to do away with every passion and everything bodily in order to bring about a "calm over all things". Against this genuine Augustinian struggle between spirit and flesh, Newman stands as a "wounded man": from childhood to old age, the "invisible" world was for him the real world, which in an almost eschatological fashion, he saw as emerging ever more as the "visible world" continued to decline:

to be detached from what is present, and to live in what is unseen; to live in the thought of Christ as He came once, and as He will come again." (Christentum VII, 25).[27]

But in the midst of this "life in what is unseen," which could seduce him into imagining the world of flesh and blood as the "fluttering veil of heavenly spirits," in the midst of this genuine English spirituality, is something far stronger—what had been fundamental in the anti-Donatist Augustine against all mystical semi-Plotinianism and all ascetic semi-Buddhism: that the last, all-important correlation in the One Divine Order of Salvation is the correlation between "sin" and "mercy." Herein lies the correlation between the "disfigured deformity of God in Christ," who bears and carries away our sin, and the "disfigured deformity" of the Church and the Christian, who in their "flesh make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ."

Against a self-sufficient "invisible world" and a self-sufficient "visible world," Newman, throughout his entire homiletic corpus, contrasts the most authentic aspect of his theology, in which both Pauline theology and Augustine's writings are completed. In this alone is the most interior answer to Luther found: that the entirety of the "visible world" must "realize" itself, unto the end, as the "world of sin"; and likewise the entirety of the "invisible world" must "realise" itself as the "world of the redeeming Cross" in the "visible world"—and that only to the extent that this correlative "self-realisation" of a real, living God and a real, living man be a real and living mutual encounter. It is in Newman's theology of Christianity as the "counterpart of nature," as an enlightening and redeeming "counterpart" to the real, concrete nature of "sin and curse and death and hell," that Pauline theology and Augustinian theology find their mutual completion. It is this theology that gave rise to the Modernism of Loisy and Tyrrell, such that the "Augustine of the Modern Era" came to be suspected as the "Father of Modernism", just as the historical Augustine was portrayed as the "Father of the Reformation, Jansenism, and European Idealism". It is this theology that I was able to extract from the whole of Newman's writings in 1922, as the entire shape of the eight volumes of Newman, Christentum. This "Newman synthesis" (to use the title of the English edition, which is still in print) corresponded exactly to Newman's plan for a theology of Revelation as the "counterpart of nature," as his last surviving friend, Francis Bacchus, was able to confirm for me on the basis of Newman's unpublished diaries. The Anglican Church Times acknowledged this "Newman synthesis" as evidence that in fact Newman "was always Catholic." This "Newman synthesis" supplied the even more important proof that the alleged "Father of Modernism" had in reality unearthed the "heresy of heresies" (as Pius X called it), decades before its advent, so as to loosen the ground for a Realist theology of Revelation of the Old and New Testaments, particularly with respect to Modernism (which he anticipated and foresaw). This theology is the answer to a Realist philosophy of the real man and the real world, in contrast to both a much too highly regarded theology of Idealist speculation, and a much too highly regarded Idealist philosophy of concepts and categories.

III.

It is little wonder, then, that there blows a breath in Newman's theology so great and overpowering that it fills and completes even the widest cracks in Augustine.

In the shift from the collapsing of antiquity through to the dawning of the Middle Ages, against both a Persian and a future Albigensian Manichaeism of the ultimate contradiction in being, and against a smooth balance of opposites (as favoured in an Alexandrian "single-line" theology), Augustine is the one who both discerns and acknowledges the real "beauty of the world" in the "coincidence of opposites,"[28] so as to worship the mystery of God through these opposites, "through whom the entire universe is perfected, including the perverse[29] side" (Civ. Dei XI, 18; Solil I 1;2).[30] Newman, as Augustine's return in the shift from a collapsing "modernity" to the dawning of a New Era, is the one who cuts short every escape from a jagged, oppositional[31] Real with his demand for "real thinking." Resultantly, the Augustinian "coincidence of opposites" is the form of Revelation itself: "it is by means of these strong contrasts that Scripture brings out to us what is the real meaning of its separate portions" (cf. Newman, Christentum, VIII, 30).[32] And that is why this "coincidence of opposites" is also the rule of the spiritual life itself: "religiosity has its life, so to say, precisely in what appears to the mind as contradictions[33] and opposites" (ibid., 29).[34]

As a result of the breakup of the world's larger territories through the collapsing limits of an ancient world of the Imperium Romanum, Augustine proclaims, in the eruption of all low-grade comprehensibilities, the ever-greater breakup of the mystery of the "chasms" and "abysses"[35] of an inconceivable and infinite God: "Si comprehendis, non est Deus," "if you have understood, then it is not God!" (cf. Sermon 52 nr. 6; 16). Newman, as Augustine's return in the breakup of the cosmic-planetary worlds in the altogether collapse of the limits of a Western and humanistic world, takes Augustine's hymn of the Infinite and Incomprehensible God, prophetically announcing again the emerging hour of humanity between heaven and hell: "I adore Thee, because Thou art so mysterious, so incomprehensible. Unless Thou wert incomprehensible, Thou wouldst not be God. For how can the Infinite be other than incomprehensible to me?" (cf. Newman, Christentum I 23).[36]

In the empty void of a time between the no-longer of a Christianised Imperium Romanum and the not-yet of a Western world of the peoples of the Migration Period, Augustine sees in this emptiness the solitude of the "God who is all in all," and out of which alone arises a "see, I make all things new!", in the mystery of death and resurrection as "creation out of nothing": "God—above whom nothing is, outside of whom nothing is, without whom nothing is! God—under whom everything is, in whom everything is, with whom everything is!" (Solil. I 1; 3-4). Newman, as Augustine's return in the empty void of a terrifying downfall of the Western world, whose resurrection in death is moving towards a true, all-encompassing "Godly Cosmos", completes Augustine's "All in Nothingness" in the intuition of his Callista:

she drank in the teaching which at first seemed so paradoxical [...] that the way to power is weakness, the way to success failure, the way to wisdom foolishness, the way to glory dishonour" (cf. Newman, Christentum I 42f.).[37]

And so, as a possible saint and Doctor of the Church for the Modern Era, Newman completes the "Solus cum Solo," the "alone with the alone,"[38] which Augustine had intoned more than a thousand years before him in the demise of Christian antiquity, and which Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross, and Francis de Sales had documented in the demise of the Christian Middle Ages—completed it, in the demise of the Christian West, in the primordial rhythm[39] of his prayers:

Amor meus crucifixus est.' [My Love is crucified.][40] The love which he inspires lasts, for it is the love of the Unchangeable. It satisfies, for He is inexhaustible" (Newman, Christentum I 62).[41]

For this reason, Newman is [to be considered] a potential saint and Doctor of the Church for the Modern Era because he, indeed he alone, sees reverently through the fateful challenges of this age,[42] which from beginning to end faces one catastrophe after another. Penetrating through this mundane time,[43] Newman sees the mystery of the constant and blessed change that comes through the unchanging God, so that a "Christian dynamism" becomes the inner conquering and fulfilment of that "worldly dynamism," which, since the Reformation, has wanted (and still wants) to be the pure and only worldly doctrine:

I know, O my God, I must change [...] Oh, support me, as I proceed in this great, awful, happy change, with the grace of Thy unchangeableness. My unchangeableness here below is perseverance in changing" (cf. Newman, Christentum VII 75).[44]

EDITORIAL NOTE: The translator's preface, by Christopher Wojtulewicz, can be found here. Our thanks go out to the German Jesuit Province for giving us permission to translate this essay.

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[1] Originally published: Erich Przywara, 'Newman—Möglicher Heiliger und Kirchenlehrer der Neuen Zeit?', Newman Studien 3 (March 1957): 28–36.

[2] John Henry Newman, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Based on His Private Journals and Correspondence, ed. Wilfred Ward, vol. 1 (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), 229, http://www.newmanreader.org/biography/ward/volume1/chapter7.html  [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[3] John Henry Newman, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Based on His Private Journals and Correspondence, ed. Wilfred Ward, vol. 2 (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), 203, http://www.newmanreader.org/biography/ward/volume2/chapter27.html  [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[4]  Ibid., 452.—Trans.

[5] Newman, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, vol. 1, 579, http://www.newmanreader.org/biography/ward/volume1/chapter19.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[6] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Travels in Italy: Together with His Second Residence in Rome and Fragments on Italy, trans. Alexander James William Morrison and Charles Nisbet, Dohn’s Standard Library (London: George Bell and Sons, 1885), 351, https://books.google.com/books?id=PYLXzPLjlmYC [accessed 23 May 2019].—Trans.

[7] Ibid., 327.—Trans.

[8] Ibid. The translation offered here differs somewhat from the form in which Przywara presents it: "Gedanken,...das Heilige mit dem Weltlichen zu verbinden, das Himmlische in das Saeculum einzuführen".—Trans.

[9] Ibid., 348.—Trans.

[10] Ur-Katholische—Trans.

[11] Schmerzlich-sonnigem Lachen—Trans.                                                     

[12] This might be a mistake, but at any rate should best read: Matthew 11:16-19.—Trans.

[13] This text is omitted by Przywara, but no ellipsis is indicated.—Trans.

[14] Newman, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, vol. 2, 76.—Trans.

[15] John Henry Newman, 'Sermon 6. The Mind of Little Children', in: Parochial and Plain Sermons (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908), 67, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon6.html [accessed 21 August 2019]. Note also that Newman calls St Philip the imago pueritiae in his litany of St Philip.—Trans.

[16] John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Being a History of His Religious Opinions (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), Chapter 2, 49, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/apologia65/chapter2.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[17] John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903), Chapter 10, 387, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter10-1.html  [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[18] Newman, Grammar of Assent, Chapter 5, §1, 107, http://newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter5-1.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[19] Ibid., 110—Trans.

[20] John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longman, Green, and Co., 1909), Chapter 2, Section 2 'An Infallible Developing Authority to be Expected', 86, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/chapter2.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[21] Newman, Apologia, Chapter 4, §2, 198, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/apologia65/chapter4-2.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[22] Ibid.—Trans.

[23] Ur-Geschichte.—Trans.

[24] John Henry Newman, 'Sermon 3. Unreal Words', in: Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 5 (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 41, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume5/sermon3.html  [accessed 21 August 2019]—Trans.

[25] Realnehmen. Przywara gives "realization" in English (as it is from Newman), and then translates it as Realnehmen.—Trans.

[26] See also ‘The Religious Gnoseology of St. Augustine’ in Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), 517.—Trans.

[27] John Henry Newman, 'Sermon 22. Watching', in: Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 4 (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 325. http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume4/sermon22.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[28] im Gegenstehen der Gegensätze. To make sense of Przywara's point relative to both Augustine and Newman I have translated Gegenstehen as "coincidence" rather than "contradiction." This is because the idea of a contradictory opposition would be alien to Augustine's and Newman's view. Love and fear, for instance, are not contradictions, but the coincidence of opposing virtues.—Trans.

[29] There is ambiguity in the Latin sinister—less obvious in English—which can mean both "left hand side" and "wrong"/"sinister," which has a bearing on the oppositional structures that Przywara is exploring. Przywara makes this more obvious to the reader in the following footnote when he quotes Lactantius.—Trans.

[30] The philosophy and theology of the "tension of opposites," which was inaugurated by Augustine and realised by Nicholas of Cusa and Newman, is arguably the expected counterpart to "Christian Manichaeism," as Lactantius (the "Christian Cicero") says in a little known place in his Divinae Institutiones (II 8): "As God was about to make this world, which consisted in mutually opposing things, He made two sources for the opposing things, namely those two spirits, one right the other wrong—as it were, one to the right of God, the other to the left—such that these oppositions be under their control." Against this "eloquent" Lactantianism, under the brilliant rhetoric of which hides this Manichaean abyss, Augustine emphasises in the above passage that precisely the "beauty of speech" stands in their oppositional play—the symbol of the oppositions [Gegensätze] in creation is not founded in a moral struggle between a "right" spirit and a "wrong" spirit (and last but not least in a God as the ultimate source of good and evil), but that only in the play-fighting of a "coincidence of opposites" is creation itself truly revealed as "cosmos"—that is, as the "jewellery of order" (which is what the Greek word means).

[31] widersprüchlich. As above, I have rendered this according to coincidence rather than contradiction.—Trans.

[32] Newman, 'Sermon 5. Equanimity', in: Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 5, 65, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume5/sermon5.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[33] Przywara has translated Newman's original "contradictions" here as Widersprüche. See nn. 55 and 58 above.—Trans.

[34] This is a straight translation of Przywara; I cannot find this in Newman's works.—Trans.

[35] Ungründe. A term used by Jakob Böhme.—Trans.

[36] John Henry Newman, 'Meditations for Eight Days', Meditations and Devotions of the Late Cardinal Newman (London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 218, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/meditations/meditations7.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[37] John Henry Newman, Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (London, New York, Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), Chapter 29, 327, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/callista/chapter29.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[38] Newman invokes this idiom as the relationship between the individual and God "face to face"—see J.H. Newman, Apologia, part 6, §2, 288, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/apologia/part6-2.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[39] Ur-Rhythmus.—Trans.

[40] This sentence which translates the Latin is not in this part of Newman's Callista (although one does find it in his Meditations and Devotions). Przywara inserts a German translation here, hence its inclusion.—Trans.

[41] J.H. Newman, Callista, Chapter 19, 222, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/callista/chapter19.html  [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.

[42] Weltzeit. This corresponds to Newman's understanding of the distinction between the changeability of external time—the world's time—and the interiority of change between subjects: the interior change that pertains to the relationship between the self and God.—Trans.

[43] This is to emphasize the fact that Przywara does not see Newman's way as looking through mundane time as though in a passive and merely transitive way; but that the analogical "beyond" of the looking through is couched in a real "in" of the world. Otherwise this might suggest a refraining from the world, which is not really the sense here. I am offering "mundane time" here as an alternative translation of Weltzeit.—Trans.

[44] J.H. Newman, Meditations and Devotions, 11, 'IX. God Alone Unchangeable', 370, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/meditations/meditations11.html [accessed 21 August 2019].—Trans.