Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Overview
Apologia is a detailed autobiography in defense of Newman’s theological and ecclesiastical conclusions. Newman wrote this volume as a formal rebuttal to many negative claims and questions concerning his theology and conversion to Catholicism. By the fall of 1863, these allegations came to a head with the publication of some negative comments about Newman in the periodical Macmillan’s Magazine. In the article, Mr. Charles Kingsley accused (then) Father Newman of possessing a weakened understanding of the source and necessity of truth and subsequently defamed many central tenets of Catholicism. Newman and Kingsley maintained brief correspondence resulting in a formal retraction from Kingsley—all of which appear as the Foreword to the present publication. After the failed attempt at corresponding with Kingsley directly, Newman published this volume and was hailed as the defender of Catholic doctrine in England. Apologia, and the included correspondence, is an essential step to understanding the theology of John Henry Newman and the nineteenth century Catholic Church.
- Extensive studies on Church history from an author burdened for the Church of Jesus Christ
- Logos edition provides integrated access to Scripture references, instantly linking to English and original text versions of the Bible
Top Highlights
“He lays down a proposition, self-evident as soon as stated, to those who have at all examined the structure of Scripture, viz., that the sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine, but only to prove it, and that, if we would learn doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church; for instance to the Catechism, and to the Creeds. He considers, that, after learning from them the doctrines of Christianity, the inquirer must verify them by Scripture.” (Pages 60–61)
“For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. To take a familiar instance, they were like the ‘Turn again Whittington’ of the chime; or, to take a more serious one, they were like the ‘Tolle, lege,—Tolle, lege,’ of the child, which converted St. Augustine himself. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum!’ By those great words of the ancient Father, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized.” (Page 158)
“First was the principle of dogma: my battle was with liberalism; by liberalism I meant the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments.” (Page 95)
“Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.” (Page 4)
“I saw clearly, that in the history of Arianism, the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and that Rome now was what it was. The truth lay, not with the Via Media, but in what was called ‘the extreme party.’” (Page 179)
The quality of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap. But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise.
The philosophical and theological thought and the spirituality of Cardinal Newman, so deeply rooted in and enriched by Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Fathers, still retain their particular originality and value.
—Pope John Paul II
Newman placed the key in our hand to build historical thought into theology, or much more, he taught us to think historically in theology and so to recognize the identity of faith in all developments.
—Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
- Title: Apologia Pro Vita Sua
- Author: John Henry Newman
- Publisher: D. Appleton and Company
- Publication Date: 1865
- Pages: 384
John Henry Newman (February 21, 1801 – August 11, 1890) was a priest and Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. His father was a banker and his mother's family was French Huguenot. Newman was raised in a strict Calvinist home and received his primary education at the famous Ealing School. John Henry Newman graduated from Trinity College, Oxford in 1821 and was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford in the following year. On June 13, 1824 he was ordained into the Anglican priesthood. From the early 1830's until 1845, Newman was a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, a group of Anglican priests and scholars from Oxford who sought to restore the rites of the Anglican church to their Apostolic roots in the Early Church. Between 1842 and 1845, during a time of solitude and the completion of Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman underwent a process conversion to Roman Catholicism. Newman also published the Oxford Conservative Journal during this time period as a platform for retracting any negative remarks he previously assailed towards the Roman Church.
He was officially received into the Catholic Church on October 9, 1845. The conversion of John Henry Newman to Catholicism was the result of a life's long struggle to reconcile the historic faith handed down from the Apostles with his own Anglican tradition. Frustrated with the errors inherent in both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, Newman abandoned his search for the via media (or, middle way) of Anglicanism and converted to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1848, Newman founded the Birmingham Oratory at Maryvale and began ministering to the Catholic population of the city. In 1851, the Bishops of Ireland elected to start a Catholic university in Dublin and they appointed Newman to be the founder and first rector of the institution. Maintaining his ministry at the Birmingham Oratory, Newman established what would become University College, Dublin. His Idea of a University was prepared for founding faculty of the university at Dublin. On May 12, 1879 Pope Leo XIII appointed Newman to the college of Cardinals. John Henry Cardinal Newman died on August 11, 1890. Cardinal Newman is currently under consideration by the Vatican for sainthood.