Heart Speaks unto Heart

Front matter

=ΠHeart Speaks unto Heart

On the Kinship of Spirit and Thought:

John Henry Newman and Edith Stein

Contents

The Modern Point of Departure 12

The Cultural and Family Contexts—the Ethos 13 Newman—the Philosopher 17

The Decision 21

Preface

Abraham became the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers ... Thus reads the genealogy of the most eminent family in human history, the genealogy of Jesus Christ, as found in the pages of the Gospel according to St Matthew.! Genealogy defines the place, time, and development of individual lives, of the faces that look back at us from old photos, redolent of the past and stern, sepia gazes. They come to life when animated by the memories of the living. Children lean over the photos and ask their parents about their ancestors, grandfathers, great grandfathers, their customs, likes and dislikes, what made them happy and what made them sad. At such moments the past assumes the form of an urgent question begging an answer: why am I what I am? or: why am I the way I am?

It is good to remember one’s own ancestors who shaped us, who stood by our side when we made efforts to take our first steps or uttered our first words; who told us what is good and what is bad. I remember very well my grandfather with his ever-present pipe dangling between his lips, as he would sit in an armchair with his hands tightly clasped on his walking stick. He would tap it regularly and hum various melodies under his nose. I remember his palms carved with wrinkles and lined with blue veins that bulged and pulsated under the thin skin. He hummed the melody of the passing of time. Like an eternal sage he would gaze into the distance.

Aside from a genealogy that results from natural family ties, we also have genealogies of the spirit and thoughts. We observe them in literary currents and trends, schools of painting, sculpture or architecture. The Middle Ages would draw on antiquity, the Renaissance on the Middle Ages, Romanticism on antiquity and the Renaissance. Shakespeare would draw on ancient drama; likewise, romantic writers drew on this drama and Shakespeare’s own endeavours. Plato was Socrates’ disciple, and Aristotle spent twenty years as a student at Plato’s academy; St Thomas Aquinas adapted Aristotle’s philosophy to Catholic doctrine. This heritage can be positive, and then it creates followers, or negative, giving birth to opponents. In the area of the spirit we encounter very powerful influences and ties between disciples and teachers as well. The prophets of the Old Testament had their followers, whom they guided and to whom they taught faith, dedication and unshaken confidence in God. Elijah brought up Elisha. The bereaved Elisha watched his master disappear in a

VIII PREFACE flaming chariot and be taken up to Heaven on a whirlwind. Christ shaped His disciples. The abandoned Disciples watched their Master as He ascended into Heaven. These are telling signs for the generations to come: remember where your Master has gone and do what He has taught you, as this is the surest way to personal fulfilment.

In this book, I would like to devote my attention to two figures in the area of spirit and thought whose ideas and impact and, above all, their lives, have affected the history of modern Europe: Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein, 1891-1942). Their heritage is again embedded in the intellectual landscape and spiritual inspirations of what has preceded them. Newman, for his part, owed much to the influence of primitive Christianity, ancient philosophy (especially Aristotle), the Alexandrian School of theology (with Athanasius at the head), and British empiricism; he would look up to Christian antiquity and the figure of St Philip Neri (1515-1595) to assuage the turmoil of his inner struggle. Edith Stein first found the gratification of her thirst for knowledge in phenomenology, and then fixed her eyes on St Augustine, St Francis, St John of the Cross, and St Teresa of Avila. It must be noted that they had both gone through a period of rationalistic delusion and even verged on the scepticism and indifference of their eras.

An opportunity for such an inter-generational discourse was Stein’s encounter with Newman's writings in which she found consolation. She was commissioned with their translation by the Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian Fr Erich Przywara (1889-1972). In a letter to her Polish colleague Roman Ingarden (1893-1970), Edith Stein herself reports: “For the last year, I used these fragments of time, during which my own work is out of the question, to translate Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University for the Theatiner-Verlag in Munich. [...] The translation gave me pure pleasure. And in addition, it is very good for me to come in close contact with such a mind as Newman—something that comes along with the translation process. His entire life was a search for religious truth and led him, inevitably, to the Catholic Church.” Thus, something that was supposed to be a mere intellectual challenge—as any translation usually is—became her personal experience. And, to use Newmanian parlance, the formal and notional level of the language barrier imperceptibly turned into a genuine communing with its author.

2 E. Stein, Letters to Roman Ingarden, trans. H. C. Hunt, Washington, D.C.: 1cs Publications Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2014, 208.

PREFACE IX

The main reason why I decided to embark on combining John Henry Newman with Edith Stein was not only the fact that the Carmelite saint translated the Cardinaľ’s texts, but primarily because they both stood firmly by what they had personally discovered as the truth of their persons: Newman in his Anglican Britain, in which Roman Catholicism was long-held in disrespect as the seat of the gravest of errors, decided to leave his cosy academic position in response to the call of his inner duty; Stein left her Jewish ancestry for Christianity and triumphed amid the inhuman national-socialist terror. Indeed, there is something triumphant in her posture as she stands on the train during her last journey to the concentration camp of Auschwitz. She stood there — and eye-witnesses testified to it — as if she were carved out of some solid matter crushed by the overwhelming sadness and inflicted injustice, and yet, at the same time, untouched by what was going on outside and in a mysterious way triumphant; a participant of the here and now and, simultaneously, a being from another reality. Reposed and majestic in her innermost certitude, Newman might say.

They are exemplars of personal prowess and dignity. The famous Carmelite was an academic scholar with a doctor’s degree in philosophy. Therefore, it is all the more interesting to see how this professional philosopher should have been inspired by someone who was from outside the academic world, who directed all his intellectual endeavours to spiritual growth. It is true that Edward Sillem, the editor of Newman’s texts published as Philosophical Notebook, acquiesces that “Newman has indeed a philosophy to give that is at least of interest [...],”5 but the famous Briton did not seek a philosophy in the first place, rather a living principle that could become the driving motor of his life.

This is what is meant by living in the context, by being at one with oneself. Edith Stein, in a sense, also had such a personal approach to philosophy, i.e. the way to find the truth. Only after her personal conversion did she realise that this quest for the truth would require a more personal effort and commitment. Both Newman and Stein illustrate the important fact that, despite our common nature as humans, we have our most unique and incommunicable tasks to fulfil.

The choice of such prolific writers as John Henry Newman and Edith Stein must evidently be mitigated by a realistic selection of the material at hand. Otherwise, the unwary author could create too many expectations which he would never be able to satisfy. Newman’s lifetime spanned almost the whole

3 E. Sillem (ed.), The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, Louvain: Nauwelaerts, vol. 1, 1969, 3. (Further referred to as The Philosophical Notebook).

X PREFACE century. He expressed himself in sermons, learned essays, theological treaties, letters, poems, and even novels. Edith Stein wrote philosophical and spiritual works, letters, and translations. Anyone who has decided to write about such authors must confine themselves to certain topics and omit others. In my book, I would like to focus primarily on Newman's theory of knowledge in the area of the phenomenology of religion, how we reach certitude and recognize the borders of ratio, the importance of the person, and Stein’s conception of primeval life, the knowledge of the heart, and the science of the Cross. Both Newman and Stein stressed the importance of treating the person with their complete endowment, i.e. the personal capacity to know, a capacity that surpasses the limitations of intellectual cognition.

They were both, gradually, coming ever closer to the recognition of the mystery of the believer. He is called upon to assent to the truth that surpasses the confines of his rational cognition. The person is, therefore, a special point of reference, a being who can learn what cannot be demonstrated and what must be left untold. The person can learn the way of science and accept in faith the winding path of mystery. It is fascinating that the more Newman and Stein came to know, the less they felt obliged to talk about it. Newman found a secluded place in the Catholic Church; Stein embraced the cross as her last relief. I used the word “secluded” here, but let me be more specific, for secluded does not mean free from any trouble. Not in the least; secluded here means: I rejoice in the fact that I am in the place where I should be. And one further thing I find in common between them — they both remained faithful to themselves in a special way, despite their revolutionary, and incomprehensible to external observers, decisions. Not in the way that they were obstinate, stubbornly holding to their private views; on the contrary, they were open to radical transformations once they recognized the urge of the truth, the personal call of duty. Since they did not cherish any inflated ambitions to convert people nor intended to save the world, and believed, rather, that their individual beings were in need of conversion and were more precious than proselytising on behalf of some tenets, even though they might “objectively” be true, they remained faithful to, and at peace with, those who surrounded them. Newman left his Anglican circles, but at the same time remained with them at a higher level, at the level of the supreme value of personal dignity and of exemplary truth to oneself. Stein left the members of her Jewish milieu, but never stopped respecting them; paradoxically, she valued them even more after her conversion than before. After her conversion she came to respect the supreme value of each individual human being, and of personal experience that is individually granted as a gift and challenge. I think that this is their common trait, a thesis I am going to prove throughout this book. Obedience to a well-informed

PREFACE XI conscience may not endear us to other people, as we make decisions they do not approve of, but it brings us closer to them as real persons.

The two minds were engaged in a symbolical conversation; Edith Stein met Newman through his writings as she embarked on translating them. It is my chief ambition to depict Newman and Stein — to use the words of Hanna- Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz from her Introduction to Edith Stein's Letters to Roman Ingarden—as “someone much in demand.”4

Their separate paths are marked with some key issues. Each book is naturally the author’s own choice on which to focus. Let us take a closer look, therefore, at the problem of knowledge (implicit and explicit), the question of assent (notional and real), personal certitude, the language of the cross, and, in general, the solitary personal path. I think that both Newman and Stein focused in their intellectual quest on the terms mentioned here in order to understand the human being and his actions; and they both realized that the person cannot be examined in the same way we examine inanimate objects, that a considerable amount of knowledge must remain untold. Therefore, ultimately, when words abound but senses are wanting, there is their readiness to remain silent. The amazing and, indeed, miraculous fact is that being faithful to oneself has a much more inherent value than forgetting about oneself and being entirely committed to socializing. This faithfulness to oneself has nothing to do with the egoism of the age of privacy or the gradually encroaching age of mass culture. Quite the opposite, Newman and Stein are illuminating examples that every person needs, first and foremost, to fulfil their own personal task, i.e. to carry himself forward through the meanderings of daily life strengthened by his personal integrity, no matter what others’ expectations are, or what kind of decorum demands are formulated.

Ihave said that both Newman and Stein illustrated what we deem to be especially important, i.e. a synthesis of the multifaceted human being. Intellect and morality, faith and reason, should go smoothly together, united in one being. Faith and reason in their mutual effort can guide a harassed being through a complicated forest of emotions, often at variance with what is due, for example inclinations and disinclinations, predilections and animosities, talents and weaknesses, acts of loyalty and betrayal, memories and hopes, expectations and regrets, images and concepts, towards the clearing of certitude; Newman always has in mind the person in concrete circumstances, swayed by hesitations and doubts, and yet capable of accomplishing certitude. The individual daily life does often resemble a journey through a densely overgrown and

4 See H.-B. Gerl-Falkovitz, Introduction in: Stein, Letters to Roman Ingarden, 2.

XII PREFACE barely lit ravine, with no sign with which to guide one’s way. As there are few things we apprehend completely, let alone understand perfectly, or recognize by virtue of clear intellectual inspection, we need to muster the faith of the whole of our person; we need to believe even in simple daily affairs, for we take for granted many things rather examine them in detail. We need the faith of a consolidated human being, a faith animated by genuine assent to the Christian tenets and emboldened by personal effort. Both Newman and Stein testify to the mystery of the person who, despite conceptual difficulties and cognitive incommensurability, can apprehend the truth and turn it into his or her guiding principle and driving motor. They themselves were true witnesses to that mystery. And despite their different individual and historical contexts, they managed to fulfil their personal calling.

My principal method in this book, as in all other works I have written so far, is the same. It is to interpret and reinterpret what material there is in order to find some practical guidelines for an interpretation of our present condition. Each age begs for a solution to its mystery, of the way people live and why they live in such a manner. Perhaps it is a truism to say that philosophers have always sought to answer some fundamental questions, and their aspirations have only partly been satisfied. And as philosophy aspires to provide satisfactory answers to the most general and vital issues, its answers indeed resist the flow of time, but the issues must be ever anew taken up and engaged with.

Acknowledgements

My sincere gratitude goes out to many people. I would like to thank Prof. Andrew Breeze from the Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona) for introducing me to many Newman scholars and for his interesting insights that opened my mind. I would like to thank Prof. John Crosby from the Franciscan University of Steubenville for sharing with me his books on Newman, for reading the manuscript and guiding my thought to areas I had not hitherto considered. My great thanks go to Dr. Mark Ô Fionnáin from the John Paul 11 Catholic University of Lublin for suggesting corrections to the text. And I would like to thank the heroes of my book for their miraculous support throughout my work.

CHAPTER 1 They that are whole can heal others [...]

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

Only the person who renounces self-importance,, who no longer struggles to defend or assert himself, can be large enough for God’s boundless action.

EDITH STEIN

John Henry Newman lived in the turbulent period of the nineteenth century that saw the rise of socialism and communism, in an era that made people look with awe at the encroachment of science onto the time-honoured territories of, for example, religion (let it suffice to mention the theory of evolution that had seemingly undermined the hitherto beliefs). When analysing the nineteenth century, one cannot forget about two, apparently contradictory, trends. On the one hand, there are the high hopes awakened by scientific endeavours which, in turn, give rise in the romantic era to popular robustness, in political life characterised by the ideas of expansionism and nationalism; but, on the other, it is a time when the human psyche often feels at a loss, when it suffers from emotional inadequacy and fragility. It senses an incongruity amid this inhuman technological milieu of the “brave new world.” The modern mind, deprived of the traditional fulcrums of stability and armed solely with individual choice, but no criteria as to which choices are good and which are bad, loses its course like a ship tossed about on a stormy sea. The theory of evolution added momentum to this feeling, especially since the authoritative voice of the institutional Church was long wanting.! The British biographer of Newman, Meriol Trevor (1919-2000), rightly observes that it “so shocked and

1 Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859.

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

alarmed the majority of Christians, who thought it contradicted the truth of the Bible,’ but Newman was in no way disturbed, for “he had been pondering his own evolutionary theory—of the development of ideas, and especially those ideas which activate the Christian society within the larger society of mankind.”? One English writer and newspaper columnist has said of Newman “that he was the only Victorian intellectual of the first rank who had not been disabused of Christian faith by the theories of Charles Darwin [...].”3

Newman had long been reconciled with the idea of evolution, for the concept of growth, and its attendant changes, were of utmost importance for him. He himself had experienced it in his own life and had long adopted a dynamic view of the world. Obviously, the dynamic nature of life must respect its constant ontic factor. If an octogenarian places in front of him two photos of himself: one aged five and the other aged eighty, he will naturally say: I have changed, but at the same time he must say: it’s me, it’s the same person. Therefore, should one try to stop and scrutinize some moments from one’s life, forgetful of its entire continuity or in isolation from others, one will surely fail to understand the person. If growth is the essence of human life, as Newman would often repeat, there is no point in directing one’s attention on a selected episode. Such a procedure may be true for the biologist who focuses his microscope on a selected strain of bacteria. But human life in its entirety cannot be fragmented into tiny and disconnected pieces, but should be considered in its integrated whole, if we seek to understand individual human actions.

All of these revolutionary modifications in the scientific picture of the world had started with the birth of modernity. Descartes (together with Galileo and Bacon) broke with the medieval world of spirits and ushered in the mechanical world of physics and chemistry; the world came to be understood as having been constructed rather than found. Just like then, so now in the romantic era it was a task for great minds to effect a religious, moral, and emotional readjustment. We are describing here a world of disenchantment in which “there is no more ontological room” for “demons and spirits.” The human being is “in a sense super-buffered.”4 The decomposition of the world in which man and his earth had lost their central position must have been restored at a higher level.

2 M. Trevor, The Pillar of the Cloud, London: MacMillan & Co Ltd, 1962, 4. In one of his prayers, Newman acquiesces: “Through you the earth was brought into its present state, and was matured to be a habitation for man’ (J. H. Newman, A Newman Prayer Book, Birmingham: The Oratory, 1990, 7). The phrases that the earth “was brought into its present state” and “was matured” undoubtedly suggest a certain evolutionary and temporal development.

3 SeeS.L.Jaki, Newman’s Challenge, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000, 265.

4 C.Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007, 136.

In the nineteenth century, the task was even more urgent, for the circulation of information was much faster due to the development of the press.

The nineteenth century is a fascinated period to study. I call it a laboratory, in which the intellectual and universal tenets of the Enlightenment clashed with the personal and idiosyncratic elements of Romanticism, creating a very dynamic amalgam. Some elements were modified, some eliminated, and still others formed a unique composite. The advent of Romanticism did not mean a total or immediate permeation by entirely new elements which began to dominate from the start. It was rather a gradual process in which the two rushing currents—the intellect and imagination—flowed side by side, erupting from time to time with their menacing rumbles.

At the dawn of modernity we have two proposals: Cartesian disengaged reason and Locke’s punctual self. The first one puts forward the duality of the body and spirit and a distanced relation to the world of the senses; the second carries further this mechanization of the world. In short, the point is that “a human agent [...] is able to remake himself by methodical and disciplined action.” Disengagement and rational control became the main driving forces of modernity. In this new approach, the human being employs his instrumental reason to create himself. Disengagement here undoubtedly refers to us being non-judgmental, i.e. to suspend our judgment about reality. We thereby objectify reality and deprive it of its normative force. Reality no longer appeals to us in its aspect of being good or bad, but only as an object of curiosity, an object of investigation and experimentation.

Because Descartes had transferred our experience onto our mind, our secondary qualities are ideas in the mind caused by the properties of the organ or object. We want to gain control over our reservoir of ideas. Therefore “disengagement involves our going outside the first-person stance and taking on board some theory, or at least some supposition, about how things work.”6 Descartes then proposes what Taylor calls radical reflexivity. It is necessary for the reconstruction of the conceptual interior of the mind. Procedural reason is employed, that which suggests the right method. In the face of such conclusions, Newman proposes the restoration of the first-person stance instead of objectification. For Newman, the first-person stance cannot be objectified. Taylor's words, that “it is not always true that the road to surer knowledge lies through disengagement and procedural reason [...],’” fit well with Newman’s

5 C. Taylor, Sources of the Self The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, 159.

7 Ibid.

message that—if I may paraphrase the previous quote—the road to surer knowledge lies through the person. Indeed, Taylor’s criticism continues: “an epistemology which privileges disengagement and control isn't self-evidently right”8 Newman, for his part, believed in a universe of meaningful order rather than in a mechanism, and God was the foundation of this order.

The main purpose of personal growth is to accomplish certitude. Newman defines certitude, of which we shall be talking at length, as “a deliberate assent given expressly after reasoning.” It is true that very often we give assent to things which later on, on reflection, turn out to be false. This fact, however, does not nullify the main purpose, i.e. that it is worthwhile to strive after certitude. What is the difference between Cartesian certainty, when confronted by clear and distinct ideas, and Newmanian certitude? To my mind, the main difference is that, for Descartes, certainty comes, in a sense, from without. Ihave written “in a sense” because we know that the French philosopher based certainty on innate ideas, but we must remember that these innate ideas have nothing to do with the person’s innermost life in Newmans sense. Rather, they respond to the inherent logic of a given proposition that strikes the mind and tolerates no objection; for Newman, certitude results from a personal process, it is the personal response to a given truth. The personal response provides a broader capacity for apprehension. It is not entirely dependent on the accurate rigidity of a proposition. If Descartes sought certitude more geometrico (by mode of geometry), Newman sought it more personae (by mode of person). Therefore, innate ideas primarily do not belong to the person and his growth, but to the intersubjective structures of logical thinking, whereas Newman sought to ground knowledge on the person and what belongs to the person.

For Descartes, extension and motion became the fundamental reality in the world. Nature became a machine in his world, and spiritual significance was banished. As the American philosopher, John Herman Randall (1899-1980), notes in his classic text on the history of philosophy, the Age of Enlightenment and Reason “led on naturally to the achievements of its predecessor, evolution and relativity.” The nineteenth century added Evolution to Nature and Reason, the leading ideas of the previous age. Locke sought to discover a social physics. He “stands as apologist and heir of the great seventeenth-century struggles for constitutional liberties and rights and toleration.” Newman, in

9 J. H. Newman, An Aid in a Grammar of Assent, Garden City: Image Books, 1955, 186. (Further in the text abbreviated as Grammar of Assent or Grammar).

10 J.H. Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind. A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926, 254.

the nineteenth century, stood amid the remnants of this revolution in beliefs and habits of thought. He was not a revolutionary in any sense; nevertheless, we may still call his proposals revolutionary—revolutionary in the philosophical and theological sense.

When these rumbles had reached the twentieth century, they were mature enough to produce destructive ideologies. Edith Stein experienced the practical implementation of bold theories, when the human intellect—liberated, as it seemed, from the rigours of old morality—conceived new methods for the speedy destruction of ill-adapted individuals or sub-humans subjected to the self-acclaimed ruling masters. What the nineteenth century daringly proposed, the twentieth century eagerly applied, and the Nietzschean will to power found an appropriate spawning ground. The human mind, lost in the labyrinth of its own contrivances, fortified by the optimistic Kantian message that practical reason could create universal morality—at the transcendental level freed from the meanderings of ephemeral experience and obviously based on the autonomy of universal laws—would chant the hymn of indefinite progress, international brotherhood, and secular eschatology. The nineteenth century saw the birth of “new men” and “new women,” and the twentieth century saw the birth of a “master race,” yet another name for the social Darwinism of the previous epoch.

Newman sought to oppose the self-confident rationalistic subject not with yet another abstract theory, but with his analysis of the living person set in operation by faith, and taking a sure hold of the tenets not effected by formal reasoning, but impressed by the living mind. This sure hold relied not only on a personal adherence to the Word of God, but also on intimate contact with the dogmatic treasure of the Church. Such a hold is not satisfied with the mere implications of the formal calculations of the immanent world, but takes the personal being in his integrity. It suffices to mention Newman's concept of conscience, of which we shall talk in greater length, as it opens the enclosed human being to stand in confrontation with the truth heard within, but whose sources, however, come from without. The pure intellect may feel at home amid the milieu of abstract concepts, but the human person should never be reduced to the intellect, for persons live among concrete beings. In his life, the idea of overall unity was the focal point of his intellectual endeavours. The commentator, Meriol Trevor, observes: “To an extraordinary degree Newman’s thought and his life were one; his own story is one of development, in ideas, in action and in personality.”

Taking unity as a starting point, but in a dynamic combination of its individual aspects, he had set about studying the origins of Christianity. Christianity must also be one, or at one with itself, but revealed gradually over time as successive generations interpret its message in keeping with the Revealed Word and with tradition. Only in its wholeness, as a unique system, can it be rendered meaningful. And only in its evolutionary rendition can it essentially remain the same, while bringing ever new forms by which to accommodate the changing times. The figures of the intellect and the spirit, those who have managed to face the revolutionary turmoil, were those who stood firmly by the profound truthfulness to their own persons.

The decision to write about Newman must come as frustrating at first, or disconcerting, for many scholars, especially those who naturally expect a certain line of philosophical tradition. As Edward Sillem, the editor of Newman's Philosophical Notebook affirms, Newman “belongs to no school,” and he “never hides himself behind the authority or the word of another he respects as <<the philosopher>>.”!3 Of course, the last words refer to Thomas Aquinas and his special indebtedness to Aristotle’s philosophy. And a contemporary Newman scholar, Laurence Richardson, adds that Newman “[...] was not dominated by any single influence.”!* Such being the case, Newman apparently emerges as a solitary thinker who refers to no tradition, a thinker by his own merit. Such an interpretation is true only to a certain extent, as with all kinds of generalisations. In his texts, Newman refers to many other philosophers. Some references are critical remarks, like the utilitarians of the nineteenth century, others show sincere sympathy, i.e. Aristotle, Locke and Butler, yet with a note of the independent and lone traveller who knows that he must find his own way; in fact, each person must make his own efforts to arrive at certitude under the given circumstances. And Sillem concludes that “the very name <<Newman>> suggests to most people a personality rather than a philosophy and it scarcely occurs to English Catholic philosophers to ask themselves whether Newman had a philosophy worthy of the name to give them.”!5 The twentieth-century French philosopher, Jean Guitton (1901-1999), in fact published a book with the very telling title La philosophie de Newman [The Philosophy of Newman] which avowedly contradicts the claim that Newman had nothing to say on philosophy. Richardson entitles one chapter of his book on Newman “The Philosopher.” And he enumerates a long list of those “who have considered his philosophical views worthy of serious attention [...].” This list includes Etienne