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Article Excerpt
In an early sermon, "Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth," John Henry Newman (1801-1890) asks how revealed truth has made its way and held its ground in the world. He answers that its chief strength has not been in rational arguments, and in fact he goes surprisingly far in granting the advantages that unbelievers have over believers on the level of "garrulous reason." Then he gives what he takes to be the true answer, revelation "has been upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by arguments, nor by temporal power, but by the personal influence of such men as have already been described, who are at once the teachers and the patterns of it." And he explains: "Men persuade themselves, with little difficulty, to scoff at principles, to ridicule books, to make sport of the names of good men; but they cannot bear their presence: it is holiness embodied in personal form which they cannot steadily confront and bear down."
Years later Newman had occasion to refer back to his sermon on personal influence. It was 1850, and he was dealing with an outburst of anti-Catholic agitation set off by the act of Pope Pius IX restoring the Catholic hierarchy in England. In one lecture Newman was discussing with a Catholic audience in Birmingham the many absurd stereotypes that controlled the thinking of English Protestants about Catholics, and was advising his fellow Catholics on how to deal with these stereotypes. He distinguished between "metropolitan opinion" about Catholics, centered in London, and "local opinion" about Catholics, centered in the neighborhoods where they live. He admonished his listeners to forget about the former, and give great care about the latter.
You cannot make an impression on such an ocean of units; it [metropolitan opinion] has no disposition, no connection of parts. The great instrument of propagating moral truth is personal knowledge. A man finds himself in a definite place; he grows up in it and into it; he draws persons around him; they know him, he knows them; thus it is that ideas are born which are to live, that works begin which are to last. It is this personal knowledge of each other which is true public opinion; local opinion is real public opinion; but there is not, there cannot be, such in London.
There immediately follows a piece of vintage Newmanian satire. He imagines the division of mind that is bound to arise in Protestants who have become personally acquainted with individual Catholics but who have not yet given up their anti-Catholic stereotypes.
The Birmingham people will say, "Catholics are, doubtless, an infamous set, and not to be trusted, for the Times says so, and Exeter Hall, and the Prime Minister, and the Bishops of the Establishment; and such good authorities cannot be wrong; but somehow an exception must certainly be made for the Catholics of Birmingham.... Priests in general are perfect monsters; but here they are certainly unblemished in their lives, and take great pains with their people. Bishops are tyrants, and, as Maria Monk says, cutthroats, always excepting the Bishop of Birmingham, who affects no state or pomp, is simple and unassuming, and always in his work."
Of course, Newman hopes that the personal influence exercised by Catholics will eliminate this situation by diminishing the Protestant stereotypes; then the dividedness of the Protestant mind would give way to an understanding of Catholicism based on the personal influence of individual Catholics.
Newman himself exercised powerfully the personal influence of which he speaks. At his death in 1890 the Times of London said, speaking in the vein in which so many Protestants spoke as they took leave of Newman, "Of one thing we may be sure, that the memory of his pure and noble life, untouched by worldliness, unsoured by any trace of fanaticism, will endure, and that whether Rome canonizes him or not he will be canonized in the thoughts of pious people of many creeds in England." The writer of these lines is remembering not Newman's arguments, not his accomplishments, not the institutions he founded, but rather the purity of his personality, which is the main thing that undermines the writer's anti-Catholic prejudices. One might object that the Times was expressing not local opinion but metropolitan opinion. But when the one exercising personal influence is a personality of Newman's proportions, metropolitan opinion and local opinion coincide. Newman's neighborhood had become the whole nation.
Newman's writings on education show us another aspect of his teaching on personal influence. They also show us personal influence as it exists among friends and not simply as it overcomes enemies. In a paper tided "What Is a University?" Newman discusses the litera scripta, or written word, which has become available in unprecedented abundance in the modern world. He acknowledges that "the inestimable benefit of the litera scripta is that of being a record of truth, and an authority of appeal and an instrument of teaching in the hands of a teacher." He then continues: "But ... if we wish to become exact and...
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