John Henry Newman on Truth and Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times by Reinhard Hütter (review)

"From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no variations to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever." With these words, John Henry Newman began the final chapter of Apologia pro Vita Sua (1865), addressed to a Protestant public to explain his conversion from the Church of England to the Catholic Church. These words might express the confidence of Reinhard Hütter's final chapter, too, an "Epilogue" which explains his own conversion from Lutheranism to Catholicism. One difference between the Apologia and Hütter's book is that the latter is written by a Catholic for Catholics, quoting conciliar documents and a plethora of papal encyclicals. There is nothing wrong with such an approach in a volume written by a professor at The Catholic University of America, in a series entitled "Sacra Doctrina" and published by The Catholic University of America Press. But it was not Newman's approach in the Apologia nor in many of his controversial works that Hütter quotes. The Apologia was teeming with Protestants, even as it criticized the one (Charles Kingsley) who accused Newman of dishonesty: from Bishop Joseph Butler, the Anglican theologian whom he credited with two of his most important theological principles, to the Anglicans he still called his friends, to the court of public opinion in which he presented his case so persuasively. Where Hütter is less persuasive than Newman is not in his prose (which is lucid), but in courting the opinion only of fellow Catholics.

The Prologue argues that the canonized cardinal can speak as our contemporary because of his threefold characterization of the predicament of the age: "the spirit of liberalism in religion, the usurpation of religion and faith by rationalism, and the unfettered rule of the principle of private judgment in religion" (1). Newman began criticizing each of these three while still the chief spokesman for a catholic renewal of the Church of England, and though faced with a different set of historical circumstances from those articulated in Hütter's epilogue, he like Hütter eventually found relief from the continual need to resort to "private judgment" by becoming a Catholic. Today's prevailing predicament is, in Hütter's phrase, "the unfettered autonomy of the sovereign self" (3)—a freedom (conceived negatively) summed up in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy as, at heart, "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" (quoted ibid., repeated on 216). Against such a counterfeit of human being and purpose, Hütter presents Newman's views on the topics of Conscience, Faith, the Development of Doctrine, and the University—or he almost does. For in Hütter's view, what Newman "initially brought to light, described, and tentatively explained in the context of discovery" as psychologist, phenomenologist, and controversialist needs supplementing with Aquinas in "the theological context of justification" (19). That Newman read Aquinas is not in doubt; however, it seems to this reviewer unlikely that he read Aquinas in the same way Hütter does. Nevertheless Hütter's method will not, he admits, "contribute to the ongoing exegesis of Newman" (20).

The drawback of this method can be seen in chapter 1, where a brief encounter with Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk is coupled with a discussion of Aquinas on synderesis and conscientia. This chapter pits the theonomic conscience against its counterfeit, either the counterfeit presented by the knockers of conscience who (in Newman's...