THE P RTAL
January 2015
UK Pages - page 14
Thoughts on Newman
Optimism - not a Christian virtue
Dr Stephen Morgan contrasts Newman’s faith in Christian hope
with our modern misplaced optimism
A
new year brings with it an inevitable optimism. New Year’s resolutions - often lasting no longer
than the first few days of January - and a natural sense of new beginnings combine to overcome the still
dark, still cold, still wintery days and give us a feeling that, in so many ways, we can start anew. Optimism,
however, is not a Christian virtue.
For the Christian there is no inevitability that human organise a better world, Hope rests on the quiet,
affairs will get better, that this year will - or even should confident belief that, because Christ has accomplished
a definitive victory over sin, whatever our troubles,
- be better than last year.
whatever the difficulties, the God who became Man in
The doctrine of progress has been so very much part Jesus Christ will triumph, will bring all things together
of western thought for three hundred years that we in Himself, will be all in all. It is, in Wesley’s words,
can be forgiven for believing that it’s true, despite the a blessed assurance, founded on the very promise of
Christ Himself.
very mixed evidence around us.
Sure, we wouldd all prefer modern dentistry to a
medieval barber-surgeon removing our teeth without
anaesthetic but how many of us would want to claim
that carpet-bombing in the total war that has marked
almost every armed conflict of the last one hundred
years was an improvement upon the strict application
of the principles of the just war theory, which outlawed
the killing of non-combatants?
the theological virtue of Hope
Newman did not have about him the character of an
optimist. If anything, his writings, and especially those
that belong to the early days of the Oxford Movement,
have about them a nostalgic pessimism: a faint sense
that things are not getting better, that - at least as far
as religion is concerned - things were better in some,
imagined yesterday.
But, although he could say that “to consider the
world” was to see ‘the disappointments of life, the
defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain,
mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin,
the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary
hopeless irreligion” [Apologia (Svaglic) p.217],
although he was clearly no optimist, he was a man
filled with the Christian alternative to optimism: the
theological virtue of Hope.
the very real source of his resilience
Instead of being grounded, like optimism, in the
naive expectation of an improvement in human nature
and behaviour, in the belief that we can legislate and
contents page
For Newman this was not the ground of a merely
theoretical hope, it was the very real source of his
resilience: not only as the Bishops of the Established
Church, one by one, came out against his Tract XC,
but as the Catholic Bishops of Ireland frustrated
his plans for a University, as their English brothers
successfully blocked an Oratory in Oxford and as his
critics in Rome distilled, blandly and suavely, into the
ears of Blessed Pope Pius IX suggestions of Newman’s
heterodoxy.
It was this promise that distinguishes hope from
optimism, that makes of it something real, something
reliable, something upon which it is possible to
build. Although he could never again, after 1845,
pray it publicly, who can doubt that Newman would
not rejoice today that within the communion of the
Catholic Church, because of the Ordinariate, it was
possible to pray:
Almighty God,
who hast given us grace at this time
with one accord
to make our common supplications unto thee;
and dost promise that when two or three
are gathered together in thy name
thou wilt grant their requests:
fulfil now, O Lord,
the desires and petitions of thy servants,
as may be most ex