For Which Our Nature is Made

 I wonder if everyone's story of conversion has a little bit of eucatastrophe to it, a bit of what Tolkien called

 " a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief"?

  It is, he also says, "a sudden and miraculous grace".... something that might not have been, that doesn't deny the reality of sorrow and hardship, but goes far beyond it.

He wrote in one of his letters:

 I was there led to the view that [eucatastrophe] produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. 

I just finished reading another Communio article, this one called Newman's Essay on the Development of Doctrine: An Alternative Interpretation.   It is by Dr Martin Bruske, and I couldn't find much about him online, at least not in English.    It looks like he is a German theologian, who has been critical of some of the things the German Catholic Church is doing.

In the article, Bruske intends to provide a somewhat directed reading guide to Newman's above-named essay.    He views it as less a theological work and more of an attempt to answer the question of the role history plays in faith,

the question of the historicity of the Christian faith; more concretely,... the question of Newman's proposal for resolving the problem of faith and historical reason.

His essay is written for the serious layperson:

... every thoughtful Christian must confront, one way or another, the fundamental question that Newman examines; the ability of thoughtful Christians to form independent judgments in the question regarding the historicity of the Christian faith is a major challenge for the future of Christianity at the beginning of the 21st century. 

Bruske makes an analogy between Newman's own conversion story and the development of his ideas on doctrine in history.    This not in a reductive sense, as if our thinking merely recapitulated our autobiography; but in the sense that Newman's journey was one of pursuing truth and so the personal and intellectual aspects were linked.

Newman's path itself may thus portray a development in his own sense of the word and, indeed, of a legitimate, not corrupting, development. One may cautiously assert that Newman's biography and theology correspond in an astounding, moving manner. It is tempting to apply Newman's criteria for a legitimate development to himself: preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, logical sequence, anticipation of the future, conservative action upon the past, and chronic vigor. Just so, his evangelical conversion (with its discovery and love of Scripture, and its decisive ethical and religious existence) is integrated into each later phase; equally enduring were the discoveries of the Church Fathers and of the episcopally structured, independent church. As a Catholic, Newman retained the whole of these things. Newman's way was not primarily the way of a no (even though decisiveness also draws limits), but rather the way of an ever-widening yes that led him in the end to the Catholic Church. His conversion was, then, not a break, but rather the following through of a path.

That was interesting to me because my own conversion process was somewhat similar.  ... not turning away from things, but expanding my understanding of what those things were.  

The event of divine revelation manifests itself for Newman in the human spirit as the fullness of an idea, which releases man into a truly historical process of appropriation. This process does not occur naturally or smoothly, but rather involves crises, challenges and struggles, even as it is firmly grounded in the history of Gods concern for the safekeeping of his truth. 

Bruske notes the Mother of God's life as a paradigm of the founding faith and love, but ongoing reflection on revelation through history that we see in the Church: 

In Newman's sermon of Candlemas, 1843, the primary image for this process of historical understanding is the Mother of God: But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart (Lk 2:19). The truth that she faithfully guarded and treasured opened up even to her over the course of a long process, which certainly did not run smoothly, in a journey through life that was just beginning.

In this post, I wanted to focus most on that "eucatastrophic" part of the article.   Bruske also wrote about the two different ways of historicizing that we have more or less inherited as Moderns.   He describes them both, finds neither of them entirely satisfactory, and wants us to consider Newman's approach as a third way to consider the problem of history in relation to faith, neither skeptical nor simple.    I may post about that aspect of it some other time if it seems to fit with where this is going.