John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman wurde am 21. Februar 1801 in Lon-don geboren und starb am 12. August 1890 in Birmingham. Mit 15 Jahren erlebte er eine Umwandlung seiner Person, die ihn zu einem einzigartigen Homo religiosus machte. Am 25. Mai 1825 empfing er die anglikanischen Weihen. Im Bewu tsein seiner Sendung f r England schlo er sich 1833 mit einigen Freunden der Oxfordbewegung an und vertrat dabei den Standpunkt der Via Media, die einen Weg zwischen Rom und Wittenberg suchte: Es erwachte in mir der Gedanke, ich h tte eine Sendung zu erf llen. (Apologia 1, 14) Zweifel an der anglikanischen Kirche kamen Newman durch das Studium der fr hen Kirchengeschichte. Er konvertierte am 8. Oktober 1845. Im Jahr 1847 empfing er in Rom die Priesterweihe und schlo sich dem Oratorium des Filippo Neri an. Durch seine Autobiographie Apologia pro Vita Sua 1864 errang er auf allen Seiten hohes Ansehen, selbst bei den Anglikanern. Papst Leo XIII. ernannte ihn 1879 zum Kardinal und anerkannte damit seine Person und sein Werk auf ungew hnliche Weise.

The following pages were not in the first instance written to prove the divinity of the Catholic Religion, though ultimately they furnish a positive argument in its behalf, but to explain certain difficulties in its history, felt before now by the author himself, and commonly insisted on by Protestants in controversy, as serving to blunt the force of its prim facie and general claims on our recognition. However beautiful and promising that Religion is in theory, its history, we are told, is its best refutation; the inconsistencies, found age after age in its teaching, being as patent as the simultaneous contrarieties of religious opinion manifest in the High, Low, and Broad branches of the Church of England. In reply to this specious objection, it is maintained in this Essay that, granting that some large variations of teaching in its long course of 1800 years exist, nevertheless, these, on examination, will be found to arise from the nature of the case, and to proceed on a law, and with a harmony and a definite drift, and with an analogy to Scripture revelations, which, instead of telling to their disadvantage, actually constitute an argument in their favour, as witnessing to a superintending Providence and a great Design in the mode and in the circumstances of their occurrence. Perhaps his confidence in the truth and availableness of this view has sometimes led the author to be careless and over-liberal in his concessions to Protestants of historical fact. If this be so anywhere, he begs the reader in such cases to understand him as speaking hypothetically, and in the sense of an argumentum ad hominem and fortiori. Nor is such hypothetical reasoning out of place in a publication which is addressed, not to theologians, but to those who as yet are not even Catholics, and who, as they read history, would scoff at any defence of Catholic doctrine which did not go the length of covering admissions in matters of fact as broad as those which are here ventured on. In this new Edition of the Essay various important alterations have been made in the arrangement of its separate parts, and some, not indeed in its matter, but in its text. February 2, 1878.