God and Secular Man- A Study of Newman's Approach to the Problem of God and its Implications for Secular Man. (An Old and Rare Book)

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This study on Newman's approach to the problem of God is a modified and enlarged form of my doctoral thesis presented to the Gregorian University. Newman has probed more than anyone else in recent times our initial awareness of God's presence within us through the experience of conscience. But New- man has not only analysed the problem of man's encounter with God. He has read the signs of the times with a prophetic eye, foreseen an age of widespread denial and rejection of God and forewarned us of the consequent impoverishment of the human spirit in the intellectual citadels of the world.

This work studies Newman's approach to the problem of God through the experience of conscience. I have called this the human experience of God. When man is open to the God of conscience, he will be naturally disposed to the same God who reveals himself to him in Jesus Christ who transforms him inwardly and makes him whole and integral as a human person. I have called this the Christian experience of God. And this Christian experience of God is always had within the com- munity of believers. Since our Christian experience of God is always communitary it is an ecclesial experience of God.

It is only in God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ that man can be truly human, Newman held, as opposed to the empty claims of Liberal Humanism of his day to construct a new type of man and society without God. The claims of Secular Humanism which is successor to Liberal Humanism are even more radical, based on premises that go counter to man's most basic experiences. In fact, it is incapable of answering man's most fundamental questions regarding his origin, freedom, moral responsibility and ambivalence in the face of good and evil and his ultimate destiny and powerless to offer the means for man's self-fulfilment.

Only a true Christian Humanism, such as professed by New- man, can give an answer to man's most radical questions and fulfill his aspirations for self-fulfilment.

There has been an intensified interest in the thought, preaching and writing of John Henry Cardinal Newman. But in the last century it has never been doubted that Cardinal Newman is the greatest of those who preached in our English tongue, whether in the Anglican days of his most numerous sermons or in the Catholic days of his fewer, perhaps, but most luminous conferences, homilies and occasional sermons.

His tremendous love and knowledge of the Fathers of the Church made it possible for him to open up to the modern Church the possibility of a fresh approach to and renewal in the Spirit and mind of the patristic church with a consequent enrichment of faith, theology and the self-knowledge of the Church. It has become commonplace to think of Newman as "the absent Council Father" of Vatican II because of the number of seed ideas, taken from Newman, which were implanted and even developed in the Council. Foremost among these was probably the Catholic concept of the development of doctrine, a concept which begins, of course, with the "deposit of faith" but recognizes that there was nothing static about that concept or the deposit itself, it being comparable to the grain of mustard seed which becomes a mighty tree wherein all the birds of the air may find their rest. Then there was Cardinal Newman's concept of the place of the laity in the life of the Church and particularly his reminder of the number of times in history when the laity had literally saved the faith by their loyal witness and fidelity. To Cardinal Newman may also be attributed no small part of the Council's preoccupation with the nature and claims of conscience in the Catholic understanding of that personal and practical moral guide. Other Newmanian themes found their way into the general teaching and sometimes specific wording of the documents of Vatican Council II.

It has remained for Dr. Sebastian Karotemprel to develop a theme which others have touched upon or even considered in part but to which Father Karotemprel has given full and masterly treatment, i.e., Newman's approach to the problem of God and its implications for secular man. The writings and sermons of Cardinal Newman were largely historical, treatises of spiritual direction or meditations on the mysteries of the faith.