ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that John Henry Newman appealed to the Religious Imagination as the safeguard of Faith and Morals: the resulting insight into moral truth, the fruit of imaginative discernment, occurring only “slowly as the dew falls,” as suggested in the citation. Newman was referring not just to the moral character that was so important for his pastoral concern, but also to the intellectual formation of the individual that would embody his educational concern at his Catholic Dublin university. When Newman lectured on the identity of a university in 1854 his pastoral, educational, and theological concerns for religious truth were inseparable. Newman argued that the historical judgments of the Christian community, which he called the subjective conscience of the Church, should be consulted before the definition of doctrine. Based upon this rapport between holiness, virtue, and wisdom, he developed another major feature of his catechesis: his theology of history and the Christian community.