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‘Amare Nesciri’: John Henry Newman on the Hidden Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2026

Rebekah Lamb-Varela
Rebekah Lamb-Varela*
Affiliation:
Divinity, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, UK
*
Email: rl89@st-andrews.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article brings into further view John Henry Newman’s idea of the self as that which is received from God and as that which remains, in various ways, hidden both from the world as well as from the self’s own view. It proceeds in the following stages. First, it posits that Newman’s emphasis on scriptural and sacramental accounts of the hidden highlights the providential revelation of the self as that which is received independently of the self, and as that which grows through self-forgetting attention to God and others. Second, it examines Newman’s idea of the saint – what we could call the sanctified or realized self – through his meditations on the life of his spiritual patron and guide, St Philip Neri. Third, it concludes by considering how Newman’s idea of the saint, of the sanctified self, rests in a personal, and often hidden, encounter with the holiness of God – an encounter which includes the ethical as a derivative of intimacy with the holy, with the personal, triune God.

Keywords

Edith SteinJohn Henry NewmanOratorian CharismPhilip Nerithe self

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New Blackfriars , First View , pp. 1 - 16
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.

… [T]rue religion is a hidden life in the heart.Footnote 1

John Henry Newman

1. Introduction

On 6 January 1940, Saint Edith Stein wrote a meditation on the hidden life of Christ, honouring the feast of the Epiphany, when the glory of Christ was paradoxically manifested in his humble childhood and reverenced by the world as represented by the Magi from the East.Footnote 2 Other modern writers, such as James Joyce, turned to this feast to consider how certain spiritual and exceptional revelations might unexpectedly shine out through everyday encounters.Footnote 3 By contrast, Stein primarily understands this feast as resisting full disclosure of its subject and the consequent call to abandonment to divine mercy, as well as self surrender. God, she notes,

want[s] the pure gold of a heart detached from all earthly goods; the myrrh of a renunciation of … this world in exchange for participation in the life and sufferings of Jesus; the frankincense of a will that surrenders itself and strains upward to lose itself in the divine will. In return for these gifts, the divine child gives us himself.Footnote 4

While the Epiphany does, for Stein, signal the ‘work of God becoming visible in our external behaviour and activity noticed by those around us’, it simultaneously announces the arrival of the Messiah in a hidden mode, in the unexpected form of a child of humble and impoverished origin.Footnote 5

In the form of the child-Messiah, Stein proposes that we are reminded of the mysterious and irreducible nature of the self and, as importantly, of the hidden character of the relationship between the self and God: the ‘formative stream of the mystical life remains invisible’, she reminds us.Footnote 6 Crucially, for Stein, every person is called to share in the mystical life rooted in encounter with Christ and facilitated by the Church as the mystical body of Christ.Footnote 7 These encounters do not need to involve visions, per se, as Stein had a sacramental view of the mystic, rooting it in a variety of ecclesial and sacramental encounters including Eucharistic adoration, participation in the Church as the mystical body of Christ, and the philosophical pursuit of truth.Footnote 8 In concluding her meditation on the Epiphany, she observes that the history of the prophets and saints shows that ‘the greatest figures … step forth out of the darkest night’, paradoxically shining out through their very hiddenness.Footnote 9 Here, and across her later writings, the ‘darkest night’ signifies, in keeping with the Carmelite charism, the close and loving intimacy between the self and God—an intimacy which exceeds language and images and is discerned through forms of prayer and reverent attention.

Stein is thus interested in the extent to which the most important moments of a person’s life will likely occur offstage, in hidden prayer with God. This leads her to observe that ‘the decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions’.Footnote 10 There are several conclusions to draw from her account of hiddenness but, for the purposes of this article, it is especially helpful to note that it presents divine providence as inclined towards the humble and hidden – especially as a means of dispensing grace, within and beyond the historical, within and beyond human sight. And it is precisely Stein’s account of divine action through hiddenness that provides a fruitful point of entry into Saint John Henry Newman’s thought, especially regarding the hidden depths of the self.

In her work translating Newman, Stein was drawn to his pastoral sensitivity concerning the essential place of the humble in history and, relatedly, the question of the self’s often hidden yet providential role within that history.Footnote 11 She was especially taken with his understanding that God knows us better than we know ourselves – that we are revealed to ourselves, and receive ourselves, through encounters with others and, first and foremost, through contact with God (whether we understand this contact or not).Footnote 12 At one level, this is Newman’s reformulation of Saint Augustine’s reminder that God is more interior to us than we are to ourselves (‘interior intimo meo et superior summo meo’).Footnote 13 At another, it is the fruit of Newman’s long and careful study of the lives of the saints in which he discerned that the workings of providence often emerge in gradual and unexpectedly commonplace or hidden ways.Footnote 14 In particular, Newman identified the humble prophets, such as the Blessed Virgin Mary or ‘holy Daniel, solitary among princes, or Elijah the recluse of Mount Carmel’ as those who, precisely from within their positions of contemplative hiddenness within the world, ‘forecast the time of God’s providence among the nations’.Footnote 15 In this, Newman implies that the human person’s capacity to participate as an agent of grace within history first emerges from the life of prayer, not from public deeds or activism of various kinds – although he certainly held that public forms of participation and service are also important (and are often fruits of the contemplative life itself).Footnote 16

Scholars have noted aspects of Newman’s influence on Christian senses of the self in emerging modernity, particularly through his formulation of conscience as the ‘aboriginal vicar of Christ’.Footnote 17 His influences have been traced in the life and thought of Stein as well as Erich Pryzwara SJ, Theodor Haecker, Ida Friederike Görres, members of the White Rose Movement, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Joseph Ratzinger, among others.Footnote 18 However, such studies have principally focused on his exposition of the conscience in both ethical and personalist terms. Otherwise, his contributions to discourses on the self in modernity remain underexplored in Newman Studies to date. This is especially the case with regard to Newman’s understanding of the self as largely hidden from view (including from the self itself), and gradually disclosed through the distinctive revelatory resources of the life of prayer, of conversation with God.

Newman’s sense of the self as an unfolding mystery, possessing a purpose and value that exceed personal understanding or control, is perhaps most famously encapsulated in his meditation on theological hope. It hinges upon, and concludes with, an act of abandonment to divine providence, expressing hope in God’s ability to effect meaning and good through our lives, even when we are unable to grasp or ensure such effects ourselves:

God has created me to do Him some definite service […] I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good. I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.Footnote 19

Here, he understands the depths of the self as a point of profoundly close contact with the providential plans of the Creator – a contact so intimate that it often exceeds our imagining, our ability to articulate, and even our awareness. Rather than treating human limitation and hiddenness as sources of anxiety, Newman prayerfully discerns within them a divine love beyond telling, often partially discernible only retrospectively—through prayer, contemplation, and acts of faith or abandonment to providence.Footnote 20 For Newman, such reflection gains its life from, and maturation through, contemplation of scripture, the lives of the saints, and the long tradition of Christian spiritual and wisdom writing. However, above all else, such insight into the prolific possibilities of providential grace comes, for Newman, from sacramental participation in the life of the Church: the source and summit of mystical encounter with the divine amid everyday life.Footnote 21

Given this, my article brings into further view Newman’s idea of the self as that which is received from God and as that which remains, in various ways, hidden both from the world as well as from the self’s own view. It proceeds in the following stages. First, it posits that Newman’s emphasis on scriptural and sacramental accounts of the hidden highlights the providential revelation of the self as that which is received independently of the self, and as that which grows through self-forgetting, or self-exiting, attention to God and others. Second, it examines Newman’s idea of the saint – what we could call the sanctified or realized self – through his meditations on the life of his spiritual patron and guide, St Philip Neri. Third, it concludes by considering how Newman’s idea of the saint, of the sanctified self, rests in a personal, and often hidden, encounter with the holiness of God – an encounter which includes the ethical as a derivative of intimacy with the holy, with the personal, triune God.

2. ‘[L]ooking unto Jesus’: prayer as derivatively self-realizing

In a sermon titled ‘Self-Contemplation’, from the second volume of Parochial and Plain Sermons (1868), Newman explicitly establishes an idea of identity, of the self, rooted in St Paul’s observation that Christians should be ‘[l]ooking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith’ (Hebrews 7:2).Footnote 22 Drawing from this invitation to look for the sources of the self in Christ, Newman observes: ‘Surely it is our duty ever to look off ourselves, and to look unto Jesus, that is, to shun the contemplation of our own feelings … as if that were the main business of religion, and to leave these mainly to be secured in their fruits’.Footnote 23 At first read, it may seem a contradiction in terms that Newman – who would later choose cor ad cor liquitur, a phrase from St Francis de Sales’ spiritual writings, as his cardinalatial motto – would be cautious about attention to our own feelings in the spiritual life. Indeed, throughout his long life of writings, the heart is shown to have a central place in the spiritual life and in one’s conscientious discernment. However, it is precisely in the special priority Newman gives to the heart that his concerns about self-contemplation become understandable. For, throughout ‘Self-Contemplation’, Newman emphasizes that, in the Christian understanding, one’s very heart (a scriptural representation of one’s inmost self) is best read and revealed by Christ – especially through his own Sacred Heart.Footnote 24 That is to say, Newman discerns in the resources of the Church, in its scriptures and sacraments, in its ordinances and commandments, the map required to navigate one’s personal path and the intricacies of one’s own heart. To understand the self, Newman advises that one must resist self-regard as the primary indicator of reality and, instead, turn towards Christ, the model and pattern of human holiness, and the guide to the self.

Contemplating Christ is a theme saturating Newman’s writing and is found, in its most personal and intimate culmination, in his later hymns and poems of praise to Christ’s hidden presence in the Blessed Sacrament as typified in the following:

O most Sacred, most loving Heart of Jesus, Thou art concealed in the Holy Eucharist, and Thou beatest for us still … I worship Thee then with all my best love and awe, with my fervent affection, with my most subdued, most resolved will. O my God, when Thou dost condescend to suffer me to receive Thee, to eat and drink Thee, and Thou for a while takest up Thy abode within me, O make my heart beat with Thine … So fill it with Thee, that neither the events of the day nor the circumstances of the time may have power to ruffle it, but than in Thy love and Thy fear it may have peace.Footnote 25

Here, Newman’s prayer is shaped by continual apostrophic turns to Christ. These turns, these forms of poetic or psalmic cries from the heart, are enabled by Newman’s belief in Christ as the source of personal meaning and love. In this prayer and elsewhere, he discloses the self as most thoroughly realized by reception of Christ’s Eucharistic presence. For, when the human heart beats as one with that of the divine Saviour, the self finds its realization, its sanctification, as a derivative.Footnote 26

Commenting upon Newman’s Eucharistic prayers, and seeing in them an implicit theology of selfhood, Pope Francis points out in Dilexit Nos that Newman understood reception of Christ in the Eucharist as the sacrament that, in a derivative mode, offers fulfilment:

… Newman took as his motto the phrase Cor ad cor loquitur, since, beyond all our thoughts and ideas, the Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart. This realization led him, the distinguished intellectual, to recognize that his deepest encounter with himself and with the Lord came not from his reading or reflection, but from his prayerful dialogue, heart to heart, with Christ, alive and present [in the Eucharist].Footnote 27

Here, and throughout Dilexit Nos, Pope Francis observes that Newman’s dedication to the self as hidden and most fully realized through the sacraments is not only Christological in character but also especially shaped by his Marian devotions. In Mary’s reception of Christ in her womb, and in her careful pondering of scripture, Newman discerned the divine reaffirmation of both the goodness of the person and the person’s place within providence’s preference for hidden, gradual revelations of divine love grounded, as he put it, in the ‘secrecy and suddenness of divine visitations’ throughout history.Footnote 28 For Newman, then, the humble is a distinctively Christological way through which the nature of the self is revealed as hidden and gradually disclosed, in part, through a life of prayer and ‘definite service’.Footnote 29

Indeed, throughout Parochial and Plain Sermons and elsewhere, he often draws upon the scriptures, notably St Paul’s epistles, to identify the self as that which is received, and more fully realized, through participation in prayer and the sacramental life of the Church. In addition to the Sacrament of the Eucharist, he frequently focuses on baptism as a sacrament of initiation which draws the self into the inner depths of life – ‘into that within the veil’ – thus proposing that the self is most fully seen (most fully known) by holy others, by God and, to a lesser degree, his angels:

St Paul plainly tells us that it is God’s purpose that ‘His manifold wisdom should be known to the heavenly principalities and powers, through the Church’. When we are made Christians, we are baptized ‘into that within the veil’; we are brought near to an innumerable company of Angels; and, resembling them in their hidden condition, share their sympathy and their services. Therefore, the same Apostle exhorts Timothy to persevere in obedience, not only by the thought of God, but by that of the Angels; and surely we ought to cultivate the habitual feeling that they see us in our most private deeds, and most carefully guarded solitudes.Footnote 30

Throughout this meditation, Newman offers a sacramentally grounded account of Christian perception that also serves as the basis for an understanding of the self’s place or purpose within history. The self, to Newman’s mind, enters into spiritual intimacy with God through the sacraments of the Church, and, in this way, also increasingly matures into a mode of seeing and being seen that is distinctively spiritual in character. Through baptism, the person is brought into the ‘company of Angels’, sharing in ‘their hidden condition’ of graced communion with God. In other words, Newman understands the self as called into, and realized through, the operations of divine grace, operations that may be glimpsed, here and there, through their fruits but that, for the most part, work in hidden ways upon the self and others, within and beyond the historical plane.

In this, Newman offers a sense of the self as primarily understood, and ordered towards, an eschatological encounter with the Jesus of history who is also the Christ of God. However, Newman’s eschatological vision resists any construal of eschatological fulfilment in which the transcendent is reduced to, or absorbed within, the continuity and progress of earthly history. In this respect, Newman preserves the dynamic, analogical distinction and relation between history and the Parousia, between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’.Footnote 31 In his understanding of earthly participation in the heavenly economy through the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church, Newman holds that the person is invited to engage with, rather than avoid, the circumstances and challenges of daily life, seeing them as occasions of prayerful preparation for Christ’s promised return and, derivatively, as forms of graced self-realization. The eschatological, in other words, does not bypass the ordinary conditions of historical existence in Newman’s thought, but discloses their deeper significance: these conditions become the very means through which each person is seen and beheld by God and the angels. That is to say, for Newman, the Christian’s vocation to sanctity (the self’s invitation to realize its spiritual ‘end’), and to sacramentally participate in heaven while on earth is worked out precisely within these ordinary conditions, in hidden and humble ways, through the grace afforded by the sacramental life of the Church.Footnote 32

3. The Philippine ‘pattern’: a theology of hiddenness

For Newman, the vocation to sanctity, to the gradual realization of the self in history, is not something that will always ‘excite the feelings, or interest the imagination’, for it requires a careful, and often demanding, discernment of the voice of God amid everyday life as well as acts of self-emptying charity for the sake of one’s neighbour.Footnote 33 Alongside Saint Paul’s epistles, the Gospel of Luke also provided Newman with events of, and meditations on, hiddenness that he explored at length in his sermons. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Luke 2:22–38), for example, afforded him a deepened sense of the humble nature and forms favoured by Christ as Messiah. He proposes that, in this biblical account of a revelation paradoxically manifested in commonplace form, we find the call to sanctity emerge out of that which is easily overlooked – especially by those in power.Footnote 34

As Mary and Joseph bring the Christ child, the Saviour of the world, into the temple, only the elderly and largely forgotten faithful, Simeon and Anna, take notice. Yet, from this seemingly simple encounter, which Newman describes as neither ‘uncommon’ nor ‘striking’, the fulfilment of centuries-old prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah takes place.Footnote 35 In his extended reading of this passage, Newman invites his congregation to consider how the feast of the Presentation reveals the gentle and ‘noiseless course of God’s providence’, and the ‘tranquil’ nature of divine ‘accomplishment, in the course of nature, of great events long designed …’.Footnote 36 In other words, he encourages, and indeed models, a way of interpreting scriptural narratives of hiddenness as revelatory of the divine plan to draw persons into encounters with the providential plans of redemption, to draw selves into sanctification.

What Newman discerns in the hidden events of scripture also provides a pattern for understanding the hiddenness of divine presence within the self: just as God’s purposes are disclosed through what appears to be outwardly insignificant, so divine love is encountered within the interior life of each person.Footnote 37 Newman’s sense of God’s dwelling within the heart of the person is also informed by the Oratorian charism that, as Cyril O’Regan points out, increasingly orbited around devotion to the Sacred Heart.Footnote 38 Through his twin devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Eucharistic adoration, Newman grew into an understanding of the self that, as John F. Crosby proposes, could be called a kind of Trinitarian personalism.Footnote 39 This understanding identifies the person, made in the image and likeness of a Trinitarian God, as a fundamentally relational being, made for and by relational love.Footnote 40 While Newman grounds this understanding of the self in his extended discussions of Trinitarian sympathy, it is in his Meditations and Devotions that we find his applied personalism, his articulation of the self as constituted by the divine and benevolent gaze of the God who is love:

God has created all things for good; all things for their greatest good; everything for its own good […] He looks on me individually, He calls me by my name, He knows what I can do, what I can best be, what is my greatest happiness, and He means to give it me […] We are blind; left to ourselves we should take the wrong way; we must leave it to Him […] Let us put ourselves into His hands, and not be startled though He leads us by a strange way, a Mirabilis Via, as the Church speaks. Let us be sure He will lead us right, that He will bring us to that which is, not indeed what we think best, nor what is best for another, but what is best for us.Footnote 41

Here, Newman presents the self as one who is looked upon lovingly by the God who is love itself, and, as importantly, as one who can only grow into a sense of (limited) self-understanding through abandonment to divine providence – ‘we are blind left to ourselves […] Let us put ourselves into His hands …’.

Such an account of becoming one’s self through prayer and service finds, of course, particular expression in, and development through, Newman’s meditations on the lives of the saints, of those persons whose vocations render visible aspects of the graced relationship between divine providence, inner growth in charity, and service to others. Among these figures, St Philip Neri held, as we know, a distinctive priority in Newman’s devotional imagination. It is therefore significant that, shortly after bringing the Oratorian charism to England’s shores, Newman turned to Neri’s life and spiritual example as a concrete model of the very spirituality of everyday life through which the Christian is called to become the person God intends. This is especially discernible in the sermons Newman preached in 1850 on Neri’s life as a ‘pattern’ for the times.Footnote 42

The first of these sermons was preached by Newman on 18 January 1850 to mark the first anniversary of the Birmingham Oratory and to further introduce the Oratory’s charism of a spirituality of everyday life to the English-speaking world. The sermons focus on Neri, founder of the sixteenth-century Oratorian Congregation, and one of Newman’s most cherished saints and spiritual fathers. Neri, called ‘the saint of Joy’, or the ‘Second Apostle of Rome’, seemed larger than life: humorous and holy, charismatic and unconcerned with social hierarchy, radically loving towards his neighbours and critics alike, and nourished by a deep, hidden life of contemplative prayer.Footnote 43 Yet, Newman singles him out as a model of holiness for the depths of his hidden spiritual life, which included intimate encounters with the Holy Spirit, brought to a particular pitch of personal union in a mystical vision that inflamed and enlarged his heart on the vigil of the feast of Pentecost in 1544.Footnote 44 While this vision was a hidden encounter, and one which Neri tried to keep a secret, it effected a profound transformation of his spiritual life, prompting his greater understanding of the life of prayer as the hidden heartbeat of each person’s individual life, and, by extension, of history itself.

In his sermons on Neri, Newman observes that it is the Italian saint’s training in the hidden life of prayer, indebted to the Dominican contemplative tradition, that gave him the visionary capacity required to establish the Oratorian Congregation in Rome. The gradual founding of the Oratory, according to Newman, also emerged out of Neri’s understanding that the interior life animates and enlivens history, including public life and the more commonplace acts of charitable service to one’s friends and to those in need.Footnote 45 Among other things, this suggests to Newman that power politics does not constitute the driving force of history but, rather, the spiritual love of the saints – a love that often remains hidden or only partially discernible.Footnote 46 In his sermons on Saint Philip Neri and elsewhere, he repeatedly implies that the saints are history’s true ‘benefactors’, serving as providential forms of redress and healing through their often hidden lives of contemplative prayer and pastoral care.Footnote 47

Given this, Newman invites his fellow Oratorians (and, by extension, the laity and all who are part of the Oratorian, parochial community) to take Neri as their spiritual ‘pattern’, listing the many ways in which he may be imitated: his humour, humility, playfulness, generosity, dedication to prayer, honesty, and pastoral concern for the needs of others.Footnote 48 Yet, Newman notes that the deepest and most challenging spiritual lesson offered by Neri’s example lies not only in the cultivation of these virtues, but also in something far deeper and humbler: Neri’s longing ‘to love to be unknown’ by the world and, instead, to be known first and foremost by God.Footnote 49 At one level, this is a practical, Oratorian theology of hiddenness, and, at another, a Christian anthropology – an understanding of the self as known by God and, in various ways, hidden from the self and from others.

For Newman, then, Neri’s desire to escape the world’s gaze is, as a profound expression of humility, also revelatory of the fundamental Christian understanding of the self, and one that resists the impulse to ground one’s identity in the recognition of others. While Newman is a major advocate of the importance and providential grace of friendships and public service in life, his sermons frequently emphasize the importance of personal relation to God – a friendship inevitably hidden and intimate – as the one thing needful.Footnote 50 This explains, in large part, his attraction to Neri’s radical preference for a close friendship with Christ above all else and as the ground of identity. In many senses, Neri’s spiritual prioritization of friendship with God anticipates later developments in conceptions of the self, particularly in psychological terms, by recognizing the self’s inscrutability and, as Adam Phillips points out, the insufficiency of categories and labels to capture its full depth and mystery.Footnote 51 In this respect, Neri’s desire to be hidden from worldly eyes, from the gazes of power, pleasure, and profit, expresses a psychological wisdom that emerges from Christian acts of detachment: rooted in abandonment to divine providence, this detachment paradoxically leads to a deeper understanding of the self through an encounter with God in prayer.Footnote 52

Neri’s pastoral invitation to a preference for hiddenness and radical simplicity has a long and rich tradition in Christian wisdom literature and practices of spiritual direction. His specific injunction originally comes from Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, in his recommendation: amare nesciri – to love obscurity, to love not to be known by the world.Footnote 53 Drawing from à Kempis, Neri would often repeat this maxim to those in his pastoral care, and especially to those called to live in the middle of the world. For Neri, and Newman after him, the call to a holy hiddenness is not for the consecrated and religious alone, but for every Christian living in the busyness of ordinary life. While Neri drew from the contemplative wisdom of à Kempis, he is, above all else, practically adopting a message from scripture. To love to be unknown is grounded in a central Gospel paradox: that to find one’s life one must lose it; that the grain of wheat, if it is to bear fruit, must fall into the earth, hide, and die (John 12:24). In this, we can discern that hiddenness in the world is not an end in and of itself. Rather, the relinquishment or surrender of the self’s desire to be seen affords the disposition required to discern life differently, to attend to the promptings of divine grace and the demands of divine love within the typically humble and commonplace conditions of daily life.

In Neri’s maxim ‘amare nesciri’, we encounter, then, a certain reserve, even a caution, concerning the capacity of the subject to ground itself. Put differently, Neri and Newman after him invite us to step back from what James K.A. Smith, Charles Taylor, and Dominic White, among others, have identified as the modern, existential efforts to make ourselves on our own terms.Footnote 54 In this, it is important to stress, however, that loving to be unknown is not a kind of subtle self-loathing. Rather, in the Christian context, it is an apophatic form of affirmation, an act of loving and trusting conversion – a deliberate turning towards Christ as the one who alone truly knows us. It is a form of self-understanding articulated in harmony with the anthropological mysteries disclosed throughout scripture, captured in Yahweh’s revelation: ‘[b]efore I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you …’ (Jeremiah 1:5). In Newman’s understanding, the self is first received as opposed to self-determined and gradually revealed (‘one step enough for me’) over time, through each correspondence of the will with the divine call to love.Footnote 55

4. A commitment to ‘the world unseen’

At the heart of Newman’s idea of the self, most fully fleshed out in his Christology, as well as his understanding of the saint as the sanctified self, is a commitment to ‘the world unseen’, to the operations of divine grace only ever partially discernible through a life of deep attention – of contemplative searching after the voice of God in the conscience.Footnote 56 To Newman’s mind, such a commitment to the eternal will translate into a life of practical wisdom. Frederick D. Aquino calls this kind of wisdom, as found in Newman’s thought, an ‘integrative habit of mind’, a broadening of epistemic horizons to include both the exercise of reason and the knowledge uniquely disclosed through faith assent.Footnote 57

If this is the case, then we also need to ask: what does such a life look like and how might it appear? How does this hidden orientation to God take shape within an ordinary human life? Newman offers us several striking and pastoral answers, and ways of discerning traces of the hidden providence of God in the hidden mysteries of the heart. For instance, in Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (1855), he explores how such a life may occasionally appear extraordinary. It may involve the often public and probing search of the young Callista, an earnest philosopher and accomplished artisan, who, shortly after her conversion to Christianity, embraces martyrdom and dies in utter obscurity, in the abject bowels of a Roman sewer – ‘that pit of death’ – yet who, interiorly, already enjoys the hidden consolations of divine grace and redemption, ‘a better country and a more lasting home’.Footnote 58 However, more often than not, Newman’s writing offers insight into sanctity as that which gradually emerges through the reception of grace in ordinary life. In this, he paints a perhaps unexpected picture of the saint (at least in comparison to popular hagiographies), as someone ordinary – likely dwelling alongside us – and invites us into the hidden shape, and paradoxical nature, of holiness as something utterly beyond us, yet radically accessible through divine generosity and ‘condescension’.Footnote 59 Across his journals, sermons, and letters, he repeatedly places emphasis on both the contingency and hidden depths of the self and its origin in, as well as sustenance by, God, the eternal being:

But there are others who look just the same to the world, who in their hearts are very different; they make no great show, they go on in the same quiet ordinary way as the others, but really they are training to be saints in Heaven. They do all they can to change themselves, to become like God, to obey God, to discipline themselves, to renounce the world … [T]rue religion is a hidden life in the heart; and though it cannot exist without deeds, yet these are for the most part secret deeds, secret charities, secret prayers, secret self-denials, secret struggles, secret victories. … [I]t is very certain that a … true saint, though he looks like other men, still has a sort of secret power in him to attract others to him who are like-minded, and to influence all who have anything in them like him. And thus it often becomes a test, whether we are like-minded with the Saints of God, whether they have influence over us.Footnote 60

In this extended reflection, Newman brings into sharp focus his distinctive understanding of the saint: not as an exceptional figure set apart from ordinary life, but one who prayerfully receives and responds to the conditions of his or her life, devoted above all else to a hidden, intimate relationship with God. The saint looks ‘just the same to the world’ yet, in the depths of her heart, a miraculous relationship with God (the source of ‘true religion’) lives hidden and active. For Newman, then, holiness consists in a hidden, grace-filled reorientation of the person towards God.

Such a view of the saint leads us into Newman’s deeper vision of the possibilities of the self and its realization. The saint bears witness to the self as that which is received from divine love and realized through receptivity to this divine love. In this sense, the human person is the site of a great, unfolding mystery: the mystery of God’s desire to enter into relationship with creatures. Arguably, Newman’s sense of the self, as received by and before God, is a maturation of his early, adolescent focus on himself and God alone. This focus, he admitted, while profoundly formative, required a widening and deepening, an evergreater recognition of his neighbour.Footnote 61 He recounts this position near the opening of his autobiography, noting how, in his youth, he ‘… rest[ed] in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator […] my mind did not dwell upon others, as fancying them simply passed over […] I only thought of the mercy to myself’.Footnote 62 While it required spiritual expansion, Newman’s early and instinctive sense, here, that the self enjoys a particular intimacy with God that cannot be found in, or replicated by, any other kind of encounter remains a persistent theme throughout his writings, especially his later poems, and developed into an anthropological sensibility rooted in Trinitarian devotion and a deep appreciation of the doctrine of the Communion of the Saints. This irreplaceable intimacy between the self and God is not, to Newman’s mind, a form of self-focus, but is cultivated through mental prayer and the reception of the sacraments. It becomes, for Newman, the means by which the self is partially revealed to itself. That is to say, the person comes to understand himself or herself as standing before God, and also before one’s neighbour, known and loved by the Trinitarian Godhead and called to a life of service.Footnote 63

It is within this interior relationship between self and God that the hidden life unfolds—especially as the soul learns to listen, to respond, and to be conformed to divine love. The work of holiness, then, for Newman, is not the invention of the self, but its discovery or reception as one’s gaze is directed towards God as the source and sustainer of identity. O’Regan, in lyrical terms, comments on Newman’s understanding of the saint, noting that the holy one first lives for Christ and, as a derivative, offers ‘glimpe[s] of hope’ to others (glimpses that may or may not be preserved in history, though their historical preservation is ultimately of secondary importance):

A saint is first for Christ, but second for us, a glimpse of hope that we can make it through the dark wood without our hearts being turned to stone … Signs of hope also that while we will be hurt and bruised on our life’s journey, we can say we loved (even if not enough), that we had faith (even if not as fervent as we might have wished), and above all we will have hope that there is a power to untangle the knots of our heart and the ravels of our minds and make us forget ourselves and praise.Footnote 64

One of the central claims here is that becoming a saint, realizing oneself, involves a kind of self-forgetting, though not in a negative sense. It is the fruitful or positive consequence of first focusing on, and entering into relation with, the luminous splendour of divine love. The saint, in Newman’s estimation, is certainly ethical and attentive to the common good, but these qualities arise as the fruit of a prior interpersonal encounter with the God who is holy.Footnote 65 The saint, for Newman, is too committed to charity to fixate on constructions of self-image. Praying, loving, serving, and caring for others lead to the derivative cultivation of the self and, interestingly, such a view accords with various strands of Christian personalism and developmental psychology.Footnote 66 In all of this, then, we see that Newman understands the saints – the representations of the potential of human persons realized in history through divine grace – as selves derivatively fulfilled, through the give and take involved in the human search for, and reception of, divine grace. Like Stein, Newman understands that this search after divine grace may or may not be intentional or conscious. It is part of the process of being human, in the world, and on the search for meaning.Footnote 67

On this account, Newman holds the self both more lightly and more seriously than several modern ideas of the self.Footnote 68 He holds it more lightly insofar as the self, in his understanding, is not something one must construct or possess as an autonomous self-made project – the profound burden of self-construction is removed. He holds it more seriously, more reverently, in that he understands the self as first received as a hidden gift from God and as subsequently matured, or realized, through acts of self-giving charity. Becoming oneself, for Newman, is a simultaneously ethical and relational task that grows out of hidden encounters with the holy and, paradoxically, manifests within one’s community – and perhaps into the wider course of recorded history – as the fruits of ‘a hidden life in the heart’, of ‘secret deeds, secret charities, secret prayers, secret self-denials, secret struggles, secret victories’.Footnote 69 For Newman, then, the growth of the self is neither first the existential project of autonomous self-construction nor the passive reception of an already predetermined course. One comes to oneself indirectly, dynamically, derivatively through participation in the life of worship and in ‘definite service’ towards God and neighbour.Footnote 70

References

1 John Henry Newman, ‘Christ Hidden from the World’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. IV (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), p. 244.

2 Edith Stein, The Hidden Life: Hagiographic Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Texts, vol. IV, ed. by Lucy Gelber and Michael Linssen, trans. by Waltraut Stein (Washington: ICS Publications, 2014), pp. 109–12.

3 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: OUP, 2008). Charles Taylor proposes that modern artists adopting and adapting the Epiphany was a resistance to ‘commercial-industrial-capitalist society’. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), p. 422. See also Beja Morris, Epiphany in the Modern Novel: Revelation as Art (London: Peter Owen, 1971).

4 Stein, The Hidden Life, p. 111.

5 Ibid., p. 111.

6 Ibid., p. 110.

7 For a further consideration of mysticism as a fruit of participation in the Church’s sacramental life, refer to Emma Mason’s ‘“Abîme Inconnus”: Raïssa Maritain’s Poetic and Mystical Gifts’, New Blackfriars, 107.2 (2026), 195–201.

8 See Peter Tyler on the mystic senses in Stein’s philosophical theology as explored in The Living Philosophy of Edith Stein (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

9 Stein, The Hidden Life, p. 110.

10 Ibid., p.110.

11 First introduced to Newman by Erich Pryzwara SJ, Stein and Newman shared similar methods and concerns, including an abiding commitment to the concrete realities of daily life and an understanding of the cross as the key to the heart. For a probing exploration of the sympathies between these two thinkers, see Jan Kłos’s Heart Speaks unto Heart: On the Kinship of Spirit and Thought: John Henry Newman and Edith Stein (Berlin: Brill, 2021).

12 Newman contemplates God’s intimate understanding of our purpose and identity across his writings and sermons but especially in Meditations and Devotions, ed. by Rev. W.P. Neville (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907).

13 Augustine turns to God in Book Three of the Confessions to proclaim: ‘You were more intimately present to me than my innermost being, and higher than the highest peak of my spirit’ (‘Interior intimo meo et superior summo meo’). The Confessions, trans. by Maria Boulding, O.S.B. (New York: Vintage, 1998), 3.6.11, pp. 44–45.

For a probing reflection on the spiritual sympathies between Newman and Augustine, consider: Erich Pryzwara, ‘Newman: Saint and Modern Doctor of the Church?’, trans. by Christopher Wojtulewicz, Church Life Journal, 11 October 2019 < https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu>.

14 For a study of Newman’s understanding of the saint as a distinctly historical phenomenon, accessible through intercessory prayer and diverse, recollected literary forms, see: Rebekah Lamb, ‘John Henry Newman’s “Historical Sense”’, in The Nineteenth-Century Present: Literature, Print Culture, and Historicity, ed. by Koenraad Claes and Elizabeth Ludlow (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025), pp. 217–37.

15 John Henry Newman, ‘Secrecy and Suddenness of Divine Visitations’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. II (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1908), p. 112.

16 As Ian Ker explored at length, Newman was a prolific and occasional writer, deeply committed to the concerns and debates of his times. However, he strove to first pray over the times before rushing to conclusions about them. Ian Ker, ‘Introduction’, in Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. by John Henry Newman (London: Penguin Classics, 1994), pp. xi–xxxiii.

17 John Henry Newman, ‘Conscience’, in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1900), p. 248.

18 See: Reinhard Hütter, John Henry Newman on Truth and Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2020); John F. Crosby, The Personalism of John Henry Newman (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2014); Paul Shrimpton, Conscience before Conformity: Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Resistance in Nazi Germany (Heredforshire: Gracewing Publishing, 2018).

19 John Henry Newman, ‘Hope in God—Creator’, in Meditations and Devotions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), pp. 301–02.

20 Newman’s emphasis on retrospection in the life of prayer, and in expanding the always already partial understanding of the self (which grows and evolves over time), is partly shaped by his integrations of Romantic poetic reverie with the life of Christian, meditative piety. This is explored at length in Kristen Drahos’s ‘Reason’s Shadow: Romanticism’s Impact on Catholic Thought’, Church Life Journal, 11 June 2018 <https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu>.

21 Newman makes this point throughout Meditations and Devotions, but it is also at the heart of several of his other works, including many sermons from his multi-volume Parochial and Plain Sermons. As just one example, see: Newman, ‘The Cross of Christ the Measure of the World’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. VI (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), pp. 83–93.

22 John Henry Newman, ‘Self-Contemplation’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908), p. 163.

23 Ibid., p. 163.

24 For a probing exploration of the heart as a symbol of the self in scripture and the long Catholic tradition, see D.C. Schindler’s ‘The Symbolic Form of the Heart: On the Art of Conversion’, Communio, 52 (2025), pp. 305–24.

25 John Henry Newman, Meditations and Devotions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1912), pp. 573–74.

26 Dietrich von Hildebrand, drawing from Newman and other thinkers, will elaborate on holiness or self-development as a derivative, and not the goal, of worship in Liturgy and Personality (Steubenville: Hildebrand Press, 2016). Joseph Ratzinger makes similar points, of course, in his reflections on ‘Liturgical Form’, in The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 159–224.

27 Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos, Encyclical Letter, Holy See, 24 October 2024, para. 26 <https://www.vatican.va>.

28 Newman, ‘Secrecy and Suddenness’, p. 107.

29 Newman, ‘Hope in God—Creator’, p. 301.

30 John Henry Newman, ‘The World’s Benefactors’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), pp. 10–11.

31 For a helpful review of eschatological narratives in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, see: Judith Wolfe, ‘Eschatology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, ed. by Joel D.S. Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber (Oxford: OUP, 2017), pp. 676–95.

32 This view is characteristic of several Catholic engagements with eschatology, within and beyond history, and is also traced in Joseph Pieper’s thought, notably Hope and History (Cluny Media, 2020).

33 Newman, ‘Secrecy and Suddenness’, p. 109.

34 Ibid., pp. 107–16.

35 Ibid., p. 109.

36 Newman, ‘Secrecy’, pp. 107–109.

37 For a more extended account of the self as the site of Trinitarian in-dwelling, see Jacques Philippe’s Interior Freedom, trans. by Helena Scott (New York: Scepter Publishers, Inc., 2007).

38 Cyril O’Regan, ‘St. John Henry Newman and the Sacred Heart’, Church Life Journal, 21 October 2025 <https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu>.

39 In this respect, Newman’s account anticipates, in its own distinctive idiom, the kind of spirit with which Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, among other Ressourcement theologians, would later describe the Church – that is, in deeply relational as opposed to primarily analytic terms. In this way, both Newman and his later readers would, in the face of different strands of individualism and existentialism, articulate the Church as a home and nuptual relation, as the ecclesial form of divine self-gift, in which the mystery of Trinitarian love is rendered communicable as a patterned life of relational participation. See Crosby’s The Personalism of John Henry Newman, pp. 1–33; 186–218.

40 Newman’s understanding of the self as relational is akin to Karol Wojtyła’s understanding of the self as a relational structure mirroring the communio personarum (communion of persons) of the Trinity. For an overview of the relational structure of the self, see: Karol Wojtyła, Person and Act: And Related Essays, vol. 1, trans. by Grzegorz Ignatik (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), pp. 87–95; Angela Franks, ‘Fluidity: Man, the Triune God, and the Eucharistic Christ’, Communio, 46 (2019), pp. 585–619; and Brett W. Smith, ‘Personalist Resonances in Robert Grosseteste’s Christology’, New Blackfriars, 103.1106 (2022), pp. 458–69.

41 Newman, ‘Hope in God—Creator’, pp. 299–301.

42 John Henry Newman, ‘The Mission of St. Philip Neri—Part I’, in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), p. 200.

43 Pope John Paul II, ‘Letter of His Holiness John Paul II on the Occasion of the IV Centenary of the Death of St. Philip Neri’, Apostolic Letter, 7 October 1994 <https://www.vatican.va>.

44 A probing account of Neri’s mysticism is offered in Jonathan Robinson’s In No Strange Land: The Embodied Mysticism of Saint Philip Neri (Angelico Press, 2015).

45 John Henry Newman, ‘The Mission of St. Philip Neri—Part II’, in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), pp. 218–42.

46 Ibid., pp. 218–42.

47 Newman, ‘The World’s Benefactors’, p. 1.

48 Newman, ‘The Mission of St. Philip Neri—Part II’, pp. 218–42.

49 Ibid., p. 241.

50 John Henry Newman, ‘Love of Relations and Friends’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), pp. 51–60.

51 Adam Phillips. Terrors and Experts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 1–18. As he notes in the introduction, the Enlightenment confidence that the self can be fully mapped, delineated, or determined exceeds the possible, and certainly exceeds the scientific remits of knowledge: ‘The Enlightenment psychoanalyst knows what people need; the post-Freudian analyst knows that needs are made with words. The Enlightenment Freud ascribes needs – which he calls instincts – to people and then shows us how and why we try to disown them. The post-Freudian Freud shows us the sense in which knowing who we are – imagining ourselves, say, as made up of the relationship between two instincts – Eros and Thanatos – is only a tautology, and always an old description, because to be an expert on the unconscious [crucial to the self] is a contradiction in terms. In the mirror one always sees oneself looking’ (6). In this passage, and throughout Terrors and Experts, Phillips suggests, from a psychoanalytic perspective, that the self cannot achieve exhaustive knowledge of itself, since the unconscious necessarily exceeds the forms of expertise and communication through which the self might seek and find such understanding. Newman’s view that the assent of faith provides the self with a form of self-understanding offered by divine revelation, and unavailable by other means, thus has various points of contrast and comparison with Phillips’s broader exploration of the limits of self-knowledge in psychoanalytic terms.

52 In Time for God, Jacques Philippe describes this as a process of affirmative detachment: the prayerful opening of the self towards God. Jacques Philippe, ‘Mental Prayer Is Not a Technique but a Grace’ and ‘Some Methods of Mental Prayer’, in Time for God (New York: Scepter Publishers, Inc., 1992), pp. 4–34 and 104–21.

53 Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (New York: Vintage, 1998), 2.4.

54 See James J.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016); Taylor, Sources of the Self; and Dominic White, How Do I Look? Theology in the Age of the Selfie (London: SCM Press, 2020).

55 John Henry Newman, ‘The Pillar of the Cloud’, in Verses on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), p. 156.

56 John Henry Newman, ‘Unreal Words’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. V (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.), p. 44. Newman frequently invokes ‘the world unseen’ and similar formulations to describe the supernatural vision we should cultivate. In this sermon, he urges his congregation to ‘[a]im at looking to the life to come, and to the world unseen, as God does … All things that we see are but shadows to us and delusions, unless we enter what they really mean’.

57 Frederick D. Aquino, An Integrative Habit of Mind: John Henry Newman on the Path to Wisdom (Illinois: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 42. The link between practical wisdom, between intellectual and moral phronesis, is also explored at length by Graham John Wheeler in his article, ‘John Henry Newman and the Uses of Antiquity’, British Catholic History, 34.1 (2018), pp. 129–54.

58 John Henry Newman, Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), p. 366.

59 Newman, ‘Christ Hidden from the World’, p. 240.

60 Ibid., pp. 239–52.

61 This is not to suggest that, for Newman, the neighbour constitutes an immediate element added to the foundational relationship between the self and God. As in his treatment of conscience and conscientious discernment, Newman does regard the relationship between the self and God as foundational to human life and action. What he quietly laments in the Apologia and elsewhere, however, is his early, adolescent tendency to construe the relationship primarily in terms of the self and God (‘myself and my Creator’), and to attend mainly to the mercies granted to him within it, without sufficiently considering the wider implications of that divine mercy, or its extension to humanity as such. In Newman’s gentle self-correction, here, we can discern how his theological understanding of this hidden and intimate relationship between the self and God grew into a deeper appreciation of the fact that this primordial relation (between ‘myself and my Creator’) is always already an invitation to participation in the communion of the Saints.

62 John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), p. 4.

63 See Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. VI (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907).

64 Cyril O’Regan, ‘Newman and the Dis-asters of Modernity’, Church Life Journal, 10 October 2019 <https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/newman-and-the-dis-asters-of-modernity/>.

65 Ibid. Newman, O’Regan concludes, thus prevents us from understanding either the saint or Christ merely as good examples throughout history. Holiness, O’Regan argues, is not primarily an ethical category in Newman’s thought but a religious one: ‘ultimately a biblical category, and it designate God’s overwhelming and overwhelmingly luminous existence’. O’Regan elaborates on the similarities and differences between ‘the ethical’ and ‘the holy’ as categories in Newman’s thought in the following way: ‘[The Holy] … is an encounter with the splendour of love and being itself, and from that derivatively flows the ethical life as a fitting response to this encounter. The Holy, though we often confound it with good moral behavior, is not an ethical category at all. The Holy is a religious category, ultimately a biblical category ... While becoming holy might require one to be good, becoming holy is about the transmutation that happens to one when one comes into close relation with God.’

66 This is especially notable in the process model of psychological forgiveness found in the work of Robert Enright or in the generosity model advanced by Alain de Botton’s humanist project, The School of Life.

67 L. Gelber and Michael Linssen, O.C.D., ‘Introduction’, in The Collected Works of Edith Stein: The Hidden Life: Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Texts, ed. by Edith Stein, vol. IV (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2014), pp. xi–xv.

68 For a discussion of the existential frustrations and psychological pressures attending the burdens of self-construction, see Angela Franks’ discussions of the empty self in Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025).

69 Newman, ‘Christ Hidden from the World’, p. 244. Newman’s observations, here, chime with Stein’s later reflections that the growth of the self first occurs through invisible or hidden contact with God, although providence may often allow such hidden intimacy to then shine outward for the sake of the common good, for the development of history: ‘The silent working of the Holy Spirit in the depths of the soul made the patriarchs into friends of God. However, when they came to the point of allowing themselves to be used as his pliant instruments, he established in them an external visible efficacy as bearers of historical development and awakened from among them his chosen people. Therefore Moses, too, was educated quietly and then sent as the leader and lawgiver.’ Stein, ‘The Hidden Life’, p. 109.

70 Newman, ‘Hope in God—Creator’, p. 301.