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This is one of several "Annunciation' works by Fra Angelico, others follow.
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As we celebrate the Annunciation of our Lord to Blessed
Mary this ‘Lady Day’ (March 25 – exactly nine months before Christmas) we contemplate
her assent to become the mother of Jesus, the Christ. In doing so, we are drawn
to consider her assent to God’s proposal along with our own assent of faith.
Full of grace, Our Lady Mary said her “yes” to God and so to the incarnation of God’s beloved Son for us and for our salvation. Mary’s
affirmation and Jesus' self-sacrifice for us are both revelation and gift, calling us to faith.
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Fra Angelico
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Mary lived in a pre-scientific age and in a traditional Jewish
society. It is difficult for us to imagine what her thoughts would have been at the Annunciation but what is clear to faith is that in her humility Mary found the fullness of
human dignity completed in her through her co-operation with the Holy Spirit.
How do we come to this faith?
Blessed John Henry Newman, though one of the greatest intellectuals of the 19th century, was also
one who did much to communicate with the average person striving to live the Christian faith in
an increasingly hostile secular society.
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Traditional Byzantine Icon: The Annunciation
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As an Anglican, Newman was both a tutor and professor at Oriel College, Oxford and pastor of the Church of St. Mary-the Virgin, the university parish church in Oxford. In his parish sermons (published as Parochial and Plain Sermons) he regularly addressed his parishioners,
students and average people on matters of faith and doctrine.
One of the major themes in his sermons was faith and our response to God.
Newman urged his listeners to simplicity and trust in God, a trust that enables
us to receive or assent to the revealed truths of the Catholic Church.
This faith, however, did not mean, he insisted, that we should give up
reason, science or any other way of understanding. Rather, faith is to be the
complement of reason and science. One does not make sense without the others.
Newman comments on how a child’s mind gives us a striking pattern. Children
distinguish right from wrong yet are not in bondage to an over-weaning
individualism or what Newman called “private judgment”.
Newman advocated an expansive reason along with a reasoned faith. He
criticized the Enlightenment understanding of reason as being a reduced notion
of reason and one that sets itself as the judge of all truth, demanding
exclusively scientific evidence. He argued that assent in faith to God is
possible by means of more than just formal evidence.
Newman points out that many truths are received implicitly. People cannot
explain what they know to be true in many cases and yet this does not diminish
the truth of their claims. Someone in Alberta may never have traveled to the
seashore, but he is absolutely certain the Pacific Ocean is to the West. He
knows this both from the observation of rains falling on the mountains and,
particularly, by trusting the word of those who have ‘seen and heard’. We might equate this with the oral and written tradition of revelation in the Church.
In fact, Newman asserted, and experience shows, that knowledge held
implicitly is often held strongly and correctly. He criticized what he
called “paper arguments” about God’s existence. He wrote: “Many a man will live
and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion . . . . No one,
I say, will die for his calculations: he dies for realities.”
Newman gave a lot of thought to the question of
faith and the assent of the mind to what God reveals through Scripture and
Tradition as interpreted by the Magisterium of the Church.
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Cardinal Newman advocated for an educated laity
and though never a bishop, he was finally made
a cardinal in his 80s by Pope Leo X. |
In correspondence with William Froude, a younger brother of his great friend
and late colleague Hurrell Froude, Newman developed his understanding of faith.
Their correspondence over many years became the foundation for one of Newman’s
major works, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.
In Grammar of Assent Newman explained that for a child, God is a real
being. A child perceives the existence of God as a Sovereign Law-giver and
Judge, a personal reality outside of himself. God is not a notion or a
conclusion.
By means of moral conscience a child has an image of God; it is basic
and must grow. Conscience can be dimmed or obliterated, but it is real. As Newman put it, the image of God is: “an image of the good God, good in Himself, good
relatively to the child, with whatever incompleteness; an image, before it has
been reflected on, and before it is recognized as a notion. Though he cannot
explain or define the word ‘God’, when told to use it, a child’s acts show that
to him it is far more than a word.”
Many adults: "cannot explain religious truths, but they know them because
they have a moral conscience that speaks to them of right and wrong, and of a
Law Giver and Judge.
In the same way, all can have this real knowledge of God
and ‘faith’ in that he creates, judges, rewards and punishes. The certainty of
this faith, however, is soon questioned."
Over the years, Newman and William Froude discussed the subject of
certainty and certitude. Froude claimed the right to skepticism of any truth:
“Our doubts in fact, appear to me as sacred, and I think deserve to be
cherished as sacredly as our beliefs.”
In a reply to Froude, Newman distinguished between religion and science:
“Much lies in the meaning of the words ‘certainty’ and ‘doubt’ much again in
our duties to a person, as e.g. a friend. Religion is not merely a science, but a devotion.”
Newman argued that evidence is not the
foundation of faith though it plays an important part in our understanding of
God’s created world. In Newman’s defense of the rationality of “simple faith”
he tried to find an adequate answer to the problem of the certitude in what he
called “the assent of faith”.
Newman dedicated part two of the Grammar of Assent to explain how
a person reaches certitude. He coined the term “the illative faculty” or “illative
sense’. The root of the word ‘illative’ comes from ilium the Latin root term for the liver
– an essential internal organ. We might say that his allusion is to what we
would call a “gut instinct” for truth.
Newman describes in this section of “The Assent of Faith” a natural mode
of reasoning which is unconscious and implicit; it goes from concrete things to
other things, not from propositions to propositions as formal inference or
logic does.
One reaches certitude through this illative sense. A skeptic might reply
that this is no more than a leap of faith, but there is no such leap because
the assent of faith is a cumulative process. We grow into a conviction, rather than leap
into it.
Newman used the example of a polygon inscribed in a circle. As its sides
become smaller it appears to become the circle. It never becomes the circle but
the mind closes the gap.
Faith is a personal act by which a person apprehends religious truths from others not simply a subjective
feeling .
Newman references the humility of a child-like spirit as being a
necessary condition for belief, not one to be denigrated but rather one to
be accepted as a gift. Without humility one is incapable of believing in God.
Those without child-like openness establish their own universe and close themselves off from any
supernatural reality. Pride closes a person in the limited sphere of
rationality.
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The Annunciation 1425 - 1430, Masolino da Panicale, Italy
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA
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The challenging doctrines of the Church e.g. the nature of marriage between
man and woman, it’s indissolubility, the Pope’s authority, the Real
Presence, the Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Our Lady and other doctrines are not simply matters of fact but are based upon
physical realities in the light of revelation.
After a long Mediterranean journey, while still an
Anglican, Newman suffered a life-threatening illness in Sicily. He composed the
hymn “Lead Kindly Light” humbly asking God to guide him. The text of the hymn remarks that once “pride
ruled my will.” Newman prays: “Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see / The distant
scene, one step enough for me.”
The assent of faith holds a claim to the believer’s mind, which can
integrate the physical with the notional (world of ideas). God reveals himself
and speaks through the Church to both the physical and spiritual realities of
life.
Unlike theological propositions, faith is not simply a set of logical
conclusions. Faith is a higher knowledge, along with the other forms of
knowledge and experience we have an illative sense of what is true.
This illative sense, Newman argued vehemently, is not contrary to reason but works in harmony with what science can prove. Again, faith speaks to the
‘why’ not the ‘how’ of reality.
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Fra Angelico
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God is revealed both by nature and by revelation as Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, knew intuitively and so responded to God's revelation herself becoming an agent of revelation.
Humans act on God’s
terms, accepting with humility what God reveals. Together, reason and
experience help us come to the assent of faith.
Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman
did just that in his life, making him an example not only for the most highly
intellectual and academic, but for all Christians.
Quotations from: M.
Aquilina and J. R. Velez, Take Five:
Meditations with John Henry Newman, available from Amazon.ca or on E-Bay.
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| Blessed John Henry Newman |
Praise
to the Holiest in the height,
And in
the depth be praise;
In all
His words most wonderful,
Most
sure in all His ways.
Words: John H. Newman, “The Dream of Gerontius,”
1865.
Published as a poem in
“The Month: An Illustrated Magazine of Literature, Science and Art. These lyrics appeared
in hymnals shortly thereafter.
