Newman Studies Journal

In a previous book, Le temps découvert. Développement et duréee chez Newman et Bergson (2014), Gregory Solari sought to bring to light the implicit philosophy animating Newman's work on development by drawing upon the philosophy of Henri Bergson that was coming into prominence at the time Newman was again coming into prominence in France. Solari was not undertaking a classic kind of comparative study, but using aspects of Bergson's thought on time to heighten appreciation for Newman's contributions and, inversely, utilizing Newman to aid in appreciating aspects of Bergson's later book Deux sources (1932).

In the slim book under review Solari again has recourse to the philosophical tradition to draw out implications of aspects of Newman's thought. Solari begins by establishing that the phenomenological tenor of Newman's philosophy has long been recognized, from early on with Franz Brentano, Max Scheler, and Erich Przywara, and that recognition has not been lacking in subsequent commentators on Newman's work. The phenomenological tenor of the Newmanian philosophy comes into special prominence in the latter's hermeneutical dimension, with the sequence "intuition"—interpretation which characterizes it.

The "four variations" of the subtitle come to expression in the book's four chapters, examining in sequence the Essay on Development (chapter one), the Parochial Sermon "Christ Manifested in Remembrance" (chapter two), and in the Apologia pro Vita Sua (chapters three and four). A brief epilogue rounds off the study.

Like Solari's previous book, this is a demanding read. Names prominent in the phenomenological tradition, both early and recent, dot its pages and populate its footnotes: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion are prominent examples. Without a working knowledge of their principal contributions, much of what Solari wants to communicate may well come across as suggestive rather than informative. That said, this is an insightful study and well repays the effort required to penetrate what it has to say.

In the first chapter the concepts of "gift," "saturation," and "distance" are brought to bear upon divine revelation in a way that can illuminate the "complexity" of Dei Verbum (17). Revelation as a "gift" of "wisdom" manifests in revelation not by a deposit in which meaning is contained but as an excess. Phenomenologically, by reason of its saturation, the "Idea" of revelation overflows the singularities of a time, place, or individual, to issue in a development that is "less an explication than a [End Page 96] discovery," less an explication than an unveiling or disclosure of truth. In its very act of creation scripture is already an interpretation, whose further unfolding requires historical distance. Newman's originality was to perceive that "what is developed is not doctrine first and foremost, but the church itself. Or more precisely that which constitutes its life, namely 'Christ manifesting himself to us'" (18).

In the second chapter the phenomenological analysis explores the essential role played by memory in the process of development. Memory is not limited to recollection of a past event, but reduces the difference between the moment of the gift and that of the manifestation. As was the case with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, it was not in the moment that Christ was recognized, but afterward that consciousness of his presence occurred. Formulated phenomenologically, what implicitly underpins Newman's sermon is the conviction that, both in the Gospels and in ordinary life experience, what is given is not manifest at first glance. What brings to light the excess, the saturation is distance, be it spatial or temporal. "It is not in the vision but in the remembrance that we become conscious of the gift" (31). Christ is not recalled as a memory, but in memory. Memory thus is not a retrieval of a distant past but a medium of reducing historical distance, such that the event is re-given in memory. The phenomenological distinguishes dimensions...