Worldwide mind and shattered soul: Ida Görres’s Newman

The Catholic world can thank Jennifer S. Bryson for her labor of love in bringing into English translation a large selection of the works of Ida Friederike Görres (1901-71). A giant of German Catholic writing from the 1930s until her death in 1971, Görres has been largely eclipsed since then. Her reflections on the nature of the Church, vocation, and the way in which Christ shines through his saints are a light from which Catholics in the English-speaking world can find warmth and deeper vision.

The only Görres volume available for many years was The Hidden Face, her brilliant analysis of St. Thérèse. But, in 2023, Bryson published with Cluny a translation of the 1950 work The Church in the Flesh, a volume about the nature of a Church both divine and human (all too human), born of controversy after Görres publicly wrote about the weakness of the German Catholic Church in the late 1940s. (She hadn’t seen anything yet.)

Coming out in the near future are: What Binds Marriage Forever, a late-life defense of the permanence of the marital bond, to be published by Catholic University of America Press; On Marriage and On Being Single: Four Letters, surely an interesting read since Görres was a consecrated virgin who left that state to be married; and Bread Grows in Winter, another collection of essays about the crisis in the Church, written between 1967 and her death, to be published by Ignatius Press.

Today, on the 224th birthday of St. John Henry Newman—born in London in 1801—we can all give thanks for the latest volume Bryson has brought into print, a beautiful book on the English saint whom Görres referred to as a “Church Father of the Twentieth Century.” John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed^* gives a marvelously lucid introduction to Newman’s life and to what fascinates those of us who have loved and identified with Newman: namely, the pulsating combination of learning, rhetorical skill, and even genius alongside a holiness that was honed by rejections, betrayals, and failures. The latter were all accepted with honesty about their difficulty and a will to receive them as from the hand of a good and loving God who wanted to make Newman over more fully into the image of Jesus Christ.

Görres, whom Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once said was “the cleverest woman” he had ever met, would have been naturally attracted to Newman’s witness. Bryson’s volume includes not only her own translator’s introduction, detailing the way in which she dealt with issues of citation and phrasing, but also a translation of the introduction Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz wrote for the volume when she published the German original in 2002, thirty-one years after Görres’s death. In that introduction, Gerl-Falkovitz details how Görres, who manifested some knowledge of Newman in the early 1940s, read a German translation of Newman sermons in late 1944 and was moved to record in her diary:

They are so dense, so original, so existential that all my writing about religious matters by comparison seems like pure sulfur to me. He ‘takes the tone deeper’ than I ever dare—beyond all objections…says the most outrageous things in proper English, understating, matter-of-factly, without paradox.

Newman could, she writes, emphasize vigilance of spirit and asceticism “without bitterness, sweetly, critical only in spirit, not emotionally, without hatred, without any polemics.”

As she studied Newman over the next five years, even spending time in England to do research, Görres became convinced of Newman’s importance for Catholics of her time who were caught between supposedly “modern” or “reformist” and “reactionary” approaches to the Church, writing in one published journal:

Newman really is ‘our’ patron; he has the only possible attitude, and at the same time the one that is so difficult to implement—the clearest, coolest critical insight into the thousands of grievances and undesirable developments in the Church and the absolutely inevitable need for many reforms, as well as the passionate one, devotion and loyalty to ‘Rome,’ which touches and stirs the whole person in all the heavy burden of this term ‘Rome.’

There were plenty of other aspects of Newman that she embraced, but it was this essential clarity and honesty—combined with a heart that loves Christ (as he is found in the one, visible Church)—that captivated her and centers this book (which she never published herself). He was willing to offer himself for the Church, following the example of the Lord. Her initial chapter, from which the English title is taken, is “The Man Who Was Sacrificed.” In it, she says that “what really moves and captivates me most” about “Father Newman” is not the amazing, gentlemanly intellectual power, but the fact that it was offered to God: “He is a victim—his whole person, who lays down his entire life on the uncompromising altar of a secret and dreadful calling.” He is, as she described Thérèse in The Hidden Face, an âme detruite, a “shattered soul.” It is true that grace perfects nature, but the way it does so is with a very sharp chisel, the blows of which seem harsh and even “tragic.”

For the author, then, Newman’s greatness is that which is the greatness of any saint: he accepts crucifixion. Görres’s second chapter, “The Golden Apple,” details how the modern world has held out for us the prospect of an earthly paradise, a fulfillment of all our desires here on earth. Though Newman appreciated all the earthly splendor and gifts that were available, even in that crazily technologically progressive nineteenth century, he nevertheless knew it could only ever be a taste of the heaven that is only available on the other side of death—death to self and the separation of soul and body that is still our fate.

Newman’s “distinctive and human perfection,” Görres writes, is achieved in the “renunciation” of that dream of “Progress” instead of the Cross. The world in the sense of God’s creation is still good, but so too is the world in the sense of our fallen human society, organized as it is against God and his Christ. How we approach that first “world” will dictate whether we fall in the second one, which St. John called an enemy traveling along with the flesh and the devil.

Though Görres could write in the wake of World War II that “the Golden Apple has snapped back into obscurity as if it had never existed,” eighty years later, we can testify that the apparition still tempts us.

What kept Newman sane and sanctified in prosperous Victorian England was his absolute devotion to truth. As Francis of Assisi said his bride was Lady Poverty, Görres writes, so “Newman could have said, ‘My bride is the Truth.’” Writing in the 1940s, she notes that Newman was all about finding truth and not merely seeking, since “in today’s parlance the word ‘seeking’ has strangely become unserious.” For Newman, as for her, the search for truth is not “all about the journey, man.” It is, instead, about being bound.

Her chapters on that passion for truth and on his conversion show how seriously he took both the responsibility to seek and the responsibility to keep one’s eyes open with a healthy and authentic skepticism and proceed to “recognize and grasp Truth” after he had found it. Her chapter “Conscience” shows how Newman did not restrict this approach to the speculative; instead, it was practical knowledge of what one’s duties are to God, who calls us to think, act, and speak under his own inspiration that is most important.

Görres did not have access to all that modern readers do of Newman’s voluminous writings, including his complete letters, but had read as much as she could by and about him. Her quotations are many and apt. Particularly delightful is her use of his 1848 novel, Loss and Gain, which included much of his own mind and heart in the story of a much younger Oxford man’s journey to the Catholic Church. There was plenty of pain involved in conversion, as there was afterward. Her chapter, “Rome,” details the painstaking journey as well as the joy in finding the center of Christ’s Church. The chapter “Newman Brought Low” chronicles how much of the pain is present even amidst the joy of being Catholic. That pain quite often came from those called by God to oversee the Church. Bishops and even St. Pius IX were among those who brought pain to him, which he sometimes lamented and even spoke harshly about.

What made Newman so unique was his ability to accept the crosses brought even by shepherds as part of God’s will, which would ultimately bring all things to good. Newman was content even if he was misused. He expressed love even for those who had hurt him. And he did not give in to temptations to split the Church in two. “He never made it easy for himself,” Görres writes, “with a cheap distinction between an invisible ideal church, ‘which one can affirm,’ and a caricatured, failing church that one rebukes and fights.”

He combined, she writes, “the clearest objectivity, an incorruptible gaze, the highest, most unfaltering self-command, and the most painfully burning indignation with perfect, truly filial piety.”

The life of St. John Henry Newman, Görres understood, is not just a part of intellectual or ecclesiastical history. It is a part of the history of the saints, who know that all things work together for good for those who love God. Newman, thoroughly in but not of the modern era, showed Görres and us how to think about the difficulties of the world and the Church. More importantly, he showed us how to receive those difficulties as his own part in the sufferings of Christ.

Both those who have studied Newman for years and those who only know a little about him will gain from this book by a woman whose cleverness is only exceeded by her wisdom in desiring the one whose sweetness exceeds that of the Golden Apple every day of the week—and into eternity.

(^*Full disclosure: I am thanked in the book’s acknowledgments and in several notes for assistance in tracking down citations and providing some facts.)

John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed
By Ida Friederike Gorres
Edited and with an introduction by Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz
Translated by Jennifer S. Bryson
Ignatius Press, 2024
Paperback, 296 pages