Henri Bremond: Preaching Newman the Preacher

Abstract

In his psychological biography of Newman, initially published in 1906, Henri Bremond (1865-1933) devoted one part of the work explicitly to "The Writer and the Preacher". However, Newman the preacher in a real sense pervades the whole of the book inasmuch as the sermons furnished Bremond clues to deciphering the man who preached them. As revelatory of Newman's "inner life," the sermons excerpted in the biography and selected for integral inclusion in the volume of sermons in French translation published by Bremond as Newman. La vie chretienne (1906) reveal Newman as an existential thinker— in which Bremond finds a way of reconciling a tension he discerns in Newman between religious experience and external authority that surfaces in Newman's writings.