Cor ad cor loquitur: Emotion and the Communion of Believers in Newman's Writings

In his lifetime, John Henry Newman delivered well over a thousand sermons, homiletic efforts distinguished by a directing logic, very much the voice of reason. That much, by even a casual perusal, contemporary readers can still clearly comprehend. Yet, even without Matthew Arnold’s personal experience of that “most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music—subtle, sweet, mournful,” anyone approaching the sermons or others of Newman’s varied writings must be impressed by the overt emotion that informs the words, words intended to be heard or read (qtd. in Willey 73). If, as Newman maintains in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, it is “the concrete being that reasons” and “the whole man that moves,” this person, for Newman, lives, moves, and has an integrated rational and emotional being in relationship with the Logos en Sarki, the Word in the Flesh (136).1 For what is now sometimes termed Incarnational theology2 lay at the core of Newman’s persistent construing and celebrating of divine grace, divine presence. That Newman found the Incarnation “the central aspect of Christianity” may clarify his concern with the sanctification that comes through the sacraments of the Church, especially the Eucharist, and it may explain his almost irritable dismissal of “paper logic” so that he might embrace a fully human, fully personal, fully passible, and therefore fully emotional Logos (Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine 36; Apologia 136). Conversion and ongoing spiritual conversation will partake of reason but also will remain the language of the heart for the pilgrim soul who, when he was elevated to Cardinal, adopted from Saint Francis de Sales the motto cor ad cor loquitur, heart speaks to heart. This fervent sentiment that informs both early and late sermons is particularly disclosed in Newman’s deliberations upon the Real Presence, reflections that prove significant, as well, in his two novels, Loss and Gain and Callista, and also in certain of his more studied theological discourses. For Newman, divinity comes to humanity in a transformative fashion of theosis3 through two communions, communion in the Sacrament of the Eucharist and communion within the body of believers, and the “religious music” of