In this Public Discourse interview, Jennifer Bryson joins Felix James Miller to discuss her recently-released translation of John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed by Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971). During their conversation, Bryson explains the value of Görres’s work, Newman’s views on conscience, and the importance of hagiography to people of diverse faith traditions.
Felix Miller: Given that Görres wrote her book on Newman in the 1940s and had access to less material than we do today, what does it offer readers today?
Jennifer Bryson: The book’s importance goes beyond the perennial value of Newman; Görres penetrates deeply into the heart of Newman’s character and life. In doing so, she reveals what made him holy, and holiness is of perennial value.
Sacrifice is a central theme of the book, and one that can help us understand both Görres’s work and Newman’s life. In Chapter 2, “The Golden Apple,” Görres provides a rich description of the dominant nineteenth-century mindset. This serves as a backdrop for the chapters that follow, in which she draws out the significance and contrast of Newman’s life as a sacrifice. She writes:
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Sign up and get our daily essays sent straight to your inbox.Decades of invention and discovery; . . . dizzying increase in wealth, power, freedom, and pleasure; as well as unlimited belief in progress are condensed, as it were, into this old mythological figure” of “the Golden Apple.” People start to think that “every drummer boy carries the drum major’s staff in his knapsack. Everyone believes the world is taking giant strides toward earthly paradise.”
Görres looks back on this with dismay, calling out the nineteenth century’s “cocky contempt for everything from yesterday, for everything conventional, the beaming arrogance of knowing better, the peculiar insolence with which even remarkable spirits believe they can treat the past—this strikes us as being ever so juvenile.” Adding to the poignancy, she wrote this in the immediate aftermath of World War II—she knew what folly this would prove to be.
As for Newman—brilliant, well-connected, assertive—he could have been at the forefront of this quest for “the Golden Apple.” Görres identifies Newman’s greatness in his rejection of this quest and his quest, instead, for Truth, even if it would mean sacrifice, which it did.
In 2024, with individual autonomy glorified more than ever (e.g., abortion, transgenderism, etc.), sacrifice is not a popular idea. For some readers, the way Newman and Görres value sacrifice may be startling. But maybe this is just what we need, to be startled out of complacency.
At the end of this book, Görres writes that Newman was the “morning star; not the evening star of a cherished, but sinking culture, humanism, etc., rather the morning star of a free, lonely, believing spirituality.” As she similarly observed in her journals in the 1950s: ‘‘Newman, too, had to descend into the ‘cave,’ dwelling in obscurity, oblivion, inactivity, so as to ‘lay the ground’ for the century to come, to be himself the foundation, cornerstone, basis of a new future.’’ (Broken Lights, 1964)
FM: Your translation of this book about John Henry Newman is part of a larger project translating Görres’s works into English. Who was Ida Friederike Görres?
JB: She was a prolific author who wrote mainly about Catholic topics. One of the most important contributions of her life’s work was to pioneer a renewed approach to hagiography. In contrast to her Enlightenment-embracing contemporaries, Görres did not reject traditional hagiography; she embraced it and mined it. Yet, at the same time, she brought two new elements.
The first new element was her sensitive attention to the inner heart of the saint. Some might call this a “psychological” approach, though she tended to be critical of secular, academic psychology and might not have appreciated that label. This focus on the heart is on full display in John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed. The second new element is her defense of the importance and relevance of hagiography, as well as the possibility of sanctity and the reality of saints. She defended these in opposition to the increasingly popular belief that rational people have nothing to gain from alleged old wives’ tales about figures too outdated to serve as role models to the “new man” and “new woman” of progress. A fine example of this second element is Chapter 6, “Church of the Saints,” in The Church in the Flesh.
Her most famous book is a work of hagiography: The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1943, rev. 1958; English 1959), though her work was translated into English as early as the 1930s, when The Nature of Sanctity was released. In addition, she wrote a novel about Ven. Mary Ward and quite a few long-form essays on individual saints. However, only one of those essays, one on St. Joan of Arc written in the 1930s, has ever been translated into English. Readers can get a sense of Görres’s style when she writes:
The Maid of Orleans is neither an Amazon nor a manwoman, neither an adventuress nor a fanatic. She is not an “emancipated” woman, who rushes arbitrarily and “with amazing energy” over the bounds of her position and sex. She is but a brave, obedient child, lost for the sake of a great love—nay of two: the love of God and the love of her people.
Görres was also a critic of feminism. She called Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of woman “satanic,” and when she first heard the idea of women’s ordination she thought it was some sort of “joke.”
FM: Reading the book, I’ve been struck by Görres’s insight both into Newman’s character and into the moral life in general, what you referred to above as “her sensitive attention to the inner heart of the saint.” Why do you think it is that, up until now, she has not attracted Anglophone readers?
JB: Görres has previously been well-known to Anglophone readers, though she is less so today. In 1932, her first work translated into English, “The Nature of Sanctity,” was included by the great English Catholics Christopher Dawson and T. F. Burns in the first volume of their anthology The Persistence of Order. This and other works by her (out of print today) were translated and published in both England and the U.S. in the 1930s.
Two major historical twists interrupted her popularity. The first interruption was World War II, when translations from German to English generally dropped off.
After the War, her star began rising again. In the 1950s and early 1960s, several works of Görres were translated into English. These included The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a major contribution to hagiography that is still in print today; Broken Lights: Diaries and Letters, 1951–1959 (out of print); and essays on topics such as her opposition to women’s ordination.
The second interruption was the revolution of the 1960s inside the Church. She died in 1971, just when a tsunami of crusaders for “all things new!” and “reform, reform, reform!” swept into positions of power in the Church. For them—especially in Germany and to some extent in the Anglophone world—Ida Friederike Görres was exactly the kind of voice these new powers wanted to sweep under the carpet. Initially, they succeeded in silencing voices like hers, those rooted deeply in tradition and the history of the Church. Now, however, primarily among Anglophone Catholics, there is renewed interest in the work of this once-famous Catholic author as part of rediscovering this rich tradition.
FM: Newman was a champion of conscience, and his work has greatly assisted theologians in understanding the crucial role it has in our moral lives. Today, it seems that conscience is under direct attack by Western governments. Even within churches, conscience seems to be misunderstood, including by Newman’s own co-religionists. We hear constantly of Catholic bishops, particularly in Germany, who wish to place fundamental moral laws at the whim of “individual conscience.” How would Görres and Newman respond to this?
JB: The importance of legal protection for freedom of conscience is often misunderstood and even maligned. This book can help readers properly understand what conscience is and why it matters. The longest chapter of this book is titled “On Conscience.” Görres provides readers with a rich guide to Newman on conscience as well as her own penetrating reflections.
Conscience was an issue of particular concern to Görres, one she addresses not only in this book but in several others as well. I think this is one reason she thought so highly of Newman. She was alarmed by how twentieth-century intellectual currents, most alarmingly those inside the Church, were trying to isolate conscience as if it were a function of individual autonomy, detached from God. As she writes in this book, “the separation of moral reason from obedience to God is the real root of every degeneration of conscience because only both, inseparably united, form a healthy conscience.”
And then Görres goes deeper, bringing to light Newman’s views not only from a famous essay he wrote on the topic but, importantly, from his sermons, which is part of what makes the chapter on conscience so valuable.
FM: Meanwhile, on the more traditional side within the Church, many are unwilling to submit to papal authority when it goes against their desires. As someone who is very attached to the Latin Mass, I have also experienced significant frustration over recent decisions from the Vatican limiting its celebration. However, for Newman as I understand him, conscience is not some radically autonomous, infallible thing. Could you speak to how conscience, in Newman’s view, ought to relate to authority?
JB: In her discussion of Newman, Görres differentiates between two notions of obedience. The first she identifies as a caricature of it: “Obedience that is military and cadaver-like, forced, coerced, hypocritical, with gnashing of teeth, conventional obedience of going along and conforming, the hysterical and subservient obedience of emotional bondage.” She contrasts this with Newman’s own life, in which she sees “The obedience of great trust, free and upright, bold and daring, without resentment and suspicion, without reservations and secret rebellion, simple and ardent, confident.”
Yes, as you say, “for Newman . . . conscience is not some radically autonomous, infallible thing.” Görres, however, agrees with this while at the same time valuing a role for critical thinking, even skepticism, when it comes to conscience and obedience. She writes: “In Newman, I also see the peculiar and specifically Catholic mixture of skepticism and trust in religiosity—skepticism and submission, skepticism and obedience to authority. These are not hostile opposites at all, as a simpleton would believe; rather, they complement one another.” She continues, “the equally honest skepticism toward the bearers of authority and their limits, in turn, saves us from making them absolute. Newman combines all of this without friction, ‘naturally,’ in stride and gracefully, without caving in: how Catholic!”
FM: Your academic background is the study of Islam. Could you tell our readers about your path to translating this work about the Catholic saint, John Henry Newman?
JB: First came German and Catholicism. I started studying German in a university course at age fifteen to prepare for a year as an exchange student. After that, I spent a year attending a gymnasium (college prep school) in Austria. Next, while I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I studied Marxist-Leninism for a year in the former East Germany. This not only solidified my knowledge of German, but it also led me to God and eventually into the Catholic Church (a story for another day).
After college, I studied medieval European intellectual history and Latin, from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, and thus discovered the transmission of Aristotle via Arabic into Latin. After a break from graduate school for intensive Arabic study and some classical Greek, I did my Ph.D. at Yale in Greco-Arabic and Islamic studies. Alongside studying the history and religion of Islam, we studied, text by text, how Greek philosophy, medicine, and natural science were transmitted from Greek to Syriac to Arabic to Latin. The program was intensely philological. We examined in close detail how the translators moved this intellectual explosion across vastly different languages. As students, we were constantly required to translate short, complex medieval Arabic texts into English. In my Syriac classes, we also studied translation theory and experimented with translating individual texts multiple ways. Plus, we had special training in editing Arabic manuscripts—a task that requires rigorous, sharp attention to every single word. All of this was exhausting, but it was outstanding training.
Later, when I did a few translations from Arabic and Persian into English while working for the U.S. military after the attacks of September 11 until 2008, I enjoyed applying my academic training, albeit along avenues oblique to my original field of study. (I was not a translator for the military, but occasionally they tapped into my language skills.) In 2019, when I translated a report on “Antisemitism among Islamists in Germany” from German to English, it reawakened my love for languages and translation and led to an avalanche!
In late 2019, at a crossroads in my career and during a period of revival in my own Catholic faith, I stumbled on Ida Friederike Görres. The first book I discovered by her was the beautiful book she wrote on marriage in 1949, Von Ehe und von Einsamkeit (On Marriage and on Being Single). Astonished to discover it had never been translated, and fascinated by this forgotten Catholic author, I knew I had to translate it (the English edition is forthcoming). As I began to read everything I could get my hands on by Ida Görres, my interest in her snowballed into a full-time focus on translating her work and researching her life. I am now translating my fifth book-length text by her.
FM: What, to your mind, is Newman’s most important work? Or, if you’re unsure, do you have a personal favorite of his writings?
JB: I cannot select just one favorite text by him; so many are wonderful. But I can say this: translating John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed gave me a deeper appreciation of his sermons, which are often less discussed than works like The Apologia or The Idea of a University. Görres quotes many of them at length, from various times of his life. I expect this book will also introduce other readers to the depth and breadth of his sermons, as it did for me.
FM: The book’s subtitle is A Life Sacrificed. Since Newman was not a martyr, this might be surprising to some. Could you explain what Görres means by the phrase?
JB: I understand the surprise. When I initially found this book in German, the title (Der Geopferte) perplexed me. A central insight of Görres into Nemwan’s spiritual development and the meaning of his life is his consent to sacrifice—friendships, worldly “success,” and more—out of obedience to Truth, to God. One finds this not only in Görres’s life of Newman in Chapters 1 to 8, but also in the two poems in Chapter 9.
The German edition has two poems by Newman translated by Görres (herself a poet). For the English edition, initially, Ignatius Press did not want to include these poems by Newman because both, though not well known, are accessible online. In the editing process, the two sections they wanted to cut that I pleaded to include were the timeline of the life of Görres (because such information about this forgotten author is hard to find) and the two poems. Being willing to beg paid off.
In my view, Görres’s selection of these two poems serves as a key to help “decode” the theme of sacrifice. Here is a sampling.
From “The Two Worlds” (1862):
This gaudy world grows pale before
The beauty of Thy face.
. . . And thus, when we renounce for
Thee its restless aims and fears,
The tender memories of the past,
The hopes of coming years,
Poor is our sacrifice. . . .
From “The Death of Moses,” describing Moses looking into the Promised Land:
Its glorious heights, its wealthy plains,
Its many-tinted groves,
They call! but He my steps restrainsWho chastens whom He loves. . . .
Görres helps us see how Newman was chastened during his lifetime, as well as his holy submission, instead of resistance, to God’s chastening hand.
FM: As you indicated, Görres is best remembered as a composer of hagiography. What do you think the role of hagiography is in man’s intellectual, moral, and spiritual life?
JB: Ida Görres explains this much better than I could. To understand the significance of hagiography, one needs to understand what sanctity is and what a saint is. These topics are central to the work of Görres. Regarding sanctity, I would point readers to her essay “The Nature of Sanctity” in The Persistence of Order.
As for the saint, in Chapter 6 of The Church in the Flesh, she explains beautifully why, for her, “the saint is the most important person, not only in the Church. The saint is the most important person in the world because the saint is the decisive answer to the big riddle: What is a human being?” Once she has explained how the saint is the solution to this riddle, she asks “Is there a greater, more exciting claim about us? A claim, if it is true, that concerns us in a more burning manner?” She would say, “No.”
FM: Newman was a convert to Catholicism, and Görres was also a Catholic. Public Discourse enjoys readers of many different faith traditions. What do you think this book on Newman—or perhaps the work of Görres and Newman in general—offers readers of different theological backgrounds?
JB: Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book for members of other faiths is its extensive treatment of the topic of conscience. Görres describes an atmosphere in which “only those who left the Church behind, like leaving a beloved and respected nursery for the wide world, could be taken seriously as seekers and thinkers.” Many of our socially conservative allies at Public Discourse among Orthodox Jews, conservative Protestants, and members of the LDS may be able to relate to this. On the topic of conscience, Görres shows how “John Henry Newman stood out like a lighthouse in the midst of this development [of secularization].”
Görres helps readers see that, in a godless world, claims about conscience lack any basis. Conscience becomes little more than a fancy label for personal feelings and whims. With Newman as her guide, she explains why “the separation of moral reason from obedience to God is the real root of every degeneration of conscience because only both, inseparably united, form a healthy conscience.” In her reflection, she draws not only on famous remarks by Newman on conscience but also on less well known passages, especially some sermons, to explain both what conscience is (when properly understood) and why this matters.
Next, I think non-Catholic Public Discourse readers would appreciate her insights into the sexual revolution in her journals from the 1950s (Broken Lights)—Görres saw early the darkness and chaos coming over the horizon. Also of broader interest would be her scathing review in 1951 of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.
That said, many of her works are useful for understanding what is distinctive about the Catholic faith as well. For non-Catholics who are perplexed by strange Catholic practices (scapulars, statues, etc.), why Catholics love the Church, and the importance Catholics give to the role of saints, I especially recommend The Church in the Flesh.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.