Newman and the Music of Faith: A Tribute to Professor Lawrence S. Cunningham

In the summer of 2002, I enrolled in an intensive summer course at the University of Notre Dame on the life and writings of Thomas Merton. Beginning to think seriously about applying to doctoral programs in Catholic theology, what drew me to the course was not just the opportunity to study the famed Trappist monk whose writings had shaped my Catholic sensibilities from the age of 15. It was also, and no less, that the course would be taught by Professor Lawrence Cunningham, a giant in the pantheon of Merton studies whose essays on Christian mysticism and “Book Notes” for Commonweal magazine had long captivated me. Taking that three-week course would prove to be pivotal in my decision to apply to Notre Dame, and thus my nascent vocation as a theologian. But Larry not only opened new vistas for me on Merton. Through his second-year seminar on John Henry Newman, he would lead me to a much more intuitive and expansive grasp of Catholic theology itself. Indeed, Newman would be critical for me in returning to Merton as a model for Catholic theology in a sapiential key, in the key of wisdom.

For Newman, the attainment of wisdom in matters of the heart – not least in the realization of God, in matters of faith – is characterized not by “polymathy,” the knowledge of many things, but more perfectly in a sense of the whole of things and “their mutual relations.”1 Wisdom is “the clear, calm, accurate vision, and comprehension of the whole course, the whole work of God”2; it “implies a connected view of the old with the new; an insight into the bearing and influence of each part upon every other; without which there is no whole, and could be no centre.”3 While admittedly no person is able to grasp “the whole work of God,” Newman’s emphasis on catholicity, or seeing reality from the divine perspective, and the organic, “slow-paced” process by which ordinary people grow into faith, was deeply attractive to me. It also resonated uncannily with Thomas Merton’s mystical biography and Catholic theological sensibilities.

For both Newman and Merton, to grow in wisdom in the sacred art and science of theology does not imply religious or rationalist hubris so much as a contemplative, disciplined sensitivity that is able, by the grace of God, to see the forest for the trees. Humility, not hubris, and an openness to change, to growth, to ever-expanding insight through experience and encounter, is wisdom’s wonder-soaked horizon. Moreover, under Larry’s able guidance, I was captivated by Newman’s account in the Grammar of Assent of the imagination as key to wisdom’s apprehension of the whole and the primordial interconnectedness of things, not least in matters of theological understanding.

As he memorably asserts in the Grammar,

The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.4

Merton, too, witnesses deep respect for a contemplative, poetic, and imaginative approach to the reception and fresh language-ing of faith, just as his discussion of wisdom, or sapientia, shares much with Newman’s account of the “theology of the religious imagination.”5 A devoted student of Hopkins and Blake, Faulkner and Pasternak, and steeped in the monastic practices of lectio divina and chant, Merton describes wisdom-awareness as a kind of knowledge by identification, an intersubjective knowledge, a communion in cosmic awareness and in nature. ... a wisdom based on love.”6 Like Newman, whose epistemology favored the concrete over the abstract, Merton insists that sapiential (or “sophianic”) awareness “deepens our communion with the concrete. It is not an initiation into a world of abstractions and ideals.” Its concern is not fixing upon “a system of truths which explain life” so much as cultivating “a certain depth of awareness in which life itself is lived more intensely and with a more meaningful direction.”7 And much in the way of Newman, Merton’s poetical approach to theology finds “the seeds of transcendence within the practices of language itself.”8

In sum, Newman’s appeal to the imagination as the dynamic faculty that aids and enlarges reason in its epistemic humility before the mystery of God provides considerable sanction to the tradition of monastic theology in which Merton firmly stands. Additionally, his fundamental trust in the Spirit’s guidance of doctrinal development in the church gives further credence to Merton’s exploration of the Wisdom passages in the Bible as a vital source for reclaiming an experience of God too long marginalized in Western theology and spiritual practice. Merton’s classic prose poem, “Hagia Sophia,” narrates a sophianic picture of God’s intimate presence to human freedom in a feminine key, at play in creation “like the air receiving the sunlight.”9

Inspired especially by the book of Proverbs and Russian mystical theology, Merton employed the image of Wisdom-Sophia as a meaningful theological symbol, mediating the sacramental remembrance of God “through the power of the imagination.”10 To borrow from Coleridge, who also influenced Newman’s understanding of imagination, Merton found in Wisdom-Sophia “the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal,” and he increasingly invoked her name for the purpose of “creative persuasion about the truth of God.”11 As I would argue in my dissertation under Larry’s direction, there seems to be no reason that the church today, so long as we remain sensitive to the metaphorical nature of theological language, might not also invoke Sophia’s memory and name in the task of theological development.

In short, the appropriation of Wisdom-Sophia as an evocative name and symbol for God in Merton’s writings offers a lucid example of what Newman called the illative sense at work in theological method.12 “Our theological philosophers,” Newman once complained,

are like the old nurses who wrap the unhappy infant in swaddling bands or boards, put a lot of blankets on him and shut the windows [so] that not a breath of fresh air may come to his skin—as if he were not healthy enough to bear wind and water in due measures. They move in a groove, and will not tolerate anyone who does not move in the same.13

By means of the imagination—“an organon more delicate, versatile, and elastic than verbal argumentation”14—Merton sought to make old things new in our experience and language of God for present and future generations.

Though Merton doesn’t refer explicitly to Newman a great deal in his vast writings, what he does say stands out as especially noteworthy. In a journal of 7 August 1961, he comments on Newman’s love of Clement of Alexandria: “To Newman he was ‘like music.’ This may look like a cliché but it is profound. For there are people one meets—in books and in life—with whom a deep resonance is at once established.” Merton then comments on the meaning of “resonance”—cor ad cor loquitur (“heart speaks to heart”)—and names writers whose “music” has moved him, closing with Clement’s image of humanity as “a musical instrument for God.”15 As a cradle Catholic and musician long drawn to the musicality of spiritual writers like Merton and Heschel, Levertov and Soelle, these observations confirmed for me the significance of a literary and poetic appreciation of the Bible, and, no less significant, of theological expression.

With heartfelt appreciation, I can say today that by introducing me to Newman, Larry opened up the music of faith for me in unexpected ways, affirming the value of a Catholic theology composed in a contemplative, poetical, and participatory key. Perhaps most significantly, the study of Newman gave me new eyes and new ears to appreciate Merton’s contribution to an authentically Catholic picture of God who comes to us in intimately feminine terms. “For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty. ... For she is a reflection of eternal light ... and an image of his goodness”(Wis. 7:25–26).

In 2008, at age 72, Larry described his vocation as a theologian and teacher as

a rare gift given to me. To be paid to do what I do, which is to follow my passion in the company of the young,makes me feel to be among the elect who have found themselves in a place where they were meant to be. The only word that covers it is gratitude.

He continued:

I am a much better teacher today than I was decades ago because I have never lost my passion for learning. … nor my desire to touch that place in students’ minds and hearts for that love of learning which, even though they may not know it explicitly, is the desire for God.16

I can only hope that my own vocation “to follow my passion in the company of the young” bears half as much good fruit as that of Professor Cunningham, a legacy of unceasing curiosity and delight in the Catholic theological tradition that I am certain would make Newman very proud.

Professor Cunningham, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, died 20 February 2025, in South Bend. He was 89.

1 Newman, US (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 287.

2 Newman, US, 293.

3 Newman, US, 287.

4 Newman, GA (University of Notre Dame Press), 89.

5 “[The theology of the religious imagination] has a living hold on truths which are really to be found in the world, though they are not upon the surface. It is able to pronounce by anticipation, what it takes a long argument to prove—that good is the rule, and evil the exception. It is able to assume that, uniform as are the laws of nature, they are consistent with a particular Providence. It interprets what it sees around it by this previous inward teaching, as the true key of that maze of vast complicated disorder; and thus it gains a more and more consistent and luminous vision of God from the most unpromising materials” (Newman, GA, 106). For an expanded discussion, see Christopher Pramuk, Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton (Liturgical/Michael Glazier, 2009), esp. 31–54, 72–74; also Christopher Pramuk, “‘They Know Him by His Voice’: Newman on the Imagination, Christology, and the Theology of Religions,” Heythrop Journal 48 (Jan. 2007): 61–85.

6 Thomas Merton, The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New Directions, 1981), 108; hereafter LE.

7 Merton, LE, 100.

8 Mark S. Burrows, “Raiding the Inarticulate: Mysticism, Poetics, and the Unlanguageable,” in Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality, ed. Elizabeth A. Dreyer and Mark S. Burrows (Johns Hopkins, 2005), 350. I can fathom no better or more concise expression of a sapiential approach to religious epistemology and theological method than what Burrows offers as a general axiom in this phrase.

9 From Thomas Merton, “Hagia Sophia,” cited in Pramuk, Sophia, my doctoral dissertation revised as a monograph, 304; also Christopher Pramuk, At Play in Creation: Merton’s Awakening to the Feminine Divine (Liturgical, 2013), based on a series of retreat conferences on this material.

10 Susan McCaslin, “Merton and ‘Hagia Sophia,’” in Merton and Hesychasm: Prayer of the Heart: The Eastern Church (Fons Vitae, 2003), 253.

11 Gerard Magill, “Moral Imagination in Theological Method and Church Tradition: John Henry Newman,” Theological Studies 53 (1992): 460–61, citing Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), Lay Sermons, and Collected Works, and studies by Stephen Happel. Magill observes that Newman “was sensitive to the paradoxical character in the history of doctrine seeking verbal formulae that decisively avoid closures of meaning while creatively generating new metaphors. ... He used the imagination, then, to maintain a paradoxical tension between disclosing the meaning of what is otherwise unavailable to us while veiling the transcendent mystery of religious truth” (471, citing Rowan Williams).

12 Newman, GA, 270–99; Pramuk, Sophia, 45, 132, 269. Where scientific rationality proceeds by linear, deductive, or syllogistic thinking, imaginative rationality (the illative sense) is closer to literary or poetic cognition, involving an intuitive process of discernment that Newman compares to the sensibilities of a climber on the face of the rock—we advance “not by rule, but by an inward faculty” (Newman, US, 257).

13 Newman to Henry Wilberforce (20 Aug. 1869), LD, 24:316, quoted in Terrence Merrigan, “Newman and Theological Liberalism,” Theological Studies 66 (2005): 614–15.

14 Newman, GA, 217.

15 Thomas Merton, Turning Toward the World: The Pivotal Years. Vol. 4, ed. Victor A. Kramer (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 149.

16 Quoted in Dennis Brown, “In Memoriam: Larry Cunningham, the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology Emeritus.”