Newman’s writings reveal his delight in the lives of the saints. Through them, he understood, we bring alive in our own person the truth of Christianity. Now Newman himself – though he once stated he had “no tendency to be a saint” – is to be canonised

In an essay on St Chrysostom published in 1859, John Henry Newman declared that he delighted in “dwelling on the characters and actions of the Saints of the first ages” as they have “left behind them just that kind of literature which more than any other represents the abundance of the heart”, their “correspondence”; they mixed “up their own persons, natural and supernatural, with the didactive or polemical works that engaged them”.
The Fathers “left behind them” a literature manifesting their “vigorous individuality”, works revealing “the presence of one active principle of thought, one individual character, flowing on and into the various matters” discussed. Newman sought always to register the “presence” of the “individual” character – declaring a “preference of the Personal to the Abstract” – and much of his originality as a thinker arose from his inclination to recognise and to vindicate the “Personal” in the life of the mind.

His Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent is an attempt to show how there is something irreducibly personal in any effort to discover the truth: the discovery of the truth involves not merely the tracing of “verbal” arguments, but an initiation into a discipline of perceiving and thinking by which the capacity to judge about certain aspects of reality is acquired, a capacity that is a “personal endowment”.