Preface to

PREFACE

NO OTHER WORK of Newman's underwent so much revision as did the
Essay on Development. This work took final form in the edition of
1878, and supplies the text of the present edition. The first
edition, 1845, was reprinted in 1846; a French translation of
portions of the Essay appeared in 1847. In its original form it did
not find ready favor with Rome. It was, of course, published in
English, and apparently no theologian in the city could read English
with facility. To make matters worse, and to deepen Newman's
disappointment, the Essay had been eagerly seized by American
Unitarians as a first-rate demonstration that the Trinitarian
doctrine was not primitive but was a development of the third
century. In the midst of the consequent excitement, the militant
American convert, Orestes Brownson, made a series of attacks on the
Essay, beginning with a review of it in Brownson's Quarterly Review
in July, 1846. Brownson called Newman's work "essentially
anticatholic and Protestant"; he objected to Christianity being
treated as an "idea"; and he also objected to Newman's third mark of
a true development, the "power of assimilation." In the meantime,
Rome's attention was drawn to passages in Newman's lectures on the
"Prophetical Office," in which the papacy had been Antichrist.
[viii] Newman made a desperate effort to vindicate his Essay. He
discovered that the principle of development was acceptable in Rome,
but that he had "carried it too far." When he asked for instances,
Roman theologians actually took the side of the Anglican Bishop,
George Bull, against the Jesuit Petavius, whose work had helped to
shape New ,man's theory. Newman's very terminology confused his
Roman readers: the word "probable" was one chief stumbling block;
Newman had used it in contrast, not to certain, but to
demonstrative. Eventually Newman found that both St. Thomas and
Aristotle were out of favor at Rome, that indeed philosophizing in
any form was profoundly suspect. It is not surprising, therefore,
that the edition of 1878 is in so many ways, both large and small,
different from that of 1845. Yet in the thirty-three years between
the two editions, the Essay made its way with the Church, and was
accepted in its original form as, in the words of Dr. Benard,
"simply an original and highly ingenious manner of presenting a
strictly traditional Catholic doctrine."
But the vicissitudes of Newman's Essay were not over. During the
last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth, there arose the Modernist Movement, in which Newman's
volume was made an instrument of heresy. This is not the place to
enter into the details of New man's relation to that Movement; a
brief and clarifying account of it may be found in Dr. Edmond D.
Benard's A Preface to Newman's Theology. It may be observed that
when Pope Pius X issued the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis in
July, 1907, condemning the Movement, many of Newman's readers at
once feared that the Essay on Development had been condemned, too.
Alfred Loisy, one of the most brilliant leaders of the Movement, had
published in the Revue du clerge français for December, 1898, an
article, under the pseudonym, "A. Firmin," devoted to "Christian
Development according to Cardinal Newman." In this article the
author skillfully paraphrased Newman so as to make Newman [ix]
express many of the Modernist teachings, such as the subjective or
symbolic nature of dogma. By the time the encyclical was published,
Newman's Essay, and others of his writings, had been appropriated by
other Modernists, such as Dimnet and Tyrrell. But at the very height
of the excitement occasioned by the encyclical Pascendi, the Most
Reverend Edward Thomas O'Dwyer, bishop of Limerick, published his
pamphlet on Cardinal Newman and the Encyclical Pascendi Dominici
Gregis (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), which showed
clearly that the Modernists could not legitimately depend on Newman
for their teaching. The final, authoritative answer to the
Modernists, however, appeared when Pope Pius X sent a letter to
Bishop O'Dwyer, confirming the latter's defense of Newman.
Though the Essay on Development has been attacked by Catholics as
being too Protestant and by Protestants as being too Catholic, it
remains one of the most influential of Newman's books. At the outset
it struck readers as a brilliant scientific study of the problem
which had been troubling them for years. According to De
Grandmaison, from the time of its first appearance in 1845, it has
influenced the thought of practically every Catholic writer on the
subject. Nor has its influence been limited to theologians; it has
effected the conversion of innumerable non-Catholics, and it has
strengthened the faith, on various points of doctrine, of great
numbers of Anglicans. To the Protestant, even to the non-religious
mind, it offers a memorable intellectual experience, in which
tumultuous ages, great dogmas, commanding personalities, virulent
heresies, and vigorous orthodoxy are presented in a style at turns
supple, argumentative, majestic, and elegiac. It is a basic book for
the Roman Catholic; it is a great classic for the English-speaking
world.

Charles Frederick Harrold

The Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio

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