1
NEVER HAS ANYTHING cost me (I think) so much hard thought and
anxiety" wrote Newman in June, 1845, concerning the
composition of
his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.
"...Besides
re-writing, every part has to be worked out and defined as in
moulding a statue. I get on as a person walks with a lame ankle, who
does get on and gets to his journey's end--but not
comfortably." By
the summer of 1845 Newman was indeed nearing "his journey's
end,"
and "not comfortably." His book was the
culmination of a long series
of inner and outer events which marked his life during the now
well-known Tractarian Movement. His Essay was both a personal
apologia and a treatise on Church history and theology. It explained
to himself and to the world why he was on the eve of joining the
Roman Catholic Church. This could not but be painful. For more than
a decade he had been an agitator and in the end a most powerful
influence in a movement which began as an effort to revive the
Catholic notes of the English Church and ended (in one sense) {Many
of the forces of the Oxford Movement are, of course, still
operative.} in thousands of conversions to Rome. While Newman was
struggling with himself in the early 1840s, his followers waited for
his lightest word; they had read his tracts and sermons, many of
them had heard his eloquent sermons, and all now wanted to know what
was to be the next step of their great leader. Many of his followers
had already, even against his wishes, gone over to Rome. And in the
summer of 1845, Newman knew that he himself was shortly [xvi] to
go, too. How, then, explain his step? How unsay all the bold and
vigorous things he had said against the Catholic Church? How could
he justify, intellectually, the tremendous act he was soon to
perform, submission to the Catholic faith?
In one respect it was extremely easy. If it was painful on the
personal side, it was in fact very pleasant, indeed satisfying and
fulfilling, on the intellectual side of his problem. When Newman
complained about the "hard thought and
anxiety" with which he wrote,
he was simply expressing his usual state of mind and body while
writing a book. "When I got to the end of my Arians [of the
Fourth
Century]," he had said, "... I had no
sleep for a week, and was
fainting away or something like it day after day." The
same
condition was to develop when he wrote his Apologia and his Idea of
a University and his Grammar of Assent. To be sure, the Apologia was
a wrenching task, and was, a good deal of the time, written in
tears. The Essay on Development was written in grief--the grief over
the parting of friends, over what seemed like a betrayal, over the
loss of all his Anglican life; yet the book was written also in an
intellectual ecstasy, as the thoughts of many years came together,
fused, and created something grandly new for its author. Certain
intimations, feelings, divinations--most of them dark and
disturbing--now unleashed themselves and took possession of Newman's
imagination: he saw in his mind's eye, in his very soul, the Church
of his desire. For years he had been a battling Anglican, trying to
convince his fellow Anglicans that their Church was the Church of
St. Clement, of Origen, of Augustine, and Anselm; and that she need
but interpret her Articles and her history to find herself divinely
descended from the Primitive Church. Now, as he wrote his Essay, all
of the unconscious or semi-conscious reasoning to the
contrary--reasoning which had long seethed within his mind--came to
the surface and shaped a work which, in spite of its complexity, is
amazingly clear, exact, and orderly, considering the circumstances
under which it was composed.
[xvii]
2
Newman had never had any difficulty with the dogmatic side of
Christianity. For him, dogmas were the stamina of religious
thinking; they were in fact necessary to the human mind; we cannot,
he says, reason, feel, or act without them. "Sooner than
dispense
with [dogmas], the mind will take them at the hands of others, will
put up with such as are faulty or uncertain." The problem is
to find
or choose the right dogmas, and then to understand them (so far as
is possible) and to act upon them. This will not be entirely
satisfying to the intellect, which will rebel at, or disdain, what
opposes or transcends logic. But the religious mind, says Newman,
submits to the "mysteries" of religion as
an act of sacrifice, which
is much more difficult for the educated person than physical
sacrifices (e.g. Lenten denials) are for the illiterate. It may be
said that some minds have a hunger for dogma. This was true of one
of Newman's most impetuous disciples, William George Ward, who said
he would like to find a Papal bull each morning on his breakfast
table. This was not true of Newman, who understood and loved the
"dogmatic principle," but who wished to
see dogma develop
unhurriedly and under enlightened circumstances. Newman had never
had a craving for dogma, for he had always lived in the dogmatic
realm. Thus the nineteenth century legend that Newman
"fled" to Rome
because he "hungered" for dogmatic
certainties must be abandoned.
This legend is merely a survival from an earlier attitude toward
religion, such as Gibbon's or Hume's, that it is the power-weapon of
cunning and unscrupulous priests. A later age was to view
priesthoods, rituals, dogmas, and ecclesiastical organizations as
the product of man's basically religious nature. For Newman, of
course, these were both natural and supernatural, both an expression
of man's needs and also parts of a divine dispensation. Newman's
task, as he saw it, was to make religious dogma acceptable to the
modern mind, to grant the [xviii] rights of man's logical faculty,
but to remind him of the need of certain statements of religious
truths, statements which impart only fragmentarily the system of
divine truth as a whole. Being fragmentary or incomplete, and not
fully adjusted to each other, these statements (or dogmas) will
affront the mind until it understands the nature of dogma, and until
it discerns the extremely important fact that dogmas develop.
As a young man, Newman had taken as one of his mottoes a sentence
from the great Evangelical divine, Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford:
"Growth is the only evidence of life."
Later, as he read in the
early Fathers of the Church--St. Clement, St. Basil, St.
Athanasius--he noted how doctrines passed into dogmas, and how
dogmas developed from the need to protect religious truth from the
tendency of the human mind to seize upon one side of a truth and to
run off with it in the conviction that this, and this alone, is the
whole truth. Dogmas grew, they showed evidence of life; but they
grew, or enlarged, or "added" to
themselves, only to remain
fundamentally what they originally were. We see this notion of dogma
as early as Newman's Arians of the Fourth Century (1833); we see it
occasionally in his papers on "Primitive
Christianity" (1833-36), in
his essay "Home Thoughts Abroad" (1836),
in his "Catholicity of the
Anglican Church" (1840). "Room is
made," says Newman in the Arians,
"for the anticipation of further and deeper disclosures of
truths
still under the veil of the letter." As Newman investigated
the
great heresies of the early Church--Arianism, Sabellianism,
Semi-Arianism, Monophysitism--he discerned two facts: that dogmas
had been set up to protect the original depositum of faith, and
that, at the same time, in so protecting the faith, the act of
statement expanded the original deposit, so that implicit truths in
that deposit became explicit, and to the old something
"new,"
something perhaps at first sight rather repugnant to the
conservative mind, had been added by the Church. By 1840 Newman's
Catholic tendencies, though still staunchly Anglican, permitted him
to view Roman [xix] doctrine and dogma with great sympathy and
insight. In writing on the "Catholicity of the Anglican
Church", he
summarizes the Roman Catholic view that "the Apostles were
implicit
Tridentines, that the Church held in the first age what she holds
now; only that heresy, by raising questions, has led her to throwing
her faith into dogmatic shape, and has served to precipitate truths
which before were held in solution." As Newman ends his
summary, he
candidly admits, "We think there is a great deal of force in
this
view."
Three years later, in February, 1843, Newman preached his great
University sermon on "The Theory of Developments in
Religious
Doctrine", which clearly is a preliminary step toward the
Essay on
Development to appear in the fall of 1845. In this sermon, {See
Sermons and Discourses (1949), Vol. II sermon no. 7. [Ed.]} the
intimations, half-thoughts, and speculations of many years come
together tentatively. Newman suggests that ideas and doctrines have
a way of moving about as if charged with a power of their own. They
enter men's minds, and use them as instruments, even while men
believe that they, as thinking beings, are producing and controlling
the ideas. A germinal idea may rise in the mind of a simple
fisherman of Galilee; it may find utterance in a few simple words.
Then, as if it has a life of its own, it will expand and develop, it
will progress in the minds of many men with consistency,
resourcefulness, and creative power. Such an idea as "the
Word was
made flesh" will require centuries for a full elucidation of
all the
implications of the words, which of themselves, says Newman, are
"but august tokens of most simple, ineffable, adorable
facts,
embraced, enshrined according to its measure in the believing
mind."
Moreover, one such idea, developed and fully set forth as a dogma,
will bring into being another dogma. Revelation has provided in the
Bible the main outlines of a great system of dogmas, which remain
yet to be fully developed. Of course, no dogma can ever fully convey
the divine realities which it attempts to express or symbolize; it
is always of an "economical,' character, [xx] partly
revealing and
partly concealing the truth. But the dominating concept in Newman's
famous sermon remains still the theory that doctrines and dogmas
have within them a kind of life, and a power of growth from simpler
and implicit forms to complex and explicit forms.
3
Newman's original reason for examining the earliest surviving
statements of Christian doctrine was, as we have intimated, to
re-discover the primitive, Catholic, and non Protestant foundations
of the Anglican Church. He was fully aware of the Protestant nature
of many, if not most, members of his Communion. At the beginning of
the Tractarian Movement, of which he was the leader, there was no
thought about the Roman Catholic Church except to consider her as
"corrupt," given to
"adding" to the original faith, cruel
and
arrogant toward her sister Communions, the Anglican and the Greek.
Later in the Movement, there was some thought of a possible reunion
with Rome, but "not until Rome ceases to be what Rome
is." But this
thought was never very vigorous in Newman's mind. His main concern
was to awaken the English Church to her divine origin, to her
independence from the state, to the importance of her priesthood,
her Catholic character, and her spiritual authority. All went well
with Newman and his cohorts in the Movement until the summer of
1839. Hitherto he had rested on his theory of the Via Media, that
the English Church stood safely free from the
"corruptions" of
Romanism and the "errors" of popular
Protestantism. Much as this
theory appealed to many people, it failed to impress many others,
and still others were of the opinion that Newman and his followers
were, consciously or unconsciously, heading for Rome. In fact,
Newman's bishop wrote a pastoral letter censuring certain
expressions in the tracts. This was a blow to Newman, who always
regarded his bishop as if he were a pope. Anglicanism did [xxi] not
at the moment seem very Catholic. Years later, in the Apologia, he
tells us that, in spite of his feeling of mastery and success in the
Movement, actually he was languishing in "a state of moral
sickness,
neither able to acquiesce in Anglicanism [as it was officially held
and practised], nor able to go to Rome." Then in June, 1839,
while
studying the early heresies, particularly Monophysitism and
Eutychianism, he became seriously alarmed. These heresies affirmed
only the divine nature of the Son, and rejected the decision of the
Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) that Christ's nature is two, human
and divine, indivisible yet distinct, united in one person. Suddenly
Newman seemed to see himself in a mirror: he was a Monophysite, and
all his arguments for the Via Media applied with horrible
appositeness to the heretics of antiquity, Eutyches and Arius. He
had hoped to prove his Church to be truly Catholic because she had
never really departed from her primitive position. But now he
realized how Protestant, how fragmentary and un-Catholic was his
Communion.
There followed a series of events which led inevitably to Newman's
leaving St. Mary's, to his retirement to Littlemore, and to his
final Anglican act, the writing of a book which would set forth the
theory that served as a bridge between his old faith and his new.
The events to which I refer are fairly well known to readers of
Newman. First there was Dr. Wiseman's article in the Dublin Review),
in which the English Church and the Donatist heretics of the fourth
century were shown as appallingly alike. But one sentence alone gave
Newman, as he said, "a stomach ache":
Securus judicat orbis
terrarum, or, roughly paraphrased, "The universal sense of
the whole
Church must be right against one local body." The Via Media
now
seemed to Newman a very poor thing indeed. Still loyal to his
Church, he contemplated giving up St. Mary's and retiring to
Littlemore. Then he began a restudying of St. Athanasius, and found
that the Arians were the Protestants of antiquity, and the
semi-Arians were the [xxii] Anglicans. "Rome now was what
it was
then." The next blow was the affair of Tract XC. Here Newman
had
tried to show that the Thirty-nine Articles had originally been
designed to keep as many Roman Catholics in the English Church as
possible, and that the Articles were tolerant of a Catholic or even
a Roman interpretation. In this tract Newman hoped to vindicate the
Anglican claim to "Catholicity." By this
time (1841) all the
dammed-up resentment against the "Romish"
cast to Tractarian
thinking broke loose, and Newman was overwhelmed with vituperation;
at Bishop Bagot's command the Tracts as a series were discontinued.
To add to Newman's disillusionment with the
"Catholic" character of
his Church was the next event, the movement to establish a Jerusalem
bishopric, in which the bishop was to subscribe to the Augsburg
Confession and observe the order of the German Evangelical Church.
During the next two years Newman spent more and more time at
Littlemore, where in 1836 he had built a chapel, and where now he
contemplated setting up a semi-monastic religious order. On
September 18, 1843, he resigned his living of St. Mary's; and on the
25th he preached his last Anglican sermon, at Littlemore, on
"The
Parting of Friends." In the meantime he had published in
February in
the Oxford Conservative Journal a formal recantation of all the hard
sayings and accusations which he had leveled at the Church of Rome.
For the next two years, Newman suffered the anguish of seeing most
of his dearest friends sorrowfully withdraw from him. He experienced
the most harrowing doubts as to the wisdom of his contemplated
step--he had been mistaken once, might he not be now, in his
Romeward thoughts? He considered the shocking thought that after his
"conversion" to the Roman Church he might
wish again to become an
Anglican. In his mental and emotional turmoil he wrote to his old
friends, John Keble and Dr. Pusey, for support and sympathy. But
Keble, though utterly l