Preview: Father Ian Ker on what Newman Learned from the Church Fathers

On Monday, September 9, we'll continue our Son Rise Morning Show series on Newman and the Fathers of the Church. In this episode, we'll take a look at one of the lessons Newman learned by reading the Fathers of the Church at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central DST/7:50 a.m. Eastern DST. Please listen live here or on the podcast later.

The late Father Ian Ker edited Selected Sermons by Newman for the Paulist Press "Classics of Western Spirituality" series. In the section of his Introduction titled "The Influence of the Greek Fathers", Father Ker highlights the impact they had on Newman's thought as demonstrated by excerpts from the Parochial and Plain Sermons. 

The five areas he identifies are:

1). The Incarnation

2). The Resurrection and Pentecost

3). The Indwelling of the Holy Spirit

4). The Sacraments

5). Mystery

He declares:

It was the thought of the Greek Fathers that shaped and guided Newman's reading of Scripture, out of which emerged that great corpus of sermons, the Parochial and Plain Sermons, one of the enduring classics of Christian spirituality. (p. 28)

We'll start with the first area of emphasis: The Incarnation. One thing Father Ker does not do in discussing these influences is to identify which Greek Father or Fathers influenced Newman to certain doctrinal and theological views. I think it's easy to identify at least one of the Fathers that influenced Newman to emphasize the Incarnation. It's Saint Athanasius of Alexandria. 

As noted before, Newman had studied the Arian crisis in the fourth century and Saint Athanasius was one of the great defenders of the Church's teaching about the Incarnation against the Arian heresy. Joseph Carola, S.J. points out in Engaging the Church Fathers in Nineteenth Century Catholicism: The Patristic Legacy of the Scuola Romana (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2023), Newman began his book publishing career with a book featuring Saint Athanasius (The Arians of the Fourth Century) in 1832 and ended it with another book about him in 1877, the final edition of his translation of Select Treatises of Saint Athanasius, first published in the  Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church in 1844. (p. 91)

Ker emphasizes that Newman gave priority to the Incarnation at a time when the doctrine of the Atonement received more emphasis because it "sets him apart from what was then at least the predominant tradition of Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, and is to be traced to the profound influence exerted on him by the Greek Fathers." (p. 29) As Father Ker states, Newman's "high Christology" matches the Christology of those Greek Fathers. As an example, he quotes Newman's 1834 sermon ("The Incarnation") on Christmas Day, as he reminds his congregation of "the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation":

Thus the Son of God became the Son of Man; mortal, but not a sinner; heir of our infirmities, not of our guiltiness; the offspring of the old race, yet {32} "the beginning of the" new "creation of God." . . . Thus He came, selecting and setting apart for Himself the elements of body and soul; then, uniting them, to Himself from their first origin of existence, pervading them, hallowing them by His own Divinity, spiritualizing them, and filling them with light and purity, the while they continued to be human, and for a time mortal and exposed to infirmity. . . .Great is our Lord, and great is His power, Jesus the Son of God and Son of man. Ten thousand times more dazzling bright than the highest Archangel, is our Lord and Christ. By birth the Only-begotten and Express image of God; and in taking our flesh, not sullied thereby, but raising human nature with Him, as He rose from the lowly manger to the right hand of power,—raising human nature, for Man has redeemed us, Man is set above all creatures, as one with the Creator, Man shall judge man at the last day. So honoured is this earth, that no stranger {40} shall judge us, but He who is our fellow, who will sustain our interests, and has full sympathy in all our imperfections.

For readers of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, this "high Christology" of Newman's is no surprise. As paragraph #460 declares, quoting St. Athanasius among other sources:

The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature":⁷⁸ "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God."⁷⁹ "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God."⁸⁰ "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."⁸¹

78 2 Pt 1:4.
79 St. Irenaeus, Adv. haeres. 3, 19, 1: PG 7/1, 939.
80 St. Athanasius, De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B.
81 St. Thomas Aquinas, Opusc. 57, 1-4.

And as we'll see next week on September 16, Newman's emphasis on the Resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost demonstrates that Newman saw the whole of Christ's Incarnate life as "one single divine act unfolding in several closely connected stages." (p. 31)

Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

 

Image Source (Public Domain): Saint Athanasius. By Francesco Bartolozzi after Domenichino.