We'll continue our series on the Son Rise Morning Show exploring how Saint John Henry Newman studied and learned from the Fathers of the Church on Monday, October 21. As a reminder, this series was inspired by a course at the
Institute of Catholic Culture, Patristics 102 "Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers" running now; Anna Mitchell (who is the
Program Assistant for ICC) asked me to explore how the Fathers of the Church influenced Newman's theology and contributed to his conversion to Catholicism and share what I learned. As he famously said, "The Fathers made me Catholic", so I've always (since 1979!) known this is an important theme in Newman studies.
On Monday, October 21, we'll talk about Newman's first unsuccessful attempt to the read the Fathers systematically and then his second more successful effort to the Fathers and how he advised others how to follow his lead. I'll be on the air at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live
here or catch the
podcast later (and remember you may subscribe to the SRMS daily Show Notes email there too).
I'm indebted for these insights today to Father Joseph Carola, SJ and his book
Engaging the Church Fathers in Nineteenth-Century Catholicism: The Patristic Legacy of the "Scuola Romana", published by Emmaus Academic. I read this
review in the Summer 2024 issue of Word on Fire's
The New Ressourcement Journal. If you read the first paragraph of that review, you'll see why I had to buy and read the book. I admit I skipped directly to the chapter on Newman, then read the next chapter on Giovanni Perrone, the Jesuit scholar Newman consulted on his
Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and other related Patristic issues.
Newman began to read the Fathers systematically in 1828, but he ran into trouble. Later, he wrote to Robert Wilberforce that
It is so difficult to read without an object. I may almost add so unprofitable--but I rather mean this--that nothing at all is done, if a man begins to read the Fathers without a previous knowledge of the controversies which are built upon them . . . I read Justin [Martyr] very carefully in 1828--and made copious notes--but I conceive most of my time was thrown away. I was like a sailor landed at Athens or Grand Cairo, who stares about--does not know what to admire, what to examine--makes random remarks, and forgets all about when he is gone. (Letters & Diaries, Vol. 5, 133, quoted on pages 109-110)
In 1838, in an article in the January issue of
The British Critic, "
The Theology of Saint Ignatius [of Antioch]" (whose feast we just celebrated on November 17) Newman gave some more instruction on how to read the Fathers, repeating the same analogy of the traveler not knowing enough about the city she's visiting to appreciate its sights and their significance. He contends that when the reader--as he had first done--tries to impose her own views on the Fathers, she won't benefit from the experience:
Thus they are ever at cross-purposes with the author they are studying; they do not discern his drift; and then, according as their minds are more or less of a reverent character, they despise or excuse him. At best they call him "venerable," which means out of date and useless. We have known one whom all would have acknowledged to be at the time deeply versed in the Fathers, yet taken by surprise by the question whether bishops and priests were the same or distinct orders in the early Church? as not having even contemplated the question. Again, we know a person who, when he entered on them, read and analyzed Ignatius, Barnabas, Clement, Polycarp, and Justin, with exceeding care, but who now considers his labour to have been all thrown away, from the strange modern divisions under which he threw the matter he found in them. (p. 226)
That "a person" sounds like Newman himself! He goes on to tell his readers of one particular pitfall, trying to find support for particular Protestant doctrines in the Fathers of the Church:
Whatever then be the true way of interpreting the Fathers, and in particular the Apostolical Fathers, if a man begins by summoning them before him, instead of betaking himself to them,—by seeking to make them evidence for modem dogmas, instead of throwing his mind upon their text, and drawing from them their own doctrines,—he will to a certainty miss their sense. (p. 228)
What Newman recommends instead is that the student first study Church History and Theology. The student should know what the Fathers mean by certain terms by studying the vocabulary, and divest herself of "modern ideas and prejudices." (p. 233)
Father Carola describes how Newman wrote to Thomas William Allies in September of 1842 and described an even more exact method: study a "particular controversy in the Fathers" like Donatism. Study the history of that heresy, its terms and context, so you know what the issues were, what the Fathers were dealing with, how they were defending the teaching of the Church against errors in that case. He told Allies to read "the worthwhile tracts of
Optatus of Milevis and Augustine of Hippo" in connection to the Donatist heresy. Newman suggested to Allies that it's best to "get a footing in some one place, and then proceed as our particular taste or curiosity leads." (pages 135-136, quoting
Letters and Diaries, vol. IX, p. 119)
BTW: T.W. Allies (1813–1903) was received into the Catholic Church in 1850. Note how the 1912
Dictionary of National Biography describes his path into the Catholic Church:
Study of the Fathers, and especially of Suarez's work, 'De Erroribus Sectæ Anglicanæ,' combined with the Gorham decision on baptismal regeneration in 1850, shattered his faith in the established church, and in his 'Royal Supremacy' (1850) he forcibly presented the Roman point of view (cf. Liddon's Life of E. B. Pusey, iii. 257 seq.). In October 1850 he resigned his Launton living and joined the Roman communion.
The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article about Allies, written by his daughter Mary, also mentions his reading the Fathers of the Church:
The Fathers, especially St. Augustine, revealed to him the Catholic Church. Moreover, they revealed him to himself, and when he now set pen to paper it was to write prose. He thought to find Anglicanism in the Fathers, and his first book is the result of this delusion. It was entitled "The Church of England Cleared from the Charge of Schism", published in 1846, a second and enlarged edition appearing in 1848. It gives the key-note of his lifelong labour and the whole question between Anglican and Catholic in a nutshell. As he perceived early in the day, the choice of the Royal Supremacy or Peter's Primacy constitutes the kernel of the entire controversy.
That choice of the Royal Supremacy in the Gorham Judgment, when the Queen's Council overrode the decision of the bishops of the Church of England, led Allies (and Henry Manning and others) to the Catholic Church.
How he advised Allies seems to have been Newman's method: assigned to write a book about the First Ecumenical Councils and the development of the Doctrine of the Trinity, he focused on the Arian Heresy and thus wrote The Arians of the Fourth Century in 1832, an effort that led him to further controversy in later years when he wrote Consulting the Laity on Matters of Doctrine in 1859, noting the faithfulness of laity during the Arian divisions in the Church.
Nevertheless, when in the summer of 1839 he started to study the Monophysite heresy and the Fathers of the Church defending the Church's true teaching on the Person of Jesus Christ and His two Natures, Human and Divine, Newman, like Allies as described above, read Pope St. Leo the Great and other Fathers to find support for his theory of the Via Media in the midst of the Fathers. He sought to find evidence that the Church of England was an Apostolic Church, in union with the Church Catholic from the beginning, in spite of its late establishment in the 16th century.
But we know that's not what he found. He described that crucial reading of the Monophysite crisis and its results in his Apologia pro Vita Sua in 1864/65, but he also spoke to his former Tractarian colleagues in the lectures he presented in 1850 on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered Volume I (In Twelve Lectures addressed in 1850 to the Party of the Religious Movement of 1833), in Lecture 12:
After this I set myself to the study of [the Fathers of the Church], with the view of pursuing the series of controversies connected with our Lord's Person; and to the examination of these controversies I devoted two summers, with the interval of several years between them (1835 and 1839). And now at length I was reading them for myself; for no Anglican writer had specially and minutely treated the subjects on which I was engaged. On my first introduction to them I had read them as a Protestant; and next, I had read them pretty much as an Anglican, though it is observable that, whatever I gained on either reading, over and above the theory or system with which I started, was in a Catholic direction. In the former of the two summers above mentioned (1835), my reading was almost entirely confined to strictly doctrinal subjects, to the exclusion of history, and I believe it left me pretty much where I was on the question of the Catholic Church; but in the latter of them (1839) it was principally occupied with the history of the Monophysite controversy, and {373} the circumstances and transactions of the Council of Chalcedon, in the fifth century, and at once and irrevocably I found my faith in the tenableness of the fundamental principle of Anglicanism disappear, and a doubt of it implanted in my mind which never was eradicated. I thought I saw in the controversy I have named, and in the Ecumenical Council connected with it, a clear interpretation of the present state of Christendom, and a key to the different parties and personages who have figured on the Catholic or the Protestant side at and since the era of the Reformation.
I can't resist quoting Newman's vivid reaction to that summer of 1839 from chapter 3 "History of My Religious Opinions from 1839 to 1841" of his
Apologia pro Vita Sua:
I have described in a former work [cited above!], how the history affected me. My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position of the Oriental communion, Rome was where she now is; and the Protestants were the Eutychians. (p. 114)
So studying the Fathers of the Church to find the authority for certain Church teachings about Jesus and His Church Catholic was not enough. There had to be something more. Father Carola's book will guide us further in our next discussion on October 28.
Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!
Image Credit (Public Domain): An icon of Ignatius of Antioch from the Menologion of Basil II (c. 1000 AD)
