St. John Henry Newman said of the Church Fathers: “They are witnesses to the fact of . . . doctrines having been received, not here or there, but everywhere . . . down to our times, without interruption, ever since the apostles.” What are the teachings of these early Christian writers whom Newman so deeply appreciated? What were their beliefs, hopes, and concerns? Do these mirror our own?
In this first (of two) semesters on the Fathers of the Church, dive deeply into the writings of the first Christian centuries and become acquainted with such figures as St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius, St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, and Origen, and come to an appreciation of their specific genius and legacy for our own generation.
The second course is in session now.
We'll start with an overview of how his study of the Fathers influenced Newman in his youth and in his leadership of the Oxford Movement; particularly how that study led him closer to the Catholic Church --or at least away from the Church of England -- when he studied the Arian, Monophysite, and Donatist heresies and the Fathers's roles in combating them. So this first episode takes us to the 1865 Apologia pro Vita Sua:
In the first chapter, "History of My Religious Opinions up to 1833", he highlights an early influence just before he went to Trinity College at Oxford:
Now I come to two other works, which produced a deep impression on me in the same Autumn of 1816, when I was fifteen years old, {7} . . . I read Joseph Milner's Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive Christians . . .
On the other hand, he recalls that for a time, he forgot the Fathers and rejected primitive Christianity:
In the next year, 1827, [Whately] told me he considered that I was Arianizing. The case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull's Defensio nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of Arian exterior. This is the meaning of a passage in Froude's Remains, in which he seems to accuse me of speaking against the Athanasian Creed. I had {14} contrasted the two aspects of the Trinitarian doctrine, which are respectively presented by the Athanasian Creed and the Nicene. My criticisms were to the effect that some of the verses of the former Creed were unnecessarily scientific. This is a specimen of a certain disdain for Antiquity which had been growing on me now for several years. It showed itself in some flippant language against the Fathers in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, about whom I knew little at the time, except what I had learnt as a boy from Joseph Milner. . . .
The truth is, I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral; I was drifting in the direction of the liberalism of the day [Note 2]. I was rudely awakened from my dream at the end of 1827 by two great blows—illness and bereavement. [His beloved sister Mary died suddenly.]
So he returns to the Fathers:
There is one remaining source of my opinions to be mentioned, and that far from the least important. In proportion as I moved out of the shadow of that Liberalism which had hung over my course, my early devotion towards the Fathers returned; and in the Long Vacation of 1828 I set about to read them chronologically, beginning with St. Ignatius and St. Justin. . . .When Newman studied the Arian heresy, he discovered the greatness of the Greek Fathers, especially Saint Athanasius:
What principally attracted me in the ante-Nicene period was the great Church of Alexandria, the historical centre of teaching in those times. Of Rome for some centuries comparatively little is known. The battle of Arianism was first fought in Alexandria; Athanasius, the champion of the truth, was Bishop of Alexandria; and in his writings he refers to the great religious names of an earlier date, to Origen, Dionysius, and others, who were the glory of its see, or of its school. The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away . . . Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long.
In 1832, he wrote a poem about the Greek Fathers.
In chapter 2 of his Apologia, "History of My Religious Opinions from 1833 to 1839", Newman describes several of the projects of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement. Two of them he published highlighted the Fathers of the Church:
The Church of the Fathers is one of the earliest productions of the Movement, and appeared in numbers in the British Magazine, being written with the aim of introducing the religious sentiments, views, and customs of the first ages into the modern Church of England. . . .
The annotated Translation of the Treatises of St. Athanasius was of course in no sense of a tentative character; it belongs to another order of thought. This historico-dogmatic work employed me for years. I had made preparations for following it up with a doctrinal history of the heresies which succeeded to the Arian.
But it's in chapter 3, "History of My Religious Opinions from 1839 to 1841", that his study of the Fathers bring him great difficulties as he studies the Monophysite heresy and then reads an article by the Catholic priest Nicholas Wiseman (later his bishop!) during the Long Vacation in the summer of 1839. First the Monophysite heresy:
About the middle of June I began to study and master the history of the Monophysites. I was absorbed in the doctrinal question. This was from about June 13th to August 30th. It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicanism. I recollect on the 30th of July mentioning to a friend, whom I had accidentally met, how remarkable the history was; but by the end of August I was seriously alarmed.
I have described in a former work, 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. Of all passages of history, since history has been, who would have thought of going to the sayings and doings of old Eutyches, that delirus senex, as (I think) Petavius calls {115} him, and to the enormities of the unprincipled Dioscorus, in order to be converted to Rome! . . .What was the use of continuing the controversy, or defending my position, if, after all, I was forging arguments for Arius or Eutyches, and turning devil's advocate against the much-enduring {116} Athanasius and the majestic Leo? Be my soul with the Saints! and shall I lift up my hand against them?
Then he read Wiseman's article in the Dublin Review about the Donatist heresy, and certain words troubled Newman greatly (even though at first he did not think much of the article): Saint Augustine's phrase, "Securus judicat orbis terrarum." (The verdict of the world is conclusive):
they were words which went beyond the occasion of the Donatists: they applied to that of the Monophysites. They gave a cogency to the Article, which had escaped me at first. They decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of Antiquity; nay, St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of Antiquity; here then Antiquity was deciding against itself. What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church! not that, for the moment, the multitude may not falter in their judgment,—not that, in the Arian hurricane, Sees more than can be numbered did not bend before its fury, and fall off from St. Athanasius,—not that the crowd of Oriental Bishops did not need to be sustained during the contest by the voice and the eye of St. Leo; but that the deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede. . . . For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. . . . By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized.
The complete sentence and its source:
Quapropter securus judicat orbis terrarum, bonos non esse qui se dividunt ab orbe terrarum, in quacumque parte orbis terrarum. (Contra Epist. Parmen. 3.24)
And on this account, the world securely judges that those who divide themselves from the world are not good, in whatever part of the world (they are).
So, although Newman was not yet ready to even consider being received into the Catholic Church, he felt he had no ground to stand upon for the position he had taken in the Anglican Church! Studying the Fathers of the Church, from whom he hoped to find support for his Oxford Movement efforts to strengthen the Anglican Church's authority, had backfired on him at this point.
Later in chapter 3, he explains his reasons for writing Tract 90, again noting the place of Fathers in his view of what he called "the Church Catholic" in other Tracts he had written:
Anglicanism claimed to hold, that the Church of England was nothing else than a continuation in this country, (as the Church of Rome might be in France or Spain,) of that one Church of which in old times Athanasius and Augustine were members. But, if so, the doctrine must be the same; the doctrine of the Old Church must live and speak in Anglican formularies, in the 39 Articles. Did it? Yes, it did; that is what I maintained; {130} it did in substance, in a true sense. Man had done his worst to disfigure, to mutilate, the old Catholic Truth; but there it was, in spite of them, in the Articles still. It was there,—but this must be shown. It was a matter of life and death to us to show it. And I believed that it could be shown; I considered that those grounds of justification, which I gave above, when I was speaking of Tract 90, were sufficient for the purpose; and therefore I set about showing it at once.
As he writes at the beginning of chapter 4, "History of My Religious Opinions from 1841 to 1845", after the publication of Tract 90 and the vehement condemnation it received:
FROM the end of 1841, I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees. . . .
In the terms of St. Augustine's dictum, the Anglican world had "securely" rejected his dissent where he was, in Oxford. Although he had escaped condemnation, he was in schism from the Church of England.
He would retreat to Littlemore and study the Church Fathers and Church History, in the midst of prayer and meditation, by writing his Essay on the Development of Church Doctrine.
Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!
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