Preview: Newman on "How to Read the Fathers of the Church", Part Two

Last week I ended my post with the comment that after his "Monophysite mirror" moment, Saint John Henry Newman had a problem. 

Antiquity, meaning the early Church and the Fathers of the Church, was the foundation upon which he wanted to build the Anglican Via Media, but that foundation was crumbling. 

So in this second look on the Son Rise Morning Show at how Newman learned to read the Fathers of the Church, Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim and I will examine what Newman did next. I'll be on the air Monday, October 28 at my usual time, about 7:50 a.m. EDT/6:50 a.m. CDT. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

Father Joseph Carola's chapter on John Henry Newman in Engaging the Church Fathers in Nineteenth-Century Catholicism: The Patristic Legacy of the "Scuola Romana", published by Emmaus Academic, provides us with excellent insight into Newman's reading of the Fathers, and what he did after he realized that Antiquity was not enough. 

He includes a partial quotation from the 1875 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, which I quote in full from chapter 2, "The Ancient Church":

In truth, this fidelity to the ancient Christian system, seen in modern Rome, was the luminous fact which more than any other turned men's minds at Oxford forty years ago to look towards her with reverence, interest, and love. It affected individual minds variously of course; some it even brought on eventually to conversion, others it only restrained from active opposition to her claims; but none of us could read the Fathers, and determine to be their disciples, without feeling that Rome, like a faithful steward, had kept in fulness and in vigour what our own communion had let drop. (p. 198)

 As Father Carola notes, 

By the early 1840s Newman's thought had clearly evolved from an effectively static vision of Christian antiquity to a dynamic understanding of doctrinal development. The Fathers had shown him that antiquity, while remaining normative, does not stand as an absolute rule in itself. The Fathers themselves point to the judgment of the living Church in every age. (p. 89)

In September of 1841, Newman moved out of Oxford to The College in Littlemore: he was as he said "on his deathbed" in the Church of England because he did not see in it "the living Church"--but was it in the Catholic Church, the feared and mistrusted 'Church of Rome'? 

By the Summer of 1843, this chronology of his life tells us that "Newman’s doubt about the Church of England is greater than his doubt about the Roman Church". From that date until October 9, 1845, Newman began to cut off more and more of his ties to the Church of England and Oxford, resigning his positions at St. Mary's and Oriel, while he prayed and studied Church History and the Fathers.

Because after that Monophysite crisis, Newman had faced another problem when he read Father Nicholas Wiseman's article about the Donatist heresy in the Dublin Review. Wiseman had cited Saint Augustine's dictum "Securus judicat orbis terrarum" (the whole world judges surely). 

Carola writes: that "axiom from one of antiquity's prime oracles decided, as far as Newman was concerned, against antiquity as an absolute rule in itself in favor of a temporal-geographical principle of magisterial catholicity," (p. 137) While Newman could temporarily argue that even Saint Augustine's statement can't be taken 'as an absolute rule' on its own, he soon had to acknowledge there was a "continuity-in-development that accounts for legitimate growth in Catholic doctrine and practice over the ages." (p. 139)

And so, at Littlemore, Newman studied the Fathers of the Church in a yet another way as he analyzed the development of doctrine during the first six centuries of Church History. Newman found in that history and in the Fathers a pattern of valid development in the Catholic Church. 

Where before he thought there was corruption, he found "continuity-in-development" as the Fathers and the Councils and the Magisterium dealt with both heresies that threatened and the growth in understanding the deposit of faith. According to his tests or notes of preservation of type, assimilation, logical sequence, etc., described in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman found chronic vigor in the Catholic Church he did not find in the Church of England or elsewhere.

Father Carola makes the interesting comment on page 143 that after Newman became a Catholic and priest of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, he continued his studies in "an unfolding doctrinal development" and sought "such continuity between the Church Fathers and the medieval Schoolman, especially Thomas Aquinas." Despite that "engagement with scholastic thought, the Church Fathers always remained Newman's first love".

Thus in his 1866 Letter Addressed to the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D.,on Occasion of His Eirenicon, Newman could write:

For myself, hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of their times is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain the value and authority of the "Schola," as one of the loci theologici; nevertheless I sympathize with Petavius** in preferring to the "contentious and subtle theology" of the middle age, that "more elegant and fruitful teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite Antiquity." The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now, as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you know, a process of development in Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them. (p. 24)

**Petavius, Denis Pétau (August 21, 1583 to December 11, 1652), also known as Dionysius Petavius, was a French Jesuit theologian. More about him here, if you are interested. The very fact that Newman read Petavius, who wrote about the history of doctrine among other subjects, demonstrates the validity of Carola's comment above!

In his biographic sketch of Newman's life, Father Carola mentions that Newman ended his publishing career where he began it, "with the Alexandrian Fathers" when he published an updated edition of Saint Athanasius' treatises against the Arians in 1881, nine years before his death. (p. 91)

This seems like an appropriate place to end this Son Rise Morning Show series on Newman and the Fathers of the Church. 

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!