Newman's Dialogues on "Doctrinal Corruption": A Book Review

Matthew Levering's Newman on Doctrinal Corruption could be considered an alternative interpretation of Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. By exploring Newman's dialogues with the (deceased) historian Edward Gibbon, his friend Richard Hurrell Froude, his own younger brother Francis Newman, his erstwhile Tractarian friend E.B. Pusey, and his German contemporary Ignaz von Döllinger, Levering helps readers understand Newman's search for religious Truth and the moral certainty that he was living in the "one True fold of Christ" (as he wrote on October 8, 1845 before Blessed Dominic Barberi received him in to the Catholic Church the next day).

As the publisher, Word on Fire Academic, describes the book:

Newman on Doctrinal Corruption examines John Henry Newman’s understanding of history and doctrine in his own context, first as an Oxford student and professor reading Edward Gibbon and influenced by his close friend Hurrell Froude, then as a new Catholic convert in dialogue with his brother Francis, and finally as an eminent Catholic during the controversies over the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (in dialogue with Edward Pusey) and papal infallibility (in dialogue with Ignaz von Döllinger).

Author Matthew Levering argues that Newman’s career is shaped in large part by concerns about doctrinal corruption. Newman’s understanding of doctrinal development can only be understood when we come to share his concerns about the danger of doctrinal corruption—concerns that explain why Newman vigorously opposed religious liberalism. Particularly significant is Newman’s debate with the great German Church historian Döllinger since, in this final debate, Newman brings to bear all that he has learned about the nature of history, the formation of Church doctrine, the problem with private judgment, and the role of historical research.

As Levering notes states in the Introduction, "Whenever Newman thinks about doctrinal development, he always has the threat of doctrinal corruption in view" (p. 5). Furthermore, "one of the Essay's [The Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine] major subplots has to do with religious liberalism's impact upon all Christian churches and traditions" (pp. 6-7) because by embracing doctrinal corruption--denying the necessity and the fact of authentic doctrinal development--"religious liberalism ultimately leaves little in Christianity worth retaining" (p. 34). So Newman's concern that he find and defend the Church that has through the centuries retained, with true development, the Deposit of the Faith, is essential to all of the following chapters in Levering's book. 

The book fulfills all the claims of the blurb: Levering does justice to each of Newman's correspondents, exploring their own efforts to understand Christian history as they sought to know how to love, worship, and serve God (except perhaps Gibbon, who imposed on his own view on history of Christians in the The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as being the source of the corruption of the that fine, humane, and tolerant culture and civilization, with Nero burning Christians like torches in the Colosseum). 

Levering describes how Newman's history of reading Gibbon's masterpiece was informed by his reading of other historians who believed in God and saw His providential action in human history, like Joseph Milner's Church History and Bishop Butler's Analogy. From the former he took his budding interest in the Fathers of the Church (as he was "nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there") and from the latter the "inculcation of a visible Church, the oracle of truth and a pattern of sanctity, of the duties of external religion, and of the historical character of Revelation", as Newman described later in the first chapter of the Apologia pro Vita Sua. As Levering notes, Gibbon's religious skepticism and particular animus against the Catholic Church means he cannot be objective at all about the Christian faith during the end of the Empire. Levering concludes that Newman sees "development and truth" where Gibbon sees "corruption and fanaticism", and that Newman "is arguably much more self-aware about the impact of his antecedent beliefs than Gibbon . . ." (p. 100).

Levering next explores Richard Hurrell Froude's influence on Newman as they collaborated with Keble and Pusey in the Oxford or Tractarian movement. (R.H. Froude's younger brother James Anthony Froude and Newman would have their own dialogues on Church History!) R.H. Froude influenced Newman to accept what he had thought doctrinal corruptions: devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, admiration for "the Church of Rome", and developing belief in the Real of Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. The main Doctrinal Corruption Froude and Newman feared in the Church of England at that time was the Erastian take over of the Church by the Prime Minister and the Parliament. Levering cites, for example, a letter John Keble sent to them recounting Thomas Arnold's proposal that the Church of England just become a part of the State, "internalized as the conscience of the nation . . . superfluous . . . [becoming] the real substance of the political order." (pp. 117-118)

This letter reminded me of a poem we'd read during our December meeting of the Lovers of the Newman, "Christmas without Christ" which I'd mentioned here before. That proposal by Arnold--the reduction of the Church ("the Bride")--may be behind the stanzas:

O Britons! now so brave and high,

How will ye weep the day

When Christ in judgment passes by,

And calls the Bride away! {99}

Your Christmas then will lose its mirth,

Your Easter lose its bloom:

Abroad, a scene of strife and dearth;

Within, a cheerless home!

If the Church is just a department of the State, what do the feasts of Christmas and Easter mean? Where's the mirth, or the bloom, or the home for the Christian believer if the Church is just a political entity, a disembodied "conscience of the nation"? What will the Incarnation or the Resurrection even mean in a such a state?

[To conclude this distraction from the immediate topic: isn't this one of the joys of reading? Understanding something you've read and wondered about a little more because you've read just one more book, not expecting that recognition?]

But it's really not a distraction after all, because this extreme Erastianism proposed by Arnold is an example of how Newman, Pusey, Keble and Froude thought the doctrines--the 39 Articles, etc--of the Church of England would be corrupted either by dis-establishment or government control. And Levering proposes, in this chapter, through an examination of Newman's works on The Via Media, the "Essay on the Development", and "Anglican Difficulties" that  Newman's "Roman Catholic sense of the importance of the role of the pope and the bishops flows partly from his anti-Erastian concerns as an Anglican." (p. 104) 

In the chapter recounting Francis Newman's path away from orthodox Christianity, Levering posits that John Henry Newman was answering his own brother in the Apologia pro Vita Sua as much as he was answering Charles Kingsley, defending his integrity by detailing his religious opinions over the course of his life until he became a Catholic, owning his errors and expressing his gratitude to those who helped him in the past and from whom those opinions and his conversion had estranged him. Levering documents how Francis Newman's critical examination of Christian doctrine led him to accept only two beliefs: God loves us and we must be perfect. Questions about Who God Is, and what it means to be perfect in comparison of Who God Is are beside the point, to Francis.

Regarding Newman's answer to Pusey's Eirenicon, which Newman called an olive branch discharged "from a catapult" (p. 259), Levering provides a thorough summary of all of Pusey's criticisms of Catholic devotions and practices--a salvo Newman deflects by noting, for example, that one cannot cite the late Father Faber as the representative expression of all Catholic devotion in England--and then documents Newman's statements about the Development of "Marian Doctrines" in his famous Essay--and covers his arguments in his Letter to Pusey based on the early doctrines of Mary being the Mother of God and the New Eve. Newman thus defends the Catholic Church's doctrinal definition of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin (and, in advance, as Levering demonstrates in a book I previously reviewed, of her Assumption) as being the fitting consequence and development. 

I think of all the opponents Newman faced in his efforts to defend the Catholic Church against charges of Doctrinal Corruption, Ignaz von Döllinger may have been the most formidable, because he based his argument so much on the Fathers of the Church, the Councils of the Church and their authority vis-a-vis the papacy, and historical precedent in the Middle Ages. Until I looked him up, I did not realize what almost exact contemporaries Döllinger and Newman were. Döllinger was born on February 28, 1799; Newman on February 21, 1801; Döllinger died on January 14, 1890 (90 years old); Newman on August 11, 1890 (89 years old)! 

At least part of Newman's argument against Döllinger--and Gladstone, whom Döllinger assisted in his Kulturkampf-tinged pamphlets against Papal Infallibility--was that this doctrinal definition (which Newman thought needed another Council for greater context since the Vatican Council had been prorogued) was an important step in protecting the Catholic Church from Erastian interference. Remember that in Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, John W. O’Malley demonstrated that the call for a definition of the pope's role in defending the Church and its teachings and discipline had begun as a grassroots movement in the context of State interference (like Gallicanism, Febronianism, and Josephinism, etc through which the state or the ruler controlled education, formation of priests, selection of bishops, monastic and religious foundations, etc.) Newman saw this centralization of ecclesiastical power as God's Providence overseeing "doctrinal development" and "the course of history so as to lead all things to Christ" (pp. 333-334) at the same time that he warned against anyone--inside or outside of the Church--taking it to extremes. As he said before, during, and the after the Council, he had already believed in papal infallibility but didn't think it was an opportune time to define it as a doctrine. Once the bishops had agreed to the definition, he, unlike Döllinger, could not in good conscience dissent from it. (Conciliar agreement was one of Döllinger's standards.)

In his Conclusion, Levering discusses Newman's thoughts on the "consensus or sensus fidelium" of the lay faithful, noting that Newman "does not mean that when the consensus of the faithful becomes difficult to perceive--as for instance during the Reformation . . . the solution is to get rid of the contested doctrines, so that only doctrines most clearly supported by a supposed "consensus of the faithful" remain in place" (p. 348) and Newman believes that "the laity is not empowered to overturn solemnly taught doctrines of prior eras". (p. 350) Thus, to cite Newman in support of lay dissent from Church teaching on abortion, artificial contraception, marriage, etc., is to misinterpret Newman's On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.

Levering evaluates the success and failures of Newman's arguments/debates with Gibbon, Froude, Newman, Pusey, and Döllinger, and discusses David Bentley Hart's criticisms of Newman's views in Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. 

The fact that John Henry Newman was alive at the time of two such great doctrinal definitions (the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility) is itself a proof of Divine Providence. As the visiting priest told us at the Traditional Latin Mass this past Sunday, our being alive at this time (he did cite birth dates in the 1980's, 1990's and 2000's, revealing his own chronological bias) is not an accident: Our Lord meant us to be alive now as this is the time for each of us to be faithful and be saints. As Saint John Henry Newman's Meditation "Hope in God--Creator" declares: 

GOD has created all things for good; all things for their greatest good; everything for its own good. . . . God has determined, unless I interfere with His plan, that I should reach that which will be my greatest happiness. He looks on me individually, He calls me by my name, He knows what I can do, what I can best be, what is my greatest happiness, and He means to give it me.

Levering's book might be better for someone who has read Newman's works and is familiar with his life and times than for one reading about Newman for the first or even second time. While he does not assume great prior knowledge, it helped me to have read Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, and his Letters to Pusey and the Duke of Norfolk, and to have consulted the Apologia pro Vita Sua a few times. General familiarity with the Newmanian bibliography and the state of Newman scholarship is also helpful. I was pleased to see Levering cite and refute Pattison's The Great Dissent, which I think is a rather obscure study of Newman's life and work.

Now I'm reading Father Dermot Fenlon's book on Reginald Cardinal Pole (I'm on the fourth chapter: Pole and the spirituali are trying to figure out how to accept Luther's doctrine on justification and remain Catholic after the breakdown of the Regensburg conference of 1541) . . . Heresy and Obedience are the issues in the title . . . 

Image Credit (Public Domain): Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890)

Preview: St. J.H. Newman's Marian "Development of Doctrine"

In our penultimate survey of Saint John Henry Newman's various opinions on Catholic Marian Doctrine and Devotion, Matt Swaim or Anna Mitchell and I will look briefly at what Newman wrote about what the Church believes about the Mother of God in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine this coming Monday, August 22, on the Son Rise Morning Show.

I'll be on at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here on EWTN Radio or on your local EWTN Affiliate.

Sr. Lutgart Govaert FSO, writing for the blog of the International Centre for Newman Friends, sums up Newman's efforts from late 1842 to 1844 when

 . . . Newman applied his mind to the principle of doctrinal development in the Christian Church. He was interested in whether a true development, a true growth, is possible and how to discern it from an innovation and corruption. This question was of crucial importance, since Newman still suspected the Church of Rome of having added new doctrines and practices to the original Creed.

In the Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman suggested that there is a link between his new insight in Marian doctrine and devotion in the Roman Church and his study of doctrinal development. He wrote:

“The idea of the Blessed Virgin was as it were magnified in the Church of Rome, as time went on, – but so were all the Christian ideas; as that of the Blessed Eucharist. The whole scene of pale, faint, distant Apostolic Christianity is seen in Rome, as through a telescope or magnifier. The harmony of the whole, however, is of course what it was”[22]. . . 

In these same years, Newman translated some writings by St. Athanasius. He did not find there anything explicitly on Our Lady, but he discovered the theological principle of devotion to the Saints, as he explained in his An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, a work he wrote in 1845, while finding the answers to his last doubts concerning the Church of Rome, and which he left unfinished on being received into the Roman Catholic Church. . . 

In Chapter 4 of the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, "Instances in Illustration": Newman highlights developments in Marian doctrine after the Nestorian controversy, in a section titled "Our Lord's Incarnation and the Dignity of His Blessed Mother and of All Saints":

10. I have said that there was in the first ages no public and ecclesiastical recognition of the place which St. Mary holds in the Economy of grace; this was reserved for the fifth century, as the definition of our Lord's proper Divinity had been the work of the fourth. There was a controversy contemporary with those already mentioned, I mean the Nestorian, which brought out the complement of the development, to which they had been subservient; and which, if I may so speak, supplied the subject of that august proposition of which Arianism had provided the predicate. In order to do honour to Christ, in order to defend the true doctrine of the Incarnation, in order to secure a right faith in the manhood of the Eternal Son, the Council of Ephesus determined the Blessed Virgin to be the Mother of God. Thus all heresies of that day, though opposite to each other, tended in a most wonderful way to her exaltation; and the School of Antioch, the fountain of primitive rationalism, led the Church to determine first the conceivable greatness of a creature, and then the incommunicable dignity of the Blessed Virgin.

Then he offers a survey of several of the great Fathers of the Church:

11. But the spontaneous or traditional feeling of Christians had in great measure anticipated the formal ecclesiastical decision. Thus the title Theotokos, or Mother of God, was familiar to Christians from primitive times, and had been used, among other writers, by Origen, Eusebius, St. Alexander, St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Gregory Nyssen, and St. Nilus. She had been called {146} Ever-Virgin by others, as by St. Epiphanius, St. Jerome, and Didymus. By others, "the Mother of all living," as being the antitype of Eve; for, as St. Epiphanius observes, "in truth," not in shadow, "from Mary was Life itself brought into the world, that Mary might bear things living, and might become Mother of living things." [Note 24] St. Augustine says that all have sinned "except the Holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom, for the honour of the Lord, I wish no question to be raised at all, when we are treating of sins." "She was alone and wrought the world's salvation," says St. Ambrose, alluding to her conception of the Redeemer. She is signified by the Pillar of the cloud which guided the Israelites, according to the same Father; and she had "so great grace, as not only to have virginity herself, but to impart it to those to whom she came;"—"the Rod out of the stem of Jesse," says St. Jerome, and "the Eastern gate through which the High Priest alone goes in and out, yet is ever shut;"—the wise woman, says St. Nilus, who "hath clad all believers, from the fleece of the Lamb born of her, with the clothing of incorruption, and delivered them from their spiritual nakedness;"—"the Mother of Life, of beauty, of majesty, the Morning Star," according to Antiochus;—"the mystical new heavens," "the heavens carrying the Divinity," "the fruitful vine by whom we are translated from death unto life," according to St. Ephraim;—"the manna which is delicate, bright, sweet, and virgin, which, as though coming from heaven, has poured down on all the people of the Churches a food pleasanter than honey," according to St. Maximus.

In the second part of the Essay, Newman applied a series of tests to determine whether or not a doctrine was a corruption or a valid development:

1. Preservation of Type
2. Continuity of Principles
3. Power of Assimilation
4. Logical Sequence
5. Anticipation of Its Future
6. Conservative Action upon Its Past
7. Chronic Vigour

Newman tests the development of Marian doctrine in Chapter 10. "Application of the Fifth Note of a True Development—Anticipation of Its Future" in a section titled "Office of the Blessed Virgin":

The special prerogatives of St. Mary, the Virgo Virginum, are intimately involved in the doctrine of the Incarnation itself, with which these remarks began, and have already been dwelt upon above. As is well known, they were not fully recognised in the Catholic ritual till a late date, but they were not a new thing in the Church, or strange to her earlier teachers. St. Justin, St. Irenæus, and others, had distinctly laid it down, that she not only had an office, but bore a part, and was a voluntary agent, in the actual process of redemption, as Eve had been instrumental and responsible in Adam's fall. They taught that, as the first woman might have foiled the Tempter and did not, so, if Mary had been disobedient or unbelieving on Gabriel's message, the Divine Economy would have been frustrated. And certainly the parallel between "the Mother of all living" and the Mother of the Redeemer may be gathered from a comparison of the first chapters {416} of Scripture with the last. . . 

Here, however, we are not so much concerned to interpret Scripture as to examine the Fathers. Thus St. Justin says, "Eve, being a virgin and incorrupt, having conceived the word from the Serpent, bore disobedience and death; but Mary the Virgin, receiving faith and joy, when Gabriel the Angel evangelized her, answered, 'Be it unto me according to thy word.'" [Note 19] And Tertullian says that, whereas Eve believed the Serpent, and Mary believed Gabriel, "the fault of Eve in believing, Mary by believing hath blotted out." [Note 20] St. Irenæus speaks more {417} explicitly: "As Eve," he says ... "becoming disobedient, became the cause of death to herself and to all mankind, so Mary too, having the predestined Man, and yet a Virgin, being obedient, became cause of salvation both to herself and to all mankind." [Note 21] This becomes the received doctrine in the Post-nicene Church.

We'll see how Newman reminds his old friend Pusey of this Patristic view of Mary as the Second Eve in our last segment on Newman and Marian doctrine Monday, August 29.

Chapter 11, "Application of the Sixth Note of a True Development—Conservative Action on Its Past" examines the development of devotion to the Mother of God and here demonstrates what we've read before: he asserts that devotion to her depends on worship of her Son, Jesus Christ:

It has been anxiously asked, whether the honours paid to St. Mary, which have grown out of devotion to her Almighty Lord and Son, do not, in fact, tend to weaken that devotion; and whether, from the nature of the case, it is possible so to exalt a creature without withdrawing the heart from the Creator.

In addition to what has been said on this subject in foregoing Chapters, I would here observe that the question is one of fact, not of presumption or conjecture. The abstract lawfulness of the honours paid to St. Mary, and their distinction in theory from the incommunicable worship paid {426} to God, are points which have already been dwelt upon; but here the question turns upon their practicability or expedience, which must be determined by the fact whether they are practicable, and whether they have been found to be expedient.

Newman looks again at the history of the early Ecumenical Councils:

1. Here I observe, first, that, to those who admit the authority of the Fathers of Ephesus, the question is in no slight degree answered by their sanction of the [Theotokos] or "Mother of God," as a title of St. Mary, and as given in order to protect the doctrine of the Incarnation, and to preserve the faith of Catholics from a specious Humanitarianism. And if we take a survey at least of Europe, we shall find that it is not those religious communions which are characterized by devotion towards the Blessed Virgin that have ceased to adore her Eternal Son, but those very bodies, (when allowed by the law,) which have renounced devotion to her. The regard for His glory, which was professed in that keen jealousy of her exaltation, has not been supported by the event. They who were accused of worshipping a creature in His stead, still worship Him; their accusers, who hoped to worship Him so purely, they, wherever obstacles to the development of their principles have been removed, have ceased to worship Him altogether.

2. Next, it must be observed, that the tone of the devotion paid to the Blessed Mary is altogether distinct from that which is paid to her Eternal Son, and to the Holy Trinity, as we must certainly allow on inspection of the Catholic services. The supreme and true worship paid to the Almighty is severe, profound, awful, as well as tender, confiding, and dutiful. Christ is addressed as true God, {427} while He is true Man; as our Creator and Judge, while He is most loving, gentle, and gracious. On the other hand, towards St. Mary the language employed is affectionate and ardent, as towards a mere child of Adam; though subdued, as coming from her sinful kindred.

And after a survey of common Catholic devotionals to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Newman concludes  there's no idolatry in them at all, and: "Again, a special office is assigned to the Blessed Virgin, that is, special as compared with all other Saints; but it is marked off with the utmost precision from that assigned to our Lord. . . . Again, a distinct cultus is assigned to Mary, but the {436} reason of it is said to be the transcendent dignity of her Son."

Newman is consistent in asserting--from that 1832 sermon on "The Reverence Due to the Virgin Mary," to the 1849 sermons "The Glories of Mary for the Sake of her Son" and "On the Fitness of the Glories of Mary", through to the reasons for her Assumption in the "Meditations" on the Litany of Loreto he wrote for the boys of the Oratory School--the Catholic Church's Marian doctrines and devotions are based on the Catholic Church's Christological doctrine and worship. 

Newman may have not said it so succinctly, but his arguments demonstrate that "Catholics do not worship Mary!"

Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image credit (public domain) Virgin Salus Populi Romani, Rome (5th or 6th century)

Newman on Papal Infallibility and Theological Conflict

Here's a fascinating post from Commonweal on Newman, Papal Infallibility, the Development of Doctrine. I think that the response by Michael Hollerich is better than the first statement on the issue by Philip Porter because of the words I've bolded below from Hollerich's response:

Porter’s account of the development of doctrine sent me back to my marked-up copy of Newman’s Apologia, a book I once read with fascination and still find a stunning literary performance. I remember being especially struck with the fifth and concluding chapter containing Newman’s defense of papal infallibility, which has important and enduring insights. I don’t blame Porter for being drawn to Newman’s beguiling rhetoric. But it is rhetoric. Porter quotes it selectively. When he endorses Newman’s statement that the church “must denounce rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest,” one demurs and thinks of how Romans 13 has reconciled the church to all manner of brutal modern regimes, for the pragmatic sake of its own survival. Porter passes over the infamous passage that immediately follows, in which Newman goes on to say that the Catholic Church teaches that it were better for the world to end “and for all the many millions of human beings on it to die of starvation in extremest agony…than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.” You don’t have to be a Benthamite utilitarian to find this objectionable.

Newman’s penchant for such antitheses reflects his vertigo in the face of modern atheism and unbelief. It turns parts of the Apologia into a drumbeat of either/ors growing out of his dispiriting discovery that his idealized Anglican Via Media between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism was only a paper church, and that really-existing Anglicanism was being drained of vitality and substance. (Some of his modern readers worry that the same thing is now happening to Catholicism.) Yet his eloquent defense of the living process by which doctrine has been debated and defined in Catholicism still has plausibility. He is certainly right that we have to accept the “givenness” of tradition, be it the facticity of the biblical canon, or the unfolding of the ecumenical councils, or even the emergence of an ultimate court of appeal in the primacy of the pope. I don’t see how Catholic theology can exist without proceeding from this accumulation of tradition, always reviewing and reinterpreting it, sometimes selectively forgetting it (what else are we to do with Boniface VIII and Unam sanctam?), but never cutting off the branches on which we all sit. We’re stuck, for instance, with Vatican I, though the full story of its reception is hardly over. I recommend Francis Oakley’s account of the suppression and re-emergence of the conciliarist tradition: rather than shelved and forgotten once and for all at Vatican I, as its enemies thought, it was available to be brought out of cold storage a century later at Vatican II.

When quoting Newman you cannot be selective, unless you wish to twist his argument to your own point of view. You must always trace his argument precisely, either quoting him or paraphrasing him carefully.

Development of the Church's View of Newman's "Development"

For Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Dr. Ryan Marr, a member of The National Institute for Newman Studies in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, reviews Newman's Early Roman Catholic Legacy, 1845-1854 by C. Michael Shea, published by Oxford University Press:

C. Michael Shea’s Newman’s Early Roman Catholic Legacy, 1845-1854, represents a landmark historical study in the field of Newman scholarship. While numerous studies of John Henry Newman’s life and writings continue to be churned out each year, few monographs within the field exhibit the depth of archival research and originality of argumentation that Shea’s book does. With this relatively brief study (the argument proper runs right around 200 pages), Shea offers a convincing revision of an assumption that has long held sway in Newman studies—namely, that Newman’s theory of doctrinal development was held in suspicion by Roman theologians during the years immediately following the publication of his Essay on Development (1845), and only fully emerged from this cloud of suspicion in the mid-twentieth century when it was officially vindicated at the Second Vatican Council.

As Shea demonstrates, this narrative gained traction through Owen Chadwick’s influential book, From Bossuet to Newman, which portrayed the influence of Newman’s Essay on Development as “almost wholly negative” (19). According to Chadwick’s reading of events, continental theologians, in particular, were unreceptive of Newman’s theory of development, and in Rome, even among those who were generally sympathetic to Newman, the idea landed with a thud. A key cog in Chadwick’s argument was his view of Newman’s famous exchange with the renowned Roman theologian, Giovanni Perrone, which Chadwick interpreted as a wholesale rejection of the concept of development. In Chadwick’s judgment, “Perrone laconically, but flatly, denied Newman’s thesis” (From Bossuet to Newman, 182).

In his introduction, Shea shows how Newman scholars have, for the most part, taken Chadwick’s rendering of events as definitive, and then constructed their histories of the reception of Newman’s theory around this basic narrative framework. As a prominent example, Shea points to Aidan Nichols’ From Newman to Congar, which “built upon Chadwick’s foundation” and, in so doing, “perpetuated and deepened the impression of the Essay on Development’s being neither accepted, nor influential, after it first appeared” (19). Since the publication of Nichols’ study in 1990, Newman scholars have continued to research and publish on the theory of doctrinal development, operating under the assumption that Newman’s idea followed a trajectory of early rejection and later acceptance in Roman Catholic circles.

Through a careful engagement with previously neglected sources, Shea demonstrates that the reception of Newman’s theory was exceedingly more complex than this narrative lets on. . . .

Please read the rest there. It would be fascinating to know what Aidan Nichols thinks about Shea's book! Here's some detail from OUP on the contents. 

Oops! Newman Does It Again

Perusing this article at The Catholic Herald, two paragraphs caught my eye before the others, because Philosophy Professor Thomas Pink mentions Newman (Blessed John Henry Newman):

Christianity came to me, as it must to anyone, at a particular time and place. But that time and place, an English public school in the 1970s, seemed to present Christianity only to contain it there – as a form of mildly liberal Protestantism combined, in some mutual tension, with evangelical enthusiasm. The school religion was the Christianity of the post-Victorian Establishment modified, to a degree, by the cultural loosening of the 1960s.

It was in the library that I discovered John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, and through Newman the Church Fathers. The Fathers were a revelation to me. Most astonishing of all, they clearly believed in the Mass – in a Eucharistic sacrifice and a change of elements, a change that took elements at a specific time and place, and transformed them into Someone really present, but not as Someone contained by a particular place or time. This Christianity came from somewhere quite different from the England of my family and school. It came from the Palestine of antiquity through Greece and Rome. And it was universal and not a religion subject to the authority of any state.

As I read him, Newman showed me that the contingency of history could unfold and reveal something eternal, not a mere object of memory, and not the property of a particular nation. My school religion was not really presenting me with this at all. The state and cultural establishment in which I had been brought up had tried to contain Christianity by seeking to suppress this very universality, and in particular – and most significantly it seemed to me – by denying the transcendent in the Eucharist.

As Newman said, "The Fathers made me Catholic" and through Newman, they had the same influence on Thomas Pink!

According to King's College London, Thomas Pink:

read history and philosophy at Cambridge, where he also received his PhD. After working for four years in London and New York for a City merchant bank, he returned to philosophy in 1990 as a Research Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He then lectured at Sheffield University prior to moving to King's in 1996.

Among his publications is the volume on Free Will for OUP's Very Short Introduction series:

Every day we seem to make and act upon all kinds of choices: some trivial, others so consequential that they change the course of one's life, or even the course of history. But are these choices really free, or are we compelled to act the way we do by factors beyond our control? Is the feeling that we could have made different decisions just an illusion? And if our choices are not free, is it legitimate to hold people morally responsible for their actions?

Thomas Pink looks at the fundamental philosophical question of free will, critically examining the claim: If our actions are causally determined by events beyond our control, that means that we can never act freely, and so can never be held responsible for our actions.

"NEWMAN WAS MISTAKEN"? Deep In History

Peter Leithart writes about "Tradition and the Individual Theologian" on the First Things blog:

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy argued that traditions always grow from seeds sown by singular individuals. Before there was a Franciscan order, there was the man Francis. Once there was only Luther; now the world is peopled with Lutherans. What is a tradition if not the persuasive claims of an individual, repeated?

Appeals to tradition become deeply unhistorical when they treat doctrinal formulations, creeds, and confessions as if they were permanent features of the landscape, as natural as falling apples and the rising sun. To be deeply historical is to be open to the possibility of another Francis, another Luther, another homoousion. It is to be open to the idiosyncratic individual scholar. Newman was mistaken: To be deep in history is to be open to the possibility of Protestantism.

It's rather unusual to see Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy cited in an article, but Leithart has written about him for First Things before.

I don't really see how being "deeply historical is to be open to the possibility of another Francis" equates with being "open to the possibility of Protestantism." And I don't accept Leithart's argument about time and revelation, because all Truth must be eternal, it is one and unchanging--it is our discovery of Truth that is time-bound and subject to change and time.

Newman's brief remark has to be placed in greater context--he was writing about the fact of how Protestants in his era rejected historical Christianity:

Meanwhile, before setting about this work, I will address one remark to Chillingworth and his friends:—Let them consider, that if they can criticize history, the facts of history certainly can retort upon them. It might, I grant, be clearer on this great subject than it is. This is no great concession. History is not a creed or a catechism, it gives lessons rather than rules; still no one can mistake its general teaching in this matter, whether he accept it or stumble at it. Bold outlines and broad masses of colour rise out of the records of the past. They may be dim, they may be incomplete; but they are definite. And this one thing at least is certain; whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.

And Protestantism has ever felt it so. I do not mean that every writer on the Protestant side has felt it; for it was the fashion at first, at least as a rhetorical argument against Rome, to appeal to past ages, or to some of them; but Protestantism, as a whole, feels it, and has felt it. This is shown in the determination already referred to of dispensing with historical Christianity altogether, and of forming a Christianity from the Bible alone: men never would have put it aside, unless they had despaired of it. It is shown by the long neglect of ecclesiastical history in England, which prevails even in the English Church. Our popular religion scarcely recognizes the fact of the twelve long ages which lie between the Councils of Nicæa and Trent, except as affording one or two passages to illustrate its wild interpretations of certain prophesies of St. Paul and St. John. It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon. To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.

Note that he does not say that "To be deep in history is to become a Catholic", since he cites the example of Edward Gibbon. Newman goes on:

And this utter incongruity between Protestantism and historical Christianity is a plain fact, whether the latter be regarded in its earlier or in its later centuries. Protestants can as little bear its Ante-nicene as its Post-tridentine period. I have elsewhere observed on this circumstance: "So much must the Protestant grant that, if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge, suddenly, silently, and without memorial; by a deluge coming in a night, and utterly soaking, rotting, heaving up, and hurrying off every vestige of what it found in the Church, before cock-crowing: so that 'when they rose in the morning' her true seed 'were all dead corpses'—Nay dead and buried—and without grave-stone. 'The waters went over them; there was not one of them left; they sunk like lead in the mighty waters.' Strange antitype, indeed, to the early fortunes of Israel!—then the enemy was drowned, and 'Israel saw them dead upon the sea-shore.' But now, it would seem, water proceeded as a flood 'out of the serpent's mouth, and covered all the witnesses, so that not even their dead bodies lay in the streets of the great city.' Let him take which of his doctrines he will, his peculiar view of self-righteousness, of formality, of superstition; his notion of faith, or of spirituality in religious worship; his denial {9} of the virtue of the sacraments, or of the ministerial commission, or of the visible Church; or his doctrine of the divine efficacy of the Scriptures as the one appointed instrument of religious teaching; and let him consider how far Antiquity, as it has come down to us, will countenance him in it. No; he must allow that the alleged deluge has done its work; yes, and has in turn disappeared itself; it has been swallowed up by the earth, mercilessly as itself was merciless." 

That Protestantism, then, is not the Christianity of history, it is easy to determine, but to retort is a poor reply in controversy to a question of fact, and whatever be the violence or the exaggeration of writers like Chillingworth, if they have raised a real difficulty, it may claim a real answer, and we must determine whether on the one hand Christianity is still to represent to us a definite teaching from above, or whether on the other its utterances have been from time to time so strangely at variance, that we are necessarily thrown back on our own judgment individually to determine, what the revelation of God is, or rather if in fact there is, or has been, any revelation at all.

This is just another example of how careful you have to be when quoting Blessed John Henry Newman.