NEW SRMS Series: Newman and the Fathers of the Church

Anna Mitchell of the Son Rise Morning Show on EWTN and Sacred Heart Radio asked me to talk about Saint John Henry Newman's study of the Fathers of the Church in a new Monday morning series. She requested this series--we've scheduled two so far--because of her participation in an Institute of Catholic Culture course: note the first paragraph of the description of Patristics 101:

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.

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

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!

More Kaufman on Augustine and More

As a quick follow-up to my review of Peter Iver Kaufman's Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More, I wanted to let you know that there's more.

The University of Richmond Scholarship Repository provides links to many articles by the same author, including several on Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas More.

There's an essay on "Augustine's Dystopia", for example, from Augustine's City of God: A Critical Guide, 55-74. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 and one on "Augustine and Corruption".

In addition to several articles on Thomas More, including one on Margaret Roper and the famous Alington Letter on conscience and "Good Company" and a response to Wolf Hall ("Dis-Manteling More"), Kaufman has also written articles on various issues in Elizabethan England and on Shakespeare's plays.

Enjoy browsing. I have not explored beyond Kaufman's works yet, but according to the website:

The University of Richmond's Scholarship Repository brings together and provides open access to the intellectual content of its faculty, students and many centers and programs. The repository includes a broad spectrum of materials and formats, including written scholarship by faculty and students.

UR Scholarship Repository is an open-access compliant institutional repository, with content freely accessible to the world and searchable via Google Scholar and other search engines.

All current and emeritus faculty and staff can deposit their work in this repository into their communities (their home departments) by contacting their respective library. Published and unpublished works of current and emeritus faculty and staff may be uploaded into the repository. Images, video and audio may be uploaded as well.

Book Review: Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More

I readily admit that political philosophy or Christian political philosophy have not been great interests of mine. Except for reading Plato's Dialogues and excerpts from the Republic in philosophy classes or Cicero's works in rhetoric classes in college, I haven't delved much into the field. I have read Thomas More's Utopia but not Augustine's City of God. A small group of friends and I have been reading The Consolation of Philosophy, so I've dipped into Boethius's thoughts about philosophers and good men getting involved in government--and Robert R. Reilly's recent book about the founding of the USA has been a big influence on me lately.

While exploring Thomas More's philosophy, wondering if his interest in the New Learning had led him to Nominalism, I noted that he had given lectures on the City of God circa 1501 and thus found this book, Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More by Peter Iver Kaufman.

Incorrectly Political, a copy of which I purchased--a remainder I presume because of the price--was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2007:

Peter Iver Kaufman explains how and why we have failed to appreciate Augustine’s and More’s profound political pessimism and thereby reintroduces readers to two of the Christian tradition’s most enigmatic yet influential figures. Each knew that government was useful—yet always deceitful. And each wrote a classic widely read to this day, Augustine’s City of God and More’s Utopia, as well as abundant correspondence and polemical tracts to explain why government on earth might be used, though never meaningfully improved.

You may read a sample of it here, via the University of Richmond Scholarship Repository.

The Table of Contents (including subheads):

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Augustine, Ambrose, and Ambition

• Christianity?
• Ambrose and Power
• A Word Peddler's New Purpose
• The Bishop Looks Back
• The Crisis at Calama

2. Limitations

• Augustine's Court
• "In the Face of Evil Days"
• "The Enemies of Grace"

3. Using Government: Augustine and the Donatists

• Secession
• Protection and Correction: Augustine and the Failure of Argument
• Thugs
• That the Government Should Be Used

4. Used But Not Improved: Augustine's "City of God"

• Martyrs
• "Love Not the World"
• Libido Dominandi
• "Mark the Contrasts"
• Other "Beginnings" with Different Ends

5. Thomas More: At Work in the World

• Becoming Useful
• Ambitions and Illusions
• More, Pico, and Erasmus

6. Utopia?

• Hythloday on Power and Integrity
• Wordplay
• Social Control
• Omnia Omnium
• Genuine Justice, Nowhere and Never

7. Crisis

• Promotion and Commotion
• "The Comon Knowen Catholyke Fayth" and the Church
• "Divisions"
• Henry VIII's Matrimonial Matter and God's "Greate Cause"
• Discomfort
• Politics in "This Time of Teares"
• Endgame

Conclusion

Notes

Index

As described in the blurb, Kaufman's main point is that both Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas More acknowledged that public affairs, government administration, and participation in the government and the courts were dangerous, but necessary, to the individual and the community. Saint Augustine served as the bishop of Hippo when the Emperor Theodosius reigned; Roman government was still mixed up with Roman pagan religion even though Catholicism had become the official religion of the State. Pagan rites and feasts were still part of the public life of the Empire and Augustine warned Catholics serving in public office not to participate in those pagan leftovers. But Augustine also wanted the government to defend Catholic teaching, helping him deal with the Pelagian and Donatist heretics--especially to defend Catholic churches the Donatists attacked because they did not accept the succession of the bishops or the ordinations of the priests by those bishops--who were dividing Catholics in his diocese. As a parallel to Saint Thomas More centuries later, Kaufman notes that Saint Augustine's written apologetics for Catholic teaching on grace and forgiveness needed the backing of the State: persuasion only went so far.

There are other parallels between Augustine and More: both were judges--Augustine in his episcopal court; More as Chancellor; both had some ambition to make their mark in the world--Augustine as a rhetorician; More as a lawyer and an official; both indicate ambivalence regarding their active, public lives: Augustine in his long process of conversion and his desire for a contemplative, monastic life; More through his comments to family and friends, his discernment of a religious vocation, and his pattern of meditation, prayer, and asceticism (the famous hair shirt).

As noted above, I've never read the City of God so cannot judge Kaufman's summary and explication of that great work. On the one hand, Augustine wanted to defend Catholics from the pagan attacks that Christianity had weakened Rome leading to its sacking by Alaric and on the other, he wanted to remind Catholics that this world was not their true home. Heaven is their/our true home: however much we participate in this world to try to make it better for others and ourselves, to try to defend true Catholic teaching, etc., we must realize that we should "Love Not the World."

With the chapters on Thomas More, I'm on more familiar ground. In addition to Augustine and More, Kaufman cites both Saint Ambrose of Milan and Erasmus of Rotterdam because of their influences on these two great men. Saint Ambrose because of his (somewhat distant) example; Erasmus because of how he encouraged and supported More's humanistic studies, organizing praise for More's Utopia among other humanists for example (16th century blurbs for that book!). Kaufman sometimes questions Erasmus' analysis of More, however, as when he casts doubts on the Erasmian interpretation of More's discernment of religious life--a misunderstanding that would only increase as More fought heresy and accepted martyrdom. Kaufman takes a nice swipe at Richard Marius, who presented an image of More as a repressed sexual neurotic in his 1983 biography of More when he notes that even though no trace of More's carefully presented lectures on the City of God has survived, Marius knows what influence Augustine had on More's decision to get married!

Describing More's rise in England's public affairs and Henry VIII's court, Kaufman also addresses More's realism about his vulnerability in such positions, like the famous comment to his son-in-law Roper that Henry VIII would have More's head cut off if it would gain the king a castle in France. In both the chapter on Utopia and the chapter on More's last years in Henry VIII's service and then in the Tower, Kaufman emphasizes that More was warning both the international humanist community and the English religious community that things are not as they seemed. Some of the improvements and advancements Erasmus and his followers wanted could only come through great community control and loss of individual freedom. The religious changes urged by Martin Luther and his followers in England and abroad (the supposed moderate Germain, the socially concerned Fish, and the Bible translating Tyndale) would lead to social upheavals that Henry VIII had not imagined and would not approve. More held on to hoping for Henry's understanding of these dangers even after he'd left the king's service and until his imprisonment in the Tower of London. Then he determined as he told Cromwell (and his daughter Meg in the letter he sent her describing one of his interrogations in the Tower) that he would leave off involvement in worldly affairs and think only of the Passion of Jesus Christ and his own preparation for death. Before that he wrote extensive and sometimes exhaustive attacks on Lutheran ideas, Fish's proposals, etc--and he applied the heresy laws of England as Chancellor, trusting for a time that he had Henry's consent and support (silence: Henry never told him to stop: consent).

I found interesting that Kaufman quotes More in 16th century English but does not cite Augustine in 4th/5th century Latin! One of the blurbs for this book in 2007 mentioned its timeliness in view of world affairs at that time; I might also say that it's timely for me to read this book in an election year. As a Catholic Christian, my devotion and assent to Church teaching influences the way I evaluate candidates and especially what they can or should and what they can't or shouldn't do while in office representing me. Augustine and More are still good guides for understanding the limitations and the necessity of government and public administration.