Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (21 page)

That truth and falsehood in religion are but matter of opinion; that one doctrine is as good as another; that the Governor of the world does not intend that we should gain the truth; that there is no truth; that we are not more acceptable to God by believing this than by believing that; that no one is answerable for his opinions; that they are a matter of necessity or accident; that it is enough if we sincerely hold what we profess; that our merit lies in seeking, not in possessing; that it is a duty to follow what seems to us true, without fear lest it should not be true; that it may be a gain to succeed, and can be no harm to fail; that we may take up and lay down opinions at pleasure, that belief belongs to the mere intellect, not the heart also; that we may safely trust to ourselves in matters of Faith, and need no other guide, – this the principle of philosophies and heresies, which is very weakness.
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Newman’s theory of the Church’s development contrasts with perspectives that would emphasise the absolutely unchanging nature of the Church. Ian Ker describes the essay as ‘comparable to Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
’,
⁵
which is fair; although the late Avery Dulles comments, perhaps unnecessarily, that Newman’s theory is ‘not a brief ’ for a kind of ‘dogmatic Darwinism’. ‘Newman’, Avery continues, also fairly, ‘opposes the “transformist” view that Christianity is ever in flux and accommodates itself to the times’.
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Such developments as occur, Newman argues, must be shown to be in accord with the Christianity of the Apostles, and antique Christianity. To probe the

authenticity of these developments, he invokes seven tests based on his vast reading in the Early Fathers, while significantly avoiding citation of any of the later Catholic authorities such as Suarez and Thomas Aquinas.

He asks that developments should be such that the Church would remain recognisably the same to an Early Father who returned to earth. He lists a num-ber of principles, such as the ‘sacramental principle’ and the primacy of faith over reason, indicating that there should be a ‘continuity’ of these original features down to the present. Far from the Church being changed by the cultures it encounters, it is the Church that assimilates and transforms cultures. And there should be logical inferences to be drawn from fundamental truths: for example the cleansing of original sin in baptism implies further satisfaction in the sacrament of penance for sin committed after baptism.

The final three tests pay tribute to the imaginative dimension of continuity, which Newman signals by emphasizing signs of vitality and growth. There is, in the fifth test, the insistence that ‘when an idea is living’, in other words, ‘influential and effective’, it develops ‘according to its own nature, and the tendencies, which are carried out on the long run, may under favourable circumstances show themselves early as well as late’.
⁷
And he gives a lively comparison:

Nothing is more common, for instance, than accounts or legends of the anticipations, which great men have given in boyhood of the bent of their minds, as afterwards displayed in their history, so much so that the popular expectation has sometimes led to the invention of them. The child Cyrus mimics a despot’s power, and St. Athanasius is elected Bishop by his playfellows.
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In the sixth test, ‘conservative action upon its past’, Newman argues that a corruption, or heresy, is a reversal of vital creativity, whereby a development, like a cancerous growth ‘ceases to illustrate, and begins to disturb, the acquisi-tions gained in its previous history’. He goes on:

A true development, then, may be described as one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds; and this is the characteristic as contrasted with a corruption.
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An example of this, according to Newman, is that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the doctrine of the existence of three persons in one God, does not, properly understood, undermine monotheism, but reinforces it.

The final test, ‘chronic vigour’, appeals to the persistence of vitality, of expanding, flourishing life; whereas corruption, heresy, tends to eventual dissolution. Heresy, he insists, is ‘an intermediate state between life and death, or what is like death; or, if it does not result in death, it is resolved into some new, perhaps

opposite, course of error which lays no claim to be connected with it’.
¹⁰
The tests are followed by Newman’s ‘application’ of them through the history of the Church, making the essay an eclectic study of the history of Christianity. In his application of the seventh and final test, ‘chronic vigour’, he enlists a catalogue of the Faith’s conflicts and struggles, external and internal, with this conclusion:

Is it conceivable that any one of those heresies, with which ecclesiastical history abounds, should have gone through a hundredth part of these trials, yet have come out of them so nearly what it was before, as Catholicism has done? Could such a theology as Arianism have lasted through the scholastic contest? Or Montanism [a second century heresy involving claims for new divine revelation] have endured to possess the world, without coming to a crisis, and failing? Or could the imbecility of the Manichean system, as a religion, have escaped exposure, had it been brought into conflict with the barbarians of the Empire, or the feudal system?
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Avery Dulles contends that Newman’s teaching on the Virgin Mary is a working exemplification of the tests of authentic development. Mary is invoked, for example, in the principle of the conservative action on the past (does the new doctrine confirm or weaken past ancient faith?). Taking the Protestant objection that devotion to Mary draws the faithful away from Christ, Newman argues that the opposite is true. The title ‘
theotokos
’ (God bearer), he argues, was bestowed on Mary ‘to protect the doctrine of the Incarnation, and to preserve the faith of Catholics from a specious Humanitarianism’.
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The book’s most challenging theme involves Newman’s view of the Catholic Church as a single organic ‘idea’, invoking a notion that owed much to the Romantic common tradition on imagination. The previous generations of poets, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge in particular, saw poetic imagination as productive, prophetic, self-authenticating, rather than merely mimicking na-ture. Newman’s notion of ‘idea’ is much closer to their version of living symbolism than to an abstract thought. It is as if Newman is treating the Church itself as a living work of art. Indeed his tests of authenticity are reminiscent of principles borrowed from aesthetics. The ‘logical sequence’ test, moreover, suggests an awareness of the Church’s essential harmonies, as if imaginatively alert to its complex musicality – the endless combining and recombining of the many and the one. The cultural historian Stephen Prickett writes of his correspondence with the theologian Nicholas Lash on this point, leading to Lash’s suggestion that the metaphor of a musical fugue is perhaps the best way to understand ‘logical sequence’:

The various models [Newman] uses serve as basic structures for the fugue: historical, philosophical, and christological. The tendency to … treat [the ‘idea’ or Church] as if it were a person, which we find in some passages, [Lash] suggests, is partly due to the fact that one of the themes of the fugue is an explicit identification of the ‘idea’ with the person of the living Christ striding, as it were, through history.
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The Church is, of course, a ‘fact’, but its contents and evidences are perceived, Newman insists, through the imagination as if it were a living, changing, diverse, organic unity, in which its diversities are drawn into a whole. ‘But one aspect of Revelation must not be allowed to exclude or to obscure another … Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical all at once; it is esoteric and exoteric; it is indulgent and strict; it is light and dark; it is love, and it is fear.’
¹⁴
It acts like all living entities in a non-stop process of growth.

While some authorities, such as Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the great seventeenth-century French preacher, had argued that change was the test of heresy (the Church being ever the same),
¹⁵
Newman turned the criterion on its head. ‘The more claim an idea has to be considered living, the more various will be its aspects; and the more social and political is its nature, the more complicated and subtle will be its issues, and the longer and more eventful will be its course.’
¹⁶
That was not the only notion he reversed. Exemplifying the dynamism of the Church with a river, he thwarted the expectations of his readers with a paradoxical rendering of the familiar metaphor. Whereas, for example, the distinguished translator of the Book of Isaiah, Robert Lowth, had employed the metaphor of a stream as in gradual deterioration, increasingly polluted, ‘the stream generally becoming more impure, the more distant it is from its source’,
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Newman turns the expectation inside out with a striking conceit:

… the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of his image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become more vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.
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The essay was challenged and criticized, most notably by Newman’s contemporary, F. D. Maurice, theologian and socialist. Maurice noted that New-man’s ‘system’ of ‘generative powers, vital energies, in unceasing movement’ is a kind of inflexible self-regulating process, more vegetable than human. It does not allow, he argued, for the conscious, interacting dialectical processes described by Coleridge within literary traditions, whereby tradition makes the writer and

the writer in turn shapes the tradition. As Coleridge wrote in his
Lectures on Shakespeare
:

… few there have been among critics, who have followed with the eye of the imagination the imperishable, yet ever-wandering, spirit of poetry through its various metem-psychoses, and consequent metamorphoses; – or who have rejoiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with each new birth, with each rare avatar, the human race frame to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs or power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity.
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Maurice, however, was convinced that Christianity’s sure foundation was not so much the Church, and emphatically not the Bishop of Rome, but Scripture; Maurice being secure in a tradition of criticism that had been exploring the Bible as poetry. In the preface to his
Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews
Maurice deconstructs Newman’s theory of development, insisting that Christianity’s organic continuity has developed from the prophetic revelation running from the Old Testament to the New. The two thinkers nevertheless share in common an imaginative apprehension of the Church that is peculiarly English, literary, of its time, and alien to scholastic and Roman ways of thinking about development.

That very literary approach has failed to impress some subsequent critics, even Catholic ones. An example of which is the Oxford philosopher, and former Catholic priest, Anthony Kenny. While still a priest, albeit in the process of thinking himself out of the Church, Kenny criticized the explanatory force of Newman’s essay when, in 1962, he was assigned to lecture on the topic of development of doctrine before a conference of diocesan clergy: