Newman’s Catholicism
Newman’s Catholicism
The Catholic Church Newman joined in October 1845 was increasingly centred round the Pope. The collapse after the French Revolution of many the authoritarian regimes that had prevailed under the Ancien Regime stripped the church of its age-old monopoly over education and religious formation, and left it at odds with increasingly hostile or indifferent secular societies. In a world bereft of its ancient landmarks, papal authority seemed to offer a rock round which counter-cultural resistance could rally. Gregory XVI, pope when Newman moved from Anglicanism to Catholicism, carried his loathing of modernity so far as to exclude the railways from the papal states. His successor, Pio Nono, was at first less confrontational (and an enthusiast for the railway), but his superficial ‘liberalism’ evaporated after the revolutions of 1848, when he himself fled Rome for sanctuary in Neopolitan territory. Papa Pio’s confrontation with the modern world would intensify as the movement for Italian unification eroded and eventually abolished the Papal States, the thousand-year old basis of the papacy’s political autonomy – and finances.
Newman the convert naturally shared this ardent reverence for the papacy, and his publications of the 1850s credited the Holy See ‘over and above the attribute of infallibility’ with ‘a gift of sagacity, [that] had in every age characterized its occupants’, even on purely practical matters.69 But in private his enthusiasm became increasingly qualified. Newman believed the Church to be infallible, but located infallibility in the whole community, represented primarily by the Pope in Council, and only secondarily in the Pope alone – he told an Anglican correspondent in 1851 that ‘I must protest with all my might against what I consider an assumption, that the infallibility of the Pope is the basis of the Catholic Religion… . There are persons who have found Papal Infallibility to be the gate; let them, if they will – our minds are so differently constituted that proof and difficulty change places in the case of separate persons.’70 Increasingly repelled by the extreme papalism of ‘ultramontane’ former friends and disciples like W. G. Ward, Henry Edward Manning, and Fr Faber’s troublesome community at the Brompton Oratory, Newman came to a more sober assessment of the central authorities in papal Rome. July 1859 was a milestone in this shift, when he published a controversial article in the liberal Catholic magazine, whose editorship he had reluctantly accepted, The Rambler. ‘On consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine’ drew on Newman’s patristic researches to argue that during the Arian crisis most of the episcopate had fallen into error, and whole provinces of the Church led by their bishops had succumbed to the Arian or semi-arian heresies. Popes, patriarchs and even General Councils ‘had said what they should not have said’, and instead the laity had become the defenders of the faith: ‘the divine dogma of our Lord’s divinity was proclaimed, enforced, maintained and (humanly speaking) preserved far more by the “Ecclesia docta” than by the “Ecclesia docens”.’ In terms familiar from his Anglican Lectures on the Prophetical Office, he argued that Apostolic tradition expresses itself at various times through different means – sometimes through the hierarchy, sometimes through theologians, sometimes through the people, sometimes through liturgy or through customs or movements thrown up by particular historical moments. Consequently ‘the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine, and … their consensus through Christendom is the voice of the Infallible church.’71 The suggestion that the hierarchy might lead the faithful into heresy, and that the laity, not the clergy, might on occasion be God’s instruments in preserving the true faith was anathema in the age of Pio Nono, where a sharp distinction between the (clerical) teaching Church and the (largely lay) taught Church was taken for granted. Newman was delated to Rome as a heretic: demands for explanations were misunderstood or not passed on to him, and his failure to explain was interpreted as defiance.
He failed to satisfy Rome on other accounts also. Since 1859 the forces of Italian unification had stripped Pio Nono of most of the papal patrimony which had once stretched from Tuscany to Naples, leaving him master only of the city of Rome and part of Latzio. The world was treated to the unedifying spectacle of a Pope holding the people of his remaining territories subject with the aid of a foreign army. Nevertheless, in a Europe most of whose peoples were Catholics, most, including, to begin with, Newman, considered that the Father of all the faithful should not be the subject of a particular nation, but should have his own political sovereignty. Ultramontanes like Manning, Cardinal Wiseman’s right-hand man and eventual successor, gave all this a theological rationale. The Pope’s political authority, Manning argued, was the cornerstone of a world order rooted in the Incarnation. The Papacy’s historic role as arbiter of international law, anointing and deposing kings, embodied the rule of Christ in the world he had redeemed, without which political society was reduced to mere brute power, the triumph of the weak over the strong. The temporal sovereignty of the Pope was therefore ‘the key-stone of the arch’ of Christian civilization. Cavour and Garibaldi’s attempts to annexe the Papal States for Italy were part of an age-old struggle between God and antiChrist. The city of Rome ‘is the only spot of ground on which the Vicar of Christ can set the sole of his foot in freedom’ and therefore ‘they who would drive the Incarnation off the face of the earth hover about it to wrest it from his hands.’72
Unsurprisingly, many people wondered what the best mind in the Catholic Church thought about all this. In his stridently polemical 1850 lectures on the Difficulties of Anglicans, Newman himself had deployed the familiar trope of the providential protection of Papal Rome, recalling that however often Pope had been exiled from their city, always when the mists and upheavals of revolution cleared, ‘the old man is found in his own place, as before, saying Mass over the tomb of the Apostles.’73 Yet Newman privately agreed with the widespread Protestant view that the Papal States were in fact badly governed. In anonymous contributions to the letter pages of the Rambler in 1859 he commented on ‘the slovenly, disgraceful way in which things go on’ in Italy, where, though ‘religion is not indeed extinct’ it ‘seems to me to be in a state of spiritual decadence’, a situation he blamed on poor government – by implication poor papal government.74
Newman’s views were increasingly shaped by dismay at the calamitous stand-off he perceived between educated Italian lay opinion on one hand, and an increasingly intransigent clericalist ultramontanism on the other, whose wholesale repudiation of modernity was forcing Italian intellect ‘to grow wild: in consequence it rebels’. Papal Catholicism in Italy, he thought, relied on repression and authority, when what was needed was conversion, education, persuasion.75 In 1866, forced by Garibaldi’s march on Rome to take a public stand on the Temporal Power, Newman preached a sermon on the subject which was a masterpiece of careful casuistry, the unenthusiastic sound of one hand clapping.76 In it, he dutifully described the Pope’s Italian enemies as ‘sacrilegious robbers’. But he also acknowledged political realities: ‘While his subjects are for him, no one can have a word to say against his temporal rule; but who can force a Sovereign on a people which deliberately rejects him?’ He had often deplored in private the hysterical rhetoric of Ultramontanes ‘almost giving up the Church, if the temporal power went, shrieking as if [they] were on the edge of an abyss.’77 Now he publicly poured cold water on any idea that the temporal Power was essential to the work of the Church. If the Pope lost the Papal States, he merely ‘returns to the condition of St Sylvester, St Julius, St Innocent, and other great Popes of early times.’ If God’s providence removed the Temporal Power, it would be because it was no longer necessary for the Church’s mission.
Newman committed himself on the Temporal Power with extreme reluctance: it was, he considered, a matter of politics and so ‘out of my way’. But he was also intensely conscious that it had become a test issue for an ultraCatolicism intent on narrowing and tightening the bounds of orthodoxy, under the cloak of loyalty to a suffering pope, and keen to unchurch anyone who dissented. In 1867 he told James Hope Scott,
…there is a great attempt … to bring in a new theory of Papal Infallibility, which would make it a mortal sin … not to hold the Temporal Power necessary to the Papacy. No one answers them, and multitudes are being carried away – the Pope … gives ear to them, and the consequence is there is a very extreme prejudice in the highest quarters at Rome against such as me.78
Behind all this lay a lack of confidence in God’s providence, a tyranny of fear. He told Emily Bowles, to whom he always wrote frankly,
we are shrinking into ourselves, narrowing the lines of communion, trembling at freedom of thought, and using the language of dismay and despair at the prospect before us …79
As a Catholic, Newman had always carefully refused the title ‘theologian’, a word he identified with technical expertise in the minutiae of official Church teaching. He told his old friend Maria Giberne in February 1869:
really and truly I am not a theologian. A theologian is one who has mastered theology – who can say how many opinions there are on every point, what authors have taken which, and which is best – who can discriminate exactly between proposition and proposition, argument and argument, who can pronounce which are safe, which allowable, which dangerous – who can trace the history of doctrines in successive centuries, and apply the principles of former times to the conditions of the present. This it is to be a theologian – this and a hundred things besides. And this I am not and never shall be … .80
In the so called ‘Munich Brief’ of 1863, Pope Pius IX attacked the European Liberal Catholic movement headed by Henry Lacordaire and the Count Montalambert, insisting that Catholic scholars were bound
not only by the solemn definitions of the Church, but also by the ordinary magisterium, the decisions of the Roman Curial Congregations, and by the common teaching of the theologians.81
So Newman understood that theology was conceived by the Roman authorities as a form of licensed commentary on official (hierarchical) teaching, as lawyers might interpret the Law Reports. Although he never publicly challenged this unernourished understanding of theology, he repeatedly deplored the lack of debate within the Church, and the suffocating effects of the uniformity expected at Rome. So his careful deference to the expertise of the Roman theologians, though not entirely strategic, had very strict limits.82 He was intensely conscious of the ignorance of the writings of the Fathers among even the most learned Roman theologians, so although, as he was to tell the Duke of Norfolk many years later, while at Rome ‘the rules of interpreting authoritative documents are known with a perfection which at this time is scarcely to be found elsewhere’, nevertheless he privately considered that a really first-rate theologian was rarely to be found there.83
Newman certainly did consider himself a theologian in this broader and more original sense. He had hoped after becoming a Catholic that he and his colleagues in what eventually became the Oratory might found a distinctively English Schola Theologorum, which would bend its energies to encountering the unbelief of the age.84 He abandoned that idea, but he certainly continued to think of the work he did as theological. The bitter experience of the hostile response to his essay On Consulting the Faithful, however, was to bring home to him the difficulty of doing theology at all in the church of Pio Nono. In 1863 he told Emily Bowles,
to write theology is like dancing on the tight-rope some hundred feet above ground: it is hard to keep from falling, and the fall is great.85
Newman, in fact, came to believe that the calamity of modern Catholicism was precisely the absence of free theological debate. In 1875 at the height of his exasperation with the ultramontanes, he wrote,
[Manning] is not a theologian, the Pope is not a theologian, and therefore theology has gone out of fashion … . I don’t profess to be a theologian, but at all events I should have been able to show a side of the Catholic religion more theological, more exact, than [theirs].86
For him, as we shall see, theology was not the docile interpreter of the magisterium, but the ‘regulating principle’ of the Church, without which authority inevitably exceeded its bounds and distorted Christian truth. Dogmatic utterances were one thing, and were for him a given, but their meaning could only be elicited by theological debate, without which they remained a lifeless skeleton or an intellectual straitjacket. And he conceived theological enquiry and debate not as the search for immediate consensus under the guidance of authority, but as genuinely open-ended, and often conflictual, a process in which personal struggle, insight and genius, not institutional docility, led to breakthrough. In discussing the role of theology he consistently deployed the rhetoric of conflict, tension and strain. It could not be otherwise, he wrote in an exuberant passage of the Apologia, his metaphors clearly influenced by his ministry in a great industrial city, since the universal church was ‘a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together … into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school’, not a hospital or a prison, and emphatically not ‘in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive’, but ‘for the melting, refining, and moulding, as in some moral factory, by an incessant noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.’87
In former times, he wrote in 1872, ‘it was by the collision of Catholic intellects with Catholic intellects that the meaning and limit of dogmatic decrees were determined’, but in the contemporary church ‘there has been no intellectual scrutiny, no controversies’.88 Even before the Council, he complained that anyone attempting original theological work was like a slave working ‘under the lash’, and he told Emily Bowles
This age of the Church is peculiar. In former times there was not the extreme centralisation which is now in use. If a private theologian said anything, another answered him. If the controversy grew, then it went to a Bishop, a theological Faculty, or to some foreign university. The Holy See was but the court of ultimate appeal. Now, if I as a private priest put anything in print, Propaganda answers me at once. How can I fight with such a chain on my arm? ... There was true private judgement in the primitive and medieval schools. There are no schools now, no private judgement (in the religious sense of the phrase) no freedom of opinion. That is, no exercise of the intellect. This is a way of things which in God’s own time, will work its own cure of necessity”.89
Unsurprisingly, Newman took a low view of some of the most celebrated papal utterances of his own day: he thought that the 1864 encyclical Quanta cura and especially its accompanying ‘Syllabus of Errors’, designed as a blast against ‘liberal’ ideas in church and state, was a theological mess, made up of scattergun denunciations of matters in which the Church had no real expertise and over which it had no legitimate jurisdiction, its terminology too sloppy to carry any real authority even with Catholics. ‘There seems nothing … in it’, he thought, ‘which looks like a theological decision’ and, ‘if it is urged against me as such, I should [be] obliged to fall back upon my liberty in opinion, till that liberty is proved to be taken away.’ Yet he was not altogether sorry that the Syllabus had been issued: it had highlighted the limits of authority in the Church and, as he told a correspondent in 1865,
Everything is good which brings matters to a crisis. It is not the matter of the document, but the animus of its authors, and their mode of doing it, which is so trying. Will not the next century demand Popes who are not Italians?90
The warm reception of the Apologia emboldened Newman to make his views known, and from 1865 he went on the offensive against the extremism which he felt was distorting perception of the Church, both within and without her boundaries. With the prospect of a General Council looming, Pusey published in 1865 an open letter to Keble, ostensibly an ‘Eirenicon’ designed to open the way to the reunion of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, but containing an extended attack on papal infallibility and the extravagances of Catholic Mariology – as Newman commented ironically to his old friend, ‘You discharge your olive-branch as if from a catapult’. Manning and the late Father Faber featured prominently among the authorities Pusey cited, including Faber’s bizarre claim that the flesh of Mary was received along with that of Jesus in the Eucharist.91
Newman seized the opportunity to appear as a champion of Catholic truth, and in the process to dissociate himself publicly from the ultramontanes. Studiously deferential to Manning, now Archbishop of Westminster, and lyrically laudatory about Faber, whom in life he had come to detest, he nevertheless made no bones about his rejection of their views: they were ‘in no sense spokesmen for English Catholics’:
I prefer English habits of belief and devotion to foreign …In following those of my people, I show less singularity, and create less disturbance than if I made a flourish with what is novel and exotic.92
He could not allow Pusey, he insisted,
to identify the doctrine of our Oxford friends in question …with the present spirit or the prospective creed of Catholics; or to assume, as you do, that, because they are thorough-going and relentless in their statements, therefore they are the harbingers of a new age when to show a deference to Antiquity will be thought little else than a mistake.
Newman’s own Catholic faith had been arrived at through the study of the Fathers, and everything a Catholic needed to believe would be found in them, though sometimes in a developed form.
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.93
The Letter to Pusey confirmed Manning’s opposition to all Newman stood for: as he told the Pope’s close adviser, Mgr George Talbot, Newman was ‘the centre of those who hold low views about the Holy See, are anti-Roman … national, critical of Catholic devotions, and always on the lower side.’ Newman embodied the ‘highest type’ of ‘the old Anglican patristic, literary tone transplanted into the Church … . In one word, it is worldly Catholicism.’ Talbot concurred: to be truly Roman he thought, required an effort for any Englishman, and Newman was ‘more English than the English – His spirit must be crushed.’94
Newman declined a papal invitation to attend the Vatican Council as a theological consultant. He pleaded age, ill-health and other pressing work, but his refusal reflected his strong opposition to the campaign for the definition of papal infallibility, not because he rejected the doctrine, rightly understood, but because he believed that in the church of Pio Nono, with its lop-sided insistence on centralized authority, it was almost impossible that the doctrine should be rightly understood. In a private jotting in September 1869 he asked, ‘Why is it, if I believe the Pope’s Infallibility I do not wish it defined? is not truth a gain? I answer, because it can’t be so defined as not to raise more questions than it solves … “Woe unto those thro’ whom scandals come”.’95 The definition was not needed – there was no heresy within the church questioning Papal authority. To define infallibility would unbalance ‘the elementary Constitution of the Church’ by encouraging the Pope to act without consultation with other bishops, and it would stir up fruitless controversies about past papal teaching.96 In the notorious leaked letter to his bishop in January 1870, he denounced the campaign for the definition as the work of an ‘insolent aggressive faction’, a ‘clique of Jesuits, Redemptorists and converts’, imposing unnecessary burdens on the consciences of the faithful: the pope himself was to blame for encouraging that faction.
What have we done to be treated, as the faithful never were treated before? When has definition of doctrine de fide been a luxury of devotion, and not a stern painful necessity?97
Late in 1870 he wrote bitterly,
We have come to a climax of tyranny. It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years. It is an anomaly and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.98
Though he eventually accepted the definition, and counselled others to do so, he believed it needed and would ultimately receive correction. As he wrote in 1871:
The late definition does not so much need to be undone, as to be completed. It needs safeguards to the Pope’s possible acts – explanations as to the matter and extent of his power. I know that a violent reckless party, had it its will, would at this moment define that the Pope’s powers need no safeguards, no explanations – but there is a limit to the triumph of the tyrannical – Let us be patient, let us have faith, and a new Pope, and a re-assembled Council may trim the boat.”99
In fact, in the light of the definition, Newman came to think that the end of the papal temporal power might even be a necessary part of that ‘trimming of the boat’. Already in 1866 he had agreed with his friend Bishop Moriarty of Kerry that if a secular government took power in Rome, it would be very likely to impose censorship on the correspondence of the Curial Congregations. But, he had added, this might not be altogether a bad thing:
there is no evil without its alleviation – it would cut off a great deal of unprofitable gossip sent to Rome from the orbis terrarum, and of crude answers sent back from Rome by men who seem to have authority, but have none – and it would throw power into the hands of the local Bishops every where.100
By the end of 1870, he was even wondering whether the annexation of Rome by the new Italy might not in fact be a divine judgement on the conduct of the Council. It would surely be a providential restraint on the future abuse of papal power: as he told his friend Mrs William Froude,
… to be at once infallible in religion and a despot in temporals, is perhaps too great for mortal man … unless the Council, when re-assembled, qualifies the dogma by some considerable safeguards … perhaps the secularly defenceless state of the Pope will oblige him to court that Catholic body in its separate nations with a considerateness and kindness, which of late years the Holy See has not shown, and which may effectually prevent a tyrannous use of his spiritual power. But all these things are in God’s hands, and we are blind.101
Ironically, in 1874 Newman was to publish what remains a classic defence of the doctrine of papal infallibility, his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. But that pamphlet represented not a conversion to enthusiasm for what had happened at the Council, but a damage-limitation exercise, designed to emphasize the narrow extent of what had been defined, and to show that the definition of Infallibility had no implications for whether or not Catholics could be good citizens of a non-Catholic state. It was one of Newman’s most courageous utterances, for, four years on from the adjournment of the Council, he reminded his readers that he had been strongly opposed to the definition, reaffirmed the contents of the leaked letter to Ullathorne, once more deploring the campaign for the definition: ‘I felt deeply and ever shall feel … the violence and cruelty of those who by their reckless and rash language had employed themselves in “unsetthng the weak in faith, throwing back enquirers, and shocking the Protestant mind”.’ He set out some of the factors that had led him to accept the definition, in the process emphasizing the very concept which had got him into bad odour at Rome in 1859, namely, the role of the sensus fidelium. A strong motive for assent would be if ‘the definition is consistently received by the whole body of the faithful, as valid, or as expression of a truth … by the force of that great dictum, “Securus judicat orbis terrarum”.’102 He explained that the definition was an example of the development of doctrine, and then went on to offer a carefully minimalist reading of what had actually been defined. Definition was one thing: interpreting what the definition implied was another, for, when the Church defines a dogma, she ‘sets her theologians to work to explain her meaning in the concrete’. Claiming that prerogative, Newman cited Roman theologians like Peronne to emphasize that infallibility was a negative gift, not a habit of mind or any kind of inspiration: it was an external aid to prevent the pope – and the Church – from going astray in solemn definitions of doctrine, bearing directly on faith or morals. Such definitions were and should be, he insisted, very rare indeed: on other matters, the pope’s private opinions were – opinions – though to be treated with profound respect as coming from him. In moral matters the Pope was bound by natural law, so cannot command anything sinful, just as the faithful were bound by their consciences. In the almost impossible event of a real clash between conscience and pope, a Catholic would sin if they disregarded conscience and obeyed the Pope, an insistence Newman emphasized in the celebrated and consciously provocative toast ‘to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.’103
That toast has often been misunderstood, as if Newman was suggesting a stark opposition between conscience and ecclesiastical authority. But his teaching on the subject was more complex. On the one hand, was an exalted view of the authority of conscience as ‘the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway.’ On the other hand, our sense of right and wrong ‘is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted’ by education, pride or passion, that conscience is at once ‘the highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous.’ It is the heart of natural religion, but natural religion needs to be ‘sustained and completed by revelation’. Church, pope and hierarchy therefore supply the guidance that the natural limitations of conscience ‘urgently demand’.104
Yet the Letter was also daring in including a masterly deconstruction of the authority and significance of overweening magisterium in the shape of the Syllabus of Errors, issued in 1864, which Newman dismisses as a mere anonymous list of errors with no direct authorization by the Pope, so that ‘I do not see my way to accept it for what it is not’.105 The Syllabus ‘has no dogmatic force’ and ‘cannot even be called an echo of the Apostolic Voice’. And he levelled a contemptuous aside at those around the Pope, egging him on to excesses: the ‘Rock of St Peter on its summit enjoys a pure and serene atmosphere, but there is a great deal of Roman malaria at the foot of it.’106 By implication, the Syllabus was a manifestation of that ‘malaria’. The Pope’s ‘great earnestness and charity’ were being sabotaged by ‘circles of light-minded men in his city’ who, Newman claimed, had been ‘laying bets with each other whether the Syllabus would “make a row in Europe”.’107
It was in the light of his continuing concern with the scope of the Infallibility decree that in 1877 Newman would publish what some consider his theological masterpiece, a short preface to a new edition of his Anglican lectures on the Prophetical Office. In this preface he argued that there was and always should be a healthy tension in the life of the Church between authority, theological exploration and the spiritual and sacramental aspects of the Church: these three different and contrasting energies were perpetually engaged in a dance of mutual correction and complementarity, which could not without peril be resolved by the permanent subordination of any one to the others. His discussion starts from an objection often raised against the Catholic Church, not least by his younger Protestant self, namely the ‘discordance’ between the claims to purity of Catholic theology on the one hand, and the apparent superstition of much Catholic devotional practice and the corruption of ‘ecclesiastics in high positions’, on the other. But his real target audience was undoubtedly those within the Church, from the Pope downwards, whose actions and ideas he believed were distorting contemporary Catholicism, and damaging the Church’s credibility in evangelising an unbelieving world.
For Newman, as we have seen, it was by what he called ‘the collision of Catholic intellect with Catholic intellect’ that in times past ‘the meaning and limits of dogmatic decrees were determined.’108 Debate and disagreement were essential to the Church’s apprehension of the truths she preached: ‘Truth is wrought out by many minds, working together freely. As far as I can make out, this has ever been the rule of the Church till now.’109 But, as he remarked to Frederick Rogers, his favourite Oxford pupil, the Catholic Church’s mission to modern society was hamstrung by a morbid fear of theological novelty, so that theologians ‘cannot move in matters of speculation … without giving enormous scandal to our people … I have long wished to write an Essay, but I never shall, I think, on the conflicting interests, and therefore difficulties of the Catholic Church, because she is at once, first, a devotion, secondly a philosophy, thirdly a polity. Just now, as I suppose at many other times the devotional sentiment and the political embarrass the philosophical instinct.’110
Newman’s argument in the Preface therefore replaced a monolithic understanding of the Church, in which hierarchy or governance determine all aspects of religious life, with a far more dynamic model, in which three divergent but complementary energies, principles or ‘offices’ exist in permanent creative tension. Newman had deployed triadic models of ecclesial life in earlier writings: here he relates these threefold energies to the threefold offices which are united in Christ – the prophetic, standing variously for revelation, teaching, theology, rational thought: the priestly, representing the spiritual, devotional, or what Friedrich von Hugel would later call the mystical element of religion: and the kingly or royal office, representing rule, governance, structure, institution, which he here identifies with the Pope and the Curia. In Nicholas Lash’s lapidary summary, Christianity is ‘at one and the same time life in the spirit, language, and organization.’111
These three powers or offices were all vital constituents of the concrete historical reality of the Body of Christ. But their different objects and scope inevitably pull them in different directions:
Truth is the guiding principle of theology and theological inquiries; devotion and edification, of worship; and of government, expedience. The instrument of theology is reasoning: of worship, our emotional nature; of rule, command and coercion. Further, in man as he is, reasoning tends to rationalism, devotion to superstition and enthusiasm; and power to ambition and tyranny.112
So the balance between the three is always precarious, and in practice never adequately attained:
Who, even with divine aid, shall successfully administer offices so independent of each other, so divergent and so conflicting? What line of conduct, except on the long, the very long run, is at once edifying, expedient, and true?113
The bulk of the preface is taken up with concrete historical examples of the ways in which this unceasing interplay between these three offices has worked out, such as Pope Stephen’s ruling that Donatist baptisms were valid, a piece of pastoral expediency in which a pope overruled the best theological opinion of the day, but which turned out to be a wise and necessary concession to the demands of unity and charity.
Newman’s argument is not always clear: what, precisely, is the relationship in his analysis between revelation and theology? The Preface is constrained and at times impoverished by Newman’s sometimes uncritical deployment of nineteenth century theological categories, for example in his apparent reduction of the sacral dimension of Christianity to religious emotion or even popular superstition. There is no suggestion in the Preface of the fundamentally sacramental nature of the Church or the centrality of the liturgy to its very being, though both those themes recur frequently elsewhere in Newman’s work, above all in the Anglican parish sermons. And despite his rejection of ultramontanism, Newman seems unreflectingly ultramontane himself in equating the ‘regal’ or ruling function of the Church tout court with the papacy, without any mention of the episcopate at large. In the light of the theology of the Church embodied in the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, the rigid separation he makes between the three offices or functions seems highly artificial and theologically malnourished. He shows no awareness in the Preface that the bishop at the liturgical heart of his church in the eucharist exercises all three functions of teaching, ruling and sacramental celebration. So, the Preface is woefully inadequate considered as a commentary on the scriptural or Patristic deployment of the triple offices of prophet, priest or king, whether in relation to the work of Christ or to the life of the Church.
Yet none of that was Newman’s real concern: the Preface addresses a different set of issues. His target was an understanding of the Church which was primarily authoritarian and managerial, and which tended to see the Church’s teaching role as an aspect of rule, an attitude that has sometimes been waggishly summed up in the phrase ‘Shut up, he explained’! In an age in which rigidly pyramidic and clericalist ecclesiologies prevailed, his intention was to argue for an irreducibly dialectical understanding of the life of the Church, to stress the plural nature of the elements of its life, and, not only to vindicate the legitimate role and freedom of theology as a permanent element in that dynamic, but to identify it, and not the governing or regal office, as the ‘regulating principle’ of the triad:
I say then, Theology is the fundamental and regulating principle of the whole Church system. It is commensurate with Revelation, and Revelation is the initial and essential idea of Christianity. It is the subject-matter, the formal cause, the expression, of the Prophetical Office, and … has created both the Regal Office and the Sacerdotal. And it has in a certain sense a power of jurisdiction over those offices, as being its own creations, theologians being ever in request and in employment in keeping within bounds both the political and popular elements in the Church’s constitution.114
On Newman’s account, the life of the Church could never be one of a sealed and self-sufficient balance, raising it above confusion, contradiction and error. It was a dialectical process, a perichoresis or dance of forces, rich and life-giving. John Coulson, one of the best commentators on the Preface, characterized its central notion as ‘an equilibrium of functions’ within the Church. But ‘equilibrium’ does not entirely reflect Newman’s sense of the inevitabiity of tensions between the conflicting claims of truth, expediency and devotion. Despite his concession to the Ultramontanes that ‘union and subordination’, the concern of the regal office, were essential to the idea of the Church, he believed that these tensions would not be fully resolved this side of the eschaton.115 As he wrote
Whatever is great refuses to be reduced to human rule, and to be made consistent in its many aspects with itself. Who shall reconcile with each other the various attributes of the Infinite God? … This living world to which we belong, how self-contradictory it is, when we attempt to measure and master its meaning and scope … We need not feel surprise then, if Holy Church too, the supernatural creation of God, is an instance of the same law … crossed and discredited now and again by apparent anomalies which need, and which claim, at our hands an exercise of faith.116
The Preface was not quite Newman’s last significant theological utterance. If the definition of papal infallibility had been the issue that had most troubled him about the Vatican Council, he was also uneasy about the Council’s ruling on the inspiration of scripture, which he took to be more restrictive than that adopted by the Council of Trent.117 Newman believed (mistakenly) that whereas Trent had ruled that it was the writers of the Bible who were inspired, rather than the books they had written, the Vatican Council has defined that the books themselves were inspired, and therefore all they contained was literally true.118 In Tract 85, written while he was still an Anglican, Newman had used the fact of the fallibility of historical and factual material in the Bible as an argument in favour of tradition and the authority of the Church, and he remained alert to the problems for faith posed by biblical criticism. In 1865 he had been visited at the Oratory by the liberal anglican Dean Stanley of Westminster, and they had discussed these issues. Newman told Stanley he had recognized the multiple authorship of the Pentateuch from his first reading of Genesis in Hebrew, and Pusey had conceded then that there was more than one author: ‘would he do so now?’. Newman then went on to ‘play the ‘Devils’ Advocate’’ against the story of David in the Books of Samuel, saying that it seemed ‘more like a poem than any other part of the Bible’. And while Newman appeared to Stanley to be worried about applying this kind of ‘dissolving criticism’ to the Gospels, he admitted to Stanley that, ‘I seem to myself to see this same compilatory character in the Gospels: not a regular history, but biographical anecdotes strung together.’ But Newman considered all this was a problem for Protestants rather than Catholics, since Catholics relied on the Church’s authority, and that authority had not so far defined that scripture (as distinct from the inspired authors of scripture) was itself inspired.119
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Newman was dismayed by what he thought was the Vatican Council’s closing down what had formerly been open questions. He returned to this issue often in private notes, conversation and correspondence, but in 1884 he was moved to publish on the subject in response to an article in the Nineteenth Century magazine, which he believed misrepresented Catholic teaching on the subject. The gist of his argument was that the doctrine of the inspiration of scripture applied simply to matters of faith and morals, and was compatible with errors of historical fact (eg. the improbably immense ages of the patriarchs) or the attribution of books of the Bible to persons who had not in fact written them (eg. the so-called books of Moses, or the Pauline authorship of Hebrews), or the insertion of later material into the Gospels themselves (eg. the longer ending of St Mark, or the story of the woman taken in adultery in St John’s Gospel).
Newman’s views were contested both from within and outside the Catholic Church, most fiercely by Dr John Healy, a Maynooth professor and subsequently Archbishop of Tuam, who insisted on the literal truth of all biblical ‘facts’. Both sides of the controversy have, of course, been overtaken by the transformation of biblical studies in the twentieth century, but Newman was writing a decade before the eruption of the Modernist crisis, and the consequent panicky closing down of serious Catholic biblical scholarship. His intervention was a characteristically careful attempt to leave open as many of the questions for faith raised by biblical criticism as possible, and to give Catholic biblical scholars room to explore and resolve those issues with freedom and intellectual integrity. Limited as the scope of his essay was, and cautious as was its tone, for a man in his eighties barely able to hold a pen, it was not far short of astonishing, and proof that his mind was questing, and unflinchingly honest, to the end