G. The Formal Cause of Justification
G. The Formal Cause of Justification
Before examining how Newman defines the formal cause of justification, we must summarize the basic contours of his position. For starters, Newman raises the topic with a valuable question concerning the believer’s union with Christ.
Again: if it be laid down that our justification consists in union with Christ, or reconciliation with God, this is an intelligible and fair answer; and then the question will arise, what is meant by union with Christ?798
For Newman, this Christological union comes to one’s soul by the Holy Spirit, who properly imputes the righteousness of Christ by means of divine indwelling. This “adherent” righteousness is distinguished from an “inherent,” “infused,” or a “habitual” deposit of justice in that the former consists in the personal inhabitation of the Triune God. Of the three divine persons, the Holy Spirit is explicated as the proper agent of justification, as a matter of his own role (proprium) in the economy of salvation,799 although strict lines of differentiation between members of the Godhead are not drawn. Thus, divine indwelling is the gratia increata upon which one is declared righteous. In connection with this, Newman summarizes what he considers to be the proper formal cause of justification: “This is really and truly our justification, not faith, not holiness, not (much less) a mere imputation; but through God’s mercy, the very Presence of Christ.”800
In addition to a “proper” formal cause of justification, Newman also posits an “improper” formal cause.801 Accordingly, when the justifying merits of Christ are imparted to an individual by divine indwelling, a real, actual righteousness is simultaneously operative.802 This inchoate or incipient righteousness belongs to the Christian and in this sense may be called “inherent.” A metaphor that Newman commonly employs to convey this notion is “shekinah”—the salvific gift of God that is an “attribute, property, virtue, or presence of the Divine Nature manifested visibly.”803 It is here where Newman closely resembles Augustine, a connection that Newman himself often makes when he describes the active, fruit-bearing quality of righteousness.804 Therefore, in view of this improper, formal cause, Newman states, “to ‘justify’ means in itself ‘counting righteous,’ but includes under its meaning ‘making righteous;” in other words, the sense of the term is ‘counting righteous,’ and the nature of the thing denoted by it is making righteous.”805
One way to describe Newman’s position on justification is in terms of a two-fold righteousness—imputed and actual—although such a distinction is intended to be logical and not temporal. The strength of this formulation, as is commonly true of duplex iustitia, is that it can stress a forensic action based upon righteousness while also taking seriously the need for faith to be formed by love. In Newman’s words, it is the simultaneous movements of “pardon and renovation.”806 Such a construction seeks to avoid legal fiction, bringing the Protestant categories of justification and sanctification into a closer relationship. What is the precise nature of this connection?
In the original 1838 version of his Lectures, Newman located the formal cause of justification in the imputation of righteousness. He made this point by emphasizing forensic imputation by divine indwelling as the proper formal cause of his via media:807 “Justification tends to sanctify,” Newman specifies; “in logical order, or exactness of idea, Almighty God justifies before He sanctifies.”808 The Catholic Newman retained these statements in his third edition (1874), but qualified them when he shifted emphasis to the one internal formal cause, a shift that he explicates in his “Advertisement to the Third Edition,” when he clarifies, “The first of these [changes from the first edition] is the proposition that more than one formal cause can be assigned to the justified state.”809
By the year 1874, Newman had switched the formal cause to a form of internal righteousness. “And so far as the author of these Lectures contradicts this categorical statement, he now simply withdraws what he has said in them. But he was mistaken if he supposed that it was thereby determined what the ‘unica forma’ really was, or again that there might not be more forms than one (whether improper forms, or forms of the justifying justice or renovation).”810 The reason that Newman feels free to make this alteration without revising his overall position is because he regards Trent to be ambiguous on the precise nature of the unica forma causa.
Though, then, there be but one formal cause (and there never can be more than one proper form of anything), still it is not settled precisely what that form is. We are at liberty to hold that it is not the renewed state of the soul, but the Divine gift which renews it.811
In the “Advertisement,” Newman supports his case by introducing several post-Tridentine Catholic voices on the doctrine of justification. He starts with Bellarmine, who acknowledges that it is an open question whether righteousness consists in grace or charity, and who, according to Newman, “allows that there are theologians who think otherwise.”812 Pallavicino, the second example, allowed for a mixture of grace and charity. Likewise, Vasquez posited two possible forms. Third, was Sporer, who held to two “partial” forms, an external divine act and an internal work—the former defined as favor Dei, the latter as habitus iustitiae. Bellarmine is mentioned again, as a fourth option, with regard to the Council’s emphasis on esse fidem charitate formatam. Fifth, and most significant for its proximity to Newman’s position, is Petavius who argued for the “substantial Presence of the Holy Ghost in the soul.”813 From this, Newman unfolded his argument that the formal cause of justification is the Spirit who brings the divine presence to one’s soul and who in turn stimulates actual righteousness as the improper form of the soul’s righteousness.
Newman’s question of whether the teaching of Trent unequivocally defined the unica formalis causa of justification in terms of habitus grows out of his relative discomfort with grounding justification squarely upon created grace. His concern, once again, is that gratia inhaerens in terms of mere renewal suggests that justification is reduced to a matter of obedience and meritorious works, which he believes to have the pastorally disastrous effect of leading one toward unhealthy introspection.814 “Hence,” says Newman, “the charge against Romanism, not unfounded as regards its popular teaching, that it views the influence of grace, not as the operations of a living God, but as a something to bargain about, and buy, and traffic with.”815 The fact that Newman retained this sentence after becoming a Catholic underscores his continued uneasiness with building justification upon the sole ground of gratia creata.816
Newman’s contention, however, goes further than the Church’s “popular teaching.” In the appendix of the third edition (1874) of his Lectures, he dedicates sixty-one pages to the question of justification’s formal cause.817 In the opening footnote of the first page, he explains,
The purpose of this Appendix is to show that the cardinal question to be considered by Catholics and Protestants in their controversy about Justification is, What is its formal cause? When this is properly examined, it will be found that there is little or no difference of view between the disputants.818
Newman’s appendix provides valuable historical background to the arguments contained in his Lectures (1838). For much of the appendix, Newman’s analysis concentrates on the controversies of the sixteenth century, when Catholics opposed Luther’s “justification by faith alone” by citing Galatians 5:6, “fides quae per caritatem operatur,” which was then translated into Aristotelian categories as “fides caritate formata.” This history of interpretation vis-à-vis the formal cause of justification is then traced through subsequent history, including the Caroline Divines, and eventually into his own day. The appendix supports the lectures with valuable historical background, but it does not advance substantive arguments beyond that which is postulated in the lectures themselves.
Sheridan rightly indicates that the two seminal chapters of the Lectures are found in the sixth and seventh lectures.819 They are instructive for understanding Newman’s formal cause, especially if one compares the first (1838) and third (1874) editions. In the first edition, Newman emphasizes that renewal follows as an extension from justification; in the third edition (1874) he stresses that these are identical. In the very center of these chapters—in the closing words of chapter six before starting chapter seven—Newman explains,820 “Lastly, we may now see what the connexion really is between justification and renewal.” A careful analysis of what follows reveals that Newman’s mature position (the third edition) no longer regards forensic justification as possessing a logical priority over renewal; they are inextricably bound up with one another.
In summarizing the development of Newman’s synthesis, Sheridan points out that “to the extent that Newman’s thought developed away from Evangelicalism, his conception of grace became more ecclesial.”821 Accordingly, what started as internal renewal derived from divine indwelling (first edition, 1838) became a unica forma causa with renewal at the very center. In this sense, Newman’s via media evolved into a via Romana. But did it evolve to such an extent that he can be said to have jettisoned his middle way, or is it simply that Newman moved closer to the Roman position?
What makes this question so vexing is that Newman’s Lectures are essentially the same from his first (1838) to his third edition (1874). Most of his statements on the relationship of justification and renewal remain unchanged in the latter edition, leading one to conclude that his position is likewise unchanged. Then one reads a piece by the Catholic Newman, such as the above segment from the third edition (1874), which reflects a clear difference (leaving behind a logical sequence between justification and renewal to draw an essential continuity between them), and the question reasserts itself. Perhaps insight can be found by identifying other areas of development (or outright disagreement) between the Anglican and the Catholic Newman.
One subject of the Lectures in which Newman the Roman Catholic clearly disagreed with Newman the Anglo-Catholic was sin and the justified. In the third edition (1874), he qualifies the statement, “For we must consider that since we are ever falling into sin and incurring God’s wrath, we are ever being justified again and again by His grace”822 (emphasis added), with a footnote: “This is incorrect. If by ‘sin’ is meant grievous sin, those who are in the grace of God need not ever be falling into it; and if lighter sins are meant, these do not bring us back again under ‘God’s wrath.’”823
Similarly, Newman’s third edition (1874) also retracts a statement with regard to the “perfect” state of righteousness among those who are justified:
Lastly, we may now see what the connexion really is between justification and renewal.
[The justified are “perfect”] in relation to the past, as being a simple reversal of the state of guilt, and a bringing into God’s favour; but as God’s favour towards us will grow as we become more holy, so as we become more holy, we may receive a higher justification. The words in the text are inconsistent with an increase of justification, which Catholics hold.824
Remembering that such notes were written twenty-nine years after Newman converted to Catholicism, it is not very surprising to find him conforming earlier statements to Catholic dogma.825 Owing to the fact that he regards justification and sanctification as one, and that the latter grows in meritorious works (performed by grace), it is logical for Newman to envisage the gradual increase of justification.826 So he asserts that the gift of righteousness “then is habitual; both permanent and increasing.”827 More specifically, he insists,
[The] Gift which justifies us is, as we have seen, a something distinct from us and lodged in us, yet it involves in its idea its own work in us, and (as it were) takes up into itself that renovation of the soul, those holy deeds and sufferings, which are as if a radiance streaming from it.828
It is at this point that Jose Morales cries foul. The problem consists in the fact that Newman seeks to preserve a ground of justification that is defined by the absolute perfection of the Triune God, and, at the same time, he asserts that this righteousness becomes a human possession which grows in a real and proper sense. Expressing his contention, Morales quotes from Newman’s sermon, “Righteousness, Not of Us, but in Us,” (1840) in which actual righteousness is said to be “not merely given to us and imputed to us, but really implanted in us by the operation of the Blessed Spirit.”829 Morales then concludes, “The vocabulary used by Newman henceforth clearly suggests the idea of inherent justice, [language] which he avoided in the Lectures.”830 And again, from the Discourses, Morales quotes Newman, “When God, for Christ’s sake, is about to restore any one to His favour, His first act of mercy is to impart to him a portion of His grace.”831
Here again we see that Newman’s position is basically compatible with St. Augustine’s. As such, the cultivation of virtue happens actively in nobis and not passively extra nos, which then gives rise to the development of charitas,832 or in Newman’s terminology, “actual righteousness.”833 This is one reason why Newman was able to reissue his Lectures (1874) as a Catholic thirty-six years after their original publication: because his position was in fundamental agreement with Augustinian soteriology in the first place (although expressed in different terms).834
Morales suggests that, after 1840, Newman’s “dialectic approach, which prompted the establishment of a forced symmetry between Protestantism and Romanism,” began to disappear.835 Dessain offers a similar assessment when he writes, “On becoming a Catholic, however, Newman wrote little on the subject of Uncreated Grace.”836 Sheridan recognizes that Newman’s doctrine of justification moved with him to Rome, especially with regard to baptism and faith, but he does not address the question of whether this also applies to the concept of uncreated grace.837 Holtzen, on the other hand, disagrees with this view, particularly with Morales’s contention that “Newman increasingly dwells on created grace as the cause of justification.”838 Holtzen gives three reasons why he believes Newman’s via media by uncreated grace stands, even after the third edition (1874) of his Lectures.
Because: (1) he adds an appendix that asserts the Holy Spirit is the formal cause of justification after his conversion, (2) he therein asserts the Holy Spirit is the proper form of justification and actual righteousness is the improper form, (3) he explicitly rejects the notion of habitus that accompanies the idea of gratia creata.839
Holtzen’s argument must be criticized. First, he is evidently under the wrong impression that Newman introduced his appendix in the third edition (1874), when, in fact, the appendix was present from the start.840 A look at the first edition (1838) reveals that they are essentially the same, including the title, “On the Formal Cause of Justification.”841 This makes the first of his three arguments a moot point. As for his second point, Holtzen is correct to point out that Newman continues to assert that the Holy Spirit is the proper form of justification, and actual righteousness is the improper form, however, Holtzen does not account for the above-mentioned section in the Lectures where Newman moves off of his via media script to emphasize one formal internal cause in terms of internal renewal.842 Finally, while Newman disavows habitus as the necessary accompaniment to gratia creata, he comes close to embracing it when he acknowledges that infusion of an inherent righteousness is the formal ground of justification. “In this then I conceive to lie the unity of Catholic doctrine on the subject of justification,” he contends, “that we are saved by Christ’s imputed righteousness, and by our own inchoate righteousness at once.”843 Holtzen acknowledges this fact when he writes, “[In the third edition, Newman switched] his understanding of the formal cause of justification from the imputation of an alien righteousness to the infusion of an inherent righteousness.”844 Newman may not call this inherent righteousness “habitus,” but what he says about it in terms of its capacity to grow, even describing it in terms of “habitual,”845 certainly gives the impression that it is something like habitus that he has in mind.