Chapter 15: Newman’s First Book: The Arians of the Fourth Century
CHAPTER 15
NEWMAN’S FIRST BOOK: THE
ARIANS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY
WITH his attention freed from the obligations of Tutor, Newman accepted an invitation from Hugh James Rose, a Cambridge scholar and founder of the British Magazine, to contribute a book to a new series of theological works, The Theological Library. Newman suggested studying the Thirty-Nine Articles, but Rose, co-editor with Archdeacon William R. Lyall, asked him instead to write a history of the Church councils that included the content of the Articles. After a few months of reading, Newman explained to Rose that the Eastern Councils required a volume of their own that should be prefaced by an account and history of Arianism.1 The rest of the year, he worked on and off on this project, as his occupations allowed. In June of 1832, Newman worked intensely on the book for a month, and by July, he had finished it. He sent the manuscript to Rose, and, exhausted from many long days of work and nights of poor sleep, he went to Brighton for some rest.
During August, Newman met a few times with Rose, who helped to edit the manuscript. Rose liked the manuscript and sent it to Archdeacon Lyall, who thought that it was excellent but too specialized for a general audience and unsuitable for a collection on Church councils.2 The Archdeacon thought that it favored Roman Catholic views of Tradition. For these reasons the book was not accepted for the series, but Rose and Lyall encouraged Newman to revise some parts of the manuscript and to publish the book as a work on its own.3 The publication of this work was delayed until October 1833, after Newman’s long journey to the Mediterranean.
The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman’s first book, was a history of theology and a short treatise on Trinitarian theology. In it, he dealt with the complicated doctrinal errors of the Arians, semi-Arians, and Sabellians that indirectly contributed to the correct formulation of doctrine on the Trinity. Newman employed many of the available sources, especially the writings of Church Fathers, early Church historians, like Sozomen and Socrates, and modern authors like Tillemont and Gibbon. He relied heavily on John Bull’s comprehensive work, Defensio Fidei Nicenae, published in 1703.
In addition to its historical and doctrinal character, this book was remarkable for its opening chapter on the subject of biblical hermeneutics. In this long chapter, Newman explained and defended the Church’s authority in interpreting Scripture and the role of Apostolic Tradition and Creeds for a proper understanding of biblical truths.
Newman argued that the Church Creeds were a chief source of instruction on the faith and a guardian of the correct interpretation of Sacred Scripture. He reasoned that the Sacred Scriptures cannot be interpreted with the Scriptures alone. The Scriptures must be interpreted by those who lived under the same Divine Influence that inspired them.4 The Creeds provide an organized presentation of the doctrine that Christians must believe. Newman wrote:
“Scripture being unsystematic, and the faith which it propounds being scattered through its documents, and understood only when they are viewed as a whole, the Creeds aim at concentrating its general spirit, so as to give security to the Church, as far as may be, that its members take that definite view of that faith which alone is the true one.”5
As a necessary introduction to the Arian Heresy, Newman explained the literal and allegorical interpretations of Sacred Scripture, which were prevalent in the Churches of Antioch and Alexandria. Chapter One of The Arians presents Tradition and Church teaching as the authoritative interpreters of Scripture. According to Newman, the Apostolic Tradition is contained both in the Sacred Scriptures and in the Church Creeds; the Creeds were a safeguard to the truths revealed in Scripture. He had earlier expressed some of these ideas in letters to his brother Charles, and later wrote some sermons and lectures on these same subjects. Newman went as far as to consider a type of divine revelation the “inspirations” of ancient poets and philosophers; these inspirations served as a preparation for the Gospel.6
The first part of The Arians explains the “Disciplina Arcani,” which was a custom practiced in early Christian churches. According to this custom, Alexandrian converts to the Catholic faith were introduced progressively to the truths of Christianity after having first learned those of natural theology and the precepts of natural law. Related to this was the principle of “economy,” which involved withholding a truth, or using it to one’s advantage, as St. Paul did at the Aeropagus when he spoke of the unknown God instead of Yahweh. Newman wrote that:
Instead of uttering any invective against their Polytheism, he began a discourse upon the Unity of the Divine Nature; and then proceeded to claim the altar, consecrated in the neighbourhood to the unknown God, as the property of Him whom he preached to them, and to enforce his doctrine of the Divine Immateriality, not by miracles, but by argument, and that founded on the words of a heathen poet.7
Economy adapted an explanation to the needs of the listener and to his philosophical notions, while it recognized the inadequacy of human language to fully convey dogmas. Newman further noted that:
It is thus we lead forward children by degrees, influencing and impressing their minds by means of their own confined conceptions of things, before we attempt to introduce them to our own; yet at the same time modelling their thoughts according to the analogy of those to which we mean ultimately to bring them.8
The central part of The Arians focuses on Arius’s biblical arguments and their refutation. Newman presented the historical setting for the controversy about Christ’s Divinity and the counter-arguments made to Arius, who denied that the Father and Son have the same being, or substance. Arius held that the Son of God was a creature, separate from the Godhead, and created in time. Newman indicated that the Church Fathers referred to Christ with two names: the eternal begotten Son and the Word of God. The latter corrected any reduction of the first to a being inferior to the Father. In the words of Newman:
The title of the Son marks His derivation and distinction from the Father, that of the Word (i.e. Reason) denotes His inseparable inherence in the Divine Unity; and while the former taken by itself, might lead the mind to conceive of Him as a second being, and the latter as no real being at all, both together witness to the mystery, that He is at once from, and yet in, the Immaterial, Incomprehensible God.9
In other sections of the book, Newman traced the origin of the Arian Heresy and other heresies that followed in its wake and listed numerous local Church councils that met to examine Christological doctrines and condemn erroneous ones. Although raised in Alexandria, Arius had studied in Antioch, where the school of biblical interpretation, at odds with the heavily allegorical school of Alexandria, fell into the error of an exaggerated literal interpretation of biblical texts.
In a hurry to meet his initial deadline, Newman ended with a short section on the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople held in the year A.D. 381. This section traced the historical background of the Council of Constantinople beginning in the year A.D. 325, when Emperor Constantine, who sought religious cohesion for his empire, convoked the first ecumenical council, which was held at Nicaea in Bithynia, not far from Constantinople. At Nicaea, the vast majority of the three hundred bishops in attendance ratified the orthodox doctrine on the consubstantial nature of the Father and the Son, giving rise to the Nicene Creed. This Creed defended the biblical truth of the unity of the Father and the Son with the celebrated expression: “begotten, not made, consubstantial to the Father.”
Athanasius, Deacon at the Church of Alexandria and assistant to Patriarch Alexander at the Council of Nicaea, appears throughout this history as the champion of orthodoxy. After the death of Alexander, he became Patriarch of the Alexandria. Athanasius, an intelligent and courageous bishop, was exiled five times by various imperial courts at the instigation of his theological opponents. At Alexandria, Athanasius exercised the power of excommunication to fight heretical views held by bishops and clergy; yet, according to Newman, he maintained a forgiving and conciliatory attitude toward them. Newman was struck by the noble and valiant character of St. Athanasius and referred to him many times as “champion of the truth”10 and an inspiring figure for Christians facing doctrinal liberalism. In 1842, he translated De Incarnatione, one of Athanasius’s works. For Newman, the English Church needed more men like St. Athanasius and St. Basil the Great, another bishop of the same period, to remedy the disease of doctrinal dissent, which was decimating the faith.
Published in 1833, The Arians was Newman’s first book. It was the theological history of a complex subject. The young author considered his work imperfect from the start, both in its content and language; nevertheless, he always agreed with the substance of the work, and believed that through it he had made some original contributions to the study of exegesis and the Arian Heresy. Many years later he added a short preface, some footnotes, and an appendix with longer notes as well as chronological charts.
Most important, however, was the effect that the study of this early heresy had on Newman’s religious ideas. Newman had begun a chronological reading of the Ancient Fathers in 1828, but only in the years after Hawkins stopped assigning him new students at Oriel was he finally able to dedicate the necessary time to study the Church Fathers in depth and learn their Christology and other doctrine.
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1LD, Vol. II, JHN to Hugh James Rose (August 24, 1831), 352-53. Initially Newman thought that his work on the councils could be divided by subject matter into three volumes.
2LD, Vol. III, William R. Lyall to Hugh James Rose (October 19, 1832), 104-5.
3LD, Vol. III, H. J. Rose to JHN (October 21, 1832), 104.
4Arians, 148.
5Ibid., 147.
6Ibid., 79-83; 82; Apo., 27.
7Arians, 65-66.
8Ibid., 72.
9Arians, 156-57.
10Apo., 26.