Section 12
6 Development of doctrine
Gerard H.
McCarren
Having decided to become a Roman Catholic, John Henry Newman laid aside his unfinished Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.1 Neither he nor anyone in the Church knew that he had just articulated ‘the classic discussion of doctrinal development’ and fixed ‘the almost inevitable starting point for an investigation of development of doctrine’.2 Newman’s Essay – and he considered it to be just that – enabled him to find intellectual warrant for his departure from Canterbury for Rome. The Essay possesses ‘continuing relevance’ for theology3 because Newman both poignantly formulated the problem created by the collision of dogmatic Christianity with the historical consciousness that impressed itself upon Western culture in the nineteenth century, and advanced ‘an hypothesis’ towards an explanation.4 In the estimation of Avery Dulles, the Essay remains unsurpassed in influence and ‘in depth and thoroughness’ among writings on development of doctrine.5 The Essay framed subsequent confrontations with the problem; indeed the compatibility between Newman’s Essay and the understanding of doctrinal development espoused by the Second Vatican Council is conspicuous.6
Newman’s understanding of development was not entirely without precedent. Some patristic authors, most strikingly St Vincent of Lérins, came near the notion almost asymptotically but, like the medieval theologians who later drew near the theme in some way, they engaged in nothing resembling systematic reflection on it. Scholastic and neo-scholastic theologians cast the problem, to the limited extent that they perceived it, in logical terms, failing thereby to attain to the crux of the problem posed by the flux of history. In 1825 Johann Adam Möhler of the Catholic Tübingen School published Die Einheit in der Kirche, which approached the issue, yet neither this nor his more famous Symbolik of 1832 contended directly with the problem of history’s clash with Catholic dogma’s claim to immutability.7 Only with Newman’s publication of his Essay could it be said that history’s inexorable bearing on Christian doctrinal claims was recognized and met with a somewhat tentative but imposing answer.8
The theme of development in Newman’s early writings
Newman’s first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century, had come almost within reach of doctrinal development but had not grappled with it. Aware that the need to formulate doctrines with the specificity of creedal statements came upon the early Christians for good and for ill,9 Newman applauded St Irenaeus’s distinction ‘between a tradition supplanting or perverting the inspired records, and a corroborating, illustrating, and altogether subordinate tradition’.10 ‘Newman was not yet occupied with the development of doctrine in its content’, however.11 He did not suggest development as a sort of middle way between discontinuity and mere explication. Similarly, Newman veered close to the idea of development when considering ‘the line of conduct which is to be observed by the Christian apologist and missionary’ in the face of the beliefs of pagans, whose writings might contain ‘the ore in which the true metal was found’,12 but Newman did not pause to reflect on the process by which Christians refine it. Newman noticed heresy’s effects upon the Church of ‘requiring its authoritative judgment on the point in dispute’13 and precipitating systematization of doctrine, but he did not go so far as to postulate development: ‘a system of doctrine becomes unavoidable; being framed, let it be observed, not with a view of explaining, but of arranging the inspired notices concerning the Supreme Being, of providing, not a consistent, but a connected statement’.14 When surveying the Arian controversy he marvelled at ‘the gradual influence of truth over error’ and especially at ‘the remarkable manner in which Divine Providence makes use of error itself as a preparation for truth’15 but approached the idea of development only tangentially: ‘The very confidence which would be felt by Christians in general that Apostolic truth would never fail, – and that they held it in each locality themselves and the orbis terrarum with them, in spite of all verbal contrarieties, – would indispose them to define it, till definition became an imperative duty’.16
In his last University Sermon, Newman took up the topic directly. In ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, Newman took as his text, ‘But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart’. He observed that, ‘The absence, or partial absence, or incompleteness of dogmatic statements is no proof of the absence of impressions or implicit judgments, in the mind of the Church. Even centuries might pass without the formal expression of a truth, which had been all along the secret life of millions of faithful souls.’ He pointed out, for example, that ‘the doctrine of the Double Procession was no Catholic dogma in the first ages, though it was more or less clearly stated by individual Fathers’ but now is constitutive of the faith and as such must have been ‘held every where from the beginning, and therefore, in a measure, held as a mere religious impression, and perhaps an unconscious one’.17 Over time
[o]ne proposition necessarily leads to another, and a second to a third; then some limitation is required; and the combination of these opposites occasions some fresh evolutions from the original idea, which indeed can never be said to be entirely exhausted. This process is its development, and results in a series, or rather body of dogmatic statements, till what was at first an impression on the Imagination has become a system or creed in the Reason.18
More important than the doctrinal statements that in combination define doctrine is the reality underneath those expressions; hence Newman articulated ‘the distinction, yet connexion, between the implicit knowledge and the explicit confession of the Divine Objects of Faith’.19 Scripture itself contains doctrinal developments and in fact warrants further development by the use of reason in theological reflection.20 Doctrinal development enshrines this progressive understanding.
The Essay on Development
Newman elaborated his pioneering understanding of doctrinal development most fully in his Essay on Development,21 which came starkly to grips with historical change:
[W]e must determine whether on the one hand Christianity is still to represent to us a definite teaching from above, or whether on the other its utterances have been from time to time so strangely at variance that we are necessarily thrown back on our own judgment individually to determine what the revelation of God is, or rather if in fact there is, or has been, any revelation at all.22
Indeed the difficulty was his own insofar as he was coming to believe that the doctrines and practices of Roman Catholicism which he had hitherto dismissed as corruptive accretions to pure Christianity stood in legitimate continuity with the Christian faith of the apostles.23 It was with the acknowledgement of ‘certain apparent inconsistencies and alterations in its doctrine and its worship such as irresistibly attract the attention of all who inquire into it’, ‘which have to be explained’,24 that Newman commenced his treatise on the theology of development. He believed that the Church standing in real continuity with the primitive Church would have as a hallmark fidelity to the teaching of the apostles. But once the weight of history impressed itself on human consciousness, how could such an identity be ascertained? If the problem had hitherto been recognized at all, it had been resolved by a denial of historical variation in the manner of Bossuet’s famously confident dismissal of it at the end of the seventeenth century.25
Newman, in contrast, embraced historical fluctuation in the Essay, as its best known sentence proclaims: ‘In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’.26 Newman countenanced change to the extent that it could be reconciled with his belief that the Church’s later doctrines were in fact contained in the apostolic deposit; it should not be forgotten that the sentence immediately preceding that most famous line declared that ‘a great idea’ ‘changes . . . in order to remain the same’.27 Having admitted the impact of the vicissitudes of history on Christian doctrine, Newman deemed doctrinal development the only hypothesis capable of explaining how Christianity could have remained faithful to its doctrinal patrimony.28 Newman rejected out of hand the ‘[hypothesis] to the effect that Christianity has even changed from the first and ever accommodates itself to the circumstances of times and seasons’ because it is ‘difficult to understand how such a view is compatible with the special idea of revealed truth’ which he assumed in his Essay.29 Newman similarly excluded Protestantism from consideration because he summarily judged it ‘not the Christianity of history’, its doctrines being manifestly incongruent with ‘antiquity, as it has come down to us’,30 ‘Protestants [being] as little [able to] bear its Antenicene as its Post-tridentine period’.31 Newman also considered whether or not the ‘hypothesis’ of the disciplina arcani was helpful ‘for accounting for a want of accord between the early and the late aspects of Christianity’,32 since according to that primitive practice the mysteries of the faith were disclosed only to the converted. Acknowledging that ‘this fact goes some way to account for that apparent variation and growth of doctrine’, Newman judged that ‘it is no key to the whole difficulty’.33
Newman found ‘more plausible’ the Anglican ‘hypothesis’ wherein ‘all usages, ways, opinions, and tenets, which have not the sanction of primitive times’, were excluded ‘as corruptions’.34 According to the famous dictum of Vincent of Lérins, ‘revealed and Apostolic doctrine is “quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus” . . .’.35 Yet Newman deemed the Vincentian Canon ultimately insufficient.36 If Anglican apologists saw in it both the ‘bulwark against Rome’ and the ‘assault against Protestantism’ that they wanted, Newman had come to find ‘difficulty’ ‘in applying it to particular cases’.37 ‘It admits of being interpreted in one of two ways’, he wrote: if interpreted narrowly so as to exclude certain Catholic doctrines, it recoiled upon teachings of the Church of England, and if broadly so as to retain Anglican teaching, then its consistent application left room for Roman doctrines considered by Anglicans to be unwarranted accretions. With St Vincent’s rule one could consistently hold both the doctrine of original sin and that of purgatory or neither; the Anglican affirmation of the former and denial of the latter could not stand.38 Newman concluded that without prejudice to the truth and utility of Vincent’s rule ‘in his own age’, in the present day ‘[t]he solution it offers is as difficult as the original problem’.39
Having excluded those ‘hypotheses’,40 Newman embarked on his own attempt to show that the entire history of Christianity, despite its variations, preserves the truth of revelation. This enquiry was simultaneously his attempt to validate the gravitational pull Rome was exerting on him. Taking up a line of argument from the last of the Oxford University Sermons, the Essay now considered how the inexhaustible riches of a real idea defy full expression in words.41 Hence ‘the primâ facie dissimilitude of its aspects becomes, when explained, an argument for its substantiveness and integrity, and their multiplicity for its originality and power’.42 Newman labelled the ‘process . . . by which the aspects of an idea are brought into consistency and form’ by the mind in which it lives ‘its development’.43 Different perspectives afford new insights, and the idea develops. Ideas develop in interaction with their environment, which comprises the minds which possess them, the communities in which these people live, and related ideas.44 Although an idea’s exchange with its environment introduces the risk of corruption, it also constitutes the possibility of the idea’s fuller display and comprehension, or for that matter of its continued intelligibility in a changing world.45 Living ideas develop.46 Should not Christian doctrines? Given the ‘nature of the human mind’ and the richness of ‘the highest and most wonderful truths’, development was inevitable.47 After a penetrating analysis, especially of scriptural warrants for a theory of development, Newman answered conclusively: ‘From the necessity, then, of the case, from the history of all sects and parties in religion, and from the analogy and example of Scripture, we may fairly conclude that Christian doctrine admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments, that is, of developments contemplated by its Divine Author’.48 Newman supported his case with various historical ‘instances in illustration’.49
Countering at the Essay’s outset those who summarily dismissed modern Christianity’s claim to possess ‘a real continuity of doctrine’ with the primitive Church, Newman, acknowledging ‘the abstract possibility of extreme changes’, asserted: ‘The onus probandi is with those who assert what it is unnatural to expect’.50 ‘Till positive reasons grounded on facts are adduced to the contrary, the most natural hypothesis, the most agreeable to our mode of proceeding in parallel cases, and that which takes precedence over all others’, he claimed, is to assume fundamental continuity.51 Considering ‘the Historical Argument in behalf of the Existing Developments’,52 Newman reaffirmed his commitment to this approach,53 assessing doctrines ‘in proportion to the strength of the antecedent probability in their favour’.54
Applying this understanding of assumptions which would later become pivotal in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Newman declared: ‘Now it is but a parallel exercise of reasoning to interpret the previous history of a doctrine by its later development, and to consider that it contains the later in posse and in the divine intention’.55 Given development, Newman believed that one can make retrospective claims based on its outcome. Though by no means wholly uncritical,56 his hermeneutic for evaluating primitive and undeveloped doctrines enabled him to offer a powerful alternative to sceptical interpretations of the history of doctrines. According to Newman, ‘[W]here a doctrine comes recommended to us by strong presumptions of its truth, we are bound to receive it unsuspiciously, and use it as a key to the evidences to which it appeals, or the facts which it professes to systematize, whatever may be our eventual judgment about it’.57
Newman’s argument that the papacy was a true development of foundations present in the primitive Church illustrates how he employed his understanding of the valid use of antecedent probability. Anticipating objections to the effect that the apostolic deposit lacks sufficient evidence for the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, Newman granted that ‘it is a theory’, principally ‘a theory to connect the words and acts of the Antenicene Church with that antecedent probability of a monarchical principle in the Divine Scheme, and that actual exemplification of it in the fourth century, which forms their presumptive interpretation’.58 Given that Newman found ‘nothing in the early history of the Church to contradict it’,59 he contended that this ‘presumptive interpretation’ grounded a strong case in favour of the Roman Catholic belief that the papacy is divinely instituted.
Having established, by finding antecedent probability of development fulfilled in the facts of Christian history, what he termed the ‘momentous fact’ ‘[t]hat, beyond reasonable doubt, there are [developments of doctrine]’,60 Newman considered the question ‘What are they?’ in light of the fact that true developments are not self-evident.61 Referring to the ‘tests’ for distinguishing these from corruptions which he devised and which he would elaborate in the second part of his book, he observed that notwithstanding the usefulness of such ‘tests’, ‘they are insufficient for the guidance of individuals in the case of so large and complicated a problem as Christianity’.62 Since it would be incongruous that developments of the saving truths revealed by God be unrecognizable,63 Newman claimed that ‘an external authority’, that is, ‘the infallibility of the Church’, is to be expected ‘to decide upon them, thereby separating them from the mass of mere human speculation, extravagance, corruption, and error, in and out of which they grow’.64 Thus Newman posited the antecedent probability of ‘an infallible developing authority’.65 Carrying his argument forward, Newman claimed that the expected developments of Christian doctrine ‘are found just where they might be expected, in the authoritative seats and homes of old tradition, the Latin and Greek Churches’.66
Roman Catholicism more than other types of Christianity resembled ‘the Church of the Fathers’.67 ‘Did St Athanasius or St Ambrose come suddenly to life’, so Newman introduced a particularly especially captivating passage, ‘it cannot be doubted what communion he would take to be his own’.68
Those developments, certified by the Church’s teaching authority, were as reasonable as the concept of development itself. As such they did not depend utterly on their sanction by ecclesiastical authority for recognition. Examining the characteristics of true development, as distinguished from corruption, or ‘perversion of the truth’,69 Newman proposed his seven ‘tests’ of faithful development, which he would label ‘notes’ when he revised the Essay for republication in 1878. These would aid in distinguishing genuine development from mere historical succession of one doctrine following upon another where the later doctrine does not preserve the substance of its antecedent.70 Newman expected by the application of these tests to confirm that his ‘hypothesis’ of development in fact showed the identity of the Roman Catholic Church of his day and the primitive Church.71 He hoped thereby to render acceptance of the Roman Catholic faith – precisely as the true representative of pristine Christian faith – inviting because reasonable. Here perhaps more clearly than in any other respect did the Essay go beyond Newman’s last University Sermon, when he had preached: ‘Nor am I here in any way concerned with the question, who is the legitimate framer and judge of these dogmatic inferences under the Gospel, or if there be any. Whether the Church is infallible, or the individual, or the first ages, or none of these, is not the point here, but the theory of developments itself.’72
In both Newman sought to show that with the passage of time truth is preserved precisely as it is presented anew and with increasing penetration,73 but in the Essay he set about ‘assign[ing] certain characteristics of faithful developments, which none but faithful developments have, and the presence of which serves as a test to discriminate between them and corruptions’.74 Seven ‘tests’ or ‘notes’ would provide ‘the interpretative assistance’ by which to show that the developments in Roman Catholicism, in the words of Aidan Nichols, ‘enjoy a reasonable claim to be aspects of an authentic re-composition of the original Christian “idea” into new “consistency and form”’.75 Newman’s replacement of the ‘tests’ of the 1845 edition with what Nichols called ‘the less ambitious “notes”’ of that of 1878 would ‘drive home the point’ that ‘the Essay does not offer a full criteriology of doctrinal development which will show Roman developments to be the genuine ones’.76
Newman labelled his ‘first note of a genuine development’ ‘preservation of type’.77 ‘The analogy of physical growth’ indicates how a plant or animal develops even as it remains the same. Newman noted that ‘unity of type . . . must not be pressed to the extent of denying all variation, nay, considerable alteration of proportion and relation, as time goes on, in the parts or aspects of an idea’.78 A review of the history of the first ecumenical councils showed that precisely as Catholic bishops added to the creed against the objections of heretical parties, who claimed that by their refusal to sanction such development they remained more faithful to the primitive Church, the Catholic bishops in union with the pope preserved the true meaning of the scriptural formulae. Thus Newman freely juxtaposed the statement that ‘the definition passed at Chalcedon is the Apostolic Truth once delivered to the saints’ with the admission that
the historical account of the Council is this, that a formula which the Creed did not contain, which the Fathers did not unanimously witness, and which some eminent Saints had almost in set terms opposed, which the whole East refused as a symbol, not once, but twice, patriarch by patriarch, metropolitan by metropolitan, first by the mouth of above a hundred, then by the mouth of above six hundred of its bishops, and refused upon the grounds of its being an addition to the Creed, was forced upon the Council, not indeed as being an addition, yet, on the other hand, not for subscription merely, but for acceptance as a definition of faith under the sanction of an anathema.79
No such penetrating insight had accompanied Newman’s review in Arians of such patristic material.
‘Continuity of Principles’ constitutes Newman’s second note of true development.80 It is because development takes place ‘on definite and continuous principles’ that type is preserved.81 Catholic principles engender true development. Newman found for example in the doctrine of the Incarnation several Gospel principles such as those of dogma, faith, theology, sacramentality, the mystical sense of Scripture, grace, asceticism, the malignity of sin, and matter’s capability of sanctification.82 These principles, according to Newman, ‘are the very instruments of [doctrinal] development’. Doctrinal development, then, respects among other things faith’s supremacy, the laws of reason, the dogmatic nature of Christianity and the spiritual interpretation of Scripture.83 There is a sense in which principles even claim priority over specific doctrines. Hence Newman claimed: ‘If it be true that the principles of the later Church are the same as those of the earlier, then, whatever are the variations of belief between the two periods, the later in reality agrees more than it differs with the earlier, for principles are responsible for doctrines’.84 The second note ‘comes to terms’, according to Jaroslav Pelikan, ‘with the stubborn fact of the doctrinal variety within every age of church history and between one age and another’.85
Another dynamic note is the third: ‘Power of Assimilation’.86 ‘The idea never was that throve and lasted, yet, like mathematical truth, incorporated nothing from external sources’, Newman asserted.87 Far from losing its identity in its interaction with its various milieus, Christianity has demonstrated ‘the power . . . of absorbing its antagonists, as Aaron’s rod’.88 Through human meticulousness89 and gracious Providence90 the Church ‘has been a treasure-house, giving forth things old and new, casting the gold of fresh tributaries into her refiner’s fire, or stamping upon her own, as time required it, a deeper impress of her Master’s image’.91 From Power of Assimilation results ‘Catholic fullness’.92 The Essay displays a confidence not found in Arians.
Newman indicated by his fourth note, logical sequence,93 that although doctrines do not ordinarily advance by syllogism, retrospective examination must be able to show that they proceed according to the rules of logic,94 if not strictly, at least such that there is ‘progress of the mind from one judgment to another, as, for instance, by way of moral fitness’.95 Time will tell the true import of a doctrine as implications unfold according to logic.96 As ‘instances of one doctrine leading to another’ Newman traced from the doctrine of baptism the development in sequence of pardons, penances, satisfactions, purgatory, meritorious works and the monastic rule.97 Owen Chadwick observed that because Newman interpreted logic in the widest sense, doctrines which proceed one from the other can be said to be truly new.98
Anticipation of future developments, Newman’s fifth note,99 follows upon the likelihood that ‘under favourable circumstances’ an idea will be displayed early in its history in richness ordinarily following upon a longer period of maturation, since ‘developments are in great measure only aspects of the idea from which they proceed’.100 Newman found the expectation fulfilled in various antenicene anticipations of allegedly later Catholic accretions.101
According to his sixth note, a true development is characterized by ‘conservative action upon its past’.102 Thus Newman quoted approvingly Vincent of Lérins’s description of development as ‘profectus fidei non permutatio’.103 Hence in Newman’s view ‘a developed doctrine which reverses the course of development is no true development but a corruption’.104 Genuine development involves ‘addition’, or ‘change which is in one sense real and perceptible, yet without loss or reversal of what has gone before, but, on the contrary, protective and confirmative of it’.105 Recalling that ‘a strict correspondence between the various members of a development, and those of the doctrine from which it is derived, is more than we have any right to expect’, just as ‘[t]he bodily structure of a grown man is not merely that of a magnified boy’, Newman held that nonetheless there is real preservation. Development is a process of ‘protecting’, not of ‘superseding’.106
Whereas corruption is ‘a brief and rapid process’ because it deviates from true development107 and its variant, decay, though enduring, lacks ‘vigorous action’ altogether,108 true development is marked by ‘chronic vigour’, its seventh note.109 Thus Newman pointed out: ‘The course of heresies is always short’.110 When indeed they appear to contradict this rule, close observation will reveal that they do so only by vacillating between possibly contradictory ideas.111 Therefore Newman ventured to state that an attempt to dismiss the longstanding peculiarly Catholic beliefs as corruptions would be to postulate a miracle indeed.112
The application of the theory of development
Few of the many studies of Newman’s Essay have brought sustained reflection to bear on its seven ‘tests’ or ‘notes’. How do they really function in the Essay? The Roman Catholic Church’s official International Theological Commission claimed in 1990 that the Essay’s ‘notes’ constitute ‘a criteriology for dogmatic development . . . that is useful . . . for the ongoing contemporary interpretation of dogmas’.113 So do other theologians, but close examination of the function of the ‘tests’ or ‘notes’ in the Essay indicates that they do not admit of so easy an application as might appear at a cursory glance. Scrutiny of Newman’s editorial work on the Essay for its final edition suggests certain subtle adjustments in his understanding of the original edition’s ‘tests’ corresponding to their recasting as ‘notes’, but perhaps more significant is Newman’s admission that the ‘notes’ were ‘of varying cogency, independence, and applicability’.114
Notwithstanding this lack of clarity, one can cautiously suggest guidelines for their application. With the Essay Newman was concerned primarily to confirm that the Roman Catholic Church as such could plausibly claim to embody authentic developments of doctrine, though it remains true that only some of the ‘notes’ apply to particular doctrines. In addition, the ‘notes’ for the most part must be applied together; it is hard to assess the applicability of just one or more of them to a doctrine or to the Church. Believing that ‘they rather serve as answers to objections brought against the actual decisions of authority, than [as] proofs of the correctness of their decisions’,115 Newman tightly circumscribed their purpose. The ‘notes’ serve to dispel accusations that Roman Catholic doctrines are additions compromising the pristine apostolic deposit of faith. With the assistance of the ‘notes’ one can defend the plausibility of distinctively Catholic doctrines. Moreover, Newman’s presentation of the ‘notes’ was not highly systematic. He did acknowledge them in 1878 to be ‘seven out of various Notes, which may be assigned, of fidelity in the development of an idea’.116 His impending reception into the Roman Catholic Church prompted him to rush the book to its conclusion, leaving it ‘unfinished’,117 such that he moved progressively from a protracted exposition of the first ‘note’ to a cursory outhne of the seventh.
Therefore, one may expect to find in the ‘notes’ qualities which may serve in a limited way as criteria for the recognition of genuine development of doctrine. On the one hand, one should not expect to construct upon them an ironclad proof. On the other hand, one should not undervalue them; to the extent that the application of the ‘notes’ can serve among the converging probabilities on the basis of which, as Newman argued in the Essay and more fully in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, one can achieve certitude, they are modest but telling indicators. Newman’s negative employment of the ‘notes’ should not prompt one to despair of their utility. The ‘notes’ have the important function of providing a check for a case constructed on other grounds. Newman conceived the Essay to refute objections to his becoming a Roman Catholic, not to discriminate between various faith options, and the book should be understood in that context. If one can employ the ‘notes’ with a presumption of the truth of doctrinal developments within the Church when one uses them as Newman did, i.e., retrospectively, upon doctrines embraced by the Church, using the ‘notes’ without reference to this intention carries much greater risk. If the ‘notes’ are applied to a doctrine that has not been embraced by the Church, one cannot attach such a presumption of truth to it. With such a presumption one might, after a favourable application of the seven ‘notes’ such that the doctrine seems tenable or reasonable, accept the developed doctrine as true, but without this presumption one would seem to be left merely with the claim that the doctrine in question is merely what the ‘notes’ can indicate: tenable because reasonable.
Given that careful examination of the ‘notes’ suggests that they are incapable of meeting the high expectations attached to them by the International Theological Commission and some contemporary theologians, how precisely may they be put to use in prospective application? Although they do not constitute a mathematical formula for adjudicating claims about possible developments of doctrine, Newman’s ‘tests’ or ‘notes’ can serve at least to identify which such claims seem plausible and therefore worthy of further consideration and which appear to be unreasonable and therefore doubtfully authentic at best.
Indicative of Newman’s view that his ‘notes’ constituted, in Dulles’s words, not ‘a set of laws’ but ‘rules of thumb’118 was his option not to exploit them after 1845 in service of other theological issues. He did, however, give a succinct explanation of doctrinal development in his substantial letter of 1868 to Father John Stanislas Flanagan. Were St Paul queried about the 1854 definition of the Blessed Virgin’s Immaculate Conception, his first answer might well reflect sheer incomprehension of the terminology, but his eventual response, upon hearing some explanation, would be affirmative.119 In addition, shortly after he became a Roman Catholic, Newman submitted short chapters and theses encapsulating the argument of the Essay to the distinguished Roman theologian Fr Giovanni Perrone, SJ. Newman sought to gain approval of his rationale for becoming Roman Catholic and to clear up Roman misunderstanding of his Essay, which for reasons of language was known there more by hearsay than by direct acquaintance. Perrone’s marginal comments suggested general acceptance of Newman’s theology.120
Newman’s ‘hypothesis to account for a difficulty’,121 his articulation of doctrinal development, retains its influence not merely for its enduring place in Christian intellectual history, but because Newman’s ‘difficulty’, despite recent theological advances, and indeed all the more because of such progress, remains a theological challenge today. Newman’s statement of the problem continues to demand attention because the problem still calls for a solution, and because his answer to it, whatever its shortcomings, promises assistance to theologians who strive to explore the issue and to venture viable solutions.
Notes
2. Jaroslav Pelikan, Development of Christian Doctrine: Some Historical Prolegomena (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 13 and 3.
3. Thomas Guarino, Revelation and Truth: Unity and Plurality in Contemporary Theology (London: Associated University Presses, c. 1993), 181 n. 3. See also David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury Press, Crossroad Books, 1975), 196 n. 46.
4. Dev., 1st edn (London: James Toovey, 1845), 27 (hereafter Dev. (1845); Dev. 3rd edn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1878) (hereafter Dev.), 90.
6. See especially Gaudium et spes, 62 and Unitatis redintegratio, 4, 6 and 17.
7. Jan Walgrave observed that Möhler neither analysed the process of development nor marshalled facts as Newman had done. J. H. Walgrave, ‘Doctrine, Development of’, New Catholic Encyclopedia iv (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967), 943. See also Walgrave, ‘L’originalité de l’idée Newmanienne du développement’, in Heinrich Fries and Werner Becker (eds.), Newman Studien, vi (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1964), 83–96; Yves M. J. Congar, OP, A History of Theology, trans. Hunter Guthrie, SJ (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968), 188; and Henry Raphael Nienaltowski, OFMCap., ‘Johann Adam Möhler’s Theory of Doctrinal Development: Its Genesis and Formulation’, The Catholic University of America Studies in Sacred Theology Series 2, no. 113 (S.T.D. diss. abstract, The Catholic University of America) (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 72.
8. By writing tentatively that what ‘may be called the Theory of Development of Doctrine’ ‘has been at all times, perhaps, implicitly adopted by theologians, and, I believe, has recently been illustrated by several distinguished writers of the continent, such as De Maistre and Möhler’, Newman indicated the essential originality of his Essay. Dev., 29 and 30. Owen Chadwick deduced from ‘that astonishing juxtaposition of names’, of Möhler and de Maistre, that Newman was hardly familiar with the very different theologies represented. Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 112; see also 111 and 118–19.
9. Ari., 36–8.
10. Ari., 55.
12. Ari., 83 and 86.
13. Ari., 141.
14. Ari., 146; see also Ari., 149–50, 154, 164, 179–80, 288, 367.
15. Ari., 377. For a similarly confident expression of the providential triumph of truth over error, see Ari., 392.
16. Ari., 434.
17. U.S., 323.
18. U.S., 329.
19. U.S., 337.
20. U.S., 335.
21. Newman considered the Essay to be one of his five ‘“constructive” works’. L.D., xxiv: 390–1, quoted in Ker, John Henry Newman, 636.
22. Dev., 9.
23. See Dev., 5–6. Newman’s personal investment in his Essay ran deep. Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), 231.
24. Dev., 9 and 7.
26. Dev., 40.
27. Dev., 40.
28. Dev., 29–30.
29. Dev., 10.
30. Dev., 9, and Newman, Church of the Fathers (H.S., i:418) quoted in Dev., 9.
31. Dev., 8.
32. Dev., 27.
33. Dev., 29.
34. Dev., 10.
35. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, 2, 6 quoted in Dev., 10.
36. In the Essay Newman did not consider in a sustained way other texts of Vincent of Lérins which he might have found more adequate. See Thomas Guarino, ‘Vincent of Lerins and the Hermeneutical Question’, Gregorianum 75 (1994), 496. See also Yves M. J. Congar, OP, Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and a Theological Essay (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 210; and Thomas Guarino, ‘Tradition and Doctrinal Development: Can Vincent of Lérins Still Teach the Church?’ Theological Studies 67 (2006), 37–8, 63–5, 68–9 and 71.
37. Dev., 11.
38. Dev., 20; see Dev., 11–24 for other striking examples.
39. Dev., 27.
40. Dev., 9.
41. Dev., 35.
42. Dev., 35.
43. Dev., 38; see also Dev., 39.
44. Dev., 38–9.
45. Dev., 39–40.
46. In Dev., 41–54, Newman elaborated eight ways in which ideas develop. See T. J. Mashburn, ‘The Categories of Development: An Overlooked Aspect of Newman’s Theory of Doctrinal Development’, Heythrop Journal 29 (1988), 33–43.
47. Dev., 29–30.
48. Dev., 74.
49. Dev., 122–65.
50. He added that ‘to be just able to doubt is no warrant for disbelieving’. Dev., 6.
51. Dev., 5.
52. Dev., 99–121.
53. Dev., 101.
54. Dev., 101.
55. Dev., 106. This claim, though edited for the 1878 edition, was present in the 1845 edition. Dev. (1845), 152. It therefore truly anticipated G.A., published in 1870.
56. Nicholas Lash noted that Newman used antecedent probability merely to make negative claims, though sometimes his use of it appears to have constituted the basis for strong positive assertions. Nicholas Lash, Newman on Development: The Search for an Explanation in History (Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos Press, 1975), 41.
57. Dev., 109–10. Moreover, Newman believed that his method of interpretation could attain the clarity Anglicans typically claimed for the Vincentian Canon. In language which would become central in the Grammar, Newman wrote: ‘[A] converging evidence in favour of certain doctrines may, under circumstances, be as clear a proof of their Apostolical origin as can be reached practically from the Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus’. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2, 6 quoted in Dev., 123.
58. Dev., 154. Newman declared: ‘[T]he simple question is this, whether the clear light of the fourth and fifth centuries may be fairly taken to interpret to us the dim, though definite outhnes traced in the preceding’. Dev., 165. Newman believed his theory of development supplied a presumption constituting warrants for an affirmative answer.
59. Dev., 154.
60. Dev., 75. The perspective of the late twentieth century, in which ‘development is now considered as a fact of life rather than as hypothetical explanation’, should not be allowed to blunt appreciation of the ‘momentous[ness]’ of the ‘fact’ of development. John T. Ford, ‘Faithfulness to Type in Newman’s “Essay on Development”’, in Newman Today, ed. with intro. Stanley L. Jaki (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 33.
61. Dev., 75; see also Dev., 76.
62. Dev., 78.
63. Dev., 89 and 100.
64. Dev., 78. See also Dev., 79–80 and 85–6.
65. Dev., 75.
66. Dev., 93.
67. Dev., 97.
68. Dev., 97–8.
69. Dev., 170.
70. Dev., 171–2.
71. See Ford, ‘Faithfulness to Type in Newman’s “Essay on Development”’, 19.
72. U.S., 319–20.
73. Dev., 169.
74. Dev., 170.
76. Nichols, From Newman to Congar, 47; John Coulson, ‘Was Newman a Modernist?’ in Arthur Hilary Jenkins (ed.), John Henry Newman and Modernism, Internationale Cardinal-Newman-Studien, 14 (Sigmaringendorf: Glock und Lutz, 1990), 78. With a broader emphasis, Jaroslav Pelikan deemed Newman’s replacement of ‘tests’ by ‘notes’ significant and directed the reader to the Charles Frederick Harrold edition (New York, 1949) ‘for a detailed comparison of the editions of 1845 and 1878’. Jaroslav Pelikan, Development of Christian Doctrine: Some Historical Prolegomena (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 34 n. 70. According to Nichols, the later edition was ‘notable for its emphasis that the theory of doctrinal development is not meant to prove the claims of Roman Catholicism. Rather was the Essay intended to dispel objections to [it]: not at all the same thing.’ Nichols, From Newman to Congar, 45. Very insightful in connection with this question is Ford, ‘Faithfulness to Type in Newman’s “Essay on Development”’. For differences between the ‘tests’ of 1845 and the ‘notes’ of 1878, see Gerard H. McCarren, ‘Are Newman’s “Tests” or “Notes” of Genuine Doctrinal Development Useful Today?’ Newman Studies Journal 2 (Fall 2004), 48–61.
77. Dev., 171–8, 207–47.
78. Dev., 173.
79. Dev., 312.
80. Dev., 178–85, 323–54.
81. Dev., 324.
82. Dev., 325–6.
83. Dev., 326–52.
84. Dev., 353.
85. Pelikan, Development of Christian Doctrine, 15. For all his appreciation of the Essay’s achievement, Pelikan ultimately judged its handling of doctrinal variation in history unsuccessful. Pelikan, Development of Christian Doctrine, 2, 13 and 144–5; see also Jaroslav Pelikan, Historical Theology: Continuity and Change in Christian Doctrine (New York: Corpus; Philadelphia: Westminster; London: Hutchinson, 1971), 58, and Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 38. Likewise, Nicholas Lash considered the possibility of admitting greater change in doctrine than Newman would have allowed. Nicholas Lash, ‘Development of Doctrine: Smokescreen of Explanation?’ New Blackfriars 52 (1971), 101–8.
86. Dev., 185–9; 355–82.
87. Dev., 186.
88. Dev., 355; see also Dev., 359.
89. Dev., 366.
90. Dev., 368–9.
91. Dev., 382.
92. Dev., 382.
93. In the 1845 edition, the fourth and fifth tests were reversed.
94. Dev., 383.
95. Dev., 383: ‘Logical sequence means a vague but general intellectual coherence’. It is not ‘the “logical implication” of the Scholastics’, but merely ‘harmony or congruity or “naturalness”’. Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 157.
96. Dev., 192–5.
97. Dev., 384–99.
98. Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 157; see also 193, 195. For a critique of Chadwick’s equation of new doctrine with new revelation, see Jan Walgrave, Unfolding Revelation: The Nature of Doctrinal Development (Philadelphia: Westminster; London: Hutchinson, 1972), 306; Ian T. Ker, ‘Newman’s Theory – Development or Continuing Revelation?’ in James D. Bastable (ed.), Newman and Gladstone Centennial Essays (Dublin: Veritas, 1978), 145–59; and H. Francis Davis, ‘Is Newman’s Theory of Development Catholic?’ Blackfriars 39 (1958), 310–21. Paul Misner held that Chadwick’s criticism, though ultimately unfounded, indicated an ‘intellectualist constriction’ on Newman’s part. Paul Misner, ‘Newman’s Concept of Revelation and the Development of Doctrine’, Heythrop Journal 11 (1970), 46. See also Gustave Thils, ‘Autour de Newman’, Ephemerides Theologicae Louvanienses 33 (1957), 352, and Avery Dulles, SJ, ‘From Images to Truth: Newman on Revelation and Faith’, Theological Studies 51 (1990), 266.
99. Dev., 195–200, 400–18.
100. Dev., 195.
101. Dev., 401–18. Newman observed that from the doctrines concerning Christ’s work of redemption follow Catholic doctrines sometimes accused of being corruptions: ‘that of the resurrection of the bodies of His Saints, and of their future glorification with Him; next that of the sanctity of their relics; further, that of the merit of Virginity; and, lastly, that of the prerogatives of Mary, Mother of God’. ‘All these doctrines’, he noted, ‘are more or less developed in the Antenicene period’. Dev., 401–10.
102. Dev., 195–9, 410–36.
103. Commonitorium, 23, 54, quoted in Dev., 201.
104. Dev., 202.
105. Dev., 420.
106. Dev., 420.
107. Dev., 203.
108. Dev., 204.
109. Dev., 203–6, 437–45. Dev. (1845), 90, employed ‘Chronic Continuance’ as the title of the seventh test.
110. Dev., 204.
111. Dev., 204.
112. Dev., 438.
113. International Theological Commission, ‘On the Interpretation of Dogmas’, Origins 20 (1990), 13.
114. Dev., 171.
115. Dev., 78.
116. Dev., 205–6.
117. Apo., 234.
118. Dulles, Newman, 79.
119. T.P., ii:159.
120. Newman, De Catholici Dogmatis Evolutione (Utrum profecerit Ecclesia Catholica in cognitione sua fidei semel sibi ab Apostolis Traditae?), in T. Lynch (ed.), ‘The Newman-Perrone Paper on Development’, Gregorianum 16 (1935), 402–47; in Newman, Roman Catholic Writings on Doctrinal Development, ed. and trans. James Gaffney (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1997).
121. Dev., 30.
Further reading
Dulles, Cardinal Avery. Newman. London and New York: Continuum, 2002, 64–82.
Ford, John T. ‘Faithfulness to Type in Newman’s “Essay on Development”’, in Stanley L. Jaki (ed.), Newman Today. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989, 17–48.
Ker, Ian. John Henry Newman: A Biography. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1988, 257–315.
Ker, Ian. ‘Newman’s Theory – Development or Continuing Revelation?’ in James D. Bastable (ed.), Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays. Dublin: Veritas, 1978, 145–59.
Lash, Nicholas. Newman on Development: The Search for an Explanation in History. Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos Press, 1975.
McCarren, Gerard H. ‘Are Newman’s “Tests” or “Notes” of Genuine Doctrinal Development Useful Today?’ Newman Studies Journal 2 (Fall 2004), 48–61.
Nichols, Aidan. From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1990, 17–70.
Walgrave, J. H. Newman the Theologian: The Nature of Belief and Doctrine as Exemplified in His Life and Works. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960, 44–65, ‘The Idea and Theory of Development in Newman’s Works’; 241–77, ‘Invariability and Development’; and 283–307, ‘Newman in Contemporary Thought’.