Section 14
7 The Church as communion
Ian
Ker
The Church as sacramental communion
Two years before the beginning of the Oxford Movement, Newman dismissed the idea of an individualistic Christianity. Any Christian who ‘stands forth on his own ground, declaring himself as an individual a witness for Christ’, would be ‘grieving and disturbing the calm spirit given us by God’, for Christians are called to ‘unite together in one, and to shelter our personal profession under the authority of the general body’.1 Two years later in 1833, the year Newman regarded as the formal beginning of the Movement, he is sure that you cannot separate Christianity from the Church: ‘The Holy Church has been set up from the beginning as a solemn religious fact . . . as a picture, a revelation of the next world, as itself the Christian Dispensation’.2 Rejecting his former Evangelical conception of the real Church as invisible, the Tractarian Newman insisted that the Church ‘is a visible body, and, to appearance, an institution of this world’.3 For it is a ‘Kingdom which Christ has set up’, or, rather, ‘a new Kingdom has been established, not merely different from all kingdoms before it, but contrary to them; a paradox in the eyes of man, – the visible rule of the invisible Saviour’.4
But although this visible communion has an institutional and regal aspect, nevertheless it is fundamentally sacramental: ‘Christ formed a body. He secured that body from dissolution by the bond of a Sacrament. He committed the privileges of His spiritual kingdom and the maintenance of His Faith as a legacy of this baptized society.’5 While rejecting any notion of an ‘Invisible Church . . . as if Scripture said one word, anywhere, of a spiritual body existing in this world separate from, and independent of, the Visible Church’, Newman at the same time is well aware that the Church does indeed have an invisible dimension: ‘No harm can come of the distinction of the Church into Visible and Invisible, while we view it as, on the whole, but one in different aspects; as Visible, because consisting (for instance) of clergy and laity – as Invisible, because resting for its life and strength upon unseen influences and gifts from Heaven.’ For, although the Church ‘is a visible body’, yet it is ‘invested with, or . . . existing in invisible privileges’, since ‘the Church would cease to be the Church, did the Holy Spirit leave it’, as ‘its outward rites and forms are nourished and animated by the living power which dwells within it’.6 Fundamentally, then, the Church is the Holy Spirit’s ‘especial dwelling-place’,7 since ‘the Spirit came to make us one in Him who had died and was alive, that is, to form the Church’. The Church, therefore, is ‘the one mystical body of Christ . . . quickened by the Spirit’ – ‘one’ by virtue of the Holy Spirit giving it life.8
This scriptural and patristic understanding of the Church as primarily the communion of those who have received the Holy Spirit in baptism was not abandoned by Newman when he entered the Roman Catholic Church of his day with its Tridentine stress on the Church as an institutional pyramid. Towards the end of his life he wrote a very lengthy ‘Preface’ (1877) to his Anglican Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (1837), in which he attempted to account for the apparent discordance between the Roman Catholic Church’s ‘formal teaching and its popular and political manifestations’, having already answered in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) the other charge that he had brought against Rome in these lectures, namely, ‘the contrast which modern Catholicism is said to present with the religion of the Primitive Church’. And it is striking how Newman takes as his starting-point not the institutional but the sacramental concept of the Church as Christ’s ‘mystical Body and Bride . . . and the shrine and organ of the Paraclete’.9
Given the Tridentine conception of the Church as first and foremost the hierarchical Church militant, one might have supposed that Newman would explain these apparent corruptions in Catholicism in a very different way. Having dealt with the alleged doctrinal corruptions in 1845, he now had to account for the superstitions and abuses of power which notoriously alienated his countrymen from Rome. And surely the most obvious explanation would have been to point out that the Catholic belief that the pope and bishops were the successors of Peter and the Apostles, in whose apostolic ministry the ministerial priesthood shared, meant that inevitably such power was open to corruption in a way that the Protestant ministry was not. It was, Newman might have argued, the unavoidably clerical and hierarchical nature of the Church which led inevitably to such abuses. A Catholic as opposed to a Protestant clergy were naturally tempted to keep the laity in submission by tolerating, even encouraging, superstition, just as papal and episcopal authority could easily be misused.
Now the striking thing about the 1877 Preface is that Newman does not attempt to employ that strategy. Far from speaking about the Church in the usual terms of clergy and laity, Newman instead begins the Preface by defining the Church as the Body of Christ, since he wants to argue that because the Church therefore shares in the three offices of Christ as prophet, priest, and king, it is the consequent difficulty of exercising this ‘triple office’ simultaneously that accounts for the apparent contradictions in Catholic theory and practice.10 The Preface does not conceive of the Church in the usual institutional terms of clergy and laity. Even the regal office, which is seen by Newman as belonging pre-eminently to ‘the Papacy and its Curia’ (thus reflecting the papalism of the nineteenth-century Church), is not regarded as shared by the bishops, let alone the clergy.11 Of the other two offices, the prophetical is assigned to the theologians, but nothing is said about whether they are clergy or laity. And, even more significantly, the priestly office ‘is not particularly assigned to the ordained, as one might have expected’. Instead, initially, Newman ‘attributes this office to the “pastor and flock”, but in the main body of the Preface he focuses almost entirely on popular religion and on the beliefs of the simple faithful’.12 Thus, rather than distinguishing clergy and laity, Newman says that the Church as a ‘religion’ has ‘its special centre of action’ in ‘pastor and flock’.13 From the point of view, then, of devotion and worship the Church is not conceived of as regulated or misregulated by the clergy and hierarchy but is regarded as pertaining to both priests and people together.
It is clear that Newman both as an Anglican and a Roman Catholic had the same sacramental conception of the Church as the Body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit, or the communion of the baptized. Fundamentally, the same is true of the famous article, ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ (1859). This essay is usually held to be a classic text on the role of the laity in the Church. When it was first edited and reprinted over 100 years later,14 the editor, John Coulson, took it for granted that the faithful are synonymous with the laity. Nor did he distinguish the clergy from the bishops with whom Newman’s article was concerned, namely, the bishops at the time of the Arian heresy who, Newman claimed, had largely failed, unlike the ‘faithful’, to uphold the orthodox faith. In a subsequent book, Coulson represented Newman as protesting against the Church’s being ‘conceived as divided into two casts – the clerical or dynamic element; and the lay or passive element’.15 However, Coulson does not conceive of the protest as being against such a division of the Church, but as being against the characterization of the laity as passive and the clergy as dynamic.
It is perfectly true that ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ was written as a result of a controversy over the English bishops’ refusal to cooperate with a government commission concerning the state of primary education, in spite of the fact that Catholic schools received state aid. Newman thought the laity should be consulted on a matter concerning their children’s education and deplored the hierarchy’s scant regard for their rights. It is therefore true that in the essay Newman implicitly accepts the division of the Church into clergy and laity.
After his conversion in 1845, he had soon become aware of how clericalized the Catholic Church had become; by contrast the very different way the laity were treated in the Church of England was for him a distinct point in its favour. His feelings on this subject came to a head during his abortive rectorship of the Catholic University of Ireland. He came to believe that the principal cause of the damaging friction between him and Archbishop Cullen of Dublin was his desire to appoint a lay finance committee (the money for the university after all had to be raised from the laity), but even more seriously to appoint as many laymen rather than less able priests to chairs as possible, which meant appointing leading Irish nationalists who were anathema to Cullen. At the time of the controversy that led up to the writing of ‘On Consulting’, Newman’s bishop in Birmingham responded to his complaint about the way the laity were treated by saying ‘something like, “[w]ho are the laity?”’, to which Newman replied, ‘The Church would look foolish without them’.16
But in spite of Newman’s strong views on the proper place of the laity in the nineteenth-century Church, what ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ also reveals is that he had a very clear understanding that such a clear-cut division was not characteristic of the early Church, and in particular that the ‘faithful’ are not synonymous with the laity. The argument of the essay is that in the fourth century ‘the divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the faithful than by the Episcopate’. It is true that Newman seems at times to equate the faithful with the laity, as when he goes on to say that ‘the body of the episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism’. But in the same sentence he acknowledges that ‘there were numbers of clergy who stood by the laity, and acted as their centres and guides’.17 Later in the essay he cites an instance where ‘there was a remarkable unanimity of clergy and people’ in rejecting the Arian bishop.18 It is therefore not correct to say that the distinction in ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ is between clergy and laity; it is between the bishops and the laity.
The second important point to make is that we need to be clear about whom Newman means by the laity. For when he comes to give his documentary ‘proofs of the fidelity of the laity’, it is striking that his very first text, a quotation from St Athanasius about the Alexandrian church, speaks about the Arian bishops physically attacking the ‘holy virgins and brethren’. Now in the terminology of Newman’s day these ‘virgins’ and ‘brethren’ would be classed as ‘religious’. In the same passage of Athanasius there is another reference to ‘virgins’ in a later quotation. And it is noteworthy that in both these instances, as in the ones that follow, the words are italicized in order to indicate that this is proof of the fidelity of the laity. Similarly, the third of the texts quoted by Newman as examples of the fidelity of the laity refers to ‘monks’. Again, in the fifth text there is a reference to two upholders of the orthodox doctrine in Antioch ‘who had embraced the ascetical life’, in other words who were ‘religious’ in modern terms, but who are described as being ‘in the ranks of the laity’, since they were ‘not as yet in the sacred ministry’.19
When Newman came to republish his first book The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) in 1871, he added an appendix which included a note containing part of ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ together with some amendments and additions. The latter include an extraordinary sentence in the first paragraph of the note: ‘And again, in speaking of the laity, I speak inclusively of their parish-priests (so to call them), at least in many places; but . . . we are obliged to say that the governing body of the Church came short’.20 If the clergy are to be included in the laity, then any idea that the essay is a learned tract defending the laity against the clergy is absurd. The truth is that, in the historical examples Newman gives, the ‘faithful’ are by no means exclusively the laity, but rather include both priests and religious. Insofar as ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ is an attack on any part of the Church, it is an attack on the bishops. The article was written out of concern that the English episcopate had failed to consult the laity in a matter that concerned them. But at a deeper theological level Newman wanted to show how the faith did not belong to the bishops alone but to the whole communion of the baptized, a fact which was dramatically highlighted in the greatest crisis ever to face Christianity when that very part of the Church whose special responsibility it was to proclaim and teach the faith substantially failed to do so. But since the faith did not pertain to them alone, it was preserved by the body of the faithful, who included what we would now call ‘priests’ and ‘religious’, as well as laity.
Authority and freedom in creative tension
Not only is the faith not the preserve of the episcopate, but the interpretation and development of doctrine does not pertain to the bishops alone. Newman’s most extended treatment of the role of theologians and their relation to the magisterium or teaching authority of the pope and bishops is to be found in the final fifth chapter of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. On the one hand, he is uncompromising about the infallibility of the teaching Church, calling it a ‘power . . . happily adapted to be a working instrument . . . for smiting hard and throwing back the immense energy of the aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy intellect’. Similarly, the Church hierarchy’s authority, ‘viewed in its fulness’ and ‘viewed in the concrete, as clothed and surrounded by the appendages of its high sovereignty’, is seen as ‘a supereminent prodigious power sent upon earth to encounter and master a giant evil’. Although infallibility strictly only belongs to solemn dogmatic definitions, Newman professes to submit not only to the traditions of the Church, but also ‘to those other decisions of the Holy See, theological or not . . . which, waiving the question of their infallibility, on the lowest ground come to me with a claim to be accepted and obeyed’.21
On the other hand, this unequivocal assertion of Church authority provokes the obvious objection that ‘the restless intellect of our common humanity is utterly weighed down’ by such an authority, ‘so that, if this is to be the mode of bringing it into order, it is brought into order only to be destroyed’. But Newman counters that in fact the ‘energy of the human intellect . . . thrives and is joyous, with a tough elastic strength, under the terrible blows of the divinely-fashioned weapon, and is never so much itself as when it has lately been overthrown’. The paradox is justified by the argument that, far from being mutually contradictory, authority and reason need each other precisely because each is actually sustained by conflict with the other:
It is the vast Catholic body itself, and it only, which affords an arena for both combatants in that awful, never-dying duel. It is necessary for the very life of religion . . . that the warfare should be incessantly carried on. Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a re-action of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide; – it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power, – into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.22
Newman insists that an infallible authority is intended ‘not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance’. He also emphasizes both the narrow limits of infallibility in defining as explicit doctrine what is already implicit in revelation, as well as its rare occurrence. And ‘because there is a gift of infallibility in the Catholic Church’, it does not necessarily follow that ‘the parties who are in possession of it are in all their proceedings infallible’. On the contrary, Newman admits, ‘history supplies us with instances in the Church where legitimate power has been harshly used’. Nevertheless, Newman quickly qualifies this admission by adding that it does not ‘follow that the substance of the acts of the ruling power is not right and expedient, because its manner may have been faulty’.23
Carefully balancing the rival claims of authority and theological freedom, Newman develops his sharply antithetical argument. He continues by reinforcing the case for authority. Despite all abuses, he insists that ecclesiastical authority has been ‘mainly in the right, and that those whom they were hard upon were mainly in the wrong’. For example, Origen (whose name ‘I love’) ‘was wrong’ and ‘his opponents were right’. And yet – ‘who can speak with patience of his enemy and the enemy of St John Chrysostom, that Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria? Who can admire or revere Pope Vigilius?’ The contradiction is resolved by a shift of perspective:
In reading ecclesiastical history, when I was an Anglican, it used to be brought home to me, how the initial error of what afterwards became heresy was the urging forward some truth against the prohibition of authority at an unseasonable time. There is a time for every thing, and many a man desires a reformation of an abuse, or the fuller development of a doctrine, or the adoption of a particular policy, but forgets to ask himself whether the right time for it is come: and knowing that there is no one who will be doing any thing towards its accomplishment in his own lifetime unless he does it himself, he will not listen to the voice of authority, and he spoils a good work in his own century, in order that another man, as yet unborn, may not have the opportunity of bringing it happily to perfection in the next. He may seem to the world to be nothing else than a bold champion for the truth and a martyr to free opinion, when he is just one of those persons whom the competent authority ought to silence; and, though the case may not fall within that subject-matter in which that authority is infallible, or the formal condition of the exercise of that gift may be wanting, it is clearly the duty of authority to act vigorously in the case.24
This is bound to arouse criticism ‘if the ruling power happens in its proceedings to evince any defect of prudence or consideration’. And so ‘all those who take the part of that ruling authority will be considered as time-servers, or indifferent to the cause of uprightness and truth’. But that is not the conclusion of the sentence. The sting lies in the rest of the sentence which is aimed at those who would deny legitimate theological freedom: ‘while, on the other hand, the said authority may be accidentally supported by a violent ultra party, which exalts opinions into dogmas, and has it principally at heart to destroy every school of thought but its own’.25
But authentic intellectual freedom is essential to the Church, for, Newman claims, it is ‘individuals, and not the Holy See, that have taken the initiative, and given the lead to the Catholic mind, in theological inquiry’. ‘Indeed’, he points out to those who believe that all Catholic truth comes from the oracle of Rome, ‘it is one of the reproaches against the Roman Church, that it has originated nothing, and has only served as a sort of remora or break in the development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I really embrace as a truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its extraordinary gift.’ Far from being distinguished for theological originality, Newman contends, ‘the Church of Rome possessed no great mind in the whole period of persecution’. There was not a single great theologian until Pope St Leo, who taught only ‘one point of doctrine’. Not even Pope St Gregory has a place in the history of theology. The greatest Western theologian, St Augustine, belonged, like the best early Latin theologians, to the African Church. Western theology, in fact, was formed to a considerable extent by heterodox theologians such as Tertullian, Origen, and Eusebius, with the result that heretical ‘questionings’ became ‘salutary truths’. Even General Councils were guided by the ‘individual reason’ of a mere presbyter like Malchion or a young deacon like Athanasius. At the Council of Trent, too, particular theologians ‘had a critical effect on some of the definitions of dogma’.26
By appealing to history to show how little authority in general has interfered with the freedom of theologians, Newman is arguing in effect for a balance to be kept between the teaching authority and theological freedom. He deliberately appeals to that most Catholic of periods, the Middle Ages:
There never was a time when the intellect of the educated class was more active, or rather more restless, than in the middle ages. And then again all through Church history from the first, how slow is authority in interfering! Perhaps a local teacher, or a doctor in some local school, hazards a proposition, and a controversy ensues. It smoulders or burns in one place, no one interposing; Rome simply lets it alone. Then it comes before a Bishop; or some priest, or some professor in some other seat of learning takes it up; and then there is a second stage of it. Then it comes before a University, and it may be condemned by the theological faculty. So the controversy proceeds year after year, and Rome is still silent. An appeal perhaps is next made to a seat of authority inferior to Rome; and then at last after a long while it comes before the supreme power. Meanwhile, the question has been ventilated and turned over and over again, and viewed on every side of it, and authority is called upon to pronounce a decision, which has already been arrived at by reason. But even then, perhaps the supreme authority hesitates to do so, and nothing is determined on the point for years; or so generally and vaguely, that the whole controversy has to be gone through again, before it is ultimately determined.27
Having previously maintained that authority has sometimes to intervene when an idea is premature, Newman now puts the other side of the question. The individual theologian must have a certain space if ideas are to be considered and explored:
It is manifest how a mode of proceeding, such as this, tends not only to the liberty, but to the courage, of the individual theologian or controversialist. Many a man has ideas, which he hopes are true, and useful for his day, but he is not confident about them, and wishes to have them discussed. He is willing, or rather would be thankful, to give them up, if they can be proved to be erroneous or dangerous, and by means of controversy he achieves his end. He is answered, and he yields; or on the contrary he finds that he is considered safe. He would not dare do this, if he knew an authority, which was a supreme and final, was watching every word he said, and made signs of assent or dissent to each sentence, as he uttered it. Then indeed he would be fighting, as the Persian soldiers, under the lash, and the freedom of his intellect might truly be said to be beaten out of him.28
Anxious, however, to maintain the delicate balance between authority and freedom, Newman is careful to allow that, ‘when controversies run high’, then ‘an interposition may . . . advisably take place; and again, questions may be of that urgent nature, that an appeal must, as a matter of duty, be made at once to the highest authority in the Church’.29 By the time Newman was writing communications had greatly improved with railways and the postal system, but he does not point out that this altered the balance between the teaching authority and the theologian, since theological ideas could quickly gain a wide currency that would have been impossible in the Middle Ages. In today’s world of electronic communications the problem has been exacerbated: on the one hand, theologians can immediately propagate their views through the mass media, while on the other hand Rome is brought face to face with ideas that in the Middle Ages would have been confined more or less to the local church or university.
The charismatic dimension of the Church
As an organic communion of the baptized, the Church must allow not only for theologians as well as bishops and popes, but also for the charismatic dimension alongside, albeit subordinate to, the hierarchical dimension. Newman’s keen awareness of the importance of the charismatic dimension as a constitutive element of the Church was one of the ways in which he anticipated the Second Vatican Council. The Council’s rediscovery of the concept of charisms in the first two chapters of its Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) was one of its most important achievements. What had formerly been regarded as extraordinary, miraculous gifts are now recognized as less unusual, albeit special gifts of grace given by the Holy Spirit to the Church which is, in Newman’s words, ‘the especial dwelling-place’ of the Spirit. Instead of the Church being seen as sustained primarily and almost entirely (except in extraordinary and miraculous instances) by the ministry and sacraments of the ordained ministry, it is now acknowledged also to be built up by the charisms given to the faithful.
The word ‘charism’ as used in Lumen Gentium is a transliteration of the New Testament Greek word charisma and was a new theological term for the Western Church which had previously used the Thomist phrase gratia gratis data (‘grace freely given’) to describe the New Testament concept of charisma. Not surprisingly, therefore, we do not find Newman using the term. Nevertheless, the idea of special graces given to individuals for the benefit of the Church was very much part of Newman’s thinking both as an Anglican and as a Catholic.
In the Apologia Newman describes how as a boy of fifteen he became enamoured of the extracts from the Fathers which he read in Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809). The Fathers who were also bishops united in their persons both the hierarchical and the charismatic dimensions of the Church, whereas in succeeding centuries the two dimensions were rarely united in one person. It was to the Fathers that Newman turned in the first of his writings to propagate the Oxford Movement. Before writing any of the Tracts for the Times, he began a series of articles ‘called the “Church of the Fathers” . . . on the principle of popularity as an element of Church power, as exemplified in the history of St Ambrose’. Far from being clerical, the early Church, in Newman’s vivid phrase, ‘threw itself on the people’.30 And indeed this is a very charismatic Church, in which there is a place for prophets: ‘a child’s voice, as is reported, was heard in the midst of the crowd to say, “Ambrose is bishop”’.31 At the time Ambrose was governor of the province and had been called to quell a disturbance in the cathedral in Milan, where the people were meeting to elect a new bishop. Not only was Ambrose not in holy orders, he was still only a catechumen awaiting baptism. However, on the prophetic word of a child he was unanimously elected bishop. Here Newman points to a remarkable instance of charism preceding hierarchy.
The point of writing these sketches of the Church of the Fathers was to show how different the religion of the first centuries was from both Protestantism and the established Church of England. And one big difference that Newman highlights is the absence of the first great charismatic movement in the Church that appeared in the third century. With the end of persecution and the spread of Christianity, there was a danger of a dilution of the faith and ‘one great purpose answered by’ monasticism ‘was the maintenance of the Truth in times and places in which great masses of Catholics had let it slip from them’. There was also the danger of Christians becoming ‘more secular’, and monasteries became ‘the refuge of piety and holiness’. Indeed, Newman adds, ‘such provisions, in one shape or other, will always be attempted by the more serious and anxious part of the community, whenever Christianity is generally professed’. In other words, the charismatic dimension of the Church is essential for Christians wishing to practise their faith in a more committed and devout way. Where no spiritual outlet exists for more serious Christians, they will be liable to ‘run into separatism’, ‘by way of searching for something divine and transcendental’, as in Protestant countries ‘where monastic orders are unknown’: ‘Methodism has carried off many a man who was sincerely attached to the Established Church, merely because that Church will admit nothing but what it considers “rational” and “sensible” in religion’. The early Church, on the contrary, dealt ‘softly with the arduous and impetuous, saying, in effect – “. . . You wish to live above the common course of a Christian; – I can teach you to do this, yet without arrogance.”’ By contrast, Newman complains, the Church of England is guilty of ‘the tyranny of those who will not let a man do anything out of the way without stamping him with the name of fanatic’. In the early Church charism and hierarchy were in harmony and unity, with the result that ‘enthusiasm’ could flourish without getting out of control and without being suppressed. Thus St Antony, the founder of monasticism, would be condemned as an ‘enthusiast’ in the Church of England, with the result that he ‘would be exposed to a serious temptation of becoming a fanatic’: ‘Longing for some higher rule of life . . . and finding our present lines too rigidly drawn to include any character of mind that is much out of the way . . . he might possibly have broken what he could not bend’. Antony, however, benefited from a hierarchical Church which accepted his charism but gave it ‘form . . . It was not vulgar, busthng, imbecile, unstable, undutiful; it was calm and composed . . . full of affectionate loyalty to the Church.’ Like Lumen Gentium, Newman is insistent that the charisms need the hierarchy to regulate them: ‘enthusiasm is sobered and refined by being submitted to the discipline of the Church, instead of being allowed to run wild externally to it’.32
In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman again wrote about monasticism, emphasizing the immense significance of this charismatic movement for the history of the Church: ‘Little did the youth Antony foresee, when he set off to fight the evil one in the wilderness, what a sublime and various history he was opening, a history which had its first developments even in his own lifetime’. Antony had simply intended to be a hermit in the desert, ‘but when others followed his example he was obliged to give them guidance’. The next stage in the development was when these hermits came together to form a community. There then followed further developments with St Pachomius and St Basil, until finally St Benedict consolidated these developments, as well as introducing the vital new element of education that was to be so crucial for the Church in the dark ages when the monasteries became the repositories of learning.33
Newman was well aware that the charisms are not given simply for the benefit of the recipient, but are intended for the whole Church. They therefore are the Holy Spirit’s answer to the needs of the Church at a particular time. And so, while ‘St Benedict had come as if to preserve a principle of civilization, and a refuge for learning, at a time when the old framework of society was falling, and new political creations were taking their place . . . when the young intellect within them began to stir, and a change of another kind discovered itself, then appeared St Francis and St Dominic’. Finally, Newman concludes, ‘in the last era of ecclesiastical revolution’ the charism of St Ignatius Loyola was given to the Church to meet new needs: ‘The hermitage, the cloister . . . and the friar were suited to other states of society; with the Jesuits, as well as with the religious Communities, which are their juniors’, the ‘chief objects of attention’ were new kinds of apostolate, such as teaching and the missions.34
There are half-a-dozen rhetorical passages in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine where Newman offers an impression of the early Church and asks the reader whether it is not also a likeness of the modern Roman Catholic Church. It is significant that in the first two of these passages it is the charismatic aspect which is singled out as the most characteristic feature in common. The first, in which Newman appeals to the imagination of the reader, begins with the provocative assertion: ‘On the whole, all parties will agree that, of all existing systems, the present communion of Rome is the nearest approximation in fact to the Church of the Fathers, possibly though some may think it, to be nearer still to that Church on paper’. He insists: ‘Did St Athanasius or St Ambrose come suddenly to life, it cannot be doubted what communion he would take to be his own. All surely will agree that these Fathers . . . would find themselves more at home with such men as St Bernard or St Ignatius Loyola . . . or the holy sisterhood of mercy’. And a couple of pages later he asks whether the faith of the Roman Catholic Church is not the ‘nearest approach, to say the least, to the religious sentiment, and what is called ethos, of the early Church, nay, to that of the Apostles and Prophets; for all will agree so far as this, that Elijah, Jeremiah, the Baptist, and St Paul are in their history and mode of life . . . in what is external and meets the eye . . . these saintly and heroic men, I say, are more like a Dominican preacher, or a Jesuit missionary, or a Carmelite friar, more like St Toribio, or St Vincent Ferrer, or St Francis Xavier, or St Alphonsus Liguori, than to any individuals, or to any classes of men, that can be found in other communions.’35
The success of the Oxford Movement raised, in Newman’s view, a very serious problem: the Church of England’s lack of the charismatic dimension. ‘Give us monasteries’, he demanded, otherwise there would be ‘continual defections to Rome’. In 1842 he himself began what was in effect a ‘monastic house’ at Littlemore.36 But next year he decided ‘to master St Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises’ as being ‘very instructive’.37 However, the charism of St Francis of Assisi had also already played a part in the process of Newman’s conversion to Rome. In 1837 he had read with delight Manzoni’s novel I promesi sposi; and two years later in the autumn of 1839, the time when his first serious doubts about Anglicanism as a via media had begun, he admitted to one of his closest friends: ‘That Capuchin in the “Promesi Sposi” has stuck in my heart like a dart. I have never got over him.’38
After his conversion, Newman became an Oratorian. He was drawn to the charism of St Philip Neri with his mixture of ‘extreme hatred of humbug, playfulness, nay oddity, tender love for others, and severity’.39 Newman thought that the Oratorian charism was important in the Counter-Reformation for the reform of the diocesan clergy. Nevertheless, he also saw Oratorians as being in some respects like the early monks, who also did not take vows. For he thought the charism of St Philip was boldly to go back to primitive Christianity in its ‘plainness and simplicity’, not least in the informal ‘exercises’, consisting of singing, prayer, readings, talks, and discussion, in which, extraordinarily for the time, laymen participated.40 Newman liked to contrast Philip’s charism with the very different charism of St Ignatius Loyola, whose followers was disciplined soldiers as compared with the more individualistic, easy-going Oratorians.
Naturally, Newman had no illusion about which of the two charisms had been more important for the Church: in terms of influence and numbers there was no comparison between the Society of Jesus and the Oratory of St Philip Neri. In a sermon of 1850, ‘The Mission of St Philip’, he called Saints Benedict, Dominic, and Ignatius ‘the three venerable Patriarchs, whose Orders divide between them the extent of Christian history’. Certainly Philip was a minor charismatic figure compared with the other giants, but nevertheless Newman points out that he ‘came under the teaching of all three successively’. Although he did not have the term ‘charism’ in his theological vocabulary and although he lived at a time when the hierarchical dimension was exaggerated, Newman never underestimated the significance of the charismatic dimension. For these ‘masters in the spiritual Israel’, ‘in an especial way . . . had committed to them the office of a public ministry in the affairs of the Church one after another, and . . . are, in some sense, her nursing fathers’. From his youth in Florence at San Marco, Philip imbibed the spirit of Dominic, whose vocation was ‘to form the whole matter of human knowledge into one harmonious system, to secure the alliance between religion and philosophy, and to train men to the use of the gifts of nature in the sunlight of divine grace and revealed truth’. Such a Christian humanism was crucial in the age of the Renaissance, when ‘a violent effort was in progress . . . to break up this sublime unity, and to set human genius, the philosopher and the poet, the artist and the musician, in opposition to religion’. Leaving Florence, Philip came to live near Monte Cassino, where in turn he imbibed the simpler Benedictine spirit; ‘and, as from St Dominic he gained the end he was to pursue, so from St Benedict he learned how to pursue it’. Philip’s Oratory resembled the early independent monastic communities without formal vows and not organized in any order or congregation, which ‘were simple in their forms of worship, and . . . freely admitted laymen into their fellowship’. Finally, he met Ignatius Loyola in Rome, with whom ‘in the care of souls he was one’, as ‘in theological traditions [he] was one with St Dominic’. Newman sums up the influence on Philip of these three great charisms: ‘As then he learned from Benedict what to be, and from Dominic what to do, so let me consider that from Ignatius he learned how he was to do it’. To these he contributed his own special charism: ‘[he] had the breadth of view of St Dominic, the poetry of St Benedict, the wisdom of St Ignatius, and all recommended by an unassuming grace and a winning tenderness which were his own’.41
In 1855 Newman gave a lecture entitled ‘The Three Patriarchs of Christian History, St Benedict, St Dominic, and St Ignatius’, of which some notes survive.42 He had had it in mind, he wrote fifteen years later, to write a book on the ‘historical contrast of Benedictines, Dominicans, and Jesuits, which I suppose I shall never finish’. In the end, he only managed to write the part on the Benedictines, which was first published in Atlantis, the academic journal he founded at the Catholic University of Ireland, and then republished in the second volume of Historical Sketches.43 It was a source of regret to him, he explained later, but, after what he had written on the Benedictines was criticized by a Benedictine abbot, he was nervous about trying to write about Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits. One can only regret that Newman was never able to complete this book on these three great charismatic movements in the history of the Church.
‘The Mission of the Benedictine Order’ was published in Atlantis in 1858 and ‘The Benedictine Centuries’ in 1859; they were later republished in Historical Sketches in 1873 under the titles of ‘The Mission of St Benedict’ and ‘The Benedictine Schools’. Unlike the Church of the Fathers, this was not a period of history he knew well. His concern was chiefly educational, occupied as he was at the time with the Catholic University of Ireland. He thought that the history of Christian education could be divided into three periods, ancient, medieval, and modern, dominated by the names of Benedict, Dominic, and Ignatius. The monastic charism was ‘a reaction from . . . secular life’, a ‘flight from the world’, it offered ‘retirement and repose . . . peace’. It was a ‘poetical’ charism, unlike the Dominican which was ‘scientific’ and the Ignatian which was ‘practical’. It evoked the ‘primitive age of the world’ and ‘was a sort of recognized emigration from the old world’ ever since St Antony – and Newman uses a colourful contemporary image to convey the excitement Antony’s charism had aroused – had found ‘gold . . . and on the news of it thousands took their departure year after year for the diggings in the desert’. It was more devotional than intellectual. But the charism was poetical not because the monks were ‘dreamy sentimentalists, to fall in love with melancholy winds and purling rills, and waterfalls and nodding groves; but their poetry was the poetry of hard work’, since Benedict’s ‘object . . . was . . . penance’. Still, monasticism was ‘romantic’ in its ‘adventures’ and history. And the paradox was that the very monasticism which had been a retreat from a dying world became ‘in no small measure [the] very life’ of the ‘new order’.44 So far as Newman was concerned, it was not the hierarchy but the charism of one man, who was not even a priest, that saved both the Church and Christian civilization.
Finally, it is noteworthy that Newman anticipated the charismatic phenomenon that was to sweep through the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, the so-called ecclesial movements and communities. They are called ‘ecclesial’ precisely because they reflect the understanding of the Church as an organic communion by virtue of their being open to all the baptized and not exclusive to priests or religious or laity. The ecclesiology of Newman anticipated that of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Church, which also understood the Church as primarily consisting of those who ‘are re-born . . . from water and the Holy Spirit’ in baptism, a ‘messianic people’ in whom the Spirit ‘dwells as in a temple’ (art. 9). But it was not only in his ecclesiology that Newman anticipated the new ecclesial movements and communities. In practice, he himself led a movement in his own time, the Oxford or Tractarian Movement, which, far from being a clerical association as some of its initiators had wanted, consisted of both clergy and laity, some of its most prominent members being lay people. Later, at the time of the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850, Newman hoped that a similar kind of movement might arise to support the Catholic cause but the clerical nature of nineteenth-century Catholicism prevented this. Furthermore, Newman’s understanding of the original nature of Philip Neri’s Oratory shows how like a modern ecclesial community it had been to begin with. It had begun as an entirely lay community, not as a priestly order or congregation. From this original community emerged a smaller community of priests but still closely linked to the larger lay community. Together, the congregation of priests and the lay community constituted the Oratory.
Newman’s understanding of the Church as an organic communion anticipated the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in its Constitution on the Church, which defined the Church as fundamentally and primarily sacramental, being the community of the baptized. Just as the word ‘laity’ is absent from the New Testament, so too the Constitution in its first two chapters that set out this definition avoids this term which implies a clerical institutional idea of the Church. Similarly, Newman’s ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ clearly understands that the ‘faithful’ are not the equivalent of the laity but of the baptized. The baptized include both theologians and those endowed with special charisms as well as the hierarchy. Naturally, the Council does not go into the practical question of the interrelationships of the baptized with their different ministries, roles, and charisms. But the most pragmatic of theologians understood very well the inevitability of the conflicts and tensions that are endemic to such an organic communion, whose vitality depends on the various checks and balances that the different but interlocking parts of the Body of Christ provide.
Notes
1. P.S., i:153.
2. P.S., ii:66.
3. P.S., ii:391.
4. P.S., vi:313–14.
5. P.S., vii:237.
6. P.S., iii:207, 222, 224; v:41.
7. P.S., iii:270.
8. P.S., iv:170, 174, 171.
10. V.M., 1:xl.
11. V.M., 1:xl.
12. Dulles, ‘Newman’s Ecclesiology’, 380.
13. V.M., 1:xl.
14. John Coulson (ed.), On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1961).
16. L.D., xix:141.
17. Cons., 75–6.
18. Cons., 94.
19. Cons., 86–8, 90.
20. Ari., 445.
21. Apo., 245–6, 250, 251.
22. Apo., 252.
23. Apo., 253, 257–8.
24. Apo., 259.
25. Apo., 260.
26. Apo., 266.
27. Apo., 266–7.
28. Apo., 267–8.
29. Apo., 268.
30. L.D., iv:14, 18.
31. H.S., i:343.
32. H.S., ii:96, 98–9, 103, 164–5.
33. Dev., 395–7.
34. Dev., 398–9.
35. Dev., 97–8, 100.
36. L.D., vii:133, 264.
37. L.D., ix:260.
38. L.D., vii:151.
39. L.D., xii:25.
40. N.O., 186, 188, 203.
41. O.S., 220–1, 224–5, 228, 240.
42. L.D., xvi:378.
43. L.D., xxv:228.
44. H.S., ii:366, 373, 375, 384–5, 388, 398, 400, 436, 443.
Further reading
Coulson, J. Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in the Language of Church and Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, 55–131.
Dulles, A. ‘The Threefold Office in Newman’s Ecclesiology’, in I. Ker and A. G. Hill (eds.), Newman After a Hundred Years. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, 375–99.
Ker, I. Newman on Being a Christian. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990; London: Collins, 1991, ch. 5.
Ker, I., ‘Newman on the Consensus Fidelium as “The Voice of the Infallible Church”’, in T. Merrigan and I. T. Ker (eds.), Newman and the Word. Louvain: Peeters, 2000; Sterling, VA.: W. B. Eerdmans, 2000, 69–89.
Ker, I., ‘Newman and the Charismatic Dimension of the Church’, in T. Merrigan and I. Ker (eds.), Newman and Truth. Louvain: Peeters, 2007; Sterling, VA: W. B. Eerdmans, 2007.
Miller, J. E. John Henry Newman on the Idea of Church. Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos Press, 1987.