Section 16

Section 16 9 Authority in the Church

Avery Dulles

For John Henry Newman the problem of authority in the Church was a lifelong preoccupation. He believed from boyhood in authoritative Scriptures and creeds, and as he grew older he pondered the question of authority in the Church. Was it located in bishops, in popes, in theologians, in lay persons, or in all together? In case of conflict, whose voice should prevail?

Committed though he was to an authoritative revelation, Newman cannot fairly be categorized as authoritarian. He was keenly aware of the rights of reason and the possibilities that authority would be abused. But he was sceptical enough to distrust the competence of pure reason in matters of religious truth. As we shall see, he generally preferred to use different authorities in the Church to supplement and counterbalance one another.

Newman believed that authority had a place even in pagan religions. Although revelation was present only in a vague and diffuse way in these ‘natural’ or ‘traditionary’ religions, God made his voice audible in them, enabling even the heathen to make acts of faith. In a sermon of 1830 he declared: ‘The prerogative of Christians consists in the possession, not of exclusive knowledge and spiritual aid, but of gifts high and peculiar’. Although God’s self-manifestation through the Incarnation is a singular and inestimable benefit, ‘yet its absence is supplied to a degree . . . in those various traditions concerning Divine Providences and Dispensations which are scattered through the heathen mythologies’.¹ In his first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), he quotes Clement of Alexandria and other Fathers to the effect that ‘there never was a time when God has not spoken to man’, creating the possibility of saving faith.²

In the present chapter we shall be dealing not with faith in the generic sense, but specifically with Christian faith.³ All who are in a position to grasp the true nature of Christian revelation, Newman believed, are in principle bound to accept the channels that God has established for communicating revealed truth. As a Catholic, Newman accepted the standard doctrine that persons in invincible ignorance, including those raised in different religions and different Christian communities, could be saved if they believed whatever religious truth was accessible to them with the help of God’s grace. But those who receive the grace to accept the divine claims of the Catholic Church had an obligation to act upon their lights. By failing to profess the Catholic faith, they would incur serious danger of losing their souls.⁴

Although the question of the possibility of faith and salvation without adherence to Christianity and the Catholic Church is of interest, it is not the theme of the present chapter. Our question has to do with the nature and locus of authority in the Christian Church, as treated in Newman’s writings. What are the means that God has established for the transmission of his revelation in Christ? To what sources should Christians turn if they wish to find Christian revelation in its purity and fullness?

Scripture and tradition

In his days as a student Newman accepted the doctrine of the Church of England that everything necessary for salvation is contained in the Bible or at least provable from it. But he never understood this doctrine as meaning that the bare text of Scripture, expounded with the tools of formal logic, suffices. He always read Scripture in light of the creed. When Newman was a young tutor at Oriel College, an older colleague, Edward Hawkins, drew his attention to the importance of the visible Church and its tradition for understanding the true sense of Scripture. In The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman contended that Holy Scripture was written for the instruction and consolation of believers but was never intended to serve as the sourcebook of all revealed truth. From Christian antiquity, he believed, the illusion that the Bible alone can teach the word of God was the very seedbed of heresy.⁵ It is presumptuous, according to Newman, to reject all helps in reading the Bible. Those who turn to it as a source of doctrine without previous formation are prone to misread it in idiosyncratic ways, falling into strange and perverse opinions. The theory of the sufficiency of Scripture lacks support in the Scripture itself.⁶

The local bishop

The next question, for Newman, was to identify the various agencies other than Scripture that were given for the preservation of the word of God and its transmission to the faithful. Initially, Newman turned to the Fathers of the Church. With the help of his friend Edward Pusey he obtained a good collection of patristic writings and set about reading them systematically in 1827, beginning with the Apostolic Fathers, who greatly influenced his ecclesiology. At the height of the Oxford Movement, in 1838, he wrote an article on ‘The Theology of St. Ignatius’ in which he quoted numerous passages on episcopal authority from Ignatius’s letters to the Trallians, Philippians, Magnesians, Ephesians, and to Polycarp.⁷ In these passages, he contended, Ignatius was not expressing his personal opinion but reflecting the teaching of the Lord himself. To separate oneself from one’s bishop, he concluded, is to separate oneself from God. The episcopal structure of the ministry, which has withstood the test of 1,800 years of history, must continue to be normative for all churches, Eastern or Western, that make any claim to catholicity.

A high priority in the programme of the Oxford Movement was to revive the doctrine of episcopal authority in the Anglican Church. As Newman’s friend John Keble pointed out in his famous sermon on ‘National Apostasy’, delivered on 14 July 1833, the Church of England had become abjectly dependent on the civil government. In a letter of 30 July 1833, Newman exclaimed, ‘O that we had some bishops for us; the Clergy are dead’.⁸ In another letter, written on 3 August 1833, he lamented: ‘Even during the Arian heresy, there was a possibility of true-minded men becoming Bishops, which is now almost out of the question. If only we had one Athanasius, or Basil, we could bear with 20 Eusebiuses.’⁹ In the Tracts for the Times, Newman often returns to the theme of apostolic succession.

In his sermons of this period, Newman exhorted the faithful to have reverence for their bishops. In a sermon published in 1835 he grieved that there were but few in the Church of England who still honoured the bishops as successors of the Apostles.¹⁰ In another sermon, published in 1838, he declared: ‘When we approach the Ministry, which He [Christ] has ordained, we approach the steps of His throne. When we approach the Bishops, who are the centres of that Ministry, what have we before us but the Twelve Apostles, present but invisible?’¹¹

What Newman urged on others, he practised himself. He felt special allegiance to his own bishop, Richard Bagot of Oxford, not only for his personal traits but especially because of the authority of his office. Describing his own mentality during the 1830s, Newman wrote in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua:

I loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop’s sight, as if it were in the sight of God . . . I could not go very wrong while I had reason to believe that I was in no respect displeasing him. It was not a mere formal obedience to rule that I put before me, but I desired to please him personally, as I considered him set over me by the Divine Hand. I was strict in observing my clerical engagements, not only because they were engagements, but because I considered myself simply as the servant and instrument of my Bishop. I did not care much for the Bench of Bishops, except as they might be the voice of my Church; nor should I have cared much for a Provincial Council; nor for a Diocesan Synod presided over by my Bishop; all these matters seemed to me to be jure ecclesiastico, but what to me was jure divino was the voice of my Bishop in his own person. My own Bishop was my Pope; I knew no other; the successor of the Apostles, the Vicar of Christ.¹²

The body of bishops

Newman, however, could not long avoid the problem arising from the fact that bishops in the apostolic succession did not always speak with one mind. The French Abbé Jean-Nicolas Jager, in correspondence with Newman in 1835, pressed him to explain how he could affirm some ecclesiastical traditions while rejecting others. How could he accept the Nicene Creed without accepting that of Pius IV, based on the teaching of Trent? To meet this difficulty Newman excogitated a distinction between two kinds of tradition – episcopal and prophetical – a distinction of fundamental importance in Newman’s Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, published in 1837. Episcopal tradition, as he defines it, is handed down from bishop to bishop, and is forced upon the attention of every Christian. It is certified by the tests of catholicity, antiquity, and the consensus of the Fathers. Prophetical tradition, by contrast, includes interpretations and commentaries on the deposit of faith by private persons and groups of believers. It is subject to error in its details and is not binding on all Christians.¹³

From this concept of tradition Newman developed his ‘branch theory’ of the Church. The Catholic Church, he thought, has three branches – Greek, Roman, and Anglican – all three of which accept episcopal tradition. The Roman Church, however, errs by treating some prophetical traditions as though they too were obligatory. Newman gradually came to admit that the decrees of the Council of Trent, if strictly interpreted, may be seen as consonant with episcopal tradition. But until his conversion he continued to hold that Catholic theology and practice since the sixteenth century had attributed normative status to some accretions that belonged only to the prophetic tradition.

In the early stages of the Oxford Movement, Newman continued to express confidence in the Anglican bishops. In 1834 he wrote: ‘Our prelates are still sound, and know the difference between what is modern and what is ancient’.¹⁴ He dedicated his Lectures on Justification (1838) to Bishop Bagot. When Bagot delivered his charge at St Mary’s Church, Oxford, later that year, Newman expected him to endorse the Tracts for the Times, of which Newman was the principal author. Bagot, however, admonished the Tractarians to take heed ‘lest in their admiration of antiquity they revert to practices which heretofore have ended in superstition’ – a veiled reference, it would seem, to the Church of Rome.¹⁵ Newman, deeply hurt, confessed to a friend, ‘What he said was very slight indeed, but a bishop’s lightest word ex Cathedra is heavy’.¹⁶ With the consent of his fellow Tractarian John Keble, he wrote to Bagot offering to withdraw any Tract that ‘was judged to be offensive or even to suppress all of them’.¹⁷ Bagot, surprised that his words were taken so seriously, gave assurances that he had no intent to censure the Tracts.

Sensing that the bishops were not always unanimous, Newman began to say explicitly that an individual bishop might fail to be a true witness to the faith. In a reply to an attack on the Tractarians, dated 22 June 1838, he wrote, ‘No one person, not even a bishop ex Cathedra, may at his mere word determine what doctrine shall be received and what not. He is bound to appeal to the established faith.’¹⁸

While Newman was experiencing increasing tensions with the Anglican bishops, his attention was called to an article by Nicholas Wiseman, the future archbishop and cardinal, on ‘The Anglican Claim to Apostolic Succession’, published in the Dublin Review for August 1839. It quoted a principle used by St Augustine to refute the Donatists: ‘The whole world judges with security’ (‘Securus iudicat orbis terrarum’). Although Newman rejected the parallelism between Anglicanism and Donatism, Augustine’s words kept ringing in his ears in much the same way that the words ‘tolle, lege’ had for Augustine himself on the eve of his conversion.¹⁹ He could not put out of his mind the apprehension that the Anglican Church might be in schism. He found it necessary to grant that ‘the deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede’.²⁰ To follow Anglican teaching where it diverged from the firm consensus of the Catholic episcopate as a whole would be to repeat the errors of the Donatists.

With these thoughts in mind, Newman made his last desperate effort to defend his Anglican allegiance and to stem the tide of young Tractarians who were moving towards Rome. In January 1840 he published an article on ‘The Catholicity of the Church’²¹ in which he argues that because bishops stand in the apostolic succession, Christians are obliged by divine law to be subject to them. To rebel against one’s bishop is to recede from the Church. Relying on a somewhat dubious interpretation of Cyprian, he maintains that each individual bishop, as a successor of Peter, is independent of the others. Intercommunion among bishops is a duty, and the breach of it a sin, but such intercommunion is not essential to catholicity. It is only a matter of ecclesiastical arrangement. If churches fall into separation from one another, they should strive to restore the broken unity. Anglicans are for the present kept from communion with Rome by their duty to their particular church and by the terms of communion that Rome forces on them.

Even while writing this article, Newman was aware that his defence of the Anglican settlement in this essay was vulnerable. Augustine, he admits, would not hold that separate parts of the Church were essentially complete even though not united with the main body. Newman concedes that if Rome reforms, ‘it will be our Church’s duty at once to join in communion with the continental Churches’.²² At this stage, Newman, no longer repudiating any official teaching of the Roman Church, blames Rome only for encouraging certain exorbitant tenets and superstitious devotions. He is worried about Catholic practices regarding indulgences, the invocation of saints, and the worship of Mary, which he regards as unwarranted by apostolical tradition.

Newman’s Tract 90, published in 1841, was a plea to interpret the confessional documents of the Church of England in the most Catholic sense that they would admit. The pamphlet aroused great indignation at Oxford and was bitterly attacked by many of the bishops, who urged Bishop Bagot to take action against Newman. To head off a formal condemnation, Newman agreed to suspend the Tracts. Lacking support in his own Church, and feeling himself to be adrift, he retired to Littlemore, where he worked on his translation of Athanasius and pondered what the future might hold.

Difficulties with the Anglican bishops continued to multiply. Failing to assert what Newman regarded as their apostolic authority, they allowed Parliament to decide what sees should be established or suppressed, as happened in Ireland. Then, in 1841, Parliament authorized the establishment of a bishopric in Jerusalem to be held alternately by Anglicans and by Lutherans. On the ground that Lutheranism was far from holding the Anglican view of apostolic succession and sacramental grace, Newman wrote letters of protest to the Archbishop of Canterbury and his own bishop.²³

At Littlemore, Newman composed his masterly Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine with a view to setthng his remaining doubts about the Church of Rome. Newman at this point repudiates his previous position on the autonomy of individual bishops.²⁴ The apostolic succession, he teaches, cannot guarantee unity in the faith because some churches, while retaining that succession, are in schism or heresy. The episcopate must be catholic as well as apostolic. In the ancient Church, he asserts, bishops were not mere local officers, but possessed a quasi-ecumenical authority, extending wherever Christians were to be found. Ignatius of Antioch addresses letters to the churches along his way to martyrdom in Rome. Athanasius, exiled from his see, makes all Christendom from Trier to Ethiopia his home. Gregory Nazianzus refers to Cyprian as a universal bishop ‘presiding not only over the Church of Carthage and Africa, but over all the regions of the West, and over the East, and South, and Northern portions of the world also’.²⁵ In the first centuries, Catholic bishops did not scruple to interfere in the affairs of schismatical or heretical dioceses. They addressed the members of such churches as though their bishops did not exist. ‘The idea of acting upon the Donatists only as a body and through their bishops does not seem to have occurred to St Augustine at all.’²⁶

Central to the Essay on Development was the issue of antiquity as a criterion of truth. As an Anglican, Newman gloried in professing the creeds and doctrines of the patristic age. But the great Trinitarian and Christological dogmas of the early councils went far beyond the clear teaching of Scripture. Anglicanism, in accepting these dogmas, committed itself to the principle that doctrine does develop. It looked upon itself as a via media between Protestantism, with its attachment to the letter of ‘Scripture alone’, and Romanism, which canonized additions to the apostolic faith. The Tractarians classified various modern Catholic doctrines, such as those concerning Transubstantiation and the pains of Purgatory, as accretions or corruptions.

The Anglican via media, Newman perceived, raised questions that he now felt it necessary to address. Why must the process of development stop in the first millennium? Could not the teachings of the Council of Trent and the Creed of Pius IV be understood as authentic continuations of the process of dogmatization at work in the early councils? In his Essay on Development, Newman concluded that the more recent Catholic doctrines had grown logically and organically out of the original deposit of faith. In consistency, therefore, Anglicans should accept them.

Papacy

Remarkable in the Essay on Development is the strong emphasis Newman now gives to papal supremacy, a theme that had been all but absent in his previous writing. He is no longer satisfied, as he previously was, to appeal to the dictum of Vincent of Lérins that Christians were obliged to believe only what has been professed ‘everywhere, always, and by all’.²⁷ Ancient Christianity, as he now presents it, was far from a harmonious chorus of Catholic bishops. It might better be described as an incessant struggle among hostile factions, freely anathematizing one another.²⁸ Arians, Semi-Arians, Macedonians, Manichaeans, Apollinarists, Pelagians, Novatianists, Donatists, and Priscillianists thrived at various times and in some regions became more numerous than Catholics. Each of these groups had its churches, its bishops, and its scholars. ‘How’, Newman asks, ‘was the man to guide his course who wished to join himself to the doctrine and fellowship of the Apostles in the times of St Athanasius, St Basil, and St Augustine?’²⁹

The first criterion, Newman suggests, is the title ‘Catholic’. Heretics strove in vain to usurp that title for themselves. But people everywhere knew that the Arians, Nestorians, and Macedonians, however numerous, were not Catholic. Newman notes furthermore that the Catholics in the fifth and sixth centuries came to be denoted by the additional title of ‘Roman’, a title by which they meant communion with the Church of Rome.³⁰

Newman’s adduces the Council of Chalcedon as a palmary example of papal authority in action. The party of Eutyches had triumphed with virtual unanimity at the so-called ‘Robber Council’ of Ephesus in 449, with three of the four Eastern patriarchs favouring the restoration of Eutyches to his see. The fourth patriarch, Flavian of Constantinople, was on trial for his allegiance to the pope. Only the papal legates were in opposition, and they had to escape as best they could lest they suffer the kind of physical violence inflicted upon Flavian. Yet only two years later, with the support of the new emperor, Marcian, Pope Leo was able to bring about the convocation of a new council, that of Chalcedon. In Newman’s words:

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 . . . for acceptance as a definition of faith under the sanction of an anathema, – forced on the Council by the resolution of the Pope of the day, acting through his Legates and supported by the civil power.³¹

Newman concludes this impressive chapter with the observation that if there is anywhere in the world today a form of Christianity in which, though ‘heresies are rife and bishops negligent within its own pale’, there is ‘but one Voice for whose decisions people wait with trust, one Name and one See to which they look with hope, and that name Peter, and that see Rome; – such a religion is not unlike the Christianity of the fifth and sixth centuries’.³²

After tracing the development of a number of distinctively Catholic doctrines and satisfying himself that they stood in continuity with the apostolic deposit of faith, Newman, leaving his book incomplete, made his submission to Rome on 9 October 1845. He wrote to Dr Wiseman, now a bishop, promising to obey the pope ‘as I had obeyed my own Bishop in the Anglican Church’.³³

For the next decade, Newman championed his new faith in rather triumphal tones. In his Discourses to Mixed Congregations (1849), he insists that a living and infallible magisterium is essential for Christian faith. In apostolic times, he writes, the gospel was believed on the word of the apostles, which was received as the word of God. ‘In the Apostles’ days the peculiarity of faith was submission to a living authority. If you will not look out for a living authority, and will bargain for private judgment, then say at once that you have not Apostolic faith.’³⁴ To believe on the word of a living authority is quite different from taking a book in one’s hands and interpreting it for oneself. Protestants, when they profess to believe the Bible, reserve the right to explain it as they see fit. For this reason they do not have faith in the sense that it was exercised by the first Christians and is exercised by Catholics today. Newman therefore hesitates to say at this point that they can have the kind of faith that saves.

Christian faith, as Newman now describes it, is an unconditional submission to a present informant and guide. By its very nature it requires an infallible authority, which can be trusted to deliver the word of God. In making a revelation, God implicitly committed himself to establishing an organ that would prevent it from being corrupted by the capriciousness of human reason. Since the Catholic Church is the only body on earth that lays claim to such authority, the Christian has good reason to suppose that she might indeed be ‘the pillar and the ground of truth’.³⁵

In his first years as a Catholic Newman was inclined to make extreme claims on behalf of the papacy. In his conversion novel, Loss and Gain, he has the hero, Charles Reding, say of the pope: ‘Catholics call him Vicar of Christ, Bishop of Bishops, and the like; and, I believe, consider that he, in a pre-eminent sense, is the one pastor or ruler of the Church, the source of jurisdiction, the judge of controversies, and the centre of unity, as having the powers of the Apostles, and especially of St Peter’.³⁶

Until the first Vatican Council, there was considerable debate within the Church about the seat of infallibility. In his Essay on Development, Newman asserts the common teaching that the pope, acting together with an ecumenical council, could not err in matters of faith, but he refrains from taking a position on the disputed question of whether the pope could speak infallibly outside a general council. Again in the Apologia (1865), he eloquently defends the infallibility of the Church, but he does not commit himself as to whether the pope, acting alone, can impose a doctrine on all Catholics as a matter of faith.

As an adviser to Bishop William Ullathorne of Birmingham, who was attending the First Vatican Council, Newman expressed his view that there was no need to define papal infallibility. On learning that Cardinal Edward Manning and others were working for a definition, he reacted angrily in a private letter to Bishop Ullathorne: ‘Why should an aggressive insolent faction’, he asked, ‘be allowed to “make the heart of the just mourn, whom the Lord has not made sorrowful”? . . . If it is God’s will that the Pope’s infallibility should be defined, then it is His Blessed Will to throw back “the times and the moments” of that triumph for which He has destined His Kingdom; and I shall feel I have but to bow my head to His adorable, inscrutable Providence.’³⁷

When the definition came, Newman’s first reaction was to interpret the thunder and lightning that attended the definition as signs of God’s wrath and to reckon that the loss of the papal states that same year was a divine punishment.³⁸ For some time he remained publicly silent, doubting whether the council had acted with sufficient unanimity for its definition to be binding. But when the dissident bishops submitted, Newman became convinced that the orbis terrarum (the whole world) had signified its consensus. Judged by the criterion that Augustine had used against the Donatists, the truth of the proclamation was secure.

The British statesman William E. Gladstone, together with some others, accused the council of having transferred to the papacy the functions of all the bishops, thus making them mere lackeys of the pope, contrary to historical precedent. In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875) Newman skilfully defends the Vatican Decrees, but in his defence he comes very close to admitting Gladstone’s point. Ancient history, he contends, is no criterion of truth, because the Church and its doctrine must develop. By default the papacy has taken over the authority that formerly belonged to bishops such as Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzus, and Ambrose. The pope today is the sole heir of the ecumenical hierarchy of the fourth century. This concentration of powers has been providential. ‘No one but a Master, who was a thousand bishops in himself at once, could have tamed and controlled, as the Pope did, the great and little tyrants of the middle age.’³⁹

Later in the book, Newman moves on to defend the new dogma of papal infallibility. Giving it a moderate interpretation along the lines already marked out by the Secretary General of the Council, Bishop Joseph Fessler, Newman insists that the pope cannot claim to speak infallibly except under severe restrictions set forth in official explanations of the conciliar decree. Then he draws the conclusion that the identification and interpretation of irreformable statements always depends on the community of theologians. ‘Theologians’, he writes, ‘employ themselves in determining precisely what it is that is condemned . . . Instances frequently occur, when it is successfully maintained by some new writer, that the Pope’s act does not imply what it has seemed to imply, and questions which seemed to be closed, are after a course of years re-opened.’⁴⁰ A little later he adds: ‘All the dogmas of Pope or Council are but general, and so far, in consequence, admit of exceptions in their actual application, – these exceptions being determined either by other authoritative utterances or by the scrutinizing vigilance, acuteness, and subtlety of the Schola Theologorum’.⁴¹ The last word, Newman seems to say, belongs to the community of theologians rather than to the hierarchical magisterium, whose determination is only penultimate.

Newman’s Letter to the Duke of Norfolk accomplished its purpose. It shielded the Catholic Church in England from the storm of protest that engulfed it in several other countries. The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith was dissatisfied with Newman’s minimizing explanation, but Cardinal Manning and Bishop Ullathorne persuaded Rome not to publish its objections, which would have undone all the good effects of Newman’s book.⁴²

Authority of theologians

In the course of his career, Newman spoke many times of the authority of theologians and its relation to that of the ecclesiastical magisterium. In his Essay on Development, he composed a short section on theology in which he insists that reason has always been alert in the Church, because the truths of faith clamour to be understood. The loving inquisitiveness of theology, as it aspires to ascertain the meaning, grounds, and implications of articles of faith, is praiseworthy and beneficial.⁴³

A few years later, in his Lectures On the Idea of a University, Newman analysed the respective functions of the hierarchical magisterium and the theological community. University theology, he asserted, is easily drawn into rationalism and scepticism, as happened in the cases of Abelard and David of Dinant in the Middle Ages.⁴⁴ But when theological inquiry is conducted in a loyal Catholic spirit, it performs a valuable service. Especially in fields such as natural science, in which the Church has no direct competence, the hierarchical leaders must exercise patience and restraint, lest they repeat the errors that had been committed in the treatment of Galileo.⁴⁵ ‘Error may flourish for a time, but truth will prevail in the end.’⁴⁶

In the final chapter of his Apologia, Newman eloquently discourses on the dialectical interplay between authority and private judgement that continually unfolds in the Church. ‘Every exercise of infallibility’, he writes, ‘is brought into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason’ and unleashes a mighty effort to assimilate the definition.⁴⁷ Infallibility is given to the magisterium ‘not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance’.⁴⁸ Theology strives to cast the great body of dogmatic teaching into the form of a science, with a distinct method and terminology, as we find in the writings of St Athanasius, St Augustine, and St Thomas.⁴⁹

Role of the laity

Newman was a pioneer in investigating the responsibility of the laity in matters of faith. He does not look upon lay persons as authoritative judges of doctrine. In The Idea of a University, he remarks that although lay persons have rarely excelled in strictly dogmatic theology, many of them have been highly successful apologists, beginning with Justin and Athenagoras and extending to René de Chateaubriand and Joseph de Maistre.⁵⁰

In 1859, during his brief editorship of The Rambler, Newman wrote his famous essay ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’. The immediate occasion was the controversy about the extent to which the views of the laity ought to be heard on the question of Catholic schools. In his article he broadened the discussion by considering the roles that lay Christians had played historically in the formation of Christian doctrine. He contended that the laity had often taken the initiative in promoting doctrines related to devotion, such as the divine motherhood of Mary, as defined at Ephesus, and the Immaculate Conception, recently defined by Pius IX. In treating the Arian crisis that racked the Church after Nicaea, Newman bluntly declared:

There was a temporary suspense of the functions of the ‘Ecclesia docens’. The body of Bishops failed in their confession of the faith. They spoke variously, one against another; there was nothing, after Nicaea, of firm, unvarying, consistent testimony, for nearly sixty years. There were untrustworthy Councils, unfaithful Bishops, there was weakness, fear of consequences, misguidance, delusion, hallucination, endless, hopeless, extending itself into nearly every corner of the Catholic Church.⁵¹

During this crisis, Newman contended, the laity did more than the bishops to sustain orthodoxy. His conclusion, which could hardly be demonstrated historically, aroused no little opposition from the hierarchical authorities of his day.

Some scholars have understood Newman in this essay as attributing an independent and infallible magisterium to the laity, but he stops short of any such claim. He asserts, however, that all faithful Christians, including the laity, receive from the Holy Spirit a kind of supernatural instinct inclining them to accept what is of faith and to reject what is contrary to faith. For this reason pope and councils, before defining doctrine, do well to consult the ‘sense of the faith’. In proclaiming the Immaculate Conception, Pius IX called attention to the ‘remarkable consensus’ (singularis conspiratio) of the Catholic bishops and faithful as one ground for the definition. But Newman never attributes to the laity the power to adjudicate or define doctrine, which belongs exclusively to the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Balance of powers

Newman’s final work on ecclesiology was his lengthy Preface to the third edition of his Via Media of the Anglican Church (1877), in which he responds to his own previous position in The Prophetical Office of the Church. This Preface takes the form of an eighty-page essay on the threefold office of the Church: the prophetic, the priestly, and the regal. Instead of concentrating all three functions in the episcopate, as Vatican II was to do, Newman distributes the functions among different segments of the Church. His position is neatly summarized in the following short paragraph:

Christianity, then, is at once a philosophy, a political power, and a religious rite: as a religion, it is Holy; as a philosophy, it is Apostolic; as a political power, it is One and Catholic. As a religion, its centre of action is pastor and flock; as a philosophy, the Schools; as a rule, the Papacy and its Curia.⁵²

In other words, the priestly function is centred in parish priests and laity; the prophetic in the theologians, and the regal in the pope and his curia. Where, then, do the bishops fit in? In the course of the essay, Newman refers to them as bearers of the regal office, with and under the pope, who is ‘the Ecumenical Bishop and one Pastor of Christ’s flock’.⁵³ The task of popes and bishops is to keep the flock in unity, sometimes tolerating deviations from strict correctness in teaching and worship for the sake of expediency. To excuse the doctrinal deviations of Popes Liberius and Honorius, Newman contends that their first duty was to maintain unity and peace among their faithful. This concern made them less firm and clear-sighted in matters of doctrine than would in theory be desired.⁵⁴

Newman allows for the possibility that a bishop might also be a preacher and a spiritual guide, as was the case with Gregory Thaumaturgus, who combined in his own person something of all three offices. But normally the maintenance of the Church in the truth of the gospel requires the interaction of different classes of believers. The devotion of the lay faithful, the doctrinal insights of theologians, and the pastoral skills of popes and bishops supplement and correct one another’s limitations. Newman thus finds in the Church something like the form of government that he cherishes in British constitutional monarchy, in which royal power is held in check by the two houses of Parliament.⁵⁵

This final venture of Newman in ecclesiology is stimulating but problematic. In our day the laity are far more educated and more critical than the simple believers Newman has in mind. They are not manifestly more devout than clerics. Theologians, many of whom are laypeople, do not constitute anything like the medieval schola theologorum. They are not conspicuously ‘apostolic’ in their teaching. We do not commonly think of theologians as judges of orthodoxy, as was customary in the late Middle Ages, but rather as religious instructors and, in some cases, explorers whose hypotheses need to be critically assessed by the hierarchical magisterium. As for the pope and the bishops, we expect them to be guardians of revealed truth and not to yield to considerations of expediency. We connect the priestly office with the public liturgy rather than, as Newman did, with private devotions.

While Newman correctly identified different tendencies in the Church, his division of powers among bishops, theologians, and laity is not easily assimilable today. His position, moreover, can scarcely be reconciled with the Second Vatican Council, which taught that bishops ‘in an eminent and visible way, take on the functions of Christ himself as Teacher, Shepherd, and High Priest and act in his person’.⁵⁶

Conclusion

Newman’s theology of the hierarchy cannot be understood apart from his career and the controversies in which he became involved. He writes not as a neutral observer indulging in cold speculation but in the heat of controversy, intent on defending some particular facet of the truth. He is not a serene systematician, seeking to build a comprehensive system, but an apologist or controversial theologian, addressing the needs of particular situations in which he was involved.

Newman’s theology passes through a number of stages as it matures. In his youth as an Evangelical he concentrated on the gospel message and gave scant attention to the Church and its organs. As a young priest he discovered the importance of tradition and became enamoured of the Fathers. Then, as a leader of the Oxford Movement, he looked to his own local bishop as his supreme authority. When he encountered opposition from local bishops, he moved towards catholicity, seeking to find community with all bishops in the apostolic succession, whether Roman, Greek, or Anglican. In his early years as a Roman Catholic, he spoke glowingly of the pope as the oracle of God, correcting the bishops, who are prone to err when they act independently of Rome. After Vatican I, he accepted the infallibility of the pope. But as a British Catholic familiar with the ‘balance of powers’ he became wary of Roman clericalism. He therefore looked to the consensus of the faithful as a support for orthodoxy, even when the hierarchy fall short. When he found it necessary to quiet the turmoil stirred up by the First Vatican Council, he appealed to the body of theologians as the organ that interprets the true meaning of the conciliar decrees. Finally, responding to his own previous views on Roman corruptions, he maintained that the hierarchy, charged with maintaining unity within the flock, should not be blamed for benignly tolerating minor deviations.

Notwithstanding these variations, Newman’s theology of authority exhibits a measure of constancy. From the beginning he was convinced that authority is of vital importance in Christian faith, since God has spoken and has entrusted his message to accredited witnesses. He never doubted that the government of the Church was by divine institution hierarchical and that the bishops were responsible for defining obligatory doctrine. All members of the Church were bound to submit to the authority of their bishops, as did Newman himself, with the eventual reservation that the bishops must speak in harmony with apostolic and catholic tradition. For the vitality of the Church, moreover, the hierarchy must give the theologians ‘elbow room’ in their search for truth and encourage the devotional initiatives of the lay faithful. Since theological speculation tends towards scepticism, and popular devotion towards superstition, both theologians and the laity are in need of mutual correction and hierarchical supervision.

Newman’s convictions regarding authority in the Church undergo a cumulative development. In becoming an Anglican clergyman, he gains a sense of church office and tradition that he had lacked as a young Evangelical. As he moves from Anglicanism towards Catholicism he recognizes that each individual bishop, to speak with authority, must maintain communion with the whole body of Catholic bishops. He also becomes aware that the episcopate requires a visible head, who exercises universal authority in the name of the Lord. Thanks to the First Vatican Council, Newman comes to acknowledge that the pope can infallibly define doctrine when acting by his own authority and not only when acting together with his fellow bishops in council. But he also insists that papal infallibility is limited; it extends only to matters of faith and morals attested by Scripture and tradition. The hierarchy should not omit to consult the laity, who have certain insights from their own position. Doctrinal definitions, once made by the pastoral leaders, always allow for a margin of interpretation that must be probed by the reflection of theologians.

To profit from Newman’s wisdom we should not be content to quote statements from one or another of his works. Since he is more a controversialist than a systematician, and since his own thought went through a series of developments, isolated passages do not do justice the full range of his thought. Sometimes he writes as an episcopalian, sometimes as a papalist, sometimes as a champion of the laity, sometimes as a spokesman for the theological community. In his long career he was able to call attention to different aspects of the truth in different works. For those who have the patience to familiarize themselves with the full corpus of his writing, he is a teacher almost without peer.

Notes

1. U.S., 33.

2. Ari., 80.

3. With the kind permission of the editor, Rev John T. Ford, CSC, I have incorporated into this article some sections from my article ‘Newman and the Hierarchy’, Newman Studies Journal 2 (2005), 8–19.

4. Diff., 353–9.

5. Ari., 50–1.

6. Dev., 58–9.

7. Ess., i:222–62, especially 254–7. As a Catholic Newman continued to use many of the same texts to the same effect; e.g., O.S., 192–5.

8. L.D., iv:13.

9. L.D., iv:33.

10. P.S., ii:401. The apostolic succession in the ministry is treated at greater length in P.S., ii:300–19.

11. P.S., iv:177.

12. Apo., 51.

13. V.M., i:249–52.

14. Tract 41, reprinted in V.M., ii:35–48, at 38.

15. Bishop Bagot’s charge is quoted in L.D., vi:285–6.

16. Newman to John W. Bowden, 17 August 1838; L.D., vi:291.

17. Newman to Archdeacon Clerke, 15 August 1838; L.D., vi:289–90; see Newman to Richard Bagot, 21 August 1838; L.D., vi:296–7.

18. Newman, ‘Letter to the Margaret Professor of Divinity [Godfrey Gaussett] on Mr R. H. Froude’s Statements on the Holy Eucharist’, in V.M., ii:195–257, at 200.

19. Apo., 116–17.

20. Apo., 117.

21. Newman, ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’, reprinted in his Ess., ii:1–73.

22. Ess., ii:72.

23. Apo., 141–6.

24. Dev., 265–73.

25. Dev., 266–7.

26. Dev., 272.

27. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, 2; PL 50:639.

28. In an essay published some years later on ‘The Trials of Theodoret’, Newman recounts how the bishops of that day appeared as ‘antagonist hosts in a battle, not as angels of their respective Churches or as shepherds of their people’; see H.S., ii:303–62, at 335. Francis McGrath, FMS, a Newman scholar stationed at the Birmingham Oratory, informed me that this essay was probably written about 1859.

29. Dev., 248.

30. Dev., 279.

31. Dev., 312.

32. Dev., 322.

33. Apo., 51.

34. Mix., 207.

35. Dev., 87–9; cf. Apo., 245–6.

36. L.G., 394.

37. Newman to Bishop William Ullathorne, 28 January 1870; L.D., xxv:18–19.

38. Newman to Mrs William Froude, 2 January 1871; L.D., xxv:261–2, at 262.

39. ‘A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation’, D.A., ii:171–378, at 212.

40. D.A., 333.

41. D.A., 334. Newman describes his concept of the schola theologorum in a letter to Henry N. Oxenham of 9 November 1865; L.D., xxii:98–9. The description of the schola in this letter is reminiscent of the ‘prophetic office’, as described in Newman’s Anglican works.

42. The relevant correspondence is printed in the original languages in L.D., xxvii:401–11.

43. Dev., 336–8.

44. Idea, 384.

45. Idea, 220; cf. Apo., 264.

46. Idea, 478.

47. Apo., 252.

48. Apo., 253.

49. Apo., 251.

50. Idea, 379.

51. Cons., 77.

52. V.M., i:xl.

53. V.M., i:lxxxiii.

54. V.M., i:lxxxii–lxxxiii.

55. In a letter to Frederic Rogers, Baron Blachford, dated 5 February 1875, Newman explained that the Catholic Church, like Great Britain, had a constitutional form of polity that protected her members against the excesses of the powerful. Just as lawyers and public offices preserve the body politic from the absolutistic tendencies of kings and lords, so, Newman argued, the theological schools (the schola theologorum) protect the Church from the encroachments of popes and councils. L.D., xxvii:211–13.

56. Vatican II, Lumen gentium, 21.