Section 9

Section 9 2 The Church Fathers

Brian E. Daley

When John Henry Newman looked for words and images to express his understanding of authentic Christian faith and practice, it seemed almost beyond question to him to reach for the writings of the theologians we generally call the ‘Church Fathers’: pastors, exegetes, polemicists, preachers who had witnessed – in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and a variety of other ancient languages – to a growing understanding of the full meaning of the Gospel during the first seven or eight centuries of Christian history. Newman, after all, was born an Anglican, living at a time of crucial importance for the development of the Anglican Church’s self-understanding; in the wake of his friend John Keble’s celebrated ‘Assize Sermon’ of 14 July 1833, he found himself caught up in a new movement in the Church, which consciously sought to present the Church of England as rooted in classical Christian doctrine, in the traditional structures of Church office and sacramental worship, yet in critical opposition to the central leadership and teaching authority of the Roman papacy – a via media or middle way, as Newman and his friends described it, between the Evangelical or liberal Protestantism of the time and Catholicism.¹ Newman tells us, from the distant vantage point of his Apologia, written in 1865, that it was his own confidence in the unique position of the Church of England, as classically Catholic in its central beliefs and practices, but irreversibly opposed to the post-Reformation papal system, which drove him in the years after Keble’s sermon to study the Church Fathers with new intensity and thoroughness: it was in the doctrines and worship of the ‘primitive Church’, Newman was convinced, expressed and regulated by the first four of the councils recognized by Christians as ‘ecumenical’ or universally authoritative,² that Anglicans could find a common Christian identity with both Orthodox and Catholic Christians and with the doctrinally faithful communities of the Reformation. Studying the Fathers, Newman was convinced in the early 1830s, could only make him a better Anglican, by revealing the shape of a purer and more universal brand of Christianity.³

In fact, Newman had begun studying the early Church even before Keble’s sermon had launched the ‘Oxford Movement’ on its fateful course. In March 1831, he had been approached by Hugh James Rose, an Anglican clergyman of High Church commitments, to write a history of the councils of the Church as part of a new series to be published by Rivington’s, dedicated to raising the Church’s awareness of its own doctrinal and liturgical tradition.⁴ Newman agreed, but as he worked on the project, he became more aware of the complex relationship between theological debate and its resolution in conciliar formulas, on the one hand, and the broader currents of piety, preaching, and customary biblical exegesis, on the other. He would at least need to produce two volumes, he thought – one for the Eastern councils, one for the Western – to do justice to the project; and the content would have to be not simply an explanation of conciliar teaching as a set of authoritative decisions and principles, but an attempt to evoke the developing consciousness in the Church of its fundamental interpretation of the Gospel of Christ.⁵ Aided by a new thirty-six-volume set of Patristic texts presented to him by his pupils, Newman threw himself into studying the theological and spiritual background of the first council, the Council of Nicaea, and ended by producing a broad survey of the forms and central content of Christian doctrines on God and Christ during the second and third centuries, as the context of Arius’s particular approach and of the ultimate Nicene response, as well as a detailed narrative of the reception of the Nicene Creed in the later fourth century. The result, finished at the end of July 1833, was Newman’s first book and first major theological achievement: The Arians of the Fourth Century.⁶

This book – eventually published by Rivington’s apart from Rose’s projected series because of its length and detail, as well as the theological misgivings of its editors about Newman’s reading of doctrinal development – begins with Newman’s analysis of the religious forces at work in second-century Christianity: the Jewish and pagan philosophical traditions, as well as two very distinct approaches within the Christian family to interpreting the person of Jesus Christ and his relationship to the God of Israel, whom he called ‘Father’. Newman devotes roughly the first third of the book to developing his own hypothesis of two distinct doctrinal and exegetical ‘schools’ in the early Church of the East: the approach of the Church of Antioch and its surrounding region, heavily influenced by the Jewish element in the Syrian population as well as by Platonic speculation, which took a somewhat rationalistic, historicist approach to interpreting Scripture and saw in Jesus at best an inspired prophet or a superhuman created mediator between a transcendent God and the world; and the contrasting approach of the Church of Alexandria, which cherished a loftier view of Jesus as truly Son of God, sharing the mysterious divine substance as his own, and which found support for this view in a figural or spiritual, rather than a historically literalist reading of the biblical canon. Arius, Newman suggests (with minimal historical evidence), was trained in Antioch, and shared the Antiochene approach to theology, even though he was an Alexandrian by birth and clerical appointment; his teaching that the Son of God was himself created before all things, and because he is a creature can act as appointed mediator between a transcendent Creator and finite reality, stands in radical contrast to the conviction later formulated in the creed of Nicaea against Arius, and defended almost single-handedly by St Athanasius for some fifty years: that Jesus is literally God as Son, in full possession of the unique, immeasurable divine reality that also belongs to his Father and to the Spirit he sends on the Church. Christian orthodoxy, in Newman’s reconstruction of the early Church’s debates, had its first home in Alexandria, not in Antioch, and in Alexandria’s way of reading the Bible.⁷

The argument, as even Newman came to realize, was somewhat hastily contrived, and more than a little tendentious. It is easy enough, from our perspective, to see the contemporary connections behind Newman’s reconstruction: the Antiochene tradition, given its full expression by Arius, combined the ‘Jewish’ biblical literalism of modern Evangelicals with the broad, philosophical relativizing of religious doctrine practised by the liberal wing of the English Church; both groups mistakenly took the Church’s Protestant character as an invitation to reject classical doctrine and sacramental practice; and the key to resisting both, for those who took classical doctrine seriously, was to seek out a more spiritual, God-centred understanding of Jesus and the Church, as represented by the tradition of Alexandria. As Rowan Williams puts it, in his introduction to the 2001 edition of The Arians of the Fourth Century,

Newman’s ‘Antioch’ is an ideal type not an historical reality. It is the type of a theology dictated by human wisdom, human desire, the reluctance to be humble before revelation. Alexandria, the home of true theology, is characterized by reverence, by the expectation that the Bible will always be deeply mysterious, working through elusive symbolism over a lifetime of contemplation; this is a theology giving priority to God. Newman’s purpose in terms of the 1820s was evidently to challenge any English assimilation of German critical scholarship and doctrinal revisionism.⁸

Perhaps the most interesting element in Newman’s argument, however, is his attempt to explain the apparent silence of ancient written sources, even in Alexandria, about Trinitarian doctrine and Christological orthodoxy before the late fourth century. The Alexandrian scriptural interpreter and theologian Origen, for instance, writing in the first half of the third century, presents us with a highly developed understanding of Father, Word and Spirit as sharing in a single, dynamic divine reality at the heart of created history; yet the three are also clearly ranked, in ways that at least echo the traditional Platonic understanding of God and his mediating agents.⁹ Elements in Arius’s discussion of the relation of Son to Father clearly echo the language and thought-patterns of Origen’s Trinitarian theology, even though – as Rowan Williams has shown in detail – there are still more substantial differences between the two Alexandrians.¹⁰ Tertullian, too, writing in Roman North Africa, and Hippolytus, his Greek-speaking contemporary in the first two decades of the third century, elaborated understandings of God as a single transcendent being, irreducibly composed of Father, Son, and Spirit; ultimately, they based their argument on the confession of those three names together in the baptismal creed.¹¹ Yet none of these authors uses the ontological language of one substance and three persons, as classical Trinitarian doctrine would begin to do from the 370s on. The question, then, inevitably rises out of the fourth-century Arian controversy and its context: is this central doctrine of Christianity, itself inextricably linked with the early councils’ view of Christ as truly the Son of God, simply an invention of fourth-century Christian theologians? Is it the product of some form of development in theological thinking, which took time to reach its full articulation? Can it really be regarded as part of the original, apostolic faith of the Church – the faith expressed in the New Testament canon?

The classical Anglican view, represented in the early seventeenth century by Hooker and his contemporaries, and later in that century by Bishop Bull, was that the substance of the Church’s faith in a Trinitarian God – the faith of the early councils – had been present in a recognizable form in Christian teaching since New Testament times, even if the technical language in which the dogma is expressed took time to develop. A prominent Roman Catholic approach, on the other hand, formulated by the seventeenth-century French Jesuit historian and theologian Dionysius Petavius (Denys Pétau), was to admit that many early Christian conceptions of God, Christ and human salvation were imprecise and even erroneous by later standards, and that a gradual development of orthodox doctrine, as it would eventually be normative for the whole Church, was only possible through the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the leadership of the Church’s hierarchical magisterium. Although Newman would gradually adopt Petavius’s view himself, his position in Arians stood somewhere between these two positions. Pointing to the ancient practice of the disciplina arcani, by which the central Mysteries of the Christian faith were not publicly available through creedal formulas or written treatises, but were only communicated to full members of the Church at the time of baptism, Newman suggests that the central dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation remained within this orally communicated tradition until public controversy, in the fourth century, made it impossible to keep them private any longer.¹² Although Newman realized, when writing Arians, that formulation and dogmatic clarity is eventually a necessity for theology, as the Church takes on a more public role in society, they are always at best a mixed blessing, an invitation to rationalism and philosophical wrangling as well as to a purer faith. The formulation of faith, in other words, can also become a cause of its being cheapened, commodified, distanced from the gaze of the contemplative heart.¹³

In his introduction to the most recent edition of the work, Rowan Williams points out that this view must have seemed unacceptable to the High Churchmen of the 1830s, who saw the Church as founded on serious continuity with the doctrines and structures of primitive Christianity, guaranteed by state patronage, just as it would have seemed to the liberals of the time, for whom doctrine was dispensable, or to the Evangelicals who clung to the text of Scripture alone:

The effect [of Newman’s argument] is a strikingly intense rhetoric of initiation, revealed-but-concealed mystery, the holy community guarding its integrity against a hostile world . . . Orthodoxy has become more of a quality of spiritual life than a public system by which a community may govern itself. If you hold Newman’s view of the Church, the legal privileges of the Church of England, with the ideology that went with them, could hardly be at the top of a polemical agenda.¹⁴

Even in this first book, Newman finds in the early Church a model of an intensely spiritual brand of Christianity that invites the modern Christian, too, to move beyond sectarian debates and religious politics.

Through the 1830s and early 1840s, Newman continued to develop his vision of the Christian life in a dazzling variety of works: sermons and lectures delivered at St Mary’s, contributions to the series Tracts for the Times, essays in The British Critic (the Tractarian journal which he edited from 1838 until 1842) and other journals, and a variety of occasional letters to newspapers and other publications. Much of this vast output was centred on the effort he and his colleagues in the movement were now making to present a fresh and lively picture of early Christianity, one that would totally engage both the heart and the mind of sympathetic readers. From the ecclesiastical and political demands of the day, Newman found himself now a Patristic scholar.

In March 1834, for instance, he began working on an edition of the Greek fragments of the works of Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, a third-century pupil of Origen’s who engaged in an important correspondence with his contemporary, Bishop Dionysius of Rome, on the proper way to conceive of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as God. This was, for Newman, a new venture into the technical, philological side of Patristic scholarship, and may have grown out of his own sense that Arians, for all its passion and energy, lacked a hard scholarly edge; unfortunately, he never finished the work.¹⁵ During the 1830s, too, Newman wrote a number of more popular biographical pieces for the British Magazine on various key figures in the early Church – Basil of Caesaraea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Antony of Egypt, Augustine, Martin of Tours, and others – most of which would later be gathered, along with similar works he wrote as a Catholic, in three volumes of Historical Sketches. In 1836, Newman and Pusey began the Library of the Fathers: a new series of translations of key Patristic texts, which was the first systematic attempt to make the most influential theological and spiritual works of early Christianity available to the English reader. He also shepherded a team of translators (including his disciples Mark Pattison, John Dalgairns, and T. D. Ryder) in producing a translation of St Thomas Aquinas’s collection of Patristic excerpts, arranged as a running commentary on the Gospels: the Catena Aurea (‘Golden Chain’), published in 1841. In the summer of 1841, Newman began to work on his own translation of Athanasius’s main doctrinal works for the Library of the Fathers – a translation that he radically revised, towards the end of his life, in the interest both of greater readability and of more recognizable Catholic orthodoxy.¹⁶

Throughout these years, however, Newman seems still to have been wresthng, in his own mind, with the central issue he had sensed in his study of the Arians and their opponents on the question of Jesus’s divinity and its implications for our understanding of God: how can one account for the apparent distortions and omissions we find in early Christian theology, alongside its obvious strengths? How can one see in the early Church a model for contemporary Christianity, if the classical dogmas acknowledged by modern Christians are often still obscure or even missing in the more ‘primitive’ Patristic works of the second and third centuries? By the early 1840s, Newman seems no longer to have been content with pointing to the ‘discretion’ of early Church teachers in expressing doctrine, as he had done in Arians, and to have moved more and more directly towards the conviction that the conceptual content of Christian doctrine – what the Church knows and says of God – itself develops, in an organic but unpredictable way, within the bounds of a living community that is itself the sole herald and interpreter of the Gospel: a theory that clearly relied, for intelligibility, on some kind of institutional teaching office within the Church’s leadership.

A first articulation of this position, now closer to that of Petavius than to that of Bull, is visible in the fifteenth (and last) of his Oxford University Sermons, delivered on 2 February 1843: ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’. Here Newman attempts to work out an epistemology of faith, based on the assumption that religion involves an encounter with realities that lie beyond the ordinary grasp of the senses, and yet that offer us genuine, life-transforming knowledge – ‘the possession of those living ideas of sacred things, from which alone change of heart or conduct can proceed’.¹⁷ Newman argues:

Further, I observe, that though the Christian mind reasons out a series of dogmatic statements, one from another, this it has ever done, and always must do, not from those statements taken in themselves, as logical propositions, but as being itself enlightened and (as if) inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any warrant to reason at all. Such sentences as ‘the Word was God,’ or ‘the Only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father,’ or ‘the Word was made flesh,’ or ‘the Holy Ghost which proceedeth from the Father,’ are not a mere letter which we may handle by the rules of art at our own will, but august tokens of most simple, ineffable, adorable facts, embraced, enshrined according to its measure in the believing mind. For though the development of an idea is a deduction of proposition from proposition, these propositions are ever formed in and round the idea itself (so to speak), and are in fact one and all only aspects of it.¹⁸

This priority of ‘simple, ineffable, adorable facts’ over our linguistic expressions of them, this experience of ultimate divine reality which serves as the foundation of all attempts to define it or argue about its limits, explains, according to Newman, the way in which the Church Fathers tended to interpret Scripture, and to use scriptural texts in argument with those they considered heretics: Scripture offers ‘the main outhnes and also large details of the dogmatic system’, but does not contain its full development:

Scripture, I say, begins a series of developments which it does not finish; that is to say, in other words, it is a mistake to look for every separate proposition of the Catholic doctrine in Scripture . . . There is one view concerning the Holy Trinity, or concerning the Incarnation, which is true, and distinct from all others; one definite, consistent, entire view, which cannot be mistaken, not contained in any certain number of propositions, but held as a view by the believing mind, and not held, but denied by Arians, Sabellians, Tritheists, Nestorians, Monophysites, Socinians, and other heretics . . . The question, then, is not whether this or that proposition of the Catholic doctrine is in terminis in Scripture, unless we would be slaves to the letter, but whether that one view of the Mystery, of which all such are the exponents, be not there. One thing alone has to be impressed on us by Scripture, the Catholic idea, and in it they all are included.¹⁹

What Newman here suggests as the reason that the life and faith of the early Church is normative for later centuries is not the conviction that the whole Catholic system of doctrine and practice is literally to be retrieved from the New Testament and the earliest Christian documents, or supposed to be part of early secret oral teaching, but rather a perceptible continuity between earlier and later forms of belief, already visible in early Christian debates and documents, that is rooted in a common experience of the saving Mystery of God.

What is still missing, of course, is an explicit acknowledgement that this perception of the Mystery, which lies behind all genuine development of doctrine, is authoritatively articulated within a universal teaching Church, one that is not identical with any national or political institution. Newman would finally come to express this conviction in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, completed in October of 1845, just before his reception into the Roman Catholic Church. Here Newman returns to the issue he had begun to deal with in Arians: the obvious reality of change – in practice, language, and even the conceptual content of teaching – within the Christian community. For some more liberal modern Christians, Newman observes, change of doctrine and practice is simply a normal fact of historical life, as the Church ‘accommodates itself to the circumstances of times and seasons’; but for them the idea of a divinely revealed truth and ‘the supernatural claims of Christianity’ are usually unimportant.²⁰ The classical Anglican position, on the other hand, often justified by the dictum of the fifth-century Gallic writer Vincent of Lérins that Apostolic doctrine can only be recognized in ‘what has been held always, everywhere, and by all’, restricts normative Church dogma and practice to what can be demonstrated as common to all orthodox communities in Christian antiquity. While conceding the attractiveness of Vincent’s principle as an ideal, Newman shows that such consensus cannot always be found among major Christian writers and Churches of the first four centuries, especially in what has come to be recognized by Anglicans as central dogma: the doctrine of the Trinity, or the composition of the person of Christ, or the reality of original sin. In contrast, other doctrines which Anglicans and other Reformation Churches rejected, as not forming part of Apostolic teaching, like the purgation of souls after death, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and even the teaching authority of the Roman see, are, he suggests, commonly affirmed by the Church of the first four centuries in both East and West.²¹ Even Newman’s own thesis, developed in Arians, that the early consensus of Christian teachers on key doctrines has been masked by the ancient practice of the disciplina arcani, no longer seemed to him to be tenable, simply on historical grounds: ‘because the variations continue beyond the time when it is conceivable that the discipline was in force, and because they manifest themselves on a law, not abruptly, but by a visible growth which has persevered up to this time without any sign of its coming to an end’.²² So Newman here proposes, instead, the very thesis he had tried to avoid ten years before, what he calls the ‘theory of development of doctrine’:

That the increase and expansion of the Christian Creed and ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion; that from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.²³

Newman goes on to illustrate his thesis in elaborate detail, and draws his examples almost exclusively from the doctrinal controversies of the early Church, as the period when the commonly accepted Christian dogmas cherished by the Anglican High Church were still in formation. Development, he concludes, is simply a natural aspect of the teachings and practices of any community that lives in history; development is given consistency, checked for authenticity, by the discerning promulgation and reception of the community itself in which it occurs; and this process requires leaders, teachers, recognized structures of authority and communication, in order to function effectively. His conclusion, based on the phenomenon of doctrinal continuity and change in the Fathers, was for him now inevitable: ‘Of all existing systems, the present communion of Rome is the nearest approximation in fact to the Church of the Fathers . . . Did St Athanasius or St Ambrose come suddenly to life, it cannot be doubted what communion he would take to be his own.’²⁴ As he would later remark to his former colleague Pusey, ‘the Fathers made me a Catholic’.²⁵

Newman discovered the reality of historical development in the Church by reading the Fathers. He was not drawn to their works, however, simply as a museum of evidence for the Church’s struggle to discern heresy from orthodoxy, or as a collection of clues to the ecclesial conditions for authentic change in doctrine and practice. In a celebrated passage in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865), he describes how, while working on Arians in the early 1830s, he found in Patristic texts, especially texts from the Alexandrian tradition of exegesis, a still deeper implication of the ever-changing character of worship and dogma, an invitation to see the world around him not simply as brute fact, but as a door to eternal, invisible reality:

What principally attracted me in the ante-Nicene period was the great Church of Alexandria, the historical centre of teaching in those times . . . The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away; the philosophy, not the theological doctrine; and I have drawn out some features of it in my volume [The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833)] with the zeal and freshness, but with the partiality, of a neophyte. Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various Economies or Dispensations of the Eternal. I understood these passages to mean that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable: Scripture was an allegory: pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets . . . In the fullness of time both Judaism and Paganism had come to nought; the outward framework, which concealed yet suggested the Living Truth, had never been intended to last, and it was dissolving under the beams of the Sun of Justice which shone behind it and through it. The process of change had been slow; it had been done not rashly, but by rule and measure, ‘at sundry times and in divers manners,’ first one disclosure and then another, till the whole evangelical doctrine was brought into full manifestation. And thus room was made for the anticipation of further and deeper disclosures, of truths still under the veil of the letter, and in their season to be revealed. The visible world still remains without its divine interpretation; Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain, even to the end of the world, after all but a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her Mysteries are but the expressions in human language of truths to which the human mind is unequal.²⁶

In one strong tradition of Patristic literature, at least, which Newman identifies (with some over-simplification) as that of Alexandria, he found the ability to find eternal significance in temporal things, typological revelations of Christ in earlier biblical events, the presence of Christ as saviour in the present sacraments of Christian worship. The Fathers offered him not just a theory of Church authority, but a spirituality.

Central to the attraction that the Alexandrian Fathers held for Newman, it seems, was their strong emphasis on the organic unity, and the divine subjective centre, of the person of Christ.²⁷ This is particularly clear in his long-lived predilection for the theological position of Athanasius, the fourth-century opponent of Arius and promoter of the Nicene formulation of Christ’s person, and for that of Cyril, his fifth-century successor as Bishop of Alexandria, who opposed the tendency of the later Antiochene theologians to see in Christ two closely entwined but ultimately distinct realities, one eternal and divine, one historical and human. In one of the revised notes Newman originally added to his translation of Athanasius, for instance, he explains the Alexandrian’s understanding of Jesus’s status as Son of God in extremely strong terms:

The Son of God must be God, granting that the human word ‘Son’ is to guide us to the knowledge of what is heavenly; for on earth we understand by a son one who is the successor and heir to a given nature . . . The Son then participates in the Divine Nature, and since the Divine Nature is none other than the One individual Living Personal True God, he too is that God, and since that One True God is eternal and never had a beginning of existence, therefore the Son is eternal and without beginning . . . Thus there are two infinite Persons, in each other because they are infinite. Each of Them being wholly One and the Same Divine Being, yet not being merely separate aspects of the Same. Each is God as absolutely as if the Other were not.²⁸

This emphasis on the personal and substantial reality of Christ’s divine identity characterizes Newman’s own thought and preaching, as early as his Anglican days. So, for instance, in a Passiontide sermon given at St Mary’s probably in 1841 or 1842, while he was at work on translating Athanasius, Newman makes it clear that the Jesus who suffered is literally God, in the full sense:

Here we are brought to the second point of doctrine which it is necessary to insist upon, that while our Lord is God He is also the Son of God, or rather, that He is God because He is the Son of God. We are apt, at first hearing, to say that He is God though He is the Son of God, marveling at the mystery. But what to man is a mystery, to God is a cause. He is God, not though, but because he is Son of God . . . The great safeguard to the doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity is the doctrine of his Sonship: we realize that He is God only when we acknowledge Him to be by nature and from eternity Son.²⁹

And this emphasis on Jesus’s divine identity, even in the midst of his human words and activities, leads Newman also to make his own the distinctive Greek Patristic idea of Christian salvation not simply as a change in the believer’s relationship with God, thanks to the work of Jesus – as most Protestants had taught since Luther – but as actual transformation, as participation through the Spirit in the divine life and Trinitarian relationships of the Son. Thus he urges in a Christmas homily, probably from 1842,

Let us steadily contemplate the mystery, and say whether any consequence is too great to follow from so marvelous a dispensation; any mystery so great, any grace so overpowering, as that which is already manifested in the incarnation and death of the Eternal Son . . . Men we remain, but not mere men, but gifted with a measure of all those perfections which Christ has in fullness, partaking each in his own degree of the Divine Nature so fully, that the only reason (so to speak) why His saints are not really like Him, is that it is impossible – that He is the Creator, and they His creatures; yet still so, that they are all but Divine, all that they can be made without violating the incommunicable majesty of the Most High.³⁰

The theme of Christian salvation as divinization, first developed explicitly by St Irenaeus at the end of the second century, embraced by St Athanasius and St Gregory Nazianzus in the fourth and St Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth, and presented with even more radical clarity by St Maximus the Confessor in the seventh, is by the 1840s, at least, an integral aspect of Newman’s increasingly Patristic interpretation of the Gospel of Christ.³¹

Newman’s Christ-centred piety and theology, in fact – his sense of who and what Christ really is – remain anchored in the Alexandrian tradition throughout his life; it was not simply the Alexandrians’ Platonic sense of meaning, or their tendency to search for types and mysteries in the narrative of Scripture that attracted him, but their deeply affective interpretation of the person of Christ, as well. So in the summer of 1858, Newman published a long, rather technical essay in the Irish journal Atlantis, defending the correctness of Cyril of Alexandria’s favourite way of expressing the mystery of Christ, in his mature works: that in him we recognize ‘one nature of the Word, made flesh’.³² While the essay is couched as ‘a purely historical investigation into the use and fortunes of certain scientific terms’,³³ Newman is clearly intent on defending Cyril’s language as being well within the mainstream of orthodox theology. The point was not obvious; the Council of Chalcedon (451), whose formulation of the concepts in which the Church traditionally understands the distinctive constitution of Jesus – as ‘one hypostasis or person’ subsisting ‘in two natures, without confusion or change, without division or separation’³⁴ – expressly set out to find a theological middle ground, a via media, between Cyril’s insistence on the ‘natural’ unity in Christ of the divine, saving Word of God with the humanity he made his own, and the more symmetrical picture of distinct but co-inherent human and divine natures promoted by Antiochene theologians and echoed, in the late 440s, by Pope Leo of Rome. Faithful adherence to Cyril’s formula, especially by major Eastern theologians of the late fifth and early sixth centuries like Patriarch Severus of Antioch, led large bodies of the faithful in Syria, Egypt and Palestine to break communion with the Church of Constantinople and to ordain their own hierarchies – the beginning of a new set of Christian divisions, which continue to this day. As an Anglican and a Catholic, Newman was clearly committed to the two-nature language of Leo and Chalcedon as expressive of later Catholic dogma; yet his own theological sympathies, evident in his sermons since the 1830s and in his work on Athanasius, just as clearly lay with the more ‘mystical’, unified, God-centred approach of Cyril. In a Lenten sermon of the early 1840s, for instance, Newman reminds his hearers that Christ, the agent of salvation, always remains God in person and being:

He took upon Him our nature, as an instrument of His purposes, not as an agent in the work. What is one thing cannot become another; His manhood remained human, and his Godhead remained divine. God became man, yet was still God, having His manhood as an adjunct, perfect in its kind, but dependent upon His godhead. So much so, that unless Scripture had expressly called Him man, we might well have scrupled to do so. Left to ourselves, we might have felt it more reverential to have spoken of Him, as incarnate indeed, come in human flesh, human and the like, but not simply as man.³⁵

Newman suggests in his article on Cyril’s formula, in fact, that this Alexandrian, strongly unitive interpretation of the person of Christ is the one that finds the most support in the whole Patristic tradition, and that the more symmetrical language of the Council of Chalcedon represented something relatively new, guaranteed as doctrinally adequate only by the intervention of Leo, ‘who saw with a Pope’s instinctive sagacity the need of the times, to explain the old truth . . . under the comparatively new formula’.³⁶ Newman’s reading of the central meaning of the Chalcedonian formula – like the interpretation of Chalcedon by mainstream Greek and Latin theology until at least the seventeenth century – was to take it in an Alexandrian rather than an Antiochene sense: as expressing the intuition of Athanasius and Cyril, in language that included, for the sake of Church unity, terminology favoured by their Antiochene critics.

The reasons for Newman’s interest in Patristic theology, it seems, were not simply formal or historical, not simply that most of the classical doctrines on which the unity of Christians is founded were originally expressed in an authentic way in the first five or six centuries of the Church’s history. Newman also seems to have felt a deep religious kinship with many of the early theologians who formulated, in conflict and meditation, what was to become the core of Christian orthodoxy. In an early Christmas sermon, for instance, he remarks that the early controversies and creeds not only set the boundaries for our own thinking about the Mystery of salvation in Christ, but ‘rouse in us those mingled feelings of fear and confidence, affection and devotion towards [Christ], which are implied in the belief of a personal advent of God in our nature’. Patristic formulations of faith are suitable for use in the modern liturgy, he suggests, precisely because ‘they kindle and elevate the religious affections’.³⁷ And in a later sketch, on the bitter political struggles of St John Chrysostom as Patriarch of Constantinople at the turn of the fifth century, Newman offers a gentle and attractive portrait of the Patristic style of theological argument that seems also to be a portrait of the kind of theologian (and perhaps correspondent) he wants to be:

Now the Ancient Saints have left behind them just that kind of literature which more than any other represents the abundance of the heart, which more than any other approaches to conversation. I mean correspondence . . . Instead of writing formal doctrinal treatises, they write controversy; and their controversy, again, is correspondence. They mix up their own persons, natural and supernatural, with the didactic or polemical works which engaged them. Their authoritative declarations are written, not on stone tablets, but on what Scripture calls ‘the fleshly tables of the heart.’ The line of their discussion traverses a region rich and interesting, and opens on those who follow them in it a succession of instructive views as to the aims, the difficulties, the disappointments, under which they journeyed on heavenward, their care of the brethren, their anxieties about contemporary teachers of error. Dogma and proof are in them at the same time hagiography. They do not write a summa theologiae, or draw out a catena [i.e., an anthology of excerpts from earlier sources], or pursue a single thesis through the stages of a scholastic disputation. They wrote for the occasion, and seldom on a carefully-digested plan.³⁸

For Newman, who always strove to listen and to speak with the heart, the Fathers always remained in touch, always were ideal partners in conversation.

Notes

1. For a full description of his position in the 1830s, see Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 54–60.

2. These are the Council of Nicaea, called by the Emperor Constantine in 325 as the first intentionally world-wide gathering of Christian bishops, to deal with the crisis of faith raised by the teaching of Arius that the Son of God, who became flesh, was created in time; the First Council of Constantinople (381), which reaffirmed the faith of Nicaea and expanded its teaching on the Holy Spirit; the Council of Ephesus (431) and the subsequent document produced by its main participants in 433, expressing a common Christian understanding of the person of Christ as ‘perfect in divinity, perfect in humanity’; and the Council of Chalcedon (451), which further refined this complex understanding of Christ, as a normative guide to the correct interpretation of the earlier creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople. This focus on the first four ecumenical councils as normative for Christian faith – rather than on the first seven, recognized together by Catholic and Orthodox Christians, or on the twenty-one general councils affirmed by the Catholic Church – has been characteristic of Anglican dogmatic theology since the sixteenth century.

3. See Apologia, ed. Svaglic, 60.

4. See Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 42.

5. Ker, John Henry Newman, 43–4.

6. The most accessible modern edition of this work, based on Newman’s third edition of 1871, is published by the Birmingham Oratory (Leominster: Gracewing, and Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2001). For recent, magisterial surveys of the fourth-century ‘Arian’ controversies over the divinity of Christ and the triune nature of God, see R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988); Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); John Behr, The Nicene Faith, 2 vols. (New York: St Vladimir’s, 2004).

7. It is important to remember, as a backdrop for High Church concerns in Newman’s time, that Arius’s understanding of Christ as a created mediator between God and humanity continued to play a role in Christian theological discussions, and was revived with considerable enthusiasm by a number of Anglican divines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Maurice Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism Through the Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

8. Rowan Williams, in John Henry Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century, xxxix.

9. For Origen’s view of the divine Trinity, see especially On First Principles Preface 4; i:1–3; ii:4; ii:6–7; iv:4.

10. Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1987), 131–48.

11. See Tertullian, Against Praxeas, and Hippolytus, Against Noetus – both treatises opposing the ‘modalist’ or ‘Sabellian’ tendency of a number of early third-century Church leaders to suggest that the names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit really refer to three distinct ways believers have encountered the single God of the Bible, rather than to any distinctions within God’s own being.

12. Ari., 44–56.

13. For Newman’s reflections on the negative aspect of doctrinal formulation, see Ari., 36–7.

14. Ari., xxxiv.

15. See Stephen Thomas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 68–70.

16. Newman’s translation of Athanasius’s works for the Library of the Fathers, published in 1844, included the Contra Gentes, the three authentic Orations against the Arians, the De Decretis and De Synodis, De Oratione Dionysii, and the Defence before Constantius. In addition, his notes on Athanasius’s Defence of his Flight and his letter To the Bishops of Egypt appeared with translations by others. All of these works, except the early Contra Gentes, reveal Athanasius in full polemical engagement with those who rejected the language of Nicaea. Newman’s revised version of his translation of Athanasius, which appeared in 1881, admits to being ‘free,’ and in many places is really more of a summary or paraphrase; he is interested now in making what he sees as the crucial sense of Athanasius’s theology as clear as possible.

17. U.S., 332.

18. U.S., 334.

19. U.S., 335–6.

20. Dev., 10.

21. Dev., 122–34.

22. Dev., 29.

23. Dev., 29–30.

24. Dev., 27–8.

25. A Letter to Dr Pusey [1865], later published in Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (London: Pickering, 1876), ii:24. Newman makes the same point, at somewhat more length, in the last of his 1850 lectures, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, which deals with the significance of ecclesiastical history: ‘I say, then, that the writings of the Fathers, so far from prejudicing at least one man against the modern Catholic Church, have been simply and solely the one intellectual cause of his having renounced the religion in which he was born and submitted himself to her’ (Diff., i:367).

26. Apologia, ed. Svaglic, 36–7.

27. For further details, see Daley, ‘Newman and the Alexandrian Tradition: “The Veil of the Letter” and the Person of Christ’, in Terrence Merrigan and Ian Ker (eds.), Newman and Truth (Louvain: Peeters, 2008).

28. Ath., ii:287–8, 292. The Rev Benjamin King, in a yet-unpublished dissertation, has shown in some detail that when Newman republished his translation of Athanasius in 1881, along with an alphabetically arranged version of the original annotations to his translation, he made significant changes to align the text and notes more closely with scholastic Catholic orthodoxy. I am grateful to Benjamin King for allowing me to read this chapter of his work.

29. ‘Christ, the Son of God Made Man’, in P.S., vi:53–82, at 56–7. This sermon, for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, was delivered before 1842. For a similar position, see his earlier sermon, ‘The Humiliation of the Eternal Son’ [before 1834]: P.S., iii:156–72.

30. Religious Joy [probably 1842]: P.S., viii:244–55, at 252–3.

31. The fullest and most recent treatment of this central Patristic theme is Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

32. ‘On St Cyril’s Formula, μία φύσις του̑ Θεου̑ Λόγου σεσαρκωμένη Atlantis (July 1858), 331–82; later published in T.T., 287–336.

33. T.T., 332.

34. J. Neuner and J. Dupuis (eds.), The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church (New York: Alba House, 1981), 154.

35. ‘Christ the Son of God Made Man’ [before 1842]: P.S., vi:61–2.

36. T.T., 376.

37. ‘The Incarnation’ [before 1835]: P.S., ii:29.

38. ‘The Last Years of St Chrysostom’, first published in The Rambler (1859–60); republished in H.S., ii:221, 223.

Section 9

2 The Church Fathers

Further reading