The Gospel's Wax Nose
Or the Radical Modernist Tradtionalism of Cardinal Newman
Nearly every Traditionalist nowadays draws from the newly minted saint, John Henry Cardinal Newman. His “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant” bromide receives plaudits, as anxiety addled converts exorcise their Evangelical ghosts. As a former Tractarian, Newman had demonstrated the incoherence of any “third way” Protestant position (as it appears among some Anglicans and Lutherans). There was simply no way to save some Catholic conception of the Church, especially the Parliamentary dominated Church of England, and therefore he swam the Tiber. But Newman had his own ghosts. He was steeped in history, he knew the problems of tracing any doctrine from the Apostles to the present. History was a chaotic swamp of incoherence, proving all points and none. Newman, however, did not want to surrender to the revolutionary nihilism that he saw inherent in liberalism and/or Parliament’s sovereignty. Instead, Newman pioneered a new solution, derived from the effervescence of German Idealism. He coined the Development of Doctrine.
In the eponymous book (the 1876 edition), Newman prefaced that this new means of dealing with history did not necessarily justify Rome. Rather, it was to clarify the use and purpose of history, to clear up the incoherence of the past in inter-ecclesiastical debate. It was “to explain certain difficulties in its history, felt before now by the author himself, and commonly insisted on by Protestants in controversy.” Newman was not ignorant of Higher Criticism throughout German universities, which undermined any appeal to mere Scripture or the Fathers. For Newman, the only way to save Christianity from the acid bath of skepticism was to understand dogma as an organic phenomenon, something one could watch over the centuries develop. This struggle for life was nearly Darwinian, with the nascent Church battling against “Oriental, Platonic, Polytheistic sources, from Buddhism, Essenism, Manicheeism” among a whole host of other demons.
Therefore Protestantism, particularly summarized by “[William] Chillingworth and his friends” who had asserted (in an irenic spirit during the English Civil Wars) that the Bible was the religion of Protestants. However, “the Christianity of history is not Protestantism” (7-8). There was nothing that tied together Protestants, and there was certainly nothing within the Church of England (even among its Tractarian polemicists, straining against Parliament’s Evangelical erastian bias) that tied it to antiquity. Fellow Anglicans, especially of a Higher Church variety, could not simply and naively appeal to the Vincentian Canon, the 5th c. solution to believe was believed always everywhere by all. It was a dead end because any candid analysis of the Fathers revealed contradiction and confusion. Even in the purest age, which many Anglicans considered the first five centuries of the Church, there was disagreement and, retrospectively, rank heresy. Newman lists several examples:
-Basil of Caesarea accused Dionysius of Alexandria of planting the seed of Arianism in Egypt
-Hippolytus was ignorant of the eternal sonship of Christ
-Methodius “speaks incorrectly” about the Incarnation
-Justin Martyr is Arianizing
-Irenaeus was patripassian (i.e. the Father suffered on the Cross somehow)
This scandal would only embolden radicals, High Critics, and liberals in teaching a “fall of the Church” due to Hellenizing. Rather, to save the Fathers and the faith, Newman approached this confusion as sign of a living principle. Doctrine was like a seed, an organic force that was inchoate, a living principle that would realize itself through the force of time. Drawing on the theories of Adam Mohler and Joseph de Maistre (both Catholic Romantic Counterrevolutionary theorists), the Church’s dogma grew in “intellect and heart” through its defenders until after “longer time and deeper thought” it emerged more mature and clarified (30). The development of doma involved conflict and contest through history. Only when “the aspects of an idea are brought into consistency and form […] being the germination and maturation of some truth or apparent truth” could the dogma be seen in its true and mature form.
Development was something that was evolutionary, it could not be considered in the abstract “like an investigation worked out on paper, in which each successive advance is a pure evolution from a foregoing, but it is carried on through and by means of communities of men and their leaders and guides.” Rather, seed-ideas were like armies, “each of them enterprising, engrossing, imperious, more or less incompatible with the rest, and rallying followers or rousing foes” (38-39). Truth only emerged through this convoluted process into the clearer day of later contemporary present. It would be ideal if truth could simply appear and manifest itself, like some Platonic forms before the sage, but “in a higher world it is otherwise, here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often” (40). Selective adaptation, driven by an inner force (rather than Darwinian chance and environment, was how truth would appear among men on Earth.
When it came to Christianity proper (true orthodox catholic Christianity), the seed-idea was Incarnation. This core notion of God-with-Us required three secondary concepts: sacraments (a ritual integration of divine with mortal), hierarchy (a means to regulate this process), and asceticism (to subjectively internalize it) (36). Unlike the development of purely Human ideas, which were “often capricious and irregular,” the development of Christianity was divine, it was to be “habituated to thought of God.” It was this process, as man experience God and was transformed by God, that dogma would eventually come to light. The experience of Incarnation was “an impression on the imagination” which would then lead, through time, conflict, and reflection, to “a system of creed in the reason” (52-53). That was why the Roman Church, for Newman, rightly developed the idea of Mary’s Immaculate Conception (from centuries of Marian devotion) and the universal theocratic monarchy of the Papacy (from centuries of ecclesiastical experience). Therefore, Roman Catholicism seemed clearly the bearer of Christianity.
In contrast, Protestant-ism (a unified system for Newman) was animated by the seed-idea of Individual Judgement. Luther’s theology may have been mostly orthodox, but the core idea was not Luther’s appeal to justification by faith alone. Rather, it was Luther’s “here I stand,” where the I received the absolute status for an inviolable conscience. Luther would always lead to Calvin and Calvin would always lead to Socinus. Protestantism, at its heart, was Unitarianism (if not revolution or liberalism). To stop this process, with a Luther or a Calvin, was like “living in a house without a roof to it.” (96). It was inevitable that the decay of Newman’s modern Europe would come from the Protestant rebellion. Therefore, the only solution was Rome as the bulwark of the faith.
Were there no alternatives?
Maybe the Church of England was corrupt, but what about Dissenting Protestants in England in their chapels? No, they exemplified the same trends for Newman, with Presbyterians moving from hotheaded calvinistic puritanism to ice cold rationalism of Unitarians and Deists. The Dissenting chapel may be preferable over the “hollow uniformity” of the Anglican parish, but they were doomed to liberalizing individual judgment (90-91).
What about the eastern churches? For Constantinople, Newman decreed that the Greeks were dead. They worshiped a failed caesaropapal emperor (either Roman or Russian), rather than the unified ecclesiastical monarch (as the Nestorian Church of the East recognized in a Catholicos and Anglicans recognized in the growing power of the Archbishop of Canterbury over a global network [155]). Eastern Orthodoxy existed as mere negation, as antithesis. Newman shrugged: “I am not aware that the Greeks present more than a negative opposition to the Latins” (95). Similarly, the barren rationalism of Monophysites and Nestorians (despite their stated hostility) was their seed-idea, rejecting all mystery in religion (181).
Therefore, Rome alone stood as the bulwark of Christianity, the only means to recapture European civilization against the relentless forces of the French Revolution, liberalism, and socialism.
One might counter Newman: why does he say that Individual Judgmeent is the seed-idea? Why not the Bible, as Chillingworth declared? Could not some sanctity of devotion to Scripture be what animated Protestants? No, because the Bible was confusing, a mystical and ultimately unknowable source. Scripture was so “unsystematic and various,” its style “so figurative and indirect,” that “no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not” (71-72). It was like a wild and untamable landscape. If a Protestant rejected Catholic doctrines of Purgatory or the communicable merits of the saints, a Catholic could cite the Scripture verse “saved; yet so as by fire” or “receiving a prophet’s reward” to justify their claims. Who could decide? A Protestant may reject these citations as out of context, but then one was thrown upon one’s ability to interpret. How could this problem ever resolve? Only an infallible judge, the Magisterium, could resolve these issues over a period of interpretive history. Newman had learned this idea not from Catholicism, but from a fellow Anglican, the famed 18th c. apologist Bishop Joseph Butler, who understood ideas were parts of a living and organic system (125-126). Anglicans had long understood the problem, but never could grasp that Rome alone was the solution.
On the surface, this rhetorical gambit appears very strong. Newman, to qualify, was not against individual judgement in principle, he did not disbelieve in conscience. Rather, he believed it must be submitted to something higher. He was not an epistemic authoritarian, like his fellow Anglican convert and Cardinal Edward Manning. Unlike Manning, who claimed that the appeal to history was treason against the Pope, Newman understood that history had to be the means through which ideas express themselves and mature. Newman was not a reactive monarchist, but was part of the whiggish Conservative tradition of Edward Burke, which had coalesced into some forms of English Liberalism (e.g. the Catholic nobleman, Lord Acton). Newman believed that individual judgement must submit to a final authority, as Newman had himself practiced in his conversion. Only Rome’s Magisterium could be the safe harbor to bring the conscience to safety (81-82). As he would later say, Newman toasted first to conscience and then, and only then, to the Pope.
Of course, this judgement seems flimsy with the benefit of retrospect. Why assume Rome’s living seed-idea is Incarnation? That is a claim, but one that is justified by the circular reasoning that it has come about because of Newman’s renarrating of ecclesiastical (and Western) history. Were the Orthodox churches dead? Newman might be secure in his judgement in 1917, when the Russian Revolution began its process of de-Christianizing the only major Orthodox power. Confessional Protestants? They no longer exist in any demographic form, and therefore are banished to the past. Today, a different story might be told, not necessary for Orthodoxy (though it has returned to Russia and seems to be growing in some places) or confessional Protestantism, but for non-denominational Evangelical Baptist Charismatics. What if history is the tale of the Holy Spirit, the seed-idea that would slowly bring a truer and more biblical Christianity to light? What if Rome was, in fact, dead? Where Roman Catholicism is growing, it imitates charismatic forms of worship. Otherwise, Roman Catholicism is contracting and has become synonymous with Christian Democracy and its general advocacy for Feminism and Gay Rights. What if Newman’s living seed-idea was wrong? What if Roman Catholicism is, in contrast, animated by papal tyranny? One could confect a history from that alone to explain two-thousand years of history.
At heart, this method is a complex and convoluted just-so story predicated on German Idealism. Orthodox utilize it in their own polemics, telling a story of how Augustine’s evil Latin theology (of predestination and voluntarism) led to the guillotine and gulag of revolutionary fervor. Similarly, they preserve the true dogma through historical conflicts, be it Nestorianism or Monotheletism or Papalism or the non-Hesychast rationalists, that eventually brought about the truest expression of faith. Or, what if socialism is the true manifestation of the seed-idea of Christianity? What if the divinization of Man came through Stalinism and Socialist Realist art? The Homo sovieticus could claim its own doctrinal development. Or perhaps its transgender priestesses in the Episcopal Church, finally broken free from Parliament and King, to effect the true Catholicism of skittles and iced-tea for a black “martyr” like Trayvon Martin?
There’s no need to buy into Newman’s gambit. There’s no need to see history as an upwards march of development and progress. Newman’s thought may justify the turn to ecumenism in Roman Catholicism, with even a conservative pope, like Benedict XVI, kissing the Koran in a sign of respect for the Muslim sacred book. Does an action like that prove anything? No, but it could. Development of Doctrine may one day, not so soon, justify the long arc towards women’s ordination (was not Mary Magdalene the first preacher of the gospel?) or gay marriage (did not some medieval monks perform fraternal bonds that appear sort of like marriage vows?). It is all wax in the hands of the sculptor. As Newman admits in an off-hand way, the Council of Trent was equally a historical novlety as the Augsburg Confession (57-58). The development proved itself through its history. That’s a claim that cuts both ways.
There’s no need to use this parlor trick. History is a disaster and requires some norm. But thank God that this norm, contrary to Higher Critics and Newman, comes out of the lips and pens of men with the promise of inspired infallibility (however that be fully understood). The Ideas of the nations are not alive or developing. The Word of God does not need to evolve.