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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
In 1850 John Henry Newman wrote: ‘Even when I was a boy, my thoughts were turned to the early Church, and especially to the early Fathers, by the perusal of the Calvinist John Milner’s Church History, and I have never lost, I have never suffered a suspension of the impression, deep and most pleasurable, which his sketches of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine left on my mind. From that time the vision of the Fathers was always, to my imagination, may say, a paradise of delight to the contemplation of which I directed my thoughts from time to time, whenever I was free from the engagements proper to my time of life.’
Brought up as an Evangelical, he studied the Fathers through Protestant spectacles even as late as his twenty-eighth year, when he was already under the influence of Whately and beginning to reach out to idea of a National Church with teaching powers and Sacraments. So he tells us:
‘When years afterwards (1828) I first began to read their works with attention and on system, I busied myself much in analysing them, and in cataloguing their doctrines and principles; but when I had thus proceeded very carefully and minutely for some space of time, I found, on looking back on what I had done, that I had scarcely done anything at all; I found that I had gained very little from them, and I came to the conclusion that the Fathers I had been reading, who were exclusively those of the ante-Nicene period, had very little in them. At the time I did not discover the reason of this result, though, on the retrospect, it was plain enough: I had read them simply on Protestant ideas, analysed and catalogued them on Protestant principles of division, and hunted for Protestant doctrines and usages in them.
1 From Difficulties of the Anglicans, Lect. xii, § 3 (1850) Newman had referred to the same labours some years earlier, when still an Anglican, in the British Critic: ‘We knew a person who …. read and analysed Ignatius, Barnabas, Clement, Polycarp, and Justin, with exceeding care, but who now considers his labour to have been all thrown away, from the strange modern divisions under which he threw the matter he found in them.’(The Theology of the seven Epistles of St. Ignatius, republished in 1871, as the sixth of Essays Critical and Historical, ed. 1901, p. 227). Newman was now moderately High Church, and he gives a characteristically lively account of an imaginary writer, who says: ‘I want to write a book upon the Fathers; I know exactly what to think of them, and pretty well what I mean my work to be.’(ib. p. 230.
2 Theology of St. Ignatius (as in preceding note), p. 233.
3 Soon after his conversion Newman turned some of them into Latin in order that they might be accessible to the Roman theologians, who were attacking bits of his book on Developments, though unable to read it as a whole. To Dalgairns he wrote (beginning of 1847): ‘What do you think of my being engaged in translating into Latin and publishing here four disputations from my Athanasius?…. You see I am determined to make a noise, if I can. It shan't be my fault if people think small-beer of me. Is not this ambitious?' —(Life, by W. Ward, I, p. 173).
4 It is difficult to imagine that Newman was still unaware of the distinction drawn by Eusebius between books of the New Testament which were universally received and those which were not: or that he did not know that the Apocalypse was for centures rejected by a great part of the East, that Hebrews was not received at Rome till the end of the fourth century, that the Lutherans excluded books from the canon for a hundred years. And what about the Protestant mutilation of the Old Testament?
5 The most complete defence of this Via Media is in the parochial lectures on The Prophetical Office of the Church and in Tract 38 of 1834. Another tract (No. 71, in 1836) is The Mode of conducting controversy with Rome. In 1836 appeared a paper How to accomplish it, being a dialogue supposed to take place at Rome between two Anglicans, both convinced of the corrupt nature of Romanism, but who ‘aim at giving vitality to their Church, the one by uniting it to the Roman See, the other by developing a nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholicism. The narrator sides on the whole with the latter of these.’
6 In A letter addressed to the Margaret Professor of Divinity he defends Hurrell Froude's words about the Real Presence by comparing them with the Homilies and with Hooker (§ 24) and contrasts the splendid rhetoric of the latter with the Zwinglian doctrine current at the time (1838). He is fairly satisfied with this High Calvinist doctrine, even though Hooker defends ‘even the Zwinglians from the charge of denying that Christ's Person as well as His grace, His Person whole and entire, is in the Lord's Supper.’ He seems to admit that the Lutheran Con-substantiation is not consistent with the Articles and Prayer Book. Later, as everyone knows, in Tract 90 (1841) he argued that the Transubstantiation denied in Article 28 is ‘a shocking doctrine,’ but not one ‘of this or that Council, but one generally received or taught both in the schools and in the multitude ‘; that the ‘philosophical position’ involved ‘is itself capable of a very specious defence.’ He concludes that there is nothing in the article’ to interfere with the doctrine, elsewhere taught in our formularies of a real super-local Presence in the Holy Sacrament. ‘It is not clear that Newman even here goes much beyond the Calvinism of Hooker or Laud; but his ignorance of Catholic teaching is still so dense that it is difficult to tell how far, if at all, he has progressed. Similarly, on Article 31, he has invented the absurdity that’“the sacrifice of the Mass” is not there spoken of, but “the sacrifices of Masses,” certain observances, for the most part private and solitary, which the writers of the Articles knew to have been in force in times past,’ etc. He shows strange ignorance of the teaching of the Reformers as to Masses, and equally as to Catholic doctrine, which, however, he seems to be ready to accept, if it be explained or explained away. Transubstantiation he did not accept (or understand in its severe simplicity) until he was received into the Church.
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