WHAT’S NEW ABOUT NEWMAN?

by Gerard V. Bradley

In a just published paper, Boston College’s Matthew Lamb reports on the scholarly tastes of his co-workers in the theological vineyard. Father Lamb’s interest arises mainly due to the curious behavior of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA). Its present leadership, he writes, "seems bent upon protesting Papal and Vatican teachings and policies." The most notable recent example is the group’s adoption, by an overwhelming vote, of a document challenging the truth that the ordained priesthood is not open to women. And the CTSA has regularly granted its own imprimatur to theologians denied one by the successors of the apostles, the bishops of the Catholic Church.

Fr. Lamb reports an alarming eclipse of the Catholic tradition, if not of Catholicism, in recent theology scholarship. For example, the number of recent dissertations on premodern theologians Ñ those from the first eighteen centuries of the Christian era, like Augustine and Aquinas and Bonaventure Ñ is dwarfed by those on moderns, by a ratio of one to five. The theologians’ interest in the moderns is, moreover, disproportionately concentrated upon (shall we say) the highly contemporary and marginally orthodox. "There are more listings," Father Lamb writes, "on feminism and women’s studies than on Christology, or on the Trinity; many more on spirituality (over 400 [scholarly pieces of all types]) than on the Holy Spirit (fewer than 40). Themes associated with liberation or world religions far outweigh those dealing with priesthood, magisterium, or the work of John Courtney Murray." Fr. Lamb also reports a disturbing trend in the educational choices of CTSA members. A quarter or more of the younger members received their advanced degrees from non-Catholic institutions and these folks are disproportionately hired in departments at Catholic universities having doctoral programs.

John Henry Newman is not mentioned by name in the Lamb article. And, though he qualifies chronologically as a modern, Newman’s resolute orthodoxy and defense of the Magisterium must not endear him to the academic theologians of our day. My guess is that Newman is now much more interesting to historians (of the Oxford Movement, for instance), and to literature buffs (as a great prose stylist) than he is to academic theologians.

The theologians’ relative neglect of Newman is deeply lamentable, and probably reflects the deeply mistaken view that he is hardly relevant, a fuddy-duddy. In reality, Newman is not only right, he is right on. The two books to which I returned for this issue of Dossier ÑThe Idea of a University and An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Ñ are not only instructive, they are classics. And more than that: each is still the best work there is on its subject. And the subjects are even more compelling now than in Newman’s time. Newman is one more Man For All Seasons.

I have space only to state the question to which Newman’s Essay is, or provides the main elements of, the answer, and to highlight the leading feature of his treatment of universities. Even so, I am sure that the enduring importance of these two books will be apparent.

Newman believed with the Church that public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. He wrote in one letter that "the Church does not know more than the Apostles knew." Yet it was obvious to him, as it must be to us, that the Church has taught many new things through the ages, that She has modified many teachings, and abandoned still others. So, the Church is now in the process of producing a new teaching, which (I anticipate) will before long be taught as certainly true, about the impermissibility of capital punishment. Within the last year or so the Church has made important statements about the Galileo case and about Christians’ anti-Semitism, which at least implicitly correct some prior teachings. And, for what it is worth, many putatively Catholic theologians confidently predict that, notwithstanding the Vatican declaration that the impossibility of ordaining women must be held as certainly true, we will have women priests no later than the pontificate after that of John Paul II’s successor.

Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, written just before he was received into the Church of Rome (and signaling the removal of the last obstacle to his embrace of the true faith) attempts to reconcile a long history of such changes with the truth about the Church. The stakes for Newman were unsurpassably high, and they are for us; the issue is no less than the identity of the Church of the Apostles with the Church of John Paul II, our Church. For if revelation was completed so long ago, there must be a decisive sense in which "new" truths are not new, and in which previously unarticulated truths were there all along. In some sense, then, Paul "knew" the Immaculate Conception, though he never articulated it, nor did the Church until Newman’s time. How could this be?

On the value of Newman’s effort to say how, I shall quote Ian Ker. Ker wrote that the Essay "remains the classic text for the theology of the development of doctrine, a branch of theology which has become especially important in the ecumenical era." At least.

(Note well: I made no effort three paragraphs ago to distinguish prior teachings from prior teachings which were taught as certainly true. Any attempt to apply an account of the development of doctrine, Newman’s or that of anyone else, will have to carefully attend to that sorting.)

The crisis of faith in our day is both reflected in and propagated by our putatively Catholic universities. Newman’s main Idea of a Catholic university is captured in his own account of his account, his self commentary: "I shall insist," he wrote in the introductory to that great work, "on the high theological view" of the University. Newman meant two things. One was the absolutely indispensable role of theology in the intellectual life of any university. In a compact but overflowing expression of this notion, Newman wrote, "Religious doctrine is knowledge, in as full a sense as Newton’s doctrine is knowledge. University teaching without Theology is simply unphilosophical Ñ that is, unsound, arbitrary, truncated."

For Newman, no genuine university could exist at all, apart from the "Catholic pale", if the Catholic faith be true. And he meant no university at all, not only no Catholic university.

Now, Newman knew quite well the possibility of what today is called "academic theology", a freestyle appropriation of things claimed to be religious, unchurched reflections upon religious experience and sentiment (and their expression in liturgy, creeds, communal life). Newman’s "high theology" was ecclesiastical all the way down. As we have seen, if the faith be true then universities (of all stripes) ignore it at their peril. But to make a genuine university a Catholic university, more than Catholic theology was needed. "It is no sufficient security for the catholicity of a university, even that the whole of Catholic theology should be professed in it, unless the Church breathes her own pure and earthly spirit into it." Why? Without what Newman called "a direct and active jurisdiction of the Church" over the University, theology (however Catholic otherwise) "would be included in its teaching only as a branch of knowledge, only as one out of many constituent portions," however important a one, of what he called philosophy, meaning true knowledge. Here Newman proved most prophetic. He predicted that once unhinged from authority and thus operating as an autonomous intellectual discipline, "Catholic theology" (my quotes) would, in Newman’s words, "become the rival of the Church in the community at large" in theological matters.