Eamon Duffy reflects on Newman’s impending elevation

Pope Leo is soon to declare St John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church: one of the great theologians whose writings have been formally recognised as reference points of Christian tradition; a perennial source of wisdom, instruction and inspiration for future Catholic theology.

Newman thought, preached and wrote on the history of doctrine, on the goals of Christian education, on the philosophy of belief, on the nature of the Church: the range and depth of his work was extraordinary, and he illuminated every field he touched. But for more than half of his 45 years as a Catholic, he was viewed in many quarters with extreme suspicion, sidelined or ignored.

Mgr George Talbot, for example, a Canon of St Peter’s and close confidant of Pope Pius IX, especially on English affairs, regarded Newman as “the most dangerous man in England”, whose spirit “must be crushed”. Newman’s erstwhile friend and disciple, Henry Manning, the second Archbishop of Westminster, thought that, despite his conversion, Newman was still half sunk in heresy and the leader of disloyal Catholics who held “low views” of the papacy, were critical of Catholic devotions and practised a “worldly Catholicism”.

It is not hard to see why he was distrusted. All his life, Newman was a theological pioneer, tackling problems that went to the roots of Christian belief, and which scared less intrepid thinkers. Since the French Revolution, the papacy had been beleaguered and politically marginalised, and Christianity itself had been apparently threatened by new scientific ideas like evolution, and by the rise of critical history, which challenged received beliefs about biblical and Christian origins.

Successive popes from Leo XII to Pius IX adopted an adversarial and fearful attitude to modernity, and allied themselves with reactionary and authoritarian political regimes. Newman himself was politically conservative, but he was willing to “go the whole hog with Darwin”, confident that there could be no ultimate conflict between different kinds of truth. He deplored the trigger-happy tendency of the Church of his day to condemn unfamiliar ideas as heresy — great minds, he insisted “need elbow room”.

Truth was reached by patient study, discussion, controversy, in theology as well as in science and history. To suppress that process locked the Church into a dead, not living, past.

“We are shrinking into ourselves,” he told one friend, “narrowing the lines of communion, trembling at freedom of thought, and using the language of dismay and despair at the prospect before us.”

Newman believed passionately in the Church; he accepted her dogmas, but thought that in former times “it was by the collision of Catholic intellect with Catholic intellect that the meaning and limits of dogmatic decrees were determined”. The Church was then a place of true intellectual freedom. In his own day, however, there was no room for real theology: “no intellectual scrutiny, no controversies … no freedom of opinion”.

Undaunted, Newman wrestled with hard questions all his life. He was certain that authentic Christianity must be consistent: one and the same since the beginning. Yet his study of the early centuries showed that central doctrines, like that of the Trinity, had been present — only obscurely or half-realised. How could one reconcile the elaborate doctrine, ritual and organisation of the Church of the 19th century with the apparent simplicity of the apostolic age?

In a theological masterpiece, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), he argued that Christianity, like all world-changing ideas or movements, needed time for its full understanding and perfection. Its growth was a necessary historical and social process, as the Church responded to new situations. The more vital and living an “idea” is, the greater is its ability to adapt, thrive and surprise — without betraying its original content. Developments like these are necessary organic growths, which preserve the original idea in new circumstances. Doctrine develops in order to remain the same. “In another world, it is otherwise, but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

It is difficult now to grasp how outrageous this insight seemed to Newman’s contemporaries, and he knew that his Essay had only outlined the idea of doctrinal development, not solved all the problems it raised. But gradually his idea took hold. It profoundly influenced great 20th-century theologians like Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac, and shaped some of the central documents of Vatican II, so that in 1986 Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, could declare that doctrinal development had become “one of the decisive and fundamental concepts of Catholicism”.

The 19th-century Church sharply distinguished the hierarchic “teaching Church” (ecclesia docens), from the passive, lay, “taught Church” (ecclesia docta). In 1859 Newman challenged that polarity in an essay, On Consulting the Laity in Matters of Doctrine. He argued that during the Arian crisis of the fourth century many bishops had embraced or tolerated the heresy, which denied Christ’s divinity, and the Catholic faith had been preserved by the rejection of Arianism by the laity. Ordinary believers had an instinctive recognition of the difference between truth and error, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the infallibility of the Church inhered not in the hierarchy alone, but in the whole body of the faithful — which alongside the bishops helped safeguard the deposit of faith.

Newman was denounced to Rome for heresy, a cloud which hung over him for the next 20 years, but his emphasis on the active role of the sensus fidelium in matters of faith proved increasingly influential in the 20th century. It was enshrined in the documents of Vatican II, and echoed in Pope Francis’s dictum that “the people’s piety is the immune system of the Church”. It has taken on a new significance in the era of synodality.

The best-known issue over which Newman found himself at odds with authority was papal infallibility. He believed the dogma, but was strongly opposed to its definition at the First Vatican Council in 1870. The Church of his day, he believed, was already too centralised and too authoritarian. The definition would burden consciences and exaggerate those trends, and would delude people into imagining the pope had a hotline to God, which made the contribution of local churches — and the hard thinking of theologians — redundant.

But although Newman was critical of the definition, he spent years helping uncertain and doubting Catholics to accept it. Despite the efforts of a “reckless party” to secure a more extreme form of words, he believed the definition needed not to be undone, “but to be completed” with safeguards that clarified the limits of the pope’s prerogatives. Confident of the divine mission of the Church, he knew from personal experience that it was also a flawed human institution, abounding in complementary but also conflicting energies.

But he remained tranquil. What was amiss would be corrected by the Holy Spirit, and truth was the daughter of time: “Let us be patient, let us have faith, and a new Pope, and a re-assembled Council may trim the boat.”

European conflict meant that Vatican I never met again, but Newman’s questing intelligence, unflustered faith and quiet persistence in the face of official disapproval remains a timely model for the Church in a new age of culture wars.

Professor Eamon Duffy is a Fellow of the British Academy

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