John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine is a work of religious argument, first written as an explanation of difficulties Newman himself felt in the history of the Catholic Church and reissued in a revised edition in 1878, the year he also recovered his fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford. It is not a narrative but a sustained piece of reasoning: an attempt to show that the large variations in Christian teaching across eighteen centuries are not embarrassments to be explained away but the natural, lawful unfolding of a living idea. The book moves from a general theory of how ideas grow, through the conditions under which Christian doctrine might be expected to develop, to a set of seven tests by which genuine developments can be told apart from corruptions, and finally applies those tests to the actual history of the Church.
“However beautiful and promising that Religion is in theory, its history, we are told, is its best refutation ;”
Newman’s central claim is stated plainly enough in his preface: the objection that the Church’s history is its own refutation, that its inconsistencies are as patent as the divisions of High, Low, and Broad churchmanship, is met by the contention that variation over time proceeds on a law, has a definite drift, and bears an analogy to Scripture that argues for a superintending Providence rather than against it. He concedes that he may have been over-generous in granting historical facts to Protestant controversialists, and asks to be read as speaking hypothetically, in the manner of an argument addressed to those not yet Catholic.
From Living Ideas to the Seven Notes
The 1878 Edition and Its Dedication
The volume opens with the front matter of the new edition issued by Basil Montagu Pickering in 1878, printed by Gilbert and Rivington of London. Newman styles himself Doctor of Divinity of the Oratory and Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and sets a Latin motto on the title page: “My eyes have failed for thy salvation.” The dedication goes to the Reverend Samuel William Wayte, President of Trinity College. Newman is careful to say he does not dedicate the book in any hope that Wayte will agree with its argument; he has simply nothing else to offer in thanks for the compliment of being made a Member of the college once more, dear to him from undergraduate memories. He notes the coincidence that the first publication fell at the moment he left Oxford, while this second edition falls at the moment he recovers his standing there, and he calls it, at his age, the last printing or reprinting in which he will ever be engaged. It is dated February 23, 1878.
The Preface: History as Objection and as Argument
The Preface of 1878 concedes at once that the pages were not written to prove the divinity of the Catholic religion, though they end by furnishing a positive argument for it. Their original purpose was to explain historical difficulties that Newman himself had felt and that Protestants pressed in controversy: the objection that the religion’s history is its best refutation, its inconsistencies as patent as the divisions among High, Low, and Broad churchmen of the Establishment. His reply is that the large variations of teaching across eighteen hundred years arise from the nature of the case, proceed upon a law, and possess a harmony, a definite drift, and an analogy to Scripture that together argue for a superintending Providence and a great Design. He admits he may have been over-liberal in granting historical facts to opponents, and asks to be read hypothetically, as arguing ad hominem and a fortiori, since the book addresses not theologians but people not yet even Catholics. The edition rearranges several parts and alters the text here and there; it is dated February 2, 1878.
Ideas Live in Many Minds
The argument proper begins with the nature of ideas. An idea is commensurate with the sum of its possible aspects, and its force and depth grow with the variety of minds in which it presents itself. Like a bodily substance, known only through its properties and results, an idea is grasped only through this variety; views taken from opposite sides may look incompatible, their shadows monstrous, yet the anomalies vanish once the point of vision is known, and the very multiplicity becomes evidence of the idea’s substance and power. No single aspect exhausts a real idea, no formula defines it. One may, for convenience, treat aspects as separate ideas, but to argue as though any one were the whole is a serious mistake. Attempts to name Christianity’s “leading idea” are ambitious—restoration of the fallen race, philanthropy, immortality, spiritual worship, salvation of the elect, mental liberty, union with God. Newman himself would name the Incarnation as the central aspect, from which the sacramental, hierarchical, and ascetic aspects rise; but no aspect may exclude another, for Christianity is dogmatic, devotional, and practical at once, esoteric and exoteric, indulgent and strict, love and fear.
The Life of an Idea and the Meaning of Development
An idea that arrests and possesses the mind may be said to live. Mathematical ideas, real as they are, hardly live; but a great proclamation about human nature, government, duty, or religion, once carried into the public throng, becomes an active principle, leading to new contemplation, application in every direction, propagation on every side—so it was with divine right, the rights of man, utilitarianism, free trade, the philosophies of Zeno and Epicurus. First comes confusion: men do not know what moves them, conceptions and misconceptions conflict, and it is uncertain which view will get the start. Then judgments accumulate, one view is modified by another and combined with a third, until the idea becomes to each mind what at first it was only to all together; it is surveyed against other doctrines, customs, religions, polities; enemies interrogate it, well-wishers defend it; opinions are collected, sifted, selected, rejected, until it has grown into an ethical code, a government, a theology, or a ritual. This process, by which aspects are brought into consistency and form, Newman calls development—the germination and maturation of a truth on a large mental field. But it is not development unless the resulting assemblage truly belongs to the idea from which it started: a republic may follow a monarchy without developing from it, whereas the Greek “tyrant” may be said to be included in the notion of kingship.
Scripture’s Unsytematic Surface and Butler’s Witness
Scripture itself, the notes urge, is unsystematic and various in structure, figurative and indirect in style, so that no one can say at first sight what is in it and what is not. It cannot be mapped or catalogued; to the end of our lives it remains an unexplored and unsubdued land of concealed wonders. Hence no doctrine that does not actually contradict what has been delivered can be peremptorily declared absent from Scripture, and no reader can claim to have mastered every doctrine it contains. Butler is cited to the same effect: the more recondite doctrines of the gospel require exact thought; the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet understood, and if it ever is, it will be as natural knowledge is come at—by continuance and progress of learning, by thoughtful men tracing obscure hints scattered up and down the sacred text. Butler, Newman notes, was not contemplating new articles of faith imperative on acceptance, but he bears witness to the probability of doctrinal developments considered in themselves.
Patristic Definitions and the Parables of Growth
The definitions and received judgments of the early and medieval Church all rest on definite, if sometimes obscure, sentences of Scripture: Purgatory on “saving by fire,” the merits of the saints on “receiving a prophet’s reward,” the Real Presence on “This is My Body,” absolution on “Whosesoever sins ye remit,” extreme unction on anointing with oil, voluntary poverty on “Sell all that thou hast,” obedience on the Child subject to His parents. Scripture nowhere asserts its own inspiration in the passages most essential, yet it distinctly anticipates the development of Christianity both as a polity and as a doctrine. The Mustard Seed—least of seeds, grown into a tree with great branches—and the seed springing secretly, the earth bringing forth fruit of herself, speak of an internal principle of life, both spontaneous and gradual, growing by its own innate power in its season, with the use of reflection and argument, depending on ethical growth and exerting reflex influence upon it. The Leaven describes development in its active, interpenetrating power.
The Dignity of Mary and the Nestorian Crisis
Newman turns to the honour paid to the Blessed Virgin, arguing that exalting a creature no more makes the Church of Rome idolatrous than Arianism makes orthodoxy blasphemous. The votaries of Mary, he insists, do not exceed the true faith unless the blasphemers of her Son came up to it. He distinguishes the Semi-Arians, who held our Lord’s derivation from the Substance of the Father yet denied His Consubstantiality and so lay open to the charge of maintaining two Gods, from the Arians who taught the Son’s Substance was created; Athanasius’s condemnation of the latter vindicates the Medieval theology. Socinians, Sabellians and Nestorians abound in these days without knowing it themselves, and men who never rise higher than to consider our Lord a man singularly inhabited by a Divine Presence—a Catholic saint—may mistake the honour paid to the human Mother for that honour alone worthy of her Eternal Son.
In the first ages, he had said, there was no public ecclesiastical recognition of Mary’s place in the Economy of grace; this was reserved for the fifth century, as the definition of our Lord’s proper Divinity had been the work of the fourth. The Nestorian controversy brought out the complement of the development: to do honour to Christ, defend the true doctrine of the Incarnation, and secure right faith in the manhood of the Eternal Son, the Council of Ephesus determined the Blessed Virgin to be the Mother of God. All the heresies of that day, though opposite to each other, tended wonderfully to her exaltation; the School of Antioch, the fountain of primitive rationalism, led the Church to determine first the conceivable greatness of a creature, then the incommunicable dignity of the Blessed Virgin.
The spontaneous feeling of Christians had largely anticipated the formal decision. The title Theotocos was familiar from primitive times, used by Origen, Eusebius, Alexander, Athanasius, Ambrose and the two Gregories; she was called Ever-Virgin by Epiphanius and Jerome; the antitype of Eve, “the Mother of all living.” Augustine excepts her alone from the reach of sin, for the honour of the Lord; Ambrose says she was alone and wrought the world’s salvation, and had grace not only to keep virginity but to impart it. Jerome calls her the Rod out of the stem of Jesse and the Eastern gate ever shut; Nilus, the wise woman who clothed believers from the fleece of the Lamb; Ephraim, the mystical new heavens and the fruitful vine by whom we pass from death to life; Proclus, the unsullied shell containing the pearl of price, God’s only bridge to man. Run through all creation in your thoughts, he cries, and see if there be equal to or greater than the Holy Virgin Mother of God. Theodotus hails her as the all-undefiled mother of holiness, the most pellucid fountain of the life-giving stream; Fulgentius calls her the window of heaven and the heavenly ladder; Chrysologus, full of grace, full indeed, which with full shower might pour upon the whole creation.
Corruption as the Loss of a Principle
From the dignity of Mary the argument passes to the marks that separate genuine developments from corruptions. The destruction of a development’s special laws or principles is its corruption. For nations, losing the spirit of a people means abandoning the lines of thought or conduct by which they grew great—not merely committing this or that act; the Roman poets deemed their State in ruin because its ancient manners and piety were failing. Countries or persons stand in a false position when they adopt a policy inconsistent with their real character. Judaism was rejected when it rejected the Messiah. Continuity or alteration of an idea’s principles is thus a second mark distinguishing true development from corruption.
The Power of Assimilation
In the physical world whatever has life grows by taking in external materials, and two things cannot become one without a power of assimilation in one or the other. Doctrines and views relating to man are not in a void but in a crowded world, making way by interpenetration and developing by absorption; facts and opinions are drawn to a new sovereign, modified or thrust aside. A new element of order proves its life by expansion without disarrangement or dissolution. An eclectic, conservative, assimilating, healing, moulding, unitive power is of the essence and a third test of faithful development. A living idea becomes many yet remains one; no lasting idea incorporated nothing external, for development is a process of incorporation. Mahometanism may be externally a compound of other theologies, yet a living idea was somewhere in it. In Christianity, opinion as raw material is called philosophy or scholasticism; when rejected as refuse, heresy. Ideas are more open to external bias at their commencement, which is why most writers who consider the Medieval Church corrupt trace the corruption to the first four centuries rather than the dark ages. An idea’s readier coalescence with some ideas shows antecedent affinity, not corruption. In politics, ideas are proposed, discussed, rejected or adopted; Bentham’s system attempted to make legal and moral truths developments of his principles, and a State may absorb some while remaining substantially what it was. The middle parties of the French Revolution successively failed from want of power or reality in their characteristic ideas; the Semi-arians attempted a middle way and could not stand, part falling into Macedonianism, part joining the Church. The stronger and more living an idea, the more it can dispense with safeguards; unreal systems are commonly decent externally, and forms and Articles are indispensable when the principle of life is weakly. Presbyterianism has kept its original theology in Scotland where legal subscriptions are enforced, while running into Arianism where that protection is away. The Church of Rome can consult expedience more freely, trusting her living tradition. So much suffices on the unitive power of faithful developments.
The Fourth Note: Logical Sequence
Logic is the organization of thought and a security for faithfulness of intellectual developments; its rules must not be transgressed, though it is not brought into exercise in every instance. If meaning conscious reasoning from premisses to conclusion, a development cannot be other than a logical operation. An idea grows in the mind by remaining there, becoming familiar and distinct, viewed in relations, leading to other aspects subtle and recondite according to the recipient’s character; a body of thought forms without his recognizing it. External circumstances elicit formal statements; he must defend them, analyze them, ascertain their dependence, and is led to regard as consequences and trace to principles what he discerned by moral perception and adopted on sympathy. Logic arranges and inculcates what no science was employed in gaining. Intellectual processes carried on silently in a party or school come to light later and are scientifically arranged; logic has the further function of propagation, analogy, antecedent probability, congruity and expedience being methods of proof continuing the development from mind to mind.
The Heathen Mirror: Superstition and Magic
The argument then turns to how heathen observers saw early Christianity.
Nestorianism and the Church of the East
The narrative turns to the heresy built on a strictly literal reading of Scripture, taught chiefly by Theodore and known as Nestorianism. It gave Christ a human as well as a divine Personality and refused Mary the title “Mother of God.” The native Syrians drew a distinction their Greek neighbours did not: they allowed one prosopon or parsopa—a character or aspect—while holding to two Persons, so that the unity they granted lay in Christ’s manhood rather than in His Divine Nature. They called “Mother of God” unscriptural, insisting Mary was mother of the humanity only, and they fortified the claim from the Nicene Creed, which assigns her no such title.
Driven from Edessa, the exiles gained power in the Chaldean communion and abolished clerical celibacy outright—Gibbon’s “public and reiterated nuptials of the priests, the bishops, and even the patriarch himself.” Barsumas set the example, said to have married a nun, and a canon passed at Seleucia permitted bishops and priests to marry and remarry as often as they lost their wives. The Catholicus after Acacius extended the licence to monks, dissolving the monastic order; his two successors were recorded as fathers, though a restriction was later placed on the Catholicus and the episcopate. The See of Seleucia became the Rome of the East, its head taking the title Patriarch of Babylon—a name preserved through the shifts to Ctesiphon and Bagdad. Under the Caliphs it headed twenty-five archbishops stretching from China to Jerusalem. Like the Novatians, the Nestorians refused to be called by their founder’s name, and Gibbon traces their missions to Bactrians, Huns, Persians, Indians, Medes, and Elamites, with bishops ordained from the Catholicus of Babylon.
Eutyches and the Latrocinium
Eutyches was archimandrite of a Constantinople monastery, seventy years old and thirty years abbot, a friend and assistant of St. Cyril. His teaching on the Incarnation, which he claimed was Cyril’s own, was denounced by others as a revival of Apollinarianism: before the union two natures, after it one, and Christ’s flesh not consubstantial with ours. A council under Flavian in 448 condemned him for holding One Nature instead of Two. Examined, he conceded the Virgin was consubstantial with us and God incarnate of her, but would not allow Christ as man consubstantial with us, apparently thinking union with the Divinity changed human nature; pressed further, he said he had not permitted himself to discuss Christ’s nature but would allow consubstantiality if commanded. Flavian observed that the council introduced no innovation but declared the Fathers’ faith. Twenty-two bishops and twenty-three abbots signed the condemnation, the Bishop of Cos among them as the Pope’s minister.
Eutyches appealed to Pope St. Leo, who at first took his part, seeing no justice in his separation on the strength of his statement, and asked for a reliable report of the new error. Flavian laid the controversy before him in its true light. But the court and Dioscorus of Alexandria supported Eutyches, and a general council was summoned at Ephesus—sixty metropolitans and a hundred and thirty-five bishops, with Dioscorus presiding by the Emperor’s appointment. Leo sent legates commissioned to condemn the heresy and reinstate Eutyches only on retraction, and published his Tome on the Incarnation to Flavian. The proceedings were so violent that the assembly was remembered as the Latrocinium, the Gang of Robbers. Eutyches was acquitted and his doctrine received; furious Monophysite monks from Syria and Egypt, backed by armed force, broke into the church, threw Flavian down and trampled him, and he died on the third day. The Pope’s legates fled; bishops were compelled to sign a blank paper later filled with Flavian’s condemnation. Dioscorus excommunicated the Pope, and the Emperor issued an edict approving the council.
The narrative pauses over the aged, blameless Eutyches, friend of a saint and champion of the faith, maintaining a doctrine he declared that saint’s own. Eustathius of Berytus quoted Cyril at Ephesus: “We must not then conceive two natures, but one nature of the Word incarnate.” Cyril had been called to account for the phrase and appealed to a passage of Athanasius whose genuineness is doubtful. Eutyches appealed to the Fathers generally—Cyril, Athanasius, Julius, Felix, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Atticus, Proclus—while allowing that they might err in expression.
Reason Within Faith
The argument then steps back to weigh Reason against Faith, opening with Augustine, who had tried both ways and contrasts them in De Utilitate credendi. Writing to Honoratus, a friend still held by the Manichees, he confesses that nothing else caused his fall into their hands than their professing to put away terrible Authority and lead hearers by plain Reason to God; for nearly nine years this made him slight the religion sown in him by his parents. He was reclaimed on finding the Manichees more successful at pulling down than building up, and disappointed in Faustus, whom he found eloquent and nothing besides. Tempted toward general scepticism, he found he must be guided by Authority, cried to God, and was led to the Catholic Church. True religion, he concludes, cannot be embraced without belief in things afterwards attained, nor without some weighty and imperative Authority.
Modern schools are then marshalled through Huet’s extracts: God repairs the weakness of the understanding by the gift of faith; Thomas Aquinas holds it necessary to receive as articles of faith not only things above reason but things knowable by reason, since human reason is deficient in divine things; Suarez says we often correct the light of nature by the light of faith even in things that seem first principles. Such doctrine makes arguments suggestions and guides rather than logical proofs, and developments a slow, spontaneous, ethical growth. Theology follows, reason subservient to faith, handling and forming truths into a system—investigation first, a temper Scripture attributes to the Blessed Virgin and the Angels, and one Our Lord calls disciples to exercise while submitting it. Reason has been awake in the Church from the first: Ignatius, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, Maximus, John Damascene, the Schoolmen, Thomas, Suarez, Vasquez, Lambertini.
Scripture, Dogma, and the Dogmatic Principle
Theodore’s exclusive literalism prompts a treatment of the mystical sense.
What Makes an Idea Live
The engine of the whole book is a claim about ideas themselves. An idea, Newman argues, is commensurate with the sum total of its possible aspects; its force and depth are proportionate to the variety of lights under which it presents itself to different minds. No single aspect exhausts a real idea, and no one proposition defines it. Views of a material object taken from opposed points may look incompatible, their shadows monstrous and disproportionate, yet all anomalies vanish once the point of vision is known. So it is with a great idea: its prima facie dissimilarity becomes, when explained, an argument for its integrity, and its multiplicity an argument for its power.
When such an idea is of a nature to arrest and possess the mind, it may be said to live. Mathematical ideas, real as they are, hardly live; but a great enunciation about human nature, government, duty, or religion, once carried into the public throng, becomes an active principle, leading to ever-new contemplation of itself, application in every direction, propagation on every side. Newman instances the divine right of kings, the rights of man, utilitarianism, free trade, the philosophies of Zeno and Epicurus. First comes agitation and confusion, conceptions and misconceptions in conflict; then new lights are brought to bear, judgments accumulate, one view is modified by another and combined with a third, until the idea becomes to each mind separately what at first it was only to all together. It grows into an ethical code, a system of government, a theology, or a ritual, according to its capabilities. This process of bringing aspects into consistency and form is what Newman means by development, and he insists on the condition: the assemblage of aspects must really belong to the idea from which they start. A republic may follow a pure monarchy without developing from it.
The Shape of the Argument
The book’s first part builds the antecedent case. Christian doctrine, Newman argues, may be expected to develop, and Scripture itself anticipates this: the mustard seed growing into a tree, the seed springing night and day the sower knows not how, the leaven working through the meal. Butler is enlisted to show that the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet understood, and that its improvement comes by thoughtful men tracing obscure hints. From the necessity of the case, from the history of sects, and from the analogy of physical and moral growth, Newman concludes that Christian doctrine admits of legitimate developments contemplated by its Divine Author. He then argues that an infallible developing authority is to be expected, since private Christians live under the bias of the doctrines they would judge, exposed to prejudices of birth, education, and party.
The historical argument follows, and its method is distinctive. Evidences for individual doctrines are to be pooled as a single integral religion, so that weak proofs combine into strong ones and one strong argument lends cogency to collateral weak ones. Newman draws on Butler and Davison to show that probable proofs added together multiply evidence, and that a doctrine recommended by strong presumptions should be received unsuspiciously and used as a key to facts. He defends antecedent probability in history and ethics, where facts are not present to the senses as they are in physics, and he notes that silence itself can tell in favour of a statement: Lucian barely notices Roman affairs, the Mishna is silent about Christianity, Eusebius omits much he might have recorded.
The Seven Notes and the Mirror of the World
The second part supplies the tests. A genuine development preserves the special laws and principles of the idea it develops; corruption is their destruction, as a nation loses its spirit when it abandons the lines by which it grew great. A living idea assimilates external material, taking it into its unity, and proves its life by expansion without disarrangement. It has a logical sequence, though logic often arranges afterward what moral perception adopted first. It anticipates its future, acts conservatively on its past, and exhibits chronic vigour. These notes are then applied across the centuries, from the first centuries through the fourth, fifth, and sixth, and to particular doctrines: the Incarnation and the dignity of the Blessed Virgin, the Papal Supremacy, devotion to Mary.
Running alongside is a striking subsidiary argument about how the early Church looked from outside. Newman reads the heathen charge of “superstition” as a kind of mirror: a charge repeated from age to age, unlike the short-lived calumny of Thyestean banquets, is an index of a fact and corresponds to definite qualities in its object. Plutarch’s treatise on superstition is examined at length to establish what the word meant, and the conclusion is that the Christians were accused of a religion of fear and scrupulous observance, not of licence. The same method governs the discussion of unity: the name Catholic, the testimony of Pacian against the Novatians, of Optatus against the Donatists, of Augustine against Cresconius, all establish the fact of a visible, worldwide, governmental body, not merely a shared origin or episcopal form.
Reason, Authority, and the Sacramental Principle
Newman’s treatment of reason is more subtle than the caricature of his position allows. He distinguishes investigation, theology, and the mystical interpretation of Scripture, and insists that reason has been awake in the Church from the first, in Ignatius and Irenaeus, in Athanasius and Augustine, in the Schoolmen and Suarez. But he sets against this the witness of Augustine’s De Utilitate credendi, where Augustine confesses that nothing but the Manichees’ promise to put away Authority and lead by simple Reason drew him in, and that he was reclaimed when he found they could pull down but not build up. The mystical sense of Scripture and orthodoxy, Newman proposes, stand or fall together; the literalist School of Antioch was the metropolis of heresy.
The book’s most original constructive idea is the sacramental principle. There is a virtue or grace in the Gospel which changes the quality of doctrines, usages, and actions when incorporated with it, making them right and acceptable where before they were infected or at best shadows. Outward rites worthless in themselves become sacraments; what was carnal in circumcision ends, while baptism endures. St. Paul’s handkerchiefs and aprons, bearing healing from his body to the sick, become the type of a grace that is communicable and diffusive, passing from him to others and making what it touches spiritual. On this principle Newman explains how the Church could take up into herself things that earlier ages seemed to denounce, and how prayers for the departed, veneration of angels, altars and sacrifices, could appear in a religion whose documents seemed to forbid them.
Why the Essay Still Presses
The essay matters less as a proof-text for one doctrine than as a sustained attempt to think historically about religious truth. Newman takes the strongest Protestant objection—that history refutes the Church—and turns it into the framework of his argument, granting the facts and contesting the interpretation. His seven notes remain a usable instrument for anyone asking how a tradition stays itself while changing, and his account of ideas growing by assimilation, anticipation, and conservative action on their past has applications far outside theology. The portrait of the early Church reflected in heathen eyes, the long examination of the name Catholic, the reading of Augustine’s long detour through scepticism: these give the book its texture, the sense of a mind working through materials rather than pronouncing on them. Newman wrote it, he says, to explain difficulties he felt himself, and the honesty of that starting point is what keeps the argument alive.
