John Henry Newman’s The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) is church history written from inside a theological crisis. Its author was an Oxford fellow and Anglican clergyman who would later become a cardinal of the Roman Church, and the book examines how the early Church confronted Arius and the doctrinal wars that followed the Council of Nicaea. It is less a neutral chronicle than an argument about authority, tradition, and the mind of the Church under pressure—concerns that were live questions for Newman’s own age.
“I was very superstitious,’ he adds, ‘and for some time previous to my conversion used constantly to cross myself before going into the dark.”
From Ealing to the Oriel Fellowship
The biographical record of Newman’s early life, preserved in an editorial memoir, explains the temper he brought to the subject. Born in London on 21 February 1801, the eldest of six children of a banker of Dutch descent and a mother from a Huguenot family of engravers, he was sent at seven to a private school at Ealing run on Eton lines. There he discovered Sir Walter Scott, read the Bible with delight, and filled his imagination with talismans and magical powers; he was superstitious enough to cross himself before entering the dark. He dated his inward conversion to the autumn of 1816, at fifteen, when he fell under the influence of a definite creed and received impressions of dogma he never effaced. His reading was chiefly Calvinistic, though Law’s Serious and Devout Call impressed him deeply, and through extracts in Milner’s Church History he first met the fathers, with whom he was, in his own phrase, nothing short of enamoured. Reading Newton on the Prophecies at the same time, he became firmly convinced that the pope was the Antichrist foretold by Daniel, Paul, and John.
He entered Trinity College, Oxford, in December 1816, two months short of sixteen, and formed there an intimate friendship with John William Bowden. A Trinity scholarship in 1818 was his only academical distinction; in 1819 his father’s bank stopped payment—no bankruptcy, every creditor was paid in full—and the same year he entered Lincoln’s Inn, his father intending him for the bar. He did badly in the final examination for highest honours, having over-read himself and been called up a day sooner than expected, and took his degree below the line in the second class. He stayed in Oxford taking private pupils and prepared for a fellowship at Oriel, the acknowledged centre of Oxford intellectualism; his election on 12 April 1822 he ever felt to be the turning-point of his life. Pusey’s election followed in 1823 and their friendship began. Ordained deacon on Trinity Sunday 1824, he became curate of St. Clement’s, Oxford, and preached his first sermon at Warton from the text “Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening”—the same text he used for his last sermon as an Anglican, nineteen years later.
At Oriel he associated closely with Edward Hawkins, who did much to root evangelical doctrines out of his creed, and in 1825 Dr. Whately made him vice-principal of Alban Hall. Intercourse with Whately largely cured his extreme shyness, and from him he derived the idea of the Christian Church as a divine appointment, a substantive body independent of the State and endowed with rights and powers of its own. He had a large share in composing Whately’s Logic, as that book’s preface testifies. He resigned the vice-principalship on becoming tutor of Oriel in 1826, and in the same year Richard Hurrell Froude was elected fellow—a friend whose influence Newman felt powerful beyond all others, one of the acutest and deepest men in the memory of man. In 1827 the bishop of London appointed him a preacher at Whitehall.
The Shadow of a Hand on the Wall
The memoir then traces the long unraveling of Newman’s Anglican confidence. Dean Church observed that the view of the Church of England set out in Newman’s 1837 volume on Romanism and popular Protestantism became the accepted Anglican view—yet by 1839 Newman had begun to question its truth. Studying the Monophysite controversy in the summer of that year, he first doubted whether Anglicanism was tenable at all; he described seeing the shadow of a hand on the wall and the thought that the church of Rome would be found right after all, a thought that vanished while his old convictions remained. In September a friend gave him Dr. Wiseman’s article on the Anglican Claim in the Dublin Review. Augustine’s words against the Donatists—Securus judicat orbis terrarum—seemed to pulverise the Via Media theory, applying beyond the Donatists to the Monophysites and showing Antiquity deciding against itself. Newman called it the first real hit from Romanism; it gave him a stomach ache, and Dean Church records that his hope and exultation gave way to uneasiness and distress.
In 1841 he published Tract 90, arguing that the Thirty-Nine Articles do not oppose catholic teaching, only partially oppose Roman dogma, and mostly oppose Rome’s dominant errors; he meant it as a test of how far the Articles could be reconciled with the Via Media. The storm of indignation began at Oxford and spread nationwide. Archibald Campbell Tait, then senior tutor of Balliol, with three other senior tutors, published a letter charging the tracts with opening a way to violate solemn engagements to the university, and the board of heads of houses issued a similar judgment. The tractarian party came under official ban, and Newman saw that his place in the movement was gone. In July he handed the British Critic to his brother-in-law Thomas Mozley, saying confidence in him was lost but that he had already lost full confidence in himself, and resolved to be guided by reason rather than imagination.
Three further blows broke him later in 1841. In the Arian history he saw the same pattern as in the Monophysite: the pure Arians were the protestants, the semi-Arians the Anglicans, and Rome now was what it had been then. Bishops began charging against him, which he recognized as a condemnation—the only one in their power. Then came the Jerusalem bishopric affair, which exhibited the Anglican church courting intercommunion with protestant Prussia and the heresy of the orientals while forbidding sympathy with Rome.
Littlemore and the Road to Rome
From the end of 1841, Newman says in the Apologia, he was on his deathbed as regarded his membership with the Anglican church, though he became aware of it only by degrees. A year later he withdrew from Oxford to Littlemore with several young men attached to his person and fortunes, in the building that came to be called the Littlemore Monastery, and passed three years of painful anxiety and suspense in prayer, fasting, and monastic seclusion. He gradually came to see the Anglican church formally in the wrong and the Roman formally in the right, with no valid reason to remain and no valid objection to joining Rome. In a letter of 1871 he states that his condemnation of the Anglican church arose from his study of the fathers; in his lectures on Anglican difficulties he testified that the identity of today’s catholicism with that of antiquity induced him, much against every natural inducement, to submit to its claims. In February 1843 he published a formal retractation of all the hard things he had said against Rome, and in September he resigned the living of St. Mary’s, writing to a friend on the 29th that he despaired of the Church of England and was so drawn to Rome that honesty forbade him to keep his living—which was different from intending to join Rome. At the beginning of 1845 he commenced his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, working through the year until October; as he advanced, his doubts about the Roman church disappeared one by one, and before reaching the end he resolved to be received, leaving the book unfinished. Father Dominic the Passionist received him in his house at Littlemore on 9 October.
Lord Beaconsfield later described the secession as a blow under which the Church of England still reeled; Gladstone said it had never been estimated at anything like the full amount of its calamitous importance. One immediate consequence was the break-up of the Oxford movement, though its spiritual forces soon manifested under other forms. Newman quitted Oxford on 23 February 1846, not to return for thirty-two years, and was called by Dr. Wiseman, vicar apostolic of the midland district, to Oscott, where he spent some months. In October he went to Rome, was ordained priest and received the degree of doctor of divinity, and on Christmas-eve 1847 returned to England with a commission from Pius IX to introduce the institute of the Oratory, founded in the sixteenth century by St. Philip Neri—whose character had specially attracted him and who, he wrote in January 1847, reminded him in many ways of Keble, formed on the same type of extreme hatred of humbug, playfulness, tender love for others, and severity. After his return he lived first at Maryvale, Old Oscott, then at St. Wilfrid’s College.
The Principle He Would Not Surrender
At the Palazzo delle Pigne in Rome, on receiving the biglietto announcing his elevation to the sacred college, Newman addressed the company and reviewed his life. He testified that for thirty, forty, fifty years he had resisted liberalism in religion—the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion and that one creed is as good as another—and he saw this resistance as the main principle of all his writings and actions. The editor affirms he was warranted: Christianity as the absolute religion, a revelation with supreme objective authority and precise inerrant teaching, was his dominant idea. In youth, under Thomas Scott and Thomas Newton, he held the evangelical view that the Bible is the present infallible and all-sufficient oracle; gradually this dropped off, since he found Scripture neither intended nor fitted to be the arbiter of doctrine and practice. We have tried the book, he wrote; either no objective revelation has been given, or it has been provided with a means of impressing its objectiveness on the world. Thus he was led to an infallible church, sought for years to realise it in the national establishment—the true scope of the tractarian movement, which aroused Oxford from spiritual torpor—and after the Anglican episcopate’s condemnation cut away his basis of external authority, decided that the church of Rome was the true home of the idea he could not surrender. In The Parting of Friends he passed over that Jordan. His contribution was to present the thesis that Rome alone satisfies the conception of the church as a divine kingdom; he discerned but allowed the difficulties of papal claims, concluding that to believe in a church is to believe in the pope. A church is to revelation what conscience is to nature. His teaching is caricatured if reduced to the claim that it is the only possible alternative to atheism: starting from God impressed by conscience, he holds a revelation urgently probable, sought in Christianity, with catholicism its only tenable form—either the catholic religion is verily and indeed the coming of the unseen world into this, or there is nothing positive in any of our notions.
He changed little over the years; the school of Alexandria, Origen and Clement, never lost hold of him. Antichrist was long the pope, then the spirit of the world working in the church for temporal ends; in a letter of 1876 he wrote that the whole world lies in the evil one. He held that the church’s strength lies in her proper gifts, the beatitudes. He was not hostile to modern thought, and early held freer views of inspiration; no German scholar, he grew conscious of the untenableness of common biblical exegesis. His last publication, in the Nineteenth Century for February 1884, cautiously lays down that the titles and ascriptions of the canonical books either do not come under inspiration or need not be accepted literally, and that it does not matter whether one or two Isaiahs wrote the book. In his earliest publication, the History of the Arians, he had already enunciated that there is something true and divinely revealed in every religion, and that revelation is a universal, not a local, gift—a position he held in substance still in 1882. His adoption of evolution in the essay on Development is significant, an immense concession to scientific history. The supremacy of conscience found in him its most eloquent preacher; he agrees with Kant, whom he had not read up to 1884, on the categorical imperative. In 1830 he wrote that men live after death in the unwritten memory of a school of pupils.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The bibliography that closes the memoir sets The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) among the earliest of Newman’s published works, alongside the Suggestions on behalf of the Church Missionary Society (1830), the Five Letters on Church Reform (1833), and the Tracts for the Times (1834), and before the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), the Lectures on Justification (1838), the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Loss and Gain (1848), and the Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849). The Arian study thus belongs to the years when Newman was working out, through the history of the early Church, the question that would eventually carry him out of Anglicanism. Its thesis—that revelation is universal in gift yet definite in content, and that the Church must possess a living authority capable of guarding that content—is the seed of everything he wrote afterward. For a reader today, the book is best approached as history written by a participant: a careful account of the fourth-century controversies that doubles as a map of one of the nineteenth century’s most consequential religious minds.
