Preview: Newman and the Greek Fathers: Mystery

In our discussion on Monday, October 14 of how, according to Father Ian Ker, the Greek Fathers of the Church influenced Saint John Henry Newman on the Son Rise Morning Show, we (Matt Swaim or Anna Mitchell and I) will look at the fifth theme of Mystery. Please tune in at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central DST/7:50 a.m. Eastern DST here or catch the podcast later. 

As a reminder, the first four topics we've discussed are: The Incarnation, The Resurrection and Ascension, the Indwelling of the Spirit/Justification, and the Sacraments. As we've examined them, we've seen the connections among them: the Incarnation makes the Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension and Descent of the Holy Spirit possible. The Descent of the Holy Spirit prepares us for the Indwelling of the Spirit, which comes to us through the Sacraments, starting with Baptism, etc.

Perhaps this last of Father Ker's themes connects them all. No matter how the Fathers of the Church sought to understand and put into words what the Catholic Church from Apostolic times believed about the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Indwelling of the Spirit, and the Sacraments, they all remain mysteries, beyond our human ability to thoroughly comprehend and explain. The more we try to explain them and make them comprehensible to our limited human reason, we may stumble into at least a stance of material heresy.

Newman certainly saw that danger in the doctrinal crises the Fathers of the Church faced in the early Church Councils, called to deal with divisive heresies about the Person of Our Incarnate Lord. But as Father Ker notes, he saw those dangers in his own time, among both Evangelicals and High-and-Dry Anglicans, the latter characterized by High theology and Low liturgy. Yes, Newman valued Reason and wanted to develop intellectual excellence (the "Imperial Intellect"), but he recognized its limitations when it comes to God's mysteries.

This is another insight we can trace to Newman's study of Saint Athanasius: "mystery is the necessary note of divine revelation" Newman states in his Selected Treatises of Saint Athanasius, Volume 2, "that is, mystery subjectively to the human mind . . ." continuing with these words of the saint: 

"Such illustrations and such images," says Athanasius, "has Scripture proposed, that, considering the inability of human nature to comprehend God, we might be able to form ideas even from these, however poorly and dimly, as far as is attainable." Orat. ii. 32, [amudros], vid. also [amudra]; ii. 17. (p. 92, under the heading "Economical Language")

If you go to the alphabetical listing of Newman's sermons, Anglican and Catholic, at the newmanreader.org website, you'll see several sermons with word "mystery" or "mysteries" in their title:

PPS1-16 The Christian Mysteries
PPS2-18 Mysteries in Religion
DMC-13 Mysteries of Nature and of Grace
PPS4-19 The Mysteriousness of Our Present Being
DMC-14 The Mystery of Divine Condescension
PPS5-7 The Mystery of Godliness
PPS6-24 The Mystery of the Holy Trinity

Or look at Rickaby's Index on the same site under M for Mysteries!

For example, in "The Mysteriousness of Our Present Being", Newman told his congregation:

There is nothing, according as we are given to see and judge of things, which will make a greater difference in the temper, character, and habits of an individual, than the circumstance of his holding or not holding the Gospel to be mysterious. (p. 292)

This long quotation (excerpted slightly) from "The Gift of the Spirit", offers a summary of what Newman wanted his hearers to understand about Mystery and the Catholic Christian Faith:

Till we {268} understand that the gifts of grace are unseen, supernatural, and mysterious, we have but a choice between explaining away the high and glowing expressions of Scripture, or giving them that rash, irreverent, and self-exalting interpretation, which is one of the chief errors of this time. [Newman then compares "men of awakened and sensitive minds" who are "led to place the life of a Christian, which "is hid with Christ in God," in a sort of religious ecstasy" with "sensible and sober-minded men, offended at such excesses" who think that the Gift of the Spirit "does nothing more than make us decent and orderly members of society"] . . .

For ourselves, in proportion as we realize that higher view of the subject, which we may humbly trust is the true one, let us be careful to act up to it. Let us adore the Sacred Presence within us with all fear, and "rejoice with trembling." Let us offer up our best gifts in sacrifice to Him who, instead of abhorring, has taken up his abode in these sinful hearts of ours. Prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, "good works and alms-deeds," a bold and true confession and a self-denying walk, are the ritual of worship by which we serve Him in these His Temples. How the distinct and particular words of faith avail to our final acceptance, we know not; neither do we know how they are efficacious in changing our wills and characters, which, through God's grace, they certainly do. All we know is, that as we persevere in them, the inward light grows brighter and brighter, and God manifests Himself in us in a way the world knows not of. In this, then, consists our whole duty, first in contemplating Almighty God, as in Heaven, so in our hearts and souls; and next, while we contemplate Him, in acting towards and for Him in the works of every day; in viewing by faith His glory without and within us, and in acknowledging it by our obedience. Thus we {270} shall unite conceptions the most lofty concerning His majesty and bounty towards us, with the most lowly, minute, and unostentatious service to Him.

Father Ker concludes this section on the Influence of the Greek Fathers by noting that this sense of mystery and awe Newman learned of Saint Athanasius and others is why Newman is often so spiritually and morally demanding--as demonstrated in the excerpt above--in his sermons:

If believers are really temples of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul teaches, then it is practically sacrilegious for a baptized Christian not to be living the life of the Spirit. (p. 41)

I'd suggest that we can see how the "Fathers made [Newman] Catholic" by looking at the last chapter of the Apologia pro Vita Sua, when he explains his religious position after being received in to the Catholic Church. Newman states that he believes, for example, in the Catholic Church's teaching on Transubstantiation to describe how Jesus is sacramentally, really, and substantially present in Holy Communion when it seems like the Host is still like bread and the Blood still like wine, which is still mysterious:

People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. It is difficult, impossible, to imagine, I grant;—but how is it difficult to believe? . . . What do I know of substance or matter? just as much as the greatest philosophers, and {240} that is nothing at all;"—so much is this the case, that there is a rising school of philosophy now, which considers phenomena to constitute the whole of our knowledge in physics. [Think of the "string theories" of recent years!] The Catholic doctrine leaves phenomena alone. It does not say that the phenomena go; on the contrary, it says that they remain; nor does it say that the same phenomena are in several places at once. It deals with what no one on earth knows any thing about, the material substances themselves. [Christ's Real Presence, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in Holy Communion]

He also comments on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity:

And, in like manner, of that majestic Article of the Anglican as well as of the Catholic Creed,—the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. What do I know of the Essence of the Divine Being? I know that my abstract idea of three is simply incompatible with my idea of one; but when I come to the question of concrete fact, I have no means of proving that there is not a sense in which one and three can equally be predicated of the Incommunicable God.

Both are Mysteries we assent to without being able to prove them by human reason alone "through God's grace" and our cooperation with it. That of course, why Newman wrote--after years of wanting to write--An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent as explained in this draft, unpublished preface, to demonstrate that it is not unreasonable to assent to mysteries like them.

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain); The Trinity, Guillaume Le Rouge, 1510 Book of Hours

NEW SRMS Series: Newman and the Fathers of the Church

Anna Mitchell of the Son Rise Morning Show on EWTN and Sacred Heart Radio asked me to talk about Saint John Henry Newman's study of the Fathers of the Church in a new Monday morning series. She requested this series--we've scheduled two so far--because of her participation in an Institute of Catholic Culture course: note the first paragraph of the description of Patristics 101:

St. John Henry Newman said of the Church Fathers: “They are witnesses to the fact of . . . doctrines having been received, not here or there, but everywhere . . . down to our times, without interruption, ever since the apostles.” What are the teachings of these early Christian writers whom Newman so deeply appreciated? What were their beliefs, hopes, and concerns? Do these mirror our own?

In this first (of two) semesters on the Fathers of the Church, dive deeply into the writings of the first Christian centuries and become acquainted with such figures as St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius, St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, and Origen, and come to an appreciation of their specific genius and legacy for our own generation.

The second course is in session now.

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

We'll start with an overview of how his study of the Fathers influenced Newman in his youth and in his leadership of the Oxford Movement; particularly how that study led him closer to the Catholic Church --or at least away from the Church of England -- when he studied the Arian, Monophysite, and Donatist heresies and the Fathers's roles in combating them. So this first episode takes us to the 1865 Apologia pro Vita Sua:

In the first chapter, "History of My Religious Opinions up to 1833", he highlights an early influence just before he went to Trinity College at Oxford:

Now I come to two other works, which produced a deep impression on me in the same Autumn of 1816, when I was fifteen years old, {7} . . . I read Joseph Milner's Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive Christians . . .

On the other hand, he recalls that for a time, he forgot the Fathers and rejected primitive Christianity:

In the next year, 1827, [Whately] told me he considered that I was Arianizing. The case was this: though at that time I had not read Bishop Bull's Defensio nor the Fathers, I was just then very strong for that ante-Nicene view of the Trinitarian doctrine, which some writers, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have accused of wearing a sort of Arian exterior. This is the meaning of a passage in Froude's Remains, in which he seems to accuse me of speaking against the Athanasian Creed. I had {14} contrasted the two aspects of the Trinitarian doctrine, which are respectively presented by the Athanasian Creed and the Nicene. My criticisms were to the effect that some of the verses of the former Creed were unnecessarily scientific. This is a specimen of a certain disdain for Antiquity which had been growing on me now for several years. It showed itself in some flippant language against the Fathers in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, about whom I knew little at the time, except what I had learnt as a boy from Joseph Milner. . . .

The truth is, I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral; I was drifting in the direction of the liberalism of the day [Note 2]. I was rudely awakened from my dream at the end of 1827 by two great blows—illness and bereavement. [His beloved sister Mary died suddenly.]

So he returns to the Fathers:

There is one remaining source of my opinions to be mentioned, and that far from the least important. In proportion as I moved out of the shadow of that Liberalism which had hung over my course, my early devotion towards the Fathers returned; and in the Long Vacation of 1828 I set about to read them chronologically, beginning with St. Ignatius and St. Justin. . . .

When Newman studied the Arian heresy, he discovered the greatness of the Greek Fathers, especially Saint Athanasius:

What principally attracted me in the ante-Nicene period was the great Church of Alexandria, the historical centre of teaching in those times. Of Rome for some centuries comparatively little is known. The battle of Arianism was first fought in Alexandria; Athanasius, the champion of the truth, was Bishop of Alexandria; and in his writings he refers to the great religious names of an earlier date, to Origen, Dionysius, and others, who were the glory of its see, or of its school. The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away . . . Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long.

In 1832, he wrote a poem about the Greek Fathers.

In chapter 2 of his Apologia, "History of My Religious Opinions from 1833 to 1839", Newman describes several of the projects of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement. Two of them he published highlighted the Fathers of the Church:

The Church of the Fathers is one of the earliest productions of the Movement, and appeared in numbers in the British Magazine, being written with the aim of introducing the religious sentiments, views, and customs of the first ages into the modern Church of England. . . .

The annotated Translation of the Treatises of St. Athanasius was of course in no sense of a tentative character; it belongs to another order of thought. This historico-dogmatic work employed me for years. I had made preparations for following it up with a doctrinal history of the heresies which succeeded to the Arian.

But it's in chapter 3, "History of My Religious Opinions from 1839 to 1841", that his study of the Fathers bring him great difficulties as he studies the Monophysite heresy and then reads an article by the Catholic priest Nicholas Wiseman (later his bishop!) during the Long Vacation in the summer of 1839. First the Monophysite heresy:

About the middle of June I began to study and master the history of the Monophysites. I was absorbed in the doctrinal question. This was from about June 13th to August 30th. It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicanism. I recollect on the 30th of July mentioning to a friend, whom I had accidentally met, how remarkable the history was; but by the end of August I was seriously alarmed.

I have described in a former work, how the history affected me. My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position of the Oriental communion, Rome was where she now is; and the Protestants were the Eutychians. Of all passages of history, since history has been, who would have thought of going to the sayings and doings of old Eutyches, that delirus senex, as (I think) Petavius calls {115} him, and to the enormities of the unprincipled Dioscorus, in order to be converted to Rome! . . .

What was the use of continuing the controversy, or defending my position, if, after all, I was forging arguments for Arius or Eutyches, and turning devil's advocate against the much-enduring {116} Athanasius and the majestic Leo? Be my soul with the Saints! and shall I lift up my hand against them?

Then he read Wiseman's article in the Dublin Review about the Donatist heresy, and certain words troubled Newman greatly (even though at first he did not think much of the article): Saint Augustine's phrase, "Securus judicat orbis terrarum." (The verdict of the world is conclusive):

they were words which went beyond the occasion of the Donatists: they applied to that of the Monophysites. They gave a cogency to the Article, which had escaped me at first. They decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of Antiquity; nay, St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of Antiquity; here then Antiquity was deciding against itself. What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church! not that, for the moment, the multitude may not falter in their judgment,—not that, in the Arian hurricane, Sees more than can be numbered did not bend before its fury, and fall off from St. Athanasius,—not that the crowd of Oriental Bishops did not need to be sustained during the contest by the voice and the eye of St. Leo; but that the deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede. . . . For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. . . . By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized.

The complete sentence and its source: 

Quapropter securus judicat orbis terrarum, bonos non esse qui se dividunt ab orbe terrarum, in quacumque parte orbis terrarum. (Contra Epist. Parmen. 3.24)
And on this account, the world securely judges that those who divide themselves from the world are not good, in whatever part of the world (they are).

So, although Newman was not yet ready to even consider being received into the Catholic Church, he felt he had no ground to stand upon for the position he had taken in the Anglican Church! Studying the Fathers of the Church, from whom he hoped to find support for his Oxford Movement efforts to strengthen the Anglican Church's authority, had backfired on him at this point.

Later in chapter 3, he explains his reasons for writing Tract 90, again noting the place of Fathers in his view of what he called "the Church Catholic" in other Tracts he had written:

Anglicanism claimed to hold, that the Church of England was nothing else than a continuation in this country, (as the Church of Rome might be in France or Spain,) of that one Church of which in old times Athanasius and Augustine were members. But, if so, the doctrine must be the same; the doctrine of the Old Church must live and speak in Anglican formularies, in the 39 Articles. Did it? Yes, it did; that is what I maintained; {130} it did in substance, in a true sense. Man had done his worst to disfigure, to mutilate, the old Catholic Truth; but there it was, in spite of them, in the Articles still. It was there,—but this must be shown. It was a matter of life and death to us to show it. And I believed that it could be shown; I considered that those grounds of justification, which I gave above, when I was speaking of Tract 90, were sufficient for the purpose; and therefore I set about showing it at once.

As he writes at the beginning of chapter 4, "History of My Religious Opinions from 1841 to 1845", after the publication of Tract 90 and the vehement condemnation it received:

FROM the end of 1841, I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees. . . .

In the terms of St. Augustine's dictum, the Anglican world had "securely" rejected his dissent where he was, in Oxford. Although he had escaped condemnation, he was in schism from the Church of England.

He would retreat to Littlemore and study the Church Fathers and Church History, in the midst of prayer and meditation, by writing his Essay on the Development of Church Doctrine.

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!