doctrinal development and the demons of history the historiography of john henry newman

8/6/2019 Doctrinal Development and the Demons of History the Historiography of John Henry Newman

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DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT ANDTHE DEMONS OF HISTORY:THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OFJOHN HENRY NEWMAN

JAMES MATTHEW WILSON

University of Notre Dame

The concept of modernity in the nineteenth century sprang, in part,from an often unstated acceptance of historicism, a belief in thecontingency of human judgments as a product of specific temporal con-ditions, that is, that the works of art of the different peoples and peri-ods, as well as their general forms of life, must be understood as productsof variable individual conditions, and have to be judged each by its owndevelopment, not by absolute rules of beauty and ugliness (Auerbach184). As such, to be modern was to be conscious of the problem of his-tory, or rather of history asa problem. This consciousness would serveas the central concern of the nineteenth centurys most celebrated the-ologian, John Henry Newman. I propose to consider Newmans theoryof history as an early attempt to recover from the limitations of histori-

cism by reinstating mystical interpretation, or figural historiography, ascentral to the life of the church. Newmans support for the notion of doc-trinal development has been of sustained interest to scholars, but becauseof the still unsettled debates over historical biblical research andModernist theology, attention to Newman has generally been limited todebating which side of the Modernist/Integralist divide he was on.1

In consequence, many scholars have debated the sufficiency of his histor-ical research in comparison with modern methods, but none havenoticed Newmans most important contribution to historical theology.He reintroduced a typological method that centralizes the multitudinousstructural meanings of historical events within the literal and chronolog-ical narrative forms standard to the practice of modern historians.2

We can best grasp his achievement if we elaborate the now well-known ideas of horizontal and vertical historiographies within the con-text of Newmans authorized narrative of his intellectual growth in The

Apologiaand his definitive statement on historical method in the Essay onDevelopment. In so doing, we shall find that Newman deployed Christian

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allegory and typology (that is, vertical historiography) and other figuralhermeneutics in tandem with what Auerbach and, to more galva-nizing contemporary effect, Benedict Anderson have described as hori-zontal historiography (Anderson 6869). This latter denotes a senseof historical depth, change over time, and causal relationships linkingevents together strictly along a successive chain or chronology. Implicitin vertical historiography is a transcendent intelligence that rendershistorical events as symbols of its will, connecting them according toa system of inner meaning rather than causality. No less implicitly, inhorizontal historiography resides a theory of immanence that mayattribute meaning to historical events through the observation of cause

and effect but leaves open the radically empirical possibility that historyis the terrain of a homogenous, empty time that cannot be meaningfully

interpreted, because it is simply a field of unrelated events.3 After exam-ining Newmans description of his earliest theories of history in particu-lar relation to these two historiographies, I shall examine hisAriansas thefirst detailed attempt to formulate doctrinal history according to theirtwinned, intertwined methods. Having established how these methodswork in his writings, we will turn to the Essay on Development, whereNewman exemplifies, articulates, and defends what had been, in Arians,left entirely to an implicit typological gloss. The fruit of this survey willbe to recognize Newmans view of knowledge as the product of a multi-foliate series of interpretive acts. One interpretation, one conclusion, doesnot necessarily work to dislodge or supersede another, but rather helps

to create a polysemous network of meanings that interact with, and mod-ify, each otheras well as coexist within what Newman saw as aninfinite body of universal Truth.

He sensed with evident anxiety that concepts of historicism were work-ing to undermine the very possibility of belief in Truth, since factscould be understood as arbitrary products of history rather than its inten-tioned incarnations of a divine intellect. Ultimately, this would leadNewman not to the advocacy of any one method of historiography butto the conviction that history itself demonstrated that the RomanCatholic Church was the single, transcendent and yet visible entity thatcould embody, interpret, and judge all the facts of history. ThroughChristianity, one could detect in historical events a surfeit of meanings

rather than a poverty of them. In turn, through the Church, one couldorganize and criticize those meanings. This attempt to recover the pat-rimony of traditional Catholic hermeneutics would bear fruit explicitly inwork by later theologians, for instance in Henri de Lubacs MedievalExegesis, and in the rise of theological pluralism more generally after theSecond Vatican Council.4

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According to The Apologia, Newman first read Bishop Butlers TheAnalogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature(1736) in 1823. There he found Butlers inculcation that through the

visible church we could learn that Nature was a parable: Scripture wasan allegory: pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properlyunderstood, were but a preparation for the Gospel (Apologia34). Theexternal world exists primarily, even exclusively, as a system of cognitiverelations: material things are only shadows when compared to the ideasthat they manifest. That system is not necessarily singular or subject toa single hermeneuticparable and allegory can be distinguished in anumber of ways without preference being given to either. Finally,

although the totality of Truth, of meaning, may be present from thebeginning, may be a permanent fact, the limitations of time andhuman understanding necessitate that totalitys unfolding along a histor-ical line. The evolution of human understanding, then, is a product ofthe economy of providence, slowly offering to the mind what existsperfectly outside of time. As Louis Dupr has noted, these ideas arecentral to the premodern worldview of the Christian West. HenceNewmans consciousness that, through Butler, he is recovering rich truthslost to the acid of modern thought.

Only a page onward in his narrative, Newman notes that it wasto the Alexandrian school and to the early Church, that I owe in par-ticular what I definitely held about the Angels. They are the realcauses of motion, light, and life, and of those elementary principles of

the physical universe, which, when offered in their developments to oursenses, suggest to us the notion of cause and effect, and of what are calledthe laws of nature (Apologia35). He suggests that such laws have a meta-physical reality; they do not emerge contingently in the thinking mind asa pragmatic concept to explain a thousand observed instances. Theinstances themselves are real, of course, but so are the laws themselves.Newman thus renews the assimilation of Platonic realism into Christianangelology, where angels take the place of exemplars. What follows fromthis thought, however, moves us from concern for natural laws to anaffirmation of history itself as having a law and a reality transcendingand subsuming the phenomena and facts of its content. History as sim-ply facts without any intrinsic meaning or order to them must be an

impossibility if even those most material, elemental phenomena are gov-erned by the genius of angels. The light and wind are only their raiment.The invisible forces of history, which of course have a material reality tothe extent that a revolution can be called realas the aggregate designa-tion for a group of shootings, stabbings, shouts, cries and explosions,have for Newman an absolute, supernatural reality as well:

James Matthew Wilson

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Also, beside the hosts of evil spirits, I considered there wasa middle race, daimnia, neither in heaven, nor in hell;partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty,benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. Thesebeings gave a sort of inspiration or intelligence to races,nations, and classes of men. Hence the action of bodiespolitic and associations, which is often so different fromthat of the individuals who compose them. Hence thecharacter and the instinct of states and governments, ofreligious communities and communions. I thought theseassemblages had their life in certain unseen Powers. My

preference of the Personal to the Abstract would naturallylead me to this view. (Apologia35)

Platonic ideas and the romantic imagination cross in the concreteunseen Powers that inform history. Newman invents an appealing, liv-ingflesh for ascendant theories of historical change that emphasized therole of races, classes, nations, or other group agents in a Hegelian dialec-tic. He seeks, in other words, to formulate theories akin to those ofGerman idealism (with which he was unfamiliar) in a language that rein-states the rich providential imagination of Christian patristic writings.

In these early reflections a specifically metaphysical, specifically realist,specifically Judeo-Christian concept of history finds articulation. Thedemons (and that is the translation of the Greek term in the passage)

of historical forces grant a sentient reality to what empiricist and mate-rialist historical theories were stripping of all anthropomorphism. Morethan that, we may infer that while these demons are immanent to thehistorical world, they do not become extinct. They are as angels not asmen, and therefore, although they are in history, they also transcend itin the sense that they continue to exist with a relatively consistent iden-tity from age to age. We may extrapolate, for example, that perhaps onesuch demon could possess the actions of, say, Cromwells Roundheads inone century and those of the mob of the French Revolution in the next.And so, still more, we might posit with Newman some kind of perma-nent, spiritual presence or entity that merely possesses or occupiesephemeral forms throughout history.

The result of any such theory is to allow for the reading of historyaccording to both vertical and horizontal historiographies. From the van-tage point of horizontal history, the demons would represent those socialforces suffusing mankind, coursing through individuals and groups alike,which cause events to occur in a teleological sequence. The early, opti-mistic understanding of Darwinian natural selection, or the graduated


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chronological development of class consciousness toward revolution inMarxism are based on similar assumptions. Newman has simply rechris-tened these forces within the speculative systems of patristic theology inwhich he was quickly becoming expert. From the vantage point of ver-tical history, causal relationships are not yet relevant. Rather, the verti-cal perspective allows one to look at any given historical moment as ifit were a frozen, discrete thing in itself, defined primarily not by itssequential relationship to past and present, but by the relation of itsparts, its participants, in their (spatially conceived) position relative to oneanother. Thus, in the example at hand, one particular demon might pos-sess Cromwells Roundheadscall it the demon of the bourgeoisie.

Another demon might possess the Jacobitescall it the demon of thenobility. And their relationship is one of conflict. This still life, thisconfiguration, becomes intelligible only when conceived as if from above,from Heaven, hence the designation vertical. We then may look toanother frozen, discrete historical momentthat of the FrenchRevolutionand easily find an analogous structure. The demon of thebourgeoisie may be pacing on the tennis court, or gathering around theguillotine; the demon of nobility may be sweating at Versailles or pack-ing for exile. In any case, from the vertical perspective these temporallydisconnected events can be understood in the spatial likeness of theirsystem of relationshipswhich, at this early stage, Newman has chosento represent as permanent, transhistorical spirits who simply put on onemask or another depending on the given scenario manifesting itself. To

be present at the moment of one revolution is in some sense to be simul-taneously present in all. Cromwell is ephemeral and mortal, but the spirithe embodies is present in all times and all times are present in him. Evenin this crude formulation, Newmans historiography anticipates thesynthesis of modern narratives of historical progress with the structural-ism that would rise to prominence in the early twentieth century.Sanford Schwartz observes one such a synthesis in James Frazers Golden

Bough, though we may also discover them throughout the works of mod-ernist authors such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce (5). One facet ofNewmans importance is the prescience of his theorizations.

A second remarkable aspect of this passage is the way in whichNewman carefully debases these demons, rendering them closest to

mankind in their fallibility. Although he would eventually find a morecompelling mode of expression for this inchoate doctrine than talk ofdemons, at that moment Newman had good reason to view historicalforces as potentially malevolent and destructive creatures. As an Anglicandivine, Newman needed a theology with a red streak of anti-Catholicismrun through it. As a historian, he required that this anti-Catholicism be


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supported by his historical method. And so The Apologiadescribes theOxford Movement as the restoration of ancient religion to Englandafter Roman and, subsequently, Anglican failures (47). The AnglicanChurchs existence was predicated on separation from Rome, and assuch, afelix culpahad to occur, creating a massive historical dark age inwhich no redeeming Demon could exist. That is, there had to be aperiod without a manifest representative of uncorrupted Christianity.The primitive church was pure because temporally proximate to themoment of revelation, the Incarnation. A gradual declension occurredthat was coupled with a gradual articulation of Christian doctrine. Atsome point, the declension turned into real corruption and as a result the

articulation of true doctrine became the invention of new doctrinenot,here, the heresies of the Arians and Socinians, but the undisputed, longunnoticed, corruptions of the Romanists. Only with the Reformation didpure Christianity reemerge. For Newman, of course, it does so only inthe High-Church Anglicanism of Andrews, Donne, and others, which herefused to associate with Luther and Calvin. Thus he quietly relocatedthe Reformation in the seventeenth century, the heyday of the Anglicanliterary divines, rather than in the sixteenth, when Luther was spirituallymarshaling an ugly war against the Papacy and Calvin was stripping thechurch of all her ornament (Apologia 119). Moreover, only with theOxford Movement did a restored Anglicanism emerge, as he and hisassociates brought back into practice the truths of the early church.Crucially, Newman had not fully integrated the vertical or structural ele-

ment of his historiography with that of the horizontal, because this wouldhave undermined his narrative of primitive innocence, fall, and restora-tion. He could not do so while still an Anglican:

I could not prove that the Anglican communion was anintegral part of the One Church, on the ground of itsteaching being Apostolic or Catholic, without reasoning infavour of what are commonly called the Roman corrup-tions; and I could not defend our separation from Romeand her faith without using arguments prejudicial to thosegreat doctrines concerning our Lord, which are the veryfoundation of the Christian religion. (Apologia122)

This helps explain why the demons had to be partially fallen. Newmancould suggest thereby how history had run so amok as to produce dis-crete moments in which there was no True Church. The transhistoricalstability his early vertical typology articulates gets quashed, leaving a


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more conventional, horizontal historiography to claim that some histor-ical moments are truly unique in a narrative of decline and progress. Ofcourse, such a privileging of primitive Christianity does not necessarilypreclude the vertical historiography Newman had begun to contemplate.Indeed, a traditional formulation of typology allows one to interpret theprimitive church as the type to modern Anglicanisms antitype. ButNewman seems not to have entirely grasped this within the context ofhis demon theory, probably because he was not looking, there, simply to

justify Anglicanism; he was, as I have said, boldly rechristening historyas a whole within the sphere of theological knowledge. Where traditionaltypology vertically draws together disparate historical events, Newmans

demons could only suggest the perennial spirits operative in every epoch:theology became the key to unlocking the meaning of every presentmoments structure. Although establishing the English Church as theChurch of History would become the young Newmans central project,he had not yet found a way to argue this, in part because the intuitionsof his demon theory of history were sufficiently Platonic to lack a theoryofessentialtemporal change. Such a claim, of course, must rely on mereextrapolation from one retrospective passage, and however probable itmay be, we are always on much firmer ground in understandingNewman when we can show how a theory arises out of, and returns to,a specific historical example presented in his writingshow a theory isalways tied so closely to a given instance that sometimes the theory itselfgoes unstated.

As Rowan Williams has observed, this preference for the concreteexample emerges in Newmans Arians as a systematic practice drawnfrom Christian tradition. There, Newman views the gradual articulationof doctrine as a necessary but real evil for the Church . . . the notion offormulation itself being a kind of betrayal of some richer truth(Williams, NewmansArians270). The unsystematic doctrine of the ante-Nicene church possessed a purity that was preserved by the variousforms of economy exemplified in scripture and beyondsuch as theAlexandrian ChurchsDisciplina Arcani(Newman,Arians30). By not shar-ing the churchs most difficult and edifying doctrines in their fullwithcatechumens, but only with the initiated, the Alexandrian Churchavoided ugly public disputes that would perforce result in a rigidifying of

what was by definition ineffable but knowable into exact, defensible, butstill inadequate, published language. Formalized doctrine is a tragedybecause it signals that apostasy and heresy have already occurred,spurring dogmatic articulation, and because the formalizing of dogmamakes possible future misinterpretation and error. While Williams assigns


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a shadow of remorse to this specter of historical contingency (andtherefore hermeneutic instability) looming over the development andarticulation of doctrine, it seems more reasonable to assign it to anothercause. A pall does linger over theArianstext, indeed. But, as Newmansbiography makes clear, the growth of the historians mind will lead himto conclude that Catholicism, not Protestantism, is the fact, that is tosay, the Churchof History: At least the Christianity of history is notProtestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this (Essay 7). As anAnglican, Newman would feel himself torn between the establishedchurchs understanding of primitive Christianity as pure and of itself asa return to that purity, and his own evolving recognition that there never

was a historical period that was in and of itselfa purer manifestation ofChristianity than another. Rather, there was simply the church thatChrist founded and which the Catholic and apostolic tradition contin-ued, whose divine origin and continued role as the mystical body ofChrist vouchsafed it against any error at the ignorant hands of thedemon of historical contingency: I am very far more sure that Englandis in schism, than that the Roman additions to the Primitive Creed maynot be developments, arising out of a keen and vivid realizing of theDivine Depositum of Faith (Apologia163). That is to say, the anxietyWilliams discovers in Arians may properly be assigned to Newmansdesire to understand Christianity as a visible church discernable in thestructure of every historical moment, from its founding to the present.The effort to suggest that the church may disappear, and therefore

appear in isolated times and locales within a vertical and typological his-tory betrayed the central belief that Christ had founded the churchthrough his incarnation and that such a church would guide Christiansto the end of time. Isolated historical churches become emblematic in hisimagination notof the formulation of doctrines per se, but of the misin-terpretation, loss and recovery of those doctrines.

Newmans demon theory corresponds in no exact way to AuerbachsFigura in his essay of that name. And yet it, and the more complextheory of history that would develop from it, can best be understood ifwe view it as a species offigura, as something real and historical whichannounces something else that is also real and historical (Auerbach 29).Further on, Auerbach elaborates that

figural interpretation establishes a connection between twoevents or persons, the first of which signifies not only itselfbut also the second, while the second encompasses orfulfills the first. The two poles of the figure are separate intime, but both, being real events or figures, are within


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time, within the stream of historical life. Only the under-standing of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, butthis spiritual act deals with concrete events. (53)

Auerbach finds figura in its purest form in the system of biblical exege-sis called typology, where, as I have indicated, the events of the OldTestament prophesy and represent in germinal or shadow form what willbe fulfilled in the New. The type, which is a literal historical event, willhave its meaning completed and revealed in the antitype, which alsomust be literal and historical. We have already observed that the sepa-ration in historical time of the two events means that they cannot stand

in causal relation to each other. Adam did not exactly cause Christ; Joshua did not either; but their meanings, as types, are developed orfulfilled in the incarnation of Christ as antitype. As such, we may envisiontheir meaningful connection occurring not in history but in the mind ofGod. Hence, we designate this concept as a form of vertical historiogra-phy. We must see an event not as a link in a chain of development inwhich single events or combinations of events perpetually give rise tonew events, but viewed primarily in immediate vertical connection witha divine order which encompasses it (Auerbach 72). Meaning is imma-nent to the events of history; it is historical because the figural resideswithin the literal.

Importantly, Auerbachs exploration of vertical historiography suggeststhat the notion of a primitive Christianity typologically fulfilled in

Anglicanism was more intuitively in accord with traditional figural inter-pretation than was Newmans early theory of ever-present demons/ideas.As such, it is hardly surprising that the next stage in Newmans thinkingwould be to reconfigure his youthful conception in better accord withthat tradition. If Auerbach was right to claim that in most Europeancountries figural interpretation was active up to the eighteenth century(61), Newmans efforts must be understood as a gradual recovery of anancient tradition, and so they would not be without alteration anddevelopment. When, in Arians, Newman writes of Christ as anti-typeand repealer (14), and later, in the Essay on Development, he notes thatthe earlier prophecies are pregnant texts out of which the succeedingannouncements grow; they are types (64), Newman is restoring to his

theological vocabulary words that have fallen into disuse and that hehimself may not always use consistently. These uses in that sense confirmAuerbachs claim that typology had disappeared. Moreover, they qualifyrather than invalidate the hybridization Benedict Anderson makes ofAuerbach and Benjamin in suggesting that vertical historical relationsceased to be perceived because they had been beaten out in competition


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with a series of horizontal systems of meaning that allowed for the devel-opment of national identities (Anderson 2425). As if confirming the real-ity of just such an interpretive competition, Newman seems anxious topreserve figura under the rubric of mystical interpretation, preciselybecause he is conscious that the modern world was becoming illiteratein reading world and texts alike in any other sense than the literal. Thatmystical interpretation or typology is everywhere in Newmans work maywell suggest that it was all but nowhere in the minds of NewmansEngland. A mono-dimensional Protestant literalism seemed to be cut-ting away all but its own pedantic reading of history, even though sucha practice guaranteed the loss of historical Christianity. As he notes in

the Essay on Development, mystical interpretation has been the doctrine ofall ages of the Church, as is shown by the disinclination of her teachersto confine themselves to the mere literal interpretation of Scripture(342). A moment later, he observes, the School of Antioch, whichadopted the literal interpretation, was . . . the very metropolis of heresy(343). In a typological formulation that anticipates much of what we shalldiscuss below, Newman reproaches modernity (through and in ancientAntioch) for losing the one hermeneutical means of orthodoxy.

The ascendancy of the literal over the figural does not necessarilyamount to the replacement of vertical with horizontal historiography. AsEtienne Gilson has argued, horizontal historiography, an idea now soprevalent as to be nearly synonymous with our idea of history, wasitself a roughly contemporary product of the same hermeneutical impulse

as the vertical. We owe both methods to the early Christian MiddleAges. Gilson wrote in rebuttal of scholars who claimed that this modernconcept of history was, in fact, uniquely modern, noting that while thereare differences between modern and medieval concepts, they are thoseof the logical development of a single idea. The medievals themselvesestablished the notion of history as teleology, rather than as events occur-ring within a fundamentally static, eternal world (Gilson 384). Thus his-tory as such, in Gilsons conception, was the ordered sequence of events,causally linked across time according to a meaningful system of forces:everything, both in the life of individuals and in the life of societies ofwhich individuals form a part, is ordered to this supernatural end. Nowthe first condition of any such ordering is that there should be a regular

unfolding of events in time, and first of all, of course, that there shouldbe a time (385). Progress was not invented by Walpoles Whigs; it was,however, systematized in St. Augustines theology.

This medieval consciousness of horizontal history operated in tandemwith vertical historiography over the centuries. Different writers appro-priated it for subjects either broader than the history of revelation found


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in Scripture or narrower, such as the rise of national histories that didnot (any longer) attempt to trace national origins to Rome and Aeneas,Eden and Adam, or any other ur-historical vanishing point. Accordingto Gilson, the chief difference between nineteenth and fourth-centuryhistory is simply intellectual secularizationthe emancipation of histori-cal method from a specifically Christian timeline. Even this transforma-tion does not uncouple the horizontal and vertical, but rather relocatesboth in a species of literal immanence. Hegel, for example, offers us his

Discourse on Universal History in which the dialectic of reasonhas taken the place of God. His ambition to provide us

with an intelligible interpretation of history as a wholebears the evident mark of a time in which reason is so pro-foundly saturated with Christianity that what, withoutChristianity, it would never have even dreamed of under-taking, it imagines itself able to effect, and to effect fromits own resources. (Gilson 394)

Newman seems to have been responding to this hubristic appropriationthroughout his career. To counter Liberalism, to counter the tendenciestoward the disestablishment of Anglicanism, and to counter the exclusionof religion and theology from education, he sought not simply to sethistory at the center of his Christianity but to reestablish Christianity asa central event in, and more importantly, as a permanent and driving

force ofhistory.As Gilson surely knew, the practice of Hegel and other nineteenth-

century thinkers in writing histories according to one metaphysicalideabe it a history of liberty, class struggle, the quest for Whig culture,the achievement of a free marketwas hardly the final development inhorizontal historiography. The historical self-consciousness that con-cerned Newman, among others, was not simply that mankind had daredwrite history according to a principle of progress independent ofChristian providence. Rather, with this secularization, a vacuum ofauthority was created that no single idea could hope to replace perma-nently or universally. If one had not the permanent currency of revela-tion upon which to found everything else, a volatility in the historical

world would of necessity become agonizingly clear. This brand of his-toricism, we noted, exposed the contingency and radical mutability ofhumanity in its historical conditions. Such would become the operatingprinciple of history after Vico and Auerbach, whose narratives, whosearbitrary teleologies, in their human, immanent character, are intention-ally man-made. Ultimately, this would result in a general discrediting of


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narrative methods of historiography and leave one only empirical eventsand chronological sequence. For his part, Newman seems to have beenalarmed not only by secular historical narrative, but also by the radicalhistoricist eclipsing of narrative.

NewmansArians of the Fourth Century therefore does not merely rejectthe older secular narrative history of Gibbon and Mosheim on which itnonetheless draws: the first half of the volume contains little narrativeat all. It seeks instead to draw up detailed sketches of the intellectualcharacter of the schools and parties in and about the Ante-NiceneChurch as they stood in relation to the ideas at stake in the Arianheresy (Williams, Introduction iii). The method is fundamentally vertical

and structural. In brief, Newman defines the Church of Antioch accord-ing to a series of ideological characteristics that appear analogous in

every way to those of the various sects in and around the Church ofEngland during his lifetime. And he defines the Church of Alexandria aspossessing many, if not all, of the attributes that in 1831 the members ofthe Oxford Movement desired that Anglicanism should itself possess.

Newmans foremost concern is to describe Antioch and prove theinfluence of Judaism on the intellectual life of that church (an ambitionWilliams describes as inaccurate and anti-Semitic [NewmansArians281]).According to Newman, Judaism in the period was a compound of super-stition, hypocrisy and Arnoldian Philistinism (Arians10). Jews had the earof rulers; they had the ear of the masses via easy appeals to the grossertastes of human nature (Arians14); and they had the ears of clerics,

steering the minute peculiarities of their doctrinal views whichare humanitarian rather than Gnostic in conception (Arians 15).The consequence of these influences and practices

is not without its bearing on the rise of Arianism. I will notsay that the Arian doctrine is the direct result of judaizingpractice; but it deserves consideration whether a tendencyto derogate from the honour due to Christ was not createdby an observance of the Jewish rites, and much more, bythat carnal, self-indulgent religion, which seems at thattime to have prevailed in the rejected nation. (14)

While Newman could have easily condemned these qualities for a per-ceptible sensuality in morality and behavior, he chose instead to arguethat Judaic influence led to a kind of sensual Christology. This ten-dency to privilege the grosser tastes led to a conception of Christ asa mere man, as a merely mortal creature, rather than the incarnatedGod-Man. Thus the Arians were anti-intellectual and anti-mystical; they


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insisted on thinking by flesh alone rather than allowing for a living,developing spirit that guides our understanding of the world and ofrevelation. Throughout his writings, Newman targets this tendencytoward simplification and loss of Truth as either the anticipationor apotheosis of a literalist heresy. In general, this is alleged not againstAntiochene Jews and Christians but Protestant dissenters of every vari-ety. Rabbinical pedantry vertically rhymes with that of modernProtestants, and Newmans history is not simply one of the Arian cen-turies but of modern England. The Church of Antiochs members aretypes to Englands antitypes.

The practical habit of this Judaic school of thought is one of exclu-

sionthe exclusion of coeternal divinity from the concept of Christ.Exclusion in general always haunts Newmans pages as the source oferror and heresy. To turn to The Idea of a University for just one example,we may note how Newman condemns adamantly the specialist in anydiscipline who refuses to think beyond his subjector rather whoattempts to portray his subjects methods and facts as coextensive withthe circle of all truth:

Were I a mere chemist, I should deny the influence ofmind upon bodily health; and so on, as regards the devo-tees of any science, or family of sciences, to the exclusionof others; they necessarily become bigots and quacks,scorning all principles and reported facts which do not

belong to their own pursuit. (37)

At stake here is not Newmans understanding of the Jews so much as hiscondemnation of an exclusionary principle of mind that seems to havebeen present in the early church, as it was present in the Reformationand in nineteenth-century Protestant theology, which, in close associationwith contemporary Utilitarianism, had sought to identify reality with asingle, reductive principle. Utilitarians argue, Newman says later in Idea,as if every thing, as well as every person, had its price (115). Emergingfrom these characterizations is a transcendental, mystical analogy thatwould guide Newmans judgments on the ancient and modern worldalike.Arianswas written during the same period Newman claims to have

been preaching his theory of angels and demons. It is no stretch to imag-ine his tacitly assigning a single demon as the genius lociof the ArianChurch of Antioch and the Utilitarian University of London.

The same figural formulation comes into play for The Schools of theSophists. These schools are not to be considered as entirely distinct fromthe Antiochene Church. Rather, they were the source of a tendency


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toward disputatiousness that Arius exploited in prosecuting his hereti-cal war against the reserved, and necessarily secretive, orthodox bishops.Their talent for belligerent debate resulted in a continuous, but specious,

victory for all manners of error and heresy: It is obvious, that in everycontest, the assailant, as such, has the advantage of the party assailed;and that, not merely from the recommendation which novelty gives tohis cause in the eyes of bystanders, but also from the greater facility inthe nature of things, of finding, than solving objections (Arians 18).Newman spent his public career as a reluctant orator, wrenched fromthe tranquility of monastic seclusion to set right what had been wrongedthrough the innovating and hyperactive opinionatedness of nineteenth-

century liberals. He almost always condemned those who choseto speakwhile he sometimes valorized those who only mounted the public lecternwhen called by the force of conscience and justice. Regarding Low-Church Anglicanism, he had a thorough contempt for the controversialposition (Apologia47). Of Catholics he had an early admiration for theirzealous maintenanceof the doctrine and the rule of celibacy (Apologia54,my italics). Always, what is right and true can be identified because it is,in a literal sense, reactionary. As in the Nicene Creed, the Truth gener-ally gets formally articulated in reaction to a crisis. And so Arius, inNewmans account, makes an especially repugnant specimen because ofhis typical argumentativeness:

When he betook himself to the doctrinal controversy he

chose for the first open avowal of his heterodoxy theopportunity of an attack upon his diocesan . . . we read ofthe excitement which his reasonings produced . . . of hisletters addressed to Eusebius and to Alexander, which dis-play a like pugnaciousness and almost satirical spirit; andthen of his verses composed for the use of the populace inridicule of the orthodox doctrine. (Arians1920)

Just as a reactionary position suggests ones stable and principled knowl-edge of the truth, a tendency to controvert doctrine betrays an absenceof principle. Thus, after the defeat of the Arians before Constantineand the Nicene Council, they became nothing better than a political

party . . . in truth it is an abuse of language to say they had any definitebelief at all (Arians136). The analogy with liberals in modern Englandin general would have been hard to miss. His regret at the republica-tion of Dr. Hampdens pamphlet, Observations on Religious Dissentwould be just one example, or antitype, of many in Newmans writings(Apologia5657).


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from it. The Neologists of the present day deny that themiracles took place in the manner related to the sacredrecord; the Eclectics denied their cogency as an evidenceof the extraordinary presence of God. (Arians57)

The one certain feature of the Eclectics is their eschewing of dogma andtheir insistence on private judgment, which Newman loathed. And so hisdisgust for modern Liberals incites him to particularly vituperativecondemnation of those of antiquity: Who does not recognize in this oldphilosophy the chief features of that recent school of liberalism and falseillumination, political and moral, which is now Satans instrument in

deluding the nations? (Arians 58). Rhetorically, Newmans centralconcern is not merely to persuade his reader to condemn these differentfactions, but to envision them as fragments outside of and in conflict withthe Church of Alexandria.

According to Williams, NewmansAriansis full of historical misrepre-sentations. If this is so, they result from a desire to preserve the Churchof Alexandria as a model of orthodoxy and authority, with its extensivetradition in theology, which Newman would later call mystical inter-pretation (Williams, NewmansArians280). Newman wishes to show thatAlexandria is a desirable figure, or type, for the Anglican Church. Hewould elsewhere observe that, during those early centuries, Romeseemed to be absent from doctrinal debate, seemed not, in other words,to have arrogated primacy to itself in ecclesiastical matters (Apologia33).

As such, the word Rome scarcely appears in the first half of the vol-ume, and Newman concentrates instead on Alexandria and its admirablycomprehensive philosophy that would be partially secularized in theform of the Eclectic sect described above (Apologia 25). Newman con-demns this conversion, while he celebrates the careful and capacious usesof the intelligence and spirit that the pre-Eclectic Alexandrians demon-strated in their use of mystical interpretation, exemplified by the churchsuse of allegory, parable, metaphor, and umbra(the shadowing forth of theesoteric in an exoteric form) and its refusal of a literalizing or scriptura solaprinciple of Christianity. In the Alexandrian Churchs thinking, Historyis made the external garb of prophecy, and persons and facts become thefigures of heavenly things (Apologia34). To Newman, Alexandria offered

the first of several via mediahe would endorse during his Anglican years,because it included a strong tradition of scripturally submissive Apostolicauthority that served as a substitute for a single, central authority (suchas the Chair of St. Peter) whose hegemony might result in a divergencefrom scripture through corrupting innovations.


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However, it must not be supposed, that this appeal toTradition in the slightest degree disparages the sovereignauthority and sufficiency of Holy Scripture, as a recordof the truth . . . Apostolical Tradition is brought forward,not to supercede Scripture, but in conjunction withScripture, to refute the self-authorized, arbitrary doctrinesof heretics. We must cautiously distinguish, with thatFather [Irenus], between a tradition supplanting or per-

verting the inspired records, and a corroborating, illustrat-ing, and altogether subordinate tradition. (33)

Had Newman made this statement a decade later, we might read it asan apologetic for Catholicism, but here, one must sense a certain attemptto characterize Alexandria in opposition to Rome. The AlexandrianChurch was scriptural, yet unreductive, open to the dispensations ofpaganism and natural religion butgenerally as a means of enhancing andexpanding the understanding of revelation (Arians48). If it risked breed-ing heresy by its tolerance of polysemantic exegetical and catecheticalpractices, this was not a fault, but the inevitable result of sophistication.Alexandria was conciliar without the atomizing democracy of congrega-tionalism. And it was apostolic of its own offices, without submission tomediation by Rome. In short, for the Anglican Newman, Alexandriaserves as the perfect model for a national church attempting to affirmits identity not as Protestant but as freestanding and independent, doc-

trinally and ecclesiastically sound. That Alexandria was surrounded andpartly penetrated by ideas and personages of heretical nature offers noimmediate cause for objection in Newmans portrayal. The soundness ofintelligence that created the inevitably short-lived Alexandrian Churchtradition could forge a sound body of doctrine and expunge heresy fromits midst just as the young men of Oxford intended to purify Anglicanismof both the illogicality of High and the vulgarity of Low-Church prac-tices. The de facto absence of Roman primacy in the primitive church

justified de juresecession from Rome in the modern. And yet Alexandriascommunion with Rome suggested that Anglicanism itself need not bemerely anti-Catholic; its purpose and identity were not dependent uponits Protestantism but upon its righteous subordination to scripture and

the teachings of the early fathers.The target of condemnation in the volume as a whole is not modern

Rome, but Westminster. We need not consider it in any great detail,but one of the most satirical and subtle moments in all of Newmansprose surely comes in his chapter detailing the Council of Nicea and its


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instigator Emperor Constantine, the inept catechumen. He appearsas the typical English stage Machiavel, obsessed with maintaining orderand peace in his empire at any costeven the cost of adopting Christi-anity as its official religion (129) and sponsoring a council to resolvea theological dispute whose matter he could not explain and whoseimportance he could scarcely fathom (134). Constantine enforced thedecision of the council with an iron fist, not through a desire for ortho-doxy but for conformity; and when the Arians were able to win hiscourts and his heirs favor, the hand of power redirected its threateninggestures accordingly.

When Newman began working onAriansin the late 1820s, the British

Parliament seemed continuously to interfere and undermine the inde-pendence of the Anglican Church. Catholic emancipation, the suppres-sion of some Irish sees, the Reform Bill all signaled that, whileParliament was more than willing to meddle in ecclesiastical organiza-tion and affairs, it was entirely unwilling to do anything that would sup-port or aid the churchs power and mission. These acts indicated thatErastianism threatened Establishment to the benefit of nonconformityand Romanism. And so Newmans figural interpretation of the Ariancontroversy became a subtle but impressive tool for a theology of history,and also for a political theology. Newmans demon theory and concernfor figural, vertical history serve to make the analogous conditions ofAlexandria and England more than mereanalogy. He in fact cataloguesthe different degrees of allegorical and Platonic methods of interpretation

in his treatment of the ancient church, while also condemning the ten-dency to spiritualization found in Origen, among others (37). Origensmethod threatened to dehistoricize scripture and, centrally, to transformthe figurative and metaphorical language of Scripture and of patristicwritings and apologetics into a nominal language of convenience, deny-ing it the reality that inspiration (and the angels and demons ofNewmans theory) was intended to vouchsafe. Newman was not writingEngland onto Alexandria merely as a means of organization or becausehe did not consider the integrity of honest history anything important incomparison to polemical effect. Were that the case, he would have beenhimself a modern Origen. He wanted his readers to take his great anal-ogy for realityto read history as typological once again.

Williamss questioning of the accuracy of Newmans analogy inadver-tently calls into question the volumes merit as an apologetic for theEnglish Church. Newman was perfectly conscious of this projection ofEnglands silhouette onto Alexandria, but he intended to take it for theliteral, historical truth, which could be justified according to the figuraltheory of history he had explored with his talk of angels and demons.


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More than a century before Williams would assail Newmans history asinadequate by contemporary scholarly standards, Newman himself woulddoubt the merit of his figural narrative. Several years after writingArians,his translation work on St. Athanasius, the hero of Nicea who remainedNewmans image of the ideal churchman during his Anglican andCatholic periods, led him to see that his typology was flawed:

I was reading and writing in my own line of study, far fromthe controversies of the day, on what is called a meta-physical subject; but I saw clearly, that in the history ofArianism, the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-

Arians were the Anglicans, and that Rome now was what itwas then. The truth lay, not with the Via Media, but withwhat was called the extreme party. (Apologia 11415)

In eliding Romes presence in the life of the early Church, Newman real-ized, he had distorted the history of orthodoxy and had given Alexandriatoo much credit. No greater testimony could be given to the importanceof fact in Newmans vertical historiography than his experience of hisown self-deception as one of three blows that effected his conversion(Apologia114). Upon considering the failure (or erroneousness) of the factson which his typology relied, Newman felt obliged to abandon his typo-logical justification of Alexandria/Canterbury in favor of the perennialChurch of Rome.

Before moving at last to the Essay on Development, in which Newmanreenacts the method ofAriansas a corrective to his own earlier conclu-sions, we should turn briefly to his theories of university education. Thesegive us a clear definition-by-analogy of how he would conceive verticalhistoriography especially in its relationship to the horizontal. We haveseen that Newmans tendency is to view error as a state of fragmenta-tion, atomization, or astringency. The Church of Antioch excluded allexegesis but the literal; the Arians denied the hypostatic union; theEclectic sect and even Origen denied the literal in favor of gnosticismand syncretism. InArians, only Alexandria, whose identity was not basedon its exclusion of Rome, embodied a Catholicor rather, a catholicdesire to have its methods and degrees of knowledge be coextensive with

the limits of human and divine reality. In The Idea of a University he com-mends this desire as an essential quality:

It is not then that Catholics are afraid of human knowl-edge, but that they are proud of divine knowledge, andthat they think the omission of any kind of knowledge


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whatever, human or divine, to be, as far as it goes, notknowledge, but ignorance. (5455)

And in the following section:

I observe, then, that, if you drop any science out of the cir-cle of knowledge, you cannot keep its place vacant for it;that science is forgotten; the other sciences close up, or, inother words, they exceed their proper bounds and intrudewhere they have no right. (55)

No image is more essential for an understanding of Newmans histori-ography than that of the circle. The Universal, which is always the True,must be a full, encompassing circle. The False, which is always provin-cial, ideological and bigoted, must be a deformed shard: a shard that canbe purified and refitted into the circle, of course, but which is a grotesque

jag so long as it remains out of communion. Newman depicts the vari-ous schisms and sects inAriansaccording to this image. The demons ofhistory are as parts of a circle, grinding against each other. One can findthe same circle and the same subordinate and heterodox units in any age(although the demons themselves disappear from Newmans theory as itmatures). To perceive this circle in a discrete historical moment is theact of vertical historiography. And the heat sectarian frictions createactually serves to make the universal circle itself more visible and there-

fore acts as the cause of, the force of, and the interpretive guide tohistory along a horizontal timeline. As Williams argues on Newmansbehalf, The accurate perception of Christian truth is shaped by conflict(Introduction xxxv). In this circle, the vertical defines the forces of his-tory that in fact drive the horizontal. Just as the entire faculty of uni-

versity subjects widens the circle of knowledge, and so intellectualprogress is made, the various shards of truth in every sphere enlarge theirrespective encircling Truth. Beyond that, by identifying the dramatis per-sonae of a historical milieu with the appropriate demon, or type, onegains a tentative guide to right action.

The Essay on Developmentillustrates these premises by subtler and moreextensive means. We shall only survey the manner in which its charac-

terizations of religions and sects outside the Catholic Church operate. Inplaces, Newman actually reproduces the conclusions ofArians, attenuat-ing and qualifying them. For example, Newmans section mentioningZenobias Judaism (218) shows the manner in which the supersti-tiousness for which he had condemned Antioch, and which certainpagan authors noted in describing the early church, wrongly associated


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Christianity with various other eastern cults. The Christianity of old, likeits true modern form, must always seem magical, gloomy, and secret tothose outside of it (219). As the pagans of old condemned Christianityfor these qualities, so do the rationalists and deists of modern England,among others, condemn Catholicism. Newman has actually, in mention-ing this Antiochene Judaism, further defined the type or circle ofCatholicism. Without ceasing to condemn it in isolation, he has used itto show one note by which one can recognize thetype of Christianityin any historical moment.

Newman turns to Tertullian for evidence of pagan scorn for Christiansbecause of their tendency to undermine or disturb the civil order (Essay

237). The pagans, as Tertullian portrays them, saw Christians lurkingeverywhere; saw their neighbors apparently losing their minds and goingover to that sect, but they never attempted to see any good or truth inChristianity: They praise that which they know, they revile that whichthey know not. Newman himself provides this gloss on the pagan viewof Christians: A tribe lurking and light-hating, dumb for the public, talk-ative in corners, they despise our temples as if graves, spit at our gods,deride our religious forms (Essay 238). The chief purpose of theseaccounts, in the argument of the text, is to show the continuity ofCatholicism from antiquity to the present. It is thepermanent type of alltrue religion.

However, in relying so heavily on pagan testimony, Newman suggeststhat the pagans themselves are not without their role as representative

figures. Indeed, he may be more successful in drawing out an analogybetween the pagans of antiquity and the English of the modern day,whose vehement anti-Catholicism was prone to create gothic caricaturesof Papists in order to represent the mysterious threat they posed torational, civil societya threat that must always be out of view in itsactuality but always in view via effigy or fiction, via gossip or the popularpress. Hence the rumors that emerged surrounding Newmans ostensibleaffinity for Catholicism late in his Anglican period only testified to thetruth of the Catholic religion and the paganism of English prejudice(Apologia 141). Such diagnosis reveals one particular manner in whichNewmans vertical history had transformed since Arians. Rather thanlooking to the various sects in and about the Church of England, or that

of Alexandria, he centralizes the Catholic and treats notof various frag-mentary groups of English who have broken from the true nation,but of the English nation and national church as a fragment of theCatholic universal. His scale has widened considerably; the nationalchurch is no longer the largest circle, but has been reduced to one ofits shards. A Catholic England would, in Newmans self-consciously


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English imagination, retain its national character, but it would do so inharmony with its universal or supranational identity.5 Until the splitbetween England and Rome was healed, he would understand thatthe Arians were as modern Protestants are. Thus when he recounts thatthe Arians cried out that they would not seek enchantments like Saul,for Scripture was enough for them, which was more powerful than allbewitchments, he insinuates this could well have been the antisupersti-tious refrain of every covenanter in Scotland (Arians245).

The conciliar nature of Anglicanism had been, in Arians, a strongrecommendation. But in Essay on Development, Newman suggests thatsuch a formation, as opposed to that of the Catholic monarchy, is

insuffi

cient. The Church of Alexandria had risked heresy, and heresy didin fact arise within it; only in this later work does Newman suggest thatsuch was the case because of the absence of an immanent, infallibleauthority: The Church is a kingdom; a heresy is a family rather thana kingdom; and as a family continually divides and sends out branches,founding new houses, and propagating itself in colonies, each of them asindependent as its original head, so was it with heresy (252). No longerstruggling to find a laudable analogy between the primitive and modernchurches, Newman brings out in full what he had all but suppressed in

Arians: that only one form of ecclesiastical hierarchy is sufficient to pre-vent the atomistic road to atheism that he had witnessed in the Englandof his Anglican years, and it is not to be found in Canterbury, or inAlexandria, if it is notfoundedupon Rome. Why then Newman opposed

the First Vatican Councils (1870) declaration of Papal infallibility is aprovocative question we cannot address here.

These few analogies will suffice to suggest that the same method ofreading history is at work in the Essay as that which is so central toArians.We must note, however, that one other change is marked indeedbetween the method of the earlier and later texts: Newman seldomexplicitly draws out the relations between type and antitype. This, in fact,is more consistent with his usual method of composition than wasArians,for Newmans distinctive style was argument by image, intimation, andallusion. He leaves his audience to examine these depictions and exam-ples for themselves, commenting on them, of course, but without addingthe vital, conclusive observation that would draw the connection into

uncomfortable clarity. This serves as a slightly ironic way of leavinginterpretive possibilities openNewmans prose never insists upon a sin-gle, literal reading. Generally, in fact, it requires one to perform a kindof mystical interpretationsuch as reading typologicallyand intuitwhich interpretation the author intends as its primary, rather thansubordinate, meaning. This of course provoked the great public contro-


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versy of his life, when Charles Kingsley saw this not as a leaving openof interpretive possibilities, but as slippery, deceitful, and unmanly. Hemay have been correct in applying such epithets in defense of straight-forward Protestant religion against the onset of the cunning serpent,Catholicism. But Newmans style is Scriptures; his texts simply repeatthe polysemantic and ever-opening attributes of biblical texts. It there-fore suggests that the varied levels of its meaning lead to typology; typol-ogy leads to the Catholic Church; and the Catholic Church is theauthority that can determine the validity and importance of thosedifferent levels of meaning.

Amidst all these swirling gossamer overlays of one time and another,

one can hardly miss what Newman demonstrates does not change. InAriansand in much of the Essay, Newmans concern was to show thenature of apostolic traditionwhich he once attributed to Anglicanismand then applied to Catholicism at its expense. His famous seven notesin the Essay are means of explaining how change can occur over a cou-ple of millennia without causing corruptions, how history, in other words,can work horizontally without destroying the metaphysical continuities orconsistent principles that he had once defined as actual spiritual beings.But in the Essay, the chief aid to his argument for an apostolic CatholicChurch is one that, with some anxiety, he had always known could neverwork for the Anglican: the Catholic Church wascatholic. Its universalitygave it a capaciousness for Truth: a capaciousness Newman intends astranshistorical, so that vertical historiography no longer has to make a

connection between disparate historical events by uniting them inHeaven or providence. Rather, one now could understand historicaltypes by positioning them relative to the immanent and ever-presentCatholic Church.

Newman would have read the Catholic Church as typological in themost important sense: that it, as the New Dispensation, was a fulfillmentof the Old. The material body of Christ, which was crucified, was anexemplary type for the mystical body of the Catholic Church. But withinthe history of this New Dispensation, the Catholic Church has notchanged in any essential way; it has simply developed. While Arians andsemi-Arians die and Anglicans and Protestants are born and die in theirown good time, the Church standsnot immutable as God the Father

does in the Catholic concept of the Trinitybut more like an inde-structible fortress: The Church is everywhere, but it is one; sects areeverywhere, but they are many, independent, and discordant (Essay251). Again: In those ancient times the Church was that Body whichwas spread over the orbis terrarum and sects were those bodies which werelocal or transitory (Essay 263). However unstable texts, language, facts,


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history, and human institutions, Catholicism is stable because it canabsorb, subsume, and order them all. It is stable, and so it is the onlyinfallible authorityis the only source ofrealauthority, independent ofthe contingent and ephemeral assents we freely give to other authoritiesout of mere pragmatism.

Newmans anxiety about the possibility of history going all the waydown resolved itself into what may be called both a reappropriation ofand an escape from history. In Catholicism, he found a shelter underwhich to stand, while his understanding of writing, hermeneutics and thenature of historical facts develops within a whirling concept of mutabil-ity and instability. By finding a divinely decreed authority in the worldof

history, he and his Catholic audience were able to evade the epistemo-logical crises that have run roughshod through intellectual debates eversince Newmans time. It is fitting that the young cleric who read Butlers

Analogy should formulate an epistemology of history that, rather thanshunning supernatural and metaphysical realism in favor of materialismand nominalism, simply sought to demonstrate by facts that ideas werereal agents in the world properly interpreted only by a visible church.Like the mystery of the Incarnation itself, Newmans historiographyinsists that spiritual and divine beings, material beings, and consciousnessitself all have a literal reality. There are of course real differencesbetween these things. Different kinds of truth, of fact, require differentmethods of interpretation and understanding, different sciences. But the-ology is the foremost of them; far from deserving to have its relevance

questioned by historians, it was to be the foundation for the proper exer-cise of their discipline and all other disciplines. Theology vouchsafed thecapacious, universalizing method of exegesis of scripture, history, and so,by default, all facts:

There is no one aspect deep enough to exhaust thecontents of a real idea, no one term or proposition whichwill serve to define it; though of course one representationof it is more just and exact than another, and though whenan idea is very complex, it is allowable, for the sake ofconvenience, to consider its distinct aspects as if separateideas. (35)

While the brave new worlds of the Utilitarians and Evangelicals wereinsisting upon one zealous cognitive pathway to Truth, Newman was lay-ing out an intricate argument that demonstrated such a narrowing mightactually put the possibility of knowledge beyond reach. The modernworld, in enlightening itself to a single concept of rational thought, was


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would in fact make knowledge impossible, and leave each individual tothe pathetic hut of private judgment and the repetitious nightmare of hisopinions.

NOTES

1 It would be impossible to provide a comprehensive bibliography of such litera-

ture. For one ample source, see Jenkins.

2 This study of Newmans historiography anticipates a study (in progress) of

Newmans influence on the structure of Joyces Ulysses. In this article I focus on

the importance of Newmans thinking for the historical Catholic Church; in the

next, I shall examine the way in which his work informed the structures ofJoyces novel and, through it, literary modernism in general.

3 See Benjamin for Andersons source for this concept.

4 See Lubac.

5 Gauri Viswanathan has critiqued Newmans efforts to reconcile national and

Catholic identity in Outside the Fold. In doing so, she presumes that Newmans

conversion was an act of dissent and that Newman himself should have

treated it as such. But Newman understood England as in dissent; as a Catholic

convert, he had merely restored himself to orthodoxy. Viswanathans insightful

treatment of Newman is compromised by a postcolonial position of being per-

petually in the opposition, as if truth and institutional power could never be on

the same side.

6 See Poovey.

WORKS CITED

Auerbach, Erich. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. New York: Meridian, 1959.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Dupr, Louis. Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture.

New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Gilson, Etienne. The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre

Dame Press, 1991.

Jenkins, Arthur H.John Henry Newman and Modernism. Sigmaringendorf, Germany:

Glock und Lutz, 1990.

de Lubac, Henri.Medieval Exegesis. Vol. 1 ofThe Four Senses of Scripture. Grand Rapids

MI: Eerdmans, 1998.

Newman, John Henry.Apologia Pro Vita Sua. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968.

. The Arians of the Fourth Century. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1919.

Facsim. ed. Eugene OR: WIPF & Stock, 1996.

.An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Notre Dame IN: University of

Notre Dame Press, 1989.

. The Idea of a University. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press,

1989.


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Poovey, Mary.A History of the Modern Fact. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press,

1998.

Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1985.

Viswanathan, Gauri. Outside the Fold. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Williams, Rowan. Introduction. The Arians of the Fourth Century, by John Henry

Newman. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.

. NewmansAriansand the Question of Method in Doctrinal History. In

Newman after a Hundred Years. Ed. Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill. Oxford, England:

Clarendon Press, 1990.


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doctrinal development and the demons of history the historiography of john henry newman

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