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2009 Cardinal Newman Lecture, Newman College, University of Melbourne

By Dr Neil Ormerod,

Dean of Theology and Philosophy

It is now over 40 years since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. Those of us who lived through its years can attest to the immediate impact it had on our lives. Changes in liturgical and sacramental practice spread through the church like wild fire. For some it was liberating, for some aggravating and for all disorienting. Change had become the order of the day after centuries of stability. We would often hear appeals to the “spirit of the Council” as justification for the wide variety of changes we faced. Few who lived through that period would doubt the epochal significance of the Council or the magnitude of its impact on the life of the Church, from the smallest country parish to the Vatican itself.

Yet increasingly the significance of the changes produced by the council has been subject to debate. On the one side there is the Bologna school of church history which emphasises the “rupture” of the council, the ways in which the council was discontinuous with what went before. On the other side is a more official interpretation which so emphasises the continuity as to rule out any possibility of discontinuity. As early as 1985 then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated that there was no “before” and “after” in relation to the council, while more recently John Paul II stated in 2000 that “to read the council as if it marked a break with the past ... is decidedly unacceptable”. These divergent, indeed dialectically opposed, interpretations of such a major event may cause us to pause and reflect at a deeper level as to the nature of the debate and the issues that underlie it.

And lest we think of this as a remote or academic debate we need only witness the recent events in the St Mary’s parish in South Brisbane. At the core of that conflict lies a proper understanding of the significance of the Council and the changes, and the limits of those changes, it introduced into Church life. Indeed it is very difficult to conceive of such a conflict arising prior to the event of the Council.

Let us begin then with the language of continuity and rupture/discontinuity. What exactly does this particular metaphor seek to express? The underlying image is, it seems to me, mathematical. One variable as measured over time either changes smoothly or jumps to a different level. But what is it exactly that is changing over time in the situation we are considering? And how do we measure whether what is changing over time is changing “continuously” or jumping “discontinuously”?

If we were to move out of the religious sphere for a moment and ask ourselves similar questions in relation to other major historical events, it might shed some light onto the difficulties our discussion engenders. If we were to talk about the scientific revolution, would we say it was continuous or discontinuous with the past? Were the scientific principles which drove it the natural progression of principles already in evidence or were they “new”, a radical departure from previous understandings? What about the industrial revolution with its multiple practical insights into mechanical systems and their application to the production of goods? Were there no similar practical insights prior to that time on which they built, simply extending them into new contexts? To produce a proper response would require a detailed historical analysis of key turning points in the events under question.

Without labouring the point, these examples may help identify some of the issues that need further consideration.

The first is that large scale social and cultural changes are incredibly complex. To attempt to reduce it through a single metaphor such as continuity versus discontinuity is never going to be adequate. Perhaps more importantly the metaphor is itself positively misleading. Human communities are grounded in shared meanings and values. The most important changes in the life of any community are shifts in those meanings and values. But such changes cannot be measured; meaning has no “metric” which would allow us to measure its changes as continuous or discontinuous over time. As sociologist Roy Bhaskar notes, “meanings cannot be measured, only understood”. If in fact the metaphor is misleading then the debate is in principle undecidable and so we can expect it to continue for some time.

The second is that we cannot attempt to deal with the question of the nature of the change at Vatican II unless we can place that change within a larger theory of social and cultural change. Unless we have an account of social and cultural change “in general”, any debate about the nature of the change at Vatican II will be building castles in the sand. If we are to be intelligent and responsible in undertaking such a task then we must delve into the human science, such as sociology and cultural studies, to help us understand what it is that happened at Vatican II. We cannot answer such questions on the basis of purely religious categories alone.

Let me be a bit more explicit. In order to understand the nature of the eucharistic change, Aquinas employed the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident, drawn from a metaphysics of natural substances to develop an account of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist in terms of transubstantiation. In order to understand changes in the meanings and values of human communities, including the particular human community we know as church, we will need to develop a metaphysics or ontology of meaning, so as to understand the being of meaning in historical communities. Of course one may be far from inspired by the present state of social and cultural studies in meeting this challenge. Mostly their categories remain descriptive rather than explanatory, more concerned with gathering data than theoretical constructs which tend to be rejected as “grand narratives”. But such is the goal we need to achieve in order to properly analyse the significance of Vatican II.

My third point is to ask, if the metaphor of continuity/discontinuity is misleading and perhaps meaningless, then what exactly is the debate really about? As biblical historian Ben Meyer pointed out of the early Church,

they did not acknowledge development. They overlooked it. They suppressed its novelty, intent on ways of relocating the creative aspects of their own historical experience, safely and objectively, in God’s eschatological saving act.

And so it has been ever since. In its efforts to remain faithful to the unique saving act of God in Jesus Christ, the Church viewed novelty as deviation from its founding saving truth. To claim rupture or discontinuity is to suggest a departure from God’s saving message. Within such a mindset, discontinuity is code for unauthenticity, at least as the Church has generally thought of it. Even if one might grudgingly acknowledge the possibility of change, I would suggest that the underlying issue is not one of continuity/discontinuity but one of the authenticity or unauthenticity of the development in relation to God’s saving act.

At this stage one might be wondering what the figure of John Henry Newman has to contribute to this debate. What light does he shed on the issue of the proper interpretation of Vatican II? And in particular what does his work “An essay on the development of Christian doctrine” contribute to the matters I have raised?

It is difficult at this distance to remember just what a remarkable contribution Newman made in this work. At a time when the official Roman theology was static and ahistorical, focusing on the absolute givenness of divine revelation, Newman was proposing a process of historical development for Christian belief. Unencumbered by scholastic metaphysical assumptions and trained in historical method, Newman began not with theological a priories but with the historical data. And in that data the evidence of development was patent. It is interesting to note that Newman published his essay in 1845, over ten years before Charles Darwin published, in 1859, his groundbreaking On the Origin of Species. If the timing had been a little different Newman may well have entitled it “The evolution of Christian doctrine” rather than “The development of Christian doctrine”. It was a work truly ahead of its time, the first mature fruits of the impact of historical consciousness on Christian faith. No wonder it was greeted at the time with suspicion in more traditional circles.

What is especially remarkable is that at a time when his more traditional critics viewed the unchanging stability of the Catholic Church as a sign that it was the one true Church – it was those other, Protestant, churches that changed – Newman argued that the developments evident in the Catholic Church were markers that it was the one true Church. Only the true Church would demonstrate the process of genuine doctrinal development he claimed to find in the life of the Catholic Church. It was after all his parting shot at Anglicanism as he moved into Catholicism. As Newman asserts, “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” (present company excepted, of course).

Over one hundred years later the impact of Newman’s work on the development of doctrine was still being felt at Vatican II. American theologian and advocate of a shift in church teaching on religious freedom, John Courtney Murray, argued that the issue of the development of doctrine was “the issue under all issues” faced by the Council. And as church historian John O’Malley has noted, “by 1962 [Newman’s work was] widely accepted as close to the definitive work on the subject”. Nonetheless it was an acceptance which was fiercely resisted among some circles, in particular among senior curial officials who remained largely untouched by the impact of historical consciousness. As O’Malley reminds us, the motto of Cardinal Ottaviani, prefect of the Holy Office, was Semper Idem, “always the same”. There were a small number of council Fathers who were troubled by what they saw as the changes to the Church being introduced by the Council. None more so than Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre who declared the changes heretical and moved into schism.

In the first part of this paper I identified three issues around the present debate on the significance of Vatican II. The first was the complexity of social and cultural change; the second was the need to investigate change in general, through an ontology of meaning; the third was that the underlying issue was not continuity/discontinuity but rather authenticity/unauthenticity. What does Newman’s work contribute to these three issues?

In relation to the first issue, Newman had a distinct advantage over his opponents. His primary training was as a historian; in particular he was steeped in the early Church Fathers. His text is littered with examples drawn from historical sources, both sacred and profane. He has a feel for the warp and woof of historical processes, the flow and development of ideas. Whereas the scholasticism of the day was metaphysically strong, it had remained immune to the issues raised by an emerging historical consciousness. Its static conceptualism left it unable to deal with history in any serious sense, a problem which would reach crisis proportions in the era of Modernism at the turn of the century, another fifty years after Newman’s groundbreaking work. For Newman the complexity of historical, social and cultural change could not be contained in the rigidity of scholastic theology. It is perhaps ironic that Newman could make this major contribution to Catholic thought precisely because he did not grow up within Catholicism.

In relation to the second issue, though Newman does not seek to develop an explicit ontology of meaning, he does recognise that the starting point for any discussion of the development of doctrine must be an account of “change in general”. Far from beginning with purely religious examples he puts before his readers a variety of other changes, what he refers to as a general “process of development in ideas”. In fact he identifies five distinct forms of such development which he names as political, logical, historical, ethical and metaphysical. While the details of these differing forms need not detain us here, it shows us a mind working creatively with historical material to attempt a characterisation of “change in general”. And Newman is not afraid to utilise this account of change in general with respect to the issue of doctrinal development. In fact he cites examples of doctrinal development which will fall into each of the five general categories he identifies:

Taking the Incarnation as its central doctrine, the Episcopate as taught by St Ignatius, will be an instance of political development, the Theotokos of logical, the determination of our Lord’s birth of historical, the Holy Eucharist of moral, and the Athanasian Creed of metaphysical.

This is no one dimensional account of doctrinal development, or a one size fits all approach. Doctrinal developments will be of different types, and it is only through a detailed historical investigation that we will be able to determine the precise type involved. Newman here demonstrates a level of sophistication beyond most contemporary debates on the matter, at least in my opinion.

And in relation to the third issue, in recognition that the basic issue is one of authenticity or genuineness rather than continuity, Newman produces seven criteria for determining the authenticity of doctrinal development as opposed to a corruption of the tradition.

  1. Preservation of type: a criterion based on an organic metaphor of bodily growth;
  2. Continuity of principles: as when new insights and judgments arise out of a fixed set of principles;
  3. Power of assimilation: an ability of adapt to and embrace new perspective leading to new developments;
  4. Logical sequence: though not a great fan of logic in itself, Newman acknowledges it too may play a role in accounting for the development of doctrine;
  5. Anticipation of its future: where explicit elements of future development can be found in much earlier sources development is likely to be genuine;
  6. Conservative action upon its past: where developments go against the grain of earlier positions they are not likely to be genuine but corruptions;
  7. Chronic vigour: ongoing vigour and duration are themselves signs of genuine development, whereas corruptions either burn out quickly or lose life in the longer term.

Further he illustrates each of these criteria with multiple historical examples, both of genuine developments and corruptions.

As a list of criteria I find them fairly eclectic and pragmatic; again Newman is not a systematic thinker drawing conclusions within a theoretical framework; rather he is a highly intelligent thinker responding to the patterns that arise in the historical data. Yet even given this constraint it is significant that when the International Theological Commission published its investigation into the nature and development of dogma, in the 1990 text, “The Interpretation of Dogma”, they could do no better than recall Newman’s criteria on the authenticity of doctrinal development. Such was the power and originality of Newman’s stance that over one hundred and fifty years after it was written it could still be referred to in such a significant theological document as providing one of the best reference points on doctrinal development.

How is it that Newman could be so creative and powerful where others remained stuck within their closed theological systems? I would argue that as well as having a fine historical sense, Newman also demonstrates a remarkable insight into the human heart and mind. As he demonstrates in this masterful work, Grammar of Assent, much as Augustine demonstrates in his Confessions, Newman was familiar with his own interiority, with the inner movements of his own heart and mind. And so he views Christianity not as a theory or a collection of documents but as a powerful and great idea inhabiting the human heart and mind.

The increase and expansion of the Christian creed and ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy and polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion; ... from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and ... the highest and most wonderful truths ... have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.

Development then is to be expected, and growth in our comprehension, leading to new formulations and doctrines, are a normal part of our life as a church. As perhaps one of his most famous quotes from his “Essay on the development of Christian doctrine” reminds us:

In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to change often.

The challenge that Newman’s work puts to us is how to evaluate change, how to discern between genuine development and corruptions which distort and damage the tradition. His list of criteria for such a discernment go beyond the fairly weak metaphor of continuity and discontinuity that dominates our present debate on the significance of Vatican II. And as with any such list of criteria, there is still the question of who applies them. But to explore this issue would require that we consider the other great contribution Newman made to the Second Vatican Council, the notion of the sensus fidei. However that would take us beyond the scope of this present lecture.

It has been suggested that this year may witness the beatification of John Henry Newman. While I do not feel competent to judge his sanctity I do know that there is a clarity and depth to his writings which speak of a more than human inspiration. In terms of his intellectual contribution to the life of the Church he was at least a century ahead of his times. He still has much to teach us. Last year’s lecturer, Fr Frank Brennan recalled Newman’s notorious declaration that he would toast the pope, but conscience first and then the pope. Tonight we toast neither the pope nor conscience, but John Henry Newman and the gift of his ongoing legacy to the Church. And we pray that the Church may find him a worthy candidate for beatification and eventual canonisation.