Ecclesia Docens et Cogitans: Doctrinal Development and the Illative Sense of the Church

Abstract

Ecclesia Docens et Cogitans:Doctrinal Development and the Illative Sense of the Church Andrew Meszaros (bio) Doctrinal development is most often accounted for by using intellectual categories. When trying to explain what happened when a given doctrine made progress, it is not uncommon to say that the Church thought about or reflected upon the deposit of faith. Given the intellectual dimension of faith, it is no accident that Dei Verbum no. 8 teaches that it is the Church's understanding of the words and realities that has grown. To the extent, then, that we have a single subject thinking, reflecting, and understanding, we personify the Church. Questions arise, however: How, precisely, are we to understand this personification? Is this personification simply a metaphor, or is there something more behind it? And, if there is something more behind it, how are we to deploy the language of personification coherently? The point of this essay is twofold: (1) to gain precision with respect to how we attribute faculties like "conscience" and intellectual virtues like "Illative Sense" to the ecclesial subject (i.e., the Church), and (2) to make sense of how we attribute such activities to the singular subject, "Church," when the Church subsists in her members. I first discuss what it means for theologians to endow the Church with an Illative Sense and, hence, apply an epistemic metaphor to the Church. Then I look more closely at Newman's use of the phrase "mind of the Church." I intend to show that Newman's use of the phrase amounts to an elaborate epistemic image or metaphor rooted in concrete examples of the activity of individual Christian "minds" throughout history. In the final section I argue that Newman's metaphor, i.e., his more historical and concrete usage of "mind of the Church," can be—and indeed needs to be—fruitfully complemented by a stronger analogy, rooted in a more "metaphysical" ecclesiology that affirms the nature of the Church as mystery, as something which cannot be reduced to the sum total of her members, but transcends [End Page 5] them. Such an ecclesiology is typical of figures ranging from Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838) to Scholastically-minded figures such as Charles Journet (1891–1975), Yves Congar (1904–1995), and Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). In other words, Newman's historical application of an epistemic metaphor should be supplemented with attributing to the Church a transcendental "personality." This means moving from an epistemic image (i.e., the "mind" of the Church being simply a metaphorical transposition from the individual person to the collective) to attributing metaphysical personhood to the Church analogically. In short, the Church, according to this view, is a metaphysical subject, endowed with an intellect and liberty, rendering her a person in the proper sense of the word—not an individual person, to be sure, but a collective person. It is my hope that this thesis on the person or personality of the Church can help us address some of the issues in doctrinal—and more relevantly here, dogmatic—development. sensus ecclesiae et sensus illativus One of the great ecclesiological achievements in twentieth-century Newman studies is the advancement of the thesis that the Church is endowed with her own Illative Sense, or that the Church's sensus fidei is her Illative Sense. While Newman himself might not have been explicit about such an identification between the sensus fidei and the Illative Sense, he left so many clues to that effect that it did not take much for subsequent disciples and commentators of Newman to connect the dots. Indeed, there is a wide consensus that the intellectual virtue or perfection that Newman elaborated upon in the Grammar can be rightfully and illuminatingly attributed to the Church. In this section, I unpack how some Newman scholars reached this conclusion and what its implications are when we think about the Church and doctrinal development. First, we must clarify some terms. (Con-)sensus Fidei et Fidelium What makes any clarification of terms difficult is that Newman often uses different words and expressions interchangeably, while also relying on those differences to communicate the nuance that he expects the reader to grasp. So, for example...