Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England Charles M. Stang Benjamin John King Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 Pp. xvii + 289. $100.00. This book surveys John Henry Newman's (1801–1890) lifelong study of the Alexandrian tradition with an eye to understanding both how he consistently turned to the Alexandrians as a resource for his own Anglican, and later Catholic, theological agenda and how his reading of the Alexandrians reflected and in turn shaped western historiography of Christian doctrine for many decades to come. Newman was an Alexandrian loyalist from start to finish, even as his tastes shifted over the years from the pristine pre-Nicene faith of Origen to the architects of conciliar orthodoxy, Athanasius and Cyril, and finally to his later tryst with Rome and a "scholasticized" Athanasius. King bucks a certain trend by refusing to read Newman through two stages, the Anglican and the Catholic, and charts instead a tripartite chronological frame: (1) the 1830s, when Newman operates with a "twofold system of doctrine"; (2) the 1840s and 1850s, when Newman deploys the notion of the "development" of doctrine; and (3) the 1860s and 1870s, when Newman increasingly saw doctrine as a "theological science." What cuts across these periods, however, is Newman's conviction that there is a compelling analogy between the fourth and fifth centuries, on the one hand, and the nineteenth, on the other. In other words, he feels as if the forces arrayed against the church (of England or of Rome) in his own day—namely liberalism and secularism—are deeply aligned with those forces arrayed against the church of Athanasius and, later, Cyril—Arianism and Nestorianism. The thinnest film, as it were, seems to separate the two beleaguered orthodox communities, and so he consistently turns to the Alexandrians for solace and guidance in his own perceived struggles on behalf of right belief and faithful authority. During the first phase, Newman's heroes were the pre-Nicene authors, especially Origen. He substantiated this elevation of the pre-Nicenes by what King calls a "twofold system of doctrine," according to which there were two categories of doctrine: the "Apostolic" or "Episcopal," which was unchanging, necessary to salvation, and concerning which the pre-Nicenes were consistent and unfaltering, [End Page 339] and the "Prophetical," which was dynamic and responsive to challenges. His preference for the pre-Nicenes can be seen in his assigning the belief that "God is three persons in one" to "Apostolic" doctrine, while the consubstantial relationship between persons (homoousios) falls into "Prophetic" doctrine. In fact, as Rowan Williams argues in his recent introduction to Newman's Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), the twofold system of doctrine implies that the Nicene formula is an arid and technical, if ultimately necessary, explanation of what the pre-Nicenes richly and dynamically confessed in a variety of idioms. The hero of the second phase, however, was undoubtedly Athanasius. Already in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), just as Newman was converting to Roman Catholicism, he was pushing Origen to the periphery of the orthodox center and faulting him for his hesitations avant la lettre regarding homoousios. King acutely notes that this shift to "development" is something of a shibboleth, for, as he puts it, "Newman's 'development' is shorthand for the triumph of Athanasian orthodoxy—an orthodoxy which, in the way he presents it, allows little room for complexity or dynamism" (185f.). One of the threads running through the first and second phases of Newman's Alexandrian enthusiasms is a peculiar geographical configuration of orthodoxy and heresy. Already in the 1830s, Newman could not countenance the fact that Arius, the heretic par excellence, was in fact an Alexandrian. Rather than imagine that Alexandria might have been home to more than one theological tradition, the Athanasian-Cyrillian line, Newman redrew the Mediterranean map such that Arius was, in his temperament and training, an Antiochene and so a descendent of the dubious line of Lucian of Antioch and Paul of Samosata. By prying Arius away from the Alexandrian context in...