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The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
WOF 515: Developments Contrasted with Corruptions (6 of 12)
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Welcome back to the Word on fire show. I'm Dr. Matthew Petrusyk, senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the Word on Fire Show. Thank you as always for joining us. Friends, in honor of St. John Henry Newman's recently being named a Doctor of the Church, we're bringing you Bishop Barron's entire Word on Fire Institute lecture series on John Henry Newman. Throughout these next several weeks, we'll dive deep into one of Bishop Barron's spiritual and intellectual heroes. As always, enjoy.
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We're continuing our study of the essay on the development of Christian doctrine. We saw last time that it's one of the great strokes of genius, I think, in Newman what we consider a more liberal point of view, right. The doctrine unfolds and develops, calls for, in fact, demands a more conservative point of view. Namely, there has to be an infallible authority to determine the difference between evolution and corruption. Newman is conservative because he's liberal, if I can put it that way. It shows how he contains within himself some of the warring elements that we see even in the conversation today. Think again a bit. Umpiring image, I think, is the most helpful. The umpire is not there to shut down the play. Right. If an umpire is over umpiring a game, he wrecks the game. If an umpire, or let's say a referee in basketball is calling every little infraction, let's say in a game of, you know, the kids are playing, he'll wreck the game. You can over referee, but you can also under referee. If you under referee, then the game also collapses. What the development of ideas calls for is this infallible authority. And see, Newman, here's the point, saw both of those on display in Catholicism. It wasn't playing the Protestant game of, let's go back to the beginning. It wasn't playing the Anglican Vincent of Laurens game. It acknowledged doctrinal development under the tutelage of an infallible authority. And he felt that was the right combination. Okay? Now, is the authority in question simply operating arbitrarily? No. Just as a referee or an umpire is operating according to the rules of the game. Right. The umpire is not just saying, hey, I'll decide what game we're going to play. I'll redefine basketball because I'm getting tired of. No, no. He so internalized the rules of basketball that he knows how to discipline the flow of the game. Okay. In a similar way, Newman says there are seven notes that determine the legitimacy of the development of doctrine. It's really under the aegis of these notes that a legitimate authority is making its decisions. So this final lecture now on the essay on development, I want to just go briefly through the seven notes and man, are they helpful in our own ruminations today about developments within the Church? Is that a corruption or is that a development? Well, Newman's notes, I think, are very helpful. Okay, here's the first one. The first note he calls preservation of type. Preservation of type, a legitimate development, has the same structure and form as its antecedent. Okay, so you say, well, this is something kind of new, but does it have the same basic structure and form of what came before it? Then it's a legitimate development. Here's a quote. Small are a baby's limbs, a youth's are larger, yet they're the same. So even as a little baby grows into a teenager and the arms become much, much larger, longer, yet their form and structure, their type, remains the same. I find this really helpful. He uses a cool illustration, Chaucer's depiction of a good parish priest from the Canterbury Tales and Goldsmith's depiction of a good parish priest in the 18th century. They're separated by centuries and yet we can recognize the type. We can say, oh, yeah. In both cases, though expressed very differently, though in very different cultural settings, they're both describing the essential type of a good parish priest. Now, Newman, always careful, always nuanced, observes. This is not to imply there aren't sometimes enormous differences between an antecedent and a development, even though the type has been preserved. Example, I'm quoting. A butterfly is the development, but not in any sense the image of the grub. We'd say caterpillar for grub. So butterfly, beautiful, colorful, luminous butterfly is indeed the development of the caterpillar, but by no means its image. Right? So there can be extraordinary difference even though the type has been preserved. Furthermore, ideas may remain fundamentally the same, though their mode of expression can change rather dramatically. I refer here to John XXIII's famous opening address at the Second Vatican Council when he said, the age old faith remains the same, but the manner in which we express it has changed. I mean, Newman sees that point very clearly. Now turn this thing around, as Newman is wont to do. By the same token, real corruptions, that is to say, a real change of type, might bear a striking superficial similarity to what came before it, even though it has fundamentally changed. Example, the Roman Republic devolved into the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was not the preservation of the type, of what came before it. But yet at the surface level, at first glance, all the offices were in place. Most of the titles were the same, most of the political positions were the same. But yet the whole thing had really changed. So preservation of type. But we got to be careful how we assess that second note. Newman says to determine the difference between a real evolution and a corruption. The second note is continuity of principles. In a valid development, the principles remain the same from beginning to end. Now, what does he mean by a principle? Think of axioms in geometry. Principles are the abstract and general norms that inform doctrine, like the basic axioms of theology, the structuring elements. So even as things unfold, these structuring elements remain the same. The principles themselves can't change. Newman speaks of a people losing its spirit and what's happened there. But a people has kind of lost the animating principle. Same is true at the level of doctrine. I won't have time to go into all of them, but let me just name some of them. Newman enumerates the principles of Christianity. Principle of dogma. We've seen, right? If suddenly, hey, we don't care about dogma anymore, that's a corruption ipso facto, because a principle's been compromised. Second, one principle of theology, a properly developing Christianity, thinks stubbornly about its faith. His image, Mary, reflecting on these things in her heart, right? Once the Church says, hey, who cares about theology? That's the corruption we're dealing with. The sacramental principle we've seen is dear to Newman, right? Visible things are the real channels of invisible grace. Once you say sacraments don't matter, that's a corruption. That's not a development. The principle of grace, the conviction that God wants us to have a real share in his life. If you deny that. And Newman would have seen forms of Protestantism denying it. Luther's simul justus et peccator. That I'm at the same time justified and a sinner, yet I remain a sinner even as God declares me just. Newman would have seen that as a corruption because it compromises the principle of grace. Just a couple more. The principle of asceticism. What's that? That a real change is possible only through a mortification of our lower nature. I think of the Church after Vatican ii, when we really de emphasized this principle of asceticism, you know, hey, God loves you. Everything's okay. Just relax. You're fine. No, the minute you do that, you're dealing with a corruption, not a development. The principle of sanctification, that matter as well as mind, are capable of real holiness and transformation. Again, just giving you a Sketch. That'd be a talk for another day just to walk through the nine principles. But the point here is, when they're preserved, we've got a development. When they're compromised, that's a corruption. Okay, third note. I love this typical Newman esque here. The third note is what he calls the power of assimilation. A power. A proper development has the power to assimilate the intellectual and cultural environment around it. Now, the image being used here, it's a very organic one. Think of an animal that is healthy. A healthy animal resists what it must in its environment, right? That means it can hold off its enemies. It can refrain from eating things that are poisonous, et cetera. It resists what it has to. But a healthy organism can assimilate what it needs from the environment. It can take in nutrients, it can adapt to the environment. So Newman says, a living idea, beautiful. A living idea is one that resists what it has to from the intellectual environment. But it can take in what it can. It can confidently assimilate to itself what it finds in its environment. Here's a couple of nice quotes. The stronger and more living is an idea, the more able it is to dispense with safeguards and to trust to itself against the danger of corruption, animal going forth with health and so on. See, Newman, I'm going to date myself here, but, you know, in the movie Gone with the Wind or in the book, there's this character, Aunt Pitty Pat, who's. She's always nervous about everything. Any little thing throws Aunt Pitty Pat, you know, for a loop and she faints away. And when the Civil War comes, she's hopeless, right, because the slightest little thing sends her. Well, there's a kind of Aunt Pittipat quality sometimes to believers, as though everything in the environment is just a threat and the church can't possibly take. Oh, my goodness. And I'm going to faint. No, no, the church is not like Aunt Pittipat. I mean, it goes forth boldly and with confidence to meet the culture. I've quoted before from Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian who said the church goes out mit klingenden spiel in his German, which means like with fife and drum. Well, that's the way a boldly confident idea goes forth, able to assimilate its environment. Here's Newman. Watch the beauty of the prose here. As strong frames exalt in their agility and healthy constitutions throw off ailments. So parties or schools that live can afford to be rash and will sometimes be betrayed in into extravagances yet are brought right by their inherent vigor. Beautiful images painting there of a healthy organism, a healthy animal going forth maybe sometimes eats something that it shouldn't, you know, but its very health allows it to throw off that challenge, you know, mit Klingendem spiel with fife and drum. So that's a mark of a properly developing Christianity, is it has the power of assimilation. Very important. Okay, fourth note. Newman says what he calls logical sequence. Now, it's a technical point he's making, but an interesting one. He said very often in the history of the Church great geniuses think of, you know, this is Chrysostom, and think of Augustine and Aquinas. Great geniuses will intuit something. They'll see the way forward. They'll say, oh, yeah, this is the trajectory of that idea. It's only later that someone comes along and kind of puts in orderly and logical sequence. Like, oh, yeah, I can see now, step by step how we got from that idea to this idea. The genius kind of saw it right away. But later a person comes along and can lay out in careful logical sequence how. How we got from A to B that logical sequence is a sign of a proper development. Let's say you're a religious genius and you intuit, hey, we gotta leap over there. But then later on someone goes, yeah, but I know he's a genius and I know that was a kind of interesting move. But actually, you can't get from here to there. That way we can honor the great geniuses in our tradition but also say. Also caution them, you know, sports analogy. Are there some people, you know, Michael Jordan comes to my mind as a Chicago one. What Michael Jordan did frequently on the basketball court when I was learning the game was called Traveling Is the way Michael would approach the. Well, no, that sounds. That's traveling when I was learning the game. But he did it. He was like a genius in basketball. Might a more minor figure later on say, well, you know, actually, that's not a legitimate way to do it. So it goes in the history of ideas. Here's a nice quote or first an observation. Robert Bellarmin, who was a very significant Catholic theologian around the time of the Renaissance but not at the level of an Aquinas or Augustine. But he says Bellarmine's achievement was to show the logical sequence that actually obtains in some of the great intuitive leaps of the earlier tradition. And that's no small thing. Anyway, I think it's an interesting test for the development of doctrine is can you lay out the logical progression From A to B, if you can, development if you can't. It might be a corruption I wanted to find. There's a quote where he talks about the process going forth by means of lesser yet more logical souls. So they're not great intuitive geniuses, but they're logical and therefore they're playing that role. Fifth note that determines the difference between a development and corruption Newman calls anticipation of its future. Very interesting idea here. So as we've seen ideas unfold over time, they display various aspects of themselves. Now, for certain reasons at a given time, one aspect might come forth and be received with special interest. People are ready for that aspect of the idea. But sometimes an idea will show an aspect of itself that people aren't ready for. It's too much to take in. They're not culturally able to appropriate it yet. Maybe its time is centuries later. But here's what Newman finds intriguing. If centuries later we can look back and say, you know what? That idea did kind of present itself, but it just wasn't accepted at the time. Some people did indeed talk about this aspect of the idea, though the Church as a whole didn't accept it. So now maybe it's five centuries later when it reasserts itself. If I can look back and say, you know, there it was a long time ago, that's a sign that it's a legitimate development. It's interesting, isn't it? It's like there's a stubbornness to an aspect of an idea, and if it showed itself a long time ago and then got suppressed and now rises again, that's an indication we're dealing with a legitimate development and not a corruption. It's interesting how people often will appeal to this intuitively by saying, well, you know, so and so. A long time ago actually said something like that. Oh, yeah, you're right. But, you know, no one took them seriously then. We weren't ready for it then, then. But yet it appeared. That's an indicator anyway, that we're dealing with a development and not a corruption. Here's a nice quote Newman says here and there, definite specimens of advanced teaching should very early occur which in the historical course are not found till a later day. That's much more elegantly expressed. What I was just trying to say. Sixth note of a legitimate development Newman calls conservative action upon its past. This is a simple idea, but very clarifying. An evolution which simply contradicts what came before. It is certainly a corruption. So, oh, no, it's a development of ideas. No, but it's directly repugnant to what came before it. That can't be a development. That's got to be a corruption. Newman says a true evolution is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects the body of thought from which it proceeds. Now, this is interesting because, see, people can wrap themselves in the mantle of Newman's theory here and say any old thing, that's a legitimate development. No, if it's completely opposed to what came before, that can't be a development. That's called a corruption. You know, Newman's great grammar of assent, as we'll see, is a very interesting reflection on this because he'll notice how Christianity represents the assimilation and development of many themes within paganism. Good, good. The Church is able to do that. It's not directly repugnant to it. It's an assimilation of it. If it is, then we're dealing with a real devolution. Okay, last one. Last of the seven notes Newman calls chronic vigor. I always thought, by the way, it was a good name for a rock band. Chronic vigor. Here's the citation from this section of the essay. Chronic. Newman says, the chance of slow corruption does not strike them. Things that are bad tend to go bad quickly. That seems to be the indication here, to be honest with you. Of the seven notes is the one I find least convincing. I think there are heresies, devolutions, corruptions that are very enduring. Think of the enduring quality of Gnosticism. It's from the very earliest days up until today. I can name a number of great heresies that I think do have chronic vigor, if I can put it that way. So I don't know. It's the one that, of the seven, I find least convincing. But that's the final one. Here's a quote. I'll bring this to a close with this. That's really useful as Newman sums up this section. In order for something to be a real development, it must be seen as one in type, one in its system of principles, one in its unitive power toward externals, one in its logical consecutiveness, one in the witness of its early phases to its later, one in the protection which it later extends to its earlier, and one in its tenacity. Okay, there they are, all seven notes. The good authority in the Church is using these seven notes to judge the difference between evolutions and devolutions. Without the authority under the aegis of these seven notes, you will not be able to make that distinction, and the Church will suffer because of it. Once all of this is together in one package. We have a legitimate situation. And this is precisely what Newman saw in Roman Catholicism.
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Matthew Petruzek, here again. Thanks so much for joining us on the Word on Fire show. As always, if you'd like to learn more about how Word on Fire can help you grow closer to Christ and become a better evangelist with and for others, visit institute.wordpressfire.org that's institute.WordPress.org we'll see you next time. And God bless and protect you.