Abstract
The odour of sanctity has settled heavily over Newman studies. Personal devotion has become hopelessly entwined with scholarship, critics are tarred as heretics, and hagiography has all too often replaced historical inquiry. Too much effort has been expended on the marginal or the unknowable or the celebratory and too little on what the surviving sources can reveal about Newman’s life, thought, and times. C. Michael Shea’s excellent new book is different. He has ignored the debates of the last 30 or 40 years to produce a densely researched, closely argued, and genuinely revelatory account of an important aspect of Newman’s career. His Newman is neither saint nor sinner, but rather an historically significant figure who lived in a particular time, read particular things, and existed in a particular set of contexts. This is much more interesting, and ultimately much more convincing, than hagiographical pieties or psychohistorical speculations. Shea’s apparently modest aim is to understand and describe how Newman’s idea of doctrinal development was received in the decade after his conversion, primarily but not exclusively in Rome. But surely this has been done? Did not Owen Chadwick cover this ground long ago in his classic study From Bossuet to Newman? What could he have missed? The answer is almost everything. Among other things, Shea contextualizes Newman’s argument with Orestes Brownson, of which Chadwick made so much, and which in reality amounted to so little, and insists on the influence on Newman of, among others, Nicholas Wiseman and Johann Adam Möhler. The sections on Wiseman are some of the most important in the book: in Shea’s convincing account, Wiseman emerges not only as an avid defender of Newman’s Essay on the development of Christian doctrine but as a crucial intellectual influence on the ideas that underpinned it. This is achieved through a careful excavation and close reading of Wiseman’s published and unpublished theological works and private correspondence, which is of course exactly the sort of thing that historians are meant to do. That Shea appears to be the first to have done so is telling, especially considering the decades of scholarly attention that Newman’s Essay received, and especially because Wiseman’s central role in its development was hiding in plain sight. Shea is similarly diligent in examining the situation in Rome. This is the heart of the book: Shea has immersed himself in the world of papal Rome, its schools, factions, and theologians. He appears to have read everything, in multiple languages, and in great depth. This is an enormous novelty in Newman studies, which has tended, not unlike the great man himself, to not much notice developments beyond the English Channel. The fruits of this approach are immediately apparent: Shea demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that Newman’s theory of doctrinal development was well received in Rome because it was in its outlines already current in Roman theology. Figures such as Giovanni Perrone (by far the most important Roman theologian of his era) largely accepted his arguments because they already believed them to be true. When criticism was levied—and it undeniably was—the focus was not on the concept of doctrinal development as such but on Newman’s account of the relationship between faith and reason. Even Pius IX, hardly the most progressive of theologians, may for a time have broadly accepted Newman’s ideas. Certainly their influence can be discerned in the justifications advanced for the promulgation of the definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. It was only in the decades that followed that Newman’s intellectual influence began to fade under the growing influence of a Neoscholasticism that was distinctly uncomfortable with ambiguity. This suggests another, wider point about the Holy See in the 19th century: there was a very real difference between the church of Gregory XVI and that of Pius IX and his successors, and the court of the former was rather more interesting, more flexible and more intellectually fertile than is often assumed. Just like Nicholas Wiseman, Gregory XVI and his legacy rewards sustained attention. In terms of Newman scholarship this is all almost entirely new: as Shea points out, Chadwick’s narrative and the literature that it informed ‘can no longer be sustained.’ This is unduly modest: From Bossuet to Newman can now safely be consigned to the shelf reserved for prose classics of residual antiquarian interest. What C. Michael Shea has demonstrated is how much there is to learn about even so well-studied (and revered) a figure as John Henry Newman if only one is prepared to look, to travel, and to learn foreign languages. This is historical theology at its finest. Perhaps Newman studies has turned a corner.