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Development or Corruption?

by Dr. M. Katherine Tillman

How do we know that Catholic teaching truly represents the faith of the ancient Church?

As Divine Revelation advances through time, the Spirit guides us into a deeper understanding of unchanging truths. This is how Catholic doctrine develops.

Doctrine does not change. In change, the form of a thing is different in substance from that of another preceding thing: the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ. Nor does doctrine evolve, in the modern sense of the term. In biological evolution, the form of a thing is new and different, arising out of a previous form: a dog evolves from a wolf.

What doctrine does is develop. In development, the thing remains the same but, invested in history, it is further unfolded, articulated, delineated, and intensified. For example, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception lately affirmed of the Blessed Virgin Mary fittingly enunciates and further develops the declaration of her as Mother of God.

As Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman, the nineteenth century English scholar and convert from Anglicanism writes, It changes . . . in order to remain the same (Dev, 40).

What Is the Difficulty?

Newman's two main writings on the subject of development are his 1843 Oxford University sermon, The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrines (US), and his 1845 book, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Dev). Although Newman was not the first to formulate this principle, which, he wrote, has at all times, perhaps, been implicitly adopted by theologians (Dev, 29), he was the first to argue with such studied detail and to test this hypothesis to account for a difficulty (Dev, 30) with such originality, subtlety, and permanent influence.

The difficulty for which Newman sets forth his hypothesis is this: From the words and half sentences of a few simple fishermen of Galilee two millennia ago, we have the creeds and confessions, doctrines and dogmas, the systems of theology, forms of worship, and varied institutions of worldwide Christianity today.

How did all of this come to be?

The question being raised here is whether the Catholic faith, as now held, is logically, as well as historically, the representative of the ancient faith.

The Sermon on development deals with the implicit, tacit, or mental locus of the Christian Idea before and as it becomes explicitly expressed verbally, either in the individual's own mind or speech, or in the language and doctrine of the Church, whereas the Essay on development deals more with the explicit development or realization of the Christian Idea in the public, historical life of the community.

The Sermon is more concerned with how developments emerge from and relate to the Revelation of Scripture. We might even say the Sermon is in search of Tradition, for Newman is still an Anglican in 1843.

The Essay, on the other hand, is more focused upon Tradition itself, Tradition as made up of the actual continuity of doctrinal development, for Newman is all but a Catholic in early 1845.

How Does Doctrine Develop?

Newman begins the great Essay by stating what no one can deny: that Christianity is an objective fact in the world's history; that Christianity has long since passed beyond the thoughts of individual minds, making the entire world its home and public property of its sacred words. Roman Catholicism, he argues, is the historical heir of the Christian tradition in its fullness. The Protestantism of the Reformation is not a historical religion, he states, in the sense that it forms a Christianity from the Bible alone and falls back on the private judgment of the individual as the sole expounder of its doctrine (Dev, 6).

Rather, maintains Newman in an often-quoted phrase, To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant (Dev, 8).

The theory of development is based on human nature and its embeddedness in history.

. . . 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, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation. (Dev, 29-30)

The development of an idea, from its inward contemplation in the individual or in the bosom of the Church, to its external expression and formulation in doctrines and creeds is thus the germination and maturation of some truth on a large mental field. The process is a development only if the assemblage of aspects, which constitute its ultimate shape, really belongs to the idea from which it began (Dev, 38).

Five Kinds of Development

Newman delineates five kinds of development in ideas: political, logical, historical, ethical, and metaphysical (Dev, 54). The Episcopate, for example, would be an instance of political development; the doctrine of the Mother of God of logical development; the determination of the date of our Lord's birth historical development; the holy Eucharist moral or ethical development; and the Athanasian Creed metaphysical development. All five kinds taken together are ways in which the Catholic idea, or the Christian idea, develops through historyremaining all the while a work in progress, ever but approximating its Great Object.

These doctrines [and all other doctrines of the Tradition] are members of one family, and suggestive, or correlative, or confirmatory or illustrative of each other. One furnishes evidence to another, and all to each of them; if this is proved, that becomes probable; if this and that are both probable, but for different reasons, each adds to the other its own probability . . . (Dev, 93).

Personal religious faith is seen, then, as the implicit storehouse of the faith of the Church and as the necessary origin of explicitly stated doctrines. In its doctrines, the Church gives developed, explicit voice to what is always already believed in the hearts of the faithful, though it may remain vague, implicit, and even unconscious in the mind of the individual believer.

Mary is the pattern of this faith, as she kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart (Lk 2:19, US, 312). Thus she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, weigh, define, as well as to profess the Gospel (US, 313).

Seven Tests for Corruption

Newman sets down his famous seven tests, notes, or tokens of fidelity in the genuine development of an idea: Notes of varying cogency, independence and applicability, to discriminate healthy developments of an idea from its state of corruption and decay (Dev, 171).

There is no corruption if it retains one and the same type, the same principles, the same organization; if its beginnings anticipate its subsequent phases, and its later phenomena protect and subserve its earlier; if it has a power of assimilation and revival, and a vigorous action from first to last (Dev, 171). He applies these notes to particular doctrines in order to distinguish them from corruptions, that is, from deviations in the lines and structures of logical development.

Only living, organic things can know corruption, which is the breaking up of life, preparatory to its termination (Dev, 170).

Change She Cannot

Both development and corruption are readily suggested by the analogy of physical growth and decay. The parts and proportions of the developed form, however altered, correspond to those which belong to its rudiments. The adult animal has the same make, as it had on its birth; young birds do not grow into fishes, nor does the child degenerate into the brute, wild or domestic, of which he is by inheritance lord (Dev, 171-72). This, of course, precludes the notion of evolutionary development, referring as it does to individual embryonic development and not a fundamental change of type, as in evolution.

Having argued in detail that modern Catholicism is the legitimate and necessary growth of the doctrine of the Early Church, Newman concludes the Essay on Development by bringing together in ironic agreement the Church Fathers and the revilers of Christianity in his own time:

Change she cannot, if we listen to St. Athanasius or St. Leo; change she never will, if we believe the controversialist or alarmist of the present day (Dev, 444).

Dr. M. Katherine Tillman

Dr. M. Katherine Tillman is professor emerita in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. She has written extensively on the life and work of Blessed Cardinal Newman. Her forthcoming book is John Henry Newman: Man of Letters (Marquette University Press).

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