The Magisterial Minimism of John Henry Newman
John Henry Newman, the latest doctor of the Catholic Church, had an exceptionally productive theological career. He made highly original and influential analyses of the epistemology of belief, the relation of theology to the other academic disciplines, and many other aspects of Christian life.
He also masterfully explained principles for interpreting the Catholic Church’s magisterial statements, setting forth what he called “a wise and gentle minimism.” He by no means supported the belief that Christians may do anything unless it is condemned by the most rigorous and solemn sorts of dogmatic statements (such has been the position, for instance, of many Catholics who support contraception). Newman rather meant to express a “repugnance to impose upon the faith of others more than what the Church distinctly claims of them.” He urged all not to read into doctrinal statements more than they actually say.
In his day, Newman used this principle to defend the Church against those who accused her of opposing basic human rights. Today his guidance is useful for controversies concerning recent magisterial statements that seem to contradict previous ones. Some have concluded that the Church’s moral teachings have changed fundamentally—for better or worse, depending on one’s opinion of the change. Now that Newman has attained preeminent status among the teachers of Catholic doctrine, we ought to consider more closely how his insights can illuminate present disputes about the magisterium’s meaning. We will find, I believe, that much that may seem offensive or contradictory in the Church’s teachings, whether past or present, is not really so.
Pius IX: Opponent of Modernity?
Newman’s method is perhaps best captured in his so-called Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. The work is not a letter, nor is it directed at any opinions of said Duke; it is rather a book that answers a public accusation made by William Gladstone, one of the great prime ministers of Victorian England (whom Newman refrained from attacking point-blank in the book’s title, perhaps out of respect).
Gladstone had alleged that Catholics could not be “trustworthy subjects of the [British] State,” because they obeyed a pope that claimed to be infallible and supreme over their consciences. Moreover, the then-reigning pope, Pius IX, had denounced fundamental principles of modern governments (like Great Britain’s) in his encyclical Quanta Cura and in the infamous Syllabus of Errors. To defend British Catholics’ ability to be both good Catholics and good subjects of Queen Victoria, Newman had to explain and demonstrate the correct way to read the Church’s doctrinal declarations.
The Syllabus of Errors, despite its greater notoriety, is the easier document to defend against Gladstone. Unlike Quanta Cura, it is not an exercise of the pope’s universal magisterium (nor did Quanta Cura explicitly cite it). It was not compiled or edited by the pope, nor was it published in his name; although he did command a certain cardinal to issue it. Moreover, it is a collection of “the principal errors of our times,” no part of which is the pope’s own opinion. Of itself it is effectively, in Newman’s words, “nothing more than the digest of certain Errors made by an anonymous writer” (a theoretical holder of said errors). Even though the Syllabus should be “received with profound submission” for having the pope’s blessing, it “has no dogmatic force.”
In Quanta Cura, however, we hear the pope “speaking officially, personally, and immediately,” and therefore it is dogmatic to some degree. But if one is faithful to Newman’s minimism, one will see that, in the encyclical, “in fact the Pope has not said … what Mr. Gladstone makes him say” on the key point of freedom of conscience. Gladstone claims that the pope has unrestrictedly “condemned those who maintain the liberty of the Press, the liberty of conscience and of worship, and the liberty of speech.” But the encyclical rather condemns the following propositions (condensed by Newman, who adds italics):
[1.] Liberty of conscience and worship is the inherent right of all men. 2. It ought to be proclaimed in every rightly constituted society. 3. It is a right to all sorts of liberty (omnimodam libertatem) such, that it ought not to be restrained by any authority, ecclesiastical or civil, as far as public speaking, printing, or any other public manifestation is concerned.
This “peremptory and sweeping” statement, Newman avers, could not be accepted by any morally sane person, let alone the pope or the prime minister. Taken at its plain meaning, it asserts the right to every sort of liberty: “to give public utterance, in every possible shape, by every possible channel, without any let or hindrance from God or man, to all … notions whatsoever.” If “liberty of conscience” means this, it is “a liberty of self-will” that could justify “regicide, … infanticide, … or free love,” and would soon destroy society. “All that the Pope has done is to deny a universal, and what a universal!”
“Why should the Pope take the trouble to condemn what is so wild?” Newman asks, anticipating Gladstone’s response. “But he does,” is the reply: the pope said what he said, and that is what binds the Catholic conscience. One could speculate about the pope’s private beliefs about what he meant, but that would be irrelevant to the question of what Catholics must believe. One cannot read the pope’s soul directly—only God can do that. Neither can one use draft statements to guess his “real” meaning, since these were not proclaimed to the Church; as with the law, the doctrine that must be obeyed is that which is publicly decreed. As Newman puts it: “the process of defining truth”—of the deliberations of popes and bishops—“is human, it is open to the chance of error; what Providence has guaranteed is only this, that there should be no error in the final step, in the resulting definition or dogma.”
Nevertheless, as Newman suggests in a postscript, perhaps the pope wanted to guard against views that some people of the time did hold effectively, if not fully consciously. John Stuart Mill, Newman’s contemporary and compatriot, supported a radically expansive notion of freedom: he defined it as “pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it”; such freedom deserved no “impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as we do not harm them.” Taken in his literal meaning, Newman points out, Mill says that all sorts of immoral behavior—prostitution, fornication, or other activities between consenting adults—could not be punished or censured by any means: not “even by society, by the press, [or] by religious influence,” let alone by civil law. Newman thinks Mill “had too much English common sense” to reach such a conclusion himself; but the plain meaning of his words can be so interpreted (and many since Mill have done so).
The Council of Trent: Champion of Religious Coercion?
Newman’s “minimism” can also shed light on contemporary questions about what Catholics must believe. Take for example the debate between Thomas Pink and John Finnis regarding the teaching of the Council of Trent, about whether baptismal vows can be enforced by civil penalties—a discussion that, according to some observers, remains unresolved.
Pink has claimed that the Council of Trent (in Canon 14 of the canons on baptism of Session 7), committed the Catholic Church to condoning the use of temporal civil power to enforce supernatural laws (a position that seems to contradict the Second Vatican Council’s Dignitatis Humanae). It did so by anathematizing those who held that “those baptized as little children” may not “be coerced by any penalty into [the] Christian life,” (in Latin, “ad christianam vitam”) “except that they be barred from the … sacraments.”
Finnis in response has pointed out that this proposition is so broad (like what Quanta Cura condemned), that the effect of its condemnation ends up being rather limited. The heretical claim states that there is no penalty beyond refusal of the sacraments that may be applied to the baptized who do not lead a “Christian life.” But “Christian living” encompasses many things: not only the strictly supernatural life of faith, hope, and charity, but also the natural law of justice, which forbids murder, theft, and the like. (This distinction was acknowledged by the same session of the Council, in Canon 7, where it condemned the proposition that “through baptism itself, the baptized become indebted to keeping only faith, but not the whole law of Christ.”) Indeed, Finnis points out, “the greater part” of the law of Christ consists of observing the precepts of the natural law—better known to Jews and Christians as the Ten Commandments. That truth might explain why, until less than a century ago, even lax or merely cultural Christians used the word “christian” as a synonym for simply “moral” or “civilized,” not referring to any dogmas about the supernatural.
Even if this canon is dogmatically binding (and it’s not clear that it is, given that canons are not dogmas but disciplinary legislation, as in “canon law”), its meaning is ambiguous. Some, even most, bishops at the council may have conflated the natural and supernatural aspects of Christian living in their minds, but that confusion is not required by the text. It was left to Dignitatis Humanae to clear up the ambiguity (in a classic case of what Newman called development of doctrine): those aspects of Christian life that are of the natural law (“the just demands of public order”) may—and indeed ought to be—enforced by civil governments; but it would be “evil” (nefas in the Latin) for civil authorities to use “force or fear or other means” to make anyone believe in, or abide by, any properly supernatural truth or law.
Pink objects that it would have been pointless for Trent to condemn those who, in the name of Christian freedom, defended moral libertinism: “Who with any sanity, would oppose the enforcement on the baptized (as on anyone else) of laws against, say, killing?” he asks. But this simply repeats the sort of objection that Newman anticipated from Gladstone, and we should repeat Newman’s response: But that is what the council said and, therefore, that is what the Holy Spirit intended. It is pointless to investigate the records of the council’s discussions to prove what the bishops really meant; that which has magisterial authority is the promulgated statement itself, not the private and ultimately inscrutable motives of those who promulgated it. Trent condemned the very general statement that nothing coercive (beyond being barred from the sacraments) may be used to enforce anything meant by the phrase “Christian life.” It therefore implies logically, not necessarily that all things meant by “Christian life” may be coerced by non-sacramental means, but only that at least some things can.
And as a matter of fact, some Christians in the sixteenth century did effectively hold the radical views Pink finds unthinkable. Antinomians—like Johann Agricola, certain Anabaptists, and other Protestants—thought that when St. Paul taught that Christians were freed from the Mosaic law by grace, he implied that Christians would remain saved even if they disobeyed the natural law. Many antinomians acknowledged that civil law still needed to punish offenders of the natural law, but such an exception seems to be inconsistent with their theology (as John Mill’s relative moral conservatism was at odds with his radical libertarianism). In any case, an antinomian spirit probably inspired such bloody rebellions as John of Leiden’s Kingdom of Muenster and the Peasants’ War, which demonstrated great zeal for “Christian freedom.” Catholic prelates of the time surely would have made the connection between religious antinomianism and civil disorder. Besides, the New Testament shows that antinomians—those who say “all things are lawful” for the Christian—have threatened the Church since its beginnings. Trent’s condemnation, even interpreted in Finnis’s modest manner—so like Newman’s—was not in vain.
A Hermeneutic of Restraint
If more of us exercised Newman’s magisterial “minimism,” public discourse about official Catholic teachings (whether on the death penalty, just war theory, or marriage) might be less volatile. Many alleged inconsistencies in those teachings—whether between past and present magisterial decrees, or between the Church’s faith and ordinary reason—would be revealed to be only apparent. But such restrained hermeneutics are more difficult in our impatient age of lightning-fast digital communications. All the more reason for contemporary Catholics—and members of any religious community—to study carefully their community’s leaders’ actual teachings and, if they wish to remain in that community, to accept them.