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Home , Aleksei Losev, Development of doctrine, Greater Croatia, John Henry Newman, Nicholas Wiseman, Raskol

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

The Relationship between the and the Papal Office

according to and Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of the

School of and Religious Studies

Of The Catholic University of America

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree

Doctor of Sacred Theology

By

Ján Dolný

Washington, D.C.

2016

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The Relationship between the Development of Doctrine and the Papal Office according to John Henry Newman and Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev

Ján Dolný

Director: John Ford, M.A., S.T.D

Development of doctrine is one of the fundamental principles in . It encapsulates the of hermeneutical continuity in the official teachings of the Catholic

Church, whose mission is to faithfully transmit the contents of divine in history. As such, the principle of doctrinal development casts an important light on the theological understanding of Revelation, and the .

The category of doctrinal development was introduced into modern Catholic scholarship by the celebrated work of John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian

Doctrine (18451, 18462, 18783). In this work, Newman employed the epistemology of a developing idea: the identity of revealed truth is preserved in the historical growth of understanding. His presentation of doctrinal development was based on the analogy between the process of a development of religious understanding in the individual mind and the doctrinal development in the Church as a whole. For Newman, the idea of the Church as a living and organic subject of development endowed with has implications for ecclesial structure: most importantly, it absolutely requires a central authority in the Church, the papacy, for effective exercise of the universal teaching office in the Church.

It is less known that a work on the development of doctrine was also written by the

Russian religious , Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev. His 1886 treatise Dogmatic

Development of the Church in Relation to the Question of the Reunification of the Churches defends the Catholic understanding of the development of doctrine against the dogmatic of some Russian Orthodox theologians. In his treatise, Soloviev employed an epistemology of development very similar to that of Newman, in which the identity of an idea is manifest in the organic process of historical development. His presentation of doctrinal development was based on the pneumatological principle of unanimity in the Church, which manifests a special divine-human subject of development in the universal Church. In his subsequent work, La Russie et l’Eglise Universelle (1889), Soloviev elaborated his findings from the treatise on doctrinal development in a powerful apologetic of the in the

Church.

This dissertation investigates the background, the origin and the presentation of doctrinal development in Newman and Soloviev’s theological works. This comparative study is focused especially on the connection between the development of doctrine and the papal office in the thought of both men. Newman and Soloviev’s converging theories of doctrinal development are explored primarily in their original proposition of ecclesiological foundations for the papal primacy in the Church. The insights from the study of Newman and Soloviev’s ecclesiological are then related to more recent developments in ecumenism, particularly as regards the relationship between eucharistic and universal ecclesiologies.

To the memory of my father

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He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. And advanced in wisdom and age and favor before and man.

Luke 2:51-52

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

Teilhard de Chardin

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... xi

INTRODUCTION The Purpose of this Study ...... 1 The Kindred Minds Who Never Knew Each Other ...... 5 This Dissertation and its Contribution ...... 15 Overview of This Dissertation ...... 25 Some Stylistic Asides: Transliteration, Capitalization and Translation ...... 27

CHAPTER 1 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: HIS LIFE AND A HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF HIS IDEA OF DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT ...... 30 Development and ...... 47 Development and ...... 52 Development and the Church...... 56 Development and the Ecclesiology ...... 61 Securus Judicat Orbis Terrarum...... 74 Newman’s University Sermon on Doctrinal Development (1843)...... 83

CHAPTER 2 DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT AND PAPACY IN NEWMAN’S ESSAY ON DEVELOPMENT History of the Publication ...... 90 A Miniature Apologia Pro Vita Sua...... 91 Development in Ideas ...... 98 Rearrangement of the Essay ...... 101 Antecedent Probability and Analogy of Faith ...... 105 Notes of Genuine Doctrinal Development ...... 112 Preservation of Type ...... 114 Infallibility of the Church and Papacy ...... 120 The Relationship between the Development of Doctrine and the Papal Office ...... 126

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CHAPTER 3 VLADIMIR SERGEEVICH SOLOVIEV: HIS LIFE AND A HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF HIS IDEA OF DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT Biography ...... 134 Fuitne Soloviev Catholicus? A Catholic Thinker ...... 170 Fuitne Soloviev Catholicus? A Member of the ...... 178 Development and the Idea of Divine Wisdom ...... 187 Development and Integral Knowledge ...... 194 Theocracy and the Catholic Church ...... 202 Soloviev’s Concept of Dogmatic Development ...... 210

CHAPTER 4 SOLOVIEV’S DOGMATIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHURCH Historical Background and Outline of Soloviev’s Treatise ...... 219 Soloviev’s Controversy with the Slavophiles ...... 221 Religious Unity and the Slavophile ...... 221 The Possible Reunification of the Churches: the Filioque ...... 227 Dogmatic Development—Polemic with T. Stoianov ...... 230 Christian Dogmatic Teaching in Apostolic Times ...... 236 The Apostolic Times ...... 236 Dogmatic Development: the Early Fathers through the Great Ecumenical Councils ...... 239 Limitations of Dogmatic Literalism...... 242 Ecclesiological Foundations of Dogmatic Development ...... 244 The Universal Church and Papacy ...... 244 The Relationship between Development of Doctrine and the Papal Office ...... 267

CHAPTER 5 THE ECCLESIOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTION OF NEWMAN AND SOLOVIEV TO PRESENT-DAY ECUMENISM Introduction ...... 271 Newman and Soloviev’s Idea of Doctrinal Development ...... 272 The Church: a Living Subject of Doctrinal Development ...... 277 Newman and Soloviev’s Understanding of the Papacy as the Guarantor of the Realm Where the Church Can Freely Live, Act and Develop ...... 290 A Proposal: The Church as a Communion, “One Body, One Spirit in Christ” ...... 307

CONCLUSION ...... 331

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Newman ...... 336 Works by Soloviev ...... 336 Selected English and French Translations of Soloviev ...... 337 Magisterial Documents ...... 338 Ecumenical Documents ...... 339 General Bibliography ...... 339

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AAS Acta Apostolicae Sedis. Multiple volumes. : Typis polyglottis Vaticanis, 1909- .

Acta Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani Secundi. Six volumes corresponding to the four sessions; each with multiple parts. Vatican City: Typis polyglottis Vaticanis, 1970-2000.

Apo. Newman, John Henry. Apologia Pro Vita Sua. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909.

Ari. Newman, John Henry. The Arians of the Fourth Century. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908.

AW John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Henry Tristram. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1957.

Dev. (1845) Newman, John Henry. An Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Edited by Stanley L. Jaki. New Hope, KY: Real View Books, 2003.

Dev. (1878) Newman, John Henry. An Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909).

DH Denzinger, Heinrich and Peter Hünermann. Enchiridion Symbolorum: A Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals. English edition: Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash, eds. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012.

ECS Vladimir Solovˈëv: Reconciler and Polemicist. Eastern Christian Studies 2: Selected Papers of the 1998 International Vladimir Solovˈëv Conference held at the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands. Edited by Wil van der Bercken, Manon de Courten and Evert van der Zweerde. Leuven: Peeters, 2000.

ER Vladimir Solovyov: Sophia, God & A Short Tale about the . Translated and edited by Boris Jakim. Middleton, DE: Angelico Press, 2014.

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Ess Newman, John Henry. Essays Critical and Historical. Vols. 1-2. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907.

IK Solovyov, Vladimir. The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge. Translated by Valeria Z. Nollan. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

LD The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman. Edited by C. S. Dessain et al. Vols. 1-10 and 23-32, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973- 2008; vols. 11-22, London: T. Nelson, 1961-1972.

Life Solovyov, Sergei M. Vladimir Solovyov: His Life and Creative Evolution. Vols. 1-3. Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications, 2000.

LOG Solovyov, Vladimir. Lectures on Godmanhood. Translated by P. Zouboff. San Rafael, CA: Press, 2007.

OUS Newman, John Henry. Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the . London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909.

Pisˈma Pisˈma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solovieva [The Letters of Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev]. Vols. 1-4. Edited by Ernest Radlov. St. Petersburg: Obschestvennaia polˈza, 1911.

PL Migne, Jacques Paul, ed. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina. 221 vols. Paris, 1844-1864.

PPS Newman, John Henry. Parochial and Plain Sermons. Vols. 1-8. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907-1908.

PSS Polnoe sobranie sochinenii V. S. Solovieva [Complete Collected Works of V. S. Soloviev]. Edited by A. A. Nosov et al. : Nauka, 2000-.

Ravenna Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, and Authority. 13 October 2007.

RNF Vladimír Sergejevič Solovjov a ruská náboženská filozofia [Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev and Russian Religious Philosophy]. Edited by Ján Komorovský. Michalovce: Spolok sv. Cyrila a Metoda, 2011. ix

RUC Soloviev, Vladimir. and the Universal Church. Translated by W. G. von Peters. Chattanooga: Catholic Resources, 2013.

La Russie Soloviev, Vladimir. La Russie et l’Eglise universelle. Paris: Albert Savine, 1889.

SS Sobranie sochinenii V. S. Solovieva [Collected Works of V. S. Soloviev]. 12 vols. Edited by S. M. Soloviev and E. L. Radlov. Brussels: Zhiznˈ s Bogom, 1966.

VM Newman, John Henry. The Via Media of The Anglican Church Illustrated in Lectures, Letters and Tracts Written between 1830 and 1841. Vols. 1-2. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would have never been completed without the help and support from a number of people. My gratitude goes first of all to Most. Rev. Alojz Tkáč, the Archbishop emeritus, and Most. Rev. Bernard Bober, the Archbishop of Košice, Slovakia, for giving me this opportunity to pursue doctoral studies in theology. Further, I am deeply grateful to the Very Rev. Vladimír Kasan, OSB, and the Benedictine community at Sampor, Slovakia, for trusting in my capability to complete the doctorate and providing me with the necessary time to do so. I must thank the executives of the Office for the Aid to the Church in Eastern and Central Europe at United States Conference of the Catholic Bishops for providing the scholarship covering a large portion of my tuition at the Catholic University of America. A heartfelt thanks belongs to Rev. John T. Ford for having directed this dissertation with an approach combining his first-rank scholarship with the virtues of humanness, class, humor and great patience. I express my gratitude also to my readers: Dr. Michael Root, for his valuable comments and suggestions; and, in very special way, to Rev. Msgr. Paul McPartlan, whose interest in this work provided me a new challenge and inspiration. Msgr. McPartlan’s import in our conversations helped tremendously to bring out the relevance of this research on Newman and Soloviev in the light of present-day ecumenism. Several times throughout the long process of work I had to change my mileu. I feel obliged to thank all the people who have provided me with an environment supportive of both my work and me personally: Rev. Melvin Blanchette, SS, the , and the seminary community of the Theological College at CUA; Msgr. Michael McCarron, the pastor, and the parish community at St. ’s Catholic Church in Williamsburg, VA; and, finally, the Rt. Rev. Dom James Wiseman, OSB, the abbot, and the monastic community at St. Anselm’s Abbey in Washington, DC. I also want to thank Rev. Štefan Migač and his parish of St. Theresa’s Catholic Church in Farmville, VA, and Rev. Mark F. Hughes and his parish community of the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Kensington, MD, for friendship and support I found there while helping out in the ministry as a . xi

I am grateful to people who have offered me financial support and the support of friendship and prayers in my studies: Mrs. Sheila Byrnes, Mr. and Mrs. Emmet Knight, Mr. and Mrs. John Drew, Sasha Eckstein, Renáta Wiegertová, Lenka Repčáková and others of whom I do not know. I thank Fr. Gabriel Young, OSB, of St. Anselm’s Abbey, for his spiritual direction. My deepest appreciation goes to Mrs. Ai Doan Bayorgeon and her husband Kevin, and Mrs. Anna Sullivan and her husband Eugene, for their tireless help, support and hospitality that included sharing their homes. My special thanks belongs to Mrs. Maureen Hurley, Mr. John Drew and Mr. Wesley Sullivan for proofreading my dissertation. My love for the Catholic Church and her theology gave me the decisive impetus for undertaking the work on this dissertation. This love is a fruit of an ongoing journey of friendship with persons who live their lives for Christ, and with whom I have experienced the unanimity in the , which is also an important theme in this dissertation. For the gift of such constitutive friendships, I am bound with gratitude to Fr. Peter Juhás, Fr. Juraj Feník, Fr. Štefan Migač and Fr. Martin Novotný. My utmost gratitude belongs to Sr. Theresa Chau Nguyen, OP, who believed in me and supported me through all those difficult moments when I doubted myself, and with whom I share the sure hope that what we contemplate now in signs will be once possessed in the reality of heaven. Finally, I owe a deepest gratitude to my family, to my mom Agnesa and siblings Martin, Juraj and Veronika with their spouses, for their loving support and prayers. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of our dad, Ján, who passed away four years ago. His amazing charisma as a father, truly iconic of the Father in heaven, taught me a lesson for life that authority is meant to guide the development of those entrusted to it.

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INTRODUCTION

The Purpose of this Study

An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine1 by John Henry Newman (1801-

1890) is known to have made a significant contribution to the genesis of the teaching of the

Second Vatican Council in its dogmatic constitution on divine Revelation Dei Verbum.2 As one of the evident sources of inspiration for the constitution, the Essay assists in its interpretation.

Indeed, Newman’s treatise can be read as an extensive historical and theological commentary on

Dei Verbum.

The most direct influence of the Essay can be seen in the Council’s teaching that sacred

Tradition “develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit” in terms of “a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words that have been handed down [from the Apostles].”3

1 Newman published three editions of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: the first in the fall of 1845; after the first edition sold out, the second—virtually unaltered—followed in 1846; in 1878, he published a third, extensively revised edition, which was subsequently reprinted in the uniform collection of Newman’s works by Longmans, Green & Co. of London. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Newman’s works in this dissertation are to this uniform edition which is available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/index.html. The editions of the Essay referenced in the footnotes throughout this dissertation are indicated by the year of publication: Dev. (1845) and Dev. (1878), respectively.

2 See Ian Ker, Newman on Vatican II (Oxford: , 2014), xi; Andrew Meszaros, “‘Haec Traditio proficit’: Congar’s Reception of Newman in Dei Verbum, Section 8,” New Blackfriars 92/1038 (March 2011): 247-254. See also Joseph Ratzinger, “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation: Origin and Background” in Herbert Vorgrimler et al., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vols. 1-5 (New York: Herder & Herder, 1968), 3: 155-166, at 156.

3 , Dei Verbum [Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation], § 8. All citations from the documents of the Second Vatican Council in this study are from Heinrich Denzinger and Peter Hünermann, Enchiridion Symbolorum: A Compendium of Creeds, 1 2

Dei Verbum declared that “a close connection and communication” exists between Scripture and

Tradition, using a metaphor of streams “flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end.”4 The constitution added the Church’s teaching office is an essential link in this chain:

It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God's most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls.5

Newman’s Essay on Development explains the links among Scripture, Tradition and

Magisterium, mentioned but not elaborated by the dogmatic constitution. First of all, it helps to understand Tradition as the continuity of Revelation in its historical expressions. Development in understanding of the Christian faith as presented by Newman can be seen as “the inner dimension” of Tradition.6 Second, in explicating doctrinal development, Newman’s Essay elucidates the intrinsic connection between Scripture and Tradition. Third, Newman’s view of doctrinal development provides solid theological foundations for teaching authority in the

Church. The idea of doctrinal development in Newman’s Essay presupposes that the Church is endowed with infallibility, which, in turn, calls for the existence of a teaching office in the

Church capable of discriminating between authentic developments and corruptions of doctrine.

Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals, -English edition, edited by Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012); DH 4001-4349.

4 Dei verbum, § 9.

5 Ibid., § 10.

6 Yves M.-J. Congar, Tradition and (New York: Burns and Oates, 1966), 211.

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As stated, “Newman made a decisive contribution to the problem of the relationship between and history in tradition.”7

Last and most important, a fascinating feature of Newman’s Essay is its theological synthesis of doctrinal development as both an epistemology and an ecclesiology. Newman’s understanding of doctrinal development has important implications for ecclesial structure. The teaching office presupposes a hierarchy in the Church. Moreover, for effective exercise of teaching authority on the universal level, a central governing office is necessary. Newman shows that the visible Catholic Church must have a monarchical form, must have the pope.

In his Essay, Newman was thus able to derive the structure of the universal Church from her essential character as the communion that safeguards the historical transmission of divine

Revelation. The Catholic hierarchy with a summit in the central office of authority—the papacy—thus has a proper ecclesiological foundation and justification, and is not merely a matter of political or sociological arrangement. The relationship between doctrinal development and the structure of the Catholic Church is indeed the main ecclesiological argument in

Newman’s Essay. Surprisingly, Newman’s original ecclesiological synthesis, the basic outline of which is enshrined in Dei Verbum in terms of the mutual connections between Scripture,

Tradition and Magisterium, has received virtually no attention in contemporary ecclesiology.

Eight years after Newman published the third edition of his Essay on Development,

Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev (1853-1900) wrote in Russia a treatise on the subject of doctrinal development as well: Dogmatic Development of the Church in Relation to the Question of the

7 Congar, 211.

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Reunification of the Churches.8 This work was smaller in scope than Newman’s Essay; however, it combined a theological depth and historical expertise comparable to Newman’s.

Soloviev’s treatise grounded the idea of development upon a hermeneutic of continuity as had

Newman’s Essay.9 Like Newman, Soloviev linked the development of doctrine with the necessity of a living Magisterium in the Church.

In 1889, Soloviev published in Paris his celebrated La Russie et l’Eglise Universelle.10

This book confronts the Russian Orthodox advocates of the separation from the Catholic Church with a powerful apologetic for the papacy, and presents an urgent call for ecumenical rapprochement between the and the Orthodox churches. Hans Urs von

8 Unless otherwise noted, Soloviev’s works are cited from Sobranie sochinenii V. S. Solovieva, the second edition of the ten-volume collected works of Soloviev edited by S. M. Soloviev and E. L. Radlov (St. Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1911), reprinted in 1966 by Zhiznˈ s Bogom in Brussels with two additional volumes that included Soloviev’s letters, poems, translations and miscellaneous texts; hereafter cited: SS. For more bibliographical information on Soloviev’s works, see below, 135, note 5. Soloviev’s 1886 treatise Dogmaticheskoe razvitie tserkvi v sviazi s voprosom o soedinenii tserkvei [Dogmatic Development of the Church in Relation to the Question of the Reunification of the Churches] was published in SS 11:1-64, and is available in a French translation Le développement dogmatique de l’Église (Paris: Desclée, 1991). Regarding the transcription of Russian names and words in this study, see the note on transliteration, capitalization and translation at the end of this introduction, 27-29.

9 According to Marvin O’Connell, Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994), doctrinal continuity was the central issue in the “Modernist Crisis” in the Roman Catholic Church. The ongoing relevance of the issue may be seen in the tension between the opposing tendencies in the reception of the Second Vatican Council described by Pope Benedict XVI as the “hermeneutic of discontinuity” and the “hermeneutic of reform” in his Christmas Address to the Roman Curia (22 December 2005), AAS 98 (2006), 40-53. See also the chapter “The Hermeneutic of Continuity in Change” in Ker, Newman on Vatican II, 40-71.

10 In the 12-volume Brussel edition of Soloviev’s collected works in Russian, La Russie et l’Eglise universelle was included in Russian translation by G. A. Rachinsky. This study uses the original French edition published in 1889 in Paris by Albert Savine; hereafter cited La Russie.

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Balthasar called this work “a brilliant apologia” which “in its clarity, verve and subtlety belongs among the masterpieces of ecclesiology.”11 In La Russie, Soloviev further elaborated his insights from his treatise on doctrinal development. He achieved an ecclesiological synthesis remarkably similar to the synthesis in Newman’s Essay, having linked the visible hierarchical

Church with the universal Church like a body and soul. For Soloviev, as for Newman, a visible

Church universal can only exist as the Church papal.

These resonances between the two particularly interesting figures—Newman and

Soloviev—on two particularly interesting subjects—doctrinal development and papal primacy— gave the stimulus to undertake this dissertation comparing and contrasting Newman’s and

Soloviev’s respective understandings of the ecclesiological relationship between the development of doctrine and the papal office.

The Kindred Minds Who Never Knew Each Other

The intriguing affinities between the theological ideas of Newman and Soloviev have been noticed and discussed ever since Michel D’Herbigny introduced Soloviev’s life and work to

French readership in a monograph, whose title hailed Soloviev as “a Russian Newman.”12

There is a poetic touch in D’Herbigny’s depiction of Soloviev and Newman as congenial minds and great witnesses to the Catholic religion:

11 , “Soloviev” in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological . Volume 3, Studies in Theological Styles: Lay Styles (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 279- 352; at 290.

12 Michel D’Herbigny, Vladimir Soloviev: A Russian Newman (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2007).

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Each possessed the soul of a philosopher; each was an intuitive theologian, an artist, and a scholar; each had deep affections and perfect purity. Their tastes seem to have been identical; they both loved Holy Scripture and the Fathers, especially Augustine; both studied ecclesiastical history and the philosophy of religious development, both strove to raise human knowledge to God, and to inculcate the daily duties of religion. Both, even before their conversion, pledged themselves to perpetual celibacy; both were impelled to sacrifice earthly friendships that they might follow Christ; both were so passionately enamoured of their country and the Catholic Church as to offer themselves to undergo any suffering, if only a reconciliation could be effected between these objects of their love.13

D’Herbigny also emphasized the parallel between Newman and Soloviev as converts to

Catholicism:

Soloviev’s profession of faith was as complete as Newman’s, and bore no resemblance to Pusey’s timid hesitation. The anguish of mind that preceded it, and the ostracism that followed it, were not unlike Newman’s trials. Both felt at first strong prejudice against the papacy, and in the case of each, this prejudice was overcome by loyalty to religion, fervor in prayer, desire to see the light, and resolution to do God’s will. Both suffered keenly when they felt it to be their duty to give up the instruction of others; Newman ceased his sermons at St. Mary’s in Oxford, and Soloviev was removed from his lectureship in Petersburg.14

In subsequent scholarship on Soloviev, D’Herbigny’s insightful parallel between

Newman and Soloviev was almost invariably reduced to arguments about the question of

Soloviev’s Catholic identity in terms of his formal entrance into the Catholic Church.

13 D’Herbigny, 31-32. As Paul Toinet observed in Vladimir Soloviev: Chevalier de la Sophia (Genève: Ad Solem, 2001), 171, D’Herbigny painted a somewhat inaccurate picture in this passage: first, Soloviev had a definite preference for celibacy and remained celibate; however, on occasion, he seriously considered marriage. Second, while both Newman and Soloviev were fascinated with the , they were both more interested in the Greek Fathers than Augustine; nonetheless, Augustine had an important role in Newman’s conversion to Catholicism.

14 D’Herbigny, 31. (1800-1882) was the Regius Professor of Hebrew and Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. After Newman’s conversion, Pusey became the leader of the of Catholic renewal in the Anglican Church.

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Notwithstanding the importance of this issue,15 it seems more important to find reasons for the similarities between Newman and Soloviev, which D’Herbigny outlined but left unexplained.

The logical question is: could the similarities between Newman and Soloviev be explained on the basis of their mutual influence, or, possibly, their study of the same sources?

This question has been examined by Bernard Marchadier in an article on Newman and

Soloviev that specifically focused on their respective ideas of doctrinal development.16 As

Marchadier has pointed out, the possibility of direct influence would only concern Soloviev’s acquaintance with Newman’s work, not vice-versa.17 The Russian philosopher was a generation younger than the English cardinal. Soloviev’s treatise on doctrinal development was published some thirty years after the first edition of Newman’s Essay on Development. Soloviev’s reading

Newman’s works is not unimaginable; the Russian thinker was a multilingual scholar with a comprehensive knowledge of modern . He was as passionately interested in the study of theology as Newman. Furthermore, in 1875, Soloviev, as a doctoral student, spent six months researching Gnostic literature in the British Museum in London.18

15 This question will be examined in chapter 3, 178-187.

16 Bernard Marchadier, “L’Idée de développement dogmatique de l’Eglise chez John Henry Newman et Vladimir Soloviev” Solovievskie issledovaniia 32 (4:2011): 125-145, at 125. I am extremely grateful to the author for providing an electronic copy of his article, which has guided much of the reflection in the following pages.

17 Ibid., 125-126.

18 Sergei M. Solovyov, Vladimir Solovyov: His Life and Creative Evolution, vols. 1-3 (Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications, 2000) 1:104-114; hereafter cited: Life. For more information on this biography, see below, 134, note 4.

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On the possibility of Newman’s direct influence on Soloviev, however, Marchadier has declared emphatically:

One thing is certain: while the Russian philosopher might have heard the name of the English cardinal, everything indicates that without any doubt he never read him nor knew his arguments. Any sort of Newman's influence on Soloviev is excluded.19

Indeed, there is no evidence that Soloviev was ever acquainted with Newman’s work. In his ecclesiological writings, Soloviev never mentioned nor even alluded to Newman. The same is true about Soloviev’s other writings and letters.

Apparently the closest historical connection between Newman and Soloviev was an

Anglican, William Palmer, who visited Russia on several occasions seeking to establish intercommunion with the Greco- on the basis of the “branch” view of the Church.20 In his Russia and the Universal Church, Soloviev referred to the response to

Palmer’s endeavor as an illustration of nationalist provincialism in the Russian Orthodox

Church. Requested by Russian authorities to be re-baptized as a condition for sacramental communion in the Orthodox Church, Palmer decided that his only option for adhering to the

Church universal was by becoming a Roman Catholic.21 Newman posthumously edited and prefaced Palmer’s Notes of a Visit to the Russian Church. According to Newman, the Anglican

19 Marchadier, 126. Regarding the translation of citations from other languages in this study, see the end of the Introduction, 27-29.

20 William Palmer (1811-1879) was an Anglican priest, Oxford scholar, theologian and ecumenist, who later became a Roman Catholic. On the “branch” view of the Church, see below, 36, 47.

21 La Russie, 60-61.

9 branch view was unreal: any possibility of ecclesiastical union between the Church of and the Orthodox Church was conceivable only by the instrumentality of the bishop of .22

Soloviev had general knowledge about “the Anglo-Roman” movement in , which he learned about from French journals. In a letter of 1896 to a French Jesuit, he expressed a positive assessment of this movement as the right effort towards ecumenical unity in contrast to

Anglo-Orthodox collaboration.23 This is apparently as far as Soloviev’s remote and indirect contacts with Newman extended; Newman did not appear on his radar.

In regard to common sources that inspired the views about doctrinal development of both

Newman and Soloviev, both acknowledged the influence of Johann Adam Möhler, who elaborated the idea of a consciousness of the Church that preserves its identity in the process of history.24 In his Essay, Newman referred to Möhler as a theological precursor of his view of doctrinal development.25 However, Newman was not familiar with German and, as Owen

Chadwick has noted, mentioned Möhler only “in a passing phrase which proves that he had not read him.”26 For his part, Soloviev in his Russia and the Universal Church lavished high praise

22 Newman, “Prefatory Notice” in William Palmer, Notes of a Visit to the Russian Church. Selected and Arranged by Cardinal Newman (London: Kegan Paul, 1882), xi-xiii.

23 See Soloviev to Eugene Tavernier (May/June 1896), Life 2:440-443, at 440.

24 See Marchadier, 127-128. Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838) was a German Roman Catholic priest and theologian at the University of Tübingen; his most influential works were Die Einheit in der Kirche oder das Princip des Katholicismus (1825) and Symbolik oder Darstellung der dogmatischen Gegensätze der Katholiken und Protestanten nach ihren Öffentlichen Bekenntnisschriften (first edition 1832).

25 Dev. (1878), 29.

26 , From Bossuet to Newman, (: University Press, 1987), 111.

10 on Möhler.27 As Marchadier has observed, however, Möhler’s work was not of vital influence for Soloviev’s view of doctrinal development; he mentioned Möhler as the author of a work on the unity of the Church which surpassed the theological achievements of the Russian

Slavophiles.28

An indirect influence on the views of doctrinal development of Newman and Soloviev was , whose work on the papacy envisioned the monarchical supremacy of the pope as an organic development of an Apostolic idea of the visible and universal Church.29

Soloviev studied and wrote an extensive entry about de Maistre for the Brockhaus-Efron dictionary.30 Newman’s mention of de Maistre in his Essay in the same sentence as Möhler suggests affinity rather than influence.

Neither Palmer, nor Möhler, nor de Maistre can then be identified as common sources of inspiration for Newman and Soloviev. Although these references do not explain parallels in their thought, they show that while Newman and Soloviev produced their theological work independently, they did not live in a vacuum. Their ideas intersected with the spiritual and intellectual culture they both shared. As Marchadier has commented,

the problems related to evolution and history (and thus development) were the mark of thought in the nineteenth century, whether in philosophy (Hegel, Spencer), social science

27 La Russie, 35.

28 Ibid., note 1. Regarding the Russian Slavophile movement, see below, 153-155.

29 See Marchadier, 128. Joseph Marie de Maistre (1753-1821), a French Roman Catholic philosopher and diplomat, whose major work (1819) was a counter-revolutionary defense of papal authority.

30 See SS 10:429-435. On Soloviev’s work as a contributor for Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, see below, 167.

11

(Comte, Marx), or in natural science (Darwin); it was the nineteenth century when the methods of historical criticism were applied to the study of sacred history, and was led by effort to contribute to the progress. In the nineteenth century, the worldview that gradually won the recognition by all was that of a [process of] becoming.31

At the roots of Newman and Soloviev’s intellectual work was then a synthesis of religious and historical consciousness generated in the 19th century—a synthesis that Newman and Soloviev respectively elaborated with different concerns, in different circumstances and in different ways, but with remarkably similar results.

Hugh MacDougall identified the main source of Newman’s view of doctrinal development as “Newman’s cast of mind, his native genius.”32 The same can be said about

Soloviev’s thought about development. Both Newman and Soloviev were original thinkers, whose most profound ideas stemmed from their creative minds which were nourished by their study of Scripture, patristic theologians, and the Church’s history. As Marchadier has concluded, Newman and Soloviev “had no mutual teacher besides the great Tradition of the

Church.”33

Similarities in the work of Newman and Soloviev must then be explained in terms of parallel minds pursuing the truth. If Newman’s spirituality and religious thought may be epitomized by the motto: “Growth the only evidence of life,”34 on the affinity of his mind with

31 Marchadier, 126; emphasis in the original.

32 Hugh A. MacDougall, The Acton-Newman Relations: The Dilemma of Christian Liberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 154.

33 Marchadier, 145.

34 See Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 5; hereafter cited: Apo.

12 that of Soloviev’s, one might add: “Everything that rises must converge.”35 The convergence of

Newman and Soloviev’s thought may be considered as exemplifying the anima ecclesiastica, which Balthasar characterized as the “‘ecclesiasticizing’ of the individual consciousness.”36 It may be suggested that Newman and Soloviev’s converging views of doctrinal development indicate the principle of religious unanimity, the sharing of believers in the mind of Christ as members of His Mystical Body, the Church.37 Newman and Soloviev might be described as kindred spirits, who unknowingly shared similar ideas, although their lives and personalities were in fact more dissimilar than alike.

The differences between Newman and Soloviev constitute a lengthy list: Newman was a priest, Soloviev a lay celibate. As Toinet has commented, Newman on account of his ministry was more interested in doctrinal issues; Soloviev had broad interests in speculative philosophy.38

Newman’s intellectual work centered on a defense of the Catholic and apostolic faith against the rationalistic challenges of modern times; at the heart of Soloviev’s thought was sophiology and the building of a new social and political order on a religious foundation. Soloviev had mystical

35 These words, originally written by Teilhard de Chardin, L’Avenir de l’homme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959), 242, were used by the American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor for the title of her 1965 collection of short stories published in New York by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

36 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Who is the Church?” in Spouse of the Word. Explorations in Theology, vol. 2 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), pp. 143-191, at 166. Balthasar’s seminal essay on the personality of the Church will guide the final section of this dissertation about the ecclesiological discussions in present-day ecumenical dialogue. See below, 290-307.

37 See below, 132-133, 284-287, 314-318.

38 Toinet, 172.

13 experiences; he was something of a philosophical visionary of religious unity. On this account he has been at times considered a prophet and pioneer of ecumenism.39

Newman has been characterized as a fastidious thinker with the soul of a .40 As

Marchadier has commented, Newman would most likely have been disturbed by Soloviev’s sophiological and theocratic ideas.41 Newman resisted belief in the inherent progress of society, which he considered a mark of forgetful of the duties of conscience and religion.42 Accordingly, Newman’s main focus in his view of doctrinal development was on the assent of faith guaranteeing the inner unity of doctrinal development. Soloviev elaborated his view of doctrinal development with an eye to its end in an ecumenical rapprochement of the churches and his vision of a universal theocracy.43

Soloviev was a systematic philosopher and fierce polemicist, Newman more of a circumstantial writer and controversialist. In regard to their views of the Anglican and Russian

39 See, e.g., Egbert Munzer, Solovyev: Prophet of Russian Western Unity (London: Hollis and Carter, 1954); Nicolas Zernov, Three Russian Prophets: Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Soloviev (London: S.C.M Press, 1944); Eugenia Gourvitch, Vladimir Soloviev: The Man and the Prophet (London: Rudolf Steiner, 1992); Karel Sládek, Vladimír Solovjov: mystik a prorok [Vladimir Soloviev: a Mystic and Prophet] (Olomouc: Refugium, 2009).

40 See Adrienne von Speyer’s comment about Newman in her Book of All (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 262: “[Newman’s] ascesis, his idea of obedience to God, his idea of chastity, of poverty, of love, are absolutely worthy of a monk and, indeed, of a well-formed monk. It is as if, at the time of his conversion, he had the whole life of a monk poured into him in a concentrated form.”

41 Marchadier, 144.

42 See “Note A. Liberalism,” Apologia, 285-297.

43 See below, 272-274.

14

Orthodox separations from the Catholic Church, Hans Urs von Balthasar commented: “Both were noble hearts, but Newman spoke more softly.”44 Newman loved his home at his

Birmingham oratory;45 Soloviev was a perpetual pilgrim who, especially towards the end of his life, lived virtually homeless.46 Soloviev might be best described as a lover of beauty and a religious idealist, Newman as a pastor of souls and guardian of revealed religion. In some respects, one could hardly imagine two more different men than Newman the reserved

Englishman and the extravagant Russian Soloviev.

It is then all the more intriguing that despite their personal differences Newman and

Soloviev presented virtually identical theological views about doctrinal development and ecclesial structures. As Marchadier has commented, “the persuasive force of their inferences only becomes more necessary.”47

To situate Soloviev’s affinities with Newman within a broader context, one can take notice of Balthasar’s observation that Soloviev “anticipated in prophetic fashion the great developments of the twentieth century.”48 According to Balthasar, Soloviev’s thought approximated and even surpassed the later philosophical achievements of and

44 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), 300. 45 See William Paine Neville, editor, Addresses to Cardinal Newman with His Replies (London: Logmans, Green, 1905), 103-106.

46 See Life 3:447-450.

47 Marchadier, 125.

48 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 287.

15

Max Scheler.49 “Most astonishing of all, though, is the relationship of the whole vision to that of

Teilhard de Chardin. One might well say out [sic] that none of the latter’s intuitions is alien to

Soloviev.”50 Balthasar’s insight on this score has been confirmed by Karel Vladimir Truhlar who in his comparative study on Soloviev and Teilhard perceived their convergence above all in a vision of love as the driving force in the cosmic process of realization of unity.51 Furthermore,

Balthasar’s comments—that Soloviev’s intellectual system “aims at bringing a whole ethical and theoretical scheme to in a universal theological aesthetic,” and, that “for Soloviev aesthetics and eschatology coincide”52— suggest another convergence: with Balthasar himself.

Great minds think alike, “not in unison, but what is far more beautiful, in sym-phony.”53

This Dissertation and its Contribution

Newman and Soloviev have had a profound influence on subsequent theological thinking. called Newman “perhaps the most seminal Roman Catholic theologian of modern times.”54 Newman’s return to the sources in patristic theology

49 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 287; see also Helmut Dahm, Vladimir Solovyev and : Attempt at a Comparative Interpretation (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1975).

50 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 287-288.

51 See Karl Vladimir Truhlar, Teilhard und Solowjew: Dichtung und religiöse Erfahrung (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1966), 48-83.

52 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 281-283.

53 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 9; see below, 191, note 186.

54 Avery Dulles, “The Threefold Office in Newman’s Ecclesiology,” in Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill, editors, Newman After a Hundred Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 375.

16 anticipated and influenced the ressourcement theology and religious renewal in the

Roman Catholic Church which was advanced by the liturgical, biblical, patristic and ecumenical movements in the decades preceding the Second Vatican Council.55 Both

Yves Congar and , who were influential theologians at the Council, had detailed knowledge of Newman’s theological writings.

Vladimir Soloviev has been regarded as the founder of modern Russian philosophy and one of the intellectual fathers of the spiritual and cultural renaissance in the early 20th century, called the Silver Age of Russian literature.56 According to Nikolai

Lossky, “[Soloviev] was the first to create an original Russian system of philosophy and to lay the foundations of a whole school of Russian religious and philosophical thought which is still growing and developing.”57 He exerted a major influence on virtually all of the important figures in subsequent Russian theology, including Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai

Berdiaev and . Soloviev’s ecumenical work has inspired a renewed interest across generations of Catholics and Orthodox in seeking to overcome the between the West and the East.

55 Ker, Newman on Vatican II, ix.

56 See Vasily V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 2:528-529; Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford: University Press, 1979), 392-393.

57 Nikolay O. Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy (London: Allen&Unwin, 1951), 133. For explanation of occasional discrepancies in spelling the names of Russian authors in the main text and the footnote references to translations of their works, see the note on transliteration at the end of this introduction, p. 27.

17

The ongoing relevance of Newman and Soloviev’s thought can be observed from the wealth of scholarship that both have inspired down to the present time. However, very little has been written to date explicitly comparing and contrasting Newman and Soloviev themselves.

Bernard Marchadier’s essay is a short treatise on the historical background of the views of

Newman and Soloviev about doctrinal development. A brief but important text highlighting the witness of Soloviev and Newman to the papacy as the guarantor of ecclesiastical freedom came from Hans Urs von Balthasar.58 A more complete theological assessment of the ecclesiological thought of Newman and Soloviev and of the light they cast on each other has not yet been written.

No study on Newman can be written without consulting Ian Ker’s magisterial biography.59 From the voluminous literature on John Henry Newman, the research conducted in the present study has utilized several major studies of his Essay on Development.60 The penetrating analysis of the Belgian Dominican theologian Jan-Hendrik Walgrave61 yielded a clarity in the understanding of the Essay by recognizing two interrelated planes of Newman’s view of doctrinal development—epistemological and ecclesiological. In contrast to the purpose

58 Balthasar, Office, 292-307. This text is analyzed in detail in the final chapter of this dissertation; see below, 290-307.

59 Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

60 In addition to the studies mentioned, see Gerard McCarren, “Tests” or “Notes”? A Critical Evaluation of the Criteria for Genuine Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (The Catholic University of America, doctoral dissertation, Washington, DC, 1998).

61 Jan-Hendrik Walgrave, Newman: Le dévelopement du dogme (Tournai: Casterman, 1957).

18 of the present study, Walgrave focused his attention on the epistemological aspect of doctrinal development, especially on the parallelism between subjective religious reasoning and the consciousness of the Church in the Catholic assent of faith.

Nicholas Lash62 has offered an incisive critique of the terminology and reasoning in

Newman’s Essay. Lash’s study provides a good tool for identifying the progression of

Newman’s thought and the various ligaments of his view of doctrinal development; however, because of his unilaterally analytical approach, Lash has not fully appreciated the overall plan and the original ecclesiological synthesis in Newman’s writing. It is this latter aspect that concerns the present study as the main point of comparison with Soloviev’s view of dogmatic development in the Church.

Thomas Norris has also presented a valuable investigation of Newman’s Essay in his study of Newman’s theological method.63 The focus in his study is also on Newman’s . Of special importance for the present dissertation is the parallel highlighted by

Norris between the faculty of judgment in the individual human mind and the Church’s teaching authority in Newman’s view of doctrinal development. This insight helps to identify the Church as the subject of doctrinal development and so to trace the similarity of the relationships between doctrinal development and the papal office in Newman and Soloviev’s works, respectively.

62 Nicholas Lash, Newman on Development: The Search for an Explanation in History (Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos Press, 1975).

63 Thomas J. Norris, Newman and His Theological Method (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1977).

19

A study of Newman touching most closely on ecclesiology is Paul Misner’s Papacy and

Development.64 Misner presented a careful historical exploration of the theological development in Newman’s ideas in his Essay with special attention to Newman’s arguments about the papacy.

According to Misner, Newman’s emphasis in the Essay is on the identification of an infallible

Church with the worldwide communion of the Roman Catholic Church; the primacy of the pope is treated by Newman as a secondary issue, as one of many doctrinal developments in the

Church. The interpretation of the role of the papacy in Newman’s view of doctrinal development presented in this dissertation differs from that of Misner. According to the findings of this study, the teaching office of the Church, which is linked inseparably in Newman’s Essay with doctrinal development, presupposes a specific structure of the Church, whose hallmark is the papacy. The papacy is thus a part of the antecedent idea of an infallible Church; the hierarchical structure of the Church cannot but have its summit in the papal office.

Soloviev’s religious philosophy was ignored throughout most of the 20th century in the official press of the former for ideological reasons.65 It was discussed only by the

Russian underground intelligentsia either in old editions or samizdats.66 However, Soloviev’s

64 See Paul Misner, Papacy and Development: Newman and the Primacy of the Pope (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976).

65 Concerning the views of Soviet ideologists about Soloviev, see Evert van der Zweerde, “Deconstruction and Normalization: Towards an Assessment of the Philosophical Heritage of Vladimir Solovˈëv” in Wil van der Bercken, Manon de Courten and Evert van der Zweerde, editors, Vladimir Solovˈëv: Reconciler and Polemicist. Easter Christian Studies 2: Selected Papers of the 1998 International Vladimir Solovˈëv Conference held at the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands (Leuven: Peeters, 2000) 2:39-62, at 49; hereafter cited: ECS.

66 One can form an impression of the underground activity of the religious intelligentsia in Communist Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Block from the “Preface” in Marina

20 ideas were studied in France by exiled Russian theologians as well as Catholic intellectuals. Of the various works on Soloviev produced in France the most outstanding are the monographs by

Konstantin Mochulˈsky and Dimitry Stremoukhov.67 Scholars associated with the Pontifical

Oriental Institute in Rome formed another important center of Soloviev studies; their most remarkable contributions were Tomáš Špidlík’s exploration of theological anthropology in

Soloviev and other Russian religious thinkers, and the study of Soloviev’s theological aesthetics by Michelina Tenace.68 An incisive essay on Soloviev’s theological work was written by Hans

Urs on Balthasar in the third volume of his theological aesthetics.69 In Anglo-American scholarship, probably the best known work on Soloviev was written by Jonathan Sutton.70

Among all of these major works on Soloviev, his ecclesiology has been studied in a limited way. Somewhat hidden behind the writings from his theocratic period, Soloviev’s

Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev: The Art of Integral Vision (Chelsea, MI: BookCrafters, 1997), ix; and from Michael A. Meerson, “Appendix: The History of the First Publication of Two Manuscripts: La Sophia by Vladimir Solovˈëv and Vladimir Solovˈëv: His Life and Creative Evolution by His Nephew Sergej Solovˈëv” in ECS 2:359-362.

67 Konstantin Mochulˈsky, Vladimir Soloviev: Zhiznˈ i uchenie (Paris: YMCA Press, 1951); Dimitri Strémooukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic Work (Belmont, MA: Norldand, 1980). For explanation of occasional discrepancies in spelling the names of Russian authors in the main text and the footnote references to translations of their works, see the note on transliteration at the end of this introduction, p. 27.

68 Tomáš Špidlík, L’idée russe: Une autre vision de l’homme (Paris: Diffusion Cerfs, 1994); Michelina Tenace, La beauté unité spirituelle dans les écrits esthétiques de Vladimir Soloviev (Arsonval: Fates, 1993).

69 See above, note 11.

70 Jonathan Sutton, The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov: Towards a Reassessment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988).

21 treatise on dogmatic development has received little attention. A notable exception is the work on modern Russian theology by Paul Valliere who has analyzed in a dozen pages the content of

Soloviev’s treatise on dogmatic development.71

The goal of this dissertation is to fill the gap in the study of Soloviev’s ecclesiological ideas and to show their profound importance by bringing them into dialogue with Newman.

Hopefully, this effort may contribute to the process of dialogue and mutually receptive learning between the Christian West and the Christian East, the “two lungs of the Church,” according to the phrase fondly used by Pope John Paul II.72

In his acclaimed work on eschatology, Joseph Ratzinger advocated a deeper study of the idea of doctrinal development. Calling for a return of contemporary theology to “a positive attitude towards a living unity of Christian history” in which “development and identity subsist together,” Ratzinger remarked:

During the course of the last century, Cardinal Newman and Vladimir Soloviev referred with some emphasis to the category of development as the key concept for a kind of theological thinking that would be appropriate to catholic dogma. This insight has not however borne fruit in modern theology, because the problem of the interrelationship of exegesis, Church and dogma has remained unresolved.73

The context for these observations was Ratzinger’s reflection on a methodological problem in modern theology caused by the use of historical criticism in isolation from, and to the detriment

71 Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 178-191.

72 John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, AAS 87 (1995), 921-982, § 54.

73 Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 260, 269.

22 of, the hermeneutic of faith in theology. Ratzinger located the interrelationship of scriptural exegesis, doctrine, the Magisterium and the living Tradition within “the enduring subjecthood of the Church in the midst of temporal change.”74 In a subsequent address, Ratzinger elaborated the idea of development as the life of “the historical dynamic of the Church:”

A body remains identical to itself over the course of its life due to the fact that in the life process it constantly renews itself. For the great English Cardinal, Newman, the idea of development was the true and proper bridge to his conversion to Catholicism. I believe that the idea of development belongs to those numerous fundamental concepts of Catholicism that are far from being adequately explored.75

Accordingly, this dissertation attempts to make a contribution to the study of doctrinal development by considering the vital links between Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium of the Church in the of Soloviev and Newman. The Church’s structure and the role of the papacy are closely knit in the reflections of both Newman and Soloviev on the Church as the subject of doctrinal development. The main focus of this dissertation is to uncover, evaluate and compare their respective understandings of the relationship between doctrinal development and the papal office.

The research for this dissertation has been decidedly influenced by the writings of Hans

Urs von Balthasar about the Petrine ministry and what he called the antirömische Affekt.76 This

“anti-Roman attitude” was described by Balthasar as a deep-seated bias against the central

74 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 270; for further explanation of the phrase “subjecthood of the Church,” see below, 264, note 1.

75 Joseph Ratzinger, “The Ecclesiology of Vatican II,” L'Osservatore Romano, Weekly English Edition (23 January 2002), 5.

76 The Anti-Roman Attitude [Der antirömische Affekt] was the original title of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s book published in English as The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church.

23 authority in the Church manifested by “the discrediting of ecclesiastical structures or the intention radically and fundamentally to ‘change’ them.”77 This longstanding Cisalpine attitude has been reinforced by a postmodern bias against any kind of authority on the basis of the absolute autonomy of human freedom. In contrast, the views of Newman and Soloviev on doctrinal development afford a true wellspring for an organic theology of ecclesial authority and a renewed appreciation of the Petrine ministry in the Church.

This dissertation also hopes to contribute to the present-day ecumenical dialogue between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches concerning ecclesiology. The legacy of

Soloviev’s ecumenical work merits much more attention than it has so far received. The reassessment of Soloviev’s ecclesiology in dialogue with Newman’s ecclesiology undertaken in this dissertation highlights the strength of Soloviev’s challenge to Orthodoxy, which still awaits an adequate response from Orthodox theologians.

Any discussion about the real visible unity of the Church cannot avoid the issue of universal primacy. As Aidan Nichols has observed, “At root, only one issue of substance divides the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches, and that is the issue of the primacy.”78 These words resonate with Soloviev’s conviction on the cause of the Catholic-Orthodox schism.79 In fact, papal primacy has moved to the fore in recent ecumenical dialogue. For example, the Joint

International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Roman Catholic Church and

77 Balthasar, Office, 14.

78 Aidan Nichols, Rome and the Eastern Churches: A Study in Schism, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 313.

79 See below, 259.

24 the Orthodox Church at Ravenna in 2007, acknowledged both an agreement on “the fact of primacy at the universal level,” and differences of “understanding with regard to the manner in which it is to be exercised.”80 According to the Commission, “it remains for the question of the role of the bishop of Rome in the communion of all the Churches to be studied in greater depth.”81 It is hoped that this dissertation may contribute to such study by highlighting the implications of the views of Newman and Soloviev about papal primacy vis-à-vis doctrinal development.

In recent years, eucharistic ecclesiology has become prominent in Roman Catholic-

Orthodox ecumenical dialogue. The final part of this dissertation applies the development- oriented ecclesiologies of Newman and Soloviev in an attempt to harmonize the tensions in present-day ecumenism between eucharistic ecclesiology and the Catholic ecclesiology of the universal Church. Their correlation is based on the perception of both Newman and Soloviev that the Church is the subject of doctrinal development and that the unity of one body and one spirit with Christ is constituted by the Eucharist; in other words, “the Eucharist makes the unanimity.” If the unity of mind, which is a principle of doctrinal development in the Church

(and so an historical reality and not merely an eschatological ideal), is rooted in the Church’s eucharistic constitution, there must be a place for primacy within that constitution as well.

80 Ravenna, § 43.

81 Ibid., § 45.

25

Overview of This Dissertation

This dissertation proceeds in the following steps: the first chapter begins with a brief biography of Newman. Then, the chapter investigates the background of Newman’s idea of doctrinal development by studying the context of Newman’s personal spirituality and theological history. The origin of the idea of development is traced to Newman’s fundamental notion of the spiritual life as developing under the guidance of divine providence. The ecclesiological foundations of Newman’s view of doctrinal development are examined in the context of his

“conversion to infallibility”82—a leitmotiv of one of the most exciting intellectual histories ever written: his Apologia Pro Vita Sua.

The second chapter focuses on Newman’s Essay on Development. The structural changes in the text of his Essay between its first (1845) and third (1878) editions are noted as indicative of his Essay’s eventual ecclesiological synthesis between doctrinal development and an authority exercising infallibility in the Church. Close attention is given to Newman’s method of theological thinking from antecedent probabilities, and to the consequences of the religious epistemology of doctrinal development for ecclesial structure. The core of Newman’s view of doctrinal development is seen to lie in the subjecthood of the Church, such that the Church is capable of “judging with certitude,” which for an effective exercise of infallibility presupposes a central authority in the Church.

Chapters Three and Four about Soloviev mirror methodologically the first two chapters on Newman. Chapter three provides a brief biography of Soloviev; this is followed by a

82 Avery Dulles, “Newman on Infallibility,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 434-449, at 437.

26 section—that was not originally anticipated—which reassesses the Catholic nature of Soloviev’s religious thought and ecclesial affiliation. Next, the origin of Soloviev’s idea of doctrinal development is traced to the sophiological inspiration of his great vision of the religious unity of mankind. The ecclesiological foundations of Soloviev’s idea of doctrinal development are examined in the larger context of his theocratic thought, in which development is the path to the realization of theocracy and the authority of Rome is the leverage in this process.

Chapter Four offers a detailed analysis of Soloviev’s treatise on the dogmatic development of the Church. Particular attention is given to Soloviev’s understanding of the link between teaching authority and the principle of religious unanimity as well as to his emphasis on the Church as the divine-human subject of doctrinal development. The final part of this chapter examines Soloviev’s presentation of the papacy in La Russie et l’Eglise Universelle.

The fifth and final chapter considers similarities and differences between the views of

Newman and Soloviev about doctrinal development. The chapter highlights their convergence in understanding the Church as the organic subject of development and in drawing the consequences of that identity for the Church’s structure. Attention is also given to the differences in the ways that Newman and Soloviev understood the Church’s infallibility. Then, after considering Hans Urs von Balthasar’s comparison of Newman and Soloviev in their witness to Rome as the guarantor of ecclesial freedom, the chapter offers further observations on the relationship between the teaching and governing offices in their ecclesiological writings. In the last part of this chapter, an attempt is made to apply insights from the study of Newman and

Soloviev’s ecclesiological ideas to more recent developments in ecumenism, particularly as regards the relationship between eucharistic and universal ecclesiologies.

27

Some Stylistic Asides: Transliteration, Capitalization and Translation

The name Владимир Сергеевич Соловьёв is variously transcribed from the Russian

Cyrillic into the Roman alphabet. These differences are due not only to different usage in various European vernacular languages—e.g. Soloviev (French and Italian), Solowjew

(German), Sołowjow (Polish), Solovjov (Slovak and Czech), etc.—but also to a plurality of transcriptions in use in English (Soloviev, Solovˈëv, Solovyov, Solovyev, etc.).

For all Russian names and words, this dissertation uses the modified Library of Congress transliteration system (ALA-LC) with omission of diacritical marks and ligatures, which has become current in academic studies. The ALA-LC system is used with two exceptions: first, in the case of Soloviev (and similar names, e.g., Afanasiev), “i” is substituted for the apostrophe indicating the Russian soft “ь.” This usage respects the original transcription of Soloviev’s name in his French publications; accordingly, “Soloviev” is used consistently in the main body of the text. In the footnote references of the translations of works by Soloviev and other Russian authors, however, their different forms of transcription are retained. This explains occasional discrepancies in spelling of Russian names between the footnotes and the main text which consistently uses the ALA-LC system. Second, in Russian names and surnames, the suffix “-ий” is transliterated as “-y” in accord with popular English usage (thus “Dimitry” rather than

“Dimitrii;” “Dostoevsky” rather than “Dostoevskii”).

The word “Church” is capitalized in this dissertation whenever the universal communion is meant or when a specific church is mentioned, for example, the ; otherwise, lower-case is used. Similarly, expressions like “the Body of Christ” and the “Bride of Christ” are capitalized when referring to the Church of Christ. “Catholic” and “Orthodox” are

28 capitalized whenever the words denote the ecclesial denominations. If these words denote the mark of universality or authenticity of the Christian faith, they are in lower case. The noun

“Tradition” is capitalized when it is used to denote the normative and irreversible historical transmission of the catholic and apostolic faith; whenever not capitalized, it is used in a broader sense that does not connote authoritative character. Analogical are the capitalization choices with respect to the words “Revelation,” “Scripture,” and “Magisterium,” which in this study are generally used in the upper case based on their categorical meaning in Catholic theology. The words “Pope” and “Bishop” are capitalized when referring to a specific pope and bishop; otherwise, they are used in the lower case, as well as in the words “papacy,” “papal” and

“episcopal.” Expressions “divine providence” and “divine wisdom” are usually in lower case.

Of course, different practices of capitalization by the authors whose texts are cited are left intact.

It must be noticed that in his presentation of the development of official Christian teaching in history, Newman used as a rule the expression “development of doctrine;” Soloviev in his treatise on the same issue used the category “dogmatic development.” In present-day theological vocabulary, the main difference between “doctrine” and “dogma” rests in the official definition; “dogma” is used in the more narrow sense to mean officially-defined doctrine.

However, this distinction does not apply to Soloviev, in whose 19th-century Russian vocabulary the word “doctrine” is lacking. For the purposes of this comparative study, “dogma” and

“doctrine” are thus generally taken as synonymous categories.

All scriptural citations are taken from the New American Bible (NAB). In citations from the writings of Soloviev and other foreign authors, effort was made to follow existing English translations which are referenced in the footnotes whenever a longer passage is quoted in an

29 indented paragraph. All translations without a reference to an English publication are mine.

Unless otherwise noted, all emphases in citations are as found in the original texts.

CHAPTER 1

John Henry Newman: His Life and a Historical and Theological Background of His Idea of

Doctrinal Development

Biography

John Henry Newman, the eldest of the six children of John and Jemima Newman (née

Fourdrinier), was born in London on 21 February 1801.1 His father was the manager of a banking business. On the social landscape, the Newmans were urban middle-class; they practiced the “Bible religion” of British Anglicans.2 John Henry was a child gifted with an affectionate character and a powerful imagination. Life seemed a dream; he sometimes thought of himself as an angel looking out for other invisible friends hiding behind the shadows.3 This memory, recorded in his , offers some insight into its author’s soul with its sensitive and introverted traits of personality, his experience of solitude and longing for friendship, as well as a predisposition to reflection and contemplation. His years in a private

1 Among the numerous primary sources about Newman’s life and work are the following: his autobiographical Apologia Pro Vita Sua; his memoirs edited by Henry Tristram with the title: John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1957), hereafter cited: AW; The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Volumes I-XXXII (1961-2009); hereafter cited: LD. Among Newman’s , the principal work is Ian Ker’s John Henry Newman: A Biography. Other major biographical studies are: , The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman: Based on His Private Journals and Correspondences, Vols. I-II (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912) and Meriol Trevor, Newman, the Pillar of the Cloud and Newman, the Light in Winter (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962).

2 Brian Martin, John Henry Newman: His Life and Work (London-New York: Continuum, 2000), 10; see: Avery Dulles, SJ, Newman (New York: Continuum, 2002), 64.

3 Apo., 2. 30

31 boarding school at (1808-1816) revealed another talent: prodigious intelligence; he excelled in Latin and writing of prose and won several prizes in .4

For Newman, the year 1816 saw several life-changing events. The bankruptcy of his father’s bank precipitated a long-lasting family financial crisis and, for Newman, assumption of responsibility not only for his own future but also for his family. Later that year, he experienced a profound spiritual change. This conversion, which he later described as “more certain than having hands and feet,” was the beginning in him of “divine faith,” opening his consciousness to an enduring notion of God’s presence in his life.5 Finally, that same year, he was enrolled at

Trinity College, Oxford University, the celebrated English center of education and intellectual life. There he was to spend the ensuing three decades as a student and scholar.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1820, Newman gained a fellowship at what was then the most respected college at Oxford: Oriel. This fellowship provided him with both a position and an income at a prominent institution of higher learning. He decided to receive orders in the Church of England; in 1824, he was ordained a deacon and in 1825, a priest. After receiving the order of deacon, he began pastoral ministry as a curate at St. Clement’s Church, which was then located across Magdalen Bridge at the edge of the university.6

From the time of his adolescent conversion, Newman began an intense spiritual and intellectual journey, which included prayer, meditation on the word of God in Scripture, and

4 Ker, Biography, 2.

5 Apo., 4.

6 Ker, Biography, 6-25.

32 obedience to the voice of conscience. His spiritual life was built on his avid reading and the influence of mentors and friends. His education was not limited to a particular philosophical system of thought or methodology. He received a comprehensive classical education with immersion in mathematics and some familiarity with the modern sciences, which at the time were just beginning to receive attention in the university. His Apologia pro vita sua (1864) indicated the wide range of works that the young Newman read—on such diverse subjects as philosophy, religion, history, English literature, etc. He had a special talent for grasping the minds of thinkers, especially their principles and insights, instead of merely becoming familiar with the content of their works.7

In addition to his study of the classics, Newman was trying to formulate his own coherent intellectual system that would faithfully present Christian Revelation. He sought an understanding of Christian Revelation in its full doctrinal meaning and orthodox practice–– initially without an apparently clear sense of purpose, but later with a personal mission to serve the Church of England. The two writers whom he credited with special influence over the development of his spirituality and religious thought were Thomas Scott8 and .9

Scott inspired Newman with his understanding of the Christian life as a continuing growth in

7 Apo., 5-28.

8 Thomas Scott (1747-1821), an Anglican cleric, rector of Aston Sanford, and one of the founders and the first secretary of the Church Missionary Society (1799) was a renowned preacher, religious writer and biblical commentator.

9 Joseph Butler (1692-1752), Anglican Bishop of Bristol and later of Durham, was an important English philosopher and theologian.

33 holiness: “growth was the only evidence of life.”10 Butler taught Newman the basis of sacramental theology and provided him with the principle that probability, rather than logical proof, was a guide in the matters of life decisions, involving the questions of faith and moral behavior.11

Newman’s earliest spiritual mentor was Walter Mayers, an Anglican cleric and teacher at

Ealing School,12 who recommended to Newman readings—mostly imbued with Calvinist theology. The youthful Newman imbibed Evangelical spirituality and teachings; most notably, he appropriated a Calvinist notion of . Later at Oxford, he would abandon

Calvinistic teachings in favor of more Catholic views, such as the cooperative interaction between grace and free will. This was a prime instance of his personal theological development—one step in a long process that eventually led him on his journey of faith to the

Roman Catholic Church.13

In the course of his undergraduate studies at College, Newman was disappointed by the lack of guidance from his college tutors. Years later, still sensitive to his failure to obtain a first-class degree, Newman recalled:

I went to the university with an active mind, and with no thought but that of hard reading; but when I got there, I had as little tutorial assistance and guidance as is

10 Apo., 4-5.

11 Apo., 10-11. Newman was influenced by Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736), a work of Christian that argued against deism.

12 Ibid., 4. Walter Mayers (1790-1828), a graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, and an Anglican cleric, who later became the curate of , where Newman preached both his first sermon and at a funeral service for Mayers. See LD 2:64.

13 Ibid., 4-5.

34

easy to conceive. . . . When I look back upon those anxious toilsome years and their event, I seem to myself to see a type of ; – zeal, earnestness, resolution, without a guide; effort without a result. It was a pattern instance of private judgment and its characteristics.14

In this reminiscence, Newman identified the intrinsic link between the process of learning and teaching authority, which might be seen as encompassing the question of the relationship between the development of doctrine and the teaching office in the Church.

Undeterred by his failure to gain honors in his baccalaureate examinations at Oxford,

Newman decided to be a candidate for a fellowship at Oriel College, then the most prestigious college at Oxford. His unexpected success in gaining an Oriel fellowship brought him into the company of some of the most outstanding and original thinkers at Oxford at that time. Their influence contributed to his spiritual and intellectual development that eventually led him to

Catholicism. helped Newman to accept the doctrine of baptismal regeneration and the role of ecclesial Tradition in handing on scriptural faith.15 planted the seeds of Newman’s philosophical thinking and introduced to him the idea of the Church as a visible, hierarchical body, autonomous from civil government.16

14 AW, 51; 52-53. At the examinations, Newman in spite of high expectations finished with below-average results; see Ker, 12-14.

15 Apo., 8-10. Edward Hawkins (1789-1882), an Anglican cleric, Oriel fellow and vicar of St. Mary’s Church, was elected Provost of Oriel in 1828; Newman succeeded him as vicar of St. Mary.

16 Ibid., 11-14. Richard Whately (1787-1863), an Oriel fellow and the principal of St. Alban Hall, Oxford, later became Anglican Archbishop of . In “The State of Religious Parties,” in the in 1839, Newman stated that he was “much indebted to the friendship of Archbishop Whately”; this essay was re-published as “The Prospects of the Anglican Church” in Newman, Essays Critical and Historical 1:263-307; hereafter cited: Ess. In Apo., 11, Newman,

35

In 1826, Newman became one of the tutors of Oriel College and was also appointed a

Select Preacher before the University. Two years later, he became the vicar of St. Mary’s

Church at Oxford University—in effect, gaining a prominent pulpit that afforded him a wide audience in English society as a preacher. This period of time also marked an important phase in his theological development by virtue of his association with new friends and co-fellows at Oriel:

John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, and Edward Bouverie Pusey.

John Keble,17 according to Newman, renewed interest in religion and theological studies at Oxford University. In a series of sermons at Oxford University in 1822 and 1823, Keble emphasized the role of moral virtue in acquiring the knowledge of faith. These sermons had considerable influence on Newman, who regarded Keble as the thinker who “turned the tide” of intellectual life at Oxford University from rationalist philosophy and nascent liberalism to questions of theology and the Church.18 Keble––a and contemplative rather than a systematic theologian––enhanced Newman’s understanding of the “Sacramental system; that is, the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and instruments of the real things

while mentioning his differences of opinion with Whately, acknowledged him as the mentor who “not only taught me to think, but to think for myself.”

17 John Keble (1797-1866) an Oriel fellow, who after receiving Anglican orders in 1815, left Oxford University to serve as a curate in Coln St. Aldwyns and later at Estleach Martin; from 1835 until the end of his life, he was vicar of Hursley. From 1831 to 1841, he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; his most acclaimed work was a collection of poems, The Christian Year (1827). With Newman, Richard Hurrell Froude and Edward Bouverie Pusey, Keble was one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement.

18 See “Liberalism,” in Apo., 285-298, at 289. See also Maria Poggi Johnson, “Probability the Guide of Life: the Influence of Butler’s Analogy on Keble and Newman,” Anglican and Episcopalian History 70/3 (2001): 302-323, at 307.

36 unseen.”19 From Keble, Newman also appropriated the principle that the intellectual certitude of faith proceeded from the light of supernatural grace.20 Elaboration of a synthesis between this principle and the process of intellectual reasoning was one of Newman’s primary interests and an important aspect of his later idea of doctrinal development.21

Newman’s close personal friend, Richard Hurrell Froude,22 was an insightful philosopher with a keen sense of paradox and insight into the disproportions between theory and reality.

Froude also had “a vivid appreciation of the idea of sanctity,” which he felt could only be realized through a visible Church. A fierce anti-Erastian,23 Froude “delighted in the notion of a hierarchical system, or sacerdotal power, and of full ecclesiastical liberty.” 24 Newman gradually accepted Froude’s belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist as well as devotion to Mary and the saints. As Henri de Lubac has remarked, “Froude inculcated in him

[Newman] love of the Virgin Mary hand in hand with admiration of the Catholic Church.”25

19 Apo., 18.

20 Ibid., 17-20.

21 Ibid., 20-22.

22 Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-1836), an Anglican cleric and an Oriel fellow, who was a leader of the first phase of the Oxford Movement, died in his early thirties from tuberculosis. Newman was the main editor of Froude’s diaries, letters, fragments and sermons, which were published in two volumes as Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, vols. 1-2 (London: Rivington, 1838).

23 Erastianism, a view that justifies the supremacy of the state over the Church, derives its name from the Swiss protestant theologian Thomas Erastus (1524-1583).

24 Apo., 21.

25 Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 314, note 1.

37

As a fellow of Oriel College, Newman immersed himself in the study of patristic literature—a pursuit that became his lifetime passion and field of expertise. On his first contact with the theology of the Fathers in his undergraduate reading in Church history, Newman was

“nothing short of enamored.”26 In a letter to his sister Jemima in the spring of 1826, he indicated his plan to delve into patristic theology in order to “trace the sources from which the corruptions of the Church, principally Romish have been derived.”27 In the summer of 1828, he began systematically studying the writings of the Fathers.28

Newman’s study of patristic theology resulted in his first major publication on the history of the Arian .29 The book reflected his personal quest for an orthodox expression of theology and doctrine. In his historical and systematic study of the Arian heresy, he explored theological issues concerning the role of Scripture, Tradition and ecclesial authority in the formation of creeds and doctrinal statements. He used the ecclesiological principles that he derived from this study as the basis for critiquing Christian practice in contemporary English society.

England, as the leading naval, colonial and economic power of the nineteenth century, was one of the first countries in Europe to experience the process of social and political transformation that resulted in secularism. As part of this process, the authority of institutional

26 Apo., 7.

27 Newman to his sister Jemima (Oriel College, 1 May 1826), LD 1:285-286, at 285.

28 See Apo., 7; 25.

29 Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century; hereafter cited: Ari.

38 religion vis-à-vis civic life was being gradually diminished in favor of the autonomy of the individual and the prerogatives of the state.30 Religious faith was increasingly perceived as a subjective and private concern; the Church was no longer generally recognized as the guarantor of universal moral and religious principles.31 It was the growing problem of secularism in

England that Newman the Anglican opposed in his struggle against “liberalism” in religion.

Newman anticipated a future religious crisis that would undercut the established position and popular influence of the Church of England in British society: “The vital question” for him was

“how to keep the Church from being liberalized?”32

In his Arians, Newman presented a vigorous defense of the doctrines of the Church, not simply as particular teachings, but as the very idea of the responsibility of the Church to teach

Christian doctrines with binding authority. It has been said that an author’s first book becomes that author’s destiny;33 in Newman’s case, much of his subsequent theological work revolved around the Church’s teaching authority. The Arians embodied his thought on religious

30 For a study of European secularism, its origins in the movement towards autonomy of human reason and freedom, and the predicament of theology vis-à-vis modern atheism, see , The God of Jesus Christ (New York: Crossroads, 2003), 3-130.

31 The Reform Bill of 1832 changed the electoral system of Parliament both by limiting the privileges of the landed and ecclesiastical lords and by increasing the representation of the urban middle-class in the House of Commons. See and , The History of England (New York: The Catholic Publication Society of America, 1915), 11:505- 519.

32 Apo., 30. On Newman’s understanding of religious liberalism, see below, 50-51. See also Stephen Thomas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge: University Press, 1991), 65-170.

33 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Tragedy under Grace: Reinhold Schneider on the Experience of the West (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 9.

39 epistemology as a process of receiving Revelation and effectively laid the groundwork of his later views about doctrinal development.

In addition to his theological writing, Newman envisioned his personal mission in the

Church in tandem with his work as an educator. As an Oriel college tutor, Newman elaborated a new mentoring system for students that combined academic instruction with moral guidance and religious formation. However, Edward Hawkins, the college provost did not appreciate

Newman’s efforts and ended his tutorship simply by not assigning him any more students.34

Newman then focused his pastoral zeal on preaching. His legendary “four o’clock sermons” at

St. Mary’s University Church attracted crowds of students in spite of the efforts of college authorities to discourage their attendance. 35 Between 1834 and 1842, Newman published six volumes of Parochial Sermons; in 1843, along with other writers of the Tracts for , he contributed to the publication of Plain Sermons.36

In the wake of John Keble’s Assize Sermon “On ” on 14 July 1833,

Newman, along with many friends and colleagues, launched a movement of religious renewal that came to be known as the Oxford or Tractarian movement. The term “Tractarian” comes from the series of ninety (1833-1844), which were published (sometimes

34 See AW, 86-107.

35 See R. D. Middleton, “The Vicar of St. Mary’s,” in John Henry Newman: Centenary Essays (Westminster, MD: Newman Bookshop, 1945), 127-138; Herman Breucha, “Newman als Prediger,” Newman Studien 2:157-177.

36 In 1869, these sermons were republished under the editorship of W. J. Copeland in eight volumes as Parochial and Plain Sermons, which were subsequently included in the uniform edition of Newman’s works published by Longmans, Green, London; hereafter cited: PPS.

40 anonymously) by members of the Oxford movement; Newman wrote about a third of the

Tracts.37

The purpose of the movement was to revive among Anglicans—especially Anglican clergy—a living consciousness of the Church as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic body independent of the civil government, as the visible institution governing the Christian practice of faith and providing the center of unity. In other words, the movement’s program of renewal was ecclesial––its main theological tenets were the of clergy, the importance of

Tradition, the visibility of the Church, the necessity of the sacraments and liturgical prayer, and the universal call to Christian holiness.38

In many respects, Newman was the de facto leader of the Oxford movement. He was the principal author of one-third of the Tracts for the Times as well as an eloquent preacher at St.

Mary’s University Church. He wrote articles for journals, carried on an extensive correspondence, and entered public debates where he exhibited his skill as a formidable controversialist. Although the movement initially enjoyed widespread success, opposition emerged from two different directions: Evangelicals were not sympathetic to the movement’s doctrinal emphasis; religious liberals saw little need for doctrine at all. Newman specifically

37 See Tracts for the Times: by Members of the University of Oxford, Vols. 1-6 (New York: AMS Press, 1969). The tracts written by Newman were published by James Tolhurst (ed.), John Henry Newman: Tracts for the Times (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013); they are also available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/times/index.html; hereafter cited: Tracts.

38 For information about the Tractarian movement, see R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years: 1833-1845 (London: Macmillan, 1922), and Owen Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays (Cambridge: University Press, 1990).

41 targeted religious liberalism as “pride of reason” or autonomy of reason, at the expense of an exercise of personal assent in matters of faith.39

Simultaneously, Newman continued to expand his personal theological horizons. In his

Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838), he attempted to find middle ground between the

Lutheran position of and justification by obedience, which he considered the position held by the “extreme writers of the Roman school.”40 In his Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (1843), Newman discussed such questions as the relationship between faith and reason; science and theology. Of his Anglican theological writings prior to his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), particularly significant were his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church Viewed Relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism

(1837).41 This work was an attempt to delineate an Anglican ecclesiology as a middle position between the supposed Roman Catholic distortions of the Church and the ecclesiological diminutions of continental protestantism.

Newman also turned his attention to the rich theological tradition of the Church of

England, especially as found in the work of the “Caroline Divines.”42 These theologians

39 See “Note A. Liberalism,” Apo., 285-297.

40 Newman, Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, 1-2.

41 In the uniform edition (Longmans, Green), Newman’s Lectures on the Prophetical Office were re-published with a lengthy “Preface to the Third Edition” as the first volume of The Via Media of The Anglican Church Illustrated in Lectures, Letters and Tracts Written between 1830 and 1841; hereafter cited: VM.

42 The “Caroline Divines” were a group of Anglican theologians active during the reigns of King Charles I (1625-1640) and Charles II (1660-1685); among the most significant were Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Archbishop William Laud (1573-1645), Archbishop John Bramhall

42 defended the English on the grounds of the Church’s teachings in the patristic period and condemned what they considered erroneous teachings in both continental protestantism and Roman-Catholicism. Newman proposed an Anglican theological via media in continuity with these 17th-century Anglican theologians and attempted to consolidate Anglican theology into a coherent system that would be convincing due to its correspondence with the teachings of the Councils and the Fathers of the early Church.

Newman’s efforts at consolidating Anglican theology in light of the teachings of the

Councils and Fathers of the early Church eventually led him to the realization that his Anglican

“middle position” was untenable. In the summer of 1839, while studying the history of the

Monophysite heresy in the 5th century, he discovered that his system of via media markedly resembled the heretical position of the Monophysites rather than the position of the Catholic

Church fighting against it.43 Newman’s comparison of with the religious denominations in the 19th century did not stem as much from the similarities in dogmatic teaching, but from a comparison of the ecclesiological standpoints taken by the heretical,

Catholic, and moderate parties in the fifth-century controversy. The major issue of dispute between Anglicans and Roman Catholics was the role and nature of teaching authority in the

(1594-1663), and Bishop George Bull (1634-1710). Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752), a prominent theologian of a later period, should also be mentioned with this list as a significant theological influence for Newman. See Kenneth Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship in the Church of England: From the Sixteenth Century to the Late Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), ix, 45-68.

43 Apo., 114-116. Monophysitism, a Christological position that maintained that Jesus possessed only a single divine nature, was condemned at the fourth of Chalcedon (451). See John Norman D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1978), 331-342; also Thomas, 171-247.

43

Church; the historical evidence surrounding the events of the fifth-century heresy dramatically favored the Catholic position. As he later acknowledged in his autobiography:

My Prophetical Office had come to pieces; not indeed as an argument against ‘Roman errors,’ nor as against Protestantism, but as in behalf of England. I had no longer a distinctive plea for Anglicanism, unless I would be a Monophysite.44

This realization was the beginning of an agonizing six-year process that eventually led

Newman to enter the Roman Catholic Church. While he had lost all confidence in his via media of the Anglican Church as a defensible theological position, he still retained his Anglican objections against Roman Catholicism. As he then saw it, the Roman Church justified doctrinal developments that were distortions of orthodox teaching. By implication, the papal office elevated itself above law, dogma and history, and so practically yielded to liberalism in religion and became an agent of “the spirit of lawlessness.”45 Thus, at the heart of Newman’s process of theological discernment on the questions surrounding doctrinal development and the papal office in the Church was the tension between the ecclesial authority and human reason within the process of the historical transmission of Christian teaching. As Yves Congar observed,

“Newman experienced personally the problem which faced Catholic theology since the sixteenth century.”46

44 Apo., 120. For a fuller analysis of Newman’s conversion, see below, 74-79.

45 Ibid., 191-192.

46 Congar, 209-210.

44

In 1841, Newman published 90,47 which attempted to interpret the Thirty-nine

Articles of Religion48 in a Catholic sense, yet without what he considered later problematic

Roman Catholic developments. This Tract provoked a stormy reaction; he was denounced both by the Heads of Houses at Oxford and by Anglican bishops in their charges. He agreed to give up the publications of further Tracts and effectively gave up his leadership of the Movement.

His faith in the Anglican Church was shaken. In 1842, he withdrew to with a small community of friends to lead a life of study and prayer.49 In 1843, he published a formal retraction of his anti-Catholic statements50 and resigned as vicar of St. Mary’s Church at Oxford.

While at Littlemore, Newman started writing about doctrinal development. “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine” was the topic of his last university sermon, which he preached on 2 February 1843.51 This sermon presented a theological outline of doctrinal development without discussing specific points of controversy between Anglicanism and Roman

Catholicism. After acknowledging doctrinal development in principle, Newman admitted: “I am

47 Published with later notes in VM 2:259-366.

48 The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (1563), which constitute the official statement of in contrast to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and continental protestantism, are available at http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/39articles.html (accessed: August 11, 2016).

49 Pastoral care for Littlemore, a village approximately 2.5 miles southeast of the city centre of Oxford, was the responsibility of the vicar of St. Mary’s (Oxford); Newman built the first Anglican church at Littlemore.

50 Published in VM 2:427-433.

51 Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, 312-351; hereafter cited: OUS.

45 far more certain (according to the Fathers) that we [Anglicans] are in a state of culpable separation, than that developments do not exist under the Gospel, and that the Roman developments are not the true ones.”52 To resolve his doubts, he embarked on writing an extensive treatise focusing on the development of doctrine in detail, without prejudice against

Roman Catholicism and with a fresh approach to the issue of an infallible teaching authority in the Church. The result was An Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine that marked

Newman’s decision to become a Roman Catholic.

Received into the Roman Catholic Church in October 1845, Newman stayed for several months with other converts at College, , before departing for Rome to prepare for his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, which took place on 30 May 1847. After completing his Oratorian novitiate at Santa Croce, he returned to England, where he founded the

Oratory of St. Philip Neri—a community of diocesan devoted to prayer, study and pastoral ministry, including the education of youth. Newman lived the rest of his life in the

Oratorian community at Birmingham, except for his times in Dublin between 1851 and 1858 when he was appointed the rector of the newly-founded Catholic University of Ireland.

As a Catholic, Newman continued lecturing and writing on various topics related to faith, composed several controversialist works in defense of the Church along with devotional works.

He also was engaged in addressing public matters of religious interest to Catholics in England and abroad, such as Catholic education and the Catholic Press, the pope’s spiritual and temporal authority and the rise of the Ultramontane movement, and the teachings of the (First) Vatican

52 Newman to Mrs. William Froude (14 July 1844), LD 10:297-298; see Apo., 197.

46

Council (1869-1870). In addition, he devoted a considerable amount of time to correspondence with prospective converts from Anglicanism and other faith-seeking people.

Among the most prominent publications of his Roman Catholic period were: the third edition of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine with extensive revisions (1878);

The Idea of a University (1873), containing lectures and essays written while he was rector of the

Catholic University in Dublin; An Essay in Aid of a (1870), a philosophical exploration of the relationship between reason and faith; a mariological treatise published in A

Letter Addressed to the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D. D., on Occasion of His Eirenicon (1864); and a discussion of the papal exercise of infallibility in A Letter to the (1875).

Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865), which narrated his personal journey to Catholicism, is considered not only one of the greatest autobiographical achievements, but also a classic work of prose in the English language.

In May 1879, Pope Leo XIII elevated John Henry Newman to the rank of Cardinal. In a speech delivered in Rome on this occasion, Newman declared that the goal of his life-long efforts was opposing “the spirit of liberalism in religion.”53 He died at the on 11 August 1890, and was buried at the Oratorian house at on August 19.

Newman has been considered one of the pioneers of the modern Catholic renewal whose theological work made an important contribution to the teachings of the Second Vatican

53 Newman, “Biglietto Speech, Rome” in W. P. Neville (editor), Addresses to Cardinal Newman with His Replies, 61-71.

47

Council.54 His influence is palpable in the text of some of its documents;55 moreover, his name was invoked by Pope Paul VI as a source of inspiration for the Council’s work.56 Newman was declared “Venerable” by Pope John Paul II on 22 January 1991. On 19 September 2010, in the course of his apostolic visit to the United Kingdom, Pope Benedict XVI beatified John Henry

Cardinal Newman at a solemn mass in , Birmingham. As Pope Benedict has remarked:

Modernity in [Newman’s] life with the same doubts and problems of our lives today; his great culture, his knowledge of the treasures of human culture, openness to permanent search, to permanent renewal and, spirituality, spiritual life, life with God—these elements give to this man an exceptional stature for our time. That is why he is like a for us and for all, and also a bridge between Anglicans and Catholics.57

Development and Conscience

In his monograph on John Henry Cardinal Newman and Sir John Edward Dalberg Acton,

Hugh MacDougall stated that the origins of Newman’s idea of doctrinal development tantalized

Acton. Acton’s effort to trace the source of the idea in the works of other thinkers yielded no conclusive results. MacDougall concluded that the idea of doctrinal development had to do more

54 See Ker, Newman on Vatican II.

55 See Meszaros, 247-254; Michael O’Carroll, “Our Lady in Newman and Vatican II,” The Downside Review 89/294 (January 1971): 38-63.

56 According to Dulles (Newman, 151), Pope Paul VI described Vatican II as “Newman’s hour”; Dulles provided an analysis of convergences between Newman and Vatican II (Chapter 10, “Newman in Retrospect”).

57 Benedict XVI, Interview with the Journalists during the Flight to the United Kingdom (16 September 2010), AAS 102 (2010), 625-630, at 629.

48 with “Newman’s cast of mind, his native genius” than the influence of any other thinkers.58

Examining the origins of Newman’s idea of development indeed leads one to look to his religious genius. It may be said that the idea grew from the rudiments of his spirituality, his theological synthesis between faith and reason, his prayer and his personal quest for holiness.

In his Apologia, Newman recounted his inward conversion at the age of fifteen—an experience that prompted the idea of “two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.”59 At the wellspring of his relationship with God was this profound experience of religious awe and divine mystery. From this experience stemmed his life-long commitment to humility and transparency before the Almighty, a wholehearted devotion to the truth and painstaking obedience to the voice of conscience. Accompanying his conversion was the experience of external reality as illusory, deceptive, transitory and unreal and of the social world as hostile, alienated, and godless, one that opposed conscience. The basis of

Newman’s theological system thus stood upon “the polar tension between conscience and world.”60 This polarity found clear expression in his Apologia:

58 MacDougall, 154. Sir John Edward Dalberg Acton (1834-1902) was an English historian, publicist, political thinker and one of the leading Roman-Catholic intellectuals of his era in England.

59 Apo., 4.

60 Terrence Merrigan, “‘One Momentous Doctrine Which Enters My Reasoning’: The Unitive Function of Newman’s Doctrine of Providence,” Downside Review 108 (1990): 254-281, at 256; hereafter cited: Merrigan. Merrigan adopted the concept of polarity from Jan-Hendrik Walgrave, who considered it “the tension of two opposite forces which find their origin in a basic antecedent unity” and the principle of “all creative activity” (ibid.). According to Merrigan, Walgrave’s idea of polarity originated in German and the philosophy of and corresponds with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s basic methodological concept

49

I look out of myself into the world of men, and there I see a sight which fills me with unspeakable distress. The world seems simply to give the lie to that great truth [i.e., the existence of the Creator], of which my whole being is so full; and the effect upon me is, in consequence, as a matter of necessity, as confusing as if it denied that I am in existence myself. If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator. This is, to me, one of those great difficulties of this absolute primary truth, to which I referred just now. Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world.61

This dualism between the vivid sense of the reality as created by God and its distortion in the temporal world has led some to consider Newman a Platonist.62 In fact, he always retained his childhood sense of wonder with a “Platonic” tendency to look through the veil of the passing universe upon the intelligible reality which was the home of immortal beings: God, souls and angels.63 His keen aesthetic insight did not allow him simply to acquiesce in a wholly negative picture of the actual world; rather, he wanted to apprehend what this world might be in its undistorted form, original—redeemed. The polarity between the reflection of God’s image in creation alive in conscience and the experience of the world in its actual state generated in

Spannung, which denotes the fruitful tension between opposing elements in an irreducible constellation of the living form, Gestalt.

61 Apo., 241-242.

62 Walgrave, 23-36. In The Arians, Newman defended the Platonic thinking of Alexandrian theologians and claimed that it was not responsible for the origin of the heresy, which was rather due to the of the school of Antioch (Ari., 130-131). Newman’s apparent should not be overstated; Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, has depicted Newman as an Aristotelian in “The Very Idea of a University: Aristotle, Newman, and Us,” British Journal of Educational Studies 57/4 (2009), 347-362, at 351.

63 Walgrave, 24.

50

Newman a restlessness, longing, and contemplation—all implying motion; an inner dynamic between the mundane and transcendent reality giving rise to a religious journey—development.

The inner drama between conscience and the world evoked in Newman a commitment to an almost superhuman transparency in an effort to realize the ideal of self perceived in the light of his faith in God. As Newman observed in his Essay on Development: “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”64 A corollary of his transparency was his intense vulnerability. As G. K. Chesterton remarked,

Newman “was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensitivity,” someone who

“lacked a skin.”65 The words Newman used in a sermon on the Patriarch Jacob might have been self-descriptive: “he felt the rudeness of the world and winced, as being wounded by it.”66

The principle governing both conscience and the world in Newman’s religious experience, the principle keeping them in dynamic unity, was his faith in divine providence. The

God communicating truth to his conscience was the Creator who willed the world. As Merrigan has pointed out, the idea of divine providence was for Newman aligned with his solus cum solo relationship with God. It was based on the notion of “the Divine Judge in conscience,” “a working out of a fundamental principle given in the primordial experience of conscience in the world.”67 Providence was for Newman discernible in a chain of perceptions of truth in his

64 Dev. (1878), 40.

65 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Victorian Age in Literature (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 47.

66 “Remembrance of Past Mercies” (No. 516, 22 September 1838), PPS 5:72-85, at 80.

67 Merrigan, 257.

51 conscience; the chain in which every link was illumined by God’s grace on Newman’s previous action in accord with right conscience.

Newman’s life of faith could be described as a step-by-step journey sustained in a continually repeated assent to the truth offered at a particular stage of his life. In other words, faith inherently included development––a process of learning, maturing in holiness—a gradual adaptation of the believer’s course in life demarcated by divine providence. “Growth the only evidence of life”—the words of Thomas Scott aptly expressed development as a guiding principle in Newman’s spirituality.68 Newman eloquently expressed this principle in his poem

“The Pillar of Cloud”—better known by its opening words “Lead kindly light”:

Lead Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home— Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene—one step enough for me.69

Watching and waiting for the light of grace and adhering to grace by real assent—the constituent parts of Newman’s personal idea of development—might well be seen as rudiments of prayer. In fact, he once described prayer as “a process by which the word [of God] which has been given [to humans], ‘returns not void,’ but brings forth and buds and is accomplished and prospers.”70 Newman’s theology was the work of a man of prayer; his personal theological

68 Apo., 6.

69 Newman, Verses on Various Occasions, 156-157.

70 Newman, “A Legend of St. Gundleus” in Arthur W. Hutton, editor, The Lives of English Saints (London: S.T. Freemantle, 1901), 5-12; at 5; emphasis added. See also Is 55:11.

52 development was an unfolding of fides quaerens intellectum.71 His idea of theological development was structured on his experience of prayer as an insight into, and submission to, the light of supernatural truth. His spirituality was based on submission to divine providence, while development and authority were mainstays of his theology.

Development and Dogma

In his Apologia, Newman described his “inward conversion” at the age of fifteen as the origin of “divine faith” in him. This experience was “a fact” of which he was completely certain.

While his conversion was individual–– and to that extent subjective––he perceived his conversion as clearly transcending subjective experience.72 This conversion experience formed in his mind an idea of the revealed Christian religion, especially Christian teachings as expressed in official statements of doctrine. His conversion experience thus committed him to a religion, whose content was universally binding, objective, and authoritative; in a word––dogmatic. As he later described his conversion in his Apologia:

I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured. . . . From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and mockery.73

71 See Anselm, Proslogion: With the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 5; also see Joseph Ratzinger, “What in Fact is Theology?” in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 29-37.

72 Apo., 4. See C. Stephen Dessain, “Newman’s First Conversion: ‘A Great Change of Thought,’ August 1 till December 21, 1816,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 46:181 (Spring, 1957): 44-59.

73 Apo., 4; 49.

53

In spite of his inherent distrust of the external world and the individualistic character of his conversion, Newman never adopted the position of religious solipsism or ; rather, throughout his life and work as an apologist, he vigorously defended dogma as the necessary means of a meaningful language about God, as the sine qua non of an objective–– interpersonal––system of religious doctrine. Newman’s personal theological development flowed from his fundamental decision to align his religious experience with Christian dogmatic teachings. The process might be seen as a process of discernment between the principles and teachings of his conversion-based faith on the one hand and a mixture of biases and imaginings on the other: a continuous effort to conform his inner faith with the faith of the Apostles.74

This fundamental choice stood out in Newman’s encounter with religious error. As he indicated in his Apologia, for a period of time after his conversion, he held the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which seemingly provided a logical explanation of his religious experience about the stark contrast between the reality of grace and truth and the volatile and illusory world.

Eventually—as a result of both theological study and pastoral experience—he abandoned “the detestable doctrine.”75 In effect, he changed his religious views in order to safeguard the correspondence of his personal faith with Christian doctrine. With dogma as a formative principle of his faith-development, he became a life-long opponent of rationalistic attitudes toward religion—“the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which

74 Newman chose as the motto for his memorial plaque at the Birmingham Oratory: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem––“From shadows and images to truth.” See Wilfrid Ward, Life of Cardinal Newman (London: Longmans, Green, 1912), 2:537.

75 Apo., 4.

54 are in their nature beyond and independent of it.”76 He considered “false liberty of thought” and

“pride of reason” the evils behind the selective reception of Christian teaching, as well as religious , and indifference to God. Complacency with a lack of religious assent to revealed truth—“the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments”—was the gist of the religious

“liberalism” against which he devoted many of his writings during his Anglican period.77

A defense of dogmatic religion was a major theme in Newman’s first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1834). This work accounted for the origins of the dogmatic tradition by means of the special character of Christian instruction. Following a line of argument adopted from Edward Hawkins, he substantiated the existence of, and need for, Tradition as the privileged means of imparting the Christian faith to neophytes. Although Scripture stood as the sufficient record of revealed truth, according to Hawkins, it was never intended as the sufficient means of Christian teaching.78

In The Arians, Newman explained the emergence of creedal and dogmatic statements on the basis of the historic transition from the private or personal means of instruction in faith as disciplina arcani in the early period of the Church to the official means of teaching in later periods when the Church became a public institution. He interpreted this change in the light of the principle of economy, that is, the method of accommodating the means of instruction to the

76 “Note A. Liberalism” in Apo., 285-297; at 288.

77 Ibid., 287-288, 296. See Robert Pattison, The Great Dissent: Newman and the Liberal Heresy (Oxford: University Press, 1991).

78 See Ari., 139, note 2.

55 prior learning experiences and limitations of his hearers.79 Thus, when Christianity became a popular religion, dogma became the preferable, indeed the necessary, instrument of religious instruction to secure the authoritative handing on of the Christian faith in its fullness.

In The Arians, Newman focused on Tradition as authoritative in the transmission of dogma; however, Tradition was not to augment, but only to “corroborate and illustrate” the

Scripture record of Revelation, to which it was “altogether subordinate.”80 Accordingly, he distinguished between the Roman Catholic tradition that in his Anglican view supplanted

Scripture with new, self-authorized doctrines, and the Anglican tradition that professed to be limited to the teaching of the Church in the Apostolic times.

The idea of the visible Church as the authoritative safeguard of dogmatic tradition clearly appealed to Newman; he admired the Roman Catholic Church with its claim of a universally- binding teaching authority that seemed to correspond to the idea of a historical Tradition of

Christian doctrine. However, as an Anglican, he adamantly held that the authority of Tradition rested not with the teacher, but rather with the authentic content of teaching. The real source of authority was truth; it was dogma that substantiated a teaching office and not vice-versa.

Accordingly, the Church of Rome had to be condemned for teaching a faith that did not correspond to the faith of the early Church.81

79 Ari., 65, 71.

80 See ibid., 55.

81 See below the section of this chapter on the via media of Anglicanism, 61-73.

56

Development and the Church

Shortly after his conversion in 1816, Newman read ’s Church History,82 where he encountered long extracts from the theology of the Church Fathers and was “nothing short of enamored.”83 The experience of sharing the faith with the great doctors of Christianity inculcated in Newman the idea of the Church as a communion of believers based on shared assent to religious truth. This notion would be strengthened by friendships at Oxford with other men, who, like Newman, were devoted wholeheartedly to Christ. While reading Milner’s

Church History, Newman came across ’s On the Prophecies84—a book which instilled in the young Newman a deep-seated suspicion of the Roman Catholic Church; he became “most firmly convinced that the pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul and St. John.”85 This idea negatively affected his understanding of ecclesiastical structure and served as a major obstacle to the idea of the Catholic and Apostolic Church in his theology.86

The “intellectual inconsistency” of the two antagonistic impressions of the visible hierarchy of the Church–– the one negative as demonic usurpation of Christ’s power; the other

82 Joseph Milner (1744-1797), an Anglican cleric and theologian, wrote The History of the Church of Christ in five volumes, which were completed by his brother Isaac and published between 1794-1809.

83 Apo., 7.

84 Newman wrote a scathing criticism of Thomas Newton (1702-1782), an Anglican bishop and writer, in “The Protestant Idea of Antichrist” for the British Critic in 1840, which was re- published in Ess 2:112-185; see below, 82-83.

85 Apo., 7.

86 See ibid., 52-56.

57 positive as a safeguard of authentic teaching––resulted in a “conflict of mind.” The solution of this inconsistency came only “after many years of intellectual unrest, in the gradual decay and extinction of one [of the ideas].”87 At the time he took Anglican orders, Newman believed that the spirit of the Antichrist dominated the Roman Catholic Church from the time of the pontificate of Gregory the Great. Eight years later, this idea apparently held less sway over him, as illustrated by his oblique description of the Church of Rome as “bound up with the cause of

Antichrist” from the Council of Trent in the 16th century. Even when this view no longer stood the test of historical critique, he felt its stain upon his conscience and imagination into his final years as an Anglican.88

The slow dissipation of Newman’s toxic ideas about the visible Church in general, and the papacy in particular, was in tandem with a steady and gradual appropriation of Catholic ecclesiology. In this process, he discovered “the sacramental principle,” that is, “the doctrine that material phenomena are both types and instruments of real things unseen.”89 His main sources of sacramental theology were: Keble’s collection of poems The Christian Year; the theology of the Church Fathers; Scripture; and the Anglican ritual. Also influential was the deep faith of his friend Richard Hurrell Fourde in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed also played an important role by helping

Newman to base his understanding of the sacramental principle on a broader philosophical

87 Apo., 6-7.

88 Ibid., 153-154. See Paul Misner, “Newman and the Tradition Concerning the Papal Antichrist,” Church History 42/3 (1973): 377-395.

89 Apo., 18, 27.

58 basis.90 The sacramental principle gave “the ultimate resolution” to the idea, entertained by

Newman from childhood, of the material world as illusory and unreal.91 It conveyed to him the

Catholic idea of the material world as intrinsically good, a part of God’s creation. It also accorded with his perception of grace as the dispensation of the light of divine truth and learning as the process of development in successive stages by forms congenial to human understanding.

In light of the sacramental principle, Newman perceived in the entirety of creation a reflection of God’s wisdom and love. In “the exterior world, physical and historical,” he saw

“the outward framework, which concealed yet suggested the Living Truth.”92 The Revelation of the Living Truth was summed up in the person of Jesus Christ and was authoritatively transmitted by the Church. The “Holy Church in her sacraments and hierarchical appointments” was “a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity;” in other words, the Church herself was a sacrament. Thus, at the beginning of the Oxford Movement (1833), Newman had formed an idea of “a visible Church, with sacraments and rites which are the channels of invisible grace.”93

An important influence on the development of Newman’s understanding of the Church was the collision of his anti-Erastian attitude with the Establishmentarianism of the Church of

England. For Newman, the spiritual authority of the Anglican Church could not proceed from an

90 Apo., 10, 24.

91 Ibid, 10.

92 Ibid., 27.

93 Ibid., 151.

59 alliance with the secular government. Such an arrangement would make the Church merely a national institution, an exact opposite of the true Catholic Church. The Establishment was simply a political arrangement convenient for a historical period when Christian sovereigns protected and promoted the spiritual interests of the Church. This arrangement was not essentially different from the support of the Church by monarchs in other Christian countries.94

As an Anglican, Newman was satisfied with the idea that for several centuries the Church of England had benefited from the alliance with the crown; however, the Church did not depend on it. In unchristian times, should a sovereign become an advocate of secularism, or should the political order change––no matter how unfortunate that would be—the Anglican Church had no reason to fear losing anything essential. The Church stood on a different principle than a secular government. As he wrote at the beginning of the Oxford Movement in Tract One:

The question recurs, on what are we to rest our authority, when the State deserts us? Christ has not left His Church without claim of its own upon the attention of men. Surely not. Hard Master He cannot be, to bid us oppose the world, yet give us no credentials for so doing. There are some who rest their divine mission on their own unsupported assertion; others, who rest it upon their popularity; others, on their success; and others, who rest it upon their temporal distinctions. This last case has, perhaps, been too much our own; I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our authority is built,—our Apostolic descent.95

94 See Misner, Papacy and Development, 22-24.

95 Tracts, 2. As a Roman Catholic, Newman considered the Anglican church Erastian: “I looked at it from without, and (as I should myself say) saw it as it was. Forthwith I could not get myself to see in it any thing else, than what I had so long fearfully suspected, from as far back as 1836,—a mere national institution” (Note E. “The Anglican Church” in Apo., 339-342; at 339). See lectures 1-4 in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, 1-125. Also see Dulles, Newman, 121-124.

60

The authority of the Church of England was then founded upon her uninterrupted continuity with the Church of the Apostles. Thus, Newman’s theological understanding of the Church was linked from the beginning with the issue of the authority of the Apostolic Church. This theme dominated the Oxford Movement, as well as his ecclesiological thinking. During his Anglican period, the defense of a visible Church was the battleground on which he fought both protestants and liberals alike; however, this position also led him into controversy with Roman Catholics.96

In attempting to delineate the ecclesiology of the Oxford Movement, Newman produced an original ecclesiological synthesis, which described the Anglican Church as a via media between continental protestantism and Roman Catholicism. This via media was a major theme in his Tracts for the Times 39 and 41 (both 1834) and in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837). His via media proposed a distinctly Anglican theology of the Church that seemed superior both to Romanism and protestantism. Relying on “the standard English authors,” “the middle path” between Romanism and protestantism embodied their sound doctrines but excluded their respective errors. He considered this theory as “the nearest approximation to the ancient model”––the early Church.97 Later, he came to feel that the

Prophetical Office—one of his major theological projects—“came to pieces.”98 Still, from those pieces Newman would later construct a new ecclesiology of doctrinal development.

96 See VM 1:5, 95.

97 Ibid., 5, 16.

98 Newman to Edward Bellasis (15 December, 1869), LD 24:390.

61

Development and the Via Media Ecclesiology

Newman laid the theological grounds of his via media by arguing that Anglican doctrine could be proved entirely from the Scripture—a position, which he was convinced, Roman

Catholics could not and would not admit.99 Nonetheless, the Bible was for Anglicans “the document of ultimate appeal in matters of faith” and not the “sole of informants in divine truths.”100 The latter distinction was meant to delineate a viewpoint different from the protestant position of Sola Scriptura and so allow for the role of an authoritative Tradition in the transmission of the revealed doctrine in the Church.

With regard to the scope and character of the Church’s Tradition, Newman granted that it was not any “certain definite number of statements” which could be exhaustively contained in a written compilation. Rather, it was a matter of “uniform custom,” of “an unconscious habit of opinion and sentiment” sanctioning the way in which “Christians had always believed and acted.” Thus, he agreed with Roman Catholics that Tradition in its fullness was “necessarily unwritten.”101 However, his main charge against the Church of Rome was not its reliance on

Tradition as such, rather its supposed admixture of false doctrines into the authentic Christian

Tradition. Thus, the Anglican controversy with Romans Catholics was not over principles as

99 For additional treatment of Newman’s Lectures On the Prophetical Office see the introduction by H. D. Weidner in the annotated edition of Via Media of the Anglican Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), i-lxxix, and Joseph Elamparayil, John Henry Newman’s Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church: A Contextual History and Ecclesiological Analysis (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, doctoral dissertation, 2012).

100 VM 1:28.

101 Ibid., 30-32.

62 with protestants; it was a controversy over facts: which traditions were or were not consistent with the teachings of the early Christian Church?102 According to Newman, Roman Catholics had added new doctrines to the deposit of faith.

The doctrines that Newman as an Anglican considered as diverging from apostolic teaching were , the veneration of saints and the infallibility of the Church. In his

Prophetical Office, he centered his criticism of Roman Catholicism on the issue of infallibility.

As Avery Dulles has observed, this was for Newman the Anglican “the underlying source of differences between the Roman Church and the Church of England.”103 Newman’s attack on infallibility was not based on any official Roman Catholic statement, since none had been issued at the time he was writing; rather, his evaluation of infallibility was based on his examination of the Roman religious doctrine and practice, including “a careful and not unfriendly study” of

Robert Bellarmine.104

Challenging inadvertently his own assumption that the Anglican-Roman controversy consisted in facts rather than principles, Newman presented infallibility as the Roman Church’s

“main tenet which gives color to all its parts” when viewed “as a practical system:”105

When we put aside the creeds and professions of our opponents for their actual teaching and disputing, they will be found to care very little for the Fathers, whether as primitive or as concordant; they believe the existing Church to be infallible, and if ancient belief is at variance with it, which of course they do not

102 See VM 1:37-38.

103 Dulles, “Newman on Infallibility,” 435.

104 See VM 1:xxxii, 65. (1542-1621) was a Jesuit priest, cardinal and theologian, whose major work On Controversies was a classic defense of papal authority.

105 VM 1:84.

63

allow, but if it is, then Antiquity is mistaken; that is all. . . . There are in fact two elements in operation within [the Roman] system. As far as it is Catholic and Scriptural, it appeals to the Fathers; as far as it is a corruption, it finds it necessary to supersede them.106

According to Newman, infallibility was the main instrument for superseding the historical doctrines of Christianity and so bestowed authority on Roman teachings and practices that in fact lacked the authorization of the early centuries.

Profession of infallibility had, according to Newman, various deleterious effects upon the

Roman Catholic system. Having supposedly provided what he regarded as an artificial ground of religious certitude in the Church’s teaching authority, infallibility led to dogmatism––a tendency to express the entire mystery of faith in precise definitions, thereby turning theology into a closed and rigid ideology. Simultaneously, infallibility brought legalism into Christian prayer and moral life, making them a calculated exercise of prescribed duties and religious practices. In addition, infallibility warranted the use of practically any means, justified by the

Church’s ends in political life.107 Newman’s refutation of infallibility corroborated the contemporary Anglican charge that Roman Catholicism “dwarfs the intellect, narrows the mind, hardens the heart, fosters superstition, and encourages blood-thirsty, crafty and bigoted temper.”108 According to Newman, all of these evils stemmed from Rome’s infatuation with

106 VM 1:49; 83.

107 See ibid., 102.

108 Ibid., xxxv. Newman apparently had in mind Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), the Irish political leader of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, whom Newman accused of joining forces with liberal enemies of the Church of England to promote Irish interests (see Apo., 122- 125; 133-134, where O’Connell was mentioned by name). Newman’s attack on Rome stemmed from such factors as the traditional protestant odium against “jesuitism” in morality and politics

64 power; in short, the doctrine of infallibility was a mechanism of control. According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, one could hardly criticize Catholic ecclesiology more effectively than did

Newman the Anglican who virtually “summed up all the objections of the anti-Roman attitude” of modern times.109

The majority of Newman’s objections against infallibility were of a moral nature: the objections against Rome’s dogmatism, legalism, and Machiavellian politics were attacks on the level of conduct rather than on the level of teaching. In other words, these arguments were directed against what could be perceived as misapprehension, misapplication––or plain abuse–– of infallibility by individuals in the Church, i.e., arguments , not arguments against the theological or historical foundations of the doctrine itself.110

Aside from these moral objections, Newman’s theological argument against infallibility in the Prophetical Office was essentially one––infallibility authorized the development of doctrines that were unprecedented in the early Church. He quoted to that effect a passage by

John Fisher, who had explained the Catholic teaching about the indulgences as a later doctrine developed contingently with the teaching on the purgatory, as a proof needing no commentary

and the strong anti-Roman Catholic language of the “Caroline Divines” (see Apologia, 202-203; “ of the Anglican Church,” Ess 2:1-111, at 69-73).

109 Balthasar, Office, 12; see below, 290-307.

110 See VM 1:47. Newman treated various objections by Roman Catholics against Anglicanism as arguments ad hominem; for example, the spread of sects and in England was supposedly not due to inherent defects in the Anglican system, but to the failure of individuals in implementing Anglicanism; see VM 1:140-143.

65 that the Roman Catholic teaching was “neglectful of antiquity.”111 In this case, Newman saw an intrinsic link between infallible teaching authority and doctrinal development in the Church, although in a negative way. In his Prophetical Office, both concepts presupposed each other and so both had to be rejected.

Dismissal of the Roman Catholic doctrine of infallibility then led Newman to address the issue of private judgment. In his Anglican terminology, he used “private judgment” to refer to the principle of subjective authority in religious matters. As such, private judgment was the characteristic protestant claim to the right of deciding subjectively about the meaning of

Scriptural teachings. In this regard, Newman’s main adversary was not Roman Catholicism, but

“the anti-dogmatic principle” in religion. By refusing to allow that Church teaching could provide any binding meaning for Scripture, protestantism allied itself with religious liberalism, whose characteristic tenet was to receive the doctrines of Revelation selectively on the basis of subjective preference. The question was––did any alternative other than subjective authority exist, if the doctrine of infallibility could not be accepted?

Elaborating a theory about the Church’s teaching authority that would present an alternative to both protestantism and Roman Catholicism was precisely Newman’s intention in proposing his via media. He claimed that if protestantism renounced all external religious authority in the name of private judgment, Roman Catholicism practically disabled any exercise

111 See VM 1:72. St. John Cardinal Fisher (1469-1535) was an English theologian, bishop and . The passage cited by Newman was from Fisher’s Confutation of Luther’s Assertion (1523).

66 of reasoning in the name of infallibility, which was detrimental to religious assent itself.112 He argued that genuine religious certitude was acquired through the process of faith, not by the assurance of the Church’s infallibility. The teaching authority of the Church was indeed indispensable, but only to make accessible and to interpret the teaching contained in Tradition,

Scripture, worship and antiquity. In other words, the voice of the Church was one of “historical witness,” a witness that carried the weight of the data of the past, leaving no possibility for fabricating novel views:

Without claiming infallibility, the Church may claim the confidence and obedience of her members. . . . The Church enforces, upon her own responsibility, what is an historical fact, and ascertainable as other facts, and obvious to the intelligence of inquirers, as other facts; viz., the doctrine of the Apostles; and Private Judgment has as little exercise here as in any matters of sense and experience.113

Thus, Anglicanism was presented as a conservative system of religion strictly keeping to the historical record of the Christian faith; in contrast, the official teaching of Roman Catholicism endorsed innovations stemming from private judgment about the content of Revelation.114

112 VM 1:85-87.

113 Ibid., 143, 189.

114 See ibid., 177, 181. It seems that Newman as an Anglican considered infallibility simply as private judgment dressed in fancy theological garments. Later as a Catholic he dismissed his accusation: “Private judgment; yes, so it may be called while it is exercised simply by individual writers. But when it is taken up by the Church, it is no longer ‘private,’ but has the sanction of her, who, as our author [Newman the Anglican] observed above, ‘may truly be said almost infallibly to interpret Scripture’. . . . In proportion as the Church took up and recognized the doctrine, it ceased to be ‘the result of private judgment’. . . . How private? since it is the interpretation of the whole Latin Church?” (ibid., 174, note 7; 177, note 9; 181, note 15).

67

In the first seven of his fourteen lectures in the Prophetical Office, Newman subjected infallibility to a shattering critique. The little positive he had to say about infallibility was “the principle of that genuine theology out of which it has arisen is the authority of Catholic antiquity.”115 While he seemed to admit the authority of the universal––Catholic testimony of the Church based on a unanimous assent to the faith’s teaching—he apparently believed that only the early Church was truly Catholic. On account of schism, none of the present Christian churches could possibly attain to the early Church’s level of the universal unanimity of faith.116

As Newman as a Catholic later recognized, by giving up the infallibility of a living Magisterium, he had abandoned in his Anglican period the ideal of Catholic unity as a present possibility. His

Anglican ecclesiology was then left with the ––a view that the Church Catholic persisted in three main branches that agreed on the essentials of faith: Latin, Greek and

Anglican.117 In the actual historical situation of the 19th century, Newman the Anglican argued that the claim of the Church of Rome to possess infallibility was false, and thus its exercise of infallibility inevitably corrupted.

Surprisingly, Newman’s eighth lecture, “The Indefectibility of the Church Catholic,” had a new tone:

Not only is the Catholic Church bound to teach the Truth, but she is ever divinely guided to teach it; her witness of the Christian Faith is a matter of promise as well

115 VM 1:84.

116 See ibid., 49-50.

117 Ibid., 62, 234, 240, 252, 278 and 315; also Apo., 69-70. For a review of the 19th-century Anglican branch theory in the context of the ecclesiological discussions surrounding Vatican Council II, see Avery Dulles, “The Church, the Churches, and the Catholic Church,” Theological Studies 33 (1972): 199-234, at 202.

68

as of duty; her discernment of it secured by a heavenly as well as by a human rule. She is indefectible in it, and therefore not only has authority to enforce, but is of authority in declaring it. This, it is obvious, is a much more inspiring contemplation than any I have hitherto mentioned. The Church not only transmits the faith by human means, but has a supernatural gift for that purpose; that doctrine, which is true, considered as an historical fact, is true also because she teaches it.118

A few passages later, the author left no room for doubt that “indefectibility” implied

“infallibility:”

Our reception of the Athanasian Creed is another proof of our holding the infallibility of the Church, as some of our Divines express it, in matters of saving faith. In that Creed it is unhesitatingly said that certain doctrines are necessary to be believed for salvation; they are minutely and precisely described; no room is left for private judgment, none for any examination into Scripture, with the view of discovering them.119

The shift in language concerning infallibility is remarkable, insofar as previously he had explicitly condemned the doctrine of infallibility as the flagship of the Church of Rome.

In the original text, Newman did not explain his new position in regard to infallibility; however, as a Catholic, he acknowledged his inconsistency in the notes to the third edition of the

Prophetical Office: “Here it is said that the claim to infallibility is the bane of the Church: yet in

Lecture viii. infallibility in teaching is claimed for her by the author [Newman]. . . . How can a divine gift be a ‘main’ error?”120 Apparently this change of mind was an instance of Newman’s

118 VM 1:190; emphasis added.

119 Ibid., 192; emphasis added. The Athanasian Creed is a statement of Catholic faith with a lengthy statement about the Trinity and Christ. While ascribed to St. († 373), this Creed probably originated in the 5th century in the Latin Church. See Kelly, 273.

120 VM 1:84-85, note 3.

69 theological development: in the process of writing the Prophetical Office, he moved away from seeing infallibility as a corruption of Christian teaching to receiving it in principle.

What seemingly influenced his change was his perception of infallibility in relation to: the divine guidance of the Church, the promise of the continuous presence of the Holy Spirit within the Church made in Scripture, and the doctrine of divine providence. Newman presumably would not have been content with supposing that the Church’s teaching was secured merely by “a human rule” and “human means.” The Church had to rely on supernatural help that guarded her exercise of teaching from error.121 Thus, in contrast to his previous lectures in the

Prophetical Office, Newman in his eighth lecture interpreted infallibility as an authentic component of “Catholic testimony.” The Church spoke infallibly “as the organ of the Catholic voice;” “the faith thus witnessed, is, as being thus witnessed, such, that whoso does not believe it faithfully, cannot be saved.”122

An important issue that remained for Newman, however, was the scope and agency of infallibility: “The Church’s Authority in enforcing doctrine extends only so far as that doctrine is

Apostolic, and therefore true.”123 He reiterated his reservations about the system of the Roman

Catholic Church. Because he understood infallibility as a function of Apostolicity in a strict sense, the Church of Rome could not claim infallibility while accepting doctrines which did not correspond entirely to those of the early Church. Infallible teaching was a historical witness to

121 See Francis A. Sullivan, “Newman on Infallibility,” in Newman after a Hundred Years, 419- 446, at 422.

122 VM 1:192.

123 Ibid., 190.

70 ancient dogma, not a legislation of new dogma. The issue of new, unprecedented Roman-

Catholic doctrines was associated in Newman’s mind with “the anti-dogmatic principle” of religious liberalism––he perceived the idea of dogmatic development as unwarranted change of

Christian doctrine. This constituted for Newman the Anglican the crucial point in the Roman-

Anglican controversy over the character of infallibility and its exercise in the Church.

It was only in the later part in of his Prophetical Office that Newman introduced the

“prophetical office” of the Church.124 This idea was based on differentiating between the essential and nonessential teachings of faith, the “greater” and “lesser truths” to be believed in the Church’s teaching. The former constituted “Episcopal Tradition,” an authoritative register of doctrines necessary for salvation. The vast body of the latter pertained to “Tradition

Prophetical,” a product of the Church’s charge to enunciate, interpret and teach the saving doctrines of faith under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.125 The prophetical tradition was a stream accompanying the stream of episcopal Tradition proceeding from one and the same, divinely given, source of Apostolic teaching. While the prophetical tradition should be

“religiously preserved,” it could be “corrupted in its details” insofar as it enjoyed “no such especial means” of preservation from error—most likely a reference to infallibility—as was afforded the official episcopal Tradition in passing on the dogmatic teaching of the Church.126

124 VM 1:250 (first mentioned in the 355-page volume of the 3rd edition).

125 See ibid., 254.

126 See ibid., 251.

71

The idea of “prophetical tradition”—the prophetical office of the Church—was an excellent contribution to ecclesiology; its significance transcended the polemical character of

Newman’s Anglican writing. “Prophetical tradition” encompassed the Catholic idea of sensus

Ecclesiae––the habit, or mind, of the faithful abiding in true teaching through the assistance of the Holy Spirit.127 “Prophetical tradition” also accounted for the process of “theological” development—in contradistinction to the idea of doctrinal development—as an explication and elaboration of the supernatural sense of the Church. The prophetical office as described by

Newman highlighted the importance of nonessential traditions in the hermeneutic of faith as providing a living context for interpreting the episcopal Tradition containing the Church’s dogmatic teaching.

Newman’s via media did not draw a clear line between the episcopal and the prophetical tradition. These traditions were so organically linked that only through a humble (though not indiscriminate) acceptance of the prophetical tradition was a person led to the assent to the doctrine of Revelation contained in the episcopal Tradition. According to Newman, the prophetical tradition had its value even in cases when it did not conform entirely with historical doctrine. He illustrated this point with a tradition claiming that St. was the child whom in a Gospel narrative Jesus took in his arms and blessed: “Even if untrue,” the tradition “indirectly confirms certain truths, viz. that St. Ignatius was closely connected with the

Apostles.”128 In contrast, the teaching authority in the Roman Church acted far beyond its

127 See VM 1:250-251. On sensus Ecclesiae, see Francis A. Sullivan, Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (Eugene, OR; Wipf & Stock, 1983), 21-23.

128 VM 1:250, note 4.

72 competence when enforcing peculiar forms of the prophetical tradition to the point of presenting them as tenets of the Christian creed necessary for salvation. Consequently, theological developments were treated by Rome as doctrines of faith. For Newman, such interference by a teaching office in religious matters spoiled the purity of faith, both in content and in act. The teaching authority of the Church was not an arbitrary judge, but an official witness of faith.

Four decades after having written these lectures, Newman identified in his notes to the third edition of the Prophetical Office some major weak points in his former Anglican theory: 1)

The idea of “historical witness” as the foundation of the Church’s teaching authority presupposed a kind of clarity of historical records that was not viable.129 2) The lectures also assumed that there was an objective disruption in the teaching in the early Church and that of later times; that “by a happy coincidence, a providential disposition, the great quarrels and divisions of the Christian body did not take place till just upon the date of the complete enunciation by the Church of all the ‘fundamentals’ of faith.”130 3) An application of the

“historical witness” in an actual controversy of faith could not be brought about by past data and historical records; it called for “an applier, that is, a living and present mind.’”131 4) A delineation of the official teaching from the historical records thus required in the via media ecclesiology a process of subjective reasoning—as he later acknowledged in his Apologia, “this

129 See VM 1:128, note 1.

130 Ibid., 203, note 3; see also Dulles, “Newman on Infallibility,” 437.

131 Ibid., 269, note 3; see also Dev. (1878), 77.

73 circumstance, that after all we must use private judgment upon Antiquity, created a sort of distrust of my theory altogether.”132

Examining the contrasts between Newman’s via media and the Roman Catholic system as presented in the original edition of the Prophetical Office, one has the feeling that in the process of writing, the theological grounds of his attack on the Church of Rome were melting away. With a tone of exasperation, Newman admitted,

Now, that our discussions on what might be fitly called the Prophetical Office of the Church draw to a close, the thought, with which perhaps we entered on the subject is not unlikely to recur, when the excitement of the inquiry has subsided, and weariness has succeeded, that what has been said is but a dream, the wanton exercise, rather than the practical conclusion of the intellect.133

As Newman later explained in his Apologia, his greatest misgivings about the Prophetical Office did not rest in the possible gaps in the system—some of which he might have perceived at the time of its composition. He presumably would have granted it was imperfect, but, at least, it was a system, a theology. The fundamental problem was his via media—“It was at present a paper religion”134––an attempted systematization of Anglican principles rather than a representation of the living faith of Anglican believers. Newman was hopeful at the time when he wrote the

Prophetical Office that his via media was consistent with the belief of the faithful in the Church of England.135

132 Apo., 113.

133 VM 1:331; see Apo., 113.

134 Apo., 68.

135 VM 1:17-18.

74

Securus Judicat Orbis Terrarum

In the spring of 1839, as Newman mentioned in his Apologia, his position in the Anglican

Church was “at its height” and he had “supreme confidence” in his “controversial status.”136 If he might have been unsure about the theological viability of his via media, he seemed confident that he could prevail against Roman Catholics in any controversy based on historical grounds.

His adamant accusation against the Roman Church was that Rome had added new doctrines to the deposit of Revelation. The main cause of the Anglican-Roman controversy, as he came to perceive it, was a dilemma between “two notes or prerogatives” of the Church: “Apostolicity versus Catholicity.”137 The Church of Rome claimed Catholicity—the attributes of unity and universality. The Church of England claimed Apostolicity—continuity with the faith of the early

Church. For Newman,

Purity of faith is more precious to the Christian than unity itself. If Rome has erred grievously in doctrine, than it is a duty to separate even from Rome.138

Newman’s confidence was unsettled in the summer of 1839, when in the course of studying the history of the Monophysite controversy, he came across historical evidence that undermined his Anglican position. Reflecting on the proceedings at the Council of

Chalcedon,139 he found himself on the side of heresy; as he wrote in his Apologia,

136 Apo., 93.

137 Ibid., 106.

138 Ibid., 110; see Newman, “Home Thoughts Abroad,” British Magazine (Spring 1836), re- published as “How to Accomplish It” in Discussions and Arguments, 1-43, at 5.

139 The Council of Chalcedon (451), the fourth ecumenical council, defined the Christological teaching against the Monophysite heresy. See above, 42, note 43.

75

My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite.140

Newman’s experience in reflecting on the history of Monophysitism was not one of syllogism, nor finding a lost piece of data; rather, the Monophysite history had the force of a living picture.

Attempting to communicate this experiencing to others, he limited himself to stating: “It was difficult to make out how Eutychians or Monophysites were heretics, unless protestants and

Anglicans were heretics also.”141 Hans Urs von Balthasar has suggested an explanation of this historical parallel:

To his horror, Newman found that Eutyches, who similarly appealed to a past tradition in a normative era, was found to be a heretic by the Council of Chalcedon, where the formula of Ephesus was changed in order to preserve orthodoxy, and this with the unequivocal leadership of the Roman See.142

What Newman apparently realized was that the Fathers of Chalcedon acted on Catholic testimony, not on historical evidence. They based their decisions on a unanimous assent, attained with Pope Leo and against the dissenting body that based its case on adherence to literal tradition. Historical testimony gave way to a developing authority of the Catholic Church.

140 Apo., 114.

141 Ibid., 114-115.

142 Balthasar, Office, 297. Eutyches (c. 380- c. 456) was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon for teaching that Christ’s human nature was consumed in his single nature of the divine Son. See Kelly, 330-334; 339-341.

76

An article published shortly afterwards in the Dublin Review by dealt

Newman another blow.143 Wiseman argued from the Church Fathers against the apostolicity of the Church of England as claimed by Tractarians. Wiseman’s main thesis was summarized in the rule that St. Augustine applied in the Donatist controversy: Quapropter securus judicat orbis terrarum, bonos non esse qui se dividunt ab orbe terrarum, in quacumque parte orbis terrarum.144 The words—securus judicat orbis terrarum (the entire world judges with certitude)—struck Newman “with a power never felt from any words before”; he compared them to the tolle lege that Augustine heard that prompted his conversion.145

Augustine’s dictum against the Donatists resolved the main issue that Newman had identified in his controversy with Roman Catholics––the infallibility of the Church. Augustine’s securus judicat orbis terrarum declared Catholic assent the deciding factor in determining authentic doctrine in times of and controversies. Securus meant that the voice of the

Catholic Church (orbis terrarum) was certain, definite, “secure of truth,” that is, infallible; judicat implied that the Church was making a living decision at a crucial time in the life of the

Church, not merely repeating a historical testimony. As Newman interpreted Augustine’s words in his Apologia, “the deliberate judgment in which the whole Church at length rests and

143 Nicholas Wiseman, “Anglican Claim of Apostolic Succession,” Dublin Review 7 (July- August, 1839): 139-180. Nicholas Wiseman (1802-1865), the rector of the English College in Rome, became cardinal archbishop of Westminster in 1850.

144 Ibid., 154. The Donatists, who formed a schismatic church in North Africa named after their leader Donatus († ca. 355), maintained that spiritual authority and sacramental validity required personal holiness. See Kelly, 409-416; 424-427. The quotation is from Augustine’s Contra Epistolam Parmeniani, 3, 24; PL 43:101.

145 See Apo., 116-117.

77 acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede.”146

In effect, Newman found that his Anglican via media was at odds with the ecclesiology of the early Church. The universal creedal witness of the existing Church, not the historical witness of the early Church, judged with certitude: “St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of

Antiquity; here then Antiquity was deciding against itself.”147 Thus, the problem with

Newman’s Anglican ecclesiology was not a mere matter of details; rather, the problem was with the narrow historical platform of authority in the Church upon which he had built his via media.

According to Dulles,

The existing Church, and not simply the prior Church, was the oracle of truth. The same rule could apply for modern times and ancient. With that realization the via media was in Newman’s judgment pulverized. He felt bound to profess infallibility, and in so doing to accept Roman Catholicism. For infallibility was, as we have seen, the distinctive trait of the Roman Church. No other church in the modern world dared to claim the gift of infallibility. If infallibility was true, the Church of Rome was the true Church.148

Dulles characterized Newman’s ecclesiological change in 1839, as a “conversion to infallibility,”149 an acknowledgement of the Church as the agent of infallibility.

According to von Balthasar, Newman realized that his Anglican position incorporated an inherent contradiction:

146 Apologia, 117; emphasis added.

147 Ibid.

148 Dulles, “Newman on Infallibility,” 438.

149 Ibid., 437.

78

How could an authority which was once present in a living tradition (and without which no church can have an orthodox faith) cease to be a living reality, and be discoverable only in a remote historical period?”150

Congar expressed this point succinctly:

[Newman] discovered that the Anglican Church today occupies a position similar to that of the semi-Arians or the Monophysites, with their via media whereas Rome held what it always had held in face of these ancient heresies. The ancient Church never defined its faith in the early councils only on the criterion of antiquity, but on that of the sense of the faith ever living in its preaching. She never merely witnessed, but judged, using an authority ever active in her.151

According to Congar, Newman “moved on from an idea of tradition directed solely towards the historical witness of the past, to a theology which encompassed the ever living magisterium of the Church.”152 In other words, Newman accepted infallibility as a doctrine-developing power.

If the Catholic Church has the ability to judge and define in matters of doctrine, she has also the capacity to develop doctrines. This new view—that Christian doctrine develops—effectively cancelled his main objection against Roman Catholicism that the Roman Church had added new doctrines to scriptural Revelation.

While Newman the Anglican was “seriously alarmed” at his findings in 1839, he later realized that a new vista had opened before him: “What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church!”153 Nonetheless, he still had to formulate a comprehensive theological explanation about doctrinal development. Thus, his recognition that infallibility was

150 Balthasar, Office, 297, emphasis added.

151 Congar, 210-211.

152 Ibid.

153 Apo., 117.

79 a true mark of the Church Catholic did not result in an instant conversion to Roman Catholicism.

His specific dilemma was not whether the pope is infallible; rather it was whether the infallibility of the Roman Church meant that a person is bound to live under ; or, put bluntly, whether the Church of England was in schism.154

Newman then examined the Roman Catholic claim of possessing the infallibility of the universal Church from two perspectives: first, he examined the claim against the backdrop of the

Anglican “branch theory” of the Church; second, he analyzed the relationship between the universal Church and her central office as presented in the institution of the papacy. He addressed these issues in an essay, “Catholicity of the Anglican Church,” written for the British

Critic as a response to Wiseman’s treatise.155 In this essay, Newman attempted to justify “the branch theory,” while acknowledging infallibility in the Catholic Church.

For Newman, Anglican episcopal ecclesiology exemplified the Catholicity of the Church on the basis of the conformity of each of its parts, in terms of the same descent from the

Apostolic Church, the same profession of faith and the same hierarchical structure under the local bishop. Local churches were “like a number of colonies sent out from a mother country” or

“a collection of crystals.”156 Relying on the writings of Saints Ignatius of Antioch and of Carthage, Anglican ecclesiology envisioned its essential Catholicity through the

154 See Misner, Papacy and Development, 26.

155 Ess, 2:1-111.

156 Ibid., 18; Apo., 107.

80 correspondence of each individual local church with the rest, rather than a local church sharing in an overarching ecclesiastical organization under the pope’s authority.

The Anglican ecclesiological position, as formulated by Newman in this article, allowed that traces, or notes, of the Church were found in the “branches” separated from Rome.

Accordingly, he characterized the papacy as an “ecclesiastical arrangement” rather than part of ecclesiological doctrine.157 Papal supremacy was then a matter of the social and political organization of the Church, a political instrument of unity like the supremacy of a monarch.

While papal supremacy might have some advantages over royal, ultimately these were issues about the temporal organization of the Church, not a matter of Revelation.

This view of the papacy notwithstanding, Newman frankly acknowledged that the position of Augustine differed from what Ignatius and Cyprian urged about the inherent unity of the local church under a bishop: Augustine endorsed the universal Church under the bishop of

Rome. According to Newman’s analysis of the Donatist controversy, Augustine affirmed as a general principle that “the whole does ever, by the best of rights, take precedence of the parts.”

Because “the whole judged with certainty,” the reference point of Catholic unity was not a diocese but the whole Church. For Augustine “the principle of unity lay, not in each individual bishop, but in the body of the Church, or, if in any one bishop, in the pope.”158

While Augustine’s teaching created a strong antecedent probability for the existence of the papacy as the central office of the Church, Newman maintained that “Catholicity, and not the

157 Ess 2:25.

158 Ibid., 32; 35.

81

Pope, is the of the Church.” Accordingly, the role of the papacy is to bring a “perfection of ecclesiastical unity”; however, the papacy was not a part of the Church’s definition, nor of any creedal statement. The contrary view––conceiving communion with the pope an essential mark of the Catholic Church––was not official Roman doctrine, but the viewpoint of the ultramontanist movement in Roman-Catholic theology; Anglicanism was then in accord with gallican theology.159 Newman’s apologetic on behalf of the Church of England thus hinged on the supposition that the Church’s unity, as presupposed by her infallibility, simply transcended the contribution of the papal office in forming the Church as a single entity.160

Newman was clearly on the defensive in this essay. Its “protestant” of argumentation––entirely against Newman’s usual grain161––disputed the authenticity of Roman

Catholicism but at the cost of giving up a higher and more visible unity of the Church. In effect, he substituted an abstract unity for a concrete unity based on the primacy of the pope.162 “What

159 Ess 2:36-38. and , which can be respectively characterized as centralizing and decentralizing movements within the Roman Catholic Church, have had a long history based on the continuous tension between the central authority of the pope and the authority of diocesan bishops––the heads of the local churches in the ecclesial structure. See Austin Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign 1848- 1853 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). By framing the issue in these terms as early as 1840, Newman showed his awareness of the intramural tensions within Roman Catholicism.

160 Ess 2:59-69. In the final part of this essay, Newman sought to prove his point by a number of historical examples of venerated Catholic figures, who lacked full communion with the pope.

161 “This had been the reason of my dislike to the word ‘protestant;’ viz. it did not denote the profession of any particular religion at all, and was compatible with infidelity.” Apo., 68; see Misner, Papacy and Development, 26.

162 See Balthasar, Office, 85-92.

82 was this but to give up the notes of a visible Church altogether?”163 His position in this essay could only be tentative; by his own standards, the case for the Catholicity of the Anglican

Church was rather bleak. As he later acknowledged, all historical examples of Catholics outside a visible bond with the papacy were like exceptions proving the rule.164 Thus, the dilemma at this point of his theological journey was the relationship between the universal Church and the office of universal jurisdiction: the papacy.

Newman later as a Catholic stated that his view of the controversy between Anglicans and Roman Catholics did not depend upon the issue of the papacy.165 In response to frequent protestant objections that his conversion was due to an allurement to the pope’s supreme power as part of a quest for religious certitude, he claimed that he did not become a Roman Catholic because he had embraced the pope’s supremacy, rather he came to embrace the pope’s supremacy because he had become a Roman Catholic.166

During the course of 1840-1841, Newman made a conscious effort to clarify his understanding of the papacy. In an essay, “The Protestant Idea of Antichrist,” he repudiated protestant interpretations of scriptural prophecies that identified the Antichrist as the bishop of

Rome and other ecclesiastical leaders. Given that representation is essential to the idea of ecclesial office, it is always possible to call an ambassador a counterfeit: any type is naturally

163 Apo., 113-114.

164 Ess 2:107-108.

165 Apo., 111-112.

166 See Newman to Daniel Radford (15 October 1862), LD 20:308.

83 open to misrepresentation as antitype. Thus, a vicar of Christ is easily accused of being an anti-

Christ. Newman then applied this observation to protestant attacks on the Tractarianism movement and the Tractarian ideal of the Anglican Church.167

In another essay, “The Reformation of the Eleventh Century,” Newman described the rise of papal supremacy as a natural consequence of an effort for an inner renewal of the Church by

Pope Gregory VII. This effort was manifested in the political arena of the day in the form of the investiture controversy between the pope and secular rulers. According to Newman, Pope

Gregory was vindicating “an ecclesiastical principle essential to the independence and well- being of the Church.”168 In retrospect, Newman seemed in the process of slowly demythologizing his Anglican notion of papacy and exorcising his deep-seated suspicions about the bishop of Rome as Anti-Christ. This changing view of the papacy, along with setting aside the methodological constraints of his via media in favor of the idea of a living Magisterium in the Church, enabled Newman to consider doctrinal development from a different perspective.

Newman’s University Sermon on Doctrinal Development (1843)

On 2 February 1843, Newman preached his fifteenth and final University Sermon, which was titled: “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine.” This sermon was the fruit of a long process of his theological reflection and spiritual journey. For the first time, he presented in

167 “The Protestant Idea of Antichrist,” Ess 2:112-150; see Apo., 121, where Newman referred to this line of thought as his “great change of opinion.”

168 “The Reformation of the Eleventh Century,” Ess 2:249-335, at 306.

84 a coherent way a major theme that had occupied his thought from his earliest theological writings.169

In his first book, The Arians, Newman presented doctrinal development as an indirect byproduct both of a clash of the Christian religion with heresies and of the principle of

“economy” in the Church’s teaching of Revelation. In his Prophetical Office of the Church, the idea of development of doctrine took shape in his idea of the prophetical tradition––a supernatural sense of the Church providing a living context for the interpretation of dogma. In his final University Sermon, he presented doctrinal development as an inherent link between the

Christian Revelation and the dogmatic teaching of the Church, as truth of Revelation living in the mind of the faithful.170

In presenting the central thesis of his sermon, Newman made this crucial remark:

[I am not] here in any way concerned with the question, who is the legitimate framer and judge of these dogmatic inferences under the Gospel, or if there be any. Whether the Church is infallible, or the individual, or the first ages, or none of these, is not the point here, but the theory of developments itself.171

Accordingly, he confined his explanation of doctrinal development in the sermon to a consideration of religious epistemology, separate from the wider ecclesiological considerations concerning the link between doctrinal development and the teaching authority in the Church.

Thus, he explored the development of doctrine as “a remarkable philosophical phenomenon,” as

169 “I had introduced [the principle of development of doctrine] into my History of the Arians in 1832; nor had I ever lost sight of it in my speculations” (Apo., 197).

170 See OUS, 318-319.

171 Ibid., 319-320.

85 a study focused on “the office of the Reason” in relation to “the connection between Faith and

Dogmatic Confession.”172 The sermon thus remained within the scope of an exploration on the relationship between faith and reason which was the major theme of all his University sermons.173

The philosophical foundation of Newman’s epistemological analysis of dogmatic development was his understanding of the development of ideas—the thought process of realization from an “inward idea” or “implicit knowledge” to an “explicit form” or the “dogmatic system” of propositions.174 According to Aidan Nichols, Newman’s explanation was indebted to the philosophy of the British empiricists, especially , who portrayed the human mind as receiving impressions of material objects by means of the senses as wax being imprinted by a seal.175 In a similar way, “Revelation sets before [the mind] certain supernatural facts and actions, beings and principles, these make a certain impression or image upon it; and this impression spontaneously, or even necessarily, becomes the subject on the part of the mind itself.”176 According to Newman,

the mind which is habituated in the thought of God begins to form statements concerning Him before it knows whither, or how far, it will be carried. One

172 OUS, 319.

173 See ibid, also Walgrave, 47.

174 OUS., 320-321; 335; 337.

175 Aidan Nichols, From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), 40. In contradistinction to Locke, in his Grammar of Assent, chapter 2, Newman described “apprehension” as an interactive process, not simply as the impression of objects on the mind.

176 OUS, 320; emphasis added.

86

proposition necessarily leads to another, and a second to a third; then some limitation is required; and the combination of these opposites occasions some fresh evolutions from the original idea, which indeed can never be said to be entirely exhausted. This process is its development, and results in a series, or rather body of dogmatic statements, till what was at first an impression on the Imagination has become a system or creed in the Reason.177

The theological principle upon which Newman built his view of developments in religious doctrine was the spiritual sense of Scripture.178 This sermon identified the “inward idea” of revealed truth with the New Testament view of the “knowledge” of Christ Jesus as mediated by the word of God in the Church.179 The ordinary means of impressing “the great

Object of Faith” upon the mind of the faithful were, for instance,

the habitual and devout perusal of Scripture, which gradually acts upon the mind; again, the gradual influence of intercourse with those who are in themselves in possession of the sacred ideas; again, the study of Dogmatic Theology, which is our present subject; again, a continual round of devotion; or again, sometimes, in minds both fitly disposed and apprehensive, the almost instantaneous operation of a keen faith.180

For Newman, “the sacred impression” generated in a living encounter with the word of

God was prior to any formulation of faith in propositions. The “sacred impression” acted as “a regulating principle” on theological reasoning, “enlightening” and “(as if) inhabiting” dogmatic statements. In this sermon, Newman invoked the scriptural exegesis of the early Church Fathers,

177 OUS, 329.

178 The spiritual (or, as Newman sometimes described it, mystical) sense of Scripture can be understood as the sensus plenior (“fuller sense”)––the unity of Scripture that transcends its literal meaning. See Henri de Lubac, Scripture in the Tradition (New York: Crossroads, 2000), 1-84.

179 OUS, 332.

180 Ibid., 333; 334.

87 whose theology was elaborated under the continual influence of the spiritual sense of

Scripture:181

One thing alone has to be impressed on us by Scripture, the Catholic idea, and in it they all are included. To object, then, to the number of propositions, upon which an anathema is placed is altogether to mistake their use; for their multiplication is not intended to enforce many things, but to express one,—to form within us that one impression concerning Almighty God, as the ruling principle of our minds, and that, whether we can fully recognize our own possession of it or no.182

The fulcrum of Newman’s view of doctrinal development was this synthesis of the inward “Catholic idea” of Revelation with the cognitive process of its components and their expression in doctrinal statements:

That idea is not enlarged, if propositions are added, nor impaired if they are withdrawn: if they are added, this is with a view of conveying that one integral view, not of amplifying it. That view does not depend on such propositions: it does not consist in them; they are but specimens and indications of it. And they may be multiplied without limit. They are necessary, but not needful to it, being but portions or aspects of that previous impression which has at length come under the cognizance of Reason and the terminology of science.183

The relationship between Revelation and dogmatic statements was presented in this sermon as forming a unity that might be compared to the unity of the soul and body or the unity of the divine and human nature in the person of Jesus, the incarnate Son of God.184 An idea,

181 OUS, 334-335.

182 Ibid., 336.

183 Ibid. See Ker, Biography, 268, and Avery Dulles, “From Images to Truth: Newman on Revelation and Faith,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 252-267, at 255; both Ker and Dulles quote the same passage as a centerpiece of Newman’s sermon on development.

184 Newman identified the spiritual or mystical sense of Scripture as one of the first principles of Christianity, and characterized it as a “principle involved in the doctrine of the Incarnation.” See Dev (1878), 325; 339-346.

88 being of a higher order, is never fully expressed (nor expressible) by , which are “the representation of an idea in a medium not native to it,” “a direct contemplation, and, if so be, a definition of what is infinite and eternal.”185 For Newman,

Creeds and dogmas live in the one idea which they are designed to express, and which alone is substantive; and are necessary only because the human mind cannot reflect upon that idea, except piecemeal, cannot use it in its oneness and entireness, nor without resolving it into a series of aspects and relations. . . . Thus, the Catholic dogmas are, after all, but symbols of a Divine fact, which, far from being compassed by those very propositions, would not be exhausted, nor fathomed, by a thousand.186

The formulation of dogmatic statements is then an unending process; in theory, doctrines may be multiplied without limit.187 The development of doctrine is an inherent part of the transmission of the Revelation in the medium of human understanding and language. As such, doctrinal development is a principle of Catholic faith and theology.

In the latter part of this sermon, Newman dealt with a plausible accusation of skepticism about his presentation of the doctrinal development of the Christian religion. The question was whether dogmatic definitions had any meaning at all if human propositions were so unequal to expressing the mysteries of faith. His response was based on the sacramental nature of

Christianity: “What have we to care whether we are or are not given to divide substance from shadow, if He is training us heavenwards by means of either?”188

185 OUS, 325.

186 Ibid., 331-332.

187 Ibid., 336.

188 Ibid., 338; 348.

89

In this sermon, Newman presented his view of doctrinal development as an epistemological explanation indicating that the growth of the Church’s doctrine did not impair the immutability of divine Revelation. As Walgrave observed, Newman understood doctrinal development as an ecclesiological reality: “This development, as it actually took place within the

Church under the direction of infallible authority, appeared to him a positive sign of its divine origin.”189 In his essay on the Catholicity of the Anglican Church (1840), Newman advanced the opinion that an ecclesiological theory of development would create as many problems as it would solve. Neither Anglicans nor Romans were able to elaborate a consistent theory of development; such a theory would differ as much from the actual state of the Anglican church as from the actual state of the papal church.190

Accordingly, by the end of 1844, Newman decided to work on such an explanation. The result was An Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine; a full-length study that was the companion to his entry into the Roman Catholic Church, a masterpiece that has become a seminal work of Catholic theology.

189 Walgrave, 215.

190 Misner, Papacy and Development, 26-27; see Ess 2:45.

CHAPTER 2

Doctrinal Development and Papacy in Newman’s Essay on Development

History of the Publication

Newman completed An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine on 6 October

1845.1 Three days later, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church.2 He considered his

Essay an unfinished, yet sufficient, presentation of the development of doctrine, which had become for him the crucial test regarding the authenticity of the Roman Catholic Church. After considerable study, he “recognized in himself a conviction of the truth of the conclusion to which the discussion leads, so clear as to supersede further deliberation.”3 As he commented two decades later in his Apologia, “Before I got to the end, I resolved to be received [into the Roman

Catholic Church], and the book [Essay] remains in the state in which it was then, unfinished.”4

In his Preface to the revised edition of his Essay in 1878, Newman noted that “various important alterations have been made in the arrangement of its separate parts, and some, not indeed in its matter, but in its text.”5 Regarding these changes, Stanley Jaki commented that

“Newman showed himself to be a meticulous stylist as he replaced many words with their

1 “Advertisement to the First Edition,” Dev. (1878), x; also, Stanley L. Jaki, editor, John Henry Newman: An Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) (New Hope, KY: Real View Books, 2003), viii; hereafter cited: Dev. (1845).

2 Ker, Biography, 316.

3 Dev. (1845), ix.

4 Apo., 211.

5 Dev. (1878), vii. 90

91 synonyms and rephrased many statements, without adding anything really new.”6 One motive for Newman in revising his Essay was apparently to make its theological terminology more consistent with Roman Catholic usage.7 The most significant change in the new edition was repositioning of the chapter dealing with “developing authority” in the Church.8 This change shed light on Newman’s idea of the theological relationship between dogmatic development and the papal office.

A Miniature Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Newman’s main focus in writing the Essay centered on the addition of new doctrines to the original deposit of Christian faith in Roman Catholic teaching. He considered these additions a major Anglican objection against the Church of Rome; such additions constituted the virtual cause of the schism between the Roman Church and the Church of England.9 This objection emerged most emphatically in his “Introduction,” where he classified the Roman Catholic position as unhistorical. The addition of new doctrines implied variableness; an apparent lack of historical continuity sanctioned those skeptical views that would claim the Christian religion had no “objective existence” and was “to each man what each man thinks it to be.”10

6 Stanley L. Jaki, “Foreword” in Dev. (1845), ix-x.

7 Ibid. See Gerald McCarren, “Are Newman’s “Tests” or “Notes” of Genuine Doctrinal Development Useful Today?,” Newman Studies Journal 1/2 (Fall 2004): 48-61.

8 See Dev. (1845), 108-122; Dev. (1878), 75-91.

9 See above, 61-73.

10 See Dev. (1878), 2-32, especially 4-10.

92

The identity of Anglicanism with the original Apostolic faith had been the Anglican

Newman’s principal concern in his controversies against both liberalism and Roman

Catholicism. As in his Prophetical Office, he also insisted in his Essay on Development on the historical identity of the Christian faith, based on the true representation of the teaching maintained in “the ancient model”––the early Church. Yet, in contrast to his Prophetical Office, he proposed in his Essay that the growth of doctrine throughout history was not a corruption of the original faith, but paradoxically, the hallmark of true teaching.

Newman’s primary effort in his Essay was nothing less than a defense of “the testimony of our most natural informant concerning the doctrine and worship of Christianity, viz., the history of eighteen hundred years.”11 He presented the development of doctrine as a phenomenon sui generis in the . Accordingly, he proposed to investigate the theological and historical dimensions of doctrinal development—prescinding, for this purpose, from the question of whether his findings would concur with dogmatic developments in the Catholic Church:

As no special aim at Roman Catholic doctrine need be supposed to have given a direction to the inquiry, so neither can a reception of that doctrine be immediately based on its results. It would be the work of a life to apply the Theory of Developments so carefully to the writings of the Fathers, and to the history of controversies and councils, as thereby to vindicate the reasonableness of every decision of Rome. . . . Thus much, however, might be gained even from an Essay like the present, an explanation of so many of the reputed corruptions, doctrinal and practical, of Rome, as might serve as a fair ground for trusting her in parallel cases where the investigation had not been pursued.12

11 Dev. (1878), 29.

12 Ibid., 31-32.

93

In other words, his Essay was an attempt at delineating the principle of doctrinal development in the history of Christianity. Whether such a defense of “historical Christianity” would prove to be an argument in favor of the Roman Catholic Church and her doctrinal developments was an open-ended question at the beginning of his Essay. Accordingly, Newman did not present his work as a full-fledged theory of doctrinal development, but modestly described it as “an hypothesis to account for a difficulty”—the principal difficulty being that of apparent historical variations and inconsistencies in the body of Christian teachings handed over throughout centuries among Christians from the times of the Apostles.13

For Newman, along with the question of the historical identity of the Christian faith in different historical periods, the very notion of divine Revelation was at stake. Was it possible that the truth revealed by God in time and space, had not been handed over uncontaminated and indefectible through later centuries? Accordingly, on the one hand, Newman dismissed protestantism, whose “utter incongruity” with historical Christianity was “a plain fact.”14 On the other hand, the view that the Christian faith changed its content in different social and historical situations was incompatible “with the special idea of revealed truth.” If the protestant creed was unhistorical, the tendency of liberalism was to abandon “the supernatural claims of Christianity,” thereby losing faith altogether.15

13 Dev. (1878), 30.

14 See ibid., 7-11. Newman concluded the passage with the words: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a protestant.”

15 Ibid., 9.

94

The bulk of the Introduction to his Essay might be described as Newman’s doctrinal apologia pro vita sua. He presented the reasons for his personal theological development concerning the historical transmission of Revelation and explained why he had ceased to believe that Anglican teaching was the true depository and vehicle of Christian Revelation. The English

Reformation rejected the supposed post-apostolic corruptions of doctrine in Roman Catholicism by claiming adherence to the dogmatic teaching formulated by the Church in the early centuries.

In the theology of the Anglican divines, the authority of the Church of England to distinguish between later corruptions and the original dogma was based on a dictum formulated by St.

Vincent of Lérins: semper, ubique et ab omnibus—that what was to be believed was held

“always, everywhere and by all.”16 Such a premise, Newman conceded, offered a plausible key to the issue concerning the identity of the Christian teaching vis-à-vis its variable interpretations throughout history. What differed from the doctrine of the early Church was not held always; therefore, it was, at best, a private opinion, and, at worst, a corrupt teaching.17

The problem with the Anglican “rule of historical interpretation” consisted in its practical application. Upon close scrutiny, Newman found himself unable to determine by means of the

“Vincentian Canon” the precise scope of the historical teaching of Christianity.18

16 Dev. (1878), 10. This dictum is from the Commonitorium (PL 50:637-686) by St. Vincent of Lérins (died ca. 445), who used this rule to distinguish the Catholic faith, regarded as the universal assent to the sense of Holy Scripture, from heresy.

17 See Dev. (1878), 10-11.

18 Ibid., 11-15, 27.

95

A case in point was the doctrine of the Trinity. If the unequivocal consent of the early Church

Fathers had been required for accepting a doctrine of the Church as universally binding, a survey of Christian writers before the Council of Nicea (313 A.D.) indicated that the doctrine of the

Trinity was far from being explicitly elaborated and confirmed by a consent that would meet the requirements of always, everywhere and by all. If, however, the Trinitarian doctrine was implied, or anticipated by the Fathers of the early Church and developed into a full-fledged dogmatic formula at a later age, Newman then asked: why could not the same have been the case with such doctrines as purgatory and papal supremacy?19

Having examined historical data regarding the doctrines of Real Presence and papal supremacy in the writings of the early Church Fathers, Newman pointed out the inconsistency of embracing the former and rejecting the latter doctrine, for which there was in fact greater evidence. Consequently, what the Anglican Via Media introduced was an exercise of “the false liberty of thought,” subjecting to private judgment “those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it.”20 In other words, Anglicanism as a system was not immune from subjectively picking and choosing—under a sophisticated garb of historical criticism—convenient doctrines, instead of endorsing the entire deposit of the revealed truth.

For Newman, the dictum of Vincent of Lérins conveyed the broad outlines of truth; however, the dictum did not suffice as a criterion for “harmonizing the records and documents of

19 Dev. (1878), 15-27.

20 Apo., 288.

96 the early and later Church”: these words were not meant to constitute such a criterion. The solution that the “Vincentian rule” offered was then “as difficult as the original problem:”

If it be narrowed for the purpose of disproving the Catholicity of the Creed of Pope Pius, it becomes also an objection to the Athanasian; and if it be relaxed to admit the doctrines retained by the English Church, it no longer excludes certain doctrines of Rome which that Church denies.21

In sum, the Vincentian rule failed to provide an authoritative criterion for the historical transmission of the doctrine of Revelation; it also failed to offer an alternative to the Catholic idea of a living Magisterium of the Church.

In light of his findings, Newman formulated the main thesis of his Essay—an hypothesis of the principle of doctrinal development:

The increase and expansion of the Christian Creed and Ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion; from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and that 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.22

Accordingly, the principle of doctrinal development stemmed from “the nature of the human mind”—a mind of the human creature existing in time and space. This was a principle in the proper sense of the word, an irreducible tenet embedded in the dynamic structure of human

21 Dev. (1878), 11-12; 27.

22 Ibid., 29-30.

97 understanding, which is a part and parcel of humanity in statu viatoris.23 The intellectual activity involved in the reception and communication of Revelation presupposed a process of thought, a progressive explication of the nexus mysteriorum in the Christian teaching. This process manifested itself not only in the material growth of expressed dogma, but also in a fuller elucidation of the deposit of faith. As Thomas Norris has written, “Newman attributed development to the discursiveness of the believer’s mind.”24

In his introductory statement, Newman did not mention the importance of doctrinal authority, in spite of the fact that the very purpose of his Essay was to present a coherent view of doctrinal development as an ecclesiological, not just an epistemological, theory. This lacuna seems due to his literary plan; his focus on the epistemological aspect of doctrinal development emerged from his prior examination of apparent inconsistencies in the historical forms of

Christian doctrines. This was the main theme of the Essay’s Introduction, where the question of doctrinal authority was emphatically presented in relation to papal supremacy as a case of a doctrinal development with a good claim to being received upon its historical witness. The epistemological orientation of the thesis thus needs to be read in the wider context of Newman’s plan to elaborate in the Essay a different ecclesiological standpoint than his Anglican Via Media.

23 “State of pilgrimage”—Aquinas’ concept indicating the historical character of human beings and human knowledge—was elaborated by , Faith, Hope and Love (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997), 91-98. See also Norris, 148.

24 Norris, 161.

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The body of Newman’s Essay might then be outlined: (A) an epistemological analysis of development in ideas; (B) an ecclesiological consideration of doctrinal development and doctrinal authority; (C) an historical investigation of doctrinal development.25

Development in Ideas

In the first part of his Essay, Newman elaborated the treatment of development that he had presented in his 1843 University sermon. The core of his analysis was a description of development in ideas: the thought process in which various aspects of an idea are brought into consistency and form. For Newman, ideas have a multiplicity of aspects, which may at first seem incompatible; however, they may eventually be combined and harmonized by the human intellect into a comprehensive representation of a particular reality. Ideas are real or false on the basis of their actual correspondence to the reality they represent.26

Newman’s view of the development of ideas stemmed from his understanding of reasoning “in the concrete”—in contrast to abstract, formal ways of thinking. His study of development thus includes the specific context in which an idea was conceived or elaborated. In his Essay, he distinguished several kinds of intellectual development on the basis of different settings or contexts, in which ideas are discerned and molded; for example, doctrinal development can have different forms: political, logical, historical, ethical and metaphysical:

Taking the Incarnation as central doctrine [of Christianity], the Episcopate, as taught by St. Ignatius, will be an instance of political development,

25 A more detailed analysis of the somewhat complex structure of the Essay, and its revision by Newman in the third edition of 1878, will be given later in this chapter, 101-105. The lettering used here will be further employed there.

26 Dev. (1878), 33-40.

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the Theotokos of logical, the determination of the date of our Lord's birth of historical, the Holy Eucharist of moral, and the Athanasian Creed of metaphysical.27

Newman’s ability to work with a variety of forms of development and to document them with ample historical evidence gave his Essay its force as a successful presentation of doctrinal development.

Newman’s view of the development of ideas illumined the temporal nature of human understanding as a process of thinking, an acquisition of insight. In principle, the development in ideas assumed that an individual human mind is capable of maintaining insights over time and sharing them with others. An insight is always generated in a particular historical context: a religious or a moral teaching, a political movement, a philosophical discussion, a metaphysical treatise, etc. In a sense, ideas remain embedded in their original setting, capable of being faithfully communicated in the terms that the specific context provided; however, an idea can be linked with other congenial insights, or contribute an entirely new context of thought in a new setting, thereby yielding a new insight, recognizing a new aspect of the idea. Both of these latter instances are, properly speaking, examples of the development of an idea.

The thesis of the epistemological part in Newman’s Essay was that the development in ideas essentially depends on a real continuity of an idea perceived, maintained, shared and transmitted in a historical community. Development must be faithful to the original idea from

27 Dev. (1878), 54.

100 which all insights proceed. For Newman, if there is an absence of continuity with the original idea, it is not a true development, but a corruption.28

In the rudiments of Newman’s view of doctrinal development, there was a link, or analogy, between the development of an idea in an individual mind and the development of doctrine in the Church. Just as an idea grows via the process of its appropriation by a person’s living and active mind, so the content of Christian Revelation gradually developed and grew historically in the process of its appropriation by the entire body of the Church.29

The parallel between the “life of an idea” in an individual mind and in a large historical body of men and women was important for Newman. A great idea could be characterized as

“real” and “living” because in a certain sense it transcended individual minds; the minds of a variety of people were capable of intersecting or sharing in one and the same idea:

The development then of an idea is not like an investigation worked out on paper, in which each successive advance is a pure evolution from a foregoing, but it is carried on through and by means of communities of men and their leaders and guides; and it employs their minds as its instruments, and depends upon them, while it uses them. And so, as regards existing opinions, principles, measures, and institutions of the community which it has invaded; it developes by establishing relations between itself and them; it employs itself, in giving them a new meaning and direction, in creating what may be called a jurisdiction over them, in throwing off whatever in them it cannot assimilate.30

The existence of such widespread ideas that remained identical when held by many people could be exemplified in particular by political ideals that could animate parties and movements for generations of people. As will be seen later in this chapter, the link between an individual’s

28 Dev. (1878), 41.

29 See Walgrave, 185; Norris, xviii; Chadwick, 182; Lash, 60-64.

30 Dev. (1878), 38-39.

101 development of an idea and doctrinal development in the Church had a vital importance in

Newman’s ecclesiological synthesis of doctrinal development and doctrinal authority.31

Rearrangement of the Essay

In order to appreciate Newman’s ecclesiological synthesis in his Essay, one must examine its overall literary plan with its somewhat complex structure. The basic line of argumentation in the main body of the Essay can be seen as a theological-historical study of the idea of development in the setting of Catholic ecclesiology. Newman approached this study as an epistemological investigation, a deeper philosophical elaboration of the idea of development.

Then, he applied the idea to concrete developments in the history of doctrine by considering

“notes” of authentic doctrinal development. In the process, he implied the necessity of a teaching authority in an overarching ecclesial context, or tradition, of doctrinal history.

Recalling the broad scheme outlined above, it may be said that the 1845 edition of the

Essay had the following design:

Introduction [1-29]

A1 An epistemological investigation of doctrinal development—development in ideas [30-57]

A2 A theological investigation of doctrinal development—the tests of authentic development in contrast to corruption of teaching [58-93]

B1 The relationship between doctrinal development and doctrinal authority [94-130]

B2 Methodological considerations concerning a theological study of doctrinal developments in history [131-202]

31 See below in this chapter, 104-105, 117-119 and 125-133.

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C An historical examination of development—an application of the individual tests of development to the doctrines of the Church [203-453]32

The theological part of the Essay—a study of doctrinal development as an idea in the religious epistemology of faith (A1-A2)—and the historical part—an application of the idea of development by means of the tests of doctrinal developments (C)—were bridged by a section on the ecclesiological link between the idea of doctrinal development and doctrinal authority and methodological issues (B1-B2).

The major structural change that Newman introduced in the 1878 edition of the Essay was to place the ecclesiological-methodological section (B1-B2) before the theological investigation of doctrinal development versus corruption (A2). The basic outline of the final edition was as follows:

Introduction [3-32]

A An epistemological investigation of doctrinal development— development in ideas [33-54]

B1 The relationship between doctrinal development and doctrinal authority [55-98]

B2 Methodological considerations concerning a theological study of doctrinal developments in history [99-165]

C1 A presentation of the notes of authentic development versus corruption of teaching [169-206]

C2 An historical examination of development—an application of the individual notes of development to doctrines of the Church [207-444]33

32 The numbers in brackets follow the original pagination presented in Jaki’s edition of Dev. (1845).

33 The page numbers follow Dev. (1878).

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The 1878 edition discussed the issue of doctrinal authority before introducing the notes of genuine doctrinal development; the latter appeared in the extensive second part together with the historical application of the notes.

In a sense, the structure of the 1845 edition was clearer than the structure of the 1878 edition. The original structure separated the theological and the historical part of the study of doctrinal development. However, the 1878 edition better presented Newman’s theological method. As Thomas Norris has effectively shown, there was a deep correspondence between

Newman’s exposition of the process of theological investigation in his 1870 treatise Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent and his exposition of doctrinal development in his Essay on the

Development of Christian Doctrine. Norris considered the latter “a classical example of

Newman’s theological method at work.”34 The structure of the 1878 edition of Essay on

Development thus better reflected Newman’s theological reasoning as elaborated in his

Grammar of Assent, where the searching mind proceeds from antecedent probabilities to certitude by the mind’s own faculty of judgment exercised upon a cumulative force of evidence.35 Accordingly, the 1878 edition treated first the “antecedent argument” on behalf of

“developments in Christian doctrine” as well as on behalf of “external developing authority.”36

The notes of doctrinal developments transferred by Newman into the later part of the Essay in its

34 Norris, 49.

35 See ibid., 42, 68.

36 See Dev. (1878), 55, 76.

104 third (1878) edition thus represented the evidences accumulated in the process of theological reasoning.

The revision in the 1878 edition made a significant contribution to understanding the ecclesiological synthesis in the Essay. Newman presented the teaching office of the Church and its role in doctrinal development as a theological equivalent of the faculty of judgment in the process of reasoning by an individual mind. He thus highlighted the relative autonomy of a developing authority as the innate power of the Church “external” to the process of doctrinal development, and as such, as the latter’s “normative standpoint.”37 The doctrinal authority is external in Newman’s terminology because it is institutionalized in the Church’s visible structure. However, this must not be confused with a modern sociological critique of the papal authority as a political force unrelated to the divine-human constitution of the ecclesial unity.38

Such a critique is contradicted in Newman’s Essay by an analogy between an individual conscience and ecclesial authority: “What conscience is in the system of nature, such is the voice of Scripture, or of the Church, or of the , as we may determine it, in the system of

Revelation.”39 Newman highlighted the ecclesiological foundation of the teaching office in the

Church by calling it the “developing authority.” This emphasized an inherent link between the ideas of doctrinal development and doctrinal authority: doctrinal development was conceivable for Newman only in conjunction with a means capable of making judgment in the realm of

37 See Lash, 114.

38 See below, 293-307.

39 Dev. (1878), 86.

105 doctrine and providing an official sanction to doctrinal development qua doctrinal, thus distinguishing “true developments of doctrine and practice” from “the mass of mere human speculation.”40

In this way, the ecclesiological relationship between the development of doctrine and the teaching authority in the Church figured more prominently in the 1878 Essay. Doctrinal development and doctrinal authority were introduced as partners of an original synthesis, one might say, in an antecedent idea of the Church.

Antecedent Probability and Analogy of Faith

What was, more precisely, the role of “antecedent arguments” in Newman’s theological reasoning, when in the first part of the Essay he postulated the probability of doctrinal developments and the existence of a doctrinal authority in the Church as something to be expected? In describing the history of his religious opinions in his Apologia, Newman credited his ideas about probability to Joseph Butler (1692-1752), the author of Analogy of Religion,

Natural and Revealed, who called probability “the guide of life.”41 Probable evidence—an indication of things likely to happen as a result of repetition and so admitting of degrees—does not amount to scientific proof. For Butler, probability is sufficient for a person to make right judgments in the concrete situations of everyday life. As human experience teaches, people in matters of life involving moral decisions usually determine their course of action by weighing

40 Dev. (1878), 78.

41 Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1868), 84. See Apologia, 10-11.

106 probabilities to consider the possibility of success. In Butler’s theology, probabilities are generally understood as observable phenomena in the natural order that provide a positive presumption for the reception of revealed truths on the basis of analogical reasoning.42

Newman adopted Butler’s line of thought about probability as an idea relevant to the process of religious reasoning. For both thinkers, faith is related to the process of reasoning insofar as faith involves a progression of thought by a series of acts of assent in tandem with an effectual realization of a larger view, or a deeper unity of the truths of Revelation. Thus, the value of Butler’s understanding of probability was its applicability to theological reasoning. This value did not consist in an abstract definition, as if determined by a place on the scale of demonstrative evidence; rather, the theological relevance of probability presupposed a theological way of thinking which would take into account the whole movement of thought concerning both probability and its field of reference. Like examining a small tessera of a large mosaic, probable evidence requires a capacity to take a comprehensive view, involving a process of realization leading from a partial aspect of truth to a holistic understanding.43

Recognition of probable evidence and its force in theological argument, according to

Newman, depends to a considerable extent upon the personal dispositions of the inquirer.44 In his University Sermons, he offered the following example: expectation of divine Revelation in the realm of history furnishes a probability concerning the veracity of Jesus’ . That

42 Dev. (1878), 83-90; see Norris, 133-135.

43 See Norris, 41-47.

44 OUS, 193.

107 probability of veracity in this case originated in a personal act of faith in a historical form of divine Revelation.45 After recognizing the relevance of probable evidence in the process of faith seeking understanding, he extended its range to a virtually inexhaustible domain of data.

Probabilities thus become multiform pieces collected, like tesserae assembled in a mosaic, in the process of realizing a living image of reality in mind. Such data usually stem from a dynamic apprehension of reality as developing from expectation of a fact to its fulfillment.

In regard to miracles, probability is derived from the prior faith’s assent to God’s self- revelation in history. Newman thus coined the term antecedent probability, which could be characterized as the likely state of affairs based on some preceding considerations.46 The attribute antecedent emphasized the value of a likely assumption in his theological reasoning prior to a process of verification. This implies that probabilities have to be accepted at face value so that they can lead to a realization of Christian truth via a gradual sequence built into the process of analogical thinking. In that sense, the attribute antecedent pertains to the state of affairs that precedes a thoroughgoing investigation. However, this attribute should also be perceived in terms of the priority of faith’s assent that generated probability as an antecedent supposition verified in the subsequent process of religious investigation.

45 OUS, 194.

46 See Lash, 31. Lash, who has deftly analyzed the central topics and categories of Newman’s religious epistemology, seems to some degree to reduce Newman’s epistemology to the level of empirical science, perhaps from underestimating the role of analogy in Newman’s theological method. On this, see the critique of Ian Ker, Newman on Vatican II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 41-42.

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Newman’s use of antecedent probability was not a lesser form of argumentation, a preconceived pattern without objective grounds or factual evidence. Rather, antecedent probability and factual evidence belong to two different types of intellectual reflection: separable, but capable of synthesis. As he stated in his 1839 university sermon Faith and

Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind:

I do but say that it is antecedent probability that gives meaning to those arguments from facts which are commonly called the Evidences of Revelation; that, whereas mere probability proves nothing, mere facts persuade no one; that probability is to fact, as the soul to the body; that mere presumptions may have no force, but that mere facts have no warmth. A mutilated and defective evidence suffices for persuasion where the heart is alive; but dead evidences, however perfect, can but create a dead faith.47

By considering antecedent probability as the soul of external evidence, Newman emphasized a kind of logical precedence of probabilities in theological reflection, to which they offered guidance. Newman’s theological reasoning was thus fully aligned with the traditional

Anselmian approach to theology as fides quaerens intellectum—as wisdom “vindicated by her children” (Lk 7:35).

Reasoning based on antecedent probability in Newman’s theological thinking could be better understood by an analysis of his analogical method. The classic description of analogy as a theological method involves three phases, or interconnected steps—via affirmationis

(predication about God by an attribute which is by necessity a finite mode of expression), via negationis (denial of the finite mode, noticing a dissimilarity in the attribute predicated to God as greater than the similarity), and via eminentiae (recognition of the perfection in the attribute

47 OUS, 200.

109 belonging to God on a higher level surpassing all finite modes of expression).48 Antecedent probability can be seen as an interaction between the level of probable evidence (via affirmationis) and the level of contemplative insight into the mystery of faith (via eminentiae).

Probabilities may lead to contemplative insight into the harmonious whole of Christian teaching.

In turn, contemplative insight can throw new light on subjects of theological investigation and generate new presuppositions—probabilities on other subjects of religious investigation. The attribute antecedent was linked with the latter movement of Newman’s use of probability in theological reasoning. Antecedent probability might then be described as a pre-understanding of a theological issue49 on the basis of a living image of revelatory truth in which the mind shares by the habit of contemplative faith.

For Newman, antecedent probabilities were undergirded by a contemplative insight into what he called the idea of Christianity or the Catholic idea—a view of the harmonious whole of

Christian truth that predetermined an actual configuration of its partial aspects. Augustine’s dictum indicating a principle of Catholic ecclesiology—“The whole does ever, by the best of rights, take precedence of the parts”—could be fittingly applied to Newman’s epistemology.50

The original idea is always reflected in particular developments; it casts a light of antecedent synthesis on particular notions in religious investigation.

48 See Kasper, 96-99.

49 Lash, 31, suggests that Newman’s antecedent probability is comparable to ’s concept of Vorverständnis.

50 Ess 2:35. According to Newman, Augustine affirmed this dictum as “a general principle” in his controversy with ; cf. De Baptismo Contra Donatistas 2, 14; PL 43:135.

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In his Grammar of Assent, Newman coined the term illative sense to describe the mind’s faculty of judging and concluding on the basis of probable evidence.51 The illative sense provided “the bridge between probability, or conditionality, and certitude or unconditionality.”52

The illative sense determined the limit of converging probabilities, lifting the mind to the level of certitude. Newman compared the process or reasoning from antecedent probabilities towards certitude—by the exercise of the illative sense upon the mass of converging evidence—to a polygon inscribed in a circle: “its sides being continually diminished, [the polygon] tends to become that circle, as its limit.”53 This comparison provides a good insight into antecedent probability as what enables a tessera in a religious mind to give a presentiment of the whole mosaic. When the investigation reaches full circle, so to speak, the mind realizes an idea on a new level of certitude.

The illative sense in Newman’s religious epistemology might be seen as the mental faculty that tends towards the whole idea somehow apprehended in its antecedent probabilities.

The power to judge possessed by the Church’s teaching office in Newman’s theory of doctrinal development was equivalent to the role of the illative sense in his religious epistemology. As

Norris has written, “the Illative Sense, or faculty of judgment, which operates in the individual, is ‘supernaturalized’ by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Catholic Communion, and, in the

51 Newman, An Essay in the Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 343-383; hereafter cited: Grammar.

52 Norris, 148.

53 Grammar, 320.

111 final analysis, is coincident with the authoritative and infallible statement of Pope or of

Council.”54

In his Essay, Newman applied his idea of reasoning based on antecedent probability to various developments in Christian doctrine and Church authority. With regard to doctrinal developments that were to be expected, he presented an antecedent argument via an analogy about the appropriation of ideas in the process of human understanding:

If Christianity is a fact, and impresses an idea of itself on our minds and is a subject-matter of exercises of the reason, that idea will in course of time expand into a multitude of ideas, and aspects of ideas, connected and harmonious with one another, and in themselves determinate and immutable, as is the objective fact itself which is thus represented.55

In addition, from the antecedent probability of doctrinal developments, he derived an antecedent probability of an infallible developing authority:

In proportion to the probability of true developments of doctrine and practice in the Divine Scheme, so is the probability also of the appointment in that scheme of an external authority to decide upon them, thereby separating them from the mass of mere human speculation, extravagance, corruption, and error, in and out of which they grow. This is the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church; for by infallibility I suppose is meant the power of deciding whether this, that, and a third, and any number of theological or ethical statements are true.56

The intrinsic link between doctrinal development and an infallible teaching authority in the Church that Newman had rejected in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office became in his

Essay on Development the foundation of his new ecclesiological synthesis. Both the

54 Grammar, 164.

55 Dev. (1878), 55.

56 Ibid., 78-79.

112 development of doctrine and infallible authority were now seen by Newman as parts of the

“Divine Scheme” of the Church, which was derived and contemplated through his prior assent to the act of divine Revelation in history.

Notes of Genuine Doctrinal Development

In order to examine continuity in doctrinal development, Newman originally elaborated seven “tests” for verifying his hypothesis of doctrinal development.57 However, he did not intend to propose these tests as indicative of prospective doctrinal development in either the present or the future. He later replaced these “tests” for recognizing genuine development with

“notes” or theological criteria corroborating the process of doctrinal growth. These notes were envisioned as tools for theological reflection upon doctrinal development as it actually occurs in history; thus, the notes served “more as answers to objections brought against the actual decisions of authority, than proofs of the correctness of those decisions.”58 The latter function would effectively have committed the exercise of the Church’s teaching authority to the censure of individual human reason, which Newman perceived as a mark of rationalism and religious liberalism.

The notes as Newman conceived them were then a posteriori criteria indicating the essential continuity in the developing system of Christian reflection on the Gospel’s teaching

57 Newman used different terminology in the first (1845) and third (1878) editions of his Essay: in the 1845 edition, he used “tests,” in the 1878 edition he used “notes.” The term “tests” aligned with his consideration of development as an hypothesis to explain a difficulty; the term “notes” reflected his later emphasis on the signs or constituents of authentic doctrinal development; see McCarren, 17-18.

58 Dev. (1878), 78.

113 and, to that extent, distinguishing authentic developments of doctrine from inauthentic developments (corruptions). Newman’s Essay proposed seven notes of genuine doctrinal development:59

1) Preservation of type 2) Continuity of principles 3) Power of assimilation 4) Logical sequence 5) Anticipation of its future 6) Conservative action upon its past 7) Chronic vigor

The key basic to all seven notes is continuity—persistently presented by Newman through analogy with the physical continuation of organic life enunciated in such phrases as: “growth the only evidence of life;”60 “a stone may be crushed to powder, but it cannot be corrupted.”61

The content of the notes of doctrinal development overlapped; all are based on a principle of organic growth. It might even be suggested that the seven notes are capable of being reduced into the first—preservation of type. As a matter of fact, the section in his Essay about the application of the first note of a true development—identity of type—was the longest: one hundred and fifteen pages.62 Approximately the same amount of space was devoted to treating the other six notes together.

59 See Dev. (1878), 171; 172-206.

60 Apo., 5.

61 Dev. (1878), 170.

62 Ibid., 207-322.

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Preservation of Type

Newman’s treatment of the first note of genuine doctrinal development—preservation of type—has been considered by some commentators as the centerpiece of his Essay.63 This treatment is virtually a separate essay within the Essay, notable for the depth of his expertise in ancient and patristic sources and controversial material. Reflecting on the preservation of type as a note of the true development of Catholic doctrine, he assembled a train of historical evidence showing the essential identity of Catholic faith in the midst of a great variety of religious sects, philosophical schools, and formidable opponents. His underlying question was which Church would such great Fathers of the Church as Athanasius, or Augustine have considered truly Catholic had they been alive in the 19th century. In a three-part historical inquiry, Newman pointed to the essential similarity between the Catholic Church of modern times and the Church of the patristic era. This similarity was manifest in multiple ways: the same type of scandal given to the surrounding world in the Church of the first centuries;64 the same type of political organization and the purported intolerance of the fourth-century Church;65 and, the same type of inerrant leadership in the papal office of the Church in the fifth and sixth centuries.66

Newman’s conclusion regarding the preservation of type in the development of Catholic doctrine was that “parts and proportions of the developed form [of teaching], however altered,

63 See, e.g., Paul Misner, Papacy and Development, 70.

64 Dev. (1878), 208-247.

65 Ibid., 248-272.

66 Ibid., 273-322.

115 correspond to those which belong to its rudiments.”67 Accordingly, the material increase of doctrines in the history of the Church from Apostolic times to the 19th century did not fundamentally affect the formal content of Catholic teaching.

As Newman recalled in his Apologia, in his reflections about the stages of his conversion, an identical type could be perceived beneath the increasing body of doctrines and forms of religious devotion that developed over the centuries; for example,

The idea of the Blessed Virgin was as it were magnified in the Church of Rome as time went on,—but so were all the Christian ideas; as that of the Blessed Eucharist. The whole scene of pale, faint, distant Apostolic Christianity is seen in Rome, as through a telescope or magnifier. The harmony of the whole, however, is of course what it was. It is unfair then to take one Roman idea, that of the Blessed Virgin, out of what may be called its context.68

The continuing identity of the “type” of the Christian religion throughout its historical development was the central argument of Newman’s Essay in discussing the notes of genuine doctrinal development. The other six notes seem more like codicils, employed in the Essay to expound further the note of preservation-of-type.

Newman’s description of the “type” of Christianity represented an overall system, a configuration, or “the harmony of the whole,” of the religious doctrines and practices held and shared by an historical community of believers. Thus, the “type” of Christianity was intrinsically associated in his theological reflections with a “typical” communion preserving that “type” of

Christian faith. Accordingly, he directed his investigation in the Essay to the ecclesiological

67 Dev. (1878), 171.

68 Apo., 196-197; see Dev. (1878), 321, note 100.

116 question concerning the structure of that communion which would correspond to the type, or the idea, of an infallible Church.

In treating the preservation of type as a note of an authentic development, Newman presented ample historical evidence indicating the constant presence of a leadership and teaching authority in what might be called the ethos of the Christian religion during the early centuries.

With the progressive organization of the Church as a unified body of Christian believers, a simultaneous process of centralization took place, almost naturally. As a result, the papal office, as if spontaneously, assumed the role of the primary teaching and governing authority:

If then there is now a form of Christianity such, that it extends throughout the world, though with varying measures of prominence or prosperity in separate places;—that it lies under the power of sovereigns and magistrates, in various ways alien to its faith;—that flourishing nations and great empires, professing or tolerating the Christian name, lie over against it as antagonists;—that schools of philosophy and learning are supporting theories, and following out conclusions, hostile to it, and establishing an exegetical system subversive of its Scriptures;— that it has lost whole Churches by schism, and is now opposed by powerful communions once part of itself;—that it has been altogether or almost driven from some countries;—that in others its line of teachers is overlaid, its flocks oppressed, its Churches occupied, its property held by what may be called a duplicate succession;—that in others its members are degenerate and corrupt, and are surpassed in conscientiousness and in virtue, as in gifts of intellect, by the very heretics whom it condemns;—that heresies are rife and bishops negligent within its own pale;—and that amid its disorders and its fears there is but one Voice for whose decisions the peoples wait with trust, one Name and one See to which they look with hope, and that name Peter, and that see Rome;—such a religion is not unlike the Christianity of the fifth and sixth centuries.69

As was characteristic of Newman’s theological style, his historical analysis complemented the historical reality mapped out by reasoning based on antecedent probabilities. In this case, the history of Christianity during the pontificates of Leo and Gregory the Great corresponded to an

69 Dev. (1878), 321-322.

117 antecedent idea of an infallible Church—which was likewise the claim of the 19th century Roman

Catholic Church. Significantly, Newman ended his summary with the theme of papal authority.

Papal primacy and the hierarchical structure of the Church were the expression—one might say a sign and instrument—of infallibility that the Church according to Newman possessed in the

“Divine Scheme.”

The result of Newman’s historical investigation concerning the type of the Church in early Christian history was summed up in a statement made earlier in the Essay: “Supposing there be otherwise good reason [antecedent probability of a monarchical principle in the Divine

Scheme] for saying that the Papal Supremacy is part of Christianity, there is nothing in the early history of the Church to contradict it.”70

Newman’s articulation of the agreement between the antecedent probability and the historical realization of the Roman Catholic structure of the Church has prompted some authors to emphasize “the negative force of [Newman’s] arguments from antecedent probability”;71 this negative aspect was exemplified in the Essay by such phrases as: “nothing. . . . to contradict it;”

“not unlike.” Lash, for example, argued:

Newman’s fundamental concern is not to make positive claims for the antecedent probability that the papacy of Pius IX represents the ideal form of church governance but, negatively, to show that the existing doctrine and practice of the Roman catholic church is not necessarily a “corruption.”72

70 Dev. (1878), 154.

71 Lash, 38.

72 Ibid., 40.

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Newman’s investigation of the development of doctrine in the Essay might be perceived in negative terms as removing objections or providing a “solution of the difficulty” regarding the historical continuity of Christianity;73 however, it was the contention of his Essay that what was not a corruption was indeed a genuine development.

While it was not Newman’s concern to argue on the basis of antecedent probabilities that the papacy of Pius IX represented the ideal form of church government, he wanted to show that the papacy of Pius IX was in continuation with the ideal form of Church government; in other words, there was a positive link between the idea of an infallible Church and papal primacy in the hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church in the 19th century. Given his method of gathering historical evidence for antecedent probability in his theological discussions, a “proof” inevitably had the character of cumulative argumentation and analogical inference. It was then impossible for such a methodology to arrive at a categorical demonstration of the link between the idea of an infallible Church and the historical structure of the Church. However, the lack of this kind of positive proof should not be equated with the lack of a positive argument: mathematical demonstration provides one type of proof, historical and theological argumentation another.

The negative aspect in Newman’s argumentation might be considered a phase of the via negationis in the process of analogical reasoning.74 As Kasper has observed, in analogy,

the via negationis presupposes the via affirmationis; the negation is not total but limited, denying only the finite mode of the positive perfection and not the perfection itself; the via eminentiae in turn negates the negation and to that extent

73 Dev. (1878), 29.

74 See above, 108-109.

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posits something higher. It expresses the positive meaning of the negation. We are dealing therefore with a coherent process of mediation that in the end does not close in on itself but is entirely open.75

Newman understood analogy in a similar way; he reflected on the link between the Catholic system of belief and the contents of Scripture:

The argument from analogy, which starts with the profession of being only of a negative character, ends with being positive, when drawn out into details; such being the difference between its abstract pretension and its actual and practical force.76

Accordingly, phrases like “nothing to contradict” and “not unlike,” employed by

Newman in his Essay at the end of a train of positive presumptions were double negations that opened a vista to a positive argumentation from analogy. As Norris has commented, “If analogy is going to be capable of producing antecedent probability, Newman sees it must have a positive effect and force in addition to its valuable negative function.”77 Thus, his Essay provided a positive argument concerning the link between the principle of doctrinal development and the actual structure of the Church with the papacy as the central office endowed with universal jurisdiction. Newman’s view of doctrinal development thus provides a solid theological foundation, not only in general terms for the Church’s Magisterium, but also specifically for the primacy of the pope.

75 Kasper, 97.

76 Newman, Discussions and Arguments, 153.

77 Norris, 134-135.

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Infallibility of the Church and Papacy

When Newman as a Catholic reiterated that papacy was not the key issue in his conversion to Roman Catholicism, he did not intend to minimize the role of the papal office in

Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Rather, he wanted to maintain the sequence of his gradual adherence to Roman Catholicism as it actually took place: first adopting Catholic ecclesiology and then, as a result, the papacy. In his Apologia, he remarked:

It is observable that the question of the position of the Pope, whether as the centre of unity, or as the source of jurisdiction, did not come into my thoughts at all; nor did it, I think I may say, to the end. I doubt whether I ever distinctly held any of his powers to be de jure divino, while I was in the Anglican Church;—not that I saw any difficulty in the doctrine; not that in connexion with the history of St. Leo the idea of his infallibility did not cross my mind, for it did,—but after all, in my view the controversy did not turn upon it; it turned upon the Faith and the Church.78

Newman’s problem was in reconciling the doctrinal teaching of the apostolic period with the Roman Catholic ecclesiology of his time. When he elaborated his view of doctrinal development, he unhesitatingly embraced the papal office as an organic part of the Catholic ecclesiological system. As he explained his personal theological development to a correspondent,

I certainly did not become a Catholic, as others have, on the ground Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia, but because, whereas the Church is to last to the end of the world, unless that large Communion which happens to be Roman be the Church, the Church has failed. This I think will be found to be the argument of my Essay [on Development].79

78 Apo., 111-112.

79 Newman to Daniel Radford (15 October 1862), LD 20:308.

121

This statement about the specific circumstances of his espousal of the papacy at the very end of his conversion process should not obscure the positive theological argument concerning the papal office within his view of doctrinal development. The lateness of his coming to terms with the papacy was reflected in his Essay, where the papal office in a sense figured as the final piece within the entire mosaic of his view of doctrinal development.

The worth of Newman’s successful presentation of the papacy in his overall theological synthesis on doctrinal development within his Essay should not be considered diminished by the fact that, during his Roman Catholic period, the papacy was not at the center of his theological interest. Newman disputed with the ultramontane movement within the Church and expressed reservations against the proposal of the dogma of infallibility at the time of the First Vatican

Council.80 None of these facts detracted from the originality of his presentation of the theological foundations of the papacy within the comprehensive ecclesiological synthesis in his

Essay, where he emphasized that the Roman Catholic Church was in fact the developed form of the Christian religion and the papacy was the hallmark of her visible structure.

For Newman, the structure of the visible Church was part of the organic process of doctrinal development: a development in the “political” aspect of the Church. If doctrinal development was his “hypothesis” to explain a difficulty in regard to the unity of doctrine, the purpose of the papacy was to safeguard the unity of the Church as an historical polity.

Accordingly, an infallible Church provided an antecedent probability with regards to a monarchical principle in the Church:

80 See, e.g., Ker, Biography, 651-693; MacDougall, 56-77.

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It is the absolute need of a monarchical power in the Church which is our ground for anticipating it. A political body cannot exist without government, and the larger is the body the more concentrated must the government be. If the whole of Christendom is to form one Kingdom, one head is essential; at least this is the experience of eighteen hundred years. As the Church grew into form, so did the power of the Pope develope [sic]; and wherever the Pope has been renounced, decay and division have been the consequence. We know of no other way of preserving the Sacramentum Unitatis, but a centre of unity.81

Newman’s Essay on Development was then the final resolution of his Anglican dilemma: apostolicity versus catholicity. The note of apostolicity—the unity of doctrine with the faith of the apostles—was viable only within the realm of catholicity—the concrete form of unity in the communion that is keeping the faith of the apostles.

In Newman’s Essay, the development of the idea of an infallible Church strongly supported the doctrine of papal primacy; however, according to Misner, Newman’s argumentation in the Essay

must be seen as tending to the proof of the necessity of the infallible doctrinal authority of the church as a whole. Whether the pope is the bearer of this authority is a subordinate question to be settled on another level.82

In his discussion of doctrinal development in his Essay, Newman refrained from expressing his thought on this issue. In a rare passage in his Essay touching on the subject of the infallibility of the pope, Newman quoted Bellarmine:

All Catholics agree. . . . first, that the Pope with General Council cannot err, either in framing decrees of faith or general precepts of morality; secondly, that the Pope when determining anything in a doubtful matter, whether by himself or with his

81 Dev. (1878), 154-155.

82 Misner, Papacy and Development, 75.

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own particular Council, whether it is possible for him to err or not, is to be obeyed by all the faithful.83

In the 1878 edition of his Essay, he observed in a footnote: “Seven years ago, it is scarcely necessary to say, the Vatican Council determined that the Pope, ex cathedra, has the same infallibility as the Church. This does not affect the argument in the text.”

Newman’s apparent hesitation about the infallibility of the papal teaching office may then be seen without prejudice to his reception of the pope’s primacy as a doctrine de jure divino in his Essay, which treated these as two separate issues; moreover, the discussion in the Church regarding the former did not end until the official dogmatic declaration at Vatican Council I in

1870.84 However, his Essay to some degree adumbrated his views about the issue of the infallibility ascribed to the pope by the Council and so throws some light on his understanding of the place of the papal office within his view of doctrinal development.

In the parts of his Essay that treated the continuity of principles as the second note of authentic doctrinal development, Newman made a distinction between the principles and doctrines of Christianity. Principles were in general simpler, reduced tenets of teaching; they

“laid deeper in the mind” than doctrines. In a mathematical analogy, principles stood to

83 Dev. (1878), 87. The quotation is from Bellarmine’s De controversiis: De Romano Pontifice IV:2. On Robert Bellarmine, see above in Chapter 1, 59, note 103.

84 Newman’s personal theological position in this discussion, his reception of the dogmatic declaration, and his defense of the Council’s teaching in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875) are beyond the scope of this dissertation; for an extensive historical study of Newman’s views about infallibility, see John R. Page, What Will Dr. Newman Do? John Henry Newman and , 1865-1875 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1994).

124 doctrines as postulates and axioms to definitions.85 For Newman, the principles of the Christian religion surfaced especially when considering the development of specific doctrines:

Doctrines expand variously according to the mind, individual or social, into which they are received; and the peculiarities of the recipient are the regulating power, the law, the organization, or, as it may be called, the form of the development. The life of doctrines may be said to consist in the law or principle which they embody.86

Thus, “a development, to be faithful, must retain both the doctrine and the principle with which it started. Doctrine without its correspondent principle remains barren, if not lifeless.”87

In his Essay, Newman sometimes spoke about Christian principles in a comprehensive way, at other times more categorically. In his Apologia, he referred to both the dogmatic and the sacramental principles as the foundation of his religious system, the latter involving a visible

Church, apostolic succession and hierarchy.88 Similarly, at one point in his Essay on

Development, he seemed to have listed Christian principles in a broad way, when speaking of the three main aspects of the Christian teaching: the sacramental, the hierarchical and the ascetic, which issued from the mystery of the incarnation viewed as the central aspect of Christianity.89

85 Dev. (1878), 178-179.

86 Ibid., 179.

87 Ibid., 181.

88 Apo., 48-52.

89 Dev. (1878), 36. Variations in Newman’s vocabulary seem due at least in part to the fact that he was not only exploring an hypothesis, but was simultaneously crafting a new theological terminology.

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Focusing on the continuity of principles as the second note of authentic doctrinal development, Newman approached Christian principles in a more categorical, or narrow, sense of the word. He then introduced nine principles of Christianity: dogma, faith, theology, sacrament, mystical sense of Scripture, grace, asceticism, malignity of sin and capacity of sanctification.90 This list comprised “specimens of the Christian principles out of the many.”91

His terminology concerning Christian principles was not rigid, but fluid: “The difference between [principles and doctrines] sometimes merely exists in our mode of viewing them; and what is a doctrine in one philosophy is a principle in another.”92 In general, principles were

“assumptions rather than objective professions;” they were on a different plane of intellectual reflection than doctrines. To some extent, principles were part of doctrines; to some extent, they were by nature undefined. In his Apologia, he identified doctrinal development as a principle of the Christian religion.93 In accordance with his perception of an intrinsic link between infallibility and doctrinal development, he suggested in his Essay that “it may be discussed whether infallibility is a principle or a doctrine of the Church of Rome.”94

Newman apparently considered the infallibility of the Church a principle rather than a doctrine. As a principle, the infallibility of the Church provided the solid theological foundations

90 Dev. (1878), 325-326.

91 Ibid., 326.

92 Ibid., 179.

93 Apo., 198; cf. Dev. (1878), 326, note 1.

94 Dev. (1878), 179.

126 of the hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church and so presented a strong antecedent probability for the papacy as the governing office in the Church as a center of unity with universal jurisdiction. He probably surmised that the doctrine of primacy already assured the pope’s supreme teaching authority in the Church and, for the sake of clarity, the question of infallibility was to remain on the level of Christian principles rather than being expressed in an explicit dogmatic teaching. In any case, his silence in his Essay about the papacy as the seat of infallibility did not affect his argumentation in favor of the authority of the papal office in his treatment of doctrinal development. In terms of his distinction between principles and doctrines, there is a definite link between the principles of doctrinal development and the infallibility of the

Church, as well as between both of these principles on the one hand and the hierarchical structure of the Church governed by papacy on the other.

The Relationship between the Development of Doctrine and the Papal Office

In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman achieved a remarkable ecclesiological synthesis by means of a profound theological and historical investigation of doctrinal development and the infallibility of the Church. Broadly speaking, the relationship of these two elements was expressed in his Essay in terms of two interlocking “principles of

Christianity”—dogma and hierarchy. Newman approached the link from the general understanding of religion as an authentic claim on human obedience and expressed it by analogy between conscience and ecclesial authority:

The supremacy of conscience is the essence of ; the supremacy of Apostle, or Pope, or Church, or Bishop, is the essence of revealed. . . . It may be objected, in deed, that conscience is not infallible; it is true, but still it is ever to be obeyed. And this is just the prerogative which controversialists assign to the See of St. Peter; it is not

127

in all cases infallible, it may err beyond its special province, but it has in all cases a claim on our obedience.95

Consistent with his method of theological investigation, Newman paired doctrinal development and infallible teaching authority as antecedent arguments or probabilities mutually presupposing each other in an idea of the Church as a visible historical communion infallibly preserving

Christian Revelation.

The groundwork of Newman’s ecclesiological synthesis was laid by a relationship between the development of doctrine and the infallibility of the Church. Like the third axis in the three-dimensional coordinate system, Newman added to this link another component which he defined as “the antecedent probability of a Popedom,” or, “the antecedent probability of a monarchical principle in the Divine Scheme.”96 In proportion to the antecedent probability of doctrinal developments under an infallible teaching authority, Newman affirmed also the probability of the monarchical structure of the Church governed by papacy.97 In other words, for

Newman, the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church with the primacy of the pope was the historical concretization of the antecedent idea of the Church as a religious body where doctrine developed under an infallible authority.

As Newman articulated it, “It is the absolute need for a monarchical power in the Church which is our ground for anticipating it. . . . if the whole Christendom is to form one kingdom, one

95 Dev. (1878), 86.

96 Ibid., 154.

97 Ibid., 78-79.

128 head is essential.”98 To understand fully the role of papacy in Newman’s ecclesiological synthesis in the Essay, it is not sufficient to regard his argument about “the absolute need for a monarchical power in the Church” merely in a generic way. The argument is not limited to stating that the Church, like every society, must have a government. Apparently, such an abstract claim did not suffice for Newman in his Anglican period to convince him of the ecclesiological necessity of the papal office. What gives a particular force to the argument is the context of Newman’s reception of infallibility of the Church in his Essay. “The absolute need for a monarchical power in the Church” means concretely that the Church, which is infallible, and hence endowed with the capacity of “judging with certainty,” must have a universal government.99 Newman unreservedly affirmed that “a center of unity” was necessary for an effective exercise of the universal teaching authority in the Church.100

The Essay thus offered Newman’s definitive solution to the question whether the idea of an infallible Church might have a different structure in the visible, historical Church, than the

Roman Catholic structure governed by the papal office. For a short time, Newman entertained this question in an article of 1840 in response to Wiseman, but soon dismissed it.101 First, historically, no other church claimed infallibility except the Roman Catholic Church. Secondly, the question was hypothetical. In his article, he asked why was it not possible—if doctrinal

98 Dev. (1878), 154; see above, 116.

99 Ibid; see above 72-74.

100 Ibid., 155.

101 See Newman, “Catholicity of the Anglican Church,” Ess 2:1-111, at 44.

129 development was truly a reality—that the Church could be formed first into a monarchy and then dissolved “into a number of aristocratic fragments.” He answered in a footnote added in his

Catholic period: “‘Why not?’ because, in fact, it is not so dissolved.”102 The link between antecedent probability and historical evidence in his theological method was closely connected; the question of another, the idea of a parallel structure of an infallible Church was for Newman as fanciful as the idea of a parallel universe in the physical science would have been.

The link between the development of doctrine and the papal office in Newman’s Essay comes to a full light when sufficient attention is paid to Newman’s defense of the Church visible, which is one of the primary concerns of his entire theological work.103 Indeed, Newman’s view of doctrinal development can be studied as his elaboration of the Catholic and the Apostolic notes of a visible Church. As he remarked in one of his writings, “Whether there is a visible

Church, and whether it is visibly one, is a question which as it is answered affirmatively or negatively changes the essential idea and the entire structure of Christianity.”104

It was precisely the argument of Newman’s Essay that the papacy along with the infallibility of the Church and doctrinal development were a part of the “essential idea” of

Christianity and defined the structure of the Church. As Newman summarized it: “Whereas the

Church is to last to the end of the world, unless that large Communion which happens to be

102 Ess 2:44, note 3.

103 See Apo., 22, 49-50, 113-114; Tracts 2:1-4; PPS 4:220-234. See also: Joseph Komonchak, Newman’s Discovery of the Visible Church (1816-1828) (New York: Union Theological Seminary, doctoral dissertation, 1976).

104 John Henry Newman, “Private Judgment,” Ess 2:336-374, at 371.

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Roman be the Church, the Church has failed.”105 The papal office presented in his ecclesiological synthesis the necessary component of the pilgrim Church as the visible universal communion, as “one kingdom.” Just as Vladimir Soloviev would later recognize, unity of faith in a visible Church requires unity of ecclesiastical action, which is guaranteed by a central authority in the Church.106 The infallible Church, in other words, cannot but be the Church papal.

Newman built his ecclesiological synthesis in the Essay on an analogy, or harmony, between the development of an idea in an individual mind and doctrinal development in the

Church.107 As Thomas Norris has observed, Newman understood an infallible teaching authority in the Church on the basis of a parallel with the illative sense—the faculty of the mind of judging in the province of converging probabilities to come to certitude. Accordingly, the illative sense was “supernaturalized” by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church and coincided with the solemn exercise of the Church’s teaching and governing office.108 In fact, Norris has claimed

“for Newman’s discovery of the act of judgment in the individual mind, and his underlining of its theological equivalent of doctrine in the mind of the Church, a real originality, perhaps, his greatest achievement as a philosopher and as a theologian.”109 With this analogy, or an

105 Newman to Daniel Radford (15 October 1862), LD 20:308.

106 See La Russie, 123; also below, 261, 292.

107 See above, 105-106.

108 Norris, 164.

109 Norris., xviii.

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“equivalent,” Newman laid an original theological foundation for the teaching office of the

Church as well as the hierarchical structure of the Church.

The link between the development of faith in the mind of an individual and the development of doctrine in the Church in Newman’s Essay was subject to recurrent criticism.

According to Owen Chadwick, the analogy was flatly denied by Giovanni Perrone, the leading

Catholic theologian in Rome, to whom Newman submitted a summary of his Essay in Latin.110

Perrone opposed the analogy on the grounds of Newman’s admission that the Church in the process of doctrinal development had to search and discover her mind. Apparently believing that such a process of determining her mind was beneath the dignity of the Church, Perrone claimed that the Church always possessed perfectly within herself the entire teaching that was only promulgated when circumstances required it. As Chadwick has contended, “Newman was a historian and Perrone was not. Perrone had no notion of the difficulties created for the older form of the doctrine of Tradition by modern historical research.”111 Although Newman always respected Perrone as an expert theologian, the latter’s a-historical objection did not alter his thinking about doctrinal development in the Church.

Criticism of Newman’s analogy between the process of thought in the mind of an individual and doctrinal development within the Church was recently advanced by Nicholas

110 See Chadwick, 182. Giovanni Perrone, S.J. (1794-1876), a professor of theology in Rome and an author of numerous writings on dogmatic theology, was considered in his time one of the greatest authorities on the subject. Newman’s Latin summary of his Essay on Development written for Perrone with the title De Catholici Dogmatis Evolutione was published in English translation with Perrone’s notes in James Gaffney (ed.) Roman Catholic Writings on Doctrinal Development by John Henry Newman (Kansas City: Sheed &Ward, 1997), 1-55.

111 Chadwick, 183.

132

Lash.112 Since Newman always emphasized the role of conscience and growth in holiness in a personal religious development and opposed the liberal idea of the progressive development of society as a whole, Lash objected that in the given analogy the idea of a collective progress was in fact presupposed:

We are left with a serious and unanswered problem, which, at least, imposes severe limitations on the extent to which the analogy between the history of an individual and history of the church may, on Newman’s own principles, be legitimately employed.113

However, Lash overlooked the fact that Newman did not apply the analogy of a personal intellectual development to the development of society as a whole, nor just any kind of society, but a unique society—the Church. The Holy Spirit forms the Church as the union of one mind with Christ within the Communion of Saints; a Communion that transcends the historical Church yet remains bound with it in the Spirit. The analogy between subjective theological development and doctrinal development in the Church is firmly rooted in the subjecthood of the Church as a communion of one body and one mind with Christ.114 The Tradition of the Church is not a mere sociological category; it is best understood as a living memory shared by the members of the

Church through their spiritual bond with the Communion of Saints. It is no coincidence that

Newman in his first exposition of doctrinal development in the Church found its pattern in the

112 See Lash, 60-64.

113 Ibid., 64.

114 See below, 297-316.

133 faith of the Blessed Virgin Mary who kept all things concerning Jesus, her Son, “and pondered on them in her heart.”115

In 19th-century Russia, independently of Newman’s views, another theory of doctrinal development, which stemmed from the rich sophiological tradition of Eastern Christian thought, was elaborated a few decades later. Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev built his own understanding of doctrinal development on the same analogy between the process of development in an individual mind and in the mind of the Church perceived as “individual God-human substance.”116 To that theory this study now turns.

115 OUS, 313; cf. Lk 2:19, 51.

116 See below in Chapter 4, 252.

CHAPTER 3

Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev: His Life and a Historical and Theological Background of

His Idea of Doctrinal Development

Biography

Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev was born in Moscow on January 16 [January 28], 1853.1

His father, Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev, was a renowned scholar of Russian history.2 His mother, Poliksena Vladimirovna, née Romanova, came from a Ukrainian family, whose ancestry included the 18th-century Cossack philosopher Grigorii Skovoroda.3 Vladimir was the fourth child in a family of twelve children, four of whom died in infancy.4

1 The date in the brackets refers to the current Gregorian calendar, which was not adopted in Russia until 1918.

2 Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev (1820-1879) was a Russian historian, critic, professor and rector of Moscow University; through his numerous writings on Russian history (some of which have been translated into English), he introduced a new level of critical scholarship into Russian historical studies. His opus magnum was the multi-volume Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen [History of Russia from the Earliest Times], published from 1851 to 1879 in Moscow; available online at: http://www.magister.msk.ru/library/history/history1.htm (accessed: 15 September 2014). Regarding the use of transliteration from the Russian Cyrillic alphabet in this dissertation, see the Introduction, 27-29.

3 Grigorii Savvich Skovoroda (1722-1794), a Ukranian poet, philosopher and composer, was sometimes dubbed “the Russian .” Cf. Zenkovsky, 1:53-69. In the later years of his life, Vladimir Soloviev resembled Skovoroda by his itinerant existence and Franciscan-like freedom from material concerns.

4 Sergei M. Solovyov, Vladimir Solovyov: His Life and Creative Evolution 1:15; hereafter cited: Life. This biography written by Vladimir Soloviev’s nephew Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev (1885-1942) incorporated several excerpts from V. Soloviev’s previously unpublished autobiographical memoir. See Igor Vishnevetsky, “Towards a History of Sergej Solovˈëv monograph Vladimir Solovˈëv: His Life and Creative Evolution” and Michael A. Meerson, “Appendix: The History of the First Publication of Two Manuscripts: La Sophia by Vladimir Solovˈëv and Vladimir Solovˈëv: His Life and Creative Evolution by his nephew Sergej Solovˈëv” in ECS 2:347-358; 359-362. 134

135

Vladimir was a “strange child with strange dreams,” as he later described himself in an autobiographical poem:5 a child gifted with a deeply sensitive and imaginative soul. He liked attaching personal names to material objects; for example, the pencil that he would carry on a string around his shoulder like a sword he called “Andriushka” [little Andrew].6 This romantic idealism seemingly remained a special characteristic of this future Russian thinker, who was styled by a French author Chevalier de la Sophia.7 This romanticism also seems the origin of, or a predisposition for, Soloviev’s contemplative bent of mind and his later especial philosophical interest in personal being—the realm of the spirit—as the pinnacle of reality.8

Soloviev’s capacity for enthusiastic admiration of high ideals emerged very clearly during his childhood. At the age of seven, listening to and reading the lives of saints, Vladimir

5 Blizko, daleko, ne zdesˈ i ne tam [Near, Far, Not Here and Not There], SS 12:92. In 2000, The Russian Academy of Sciences began issuing a new critical edition of Vladimir S. Soloviev’s collected works edited by A. A. Nosov et al. with the title V. S. Soloviev: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moskva: Nauka, 2000-); to date, four volumes of the projected twenty-volume collection have appeared; hereafter cited: PSS. All other quotations of Soloviev’s work are from Sobranie sochinenii V. S. Solovieva, the second edition of the ten-volume collected works of Soloviev edited by S. M. Soloviev and E. L. Radlov (St. Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1911), reprinted in 1966 by Zhiznˈ s Bogom in Brussels with two additional volumes with Soloviev’s letters, poems, translations and miscellaneous texts; hereafter cited: SS. Regarding the English translation of quotations from Soloviev and other foreign authors in this dissertation, see the Introduction, 27-29.

6 Life 1:31-32.

7 See Toinet. “Sophia” refers to the personification of divine wisdom, the main theme of Soloviev’s mystical experience and religious philosophy; see below, 137-139, 172-174 and 187- 193.

8 An important category in Soloviev’s religious thinking was “spiritualization,” understood as a movement of created reality into the personal dimension of God’s love; a process in which humans as personal beings were to cooperate. See Oliver Smith, Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011); also Sutton, 72-74.

136 immersed himself into ascetical practices bordering on self-torture in preparation for “the imminent arrival of the Antichrist.”9 Soloviev later credited his father for delivering him from the snares of religious fanaticism by introducing him to the literature on Greek mythology that broadened his religious horizons.10

For the children, growing up in the Soloviev household meant subordination to a rather strict patriarchal order and discipline, demanded by the regimented life of Sergei Soloviev as he pursued his life-long work of research and writing. In his relationship with his father, Vladimir

Soloviev displayed an attitude of deep reverence—one might say, a genuine filial piety. As his nephew S. Soloviev aptly remarked in his biography, “this feeling for his father undoubtedly exerted an influence on the worldview of Vladimir Soloviev, for whom the ideas of fatherhood and universal father played such an important role” in his theocratic writings.11

Sergei Soloviev the historian undoubtedly influenced the spiritual and intellectual journey of his son in several ways. The latter gained from his father a scholarly disposition and literary talent. Vladimir Soloviev was the true heir of Sergei Soloviev’s method of historical criticism and contextualization.12 Sergei Soloviev’s historical perspective was based on the Hegelian idea that history was marked by the steady progress of society, whose main agent in Russia was

9 Life 1:32.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 10.

12 The high academic standards of historical research that Sergei Soloviev inculcated in his son Vladimir can be noticed in the former’s comment on Ernest Renan, made after his discovering the adolescent Vladimir’s interest in the French critic of religion: “Not only are Renan’s ideas false, but so are his quotations” (Life 1:42).

137

Russian statehood. This position, termed the “etatist” school of historical thinking, was at odds with the current canon of Russian historiography defined by the romanticized view of the

Russian past.13 Reading virtually all of his father’s volumes on Russian history as an adolescent,

Vladimir absorbed his father’s ability of perceiving an overarching unity in the history of peoples and nations, the chain of continuity in events—a process of historical development.14

Furthermore, as a pioneer of the modern approach to Russian historical scholarship, Sergei

Soloviev often found himself “swimming against the current” of traditional historiography in

Russia which had strong adherents in the Russian Slavophiles.15 Vladimir Soloviev might be said to have leaned throughout his life on his father’s virtue of perseverance: as a man pursuing a deep religious life devoted to Sophia—divine wisdom; as an original thinker breaking new grounds in Russian philosophy and religious thought; and as an undaunted polemicist against the

Russian nationalists who opposed his project of ecumenical rapprochement with Catholicism.

Sophia, the personification of divine wisdom—the religious idea of paramount significance in Vladimir Soloviev’s life and work—entered into his life with an extraordinary vision, first experienced at the age of nine. In his autobiographical poem Tri svidaniia [Three

Meetings], Soloviev narrated his first encounter with divine wisdom in the figure of a woman of

13 See Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, CA: University Press, 1979) 150; Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter in the Russian History and Thought (Oxford: University Press, 1985) 150.

14 See Mochulˈsky, 13.

15 Life 1:10. The venerated authority of such traditional Russian historiography, whose work was challenged by Sergei Soloviev, was Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826). Regarding the Slavophile movement, see below, 153-155.

138 exquisite beauty, which occurred while attending a church service on the feast of the Ascension in Moscow. In his poetic description, the figure of the woman was surrounded by unearthly light—“a golden azure;” she held a flower and nodded to him with a radiant smile. The vision that apparently lasted only for a short moment made the nine-year-old Soloviev oblivious to

“earthly things” and filled him with a heavenly love.16

The experience of the vision of Sophia, which repeated itself on two other occasions in

Soloviev’s young adult age, seemed to have left a lasting mark on Soloviev’s mind and heart. In a note appended to the poem Tri svidaniia, Soloviev referred to the vision as the “most significant thing that ever happened in my life.”17 The vision inculcated in Soloviev a lifelong devotion to divine wisdom—not as an abstract or formless idea, but a vivid, personified ideal of eternal feminine beauty. Sophia inspired and permeated virtually all of Soloviev’s intellectual work: his critique of autonomy in Western philosophical thought and search for a new philosophical synthesis, his program of Christian unity and work on the reunion of the churches in a theocracy and, finally, his theological aesthetics. Because of the profound significance of

Soloviev’s encounter with Sophia, the idea of divine wisdom, in his life and his work, the

16 SS 12:80-86, at 81. For an analysis of Soloviev’s mystical visions of Sophia in his poem Tri svidaniia, see Michel Grabar, “Les recontres avec la Sophia: Une experience érotique et mystique de Vladimir Solovˈëv” in ECS 2:107-118. See also the editor’s essay, “Who is Solovyov and What is Sophia?” in Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, editor, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 2009), 1-97.

17 SS 12:86.

139 character of this experience and its influence over the development of his philosophy and religious thought shall be explored in more depth later in this chapter.18

From 1864 to 1869, Vladimir Soloviev attended the distinguished First Moscow

Gymnasium (restructured at the time of Soloviev’s studies and named the Fifth Moscow

Gymnasium), where he was educated at the level of present-day middle and high school. He was an excellent student, passing his final examination with distinction.19 In comparison with

Soloviev’s passion for reading on his own, however, the school seemingly played a minor role in

Soloviev’s intellectual development. From an early age, Soloviev took a lively interest in the books in his father’s study with their wide range of subjects ranging from mythology and history through natural sciences and philosophy. Many of these publications were in foreign languages.

Soloviev had a talent for foreign languages; in addition to French—spoken by virtually everyone in the educated class of 19th-century Russia—he as an adolescent acquired reading proficiency in

German and English.20 Soloviev also mastered the classical languages—a part of the gymnasium curriculum at the time—so that he was able to study the original texts of and of both the

Greek and Latin Church Fathers.21 He was also well read in Polish and Italian literature.

18 See below, 172-174 and 187-193.

19 Life 1:36-39.

20 See ibid., 61.

21 See ibid, 37.

140

Finally, immersing himself in the study of the biblical idea of theocracy in his early thirties,

Soloviev mastered biblical Hebrew.22

Interest in the natural sciences, encouraged to some extent by the Zeitgeist of the 1860s in

Russia, generated in Soloviev during his time at the gymnasium a materialist worldview. As his nephew Sergei stated in Soloviev’s biography, “Developing, as always, his ideas to the end and not being satisfied with theory, he put his new beliefs into practice;” in consequence, the teenage

Soloviev became “a complete nihilist.”23

According to the biography by Soloviev’s nephew, his “nihilist phase lasted from the age of twelve to sixteen, that is, from 1865 to 1869.”24 Soloviev vehemently denied the existence of

God and opposed every religious idea or practice. In his autobiographical memoir, Soloviev recalled:

My independent mental development began at age thirteen with the onset of religious skepticism. The progression of my thoughts in this direction was perfectly logical and in four years I experienced one after the other all the phases of the negative development of European thought over the past four centuries. Passing from iconoclasm and doubt about the necessity of external religious practice, I advanced toward rationalism and disbelief in miracles and the divinity of Christ. I became a deist, then a pantheist, then an atheist and a materialist. I settled on each of these stages with enthusiasm and fanaticism.25

Francis Rouleau has described this stage of atheistic materialism as the first in a series of spiritual crises that marked Soloviev’s intellectual journey:

22 See Life 2:284, 289.

23 Ibid. 1:36.

24 Ibid 1:40.

25 Ibid. 1:41.

141

[Atheism] upset his entire being; however, his moral integrity remained unharmed. The crisis was deep, and it would be wrong assuming that this was just a childish affair. The boy went through an experience of intellectual nihilism. He would later analyze the content of this drama in his doctoral work The Crisis of Western Philosophy.26

According to Rouleau, the struggle with materialism in his youth provided for Soloviev a most valuable realization—recognition of an urgent need for recovering the metaphysical foundations of modern science.

One might wonder how the religious crisis that gave rise to atheism at the time of

Soloviev’s adolescence could be reconciled with his profound religious experience of Sophia in his childhood. Seemingly, there was no possible link; either Soloviev’s vision of Sophia was an ephemeral experience with no lasting influence or its memory had no effect on the atheist worldview in Soloviev’s adolescence, indicative, as it were, of inconsistencies in intellectual development, of which Soloviev has at times been accused by his critics.27 Konstantin

Mochulˈsky has offered an insightful explanation of a different kind: the atheism of the young

Soloviev was in continuity with his earlier, childish and unenlightened, religious faith and experience; it was the faith, however, which “turned to another object.”28 After experiencing the

26 Francis Rouleau, introduction to Tři rozhovory [Three Conversations] (Prague: Zvon, 1997) 5- 15; at 6.

27 Alexei F. Losev has discussed some of the criticism of Soloviev in his article “Vl. Solovjov— ‘mystik’” in Ján Komorovský, ed., Vladimír Sergejevič Solovjov a ruská náboženská filozofia [Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev and Russian Religious Philosophy] (Michalovce: Spolok sv. Cyrila a Metoda, 2011); hereafter cited: RNF, 433-443. The questions regarding Soloviev’s enigmatic personality and the peculiar character of his thought are addressed more fully in a special section of this chapter; see below, 170-178.

28 Mochulˈsky, 22.

142 promise of abundant unity in his vision of divine wisdom, the young Soloviev could not content himself with the present reality involving a transient, incomplete existence, broken by sin, suffering and mortality. It might be said that rejection of his naïve faith in the God of childhood was bound with his desire for a deeper, all-embracing unity of the life-experience, envisioned at this initial stage of his intellectual journey only by reducing all reality to the material realm. The principle of matter thus became in this transitory stage of Soloviev’s intellectual development the new object of his faith.

The young Soloviev apparently believed that society built upon the premises of materialist ideology would realize a new epoch in the unification of mankind. His early materialist phase of thinking thus to some extent anticipated the challenges of Russian Leninist ideology and his later theocratic work provided a foundation for overcoming those challenges.29

Sergei Soloviev avoided open confrontation with the atheism of his adolescent son; rather, he indicated grief, considering Vladimir’s denial of belief in God a sort of inner malady.

Vladimir Soloviev later remarked in his autobiographical memoir,

This attitude on the part of a man of intellectual and moral authority was, of course, the best; in any case, it produced more of an effect on my stubborn and self-assured mind than direct arguments, against which I would always find something to object. My only recourse, then, was to convince myself that I was more intelligent, more experienced, and more perceptive than my father, which, of course, I could not do with complete confidence and an untroubled conscience.30

29 See Katharina Breckner, “Vladimir Solovˈëv as the Mentor of Anti-Marxian Socialism: Concepts of Socialism in S. N. Trubeckoj, S. N. Bulgakov and N. A. Berdjaev” in ECS 2:461- 471.

30 Life 1:41-42.

143

In this account, one might detect Soloviev’s insight into the vital role of authority in the learning process, upon which he would later ground his theological understanding of the relationship between doctrinal tradition and the teaching office of the Church.

At age sixteen, Soloviev began studies at Moscow University. Probably under the influence of his father, Soloviev decided to major in philology and history. In the course of the first year, he transferred to studies in natural sciences, which he pursued for three years, before gradually losing his enthusiasm for scientific knowledge. As he wrote in his memoir, the specific details of scientific research did not interest him, only “general conclusions and the philosophical aspect.”31 A few months before the end of the course of studies, he withdrew from the department of science and returned to his original major in philology and history. As a mark of his broad erudition and keen mind, he passed the final exams in this area after just a few months of preparation in June 1873.32 Later in his philosophical and theological work, especially in his writings on love and beauty, Soloviev made considerable use of his studies in natural sciences. On Soloviev’s ability to integrate faith and science in one theological vision, Hans Urs von Balthasar has compared the Russian author with Teilhard de Chardin.33

In the following years, Soloviev immersed himself in the study of philosophy and theology. He spent the year after completing his university education as a lay student at the

Religious Academy, the Russian Orthodox clerical seminary in Moscow. At the academy,

31 Life 1:55.

32 Ibid., 59.

33 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 290; see above, 15.

144

Soloviev pursued research in the theology of the Greek Fathers of the Church and 19th-century

German idealist philosophy, while writing his master’s thesis in philosophy and composing his first poems.34

The extent of Soloviev’s readings and the intensity of his intellectual development during his years at the university and the academy (1869-1874) can hardly be overstated. The list of studied by Soloviev at that time included René Descartes, , Ludwig

Feuerbach, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant and the school of German idealist philosophy: Johan Fichte, Friedrich Schelling and Georg Hegel.35 This period was the crucial stage of Soloviev’s intellectual journey, marked by his transition from the negative phase of atheism to a positive vision of a religious universalism that became the hallmark of his intellectual legacy.

Tracing Soloviev’s transition from materialism to positive religious thinking would require a separate dissertation in the department of philosophy; only a sketch of his intellectual development can be offered here.36 Soloviev entered the university with a decidedly negative attitude toward religion. A landmark in his intellectual development was his encounter with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s rationalist system of pantheist unity convinced

Soloviev of the spiritual reality surpassing matter in the ontological order of being. Soloviev’s

34 Life 1:60, 83, 90-91.

35 Ibid., 43, 61.

36 A well-researched study on the development of Soloviev’s philosophical thinking is Thomas Nemeth’s The Early Solovˈëv and His Quest for (New York: Springer Science&Business Media, 2013).

145 study of Spinoza evidently brought a change in his intellectual perspective from a unity of reduction to a more positive unity of abstraction that encompassed religious categories, thus opening his mind to the broad sphere of religious thinking.37

Another thinker who at the time influenced the young Soloviev was Arthur

Schopenhauer. The immediate relevance of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical speculation to his ethical system made a strong impact on Soloviev, who was eager to realize ideas in practical action. Schopenhauer’s pessimist view of the material life as a pool of insatiable desires producing human suffering confirmed Soloviev’s ascetic tendencies.38 However, Soloviev’s enthusiastic interest in Schopenhauer, or, for that matter, any other thinker, did not lead to any sort of permanent philosophical discipleship. His profound encounters with the philosophical systems of various thinkers were all stages in his individual journey of intellectual development.

As Mochulˈsky has observed, philosophy for Soloviev was not just a theory, but an existential drama: “The ideas of the philosophers he studied overpowered his entire being, he lived by them.” 39 This personal engagement was both the trigger of Soloviev’s rapid intellectual development and the realistic criterion in his philosophical discernment.

The work of John Stuart Mill also made an important contribution to Soloviev’s philosophical upbringing. Soloviev seems to have esteemed Mill’s consistent method of criticism with regards to both the materialist and spiritualist standpoint. However, he did not

37 Life 1:43, 61.

38 Ibid., 61.

39 Mochulˈsky, 30.

146 embrace Mill’s philosophical skepticism; rather, this confirmed his conviction of the necessity for a new philosophical foundation. The same might be said of Soloviev’s reading of Immanuel

Kant’s formalist theory of knowledge and ethics.40

Of decisive import to Soloviev’s philosophical development was German idealist thinking. Schellingian philosophy of revelation guided Soloviev’s argumentation in his first published treatise Mifologicheskii protsess v drevnem iazychestve [The Mythological process of

Ancient Paganism] in 1873.41 Likely, this work inspired his early ambitious plan to formulate the principles of universal religion as the basis of a new religious and philosophical synthesis.42

According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, German idealism impressed upon Soloviev’s thought two

“formal concepts.” The first was Hegelian universalism, in which the subjective spirit attained a transcendent, objective meaning. The other pertained to the German-idealist idea of a “world process,” or, eschatology, perceiving the unity of all reality in its process of development to the world’s final destiny.43

Soloviev’s feverish reading of philosophy during his university education was not the only vehicle of his personal intellectual development. The formative experience of great importance was Soloviev’s first deep romantic love for Ekaterina Vladimirovna Romanova, his

40 Life 1:61.

41 PPS 1:17-36.

42 See Paul Valliere, Solovˈëv and Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation in ECS 2:119-130.

43 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 282-283.

147 cousin, younger by two years. This was a “platonic” relationship that lasted three years.44 In

Ekaterina (Katia), Soloviev searched for a soul mate, muse, and confidant of his philosophical insights via correspondence.45

There was apparently an inner correlation between Soloviev’s turning to a religious worldview and his love for Katia. Soloviev experienced love as an ecstatic, spiritual force that yielded the lover’s affirmation of the beloved in the deepest domain, one might say, at the source of one’s personal being. It was the love of the Creator, God’s affirming will, that Soloviev discovered at this source. The relationship to Katia thus marked Soloviev’s definitive departure from materialism and atheism. In the experience of human love, he perceived a touch of divine mystery.

Soloviev’s understanding of the experience of human love as sharing in divine love was reflected in his later work Smysl liubvi [The Meaning of Love]:

The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for another the same absolute significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. . . . I can only acknowledge the absolute significance of a given person, or believe in him (without which true love is impossible), by affirming him in God, and consequently by belief in God Himself, and in myself, as possessing in God the center and root of my own existence.46

44 Life 1:67-79.

45 A collection of 28 letters from Soloviev to Ekaterina Romanova was published by Ernest L. Radlov, editor, Pisˈma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solovieva, vols. 1-4 (St. Petersburg: Obschestvennaia polˈza, 1911); hereafter cited: Pisˈma. Many of these letters have been translated by Boris Jakim in Sophia, God & A Short Tale about the Antichrist (Middleton, DE: Angelico Press, 2014) 71-100; hereafter cited: ER.

46 SS 7:3-60, at 21, 43; translation, The Meaning of Love (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1995), 51, 88.

148

A deep sense of continuity between the love of a man and a woman and divine love was to remain a constant feature of Soloviev’s thought and spirituality. For this reason, Soloviev’s biographer aptly styled Katia “the godmother of his worldview that was coming into being.”47

The letters written by Soloviev to Katia in that period bore testimony to his intense personal intellectual growth. Soloviev learned to reconcile his reason with faith in God: “A little mind and a little philosophy lead one away from God; whereas more mind and more philosophy bring one closer to him again.”48 Recognizing God as the absolute being, as the luminous One- in-all, was tied to an act of intellectual humility:

All that abstract reason can give, has been experienced and turned out to be worthless; and reason itself has rationally proved its own insolvency. But this darkness is the beginning of light; for when a person is compelled to say: I am nothing, he thereby says: God is all.49

As Aleksei Losev has commented, the 19-year-old Soloviev already manifested in this passage his “principal standpoint” which he would never abandon in his later life and work.50

47 Life 1:78. Mochulˈsky 36-38, likewise considered Soloviev’s experience of romantic love instrumental in his religious conversion, by reviving the memory of religious unity perceived in the mystical vision of Sophia from childhood. In contrast to Sergei Soloviev, the author identified this love experience not with his relationship with Katia, but with a different woman whom Soloviev encountered when nineteen years old. Mochulˈsky based this assumption on Soloviev’s semi-autobiographical short story Na zare tumannoi iunosti [At the Dawn of Hazy Youth]; SS 12:289-302; English translation by Kornblatt, 231-245.

48 Soloviev to Ekaterina Romanova (31 December 1872), Pisˈma 3:73.

49 Ibid., 75; translation, ER, 82.

50 Alexei F. Losev, Vladimir Soloviev i ego vremia [Vladimir Soloviev and His Times] (Moskva: Molodaia gvardiia, 2009), 21.

149

At the time of this “philosophical” conversion to God—and in some sense always thereafter —Soloviev was an enthusiast whose religious worldview was broader than official

Christian doctrine.51 As evident in his letters to Katia, the young Soloviev was nursing an ambition to elaborate the philosophical principles of universal religion, principles compatible with the Christian religion, yet raising it to a new level of intelligibility.52 There was certainly some Promethean hubris in this grandiose project that aspired to transcend the scope of revealed religion; however, in the young Soloviev’s vision of universal religion, one might also already perceive his incipient Catholicism. Moreover, from this vision Soloviev derived an understanding of his personal mission in life: to promote the cause of religion in the world as a herald of universal religion and a prophet of theocracy.53

The first significant fruit of Soloviev’s intellectual development was his master’s thesis,

Krizis zapadnoi filosofii: Protiv pozitivistov [The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against

Positivists].54 The 21-year old Soloviev emerged in this work as a mature thinker with a definite philosophical standpoint. He presented an exquisite historical overview of from to August Comte, which he saw as a completed process of epistemological criticism resulting in the positivistic denial of metaphysics. In the light of a broader

51 This accounts not only for Soloviev’s sophiological thought, but also for his interest in spiritism, Gnosticism, Kabala and various mystical writers along the journey of his personal religious development. See below, 170-178 and 189, note 184.

52 Life 1:60.

53 See Toinet, 15-54; also Sutton, 78-86.

54 PSS 1:37-138; cf. The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against Positivists (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1996).

150 philosophical development in Western society, Soloviev did not consider philosophical positivism as an inherently wrong position, but as false in its exclusiveness, in its assertion of its own criteria of truth at the expense of the other levels of philosophical thinking.55 Soloviev’s master’s thesis laid the foundation of his personalist philosophy of integral knowledge, expounded in his later works.

The public defense of his thesis at St. Petersburg University in the fall of 1874 met with considerable success; the intelligentsia of the capital city hailed Soloviev as Russia’s new-born philosophical genius.56 Following this splendid entrance into the academic world, Soloviev was offered the position of an adjunct faculty member in philosophy at the University of Moscow. In the spring semester of 1875, he lectured on metaphysics; then the university approved his year- long stay as a visiting scholar at the British Museum in London, where Soloviev conducted research in Hindu, Gnostic and Medieval Latin manuscripts.57 The motivation for this project was Soloviev’s fascination with the idea of divine wisdom, which in the form of theological reflection he apparently encountered in his studies of Scripture and patristic theology during his stay at the Moscow Theological Academy the previous year.58

55 PSS 1:39; cf. Life 1:95.

56 Life 1:100.

57 Ibid., 104; 114.

58 Ibid., 87.

151

In the archives of the British Museum, Soloviev threw himself into the study of Sophia, the divine wisdom, in Jewish, Christian, gnostic and kabbalist sources.59 According to his poem

Three Meetings, while in London, Soloviev experienced his second mystical vision of Sophia.

This vision was the immediate cause for Soloviev’s abrupt decision to travel to the Cairo desert in Egypt, where his third, presumably final, mystical encounter with Sophia took place.60 Before returning to Moscow in the summer of 1876, Soloviev also visited Italy and France.61

The fruit of Soloviev’s research and mystical visions on his journey abroad was a treatise on Sophia written in French.62 Soloviev at first envisioned this work as his doctoral dissertation; however, later he decided that the work did not achieve his desired standard of philosophical scholarship. The treatise was a confused mix of philosophy and esoteric speculation, a “creative chaos” resulting from his absorption of Kabalistic and Gnostic texts, brilliant insights, and mystical experience.63 Soloviev never published this work; however, in his subsequent works he elaborated in a clear philosophical and theological language some of the insights on Sophia present in the manuscript.

59 Life 1:124-128.

60 SS 12:80-86, at 81-85. See also Life 1:131-135 and Grabar, 148-150.

61 Life 1:162-165.

62 Soloviev’s La Sophia: Principes de la Doctrine Universelle was not included in the 1911 Sobranie sochinenii, nor in the two supplemental volumes of SS published in 1967 in Brussels; it appeared in the second volume of the new Polnoe sobranie sochinenii in the original French with a synoptic Russian translation (see PSS 2:8-161). Judith Kornblatt has published an English translation of Soloviev’s treatise in Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, 115-163.

63 Life 1:149; 161 and 165.

152

On his return to Moscow, Soloviev resumed his lectures at the university and continued his project of a new philosophical alternative to modern European thinking. This project found its expression in the works that Soloviev conceived as twin treatises and embarked upon simultaneously: Kritika otvlechennykh nachal [A Critique of Abstract Principles]64 and

Filosofskie nachala tsel'nogo znaniia [The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge].65

The former presented Soloviev’s analysis of the development of Western thought; the latter was intended to be an exposition of his philosophical conception of universal or integral knowledge.

Advised by the Faculty of Philosophy to present the Critique of Abstract Principles for his doctoral defense, Soloviev interrupted his writing of Philosophical Principles of Integral

Knowledge, and never completed it. The latter treatise was published in its unfinished form in

1877.66

The main thesis of Philosophical Principles may be found in the following citation: “a development must properly consist of the separation or detachment of the composite forms and elements of an organism in the light of their new, already fully organic integration.”67 On this idea of organic development Soloviev designed his philosophical program whose aim was to overcome autonomy in Western intellectual, ethical and socio-religious life in a higher synthesis of what the author described, respectively, as “free theosophy”—an integration of theology,

64 PPS 3:8-362.

65 PPS 2:185-308; cf. The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); hereafter cited: IK.

66 Life 1:174.

67 PPS 2:188.

153 philosophy and positive science; “free theocracy”—a universal human society ordered by religious principles; and “free theurgy”—the cooperation of human activity with the divine principle of grace.68

In 1877, Soloviev abandoned his teaching position at the Moscow University and moved to St. Petersburg in order to accept a governmental position on a department committee for education. In the summer of that year, under the influence of Slavophile ideals, Soloviev joined the Russian military campaign in the Russo-Turkish War and went to Asia Minor as a war correspondent. Apparently realizing that he was unsuited for this career, Soloviev returned to St.

Petersburg to serve the Slavophile cause as a writer and a public speaker.69

The rise of the Slavophile movement in 19th-century Russia was associated with the birth of modern historical consciousness and the need on the part of the Russian intelligentsia to adopt a stance towards the rapid social changes in European society. While in Western European countries modern secular societies were emerging, the remained a post-feudal monarchy with a repressive tsarist regime and a traditional agrarian way of life. The widening societal breach between Western Europe and Russia caused an intellectual ferment in 19th- century Russia, generating various streams of social, religious and political thinking. The

68 PPS 2:196. Based on this triple program of synthesis, Soloviev’s lifework has been divided, originally by E. Trubetskoi, into three main phases: theosophical (1873-1880); theocratic (1881- 1890) and theurgic (1891-1900); Dimitry N. Stremoukhov has added to the third period an “apocalyptic” phase as a distinct area. Cf. Dimitri Strémooukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic Work (Belmont, MA: Norldand, 1980), 13.

69 Life 1:184-188. As a result of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, Russia gained control of territories in the Caucasus, and Bulgaria, Romania, and declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire.

154 reformist intellectuals seeking some adaptation in Russia to the social developments in Western

Europe were labeled as zapadniki [Westernizers].70 The opposing camp of Russian intelligentsia became known as Slavianofily [Slavophiles], who believed in a path of Russia’s social development that was distinct from the processes of the social, economic and religious transformation in Western Europe. This unique path for Russia was considered by the founders of the Slavophile movement—Ivan Kireevsky, Aleksei Khomiakov and Konstantin Aksakov—as a special historical role, indeed, a messianic mission, of Russia in Europe and the whole modern world.71 Russian messianism, or the Russian idea, became the main tenet of the varied forms of

Slavophile aspirations, aptly characterized by Andrzej Walicki as a “conservative-romanticist” movement of Russian social and religious thinking.72

70 Russian Westernism in the 19th century was not a homogenous ideological movement; it included socialists such as Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) and liberals such as Konstantin D. Kavelin (1818-1885). The unifying element was a desire for Russian political reform, patterned after Western-European political and social activism and often sympathetic to revolutionary ideas.

71 Ivan Vasilˈevich Kireevesky (1806-1856), a Russian nobleman, literary critic and philosopher, was the author of a small literary work which contained highly influential ideas criticizing in Western society and extolling sobornostˈ—the integral way of life in Russian society. Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov (1804-1860), a Russian landlord, theologian, philosopher and poet, elaborated the idea of sobornostˈ into an ecclesiological and social theory. The work of Konstantin Sergeevich Aksakov (1817-1860), a Russian nobleman, writer and critic, was imbued with romantic patriotism idealizing the life of Russian peasants. Among younger Slavophiles, the most influential was Iury Fedorovich Samarin (1819-1876), a Russian aristocrat, thinker, and diplomat; one of the architects of the Russian Emancipation Reform of 1861 that abolished serfdom in the country. V. Zenkovsky’s study of these Slavophile thinkers in his History of Russian Philosophy (1:171-216) has highlighted their importance in the Russian intellectual tradition.

72 The Russian Idea by Nikolai A. Berdiaev is a popular survey of Russian religious philosophy; V. Soloviev used the same title in a short French treatise on the historical mission of Russia. Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile : History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteen-century

155

A committed Russian patriot, Soloviev acquainted himself with the works of Slavophile thinkers and was influenced by the Slavophile movement throughout his life. The belief in

Russia’s special historical task resonated with Soloviev’s own sense of a great personal calling.73

Captivated by the Slavophile ideal of a harmonious, communitarian way of life as the special mark of the Russian people, Soloviev formed a lasting hope that Russia would implement a social ideal that would lead to elevating the whole of mankind to a new level of organized society; he believed that his mission was to serve this goal as a herald. However, his original philosophical thinking, combined later with his Catholic faith, placed him apart from the other

Slavophile thinkers. As Pauline Schrooyen has succinctly stated in regard to Soloviev’s relationship to the Slavophile movement, he was both its heir and a critic.74

Experience from his travels throughout Europe in 1875-1876 confirmed Soloviev in his

Slavophile beliefs.75 Another important Slavophile influence was Soloviev’s friendship with

Fiodor M. Dostoevsky. From their first contact in 1873 to Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, Soloviev

Russian Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) is a history of the Slavophile movement with detailed presentations of the life and work of the leading Slavophile thinkers. The Slavophile idea of Russian messianism might be said to have become the most influential Russian state ideology, influencing Russian politics through the Soviet era until the present time. See Peter J. S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, and After (London: Routledge, 2000).

73 See Toinet, 15-54.

74 Pauline Schrooyen, “Vladimir S. Solovˈëv: Critic or Heir of Slavophilism,” ECS 2:13-27, see: Strémooukhoff, 14-15; 151-153.

75 Life 1:165.

156 and the famous Russian novelist knew and respected each other, shared their ideas, and were sources of mutual inspiration. As Hans Urs von Balthasar has written,

There was the most intimate commerce of soul and mind [between Soloviev and Dostoevsky], so that (for instance) we do not know which of them first conceived the figure of the Grand Inquisitor or the notion of applying the three temptations of Jesus to the Church and to Catholicism in particular. It is in fact more likely to have been Soloviev.76

Also Soloviev apparently inspired the main heroes in Dostoevsky’s last novel Bratˈia

Karamazovy [The Brothers Karamazov], Alesha and his brother Ivan.77

Soloviev gave his Slavophile ideas, already evident in Philosophical Principles of

Integral Knowledge, their most explicit expression in a public lecture delivered early in 1877 in

Moscow under the tile Tri sily [The Three Forces].78 In this lecture, Soloviev adopted the criticism of Catholicism and protestantism launched by Slavophile thinkers, as well as the

Slavophile ideal of harmonious social unity in Russia and set them into his frame of a dialectical interpretation of history: the faith of the Russian people represents the higher synthesis of the religious idea, which in the Western forms of Christianity attained only a partial, hence preliminary, historical expression.

76 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 294-295; see Life 1:195.

77 For a detailed history of the friendship of Dostoevsky and Soloviev, see Kostalevsky, 49-80. Fiodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was one of the most renowned Russian writers; the main theme of his novels was the psychology of modern man’s religious drama. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s last novel, might be seen as an artistic expression of the author’s personal quest for the realization of the ideal Christian society in Russia, reflecting the influence of the Slavophile movement. See “V. S. Soloviev” in Kenneth A. Lantz, The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 406-408.

78 PSS 1:199-208.

157

In St. Petersburg in 1878, Soloviev delivered a series of twelve lectures on religion and society, later published as Chteniia o bogochelovechestve [Lectures on Godmanhood].79 As suggested by the title, the Lectures offered a broad religious-philosophical synthesis based on the central idea of the incarnation of God in the person of Christ Jesus. Soloviev’s plan was to elaborate his original ideas presented in Philosophical Principles in relation to contemporary ethical, social, political and religious issues. He perceived the Roman Catholic Church as a

“false theocracy,” securing unity by the force of authority; religious development in the Western world had reached a full, enclosed circle; a true theocracy required integration of the forms of

Western-European Christianity on a higher plane, with the help of an outside alternative form of

Christianity found in the religious spirit of Russia. 80

Soloviev’s Lectures on Godmanhood might be considered as a programmatic work of a new Russian Orthodox thought, including his theological exploration on Sophia—divine wisdom. This was the highpoint of Soloviev’s fame in Russian society; his St. Petersburg lectures were great public events attended by the elite of the Russian intelligentsia.81 In regard to

79 PSS 4:9-168; cf. Lectures on Godmanhood (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2007); hereafter cited: LOG.

80 See PSS 4:22-23.

81 Life 1:189. Soloviev’s St. Petersburg lectures were the setting of the “non-meeting” between Fiodor M. Dostoevsky and Lev N. Tolstoi, as narrated by Dostoevsky’s wife, Anna. Tolstoi attended one of the lectures anonymously to avoid public attention; thus, both he and Dostoevsky were in the same auditorium at the same time without knowing about each other’s presence; they later regretted missed the opportunity for a personal acquaintance. See Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences (Skylight, KY: Wilwood House, 1976), 290-291, 364.

158 the trajectory of Soloviev’s work, these lectures marked his transition to the theological and ecclesiastical issues that dominated his thought in the 1880s.

In the spring of 1880, Soloviev defended and published his philosophical dissertation

Kritika otvlechennykh nachal [A Critique of Abstract Principles] at the University of St.

Petersburg. In this dissertation, Soloviev carried out a great historical overview of modern ethical and epistemological thinking in the light of his philosophical program of integral knowledge.82 Following the successful defense, he was appointed adjunct professor of philosophy at St. Petersburg University.

Several fateful events took place in Soloviev’s personal life in the years surrounding his work on the dissertation. First and foremost, Soloviev became a friend of Count Alexei Tolstoi and his family and a frequent guest at their estates near St. Petersburg, where he developed a long romantic relationship with Sofˈia Petrovna Khitrovo, the niece of the count’s wife.83 Sofˈia was married and had three children; however, she was alienated and lived separately from her husband who had a diplomatic career. Although Soloviev and Sofˈia seemed to have seriously considered the possibility of her divorce—allowed in the Orthodox Church under certain terms— and marrying, this never materialized. Soloviev was seeking a spiritual rather than marital

82 PPS 3:8-362. For a more detailed presentation of Soloviev’s ideas in this work, see below, 194-196.

83 Life 1:240-250. Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoi (1817-1875), a Russian nobleman and writer, well-known for his poetry, historical dramas and satirical writings, was a distant relative of Count Leo Tolstoi. Sofˈia Petrovna Khitrovo, née Bakhmeteva, (1848-1910), Tolstoi’s adopted daughter, was born to his wife Sofˈia Andreevna as a single mother and raised by her uncle. Sofˈia Petrovna separated from her husband Mikhail Aleksandrovich Khitrovo several years after their marriage, but they never officially divorced.

159 union; on her part, Sofˈia Petrovna likely never fully fathomed Soloviev’s celibate love for her; also, as a practical woman, she sought to protect the interests of her children. Soloviev’s love for

Sofˈia lasted over a decade, and it was for Soloviev a source of more suffering than happiness.84

Sofˈia Petrovna was nevertheless the most significant woman in Soloviev’s life. She inspired most of his love poems, which describe her beauty as a reflection of divine Sophia. Soloviev remained in contact with Sofˈia; his last visit to her was just a few weeks before he died.85

Another important event in that period was the abrupt end of his university career in the spring of 1881. In a public lecture delivered soon after the assassination of Russian tsar

Alexander II, Soloviev suggested that the ascending tsar should have offered amnesty to those responsible for the regicide of his father as a sign of the spiritual authority the tsar possessed together with his civil authority in Russia. This suggestion provoked a public outcry against

Soloviev. While he was not officially sanctioned, he decided to abandon his teaching post at St.

Petersburg University to publicize his ideas with greater freedom as an independent scholar and a freelance writer.86

A series of personal blows also afflicted Soloviev, including the death of his father at the end of 1879 and the death of his friend Dostoevsky at the beginning of 1881.87 In the spring of

84 See Life 2:302-303, 334.

85 See ibid 3:516-517.

86 Life 1:227. Alexander II Nikolaevich Romanov implemented a number of successful reforms during his reign as Emperor of Russia (1855-1881), including the emancipation of serfs. He was assassinated by members of the left-wing terrorist organization Narodnaia volia [The People’s Will].

87 Ibid., 210-212, 235.

160

1883, Soloviev himself was close to dying from high fever and nervous exhaustion. In critical moments, he earnestly prayed for health and strength to accomplish the mission given him by

God.88 Around this time Soloviev had a “prophetic dream,” an account of which was recorded by his friend Evgenii N. Trubetskoi:

[Soloviev] was going along several Moscow streets and distinctly recalled their names as well as the house at which his carriage stopped. At its entrance a high- ranking Catholic clergyman came out and approached him, and Soloviev immediately asked him for a blessing. The prelate, apparently, hesitated, doubting whether he should bless a “schismatic.” Soloviev vanquished his doubts by pointing out the mystical unity of the Universal Church, unharmed by the visible division of its two halves. The blessing was subsequently bestowed.89

Shortly after recovering from his illness, Soloviev had the same experience in reality—on the same street, in front of the same house in Moscow that he had seen in dream, Soloviev supposedly encountered a Catholic prelate who granted his request for a blessing.90

The story, whether true or not, might be seen as an indication of the pivotal change in

Soloviev’s vision of universal religion; indeed, a sort of religious conversion, took place at the beginning of the 1880s. He embraced humility and, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has stated, “the

88 Life 1:250-252.

89 Evgeny Nikolaevich Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie Vl. S. Solovieva [The Worldview of V. S. Soloviev], vol. 1 (Moscow: Tovarishchestvo tip. A. I. Mamontova, 1913) 448-449; available at: http://www.runivers.ru/lib/book3335 (accessed: 19 March, 2015). See Life 1:238-239. Evgenii N. Trubetskoi (1863-1920) was a Russian nobleman and philosopher, a friend, disciple and biographer of V. S. Soloviev.

90 Life 1:252. According to Strémooukhoff, 150, the Catholic prelate was Vincenzo Vannutelli (1836-1930), an Italian priest, Roman Curial official, and cardinal, who visited Russia in 1883 to attend the coronation ceremony of Tsar Alexander III.

161

Roman Catholic ethic of ecclesiastical obedience and practical discipline;”91 and, with this, a mission to work on reconciliation between the Roman Catholic and the Russian Orthodox

Church.

A change in Soloviev’s tone might then be perceived in his Tri rechi v pamiatˈ

Dostoevskogo [Three Speeches in Memory of Dostoevsky], written between 1881 and 1883.92

Soloviev emphasized the appeal to the universal religious character of human existence in the experience of the Russian literary heroes in Dostoevsky’s novels, with an intentional effort to outweigh Dostoevsky’s tendency towards the Slavophile . Soloviev blended his evaluation of the great novelist with his personal reflections on an artist’s vocation to serve the universal purpose of humankind by embodying the universal good in his artistic work.

In 1883, Soloviev wrote his first series of articles about the union between the Roman

Catholic and the Russian Orthodox Church with the title Velikii spor I khristianskaia politika

[The Great Controversy and Christian Politics].93 In these articles, Soloviev studied the ecclesial schism between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches in light of the prolonged historical and cultural dichotomies between the East and the West. In his effort to present a practical solution to the “great controversy,” Soloviev proposed a program embodying an irenic and ecumenical program for Christianity. He emphasized the role of Rome as the necessary central ecclesial

91 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 294. The new emphasis on humility was apparent in Soloviev’s letters of that period—cf. Soloviev to Ivan Aksakov (January 1883) Pisˈma 4:18. Also imbued with humility was the text of Soloviev’s treatise on spiritual theology Dukhovnye osnovy zhizni [The Spiritual Foundations of Life] SS 3:301-416, composed between 1882 and 1884.

92 SS 3:186-218.

93 SS 4:3-114.

162 authority, distinguishing papacy from “papism,” which he criticized for confusing ecclesial unity with political centralization as an end itself.94 In his new ecumenical vision, which accepted the papacy as centrum unitatis, the unity of the Church was based on an organic cooperation of

Christian and ecclesial forces, subordinated to a single end: realization of the theocratic ideal.95

The unmistakably new, ecumenical tone in Soloviev’s approach to religious issues in the

Great Controversy provoked further disenchantment with “the Russian genius” among the

Russian intelligentsia. These writings initiated a longstanding controversy between Soloviev and

Slavophile thinkers, particularly shown in his first polemics with Ivan Aksakov and Alexander

Kireev.96 Also, the treatise drew the ire of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the chief state supervisor of the Holy in Russia, which marked the beginning of Soloviev’s perennial difficulties with official religious censorship.97 On a positive side, Soloviev’s Great Controversy was warmly received by the Croatian Catholic bishop, Josip Strossmayer, an outspoken defender of

94 See SS 4:76-103. Soloviev’s remarkable shift in his attitude towards papacy shall be analyzed later in this chapter; see below, 202-210.

95 SS 4:83; 113.

96 Life 2:263-278. Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov (1823-1886), a Russian nobleman and prominent Slavophile writer, the younger brother of Konstantin Aksakov, from 1880, was the editor-in- chief of the magazine Rusˈ, in which Soloviev published his series on Great Controversy. Aleksandr Alekseevich Kireev (1833-1910) was a Russian nobleman, military general, publicist and a supporter of the Slavophile movement.

97 See Life 2:259; 262. Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (1827-1907) was a Russian jurist and statesman; during his long career at the imperial court, he advised three Russian tsars on Russian domestic politics; as the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod—the official college of the Russian-Orthodox hierarchy—from 1880 to 1905, he was de facto the head of the Russian- Orthodox Church.

163

Slavic interests and promoter of Catholic-Orthodox reunion. Strossmayer entered into correspondence with Soloviev in 1883, and became his lifelong friend and supporter.98

The opposition Soloviev encountered among Russian intellectuals, which began with the publication of the Great Controversy, did not prevent him from pursuing his ideas about the restoration of ecclesial unity. He wrote dozens of articles throughout the 1880s on various ecclesiastical issues in Russia; several essays professed his interest in the religious-political situation in Poland and in contemporary Judaism.99 In addition, in 1884, Soloviev published a beautiful dogmatic-based treatise on spirituality entitled Dukhovnye osnovy zhizni [The Spiritual

Foundations of Life].100

In 1885, Soloviev began developing his ecumenical and theocratic vision outlined in his

Great Controversy; the result of this labor was Istoriia i budushchnostˈ teokratii [History and

Future of Theocracy].101 Soloviev originally intended to publish the work in a magazine first as a series of articles, and then to collect them in a single treatise; however, censorship thwarted his attempts at publishing the work in Russia. Meanwhile Soloviev continued his polemic with the

98 Life 2:272, 282. (1815-1905) was a Catholic bishop, diplomat, intellectual, benefactor and a leading figure of Catholic Slavs in the Balkan part of the Austrian- Hungarian monarchy. On Strossmayer-Soloviev relations, see Ante Kadić, “Vladimir Soloviev and Bishop Strossmayer,” American Slavic and East European Review 20:2 (April 1961): 163- 188.

99 SS 4:134-185; 207-221. Soloviev’s study of Judaism was guided by his interest in the Jewish idea of theocracy. To conduct his research in the biblical history and theology of the Old Testament, he learned biblical Hebrew (see Life 2:289-299).

100 SS 3:301-416; cf. God, Man and the Church: The Spiritual Foundations of life (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2016).

101 SS 4:243-633; cf. Histoire et avenir de la théocratie (Paris: Cujas, 2008).

164

Slavophile opponents of his ecumenical program, who considered the promulgation of the new

Catholic dogma on infallibility as the main obstacle to reconciliation with the Catholic Church.

To corroborate the relevance of his work on theocracy, Soloviev wrote Dogmaticheskoe razvitie tserkvi v sviazi s voprosom o soedinenii tserkvei [Dogmatic Development of the Church in

Relation to the Question of the Reunion of the Churches].102 Soloviev published this study first as a separate treatise in Moscow. When it became clear that his History and Future of Theocracy had no chance of being published in Russia, Soloviev decided to publish the Russian original in

Zagreb, , courtesy of Bishop Strossmayer. Soloviev included the treatise Dogmatic

Development as the first chapter of the Zagreb issue.103

In the latter half of 1886, Soloviev visited Zagreb, Croatia, as a guest of Bishop

Strossmayer. It was through Strossmayer that a French publicist specializing in Russian history,

Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, as well as several Jesuits in France, became interested in Soloviev and invited him to compose and publish a study of his religious philosophy in France.104 Soloviev welcomed the opportunity of addressing readers in Western Europe, as his chances of publishing his writings on religious philosophy in Russia were minimal. He proposed writing an article in

French, “Philosophie de l’Eglise universelle,” offering a short summary of his thought on

102 SS 11:1-64; cf. Le développement dogmatique de l’Église (Paris: Desclée, 1991).

103 See Life 2:296-300; 319. For more information on the background of Soloviev’s treatise on Dogmatic Development, see below, 171-172.

104 See Life 2:321. Henri Jean Baptiste Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (1842-1912) was a French publicist and historian, whose work focused primarily on the issues of political and ecclesiastical history in France and Russia.

165 theocracy and theosophy. The article grew into a substantial work, La Russie et l’Eglise universelle, published in 1889 after his stay of several months in Paris.105

This book had three quite different parts. The first part was a polemical treatise confronting the Russian Orthodox Church on the score of submission of its hierarchy to the supremacy of a civil power in Russia, which, for all practical purposes, transformed it into a state church. The second part was an historical a theological apologetic concerning the primacy of the pope in the Church. In the third part, Soloviev sought to articulate his sophiological thinking, by means of which he envisioned the specific contribution of Russia to the religious history of

Christianity as the people promoting the universal brotherhood of mankind in theocracy. This part of the work might be seen as Soloviev’s original synthesis between sophiology and Catholic dogmatic teaching.106

The third part of La Russie was greeted with a suspicion of heresy by Jesuits in France.

Unable to dissuade Soloviev from including it, they withdrew from the publication. Soloviev was disheartened by the prevalent attitude of distrust among Catholics to his sophiological thinking; the attitude that, as he thought, identified unity with a narrow dogmatic uniformity.107

Soloviev left for Russia, apparently forfeiting an opportunity for a personal audience with the

105 On the citations from Soloviev’s La Russie et l’Eglise universelle in this study, see above, 1, note 2. All quotations in English follow the text of Russia and the Universal Church (Chattanooga: Catholic Resources, 2013); hereafter cited: RUC.

106 Henri de Lubac, La posterité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore. Vols. 1-2 (Paris: Éditions Lethielleux, 1981) 2:410, considered the third part of La Russie “the most comprehensive and elaborated synthesis left by Soloviev,” and, at the same time, “the most disregarded and unknown.”

107 Life 2:347-348; 355-357.

166 pope Leo XIII in Rome negotiated by Bishop Strossmayer, perhaps apprehensive of receiving from the pope a similar disapproval of his work. After becoming acquainted with Soloviev’s vision of ecclesial and theocratic unity, the pontiff supposedly took a larger, but still dismissive view, considering it beautiful but unrealistic.108

After returning to Russia, disillusioned Soloviev abandoned his work on theocracy. He engaged in a bitter polemic with Nikolai Strakhov about the legacy of Nikolai Danilevsky’s development of Slavophilisim into a nationalist doctrine.109 Soloviev’s criticism of Russian

Orthodoxy likewise escalated; his public lecture Ob upadke srednevekovogo mirosozertsaniia

[On the Decline of the Medieval Worldview] bordered on defiance of all forms of institutional

Christianity as counterfeits of religion.110 Soloviev published his collected critical and polemical essays on Slavophilism and Orthodoxy in the 1891 edition of Natsionalˈnyi vopros v Rosii [The

National Question in Russia].111

108 See ibid., 349. Pope Leo was informed about Soloviev and his work by Bishop Strossmayer, who was also negotiating for a personal audience with the pope.

109 Ibid., 357, 367-368. Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov (1828-1896) was a Russian publicist and literary critic, a representative of Pochvenichevstvo movement closely associated with the Slavophile ideals, which proclaimed the ideal of returning to the soil as a way of reforming society. Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevsky (1822-1885) was a Russian thinker and historian, well- known for his theory of cultural types as segregate organisms and his anticipation of the decline of Western civilization.

110 SS 6:381-393; cf. “On the Decline of the Medieval Worldview” in Vladimir Wozniuk, editor, Freedom, Faith, and Dogma: Essays by Vladimir Soloviev on Christianity and Judaism (Albany, NY: State University of NY Press, 2008), 159-170.

111 SS 5:157-401.

167

During the last decade of his life, Soloviev was preoccupied primarily with questions of philosophy. In 1889, he accepted a place on the board of editors of a specialized library and philosophical journal in Moscow.112 In this capacity, Soloviev wrote two essays on the philosophy of aesthetics: Krasota v prirode [Beauty in Nature] and Obshchii smysl iskusstva

[The General Meaning of Art].113 Beginning in 1891, he contributed philosophical articles for the Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.114 In 1893, he again visited Paris, where he finished his series of essays on the philosophy of love, Smysl liubvi [The Meaning of Love],115 and a treatise on Mohamed’s life and teaching, Magomet: ego zhizhnˈ i religioznoe uchenie.116

Towards the end of his life, Soloviev’s lifestyle became nomadic. He moved between

Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other places, staying in hotel rooms or with friends and relatives.117

Between 1894 and 1896 he visited Imatra in Finland several times for prolonged stays; in solitude near Lake Saima, he wrote the bulk of his major work on moral philosophy, Opravdanie

112 Life 1:362.

113 SS 6:33-74; 75-90.

114 Life 1:371. Of the 194 dictionary entries written by Soloviev, approximately a third were published in SS 10:229-523; all other entries, including their complete alphabetical list, were printed in SS 12:547-619. The Brockhaus-Efron encyclopedia was published in Russia between 1890 and 1907 in 86 volumes as a joint project of Leipzig and St. Petersburg publishers.

115 SS 7:3-60; cf. Meaning of Love (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1995).

116 SS 7:203-281.

117 See Life 3:447-450.

168 dobra [Justification of the Good].118 In the following years, he revisited his metaphysical philosophy in three essays,119 and wrote articles on the Russian Alexander Pushkin,

Mikhail Lermontov and others, as well as a study on the Polish Romantic poet Adam

Mickiewicz.120 As an introduction to a translation of Plato’s work prepared by Soloviev and his brother Mikhail, he wrote an intriguing examination of Plato’s personal philosophical development, Zhiznennaia drama Platona [Drama of Plato’s Life].121

In the last years of his life, Soloviev became increasingly disquieted by a sense of evil and an apprehension of a coming darkness over the world. He conceived the growing evil as the global political threat posed to Christian civilization by Asians—the Mongol and the Chinese people.122 However, Soloviev engaged such intuitions on the level of historical and theological thinking rather than a level of political prognosis; thus, his thoughts centered on a vision of apocalyptic evil, the end of history. His last book was a popular treatise written in the form of

Platonic dialogs on the theme of evil and its ramifications in human history, Tri razgovora

118 SS 8; cf. Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005).

119 SS 9:89-166.

120 SS 9:33-62; 257-264; 279-287; 294-347; 348-370

121 SS 9:194-241.

122 See Life 3:495-510.

169

[Three Conversations], which ended with a short story about the coming of the Antichrist at the end of time before Christ’s parousia.123

Soloviev’s last work, culminating in an apocalyptic vision, has been recognized by several prominent commentators on his work as a radical reconfiguration of the main theme of his lifework—his theocratic eschatology.124 While the author of Three Conversations might in fact have never surrendered the truthfulness of theocracy in theory, he did accept the impossibility of its actual historical fulfillment. In Three Conversations, the realization of God’s kingdom was to come not from a linear development of human history into theocracy, but as a result of the apocalyptic struggle with evil in the person of the Antichrist. For Soloviev, this writing expressed his “final view on the Church question:” the unity of the universal Church was to be expected only in the eschatological future.125

Vladimir Soloviev died on July 31 [August 13], 1900, on the Trubetskoi family estate in

Uzkoe near Moscow. His death was apparently caused by long-term malnutrition and extreme physical exhaustion.126 On his deathbed, Soloviev received the last rites from a Russian

123 SS 10:81-221; cf. War, Progress and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Antichrist by Vladimir Solovyov (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1990).

124 See Strémooukhoff, 315-334; Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 349-352.

125 Life 3:510

126 Ibid., 519.

170

Orthodox priest, and spent long hours in prayer, during which he recited psalms in Hebrew for the Jewish people. His last words were, “Hard is the labor for the Lord.”127

Fuitne Soloviev Catholicus?128 A Catholic Thinker

Soloviev’s personality has often presented a puzzle for scholars interested in his life and work. Nikolai Berdyaev styled Soloviev “the most enigmatic figure of 19th century Russian literature,” suggesting that there was “the daytime Soloviev” and “the Soloviev of the night.”129

Similarly, Samuel Cioran has spoken about “the public” and “the private” Soloviev.130 These descriptions underline the contrasting elements in Soloviev as a man with a brilliant mind employing strict logic and crystal-clear philosophical expression on the one hand, and on the other a mysterious man of strange visions, obscure religious influences, swinging moods and a nomadic way of life.

127 Smertˈ V. S. Solovieva [Death of V. S. Soloviev]—a memoir by Sergei N. Trubetskoi in the Vestnik Evropy 35/5 (1900): 412-413; available online at http://www.vehi.net (accessed: March 19, 2015). Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoi (1862-1905), a Russian nobleman and philosopher, was a disciple and friend of V. S. Soloviev and the brother of Evgeny N. Trubetskoi. See above, 160, note 89.

128 This heading comes from the title of the doctoral dissertation Fuitne Vladimirus Soloviev catholicus: Inquisitio in eus vitam et personam [Was Vladimir Soloviev a Catholic: A Study of His Life and Personality] at the Papal Oriental Institute in Rome by the Eastern-rite Catholic priest Ján Mastiliak in 1941. The dissertation was published in a Slovak translation in the posthumous anthology of Mastiliak’s writings Etika Božieho kráľovstva [The Ethics of God’s Kingdom] (Bratislava: Lúč, 2003).

129 Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1992), 244; hereafter cited: Berdyaev.

130 Samuel Cioran, Vladimir Solov'ev and the Knighthood of the Divine Sophia (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1977), 11.

171

Many traits of “the private” or “the nighttime” Soloviev were revealed in one of his earliest biographies by a friend, Evgeny Trubetskoi.131 In Trubetskoi’s description, Soloviev had an air of unearthliness about him, resembling a physically fatigued man of neglected appearance.

He wore long hair and a lavish beard; his face was dominated by his beautiful deep eyes “shining with extraordinary rays penetrating through the surface of things accessible to the exterior senses, seeing something limitless and hidden from others.”132 Soloviev apparently neglected proper nourishment, worked intensely and excessively, and rested little and irregularly. This caused him chronic problems with digestion and led eventually to his premature death.

Soloviev’s constant and excessive mental and physical exertion took a toll on his inner well-being. In his later years he became impatient, irritable and prone to depression and despair.

He apparently suffered from some form of neurosis, which was probably due not only to stress and overwork, but also to his youthful entanglement in spiritism. According to Berdayev,

Soloviev had “occult gifts;”133 well into his in his twenties, he participated in séances and considered himself a powerful medium for communicating with the spirits of the dead.134 He repudiated spiritism early in his life—around the time of his return from Egypt in 1876, calling it not only vain but inherently sinful. However, he seemed to have practiced mediumistic writing for an extended period of his life. Many of Soloviev’s manuscripts have preserved markings and

131 See the first chapter, Lichnost' V. S. Solovieva [Personality of V. S. Soloviev] in Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie, 1-34.

132 Ibid, 3. See Life 1:121.

133 Berdyaev, 245.

134 Life 1:64, 108-109 and 162.

172 notes apparently scribbled in a state of trance. These marks were most copious in the French manuscript of Sophia; they were present also in his later writings, although less frequently, and virtually disappeared towards the end of Soloviev’s life. These notes, especially when longer, often gave an impression of “love letters” from Sophia to Soloviev.135

Soloviev’s interest in occult practices apparently stemmed from his explorations in religious epistemology understood broadly as a possible realm for communicating with spiritual beings—the souls of the dead, angels, and, above all, with the Sophia of his mystical visions.

However, exposure to such practices also seems to have brought undesired consequences: as he mentioned to his friends on more than one occasion, he suffered from demonic attacks.136 These experiences might have been hallucinations generated by his morbid sensitivity and neurosis. He acknowledged such a possibility and the need for therapy suggested to him by E. Trubetskoi; yet,

Soloviev was convinced that his perceptions of evil spirits had an objective basis.137

Perhaps these eccentricities in Soloviev’s religious worldview originated in his deep sacramental spirituality, developed somewhat anomalously outside the context of liturgical piety.

While he respected, venerated, and more regularly than not received the Christian sacraments as the efficient sign of Christ’s redeeming grace, he seemingly did not allow liturgical worship to inform his religious thought and practice. This by no means implies that Soloviev’s religious philosophy was not sacramental in the broad sense of the word. As Trubetskoi has written, “It

135 See Life 1:125-127 and 207; Strémooukhoff, 58; and Kornblatt, 83-85, which included a photocopy of Soloviev’s mediumistic markings.

136 Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie, 20-21; see Life 1:129, 463-464, and Losev, “Mystik,” 440-442.

137 Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie, 21.

173 belonged to the fundaments of [Soloviev’s] worldview that the material world was not an autonomous and self-contained whole, but rather a sphere of manifestation and incarnation of spiritual forces.”138 For Soloviev, the world was a great sacrament, the efficient sign of the love of the Creator, the token of divinization, of the all-unity (vseedinstvo) already in progress, in the process of realization. Mediation between God and the world was for Soloviev linked with his vision of Sophia, and, theologically, primarily depended upon the dogma of the incarnation; however, the paschal mystery did not receive appropriate attention in Soloviev’s religious philosophy.139 Thus, his apocalyptic reconstruction of his eschatological thought in the final work of his life was apparently due not only to the collapse of his theocratic theory, but also to his personal encounter with the powers of darkness, whose existence he had denied as a young philosopher.140

A puzzling part of Soloviev’s life story is the role of women in his life. When asked whether he had ever been in love, and how many times, Soloviev answered, “Seriously—once; otherwise—twenty seven times.”141 In the first part of the answer Soloviev was apparently speaking of his relationship with Sof'ia Khitrovo; the second was a humorous reference to various fleeting romances during his life. In any case, Soloviev’s eroticism has opened for some

138 Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie, 22.

139 See below, 199-202.

140 Soloviev to Ekaterina Romanova (2 August 1873), Pis'ma 3:87-90, at 88: “I do not recognize existing evil to be eternal; I do not believe in the devil.”

141 Quoted in Lossky, 89.

174 scholars a fertile field of research guided by speculation as to whether Soloviev ever sexually consummated any of his erotic friendships.142

Soloviev’s eroticism was paradoxically intertwined with his high ideal of celibacy. He was in the most precise sense of the word a platonic lover of beauty; to him, the erotic drive was bound with an aesthetic contemplation of the ideally beautiful in an eternal embrace of divine love; thus, his amorous relationships always remained on the platonic level. In his experience of erotic attraction, Sophia, his only true beloved, seemed to merge her own beauty with the contours of an individual woman. In the end, however, his devotion to the universal ideal always prevailed over any special relationship he had with any woman.143 As Hans Urs von Balthasar stated, “Soloviev lived in an habitual state of ‘baptized Eros’ directed toward Sophia;”—“despite occasional and impassioned relationships with earthly women, which remained, however, unrequited or unconsummated, signifying for him no more than transitory embodiment of his

‘secret mistress.’”144 In fact, Soloviev’s original conception and experience of sophianic love has been a source of inspiration for the contemporary theology of love, marriage and nuptiality.145

142 E.g., see Cioran, 42-86.

143 Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie, 30; cf. Berdyaev, 184.

144 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 293.

145 See Angelo Scola, The Nuptial Mystery (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005); Anna Lisa Crone, Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal: The Philosophers and the Freudians (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2010); and John Romanowsky, Sexual-Spousal Love in the Theological Anthropology of V. S. Soloviev: Systematic Analysis and Recent Roman Catholic Interpretation (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, doctoral dissertation, 2011).

175

Another curious feature of Soloviev, adding to the enigma of his personality, was his sense of humor. He was known as a very entertaining companion, amusing others by witty puns, humorous story-telling, and good-natured self-deprecation.146 A sense of humor marked many of his letters. Occasionally he employed irony and puns in his works of prose. His humor also had a great impact on several poetic compositions—farcical comedies. The prime example of these plays, Belaia liliia [The White Lily], has been characterized by Boris Jakim as

the comical mystical genre, a genre probably invented by Soloviev: deep mystical longings and ecstatic outpourings coexist with pratfalls, guffaws, and buffoonery. . . The approach to the Holy of Holies is accompanied by laughter, sometimes of a very crude kind.147

Humor seemed to have assisted Soloviev, alleviating his intense intellectual preoccupation with the ideal world. The mismatch between the ideal that he perceived so clearly and our misshapen reality elicited his liberating laughter. He often made himself the object of his parody, as if a caricature gave him the chance to express his intimate thoughts and feelings most freely.

At the other extreme of Soloviev’s magnanimous spirit were his occasional outpourings of great sorrow. E. Trubetskoi recalled:

Indeed, his merry disposition sometimes changed all of a sudden into a desperate grief, and the people who were close to him might have witnessed his altogether unexpected and seemingly unfounded tears. I remember how a stream of such tears ended a dinner to which Soloviev invited some friends; we understood that he needed to be left alone and departed quickly. The source of his tears was deeply intimate; few people were able to perceive it. It was possible to see them

146 Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie, 3-4, 11. In her Reminiscences, 223, Dostoevsky’s wife Anna thus recalled her acquaintance with Soloviev: “Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev—then still a very young man who had just completed his education—began coming to visit us that winter [of 1873]. . . . He made an enchanting impression on us. . . .”

147 Boris Jakim in the introduction to The Religious Poetry of Vladimir Solovyov (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2008), 1-8, at 6.

176

rarely, however; it was more common to find Soloviev disgusted and in gloomy silence.148

The words of the Book of Ecclesiastes come to mind: “For in much wisdom there is much sorrow; whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow” (1:18). Soloviev’s deepest dejection apparently grew out of his realization that his dearest idea of theocracy found nowhere support.

Soloviev’s disinterestedness about the mundane things of daily life was combined with a deep empathy and charity towards others. As a result, he often gave money to anyone in need, often allowing others to exploit his generosity. Even in the destitute conditions of winter, he would offer a beggar his own coat.149 In his freedom from material concerns, joy from giving, and contentment with poverty to the point of suffering dire need, Soloviev’s spirituality has been compared with that of St. .150

It has become a rather common feature in the literature about Soloviev to consider him a

“mystic,” thus conveniently summing up the seemingly diverse strands of his exceptional personality. Considering Soloviev a mystic is true but can easily be misunderstood: the term

“” in colloquial use can imply something irrational or phantasmagorical. Soloviev’s poetry and religious philosophy possibly originated in a genuine mystical experience—his three mystical encounters with Sophia. These most likely comprised all of his mysticism in the narrow sense of the word. However, it should be remembered that he was an artist, a poet. As Losev

148 Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie, 4.

149 Ibid., 11-13.

150 Losev, “Mystik,” 438.

177 has argued, much of Soloviev’s supposed mysticism was in fact his aesthetic sensibility and capacity to grasp things in a poetic imagination by an allegorical personification of the ideal.151

In regard to his religious philosophy, Soloviev owed to his mystical experience of Sophia his idea of vseedinstvo [all-unity], the focal point of his thinking. From this mystical core, the rest of his religious philosophy developed as a magnificent work of reason, tirelessly refining, digesting and applying the principles in his system of faith until it virtually coalesced with

Catholic dogmatic teaching. As Hans Urs von Balthasar commented,

The muddy stream [of Gnosticism, Kabala and modern sophianic literature] runs through him as if through a purifying agent and is distilled in crystal-clear, disinfected waters answering the needs of his own philosophical spirit, which can live and breathe only in an atmosphere of unqualified transparency and intelligibility.

Balthasar considered Soloviev’s capacity for philosophical synthesis “perhaps second only to

Thomas Aquinas.”152

With all the complexities of his personal character, and with his investigations in uncharted territories of religious thought and mystical experience, Soloviev “arrived at the

Catholic conclusion.”153 His work has been recognized as a legacy of a great Catholic thinker by major figures of Catholic theology; in addition to Balthasar, the list includes Pope John Paul II,

Joseph Ratzinger, Angelo Scola, Christoph Schönborn, Tomáš Špidlík, Marko Rupnik, and

151 Losev, “Mystik,”443.

152 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 281; 284; 293. On the modern sophianic thinkers, see below, 189, note 184.

153 See ibid., 282.

178 others.154 Perceiving Soloviev as a Catholic philosopher does not mean ignoring the various odd features of his unique personality and thought, but rather holding them together as the image of a living paradox, which Henri de Lubac called the human being itself.155

Fuitne Soloviev Catholicus? A Member of the Catholic Church

Closely associated with the question of the Catholic character of Soloviev’s religious philosophy is the issue of his “Catholic conversion” in terms of his formal entry into the Roman

Catholic Church. This has been a point of ongoing controversy, in which scholars representing the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church have claimed Soloviev as a full member of their respective bodies.156 It has also been suggested that he did not seek to be affiliated with any particular confession, considering himself a member of the Church Universal

154 See John Paul II, Fides et Ratio [Encyclical Letter on the Relationship Between Faith and Reason] AAS 91 (1999), 5-88, § 74; Christoph Schönborn, foreword to Vladimir Soloviev, The Russian Church and the Papacy, 7-11; Tomáš Špidlík, L’idée russe: Une autre vision de l’homme (Paris: Diffusion Cerfs, 1994); Marko Rupnik, In the Fire of the Burning Bush: An Initiation into Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).

155 See Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 8.

156 Among Orthodox theologians, Soloviev’s entrance into the Catholic Church has been denied by Sergei L. Frank in his editorial preface to Solovyov Anthology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 9-33, at 22-23; Mochulˈsky 168-169, and Strémooukhoff, 258-259, 334, have considered it unlikely. Among Catholic authors, his conversion has been maintained by S. Soloviev, Life 3:436-444; Michel D’Herbigny, Vladimir Soloviev: A Russian Newman (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2007), 25-26; Mastiliak, 111-142; Heinrich Falk, “Wladimir Solowjews Stellung zur katholischen Kirche” Stimmen der Zeit 144/11 (1949): 421- 435. See also “Regarding Soloviev’s ‘Conversion’” in Paul Marshall Allen, Soloviev: The Russian Mystic (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 2008), 302-306, who leans towards to view of the Orthodox writers; and Gregory Glazov, “Vladimir Soloviev and the Idea of the Papacy,” Communio 24 (Spring 1997): 128-142, who has called D’Herbigny’s position on Soloviev’s Catholic conversion “logically defensible.”

179 that transcended any particular historical division.157 Soloviev’s personal stance with regard to the Catholic-Orthodox schism, obviously, casts an important light on his ecclesiological views.

Soloviev explained at length his position in a letter to Bishop Strossmayer, written in

1885 as his memorandum on the position of Russian Orthodox believers in relation to the Roman

Catholic Church.158 Soloviev argued that in the area of dogmatic teaching, the Russian Orthodox

Church preserved faithfully the doctrine of the first seven ecumenical councils. Although

Russian Orthodoxy did not embrace the more recent dogmatic developments of the Catholic

Church, it had added nothing contrary to Catholic doctrine. Any heterodox or heretical propositions opposed to the Catholic Church and its teaching made supposedly by the Russian

Orthodox Church were “never confirmed by any higher authority.” Hence, according to

Soloviev, these were no more than opinions by private individuals comparable to the conflicting unofficial teachings of theological schools over the long history of the Catholic Church.159

It was in this frame of mind that Soloviev wrote his famous profession of Catholic faith that was published in the introduction of his work La Russie et l’Eglise universelle:

As a member of the true and venerable Eastern or Greco-Russian Orthodox Church which does not speak through anti-canonical synod nor through the employees of the secular power, but through the utterance of her great Fathers and Doctors, I recognize as supreme judge in matters of religion him who has been recognized as such by St. Ireneus, St. Dionysius the Great, St. Athansius the Great, St. , St. Cyril, St. Flavian, the Blessed Theodoret, St. , St. Theodore of the Studium, St. Ignatius, etc. etc.– namely, the Apostle Peter, who lives in his successors and who has not heard in

157 Berdyaev, 193, has referred to Soloviev as “a supra-confessionalist.”

158 Soloviev to Bishop Strossmayer (Agram, 21 September 1886), SS 11:380-386.

159 SS 11:383.

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vain our Lord’s words: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church;” “Strengthen thy brethren;” “Feed My sheep, feed My lambs.”160

Soloviev presented this statement under a personal conviction of the fundamental unity of faith between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches. He felt assured that their schism did not impair the doctrine, sacraments and the moral teachings of the Orthodox Church; and, that their corporate reunion was indeed possible. Hence, while Soloviev defended in his 1886 treatise on Dogmatic Development the new Catholic developments of doctrine as the legitimate part of the Christian doctrine, he did not consider these new developments an essential obstacle for the unity between the Catholic and the Orthodox Church:

The true essence of the Church does not depend on greater or lesser progress in the definition and formulation of dogmatic details, but depends on the presence of apostolic succession, on the orthodox faith in Christ as perfect God and perfect man, and finally on the plenitude of the sacraments.161

In sum, Soloviev held that one was able to practice the Catholic faith in its fullness within the bounds of the Russian Orthodox Church, praying for the restoration of the full and visible unity with the Catholic Church that had been lost due to the schism of the 11th century.162

160 La Russie, 66; translation: RUC, 30.

161 See Soloviev to Aleksandr A. Kireev (12 November 1883), SS 11:352.

162 Soloviev’s standpoint on the relationship between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches was in fact in agreement with the later teaching of the Second Vatican Council in the Decree on ecumenism Unitatis Redintegratio, § 15: “These Churches [of the East], although separated from us, possess true sacraments, above all by apostolic succession, the priesthood and the Eucharist, whereby they are linked with us in closest intimacy.” In § 17, the Council declares that the Orthodox heritage of liturgy, spirituality and theology “belongs to the full Catholic and apostolic character of the Church.”

181

In this regard, Soloviev defended his position in a polemical article of 1886 published in

Croatia:

My personal views on Catholicism can be of no value, but the fact that such views are tolerated by the Eastern Church and that I have not been excommunicated by this Church is important to a certain degree. If an Anglican, for example, spoke publicly in this manner about Catholicism, he certainly could not remain a member of the Anglican Church. A nightingale does not create a spring. But if this nightingale withstands the climate of the north without dying from cold, it is certain that winter has passed, that one can have more confidence in the sky, and that no one should stay indoors any longer.163

Soloviev repeatedly refuted suggestions that he formally entered the Roman Catholic Church; he saw such suggestions stemming from a narrow notion of Catholic unity as uniformity with the

Latin-rite Catholic Church.164 He believed that becoming a Roman Catholic was not imperative for him as a member of the Russian Orthodox Church; moreover, such a step would have practically terminated his ecumenical work on account of the prevalent anti-Roman bias and suppressive state control over religious matters in Russia.

Living as a Russian Orthodox believer publicly professing Catholic views in tsarist

Russia was a severe test for Soloviev’s conviction about the fundamental unity of faith shared by the communions. He was a target of much calumny in the press, while his own attempts at response by publishing his religious views were barred by the official censorship. On account of his frank criticism of the Orthodox Church, Soloviev regularly faced the threat of criminal

163 Quoted in Strémooukhoff as an appendix, 335-337, at 337. Soloviev’s reference to the case of a member of the Anglican Church brings to mind John Henry Newman and his discernment that brought him into the Catholic Church; however, one must agree with Soloviev that as a Russian Orthodox, he was in a different situation from Newman in relation to the Catholic Church.

164 See Life 2:304, 3:444.

182 prosecution by the Russian government. Soloviev confronted the Russian Orthodox Church neither on the points of doctrine, nor sacramental worship; his challenge concerned strictly the

Orthodox hierarchy on account of its alliance with the civil government. Soloviev presented this challenge most forcefully in La Russie et l’Eglise universelle, where he claimed that the Russian

Orthodox Church preserved the apostolic succession and the validity of the sacraments “despite the absence of any lawful Church government.” As he further elaborated: “All our bishops are nominated in a manner absolutely forbidden and condemned by the third canon of the seventh

Ecumenical Council, a canon which in the eyes of our own Church can never have been abrogated (for lack of subsequent ecumenical councils).”165

Soloviev’s alienation from the Russian Orthodox hierarchy reached its zenith when he was denied the sacraments in Orthodox churches, apparently on the basis of a directive by the

Orthodox authorities. Information about the existence of such a directive was provided by

Nikolai Tolstoi, a former Russian Orthodox priest who under the influence of Soloviev’s religious philosophy became a Catholic.166 As Soloviev’s nephew commented in his biography,

“This fact exerted a strong influence on Soloviev’s psychology and definitely placed him in statu belli with the Greco-Russian Church.”167

In February 1896, Soloviev made a Catholic profession of faith to the same Fr. Tolstoi, and received the sacraments from Fr. Tolstoi at a celebration of the Eastern Catholic rite

165 La Russie, 28, 29 note 1; translation: RUC, 51 note 3.

166 Mastiliak, 119; 136 note 41 and 139 note 74; see also D’Herbigny, 251.

167 Life 3:432.

183 liturgy.168 Tolstoi had to flee Russia soon after the event to escape imprisonment. Soloviev, on his part, did not subsequently avail himself of the opportunity to attend sacramental worship with any of the Western rite Catholic communities in Russia. As Gregory Glazov has suggested,

Soloviev “suffered his ostracism in the Orthodox Church as a martyrdom to his cause of liberating Orthodoxy through unification with Rome.”169 Evidently, he only received the sacraments again with the last rites on his deathbed from a Russian Orthodox priest, whom he explicitly requested to visit, rather than from a Catholic priest of foreign nationality.170

In regard to the controversy regarding Soloviev’s ecclesial affiliation, Catholic authors have considered his profession of Catholic faith before Fr. Tolstoi as evidence of Soloviev’s formal entrance into the Catholic Church; Orthodox writers have emphasized Soloviev’s explicit wish to be administered last rites by the Russian Orthodox priest. Catholic writers have insisted that according to Catholic sacramental discipline, Soloviev, as a Catholic, was allowed to receive the last rites from an Orthodox priest due to the circumstances of his imminent death. Orthodox writers have argued that in death Soloviev repented his former Catholic profession of faith. This supposition was based on the testimony by Rev. S. A. Beliaev, the priest who administered the last rites to Soloviev, who in reaction to Tolstoi’s testimony on Soloviev’s reception into the

Catholic Church published an account about Soloviev’s last confession in Moskovskie vedomosti

168 An account of this event was published by Nikolai Tolstoi in 1910 in the French magazine L’Universe and the Russian magazine Russkoe slovo. The event was later confirmed by two eye- witnesses, Princess Elena Vasil'evna Dolgorukova and Dmitry Sergeevich Novsky. See Life 3:437-439; Mochulˈsky, 168-169, Strémooukhoff 258-259, Mastiliak, 124-125, and 138, note 69.

169 Glazov, 133.

170 See Life 3:438.

184

[Moscow News] in 1910, under the pseudonym N. Kolosov. Soloviev, according to Beliaev, admitted that he was wrong on “a dogmatic issue”—not specified explicitly—in the controversy with an Orthodox priest who several years ago had withheld the sacraments from him.171

It can only be guessed what constituted the “dogmatic issue” that Soloviev disowned when receiving the last rites. Most likely, this issue involved Soloviev’s conviction that he maintained his membership in the Orthodox Church even after his formal submission to

Rome.172 At any case, suggestions that Soloviev might have repented any of his Catholic tenets at the end of his life—or his profession of the Catholic faith to Fr. Tolstoi—seem to omit the meaning of Soloviev’s martyrdom-testimony in abstaining from sacraments in the final years of his life, as well as the total orientation of his religious work, his legacy, and his mind of a poet and philosopher of universal unity.

After collecting all pieces of information regarding Soloviev’s attitude to the Catholic and the Orthodox churches in the final years of his life and his decisions in receiving sacraments, one can conclude the following: an interpretation of his ecclesial standpoint should undervalue neither Soloviev’s Catholic profession of faith in 1896 nor his decision to receive the last rites from the Orthodox priest. The detailed account of both events in the biography by Soloviev’s

171 Mastiliak, 124; 138 note 63. According to Glazov, 134, the Orthodox priest who argued with Soloviev over a dogmatic issue and withheld sacraments from him was Aleksandr Mikhailovich Ivantsov-Platonov, Soloviev’s former teacher at the Moscow Theological Academy; the incident supposedly took place in 1897. However, this identification must be wrong—Ivantsov-Platonov died in November 1894.

172 See Glazov, 135.

185 nephew supports the view that Soloviev carefully considered his steps in both situations.173 His premonition of approaching death intensified his quest for an inner reconciliation of his personal relationship to the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. The end of his life can be seen as a manifestation of this last achievement of reconciliation, hence Soloviev’s final statement, indeed, his religious testament, about the ecclesial question.174

Both sides in the argument on Soloviev’s ecclesial affiliation are thus partially true. The claim by Russian authors that Soloviev never left the Orthodox communion is valid, insofar as to the end of his life, Soloviev maintained his conviction about the Catholicity of the Orthodox

Church. His profession of the Catholic faith followed by reception of the sacraments from an

Eastern-rite Catholic priest was apparently the result of Soloviev’s attempt to practice his

Catholic faith at a time when he was barred from receiving the sacraments by the official

Orthodox leadership which he had defied. In this instance, Soloviev simply decided to ignore and circumvent the Orthodox clergy by receiving sacraments from a validly ordained Russian priest who had been accepted into the Catholic Church.175

173 Life 3:437-444, 510-522.

174 Cf. Soloviev’s reference to his last work The Three Conversations as his “final view on the Church question.” The desired end of ecumenical reconciliation is in this work only accomplished by a handful of the Catholic, Orthodox and protestant believers in the face of an apocalyptic catastrophe at the end of times. See Life 3:510.

175 According to Mastiliak, Soloviev was involved in discussions led by Catholic-oriented Orthodox priests and believers in Russia about the possibility of erecting a hierarchy of Russian Catholic clergy within the Russian Orthodox Church; these proposals bore no result, however. See Mastiliak, 141-142, note 91; see also D’Herbigny, 253.

186

The Catholic authors are also right when pointing out that Soloviev’s profession of the

Catholic faith can be recognized as making him objectively—canonically—a full member of the

Catholic Church. This constitutes a fact even if Soloviev’s submission to Rome involved no abjuration of Orthodoxy on his part, and he personally believed in having maintained his place in the Orthodox Church as an Eastern-rite or Russian Catholic.176 It is likewise true that according to the Catholic discipline, the reception of last rites by the Orthodox priest would not impair the status of a member of the Catholic Church.177

Soloviev’s ecclesial position was shaped by his ecumenical work. He defined himself as a Catholic, a member of the universal Church, via the Russian Orthodox Church. This is apparently the content of what might be called his religious testament—the act of his Catholic profession of faith in conjunction with his reception of last rites from an Orthodox priest. If, in fact, the “dogmatic issue” that had cost Soloviev the sacraments in the Orthodox Church was based upon his conviction to remain eligible for receiving the Orthodox sacraments after his formal profession of Catholicism—as general speculation has granted, then his admission of being wrong during his last confession would contain a touch of irony. By having allowed as much as that he had erred about the possibility of intercommunion in the Orthodox Church,

Soloviev surely did not retract anything from his Catholic beliefs. Rather, he merely indirectly confirmed that he was indeed a Catholic, which—as he was sure—was not to be an obstacle for receiving sacraments in the extraordinary circumstances of imminent death.

176 Glazov, 129.

177 Ibid., 135.

187

Soloviev’s “religious testament” should be interpreted in inclusive rather than exclusive terms. It affirmed both the Catholic and the Orthodox Church in its fundamental unity of the

Church universal. One then might agree with Ján Komorovský that, in a sense, Soloviev succeeded in bridging the Catholic and the Orthodox churches in himself.178

Development and the Idea of Divine Wisdom

In his autobiographical poem Three Meetings (1898), Soloviev singled out “the most significant thing that had ever happened in my life”—his three visions of Sophia, the divine wisdom.179 Although different authors might have variously interpreted the content and meaning of his vision of Sophia, there is a general consensus that it constituted for Soloviev the wellspring of his spirituality and thought. In particular, his understanding of divine wisdom and his idea of dogmatic development are indebted to his vision of Sophia.

Whatever the precise nature of Soloviev’s vision of Sophia as an authentic mystical experience, his interest in divine wisdom was certainly not alien in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. His experience had biblical precedent in the accounts of the wisdom of God in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. In the Book of Proverbs, the Book of Wisdom and the

Book of Sirach, wisdom figures as a personified being, an eternal companion of God, with feminine traits. She is described as the first of God’s creation, who was present and helping in all of God’s work of creation and was intimately familiar with His intentions and purposes.

178 Ján Komorovský, “Život a dielo Vladimíra Solovjova” [The Life and Work of Vladimir Soloviev] in an anthology of Vladimir Soloviev’s writings in Slovak, Una Sancta. Spisy o kresťanskej jednote, edited by Ján Komorovský, (Bratislava: Lúč, 2004), 451-463, at 462.

179 SS 12: 80-86, at 86.

188

Divine wisdom, as personified in the Old Testament, delighted in human beings and her mission was to teach and guide them in the art of a beautiful life.180

Examples of a mystical encounter with Sophia, the divine wisdom, similar to that of

Soloviev, are also evident in the hagiographical tradition. For example, there is a striking parallel between Soloviev’s childhood vision of Sophia and an account in the ancient Life of St.

Constantine—Cyril.181 Furthermore, sophianic themes were present in the poetry of Dante

Alighieri and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe in the Eternal Feminine,182 and, more recently, in the religious thought of Teilhard de Chardin and .183

From Soloviev’s biography, it would appear that his avid interest in Sophia, the divine wisdom, was not elicited by his studying biblical or hagiographical sources, but rather stemmed from his personal religious experience. His subsequent study of biblical and other literature on

Sophia thus only helped him interpret and develop the expression of his original sophianic

180 See Proverbs 8:1-9:6, “The Prayer of Solomon” in Wisdom 9 and Sir 24.

181 Štefan Vragaš, editor, Život sv. Konštantína-Cyrila a život sv. Metoda [The Life of St. Constantine-Cyril and the Life of St. Methodius] (Martin: Matica Slovenská, 1991), 32. St. Constantine (ca. 827-869), later called Cyril, was a Greek priest and scholar, the originator of the Cyrillic alphabet; with his brother St. Methodius (ca. 820-885), he led a Christian mission to the Slavic population in Great Moravia in Central Europe. The authorship of Constantine-Cyril’s biography is accredited to his brother Methodius, or sometimes to the most prominent scholar of their disciples, St. Clement of Ohrid (ca 840-916). In this account, the seven-year-old Constantine had a dream in which a city official offered him the hand of any maiden of his native town, Thessaloniki; he chose the most beautiful woman, whose name was Sophia.

182 See Kornblatt, 76-82.

183 See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Eternal Feminine” in Writings in Time of War (New York: Harper&Row, 1968), 191-202; Thomas Merton, “Hagia Sophia” in Christopher Pramuk, Sophia. The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996), 301-305.

189 visions. In his on-going quest to conceptualize and contextualize his sophianic experience,

Soloviev acquired a comprehensive knowledge of the theme of divine wisdom in religious literature, by surveying virtually all the relevant sources from Scripture, the ancient patristic,

Gnostic and Kabala literature as well as protestant mystics of the period.184 His long study of Sophia, moreover, went hand in hand with his personal religious and theological development towards Catholicism.

Soloviev wrote about his final and most extensive sophianic vision in the Egyptian desert in the following verses of his biographical poem The Three Meetings:

What is, what was, and what will be were here Embraced within that one fixed gaze. . . . I saw it all, and all of it was one One image there of beauty feminine. . . .185

Soloviev described his mystical experience of Sophia in terms of an all-embracing vision of unity. Everything was contained in his “one fixed gaze” of Sophia. All of reality was somehow related to this vision; he conceived Sophia as the key to a unified representation of reality— vseedinstvo [all-unity], which is the essence of his religious philosophy.

184 Life 1:186 specifically mentioned Soloviev’s study of the theme of Sophia in the religious work of the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541) and protestant authors: Jakob Böhme (1575- 1624), a Lutheran mystic and theologian; his disciples in Germany Johann Georg Gichtel (1638- 1710) and Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), and John Pordage (1607-1681) in England; and the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). In general, Soloviev regarded the sophianic ideas of these authors in a positive way (see Life 3:513); however, according to Balthasar (“Soloviev,” 284), his genius raised sophiology, in comparison with them, to a higher philosophical level.

185 SS 12:80-86, at 84; translation, The Religious Poetry of Vladimir Solovyov, 99-107.

190

Soloviev first introduced his concept of vseedinstvo [all-unity] in his dissertation on the

Critique of Abstract Principles.186 In an entry for the Brockhaus-Efron encyclopedia, he characterized vseedinstvo as a relation of a single principle to everything in a positive sense (in contradistinction to the abstract concept of being, derived negatively, by elimination of all aspects other the being): “the relation of an all-encompassing spiritual-organic whole to the living members and elements in it.”187 Soloviev elaborated this philosophical idea from a contemplative, sophianic vision of reality as the universe of living and spiritual beings created by

God with a specific purpose—the single principle to which everything is related—love. As S. L.

Frank commented, “Intuition of this unity determines the whole of Soloviev’s world- conception.”188

On the basis of his pivotal idea of oneness (vseedinstvo), Soloviev has at times been considered a pantheist thinker. According to Lev Šestov, Soloviev’s conception of all-unity was based on an abstract philosophical conception of God in the manner of Spinoza or various trends in German idealist philosophy.189 However, the allegation of pantheism ignores the fundamental orientation of Soloviev’s philosophical thought, which was decidedly at odds with “abstract

186 See PSS 3:15, 162-175, 250-256, 306-314.

187 SS 10:231.

188 S. L. Frank in his foreword to A Solovyov Anthology, 10.

189 See William Desmod, “God Beyond the Whole: Between Solov’ëv and Šestov” in ECS 2: 185-210, who critiqued Šestov for misrepresenting Soloviev’s nuanced notion of God in his religious philosophy.

191 principles,” including any purely abstract or formalist idea of God. Soloviev’s religious thinking stemmed from a conception, which was, in the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar,

alike beyond (God as the free hen) and beyond vulgar pantheism (God as pan). The emphasized the pan, the Jews the hen; but the Christian God [as in Soloviev’s religious philosophy] is in the truest sense both hen and pan.”190

In the light of Soloviev’s sophiology, one can notice a clear distinction between his religious philosophy and pantheism. There is an inherent link between Soloviev’s mystical vision of

Sophia and his philosophical conception of all-unity. The latter was for Soloviev neither a general, nor an abstract idea. As Mochul’sky has commented,

The spiritual all-unity [vseedinstvo] is [for Soloviev] not an amorphous element, nor a lifeless energy: it is a living and personal being, a human image. It is the image of feminine beauty.191

What the vision of Sophia conveyed for Soloviev was not an abstract idea of pan-unity as a total realm of undifferentiated being; rather, his conception of reality was integrated into an all- encompassing unity as an object of God’s personal love. Perceived as the perfect image of feminine beauty, the Sophia of Soloviev’s mystical vision seemingly embodied God’s idea of humanity or an ideal humanity, in which all people —and by an extension, all of creation—was participating. Soloviev’s entire intellectual thought was devoted to reflection on history as a process of realization—a development—of the high status of human beings as contemplated in the ideal of Sophia. In Soloviev’s theology, Sophia thus figured both as the primordial ideal and

190 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 284-285. The Greek expression hen (ἕν) means “one;” pan (παν) “all, everything.”

191 Mochulˈsky, 19.

192 an eschatological vision of creation, brought by divine love to its originally intended perfection, to all-unity (vseedinstvo).

It might be said that Soloviev’s mystical experience of Sophia resulted in his intellectual synthesis, an overarching aesthetic vision, the universal goal toward which all thinking tends as its point of ultimate culmination. This vision laid the foundation of both his spirituality and his religious philosophy. His spiritual growth stemmed from a life-long asceticism practiced as a submission of lower motives to the pursuit of his high ideal of integrity and a sublimation of lower desires within his elevated aesthetic love for all-unity. Accordingly, Soloviev’s intellectual development may be seen as a method of thinking which integrated the lesser parts into a higher synthesis contemplated in his vision of universal unity.192

In Soloviev’s extended intellectual development, sophiology was eventually encompassed in a majestic vision of all-unity as a mystery of the universal—the Catholic

Church. At the center of his theological synthesis was the dogma of the Incarnation: the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ.193 Soloviev perceived in this mystery a nexus of the ongoing process of God’s unification with created reality: the summation of this process was the eschatological goal of all-unity, of love between

192 There is in fact an intriguing convergence between Soloviev’s style of religious philosophy and the eschatological method in Balthasar’s aesthetic theology. Soloviev’s Sophia seems to coincide with the key category of “glory” in Balthasar’s theological thinking. See Michael Martin, The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015), 183-189. On Soloviev’s aesthetic thinking as the core of his intellectual synthesis, see Michelina Tenace, La beauté unité spirituelle dans les écrits esthétiques de Vladimir Soloviev (Arsonval: Fates, 1993).

193 See Strémooukhoff, 96-100.

193

God and His creation. Sophia in this theological vision represented Soloviev’s idea of the other in the polarity of God’s love for His creation. In the light of Christian Revelation, Sophia was perceived as the Immaculate Virgin, the Bride of the Lamb, the Church, and the sacrament of creation. “The theme and content of Soloviev’s aesthetic is nothing less than this,” Han Urs von

Balthasar commented:

The progressive eschatological embodiment of the Divine Idea in worldly reality; or the impress of the limitless fullness and determinacy of God upon the abyss of cosmic potentiality. . . . By this means, the total meaning of the world’s evolution is clearly established for the future: the development of humanity and the totality of the world into the cosmic body of Christ, the realization of the eschatological relation of mutuality between the Incarnate Word and Sophia, who receives through the Word her final embodiment as His Body and His Bride.194

Soloviev’s philosophical idealism thus became woven into the Catholic theology of the Church as the universal sacrament, God’s instrument for divinization of creation.

The idea of doctrinal development clearly had a central place in Soloviev’s philosophical and theological thought. With his aesthetic vision of the eschatological goal of the world, he perceived everything in a process of all-becoming-unity. Development was thus for Soloviev the key concept of dynamic unity, allowing him to grasp the fragments of our knowledge in their relation to the eschatological fulfillment of reality, the all-unity, their ultimate purpose.

Development might be seen as Soloviev’s method of thinking: a way of organizing all elements of knowledge into a form of unity contemplated in Sophia. This way of thinking enabled

Soloviev to envision a developmental process of dogma.

194 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 283.

194

Development and Integral Knowledge

The path to Soloviev’s theological view of dogmatic development was paved by his philosophical idea of integral knowledge, where development played a prominent role. For example, the first chapter of his Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge was entitled

“Concerning the Law of Historical Development.”195 The “law of historical development” provided Soloviev’s thought with a basic methodological tool, or organizing principle: history understood as a progress towards an ever-greater unity of mankind in love. Soloviev’s philosophical genius is perhaps most recognizable by his great capacity for critical evaluation of virtually every epistemological, moral or political theory in terms of its partial contribution to such progress towards the universal unity. If humankind had a common goal for its existence, then human history constituted a development toward this end. A part had to be understood in the context of the whole: the purpose of an individual human existence had to be always understood in the light of the universal goal of humankind.

A development could not consist of any series of changes of any subject, rather only the changes in a living organism accomplishing a gradual transition from its original state to its ultimate goal. Accordingly, all humanity formed a unified entity, a social organism; hence, he considered all humankind as the “genuine organic subject of historical development.”196

“The law” of historical development was accordingly understood by Soloviev as a dialectical process in the Hegelian terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The original state of

195 PPS 2:185-216. This text might be said to have charted the essential plan of Soloviev’s philosophical work.

196 PPS 2:189.

195 an organism was a phase of undifferentiated unity, as a bud or an embryo was already a complete organism, the composite parts of which did not yet attain their determined form and function.

Soloviev considered the second, negative phase of dialectical development strictly as a process of differentiation of those composite parts, which was inevitable for their fuller integration in the higher synthesis of the third and definite phase of development.197

Soloviev’s law of development perceived as a triadic dialectical synthesis was obviously derived from German idealistic philosophy.198 His original philosophical contribution consisted first of all in correlating this theoretical scheme with the process of organic growth. Second and more important, he applied this law of development in versatile and fruitful ways to virtually every area of philosophical reflection.

In his Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge, Soloviev distinguished three major areas of philosophical reflection on the basis of the traditional transcendent categories of the true, the good and the beautiful. To each category belongs the corresponding triadic law of dialectical development in the areas of knowledge, society and art, respectively.199 In each area, the second, negative phase of development leads to differentiation and autonomy of the particular level of thought and activity. The positive meaning of this negative phase became clear

197 See PPS 2:187-189.

198 See Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 282-283.

199 PSS 2:190-196.

196 in the light of a higher synthesis presupposed by the preceding separation and individualization.200

Soloviev’s philosophical conception of integral knowledge might be seen as pioneering a first major and compact criticism of Western secularism based on the idea of autonomy.

According to Walter Kasper, the idea of autonomy present in a self-referential scheme of positive science and thought to be a safeguard of human freedom in the ethical system has become the fundamental feature of modern secular thinking.201 Every limitation of the sphere of knowledge, while facilitating its more sophisticated research and better analysis, by the same token diminished the real apprehension of the given part as the constituent of a greater whole, or context. The particular strength of Soloviev’s critique was in his positive assessment: a stage of autonomy was an integral part of a developmental process towards a higher, organic synthesis of human thought.202 According to Soloviev, the negative way of thinking pertaining to the goal of differentiation was to be condemned only when it becomes the end in itself, when abstracted from the essential character of the integral knowledge of reality as a unified whole.203

Soloviev’s view of autonomy provided his basic methodological approach in his study of modern thinking, presented in his philosophical dissertation A Critique of Abstract Principles. In this work, he argued that many modern intellectual constructions were valuable developments

200 PSS 2:190-196.

201 See Kasper, 16-46.

202 PSS 3:26.

203 See PSS 2:215-216; PPS 3:306-315.

197 carrying important insights; they were false only in their exclusivity—when declared absolutely valid, irrespectively of input acquired from other planes of intellectual reflection.204 Thus, for example, in his criticism of 19th-century developments in moral thinking, Soloviev affirmed the relative value of Arthur Schopenhauer’s empirical approach to ethics with its emphasis on one’s natural disposition to sympathy as opposed to egotistic behavior. However, in the attempt to derive from the feeling of sympathy the universally binding imperative, Soloviev found the inherent defect of Schopenhauer’s ethical position; for such an imperative it was necessary to transcend the level of empirical reflection onto the level of Kantian formalist idealism.

Nevertheless, Soloviev simultaneously criticized Immanuel Kant’s insistence on obligation as the sole principle of universally valid moral action.205

In his own ethical thinking, Soloviev combined the altruism of Shopenhauer’s ethical imperative, as the content, and Kant’s emphasis on obligation, as the form of moral action, with the religious goal of all human beings:

Only such action can be considered moral and normative, which is derived from the feeling of love (causa materialis of morality), accepts the form of obligation (causa formalis of morality), and its subject, that is, its purpose is realization of all-embracing [vseedinogo] God-human society (causa finalis of morality).206

The moral character of individual action was for Soloviev always, on principle, derived from the common goal of humanity—from the universal destiny of humankind in a worldwide society united with God by sharing in divine love. Accordingly, the goodness of an individual’s action

204 See PSS 3:11-26.

205 PSS 3:34-75.

206 PSS 3: 174.

198 always depended upon participation in the universal mission of humankind to create a society embracing all people united on religious principle. His ethics were thus deeply intertwined with his social philosophy, which, in turn, was governed by a religious idea.

The philosophical synthesis envisioned by Soloviev was inseparably linked with his conviction about the progressive realization of the social ideal in human history. The value of any particular claim regarding truth, or any individual moral effort, was always seen by Soloviev against the backdrop of the eschatological fulfillment of universal unity, the manifestation of the social order of humankind. What was indeed extraordinary in Soloviev’s thinking—a clear sign of his romantic idealism—was his wholehearted belief in the transformation of society towards this ideal of unity; he expected a historical fulfillment of social development in a “free theocracy.”207 In other words, he considered theocracy the universal enterprise of humankind, its common object of striving; literally, the universal social and political program of human beings.

So too Soloviev always understood his personal mission in life in conjunction with this goal as his contribution to the realization of universal theocracy.

Given the evident influence of German idealism, one should question the role of free will in Soloviev’s philosophical thought. Was his “law of historical development” geared towards the fulfillment of the social ideal an immanent, deterministic process encoded in the history of the world, without the need to pay respect to the exercise of freedom by individual human beings? Did his philosophical synthesis of historical development remain enclosed in the

207 PSS 3:162-172.

199 somewhat ideological limits of the Hegelian triadic scheme of progress that nothing was to disturb, not even the drama of struggle between good and evil in every person and society?

According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, in Soloviev’s philosophical synthesis “that which was transcended was preserved far more successfully than in Hegel.”208 This also seems true in regard to the role of free will in Soloviev’s religious philosophy: he perceived its relationship with world development in terms of a paradoxical unity. Accordingly, development toward the all-unity was an inevitable process whose realization at the same time required the involvement of full human freedom. The requisite of free participation in the eschatological process towards theocracy was manifest in Soloviev’s high idea of artistic creativity and moral responsibility, as well as in his espousal of ecumenical endeavor as his personal mission.

From a theological point of view, however, one might argue that in Soloviev’s theocratic vision there was an exaggerated emphasis on the historical continuity between present reality and the manifestation of the Kingdom. His conception of theocracy seemingly suffered from a deficient soteriology that underestimated the reality of sin, which generated real obstacles to the universal integration of humankind in the Church. Soloviev had a tendency of reducing the evil to an absence of unity: finitude, separation, and egotism—all of which were conveniently linked with the preliminary stage of historical development of theocracy. It was as if in his theocratic vision he considered the possibility of accomplishing universal salvation by Christ’s proclamation of the Kingdom alone, irrespective of the paschal mystery. Soloviev’s faith in theocracy apparently neglected the whole scope of salvific drama, which included the reassertion

208 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 283-284.

200 of the Kingdom by Christ in the face of opposition to him, and the final soteriological act of

God’s definitive victory over human rejection by Jesus’ cross and resurrection.

Balthasar, who gave Soloviev’s religious philosophy a very positive appraisal, indicated the difficulty regarding Soloviev’s theocratic vision with a question mark:

Like Dante, Soloviev dreamt of the unification of the world, not in a totalitarian monarchy, but in a total free theocracy, into which all things, secular and spiritual, must be integrated. Did he seriously hope to see this distant goal of his ecumenical efforts attained?209

Indeed, Soloviev, certainly in his “theocratic period” (1881-1890), laid the theocratic ideal within the reach of historical realization as the practical goal of Christian politics. The main difficulty with Soloviev’s theocratic thought thus seems to consist in its unbalanced eschatology.

Henri de Lubac addressed the problem of Soloviev’s eschatology in his last large-scale work on the millenarianism of Joachim of Flore and its various guises throughout history.210 He recognized that the process of transformation of the world and the hope for the historical realization of God’s kingdom was a vital part of Soloviev’s religious philosophy. However, de

Lubac refused to consider Soloviev a joachimite.211 The characteristic trait of the joachimate millenarianism was a belief in the evaporation of the institutional Church in the face of the

209 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 339.

210 De Lubac, La posterité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore 2:406-416. Joachim of Flore (ca. 1135-1202) was an Italian monk and religious thinker who taught about the historical realization of a new age of the Holy Spirit superseding the present era of the Church. Although never officially condemned by the Church in his lifetime, his views were a specimen of millenarianism (also termed chiliasm): a belief in an immanent realization of the Kingdom of God on earth at a particular stage in human history.

211 De Lubac, Joachim de Flore 2:407.

201 coming of a new age of the Spirit. According to de Lubac, there was no such “disincarnation” in

Soloviev’s theocratic thought.212 He observed that the future realization of universal unity of mankind was for Soloviev firmly rooted and never divorced from the mission of the historical universal Church.

After becoming convinced that his theocratic and ecumenical theory was an unrealizable ideal, Soloviev at the end of his life revised his conception of world development in light of a deeper understanding of the evil forces in the world. He placed the eschatological summation of all-unity outside the framework of history, seeing it purely as Christ’s accomplishment at his parousia. This occurred during the final stage of his work, often referred as the “apocalyptic period,” that yielded his Three Conversations with a Short Legend about the Antichrist.

According to de Lubac, Soloviev in this final work presented an eschatological vision “stripped of all elements of progressivist ideology,” taking a position “explicitly anti-joachimite.”213

Soloviev’s legend opposed the claims of a representative of a new age to surpass Christ’s salvific work. In a fulfillment of Christ’s prophecy in Mt 16:18—“the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it,” the pope Peter exclaims in the finale of the story against the Antichrist:

“Contradicatur! We have no Lord but Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God!”214 As Hans Urs

212 De Lubac, Joachim de Flore 2:408, 414.

213 Ibid., 414, 415.

214 SS 10:217.

202 von Balthasar astutely observed, at last, “Soloviev humbled himself before the all-conquering cross.”215

The ideal of theocracy was for Soloviev possible solely through the religious principle of the universal participation of people in the gift of divine love. The agent of such participation was found by Soloviev in the universal Church. In this way, Soloviev became preoccupied with ecclesiology, and in particular, with the Church’s unity.

Theocracy and the Catholic Church

Under the influence of the Russian Slavophiles, the young and patriotic Soloviev adopted a negative appraisal of historical developments in Western society and an exalted view of

Russia’s future messianic role. In his early philosophy of history and religion, the unfolding of modern society in the Western world represented the second—the negative phase of autonomy and differentiation as conceived in his triadic law of historical development towards universal theocracy. For the young Soloviev, the Roman Catholic Church bore major responsibility for the progress of autonomy—and atomization—in Western society.216

The Church started the process of social disintegration by her struggle for political supremacy against secular powers in the middle Ages. The political dominance of the papal

Church in medieval society backfired at the dawn of modern centuries in the reaction of the protestant reformation. Protestantism asserted the just claim of individual rights; however, in its exclusive emphasis on individual freedom it encouraged egotism and indifference to the common

215 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 352; see also Strémooukhoff, 315-334.

216 See PSS 2:198; 4:22-23.

203 good.217 As a result, protestantism generated Western individualism, with its ideal of the moral, political and religious autonomy of each person. In Soloviev’s view, socialism, with its ideal of political and economic collectivism devoid of a religious basis, completed the negative phase of the historical development in the West towards secular autonomy.218

Soloviev’s early analysis of the historical development of Western society highlighted both negative and positive factors:

A separate egotistical interest, accidental fact, minor detail—atomism in life, atomism in science, atomism in art—this is the last word of Western civilization. . . . Having isolated separate elements [of life], it took them to the most extreme degree of development that was possible only in their separateness, but without an organic connection they were deprived of a living spirit, and all this wealth became dead stock.219

Based on the triadic schema of development in his religious philosophy of history and in keeping with the major tenet of Slavophilism, he maintained that it was the historical mission of the

Russian people to introduce the third and final stage of historical development in a new, integral society or theocracy.220 This new society was to overcome the mutual negation of the autonomous spheres of human life and activity in their free cooperation, facilitated by the religious unity of its members.221

217 PSS 2:199-200.

218 Ibid., 200-213.

219 PSS 2:211, translation: IK, 49-50.

220 Ibid., 212-213.

221 PSS 3:162-172.

204

Soloviev conceived theocracy as the realization of a divine idea in the historical realm of a social order that corresponded to the idea. The given social order was simultaneously to bring the fullest actualization of human freedom, as it presupposed maximizing the potential of human activity, liberated from constrictions of various negations imposed by the past and current historical forms of society.222 He arrived at such a vision because he understood that God’s will was not to contest human freedom, but was rather the latter’s ontological foundation and moral presupposition. He was thus entirely free from the typical modern dilemma that seeks to find the essence of human being in autonomy, pitting the idea of an acting God against the possibility of human freedom.223 Apparently, Soloviev’s theocratic ideal stemmed from his vision of beautiful life inspired by his mystical encounter with Sophia; the experience resulted in a paradigm linking divine and human love, their reciprocity and interaction. As Soloviev wrote in his La Russie, he conceived theocracy as a “social incarnation” of Sophia.224 Hence, far from a being a matter of side interest, the theocratic ideal should rather be seen as the capstone of Soloviev’s religious philosophy.

For Soloviev, Russia’s historical mission to realize theocracy was a design of providence rather than any special merit or virtue on the part of Russia. His theory of historical development presupposed a nation that was external, yet close, to Western civilization. Russia was predestined for the realization of theocracy by both its geographical and cultural connection to

222 See PSS 3:165-167.

223 See Kasper, 26-45.

224 La Russie, 259; see Strémooukhoff, 205.

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European society; it was in the right position to benefit from the developments of Western civilization, and to raise them to a new level of integration in a better society. The actual humble political and economic conditions in 19th-century Russia did not prevent achieving its lofty mission; the only essential requirement on the part of Russia was to respond to its task by selfless submission.

In his criticism of the Catholic Church, the early Soloviev endorsed the widespread anti-

Catholic bias in Russian society reflected in the ideas of major Slavophile figures. His basic thesis on Catholicism issued from his philosophy of history, in which he linked Catholicism with the principle of autonomy characterizing the second, negative phase of historical development.

In his doctoral dissertation, Soloviev described Catholicism as “abstract clericalism.”225 He perceived its attributes to be emphasizing teaching authority and Tradition over rational inquiry, presenting asceticism as an exclusive goal and not just as the means of moral life, and trying to subordinate civil and economic society to spiritual authority. In sum, the Catholic Church represented a “false theocracy,” as it was seeking to govern and manage all areas of human life exclusively, without making the most of their potential in a just order of society.226

In his Lectures on Godmanhood, the early Soloviev presented his most elaborate criticism of the Roman Catholic Church. In the second lecture he wrote:

The spiritual society—the Church—should subject the worldly society to itself by raising it up to itself, by spiritualizing it, by making the worldly element its instrument and means, its body; then the external unity would appear by itself, as a natural result. In Catholicism, however, the external unity appears not as the result but as the foundation, and at the same time as the end. For an external unity

225 PSS 3:151-155.

226 PSS 3:151.

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as the aim, however, there is but one means—an external force; and Catholicism adopts it and thereby places itself in the ranks of the other external, i.e. worldly, forces. But asserting itself as a worldly external force, Catholicism thereby obviously justifies also the self-assertion of those other external forces which it strives to subject to itself, and thus itself renders that subjection impossible.227

According to these lectures, Catholicism could be likened to the Apostle Peter seeking to build the earthly dwelling for the Lord on the Mount Tabor and drawing his sword—a worldly means—in the Garden of Gethsemane to defend Christ.228 In the final lecture of this series,

Soloviev drew an analogy about Catholicism by using the Gospel narrative of Christ’s three temptations in the desert. By lusting for worldly power, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic

Church fell into the third temptation, offering dominion over the world in exchange for worship of Satan.229 Moreover, Roman Catholicism found its purest expression in “Jesuitism”— perceived as the effort to subject all nations to the pope’s authority with the end justifying any moral or immoral means.230

In the early 1880s, Soloviev started to revise his views on Catholicism; this change took place during a personal crisis resulting from a series of painful events in a relatively short span of his life, including the deaths of his father and of his close friend Dostoevsky, the public scandal following Soloviev’s plea for amnesty for the assassins of Tsar Alexander II, the abrupt end of

227 PSS 4:22-23; translation: LOG, 78.

228 Ibid., 20-21.

229 Here apparently lies the source of inspiration for Dostoevsky’s famous Legend of the Grand Inquisitor narrated in his last novel Brothers Karamazov, which attacked Roman Catholicism on the same grounds as in Soloviev’s critique. See above, 156, notes 76 and 77.

230 PSS 4:162.

207 his teaching career and his grave illness. Just as there was hardly a specific event, a single moment, generating Soloviev’s “spiritual conversion” to Catholicism—no such account seems to have been mentioned in any autobiographical references in his writings and accessible letters—it is not possible to trace the precise point in the process of his intellectual development that prompted his change of heart regarding Catholicism.

Soloviev’s changed attitude probably originated in the failure of his plea for amnesty on behalf of Tsar Alexander II’s assassins. According to Stremoukhov, this failure undermined

Soloviev’s belief in the Russian emperor as the possible instrument for the realization of theocracy.231 According to Soloviev’s philosophical prolegomena of theocracy, no single ruler was in a position to combine both temporal and spiritual authority in himself, whether he was the pope or the Russian tsar. The concern for temporal justice displayed by a temporal government had to be transcended—and transformed—by another social force representing spiritual authority, the Church.

Soloviev considered the Orthodox Church in Russia a weak institution controlled by the civil power, unable to be the vehicle elevating society towards the theocratic ideal. More than the reforms of that made the Orthodox Church effectively into a state department,

Soloviev considered the root of the Church’s weakness to be the centuries-long schism of

Raskol.232 In his article O dukhovnoi vlasti v Rossii [On the Spiritual Authority in Russia] of

231 Strémooukhoff, 139.

232 Raskol was the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church triggered in 1653 by the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon (1601-1685). The schism led to the formation of Starovery [],which experienced a series of brutal persecutions in tsarist Russia. See Daniel

208

1881, he insisted on the resolution of the schism as a necessary step to recovering the Church’s spiritual authority and influence in Russian society. He argued that given the character of the schism as a conflict between (a local) authority and (a local) tradition, reconciliation was possible only via appeal to the higher, universal authority of the Church.233

It was then most likely his survey of the state of spiritual authority in Russia that led

Soloviev to take a critical look at the history and theology of the Roman Catholic Church.

Stremoukhov has summarized Soloviev’s progression of thought towards Catholicism:

Russia must incarnate divine Wisdom, and to be able to do this it must be strong from the agreement between the sovereign and the people, which can take place only with the unifying role of the Church. But the Russian Church, weakened by the Raskol, was not capable of playing this unifying role and of having an influence over social life. If this is the case, it is first necessary to examine the causes of this weakness and then to find ways to do away with it. The study of ecclesiastical history shows Soloviev that the cause lies in the schism between the East and the West, which make up the universal Church only when they are not separate. This is the origin of the Christian and irenic politics which comes to preoccupy the philosopher more and more.234

In other words, Soloviev saw the reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Roman

Catholic Church as the mandatory condition for the historical realization of universal theocracy, in which, he maintained, Russia was to play an important role. This, however, meant first of all the subordination of the Russian Orthodox Church to the papacy, which Soloviev remarkably then embraced as the fulcrum for elaboration of his theocratic vision. Soloviev recognized in the

H. Shubin, A History of Russian Christianity, vol. 2: The Patriarchal Era through Tsar Peter the Great (1586-1725) (New York: Algora Publishing, 2005).

233 SS 3:227-242.

234 Strémooukhoff, 149-150.

209 papacy the legitimate center of unity in the universal Church and the indispensable instrument of spiritual authority for bringing all people into a theocratic communion.235

Soloviev thus entered what has been called the “theocratic” phase of his work during the

1880s—the period in which his religious and philosophical thought was preoccupied with theocracy. In 1884, he wrote several articles on Judaism as a result of his preliminary historical, biblical and theological study of the Jewish theocratic ideal as presented in Scripture. In the following year, Soloviev started writing his major work on theocracy, eventually published in

Zagreb, Croatia, under the title A History and Future of Theocracy. This work was a mature synthesis of Soloviev’s religious-political ideas. Based on his detailed knowledge of biblical and ecclesiastical history, he presented a vision of history as the development of the kingdom of God on earth as a progressive realization of a theocratic ideal. Soloviev conceived the future theocracy as a society organized upon a symphonic unity of the three principles of authority: sacerdotal, royal and prophetic, which emerged from the process of differentiation in history and were to be exercised by different groups in the theocratic society.

Soloviev’s idea of theocracy stemmed from his understanding of history as an ongoing process of the mystery of the incarnation; he called the Church “the sacrament of Christ’s incarnation”; theocracy was for him human society fully transformed by the Church, integrated—divinized.236 Emphasis on the continuity of divine work in the mystery of the incarnation and the Church’s foundation accounted for the high ecclesiology of Soloviev’s

235 See Strémooukhoff, 145-146.

236 See SS 4:489-493; 629-633.

210 theocratic thought. Seeking the great goal of the total religious unity of mankind, he believed theocracy to be the apex of every religious endeavor. His theocratic vision thus constituted the wider context of his ecumenical plan for reunion between the Roman Catholic and the Russian

Orthodox churches.

Soloviev in the process of his personal religious development adopted for his ecumenical endeavor the standpoint of the Roman Catholic Church; in other words, he affirmed that reunification of the churches was conceivable only by taking into account the hierarchical structure of the universal Church with her divinely appointed center in the Papacy. However, his irenic writings proposing the reconciliation between the Russian Orthodox and the Roman

Catholic Church, which presupposed the recognition of papal primacy, encountered stiff opposition from his fellow Russian Orthodox intellectuals, especially those associated with the

Slavophile movement. From Soloviev’s polemic with his Slavophile opponents, it soon became clear that the major obstacle to his proposal of the reunification of the churches was perceived by his opponents to be the existence of a new dogmatic development in the Church of Rome.

Soloviev’s Concept of Dogmatic Development

The fresh look that Soloviev adopted towards the Roman Catholic Church was connected with his inner need for a new positive re-evaluation of Catholicism. He was not satisfied with superficial dilemmas or a merely polemical view of the Roman Catholic Church without a just and well-disposed assessment of her system of belief and practice. In one of his later letters,

Soloviev referred to Letters to the Jesuits, a polemical treatise against Catholicism written by the leading representative of the Slavophile movement, J. F. Samarin, as having

211

significantly contributed to the origins of my sympathies towards the Catholic Church. The coarse logical errors and the apparent negligence on the part of such an altogether honest and rational person as J. Samarin compelled me to ponder seriously our attitude toward Catholicism.237

It went against Soloviev’s conscience to profess religious tenets negatively, by way of denial of some positive principle. In his work as ecumenist, Soloviev thus decidedly refused to identify a protest against the Catholic Church as a constitutive part of Orthodox teaching. Against such a position, prevalent among the Slavophile thinkers, Soloviev objected in a letter to A. Kireev with some irony:

Well, it might be that you are destined to squirm in a wheel: you protest against Rome in the name of Orthodoxy; and when you are asked what do you understand as Orthodoxy, you have only one answer: a protest against Rome.238

As Stremoukhov has observed, Soloviev was eventually able to overcome the conflict between authority and truth in his acceptance of the Roman Catholic Church as the embodiment

(together with the Orthodox Church) of the ideal Church universal.239 In his earlier works, he had written a Slavophile critique of Catholicism, with the main source of his objections against the Roman Church based on an alleged suppression of Christian freedom in the Church by the iron rule of the hierarchy. In his doctoral dissertation, however, while still condemning the subjection to authority as the highest goal of the “abstract clericalism” in Catholicism, he recognized the hierarchical principle as a necessary component of the spiritual society—the

237 Soloviev to Ivan M. Martynov (18 [30] June 1887) SS 11:393-395, at 393. On Iury F. Samarin, see above, 154, note 71.

238 Soloviev to Alexander A. Kireev (1885) SS 11:355-357, at 357. On Alexander A. Kireev, see above, 162, note 96.

239 Strémooukhoff, 145-146.

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Church—for “the realization of the divine end in the natural order.”240 According to

Stremoukhov,

Authority is for [Soloviev] an indispensable means for the realization of the Kingdom of God in history. The very need for this means attracts Soloviev to the papacy, though he realizes that very often the papacy turns this means into an end in itself, and sins through an excess of zeal which turns the Church into a state.241

Soloviev came to realize that despite certain tendencies in the Roman Catholic Church to abuse the practice of authority, the principle of authority in the Church was not without merit in itself.

Soloviev’s new understanding of the necessity of ecclesiastical hierarchy was evidently linked with his acceptance of obedience as an inherent part of the Christian freedom. The idea of

God’s reign presupposed an act of humble submission on the part of human beings; in the same way, obedience and authority had to coexist as the basic elements of the ecclesial form of life and the means guiding every person along the path of moral perfection towards the realization of universal love in theocracy. Thus, obedience became a fundamental theme of Soloviev’s view of theocracy:

Self-denial, that is, the renunciation of the self, is the marvelous law and the holy mystery of the universal life, of universal self-sacrifice. . . . If the Church is a building of living stones, then its general architectural plan is the hierarchical structure. . . . In heaven Christ is first the truth and then a power; in our terrestrial world Christ appears first as a power and only later he is understood as the truth. The person in whom we believe before anyone else embodies for us the highest authority: obedience precedes understanding. In order to attain the heights of free perfection, it is necessary to pass through the valley of humility.242

240 PSS 3:165-166.

241 Strémooukhoff, 146.

242 SS 4:604, 621; translation: Life 2:296.

213

In Soloviev’s article of 1884 O narodnosti i narodnykh delakh [On National Character and National Tasks], Russia’s historical task in the realization of theocracy also included the character of renunciation. In addition to the two great historical acts of renunciation of the

Russian people in their submission to the rule of the Varangians and to the reforms of Peter the

Great, which stood at the origin of the Russian state and its civilized epoch, the dawn of universal theocracy was to come with the third great renunciation in the religious realm, where the restoration of the unity of the universal Church required submission of the Russian Orthodox

Church to the Papacy.243

This emphasis on the role of obedience and the recognition of religious authority in the

Roman Catholic Church marked a kind of spiritual conversion on the part of Soloviev. In a letter of January, 1883, he testified to having become more humble and having renounced his former pretensions.244 In the process of this personal change, Soloviev might be said to have entered into the idea of Catholicism; as Hans Urs von Balthasar observed, he acquired “the feeling for the specifically Roman form of the Church” and embraced “the Roman Catholic ethic of ecclesiastical obedience and practical discipline.”245 What is most important, Soloviev saw

243 See SS 5:24-38. Varangians or Varyags were Scandinavians (Vikings) who in the 9th century constituted the ruling class of Eastern Slavs and formed their first state Kievan Rus under the rule of the Rurik dynasty. Slavs invited the Varangians to consolidate their tribes into a kingdom. See Nora K. Chadwick, The Beginnings of Russian History (Cambridge: University Press, 1966), 19. On the rule of Peter the Great (1672-1725) in Russia, see M. S. Anderson, Peter the Great (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978).

244 Soloviev to Ivan S. Aksakov (January 1883) Pisˈma 4:18. On Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov, see above, 162, note 96.

245 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 281, 294.

214 ecclesial obedience and authority as a means to an end; a means required by the need of development—towards the historical realization of the theocratic ideal of society. One might perceive here the origin of Soloviev’s insight into the basic link between authority and development, which was later to unfold in his theological understanding of the relationship between dogmatic development and the universal ecclesial office of the teaching authority and unity in the Church.

With his new appreciation of the Roman Catholic Church, Soloviev accepted without reservation papal primacy as an essential part of Catholic doctrine. According to Stremoukhov,

Soloviev became convinced virtually from the outset of his Catholic sympathies that the office of central unity and supreme authority of the Church was the indispensable instrument of unity in the universal Church.246 Soloviev expressed this conviction in no ambiguous terms as early as

1883 in a letter to I. Aksakov:

It seems to me that all that you are seeing [in Catholicism] is papism, while I am seeing first of all the great, glorious, holy and eternal Rome, the foundational and inseparable part of the universal Church. In this Rome I believe, I bow before her, I love her with the whole of my heart, and with all the strength of my soul I wish her the restoration of unity and integrity of the worldwide Church. Let me be cursed as a parricide, if I ever say a word of condemnation against the sanctuary of Rome.247

After incorporating papal supremacy into his religious and social philosophy, Soloviev came to believe that the major prerequisite for the realization of theocracy was the reunification of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Roman Catholic Church. This ecumenical project thus

246 See Strémooukhoff, 145-149.

247 Soloviev to Ivan S. Aksakov (March 1883) SS 11:351; translation: Life 2:264.

215 became his primary occupation; he espoused it as his personal mission in life. In addition, it seems that once Soloviev was able to embrace the “hallmark” Catholic doctrine of papal primacy, he had no great difficulty in accepting the recent definitions of Catholic dogma. The first Catholic dogma to which he explicitly subscribed was the . He discussed the subject in a series of letters to Fr. Astromov in the summer of 1883.248 According to Stremoukhov, Soloviev perceived an affinity between the dogma of the Immaculate

Conception and his sophiological intuitions.249

The confidence with which Soloviev approached new dogmatic developments in the

Roman Catholic Church appeared in a letter to A. Kireev in November, 1883. After identifying recent Catholic doctrinal pronouncements as the root of controversy, Soloviev observed:

According to you, these “new” dogmas; that is, infallibilitas and immaculata conceptio, to which you also add filioque, constitute heresy and deprive Catholicism of the meaning of a Church in a true sense of the word. According to me, these dogmas are neither new nor do they comprise any kind of heresy either in essence or form and, therefore, they also cannot deprive Catholicism of the character of a true Church, since the true essence of the Church does not depend on greater or lesser progress in the definition and formulation of dogmatic details, but depends on the presence of apostolic succession, on the orthodox faith in Christ as perfect God and perfect man, and finally on the plenitude of the sacraments. All of these belong equally to us and to the Catholics, consequently, both they and we constitute together the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, despite our temporary historical separation, which does not correspond to the truth of the matter and is, thus, all the more painful. Therefore, I resolutely reject the opinion ascribed to me that, strictly speaking, the Universal Church no longer exists. On the contrary, it exists both in Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism.250

248 Life 2:285.

249 Strémooukhoff, 155.

250 Soloviev to Alexander Kireev (November 1883) SS 11:352; translation: Life 2:271.

216

Apparently, therefore, as early as the fall of 1883, Soloviev held that none of the new Catholic dogmatic definitions “comprised any heresy either in essence or form,” rather, they were aspects or “details” implicit in traditional Christian doctrine which the Roman Catholic Church had formulated explicitly.

For Soloviev, however, Catholic dogmatic development was not the essential mark of a true Church: “The true essence of the Church does not depend on greater or lesser progress in the definition and formulation of dogmatic details, but depends on the presence of apostolic succession,” etc. This position seemingly always identified Soloviev’s view of the relationship between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy and the question of his formal affiliation with the

Roman Catholic Church.251 Recognition of the Roman Catholic Church, with her doctrine of

Papal primacy, did not disturb Soloviev’s faith in the Russian Orthodox Church; he considered both as authentic, if imperfect, embodiments of the ideal universal Church. Neither did

Soloviev’s adoption of Catholic views significantly alter his conviction about Russia’s historical mission as the major instrument for fulfilling the ideal of theocracy; this changed only in that he now saw that such a task presupposed the reunion of the churches.

Soloviev’s elaboration of his theocratic vision encountered strong opposition among

Slavophiles. They fiercely opposed what was the basic presupposition of his theocracy: the idea of ecclesial reunion. Based on their reactions, Soloviev identified the fundamental issue of those who defied the possibility of reunion between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church as the problem of dogmatic developments in the Church. In response to this issue, which would have

251 See Soloviev to Bishop Strossmayer (Agram, 21 September 1886), SS 11:380-386; see above, 137.

217 precluded his theocratic vision from the outset, he wrote an apologetic treatise on dogmatic development, which he later incorporated in his History and Future of Theocracy.

The book, consisting of five chapters, had a rather complicated genesis. According to the biography written by his nephew, Soloviev first composed the bulk of the last chapter, concerning the New Testament foundations of theocracy, which was originally published in the

1885 issue of the Russian religious magazine Pravoslavnoe Obozrenie [Orthodox Review]. The article contained a part with a historical and theological apologetic for papal primacy, which was excluded by official censorship. Soloviev later incorporated this section into the first part of his

La Russie et l’Eglise Universelle. Soloviev then wrote what became chapters 2, 3 and 4 of

History and Future of Theocracy, giving a biblical examination of the idea of theocracy in the times of the patriarchs, Moses, and the Israelite kings and prophets, respectively.252 Apparently after finishing the chapters dealing with the subject-matter of theocracy, Soloviev wrote what became the first chapter, dealing with the “Principal Prejudices against the Theocratic Cause in

Russia.”253 This was the text of Soloviev’s treatise on dogmatic development, first published as a separate treatise in the 1886 issue of Pravoslavnoe Obozrenie under the title “The Dogmatic

Development of the Church in Relation to the Question of the Church Reunion.”

Although Soloviev incorporated his treatise on dogmatic development within his work on theocracy, the treatise clearly had its own purpose and theme. The treatise focused on dogmatic development as an historical and ecclesiological study and had little or no bearing on his

252 See Life 2:296-299.

253 Ibid., 299.

218 discussion of theocracy in the subsequent chapters of the book. This is not intended to diminish the value of Soloviev’s Theocracy, in which he presented excellent historical and theological points, as well as an inspiring vision for what could be called Christian politics. In fact, this work could be read as an expression of a maximalist ecclesiology or a type of ultramontanist theory of a singularly Russian kind. However, the purpose of the original treatise in the first chapter was to present Soloviev’s view of dogmatic development. It was originally written as a self-contained work and remained so even after he included it in Theocracy as a sort of preliminary study to remove the obstacle to ecclesial reunion for those who might have considered Theocracy a utopian work. No matter how one may evaluate Soloviev’s theocratic thinking, his treatise on dogmatic development deserves to be read and studied on its own terms.

CHAPTER 4

Soloviev’s Dogmatic Development of the Church

Historical Background and Outline of Soloviev’s Treatise

Soloviev’s Dogmaticheskoe razvitie tserkvi v sviazi s voprosom o soedinenii tserkvei

[Dogmatic Development of the Church in Relation to the Question of Reunification of the

Churches] was originally published as an essay in Pravoslavnoe Obozrenie [Orthodox Review] in December 1885, and the following year as a separate brochure by the Moscow University

Press; then the treatise appeared with several minor alterations as the first chapter of Soloviev’s

Istoriia i budushchnostˈ teokratii [A History and Future of Theocracy] in 1887.1 The original ten-volume collection of Soloviev’s Sobranie sochinenii edited by M.S. Soloviev printed the later version of Dogmatic Development as part of Theocracy.2 However, the supplemental volume eleven of the Brussels 1966 edition of Sobranie sochinenii published the text of

Dogmatic Development as it originally appeared in the periodical and the brochure.3

From a close analysis, the text of Dogmatic Development as a separate treatise and the text in the first chapter of Theocracy are virtually identical. The changes in the text made by

Soloviev when incorporating his Dogmatic Development into Theocracy included revision of the three introductory paragraphs upon weaving the text with the general introduction, division of the formerly undivided text into twenty four sections with customary Roman numerals as

1 See Life 2:296-299.

2 SS 4:265-336.

3 SS 11:1-64. Soloviev apparently prepared another revised manuscript of the treatise, which was lost without a trace in the apartment of the censor to whom he sent it; see Life 2:298. 219

220 headings, several cosmetic changes in the wording of the text, and omission of several footnotes.4 This dissertation uses the text of Dogmatic Development as a separate treatise as found in volume 11 of Sobranie sochinenii and in the French translation.

The treatise on dogmatic development has a polemical character and covered no more than sixty-three pages in the standard edition of works by Soloviev. However, the author managed to condense within this relatively short treatise a comprehensive analysis of the dogmatic development of the Church as a historical phenomenon and a theological principle, offering biblical, historical and ecclesiological foundations for the developmental process in

Christian doctrine. This dissertation investigates the progression of Soloviev’s thought in his treatise, devoting special attention to his ecclesiological understanding of dogmatic development in relation to the universal teaching authority in the Church.

For present purposes, the content of Soloviev’s treatise on the dogmatic development in the Church can be outlined as follows:

1) Soloviev’s controversy with the Slavophiles [pages 3-21]

a. Reunification of the churches and the Russian irenic politics of Christian

universalism: the case of Slavdom (response to I. A. Aksakov and A. A. Kireev) [3-9]

b. Reunification of the churches and the purity of Roman Catholic doctrinal

teaching: the case of the filioque (response to N. I. Danilevsky) [9-18]

4 The purpose of publishing Dogmatic Development in Sobranie sochinenii, Volume 11, was apparently to retain the original version and highlight its importance as a separate treatise outside Soloviev’s Theocracy; an added value was the use of modern Russian orthography in supplemental volumes 11 and 12; the modern Russian alphabet was introduced in the 20th century.

221

c. Reunification of the churches and the issue of dogmatic development

(introduction to the main polemic with G. T. Stoianov) [18-21]

2) An historical overview of Christian dogmatic teaching [21-46]:

a. In apostolic times [21-31]

b. From the times of the early Fathers of the Church through the seven ecumenical

councils [31-46]

3) Theological and ecclesiological principles of dogmatic development [46-64]:

a. Limitations of dogmatic literalism [46-53]

b. Unanimity of the members of the Church in faith as the mark of her divine-human

constitution [53-64]

Soloviev’s Controversy with the Slavophiles

Religious Unity and the Slavophile Ideology

From the very first words in his treatise, Soloviev displayed a sense of great urgency regarding ecumenism. His exposition of dogmatic development issued from his polemic with opponents to his ecumenical ideas in Russia, whose general attitude Soloviev summarized:

“Reunification of the churches is neither possible nor desired.”5 As Francois Rouleau stated,

“Soloviev’s occupation with dogmatic development does not stem merely from the theological principles [expounded in his former writings], it has a different source: his project of

5 SS 11:1.

222 rapprochement of the churches, his ecumenical action.”6 Paul Valliere likewise considered the treatise “one of the best statements of Soloviev’s ecumenism.”7 As Soloviev himself stated, the work materialized his effort to “remove obstacles”8 in the path towards ecclesial unity between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions.

The controversy over the reunification of the churches started in 1883 with Soloviev’s publication The Great Controversy and Christian Politics, in which he first presented his ecumenical ideas. During the following years, several Russian magazines presented critical responses to his irenic project of reconciliation between East and West. Soloviev followed those replies with understandable interest. He attempted to address some of these issues in extended correspondence with I. A. Aksakov and A. A. Kireev.9 Other noteworthy reactions in the

Russian press to Soloviev’s ecumenism were written by N. I. Danilevsky and T. G. Stoianov.10

In the opening of his treatise on Dogmatic Development, Soloviev referred explicitly to these four opponents of his proposed project of ecumenical rapprochement between the churches as

6 Francis Rouleau in his “Préface” to Le développement dogmatique de l’Église, 11.

7 Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 178.

8 SS 11:5.

9 On Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov and Aleksandr Alekseevich Kireev, see above, 162, note 96.

10 On Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevsky, see above, 166, note 109. T. Stoianov was a pseudonym of Konstantin E. Istomin, a Russian Orthodox priest and theologian; the contributor and later the chief editor of the Orthodox theological magazine Vera i Razum [Faith and Reason]; see Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Ermichev, “Istoriia Russkoi filosofii v zhurnale ‘Vera I Razum’” in Vestnik Russkoi khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii 9 (2:2008): 143-152, at 145. Soloviev reacted to Stoianov’s article “Neskol'ko slov o ‘zametke’ Solov'eva na nash otvet emu [Several Words on Soloviev’s ‘Note’ to Our Response to Him]” in Vera i Razum 15 (August 1885): 171- 206.

223 critics who “expressed their views with some clarity.”11 Soloviev wanted his treatise to provide a comprehensive response to these critics, recapitulating “the results of their preliminary three- year polemic.”12

In the first part of Dogmatic Development, dealing with his response to Aksakov and

Kireev, Soloviev confronted the typical worldview of the Russian Slavophiles: “The inner essence of all [Aksakov’s] objections can be straight reduced to the assertion that Roman

Catholicism is antagonistic to our national spirit and feeling.”13 Soloviev perceived in this attitude the inherent weakness of Slavophilism, issuing from its oscillation between authentic religious interests and a narrow nationalist ideology. In his critique of Aksakov, Soloviev claimed “a common intellectual basis” with the Slavophile ideal of religious unity,14 while categorically dismissing the conflation of this ideal with a blind and self-conceited love of the

Russian nation—identified by Soloviev as the main cause of the Slavophiles’ anti-Catholic attitude.

Ivan Aksakov was certainly not a superficial thinker nor someone blinded by a romantic conservatism to the many defects in the Russian church and society. Soloviev referred to

Akasakov as his “esteemed opponent” and a “worthy Russian author;” it was not just rhetoric,

11 SS 11:3.

12 Ibid., 3.

13 SS 11:4. Soloviev referred to articles by Ivan Aksakov published in Rus' magazine issues 6 and 7, 1884.

14 Soloviev called the Slavophiles “the inadvertent prophets of ecclesial unification,” and quoted I. Aksakov’s statements insisting on the universal character and unifying influence of the Russian messianic idea; see SS 11:4-5.

224 but also in recognition of his death, which shortly preceded the publication of Dogmatic

Development.15 As a respected moral authority, Aksakov unsparingly criticized the religious establishment in Russia, which for all practical matters made the Russian Orthodox church into a lifeless department of the state. Soloviev later quoted extensively from Aksakov in his La Russie et l’Eglise universelle, thereby supporting his own harsh diagnosis of the established church in

Russia.16

In order to refute the claim that a reunification of the churches was undesirable, Soloviev sharply focused the question of the possibility of realizing the Slavophile vision. What was

Russia to do in order to bring about the universal that was for Slavophiles the sole content of her national calling? According to Aksakov, the accomplishment of the Russian religious ideal was going to transcend the division between East and West on an “Orthodox-

Slavic basis.”17 In reply, Soloviev simply inquired by what process, or practical means, was this lofty end to be achieved, given that the Slavic universe itself was desperately torn by a confessional breach that generated a long history of political hostility between Catholic Slavs, such as Poles and on the one hand, and Orthodox Slavs, such as and Serbians on the other.

15 SS 11:4, note 2.

16 See the chapter “J.-S. Aksakov sur l’Église officielle en Russie” in Soloviev’s La Russie et l’Eglise universelle, 46-58.

17 SS 11:5.

225

With typical candor, Soloviev dismissed the possibility of accomplishing the political unity of Slavic nations through a nationalist ideology. With an eye on the contemporary political situation in the relations of Slavic nations, Soloviev commented:

It is clear that on the basis of nationalist self–centeredness Slavic nations are not content with their independence, but seek dominance; and, since dominance of one is possible only at the cost of Slavic brotherhood, the necessary result is an outright irreconcilability of national interests in the Slavic milieu. Confessional intolerance—wherever occurring—is only a symptom of the political fever caused by escalated nationalism.18

For Soloviev, Slavic unity as an issue of a supra-national integration was conceivable only on a higher developmental level if governed by the religious principle of ecclesial unity.

In his polemic with the Slavophiles about ecumenism, Soloviev from the philosophical premises of his theocratic thinking elaborated a critical attitude towards nationalism that became the characteristic feature of his socio-religious and ecumenical endeavor. In the light of his view of the world as the process towards universal unity, Soloviev perceived nationalism as a principle restricted to the second phase of triadic historical development.19 This second phase

18 SS 11:7. Unless otherwise noted, all translation from Soloviev’s treatise Dogmaticheskoe razvitie tserkvi v sviazi s voprosom o soedinenii tserkvei are mine. Larger citations in indented paragraphs are accompanied with the original Russian text in the footnote: Ясно, что славянские народности на почве национального самолюбия не довольствуются независимостью, а ищут преобладания, а так как преобладание для каждой из них возможно только на счет своей же братии славян, то и происходит неизбежно полная несовместимость национальных интересов в среде славянства, при чем вероисповедная рознь (там, где она существует) является лишь признаком обострения национально- политической горячки.

19 See Soloviev’s analysis of the idea of society in the first chapter of his Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge, PPS 2:185-216. See also Michael Karpovich, “Vladimir Soloviev on Nationalism,” The Review of Politics 8:2 (April 1946), 183-191; Ján Mastiliak, “Národná otázka u Vladimíra Solovjova” [The National Question according to Vladimir Soloviev] in Mastiliak, 105-109.

226 served the preliminary process of autonomy and differentiation of particular elements that was necessary for the goal of their more complete integration on a higher level. Love of a nation had its proper place and historical role in facilitating a nation’s growth, in acquiring strength and stature corresponding to its historical mission of pressing on towards the realization of the universal goal of humankind in theocratic unity. However, the evil of nationalism consisted in its tendency to elevate a part above the whole, a means above the end—the good of a nation above the good of all people. Such a tendency was for Soloviev’s religious worldview virtually synonymous with .20

Soloviev had no difficulty showing that aside from ecclesial unity there was no other

“positive principle” capable of bringing Slavs together under the banner of political unity:

Could the Slavic nations be united without the Church? But how? Perhaps by recognizing common benefits and common dangers? There indeed exists such recognition; however, by itself it is too abstract and so it can by no means overcome the nationalist self-love in every particular Slavic nation.21

The author added with a scathing irony, “The Serbian ‘idea’ consists in occupying more foreign lands; the Bulgarian ‘ideal’ means the same. What used to be called simply robbery is nowadays called idea and ideal.”22

20 See “Slavianofil'stvo i ego vyrozhdenie” [Slavophilism and Its Degeneration], SS 5:181-244.

21 SS 11:7—Или это объединение может совершиться и при разделении церквей, и славянские народы могут быть связаны между собою и помимо церкви? Чем же однако? Сознанием общих выгод и общих опасностей? Такое сознание существует, но оно само по себе слишком отвлеченно и никак не может осилить национального себялюбия в каждой отдельной славянской народности.

22 Ibid., 9.

227

Soloviev’s response to Aksakov challenged the religious basis of the Slavophile program of Slavic unity: either Slavophiles used orthodoxy as a mere “mask for a superficial and vicious nationalist egotism,”23 or, by necessity, they had to pursue the goal of ecclesial reconciliation.24

Soloviev briefly considered the possibility of Slavs’ political integration outside the Church, on the basis of “religious indifferentism.” He admitted that it could occur in the future, but was skeptical about its prospects: “Decline of religion so far has never prevented people and nations from hating and annihilating each other.”25 The non-religious vision of Slavic unity, at any rate, opposed the rudiments of the Slavophile ideology of a Christian empire.

Reconciliation of the churches, according to Soloviev, was not incompatible with the ideals of Russian Slavophiles; on the contrary, it presented a concrete program of bringing these ideals to practical realization. Only the brotherhood of all in one Church could enable the positive principle of unity, overcoming nationalist self-love, thus promoting the political integration of Slavic nations.

The Possible Reunification of the Churches: the Filioque

Slavophile opponents of Soloviev’s idea of ecclesial reconciliation argued against it on the basis of doctrinal controversy. Soloviev recognized this as a move to a different polemical level, concerned more strictly with theological and historical argumentation. He addressed his response to Nikolai Danilevsky, whom he singled out as a mouthpiece of the Slavophile claim

23 SS 11:8.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

228 that reunification between the churches was impossible on account of false doctrines professed by the Catholic Church.26 Danilevsky charged Catholicism with heresy on the grounds of the well-known question of the Filioque: an addition by the Latin Church of the phrase “and the

Son” to the original article in the Nicene Creed, stating belief in the Holy Spirit “who proceeds from the Father.”27

Soloviev examined the question of the Filioque with a careful historical analysis to evaluate the justice of the charge of heresy:28

1) The question as to whether the Filioque is a dogmatic error or not could only be

decided on the authority of the universal Church gathered for an ecumenical council.

No explicit conciliar definition ever contradicted it; private opinions of Orthodox

theologians were not sufficient to justify the schism.

2) The formulation of the article of faith on the procession of the Holy Spirit from the

Father at the Council of Constantinople was directed against the Pneumatomachians,

who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit.29 This, obviously, was not the case with

Catholics; thus the addition of the Filoque could not result ipso facto in

excommunication as if this teaching were against the procession of the Holy Spirit.

26 See SS 11:10.

27 On the history of the Filioque controversy, see A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford: University Press, 2010).

28 See SS 11:10-18.

29 Also known as Macedonians after Macedonius (died ca. 360), the bishop of Constantinople, the Pneumatomachians were a heretical party of the fourth century denying the divinity of the Holy Spirit and so were described as “combators against the Spirit.” See Kelly, 259-260.

229

3) Prohibition of a variety of professions of faith was not required by the great councils

of the Church, which did not demand literal identity in creedal statements. As a

proof, Soloviev offered historical evidence regarding various textual alterations in the

Latin translations of the Creeds of Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon that were in

use centuries after the respective councils. Such alterations, sometimes involving

entire words and phrases, were not deemed problematic if there was consensus that

the sense of the words in the Creed was attained. If there never existed any “original

and universally binding (in the Spanish church) Latin translation of the

Constantinopolitan symbol, into which the word Filioque was then liberally added,” it

follows that Catholics could not be accused of either arbitrary, nor, much less,

malevolent changes in the official statement of Orthodox faith.30

Soloviev concluded:

My opponents attempted with all possible means to present Catholicism as a certain heresy. Nevertheless they were not able to provide a single proof that would apply in this case—i.e. the judgment of the universal Church—because such judgment has never existed.31

These few pages of Soloviev’s reply to Danilevsky about the Filioque displayed excellent historical scholarship. Soloviev’s overview of ancient dogmatic statements of the faith combined a careful textual analysis of the original Greek and Latin with a detailed knowledge of their

30 SS 11:15.

31 SS 11:18—Возражатели мои всячески старались выставить католичество как несомненную ересь. И однако они не могли представить того един- ственного доказательства, которое требовалось в данном случае, а именно—приговора вселенской церкви—что такого приговора вовсе не существует.

230 historical background to cast light on the original intention of the authors. As Hans Urs von

Balthasar has pointed out, Soloviev’s sketch of dogmatic development in the Church must have required at least as painstaking a historical analysis as Newman’s Essay on Development.32

Dogmatic Development—Polemic with T. Stoianov

Soloviev’s replies to Ivan Aksakov and Nikolai Danilevsky constituted a sort of introduction to the main subject of his treatise, which was for the most part a polemical response to T. Stoianov.33 A Russian Orthodox priest and theologian, Stoianov argued against the possibility of reunification between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. According to

Stoianov, the essential religious divergence between the two Christian communions that made their reunification impossible was the fact that Catholicism admitted an advance in dogmatic truth, while Orthodoxy allowed merely preservation of the contents of Christian Revelation.

Soloviev recognized that this argument put the controversy on a different plane, dealing with the question of dogmatic development in the Church. As Bernard Marchadier has stated, Soloviev forged his conception of dogmatic development against the “dogmatic conservatism” of Russian

Orthodox theologians.34

32 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 283. In the present-day ecumenical dialog, the Catholic Church holds a reconciliatory position concerning the issue of the Filioque. The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 248, followed by the 1995 statement The Greek and Latin Traditions About the Procession of the Holy Spirit by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, affirms the fundamental identity of the faith in confessing the mystery of the procession of the Holy Spirit in the Catholic Church and the churches of the Christian East.

33 On T. G. Stoianov, see above, 222, note 10.

34 Marchadier, 125.

231

Soloviev, in his preliminary remarks questioned Stoianov’s narrow idea of doctrinal preservation:

It is one thing to preserve a chest with money, another to preserve a soul from temptations, and another to preserve the truth in a combat with error. To preserve the soul from evil we develop its moral virtues; to preserve the truth from wrong understanding we develop its correct meaning.35

Thus, Soloviev believed that the Church’s obligation of faithfully preserving the truths of the

Christian faith established through divine Revelation involved affirming them against new heresies by means of new dogmatic definitions:

These definitions are not new , but rather new disclosures of one and the same immutable truth from those of her aspects, which had not been previously perceived in full clarity and distinctiveness by the Church’s consciousness. When these aspects or articles of true doctrine of faith were in a vague form, they could not have been unconditionally mandatory for all faithful; however, as soon as the universal Church precisely defined them, she gave them by the same token a mandatory character. The Church added nothing, nor could she, to the inner truthfulness of these dogmatic statements, but rather made them clearer and indisputable for all the orthodox.36

35 SS 11:18—Иначе охраняется сундук с деньгами, иначе охраняется душа от искушений, иначе охраняется истина в борьбе с заблуждениями. Охраняя свою душу от зла, мы развиваем ее нраственные силы; чтобы охранить истину от ложного понимания, мы должны развить ее настоящий смысл.

36 Ibid., 19—Такие определения не суть новые откровения, а лишь новые обнаружения одной и той же неизменной истины с тех ее сторон, которые не представлялись вполне ясно и определенно церковному сознанию. Пока эти стороны или члены истинного вероучения находились в таком неотчетливом состоянии, они не могли быть безусловно обязательны для всех верующих; но как только вселенская церковь давала им точное определение, так она тем самым придавала им этот общеобязательный характер. Церковь ничего не прибавляла и не могла прибавить к внутренней истинности этих догматических положений, но она делала их ясными и бесспорными для всех православных.

232

This summary of dogmatic development, which is in remarkable harmony with Newman’s thought on doctrinal development,37 might have seemed a sufficient reply to Stoianov’s objections. However, this would not have settled the question whether dogmatic development in the Church was strictly limited to the past, specifically the era of the first seven ecumenical councils,38 as acknowledged by Orthodoxy, or a living and ongoing phenomenon, as accepted by

Catholicism.

In his argumentation against the Catholic understanding of dogmatic development,

Stoianov asserted that it implied “changes in efficaciousness of divine powers.” 39 Stoianov apparently perceived the idea of doctrinal development as involving qualitative changes in the order of supernatural grace, in the realm of divine nature, which was incompatible with God’s attribute of immutability. Accordingly, Stoianov only admitted of the possibility of “subjective” development of religious knowledge, rejecting a possibility of its “objective” growth.40 Not unlike Newman with his Anglican idea of “the prophetical office,”41 Stoianov allowed only a theological development in the Church, but by no means a development of doctrine.

37 See above, 96.

38 Only the first seven of the great councils—from the (325) to the Second Council of Nicaea (787)—are acknowledged by the Eastern Orthodox churches as ecumenical, i.e., having a universally binding character. See Leo Donald Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1990).

39 SS: 11:20.

40 Ibid.

41 See above, 71.

233

Soloviev rejected the implication of any essential changes within the divine powers; however, he affirmed the change in their efficaciousness proportionate to changes in human receptivity: “Surely, the Word of God, although in His essence remaining identical and unchangeable, in the act of His Incarnation in the Blessed Virgin nevertheless manifested efficaciousness incomparably more vigorous than in the Old Testament revelation.”42 Likewise,

Soloviev rejected Stoianov’s distinction between subjective and objective development of religious knowledge:

Such terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are so relative and conventional that one cannot build on them a categorical conclusion in such a serious matter [as dogmatic development]. What are, for example, Mr. Stoianov’s thoughts on the transition from the Old Testament Revelation to that of the New Testament? Was it a subjective or an objective advance? I think it was both one and the other. . . . Was the definition of the First Council of Nicaea that the Son is of one substance with the Father a subjective or objective advance of Christian dogma? Again, only a non-exclusive answer is possible. The truth of consubstantiality vis-à-vis the more precise definition of the Nicaean Fathers absolutely did not change, and in this it presented in the Church only a subjective development. However, this was at the same time something more than merely a deeper realization by one or another individual mind of one or another theologian into Revealed truth. This was a definition given properly by the universal Church with the special cooperation of the Holy Spirit; a definition that has become mandatory for all members of the Church for all times, and in this sense it has received for us an objective meaning, independent of our subjective mind.43

42 SS 11:20.

43 SS 11:20-21—Эти термины «субъективный» и «объективный» столь относительны и условны, что на них никак нельзя основывать решительного суждения в этом деле. Как, например, полагает г. Стоянов: переход од ветхозаветного Откровения к новозаветному был субъективным или же объективным прогрессом? По-моему—и то и другое. . . . Определение первого Никейского собора о том, что Сын единосущен Отцу, было ли это субъективным или же объективным прогрессом христианского догмата? Опять таки возможен только обоюдный ответ. Истина единосущия сама по себе нисколько не изменилась от более точного определения никейских отцов, и в этом смысле определение это составляло лишь субъективный прогресс в церкви. Но вместе с тем это было нечто бóльшее, нежели простое углубление личного ума того или другого богослова в истину

234

Soloviev concluded that the development of doctrine is a historical fact; otherwise, there is no explanation for all the recurrent battles of the Church with heresies throughout history.

Soloviev then formulated the thesis of his treatise on dogmatic development:

We claim the following: Revealed Truth is one and indivisible. From the first chapters of Genesis to the last chapters of the Apocalypse, from Eden in the East to the New coming down from heaven, this truth consists of one and the same thing and to it belongs one and the same name—Godmanhood, the union of God with creation. This one and unchangeable truth, deposited in humankind first as a hope (for the Gentiles) and as a promise (to the people of God), becomes an event through the incarnation of the real God-man Jesus Christ, the personal focal point of universal Godmanhood. The truth of the God-and-man, who already came in the body and will come again in glory; this one truth summarizes the whole fullness of New Testament Revelation (as in Christ himself dwells the whole fullness of the deity bodily). The Christian People were from the beginning obliged to keep unchangeably this truth in its unity; however, (because of human nature) it could not be received in the whole fullness of its particular definitions, which were gradually to develop in the Church’s consciousness in battle with heresies in the measure of the Church’s appropriating the mind of Christ.44

откровения, это выло определение, данное самою вселенскою церковью при особом содействии Духа Св.,—определение, ставшее обязательным для всех членов церкви на все времена и в этом смысле несомненно получившее для нас объективное, независимое от наших субъективных мыслей значение.

44 SS 11:21-22—Мы утверждаем следующее. Истина откровения одна и неделима. От первых глав Бытия и до последних глав Апокалипсиса, от Едена на Востоке и до Нового Иерусалима, сходящего с небеси, эта истина состоит в одном и том же, ей принадлежит одно и то же название—богочеловечество, сочетание Бога с творением. Эта единая и неизменная истина, заложенная в человечестве сначала как чаяние (для языков) и как обетование (для народа Божия) становится событием чрез явление во плоти действительного Богочеловека Иисуса Христа, как личного средоточия для вселенского богочеловечества. Истина Богочеловека, уже пришедшего во плоти и еще грядущего в славе, эта единая истина содержит и себе всю полноту новозаветного откровения (как в самом Христе обитает вся полнота Божества телесно). Христианское человечество изначала было обязано неизменно держаться этой истины в ее единстве, но оно не могло (по свойству человеческого естества) сразу обнять ее во всей полноте ее частных определений, которые и должны были в борьбе с заблуждениями постепенно раскрываться для ума церкви по мере усвоения им ума Христова. The phrases “in Christ himself dwells the

235

Similar to Newman, Soloviev perceived the truth of Revelation as a unified idea.45 For both

Newman and Soloviev, the principle of doctrinal development stemmed from the nature of the human mind, from the dynamic structure of understanding by human beings in statu viatoris, which requires a process of thought and progressive appropriation of the revealed deposit of faith.46

Furthermore, both writers were referring to the Incarnation as the central doctrine of

Christianity. Newman did so

out of convenience, in order to group other [doctrines] around it. . . . In this sense I should myself call the Incarnation the central aspect of Christianity, out of which the three main aspects of its teaching take their rise, the sacramental, the hierarchical and the ascetic.47

Soloviev, however, referred to the Incarnation more specifically as the heart of Christianity seen as the progressive divinization of creation. This is what he called Godmanhood, an idea joining together the theology of creation, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology.

Thus Soloviev seamlessly wove into his thesis of dogmatic development his conception of the Church, which he had presented two years earlier in his Spiritual Fondations of Life:

The Church was founded by the God-and-man Christ, therefore her structure also is God-human. The difference, however, consists in Christ being the perfect God-

whole fullness of the deity bodily” and “appropriating the mind of Christ” refer to Col 2:9 and 1 Cor 2:16, respectively.

45 See above, 98-101.

46 See above, 96-97.

47 Dev. (1878), 36; see above, 98-99.

236

and-man, while the Church is not yet a perfect Godmanhood, but rather Godmanhood in the process of being perfected.48

The life of the God-human organism of the Church meant for Soloviev a process of ongoing growth towards the eschatological union between God and creation, growth that included progress in understanding and fuller expression of the truth confessed by the Church—namely, dogmatic development.49 This also explains Soloviev’s expression in the title of the treatise

“Dogmatic Development of the Church;” he understood dogmatic development as a part and parcel of historical development of the Church towards the prefect universal Godmanhood.

Christian Dogmatic Teaching in Apostolic Times

The Apostolic Times

To prove his thesis about dogmatic development, Soloviev plunged into an historical analysis of Christian dogma. He could hardly have been matched in this arena; he excelled in historical scholarship not only with his great erudition, language skills and modern method of historical criticism, but also with that rare capacity of an “illative sense,” as Newman called it, which facilitated Soloviev’s expertise as an historian of ideas.50 In a relatively concise text comprising a little less than half of his treatise, Soloviev presented a chronological overview of

48 SS 3:385-386.

49 Ibid., 393.

50 On the illative sense, Newman’s term for the faculty of the human mind that perceives the convergence of antecedent probabilities and comes to a firm conclusion (certitude) without a strictly logical proof, see his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 343-383. See also above, 110.

237 dogmatic development from the New Testament period through the history of the Great

Ecumenical Councils to the Great Schism between the Western and the Eastern Church.

The one and only indivisible truth of Christian Revelation, understood by Soloviev as

Godmanhood, was represented in the New Testament by the Truth of one God and man—Jesus the Christ. Soloviev perceived the truth of the Incarnation in a broader sense that included soteriology and pneumatology: “The only dogma, the only truth comprising in itself all others, was the Truth of God-and-man, who was revealed in the body, rose from death, ascended into heaven and poured out the Holy Spirit upon his disciples.”51 This faith was “the sole dogmatic criterion” of the Church of the Apostles.52

As evidence, Soloviev gave a long list of references from Scripture. Analyzing the content of the Apostles’ preaching in the Acts of the Apostles, he noted that Christological truth was the sole doctrinal content of Peter’s preaching on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:32-33; 36), in

Solomon’s Portico (Acts 3:12-26) and before the Sanhedrin (Acts 4:8-12; 5:30-32). The same content was found in Philip the deacon’s instruction to the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:35-37) and in the preaching of (Acts 9:20-22; 13:14-41; 16:30-31; 17:1-3 and 30-31; 18:28;

19:4-5, etc.). The same result emerged from Soloviev’s analysis of the doctrinal content of the

Letters of the Apostle John.53

51 SS 11:23. It seems curious that Soloviev in this sentence omitted Jesus’ death on the cross, as if indicative of the certain neglect of the paschal mystery in his religious philosophy; however, he did mention that the Lord “died for men” a few pages later (SS 11:25); see above, 172-173 and 199-202.

52 Ibid., 25.

53 See ibid., 23-27.

238

In the New Testament, Soloviev found a prime example of dogmatic development in the

First Letter of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 15. In this passage, Paul asserted the teaching of the resurrection for “those who have fallen asleep in Christ” on the basis of the fundamental truth of Christ’s own resurrection. The Apostle Paul, as “the authorized teacher of faith,” demonstrated “the inner logical connection of the truth in question with the sole and for all indubitable dogma of the Christian faith.”54 As Soloviev carefully noted, the resurrection of the dead was certainly a teaching known and accepted in the Church prior to its declaration by

Paul in his Corinthian correspondence. However, the truth became indisputable and universally binding only after Paul, teaching with the authority of an Apostle, promulgated it as an integral part of Christian doctrine. Soloviev thus considered the instance of dogmatic development (in 1

Cor 15) as “an immediate historical fact clearly attested at the very cradle of the Christian

Church, and abundantly confirmed by the further course of ecclesiastical history.”55

Soloviev’s study of Διδαχή των Δώδεκα Αποστόλων [The Teaching of the Twelve

Apostles]56 yielded another important observation regarding the teaching on the resurrection of the dead. He claimed that the treatise endorsed the teaching on the general resurrection only to the extent defined by Apostle Paul—understood in a strict sense as concerning only those “who

54 SS 11:28.

55 Ibid., 29.

56 Διδαχή, an early Christian treatise written around the end of the first century, is a short exposition of Christian faith and practice. The treatise was discovered in 1873 by Philotheos Bryennios (1833-1917), the Greek-Orthodox Metropolitan of Nicomedea. In 1886, Soloviev wrote a scholarly essay on the treatise as the preface to the first Russian translation prepared by his brother Mikhail (SS 4:222-240; see Life 2:303).

239 have fallen asleep in Christ;” i.e. the deceased baptized Christians. Soloviev assumed from this that “the truth of the universal resurrection had not yet entered into the ecclesial consciousness of all believers,” which confirmed his thesis of dogmatic development, admitting a gradual growth of Christian doctrine in “the ecclesial consciousness.”57

Dogmatic Development: the Early Fathers through the Great Ecumenical Councils

In his overview of “the writers of the Pre-Nicene era,”58 Soloviev emphasized the fact that any deficiencies in dogmatic teaching by writers such as Justin the Martyr or his disciple

Theophilus of Antioch59 prejudiced neither their integrity as authentic teachers of faith nor their later veneration as saints in the Church.

The vague and indefinite teaching of these teachers on the Most Holy Trinity in itself presented no heresy inasmuch as the Church yet did not define the orthodox dogma on the subject. Only after such definition by the Church came to being, any deviation from it, any return to the former vagueness, became an explicit heresy to be resolutely condemned.60

57 SS 11:31.

58 See SS 11:32. The Pre-Nicene era is customarily classified as the period of Church history from the beginning of the second century to the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325). For a detailed analysis of the theology in that period, see Kelly, 83-221.

59 Justin the Martyr (died ca. 160) was well-known for his Apologia for Christianity written to the Roman Emperor (died. 161). Theophilus of Antioch (died ca. 185) was a bishop of Antioch and early Christian writer of apologetic and polemical treatises. See Johannes Quasten, Patrology. Vols. 1-5 (Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1995) 1:196-219, 236-241.

60 SS 11:32—Неопределенное и смутное учение этих церковных писателей о св. Троице не составляло само по себе никакой ереси до тех пор, пока догмат православия по этому предмету не был еще определен церковью, а как только это церковное определение состоялось, так уже всякое отступление от него, всякое возвращение к прежней неопределенности становилось прямою ересью и подлежало решительному осуждению.

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The various evaluations given by the Church to unorthodox teachings prior to and after her authoritative doctrinal definition exhibited an historical progress of official teaching. Soloviev, like Newman,61 found in this progress a testimony to the dynamism of the Church’s dogmatic development.

Soloviev found a similar testimony in the tolerant approach by the famous bishop

Gregory of Nazianzus towards the dubious teaching on the Holy Spirit by the Macedonians, prior to the time when the divinity of the Holy Spirit was officially recognized by the explicit and universally binding dogma of the Church.62 Similarly, Bishop Nestorius

before the Council of Ephesus was no heretic, he was only mistaken in his wrong conclusions made from indefinite propositions. Only after he began to resist the defined truth [on Mary, the Mother of Jesus, as the Θεοτόκος] and the Church which defined it, did he become a real heretic, and as such he was also denounced.63

Soloviev also noted that the proponents of Monophysitism invoked the authority of

Bishop , based on his vague Christological teaching on Christ’s one incarnate

61 See above, 94-95.

62 (ca. 329-390) was the Patriarch of Constantinople and one of the greatest Eastern-Christian theologians, a Doctor of the Church. See Quasten, 3:236-253. Regarding Macedonians, see above, 180, note 28.

63 SS 11:38—Несторий до Ефесского собора не был еретиком; он только заблуждался, делая неверные выводы из неопределенных положений: лишь с тех пор, как он стал сопротивляться определенной истине и церкви, ее определившей, он сделался действительным еретиком, каковым и был признан. Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople (386-450) who rejected the doctrine on Mary, the Mother of Jesus, as Θεοτόκος (Mother of God), was condemned by the Council of Ephesus (431). See Kelly, 310-329.

241 nature.64 Yet, Cyril’s status as the champion of Orthodoxy was never compromised on this score, because he did not oppose the official dogma about the hypostatic unity of two natures in

Christ which was defined only later by the Council of Chalcedon. Soloviev concluded that if all dogmatic teachings of the Church had been clear and known from the very beginning, as was claimed by the opponents of dogmatic development, there was no sufficient explanation as to why Cyril could have escaped the charge of heresy.65

The last dogmatic controversy visited by Soloviev in his historical excursus was the

Iconoclast controversy. He considered the history of the controversy a prime example of dogmatic development in the Church, insofar as the Second Council of Nicaea defended the tradition of venerating icons and images by a dogmatic decree, thus raising it to the level of dogmatic teaching.66 This fact clearly contradicted Stoianov’s argument about the existence of the whole and immutable catalogue of dogma from the conception of the Church.67 Soloviev summarized:

The Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council appear not merely as the witnesses of the pious custom, but—with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit—as the effective agents of one of those procedures or the [new] measures [of dogmatic development]. . . . The task of the Church’s faith-teaching did not consist in the discovery of new truths, but rather in the new disclosure of the one

64 Cyril of Alexandria (376-444) was the Patriarch of Alexandria and a distinguished theologian and polemical writer. See Quasten, 3: 116-142. Regarding the heresy of Monophysitism and the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, see above, 42, note 43.

65 SS 11:39-40.

66 The Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (787) condemned Iconoclasm, the heresy that rejected the veneration of images of Christ, angels and the saints in the Church. See Davis, 290- 322.

67 See SS 11:42-43.

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and the same primordial truth. The novelty was twofold. First, new was a greater elaboration in this or that part of the doctrine of faith as they arose in the Church’s consciousness; elaboration that admitted of no further disagreements in that same sense for conscientious Orthodox believers. Second, new was the mandatory character that the well-known points of the faith teaching assumed upon their all- ecclesial affirmation.68

Soloviev concluded his historical overview of dogmatic development with an unambiguous remark: the claims of Stoianov and other Orthodox theologians opposing dogmatic development were “ahistorical.”69

Limitations of Dogmatic Literalism

Did Stoianov’s view of the primordial “catalogue of dogma” coming from Christ and the apostles acknowledge that all the dogmatic teaching of the Church was hidden therein, as in a seed, later to be formed into explicit dogmatic teaching? If this had been the case, his position would have been virtually the same as Soloviev’s Catholic understanding of dogmatic development.70 However, Soloviev recognized in Stoianov’s approach the kind of conservatism

68 SS 11:43, 46—Отцы седьмого вселенского собора являются не только простыми свидетелями благочестивого обычая, но при содействии Духа Святого—властными проводниками одного из тех поступлений или восхождений. . . . Задача церковного вероучительства состояла не в открытии новых истин, а в новом раскрытии одной и той же первоначальной истины. Новизна при этом была двояка: во-первых, нова была самая определенность, с какою те или другие части вероучения выступали в церковном сознании,—определенность, не допускавшая для добросовестных православных никаких дальнейших недоразумений в том же самом смысле: а во—вторых, нов был обязательный характер, которым облекались известные пункты вероучения после всецерковного о них постановления.

69 Ibid., 46.

70 See SS 11:46-47.

243 that ruled out in principle the possibility of dogmatic development by rejecting the idea of a center of unity in the Church with a universal teaching authority.

Soloviev emphasized that the ecumenical councils did not confirm their dogmatic definitions because they were ancient, but because they were true. In contrast, Stoianov expressly identified authentic Christian teaching with ancient formulae, and condemned new

Catholic developments merely for being new and “progressive.” According to Stoianov, the innovations of Catholic doctrines were “additions” to ancient formulae of the Orthodox faith.71

The inherent problem of Stoianov’s approach for the purposes of Christian theology was caricatured by Soloviev in a fictitious dialogue between his opponent and a member of the

Jewish religion:

Jew: You agree, don’t you, that the truth of the unity of God is the most indubitable and original truth entrusted to our fathers by God Himself? Stoianov: Without a doubt. Jew: And are we obliged to treasure this truth? Stoianov: Of course. Jew: And therefore protect it? Stoianov: Yes. Jew: Well, then, in view of the fact that various goim (Gentiles) encroach on the purity of this truth we have the right and even the obligation to insist on this truth strenuously and to say over and over again that God is one, only one, exclusively one. Stoianov: But divine revelation also attests to God in three persons. Jew: Now this, as far as I am concerned, is a great novelty. Our fathers never heard this from God and God did not hand it down to us. From the beginning we have all known only that God is one. Stoianov: But the unity of God does not exclude trinity. Like you, we affirm that God is one in His essence but at the same time is three in persons. Jew: Perhaps! Perhaps what you affirm does not contradict monotheism, perhaps it is even true. Let us accept it for the moment. Nevertheless, these ‘buts’ of yours, these ‘at the same times,’ affirm something which is not contained in the

71 SS 11:50.

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simple and original truth of monotheism, they introduce new content, new evidence, a new idea.72

Soloviev did not intend to say that dogmatic development is equal to a new content of divine

Revelation, but he was pointing out that conservative literalism did not provide a full guarantee for keeping the truth. As a matter of fact, such conservatism in the history of Christianity often served as a “bulwark of error.”73

Ecclesiological Foundations of Dogmatic Development

In the initial sections of his treatise, Soloviev’s apologetic on behalf of dogmatic development in the Church was for the most part historical and philosophical. In the last section, he ventured to address the issue theologically with a reflection on the Church, in which he elevated his historical apologetic of dogmatic development to the level of an ecclesiological synthesis. Soloviev perceived that Stoianov’s refusal to recognize the Church’s doctrine- developing power cast doubt on the reality of the —the instinct of the Church’s faithful in matters of faith.74 This universal sense of the faithful or “the principle of religious

72 SS 11:51-52, translation: Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 184-185; transliteration of Stoianov’s name was adjustated in Valliere’s translation according to ALA-LC system used in this dissertation.

73 SS 11:53.

74 According to Sullivan, Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church, 23: “The sense of faith (sensus fidei) is a supernatural gift, an aspect of the gift of faith itself, a kind of God-given instinct by which believers are able to recognize the word of God for what it is, to discern truth from error in matters of faith, and to have sound insights into what they believe. This then is a subjective quality of the one who believes. The term sensus fidelium (sense or mind of the faithful) on the other hand generally has an objective meaning, referring not to the believer but to what is believed. The term sensus Ecclesiae (mind of the Church) is often used with much the same meaning. It is particularly frequent in the documents of the Council of Trent.

245 unanimity,” as Soloviev called it, stemmed from the living presence of the Holy Spirit giving the members of the Church a share in “the mind of Christ.”75 In other words, “religious unanimity” meant “the agreement of all believers in their understanding of the divine truth.” Such agreement was possible only due to the Holy Spirit, by whose influence the “private judgment” of individual believers was transcended and they were thus made “of one mind.”76

Religious unanimity was not a mere sociological or political matter for Soloviev.

Doctrines were never defined nor dissenters condemned by a mere majority of votes. “No, it was the direct action of the living organism of the Church who elaborated her forms and expelled from herself pernicious elements.”77 If the universal Church had not been able or allowed to

“express her mind,” where could one find this “ordering principle of religious unanimity?”78

How was it concretely manifested in the life of the Church? It could have only been a theoretical and abstract proposition—“a paper religion,” as Newman would have said.79 It was precisely in

The term consensus fidelium (agreement of the faithful) adds the element of universal agreement to the notion of sensus fidelium. It refers to the situation in which, on a particular issue of faith, the whole body of the faithful, ‘from the bishops down to the last member of laity,’ shares the same belief. . . . It is in such consensus that the Second Vatican Council says that the whole People of God cannot be in error.” Soloviev’s use of the term “religious unanimity” coincided with consensus fidelium as explained by Sullivan. See also Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church by the International Theological Commission (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2014).

75 SS 11:55-56, 63; see 1 Cor 2:16.

76 SS 11:55.

77 Ibid., 61.

78 Ibid., 55, 58.

79 Apo. 68; see above, 73.

246 this sense that Soloviev refused —just as had Newman the Anglican—the dictum of Vincent of

Lérins quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, used by Stoianov as the historical criterion of Christian doctrine.80 The dictum, though true in itself, could not substitute for the Church’s living Magisterium. The dictum had “no practical effect”; the abundant dogmatic controversies in Church history were never settled by merely appealing to “what was held always, everywhere and by all.” If this had been the case, why were there any dogmatic controversies in the first place?81

Having pursued his polemic with Stoianov to the level of “universal [ecclesial] principles,” Soloviev stated “an essential and explicit disagreement regarding the very concept of the Church.”82 “Such dynamic preservation or—what amounts to the same thing, development—of truth requires the Church as the real and living being growing in her spiritual virtue and understanding.”83 Such a view of the Church presupposed for Soloviev “the two constituents of the Church—divine and human. . . . inseparably and without confusion, united in a one and living whole; the God-human union which I perceive in the one, holy, Catholic and

Apostolic Church.”84 Soloviev believed that Stoianov’s ecclesiological vision deprived the

80 See SS 11:55; on the formula of Vincent of Lerins and Newman’s critique thereof, see above, 94-95.

81 SS 11:55.

82 Ibid., 53.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., 54.

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Church of her doctrine-developing power, considering her to be an abstract form of unity rather than a living being:

According to the view of Mr. Stoianov. . . . these two distinct constituents, divine and human, are sealed together on the earth with no essential and vital union, but rather each of the constituents exists separately, so their mutual bond is only relative and, so to speak, fragmented. In other words, for such a view the Church is just a concept expressing a moral relationship, while I perceive behind this moral relationship the real-metaphysical essence of the Church, single and indivisible, viable and developing. Mr. Stoianov from his point of view must understand the apostolic statements on the Church as the body of Christ, as the Spouse or the Bride of Christ—only in a metaphoric sense, while we give these statements a mysterious but still completely realistic sense.85

Soloviev went so far as to warn that Stoianov’s theological perspective ended in a denial of the

Church, by applying “a Nestorianist division between divinity and humanity.”86 “To which of the two [constituents],” asked Soloviev, “then belong the definitions of the universal councils?”87

For Soloviev, the authentic sense of religious unanimity required a penetration of the total and immutable catalogue of dogma that might be conceived as the property of “the invisible

85 SS 11:54—По взгляду же г. Стоянова. . . . оба различные элемента, божеский и человеческий, не связаны между собою на земле никаким существенным и живым богочеловеческим единством, а пребывают каждый в своей отдельности, находясь лишь в относительной и так сказать раздробленной связи между собою. Другими словами, для такого взгляда церковь есть лишь термин, выражающий моральное отношение, тогда как я за этим моральным отношением признаю еще реально-метафизическое существо церкви, единое и неделимое, живое, подвижное и развивающееся. Г. Стоянов с своей точки зрения должен понимать апостольские выражения о церкви о теле Христовом, как невесте или жене Христовой—лишь в переносном смысле, тогда как мы придаем этим выражениям хотя таинственное, но совершенно реальное значение.

86 SS 11:60.

87 Ibid., 61.

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Church” into the minds of the individual believers in the Church on earth.88 Soloviev explained this point in a crucial passage:

From our point of view, however, between the relative thought of human beings and the absolute content of divine Revelation there is no whimsical illusion of universal unanimity, but rather real and living organs within the real and living being of the Church. Precisely these organs on the basis of the full authority given from above, together with the cooperating divine assistance, place the seed of divine truth in the concrete and distinct forms and definitions as a single and universally binding boundary for all partial minds theologizing on the given truth. The living Church, organically united and equipped with internal is made firm by the continuous hierarchical bond, and thus presents a real and sovereign being. Her universal teaching office in its definitions is not a mere witness of faith existing in this or that local church. While the sum of all believers undoubtedly keeps and protects the faith, this common faith in itself is not sufficiently clear and elaborate. It belongs rather in the domain of cordial feeling. To confirm such faith, to express religious sentiment in religious dogma, the universal teaching office of the Church employs the full powers given it from the beginning and the promised help from above: “Go and teach all people—behold, I am with you until the end of times.” It proceeds by the divine law and in its decisions the free movement of the Holy Spirit living in the Church is made manifest. All who belong to the universal Church participate in her statutes, not only clergy but also the laity. However, they do not participate individually by their private opinion and will. A universal council is no Polish Congress wherein everyone was creeping with his veto. They participate morally with an act of trust and free assent by means of which each and every individual mind is united with the universal mind of the Church; by such a seal it becomes a worthy dwelling for the action of the Holy Spirit.89

88 See ibid., 43.

89 SS 11:56—С нашей же точки зрения между относительным умом отдельных человеческих лиц и абсолютным данным божественного Откровения стоит не выдуманный призрак всеобщего единомыслия, а реальные и живые органы единства в реальном и живом существе церкви: их то свыше уполномоченное и с Божьею помощью соединенное действие вводит семя Божественной истины в точные и отчетливые формы и определения как в единую и общеобязательную грань для всех частных умов, богословствующих о данной истине. Живая церковь, органически объединенная и внутренно солидарная, скрепленная неразрывною иерархическою связью, есть совершенно реальное и самостоятельное существо. Ее вселенское учительство в определениях своих является не простым свидетельством существующей в тех или других местных церквах веры; ибо хотя совокупность верующих в своей целости несомненно

249

As Soloviev powerfully explained in this text, the universal teaching office of the Church is intrinsically linked to the gift of religious unanimity in the Church. With the special help of the

Holy Spirit, the living Magisterium clarifies and elaborates—develops—the content of the

Church’s faith.

Soloviev decidedly rejected Stoianov’s suggestion that the Catholic understanding of teaching authority in the Church functioned as an “external” and “formal” force that replaced veneration of the truth with “legalism.” His response contained an unambiguous justification of the universal Magisterium:

Not only does legality not present any “singular mark of the truth” (who has ever dreamt of such a vile thing?), but it cannot constitute the mark of the truth as such, in itself. The legal character of universal dogma is only the mark of the truth recognized and defined which therefore became mandatory and indubitable, and does not admit the possibility of a new solution. . . . The explicit and definite decisions of the universal Church do not bear for us only formal significance and external authority. We recognize in them the real and living manifestation of the power confirmed by God and based on the real and living operation of the Holy Spirit. Decisions of the universal Church could only bear a mere formal authority to those who are outside of the Church, but for them these decisions bear no authority. For the living members of the universal Church her deeds can be

держит и сохраняет, но эта общая вера не имеет сама по себе достаточной ясности и определенности и пребывает более в области сердечного чувства;—чтобы закрепить ее, чтобы выразить религиозно чувство в религиозном догмате, вселенское учительство церкви пользуется данным ему изначала полномочием и свыше обещанною помощью: шедшее научите вся языки—и се Аз с вами семь до скончания века. Оно поступает здесь по божественному праву, и в его решениях проявляется свободное движение—того Духа Божия, который живет в церкви. В этих решениях вселенской церкви участвуют все принадлежащие к ней, не только духовные, но и миряне, но участвуют не своим отдельным особым мнением и волею, —ибо вселенский собор не есть польский сейм, куда всякий лез с своим не позволяем, —а участвуют нравственно, актом доверия и свободного признания, коим каждый личный ум связан с вселенским умом церкви и чрез эту связь образует из него достойное вместилище для действия Духа Святого.

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neither alien nor external. Each true member of the Church himself morally shares in her decisions—he shares in them with the better part of his spiritual being—by means of trust and love for the great God-human entity in her living representatives. Without this moral participation of the entire sheepfold, God’s people itself in the dogmatic decrees of the Church, the shepherds would not be able to manifest their spiritual authority, nor would the Holy Spirit find in the Church the bond of love and freedom induced by His action. Each decision of the universal Church represents her own decree that proceeds from her interior where the Holy Spirit is dwelling. This constitutes a positive step on the path of the Church’s internal development, her growth and perfection to the measure of the full stature of Christ.90

In this passage, Soloviev provided his explanation of the living Magisterium of the Church as an integral part of his ecclesiological synthesis, as a visible sign of the divine and human constituents cooperating in the Church. The universal teaching office in the Church was

90 SS 11:57, 59-60; see Mt 28:19-20 and Eph 4:13—Легальность не только не есть «единственный признак истины» (кому и когда снилась такая нелепость?), но она вообще не может составлять признака истины как такой, в ней самой; легальный характер вселенского догмата есть только признак истины опознанной и определенной, и поэтому ставшей обязательной и бесспорной, не допускающей возможности перерешения. . . . Прямые и явные решения вселенской церкви имеют для нас не одно формальное значение и не внешний только авторитет. Мы видим здесь реальное и живое проявление богоутвержденной власти, обусловленное реальным и живым действием Духа Святого. Решения вселенской церкви могли бы быть исключительно внешним авторитетом лишь для тех, кто вне церкви,—но для них эти решения не имеют никакого авторитета. А для живых членов вселенской церкви ее действия не могут выть чуждыми или внешними. Каждый истинный член церкви сам нравственно участвует в ее решения—участвует лучшею стороною своего духовного существа—доверием и любовью к великому, богочеловеческому целому в его живых представителях. Без этого нравственного участия самой паствы, самого народа Божия в догматических актах вселенской церкви и пастыри не могли бы проявить надлежащим образом свою духовную власть, и самый Дух Божий не нашел бы в церкви того сочетания любви и свободы, коим привлекается Его действие. Всякое решение вселенской церкви, будучи ее собственным действием, идущим изнутри от обитающего в ней Духа Божия, составляет положительный шар на пути ее внутреннего развития, ее возрастания и совершенствования в полноту возраста Христова.

251 instituted and guided by God for the purpose of regulating the Church’s growth towards her eschatological perfection.

To emphasize the development of the Church in her dogmatic decrees as the expression of the combined action of the Holy Spirit and the Church’s human representatives, Soloviev added:

If in the decrees of the universal Church her shepherds acted merely as simple witnesses of the factual faith of their sheepfold, then there would have been no need for a special cooperation of the Holy Spirit. It is enough to possess the usual human honesty in order to testify a certain fact. . . . We decidedly refuse to perceive why a particular illumination and instruction by the Holy Spirit is necessary if [the teaching authority] were only to witness what is always and everywhere believed.91

The progression of Soloviev’s thought on doctrinal development was virtually identical to

Newman’s realization that “the entire world judged with certainty.”92 The universal Church in her teaching not merely witnessed but also judged, using an ever active teaching authority exercised by the hierarchy.

In Dogmatic Development, Soloviev did not directly address either the infallibility of the

Church nor the infallibility of the papal Magisterium in the terms of the 1870 dogmatic definition at the . Presumably, he understood the infallibility of the Church in terms of the universally binding character of the definitions promulgated by the universal teaching

91 SS 11:56-57—Если бы в актах вселенской церкви пастыри ее являлись лишь простыми свидетелями о фактической вере своей паствы, то для этого не было бы надобности ни каком особом содействии Духа Святого, ибо для того, чтоб засвидетельствовать известный факт, достаточно было бы обыкновенной человеческой честности. . . . Мы решительно отказываемся понять, к чему тут особое просвещение и наставление от Духа Св., когда нужно только засвидетельствовать то, что все и всегда исповедовали.

92 See above, 74-79.

252 authority. Whether the exercise of the universal teaching authority involved an ecumenical council or a pope or both of them, Soloviev did not specify in the treatise. He simply refused to ascribe to Catholics the naïve beliefs attributed to them by Orthodox theologians:

That a Christian might be saved by a mere obedience to the pope, or that everything would be forgiven the Christian based on this obedience, or that every opinion of the pope is infallible. . . . there is, however, no place for such vile things in the Catholic teaching.93

Soloviev summarized his view of dogmatic development:

The Church is a special and individual substance, incomparably more real and more alive than all those individuals and nations from which she is composed. She is more real and more alive as the human body surpasses the particular organs and cells that compose it. If we failed to perceive in the universal Church such an authentic God-human substance, we would hardly be able to speak of the development of the Church and her teaching.94

These words seem crucial in Soloviev’s entire theory of dogmatic development. Just as Newman who built his theory on the analogy between the process of a development of religious understanding in the individual mind and the doctrinal development in the Church as a whole,

Soloviev understood dogmatic development as a part and parcel of the organic historical development of the Church as a single body, a living subject, or “an individual substance.”

93 SS 11:64—будто христианин спасается одною покорностью папе, или будто католику все прощается ради одной этой покорности, или будто всякое мнение папы безошибочно. . . . так как подобных нелепостей в католическом учении не находится.

94 Ibid., 60-61—Церковь есть особое самостоятельное существо, неизмеримо более действительное и жизненное, нежели все те лица и народы, что входят в ее состав: она настолько их действительное и жизненнее, насколько целое человеческое тело превосходит отдельные органы и клеточки, его составляющие. Если же не видеть во вселенской церкви такого самостоятельного богочеловеческого существа, тогда конечно нельзя говорить о развитии церкви и ее учения.

253

Newman presented the link between the development of an idea in the mind of an individual believer and doctrinal development in the Church as an illustration of the latter by the former. The subjecthood of the Church in which doctrinal development subsists as an organic historical continuity was thus in Newman’s work implied but not elaborated. Soloviev, in contrast to Newman, outlined explicitly the subjecthood of the Church as the core of his presentation of doctrinal development.

[In] an act of trust and free assent . . . each and every individual mind is united with the universal mind of the Church; by such a seal it becomes a worthy dwelling for the action of the Holy Spirit. . . . The living Church, organically united and equipped with internal solidarity is made firm by the continuous hierarchical bond, and thus presents a real and sovereign being.95

Clearly, Soloviev understood the subjecthood of the Church not merely as a figure of speech but rather as a necessary part of the Church’s pneumatological and sacramental mystery: “If we failed to perceive in the universal Church such an authentic God-human substance, we would hardly be able to speak of the development of the Church and her teaching.”96

Newman’s view of doctrinal development was bound with contemplation of Mary who

“kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart” (Lk 2:19, 51). The holy Mother of Jesus was perceived by Newman as the special example of the Church for all ages:

St. Mary is our pattern of faith, both in the reception and in the study of divine truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it. . . . And thus she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel; to draw the line between truth and heresy; to anticipate or remedy the various aberrations of wrong reason; to combat pride

95 SS 11:56; emphasis added. For the original text in Russian, see above, 248, note 89.

96 Ibid., 60-61; emphasis added.

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and recklessness with their own arms; and thus to triumph over the sophist and the innovator.97

It might be said that Newman’s ecclesiological understanding of the subjecthood of the Church in his presentation of doctrinal development stemmed from the catholic notion of the universal form of Mary’s faith. In a certain sense, in their individual religious development, all Catholics participate in the assent of the “handmaid of the Lord” on whom the “fullness of grace” was bestowed (Lk 1:28, 38).

In Soloviev’s case, his ecclesiological understanding of the subjecthood of the Church most likely had sophiological foundations. In Sophia, the divine wisdom, Soloviev contemplated the personalist ideal of the created subject who was receiving divine love. This universal ideal of reception was realized in the religious assent uniting all members in the one body and one mind of the Church. It is possible to say that the deepest source of ecclesiological convergences between Newman and Soloviev originated in a theological overlap between mariology and sophiology.98

The Universal Church and Papacy

Three years after writing Dogmatic Development of the Church, Soloviev penned his acclaimed La Russie et l’Eglise universelle. This work introduced Soloviev’s religious system and his ecumenical endeavors to French readers. The first two parts of the book presented an

97 OUS, 313-314.

98 Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 286, has raised the question whether Soloviev’s mystical visions of Sophia were not in fact apparitions of Our Lady.

255 historical and theological apologetic for the papacy; the third part presented a sophiological foundation for his theocratic program of social reform.

The enigmatic and somewhat extravagant character of the last part of La Russie caused mixed reactions at the time of its first publication in France. Soloviev’s sophiology attracted little attention outside intellectual circles interested in the spirituality and thought of Eastern

Christianity; for the most part, his sophiology encountered either suspicions or outright neglect as unorthodox.99 However, his historical and theological study of the papacy in the first part of

La Russie attracted substantial interest, and, after his last work, Three Conversations, containing the famous Short Tale of the Antichrist, it is probably the most studied and translated of

Soloviev’s writings.

La Russie et l’Eglise universelle, like Dogmatic Development of the Church, originated in the “theocratic” period of Soloviev’s work, framed in scholarship by the years 1881-1890.100 In fact, La Russie might be considered the crowning work of that period. Its lukewarm reception was among the main reasons for Soloviev’s retreat to Russia and his return to his preoccupation with literary criticism and systematic philosophy in the last decade of his life. At any rate,

Soloviev wrote La Russie during his yet undaunted endeavor to promote social reform as the herald of theocracy. This was indeed the fundamental purpose of the entire writing, aside of which it cannot be completely understood. Ecclesiological and ecumenical themes in his writing

99 See above, 165.

100 See above, 153, note 68.

256 emerged from his synthesis of Catholicism with his religious philosophy of social reform and history.101

Soloviev summarized his general viewpoint and the purpose of La Russie in its introduction by means of a short parable. He compared the Lord Jesus to the Master who built the foundation of a great Temple and ordered his pupils to finish the structure in his absence according to the architectural plan that He entrusted to them. After working harmoniously in building about a third of the Temple, a quarrel broke out among the pupils and they split into parties that were not able to agree on how to proceed with construction. One party declared it was necessary to preserve what was already built, another insisted on focusing entirely on studying and contemplating the Master’s original plan, still another left the construction and attempted to build the temple on a new site. Soloviev saw his treatise as an urgent call to the divided bodies of Christianity of his time to reunite and proceed with the realization of Christ’s plan for the Church in the world, which could be accomplished only by their combined effort.102

Soloviev’s ecumenical and ecclesiological point of view required ecclesial reunification.

His envisioned process of social transformation relied on ecumenism in that it could be realized in no other way and upon no other basis than that of the universal visible Church. Soloviev thus recognized in the papacy the universal doctrinal authority and center of unity to be expected if such a Church existed in reality as an active, theocracy-developing power in history.

101 See above, 198-210.

102 See La Russie, lxi-lxvi.

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Accordingly, Soloviev devoted the bulk of La Russie to a historical and theological apologetic of the papacy.

As Cyril Vasiľ has observed, in La Russie, Soloviev applied and further elaborated his analysis of dogmatic development.103 The continuity of La Russie with Dogmatic Development of the Church was apparent from the first pages of Soloviev’s introduction in La Russie, where he returned to the main thesis of his view of dogmatic development, which he understood as a process of elaborating “the one and indivisible idea” of Christian Revelation—Godmanhood—

“the perfect union of the divine and the human individually achieved in Christ, and finding its social realization in Christian humanity.”104 Accordingly, Soloviev summarized the history of dogmatic controversies during the time of the first seven ecumenical councils as a long chain of attacks on the divine-human constitution of the Church, which sought to hinder its spiritual influence in the social realm.105

Soloviev’s perception of a common ecclesiological thread in the history of dogmatic controversies—which is noteworthy in itself—led him to an original discernment of the authentic exercise of the universal teaching authority in the Church by the papacy in the course of history.

Time and again, heresies emerged in the Christian East; they were fuelled by the Byzantine

103 Cyril Vasiľ, “Dogmatický rozvoj vo vzťahu východnej a západnej cirkvi z pohľadu V. S. Solovjova” [Dogmatic Development in the Relation between the Eastern and the Western Church from the Perspective of V. S. Soloviev] in Kresťanská spoločnosť a kultúra vo filozofii V. S. Solovjova. Zborník konferencie príležitosti 150. výročia jeho narodenia (Kosice: Centrum Michala Lacka, 2003) 23-34, at 23.

104 SS 11:21; La Russie, xxv.

105 La Russie, xxvi-xxx.

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Caesaropapism, described by Soloviev as “political .”106 Time and again, these heresies were crushed by the rock of the papacy, “that miraculous icon of universal Christianity.”107

The pseudo-Christian Empire of Byzantium was bound to engage in decisive combat with the orthodox Papacy; for the latter was not only the infallible guardian of Christian truth but also the first realization of that truth in the collective life of the human race. . . . This was especially true of the iconoclastic heresy; for in denying all external manifestation of the divine in the world it was making a direct attack on the raison d’être of the Chair of Peter as the real objective center of the visible Church.108

For Soloviev, the imperial court of Byzantium regularly supported heretical parties for the sake of its own “separatist and semi-pagan tendencies.”109 The history of the great ecumenical

Councils provided a long list of evidence of the papacy as “the infallible guardian of Christian truth,” before which “the imperial heresies” ultimately always had to bow and surrender.110

Soloviev’s analysis depicted “the great majority of the higher Greek clergy” as continually playing the role of “a third party” in the history of dogmatic controversies, a middle

106 La Russie., xxxii-xxxiii, xlvii. Caesaropapism is a theory that secular rulers are entitled to exercise supreme authority in ecclesiastical matters. According to Soloviev, it “confused the temporal and spiritual powers without uniting them, and made the autocrat something more than the head of the State, without succeeding in making him a true head of the Church.” In its main principle of the state control over the Church it is virtually the same theory as the Erastianism criticized by Newman; see above, 367, note 23, and p. 59, note 95.

107 Ibid., xxix.

108 Ibid., xxix-xxx; translation: RUC, 12. Longer citations in indented paragraphs follow the most recent English translation of La Russie by W. G. von Peters (RUC). On a few occasions, a few minor changes have been made in W. G. von Peters’ translation regarding capitalization or hyphens to harmonize the style with the rest of this dissertation.

109 Ibid., xxxi.

110 Ibid., xlii, xlviii.

259 party between heretics on the one side and Orthodox Catholics on the other. Soloviev characterized their position as “semi-orthodox” or “orthodox—anti-Catholic” in the following way:

They had nothing in principle against the unity of the universal Church, provided only that the center of that unity was situated in their midst; and since in point of fact this center was situated elsewhere, they preferred to be Greeks rather than Christians and accepted a divided Church rather than a Church unified by a power which was in their eyes foreign and hostile to their nationality. As Christians, they could not be Caesaropapists in principle, but as patriotic Greeks first and foremost, they preferred the Byzantine Caesaropapism to the Roman papacy.111

In this anti-Catholic Caesaropapism of the Byzantine clergy, Soloviev perceived the origin of the anti-Catholic position of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy of his day.112 Its “pseudo-orthodox” theology was nothing more than “arbitrary negations produced and maintained by controversial prejudice.”113 These negations consisted in a refusal of: the Filioque, the Immaculate

Conception of Mary, and the teaching and governing authority of the Pope. Since Soloviev considered the first two mere pretexts, he summarized the Russian pseudo-orthodox theology and Slavophile ideology as “a national protest against the universal power of the Pope.”114

In the first section of La Russie, Soloviev asserted that the Church in Russia “deprived of any point d’appui or center of unity outside the national State, has inevitably come to be

111 La Russie, xxxiii; translation: RUC, 13.

112 See ibid., 17-19. Soloviev suggested that the title of the “Third Rome” was given Muscovy by the Greek who sought refuge in Russia after the fall of the Byzantine Empire (La Russie, 8 note 2). Soloviev expressed the same opinion about the origin of the conception “Third Rome” in his poem Панмонголизм [Panmongolism] (SS 12:95-96).

113 La Russie, 18.

114 Ibid., 20.

260 subservient to the secular power” and has thus became “a merely national Church.”115 The ideal of the Church’s “spontaneous unity in freedom and charity,” elaborated by Russian Slavophile thinkers such as Khomiakov, was considered by Soloviev as abstract and empty, and clearly contradicted by the actual conditions of subservience of the Russian church to the secular government.116 Such an abstract ideal, resisting the universal ecclesiastical governance in the papacy, confused religious and ecclesiastical freedom.

The earthly Church, Soloviev argued, “is not absolutely free, since she is subject to the conditions of finite existence; but she must be sufficiently independent to be able to carry on the constant and active struggle against the powers of the enemy.”117 The Church had to be

“universal in so far as she cannot be confined exclusively to any one or group of nations, but must have an international center from which to spread throughout the whole universe.”118

Finally, the Church has to be “infallible, that is to say, she cannot be mistaken when, at a given moment, she defines such and such a religious or moral truth, the explicit knowledge of which has become necessary to her.”119

115 La Russie, 73, 76.

116 See Ibid, 35-36. Regarding Aleksei S. Khomiakov, see above, 154, note 71.

117 Ibid., 38.

118 Ibid., 38.

119 Ibid., 38.

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The independent, universal and infallible Church must be endowed with “a center of active coherence between the divine and the human,” “a real and indivisible principle of unity,”

“under the ‘species’ of a visible and definite social authority.”120

Soloviev acknowledged the universal center of the Church’s governance and teaching authority as the fulcrum for his envisioned dynamic of social renewal and religious integration.

Such a center of unity was an indispensable means for the historical realization of the ideal of religious unity of all human beings in the universal Church. Only by the instrumentality of such an office of universal unity representing the just claims of a universal brotherhood of humankind would it be possible to overcome narrow nationalist politics and pseudo-religious .

Between the hateful reality of the disharmony reigning in this world and the longed-for unity of perfect love in which God reigns, there is the necessary road of a juridical and authoritative unity linking human fact to divine right. The perfect circle of the universal Church requires a unique center, not so much for its perfection as for its very existence. The Church upon earth, called to gather in the multitude of the nations, must, if she is to remain an active society, possess a definite universal authority to set against national divisions; if she is to enter the current of history and undergo continual change and adaptation in her external circumstances and relationships and yet preserve her identity, she requires an authority essentially conservative, but nevertheless active, fundamentally unchangeable though outwardly adaptable; and, finally, if she is set amid the frailty of man to assert herself in reaction against all the powers of evil, she must be equipped with an absolutely firm and impregnable foundation, stronger than the gates of hell.121

Whether Soloviev spoke of gathering the multitude of nations into one, or of adaptations to external circumstances, or of doctrinal development, or of a struggle against evil, he envisioned different aspects of the process of historical development bound to rely on the help of religious

120 La Russie, 91, 130.

121 Ibid., 130-131; translation: RUC, 115-116.

262 authority—“the necessary road of a juridical and authoritative unity”—in order to advance towards the distant goal of history—the “unity of perfect love in which God reigns.”122 The center of universal unity in the Church had to be of divine institution:

If the Church is to guide the common life of mankind towards the goal of divine love, and to direct public opinion on the road to divine truth, she must possess a universal government divinely authorized. This government must be clearly defined so as to be recognizable to all, and permanent so as to form a standing court of appeal; it must be divine in substance so as to be finally binding upon the religious conscience of every instructed and well-intentioned person, and it must be human and imperfect in its historical manifestation so as to admit the possibility of moral resistance and allow room for doubts, struggle, temptations and all that constitutes the merit of free and genuinely human virtue. Though the supreme authority of the Church may admit of various administrative forms according to differences of time and place, yet it is to form the primary basis of union between the social conscience of mankind and the providential government of God, and to share in the divine Majesty while adapting itself to realities of human life, it must always as the center of unity preserve its purely monarchical character.123

In summary, Soloviev having recognized—like Newman—“the absolute need of a monarchical power in the Church,” Soloviev—again like Newman—refused to search for it anywhere else than where it actually presented itself clearly in reality.124 “The papacy is a positive principle, an actual institution, and if Eastern Christians believe this principle to be false and this institution to be evil, it is for them to create the organization which they desire to see in the Church.”125

122 La Russie, 130.

123 Ibid., 128; translation: RUC, 114.

124 See Newman, “Catholicity of the Anglican Church,” Ess 2:44, note 3; see also above, 129.

125 La Russie, 21.

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Soloviev thus strongly affirmed the supremacy of the pope as a doctrine de jure divino.

The crucial passage concerning the institution of the in Mt 16:13-19 was for

Soloviev incontestable biblical testimony to Christ’s foundation of the Petrine ministry as “the specific principle of social unity in the Church” and “the first realization of the truth [of God- manhood] in the collective life of the human race.”126 He understood Jesus’ designation of Peter as “the Rock of the Church” to indicate “a living moral bond”127 which, while less than the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in Christ, further advanced the cause of God- manhood in the world by establishing a permanent link of cooperation between the Spirit of

Christ and the fully active will and intelligence of a human being in Peter and his successors.

“This new link between Christ and the Church”—the link constituted by the Petrine office— was

“the creative foundation of a collective entity,” “not confined to a personal relationship,” but

“extended through time as a permanent function of the society thus formed.”128 Soloviev concluded, “It was necessary, therefore, to find in mankind as it is such a center of active coherence between the divine and the human, which form the base or rock—the foundation of the Christian Church.”129

126 La Russie, xxx.

127 Ibid., 90.

128 Ibid., 91.

129 Ibid., 91; emphasis added.

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It should come as no surprise that Soloviev, with reference to Matthew 16, subscribed without hesitation to the teaching of the First Vatican Council on the infallibility of the papal

Magisterium:

Wherever Peter does not speak, it is only the opinions of men that find utterance—and the Apostles are silent. But Jesus Christ did not commend the vague and contradictory opinions of the mob nor the silence of His chosen disciples; it was the unwavering, decisive and authoritative utterance of Simon Bar-Jonah upon which He set the seal of His approval. Clearly this utterance, which satisfied our Lord, needed no human ratification; it possessed absolute validity etiam sine consensu Ecclesiae. It was not by means of a general consultation but (as Jesus Christ Himself bore witness) with the direct assistance of the heavenly Father that Peter formulated the fundamental dogma of our religion; and his word defined the faith of Christians by its own inherent power, not by the consent of others—ex sese, not autem ex consensu Ecclesiae.130

Based on his understanding of the Petrine ministry in terms of “a living moral bond” between

Christ and Peter and his successors, and as “a center of active coherence between the divine and the human,” Soloviev understood the infallibity of the papal Magisterium not as an accidental attribute of the pope in terms of his being merely a voice or herald of the universal Church, but rather as a part of the very essence of papal office. In other words, the pope, when speaking ex cathedra—exercising infallibility—shared in Christ’s mind not merely via the gift of unanimity

130 Ibid., 95-96; translation: RUC, 95. Soloviev made this statement in light of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of the First Vatican Council Pastor Aeternus, chapter IV, § 9: “It is a divinely revealed dogma that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, acting in the office of shepherd and teacher of all Christians, he defines, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, possesses through the divine assistance promised to him in the person of blessed Peter, the infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed his church to be endowed in defining the doctrine concerning faith or morals; and that such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are therefore irreformable of themselves, not because of the consent of the Church (ex sese, non autem ex consensu ecclesiae).” DH 3074.

265 in the universal Church over which he presides with supreme governing authority, but rather by a special and direct privilege given by Christ to the apostle Peter and his successors.

Soloviev, however, did not ignore the deficiencies and failings of the popes on account of their human frailty and sin. The special link between Christ and Peter securing the God-human foundation of the Church did not obliterate the latter’s imperfect nature suffering like any other man from the consequences of the human condition. The real possibility of sin was a token of the humanity of Peter with whom Christ forged the “living moral bond” establishing Peter’s primacy. This bond did not require “an absolutely pure and sinless human individual,” but only

“the response of imperfect humanity in an act of irrevocable adherence,” as declared in Peter’s confession.131 The fact that Peter’s primacy had to be built upon the actual conditions of imperfect humanity had for Soloviev a positive import:

The universal government [of the Church] divinely authorized. . . . must be human and imperfect in its historical manifestation so as to admit the possibility of moral resistance and allow room for doubts, struggle, temptations and all that constitutes the merit of free and genuinely human virtue.132

In his comments on Jesus’ rebuke of Simon Peter (Mt 16:21-23) immediately following the narrative on the institution of Peter’s primacy, Soloviev acknowledged: “The same Simon Peter as a private individual, speaking and acting by his natural powers and mere human intelligence, may say and do things that are unworthy, scandalous and even diabolical.” He added, “However,

131 La Russie, 89-90.

132 Ibid., 128; translation: RUC, 114

266 the failures and sins of the individual are ephemeral, while the social function of the ecclesial monarch is permanent.”133

Christ “conferred on a single individual supreme and undivided authority over the

Church” not merely as a “personal relationship” or privilege of the apostle Peter, but as “a permanent function” facilitating “union between the divine and human in the social order.”134

Such a permanent function presupposed a “social and visible foundation;” Soloviev thus claimed that in granting the apostle Peter “the primacy of power,” Christ “foresaw the necessity of an ecclesiastical monarchy” which would determine the form of the Roman Catholic Church.135

There was then no doubt that popes of Rome were heirs of Peter’s primacy:

Once it is admitted that there is in the universal Church a fundamental supreme authority established by Christ in the person of St. Peter, then it must follow that this authority is in existence somewhere. And it seems to us that the obvious impossibility of discovering it anywhere else but at Rome is at once a sufficient reason for supporting the Catholic thesis.136

In a way similar to Newman,137 Soloviev saw in the world and its long history only one

“ecclesiastical power” that “perpetually and unchangingly preserved its central and universal character.”138

133 La Russie, 112.

134 Ibid., 91, 131, 142.

135 Ibid., 104, 131. See Balthasar, “Soloviev,” 281.

136 Ibid., 156; translation: RUC, 131.

137 See above, 116 and 129.

138 La Russie, 131.

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The idea that the Catholic Church preserved unchangingly the gift of Peter’s primacy did not preclude for Soloviev the growth of the outward form of this gift. He likened the relationship between the primacy originally bestowed by Christ on the apostle Peter and the papal office in the Church of the 19th-century to an acorn and a grown oak tree:

Though Peter was entrusted by Jesus Christ with that universal sovereign authority which was to endure and develop within the Church throughout its existence upon earth, he did not personally exercise this authority except in a measure and in a form suited to the primitive condition of the Apostolic Church. The action of the prince of the apostles had as little resemblance to modern papal administration as the acorn has to the oak; but this does not prevent the papacy from being the natural, logical and legitimate development of the primacy of Peter.139

Again, similar to Newman, Soloviev perceived in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church the same type of communion of believers defined by their adherence to the supreme central authority.140 Papal primacy was itself an instance of the doctrinal development in the Church.

The Relationship between Development of Doctrine and the Papal Office

The progression of Soloviev’s thought with regards to doctrinal development and the papacy might be summarized as follows: Soloviev delved into the question of doctrinal development to address the main point of conflict between the Russian Orthodox and the

Catholic Church, after this issue had emerged as the main point during his controversy about ecumenism with the Russian Slavophiles. He adopted a positive view of dogmatic development in the Church, which he perceived as an aspect of an ongoing historical realization of the divine

139 La Russie, 150-151; translation: RUC, 126.

140 See above, 114-119.

268 ideal in the religious unity of humankind. In other words, dogmatic development was for

Soloviev the gradual growth in the Church’s understanding of the truth of God-manhood—the union of God and the creation revealed in the Christ event. Soloviev’s careful historical analysis of Christian doctrine led him to discover the gradual increase in the universally binding teachings of the Church generated in the Church’s official response to disputes about faith. Such a process presupposed the existence of a universal teaching authority of the Church with the power not only to witness to the authentic faith but to judge—affirm or condemn—its individual aspects and raise their formulation to the level of universally binding doctrines.

Soloviev considered the living Magisterium of the universal Church, exercised with the special assistance of the Holy Spirit, a remarkable indicator of her divine-human constitution.

He repudiated the position of those Orthodox theologians who sought to confine the living

Magisterium and dogmatic development to the past. For Soloviev, the living Magisterium and dogmatic development were marks of the true universal Church, and he recognized their presence in the Catholic Church.

The exercise of the universal teaching Magisterium was, in Soloviev’s mind, inherently linked with the supreme central authority in the universal Church. This central authority was the pope, whose teaching authority was an intrinsic part of his role to “govern the unity of ecclesial action:”

As the unity of the orthodox faith is finally guaranteed by the dogmatic authority of a single individual speaking for all, so unity of ecclesiastical action is necessarily conditioned by the directing authority of a single individual bearing sway over the whole Church. But in the One Holy Church, founded upon truth, government cannot be separated from doctrine; and the central and supreme

269

power in the ecclesiastical sphere can only belong to him who by divinely aided authority represents and displays in the religious sphere the unity of true faith.141

For Soloviev, the pope’s exercise of the universal teaching Magisterium was relatively autonomous from the consent of the universal Church represented at an ecumenical council. The pope’s universal teaching authority was supported directly by Christ by a special privilege given to the apostle Peter and his successors:

If it is to bear unanimous witness to the pure and simple truth, the council must be in absolute agreement. The decisive act must be an entirely individual act, the act of a single person. It is neither the multitude of the faithful nor the apostolic council, but Simon Bar-Jonah alone who answers Jesus. Respondens Simon Petrus dixit: Tu es Filius Dei vivi. He replies for all the apostles, but he speaks on his own responsibility without consulting them or waiting for their consent.142

On account of the character of the papal office as an individual share in the permanent moral and social bond of Christ with Peter and his successors, the latter possessed the gift of infallibility in the solemn exercise of their universal teaching authority.

Soloviev’s understanding of the universal Magisterium in the Church proceeded from his original attempt to mediate between universal consent or unanimity seen as the eschatological ideal and the Church in her present condition of growth towards that goal of universal unity. He thus perceived in the central office of universal authority the fulcrum of the Church’s historical development towards this eschatological goal: papal primacy is the indispensable historical means guiding the progress of the Church to her divinely ordained fulfillment. Simply speaking, the universal Magisterium was for Soloviev the guiding compass of the Church throughout

141 La Russie, 123-124; translation: RUC, 112.

142 Ibid., 92-93; translation: RUC, 93.

270 history—from the point of her origin to her eschatological consummation. This was the heart of

Soloviev’s understanding of the relationship between dogmatic development and the papal office, in which both realities presuppose each other.

CHAPTER 5

The Ecclesiological Contribution of Newman and Soloviev to Present-Day Ecumenism

Introduction

From the previous presentation of the views of Newman and Soloviev regarding doctrinal development, it seems clear that they had a similar understanding of the Church as the unique subject of doctrinal development. In addition, the two writers shared the conviction that the

“subjecthood of the Church”1 entailed in the idea of doctrinal development has clear implications for the way that the Church is structured. If the very nature of the Church includes the capacity for making universally binding judgments in matters of doctrine, the Church must be endowed with a central office or central authority that allows the Church to express her doctrinal position in matters pertaining to faith and morals. Hence, both Newman and Soloviev defended the papacy as a necessary institution in the doctrine-developing Church.

The present comparative chapter will examine Newman and Soloviev’s presentations of doctrinal development and its ecclesiological relationship to the papal office in four sections.

The first section will review several broader points of comparison and contrast between the views of Newman and Soloviev on doctrinal development. In the second, the ideas of Newman and Soloviev about doctrinal development and the papacy will be related to their fundamental perception of the Church as the living subject of doctrinal development. The third section will consider Newman and Soloviev’s ecclesiological contribution in the perspective of Hans Urs von

1 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 270. “Subjecthood of the Church,” the English translation of Joseph Ratzinger’s expression “das Subjektsein der Kirche,” is a neologism conveying the idea of the historical continuity of the Church as a living subject. Other expressions with the same or closely related connotation are “individuality” and “personality” of the Church, which were both used by Newman in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk; see below, 279. 271

272

Balthasar’s comparison of Newman and Soloviev in his influential work on Petrine ministry.2

This and the subsequent section will highlight Newman and Soloviev’s relevance for the contemporary ecclesiology. The fourth section will examine Newman and Soloviev’s views on the relationship between the development of doctrine and the papal office within the subjecthood of the Church in light of the eucharistic ecclesiology which has emerged as a leading theme in current Roman Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue. It will be proposed therein that

Newman and Soloviev’s ecclesiological ideas can present a significant contribution in the effort to harmonize eucharistic ecclesiology with the Catholic ecclesiology of the universal Church.

Newman and Soloviev’s Idea of Doctrinal Development

The idea of development was at the very core of the theological thinking of both

Newman and Soloviev. Newman’s idea of doctrinal development stemmed from his view of the assent of faith as the condition sine qua non of a person’s personal spiritual development, one’s journey with God.3 More than anything else, what attracted Newman to the question of doctrinal development was his concern to identify those church teachings that required an assent of faith.

With some simplification, it can be said that Newman’s focus in elaborating his view of doctrinal development was the bearing of the past on the present. He sought to ascertain precisely the scope of the ancient faith as a present-day requirement for the contemporary spiritual life experienced as a step-by-step journey with God.

2 Balthasar, Office, 292-307.

3 See above, 47-52.

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One of Newman’s notes of authentic development—“conservative action on its past” 4— seemingly was a major factor undergirding his view of development. He proposed doctrinal development not to emphasize the changes and progress in Christian teaching but rather to affirm its essential identity.5 Accordingly, the perceived novelties in Catholicism were in fact part and parcel of Revelation. In writing his Essay on Development, Newman pursued a controversialist rather than an ecumenical goal—presenting an apologetical argument for the doctrinal development in the history of Christianity, which in the final analysis he found coherent with the

Catholic understanding of doctrinal tradition and ecclesial structure.6

In contrast to Newman, the principle of doctrinal development attracted Soloviev because of his zeal for a progressive realization of his theocratic vision.7 Soloviev’s impetus in elaborating his view of doctrinal development was seemingly the bearing of the eschatological future on the present. The obvious contrast between the ideal vision of an all-embracing eschatological unity and the present condition marked by the religious and social fragmentation of mankind stimulated Soloviev’s interest in historical development understood as a progressive realization of the universal unity. Soloviev was attracted to the idea of dogmatic development in the Church as a mark of such progress.8

4 Dev. (1878), 199-203.

5 See above, 99.

6 See above, 92-93.

7 See above,.202-210.

8 See above, 236.

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Soloviev’s treatise on dogmatic development originated in the context of his ecumenical activity. The question of doctrinal development emerged as the main stumbling block in his controversy with Russian Slavophiles over the possibility of reunification between the Roman

Catholic and the Orthodox churches. Soloviev sought to show that the doctrines of the Roman

Catholic Church differed from those of the Orthodox Church because of a legitimate development of dogmatic details.9 For Soloviev, dogmatic development was part and parcel of the overall historical growth of the Church in relation to the eschatological fulfillment of history.

Bernard Marchadier has noted that Soloviev wrote his treatise on doctrinal development against the “dogmatic conservatism” of Russian theologians, while Newman wrote his Essay against the “adogmatism of the protestant church” in England.10 This statement may be said to be only partially correct. At the outset of his Essay, Newman indeed situated his work against

“the opponents of historical Christianity” who challenged the very notion of universal Christian doctrine as the authoritative vehicle for the historical transmission of revealed faith.11 However,

Newman devoted the bulk of his Essay to elaborating his view of doctrinal development as a corrective to his own Anglican Via Media ecclesiology which in his later estimation “came to pieces.”12

9 See above, 215, 243.

10 Marchadier, 125.

11 Dev. (1878), 9.

12 See above, 74-79, 92.

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Newman’s Anglican Via Media ecclesiology to a large extent resonated with the dogmatic conservativism of the Orthodox theologians with whom Soloviev waged his polemic.13

Both ecclesiologies were based on a notion of “historical testimony” to the doctrines of the early

Church that rejected all later developments of doctrine as teaching that was not held “always, everywhere and by all.” Newman and Soloviev both rejected the Vincentian canon—not as wrong in itself, but when mistakenly applied as an abstract historical criterion to supplant the living Magisterium of the Church.14

The refutation of the Vincentian canon by Newman and Soloviev was based on remarkably similar historical analyses. They both observed that the fact of a gradual increase of universally binding doctrinal definitions clearly contradicted the ahistorical assumption about a purported definite and perpetual consensus about Christian doctrine. Doctrinal definitions were always made without prejudice to the former teachers who had not previously held them. A simple comparison of the earlier records of Christian doctrine and the later teaching of ecumenical councils attests to the fact of doctrinal development.15

On the epistemological level, the views of Newman and Soloviev about doctrinal development remarkably converged in regard to the content of revealed religion as a unified idea. The process of doctrinal development gradually illuminates particular aspects of this one,

13 Marchadier, 132, aptly described Slavophilism as “puseyisme moscovite.”

14 See above, 94-95 and 246.

15 See above, 94-95 and 240 .

276 complex idea, as the particulars become expressed in individual dogmatic definitions. As

Newman observed:

This idea is not enlarged, if propositions are added, nor impaired if they are withdrawn: if they are added, this is with a view of conveying that one integral view, not of amplifying it. . . . The human mind cannot reflect upon that idea, except piecemeal, cannot use it in its oneness and entireness, nor without resolving it into a series of aspects and relations.16

Similarly, Soloviev understood doctrinal development as an exposition of a unified religious idea:

The [new] definitions are not new revelations, but rather new disclosures of one and the same immutable truth from those of her aspects, which had not been previously perceived in full clarity and distinctiveness by the Church’s consciousness. . . . The Church added nothing, nor could she, to the inner truthfulness of these dogmatic statements, but rather made them clearer and indisputable for all the orthodox.17

For this “one and the same immutable truth” Soloviev coined the term Godmanhood:

Revealed Truth is one and indivisible. . . . This truth consists of one and the same thing and to it belongs one and the same name—Godmanhood, the union of God with creation.18

In his concept of Godmanhood, Soloviev assembled the mysteries of the incarnation with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Church based on the mystical union of the

Church’s Head and the Body; the Church was considered, furthermore, as the representative of the new creation. The process of dogmatic development only brought

16 OUS, 331-332, 336; see above, 88.

17 SS 11:19; see above, 231.

18 Ibid., 21; see above, 234.

277 into the full light of clearly defined doctrines various particular aspects of this same mysterious truth.

In similar fashion, Newman considered the mystery of the incarnation “the central aspect of Christianity out of which the three main aspects of its teaching arise, the sacramental, the hierarchical and the ascetic.” 19 Accordingly,

Taking the Incarnation as the central doctrine [of Christianity], the Episcopate, as taught by St. Ignatius, will be an instance of political development, the Theotokos of logical, the determination of the date of our Lord’s birth of historical, the Holy Eucharist of moral, and the Athanasian Creed of metaphysical.20

The political, logical, historical, moral and metaphysical developments are then different aspects of doctrinal development.

The Church: a Living Subject of Doctrinal Development

Newman and Soloviev’s recognition of the content of divine Revelation as a unified idea in their epistemological analysis of doctrinal development is directly linked with their mutual understanding of the Church as the proper subject of doctrinal development. This ecclesiological view constitutes the core of their ecclesiological synthesis between the idea of doctrinal development and the universal teaching and governing office in the Church. Newman predicated his view of doctrinal development on an analogy of development of an idea in the mind of an individual believer and the development of doctrine in the mind of the Church. In other words, doctrinal development in the Church parallels the dynamic of growth in the personal religious

19 Dev. (1878), 36.

20 Ibid., 54; see above, 99.

278 development of an individual with his or her mind engaged in the process of faith seeking understanding.

According to Newman, “from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas.”21 The process of development was for Newman embedded in the dynamic structure of human understanding carried out by a discursive mind operating in time and space. In his analysis of the relationship between faith and reason in the process of religious thinking, Newman emphasized the role of “the illative sense”—the capacity of the human mind to make judgments based on converging probabilities and so to acquire intellectual certitude. Accordingly, doctrinal development is spurred by the capacity of the

Church to judge in the province of doctrine, as if using an illative sense “supernaturalized” by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church.22

Newman’s theological understanding of the parallelism between the illative sense and the

Church’s capacity to judge matters of faith indicates that he considered the Church the subject of doctrinal development. In fact, the key to Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism can be considered precisely to be his discovery of the Church endowed with infallibility as a doctrine- developing subject. His account of his personal theological development concerning the infallibility of the Church as found in his Apologia indicates his new conviction that the Church is capable of making new decisions concerning doctrine.23 The principle, securus judicat orbis

21 Dev. (1878) 29; see above, 96.

22 Norris, 164; see above, 130.

23 Apologia, 114-119; see above, 74-79.

279 terrarum, means that the Church is so organically united as to be a mystical subject endowed with a living mind.24

Newman expressed this view of the Church as a subject most emphatically in his defense in 1870 of the dogmatic definition of the infallibility of the papal Magisterium:

The Church is one, and that, not only in faith and morals, for schismatics may profess as much as this, but one, wherever it is, all over the world; and not only one, but one and the same, bound together by its one regimen and discipline and by the same regimen and discipline,—the same rites, the same sacraments, the same usages, and the same one Pastor; and in these bad times it is necessary for all Catholics to recollect, that this doctrine of the Church’s individuality and, as it were, personality, is not a mere received opinion or understanding, which may be entertained or not, as we please, but is a fundamental, necessary truth.25

Infallibility was for Newman an attribute of the Church as a unified and unanimous body, the

Church’s capacity to act with a single mind, so to speak. The infallibility of the Church required a living subject, a concrete unity of the Body of Christ.

Soloviev also considered the Church as the subject of doctrinal development:

Dynamic preservation, or—which means the same—development of truth requires the Church as a real and living being constantly growing in spiritual virtue and understanding. . . . The Church is a special and individual substance, incomparably more real and more alive than all those individuals and nations from which she is composed. She is more real and more alive as the human body surpasses the particular organs and cells that compose it. If we failed to perceive in the universal Church such authentic God- human substance, we would hardly be able to speak of the development of the Church and her teaching.26

24 See above, 74-79.

25 “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk” in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, 2:236; emphasis added.

26 SS 11:60-61—Церковь есть особое самостоятельное существо, неизмеримо более действительное и жизненное, нежели все те лица и народы, что входят в ее состав: она настолько их действительнее и жизненнее, насколько целое человеческое тело превосходит отдельные органы и клеточки, его составляющие. Если же не видеть во

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Soloviev’s theological understanding of the Church as a unique subject stemmed from his religious philosophy of unity.27 The highest form of unity was for Soloviev a religious society— a society permeated by divine love creating a just order and harmony among its members.

Members of such a society were not depersonalized by the demands of the whole as in a totalitarian regime; on the contrary, their individual personalities were to flourish in perfect relationships of mutual sympathy and understanding. The Church—spiritual or “Godhuman” society—was envisaged by Soloviev as a social organism whose members, in a sense, think and will as one.28

Soloviev contemplated the Church as a subject in terms of the Chalcedonian dogma which he called “the universal rule of religious reasoning”:

The authentic understanding of the Church is guided by the universal rule of religious reasoning: to distinguish in unity and to avoid equally mixing and separating. Hence, within the Church we distinguish, but do not separate, divine and human principles. . . . Thus, in the Church there is no isolated divinity nor isolated humanity, but their unity without division and confusion, which constitutes the individual Godhuman being of the Church, and which dwells equally but manifests differently in both of these facets of her being. From this follows also the universal law of life of the Church. If divinity is in itself absolutely immutable, and if humanity in itself is subject to haphazard changes, then Godmanhood develops in an orderly way. This means, it preserves without change its essence and fundamental forms, and grows not only in terms of an external volume but also in an inner fullness and perfection of expressions in all spheres of its existence.29

вселенской церкви такого самостоятельного богочеловеческого существа, тогда конечно нельзя говорить о развитии церкви и ее учения.

27 See above, 198-210.

28 See above, 202-210.

29 SS 11:60—Истинное же понятие о церкви руководится общим правилом религиозного рассуждения: различать в единстве, равномерно избегая смешения и разделения. Поэтому мы различаем, но не разлучаем в церкви божеское и человеческое начало. . . . Итак, в

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Doctrinal development was for Soloviev simply an aspect of the overall evolution of the Church toward her eschatological fulfillment. It seems that this view was his reason for describing his treatise as “dogmatic development of the Church,” rather than “in the Church.”

The Church’s dogmatic definitions were, according to Soloviev, expressions of the divine-human constitution of the Church par excellence.30 In other words, the Godhuman organism of the Church in the acts of universal teaching manifests most fully the unity of the

Church as “a real and living subject”:

If definitions represented merely subjective interpretations of truth, they would be then as little binding as subjective opinions by theological schools or by an individual theologian. If they simply expressed the primordial divinely revealed truth, then they could not possibly present a real progress which they do. Avoiding such contradiction is possible only by acquiescing in our view that in all statutes of the universal Church, enacted by her authentic representatives, neither divine nor human powers operate in isolation. Rather, operating is the actual Godhuman essence of the universal Church, in which the divine principle unites without separation and confusion with the human principle. . . . The universal definition, once it is given, can be neither abrogated nor alternated, because the Godhuman essence of the Church cannot contradict itself. However, to ascend from light to light, to grow and develop, this the universal Church can, or rather must do; otherwise, she would never be able to come to the fullness of stature of Christ, as the

церкви нет ни отрешенного Божества, ни отрешенного человечества, а только их нераздельное и неслиянное соединение, оно же и образует особое богочеловеческое существо церкви, одинаково пребывающее, но различно проявляемое в этих двух сторонах своего бытия. Отсюда же и общий закон жизни для церкви. Если Божество само по себе абсолютно неизменно, если человечество само по себе подвержено случайным изменениям, то богочеловечество правильно развивается, т. е., сохраняя неизменным свое существо и свои основные формы, возрастает не только по внешнему объему, но и по внутренней полноте и совершенству своих проявлений во всех сферах своего существования.

30 See above, 247.

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Apostle said, or reach perfect divinization (Θέοσις), as some of our Fathers put it.31

For Soloviev, dogmatic definitions bear witness to the ongoing growth of the Church, which is the very life of the Godhuman organism on its journey to eschatological perfection, “to the full stature of Christ.”

Soloviev’s emphasis on the divine-human constitution of the Church could leave him open to charges of hypostasizing the Church, as if the Church was constituted literally as the union of a divine and a human nature in one person. The use of the Chalcedonian dogma in his exposition of the unity of the Church might be seen as indicative of such hypostasizing; however, on closer inspection, an important distinction must be made in his use of the

Chalcedonian formula and the content of the Christological dogma. Soloviev applied to the unity of divine and human constituents in the Church the form found in the dogmatic definition—unity “without separation and confusion,” but he never implied that this unity involved the same content as the hypostatic union. In La Russie, Soloviev explicitly

31 SS 11:61-62—Если бы определения были только субъективными изъяснениями истины, то они были бы столь же мало обязательны, как субъективные мнения какой-нибудь богословской школы или какого-нибудь частного богослова; а если бы они были простым выражением первоначальной богооткровенной истины, то они не могли бы представлять того прогресса, который они действительно представляют. Избегнуть такого противоречия можно только держась того нашего взгляда, что во всех актах вселенской церкви, совершаемых чрез ее законное представительство, ни божественные, ни человеческие силы не действуют в своей отдельности, а действует само богочеловеческое существо вселенской церкви, в коем божеское начало нераздельно и неслиянно сочетается с началом человеческим. . . . Данное однажды вселенское определение не может быть ни отменено, ни изменено, ибо богочеловеческое существо церкви не возрастать и развиваться вселенская церковь может и должна, иначе она никогда не пришла бы в полноту возраста Христова, как говорит апостол, или никогда не достигла бы совершенного обóжения (Θέοσις), как выражаются некоторые великие отцы церкви.

283 differentiated in the mystery of the Church three kinds of union between the divine and the human principles in his original analysis of the three rocks of Christianity:

The foundation of the Church, speaking in general terms, is the union of the divine and the human. This foundation (the rock) we find in Jesus Christ inasmuch as He unites the Godhead hypostatically with sinless human nature; we find it also in every true Christian inasmuch as he is united to Christ by the sacraments, by faith and by good works. But is it not clear that these two modes of union between the divine and the human (the hypostatic union in the person of Christ, and the individual union of the believer with Christ) are not in themselves sufficient to constitute the specific unity of the Church in the strict sense of the word—that is, as a social and historical entity?32

Soloviev then postulated a third kind of union, “the specific principle of social unity in the

Church,”33 and he stressed that there was “no question in this case of creating a substantial and individual relation, or a hypostatic and complete union between two natures, but simply of forging a living moral bond.”34 He referred to the office of Peter—“he alone is the rock of the

Church in this special and strict sense of the term, that is to say, the unifying basis of the historic

Christian society.”35

If Soloviev theologically articulated the unity of divine and human elements in the

Church with language strongly evocative of the mystery of the incarnation, it was because he emphasized the continuity between incarnation and divinization in the mystery of the Church.

Paraphrasing the term “realized eschatology” that later became popular in biblical scholarship in

32 La Russie, 105-106; translation: RUC 100. Emphasis added.

33 Ibid., 106.

34 Ibid., 90.

35 Ibid., 106.

284 reference to the reality of the kingdom of God in the Gospels,36 it might be said that Soloviev conceived Godmanhood as a “realized theosis.”

The subjecthood of the Church was for both Newman and Soloviev closely associated with the gift of infallibility. Yet, on this point, their respective understandings differed significantly. Newman derived the “antecedent probability” of infallible authority developing in the Church from the complementary link between doctrinal development and infallibility:

In proportion to the probability of true developments of doctrine and practice in the Divine Scheme, so is the probability also of the appointment in that scheme of an external authority to decide upon them, thereby separating them from the mass of mere human speculation, extravagance, corruption, and error, in and out of which they grow. This is the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church; for by infallibility I suppose is meant the power of deciding whether this, that, and a third, and any number of theological or ethical statements are true.37

To distinguish between authentic doctrinal development and corruption of doctrine, the

Church has to be endowed with the power to judge securely in teaching about Revelation.

This power issues from a special assistance of the Holy Spirit given the Church by Christ, who does not allow the Church to err in its universal teaching about faith and morals.

In his Essay, Newman approached the topic of infallibility on the level of principles rather than doctrines38 and located infallibility within the universal assent of

36 See Charles Harold Dodd, Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961). On the positive reception of the term realized eschatology in Catholic theology, see Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From in the Jordan to Transfiguration (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 188.

37 Dev. (1878), 78-79; see above 79 and 127.

38 See above, 124-126.

285 the Church in matters of faith and morals.39 One might say that Newman identified infallibility as “the illative sense” in the mind of the Church.40 In his 1859 article On

Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, Newman emphasized the importance of the consensus fidelium (understood as an instinct for the true faith on the part of the laity in the Church) in determining the mind of the Church (sensus Ecclesiae, understood as an instinct on the part of both the laity and the clergy):41

One man will lay more stress on one aspect of doctrine, another on another; for myself, I am accustomed to lay great stress on the consensus fidelium. . . . Gregory [of Valencia] says that, in controversy about a matter of faith, the consent of all the faithful has such a force in the proof of this side or that, that the Supreme Pontiff is able and ought to rest upon it, as being the judgment or sentiment of the infallible Church. These are surely exceedingly strong words; not that I take them to mean strictly that infallibility is in the “consensus fidelium,” but that that “consensus” is an indicium or instrumentum to us of the judgment of that Church which is infallible.42

To support his interpretation of the consensus fidelium from the history of the Church,

Newman offered a long list of instances in history when orthodox dogma was upheld more effectively by the faithful laity than by the hierarchy.43

39 See above, 76-77; also Balthasar, Office, 296.

40 See above, 130.

41 Ordinarily, the terms sensus fidelium and sensus Ecclesiae are understood as synonymous (see Sullivan, Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church, 23; see above, 244, note 74). The distinction which Newman employs is found specifically in On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, 205-206, where Newman highlights the contribution of the laity in preserving orthodox teaching.

42 On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, 205, 208. Gregory of Valencia (1550-1603) was a Spanish Jesuit priest and theologian.

43 Ibid., 219-230.

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When underscoring the role of the faithful as “the voice of the infallible Church,”

Newman did so not in opposition to but in unity with the Magisterium. Thus, he fully acknowledged that “the gift of discerning, discriminating, defining, promulgating, and enforcing any portion of that tradition resides solely in the Ecclesia docens.”44 Earlier in his Essay, he had characterized the foundations of the Magisterium as “a developing infallible authority” in the Church capable of giving official sanction to authentic doctrinal developments.45

Soloviev never used the Latin expression sensus Ecclesiae;46 however, he spoke about “religious unanimity” virtually in the same sense.47 According to Soloviev, the theory in Russian Orthodox theology of a complete historical deposit of Church doctrine, as represented by Stoianov, reduced the principle of religious agreement from a living memory and present reality to an archeological artefact. The individuality of the Church was for Soloviev most recognizable in the process of making decisions concerning doctrinal truth in dogmatic controversies, when the Church by unanimous consent acted as a living organism “expelling from herself pernicious elements.”48 In contrast,

44 On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, 205.

45 See above, 104-105 and 111.

46 The sole exception is a passage in La Russie, 96, referring to the 1870 definition.

47 See above, 244, note 74.

48 SS 11:61.

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Stoianov’s version of Orthodox theology presented a vision of the Church no longer capable of “expressing her mind” and thus devoid of real unanimity.49

On this point Soloviev and Newman seem in accord: if doctrinal development represents a phenomenon observable in history of a process of raising certain statements to the level of universally binding doctrines, there logically has to be in the Church a legitimate authority capable of making such decisions. However, Soloviev differed from

Newman in locating the gift of infallibility. It is not an attribute of religious agreement, of the sensus Ecclesiae, which for Soloviev had only the character of a pre-definite

“cordial feeling.”50 In La Russie, he described infallibility as an attribute of the teaching authority, and more specifically, of the pope’s universal teaching authority. Although the pope does not exercise the Church’s universal Magisterium in isolation from other bishops in the episcopal college, it is the pope who gives ecclesiastical acts in matters of faith and morals the form of a human judgment, to which his office gives the character of

“absolute validity.”

It was not by means of a general consultation but (as Jesus Christ Himself bore witness) with the direct assistance of the heavenly Father that Peter formulated the fundamental dogma of our religion; and his word defined the faith of Christians by its own inherent power, not by the consent of others—ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae.51

49 See above, 245.

50 See above, 248.

51 La Russie, 95-96; translation: RUC, 95. See above, 264.

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In regard to their theological understandings of infallibility, both Newman and

Soloviev referred to infallibility as related to an act of judgment on behalf of the universal Church that determines the true teaching of faith. However, Newman understood such judgment as an act of the illative sense in the mind of the Church discerning with certitude truth from heresy. Soloviev understood the judgment to consist in the official definition by the authentic representative of the universal Magisterium, the pope. The difference between Newman and Soloviev’s views on infallibility seems rooted in their use of “judgment.”

In commenting on the First Vatican Council’s declaration of the dogma concerning the infallibility of the papal Magisterium (1870), Newman affirmed infallibility in the case of the pope teaching ex cathedra: “I have ever believed as much as the definition says.”52 He apparently thought that doctrinal judgments involved the capacity by the authentic universal Magisterium of the Church to express the mind of the

Church as dogmatic definitions.

Where Newman and Soloviev were definitely in agreement was regarding the absolute requirement of a center of unity in the Church where doctrine developed under the authority of the universal Magisterium. The Church—which both authors conceived as the subject of doctrinal development—presupposed a visible hierarchical structure with a “living organ” of supreme teaching and governing authority. According to

Newman,

52 Newman to Mrs. William Froude (Birmingham, 8 August 1870), LD 25:176.

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it is the absolute need of a monarchical power in the Church which is our ground for anticipating it. A political body cannot exist without government, and the larger is the body the more concentrated must the government be. If the whole of Christendom is to form one Kingdom, one head is essential; at least this is the experience of eighteen hundred years. As the Church grew into form, so did the power of the Pope develope [sic]; and wherever the Pope has been renounced, decay and division have been the consequence. We know of no other way of preserving the Sacramentum Unitatis, but a centre of unity.53

The subjecthood of the Church had for Newman necessary consequences for the structure of the Church which by means of the papal office secures effective exercise of the universal Magisterium. Such effective exercise required a synergy of the teaching and governing authority in the Church in a personal representative capable of declaring the mind of the Church.54

Soloviev affirmed the synergy of the pope’s universal teaching and governing authority more emphatically:

As the unity of the orthodox faith is finally guaranteed by the dogmatic authority of a single individual speaking for all, so unity of ecclesiastical action is necessarily conditioned by the directing authority of a single individual bearing sway over the whole Church. But in the One Holy Church, founded upon truth, government cannot be separated from doctrine; and the central and supreme power in the ecclesiastical sphere can only belong to him who by divinely aided authority represents and displays in the religious sphere the unity of true faith.55

Both Newman and Soloviev insisted on the monarchical character of the ecclesial structure. According to Newman, the monarchical character corresponds to the hierarchical principle in the antecedent idea of the Church as the subject of doctrinal

53 Dev. (1878), 154-155; see above, 122.

54 See above, 126-131.

55 La Russie, 123-124; translation: RUC, 112. See above, 268-269.

290 development; a government is absolutely necessary if the Church is to act as a single body.56 For Soloviev, the monarchical character of the Church is a direct result of the special “moral bond” between Christ and Peter’s successors forming “the primary basis of union between the social conscience of mankind and the providential government of

God.”57 Soloviev perceived the monarchical power of the papacy in terms of “the unique institution of universal fatherhood in the Church.”58 In sum, Newman and Soloviev saw the hierarchical structure culminating in the papacy as a part of the visible body of the universal Church, which envelops and expresses her living and developing mind.

Newman and Soloviev’s Understanding of the Papacy as the Guarantor of the Realm Where the Church Can Freely Live, Act and Develop

In his book concerning “the anti-Roman attitude” in the Church, Hans Urs von

Balthasar has a section entitled “The Citadel of Freedom,”59 which brings to the fore

Newman and Soloviev’s ecclesiological legacy as a twofold witness to Rome—“the guarantor of Christian freedom in the face of the powers of this world.”60 As Balthasar recognized, calling the papal see a guardian of Christian freedom (a reference to Paul’s spiritual freedom in 2 Cor 3:17, Rom 8:21) seems rather paradoxical. However,

56 See above, 122, 126-131.

57 La Russie, 128; see above, 262.

58 La Russie, 308.

59 Balthasar, Office, 287-307.

60 Ibid., 287-288.

291 according to Balthasar, Newman and Soloviev, were “men of free, enquiring minds who, in searching for a guarantee of ecclesial freedom were led by a compelling logic to

Rome.”61

According to Balthasar,

Newman’s religious soul sought a true encounter with the absolute God, the Creator, Redeemer and Judge, and with living authority, an authority in which Christ becomes unavoidably real and is mediated without distortion, by a christiform Church.62

Balthasar then traced the collapse of Newman’s Anglican Via Media ecclesiology to his recognition that the episcopal office is paralyzed without a primacy, it cannot act and judge. Securus judicat orbis terrarum: “Unity of faith was preserved by the action of a concrete center, endowed with authority.”63

Balthasar quoted a text written by Newman as a Roman Catholic, which presented a long historical list of heretical and schismatic parties invariably fastening to a secular power—and thus being deprived of their Christian-ecclesial freedom:

Can a Church cast off Catholic intercommunion without falling under the power of the state? . . . Truly is it then called a Branch Church; for as a branch cannot live of itself, therefore, as soon as it is lopped from the Body of Christ, it is straightway grafted of sheer necessity upon the civil constitution.64

61 Balthasar, Office, 290.

62 Ibid., 292.

63 Ibid., 297.

64 Ibid., 295; quoting Newman’s Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, 1: 186.

292

Balthasar recognized the ecclesiological relationship between doctrinal development and the papal office in Newman’s Essay:

His whole problem was how to reconcile the two aspects of an authority that is both divine and contemporary in the Church: it had to be unchangeable yet timely, mysterious and unfathomable yet presenting a clear challenge. Both aspects were present in the first councils of the Church. . . . Ultimately, “development” is necessary, even in the supernatural organism of the Church, in order to maintain her living identity. This is the point reached in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). However, the exercise of episcopacy by itself cannot guarantee universal unity. . . . Consequently, “we know no other means to safeguard the sacramentum unitatis of the Church than by a center of unity.” In the same year (1845), Newman became a Catholic to gain contact with that center.65

In his Roman Catholic period, Newman did not put the papacy at the center of his theological interests. According to Balthasar, later in life and work as a Catholic,

Newman’s focus was not on the papacy, but on “the realm of freedom” upheld by the papacy.66

In Balthasar’s view, Soloviev was “a completely different person from Newman,” yet the reasons for his attraction to Rome were “precisely the same as those of the

Englishman.”67 In Soloviev’s critique, the Slavophiles’ ideal of a free ecclesial collegiality confused “the goal for which they strive—which they take for granted—with the path along which such an ideal must be approached.”68 Soloviev found in the papacy

65 Balthasar, Office, 297-298.

66 Ibid., 299.

67 Ibid., 299-300.

68 Ibid., 297.

293 the fulcrum, a real basis for the Church’s evolution to religious all-unity. More emphatically than Newman, Soloviev condemned the nationalism of a church separated from Catholic communion: “A Church that is a subdivision of the state, i.e. of a ‘kingdom of this world,’ is compelled to share the fate of all worldly kingdoms.”69

Balthasar recapitulated the fundamental point of Soloviev’s ecclesiology:

It was the freedom of Peter’s personal confession of the total (supranational) truth of the God-man that made him the rock that serves as a bridge between the real rock, Christ, who upholds all, and the rock of the Church, in which all believers are placed as living stones. He has been set within the collegium, the “primitive council of the twelve apostles,” but this collegium can only find and maintain its unbreakable unity if it remains in union with Peter: “The divine Architect. . . . establishes the ideal of unanimity by tying it to a real, living authority.”70

Returning to his point about Newman and Soloviev’s witness to Rome as the citadel of ecclesial freedom, Balthasar concluded:

For both of them [Newman and Soloviev], papacy is not an end in itself but a means to and a guarantee of freedom. For both, the Church is the embryonic city of God, asserting itself in the freedom of love. Their eyes are fixed on this as the only goal but they know that the obligatory and concrete point of reference, Rome, is the condition for such freedom.71

For Balthasar, Newman and Soloviev’s ecclesiological ideas are still highly relevant for current ecclesiology and ecumenical dialogue. In a secular culture marked by a rampant bias against authority as a result of absolutizing the autonomy of human freedom and an

69 La Russie, 57; quoted in Balthasar, Office, 301.

70 Balthasar, Office, 304; see La Russie, 103.

71 Ibid., 306-307.

294 ideology of progress, secular motives can easily seep into ecclesiology, bolstering dissent, provincialism and individualism.

Dissonant ecclesiological tones can sound, paradoxically, in the ecumenical search for unity whenever the papal office is considered not as a necessary center but as an obstacle for ecclesial unity and so relegated to the level of secondary issues. What figures as a common refrain in objections against papal primacy by Orthodox theologians is their complaint that the pope’s exercise of the governing office in the Church creates an ecclesial structure that presents merely a “juridical” or “external” form of unity.72

Balthasar cautioned against a critique of the papacy grounded on a sociological rather than theological basis as the working frame for ecumenical dialogue.73

Newman and Soloviev’s ecclesiological contextualizations of doctrinal development clearly indicate that the papacy is not an institution providing a mere external integration, or political or sociological centralization. Rather, the papacy is a visible sign of the subjecthood of the Church, her internal centralization proceeding from the unanimous consent of believers in one universal faith. The challenge that Newman and Soloviev present to any opponents of doctrinal development in the Church concerns, first of all, the category of unanimity, oneness of mind, the sensus Ecclesiae. The Church

72 See for example the essay by Nicholas Afanasiev (first published in 1963) “Una Sancta” in Michael Plekon, editor, Tradition Alive (New York: Sheed&Ward, 2003), 3-30, at 24; John Zizioulas, “Primacy in the Church: An Orthodox Approach” in James F. Puglisi, editor, Petrine Ministry and the Unity of the Church (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier, 1999), 115-125, at 124 and John Zizioulas, “Recent Discussions on Primacy in Orthodox Theology” in Cardinal Walter Kasper, editor, The Petrine Ministry (New York: Newman, 2006), 231-248, at 245.

73 See Balthasar, Office, 128-134.

295 would be merely an archeological artifact if the Church no longer has the capacity to judge about matters of faith and morals. Such a lack would imply that the visible unity of the Church is an unattainable ideal; a visible Church would no longer exist. As Newman summarized the argument of his Essay, “whereas the Church is to last to the end of the world, unless that large Communion which happens to be Roman be the Church, the

Church has failed.”74

In light of Soloviev’s analysis of doctrinal development, one can see that the link in Newman’s theory between the development of faith seeking understanding in the individual mind and the development of doctrine in the Church, the link between the illative sense in the mind of a believer and the sensus Ecclesiae, is not merely figurative.

This analogy is fundamentally rooted in a recognition of the divine-human constitution of the Church, which in her universality is not an abstract or idealistic concept, but a concrete and organic form of unity. The Church in her universality is thus the proper subject of doctrinal development. As Soloviev wrote, “If we failed to perceive in the universal Church such authentic God-human substance, we would hardly be able to speak of the development of the Church and her teaching.”75

Soloviev thus considered doctrinal developments to be a necessary expression of the divine-human subjecthood of the Church, combining the divine principle conspicuous in its irreversibility and the human principle seen as a human medium admitting of further elaboration.

74 Newman to Daniel Radford (15 October 1862), LD 20:308; see above, 130.

75 SS 11:60-61; see above, 279.

296

The teaching and governing offices of the Church are not mere external forces or juridical means. All members of the Church participate in doctrinal decisions, clergy and laity; the latter do so “morally. . . . by means of trust and love for the great God-human entity in her living representatives.”76 As a result, “the living Church, organically united and equipped with internal solidarity is made firm by the continuous hierarchical bond, and thus presents a real and sovereign being.”77 As Soloviev elaborated,

All who belong to the universal Church participate in her statutes, not only clergy but also the laity. However, they do not participate individually by their private opinion and will. . . . They participate morally with an act of trust and free assent by means of which each and every individual mind is united with the universal mind of the Church; by such a seal it becomes a worthy dwelling for the action of the Holy Spirit.78

This view accords with the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum, which presented the teaching authority of the Church not only as an external or formal means but also as an authority inseparably linked with the process of handing on Revelation via Scripture and

Tradition in such a way that all three realities “under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls.”79

Soloviev understood that the teaching and governing office in the Church was an innate power or internal organ in the ecclesial structure to safeguard the unity of faith:

Between the relative thought of human beings and the absolute content of divine Revelation there is no whimsical illusion of universal unanimity, but rather real

76 SS 11:59-60; see above, 250.

77 Ibid., 56.

78 Ibid.; see above, 253.

79 Dei Verbum, § 10.

297

and living organs within the real and living being of the Church. Precisely these organs on the basis of the full authority given from above, together with the cooperating divine assistance, place the seed of divine truth in the concrete and distinct forms and definitions as a single and universally binding boundary for all partial minds theologizing on the given truth.80

The last sentence presents a profound insight into the role of teaching authority in the learning process. A teacher’s authority is a means to an end. A good teacher is not satisfied with passing on to his students a mass of information and leaving his students to sort it out all by themselves. His role also entails guiding their minds, which includes dismissing any premature or incorrect conclusions that do not correspond to the truth on a given subject. By affirming the valid principles as “a single boundary” of study in a certain field, a teacher provides students an invaluable service: he helps to form their minds and enables them to develop most fully their potential. Revolting against teaching authority as an external force that does not serve the interests of students or believers, but constrains their freedom, can only impair if not wreck the learning process or the desired growth of believers in their personal religious development.

Newman himself never understood the hierarchical authority of the Church as merely an external or juridical means of ecclesiastical order. Although he described the

Magisterium in his Essay as “an external developing authority,”81 “external” indicated that such authority was “a normative standpoint” for doctrinal developments which

80 SS 11:56; see above, 248.

81 Dev. (1878), 78, 86.

298 transcends the realm of subjective reasoning.82 As such, the doctrinal authority is according to Newman relatively independent from doctrinal developments; however, it is an inherent part of the Church’s constitution. “Developing” includes the authority intrinsically linked with the Church’s capacity to judge; the “external developing authority” is always integrated with the innermost being of the Church, because it conveys the ecclesial mind. Further, this authority has a concrete representation in the visible Church; it is, so to speak, externalized in the office of the institutional Church.

Newman thus drew an interesting analogy with the authority of conscience which represents a judge in a certain sense external to human processes of reasoning and volition:

The supremacy of conscience is the essence of natural religion; the supremacy of Apostle, or Pope, or Church, or Bishop, is the essence of revealed; and when such external authority is taken away, the mind falls back again of necessity upon that inward guide which it possessed even before Revelation was vouchsafed. Thus, what conscience is in the system of nature, such is the voice of Scripture, or of the Church, or of the Holy See, as we may determine it, in the system of Revelation. It may be objected, indeed, that conscience is not infallible; it is true, but still it is ever to be obeyed. And this is just the prerogative which controversialists assign to the See of St. Peter; it is not in all cases infallible, it may err beyond its special province, but it has in all cases a claim on our obedience.83

This is surely a very different perspective from suggesting that the papacy is a matter of merely external structure and canonical order which has no relation to the essence of ecclesial unity.

82 See Lash, 114.

83 Dev. (1878), 86.

299

In his Preface to the Third Edition of the Via Media, Newman analyzed the interaction between the teaching and governing offices.84 He insisted that the Church does not exercise the teaching office “in isolation,” but rather as part of “a triple office” in the Church of teaching, governing and sanctifying—ministries which are “indivisible, though diverse:”85

Christianity, then, is at once a philosophy, a political power, and a religious rite: as a religion, it is Holy; as a philosophy, it is Apostolic; as a political power, it is imperial, that is, One and Catholic. As a religion, its special center of action is pastor and flock; as a philosophy, the Schools; as a rule, the Papacy and its Curia.86

The Preface delineated the intricate relationship between the prophetic office— understood here by Newman in terms of the teaching function of theology—and government in the triple office of the Church, where “each of the three has its separate scope and direction; each has its own interests to promote and further; each has to find room for the claims of the other two.”87 The superhuman task of combining all three ministries in the practice of the Church’s leadership, given the human frailty of Church leaders, can easily expose them to charges of hypocrisy or rigidity, cowardliness or tyranny.88

84 See VM 1:xv-xciv.

85 Ibid., xl.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid., xli.

88 Ibid.

300

Newman did not hesitate to admit that the hierarchy can make mistakes when mediating among differing claims of the three offices in the Church. This fact can be seen epitomized in the incident at Antioch when the Apostle Paul confronted the Apostle Peter for erring on the side of the Jewish Christians in his effort to safeguard the precarious compromise with Gentile Christians in the Church of the New Testament.89 However,

Newman insisted that the Church in principle must exercise its universal government in conjunction with her teaching and priestly office; and, that the “special center of action” of the governing office in the Church is the Holy See.90 In effect, Newman rejected the

“anti-Roman attitude” embedded in his own Anglican lectures.

Soloviev also distinguished between the priestly, governing and prophetic offices in the Church in his La Russie et l’Eglise Universelle. He discussed the unity of the three offices on two different levels: on the one hand, as different functions of the hierarchy in the Church;91 on the other, as building blocks in his basic outline for theocracy.92 In the latter analysis, the priestly office is represented in society by the Church which is the primary constituent in the structure of Soloviev’s theocracy. The Church fulfills her priestly function as “the organization of a permanent fatherhood”93 by preserving the

89 VM 1:lxxv-lxxvi; see Galatians 2:11-14.

90 Ibid., xl.

91 See La Russie, 121-133.

92 See ibid., 297-329. Cf. a good analysis of Soloviev’s idea of theocracy in Sutton, 64-81.

93 La Russie, 304, 312.

301 religious memory of Christ’s salvific work, generating the Christian life of believers and sustaining it by the word and the sacraments. The priestly office of the Church is then a conservative social force keeping alive the reality of salvation history.94

The role of the governing office or kingship bestowed by the Church on the

Christian state is to manage public affairs according to the actual demands of Christian life.95 Soloviev was decidedly opposed to the separation of Church and state.96 However, he envisioned a truly Christian state subordinated to the Church and eager to apply

Christian teaching in social life in contrast to the historical experience in the Byzantine world. As he indicated in the first part of La Russie, an effort to eliminate the Church’s influence in social and political spheres in society was the common denominator of all imperial heresies.97 Finally, for the successful integration of the priestly and governing offices in Soloviev’s theocracy, the prophetic office is necessary in order to orient the priesthood and the government to the future and order them to “the perfect ideal of deified humanity as the supreme goal of their activity.”98 By its nature, the prophetic

94 La Russie, xvi-xix, 303-306, 317-318.

95 Ibid., 314-320.

96 Ibid., xii-xiii.

97 Ibid., xxiv-li.

98 Ibid., 321.

302 office in the theocratic society does not need an institutional form; it is carried by men and women possessing a divine inspiration in some way or another.99

Soloviev’s understanding of the priestly, governing and prophetic offices as representing tradition (past), action (present) and eschatology (future), respectively, is an original idea which can help to illumine the inner structure of “the triple office” in the

Church. For present purposes—the relevance of Newman and Soloviev for 21st century ecclesiology—it is important to highlight Soloviev’s emphasis on the coalescence of the teaching and governing functions as he discussed them in a narrow sense in La Russie, as functions within the theocratic priesthood—the Church:

As the unity of the orthodox faith is finally guaranteed by the dogmatic authority of a single individual speaking for all, so unity of ecclesiastical action is necessarily conditioned by the directing authority of a single individual bearing sway over the whole Church.100

The governing office cannot be separated from the teaching office in the ministry of the

Supreme Pontiff, simply because in fact the exercise of teaching must always include some form of ecclesiastical action.

To those promoting the Orthodox ideal of the Church “as the spontaneous, inward synthesis of unity and freedom in charity”101 in contrast to caricatures of the unity of Roman Catholic Church as based on “the external and binding jurisdiction of a public

99 La Russie, 321-322.

100 Ibid., 123-124; translation: RUC, 112. See above, 244-246.

101 Ibid., 35.

303 religious authority,”102 Soloviev had a twofold response. First, as Balthasar pointed out,

Soloviev’s critics confused an eschatological ideal with the concrete historical form of the visible Church: “These self-styled Orthodox maintain that the best way of reaching the harbor is to pretend that you are there already.”103 Second, these critics confused ecclesiastical and religious freedom.104 The former is guaranteed by the universal center independent of any secular power; the latter is enjoyed in “the free assent by means of which each and every individual mind is united with the universal mind of the

Church.”105

Soloviev, like Newman, had no difficulty in admitting that the Roman Catholic

Church has at times erred in its exercise of the governing office due to an excess of zeal that resulted in forms of coercion. Nonetheless, Soloviev, like Newman, strenuously defended the governing office as an authentic principle:

The Slavophiles, in their anti-Catholic propaganda, have labored to confuse ecclesiastical with religious freedom. Since the Catholic Church has not always been tolerant, and since she does not admit the principle of indifference in religious matters, it is only too easy to declaim against the despotism of Rome without mentioning the great prerogative of ecclesiastical freedom which Catholicism alone of all Christians communions has always maintained.106

102La Russie, 36.

103 Ibid., 36; see above, 292.

104 Ibid., 40-45.

105 SS 11:56; see above, 253.

106 La Russie, 44; translation: RUC, 61.

304

Soloviev then remarked: “But when it comes to our own case, nothing is gained by the confusion of these two freedoms since it is clear that we [Russian Orthodox] possess neither.”107

Based on the prohibition in the canons of the Seventh Ecumenical Council of the election of bishops by secular rulers,108 Soloviev had considerable reservations about the legitimacy of the ecclesial administration in Russia.109 He supposed that in the mind of the faithful the ecclesiastical administration of the Orthodox Church was “tolerated half- heartedly for want of something better.”110 According to Soloviev, an authentic ecclesial hierarchy had to form one single whole with the universal Magisterium by means of visible union with the center of unity—the papacy. This union serves as the hallmark of the interior connection between the hierarchy and ecclesial consciousness. As Soloviev wrote in his treatise on dogmatic development, “the living Church, organically united and equipped with internal solidarity is made firm by the continuous hierarchical bond, and thus presents a real and sovereign being.”111

107 La Russie, 44.

108 See Second Council of Nicaea, Session 8, 23 October 787, Canons on the election to , DH 604.

109 See La Russie, 29, note 1.

110 Soloviev to the editor of L’Univers (22 September 1888), SS 11:135-138, at 138.

111 SS 11:56; see above, 253.

305

In this context, Soloviev’s view of the papacy in terms of “the unique institution of universal fatherhood in the Church, the image and instrument of divine Fatherhood”112 merits attention. There is no doubt that with regard to the sacrament of holy orders, the bishop of Rome is equal to all other bishops in the Church in possessing the fullness of priesthood through episcopal ordination. However, the Petrine ministry should not be relegated to a matter of juridical administration—supposedly having nothing to do either with the channels of or with the divine-human constitution of the Church.

The Second Vatican Council employed sacramental terminology in a broader sense—encompassing all means of grace in the Church including sacraments, sacramentals, charisms, special ministries as well as different manifestations of spiritual fruitfulness: “the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race,”113 There seems to be no reason why the protos, the visible sign of ecclesial unity, should not also be understood sacramentally in a broad sense of the term.

For Soloviev, the pope is an external and visible sign of the Church and an instrument of her universal unity not merely externally and juridically, but internally and familially. Spiritual fatherhood, of course, does not belong to the pope exclusively, but is

112 La Russie, 308.

113 Lumen Gentium, § 1.

306 shared by the clergy on every level of pastoral office in the Church. The distinguishing mark of the pope’s spiritual fatherhood is its universal scope of influence.114

As a Catholic, Newman often found himself at odds with the ultramontanists in the Church. He might be said to have experienced personally the intrinsic tensions between the prophetical and the governing office which he so vividly described in his preface to the third edition of the Via Media. Nonetheless, Newman was not a leader of resistance to the papacy.115 In response to a journal that was spreading rumors about his supposed disappointment as a convert and his plans for returning to the Church of

England, Newman earnestly defended the freedom that he found in the Roman Catholic

Church:

I have not had one moment’s wavering of trust in the Catholic Church ever since I was received into her fold. I hold, and ever have held, that her Sovereign Pontiff is the centre of unity and the Vicar of Christ; and I have ever had, and have still, an unclouded faith in her creed in all its articles; a supreme satisfaction in her worship, discipline, and teaching; and an eager longing, and a hope against hope, that the many dear friends whom I have left in Protestantism may be partakers of my happiness. This being my state of mind, to add, as I hereby go on to do, that I have no intention, and never had any intention, of leaving the Catholic Church and becoming a Protestant again, would be superfluous except Protestants are always on the look-out for some loophole of evasion in a Catholic statement of fact. Therefore, in order to give them full satisfaction, if I can, I hereby profess ex animo, with an absolute internal assent and consent, that Protestantism is the dreariest of possible religions; that the thought of the Anglican service makes me shiver and the thought of the Thirty-nine articles makes me shudder. “The net is broken and we are delivered.” I should be a consummate fool (to use a mild term) if in my old age I left

114 La Russie, 312-313. See the chapter “Fatherhood of the Clergy” in Henri de Lubac, Motherhood of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 85-112.

115 Kathleen Kirk, The Sensus Fidelium: With Special Reference to the Thought of Blessed John Henry Newman (Leominster: Gracewing, 2010), has shown convincingly that theologians misinterpret Newman when portraying his ecclesiology in terms of a conflict between sensus fidelium and the Magisterium.

307

“the land flowing with milk and honey” for the city of confusion and the house of bondage.116

Newman and Soloviev experienced first-hand the religious captivity of a church stripped of any real means to transcend either “the private judgment”117 and the issuing pluralism even on fundamental points of faith and morals or nationalism built upon a stagnant theology of conservatism and dogmatic literalism.118 Both Newman and

Soloviev found freedom of spiritual fruitfulness in the realm of unanimity charted by “the unique institution of universal fatherhood in the Church.”119 Soloviev and Newman thus offer a sobering corrective to the theories of those non-Catholics who, according to an old

Slovak saying, make from poverty their virtue, pretending that their lack of unanimity and ecclesial unity in fact embodies a higher ideal of the Church.

A Proposal: The Church as a Communion, “One Body, One Spirit in Christ”

The inner connection between ecclesial consciousness and ecclesial authority in the views of Newman and Soloviev about doctrinal development and its relationship to the papacy provides a basis for a concluding reflection on the subjecthood of the Church and its relevance for contemporary theology and ecumenism. In the following section, an attempt is made to bring into dialog Newman and Soloviev’s understanding of the Church in terms of a real and

116 Newman to the editor of The Globe (Birmingham, 28 June 1862) LD 20:215-216. See Ps 124:7, Ex 3:8.

117 See above, 65.

118 See above, 242-244.

119 La Russie, 308.

308 living subject of doctrinal development with some more recent developments in eucharistic ecclesiology. It proposes that Newman and Soloviev’s ecclesiological ideas can contribute to a harmonization of eucharistic ecclesiology and the Catholic ecclesiology of the universal Church.

The subjecthood of the Church is derived from the New Testament images of the Church as the Bride of Christ and the Body of Christ. Both these images figured prominently in the writings of the Church Fathers and have informed theological reflections on the Church throughout history.120 Benoȋt-Dominique de la Soujeole in his recent book on ecclesiology devoted a section to the personality of the Church and commented that the question “is not a purely intellectual exercise that smacks of rationalism and is supposed to captivate minds that have a speculative bent. It aims at a better understanding of the scriptural data.”121 After referring to the Pauline images of the Body of Christ and the Bride of Christ, Soujeole added:

Our speculative categories try to grasp the most profound unity, which is much more than the moral unity of a political society. . . . This is a mystical unity, which is defined chiefly by distinguishing it from what it is not rather than by affirming clearly what it is.122

Soujeole noted that the question of the personality of the Church “has not been studied much at all to date and is very rarely presented by theological writers.”123

120 See Hans Urs von Balthasar’s programmatic essay “Who is the Church?” in Explorations in Theology 2: Spouse of the Word (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 143-191.

121 Benoȋt-Dominique de la Soujeole, Introduction to the Mystery of the Church (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 509.

122 Ibid.

123 Ibid., 510. The list in Soujeole’s bibliographical section presenting the few writers who have addressed this topic includes prominent Catholic theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar, Louis Bouyer, Yves Congar, Charles Journet and .

309

For the present purposes, which is to highlight Newman and Soloviev’s ecclesiological contribution to contemporary ecumenism, it is important to comment on the question of the subjecthood of the Church from the viewpoint of eucharistic ecclesiology which, according to

Cardinal Walter Kasper, “has become one of the most important foundations of the ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches.”124 In the Roman Catholic

Church, eucharistic ecclesiology can be traced to the work of Henri de Lubac, whose book,

Corpus Mysticum, recovered the ecclesiological understanding of the Eucharist as the principle of the organic unity of the Church as the Body of Christ: “the Eucharist makes the Church.”125

The Eucharist effectively forms believers into a communion in Christ. As Joseph Ratzinger once observed:

The Church is Eucharist. . . . This can also be translated into the statement that the Church is communion, communion with the whole Body of Christ. Expressed in different terms: In the Eucharist I can never demand communion with Jesus alone. He has given himself a Body. Whoever receives him in Communion necessarily communicates with all his brothers and sisters who have become members of the one Body.126

124 Quoted in Marc Cardinal Ouellet, “Address at the Opening of the International Theology Symposium The Ecclesiology of Communion, 50 Years after the Opening of Vatican Council II” (Maynooth, Ireland, 6 June 2012). Available online: https://zenit.org/articles/cardinal-ouellet-at- international-theology-symposium/ (accessed: August 11, 2016).

125 Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 88.

126 Joseph Ratzinger, Called to Communion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 82.

310

According to Ratzinger, “From this approach of eucharistic ecclesiology follows that ecclesiology of local churches which is characteristic of Vatican II and represents the inner, sacramental basis for the teaching about collegiality.”127

While the ecclesiology of communion centered on the Eucharist has flourished in the

Roman Catholic theology inspired by the Second Vatican Council, “eucharistic ecclesiology” appeared earlier in the work of Nikolai Afanasiev, one of the exiled Russian theologians of the

20th century. Considering the universalistic claims of Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism irreconcilable, Afanasiev identified in the Eucharist the deeper level of ecclesial oneness, indeed, the fundamental unity that belongs to both the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Church on the level of local eucharistic gatherings.128 Visible universal unity among local churches was not a constitutive element in the Church: “All of the attributes of the Church that I indicated belong to the local church. This thesis is found in the primitive ecclesiology that I have called eucharistic.”129

Afanasiev believed that the question of papal primacy was “not so much of an ecclesial but a juridical nature.”130 As Ratzinger has observed with regard to the eucharistic ecclesiology developed in the East by Afanasiev and others, “the inference is drawn that the idea of a Petrine

127 Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 18.

128 See Nicholas Afanasiev, “Una Sancta” in Michael Plekon, editor, Tradition Alive (New York: Sheed & Ward, 2003), 3-30 (first published in 1963).

129 Ibid., 14.

130 Afanasiev, 24.

311 office is contradictory, it resorts to a worldly pattern of unity that is opposed to the sacramental unity represented in the Church’s eucharistic constitution.”131 Such a negative judgment about the papal office seems to follow necessarily if one disallows the possibility of doctrinal consensus, as Afanasiev was inclined to do.132 It also logically follows that the universal Church has merely an ideal existence; in fact, there are only local churches. The local church constituted in the Eucharist is properly speaking the Body of Christ; the visible unity of the universal Church has only an external, juridical basis.

Afanasiev’s view of papal primacy as a matter of a “juridical nature” is not fully shared by other Orthodox theologians such as John Meyendorff and Alexander Schmemann, who have recognized a fundamental ecclesiological need for a primate in the Church as an agent of unity on the universal level.133 Similarly, according to the Greek Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas,

the nature of the Eucharist points to the simultaneity of locality and universality in ecclesiology. . . . This is precisely the reason that the term καθολική ἐκκλησία (Catholic Church) is marked in the early patristic sources with the ambiguity of indicating both the local and the universal Church.134

Zizioulas, a prominent theologian and Orthodox partner in ecumenical dialogue, has elaborated his thinking from the fundamental principle of personhood and relationality stemming from

131 Ratzinger, Called to Communion, 80.

132 Afanasiev, 9-11.

133 John Meyendorff and Alexander Schmemann published their essays on papal primacy from an Orthodox perspective along with Afanasiev and Nicolas Koulomzine in a collection marking the convocation of the Second Vatican Council: The Primacy of Peter (Bedfordshire: Faith Press, 1973); see 148, 163-166.

134 John Zizioulas, “Primacy in the Church: An Orthodox Approach,” 119.

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Trinitarian theology, by defining the basic structure of being in terms of the relationship between the one and the many.135 He has applied this principle to ecclesial structure: “The many cannot be a church without the one, but equally the one cannot be the primus without the many.”136 For

Zizioulas, primacy is “a sine qua non conditio for the catholicity of the Church”137 on every level, including the universal. As a matter of ecclesiological necessity, primacy is of the esse of the Church and not simply of the bene esse, which would simply relate to human aspects of the church.138

In relation to the dialogue between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Church about eucharistic ecclesiology, Paul McPartlan has compared and contrasted the thought of Henri de

Lubac and John Zizioulas on a wide range of issues concerned with the eucharistic constitution of the Church.139 McPartlan has highlighted convergences between de Lubac and Zizioulas in overcoming individualism in Christianity by recovering the centrality of the Eucharist in the

Christian life—which is intrinsically communal, ecclesial. McPartlan has given special attention to Zizioulas’ understanding of Christ as a corporate personality in terms of the concrete

135 Zizioulas, “Primacy,” 118; also see his Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 141-158.

136 Zizioulas, “Primacy,” 121.

137 Ibid.

138 John Zizioulas, “Recent Discussions on Primacy in Orthodox Theology,” 232, 242-243.

139 Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993).

313 eschatological reality visibly manifested at the eucharistic assembly.140 The scriptural image of the Church as the Body of Christ thus acquires its fullest realization of universality: the Church made by the Eucharist represents not only the unity of all in Christ in this or that particular church, but the unity across all particular churches in every place, and across all time as well.

Zizioulas’ ecclesiology of Christ’s corporate personality also brings to the fore the theme of the Church’s subjecthood. Indeed, it would seemingly be a major advance in ecumenical dialogue if there could be consensus that the Church in her mysterious, organic and universal unity is one in terms of “a real and living subject,” or “a special and individual substance,” or “a corporate personality.” Clearly the use of the term subject or personality in reference to the

Church is not merely figurative, but analogical. An understanding of the Church merely as a conglomerate of individuals is deficient, as would be a view of the Church as a totality suppressing individual personality. Accordingly, for an adequate reflection on the unique mystery of the Church, the relationship between the one and the many in ecclesial communion might well be contemplated in terms of a perichoretic unity which makes the Church an icon of the Most Holy Trinity.141 Ultimately the mysterious unity of the Church might best be grasped in terms of personality, because the “‘person’ is the highest category we have at our disposal.”142

140 McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, 166-186.

141 expresses the mysterious “circumincession” or “interpenetration” of the divine persons in the Trinity. This term was used in a more figurative sense by Henri de Lubac to describe the relationship between ecclesial motherhood and the spiritual motherhood of Mary in his Splendor of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999), 328 (orig. 1953).

142 See Kasper, 153, who critiques references to God as “suprapersonal” as abstract and void of real meaning.

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The subjecthood of the Church in Newman and Soloviev’s ecclesiologies derives from the unity of mind in the Church. As has been seen in this study, Newman based his view of doctrinal development on the analogy between development in the individual mind and in the

Church, and Soloviev considered the unity of mind—unanimity—an essential attribute of the

Godhuman organism of the Church. They both rejected the narrow view of doctrinal unanimity in terms of a literal uniformity enshrined in the historical testimony of the early Church’s teaching. Instead, they perceived unanimity as a reality continuously effectuated by the Spirit of

Christ in the minds of believers, the mark of which is doctrinal development. It is to unanimity in this latter sense identical with the meaning of St. Paul: “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor

2:16), that the following observations are applied.

An important ecclesiological question presents itself: can the two approaches to the personality of the Church—on the one hand as the Body of Christ, in terms of the eucharistic ecclesiology developed by Afanasiev, Zizioulas and others, and, on the other hand, as the subject of doctrinal development, as described by Newman and Soloviev—be understood as similar or complementary? Do these two ecclesiological approaches overlap or do they convey essentially different ideas?

The impression that these approaches convey two disparate ideas has surfaced in ecumenical dialogue whenever Catholic ecclesiology of the universal Church and Orthodox eucharistic ecclesiology, following Afanasiev’s thought, are considered as being in opposition.143

143 See Paul McPartlan, “Catholic Learning and Orthodoxy—The Promise and Challenge of Eucharistic Ecclesiology” in Paul D. Murray, editor, Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 160-175, at 162.

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The assumption has sometimes been made that the present structure of the Roman Catholic

Church does not readily correspond to the Eucharistic constitution of the Church and that she should therefore reassess and reform her structures. As McPartlan has observed,

Afanasiev’s emphasis upon the Eucharist, but extreme reaction against ecclesial structures, precipitated a searching critique of those structures that really do not have a eucharistic justification but arise from other, more worldly considerations. . . . It can fairly be said that the one crucial theological issue confronting Catholic-Orthodox dialogue today is that of identifying the structure of unity that properly corresponds to the mystery of the one Eucharist.144

These words recapitulate the point that is found already in the footnotes of the penultimate draft of the dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. Having referred approvingly in one of the footnotes to Afanasiev’s writings on “the bond between ecclesiology and the Eucharist,” the document added in another footnote: “It seems of the greatest benefit to indicate in what way the Catholic Church also starts from a eucharistic ecclesiology [but one] which is at the same time universal.”145

The contribution of Newman and Soloviev to an ecclesiological understanding of the subjecthood of the Church may assist precisely in harmonizing eucharistic ecclesiology and universalist ecclesiology. According to the principle of eucharistic ecclesiology that “the

Eucharist makes the Church,” Christ, offering himself in the sacrament, nourishes and forms believers into a communion of one Body. Accordingly, the one ecclesial Body of Christ is

144 McPartlan, “Catholic Learning and Orthodoxy,” 163.

145 Acta II 1:4 (1971), 87, note 2.1; quoted in Paul McPartlan, “Eucharistic Ecclesiology,” One in Christ 22 (1986): 314-331, at 327. The author of the remarks was most likely Gérard Philips, the principal redactor of Lumen Gentium. See also McPartlan, “Catholic Learning and Orthodoxy,” 162.

316 neither a heartless, nor a mindless communion. The unity of believers as the one Body in Christ in the mystery of the Church is the unity of the one mind with Christ as well. The pneumatological principle of unanimity in the Church cannot be divorced from the Church’s center in the Eucharistic communion with Christ; the unity of mind both leads under the action of the Holy Spirit to this communion and proceeds from it as its essential spiritual fruit.

Such an interpenetration of ecclesial unanimity and eucharistic communion in the mystery of the Church is found in the Church’s lex orandi. For example, the Third Eucharistic

Prayer in the Roman Missal states: Concede, ut qui Corpore et Sanguine Filii tui reficimur,

Spiritu eius Sancto repleti, unum corpus et unus spiritus inveniamur in Christo146—“Grant that we, who are nourished by his body and blood, may be filled with his Holy Spirit, and become one body, one spirit in Christ.”147 Given the action of the Holy Spirit who fills partakers of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the expression “one spirit in Christ” clearly denotes the unity generated by the Holy Spirit in the realm of the human spirit.148

146 Prex eucharistica III, in Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2002), 358-359.

147 Eucharistic Prayer III, in The Roman Missal, translated by The International Commission on English in the Liturgy, 3rd typical edition, section 88 (Washington DC: United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, 2011), 653.

148 The word “spirit” is not capitalized either in the Latin text or in the English translation. The Third Eucharistic Prayer is certainly not a unique instance of liturgical prayer for unity; for example, the prayer Super oblata for the 23rd Sunday in ordinary time reads: Deus, auctor sinceræ devotionis et pacis, da, quæsumus, ut et maiestatem tuam convenienter hoc munere veneremur,et sacri participatione mysterii fideliter sensibus uniamur. The English translation: “O God, who give us the gift of true prayer and of peace, graciously grant that, through this offering, we may do fitting homage to your divine majesty and, by partaking of the sacred mystery, we may be faithfully united in mind and heart” (Missale Romanum, 287; Roman Missal, 483; emphasis added).

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The importance of unity in the Eucharistic liturgy is further highlighted by the sign of peace reintroduced into the Latin rite liturgy after Vatican II. Maximus the Confessor interpreted this sign—known in ancient liturgies as the kiss of peace—in the following way:

The spiritual kiss which is extended to all prefigures and portrays the concord, unanimity, and identity of views which we shall all have among ourselves in faith and love at the time of the revelation of the ineffable blessings to come.149

Accordingly, the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church emphasizes the complementarity of

Eucharistic unity and doctrinal oneness.

In the Church’s “enduring subjecthood in the midst of temporal change,” the locus in which “development and identity subsist together,”150 one can recognize the complementarity of eucharistic and universal ecclesiologies. The Roman Catholic Eucharistic liturgy indicates that the unity of mind in the Church has a eucharistic constitution: the Eucharist makes the ecclesial unanimity. Doctrinal development is then part of the Church’s “psychology,” part of her unified and dynamic consciousness.151 The Church, precisely as the Body of Christ, is capable of making doctrinal judgments; she can make up her mind, so to speak, a mind united with Christ’s mind, and therefore “judging with certitude.” Both Newman and Soloviev identified the ecclesial unanimity in the Church as the springboard of her capability of making correct judgments about faith and morals. Far from being an external power separated from the

149 George C. Berthold, editor, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 202; quoted in Owen F. Cummings, Eucharistic Doctors: A Theological History (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005), 91.

150 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 260-270; see above 22.

151 Walgrave’s study of Newman, which encompasses a “psychology of doctrinal development,” highlights the personality of the Church.

318 eucharistic constitution of the Church, the living universal Magisterium may thus be said to stem from the inmost being of the Church, her eucharistic unity as one body, one spirit with Christ.

With the Church, Christ has shared three munera—his three offices as priest, king and prophet—to teach, govern and sanctify. The New Testament confirms Christ’s institution of ecclesial structure together with His institution of the Eucharist. Having “conferred a kingdom” on his disciples at the Last Supper, Jesus taught them a crucial lesson about the munus of governing—shared as part of his total eucharistic self-oblation:

The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them and those in authority over them are addressed as “Benefactors;” but among you it shall not be so. Rather, let the greatest among you be as the youngest, and the leader as the servant. For who is greater: the one seated at table or the one who serves? Is it not the one seated at table? I am among you as the one who serves. It is you who have stood by me in my trials; and I confer a kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom; and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.152

The Church then must always follow her Head, the King who “did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”153

Also at the Last Supper, depicted in John’s gospel as the event of Jesus’ total sharing of mind with his disciples—“I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father”154—Jesus indicated to his disciples their responsibility in exercising authority in the Church. In a memorable gesture of humble service, Jesus, “having loved his

152 Lk 22:25-30.

153 Mt 20:28.

154 Jn 15:15.

319 own in the world and loving them to the end,”155 and “fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power,”156 washed his disciples’ feet.

You call me “teacher” and “master,” and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.157

The extended exchange of Jesus with Peter indicated that he was to exercise his primacy as a service within the eucharistic communion of love.158

In Luke’s account of the Last Supper, Peter’s role of leadership is highlighted by Jesus’ exhortation: “You must strengthen your brothers.”159 It might be said that Luke’s gospel sets up a framework in which Peter’s primacy is related to the institution of the Eucharist as an enduring ministry, a related institution. McPartlan has commented on the Lukan Eucharistic contextualization of Petrine ministry: “Thus understood, the universal primacy given to Peter continues in the church precisely as a service to the mystery of the Eucharist and to the life of the

Church that derives from the Eucharist.”160 Indeed, in the Catholic Church, the exercise of

155 Jn 13:1.

156 Jn 13:3.

157 Jn 12:12-15.

158 See Jn 13:6-10.

159 Lk 22:32.

160 Paul McPartlan, A Service of Love: Papal Primacy, the Eucharist & Church Unity (Washington DC: CUA Press, 2013), 18.

320 authority is understood as “a service of love” for the Body of Christ.161 The bishop of Rome is the servus servorum Dei, whose special position in the ecclesial structure allows him, in the words of , to “insinuate himself into all the body,”162 for the purpose of strengthening brothers in faith.

Newman and Soloviev did not fail to perceive in Rome “the citadel of freedom”—the way in which the Petrine ministry safeguards the realm of pneumatological unanimity in the

Church manifested above all in the Eucharistic assembly. This Petrine ministry at times takes the special form of the pope’s extraordinary universal Magisterium when deciding on a matter of faith and morals with the college of bishops as a dogma of the Church. In day-to-day Christian life, however, the pope’s ministry is experienced as a fatherly assurance to all Catholic believers of being members of the universal ecclesial family. In McPartlan’s words,

Since right belief and peaceful communion are prerequisites for the celebration of the Eucharist, as is shown by the liturgical practice of professing the creed and exchanging a sign of peace before the reception of holy communion, it can certainly be said that in enabling and presiding at the ecumenical councils which define the church’s faith and resolve doctrinal controversies, and in moderating the disputes that disrupt the communion of the church, the bishop of Rome actually renders vital service to the Eucharist. However, going beyond those specific and occasional instances of service, it may more generally, lastingly, and fundamentally be said that the universal primacy exists in order to symbolize and serve the harmony of the church in unity, charity and peace that comes from its regular Eucharistic life.163

161 See John Paul II, Ut Unum Sint, § 95. The saintly pope’s prayer “that we may seek—together, of course—the forms in which this [Petrine] ministry may accomplish a service of love recognized by all” is echoed also in the title of McPartlan’s study on papal primacy, A Service of Love.

162 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1958), 261.

163 Paul McPartlan, A Service of Love, 83.

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It is remarkable indeed how the living experience of the pope’s ministry as a peacemaker and guarantor of the Eucharistic unity among Catholics differs fundamentally from those views of the Orthodox who consider this ministry just a matter of external and oppresive force.

Commenting on the arduous task of combining, “even with a divine aid,” the teaching, governing and sanctifying offices, “so independent of each other, so divergent, and so conflicting,” in an effective exercise of leadership in the Church, Newman asked with the

Apostle Paul: “Who is sufficient for these things?”164 Indeed, because of his unique office in the

Church, it may be said that the pope—more than any other minister in the Church—must become

“all things to all” and a “slave to all.”165 After conferring his mission as the leader and shepherd in the Church, the risen Christ said to Peter: “You will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”166 These words point to the theological theme of expropriation as elaborated by Balthasar, whereby a person receiving a commission empties himself to become an effective instrument in the hands of the Holy Spirit.

In Balthasar’s theology, expropriation is the principle of spiritual fruitfulness “archetypically realized in Mary.”167 Accordingly, he says, “the spirituality of the hierarchical office must draw its deepest nourishment from the same Marian spirit of the expropriated readiness to serve.”168

164 VM 1:xlii; see 2 Cor 2:16.

165 See 1 Cor 9:19, 22.

166 Jn 21:18.

167 Hans Urs von Balthasar “The Mass, a Sacrifice of the Church?” in Explorations in Theology 3: Creator Spirit (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 121.

168 Ibid.

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Understanding the Petrine ministry in terms of the unique institution of spiritually fruitful universal fatherhood is evidenced by faithful who traditionally call the bishop of Rome papa, the holy father.169

Could Zizioulas’ conception of the Church as Christ’s corporate personality allow for

Christ’s provisioning an agent in his Body capable of acting and speaking under certain circumstances on the behalf of the whole Church? The answer would seemingly be no.

Zizioulas conceives corporate personality as an eschatologically accomplished reality that constitutes the Church in time.170 A fundamental principle of Zizioulas’ theology of personhood is that the one constitutes the many and, vice-versa, the many constitute the one. However, the many must be constituted by Christ and Christ by the many in irreducible totality; hence, the

Eucharist makes present the eschatological totus Christus, Christ’s corporate personality in its perfect state of eschatological unity.171

Zizioulas’ ecclesiology apparently eliminates the possibility of doctrinal development, for if the Eucharist makes the Church in terms of the eschatologically realized corporate personality,

169 An exception to the general lack of theological study on the pope’s universal fatherhood is Scott W. Hahn, who perceives the Church primarily as God’s worldwide family established by the New Covenant; this overarching vision recognizes the pope’s special role in the Church as a universal father. Hahn has found biblical support for this role in Isaiah 22:21-22 which are clearly echoed in Jesus’s words to Simon Peter in Mt 16:18-19: “He shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to the house of Judah. I will place the key of the House of David on his shoulder; what he opens, no one will shut, what he shuts, no one will open.” See the transcription of Hahn’s conference “The Pope: Holy Father,” which is available at: http://www.catholic-pages.com/pope/hahn.asp (accessed: 11 August 2016).

170 Zizioulas, Being As a Communion, 182.

171 Ibid., 161, 168.

323 then the unity of mind in the Church is already present as an eschatologically accomplished fact.

Thus, there is no need for the Church to develop her mind, and the idea of a universal

Magisterium intrinsically linked to papal primacy, as presented by Newman and Soloviev, seems superfluous, or, at least, a mere matter of an external ecclesiastical arrangement.

In addition to a lack of space for doctrinal development, another lacuna in Zizioulas’ ecclesiological synthesis is a lack of appreciation for the Church’s mission to preach the

Gospel.172 Zizioulas’ emphasis on the already seemingly has underplayed the not yet of salvation, especially the reality of sin and the absolute requirement for conversion as presented by the Gospel.173 Both mission and conversion are dynamic realities implying a process, a history. While appreciating Zizioulas’ effort to draw out the full eschatological implications of

Christology in his ecclesiology of Christ’s corporate personality, the relationship of eschatology to history in his theological thought seems problematic: “The eucharistic community constitutes a sign of the fact that the eschaton can only break through history but never be identified with it.”174 Zizioulas in this regard seems overly indebted to platonic philosophy: the Church as corporate personality seemingly does not have a real subsistence in history. The Church exists outside history and its presence in history only takes the form of transient embodiments when the

172 Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, 298-301.

173 See the penetrating critique of Zizioulas by Derek Sakowski, The Ecclesiological Reality of Reception as a Solution to the Debate over the Ontological Priority of the Universal Church (Rome: Gregorian & Biblical Press, 2014), 348-362.

174 Zizioulas, Being As a Communion, 161.

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Eucharist is celebrated. Ecclesial unity then is also only a platonic ideal and not a living and developing reality.

McPartlan, who considers Zizioulas’ ecclesiology of corporate personality a great contribution to de Lubac’s Eucharistic-centered ecclesiology of communion, has noticed

Zizioulas’ tendency to neglect history:

Having reset the Eucharist at the centre of Christian life and the other sacraments within it, Zizioulas must show not only how to rehabilitate the ministry of the Word and the Church’s mission to humanity, but also what he admits that the Eastern tradition seems to ignore, namely, “the ethical implications of the Eucharist in particular and sacramental life in general”. . . . As [Zizioulas] himself says, the risk which traditionally faces the East is that of “undermining mission and involvement in history and being satisfied with a beautiful liturgy without bothering to draw its social and ethical implications.”175

Zizioulas needs then to “clarify that history still has the space, as it were, really to happen.”176

Soloviev’s critique of the Slavophiles for confusing “the goal for which they strive—which they take for granted—with the path along which such an ideal must be approached,”177 and for claiming “that the best way of reaching the harbor is to pretend that you are there already”178 seems relevant. Also pertinent seems Newman’s observation about history in his Essay on

Development that “men never would have put it aside, unless they had despaired of it,” and that

“to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”179

175 McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, 298-299.

176 Ibid., 300.

177 Balthasar, Office, 297; see above, 292.

178 La Russie, 36; see above, 303.

179 Dev. (1878), 7-8; see above, 93, note 14.

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In regard to the personality of the Church in the light of eucharistic ecclesiology,

McPartlan has observed,

Zizioulas does not adopt bridal terminology for the Church at all. . . . Just as the bridal image is prominent in de Lubac’s ecclesiology, so its absence is a prime characteristic of Zizioulas’.180

McPartlan has used this point for a critique of tensions in de Lubac’s ecclesiology, while highlighting a greater consistency in Zizioulas’s ecclesiology in which Christ solely is the “I” of the Church’s corporate personality, and agreeing with Zizioulas that the image of the Church as the Bride of Christ assigns a different identity to the corporate personality than that of Christ.181

More recently in bringing Zizioulas and Balthasar into dialogue about the Church’s personality,182 McPartlan reconsidered his former stance (in which he had inclined towards

Zizioulas) and noted that the image of the Church as a bride is prominent in Scripture and that together with the image of the body of Christ it is “immensely hallowed by the tradition of the

Church and profoundly linked to the liturgy.”183 Balthasar’s nuptial ecclesiology, McPartlan acknowledged, drew out the ecclesiological implications of both of these images.

As regards the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, McPartlan has seen the special strength of the bridal image as a “clear recognition of the role of human freedom by which we respond to

180 McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, 90-91.

181 Ibid. 93-97.

182 Paul McPartlan, “Who is the Church? Zizioulas and von Balthasar on the Church’s Identity,” Ecclesiology 4 (2008): 271-288.

183 McPartlan, “Who is the Church?” 278, 283-284.

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Christ and embrace the salvation he offers.”184 In highlighting the free reception of grace perfectly exemplified in Mary, the bridal image is an indispensable complement of the image of the Church as the body of Christ. As McPartlan concluded,

Indeed it would seem that a rounded ecclesiology rooted in the liturgy ought to find place for both images of the Church, as body of Christ and bride of Christ, and a place for Mary, too. We have reflected on the curious fact that, in his very liturgical ecclesiology, Zizioulas finds no place for the bridal image, and we can now additionally note that he finds no place for Mary either. Those two absences cannot be unrelated.185

McPartlan then outlined how such an ecclesiology might be rooted in the Eucharist:

The Eucharist, then, precisely as foretaste of the Parousia, could be seen as having a twofold aspect: the Lord first cleanses, sanctifies and presents the Church, his bride, to himself, and then immediately offers her, through him, with him and in him, as his body, one flesh with himself, to his Father, so that God may be “all in all.”186

McPartlan has noticed that this “appealing solution in some ways” is problematic for Zizioulas’ ecclesiology of corporate personality. It contains a movement towards the union of Christ and the Church, which in Zizioulas’ mind implies a separation between them and thus individualizes

Christ from his eschatological configuration of corporate personality.187 However, without sufficient recognition of the reception of Christ by the faithful, their freedom opening up in history the realm for the assent and development of faith, Zizioulas’ ecclesiology tends to

184 McPartlan, “Who is the Church?” 278. McPartlan referred to Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (2007).

185 Ibid., 285.

186 Ibid., 282; see Eph 5:25-27, 1 Cor 15:28.

187 Ibid.

327 collapse into eschatology and the role of the Eucharist risks being reduced into a mechanistic requirement rather than being “the sacrament of love.”

What the ecclesiological contextualization of doctrinal development by Newman and

Soloviev bring to the fore seems to be precisely the necessity of ecclesial consent that makes the reception of the Eucharist fruitful in the constant spiritual development of the pilgrim Church.

The subjecthood of the Church is constituted in the historical realm by the unity of body and spirit with Christ who offers himself to the Church in the Eucharist. The assent of faith in the

Church has by definition a universal form, which is symbolized in the universal significance of

Mary’s fiat and Peter’s confession of Christ as the Messiah.

The image of the Church as Bride particularly highlights the free assent of faith in which the members of the Church respond and conform to the love of the Bridegroom. The Church is the Bride who under the promptings of the Spirit and with the Spirit says unanimously: “Come,

Lord Jesus.”188 The Church is conformed to the mind of Christ in becoming ready to receive His love and becomes one Body with Christ in the mystery of the Eucharist. The presentations of doctrinal development by Newman and Soloviev can then point to a profound interdependence between the images of Bride and the Body of Christ, which can be interpreted via an analogy with the sacrament of marriage. The mutual consent of the spouses is an absolute requirement for a valid marriage. The spouses form “one mind” in freedom before becoming “one body” in spousal love. In an analogical way, ecclesial unanimity is both presupposed and reinforced by the Eucharist in the mystical Body of Christ. Such a unity of mind in the Church is the fertile

188 Rev 22:17-21.

328 soil in which the Eucharist can plant divine life: “Only in this way can Jesus entrust the mystical principles of inner unity, namely his Eucharist and the trinitarian life it contains, to the transcendent unity of the Church.”189

In regarding the Church as the subject of doctrinal development, it is always the whole

Church in the union of the Head and the Body that is understood to develop. The dilemma of opposing ecclesiological implications for the identity of the Church based on the images of the

Bride and the Body can be surmounted with Soujeole’s realization that these are “our speculative categories trying to grasp the most profound unity [of the Church]” and “the scriptural way of pointing out the mystery.”190 These images interpret and illumine each other in an attempt to contemplate the mystery of the Church in all its complexity. Just as the image of the Bride of

Christ is distinct from Christ, similarly the two natures in Christ’s hypostatic union are distinct; nonetheless, one can affirm that these natures are united without confusion, change, division or separation. Similarly, in regard to the personality of the Church, one can distinguish the images of the Bride and the Body as presupposing each other and mutually complementing each other.

There is, accordingly, a steady place in Catholic ecclesiology for contemplating the Church as the Bride of Christ especially in reference to the pilgrim Church in history that must constantly

189 Balthasar, Office, 304, commenting on the final part of Soloviev’s La Russie.

190 Soujeole, 509.

329 conform herself to Christ her eschatological Head. As such, the Church finds her archetype in

Mary, the Mother of our Lord.191

Once unanimity understood by Newman and Soloviev as the source of doctrinal development is recognized as part of the Church’s Eucharistic constitution, it is apparent how the ecclesiologies of Newman and Soloviev can contribute to an understanding of how the ministerial and governmental offices in ecclesial structure are both related to and derived from the Eucharist. The ministers of the sacrament—bishop and priest—are necessary for transmitting the life contained in the Eucharist. Before administering the sacrament, bishops and priests are instrumental in forming the one-mindedness of a congregation by preaching the word.

The unanimity presupposed and sealed by the Eucharist then opens up the Petrine dimension in the ecclesial structure: “The universal primacy exists in order to symbolize and serve the harmony of the church in unity, charity and peace that comes from its regular Eucharistic life.”192

The munus of central authority expressing the mind of the Church has no other purpose than to prepare the Bride with the help of the Holy Spirit to become one Body with Christ. This mission can be expressed in the words of John the Baptist who described his role as “the friend of the Bridegroom” who brings the Bride to the Lamb.193 The Apostle Paul used the same image in respect to his ministry when he wrote the Corinthian community: “I betrothed you to one

191 An excellent study on Marian ecclesiology is Theresa Chau Nguyen, The Marian Mystery of the Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, doctoral dissertation, 2016).

192 McPartlan, A Service of Love, 83.

193 See Jn 1:29, 3:29.

330 husband to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.”194 Such Johannine and Pauline images of the pastoral office in the Church—that includes the Petrine ministry—proceed from an understanding of the Church as a living and developing corporate personality, “the Bride- becoming-the Body.” It is from the “becoming” that the ecclesial structure is derived, for a development requires a structure. “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”195 Indeed, while an ideal Church has no more need for development, growth is the evidence of the pilgrim Church’s life.196

194 2 Cor 11:2.

195 Dev. (1878), 40.

196 See Apo., 4; see also Newman to Henry Wilberforce (21 January 1846) LD 11:101: “I believe I was the first writer who made life the mark of a true Church.”

CONCLUSION

The concept of reason excludes a priori any of truth, since what is genuinely true can never cease to be true. There must be [therefore] something like a philosophia perennis: a philosophy that is not corroded by time or the powers that be but remains as the form of truth in vital development, adapting and offering itself as such to the vessel of revelation. It is Aristotle’s most basic thesis that this strenuous form is continuously developing as a living thing. The fact that “what changes accommodates itself to this rigid boundary” corresponds to the worldly and human essence of truth.1

Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote this in a passage attempting to delineate the basic principles of the

Catholic worldview. What changes accommodates itself to a rigid boundary—this sentence sums up for Balthasar the essence of philosophical reasoning, in which the identity of truth is manifest in its organic historical development. The immutable character of the virtues can be considered an example of such a perennial truth. A virtue is by definition a disposition for moral action which must be acquired in a process of human effort, yet the virtue has an abiding character precisely as a good and true disposition; thus, it has a universal form and value.

What changes accommodates itself to a rigid boundary. As a matter of fact, this statement presents a good explanation for convergences in the religious thought of John Henry

Newman and Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev. Development was the key category of their thought; it was also the fundamental idea in their understanding of the Christian life. To be a

Christian meant for both Newman and Soloviev a constant growth in which one must accommodate oneself to Christ. What changes accommodates itself to a rigid boundary; therefore, “everything that rises must converge.”2

1 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 251.

2 Teilhard de Chardin, L’Avenir de l’homme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959), 242. 331

332

What changes accommodates itself to a rigid boundary—this sentence can be said also to summarize the essence of doctrinal development. Newman founded his presentation of doctrinal development on the epistemology of a developing idea: the identity of revealed truth is preserved in the historical process of an organic growth of understanding. Similarly, Soloviev elaborated the idea of doctrinal development in terms of an organic growth: in doctrinal development, the identity of the revealed truth is maintained in a progressive understanding that must proceed in an orderly way.

This dissertation on the relationship between doctrinal development and the papacy in the work of Newman and Soloviev has argued that in the thought of both men, the firm axis of truth that guides doctrinal development is, by God’s design, reflected in the structure of the

Catholic Church. As Newman emphasized, the idea of doctrinal development requires that the

Church be endowed with infallibility, which, in turn, calls for the existence of a teaching office in the Church capable of discriminating between authentic developments and corruptions of doctrine. The exercise of a universal teaching office then requires an office of primacy in the

Church. Likewise, for Soloviev, the unity of faith as a living and developing reality was guaranteed by the doctrinal authority of the office in the Church instituted by Christ as “a living moral bond” with Peter and his successors.3

In the religious vision of Newman and Soloviev, Christ is the Truth to whom the pilgrim

Church constantly accommodates herself in her journey through history: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6). Being formed, in

3 La Russie, 90.

333 the Eucharist, as a communion of one Body and one mind with Christ, the members of the

Church become united with each other by the bond of a real unanimity. The Petrine ministry in the Church signifies this bond, serves and protects it. As Newman and Soloviev insisted, the unity of the Church is secured by the Church’s hierarchical structure, and thus the Church forms the mystical subject presented in the Scripture by the images of Christ’s Bride and Body. It is then the mission and purpose of the hierarchy, governed by the papal office, to lead the faithful to Eucharistic unity with the Lord. The Church is the universal form of this unity.

From this common conviction of both Newman and Soloviev it follows that ecclesial unity cannot consist only in relying on the eschatological goal as the common ideal set before the eyes of divided Christians today. It must consist in the concrete and visible unity of the Church as a pilgrim people. To build up the Church on earth as the historical communion in which the

Body of Christ subsists, our Lord instituted the Eucharist as cibus viatoris, “the food for a pilgrim.”4 To progress on her historical journey, the Church formed by the Eucharist into a subject of mystical unity and a universal communion needs a common leadership. Such is the form of the real and visible ecclesial unity which must always remain the goal of the ecumenism.

“The restoration of unity” was pronounced as “one of the principal concerns” of the

Second Vatican Council.5 Has this goal come any closer as a result of the immense ecumenical effort by the Catholic Church in recent decades? Or is it as distant as it ever has been and will it

4 This expression is found in a verse of the sequence Lauda Sion Salvatorem, written by St. and prescribed in the Latin rite liturgy for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

5 Unitatis Redintegratio, § 1.

334 remain so? Newman and Soloviev’s personal struggles against “the anti-Roman feeling” elucidate the real depth of ecclesial divisions in the West and the East. Newman’s description of protestant prejudices against Rome as a seat of the Antichrist, which for long years stained his imagination and created “something of a false conscience,”6 fills a heart longing for Christian unity with pessimism. So does Soloviev’s vain struggle with nationalism in the Russian

Orthodoxy of the Slavophiles.

In Soloviev’s ecclesiological testament with his famous legend about the Antichrist, the accomplishment of ecclesial reunification is set within the apocalyptic period immediately preceding Christ’s Parousia. The few remaining faithful not swayed by the temptations of the

Antichrist unite themselves in the legend around the last pope (Peter), the Johannine figure of an orthodox patriarch (John) and the Pauline figure of a protestant leader (Paul). Could it be that

Soloviev’s message in the legend is truly prophetic? Is it possible that the desired goal of ecclesial unity shall only be accomplished at the end of times?

Joseph Ratzinger sees Soloviev’s last word on ecumenism in a different light, however:

It would be utterly mistaken to suppose that this vision of the passionate advocate of ecumenism, Soloviev, postpones the whole matter of Christian unity to the end of the ages or in any way to the realm beyond time. In Soloviev’s vision, eschatology is correctly understood in the biblical sense: it is not later in the chronological sense, something that with the succession of days will sometime arrive in an indefinitely distant future and is just not here yet today. No, what is eschatological is what is genuinely real, which at some time will be revealed as such but already sets its mark upon all our days. The vision shows, rather, that this unity is “eschatological” in the true sense of the term: already present and yet within time never perfected, never simply frozen into the state of a complete empirical fact. What becomes visible in the light of Christ when he comes again exposes the truth of our time, that of each and every time. . . . Ecumenism is really nothing other than living at present in an eschatological light, in the light of Christ who is

6 Apo., 7.

335

coming again. It thus also signifies that we recognize the provisional nature of our activity, which we ourselves cannot finish; that we do not want to do for ourselves what only Christ, when he comes again, can bring about. On our way toward him, we are on our way toward unity.7

7 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 268-269.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Newman

Newman, John Henry. Uniform edition of works. 37 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907-1913.

______. Autobiographical Writings. Edited by H. Tristram. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1957.

______. An Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Edited by Stanley L. Jaki. New Hope, KY: Real View Books, 2003.

______. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman. Edited by C. S. Dessain et al. Vols. 1- 10 and 23-32, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973-2008; vols. 11-22, London: T. Nelson, 1961-1972.

______. Roman Catholic Writings on Doctrinal Development by John Henry Newman. Edited by James Gaffney. Kansas City: Sheed &Ward, 1997.

______. Tracts for the Times. Edited by J. Tolhurst. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.

______. Via Media of the Anglican Church. Edited by Weidner, H. D (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Works by Soloviev

Soloviev, Vladimir. La Russie et l’Eglise universelle. Paris: Albert Savine, 1889.

______. La Sophia et les autres écrits français. Edited by F. Rouleau. Lausanne: La Cite – L’age d’homme, 1978. 336

Soloviev, Vladimir Sergeevich. Pisˈma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solovieva [The Letters of Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev]. 4 vols. Edited by E. L. Radlov. St. Petersburg: Obschestvennaia polˈza, 1908-1911.

______. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete Collected Works]. Edited by A. A. Nosov et al. Moscow: Nauka, 2000-.

______. Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works]. 12 vols. Edited by S. M. Soloviev and E. L. Radlov. Brussels: Zhiznˈ s Bogom, 1966.

Selected English and French Translations of Soloviev

Soloviev, Vladimir. Le développement dogmatique de l’Église. Translated by F. Rouleau and R. Tandonnet. Paris: Desclée, 1991.

______. Freedom, Faith, and Dogma: Essays by V. S. Soloviev on Christianity and Judaism. Translated and edited by V. Wozniuk. Albany, NY: State University of NY Press, 2008.

______. Histoire et avenir de la théocratie. Translated by F. Rouleau et al. Paris: Cujas, 2008.

______. Russia and the Universal Church. Translated by W. G. von Peters. Chattanooga: Catholic Resources, 2013.

______. The Russian Church and the Papacy: An Abridgement of Russia and the Universal Church. Translated by R. Ryland. San Diego: Catholic Answers, 2001.

Solovyev, Vladimir. God, Man and the Church: The Spiritual Foundations of life. Translated by D. Attwater. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2016.

Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich. The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against Positivists. Translated by B. Jakim. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1996.

______. Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov. Translated and edited by J. D. Kornblatt. Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 2009.

337

______. The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy. Translated by B. Jakim Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. ______. Lectures on Godmanhood. Translated by P. Zouboff. San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2007.

______. The Meaning of Love. Translated by T. R. Beyer. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1995.

______. The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge. Translated by Valeria Z. Nollan. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

______. The Religious Poetry of Vladimir Solovyov. Translated and edited by B. Jakim and L. Magnus. San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2008.

______. Solovyov Anthology. Edited and translated by Sergei L. Frank and Natalie Duddington. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974.

______. Sophia, God & A Short Tale about the Antichrist. Translated and edited by B. Jakim. Middleton, DE: Angelico Press, 2014.

______. War, Progress and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Antichrist. Translated by A. Bakshy and T. R. Beyer. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1990.

Magisterial Documents

Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani Secundi. Six volumes corresponding to the four sessions; each with multiple parts. Vatican City: Typis polyglottis Vaticanis, 1970-2000.

Benedict XVI. Ad Romanam Curia ob omina natalicia. AAS 98 (2006), 40-53.

Benedict XVI. Sacramentum Caritatis AAS 99 (2007), 105-180.

Catechism of the Catholic Church. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994.

338

John Paul II. Fides et Ratio. AAS 91 (1999), 5-88,

______. Ut Unum Sint. AAS 87 (1995), 921-982.

Missale Romanum. Editio typica tertia. Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2002. English translation: The Roman Missal. 3rd typical edition. Washington DC: United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, 2011.

Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. “The Greek and Latin Traditions About the Procession of the Holy Spirit.” L’Osservatore Romano, Weekly English Edition (20 September 1995): 3 and 6.

Second Vatican Council. Dei Verbum. DH 4201-4235.

______. Lumen Gentium. DH 4101-4179.

______. Unitatis Redintegratio. DH 4185-4194.

Ecumenical Documents

Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/ch_orthodox_docs/rc _pc_chrstuni_doc_20071013_documento-ravenna_en.html (accessed: August 11, 2016).

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