Newman on Truth and its counterfeits

Reinhard Hütter, John Henry Newman On Truth and Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times, Sacra Doctrina, Chad C. Pecknold and Thomas Joseph White, OP, eds., Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2020. Softcover. $24.95 Paperback + 267 pp.

Review by Kevin M. Clarke, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Scripture and Patristics (St. Patrick’s Seminary and University)

Reinhard Hütter has written perhaps the most significant theological work of 2020. John Henry Newman On Truth and Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times is a trenchant critique of contemporary culture providing insights gained by Hütter’s ease in making Sts. Thomas Aquinas and Newman conversation partners. Hütter astounds the reader not only has with his command of Newman’s writings but also by showing how each of Newman’s works fit into his life. For my part, I have found the book to be an important course-preparation resource for establishing a development of doctrine framework in the Church history classes I have taught in seminary over the past academic year. I am re-reading and discussing the text with one of our seminarians.

In each of the chapters, Hütter juxtaposes a Newmanian theme against an account of its modern counterfeit. The chapters are lengthy, yet they are quite digestible. Hütter engages a range of audiences, and goes into greater depth in footnotes and numerous excellent appendices at the end of each chapter, which bring in a wide range of Thomistic and Newmanian interlocutors (younger students could skip these, though the readers of Thomistica will not want to do so). Hütter identifies how Newman provides both the “theological context of discovery” and the “theological context of justification” for each of the themes, wherein the reader enters the theological depths with Newman as guide. Here are the foci of the chapters, along with their counterfeits: In chapter 1, conscience and its counterfeit, a false conscience not rooted in synderesis and divine law but in the “whims and wishes” of “sovereign self-determination”; in chapter 2, faith and its counterfeit, private judgment; in chapter 3, the development of doctrine and its counterfeits, ecclesial antiquarianism and ecclesial presentism; in chapter 4, the authentic university and its counterfeit the Baconian polytechnicum. In the epilogue, Hütter describes his own Newmanian journey into the Catholic Church and his eventual surrender of private judgment in the profession of faith in the reception into the Catholic Church. Though no chapter is specifically dedicated to “truth,” as the title might suggest, truth is integral to the topic of each chapter.

 Newman famously observes that “conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and, even through the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a say.” As such, it is possible—indeed, oftentimes it is the case—that the conscience comes into conflict with legitimate human or spiritual authority. Hütter cites two examples from Newman’s post-conversion address concerning Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching. The first concerns a conflict between the conscience and the papal authority. Newman writes, “Were I a soldier or sailor in her Majesty’s service, and sent to take part in a war which I could not in my conscience see to be unjust, and should the Pope suddenly bid all Catholic soldiers and sailors to retire from the service ... taking the advice of others, as best I could, I should not obey him” (23). In other words, if the Pope commands soldiers to refuse service in a war the conscience judges to be a just war, the soldier should follow the conscience. The second concerns an unjust governmental act: “Suppose, for instance, an Act was passed in Parliament, bidding Catholics to attend Protestant service every week, and the Pope distinctly told us not to do so, for it was to violate our duty to our faith—I should obey the Pope and not the Law” (23).

It would seem then that the conscience then stands in a unique place of judgment over both civil and ecclesiastical authority. In a certain way, that is true. But the problem is that the counterfeit of conscience, the conscience of modernity’s so-called “sovereign subject,” is an ill-formed conscience that judges not in accord with the truth. Such a one lives under no authority, moved by whims to self-assertion. Yet the freedom offered by the counterfeit is “a profound self-deception” (53). The reality is that the nature of the conscience must be rooted in the divine law; that is, conscience is theonomic (25). This grounding excludes the counterfeit, which “is merely selfishness produced by forces beyond human control” (27). Instead, conscience must be rooted in the “innate habitus” of synderesis (42). For the conscience to be unmoored from theonomy and from synderesis means that “the counterfeit is inherently unable to afford the peace that is characteristic of a conscience truly so-called, that is both subjectively true and therefore good and objectively correct” (53).

Hütter laments the loss of divine faith in the world today. Its opponents consider it “a benign superstition or, at worse, as pernicious and dangerous nonsense.” But sadly the practitioners of faith often regard it as “a strong conviction to be adhered to with heroic persistence, or some existential leap of trust beyond reason, or an exclusively divine act that simply happens in someone, or, simply a dogged attachment of the will to certain liturgical, moral, and social practices” (91-92). For Newman, “the very meaning, the very exercise of faith, is joining the Church.”

Faith’s counterfeit is private judgment, which exalts the will of the sovereign subject over revealed religion in “refusing assent to the divine testimony.” Private judgment in matters of revealed religion is, Hütter says, “a kind of rationalism” (99). Private judgment always “anticipates the possibility of future doubt,” but “divine faith excludes all doubt” (100), which is why it assents to the different articles of faith happily. Divine faith is simple and one. It is, as Newman says, “not a mere conviction in reason, it is a firm assent, it is a certainty greater than any other certainty; and this is wrought in the mind by the grace of God and by it alone” (106). How many times have we tried to win souls by winning apologetics arguments? Or how often do we try to prove the conviction of our faith by the impeccability of our words? If we follow Newman and Aquinas, we would not expect our arguments to be so efficacious in the conversions of others.

 The development of doctrine is, of course, one of the teachings for which Newman is most widely known. Hütter quotes Newman, “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant,” but Newman does not mean history as it is commonly understood in our day. Hütter points out that “the history Newman refers to … is the Spirit guided and Spirit-filled history of salvation that the living church holds in her memory. It is the church’s memory of the living Christ, the bridegroom, who guides his bride, the church by means of the Comforter he promised to send” (131). Such a notion of history is crucial for theological education, as doctrine is not the accident of historical processes and shifts of ecclesial power.

Authentic development of doctrine is good and healthy for the Church, but its two counterfeits, ecclesial antiquarianism and ecclesial presentism, always tend toward the corruption of doctrine.

 The ecclesial antiquarianist, on the one hand, finds himself locked into the past. The antiquarianist is someone like Luther who is chasing after the pristine and unadulterated doctrine of Christ. Antiquarianists might also look with suspicion upon anything not found explicitly in the text of Scripture. Perhaps they would have little regard for conciliar developments, such as the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son. However, as Hütter puts it, “the development of doctrine lies in the dynamic of unfolding what is implicit in the original deposit of the faith into explicit affirmations” (137). This quote captures well what Athanasius the Great said of the Nicene Fathers that they “found it necessary again to gather together the sense of the Scriptures and to speak more clearly the things which they said before” (de decretis, 20 in Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius [Routledge: 2004]).

On the other hand, the ecclesial presentist finds himself locked into the future. He is likely to cleave to an evolutionary notion of doctrine as something ever in flux. The ecclesial presentist only makes use of doctrine in order to refashion the future. There is quite a lot of this in the field of patristics, for example, when scholars want to dismiss the Fathers, or to elevate their opponents over them, or to authenticate contemporary identity theory from the texts of ancient Christianity regardless of the author’s intent, because the reading subject becomes all-important.

The commonality between both counterfeits is a rejection of the present moment; both concede rupture’s victory over doctrine. The antiquarianist and the presentist are unsatisfied with the doctrine of the present, and each seeks his own form of escape. The antiquarianist concedes that the present moment is of human making, but the presentist aspires to make his own future. But as Cardinal Avery Dulles pointed out, the challenge is to find with Newman “a middle course between a fluid historicism and a rigid dogmatism” (139). Against these notions, Hütter carefully sets forth Newman’s seven notes of authentic doctrinal development along with its ten foundational principles. To illustrate development in action, Hütter applies the notes of development to the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on religious freedom.

 Finally, Hütter contrasts Newman’s university with its counterfeit, what Hütter calls the Baconian polytechnicum, named after its “spiritus rector,” Francis Bacon. Whereas a university presumes the unity of the sciences—“many looking towards one,” as the etymology suggests—the polytechnicum presupposes their fragmentation at the service of utility. Therefore, the Baconian polytechnicum gradually evolves into the “polytechnic utiliversity” of today that dismisses theological and philosophical inquiry (195). Such institutions carry the seeds of their own undoing, as Hütter points out, because they can be easily outsourced. Newman stands as a witness to the centrality of natural theology, namely, the praeambula fidei, as the apex of university science, because “a university, properly conceived, is founded on the unity of all truth” (173). The removal of theology from the university curriculum is, in Newman’s words, “to take the spring out of the year.”

Hütter clearly has taken Newman as a theological companion of his own. If the reader is interested in the brief biography of John Henry Newman the convert as told in the prologue, he should also attend to the brief biographical account of Reinhard Hütter the convert as told in the epilogue. This epilogue provides Hütter a marvelous opportunity for an autobiographical turn, a fitting tribute to Newman, by whose doctrine we not only have such profound teachings, but by whose witness we have such a fine teacher in Hütter.

On Truth and Its Counterfeits is a model for how to write about great thinkers. As the acknowledgements section makes clear, the text came together from a series of lectures. What stands out in this book compared with works of similar genesis is the thematic unity and coherence of On Truth and Its Counterfeits. Hütter has not given us a text so much about Newman as he has crafted a text in which Newman speak to us once again as “a guide for our times,” that is, in his own words and with fresh wisdom for today.

 I am grateful to John Brungardt for our exchanges about this text, along with his suggestions and corrections for this review.