In this well-written doctoral thesis Christopher Cimorelli demonstrates an enviable grasp of Newman's writings. He seeks to show that Newman indeed had a ‘theology of history’, forged above all in the writing of The Arians of the Fourth Century, and serving as the all-important background for the account of doctrinal development in the Essay on that subject which marked Newman's move from the Church of England to the Church of Rome. To this extent, Cimorelli's work is a contribution to historical theology and an admirable one at that. But he is more ambitious. He wishes to offer in the culminating chapter of this book a contribution to a future dogmatic theology – and here one might have some misgivings as to the wisdom, or at any rate the prudence, of his speculative deployment of Newman's thought.
The book has five chapters. In the first he surveys the Anglican background of early Tractarianism, noting in particular the importance the Tractarians assigned to ‘ethos’ or moral disposition in the making of judgments; the role they gave in epistemology to probability and the analogy between creation and revelation (shades of Joseph Butler) as well as practical wisdom (courtesy of Aristotle); and how they regarded the patristic Church as the proper paradigm for any modern Christian revival. Much of this is familiar terrain to English people with a knowledge of the religious history of their own country, but Cimorelli – on internal evidence, an American– is sure-footed in covering it (at any rate if we disregard an expression of surprise that the University of Oxford had no Chair of Liturgics as late as 1840).
Chapter two considers what Newman thought he was doing as an ecclesiastical historian. Unlike earlier English and French students of the Church Councils, Newman believed himself to be not an antiquarian but the writer of a continuous narrative which would both indicate how heresy stimulated orthodoxy and also engage the attention of a wide Church-oriented readership. He proposed to arrange factual evidence of various kinds (persons, events, texts) in an interpretative scheme that relied both on well-founded prejudices and considerations of antecedent probability. By triangulating facts, prejudices and probabilities the historian was in an optimal position for identifying emergent patterns.
Chapter three tests the operation of the ‘model’ of historical understanding thus outlined on a trio of theses crucial to Newman's view of patristic Christianity. And these are: the ‘discipline of the secret’ (the discreetly controlled provision of revealed truth in the catechesis of pagans), ‘economy’ (the divine saving outreach in its self-accommodation to human beings, and its derivative in the Church's own accommodation of its message to a variety of audiences), and the contrast between the ‘schools’ of Alexandria and Antioch (the first of which alone recognized the ‘sacramental’ – i. e. figurative – texture of Scripture in a way that was congruent with both catechetical reserve and the divinely accredited method of economy) . As my explanatory parentheses suggest, these theses interlock and in so doing they furnish the basic shape of tradition in its transmission of revelation as found in antiquity.
Chapter four investigates the way the social community of the Church was imaginatively entertained (hence the ‘imaginaries’ of Cimorelli's sub-title) in Newman's perception as historian – and as ecclesiastical controversialist concerned to find in the Church of the Fathers a ground for commending the claims of the Church of England as an apostolic body. In Newman's continuing explorations in patristic history – notably in regard to the origins of Monophysitism – the triangular relations of factual evidence, plausible prejudices and antecedent probabilities were re-configured. The ‘imaginary’ of the celebrated ‘branch theory’ gave way under the pressure of evidence and reflection. There was, evidentially, no received consensus that could un-Church Eutyches and the Robber Synod at Ephesus; there was, reflectively, an antecedent probability that if the authentic content of a revelation given in history is actually recuperable this can only be because the ecclesial community is equipped with an organ for the infallible identification of that content where its contours are in otherwise irresoluble dispute. Cimorelli emphasizes the positive role of prejudice in this (Roman) outcome. Newman, in his opinion, was ‘prejudiced’ in favour of whatever historical and theoretical presentation of the internal conflicts of the patristic Church would permit the believing subject in the post-patristic period to maintain the truth of the Christian faith and to act upon it in daily living.
In his fifth and final chapter Cimorelli considers the implications for theories of the development of doctrine, doing so from an explicitly Roman Catholic standpoint. The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation of the Second Vatican Council in effect sanctioned Newman's view of doctrinal development in the service of its own concept of revelation as at once verbal and enacted, by divinely originated words and deeds. Appropriately, then, its model of doctrinal development can be called propositional-historical. But neither the Dogmatic Constitution nor subsequent pertinent statements of the Roman magisterium (above all the Declaration Mysterium Ecclesiae of Paul VI's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) have done justice to the subtler features of the account of development Newman laid out in the 1845 Essay which marked the change of ‘imaginary’ from Anglicanism to Rome. Cimorelli describes those features as ‘participative’, ‘relational’ and ‘narrative’ and in so doing he weakens, of set purpose, the force of the appeal to both verbal enunciation and historical act as found in the official Church documents. A tradition where understanding develops by the refinement of propositions and the better understanding of the salvific acts of God in history seems extrinsic to the subjectivity of those human beings who are Christians now. Participation in tradition, relation to its divine centre, and the re-telling of the biblical narrative, notably through liturgical celebration in each case: these suggest a quality of response surely needed if the objective revelation is not to be deprived of the fulness of subjective reception. But care must be taken in this not to devalue the proposition which is the sharpest instrument the human mind has, nor to allow ‘narrative’ to take precedence over the ontology that the historical saving acts show forth.
