This article was published in the British Critic, in 1839. St Newman was still an Anglican at this time, but was moving closer and closer to the Catholic Church. This article is significant not so much for what it says about St Ignatius himself, although that is quite good, but because of what he says about how we think about Church history, and how we think in general. The question of how to think about religion will receive a stunningly brilliant treatment in The Tamworth Reading Room, published in 1841.
The real subject of this piece on St Ignatius is what he indicates at the start: “… a certain system, called Catholicism, … the religion of the whole of Christendom, not many centuries after the Christian era, (which) continued to be mainly identified with the Gospel, whether with or without certain additions, at least down to the Reformation …” (222)
The question for St Newman, and for his readers, was whether this Catholic system had an Apostolic origin. He points to the fact that in the earlier centuries: “The works of the Apostolical Fathers … are short, and their doctrinal declarations, of whatever kind, brief …” (223) Then, there is a question of interpretation. As he says: “Clement uses the word [prosphora], sacrifice, and [leitourgia], or liturgy; and Ignatius [thusiasterion], altar; and [hairesis], heresy.” He asks: “Are the Greek words adequately represented by the English, which convey the more modern or Catholic ideas?” (223)
Having stated the question, St Newman poses the critical question with an astonishing clarity:
It will be seen at once, then, that the state of the case is one in which every reader is likely to make up his mind according to his previous modes of thinking. Men have ever a tendency to explain phenomena of whatever sort on the principles familiar to their own minds, or by their own bias. (223)
Each side is unable to feel the force of the case opposed to it, and drops all considerations but those which make for itself. So are we constituted; and in the instance before us, in like manner, unless a document speaks out with extraordinary clearness, it will not impress its own sense, whatever it be, on a reader; but he will consider his own in particular to be the one natural sense, and every other to be strained and perverse. The one party will take it, for instance, as a self-evident truth that [thusiasterion] in Ignatius cannot but mean altar in the modern sense; and the other, that this is a refinement put upon the free inartificial language of a primitive document. (224)
How to settle this question? The first thing St Newman notes is that: “whereas explanations look strange or not, according to our previous {225} bias, therefore their looking strange to us is no reason that they are not true.” When a person is confronted with a new interpretation, he is often surprised, for as the saint says: “Prepossession has imposed, and habit has fixed for him, a certain meaning on the words of Scripture; and, as we all know, a man’s will is the best of all possible reason; and habit is confessedly a second nature.”
St Newman writes so clearly that it is sometimes easy to overlook his meaning, simply because we do not have to struggle to uncover its meaning. He is saying that the best reason we ever have for an interpretation and belief is our will – we want to believe it; and next, our habit, that we are used to it, something which he calls our “second nature.” As he says, if we but look around with open eyes, we will find examples of this, “stronger than he would dare to indulge his fancy in inventing.” (225)
When it comes to reading the Fathers, they “do not know what to look for, or are possessed with one or more ideas which they in vain seek to find in them. Their notion of the matter of divinity is so different from what prevailed in primitive times, that the surface of their minds does not come into contact with what they read; the points on which they themselves would insist slip on one side, or pass between those of the Fathers; their own divisions of the subject are cross-divisions, or in some way or other inconsistent with theirs. Thus they are ever at cross-purposes with the author they are studying; they do not discern his drift; and then, according as their minds are more or less of a reverent character, they despise or excuse him.” (227) This is an umatched description of how not even the surface of our minds engages, more often than not, with what we read. It could only have been written by someone who had engaged his mind at a profoundly deep level.
The result is, as he says that:
“It is much more comfortable to suppose a book to be absurd, than one’s self to be dull; and … moderns have the decision all their own way. The ancient Church cannot speak for herself.” (228). Sometimes, the evidence of the Fathers is “peremptorily put aside,” for “Who denies that opponents are often prejudiced, and not to be trusted? and that their testimony therefore is, in all cases, to be narrowly watched? But how does that acquit a critic, in a given case, who will not take that case as it stands {230} A modern writer “condemns the Fathers for some things; applauds them in other cases; explains away their language in other. He interprets them upon his own modern notions, and calls it vindicating them.” (231)
When it comes to St Ignatius of Antioch, he says: “We do not assume … more than this, that his witness comes immediately after the inspired sources of truth, that he was the friend of Apostles, and that, therefore, he was more likely to know their views of Gospel truth, and consequently their meaning in their extant writings, than a modern. This being taken for granted, the following remarks are made in proof of this point, that St. Ignatius’ view of Gospel truth was very much the same as that taken in “the Catholic religion,” and not that of ultra-Protestantism.” (235)