John Henry Newman famously wrote in the introduction to his An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ‘To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.’ Quoted all too often as an appeal to an imagined congenial terra firma of conclusive historical scholarship, Newman’s assertion is actually one of some daring. Reformation controversies galvanised historical study in unpredictable ways: Matthew Parker promoted Anglo–Saxon studies to refute transubstantiation from the homilies of Aelfric, and the titanic clash between the Magdeburg Centuriators and Baronius began the ambition to achieve a universal ecclesiastical history. But erudition awaited the maturity of scientific technique, and it was the realisation that this maturation had now arrived that prompted a succession of original and industrious scholars engaged in the reconstruction of Catholic academic institutions after the disruption of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to embrace the idea that the close study of history could and did elucidate doctrine.
It is important to recall just how exiguous the resources for any sort of theological work were in the aftermath of the Napoleonic trauma. Lacordaire notoriously discovered that the only viable Dominican house left in Italy was engaged in manufacturing lavender water. But with the restoration of the Society of Jesus and the reappropriation of the Church in Germany of a newly pastoral spirit, individuals of conspicuous theological talent began to find an environment in which to develop their insights. Newman – now, of course, saint and Doctor – has come to dominate our picture of this time, but although he has a chapter dedicated to him here, he by no means dominates this book. The received wisdom – owing much to Owen Chadwick’s presentation in From Bossuet to Newman – is that Newman the historian and patristic scholar arrived in Rome after his conversion to be confronted by uncongenial and uncomprehending scholastic theologians, who ensured his insights about doctrinal development would be pigeon-holed for the next three decades until Leo XIII belatedly rescued him. This book demonstrates that this was far from the case.
Although Carola directs us in the title to the importance of the Scuola Romana, the book is framed by two German theologians whose work is fundamental to any account of historical theology in the nineteenth century: Johann Adam Möhler and Matthias Joseph Scheeben. Both were diocesan priests and both wrote their principal works in German, remarkable enough in itself at the time for communicating dogmatic theology. Möhler died young, but not before his Symbolik had anticipated many of Newman’s key themes about doctrinal development, and his patristic studies revitalised attention to the Fathers as sources of dogmatic testimony. Scheeben synthesised and elaborated on the insights Möhler first elucidated, and in his magisterial Mysterien des Christenthums and subsequent unfinished Dogmatik, sets out how the monumenta of the patristic era ought to be weighed and adduced in bringing doctrinal propositions to an appropriate clarity and maturity.
Having framed his account with the originator and the synthesiser of the new historical theology in the German lands, Carola centres the core of his analysis on Rome and the Jesuits who ran the Roman College from its re-opening in 1824 to its closure in 1870. Here, the two key names are Giovanni Perrone and Carlo Passaglia, and the key test of the new scientific historical method in doctrinal development is the definition of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1854. Perrone was the theologian tasked with looking after Newman after his reception into the Catholic Church and his move to Rome: their supposed disagreement about the nature and scope of development in doctrine is the foundation of the idea that Newman was confronted by an unthinking Aristotelianism among the Roman theologians. Carola argues emphatically that this was not so: Perrone is an astute interlocutor of both Möhler and Newman, and his classic Praelectiones Theologicae, far from being a sort of proto-scholastic work, shows a thorough examination of the weight to be given to historical evidence in adducing doctrine.
It is, however, Passaglia who receives most attention, as the (fallen) star of the Roman School and the principal engineer of the historical-patristic compendium of evidence that secured the 1854 definition. The massive erudition of Passaglia’s collection of patristic evidence for the definition, complemented by the expertise in Orientalia of his colleague and close collaborator Clemens Schrader SJ, was by no means simply a bran tub of choice excerpts from the Fathers. It is Passaglia who develops and applies rigorous criteria for assessing what weight might be put on the various sorts of patristic testimony to the Consensus Fidelium, while at the same time acknowledging that, because the historical record necessarily cannot provide an absolutely comprehensive and explicit account, the implicit witness of what Newman calls elsewhere the ‘chronic vigour’ of doctrinal development is reliable. It is remarkable to note that Passaglia includes Islamic testimony to the Immaculate Conception in his magisterial De Immaculato Deiparae Semper Virginis Conceptu Commentarius. Passaglia’s departure from the priesthood in the face of Pius IX’s political intransigence is an interesting coda to his seminal role in the 1850s, which Carola does not shirk from presenting.
It is a curious and discomfiting fact that the two most prominent Jesuit theologians of the mid-nineteenth century in Rome: Passaglia and Joseph Kleutgen, who was responsible for drafting much of the infallibility decree at Vatican I, ended their clerical careers in scandal; in Kleutgen’s case, one of such moral enormity that it was assiduously hushed up. But this was not the only reason why the advocates of the historical method in theology, so closely associated with the Collegio Romano, lost favour, reputation, and prominence. Leo XIII committed the Catholic Church to a renewal of theology after the mind of St Thomas Aquinas in his encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879, and, unusually for a Pope, he had the longevity, the collaborators, and the energy to make this happen. Newman’s red hat was thus in some respects a valedictory mark of recognition: those who, in the 1840s and 50s, had borne the heat of the day in defending the authenticity of Christian doctrine in the light of the new scientific historicism that transformed so many disciplines now gave way to the very different practitioners of incipient Neo-scholasticism.
We find ourselves in different and more plural times. This book is a timely, thorough, and engaging account of a particular way of doing theology that embraced the critical historical study of Christian history with confidence and immense erudition. When Bernard Lonergan set out the skills required of the theologian in Method in Theology, even he did not countenance their complete possession by individual scholars, and yet Carola’s theologians, often working alone and with somewhat sketchy and disrupted early education, displayed an astonishing capacity to master primary sources and assess them critically. What Cardinal Manning mocked as the ‘old Oxford patristic tone’ in Newman has come full circle as Newman is now a doctor of the Church, and Carola’s book is a fine account of why this should be so.
