THE
P RTAL
April 2017
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Two Lungs: Newman
on East and West
Dr Stephen Morgan relates this to the modern world
S peaking in
Czestochowa on the Solemnity of the Assumption in 1991, Pope St John Paul II
suggested that as the Iron Curtain (remember that?) had now come down, the Church could now breathe
freely with both lungs once again. Although it seems likely he was as much referring to the Latin Church
across the former Warsaw Pact countries as anything else, it has been taken to imply that the Church needed
to breathe with her Greek East lung as well as her Latin West.
From the time of his adolescent conversion, Newman
had been fascinated by the question of holiness. He
came to understand that the largely Calvinist answers,
which had dominated Anglican theology since the
sixteenth century, simply did not cohere with the
pastoral realities he encountered as he served his title
in the parish of St Clement, just over Magdalen Bridge.
It seemed to St John Paul II to be unarguable that the Nor did they answer the question of how, once justified
loss of the different but complementary perspectives by grace, we could live lives pleasing to God despite of
of the Greeks left Catholicism the poorer. This is not the persistence of our sin.
to ignore the many blessings that have come with
In the notion of grace as the indwelling of the Holy
the reconciliation of many Eastern Churches since
the seventeenth century but the wider impact of the Ghost, he began to plot a course towards an answer that
Melkite, Ukranian and Syro-Malabar Churches, to came to understand justification and sanctification as
name but three, has been limited. It is rare, indeed, to being a continual dynamic between the shared Divine
find an Orthodox hierarch who would admit that they life and our human imperfection.
might gain from a Western lung.
The route that began in St Clement’s ran through the
The renewed Western interest in the Greek East can Chapel of Adam de Brome in St Mary the Virgin, where
claim many midwives but it certainly gained impetus Newman delivered his Lectures on Justification, those
in an Anglican attempt to establish a real connection arguments forged and refined in correspondence a
with historic, pre-reformation Christianity which the French Catholic priest, the Abbé Jager, were taken
wasn’t Roman. The “anywhere but Rome” school will up in the Aula of St Peter’s during the Second Vatican
be familiar to many readers of T he P ortal and has Council.
led to some exotic claims and still more exotic inter-
ecclesial pilgrimages.
If the Church is once again to breathe freely with
both its Greek East and Latin West lungs it will
Newman’s own fascination with the Greek fathers – be invigorated by other discoveries. Imagine for a
and especially with his beloved Athanasius – can be moment, the Christian East drawing in deeply the air
seen, at least in its origins, as part of this same attempt. of Augustine or even Aquinas.
Howsoever it was sown, it came to full-flowering in his
discovery of the notion of Grace as the indwelling of the
Holy Ghost in the Christian, brought about in Baptism.
To live is to change, and to
The distinct approaches to the way the Church
prayed and thought in East and West, which – as
much for political as theological reasons – had grown
steadily further apart from the eighth century onwards,
reached the point of definitive breach with the mutual
anathemas pronounced in Hagia Sophia in July 1054.
The idea of grace as a share in Divine life enabled
Newman to approach the sixteenth century debates
about how grace works, debates that had led to an
effusion of much ink and even more blood, from a
new, more ancient angle.
‘
’
be perfect is to have
changed often.
Bl. John Henry Newman