The development of ecclesiastical doctrine

The Development of Ecclesiastical Doctrine
Anthony Kenny

The development of doctrine is not itself a doctrine of the Catholic Church. From the beginning, the Church has taught, not that its dogmas develop, but that its faith is immutable. St Paul told the Galatians: 'Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preach to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed' (Galatians, 1, 8). Quoting those words 400 years later, Pope Simplicius wrote 'One and the same norm of apostolic doctrine continues in the apostles' successors'. The Council of Trent, in its preamble, asserted that the Gospel truth is to be found in the written books, and unwritten traditions, which were received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ, or dictated to them by the Holy Spirit; which have been handed down to us and preserved by continuous succession in the Catholic Church. Pius IX, writing against Günther in 1857, spoke of the 'perennial immutability of the faith' which he contrasted with 'philosophy and human sciences which are neither self-consistent nor free from errors of many kinds'. The Syllabus of 1864 condemned the view that divine revelation was imperfect and might progress in step with the progress of human reason. The Vatican Council repeated this. 'The doctrine of faith which God has revealed is not, like a philosophical theory, something for human ingenuity to perfect; but rather divine deposit from Christ to his bride, to be faithfully preserved and infallibly explained.' The immutability of dogma is not a matter of words only but of meaning also: 'That sense is always to be given to sacred dogmas which holy mother Church has once explained; it is never to be given up under the pretext of a more profound understanding.'¹

The only mention of the development of doctrine in official ecclesiastical documents occurs in the unflattering context of the modernist crisis. The encyclical Lamentabili attributes to the modernists the following view: 'The objects of religious sensibility, since it is coextensive with the Absolute, has infinitely many aspects, of which one may be clear at one moment, and another at the next. In a similar manner, the condition of believers is not always and everywhere the same. It follows that the formulae which we call dogmas must be subject to the same vicissitudes, and therefore must be capable of alteration. Thus there is nothing to prevent an intrinsic evolution of doctrine.' Such a view was described by Pius X as an unending tissue of sophistries, which wrecks and ruins all religion.

Many of the condemned modernist propositions were concerned with the development of doctrine. Two of the most interesting read as follows. (l) The revelation which constitutes the object of Catholic belief was not completed with the Apostles. (2) The principal articles of the Apostles' Creed did not have the same meaning for the early Christians as they have for Christians of the present day.²

Against this array of pronouncements hostile to the notion of development two passages must be set. The first is a text of Vincent of Lerins quoted at the Vatican: 'May the understanding, knowledge, and wisdom of all and each, of the individual and of the Church, grow and progress mightily as the years and ages pass, but always in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same belief.' The second is a letter of Pius X written in 1908 which said that the condemnations of modernism were not directed against the Cardinal Newman who was and remains the most distinguished Catholic exponent of the notion of doctrinal development.³

It is clear from the texts which I have cited that when we speak of the development of doctrine we are not referring to some doctrine, or meta-doctrine, of the Church concerning its own teaching. Rather we are alluding to a theory, or set of theories, to account for certain general and obvious facts about the Church's doctrine; and in particular to reconcile the course of the Church's history with the dogma of the immutability of faith. To deny flatly that dogma develops would not necessarily be heretical; it would merely argue great ignorance of history.

It is first of all obvious that the number of defined dogmas has grown constantly since the earliest Councils. Beliefs whose acceptance is now a condition of membership of the Church were formerly rejected by men who retained the communion and favour of the Apostolic See. It is well known that St Clement of Alexandria held views upon the Eucharist, and St John Chrysostom upon Predestination, and St Thomas Aquinas on the Immaculate Conception, which, if expressed in 1870, would have made it impossible for any of them to take part in the deliberations of the Vatican Council. At that Council there was defined a doctrine whose definitions many of the attending bishops opposed until the last moment; and in our own day Pope Pius XII proclaimed, for the first time under the sanction of an anathema, the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary.

The multiplication of definitions does not, merely in itself, raise any problem concerning the immutability of faith. The avowed purpose of the majority of conciliar and papal definitions has not been to make change or addition to the beliefs of orthodox Christians, but rather to provide a legal instrument for the reform or expulsion of heretics alleged to have denied an article of faith hitherto an unquestioned part of the Christian patrimony of belief. It has never, so far as I know, been officially defined that Jesus was a man — a male, and not a woman — because there has never been a feminist heresy to deny this truth. But if a group began to propound such a heresy, and it was condemned under anathema, the Pope could scarcely be reproached with altering, or adding to, the faith handed down from the Apostles.

It is impossible, however, to produce an actual case of a definition on any major topic which can be seen beyond all possibility of cavil to be merely a reaffirmation of a belief held unanimously by Christians until the appearance of the heresy which provoked the anathema. Theologians sometimes quote with approval the dictum of St Vincent of Lerins, that the object of faith is what has been believed at all times and in all places by all Christians: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. Taken seriously, this dictum would rule out all articles of faith except those contained in the Apostle's Creed, and perhaps some of those. There is an ambiguity, of course, in the phrase 'ab omnibus'. Does this mean 'by all who have claimed to be Christians'? If so, then the dictum is patently false of the corpus of doctrine which is now imposed under pain of excommunication. Does it mean 'by all orthodox Christians'? Here again, we must distinguish. If 'orthodox Christians' means 'orthodox by the defined standards of the time in which they lived' then again the dictum is false. If it means 'orthodox by the defined standards of the present day' then it is true; but trivially so, and only at the cost of making heretics of a large number of Fathers, Saints, and Doctors of the Church. For there has been scarcely any major definition of Pope or Council which has not contradicted the recorded views of one or other of the bishops and theologians of the early centuries of the Church.

To illustrate the difficulties against the doctrine of the immutability of dogma, I shall mention four dogmas of the Christian faith, each defined under anathema at different periods of history: the dogma of the Blessed Trinity, the teaching concerning the particular judgement and the beatific vision before the resurrection, the prohibition of usury, and the definition of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven.

The dogma of the Trinity was defined early in the history of the Church, and its expression has remained stable for many centuries. On such a cardinal doctrine, if anywhere, one would expect to find a unanimous testimony from the beginning to the faith which we now recognize as orthodox. But it is not so. Let me quote Newman on the difficulty of securing a consensus of ante-Nicene divines to the doctrine defined at Nicea and later councils,

The Catholic truth in question is made up of a number of separate propositions, each of which, if maintained to the exclusion of the rest, is a heresy. In order then to prove that all the ante-Nicene writers taught the dogma of the Holy Trinity, it is not enough to prove that each has gone far enough to be a heretic — not enough to prove that one has held that the Son is God (for so did the Sabellian, so did the Macedonian), and another that the Father is not the Son (for so did the Arian) and another that the Son is equal to the Father (for so did the Tritheist), and another that there is but one God (for so did the Unitarian) . . . but we must show that all these statements at once, and others too, are laid down by as many separate testimonies as many fairly be taken to constitute a consensus of doctors.

Newman went on to summarize the evidence. The Creeds of the period make no mention in their letter of the Catholic doctrine. The only great Council of ante-Nicene times condemned, or at least withdrew, the use of the word 'homoousion' to express the relation of the Son to the Father: the word which, after Nicea, was the criterion of orthodoxy. He writes:

The six great bishops and saints of the ante-Nicene Church were St Irenaeus, St Hippolytus, St Cyprian, St Gregory Thaumaturgus, St Dionysius of Alexandria and St Methodius. Of these St Dionysius is accused by St Basil of having sown the first seeds of Arianism; and St Gregory is allowed by the same learned father to have used language concerning our Lord, which he only defends on the plea of an economical object in the writer. St Hippolytus speaks as if he were ignorant of Our Lord's eternal Sonship, St Methodius speaks incorrectly at least upon the Incarnation; and St Cyprian does not treat of theology at all. Such is the incompleteness of the extant teaching of these true saints, and, in their day, faithful witnesses of the eternal Son.⁴

Newman's purpose in writing thus was neither to propose difficulties against the doctrine of the immutability of faith nor to impugn the orthodoxy of the fathers of the first centuries. Rather he wished to suggest to his fellow-Anglicans that if they accepted the Nicene formulae in face of such incomplete evidence in their favour from the primitive Church, they had no reason for rejecting the primacy of the Roman See about which, he claimed, the surviving records were considerably more eloquent. None the less, the case which he presents raises an obvious problem for the doctrine which we are considering; a problem which scholarship since Newman's day has done little to mitigate and something to aggravate.

A millennium after Nicea, Pope Benedict XII defined as a truth of faith that the souls of the faithful departed, once they have been purified from sin if necessary, are taken to heaven and there enjoy, before the resurrection of their bodies, the beatific vision of God. The circumstances which led to the definition of this now so familiar doctrine are well known. Pope Benedict's predecessor John XXII had preached, and had retracted only on his deathbed, the doctrine that the Saints would begin to enjoy the vision of God only after the resurrection and the general judgement. They were meanwhile, he had maintained, in a state of imperfect happiness, blessed with the company of Christ's human nature, but not yet in the joy of the Lord.

These circumstances are well known. What is perhaps less well known, is that the view put forward by John XXII seems, on the evidence we have, to have been the common one before the time of the great scholastics. The New Testament has little to say about the fate of the soul between death and the return of Christ: what little it says — e.g. St Paul's wish to 'be away from the body and at home with the Lord' — is as compatible with the heresy of Pope John as with the orthodoxy of Pope Benedict. The prayer of the Mass that the faithful departed may be received into a place of rest and light and peace, seems a rather cool and unenthusiastic description for the beatific vision. A letter of St Ambrose is a good example of the eschatological picture current in his time. The apostles and the martyrs, he thought, already enjoyed the beatific vision; but the rest of men had not yet entered into their everlasting destiny. Their souls were housed in spiritual warehouses, sorted but not yet despatched, in three groups. The wicked were being punished, but not yet in Hell; run-of-the-mill sinners were to be tried by fire after the last judgement; the just enjoy a certain rest, but suffer still as they wait for the number of the elect to be filled up. Similar views, though not so quaintly explicit, are to be found in St Augustine and St Gregory. As late as the twelfth century St Bernard preached that the faithful departed, though 'at their ease, being freed from the confining flesh' still 'await a perfection which will come only from the resurrection of the body' and are not yet 'with the angels' nor enjoying 'the satisfaction of glory'. It was to St Bernard that Pope John XXII appealed in his ill-starred sermon at Avignon.⁵

The condemnation as heretical of the opinion that usury is not a sin took place in the lifetime of Pope John XXII. Here the case is reversed: it is not the prehistory of a defined doctrine which presents a difficulty but rather the subsequent attitude of official Catholicism. For centuries before and after the Council of Vienne it was taught, with every possible emphasis, that it was a sin to charge interest on money lent. The condemnation of usury in the Middle Ages were more formal and more grieviously sanctioned than any condemnation of artificial contraception in our own day. No-one could say that detestation of usury was nowadays a notable mark of a church whose bishops impose on their clergy an obligation of fruitful investment of ecclesiastical moneys and who are sometimes inclined to see the capitalist societies of the West as Godsent champions of the right against the evils of Communism. This change is comparatively recent. As late as 1745 it was taught, in the encyclical Vix Pervenit, that it was a sin to ask for more money back than one had lent; any money however little, demanded over and above the return of the principal, was illicitly acquired. The encyclical admitted that there might be legitimate grounds other than that of the loan itself on which a consideration might be demanded beyond the principal; but it concluded: 'It must be carefully noted that anyone who says that there are always such grounds attached to a loan would be rashly persuading himself of falsehood.' Compare this with the brief statement of an approved modern manual of moral theology. 'The lender may not, as a rule, require a remuneration for the thing lent. For extrinsic reasons, however, which nowadays are always verified, in case money is lent, a just rate of interest may be charged.'

Consider finally the dogma of the Assumption. Pope Pius XII declared in 1950 that it was dogma divinely revealed, and to be believed under pain of anathema, that the Blessed Virgin Mary at the end of her earthly life, was raised body and soul to heavenly glory. His predecessor, Pius X, had declared that the revelation which constituted the object of Christian faith was complete with last Apostle. It follows that the doctrine of the Assumption must have been revealed before the death of the last Apostle. Yet the records which we have show no trace of a belief in the Assumption before the end of the fourth century; a gap as wide as that which separates us from Queen Elizabeth's death. The first references to the belief occur either in spurious and legendary treatises or in hesitant passages in genuine sermons. Only with the liturgical establishment of the feast of the Dormition on 15 August (c. 650) have we, in the collect and office of the day, a clear witness to the doctrine. There could hardly be a clearer example of the difficulties attendant on the doctrine of the immutability of the faith and of the nature of the phenomena to be explained by any theory of the development of doctrine.

Various explanations have been offered by Catholics of these problematic cases. Sometimes, we are told, doctrines held implicitly are only later explicitly formulated. Other dogmas are deductions from the reading of Scripture. Some variations between ancient and modern teaching may be due to a degree of corruption. Many doctrines may have been believed for centuries without leaving any written record. I will examine how far these explanations can account for the phenomena of development.

1. Formulation. It is often said that we believe the same as the first Christians, only they believed implicitly what we believed explicitly. In support of this theory reference is sometimes made to S.T. IIa, IIae 1, 7 where St Thomas asserts that whatever more recent people have believed was contained in the faith of the fathers who proceeded them, but implicitly. St Thomas, however, was considering the relation not between the faith of later and earlier Christians, but between the faith of Christians and the Hebrew patriarchs. Since revelation continued between the age of the patriarchs and the time of the Apostles, it will not suffice to say that modern Catholics have the same faith as St Peter in the same sense in which St Peter had the same faith as Abraham. Even for the purpose which he had in mind, St Thomas's use of 'implicitly' seems very strained. He says that belief e.g. in the Virgin Birth is contained implicitly in belief in God's providence. To clarify this he compares it to the way in which all other principles are contained in the principle of contradiction. It is difficult to make any credible sense of this Aristotelian dictum which is at all helpful in connection with the development of dogma.

   The notion of implicit belief is, of course, a valid one, and has many applications in the history of dogma. If it is the case that being a perfect human being involves possessing adrenal glands, then it is quite natural to say that the fathers of Chalcedon believed implicitly that Christ possessed adrenal glands. But it is a different matter to say that St Irenaeus believed implicitly in the Immaculate Conception because he compared our Lady to Eve, or to say that ante-Nicene writers, whose words explicitly contradict the teaching of the Council, implicitly believed in Nicene orthodoxy.

2. Deduction. There are certainly some dogmas which are, and are put forward as, deductions from other dogmas or from Scripture; as the doctrine that Christ had two wills follows from the doctrine that he had two natures. But the relation of some dogmas to the Scriptures seems not to be that of conclusion to premisses, but rather that of hypothesis to data: I mean that a dogma such as the Nicene and Constantinopolitan formulation of the Trinity seems to supply a set of premisses from which the Scriptural statements about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost may be derived as conclusions, rather than a set of conclusions which may be derived from the words of Scripture as premisses. This pattern seems to apply particularly to those now defined dogmas each of which is first recorded as one among a number of competing theological theories to account for the data of revelation; I am thinking particularly of the definitions concerning justification, from Orange to the Synod of Pistoia. It is certain that heresies are condemned normally not because they do not follow from Scripture, nor even because they contradict something which follows from Scripture, but rather because from them there follows something which contradicts Scripture.

   But there are some doctrines, such as the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, which do not seem to be in a deductive relationship to scripture any more than docs the canonization of a particular Saint. The difficulty here has led some writers on development to dangerous sophistry; saying that the development of doctrine 'occurs in conformity with a logic which is rigorous and unescapable' but that 'the process by which a truth of the faith is derived from one that precedes it takes place wholly in the night of faith' according to a 'logic of God' which is 'above ours' and which 'goes beyond the purely rational expression which we instinctively try to give it'.

3. Corruption. Since the Reformation, it has been a commonplace outside the Roman communion to account for the variations between Catholic teaching at different periods by regarding recently defined doctrines as Romish corruptions. Such a course is naturally not open to a Catholic; but Catholics concede that the charism of infallibility guarantees only that the Church's official magisterium will not teach anything which it ought not to teach; not that it will teach everything which it ought to teach at any given period of its history. A further question can be raised concerning the limits of infallibility. Is it possible that a Pope might be mistaken in thinking that he was speaking ex cathedra? The charism extends only to matters concerning faith and morals. Would it be possible for a Pope to believe mistakenly that a certain belief was necessary to salvation, and therefore within his competence to define? If not, then is there no criterion of what pertains to the deposit of faith independent of what Popes have said, or may say, in their definitions? If so, then how is it known that — e.g. in defining the Assumption — the Pope did not perhaps go beyond his competence and was therefore deprived of the charism of infallibility and perhaps erred?

4. Unrecorded belief. The decree of the Council of Trent quoted earlier is quite naturally read as implying that the Gospel truth is contained partly in the written records which make up Scripture and partly in unrecorded beliefs which have been orally transmitted from generation to generation. Theologians, faced with the task of accounting for the emergence of an apparently new doctrine, have sometimes solved their difficulties by claiming that the doctrine had always been explicitly believed since the time of the Apostles, but that no record of such a belief had survived. The absence of records in such cases is sometimes shrugged off as the result of chance, sometimes accounted for by appeal to a disciplina arcani or deliberate concealment of esoteric doctrines by the early Christians.

   Now there is nothing inconceivable in the faithful transmission, over long periods, of a piece of oral tradition. In the nature of the case, one cannot produce a conclusive proof of its possibility by pointing to the present existence of an accurate record of a remote event which has been transmitted purely orally. But there are many pieces of lore which, though they may be found in print at various times, are almost always acquired by hearing and passed on by word of mouth. Examples are nursery rhymes, bawdy songs and jokes, the way to tie complicated knots, and simple and staple prayers. Monsignor Knox has pointed out that the Lord's Prayer has been transmitted from the time of the Apostles almost entirely by word of mouth: most of those who have known it have been illiterate and almost all of us learnt it at an age when we were too young to read. The unimportance of written, as compared with oral, influence here may be gauged by the surprise with which Catholics make the discovery — if they ever do — that the Douay version reads 'Our Father which art in heaven . . .' Iona and Peter Opie, in The Lore and Language of School Children (Oxford, 1959), give some striking examples of the transmission from child to child, over centuries, of beliefs which though recorded in books were not written in any place where a child would be likely to read them. Such are the beliefs that a cut between thumb and forefinger causes lockjaw, that dock-leaves cure nettle stings (mentioned by Chaucer), that finding a four-leaved clover brings luck (recorded in 1620) and that stepping on two flagstones at once brings disaster (a belief which Dr Johnson never grew out of). (Ibid. pp. 1, 62, 221, 223.)

   If the existence of an oral tradition independent of the Scriptures is not inconceivable, it is not, on the other hand, an item of Catholic faith. For the fathers and the great Scholastics all the truths which are necessary to salvation are contained in the Scriptures; 'tradition' means the handing on and interpreting of the Scriptures, not a set of beliefs side by side with them. The suggestion that there are some Catholic truths which have been derived from the Apostles by oral transmission was first made, it seems, by Ockham. This view was taken up by fifteenth-century theologians, and became naturally popular with anti-Lutheran polemists. It was the view held by the majority of the fathers present at the Council of Trent, but it was not defined by the Council, as has recently been brilliantly shown by George Tavard. The original draft of the decree on tradition, championed by the Papal Legate, and using language derived, oddly enough, from King Henry VI II, spoke of the Gospel truth as being 'contained partly in written books, partly in unwritten traditions'. A vociferous minority, including the Bishop of Worcester and Cardinal Pole, opposed the draft. Typical of their attitude was the statement of Angelo Bonuti, the general of the Servites, 'I consider that all evangelical truth is in Scripture, not therefore partly'. To secure unanimity, the words 'partim . . . partim . . .' were dropped from the final decree, which thus deliberately left room for the classical, but by then unpopular, conception of tradition as an interpreter of, rather than a supplement to, Scripture.⁶

   It is obvious, and we are told expressly by the Gospel writers, that while men lived who remembered Jesus, there were many facts about his life and teaching which were known but which were never committed to writing. It does not follow from this, however, that any of these facts were still known and repeated some generations later, after the formation and circulation of the canonical scriptures. That by the fifth century there were still current reliable oral traditions of this kind seems unlikely for the following reasons.

   It is rare today to find stories circulating concerning persons who lived or events which happened much more than 100 years ago which can plausibly claim both to be reliable and to have been transmitted only by word of mouth. The examples of oral tradition mentioned earlier all concern frequently repeated formulae, or are connected with often repeated actions. Fidelity of transmission is much more credible in such contexts than in the case of a narrative of a particular event which there is not frequent reason to repeat or of a statement of abstruse theory.

   Since the institution of the feast of 15 August, and especially since the rosary became popular, the doctrine of the Assumption has belonged precisely to that class of beliefs whose oral propagation is most credible: even today, probably far more Catholics first heard of the Assumption in connection with the holiday of obligation or of learning to tell their beads rather than through the reading of pious books or catechisms. But this does not yet make it credible that the belief was transmitted orally from the time of the death of St Mary until the period at which it is first recorded.

   It may be argued that the parallel with the present day does not hold; first because we live in a much more literate age, and secondly because we do not know that there were not written records of the belief, say from the second century, which have been lost. This is so: but there are particular as well as general reasons for doubting the survival of oral tradition concerning evangelical events after the second century. Christian writers in the third and later centuries never make appeal to such traditions, other than liturgical ones, and write as if the canonical scriptures contained all the information which had survived about the life of our Lord and his circle. Origen, for example, writing about the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, cannot appeal to any reliable tradition on this point: he bases his guess about the Epistle's composition on its style and content. The manifestly legendary elements in the apocryphal gospels suggest that the gaps in the life of our Lord left by the scriptures were filled up rather by imagination than by an extra-scriptural tradition, and the circulation of such untrustworthy narratives must soon have made it impossible to place reliance on any story which was current but unvouched for by the canonical writers. Tradition is appealed to by the Fathers for the reception and interpretation of the Scriptures, not as source of information and saving truth flowing side by side with them.

   By itself, therefore, the postulation of unrecorded beliefs does not provide a satisfactory solution of the problems connected with the development of dogma. If this is so in the case of the Assumption, where the phenomenon to be explained is merely the silence of early writing concerning a later defined dogma, it is much more so in the case of other examples of development, where early writings give testimony of the existence of beliefs contrary to, or difficult to reconcile with, the finally defined orthodoxy.⁷

[Footnotes]

¹ See H. Denzinger and C. Bannwart, Enchiridon Symbolorum, 25 edn, pp. 783, 1795, 1800, 1817.

² Ibid., 2021, 2060ff.

³ Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 1, 200f.

⁴ The two passages quoted are from The Development of Doctrine (London, 1960, pp. 11-12).

⁵ St Ambrose, Ep. 35, 7 (J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, series latiba, henceforth. P. L., pp. 16, 1125); St Bernard, Sermons (P. L., pp. 183, 325, 528, 698). See H. Rondet, S. J., Do Dogmas Change? (London, 1962), pp. 22-35.

⁶ Holy Writ or Holy Church, (London, 1963), ch. 12.

⁷ I am indebted to Prof. G. E. M. Anscombe for criticism of this paper when presented in 1964.