Sunday, October 2, 2022

John Henry Newman on Slavery and the New Testament

  

The inventor of the idea that Christian doctrine develops is John Henry Newman. Ignoring the boast of Bossuet that doctrine is unchanging, escaping the thin theorizing that would restrict development to a movement from the implicit to the explicit. Newman pointed to transformation od doctrine as tangible and as organic, as many-sided and complex and real, as the passage from childhood to adulthood. An Anglican arguing his way into the Catholic Church, Newman saw that the anomalies and novelties of his new spiritual home were the marks of vigor, of maturity, of being alive. What Newman noticed and defended were changes in the ways that piety was expressed, in the rules guiding the governance of the Church, in the understanding of the nature of Christ. What he spent no time in either enumerating or explaining were changes in the rules of moral conduct.

 

On October 26, 1863, Thomas William Allies, a lecturer on history at Oxford University and a convert to the Catholic Church, sent Newman the draft of a lecture in which he pronounced slavery to be intrinsically evil. He wanted his friend’s opinion. Newman replied cautiously: “I do not materially differ from you, though I do still startle at some of the sentences of your Lecture.” The source of his startle was St. Paul. Newman wrote:

 

That which is intrinsically and per se evil, we cannot give way to for an hour. That which is only accidentally evil, we can meet according to what is expedient, giving different rules, according to the particular case. St. Paul would have got rid of despotism if he could. He could not, he left the desirable object to the slow working of Christian principles. So he would have got rid of slavery, if he could. He did not, because he could not, but had it been intrinsically evil, had it been in se a sin, it must have been said to Philemon, liberate all your slaves at once. (Newman to Allies, Nov. 8, 1863, John Henry Newman, Letters and Diaries, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain [London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1976], vol. 20, 554-556)

 

Succinctly raising his central difficulty, Newman elaborate with examples of other institutions that he saw to be bad but not to be intrinsically evil. Any army and any government offered occasions of sin and provided temptations to sin and were instruments to sin. Neither an army nor a government was to be condemned as intrinsically evil. “Which did most harm to the soul the Jewish slavedom or the Jewish army?” Slavery, he surprisingly added, was not even as bad as polygamy. (John T. Noonan, Jr., A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005], 3-4)

 

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