Did Cardinal Newman consider Eastern Orthodoxy?

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Hello all,
I’ve wondered about this, but can’t seem to find any info. I have not come across any of Newman’s writings where he evaluates Eastern Orthodoxy, but surely a man of his intellect and intense investigation into Roman Catholicism, would have entertained the idea of going over to Orthodoxy instead. Anybody know of his views on it?

Thanks!
K
 
Kaste said:
Hello all,
I’ve wondered about this, but can’t seem to find any info. I have not come across any of Newman’s writings where he evaluates Eastern Orthodoxy, but surely a man of his intellect and intense investigation into Roman Catholicism, would have entertained the idea of going over to Orthodoxy instead. Anybody know of his views on it?

Thanks!
K
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Actually, Newman’s intense investigation was of Christianity, with the purpose to show how Catholicism was in error … He studied the history of Christianity and ended up defending the papacy … so yes, Newman looked at the schism and came down on the side of the Catholic Church not the Orthodox.
 
YADA said:
Actually, Newman’s intense investigation was of Christianity, with the purpose to show how Catholicism was in error … He studied the history of Christianity and ended up defending the papacy … so yes, Newman looked at the schism and came down on the side of the Catholic Church not the Orthodox.
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That’s right. I’ve read it somewhere in his writings where he dismisses the Eastern Orthodox option (for himself.) I’ll try to find the exact reference.

Newman was suspicious of Erastianism, and national Churches. In Newman’s mind the Orthodox Churches would have been national churches. Newman was always a great advocate of Catholicity. He tried to see Anglicanism in a Catholic light, so when that failed, he was drawn to the only other Catholic Church; the Roman Catholic Church. In fact the Roman Catholic Church always loomed like a specter over his own Oxford Movement. Everyone knew, (even though Newman resisted the idea for some time) that eventually he would go over to Rome, in his quest for Catholicity.
 
Ambrose,

Any luck with finding Newman’s passage on Eastern Orthodoxy yet?

Thanks,

K
 
I haven’t found the exact passage I was trying to recall yet, but I have found something that I think will bear out my statement in Newman’s prefatory notes to the book Notes of a Visit to the Russian Church by the Late William Palmer, M.A.

Newman was friends with Mr Palmer, an Anglican, who had the peculiar idea of going to Russia to have the Eastern Orthodox acknowledge Anglicans as another “Orthodox” Church (making three branches of Christianity; Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic.) Newman notes that this mission was an utter failure.

Knowing Newman’s thoughts on the importance of Catholicity, one can see in which direction Newman’s sympathies would lie (with respect to “considering” Eastern Orthodoxy) despite his sensitivity in not offending them in these prefatory remarks.

Here Newman summarizes the Eastern Orthodox Prelates reply to Palmer:
but, instead of keeping to ground so clear and so easily maintained, some of their highest prelates and officials go out of their way to deny altogether, or at least to ignore, the Catholicity of the Church as recognized in the Creed, as if their own time-honoured communion was but a revival of the ancient Donatists. They say virtually, even if not expressly, “We know nothing about Unity, nothing about Catholicity; it is no term of ours; it had indeed a meaning once, it has none now. Our Church is not Catholic, it is Holy and Orthodox; also, (because it came from the East, whence Divine Truth has ever issued,) it is Oriental. We know of no true Church besides our own. We are the only Church in the world. The Latins are heretics, or all but heretics; you are worse; we do not even know your name. There is no true Christianity in the world except in Russia, Greece, and the Levant; and, as to the Greeks, many as they are, after all they are a poor lot.”
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Anyone familiar with Newman at all, would realize this is a polar opposite in ecclesiology from his own ideas on Catholicity.

I’ll keep looking, but Newman wrote an awful lot, and I’ve read a lot of his works, and works about his works, with an aged and forgetful mind, so you may want to try searching yourself through the online Newman reader, which may yield results quicker. 😉
 
Newman is a very dense read, and hence a very dense search. Unless you know for certain what search terms he’s using, or you find a very good index, you may as well just read the whole book. “Greeks” and “Orthodox” are prone to come up in many other contexts besides Greek Orthodoxy, for instance. So I’m very certain that I’ve read side comments along the lines above; but I have no idea where to find them.

There’s a bit in Apologia pro Vita Sua that says that initially, he figured that the Catholic Church had three branches: Roman, Greek, and Anglican, and that all three had inherited the whole of the Church.

There’s a bit in his conversion autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua, that glances at contemporary Orthodoxy, but not in an approving way. It’s in Part 5, “History of My Religious Opinions from 1839 to 1841”.

He recaps an argument article that he had written between two fictional arguers. One argues that the Catholic Church is the only catholic one, and that the others are cut off from the Vine, like St. Cyprian said of the Donatists. The other fictional disputant is recapped thusly:

“The other replies, by denying the fact that the present Roman communion is like St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, inasmuch as there are to be taken into account the large Anglican and Greek communions.”

Then there’s a lot more:

"As if all this were not enough, there came the affair of the Jerusalem Bishopric; and, with a brief mention of it, I shall conclude.

"I think I am right in saying that it had been long a desire with the Prussian Court to introduce Episcopacy into the new Evangelical Religion, which was intended in that country to embrace both the Lutheran and Calvinistic bodies… M. Bunsen and the then Archbishop of Canterbury were taking steps for its execution, by appointing and consecrating a Bishop for Jerusalem. Jerusalem, it would seem, was considered a safe place for the experiment; it was too far from Prussia to awaken the susceptibilities of any party at home; if the project failed, it failed without harm to any one; and, if it succeeded, it gave Protestantism a status in the East, which in association with the Monophysite or Jacobite and the Nestorian bodies, formed a political instrument for England, parallel to that which Russia had in the Greek Church and France in the Latin.

"Accordingly, in July 1841, full of the Anglican difficulty on the question of Catholicity, I thus spoke of the Jerusalem scheme in an Article in the British Critic: “When our thoughts turn to the East, instead of recollecting that there are Christian Churches there, we leave it to the Russians to take care of the Greeks, and the French to take care of the Romans, and we content ourselves with erecting a Protestant Church at Jerusalem, or with helping the Jews to rebuild their Temple there, or with becoming the august protectors of Nestorians, Monophysites, and all the heretics we can hear of, or with forming a league with the Mussulman against Greeks and Romans together.”

“…Now here, at the very time that the Anglican Bishops were directing their censure upon me for avowing an approach to the Catholic Church not closer than I believed the Anglican formularies would allow, they were on the other hand fraternizing, by their act or by their sufferance, with Protestant bodies, and allowing them to put themselves under an Anglican Bishop, without any renunciation of their errors or regard to the due reception of baptism and confirmation; while there was great reason to suppose that the said Bishop was intended to make converts from the orthodox Greeks, and the schismatical Oriental bodies, by means of the influence of England. This was the third blow, which finally shattered my faith in the Anglican Church. That Church was not only forbidding any sympathy or concurrence with the Church of Rome, but it actually was courting an intercommunion with Protestant Prussia and the heresy of the Orientals. The Anglican Church might have the Apostolical succession, as had the Monophysites; but such acts as were in progress led me to the gravest suspicion, not that it would soon cease to be a Church, but that, since the 16th century, it had never been a Church all along.”

He’s got a foreword from 1882, dealing with an Anglican man’s long attempt to get the Russian Orthodox Church to let him receive Communion. The gentleman left Newman his notes and papers on this attempt, so Newman learned Russian and published them as a book. (An unusual act of literary honor.)

Even in London, there simply wasn’t much going on with Orthodoxy in England. To go to any foreign immigrant church in a foreign tongue, even for reasons of church exploration, would have been highly unusual. That’s part of why Catholicism gave heebie-jeebies to Englishmen of Newman’s time. How much less likely would exploring Orthodoxy be?
 
I ran into this very question years ago from a Ruthenian Byzantine. The thinking ran along the line that considering Church ecclesiology today, in light of Vatican II, and considering how ahead of his time, John Henry Newman was, it seems likely that IF Orthodox Churches had a real presence in England during his own time, THEN he may have considered them rather than the Roman Catholic.

This is a very conjectural and hypothetical argument of course. But the more one familiarizes himself with the writings of John Henry Newman, the more one is disinclined to credit that probability. He placed great stress on Catholicity in his own writings. He abhorred national Churches as Erastian (ultimately at least.) He considered Eastern Orthodox Churches to be national churches (certainly in origin.) So although Newman would have absolutely considered the Orthodox to be under the Catholic umbrella, he would have seen that their own ecclesiology downplayed Catholicity (at least in his own time.) This would have been a much less satisfying fit for Newman when compared to the Roman Catholic Church, which maintains Catholicity as central to its constitution.
 
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