“If you desire to profit, read with humility, simplicity, and faith, and have no concern to appear learned.”—Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (I.5)
Even if I have not always adhered to Thomas à Kempis’ advice, it seems a fitting introduction to my current reading schedule. Recently I picked up a used copy of the 1968 Norton annotated edition of John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. It is the celebrated defense of the English writer’s theological development and eventual break with the Anglican Church in favor of Catholicism.
At the moment, however, I’m delving into a somewhat different work by Newman, his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). It was prompted by a discussion with a Protestant friend on the subject of “divine simplicity.” As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains: “According to the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, God is radically unlike creatures and cannot be adequately understood in ways appropriate to them. God is simple in that God transcends every form of complexity and composition familiar to the discursive intellect.”
Newman works from this same definition. He does so not only to help us better understand why the infinite is so difficult of comprehension by finite beings; but also to explain the root of (and potential solution to) theological complexities and differences:
If Christianity is a fact, and impresses an idea of itself on our minds and is a subject-matter of exercises of the reason, that idea will in course of time expand into a multitude of ideas, and aspects of ideas…. It is a characteristic of our minds, that they cannot take an object in, which is submitted to them simply and integrally. We conceive by means of definition or description; whole objects do not create in the intellect whole ideas, but are, to use a mathematical phrase, thrown into series, into a number of statements, strengthening, interpreting, correcting each other, and with more or less exactness approximating, as they accumulate, to a perfect image. There is no other way of learning or of teaching.
Newman’s tantalizing discussion of doctrinal development is an apt preface to my own foray into the subject. I hope to post further comments as time permits.
Imlac's Journal 