Before Deification Became Eastern: Newman's Ecumenical Retrieval

International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 20 Number 2 doi:10.1111/ijst.12276 April 2018 Before Deification Became Eastern: Newman’s Ecumenical Retrieval MARK MCINROY * Abstract: John Henry Newman spearheaded one of the first modern retrievals of the Christian doctrine of deification. This article argues that, precisely because of the early date of Newman’s rehabilitation, his treatment is not tinted by the polemics surrounding theosis that developed in the late nineteenth century between Eastern and Western Christianity. To Newman, deification is not an Eastern doctrine, it is not cause for division between East and West, and it does not supplant justification. Instead, it arises from a broad patristic consensus, it is a tool for union among the churches, and it provides resources for understanding justification properly. John Henry Newman (1801–90) spearheaded one of the first modern retrievals of the Christian doctrine of deification (or theosis) in his Lectures on Justification (1838) and other works. This article argues that, precisely because of the early date of Newman’s rehabilitation, his view of deification is not tinted by the polemics surrounding theosis that developed in the late nineteenth century between Eastern and Western Christianity. At the provocation of German Liberal Protestant historians of doctrine, deification came to be perceived as the most egregious example of the Hellenistic corruption of the gospel. In the early twentieth century, emigre Orthodox theologians in Paris encountered this narrative and inverted it by embracing theosis as the highest achievement of Hellenistic Christianity, which had been heroically preserved in Eastern Orthodoxy. Newman scholarship has been unwittingly mesmerized by this narrative, and it has tended to see Newman as ‘turning East’ in his retrieval of deification. However, this article maintains that Newman does not perceive the doctrine to be an ‘Eastern’ idea at all. Instead, I claim that Newman views deification as an ancient Christian doctrine with enormous ecumenical potential for the church of * Theology Department, University of St Thomas, 2115 Summit Ave, JRC 153, Saint Paul, MN 55105, USA. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 254 Mark McInroy his day. The axis of Newman’s rehabilitation, then, is not between East and West, but rather between ancient and contemporary. This reframing of Newman’s retrieval allows one to see features of his version of the doctrine that would otherwise remain obscured from view. First, Newman sees the warrant for deification as lying not within the Greek patristic tradition alone, but instead among both Latin and Greek Fathers, who together form the common heritage of the universal church. More importantly, behind these patristic figures lies Scripture, from which Newman draws extensively in articulating his version of deification. On Newman’s reading, then, deification is not an exotic artifact of the Christian East; instead, it is drawn from a broad biblical and patristic consensus. Second, whereas deification comes to be used in the twentieth century as an implement for touting the superiority of Orthodoxy over and against the ‘rationalistic’ West, Newman deploys the doctrine with a fundamentally different goal in mind. Specifically, Newman turns to deification in the interest of locating the common root of the issues that divide the Catholic and Protestant churches. Deification for him is not an instrument with which to mark out division; instead, it is a tool for unity. Third, twentieth-century Eastern Orthodox theologians often suggest that the West has become unduly preoccupied with justification, and that deification should supplant such ‘thin’, ‘legalistic’ soteriologies. Newman, however, does not seek to move justification aside; instead, he holds that deification offers resources for understanding justification aright. In fact, in an unexpected echo of the concerns that animate Luther (whom Newman purportedly rejects), Newman actually intensifies the requirements of justification to the point that only being deified will meet the otherwise impossible demand of being sufficiently righteous for God. Newman’s retrieval of deification Newman uses a wide range of terms to describe deification, including ‘participation’, ‘adoption’, ‘children of God’, ‘new birth’, being ‘born of God’, ‘union with Christ’ and being a ‘partaker of the divine nature’.1 However, he most frequently refers to deification as the ‘indwelling’ or ‘presence’ of God within the individual Christian.2 1 John Henry Newman, Lectures on Justification ( London: J.G. & F. Rivington, 1838) (hereafter Jfc.). For Newman’s discussions of participation, see pp. 61, 251–2; adoption: pp. 79, 83, 116, 148, 152, 166, 424; children of God: pp. 137, 266, 353–4; new birth: pp. 34, 244; born of God: p. 276; union with Christ: pp. 148, 184; John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols. (London: J.G. & F. Rivington, 1880) (hereafter PPS). For Newman’s discussions of Christians being partakers of the divine nature, see PPS II, pp. 34, 222; PPS III, p. 260. 2 Jfc., indwelling of the Holy Spirit, Christ, the Trinity, or God: pp. 139, 161, 163, 165, 166, 172, 175, 183, 190, 192, 210, 213, 217, 220, 222, 232, 233, 252, 352, 397, 399, 423, 425, 427, 428; presence of the Holy Spirit, Christ, the Trinity, or God: pp. 67, 100, 102, 151–3, 160–7, 169, 171–5, 178, 180, 183–4, 186, 196, 198, 201, 213–14, 216–18, 220, 222–3, 230, 232, 247, 252, 253, 256, 268, 278, 318, 325, 327, 355, 396, 398–9. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Before Deification Became Eastern 255 The idea began to interest him shortly after his turn away from evangelicalism toward High Church Anglicanism, and as the Oxford Movement began in the early 1830s, Edward Pusey and John Keble joined Newman in his forays into patristic thought in general, and deification in particular.3 Newman first preached on deification at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in a sermon titled ‘The Indwelling Spirit’ in 1834, and he returned to the topic in a number of other sermons from this period.4 In 1837 he gave a series of lectures on justification in which deification plays an integral role. Newman described the lectures as coming from the desire ‘to fill up a ditch’ between Protestant and Catholic positions on justification,5 and he saw his work as bringing about a ‘convergence’ of these ‘apparently discordant views’.6 As we will see, deification effects that convergence. But first, a description of the problem, namely, the differences between the Protestant and Catholic views of justification: Newman took as his main target the supposedly ‘Lutheran’ idea that our righteousness before God is merely imputed to us, not imparted such that it resides within the human soul.7 Newman resists this ‘extreme Protestant’ view by appealing in the first place to Augustine, who has ‘the whole of scripture’ behind him, whereas Luther and other continental Protestants ‘like the Arians, entrench themselves in a few favorite texts’.8 Newman goes on to summon a catena of biblical passages that make a collective case for the idea that we are not simply declared righteous, for ‘God’s word . . . effects what it announces’.9 Justification is therefore not a legal fiction. God ‘imputes, not a name, but a substantial Word, 3 Andrew Louth, ‘Manhood into God: the Oxford Movement, the Fathers, and the Deification of Man’, in Kenneth Leech and Rowan Williams, eds., Essays Catholic and Radical: A Jubilee Group Symposium for the 150th Anniversary of the beginning of the Oxford Movement 1833–1983 (London: Bowerdean Press, 1983), pp. 70–80; and A.M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1988). 4 PPS II, pp. 217–34. See John Connolly, ‘Newman’s Notion of the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Parochial and Plain Sermons’, Newman Studies Journal 5 (2008), pp. 5–18. 5 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London: Longmans, 1875), p. 72. 6 Jfc., p. 151. 7 Newman’s reading of Luther is notoriously contentious. Julius Charles Hare disputed Newman’s interpretation in Vindication of Luther against His Recent English Assailants (London: J.W. Parker, 1855), and scholars since have added to Hare’s complaints. Alister McGrath most witheringly criticizes the Lectures as ‘seriously inaccurate as regards their historico-theological foundations’ in his ‘John Henry Newman’s “Lectures on Justification”: the High Church Misrepresentation of Luther’, Churchman 97 (1983), p. 121. As a possible explanation of this puzzling misreading, Thomas Sheridan notes the strategic benefit of indicting Luther, who was not well known in England, rather than evangelicals, whom Newman did not want to alienate. Thomas Sheridan, ‘Justification’, in Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 98–117. 8 Jfc., p. 65. 9 Jfc., p. 87. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Mark McInroy 256 which, being “ingrafted” in our hearts, “is able to save our souls”’.10 Against any extrinsicism Newman maintains that to be justified is to be transformed by God’s grace. Thus far Newman may sound thoroughly Catholic. However, he holds that there are also problems with the ‘Romanist’ view of justification as articulated at the Council of Trent. To Newman, ‘When the Council of Trent is treating of man, it is not treating of God. Its enunciations are isolated and defective, taken one by one.’11 In its emphasis on justification as the renewal of the human soul, Trent overly focuses on the human being, not the source of his or her renewal. As a result, Newman holds that Catholicism too frequently ‘views the influences of grace, not as the operations of a living God, but as something to bargain about, and buy, and traffic with, as if religion were, not an approach to Things above us, but a commerce with our equals concerning things we can master’.12 In a footnote added to the third edition of the Lectures (1874), Newman explains further his concern with this way of thinking: This school is elsewhere called in these Lectures ultra-Roman or extreme Romanist. Such Catholic divines as Caietan, Vasquez, and Bellarmine were intended by this title, who, by making justification consist in the habit of charity, or again in good works, not in sanctifying grace as an initial and distinct gift from above, seemed to the writer to fix the mind . . . not on a Divine inward Presence vouchsafed to it, but on something of its own, as a ground to rest upon and take satisfaction in.13 To Newman, one must not presume that one has grace as a possession. In his efforts at resisting this stance, Newman insists that the view of the ancient church differs from that of Tridentine Catholicism: In the Roman schools . . . to use the technical language which even the Council of Trent has adopted, spiritual renewal is said to be the ‘unica formalis causa,’ the one and only true description of justification; and this seems to be the critical difference between those schools and such divines, whether of the Ancient Church or our own.14 In fact, Newman reads the early church as advancing a different model of justification than either Tridentine Catholicism or extreme Protestantism. He describes the key feature of this patristic view as follows: through the participation of Christ we receive, as through a channel, the true presence of God within and without us, imbuing us with sanctity and immortality. This is our justification, our ascent through Christ to God, or 10 11 12 13 14 Jfc., p. 86. Jfc., p. 33. Jfc., p. 216. Jfc., p. 190, uniform edn (London: Longmans, 1892). Jfc., p. 33. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Before Deification Became Eastern 257 God’s descent through Christ to us . . . And this is our true Righteousness, – not the mere name of righteousness, not only forgiveness or favour as an act of God’s mind, not only sanctification within, (great indeed as these blessings would be, yet it is somewhat more) . . . it is the indwelling of our glorified Lord.15 This emphasis on the divine indwelling, or deification, focuses not on the created grace of the renovated soul, but instead on the uncreated grace of the divine presence. Newman makes clear that ‘faith and spiritual renovation are fruits’ of this divine presence, but the indwelling logically precedes such fruits.16 Although Protestants neglect the divine indwelling through their emphasis on extrinsic righteousness, Catholics are also insufficiently attentive to the inner presence of God in that they focus on the renovated human soul instead of the divine source of its renewal. Newman, then, is among the very first nineteenth-century figures to insist that deification occupies a central position in Christian theology. He would treat deification in other works such as his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and Select Treatises of St Athanasius, but his most sustained discussion of the topic is found in his Lectures.17 With the broad features of Newman’s position in place, we now turn to the way in which deification has been characterized by modern theologians and historians. Perceptions of deification in modern scholarship Modern scholars typically associate deification (theosis) with Eastern Orthodox theology, and studies of the doctrine routinely insist that Greek patristic figures and Eastern Orthodox theologians emphasize theosis in a manner not matched by their Western counterparts. Emblematic of this attitude are the words of Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, who flatly declare: ‘The Eastern Orthodox Church has retained theosis as a concept for theological reflection, while the Western churches – separated by time, language, and philosophy from the Greek thinkers of the early church – have dropped it.’18 According to this way of thinking, the true source of theosis can be found in Greek (not Latin) patristic figures, and one’s proximity to those figures determines whether one will advocate the doctrine or not. The situation for the West is indeed dire, as Finlan and Kharlamov continue: 15 Jfc., pp. 251–2. 16 Jfc., p. 151. 17 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, Basil Montagu Pickering, 1878), pp. 140–1; and John Henry Newman, Select Treatises of S. Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria, in Controversy with the Arians, vol. 2 (London: J.G. & F. and J. Rivington, 1844), pp. 344, 380–1. 18 Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, ‘Introduction’, in Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, eds., The osis: Deification in Christian Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006), p. 8. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 258 Mark McInroy ‘The near disappearance in Western Christendom of an idea that was widely accepted for over a thousand years . . . is a serious loss for Christian thought and hope’.19 Whereas the East has preserved the heritage of the early church, the West has squandered its inheritance. Although this line of thinking is remarkably widespread, current academic treatments of deification have demonstrated that the narrative is a relatively recent scholarly construction.20 A number of figures today claim that deification only came to be perceived as a dividing line between Eastern and Western Christianity in the late nineteenth century; many further hold that the characterization of deification as ‘Eastern’ actually has its roots in German Liberal Protestant history of doctrine.21 According to Carl Mosser, the separation begins with Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), whose Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (1870) defines reconciliation from the outset in a manner that precludes deification: ‘The Christian notion of reconciliation can only be understood as a removal of the one-sided or mutual contrariety between the Divine and human will. Accordingly, the fancies of the Church Fathers . . . about the deification of the human race as a natural unity, do not fall under that notion’.22 To Ritschl, the West alone is equipped to treat of justification and reconciliation. ‘Such trains of thought have been constructed only by the theologians of the West. The doctrines of reconciliation and justification are precisely those which have found their development exclusively in this portion of the Church.’23 The East, by contrast, ‘has not, as a whole, set before itself the problem which is involved in these ideas’.24 Justification and reconciliation, according to Ritschl, presuppose an opposition of wills between God and human beings. This is the concern of the West. The East is occupied with an entirely different set of soteriological issues. Ritschl portrays a progressive history, according to which Greek patristic theology, precisely because it lacks the concepts of reconciliation and justification, represents the most primitive stage of the church. Catholicism advances beyond its 19 Finlan and Kharlamov, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 20 See especially Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Daniel Keating, Deification and Grace (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007); Paul Gavrilyuk, ‘The Retrieval of Deification: How a Once-Despised Archaism Became an Ecumenical Desideratum’, Modern Theology 25 (2009), pp. 647–59; Carl Mosser, ‘An Exotic Flower? Calvin and the Patristic Doctrine of Deification’, in Michael Parsons, ed., Reformation Faith: Exegesis and Theology in the Protestant Reformations (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2014), pp. 38–56; and Carl Mosser, ‘Deification: A Truly Ecumenical Concept’, Perspectives (July/August 2015), pp. 8–14. 21 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, p. 3; Keating, Deification and Grace, p. 29; Gavrilyuk, ‘The Retrieval of Deification’, p. 1; and Mosser, ‘An Exotic Flower?’, p. 41. 22 Albrecht Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, trans. John S. Black (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872), p. 11; and Mosser, ‘Deification’, p. 11. 23 Ritschl, A Critical History, p. 21. 24 Ritschl, A Critical History, p. 19. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Before Deification Became Eastern 259 predecessor in that it has the concepts of justification and reconciliation, but deification hangs on in figures such as Thomas Aquinas and Bernard of Clairvaux.25 Christian theology enters a third stage with Luther, who ‘adopts a standpoint which is as manifestly distinct from the Greek method as from the Latin’.26 As noted by a number of scholars, Ritschl’s most influential student, Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), intensified this narrative by casting deification as the paradigmatic instance of the corruption of the gospel by Hellenism.27 In his History of Dogma, he claims that deification is in truth a Platonic idea that early figures such as Irenaeus and Hippolytus pressed into service for the church: The apotheosis of mortal man through his acquisition of immortality (divine life) is the idea of salvation which was taught in the ancient mysteries. It is here [i.e. in the thought of Irenaeus and Hippolytus] adopted as a Christian one . . . What the heathen faintly hoped for as a possibility was here announced as certain, and indeed as having already taken place. What a message!28 These second-century figures radically recast redemption as deification, which entails ‘the abrogation of the natural state by a miraculous transformation of our nature . . . atonement was not included in it’.29 To Harnack, the gospel originally involved simply ‘the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men’, and deification represents the first swerve away from that message: When the Christian religion was represented as the belief in the incarnation of God and as the sure hope of the deification of man, a speculation that had originally never got beyond the fringe of religious knowledge was made the central point of the system and the simple content of the Gospel was obscured.30 In What is Christianity?, Harnack further insists that the Christian understanding of redemption was distorted by the Hellenistic context in which it took root: What a severely Greek idea this is we can see, in the first place, from the fact that redemption from death is presented, in a wholly realistic fashion, as a 25 Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine, trans. H.R. Mackintosh and A.B. Macaulay (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1900), p. 389. 26 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, p. 394. 27 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, p. 3; Keating, Deification and Grace, p. 29; Gavrilyuk, ‘The Retrieval of Deification’, p. 1; and Mosser, ‘An Exotic Flower?’, p. 41. 28 Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. 2, trans. Neil Buchanan (London: Williams and Norgate, 1896), pp. 10–11. 29 Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. 3, trans. James Millar (London: Williams and Norgate, 1897), p. 165. 30 Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. 2, p. 318. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 260 Mark McInroy pharmacological process – the divine nature has to flow in and transform the mortal nature – and, in the second, from the way in which eternal life and deification were identified.31 Harnack’s blistering treatment of deification reaches its apex as he remarks, ‘It was to destroy this sort of religion that Jesus Christ suffered himself to be nailed to the cross, and now we find it re-established under his name and authority!’32 In a manner similar to Ritschl, Harnack advances a history in which Eastern Orthodoxy is ‘the ancient form of the lowest class of religion’; it ‘has absolutely nothing to do with the religion of Christ’.33 It is more accurately viewed as a continuation of pre-Christian Greek religion than Christianity proper.34 Roman Catholicism improves on Orthodoxy largely because of Augustine, who retrieves Pauline notions of sin, grace, guilt and justification.35 In so doing, Harnack claims, ‘If I am not mistaken, Augustine himself brought it [deification] to an edifying end.’36 During the late medieval period Augustine’s influence fades and Catholicism comes to resemble Eastern Orthodoxy; however, Luther restores the gospel through his emphasis on justification by faith. Deification, then, is the hallmark of primitive Hellenism; justification (especially its Protestant form) indicates progress toward the rediscovery of the simple message of the gospel. In the early twentieth century, Russian emigres to the West were confronted with Harnack’s derisive characterization of deification, and, more broadly, Eastern Orthodox theology.37 Myrrha Lot-Borodine (1882–1957), in a series of articles in the Revue de l’histoire des religions in 1932 and 1933, underscores the distinction between Eastern Orthodoxy and the West along the precise lines laid down by Ritschl and Harnack.38 In the first of her articles, Lot-Borodine mentions Harnack’s characterization of deification as a ‘physico-pharmacological’ process, and she insists that the Western tradition, under the influence of Augustine, has a fundamentally different view of salvation than that of Orthodoxy.39 Whereas the West has focused on reconciliation and the forgiveness of sins, the East has 31 Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1957), p. 232. 32 Harnack, What is Christianity?, p. 238. 33 Harnack, What is Christianity?, pp. 239, 241. 34 Harnack, What is Christianity?, p. 263. 35 Harnack, What is Christianity?, p. 258. 36 Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. 3, p. 165. 37 By this time, Theodore de Regnon’s paradigm had come to be understood as further dividing East and West through a now-disputed distinction between different approaches to the Trinity. See Michel Rene Barnes, ‘De Regnon Reconsidered’, Augustinian Studies 26 (1995), pp. 51–79.  38 Myrrha Lot-Borodine, ‘La Doctrine de la “deification” dans l’Eglise grecque jusqu’au XIe siècle’, Revue de l’histoire des religions 105 (1932), pp. 5–43; 106 (1932), pp. 525–74; and 107 (1933), pp. 8–55, 245–6. 39 Lot-Borodine, ‘La Doctrine de la “deification”’, Revue de l’histoire des religions 105 (1932), p. 33. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Before Deification Became Eastern 261 consistently emphasized participation in the divine life.40 Beginning with Lot-Borodine, then, Orthodox figures developed an anti-Western polemic organized around deification, which they valued positively in contrast to their German counterparts. After being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922, Vladimir Lossky (1903– 58) eventually settled in Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne under Lot-Borodine’s husband, Ferdinand Lot (1866–1952), and the renowned medieval  historian Etienne Gilson (1884–1978). In 1944 Lossky published The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, in which he claims that ‘many a passage of Harnack’ exemplifies a trend among Protestant historians: ‘the mystics are set up against the theologians’.41 As a corrective, Lossky first insists that the East does not oppose mysticism and theology. He then casts the mystical union expressed by theosis as the ‘dominant preoccupation’ of early defenders of orthodoxy from the fourth to seventh centuries in their efforts to refute all of the major christological heresies that arose during that critical period.42 To Lossky, deification is the unifying thread that can be pulled through anti-Arian, anti-Nestorian, antiApollinarian and anti-Monothelite positions. Lossky then confidently proclaims: ‘All the history of Christian dogma unfolds itself around this mystical centre.’43 Lossky thus elevates deification to a position of newfound prominence in Orthodox theology, as he casts theosis as the guiding theological concern behind the great doctrinal disputes of the patristic period. In a critique of the Western soteriological model that had been championed as authentic by Ritschl and Harnack, Lossky insists that the debate between Augustine and Pelagianism betrays an error common to both parties, which is that of ‘transposing the mystery of grace onto a rational plane’.44 In an inversion of the Ritschlian–Harnackian paradigm, Lossky holds that understandings of divine grace took a wrong turn in the West, not the East, and Augustine’s rationalizing influence increased ‘as living contact with the Eastern tradition was lost’.45 Lossky additionally contrasts East and West based on differing views of what ‘conformity to Christ’ means in each tradition. Whereas the West has tended to regard such conformity as merely imitation of Christ, ‘the spirituality of the imitation of Christ which is sometimes found in the West is foreign to Eastern spirituality, which may rather be defined as a life in Christ’.46 According to Lossky’s understanding, then, the West is consistently deficient in its view of the God–human relation, and the 40 Lot-Borodine, ‘La Doctrine de la “deification”’, Revue de l’histoire des religions 105 (1932), p. 33. 41 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (repr. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), p. 8. 42 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 10. 43 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 10. 44 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 198. 45 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 199. 46 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 215. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 262 Mark McInroy East has rightly adhered to the doctrinally central notions of union with Christ and deification. This theosis-centered conception of Orthodox identity has exerted a powerful influence on generations of scholars down to the present day, but there are reasons to be critical of the narrative. First, German Liberal Protestants should be held accountable to their claim that deification is a pre-Christian, Platonic idea that is minimally altered as Greek patristic figures baptize it for Christian theology. As Jules Gross first demonstrated, one actually finds in Scripture a broad constellation of concepts and terms that are later synthesized as theosis/deification.47 Although 2 Peter 1:4 is most commonly cited today, patristic figures relied heavily on Psalm 82:6 (‘You are gods, children of the Most High’), which they saw as fulfilled in Paul’s notion that Christians are adopted as God’s children.48 Similarly noteworthy is the spiritual filiation about which Jesus preaches in the Synoptic Gospels.49 Johannine discussions of rebirth as captured in phrases such as being ‘born of God’ or ‘from above’ also figure prominently.50 The terminological issues here are certainly complex, yet Gross insists, ‘If this latter term [i.e. divinization, deification] and its equivalents are absent from the New Testament, it is not less certain that the reality they express is found there.’51 A number of scholars today agree that deification enjoys broad biblical support. Second, we can appreciate that these anti-Western polemics rely on conditions determined not by Eastern figures themselves, but instead by German Liberal Protestant historians of doctrine. Although the emphasis on theosis may seem to arise internally as a source of Orthodox pride, Orthodox theologians seem instead to have been goaded by Western figures into making deification central to their theology. Therefore, it is misleading to suggest that deification has been constantly upheld as a central doctrine in Orthodox theology. In fact, Russell claims that, prior to the 1960s, ‘if you had asked the average Orthodox Christian . . . what theosis meant, you would probably have been met with a puzzled look . . . The word hardly featured in the standard theological handbooks. It was a technical term familiar only to monks and patristic scholars.’52 Mosser adds, ‘Before the 19th century, it is difficult to find support for the idea that deification divides Eastern and Western Christianity.’53 Most instructively, perhaps, after Patriarch Cyril Lucaris attempted to reform Orthodox theology along Calvinistic lines in the 47 Jules Gross, The Divinization of the Christian according to the Greek Fathers, trans. Paul A. Onica (Anaheim, CA: A&C Press, 2002), esp. pp. 61–91. Originally published in French as La Divinisation du chreti en d’apre`s les Pe`res grecs. Contribution historique a la doctrine de la gr^ ace (Paris: Gabalda, 1938). 48 Gross, The Divinization of the Christian, pp. 82–8. 49 Gross, The Divinization of the Christian, p. 81. 50 Gross, The Divinization of the Christian, pp. 88–90. 51 Gross, The Divinization of the Christian, p. 91. 52 Norman Russell, Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), p. 13. 53 Mosser, ‘Deification’, p. 11. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Before Deification Became Eastern 263 seventeenth century, the Orthodox repudiations composed by Peter Mogila and Dositheus give no significant role to deification.54 Such would have been a prime opportunity to use theosis to distinguish Orthodox theology from that of the West. The fact that deification does not play a significant role bespeaks the fact that, although it was a feature of the tradition at some level, in the seventeenth century it did not occupy the position of prominence that it currently enjoys. Third, although it is indeed difficult to locate discussions of justification among Greek patristic figures, a growing body of literature demonstrates that deification is in fact a prevalent theme among their Western counterparts, including – indeed, especially – Augustine.55 Furthermore, new studies are revealing that the doctrine does not fade from view in the West after Augustine, but instead can be found in the writings of major Western medieval theologians such as Boethius, John Scotus Eriugena, Richard of St Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux, Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa.56 Newman as Eastern: a questionable paradigm The characterization of Newman as ‘turning East’ in his theology can be traced back in large part to an influential article by Charles Stephen Dessain in which the author casts Newman as ‘an embodiment of the Eastern Tradition’.57 Dessain makes this determination on the basis of allegedly Eastern emphases that appear in Newman’s writings. For instance, Dessain maintains, ‘It is one of the claims of the Eastern Tradition that it preserves the sense of the mystery in Christianity, its theology is apophatic, it has a deep sense of reverence and of the Divine Transcendence.’58 Newman’s opposition to Arian ‘rationalism’ and his pervasive emphasis on mystery thus qualify him as ‘Eastern’, on Dessain’s reckoning. Dessain additionally claims that the Eastern influence on Newman’s thought can be observed in his discussions of the Trinity: As is well known, the starting point in Latin theology has been the idea of the eminent and absolute simplicity of the Divine Nature – that came first, and the 54 Mosser, ‘Deification’, p. 12. 55 See especially David V. Meconi, The One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013); Alexey Fokin, ‘The Doctrine of Deification in Western Fathers of the Church: A Reconsideration’, in Theresia Hainthaler, Franz Mali, Gregor Emmenegger and Mant_e Lenkaityt_e Ostermann, eds., F€ ur Uns Und F€ ur Unser Heil: Soteriologie in Ost und West (Innsbruck and Vienna: Tyrolia Verlag, 2014), pp. 207–20; and Jared Ortiz, ‘Deification in the Latin Fathers’, in David Meconi and Carl E. Olson, eds., Called to be Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016), pp. 59–81. 56 For references see Mosser, ‘An Exotic Flower?’, pp. 45–6. 57 Charles Stephen Dessain, ‘Cardinal Newman and the Eastern Tradition’, Downside Review 94 (1976), p. 85. 58 Dessain, ‘Cardinal Newman and the Eastern Tradition’, p. 88. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 264 Mark McInroy idea of the distinction of Persons was reduced in significance . . . Newman a hundred and fifty years ago was carrying on in the West the Eastern tradition.59 Dessain leads his reader into deification by first echoing the concerns raised by Lot-Borodine and Lossky outlined above: ‘It is another complaint of the Eastern theologians of modern times that in the West the doctrine of the Atonement is not simply accepted as the mystery it is, but is dissected and rationalized.’60 In a now familiar contrast, Dessain insists that Eastern Christianity has consistently emphasized deification and union with God, whereas ‘in the West grace has tended to be thought of more as a remedy for sin and as a quality in the soul’.61 Lot-Borodine and Lossky remain in the background throughout much of Dessain’s article, and they receive explicit mention as the author concludes: ‘In the East the teaching of the Greek Fathers as to our deification through our union with the Son was kept alive in a later age by St Gregory Palamas, and is presented to us today in the writings of Vladimir Lossky and Myrrha Lot-Borodine.’62 Dessain clearly views deification through the lens of its Russian emigre advocates. As a result, he sees Newman as importing Eastern ideas into Western Christianity, which has been bereft of deification. Dessain has played a major role in the reception of Newman’s works, and his remarks about Newman’s Eastern inclinations have been echoed by his prominent student Ian Ker. In Newman and the Fullness of Christianity, Ker devotes a chapter to Newman’s engagement with Eastern Christianity, and at the outset of the chapter he offers the following speculation about Newman’s use of patristic figures: ‘When he later said, “The Fathers made me a Catholic”, he was thinking particularly of the Greek or Eastern Fathers rather than the later Latin Western Fathers.’63 Like Dessain, Ker upholds Newman as one who appreciates the Eastern emphasis on mystery in contrast to Western rationalism, and he sees Newman’s trinitarian theology as carefully differentiating the persons of the Trinity, as does the East, rather than starting with the one nature of God, as does the West. The binary oppositions continue: whereas the West is juridical in its ecclesiology, the East has a ‘pneumatic theology of the Church’.64 Ker once again sharply contrasts East and West on the topic of deification. The East has consistently emphasized deification and divine indwelling, but ‘this personal union with the Trinity is very different from the Western idea of grace as negatively a remedy for sin and a mere quality of the soul’.65 Newman in his Lectures on Justification rescues the Western church through his rehabilitation of 59 60 61 62 63 Dessain, ‘Cardinal Newman and the Eastern Tradition’, pp. 89–90. Dessain, ‘Cardinal Newman and the Eastern Tradition’, p. 94. Dessain, ‘Cardinal Newman and the Eastern Tradition’, p. 95. Dessain, ‘Cardinal Newman and the Eastern Tradition’, p. 96. Ian Ker, Newman and the Fullness of Christianity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), p. 83. 64 Ker, Newman and the Fullness of Christianity, p. 98. 65 Ker, Newman and the Fullness of Christianity, p. 94. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Before Deification Became Eastern 265 deification, which had been ‘so long forgotten and neglected in the West by both Protestants and Roman Catholics’.66 The habit of viewing Newman as Eastern endures in the contemporary theological climate. It can be observed in recent works such as those of Daniel J. Lattier, who describes ‘the Eastern influence on Newman’ in his formulation of deification; Lattier additionally holds that the doctrine for him has an ‘Eastern character’.67 Similarly, Chris Castaldo comments that ‘Newman’s indebtedness to the eastern doctrine of theosis is evident’.68 These treatments consistently maintain that, although Newman may refer simply to the ‘Fathers’ in his writings, he actually intends to convey his reliance on Eastern patristic figures. Deification as ancient, not Eastern When Newman’s Lectures on Justification appeared in 1838, Albrecht Ritschl was 16 years old. Adolf von Harnack would not be born for another 13 years. The deification-centered divide as scholars have known it for the last 150 years had not yet been established when Newman was conducting his ressourcement. Although it may be tempting to categorize Newman’s retrieval of deification as a result of Eastern influences, it is striking that the terms ‘East’ and ‘Eastern’ do not appear at all in Newman’s Lectures. Whereas Newman refers to the ‘Fathers’ throughout his Lectures, he mentions the ‘Greek Fathers’ as such only once. Newman, of course, sees Athanasius and others as Greek patristic authors, but the term has an entirely different valence for him than it does for scholars today, as noted by Benjamin J. King: ‘Newman’s viewpoint is not ours: he could read the Fathers without inflicting on them notions of East–West difference that have arisen since him.’69 East and West simply are not the classifications Newman uses in his Lectures. Instead, the ‘ancient’ functions as the chief category in Newman’s retrieval. Evidence to support this claim emerges not only through the many references to the ‘ancients’ throughout the Lectures,70 but also through the unceremonious manner in which Newman alternates between Greek and Latin Fathers when discussing deification. The appendix to the Lectures produces a list of citations from patristic figures who support the doctrine of divine indwelling. References to Augustine (or ‘Austin’, as Newman frequently calls him), Cyprian and Ambrose are interspersed 66 Ker, Newman and the Fullness of Christianity, p. 95. 67 Daniel J. Lattier, ‘John Henry Newman on Deification’, in Meconi and Olson, Called to be Children of God, pp. 181–2. See also Daniel J. Lattier, ‘The Orthodox Theological Reception of Newman’, in Frederick D. Aquino and Benjamin J. King, eds., Receptions of Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 177–94. 68 Chris Castaldo, Justified in Christ: The Doctrines of Peter Martyr Vermigli and John Henry Newman and their Ecumenical Implications (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017), p. 118. 69 Benjamin J. King, Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 22. 70 Jfc. pp. 33, 109–11, 141, 232, 265, 277, 284, 309, 359–60, 414, 442. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Mark McInroy 266 with citations of the Cappadocians, John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria. Newman does not mark out Eastern figures who are joined by their Western counterparts. Instead, the ancients are brought together as a collective witness for deification. Moreover, it is not the case that the majority of evidence for deification is adduced from Greek Fathers, to whom a sprinkling of Latin Fathers are added. Instead, key ancient Greek theologians such as Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa each receive only one mention by name throughout the entire volume. Conversely, in addition to the pervasive presence of Augustine, Cyprian is discussed a number of times as well. If anything, Newman’s Lectures tilts in the direction of Latin influences, at least in terms of those who show up overtly in his text. A more detailed treatment of Augustine will drive this point home. Newman often uses Augustine as an exemplar of Catholic teaching on the importance of the soul’s renewal for our justification, which might appear to align Augustine with the Tridentine position Newman resists.71 However, in an illuminating passage Newman explains that Augustine’s stance should not be confused with those of later figures: ‘St. Austin and others . . . though they place justification in renewal, refer renewal to the indwelling presence of the Holy Ghost’.72 Newman, then, reads Augustine as one who regards the renovation of the soul as a direct result of the indwelling Spirit. Augustine therefore does not bring deification to an end, as Harnack claims. Instead, he brings justification and deification into explicit relationship with one another, as does Newman himself. Conversely, it is difficult to locate in Athanasius and other Greek Fathers a discussion of justification that accompanies their well-known treatments of deification. In this regard, Newman’s own position is actually closer to Augustine than to the Greek Fathers often thought to have inspired his retrieval. Ultimately, Newman restrains his references to patristic figures in the interest of developing a predominantly biblical treatment of his theme: ‘Numerous passages might be cited from the Fathers in point, but it would be scarcely to the purpose to do so, for Scripture itself, to go no further, is as clear, as far as words go, on the doctrine of a Divine Indwelling, as the Fathers can be.’73 Indeed, throughout the Lectures Newman appeals to portions of Scripture that express the idea of deification, many of which are identified by Gross and others as key biblical supports for the doctrine.74 A convergence of apparently discordant views: deification as a tool for unity We have seen that Newman views deification as a feature of both Latin and Greek patristic theology that is widely attested in Scripture. It follows that deification 71 72 73 74 See Jfc. pp. 62–4. Jfc., p. 213. Jfc., p. 427. See the citations at the beginning of our treatment of Newman above. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V Before Deification Became Eastern 267 should not be understood as belonging within one particular branch of the church, but instead as having broad ecumenical applicability. Newman sees precisely this potential in the doctrine: ‘By tracing back farther the lines of thought on which these apparently discordant views are placed, they are made to converge; they converge, that is, supposing there to be vouchsafed to us, an inward divine presence, of which both faith and spiritual renovation are fruits.’75 For all of his criticism, Newman ultimately seeks a rapprochement between Protestants and Catholics, and he sees deification as the tool for such a task. Indeed, one of the reasons Newman makes such thorough reference to Scripture, as demonstrated above, is that he finds resources there that are valued by Protestants and Catholics alike. Whereas the suggestion of theosis advocates today is often that the West should integrate something of a foreign teaching into its theology, Newman maintains that deification can be found within the universal church. Clearing an impossibly high bar: deification as the only means of justification Regardless of whether the respective doctrines are vilified or celebrated, Ritschl, Harnack, Lot-Borodine and Lossky all cast deification and justification as mutually exclusive theological options. Newman, however, views the two doctrines as inextricably connected to one another. To be justified is to be deified, and to be deified is to be justified. Unlike Lot-Borodine, Lossky and their contemporary followers, then, Newman does not attempt to downplay the importance of justification for the early church. Instead, he actually intensifies the requirements of justification such that only being deified will meet the otherwise impossible demand of being justified to God. Newman’s Lectures betrays a thoroughgoing preoccupation with righteousness, and he at several junctures emphasizes the sharp distinction between Christ’s righteousness and our own: ‘Taking a general view of human nature, we may say that its highest piety and devotion . . . is but the poor effort after that righteousness which it never can really reach, and which He is’.76 Newman’s remarks culminate in the following extraordinary set of claims: If, as I would maintain, the Presence of Christ is our true righteousness, first conveyed to us in Baptism, then more sacredly and mysteriously in the Eucharist, we have really no inherent righteousness at all. What seems to be inherent, may be more properly called adherent, depending as it does, wholly and absolutely upon the Divine Indwelling, not ours to keep, but as heat in a sickly person, sustained by a cause distinct from himself.77 75 Jfc., p. 151. 76 Jfc., p. 225. 77 Jfc., p. 217. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 268 Mark McInroy Although Newman elsewhere in his Lectures appears to endorse inherent righteousness in an effort at fending off extreme Protestant views of justification, he here clarifies his position. Christ’s righteousness adheres to us, and it genuinely transforms us, but we should never make the mistake of thinking that it is our possession. As Newman puts the same point elsewhere, we should not ‘praise the daylight, yet forget the sun’.78 Unexpectedly, then, this passage can be seen as both an inversion and a continuation of Luther’s thought. It is an inversion in the sense that what is often thought to be ‘alien’ for Luther, namely, the righteousness of Christ, is clearly internal to Newman.79 The righteousness of Christ is not outside of us; it dwells within. And yet, Newman continues Luther’s thought in that the same condition for justification that so intensely haunted Luther reappears in Newman. How can one become righteous enough for God? Luther holds that one must give up on being righteous oneself, and one must instead wholly cleave to Christ. Newman, too, suggests that no amount of renewal could suffice, precisely because it would still be creaturely, and that we need nothing short of God himself (this time within us, adhering to us) in order to be sufficiently righteous. In Newman’s retrieval, then, deification is deployed in order to meet the demands of classically Protestant sensibilities, which insist that Christ’s righteousness – and not our own – is what justifies. Conclusion Newman’s retrieval stands outside of and resists the grand narrative of deification as it has been handed down since the late nineteenth century. For Newman, deification is not exclusively or even particularly Eastern, it is not a cause for division between East and West and it does not supplant or preclude justification as a soteriological locus. Instead, it is arises from a broad patristic and biblical consensus, it is found within the common root from which the church branches, and it provides the resources with which to understand justification properly. In addition to aiding scholars in properly understanding Newman’s thought, Newman’s retrieval stands to introduce new interpretive options for deification to Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox scholars today. 78 Jfc., p. 231. 79 Supporters of the so-called Finnish school of Luther interpretation will be tempted to see greater similarity still between Luther and Newman, as the Finns and their followers hold that Luther himself holds a doctrine of deification in which an inner union with Christ plays an important role. For a critical engagement with the Finnish reading of Luther that nevertheless upholds the importance of deification for Luther’s theology, see Mark McInroy, ‘Rechtfertigung als Theosis: Zur neueren Diskussion €uber die Lutherdeutung der Finnischen Schule’, Catholica (M€unster) 66 (2012), pp. 1–18. C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd V