Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A short glossary of heresies
- Introduction
- PART ONE DEFENCE: ARIANISM AND THE CHURCH–STATE CRISIS
- PART TWO ATTACK: SABELLIANISM AND APOLLINARIANISM – LIBERALISM UNMASKED.
- PART THREE RETREAT AND REALIGNMENT: MONOPHYSITISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE ‘VIA MEDIA’
- 15 Construction
- 16 Collapse
- 17 Rhetoric refashioned
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A short glossary of heresies
- Introduction
- PART ONE DEFENCE: ARIANISM AND THE CHURCH–STATE CRISIS
- PART TWO ATTACK: SABELLIANISM AND APOLLINARIANISM – LIBERALISM UNMASKED.
- PART THREE RETREAT AND REALIGNMENT: MONOPHYSITISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE ‘VIA MEDIA’
- 15 Construction
- 16 Collapse
- 17 Rhetoric refashioned
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
MONOPHYSITISM (1839–40)
Newman had used analogy between past and present as polemic, subjecting his opponents to a hostile interrogation in which the pattern of the past laid bare their hidden tendencies. When he came to portray his own period of doubt and self-questioning from 1839 to 1843, he presented the analogical and critical structure of his own rhetoric as turning back upon himself, as he found his own position the subject of an inner inquest, in the same style of interrogation to which he had subjected his opponents. In his 1839 study of Monophysitism, the analogy turned:
My stronghold was Antiquity: now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me Christendom of the sixteenth and nineteenth reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the ‘Via Media’ was in the position of the Oriental Communion, Rome was where she now is; and the Protestants were the Eutychians.
And, quoting from Difficulties of Anglicans:
It was difficult to make out how the Eutychians or Monophysites were heretics, unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also; difficult to find arguments against the Tridentine fathers which did not tell against the Fathers of Chalcedon; difficult to condemn the Popes of the sixteenth century without condemning the Popes of the fifth.
Newman's doubts are here depicted as taking on a rhetorical structure – ‘difficult to find arguments’ he is always thinking of how to persuade, how to justify, imagining an audience.
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- Newman and HeresyThe Anglican Years, pp. 203 - 227Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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