Articles
Newman, Education, and the Nicene Creed
October 4, 2025
(Oratory Library, Birmingham)
Newman, Education, and the Nicene Creed
Fr. Brian W. Geary
The Church recently received the news that St. John Henry Newman will be named a Doctor of the Church on November 1st, within the context of the Vatican’s Jubilee of Education. Newman’s love of education is apparent, having labored in academia for the majority of his life. However, less readily apparent is Newman’s interest in pedagogy. Indeed, one might argue that it was Newman’s investigation of pedagogy in his study of the Church fathers, that began his journey to Rome.
In his first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century, written over a decade before his conversion, Newman examines pedagogy as it would have been practiced in the early Church. Specifically, he examines the preparation of Catechumens for the sacraments of initiation in the school of Alexandria. To the modern Catholic, or indeed, anyone with an interest in the Catholic faith, the teachings of the Church are readily available. The Catechism of the Catholic Church distills all Catholic doctrine into a single, albeit large, volume. The internet has placed instantly-searchable, encyclopedic knowledge at one’s fingertips, such that there is no Catholic teaching that remains a secret. Her teachings are free for the world to examine at will. Of course, this was not so in the early Church. Printed resources were a scarcity, and teaching was largely transmitted orally. But even more fundamental was the startling newness of Christianity. The world did not know the teachings of the Church, because the Church and her teachings in the wake of the Incarnation represented something radically new for the pagan world.
In the early Church, the faith would have been passed on to catechumens gradually, with the truths of the faith being unfolded before them in a manner that was suited to their own background. Any good educator recognizes no two students are the same, and so did the early Church! This gradual, private practice was known as the disciplina arcani, or “secret teaching.”
While the young Newman perhaps viewed this practice in somewhat idealistic terms, he saw in it a noble desire to protect the precious truth of the faith from heresy. Heresy, for the young Newman, had the double effect of not only attacking the faith, but also of forcing the Church to bring her teachings, once secret, into the light, in an effort to confront error and misunderstanding.
Enter the Nicene Creed. While the Church this year rightly celebrates the 1700th anniversary of the Creed, Newman in 1833 viewed its formulation as something regrettably novel. Newman viewed that “freedom from symbols [i.e., creeds] and articles is abstractedly the highest state of Christian communion…because when confessions do not exist, the mysteries of divine truth, instead of being exposed to the gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are kept hidden in the bosom of the Church, far more faithfully than is otherwise possible.” Here Newman expresses an admirable concern that the faith is first and foremost, meant to be lived, and cannot be reduced to a set of professions and propositions. One can sense Newman’s pain: “Now, we allow ourselves publicly to canvass the most solemn truths in a careless or fiercely argumentative way; truths, which it is as useless as it is unseemly to discuss in public, as being attainable only by the sober and watchful, by slow degrees, with dependence on the Giver of wisdom, and with strict obedience to the light which has already been granted.”
Still, the truth must be preserved, and Newman understands that the Church must undertake this most solemn duty of defending the faith. Here we can see, in seed form, what will eventually grow into Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine. As a young Anglican, Newman does not allow that doctrine develops. But in the Nicene Creed, one must confront the reality that at the very least, the language used to elucidate doctrine has developed. The Greek philosophical term homoousios, “consubstantial” in today’s English translation, represents a decidedly new formulation. Thus for Newman, this terminology is merely a bringing to light of that which has always explicitly been believed and taught via the disciplina arcani, and not a development per se.
This is not insignificant. A student of history, Newman recognized that the language used by the Fathers in the pre-Nicene Church at times seemed contradictory to the language of Nicaea and the homoousios, especially regarding the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. For example, one can find in the writings of St. Justin Martyr indications that the Son is subordinate to the Father. All this is to say that the Fathers did not formulate their teachings in a unified way. Would they have recognized the developments at Nicaea as consistent with their own teaching? It’s difficult to say.
As a young Anglican, Newman cannot take the step of recognizing doctrinal development. Only a short time later, in another book, he will inch closer. Still, the reality of linguistic change in the Church’s teaching forced Newman to wrestle with the issue. Even still, Newman’s use of the disciplina arcani soon became untenable. Through his study of history, he recognized that apparent doctrinal development continued even after the practice of the disciplina arcani ended. No longer could he fall back on the notion that heresy forced the Church’s teaching into the open. Soon, Newman will also recognize that the Church’s encounter with heresy and the formulation of creeds is not always an evil. Indeed, the Church’s confrontation with error allows her to clarify her teaching, and can even advance the development and unfolding of our understanding of the deposit of revelation.
On many levels, Newman’s Arians of the Fourth Century is far from a perfect work. Yet, we must be grateful for this stage of Newman’s life, seeing that it was only through wrestling with the concepts of the disciplina arcani and the formation of the Creed that Newman could arrive at his theory of development that would lead him to Rome.
