The most conservative (or traditional, or reactionary—pick what adjective you will) among the Vatican II Council Fathers, the men who prepared most of the working documents that were called into question once the Council was underway, insisted that divine revelation was, as it were, bivocal. They insisted that Scripture and Tradition were two separate deposits of the Word of God. This implied that neither could adequately be used as a yardstick to understand, correct, or judge the other. The perceived need to avoid implying that such a yardstick existed is understandable given that the primacy of Scripture in all situations is a characteristic Protestant belief. The Council Fathers solved this by eventually teaching, in Dei Verbum, that there is only one source of revelation and deposit of faith, the Word of God (Logos) qua Word of God, with Scripture and Tradition as two means of transmission (§2; §§9-10). Scripture and Tradition’s symbiotic nature guards against private interpretation but avoids overly absolutizing “small-t” tradition, in the sense of the fallible customs of a particular time and place.
The practical effects of this distinction are blunted somewhat by the fact that the Word of God is in fact expressed through both Scripture and Tradition. Both the “double sources of revelation” account of the working documents and the “divine revelation itself” account of Dei Verbum agree on this. Yet the significance of Dei Verbum to current debates about subjects like development of doctrine is real and has recently been highlighted by Pope Leo. Between January 14 and February 11 of this year, Leo dedicated five general audiences’ worth of weekly catechesis to the document. These were the first installments in a planned series covering the various Vatican II documents (at the time of writing, the second set of installments, his catechesis on Lumen gentium, is ongoing). Leo discusses this issue of development in the third of these five weeks, the general audience of January 28:
In this regard, the expression of Saint Gregory the Great is famous: “The Sacred Scriptures grow with the one who reads them”. And Saint Augustine had already remarked that “there is only one word of God that unfolds through Scripture, and there is only one Word that sounds on the lips of many saints”. The Word of God, then, is not fossilized, but rather it is a living and organic reality that develops and grows in Tradition. Thanks to the Holy Spirit, Tradition understands it in the richness of its truth and embodies it in the shifting coordinates of history.
In this regard, the proposal of the holy Doctor of the Church John Henry Newman in his work entitled The Development of Christian Doctrine is striking. He affirmed that Christianity, both as a communal experience and as a doctrine, is a dynamic reality, in the manner indicated by Jesus himself in the parables of the seed (cf. Mk 4:26-29): a living reality that develops thanks to an inner vital force.
Pope Leo goes on to conclude that the term “deposit” is properly “juridical in nature and imposes on the depositary the duty to preserve the content, which in this case is the faith, and to transmit it intact.” However, the Pope acknowledges what Newman proposed in the nineteenth century and Ratzinger and Congar advanced at the Council. That is, since Sacred Tradition is a way in which God’s Word communicates Itself, it can carry on discussions or dialects or even debates within the life of the People of God. (I say this metaphorically; there aren’t actually dialectics or debates within the divine will Itself, only between God and the Church, or within the Church, or within History.)
Newman’s preferred metaphors for this argument are worth a look. As Damian Costello wrote a few years ago, Newman believed that “the trees and all of Nature are participants in the angelic hierarchy, an order now so foreign to most of us that we don’t even know that we’ve lost it.” Doctrine develops; moreover, everything develops; everything in existence works (says Costello, quoting Newman directly) according to the “Spiritual Intelligences” that govern “[t]hose wonderful and vast portions of the natural world which seem to be inanimate.” If even grass and trees have Spiritual Intelligences and participate in a real and spiritual way in the beating of Christ’s Sacred Heart, why in the world would something seemingly dry and intellectual and indeed “juridical,” like the deposit or archive of the Catholic Church’s doctrine, not live and grow accordingly?
I have written at length in the past about the similarities and differences between humans and other living things, and what those imply for the unique nature of our moral responsibilities to God. Newman is one of the theologians I most regret having not engaged in more depth in that writing (the other is Ramon Llull; both could have helped make some points much more clearly than I did). I think attitudes about so-called nature spiritualities in the public mind, and even as represented in some popular fiction, might come closer to grasping what someone like Newman regarded as the emotional heart, the felt heart of things, than do any of the structured accounts that we have today to explain how the Church develops over time.
So, in the passage that Pope Leo cites, we see a green, growing, vital, I would almost say Tolkienian approach to the development of doctrine.
In one of our Lord’s parables “the Kingdom of Heaven” is even compared to “a grain of mustard-seed, which a man took and hid in his field; which indeed is the least of all seeds, but when it is grown it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree,” and, as St. Mark words it, “shooteth out great branches, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.” And again, in the same chapter of St. Mark, “So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how; for the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself.” Here an internal element of life, whether principle or doctrine, is spoken of rather than any mere external manifestation; and it is observable that the spontaneous, as well as the gradual, character of the growth is intimated. This description of the process corresponds to what has been above observed respecting development, viz. that it is not an effect of wishing and resolving, or of forced enthusiasm, or of any mechanism of reasoning, or of any mere subtlety of intellect; but comes of its own innate power of expansion within the mind in its season, though with the use of reflection and argument and original thought, more or less as it may happen, with a dependence on the ethical growth of the mind itself, and with a reflex influence upon it. (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Chapter II, §16)
This kind of vitalist language was very popular in the nineteenth century; Carlyle or even Darwin could have written parts of this paragraph. For this and other reasons, it probably required some systematization—which it has since had. I say this despite how effusively I described it above; I really do think it is a deep and true emotional heart that I am describing there, but the emotions can be misleading. Yet the image’s power remains.
Newman also uses the image of the river. With this image he adds details that I think are of special significance to our perspective at Where Peter Is and to the broader Pope Francis–Pope Leo school of thought in the Church:
Nor does [a “great idea”] escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become more vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Chapter I, §7)
It was almost painful for me to trim the beginning and end of this paragraph, which is well worth reading in full and which I think is probably the most beautiful exposition of this principle in the history of our Church. Not necessarily the best exposition—this is an area that itself continues to be refined, a “development of the development of doctrine”—but the most beautiful.
Indeed, the early version of an idea is not necessarily the best or the purest. In some areas the actual substance of Newman’s own thought has had to be corrected, as with his defenses of the Church’s then-current conditional toleration of slavery. We don’t have any good way of knowing what the streams of our own thoughts will look like a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, two thousand years after we are gone. Neither we nor our descendants should assume any privileged position in the timeline other than through our (hopefully) shared aspirations to faithfully work in the Lord’s vineyard. Quite the contrary. This understanding of developing Tradition should lead us to a deep well of intellectual and spiritual humility.
One can also see the connection between this riverine metaphor and the agricultural metaphors and parables that Newman discusses, and that Leo discusses Newman discussing. “Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24 NASB). Moreover, of course, the Word of God is talking about Itself—Himself—when He says that.
This is, in Pope Leo’s account of things and in the catechesis that he now is giving to the Church, what Dei Verbum saw in Newman’s thought and what aspects of his thought the Council Fathers incorporated into the dogma of the Church. If Scripture and Tradition are two modes of transmission of the univocal Word of God—two lungs, as Pope Francis might have put it— this is the way to be a faithful depositary. A river that does not change direction or deepen its channel when it hits an obstacle—a rock wall, a sink hole, a marsh—does not stay marvelously intact. It breaks apart. Let us hope and pray that our rivers of Tradition not follow such a course.
Image: The headwaters of the Hime River in Japan. From Wikimedia Commons.
Nathan Turowsky—a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution—works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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