Books: The past, like the present, is at its heart a spiritual drama, in which each and every one of us fights (or fails to fight)...

Finding God with Basil, Gregory, and Newman

by Christopher O. Blum

The advantage that tragic poetry has over historical narrative seems to lie in the way individual deeds are portrayed: they are enacted. 

History at its best, however, can accomplish much the same function as dramatic poetry, and John Henry Newman’s Church of the Fathers does just that.

The work was originally published serially in the 1830s in the pages of the British Critic, and later collated, edited, and to a degree refashioned by Newman after his conversion. The Fathers of the fourth century were to Newman models of theological seriousness and of heroic sanctity whose example promised to help the Church of England regain its apostolic character. Newman warned his reader that the Church of the Fathers contained mere “sketches,” whose “form and character” he qualified as “polemical.” Yet he was just as clearly at pains to avoid offending his reader’s sense of how a good story ought to be told as he was eager to put before them such puzzling topics as clerical celibacy and the warfare between the saints and demons. Not only would a careful telling of the story of the saints help to diffuse criticism and to discourage scoffing, it would also make the saints more available as models to imitate. Newman explained that the “frankness” that he would employ in depicting the “lingering imperfections” of the saints would “surely make us love them more, without leading us to reverence them the less, and act as a relief to the discouragement and despondency which may come over those who, in the midst of much error and sin, are always striving to imitate them.” It was in this spirit that he wrote the first four of the ten chapters which eventually made up The Church of the Fathers, on Saints Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzen.

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