Living and Real Ideas

 It is difficult to summarize Cardinal Newman's thought -- at least it is to me, and when I read summaries of his works and then read the work itself I realize that the summaries hardly prepared me for the original.   From Chapter 1 of Essay on Development of Doctrine -- this excerpt comes from Section 1 paragraph 4:

When an idea, whether real or not, is of a nature to arrest and possess the mind, it may be said to have life, that is, to live in the mind which is its recipient. Thus mathematical ideas, real as they are, can hardly properly be called living, at least ordinarily. But, when some great enunciation, whether true or false, about human nature, or present good, or government, or duty, or religion, is carried forward into the public throng of men and draws attention, then it is not merely received passively in this or that form into many minds, but it becomes an active principle within them, leading them to an ever-new contemplation of itself, to an application of it in various directions, and a propagation of it on every side. 

The distinction between real ideas and the alternative, and between living ideas and real-but-not-generally living, seems very useful.      It grounds ideas in their relation to reality, which is important; and does not dismiss the real influence that belongs to some largely erroneous concepts.    He does not talk about it here, but he and others such as Dietrich von Hildebrand, GK Chesterton and others have noted that very often, false ideas contain enough truth to seize peoples' minds, but they are unbalanced or uncompleted ideas.    Chesterton defines heresy as a truth taken to an unbalanced extreme.  

He goes on to give some specific examples of the kind of ideas he is talking about, such as the divine right of kings, and describe the effect of them as they reach a general audience and are sorted, sifted, worked out, disagreed about, ramified in different spheres of life, and so on.   By the way, I am emphasizing the terms he uses by putting them in bold format.  

This process, whether it be longer or shorter in point of time, by which the aspects of an idea are brought into consistency and form, I call its development, being the germination and maturation of some truth or apparent truth on a large mental field. On the other hand this process will not be a development, unless the assemblage of aspects, which constitute its ultimate shape, really belongs to the idea from which they start. 

This, in addition to much of the chapter that I haven't quoted, is already a far more organic notion of the development of doctrine than you generally see in discussions today.   It allows for the complexity, variety and not-infrequent messiness of taking ideas seriously and trying to work them out in very different spheres of action and thought.  

In Section II he analyzes different types of development -- paragraph 10 is a summary:

So much on the development of ideas in various subject matters: it may be necessary to add that, in many cases, development simply stands for exhibition, as in some of the instances adduced above. Thus both Calvinism and Unitarianism may be called developments, that is, exhibitions, of the principle of Private Judgment, though they have nothing in common, viewed as doctrines.

As to Christianity, supposing the truths of which it consists to admit of development, that development will be one or other of the last five kinds. Taking the Incarnation as its central doctrine, the Episcopate, as taught by St. Ignatius, will be an instance of political development, the Theotokos of logical, the determination of the date of our Lord's birth of historical, the Holy Eucharist of moral, and the Athanasian Creed of metaphysical.

 If you want to know how he defines those terms, it would be best to read the section yourself.    Some of them, like political and historical, seem fairly clear in the examples given; logical seems to mean demonstrable by a syllogism, and metaphysical seems to mean putting ideas hitherto understood informally into precise philosophical language.    To define "moral" he takes a couple of quite long quotes from other authors and they seem to evoke the behaviorial implications of the doctrine.    He also uses the word ethical:

Ethical developments are not properly matter for argument and controversy, but are natural and personal, substituting what is congruous, desirable, pious, appropriate, generous, for strictly logical inference. 

 That does not imply that people never quarrel about ethics or morals -- in fact, we do a lot of it -- but that behaviorial implications of doctrines are not worked out syllogistically, but according to a kind of rightness, perhaps?  

Nowadays  "doctrines" are often thought of as what he calls metaphysical statements -- precise formulations meant to clarify and specify truth and exclude erroneous interpretations.   Then they are contrasted with pastoral practice which because of the subjectivism of our time is thought of as more "real" and organic than the statements.   

There probably are times when Christians make the mistake of affirming doctrines in a thin, abstract way.   But Newman does not here pit the different implications of a living idea (which is what a doctrine encapsulates) against each other.   From paragraph 9 in section II:

"The mind which is habituated to the thought of God, of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, naturally turns with a devout curiosity to the contemplation of the object of its adoration, and begins to form statements concerning it, before it knows whither, or how far, it will be carried. One proposition necessarily leads to another, and a second to a third; then some limitation is required; and the combination of these opposites occasions some fresh evolutions from the original idea, which indeed can never be said to be entirely exhausted. This process is its development, and results in a series, or rather body, of dogmatic statements, till what was an impression on the Imagination has become a system or creed in the Reason.

Because we are human and think in sequence and parts, we use language to analyze and classify, but that does not mean that the words of our doctrines are  unrepresentative of the Object or focus.  It also does not mean that in themselves the words exhaust our perceptions of the Real:

As God is one, so the impression which He gives us of Himself is one; it is not a thing of parts; it is not a system; nor is it anything imperfect and needing a counterpart. It is the vision of an object. When we pray, we pray, not to an assemblage of notions or to a creed, but to One Individual Being; and when we speak of Him, we speak of a Person, not of a Law or Manifestation . . .  Creeds and dogmas live in the one idea which they are designed to express, and which alone is substantive; and are necessary, because the human mind cannot reflect upon that idea except piecemeal, cannot use it in its oneness and entireness, or without resolving it into a series of aspects and relations."