The Newman Rambler

Conversion and Development in Newman

10 November 2019 ‖ Raymond Lafontaine

In this essay, I will be addressing the topic, “Conversion and Development in Newman.” The former word conjures up the internal journey culminating in Newman’s reception into the Roman Catholic Church on 9 October 1845; the latter alludes to Newman’s virtually simultaneous publication of the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Therefore, in the first part of this presentation, I would like to address the link between these two major events in Newman’s life, stressing the specific impact of the writing of the Essay on Development on the discernment process culminating in Newman’s decision to become a Roman Catholic. 

After this brief existential reflection on Newman’s own life, I will then discuss its more properly theological implications.  First, looking at the Essay on Development itself, I will suggest that its significance for contemporary theology lies primarily in the method by which Newman arrived at his conclusions about doctrinal development, and only secondary in the conclusions themselves.  Second, building on Bernard Lonergan’s assertion that reflection on conversion – individual, social, and ecclesial; affective, intellectual, moral, and religious – is the foundational task for contemporary theology, I will highlight some of the implications of Lonergan’s rich and multifaceted understanding of conversion for the question of the development of doctrine in the Church.  Finally, I will argue that Newman’s formal “conversion” to Roman Catholicism needs to be seen not as an isolated decision, but as part of an ongoing journey of intellectual, moral, and religious conversion, which began well before 1845, and which led him, at the end of his life, to an even deeper and more penetrating understanding of the complex process by which the Church’s doctrinal heritage continues to grow and develop, “changing in order to remain the same.”[1]

Newman’s Conversion to Roman Catholicism and the Essay on Development 

Although the Essay on Development was only published in 1845, the issue of the development of doctrine had been an interest of Newman’s since at least 1832, when he published his historical-doctrinal study on the Arians of the Fourth Century.  However, in charting “the history of his religious opinions” between 1841 and 1845, Newman claimed that by the end of 1842, he had “given his mind” explicitly to the consideration of “the principle of development of doctrine in the Christian Church.”[2]

“So, at the end of 1844, I came to the resolution of writing an Essay on Doctrinal Development; and then, if, at the end of it, my convictions in favour of the Roman Church were not weaker, of taking the necessary steps for admission into her fold.  I acted upon this resolution in the beginning of 1845, and worked at my Essay steadily into the autumn. (206) As I advanced, my view so cleared that instead of speaking of the ‘Roman Catholics’, I boldly called them Catholics.  Before I got to the end, I resolved to be received, and the book remains in the state it was then, unfinished.”[3]

In the Apologia, Newman makes the connection between these two events clear.  In his response to Charles Kingsley’s insinuations around the sincerity of his conversion and the moral and intellectual integrity of his religious positions, Newman went to great pains to demonstrate that the discernment process culminating in his decision to become a Roman Catholic had not been prompted by mere sentiment or inclination – and far less, by the suggestion that he had for years been a Papist “fifth columnist” masquerading as an Anglican clergyman.  Summing up the journey, which led him, between 1839 and 1845, from the Anglican Communion to the Roman Catholic Church, he writes:

“On the one hand, I came gradually to see that the Anglican Church was formally in the wrong, on the other that the Roman Church was formally in the right: then, that no valid reasons could be assigned for continuing in the Anglican, and again that no valid objections could be taken to joining the Roman.  Then, I had nothing more to learn: what still remained for my conversion was, not further change of opinion, but to change opinion itself into the clearness and firmness of intellectual conviction.”[4]

Anticipating his later distinction between notional and real assent, Newman’s reflection on the process leading to his conversion also demonstrates his awareness of the different levels at which conversion gradually takes hold of us: the affective, the intellectual, the moral, the religious. As an Anglican, Newman had experienced disappointments and betrayals, culminating with what he describes as the “three death-blows” of 1841:

(i) a vivid awareness that Athanasius’ 4th-century critique of the Christology of the semi-Arians could be meaningfully transposed to the 19th-century Anglican claim to be a via media between Romanism and Protestantism;

(ii) the condemnation of his Tract 90, which argued for the legitimacy of a ‘Catholic’ interpretation to the “Thirty-Nine Articles” of ‘orthodox’ Anglicanism; and

(iii) the creation, for purely political reasons, of a diocese in Jerusalem whose pastoral leadership would alternate between Anglicans and Lutherans, with little regard for theological differences and the issue of apostolic succession.  

At the same time, though, Newman’s Anglican roots and associations were deep: in not only friendships, associations, and memories, but also more crucially, the Anglican Church was where he had come to personal knowledge of Christ, where he had been formed in a love of the Church of the Fathers.  Writing to a friend on November 16, 1844, Newman claimed

“no existing sympathies with Roman Catholicism; I know no Catholics, I do not like what I hear of them.” 

However, the “deep, unvarying conviction” that his personal salvation depended on his joining the Church of Rome was daily growing within him.  Moreover, this conviction “remained firm in all circumstances, in all frames of mind,” despite the nagging fear that he was acting under delusion, despite the deeply-rooted “anti-Roman bias” which continued to leave its imprints on his imagination.

The dénouement of the story is familiar to many of us. From January through October, Newman worked diligently at his Essay on Development, until these difficulties were resolved.  Three days after submitting the still-unfinished manuscript for publication, on 9 October 1845, in the chapel at Littlemore, John Henry Newman was received into the full communion of the Roman Catholic Church.

Reading the Essay on Development 150 years later, it needs to be remembered that the primary raison-d’être of the Essay was not theological exposition, but existential discernment.  As a man in whom obedience to the voice of God – externally in the authoritative voice of the Church, internally in the dictates of conscience – was the supreme principle, Newman was facing a profound crisis of conscience, with respect to his place within Anglicanism and Catholicism, that demanded resolution.  And in Newman’s life and writings, the theological and the existential are fundamentally intertwined.  Far from being undermined by the personal and existential concerns which inspired its original composition, the Essay on Development contains valuable insights into the role of personal transformation and conversion in the process of theological research and exploration. 

In so great a matter, Newman knew that his decision could not rely only on sentiment or inclination, or even on a convergence of purely historical arguments; it needed to be built on a foundation of religious and moral truth.  Moreover, Newman’s concern went beyond that of his own personal salvation. As an influential Anglican clergyman, as a leader within the Oxford movement, as a man with a considerable personal following, his decision would have a wide-ranging impact, in both his present and future ecclesial homes.  Newman was aware of that impact, and the responsibilities it implied.  Therefore, if the writing of the Essay was prompted by his personal journey of conversion, its publication and dissemination made the fruits of Newman’s own intellectual, moral, and religious conversion available to a much wider audience.  It also contributed to a movement of ecclesial conversion whose impact went far beyond what Newman himself could ever have imagined.  This was so in 1845; it is no less true as today, we commemorate the bicentenary of his birth.

 The Essay on Development: Its Theological Significance

The contemporary significance of Newman’s Essay on Development is not to be sought, I would suggest, in looking to the Essay for an a priori, all-englobing theory of development. No theory is capable of neatly accounting for every conceivable historical instance of development in the Church’s doctrine, or, for that matter, of providing a set of criteria capable of discriminating, with absolute certainty, between true and false developments.  Instead, Newman offers, “a hypothesis to account for a difficulty,” the difficulty being that of the apparent inconsistencies and alterations which have appeared in the history of Christian doctrine.  The Essay provides us therefore not with a theory of development, but a method for development, demanding careful attention to and penetrating understanding of the ways in which the truths of Catholic faith – ever ancient, ever new – enter into and penetrate the diverse cultural and historical contexts in which the Gospel is preached.  

In Part One of the Essay, Newman lays down these foundations. First, he constructs a credible analogy between the way an idea comes to life and maturity in the mind receiving it, and the way in which doctrine develops as it is received in the open and receptive mind of the Church. Second, recognizing the special character of Christian doctrine, which deals with mysteries which could not be known unless God had revealed them, Newman asserts the “antecedent probability” that God will provide a “developing authority” capable of infallibly guiding the Church in her doctrinal judgments on the religious and moral truths necessarily connected with salvation.  Third, making the further claim that existing developments within Roman Catholicism represent “the probable fulfillment of this expectation,” he proposes a “method of proof” grounded not in the syllogisms of logic and scientific method, but rather by a convergence of arguments, confronting the Church’s antecedently probable claims with the concrete data of history. 

Finally, having established his claim that “modern Catholicism is nothing else but simply the legitimate growth and complement, that is, the necessary and natural development, of the doctrine of the early Church,” Newman acknowledges that what he now called ‘developments’ were many of the same beliefs and practices that, seven years earlier, he had accused of being corruptions.  Therefore, in Part II of the Essay, drawing on the insights he had accumulated in his historical investigation of alleged instances of change, Newman provides us with:

“seven Notes of varying cogency, independence and applicability, to discriminate healthy developments of an idea from its state of corruption and decay, as follows - There is no corruption if it retains one and the same type, the same principles, the same organization; if its beginnings anticipate its subsequent phases, and its later phenomena protect and subserve its earlier; if it has a power of assimilation and revival, and a vigorous action from first to last.”[5]

In 1845, Newman referred to these seven criteria as “tests”. When 33 years later, Newman would revise and rearrange the Essay for its republication, he abandoned the language of “tests”, using instead the weaker term “notes”, and emphasizing their descriptive character, rather than the evaluative. In so doing, Newman recognized that although theologians perform a key and irreplaceable function in promoting a deeper and more penetrating understanding of individual cases of doctrinal development, and of the general process by which doctrines develop in the Church, it was not within their power to decide, according to criteria of their own creation, the legitimacy of particular developments.  Newman reserved this judgment to the Church as a whole, a Church in which the charism of infallibility was expressed through an external and objective authority. 

In the same revision, though, Newman upgraded the idea of development from “a hypothesis to account for a difficulty” to a distinct and fundamental principle of Christianity:

“And thus I was led on to a further consideration. I saw that the principle of development not only accounted for certain facts, but was in itself a remarkable philosophical phenomenon, giving a character to the whole course of Christian thought. It was discernible from the first years of Catholic teaching up to the present day, and gave to that teaching a unity and individuality.”[6]

The genius of Newman’s theology of doctrinal development, I would argue, lies in his unique ability to combine absolute faithfulness to the Church, commissioned to preserve and hand down the deposit of faith entrusted by Christ to the apostles, with an equally absolute belief that because her chronic vigor is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, the Church possesses a power of assimilation. Just as a body only lives by drawing nourishment from its surroundings, absorbing that which is healthy and strengthens it, and rejecting that which would sicken or kill it, so too does Christianity thrive and grow by engaging ideas which emerge beyond its boundaries – discussing, adopting, rejecting, amending – discerning what is in coherence with its Tradition of revealed truths, rejecting that which cannot safely be assimilated. 

Newman’s own personal journey, and his vision of the course charted by the Catholic Church in history, is not that of a smooth, uninterrupted journey, a straight sail to its chartered destination.  Newman biographer Ian Ker has written that

“Far from envisaging the Catholic Church as steaming straight ahead to her destination, for Newman, the bark of Peter is not so much a steamship as a sailing boat which makes progress only by tacking to left and to right.  The Catholic Church of history is the despair of those who think in straight linear terms.”[7]

To those who radically de-emphasized the real historical character of Christian faith, or who interpreted perceived inconsistencies in Christian belief, worship, and practice as a historical judgment upon the Church’s supernatural claims, Newman responded with a spirited defense of apostolic Christian faith.  At the same time, though, as Owen Chadwick has noted, “if the theologian in Newman vehemently distrusted the new school of historians, the historian in him could not help learning from them.”[8]   Without sacrificing any of the basic truth-claims of Christian faith, Newman acknowledges the minor setbacks and circuitous detours through which Church doctrine has taken shape, always under the guidance and protection of the Spirit:

“Full of deep interest, to see how the great idea takes hold of a thousand minds by its living force ... and grows in them, and at length is born through them, perhaps in a long course of years, and even successive generations; so that the doctrine may rather be said to use the minds of Christians, than to be used by them.  Wonderful it is to see with what effort, hesitation, suspense, interruption – with how many swayings to the right and to the left – with how many reverses, yet with what certainty of advance, with what precision in its march, and with what ultimate completeness, it has been evolved ... Wonderful to see how heresy had but thrown that idea into fresh forms, and drawn out from it farther developments ... And this world of thought is the expansion of a few words, uttered, as if casually, by the fishermen of Galilee.”[9]

Conversion and Development in Lonergan 

I have just suggested that what Newman offers, rather than a theory of development, is a method for development.  This reading of Newman is inspired by my own reading of the noted Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan, who in his groundbreaking 1957 philosophical work Insight and its 1972 theological companion-piece Method in Theology, acknowledged the significant influence of Newman on his own thought.  Although most directly influenced by the Grammar of Assent, in a 1973 lecture on “Change in Roman Catholic Theology,” Lonergan made the bold assertion that

“the profound change in the structure and procedures of Catholic theology dates not from 1965 when the Second Vatican Council closed, but rather from 1845 when Newman completed his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.”[10]   

Such change, Lonergan argues, can be based neither on “the blind and total rejection of medieval achievement,” nor on any “undiscriminating acceptance of the modern.”  The change it advances is limited to “filling out the old with the new,” or in Leo XIII’s phrase, vetera novis augere et perficere.

Four decades earlier, in an essay of which only fragments now survive, the 29-year old Lonergan interpreted Newman’s doctrine of assent, which had influenced Newman’s view of doctrinal development, through the prism of his ongoing conversion:

“The conversion of Newman offers a striking illustration of this problem of light and assent.  For a considerable time before his actual conversion, Newman was intellectually satisfied of the truth of Catholicism; he did not yet assent; he feared that the light of his intellect was a false light that had come upon him in punishment for his sins; he did not assent but he prayed.  The kindly light had indeed led him on, led him where he never expected to be brought; it led him to an extremity that terrified him; he wrestled, as Jacob with the angel.”[11]

Conversion was to play an increasingly central role in Lonergan’s theological method.  In his seminal 1968 essay “Theology in its New Context,” Lonergan identifies reflection on conversion as the most important theological task confronting post-conciliar Catholic theology.  Here, Lonergan is no longer referring primarily to the transition from one denominational tradition to another. Rather, he describes conversion as a “radical transformation on which follows, on all levels of living, an interlocked series of changes and developments.”  Without ignoring the significance of dramatic instances of individual conversion, he asserts that conversion needs to be viewed “as an ongoing process, at once personal, communal, and historical.”[12] 

In Method in Theology, Lonergan expands on these foundations.  He defines conversion as a movement into a new horizon which requires of the subject self-transcendence, an “about-face” that both repudiates characteristic features of the earlier synthesis, while embracing “a new sequence that can keep revealing ever greater depth and breadth and wealth.” In intellectual conversion, self-transcendence leads to a new perception of truth, in which biases are overcome and naïve realism supplanted by a more critical realism. In moral conversion, the shift takes place in the subject’s perception and realization of the good, with moral choices now guided by long-term values rather than immediate satisfactions.  In religious conversion, which Lonergan describes as “the awareness of God’s love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5), the subject experiences an “unrestricted being-in-love-with-God” from which there follows a shift in “one’s desires and fears, one’s joys and sorrows, one’s discernment of values, one’s decisions and deeds.”   

Applying this vision of conversion to the problem of doctrinal development, Lonergan defines development “from below upwards” as

“the long, hard, uphill climb from experience to growing understanding, to balanced judgment, to fruitful courses of action, and to the new situations that call forth further understanding, profounder judgment, richer courses of action.”[13]  

Though influenced and prompted by grace, this growth is primarily the fruit of natural human effort and insight, a movement in the direction of affective, intellectual, and moral self-transcendence.  At the same time, Lonergan is also conscious of the existence of a

“downward healing moment, a vector of redemptive love urging us towards greater moral self-transcendence and intellectual achievement.”

He calls this development “from above downwards.”[14] Thus, beyond the knowledge which accrues from human experience, understanding, and judgment, the free decision to respond to God’s love – always simultaneously an exercise of human freedom and a free gift of God’s grace – opens our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to a knowledge,

“reached through the discernment of value and the judgments of value of a person in love.”[15]

Although the movement from experience to understanding to judgment to decision would seem to logically indicate a parallel movement from intellectual to moral to religious conversion, as a Catholic theologian Lonergan recognized the priority of the divine initiative, and hence of religious conversion:

“From a causal viewpoint, one would say that first there is God’s gift of his love.  Next, the eye of this love reveals values in their splendor, while the strength of this love brings about their realization, and that is moral conversion.  Finally, among the values discerned by the eye of love is the value of believing the truths taught by the religious tradition, and in such tradition and belief are the seeds of intellectual conversion.”[16]

Although one could pursue this in the form of an endless chicken-and-egg argument, the important thing is that the development of Catholic tradition occurs in the intersection between “the upward vector from study and deeper insight,” and “the downward vector from God’s gift of his love.”  This enables the Church to know, understand, and see things that she could not see, understand, and know before, even though the deposit of faith remains the same.  Philip Egan sums up this point well:

“Lonergan gives us the organon of development.  His account of the two vectors, applied to the individual and to the Church community as a whole, enable us to grasp the meaning of Christ’s promise to his Church of the Spirit who will ‘not speak on his own authority’ because he will take everything from Christ, and yet who will guide the Church into all the truth, ‘declaring the things that are to come.’ (John 16:13-14).”[17]

Newman’s Intellectual Journey: Ongoing Conversion, Expanding Notions of Development

In the Apologia’s final chapter, Newman makes a claim which on first hearing is puzzling:

“From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to relate.  I have been in perfect peace and contentment; I never even have had one doubt.”[18] 

Even the final decision to leave the Anglican Communion and embrace Roman Catholicism, over which he agonized for years, he describes as having taken place without his being conscious “of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind.”  If personally, the transition had been painful and difficult, religiously, “it was like coming into port after a rough sea.”[19]

From a distance, we may envy Newman’s gift of faith.  Before we envy him too much, though, we should recall his parallel statement that: “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” If Newman’s faith was preserved from doubt, his life most emphatically was not preserved from difficulties.  The eight-week marathon of writing which produced the Apologia in the spring of 1864 came at a time when Newman’s life and reputation were both at their lowest ebb. Kingsley’s accusations were not coming at an easy time in Newman’s life: rumors were flying fast and furious about Newman’s imminent return to the Anglican Church, as a result of the suspicion and disapproval he had encountered in a series of disappointments with the Roman Catholic Church: the lack of support he received during the Achilli trial, his frustrating association with the Catholic University of Ireland, internal conflicts in his Oratorian community, and his invocation to Rome for heresy as a result of his Rambler article “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.” 

Newman knew these accusations to be false, and galvanized by Kingsley’s sheer nerve, was stirred to action. In retracing the steps of his own conversion, in appropriating more deeply the development of his own religious opinions, he became more aware of the faithful presence of God as the continuity sustaining him in the midst of external change and conflict, the “kindly light” leading him on “amid th’encircling gloom.”  For Newman, trust in God implied trust that the Holy Spirit guided the authorities of the Church in their doctrinal pronouncements, and that when these directly addressed the religious and moral truths necessary for salvation, they benefited from the charism of infallibility. 

But as Newman’s later writings all suggest, his thought – including his thought on doctrinal development – did not remain static. His treatment of apprehension and assent, his distinction between the real and the notional, his existential treatment of conscience as the locus of religious and moral assent, and his situation of the accumulation of probabilities as the method of proof appropriate to all concrete matters, allowed the Grammar of Assent to express more clearly and synthetically its understanding of what the Church does when the internal processes of development are set in motion. In the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Newman provides a stirring defense of the rights and duties of conscience, as well as a subtle understanding of its relation to civil and ecclesiastical authority.  However, Newman also introduces a hermeneutic for the reading of magisterial texts, which he characterizes as a “wise and gentle Minimism.” In so doing, his goal was to protect the infallibility of the Church against Gladstone’s denials, while denying the exaggerated claims of papal and magisterial authority of Cardinal Manning and the Ultramontane party. Finally, in the 1877 Preface to the Via Media, the issue of the “difference between the Church’s formal teaching and its popular and political manifestations” is addressed in terms of the dialectical tension between the Church’s threefold office of sanctification, teaching, and ruling. Here, Newman introduces the key insight that doctrinal developments are driven not only by theological, but by pastoral and political concerns, and that the tension between these offices, though often painful, can become ultimately creative. 

Faithful to his own journey of conversion – the intellectual and moral conversion, which flowed from his broad experience, penetrating intelligence, and patient judgment, and the religious conversion which came as an eruption of divine grace and to which he responded with all his natural abilities – Newman’s understanding of development itself developed: “it changed in order to remain the same.”[20]

Over a century later, summing up the intellectual debt he owed to John Henry Newman, Bernard Lonergan said:

“Newman’s remark that ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt has served me in good stead. It encouraged me to look difficulties squarely in the eye, while not letting them interfere with my vocation or my faith.”[21]  

In the aftermath of Vatican II, some misinterpreted Newman’s statement that “here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often” as an apologia for a vision of doctrinal development which advocated change for change’s sake. In reaction, confusing unity with uniformity, others took refuge in the false absolutization of beliefs and practices that were never more than contingent.  What Lonergan advocated – and, I firmly believe, what Newman provides, is a genuine via media between these two extremes:

“There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this, now that new development, exploring now this and now that new possibility. But what will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half-measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait.”[22]

Notes

[1] John Henry Newman, An Essay On The Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. Ian T. Ker, (Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 40.

[2] John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Introduction and Notes by William Oddie (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 182.

[3] Newman, 211.

[4] Newman, 183.

[5] Newman, An Essay On The Development of Christian Doctrine, 171.

[6] John Henry Newman, Essay, 326, citing Apologia, 182.

[7] Ian Ker, “Newman and the ‘Orphans of Vatican II’,” Louvain Studies 15 (1990), 119-135, at 135.  Borrowing another image from the world of transportation to indicate the impatience of many of his contemporaries with respect to the speed of this development, Newman realized that “We do not move at railroad pace in theological matters, even in the 19th Century.”

[8] Owen Chadwick, Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Indoctrinal Development (Cambridge: 1957), 100.

[9]James Gaffney, Conscience, Consensus and the Development o Doctrine: Revolutionary Texts by John Henry Newman (New York: Image Books, 1992), University Sermon XV, 9.

[10] Bernard Lonergan, “Change in Roman Catholic Theology”, (unpublished lecture, Trinity College, U. of Toronto).

[11] Richard M. Liddy, Transforming Light: Intellectual Conversion in the Early Lonergan: 40. (cited in Liddy, Transforming Light 40)

[12] “Theology in Its New Context,” in W. Ryan & B. Tyrrell ed., A Second Collection (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974): 55-67, at 65-66.

[13] Bernard Lonergan, “Method in Theology”, (London: Darton, Longman & Todd).

[14] Philip Egan, “Doctrinal Development: Some Notes from Newman and Lonergan”, 30.

[15] Lonergan, Method in Theology, 115.

[16] Lonergan,  243.

[17] Egan, “Doctrinal Development: Some Notes from Newman and Lonergan,” Unpublished paper delivered at Lonergan Seminar, Boston College, August 2000: 30.

[18] Newman, Apologia.

[19] Newman, 214.

[20] Newman, An Essay On The Development of Christian Doctrine, 40.

[21] Bernard Lonergan, A Second Collection, ed. William F. Ryan & Bernard J. Tyrrell (London: Darton, Longman & Todd), 263.

[22] Bernard Lonergan, “Dimensions of Meaning,” in Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan (New York: Herder & Herder, 1967): 266-67.

Works Cited

John Henry Newman:

1843: Oxford University Sermon §15, “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” in Gaffney 1992: 6-29

1845, 2nd ed.  1878:  An Essay On The Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. By Ian T. Ker, (Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame Press, 1989).

1864: Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Introduction and Notes by William Oddie.  London: Everyman’s Library, 1993.

1870: An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, ed. With an introduction by Nicholas Lash. (Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame Press, 1979).

Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Cambridge: 1957).

Philip Egan, “Doctrinal Development: Some Notes from Newman and Lonergan,” Unpublished paper delivered at Lonergan Seminar, Boston College, August 2000.

James Gaffney (ed.), Conscience, Consensus and the Development of Doctrine: Revolutionary Texts by John Henry Newman (New York: Image Books, 1992).  Includes OUS §15, (1843), Essay on Development (1845), On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (1859), and Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875)

James Gaffney (ed.) Roman Catholic Writings on Doctrinal Development (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1997).  Includes Preface to the 3rd ed. of the Via Media (1877).

Ian T. Ker, “Newman and the ‘Orphans of Vatican II’,” Louvain Studies 15 (1990), 119-135.

Richard M. Liddy, [1] Transforming Light: Intellectual Conversion in the Early Lonergan.  Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1994.

Bernard J.F.  Lonergan:

1967.  Collection.  Ed. by Frederick E. Crowe. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.

1971.  Method in Theology.  London: Darton, Longman & Todd.

1973. “Change in Roman Catholic Theology,” Unpublished Larkin-Stuart lecture, Trinity College, U. of Toronto.

1974. A Second Collection. Ed. by William F. Ryan & Bernard J. Tyrrell. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.