John Henry Newman and the Church Fathers: Writing Church History in the First Person

Abstract

Throughout his life, Newman’s particular historical interest lay in what he took to be the triumph of Athanasius of Alexandria’s orthodoxy over Antiochene heresy in the early church. But the construction of the Alexandrian-Antiochene split served more than Newman’s scholarly interest: he deployed it to make objections to opponents in his own day. The three texts examined here (from the end, middle, and beginning of his scholarship) enabled him to show his own Alexandrian credentials in three different controversies—and reveal that Newman was not quite as consistent a thinker as some have claimed.