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John Henry Newman occupies a unique place in the religious history of the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. In the Victorian Church of England, the Oxford Movement which Newman helped to create effected a transformation of the spiritual and clerical life of Anglicanism. Within the Roman Catholic Church, Newman's conversion, primarily on the basis of his understanding of Scripture and revelation as properly interpreted through the tradition of the church, has served as a powerful apologetic for Catholicism.
The scholarly literature on Newman is voluminous and widespread; his place within his two traditions has undergone constant interpretation. Within the Roman Catholic Church Newman has served as a cipher for understanding the struggle with rationalism and authority which absorbed the late-nineteenth-century church.1 The relevant portions of Newman's biographies2 describe the Anglican period of his life with particular emphasis on the development of his religious thought, preparing the way for his conversion in 1845. This is Newman's own attitude towards his Anglican years in his autobiography, the Apologia pro Vita Sua.
My goal in this paper is to look at a particular aspect of Newman's work which is largely overlooked: namely, Newman as historian. Newman's place as theologian and preacher has been duly recognized; his historical work much less so.3 In particular I will examine Newman's understanding of heresy and its influence on the two most critical moments in his life. First I will explore Newman's treatment of Arianism, highlighting the significance of his The Arians of the Fourth Century by showing how his treatment of that heresy prepared the way for the Oxford Movement. Second, I will show how Newman's foray into Monophysitism, still operating from the hermeneutic established in his work on Arianism, helped to pave the way for his conversion.
Newman is not only significant for the history of the nineteenth-century church. The Arians of the Fourth Century helped to establish the historiographic attitude towards heresy in British Arian scholarship. It paved the way for H. M. Gwatkin's Studies of Arianism, published some fifty years later. Gwatkin, while differing with Newman over the origin of Arianism, nonetheless continued his predecessor's line of argumentation by seeking to uncover the pagan influences on heresy, in order to explain its failure. Such an interpretation governed...