By Matthew Walz
During the past academic year, I had the honor of holding the St. John Henry Newman Visiting Chair of Catholic Studies at the Thomas More College. (This was especially an honor since this same Chair was initially held by Robert Royal, of TCT, and then by Joseph Pearce). Shortly after accepting this appointment, the Church announced that it would name St. John Henry Newman Doctor Ecclesiae, Doctor or Teacher of the Church, which it did last November. For me, this was a happy coincidence or a “God-incidence,” as a priest once suggested calling such an event. I was being asked, I thought, to ponder the meaning of Newman as Doctor.
The “of” in “Doctor of the Church” (the genitive case of Ecclesia) certainly expresses a relationship of possession: a Doctor belongs to the Church; he or she worked and continues to work for the Church’s evangelizing mission. The “of” also suggests, it seems to me, the object of a Doctor’s teaching (in Latin, Ecclesiae can be read as an “objective genitive”). Thus, a Doctor not only represents the Church, but also teaches the Church itself, leading it to a greater realization of revealed truth.
The Church learns something new from Newman. Newman excavated the depths of Scripture and of the Church’s Tradition in illuminating ways and, in turn, articulated novel insights that now form part of the Church’s intellectual treasury. Newman taught the Church a great many things, ranging from the development of doctrine to the primacy of truth and the nature of conscience.
But I want to consider here something that the most recent Doctor teaches the Church, reflecting on a captivating phrase he uses, a phrase altogether pertinent to those who wish to be sanctified in the truth. The phrase comes from a meditation written by Newman called “Hope in God—Creator,” one of the most powerful of his numerous Meditations on Christian Doctrine.
God the Creator, says Newman, “knows what He is doing.” God knows what He is doing! Perhaps more than any Doctor, Newman teaches us how to take this phrase as a touchstone for our lives. Do we know what we are doing? Do we trust that God knows what He is doing? What does it even mean to know what one is doing, especially given that we encounter so many shadows and images on our way toward and into the truth? (Newman had the words Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem engraved on his tomb).
Humanly speaking, knowing what one is doing is an achievement, perhaps of a lifetime. Great minds have long recognized it as such, though not as concisely as Newman. Consider, for example, Socrates, undoubtedly a man who knew what he was doing. The oracle at Delphi revealed that no one is wiser than Socrates. Thus provoked, Socrates probes this claim, eventually seeing that its truth lay in Socrates’ knowing-that-he-does-not-know.
As Plato relates, moreover, Socrates’ knowing-that-he-does-not-know was at the heart of his apologia, his defense against those Athenian fellow-citizens who accused him of spreading harmful teachings.
Newman, of course, also delivered an Apologia in response to similar accusations from his fellow countrymen. Like Socrates, Newman narrates the extent to which he probed his own knowing-that-he-does-not-know in pursuit of the fullness of truth. It was a relentlessly honest probing that led him into the arms of Mother Church and into the intellectual sanctuary of her infallibility.
We know, of course, that there exists an even greater model of someone who knows what he is doing, whose four apologiai were written by men whose lives were transformed by faith in Him. It is instructive to read the Gospels as the story of a man—a God-man, to be sure—who knows what he is doing. We cannot help but be struck by Jesus’ self-presence, his self-possession, his ability to carry out conscientiously the ends toward which he strives. Jesus Christ, above all others, knows what he is doing.
The crowd notices. Unlike what they see in the scribes and Pharisees, they hear in Jesus a man who has authority: “When Jesus had finished saying these things,” we are told, “the crowds were astonished at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.” (Matthew 7:28-29)
Jesus has “authority,” exousia, a fascinating Greek word that combines ex (“from” or “out of”) with ousia (which refers to the “reality” or “substance” of a thing itself). Jesus spoke from his own reality, from his own substance; I would venture to say, from his own heart. Was it not his capacity to speak cor ad cor, as Newman put it, that astonished the crowds and continues to astonish us?
It was doubtless due to Jesus himself that Newman believed that God knows what He is doing. Jesus lived a life of striking self-awareness and self-mastery, which manifested itself in the greatest self-gift the world will ever see. The Paschal Mystery, and the union with his Church consummated in it, absolutely verifies that Jesus knows what he is doing. In his light, should we not, simply and wholeheartedly, trust in Him?
Our most recent Doctor of the Church did so, and in an exceptional way. He trusted in the Creator who knows what He is doing. In what he wrote, but even more by how he lived, Newman teaches us what it means to live, like Christ, as someone who knows what he is doing. Family, friends, countrymen, customs: Newman was willing to abandon them all for the sake of the truth; the full truth of Jesus Christ and his Church, and the full truth about himself.
Like Christ, Newman seems to have been born and to have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. As his Apologia Pro Vita Sua relates, he did so in his own fragile, creaturely way, reflecting as best he could the Creator who knows what He is doing. Fittingly the Church has invested him with the authority such truthfulness deserves; fittingly he has been named Doctor Ecclesiae.
About the Author
Matthew Walz will begin serving as president of Thomas More College at the beginning of the next academic year, after nearly two decades of teaching and administrative work at the University of Dallas and Holy Trinity Seminary. His installation will take place in September. He and his beautiful wife, Teresa, have been blessed with eight children.