Newman, Doctrine, and the Second Vatican Council

It could credibly be argued that the first seeds of the Second Vatican Council were sown on 2 February 1843, when the then-Anglican John Henry Newman preached a sermon in Oxford under the title of ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’. [1]

Taking as his text Luke 2:19, ‘Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart,’ Newman argued that a truly Christian faith is a Marian faith, not merely accepting what has been revealed, but reflecting upon it, using it, developing it, reasoning on it.[2] Describing as ‘wonderful’ the development and growth of the Christian mind, Newman said:

‘And this world of thought is the expansion of a few words, uttered, as if casually, by the fishermen of Galilee. … Reason has not only submitted, it has ministered to Faith; it has illustrated its documents; it has raised illiterate peasants into philosophers and divines; it has elicited a meaning from their words which their immediate hearers little suspected. … Its half sentences, its overflowings of language, admit of development; they have a life in them which shows itself in progress; a truth, which has the token of consistency; a reality, which is fruitful in resources; a depth, which extends into mystery: for they are representations of what is actual, and has a definite location and necessary bearings and a meaning in the great system of things, and a harmony in what it is, and a compatibility in what it involves.’[3]

Drawing on an earlier distinction between what he deemed ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ reason,[4] Newman argued that Revelation impresses certain supernatural facts or principles on the minds of those to whom truth is revealed, holding that those upon whose minds these supernatural realities had been impressed could be unaware of the truths which they possessed, such that over time they would draw unconsciously on realities they could not articulate, and ‘centuries might pass without the formal expression of a truth, which had been all along the secret life of millions of faithful souls’.[5]

Two years later, in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman developed this thesis at much greater length, addressing the apparently undisputable historical reality that Christian teaching had varied so much over the centuries that one might legitimately wonder whether there had been any true ‘continuity of doctrine’ since Apostolic times. [6]

Newman argued that a true continuity of doctrine could indeed be discerned, with any appearances to the contrary to be expected, given that Christianity is a living thing; butterflies do not obviously resemble the caterpillars from which they grow, after all, but the butterfly is, as it were, ‘written’ in the caterpillar and should be regarded as its authentic and flourishing mature form, just as the chicken is written in the egg, and the mustard bush in the proverbial mustard seed.[7] In a famous passage he wrote that while it is sometimes said that streams are clearest near where they rise, this is not quite true for the history of philosophy or belief, which:

‘… is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary.’[8]

Newman had long believed growth, as he remarks in his spiritual autobiography, ‘the only evidence of life’,[9] and as he regarded the Church as a living thing, so he regarded development of Christian tradition as inevitable. To be faithful, however, a development must retain ‘both the doctrine and the principle with which it started.’[10]As a living thing, however, it was prone to develop in an organic fashion:

‘From time to time it makes essays which fail and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’[11]

This notion of organic development was perhaps Newman’s greatest contribution to Christian thought. Hitherto there had been a number of ways of addressing the question of doctrinal development, none of which Newman found satisfactory: some Protestants believed that Christianity had only developed by absorbing foreign elements,[12] which necessitated a return to a Bible-only religion and seemed to contradict the guarantees Christ had given his Church, while Anglicans tended to favour the principle of St Vincent of Lerins that Christianity is ‘what has been held always, everywhere, and by all’, which Newman felt unworkable and inclined to undercut all Christian groups without exception.[13]   Catholic theories on development tended to hold that all doctrines had always been explicitly present even if secretly so, but the Scholastic theory of logical explication based on deductions from earlier formulations did not fit easily with the known facts of history, and Bossuet’s principle of clarification which saw developments as later explanations of earlier formulations did not really explain how so much development had demonstrably taken place.[14]

Just as Newman’s contemporary Darwin was not the first to envisage some form of development of species, so Newman was not the first to envisage some form of development of doctrine; what was new, however, was his belief that doctrine developed organically, with the faithful reason of believers working over centuries under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to nurture and polish the original revelation so that it became a divine philosophy.[15] That Newman should have thought in this ‘evolutionary’ fashion is hardly surprising given how ‘progress’ was the central theme in mid-nineteenth century thought; the Industrial Revolution had dramatically changed technology, culture, and society, such that scholars and intellectuals of all sorts wrestled with how economies, life, personalities, and ideas develop. [16]

Newman may have regarded the process of development as organic, but he certainly did not believe it aimless or random; if he thought Vincent of Lerins’ approach unworkable, nonetheless it had value in how it defined authentic development in doctrine as ‘a real progress for the faith, and not an alteration: the characteristic of progress being that each element grows and yet remains itself, while the characteristic of alteration is that one thing is transformed into another.’[17] As Newman understood it, true developments retained both the original doctrine and the original principle.

Having early in his Anglican career regarded dogma as a mere necessary evil, taking the view that ideally Christianity would be – as it surely was in its earliest years – simple and free of such clutter,[18] by the time he came to write his Grammar of Assent he had come to believe that the supposition that there was ‘a contrariety and antagonism between a dogmatic creed and vital religion’ was simply false. He explained that dogma ascertains and makes clear ‘the truths on which the religious imagination has to rest’, as ‘knowledge must ever precede the exercise of the affections’; emotional and imaginative sentiment, then, depend on the intellect, and as such devotion depends upon dogma.[19]

If it might seem surprising that this could ever have proved congenial to him, given his earlier views, it is worth turning to G.K. Chesterton, the final chapter of whose Orthodoxy  seems to owe a clear debt to Newman’s Grammar[20]. In this, Chesterton observes that Christianity needs doctrine if it is to flourish and to be free:

‘Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. […] We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.’[21]

Given this, the teaching duty of the Church, for Newman, could hardly have been clearer. To a Catholic, wrote Newman to Richard Holt Hutton in 1871, the Church is, so to speak, ‘a standing Apostolic committee – to answer questions, which the Apostles are not here to answer, concerning what they received and preached.’ Not knowing more than the Apostles, he explained, there are questions the Church cannot answer, but it nonetheless was empowered to state the doctrine of the Apostles, ‘what is to be believed, and what is not such’. [22]

This imposed a responsibility on the Magisterium so fearful that, Newman believed, occasional excesses of zeal on the part of the Church’s doctrinal watchdogs were as understandable as they were unavoidable:

‘In this curious sceptical world, such sensitiveness is the only human means by which the treasure of faith can be kept inviolate. There is a woe in Scripture against the unfaithful shepherd. We do not blame the watch-dog because he sometimes flies at the wrong person. I conceive the force, the peremptoriness, the sternness, with which the Holy See comes down upon the vagrant or the robber, trespassing upon the enclosure of revealed truth, is the only sufficient antagonist to the power and subtlety of the world, to imperial comprehensiveness, monarchical selfishness, nationalism, the liberalism of philosophy, the encroachments and usurpation of science.’[23]

Occasional bouts of hypervigilance, then, however regrettable, were a price worth paying if the integrity of the Faith was to be protected. Not, of course, that it was for the Holy See alone to guard the deposit of faith. One of the other great themes in Newman’s writing, and one which flourished in the Second Vatican Council, was the role of the laity in preserving the truth that had been revealed; as early as 1835 Newman remarked of the laity to his friend Richard H. Froude that ‘the maintenance of the faith is their clear prerogative’.[24]

Clearly seeing the laity as an essentially conservative body, in 1859’s On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine Newman argued forcefully that it was appropriate for Rome to take into account what the laity believed on issues as yet undefined. It was wise to do this, he said, ‘because the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine, and because their consensus through Christendom is the voice of the Infallible Church.’[25]

When Newman spoke of the laity being consulted, he stressed, he did not mean that the Magisterium should seek their opinion on how Rome should define things; rather, he said, the Holy See should consult the laity as a man would consult a barometer or a railway timetable, as a simple matter of fact: the question on any given doctrine was not ‘what does the laity believe the Church should teach?’ so much as ‘what does the laity see Church teaching as being?’

Newman was careful to speak, too, of the laity as a whole, referring to the consensus fidelium, the shared mind of the faithful throughout the world. He was all too aware of how portions of the laity could be out of step with the mind of the universal Church, noting, for instance, in his lectures on The Present Position of Catholics in England, that:

‘In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit; they saved the Irish Church three centuries ago and they betrayed the Church in England. Our rulers were true, our people were cowards.’[26]

Insofar as the Church’s infallibility subsisted in the laity, then, it did so in a universal, not a sectional sense, and depended to an enormous – perhaps to an absolute – degree on how effectively and thoroughly they had been raised and formed in the truths of the Faith. Newman’s views on the laity as an authentic channel of tradition had been formed by his studies of the Arian heresy and how it was received by the fourth-century Church. Distinguishing between the part of the Church that teaches and the part of the Church that is taught, Newman maintained that the fourth-century Church leadership had hardly covered itself in glory, whereas the sort of well-instructed laity for which he hoped in his own day resisted the Arian innovations and maintained the true doctrine of the Church:

‘For I argue that, unless they had been catechised, as St Hilary says, in the orthodox faith from the time of their baptism, they never could have had that horror, which they show, of the heterodox Arian doctrine. Their voice, then, is the voice of tradition…’[27]

In short, then, Newman regarded doctrine as something that developed but did so organically, developments arising and being embraced gradually after centuries of reflection, these developments being signs of true growth, rather than the kind of changes that would change the essential character of things.

Theologians had the job of thinking and pondering on what the Church believed, but it was not for them to steer Peter's barque; rather, that task was primarily that of the Magisterium, with the Pope's primary role being to ensure the Church's unity in truth. If theologians should step outside the boundaries of the Church's belief, or threaten to lead others outside the established limits of Christian truth, then it was the duty of Rome to step in. Doing otherwise would be to neglect Rome's pastoral duties: good shepherds try to prevent sheep from straying, and strive to bring back lost sheep.

As for the laity, Newman saw theirs as an essentially conservative role, their job being in large part to watch the watchmen, to preserve the historical faith and practice of the Church -- because practice does not merely reflect faith, but can drive faith, with changes in practice leading to changes in faith -- even when clergy and theologians discard and deny what the Church had long believed and done. But the laity could not do this job, Newman was clear, unless they knew and embraced the Church's authentic historical belief; without a well-catechised laity, there could be no true sensus fidelium. Proper instruction in the realities of the Catholic faith, then, is vital if the laity is to be empowered, and health of the Church to be robust.

GD, Cork, January 2014.

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[1] Ker, Ian, John Henry Newman, Oxford 1988, 266-269; Ker, Ian, Newman on Being a Christian, London 1990, 29-31; Newman, John Henry, Oxford University Sermons, London 1900, 312-351. Development of doctrine was arguably the central issue at the Second Vatican Council, with Newman’s work in this area being regarded as foundational, according to O’Malley, John W., What Happened at Vatican II, Cambridge MA 2008, 39.

[2] Newman, Oxford University Sermons, 313. Congar, Yves, The Meaning of Tradition, trans. A.N. Woodrow, San Francisco 2004, 112 likewise presents Mary as the archetype of the reflective Church, citing Hugo Rahner’s description of the Church as ‘the Mary of the history of the world’.

[3] Newman, Oxford University Sermons, 317-318.

[4] Newman, Oxford University Sermons, 251-277.

[5] Newman, Oxford University Sermons, 320-323.

[6] Newman, John Henry, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, London 1973, 69-72 notes his belief that the human and institutional continuity that was so clear in Christian history pointed strongly to the likelihood of real doctrinal continuity, but also admits the possibility that over time the ‘blade’ and ‘handle’ of Christianity might have been changed so often that doctrinal change could have happened without matters looking any different.

[7] Newman, Development, 117; on mustard seeds, see, of course, Matthew 13:31-32,  Mark 4:30-32, and Luke 13:18-19.

[8] Newman, Development, 100.

[9] Newman, John Henry, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, London 1962, 99.

[10] Newman, Development, 129.

[11] Newman, Development, 100.

[12] Bieber, Newman on Tradition, 131; Newman, Development, 88.

[13] Ker, John Henry Newman, 302; Newman, Development, 74-88.

[14] Bieber, Newman on Tradition, 131-132; Ker, Newman on Being a Christian, 31-32; Newman, Development, 88-90.

[15] Bieber, Günter, Newman on Tradition, translated by Kevin Smyth, London 1967, 130.

[16] Elsdon-Baker, Fern, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins rewrote Darwin’s Legacy, London 2009, 72.

[17] As quoted in Congar, Meaning of Tradition, 119.

[18] Ker, Newman on Being a Christian, 22; Newman, John Henry, The Arians of the Fourth Century, London 1890, 36-37.

[19] Newman, John Henry, The Grammar of Assent, ed. I.T. Ker, Oxford 1985, 82-83. Ker, Newman on Being a Christian, 25-26.

[20] Chesterton, G.K., Orthodoxy in G.K. Chesterton Collected Works Volume I, San Francisco 1986, 348-349 reads as a personal take on Newman’s arguments for belief in Christianity based on natural inference and the illative sense. See also Oddie, William, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908, Oxford 2008, 362-363 on Chesterton as a disciple of Newman in this respect.

[21] Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 350.

[22] Dessain, Charles Stephen and Thomas Gornall, eds, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman – Volume XXV: The Vatican Council January 1870 to December 1871, Oxford 1973, 418.

[23] Newman, John Henry, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, London 1961, 61.

[24] Bieber, Newman on Tradition, 39.

[25] Newman, John Henry, On Consulting the Faithful, 63. On the witnesses to Christian tradition, see Congar, Meaning of Tradition, 129-155, especially 140: ‘Living tradition, faithfully lived by Christians, is not creative, but is, in a sense, a source of Revelation – precisely because it contains and makes explicit things that it has always held and practiced concretely, but for which, in the beginning, there existed no written or verbal formulation.’

[26] Newman, John Henry, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, London 1896, 390-391; Newman’s comments on the cowardice of the English laity must be seen not as an absolute criticism, but as a comparative one, in contrast to the faith of their Irish brethren. His observation on the courage of their ecclesiastical leaders seems broadly fair; Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, New Haven 2009, #, notes that 10 of the 23 bishops Mary inherited from Edward VI returned to unity with the Catholic Church, with all bar one of the bishops she bequeathed Elizabeth rejecting the Elizabethan settlement, and observes that more than two thirds of Edward’s clergy returned to the Catholic Church under Mary, many of them retaining this allegiance after her death, noting that, for instance, it was possible in 1561 to walk through sixteen parishes between the Surrey border and the Sussex coast, in each of which the incumbent had either died of influenza or been deprived of office for refusing to conform to the Elizabethan settlement.

[27] Newman, Consulting the Faithful, 76; on Newman’s desire for an ‘intelligent, well-instructed laity’, see, famously, Newman, Present Position, 390.

Armageddon on the Aufidus: Locating the Battle of Cannae

For the historian of ancient warfare, there can be few tasks as frustrating – or as tempting – as trying to locate the sites of ancient battles. Our sources rarely say much about topography, what they say is usually vague or contradictory, and, to make matters worse, two thousand years of earthquakes,  floods, and common-or-garden erosion is generally enough to transform any landscape, especially when assisted by the twin forces of farming and construction. 

Despite these difficulties, military historians over the years have relentlessly sought the locations of the major battles of Antiquity, notable the great clashes of the Second Punic War, Rome’s infamous life-and-death struggle with Carthage at the end of the third century BC. Predictably enough, considering the spell it’s cast on tacticians and military historians over the years, the quest to locate the battle of Cannae has been an unashamed free-for-all. Offhand, I can think of about a dozen different theories of where the battle took place.

Just to put this into context, in the summer of 216 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal was marauding around Italy with an army of around 50,000 men.  Having been decisively thrashed by him in their three previous encounters, the Romans concentrated on building up their army to a total strength – perhaps, this is debated – of 86,000 men. Hannibal seized the grain stores at Cannae, near Canusium, and the Romans under their consuls Paullus and Varro moved closer, evidently planning to give battle soon. They set up camp by the river Aufidus, across the river from Hannibal’s camp. Hannibal crossed the river and made camp, the next day offering battle to the Romans, who declined. 

The following day the Romans under Varro crossed the river to challenge Hannibal, and Hannibal led his men across the river to face them. Despite being massively outnumbered, Hannibal was able to outflank the Romans and surround them, killing 50,000 men in a manoeuvre – the ‘double envelopment’ – which has been a model to generals ever since.

At the south-western end of the citadel at Cannae there’s a small modern monument, a simple column bearing an inscription from Livy, with a magnificent view of what you might assume is the battlefield. You can see it here, a broad flat plain with the river Ofanto – the ancient Aufidus - shown running across the centre of the shot, rendered clearly visible by the trees and bushes that line its banks. The town in the background is San Ferdinando, which some historians have identified as the site of Hannibal’s camp before the battle. It all looks very straightforward – and if you ask in the museum, or at the small tourist office at the train station, you’ll be told that it is. Unfortunately, as with virtually everything that we touch in the field of ancient history, matters aren’t anywhere near so simple.

Back in the late sixteenth century it seems to have been normal to assume the battle took place on the south-eastern bank of the river. If you ever visit the hall of maps in the Vatican Museum and seek out the map of this area  by the Dominican friar Ignazio Danti you’ll see that not only has Danzi seen fit to mark the site of the battle of Cannae on the southern bank of the river, with the two main camps on the northern bank, but he’s painted both armies deployed for battle with the opposing commanders clearly identified. He does a similar thing with other maps in the series, showing, say, the opposing camps before the Battle of Lake Trasimene, and Caesar about to cross the Rubicon.

If you look at a satellite image of the region round the hill of Cannae, with the river Ofanto – the ancient Aufidus – running in a more or less north-easterly direction from the bottom left corner, you can just about make out the hill of Cannae in the very centre of the shot.

What positive information can we gather from the sources? Well, Polybius 3.113 clearly states that the Roman right wing – the citizen cavalry were positioned by the river, faced by the Carthaginian left wing – the Celtic and Spanish horse. Further, Polybius 3.114 and Livy 22.46 tell us that the Romans faced south, the Carthaginians north. We needn’t be too dogmatic about what Polybius meant when he wrote ‘north’ and ‘south’ here. It can be taken as read, I think, that he meant ‘roughly north’ and ‘roughly south’; it seems unlikely that either Hannibal or the Roman commanders were using compasses to deploy their armies. 

What’s more, both armies had to cross the Aufidus to do battle, since most of their men were camped on the far side of the river; Polybius 3.113 states this unambiguously, while Polybius 3.110 indicates that they must have crossed from west to east, since only a third of the Roman forces were encamped on the eastern side of the river.

It can be helpful to see how people have read the data and attempted to locate the battle over the years. The turquoise box on this black-and-white satellite shot marks the area generally identified as the site of the battle of Cannae up to the early nineteenth century, and still generally pointed to as the battlefield by locals in Barletta and thereabouts. 

Obviously, I've enhanced the course of the river; the hill of Cannae should still be clear in the centre. The problem with the obvious identification is that it’s based simply on the assumption that this is a good, handy, flat space that would have been an obvious spot for a fight. Quite right, but unfortunately the sources rule out this location, at least if we take them at face value.

It seems pretty clear, from the aforementioned passages, that the battle must have been fought on the right bank of the river, with the two armies deployed more-or-less at a right angle to it, the Romans facing roughly south, the Carthaginians roughly north. Some nineteenth-century writers attempted to place the battle to the southwest of the hill of Cannae, notably Hesselbarth in his 1874 Göttingen dissertation and Thomas Arnold in 1886. Unfortunately, a cursory inspection of the area – represented with an orange box – ought to have ruled out such ideas – the ground they identified as the site of the battle is rugged and hilly, unsuitable for an infantry battle, let alone a battle involving the use of about 15,000 horses and some fairly sophisticated cavalry manoeuvres.

Attention returned once more to the left bank of the Aufidus, with the American Theodore Dodge placing the battle almost parallel to the river, close to the coast, as represented by the pink box; Dodge wasn’t working so much on the basis of the evidence as he was using what’s termed "inherent military probability". This is the idea that soldiers of whatever era will do what makes military sense, and that bearing in mind certain principles of warfare we can establish what historical generals are likely to have done. Although it ignores the fact that war’s a cultural activity – it varies in aims and methods between cultures – it is a useful tool. However, it’s a tool far too easily abused, as in this case; there’s not a jot of evidence to support Dodge, and plenty of it to refute his theory.

Konrad Lehmann and Hans Delbrück hypothesised that the battle was fought on the river’s left bank, a couple of miles west of the hill of Cannae, as represented by the green box, but Lehmann has the Romans facing roughly north and the Carthaginians roughly south, in direct contradiction of the sources, while Delbrück had the Romans facing roughly east and the Carthaginans roughly west. Again, their theories, however ingenious, lacked any real basis in our evidence. 

De Sanctis, at least, in placing the battlefield on the left bank as shown by the yellow box, with the Romans facing north-east and the Carthaginians facing south-west, had an explanation. Polybius, he believed, thought of Italy as a triangle with its base in the Alps and bisected by the Apennines; the Aufidus thus must have, in Polybius’ mind, flowed in a south-easterly direction; since the Aufidus in fact flows north east, all Polybius’ directions must be corrected – a Roman force facing roughly southeast, for Polybius, would in fact have been facing northeast, with its right flank on the river. 

It’s a clever idea but it doesn’t really follow that Polybius if envisaged Italy as a triangle he must have assumed that all rivers flowing into the Adriatic flowed south-east; besides, considering that Polybius explicitly speaks of the Aufidus having an east bank, it would seem that he believed the river to have flowed from south to north. De Sanctis’ theory, though ingenious, doesn’t hold up.

In 1912, Johannes Kromayer proposed that the battlefield was in fact on the river’s right bank, downstream from the hill of Cannae, on a front over four kilometres wide, with the Romans facing south-west-south and the Carthaginians north-east-north, the Roman right flank and the Carthaginian left flank both resting on the river. The red box here represents Kromayer's theory. Over time this theory gained more and more ground, eventually becoming generally accepted as the one that best fits the evidence, the topographical reality, and military practicality. See, for instance, the definitive book on the battle*. (Cough, cough)

Yes, I'm using the drawing in my book. So sue me.

 In 1981, however, Peter Connolly dropped a very astute bombshell onto this increasingly cosy consensus. It was all very well working on the basis of the texts, he pointed out, but we only have two items of geography to correlate with our literary evidence, and while the hill of Cannae is conveniently stationary, rivers have a habit of moving. What, he asked, if the Aufidus had flowed rather further north in 216 BC than it had done in his day? 

Assuming the river was at the northernmost limit of its floodplain in 216 BC, he placed the main Carthaginian camp at the modern town San Ferdinando with the main Roman camp just over a mile downhill. His proposed site for the battle, shown in pink below, falls down largely because it doesn’t allow for Hannibal having challenged the Romans to battle on the left bank of the Aufidus the previous day. Polybius 3.112 describes Hannibal’s army deploying for battle along the Aufidus, without crossing the river, and if we follow Connolly’s theory there simply isn’t space for them to have done that in the narrow stretch between San Ferdinando and Connolly's hypothetical battlefield.

Nevertheless, Connolly had raised an important point, one that Adrian Goldsworthy was to take up a few years ago in his book Roman Warfare (as shown in orange) and subsequently revisit in his books on The Punic Wars (with the battle located in the general area of the dotted turquoise box) and Cannae (as shown in olive green), where he explained his theory. Goldsworthy clearly changed his mind a couple of times as to the precise location of the battle, but that’s no argument against his basic thesis, which needs to be addressed. 

• First, he says, Kromayer requires Hannibal’s camp to be in the open plain rather than on higher ground at the modern San Ferdinando – of this he says "there could have been no intrinsic value to such a position apart from the pressure it applied on the enemy by its proximity to their camp". 
• Second, he argues that the location where Varro offered battle, according to Kromayer, is no less suited to cavalry combat than that location declined by Paullus the previous day. 
• Third, he points out that we have no reason to believe the course of the Aufidus in 216BC was anywhere near where it is now, and it could well have been much further north as per Connolly’s theory. 
• Finally, he says that Connolly has overestimated – and Kromayer has grossly overestimated – the frontage that a Roman army of 76,000 men would need. It would be possible, he argues, to squeeze an enormous Roman army into a battlefield only two kilometres wide – and with one Roman flank anchored on the river and the other flank anchored on the hill of Cannae or thereabouts, the Romans would be able to thwart any attempts by Hannibal’s cavalry to outflank and surround them.

Where do we start? Well, firstly there’s the issue of Hannibal gaining nothing from being encamped in the plain, barring the pressure that he’d apply on the Romans through being so close to their camp. Frankly, that could be reason enough to camp there – Hannibal wanted to draw the Romans out, after all. He wanted them to fight him, since he was sure that if they fought, he’d win.

What then of the charge that Kromayer’s proposed location for the battle is just as well-suited to cavalry combat as the the plain between the camps, in Kromayer’s thesis? That’s simply not true. The map I've cunningly nabbed from my own book shows that the terrain between the two camps is as flat as a pancake, perfect for cavalry combat, while there are at least a few contours in the area where Kromayer places the battle. But even if that area had been better suited to cavalry combat than the area where Hannibal had offered battle the previous day, Varro would still have had good psychological grounds for offering battle there. The previous day Hannibal had picked his terrain – now it was time for the Romans to pick theirs. This is an example of the dangers of applying "inherent military probability" to cultures that are different from our own.

Third, and now we’re moving into the meat of the Connolly/Goldsworthy hypothesis, what if the Aufidus flowed rather further north in Hannibal’s day than it does now? The first thing that has to be borne in mind is that, yes, the river’s current path almost certainly doesn’t match its route in 216BC. It doesn't follow exactly the same route now, even, as it did when Kromayer drew his map. Rivers move, and over the course of six or seven centuries the river could easily move from one side of its flood plain to the other. 

The Aufidus – or the Ofanto as it’s now called  isn’t a particularly impressive river, after all. It’s neither broad nor deep, and lacks in power – it’s the type of river that would always take the path of least resistance. But there’s no evidence at all for what path it took in Hannibal’s day. Yes, it’s rather arbitrary to assume that the river’s current course matches its course when the battle was fought, but it’s equally arbitrary to assume that its course in 216 BC was along the northern limit of its floodplain. It’s even possible that its course then was slightly further to the southeast than it is now, so that it would have tightly hugged the hill of Cannae.

Certainly, whatever path the river took when the battle was fought, two things are definite. Firstly, its general direction must still have been towards the northeast, and second there's no way it followed the almost straight path we see in Connolly and Goldsworthy’s diagrams – though not in Connolly’s reconstruction, which is a more accurate reflection of reality. Rivers don’t follow straight paths in their old age – they meander wildly, as Gerry Fee taught me in geography class millions of years ago, and whatever course the Aufidus would have followed would have been marked by twists and turns, just as today’s river is, if not more so. 

The only way to find what the course of the Aufidus would have been in 216 would involve a close topographical and geological study of the area, looking for evidence of meanders and oxbow lakes – these would almost certainly have been filled in over time, but they could be found. Once found, they could be cored, and the cored deposits could be dated. Without such a project, any attempt to locate the ancient course of the Aufidus must be regarded with suspicion.

What then of the idea that a Roman army of 70,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry could have been squeezed into a plain two kilometres wide? Well, it’s possible. It does seem terribly convenient, though, doesn’t it? The Roman army can, just about, be squeezed into a frontage two kilometres wide… and the gap between the hill of Cannae and the river Aufidus can, just about, be stretched to two kilometres wide. It does rather look as though the facts are being forced to fit the theory here. Besides, it would have been very tricky to deploy an army squeezed so tightly together into such a narrow corridor.

What about the suggestion that with their flanks protected by the river and the hill the Romans would have been well-protected, at least in theory, from Hannibal’s cavalry? Well, the first thing you might wonder is "why doesn’t Polybius or any of our other sources for the battle even hint at the Romans having adopted such a position?" That doesn’t disprove Goldsworthy’s theory, by any means, since ancient writers are often far from forthcoming on the topography of battlefields, but Goldsworthy’s asking us to accept that Polybius was willing to relate the positions of the armies at Cannae to one of the battle’s crucial landmarks, but not to the other. Such a half-silence would be curious, to say the least.

We also need to remember that the encounter at the Aufidus had been invited in the first place by Hannibal’s seizure of Cannae’s citadel, as is described in Polybius 3.107 Hannibal had since then moved the bulk of his army to the left bank of the Aufidus (Polyb. 3.111.11), but it seems unlikely that he would have altogether abandoned the most important and defensible strategic point in the vicinity. For what it’s worth, Plutarch suggests that Hannibal had control of the heights around Cannae when he describes a rather feeble joke made by Hannibal while on a hilltop viewing the Roman army being deployed (Plut., Vit. Fab. Max. 15.1)

If Hannibal did control the hill of Cannae it would have been suicidal for the Romans to have anchored their left flank on it, exposing their men to a potential bombardment of missiles from above – such missiles might not just include the heavy stones that Hannibal’s Balearian slingers could hurl for great distances, but even such simple things as rooftiles! Again, this doesn’t definitively refute Goldsworthy’s thesis, but again it should cause us to pause before swallowing it.

One thing that’s crucial to remember in evaluating this hypothesis is that the hill of Cannae is not an isolated hill. Rather, it’s part of a ridge about fifty to sixty metres high You can pick out Cannae on this shot, just about, by squinting and looking for the memorial column. 

These hills are quite steep with something in the region of a 45 degree slope. All very well, you might think, but bear in mind how little space Goldsworthy allows for the Roman frontage – somewhere in the region of two kilometres – 360 metres for the 2,400 citizen cavalry at the river, 1050 metres for the infantry in the centre, and 540 metres for the 3,600 allied cavalry at the foot of the hills. This seems terribly constricted. 

It’s reasonable to assume that the cavalry by the river were squeezed tightly together –  Polybius 3.115 and Livy 22.47 relate how with little room to manoeuvre the cavalry battle by the river turned into a barbaric melee with all fighting being done at close quarters. But what of the cavalry on the other flank? Polybius 3.116 gives no hint that the cavalry there lacked room to move; on the contrary, it seems as though that part of the battle was characterised by the typical skirmishing and repeated sallies so typical of the Numidian cavalry; there’s certainly no suggestion of any close combat between the Numidians and the Allied cavalry, something which surely would have happened had they been wedged between the infantry and the steep slopes of Cannae and the adjoining hills. No, this part of the battle took place in the open plain.

So where does this leave us? Goldsworthy’s theories don’t really hold up, but can we simply return to Kromayer? Not quite. Kromayer’s theory that the battle was fought on the plain where the uplands near Cannae slope gently towards the sea at Barletta is still the best theory to date, fitting all the facts we have. Unfortunately, the river moves, and until we know exactly what course it took in 216 BC we can never be fully sure where the battle was fought. 

As it happens, even that may be too optimistic; part of me suspects that unless we find a big pile of spearheads with ‘made in Carthage’ written on them we’ll never know for certain, but that’s just me. 

– Modified from a talk first given in July 2005.
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* Also available in Italian, and a second Italian version at that. I hear it's good. 

Falling at the First Hurdle

“The Catholic Church, aka the western church of the Latin rite,” Diarmaid MacCulloch begins an astonishingly dodgy piece in today’s Irish Times, “trades on tradition.”

It takes real effort for a respected historian to start an article with such an egregious factual error, but MacCulloch manages it, and then parades out a litany of dodgy statements that will no doubt be nodded along to by almost all the Irish Times’ declining readership, with hardly anyone bothering to check the claims of an esteemed Oxford academic, especially one they might have seen on the telly.

This isn’t the first time that MacCulloch’s described the Catholic Church in this clunky and inadequate way; in his 2009 book A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years he deployed this description as being, in his view, more neutral than descriptions which emphasise the papacy, as it acknowledges what MacCulloch deems “the equal historic status of the various Churches of Orthodoxy in eastern Europe and the Middle East [...] not to mention the various Churches of Asia and Africa which decided after the fifth century to ignore or repudiate the Chalcedonian Definition of the nature of Jesus Christ.”

Now.

Here’s the thing. Anybody who paid attention when John Paul died and Benedict became pope may have noticed a few lads knocking around at the funeral and investiture while wearing hats that, well, weren’t your typical common-or-garden bishops’ mitres. Like so:

These guys are the patriarchs and metropolitans of the Eastern Catholic Churches. The Catholic Church, contrary to Professor MacCulloch’s claims, is by no means simply “the western church of the Latin rite”; rather, it’s a network of dozens of churches, all unified by their association with the Pope, who acts as a physical and indeed personal point of unity for the Church. The simplest working definition of a Catholic is a Christian who is in communion with the bishop of Rome.

The biggest church by far within the Catholic Church is indeed the western church of the Latin rite – leaving aside the little matter of there being more than one Latin rite – but there are plenty of other smaller churches all in union with Rome, the most prominent of which being the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, the Maronite Catholic Church, and the Melkite Catholic Church.

These churches are among those being most heavily persecuted in the Middle East, and their members are just as much members of the Catholic Church as I am; indeed, friends of mine in America were received into the Melkite Church some years back, and I’ve been to a Melkite Mass in Aleppo. 

This is one of the reasons why it's inaccurate to refer to the Church as the Roman Catholic Church; it's not just a Roman or Latin Church. It's just what it's said on the tin since before Ignatius of Antioch used the word in 107 or thereabouts: Catholic. 

And no, it won't do to say that MacCulloch was right to equate the Catholic Church with the "western church of the Latin rite" because the other churches in the Church are so small as to hardly count. Or, at any rate, it won't do unless you don't think Benedict should have appointed two Eastern patriarchs as cardinals in his last consistory, making sure they'd have a say in the selection of his successor, and basically don't think they matter.

Mind, if that is a common view it could explain why we've done so little in recent years to help the beleaguered Christians of  Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere.

MacCulloch’s article begins by misrepresenting the Catholic Church. It doesn’t get better.

Beware the Idiots’ Lantern or They hide that information in books, you know

I’ll come back to MacCulloch’s dreadful article in a bit, but at this point it mightn’t be a bad idea to drag up an email I wrote a couple of years back when a devout and intelligent Anglican friend – a scientist rather than a historian – asked me what I’d thought of MacCulloch’s BBC series on Christianity’s history. It'll give you a sense of what where I'm coming from on this. When you approach a historian, listen to the bees buzzing in his bonnet before you listen to what he says, as E.H. Carr advised. That goes for me as much as for Diarmaid, of course.

“So, I got to pondering your question about Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity, and wondered whether I was being unfair. You looked a mite troubled when I said how poor I’d found it, and given that MacCulloch is a very highly respected scholar of the Reformation, I wondered whether my gut reaction had been wrong. With that in mind, and believing that you deserved a far better answer than I’d given you, I decided to give it another shot, so put my work aside last night and watched the first couple of episodes. Unfortunately, and I scrabbled down some notes as I watched just to keep a shape on my thoughts, I found it even worse than I’d remembered.

Obviously I’m coming at this from a different perspective than MacCulloch; he’s recognised as a brilliant scholar of the Reformation, and is an Anglican who was ordained as a deacon but declined -- or was declined -- priestly orders because of the Church of England’s stance on non-celibate homosexual clergy, him being openly gay himself. All of this affects his take on things, as far as I can see, giving his argument a serious bias. 

It could equally be argued that as a straight Catholic ancient historian, with some background in medieval studies, I have biases of my own, and this is true, but all I can really say on this is that it’s largely for historical reasons that I’m a Christian – and in particular a Catholic one – now, and I’d have been unlikely to have distorted and misinterpreted my evidence to give me the answer I wanted. I didn’t set out wanting to return to Catholicism, after all, and was an extremely reluctant revert!

There are things MacCulloch does very well. It’s admirable and important that he draws attention to highly ritualistic churches of the East, with their ancient roots, as we often forget them, though he glosses over how there are hardly any of them and how a large proportion of them have reunited with the Catholic Church over the past few hundred years. He’s elegantly concise in explaining the Arian and Nestorian controversies that the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon attempted to resolve, and I think is depressing on the ball in showing how the Church’s teaching on purgatory and indulgences became corrupted and turned into a scandalous industry in the late medieval period.

Other than that, though, I thought both programmes were very poor. I know from personal experience how television requires simplification, but there’s a point at which simplification – if carried out selectively enough – becomes falsification. And the programmes were blighted by such selectivity, with inconvenient evidence being ignored and details being cherrypicked to support a highly questionable thesis. Questionable? Yes, I’d say so, because I don’t think it works to present Christianity as a mere accident of history, which could very easily have been very different and far more Eastern in its appearance. 

That works perfectly well as a thesis if you assume God doesn’t exist or takes no interest in us, but I don’t think it works at all if you believe, as we do, that He does exist and loves us too. There’s a passage in C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves where he says that strictly speaking for a Christian there’s no such thing as chance. I wish I could find the quote, but having spent the past ten minutes flicking to no avail through my battered paperback edition, I’m coming up blank. Anyway, if Lewis is right, then it can’t be a mere fluke that the Church – in the broadest sense – takes the shape it has done through history.

One of the first things that bothered me about the programme was how little reference there was to the Bible in it, and how what references there were seemed skewed. This all struck me as seriously problematic, because I think it’s a very weird history of Christianity that doesn’t have the Bible in a fairly central place, not least because the Bible tells us how the Church began. I’d also argue that the story of how the Bible was written and slowly pulled together over the first Christian centuries is itself one of the most interesting and important parts of the Christian tale. 

That aside, though, it was only by leaving out a serious treatment of what the Bible is and says that he was able to launch into his main claim that Jerusalem was the natural centre of the Church and that it was only after the destruction of the Temple that the Church looked elsewhere for leadership, looking as much to east as to west until Constantine came along. As he sees it, nobody before the fourth century would have ever imagined that Rome could have become the headquarters of the Church.

This is poppycock by any definition. Well before the fall of the Temple the Church had looked west; look at Paul’s letters, and Peter’s presence in Rome, and at how Revelation features the Greek churches of Asia Minor. Were it not for the crowds at Pentecost, we’d have no Scriptural reason to ever believe there were any Christians in the east at all! Indeed, the fact that all the New Testament documents were written in Greek should be a clue as to which direction the Church was inclined to look! 

As for Rome itself, before 100AD a bishop of Rome wrote to the Corinthians to settle rows there, and just a few years later a bishop of Antioch who had been a disciple of John would write commandingly to numerous other eminent churches but say that he wouldn’t dare tell the church at Rome what to do. 

By the late second century the bishop of Lyons, formerly of Asia Minor, would write of how the Roman bishop stood in a direct line from Peter and Paul and should be regarded as a point of doctrinal unity for all Christians, and within twenty years of that the African Tertullian, having turned from the Church, sneered at the bishop of Rome as ‘the bishop of bishops’.  No, Rome’s position may have been copperfastened by Constantine in the early fourth century, but there’s no honest way of claiming that it wasn’t preeminent long before that. 

Against this he builds up a fantasy of what the Church might have been, inspired by the tiny relics that are the churches of the east. Glossing over what their ritualism might imply, and over their Eucharistic beliefs, he goes straight to what he sees as their core. These, he believes, are churches that have always listened, churches that have compromised with the societies in which they lived. Given his own personal history, I can see why he’d approve of churches that accommodate themselves to the values of the lands where they might be, but is this really what Christianity is about? 

I don’t believe Jesus ever presented his teaching to his disciples as a religion of compromise. He assured his disciples that they would be at odds with the world, and that the world would hate them as it had hated him. If the apostles had compromised, would they have been martyred? It would have been very easy for the Christians of the west to compromise with their Roman persecutors: all they had to do was to sacrifice to the emperor; they didn’t do it, and were persecuted accordingly. It was this, and really only this, that marked them out a distinct from all the other eastern cults that came to Rome and melted away in Rome’s religious hotpot. By refusing the compromise, they weathered the many storms of persecutions and eventually came out on top, unlike the eastern churches which compromised with their overlords and who now number just a few million souls.

It's painfully obvious that MacCulloch’s no more of a medieval historian than he is an ancient one, as glaring errors mark his comments on why Rome’s main church of St Paul is where it is, on when and how Britain was reevangelised, on Charlemagne, and on the Crusades. Most striking, though, was what he had to say about the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, where the Church clarified its language for describing what happens at the Eucharist. 

For him this whole idea of the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ was a new invention, based on pagan philosophy, when it was nothing of the sort. The language was new, sure, but the language was an attempt to grapple with a long held belief, a belief we can see in John 6 and 1 Corinthians 11, a belief which is very clearly expressed by Christian writers from the generation taught by the apostles, and a belief which is shared by the Orthodox and the churches of the east, none of which would have been inclined to adopt a new Catholic doctrine in the thirteenth century.

I may give the later episodes a shot later, because surely he must be better when he moves into his own specialist field. And I am rather tempted to read his big book on Christianity, which being a massive tome must be less likely to leave out inconvenient truths. It’s had very high praise from people who know what they're talking about, so it probably is worth looking at. Not yet, though.”

On this email, yes, I know parts of it may cause eyebrows to raise, but it was addressed to someone who knows that when I spoke of a Biblical focus in early Christianity I was speaking purely in terms of it as a historical text rather than an inspired one, who realises that the persecutions the early Church faced tended to be sporadic, localised, and erratic in application, and who’s well aware of my view that historians of the early Church should start from an essentially agnostic position.

As ever, there's a basic rule of historical analysis which says that when considering what somebody says, you need to pay attention to their target audience. Mine was a dear friend who's smarter than most and who shares certain preconceptions with me so I didn't need to spell everything out; Diarmaid's were ordinary BBC viewers and now are Irish Times readers.

And yes, I’ve since read his book, and found it a mixed bag. I'd definitely recommend it as well worth a read, but it certainly shouldn’t be the only general survey of Christianity anyone tackles.

Anyway, what of today’s article? Well, some of the points in it are basically addressed in my email to my friend, but to take a few others:

Peter and Rome

Rome’s prestige, MacCulloch says, “derives from possessing the tomb of the Apostle Peter, who probably never visited the city. This Palestinian fisherman, who would have spoken a version of Aramaic, plus enough street-Greek to make himself understood in the forum, may have been illiterate in either language, but he is represented among the books of the Bible by two elegantly-penned Greek letters written by two different authors – he himself was neither of them.”

Now, I’m quite happy to buy that Peter authored neither letter traditionally attributed to him, that being a well-argued scholarly orthodoxy, but it’s worth noting a couple of points about 1 Peter in particular. 1 Peter was clearly known to several early second-century authors, such that it must have been written before the end of the first century, with scholars tending to date it around 80, and it ends with the farewell:

“She who is at Babylon, and is likewise chosen, sends you greetings; and so does my son Mark. Greet one another with the kiss of love. Peace to all of you that are in Christ.”

Nobody believes Peter actually wrote this from the distant backwater that was first-century Babylon; rather, modern scholars are almost unanimous in holding that, as in Revelation, ‘Babylon’ is here a codeword for Rome. The question then is why, within a generation of Peter’s death and the lifetimes of many people who knew him, anybody who would have written a letter associating Peter with Rome had he not even visited the city.

Indeed, why would Clement, a Roman bishop generally thought to have written around 97, have in his Letter to the Corinthians held up Peter and Paul as the martyrs to whom the Corinthian Christians should look for example, were they not especially cherished by the Roman Church? Why would they in particular have been so cherished? One might even wonder Rome’s last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate, claimed in the mid-fourth century that Rome’s Christians used to gather to worship at the tombs of Peter and Paul even within the lifetime of the last apostle.

MacCulloch accepts even in the article that Rome holds the tomb of Peter, speculating in his book that Peter’s shrine was built in the 160s to mark the centenary of Peter’s death, but this avoids pointers that Peter was especially venerated in Rome rather earlier than that, and also how early second-century texts indicate that Rome had a pre-eminence of some sort within the lifetimes of some of those who’d been taught by the apostles. Clement, for instance, sees it as his Roman duty to direct the Church at Corinth in how it should conduct its affairs, and writing around 107, Ignatius of Antioch balks at exhorting Rome in the way he exhorted other early churches, saying “I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you.”

But MacCulloch knows all of this, which is why not once in his book does he go further than to say that it is unclear whether Peter ever played the role of bishop in Rome, even if he did die there, about which he comments: “the suspicion does linger that the story of Peter’s martyrdom there was a fiction based retrospectively on the undoubted death of Paul in the city.”

Which, I think we can all agree, is far cry from claiming that Peter probably never even visited Rome.

An Italian Prince?

Until the French Revolution, MacCulloch proclaims, the Pope was just one Italian prince among others.

Well, there’s some truth in that: certainly, I think we’d all agree that for much of papal history, the fourteenth century obviously aside, popes tended to be Italian princes; it is, however, ludicrous to say that they were just that, on a par with other Italian princes.

There were not many Italian princes whose definition of the dual nature of Christ would have been accepted by the gathered bishops of the Church at Chalcedon in 451, after all, but Leo I’s definition was supposedly greeted there with the great cry “Peter has spoken thus through Leo!” It's safe to say that few Italian princes in 595 would have commissioned Augustine of Canterbury to evangelise the English, as Gregory I did.

It would have meant nothing for an Italian prince to crown Charlemagne as Emperor, but it meant a lot for Leo III to do so on Christmas day in 800, and I think there’s no need to ask whether any other Italian prince could have stood at Clermont in 1095 and successfully called, as Urban II did, for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem to liberate the city and its pilgrim routes and to help the beleaguered Byzantines.

Which Italian princes would have been capable of transforming Christian Europe – and the wider world – through formally establishing such orders as the Dominicans and the Franciscans, as Honorius III was to do in 1216 and 1223, or the Jesuits, as Paul III would do in 1540? No other Italian prince had his realm become for centuries the great prize of European politics, with France so controlling the fourteenth-century papacy that the Templars were suppressed by Clement V in 1312 at the behest of a French king, with the papacy being based in Avignon for almost eighty years.

Yes, the Renaissance popes embroiled themselves as deeply as could be in the power politics of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, but again we have to ask ourselves whether they were simply Italian princes or whether they were something more than that. Again, all we have to do is look to Paul III, who for all his personal failings nonetheless convened the Council of Trent in 1545, after nine years of trying; in organising Trent and supporting the Jesuits, Paul III launched the Catholic Reformation and shaped Catholicism for the next four hundred years. I cannot see how a capable or honest historian could ever dismiss him as a mere Italian prince.

Whatever one might think of the actions of the popes prior to the French Revolution, I cannot see how any historian could dismiss said popes as mere Italian princes. They may have been that, but they certainly weren't just that. They had a reach, for good or ill, that no other Italian prince could even have dreamed of.

As for the Revolution?

MacCulloch claims that the French Revolution transformed the papacy by sweeping aside innumerable Catholic monarchs, prince-bishops, and other fiercely independent local jurisdictions in cathedrals and the like, leaving the papacy as the last piece on the board, enabling it to remodel the Church across the world, to eliminate local independence in Church government, initiative, and scholarship.

Yet again, there’s some truth to this, but MacCulloch’s description of a monarchical papacy owes rather more to the deep-seated Protestant paranoia that even now is latent among so many English – and, sadly, an increasing number of ill-informed Irish – than it does basic reason or cold historical fact.

Regardless of the fantasies of the ultramontanists, the papacy has never been monarchical in the way MacCulloch imagines; indeed, it could not have been. How, in an age before telecommunications and flight, could the papacy really have controlled matters in the local churches of Ireland, Paraguay, California, and the Philippines? 

Even now Rome’s power is profoundly limited in this respect: scarcely more than 2,000 people are employed in the Vatican – of whom only about half work, quipped John XXIII – and the budget of the Holy See is roughly half that of UCD or a decent-sized English university. The Catholic Church is, and has always been, profoundly decentralised.

It could hardly have been otherwise.

Bits and Pieces

The tail end of MacCulloch’s article is no better than the body of it.

The variety of Catholicism that predominated in Ireland until recently he sees simply as the creation of the Vatican; not for him the possibility that it might have been tainted by French Jansenism during the penal years, let alone that it was shaped above all by the Victorian values that marked the era in which it rose to dominate Irish public life; there is something to be said, after all, for Vincent Twomey's contention, in The End of Irish Catholicism?, that Irish Catholicism was rather out of step with the varities of Catholicism found on mainland Europe.

Benedict he describes as an arch-traditionalist, which really only suggests that he’s neither encountered any traditional Catholics nor engaged with any of Benedict’s writings. Did Benedict really say this week that nothing much happened in the Second Vatican Council? No, Diarmaid, he didn’t. He said something rather different and a damn sight more profound than that. Even our earliest account of his talk with Rome’s clergy made that clear.

It looks to me as though MacCulloch’s strolled into the trap John Allen so prudently warned of in the one very good section in his otherwise rather ropey 2000 book Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican’s Enforcer of the Faith:

“Because Ratzinger is a polarising figure, reaction to him is often uncritical, driven more by emotion and instinct than sober reflection. Progressives do not read his books, they disregard his public statements, and they assume every position he takes is based on power politics; conservatives revere most of what he says as holy writ, often spouting it mindlessly without penetrating to the principle or value he sees at stake. Neither response takes Ratzinger seriously.”

MacCulloch talks of a need for a multi-polar Catholicism, unaware of how that is, in so many ways, a reality already. John Allen puts it well, pointing out that the Church may be “top down on doctrine”, but is “bottom up on everything else”. Administration, finances, personal, and management are all run locally, bishops are basically popes in their own dioceses for most purposes, and among the most dynamic aspects of modern Catholicism are such new lay movements as the Focolares, Communion and Liberation, the Neocatechumenate, and L’Arche, all of which are basically grassroots phenomena.

Having displayed a shocking incomprehension of historical and modern Catholicism and the person and outlook of the current pope, MacCulloch wraps up with an ode to historians.

“But history has rich resources to offer: showing how they did things in the past, so Catholics can find sensible solutions for what to do next. In the middle of what any fool can see is a deep crisis in Catholic Church authority, let historians ride to the rescue.”

There’ll not be much point in our riding to the rescue unless we’re on the right kind of horses, wielding the right kind of weapons, carrying the right kind of ammunition, and clued in on the nature of our allies and our opponents.

Know yourself and know your enemy, and all that.