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.

---

[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.

Papers of Record Don't Refuse Ink

The Irish Times hasn't exactly had a spotless record on the abortion debates in Ireland over the last year or so. 

You'll remember how last September it bowed to pro-choice pressure and jibes from the likes of Graham Linehen to revise initial reports that "less than 1000 people" had participated in a pro-choice rally -- a figure borne out by video footage taken at the march -- in favour of a claim that "several thousand people" had taken part.

You'll remember too how last November it broke the story of Savita Halappanavar's death, relating a range of details which were subsequently cast into question by April's coroner's inquest. It also falsely claimed that in Britain doctors are "legally able to carry out abortions until the 24th week of a pregnancy for all reasons, not just medical"; I know someone who wrote to the paper to alert it to its misrepresentation of British abortion law, just as I did so about the discrepancies in the paper's reporting of the story. Neither letter was published, and corrections did not follow.

I could go on, pointing out the relative emphases given to different stories, depending on whether they leaned towards a pro-life or pro-choice agenda, but time is short and you get the idea. The last couple of weeks, though, may well have topped this. 

On 23 August, the following story appeared on the paper's front page, relating how a twin pregnancy had been terminated at the National Maternity Hospital on Dublin's Holles Street to save the twins' mother's life; supposedly this was the first termination conducted under the terms of the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act.

A tragic story, it provoked the hospital's Clinical Director and former Master, Dr Peter Boylan -- yes, that Peter Boylan -- to call the report "outrageous", declaring that the details in the Irish Times allowed the woman in the story to be identified: "The breach of patient confidentiality - that's the most serious thing about this whole episode."

Peter Boylan, you'll have noticed, was named in the article as having been party to the decision to terminate the pregnancy:

"The Act does not provide for the identification of either patients or the doctors involved in the process. In this case, it is understood the master of the hospital Dr Rhona Mahony, former master Dr Peter Boylan, other senior obstetricians at the hospital and a paediatrician were involved in the decision-making process."

Given his supposed involvement in the process, you can understand his anger over how the woman being treated could be identified; presumably, you might think, he knew exactly who the paper was talking about. No wonder he was talking about possibly reporting a fellow doctor to the Medical Council.

The day the story broke, however, the Department of Health issued a statement pointing out that the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill 2013 had not yet commenced -- I'm not sure how the paper's legal people missed that little detail -- and the following day the article on the paper's website was prefaced with a sentence to the effect that subsequent sentences were untrue. The headline wasn't the only part of the article that was poppycock, after all; from the very first sentence on, the article, seemingly, was claptrap. 

A week later matters took a turn for the truly bizarre, as tucked away in a corner of page seven of Saturday's paper was a little box reading as follows. 

"On August 23rd last, under a story headlined 'First abortion carried out under new legislation', we reported on a purported clinical case at the National Maternity Hospital. The hospital has pointed out that the case described in the article did not happen. The Irish Times accepts this and apologises unreservedly to the hospital for any distress caused. 

The National Maternity Hospital has welcomed the correction and apology, accepts that the article was published by The Irish Times in good faith, believes the matter is now concluded and wishes to make no further comment."

Now. I don't even know where to start with this. The key sentence, of course, is: "The hospital has pointed out that the case described in the article did not happen." 

Yes, the entire story, we're now told, was fiction from start to finish. The Irish Times ran a piece of fiction on its front page, and eight days later issued a tiny discreet correction to the effect that Ireland's so-called paper of record doesn't refuse ink.

As Simon McGarr has so well shown, newspapers have a duty to correct errors with "due prominence", guidelines on how to do this being conveniently supplied by the Press Council of Ireland. I think it's pretty clear that that's not been done here. This, rather, is the journalistic equivalent of tucking something away in a dark cellar at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

When I did Accounting in school I was taught that when you'd made an error, you corrected it by putting a line through the erroneous figure with the correct one above the struck out one; under no circumstances, we were told, were we to reach for the Tipp-Ex bottle* and cover up the error so people couldn't see the problem. It's a good principle and one that the Irish Times would do well to live by.

Sadly, it seems that the Irish Times editorial staff weren't sitting in on my bookkeeping lessons, because the original story has now been wiped from the website, with all its fictional detail a thing of the past. Instead, under the same old dodgy headline, we have the bald statement that the HSE had confirmed on 23 August that the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act, signed into law by the President on July 30th, 2013, had not yet commenced, followed by the 31 August correction.

Thing is, I'm still a bit puzzled. 

There was no termination, as the hospital says and as the Irish Times now accepts. I understand that. 

Had there been a termination, it would not have taken place under the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act, as that has yet to commence. I understand that too.

What I don't understand is this. Given that he'd been identified as party to this supposed double termination that we're now told didn't take place, why on earth did Peter Boylan react to the original story by saying that the breach of confidentiality was an outrage and that the woman in the report was identifiable? Why didn't he say that such breaches of confidentiality are completely unethical, that to his knowledge the case described in the report never happened, and that he could confirm that he personally had never been party to such a case?

I don't understand that. Why not kill the story on the very first day?

___________________________________________________________________________
* You remember Tipp-Ex, right?

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. 

Violence and Islam

The brutal murder on 22 May of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich by two young Muslim men has shaken Britain. One of the murderers, blood still on his hands, promptly addressed a cellphone camera held up by a witness to declare: “I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land, women have to witness the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. … Tell them to bring your troops back and you can all live in peace”.

As the tattooed hordes of the English Defence League sought to hijack popular disquiet by taking to the streets,  it was all too easy to forget how two years ago, when gangs of teenagers rioted and ransacked England’s cities, Britain’s Muslims were models of the virtues the English see as distinctively their own. Muslims took to the streets to protect communities and businesses from the rioters, and when three Muslims were killed in Birmingham, it was the Muslim community, led by the bereaved father of one of the slain, who appealed for calm.

Aggressive

This seems a distant memory now, with too many seeming willing to accept the constant refrain that Islam is an inherently aggressive religion. Some of these will concede, echoing the lazy clichés of the new atheists, there are plenty of peaceful Muslims, but this is only because they’re not doing it right. To their mind, it is hardly surprising that Islam, as Samuel Huntingdon put it in 2000’s The Clash of Civilizations, “has bloody borders.”

Such claims, however, betray an ignorance of Islam symptomatic of that religious illiteracy which Christians so rightly castigate when displayed by atheists, and which the 2012 parliamentary report Clearing the Ground identified as a serious challenge for public discourse in modern Britain.

It would be absurd to deny that the Qur’an is replete with martial passages – notably the eighth and ninth suras – calling for acts of warfare and violence against those who defy Allah. It would, however, be equally absurd to assume that such passages must necessarily be read in so brutally literal a way.

Over the centuries, Muslim scholars have often historicized the more violent parts of the Qur’an, seeing them as primarily relevant to the martial age in which they were composed, and arguing that passages about slavery, the rights of women, and jihad against non-believers represented stages in a process of liberation.

Spiritual Warfare

Spiritual and symbolic readings of the Qur’an’s more difficult passages have been even more common, with difficult passages being regarded as models of internal spiritual warfare. Sufi Muslims especially embraced such interpretations over what they saw as the naïve literalism of those who believed the Qur’an advocated real

warfare.

Radicalism and violent fundamentalism may blight parts of the Muslim world now, but this is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Fundamentalism is an act of violence against tradition, with fundamentalists reading religious texts as modern atheists often do; they read them directly and literally, heedless of history and context, as though their meanings are self-evident.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that religious literalism is conspicuously popular among university students of engineering, medicine, and the sciences, where poetic and multi-layered writing is frowned upon and where binary thinking is all too common.

Coping Strategy

Although fundamentalism is a coping strategy for those who would barricade themselves against the complexities and challenges of modern life, it’s ineffective and sometimes degenerates into a violent fanaticism. This fanaticism draws on models of terrorism as pioneered by the European anarchists of a century ago, nationalist groups such as the Stern Gang and the IRA, and especially Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers. Islamic terrorism, far from being a medieval throwback or something intrinsic to Islam, is a child of globalised modernity.

What’s striking about much modern smugness towards Islam is that it disregards how our Christian and Jewish scriptures can themselves be mined to justify all kinds of violence. The description of Samson’s death in Judges seems tailor-made to justify suicide attacks, after all, while the 1994 slaughter of twenty-nine Muslims in a Hebron mosque by New York-born Baruch Goldstein was explicitly identified as a response to the biblical injunction to make war throughout time on the Amalekites.

Of course, Catholics aren't meant to read the Bible in this fashion; the violent passages of the Old Testament, calling for bloody warfare and even the absolute extermination of Israel’s enemies, have been read from antiquity in a spiritual sense.

Christians such as Origen of Alexandria followed in Jewish footsteps by developing the idea of the four senses of Scripture, drawing on the example of Jesus who taught the disciples on the way to Emmaus how the Jewish scriptures constantly spoke of him.

Biblical passages were understood as having a basic literal meaning, which needed to be understood in light of the literary genre and historical context of the text – history wasn’t the discipline it now is when the Bible was written, such that it’s naïve to treat it as historical in a modern sense – but they could also have as many as three spiritual senses: the moral; the allegorical, which usually points to Jesus; and the anagogical, referring to our eternal destiny.

The effect of such nuanced readings of scripture was such that over the course of the Middle Ages scholars and theologians developed humane doctrines limiting the legitimate grounds for wars and controlling to some degree the way wars were fought, especially with an eye to how non-combatants should be respected. Unfortunately, these gains were cast aside following the invention of printing as widespread access to the Bible for those unfamiliar with nuanced ways of reading it ushered in one of the most violent ages Europe has ever known.

Justify

During the wars of religion, it was all too easy to justify the extermination of one’s foes on the basis that they were the Amalekites of the day; the butchery of women and children could easily be justified on the simple basis that “nits breed lice”.

The Biblical conquest narratives cast a long shadow. In his second inaugural address, for example, Thomas Jefferson explicitly appealed to God as having led his people to a promised land. Ideas such as these naturally led to the subsequent Manifest Destiny theory that America had been given to the European settlers, and that those already there could legitimately be swept away.

Such readings abuse the Bible, which should be read within the Church in light of reason and traditional understandings.  Crude literal readings are alien to Catholicism and relatively rare among other Christians; we should refrain from assuming that our Muslim brothers and sisters are incapable of similarly avoiding a brutal and dangerous fundamentalism.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 20 June 2013.