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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2010
One of the most dramatic moments in Victorian literature is that in the Apologia pro Vita Sua in which Newman first expresses doubt about the tenablehess of his position in the Anglican Church. It was die summer of 1839 and he was proposing to spend die time quietly, reading in his favorite subject, die history of the early church. As he began to go more deeply into the matter, however, he became uneasy, and by the end of August he was seriously alarmed. “My stronghold,” he says, “was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of die fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of die sixteenth and die nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a monophysite.” It is true, the impact of this passage is somewhat diminished for the modern reader by his uncertainty what a Monophysite is. Even after he has done his researches and learned that a Monophysite is one who believed in the one, not the two, natures of Christ, he is little better off, for Newman was not concerned widi the doctrinal question. He was concerned with the relationship of the parties one to anodier and with the fact that, if an extreme version of a position was heretical, then a moderate version of that position was heretical too. “It was difficult,” he wrote, “to make out how the Eutychians or Monophysites were heretics, unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also; … There was an awful similitude, more awful, because so silent and unimpassioned, between die dead records of die past and the feverish chronicle of the present. The shadow of the fifth century was on the sixteenth. It was like a spirit rising from the troubled waters of the old world, with die shape and lineaments of the new.”
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