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John Henry Newman's The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833):
I ts Place in His Theological Development
Kenneth J. Stewart, Covenant College, Lookout Mtn. GA 30750
©
Kenneth J. Stewart
Any author's first book may reasonably be expected to display tendencies of thought
and expression which, when viewed in light of subsequent publications, may be judged to have
been characteristic from the first. This paper proposes to ask just such questions about the
tendencies of thought displayed in John Henry Newman's first published work, The Arians of the
Fourth Century (1833).
Yet the task which this paper takes up is fraught with difficulty; for not only this first
book of 1833, but the whole early part of its author's career through October, 1845 (at which
time Newman was received into the Roman Catholic communion) has been subjected to close
scrutiny. Those Protestants who were most appalled at Newman's re-affiliation to Rome in 1845
claimed to have been observing a barely-concealed Catholicizing agenda in Newman for a
decade or more previous to his formal departure.
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From their vantagepoint, Newman's first book
- like those which followed - seemed to display definite references to his largely-veiled Roman
Catholic position.
Conversely, Newman's own version of the story as told in his autobiography of 1864,
Apologia Pro Vita Sua, (and this was the version of the story which the Roman communion
endorsed) is that the years leading to 1845 contained only a growing affinity for things catholic
(though not Roman catholic); these affinities gradually coalesced into a preference for
Catholicism in its Roman rather than Anglican expression. On this view, Arians of the Fourth
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John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), Longmans, London, 1934, xix. Newman in 1864 took a
puckish delight in detailing this ultra-Protestant suspicion of his early career. He spoke of the early suspicion that
"he had been a Romanist in Protestant livery".