Two further ideas about development of doctrine

Go read Mike Pakaluk’s excellent brief article “Four Ideas About Development” at First Things, then come back.  Welcome back.  Here are a couple of further thoughts to add to his:

Fifth, development is properly spoken of in the passive voice rather than the active voice.  It always drives me crazy when Catholics, including churchmen, go around talking about whether a pope will or will not “develop” this or that doctrine.  Development is essentially something that happens.  It is not an activity that a pope or anyone else decides to carry out when he gets some bright idea into his head.

 
Through the course of the centuries, the Church faces various doctrinal crises – involving Arianism, Pelagianism, or what have you – and has to make a decision as to what orthodoxy requires.  In hindsight, we can see how doctrine developed as these decisions were made.  Naturally, the decisions involved conscious deliberation, but they were essentially reactive rather than proactive.  The question was: “We’re faced with this new idea; what does the deposit of faith force us to say about it?”  The question was not: “We’ve come up with this new idea; can we get away with saying it, given the deposit of faith?”

In a blurb on the back cover of E. Christian Brugger’s book Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition, Germain Grisez notes that Brugger “explores and defends the proposition that the Catholic Church could teach that capital punishment is always morally wrong” (emphasis added).  But development is not a matter of looking for loopholes by which the Church “could teach” some novel doctrine you’ve come up with.  The Church either already teaches something, at least implicitly, or she does not.  If she does, then naturally she could teach it.  But if she doesn’t, then she can’t teach it.  As the First Vatican Council taught:

For the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles.

And as Pope St. Pius X exclaimed: “Far, far from the clergy be the love of novelty!”

In his book on Aquinas, Chesterton says, concerning the development of doctrine:

When we talk of a child being well-developed, we mean that he has grown bigger and stronger with his own strength; not that he is padded with borrowed pillows or walks on stilts to make him look taller.  When we say that a puppy develops into a dog, we do not mean that his growth is a gradual compromise with a cat; we mean that he becomes more doggy and not less.

Now, part of the point here is that a true development of doctrine is neither the introduction into Catholic teaching of some novelty from outside (which would be like putting pillows and stilts on a child) nor the reversal of past teaching (which would be like a puppy becoming less dog-like).  But the example also illustrates the point (whether Chesterton meant it to or not) that development is something that happens rather than something the Church does.  A child’s developing is not like a child’s stretching.  It is not something he tries to do.

Unsurprisingly, then, proposals that doctrine be actively “developed” in this or that direction end up resembling amputations of doggy parts or strapping pillows, stilts, and the like onto a child.  To cash out the metaphors, such proposals involve ignoring aspects of past teaching that conflict with a proposed novelty, strained reinterpretations of texts that contradict the novelty, claiming to see novel theses asserted in ancient texts that have never historically been understood to assert such theses, and so forth.

That brings us to a sixth point: Much of what is peddled as “development of doctrine” these days is precisely the kind of thing Pius X condemned as modernism.  Go read Pascendi Dominici Gregis.  And weep.