Faith and doubt
Faith and doubt
Newman’s philosophical outlook was formed in the empiricist tradition that stemmed from John Locke. In that tradition, sound religious faith was the product of a rational assessment of the evidence for beliefs such as God’s existence or the inerrancy of the Bible: as Archbishop John Tillotson wrote ‘… all assent must be grounded upon evidence; that is, no man can believe any thing, unless he have, or think he hath, some reason to do so. For to be confident of a thing without reason is not faith, but a presumptuous persuasion and obstinacy of mind.’52 The young Newman’s philosophical mentor at Oriel, Richard Whately, agreed: Christian faith was distinguished from superstition by ‘its resting on evidence; – by its offering a reason, – and requiring Christians to be able to give a reason, for believing it.’53 Accordingly, works like William Paley’s Natural Theology: Evidences of the being and Attributes of the Deity mustered ‘proofs’ for the truth of Christianity, drawn largely from the physical sciences, and became a staple of early nineteenth century university instruction.54
The Romantic Movement, of which Newman was a product, rejected all this: how could faith in the living God be the outcome of a cold bean-counting calculation, an exercise of mere mind, and not a movement of the longing heart? As Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, ‘Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own Evidence …’55 Newman shared that perception, and in the Oxford University Sermons he preached in the late 1830s, explored its implications for a right understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. The eighteenth century, he thought, had been ‘a time when love was cold’, and so had been ‘especially the age of evidences’. Though not entirely discounting their value, he was acutely aware of the vulnerability of ‘proofs’ of the existence of God drawn from the natural world: ‘It is a great question whether Atheism is not as philosophically consistent with the phenomena of the physical world … as the doctrine of a creative and governing Power.’56 Man, he insisted elsewhere, ‘is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal …’ and therefore ‘The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.’57
Newman was not here justifying irrationality, the triumph of heart over head: instead, he was proposing a different model of what human reason actually was. Instead of the simplistic Enlightenment image of rationality as a neutral weighing up of evidence until the balance tipped in favour of a conclusion, he pointed to the complex ways in which human beings actually arrive at their core convictions, in science and daily life just as much as in religion.
The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out, and advances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not himself; by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another. … And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason – not by rule, but by an inward faculty.58
That ‘inner faculty’ he called ‘Implicit reason’, ‘a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art’, as distinct from Explicit reason, the ‘reflective power of the human mind, contemplating and scrutinizing its own acts’. It was a fatal error to confuse these two quite separate exercises, and to privilege the secondary business of analyzing our thinking over the primary and often intuitive processes by which everyone except logicians arrive at the conclusions that guide action. Human beings on the whole ‘do not reason incorrectly: they may argue badly but they reason well’. In other words, ‘all men have a reason, but not all men can give a reason.’59
Newman pushed his critique of Enlightenment models of the grounds for religious certainty further, by challenging the idea that right thought is essentially neutral. It was a mistake to imagine that in searching for truth ‘there is no room for choice; there is no merit, no praise or blame, in believing or disbelieving ... that a man is as little responsible for his faith as for his bodily functions.’ On the contrary, ‘a man is responsible for his faith, because he is responsible for his likings and dislikings, his hopes and opinions, on all of which his faith depends.’ In the process of arriving at our moral or political or religious choices, nobody starts with a blank sheet: what we find plausible or persuasive, what we take to be true, will be influenced by ‘antecedent probabilities’ – the network of prior beliefs and assumptions, past experiences, moral habits and temperamental inclinations which shape our judgements: the Enlightenment insistence that the rational man is an unbiased calculator had no basis in human nature as it really is. That was why arguments that seem strong and persuasive to one person, fail to move another. Our moral and religious conclusions reflect the kind of person our deliberate choices have made us, and so faith ‘is the reasoning of a religious mind, or of what Scripture calls a right or renewed heart, which acts on presumptions rather than evidence.’ We are disposed to believe in what we have learned to love or hope for, and ‘it is almost a proverb, that persons believe what they wish to be true.’60
Newman of course recognized the dangers of ‘wishful thinking’: the ‘antecedent probabilities’ that lead us towards particular conclusions ‘may be equally available for what is true, and what pretends to be true’. But he considered that the best protection against ‘credulity and superstition’ was not a hermeneutic of suspicion, resolving to doubt everything except what could be proved from hard ‘evidence’, but ‘a right state of the heart’. It was a fatal error for the worldly to imagine themselves judges of religious truth, ‘without preparation of heart’. Mountains of dead evidence could produce nothing but a dead faith, whereas a heart rightly disposed can discern in even imperfect and partial hints and glimpses the reality of God: ‘a mutilated and defective evidence suffices for persuasion where the heart is alive’. In all the important actions of life, the ‘venture of faith’ was a necessity of human nature:
We are so constituted, that if we insist upon being as sure as is conceivable, in every step of our course, we must be content to creep along the ground, and can never soar. If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards; and, whereas we are given absolute certainty in nothing, we must in all things choose between doubt and inactivity …61
For Newman that right disposition of the heart was above all rooted in obedience to conscience. Within every human breast, pagan or Christian, educated or uneducated, there was a faculty which by its very existence provided an inescapable witness to the reality of a higher power, ‘not a mere opinion, or impression, or view of things, but a law, an authoritative voice, bidding him do certain things and avoid others.’ Though the voice of conscience in any given individual might be obscured, inconsistent, even mistaken when distorted by sin or error, nevertheless, the very existence of conscience, and the fact that it ‘commands, it praises, it blames, it promises, it threatens, it implies a future, and it witnesses the unseen’, all this ‘throws us out of ourselves, and beyond ourselves, to go and seek Him in the height and the depth, whose Voice it is’.62 This insistence that the most importance single witness to the reality of God was the voice of conscience within every human being was one of Newman’s most characteristic and consistent teachings: in his controversy with Gladstone over infallibility, Newman would go so far as the call conscience “‘the aboriginal Vicar of Christ’. It is also one of the most controversial of his ideas, not least because in its most carefully articulated form, in the Grammar of Assent, he gave to it an emotional colouring that, as Sir Anthony Kenny has observed, cannot be read by a post-Freudian generation ‘without acute discomfort’. Newman wrote that
If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same sunny serenity of mind, the same soothing satisfactory delight which follows on our receiving praise from a father, we certainly have within us the image of some person, to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being.63
Newman’s preoccupation with the rationality of belief was heightened in the 1860s by his friendship with the distinguished naval engineer, William Froude, younger brother of his closest Oxford friend, Richard Hurrell Froude. Froude’s wife and all but one of his children became Catholics under Newman’s influence. Yet Froude himself remained a sceptic, convinced that scientific reasoning was the only legitimate model for all enquiries after truth, and therefore that all ‘certainties’ whatever were purely provisional, exactly proportional to the hard evidence that could be adduced for them. Their extended and fascinating correspondence lay behind Newman’s most technical philosophical work, endlessly drafted and redrafted over the course of many years, and published in 1870 as The Grammar of Assent. In the Grammar Newman refined, systematized and extended the ideas which had been set out in the Oxford University Sermons and the letters on the Tamworth Reading Room. The idea of ‘Implicit Reasoning’ was now given the name ‘the Illative sense’, an informal but generally reliable faculty of discernment that underlay all our assents, which Newman likened to Aristotle’s idea of Phronesis, wisdom or practical intelligence, and which he compared to aesthetic judgement or taste, which may be good or bad, which is generally considered to be objective, yet about whose judgements argument was often difficult to resolve. The demand of thinkers like Froude for perfectly objective standards of proof was the pursuit of an illusion, the attempt to force human intelligence into forms alien to it.
I am what I am, or I am nothing. I cannot think, reflect, or judge about my being, without starting from the very point which I aim at concluding. My ideas are all assumptions, and I am ever moving in a circle. I cannot avoid being sufficient for myself, for I cannot make myself anything else, and to change me is to destroy me. If I do not use myself, I have no other self to use. My only business is to ascertain what I am, in order to put it to use. It is enough for the proof of the value and authority of any function which I possess, to be able to pronounce that it is natural. What I have to ascertain is the laws under which I live. My first elementary lesson of duty is that of resignation to the laws of my nature, whatever they are; my first disobedience is to be impatient at what I am, and to indulge an ambitious aspiration after what I cannot be, to cherish a distrust of my powers, and to desire to change laws which are identical with myself.64
This was no mere concession to religion, an attempt to justify faith on weak and insufficient grounds. All our important certainties were acquired by a similar exercise of judgement.
in no class of concrete reasonings, whether in experimental science, historical research, or theology, is there any ultimate test of truth and error in our inferences besides the trustworthiness of the Illative Sense that gives them its sanction; just as there is no sufficient test of poetical excellence, heroic action, or gentleman-like conduct, other than the particular mental sense, be it genius, taste, sense of propriety, or the moral sense, to which those subject-matters are severally committed. Our duty in each of these is to strengthen and perfect the special faculty which is its living rule, and in every case as it comes to do our best.65
Much of the Grammar was devoted to arguing that there were no degrees in assent: we either believe something to be true, or we do not. This was part of Newman’s wider rejection of the Lockean notion that any particular belief could only be as strong as the solid weight of the evidence for it. Yet it was fundamental to Newman’s analysis that in point of fact we often come to firmly held convictions – certitudes – on the basis of intuitions or fragments of evidence which suggest to us greater patterns. He had deeply internalized the teaching of the eighteenth century Bishop of Durham, Joseph Butler, that ‘Probability is the guide of life’. Rationalists of Froude’s kind rejected that model of thinking on the grounds that ten weak arguments do not add up to one good one. Newman challenged that assumption. As he explained to a correspondent in 1864:
The best illustration of what I hold is that of a cable which is made up of a number of separate threads, each feeble, yet together as sufficient as an iron rod. An iron rod represents mathematical or strict demonstration; a cable represents moral demonstration, which is an assemblage of probabilities, separately insufficient for certainty, but, when put together, irrefragable. A man who said ‘I cannot trust a cable, I must have an iron bar,’ would, in certain given cases, be irrational and unreasonable: so too is a man who says I must have a rigid demonstration, not moral demonstration, of religious truth.66
Until fairly recently, Newman’s writings on the nature of belief were very largely ignored by mainstream philosophers, probably because of his explicitly (and unfashionably) religious agenda. More recently, however, the range, sophistication and originality of his account of the phenomenology of belief are coming to be recognized. In his last letter to William Froude, Newman wrote:
We differ in our sense and use of the word ‘certain’. I use it of minds, you of propositions. I fully grant the uncertainty of all conclusions in your sense of the word, but I maintain that minds may in my sense be certain of conclusions which are uncertain in yours.67
Newman is sometimes criticized for slipping illegitimately from a powerful and subtle analysis of how in fact we acquire our certitutudes, to suggesting that what we believe with certitude is likely to be true: the criticism has some force, though he was clear that even our certitudes might be mistaken. His argument that conscience is the most powerful single evidence for the existence of a personal God is vulnerable to counter-claims that there are perfectly satisfactory naturalistic explanations for the universal possession of a moral faculty. Yet the argument from conscience has been taken up and developed by distinguished modern philosophers of religion like Alvin Plantinga, and the University Sermons and, especially, the Grammar of Assent, anticipate many of the concerns, strategies and conclusions of the later Wittgenstein in On Certainty.68 At the very least in the subtlety and range of its analysis of the processes by which we attain our certainties the Grammar is a major contribution to the psychology of belief. In philosophy, as in theology, Newman remains a force to be reckoned with.