Conclusion
Karl Rahner once called attention to an ‘unnamed virtue’. The need for the virtue in question arises from ‘discrepancy that occurs … frequently’ – ‘that between how the rational and reflective reasons for a moral attitude are problematic and insecure, on the one hand, and how a decision made in freedom is absolute’, so that ‘very often the ethical reflection that comes before the act itself cannot deliver the definiteness and unquestionable sureness with which, willy-nilly, one is then acting in the action itself’. To resolve the tension, one might become ‘sceptical and relativist, and write off the significance of the ethical reflection that happens before the action, on the ground that, seeing that it cannot deliver the absolute definiteness that inevitably marks the action, nothing depends on it’, or one might ‘deny the validity … of these problems’, taking up an ‘ideological fanaticism’ which would maintain that ‘the rational and conscious argument for our own decision is in every respect absolutely illuminating’.
Sceptical relativism that thinks it can dispense itself from making a decision, and ideological fanaticism that wants to derive the absolute nature of a decision in freedom from an absoluteness in rational reflection of a kind that just does not exist – these are the two false conclusions that people can very easily draw from the irresoluble difference that exists between a reflection that will always involve problems and a decision that will always be once and for all, the difference between theory and practice.
If one takes the ‘middle ground’, however, ‘one takes seriously prior reflection about whether a decision is legitimate, and yet one does not demand more from this reflection than it can give’, and yet ‘the problems do not stop us having the courage to make calm, courageous decisions’, in a manner informed by a proper sense of ‘what human beings are … neither Gods of absolute, comprehensive security and clarity; nor … beings of empty whim … . They have contours that are to be respected, even though these do not have the brilliance of the divine and self-evident.’ There is no ‘simple and obvious and indisputable principle that can justify’ this virtue, ‘when it comes to applying’ it in practice; it is a kind of ‘wisdom that knows how to make the best of things’. ‘You can lump the virtue we are trying to find here in with prudence, or perhaps with wisdom. But is a “lumping in”, of the kind that makes something specific get lost in something general.’1
One way of understanding John Henry Newman, as a thinker, is that he is concerned with the ‘contours that are to be respected’ in the life of the mind. Reflection, ‘theory’, in most matters, and in almost all matters of importance, cannot realize that ‘brilliance of the divine and self-evident’ to which it aspires. That need not mean that it does not attain to anything. If one cannot attain to the ‘divine and self-evident’, while being, nevertheless, obliged to act, to decide, so one must make the best of whatever insight one has. One has an obligation to ‘make the best’ of whatever insight one has, and that insight might, in a particular case, oblige one to believe something. That act of belief, in itself, as marked by ‘absolute definiteness’, requires something like ‘courage’, since the reflection, and deliberation, informing it, does not itself have ‘absolute, comprehensive security and clarity’. That there is not ‘absolute … clarity’ in the reflection that informs the act of belief does not mean that the act of belief is an act of arbitrary, irresponsible ‘whim’; rather, the freedom that arises, when there is not an ‘absolute … clarity’, compelling the act of belief, implies a certain responsibility: to recognize this freedom, is to recognize the responsibility, and it requires something like courage to live with the awareness of this responsibility. Newman observes that the awareness of freedom, and responsibility, can itself be ‘burdensome’, and the ‘burden’ can make for an inclination to deny that one has responsibility for oneself.
So fearful and burdensome is this almost divine attribute of our nature that, when we consider it attentively, it requires a strong faith in the wisdom and love of our Maker, not to start sinfully from His gift; and at the mere prospect, not the memory of our weakness, to attempt to transfer it from ourselves to the agents, animate and inanimate, by which we are surrounded, and to lose our immortality under the shadows of the visible world. And much more, when the sense of guilt comes upon us, do we feel the temptation of ridding ourselves of the conviction of our own responsibility.2
If there is a ‘temptation’ to deny that one has freedom in acting, ‘to transfer it from [oneself] to the agents, animate and inanimate, by which [one is] surrounded’ – to envisage these agents, rather than oneself, as the true causes of how one acts – so there is a ‘temptation’ to deny that one has a certain freedom with respect to what one believes, to ‘transfer’ it to the ‘paper logic’ arguments ‘by which [one is] surrounded’. Such arguments are not to be disregarded (with a kind of ‘sceptical relativism’) but what one must ultimately consult, if one would make a responsible decision as to what to believe, is oneself: one forms, over time, by making conscientious judgements, a sense of truth, or a capacity for judgement; and one must consult this sense of truth, since one has a responsibility to make judgements so as to live in a manner informed by the best judgements one can make. One must recognize and accept the imperfection, the finitude, of the ‘light’ by which one judges, if one is to be truthful with oneself. One must recognize the ‘light’ by which one judges for what it is – finite, imperfect – and one must ‘make the best’ of it. The ‘unnamed virtue’, with which Rahner is concerned, seems to be a virtue of recognizing, honestly, the limitations of the ‘reflection’ one must judge by, and act on, without making those limitations a pretext for abdicating the responsibility one has for making the best judgements one can, and for striving to act in a manner informed by the best judgements one can make. ‘That is to be accounted a normal operation of our nature’, Newman observes, ‘which men in general do actually instance. That is a law of our minds, which is exemplified in action on a large scale, whether a priori it ought to be a law or no.’3 It is, in this regard, ‘a law of our minds’ to be obliged to make judgements, without ‘absolute, comprehensive security and clarity’.
As we use the (so called) elements without first criticizing what we have no command over, so is it much more unmeaning in us to criticize or find fault with our own nature, which is nothing else than we ourselves, instead of using it according to the use of which it ordinarily admits … . If I may not assume that I exist, and in a particular way, that is, with a particular mental constitution, I have nothing to speculate about, and had better let speculation alone. Such as I am, it is my all; this is my essential stand-point, and must be taken for granted; otherwise, thought is but an idle amusement, not worth the trouble. There is no medium between using my faculties, as I have them, and flinging myself upon the external world according to the random impulse of the moment, as spray upon the surface of the waves, and simply forgetting that I am … . 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.4
Newman does not invoke an ‘a priori’ ideal, in ascertaining the ‘law of our minds’, or identifying the ‘normal operation[s] of our nature’, but he does invoke, implicitly a norm, a sense of the proper mean, and that sense of the proper mean is connected with the ‘unnamed virtue’ of ‘making the best’ of whatever insight one has.
The reflections of Newman on ‘what I am’ are connected with his efforts to ‘put … to use’ his ‘faculties’ in the proper way; they are connected with his efforts toward a ‘practice’ of good judgement: that practice – involving an awareness of freedom, of responsibility, of the need to ‘make the best’ of whatever ‘light’ one has, even if it does not have the ‘brilliance of the divine and self evident’ – involves a certain confrontation with ‘what I am’. The reflections of Newman on the ‘contours’ of the life of the mind – ‘contours’ deriving from its finiteness – are not animated so much by a spirit of resignation to ‘limits’, as by an aspiration toward a proper ‘use’ of the mind, a use in which those ‘contours’ are ‘respected’. The imagination, for Newman, is connected to the limits, the ‘contours’, of the ‘concrete being that reasons’, the ‘whole man’; he associates the imagination with the apprehension of the ‘concrete’, the particular. Yet he suggests, equally, that in the apprehension of the ‘concrete’, there can be an intuition of meanings that the ‘reason’ cannot articulate. Persons are encountered in the ‘concrete’, in their ‘concrete being’; and it is in the apprehension of the ‘concrete’ that there is ‘the common sense, the delicacy, the sharp observation, the tact’ by which others are understood, sympathized with, consulted for; it is in the apprehension of the ‘concrete’ that there is the ‘living principle, call it (in human language) judgement or wisdom or discretion or sense of propriety or moral perception’ which creates community, and which even subserves charity. What is more, it is the imagination which encounters, and which makes present to thought, that which is ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’; it is the imagination that makes present to thought that which ‘explicit reason’ cannot ‘draw a line around’, so that the mind can move outside the ‘circumference’ of its own, finite thinking – to get, through the ‘signs and types’ making up this world, a ‘glimpse of a Form which we shall hereafter see face to face’.
NOTES
1 Karl Rahner, ‘Plea for an Unnamed Virtue’, in Karl Rahner: Spiritual Writings, ed. by Philip Endean (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 183–7.
2 ‘Human Responsibility, as Independent of Circumstances’, in Fifteen Sermons preached before the University of Oxford (1843; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 139–40.
3 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, (1870; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 344.
4 Grammar of Assent, 346–7.