Part 4
Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis
Over the course of the 1830s, Newman developed an account of ‘faith’ as something ‘practical’ – a ‘practical perception of the unseen’. He was countering, in this, an understanding of faith that, in his view, made it too much a matter of mere ‘feeling’. Faith, he maintained, involves a distinctive kind of insight. In his efforts to characterize this insight, he worked with, and from, Aristotelian notions of ‘practical wisdom’ or phronesis – the insight involved in living rightly.
1.
In an article for the British Critic in 1839 on the ‘existing state of parties in the [English] Church’, Newman observed that ‘there has been for some years, from whatever cause, a growing tendency towards the character of mind and feeling of which Catholic doctrines are the just expression’.
This manifested itself long before men entered into the truth intellectually, or knew what they ought to believe, and what they ought not; and what the practical duties were, to which a matured knowledge would lead them. During the first quarter of this century a great poet was raised up in the North, [Scott] who, whatever were his defects, has contributed by his works, in prose and verse, to prepare men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth. The general need of something deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere, may be considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he re-acted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles … . And while history in prose and verse was thus made the instrument of Church feelings and opinions, a philosophical basis for the same was under formation in England by a very original thinker, who, while he indulged a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept. In this way he made trial of his age, and found it respond to him, and succeeded in interesting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth. It has indeed been only since the death of Coleridge that these results of his writings have fully shown themselves; but they were very evident when they were once seen, and discovered the tendencies which had been working in his mind from the first. Two living poets may be added, (Southey and Wordsworth) one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in the same direction.1
Newman discerns, in the thought of the time, a movement toward the ‘true principles of the Church’, toward ‘Catholic truth’, and he discerns, in the ‘visions’ of Scott, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth, something of the ‘spirit’ that characterizes that movement.2 Of this movement, or this ‘reaction to the true principles of the Church’, Newman remarks that it is ‘is within us, rising up in the heart where it was least expected, and working its way, though not in secret, yet so subtly and impalpably, as hardly to admit of precaution or encounter, on any ordinary human rules of opposition’, and that it is ‘a something one and entire, a whole wherever it is, unapproachable and incapable of being grasped, as being the result of causes far deeper than political or other visible agencies, – the spiritual awakening of spiritual wants’. This state of ‘spiritual awakening’ is a state of ‘character’; and, if the ‘reaction to the true principles of the Church’ is an expression of this ‘spiritual awakening’, so this ‘reaction’ is an ‘expression’ of ‘character’.
Newman characterizes the ‘visions’ of the first generation of the Romantic poets as ‘indications’ of a ‘spirit’: the visions are, in some sense, an ‘expression’ of this ‘spirit’. Newman, likewise, characterizes certain ‘Catholic doctrines’ as an ‘expression’ – an ‘expression’ of a ‘character of mind and feeling’. Newman suggests that in having certain ‘visions’, the Romantic poets were actuated by a ‘spirit’ that they did not fully comprehend. More than that, he suggests that this ‘spirit’ – as something ‘unapproachable and incapable of being grasped’ – might not be comprehensible. He suggests that the ‘ideas’, present (‘silently’, implicitly) in the ‘visions’ of the Romantic poets, were brought out explicitly when ‘men entered into the truth intellectually, or knew what they ought to believe’: the meaning of those ‘visions’ is made explicit in the ‘Catholic doctrines’; the ‘Catholic doctrines’ are the interpretation, the explanation, of the ‘visions’, and of the ‘spirit’ of which the ‘visions’ are an expression. Yet if the ‘spirit’ is ‘incapable of being grasped’, then this would suggest it is not fully ‘grasped’ even in the ‘Catholic doctrines’: there cannot be a perfect comprehension of that which is ‘unapproachable’, ‘incapable of being grasped’. The ‘doctrines’ are, Newman maintains, the ‘expression’ of a ‘character of mind and feeling’. Is the ‘spirit’ itself to be identified with this ‘character of mind and feeling’, or is it something more than that? Newman maintains that the ‘opinions’ associated with the ‘present movement’ are ‘one and all in their degree the organs of One Sentiment, which has risen up simultaneous in many places very mysteriously’.
It may be frankly confessed that an excitement of the feelings, of whatever kind, has much to do with what is taking place, and perhaps will have still more, – and so again has the influence of authority, respect for character, and the like; so has sentiment, imagination, or fancy; and lastly … so has discussion, argument, investigation. But neither one, nor a ll of them together have been the real operating cause; rather they had been the means only, through which that cause has acted. Men who feel in themselves a moral need, which certain doctrines supply, may be right or wrong in their feeling, as the case may be; and the doctrines may supply it more or less genuinely; but anyhow they embrace the doctrines because they need them; and if they give tokens of being moved by argument, or feeling, or fancy, or by sympathetic excitement, or by influence and authority, it is merely that they are moved through these means, not by them. Minds contented with what they are and what they have, easily resist solicitations whether of imagination or argument; but they who wish for things which they have not, start and look about them with beating hearts and troubled eyes, when a whisper, from whatever source, tells them that their yearnings perchance may find somewhat to satisfy them. Such feelings, if of earth, are merely enthusiastic, and often argue impatience and want of discipline: – thus youths of high spirit indulge ambitious views, or allow themselves in other ways to idolize the creature; but when those feelings are true and right, they are the motions of a divine love, and the disposition to confide which they involve, whithersoever tending, is of the nature of faith. As to what are earthly, what heavenly feelings, and who is to discriminate between them, this is quite another question, on which men of different sentiments will decide differently. All we insist on is, that religious opinion in general is the result of something deeper than mere caprice or than syllogistic conviction, and more enduring than excitement or passion. … in a given case, argument, novelty, influence of others, imaginative beauty, these and the like appeals which address themselves to the mind from without, are but touchstones or tests, bringing out the hidden dispositions of one man, not of another. They are but the occasions, not the causes, of a man’s changing his mind, and any other view of them is a very shallow one. But at the same time we have no intention of disputing that, besides this moral orthodoxy, as it may be called, there are a great number of persons of unformed characters and opinions, who have not definite basis enough within them, good or bad, to respond to or revolt from the real substance of the various phantasiae offered to them; and they certainly are arrested and accidentally persuaded one way or the other by those visible exhibitions, which to the former class of minds are but means and channels of something deeper. As some men are converted or repulsed by the hidden sympathy or antipathy of their hearts toward the objects presented to them, many more, being incapable of either, are what is called ‘convinced,’ that is by argument, or ‘taken,’ that is by mere fancy, or ‘persuaded,’ that is by mere external influence. Such persons, while they remain in this state, without root in themselves, are ever liable to be ‘convinced,’ ‘taken,’ or ‘persuaded’ back again, and then they are rightly called inconsistent; though very often, nay in a measure always, in spite of the superficial character of such alternations, their hearts are unconsciously operated upon, for good or bad, by that doctrine, which they at first took up, not from its congeniality to their own minds, but from the shape in which it addresses them. And again some are called inconsistent by the world, whose changes are really owing to the keenness of their cravings after true spiritual nourishment. Persons thus earnestly on the look-out for something higher in the way of religion, than they at present possess, naturally close at once with whatever promises best. Then as their tone of mind rises, they become dissatisfied with their first choice; and on something better offering itself, quit it; not of course from light or capricious motives, but from the ordinary development of their own character and perceptions … . In spite of the extravagances, misapprehensions, and inconsistencies … in men both on the right and on the wrong side of ecclesiastical questions, there will after all be a general coincidence between a certain set of opinions and a certain character. The one will attend upon the other, and be a sort of type of it, correct in the main, though not to be depended on in every particular case. It is surely reasonable to judge in this way. We expect of a person who has adopted a set of opinions, whatever it may be, a character and tone of mind to correspond; and if we fail to see it in him, we note down the inconsistency.3
Newman maintains that certain ‘doctrines’ may ‘supply’ a ‘moral need’, and that the doctrines may be assented to as satisfying that need. ‘Men who feel in themselves a moral need, which certain doctrines supply … embrace the doctrines because they need them.’ He suggests that those who ‘embrace’ the ‘doctrines’ might well be unaware of how ‘they need them’. He envisages a situation in which those who ‘embrace’ the doctrines ‘give tokens of being moved by argument, or feeling, or fancy, or by sympathetic excitement, or by influence and authority’. This state of ‘being moved by argument, or feeling, or fancy, or by sympathetic excitement, or by influence and authority’ involves an awareness of the arguments, feelings, fancies and authorities in question: the awareness of the one who is moved is taken up with those arguments, feelings, fancies and authorities. Newman maintains that those who are moved in this way may be ‘moved through these means, not by them’, that the true ‘cause’ may consist in the ‘hidden dispositions’ of those who are moved in this way. They attend to these ‘means’, and are thereby ‘moved through’ them; and, in attending to the ‘means’, they are not attending to how they are moved by them, or to that which is acting ‘through’ those ‘means’. The ‘hidden dispositions’ consist, one may take it, in certain desires, related to ‘moral need’: they consist in ‘the hidden sympathy or antipathy of [the] hearts [of those who have these dispositions] toward the objects presented to them’. The various arguments, feelings, fancies and authorities may, in this regard, be considered as means through which certain ‘objects’ are ‘presented’. The ‘moral need’ is concerned with those ‘objects’ in themselves, and it consists in an attraction to, or aversion to, those objects. Newman comments on how some might ‘respond to or revolt from the real substance of the various phantasiae offered to them’; the arguments, feelings, fancies and authorities seem, in this regard, to be as phantasiae, and the ‘moral need’ relates to ‘real substance’ of what is manifested in or through these phantasiae. One might, then, have an imperfect awareness of that ‘real substance’, in responding to these phantasiae, and yet it is to that ‘real substance’ that one is responding, if one has the right ‘d ispositions’. What, then, of the ‘supply’ of ‘moral need’, in or through certain ‘doctrines’? How might a ‘moral need’ be ‘supplied’ by certain doctrines?
Newman makes a couple of remarks on the ‘supply’ of ‘moral need’: ‘minds contented with what they are and what they have, easily resist solicitations whether of imagination or argument; but they who wish for things which they have not, start and look about them with beating hearts and troubled eyes, when a whisper, from whatever source, tells them that their yearnings perchance may find somewhat to satisfy them’; ‘persons thus earnestly on the look-out for something higher in the way of religion, than they at present possess, naturally close at once with whatever promises best’ but ‘as their tone of mind rises, they become dissatisfied with their first choice; and on something better offering itself, quit it … from the ordinary development of their own character and perceptions’. He contrasts the state of discontent and unsettlement of those animated by ‘heavenly feelings’, who have the right ‘dispositions’, with that of ‘youths of high spirit [who] indulge ambitious views, or allow themselves in other ways to idolize the creature’. If, then, to have ‘heavenly feelings’ is not to ‘idolize the creature’, it is to desire, and to aim at, God: it is to desire the righteousness whereby one desires God above all else, a righteousness that is itself a participation in the righteousness of God. One desires the righteousness to desire God above all else – which is a ‘need’ to attain to a certain ‘moral’ state (‘minds’ animated with this desire are not ‘contented’ with ‘what they are’) – and one desires communion with God (‘minds’ animated with this desire are not ‘contented’ with ‘what they have’). One must have ‘yearnings’ toward this state, if one is to be moved by a ‘whisper, from whatever source’ that these ‘yearnings perchance may find somewhat to satisfy them’. ‘Catholic doctrines’ are, among other things, about the ‘supply’ of a ‘moral need’: they concern how it is to be ‘supplied’; they suggest how one should act, to ‘supply’ it. The ‘doctrines’ present a way of attaining to a certain good – communion with God – and one will be disposed to attend to them, to consider ‘embrac[ing]’ them, if the good, to which they present a way of attaining, is something which one desires. Newman suggests that there is a ‘spiritual nourishment’ in the ‘embrac[ing]’ of the doctrines. Could an assent to those ‘doctrines’ be itself involved in a certain ‘moral’ or spiritual state, such that one comes to think differently, and becomes in certain respects a different sort of person, if one assents to them? If so, and if the ‘moral need’ with which Newman is concerned involves becoming that sort of person, then there is a certain ‘supply’ of that ‘need’ in the very act of assenting to those ‘doctrines’. Newman maintains that ‘there will … be a general coincidence between a certain set of opinions and a certain character [even if there may be exceptions in particular cases] … . We expect of a person who has adopted a set of opinions, whatever it may be, a character and tone of mind to correspond.’ If there is a ‘coincidence’ or a ‘correspondence’ between ‘a certain set of opinions and a certain character’, then it could be that the acquisition of those ‘opinions’ is involved in attaining to that ‘character’, and that a certain ‘moral need’ – a ‘need’ concerning what is required if one is to attain to a ‘certain character’ – is ‘suppl[ied]’ in the acquisition of those ‘opinions’.
Newman claims that ‘Catholic doctrines are the just expression’ of a certain ‘character of mind and feeling’. If the ‘doctrines’ are to be an ‘expression’ of the ‘character of mind and feeling’, then this suggests that the ‘character of mind and feeling’ can be present without the ‘doctrines’: something must be present, if it is to be ‘expressed’. Newman suggests, equally, that the ‘doctrines’ are themselves involved in that ‘character of mind and feeling’. To have a ‘character of mind and feeling’ is to aim at certain things, to be disposed toward certain ends, teloi. This state involves some awareness of those ends. The awareness of those ends might be set out in certain ‘doctrines’; and the doctrines would, as such, manifest an awareness involved in a certain state of character. Yet to aim at certain things – to have a character in which such aims are predominant – is not necessarily to have a full, perfect apprehension of those things: the apprehension requisite for, sufficient for, such a character might be imperfect, and might, as such, admit of becoming fuller. One might, then, have the ‘character of mind and feeling’ that consists in aiming at certain things, without clearly apprehending them; one might get a fuller apprehension of them from ‘Catholic doctrines’; and the acceptance of those ‘doctrines’ might then affect how one aimed at those things: a fuller apprehension of certain ends would be implicated with a stronger desire for, a surer movement toward, those ends. If the insight, associated with the ‘doctrines’, were to be involved in this way in a certain ‘character of mind and feeling’, then the ‘expression’ here – whereby the state of ‘character’ is taken to be ‘expressed’ in certain ‘doctrines’ – would be a matter of the coming into being, the realization, of that ‘character of mind and feeling’: the act of accepting those ‘doctrines’ would be involved in the realization of that ‘character’. That character might be present, in an inchoate form, before the acceptance of those ‘doctrines’, and would become more fully realized, more fully developed, with the acceptance of those doctrines.
Newman maintains that the ‘spirit’, which is being expressed in the ‘reaction to the true principles of the Church’, a reaction taking place in the intellectual life of England, and having its clearest expression in the Oxford Movement, is something ‘within us, rising up in the heart where it was least expected, and working its way’ and that it is ‘a something one and entire, a whole wherever it is, unapproachable and incapable of being grasped’. This sense that it is ‘a something one and entire, a whole’ would suggest that everything associated with the manifestation or expression of that ‘spirit’ might be regarded as proceeding from that ‘whole’, as originating in it, and as realizing it. In his Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838), Newman set out an account of the ‘indwelling’ of the Holy Spirit, the ‘indwelling in us of God the Father and the Word Incarnate through the Holy Ghost’. To have ‘righteousness’, to live in a r ighteous manner, it is necessary to have the ‘gift’ of the Holy Spirit – it is necessary that the Holy Spirit be present, as ‘indwelling’ in the ‘heart’ – such that the acts which manifest ‘righteousness’, manifest, equally, the presence, and the ‘indwelling’ of the Holy Spirit: they are an expression of the Holy Spirit. The various acts of ‘righteousness’ that manifest, or attest to, the presence of the Spirit, are not a realization, a coming into being, of that Spirit itself (for that Spirit is always fully in being); but there is a sense in which the Spirit is more fully present in those who attain to a more perfect righteousness. There can be a greater or lesser realization of the Spirit – and of the ‘character’ that is an ‘expression’ of the ‘Spirit’ – in the acts of those who are animated by the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is, evidently, ‘a something one and entire, a whole wherever it is, unapproachable and incapable of being grasped’: it is manifest in various ways, but those various manifestations ultimately attest to the presence of ‘something one and entire’, complete in itself.
2.
Newman claims that ‘there will … be a general coincidence between a certain set of opinions and a certain character [even if there may be exceptions in particular cases] … . We expect of a person who has adopted a set of opinions, whatever it may be, a character and tone of mind to correspond.’ A locus classicus, to which Newman may well be referring here, is the passage from the third book of the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle claims that the true ‘object of wish’ – the true ‘good’ – is that which is the ‘object of wish’ of ‘the good man’.
Are we to say that … that which is in truth an object of wish [the object which should be truly wished for, or desired] is an object of wish to the good man, while any chance thing may be so the bad man, as in the case of bodies also the things that are in truth wholesome are wholesome for bodies which are in good condition, while for those that are diseased other things are wholesome – or bitter or sweet or hot or heavy, and so on; since the good man judges each class of things rightly, and in each the truth appears to him? For each state of character has its own ideas of the noble and the pleasant, and perhaps the good man differs from others most by seeing the truth in each class of things, being as it were the norm and measure of them.4
Newman was closely acquainted with the Ethics: it was central to the Oxford curriculum; and his mentor, Richard Whateley, had, in the 1820s, promoted a recovery of Aristotelian ideas (above all, Aristotelian logic and rhetoric). Newman had helped Whateley to prepare his Elements of Logic for publication in 1826. John Keble, with whom Newman became acquainted in the late 1820s, accorded the Ethics particularly high importance, and had suggested, in a number of sermons preached in the 1820s, that ethos was connected, not simply to acting, but to thinking – to the formation of beliefs. In an account of the origins of the Oxford Movement, written by S. F. Wood in the 1840s, which Wood showed to Newman and Pusey, and which they corrected, it is suggested that the Ethics of Aristotle formed the foundation for the system of theological education developed by Keble and the other Tractarians.
The Ethics of Aristotle … long a text book in the University, became in the hands of more than one College Lecturer the ground work of a very instructive course of Ethical study. Not that this course was either very extensive or scientific, but it led to much useful reflexion on the formation of moral habits, on their influence on opinions and such like practical points. Bishop Butler’s great work The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature was also studied; much more for the sake of the poignant suggestions it incidentally contains on the points just named, than as an argumentative defence of Religion. … To minds thus engaged the Religious teaching of the day naturally became unsatisfactory; they found it wanting in practical reality, in any discrimination of character or insight into motives and principles of action. Indeed, it was probably this which led them to make so religious a use of a Heathen treatise on morals, to dwell so largely on its details, and to make it as it were the groundwork of an education bearing to a great degree a Theological aspect. They imployed this indirect means for the inculcation of that which found no place in the explicit system.5
The sixth book of the Ethics, with its account of ‘practical wisdom’ or phronesis, the understanding that informs the conduct of ‘the good man’, explicates the claim that ‘the good man … [sees] the truth in each class of things, being as it were the norm and measure of them’: one must, Aristotle maintains, be virtuous if one is to have phronesis, and to ‘see’ the ‘truth’ with which phronesis is concerned, the ‘truth’ of how one should act, here and now; but Aristotle maintains, equally, that one must have phronesis if one is to be virtuous. ‘It is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral virtue.’ That ‘practical wisdom’ and ‘virtue’, understanding and desire, are implicated in this way could suggest that they are aspects of something ‘one and entire’, namely ‘the good man’: the different aspects of ‘the good man’ – whether pertaining to understanding, or desire – must be realized together, not in isolation, if they are to be realized at all; the states of understanding and desire involved in being ‘good’, virtuous, are expressions of the whole person, something ‘one and entire’, a ‘whole’, and the whole person is manifest in them.
In the sixth book of the Ethics, Aristotle characterizes phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’ as concerned mostly with ‘means’ – it is a kind of deliberation, concerned with identifying the appropriate ‘means’ to various good ends: to be virtuous is to desire certain good ends, and to have phronesis is to deliberate well about how to attain them. Yet one cannot desire good en ds if one does not apprehend those ends, so the apprehension of those ends would itself seem to be involved in phronesis.
Excellence in deliberation in the unqualified sense, then, is that which succeeds with reference to what is the end in the unqualified sense … . Excellence in deliberation will be correctness with regard to what conduces to the end which practical wisdom apprehends truly.6
Is Aristotle claiming here that ‘practical wisdom’ apprehends ‘truly’ what ‘conduces to the end’ or that it apprehends truly ‘the end’ itself? Aristotle, generally, associates the apprehension of the ‘ends’ with the ‘moral’ virtues, ordered to those ends, and he associates the apprehension of what ‘conduces’ to those ends with phronesis. Yet he, equally, maintains that the virtues require, and involve, phronesis, which is ‘correct reason’ (and it is ‘reason’, one would think, which apprehends the ‘end’). What is more, one cannot deliberate about ‘means’ without considering the ‘ends’ that are to be realized through those ‘means’. That is, the apprehension of the ‘end’ would seem to be involved in ‘practical wisdom’, phronesis; and ‘virtue’ itself – as a matter of being rightly disposed toward the ‘end’ – would seem to require such an apprehension. The ‘true apprehension’ of the end, equally, requires virtue.
[The] eye of the soul acquires its formed state not without the aid of virtue, as has been said and is plain; for the syllogisms which deal with acts to be done are things which involve a starting-point, namely ‘since the end, i.e. what is best, is of such and such a nature’ … and this is not evident except to the good man; for wickedness perverts us and causes us to be deceived about the starting-points of action.7
Aristotle distinguishes between two parts of the ‘soul’, one of which ‘grasps a rule or rational principle’ – as the power of thinking or ‘reason’ itself – the other of which ‘is irrational’. He maintains that the ‘virtues’ are states of the ‘irrational’ part, comprising various states of desire with respect to the ‘ends’. If these states of desire are not, in themselves, ‘rational’, they are nevertheless responsive to ‘reason’.
The appetitive and in general the desiring element in a sense shares in [the ‘rational principle’], in so far as it listens to and obeys it; this is the sense in which we speak of ‘taking account’ of one’s father or one’s friends, not that in which we speak of ‘accounting’ for a mathematical property. That the irrational element is in some sense persuaded by a rational principle is indicated also by the giving of advice and by all reproof and exhortation. And if this element also must be said to have a rational principle, that which has a rational principle (as well as that which has not) will be twofold, one subdivision having it in the strict sense and in itself, and the other having a tendency to obey as one does one’s father.8
This could suggest that the ‘desiring element’ of the ‘soul’ somehow responds to what is presented by ‘reason’ (to what ‘practical wisdom’, phronesis presents, in a ‘true apprehension’ of the ‘end’). Aristotle maintains that such a responsiveness, in the ‘desiring element’ of the ‘soul’, is developed by living in a certain way: it is developed by habituation, by carrying out the acts that ‘correct reason’ ordains – such that, the more one carries out such actions, the more one forms a propensity to carry out those actions; they become what one truly wants to do. One does not form oneself deliberately: one is formed, as a child, before one has acquired ‘reason’, by the kind of upbringing one has. One is initiated into the ‘good life’ by being induced to carry out the actions that befit that life – initially without understanding – and in carrying out those actions, one acquires an appreciation of why they are worthwhile (developing a ‘true apprehension’ of the ‘end’) and one develops an inclination, a desire, to do them. There is, one might suggest, a ‘rational principle’ informing such an initiation into the ‘good life’ – in that those responsible for bringing up children are aware of what they are doing, and what they are aiming at; but this ‘rational principle’ is not fully possessed, initially, by those being initiated into that way of life. Those being initiated acquire that ‘rational principle’ by going through that initiation. Aristotle maintains that ‘virtue’ proper – as a matter of being disposed toward certain ends, as apprehending ‘truly’ those ends – involves phronesis.
In the moral part there are two types, natural virtue and virtue in the strict sense, and of these the latter involves practical wisdom. … For it is not merely the state in accordance with correct reason, but the state that implies the presence of correct reason, that is virtue; and practical wisdom is correct reason about such matters.9
The ‘end’ of virtuous conduct is virtue itself: the ‘end’ consists in virtuous acts, and acts are particular, and it is phronesis, or, rather, the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis, which assesses the particular. Aristotle contrasts this ‘perception’ with ‘science’. Where ‘science’ is concerned with the ‘universal’, ‘perception’ is concerned with the ‘ultimate particular’; and the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis is ‘akin to that by which we perceive that the particular figure before us is a triangle’.10 Where ‘science’ might be concerned with the ‘universal’ qualities of the ‘triangle’, with triangularity as such, ‘perception’ is concerned with identifying that this ‘before us is a triangle’. To recognize that this ‘before us is a triangle’ is to assign ‘this before us’ to a kind, and it is, accordingly, to have some notion, however rudimentary, of the kind. One cannot, what is more, develop an understanding of the universal qualities of this kind, of triangularity, if one cannot identify this ‘before us’ as a triangle. One can recognize that this ‘before us’ is a triangle without having the ‘science’ by which one understands triangularity as such. The ‘science’, presumably, would involve a development of the understanding of ‘triangularity’ involved in the capacity to recognize that this ‘before us’ is a triangle. Aristotle claims that perception is a kind of ‘intuitive reason’ which apprehends the ‘terms’ of an ‘argument’.
The intuitive reason which is presupposed by demonstrations grasps the unchangeable and first terms, while the intuitive reason involved in practical reasonings [perception] grasps the last and variable fact, that is, the minor premiss. For these variable facts are the starting-points for the apprehension of the end, since the universals are reached from the particulars; of these therefore we must have perception, and this perception is intuitive reason.11
For Aristotle, ideas are formed by abstraction from ‘particulars’ such that, in identifying the forms of the ‘particulars’ one experiences, one abstracts from what is merely particular about them. He does not regard all ‘moral’ understanding as being concerned with an idea of ‘the good’, with a ‘universal’, ‘goodness’; rather, he characterizes the virtues that make for a good way of living, and he suggests that these virtues involve, or that they are connected to, a distinctive kind of understanding, phronesis. It could be, though, that the ‘universals’ with which he is concerned, in discussing ‘perception’, are ‘universals’ relating to the virtues – ideas of courage, temperance, justice and the like. If so, though, Aristotle is insistent that ‘moral’ understanding does not attain to the kind of ‘universals’ involved in ‘science’: one can attain to certain generalizations, but these admit of exceptions. He maintains that while virtuous activity consists in a ‘mean’ between extremes – as courage, for instance, is a ‘mean’ between cowardice and rashness – that ‘mean’, in any particular situation, can be determined only by considering all the (morally salient) features of that situation, such that the recognition of the ‘mean’, in any particular situation, requires ‘perception’: it is ‘perception’ that determines that such and such an act, in such and such a situation, would be just, identifying what ‘justice’ means in such and such a situation. ‘Up to what point and to what extent a man must deviate before he becomes blameworthy it is not easy to determine by reasoning, any more than anything else that is perceived by the senses; such things depend on particular facts, and the decision rests with perception.’12 One might be able to formulate generalizations about ‘justice’, but these are not sufficient for determining whether this act, here and now, would be just. Aristotle maintains that there is this surpassing of the ‘universal’ in ‘equity’: he observes that ‘equity’ supplements the ‘universal statements’ of the ‘law’ with an awareness of the ‘particular facts’, adjusting the sentence that the ‘law’ would ordain to a sentence more attuned to true justice, such that it is ‘a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality’.13 So, too, perception might ‘correct’ certain ‘universal statements’ about virtue; and if perception is to ‘correct’ such ‘statements’, it must involve an insight that surpasses them.
Aristotle likens the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis to ‘that by which we perceive that the particular figure before us is a triangle’, but what is apprehended by this ‘perception’ – particular acts, in relation to particular situations – is something rather more complex than a ‘particular figure’, such as a ‘triangle’: a situation might have various morally significant features, and an assessment of that situation, to be adequate, would need to take cognizance of all of them. To register the significance of those features, even taken singly, it might be necessary to have a matured appreciation of the subtleties of how things are – an appreciation that is not a matter of having, and applying, simple concepts (like ‘triangle’).14 Aristotle observes that one must be experienced to have such insight, that ‘young men’ are, accordingly, not capable of it. ‘Young men have no conviction about [“first principles” that “come from experience”] but merely use the proper language.’15 This assessment is ‘intuitive’: it is intuitive as a perception of a whole situation, the significance of which can be appreciated only when it is considered as a whole (and this perception of the whole is intuitive); it is intuitive as a spontaneous, swift perception – in acting, one might have but a moment to make an assessment that could inform how one acts. Aristotle maintains that it is ‘perception’ that identifies the ‘mean’, identifies what it is to be just, courageous, or the like, in particular situations: one doe s not recognize this by making ‘deductions’ from ‘universal’ notions of justice, courage, or the like. The insight involved in such ‘perception’ accordingly surpasses that which is involved in generalizations about justice, courage, or the like; and the best insight that one has into justice, courage, or the like, is an insight that one has in perception, in addressing oneself to a situation here and now, in living. Aristotle remarks that the ‘universals are reached from the particulars’, but it would seem that the best insight one has into the ‘universals’ pertinent to virtue, is in living, ‘reaching towards’ them in particular acts of perception. One does not simply apply ‘universals’ that one comprehends fully before applying them: there is an accession of understanding in the perception that is a ‘reaching towards’ the ‘universal’. And one is always in the position of ‘reaching towards’ the ‘universal’, always obliged to make sense of something here and now, as one is always in the midst of living. What is more, phronesis itself is not merely something that assesses ‘the good’, or ‘the good life’, but it is something that is involved in, and constitutive of, the good life. It is, Aristotle insists, ‘practical’, involved in practice, and expressed in particular acts. ‘Practical wisdom [is not] concerned with universals only – it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars.’16 An action is constituted, in part, as the action it is, by the intention with which it is carried out: to be virtuous is to want to do virtuous actions, because they are virtuous; the apprehension of the virtuousness of those actions (phronesis, perception) is, then, involved in those actions, as something making them virtuous. ‘To be good’, Aristotle maintains, ‘one must be in a certain state when one does the acts, i.e., one must do them as a result of choice and for the sake of the acts themselves’17 and phronesis is involved in ‘choice’, which Aristotle characterizes as ‘either desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire’: it is the ‘ratiocinative’ part of it.18 This would suggest that phronesis is involved in a good form of life, as one of the things making that life good. This is not to claim that virtuous acts are made virtuous solely through the intention with which they are carried out: that intention, after all, involves registering those features of particular acts that make them good. Yet, if the intention with which an act is carried out is involved in, necessary to, its goodness, then the act is as it is, as the expression of that intention; what one intends to do, is connected to what one perceives as good, what one understands to be good; and, evidently, a virtuous intention is informed by the insights of phronesis. To be a good person is to be actuated by those insights that proceed from phronesis. There is a certain convergence between who one is, and the insight that is phronesis: it is the understanding that the ‘good man’ has in being who he is, or the understanding that makes him who he is. As it is an understanding involved in being a certain sort of person, so it is the person, ‘the good man’, who is ‘the norm and measure’.
Newman maintains, in his 1839 article on the ‘existing state of parties in the [English] Church’, that ‘Catholic doctrines’ are the ‘just expression’ of a certain ‘character of mind and feeling’. He suggests that the ‘embrace’ of those ‘doctrines’ may be attendant on ‘the ordinary development of … character and perceptions’: in ‘religious opinion’, certain ‘dispositions’ may be at work, in the ‘hidden sympathy or antipathy’ of the ‘heart’ toward the ‘objects presented’ to it (through various means) such that there is a kind of ‘moral orthodoxy’ – something like a ‘moral’ state, a set of ‘dispositions’, which ‘corresponds’ with ‘Catholic doctrines’. These ‘doctrines’, then, like phronesis, require certain ‘dispositions’: as the ‘eye of the soul [in phronesis] acquires its formed state not without the aid of virtue’, so it seems that the acceptance of ‘Catholic doctrines’ – and the understanding associated with the acceptance of those ‘doctrines’ – requires a ‘development of … character and perceptions’, and a certain state of ‘heart’. As phronesis does not only require virtuous dispositions, but is required for such dispositions – as the ‘eye of the soul’ must discern the ‘end’, if that end is to be virtuously desired – so too, perhaps, the ‘Catholic doctrines’ are involved in a certain type of character.
Aristotle maintains that phronesis is concerned with the ‘human’ good, with the life of the polis. He distinguishes it, as such, from ‘contemplation’, which is concerned with what is ‘divine’, with what is more than ‘human’: ‘contemplation’ is the activity of that which is most ‘divine’ in the soul. He contrasts the variable, multiform ‘human’ good, with which phronesis is concerned, and the changeless ‘divine’, with which the life of ‘contemplation’ is concerned.19 Aristotle makes a distinction between the ‘human’ and the ‘divine’, which relates to the distinction between phronesis – and the ‘perception’ involved in it – and contemplation. In Christianity, though, there is the ‘doctrine’ of the God-man, Christ. Does not this doctrine involve a way of conceiving of the distinction between the ‘human’ and the ‘divine’ that is different from, or that supersedes, the way in which Aristotle conceives of this distinction?
If God is incarnate in Christ, the ‘divine’ fully present in the ‘human’, then the kind of ‘perception’ by which one apprehends the ‘human’ becomes pertinent to the apprehension of the ‘divine’. Christ, as ‘human’, is perfectly virtuous, and to perceive the ‘humanity’ of Christ aright is to register His virtue. Aristotle suggests that there are forms of phronesis – ‘understanding’, sunesis, and ‘judgement’, gnome – by which one apprehends phronesis in others, registering the virtuousness of the acts of others: these forms of insight involve a sympathetic recognition of what animates others.20 If the recognition of the ‘divine’ in Christ requires a recognition of his ‘human’ qualities, his virtuousness, then it would seem that these forms of phronesis – namely, ‘understanding’, sunesis, and ‘judgement’, gnome – are involved in the recognition of the ‘divine’ in Christ.
If God is sheer goodness, goodness itself, then how might the perception of goodness, involved in phronesis, relate to the apprehension of the ‘divine’? If the goodness of God is analogous to the goodness which phronesis apprehends, then what one apprehends, in registering the ‘human’ virtue of Christ, is something analogous to what one apprehends, in registering the divine in Christ. To perceive the humanity of Christ aright, as wholly good, a right state of ‘conscience’ is needed, and what is perceived, when the goodness of Christ is registered, is something analogous to the ‘divine’. In a sermon preached in 1831 on ‘The Usurpations of Reason’, Newman suggests that ‘the moral sense’, or ‘moral perception’, is involved in the apprehension of the ‘truths’ of revelation: he reflects on the error of making use of ‘reason’ – or certain forms of reason – in ‘attempting to judge of those truths which are subjected to another part of our nature, the moral sense’, or to resolve ‘questions … which are addressed to the cultivated moral perception, or, what is sometimes improperly termed, “feeling”; – improperly, because feeling comes and goes, and, having no root in our nature, speaks with no divine authority; but the moral perception, though varying in the mass of men, is fixed in each individual, and is an original element within us’.21 It ‘is as little strange that the mind, which has only exercised itself on matters of literature or science, and never submitted itself to the influence of divine perceptions, should be unequal to the contemplation of a moral revelation, as that it should not perform the office of the senses’.22 That is, Newman suggests that the ‘contemplation’ of the ‘revelation’ – the proper awareness of it – is a matter of ‘moral perception’, or ‘divine perceptions’; and this ‘perception’, one may take it, is like that involved in phronesis – a ‘perception’, involved in ‘conscience’ (an ‘original element within us’), that something particular, here and now, is good. Newman suggests that it is this ‘perception’ which apprehends, which ‘contemplates’, the good, and which, as such, ‘contemplates’ the ‘revelation’. Newman characterizes the revelation as itself a ‘moral revelation’, which would suggest that a capacity to recognize what is ‘moral’ is required for the ‘contemplation’ of the revelation: one is ‘unequal’ to such ‘contemplation’ otherwise – one cannot ‘perceive’ the ‘revelation’. The revelation presents, however, something more than what is ‘contemplated’ by ‘moral perception’: the goodness of God is something more than ‘human’ goodness. How should the phrase ‘divine perceptions’, which Newman uses, be understood? Can there be, in the right perception of Christ, something like a ‘perception’ of the divine itself? Aristotle suggests that the perception of virtue is itself an expression of virtue, and is involved in a virtuous life: the ‘good man’ apprehends the good, here and now, in being good. Christian ‘faith’ is – according to Christian doctrine – a gift of God, and is an expression of the ‘indwelling’ of the Holy Spirit. As phronesis involves a perception of virtue that is an expression of a virtuous life, so faith, perhaps, involves a perception of the divine that is an expression of a divine life, the life of the Holy Spirit: the perception of the divine in Christ would, then, be an expression of the spirit of Christ, a manifestation of the working of the Holy Spirit. Does it make sense, though, to characterize ‘faith’ as a kind of ‘perception’? If ‘perception’ is taken to be a kind of ‘sight’, then ‘perception’ would seem to be contrary to ‘faith’: if faith is the ‘evidence of things not seen’, if it is concerned with what is not ‘seen’, so it would seem to be something quite other than ‘perception’. ‘Faith’ is not ‘sight’: one has faith because ‘sight’, in the here and now – in statu viatoris – is not possible; a ‘sight’ of the ‘divine’ is not for the here and now, but for the hereafter. Could there, however, be a ‘perception’, or something like perception, which is not ‘sight’, and which does not supersede faith?
Newman could characterize faith as a kind of ‘perception’. In a sermon, preached in 1830, on ‘Faith and Obedience’, Newman suggests that faith is a ‘practical perception of the unseen’.
What is meant by faith? it is to feel in good earnest that we are creatures of God; it is a practica l perception of the unseen world; it is to understand that this world is not enough for our happiness, to look beyond it on toward God, to realize His presence, to wait upon Him, to endeavour to learn and to do His will, and to seek our good from Him. It is not a mere temporary strong act or impetuous feeling of the mind, an impression or a view coming upon it, but it is a habit, a state of mind, lasting and consistent. To have faith in God is to surrender one’s-self to God, humbly to put one’s interests, or to wish to be allowed to put them into His hands who is the Sovereign Giver of all good … . What is obedience? it is the obvious mode, suggested by nature, of a creature’s conducting himself in God’s sight, who fears Him as his Maker, and knows that, as a sinner, he has especial cause for fearing him. Under such circumstances he ‘will do what he can’ to please Him, as the woman whom our Lord commended. He will look every way to see how it is possible to approve himself to Him, and will rejoice to find any service which may stand as a sort of proof that He is in earnest. And he will find nothing better as an offering, or as an evidence, than obedience to that Holy Law, which conscience tells him has been given us by God Himself; that is, he will be diligent in doing all his duty as far as he knows it and can do it. – Thus as is evident, the two states of mind are altogether one and the same: it is quite indifferent whether we say a man seeks God in faith, or say he seeks Him by obedience; and whereas Almighty God has graciously declared He will receive and bless all that seek Him, it is quite indifferent whether we say, He accepts those who believe, or those who obey. To believe is to look beyond this world to God, and to obey is to look beyond this world to God; to believe is of the heart, and to obey is of the heart; to believe is not a solitary act, but a consistent habit of trust; and to obey is not a solitary act, but a consistent habit of doing our duty in all things. I do not say that faith and obedience do not stand for separate ideas in our minds, but they stand for nothing more; they are not divided one from the other in fact. They are but one thing viewed differently.23
‘Faith’ and ‘obedience’ are, Newman maintains, different aspects of ‘one and the same general character of mind’ or ‘temper of mind’, such that ‘to believe and to obey be but different characteristics of one and the same state of mind’.24 Those who have this ‘character of mind’ seek their good – something that is an eminently ‘practical’ matter – solely in God, and Newman suggests that this involves a certain ‘surrender’: one does not aim to procure the good by exerting whatever powers one has in oneself, but by relying on God, so that ‘to have faith in God is to surrender one’s self to God, humbly to put one’s interests, or to wish to be allowed to put them into His hands who is the Sovereign Giver of all good’.25 ‘Obedience’ is an attempt to ‘please’ God – to show one is in ‘earnest’ by acting in accordance with the ‘Holy Law’ of God, discerned by the ‘conscience’ – and this attempt to ‘please’ God is informed by a sense that ‘one’s interests’ are best secured by God. ‘The only way of salvation open to us is the surrender of ourselves to our Maker in all things – supreme devotion, resignation of our will, the turning with all our heart to God; and this state of mind is ascribed in Scripture sometimes to the believing, sometimes to the obedient … and it is no matter to which it is ascribed.’26 With respect to the ‘surrender’ of ‘interests’ – this might mean that one does not merely regard God as acting to secure ‘interests’ one already is aiming at; it might, rather, mean that one submits to the ‘commands’ of God, trusting that these commands proceed from a regard for ‘one’s interests’, even if one cannot fully appreciate how they make for those ‘interests’, and even if one cannot fully appreciate what those true ‘interests’ are. One surrenders ‘one’s self’ in this, or, at least, one surrenders the self-possession involved in the claim to identify ‘one’s interests’, and to identify the means of realizing them: in this, there is a ‘resignation of the will’. One surrenders the ‘self’ that one is aware of, so to speak, and the interests associated with this ‘self’, and recognizes that it is God who apprehends the truth about ‘one’s self’ and ‘one’s interests’, and that the ‘commands’ of God proceed from a care for ‘one’s [true] interests’. One recognizes, further, that the ultimate ‘interest’ one has is an ‘interest’ in God. One recognizes that this ‘interest’ in God it is an interest in ‘being with’, communing with, God, an interest that is attained when one accords with the will of God – when one lives in accordance with that will, as manifest in ‘God’s holy Law’, forming oneself and acquiring certain virtues so that what one desires is in accordance with that ‘holy Law’.
Newman characterizes ‘faith’ as connected to the effort to ‘seek our good’, or ‘our happiness’: it is connected to those things with which ‘practical wisdom’ or phronesis is concerned – to the striving for ‘happiness’, the striving for ‘our good’. It is an attitude of ‘surrender’, connected to the awareness that ‘our good’, ‘our happiness’, proceeds from the ‘Sovereign Giver of all good’. Newman suggests that the ‘surrender’ coincides with the perception of God as the ‘Sovereign Giver of all good’. That is, to have a right ‘perception’ of the ‘unseen’, of God, is to ‘surrender’ – to recognize that there is no ‘good’ to be attained, apart from God – and this ‘surrender’ is ‘practical’, in that it informs how one lives: it is an attitude, a settled ‘state’, which animates how one lives. As, then, phronesis is ‘practical’, involving a ‘perception’ of the good that is ordered toward, and expressed in, a way of living, so ‘faith’ is ‘practical’, such that the recognition that ‘all good’ proceeds from God, the ‘surrender’ to God, informs a way of living.
By obedience is meant obedience , not to the world, but to God – and habitually to obey God, is to be constant in looking on to God – and to look on to Almighty God, is to have faith; so that to ‘live by faith,’ or ‘walk by faith’ (according to the Scripture phrases), that is, to have a habit of faith, and to be obedient, are one and the same general character of mind.27
Newman suggests that the ‘character of mind’, of which ‘faith’ and ‘obedience’ are aspects, is animated by a ‘looking on to God’. ‘Looking on’ here suggests ‘looking’ for, hoping for, a certain good, and it suggests ‘looking’ for direction, or ‘commands’: ‘God’s commands are promises, and His promises commands to a heart devoted to Him.’28 The experience of those who have recognized ‘all good’ to proceed from God, who have recognized that ‘this world is not enough for our happiness’, who ‘look beyond’ the world to God, is different from those who do not ‘look beyond’ the world to God. This ‘looking beyond’ the world concerns the ‘end’ one aims at, in what one does, and it concerns what one expects to accomplish, in what one does: one aims at God, and one recognizes that one cannot attain to God of oneself, one requires something ‘beyond’ oneself – one requires God to ‘give’ freely, one requires grace, if one is to attain to communion with God. One ‘looks on’ to God, moreover, to ascertain what one should do – one looks for the ‘commands’ that are to determine what one is to do. To ‘look beyond’ the world is, then, to experience the world, and oneself, in a certain way; and this experience of the world involves a certain ‘perception’ of things, moment to moment, as related to the ‘unseen’. Newman suggests that, in this account of faith and obedience, he is characterizing ‘the temper of mind which has, in every age, been acceptable to Almighty God’.29 In the old dispensation, ‘Abraham found favour in God’s sight, because he gave himself up to Him: this is faith or obedience, whichever we please to call it.’30 Newman observes that ‘in every age “the righteous shall live by faith.” And it is remarkable that these words of the prophet Habakkuk, which St. Paul quotes three several times, to show the identity of true religion under all dispensations, do also represent it under these very two characteristics, Righteousness and Faith.’31 If, for Newman, this ‘temper of mind’ is not uniquely associated with a response to Christ – if it is not created with the revelation of Christ, as a response to Christ in particular – it seems, nevertheless, to be a ‘temper’ that animates a right perception of Christ, a right response to Christ.
The ‘practical perception of the unseen’ would, then, seem to be a matter of ‘look[ing] beyond’ the ‘world’, and of relating the ‘world’, as one experiences it, to what is ‘beyond’ it, so that the way one lives is animated by this ‘perception’ of the ‘unseen’. The ‘perception’ is ‘practical’ as it moves one to ‘practice’ – it moves one to live in a certain way. In a sermon on ‘Faith without Sight’, preached in 1834, Newman associates this ‘look[ing]’ beyond the ‘world’, and the ‘self’, not with ‘faith’ but with ‘conscience’: he suggests that in the apprehension of the ‘rule of conscience’, there is an intimation of that ‘rule’ as proceeding from ‘a superior’, and in the submission to that ‘rule’, there is a submission to that ‘superior’.
Every religious mind, under every dispensation of Providence, will be in the habit of looking out of and beyond self, as regards all matters connected with its highest good. For a man of religious mind is he who attends to the rule of conscience, which is born with him, which he did not make for himself, and to which he feels bound in duty to submit. And conscience immediately directs his thoughts to some Being exterior to himself, who gave it, and who evidently is superior to him; for a law implies a lawgiver, and a command implies a superior. Thus a man is at once thrown out of himself, by the very Voice which speaks within him; and while he rules his heart and conduct by his inward sense of right and wrong, not by the maxims of the external world, still that inward sense does not allow him to rest in itself, but sends him forth again from home to seek abroad for Him who has put His Word in him. He looks forth into the world to seek Him who is not of the world, to find behind the shadows and deceits of this shifting scene of time and sense, Him whose Word is eternal, and whose Presence is spiritual. He looks out of himself for that Living Word to which he may attribute what has echoed in his heart; and being sure that it is to be found somewhere, he is predisposed to find it.32
One who ‘attends to the rule of conscience’ is, then, ‘thrown out of himself’, ‘looks out of himself for that Living Word to which we may attribute what has echoed in his heart’, and is accordingly ‘predisposed’ to accept a revelation of that ‘Word’. What is more, ‘everyone who tries to do God’s will, is sure to find he cannot do it perfectly’.
He will feel himself to be full of imperfection and sin; and the more he succeeds in regulating his heart, the more he will discern its original bitterness and guilt. Here is an additional cause of a religious man’s looking out of himself. He knows the evil of his nature, and forebodes God’s wrath … and, in consequence, seeks about for some means of propitiating his Maker, for some token, if so be, of God’s relenting. He cannot stay at home; he cannot rest in himself; he wanders about from very anxiety; he needs some one to speak peace to his soul. Should a man come to him professing to be a messenger from heaven, he is at once arrested and listens; and, whether such profession be actually true or false, yet his first desire is that it may be true.33
Those who experience the world in this way will have the ‘practical wisdom’ to recognize the significance of the revelation. They will be preoccupied with certain ‘pract ical’ concerns, and will recognize that the revelation pertains to those concerns: they will recognize that it is ‘practical’ and ‘momentous’, that it pertains to something they care about. Those who accept the revelation with such ‘practical wisdom’ will treat the revelation, once accepted, with the same ‘practical wisdom’.
[This] blessed temper of mind … does not stipulate that the text of Scripture should admit of rigid and laboured proofs of its doctrines; it has the practical wisdom to consider that the Word of God must have mainly one, and one only sense, and to try, as well as may be, to find out what that sense is, whether the evidence of it be great or little, and not to quarrel with it if it is not overpowering. It keeps steadily in view that Christ speaks in Scripture, and receives His words as if it heard them, as if some superior and friend spoke them, one whom it wished to please; not as if it were engaged upon the dead letter of a document, which admitted of rude handling, of criticism and exception.34
It is ‘practical wisdom’, Newman suggests, to treat the ‘words’ of Scripture as the ‘words’ of a particular person, Christ – taking those words to manifest the presence of that person. To have such wisdom is to ‘keep steadily in view’ the reality of whatever situation one is in; and the reality of the situation one is in, when presented with the ‘words’ of Scripture, is that one is being presented with the ‘words’ of Christ – ‘Christ speaks’. Newman associates the capacity to relate to another person, the awareness of another person, with ‘practical wisdom’. The account Aristotle gives of phronesis (and of ‘understanding’ and ‘judgement’) suggests that, in living, it is with ‘practical wisdom’ that one appraises others, and determines how one should comport oneself toward them. This ‘wisdom’ is involved in how one relates to others, animating the relationships one forms: friendship requires this sort of wisdom. Newman suggests that this ‘wisdom’ should inform the way one treats the ‘words’ of Scripture – as ‘words’ by which a relationship with a ‘superior and friend’, Christ, is established and maintained: such wisdom ‘receives His words as if it heard them’. If, though, it is ‘practical wisdom’ that registers what another person is like, this is something different from registering that another person is present. (Then again, if one has, in the aspect of ‘practical wisdom’ that is ‘conscience’, certain intimations of a ‘superior’, and a sense of that ‘superior’, then might not that sense enable one to recognize the presence of that ‘superior’ in the ‘words’ of Scripture? If one has ‘heard’ the ‘echo’ of the ‘Living Word’ in the ‘conscience’, then perhaps one is disposed to recognize the ‘Living Word’ itself, when it presents itself. If the intimations of a ‘superior’ in the ‘conscience’ are marked by a sense of what the ‘superior’ is like, so perhaps the presence of that ‘superior’ can be discerned in the ‘words’ of Scripture.)
Those who ‘prefer this world to the leadings of God’s Spirit within them, soon lose their perception of the latter, and lean upon the world as a god’.
Having no presentiment of any Invisible Guide, who has a claim to be followed in matters of conduct, they consider nothing to have a substance but what meets their senses, are contented with this, and draw their rules of life from it. They truly are in no danger of being superstitious or credulous; for they feel no antecedent desire or persuasion that God may have made a revelation of Himself in the world; and when they hear of events supernatural, they come to the examination of them as calmly and dispassionately as if they were judges in a court of law, or inquiring into points of science. They acknowledge no especial interest in the question proposed to them; and they find it no effort to use their intellect upon it as rigidly as if it were some external instrument which could not be swayed.35
It is the effort to ‘attend to the rule of conscience’, and to live according to that ‘rule’, which makes the question of whether God has ‘made a revelation of Himself in the world’ a matter of ‘especial interest’ and of ‘practical’ moment.
In any matter so momentous and practical as the welfare of the soul, a wise man will not wait for the fullest evidence before he acts; and will show his caution, not in remaining uninfluenced by the existing report of a divine message, but by obeying it though it might be more clearly attested. If it is but fairly probable that rejection of the Gospel will involve his eternal ruin, it is safest and wisest to act as if it were certain. On the other hand, when a man does not make the truth of Christianity a practical concern, but a mere matter of philosophical or historical research, he will feel himself at leisure (and reasonably on his own grounds) to find fault with the evidence. When we inquire into a point of history, or investigate an opinion of science, we do demand decisive evidence; we consider it allowable to wait till we obtain it, to remain undecided; in a word, to be sceptical. If religion be not a practical matter, it is right and philosophical in us to be sceptics … . Those whose hearts are not ‘tender’ (2 Kgs xxii.19) as Scripture expresses it – that is, who have not a vivid perception of the Divine Voice within them, and of the necessity of His existence from whom it issues, – do not feel Christianity as a practical matter, and let it pass accordingly. They are accustomed to say that death will soon come upon them, and solve the great secret for them without their trouble, – that is, they wait for sight: not understanding, or being able to be made to comprehend, that their solving this great problem without sight is the very end and business of their mortal life: according to St. Paul’s decision, that faith is ‘the substance,’ or the realizing, ‘of things hoped for,’ ‘the evidence,’ or the making trial of, the acting on, the belief of ‘things not seen’ (Heb. xi.1). What the Apostle says of Abraham is a description of all true faith; it goes out not knowing whither it goes. It does not crave or bargain to see the end of the journey … . It is persuaded that it has quite enough light to walk by, far more than sinful man has a right to expect, if it sees one step in advance; and it leaves all knowledge of the country over which it is journeying, to Him who calls it on.36
Newman suggests that the attitude one takes to the ‘evidence’ for a revelation is connected to whether or not one regards the matters which that revelation concerns as ‘practical and momentous’; and one will regard those matters as ‘practical and momentous’ if one is trying to ‘attend to the rule of conscience’, ‘looking out of oneself’ for ‘that Living Word’ to which one ‘may attribute’ the ‘voice’ of conscience, and ‘looking out of oneself’ for indications of ‘God’s relenting’ at the ‘guilt’ one has incurred by not living up to that ‘rule’. In this, Newman suggests that one must have acquired some ‘practical wisdom’ (by living in a certain way, attentive to the conscience), if one is to recognize that the acceptance of a revelation is a matter for ‘practical wisdom’ – if this acceptance is to present itself as a ‘practical’ question, as something of ‘practical’ moment, such that one can ‘feel Christianity as a practical matter’.
Newman observes that there is a difference between the treatment of ‘evidence’ by ‘practical wisdom’, and the treatment of ‘evidence’ by more theoretical kinds of ‘research’, such as ‘philosophical or historical research’: when it is a question of how one is to act, here and now, of how one is to live, then one does not address oneself to the question in such a way as to ‘remain undecided’ until the ‘evidence’ is perfectly ‘decisive’ one way or the other. The kinds of proof acknowledged by ‘practical wisdom’ differ from those required in ‘philosophical or historical research’: such wisdom can take account of what is ‘but fairly probable’.37
Newman observes that a ‘wise man’ will take the view that if ‘it is but fairly probable that rejection of the Gospel will involve his eternal ruin, it is safest and wisest to act as if it were certain’. To ‘act as if’ the Gospel ‘were certain’ could be, in truth, to ‘act as if’ one were certain of it, ‘as if’ one believed it (rather than, simply, to be certain of it, to believe it). Newman associates ‘rejection of the Gospel’ here, with how one ‘acts’. If the ‘Gospel’ is primarily a ‘light to walk by’ – if it is primarily a form of ‘practical wisdom’ – then to accept the Gospel is to take it as a ‘light to walk by’, to act on it.
Newman is concerned with how one develops the ‘practical wisdom’ to recognize that ‘religion’ is a matter referred to ‘practical wisdom’ – the ‘wisdom’ to recognize and to feel that the concerns of ‘religion’ are ‘momentous and practical’. This is not simply a matter of making a right reckoning among ‘interests’; it is a matter of recognizing what is of ‘especial interest’, of identifying what is, and what is not, an ‘interest’. What is more, Newman is concerned with how the ‘revelation’ itself becomes, in being recognized as practical wisdom, something that is ‘acted on’. ‘Practical wisdom’ or phronesis is not a perfect knowledge – satisfying the ‘demand’ for ‘decisive evidence’ – but an insight into a particular situation, in which one is obliged to act one way or another: it is concerned with ‘one step in advance’. Faith, Newman suggests, is equally concerned with the next ‘step’, and does not ‘crave or bargain to see the end of the journey’ if it has ‘enough light to walk by’. ‘Practical wisdom’ is concerned, to some extent, with the ‘end of the journey’, assessing the present situation in relation to the ‘end’, but it need not involve a perfectly clear apprehension of the ‘end’; it requires an insight into the ‘end’ sufficient for the ‘next step’. Faith, Newman suggests, affords an insight into the ‘end’ – into God – which supplements the insights of the ‘conscience’ (and the insights of the ‘conscience’ are themselves the ‘leadings of God’s Spirit within’). Yet, if faith presents the ‘Living Word’, the ‘echo’ of which is in the ‘conscience’, it does not present a perfect ‘sight’ of the ultimate ‘end’. Faith affords ‘light to walk by’, a ‘light’ which is sufficient for the ‘practical’ requirements of ‘walking’, of living.
Commenting on the claim that faith is ‘the evidence of things not seen’, Newman glosses the term ‘evidence’ with the remark that it is the ‘making trial of, the acting on, the belief of “things not seen”’. He glosses ‘evidence’ here with ‘making trial of’. While it seems natural to think of a ‘trial’ as involving the use of ‘evidence’ – one might refer to ‘evidence’, in testing the truth of certain assertions – or it seems natural to think of some ‘trials’ as yielding evidence – one might carry out certain ‘trials’ or tests, the upshot of which would be ‘evidence’ for the truth of an assertion – it seems less natural to equate ‘evidence’ with the act of ‘trial’ itself. Newman seems to be presenting a contrast, here, between different kinds of ‘trial’ – that involved in ‘philosophical or historical research’ or in ‘science’, and that involved in ‘practical wisdom’. The sort of ‘evidence’ that ‘practical wisdom’ requires, in determining how to act, is different from the sort of ‘evidence’ required by ‘philosophical or historical research’, in determining what seems true. To recognize that what is presented in ‘religion’ is something ‘practical’, one must live in such a way that the matters with which religion is concerned seem of ‘especial i nterest’ – corresponding with what one takes to be of ‘practical’ moment. To recognize that what is presented in ‘religion’ is ‘practical’, that religion is presenting ‘practical wisdom’, is to recognize that, as ‘practical wisdom’, ‘religion’ is ordered toward ‘acting’, and it is to recognize what sort of ‘light’ or ‘evidence’ one should require in ‘acting’ on that ‘wisdom’: the ‘light’ one requires in acting, the ‘light’ that is ‘enough to walk by’, is not the ‘decisive evidence’ one requires in matters of ‘science’. That one apprehends ‘religion’ in this way, as ‘practical wisdom’, is shown by whether one acts on it: that is, it takes a certain kind of ‘practical wisdom’ to recognize that ‘religion’ is ‘practical wisdom’, and, since such ‘wisdom’ is for acting on (phronesis – Aristotle observes – is ‘practical’, is present only where it is acted on) so to recognize that ‘religion’ is ‘practical wisdom’ is to act on it. One takes it as a ‘light’ to ‘walk by’. The ‘light’ by which religion is ‘tried’ – the light of ‘practical wisdom’ – is itself ‘practical’, is itself acted on, so the ‘trial’ is implicated with ‘acting’. If one lives rightly, attending to the ‘conscience’, one will recognize ‘religion’ to be relevant to the concerns that one already has; it will present itself as akin to the considerations that already actuate one, in living, and it will affect one in the way that those considerations affect one – that is, it will move one to act. There is, then, a kind of ‘trial’ whereby one recognizes ‘religion’ as ‘practical wisdom’. As ‘religion’ is ‘practical’, expressed in acts, so one cannot simply ‘let it pass’: if one ‘lets it pass’, then one is, in fact, adopting a ‘practical’ attitude at odds with that of ‘religion’ – ‘to say [as “sceptics” do] that death will soon come upon them, and solve the great secret for them without their trouble’ is to have the sort of ‘practical’ attitude that does not ‘feel [religion] as a practical matter’. The observation that one ‘makes trial’ of a ‘belief’ in ‘acting on’ it suggests, furthermore, that when one acts on a belief, one puts it to the test; it suggests that, by acting on a belief, one acquires ‘evidence’ as to the truth of that belief. In what sense, though, might the ‘practical wisdom’ one acts on, be put to the test in being acted on? Such ‘wisdom’ is not a kind of hypothesis, which one might test by experiments. ‘Practical wisdom’ or phronesis would seem, rather, to be that by which one ‘tests’ whether particular acts are virtuous or not (and, conversely, the test of whether one has ‘practical wisdom’ is whether one acts virtuously or not). ‘Practical wisdom’ is, though, something that develops through experience: the more one acts rightly, the more ‘practical wisdom’ one develops. So the more one acts rightly, the more one acquires the ‘wisdom’ to ‘test’ whether or not certain acts are right. In his British Critic article on the ‘existing state of parties in the [English] Church’, Newman observes that ‘changes’ in religion may arise from an ‘ordinary development of … character and opinions’: those who are ‘earnestly on the look-out for something higher in the way of religion, than they at present possess, naturally close at once with whatever promises best … [but] as their tone of mind rises, they become dissatisfied with their first choice; and on something better offering itself, quit it; not of course from light or capricious motives, but from the ordinary development of their own character and perceptions’. This might suggest that those who recognize in ‘religion’ genuine ‘practical wisdom’, and act on it, acquire – if it truly is ‘wisdom’ – a greater ‘practical wisdom’ by so acting – ‘their tone of mind rises’ – so they are better fitted to discern what is ‘practical wisdom’ and what is not, and to confirm whether ‘religion’ is ‘practical wisdom’.
In a sermon preached on ‘Saving Knowledge’, about a month after the sermon on ‘Faith without Sight’, Newman maintained that ‘Obedience is the test of Faith’.
To know God is life eternal, and to believe in the Gospel manifestation of Him is to know Him; but how are we to ‘know that we know Him?’ How are we to be sure that we are not mistaking some dream of our own for the true and clear Vision? How can we tell we are not like gazers upon a distant prospect through a misty atmosphere, who mistake one object for another? … St. John says, ‘Hereby do we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.’ Obedience is the test of Faith.38
Newman observes that ‘deeds of obedience are an intelligible evidence, nay, the sole evidence possible, and, on the whole, a satisfactory evidence of the reality of our faith’.39 The phrase ‘reality of our faith’ is somewhat ambiguous: it could be taken to mean ‘a faith that is genuine’, a ‘real, authentic faith’; it could, equally, suggest ‘a faith in what is real’, a ‘belief accorded to what is real, true, rather than illusory’. ‘Deeds’ can evidently be a ‘test’ of whether one really has faith – ‘acting on’ a belief is a mark of really having that belief, a mark of being committed to that belief. Are they equally a ‘test’ that what is believed is a ‘reality’, that the belief is warranted? Newman precedes his account of how ‘Obedience is the test of Faith’ with an account of ‘Gospel faith’, setting out how such faith differs from the ‘faith of heathens’.
To know God and Christ, in Scripture language, seems to mean to live under the conviction of His presence, who is to our bodily eyes unseen. It is, in fact, to have faith, according to St. Paul’s account of faith, as the substance and evidence of what is invisible. It is faith, but not faith such as a Heathen might have, but Gospel faith; for only in the Gospel has God so revealed Himself, as to allow of that kind of faith which may be called, in a special manner, knowledge. The faith of Heathens was blind; it was more or less a moving forward in the darkness, with hand and foot … . But the Gospel is a manifestation, and therefore addressed to t he eyes of our mind. Faith is the same principle as before, but with the opportunity of acting through a more certain and satisfactory sense. We recognise objects by the eye at once; but not by the touch. We know them when we see them, but scarcely till then. Hence it is, that the New Testament says so much on the subject of spiritual knowledge … It is plain what is the object of spiritual sight which is vouchsafed us in the Gospel – ‘God manifest in the Flesh’. He who was before unseen has shown Himself in Christ; not merely displayed His glory, as (for instance) in what is called a providence, or visitation, or in miracles, or in the actions and character of inspired men, but really He Himself has come upon earth, and has been seen of men in human form. In the same kind of sense, in which we should say we saw a servant of His, Apostle or Prophet, though we could not see his soul, so man has seen the Invisible God; and we have the history of His sojourn among His creatures in the Gospels.40
Newman presents ‘deeds of obedience’ as a ‘test’ whereby ‘we know that we know Him’, getting assurance that ‘we are not mistaking some dream of our own for the true and clear Vision’, not mistaking ‘one object for another’.41 Are these ‘deeds’, though, a test that the ‘object’ of ‘vision’ is Jesus Christ, as he appeared in ‘history’, rather than some other, imaginary ‘object’, or are they a test that, in Jesus Christ, God is ‘manifest’? If the ‘faith of the Heathens’ is accorded to whatever of God is manifest to the ‘conscience’ – if it is a matter of striving toward the good, as discerned ‘through a misty atmosphere’ by the conscience – and if Christ is a manifestation of God, then Christ should be a manifestation of that ‘object’ which is imperfectly discerned by the conscience – the ‘Living Word [which] has echoed in [the] heart’. One should be able to live by the ‘vision’ of Christ, in the way that ‘Heathens’ live by the intimations of the conscience; one should be able to make Christ the ‘object’ of all efforts to realize the good; and, if Christ manifests supreme goodness, then efforts to realize the good, informed by the ‘vision’ of Christ, should surpass efforts informed only by the ‘conscience’, ‘moving forward in the darkness’. The more ‘practical wisdom’ one has, the more one acts rightly, and the more one acts rightly, the more ‘practical wisdom’ one acquires. If Christ is a ‘manifestation’ of the good that ‘conscience’ or ‘practical wisdom’ discerns ‘in the darkness’, then to have a ‘spiritual sight’ of Christ is to have a better ‘sight’ of the good. To have this ‘sight’ of Christ is to act rightly (in that it is ‘practical wisdom’, a ‘sight’ of the good, and such wisdom is ‘practical’, is acted on) and to act in a way informed by this ‘sight’, is to acquire a better ‘sight’ of Christ. This ‘sight’, Newman maintains, is something to ‘direct’ oneself by. ‘To be consistent, to “walk in all the ordinances of the Lord blameless,” is [for the one with faith] his one business; still, all along looking reverently towards the Great Object of faith, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Three Persons, One God, and the Son Incarnate for our salvation. Certainly he will have enough to direct his course by, with God in his eye, and his work in his hand.’42 ‘Deeds’ would not be an ‘evidence’ of ‘faith’ unless ‘faith’ were, of itself, something expressed in ‘deeds’, a kind of ‘practical wisdom’; and, as ‘practical wisdom’ develops by being acted on – such that, in acquiring more ‘practical wisdom’ by acting rightly, one acquires a greater assurance that one is acting rightly – so in taking the ‘Vision’ of Christ as something to act on, to ‘direct’ oneself by, one acquires a greater perception of the good, and of Christ, and a greater assurance that this ‘Vision’ is genuine.
The one who lives ‘with God in his eye, and his work in his hand’, ‘looking reverently towards the Great Object of faith’, ‘directs’ his ‘work’ by the sight of that ‘Great Object’: he discerns ‘enough’ of that ‘Great Object’ as is required for ‘one step in advance’, enough to register what ‘step’ would be consistent with, and harmonize with, that ‘Great Object’. That ‘work’ consists of a number of particular acts, and in the appreciation of each particular act, there is an insight into the ‘Great Object’, as pertinent to each act. Aristotle contrasts the ‘perception’, concerned with the ‘ultimate particular fact’, with the apprehension of the ‘universal’, and with ‘universal statements’, and he suggests that ‘perception’ involves an insight into the good – as pertinent to how one should act, here and now – which surpasses whatever can be presented in ‘general propositions’. With this perception, one does not have a clear, direct ‘sight’ of the ‘end’: one registers a certain significance in ‘this’, here and now – registering, say, that ‘this’ act is consistent with the ‘end’, registering that ‘this’ act befits, or is in accordance with, the good life, and is, as such, a moment in the realization of such a life. So too, perhaps, the one who lives ‘with God in his eye, and his work in his hand’, ‘looking reverently towards the Great Object of faith’, discerns, in that ‘work’, something of the ‘Great Object of faith’ surpassing whatever can be presented in ‘general propositions’: there is an insight into the ‘Object of faith’ in discerning the significance of ‘this’, here and now, as harmonizing with that ‘Object’, which can be had only in discerning the significance of ‘this’, here and now. This could be so, if something of that ‘Object’ is manifest in the significance of ‘this’ act, here and now, if there is an appreciation of some aspect of that ‘Object’ in the appreciation of the significance of ‘this’ act, here and now – if something of the Holy Spirit is expressed in the life of each one who lives ‘with God in his eye, and his work in his hand’, and if what is expressed of the Holy Spirit is expressed in that which makes that life unique.
3.
Newman maintains that to attend to the ‘conscience’ is to be ‘thrown out’ of oneself. Aristotle does not suggest, in his account of phronesis, that to have phronesis is to be ‘thrown out’ of oneself. For Aristotle, the supreme end, with which phronesis is concerned, is happiness, and happiness consists in the full realization of whatever powers one has. The aim, then, would seem to be the realization of the self, rather than something ‘beyond’ the self. One might take the ‘end’ here to be the realization of ‘nature’: for Aristotle, to have a certain nature is to have certain ‘ends’, intrinsic to that nature. The having of these ‘ends’ is not, for Aristotle, something that requires explanation, by reference to God: to have a nature just is to have certain ends. To consult whatever nature one has, in acting, is not, then, to be referred to God (as, say, the ‘maker’ of nature). Aristotle suggests that the apprehension of what ‘nature’ requires, of how one should act, moment to moment, is itself a realization of ‘nature’: that apprehension is itself a virtuous activity. Newman maintains, in his account of why to ‘attend’ to the ‘rule’ of conscience is to be ‘in the habit of looking out of and beyond self’, that ‘conscience immediately directs’ one to ‘some Being exterior’ to oneself, ‘who gave it’; and he characterizes ‘conscience’, here, as an awareness of a ‘command’ or a ‘law’: one who attends to the ‘rule’ of ‘conscience’ attends to a ‘rule’ which is ‘born with him, which he did not make for himself, and to which he feels bound in duty to submit’. Newman does not derive from ‘nature’ the ‘law’ or the ‘command’ which the conscience discerns – he does not envisage it as a ‘law’ derived, ultimately, from an obligation to realize a ‘nature’ (albeit a nature ‘made’ by God). He does characterize conscience as something one is ‘born with’; he suggests that there is an innate, natural capacity to apprehend the ‘law’, but he does not suggest that the ‘law’ itself, in its substance or content, derives from ‘nature’, from an obligation to realize whatever nature one has. He suggests that there is, in the apprehension of the authoritativeness of the ‘law’, an apprehension of God. The ‘rule’ or ‘law’ of ‘conscience’ has authority as a ‘law’ given by God, and to register that authority is to register – albeit imperfectly – the ‘lawgiver’.
When Newman maintains that one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself, by the conscience, he suggests that, in apprehending the ‘commands’ of the conscience, one becomes aware of ‘some Being exterior’ to oneself, whose ‘commands’ they are. In the conscience, in a capacity of the self, something other than the self is manifest – in this interior ‘voice’, a ‘Voice’ other than the self ‘speaks within’: ‘a man is at once thrown out of himself, by the very Voice which speaks within him … he looks out of himself for that Living Word to which he may attribute what has echoed in his heart’; the ‘inward sense [of the conscience] does not allow him to rest in itself, but sends him forth again from home to seek abroad for Him who has put His Word in him’. This sense that, in what is ‘inward’, innermost in the self, there is a mark of ‘some Being exterior’ to the self, transcending the self, is Augustinian rather than Aristotelian. For Augustine, ‘the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth’:43 when one reflects on oneself, considering the activity by which one makes sense of things, one encounters certain truths or principles of ‘wisdom’, standards by which one understands and judges things – such as the truth that one ought to be just, the truth that the eternal is superior to the temporal and so on – and ‘knowing simply that these truths are so one does not examine them with a view to their correction but rejoices to have discovered them … [and] we pass judgement on our minds in accordance with truth as a standard, while we cannot in any way pass judgement on truth’.44 These are truths that make the mind – truths by which one thinks, by which ‘we pass judgement on our minds’: they are truths which subsist in God, and which, as present within the soul, attest to God. One looks inward, and what one encounters, as innermost in oneself, is a ‘light’ that is of God. ‘What is the light which shines right through me and strikes my heart without hurting? It fills me with terror and burning love; with terror inasmuch as I am utterly other than it, with burning love in that I am akin to it. Wisdom, wisdom it is which shines right through me.’45 In thinking – in the thinking by which one possesses oneself – one depends on a ‘wisdom’ which is of God. One exists in a manner such that one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself: that by which one possesses oneself – ‘wisdom’ – is something ‘out’ of oneself (‘the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth’). When one recognizes that one exists in this way, that one is sustained by a ‘light’ that is something ‘out’ of oneself, one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself in reverence, ‘terror’ and ‘love’: one reveres the ‘wisdom’ that ‘shines right through’ one, recognizing how much one owes – how one owes what one is – to this ‘wisdom’. Augustine maintains that, in reflecting on how one thinks, one recognizes that in the activity of thinking one is sustained by a ‘wisdom’ which transcends the self: at the centre of the self, is something more than the self; in the acts of the self, something more than the self – a ‘wisdom’ that is ‘other than’ the self and ‘akin to’ it – is manifest. When Newman observes that ‘a man is at once thrown out of himself’ by the conscience, he maintains that the ‘inward sense [of the conscience] does not allow him to rest in itself, but sends him forth again from home to seek abroad for Him who has put His Word in him’: the insight, or ‘Word’, of the conscience, is experienced as something ‘put’ there by another, ‘some Being exterior’ to the self. Why is this so? It could be that Newman, like Augustine, would discern in a certain ‘judgement’ the presence of a ‘wisdom’ transcending the self: the conscience is a certain judgment on the self, and while, with the conscience, ‘we pass judgement’ on the self, ‘we cannot in any way pass judgement’ on the conscience. What is more, the judgment of the conscience concerns a certain necessity, to which one is subject: it is the recognition that it is necessary, obligatory, that one do such and such. The necessity associated with the ‘truths of wisdom’ is somewhat different: it is a matter of what one is obliged to think – one is compelled to take certain things to be true. In each case, though, one experiences oneself as subject to necessity, and this necessity is constitutive of the self, in certain respects: taking the ‘truths of wisdom’ to be true is a fulfilment of the power of thinking; acting in accordance with the ‘commands’ of the conscience is a fulfilment of the self – one fully realizes the self by so acting. One is sustained as what, or who, one is, by this necessity, deriving from ‘some Being exterior’ to oneself, so that one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself, in being sustained by something ‘out’ of oneself.
In a sermon on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, preached in 1830, Newman identifies certain faults in the ‘moral character’ formed by the ‘school’ of Aristotle, and he relates the defects of this ‘school’ to a primary defect of ‘Natural Religion’ – that it ‘gives little or no information respecting what may be called [the] Personality’ of the ‘Deity’.46 ‘Natural Religion’, Newman maintains, is imperfect as it does not conceive of the ‘moral’ life as a matter of a relationship to a divine ‘Person’ or ‘Agent’.
The philosopher aspires towards a divine principle; the Christian, towards a Divine Agent. Now, dedication of our energies to the service of a person is the occasion of the highest and most noble virtues, disinterested attachment, self-devotion, loyalty; habitual humility, moreover, from the knowledge that there must ever be one that is above us. On the other hand, in whatever degree we approximate towards a mere standard of excellence, we do not really advance towards it, but bring it to us; the excellence we venerate becomes part of ourselves – we become a god to ourselves. This was one especial consequence of the pantheistic system of the Stoics, the later Pythagoreans, and other philosophers; in proportion as they drank into the spirit of eternal purity, they became divine in their own estimation; they contrasted themselves with those who were below them, knowing no being above them by whom they could measure their proficiency. Thus they began by being humble, and, as they advanced, humility and faith wore away from their character. This is strikingly illustrated in Aristotle’s description of a perfectly virtuous man. An incidental and unstudied greatness of mind is said by him to mark the highest moral excellence, and truly; but the genuine nobleness of the virtuous mind, as shown in a superiority to common temptations, forbearance, generosity, self-respect, calm high-minded composure, is deformed by an arrogant contempt of others, a disregard of their feelings, and a harshness and repulsiveness of external manner. That is, the philosopher saw clearly the tendencies of the moral system, the constitution of the human soul, and the ways leading to the perfection of our nature; but when he attempted to delineate the ultimate complete consistent image of the virtuous man, how could he be expected to do this great thing, who had never seen Angel or Prophet, much less the Son of God manifested in the flesh? … [In Scripture, by contrast] not only is all moral excellence expressly referred to the Supreme God, but even the principle of good, when implanted and progressively realized in our hearts, is still continually revealed to us as a Person, as if to mark strongly that it is not our own, and must lead us to no preposterous self-adoration. For instance, we read of Christ being formed in us – dwelling in the heart – of the Holy Spirit making us His temple.47
Aristotle does not maintain that to be ‘virtuous’ is to be ‘thrown out’ of oneself, or that to have a right conscience is to be ‘thrown out of oneself’, because, Newman suggests, he does not conceive of the moral life as a matter of aspiring to a ‘divine Agent’, ‘ever … above us’. The philosophers of ‘Natural Religion’ generally, conceive of the moral life as a matter of ‘aspir[ing] to a divine principle’, rather than a ‘divine Agent’, and such a ‘principle’ can be regarded as something that one might assimilate to oneself, ‘bring to’ oneself. Such a principle ‘was not an object of worship, inasmuch as each intelligent being was, in a certain sense, himself a portion of it’: that which is highest is something of which the self is ‘a portion’ – it does not wholly transcend the self.48 The ‘preposterous self-adoration’ that can be generated by such an understanding of the ‘divine’ is apparent in ‘Aristotle’s description of a perfectly virtuous man’, the exemplar of ‘greatness of mind’ – the character of whom is ‘deformed by an arrogant contempt of others, a disregard of their feelings, and a harshness and repulsiveness of external manner’. Does Aristotl e conceive of the life of virtue as a matter of ‘aspir[ing] to a divine principle’? Aristotle makes a person, not a ‘principle’ – ‘the good man’ – the ‘norm’ and ‘measure’ of virtue. This ‘measure’ is, though, evidently something that one might ‘bring to’ oneself, and realize in oneself, and ‘the excellence we venerate [might] become part of ourselves’, so that, to take ‘the good man’ as the ‘measure’ is to be liable to ‘self-adoration’. When Newman refers to ‘Aristotle’s description of the perfectly virtuous man’, he seems to be referring to the account of the ‘great-souled man’, in Book 4 of the Ethics. With regard to the ‘great-souled man’, Aristotle observes that if the pride, associated with such ‘greatness of mind’, is to be a virtue, then it must be justified, and if it is to be justified, then it must be a pride in what is truly worthwhile, in virtue; so, ‘greatness of soul’ is only a virtue, if one is truly virtuous – it is difficult to truly be ‘great-souled’, ‘for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character’. Aristotle does consider pride (if justified) to be a virtue, and he takes ‘greatness of soul’ to require virtue. Aristotle characterizes the ‘great-souled man’ as primarily concerned with honour: the ‘great-souled man’ is self-regarding and self-sufficient in the sense that he lives to fulfil an idea of himself, as honourable, and desires honour from himself above all, since only honors received from the great and honourable are worth anything (hence a certain ‘arrogant contempt’ and ‘disregard’ of others). (One might question, incidentally, whether the ‘great-souled man’ truly illustrates the ‘system’ of Aristotle: after all, the ‘great-souled man’ aims primarily at honour, and at virtue as something honourable, but honor is something secondary, and not the true ‘object of wish’ itself. The ‘good man’ aims at virtue, but to aim at virtue is not to aim at honour, even if one aims to acquire honour by being virtuous. Yet Aristotle does not address this difficulty.) It is evident, though, that Aristotle does not regard virtue as a matter of being ‘thrown out’ of oneself, aware of oneself as dependent on, and sustained by, a ‘Being exterior’ to the self. For Aristotle, as one must be virtuous to have phronesis and to perceive the good, so to have phronesis is to perceive a good that one realizes in being oneself (that is, virtuous): the imperative that ‘the good man’ apprehends is, in a sense, that of his own being. Aristotle does not identify the good, ‘realized in our hearts’, with a ‘Person’ other than the self. Newman acknowledges that Aristotle ‘saw clearly the tendencies of the moral system, the constitution of the human soul, and the ways leading to the perfection of our nature’; he suggests that his mistake was in not identifying the ‘perfection of our nature’ with the presence of a divine ‘Person’, this ‘perfection of our nature’ being a state that involves an awareness of that presence, and an attendant ‘humility and faith’. Newman suggests that Aristotle could not ‘delineate the ultimate complete consistent image of the virtuous man’ because he ‘had never seen Angel or Prophet, much less the Son of God manifested in the flesh’ – he had never been presented with that ‘perfection’ as realized in particular persons. Newman retains, from the Aristotelian scheme, a sense that the ‘measure’ consists in a person rather than a generalized ‘principle’ (for Aristotle, it is ‘the good man’, for Christianity, ‘the Son of God manifested in the flesh’). Newman, equally, retains from the Aristotelian scheme a sense that the ‘realizing’ of goodness, in particular acts, is primary: in Christianity, a way of being good, which Aristotle ‘had never seen’, came into being, initiating a more complete understanding of goodness, an understanding of goodness that was the completion of, the ‘Natural’ (and Aristotelian) understanding of ‘the tendencies of the moral system, the constitution of the human soul, and the ways leading to the perfection of our nature’. A year after preaching on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, Newman preached on ‘Christian Nobleness’, and on the ‘greatness of mind’ cultivated by Christianity, observing how the ‘greatness of mind … which in other religious systems degenerates into pride, is in the Gospel compatible – nay, rather intimately connected – with the deepest humility’.49 The sermon seems to be an attempt to show how the characteristics of the ‘great-souled man’ of Aristotle are present, in the character formed by ‘the Gospel’, in a perfected form, not ‘deformed’ by certain attendant vices. Newman suggests that the awareness, on the part of the Christian, of the gift of the indwelling Spirit, occasions a certain ‘negligence about the world’ – ‘such a doctrine … will exceedingly raise the Christian above himself, and … will make him feel all things of earth as little, and of small interest or account, and will preserve him from the agitations of mind which they naturally occasion’.50
He will be calm and collected under all circumstances; he will make light of injuries, and forget them from mere contempt of them. He will be undaunted, as fearing God more than man; he will be firm in faith and consistent … not impatient, as one who has no self-will; not soon disappointed, who has no hopes; not anxious, who has no fears; nor dazzled, who has no ambition; nor open to bribes, who has no desires.51
The awareness that the presence of the Spirit is a ‘gift’, however, occasions ‘humility’ – ‘The self-respect of the Christian is no personal and selfish feeling, but rather a principle of loyal devotion and reverence towards that Divine Master who condescends to visit him.’52 What is more, the awareness that the presence of the Spirit is a ‘gift’ occasions a certain anxiety: if one is presumptuous, or if one considers oneself to have a title to the gift, then God might take it back – ‘How know they but He, by whom their souls live, will withdraw that life – nay, will to a certainty withdraw it – if they take that glory to themselves which is His?’53 Newman suggests, then, that the ‘nobleness’ cultivated by Christianity matches, and surpasses, the ‘greatness of mind’ celebrated by Aristotle.
In his sermon on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, Newman maintains that the main defect of natural religion is that it ‘gives little or no information respecting what may be called [the] Personality’ of the ‘Deity’. What Newman means by ‘personality’ here is somewhat ambiguous: ‘personality’ could mean ‘personhood’, ‘the quality or fact of being a person’, or it could mean ‘character’, or ‘the assemblage of qualities or characteristics which makes a person a distinctive individual’. When setting out certain defects in the ‘moral character’ formed by the ‘school’ of Aristotle, and the ‘philosophers’ generally – above all, a certain pride and self-sufficiency – Newman relates these to a tendency to conceive of the ‘moral’ life as a matter of ‘aspir[ing] to a divine principle’ rather than a divine ‘Agent’ or ‘Person’. It would seem, then, that, for Newman, it is when God is conceived of as a ‘Person’ that one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself. The distinction between person and person, Newman suggests, is more impenetrable than that between a person and a ‘principle’: it is when the good is conceived of as a ‘Person’, that one recognizes that ‘there must ever be one that is above us’; a ‘principle’ is something that one might ‘bring to’ oneself, assimilate into oneself. If, for Newman, the main defect of the philosophy that proceeds from ‘Natural Religion’ is that it does not involve a definite sense of God as an ‘Agent’ or ‘Person’, then this would suggest that, when Newman maintains that natural religion ‘gives little or no information respecting what may be called [the] Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, what he means by ‘personality’, here, is personhood. He claims that ‘though Heathen Philosophy knew so much of the moral system of the world, as to see the duties and prospects of man in the same direction in which Revelation places them, this knowledge did not preclude a belief in fatalism, which might, of course, consist in unchangeable moral laws, as well as physical’.54 He then acknowledges that ‘though Philosophy acknowledged an intelligent, wise, and beneficent Principle of nature, still this too was, in fact, only equivalent to the belief in a pervading Soul of the Universe, which consulted for its own good, and directed its own movements, by instincts similar to those by which the animal world is guided; but which, strictly speaking, was not an object of worship, inasmuch as each intelligent being was, in a certain sense, himself a portion of it’.55
It would seem that an ‘intelligent, wise, and beneficient Principle’ must be something ‘personal’ – intelligence and wisdom are personal qualities. Yet Newman maintains that these qualities are attributed, by ‘Philosophy’, to something conceived of as a ‘Soul of the Universe’ animated ‘by instincts similar to those by which the animal world is guided’ – that is, by ‘instincts’ of a less-than-personal kind. Newman then suggests that, for ‘Philosophy’, ‘each intelligent being’ is a ‘portion’ of this ‘Soul’: the intelligence of ‘each intelligent being’ is a kind of participation in this ‘Soul’, which becomes a kind of cosmic logos, but not something altogether other than the self, and not, certainly, a distinct ‘Person’, encountered by the self.
Newman suggests that natural religion does not present God as a ‘Person’ or ‘Agent’ – which would suggest that the ‘Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, concerning which natural religion ‘gives little or no information’ is the personhood, the personal existence, of God. Yet he maintains, equally, that the deficiency of natural relation is in its presentation of the ‘personal character’ of God, and if ‘natural religion’ presents God as having a ‘personal character’ – even if it presents that ‘character’ very imperfectly – then this would suggest that it envisages God as personal – such that the ‘Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, concerning which natural religion ‘gives little or no information’ would, then, be the ‘character’, rather than the personhood, or personal existence, of God. Newman observes that Natural Religion presents ‘no tangible history of the Deity, no points of His personal character (if we may so speak without irreverence)’ and accordingly wants ‘that most efficient incentive to all action, a starting or rallying point – an object on which the affections could be placed, and the energies concentrated’.56
How, then, should the beauty of virtue move the heart, while it was an abstraction? … . It did but witness against those who disobeyed, while they acknowledged It; and who, seemingly conscious where their need lay, made every effort to embody It in the attributes of individuality, embellishing their ‘Logos,’ as they called It, with figurative actions, and worshipping It as the personal development of the infinite Unknown. [Yet the attempt to] … attribute a personal character and a history to the Divinity [by ‘Heathen Religion’] … failed, as degrading His invisible majesty by unworthy, multiplied and inconsistent images, and as shattering the moral scheme of the world into partial and discordant systems … . The God of philosophy was infinitely great, but an abstraction; the God of paganism was intelligible, but degraded by human conceptions … . [whereas in Revealed Religion] the life of Christ brings together and concentrates truths concerning the chief good and the laws of our being, which wander idle and forlorn over the surface of the moral world, and often appear to diverge from each other. It collects the scattered rays of light, which, in the first days of creation, were poured over the whole face of nature, into certain intelligible centres, in the firmament of the heaven, to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. Our Saviour has in Scripture all those abstract titles of moral excellence bestowed upon Him which philosophers have invented. He is the Word, the Light, the Life, the Truth, Wisdom, the Divine Glory.57
While Newman treats of ‘Heathen Philosophy’, in most of this sermon, as almost an aspect of ‘Natural Religion’, he makes a distinction, here, between the ‘God of philosophy’ (associated with ‘abstraction’) and the ‘God of paganism’, associated with the attempt to ‘attribute a personal character and a history to the Divinity’ (in images, in stories). If the various ‘conceptions’ of the ‘personal character’ of the ‘Divinity’ developed within ‘paganism’ shattered ‘the moral scheme of the world into partial and discordant systems’, this would suggest that each attempt to conceive of the ‘personal character’ of the ‘Divinity’ involved a ‘moral … system’: to attribute a certain ‘character’ to the ‘Divinity’ is to accord that ‘character’, and the ‘moral’ characteristics central to it, supreme ‘excellence’. Newman seems to be suggesting that no ‘system’ was developed which accorded proper recognition to all the forms of moral ‘excellence’ recognized by the conscience, harmonizing and unifying them into a single ‘scheme’: to insist on one sort of ‘character’ as preeminent, was to neglect to recognize the worth of another sort of character, and the ‘moral’ qualities associated with it. It is only in the example, and image, of Christ that the ultimate ‘truths concerning the chief good and the laws of our being, which … often appear to diverge from each other’ are harmonized. This would suggest, then, that ‘paganism’ could not ‘give information’ on the ‘Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, as it could not conceive of a personality, a character, which combined all the various excellences registered by the conscience (and the personality of the ‘Deity’ would have to be a combination of those excellences). The attempt, with respect to the ‘God of paganism’, to ‘attribute a personal character’ to the ‘Deity’, was unsuccessful. The making of that attempt would seem, though, to attest to a sense that it is not inappropriate to conceive of God as having a ‘character’ – it would seem to attest to a sense of God as ‘personal’. Yet Newman refers to the ‘Logos’, to which ‘Heathen Religion’ sought to ‘attribute a personal character’, as an ‘It’. The ‘actions’ associated with it, in the ‘images’ of ‘Heathen Religion’, are ‘figurative actions’. Newman seems to suggest that these ‘images’ were a presentation, in ‘personal’ terms, of that which was not taken, in itself, to be personal. What is a ‘personal development of the infinite unknown’? Is it an ‘unfolding’, in a ‘personal’ mode, of something that is other than personal? Is it an expression of that, in the ‘infinite unknown’, which can be expressed in ‘personal’ terms (while the full reality, as it is in itself, is still ‘unknown’)? Newman seems uncertain, then, as to whether the efforts to ‘attribute a personal character’ to the ‘Deity’, in the ‘images’ of ‘paganism’, involved a sense that the Deity was, in truth, personal. Newman suggests that there was, in Christ, not simply a revelation of the personhood of God, but a revelation of the ‘personal character’ of God. Newman might maintain, perhaps, that one cannot have a definite sense of the personhood of God, without having some sense of the ‘personal character’ of God: to be a person is to have a ‘personal character’, so one cannot properly envisage God as a person, without ‘attributing’ some sort of character to Him. Yet he seems, equally, uncertain of how much the attempt, in ‘paganism’, to ‘attribute a personal character’ to the ‘Logos’, involved a definite sense of the personhood of God. The ‘personal character’ of Christ, Newman maintains, was not simply one sort of ‘character’ among others: that ‘character’ was a kind of ‘moral’ revelation in itself – it manifested the ‘moral scheme of the world’, as something cohesive. If this ‘moral scheme’ is cohesive, unified, then it need not be regarded as something alien to the ‘One’, or the ‘Logos’ – as something pertaining only to the order of appearances, distinct from the ‘One’.
When the sermon on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’ was republished in 1871, Newman commented, in a note, on his remark that ‘Natural Religion … gives little or no information respecting what may be called [the] Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, that ‘this seems to me too strongly said, and inconsistent with what is said infra, vi. 10. Vide Essay on Assent, v. i.’. The reference ‘infra, vi. 10’, is to the claim, in a sermon ‘On Justice, as a Principle of Divine Governance’ (1832), that ‘the very authoritativeness with which conscience dictates to us’ involves ‘the notion of duty to an Unseen Governor’, ‘a notion which suggests to the mind that there is, in truth, some object more “desirable in its own nature” than “the general happiness” of mankind – viz. the approbation of our Maker’.58 Newman maintains here that the ‘dictates’ of ‘conscience’ involve a sense of One who ‘dictates’, an ‘Unseen Governor’. He suggests, then, in his note on the sermon, that the claim that ‘Natural Religion’ involves no sense of the ‘Personality’ of God is at odds with the claim that conscience ‘involves the notion’ of an ‘Unseen Governor’. The awareness of an ‘Unseen Governor’ is not, it would seem, an awareness of the ‘personal character’ of that ‘Governor’; it would seem, rather, to be an awareness merely of the ‘Deity’ as personal, as having personhood. By 1832, then, Newman was inclined to regard the conscience as involving a sense of an ‘Unseen Governor’, whose ‘approbation’ might be sought: the conscience involves a sense of an ‘Unseen’ person. In 1830, in ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he characterizes natural religion as developing from the conscience, yet he suggests that natural religion is deficient with regard to its sense of the personhood of God. How, then, does he characterize the conscience, in ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’?
Conscience is the essential principle and sanction of Religion in the mind. Conscience implies a relation between the soul and a som ething exterior, and that, moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power. And since the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become, and the standard of excellence is ever outstripping, while it guides, our obedience, a moral conviction is thus at length obtained of the unapproachable nature as well as the supreme authority of That, whatever it is, which is the object of the mind’s contemplation. Here, then, at once, we have the elements of a religious system; for what is Religion but the system of relations existing between us and a Supreme Power, claiming our habitual obedience: ‘the blessed and only Potentate, who only hath immortality, dwelling in light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen or can see’? … . Conscience implies a difference in the nature of actions, the power of acting in this way or that as we please, and an obligation of acting in one particular way in preference to all others; and since the more our moral nature is improved, the greater inward power of improvement it seems to possess, a view is laid upon to us both of the capacities and prospects of man, and the awful importance of that work which the law of his being lays upon him … [a view] of a future life, and of a judgement … . Since the inward law of Conscience brings with it no proof of its truth, and commands attention to it on its own authority, all obedience to it is of the nature of Faith; and habitual obedience implies the direct exercise of a clear and vigorous faith in the truth of its suggestions, triumphing over opposition both from within and without; quieting the murmurs of Reason, perplexed with the disorders of the present scheme of things, and subduing the appetites, clamorous for good which promises an immediate and keen gratification … . Conscience is thus ever the sanction of Natural Religion, [and]it is, when improved, the rule of Morals also … [but] it is, as such, essentially religious … which is implied in the remorse and vague apprehension of evil which the transgression of Conscience occasions.59
If the ‘object’ of the conscience is ‘the blessed and only Potentate, who only hath immortality, dwelling in light unapproachable’, then would this not suggest that this ‘object’ is something personal? A ‘Potentate’ is, evidently, personal. When Newman refers to the ‘blessed and only Potentate’, however, he is quoting from the Scriptures – he is presenting how ‘Revealed Religion’ understands the object of the conscience. While Newman would evidently maintain that the ‘something’ which the conscience apprehends is, in truth, God, would he maintain, here, that this ‘something’ is apprehended, by the ‘natural’ conscience, as God – as a personal God? Newman associates the ‘essentially religious’ aspect of the conscience with certain emotions – with the ‘remorse and vague apprehension of evil which the transgression of Conscience occasions’. He would, later, maintain that these emotions imply an ‘object’ of a personal nature: in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) he observes that conscience ‘is something more than a moral sense … it is always emotional’.
It always implies what that sense only sometimes implies … it always involves the recognition of a living object, towards which it is directed. Inanimate things cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.60
In ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he suggests that ‘affections’ of this kind make the conscience ‘essentially religious’ – and he distinguishes the conscience, as such, from the ‘rule of morals’ – but he does not maintain, with any definiteness, that these emotions involve a sense of a ‘living object’, a ‘person’. In ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he suggests that the understanding of ‘the moral system of the world’, attained by ‘Heathen Philosophy’, ‘did not preclude a belief in fatalism, which might, of course, consist in unchangeable moral laws, as well as physical’. The ‘remorse and vague apprehension of evil’, which he identifies as ‘essential’ to the conscience, might, then, be taken to be an ‘apprehension’ of an ‘evil’, a retribution, attendant on the operation of ‘unchangeable moral laws’. (Feeling ‘remorse’ – feeling a desire not to have done something – is different, in this regard, from feeling ‘ashamed’: ‘shame’ can be taken to imply the consciousness of another person ‘before whom we are ashamed’, in a way that ‘remorse’ does not.) More generally, in ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, Newman characterizes the ‘object’ of the conscience in terms that are not quite personal: it is a ‘something exterior’, a ‘That, whatever it is’, a ‘Supreme Power’, a ‘standard of excellence’. While Newman suggests that conscience apprehends a ‘something exterior’, to which the self is subject, this ‘something’ could be identified with a ‘standard’ or ‘law’: it is not necessarily the personal God of revealed religion. He does observe that conscience ‘implies a relation’ to ‘an excellence which it does not possess’; and this would suggest that the ‘something’ apprehended by the conscience ‘has’ excellence, that it has the excellence designated by the ‘standard’. Could there be a somewhat Platonic understanding of universals here – a sense that there is a Form of goodness that ‘has’ (to the utmost) goodness? Newman observes that the more one ‘follows’ the ‘standard of excellence’, the more clearly one apprehends it (just as, for Aristotle, the clear apprehension of the good is part of the goodness of the good man): seeing the good is involved in being good, and being good is involved in the seeing of the good. This could suggest that the idea of an ultimate ‘tribunal’, wherein there would be a perfect apprehension, and application, of the ‘standard of excellence’, involves the idea of a perfect being, who would apprehend that standard perfectly: the idea of the ‘standard of excellence’, of the ultimate ‘tribunal’, involves the idea of a being that has that excellence, as the ‘standard’ is present in, or to, the apprehension of a being who perfectly realizes that standard. Then again, when Newman remarks that the conscience has a ‘relation’ to an ‘excellence it does not possess’, this migh t mean, simply, that when one contemplates moral ‘excellence’ – in reference to the ‘standard’ – one is aware of the ways in which one does not ‘possess’ it. If, then, the conscience does not, of itself, apprehend the ‘something’ that it ‘contemplates’ as a person, a personal God, then this ‘something’ might be taken for a ‘principle’ rather than an ‘Agent’: it might be consistent with the experience of the ‘natural’ conscience to interpret it in this way. Newman observes that, prior to the revelation, ‘though Conscience seemed to point in a certain direction as a witness for the real moral locality (so to speak,) of the unseen God, yet, as it cannot prove its own authority, it afforded no argument for a Governor and Judge, distinct from the moral system itself, to those who disputed its informations’.61 Newman observes that the conscience ‘afforded no argument for a Governor and Judge, distinct from the moral system itself, to those who disputed its informations’; and one might take ‘distinct from the moral system’ to qualify ‘argument’ or one might take it to qualify ‘Governor and Judge’. If one were to take ‘distinct from the moral system’ to qualify ‘Governor and Judge’, then one would be construing the sentence to mean that the ‘conscience’ did not attest to a (personal) ‘Governor and Judge’ distinct from the (impersonal) ‘moral system itself’, in a manner that could not be ‘disputed’. If one were to take ‘distinct from the moral system’ to qualify ‘argument’, then one would be construing the sentence to mean that the ‘argument’ for God, presented by the conscience, was only convincing for those who accepted the ‘informations’ of the conscience, and ‘the moral system’. Newman observes that ‘Conscience seemed to point in a certain direction as a witness for the real moral locality (so to speak,) of the unseen God’; the notion of a ‘real moral locality’ is far from clear; and there seems to be a difference between ‘pointing’, attesting, to a ‘moral locality’, and ‘pointing’ (simply) to ‘the unseen God’: Newman seems to hesitate about whether the (natural) ‘Conscience’ attests to God. Newman maintains that while conscience does involve a sense of a ‘something exterior’, which is ‘superior’ to the self, nevertheless, if this ‘something’ is taken to be a ‘principle’ – as the ‘philosophers’ take it – rather than a personal God, then this understanding of it does not ‘throw’ one out of oneself. If, to be ‘thrown out’ of oneself by the conscience, one must be aware that the ‘object’ presented by the conscience is not simply something ‘superior’ to oneself, but a ‘Person’, and if the experience of the conscience involves an awareness of a ‘something exterior … superior’ to the self, but not necessarily an awareness that this ‘something’ is a ‘Person’ or ‘Agent’, then one is not ‘thrown out’ of oneself by the conscience.
Newman observes that as ‘the inward law of Conscience brings with it no proof of its truth, and commands attention to it on its own authority, all obedience to it is of the nature of Faith’. How does this ‘faith’, involved in ‘obedience’ to the conscience, relate to the faith that is a response to the revelation of God? The faith that is a response to the revelation is a faith, ultimately, in a person – a faith in Christ, and in a personal God. Newman characterizes the ‘faith’ involved in obedience to the conscience as, in part, a matter of trusting where one does not have ‘proof’: one has faith that the ‘inward law’ of the conscience is ‘truth’, in the absence of ‘proof’ that it is so. Newman might regard the ‘law’, the principles, apprehended by the conscience as first principles: principles which do not admit of being proved – principles which one thinks with, and recurs to, in proving other things. If these are not self-evident, then they must be simply assumed – taken on faith – or rejected. More than this, though, Newman suggests that the ‘attention’ accorded to this ‘inward law’ involves a recognition of ‘authority’: there is something about the ‘inward law’, an ‘authority’ apparent in it, that ‘commands attention’. Newman observes that ‘the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become … [so that] a moral conviction is thus at length obtained of … the supreme authority of That, whatever it is, which is the object of the mind’s contemplation’. How does the ‘inward monitor’, here, relate to ‘the object of the mind’s contemplation’? Newman could be suggesting that in the ‘dictates’ of this ‘inward monitor’, presenting particular things as good – presenting particular acts as obligatory – there is a sustained ‘contemplation’ of goodness in itself: there is an awareness of goodness in all the deliverances of this ‘inward monitor’. What one ‘obeys’, when one acts in accordance with the conscience, is this goodness, which is something ‘exterior’ to, something transcending, the self. This ‘something exterior’ becomes present to the self via the conscience, so that the conscience is, in a sense, the presence of this ‘something’ in the self – the conscience is that whereby it ‘speaks within’. Would Newman maintain that the ‘inward monitor’ is experienced as an expression of ‘something exterior’ – so that this ‘inward’ activity is the expression of something ‘out of’ the self? Newman can suggest that the ‘dictates’ of the conscience have a certain ‘authority’ that is the authority of something other than the self (not simply of, say, a higher aspect of the self); and yet he can suggest that this ‘something’ might be taken to be a ‘Principle of nature’, which is ‘not an object of worship, inasmuch as each intelligent being [is], in a certain sense, himself a portion of it’. For Newman, then, it seems that, even if the conscience is experienced as the expression of something ‘out of’ the self, one is not ‘thrown’ out of oneself unless this ‘something’ is recognized to be a ‘Person’. In 1831, in ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he suggests that to register this ‘something exterior’ need not be to recognize that it is a ‘Person’; in 1834, in ‘Faith without Sight’, he suggests that the conscience is experienced as the ‘Voice’ of another who ‘speaks within’, or as the ‘echo’ of that ‘Voice’.
Newman suggests that, in the acts of th e ‘inward monitor’ of the conscience, there is an ‘object of the mind’s contemplation’: there is a kind of ‘contemplation’ associated with the conscience. He characterizes faith as a ‘practical perception of the unseen’. Faith, for Newman, is, like the conscience, like phronesis, ‘practical’ – it animates a kind of practice, and a kind of life. How, though, does this ‘practical perception of the unseen’ relate to a ‘perception of the unseen’, a ‘contemplation’, that is less evidently ‘practical’?
Notes
1 John Henry Newman, ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in Essays, Critical and Historical [hereafter referred to as ECH i] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 268–9.
2 The influence of Romantic ideas on Newman has been examined by Sidney John Coulson, in Newman and the Common Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) and in Religion and Imagination: ‘in Aid of a Grammar of Assent’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) and by Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
3 ECH i, 274–7.
4 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by David Ross (1980; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 45.
5 Quoted in James Pereiro, in Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 253.
6 Aristotle, Ethics, 114.
7 Ibid., 116.
8 Ibid., 21.
9 Ibid., 116–17.
10 Ibid., 110.
11 Ibid., 113–14.
12 Ibid., 36–7.
13 Ibid., 99.
14 Joseph Dunne discusses the complexity of what the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis might register in Back to the Rough Ground – in which he attempts to show how the Aristotelian notion of phronesis has been central to the thought of several modern philosophers – Newman, R. G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas. Looking at how these philosophers have developed the Aristotelian account of phronesis, Dunne then interrogates the various texts in which Aristotle discusses it, considering whether the Aristotelian account might afford notions that offer a way through some of the difficulties encountered by modern philosophy (which relate, Dunne suggests, to an overprivileging of techne, the systematic, ‘scientific’ understanding that is the counterpart to phronesis). Regarding the complexity of ‘perception’, or phronesis-nous, Dunne suggests that this perception is ‘usually not about objects, but about actions, motivations, gestures, expressions, events, or situations that are involved in a flux; and it may be that only with the phronetic insight itself is a particular pattern made to stand out in a way that escape notice before the occurrence of such insight’. Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgement and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 304.
15 Aristotle, Ethics, 110.
16 Ibid., 109.
17 Ibid., 115.
18 Ibid., 104.
19 ‘If reason is divine … in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything and this would seem actually to be each man, since it is the authoritative and better part of him … . We assume the gods to be above all other being blessed and happy, but what sort of actions must be assign to them? … . If we were to run through them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still, everyone supposes they live and therefore that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of god, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative, and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.’ Ethics, 195, 197
20 Aristotle, Ethics, 112–13.
21 Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (London: Longmans, Greene & Co., 1909), 59–60.
22 OUS, 61.
23 John Henry Newman, ‘Faith and Obedience’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iii [hereafter PPS iii] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 79–81.
24 PPS iii, 87.
25 Ibid., 80.
26 Ibid., 82–3.
27 Ibid., 81.
28 Ibid., 85.
29 Ibid., 86.
30 Ibid., 85.
31 Ibid., 86.
32 John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plan Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 17–18.
33 PPS ii, 20.
34 Ibid., 22–3.
35 Ibid., 19–20.
36 Ibid., 21–2.
37 Joseph Butler, who influenced Newman greatly, maintained, in his Analogy of Religion (1736) that ‘religion’ is a matter for ‘prudence’. ‘In questions of difficulty, or such as are thought so, where more satisfactory evidence cannot be had, or is not seen; if the result of examination be, that there appears upon the whole, any the lowest presumption on one side, and none on the other, or a greater presumption on one side, though in the lowest degree greater; this determines the question, even in matters of speculation; and in matters of practice, will lay us under an absolute and formal obligation, in point of prudence and of interest, to act upon that presumption or low probability … . For surely a man is as really bound in prudence to do what upon the whole appears … to be for his happiness, as what he certainly knows to be so. Nay further, in questions of great consequence, a reasonable man will think it concerns him to remark lower probabilities and presumptions than these.’
38 John Henry Newman, ‘Saving Knowledge’, in PPS ii, 153.
39 PPS ii, 157.
40 Ibid., 152–3.
41 Ibid., 153.
42 Ibid., 159.
43 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), (IV.xv.25)
44 Quoted in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 133. Taylor observes that ‘there is a certain family of “proofs” of the existence of God whose basic form is typically Augustinian. The demarche which is common to them all is something like this: my experience of my own thinking puts me in contact with a perfection, which at one and the same time shows itself to be an essential condition of that thinking and also to be far beyond my own finite scope and powers to attain. There must then be a higher being on which all this depends, i.e., God.’ Sources of the Self, 140. In A Secular Age (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2007) Taylor remarks on a contrast, which emerges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between an ideal of ‘human flourishing’ (associated variously with certain forms of Christianity, with Deism, and with ‘exclusive’ humanism – a humanism that ‘excludes’ God in conceiving of the capacities, and aims, of human life) and more ‘transformative’ ideals: where the idea of ‘human flourishing’ makes such ‘flourishing’ the ultimate aim of human life (an aim that might, or might not, be conceived of as something sanctioned by God), the ‘transformative’ ideal envisages the aim of human life as consisting in something ‘beyond’, transcendent of, human ‘flourishing’. In his account of the conscience, Newman attempts to discern in the conscience something like a ‘pull’ or a ‘summons’ beyond this-worldly human ‘flourishing’.
45 Augustine, Confessions (XI.ix.11).
46 John Henry Newman, ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 22.
47 OUS, 28–9.
48 Ibid., 22.
49 John Henry Newman, ‘Christian Nobleness’, in Sermons on Subjects of the Day [hereafter SSD] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 146–7.
50 SSD, 144.
51 Ibid., 146.
52 Ibid., 148.
53 Ibid., 147.
54 ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in OUS, 22.
55 OUS, 22.
56 Ibid., 23.
57 Ibid., 23–8.
58 John Henry Newman, ‘On Justice, as a Principle of Divine Governance’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 105–6.
59 OUS, 18–20.
60 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 109.
61 ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in OUS, 23.