Part 9

In Loss and Gain, a Catholic priest declares, ‘Englishmen have many gifts. Faith they have not.’¹ In the Discourse on ‘Faith and Private Judgement’ in Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849), Newman observes that ‘when we consider the beauty, the majesty, the completeness, the resources, the consolations, of the Catholic religion, it may strike us with wonder … that it does not convert the multitude of those who come in its way’ and he insists that ‘men do not become Catholics, because they have not faith’ – not ‘that men do not believe the Catholic Church because they do not believe it’ – but, rather, that they are deficient in the ‘faith’ that is a kind of ‘virtue’.²

Faith is a state of mind, it is a particular mode of thinking and acting, which is exercised, always indeed towards God, but in very various ways … . The multitude of men in this country have not this habit or character of mind. We could conceive, for instance, their believing in their own religions; this would be faith, though a faith improperly directed; but they do not believe even their own religions; they do not believe in any thing at all. It is a definite defect in their minds: as we might say that a person had not the virtue of meekness, or of liberality, or of prudence, quite independently of this or that exercise of the virtue, so there is such a virtue as faith, and there is such a defect as the absence of it. Now I mean to say that the great mass of men in this country have not this particular virtue called faith, have not this virtue at all. As a man might be without eyes or without hands, so they are without faith; it is a distinct want or fault in their soul; and what I say is, that, since they have not this faculty of believing, no wonder they do not embrace that, which cannot really be embraced without it. They do not believe any thing at all in any true sense; and therefore they do not believe the Church in particular.³

Newman observes that what he means by ‘faith’ is an assent to a ‘doctrine’ as proceeding from God.

What is faith? It is assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie. And further than this, since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God … . He who believes that God is true, and that this is His word, which He has committed to man, has no doubt at all. He is as certain that the doctrine taught is true, as that God is true; and he is certain, because God is true, because God has spoken, not because he sees its truth or can prove its truth. That is, faith has two peculiarities; – it is most certain, decided, positive, immovable in its assent, and it gives this assent not because it sees with eye, or sees with the reason, but because it is told by one who comes from God … . This is what faith was in the time of the Apostles … . They preached to the world that Christ was the Son of God, that He was born of a Virgin, that He had ascended on high, that He would come again to judge all, the living and the dead. Could the world see all this? could it prove it? how then were men to receive it? why did so many embrace it? on the word of the Apostles, who were, as their powers showed, messengers from God. They were to submit their reason to a living authority.⁴

He contrasts this submission ‘to a living authority’, with a submission to ‘a book’: there is little of genuine submission if one is ‘to take a book, such as Scripture, and to use it as you please, to master it, that is, to make yourself the master of it, to interpret it for yourself, and to admit just what you choose to see in it, and nothing more’.⁵ There is ‘an essential difference between the act of submitting to a living oracle and to his book; in the former case there is no appeal from the speaker, in the latter the final decision remains with the reader’.⁶ The belief professed by some in Scripture, as the word of God, may be ‘nothing better than a prejudice or inveterate feeling impressed on them when they were children. A proof of it is this; that, while they profess to be so shocked at Catholic miracles … they have no difficulty at all about Scripture narratives, which are quite as difficult to the reason.’⁷ Genuine faith is inconsistent with ‘doubt’. ‘If men believed now, as they did in the times of the Apostles, they could not doubt nor change. No one can doubt whether a word spoken by God is to be believed; of course it is; whereas any one, who is modest and humble, may easily be brought to doubt of his own inferences and deductions.’⁸ ‘Men … now’ are inclined to think that the ‘state of mind’ involved in recognizing the ‘claim’ of the Catholic Church, ‘the disposition to accept without reserve or question, is slavish’.⁹

It goes against them to believe her doctrine, not so much from want of evidence that she is from God, as because, if so, they shall have to submit their minds to living men, who have not their own cultivation or depth of intellect, and because they must receive a number of doctrines, whether they will or no, which are strange to their imagination and difficult to their reason.¹⁰

They ‘may acknowledge that the Catholic religion is noble and majestic: they may be struck with its wisdom, they may admire its adaptation to human nature, they may be penetrated by its tender and winning conduct, they may be awed by its consistency. But to commit themselves to it, that is another matter.’¹¹ While ‘reason’ might enable one to recognize that one should ‘commit’ oneself in this way, nevertheless, ‘reason’ does not ‘force the will’, and a commitment of this kind is an act of the will. ‘The two things are quite distinct from each other, seeing you ought to believe, and believing; reason, if left to itself, would bring you to the conclusion that you had sufficient grounds for believing, but belief is the gift of grace.’¹²

In his Discourse on ‘Faith and Doubt’, Newman reflects on the distinction between ‘seeing you ought to believe, and believing’.

Faith is the gift of God, and not a mere act of our own, which we are free to exert when we will. It is quite distinct from an exercise of reason, though it follows upon it. I may feel the force of the argument for the divine origin of the church; I may see that I ought to believe; and yet I may be unable to believe. This is no imaginary case; there is many a man who has ground enough to believe, who wishes to believe, but who cannot believe. It is always indeed his own fault, for God gives grace to all who ask for it, and use it, but still such is the fact, that conviction is not faith. Take the parallel case of obedience; many a man knows he ought to obey God, and does not and cannot, – through his own fault indeed, but still he cannot; for through grace alone can he obey. Now faith is not a mere conviction in reason, it is a firm assent, it is a clear certainty greater than any other certainty; and this is wrought in the mind by the grace of God, and by it alone. As then men may be convinced, and not act according to their conviction, so may they be convinced, and not believe according to their conviction. They may confess that the argument is against them, that they have nothing to say for themselves, and that to believe is to be happy; and yet after all, they avow they cannot believe, they do not know why, but they cannot; they acquiesce in unbelief, and they turn away from God and His Church. Their reason is convinced, and their doubts are moral ones, arising from an act of the will. In a word, the arguments for religion do not compel any one to believe, just as arguments for good conduct do not compel any one to obey. Obedience is the consequence of willing to obey, and faith is the consequence of willing to believe; we may see what is right, whether in matters of faith or obedience, of ourselves, but we cannot will what is right without the grace of God. Here is the difference between other exercises of reason, and arguments for the truth of religion. It requires no act of faith to assent to the truth that two and two make four; we cannot help assenting to it; and hence there is no merit in assenting to it; but there is merit in believing that the Church is from God; for though there are abundant reasons to prove it to us, yet we can, without an absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion; we may complain that it is not clearer, we may suspend our assent, we may doubt about it, if we will, and grace alone can turn a bad will into a good one.¹³

There is a difference, Newman maintains, between recognizing the force of an ‘argument’, and believing the proposition that the argument proves. To recognize the force of an argument is to recognize that one ‘ought’ to believe something, but it is not to be compelled to believe it: where an ‘ought’ is recognized, then an ‘act of the will’ is required. It is when ‘we can, without absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion’ that the ‘will’ is pertinent to belief: ‘we cannot help assenting’ to some arguments, or propositions. The sort of argument that moves one to recognize that one ‘ought’ to believe, is of a kind where one can, ‘without absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion’. That one can ‘quarrel with the conclusion’ depends on the nature of the argument; that one opts to ‘quarrel with the conclusion’ depends on the will. Newman envisages a case where ‘men may be convinced, and not believe according to their conviction’: being ‘convinced’ means ‘they … confess that the argument is against them, that they have nothing to say for themselves’; it means they recognize the strength of an ‘argument’, and they acknowledge they cannot counter it; yet to recognize the strength of an argument, is not, thereby, to believe what the argument shows – ‘After all, they avow they cannot believe, they do not know why, but they cannot.’

If one ‘cannot’ believe, and this is owing to the ‘will’, then the ‘will’ is not something over which one has power – it is something which determines what one ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ do: it is, before one acts, already disposed in a certain way – its disposition determined, perhaps, by how one has lived hitherto; but, however that may be, it is a will which is not something over which one has power, and Newman maintains that it is ‘grace’ which disposes it; ‘grace alone can turn a bad will into a good one.’ Those who look for counter-arguments, when ‘the argument is against them’, and ‘quarrel with the conclusion’, do so because they are unwilling to accept that conclusion. Newman does not attempt to characterize how the will is involved in maintaining certain beliefs; he maintains, merely, that it is involved. One is not passive, with respect to what one believes; those beliefs are not a mere reflex of whatever arguments one has been presented with; they are not a mere reflex of whatever arguments one has formed for oneself. In the experience of ‘looking’ for arguments, of resisting the ‘conclusion’ to arguments one recognizes to be ‘against’ one, of feeling that one ‘cannot believe’ certain things – that it is impossible to believe them – there is an experience of something at work other than ‘argument’ or ‘reason’ itself: the disposition of the will is making itself felt.

Conviction is a state of mind, and it is something beyond and distinct from the mere arguments of which it is the result; it does not vary with their strength or their number. Arguments lead to a conclusion, and when the arguments are stronger, the conclusion is clearer; but conviction may be felt as strongly in consequence of a clear conclusion as of one which is clearer. A man may be so sure upon six reasons, that he does not need a seventh, nor would feel surer if he had it. And so as regards the Catholic Church: men are convinced in very various ways, what convinces one, does not convince another; but this is an accident; the time comes any how, sooner or later, when a man ought to be convinced, and is convinced, and then he is bound not to wait for any more arguments, though they are producible. He will be in a condition to refuse more arguments, and will perhaps own that he has heard enough; he does not wish to read or think more, his mind is quite made up. Then it is his duty to join the Church at once; he must not delay; let him be cautious in counsel, but prompt in execution.¹⁴

One may, by reasoning, acquire the conviction that the ‘Church is from God’. The ‘time comes … when a man ought to be convinced, and is convinced’. One ‘ought to be convinced’ when one has good ‘reasons’ for being so; and one ‘is convinced’ when one recognizes that one ought to believe what those ‘reasons’ show. When one has a ‘mind [that] is quite made up’, one recognizes that one has a ‘duty to join the Church’. To recognize this ‘duty’ is to recognize that one ought to believe the Church. To recognize that one ought to believe the Church is not, in itself, to believe the Church. To ‘join the Church’ is to be granted the ‘grace’ by which one believes: when one is in the church, one is in a state in which one believes. One does not have the power to put oneself into such a state: if one were to wish to be in such a state, that act of wishing would be an expression of the state one would already be in; it could not determine that state – that state would determine it. If one is in a state in which one feels that one ‘cannot believe’, one cannot change this by wishing things were otherwise. Newman is not, then, maintaining that one can simply ‘choose’ to believe (arbitrarily). If, though, one recognizes that the state one is in, in which one ‘cannot believe’, might involve a ‘bad will’, one can strive to form in oneself a ‘good one’, by acting in accordance with the ‘light’ of the conscience (and one is, in any case, obliged to act in accordance with that ‘light’). What one thinks of as ‘bad’ or ‘good’, in this regard, will relate to what one believes, and what one believes will relate to whether or not one has a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ will; while one cannot simply ascertain, by introspection or the like, what sort of disposition of will one has, one can, at the least, strive to form in oneself a ‘good will’ by doing what seems to one to be right.

In his remarks on how a ‘man may be so sure upon six reasons, that he does not need a seventh’ Newman is counselling those who might be inclined to refrain from ‘join[ing] the Church’ until setthng fully all the arguments for and against doing so: argument in this matter, he suggests, can be interminable; it is not, in any case, independent of the ‘will’; one might have ‘reasons’ enough to act on, even if it might be possible to ‘quarrel’ with those reasons ‘without absurdity’ – and if one has ‘reasons’ enough, one should act on them.

‘Grace’ can, Newman maintains in his Discourse on ‘Nature and Grace’, be ‘mistaken for nature, and nature mistaken for grace’.

They may easily be mistaken for each other, because … the difference is in a great measure an inward, and therefore a secret one. Grace is lodged in the heart; it purifies the thoughts and motives, it raises the soul to God, it sanctifies the body, it corrects and exalts human nature in regard to those sins of which men are ashamed, and which they do not display. But in outward show, in single actions, in word, in profession, in teaching, in the social and political virtues, in striking and heroical exploits, on the public transitory scene of things, nature may counterfeit grace, nay even to the deception of him in whom the counterfeit occurs. Recollect that it is by nature, not by grace, that man has the gifts of reason and conscience; and reason and conscience will lead him to discover, and in a measure pursue, objects which are, properly speaking, supernatural and divine. The natural reason is able, from the things which are seen, from the voice of tradition, from the existence of the soul, and from the necessity of the case, to infer the existence of God. The natural heart can burst forth by fits and starts into emotions of love towards Him; the natural imagination can depict the beauty and glory of His attributes; the natural conscience may ascertain and put in order the truths of the great moral law, nay even to the condemnation of that concupiscence, which it is too weak to subdue, and is persuaded to tolerate. The natural will can do many things really good and praiseworthy; nay, in particular cases, or at particular seasons, when temptation is away, it may seem to have a strength which it has not, and to be imitating the austerity and purity of a Saint.¹⁵

Newman acknowledges that ‘grace is over all the earth; if it comes to good effect and bears fruit in the hearts of the unbaptized, [God] will reward it’.¹⁶ Yet he observes, in addition, that ‘we can only judge of what we see, and can only admire what is good, without having any means of determining the real moral condition of those who display it’.¹⁷ What ‘we see’ of others may not manifest their ‘real moral condition’: it does not, at any rate, manifest the ‘hearts’ of others fully, and grace is ‘lodged in the heart’.

Many are the tales and poems written now-a-days, expressing high and beautiful sentiments; I dare say some of you, my brethren, have fallen in with them, and perhaps you have thought to yourselves, that he must be a man of deep religious feeling and high religious profession, who could write so well. Is it so in fact, my brethren? it is not so; why? because after all it is but poetry, not religion; it is human nature exerting the powers of imagination and reason, which it has, till it seems to have that which it has not. There are, you know, in the animal world various creatures, which are able to imitate the voice of man; nature in like manner is a mockery of grace. The truth is, the natural man sees this or that principle to be good or true from the light of conscience; and then, since he has the power of reasoning, he knows that, if this be true, many other things are true likewise; and then, having the power of imagination, he pictures to himself those other things as true, though he does not really understand them. And then he brings what he has read and gained from others, who have had grace, to his aid, and completes his sketch; and then he throws his feelings and his heart into it, meditates on it, and kindles in himself a sort of enthusiasm, and thus he is able to write beautifully and touchingly about what to others may be a reality, but to him is nothing more than a fiction. Thus some can write about the early Martyrs, and others describe some great Saint of the middle ages, not exactly as a Catholic, but as if they had a piety and a seriousness, to which they are strangers. So too actors on a stage can excite themselves till they think they are the persons they represent … So it is, I say, with a number of authors in verse and prose; readers are deceived by their fine writing; they not only praise this or that sentiment, or argument, or description, in what they read, which happens to be true, but they put faith in the writer … A preacher or speaker, who is in a state of nature, or has fallen from grace, is able to say many things to touch the heart of a sinner or strike his conscience, whether from his natural powers, or from what he has read in books; and the latter forthwith takes him for his prophet and guide, on the warrant of these accidental truths which it required no supernatural gifts to enforce.¹⁸

Newman is concerned with how one might in ‘writing’ – ‘expressing high and beautiful sentiments’ – create the impression of having a certain character, this impression being, ultimately, a ‘fiction’. In ‘writing’ of sanctity, in creating a ‘sketch’ of a ‘Saint’, one evinces a certain knowledge of what sanctity is, and a certain attitude toward sanctity. What qualities of character are required if one is to have such a knowledge of sanctity? Can only those who have some sanctity of character themselves, or, at least, who have ‘piety and seriousness’, truly apprehend sanctity, so as to conceive of, and to appreciate the character of a ‘Saint’? Newman reflects, in this, on two different, but related things: on an exertion of the ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’ to ‘picture’ the character of a ‘Saint’; and on an exertion of the ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’ to feel (and display) a ‘sort of enthusiasm’ toward the character of a ‘Saint’ (showing ‘sentiments’ comporting with, or expressing, a character marked by ‘piety and seriousness’). He maintains that the ‘natural man’ can recognize a ‘principle’ to be true ‘from the light of conscience’, and make inferences from that ‘principle’, recognizing ‘other things’ to be ‘true likewise’, and then ‘picture’ those other things ‘as true’, ‘though he does not really understand them’; and he can, moreover, make use of what ‘he has read and gained from others, who have had grace’; and, doing this, the ‘natural man’ can make a ‘sketch’, for which he feels a ‘sort of enthusiasm’ – and ‘thus … can write about the early Martyrs … [or] some great Saint’. These exercises of ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’ are concerned with forming a ‘sketch’ of a holy character, a ‘Saint’. The ‘natural man’ reasons from a ‘principle’ recognized by the ‘light of conscience’ to ‘other things’ (implied by the principle) and then ‘pictures … as true’ those ‘other things’: if it is a ‘principle’ that certain acts are good, then this implies that other acts are, likewise, good; if a ‘Saint’ lives out what the ‘conscience’ ordains, then one may ‘picture’ how a Saint lives, by thinking out the various things that the ‘conscience’ ordains, reasoning from a ‘principle’ that one recognizes ‘in the light of conscience’. Newman suggests that one who thinks out, by reasoning from a ‘principle’, a ‘sketch’ of what perfect goodness would be like, can ‘picture … as true’ certain good acts ‘though he does not really understand them’. What sort of ‘understanding’ is it by which one can ‘really understand them’? Would it be the understanding involved in carrying out those acts? Would that understanding be, ultimately, a form of the ‘light of conscience’? If so, this would suggest that those acts can be properly understood only in the ‘light of conscience’, when that ‘light’ is properly developed (through a life lived in accordance with that ‘light’). That is, Newman seems to be contrasting different kinds of ‘understanding’ – an understanding from without (by ‘reasoning’ and ‘imagination’) and an understanding from within (by something like connaturality). Newman had presented a contrast between ‘reasoning’ and ‘conscience’ as early as 1831, in a sermon on ‘Evangelical Sanctity the Completion of Natural Virtue’. Newman observes in that sermon that ‘morals may be cultivated as a science; it furnishes a subject-matter on which reason may exercise itself to any extent whatever, with little more than the mere external assistance of conscience and Scripture’.¹⁹ The ‘exercise’ of ‘reason’ involved in the ‘science’ is something ‘external’ to ‘conscience and Scripture’. ‘The [ancient] Roman moralists write as admirably, as if they were moral men.’²⁰ The understanding of the ‘science’ of ‘morals’ is something other than the understanding of goodness involved in being ‘moral’ (though one can, by ‘reasoning’, acquire enough of an understanding of the ‘science’ of ‘morals’ to appreciate how those who are ‘moral’ would act). In his Discourse on ‘Nature and Grace’ he envisages a ‘reasoning’ of this kind – a making of inferences from a ‘principle’ apprehended by the ‘light of conscience’ – being used to form a ‘sketch’ of ‘a Saint’. A Saint, it would seem, is moved not simply by the ‘light of conscience’, however, but by the ‘light’ of ‘faith’. How much, then, could one get an understanding of the ‘principles’ moving a ‘Saint’, by reasoning from a ‘principle’ apprehended by the ‘light of conscience’? In his Discourse on ‘Sainthness, the Standard of Christian Principle’, in Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, Newman suggests that the ‘light’ of faith, rather than superseding the ‘light’ of conscience, ‘sustains’ that ‘natural’ light: ‘Conscience … cannot perform [its “office”] adequately without external assistance; it needs to be regulated and sustained. Left to itself, though it tells truly at first, it soon becomes wavering, ambiguous, and false; it needs good teachers and good examples to keep it up to the mark and line of duty … the natural inward light grows dim … [when] the Light, which lightens every one born into the world, is removed out of sight.’²¹ To reason, then, from a ‘principle’ recognized by the ‘natural … light of conscience’, could be to get some sense of how ‘the Saint’ – animated by a ‘sight’ of the ‘Light, which lightens every one’ – would act. Newman observes, moreover, that a ‘natural man’, making a ‘sketch’ of a Saint, could ‘bring what he has read and gained from others, who have had grace, to his aid’, reasoning from ‘what he has read’ about the ‘principles’ of faith, to ascertain what acts would be ordained by those principles. The contrast, then, between a ‘pious’ understanding and a merely ‘literary’ understanding, seems to be between a ‘seeing with’ certain principles, so to speak, such that those principles are constitutive of the mind that ‘sees with’ them, and a reasoning that is ‘external’ to those principles, which takes those principles as a ‘subject-matter on which reason may exercise itself to any extent whatever’.

Newman maintains, in his Discourse on ‘Nature and Grace’ that one who ‘pictures’ perfect goodness, through the use of ‘reasoning’ and ‘imagination’, can ‘write beautifully and touchingly about what to others may be a reality, but to him is nothing more than a fiction’. What exactly is it that is ‘a fiction’ to the ‘natural man’? Is it that the ‘natural man’ has no experience, in himself, of sanctity as ‘a reality’, and so can only imagine it, or is it that the ‘natural man’ regards sanctity itself as a ‘fiction’? Newman likens how the ‘natural man’ imagines ‘a Saint’, with apparent ‘piety and seriousness’, to how ‘actors on a stage can excite themselves till they think they are the persons they represent’. Though actors, may, while ‘on the stage’ in some sense ‘think they are the persons they represent’, they are, equally, conscious that they are not those persons – they are aware that they are creating a representation, a ‘fiction’. How is the writer, imagining a ‘Saint’, like these actors? The writer seems to exhibit a certain character (‘piety and seriousness’) in imagining, and appreciating, a character (that of a ‘Saint’); the writer exhibits this character in writing ‘beautifully and touchingly about what to others may be a reality, but to him is nothing more than a fiction’: that is, the writer seems to manifest the sort of character possessed by those for whom sanctity is ‘a reality’. Newman seems to suggest that there is a way of apprehending sanctity, or that there is a kind of insight into sanctity, that comports with a certain kind of character: to be one of those for whom sanctity is a ‘reality’, is to have ‘piety and seriousness’. The writer, Newman maintains, is like those ‘actors on the stage’ who, imagining certain ‘persons’, ‘think they are the persons they represent’. When they ‘think they are the persons they represent’, they are in a state of mind in which certain things are envisaged ‘as if’ real. What is significant, here, is the act of ‘taking something as if real’. The writer, imagining the ‘Saint’, treats the ‘Saint’ (or sanctity) ‘as if’ real; and, in an act of imaginative identification – envisaging the thoughts, feelings, acts of the Saint, in forming a ‘sketch’ of the Saint – treats ‘as if’ real those things which the Saint regards as real. The act of treating something ‘as if’ real resembles, while being quite distinct from, the act of regarding that thing as a ‘reality’. Newman suggests that the writer, in imagining a certain character, treats ‘as if’ real things which are, for those who have a certain character, simply ‘a reality’.

To have a certain character is to have a certain sense of reality; but to have a certain sense of reality is not always to be ‘moved … to act upon’ that sense. Newman maintains, in his Discourse on ‘Sainthness the Standard of Christian Principle’, that the ‘awakened soul’, when ‘it has heard and has faith in the word of God’, undergoes ‘a change in its views and estimation of things’ (a change which is not necessarily a ‘moral conversion’, a change which is not necessarily a matter of being ‘moved … to act upon the sights it sees’), perceiving that ‘sainthness and all its attendants … are the high and precious things’: those who undergo this change ‘have the idea of a Saint’ such that while they ‘may not do what is right and good … they know what is true … . They have a standard for their principles of conduct, and it is the image of Saints which forms it for them.’²² Newman likens this perception of the ‘idea of a Saint’ to the sight of Christ transfigured on Mount Tabor, when the ‘holy Apostles’, experiencing a ‘glimpse of heaven’, were ‘introduced into a new range of ideas, into a new sphere of contemplation’.²³ In his Discourse on ‘Nature and Grace’, Newman would contrast this perception of ‘the image of Saints’, as a ‘reality’, a perception that is of ‘grace’, and associated with ‘faith’ – constituting a ‘standard’, by which a ‘new sphere of contemplation’ is ‘introduced’ – with the imagining of ‘a Saint’ by the ‘natural man’. In his Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’, Newman maintains that the perception of ‘things spiritual’ which ‘grace’ gives is virtually a kind of ‘sight’: ‘One of the defects which man incurred on the fall, was ignorance, or spiritual blindness; and one of the gifts received on his restoration is a perception of things spiritual; so that, before he is brought under the grace of Christ, he can but inquire, reason, argue, and conclude, about religious truth; but afterwards he sees it.’²⁴

Newman maintains, in his Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’, that ‘grace’ is not so much the ‘eye’ by which one perceives as it is the ‘light’ by which objects are made perceptible.

You ask, what it is you need, besides eyes, in order to see the truths of revelation: I will tell you at once; you need light. Not the keenest eyes can see in the dark. Now, though your mind be the eye, the grace of God is the light; and you will as easily exercise your eyes in this sensible world without the sun, as will be able to exercise your mind in the spiritual world without a parallel gift from without. Now you are born under a privation of this blessed spiritual light; and, while it remains, you will not, cannot, really see God. I do not say you will have no thought at all about God, nor be able to talk about Him. True, but you will not be able to do more than reason about Him. Your thoughts and your words will not get beyond a mere reasoning. I grant then what you claim; you claim to be able by your mental powers to reason about God: doubtless you can, but to infer a thing is not to see it in respect to the physical world, nor is it in the spiritual.²⁵

Newman contrasts the way in which a ‘Catholic sees … Catholic truths’ with various other ways in which those truths may be apprehended.

There is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world; it comes down by tradition from age to age; it is carried forward by preaching and profession from one generation to another, and is poured about into all quarters of the world. It is found in fulness and purity in the Church alone, but portions of it, larger or smaller, escape far and wide, and penetrate into places which have never been illuminated by divine grace. Now men may take up and profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them; these fragments of revelation, such as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, or the Atonement, are the religion which they have been taught in their childhood; and therefore they retain them, and profess them, and repeat them, without really seeing them, as the Catholic sees them, but as receiving them merely by word of mouth, from imitation of others … . Then again Catholic truths and rites are so beautiful, so great, so consolatory, that they draw one on to love and admire them with a natural love, as a prospect might draw them on, or a skilful piece of mechanism. Hence men of lively imagination profess this doctrine or that, or adopt this or that ceremony or usage, for their very beauty-sake, not asking themselves whether they are true, and having no real perception or mental hold of them … . And moreover the Catholic Creed, as coming from God, is so harmonious, so consistent with itself, holds together so perfectly, so corresponds part to part, that an acute mind, knowing one portion of it, would often infer another portion, merely as a matter of just reasoning. Thus a correct thinker might be sure, that, if God is infinite and man finite, there must be mysteries in religion. It is not that he really feels the mysteriousness of religion, but he infers it; he is led to it as a matter of necessity, and, from mere clearness of mind and love of consistency, he maintains it. Again, a man may say, ‘Since this or that doctrine has so much evidence in its favour, of course I must accept it;’ he has no real sight or direct perception of it, but he takes up the profession of it, because he feels it would be absurd, under the conditions with which he starts, to do otherwise. He does no more than load himself with a form of words, instead of contemplating, with the eye of the soul, God Himself, the Source of all truth, and this doctrine as proceeding from His mouth … . In these cases reason becomes the handmaid of faith: still it is not faith; it does not rise above an intellectual view or notion; it affirms, not as grasping the truth, not as seeing, but as ‘being of opinion’, as ‘judging’, as ‘coming to a conclusion’.²⁶

Newman contrasts a ‘professing’ of a truth, with a ‘seeing’ of that truth. There are those who ‘profess … and repeat … without really seeing … from imitation of others’; there are those who ‘profess this doctrine or that … for their very beauty-sake, not asking themselves whether they are true, and having no real perception or mental hold of them’; there are those who recognize the ‘evidence’ in ‘favour’ of a doctrine, and who, from ‘love of consistency’, profess it, as recognizing ‘it would be absurd, under the conditions … to do otherwise’. In all these cases, something other than the ‘doctrine’ itself is contemplated, as an object – whether ‘others’ who are imitated, or ‘beauty’, or logical ‘consistency’. The ‘Catholic’, by contrast, ‘sees’ certain doctrines, or has ‘real perception or mental hold of them’, or contemplates ‘with the eye of the soul, God Himself, the Source of all truth, and [these doctrines] as proceeding from His mouth’.²⁷

Newman maintains that the Catholic, apprehending certain objects as ‘a reality’, has something like a ‘spiritual sight’ of those objects. It was this kind of ‘spiritual sight’ which made the Martyrs ‘what they were’. ‘No one is a Martyr for a conclusion, no one is a Martyr for an opinion; it is faith that makes Martyrs. He who knows and loves the things of God has not power to deny them … . The Martyrs saw, and how could they but speak what they had seen?’²⁸ Though some, by reasoning, get to the ‘conclusion … that the Catholic Church comes from God … [and] do not doubt [this conclusion] in their reason at all … they cannot rule their mind to grasp and keep hold of this truth.’²⁹ Newman maintains that ‘it is the office of grace to clear up gloom and haziness, to steady that fitful vision, to perfect reason by faith, and to convert a logical conclusion into an object of intellectual sight’.³⁰ One may get to certain ‘conclusions’ by ‘reason’, but the ‘sight’ of these conclusions requires (or is) ‘faith’.

Human reason … is the way to faith; its conclusions are often the very objects of faith. It precedes faith, when souls are converted to the Catholic Church; and it is the instrument which the Church herself is guided to make use of, when she is called upon to put forth those definitions of doctrine, in which, according to the promise and power of her Lord and Saviour, she is infallible; but still reason is one thing and faith is another, and reason can as little be made a substitute for faith, as faith can be made a substitute for reason.³¹

Newman maintains that faith ‘convert[s]’ a ‘conclusion’ to an ‘object of intellectual sight’; one might take this to mean that faith is itself the ‘intellectual sight’, or that it is the means to the ‘intellectual sight’. One might regard this ‘sight’ as a kind of ‘looking with’ the ‘doctrines’ of the Church – a ‘perception’ of that which is revealed by those ‘doctrines’. In his Discourse on ‘Sainthness the Standard of Christian Principle’, Newman associates having the ‘idea of a Saint’, as a ‘standard for … principles of conduct’, with having an ‘image of Saints’. Indeed, he maintains that the ‘image … makes’ the ‘standard’: he associates having objects of ‘intellectual sight’ with having ‘images’ of those objects. In his Discourse on ‘Faith and Doubt’, he suggests that one who worships ‘with a caveat’, that ‘he would not answer for himself that some argument might not come to light, which he had never heard before, which would make it a grave moral duty in him to suspend his judgment and his devotion’ is, in truth, ‘worshipping his own mind, his own dear self, and not God’, such that ‘his idea of God was a mere accidental form which his thoughts took at this time or that, – for a long period or a short one, as the case might be, – not an image of the great External Object, but a passing sentiment or imagination which meant nothing at all’.³² To have something beyond the ‘self’ as an ‘object’, in ‘devotion’, is to have ‘an image of the great External Object’, as distinct from a ‘passing sentiment or imagination’.

In his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans (1850), Newman maintains that Protestants misunderstand the religious ‘aspect of Catholic countries’, as they do not appreciate that faith, for Catholics, is a kind of ‘sight’ (rather than ‘love’ or ‘obedience’) and they do not appreciate that faith is a kind of ‘sight’, rather than ‘love’ or ‘obedience’, because they do not have a faith of this kind.³³ In ‘Catholic countries’, Newman acknowledges, a ‘definite character’ is apparent in the ‘nation’, marked by ‘the combined and contrary faults of profaneness and superstition’, such that the ‘most sacred feelings, the most august doctrines, are glibly enunciated in the shape of some short and smart theological formula; purgatory, hell, and the evil spirit, are a sort of household words upon their tongue; the most solemn duties, such as confession, or saying office, whether as spoken of or as performed, have a business like air and a mechanical action about them, quite inconsistent with their real nature’.³⁴ Newman acknowledges that this ‘character’ exists, but he maintains that it is ‘the very phenomenon, which must necessarily result from a revelation of divine truth falling upon the human mind in its existing state of ignorance and moral feebleness’.³⁵ He maintains that the Catholic understanding of what faith is – the idea that faith can exist apart from ‘love’ – better accounts for the ‘phenomenon’ presented by ‘Catholic countries’, ‘a confused and motley scene … good and evil mingled together in all conceivable measures of combination and varieties of result’ than the Protestant understanding of faith.³⁶

Protestants, then, consider that faith and love are inseparable; where there is faith, there, they think, are love and obedience; and in proportion to the strength and degree of the former, are the strength and degree of the latter. They do not think the inconsistency possible of really believing without obeying; and, where they see disobedience, they cannot imagine there the existence of real faith. Catholics, on the other hand, hold that faith and love, faith and obedience, faith and works, are simply separable, and ordinarily separated, in fact; that faith does not imply love, obedience, or works; that the firmest faith, so as to move mountains, may exist without love, – that is, real faith, as really faith in the strict sense of the word as the faith of a martyr or a doctor. In other words, when Catholics speak of faith they are contemplating the existence of a gift which Protestantism does not even imagine. Faith is a spiritual sight of the unseen; and since in matter of fact Protestantism does not impart this sight, does not see the unseen, has no experience of this habit, this act of the mind – therefore, since it retains the word ‘faith’, it is obliged to find some other meaning for it; and its common, perhaps its commonest, idea is, that faith is substantially the same as obedience; at least, that it is the impulse, the motive of obedience, or the fervor and heartiness which attend good works. In a word, faith is hope or it is love, or it is a mixture of the two. Protestants define or determine faith, not by its nature or essence, but by its effects. When it succeeds in producing good works, they call it real faith; when it does not, they call it counterfeit.³⁷

Faith, for Newman, is a ‘spiritual sight of the unseen’; and he maintains that the ‘nearest parallel’ to ‘faith’, as a ‘spiritual sight of the unseen’, is the ‘moral sense’.

Faith, in a Catholic’s creed, is a certainty of things not seen, but revealed; a certainty, preceded indeed in many cases by particular exercises of the intellect, as conditions, by reflection, prayer, study, argument, or the like, and ordinarily by the instrumental sacrament of Baptism, but caused directly by a supernatural influence on the mind from above. Thus it is a spiritual sight; and the nearest parallel by which it can be illustrated is the moral sense. As nature has impressed upon our minds a faculty of recognizing certain moral truths, when they are presented to us from without, so that we are quite sure that veracity, for instance, benevolence, and purity, are right and good, and that their contraries involve guilt, in a somewhat similar way, grace impresses upon us inwardly that revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye; similarly, yet more vividly and distinctly, because the moral perception consists in sentiments, but the grace of faith carries the mind on to objects. This certainty, or spiritual sight, which is included in the idea of faith, is, according to Catholic teaching, perfectly distinct in its own nature from the desire, intention, and power of acting agreeably to it.³⁸

Newman likens ‘grace’ to the ‘moral sense’: the ‘moral sense’ is to certain ‘moral truths … presented to us from without’, as grace is to the ‘revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye’; the ‘moral sense’ recognizes the ‘m oral truths … presented to us from without’, and grace ‘impresses upon us inwardly the revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye’. How much, though, can the ‘moral truths’ which the ‘moral sense’ recognizes be regarded as something ‘from without’? If there is a ‘moral sense’, then this would seem to be a capacity for understanding, and recognizing, what is good. The ‘truths’ that the ‘moral sense’ recognizes could be taken, then, to be deliverances of the ‘moral sense’, expressions of the understanding of goodness involved in the ‘moral sense’, such that they originate from within – with the ‘moral sense’ recognizing those truths, when ‘presented’ with them, as its own, so to speak. The truths presented in the ‘revelation’, however, are not truths for which the mind has a native ‘sense’. It seems, though, that Newman is concerned primarily with the effect of the ‘moral sense’ in making one ‘quite sure’. As the ‘moral sense’ makes one ‘quite sure’ of certain ‘truths’, so grace makes one certain of the truths presented in ‘that revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye’. He maintains that grace ‘impresses upon us inwardly that revelation’. The ‘impressing’ here may be taken to be a ‘making certain’ of something: grace ‘impresses upon us’ the truth of ‘that revelation’. The ‘sight’ of the objects revealed by ‘that revelation’, the objects of faith, is not, then, a direct perception of them (as if, by ‘grace’, one acquired new faculties of perception, susceptible of receiving impressions of those objects). What is ‘impresse[d] upon us’ is the ‘revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye’: the objects revealed by that revelation do not ‘impress’ themselves directly, on some faculty for receiving that impression (by which the ‘impressing’ is registered). The revelation, which is something ‘sensible’ to ‘ear and eye’, presented to the ordinary faculties of perception, is the sole means of acquiring any insight into the objects which it reveals. To believe that revelation, to make a ‘firm assent’ to it, is to regard the objects revealed by it as realities, to attend to them as objects of ‘intellectual sight’, of which one is certain.

Newman contrasts the ‘perception’ of the ‘moral sense’ with the ‘grace of faith’ – ‘the moral perception consists in sentiments, but the grace of faith carries the mind on to objects’. What does Newman mean by the remark that the ‘moral perception consists in sentiments’? It seems to mean that one recognizes certain ‘moral truths’ – ‘that veracity, for instance, benevolence, and purity, are right and good’ – by the ‘sentiments’ one feels toward acts of ‘veracity … benevolence, and purity’ when presented with them, ‘sentiments’ of approval, admiration, and the like. What, though, does Newman mean by the claim that ‘the grace of faith carries the mind on to objects’? Could this mean that one has certain ‘objects’ of ‘intellectual sight’ only if one believes the ‘revelation which comes to us sensibly’? The only way in which those objects could be ‘presented’ to one is through that revelation, for the ‘mind’ has no other way of registering them. The ‘moral sense’ responds to objects, once it has them ‘presented’ to it, whereas the ‘grace of faith’ is what makes one ‘have’ certain objects: it is what makes them present to the mind, as ‘objects’ of ‘intellectual sight’ or ‘spiritual sight’. This ‘certainty, or spiritual sight’, Newman maintains, is something quite distinct from the ‘desire, intention, and power of acting agreeably to it’.

In ‘Sainthness the Standard of Christian Principle’, Newman reflects on the ‘change’ that is experienced by those who ‘first begin to see with the eyes of the soul, with the intuition which grace gives, Jesus the Sun of Justice, and the heaven of Angels and Archangels in which He dwells; and the bright Morning Star, which is the Blessed Mary; and the continual floods of light falling and striking against the earth, and transformed, as they fall, into an infinity of hues, which are the Saints’.³⁹ Newman likens this ‘intuition’ to the ‘sight’ of the transfigured Christ, granted to the ‘favoured disciples’: ‘Such was the surprise, such the transport, which came upon the favoured disciples, whom, on one occasion, our Lord took up with Him to the mountain’s top. He left the sick world, the tormented restless multitude, at its foot, and He took them up, and was transfigured before them.’⁴⁰

Newman maintains in his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans that in the ‘motley scene’, which is the ‘aspect of Catholic countries’, there is evident, in the ‘populace’, a ‘clear intellectual apprehension of the truth’, despite a certain ‘moral confusion’. Catholic truths are present to the minds of the populace as ‘facts which all men … take for granted’.

Just as in England, the whole community, whatever the moral state of individuals, knows about railroads and electric telegraphs; and about the Court, and men in power, and proceedings in Parliament; and about religious controversies, and about foreign affairs, and about all that is going on around and beyond them: so, in a Catholic country, the ideas of heaven and hell, Christ and the evil spirit, saints, angels, souls in purgatory, grace, the blessed Sacrament, the sacrifice of the Mass, absolution, indulgences, the virtue of relics, of holy images, of holy water, and of other holy things, are facts, by good and bad, by young and old, by rich and poor, to be taken for granted.⁴¹

There is, in a ‘Catholic country’, a picture of the world, common to all, comprised of ‘facts attested by each to all, and by all to each, common property, primary points of thought, and landmarks, as it were, upon the territory of knowledge’ – ‘the great invisible subjects … possess their imagination’.⁴² Newman considers various scenes that one might be presented with in a Catholic town, making up the ‘spectacle of supernatural faith acting upon the multitudinous mind of a people’, one such scene being a ‘pageant’, staged by the ‘incorporated trades’ of a town. He suggests tha t while such a ‘pageant’ might appear ‘profane’ to some – as treating heavenly realities in too earthly a fashion – it is not so to those who ‘have a vision within, which … takes up into itself, the external pageant’.

You go forward, and you find preparations proceeding for a great pageant or mystery; it is a high festival, and the incorporated trades have each undertaken their special religious celebration. The plumbers and glaziers are to play the Creation; the barbers the Call of Abraham; and at night is to be the grandest performance of all, the Resurrection and Last Judgment, played by the carpenters, masons, and blacksmiths. Heaven and hell are represented – saints, devils, and living men; and the chef d’oeuvre of the exhibition is the display of fireworks to be let off as the finale. ‘How unutterably profane!’ … you cry. Yes, profane to you, my dear brother – profane to a population which only half believes; not profane to those who, however coarse-minded, however sinful, believe wholly, who, one and all, have a vision within, which corresponds with what they see, which resolves itself into, or rather takes up into itself, the external pageant, whatever be the moral condition of each individual composing the mass. They gaze, and, in drinking in the exhibition with their eyes, they are making one continuous and intense act of faith.⁴³

Those who ‘gaze’ at the ‘external pageant’ believe in the realities represented in it, and, as they contemplate those realities in gazing at the ‘pageant’ – this ‘sight’ or ‘vision’ of those realities being itself faith – so their experience of the pageant differs from that of those who only ‘half believe’. With regard to the relation between the ‘vision’ and the ‘external pageant’, Newman observes that the vision ‘corresponds with’ the pageant, that it ‘resolves itself into’ the pageant, and that it ‘takes up into itself’ the pageant. While the phrase ‘resolves itself into’ suggests that the pageant is an interpretation of the vision – such that it sets out, and makes visible, the elements of that vision, showing what it consists of – the phrase ‘takes up into itself’ suggests that the vision interprets the pageant – such that it construes the pageant as presenting signs of the objects that it contemplates (‘colour[ing] … [the] object to which it directs its view’, ‘incorporat[ing] … [it] into the substance of its own creations’ – to use some of the phrases Newman used of the ‘poetical mind’ in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’). Newman suggests that, as those who ‘gaze’ on the pageant have the things represented in it as objects of intellectual ‘sight’, and are certain that those things are realities, so they are not disconcerted when they have those realities presented to ‘their eyes’: such a presentation ‘corresponds’ with how those realities are present to their ‘intellectual sight’; it is not at odds with their sense of the presence of those realities, as external to them, impressing themselves on them; the ‘positiveness’ of the presentation is not felt by them to be unsuitable – they do not feel those realities should be presented in an indistinct, indefinite manner, for they are not present in such a manner to faith. Newman maintains, equally, that they are conscious less of the pageant as an ‘external’, sensible thing, than of the ‘vision within’: they are not affected by the incidental defects in the form of the pageant, for the ‘vision within’ is independent of such ‘externals’, and is not something that might be injured by them. Newman contrasts this attitude with the attitude involved in ‘Protestant’ devotion.

They have no certainty of the doctrines they profess, they do but feel that they ought to believe them, and they try to believe them, and they nurse the offspring of their reason, as a sickly child, bringing it out of doors only on fine days. They feel very clear and quite satisfied, while they are very still; but if they turn about their head, or change their posture ever so little, the vision of the Unseen, like a mirage, is gone from them. So they keep the exhibition of their faith for high days and great occasions, when it comes forth with sufficient pomp and gravity of language, and ceremonial of manner. Truths slowly totter out with Scripture texts at their elbow, as unable to walk alone. Moreover Protestants know, if such and such things be true, what ought to be the voice, the tone, the gesture, and the carriage attendant upon them; thus reason, which is the substance of their faith, supplies the rubrics, as I may call them, of their behaviour. This, some of you, my brethren, call reverence; though, I am obliged to say, it is … a mannerism.⁴⁴

The ‘vision of the Unseen’, for ‘Protestants’, is sustained by various things external to it – whether ‘reason’, or ‘ceremonial’, or ‘Scripture texts’. The ‘substance’ of this ‘vision’ is ‘reason’: those who have this attitude are induced, by ‘reason’, to ‘feel they ought to believe’, and they ‘try to believe’ – and their ‘vision’ is sustained by their awareness of their reasons for belief, so that if they ‘are very still’, attending to those reasons, they ‘feel very clear and quite satisfied’ – and they know ‘what ought to be the voice, the tone, the gesture and the carriage attendant upon’ belief in certain things. They are attending to various ‘oughts’ – to what they ‘ought’ to believe, and to how believers ‘ought’ to act – and they are attending to their own efforts to fulfil these ‘oughts’, instead of simply attending to the ‘objects’ of faith.

Newman professes, in setting out an account of ‘faith’ in his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans, to be presenting the ‘Catholic teaching on the subject of faith’. How much might Newman himself be suspected – in his a ccount of ‘Catholic countries’, and of the ‘vision within’, animating Catholics – of setting out what ‘ought’ to be the case, according to ‘Catholic teaching’? He is maintaining, with regard to ‘Catholic teaching on the subject of faith’, that considered ‘as an hypothesis’, it can ‘serve and suffice to solve the difficulty which is created in [the] minds [of Protestants] by the aspect of Catholic countries’: ‘Walk forward, then, into the Catholic Church, and the difficulty, like a phantom, will, as a matter of necessity, disappear.’⁴⁵ To become a Catholic is to accept the ‘Catholic teaching’ that faith is a kind of ‘spiritual sight’, and that it is distinct from ‘obedience’; to accept that faith is like this, is to overcome the ‘difficulty’ presented by ‘the aspect of Catholic countries’. On becoming a Catholic, one accepts the ‘teaching’ that faith is like this; but, more than that, will one not know, from experience, that faith is like this, for will one not have this sort of faith oneself – a faith for which ‘the invisible mysteries of faith ever stand out, as if in bodily shape, before … [the] mental gaze’?⁴⁶ Newman himself, on becoming a Catholic, felt that he experienced in himself, and that he detected in his fellow Catholics, a faith of this kind. It was, he declared in a letter to a friend, a ‘real religion, not a mere opinion such, that you have no confidence that your next door neighbour holds it too, but an external objective substantive creed and worship’.⁴⁷ In his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans he maintains that ‘among a Protestant people … private judgment does but create opinions, and nothing more; and these opinions are peculiar to each individual, and different from those of any one else’, and this ‘leads men to keep their feelings to themselves, because the avowal of them only causes in others irritation or ridicule’: those who hold such opinions experience them as private or ‘peculiar’ to themselves.⁴⁸ When Newman maintains that Catholicism is ‘external objective substantive’, and that it involves a ‘confidence that your next door neighbour holds it too’, the phrase ‘external objective substantive’ can be interpreted in a couple of ways: the phrase could mean that it is ‘external objective substantive’ in that ‘your next door neighbour holds it too’ – it is shared with others, it is not merely ‘private’ or ‘peculiar’ to oneself, and it is a ‘real religion’ involving a ‘creed’ and ‘worship’ which is not something one has created oneself, but which is ‘external’ to oneself; the phrase could, equally, mean that as it is ‘external objective substantive’, as it is an apprehension of what is ‘real’, one can have ‘confidence that [one’s] next door neighbour holds it too’ – for when one apprehends what is ‘real’, one has ‘confidence’ that others will apprehend it as well. If the faith of the ‘Protestant’, as Newman characterizes it, involves an excessive attention to what one ‘ought’ to believe – an excessive contemplation of oneself as judging, of ‘private judgement’, and of the arguments that set out what one ‘ought’ to believe – could the faith of the ‘Catholic’, as Newman characterizes it, involve an excessive attention to what others believe, a consciousness of believing as ‘your next door neighbour’ believes? If Protestants identify their faith with what is ‘private’, might Catholics identify their faith with what is ‘public’ or ‘common’ (according it a kind of belief which is a matter of identifying oneself with others – and which requires a sense of the presence of others – in ‘ceremonial’, in social experiences, and the like – if it is to be felt)? Newman insists that a sense of the ‘soul’, in its individuality, in its uniqueness, is central to Catholicism – that ‘the Church … contemplates … not society in the first place, but in the second place, and in the first place individuals’, that it ‘overlooks everything in comparison of the immortal soul’: this ‘supernatural sight and supernatural aim’ is at the centre of Catholicism, so that one cannot make sense of it, if one does not have this sense of the ‘immortal soul’ (and one gets this sense of the soul from having a sense of oneself as ‘individual’, distinct from the ‘world’).⁴⁹ In Catholicism that which is innermost in the self is recognized, and that which is innermost in the self is engaged in a ‘real … worship’ which expresses it, and sustains it. When Newman maintains that Catholicism is a ‘real religion, not a mere opinion such, that you have no confidence that your next door neighbour holds it too, but an external objective substantive creed and worship’, he can be taken to mean that it is not felt, by those who profess it, to be a mere ‘private … opinion’, the ‘offspring’ of ‘private judgement’, but to be an apprehension of what is ‘real’: to feel that what one professes is a ‘private … opinion’ is to contemplate oneself, as forming that opinion; to feel that what one professes is ‘objective’ is to contemplate what is ‘external’ to oneself. For Newman himself, his sense of the ‘reality’ of Catholicism, on joining the Catholic church, was connected to his experience of the Mass, and of Eucharistic devotion: in the tabernacle of every church, was the sacrament, in which Christ was present.⁵⁰ With regard to this ‘Divine Presence’, Newman declared, ‘I never knew what worship was, as an objective fact, till I entered the Catholic Church.’⁵¹ If the contemplation of the Eucharist involves a sense of the presence of Christ, participation in the sacraments, generally, involves a sense of being in an ‘atmosphere’ pervaded with that presence: ‘The Atonement of Christ is not a thing at a distance … We are surrounded by an atmosphere and are in a medium through which his warmth and light flow in upon us on every side.’⁵² This sense of the presence of Christ, as a ‘medium’ in which one participates, informs the sense one has of ‘[one’s] next door neighbour’, as participating in that ‘medium’. One participates in a ‘divine presence’, and the sense one has of that ‘presence’ is not experienced as an ‘opinion’ one has evolved by a ‘private judgement’ that is ‘peculiar’ to oneself; one’s ‘neighbour’ participates, equally, in that ‘divine presence’, and, as one does not regard the sense one has of that presence as a matter of ‘private judgement’, ‘peculiar’ to oneself, so one regards one’s ‘neighbour’ as having a similar sense of that presence – a sense which is expressed in an ‘external objective substantive creed and worship’.

Newman maintains in his Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, that ‘Protestants’ do ‘not believe even their own religions; they do not believe in any thing at all’, for they do not ‘submit their reason to a living authority’. He maintains that Catholics, having faith in the deliverances of a ‘living authority’, the church, and being certain of what is proposed for belief by that ‘authority’, contemplate the ‘objects’ of belief with a ‘spiritual sight’. How much, for Newman, did becoming a Catholic involve a repudiation of his former views about ‘faith’?

One of the claims Newman makes about the faith of ‘Protestants’, in his Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, and his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans, is that the ‘substance’ of this faith is, in truth, ‘reason’. In a number of sermons, preached in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and published in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (1843) Newman sought to set out the relationship between ‘faith’ and ‘reason’, maintaining that while ‘faith’ differs from ‘what is commonly understood’ by ‘reason’, it is nevertheless a legitimate ‘instrument of knowledge and action’ and, indeed, a form of ‘reasoning’ itself.

In ‘Faith and Reason, contrasted as Habits of Mind’, preached in 1839, he aims to counter the view that ‘Faith is but a moral quality, dependent upon Reason, – that Reason judges both of the evidence on which Scripture is to be received, and of the meaning of Scripture; and then Faith follows or not, according to the state of the heart; that we make up our minds by Reason without Faith, and then we proceed to adore and to obey by Faith apart from Reason; that, though Faith rests on testimony, not on reasonings, yet that testimony, in its turn, depends on Reason for the proof of its pretensions, so that Reason is an indispensable preliminary’.⁵³ He would maintain that faith is distinct from ‘reason’, without suggesting, as ‘enthusiasts [do] … that faculties altogether new are implanted in our minds, and that perceptibly, by the grace of the Gospel; faculties which, of course, are known to those who have them without proof; and, to those who have them not, cannot be made known by any’.⁵⁴ He grants that ‘Reason has a power of analysis and criticism in all opinion and conduct, and that nothing is true or right but what may be justified, and, in a certain sense, proved by it, and [that it is] undeniable, in consequence, that, unless the doctrines received by Faith are approvable by Reason, they have no claim to be regarded as true’ but he denies that it ‘follow[s] that Faith is actually grounded on Reason in the believing mind itself; unless, indeed, to take a parallel case, a judge can be called the origin, as well as the justifier, of the innocence or truth of those who are brought before him’.⁵⁵

A judge does not make men honest, but acquits and vindicates them: in like manner, Reason need not be the origin of Faith, as Faith exists in the very persons believing, though it does test and verify it. This, then, is one confusion, which must be cleared up … the assumption that Reason must be the inward principle of action in religious inquiries or conduct in the case of this or that individual, because, like a spectator, it acknowledges and concurs in what goes on; – the mistake of a critical for a creative power … . No one will say that Conscience is against Reason, or that its dictates cannot be thrown into an argumentative form; yet who will, therefore, maintain that it is not an original principle, but must depend, before it acts, upon some previous processes of Reason? Reason analyzes the grounds and motives of action: a reason is an analysis, but is not the motive itself. As, then, Conscience is a simple element in our nature, yet its operations admit of being surveyed and scrutinized by Reason; so may Faith be cognizable, and its acts be justified, by Reason, without therefore being, in matter of fact, dependent upon it.⁵⁶

A ‘reason is an analysis, but is not the motive itself’. The ‘motive itself’ is an insight or perception (of the ‘Conscience’); a ‘reason’ (on this account) emerges through an act of reflection on the ‘motive’ whereby the insight or perception involved in it is identified. The ‘motive’ is the state of awareness that animates, or that is involved in, ‘action’. That this state of awareness does not involve reflection, or an ‘argumentative form’, need not mean that it should be contrary to the awareness of things attained by reflection and argument – it need not mean that what is perceived, or accepted, in one form of awareness should be contrary to what is perceived, or accepted, in the other form of awareness. Newman observes that on the ‘popular view’, the ‘contrast that would be made’ between faith and reason is that ‘Reason requires strong eviden ce before it assents, and Faith is content with weaker evidence’, and he asks, ‘If this be so, how is it conformable to Reason to accept evidence less than Reason requires?’⁵⁷

Faith … does not demand evidence so strong as is necessary for what is commonly considered a rational conviction, or belief on the ground of Reason; and why? For this reason, because it is mainly swayed by antecedent considerations. In this way it is, that the two principles are opposed to one another: Faith is influenced by previous notices, prepossessions, and (in a good sense of the word) prejudices; but Reason, by direct and definite proof. The mind that believes is acted upon by its own hopes, fears, and existing opinions; whereas it is supposed to reason severely, when it rejects antecedent proof of a fact, – rejects everything but the actual evidence producible in its favour … . Faith is a principle of action, and action does not allow time for minute and finished investigations. We may (if we will) think that such investigations are of high value; though, in truth, they have a tendency to blunt the practical energy of the mind, while they improve its scientific exactness; but, whatever be their character and consequences, they do not answer the needs of daily life … Faith, then, as being a principle for the multitude and for conduct, is influenced … less by evidence, more by previously-entertained principles, views, and wishes. This is the case with all Faith, and not merely religious.⁵⁸

Newman observes that ‘the mind that believes is acted upon by its own hopes, fears, and existing opinions’. What is the ‘act’ of these ‘hopes, fears, and existing opinions’, these ‘antecedent considerations’? Newman maintains that faith is a ‘principle of action, and action does not allow time for minute and finished investigations’. There are, though, ‘investigations’, relating to the ‘needs of daily life’, that constitute, or that terminate in, a ‘principle of action’ (the ‘investigations’ of ‘practical wisdom’, phronesis). One might think of these ‘investigations’ – which would engage ‘previously-entertained principles, views, and wishes’ – as terminating in a ‘principle … for conduct’ – an insight (of phronesis) on which one acts: the mind that determines how to act, the mind that chooses, is itself ‘acted upon by its own hopes, fears, and existing opinions’, and these are involved in the deliberation that is phronesis. With faith, it would seem that the decision in question is not how to act, but whether to believe. Yet what is believed is, itself, pertinent to, and so a ‘principle’ for, ‘conduct’.

Newman maintains that the ‘previously-entertained principles, views, and wishes’, in accordance with which – ‘by a law of our nature, and whether they are in the particular case reasonable or not’ – the ‘evidence’ for religion is interpreted, will vary according to the character of those who entertain those ‘principles, views, and wishes’.⁵⁹

Since probabilities have no definite ascertained value, and are reducible to no scientific standard, what are such to each individual, depends on his moral temperament. A good and a bad man will think very different things probable. In the judgment of a rightly disposed mind, objects are desirable and attainable which irreligious men will consider to be but fancies. Such a correct moral judgment and view of things is the very medium in which the argument for Christianity has its constraining influence; a faint proof under circumstances being more availing than a strong one, apart from those circumstances … . It is plain … why our great divines, Bull and Taylor, not to mention others, have maintained that justifying faith is fides formata charitate, or in St. Paul’s words, [‘faith working by love’]. For as that faith, which is not moral, but depends upon evidence, is fides formata ratione – dead faith, which an infidel may have; so that which justifies or is acceptable in God’s sight, lives in, and from, a desire after those things which it accepts and confesses.⁶⁰

Newman maintains that the character of those who consider certain ‘things probable’, such that they are predisposed to accept the revelation, is animated by ‘love of the great Object of Faith, watchful attention to Him, readiness to believe Him near, easiness to believe Him interposing in human affairs, fear of the risk of slighting or missing what may really come from Him’, and he observes that ‘these are feelings not natural to fallen man, and they come only of supernatural grace; and these are the feelings which make us think evidence sufficient, which falls short of a proof in itself’.⁶¹ If one thinks of God as ‘near’, and likely to reveal Himself – and this way of thinking of God is implicated, Newman suggests, with a certain ‘love’ of God – then one will, when presented with something that purports to be a revelation from God, respond differently from those who do not feel this ‘love’ of God. Newman elaborated on this in a sermon he preached a week later, on ‘The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason’, observing that a ‘love’ for the ‘message’ of the revelation can actuate belief in that ‘message’: ‘The Word of Life is offered to a man; and, on its being offered, he has Faith in it. Why?’

On these two grounds, – the word of its human messenger, and the likelihood of the message. And why does he feel the message to be probable? Because he has a love for it, his love being strong, though the testimony is weak. He has a keen sense of the intrinsic excellence of the message, of its desirableness, of its likeness to what it seems to him Divine Goodness would vouchsafe did He vouchsafe any, of the need of a Revelation, and its probability. Thus Faith is the reasoning of a religious mind, or of what Scripture calls a right or renewed heart, which acts upon presumptions rather than evidence.⁶²

To support the claim that ‘Faith is the reasoning of a religious mind’, Newman characterizes ‘reason’ as ‘a faculty of proceeding from things that are perceived [by the senses] to things which are not; the existence of which it certifies to us on the hypothesis of something else bei ng known to exist, in other words, being assumed to be true … . Its exercise lies in asserting one thing, because of some other thing; and, when its exercise is conducted rightly, it leads to knowledge; when wrongly, to apparent knowledge, to opinion, and error.’⁶³ Faith, Newman maintains, is ‘an acceptance of things as real, which the senses do not convey, upon certain previous grounds; it is an instrument of indirect knowledge concerning things external to us’. With regard to such ‘reasoning’, Newman observes that ‘men advance forward on grounds which they do not, or cannot produce, or if they could, yet could not prove to be true, on latent or antecedent grounds which they take for granted’, that ‘there must ever be something assumed ultimately which is incapable of proof’, and that the ‘greater achievements of the Reason’ often involve ‘ways of thought so recondite and intricate that the mass of men are obliged to take them on trust, till the event or other evidence confirms them’, ‘ways of thought’ which would not ‘show to advantage’ if ‘thrown into the technical forms which the science of argument requires’.⁶⁴ Faith, Newman maintains, is a ‘reasoning’ of this kind: it ‘is a process of the Reason, in which so much of the grounds of inference cannot be exhibited, so much lies in the character of the mind itself, in its general view of things, its estimate of the probable and the improbable, its impressions concerning God’s will, and its anticipations derived from its own inbred wishes, that it will ever seem to the world irrational and despicable, – till, that is, the event confirms it’.⁶⁵

In ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, Newman maintains that, as faith consists ‘of certain exercises of Reason which proceed mainly on presumption’, such that it ‘begins with its own previous knowledge and opinions, advances and decides upon antecedent probabilities, that is, on grounds which do not reach so far as to touch precisely the desired conclusion, though they tend towards it, and may come very near it’ – whereby most of those who have faith do so ‘not on an examination of evidence, but from a spontaneous movement of their hearts towards it … [and] go out of themselves to meet Him who is unseen … discern[ing] Him in such symbols of Him as they find ready provided for them’ – so it is a ‘test of a man’s heart’.⁶⁶

Faith is a test of a man’s heart … [as] it shows what he thinks likely to be … and what he thinks likely, depends surely on nothing else than the general state of his mind, the state of his convictions, feelings, tastes, and wishes. A fact is asserted, and is thereby proposed to the acceptance or rejection of those who hear it. Each hearer will have his own view concerning it, prior to the evidence; this view will result from the character of his mind; nor commonly will it be reversed by any ordinary variation in the evidence. If he is indisposed to believe, he will explain away very strong evidence; if he is disposed, he will accept very weak evidence … . Most men must and do decide by the principles of thought and conduct which are habitual to them; that is, the antecedent judgment, with which a man approaches the subject of religion, not only acts as a bearing this way or that, – as causing him to go out to meet the evidence in a greater or less degree, and nothing more, – but, further, it practically colours the evidence, even in a case in which he has recourse to evidence, and interprets it for him.⁶⁷

What prevents faith from ‘from running (as it were) to seed, and becoming superstition or fanaticism’, is a ‘right state of heart’: ‘this it is that gives it birth; it also disciplines it’, preventing it from becoming ‘bigotry, credulity or fantaticism’; it is ‘Love which forms it out of the rude chaos into an image of Christ; or, in scholastic language, justifying Faith, whether in Pagan, Jew, or Christian, is fides formata charitate’.⁶⁸ ‘The divinely enlightened mind sees in Christ the very Object whom it desires to love and worship, – the Object correlative of its own affections; and it trusts Him, or believes, from loving Him.’⁶⁹ The ‘divinely enlightened mind’ recognizes in Christ the ‘Object correlative of its own affections’ – ‘affections’ which are ‘affections’ for God (which are ordered to God, as their proper object). Newman might be suggesting, in this, that the ‘divinely enlightened mind’ recognizes, in the ‘affections’ roused by Christ, what sort of ‘Object’ Christ is, for those ‘affections’ are ‘correlative’ to a certain ‘Object’ – namely, God. Newman might be suggesting, equally, that if one has a ‘divinely enlightened mind’, one has – prior to any encounter one might have with Christ – a sense of God, of a divine ‘Object’, and that, if one has such a sense of the divine ‘Object’ one will be disposed to accept the revelation which presents Christ, for what is presented in that revelation accords with the sense of the divine ‘Object’ that one already has. If one feels ‘love and worship’ for Christ, one will trust Christ – such trust being an expression of ‘love and worship’; to recognize that Christ is the ‘Object correlative’ of such ‘love and worship’ – that Christ is a fit object of such ‘love and worship’ – is to sense that Christ merits trust. Newman suggests that to encounter the revelation which presents Christ is to encounter the presence of Christ as informing that revelation: to be presented with the revelation is to encounter certain ‘symbols’ of the presence of Christ, so that trusting the revelation is implicated with trusting Christ.

Newman maintains that a ‘good man and a bad man will think very different things probable’. What one thinks ‘probable’ is a function of the ‘presumptions’ one has about the nature of things, about how things tend to happen. As a ‘good man and a bad man will think very different things probable’, so there are ‘holy, devout, and enlightened presumptions’; and the revelation will seem more probable, to those who are ‘holy, devout, and enlightened’, as it accords with their ‘presumptions’ – it fits with their sense of what might be, of what is likely.

Right Faith is the faith of a right mind. Faith is an intellectual act; right Faith is an intellectual act, done in a certain moral disposition. Faith is an act of Reason, viz. a reasoning upon presumptions; right Faith is a reasoning upon holy, devout, and enlightened presumptions. Faith ventures and hazards; right Faith ventures and hazards deliberately, seriously, soberly, piously, and humbly, counting the cost and delighting in the sacrifice. As far as, and wherever Love is wanting, so far, and there, Faith runs into excess or is perverted. The grounds of Faith, when animated by the spirit of love and purity, are such as these: – that a Revelation is very needful for man; that it is earnestly to be hoped for from a merciful God; that it is to be expected; nay, that of the two it is more probable that what professes to be a Revelation should be or should contain a Revelation, than that there should be no Revelation at all; that, if Almighty God interposes in human affairs, His interposition will not be in opposition to His known attributes, or to His dealings in the world, or to certain previous revelations of His will; that it will be in a way worthy of Him; that it is likely to bear plain indications of His hand; that it will be for great ends, specified or signified; and moreover, that such and such ends are in their nature great, such and such a message important, such and such means worthy, such and such circumstances congruous. I consider that under the guidance of such anticipations and calculations as these, which Faith – not mere Faith, but Faith working by Love – suggests, the honest mind may, under ordinary circumstances, be led, and practically is led, into an acceptable, enlightened, and saving apprehension of Divine Truth without that formal intimacy and satisfaction with the special evidence existing for the facts believed, which is commonly called Reasoning, or the use of Reason, and which results in knowledge.⁷⁰

Newman observes that when St Paul preached the Gospel, he appealed to the ‘enlightened presumptions’ of those he encountered, ‘he appealed to that whole body of opinion, affection, and desire, which made up, in each man, his moral self … which, if it was what it should be, would respond to the Apostle’s doctrine, as the strings of one instrument vibrate with another’.⁷¹

He taught men, not only that Almighty God was, and was everywhere, but that He had certain moral attributes; that He was just, true, holy, and merciful; that His representative was in their hearts; that He already dwelt in them as a lawgiver and a judge, by a sense of right and a conscience of sin; and that what he himself was then bringing them fulfilled what was thus begun in them by nature, by tokens so like the truth, as to constrain all who loved God under the Religion of Nature to believe in Him as revealed in the Gospel.⁷²

In ‘The Nature of Faith in relation to Reason’, Newman maintains that the ‘reasoning of a religious mind, or of what Scripture calls a right or renewed heart . . . acts upon presumptions rather than evidence’; in ‘Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, he considers the relationship between a ‘right or renewed heart’, and certain ‘presumptions’ or presentiments, which are involved in such a state of ‘heart’; in ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’ (preached in 1840), he considers the mode in which such ‘presumptions’ may be operative – he considers how ‘reasoning’ is not identical with ‘explicit’ argumentation, but is itself a ‘living spontaneous energy within us’, a ‘faculty … of ascertaining one thing by means of another’, which need not take the form of ‘explicit’ argumentation if it is to be present, and active.⁷³ If ‘reasoning’ is to take the form of ‘explicit’ argumentation, the mind must reflect on itself, on its own ‘reasonings’, and articulate them; and the reasonings must have already occurred, if they are to be reflected on and articulated. The mind may, moreover, reflect on the form taken by its reasonings, identifying the ‘main principles on which they are conducted’ (as in ‘the analysis of the reasoning process … [in] the well-known science for which we are indebted to Aristotle’); but those principles must have been already acted on – in the spontaneous activity of reasoning – before an ‘analysis’ of them could be carried out: the activity, the reasoning, in which they were acted on, was not informed by a conscious awareness of them.⁷⁴ The ‘analysis’ of the reasoning involved in ‘faith’, is not that reasoning itself; yet ‘the mind may be allowably, nay, religiously engaged, in reflecting upon its own Faith; investigating the grounds and the Object of it, bringing it out into words, whether to defend, or recommend, or teach it to others’.⁷⁵

Nothing would be more theoretical and unreal than to suppose that true Faith cannot exist except when moulded upon a Creed, and based upon Evidence; yet nothing would indicate a more shallow philosophy than to say it ought carefully to be disjoined from dogmatic and argumentative statements. To assert the latter is to discard the science of theology from the service of Religion; to assert the former, is to maintain that every child, every peasant, must be a theologian. Faith cannot exist without grounds and without an object; but it does not follow that all who have faith should recognize, and be able to state what they believe, and why. Nor, on the other hand, because it is not identical with its grounds, and its object, does it therefore cease to be true Faith, on its recognizing them.⁷⁶

Newman suggests that the ‘reasoning’ that is a ‘living spontaneous energy’, present before it is reflected on, could be termed ‘implicit’ reason.

All men reason, for to reason is nothing more than to gain truth from former truth, without the intervention of sense, to which brutes are limited; but all men do not reflect upon their own reasonings, much less reflect truly and accurately, so as to do justice to their own meaning; but only in proportion to their abilities and attainments. In other words, all men have a reason, but not all men can give a reason. We may denote, then, these two exercises of mind as reasoning and arguing, or as conscious and unconscious reasoning, or as Implicit Reason and Explicit Reason. And to the latter belong the words, science, method, development, analysis, criticism, proof, system, principles, rules, laws, and others of a like nature.⁷⁷

As ‘implicit reason’ and ‘explicit reason’ are distinct, so it is mistaken to maintain that ‘faith’ must be ‘founded on’ explicit argument, or to maintain that faith is unreasonable if it is not sustained by explicit argument. What is more, it may be difficult to set out in ‘explicit’ form all that is ‘implicit’ in the mind that has faith.

No analysis is subtle and delicate enough to represent adequately the state of mind under which we believe, or the subjects of belief, as they are presented to our thoughts. The end proposed is that of delineating, or, as it were, painting what the mind sees and feels: now let us consider what it is to portray duly in form and colour things material, and we shall surely understand the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of representing the outhne and character, the hues and shades, in which any intellectual view really exists in the mind, or of giving it that substance and that exactness in detail in which consists its likeness to the original, or of sufficiently marking those minute differences which attach to the same general state of mind or tone of thought as found in this or that individual respectively. It is probable that a given opinion, as held by several individuals, even when of the most congenial views, is as distinct from itself as are their faces. Now how minute is the defect in imitation which hinders the likeness of a portrait from being successful! How easy is it to recognize who is intended by it, without allowing that really he is represented! Is it not hopeless, then, to expect that the most diligent and anxious investigation can end in more than in giving some very rude description of the living mind, and its feelings, thoughts, and reasonings? And if it be difficult to analyze fully any state, or frame, or opinion of our own minds, is it a less difficulty to delineate, as Theology professes to do, the works, dealings, providences, attributes, or nature of Almighty God?⁷⁸

An imperfect ‘representation’, in explicit form, of what is implicit in the mind, may become virtually a misrepresentation. The ‘science of controversy … [when] it professes to have done much’ may ‘lead the student to mistake what are but secondary points in debate, as if they were the most essential’.

Who shall analyze the assemblage of opinions in this or that mind, which occasions it almost instinctively to reject or to accept … [certain] positions? Far be it from me to seem to insinuate that they are but opinions, neither true nor false, and approving themselves or not, according to the humour or prejudice of the individual: so far from it, that I would maintain that the recondite reasons which lead each person to take or decline them, are just the most important portion of the considerations on which his conviction depends.⁷⁹

If ‘the proof of Christianity, or the Scripture proof of its doctrines, [should] be of this subtle nature, of course it cannot be exhibited to advantage in argument’.⁸⁰ To rely solely on what can be ‘exhibited … in argument’ is, then, of itself, to disregard certain aspects of the ‘proof of Christianity’.

In the Oxford University Sermons, Newman suggests that those who are moved to believe the revelation do so, as moved by its correspondence to their ‘presumptions’, their sense of what is ‘likely’ – ‘presumptions’ that might be too numerous and subtle for them to set out ‘explicitly’ – and he suggests that their ‘presumptions’ relate to their ‘character’, such that there are ‘holy, devout, and enlightened’ presumptions. Is this to regard ‘faith’ as a form of ‘reason’, or ‘private judgement’ – a ‘reason’ that is implicit, and actuated by various ‘presumptions’? What is more, he suggests that those who are moved to believe the revelation do so, as recognizing ‘the intrinsic excellence of the message … its desirableness’, and as moved by a love for the ‘Object’ revealed by it: ‘We believe, because we love.’ Is this to maintain that ‘faith and love are inseparable’, such that ‘where there is faith, there … is love and obedience’?

In 1856, Newman preached on ‘Dispositions for Faith’, reworking an earlier sermon, from 1834, on ‘Faith without Sight’. Comparison of the two sermons shows something of how Newman, on becoming a Catholic, adjusted some of his earlier ideas about ‘faith’ and ‘reason’.

In both of the sermons Newman maintains that a proper receptivity to the revelation arises from ‘attending’ or ‘listening’ to the conscience. In the earlier sermon, Newman characterizes this state as something involving a ‘believing temper’, a ‘readiness to believe’; in the later sermon, he characterizes this state as something marked by ‘easiness of belief’ and as something involving ‘good dispositions’ – ‘With good dispositions faith is easy … without good dispositions, faith is not easy.’ Newman characterizes in a similar way in each of the sermons the elements of the attitude that he takes to arise from a proper attentiveness to the conscience. The ‘voice’ of the conscience presents one with certain authoritative ‘dictates’, which ‘command’ one. One does not experience these ‘dictates’ as something one has created for oneself – they seem to have an ‘exterior’ origin. One experiences oneself as subject to these ‘dictates’ – they seem to have their origin in a ‘superior’. One is simply presented with ‘commands’, and in the experience of being ‘commanded’, there is an intimation of One, other than the self, who commands, One who commands as superior to the self. From the experience of the conscience, one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself – one becomes aware of the presence of God (‘exterior’ and ‘superior’ to oneself) whose ‘voice’ is manifest in the ‘dictates’ of the conscience. From the sense of the presence of God, arising from the experience of the conscience, there arises a desire to encounter God, and an inclination to ‘look’ for God. What is more, from the experience of the conscience, there arises an awareness of sin, and a desire for ‘deliver ance’ from sin: those who attend to their consciences are aware of their own sinfulness, and of their inability to overcome, by themselves, their own sinfulness. Those who have this attitude – those who ‘look’ for God, and who aspire to transcend themselves – will, when presented with something that purports to be a revelation, respond differently from those who do not have this attitude. Those who ‘look’ for God will address the question of whether there is a revelation as a ‘practical concern’, as a matter of ‘personal interest’. As this alertness of ‘conscience’ affects the way in those who have this ‘sensitiveness’ take the ‘evidence’ for the revelation, so, for those who accept the revelation, it is the ‘safeguard and nutriment’ of their commitment. The two sermons, then, characterize the attitude that makes for faith, or for commitment to ‘the Gospel’, in similar ways. Newman summaries the ‘dispositions … leading to faith’, in 1856, as ‘first … belief in God, as our Teacher, Governor, and Judge; and … second … the earnest desire that He would reveal Himself, and an eager looking-out for the chance of His doing so’.

While each sermons is concerned with a contrast of ‘tempers’, the 1834 sermon associates the ‘sceptic[al]’ temper with ‘reason’ (or with what in ‘ordinary language’ is termed ‘reason’) while the 1856 sermon does not. In 1834 Newman observes that ‘in our ordinary language we speak of religion being built upon faith, not upon reason; on the other hand, it is as common for those who scoff at religion to object this very doctrine against us; as if, in so saying, we had almost admitted that Christianity was not true’. His use of the phrase ‘ordinary language’ suggests a certain hesitation: what ‘ordinary language’ terms ‘reason’ may not be the only form of ‘reason’. In 1834, Newman had not yet set out an account of ‘implicit reason’, devising a ‘language’ of his own to set against ‘ordinary language’: according to the contrast Newman would later establish, between ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit reason’, that which ‘ordinary language’ terms ‘reason’ is only one form of reason – namely, ‘explicit reason’. Yet since, in his 1834 sermon, he calls attention to the ‘ordinary’ characterization of ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ – since he calls attention to the naming of these things, to how these things are ‘commonly … called’ by certain names – he suggests that this is not the only way of characterizing them: he puts the ‘ordinary’ terms in question (without proposing alternative terms).

In 1834, he associates the ‘sceptical’ temper with certain virtues, and the ‘religious’ temper with certain vices. Those who are not predisposed to think a revelation likely ‘are in no danger of being superstitious or credulous’.

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. Here then we see two opposite characters of mind, the one credulous (as it would be commonly called), the latter candid, well-judging, and sagacious.⁸¹

If Newman observes that certain virtues may be ascribed to the sceptical temper (it is ‘candid, well-judging, and sagacious’, calm and dispassionate, not ‘swayed’) he, equally, questions the ascription of these virtues – calling attention to how certain ‘characters of mind’ are ‘commonly called’ certain things. Those who are taken to be ‘candid, well-judging, and sagacious’ are those who, in fact, ‘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’; they are those who, having ‘no presentiment of any Invisible Guide, who has a claim to be followed in matters of conduct … consider nothing to have a substance but what meets their senses, are contented with this, and draw their rules of life from it’.⁸² He suggests that what may be ‘called’ conscientiousness in ‘judging’ may, in fact, arise from an insensitiveness to the conscience, and its intimations of an ‘Invisible Guide’. He is, in this, subverting an established rhetoric (an eighteenth-century rhetoric in which certain states of mind are identified with ‘reason’, good judgment, good sense), indicating that it involves paradiastole, the characterizing of a vice as a virtue. He observes that the sceptical ‘find it no effort to use their intellect upon [the question of whether there has been a revelation] as rigidly as if it were some external instrument which could not be swayed’.⁸³ He suggests, in this, that the notion of a universal, impartial ‘reason’, is associated with a particular use of the ‘intellect’ – a use in which it is treated as if an ‘external instrument’. As the ‘intellect’ is not an ‘external instrument’, then there is something like a denaturing of the intellect in this ‘use’ of it; as the ‘intellect’ is not ‘external’, but internal, as it is involved in the self, so there is a sense that to treat it as if ‘external’, is to be alienated from oneself. If Newman, then, resists the characterization of the disengaged ‘intellect’ as ‘well judging’, he, nevertheless, acknowledges that the engaged ‘intellect’, animated by ‘concerns’ and ‘presentiments’ arising from attentiveness to the conscience, may ‘mistake error for truth’, in thinking a purported revelation to be genuine, when it is not so.

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, and often thinks he has found it when he has not. Hence, if truth is not at hand, he is apt to mistake error for truth, to consider as the presence and especial work of God what is not so; and thinking anything preferable to scepticism, he becomes (what is sometimes imputed to him by way of reproach) superstitious.⁸⁴

Newman, once again, seems to question the way in which a certain qual ity or character is ascribed or ‘imputed’: he questions whether being ‘superstitious’ (in certain circumstances) is truly matter of ‘reproach’. Yet he does, nevertheless, characterize this as a matter of mistaking ‘error for truth’, and of ‘becom[ing] … superstitious’. In 1856, Newman does not address whether the ‘dispositions’ with which he is concerned might make for ‘becom[ing] … superstitious’. He acknowledges that one who is predisposed to accept a revelation will, on being presented with the ‘news … that a message has been received from the unseen world’, ‘be under a strong temptation to believe it, if he can, on very little evidence, or on none at all’;⁸⁵ and the pejorative resonance of ‘temptation’ suggests that to ‘believe’ in this way is not altogether right; it is certainly not to observe the proper standards of intellectual enquiry (but then those are not the only standards that obtain in life).

In 1834 and 1856, Newman quotes passages from the Gospels, wherein Christ praises the ‘faith’ of some of those He encounters – the ‘blessedness of a mind that believes readily’ (1834), the ‘easiness of belief’ (1856). Of these passages, Newman observes, in 1834, that ‘faith holds among the evidences of a religious mind’ a ‘peculiar place’, and that ‘in our ordinary language we speak of religion being built upon faith, not upon reason’;⁸⁶ but in 1856 he insist that ‘these passages cannot mean that faith is against reason, or that reason does not ordinarily precede faith, for this is a doctrine quite contrary to Revelation’.⁸⁷

I think I shall not be wrong in understanding them thus, – that with good dispositions faith is easy; and that without good dispositions, faith is not easy; and that those who were praised for their faith, were such as had already the good dispositions, and that those who were blamed for their unbelief, were such as were wanting in this respect, and would have believed, or believed sooner, had they possessed the necessary dispositions for believing, or a greater share of them.⁸⁸

Newman, in 1856, associates the ‘good dispositions’ of those for whom ‘faith is easy’ with ‘good will’, the ‘good will’ adverted to in ‘the glorious hymn of the Angels upon Christmas night’.

They sang, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will’. By ‘good will’, is meant ‘good disposition’; the peace of the Gospel, the full gifts of the knowledge, and of the power, and of the consolation of Christian Redemption, were to be the reward of men of good dispositions. They were the men to whom the Infant Saviour came; they were those in whom His grace would find its fruit and recompense; they were those, who, by congruous merit, would be led on, as the Evangelist says, to ‘believe in His Name’.⁸⁹

The ‘congruous merit’ that God rewards is not a ‘merit’ that obliges Him to give that reward. He is not obliged or compelled to reward those who have this ‘good will’, with the gift of ‘faith’, but He does so, out of love and mercy. There is nothing that necessitates ‘faith’ arising from ‘good dispositions’: it is the free gift of God.

As Newman refuses to contrast ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ in 1856 – ‘this is a doctrine quite contrary to Revelation’ – so he refuses to engage with the rhetoric that associates ‘sceptical’ attitudes with ‘reason’. In 1834, he subverts the rhetoric by which ‘sceptical’ attitudes are characterized as more ‘rational’; in 1856, he does not mention this rhetoric. In 1856, he simply contrasts those with ‘good dispositions’, and those without such dispositions; and where, in 1834, he had observed that those of a ‘sceptical’ temper ‘use their intellect … rigidly’, and ‘come to the examination’ of the evidence ‘calmly and dispassionately’ – suggesting that they think about the ‘question’ with a certain rigour – in 1856, he suggests that those with such a temper scarcely think about the ‘question’ at all:

The one [disposed to take a “personal interest” in the question of whether there has been a revelation] is active, and the other passive, when Christ is preached as the Saviour of the world. The one goes to meet the truth; the other thinks that the Truth ought to come to him. The one examines into the proof that God has spoken; the other waits till this is proved to him.⁹⁰

In 1834, he suggested that if one is sceptical, one will use the intellect like ‘an external instrument’; in 1856, he suggests that if one has no ‘personal interest’ in the question of whether there has been a revelation, one will be ‘passive’, not engaging with ‘the proof’, but ‘waiting’ for it, waiting for an external initiative. To be without ‘those dispositions at all which lead to faith’ is to be ‘passive’ in relation to the question of whether there has been a revelation; one without such dispositions ‘feels no personal interest in [the question]; he thinks it not his own concern, but (if I may so say) God Almighty’s concern. He does not care to make the most of his knowledge; he does not put things together; he does not add up his facts and cumulate his arguments; he leaves all this to be done for him by Him who speaks to him; and if he is to have any trouble in the matter, then he is willing to dismiss it altogether.’⁹¹

The way in which Newman characterizes the response of those with a ‘believing temper’ to the ‘news’ of a revelation in 1834 differs from how he characterizes the response of those with ‘good dispositions’ to that ‘news’ in 1856. In 1834, he suggests that those with a ‘believing temper’ are moved, by the ir encounter with the revelation, to live in accordance with it. In 1856, he suggests that those with ‘good dispositions’ are moved, by their encounter with the revelation, to ‘enquire’, to ascertain whether it is genuine. In 1834, he maintains that ‘a religious mind … will … welcome and gladly commit itself to the hand of God, when allowed to discern it in the Gospel. Such is faith as it exists in the multitude of those who believe, arising from their sense of the presence of God, originally certified to them by the inward voice of conscience’.⁹²

He who is religious will believe more and reason less than the irreligious; that is, if a man’s acting upon a message is the measure of his believing it, as the common sense of the world will determine. For 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.⁹³

The response to the encounter with the Gospel is a matter of ‘acting’, ‘obeying’, and Newman suggests that acting ‘is the measure’ of belief. Faith is a matter of having ‘light to walk by’, and is concerned with ‘see[ing] one step in advance’, with having enough ‘light’ for the next ‘step’, the next act. In 1856, Newman suggests that the one with ‘due religious dispositions’, when presented with the Gospel, will ‘be under a strong temptation to believe it, if he can, on very little evidence, or on none at all’ but ‘at all events he will set about inquiring what its evidence is, and will do his best to find it all out, whether it be more or less’.⁹⁴ The response of the one with the right ‘dispositions’ is not to ‘obey’ or to ‘act’ but to ‘inquire’. Newman insists that ‘to be easy in believing is nothing more or less than to have been ready to inquire; to be hard of belief is nothing else but to have been loth and reluctant to inquire. Those whose faith [Christ] praised had no stronger evidence than those whose unbelief He condemned; but they had used their eyes, used their reason, exerted their minds, and persevered in inquiry till they found.’⁹⁵ He observes that the fault of St Thomas – who declared he would not believe the report of the resurrection, until he saw Christ, and felt ‘in His hands the print of the nails, and put [his] finger into the place of the nails, and put [his] hand into His side’ – was in ‘in thinking he had a right to be fastidious, and to pick and choose by what arguments he would be convinced, instead of asking himself whether he had not enough to convince him already; just as if, forsooth, it were a great matter to his Lord that he should believe, and no matter at all to himself’.⁹⁶

The rightly disposed undertake a form of enquiry in which they ‘exert their minds’, ‘put things together’, ‘add up … facts and cumulate … arguments’, and ask themselves if they have ‘enough to convince’ them, in this accumulation of insights, ‘facts’, ‘arguments’. As they ‘exert their minds’ so, it would seem, they must avail themselves of their ‘presentiments’, ‘presumptions’ – their ‘implicit reason’ and their sense of what is ‘likely’. What each person ‘puts … together’ will vary – ‘is there not more than one way of arriving at faith in Christ? are there not a hundred proofs, distinct from each other, and all good ones?’ What each person ‘puts together’ will be a cluster of insights, ‘facts’, interpretations, arguments, and the like; and this will ultimately make up something like an impression of the ‘revelation’ – it will be the way in which the particular ‘revelation’ impresses itself upon, or manifests itself to, their apprehension. The question of whether this impression is ‘enough to convince’ is – as concerned with something particular, namely, the particular revelation itself – not a question that can be resolved by generalizations, by abstract rules: it is a matter for the good sense, the judgment, of each person. (The kind of ‘intellect’, the kind of thinking, that is akin to an ‘external instrument’ is not adequate to such a problem.) Newman, in 1834, associated ‘reason’ with a certain ‘use’ of the ‘intellect’ (even if he was inclined to suggest that such a ‘use’ of the ‘intellect’ was not invariably appropriate); his strictures, in 1856, on those who are ‘fastidious’, who determine ‘to be convinced in one particular way’, apply to those who insist on only one form of ‘reason’ – ‘explicit’, ‘rigid’ reason – as ‘enough to convince’. To be ‘ready to inquire’ is to be ‘ready’ to make use of whatever insights one has, whatever ‘proofs’ present themselves, whatever forms of ‘reason’ seem useful and pertinent (whether ‘implicit’ or ‘explicit’); it is to be more ‘reasonable’ than those who are ‘loth to inquire’, or who determine ‘to be convinced in one particular way’, since those who determine ‘to be convinced in one particular way’ arbitrarily restrict what is to count as ‘reason’. What is more, those who are ‘fastidious’ do not have the ‘reasonableness’ to recognize their own situation, to recognize that what is in question is their ‘concern’ (rather than ‘God Almighty’s concern’), and that it behoves them to ‘exert their minds’, and make use of whatever insights they can use, in resolving the question.

Newman in 1834 and in 1856 maintains that the ‘dispositions’ that make for faith arise from an attentiveness to the ‘conscience’, from a sense of the presence of God, and that they involve ‘looking out’ for God. Yet he characterizes these ‘dispositions’, and the desires associated with them, slightly differently, in each case. In 1834 he observes that ‘a man is at once thrown out of himself, by the very Voice which speaks within him’ and ‘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 out of himself for that Living Word to which he may attribute what has echoed in his heart.’⁹⁷ The sense of the presence of the ‘Living Word’ actuates a desire to encounter that ‘Word’. In 1856, he observes, in much the same way, that the ‘existence [of the “voice” of the conscience] throws us out of ourselves, and beyond ourselves, to go and seek for Him in the height and depth, whose Voice it is’.⁹⁸ He characterizes this ‘seek[ing]’, however, not as a movement toward God but merely as a ‘disposition’ to ‘believe in His existence, not because others say it, not in the word of man merely, but with a personal apprehension of its truth’.⁹⁹ He then goes on to observe that the desire to ‘seek for Him’ is related to a sense of the inadequacy of the ‘guidance’ of the conscience, which ‘does not do enough’ with regard to determining how one should live. ‘In spite of all that this Voice does for them, it does not do enough, as they most keenly and sorrowfully feel.’¹⁰⁰

They find it most difficult to separate what it really says, taken by itself, from what their own passion or pride, self-love or self-will, mingles with it. Many is the time when they cannot tell how much that true inward Guide commands, and how much comes from a mere earthly source. So that the gift of conscience raises a desire for what it does not itself fully supply. It inspires in them the idea of authoritative guidance, of a divine law; and the desire of possessing it in its fulness, not in mere fragmentary portions or indirect suggestion. It creates in them a thirst, an impatience, for the knowledge of that Unseen Lord, and Governor, and Judge, who as yet speaks to them only secretly, who whispers in their hearts, who tells them something, but not nearly so much as they wish and as they need.¹⁰¹

Those who attend to the conscience have a sense that the conscience ‘does not do enough’: they ‘hope that He will teach them more, and so are on the look-out for His teaching’.¹⁰²

Newman characterizes the desires, attendant on the consciousness of ‘sin’ differently in 1834 and in 1856. In 1834 he remarks that one who ‘knows the evil of his nature, and forebodes God’s wrath as its consequence … fears; and, in consequence, seeks about for some means of propitiating his Maker, for some token, if so be, of God’s relenting … he wanders about from very anxiety; he needs some one to speak peace to his soul’.¹⁰³ In 1856, he observes that one who attends to the ‘voice’ of the conscience, acquiring a ‘more delicate’ awareness of ‘transgression’, understanding ‘more and more how many things he has to be forgiven’, ‘also understands more and more clearly that the voice of conscience has nothing gentle, nothing of mercy in its tone’.¹⁰⁴

It suggests to him a future judgment; it does not tell him how he can avoid it. Moreover it does not tell him how he is to get better; he feels himself very sinful at the best; he feels himself in bondage to a tyranny which, alas! he loves too well, even while he hates it. And thus he is in great anguish, and cries out in the Apostle’s words, ‘Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!’¹⁰⁵

In 1834, he maintains that the desire, occasioned by the consciousness of sin, is a desire ‘of God’s relenting’ – a desire for forgiveness; in 1856, he maintains that the desire, occasioned by the consciousness of sin, is a desire ‘to get better’, to be delivered ‘from the body of this death’ – a desire for sanctification, or the ‘new life’.

In 1834 and in 1856, Newman considers how the dispositions that ‘lead’ to faith become, once faith has arisen, dispositions that ‘extend’ themselves into faith (1834) or that function as a ‘safeguard’ to faith (1856). In 1834, he observes that ‘faith … 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 keeping] steadily in view that Christ speaks in Scripture, [it] receives His words as if it heard them, as if some superior and friend spoke them’.

Towards every institution of Christ, His Church, His Sacraments, and His Ministers, it acts not as a disputer of this world, but as the disciple of Him who appointed them … [and] it rests contented with the revelation made to it; it has ‘found the Messias,’ and that is enough. The very principle of its former restlessness now keeps it from wandering.¹⁰⁶

In 1856, Newman maintains that ‘that same sensitiveness and delicacy of conscience, which is the due disposition for faith, is also its safeguard and its nutriment, when it is at length possessed. It feeds the flame of faith, and makes it burn brightly.’

Catholics go into the world; they mix with men of all religions; they hear all manner of sophistical objections made to the Church, her doctrines, and her rules. What is practically to keep them steadfast in the faith, but their intimate perception of their need of it? what is to bring them to the sacrament of penance, but their sorrow and their detestation of sin? what is to bring them to communion, but a thirst for the Living and True God? what is to be their protection against the aberrations of the intellect, but the deep convictions and eager aspirations of the heart?¹⁰⁷

One will only go to the ‘sacrament of penance’, if one believes that this sacrament expunges sin; and one will only go to ‘communion’, if one believes that the ‘Living and True God’ is present in the sacrament; so one must have faith, if one is to be moved by the ‘aspirations of the heart’ to receive these sacraments. Yet it is these ‘aspirations’ that move one to do so. The ‘perception of … need’ which moves one to ‘look out’ for a revelation, then moves one – when one has accepted a revelation – to make use of what, according to that revelation, satisfies that ‘need’. (This ‘perception of … need’ is evidently not ‘love’ or ‘charity’, though it may coexist with it; and the gratitude, occasioned by the satisfaction of ‘need’ may develop into ‘love’.) Newman takes care, in 1856, to make clear that the influence of these ‘dispositions’, in ‘leading’ to faith, is in no way inconsistent with the supremacy of grace, in creating faith. ‘I shall not of course be forgetting that faith, as I have already said, is a supernatural work, and the fruit of divine grace; I only shall be calling your attention to what must be your own part in the process.’¹⁰⁸ He characterizes these ‘dispositions’ as ‘necessary for faith’; to be ‘necessary’ is not to be sufficient; and ‘faith’ may have certain conditions, but be, nevertheless, a gift and a ‘supernatural work’. What is more, Newman maintains that God ‘creates’ the ‘dispositions’.

The Holy Baptist was sent before our Lord to prepare His way; that is, to be His instrument in rousing, warning, humbling, and inflaming the hearts of men, so that, when He came, they might believe in Him. He Himself is the Author and Finisher of that Faith, of which He is also the Object; but, ordinarily, He does not implant it in us suddenly, but He first creates certain dispositions, and these He carries on to faith as their reward.¹⁰⁹

The ‘reward’ is for ‘congruous merit’: God is not obliged to create faith in those with the ‘necessary’ dispositions.

When Newman republished his Oxford University Sermons in 1871, he added a Preface, outhning what he considered to be the main claims made in those sermons. He observes that the sermons present a notion of faith as ‘properly an assent, and an assent without doubt, or a certitude’ (adducing ‘Faith is an acceptance of things as real’ from the ninth sermon, ‘Faith simply accepts testimony’ from the tenth, ‘Faith is not identical with its grounds and its object’, from the thirteenth’, and ‘Faith starts with probabilities, yet it ends in peremptory statements; it believes an informant amid doubt, yet accepts his information without doubt’, from the fourteenth). He then observes that ‘since, in accepting a conclusion, there is a virtual recognition of its premisses, an act of Faith may be said (improperly) to include in it the reasoning process which is its antecedent, and to be in a certain aspect an exercise of Reason; and thus is co-ordinate, and in contrast, with … explicit, evidential, and secular Reason’.¹¹⁰ It seems, then, that in 1871, Newman regarded the sermons as giving an accurate account of the ‘reasoning process’ which is the ‘antecedent’ of faith and he characterized that process as something that might ‘be said (improperly)’ to be ‘included’ in faith. He would distinguish the act of faith, as an act of ‘assent’, from the ‘reasoning’ which is ‘its antecedent’. The ‘reasoning’ that is ‘antecedent’ to faith is not ‘properly’, strictly, ‘included’ in it. He observes that ‘in accepting a conclusion, there is a virtual recognition of its premisses’; he does not maintain that the ‘recognition’ or acceptance of certain ‘premisses’ impels the ‘acceptance’ of a ‘conclusion’; he suggests that the ‘recognition’ of the ‘premisses’ is a ‘virtual’ concomitant of an act of assent – as if the premisses are recognized ‘in’ the assent, or accepted in the act of accepting the ‘conclusion’.

In a note added to the Oxford University Sermons in 1871, Newman reflects on the relationship between ‘moral temper’ and ‘argumentative exercises’, observing that ‘the intellectual principles on which the conclusions are drawn, to which Faith assents, are the consequents of a certain ethical temper, as their sine qua non condition’.¹¹¹ If the ‘intellectual principles’ are the ‘consequents of a certain ethical temper’, and if that ‘ethical temper’ is ‘their sine qua non condition’, then it would seem that this ‘temper’ is in some sense ‘prior’ to those ‘principles’. Newman makes, equally, a distinction between the ‘drawing’ of ‘conclusions’ – on certain ‘intellectual principles’ – and the ‘assent’ of faith. ‘Faith assents’ to certain ‘conclusions’; but it is not itself the ‘drawing’ of those conclusions. That assent, it would seem, is something more than a ‘drawing’ of ‘conclusions’. Does ‘Faith assent’ on the ‘intellectual principles’ that arise from ‘a certain ethical temper’, or does it assent on another ‘principle’?

In Loss and Gain, the priest with whom Reding converses on the train to London observes that ‘there is quite evidence enough for a moral conviction that the Catholic or Roman Church, and none other, is the voice of God’.¹¹² When Reding asks, ‘Do you mean … that before conversion [a man] can attain to a present abiding actual conviction of this truth?’ The priest replies, ‘I do not know … but, at least, he may have habitual moral certainty; I mean, a conviction, and one only, steady, without rival conviction, or even reasonable doubt, present to him when he is most composed and in his hours of solitude, and flashing on him from time to time, as through clouds, when he is in the world; – a conviction to this effect, “The Roman Catholic Church is the one only voice of God, the one only way of salvation”’; and the priest adds, ‘He will not have, he cannot expect, clearer light before conversion.’¹¹³

Certainty, in its highest sense, is the reward of those who, by an act of the will, and at the dictate o f reason and prudence, embrace the truth, when nature, like a coward, shrinks. You must make a venture; faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a gift after it. You approach the Church in the way of reason, you enter into it in the light of the Spirit.¹¹⁴

When the priest remarks ‘faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic’ and a ‘gift after it’, how should this be understood? In a sermon preached in 1836, on ‘The Ventures of Faith’, Newman observes that ‘our duty as Christians lies in this, in making ventures for eternal life without the absolute certainty of success … . No one among us knows for certain that he himself will persevere; yet every one among us, to give himself even a chance of success at all, must make a venture.’¹¹⁵ Faith is ‘in its very essence the making present what is unseen; the acting upon the mere prospect of it, as if it really were possessed; the venturing upon it, the staking present ease, happiness, or other good, upon the chance of the future’.¹¹⁶ He observes that Abraham ‘went out, not knowing whither he went’, that St Paul declared that ‘if the dead are not raised, we have indeed made a most signal miscalculation in the choice of life, and are altogether at fault’, that St Peter made an ‘offer of service’ to Christ, not fully understanding what would be involved in abiding by it, that Christ insists on the need of ‘forsaking all’ else but Him – ‘We give up our all to Him; and He is to claim this or that, or grant us somewhat of it for a season, according to His good pleasure.’¹¹⁷ Newman maintains that ‘if faith be the essence of a Christian life, and if it be what I have now described, it follows that our duty lies in risking upon Christ’s word what we have, for what we have not … uncertain about our reward, uncertain about our extent of sacrifice, in all respects leaning, waiting upon Him, trusting in Him to fulfil His promise, trusting in Him to enable us to fulfil our own vows, and so in all respects proceeding without carefulness or anxiety about the future’.¹¹⁸ There are, in a sense, two ‘ventures’: one ventures ‘upon Christ’s word’, his ‘promise’, that if one should ‘give up … all to Him’, one will attain to a ‘reward’; and one ventures that one will be able to persevere in living in this way, so as to attain to this ‘reward’. The two ventures are connected: as one trusts that Christ will ‘fulfil His promise’ – requiting the ‘sacrifice’ one makes for Him – so one trusts that He will ‘enable’ one to ‘fulfil’ the ‘vows’ made to Him. While the two ventures are connected, however, and while they each involve an uncertainty as to the future, they are, nevertheless, distinct: one ‘venture’ relates to an uncertainty about the nature of reality (about whether reality is such, Christ is such, that to act in a certain way, is to obtain a ‘reward’); the other ‘venture’ relates to an uncertainty about the self (about whether one can persevere in a mode of life). In ‘The Ventures of Faith’, then, Newman suggests that the ‘venture’ of faith consists in living in a certain way, while uncertain of the future – uncertain of whether living in this way will make for a ‘reward’, and uncertain of whether one will be able to persevere in living this way. To ‘believe’, for Newman at this stage, in 1836, is to act on the belief. One could act, in faith, while nevertheless being in some uncertainty. On becoming a Catholic, Newman certainly did not think that one could be certain that one would persevere in righteousness;¹¹⁹ but he did think that one could attain to ‘certainty’ in faith – one could be certain that Christ would ‘fulfil His promise’ (if one were to live in accordance with His ‘word’). The priest, in Loss and Gain, declares that ‘faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic’ and a ‘gift after it’. The priest maintains that one may have a ‘conviction’, ‘before conversion’ that the ‘Catholic or Roman Church … is the voice of God’, and that this conviction may amount to an ‘habitual moral certainty’. An ‘habitual moral certainty’ is not an absolute certainty; so to act on such a ‘moral certainty’ is to make a ‘venture’ (for such an act may involve some uncertainty). When the priest declares that ‘faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic’, then, he might be suggesting that the ‘venture’ is in acting on the ‘habitual moral certainty’ that the church is of God – namely, in joining the church, and making an act of faith in what the church presents as the ‘word’ of God. When one has become a Catholic, faith, sustained by grace, is a ‘gift’. Where, in ‘The Ventures of Faith’, the ‘ventures’ are the acts that proceed from faith (Newman suggests that, where there are the acts, there is ‘faith’) in Loss and Gain, the ‘venture’ seems to be in the initial ‘act’ of joining the church (a ‘venture’ made on a view that is a ‘moral certainty’, but not an absolute certainty). In ‘The Ventures of Faith’, the ‘ventures’ are the acts that proceed from faith, and, if a venture is an act that is carried out in some uncertainty, then this would suggest that faith involves some uncertainty.

The priest, in Loss and Gain, maintains that that ‘[men] will not be blessed, they will effect nothing in religious matters, till they begin by an act of unreserved faith in the word of God, whatever it be; till they go out of themselves; till they cease to make something within them their standard; till they oblige their will to perfect what reason leaves sufficient, indeed, but incomplete’.¹²⁰ The priest seems to distinguish between a ‘moral certainty’ that the ‘Church … is the voice of God’, and ‘an act of unreserved faith in the word of God’. The priest maintains that those who make an act of faith ‘go out of themselves … [and] cease to make something within them their standard’. There is a difference between having a ‘conviction’ that the ‘Church … is the voice of God’, on the ‘ground’ of various ‘reasonings’ – in which those reasonings are ‘something within’, a ‘standard’ by which a judgment is formed – and making an ‘act of unreserved faith in the word of God’, in which the ‘word’ is believed ‘as’ the word of God, the ‘standard’ being the truth of God.

In his Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, Newman maintains that faith ‘is assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie’ and ‘since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says … as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God’.¹²¹ This account of faith corresponds to that of Thomas Aquinas, who maintains that ‘faith … does not assent to anything, except because it is revealed by God’, and it ‘bases itself on the divine Truth as on its means’.¹²² Those who have a belief that ‘bases itself on the divine Truth as on its means’ would seem to ‘go out of themselves’ and ‘cease to make something within them their standard’: they take as ‘their standard’ something other than what is ‘within them’ – namely, ‘the divine Truth’ itself. To believe what is proposed by the church ‘because it is revealed by God’ is to treat the church ‘as’ the ‘voice of God’ (and to ‘base’ belief ‘on the divine Truth as on its means’).

Newman observes that ‘there is merit in believing that the Church is from God; for though there are abundant reasons to prove it to us, yet we can, without an absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion; we may complain that it is not clearer, we may suspend our assent, we may doubt about it, if we will, and grace alone can turn a bad will into a good one’.¹²³ How does Aquinas relate the ‘assent’ of faith (and the ‘merit’ of faith) to the ‘act’ of the will? He observes that, as faith is not ‘moved to assent by its very object, which is known either by itself (as in the case of first principles, which are held by the habit of understanding), or through something else already known (as in the case of conclusions which are held by the habit of science)’, so ‘the intellect [in an act of faith] assents to something, not through being sufficiently moved to this act by its proper object, but through an act of choice, whereby it turns voluntarily to one side rather than to the other’.¹²⁴ ‘To believe’, then, is an ‘an act of the intellect, in so far as the will moves it to assent’: with regard to the ‘intellect’, ‘the formal aspect of the object … the medium because of which we assent to such and such a point of faith’, is the ‘First Truth’, so an ‘an act of faith is to believe God, since … the formal object of faith is the First Truth, to Which man gives his adhesion, so as to assent for Its sake to whatever he believes’; with regard to the ‘will’, an ‘an act of faith is to believe in God’, since ‘the First Truth is referred to the will, through having the nature of an end’.¹²⁵ As the will is involved in faith, so faith is ‘meritorious’.

Our actions are meritorious in so far as they proceed from free choice moved with grace by God. Therefore every human act proceeding from free choice, if it be referred to God, can be meritorious. Now the act of believing is an act of the intellect assenting to divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God, so that it is subject to free choice in relation to God; and consequently the act of faith can be meritorious.¹²⁶

The act of faith is the start of a movement toward a ‘beatitude’ that consists in the ‘vision’ of God: ‘To this vision man cannot attain unless he be taught by God,’ and as ‘every one who learns … must needs believe, in order that he may acquire science in a perfect degree’, so, in the spiritual life, which is a movement toward ‘vision’, perfect knowledge, ‘in order that a man arrive at the perfect vision of heavenly happiness, he must first of all believe God, as a disciple believes the master who is teaching him’. The ‘free choice’, here, would seem to be a choice to ‘believe God’ – for the mind is not ‘sufficiently moved’ to believe what God ‘teaches’ by apprehending it for itself.

When Newman remarks that ‘there is merit in believing that the Church is from God’, he seems to be suggesting that the arguments that would show the Church to be ‘from God’ do not, of themselves, compel belief (‘we can, without an absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion’ [that the ‘Church is from God’]); so something more than those arguments – namely a ‘good’ will – is required if one is to believe that the Church is from God, and ‘there is merit’ in a good will. Aquinas observes that in faith there is ‘free choice’ since the intellect, in believing, is not ‘moved to assent by its very object’: its ‘object’ is not evident to the intellect in such a way that the intellect is compelled to believe. Aquinas relates the ‘merit’ of faith to its being ‘subject to free choice in relation to God’: in ‘divine’ faith, one simply believes God – the ‘formal object of faith is the First Truth’ – such that God is the object of the act of belief; one believes what God ‘teaches’, though one cannot ‘see’ for oneself what God teaches. Newman maintains that faith consists in assenting to that which God ‘says’ is true, and ‘since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says … as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God’. Believing that ‘the Church is from God’ is involved in believing that God ‘teaches’ one ‘by the voice of His messengers’, and one must believe that one is presented with the ‘voice’ of God in ‘the voice of His messengers’, if one is to take the ‘divine Truth’ as a ‘means’ or ‘basis’ for believing what one is ‘taught’. One cannot ‘believe God’, if one does not take something to be the ‘voice’ of God; and one must recognize the Church to be a ‘messenger’, if one is to take ‘what man says’ as the ‘voice’ of God. Believing that ‘the Church is from God’ is, then, involved in the act of believing God through the medium of the Church (an act which is ‘meritorious’). ‘Believing that the Church is from God’ is something with ‘merit’ when it is something that animates the act of believing the ‘word’ of the Church as the word of God.

One can only believe ‘what God teaches’, if one believes ‘that God teaches’: one can only believe something as the teaching of God if one apprehends it as the teaching of God. The apprehension ‘that God teaches’ is the ‘formal object’, the ‘means’, which is involved in believing what God teaches. There need not be, though, distinct ‘acts’ of believing ‘that God teaches’ and believing ‘what God teaches’; rather, ‘believing a teaching as the teaching of God’ could be considered a single act, in which a belief in what God teaches is sustained, motivated, by the belief that God, the First Truth, teaches. The belief ‘that God teaches, and God is Truth’ is, in ‘divine faith’, present as the motive for an act (of believing what is taught). (In this regard, it is present in the way the insights of phronesis are present in the virtuous acts that proceed from, or are informed by, phronesis.) The belief ‘that God teaches’ – that ‘this is a genuine revelation’ – is not itself the ‘motive’ or ‘formal object’ for the belief ‘that God teaches’; otherwise, there would be an infinite regress (one believes that God teaches because God teaches that He teaches, and so on). The belief ‘that God teaches, and God is Truth’ is the motive for the belief in ‘what God teaches’. A ‘motive’, generally, is ‘that because of which’ one acts in a certain way. There is the ‘thing itself’, because of which one acts (a certain reality, or situation) and there is the apprehension of the ‘thing itself’, which makes it present to, or in, the will. The ‘thing itself’, because of which one believes God, is the truth of God, and so this truth, itself, is present as the motive for believing what God teaches (‘the formal object of faith is the First Truth, to Which man gives his adhesion, so as to assent for Its sake to whatever he believes’). This ‘First Truth’ cannot be apprehended, in itself. What is apprehended is the revelation. The ‘First Truth’ is present as a motive, in the will, when the revelation is believed as ‘what God teaches’, because ‘God, who is Truth, teaches’ it. As belief in the proposition ‘that God teaches’ cannot have as its motive the belief ‘that God teaches’, it would seem that it needs to be established by ‘reason’. (In an essay on ‘The Benedictine Schools’, Newman observes that ‘it is self-evident, that we should not know what was revelation and what was not, unless we used our reason to decide the point’.¹²⁷) ‘Be convinced in your reason’, Newman observes, ‘that the Catholic Church is a teacher sent to you from God, and it is enough.’¹²⁸ If such conviction is ‘enough’, it is also, it would seem, necessary. ‘If you are half convinced, pray for a full conviction, and wait till you have it.’¹²⁹ To be ‘convinced in … reason’ – or, at least, to ‘feel the force of the argument for the divine origin of the Church’, so as to recognize what ‘reason’ establishes with regard to this ‘divine origin’ – is not in itself, however, to have that conviction present as a motive in the will. Newman maintains that ‘faith is the consequence of willing to believe; we may see what is right, whether in matters of faith or obedience, of ourselves, but we cannot will what is right without the grace of God’.¹³⁰ It is when the conviction is ‘in’ the will, animating the will – as the insights of phronesis, a kind of ‘ratiocinative desire’, animate the virtuous acts that are informed by phronesis – that the will is ‘moved’ by the ‘First Truth’ itself.

It requires a certain ‘good will’ to become ‘convinced’ that the Church is ‘of God’ – to be moved by the arguments that would establish this – as these arguments are not irresistible, and do not compel assent. That ‘conviction’, in turn, is present as a motive in the act of faith, motivating an assent to what the Church proposes as ‘of God’. In the act of faith, one simply ‘believes God, as God is Truth’. The will to ‘believe God, as God is Truth’ must be, it seems, different from the will that disposes one to accept the arguments proving the ‘Divine origin’ of the church: those arguments are not construed, themselves, as the ‘word’ of God, such that, in accepting them, the will to ‘believe God, as God is Truth’ need be involved. Could, though, the will to ‘believe God, as God is Truth’ be present, in any way, prior to any apprehension of something as the ‘word’ or ‘voice’ of God? If it could, then one might maintain that this will, in itself, is somehow at work, disposing one to accept the ‘conclusion’ of the arguments that would show the Church to be ‘of God’: that is, if one is indisposed to ‘believe God’, tout court, then one might be indisposed to recognize something as the ‘voice’ of God, requiring belief; if one is indisposed to fulfil a ‘claim’ on oneself, then one might be indisposed to recognize something that presents that ‘claim’ for what it is (and the arguments that would show the Church to be ‘of God’ would show that there is something that presents one with the ‘claim’ to ‘believe God’). If, then, the disposition to ‘believe God, the will to ‘believe G od’, might be present, prior to any occasion for its exercise, then it might make one apt to recognize the ‘word’ of God, when presented with it. (It might even, perhaps, incline one to take something ‘as’ the ‘word’ of God that is not, in truth, the word of God: as one would ‘believe God’, so one would have an occasion for ‘believing God’, which might incline one to believe – too hastily – that one is being presented with such an occasion.) If the will to ‘believe God’ might be present, prior to any occasion for its exercise, then the will to ‘believe God’ might, then, be present in those who do not yet accept any particular ‘word’ as the ‘word’ of God (with its presence being, nevertheless, owing to ‘grace’ – God imparting that willingness to ‘believe God’).

In his sermon on ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, Newman observes, ‘It is the new life, and not the natural reason, which leads the soul to Christ. Does a child trust his parents because he has proved to himself that they are such and that they are able and desirous to do him good, or from the instinct of affection? We believe because we love?’¹³¹ In 1871, he commented on this in a note, ‘This means, not love precisely, but the virtue of religiousness, under which may be said to fall the pia affectio or voluntas credendi.’¹³² The note indicates the sense in which, as a Catholic, he is willing to maintain that ‘we believe because we love’: there is a disposition of the will, involved in belief, but it is ‘not love precisely’, not charity, but a ‘willingness to believe’, a good will. Newman suggests that the ‘voluntas credendi’, the willingness to believe, comes ‘under’ the ‘virtue of religiousness’. The ‘virtue of religiousness’, unlike faith, is not ‘theological’, because it does not have God as its ‘formal object’. The ‘virtue of religiousness’ is a disposition to give God what is due to Him: it is to be moved by ‘justice’ (what is due), rather than by God Himself. In a note in the 1871 edition of Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, Newman remarks that ‘Catholics hold that, whereas faith, as a disposing condition, is prior to justification, love or charitas is posterior to it. It is a pia affectio and a bona voluntas, not charitas, which precedes faith.’¹³³ If this ‘bona voluntas’ is analogous to the ‘trust’ a ‘child’ has for its parents, then it would seem to be the ‘will to believe’ that ‘commands’ the intellect to assent to the word of God. If this ‘bona voluntas … precedes faith’, then it would seem that it is present, and formed, prior to the act of faith itself: if one might ‘see’ that one ‘ought to believe; and yet … be unable to believe’, so, perhaps, one might be able to believe, but not yet ‘see’ that one ‘ought to believe’.

Faith, Aquinas maintains, is an act of the intellect, but it involves the will:

If the act of faith is to be perfect, there needs to be a habit in the will as well as in the intellect: even as there needs to be the habit of prudence in the reason, besides the habit of temperance in the concupiscible part, in order that the act of that part be perfect. Now to believe is immediately an act of the intellect, because the object of that act is the true, which pertains properly to the intellect. Consequently faith, which is the proper principle of that act, must needs reside in the intellect.¹³⁴

That is – faith is ‘in the intellect’, as ‘temperance’ is in the ‘concupiscible part’, but as ‘temperance’ requires phronesis, so faith requires a ‘habit in the will’. Aquinas maintains that ‘charity’ is the ‘form’ of faith, that charity perfects faith.

The act of faith is directed to the object of the will, i.e., the good, as to its end; and this good which is the end of faith, viz. The divine Good, is the proper object of charity. Therefore charity is called the form of faith, in so far as the act of faith is perfected and formed by charity.¹³⁵

There can, however, be ‘formless faith’, Aquinas maintains, which is the ‘same habit’ as ‘formed faith’; but formless faith is ‘not a virtue’.

Though the act of formless faith is duly perfect on the part of the intellect, it has not its due perfection on the part of the will [namely, charity]. So, too, if temperance be in the concupiscible part without prudence being in the rational part, temperance is not a virtue because the act of temperance requires both an act of reason, and an act of the concupiscible part; even as the act of faith requires an act of the will, and an act of the intellect.¹³⁶

If, though, ‘formless faith’ is without the requisite ‘perfection on the part of the will’, but faith, in itself, requires an ‘act of the will’, then how can there be such a thing as ‘formless faith’ at all? Aquinas observes that, while faith is ‘formed’ by charity, it must, equally, precede charity: there can only be an act of will, if that act has an object, and the object of an act of will is apprehended by the intellect; faith apprehends the ‘last end’, which is the object of charity; so there cannot be ‘charity’ without the apprehension of the ‘last end’ in faith.

Essentially faith precedes all other virtues. For since the end is the principle in matters of action … the theological virtues, the object of which is the last end, must needs precede all the others. Now the last end must of necessity be present in the intellect before it is present in the w ill, since the will has no inclination for anything except in so far as it is apprehended by the intellect. Hence, since the last end is present in the will by hope and charity, and in the intellect, by faith, the first of all the virtues must, of necessity, be faith, because natural knowledge cannot reach God as the object of heavenly beatitude, which is the aspect under which hope and charity tend towards Him.¹³⁷

Aquinas considers the objection that since ‘in the act of faith, the act of the will, which is perfected by charity, precedes the act of the intellect, which is perfected by faith, as the cause which precedes its effect’ so it must be the case that ‘charity precedes faith’;¹³⁸ he counters this objection by observing that ‘some act of the will is required before faith, but not an act of the will quickened by charity. This latter act presupposes faith, because the will cannot tend to God with perfect love unless the intellect possesses a right faith about Him.’¹³⁹ ‘Some act of the will’, then, is required for faith, but it need not be ‘an act of the will quickened by charity’. Aquinas maintains that ‘faith which is a gift of grace, inclines man to believe by giving him a certain affection for the good even when that faith is formless.’¹⁴⁰ Faith can be animated, sustained, elicited by a ‘certain affection for the good’ (‘aliquem affectum boni’) even when it is not animated by ‘charity’. Faith – whether ‘formed’ or ‘formless’ – assents to what it assents to, on the authority of God. One might, then, recognize it to be good to assent to what God reveals – and one might have sufficient ‘affection for the good’ to assent to what God reveals – without necessarily having the ‘love of God’ that is charity.

Aquinas insists that the ‘internal cause’ of faith, ‘which moves man inwardly to assent to what belongs to faith’, must not be conceived of in a ‘Pelagian’ manner.

The Pelagians held that this cause was nothing else than man’s free choice, and consequently they said that the beginning of faith is from our selves inasmuch as, namely, it is in our power to be ready to assent to the things which are of faith, but that the consummation of faith is from God, Who proposes to us the things we have to believe. But this is false, for since by assenting to what belongs to faith, man is raised above his nature, this must needs come to him from some supernatural principle moving him inwardly; and this is God. Therefore faith, as regards the assent which is the chief act of faith, is from God moving man inwardly by grace’¹⁴¹

Faith has as its ‘formal object’, God Himself: the ‘formal object’, in the act of faith, the ‘medium because of which we assent’, is God; ‘an act of faith is to believe God, since … the formal object of faith is the First Truth, to Which man gives his adhesion, so as to assent for Its sake to whatever he believes’. The ‘First Truth’ is that ‘by which’ one believes, ‘the medium because of which’ one believes. One assents ‘because God is Truth’, and so the truth of God moves one ‘inwardly’ to assent. Aquinas would counter the ‘Pelagian’ view that ‘it is in our power to be ready to assent to the things which are of faith’, such that while God ‘proposes to us the things we have to believe’, it is ‘in our power’ to be disposed to assent to them: on this account, God acts in ‘proposing’ the ‘things we have to believe’, and the response to this is ‘in our power’, is ‘our’ act. Aquinas would insist that the response to what God ‘proposes’ is itself ‘moved’ by God; he maintains that, as the truth of God is the ‘formal object’, the ‘medium because of which we assent’ – as that truth motivates the assent – so it is not ‘external’ to that act.

God ‘proposes to us … things we have to believe’ in the revelation, and those things are concerned with God. God reveals Himself, so that, to have faith in the self-revelation of God, is to be presented with what God has revealed of Himself, to contemplate God as revealed by His ‘word’, to contemplate the ‘image’ of God. To contemplate the ‘image’ of God presented in the revelation, taking that image to be true, because ‘from God’ (via a ‘messenger’ of God, of one kind or another) is, then, to have faith. Newman observes that ‘there is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world; it comes down by tradition from age to age; it is carried forward by preaching and profession from one generation to another, and is poured about into all quarters of the world’;¹⁴² to encounter the traces of this ‘body’, is to be capable of forming something of the image of God, in which ‘Catholic truth’ consists; to encounter some of these traces is to be capable of forming just so much of the ‘image’ of God, as those traces present, or contain; and if one takes the traces which one encounters to be ‘from God’, requiring belief precisely because they are ‘from God’, then one can have a divine faith, animated by the image of God one has formed from the traces of ‘Catholic truth’ one has encountered. Faith can, then, be an un-self-conscious ‘seeing’ or contemplation of an image of the ‘Unseen’, taken to be a manifestation of God (and it is a ‘vision’ of this kind which Newman attributes to ‘Catholics’, in the late 1840s and early 1850s – even those Catholics who are without ‘love’).

The ‘word’ one believes, in the act of faith, is a ‘word’ that shows God to be ‘like such and such’. The act of faith, then, involves not only ‘believing God’, but believing ‘that God is such and such’ or ‘like such and such’; and what one believes about God – in accepting the ‘image’ of God presented in the ‘word’ one takes to be ‘from God’ – must be consistent with the act of believing Him: that is, the image of God which one accepts, in accepting the ‘word’ of God, must show God as having qualities consistent with being the ‘First Truth’. With regard to the ‘motives for belief’ that a re present in ‘reason’, it would seem that, since the ‘word’ of God, which one is invited to believe, is a word which shows God to be ‘such and such’ or ‘like such and such’, so one is – to the extent that one is inclined to think that God is ‘like such and such’ – inclined to credit that ‘word’.

What God reveals, in the revelation, is His very self: He shows Himself to be ‘such and such’; He presents an ‘image’ of Himself. The revelation, then, presents an image of the One whom one is believing, when one believes the revelation. One ‘believes God’, in accepting the revelation, and the revelation presents one with an image of whom it is that one is believing. In believing the revelation, one believes ‘the God who reveals Himself to be such and such’ in that revelation. One might observe that God ‘reveals Himself to be such and such’ not simply in the content of the revelation, but in the manner of the revelation: that God reveals Himself at all, is an act of mercy (God showing Himself, thereby, to be merciful). God reveals Himself in an act that is analogous to an act of personal expression, in an utterance of His ‘voice’; and, as there is, in the apprehension of the ‘voice’, and manner, of another person, an apprehension of something of the spirit, the character, of that person, so there is, perhaps, something analogous to this in the apprehension of the ‘voice’ of God, and this might involve a registering of something like a quality of ‘truthfulness’. (Newman was willing to maintain, in this regard, that ‘there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who feel cannot communicate’; and if it is possible to ‘feel’ a certain ‘divinity’ in the ‘theology of the Church’, then perhaps, all the more, it is possible to ‘feel’ a certain ‘divinity’ in the revelation itself, presented by the Church.)

In Christianity, the primary ‘image’ of God is Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the Logos incarnate, the self-expression of God. In an article on ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, published in 1866, Newman observes that in Christ, ‘the motivum credibililatis, the objectum materiale, and the formale’ coincide. He reflects, in the article, upon how the authority of the Scriptures could be established – against sceptical challenges to that authority – and he considers whether the Scriptures might derive a certain authority from what they present – the image of Christ. The image is of a ‘Teacher sui generis, distinct, consistent and original’: it seems such that it could not have been simply imagined; it has about it a quality of reality, of ‘fact’. What is more, as ‘the qualities with which He is invested’ in that image ‘are incompatible with what it is reasonable or possible to ascribe to human nature viewed simply in itself’, so the image seems to ‘record’ not simply a ‘fact’ but ‘a superhuman fact’. ‘The representation in question is there, and forces upon the mind a conviction that it records a fact, and a superhuman fact, just as the reflection of an object in a stream remains in its general form, however rapid the current, and however many the ripples, and is a sure warrant to us of the presence of the object on the bank, though that object be out of sight.’

[There are those who, in defending Christianity, would urge the] contemplation of our Lord’s character, as it is recorded by the Evangelists, as carrying with it its own evidence, dispensing with extrinsic proof, and claiming authoritatively by itself the faith and devotion of all to whom it is presented. Such an argument, of course, is as old as Christianity itself; the young man in the Gospel calls our Lord ‘Good Master’, and St. Peter introduces Him to the first Gentile converts as one who ‘went about doing good’; and in these last times we can refer to the testimony even of unbelievers in behalf of an argument which is as simple as it is constraining. ‘Si la vie et la mort de Socrate sont d’un sage’, says Rousseau, ‘la vie et la mort de Jésus sont d’un Dieu’. And he clenches the argument by observing, that were the picture a mere conception of the sacred writers, ‘l’inventeur en serait plus étonnant que le héros’. The force of this argument lies in its directness; it comes to the point at once, and concentrates in itself evidence, doctrine, and devotion. In theological language, it is the motivum credibililatis, the objectum materiale, and the formale, all in one; it unites human reason and supernatural faith in one complex act; and it comes home to all men, educated and ignorant, young and old. And it is the point to which, after all and in fact, all religious minds tend, and in which they ultimately rest, even if they do not start from it. Without an intimate apprehension of the personal character of our Saviour, what professes to be faith is little more than an act of ratiocination. If faith is to live, it must love; it must lovingly live in the Author of faith as a true and living Being, in Deo vivo et vero; according to the saying of the Samaritans to their townswoman: ‘We now believe, not for thy saying, for we ourselves have heard Him.’ Many doctrines may be held implicitly; but to see Him as if intuitively is the very promise and gift of Him who is the object of the intuition. We are constrained to believe when it is He that speaks to us about Himself.¹⁴³

If Christ is the self-expression of God, then the ‘representation’ which presents Christ is a representation of the self-expression of God. To apprehend Christ through that ‘representation’, as the self-expression of God, is to be presented, via that ‘representation’, with the self-expression of God – as a ‘word’ demanding ‘divine faith’. A ‘word’ is presented, through the representation of Christ, in which God ‘speaks to us about Himself’. Such a response to the ‘representation’ of Christ ‘unites human reason and supernatural faith in one complex act’ – the ‘human reason’ that registers the ‘superhuman’ in Christ, and the ‘supernatural faith’ which responds to the self-expression of God, mediated by that ‘representation’. (The way in which, in or through the representation of Christ, the ‘speech’ of God is registered, is perhaps analogous to the way in which, in or through a text, a ‘voice’ is registered – and, in that ‘voice’, something of the character, and something of the personal presence, of the one whose ‘voice’ it is. The word that is apprehended as presenting the ‘voice’ of God is a word that puts one into the presence of God: it is a word that is sacramental.) If Christ is the self-expression of God, and something of the ‘speech’ of God can be registered, in or through ‘representations’ of Christ, then those who are presented with representations of Christ can register, and respond to, the ‘speech’ of God, as mediated by those representations; they can respond in faith to the ‘speech’ of God, when presented with the image of Christ. These representations of Christ are not encountered only by members of the Catholic Church; as Newman observes, in his Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’, ‘There is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world; it comes down by tradition from age to age; it is carried forward by preaching and profession from one generation to another, and is poured about into all quarters of the world.’ He maintains that ‘men take up and profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them’, and this ‘without really seeing them, as the Catholic sees them, but as receiving them merely by word of mouth, from imitation of others’.¹⁴⁴ That some ‘men … profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them’ need not, surely, mean that all who ‘profess’ these ‘truths’ do so in this way. Could not some of those who encounter these ‘truths’ register them as manifesting the self-expression of God (even if there are other truths which they do not ‘see’)? Would Newman maintain that one can only ‘see’ the truths of the revelation, when one sees them as parts of the whole which is conveyed by the revelation, parts of the overall ‘image’ or ‘impression’? In the Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’, he claims that what looks like ‘Catholic’ profession, need not be a manifestation of genuine Catholic faith. Could there not, though, be something akin to Catholic faith in those who receive these ‘scattered truths’, if they receive them as ‘from God’, and register in them, or through them, the self-expression of God? In his Discourse on ‘Faith and Doubt’, when he observes that ‘the multitude of men in this country have not this habit or character of mind’, he is observing what, in his view, is the case – not what must be the case. There is a ‘habit or character of mind’ which ‘men in this country’ do not have: ‘We could conceive, for instance, their believing in their own religions; this would be faith, though a faith improperly directed; but they do not believe even their own religions.’ It does not seem to be a necessity that they should not believe ‘their own religions’; and, if they were to do so, ‘this would be faith, though a faith improperly directed’. If they were to exercise faith in the ‘scattered truths’ presented to them, through ‘their own religions’, as ‘truths’ revealed by God, then this would be something very like ‘divine faith’. In Loss and Gain, in the conversation Reding has with a priest on the train to London, Reding declares that there are ‘a good many persons’ in the Church of England ‘who, from knowledge of the Gospels, have an absolute conviction and an intimate sense of the reality of the sacred facts contained in them, which, whether you call it faith or not, is powerful enough to colour their whole being with its influence, and rules their heart and conduct as well as their imagination’.¹⁴⁵ The priest observes that if ‘these persons believe and practise all that is brought home to them as being in Scripture’ then ‘perhaps they may be practising the virtue of faith; if there are passages in it to which they are insensible, as about the sacraments, penance, and extreme unction, or about the See of Peter, I should in charity think that these passages had never been brought home or applied to their minds and consciences – just as a Pope’s Bull may be for a time unknown in a distant part of the Church. They may be in involuntary ignorance.’¹⁴⁶ (Newman adds, in a note, a quotation from John De Lugo, a seventeenth-century Jesuit theologian, to the effect that those who are in ‘invincible error’, as to certain articles of faith, while believing others with ‘supernatural faith’, can go on to make an act of contrition that is ‘saving’.¹⁴⁷ That is, De Lugo recognizes that ‘supernatural faith’ can exist in those who are not Catholics.) Newman maintains that as the Christian faith is a whole, a unity, so the ‘scattered truths’ of Christianity fit together within a whole, and those ‘truths’ tend, as such, to coalesce; if one believes some of those ‘scattered truths’, so one tends toward believing that in which they are all united – namely, the faith professed by the Catholic Church.

In his article on ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, Newman maintains that the ‘argument’ for the ‘divinity’ of Christianity from the ‘character’ of Christ, as represented in the Gospels, is ‘an argument for the divinity not only of Christ’s mission, but of that of His Church also’. One is presented, in that ‘representation’, not simply with Christ, but with the church (as instituted by Christ), and with a notion of the church as something instinct with the presence of Christ.

‘The kingdom of God is at hand’. What was meant by the kingdom of God? … . At the first formation of the nation and state of the Israelites, the Almighty had been their King; when a line of earthly kings was introduced, then God spoke by the prophets. The existence of the theocracy was the very constitution and boast of Israel … . Moreover, the Gospel proclamation ran, ‘Poenitentiam agite; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’: here again was another and recognized token of a theophany; for the mission of a prophet, as we have said above, was commonly a call to reformation and expiation of sin … . There was this peculiarity in (the) mission (of Christ), that He came, not only as one of the prophets in the kingdom of God, but as the King Himself of that kingdom … . He is, then, a King, as well as a Prophet … . In what, then, did He consider His royalty to consist? … . In truth, He passed by the lesser powers of royalty to claim the higher. He claimed certain divine and transcendent functions of the original theocracy, which had been in abeyance since that theocracy had been infringed … . God had created, first the people, next the state, which He deigned to govern … . These two incommunicable attributes of divine royalty, as exemplified in the history of the Israelites, are the very two which our Lord assumed. He was the Maker and the Lawgiver of His subjects … . To these two claims He added a third: first, He chooses the subjects of His kingdom; next, He gives them a law; but thirdly, He judges them … . We shall mention one further function of the new King and His new kingdom: its benefits are even bound up with the maintenance of this law of political unity … . But cui bono is a visible kingdom, when the great end of our Lord’s ministry is moral advancement and preparation for a future state? … . The Christian law is political, as certainly as it is moral. Why is this? It arises out of the intimate relation between Him and His subjects, which, in bringing them all to Him as their common Father, necessarily brings them to each other. Our Lord says, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am in the midst of them.’ Fellowship between His followers is made a distinct object and duty, because it is a means, according to the provisions of His system, by which in some special way they are brought near to Him. This is declared, still more strikingly than in the text we have just quoted, in the parable of the Vine and its Branches, and in that (if it is to be called a parable) of the Bread of Life. The almighty King of Israel was ever, indeed, invisibly present in the glory above the Ark, but He did not manifest Himself there or anywhere else as a present cause of spiritual strength to His people; but the new King is not only ever present, but to every one of His subjects individually is He a first element and perennial source of life. He is not only the head of His kingdom, but also its animating principle and its centre of power.¹⁴⁸

To apprehend the Church rightly is to apprehend it as having Christ as ‘its animating principle and its centre of power’. The Church is not something wholly distinct from, separate from, Christ; so a full apprehension of Christ involves an apprehension of the Church (and vice versa). To apprehend the ‘scattered’ traces of Christ in the world is to tend toward an apprehension of the Church as manifesting Christ.

In his Oxford University Sermons, Newman maintains that the ‘reason’, by which the revelation is recognized as a revelation, is more ‘implicit’ than ‘explicit’; and he maintains that this ‘implicit reason’ is inseparable from the ‘moral self’. If, at the time he first preached the sermons, he regarded the ‘moral’ spirit animating ‘implicit reason’ as ‘love’ or ‘charity’, he would later maintain that this ‘spirit’ is ‘good will’ rather than ‘charity’. In the Oxford University Sermons, Newman maintains that ‘the Gospel’ is encountered ‘through’, or with, this ‘antecedent’, and ‘implicit’ understanding. When St Paul preached the Gospel, ‘He appealed to that whole body of opinion, affection, and desire, which made up, in each man, his moral self … which, if it was what it should be, would respond to the Apostle’s doctrine, as the strings of one instrument vibrate with another.’ Newman suggests that the ‘body of opinion, affection, and desire’ which makes up ‘in each man, his moral self’, the understanding of goodness involved in that ‘moral self’, conduces to the recognition that a certain revelation is genuine. ‘Why does he feel the message to be probable? … . He has a keen sense of the intrinsic excellence of the message, of its desirableness, of its likeness to what it seems to him Divine Goodness would vouchsafe did He vouchsafe any, of the need of a Revelation, and its probability.’ The ‘reasoning’ by which the ‘conviction’ is formed that ‘this is the revelation’ is a matter, not merely of ‘explicit’ argumentation (though it may involve such argumentation, and is consistent with it) but of the understanding involved in experience, the understanding acquired through responding to the multifarious ‘needs of daily life’. ‘All men have a reason, but not all men can give a reason’: the ‘reason’, here, is inseparable from the ‘moral self’. The forming of a ‘moral self’, animated by ‘presumptions’ disposing one to recognize the revelation, could be taken to involve the forming of a ‘good will’, a will disposed to ‘believe God’ when presented with what is taken to be a revelation. All of this is consistent with the notion of ‘divine faith’, which Newman set out in the late 1840s and early 1850s. If one were to maintain that a ‘good will’ is a condition for faith, and that a recognition of the genuineness of the revelation is a condition for faith, then one could maintain that, in the Oxford University Sermons, Newman suggests that the conditions for faith – in the ‘reason’, and in the ‘will’ – arise together, and are connate. (That these conditions are present, however, need not mean that faith is present.) In an address to those ‘as yet external’ to the church, in Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, Newman takes it that those ‘external’ to the church might be animated by ‘anticipations’ of a revelation; and he invokes the ‘presumptions’ that, in ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, he had characterized as ‘holy, devout, and enlightened presumptions’ (‘that a Revelation is very needful for man; that it is earnestly to be hoped for from a merciful God; that it is to be expected … that it will be in a way worthy of Him … that such and such ends are in their nature great, such and such a message important, such and such means worthy, such and such circumstances congruous’).

The simple question to be decided is one of fact, has a revelation been given? … . It comes to you recommended and urged upon you by the most favourable anticipations of reason … . He has always addressed you circuitously, by your inward sense, by the received opinion, by the events of life, by vague traditions, by dim histories; but as if of set purpose, and by an evident law, He never actually appears to your longing eyes or your weary heart, He never confronts you with Himself. What can be meant by all this? a spiritual being abandoned by its Creator! there must doubtless be some awful and all-wise reason for it; still a sore trial it is; so sore surely, that you must gladly hail the news of His interference to remove or to diminish it. The news then of a revelation, far from suspicious, is borne in upon our hearts by the strongest presumptions of reason in its behalf. It is hard to believe that it is not given, as indeed the conduct of mankind has ever shown. You cannot help expecting it from the hands of the All-merciful, unworthy as you feel yourselves of it. It is not that you can claim it, but that He inspires hope of it; it is not you that are worthy of the gift, but the gift which is worthy of your Creator . It is so urgently probable, that little evidence is required for it, even though but little were given. Evidence that God has spoken you must have, else were you a prey to impostures; but its extreme likelihood allows you, were it necessary, to dispense with all proof that is not barely sufficient for your purpose. The very fact, I say, that there is a Creator, and a hidden one, powerfully bears you on and sets you down at the very threshold of revelation, and leaves you there looking up earnestly for divine tokens, that a revelation has been made. Do you go with me as far as this, that a revelation is probable? well then, a second remark, and I have done. It is this, the teaching of the Church manifestly is that revelation.¹⁴⁹

On becoming a Catholic, then, Newman considered his account, in the Oxford University Sermons, of the ‘anticipations of reason’, as applicable to the situation of those ‘external to the Church’. That one has faith, though, does not mean that one ceases to ‘reason’, or that one ceases to be moved by ‘reason’. In his Preface to the 1871 edition of the Oxford University Sermons, Newman observes that ‘since, in accepting a conclusion, there is a virtual recognition of its premisses, an act of Faith may be said (improperly) to include in it the reasoning process which is its antecedent, and to be in a certain aspect an exercise of Reason; and thus is co-ordinate, and in contrast, with … explicit, evidential, and secular Reason’. If the assent of ‘Faith’ is not simply a matter of accepting a ‘conclusion’, as inferred from certain ‘premisses’, but is, rather, a matter of believing God, and accepting a ‘word’ which is taken to be ‘from God’, nevertheless, there is, in that assent, a ‘virtual recognition’ of any (rightly conducted) ‘reasoning process’ undertaken, as an ‘antecedent’ to faith, showing that the ‘word’ assented to, is ‘from God’. Faith is ‘in a certain aspect an exercise of Reason’; the ‘reasoning’ by which one recognizes that a revelation is ‘from God’ is, in a sense, ‘included’ in faith. What is more, faith involves an acceptance of various propositions, and there is in the ‘assent’ of faith a ‘virtual recognition’ of ‘exercises of reason’ implied by, or consistent with, those propositions.

The propositions to which ‘Faith assents’ are consistent with some ‘premisses’, and not with others. In a sermon on ‘The Usurpations of Reason’ in the Oxford University Sermons, Newman remarks that ‘unlearned Faith, establishing itself by its own inherent strength, ruled the Reason as far as its own interests were concerned, and from that time has employed it in the Church, first as a captive, then as a servant; not as an equal, and in nowise (far from it) as a patron’.¹⁵⁰ In a note added in 1871 he observes, of this, that ‘unlearned Faith was strong enough, in matters relating to its own province, to compel the reasoning faculty, as was just, to use as its premisses in that province the truths of Natural Religion’.¹⁵¹ Newman shows, in his note, a wish to make clear that that ‘unlearned faith’ did not obtrude itself beyond its own ‘province’: it did not impose ‘conclusions’ on the ‘reasoning faculty’ which that faculty could not support or demonstrate; rather, it required the ‘reasoning faculty’ to use, in the ‘province’ of faith, ‘premisses’ of a kind which the ‘reasoning faculty’ could, of itself, recognize and condone – the ‘truths of Natural Religion’. ‘Unlearned faith’ might, in this, have provided a stimulus to ‘reasoning’ – eliciting forms of reasoning consistent with ‘faith’. Newman recognizes, moreover, that there is a ‘reasoning from’ the ‘premisses’ of faith; in his Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’ he acknowledges that ‘reason’ is ‘the instrument which the Church herself is guided to make use of, when she is called upon to put forth … definitions of doctrine’.¹⁵² (He suggests that the Church ‘is guided to make use of’ reason, rather than that it is ‘compelled’ to make use of it, for want of anything else to use: the use of ‘reason’ is subject to a higher ‘guidance’, a higher sanction, rather than being self-legitimating. This ‘use’ of ‘reason’ is, in any case, legitimate.)

If Newman could not, as a Catholic, regard ‘faith’ as merely a form of ‘reasoning’ – ‘faith’ was distinct from ‘reason’ – he could acknowledge that it was ‘in a certain aspect an exercise of Reason’; the reasoning, ‘antecedent’ to faith, by which a certain ‘word’ is recognized as the ‘word’ of God, is in a sense ‘included’ in the act of faith, even if faith, assenting to that ‘word’ as the word of God, has as the ‘principle’ of its assent the ‘truth of God’, the ‘First Truth’. Newman could, moreover, as a Catholic, accept the account, in the Oxford University Sermons, of the kind of ‘reason’ that might be the ‘antecedent’ of faith – ‘implicit reason’, animating, and implicated with, the ‘moral self’. He did not, however, regard this ‘reason’ as itself animated by ‘love’ or ‘charity’. As an Anglican, he had maintained that faith ‘may be described as the temper under which men obey; the humble and earnest desire to please Christ which causes and attends on actual services’. ‘To believe and to obey [are] but different characteristics of one and the same state of mind.’ He claimed that faith is a ‘principle of conduct’: there is no faith, unless there are the acts which accord with, which proceed from, faith. In his Oxford University Sermons, he suggests that the ‘reason’ by which the revelation is recognized as genuine, is a ‘reason’ implicated with the ‘moral self’. If it is the ‘moral self’ that recognizes the revelation, this might suggest that the revelation, when recognized, itself becomes a part of the ‘moral self’, animating the ‘moral self’: it is apprehended, and then appropriated, by the ‘wisdom’ constituting the ‘moral self’. If ‘action is the criterion of true faith’, and action is an expression of the ‘moral self’, then it would seem that there is ‘true faith’ when that ‘faith’ has become a p art of the ‘moral self’. As a Catholic, Newman maintained that faith – though something requiring ‘good will’ – was ‘perfectly distinct in its own nature from the desire, intention, and power of acting agreeably to it’. In his Discourse on ‘Sainthness the Standard of Christian Principle’, Newman maintains that one might have an ‘awakened soul’, animated by the ‘idea of a Saint’, and be, nevertheless, ‘worldly minded’.

The awakened soul is witness [to a sharp contrast] between the objects of its admiration and pursuit in its natural state, and those which burst upon it when it has entered into communion with the Church Invisible, when it has come ‘to mount Sion … and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Testament’. From that day it has begun a new life: I am not speaking of any moral conversion which takes place in it; whether or not it is moved, (as surely we believe it will be) to act upon the sights which it sees, yet consider only what a change in its views and estimation of things there will be, directly it has heard and has faith in the word of God … . Worldly-minded men, however rich, if they are Catholics, cannot, till they utterly lose their faith, be the same as those who are external to the Church; they have an instinctive veneration for those who have the traces of heaven upon them, and they praise what they do not imitate. They have an idea before them, which Protestants have not; they have the idea of a Saint.¹⁵³

The parenthesis – ‘surely we believe it will be’ – suggests that it is ‘natural to suppose’ that the ‘soul’ will be ‘moved’ by the ‘sights’ presented by faith. Yet Newman acknowledges that there can be ‘worldly-minded’ Catholics, who ‘praise what they do not imitate’. In ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, he observes that ‘Catholics are both deeper and shallower than Protestants’, and that the ‘shallower’ Catholics, who ‘live to the world and to the flesh’, have a ‘certainty about religious truth, however firm and unclouded, [which] is but shallow in its character, and flippant in its manifestations’.

In Tract 85 (1838), reflecting on how, to the question of Christ, ‘will you also go away?’ St Peter responded ‘Lord, to whom should we go?’ Newman observes that Peter ‘had within him ideas of greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity – he had a love of them – he had an instinctive hope and longing after their possession’ and that this ‘love’ was a ‘parent’ of his ‘faith’.

Nothing could convince him that this unknown good was a dream. Divine life, eternal life was the object which is soul, as far as it had learned to realize and express its wishes, supremely longed for. In Christ he had found what he wanted … . Christ’s ways might be dark, His words often perplexing, but still he found in Him what he found nowhere else – amid difficulties, a realization of his inward longings. ‘Thou hast the words of eternal life’ … . Love is the parent of faith. We believe in things we see not from love of them: if we did not love, we should not believe. Faith is reliance on the word of another; the word of another is in itself a faint evidence compared with that of sight or reason. It is influential only when we cannot do without it. We cannot do without it when it is our informant about things which we cannot do without. Things we cannot do without, are things which we desire. They who feel they cannot do without the next world, go by faith (not that sight would not be better) but because they have no other means of knowledge to go by. ‘To whom shall they go?’ If they will not believe the word preached to them, what other access have they to the next world.¹⁵⁴

Newman suggests, here, that the ‘faith’ is credible to those who desire that what is presented by the ‘word’ of faith should be true (and he suggests that the desire is virtuous, in being a desire for ‘greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity’): one accepts ‘faith’ as an ‘informant’, because one desires that what the ‘informant’ presents to one, should be so. Is this, ultimately, simply a matter of believing an ‘informant’, because one wants what that ‘informant’ tells one to be true? This seems to be something different from believing an ‘informant’ because one takes that ‘informant’ to know the truth, and to be veracious – it would seem to be something different from the attitude involved in ‘divine faith’. To be moved to ‘faith’ by a desire for ‘divine life, eternal life’, is evidently, not to be moved by the ‘truth of God’; yet a desire of this kind might be considered one of the ‘good dispositions’, making for faith. Since ‘divine life, eternal life’, according to Christian teaching, is life in communion with Christ, so the desire for ‘divine life’ might be taken to involve something like a desire for Christ. Once he had become a Catholic, Newman may have considered such a desire as having its proper function in actuating the ‘enquiry’ of ‘reason’ that is the ‘antecedent’ to faith, rather than determining the result of that ‘enquiry’. The desire to ‘believe God’, simply, which is involved in the ‘good will’ that disposes one to ‘divine faith’, is different from the desire for ‘the next world’ as implicated with ‘greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity’ (as making for an inclination to credit an ‘informant’ about the ‘next world’) but these different desires are not incongruous, inconsistent with one another. One who has a desire for ‘the next world’, as implicated with ‘ideas of greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity’, is disposed, when presented with the revelation, to recognize ‘the intrinsic excellence of the message … its desirableness … its likeness to what it seems to him Divine Goodness would vouchsafe did He vouchsafe any … the need of a Revelation, and its probability’. Yet to recognize the ‘need of a Revelation’ in this way is not, in itself, to have faith.

In ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, Newman maintains that the love of God actuates faith, because that love discerns in Christ its proper object: ‘The divinely enlightened mind sees in Christ the very Object whom it desires to love and worship, – the Object correlative of its own affections; and it trusts Him, or believes, from loving Him.’ Those who believe, Newman maintains, do so ‘not on an examination of evidence, but from a spontaneous movement of their hearts towards it … [and] go out of themselves to meet Him who is unseen … discern[ing] Him in such symbols of Him as they find ready provided for them’. Faith, Newman maintains, is a response to a person. A desire for the presence of ‘Him who is unseen’ moves some (rightly or wrongly, as the case may be) to discern ‘Him in … symbols of Him’ – to discern certain things as ‘symbols of Him’, instinct with His presence. The desire for His presence makes for an inclination to discern marks or ‘symbols’ of that presence. There is a ‘desire to love and worship’ that precedes, in a sense, an encounter with the ‘Object’ of that desire; and Newman seems to be suggesting, here, that the capacity to ‘love and worship’ aspires to realize itself, to have an ‘Object correlative’ of itself, that it may be fully realized.

Newman certainly did not, on becoming a Catholic, deny that there could be, prior to conversion, aspirations toward the ‘love’ of God. In Callista (1855), a novel set in the third century, Newman attributes to a pagan Greek character – who reflects on ‘religion’, having conversed with Christians about it – the recognition that ‘religion was the soul’s response to a God who had taken notice of the soul. It was loving intercourse, or it was a name’; and this character recognizes in the Christian teaching that ‘Christianity … consist[s] in intimate Divine Presence in the heart … the friendship or mutual love of person with person’ a ‘teaching which already was so urgently demanded both by [the] reason and [the] heart’. There is, here, an aspiration not simply to ‘love and worship’ but to experience the ‘mutual love of person and person’, the ‘mutual love’ of God and ‘the soul’. To recognize such an aspiration in oneself, however, is not (yet) to have faith. What of the experience of ‘the divinely enlightened mind’, which ‘see[ing] in Christ the very Object whom it desires to love and worship, – the Object correlative of its own affections … trusts Him, or believes, from loving Him’? What is it to ‘see in Christ the very Object whom [one] desires to love and worship, – the Object correlative of [one’s] own affections’? What does ‘correlative’ mean here? One might take it to mean that one has a capacity for experiencing certain ‘affections’, and that one recognizes ‘in Christ’, an object adequate to those affections, an object in relation to whom those affections can be fully expressed. One might, equally, take it to mean that one recognizes that certain ‘affections’ are a fitting response to Christ, that Christ merits them, and that these ‘affections’ are, equally, ‘correlative’ to God. If there are ‘affections’ that are, in a sense, ‘divine’ affections – affections ordered, in themselves, to God – then could those affections be a means of recognizing what is of God? To feel ‘affections’ that are ‘correlative’ of a divine ‘Object’ could be to recognize – in, or through those ‘affections’ – the presence of a divine ‘Object’: to feel those ‘affections’ for Christ, could be to recognize in Christ such an ‘Object’. In this ‘intimate apprehension of the personal character of our Saviour’ there is something like an apprehension, in Christ, of ‘the motivum credibililatis, the objectum materiale, and the formale, all in one’, in a manner that ‘unites human reason and supernatural faith in one complex act’. The ‘affections’ felt for Christ, if taken as a mark of the presence of a divine ‘Object’, would be a ‘motive of credibility’, a sign of the presence of something divine. Newman would maintain that the contemplation of Christ, as presented in the Gospels, as the ‘material object’ and ‘formal object’ of faith, and as the ‘very food of our devotion’, was the ‘very life of personal religion among Catholics’.

It is the character and conduct of our Lord, His words, His deeds, His sufferings, His work, which are the very food of our devotion and rule of our life … . As the Psalms have ever been the manual of our prayer, so have the Gospels been the subject-matter of our meditation … . What Catholics, what Church doctors, as well as Apostles, have ever lived on, is not any number of theological canons or decrees, but, we repeat, the Christ Himself, as He is represented in concrete existence in the Gospels … and after all is there not That in all Catholic churches which goes beyond any written devotion, whatever its force or its pathos? Do we not believe in a Presence in the sacred Tabernacle, not as a form of words, or as a notion, but as an Object as real as we are real?

Wherever ‘the Christ Himself’ is ‘represented in concrete existence’, and is recognized as ‘real’, and as divine, there, something of ‘divine faith’ may be present. All the ‘instinctive … longings’ making up the ‘moral self’, the ‘instinctive’ sense of the divine, and of ‘greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity’, are involved in the apprehension of Christ as the ‘voice’, and self-expression, of God; and where the ‘voice’ of God is recognized, in the ‘image’ of Christ, then it can be believed ‘as’ the voice of God, believed ‘because God is true’.

Notes

1 Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 265.

2 ‘Faith and Private Judgement’, in DMC, 192, 193.

3 Ibid., 193–4.

4 Ibid., 194–6.

5 Ibid., 199.

6 Ibid., 200.

7 Ibid., 205.

8 Ibid., 201.

9 Ibid., 202.

10 Ibid., 204.

11 Ibid., 207.

12 Ibid., 211.

13 ‘Faith and Doubt’, in DMC, 224–5.

14 Ibid., 234–5.

15 ‘Nature and Grace’, in DMC, 151–2.

16 Ibid., 153.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 156–8.

19 John Henry Newman, ‘Evangelical Sanctity the Completion of Natural Virtue’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1909), 40

20 ‘Evangelical Sanctity the Completion of Natural Virtue’, in OUS, 41.

21 ‘Sainthness the Standard of Christian Principle’, in DMC, 83–4.

22 Ibid., 93–4.

23 Ibid., 93.

24 ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 169–70.

25 Ibid., 171.

26 Ibid., 174–6.

27 Ibid., 175.

28 Ibid., 181.

29 Ibid., 187. The first edition had, instead of ‘they cannot rule their mind’, ‘their mind is too feeble and dull to grasp and keep hold of this truth’.

30 ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 187.

31 Ibid., 187–8.

32 ‘Faith and Doubt’, in DMC, 220.

33 Diff i, 268, 269, 272, 288.

34 Ibid., 266.

35 Ibid., 268.

36 Ibid., 275.

37 Ibid. In the first edition of Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, having observed that Protestantism ‘does not see the unseen’, that ‘this habit, this act of the mind is foreign to it’, Newman remarks that it ‘does not contemplate faith in its Catholic sense; for it has been taught by flesh and blood, not by grace’ (Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (London: Burns & Lambert, 1850), 223). Newman excised this remark from later editions.

38 Diff i, 270–1.

39 ‘Sainthness, the Standard of Christian Principle’, in DMC, 92.

40 Ibid., 92–3.

41 Diff i, 276.

42 Ibid., 276–7, 282.

43 Ibid., 287. The first edition of Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans did not include the phrase ‘however coarse-minded, however sinful’. The original version had a simple contrast between ‘a population which half believes’, and those ‘who believe wholly’. That he added the qualification about those who ‘believe wholly’ (making them those ‘who, however coarse-minded, however sinful, believe wholly’) could suggest that he wished to avoid suggesting that to ‘believe wholly’ is invariably to believe in this particular way: the pageant is a somewhat ‘coarse-minded’ expression of faith; a faith that ‘believes wholly’ need not be expressed in this way; such an expression of faith is not the ‘ideal’ expression of it.

44 Diff i, 289–90.

45 Ibid., 272.

46 Ibid., 288.

47 LD, xii, 168. Quoted in Ian Ker, ‘Newman’s Post-Conversion Discovery of Catholicism’, in Ian Ker, ed., Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 44.

48 Diff i, 289.

49 Ibid., 236, 237.

50 Ian Ker has stressed the importance for Newman of his ‘discovery’ of Eucharistic devotion in his first years as a Catholic, and how this informed his sense that ‘Anglicanism’ and ‘Catholicism’ were quite different ‘religions’. See Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Catholic Revival in English Literature: 1845–1961 (Leominster: Gracewing, 2003) and ‘Newman’s Post-Conversion Discovery of Catholicism’, in Ian Ker, ed., Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 37–58.

51 LD x i, 252–3.

52 Ibid., 224.

53 ‘Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 182.

54 ‘Faith and Reason, contrasted as Habits of Mind’, in OUS, 182.

55 Ibid., 182–3.

56 Ibid., 183.

57 Ibid., 187.

58 Ibid., 187–8.

59 Ibid., 190.

60 Ibid., 191, 193.

61 Ibid., 193.

62 ‘The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason’, in OUS, 202–3.

63 Ibid., 203, 206.

64 Ibid., 212–13, 216, 217.

65 Ibid., 218.

66 ‘Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, in OUS, 223–4, 225, 226.

67 Ibid., 226–7.

68 Ibid., 233–4.

69 Ibid., 236.

70 Ibid., 239–40.

71 Ibid., 248.

72 Ibid., 248–9.

73 ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, in OUS, 256, 257.

74 Ibid., 257, 258.

75 Ibid., 253.

76 Ibid., 253–4.

77 Ibid., 258–9.

78 Ibid., 267–8.

79 Ibid., 272.

80 Ibid., 275.

81 ‘Faith without Sight’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 19–20.

82 ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 19.

83 Ibid., 20.

84 Ibid., 18.

85 ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions [hereafter OS] (1857; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 69.

86 ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 17.

87 ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 63.

88 Ibid., 63.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid., 69–70.

91 Ibid., 70.

92 ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 19.

93 Ibid., 21.

94 ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 69.

95 Ibid., 70.

96 Ibid., 72.

97 ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 19.

98 ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 65.

99 Ibid., 65–6.

100 Ibid., 66.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid., 67.

103 ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 20.

104 ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 67.

105 Ibid.

106 ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 23.

107 ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 73–4.

108 Ibid., 61.

109 Ibid., 60.

110 OUS, xvi.

111 ‘Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, in OUS, 179n.

112 Loss and Gain, 264.

113 Ibid., 264.

114 Ibid., 264–5.

115 ‘The Ventures of Faith’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1839; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 296.

116 ‘The Ventures of Faith’, in PPS iv, 297

117 Ibid., 297–9.

118 Ibid., 299.

119 In a Discourse on ‘Perseverance in Grace’, he observes that ‘we cannot know [that we will persevere] till the end; all we know is, that God has helped us hitherto, and we trust He will help us still. But yet the experience of what He has already done is no proof that He will do more; our present religiousness need not be the consequence of the gift of perseverance as bestowed upon us; it may have been intended merely to prompt and enable us to pray earnestly and continually for that gift.’

120 Loss and Gain, 265.

121 ‘Faith and Private Judgement’, in DMC, 194.

122 S.T. II-II Q1. A1. co. (The translation used is that of the English Dominican translation of 1947, as amended by Anton C. Pegis, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1945).)

123 ‘Faith and Doubt’, in DMC, 224.

124 S.T. II-II Q1. A4. co.

125 S.T. II-II Q2. A2. co.

126 S.T. II-II Q2. A9. co.

127 ‘The Benedictine Schools’, in Historical Sketches ii (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 483.

128 ‘Faith and Doubt’, in DMC, 233.

129 Ibid.

130 Ibid., 225.

131 ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, in OUS, 235–6.

132 Ibid., 236n.

133 Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, (1838; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 236n.

134 S.T. II-II Q4. A2. co.

135 S.T. II-II Q4. A3. co.

136 S.T. II-II Q4. A5. co

137 S.T. II-II Q4. A7. co.

138 S.T. II-II Q4. A7. arg 5.

139 S.T. II-II Q4. A7. ad 5.

140 S.T. II-II Q5. A2. ad 2.

141 S.T. II-II Q6. A1. co.

142 ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 174.

143 ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, in Discussions and Arguments [hereafter DA] (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 366–7.

144 ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 174–6.

145 Loss and Gain, 262.

146 Ibid., 262–3.

147 The quotation from John De Lugo is: ‘Errantes invincibiliter circa aliquos articulos, et credentes alios, non sun formaliter haeretici, sed habent fidem supernaturalem, qua credunt veros articulos, atque adea ex ea possunt procedere actus perfectae contritionis, quibus justificentur et salventur.’ Loss and Gain, 262n.

148 ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, in DA, 374–9.

149 ‘Mysteries of Nature and Grace’, in DMC, 276–7.

150 The Usurpations of Reason in OUS, 58.

151 Ibid., 58n.

152 ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 187.

153 ‘Sainthness the Standard of Christian Principle’, in DMC, 93–5.

154 ‘Holy Scripture in its Relation to the Catholic Creed’, in DA, 250, 252.

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