NOTES

Chapter Four

Newman’s Mature Notion of Catholic Faith

According to Newman, Catholic faith, and the process by which it is obtained, is analogous to the process by which the mind arrives at certitude in matters of concrete human truths. As an assent of certitude, the act of Catholic faith includes the same elements that are operative in the act of human certitude in concrete matters of truth. However, Newman is employing an analogy, and it is not legitimate to identify completely the act of human certitude with the act of Catholic faith. In arriving at human certitude, the person is engaged in a process that includes informal reasoning, the illative sense, and a free personal decision that involves the will. The act of Catholic faith also includes all of these elements. However, any explanation of the act of Catholic faith also has to include a discussion of God’s Word and God’s grace. This means that any attempt to describe how the elements of human certitude apply to the act of Catholic faith must take into consideration the differences as well as the similarities between the two.

Also, it must be kept in mind that in A Grammar of Assent, Newman himself did not explicitly apply all of the elements involved in the act of human certitude to the act of Catholic faith. As a result, the attempt to do so will, to some extent, go beyond Newman’s explicit statements and will involve a certain amount of speculation. Drawing upon his applications of human certitude to Catholic faith in A Grammar of Assent, as well as his statements on faith in his other writings, this chapter will present a constructive and systematic analysis of Newman’s mature understanding of Catholic faith.

Our starting point is A Grammar of Assent. Here Newman applies the results of his analysis of human certitude to the Catholic notion of faith in two instances. In chapter 5 of A Grammar of Assent, he applies the results of the first part of the book, the discussion of assent and apprehension, to two revealed truths of Catholic teaching: “He [God] is One” and “He [God] is Three.”¹ The results of the second part of A Grammar of Assent, the discussion of inference, assent, certitude, informal inference, and the illative sense, are applied to Catholic faith in chapter 10, where Newman examines the evidences for Christianity.² This chapter will not discuss the evidences for faith but will focus on Newman’s understanding of the nature of Catholic faith.

In discussing the nature of Catholic faith in A Grammar of Assent, Newman makes a distinction between the act of faith and the object of faith. He says that he is going to talk about two elements. First, Newman says, he is going to talk about assent, the act of faith, “to investigate what it is to believe in the [doctrines], what the mind does, what it contemplates, when it makes an act of faith.”³ Second, he states that he is going to discuss the material object of faith, “the thing believed,”⁴ or the object of faith. Based on his analysis of the act of faith and the object of faith, one gets the impression that Newman views the two to be inseparable. He always speaks of the act of faith in relation to the object of faith. He does distinguish between the two, but he never seems to want to separate them. His approach seems similar to that of Paul Tillich, who holds that you cannot separate the objective and subjective poles of faith. However, Tillich does maintain that, for purposes of discussion, you can distinguish the two, even though each must be discussed in relationship to the other.⁵

With this distinction as a model, Newman’s notion of Catholic faith will be examined first from the point of view of the act of faith. Then we will analyze his understanding of the object of faith.

THE ACT OF FAITH

A Real Assent

For Newman, the act of Catholic faith at its deepest level is a real assent to the realities of revelation and not just a notional assent to the abstract propositional statements of the truths of revelation. In the act of faith, the believer assents to the truths of revelation with the reflex awareness that one knows that what one accepts is indeed true. The act of faith is expressed as follows: “I know that the truth that God is One is True,” “I know that the truth that God is Three is true,” and “I know that the Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus is true.” As an act of certitude, Catholic faith includes a simple assent, accepting the revealed truth, as well as a complex, reflex assent that what one believes is indeed true. From the point of view of the reflex, complex assent, the act of Catholic faith is a notional assent, as are all certitudes. But from the point of view of simple assent, the act of Catholic faith is a real assent.

In A Grammar of Assent, Newman goes to great lengths to show that the dogmas of faith, which are notions, can be apprehended really and can be the objects of real assent. In demonstrating this point, he discusses two dogmas (revealed truths), “He [God] is One” and “He [God] is Three.”⁶ At the end of the discussion of the belief that God is One, Newman concludes that this dogma can indeed be the object of an act of real assent. He writes, “I have wished to trace the process by which the mind arrives, not only at a notional but at an imaginative or real assent to the doctrine that there is One God, that is, an assent made with an apprehension, not only of what the words of the proposition mean, but of the object denoted by them.”⁷

In the actual demonstration of this conclusion, Newman focuses on the doctrine of the oneness of God as a natural truth rather than a revealed truth, although he admits that it is both.⁸ He outhnes his argument for the existence of God from conscience and shows how conscience can lead to an image of God that is vivid, concrete, real, and personal. On the basis of this image of God, one can have a real apprehension of God and make a real assent to God’s existence and the oneness of God.⁹ It is also clear that the real apprehension and real assent to the natural truth that God is One equally applies to the revealed truth that God is One. For Newman states that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ intensifies the personal realness of our image of the One God. The personal God who is revealed in the Scriptures and in the tradition of the church is even more vivid, concrete, and capable of being an object of real apprehension and real assent.¹⁰

Newman also thinks, with some qualifications, that the dogma of the Trinity can be the object of real apprehension and real assent. In explaining his position, he makes a distinction between the dogma of the Trinity as a whole and the dogma in its individual parts, its distinct propositions. According to Newman, the doctrine of the Trinity taken as a complex whole, as a mystery, cannot be the object of real apprehension or real assent. His reason is that he does not think that it is possible for the human person to imagine the doctrine as a whole, because the doctrine as a whole is a mystery that transcends our experience.¹¹ However, Newman states that the individual statements of the doctrine, taken one by one, can be the objects of real apprehension and of real assent.¹² Therefore, for Newman, it is possible to give a real assent to the individual propositions of the Trinity, such as “From the Father is, and ever has been, the Son,” “The Father is the One Eternal Personal God,” and “The Father is not the Son.”¹³ In this discussion, Newman seems to be intent on maintaining two principles. One is that the reality of God remains shrouded in mystery and beyond our ability to completely imagine and personally experience in a total way. Newman says that it is a general principle that we know God only in shadows and that we cannot bring those shadows together.¹⁴ We can, he states, combine the individual truths notionally, but we cannot hold them all together in the imagination.¹⁵ The second principle that Newman wishes to maintain is that the doctrine of the Trinity can be an object of personal faith and devotion.¹⁶ He states that this is demonstrated by the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity has been taught in the creeds and the liturgy throughout the history of the church.¹⁷ The church, in its statements on the Holy Trinity, Newman adds, has fulfilled the maxim “Lex orandi, lex credendi ” (the law of prayer [liturgy] is the law of belief).¹⁸ His treatment of the doctrines of the “Oneness of God” and of the Trinity support the position that, in his view, the act of faith is a real assent, not simply a notional assent to abstract propositions.

This view that faith is a real assent for Newman is further confirmed by his distinction between religion and theology. When a person gives a real assent to a dogma that is apprehended by the imagination as a real thing, Newman calls this act religion. On the other hand, theology is the act of giving a notional assent to a dogma that is apprehended as an abstract truth of revelation. ¹⁹ It is clear that here he intends to distinguish between two modes of assent, a religious assent and a theological assent.²⁰ However, even though religion and theology are distinct, they are closely related to one another. Newman writes, “every religious man is to a certain extent a theologian, and no theology can start or thrive without the initiative and abiding presence of religion.”²¹ He adds that religion uses theology and theology uses religion.²²

Based on Newman’s description of this distinction, it becomes evident that the reality of Catholic faith lies at the level of the assent of religion. In the act of religious assent, the truths of revelation are apprehended by the imagination and accepted through a real assent. As has already been pointed out, the moment of the response of Catholic faith, for Newman, is the moment of real assent. Newman states that religion apprehends the realities of revelation for the purpose of devotion.²³ He describes the assent of religion as “vital religion,” “believing in God,” and “the true reception of the Gospel.”²⁴ On the other hand, when the truths of revelation are apprehended and accepted as notions, they become the objects of theology. Theology, Newman states, apprehends propositions “for the purpose of proof, analysis, comparison, and the like intellectual exercises.”²⁵ The assent of theology is notional, while the religious assent of Catholic faith is a real assent to the realities of divine revelation.

Newman goes on to show that there is no opposition between religion and theology, no antagonism between a personal, living faith and the notional acceptance of dogma. Any opposition that seems to exist between the two is the result of failing to recognize that dogmas can be accepted through a real assent as objects of faith and devotion, as well as being viewed as notions. It is when dogmas are viewed only as abstract notions that they present problems for personal faith and devotion.²⁶ For Newman, dogmas serve a twofold purpose. Apprehended and accepted through real assent, they express the realities of revelation that are accepted in faith through the religious imagination, and they become the objects of devotion. Apprehended and accepted as notions, they ascertain and make clear for the believer “the truths on which the religious imagination has to rest.”²⁷ In light of this second purpose, he thinks that religion is more dependent on theology for its maintenance than theology is on religion. Theology, Newman states, can stand “as a substantive science, though it be without the life of religion.”²⁸ However, religion, he adds, “cannot maintain its ground at all without theology.”²⁹ Explaining his basis for this statement, Newman states that knowledge precedes the exercise of the affections, ³⁰ and, in religion, “the imagination and affections should always be under the control of reason.”³¹

Although the distinction between religion and theology is helpful, it does present some problems. For one thing, calling theology an assent can be a little misleading. More properly speaking, theology is the moment of reflecting on that which is accepted through faith and not the moment of assenting to the truths of faith. Theology is reflection, not assent. By speaking of theology as notional assent, Newman’s main point seems to be that he wants to show that theology arises out of the intellect. But why call theology an assent, since it really is the moment when the intellect reflects? In speaking of both a religious assent and a theological assent, it seems that Newman is really speaking about two types of faith, a personal faith based on real assent and an intellectual faith based on notional assent. Another problem is that theology appears to be reduced to an abstract science. Based on this distinction, theology is viewed only as reflection on abstract notions and not as reflection on the divine realities themselves. It would seem that theology, as reflection on faith, should be able to be elicited after a real assent as well as after a notional assent. Perhaps, in the context of this distinction, Newman is limiting the notion of theology to dogmatic theology in the Roman and neoscholastic senses. In any case, this analysis of theology does not represent Newman’s complete view of this subject. In his book Personal Catholicism, Martin Moleski suggests that theology, for Newman, is also a personal form of reflection and reasoning and is not exclusively a notional and deductive science.³²

The Role of Personal Reasoning

Another consequence of the application of the analogy of human certitude to Catholic faith is the realization that a process of personal reasoning is one of the elements that constitutes the act of faith for Newman. The act of Catholic faith, like human certitude, is an assent that engages the operations of informal reasoning and the illative sense. As in human certitude, informal reason and the illative sense demonstrate that it is rational for a person, in the act of faith, to accept things that one cannot fully understand and that go beyond the logical force of the available evidence. Also, similar to the assent of human certitude, the reasoning process in the act of faith includes such elements as presumptions, antecedent considerations, antecedent reasons, and the available evidence. This means that in the process of arriving at the certitude of faith in a Catholic sense, the person has to consider the concrete evidences of revelation, such as Scripture and the teaching of the Christian churches throughout history. Such factors as one’s openness to revelation, one’s moral dispositions, as well as God’s revelatory Word and grace also have to be considered. All of these elements are influential factors in the illative sense’s evaluation of the accumulation of probabilities and the process of arriving at certitude in the act of Catholic faith.

As a result of the personal and holistic reasoning process, the believer is led to assent to the realities and propositions of revelation. Through this personal reasoning, the mind concludes that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is true. Confronted with the truth of revelation, the believer’s personal reasoning processes are constrained by the evidence, but not logically forced to accept the conclusion. Similar to human certitude, the act of Catholic faith engages reasoning processes that are compatible with the normal operations of the human mind. It does not shut down our reasoning processes. However, the assent of certitude of Catholic faith, as is the case in human certitude, is not the conclusion of a syllogism or the result of a logical demonstration. Formal reasoning does not lead to the assent of faith. The certitude of Catholic faith goes beyond the evidence through the operations of informal reason and the illative sense. The intrinsic force of the evidence does not impersonally compel certitude. What this analysis demonstrates is that, for Newman, the act of faith is reasonable, even though it is not the conclusion of rational process. Faith is “reasonable,” but not “reasoned to.”

The Role of the Will

According to Newman, the act of Catholic faith is a free act for which the person is responsible. From this it follows that the act of faith also involves the operation of the will. It would seem consistent with Newman’s thought to suggest that the will operates in the act of Catholic faith in a way that is similar to the role that it plays in human certitude. Consequently, as in human certitude, the act of Catholic faith is not an arbitrary choice that results from an independent act of the will separate from the reasoning process. In the act of faith, it is not as if the believer, in encountering Christian revelation, comes up against a brick wall and is forced to decide either to accept it or reject it through an act of the will. It is not as if the informal reasoning process can only go so far, then the will jumps in, and the act of Catholic faith happens. Such an interpretation is voluntarism and reduces faith to nothing more than an arbitrary choice. This is not Newman’s understanding.

M. Jamie Ferreira’s distinction between the two roles of the will provides a framework for explaining Newman’s understanding of how the will operates in the act of Catholic faith. As in human certitude, the act of the will in arriving at the certitude of Catholic faith is distinct from the operation of the will in the affirmation of faith. In the process of arriving at the certitude of faith, the will operates through the dynamics of what Ferreira refers to as “active recognition.” As in human certitude, the will in the act of Catholic faith is constrained by the personal rational evaluation of the evidence but is not compelled by it. Therefore, in the act of Catholic faith, the will, constrained but not compelled, actively recognizes the truth of the realities and propositions of the Christian revelation and moves the person to assent. The assent is not forced by the will, but the assent could not be given without or against the will. The will does not operate by adding an independent and arbitrary choice but is involved in an integral and active way in the whole personal process of arriving at the assent of certitude of Catholic faith.

As with human certitude, the will also performs a role in the affirmation of the certitude of Catholic faith. If human certitudes are fragile, this is even truer of the certitude of the act of Catholic faith. Like human certitude, the certitude of Catholic faith can be stifled and given up. As a result, it is necessary for the believer to affirm one’s faith. After certitude is reached, the Christian believer, through an act of the will, affirms one’s commitment to the acceptance of the truth of the realities and propositions of the Christian revelation. Such an affirmation is necessary if the certitude of the act of Catholic faith is to endure. In this affirmation, the believer personally appropriates the assent of faith and acknowledges that the revelation that is accepted in this act is in fact true. Here the will acts in a deliberate way, moving the person to consciously affirm the certitude of the act of Catholic faith. Following Ferreira’s model, this second act of the will in the act of faith can be described as “the deliberate act of intending to believe.”³³ When Newman speaks of faith as a free personal choice that involves a total personal commitment to the realities of revelation, he is referring to the role of the will in the affirmation of the certitude of faith.

The Role of God’s Word: The Formal Object

In his brief description of the formal object of faith in A Grammar of Assent, Newman describes it as the “ground of believing.”³⁴ The believer accepts the realities and propositions of revelation on the basis of God’s Word, “because God has revealed them.”³⁵ Nothing more is said about the role of the formal object in A Grammar of Assent. However, it is clear that, for Newman, the act of Catholic faith cannot be adequately explained without including an analysis of the role of God’s Word, the formal object of faith.

Newman does discuss the formal object of faith in some of his other Catholic writings. In the “1847 Paper on the Certainty of Faith,” he distinguishes between the formal object quod (what) and the formal object quo (by which). The formal object quod is God as the object of faith’s contemplation and the source of revelation’s meaning. The formal object quo is God revealing. It is the reason (ratio formalis, formal reason) for the certainty of Catholic faith. Newman writes, “faith [Catholic Divine] is certain, because God speaks who cannot lie.”³⁶ He also discusses the role of the Word of God in the paper “On the Certainty of Faith,” written on December 16,1853. Newman describes the final step in the act of Catholic faith as the assent of the intellect, being commanded by the will, to the truths of revelation because God has revealed these truths.³⁷ Here he describes the formal object of faith as the “authority of God revealing.”³⁸

For Newman, the formal object of faith is a distinctive and essential element in both the formation and continuance of the act of Catholic faith. The act of faith depends on hearing and accepting the word of the Divine speaker who enables us to grasp in faith God testifying to God’s own revelation.³⁹

The Role of Grace

It is the grace of God that enables the believer to grasp that, in the Christian revelation, God is revealing God’s self and that one is actually encountering God’s Word. Without God’s grace, this realization would not be possible. The importance of the role of God’s Word and God’s grace in the act of Catholic faith cannot be underestimated. According to William Fey, Newman does not intend to say that grace merely lends a supernatural quality to an act that is basically natural. The act of faith is not simply the result of an act of informal inference and the illative sense that has been aided by grace. Fey points out that Newman does not intend to reduce faith to a form of rationalism, even an informal one.⁴⁰ The act of faith could not occur simply as a result of a reasoning process. It cannot be created by the will alone. Faith is not simply a human act. The whole process is informed by God’s grace. Since the act of faith cannot occur without the influence of God’s grace, grace, for Newman, is a distinctive element in the act of Catholic faith—distinctive, but not exclusive, for without the personal reasoning process and the act of the will, God’s Word and God’s grace could not produce the act of faith.

Because of his understanding of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, Newman did not have any difficulty explaining the role of grace in the act of Catholic faith. Grace permeated the whole process, both the elements that some call natural and those that some designate as supernatural. For Newman, all human relationships with God, including natural religion, are the result of the influence of God’s grace. Newman did not think that it was necessary to make a rigid distinction between the moment of God’s action and the moment of the human person’s action. Grace and the human response could interpenetrate one another at every level. As a result, Newman found it very difficult to explain his understanding of Catholic faith in the categories of Roman theology that held for a more rigid distinction between the natural and the supernatural. In A Grammar of Assent, he seems to have decided not to adopt the Roman view of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural in his explanation of Catholic faith. For Newman, the act of faith is not a response in which a person goes so far rationally, and then God jumps in with grace and supernaturalizes the act. Rather, the act of Catholic faith is a total personal response, a form of personal knowledge including informal reasoning, the illative sense, and the operation of the will, which is permeated through and through with the grace of God.

The act of faith for Newman is one integrated act of the person and not a conglomeration of disparate elements. The act of Catholic faith is an act in which all of the elements converge into one total personal response. Although he never uses Paul Tillich’s language of faith as a centered act,⁴¹ Newman’s understanding of the act of Catholic faith seems to embrace some of the features of this metaphor. The act of Catholic faith is that response from within the center of the person, which follows when all the elements converge together. If any one of the elements is omitted, or if the act of Catholic faith is reduced to any one of its elements, then this results in a distortion of the act of faith. To maintain that the act of faith is simply the result of the illative sense and/or an informal reasoning process is a distortion. To hold that the act of faith is merely an arbitrary act of the will forcing one to accept truths one cannot understand is a distortion. To reduce faith to an act of God imposed on the human person through God’s Word and God’s grace is also a distortion. To reduce faith to an act of God imposed on the human person through God’s Word and God’s grace is also a distortion. Since all of the elements form one holistic act, any examination of any one of the individual elements will necessarily include a discussion of its relationship to the other elements.

THE OBJECT OF FAITH

The Revelation of God in Jesus Christ

For Newman, the object of Catholic faith is God and the revelation of God in Jesus Christ as concretely expressed in Scripture and the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church. The object of Catholic faith is what Newman refers to as the material object of faith, the “res revelata,” the things that have been revealed. The object of Catholic faith is not “the fact of a revelation,” which is derived through an investigation of the motives of credibility. This is the object of what Newman calls human faith, “fides acquisita.” Also, the object of Catholic faith is not the truths of natural religion, even though these truths prepare the way for the Christian revelation. In Newman’s language of the natural religion/revealed religion distinction, it is the truths of revealed religion, the Judeo-Christian religion, that are the object of the act of Catholic faith. In A Grammar of Assent, Newman describes the object of faith in more concrete and personal terms. He writes, “They [the disciples] ‘preached Christ’; they called on men to believe, hope, and place their affections, in that Deliverer who had come and gone.”⁴² The main content of this preaching was the “description of the life, character, mission, and power of that Deliverer.”⁴³ Newman adds that Jesus himself is the “center and fulness of the dispensation.” ⁴⁴ He speaks of Jesus himself as the “central Image” of faith. It is the thought of Christ, not a corporate body of doctrine, that is the true object of Catholic faith.⁴⁵

The Sources of Revelation

The sources of God’s revelation for Newman are the Scriptures, the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament, as well as Tradition, the teachings of the Christian churches throughout history. One major source for Newman was the history of Christianity, particularly the early councils of the Church and the writings of the early Greek and Latin fathers of the Church. One cannot fully understand Newman without realizing that his vision of Christian faith and his approach to theology are rooted in the history of Christianity. And, of course, for Newman, the Catholic Church through its teachings and practices plays a central role in transmitting God’s revelation, the object of Catholic faith.

Distinction between Realities and Propositions

In his treatment of the object of faith, Newman makes a distinction between the realities of Christian revelation and the propositions of Christian revelation, which are the various ways in which the realities of revelation are concretely expressed. Although the two can never be separated and are both an integral part of the object of Catholic faith, Newman gives a certain priority to the reality, the thing revealed, over the proposition that expresses the revealed reality. This can be seen from the description of his understanding of the act of certitude in Catholic faith. As we have seen, the act of Catholic faith at the level of simple assent is a real assent. This means that the actual object of faith is the reality of revelation and not its notional expression. The act of faith goes beyond the notional level of the propositions of revelation to find its true object, which is the experiential encounter with God and the realities of God’s revelation. You cannot give a real assent to a notion unless the imagination penetrates the abstraction of the notion and encounters the reality (the thing) that it reveals.

Although Newman does not use this language, it does seem that he makes a distinction between a primary object of faith, the realities of revelation, and a secondary object, the propositional expressions of divine revelation. Such a distinction finds precedence in the Catholic tradition of the theology of faith. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between the primary object of faith, God as First Truth, and the secondary object of faith, those things related to God as First Truth, the propositions of revelation.⁴⁶ Some contemporary theologians, such as Avery Dulles, when discussing the object of faith, make a distinction between revelation as God’s self-communication and the concrete expressions of revelation.⁴⁷ Newman’s distinction between these two levels of the object of faith highlights the personalist nature of his understanding of Catholic faith. The act of faith is not simply an intellectual assent to doctrines and dogmas but is a personal and experiential encounter with God and the realities of God’s revelation.

The Role of the Catholic Church

The Catholic nature of the object of faith, for Newman, is grounded in his understanding of the role of the Catholic Church in transmitting the realities and propositions of Christian revelation. For the Catholic, God’s Word, the realities of revelation and the concrete expressions of revelation, is encountered and known in and through the mediation of the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. At times, Newman is quite strong in his statements about the role of the Catholic Church in communicating God’s revelation. In his work Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, published in 1849, Newman states that what the Catholic Church declares is God’s Word and is, therefore, true.⁴⁸ Newman often speaks of the Catholic Church as the “oracle of God.”⁴⁹ Because of the gift of infallibility, he goes even further, calling the Catholic Church the “sure oracle of truth” and the “messenger of heaven.”⁵⁰ His language is even stronger when he expresses his view of the role of the Catholic Church in revelation in A Grammar of Assent. “The Word of the Church is the word of revelation. That the [Catholic] Church is the infallible oracle of truth is the fundamental dogma of the Catholic religion.”⁵¹ These statements demonstrate Newman’s strong belief in the central role that the Catholic Church plays in the communication of God’s revelation. However, as will be seen in the next chapter, they do not mean that Newman totally and completely identifies the Word of God and the teachings of the Catholic Church.

In A Grammar of Assent, Newman insists that the object of Catholic faith is the totality of Christian revelation as concretely expressed in the teachings of the Catholic Church. As a result, the Catholic Church expects all Catholics to profess the whole of revelation. This includes not only the concrete and practical propositions, “those bearing on moral content and character,”⁵² but “all the canons of the Councils, and innumerable decisions of Popes.”⁵³ Yet, as Newman points out, the propositions of revelation are so numerous and notional that most ordinary believers do not even know about them, much less are they capable of apprehending them.⁵⁴ Many of these propositions are known and apprehended only by “professed theologians.”⁵⁵

Because the Catholic Church expects all Catholics to accept all the propositions of revelation, even those not known or beyond one’s apprehension, Newman says that the Catholic Church is often accused of imposing its teachings on uneducated believers.⁵⁶ He does not think that this accusation is valid. According to Newman, the Catholic Church does not really impose dogmatic statements on the interior assent of those who cannot apprehend them.⁵⁷ This difficulty, he writes, “is removed by the dogma of the church’s infallibility, and of the consequent duty of ‘implicit faith’ in her word.”⁵⁸ The first duty of the Catholic is to believe all that God has revealed, the whole deposit of revelation. ⁵⁹ Even though it is true that one cannot consciously know all the propositions of revelation, a Catholic believer can achieve this acceptance of the whole of revelation through implicit faith. Newman describes the act of implicit faith of the Catholic believer this way: “whether he knows little or much, he has the intention of believing all that there is to believe whenever and as soon as it is brought home to him, if he believes in Revelation at all.”⁶⁰ This intention, Newman states, is an act of faith, “a believing implicité” (implicitly). ⁶¹ A Catholic, in accepting the deposit of revelation, does implicité accept all the propositions of revelation.⁶² What guarantees the validity of the act of implicit faith is the Catholic’s belief that the church is infallible and, therefore, its teachings are true expressions of God’s revelation.⁶³

For Newman, this act of implicit faith in which the Catholic believer affirms, “I believe what the Church proposes to be believed,” is an act of real assent.⁶⁴ This is so because, for Newman, the church is a concrete reality.⁶⁵ Through this implicit faith, the Catholic believer, Newman says, “supplements the shortcomings of his knowledge without blunting his real assent to what is elementary, and takes upon himself from the first the whole of revelation.” ⁶⁶ It is clear from the whole context of this discussion that Newman is not saying that Catholic faith is blind obedience to the magisterium and an uncritical acceptance of the teachings of the church. Newman’s point is that, because of the implicit faith of the Catholic believer, the Catholic Church does not need to impose on individual believers those teachings in the deposit of faith that they do not know about and/or that they cannot apprehend. In fact, because of the Catholic believer’s implicit faith in the whole of God’s revelation, the church can patiently wait as believers, paraphrasing Newman, and progress from one apprehension of the whole truth of revelation to another according to one’s opportunities for doing so.⁶⁷

In light of today’s tensions between some Catholic believers and the magisterium, Newman’s notion of implicit faith and the gradual appropriation of the propositions of revelation offers a healthy balance. The attitude of the Catholic believer toward the teachings of the church is neither “picking and choosing” nor “writing a blank check.” A Catholic from the start commits to the whole of revelation but, throughout the life of faith, personally appropriates particular propositions of revelation as one becomes aware of them and can apprehend them in a personal way. The church does not force believers to accept teachings that they cannot personally apprehend. This appropriation is, of course, always done in relation to the church as the community of faith and the oracle of God’s revelation.

This chapter demonstrates how Newman’s analogy of human certitude serves as the basic analogy for his Catholic notion of faith. Its purpose has been to draw together the different strands of Newman’s Catholic notion of faith in order to present a systematic analysis of his mature notion of Catholic faith. We have focused on his understanding of Catholic faith through an examination of the act of faith and the object of faith. His understanding of the relationship between faith and reason in his mature notion of Catholic faith remains to be discussed. This is the subject matter of the next chapter.

NOTES

GA, 99.

GA, 384—492.

GA, 99.

Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1958) 10—11.

GA, 100.

GA, 119.

GA, 100.

GA, 105—18.

GA, 118—19.

GA, 129—30.

GA, 130—31.

GA, 135—36.

GA, 131.

GA, 126—27, 140.

GA, 132—35.

GA, 135.

GA, 98.

GA, 99.

GA, 119.

GA, 120.

GA, 119.

GA, 120.

GA, 121.

GA, 120.

GA, 121.

Martin X. Moleski, Personal Catholicism: The Theological Epistemologies of John Henry Newman and Michael Polanyi (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 118, 134, 154—55.

M. Jamie Ferreira, Doubt and Religious Commitment: The Role of the Will in Newman’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 75.

GA, 99.

GA, 99—100.

Newman, “1847 Paper on Certainty,” 1.

Newman, Theological Papers, 37.

Newman, Theological Papers, 132.

William R. Fey, Faith and Doubt: The Unfolding of Newman’s Thought on Certainty (Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos, 1976), 181.

Fey, Faith and Doubt, 180.

Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 4.

GA, 464.

GA, 465.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II, II, Q. 1, A. 1 & 2, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), Vol. II:1056—57.

Avery Dulles, The Survival of Dogma (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 173—82.

Mixed, 215.

Mixed, 215. See also Apo., 228.

Mixed, 227.

GA, 153.

GA, 142.

GA, 146.

GA, 142.

GA, 150.

GA, 151.

GA, 152.

GA, 153.

Edward Jeremy Miller, “Review of Doubt and Religious Commitment: The Role of The Will In Newman’s Thought, by M. Jamie Ferreira,” The Thomist 48, no. 2 (April 1984): 313.

GA, 153.

↑ Back to top