Chapter 39: Newman, the Philosopher
CHAPTER 39
NEWMAN, THE PHILOSOPHER
AFTER this difficult period in his life, during which he tried to defend his intentions and actions, as well as those of Catholic priests, and Catholic intellectual thought in general, came one of Newman’s greatest works: An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, published in March of 1870. It was a heavily philosophical book, and the one on which he worked for the longest time. Newman wrote it in response to the difficulties of William Froude, a Protestant friend who was losing his faith. The book, which was a culmination of his thinking about the philosophical nature of belief and certitude in the University Sermons, interrupted Newman’s writing on metaphysics.
Newman had a philosophical mind and read widely on philosophy. At the end of 1858 he began a course of reading on metaphysics to write a book for a projected magnum opus on philosophy of religion. Some years later he abandoned this work, titled Discursive Enquiries on Metaphysical Subjects, but his notes were compiled into a book and published posthumously as his Philosophical Notebook. He had studied in detail Aristotle’s Logic, Rhetoric and Nichomachean Ethics, which had a major influence on his thinking about knowledge as a personal possession and about knowledge as the grasping of existent realities, rather than abstractions. In the Grammar of Assent he acknowledged deriving from Aristotle ideas on moral duty and φρόνησις (phronesis), or the personal prudential judgment. Regarding his own doctrine of the Illative sense, he wrote: “As to the intellectual position from which I have contemplated the subject (of human knowledge), Aristotle has been my master.”1
The study of Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion helped him to overcome a nominalist and rationalist reading of Aristotle, predominant at Oriel College. He was influenced by Butler’s notion of probability, without accepting the way Butler left it, and thus avoided the mistaken claim of falling into skepticism. In the Grammar of Assent he says: “My aim is of a practical character, such as that of Butler in his Analogy, with this difference, that he treats of probability, doubt, expediency and duty, whereas in these pages, without excluding, from it, the question of duty, I would confine myself to the truth of things, and to the mind’s certitude of that truth.”2
From the Alexandrian Fathers, especially Clement and Origen, he was acquainted and influenced by the Neo-Platonic philosophy about the unseen world. He greatly admired Francis Bacon and his distinction between physics and natural theology, and had studied Isaac Newton’s Principia. He read English and Scottish philosophers, in particular John Locke, whom he considered a “highly respected adversary with whom he liked to discuss (figuratively) his own ideas.”3 On the surface it would seem that Newman had a few ideas in common with Locke, such as making the individual, or self, the starting point of his whole philosophy; but the self and the God of Locke were completely rationalist and alien to the thought of Newman, who opposed British Empiricism, of which he considered Locke to be the founder.
A minor source of his philosophical thought was St. Thomas Aquinas. At Oxford he had a 28-volume set of St. Thomas’s works, which he read in part, and while residing in Rome he attempted to study Aquinas’s philosophy and theology. He was disappointed to find that Aquinas and Aristotle were both in disregard, but this may have actually helped Newman to further his development of a type of personalism relying at once on both Ancient and Patristic sources and on modern empirical thought, particularly on associationist theories in psychology. From Abraham Tucker and Joshua Reynolds, representatives of this theory of knowledge, Newman may have taken the notion of the imagination as a cognitive power capable of giving us direct apprehension of individual objects with which we come into experiential contact.4 Through the imagination particular things can absorb the attention of the knowing subject, and the cognition is a personal and living relationship between the knower and the object. Knowledge is therefore more than reasoning; rather, it is a real possession of the things we know. This was a key point for Newman’s argument for the existence of God, as well as his explanation of a person’s understanding of the teaching of Scripture and the articles of the Creed about the Blessed Trinity. Today his philosophical approach would be described as phenomenology, or more specifically, Christian personalism, with elements of Aristotelian philosophy of the human mind and ethics.
The Grammar of Assent is a philosophy of knowledge and a philosophy of religion or natural theology. It was a criticism of the natural theology of deists such as William Paley and skeptics such as David Hume, and an exposition of a Christian approach to belief in God and the Catholic Church. The book has two parts; the first is an explanation of how the mind assents to God and other religious truths, and the second, of how the mind arrives at certitude. Newman began with the assent of the mind to truths in general, since according to him we assent to God’s existence and attributes in the same way that we assent to other truths. Newman explained that a person knows real objects as well as notions or concepts. Faith or religion consists in the knowledge of the real objects, whereas theology consists in the knowledge of propositions or notions, which are judged to be true.
In this first part of the book, Newman developed his argument for the existence of God from the moral conscience. It is an argument which he often had referred to in his sermons and also in the Apologia. There, Newman explained that for a child, God is a real being. A child perceives the existence of God as a Sovereign Law Giver and Judge, someone outside of himself. God is not a notion or a conclusion. By means of his moral conscience a child has an image of God which, although nascent and capable of being dimmed or obliterated, is nevertheless real. “It is an image of the good God, good in Himself, good relatively to the child, with whatever incompleteness; an image, before it has been reflected on, and before it is recognized as a notion. Though he cannot explain or define the word ‘God,’ when told to use it, his acts show that to him it is far more than a word.”5 Something similar can be said for many adults: they cannot explain religious truths, but they know them because they have a moral conscience that speaks to them of right and wrong, and of a Law Giver and Judge.
In the same way, all men can have this real knowledge of God—that is, faith—in God and in the fact that He creates, provides, judges, rewards and punishes. The question of the certainty of this faith soon arises. Over the years Newman had discussed with William Froude, younger brother of Hurrell, the subject of the certainty of propositions and certitude of the mind. Froude claimed the right to skepticism of any truth: “Our doubts in fact, appear to me as sacred, and I think deserve to be cherished as sacredly as our beliefs.”6 In a reply to Froude, Newman distinguished between religion and science: “Much lies in the meaning of the words certainty and doubt—much again in our duties to a person, as e.g. a friend—Religion is not merely a science, but a devotion.”7
In the second part of the Grammar of Assent, Newman tried to give an account of the certitude of faith. He argued that the mind reaches certitude through informal inference and formal inference and that religious faith is based on the former. In it he made the well-known observation: “Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion,”8 the result of a logical syllogism. He insisted, “No one, I say, will die for his calculations: he dies for realities.”9 Newman explained that informal inference is attained by means of what he called the illative faculty or sense. This is a natural mode of reasoning which is unconscious and implicit; it goes from concrete things to universal principles, not from propositions to conclusions, as in formal inference or logic.
For Newman, a man reaches certitude through this illative sense. A skeptic might reply that this is tantamount to a leap of faith, but there is no such leap because the assent of faith has a cumulative and pains-taking dimension. It is something of a process, and we grow into a conviction, rather than leap into it.10 Newman used the example of a polygon inscribed in a circle. As its sides become smaller it tends to become the circle. It never becomes the circle but the mind closes the gap.11
On this subject Newman shared a number of ideas with Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), whom he quoted in various places, especially in the Grammar of Assent. Newman’s understanding of implicit (or instinctual) reasoning and the illative sense has common elements with Pascal’s notion of the heart and the intuitive mind. Like Pascal, Newman thought that external proofs of religion as grounds of faith were insufficient for most ordinary people. Instead he pointed out that the assent of faith depends on a person’s moral character and openness to believe. Newman explained that the inquirer is “guided by the implicit process of the reasoning faculty, not by any manufacture of arguments forcing their way to an irrefragable conclusion.
Faith is a two-dimensional personal act. It is subjective in so far as it is different for me than it would be for anyone else, and yet objective as well, since through it a person apprehends religious truths from the Church. For Newman, humility, or a childlike spirit, is a necessary condition for belief. Without humility one is incapable of believing in God; a person establishes his own universe and banishes any supernatural reality. Pride closes a person in a limited sphere of rationality.
The second part of the Grammar of Assent ends with a long section on natural and revealed religion. It presents arguments on how Catholicism fulfills what would be expected of a true revealed religion and how it corresponds to the fulfillment and completion of the promises God made to the Jewish people.
Newman considered the Grammar of Assent, together with the Prophetic Office of the Church, Lectures on Justification, the Development of Christian Doctrine, and Idea of a University to be one of the books that gathered the central themes of his thought on fundamental subjects. He hoped that it would show the harmony of faith and reason, and renew Christian apologetics. Although Newman discontinued his projected work on metaphysics, his philosophical notes and sermons reveal an original philosopher who made a lasting contribution to philosophy of religion through his University Sermons and his Grammar of Assent. William Froude died in 1878 while engaged in a continued correspondence with Newman on religion and certainty. His wife, Mrs. William Froude, had long since, in 1857, become a Roman Catholic with the help of Newman’s lengthy correspondence.
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1John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, University of Notre Dame Press (1979), p. 334. After this it will be cited GA.
2GA, 271.
3John Henry Newman, The Philosophical Notebook, Ed. Edward J. Sillem, Nauwelaerts Publishing House, Louvain, 1969, Vol. II, 203.
4Ibid, 207.
5GA, 105.
6LD, Vol XIX, William Froude to JHN (December 29, 1859), 270.
7Ibid, 273.
8GA, 89.
9Ibid.
10Ibid. 18 (introduction).
11Ibid. 253-254.