Section 11

Section 11 4 Faith

Thomas J. Norris

John Henry Newman not only had much to say about faith in its many dimensions.¹ He was above all a striking instance of the journey and the drama of a lived faith. The Psalmist praises the person who decides in his heart to go on the holy journey (Ps 84:5). This praise seems altogether appropriate in the case of the leader of the Oxford Movement who traced an itinerary that a recent pope described as ‘the most toilsome, but also the greatest, the most meaningful, the most conclusive, that human thought ever travelled during the last [nineteenth] century, indeed one might say during the modern era’.² That itinerary put Newman into a living contact with what Ian Ker calls ‘the varieties of Christianity’.³ This ecumenical experience gives his theology of faith both a providential ecumenical flavour and a vividly Catholic tone since his was a sustained search for the fullness of ‘the faith given once for all to the saints’ (Jude 3) and so for catholicity.⁴ There is in his theology of faith a palpable tension between the devout Catholic and the dedicated ecumenist who could write that ‘the absence of visible unity between . . . different communions is so great a triumph, and so great an advantage to the enemies of the cross’.⁵

However, the ecumenical dimension of Newman’s own life of faith also identifies an important hermeneutical tool for the reading of his texts, namely, one has to pay attention to the precise context of his various works. ‘Never was a mind so unceasingly in motion. But the motion was always growth, and never revolution.’⁶ The context within which Newman worked was quite variegated. Sometimes he is writing as a controversialist or a theologian, other times as a pastor or a guide to those seeking guidance in very personal journeys of faith, and still other times as an educator or soul-friend. And always there is that ever-expanding horizon of truth opening up in parallel with his personal itinerary of faith. His principal works, in fact, bear this out, being what may be called ‘vocational’, works undertaken in response to major shifts of perspective along his journey of faith.

One may locate the central axis of Newman’s whole life in his very deliberate decision to follow Christ in ‘the obedience of faith’ (Rom 16:26; II Cor 10:5–6) whatever the cost, and to assist others in the breathtaking adventure ⁷ that inevitably follows such a decision. That adventure was intensified by the context of his time, a time when he felt ‘love was cold’,⁸ and the tremors of the Enlightenment were being felt by many in his beloved England.⁹ Towards the end of his life he wrote lines that seem to catch the thrust of his whole life, ‘From the time that I began to occupy my mind with theological subjects I have been troubled at the prospect, which I considered to lie before us, of an intellectual movement against religion, so special as to have a claim upon the attention of all educated Christians’.¹⁰ It is that ‘claim’ that provides the true co-ordinates of his whole life as disciple and pastor, educator and thinker. The purpose of this chapter is to expound the key themes in Newman’s theology of Faith, both as act or virtue and as content (fides qua and fides quae).

This chapter will first attempt a formulation of his teaching on faith as a Catholic. Then it will consider faith as a principle of action in the life of believers. Next, reverting to his life’s itinerary, we will look at the Oxford University Sermons as the principal formal texts addressing the topic of Christian faith during the Anglican years. This will be followed by a brief study of his engagement with the Roman schools of theology between 1846 and 1848. In a fourth moment we will study his thinking as a Catholic on the topic of faith. Finally, we will state some key conclusions concerning his theology of faith.

Faith: a Catholic definition

Newman often preferred to initiate a reflection by leaping in medias res.¹¹ Perhaps it is best for us to throw ourselves into the analysis of a text dealing directly with the theme of faith in the great theologian. In the Discourses to Mixed Congregations, delivered in 1849, four years after he had become a Catholic, he provides a succinct statement of the nature of faith. He writes as follows: ‘[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 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 man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador of God.’ One notices at once in this definition that the object of faith is God and the doctrine he has made known by means of ‘a messenger, prophet, or ambassador’. Faith is by its very constitution an effect of God speaking and communicating: it is not primarily the result of our own thinking: ‘we do not see, we cannot prove’. Faith, in other words, is not immanently generated knowledge, truth gained ‘by sight or by reason’. Faith rather is knowledge generated in believers by the action of grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Faith has two qualities or ‘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 receives the tidings from one who comes from God’. Newman goes on at once to illustrate his teaching by reference to the Apostles who, as ambassadors of Christ, handed on to others what they themselves had received (see I Cor 11:23; 15:1-2). ‘They preached to the world that Christ was the Son of God, that he was born of a Virgin . . . 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.’¹² The key question in the ancient Church, as in all subsequent centuries, was, has God spoken? And if he has spoken, who are the appointed hearers of his Word, his spokespersons? That means that the Apostles ‘were nothing in themselves, [but] they were all things, they were an infallible authority, as coming from God’.¹³

Here he locates the apostolic credentials of Catholic faith: ‘No one can be a Catholic without a simple faith, that what the Church declares in God’s name, is God’s word, and therefore true’. The word of the Church, spoken with the authority of ‘the oracle of God’, constitutes what is specific to Catholic faith and gives a definite coloration to the faith of Catholics. The Catholic view is that ‘the object of faith is not simply certain articles . . . contained in dumb documents, but the whole word of God, explicit and implicit, as dispensed by his living Church’.¹⁴ An aspect of this distinctiveness is the principle that the believer assents to all that is revealed and taught by the Church, ‘No one could say, “I will choose my religion for myself, I will believe this, I will not believe that”’.¹⁵

The implications of the text which we have analysed are great indeed. Faith presupposes divine revelation which is ‘the initial and essential idea of Christianity’.¹⁶ Revelation and dogma thus ‘precede’ faith which is the correlative of dogma,¹⁷ itself the illuminated face of divine revelation.¹⁸ Newman explains this order in a work of 1874 written to explain the teaching of Vatican I on papal infallibility, The Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. ‘Our Divine Master might have communicated to us heavenly truths without telling us that they came from him, as it is commonly thought he has done in the case of heathen nations; but he willed the Gospel to be a revelation acknowledged and authenticated, to be public, fixed, and permanent; and accordingly, as Catholics hold, he framed a society of men to be its home, its instrument, and its guarantee. The rulers of that association are the legal trustees, so to say, of the sacred truths which he spoke to the Apostles by word of mouth.’¹⁹ Since the topic of revelation is treated at length in the previous chapter there is no need to elaborate it further here.

Faith a principle of personal action

By means of his own conversion in the summer of 1816 through the influence of Walter Mayers – ‘the human means of the beginning of divine faith in me’²⁰ – when he ‘received into his mind impressions of dogma, which through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured’,²¹ the teenager began to live a serious Christian life. Through mentors such as Thomas Scott he adopted the motto, ‘Holiness before peace’. Newman’s faith was to be rooted in revealed truths, for ‘as well can there be filial devotion without the fact of a father as devotion without dogma’. This aspiration after a ‘creedal holiness’ must come to expression in obedience to the Word of God and adherence to the Christian system of belief. When in 1828 he succeeded in resisting a preference for intellectual achievement over holiness of life, and began to read the Fathers as the youthful diary of the Church, his faith-life took a second quantum leap. By means of the Fathers, he entered what he described much later as ‘a paradise of delight’.²²

He stresses the fact that the New Testament sees in faith the chosen instrument connecting heaven and earth. Faith opens to the believer a whole world inviting to action and driving such action with a unique inspiration and energy. Faith is not only an access to an otherwise inaccessible world, ‘a world of overpowering interest, of the sublimest views, and the tenderest and purest feeling’,²³ but also to a new life that fulfils the present life in superabundant fashion. Taking as his text, ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Heb 11:1), he contrasts faith and reason as habits of mind. He stresses the fact of ‘faith . . . as an instrument of knowledge and action, unknown to the world before . . . independent of what is understood by reason’. As ‘a novel principle of action’, faith is much more than a ‘believing upon evidence, or a sort of conclusion upon a process of reasoning’.²⁴ Through faith a unique principle of action enters history and transvalues all human thinking and acting. Ordinary mortals take upon themselves divinely appointed roles.²⁵

His discovery of the Fathers of the Church had shown him this principle in action. In Ambrose, Athanasius ²⁶ and Augustine he noticed a style of living and thinking appropriate to Revelation and its mysterious profundity. This style was at the same time at variance with merely logical forms of thought whose presuppositions would eliminate on principle the very notion of mystery. ‘If the Fathers were not cold, and the Schoolmen are, this is because the former write in their own persons, and the latter as logicians and disputants. St Athanasius or St Augustine has a life, which a system of theology has not.’²⁷ Faith has to do with life and living it is the only proof of its authenticity. ‘It is the new life, and not natural reason, which leads the soul to Christ.’²⁸

Still, faith is only a beginning. It has to advance to hope and charity or love. If it is not animated as it were by the greatest of the theological virtues (I Cor 13:13), faith can become defective. In fact, it can easily decline into superstition. Faith may even justify bigotry or fanaticism, as Church history tragically witnesses.²⁹ It needs a safeguard. Since ‘faith is a test of a man’s heart’, that safeguard is logically ‘a right state of heart’.³⁰ That is why ‘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’.³¹ This prepares the way for this famous principle, ‘We believe because we love’.³² The perfecting of faith through charity ‘does not change its nature . . . It remains what it is in itself, an initial principle of action.’³³

The Anglican Newman

This personal context of his own faith-journey, however, was to be challenged and, in the event, still further enhanced as he grappled with the religious and cultural context he diagnosed around him. He described that context towards the end of his life, on the occasion of receiving the cardinalate in 1879, as ‘religious liberalism’. ‘I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of Liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth.’³⁴ What was ‘this spirit of Liberalism’? His definition is both succinct and theoretically penetrating. ‘Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another . . . It is inconsistent with the recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.’³⁵

Newman acutely felt the rising tide of this liberalism. He decided to act. Among the first things that needed serious attention was the truth-claim of Christianity. Between 1826 and 1843 he composed a set of fifteen sermons on the topic of faith and reason. He did so with ‘no aid from Anglican theologians and no knowledge of Catholic theologians’.³⁶ The only exception in relation to Anglican theologians was Joseph Butler, the author of the Analogy of Religion which Newman read in 1823. This work was destined to exert a profound impact on his evolving method of theological reasoning.³⁷

The sermons before the University of Oxford

In the University Sermons he plots the phases in the journey towards faith in God. The Sermons are a modern itinerarium mentis in Deum. He advances slowly, drawing insight from his knowledge of individuals and, in particular, from the manner in which living people actually think and reason as opposed to the manner in which they are supposed to perform these activities. He concentrates on this difference between practice and theory. The path to spiritual and moral reality, and so to divine truth and life, is not the path of demonstration and logic. He saw this fact personified in the Fathers who stressed the need to change one’s own mindset and behaviour in order to perceive and embrace the Word of God. In the Apologia many years later, he put it in these terms, ‘And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St Ambrose, Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum; – I had a great dislike of paper logic . . . It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place: how? The whole man moves: paper logic is but the record of it.’³⁸ This explains a patent fact, namely, that ‘logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot around corners and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism’.³⁹ It is the concrete being, the whole man ⁴⁰ who is in any case a unity, who thinks and reasons. ‘After all’, he writes in 1838, ‘man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal’.⁴¹

It is fatal to assume that ‘truth may be approached without homage’.⁴² Now the forum where the person is most immediately and vitally invited to seek and to do the truth is conscience. The experience of conscience constitutes therefore the first phase in the soul’s itinerary to faith. In Newman’s epistemology, conscience plays a central role as ‘a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator’.⁴³ Since conscience is both a ‘moral sense’ or ‘judgement of reason’ and a ‘sense of duty’ or a ‘magisterial dictate’, it opens up the way to the most vivid grasp of moral and spiritual reality. Still, it is the second aspect of conscience which acts as a ‘a certain commanding dictate, not a mere sentiment, not a mere opinion, or impression, or view of things, but a law, an authoritative voice bidding him to do certain things and avoid others’.⁴⁴ The result of that experience, as real as the experience of thinking or choosing or remembering, is that the individual knows him/herself to be under address by Someone! One understands how conscience provides the most vivid grasp – ‘real apprehension’ he will say much later in the Grammar – of spiritual reality, whether natural or supernatural. It is through conscience, then, that ‘a primal remembrance of the good and true is bestowed on us by God. If man does not hide from his own self . . . he comes to the insight: this is where I want to go’.⁴⁵ Obeying the good and the true, he begins to walk towards the light and the truth and the life (John 3:21; 14:6).

With his gift for introspection and phenomenological analysis, Newman describes the appearance of God in conscience, detecting three stages in the process. The first stage is the ‘emotional’ one where the specific ‘phenomena of conscience’⁴⁶ make their appearance. These phenomena are the familiar classifications of a ‘good’ and a ‘bad conscience’. The second stage involves an unavoidable quest. We ‘are not affective towards a stone, and do not feel shame before a horse or a dog’, so that the exciting cause of these emotions cannot belong to this world. Rather, ‘these feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being’. They argue the existence of a Person ‘to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear’.⁴⁷ Conscience discerns this Person acting in nature even before it hears him in revelation. It is in this sense that Newman drinks to conscience first and to the pope afterwards.⁴⁸ Conscience in fact is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.⁴⁹ Finally, this search for the adequate cause of these emotions not only brings home the existence of a Personal Being speaking in the abyss of this most human faculty of conscience, it also points up for us the attributes of the Supreme Being. This phase, given such importance by Newman in the ascent towards the ‘ethical character’ of the Creator, will have the impact of enabling us to apprehend imaginatively or really. This theme will return very centrally in the Grammar where he will show that a delicate and obedient conscience is capable of apprehending the attributes of God in the ‘phenomena of conscience’.

A special effect of heeding this Voice is the emergence in the soul of sets of value-convictions and truth-perceptions. These he calls ‘first principles’ and are the second phase in the itinerary to faith. What are they precisely? They ‘are the means of proof, and are not themselves proved . . . they are to the mind what the circulation of the blood and the various functions of our animal organs are to the body . . . they are in short the man’.⁵⁰ Thus someone who loves status and notoriety, or someone who focuses life on eating, drinking and being merry ‘does not wish the Gospel to be true, and therefore is not a fair judge of it’.⁵¹ But someone who loves truth, who acts justly and who lives by respect for the dignity of every other person, even when he has to disagree in the particular, is well disposed towards the Gospel and the message it carries from on high. If we forget this stage of the itinerary to faith, we become ‘theoretical and unreal’⁵² in our thinking about faith and the act of believing. Besides, we will not understand the fact that ‘the most powerful arguments for Christianity do not convince, only silence’.⁵³

If the second phase of the itinerary to faith consists in ‘first principles’, the third consists in what Newman calls ‘antecedent probabilities’. They constitute a kind of prism through which we view and assess all moral and religious questions. Thus ‘a good and a bad man will think very different things probable’⁵⁴ in accordance with the tenor of their first principles. From Joseph Butler he had gleaned the principle that ‘probability is the guide to life’, a principle that was to land him in serious difficulty when he went to the Church of Rome.⁵⁵ As if aware of this danger, Newman spelled out the true meaning of ‘antecedent probability’. ‘I do but say that it is antecedent probability that gives meaning to those arguments from facts which are commonly called the Evidences of Revelation: that, whereas mere probability proves nothing, mere facts persuade no one; that probability is to fact, as the soul to the body; that mere presumptions have no force, but that mere facts have no warmth.’ When positive antecedent probabilities are in place, ‘the heart is alive’⁵⁶ with the result that evidences are truly heard and seen and accepted. Otherwise people ‘may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand’ (Mark 4:12; Is 6:9–10).

The University Sermons underline the central role of antecedent probabilities in coming to spiritual truth and so to faith. This must not be taken to mean that he dismisses the role of ‘the Evidences of Revelation’ as they stand out in prophecy, miracles and holiness. However, the mind has need of a heart that is truly converted or on the way to conversion before evidences can speak and convince. Bernard Lonergan seems to hit the nail on the head here. He sees in Newman’s approach to the act of faith a transition from the classic approach to the concreteness of method. ‘On the former view, what is basic is proof. On the latter view what is basic is conversion. Proof appeals to an abstraction named right reason. Conversion transforms the concrete individual to make him capable of grasping not merely conclusions but principles as well.’⁵⁷ After all, man is not a rational animal only, but, as we have seen already, a feeling and suffering one also. When these antecedent probabilities accumulate and converge in an adequate number, a number which may vary from person to person, they convince the person of the particular truth under consideration. As soon as the person reaches the point where he is convinced that he ought to believe, reason has done all it can do. The conviction that one ought to assent unconditionally to the message of the Gospel as God’s Word is as far as reason is able to go. The final step of assent requires an act of the will and this involves our freedom. Faith, in other words, is ‘not a conclusion from premises, but the result of an act of the will, following upon a conviction that to believe is a duty’.⁵⁸ At this stage ‘what is wanted for faith is, not proof, but will’,⁵⁹ since faith ‘is the consequence of willing to believe’.⁶⁰ To cross the gap from knowing that I ought to believe the Catholic Faith as God’s Word to saying, Yes, I believe in the Catholic Faith as God’s Word, is an act of the will enabled by grace. This grace has of course been operative all during the previous phases of the journey. This view is characteristic of the entire theological tradition.⁶¹

The University Sermons in summary

Thus far we have largely followed Newman the Anglican in his analysis of the phases through which the inquirer passes on his journey towards faith. The University Sermons, however, also deal with the relationship of faith and reason. In fact, some regard them ‘as perhaps the most useful analysis of the relationship between faith and reason, for our time’.⁶² It is only proper, then, to investigate that relationship. That task is wonderfully facilitated by the fact that in 1871 Newman wrote an extended Preface to the third edition of the Sermons. There he states ‘their doctrine . . . in a categorical form, and, as far as possible, in the words used in the course of them’. He admits that, given the circumstances of their composition, he is surprised that ‘the errors are not of a more serious character’, especially in the case of ‘the Discourses upon the relation of faith to reason’ which are the last five of the fifteen.⁶³

Clearly addressing the widespread perceptions of the day, he first sets down the popular notion of faith and reason. ‘Whatever be the real distinction and relation between faith and reason, the contrast which should be made between them on a popular view, is this – that reason requires strong evidence before it assents, and faith is content with weaker evidence.’⁶⁴ Faith, then, is in all cases an exercise in ‘weak reason’.⁶⁵ His strategy in dealing with the popular belitthng of faith is to explore the many senses of the word ‘reason’. One perceives his prowess in what Jan Walgrave perceived as ‘a method of phenomenological investigation’⁶⁶ or in what Edward Sillem has called ‘personal liberalism’.⁶⁷

He detects ‘three senses of the word “Reason” over and above the large and true sense’. The first sense consists in ‘expertness in logical argument’. It has to follow that ‘unless the doctrines received by faith are approvable by reason, they have no claim to be regarded as true’.⁶⁸ The second sense of the word reason viewed relatively to religion is as ‘a faculty of framing evidences’.⁶⁹ The model of such a reason is reason as operative in demonstration through the clear exhibition of the appropriate evidences. ‘The mind is supposed to reason severely, when it rejects antecedent proof of a fact, rejects every thing but the actual evidence producible in its favour.’⁷⁰ If this is the one and only sense of reason allowed, it is obvious that religion can have no dogmas or revealed truths, and only opinions.⁷¹

The third popular meaning of reason involves ‘a certain popular abuse of the faculty; viz., when it occupies itself upon Religion without a due familiar acquaintance with its subject-matter, or without a use of the first principles proper to it. This so-called reason is in Scripture designated “the wisdom of the world”.’⁷² In this third operation of reason there is absolutely no recognition of Christianity’s proper subject-matter as supplied by revelation and dispensed by a living Church. It involves a rejection of the duty to observe the ‘sacrificium intellectus’ when dealing with revealed mystery. This ‘sacrificium’ ‘was understood from Athanasius to Kant . . . [as] the obligation not to operate with the human intellect in regions inaccessible to it’.⁷³

These, then, are the three popular senses of the word ‘reason’. They cover reason as explicit, evidential and secular. The first refers to the process of reasoning, the second to the method, and the third to the field of its operation. Whatever, of course, does not enter under these rubrics or criteria will not be considered rational or scientific. Thus faith and theology will inevitably suffer relegation to the realms of opinion and the pre-scientific.

The question asserts itself: are these the only operations of reason? May there not be other and even more vital operations of our capacity to know, understand and decide? Besides explicit reasoning, may there not also be implicit reasoning? And as for secular reasoning, may there not also be authentic operations of mind in the field of moral, spiritual and faith realities? The answer of Newman in each case is in the affirmative. In fact, ‘faith viewed in contrast with reason in these three senses, is implicit in its acts, adopts the method of verisimilitude, and starts from religious first principles’.⁷⁴ Newman enlarges the sense of reason and reasoning against its trivialization. ‘By the exercise of reason . . . is properly meant any process or act of the mind, by which, from knowing one thing it advances on to know another; whether it be true or false reason, whether it proceed from antecedent probabilities, by demonstration, or on evidence.’⁷⁵ The drawing out of these processes and methods, together with their appropriate deployment in the understanding of faith and in the work of theology, will very largely constitute the warp and the woof of the remainder of Newman’s life and ministry. Thus, for example, the way of antecedent probability coupled with the way of evidences might turn out to be a quick, powerful and effective method in the field of faith and that faith-thinking we call theology. A personally dramatic instance of such coupling was about to break upon him.

The phenomenon of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine

As John Henry Newman began to see that developments of doctrine, as the very unfolding of the mystery of Christ and its riches (see Eph 3:3–13), were possible, even probable in the circumstances of history and humanity, his antagonism towards Rome began to mellow somewhat. Such developments of dogma now began to appear as antecedently likely. This was to be the theme of the greatest and concluding contribution in the Sermons, ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’. In other words, it was probable, antecedent to the investigation of the annals of history and the facts of Church history, that there would be developments of Christian doctrine. From 1841 onwards he turned his mind increasingly towards the history of dogma, in particular, the phenomenon of new dogmas of faith being taught with the passing of time. This very insight of Newman is the key to the method of the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

Antecedent probability will have to be verified by a critical interfacing with the facts of history, in particular, the annals of the Church’s teaching record. This results in a fascinating encounter between antecedent probability and the facts of doctrinal history which then yields a principle of verification of the harmony between probability and fact, what he called ‘tests’ or ‘notes’.⁷⁶ Probability, historical fact and verification provide both the logical and the theological structure of the Essay. As his research advanced he was increasingly amazed at the harmony between antecedent probability and historical fact. They began to dovetail perfectly. In fact, long before he had concluded the Essay he was convinced that he had the ‘answer (to) an objection against Catholicism’,⁷⁷ namely, that the Catholic Church was guilty of the corruption of the apostolic faith.

Some observers concluded that Newman had been converted by probabilities, and not by facts. They went even further and contended that for Newman Catholic faith was only probably true. Having accepted from John Locke the principle that a conclusion cannot rise above its premises, this conclusion was inescapable.⁷⁸ Added to this was the notion that Newman had learnt from John Keble and his version of Butler’s famous maxim, ‘Probability is the guide of life’.⁷⁹ His critics were of the view that for the learned Oxford scholar the Catholic Church is probably the true Church. The truth was simply the opposite: the anticipation engendered by probability had put soul into the corpus of historical and doctrinal fact. In that way the warmth of probability had bonded with the force of fact and evidence.

Interfacing with the Roman schools (1846–1848)

The stage was well set for Newman’s arrival in Rome to study for the priesthood in September 1846. His views of the moral certainty of faith, as outhned in the Sermons and employed in the Essay on the Development, had preceded him. He was soon to learn that the leading Roman theologian of the day, Giovanni Perrone, SJ, had not understood them. ‘Here persons at first misunderstood me’, he wrote, ‘and because I talked of “probable arguments”, they thought I meant that we could not get beyond a probable conclusion in opposition to a moral certainty; which is a condemned proposition’.⁸⁰ It was disconcerting to be ‘accused of denying moral certainty, and holding with Hermes ⁸¹ (that) we cannot get beyond probabilities in religious questions’.

He had to explain. ‘This is far from my meaning. I use “probable” in opposition to “demonstrative”, and moral certainty is a state of mind, in all cases however produced by probable argument which admits of more and less, the measure or probability necessary for certainty varying with the individual mind . . . I do but say that the great line of argument which produces moral certainty is not evidence, but antecedent probability.’⁸² He defended the position that none of the ideas in the University Sermons is as important or as ‘original’ as the idea of antecedent probability. In fact, ‘antecedent probability is the great instrument of conviction in religious (nay in all) matters’.⁸³ The Essay on the Development had served to show it in action: it had verified the principle that ‘antecedent probability’ is in fact ‘the great instrument’ in reasoning, especially in the field of religion. Allen Brent contends that the reason for Perrone’s misunderstanding of Newman had to do with the reaction to Kant in Roman circles, and, more specifically, with Perrone’s ‘synthetic and syllogistic method of theology originally developed as a specifically anti-Hermesian polemic’.⁸⁴

Newman set about working up the theology of faith in his new setting. He read Holden’s Divinae Fidei Analysis. He found it to be ‘worth reading, though it has acknowledged faults’. He also read Perrone’s Treatise on Faith and Reason and he liked it better than that of Holden. He was much relieved to find that his views largely coincided with those of Perrone.⁸⁵ He now composed a set of theses on the nature of the act of faith. His room in the Oratory in Birmingham contains no fewer than four copies of the Theses de Fide, the last being done in 1877 with a note appended, ‘The Theses were drawn up by me at Rome in 1847, and corrected by our theological tutor. J. H. N.’ He submitted them for correction to a repetitore, in spite of which they seem to be exactly as he wrote them.

The Roman Schools held that unaided reason could achieve a definite judgement of ‘credibility’ based on the external signs of prophecy, miracles and holiness. This judgement with regard to revelation came before the act of faith. In his Theses Newman tries to harmonize the Sermons with this Roman Theology. In doing so he draws from scholastic theologians such as Suarez and de Lugo and others. In the judgement of Avery Dulles, however, ‘these theses . . . do not represent an advance in Newman’s thinking, but rather a defensive maneuver in which he clothed his thought in the ill-fitting suit of scholastic armor’.⁸⁶ This is obvious in the very first Thesis where faith is defined as ‘a certain, nonevident assent of the intellect given to divine truth’,⁸⁷ or again in the fourth Thesis where he adopts the position of Suarez that faith is absolutely certain of itself and does not admit any contribution whatsoever from antecedent probabilities.

Still the shock he felt at the Roman reaction to his theology of faith was acutely felt. He decided to write an Introduction for a French translation of the Sermons which was in the offing from 1846 onwards. A French priest, the Abbé Deferrière, encouraged by Newman’s friend, Dalgairns, took up the project in France. Newman’s Introduction ‘would give him [Newman] elbow-room to explain himself on the subject of probability’.⁸⁸ Since time was of the essence, and the French translation lagged, he initially wanted the last six of the Sermons published in Rome under the title, Remarks on the Relation of Faith and Reason, together with a Preface explaining their origin and the likelihood that not all points would be accurate. He hoped, besides, that this might respond to the concerns raised by the Essay. In particular, the Sermons selected brought out two principles prominent in the Essay, namely, ‘1. that no real idea can be comprehended in all its bearings at once; and 2. that the main instrument of proof in matters of life is antecedent probability’.⁸⁹

In the end he composed in Latin a Preface for the French translation of the Sermons to be done by Dalgairns. It is particularly significant that Newman should have felt compelled to explain his theology of the act of faith in both the Roman and French milieus. Although he was conscious that ‘throughout he is pursuing a process of investigation’,⁹⁰ ‘an exploring expedition into an all but unknown country’,⁹¹ the doctrinal integrity of his efforts was a source of preoccupation for him during the first five or so years after his becoming a Roman Catholic. However, when he returns to the theme of faith and reason formally, and begins the ‘inquiry which will occupy him for about twenty years’⁹² until the Grammar appears in 1870, he will seek his inspiration from the Sermons and the Essay, and not from the Theses.

The Catholic Newman

Between 1860 and 1865 Newman carried on a deeply engaging correspondence with his friend, the scientist William Froude.⁹³ Froude challenged Newman to deal with his first principle, ‘More strongly than I believe anything else I believe this. That on no subject whatever . . . is my mind (or as far as I can tell the mind of any human being) capable of arriving at an absolutely certain conclusion . . . Our “doubts” in fact, appear to me as sacred, and I think deserve to be cherished as sacredly as our beliefs.’⁹⁴ Froude wanted ‘perfect logical demonstration’.⁹⁵ This is the very antithesis of what Newman had outhned in the University Sermons. It would also prove devastating for theology and dismissive of the faith of Catholics and of all Christians. ‘If children, if the poor, if the busy, can have true faith, yet cannot weigh evidence, evidence is not the simple foundation on which faith is built.’⁹⁶

Newman saw that a fresh endeavour on his part was simply necessary. His great concern ‘would be to show that a given individual, high or low, has as much right (has as real rational grounds) to be certain, as a learned theologian who has the scientific evidence’.⁹⁷ He could see already that there were numerous certainties that people lived by but which could not be justified at the bar of logical demonstration. From Aristotle he knew of phronēsis as the faculty of practical judgement and he wondered if it might be indicative of the way in which people know concrete facts. Of course, this could not be a privileged route to truth, but one coincident with the universal one. To look for a privileged route would mean simple capitulation to fideism; to deny there was a way to know concrete truths and spiritual reality was to capitulate to rationalism.

As for the philosophical underpinning of the syllogistic method, Newman saw it typified in the philosophy of John Locke. The test of loving the truth is the principle of ‘not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the roots it is built on will warrant’. For Locke, ‘there are degrees of assent . . . and . . . as the reasons for a proposition are strong or weak, so is the assent’. Newman adjudicates Locke’s viewpoint, so widely accepted then and even more so now, as ‘a view of the human mind, in relation to inference and assent, which . . . seems theoretical and unreal’.⁹⁸ He sees in Locke the outcome of an ‘a priori method of regarding assent in its relation to inference’. He does not go ‘by the testimony of psychological facts’ in order to determine ‘our constitutive faculties and our proper condition’. It seems as if he wants to keep us ‘under the narrow wings of his own arbitrary theory’.⁹⁹

Both the science and the philosophy of the day converged on positions hostile to the meaning and integrity of faith and faith-life. In a ‘Note’ appended to the second edition of the Apologia in 1865, he formulated the resulting principles. The second and the fourth of his eighteen theses provide an incomparable summary of the issues involved.

2. No one can believe what he cannot understand.

Therefore, e.g., there are no mysteries in religion.

4. It is dishonest in a man to make an act of Faith in what he has not had brought home to him by actual proof.

Therefore, e.g., the mass of men ought not to believe in the divine authority of the Bible.¹⁰⁰

Towards a ‘third way’: a ‘Grammar of Assent’

An organum investigandi was needed.¹⁰¹ The organum would have to confront the two principles just enunciated. Having gone on year after year in search of an entrée, he found the breakthrough during a vacation in Switzerland. ‘At last when I was up at Glion over the lake of Geneva, it struck me: “You are wrong in beginning with certitude – certitude is only a kind of assent – you should begin with contrasting assent and inference.” On that hint I spoke, finding it a key to my own ideas.’¹⁰² He had discovered the organizing centre of the opus he wanted to write on the structure of believing and of faith-life, in order to vindicate the faith of ordinary believers. He had felt this task on his conscience for years so that ‘it would not do to quit the world without doing it’.¹⁰³

The precise structure of the Grammar bears out his intuition. In the first part Newman deals with Assent (the acceptance of a proposition as true) viewed in relation to Apprehension (the grasping of the meaning of the terms of the proposition), in the second in relation to Inference (the argumentation supporting the assent). He does so because he has suddenly grasped the contrast between formal inference and assent. That contrast turns on two facts or rather differences. First, in formal inference the conclusion is necessary but its truth is conditional upon the truthfulness of the premises, whereas in assent the conclusion is simply unconditional. In fact, ‘assent is the acceptance of truth, and truth is the proper object of the intellect’.¹⁰⁴ Second, in formal inference it is not necessary to understand the terms of the premises, whereas in assent such an understanding or ‘apprehension’ is necessary. As we have already stressed, the theological aim was ultimately the legitimation of certitude in the belief of the man on the top of the Clapham omnibus. ‘But Newman puts the question on a wider philosophical basis and inquires into the actual forming or development of certitude in general, and its legitimacy.’¹⁰⁵

He succeeds in outhning an epistemology of faith by ‘interrogating human nature, as an existing thing, as it is found in the world’.¹⁰⁶ The route to assent is through ‘apprehension’, as well as through what he called the ‘Inductive’ or ‘Illative Sense’. Apprehension may be real or notional, depending on whether the object indicated by the terms of a proposition is understood as a ‘thing’ (an object of experience) or a notion (a concept or idea).¹⁰⁷ The ‘real’ deals with particulars, and real apprehension and assent are dependent upon the imagination’s capacity to render the ‘object’ somehow present. At times Newman even speaks of ‘imaginative apprehension’ instead of ‘real apprehension’.¹⁰⁸ He illustrates the two modes of apprehension and assent in terms of religion and theology: the former employs notional apprehension, the latter real or imaginative.¹⁰⁹ Hence, as Newman explains, a religious doctrine can be held ‘either as a theological truth, or as a religious fact or reality’.¹¹⁰ In this way he shows the indispensable role of doctrinal statements in religion. Newman concludes his discussion with a chapter applying his thought to the quality of our apprehension of the central doctrines of Christian faith. Real apprehension issues in real assent and inspires devotion. Dogma grounds devotion.

Still it was the step from apprehension to assent that principally preoccupied him. He wanted to show how the faithful can believe what they cannot absolutely prove in the sense of ‘the highest degree of formal correctness of proof’. He was convinced that ‘spontaneous mental reasoning precedes verbal arguing. There may be plain people who reason well, but produce only bad arguments. Even in science spontaneous reasoning precedes correct formal proof.’¹¹¹ As we have seen earlier, he had laid the foundations of such understanding in the University Sermons.

But now Newman saw that such a rational faith, as the Catholic tradition demanded, could be ‘the result of converging probabilities, and a cumulative proof’ from ‘cumulating probabilities’.¹¹² He did so without prejudice to the mainstream position of Catholic theology which underlines the ‘motives of credibility’ in miracles, prophecy and holiness. His preference, however, is for the former. As he puts it, religious conviction arises out of ‘the cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and the circumstances of the particular case . . . probabilities too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms, too numerous and various for such conversion, even were they convertible’. This living logic of proof differs from ‘the rude operation of syllogistic treatment’ as much as a portrait differs from a mere sketch ‘in having, not merely a continuous outhne, but all its details filled in, and shades and colours laid on and harmonized together’.¹¹³

Can one be more precise regarding this living reasoning of the mind? Newman answers in terms of what he calls the ‘Illative’ or ‘Inductive’ Sense. The Illative Sense, with roots in Aristotle’s notion of phronēsis,¹¹⁴ is ‘the sole and final judgement on the validity of an inference in concrete matter’.¹¹⁵ In a letter to a friend he explains further the meaning of the term as follows, ‘There is a faculty of the mind which I think I have called the inductive sense, which, when properly cultivated and used, answers to Aristotle’s phronēsis, its province being, not virtue, but the “inquisitio veri”, which decides for us, beyond any technical rules, when, how, etc., to pass from inference to assent, and when and under what circumstances etc. etc. not.’¹¹⁶ This faculty is nothing less than the faculty of judgement. As ‘the power of judging about truth and error in concrete matters’ it constructs the passage from inference to assent, and so from the conditional to the unconditional, to that which is. In that way the Illative Sense ‘determines what science cannot determine, the limit of converging probabilities, and the reasons sufficient for a proof’.¹¹⁷

In the concluding chapter of the Grammar he applies his thinking in the realms of both natural and revealed religion. This will allow us to see his epistemology of faith in action. He compares and contrasts his ‘methods of reasoning’¹¹⁸ with those of two eminent theologians, namely, Eusebius Amort (1692–1775) and William Paley (1743–1805). The former ‘has dedicated to the great Pope, Benedict XIV, what he calls a “new, modest, and easy way of demonstrating the Catholic Religion.” In this work he adopts the argument merely of the greater probability.’ Newman holds with Amort that ‘from probabilities [we] may construct legitimate proof, sufficient for certitude’. However, he differs from Amort in as much as Amort adds up probabilities in his argument while he highlights the fact of their ‘accumulation’ and convergence.¹¹⁹

As for Paley, his famous work, A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794), is content to exhibit the evidence for miracles and to prove the truth of Christianity in that fashion. A ‘clear-headed and almost mathematical reasoner’, Paley’s ‘argument is clear, clever, and powerful’. Still, Newman does not warm to it at all. He is convinced that ‘modes of argument such as Paley’s encourage . . . men to forget that revelation is a boon, not a debt on the part of the Giver; they treat it as a mere historical phenomenon’.¹²⁰ Paley assumes that one can ‘compel men to come in’, by the strength of ‘a smart syllogism’, forgetting that ‘some exertion on the part of the persons whom I am to convert is a condition of a true conversion’.¹²¹ The kind of person one is determines what one seeks and accepts. ‘Truth there is, and attainable it is, but . . . its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our moral as well as our intellectual being’.¹²² Here again, one is face to face with a recurring theme in Newman: his personalism.¹²³

Conclusion

Newman read ‘the tendency of the day’ as the increasing propensity ‘to deny that the proofs of Revelation are sufficient for faith – not only do unbelievers deny, but believers seem to grant’. To bring out the genuine rationality of faith as act and content, however, was personally necessary, pastorally essential and culturally urgent. If he did not attempt this project, he believed his life would be unfinished. Faith would be seen as an exercise in ‘weak reason’, believers as weak-minded, and faith-life as nothing more than a certain cultural or aesthetic option. He highlighted the fact that ‘all men reason . . . but all men do not reflect upon their own reasonings, much less reflect truly and accurately, so as to do justice to their meaning’.¹²⁴ He undertook such reflection. He succeeded in showing the reasonableness of the act of faith against fideists and protected the supernatural character of that act against naturalists.

Newman fought all his life against the reduction of reason to the dimensions of formal inference. He struggled for ‘a wider concept of reasoning than had been current since the seventeenth century’.¹²⁵ Just as the great Christological controversies of the early centuries were instrumental in forging the language of ‘person’ and ‘nature’ and ‘relation’, in a similar way Newman, responding to the debates engendered by the attacks on faith in his own day, was able to forge a fresh language in this field. This is the great value of his notions of ‘weak and strong reason’, the ‘real’ and the ‘notional’, ‘accumulation and convergence of probabilities’, ‘formal, informal and natural inference’, ‘Illative Sense’, the ‘unconditional’ and others. He has enhanced the theology of the act of faith in a manner reminiscent of St Augustine’s handling of the theology of the Trinity in the fifth century.¹²⁶

From his conversion at the age of fifteen, John Henry Newman stressed and defended the fact that Christianity is a revealed religion. ‘The Gospel revelation is divine and . . . it carries with it the evidence of its divinity.’¹²⁷ However, he highlighted the harmony of revealed and natural religion, for ‘we find in Scripture our Lord and His Apostles always treating Christianity as the completion and supplement of Natural Religion, and of previous revelations’.¹²⁸ Conscience is the lynchpin of that harmony as a ‘connecting principle between the creature and his Creator’.¹²⁹ In fact, ‘what conscience is in the history of an individual mind, such was the dogmatic principle in the history of Christianity’.¹³⁰

In the process of this life-long project, he recovered the range of human reasoning, spelled out the gift-quality of faith, and exhibited its reasonableness against both rationalists and fideists. In doing so, he forged a rich philosophical and theological vocabulary which still awaits appropriate deployment. His first account of the relation between faith and reason in the University Sermons caused more than a little anxiety within the Roman School of Theology after he became a Catholic. However, a little over a century and a half later, a major papal encyclical ‘gladly mentions’ him as first among those ‘more recent thinkers’ who, in ‘the Western context’ in modern times, have shown through ‘courageous research’ the fruitfulness of the relationship between ‘the Word of God’ and philosophy.¹³¹

Notes

1. U.S., 177. I have written on the general subject of faith in the life and thinking of the Venerable John Henry Newman in various places: ‘Newman and the Act of Believing’, Doctrine and Life 51 (2001), 84–90; ‘Newman’s Approach to the Act of Faith in the Light of the Catholic Dogmatic Tradition’, Irish Theological Quarterly 69 (2004), 239–61. The latter has been of some help in the writing of the current chapter.

2. Pope Paul VI, Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 1963, 1025: from the homily delivered on the occasion of the beatification of Blessed Dominic Barberi, the Italian Passionist and missionary who received John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church in 1845.

3. Ian Ker, Newman and the Fullness of Christianity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 1–9.

4. See Ess., ii:231–3.

5. L.D., xxiv:22. See Thomas J. Norris, Only Life gives Life: Revelation, Theology and Christian Living According to Cardinal Newman (Dublin: Columba, 1996), 155–73.

6. Owen Chadwick, Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 5.

7. See ‘The Ventures of Faith’, P.S., iv:295–306.

8. U.S., 197; see P.S., ii:27: ‘when love waxed cold’.

9. Apo., 30-1.

10. S.E., 104.

11. See, for example, the opening of the Grammar of Assent.

12. Mix., 194–7; in the U.S., 202–3, he writes, ‘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’.

13. Mix., 197.

14. L.D., xxiii:105; Mix., 98–100.

15. Mix., 197.

16. V.M., i:xlvii, Preface to the third edition, 1877.

17. See Dev., 326–35, ‘The Supremacy of Faith’; in Jfc., 217, he defines faith as ‘the correlative, the natural instrument of the things of the Spirit’.

18. Ess., i:41–2.

19. Diff., ii:322; see n. 137.

20. A.W., 181.

21. Apo., 4.

22. Diff., i:370.

23. Ess., i:23.

24. U.S., 177, 179.

25. See the following sample sermons on faith which emphasize faith as a principle of unique activity: ‘Faith and Obedience’ (P.S., iii, Sermon 6); ‘Subjection of the Reason and Feelings to the Revealed Word’ and ‘Faith without Demonstration’ (P.S., vi, Sermons 18 and 23); ‘Obedience to God, the Way to Faith in God’ (P.S., viii, Sermon 14).

26. Newman translated and published Athanasius’s Orations against the Arians in two volumes in 1844. The second volume is a treasure-house of Athanasian theology.

27. Jfc., 31.

28. U.S., 235.

29. See Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, International Theological Commission (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 30–8.

30. U.S., 226, 234.

31. U.S., 234; see 193.

32. U.S., 236. In a note in the third edition he explains that this is ‘not love precisely, but the virtue of religiousness, under which may be said to fall the pia affectio, or voluntas credendi’.

33. U.S., 250. Newman backs up his contention here with numerous loci from the Scriptures of both the Old and the New Testaments.

34. Ward, ii:460–1.

35. Ward, ii:460–1.

36. U.S., ix–x.

37. Apo., 67–8 and 78–9; see K. Dick, Das Analogieprinzip, Newman Studien, V Folge (Nürnberg: Glock & Lutz, 1962), 9–228, especially 122–3.

38. Apo., 225; the Ambrose quote is in his De fide ad Gratianum Augustum, PL, 16, 42.

39. D.A., 294; he quotes this text many years later in the Grammar 90 with glowing approval; see L.D., xxix:106.

40. J. Boekraad, The Argument from Conscience to the Existence of God According to J. H. Newman (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1961), 103.

41. D.A., 294.

42. U.S., 198.

43. G.A., 117.

44. O.S., 64.

45. Paul Kokoski, Letter to the Editor, The Irish Independent, 23 June 2007.

46. G.A., 110. Newman is clearly aware of David Hume’s reduction of conscience to the level of mere moral emotion.

47. G.A., 110, 109.

48. See Diff., ii:261; see Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 191.

49. Diff., ii:248.

50. Prepos., 283–4; see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965); English translation, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975).

51. P.S., viii:114.

52. U.S., 225.

53. Text quoted in Ian Ker, Newman on Being a Christian (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1990), 1.

54. Ker, Newman on Being a Christian, 191.

55. See Norris, ‘Newman’s Approach to the Act of Faith’, 246–7.

56. U.S., 200.

57. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), 338. When several years later Newman returns to the theme of faith in the Grammar, he will stress the same point. He will speak to inquirers and not to controversialists. ‘I say plainly I do not care to overcome their reason without touching their hearts’ (G.A., 425).

58. Ward, i:242; see Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 35–6.

59. Ward, i:242; see also Ward, ii:276–7.

60. Mix., 225.

61. For interesting texts see Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 35–6.

62. New York: Doubleday, 1973, 47.

63. U.S., x.

64. U.S., x, 17.

65. U.S., 202, 204. Here Newman anticipates by a century and a half recent philosophic discourse: see Arnella F. Clamor, ‘In Search of a “Via Media” between Atheism and Catholicity: A Dialogue with John Henry Newman’ (diss., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2006).

66. J. Walgrave, ‘Newman’s beschrijving en verantwoording van het werkelijke denken’, Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 1 (1939), 541–55.

67. P.N., i:5.

68. U.S., x, 13.

69. U.S., xv.

70. U.S., x, 26.

71. Much later, in a discourse as Rector of the fledgling Catholic University in Dublin, he will spell out the devastating implications of this thinking for faith and belief. See ‘A Form of Infidelity of the Day’, in Idea, 381–404.

72. U.S., xv.

73. Eric Voegelin, ‘On Christianity’, in P. J. Opitz and Gregor Sebba (eds.), The Philosophy of Order: Essays on History, Consciousness, and Politics (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 451.

74. U.S., xvi–xvii.

75. U.S., 223 (italics added).

76. Newman substitutes the word ‘note’ for the word ‘test’ in the third edition of 1878.

77. L.D., xii:332.

78. See Stanley L. Jaki, ‘Newman’s Assent to Reality, Natural and Supernatural’, in Stanley L. Jaki (ed.), Newman Today (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 189–220.

79. Apo., 30–1.

80. L.D., xi:293; for the Church’s teaching, see Denzinger-Schoenmetzer 2738–2740. See A. Brent, ‘The Hermesian Dimension of the Newman–Perrone Dialogue’, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 61(1985), 73–99; see also his article, ‘Newman and Perrone: Unreconcilable Theses on Development’, The Downside Review 102 (1984), 276–89.

81. Georg Hermes (1775–1831), Professor of Dogmatic Theology at Bonn.

82. Ward, i:168 as quoted by Henry Tristram in ‘Cardinal Newman’s Theses de Fide and his Proposed Introduction to the French Translation of the University Sermons’, Gregorianum, 18 (1937), 223.

83. L.D., xi:293.

84. Brent, ‘The Hermesian Dimension of the Newman–Perrone Dialogue’, 99.

85. Ward, i:168.

86. Avery Dulles, ‘From Images to Truth: Newman on Revelation and Faith’, Theological Studies 51(1990), 264.

87. Tristram, Theses, 226: ‘Actus divinae fidei est intellectus assensus, Divinae veritati praestitus, certus, inevidens’.

88. Tristram, Theses, 242.

89. Tristram, Theses, 242.

90. Tristram, Theses, 244.

91. U.S., x.

92. See L.D., xxv:34.

93. The correspondence was published by G. H. Harper as Cardinal Newman and William Froude, F. R. S., A Correspondence (Baltimore, 1933). Nicholas Lash is critical of Harper’s evaluation of the exchange because Harper ‘took for granted just that restricted, monochrome notion of human rationality which, in the Grammar as in the University Sermons, Newman sought to undercut’. See Nicholas Lash, ‘Introduction’, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 3.

94. L.D., xix:270.

95. L.D., xxiv:104–5.

96. U.S., 231; see also 253–4.

97. L.D., xix:294.

98. G.A., 155, 152, 157.

99. G.A., 157.

100. Apo. (1865), 499.

101. Note II appended to subsequent editions of the Grammar of Assent describes this organum.

102. A.W., 270. In 1878 he discussed the purpose of the work with Fr Edward Caswall of the Birmingham Oratory who wrote on his copy of the work these words. ‘Object of the book twofold. In the first part shows that you can believe what you cannot understand. In the second part that you can believe what you cannot absolutely prove.’

103. A.W., 273.

104. G.A., 165.

105. Johannes Artz, ‘Newman as Philosopher’, International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976), 273.

106. G.A., 157; see 168–9.

107. See Terrence Merrigan, ‘Newman on Faith in the Trinity’, in Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (eds.), Newman and Faith, Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs, 31 (Leuven: Peeters; Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 93–116. See p. 96: ‘Real apprehension occurs when religious doctrines are “regarded” as referring to “some-thing” which can be experienced. Real assent is the recognition that what the doctrine says is true, in the sense that it resonates with some aspect of our actual experience of life.’ See also p. 99: ‘Notional apprehension occurs when religious doctrines are thought of as referring to generalizations, to “creations of the mind”. Notional assent is the unconditional acceptance of the truth of such generalizations. That is to say, notional assent is the conviction that the results of the reasoning process are sound.’ See G.A., 10–12, 13, 102–5, 195.

108. See Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman, Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs, 7 (Leuven: Peeters; Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 50–1; see pp. 48–81 on the imagination.

109. G.A., 115–16. According to H. H. Price, Belief (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 315–16, this distinction is ‘Newman’s most original contribution to the epistemology of belief’.

110. G.A., 119.

111. Artz, ‘Newman as Philosopher’, 273, 274–5.

112. L.D., xv:457–8. The letter is dated 7 October 1853 and is evidence of his early preoccupation with the topic.

113. G.A., 281.

114. See G. Verbeke, ‘Aristotelian Roots of Newman’s Illative Sense’, in James D. Bastable (ed.), Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays (Dublin: Veritas, 1978), 177–96; and Jaki, Newman Today, 197.

115. G.A., 338.

116. Ward, ii:589.

117. G.A., 346.

118. G.A., 383.

119. G.A., 406.

120. G.A., 418–19.

121. G.A., 419–20.

122. G.A., 304.

123. See P.N., i:67–148. In The Theological Method of John Henry Newman: A Guide for the Theologian Today (Leiden: Brill, 1977), I have attempted to show that for Newman conversion, religious, moral and intellectual, is the bedrock of theological method and, a fortiori, for understanding the structure of the act of faith (see chapter IV, ‘Theology and its Methodical Foundations’, 84–111).

124. U.S., 258–9.

125. Ker, Newman on Being a Christian, 1. Nicholas Lash endorses the contention of Maurice Nedoncelle that the University Sermons already had as one of their ‘incontestable merits’ the broadening of ‘the concept of intelligence, too narrowly defined by classical rationalism’. See Lash, ‘Introduction’, 9; see M. Nedoncelle, ‘Le drame de la foi et de la raison dans les Sermons Universitaires de J. H. Newman’, Etudes 247 (1945), 75.

126. See Jean Guitton, The Modernity of St Augustine (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1959), 65–70.

127. G.A., 381.

128. G.A., 383.

129. G.A., 117; see U.S., 194–5.

130. Dev., 361.

131. Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (Dublin: Veritas, 1998), 108.