Section 20

Section 20 13 Newman in retrospect

David B. Burrell

Introduction: Newman and the logic of faith

Writing in the heyday of ‘modernist rationalism’, John Henry Newman’s analysis of the fiduciary roots of all inquiry – an argument reproduced in our century by Hans-Georg Gadamer – offers us a benign understanding of the ‘postmodern’: that one ought not simply oppose knowing and believing, notably when the object of belief is divine revelation. Yet in finding room for faith, his mode of argument resists including any belief whatsoever under that rubric. So the quality of discernment whereby one discriminates among different modes of faith represents a primary and indispensable use of reason.

Like Socrates, Newman believed in the capacity of human intelligence to discriminate, with proper tutelage and catechesis, the relevant from the spurious.¹ In fact, one always hears the tutor in his writings, as he poses issues in commonplace ways only to lead us to greater appreciation of the nuances needed to move beyond oppositional clichés or crude descriptors like ‘modernist rationalism’ (found in the opening sentence of this chapter). Newman’s preponderant legacy, I suggest, lies in teaching us how to elude distracting oppositions by effectively neutralizing their appeal.

The clichés which abounded in Newman’s time are reflected in the ways he poses questions, only to recast them before we can respond to them effectively. In his Achievement of John Henry Newman, Ian Ker notes that:

Newman was much more prolific as a theologian than as a philosopher of religion, and yet the justification of religious belief always remained the subject which was closest to his heart and which was never far from his thoughts throughout his life. In the face of increasing secularization and unbelief, he came to feel that the fundamental religious problem of the modern age was the crisis of faith.²

Yet the ways he proposes to resolve such a pervasive ‘crisis’ are hardly dogmatic, and proceed by his characteristic way of ‘deconstructing’ the very problematics which may have inadvertently incited the crisis. In the process, as we shall see, ‘the justification of religious belief’ becomes a genial conversation, replete with reminders of things we already realize. Note how he gently mocks standard strategies for ‘justification of belief’ in his eleventh Oxford University Sermon (1839), ‘The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason’:

It is usual at this day to speak as if Faith were simply of a moral nature, and depended and followed upon a distinct act of Reason beforehand, – Reason warranting, on the ground of evidence, both ample and carefully examined, that the Gospel comes from God, and then faith embracing it. On the other hand, the more Scriptural representation seems to be this, which is obviously more agreeable to facts also, that, instead of there being really any such united process of reasoning first, and then believing, the act of Faith is sole and elementary, and complete in itself, and depends on no process of mind previous to it.

For consider:

The Word of Life is offered to a man; and on the grounds of its being offered, he has Faith in it. Why? On these two grounds, – the word of its human messenger, and the likelihood of the message. And why does he feel the message to be probable? Because he has a love for it, his love being strong, though the testimony is weak. He has a keen sense of the intrinsic excellence of the message, of its desirableness, of likeness to what it seems to him Divine Goodness would vouchsafe did He vouchsafe any, of the need of a Revelation, and its probability.

Nor is Newman unaware of the interlocking set of presumptions in this account:

Thus Faith is the reasoning of a religious mind, or of what Scripture calls a right or renewed heart, which acts upon presumptions rather than evidence, which speculates and ventures on the future when it cannot make sure of it.³

Yet how can this complex description amount to a ‘justification of religious belief’? Indeed, Newman freely admits that

this instance . . . seems very fully to justify the view of Faith which I have been taking, that it is an act of Reason, but of what the world would call weak, bad, or insufficient Reason; and that, because it rests on presumptions more, and on evidence less.⁴

Yet to lead us out of ‘the common opinion of men [who] rather consider Faith to be weak Reason’, he asks us to consider

the instance of St Paul preaching at Athens: he told his hearers that he came as a messenger from that God whom they worshipped already, though ignorantly, and of whom their poets spoke. He appealed to the conviction that was lodged within them of the spiritual nature and the unity of God; and he exhorted them to turn to Him who had appointed One to judge the whole world hereafter. This was an appeal to the antecedent probability of a revelation, which would be estimated variously according to the desire of it existing in each breast.⁵

Newman contrasts this intentional attitude with those who

regard the pursuit of truth only as a syllogistic process, and failure in attaining it as arising from merely a want of mental conformity with the laws in which just reasoning is conducted. But surely there is no greater mistake than this. For the experience of life contains abundant evidence that in practical matters, when their minds are really aroused, men commonly are not bad reasoners. Men do not mistake when their interest is concerned . . . They may argue badly, but they reason well; that is, their professed grounds are no sufficient measures of their real ones. And in like manner, though the evidence with which Faith is content is apparently inadequate to its purpose, yet this is no proof of real weakness or imperfection in its reasoning. It seems to be contrary to reason, yet is not; it is but independent of and distinct from what are called philosophical inquiries, intellectual systems, courses of argument and the like.⁶

The strategy invoked here will be developed nearly three decades later (1870) in his extended Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, which eases one into the peculiarities of assenting to faith by noting that the touted process of reasoning itself depends upon a bevy of prior assents. Newman evidences an abiding trust in the discernment of ‘ordinary people’, whose philosophical skills may be underdeveloped, yet whose reasoning from ‘real grounds’ makes up for their inability to profess these quite adequate grounds. The fact that we invariably reason from presumptions which are often more implicit than explicit, and that most people possess a ‘homing instinct’ for what is true for them, which philosophy may indeed be used to refine, but which the most astute philosophical reasoning already presumes in practice – these are part of Newman’s arsenal in defending the ‘rationality of faith’ without reducing it to a rationality which can pass universal muster. For, in effect, no reasoning process can do that, since each one presumes premisses only implicitly present yet nonetheless operative. Nicholas Lash offers firm guidance on this point when he invokes John Coulson to help interpret the complex paragraph we have just seen: ‘Newman’s distinction is not between rational cognition and some other activity which is nonrational . . . It is rather . . . between two modes of rationality or, in his own words, between two habits of mind.’⁷

Newman and postmodernity

Newman’s Grammar of Assent is manifestly the best document from which to offer a philosophical assessment of his legacy, though it will have been useful to compare and contrast this extended treatment with that of the Oxford University Sermons, delivered nearly three decades earlier. Citing from Newman’s letter to ‘his old friend Maria Giberne: “I have done five constructive works in my life, and this is the hardest”’ (16 February 1870),⁸ Lash helps us to appreciate the difficulties involved, from a larger cultural context:

In an intellectual climate in which post-enlightenment rationalism is presumed to be normative for the exercise of human rationality, Newman’s lifelong hostility to rationalism is bound to be misunderstood. In such a climate, emphasis on ‘the personal conquest of truth’ is invariably misconstrued as ‘subjectivism’. It is therefore not surprising that, from the Modernist crisis to our own day, Newman has frequently been charged with ‘irrationalism’, ‘fideism’, and cognate vices.⁹

Yet in the intervening quarter-century since this Introduction was composed, that ‘intellectual climate’ has shifted in such a way that we all now imbibe a ‘postmodern’ cultural context, despite the various meanings that term can convey. Yet Newman’s Grammar of Assent can be taken as key to opening us to a benign reading of ‘postmodern’, assisted by astute critics like George Steiner with philosophers like Pierre Hadot.¹⁰ What has taken place? A heightened sensitivity to context (Hans-Georg Gadamer) and to the inescapability of ‘tradition-directed inquiry’ (Alasdair MacIntyre), notably in assessing the works of those who thought they had ‘overcome’ tradition.¹¹ To appreciate this positive use of a postmodern ethos, allow me a scheme which reorients our standard way of constructing the history of philosophy.

Regularly teaching a course in ancient and medieval philosophy has led me to identify the difference between these two periods quite clearly: the presence of a free creator. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers converged in their efforts to find place for a free creator in the apparently seamless Hellenic philosophy they inherited. (Josef Pieper’s observation that ‘creation is the hidden element in the philosophy of St Thomas’ should have alerted us decades ago to this operative difference from Aristotle, yet many Thomists managed to overlook it in their anxiety to demarcate philosophy from theology.¹²) Yet if we can say, schematically, that the presence of a free creator divides medieval from ancient philosophy, what marks the subsequent transition to modern philosophy? Many things, of course, but to continue speaking schematically, ‘moderns’ wanted to distinguish themselves by eliminating theological overtones of ‘scholastics’, so proceeded by avoiding reference to a creator. Yet the creator is a bit large to overlook, so the gradual tendency was to deny its relevance, as evidenced in Enlightenment fascination with ‘the Greeks’, even though they seemed more a construct than an historical reference. Aristotle, after all, had managed quite well without a creator. Now if that be the case – again, speaking quite schematically – we can characterize modern philosophy as ‘post-medieval’, where the ‘post-’ prefix carries a note of denial – in this case, of a creator, either directly or implicitly. A cursory look at the strategies whereby modern philosophers compensated for the absence of a creator, however, shows them to lead inescapably to foundational grounds, be they ‘self-evident’ propositions or ‘sense-data’ or whatever. Once these proved illusory, we cannot but enter a ‘postmodern’ world. Yet if our presumptions regarding ‘philosophy’ itself are inherently linked to such strategies, then we will inevitably regard a postmodern context as one in which ‘anything goes’.

Here is where Newman puts flesh on our schema: if modern philosophy can be seen as ‘post-medieval’, then ‘postmodern’ philosophy will have to be read as ‘post (post-medieval)’. And while the ‘post-’ prefixes may not connote the same sort of denials, we will be directed to a sense of ‘postmodern’ which bears affinities with medieval inquiry. Put more positively and less schematically, both medieval and postmodern inquiry find themselves quite at ease with Gadamer’s contention that any inquiry whatsoever rests on fiduciary premisses. In practice, this means that faith may be regarded as a way of knowing, though like any other way of knowing, never uncritically; however starthng such a contention would sound to Descartes! Ironically enough, however, those forms of inquiry we call ‘Thomist’ owed more to Descartes and the context of modernity than to Aquinas himself, for they sought a metaphysical way of attaining the very certitude which Descartes had postulated epistemologically. By way of revenge, Cartesian failure would spell Thomistic failure as well. If there can be no viable epistemology without metaphysics, a postmodern ethos can be shown to direct us (albeit negatively) to see that there is no way to move to the level of metaphysics without a critical faith. But this carries us well beyond Newman’s struggles in the second half of the nineteenth century, well before Pope Leo XIII’s clarion call to follow the philosophy of St Thomas (in his encyclical letter, Aeterni Patris [1898]), though it is an undisputed fact that Newman’s inability to hew to the ‘potted Thomist’ line extant in his day led many Catholics to question his full assimilation into the Catholic Church! What becomes clear to us, however, with the help of Pierre Hadot’s reminders about ancient philosophy demanding a cognate ‘way of life’, is the way Newman’s having been steeped in a patristic mode of thought led him more naturally into a posture of reciprocity between faith and reason which characterizes the work of Aquinas, by contrast with neo-Thomist reconstructions. Clement of Alexandria, after all, had no scruples denominating his reflections on sacred doctrine ‘philosophy’, as they called upon all the skills which Pierre Hadot has identified as required for executing philosophy among the ancients; that is, exercises embodying a way of life consonant with one’s beliefs.

What I have dubbed the ‘additive picture’, whereby theology is demarcated from philosophy by the presence of premisses taken from faith, reflects the modern presumption of ‘pure reason’, now acknowledged (thanks largely to Gadamer) to be chimerical, whereas Newman’s characterization is far more fluid or ‘dialectical’:

Now, in attempting to investigate what are the distinct offices of Faith and Reason in religious matters, and the relation of the one to the other, I observe, first that undeniable though it be, that reason has a power of analysis and criticism in all opinion and conduct, that nothing is true or right but what may be justified, and, in a certain sense, proved by it, and undeniable, in consequence, that, unless the doctrines received by Faith are approved by reason, they have no claim to be regarded as true, it does not therefore follow that faith is actually grounded on reason in the believing mind itself; unless, indeed, to take a parallel case, a judge can be called the origin, as well as the justifier, of the innocence or truth of those brought before him. A judge does not make men honest, but acquits and vindicates them: in like manner, Reason need not be the origin of Faith, as Faith exists in the very persons believing, though it does test and verify it.¹³

The phrase which sets Newman apart from his nineteenth-century interlocutors, and aligns him with a post-Wittgensteinian legacy is the following: ‘it does not therefore follow that faith is actually grounded on reason in the believing mind itself’. That is to say, reason has a role to play other than a foundational one; in fact, a critical one. Yet the example reminds us that this role is largely practical rather than speculative, for that is how judges operate. One might indeed characterize Newman as restoring Aristotelian ‘practical reason’ in a climate where those uses of reason had been eclipsed by deductive models. This will be elaborated in the following section.

Newman and the retrieval of practical reason

The Grammar of Assent is perhaps best known for the strategic distinction among assents as either real or notional, reserving ‘real assent’ for matters of faith and practice. Yet a great deal of work concerning inference and judgment precedes this famous distinction, to give it proper philosophical bite. The key text is as follows:

In comparison of the directness and force of the apprehension, which we have of an object, when our assent is to be called real, Notional Assent and Inference seem to be thrown back into one and the same class of intellectual acts, though the former of the two is always an unconditional acceptance of a proposition, and the latter is an acceptance of the condition of an acceptance of its premises. In its notional assents as well as in its inferences, the mind contemplates its own creations instead of things; in real, it is directed towards things, represented by the impressions which they have left on the imagination. These images, when assented-to, have an influence both on the individual and on society, where mere notions cannot exert.¹⁴

Philosophical readers will detect traces of the scholastic distinction between the intentional and real, as well as Hume’s emphasis on ‘impressions’, while the composition is Newman’s own. A characteristic biblical reference is to

the confession of the patriarch Job, when he contrasts his apprehension of the Almighty before and after his afflictions. He says he had indeed a true apprehension of the Divine Attributes before as well as after; but with the trial came a great change of character of that apprehension: – ‘With the hearing of the ear’, he says, ‘I have heard Thee, but now mine eye seeeth thee; therefore I reprehend myself, and do penance in dust and ashes’ (Job 42:5–6).¹⁵

What characterizes any assent, we shall see, is that it must be unconditional, while what distinguishes ‘real assents’ is ‘that they are of a personal character . . . proper to the individual’.¹⁶ Newman characterizes the way the inferences involved culminate, to bring one to such an unconditional assent, as ‘severally the co-incidents of many laws . . . but what is not clear is how all these various conditions met together in a particular case’.¹⁷ Here is where the practicality inherent to ‘real assent’ figures so prominently:

After all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. [Indeed,] life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof. [Yet] why we are so constituted that faith, not knowledge or argument, is our principle of action, is a question with which I have nothing to do; but I think it is a fact (90–1).¹⁸

We can enlist the services of Bernard Lonergan, who freely celebrated his inspiration by Newman, and especially by this text, to elucidate the inherently practical character of ‘real assent’, as well as Newman’s initially puzzling demand that any assent be unconditional.¹⁹ In deference to Newman and to a philosophical tradition stemming from Aristotle, Lonergan insists that any judgment must be unconditional, yet underscores the character of fallible human judgments by elucidating them as ‘virtually unconditioned’. That is, to be straightforward, an assertion must indeed assert that something is the case. Yet it is a feature of progressive human understanding, consonant with our experience, that we are able to recognize when objections to our assertions meet their mark or not. Yet this recognition is thoroughly ‘virtual’, in that we cannot be conscious of all that we have (or have not) taken into consideration in making particular judgments, yet as objections emerge, we are nonetheless able to recognize whether we have met them or not. In this way, any particular judgment will in principle be open to revision (its ‘virtual’ side) while in fact a developed capacity to meet objections, in a non-defensive way, converges to unconditionality. Fred Lawrence identifies Lonergan’s intellectual debt to and development of Newman as follows:

Lonergan was enabled to grasp Aquinas’s achievement on reflection and judgment because of his prior familiarity with John Henry Newman’s appropriation of Aristotle’s phronēsis in working out the ‘illative sense’ in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.²⁰ There is a direct kinship between Newman’s elucidation of ‘arguments too various for direct enumeration, too personal and deep for words, too powerful and concurrent for refutation’, and Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice.²¹ Newman’s proposal that Aristotle’s analysis of phronesis as a concrete mode of human knowing is appropriate not just in the realm of moral judgment but in all fields of human knowing anticipated Heidegger, Gadamer, and Lonergan. Because Gadamer espouses Heidegger’s disclosure-model of truth as a-letheia, the difference between insight and interpretation and reflective understanding and judgment was not a central issue for him.

For Lonergan, as for Heidegger and Gadamer, the hermeneutic revolution implies that the epistemological question is no longer the first relevant question about human knowledge. As Lonergan agreed, the genuine issue is not the quaestio juris but the quaestio facti: not whether we know but What do we do when we know? Quite early on, Lonergan learned both from Augustine’s early dialogues at Cassiciacum and especially from Newman’s Grammar of Assent that questions about the nature of human knowledge can only be answered by reflecting on one’s own experience of coming to know. Newman thus preceded Heidegger and Gadamer in carrying out the hermeneutic explication of performative acts of consciousness, thereby convincing Lonergan that Newman’s discoveries about apprehension and assent were congruent with his own experience of knowing.²²

All of this reflection comes to a point in Lonergan’s articulation of judgment as ‘virtually unconditioned’, seen here as a refinement of Newman’s insistence on uniting both unconditionality with adventitiousness in judgment, under the neologism of ‘the Illative Sense’. As Newman puts it:

Judgment then in all concrete matter is the architectonic faculty; and what may be called the Illative Sense, or right judgment in ratiocination, or one branch of it.²³

Finally, Lonergan’s cryptic comment that ‘I had become something of an existentialist from my study of Newman’s A Grammar of Assent’ offers a clue to his guiding observation at the beginning of Insight defining it as a ‘performative’ work, whose pointers must be executed if one ever hopes to grasp their point.²⁴ It is not, in short, a treatise on epistemology, but a recipe for becoming conscious of the act which defines our reach as humans: understanding. That guiding inspiration comes manifestly from Newman.

The next figure connecting us to Newman and Newman to us has to be Ludwig Wittgenstein. James Cameron’s observations set the stage:

Language, then, for Newman is a set of tools well enough adapted to the furthering of particular practical or even speculative purposes, but compelled to strain itself to breaking point when it attempts to speak of God or the soul or faith. Language is framed to deal with our ordinary commerce with the world of things and persons, not with the subject-matter of theology. It is the tragedy of the vocation of the theologian – or the philosopher – that he must proceed by way of analysis and definition; but the nature of language is such that every comment he makes is an oblique one, every description a travesty, every definition a mutilation . . . Newman has the view of language as a set of tools the function of which are determined by needs arising out of the way of life of those who use the language, and this view is close to that elaborated by Wittgenstein in his later work.²⁵

But there is much more. Not only do they share views of how language works, but this view is constantly reflected in the ways they approach issues, beginning with a devastating deconstruction of standard – usually ‘theoretical’ – problematics, designed to return one to the paths which we find inscribed in our actual quest for understanding. Newman’s impatience with ‘philosophical accounts’, especially of reasoning, will be echoed by Wittgenstein’s insistent attempts to move questions out of the parameters into which they had been constrained by ‘philosophers’, so that they have a chance of meeting the actual needs of inquirers. What is at stake here is recovering ‘philosophy as a way of life’, a staple of Wittgenstein’s approach, embodied in the title of Pierre Hadot’s essays illustrating an effective way of taking philosophy to heart.²⁶ Moreover, by focusing on practice and judgment, Wittgenstein’s strategies can facilitate a hermeneutical retrieval of classical texts, reminiscent of the ways in which Newman’s sensitive ways of reading such texts can bring them to life, as his retrieval of developments in Christian doctrine had a profound impact on his life and that of countless others in the nineteenth century.

Cyril Barrett explores in some detail the relation between these two thinkers. Wittgenstein rarely cited others, even those whom he appreciated, so the cryptic remark in On Certainty, ‘a curious [komische] remark of H. Newman’, offers but a slim lead, yet affinities between the Philosophical Investigations are Newman’s characteristic ways of parsing ‘understanding’ are everywhere to be remarked. Barrett’s comparison turns principally on the apparently circular character of Newman’s attempts (notably in the Grammar) to ‘justify’ religious belief, for this is at once where both thinkers appear most vulnerable and yet made their signal contributions to this endeavour. But one will miss those very contributions if one insists on reading ‘justify’ as ‘offering proof’ or a foundation. Barrett notes this, and suggests that ‘here might be a better way of describing what [Newman] is doing’:

This would be to say that what he was giving was not a piece of information and cumulative reasoning in support of religious belief so much as a rational account of the basis of Christian belief: why Christians believe what they do and what that implies. In other words, if the Grammar of Assent is seen as a rational exposé of what Christian belief implies and involves, and not as a cumulative argument, there can be no question of circularity, since nothing is being proved, even informally.²⁷

Barrett goes on to compare this ‘non-foundational’ use of reason to Anselm’s famous exercise of reason in his Proslogion, miscast (since Kant) as ‘the ontological argument’.

What makes it look like an argument (or rather, arguments) is that he dragged in the fool who said in his heart ‘there is no God’. This made it look like a refutation, whereas Anselm was speaking to his fellow monks, all of whom believed in God, and, had they not, would have been unimpressed by his arguments (as would the fool). What Anselm was in effect proving was that believing in God involved belief in a necessary, all-perfect, eternal being, and that that made sense. Implied in this account is its rationality. This is precisely what Wittgenstein had in mind when he wrote, ‘I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their “belief” an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never had come to believe as a result of such proofs’.²⁸

And what is here described as ‘coming to believe as a result of proof’ is what we normally call a ‘foundational’ use of reason. Barrett’s description of how Anselm wanted his ‘argument’ to function not only illustrates a sensitive reading of the Proslogion in its larger context, as well as noting how the preliminary chapters of that classic work are intended to direct our interpretation of his endeavour, but can also remind us how singular are Newman’s and Wittgenstein’s way of relating reason to faith in the climate of ‘philosophy of religion’ which seems to have perdured from their day to ours!

Pierre Hadot can supply yet another link to Newman’s way of modelling and stimulating our understanding of matters religious, by reminding us how crucial are ‘spiritual exercises’ to doing philosophy, thereby showing how contemporary such a ‘classical’ paradigm can be.²⁹ We know such exercises from Socratic dialogue as well as our own efforts to carry on something similar in our own efforts to reach students. Indeed, the very term, ‘exercises’, introduces a notion of inquiry shaped by intellectual virtues, endorsing a style of teaching geared to helping students acquire virtues requisite to the inquiry in question. Of another order than the ‘decision algorithms’ endemic to formal logic, acquiring these virtues will demand a quality of judgment akin to the phronēsis at the heart of all moral virtues.³⁰ Moreover, that same quality of judgment emerges at the heart of Aquinas’s understanding of the analogous use of terms, as Etienne Gilson insisted.³¹ It may help to illustrate this elusive yet pervasive practice of judgment from that of translating, which must have been a practice at which Newman was adept, given his mastery of classical languages.

Those who have tried their hand at translating quickly come to realize that there are no rules for doing it.³² I call it ‘hermeneutics where the rubber hits the road’. For as one seeks to ascertain what the author in question means, one does so by casting about for an idiom which will convey that sense as perspicuously as possible to one’s contemporaries. And where the distance is cultural as well as chronological, as in the author whom I have translated most, al-Ghazali, one is engaged in making complex and imbedded judgments. They will be shaped by what one has come to learn of the context of the work, which will help illuminate how the work itself serves as context for the sentences one must render into another language and a contemporary idiom. So the endeavour cannot be solitary; indeed, it cannot but embody multi-disciplinary efforts, ideally as a team but inescapably involving consultants to the work. Moreover, these efforts will have a duplex goal: to render al-Ghazali intelligible to contemporary readers with a different cultural formation, and at the same time to invite those very readers to enlarge their working presumptions by enticing them into the author’s culture.

Listen to the appeal which opens al-Ghazali’s commentary on a central Muslim practice, reciting the ‘ninety-nine beautiful names of God’:

Praise be to God, alone in His majesty and His might, unique in His sublimity and His eternity, who clips the wings of intellects well short of the glow of his glory, and who makes the way of knowing Him pass through the inability to know Him; who makes the tongues of the eloquent fall short of praising the beauty of His presence unless they use the means by which He praises Himself: His names and attributes which He has enumerated. And my blessings be upon Muhammad, the best of his creatures, and on his companions and his family.³³

It should be clear how an entire set of practices as well as a tradition of reflection is imbedded in this text, carefully crafted to inaugurate his commentary on the practice of reciting a canonical list of ‘names’ for the divinity culled from the Qur’an itself. They are indeed attributes but also names which enjoy the authority of God naming God’s own self. Hence they allow us to engage in an activity which far surpasses our own powers: of praising God, and expecting that praise to attain its object. And any efforts to praise God will also bless the Prophet, whose recitation (Qur’an) delivered these very names to us so as to leave their divine provenance undiluted. Indeed, their divine origin will privilege these attributes as names, and lead al-Ghazali to invest his commentary on each of them with a correlative ‘Admonition’ sketching ways in which those reciting them might assimilate themselves to that divine attribute, in as much as humans can. So the practice of recitation of the divinely given names on the part of Muslims – that is, those seeking to respond faithfully to the revelation of God in the Qur’an – at once calls attention to the gulf between creator and creatures as well as the call to those who recognize the gift of creation to return everything to the One from whom they received everything. In short, this opening appeal limns the heart of Islamic reflection on the ‘straight path’ offered by the Qur’an and itself announced in Sura 1 (Fatiha) – lineaments translators must detect if they would lead readers to appreciate them. Indeed, the elegance of the original appeal must also inform the English rendering, if the appeal is to do its work – a demand which actually facilitates the effort of translating, even while it helps assure that the project will seldom meet the standards it sets for itself.

One is immediately reminded of Newman’s invocation of Scripture to illuminate transitions in human life and understanding, like the way he took Paul’s preaching in the agora in Athens to be exemplary:

Now, what was the evidence he gave, in order to concentrate those various antecedent presumptions, to which he referred, in behalf of a message which he brought? Very slight, yet something; not a miracle, but his own word that God had raised Christ form the dead; very like the evidence given to the mass of men now, or rather not so much. No one will say it was strong evidence; yet, aided by the novelty, and what may be called originality, of the claim, its strangeness and improbability considered as a mere invention, and the personal bearing of the Apostle, and supported by the full force of the antecedent probabilities which existed, and which he stirred within them, it was enough. It was enough, for some did believe, – enough, not indeed in itself, but enough for those who had love, and therefore were inclined to believe. To those who had no fears, wishes, longings or expectations, of another world, he was but a ‘babbler’; those who had such, or in the Evangelists’ words in another place, were ‘ordained to eternal life’, ‘clave unto him, and believed’.³⁴

So it is the lived context of conversation which can constitute ‘sufficient evidence’, and the introduction of love reminds one of a related sermon: ‘Love: The Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, which addresses the objection that his way of articulating the reasonableness of faith

may be made an excuse for all manner of prejudice and bigotry, and leads directly to credulity and superstition; and on the other hand, in the case of unbelief, that it affords a sort of excuse for impenetrable obduracy. Antecedent probabilities may be equally available for what is true, and what pretends to be true . . . They seem to supply no intelligible rule what is to be believed, and what not; or how a man is to pass from a false belief to a true.³⁵

It is plain that some safeguard of Faith is needed, some corrective principle, which will secure it from running (as it were) to seed, and becoming superstition or fanaticism . . . What, then, is the safeguard, if Reason is not? I shall give an answer, which may seem at once common-place and paradoxical, yet I believe is the true one. The safeguard of Faith is a right state of heart. This it is which gives it birth; it also disciplines it.³⁶

This anticipates Lonergan’s crucial distinction between ‘quest for understanding’ and a ‘need for certitude’, which reminds each of us that psychological needs may be distracting in the journey to faith, even if we cannot simply (with Freud) dismiss that journey as an irresponsible catering to such needs. What Newman calls a ‘right state of heart’ Lonergan will match with ‘the unrestricted desire to know’, for what gives that ‘state of heart’ its rightness are the disciplines which help us dissolve projections in seeking what is right and true. And here is where Hadot’s reminder of ‘spiritual exercises’ and Newman’s search for an authentic ecclesial tradition coalesce. It can also remind us that the certitude which Newman celebrates and which Lonergan denigrates are far from the same thing. As the extensive treatment of certitude in Chapter 7 of Grammar of Assent makes clear, it is not something one claims to possess, but a spontaneous ‘law of my mind to seal up the conclusions to which ratiocination has brought me’.³⁷ Certitude for Newman is not something I claim, but something which rightly claims me. It is in fact ‘attainable as regards general and cardinal truths’.³⁸ Yet it

does not admit of an interior, immediate test, sufficient to discriminate it from false certitude. Such a test is rendered impossible from the circumstance that, when we make the mental act expressed by ‘I know’, we sum up the whole series of reflexive judgments which might, each in turn, successively exercise a critical function towards those of the series which precede it . . . It seems then that on the whole there are three conditions of certitude: that it follows on investigation and proof, that it is accompanied by a specific sense of intellectual satisfaction and repose, and that it is irreversible. If the assent is made without rational grounds, it is a rash judgment, a fancy, or prejudice; if without a sense of finality, it is scarcely more than an inference; if without permanence, it is a mere conviction.³⁹

Moreover, Newman joins Plato to insist that ‘the multitude of men confuse together the probable, the possible, and the certain, and apply these terms to doctrines and to statements almost at random. They have no clear view what it is they know, what they presume, what they suppose, and what they only assert.’⁴⁰ So what is required for any intellectual inquiry, and especially to ‘seal it’, are skills which are eminently human, but require keen development, so that we shall use our powers to discern properly.

In this respect, Newman’s work offers a paradigm example of ‘tradition-directed inquiry’, to anticipate the astute ways in which Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum can retrieve classical texts for contemporary illumination.⁴¹ His manner of writing reveals how much he would resonate with Martha Nussbaum’s exemplary way of using narrative to offer philosophical elucidation of central human issues. What all these thinkers have in common is a sense that philosophical inquiry proceeds best when it imbeds itself in a tradition, always critically but never presuming to ‘go it alone’. I have tried to show how this governing conviction can be seen to be ‘postmodern’, rejecting the utterly ‘autonomous’ picture of philosophy (and of ‘the self’) which governed modern inquiry. For a final illustration of Newman’s intellectual legacy, let us turn to John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio (‘Faith and Reason’).

Fides et Ratio has been the subject of numerous commentaries, one of which I shall feature, by Jorge Garcia.⁴² What Karl Wojtyla highlights in his exploration of ‘faith and reason’ is their reciprocal relation to one another, which can be one of ‘mutual illumination’. While insisting on the proper ‘autonomy of philosophy’, he also suggests ‘how faith can help philosophy remain true to its vocation by remaining on the trail of the answers it seeks and drawing close to them’. Here Garcia remarks that ‘the very suggestion that religious faith might actually assist philosophy is shocking to those who see philosophy as religion’s enemy, [for] as many philosophers today view religious faith with contempt, so many religious people view philosophy with suspicion’.⁴³ Continuing his commentary, Garcia asks:

What, according to this pope, can faith give philosophy? First, and most important, John Paul II maintains, is a Christocentric anthropology . . . [For] Jesus’ was a life lived in love, devotion to the good of persons. His love of God was expressed as utter obedience in which his own will harmonized with the Father’s. [And] that means that self-fulfillment depends on the truth about the human being’s origin, essence, and vocation. For John Paul II’s personalism, the personal presupposes the interpersonal . . . Here, human personhood in loving relationship mirrors the internal life of the three divine persons . . . Whatever [faith’s] epistemic disadvantage as compared with belief based either in logical demonstration or in direct empirical evidence, faith is more human precisely in being interpersonal.⁴⁴

All of these features of philosophical reason informed by faith, and of a faith made critically available by judicious use of rational strategies, are deeply redolent of Newman’s consistent practice. So the fact that one can identify portions of his legacy in so many contemporary thinkers, some explicitly linked to the practice of Christian faith, and others not so linked, or even linked to other faith traditions, can only remind us of the central role which this Catholic inquirer has played in helping us wend our way in a confusing and turbulent intellectual and interfaith milieu.⁴⁵

A final note regards the perspective which Newman’s life and writings can give us regarding professional philosophy. His way of giving short shrift to ‘formal reasoning’ while engaging in a good bit of it himself, is reminiscent of the way Søren Kierkegaard can denigrate ‘philosophy’ while employing philosophical strategies with acuity. The explanation is really quite simple: when the ‘philosophy’ taught in universities was in fact ‘potted Hegel’, the critique had to sidestep this elephant as it limned a fresh way of retrieving the promise which Socrates had brought to philosophy.⁴⁶ For Newman, when the ‘uses of reason’ had been unduly restricted to formal reasoning in the name of ‘philosophy’, he was forced to retrace Socrates’ steps to recover the wellsprings of human reasoning, and in his case, this would amount to retrieving Aristotle’s ‘practical reason’. Here especially is where he can appear so timely to us today, in a ‘postmodern’ context in which attention to the practices of reason is slowly coming to the fore, to eclipse philosophers’ predilection for ‘theories’, in the wake of Wittgenstein. Again, however, university practice of ‘philosophy’ may be slow to adopt these changes, so Newman’s task of deconstruction, and then of restored attention to practice, remains perennially ours.

Notes

1. For an inspired use of ‘catechesis’, see Paul Griffiths, ‘How Reasoning goes Wrong: A Quasi-Augustinian Account of Error and its Implications’, in Paul Griffiths and Reinhard Hutter (eds.), Reason and the Reasons of Faith (New York and London: T & T Clark, 2005), 145–59.

2. Ian Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 35.

3. U.S., 202–3. For a cognate assessment of the role of praeambula fidei, see Guy deBroglie, SJ, ‘La vraie notion thomiste des praeambula fidei’, Gregorianum 34 (1953), 341–89.

4. U.S., 204.

5. U.S., 203.

6. U.S., 211–12.

7. Nicholas Lash, ‘Introduction’ to John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 15. Lash refers to G.A., 98–9, and to Sermon X, ‘Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, of U.S., 176–201. See also John Coulson, ‘Belief and Imagination’, Downside Review 90 (1972), 1–14.

8. Lash, ‘Introduction’, 1 n. 3.

9. Lash, ‘Introduction’, 8; for references Lash directs us to his study, Newman on Development (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975), 11, 148–9.

10. See George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). For an illuminating introduction to the work of Pierre Hadot in English, see Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davidson (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995); for a synopsis, see his What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2002).

11. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).

12. Josef Pieper, The Silence of St Thomas: Three Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1957): ‘The Negative Element in the Philosophy of St Thomas’, 47–67 (reissued: South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2002).

13. U.S., 182–3: Sermon X: ‘Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind’. For a development of this ‘dialectical relation’, see David Burrell, ‘Philosophy’, in Gareth Jones (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 34–46.

14. G.A., 75.

15. G.A., 80. For a recent study of Job which exploits this crucial distinction, see David Burrell, Deconstructing Theodicy (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007).

16. G.A., 83.

17. G.A., 84.

18. G.A., 94.

19. Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, chapters 10 and 11. See Frederick Crowe and Robert Doran (eds.), Collected Works, vol. iii (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 304–71 (original edition (fifth, revised and augmented): London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1957). For a critical summary of Lonergan’s intent in Insight, see Edward M. McKinnon, SJ, ‘Understanding According to Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J.’, Thomist [Part I] 28 (1964), 97–132; [Part II] 28 (1964), 338–72; [Part III] 28 (1964), 475–522.

20. Bernard Lonergan, ‘Insight Revisited’, in William Ryan and Bernard Tyrell (eds.), Second Collection (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), 263–78. Recapping the long-term steps to Insight, Lonergan notes: ‘[I] read several times the more theoretical passages in Newman’s A Grammar of Assent . . . His illative sense later became my reflective act of understanding [i.e., judgment]’ (263); and ‘I had become something of an existentialist from my study of Newman’s A Grammar of Assent’ (276).

21. Joseph Dunne has developed the parallel more broadly in Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

22. Fred Lawrence, ‘The Hermeneutic Revolution and the Future of Theology’, in Andrzej Wiercinski (ed.), Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2002), 326–54, at 337–48.

23. G.A., 342.

24. Lonergan, Insight, Preface.

25. James Cameron, Night Battle (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1962), 204–5.

26. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. and presented Arnold Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).

27. Cyril Barrett, ‘Newman and Wittgenstein on the Rationality of Religious Belief’, in Ian Ker (ed.), Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 98.

28. Barrett, ‘Newman and Wittgenstein’, 98–9. The Wittgenstein reference is to Culture and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 85.

29. Pierre Hadot, What is Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); for a hermeneutical application, see David Burrell, Exercises in Religious Understanding (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), featuring readings (in the manner of Wittgenstein and of Lonergan) of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and Jung.

30. See Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundation of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

31. This idea is developed in David Burrell, ‘From Analogy of “Being” to the Analogy of Being’, in John O’Callaghan and Thomas Hibbs (eds.), Recovering Nature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 253–66.

32. See the illuminating set of essays collected by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Theories of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) where renowned writers and translators conspire to undermine the title of the collection.

33. Al-Ghazali: The Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God [al-Maqsad al-asna fi sharh asma Allah al husna], trans. David Burrell and Nazih Daher (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1995, and Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2000).

34. U.S., 203–4.

35. U.S., 232.

36. U.S., 233–4.

37. G.A., 229.

38. G.A., 240.

39. G.A., 255, 258.

40. G.A., 234.

41. MacIntyre, Whose Justice?; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1989); Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). For a discussion with others, see also Charles Taylor, A Catholic Modernity, ed. James Heft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

42. J. L. A. Garcia, ‘Death of the (Hand)maiden: Contemporary Philosophy in Faith and Reason’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 2 (1999), 11–19.

43. Garcia, ‘Death of the (Hand)maiden’, 15.

44. Garcia, ‘Death of the (Hand)maiden’, 15–16.

45. See Terrence Merrigan’s contribution to Ian Ker (ed.), Newman and Conversion, ‘The Anthropology of Conversion: Newman and the Contemporary Theology of Religions’, for one perspective on how Newman’s ‘antecedent probabilities’ analysis might be applied to other religious convictions, as he himself does to ‘paganism’.

46. See John Macquarrie, ‘Newman and Kierkegaard on the Act of Faith’, in Ker (ed.), Newman and Conversion, 75–88.

Section 20

13 Newman in retrospect

Introduction: Newman and the logic of faith

Newman and postmodernity

Newman and the retrieval of practical reason

Further reading