Cardinal Newman – Special Supplement
Two of Newman’s greatest works were dedicated to showing that Christianity is profoundly reasonable, writes Dr Tom Norris
When Blessed John Henry Newman (1801-1890) is named by Pope Francis among the saints of the Catholic Church on Sunday, October 13, he will be the first Englishman born since the Reformation to be canonised.
His canonisation will be warmly welcomed in the Church of England and in the wider Anglican Communion, as of course in the Catholic Church. He was a man of many parts who travelled a huge journey, an itinerary of many stages and fascinating variety, to become a Catholic Christian at the mid-point of a life spanning almost the whole of the 19th Century. In 1963 Pope Paul VI described that journey of learning, action and holiness as “the most toilsome, but also the greatest, the most meaningful, the most conclusive, that human thought ever travelled during the last century, indeed one might say during the modern era”.
And yet this was an English parish priest: at his death in 1890 over 15,000 people lined the streets of Birmingham.
That journey into Catholic faith almost didn’t begin. In his autobiography, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, he tells us that already in teenage years he read French atheists such as Voltaire. Their writing made a deep impression on him.
Providence
A kindly providence, however, exposed him to Christian writings at the same time. In particular, there was the headmaster of his school, Walter Mayers, who put some works by Thomas Scott and others in the teenager’s way for the summer of 1816. These books were destined to impact the young student very deeply.
Decades afterwards he described that impact in these words: “From the age of 15, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being.” His conviction at the time expressed itself in a motto, ‘Holiness before peace’.
Shortly afterwards he went up to Oxford where a brilliant and dramatic adventure started to unfold. I shall not go into detail in relation to that “greatest of journeys”, to quote St Pope Paul VI. My focus rather will be on his understanding of the connection of reason and faith.
For Newman, Faith follows revelation, that is the way God himself speaks to us, itself ‘the initial and essential idea of Christianity’”
To that end we will need to look first at the world around the young John Henry. The context of his life and work in Oxford in the early decades of the century is a key to his journey. Three aspects of that culture are essential to understanding him.
First, there was the narrow rationalism deriving from the world of the sciences. All around him Newman saw advancing the conviction that science was based on “strong reason” while faith and theology were based on “weak reason”. In fact, as early as 1831 he had used the term “weak reason”. It was an attitude far removed from that of the opening of John Paul’s great encyclical Fides et ratio which speaks of the “two wings of faith and reason’” by which we ascend towards God.
For Newman, Faith follows revelation, that is the way God himself speaks to us, itself “the initial and essential idea of Christianity”. Now this revelation speaks to the depths of our humanity, to the heart of the person. Of this Newman was convinced to the point that he chose as his motto as cardinal, ‘Cor ad cor loquitur: ‘Heart speaks to the heart’. Science, then, is not the measure of Christian faith.
Second, there was doctrinal liberalism, taking the view that doctrines are only opinions that happen to be held by groups of people. In this threat Newman diagnosed the most perfect antithesis of faith, which was the idea that Faith did not access the final reality.
Truth
He spoke on the occasion of receiving the red hat from Pope Leo XIII in 1879 that he had spent up to 40 years resisting the spirit of doctrinal liberalism. Christianity, he said, is based on facts – revealed facts. Nobody dies for theories or opinions, he stressed, they die for truths and for the Truth! And all this from someone who sang the praises of a “liberal education” and its product, the culture of the mind.
Reason, he writes, is popular believed to require ‘strong evidence’ before it assents while faith is content with ‘weaker evidence’”
The third challenge came not from outside but from within. It placed the emphasis on religious feelings. The Romanic movement and the rise of Evangelical Protestantism had given new currency to emotional feelings of conversion and spiritual feelings in general. John Henry did underline the role of ‘imagination’, ‘heart’ and the ‘affections’ in Faith, but he remained suspicious, however, of what would devalue the sacramental, historical and doctrinal components of Christianity.
In the words of the late Michael Paul Gallagher SJ, what was needed, in Newman’s view, was a fresh “anthropology of faith”, a new religious understanding of the human person. In any case this is the true key to two of his greatest works that span the greater part of his life – the Oxford University Sermons and the Grammar of Assent. It is to these we must principally turn in order to advance our effort to understand his study of this great topic.
No less a man than Cardinal Avery Dulles SJ in his book The Survival of Dogma reads the Oxford University Sermons as “perhaps the most useful analysis of the relationship between faith and reason for our time”.
In the Preface to a third edition, Newman sets down “their doctrine…in a categorical form”. He first states the popular notion of faith and reason. Reason, he writes, is popular believed to require “strong evidence” before it assents while faith is content with “weaker evidence”.
Questioning this notion of ‘reason’, he notices three senses of the word.
The first consists in “expertness in logical argument”.
The second sense is that of “a faculty of framing evidences”. It means that “the mind is supposed to reason severely, when it rejects antecedent proof of a fact”. In other words, by this understanding reason is only seen as properly working if it rules out the factual claims underpinning conclusions. If this is the only sense of reason allowed, it is obvious that religion can have no dogmas or revealed truths: it can have only opinions.
The third popular meaning of reason is present where people discuss religious questions without due preparation of heart. This is what Scripture calls “the wisdom of the world”.
The opening chapters of St Paul’s two Letters to the Corinthians provide a vivid instance in the contrast between the wisdom based on the Crucified and the rejecting vision of the “worldly wise” who cannot make any sense of Jesus Crucified. The net effect will inevitably be the relegation of faith and faith-questions to the realms of the pre-scientific or opinion.
The question has to arise: are these the only operations of human reason? Perhaps there are other expressions of thought and mind? Newman enlarges the sense of reason and reasoning against their reduction. He therefore writes with insight: “By the exercise of reason …is properly meant any process or act of the mind by which, from knowing one thing it advances to know another.”
From costly personal experience he knew that, in the words of Michael Paul Gallagher, any fruitful path towards faith will always need a certain spiritual receptivity as opposed to arrogant distance. In his view the religious horizon becomes real, not through clever argumentation, but only, as he says in the University Sermons, when “the heart is alive”.
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John Henry had a particularly poignant experience which spoke volumes to him. He entered a vigorous debate with his brother, Charles. The latter had become an atheist. In the debate John Henry said bluntly to Charles: “You are not in a state of mind to listen to argument of any kind.” This experience made John Henry aware that external approaches, in spite of their validity, neglect the subject, the inquirer himself.
The living tradition of the Church sees three pillars pointing towards the credibility of the Faith message”
A metaphor he employed in the University Sermons is an arresting statement of the journey towards God. “The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out, and advances forward with a quickness that has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation,” he writes.
“It passes on from point to point…it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not himself…and such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason – not by rule, but by an inward faculty.”
Having concluded this study of the actual way we reason in matters of religion, one might have thought that Newman would leave the great topic. This was not to be the case, however. The faith of children and ordinary believers needed championing.
During a vacation in Switzerland, he had the insight with which to begin a second work on faith and reason, A Grammar of Assent, which was the ways we use our reason and minds in everyday life is a lot closer to how we tend to believe in terms of religion than is the strict scientific method.
“You are wrong in beginning with certitude – certitude is only a kind of assent – you should begin with contrasting assent and inference,” he later wrote, recalling his thinking at the time. Assent, he believed, is a judgement, and as such is unconditional and therefore certain, unlike inference, which he argued was conditional upon the truth of the evidences.
The structure of the Grammar bears this out: in the first half he views the relationship of assent or judgement to apprehension or understanding. In the second half he focuses on assent at some length.
Here he uses a term that has been the cause of much inquiry – the ‘illative sense’. An illustrious term, it has given rise to an equally famous debate as to its precise meaning! He wished to show that the faithful can believe what they cannot absolutely prove.
The living tradition of the Church sees three pillars pointing towards the credibility of the Faith message. These pillars are prophecy, holiness and miracles. They constitute the “motives of credibility” and enjoy an “objective” character.
But John Henry Newman was aware even in the 19th Century of what has been called “the turn to the subject”, an attention to the human person himself as a subject in his own right. John Henry was convinced that there is another and parallel way to reach Faith, a living logic of mind.
In a letter to a friend, he describes it in these terms: “There is a faculty of the mind which I think I have called the illative sense, which, when properly cultivated and used, answers to Aristotle’s phronesis [practical wisdom], its province being, not virtue, but the ‘search for truth’, which decides for us, beyond any technical rules, when, how, etc. to pass from inference to assent, and when and under what circumstances etc. not.”
This faculty is the very faculty of judgement which allows us to grasp hold of the truth on the basis of our experience. It terminates and finalises the movement from experience, through apprehension, understanding and the accumulation of probabilities to that which is. In that fashion, the illative sense “determines what science cannot determine, the limit of converging probabilities, and the reasons sufficient for a proof”.
The illative sense names and identifies the way Newman would explain our de facto way to gain spiritual and moral truth, and so to the conviction of the existence of God. It fits with the uniqueness of religious truth, is touched by the imagination, and takes on board what Newman calls “antecedent probabilities”.
“Some exertion on the part of the persons I am to convert is a condition of a true conversion,” Newman wrote in the Grammar, having earlier noted that truth is attainable but that “its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our moral as well as our intellectual being”. The quest for truth, in other words, is a job for the whole person, intellectually, emotionally and morally.
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John Henry Newman spent his life bringing out and communicating the good news of Christ the Redeemer, at a time when Faith was widely seen as an exercise in “weak reason” while the flowering sciences entailed “strong reason”.’
Newman challenged this lazy consensus, the great Anglican and Catholic convinced that the times needed an exposition of the real relationship between faith and reason. He saw this as personally necessary, pastorally essential and culturally urgent. If he did not undertake the project, his mission would be unfinished.
What did he do? He succeeded in demonstrating, at the heroic lengths of the Oxford University Sermons and the Grammar of Assent, the reasonableness of the act of faith against those believers who said reason was irrelevant while protecting the supernatural character of faith against those who wanted to reduce it to what could be scientifically proven.
Faith and reason, he showed, are friends.
Dr Tom Norris is a priest of the Diocese of Ossory, who has served as lecturer in theology in Maynooth, as spiritual director of the Irish College in Rome, and as a member of the International Theological Commission.