By Anthony Kenny, JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: Part 2 of Three Modern Masters, in An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy [plus my uncle Ambrose whose Assent was not sought]
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
If the nineteenth century set the stage for the fiercest ever battle between science and religion, it was also spanned by the lifetime of a thinker who made a greater effort than any other to show that not just belief in God, but the acceptance of a religious creed, was a completely rational activity: John Henry Newman.
Newman was born in London in 1801, and was educated in Oxford, where he became a Fellow of Oriel in 1822, and Vicar of St Mary’s in 1828. After an evangelical upbringing, he became convinced of the truth of the Catholic interpretation of Christianity, and as a founder of the Oxford movement he sought to have it accepted as authoritative within the Church of England. In 1845 he converted to the Roman Catholic Church, and worked as a priest for many years in Birmingham. … Most of his writings are historical, theological, and devotional; but he was the author of one philosophical classic, The Grammar of Assent, and of all the philosophers who wrote in English his style is the most enchanting.
Newman’s principal concern in philosophy is the question: how can religious belief be justified, given that the evidence for its conclusions seems so inadequate? He does not … demand the adoption of faith in the absence of reasons, a blind leap over a precipice. He seeks to show that the commitment of faith is itself reasonable, even if no proof can be offered of the articles of faith. In the course of dealing with this question in The Grammar of Assent, Newman has much to say of general philosophical interest about the nature of belief, in secular as well as religious contexts.
Newman philosophized in the empiricist tradition, and disliked German meta physics. Only the senses give us direct and immediate acquaintance with things external to us: and they take us only a little way out of ourselves. Reason is the faculty by which knowledge of things external to us, of beings, facts, and events, is attained beyond the range of sense. Unlike Kant, Newman believed that reason is unlimited in its range. ‘It reaches to the ends of the universe, and to the throne of God beyond them.’ Reason is the faculty of gaining knowledge upon grounds given; and its exercise lies in asserting one thing, because of some other thing.
The two great operations of the intellect, then, are inference and assent; and these two are always to be kept distinct. We often assent when we have forgotten the reasons for our assent. Arguments may be better or worse, but assent either exists or not. Some arguments may indeed force our assent, but even in the case of mathematical proof there is a difference between inference and assent. A mathematician would not assent to the conclusion of a complex proof he had produced himself, without going over his work and seeking the corroboration of others. Sometimes assent is given without argument, or on the basis of bad argument; and this commonly leads to error.
Is it always wrong, then, to give assent without adequate argument or evidence? Locke believed so: he gave, as a mark of the love of truth, the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant.
‘Whatever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain, receives not truth in the love of it, loves not truth for truth-sake, but for some other by-end.’
If Locke were right, Newman observes, then no lover of truth could accept religious belief; and Hume and Bentham would be right to accuse believers of credulity. For, as Newman agrees, the grounds of faith are conjectural, and yet they issue in the absolute acceptance of a certain message or doctrine as divine. Faith starts from probability and ends in peremptory statements.
Newman is thinking not just of any kind of belief in the supernatural, but of faith strictly so called, contrasted on the one hand with reason and on the other hand with love. ‘Faith’, in the tradition in which he is writing, is used in a narrower sense than ‘belief’. Aristotle believed that there was a divine prime mover unmoved; but his belief was not faith in God. On the other hand, Marlowe’s Faustus, on the verge of damnation, speaks of Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament; he has lost hope and charity yet retains faith. So faith contrasts both with reason and with love. Faith is belief in something as revealed by God; thus defined, it is a correlate of revelation. If we are to believe something on the word of God, it must be possible to identify something as God’s word.
Faith of this kind would be condemned on Locke’s criterion: for the reasons for taking any concrete event or text as a divine revelation fall short of certainty. But Newman argues that faith is not the only exercise of reason which when critically examined would be called unreasonable and yet is not so.
The choice of sides in political questions, decisions for or against economic policies, tastes in literature: in all such cases if we measure people’s grounds merely by the reasons they produce we have no difficulty in holding them up to ridicule, or even censure.
Many of our most solid beliefs go well beyond the flimsy evidence any of us could offer for them. We all believe that Great Britain is an island; but how many of us have circumnavigated it, or met people who have? We believe that the earth is a globe, covered with vast tracts of earth and water, whose regions see the sun by turns. I believe, with the utmost certainty, that I shall die: but what is the distinct evidence on which I believe it? On all these truths we have an immediate and unhesitating hold, nor do we think ourselves guilty of not loving truth for truth’s sake because we cannot reach them through the steps of a proof.
If we refused to give assents going beyond the force of evidence, the world could not go on, and science itself could never make progress. Probability is the guide of life. If we insist upon being as sure as is conceivable, in every step of our course, we must be content to creep along the ground, and can never soar. ‘If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards; and whereas we are given absolute certainty in nothing, we must in all things choose between doubt and inactivity.’
Someone may object that there is a difference between religious faith and the reasonable, but insufficiently grounded, beliefs to which Newman appeals. In the ordinary cases, we are always ready to consider evidence which tells against our belief; but the religious believer adopts a certitude which refuses to entertain any doubts about the articles of faith. But Newman denies that it is wrong, even in secular matters, to hold a belief with a magisterial intolerance of contrary suggestions. If we are certain, we spontaneously reject objections as idle phantoms, however much they may be insisted on by a pertinacious opponent, or present themselves through an obsessive imagination.
I certainly should be very intolerant of such a notion as that I shall one day be Emperor of the French; I should think it too absurd even to be ridiculous, and that I must be mad before I could entertain it. And did a man try to persuade me that treachery, cruelty, or ingratitude was as praiseworthy as honesty and temperance, and that a man who lived the life of a knave and died the death of a brute had nothing to fear from future retribution, I should think there was no call on me to listen to his arguments, except with the hope of converting him, though he called me a bigot and a coward for refusing to enter into his speculations.
To be sure, we can sometimes be certain of something and then later find out that we were wrong. This does not mean that we should give up all certainty, any more than the fact that we are sometimes told the wrong time means that we should dispense with clocks.
How does Newman apply all this to the evidences of religion? The strongest evidence for the truth of the Christian religion, he believes, is to be found in the history of Judaism and Christianity; but this evidence only carries weight to those who are already prepared to receive it. To be ready to accept it, one must already believe in the existence of God, the possibility of revelation, and the certainty of a future judgement. The persuasiveness of any proof, Newman says, depends on what the person to whom it is presented regards as antecedently probable.
Two objections may be made to this. The first is that antecedent probabilities may be equally available for what is true and what merely pretends to be true, for a counterfeit revelation as well as a genuine one. They supply no intelligible rule to determine what is to be believed and what not.
If a claim of miracles is to be acknowledged because it happens to be advanced, why not for the miracles of India as well as for those of Palestine? If the abstract probability of a Revelation be the measure of genuineness in a given case, why not in the case of Mahomet as well as of the Apostles?
Newman, who is never more eloquent than when developing criticisms of his own position, nowhere succeeds in providing a satisfactory answer to this objection.
Secondly, we may ask why one should have in the first place those beliefs which Newman regards as necessary for the acceptance of the Christian revelation. What are the reasons for believing at all in God and in a future judgement? Traditional arguments offer to prove the existence of God from the nature of the physical world; but Newman himself has no great confidence in them.
It is indeed a great question whether Atheism is not as philosophically consistent with the phenomena of the physical world, taken by themselves, as the doctrine of a creative and governing Power. But, however this be, the practical safeguard against Atheism in the case of scientific inquirers is the inward need and desire, the inward experience of that Power, existing in the mind before and independently of their examination of His material world.
The inward experience of the divine power, to which Newman here appeals, is to be found in the voice of conscience. As we conclude to the existence of an external world from the multitude of our instinctive perceptions, he says, so from the intimations of conscience, which appear as echoes of an external admonition, we form the notion of a Supreme Judge. Conscience, considered as a moral sense, involves intellectual judgement; but conscience is always emotional, therefore it involves recognition of a living object. Our affections cannot be stirred by inanimate things, they are correlative with persons.
If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if on doing right, we enjoy the same sunny serenity of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on our receiving praise from a father, we certainly have within us the image of some person, to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being.
It is not the mere existence of conscience which Newman regards as establishing the existence of God: intellectual judgements of right and wrong can be explained – as they are by many Christian philosophers as well as by Utilitarians – as conclusions arrived at by reason.
It is the emotional colouring of conscience which Newman, implausibly, compares to our sense-experience of the external world.
The feelings which he engagingly describes may indeed be appropriate only if there is a Father in heaven; but they cannot guarantee their own appropriateness.
If the existence of God is intended simply as a hypothesis to explain the nature of such sentiments, then other hypotheses must also be taken into consideration.
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
The Source of today’s exhibit has been:
Anthony Kenny, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy, 20th anniversary edition, John Wiley & Sons 2019
MGH:
I include below an extract from Wikipedia about my great uncle Ambrose St John who was the intimate friend of John Henry Newman. Both were disgracefully treated by a diabolical Catholic Church when their intertwined remains were disinterred.
Professor Ian Ker on behalf of Catholic officialdom wrote the following:
Throughout his life as a Catholic Newman always insisted that whatever he wrote he wrote under the correction of Holy Mother Church. That was his constant refrain. If the Church decrees that his remains should be removed to a church, then Newman's undoubted response would be that of his last testament. Like everything else he wrote, he wrote under correction of higher authority. And if that higher authority decrees that his body be removed and that of his friend left, then Newman would say without hesitation, "so be it".
I cannot imagine how my great uncle Ambrose might have felt upon being made aware that John Henry Newman insisted by “my imperative will” on being buried alongside him (after having driven him to his grave by overworking him), and then to learn that the religious authorities by their imperative were to dig him up, mess up his disintegrated remains, and stir up a flurry of queer interest in the tabloid newspapers.
Newman let us not forget was the author of The Grammar of Assent. Who gave their assent as inference or apprehension in this case? A grammar unlearned if my great-uncle’s assent was not sought by Newman, and if Saint Newman’s wishes were not assented to by the authority purporting to defend this faith founded on assent.
Wikipedia despite faults often gives the handiest layman summary of a complexity.
WIKIPEDIA ENTRY FOR MY GREAT-UNCLE AMBROSE ST JOHN
Ambrose St John (1815 – 24 May 1875) was an English Oratorian. He was a classical scholar and a linguist both in Oriental and European tongues. St John was born and brought up in Hornsey, North London. He was the son of Henry St John, descended from the Barons St John of Bletso, and the grandson of Andrew St John, Dean of Worcester. He was educated at Westminster School, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated MA, forming a lifelong friendship with Newman.
In 1841 he became curate at Walmer, subsequently at East Farleigh. He then joined Newman at the chapel of Littlemore which he left, on his conversion to the Catholic Church, about a month before Newman's own conversion in October 1845.
After a short time spent with Newman at Maryvale he accompanied him to Rome where they were ordained as priests. Having become Oratorians, they began mission work in Birmingham (1847). There he devoted himself entirely to missionary work, taking a leading part in the work of the Birmingham Oratory and its school. He was a classical scholar and a linguist both in Oriental and European tongues.
St John's death followed his work in translating Josef Fessler's book on papal infallibility, published as The True and False Infallibility of the Popes in London in 1875, a defence of the doctrine of Infallibility as taught by the Italian "Ultramontane" theologians, at a time when the controversy over the doctrine was mounting and Newman was engaged in controversy with [Prime Minister] William Ewart Gladstone.
Newman, who with others had been privately opposed to a dogmatic declaration of the doctrine, which Gladstone had vigorously attacked, reproached himself that he had caused his friend's death by overworking him.
Ambrose St John’s relationship with John Henry Newman
Ambrose St John (left) and John Henry Newman (right).
St John's longest friendship was with John Henry Newman, and the two shared communitarian life for 32 years from 1843 (when St John was 28). Newman wrote after St John's death: “I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine”.
Newman paid tribute to him in his Apologia, and directed that he himself be buried in the same grave as St John: “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Ambrose St John's grave — and I give this as my last, my imperative will”.
The two share a memorial stone inscribed with the words he had chosen: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem — “Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth”. [or should that be, ‘out of the coffin and into the deceit’?]
In 2008, the Vatican ordered that Fr Ambrose St John's remains be separated from those of Newman, contrary to Newman's dying wishes, in preparation for Newman's canonisation as a saint.
Campaigners for gay rights speculated the Vatican was embarrassed by the relationship between the two though historians and scholars of the period suggest this is a misunderstanding of the concept of friendship that existed at the time. Newman's remains in the shared grave were exhumed as part of a plan to move them to the Oratory in Birmingham city centre. At the exhumation, Newman's wooden coffin was found to have disintegrated and the bodies completely decayed.
[MGH: What also disappoints me is that my great-uncle was making himself sick in Birmingham translating an utterly pointless ‘infallibility’ text by Josef Fessler when he could have been enjoyably reading and chatting down in Hornsey with Herbert Spencer or Charles Darwin, as we have so frequently done at Social Science Files.]
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