Newman on Assenting to Mysteries

Some Help in Assenting to Mysteries of Faith

from John Henry Newman’s  

An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870)

 

 

Sunday by Sunday Christians solemnly declare, “I believe in one God”, and a whole set of dogmatic statements which follow from that. The grounds for this statement of faith seems radically inconsistent with the grounds we have for other statements of what is the case, based on observation of the patterns and probablities in the natural world, as observed and recorded by the mathematician and scientist. These alone seem to give proof, or at least sure grounds for making reasonable assumptions about what is the state of things, whereas statements of religious faith are based upon no such secure ground.

This is no new phenomenon, and today it is the natural scientist rather than the mathematician or physicist who is challenging Christian claims to truth. Indeed, given the focus upon quantum theory, which admits of the massive complexity of sub-atomic reality rather than posturing in grand theory, there is now a huge fertile interface between physicists, mathematicians, philosophers and theologians. It is also helpful in this if the theologian admits of massive compexity in his science too, and allows himself more modest horizons and claims instead of posturing in grand theory. This is another theme taken up by Newman as he wrote cautiously and carefully on theological subjects and Catholic claims, when many of his fellow Catholics were pushing a triumphalistic agenda against the world. His cautious approach in the field of doctrine won him the empithet “the most dangerous man in England” in a letter from the Pope’s English secretary to the Archbishop of Westminster.

In the mid 19th century John Henry Newman faced similiar questions to those of today, with the claims of Christianity relegated to superstition by those who postulated stricter scientific criteria for truth claims. His reply to this challenge was a philosophical work published in 1870, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, which summed up thirty years of thought on the subject of Christian belief. It was his contention that it is possible to be certain of things of faith, and that the credal statements made by Christians of all classes and levels of education were true.

Many Christians when faced with the rigourous challenges of scientific method tend to revert to ‘fideism’, that is the assent to dogmatic propositions without any rational assent involved. There is just ’simple’ faith in God and the things of God, and a strong personal relationship is established between the believer and the person of Jesus. This can be the case for conservative Catholics just as well as Evangelical Protestants, who are fearful of reason, and its potential to wreck their carefully nurtured faith and devotionally constructed orthodoxies. It is often the case, at least from my experience as a priest working throughout my ministry in higher education, that such Christians experience great crises of doubt when they eventually allow reason to invade their religious territory, and what was once held onto as dear is now seen as an embarrassing residue of childish superstition. The mysteries of faith are rejected with equal fervour as they were once held.

So what is to be done? It seems to the rational scientist that the Christian believer is being dishonest, and conversely to the believer that the rationalist is being unfaithful. This was Newman’s project in 1870; to show how the believer comes to assent to the dogmas of faith rationally, and that this assent to open to all people, not simply the intellectual elite.

There is the story about the man driving round in circles, completely lost, and when he asks for directions (usually from an Irishman, so the joke goes) he gets the reply, “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.” This may sound trite, but it is what both believer and doubt will say to each other in a polemical argument concern faith in the Christian msteries. Each wants to establish the foundation according to his perception of how things are, how therefore they will go, and what the outcome ought to be. But Newman insists, it is important to recognise that each person begins from where they are, and not where someone else is, or where they think they ought to be, but where they are with all the complexity that that brings. The believer has to allow for his believing to be complex, because whereas one holds to scientific reason as the sole criterion for getting to the truth of things, the believer has more material and more processes in play when he comes to analyse a proposition. This should not leave the believer any position of smug superiority over the unbeliever, rather it should allow him to have some humility when regarding the act of faith, seeing that it is a complex act involving the whole person.

This is really Newman’s point; the whole man assents, not merely his mere reason or “paper logic” as he calls it, as if it were some isolated higher part of a human being. This was Newman’s point throughout his life, and what he was fighting was the idea of Reason that had established itself since the Enlightenment as the only place where truth was to be found. By the mid 19th century the application to Universal Reason as the sole means of finding the truth was held by many in the Established Church of England, in the Universities, public and social life, as well as in politics. It sought to establish things according to the secular, purely rational order, from the design of gardens to sermons on the miracles of Jesus. This universal Reason was not a personal mind, not a way of thinking; rather it was the impersonal, formalised pattern of argumentation, universally the same, infallible, autonymous demonstration. This logical reason could alone be trusted by everyone at every time and place bring forth truth, and anything else (especially religion) was simply dangerous, illogical, enthusiasm and intellectually dishonest.

Newman rejected this account of thinking, and the liberal doctrine of universal Reason. He did so as a Christian thinker and philosopher because this system denies ’super rational’ truths and the authority of God’s Word. However, the answer he gives in the Grammar is as a philosopher and psychologist, rather  than simply a Christian preacher and teacher. He maintains that there is genuine knowledge which is unattainable by simple logical reasoning, of which we can have certitude. Faith gives the ’simple peasant’ who does not know this universal reason, real knowledge and certitude. He can have faith in dogma without damaging his mind, and that this certitude is normal, healthy, reasonable and resonsible. Theology deals with genuine knowledge without coming to terms with the totalitarian liberal force of universal reason.

Newman’s argument in the Grammar can be reduced to these points:

1. People do not think in the same uniform way in anything.

2. People do not follow the same lines of demonstration in the sciences, say, to find the same conclusion.

3. There is no universal Reason that thinks in us in an impersonal way that we simply accept.

4. Individual people do not think exactly the same way about something.

5. Individual people do not reach certitude in exactly the same way in the same manner.

Newman maintains that the living person is sure of things that he cannot prove, otherwise what he is sure of can be reduce to a very few points reached by impersonal ‘paper logic’. Thinking is a subtle and highly complex operation, which varies from person to person. It will have some logical guiding lines, but then each living person will have his individual twists and turns in the process. Individuals have different outlooks, habits and peculiarities; different movements, agilities and grips on subjects; different starting points and goals. So, with subjects such as metaphysics, theology and ethics there is no justification for presuming the instrinsic probabilty of formalised demonstrations, which infallibly convince all clear-minded people of their conclusions. The totalitarian, ultramontanism of some of his fellow Catholics on the theological far-right was citicised here, just as much as the totalitarian liberal rationalists of the far-left. Both right and left present the human knower and believer as a simple vessel to be filled from outside, or a machine programmed to accept data and produce the given conclusion, whereas Newman recognised the complexity of human life and faith.

Different arguments will convince different kinds of people, depending upon the difficulties met, the degree of goodwill in enquiry, the length of time spent puzzling on the subject, upon their teachers and the influence of friends. Throughout his life Newman had been convinced that one personality effects another, and so in his academic work at Oxford he was determined to retain the tutorial system, where the student’s mind and personality was shaped and developed by the tutor, according to his lights. And in his choice of vocation as a member of the Congregation of the Oratory, as well as in his personal correspondence, he would gain a subtle influence over individuals rather than offer a blanket scheme for all comers.

So, an argument is demonstrative only for those whom it convinces of certitude, and therefore, arguments qua arguments are not demonstrative. It does not matter how clear your thinking and presentation are, if someone does not want to be convinced he will not be convinced.  For example, a member of the Conservative party may stand on your doorstep all day and explain his party’s macro-economic policy to you in clear and lucid terms, but if you are a retired miner living in Scargill Close in Barnsley, it is unlikely that you are going to vote for the Tory candidate even after such a clear and well-intentioned presentation.

It is man’s first principle which commands all his thinking, his starting point which is created through a miriad of different influences. This will shape his mind and outlook, and will decide how he will estimate the probability or the probative force of a particualr argument.

But what about God?

Newman was not interested in the 18th and 19th century arguments for the existence of God; the rationalism of Leibniz, Locke, Paley, etc. He was suspicious of any kind of a priori metaphysics or system of philosophy foisted onto experience. It was not that he was unfavourable to metaphysical systems, he just disliked committing himself any ‘ready made’ self, which removed his mind, personality and temperament. Factory line philosophy and theology were of no use him as his work was as an apologist, who had to address the problems and questions of various individuals on the ground, not by getting them to submit to a certain system before he could engage with them. There was no set system, but each individual was treated precisely as an individual, and in this Newman shows us his Oratorian charism; again not offering a blanket solution, or a bold programme, but rather dealing case by case in the unique manner presented to him.

This way of proceeding can be seen in Newman’s own intellectual formation. Whereas most of his clerical counterparts had been formed in the system of Pontifical universities and seminaries, where a careful foundation of philosophy was laid before theology was undertaken in the same system, Newman was a product of the British University system, where a broad liberal education was offered as the foundation, and theology developed out of this. This lead to a clash of understandings as well as of personalities throughout Newman’s life, but it has its counterpart in more recent theological debate between those formed in the Schools and those in the academies of the liberal arts (e.g. the contrasting theological styles of Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, or for that matter John Paul II and Benedict XVI).

For Newman, metaphysics is best grounded in personal experience if it is to be convincing. The simple process of dialectics may well be exciting and stimulating, but it will not bring someone to the living God. Indeed, it may well turn them off. And so his way is not one of metaphysical argumentation of the rationalist philosopher, but neither is it a substitute for rational metaphysics. Rather, it is to impress on the person who believes in God but does not know how to think about God, who is utterly transcendent and inescapably real. It is not an argument to prove the existence of “what everyone calls God” (which is St Thomas’ project), nor a way to discover God, but to allow a vivid personal realisation of the living God in whom the Christian already believes. He examines the reasons which precede metaphysical argumentation and study, which bring us to assent; “what the mind does [when it assents], what it contemplates, when it makes an act of faith” (p.99).

To know God is to know God personally, and we cannot discover and know a person by metaphysical speculation and reasoning. We first discover God as a person and then we are in a position to appraoch the metaphysical problems of Infinite Being, and such like. So, as we know God in this personal way the proper object of our thinking and knowing is always real and existent. God is neither an abstract proposition, nor a mere cohesion of reason, nor an idea viewed solely in the mind. Again, this is because reasoning is not solely the rationcination of deductive logic, but the complex activity of the whole person. People think concretely (about things), from one thing to another thing, and then abstractly with universal propositions.

Influence comes from all sorts of impressions made upon us, as well as the laws of logic, and these influences have a profound effect on our thinking imbuing us with moral character, habitual conduct, a way of living, and so forming our ways of thinking. There can be a blinding effect of pleasure of the senses and imagination  through various passionate influences, neuroses, ideologies and bias, and these too will shape the mind and the way in which we think. As we are not pure minds these forces should not be taken too importantly, as they will find their own place in the greater scheme of our thinking if their presence is accepted, noted and controlled. Still, they help make us what we are. “Everyone who reasons is his own centre; and no expedient of attaining a commom measure of mins can reverse that truth.” (p.345)

Newman realised that the search for God, for truth in philosophy and for the act of thinking about God, is part of an individual’s concrete existence, the living setting for his own life. And as such it is not just a theoretical question for academic metaphysics and pure logic, instead it is integrally liked with man’s struggle for happines, with his struggle to live as perfectly as possible according to his moral nature as found in his conscience.

God is not an abstraction, not a philosophical First Principle, and so metaphysics gives no knowledge of the living God, only knowledge of what can be said in a secondary fashion about “what everyone calls God”. This is in contrast with the living, personal God written of in sacred Scripture, who created man in his own image, and who has providential care for each person. This is the primary subject of faith, and to which the Christian gives the assent of faith; the prior dogma, of which secondary developing doctrine will come to be formualted.

It is certain assent that is given to the living God through the complexities of human experience in implicit reasoning. This implicit reasoning differs from explicit reasoning, which is formal, verbal and limited. Indeed this explicit form gives a way of argumentation with others through a series of symbols and algebraic equations, and avoids the mind running riot. It produces necessary logical formulae, but this ratiocination does not produce any proof for the living God, but is restricted by the modes of necessary inference demanded by Reason. Implicit reason, on the other hand, moves by informal logic, and is more delicate and elastic than verbal or mathematical argumentation;

“…the processes of reasoning which legitimately lead to assent, to action, to certitude, are in fact too multiform, subtle, omnigenous, too implicit, to allow of being measured by rule… they are after all personal, - verbal argumentation being useful only in subordination to a higher logic.”

So, reasoning is not a simple process, series or act of formal deduction from given premises, but is subtle and complex. But because it is implicit this does not make it irrational, rather it is simply in the naure of things to be like that. There are so many little hints and signs which influence and shape our starting position, our reasoning and its outcome.  In themselves they may not amount to much, or may not be conclusive, but when placed together the collective weight of these influences allow to us say with certainty, “I believe…”.

 

 

Fr Christopher Hilton

(This Article was first given as a paper to the North West Catholic Writers Guild, September 2009.)