by Edward Short
William always bristled whenever Newman told him that he would eventually see the unsustainability of doubt. As fond as he was of Newman, William felt no affinity whatever with his friend’s Catholic certitude. “No one, I think, who has ever enjoyed the privilege of affectionate intercourse with you can fail to experience acute pain on coming to feel that he has become practically severed from you,” he told Newman, “in whatever way the severance has arisen – Rogers has always said that it was, to him, ‘like losing a limb’ and I know of no expression which has so accurately described my own feeling.” This admission was prompted by Newman telling William, after he had received his son Hurrell (Newman’s grandson) into the Church: “As to yourself, I do not believe, and never will believe, that in the bottom of your mind you really hold what you think you hold, or that you master your own thought. I think that some day or other you will allow the truth of what I say.”67 In a long letter William tried to disabuse his friend of this sanguine assessment. “It may indeed be as you tell me that I ‘do not really hold what I seem to hold’ and ‘do not master my own views’ –. But to me it seems as if, different as are many of my opinions … from those you would teach me, there is, underlying all such differences, and irrespective of them or undercutting them, a source of disagreement between us indefinitely stronger than them, seated in the very principle of ‘thinking’ and of ‘concluding’ and in the very nature of ‘thoughts’ and of conclusions – and pervading the laws, which govern the various states of mind included in the various senses of the term ‘belief,’ and which fix the duties attached to them.” None of this would have come as a surprise to Newman: he already knew the extent of William’s sprawling skepticism; but he must have been surprised to hear William’s account of its genesis. “My convictions so to call them,” he declared, “are the growth of a life. I seem to hold them, or to be held by them, very completely, and to see my way through them, as clearly as I can see my way through anything – they first were reared I am confident under the mental training I received from my Brother Hurrell and I am persuaded they have since been legitimately developed.” That William credited Hurrell with inculcating this skeptical temper in his brother must have struck Newman as a cruel irony; Hurrell, after all, had been so instrumental in turning Newman to Rome. Indeed, William was convinced that if Hurrell had lived, he would have come round to his own radically skeptical views. For William, Hurrell’s “mind was, as he himself felt, in many respects in a state of transition, and it is at least possible that he would have arrived at the same conclusions as those at which I have arrived, and there are many reasons which incline me to think he would have done so. But the consciousness that this surmise may be an error, does not at all shake my confidence that the principles of thought by which I am guided are not merely those which the experience of life has fully verified to me, but are also those which he was the first to develop in my mind.”68
Anthony would not have agreed. “My brother was young, gifted, brilliant, and enthusiastic. No man is ever good for much who has not been carried off his feet by enthusiasm between twenty and thirty; but it needs to be bridled and bitted, and my brother did not live to be taught the difference between fact and speculation. Taught it he would have been, if time had been allowed him. No one ever recognized facts more loyally than he when once he saw them. This I am sure of, that when the intricacies of the situation pressed upon him, when it became clear to him that if his conception of the Church, and of its rights and position, was true at all, it was not true of the Church of England, in which he was born, and that he must renounce his theory as visionary or join another communion, he would not have ‘minimised’ the Roman doctrines that they might be more easy for him to swallow, or have explained away propositions till they meant anything or nothing. Whether he would have swallowed them or not I cannot say; I was not eighteen when he died, and I do not so much as form an opinion about it; but his course, whatever it was, would have been direct and straightforward; he was a man far more than a theologian; and if he had gone, he would have gone with his whole heart and conscience, unassisted by subtleties and nice distinctions … .” Anthony rarely allowed sincerity to spoil the fun of his paradoxical irreverence but here he spoke from the heart with a brother’s affection of a brother’s sincerity.69
Anthony may have been convinced that Hurrell “had the contempt of an intellectual aristocrat for private judgement,” but William saw him as the progenitor of his own doctrinaire doubt.70 “I have no skill of saying much in few words,” Newman’s prolix friend admitted, “and the profusion of words into which I run my thoughts tends oftener to mystify than to explain. But I will at least endeavour to convey to you as distinctly as I can that rule or principle of thought which … seems to hold my mind in the most complete antagonism to Catholicism,” and with that William shared with his friend his manifesto of universal doubt:
More strongly than I believe anything else I believe this. That on no subject whatever, – distinctly not in the region of the ordinary facts with which our daily experience is conversant – distinctly not in the domain of history or politics, and yet again a fortiori, not in that of Theology, is my mind, (or as far as I can tell the mind of any human being,) capable of arriving at an absolutely certain conclusion. That though of course some conclusions are far more certain than others, there is an element of uncertainty in all. That though any probability however faint, may in its place make it a duty to act as if the conclusion to which it points were absolutely certain, yet that even the highest attainable probability does not justify the mind in discarding the residuum of doubt; and that the attempt (by any other means than a reiterated and (if so be) improved examination of all the bases of the whole probability) to enhance or intensify the sense of the preponderance of the probabilities in either scale, is distinctly an immoral use of faculties. And then, whereas on concluding that it is one’s duty to act on such and such a degree of probability, (whether great or small) the mind is very strongly drawn and inclined, to overrate the degree of probability in reference to which we proceed to act, this inclination is a temptation to be resisted, not an intimation to be relied on.71
Wishing, perhaps, to appear even-handed, William acknowledged that there might be some valuable aspects of faith. “I do not overlook the view that ‘Spiritual insight is granted as the reward of Faith,’” though even here he was dubious. “I feel it to be one in the highest degree improbable, if the merit of the Faith be measured as Theologians seem to measure it, directly, as the positiveness of the Belief and inversely as the strength of the evidence. Thus measured, ‘Faith’ seems to be but another word for ‘prejudice’ – i.e as the formation of a judgement irrespective of, or out of proportion to the evidence on which it rests – and I regard it as … an immoral use of the faculties – While on the other hand the only pattern of Faith which I can conceive to be meritorious, is the temper which, while it realises as carefully as possible the exact degree of doubtfulness which attaches to its conclusions, acts nevertheless confidently on the best and wisest conclusions it can form – in confidence that the best and wisest use of every faculty we possess must be that use which will be most pleasing to Him by whom those faculties, whether perfect or imperfect, have been given us ‘to be exercised therewith’.” And here he claimed that it was precisely this enlightened skepticism that made the Victorians’ various mechanical accomplishments possible. “It is but of late years that this temper has been thoroughly appreciated in the pursuit of scientific truth and in the cultivation of the mechanical arts,” though, for William, this “thorough appreciation” was “confined to the higher class of minds …” Nevertheless, “if year by year, Physical science and the mechanical arts have … made progress with increasing rapidity … it is only by virtue of the wider and freer scope of action which this principle has conquered for itself in those districts of thought. The principle is making some progress even in Politics. By and Bye I hope it will master men’s minds in the province of Religion.�
�� This, in sum, was William’s metaphysic of skepticism: “Our ‘doubts’ in fact, appear to me as sacred, and I think deserve to be cherished as sacredly as our beliefs; and our ‘will’ has no function in reference to the formation or maintenance of our ‘Belief’, but that of insisting that all probabilities on either side shall be honestly regarded, and weighed, and borne in mind.”72
Newman’s response was as fair-minded as it was candid. “Your letter of this morning has been a very great comfort to me. The greatest evils in the intercourse of friends is ignorance about each other’s feelings.” That having been said, Newman assured his skeptical friend that “The line you draw out in your letter is familiar to me … not that you do not bring it out more clearly than I perhaps have done to myself … Still, I have long meditated on its subject. I think it a fallacy, but I don’t think it easy to show it to be so. It is one of various points which I have steadily set before me, as requiring an answer, and an answer from me … I am saying all of this to show how little I can mean to be disrespectful to your view on the subject, and how little I should dream of putting it down in a few magisterial words. At the same time I do with all my heart, and what is more to the purpose, with all my reason think it a sophism; but you will perfectly understand that a sophism may require an effort of almost genius to overset … In truth, I think there is a far deeper philosophy on the subject than yours, if I could develop it.”73 After encouraging him to “work out this question … which you more than anybody else” are “competent to examine fully,” Froude asked him “whether when you say that you feel the view which I endeavored to express is a sophism, you mean that it is so in reference to the pursuit of truth generally or only in reference to the pursuit of Religious truth.”74
Here was one of the main questions that Newman would set himself to answer in Aid to a Grammar of Assent, and in responding to William’s letter, he laid out some of the lines of argument that he would pursue in depth in that extraordinary book. First, Newman assured his friend that “I do not mean that there is any thing sophistical in the principles on which non-religious truth is pursued at present, but that theologians … all affirm that Christianity is proved by the same rigorous scientific processes by which it is proved that we have an Indian Empire or that the earth goes round the sun.” Second, “the scientific proof of Christianity is not the popular, practical, personal evidence on which a given individual believes in it …” And, for Newman, “there is a popular and personal way of arriving at certainty in Christianity as logical as that which is arrived at by scientific methods in subjects non-religious …” Then, too, Newman doubtless startled his scientific friend when he observed that, “when all scientific proof, even for the existence of India, is examined microscopically, there will be found hiatuses in the logical sequence, so considerable, as to lead to the question, ‘Are there no broad first principles of knowledge which will protect us from scepticism as to all reasoning on things external to us, both scientific and popular?’”75 If William imagined that skepticism would somehow spare his own cherished first principles, he was mistaken.
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent is a demanding book. When Mrs. Froude confessed that she was “reading the Grammar through again, (for the 6th or 7th time) by way of light and airy reading,” Newman thanked her for “the compliment you pay my crabbed assent.”76 To another old friend, Maria Giberne, he wrote in February 1870, a month before the Grammar was published: “I have now done my last work. I use the word ‘work’ in its true sense – for some books are not work, but this book has been a real hard work. I have done five constructive works in my life, and this is the hardest, though all have been hard – my Prophetical Office, which has come to pieces – my Essay on Justification, which stands pretty well – and three Catholic – Development of doctrine – University Education, and the last which I have called an Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent.”77 To James Hope-Scott, the Catholic lawyer and munificent philanthropist whose own faith Newman found so exemplary, he described the writing of the book as “like tunneling through a mountain— I have begun it, and it is almost too much for my strength … Perhaps the tunnel will break in, when I get fairly into my work. When I have done it, if I am to do it, and done my letters of past years, then I shall say, Nunc dimittis.”78 Yet readers should not be put off by the air of difficulty that has always surrounded the book. Yes, it is demanding but it is also immensely rewarding. If one approaches it as a record of Newman’s attempts to share with the Froudes—and by extension, all readers, Christian and non-Christian—his sense of vocation, it becomes a good deal more accessible. Indeed, in discussing the role of personal testimony in the apprehension of truth, Newman addresses each reader cor ad cor:
In religious inquiry each of us can speak only for himself, and for himself he has a right to speak. His own experiences are enough for himself, but he cannot speak for others: he cannot lay down the law; he can only bring his own experiences to the common stock of psychological facts. He knows what has satisfied and satisfies himself; if it satisfies him, it is likely to satisfy others; if, as he believes and is sure, it is true, it will approve itself to others also, for there is but one truth. And doubtless he does find in fact, that, allowing for the difference of minds and of modes of speech, what convinces him, does convince others also. There will be very many exceptions, but these will admit of explanation. Great numbers of men refuse to inquire at all; they put the subject of religion aside altogether; others are not serious enough to care about questions of truth and duty and to entertain them; and to numbers, from their temper of mind, or the absence of doubt, or a dormant intellect, it does not occur to inquire why or what they believe; many, though they tried, would not be able to do so in any satisfactory way. This being the case, it causes no uneasiness to any one who honestly attempts to set down his own view of the Evidences of Religion, that at first sight he seems to be but one among many who are all in opposition to each other. But, however that may be, he brings together his reasons, and relies on them, because they are his own, and this is his primary evidence; and he has a second ground of evidence, in the testimony of those who agree with him. But his best evidence is the former, which is derived from his own thoughts; and it is that which the world has a right to demand of him; and therefore his true sobriety and modesty consists, not in claiming for his conclusions an acceptance or a scientific approval which is not to be found anywhere, but in stating what are personally his own grounds for his belief in Natural and Revealed Religion,—grounds which he holds to be so sufficient, that he thinks that others do hold them implicitly or in substance, or would hold them, if they inquired fairly, or will hold if they listen to him, or do not hold from impediments, invincible or not as it may be, into which he has no call to inquire.79
This echoes something Newman had told Catherine Holdsworth thirty years before: “The only safety many people find against Catholic truth is not inquiring, but that cannot last in the 19th century.”80
Despite the refreshing personal testimony that Newman brings to his book, he never confuses personal testimony with subjectivism. Indeed, as the great Thomist Etienne Gilson pointed out, Newman gives his readers no warrant to “present the Grammar of Assent as exalting the inner faith of the believer at the expense of the objective truth of dogma,” which, for Gilson, would be “about the worst misrepresentation of Newman’s thought that it is possible to imagine.”81 On the contrary, “far from doing away with systematic theology, the doctrine of Newman presupposes its necessity. His own problem is not to pursue the definition, organization, and systemization of theological truth, but … to study the birth, the life … of real assent in the minds of concrete and existing men.”82
The birth of that assent, for Newman, is made possible by conscience, about which he writes with moving eloquence. “Half the world would be puzzled to know what was meant by the moral sense; but every one knows what is meant by a good or bad conscience. Conscience is ever forcing on us by threats and by promises t
hat we must follow the right and avoid the wrong; so far it is one and the same in the mind of every one, whatever be its particular errors in particular minds as to the acts which it orders to be done or to be avoided …” For Newman, “conscience … is concerned with persons primarily, and with actions mainly as viewed in their doers, or rather with self alone and one’s own actions, and with others only indirectly and as if in association with self.” Nevertheless, it “does not repose on itself, but vaguely reaches forward to something beyond self, and dimly discerns a sanction higher than self for its decisions, as is evidenced in that keen sense of obligation and responsibility which informs them. And hence it is that we are accustomed to speak of conscience as a voice … and moreover a voice … imperative and constraining, like no other dictate in the whole of our experience.”83
Newman begins with conscience because, as he says, “what I am directly aiming at, is to explain how we gain an image of God and give a real assent to the proposition that He exists. And next, in order to do this, of course I must start from some first principle;—and that first principle, which I assume and shall not attempt to prove, is … that we have by nature a conscience.” And then he demonstrates how “Conscience has an intimate bearing on our affections and emotions, leading us to reverence and awe, hope and fear, especially fear … No fear is felt by any one who recognizes that his conduct has not been beautiful, though he may be mortified at himself, if perhaps he has thereby forfeited some advantage; but, if he has been betrayed into any kind of immorality, he has a lively sense of responsibility and guilt, though the act be no offence against society,—of distress and apprehension, even though it may be of present service to him,—of compunction and regret, though in itself it be most pleasurable,—of confusion of face, though it may have no witnesses. These various perturbations of mind which are characteristic of a bad conscience, and may be very considerable,—self-reproach, poignant shame, haunting remorse, chill dismay at the prospect of the future,—and their contraries, when the conscience is good, as real though less forcible, self-approval, inward peace, lightness of heart, and the like,—these emotions constitute a specific difference between conscience and our other intellectual senses,—common sense, good sense, sense of expedience, taste, sense of honour, and the like …”84 Then, again, as Newman shows, conscience “always involves the recognition of a living object, towards which it is directed … If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.” To make this matter of personal responsibility more vivid still, Newman connects it to personal terms to which most of us can readily relate. “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: we are not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we feel shame before a horse or a dog; we have no remorse or compunction on breaking mere human law: yet, so it is, conscience excites all these painful emotions, confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation; and on the other hand it sheds upon us a deep peace, a sense of security, a resignation, and a hope, which there is no sensible, no earthly object to elicit.”85