by Edward Short
Sir Anthony Kenny in his Philosophy in the Modern World (2007) responds to this passage by remarking, “It is difficult for members of a post-Freudian generation to read this passage without acute discomfort … The feelings that [Newman] describes may indeed be appropriate only if there is a Father in heaven. But no feelings can guarantee their own appropriateness in the absence of reason.”86 Kenny’s objection is useful because it exhibits the very pert, unfeeling, arid intellectualism against which so much of the Grammar is written. To return to Newman after Kenny’s commentary is to leave the fashionable shadows for an ancient sunlight.
“The wicked flees, when no one pursueth;” then why does he flee? whence his terror? Who is it that he sees in solitude, in darkness, in the hidden chambers of his heart? If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which his perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the phenomena of Conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive, and is the creative principle of religion, as the Moral Sense is the principle of ethics.87
Moreover, for Newman, Protestantism is the “religion of civilization” precisely because it rejects conscience, which it sees as primitive and barbaric, and “since this civilization itself is not a development of man’s whole nature, but mainly of the intellect, recognizing indeed the moral sense, but ignoring the conscience, no wonder that the religion in which it issues has no sympathy either with the hopes and fears of the awakened soul, or with those frightful presentiments which are expressed in the worship and traditions of the heathen.”88 Newman makes a similar point in one of his Oxford Sermons, where he says of St. Paul, “even in the case of the heathen, the Apostle was anxious to pay due respect to the truths which they already admitted, and to show that the Gospel was rather the purification, explanation, development, and completion of those scattered verities of Paganism than their abrogation.”89 Looking from conscience to the world, Newman saw another confirmation of the existence of God, though one fraught with an inquisitorial mystery. “What strikes the mind so forcibly and so painfully is His absence (if I may so speak) from His own world. It is a silence that speaks. It is as if others had got possession of His work. Why does not He, our Maker and Ruler, give us some immediate knowledge of Himself? Why does He not write His Moral Nature in large letters upon the face of history, and bring the blind, tumultuous rush of its events into a celestial, hierarchical order? Why does He not grant us in the structure of society at least so much of a revelation of Himself as the religions of the heathen attempt to supply? Why from the beginning of time has no one uniform steady light guided all families of the earth, and all individual men, how to please Him? Why is it possible without absurdity to deny His will, His attributes, His existence? Why does He not walk with us one by one, as He is said to have walked with His chosen men of old time? We both see and know each other; why, if we cannot have the sight of Him, have we not at least the knowledge? On the contrary, He is specially ‘a Hidden God;’ and with our best efforts we can only glean from the surface of the world some faint and fragmentary views of Him. I see only a choice of alternatives in explanation of so critical a fact:—either there is no Creator, or He has disowned His creatures. Are then the dim shadows of His Presence in the affairs of men but a fancy of our own, or, on the other hand, has He hid His face and the light of His countenance, because we have in some special way dishonoured Him? My true informant, my burdened conscience, gives me at once the true answer to each of these antagonist questions:—it pronounces without any misgiving that God exists:—and it pronounces quite as surely that I am alienated from Him; that ‘His hand is not shortened, but that our iniquities have divided between us and our God.’ Thus it solves the world’s mystery, and sees in that mystery only a confirmation of its own original teaching.”90
Such teaching, however true, is not complete. “Natural Religion is based upon the sense of sin; it recognizes the disease, but it cannot find, it does but look out for the remedy. That remedy, both for guilt and for moral impotence, is found in the central doctrine of Revelation, the Mediation of Christ.” Although it comes at the very end of the book, Newman’s account of the rise of Christianity is masterly. “Thus it is that Christianity is the fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham, and of the Mosaic revelations; this is how it has been able from the first to occupy the world and gain a hold on every class of human society to which its preachers reached; this is why the Roman power and the multitude of religions which it embraced could not stand against it; this is the secret of its sustained energy, and its never-flagging martyrdoms; this is how at present it is so mysteriously potent, in spite of the new and fearful adversaries which beset its path.”91 Here was a radiant rebuttal of the claims of Gibbon, though no mention of it will be found in the commentary on Gibbon of John Pocock, J. W. Burrow or Patricia Craddock. For Newman, the rise of Christianity was not a tale of fanaticism or credulity or even virtue.92 Rather, its power rose from that “gift of staunching and healing the one deep wound of human nature, which avails more for its success than a full encyclopedia of scientific knowledge and a whole library of controversy, and therefore it must last while human nature lasts. It is a living truth which never can grow old.”93 Here Newman directly refuted the charge, brought by so many of his agnostic and Protestant critics, that in embracing Roman Catholicism he was embracing the superannuated or the reactionary. For Newman, there was nothing fusty about the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. “Some persons speak of it as if it were a thing of history, with only indirect bearings upon modern times. I cannot allow that it is a mere historical religion. Certainly it has its foundations in past and glorious memories, but its power is in the present. It is no dreary matter of antiquarianism; we do not contemplate it in conclusions drawn from dumb documents and dead events, but by faith exercised in ever-living objects, and by the appropriation and use of ever-recurring gifts.”94 And, here, Newman substantiated his point by citing the example of Holy Mass, “which He who once died for us upon the Cross, brings back and perpetuates, by His literal presence in it, that one and the same sacrifice which cannot be repeated. Next, there is the actual entrance of Himself, soul and body, and divinity, into the soul and body of every worshipper who comes to Him for the gift, a privilege more intimate than if we lived with Him during His long-past sojourn upon earth. And then, moreover, there is His personal abidance in our churches, raising earthly service into a foretaste of heaven. Such is the profession of Christianity, and, I repeat, its very divination of our needs is in itself a proof that it is really the supply of them.”95
The Grammar of Assent was, on the whole, well received. Newman was particularly pleased with a review that the leading Tractarian writer James Mozley wrote for the Quarterly Review, in which he treated Newman’s Essay “as what it really and in substance is, a defence, and powerful defence, of a common Christianity, which has filled up a vacant place in Christian apologetics …”96 Others took issue with the book, including F. D. Maurice writing in the Contemporary Review and the high court judge and journalist James Fitzjames Stephen writing in Fraser’s Magazine. Maurice used his review to tout his own anti-theological Christianity: “The revelation of Christ brings to me evidence that it was not the work of priests and doctors of the law, seeing that priests and doctors were the great enemies of it … Priests and doctors speak of a God whose purpose is to destroy the great majority of His creatures; Christ reveals to us a God of salvation; His Apostles testify of a day when all shall be gathered up in Him. Dr. Newman speaks of ‘Christianity’ doing this and that. If Christianity is not the revelation of Christ the Son of God, I cannot see what it has done but mischief.”97 Stephen, who turned to journalism to take his mind off what he regarded as the “buffoonery” of circuit life, saw Newman’s text as little more than an endorsement of exploded Popery.98 “When the Church was in the plenitude of its power,” he tol
d his readers, it taught that “the Supreme God was … a Being who looked approvingly on an auto-da-fé, who could be bribed to remit the penalties of sin by masses purchased with money, who, though all-wise and all-good, could be turned aside from His purpose by entreaties or remonstrances of the saints. The same notion is still evidently held by Father Newman …” Stephen’s response to one passage in the book is worth quoting at length, especially since William Froude thought so highly of him (Stephen was one of those whom he regarded as a “high cast mind”). The passage from Newman is the one where he illustrates what he means by the “indefectability” of certitude.
Let us suppose we are told on an unimpeachable authority, that a man whom we saw die is now alive again and at his work, as it was his wont to be; let us suppose we actually see him and converse with him; what will become of our certitude of his death? I do not think we should give it up; how could we, when we actually saw him die? At first, indeed, we should be thrown into an astonishment and confusion so great, that the world would seem to reel round us, and we should be ready to give up the use of our senses and of our memory, of our reflective powers, and of our reason, and even to deny our power of thinking, and our existence itself. Such confidence have we in the doctrine that when life goes it never returns. Nor would our bewilderment be less, when the first blow was over; but our reason would rally, and with our reason our certitude would come back to us. Whatever came of it, we should never cease to know and to confess to ourselves both of the contrary facts, that we saw him die, and that after dying we saw him alive again. The overpowering strangeness of our experience would have no power to shake our certitude in the facts which created it.99
In response, Stephen gave witty vent to his impatience with the miraculous: “No better illustration could have been given of the difference between what is called in commendation ‘a believing mind,’ and a mind trained to careful and precise observation. In such a case as Father Newman supposes, a jury of modern physicians would indisputably conclude that the man had never been really dead, that the symptoms had been mistaken, and the phenomena of catalepsy had been confounded with the phenomena of death. If catalepsy was impossible, if the man had appeared, for instance, to lose his head on the scaffold, they would assume that there had been a substitution of persons, or that the observers had been taken in by some skilful optical trick. Father Newman, may, perhaps, go further and suppose that they had themselves seen the man tied to a gun and blown to pieces beyond possibility of deception. But a man of science would reply that such a case could not occur. That men once dead do not return to life again has been revealed by an experience too uniform to allow its opposite to be entertained even as a hypothesis.”100 This is wonderfully funny but it also proves Newman’s point that there is no happy medium between scepticism and Catholicism.
Etienne Gilson put the author of the Grammar in useful perspective: “Newman did not write as a disciple of the scholastic masters whose works illustrated the thirteenth century; he wrote in the free style of a twelfth-century master, full of classical erudition and fond of good language, but, at the same time, a man of his own epoch … When Newman entered the Catholic Church, he brought with him a more purely patristic intellectual formation than would have been the case if, born in the Church, he had received in it his early theological formation. The Church alone has authority to say what place John Henry Cardinal Newman will later occupy in the memory of the faithful, but it is not too early to say that, owing to him, the great theological style of the Fathers has been worthily revived in the nineteenth century.”101
In the several passages quoted here from the Grammar of Assent, readers can see the extraordinary perspicuity with which Newman takes up the themes of Natural Religion and Revealed Religion. But he also stresses again and again that, by their very nature, there can be no scientific proof of the truth of these matters. “In thus speaking of Natural Religion as in one sense a matter of private judgment, and that with a view of proceeding from it to the proof of Christianity, I seem to give up the intention of demonstrating either. Certainly I do; not that I deny that demonstration is possible. Truth certainly, as such, rests upon grounds intrinsically and objectively and abstractedly demonstrative, but it does not follow from this that the arguments producible in its favour are unanswerable and irresistible. These latter epithets are relative, and bear upon matters of fact; arguments in themselves ought to do, what perhaps in the particular case they cannot do. The fact of revelation is in itself demonstrably true, but it is not therefore true irresistibly; else, how comes it to be resisted? There is a vast distance between what it is in itself, and what it is to us. Light is a quality of matter, as truth is of Christianity; but light is not recognized by the blind, and there are those who do not recognize truth, from the fault, not of truth, but of themselves. I cannot convert men, when I ask for assumptions which they refuse to grant to me; and without assumptions no one can prove anything about anything.” Indeed, in this respect, as Frederick Copleston remarked in his history of philosophy, “unbelief or scepticism is in the same boat as faith,” and to illustrate his point he quoted from Newman’s University Sermons: “Unbelief … considers itself especially rational, or critical of evidence; but it criticizes the evidence of Religion, only because it does not like it, and really goes upon presumptions and prejudices as much as Faith does, only presumptions of an opposite nature … It considers a religious system so improbable, that it will not listen to the evidence of it; or, if it listens, it employs itself in doing what a believer could do, if he chose, quite as well, what he is quite as well aware can be done; viz., in showing that the evidence might be more complete and unexceptionable than it is.” For Copleston, “Sceptics do not really decide according to the evidence; for they make up their minds first and then admit or reject evidence according to their initial assumption.”102
To say that one cannot mount irresistible arguments for the existence of God is not to say that one cannot know certitude, which Newman defines as “the perception of a truth with the perception that it is a truth.” And here he was directly addressing the vexed matter with which he debated William Froude for so many years. “We may indeed say, if we please, that a man ought not to have so supreme a conviction in a given case, or in any case whatever; and that he is therefore wrong in treating opinions which he does not himself hold, with this even involuntary contempt;—certainly, we have a right to say so, if we will; but if, in matter of fact, a man has such a conviction, if he is sure that Ireland is to the West of England, or that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ, nothing is left to him, if he would be consistent, but to carry his conviction out into this magisterial intolerance of any contrary assertion; and if he were in his own mind tolerant, I do not say patient (for patience and gentleness are moral duties, but I mean intellectually tolerant), of objections as objections, he would virtually be giving countenance to the views which those objections represented. I say 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 inquire into his speculations. And if, in a matter in which my temporal interests were concerned, he attempted to reconcile me to fraudulent acts by what he called philosophical views, I should say to him, ‘Retro Satana,’ and that, not from any suspicion of his ability to reverse immutable principles, but from a consciousness of my own moral changeableness, and a fear, on that account, that I might not be intellectually true to the truth. This, then, from the nature of the case, is a main characteristic of certitude in any matter, to be confident indeed that that certit
ude will last, but to be confident of this also, that, if it did fail, nevertheless, the thing itself, whatever it is, of which we are certain, will remain just as it is, true and irreversible.”103