Newmans Grammar of Assent: An Introduction

January 22, 2008 Copywrite C 2004 by Richard Geraghty

Richard P. Geraghty, Ph.D. Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) St. Joseph House of Studies 5821 Old Leeds Road Birmingham, AL 3521 Home Address: 1601 Trailer Lane, Lot 126 Birmingham, AL 35210 (205) 957-2607 drgeraghty@yahoo.com

Table of Contents

Forward Chapter One: The Infidelity of the Future Chapter Two: Assent and Inference, Two Basic Terms of the Argument Chapter Three: Apprehension, the Third Term Chapter Four: Apprehension of Propositions Chapter Five: Notional and Real Assent Chapter Six: Real Assent Contrasted With Inference Chapter Seven: Assent and Apprehension in Religious Matters Chapter Eight: Assent Considered As Unconditional Chapter Nine: Certitude Chapter Ten: Formal, Informal and Natural Inference Chapter Eleven: The Illative Sense Chapter Twelve: Assent and Inference in Religious Matters Chapter Thirteen: Truth of Revelation Afterward Appendix: Samoa Bibliography

5 11 22 38 46 58 75 86 103 117 128 148 161 171 182 190 195

Forward
The reason why I have written this book goes back to the time when I first encountered Newman or, to be more proper, John Henry Cardinal Newman, in my college years of the early fifties. I was able to meet the man because, although he had been dead for over sixty years, I lived in a Catholic world where his reputation and books were quite alive. At the time I was a young Brother preparing to be a teacher in the various schools run by a congregation of priests and brothers. Before that I had spent my high school years preparing to be a member of this congregation, having left home at the age of thirteen to go in the Mid-West where the school was located. And before that I was a city kid raised by my Irish Catholic parents in a typical parish in Queens, N.Y. So I was and, of course, still am a pre-Vatican II Catholic because, quite obviously, that is where my roots are. A tree grows and expands as it moves through seasons and years; but it stays in one spot if it is to stay alive. Basically, my book is about roots, about the great Catholic tradition of faith and reason as portrayed in Newmans The Grammar of Assent. Many things have happened along the way from those days of my relative innocence to these days in the first decade of the Third Millennium. I wish to explain what happened. This is not a threat to write an autobiography but rather an explanation of why I have written this book. In my college years I was filled with a drive to master Newmans Grammar of Assent out of a sense that there was something in that book that I wanted to get. Now I feel that I understand this classic as much as I ever will. So I have written this book Step by Step: an Introduction to Newmans Grammar of Assent in order to portray the unique danger that Newman foresaw would confront the Church in the modern world and the advice he offered to future generations for living in the middle of this danger. I trust that, if we understand what he wrote, we will better understand who we are and what the world is around us. Not only that. Our understanding will include our hearts as well as our heads because Newman is a thinker whose motto is Heart speaks to heart. A philosopher who can explain things with the best of them in great prose is a rare phenomenon; one who has the heart to match this talent is even rarer. I first met Newman in his masterpiece The Idea of a University when a wise old priest took our freshman class through that classic chapter by chapter. The priest
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lectured us with his eyes down either on the floor or up some place on the ceiling. He would, however, allow the class to interrupt him. And so we would think up questions just to see if we could get him to look at us. It soon became apparent that beneath his peculiar ways there lay a keen mind and a patient spirit. He would handle our questions, intelligent or not, with great ease and kindness. I was impressed with the way he could give such an incisive account of what I had read the night before. Eventually I had a great desire to get that philosophical habit of mind that Newman wrote about. I wanted to become an Imperial Intellect, the master of all I surveyed, not in the sense of knowing a lot of grubby facts, which seemed to be what college was all about, but in the sense of grasping the very principles of reality, the very foundations of the universe. And it would be me that would be doing the grasping. I would not just be a passive note-taker scribbling away only to pass the test that some professor had given. I was tired of taking on faith the truth of what others had to say. I wanted to see things for myself. So I took off cross-country, so to speak, grabbing at anything I could get my hands on that was written by or was about Newman. While I took care to pay gentlemanly regard to my regular course work, I saved my energy for the grand pursuit, putting into it all the passion I usually reserved for perfecting my jump shot in basketball. In time I came upon Newmans sermons, particularly his Oxford University Sermons, a series he had preached to the students and faculty of the university. 1 There I discovered my intellectual hero was also a preacher, and a very holy and insightful one at that. I would not have described myself as a reader of sermons. Listening to them was what happened in church. And by that time I had the rather hard shell of a veteran altar boy who was used to moving among sacred things and then getting on with the business of life after he hung up his cassock and surplice in the sacristy cloak room. Deep down beneath my shell, however, was a sense of the reality of Christ in Holy Communion and of the Blessed Virgin my Mother, the special object of my prayers. I had learned this from the brothers, priests, nuns and especially my parents. But I didnt go talking about it all the time or even much of the time. Yet the devotion was there beneath the appearance of trying to be a regular guy who was also a Brother. Anyway, I started reading Newmans sermons. I was after something. I wanted to
1

John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. This work provides a good introduction to Newmans thought on the relationship of faith to reason in a theological setting. In fact Newman, fearful that he might never get the opportunity to treat this topic in a philosophical setting, entertained the idea that he might simply reissue these sermons with an expanded collection of notes. 6 6

see how a great intellect who was also a great and holy Catholic treated the topic of the relationship of reason to faith. While I wanted to figure out things for myself, I also wanted to be a good Catholic; thats what a Brother was all about. I knew from my catechism that faith is the act of believing in the teachings of the Church because they come from God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. When the Church talked, God talked; I was to listen. There was, then, a great deal of authority bearing down on me, not just from the Church, but from the more immediate ministrations of my elders, who were not bashful about showing me the right way to live. But how did all this authority, particularly that of the Church, fit into my great desire to be my own man and think for myself? I sensed that Newman had performed this feat both of being a sheep following The Shepherd and of thinking for himself. I wanted him to show me how to do this. I discovered that he lay down in no uncertain terms that, if I were to have faith, I would have to be humble and docile before the teachings of Christ, which were transmitted through the teachings of the Church. It was easy enough for me to imagine that one must be humble before Christ. He is, after all, God. It was quite another thing for me to imagine being humble before the Church, which is that place of ordinary human beings, sinners all. I tried but lacked a certain amount of enthusiasm. But Newman showed that, if an aspiring intellectual were not humble, he would turn into a sophist using big words to signify nothing. He would turn out to be a mere scoffer against The Faith, either a quiet one if he wished to maintain a gentlemanly reserve, or a noisy one if he had lost all fear of the Lord. There was the carrot and stick approach in Newmans sermons. On the one hand was the ideal of a man solidly based upon both faith and reason. On the other hand was the prospect that this combination was either gained or lost in the light of ones eternal destiny. Newman was never reticent about bringing up eternity before the eyes of his congregation, quietly but persistently urging them to remember that they had souls. When I discovered that Newman had written The Grammar of Assent, the last book of his old age summoning up his reflections on faith and reason, I was especially excited because he was proposing an argument that was strictly philosophical. By the rules of that game, he would have to supply all the evidence for his case by drawing solely upon ordinary human experience. And what was his case? It was that men and women, youths and children, whether literate or illiterate, high or low, rich or poor could

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attain by reason alone certainty in the truth of the belief that the One God existed and was Judge of the world. It was, further, that men informed with this belief in the One God could go on and attain, again by reason alone, belief with certitude in the fact that God had founded the Catholic Church to save man from his sins. Now thats what I wanted to see for myself. I already knew that I had The Faith, a common expression of the time, by being baptized into it. I was not put off by the fact that I was not consulted or given a choice; I thought of myself as quite fortunate to have had the parents and teachers I had. But I still wanted Newman to show me step by step how The Faith could come to ordinary people who just had their own reason to work with. Naturally, I already believed that the Holy Spirit was the source of grace and had poured his fullness over a particular people called Catholics and, through them, over the rest of the world. What I wanted to see was the underside of this process of how The Faith comes, the human side of the way people themselves actually think and move, the side that I could point to and say See, The Faith is most eminently reasonable because, after all, it has its foundations in actual human beings who have reason. I wanted to see the nature upon which The Faith had wrought its grace. So I pursued the argument during my junior and senior years of college for the love, not just of the chase, but for catching something as the end of it either by hook or by crook. Well, I did catch what I was looking for but without quite knowing how. There is, however, something unsatisfying about not being able to put all the pieces of an argument together so that one not only gets the point but knows how he got it. Since that day I have done a lot more living. I have seen the Catholic world I grew up in, the world before Vatican II, blow itself up and disappear. I have seen myself as a helper in this process of self-destruction. For about twenty-five years after Vatican II ended in the mid-sixties, I saw myself put aside Newman as my mentor and look for a new vision of the world, the Church and myself. I have finally come around again to where I began. I began impressed with Newmans message that, for a Catholic to be faithful to his heritage of faith and reason, he must maintain a healthy sense of his own sins. Thus when he looks out upon the world he will see it as it always was and always will bea battle field where the City of God and the City of Man are locked in combat. To forget about sin is to forget about the war. To forget about the war is to become a lotuseater filled with dreams about the future of the Church that have no roots in reality. This is this stark vision of war from which I and a great many others of my generation took a very long vacation. Somehow we got the idea that our generation would blaze a new trail
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into the future which would open us out to the modern world. We would be more positive, more optimistic than our forebears had been about the world. What an illusion that was! When I started reading my old mentor again, I ran across a little known sermon of his on The Infidelity of the Future 2 . There I read how he predicted in 1873 that an atmosphere of open unbelief would envelop the modern world and isolate the Church as she had never been isolated before in her long history. I finally had the eyes to see that he was absolutely right. We are already in that age. Equipped with this experience, I have resolved once again to tackle the argument of The Grammar of Assent or, to use its full title, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. 3 My focus is still the same as it was; namely, what does a man of faith and reason look like. But it is more intense now because I know what a man of faith and reason doesnt look like. It doesnt look like the vision which I and my generation chased for so many years. My book is an introduction written primarily for those who have not read Newmans classic. That his classic requires an introduction is obvious to anyone who has attempted to read it. Newman wrote no introduction but started his book by plunging the readers into what they must have considered the middle of an argument about which they knew neither where it had come from nor where it was going. That makes for great confusion. The situation has not changed with the passing of time. Thus the reader today could use an introduction to the argument. I have tried to fill that need. I have written for beginners in such a way that they will be inspired to read the classic for themselves. I have already been trying to do that as a teacher in the classroom. Now that I am going public, so to speak, I have thought it prudent to avail myself of the help provided by Father Kerr. In the introduction to his critical edition of

The Grammar of Assent

he has given an excellent summary of the argument which

follows as accurately as possible the text and nothing but the text. The trouble with such a summary, however, is that one cannot understand it very well until one has already read the book. His concise summary is not for beginners. But it has been a great help to me in focusing my analysis of the argument.
2

John Henry Newman, Reason For Faith, Source Books, Box 794, Trabuco Canyon, CA 92678, p. 118. Originally published in 1957 as The Catholic Sermons of Cardinal Newman.

John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. The references will be to the Notre Dame edition. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Edited by I.T. Kerr, Oxford University Press, 9 9

For the readers who have already read Newmans classic I have included many footnotes in places where they might be curious about my analysis of the text compared to theirs. However, readers may also follow the argument in the main text without worrying very much about the footnotes. In writing my analysis I have done two things in order to make The Grammar of

Assent more accessible. In the next chapter I will start with a presentation of Newmans
sermon on The Infidelity of the Future in order to show the catastrophe that he predicted would come upon the Church. Here the intention is to focus on the argument of The Grammar of Assent as the antidote offered to future generations of Catholics to help them deal with this catastrophe. This approach makes The Grammar of Assent a practical rather than a theoretical exploration of the topic of assent. It makes Newmans classic more like Aristotles practical science of ethics than the ancient thinkers speculative science of metaphysics. The other thing I have done is to fill in the Aristotelian background of the argument. Newman places many demands upon the reader, one of them being the assumption that they are familiar with Aristotle, particularly the logic and the

Nicomachean Ethics. That assumption may have been valid in his day when Aristotle
was standard fare at Oxford University. Unfortunately, it is not valid in our day. So I have taken Newman at his word when he states that Aristotle has been his secular master. 5 I have taken care to fill out the Aristotelian background of the argument as the occasion requires. I trust that, since Aristotle is the thinker who laid down ordinary human experience as the foundation of philosophy, my explanations will make sense even to those who are not familiar with that author. Nor, for that matter, do I presume that the reader has any previous knowledge of Newman. I will try to fill in what knowledge he needs as the argument unfolds. Let us begin!

2001, Editors Introduction, The Argument, pp. xo-xxii. 5 G.A,., p. 334. ...and as to the intellectual position from which I have contemplated the subject, Aristotle has been my master. 10 10

Chapter One The Infidelity of the Future

As I have already mentioned, Newman did not write an introduction to his book but plunged immediately into the argument. Obviously, he considered that, although he was giving up the advantage of introducing his readers to the argument, he would still be able to make himself clear to readers who were familiar with philosophy. The best way to see whether he was right or not in that presumption would be to read the book in order to see whether he had succeeded. Since, however, I am writing mainly for those who have not read the book, I will provide the introduction that Newman never wrote. I will, however, use his own words. The Introduction As I have noted, in 1873, three years after he published The Grammar of Assent, Newman gave a sermon entitled The Infidelity of the Future in order to inaugurate the opening of a seminary for Catholic priests. 1 Here Newman is very direct in his approach and is not at all like a philosopher breaking new ground. He has the awesome directness of a saint. Thus the sermon is a fitting introduction to a giant of the faith delineating a philosophical problem which he foresees will plague the Catholic community. The Sermon Newman begins as a man of faith. Here he will present us with a very clear image of faith depicting what the Catholic Church is. After speaking of the joy of English Catholics at the dedication of a seminary for the education of priests in their diocese, Newman notes that the task of the future priests is to hand on the truth. Newman says: This handing on of the truth from generation to generation is obviously the direct reason for the institution of seminaries for the education of the clergy. Christianity is one religious idea. Superhuman in its origin, it differs from all other religions. 2 As man differs from bird, quadruped or
1

John Henry Newman, Reason For Faith, Source Books, Box 794, Trabuco Canyon, C 92678, p. 118. Originally published in 1957 as The Catholic Sermons of Cardinal Newman.

Newman, of course, would not deny that the religion of Abraham is also supernatural in origin. In fact, the supernatural significance of Abraham will play an essential part of his argument for the supernatural mission of the Church. He would also accept the idea that other religions and philosophies have good in them. But he would also insist that it is the Church which is divinely ordained to preserve and purify these goods. 11 11

reptile, so does Christianity differ from the superstitions, heresies, and philosophies which are around us. It has a theology and an ethical system of its own. This is its indestructible idea. How are we to secure and perpetuate in this world that gift from above? 3 Newmans declaration follows from the traditional definition of faith that it is a supernatural gift of God which enables the believer to assent fully to the teachings of the Church because they come from God. Here supernatural faith is not a vague feeling or ineffable experience but is an intellectual assent to the truth of definite objects. These truths are contained in the doctrines and dogmas that constitute the teachings of the Church 4 . Further, we have a strong demarcation between the teachings of the Church and those of any other. The reason for this difference is that the Church's teaching is "superhuman in origin" -- it comes from God. Though the things of God are a mystery beyond human comprehension, they have been revealed in human language, which expresses a "theology or an ethical system". Because of their divine origin, these truths are "indestructible", meaning unchanging 5 or infallible. Here we find that forthright recognition that the significance of the Church rests on a single truth; namely that the One God has revealed Himself through the Church. If this is not true, then the teaching of the Church that all of mankind should believe in it with absolute certitude is the most dangerous, tyrannical, and arrogant imposition ever put upon the human race. The lynch pin of the whole enterprise depends on whether the God of revelation exists or not, whether the claim is true or not. The Divine Provision To the question of how this indestructible idea is to be transmitted, Cardinal Newman answers: The divine provision [for handing on the gift] is as follows. Each circle of Christians has its own priest, who is the representative of the divine idea to
3 4

Ibid., p. 118.

In reading this passage about the efficacy of the dogmas of the Church we should keep in mind that the dogmas are meant to enshrine and protect the Image of Christ within the hearts of the faithful. Later on in the Grammar of Assent (p. 359) Newman says: It was the Thought of Christ, not a corporate body or a doctrine, which inspired that zeal which the historian [Gibbon] so poorly comprehends; and it was the thought of Christ which gave a life to that promise of eternity which so inspired the Christians.
5

For Newman the idea that the truth is unchanging does not rule out the fact that it may develop over the ages. Just as a developing human being keeps his identity throughout the process, so does doctrine keep its identity while developing.

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that circle in its theological and ethical aspects. He teaches his people, he catechizes their children, bringing them one and all into that form of doctrine, which is his own. But the Church is made up of many such circles. How are we to secure that they all speak one and the same doctrine? and that, the doctrine of the Apostles? Thus: by the rule that their respective priests should in their turn all be taught from one and the same center, viz. their common Father, the Bishop of the diocese. 6 We may add that the final guarantee of faith is the union of the Bishops with the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. A Good Example So far we have a good example of what supernatural faith looks like. It is a knowledge of teachings which moves from the top on down, from God to man through the intermediary of the priests. Authority is its source and obedience marks its reception. We have no difficulty, then, in seeing what kind of a Church Newman is speaking about. It is a Church founded by God who directs it through the office of the priesthood. The Church, then is the living authority of Christ on earth. Though she is composed of human beings, she rules and teaches as the appointed representative of Christ. What she looses or binds on earth is loosed and bound in heaven. Thus she is involved in one way or another in all the affairs of man. The Future Danger Newman now proceeds to examine the future trials that will assail the Church. ...I think the trials that lie before us are such as would appall and make dizzy even such courageous hearts as St. Athanasius 7 , St. Gregory I, or St. Gregory VII. And they would confess that, dark as the prospect of their own day was to them severally, ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it. 8 Here Newman selects three giants of the past and surmises that even they would
6 7

Ibid., p. 119.

In fighting the heresy of Arianism in the Fourth Century, this Saint certain faced great trials. About this period Newman says: The episcopate, whose actions were so prompt and concordant on the rise of Arianism, did not as a class or order of men, play a good part in the troubles consequent upon the Council; and the laity did. The Catholic people, in the length and breadth of Christendom, were the obstinate champions of Catholic truth, and the bishops were not A bit later Newman says: ...but on the whole, taking a wide view of the history, we are obliged to say that the governing body of the Church came short, and the governed were pre-eminent in faith, zeal, courage, and constancy. The Arians of the Fourth Century, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, p. 445. The divine plan that the truth proceeds from the top on down does not rule out the possibility that the governed may sometimes be more loyal to the truth than the top. But at other times in history, the top has been more loyal.

Ibid., p. 121.
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be appalled by the future darkness. He calls the future darkness different in kind from any previous crisis in the Church. Newman explains: The special peril of the time before us is the spread of that plague of infidelity, that the Apostles and Our Lord Himself have predicted as the worst calamity of the last times of the Church. And at least a shadow, a typical image of the last times is coming over the world. I do not mean to presume to say that this is the last time, but that is has had the evil prerogative of being like that most terrible season, where it is said that the elect themselves will be in danger of falling away. 9 So far we do not have any specific idea of the new danger. But we have a general idea of the category into which this man of faith puts it. It is similar to but not necessarily the open infidelity at the end of the world predicted by Christ. Overt Infidelity Newman holds that there has always been infidelity in the world since the sin of the first parents. But this infidelity was hidden under the form of some kind of religious belief. The characteristic of the new infidelity will be its overt repudiation of religion. There will be a naked face-off between the world and the Church. Formerly, the Fathers of the Church held in common with their pagan enemies many of the values of classical Greece and Rome. Both were educated on the same classics, which spoke of the natural connection between the use of reason and the truths of religion and morality. The struggle between the Christians and pagans was not about whether religion was reasonable. Rather it was about which religion was true. In the future there will be no such agreement about the nature of reason and its connection with religion. This is the feature that will make the future crisis unique in the history of Western Civilization. Modern reason will create a culture which will separate itself, not just from the Catholic faith, but from the traditional sense of reason, the result being a Church isolated from western man as she has never be isolated before. What Is This Danger? So far Newman has not specifically defined this future danger. Now he declares that the future danger will be a philosophy. The elementary proposition of this new philosophy which is now so threatening is this--that in all things we must go by reason, in nothing by faith, that things are known and are to be received so far as they can be proved. Its advocates say, all other knowledge has proof--why should religion be an exception? And the mode of proof is to advance from what
9

Ibid., p. 121.
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we know to what we do not know, from sensible and tangible facts to sound conclusions. The world pursued the way of faith as regards physical nature, and what came of it? Why, that till three hundred years ago they believed, because it was the tradition, that the heavenly bodies were fixed in solid crystalline spheres and moved round the earth in twenty four hours. Why should not the method which has done so much in physics, avail also as regards that higher knowledge which the world believed it had gained through revelation? There is no revelation from above. There is no exercise of faith. Seeing and proving is the only ground for believing. 10 Implication Newmans view of modern reason is that which is exemplified in the physical sciences. Modern men will simply assume that the way to knowledge cannot be by the way of faith, which comes by accepting the authority of the Church. Truth only comes by first observing the facts and then proving by reason alone that the conclusions drawn from these facts are true. Modern reason not only denies the validity of faith; it also denies the legitimacy of traditional reason. It notes that traditional thinkers held that the heavens were ordered like solid crystalline spheres, a view which prevailed for many centuries until the astronomers of the sixteenth century discredited it. If, the modern is saying, the ancients and medievals could be so mistaken, how can any reasonable man take their philosophy seriously? Not Just the Intellectuals The view that the sciences provide the only model for the legitimate use of reason will not be just the view of intellectuals but will also be the view of the common man. All will take for granted that the Church rejects the use of reason. We today do not have much difficulty in seeing that Newmans prediction was right. Today the Church rejects contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, the complementary nature of man and woman, in vitro suicide. fertilization, cloning, stem cell research, euthanasia, and assisted And does not the public think that contraception is necessary to control

population, that women have a right to their own bodies, that people should be free for same-sex marriages, that scientists should not be hindered by sectarian restrictions? Modern culture has injected the notion of being progressive into the definition of reason, thus casting orthodox Catholics and those who think like them into the category of being right wing conspirators who are enemies of American democracy. The isolation of
10

Ibid., p 123.

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Catholics who take their faith and their reason seriously, then, is quite real. The Modern Notion of Reason More specifically, what is this modern notion of reason? Newman explains in language that is reminiscent of the Grammar of Assent: They [the future philosophers] go on to say, that since proof admits of degrees, a demonstration can hardly be had except in mathematics; we can never have a simple knowledge; truths are only probably such. So that faith is a mistake in two ways. First, because it usurps the place of reason, and secondly, because it implies an absolute assent to doctrines, and is dogmatic, which absolute assent is irrational. 11 The Term Assent Here the term assent is used for the first time in the sermon. In general it means the act by which a man agrees to the truth of some statement. Thus the term assent is a broad one covering many different intellectual acts. In this case the term assent applies to the act of faith made by Catholics to the dogmas of the Church. It also applies to the assent given by mathematicians to the demonstrations of mathematics. While moderns have no trouble in assenting to the truths of mathematics, they find it impossible to assent to the dogmatic claims of the Church. The Point We now come to the point of the opposition between Newman and the moderns that will occupy us for the rest of the argument. Newman will not be arguing directly against the modern rejection of the Catholic faith. Nor will he be arguing directly against the modern rejection of Catholic reason with its claim for the legitimacy of demonstrative proofs for such matters as the existence of God or the immortality of the soul by such thinkers as St. Thomas Aquinas. What he will be arguing against is the modern rejection of another form of reason; namely of belief in general and of belief in God in particular. This is clear from the following statement of Newman: ...you will find, certainly in the future, nay more, even now, even now, [italics his] that the writers and thinkers of the day do not even believe there is a God. They do not believe either the object--a God personal, a providence, and a moral governor; and secondly, what they do believe, viz., that there is some first cause or other, they do not believe with faith,

11

Ibid., p. 123.

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absolutely, but as a probability. 12 What shocks Newman is the rejection of belief in the One God as a person and a moral governor. This is not just a teaching of the Church. It is a teaching of reason, that faculty which all men have by the fact that they are human beings. It is the belief sustaining conscience, which is the voice of natural religion. It is the belief by which the common man as well as the philosophers appropriate the truth that the living God exists. For Newman to hear men in effect denying the existence of God while addressing a nation which still considered itself to be Christian is what shocks him. Opposing this traditional view of reason is the modern position that belief in the proposition that God exists is at best only a probability and not a very likely one at that. Moreover this probability may not even be a Person but only some vague first cause or other. Here the statement that one believes in God does not even mean that the speakers are Unitarians or Deists. It means that they may very well be Pantheists. Even then they show no absolute belief; instead, they profess a rather tentative agreement to some kind of a probability. Here we have the basic question which Newman aims to answer in his Grammar of Assent. The comments of Ian Ker about Newmans thoughts on the matter confirm the analysis above. They go as follows: So far as religious belief was concerned, he [Newman] was convinced that the serious intellectual threat came from hard-headed logicians, particularly if they address themselves to the young and mentally unformed. Conscious of his own work, he wrote to one correspondent: an evil time is before us. Principles are being adopted as starting points, which contradict what we know as axioms. It follows that the only controversy which is likely to do any good is philosophical [his italics]. 13 Hard-headed logicians will argue that, since all reasoning or inference in concrete matters is only probable, there is no such thing as a legitimate assent to or belief in a truth. This will constitute the first principle of the new philosophy whose general acceptance will bring about the future infidelity. These are the evil times that Newman has predicted. In opposition Newman will accept as his first principle or axiom that, though reasoning or inference in concrete matters is necessarily probable, it nevertheless can lead to assent to or belief in a truth. This is the thesis of The Grammar
12

Ibid., p. 123.
Ian Ker, John Henry Newman, Oxford University Press, 1990 paperback, p.624. 17 17

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of Assent. We will explain these terms more fully in the next chapter.
Helpful Before we move on to the next chapter, let us take an informal warm-up by explaining the notion of belief in reference to the terms faith and reason. When we get to the next chapter, the reader can forget about this warm-up and start from scratch, concentrating upon the way that Newman sets up the terms of the argument. But for the time being it will be useful for us to explore the notion of belief in an informal way. Let us start with an example of belief in action. A mother tells her child not to touch the stove because it is hot. The child trusts in the word of his mother, thereby acquiring a truth about the way reality is in this case. We may say, then, that the child assents to the truth of the proposition that the stove is hot, his motive being that his mother said so. But suppose that, when the mother leaves the kitchen for a moment, the child, overcome by curiosity, touches the hot stove. He is no longer a believer; he is a knower. Thus, one can know a truth by means of belief or by means of direct experience. The object of both acts is the same truth. There is no doubt that the experience of touching the stove is a much more vivid way of apprehending a truth than in simply believing in the word of an authority. But that is beside the point. The point is that a truth may be held either as the result of belief or of direct experience. Both are exercises of human reason. The Issue The importance of this fact that the act of belief can refer to a truth becomes clearer when we consider the view of Newmans opponents. They hold that there is no valid connection between the act of belief and the attainment of truth. They argue that, since human authorities are capable of being mistaken or even lying, one cannot place entire trust in their word. In other words, one can never be justified in giving assent to the truth of some belief because there is always the chance that it might be false. Thus one can never hold a belief as a definite truth but only as a probability, perhaps a high one, but a probability nonetheless. This view destroys the validity of belief in a truth. There is a huge difference between saying that one believes in God and saying that one believes in Godas some kind of probable truth. To miss the significance of this distinction is the beginning of intellectual catastrophe. So here the issue is joined between Newman and his opponents about the nature of belief. If his opponents are right, then assent to the truth of any belief is always illegitimate. If Newman is right, assent to the truth of a belief

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may sometimes be right and sometimes be wrong, depending upon the circumstances.. Faith and Reason Now let us consider the terms faith and reason as they are understood in the Catholic tradition. Pope John Paul II has called faith and reason the two wings upon which man rises to the fullness of truth. 14 Implied is that the two are distinct. Supernatural faith is on one side of the equation while natural reason is on the other side. Yet there is a similarity between the two. Just as the Catholic accepts the authority of the Church by an act of supernatural faith, so man accepts the authority of God by an act of reason called belief. On this view there is revealed or supernatural religion on one side and natural religion on the other side. Though each wing is distinct, they are related in that both deal with a form of religion. Reason At the risk of some repetition, let us fill in the notion of reason more fully. Reason is the faculty by which man attains truth by his own efforts. These truths fall into several classes. First are the truths he attains by sense experience. For example, man knows that there are rocks, trees, rabbits and men in the world because he sees them. He knows that they are there; he does not merely believe in their existence just as certainly as child who touched the stove knows it is hot. Second, there are the truths he attains by trust in the word of some human authority. For example, because the child believes in the word of his mother, he knows that the stove is hot even though he did not sense it for himself. A related example is belief in the existence of God. Certainly, the word of human authorities is a factor in this belief. Yet there is also the internal factor in this type of belief which is independent of the authority of other men. We will see more about this type of belief later. Finally is the truth man attains by means of the philosophy and the sciences. All of these various kinds of acts are works of reason alone. The field of battle between Newman and his opponents concerns the use of reason in the realm of natural belief. Newman will contend there is an intimate connection between the proper use of reason or inference, which is necessarily probable, and the assent to or belief in a truth. The moderns will argue that there is no connection at all, that assent to or belief in a truth is plainly irrational, an abuse of reason. Newmans Goal In writing The Grammar of Assent Newman is assuming the role of a leader in
John Paul II, Fides et Ratio: On the Relationship between Faith and Reason, Pauline Books and Media, 1998, p. 7. 19 19
14

the Catholic community who, having an articulate view of the relationship between faith and reason, faces a younger generation who hold to the same tradition but in a more inarticulate form. His task is not to argue them into being Catholics--they are already so. Rather it is to give them a philosophical grasp of their tradition by taking them through a philosophy of belief in general so that they will be prepared for the onslaught of a culture where total unbelief will reign. But his exposition of this philosophy will be a practical, not a theoretical one. This means he will not try, for example, to demonstrate to them the existence of God in the manner of St. Thomas Aquinas with which neither Newman nor his opponents are concerned. He will simply assume, not only that they believe in the truth of this proposition but also live it out in their lives. What he will try to show them is how to think and live out this proposition by giving them insight into who they are and where they will stand in the age of future infidelity. With this insight they will strengthen their wing of reason, an act which cannot help but strengthen their wing of faith. To Sum Up To sum up: my argument is that Newman wrote The Grammar of Assent as an answer to the type of problem he envisaged in his sermon. The problem would center round the opposition between his notion of belief and that of the modern world. Newmans reason for treating this problem would be to prepare the Catholic community for living in a culture of open unbelief. Whether I am correct in making this judgment can be verified only after we have finished my book. From here on in we will be observing what Newman has to say about his own argument. Newmans Parting Words But before we conclude, let us note the way that Newman ends his sermon. He does so, not as a philosopher, but as a man of faith. He states: A seminary is the only true guarantee for the creation of the ecclesiastical spirit. And this is the primary and true weapon for meeting the age, not controversy. Of course every Catholic should have an intelligent appreciation of his religion, as St. Peter says, but still controversy is not the weapon by which the world is to be resisted and overcome. 15 Faith is the weapon. It constitutes the heart both of what is taught in the seminary

15

Reason For Faith, p. 132 .

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and what is taught to children and adults in the catechism. It is the great weapon in the hands of believers, not because they are more intelligent than other men, but because they are sinners who acknowledge their faith as a special gift from God. Thus it is God who will do the fighting in order that all mankind might repent of their sins and go to heaven. These words may seem strange coming from a man who was noted for his talent in controversy and had written a philosophical work defending belief just three years before. Newman, however, is a man of faith. He lives in a world in which the struggle is between those in the City of God and those in the City of Man as described by St. Augustine. The battle is ultimately between pure spirits, between God and his most powerful but rebellious creatures, the fallen angels. The most intellectually gifted of men are but dimwits stumbling about the earth while pure spirits battle above and within them. But even dimwits have wits. So let us proceed to use ours.

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Chapter Two
Assent and Inference, Two Basic Terms of the Argument1

Let us now begin our analysis of the argument in the order which Newman presents it. He entitles his book An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. So the book is an attempt to explore a subject rather than to be a full treatise designed to say the last word on it. The subject is assent. This is a broad subject because to assent is to agree to the truth of some statement regardless of the way one has arrived at it. It may be by way of direct experience, of belief or of demonstrative proof. The author will have to narrow the field to the type of assent called belief. Finally, the book proposes to be a grammar, a kind of lexicon of the terms that the author uses in his discussion in order that he may equip Catholics for understanding the notion of belief and for carrying on the inquiry for themselves aided by a common vocabulary, a necessary condition in any discussion about a matter essential to the well being of the community. The Infamous Beginning Now we come to the infamous beginning which has discouraged so many readers over the years. Though it is a good piece of prose which shows Newman carefully laying out his first principles in a clear and precise way, it presumes that the reader is acquainted with Aristotelian logic. But once we have overcome that difficulty, we will see the beginning for what it really is, the masterly start of a philosophical argument. I would call this beginning the work of a philosopher in chopping out of the rocks the foundations upon which the rest of his argument will be built. To change the metaphor, here Newman locates the source from which the rest of the argument flows like a river coming from the mountain heights. A little mistake in the beginning endangers the structure upon which it is built; a slight shift in the source determines which way the river will flow. We should not be surprised, then, with the care and precision with which Newman lays down his first principles. The First Words The very first words of the book are: Propositions (consisting of a subject and a predicate united by the copula) may take a categorical, conditional or interrogative

We will be covering Chapter One, pp. 25-29 of The Grammar of Assent. 22 22

form. 2 The author then proceeds to illustrate. One may ask a question: Does free trade 3 benefit the poorer classes? The sentence or proposition is interrogative in form. One may then proceed to answer it by going through a reasoning process and drawing a conclusion: e.g. Therefore, free trade benefits the poorer classes. Here is a qualified or conditional proposition, the term therefore being the qualifier. Finally, one may go on to state without qualification: Free trade benefits the poorer classes. Note that Newman makes a sharp distinction between the qualified proposition Therefore free trade benefits the poor and the flat statement proposition Free trade benefits the poor. There seems to be no basic difference in their meaning. In fact, the proposition preceded by therefore seems to be more emphatically true. That is not really the case, as we will soon see. Standard Grammar This classification is standard grammar showing the way that man thinks by the way he uses language. He uses the interrogative sentence to ask a question, the conditional sentence to state a conclusion, and the categorical sentence to state an unqualified truth. This is the first appeal which Newman makes to ordinary experience, which shows that men ask questions which they then answer either conditionally or unconditionally. They do not have to know the technical names which the grammarian gives propositions in order to use them. Nor are they necessarily correct in the answers they give. Whether they are right or wrong in their reasoning, the form of question and answer remains the same. That is the nature of the activity of reasoning that, Newman presumes, flows from the nature of what man is. This is the way man either uses or abuses his reasoning powers. Note Note that Newman starts with an analysis of propositions. For a philosophical realist they express what happens in the mind when man encounters the world around him. They record both what man grasps out there and how he grasps them inside his mind. Thus if one wishes to reflect upon the way man understands reality, he has only to
2 3

G.A., p. 25.

There is no particular significance to the example that Newman uses. He just happens to use the topic of free trade probably because everybody was familiar with it.

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turn to the propositions which express his understanding of reality. In this case Newman wishes to understand how man reasons. Thus he selects the propositions dealing with questions, conditional statements and categorical statements as a starter. He need not go back any further than this in his analysis of reasoning Three Acts of the Mind Next Newman considers the logic implied in the grammar of propositions or sentences. Since propositions are expressions of the mind, he describes the three states of mind which originate them. First, there is the act of doubt, which prompts one to ask a question: Does free trade benefit the poorer classes? So far one does not yet know whether to say yes or not to this question. To decide the matter one must then take the next step, which is reasoning or inferring. After one has reflected upon the matter and gathered the necessary evidence, one reaches a conclusion or inference. If he answers the question affirmatively, he states Therefore free trade benefits the poorer classes. If he answers the question negatively, he states Therefore free trade does not benefit the poorer classes. The therefore is the qualifier indicating that the propositions depend for their truth upon the evidence given in the premises. This is why such a proposition is called conditional. It is true on condition that the premises are true. Assent Finally, there is the act of the mind called assent by which one holds to the truth of a proposition in an unqualified way: e.g. Free trade does (or does not) benefit the poorer classes. This categorical sentence is the vehicle employed by one who has given his assent to what he takes to be a truth. As a matter of fact the economist may be either right or wrong. But that is beside the point. The form of the statement indicates that the statement is meant to be a truth which of course is unconditional. There are, then, three ways to hold a proposition. One may hold it in doubt, as in a question. One may hold it conditionally, as in a conclusion or inference. Finally, one may hold it as an unqualified statement of a truth, as in an assent. A Difference? To repeat: there does not seem to be much of a difference between the qualified proposition Therefore, free trade benefits the poor and the unqualified proposition Free trade benefits the poor. They seem to amount to the same thing. But they do not. To hold a proposition as an inference is to hold it on the condition that the reasoning that

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led to it is true. If the inference that led to it is false, the conclusion following it will be false. But to hold a proposition as unconditionally true is to hold it without any reference to a previous inference. This does not mean that no previous reasoning preceded the assent. Some kind of reasoning must have preceded such a flat statement of truth if the speaker is intellectually responsible. It only means that the flat statement of truth includes within it no reference to a previous inference. As far as the nature of human reasoning is concerned, then, Newman holds that the forms of inference are statement of conditionally truth while the forms of assent are statements of unconditional truth. The point is self evident when one understands what the form of an inference and an assent is. There is no middle ground between a conditional and an unconditional statement of truth. A proposition is either one or the other. Again, we must remind ourselves that, since either type of proposition may be false as a matter of fact. We are talking about the forms of its expression. Whence the First Principles? From where did Newman get this definition of inference and assent which are the first principles of all reasoning? Being a philosophical realist, he got them from the facts of ordinary experience. Experience shows that an inference is composed of premises and a conclusion. Using Newmans example, the conclusion is: Therefore, free trade benefits the poor. The premises for this conclusion would go something like this: If free trade increases the volume of trade and an increase in volume benefits the poor, it follows that free trade benefits the poor. The whole process may be called an inference. So also may the conclusion alone may be called an inference because it includes within it a reference to premises. There is an ambiguity, then, in the term inference. It can refer either to the whole process or simply to the result. Exactly how Newman uses this term has to be determined from the context. The context is usually a single proposition, the conclusion, in the form of Therefore, free trade etc. Flat Statement Experience also shows that assent is expressed in the form of a flat statement of truth or what is taken to be true. Therefore, it is unconditional. Since these are the rock bottom truths about the nature of inference and assent, they are the first principles which govern all further reasoning about this subject matter. In defining his terms Newman is not just telling us about how he happens to understand them. Being a philosophical realist, he is telling us how everyone should
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understand them if they are to be in accord with the nature of reasoning. Readers of the same philosophical persuasion will agree with Newman. They can then take the definitions as first principles or axioms or objective standards of truth that they can use to test the truth of other statement further down in the argument. Not a Philosophical Realist Of course, if one is not a philosophical realist, one will not accept these definitions as first principles. One may not accept that propositions express the way reality is but only the way man happens to think, which is the way most philosophers today understand definitions. Thus Newmans statement of first principles will not be the beginning of a collaboration with his readers in order to investigate questions about the specific nature of belief but just the beginning of a war about mutually opposed first principles. If I were teaching a class instead of writing a book, I would stop right here and invite the class to test these first principles to see if they are really true. This is what Aristotle did in his day, using his notes to initiate a live investigation. This is what Newman does in book form in this first chapter. He hammers home the point that his definitions are according to nature. It took me a long time before I quit breezing over this chapter in the hope that Newman would get more concrete later on. One has to pay very close attention when a philosopher of Newmans caliber lays down first principles. The whole following argument is buried right there in the beginning. The Summing Up Newman sums up this section 4 with the following comment: ...it cannot be denied that these three acts [doubt, inference and assent] are all natural to the mind; I mean that, in exercising them, we are not violating the laws of our nature, as if they were in themselves an extravagance or weakness, but are acting according to it, according to its legitimate constitution. Undoubtedly it is possible, in the particular case to err in the exercise of Doubt, of Inference and of Assent. ...We do but fulfill our nature in doubting, inferring and assenting; and our duty is, not to abstain from the exercise of any function of our nature but to do what is in itself right rightly. 5 After laying down his definitions, he insists that, since acts of inference and assent are natural to the mind, they are legitimate. As I have said, this does not mean that man always achieves truth by these acts. But it does mean that men are not always
4 5

G.A., pp. 25-29. G.A., p. 28.

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wrong when they act so. No one should say, then, that the act of assent is extravagant. Rather one should say that, when man does give his assent to the truth of some proposition, he should do it correctly. From the Sermon Since we have had the benefit of reading Newmans sermon we can see right from the beginning that Newman is laying down a first principle which directly contradicts the modern position that assent is an illegitimate act of the mind. Newmans readers would not have known this. What they would have known, however, is that assent is a perfectly natural act and, therefore, must be legitimate in many cases. Demonstrative and Non-Demonstrative Reasoning Newman then goes on to make a distinction which, if a reader misses its significance, will embroil him in great difficulties for the rest of the whole argument. He says: ... in this Essay I treat of propositions only in their bearing upon concrete matter, and I am mainly concerned with Assent; with Inference, in its relation to Assent, and only with such inference as is not demonstration.. 6 Here Newman declares his intention of dealing only with concrete matter and its bearing upon inference and assent and of excluding its opposite, abstract matter and it bearing upon demonstrative inference and assent. In other words he will search for the meaning of belief in the realm of nondemonstrative inference and of the type of assent that may follow upon this type of reasoning. He says no more, assuming that his readers are familiar with Aristotelian logic. Yet so important is this move that we must examine it very carefully in order to make sense of the rest of the argument. I do not know what the readers of Newmans day made of this declaration of intent. But I certainly knew what I made of it; I glossed over it and went on ahead for more examples of what Newman was talking about. This made for much confusion. So let us clarify this distinction which Newman so casually makes by going back to its Aristotelian source and begin at the beginning. A Philosophical Realist Aristotle is a philosophical realist, a position which accords more or less with common sense. On the one hand we have the world composed of individual rocks, plants, animals and men. On the other hand we have man, initially a blank tablet upon which the world has not yet inscribed anything. But man has the power both to sense and to know the things in the world around him, thus effecting a kind of wedding between
6

G.A., p. 28.
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things and man through his knowledge of them. This is the rock bottom knowledge, the foundation of all further knowledge. This knowledge is expressed in propositions. Sense Knowledge Through the senses man attains knowledge of individual things as they exist in their particularity. This knowledge comes in the form of images which express more or less of what a man senses. Thus, for example, the tree he sees on his lawn is reflected in his image of that tree. The same goes for the rocks, animals and men he senses. They all have their images within the mind. Experience shows, however, that man begins to compare and contrast these images in his mind because he has the ability to form ideas or notions of them, something animals cannot do. Here we have the phenomenon of abstraction, which is the ability to note how individual things are both similar and dissimilar to each other. For example, Peter is like John in that both are men and unlike other bodies like rocks, trees and animals. In brief, we have ideas or notions being defined in terms which show the similarity and dissimilarity of one notion to another. The notion that man is a rational animal indicates that he has in common with animals the capacity to move about and sense but also the further capacity to reason, which differentiates man from the brute animals. The fact that man has the faculty of reason means that he has two approaches to learning about the world around him. The first is by experience. The longer he lives in the world, the more he learns about it. Thus a child with time is able to distinguish among living bodies the difference between plants, animals and men after experiencing enough of them. The second is by reasoning which is the ability to move from the truth of one thing to the truth of another. This is the topic that most concerns us. The Syllogism Aristotle reduces all reasoning, whether implicit or explicit, to a simple scheme that is called the syllogism. From observing the various ways that men have reasoned, he has laid down the essential conditions which they have met without realizing it. They have done it naturally. As a man needs no analysis of all the motions necessary for riding a bike in order to do it, so men need no analysis of the steps in reasoning in order to reason. Yet its analysis into the basic elements by Aristotle has put a tool into the hands of students over the last twenty-three hundred years that has given them an art to

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aid them in the performance of a natural activity. 7 The aid is as follows: (1) If B is C (2) And A is B (3) Therefore A must be C In other words, if two things are equal to a third thing, the two things must be equal to each other. The syllogism shows that since both A and C are equal to B, then A and C are equal to each other. Thus if a farmer knows that a bag of beans is equal in weight to a bag of apples and a bag of nuts is equal to the weight of the bag of beans, he knows without a shadow of a doubt that the bag of nuts is equal to the bag of apples without having to weigh them. Here he has performed an act of reasoning which saves him some extra work. He has reasoned, that is, has moved from the knowledge of premises to the new truth embodied in the conclusion. The first two statements constitute the premises that justify the conclusion. The conclusion, which always includes a term like therefore, is always held conditionally or as an inference. Our task now is to see what happens when we pour demonstrative matter into the syllogism rather than bags of apples, nuts and beans. If the subject matter fits the form, we will have the absolute truth. The Key To Success The key to success in this project is to use the material that will fit most precisely into the form of the syllogism. Since the form is abstract, the material should be as much like it as possible. Now we have seen that when man faces the world, he has before him only individual things existing on their own. Besides taking in the images of these things, he also classifies them according to notion or ideas. Now let us suppose he has noted from his experience that particular men have died. He certainly knows that these men were mortal (capable of dying) because they have already proven it by doing it. But suppose he asks the question of whether all men are mortal. He will probably conclude that they are despite the fact he has not checked out each and every man, a feat that is beyond his experience and one which will always be beyond his experience. Is there any way he can establish the conclusion that absolutely all menpast, present, and future are mortal? Note that this question is not about whether all men will actually die. The question is about whether the nature of man necessarily entails being mortal. The
7

It is true that around the beginning of the twentieth century there was a concerted effort to replace Aristotelian logic with mathematical logic. Today, however, Aristotelian logic seems to be making a comeback because it conforms more readily to how men actually think. 29 29

answer is yes. The questioner has enough insight into the nature of man to know that such a creatures must be a living body. The questioner also has enough insight into living bodies to know that they can be torn apart, crushed, killed, poisoned or destroyed in any number of ways. Thus they too must be mortal. The conclusion, therefore, is that man must be mortal because he is a living body. Demonstrative Syllogism The following syllogism, called demonstrative, expresses the reasoning we have already described. (B) A living body is (C) mortal. (A) Man is (B) a living body. Therefore (A) man is (C) mortal. The material put into this syllogism are universal ideas or abstractions like living body, mortal, and man. As such they exist only in the mind; they do not exist on their own in reality. Only particular rocks, trees, animals and men exist in that way. In this case the syllogism is strictly demonstrative because the material fits the form exactly. The reason is because the material deals with physical reality, not as particular things, but as natures or kinds of things. Here one is not considering this dog, cat or man with all their particular characteristics of weight, size, color or shape. One is dealing with these individual bodies from the one feature they have in commonthat they are living bodies. Thus the philosopher is able to compare this notion with other notions like man and mortal without having to bother looking at any individuals while he compares the notions to each other. Why should he be obliged nervously to check constantly with the individual realities again as if they might have done something on their own while he was not looking? The case would be different if one were trying to prove that, since all men are mortal, all men will die. As we will see later, this move would not be valid. Here, however, one has fixed his attention upon a feature of living bodies which holds even if no living bodies happen to exist in reality. Has he not fixed on a feature they all share simply because they have the nature of living bodies? Cannot he have confidence that the universal notions hold still as he compares them with each other? So there is nothing wrong with comparing notions to each other in order to arrive at a truth about the way all bodies must be. A Head Game? Of course, if one holds that universal ideas are simply creations of the mind with
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no reference to reality, the demonstrative syllogism is a kind of head game which tells us how man thinks and not what things are. But this is neither Newmans view nor that of any philosophical realist. When used properly the demonstrative syllogism is a triumph of human reasoning because it nails down exactly why in this case man is and must be mortal. To see this let someone ask a class for the precise reason why man is mortal and see what happens. He will see a class actually thinking as it debates, objects, counter-objects, thus recreating the arguments of the ancient Greeks. Keeping the nature of the syllogism in mind as a standard will be a great help in sorting out the disputes that will inevitably arise as a group wrestles with the meaning of first principles so abstractly stated. Absolutely True A consequence of the fact that notions or ideas fit so perfectly into the syllogistic form is that the conclusion, though conditional, is absolutely true because the conditions upon which it depends are absolutely true. The very clarity of the demonstration compels the intellect to assent. There is no gap between premises and conclusion. Thus it is easy to turn the inference Therefore man is mortal into a flat statement of assent Man is mortal. This is the background against which its opposite, non-demonstrative inference, is measured. Let us now see what non-demonstrative inference looks like. Non-demonstrative Inference We have already seen Newmans declaration that he will not be concerned with abstract subject matter, an object which is treated by demonstrative inference which, though conditional, compels assent as in the example given above. In excluding this type of material Newman is saying that, when he gets to the topic of belief, he will not be subjecting it to a philosophical analysis in the way someone like St. Thomas Aquinas does. This does not mean that he will differ with the views of Aquinas. It only means that his approach will be non-demonstrative rather than demonstrative. Concrete Matter Let us now see what Aristotle and Newman mean by concrete subject matter. The one example Newman uses, that of an economist looking at the world and concluding that free trade benefits the poorer classes, is a concrete matter. The economist is interested in determining whether free trade, a economic practice coming into prominence in the nineteenth century, does or does not help the poor, not as a matter of theory, but as a matter of fact.
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Other Examples Other examples are as follows. The historian asks whether Alexander the Great really conquered the known world or not. The juror asks whether the accused is guilty of a crime or not. The seeker for religious truth asks whether God really exists or not. If the seeker determines that God does exist 8 , he goes on to ask the further question of whether God founded the Catholic Church. All of these matters are questions about matters of fact. Thus these questions are essentially unlike the questions that the philosopher puts to the world before him. The philosopher asks about the necessities involved in, for example, the fact that plants, animals and men die. He answers that the cause is that living bodies are necessarily mortal. The fact that the philosopher has before his gaze a clear notion means that he can trace out the necessities involved in this notion. But what do the jurors, historians, economists and seekers have before their eyes? The jurors have a particular man about whom is the question of whether he has committed a crime or not. The historians have before them the question about whether the particular man called Alexander the Great conquered the known world or not. The economists have before them the question of whether a particular method of trade really does benefit the poor, not in some general land of theory, but in the particular time and place in which actual poor people live. The seekers have before them the question of whether God is real or not. Further, if God is real, has He founded over two thousand years ago the particular Church called Catholic? Here the inquirers are looking for the truth about particular persons, events or things. There is no way that the inquirer can easily fit such material into the abstract scheme of a syllogism and get the truth. The path that the inquirers reasoning must take to get the truth is too varied to allow of being put very easily in marching order. A Difficult Realm The factor that makes reasoning in this realm so difficult is that, since the inquirer has not been an eye witness to the persons or events in question, he has to rely upon the testimony of others and the circumstantial evidence supplied by history. Without such a train of evidence he must give up hope about ever attaining truth in these
8

The case of Gods existence is an exception. While he is the Supreme Being, a concrete fact, he is also the first cause of the universe. Thus a philosopher can examine the necessities found in the universe and demonstrate that only God can be the cause. There are no other entities, not even angels, let alone individual men, where one can consider the necessities involved in nature and conclude that these entities must exist. These matters are beyond demonstration. We know as a matter of fact that men do exist because we see them. We do not have to reason about that. But the only existent we can demonstrate that has to exist is God. 32 32

matters. Even with a train of evidence he has to take into account that eye witnesses can either tell the truth, lie or be mistaken, that circumstances can be misleading, that records may be falsified. How, then does one put this type of evidence into the formal structure of a syllogism? How does he make the material fit the form? He can still attempt to this. But not in the way a philosopher pours universal ideas into a syllogism and attains universal truths like, for instance, man is mortal. In concrete matters the inquirer has only a mixture of facts, guesses, hunches, judgments, circumstances, records, insights, and testimonies to pour into the syllogism. The inescapable conclusion is that the reasoning here can at best attain only probabilities. As far as inference is concerned, jurors, economists, historians and religious believers can reach conclusions which at best are only probably true, not definitely true. These are the limits imposed upon reason when it is dealing with concrete matters, a point upon which both Newman and his opponents agree. 9 Where they disagree is on the next point. Newman holds that men nevertheless often legitimately give assent in these matters. His opponents hold the opposite, insisting that, while men do give their assents, they should not do so because it violates the canons of good reasoning. Here we have the main issue of The Grammar of Assent. A Gap There is a gap between probable inference and unconditional assent. The inference, for example, Therefore, free trade benefits the poor sounds quite grand and definitive. But the reasoning supporting that conclusion is only probable. This is evident if one thinks of all the steps that an economist, for example, has to go through in order to conclude that free trade actually improves the condition of the poor in a particular time and place. Being just one man he has to have plowed through hundreds of statistical charts, interviewed witnesses at the ports of entry, evaluated their honesty, checked the actual conditions of the poor in their homes and cities. Consequently, he will usually confine his conclusion to the statement of a probability, perhaps a high one, but a probability nonetheless. It will be a very rare economist who will leap the gap and say flat out without any qualification Free trade benefits the poor. There is, then, always a gap between inference and assent in concrete matters. Newman will argue that it can be closed; his opponents will argue that it cannot.

Inference is conditional, because a conclusion at least implies the assumption of premises, and still more, because in 33 33

Why Bother? Seeing how poor the results are of pouring concrete material into the form of the syllogism, we may ask why anyone bothers to try it. The answer is that such an effort is an aid in ordering ones thoughts or in breaking down a complicated argument into manageable parts when speaking to an audience. A speaker can either expand the syllogistic form by clothing it with graceful prose or contract it into pity hard-hitting statement. Here the use of the syllogism is rhetorical, not philosophical. It can serve the purpose of an honest speaker who knows its limitations. But it can also serve the purpose of a rogue intent of deceiving as he dresses up sophistries in the robes of a time-honored tool. It is this usage that Newman attacks in his many satirical comments about the inadequacies of formal reasoning. He is attacking the sophists, not the true philosopher. Thus I conclude the Aristotelian background behind Newmans declaration that he will be concerned with the topic of assent, not in regard to demonstrative inference, but only in regard to non-demonstrative inference in concrete matters. Newmans Place in the Argument Having filled in the background to Newmans statement, let us return to see how far he has gone in laying out his argument. All that he had done so far is to lay down for his readers two principles that will guide him to the rest of his book. The first is that all acts of inference are conditional and that all acts of assent are unconditional. Since Newman has declared his intention of treating of inference only in concrete matters, we can tighten these principles to mean that all inference is probable while all assent, though still unconditional, is the type under the heading of belief. If we wish to boil down the opposition between inference and assent, we get the following. The statement that free trade probably (or improbably) benefits the poor is an inference. The statement that free trade helps (or does not help) the poor is an assent. The Question Arises Naturally, the question arises of how Newman will derive unconditional assent from inferences that are admittedly only probable. How for example can Newman admit that all the probable inferences leading to the conclusion that the Catholic Church is founded by God nevertheless lead the reasonable man to assent or believe in the truth of this conclusion with certitude? This is the great question. He must give a specific answer to this question in order to finish off his opponents, who insist that probable
concrete matter, on which I am engaged, demonstration is impossible. G.A., p. 34 34

inference leads only to probabilities, not definite truths. He has already started undermining their position by showing on general principle that assent is natural and, therefore, must be legitimate in some cases. But that is as far as he has gone up to this point. And that is as far as he will go because he defers this matter to Part Two which deals with assent in relationship to inference. Only there will he take up again the matter that usually grabs the readers attention. No Place To Go Having filled in the Aristotelian background I feel as if I have dressed up both myself and the reader for attending the main event at Madison Square Garden entitled Newman vs the Moderns only to find out that my champion will not be showing up just yet. He has a few more things to do before he enters the ring. One of them is to take up the definition of the third term of his argument, apprehension. He will continue to go along, slowly and patiently putting his first principles in place while ignoring his opponents and my expectations for any immediate fight. All we can do, then, is to let Newman have his way. His way will be to cover the ground I have already laid out in giving the Aristotelian background to his thought. At this point the reader has to take my word for it that this background is also Newmans. But after we have completed following the whole argument of Newman, everyone will be able to judge whether Newman has indeed followed the program Aristotle has laid out for him. Before Proceeding However, before moving on to the next chapter, let us have our fight after all. Let us imagine that one of Newmans opponents happens to pick up The Grammar of

Assent and read the account of first principles. Would he agree with them? If he were a
philosophical realist, he would have to agree. He would have to leave aside his blanket condemnation of assent and recognize that it must be legitimate at least in some cases. Of course he will not agree because he is quite aware that he has rejected philosophical realism long ago and is now quite ready to defend himself. He says: Dr. Newman, I can already see where you are going with your first principles. You are aiming to put me in a box where I can be accused of being unnatural, theoretical etc., etc. because I reject the notion that belief can ever lead to truth. But you do not really have to push me into that box because I will gladly jump into it myself. I wish to be unnatural, as you put it. Indeed I glory in the term because the whole trouble with believers in the modern world
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is that their idea of being natural is the great obstacle to mankinds progress in becoming a truly rational species. You base your case for realism on an old timer like Aristotle, who feels that he only has to use nature as his trump card in order to take the trick. But I am not playing that old game. I am playing a new one, that of reshaping human nature into a new entity, a creature who has never existed before but is now coming into its own if I can help it. So your first principles do not apply to me at all. I reject them root and branch. Of course, you can proceed with your argument, which is your right. Go ahead and preach to your congregation or, if you will, reason with them in the old dry ways of Aristotle. Ill not have any part of it. The Reply Imagine Newman replying: My dear fellow, I compliment you on the forthright way you have put the matter. You are right. I am not trying to convince you because there is absolutely no common ground between us. As you have rightly observed, I am addressing my argument to the congregation. They already believe that their religious beliefs are reasonable but do not yet realize the full implications of their stand. I am merely reminding them that belief is a natural act. So go your way in peace. Of course, I am sure that you wont mind if I happen to speak about you in your absence. I have nothing personally against you; but my argument will occasionally require that I warn my community against your views as a threat to their sanity and, if I may be frank, to your own as well. Anyway, go in peace and I thank you again for stating the point of our difference so clearly. Realists We see, then, that Newmans argument is addressed to those who will grant the self-evidence of his first principles, not because they feel kindly towards Newman, but because it is the truth. Though the members of the Catholic community at this point may not yet understand philosophically that their tradition of faith and reason is eminently realistic, they will begin to see at least that probable inference and unconditional belief must have a place in life. While they do not yet know the details of the answer, they do know that the blanket condemnation of belief by the modern world must be wrong simply because it is unnatural. In doing so they will not be tempted to take the erroneous path of saying that, though their beliefs are true, they are not based upon reason. This is not the Catholic way. Seeing that ordinary belief is an exercise of reason, they can refuse to jump into the box prepared for them by the modern world, that box with the label the
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home of the irrational--the rigid, frigid and dead. They can remain outside the box and follow Newman as he makes the argument for showing that belief is not only rational but rational in the deepest sense of the word. . Rsum Since Newmans argument is a long one, we are apt to get lost in it by the time we reach the end. So to help matters, we will review the progress of the argument at the end of each chapter. We will do so by first reminding ourselves of the destination towards which Newman is traveling and then marking the progress he has made on the trail. What, then, is Newmans goal? It is to show by reason alone that the ordinary man, whether literate or illiterate, is capable of belief with certitude in the concrete matter of the Catholic Church being founded by God. How far along the trail has Newman come? He has located his subject matter in the realm of the concrete. Thus he will place the matter of the Church in the factual category of whether it has or has not been founded by God at a particular period in time. While the path to this religious goal will be longer than the paths to other goals, the general reasoning process will be the same. It will be the process of non-demonstrative reasoning seeking to discover what really happened but did not necessarily have to happen. Since the truth of the Church is a contingent, not a necessary matter, Newman cannot employ the method of strict demonstration. In fact no philosopher, not even St. Thomas Aquinas, can use this method to attain the truth about a contingent matter. If Newmans subject matter had simply been the existence of God, he might, like St. Thomas Aquinas, have chosen to demonstrate this truth. But as we have said, Newman did not choose to do this. Further, we also know that the investigation will deal with propositions because they are what man must use in trying to determine the truth about any matter, concrete or abstract, religious or non-religious. This Newman has already shown in portraying the logic behind the use of reason. In the back of his mind, however, Newman is laying the ground work to show that religious belief also involves the use of propositions and, therefore, the use of reason. Excluded, then, is the view of belief as being a mere feeling or personal opinion which cannot be verified or defended. If religious belief were a mere feeling or opinion, there would not be much point to arguing about it. But if belief is in the class of being a legitimate assent to a definite truth, then the way will be open to seeing how this conclusion applies to religious belief.

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Chapter Three
Apprehension, The Third Term
Let us now settle down to see how Newman goes about defining apprehension, the third term of his argument. 1 He has already discussed the relationship of probable inference to unconditional assent, insisting that these acts are natural to man and, therefore, must be legitimate in many cases. The reader might have expected that Newman develop this argument to show in more detail how the moderns are wrong. Instead, he switches his attention to another feature of assent; namely, that it can be apprehended in different ways. What is Apprehension? What is apprehension? Newman answers that it is an imposition of a meaning upon the terms of an assent. Broadly speaking, then, we apprehend a proposition when we understand its terms. Sometimes the terms of a proposition refer to individual things. For example, Philip was the father of Alexander, the earth goes round the sun, the Apostles preached to the Jews. Here the terms refer to individual things that have existed or continue to exist in the exterior world. Newman calls these terms real. In contrast there are propositions whose terms are common or abstract. For example, man is an animal, some men are learned, an Apostle is a creation of Christianity, a line is length without breadth. Here the terms are common, not singular. Man, for example, is that kind of thing which is in the general class of being an animal. Thus we have a contrast between things as they exist in the world and ideas as they exist in the mind. Things are the object of real apprehension; general ideas or notion are the objects of notional apprehension. At this point we may wonder why Newman called this process of understanding the terms of a proposition an imposition of meaning upon the terms. Would it not seem to be more natural to say that, instead of man imposing a meaning upon the terms it is rather the terms imposing a meaning upon the man? An Imposition of Meaning The following example shows why Newman speaks of apprehension as imposing meaning upon the terms rather than simply of understanding the terms. He speaks of the difference between the way a school boy and a mature adult reads the same passage
1

We will be covering pages 29 to 31 of The Grammar of Assent 38

written by the poet Virgil. The passage portrays a great ceremony held in ancient Rome and so is about things in the real world and not about notions. While the boy understands the meaning of the terms and can translate them, noting every turn of syntax, he does not have the experience of life which could enable him to impose a vital meaning upon the terms. He just reads about another ancient ceremony that happened sometime in the past. Thus his apprehension is merely notional even though he understands all the terms in the account as real. But an adult who has lived long enough to see that many of the events that he had experienced as a youth are buried in his past, never to be seen again, will bring a far different sense of life to reading this passage of ancient glory. He will read the words in the way they were meant to be read by the poet who wrote them. The words are monuments to a great glory that is no more. Thus the adult will find a poignancy in the passage that the school boy could never feel. Now we see why Newman defines apprehension as the mind imposing a meaning on the terms rather the terms imposing a meaning on the mind. He wishes to bring in the subjective side of the process. The school boy brings to the passage little experience of life while the adult brings to the same passage a rich experience of life. At the same time there is an objective side because the passage has its own meaning, in this case being an account of a great ceremony from the past. The act of apprehension, then, is a kind of wedding between what a man brings to the terms of the account and what the terms bring to the man. If a man brings the experience of life to his understanding of a proposition, his apprehension is real. But suppose the proposition was that man is a rational animal. Naturally the boy and anyone else for that matter would identify this proposition as notional and, therefore, apprehend it notionally. Rule Out the Fact Does this rule out the fact that this proposition concerning mans definition could be apprehended really? No. Imagine a thinker who has been searching for years in order to get a proper appreciation for the dignity of man. Is it not possible for us to imagine him greeting the notion that man is a rational animal in a near state of ecstasy, proclaiming that he is not a brute at all but one of those glorious creatures who can think. He imposes his own interpretation upon the terms of the proposition. The same proposition, then, can be apprehended either notionally or really. In the notional apprehension the mind is moved but not the imagination and the heart. The definition remains a notion. In the real apprehension everything in the man is moved because the definition takes on the glow of being a great fact. From the above one can see that Newmans distinction
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between real and notional propositions is not one that can be applied mechanically. To appreciate the distinction one has to keep in mind, not just the literal terms of the proposition, but the experience of life that one brings to meeting these terms in a proposition. Apprehension Now let us go on to see how Newman finishes his introductory treatment of apprehension. 2 Noting that a proposition consists of a subject and a predicate Newman asks what is the minimum condition necessary for apprehending the meaning of a proposition before one can assent to its truth. He answers that one must at least understand something about its predicate. For example, if the proposition is that free trade is an interchange of goods, one must at least apprehend the meaning of an exchange of goods. Even if one knows absolutely nothing beforehand about the meaning of free trade, he will at least know now that it is an interchange of goods. Newman concludes, then, that one may give assent to the truth of this proposition because one has met the minimum condition. Now this logical rule is certainly true. The function of predicates is to explain something about the subject of a proposition. Fine! Stumbling Block But this is just the sort of claim made by Newman that is at first sight a stumbling block to the reader. The implication is that even a child who barely understands the predicate of the proposition is then capable of giving assent to the truth of the proposition. How can that be? Are assents so easy to come by that even children can make them? Does one just pop off all over the place making assents simply because one understands the predicate? Even though an assent stands by itself without a reference to any inference preceding it, surely there must be some kind of inference involved off stage, so to speak. Otherwise assent is some kind of free floating assertion without any intellectual justification at all. Let us see how Newman answers these difficulties in the following example about a mother and child. Mother and Child There is a mother and child walking among fields filled with a particular kind of plant. 3 The mother calls it lucern and the child asks about the meaning of the word. If she were to answer by giving the scientific definition that Lucern is medicago sativa, of the class Diadelphia and order Decandria, the child would understand nothing. The
2 3

G.A., Chapter Two, Assent Considered as Apprehensive, pp. 32-35. G.A., p. 33.
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proposition would be totally inapprehensible to him even if he could repeat it like a parrot. He has not met the minimum condition of understanding the predicate. Here we see the logic behind the minimum condition. If a proposition is totally without meaning to the child, he cannot tell whether it is true or false. Therefore he cannot give assent to it because assent is an agreement of the mind to the truth of a statement. As far as the child is concerned, then, the statement here is meaningless. Indeed it would be meaningless to those of us who do not know anything about plants. As far as we are concerned, the statement could be referring to men from outer space or to crocodiles. We could neither agree nor disagree with such a statement because as far as we are concerned it is not a statement at all. Therefore, it is not possible to give assent to it. Assents are not products of the lips but rather acts of the mind. The Mothers Answer Naturally, the mother does not answer the childs question with the scientific definition of lucern. Instead she points to some cattle grazing in the field and answers that lucern is food for cattle. The child is now able to give assent to the proposition because he has met the minimum requirement. Then Newman asks whether the child could ever assent to the scientific definition that lucern is medicago sativa etc., an inapprehensible proposition to him. Newman answers that, if one changes the form of the proposition, the child could assent to it. The new form is: That lucern is medicago sativa etc. is true. Because the child knows the meaning of the predicate true, he can then give assent to the inapprehensible. But we still have the problem mentioned above. Granted that the child recognizes that he has a proposition before him which could be either true or false, how can he give assent to its truth? Does understanding the predicate true give him the right to say that what is inapprehensible or meaningless to him is true? The Answer Newman supplies the answer to this question in his final example. He has the child say: My mothers word, that lucern is medicago sativa etc. is true. This proposition is something new. The other propositions like Lucern is food for cattle or The statement that lucern is medicago is true gave no indication why they were held to be true. The propositions just showed us that they met the minimum condition of having an apprehensible predicate. But in this last proposition Newman includes the reason why the child accepts it as true. In other words he not only gives us the proposition itself but also the ground or reason why the child accepts it. In fact, the child not only accepts it;
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he does so with a vigor that will lead him to fight any kid on the block who dares to cast any doubt upon the veracity of his mother. Here is an assent to a truth that is not even apprehensible in itself but still stirs the heart and fires up the imagination of the child. Such is the power of real apprehension. Shakespeare Newman gives another example of how the inapprehensible may serve as the object of real assent. A mother is teaching her child the line from Shakespeare that Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied. 4 When the child asks about the meaning of the phrase, the mother answers that he is too young to understand but that it has a very beautiful meaning. The child accepts her word. While he does not know the meaning of the words, he not only gives assent to its truth; he gives a real assent which flows from his heart. He has not merely heard words written in some book but has accepted them in the glow of his mothers love for the author named Shakespeare. Problem Solved The last two examples solve our problem. We now have a rounded picture in which the act of assent takes place. Up to this point we might have thought that the act of assent concerned propositions that are quite evidently the result of deep thought by an economist or historian sorting his way through such matters as the benefits of free trade or the existence of Alexander the Great. But now we see that the act of assent can be exercised by a mere child believing in the word of his mother. In other words, we now see that the acceptance of authority can be the motive for assenting. The authority is not just any authority. What child or what adult for that matter would start fighting to uphold the authority of a dictionary definition? But when the authority is a beloved person, we then get some idea of the power of real apprehension. Very good! We would not mind hearing some more about this intriguing topic. The only trouble is that Newman is not interested in developing it at this point. He says: Of course, I am speaking of assent itself, and its intrinsic conditions, not of the ground or motive of it. Whether there is an obligation upon the child to trust his mother, or whether there are cases in which such a trust is impossible, are irrelevant questions, and I mention them only to put them aside. 5 Irrelevant, says he! When we are finally beginning to get a handle on this mysterious thing called assent, he tells us that this is not his interest for the moment!
4 5

G.A., p. 34. G.A., p.34.

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But what then is the point he is interested in making? It is about the fact that assents may be apprehended either notionally or really. The childs apprehension of the propositions themselves is notional. But when the word of the mother was put into the last proposition, we now have real apprehension, the kind that moves the heart and imagination in the way a notional apprehension by itself cannot. This is the point that Newman is making. He will then go on to develop this topic in the next chapter. Pause a Moment But before moving on to observe how Newman develops his next point, let us pause a moment to see some of the implications of Newmans examples. He shows us a child giving spontaneous assent to a proposition. Does that mean there is no act of inference involved? I would not say so. When the child takes the step of believing his mother, he does go through a spontaneous process of deciding that his mother is a trustworthy witness. This is not the reflex reaction of a dog to its master. It is the decision of a human being, a child to be sure, but a creature with the use of reason. He has registered the fact almost instantaneously that, since it is his mother speaking, she should be trusted despite the fact she might have once fooled him by saying that the pill she offered was candy instead of the bitter thing it was. Nevertheless, he has forgotten about that and spontaneously has given assent in the present case. Thus this assent has been preceded by some kind of reasoning which, though done in an instant without much reflection, is still a response of a rational creature. The Distinction Holds The distinction between probable inference and unconditional assent still holds whether one is analyzing the belief of a child in its mother, a student in his teacher, or an expert in the word of another expert. The inexperienced know at least in an implicit way that authorities make mistakes. Though they may feel that certain authorities are like God to them, they are not stupid enough to think that they really are gods. There is an implicit sense that their reasoning about the trustworthiness of the authority in question, as spontaneous and unconscious as it is, is only highly probable at best, not absolute or demonstrative. Nevertheless, they often give real assent to the truth of what their elders say. Life being as it is, they are sometimes wrong. By the same token, they are often right. This is the fact. Am I pressing things here a bit? I dont think so. But if I had to argue with a modern about the validity of belief, I would not fly off to all kinds of epistemological considerations of belief in general. I would stay on the ground and ask the modern how
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he would explain the belief of a child in his mother. I am sure that we would still not agree. But at least I would get a line on him by seeing what he does about a matter of common sense. Would he dare to suggest that the child should accept the word of his mother as some kind of high probability rather than a definite truth? Would he say that the childs reaction is the kind of stimulus and response which an electronic eye opens and closes the door for a customer? Would he say that the child has been conditioned like Pavlovs dog? Perhaps. Whether I continued the discussion or not, I would at least recognize that here we have a deep difference in first principles. The Lives of Men The concrete illustrations given by Newman here and throughout the rest of Part One prompt this reflection about the place of belief in mans natural development as a rational being. He begins life by believing in the truth of many things, even the inapprehensible, because of the word of some authority. But these simple beliefs serve as the foundation for all future knowledge. The child can take his belief that lucern is food for cattle and later express his own personal experience of seeing a man mowing a field and then uttering on his own that the field is full of lucern. He can build up his experience so that he might eventually become an expert who can define every word of the scientific definition and give many examples of each category. So too with the words of Shakespeare or any other great author. On the basis of real assent to the words of some parent or teacher, the student can tackle the works of great men and eventually see that his teachers were right. The author does express the students personal experience and, indeed, the experience of a whole people in the way a classic is supposed to do. In brief, the way of real belief or assent is the personal gate which opens out to a whole world of truths which, though initially beyond a mans immediate experience, enables him to appropriate the experience of the past and present as he heads into the future. The Mother and Child The way that Newman uses the example of the mother and child does show how the careful examination of a simple factual situation can cut through the haze of skepticism that often envelopes us. He takes the easier case and points the reader to its reality. Readers like myself may have been preoccupied by the skeptical argument that, since all inference is probable, it must lead only to probability because human authorities can be mistaken or even lie. Newman cuts through this obsession by having us consider a mother speaking with her child, an experience which we all have had. In that light it
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does seem a bit silly to be worried about the theoretical axiom that human authority of its very nature can be mistaken or lie. The question has its importance; there is a point to asking why the mother has the right to say that free trade benefits the poor. Is she an economist? Perhaps she isnt. But perhaps she is married to an economist and so trusts in his word. But who says that an economist has the truth? So on we go with question after question trying to get to an answer that will stop the march into an infinite regress. As I said, there is a point to trying to get to the basic limits or ultimate foundations of a belief. But at the same time that effort should not blind us from also going with the flow of common sense. We are still a long way from solving all our difficulties. But so far we have a fact upon which we can rest a while. However one explains the fact, the fact is that children believe mothers, students believe teachers, and even experts believe other experts. Newmans opponents consider all of these acts irrational because of their theory that probable inference legitimately result only in probabilities. Common sense reports that they claim too much. Rsum Let us check again Newmans progress towards the goal of showing how man attains belief with certitude in the proposition that God has founded the Catholic Church in a particular place and at a particular time. He has factored apprehension into the argument, thus preparing the way to show that this belief will be an object primarily of real apprehension though it will not rule out notional apprehension. Only beliefs really and notionally apprehended will have the roots to withstand the winds of total unbelief. Of these two types of belief real belief is primary.

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Chapter Four Apprehension of Propositions

Let us return again to following the strict line of Newman argument. Having put apprehension, the third term of his argument in place, he will proceed to stay on this topic of apprehension for the rest of Part One entitled Assent and Apprehension. As I have said this treatment represents a significant turn in the argument. He has already reserved the project for showing how unconditional assent can rise from probable inference to Part Two entitled Assent and Inference, thus putting what I have called the burning question on the shelf for a while. I would have preferred that he had completed his demolition of his opponents stand by pressing on immediately. 1 Instead, Newman will go on ignoring his opponents, disregarding my expectations and arguing his case in his own way. An Experienced Attorney I picture the situation as follows. Newman is like an experienced attorney arguing in defense of Man, who stands accused by the prosecution of being irrational because he has committed the crime of saying that what he believes is true. When Newman first addressed his earlier remarks to us the jury, he paid no attention to the charge leveled by the prosecution but showed us instead that the man in the dock was simply being natural even though he might have made mistakes in his reasoning. Putting that premise in place, Newman has confirmed our common sense that the accused cannot be always wrong and may often be right. Thus he has already inoculated us against the fantastic charge of the prosecutor that most men are irrational except themselves. What Newman has done is to shift the burden of proof to the prosecution. They are the ones who have brought the charge that man is irrational in giving his assent. They are the revolutionaries here. It is, therefore, up to them to prove their charge. Newman then need not spring to the defense of man like some rookie defense attorney who is nervous
I am not the only one who seems to have been bothered by the fact that Newman here has shifted the focus of his argument by dwelling in Part One on the relationship between assent and apprehension in Part One and reserving the relationship between assent and inference to Part Two. Ian Kerr reports: There is another difficulty. The work [The Grammar of Assent ], in effect, is almost made up of two different books. Newman admitted as much to a member of his Oratory in Birmingham p. xi of editors introduction to An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. I think Newman wrote better than he knew, as I will argue above. 46
1

about clearing his client. He has tradition and common sense on his side. He can then turn with confidence to the next part of his defense, which is to show us how truths, not just mere opinions or probabilities, may be apprehended either by head or by heart. This is how he innoculates the jury with some further premises to deal with the attacks of the prosecution that will come. On that view of the matter Newman is not starting on a new book. He is writing the same book, one that will answer the problem, not only of the head, but the heart as well. Newmans Intention That it is Newmans intention to address the heart and imagination as well as the head of the reader is clear if we consider the sermon again. The problem is not just that intellectuals will deny the validity of assent but rather that the vast majority of people will lose their hold on the great belief that the One God exists. Still further, as evil as this denial of God as a truth of the mind is, it is much more evil as the denial of God as a truth of the heart. The heart is where religion is, that practical endeavor of human beings to acknowledge on bended knee that God rules each and every individual in creation. This is the problemit not just a theory of unbelief--it is the practice of unbelief. No mere argument can solve this kind of problem. Consequently, Newman will concentrate his attention on the type of belief that is the driving force in a human being. Even granting that people hold to the truth that God exists, a proposition that can be developed by theologians and philosophers, there is the question of how this belief may become a reality in the hearts as well as in the minds of men. How can this happen when a culture generates an atmosphere of unbelief that clouds the heart and imagination? Propositions in General It seems that focusing on this type of question is what turns Newman to the consideration of propositions in general. What is there about a proposition expressing a belief that make some of them an expression of truth which moves the intellect without apparently moving the heart and makes others an expression which does move the heart as well as the mind? This is not just a question pertaining to religion but one pertaining to the whole of human life. Unless Newman deals with this problem, he is not dealing with the whole problem confronting modern man; he is just talking to intellectuals about the sophisticated matter of how unconditional assent can follow from probable inference. That is not enough. To be practical he has to sit the intellectuals down and

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show them that, before they are equipped to deal with the intellectual problem, they will have to deal with the problem that the heart and imagination presents to all men in general and to themselves in particular. They will have to explore their own hearts, examine their own conscience before they tackle the question of the relationship of assent to inference. Thus Newman is not going out of his way in dealing with the two ways of apprehending a proposition either as an expression of ideas that seem to move the mind without necessarily moving the heart or as an expression of concrete persons or things or of things that move the heart as well as the mind. Rather he is quite within his way of being practical about the matter, of dealing with the whole man rather than with part of him, of dealing with the way men live rather than just with the way they think. Viewed from this perspective, Newman is absolutely right in moving on to the examination of apprehension, the third term of his argument. Apprehension Again From Newmans example of the mother and child we can see that he is interested in the topic of apprehension because of the bearing it has upon assent. For the child to give real assent to the word of his mother is certainly a more powerful assent to the truth than the one he gives to the scientific definition of lucern. In this chapter, however, we will observe how Newman backs up a bit, considering notional and real apprehension in so far as they are expressed in any or all propositions. This is a much wider topic than considering apprehension in relationship to assent. Newman is back again to consider that most elemental of things, the proposition, the record of what happens in the human mind when it meets up with the realities of the outside world. It is helpful to consider the mind as a kind of blank tablet upon which the things in the world inscribe themselves because man, unlike the beasts, has the power to ingest them in this fashion. This chapter, then, is foundational because it will describe what goes on in the mind before we come to the question of belief or assent. A Fussy Distinction? Newman now gets down to the job of how man apprehends the world. He makes what appears to be a rather fussy distinction between understanding a proposition and apprehending it. One may apprehend the proposition that John is Richards wifes fathers aunts husband without understanding that John is the great-uncle-in-law to Richard. The first act gives one a bare understanding of the words; one could agree to its truth if one accepted the authority of another who spoke this proposition. This vague
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understanding, then, is a notional apprehension, a kind of understanding from the outside of things, so to speak. If, however, one brings to this proposition a ready familiarity with family relationships, he will have a real apprehension of it. He will understand it from the inside, from his own sense of things. We see, then, that a proposition looks both ways. It looks outward to realities as they exist in the world. And it looks inward to the mind entertaining it. If the mind inside is sharp enough, the proposition is apprehended really. If the mind is not sharp enough, the proposition is apprehended notionally. Thus the same truth can be apprehended either really or notionally by different observers. Newmans use of the term apprehension, then, takes into account not only the content of the proposition but also the way it is perceived by the knower. So the term is after all not a fussy distinction. If Newman were to speak only of understanding a proposition, he would be speaking only of how it imposes its terms on the knower. In speaking of apprehending a proposition, he is speaking of the meaning the knower imposes on the proposition. It is this meeting of the mind with the proposition that Newman is most interested in. Different Subject Matters Newman then gives an example of how different subject matters determine the different ways the mind approaches them. The subject matter of a grammarian is the relationship of words to words, phrases to phrases, all general notions. Since his subject matter is notions, his apprehension of them is notional. Here we have no slight upon the intelligence of the grammarian. His expertise is to sort out the relations of various notions to each other. On the other hand the philosopher or the experimentalist has real things for their subject matter. Their goal is to get to the truth about these things existing, not as notions in the mind, but as things in reality. Here is a straight forward relationship between the kind of object and the way it is apprehended. The interesting twist, as Newman points out, is that the philosopher or experimentalist should be forgiven for any obscurity in his thought because of the difficulty of their subject matter. It is not easy for them to lead their listeners into the complicated matter of how reality stands. The listeners cannot just sit back and expect to have the truth delivered to them in a neat package. They must throw themselves into the subject and join the philosopher or experimentalist in his exploration. On the other hand, a literary man should be held to a higher standard of clarity because his art is to shape notions, round them out, dress them up and present them to his listeners. His job is to present his views in a clear
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package. Whatever one thinks of Newmans view of philosophers and literary men, his point is clear. Thinkers dealing with notions have more liberty to put them in a clear shape than those dealing with things. Another Example Newman gives another example contrasting an economist who has written in French a treatise on national wealth, trade balances etc. Here the man is aiming to discuss what happens in the world of economics. Imagine a clever English school boy quite familiar with the two languages but ignorant about economics. Nevertheless, the boy might turn out to be quite successful in his translation because he has concentrated on dealing with general notions. This example reminds Newman of a common test in his school days when the student was presented with a text from some ancient author and asked to present its syntax and grammar without ever bothering his head about any of the great themes expressed by the author. We have, then, a similar example of the same text lending itself to two different kinds of treatment, two different ways of apprehending it. The one deals with the notional aspect of the text; the other deals with its real aspect. Nothing Wrong In the earlier example about the way a school boy and an experienced adult read the same text of the poet, the adults reading was superior to that of the school boy because he had more experience of life. Here the notional apprehension of the boy shows itself to be inferior to the real apprehension of the adult. One could also say there was a deficiency in the man who could not take in the meaning of the phrase of dealing with family relationships compared to the one who did take in the meaning. But in the examples above about the grammarian as opposed to the philosopher or the school boy as opposed to the economist, no deficiency is implied. They just illustrate the rule that different subject matters require different apprehensions. General notions involve notional apprehension and individual things involve real apprehension. Doctors Another example stresses the same point. Doctors employ a notional vocabulary to describe terrible injuries or diseases. The Greek and Latin terms put these afflictions upon a notional level in which one affliction can be compared and contrasted with other afflictions, thus giving the doctor a scientific hold upon things that a healer without this theory cannot have. This does not mean that the healer cannot cure the particular
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affliction in front of him. It only means that he has no general grasp of the nature of the affliction. Another advantage of a notional vocabulary is that it shields all concerned from the shock generated by the sight or smell of the affliction. Thus a notional vocabulary performs the service of giving the doctor a better understanding of the affliction while shielding him from the distress caused by the actual treatment of these diseases or injuries. In the doctor, then, we have an ideal combination of both notional and real apprehension. But if one having no experience in the field of medicine uses the proper medical terms, he has only a notional apprehension due to a deficiency on his part. In this case his apprehension is merely notional. A Grasp of the Real Newman then goes on at great length to show how mans initial grasp of the world is real. Obviously it is real when he confronts actual sunrises, fires, great cities, famous individuals. But what about when these persons, places or things are not actually before him? His apprehension of things can still be real because, having a memory of these things, he can recall them as images in the present. But can he have a real apprehension of cities which he has never visited but exist in the present day? Can he have a real apprehension of cities he will never visit because they are past and gone? Newman answers yes because memory holds images and it is images that impart the feel and reality of things. Thus one man can be the means of imparting a real apprehension of things to another by his use of stories and historical accounts which have life in them. There is a limit, however, to this transference of a real apprehension from one man to another. There is no way a writer, for instance, can give a reader the actual feel of reading a great author. He can use metaphors for the author like a light shining in the darkness or a tower of strength among the barbarians but such expressions will not do the job. One has to read the author to have the experience. His Main Point So far Newmans main point is that man is so constituted that his sense knowledge of individual things in the real world supplies him with images that move his imagination as well as inform his mind. Thus a man who has more experience of life will have more insight into the things in the world around him than a child or boy can have. This means that the adult brings more to the apprehension of things than a youngster does, thus giving the adult more of an inside feel for what is going on in front of him. The inexperienced do not yet have this feel for things, this fund of accumulated experience
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that, for example, makes a man experienced in the wild jungles of the Amazon a much more perceptive observer of exactly the same sights, sounds and smells that the inexperienced perceive. This perceptiveness does not apply just to actual sights, sounds and smells. It applies to any concrete accounts given about events in history or in literature. The accounts move the imagination. The more the imagination is filled with images drawn originally from the experience of life, the more powerful is the perception. This does not mean necessarily that the perception is true to the facts. It only means that the perception is powerful in moving the imagination. Subject Matter of Notional Apprehension Now Newman moves to the consideration of notions or ideas. While man goes about taking in knowledge about the particular things existing in the external world, he spontaneously reduces them to various kinds of things in his mind which he is then able to compare and contrast with each other. Thus by sense knowledge he knows this rock, this tree, this dog and this man and by his intellect he knows rock, tree, dog and man in general. This does not happen all at once but with more experience of life he will see that men are similar to dogs in being animals but are different in being rational. Again, he will see that dogs are similar to trees in being living bodies but different in having senses. Finally, he will see that trees are similar to rocks in being bodies but different in being living bodies. Thus the process of placing individual things in various categories like rational bodies, sentient bodies, living bodies and plain bodies is natural to man. It was this spontaneous and informal systemization of ideas that Aristotle used as his basis for logic. As Newman puts it: We apprehend spontaneously, even before we set about apprehending, that man is like man, yet unlike; and unlike a horse, a tree, a mountain or a monument. 2 Man can then turn his gaze away from individual things and consider only his ideas or notions which, of course, exist as such only in his mind. Newmans comment on the process is as follows: In processes of this kind we regard things, not as they are in themselves, but mainly as they stand in relation to each other. We look at nothing simply for its own sake; we cannot look at one thing without keeping our eyes on a multitude of other things besides. Man is no longer what he really is, an individual presented to us by our senses, but as we read him in the light of those comparisons and contrasts which we have made him suggest to us. He is attenuated into an
2

G.A., p. 44.
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aspect, or relegated to his place in a classification. Thus his appellation is made to suggest, not the real being which he is in this or that specimen of himself, but a definition. If I might use a harsh metaphor, I should say he is made the logarithm of his true self, and in that shape is worked with the ease and satisfaction of logarithms. 3 Here is a fairly typical comment that Newman makes when discussing such topics as definitions or syllogisms. His tone is often derogatory, certainly not my tone when I presented the reader with the conclusion of the demonstration that man must be mortal as if it were a great triumph of thought. If Newman had specifically in mind Aristotles classic treatment of definition and the demonstrative syllogism, I would judge him to be but another English philosopher in the long line of those vigorously satirizing the use of the syllogism by the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages. Whatever the Schoolmen did or did not do is not my concern here. Aristotle What is my concern is what Aristotle did. I do not see how Newman is taking sides with those English philosophers here. Since his general approach to concentrate mainly on non-demonstrative reasoning about concrete matters, he is alert to deficient ways of approaching these matters. One of them is to abuse the art of definition by trying to make it do a task it was never designed for. It was designed to capture a single aspect of things, namely, their kinds or natures. The syllogism was designed to show how one reasons about them. The use of the strict definition and of the demonstrative syllogism is an abuse of reason if one tries to push it beyond this use, as Newman will show later on. Thus thinkers who do this may be fairly accused of substituting mere notions of the mind for things in reality, of taking men in all their richness and individuality and shrinking them down to mere logarithms of themselves so that all that is left is the colorless, odorless and ghostly notion of rational animal. So Far So far Newman has shown that the process of knowing things by sense knowledge and then contrasting and comparing them by the process of definition is natural to man. Hence we have his division into things which are the object of real apprehension and notions which are the object of notional apprehension. The ideal combination of them is found in a man who weds his experience of things with his notion or definition of them. The images of sense experience are joined to the notions of
3

G.A., p. 44-45.
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abstraction to give the man both a real and notional apprehension of the same things. Should he have any doubt about the validity of his abstractions, he goes back to the things from which they have been derived. Thus experience of things is primary and their definition is secondary. Yet the notions do have their use because they give man an overview of both the things he has experienced directly and of the things of which he has no direct experience. We saw this earlier when we concluded that all menpast, present, and futureare and must be mortal. Loss of Roots If, however, the notion loses it roots in the real, it floats off as a mere notion. This is necessarily the case in the affairs of life. The young can certainly memorize the notions of all kinds of things but lack the experience to realize their underpinning in reality. This cannot be helped. But it explains how the same poem by a classic author can be apprehended really by an adult but only notionally by a school boy. It explains how the notions of doctors which have their roots in their experience of terrible infirmities can be bandied about by the general populous who, though they have a notional apprehension of the terms, do not really know what they are talking about. The menace of notions and of notional apprehension does not consist in being what they are but in being detached from the experience from which the objects and their apprehension have been derived. Newmans Comment As if to ward off the impression that notions and their apprehension are always the signs of an abuse of reason, Newman makes the following comment: Each use of propositions [the notional and the real] has its own usefulness and serviceableness, and each has it own imperfection. To apprehend notionally is to have breadth of mind, but to be shallow. To apprehend really is to be deep, but to be narrow-minded. The latter is the conservative principle of knowledge, and the former the principle of its advancement. Without the apprehension of notions, we should forever pace round one small circle of knowledge; without a firm hold upon things, we should waste ourselves in vague speculations. However, real apprehension has the precedence, as being the scope and end and test of the notional; and the fuller is the minds hold upon things or what it considers such, the more fuller is it in its aspects of them, and the more practical in its definitions. 4 Individual things existing in the world are supreme. Thus mans direct
4

G.A., p. 24.
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experience of them is supreme, making real apprehension the foundation of the ideas or notions that are derived from them. Real apprehension makes a man deep so that he has roots in the real sufficient to prevent him from wandering all over the place when he thinks about them. Thus experience is the conservative principle in knowledge. But if he sticks just to his own experience of things without taking into account the human ability to abstract ideas from this experience and use them to get a broader view of reality that puts him beyond himself, he becomes narrow. Thus man should avail himself of the opportunity for a liberal education to attain that philosophical habit of mind which gives him an overview of reality which he cannot obtain by his own immediate experience of things. But the quest for a philosophical habit of mind also has its dangers. It is not possible for the student to maintain the connection between his experience of life and all the notions that pour in upon him. He is like a sloop trying to take on the sails of a great man-of-war. While he must try to take on this new rigging, he also has to take care to construct a bigger ship under them. He cannot do this in a day; only the experience of life can do that. Thus while he conducts this task of mounting bigger sails and putting a ship under them, he has to heed the warning of Newman that a liberal education can also be a very dangerous thing. It can make a man quite broad but also quite shallow unless he take care to load up his hold with the ballast of real apprehension. Anticipate the Argument If I may anticipate the argument for a moment, let me ask how the student is to get this ballast, these stones in his hold and that lead in his keel which will prevent his vessel from rolling over in the storms of life? He cannot just go about increasing his experience of life by trying to live life to the fullest in the way that students and aspiring writers often try. Here he will be getting the experience of life alright, the experience that only a person with money and time on his hands can drink down and feel wholesale. He has to discipline himself and look for mentors who really know what they are talking about and trust them like a child does his mother, a pupil does his teachers, and even an expert in one field trusts another. That means that even an aspiring philosopher wishing to see things for himself spends a great deal of his life exercising the very humble habit of belief in the word of another. Without the real apprehension of the importance of belief, he will turn out to be simply another windy sophist who thinks he knows what he is talking aboutbut doesnt. If he is of a more artistic or literary bent, he will turn out to be

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simply another weary artist who has become disillusioned with life before he has even started living a real one. Return To the Argument To return to the argument: in his discussion of the notional and real apprehension of propositions Newman has provided us with the foundations underlying all further acts of belief and assent. Before he can address questions about the relationship of assent, particularly that of belief, to life in the world, he first has to deal with life as man first encounters it in the world. He encounters it first in the rocks, trees, rabbits and men he sees around him, giving him images of what is real, images of what fills his imagination and memory. He then encounters it in the notions or ideas he derives from these things, thus supplying him with ideas which he may then consider on their own terms. These ideas or notions by themselves do not move the imagination so much as they inform his mind. Yet they also have a very important role to play in life. All in all, direct experience of things and notions give men their insides so to speak. Thus when they begin to ask questions about matters beyond their immediate experience, they have to rely upon the word of the more experienced in life and upon their own sense of what is probable. In brief, any realists account of belief and inference starts from the fact that man already has knowledge, not just belief, of many things in the world. Rsum Let us now review the progress of the argument up to this point by considering once again Newmans final destination; namely, that man can legitimately assent to the truth of the Catholic Church on the basis of reason alone. We now have a more specific notion of the type of assent which Newman is referring to. It is the act of belief. If belief is the truth about the idea of the Church, it will be notional. If it is to the truth that this concrete thing called the Church will be the anchor of his life, it will be real. We may conjecture that, while notional assent is important, real assent will be far more important. As we saw in his sermon, the prospect that most appalls him is the thought that unbelief will dominate the minds and especially the hearts and imaginations of modern man. So his aim will be to show, not just how one may believe in the Church as a truth, but how one may believe in the Church as a reality which claims the heart and imagination. Only such real assent to the truth will have the power to stand against the all pervasive atmosphere generated by the culture of unbelief in the modern world. This chapter has also filled in for us what the Catholic notion of reason looks like.
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It is realist; it includes the highly notional apprehension of philosophy and the highly real apprehension of belief. Thus just as notional and real apprehension have their place in the life of the individual, so they have their place in the life of the community where the notional apprehension of the intellectuals joins with the real apprehension of ordinary believers to give a community which has the proper balance.

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Chapter Five
Notional and Real Assent 1
Having presented his foundational view of notional and real apprehension as far as propositions are concerned, which means as far as basic knowledge of the world is concerned, Newman now turns to the relationship of apprehension to his main topic of interest, assent. It is obvious that that the real assent, say, of a child to the word of his mother is much stronger than the notional assent he gives to the scientific definition of lucern. May we conclude, then, that real assents have somehow more truth in them than notional assents? Are there degrees of truth matching degrees of assent? Can we say that the real assent a child gives to the word of his mother is somehow truer than the notional assent he gives to the scientific definition of lucern? Newman has to answer no if he is to be faithful to his first principle that assent is unconditional. An unconditional proposition lays out what is taken to be true without any conditions. It makes no difference how one has arrived at this truth. Either the proposition is true or it is not true. There is no middle ground here. It makes no difference, then, whether one holds an assent strongly or weakly. It also makes no difference how one has arrived at an assent. The scientific definition of lucern is just as true whether made by an expert or by a child. With this problem as well as many others in the back of his mind Newman will conduct a complete inventory of assent, putting all five types of notional assent on one side of the ledger and the act of real assent on the other side. We will reserve the topic of real assent for the next chapter and concentrate on the five types of notional assent. In doing this Newman will reveal the basic philosophical stance he has adopted toward the whole topic of assent. In other words, he will spell out in detail the first principles upon which he is conducting his investigation. A Digression There is one category, that of assent to first principles, where I will digress in order to show how dramatically Newmans view differs from that of the moderns. I will face off Descartes (d. 1650), the Father of Modern Philosophy, with Aristotle, the Father of Traditional Philosophy for the purpose of showing how dramatically the two sides are
1

We will be covering the basic argument of Chapter Four of The Grammar of Assent. entitled Notional and Real Assent.

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opposed. Aristotle is a philosophical realist. Descartes in contrast is a kind of philosophical idealist. My reason for doing this is that there is enough of the modern sense of things in all of us, whether we profess to be philosophical realists with a phenomenological, analytic, Aristotelian or Thomistic slant on things. Educated in modern times we have absorbed some ways of doing philosophy that blunt the force of Newmans realist approach. For that reason I have taken occasion to expand on comments by Newman in order to highlight the view that I think accounts for our skeptical reflexes. (1) Profession 2 Newman says: There are assents so feeble and superficial, as to be little more than assertions. I class them all together under the heading of profession. Such are the assents made upon habit and without reflection; as when a man calls himself a Tory or a Liberal, as having been brought up as such. 3 He gives other examples of men taking up the fashion of the day in dress or literary taste. They feel they know how to dress properly and how to discriminate between good or bad novels, their standard taken from what the fashionable people hold. There are again the assents of men of wavering or restless minds who take up and abandon beliefs so readily that they appear to have no views at all. An Assertion In Newmans usage the term an assertion seems to mean a proposition which one simply wishes to hold without much concern for the truth. Here one asserts rather than assents. The assent of profession seems to be one step above this. Although such assent is made out of habit without much reflection, it is an assent because the person making it holds it as true without thinking about it. But so weakly are assents of this type held that it is hard to judge in any particular instance whether a person is assenting or just holding to a probability. Today, for example, a person may say he believes in God but, upon closer examination by another, will show that he really holds this proposition as a merely high probability or likely opinion and not as a truth. Thus he professed to believe but really doesnt. In the realm of religion Newman cites notions such as justification by faith alone, or private judgment, or the Bible and nothing but the Bible. The contents of these
2

This section will cover the basic argument of pp. 52-60 of The Grammar.

G.A., p. 52-53.
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assents passively given due to ones upbringing and surroundings are mere notions vaguely understood. In the minds of serious thinkers these notions have a specific content, thus giving these thinkers a right to them that the populous does not have. Corrupt Form Profession seems to be a corrupt form of belief. There is nothing wrong with a subordinate believing in the truth of something upon the word of an authority. But when the subordinate professes to hold these beliefs as if he has arrived at them by his own insights, he becomes a victim of mere formalism. Newman gives the example of students being able to repeat the views of some admired professor word for word as if they know what they are talking about. But what has a definite meaning in the mind of the professor has little meaning in their own. The students, then, are being merely fashionable and simply repeat what they have heard. They are really believers but wish to impress everyone that they are knowers in their own right. Modern Example Perhaps a good modern example of profession would be the claim that the earth fully rotates on its axis in twenty four hours and completes its revolution around the sun in a year. Yet these truths are not drawn directly from experience because no one on earth has any sensation of the tremendous speed at which the earth is moving. These truths are conclusions drawn from the use of a great many experiments and calculations. Since few people have performed these experiments, they do not have the right to profess knowledge in this matter. There is nothing wrong if people admit that they hold this proposition about the movement of the earth because they accept the words of the experts. But here we would have a straight exercise of belief, which is perfectly legitimate in Newmans eyes. What is not legitimate is to profess knowledge when one has the right only to belief. 2) Credence 4 Newman states: What I mean by giving credence to propositions is pretty much the same as having no doubt about them. For example, school children assent to what they have been taught by their teachers. There is nothing unnatural here. It is a virtue that the young be open to the teachings of their elders. Further, college students harvest a great deal of information and imbibe a host of notions which constitute, as Newman says, the furniture of a gentlemans mind. Credence also constitutes the cultural
4

This section will cover the basic argument of pp. 60-64 of The Grammar. 60

framework in which the citizens relate to one another in a general way. Newman has no objection to this type of assent because it is natural to those who have less experience of life than their elders. It is also natural even to mature men because no man can evaluate all the information that pours in on him every day from the accounts of other people, of newspapers, magazines and other sources of information. If the information does not carry on the face of it anything that rings false and if the source seems credible enough, he accepts the propositions as a matter of course. Here it does not seem to make much difference whether the propositions deal with things or with notions because the apprehension of them is notional due to the perceivers lack of experience in the matter. This is part of the human condition. Without those acts of credence by members of society there would be no possibility of one generation handing on its accumulated wisdom to another generation. Without the exercise of credence by the inexperienced, they would not be open or docile enough to learn from their elders, instead taking everything they said with a large dose of salt. An Example from Religion Using an example from religion, Newman gives us a more precise idea of what he means by credence by contrasting it with real assent. Both are given to the truth of a belief but each represents a different kind of apprehension. He characterizes the assent that the majority of the Englishmen in his day gave to their religious beliefs as notional. They took for granted the truth of the religion in which they had been raised, respecting but not thinking about it very much. He contrasts this attitude with the religion of people in the Middle Ages or in the Spain of his day. Here the belief in Christ, his Mother and the Saints is a belief in actual persons, not notions. Heaven and Hell are places which are as real to them as the houses in which they live. Saints are to them as actual persons living in the house and not as mere pictures on the wall. In Newmans view, the only belief to which most religious Englishman gave real assent was Gods Providence over the nation, a lesson they learned from the devout and regular way they had been taught to read the Bible and from the historical lore of how God saved Great Britain from its enemies, particularly Catholic Spain. Here is an example of how real assent can stamp the character of a culture with traditions which hold for centuries. Today whenever English speakers see a man in an adventure movie who looks Hispanic, they know that they are looking at the bad guy who is hatching some plan to do in the hero, an Anglo of course.

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In the comparison between the beliefs held by the typical Englishman and Spaniards of his day, we have an example of the role apprehension plays in regard to assent. Notional assent to a truth of a notion is cooler and more detached. It is not hard to imagine, then, how such assents to religious doctrines may give way to holding them as mere probabilities due to the impact of a culture turning more skeptical about its religious beliefs. However real assent, the result of real apprehension of actual persons and places, gives roots that sustain belief against the winds of skepticism. Newmans Interest By implication we have an insight into the roles that notional and real assent play in society. The notional assent of the inexperienced to the word of elders explains the fact that information and standards are transmitted from one generation to the next. But real assent to what is taken as truth is the driving force in the shaping of a culture. The child in our earlier example accepted that the words of Shakespeare were wise because he respected his mother. Though he could not appreciate the wisdom of these words, he could sense the love of his mother for this author. Thus he will be equipped to undergo the hard labor of reading Shakespeare in school, a highly notional exercise. If he perseveres and lives long enough, he too will arrive at real assent to the truth of the Bards words and will impart respect for this wisdom to his own children. Through the interaction of notional and real assent a community passes on its wisdom from one generation to the next. Of course, a community also passes on its illusions. But the presumption is that, because all men have a basic grounding in sense knowledge of the world and because they are subject to the hard lessons imposed upon them by the passage of time, they will arrive at traditions with a great deal of truth in them. This conviction explains why Western educators have used the classics of ancient Greece and Rome to educate the future leaders of preserving the basics of Western civilization. The Import of the Examples mplicit in Newmans argument is that credence is natural to man. Without it the elders of a community would not be able to pass on their wisdom to the inexperienced. But do the elders have any wisdom to pass on? The realist presumption is that they do. If all men start out in life with an immediate but vague knowledge of the world around them, the more experienced will generally know more about the world simply because they have lived longer in it. This is not an absolute truth because there are older people
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society, intending to pass on notional

apprehension of traditions so that they might become real apprehensions, thus

who remain quite impervious to learning anything new. Yet it is a true enough generalization to warrant that the inexperienced defer to elders. This is the kind of universal statement which Aristotle uses to express his experience of the way things happen in the real world. Here generalizations are true only for the most part. This is a low standard of judgment for a geometrician, whose subject matter allows him to be more exact. But it is a good standard for the practical man, whose subject matter is not geometrical figures which may be defined with precision but rather the many ways that one generation passes on what it holds to be true to a younger generation. (3) Opinion Under the heading of opinion Newman classifies the type of deliberate notional assent a man gives to a proposition, not as a truth, but as a probability. This act of assent to a proposition as only probable comes about as men advance in intellectual maturity. In the course of growing up a man will review the store of beliefs he has acquired as a child and begin to sort them out. For example, a man who once gave the notional assent of credence to the proposition that God exists may upon further reflection suspend his assent because of doubts. While he may not rule out the possibility that God exists, he no longer holds it as a truth. Here he has reduced his assent to a truth into an assent to a probability or opinion. Or a person who once held the existence of God as a probability may end up holding it, not just a truth, but as a living truth. He has moved from holding an opinion to holding a belief. So the fact that man matures in his opinions leads Newman to classify opinion as an assent, not to what is held as a truth, but to what is held as a probability. Here a man says that it is a definite truth that I hold a particular proposition as a probability. Modern View The moderns hold that, since there is no such thing as a legitimate assent, absolutely everything should be held as a probability. Their general stance does not allow them to make the distinction that Newman makes. A modern will say that a man is not entitled to be so definitive in holding to a proposition as a probability. Up To This Point Up to this point we have been considering profession and credence as two types of notional belief. The probable inference leading to these beliefs rests heavily on the word of authority in one form or another. In the notional assent of opinion, we have the case of a more deliberate assent to a probability. This is more inner-directed than the other two. In the next part Newman will shift his attention to notional assents that are not
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beliefs at all. Rather they are assents given to what is taken to be strict knowledge. Here the word of authority plays no essential role. The assent depends upon a persons insight into the necessities involved in the world around him. Here we have the height of intellectual development. (4) Presumption The first necessities presented by the experience of man in any subject matter, whether it be in a particular field like philosophy, science, or indeed in the whole field of the external world are various presumptions. By presumption Newman explains, I mean an assent to first principles and by first principles I mean the propositions with which we start in reasoning about any given subject matter. They are in consequence very numerous and vary in great measure with the person who reasons, according to their judgment and power of assent, being received by some minds, not by others, and only a few of them received universally. They are all of them notions, not images, because they express what is abstract, not what is individual and from direct experience. 5 Comment A good example of a presumption or first principle in a particular field, say philosophy, is the definition of inference and assent with which Newman started his argument. These definitions are surely notions expressing universal abstractions. But where have they come from? They come from the only place they can come from in a philosophical realists scheme of things. They are drawn or abstracted from individual images, individual experiences of men actually inferring and assenting in the ordinary affairs of life. They are the result of the comparisons man spontaneously makes about this natural activity of reasoning. It is the experience of the fact of reasoning, then, that leads grammarians and logicians to distinguish between conditional inference and unconditional assent. What they have done is simply to note what takes place implicitly when man reasons. By a process of induction, they move from the images to the notions, from the concrete examples to the universal ideas and then formulate the first principles which necessarily apply to any instance that claims to be an exercise of reason. Obviously, not all philosophers accept this first principle because they are not philosophical realists. Here is an example, then, of what Newman means by a first principle in which experts in the field differ widely.
5

G.A., p. 66.
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Trust In the Powers of Reason and Memory

Let us now consider the example that Newman gives to illustrate what he means by a first principle or presumption disputed by experts. Some philosophers take it for granted that one must begin philosophizing by trusting in his powers of reasoning and of memory. Newman begs to differ. He points out that one can be absolutely certain that three times six is eighteen or that the diagonal of a square is always longer than its sides without being at all certain about ones reasoning powers in general. One may actually be a poor mathematician. Here are examples of notional truths. Similarly, a man may remember with absolute certitude that he walked to town yesterday without holding that his memory is reliable in all matters. Indeed, he may have a poor memory in general. Here is an example of a truth of fact. With these observations Newman explodes the theories either that man must begin with trust in his faculties of reasoning or memory. For example, three times six is quite a particular object even if it is a universal claim. So is walking to the town yesterday a quite particular object even if it is a transitory fact. So too are the reflective acts by which we recognize the truth of these objects. Why, then, should not man be certain of them? It is the particular act, not general trust in his powers, that gives him certitude about the particular object in question. Distrust of Mans Powers Newman would give the same answer to those philosophers who maintain that philosophizing must start with distrust of mans powers. Actually, this presumption is more common than the first because of the influence of Descartes, who started his philosophy by casting doubt upon the validity of knowledge supplied by the senses. Newman is impervious to doubt about these matters because he takes it for granted that a sane man may remember very well that he went to town yesterday even though he might have a very poor memory. Particulars What Newman insists upon is that mans first contact with the world begins with knowledge of particular things. Being focused on the things before him man also has a sense that it is he who is walking to town, that it is he who sees the tree in front of him. Further reflection will enable him to distinguish between the faculties by which he knows the truth of the particular thing in question. He can recall the feel of his walking and

G.A., p. 66.
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memory of the things he saw along the way. He can also see that three times six is eighteen. In short all of mans knowledge begins with particulars, with a man seeing something before him and also sensing that he is doing the seeing. Only upon reflection does he see that he has faculties. This reflection leads him to the conclusion that philosophy begins neither with the trust or the distrust of his faculties. It begins with a knowledge of things themselves. Thus his insight into the truth that he has the faculties of sense, reason and memory is indirect. He is not an angel whom the theologians tell us is able to have a direct intuition into his own nature. Rather man is a composite of body and soul, a unity which is first in contact with the external world through the senses of his body, those images in turn providing the material from which his notions are abstracted. As a Realist Here Newman is speaking as a philosophical realist holding that man is in immediate contact with the material world through the act of his senses, reason and memory. Thus a man can be sure that he walked to town because he has been in direct contact with his own act of walking. In regard to abstract matters: a man can see immediately the general truth that three times six is eighteen because he simply sees the truth in this particular instance. It is direct knowledge of a specific object, not trust or distrust in his powers, that provides man with the guarantee that he has the truth in particular case. Primacy of the Thing 7 Newmans argument is based upon the presumption that man has immediate knowledge of material things through his senses. If we were to track the path of this theory of knowledge, which is basically Aristotelian, we would start with things in the world, which, of course, exist on their own whether man knows them or not. Before man senses them, he is a blank tablet. After he senses them, they have inscribed themselves on his mind, imagination and memory as individual things. Thus if he becomes uncertain or doubtful whether he is right about something, he goes back to the thing itself. 8 He
7

For an excellent discussion of the primacy of things in a realist epistemology see Joseph Owens, C.Ss.R., Cognition: An Epistemological Inquiry, Center for Thomistic Studies, 1992, pp. 33-54.
8

Man can go back to the thing itself because he becomes the thing he senses, not physically, but cognitionally. Thus the same thing which exists as a tree on the lawn also exists in his mind. Here there is an identity between what is known and the knower. Thus mans knowledge of things is not a mere representation of things. It is the things themselves with a new kind of existence in the mind. In view of this realist epistemology, the primacy goes to the existence of the thing. Now in the act of sensing a thing man is also aware that he is doing the sensing. He can, then, reflect upon his own act of sensation and conclude that he does indeed have the power of sensation. Further, reflecting upon the fact that he not 66

very definitely does not go back to putting trust in an inward faculty like reason or memory, which is the more typical modern approach. A modern holds that, before he puts his trust in the knowledge of things in reality, he has to examine his own faculties to see if they are trustworthy instruments. Here we have the birth of various epistemologies or critiques concentrating upon the man within rather than the thing without. Here we have the heart of a so-called critical approach as opposed to the supposedly nave approach of Aristotle. Out of Fashion Now this appeal to things was going out of fashion in Newmans time and is even more out of fashion today. Part of the reason is to be found in Descartes (d. 1650), the Father of Modern Philosophy. So let us examine his position in order to provide a contrast with the method of Aristotle and Newman. Descartes starts by throwing doubt upon the existence of the external world. 9 He does not assert dogmatically the non-existence of the external world. But neither does he say that it does exist. Rather he suspends the spontaneous assent he had given to this proposition in his childhood and youth, fearing that it might be the source of illusion. To rid himself of this fear, he employs what is called the methodic doubt. This is what later philosophers will call being properly critical. Descartes will test his former assents of both knowledge and belief and, if he can find even the slightest reason to doubt them, he will put them aside for the time being. In doing so, he puts aside the realism of Aristotle, who holds that man has a vague but immediate knowledge of the sensible things in the world, a knowledge which does not have to be justified by proof because of the fact that it is self-evident, bearing its proof within itself. His Procedure Descartes proceeds as follows: at first he feels certain that he is sitting in his study before the fireplace. But then he reflects that he has often dreamed of this

only senses a particular tree but also knows that that it has the nature of tree reveals to him that he also has the power or faculty of intellect. He can abstract the universal idea implicit in the thing. He can conclude, then, that he is a rational animal; an animal because he can sense and rational because he can abstract. All these conclusions stem from the initial act which put him in direct contact with particular things in the world. So for the realist it is mans certain knowledge of particular things that anchors all further knowledge about his operations, his powers and even his very nature.
9

Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by Haldane and Ross, Dover Publications, 1955, Meditations on First Philosophy, pp. 131-200.

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situation. How then does he know that he is not dreaming? This question is enough to toss out the old assent. Again, he is certain that he has at least a head and a pair of hands. But then he notes that they are parts of a body. Are these parts really his or is he only dreaming again? Descartes goes on in this fashion like a man falling down a steep incline reaching out for various handholds only to discover that his grip gives way. He is headed for the bottomless pit of absolute skepticism. An Acknowledgement He explicitly acknowledges this, as well he might. Once a person suspends his assent to the reality of the world, he removes by a single stroke his position in that world and is left alone just with his impressions. He is no longer a definite part of the world of rocks, trees, animals and men. He no longer lives in a common world whose existence can be taken for granted by himself and others. He can no longer be certain that the tree he sees on a lawn is the same tree that his neighbor sees. In fact, he cannot even be sure that his neighbor exists. If it is legitimate to doubt that bodies exist, it is legitimate to doubt that other bodies called men exist. While Descartes still continues to live his life in the ordinary way, he now has no foundation for any knowledge of the world. How will he stop his fall into bottomless skepticism and arrive at a place that will allow him to begin climbing out of the pit? Like a good dramatist, Descartes leaves the reader with that question at the end of one of his meditations. Not Frightened Yet Descartes is not really frightened over the prospect of never getting out of the pit but is really quite happy to place himself and the reader in it. His use of the methodic doubt has performed the work of rendering the thought of Aristotle as old fashioned naivet. Did not Aristotle, we might picture Descartes asking, have theories about the heavens which, though modern science has shown them to be wrong, were accepted by mankind for over a thousand years? Though his theories had some basis in common sense, he was not truly critical. So I will forgive him for behaving like any peasant in swallowing down as facts the existence of potatoes growing in his fields and sheep grazing on the hills. He was of a less critical age. Descartes is determined not to be that gullible. Casting doubt on the existence of all sensible things, he will search for a first principle which will be impervious to any and all doubts.

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I Think, Therefore I Am He finds it, giving us the famous expression: I think, therefore I am (Cogito ergo sum). He now has a handhold. Even if the world does not exist, he knows at least that he exists. Now even realists will have to grant that this principle is true. If a man should attempt to doubt that he exists, the very doubt shows that he does exist. A non-being cannot doubt. But for Descartes the cogito is not only a true principles; it is the first principle. Thus it will supplant the first principle which Aristotle had located in things. Having assured himself that he exists beyond any shadow of a doubt, Descartes can then assure himself that, whether the ideas in his mind fit reality or not, he at least has ideas. Here is his second hand hold. He will then examine these ideas and prove in succession that he is at least a mind or spirit, that God exists, and finally that the external world exists. The details of how he does this need not concern us here. The noteworthy point is that we now have the spectacle of a philosopher who, having initially put aside any certitude about the rocks, trees, animals and men in front of him, will now try to get back to that world by means of thought alone. He will put together an elaborate chain of what he considers to be clear and distinct ideas in order to reestablish contact with the external world. In effect, he has initially denied the reality of the tree on his lawn and then brought it back by a process of what he considered to be a strict demonstration. Here it is not the existence of the world that serves as the basis for his theory; rather it is his theory that serves as the basis for accepting the world. Attractive To Moderns This approach of accepting the world on the basis of ones own theory has a great attraction to modern thinkers because they are almost by definition quite reluctant to accept the realism of the past and feel that they must create a new world for themselves. Though modern philosophers have rejected practically all of Descartes conclusions, they nevertheless share his starting point. They give priority to the existence of their ideas about things rather than to the existence of the things themselves. If the reader wishes to give himself a short test on whether he is a crypoCartesian or not, he can do the following thought experiment. Look at anything in front of you, perhaps a tree on your lawn. Ask yourself if it is really there, not as a practical matter, but as a matter for philosophical investigation. Naturally, this will get you thinking about all the skeptical doubts that have come down through the ages saying that you
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should not trust your perception that the tree is right in front of you and rooted right in that place on your lawn. If this shakes you up enough so that you begin to look for a more solid starting point for your philosophizing and you latch onto the idea that, even if you are not absolutely sure that the tree is on your lawn, you are absolutely sure that you have the impression in your mind that the tree is thereyou are a budding Cartesian. You have given priority over the tree in your head as opposed to the tree on the lawn. Now you may out of love for that tree try to reason your way back to it. But even if you get there (and I doubt you will) you will have gotten there by such a maze of thoughts that you will not end up with the tree you started with. How can you? How can a tree immediately informing you of its presence be the tree that you have to work so hard to get back to again? Putting a philosophy between you and the tree cannot help your being comfortable again with rocks, trees, rabbits and men. Something has happened! Look at the Tree Again On the other hand, look at the tree again on your lawn. Aware of all the objections that have been made to its real presence, check to see whether you are dreaming, on drugs or drunk. Having assured yourself that you are fit to philosophize, look at the tree again. If you can give full, unqualified, absolute and heartfelt assent to its presence, you are a budding Aristotelian or Thomist of the proper persuasion, all objections notwithstanding. You now have the solid starting point of the tree, not for just the eminently practical purpose of not running into it when you back out of the garage, but for the most glorious purpose of using it as the key to the knowledge of the whole world. Universal First Principle We have already seen how Newman rejects trust in mans powers as a first principle. We will now see how much of a realist Newman is when he does lay down what he considers to be a universal first principle that should be accepted by all men in regards to all subject matters; namely, that the external world exists. This first principle is based on the fact that there is a world out there and not on the fact that man can think. Let us see the way in which man arrives at this principle. First, there is the level of experience. Man has an immediate but vague certain knowledge through his senses that there are individual things around him. Experience through time sharpens his perceptions of these things. Here is real apprehension. Most people are content to leave the matter at that and conduct the rest of their thinking on that presumption. But if one
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were to reflect upon his knowledge of individual things, he would arrive immediately at the generalization that the external world exists. The result is a universal proposition or articulated first principle apprehended notionally. Not Demonstration The process of arriving at this principle is not a demonstration but rather a basic induction. Sense knowledge provides an immediate knowledge of the particular facts. No proof is necessary or even possible. Intellectual reflection then reviews the facts and then abstracts or induces from them a universal principle. The inquirer is now in the position to know that he is starting upon an intellectual foundation that he knows is true without having to prove it. For it is not possible to prove or demonstrate what one sees as immediately evident. If one tries, he would have to discover a principle which was even more evident than the one he is trying to prove. But what could be more evident than the proposition that the external world exists? 10 The fact that a man can make a mistake in some particular instance of sense knowledge is surely no reason for doubting the ability of the senses to grasp things. In laying out a first principle, then, the inquirer is laying out a truth which he takes for granted since it is self-evident. If a man does not do this, he begins his fall into the pit of skepticism, one that he will not climb out of with the ease with which Descartes made that move. As his followers later discovered, they found the bridge back to the external world was much harder to find that their master seemed to think. We are still in that situation today. First Principle of Morality Another proposition which Newman considers a first principle of universal acceptance is that there is right and wrong. As in the case of sense knowledge where man is a blank before he actually senses things, so in the case of moral knowledge, man is a blank before he learns right from wrong. Man is a composite of body and soul where all knowledge of whatever kind comes to him through the senses. Thus as man reaches

I remember the day I opened the book of a revered teacher of metaphysics, curious to see how he would handle the vexing problem of Descartes methodic doubt. His solution was along these lines. First, look at some object like a tree on your lawn. Then check to see whether you are asleep, on drugs, or drunk. If you pass these tests, then look at the tree again. If it is still there, then you know it is still there. I was immensely relieved. Who would have thought that a great metaphysician could be so sensible? When, however, this renowned professor said something like this to an audience of professors, they were honestly stunned. They could not believe that such a well known professor could have said that. They may even have concluded that the old man, renowned for his alertness, was finally beginning to slip a bit.

10

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the age of reason when he sees particular deeds of kindness or of cruelty, he knows without argument that kindness is right and cruelty is wrong. A bit later in keeping with his intellectual development, he judges a man who gives up his life for another as a hero. He judges a rapist as a criminal. These particular judgments already move on the implicit presumption that there is right and wrong. If one wishes to turn this presumption into a universal first principle, he abstracts from all particular circumstances and states that there is right and wrong in general. A Problem As Descartes set the fashion for starting with doubt about the existence of the external world, so a vast majority of philosophers today reject the traditional view that there are first principles of morality. Today we see a great cultural division about the morality of abortion, contraception, homosexuality, lying, torture, etc.,-- specific types of actions in the concrete order. If we are at the university, we will hear many arguments against the principle that there is such a thing a right and wrong. This generates an air of skepticism which makes it difficult for the reader to accept Newmans account of first principles unless he has done a great deal of reflection on the matter. I mention this, not to pursue the matter, but to point out that, if the reader has a hard time in understanding the traditional notion of first principles, he is simply registering the fact that he lives in the modern age. The only cure is to undergo a kind of intellectual therapy in order to regain the instincts of a realist by unlearning much of what he has learned. An Object of Devotion The philosophy of Descartes is not the only or even the main issue that Newman has in mind when he discusses first principles. Rather his basic concern is to suggest how man may attain belief in God, not simply as a truth, but as an object of devotion. And here we begin to get some idea of why Newman has been so interested in discussing the nature of first principles. We have already shown that mans imagination and emotions are involved in a special way when he has a real apprehension of things in the world. But God is unseen. Is it possible then to have a real apprehension of God? Pointing to the fact that man has a conscience, Newman answers yes. As we will see later, he does not argue that there is such a thing; he presumes it. To explain himself he draws an analogy between the senses and conscience. Just as sense knowledge provides man with immediate knowledge of the external world, so does the conscience put man in immediate contact with right and wrong and hence, with God.
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What Are the Images? But just what are these images which conscience supplies? They derive from the immediate experience of the feelings of being blessed or accused by a Law Giver. These feelings either precede, accompany, or follow upon the commission of some thought, word or deed. The feelings are particular; the actions are particular; both are the starting points in reality which launch the believer into the world of the unseen just as individual things are the starting points which launch man into the external world. And just as man forms realistic images of the world in his imagination which carry with them an emotional charge, so does man form vivid images of himself in relation to God which also carry an emotional charge. Conscience, then, provides the starting point of authentic religious experience. Other religious thinkers might start with other first principles as, for example, awe at the beauty of nature and its Maker or delight in the grand design of things. They of course will have their own view of what constitutes true religion. Newman has a more severe view. In making the voice of conscience a first principle, he indicates the type of religion he has in mind. It is a religion in which the initial stance of man towards God is that of a sinner before a judge. Here Newman is preparing the reader for the point towards which he has been moving since the beginning; namely, the matter of real belief in the existence of God. 5) Speculation Having finished with the notional assent man gives to the knowledge of first principles, Newman proceeds to discuss the notional assent man gives to the conclusions of demonstration. The term speculation is a poor word to describe what Newman means by it. Today the term makes us think of stock manipulators, land grabbers or dreamers of far out ideas. But the origin of the word comes from the distinction which Aristotle makes between pursuing truth simply for its own sake and pursuing it for the sake of action. To pursue the truth for its own sake is to approach reality as a spectator solely interested in knowing the way things are in themselves. Here reality itself dictates to man what it is. We may call it a theoretical approach but even that is not a good word because theoretical is often equated with being unreal. At any rate, the term that has come down today to signify a purely objective study of reality is speculative or contemplative. In contrast the pursuit of truth for the sake of action is to look at the world for the sake of doing something about it. The approach is practical. Without going into the matter of exactly how Newman divides the sciences, we will only note that here he includes the demonstrative sciences under the heading of speculation.
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Since the conclusions of a demonstration or syllogism follow upon the immediate truth of first principles, Newmans discussion of speculation follows upon his discussion of first principles. Since the reasoning involved in speculation is abstract, it compels assent if done correctly. Further this assent is strictly notional because it concerns universal notions. Review of This Chapter Newman has completed his survey of notional assent. In the case of profession and credence, we have the assents of belief, the latter being held with more tenacity than the former. Nevertheless, both are notional because the object is general notions accepted by those without the experience in life to know the roots from which these notions have come. Next is the more reflective assent of opinion that accepts a proposition as only probable. Finally, are the two assents given to the truth of first principles and of demonstrations. All of these assents are notional because their objects are notions. In the next chapter we will take up the subject of real assent, the counter weight to notional assent. Rsum Although Newmans main goal is to show how any man main attain real belief in the truth that the Catholic Church is founded by God, he does not exclude the role that the notional assents of credence, opinion, presumption, and speculation play in arriving at the truth. They are factors in the life of men. Nevertheless, real assent is Newmans main interest.

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Chapter Six
Real Assent Contrasted With Inference1
Having completed his discussion of the notional assents of belief and of strict knowledge, Newman then proceeds to a discussion of the real assent of belief. As we saw in the previous chapter, things are the objects of real apprehension while notions are the objects of notional apprehension. This means that, while the assent given to the truth of notions is more impersonal, cool, detached, the assent given to the truth of things is more personal, emotional, engaged. It also means that real assent follows from experience in the realm of the concrete while notional assent takes place in the realm of the abstract. Though the two types of assent are distinct, they are also related. One may give his assent to the truth of some idea without necessarily realizing the full import of that truth. It is the experience of life that may lead him to real apprehension. Here we have, then, a natural progression from notional belief to real belief. The Old and the Young Newman proceeds to give many examples of how notional assents may be changed to real assent due to the passage of time. The school boy reads the stories of Homer and accepts their lessons because they enchant him and have the approval of his elders, who consider them classics. He apprehends the words, but simply as notions, because he does not have the experience of life in order to realize their full import. But when the reader matures, he begins to understand, his brow having been creased with worries and his heart ploughed by grief. Then the words uttered by the poet over two thousands years ago take on life. The Duke of Wellington Newman draws another example of the passage from notion to real assent from English history. After his victory over Napoleon the Duke of Wellington laid out a program for new plans that the nation had to adopt in order to have an adequate defense. The public accepted these suggestions on the authority of the great hero but did not do anything about them for thirty years. Only when a new crisis presented itself did the reforms suggested by the Duke become a reality. There was no change in the
1

This chapter will cover the argument at the end of Chapter Four of The Grammar of Assent.

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beliefs of the public. The change consisted in the way that beliefs were apprehended. The Practice of Meditation In another example Newman cites the Catholic practice of meditating on the mysteries portrayed in the Gospels so that notional beliefs may become real. Here the images of the Gospels which over time may be apprehended only notionally at some point take on life when the experience of the Catholic catches up with the mystery portrayed in the sacred accounts. In another example he speaks of a preacher who, through long practice, has preached for many years on the mysteries of religion as if they were mere notions which he had to work up so as to impress his congregation. But at a certain point in his life his heart may be ploughed by grief. It is then that the Gospel accounts become real. The Movers of Society We should not think that, just because real apprehension of beliefs gives reformers, systematizers, inventors etc. a special energy in pursuing their projects, they necessarily hold to a truth. They may or may not. What they hold to be true may really be a great illusion. But this illusion will be held with energy and, consequently, drive truths that are only notionally apprehended off the public stage. There is the possibility, then, of a whole culture being dominated by unbelief as a driving force dominating the imaginations and hearts of men as completely as the culture of belief once shaped Western Man. The Key Feature The key feature of real assent or belief is that it supplies the internal drive to mans life even in its ordinary aspects. The phenomena of notional assent explain how the wisdom of a society is able to be passed down from one generation to another. General statements are notional and, therefore, communicable. They can be expressed by elders and received by the inexperienced as truth. They provide a general framework. It is each persons experience of life, however, that brings realization. It is this realization that puts the guts, the drive, the heart into belief. For instance it is the American belief in democracy as the best form of government. Such a belief is a mere platitude until it is taken into the heart and imagination of Americans. When it has been taken in it becomes a real force in the national life so that Americans will simply take for granted that the rest of the world should embrace democracy as the only form of government suitable for modern men. This is real assent in action.

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A Fight In concluding this survey between notional and real assent Newman finally steps into the ring, acknowledging for the first time the views of his opponents. They fight in the colors of inference; he will fight in the colors of real assent or belief. In denying the legitimacy of belief, both notional and real, his opponents maintain that men should conduct their affairs in the cool light of reason. This flows from their stand that, since inference in concrete matters attains only probability, an honest thinker must detach himself from his emotions and tailor his conclusions to the precise degree that the evidence warrants. His mind, then, is like a balance scale, weighing the pros and cons of each issue until one side or the other tips the balance, thus giving him the most probable truth of the matter. Newman takes the side of real belief in what is taken for a truth. Here religion, whether true or false, enters the ring. The question is not whether the moderns or the religionists have the truth or not. Rather the question is whether which side has taken the proper assessment of the way human nature works. The particular issue is the question of how to reform the morals of society. The moderns say that the reformation of morals may be achieved by exposing the people to the marvels of science and literature in order to perfect their skills in inferential reasoning. Implicit in this plan is the effort to pry those who are religious from their supposedly rigid belief in truth in order to open their minds to a supposedly more rational attitude. Newman will attack this plan, arguing that it is a mere theory which cannot stand under an examination of the facts of how men actually reason and behave. Indeed he will close by showing that this theory of theirs does not even square with the way they operate. They really operate like believers, not models of purely inferential reason. An Earlier Piece Newman begins by quoting a large section of a piece that he had written originally in 1841, thirty-nine years before he wrote the Grammar of Assent. After noting that the statesmen of his day were mounting a campaign to improve the morals of society, especially those of the lower orders, he comments upon the doctrine of the day that animated them: That doctrine was to the effect that the claims of religion could be secured and sustained in the mass of men, and in particular in the lower classes of society, by acquaintance with literature and physical science, and through the instrumentality of Mechanics' Institutes and Reading Rooms, to the serious disparagement, as it seemed to me, of direct Christian instruction. 2
2

G.A., p. 88.
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On the field enter the statesmen, stand-ins for cool reason, who supposedly restrict themselves to sorting through various probabilities until they arrive at the most probable conclusion. They will teach the masses to think in this fashion by exposing them to literature and the discoveries of science. Newman enters the field. He considers this proposal, however well intentioned, to be a disparagement of direct Christian instruction. Christian instruction moves from top to bottom, from the authority of the Church to the obedience of men. Its typical form is the catechism, which asks what the Church teaches and gives definitive answers. It teaches beliefs to young and old, requiring that they pattern their lives upon them. In brief, the traditional way of inculcating morals in the community has been by way of belief in definite truths learned from some religious authority. Newman Continues: People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity should regain the organic power in human society that once it possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy and resisting a pretense. ... Do not attempt by philosophy what was once done by religion. The ascendancy of faith may be impractical, but the reign of knowledge is incomprehensible. The problem for statesmen of this

age is how to educate the masses, and literature and science

This passage summarizes Newmans whole argument. The question is the eminently practical one of how to maintain the morals of society. For Western man the education for morality had been entrusted to religion, pagan at the beginning and Christian later on. One may debate religions success in this matter but the historical fact remains that such was the traditional approach. Beliefs, both of credence and real assent, dictated the process by which the elders passed on the standards of morality to succeeding generations. Now the question arises whether a new view of reason can supplement the role of religious authority. Later in time the question will be whether inferential reason can supplant religion altogether. After considering the facts of how men actually think and live, Newman brands the modern suggestion as a pretense. It is an unreal theory, a plan that cannot work. His argument, then, is a pragmatic one which does not get into the question of whether the religious beliefs are true or not. Rather it gets into the question of whether the new reforms are real or not. Will they do the job of

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raising the morals of society? The Tendency of Intellectuals Newman charges his opponents with overestimating the power of inferential reason as far as living life is concerned. Here they share in the fault of intellectuals in general, who often take the view that belief in definite truths is the result of mere feelings, not the result of reason. They want people to learn how to take a more notional or intellectual approach, to learn how to balance one set of probabilities against another set and reach a conclusion about which set is more probable. In Newmans language, they over-estimate the power of the notional. He says: This is why science has so little of a religious tendency; deductions have so little a power of persuasion. The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma; no man will be a martyr for a conclusion. A conclusion is but an opinion; it is not a thing which is; but which we are 'quite sure about. 3 If I had to put in a few words Newmans argument for the power of real belief, it would be this passage on how actual things and real people influence us most deeply. The passion and pride of man are powerful. Traditionally religion has tried to guide them by the exercise of authority, by holding up saintly persons as models for imitation, and by initiating solemn rituals in the honor of real persons like Christ and Mary. Will the notional arguments of inferential reason be able to exercise that kind of power? Inferential Religion Newman answers no. Inferential religion or philosophy will not be able to do the job. He says: Life is not long enough for a religion [or philosophy] of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof. We shall ever be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences, and divines into textuaries. We shall never get at our first principles. Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyze your elements, sinking farther and farther, and finding 'in the lowest depth a lower deep', till you come to the broad bosom of skepticism. 4
G.A., p. 89.

G.A., p. 89.
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Here is a perfect description of what happens to one who subjects his belief to an intellectual review in the modern spirit. Let us suppose that, if one is a Catholic, he asks himself how he can be sure that Christ founded the Catholic Church. To meet the supposedly scientific standard of being objective or detached, he must suspend his belief. Then he must launch himself upon a reading program which includes many thinkers of different persuasions, even including St. Thomas Aquinas. He also checks the various commentaries on the Bible, and reviews problems in Church History. How many years will this take him to reach some kind of answer to his question? And what will be the nature of his answer? At the very best he may arrive at the high probability that Christ did found the Church. But belief in a high probability is not the same as belief in a definite truth. If we assume that he had definite belief at the beginning of his inquiry, we can assume he has lost this belief. He may not realize this for a while; but he will increasingly grow restless at the way the Church carries on as if it is speaking eternal and definite truths. Whether he continues to go to Church or not, he has become a skeptic to one degree or another. He will not think and live by the words of authority, considering them demeaning to an intellectual like himself. Anti-Intellectual in Attitude? As if to ward off the impression that he is being anti-intellectual, Newman goes on to say: I only say, that impressions lead to action, and that reasonings lead from it. Knowledge of premises and inferences from them, this is not to live. It is very well as a matter of liberal curiosity and of philosophy to analyze our modes of thought: but let this come second, and when there is leisure for it, and then our examination will in many ways even be subservient to action. But if we commence with scientific knowledge and argumentative proof, or lay any great stress upon it as the basis of personal Christianity, or attempt to make man moral and religious by libraries and museums, let us in consistency take chemists for our cooks, and mineralogists for our masons. 5 Newman has the same sense as Aristotle does about the radical difference between a theoretical and a practical approach to religion and morality. As we will see

G.A., p. 91.

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later in more detail, 6 the ancient Greek insists that, before anyone can take up the philosophical study of ethics, he must already have met the two conditions of being both virtuous and experienced in the affairs of life. His reason is that men become good, not by argument, but by long practice in attaining the virtues in the context of a proper upbringing. This upbringing naturally includes deference to the elders of the community, whose authority sets the framework. Further, the young become experienced in the affairs of life only by assuming the role of adults in the affairs of the community. Action based upon belief precedes the reflections of philosophy. Living upon practical truths comes before reflection upon those truths. Thus only those who first live out their morality in the context of a community are equipped to reflect upon morality in philosophical endeavors. The same goes for Catholics raised in the community of the Church. As Newman has said, the impressions of real belief lead to action while inferential reason leads from it. If there is no real belief to start with, inferential reason leads to some form of skepticism. No Opponent Newman is no opponent of liberal studies or philosophy when they are kept in their proper place. That place is within the larger context of living a good life. Living consists in all the actions that take a man through the day, week, or month. These many actions are determined by many choices. Chief among these choices is the act of real assent or belief. These acts both mold and are molded by the character of a man. If vital belief in a truth underlies the study of the liberal arts, philosophy or theology, then such beliefs shape the notional assent given to the truth of generalizations. These generalizations do not drift in and out of the mind according to the prevailing intellectual fashions of the day. Rather they are anchored in vital belief and serve that belief. If, however, vital belief is absent, then mere notional assents even to truth are but castles built upon sand. They will look good for a while but will crash when the floods come. A Reflection Upon the Recent Past In reading Newmans words upon the place of philosophy in the scheme of education, I cannot help but think of the disappearance of traditional philosophy in the mid-Sixties from the curriculum of Catholic colleges. Formerly, all students had to take eighteen hours in philosophy and eighteen hours in theology to appreciate the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Those requirements evaporated with amazing rapidity in the
6

See Chapter Nine below, note 9 and the discussion above it. 81

course of a few years. I was amazed. How could studies based upon demonstrative reason just evaporate from the curriculum? Something had happened in the minds of those shaping the new curriculum. Somehow the basic beliefs underlying the worth of studying St. Thomas must have disappeared. Here we have an illustration of Newmans contention that the foundations of a liberal education in philosophy and theology are ultimately real beliefs. Remove that foundation and the structure raised upon it will collapse even when that structure deals with the highest type of notional assent to demonstrative truth. The notional assent to strict knowledge cannot hold up against the waves of unbelief unless it is grounded in real belief. St. Thomas Aquinas In the case of St. Thomas Aquinas real belief generated the desire to demonstrate Gods existence. He believed in the existence of God long before he ever demonstrated it. If, however, a generation loses a real sense of that belief, the demonstrations of St. Thomas will appear to them merely as historical monuments to an age that has passed. His demonstrations will somehow become historical curiosities rather than real proofs and so may be removed from the general program and relegated to the study of a few philosophy majors who have to study the history of philosophy to meet the requirements of their specialty. The Cardinal Concludes The Cardinal concludes his essay by noting that the social planners show by their actions that they are really in agreement with his assessment of how powerful real apprehension and belief are upon the dynamics of society. Lord Broughan [one of the political figures behind the social program] has recognized the force of this principle. He has not left his philosophical religion to argument; he has committed it to the keeping of imagination. Why should he depict a great republic of letters, and an intellectual pantheon, except that he feels instances and patterns, not logical reasonings, are the living conclusions which alone have a hold over the affections or can form the character? 7 The Omnipresence of Real Assent The plans of the elite for the reformation of society are, then, a pretense. In theory

G.A., p. 92.

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they talk about the power of clear thinking. In reality they propagate their views with images of respected figures erecting great monuments to a republic of letters. Thus they really adhere to the same view as Newmans; namely, that real assent to what is taken for truth is what moves individuals and communities. Newman called the efforts of the reformers of his day a pretense and let it go at that. We today, having much more experience in hearing about new visions for the future, may well brand such efforts as shams. The modern elite feel in their very bones that there is no God and, if there is, He cannot be one who faces man as a Judge of sinners. They are not neutral but rather vehemently opposed to the claim of the Church that it has the truth. They scorn the position that the common man can know of moral absolutes. They despise the past and yearn for the future like devotees of a secular Moses fleeing the slavery of Egypt (the Church) and heading for the Promised Land of some utopia 8 . These are not the conclusions of mere inference but the driving beliefs of men whose convictions now dominate our culture. How does the claim of the experts to go by cool reason square with their zeal to revolutionize society? They are really believers. They hold their views as truths. Being men of the world, they know what it takes to effect changes in society. So they equip themselves with all the tools of image-making to plant their message in the minds and hearts of men. In their use of images and sound bites they present the

appearances of truth. They manipulate. But when they present themselves to the public,
they assume the pose of fair and impartial minds who nevertheless must attack traditional religion out of a sense of duty because the Church is so obviously against reason and progress. The scholarly elites leave it to the louder mouths among their followers to protest in righteous indignation at the sins of the Church, real in some cases, as the scandals about clerical child abuse show, but imagined in many others. Behind it all is the driving force of unbelief masquerading as impartial reason. The Modern Drive To appreciate just how deep is the modern drive to revolutionize the world, we should recall the audacious move of Descartes in doubting the existence of this world and taking as his first principle the certitude that only he himself exists. At one stoke he removes the sense that all men live in the same world and substitutes the sense that

I am using the term utopia in the sense that such will be the goal of any secular program which strives to create a heaven upon earth at the expense of the religious hope that the real heaven exists only after man passes through the gates of death to the after-life.

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each man can be certain only of himself. Thus man cannot be immediately certain of the existence of his parents, his relatives or of anyone else upon this earth. At one stroke he deprives man of the authority invested in elders and traditions of the community. It is True It is true that Descartes subsequently tries to restore a world so that men can live in it. But he does so by an elaborate chain of reasoning. By sheer inference he tries to fill in the blank that he had made of the old world with a new one according to his own ideas. To be intellectually respectable, philosophers must now continue to doubt that there is a world out there in order to avoid the label of being naive like old Aristotle and St. Thomas. Thus they continue the habit of approaching the world as a creator who must fashion a new world rather than as a creature who must accept the world he never made. Descartes was still Catholic enough to keep the existence of mans immortal soul and of God in the picture. But later thinkers discarded the religious tenets but held onto the doubt. I can imagine them saying: What harm is there in doubting the existence of the old world? Will there not come experts with plenty of ideas about the way the world should be and construct a new one? Why shouldnt experts treat the world of nature and of men like an undifferentiated mass just waiting to be put into shape? Why should they be intimidated by an author like Newman making his old-fashioned appeal to the nature of things? Does he not realize that such an approach is the problem, not the solution? Does he not realize that men should not settle for the way the world is but rather make it into what it should be? Rsum Once again let us see how far along the argument we are by taking another sighting of Newmans goal. It is to show how the ordinary man can arrive at real certitude of the truth of the Catholic Church by the use of reason alone. What Newman has done in the chapter above is to contrast the workings of inferential reason with those of real assent as far as the morality of a community is concerned. He has shown that, while the elite talk about the use of inferential reason as the ideal way to go, they do not themselves follow that way. They are really believers, as fervent in their real assent to the tenet that the world will be improved by science as Christians are devoted to the belief that the after life exists. But the moderns take on the pose of being impartial thinkers carefully balancing all sides of a question about morality to arrive at the greater probability. The Church takes the more honest position of acknowledging that it is not impartial at all. It is openly committed to a program of moral reform based on the twin
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authorities of faith and reason. In the argument above Newman shows that it is realistic, indeed more rational and more honest, to entrust the improvement of the moral condition of society to the authority of religion. .

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Chapter Seven Assent and Apprehension in Religious Matters 1

Newman has finished four-fifths of Part One entitled Assent and Apprehension by considering ordinary matters. Now he proceeds to the one fifth of his presentation; namely apprehension in religious matters. His strategy has been to clear away as much as possible from our minds and imaginations the illusions created by an atmosphere of open unbelief, not just in religious matters, but in ordinary matters as well. Having undergone this therapy, we are now ready to consider religious matters, those hot button issues which trigger off all kinds of reactions in the human psyche. He will be particularly concerned with belief in the existence of the One God. Since philosophy is concerned with basic causes, it sure makes a big difference in ones view of the world whether one holds either that God exists or not. And the first thing he makes clear is that he will simply assume the truth of this proposition. Now for the longest time I could not get over my expectation that Newman should prove the truth of this belief even though he explicitly stated his intention not to. Here we have again one of those disagreements between a reader and an author about what the author should have done. I suppose that I was used to reading St. Thomas proofs for Gods existence and so took this procedure as the only way to proceed in dealing with the existence of God. Wrong Expectation But eventually I saw that I was wrong. I was confusing a practical with a theoretical investigation. St. Thomas never confused the two. 2 Following Aristotle, he insisted on the radical distinction between the way of proceeding in a theoretical science like metaphysics and in a practical one like ethics. In a metaphysical demonstration for Gods existence, the only presumption that one starts with is that the world exists. From there one proceeds to demonstrate that only God is the cause. But in a practical
1

Grammar of Assent.
2

In this chapter we will cover in a general way Chapter Five (Assent and Apprehension in Religious Matters) of The

Geraghty, Richard. The Object of Moral Philosophy According to St. Thomas Aquinas. Washington: University Press of America, 1982. The whole point of this book is to show that moral philosophy is a practical rather than a speculative science. 86

argument the teacher presumes that his students are already virtuous because they, having formed their characters on the proper moral and religious beliefs, are not looking for a demonstration. They are looking for practical norms on how to live out their beliefs. The teacher of ethics, then, should not burden his argument with proofs that are proper to metaphysics but should stick to the practical goal of ethics. Realization After finally realizing that this practical approach had a firm place in the Catholic tradition, I could appreciate what Newman was doing. He was moving, not as a man who had lost faith in the power of metaphysical demonstration, but as a man making a practical investigation into the topic of belief. This becomes clear when we read the very first words of the chapter. He says: We are now able to determine what a dogma of faith is, and what it is to believe it. A dogma is a proposition; it stands for a notion or for a thing; and to believe it is to give the assent of the mind to it, as it stands for the one or for the other. To give a real assent to it is an act of religion; to give a notional, is a theological act. It is discerned, rested in, and appropriated as a reality, by the religious imagination; it is held as a truth, by the theological intellect. 3 Here he makes a direct connection between what he has been doing in the first four-fifths of his argument with what he will be doing in the last fifth. Having shown that in ordinary matters beliefs may be apprehended either notionally or really, he now states that dogmas, which are but another name for beliefs, may be apprehended either notionally or really. Real apprehension constitutes the heart of religion. Notional apprehension constitutes the basis of theological reflection. Note that Newman is not saying the dogmas are true because he has shown the ordinary beliefs are true. Rather he is just pointing out a similarity between ordinary and religious beliefs. As far as the truth of dogmatic beliefs are concerned, he takes for granted that they are true and assumes the same for his readers because he is a Catholic addressing Catholics. What he does not take for granted is the point that he is making; namely, when his readers consider their own religious experience, they should see that their dogmas are stated in propositions intended to be taken as truths about the way reality is and not as mere emotions about the way the believer happens to feel. To believe in a dogma as true is, then, just as rational an act as holding an ordinary belief as true.
3

G.A., p. 93.

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The Difference The difference is that, while the ground or justification for holding an ordinary belief as true depends on an ordinary exercise of reason, the ground for holding a dogma as true depends upon a supernatural act of faith. But this difference in the grounding of natural and supernatural belief is not Newmans concern. Rather he as a philosopher is showing his readers that they should not fall prey to the modern assumption that all belief, particularly religious belief, is irrational. If they fall into this presumption, which they may do so even without realizing it because of the powerful atmosphere generated by the culture of unbelief, they will be cutting off from themselves their wing of reason and trying to fly upon the wing of faith alone. This move is fatal for a Catholic living in the modern world. For such a Catholic will see no contradiction between holding his faith as a private act which has nothing to do with his public stance on moral and political questions. Having been influenced to cut off reason from his own faith, he will cut off his faith from having anything to do with the reason he exercises in his public life. The result will be the chorus among many Catholics today that they are personally opposed to abortion, same-sex-marriage or euthanasia but etc. etc. That but becomes the epitaph written on the tomb stone of a local Church that has given up its soul. To Continue But let us continue with Newman the philosopher in his effort to save the reason of future Catholics. A bit later he says: This being understood, [that dogmas are expressions of reason] I propose to consider the dogmas of the Being of God, and of the divine Trinity in Unity, and in their relation to assent, both notional and real, and principally to real assent... .4 Later he will add to this list the third category of belief in dogmatic theology. 5 The particular angle from which he will treat these three beliefs is to investigate how they, which are obviously the objects of notional assent, may also be the object of real assent. To repeat myself: in this investigation he will put aside the matter of how man acquires belief in the One God, the basic proposition of natural religion. He will also put aside the matter of how man acquires belief in the Holy Trinity, which is the basic proposition of revealed religion. Finally, he will put aside the question of how man
4

G.A., p. 93. G.A., p. 123.

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acquires belief in dogmatic theology, which is due to his faith in the Church. He will put aside the argument showing the ground of these beliefs, not because grounds cannot be given, but because his goal is practical. As he states: So far is clear [that dogmas may be the object of notional assent]; but the question follows, Can I attain to any more vivid assent to the Being of a God, than that which is given merely to notions of the intellect? Can I enter with a personal knowledge into the circle of truths which make up that great thought? Can I rise to what I have called an imaginative apprehension of it? Can I believe as if I saw? Since such a high assent requires a present experience or memory of the fact, at first sight it would seem as if the answer must be in the negative; for how can I assent as if I saw, unless I have seen? but no one in this life can see God. Yet I conceive that a real assent is possible, and I proceed to show how. 6 The Readers Experience Newman can assume that Catholic readers have already given notional and real assent to their beliefs. But usually they cannot sort them out one by one because, when they believe in the teachings of the Church as coming from God, they take in these realities as a whole. Thus they already consider God, Christ, Mary and the saints to be real persons even though they have not been seen with the eyes. Should someone object that real belief in unseen persons seems impossible, they will not be startled. Did they not learn in their catechism as children that, though man does not see God because He is a spirit, God knows everything that a man thinks, says, and does? Thus while Newman assumes that his readers hold their beliefs as vivid realities, he also assumes that that they are unable to give a philosophical account of how beliefs apprehended notionally can also be apprehended really. This was no problem when he was considering the phenomena of real assent to the truth of the things in ordinary experience. After all, persons and things in the world are capable of being seen though in particular cases they are unknown by the particular believer. But how does one explain the fact that there is real assent to realities as if they were seen but are really unseen? There is a big difference, then, between the objects of ordinary belief and those of religious belief. They belong to two different orders of reality. Notion of God But before he gives his answer, Newman takes care to define the traditional notion of

G.A., pp. 95-96.

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the One God. This notion is pretty much what a child learns in his catechism. God is one, creator, all knowing, all present etc. Since, however, Newman is aware that there were many other notions of God floating about in his time, a phenomena which will increase in the future culture, he reviews some of those ideas in order to put them aside. For some God is a general spirit animating the world; for others God is an impersonal principle from which the world has come. For still others it is a collective spirit inhabiting humanity. Newman does not include the classical peoples of Greece and Rome in this inventory but he may well have. For the ancients God was the ruler over a kingdom of many gods. Following St. Paul, he considered polytheism to be a corruption of the natural knowledge men should have of the One God. 7 The Inventory This inventory reminds us that beliefs held notionally are still held as truths. Thus it makes a great difference to the young that they learn their catechism that for the most part will be a summary of beliefs held as ideas or notions. If not instructed in these beliefs, they will be susceptible to drawing in other notions about God from their culture, as is the case today. If the teachers of these children have been infected with the notions of New Age religion, the children will pick them up because such teachers have done away with the precise formulas of the old catechism and rely on an appeal to experience, which is simply an appeal to what modern culture will accept as a spiritual experience. Sense Knowledge Newman now addresses the question of how the unseen may nevertheless be the object of real assent. He observes how man can only know of the thought and character of other human beings through sense impressions. For example men experienced in reading the writings of such authors as Cicero and Dr. Johnson can sense their distinct personalities just from the words on the printed page. Newman is content to note facts such as these and moves on. But let us pause for a moment. As familiar as we are with such facts, there is still a mysterious quality to them. How can man, a body, be aware of other men, also bodies, not only in their physical
Here Newman follows in the Christian tradition initiated by St. Paul in his First Epistle to the Romans, Chapter One, verses 18-26. His teaching is that all men should have an understanding of the true God unless they have corrupted it by sin. Polytheism is a corruption because, in holding for the existence of many gods, it gives believers the sense that they can play off these gods against each other when he prays to fulfill his own desires. Here man is like a child with a whole collection of fathers and mothers whom he can manipulate. The belief that God is One is a deterrent to this type of human connivance. 90
7

characteristics but even in their mental make-up? Any impressions men have of others and of reality itself must start with the senses. But how can sense impressions, which must be physical, lead to a deeper knowledge about other bodies which are not just material. Again, how can even a dog not only be aware of his masters physical presence but also sense his moods? The facts are clear but their explanation constitutes one of the most difficult projects in philosophy. Somehow man is able to reach out by means of sense impressions to realities in this world which are beyond mere sense impressions. He does not say this to prove that man can therefore sense the unseen God in this way. But he does say it to insist that, however the unseen is grasped, it must be through something sensible because man is a bodily thing and not an angel. Having Bodies This is an important point. While his readers will certainly grant they are somehow in contact with God as an actual person, they may not realize that they are so because they have bodies. Obviously the experience of their senses puts them in contact with the immediate world around them. But this fact may lead them to the illusion that they are in contact with the unseen by some special intuition or spiritual faculty which has nothing to do with their bodies. The result will be a split between their bodies and souls. Newman will have none of that. He will insist that their contact with the unseen must somehow take place in their bodies as an essential part of their make-up. Feelings of Guilt Man has emotions, which are movements in his body due to movements in his spirit. Angels do not because they do not have bodies. What then are the particular emotions which put man in contact with the unseen? They are the feelings of approbation or guilt which one experiences when he is involved in making choices about his actions. Since actions take place only in the particular realm of time and place, these feelings are also associated with particular times and places. For example, a man will feel approbation after he has gone out of his way to help his neighbor. Or he may feel guilt after intentionally harming someone. Thus these feelings make a definite impression upon the imagination and memory. And that impression is of an Unseen Judge who either approves or disapproves of the particular action in question. Clearly, we are not speaking of the general feelings or thoughts that may occur in considering general notions about good and evil. We are speaking of particular feelings associated with particular deeds. In this way Newman points to conscience as the way to the

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unseen. Thus even a child, who is not mature enough to have general thoughts about ethics, may still have this experience of feeling the approval or disapproval of an unseen judge and law giver. The Two Orders Newman goes on to maintain that, though the two orders of sense knowledge and of conscience are obviously distinct, they share common features of being first, immediate, and personal in their respective orders. Just as sense knowledge is the first step man spontaneously takes in acquiring knowledge about the world, so the sense of obligation is the first step he takes towards belief in the unseen judge. Again, just as the senses supply an immediate knowledge without need of further proof that the world exists, so does conscience with its immediate sense of obligation supply the insight that the Judge exists. Finally, just as a man understands the world through his own acts of seeing, hearing, touching etc., so does man feel his sense of obligation as pressing immediately upon himself and no other. No Platitude Clearly, Newman is not tossing off some platitude about conscience, true but very common, which anyone could make who has learned his catechism. He has carefully prepared the way by speaking earlier of images, impressions, first principles, and imagination. And now he comes down with all his weight on locating the universal, common, and primary path to the unseen as the feelings generated by conscience. Whatever others may think, I have always found this teaching of Newman quite startling. I could not doubt that he was speaking very seriously and precisely. I was not sure that I would have summarized my experience as a Catholic in this fashion. Quite obviously he did. Should anyone be in doubt about that matter, let us consider the example he gives to illustrate his point. An Ordinary Child He takes an ordinary child of about six or seven years of age who has not been subjected to influences which are destructive of religion. Obviously this child does not possess many of the ideas that will later come to him as a youth and an adult. That is why Newman will use the child as an example. There is an innocence about children before their intellectual powers are fully developed. What Newman is doing here is abstracting the child from the concrete situation in which all children are necessarily influenced by their parents, teachers and the general culture around them. The beliefs of profession and credence are certainly important factors in the childs development,
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factors which may either support or inhibit religious development. But Newman is intent to show that there is something in the very nature of man himself which has an instinct of its own, so to speak. It is something deeply personal while at the same time being quite tender and fragile and, therefore, something which men often put aside as childish fantasies when they grow older. A Common Situation Newman starts with a common situation. Should a child have offended his parents, he will on his own and without effort appeal to God to set himself right with them. How does Newman know this? Clearly, he is speaking from his own memory as a child. Most of his readers would be able to identify with this experience and so would accept the analogy which Newman makes between the knowledge imparted by the senses and that imparted by conscience. Of course, those who would not admit to this experience would not accept the analogy because they do not admit to any experience of the unseen in the first place. At any rate, Newmans example suggests that religion is highly congenial to the nature of children. He does not lay down the law about how all children react. Does the fact that some children might not have this experience dissuade Newman from speaking of his own? Clearly not. Or does the fact that many others might later discount such an experience prevent him from using his? Clearly not. When Newman uses this example, he is speaking as an adult about seventy years of age who has kept the voice of conscience steadily before him for his whole life. Conscience has been his first principle. Since he is basing his argument on experience, he feels he has the right to draw upon his own though it might not be the experience of everyone. Yet he also feels confident that those in the community of believers will agree with him. He will also feel confident in his own experience because it is in accord with the traditions of over two thousand years that there is such a thing as a good conscience and a bad conscience. The ancient Greek dramatists were certainly an example of the general belief that the gods would reward the good and punish the evil. Implications of the Example Newman then gives four implications of the experience of the child. He says: Let us consider how much is contained in this simple act. First, it involves the impression upon his mind of an unseen Being with whom he is in immediate relation, and that relation so familiar that he can address Him whenever he himself chooses; next, of One whose good will towards him he is assured of, and can take for granted--nay, who loves him better, and is nearer to him, than his parents; further, of One who can hear him wherever he happens to be and can read his thoughts, for his prayer need not be vocal; lastly, of One who can effect a
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critical change in the state of feeling of others towards him. 8 Implicit in the prayer of the child is the evidence of an impression which contains implicitly a theology which may be later drawn out for inspection. This impression of God is not just one of fear about offending him but one of love for God because He is good. Awe and love go together. A Difficulty The question naturally occurs whether this child would have been able to pray if he were under no outside religious influence. Newman asks this question only to dismiss it as being too theoretical for his purposes. He does indicate, however, that the answer is probably not. This seems reasonable. An inborn faculty like conscience is much more susceptible to outside influence in its development than, say, the sense powers. No matter what a mans character and upbringing might be, he sees rocks and trees more or less like everyone else. Conscience does not operate in this way. Though it is like a voice implanted in man by God, it does not normally operate like a tape recorder announcing to everyone that the Judge is pleased or displeased no matter what their upbringing or character might be. In the normal course of events the voice of conscience is subject to outside influences which, though they might not wipe out entirely the intimations of conscience, certainly dim them. A Personal Act Since Newman is concerned with real assent, he concentrates his attention upon the personal aspects of that act. If Newman were to concentrate on belief as accepting the word of others, we would not get the idea that beliefs can be made personal, that they can resonate deeply in the heart of the believer. That is why he chose the child to illustrate just how personal belief can be. To believe, then, is not simply accepting the existence of God because others have said so. If it were just that, there would be something to the old argument that believers are just like a herd of sheep. You know the old story. Sheep leap over a stick placed in their way by a farmer. The sheep following still keep jumping even after the farmer removes the stick. The moral of the story? Belief is just a herd instinct. There is something to that because profession and credence are natural to man. But real belief has a deeply personal element in it. So some sheep leap at the thought of God because it answers to something deep in their souls.
8

G.A., p. 103.
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An Important Distinction A difficulty about the view that every man has a conscience which informs them about God is that many men today spend much time and effort in denying that view. We may wonder, then, about the claim that this sense of God is natural. We may object that, if it is so natural to man, how can so many men deny it? Newman helps us to answer this question by making a distinction between conscience as a moral sense of right and wrong and as a sense of duty towards God. In the original experience of conscience both aspects go together. The aspect of the moral sense serves as the basis for the study of ethics. The aspect as a sense of duty towards God serves as the basis for religion. But these two aspects may be separated. A man who has lost a sense of God through distractions or temptations will still recognize that murdering or robbing other men is wrong. The fact is, however, that if he is hardened in such actions, he will simply not care that he is doing wrong. Doing such deeds may have become a way of life for him. Consequently, I do not think that men like Hitler or Stalin eliminated conscience as a sense of right and wrong. They simply did not care if they murdered millions of people nor did they care particularly about what others might think of them. But I can see how they could eliminate conscience as a sense of being obligated by God to do good and avoid evil. But perhaps even this sense was not totally eradicated because these tyrants showed a lively sense of hatred for all things religious, particularly the notion of God as their ultimate Judge. Perhaps one can argue for the voice of conscience being natural to all men by showing how subhuman many of them become when they deliberately set out to deny it. Perhaps the hatred for the very thought of God that consumes some men can be taken as a proof that there is something there to hate. Here the enmity of darkness to light could be taken as a proof that there is such a thing as a light which is hated. A Problem But whatever the case with other people, Newman is intent upon developing his experience of the first principle, an experience he is sure that many others share. However, we may still wonder how a faculty which is natural to all men by the fact that they are human can appear to be non-existent in many cases. The fact that Newman makes the initial prompting of conscience a feeling generated by an image or impression of God, however, makes it easier to see how such an image may be destroyed or diluted by other impressions which are destructive of religion. Many older people today who were formed at a time when conscience received a great deal of training in the family,
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school and parish are sometimes shocked by the behavior of the young, who do not seem to possess any conscience at all. It may take the older generation a while to see that, unless the young have been formed correctly, conscience does not speak with the same precision and authority in their case, especially in sexual matters, as it did in the older generation. Of course, many in the older generation may have put aside their own sense of conscience as useless baggage from the past which has inhibited their emotional maturity. Their children pick up this parental attitude towards the sexual which is often accompanied by religious indifference or even hostility. Hence the youth are left to wander about following their own devices. But if a boy happens to make his girl friend pregnant, then he might begin to see that he can expect more mercy from God than he will ever get from the type of parents and friends who said very little about his recreational attitude towards sex. They may well brand the boy and girl as simply stupid, pointing out all the modern ways available for contraception. They may even suggest that abortion is the only reasonable way out of the difficulty. There are many factors in modern life, then, which make the teaching that everyone has a conscience seem unreal. Macbeth People who have been trained at an earlier period in American culture may have the tendency to envisage conscience as a faculty which speaks with irrepressible power to all men. They think of someone like Shakespeares Macbeth as tortured by all the blood he has shed and fearful about his immortal soul. This is a true account of conscience, but of one developed in an age when religion was a living part of the culture. Here one can speak of conscience as having the power to haunt the guilty, prod the indifferent, or console one who has suffered from the evil of others. One can then speak confidently of every man having this voice implanted by God in his heart. But those were ages when belief in the voice of conscience was real. But what happens when the prevailing images ruling society change from the religious to the non-religious or even anti-religious? One of the image close to the heart of political revolutionaries, for example, is that Capitalists are hopelessly inhuman and so must be destroyed before a classless society becomes a reality. As the expression goes today, they demonize the upper classes. Being demons and not human beings, the rich have no rights. By the same token, the image close to the heart of Capitalists is that Communists are not human beings but rather devils incarnate. Having been expelled from the circle of human beings, Communists may be done in by any means possible. Considering the
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pride and passion of men, one can see that there is no great mystery why conscience seems to be non-existent. Without the Aid of Revelation At any rate, Newman contends that man can have a true conscience even without any knowledge of the special revelation of God in the Old and New Testaments. This is because of his view that all men have reason and, therefore, have the ability to tell right from wrong. Conscience is simply a more specific term for the ability to tell right from wrong when men are confronted with a choice about a course of action. This view of conscience is central to both the theological and philosophical tradition of the Church. Theologically speaking, man had the voice of conscience to guide him in natural religion long before the coming of revelation. Philosophically speaking, the pagan authors give vivid testimony to the existence of conscience. Summary In summary we can say that conscience puts one person, a creature, in contact with another person, the Creator, not in some superficial aspect of his life, but in the deepest aspect of his thoughts, words, and deeds. What is a good, indifferent or evil man but the sum total of his choices? If a man is good, it makes no difference whether he is poor, uneducated, or a failure in business. If a man is evil, it makes no difference whether he is rich, educated or a great success. Conscience fixes on the essential aspect of what makes man a man. The other aspects are merely incidental in the eyes of the Judge. In depicting conscience as the cause of mans image of God, Newman answers the question of how a notional apprehension is related to a real one. In the first, one considers the proposition simply as a truth which may be analyzed into its different parts, certainly a worthy enterprise. In the second, one considers the proposition as signifying the object of worship, an even more worthy enterprise. Both have a role to play in religion, as the next point will show A Problem Solved Some raise the objection that one need not pay attention to creeds or dogmas because they lead to a cold or merely formal practice of religion. Newman grants that such may be the case in some instances. There is a kind of notional belief which is characteristic of some religious thinkers who see creeds primarily as expressions of the truth and only secondarily as commands to worship. Their belief is correct - but cold. Such belief, however, is not necessarily the result of taking dogmas seriously. It is the result of not taking conscience seriously. Once, however, a person having a merely
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notional belief begins to pay attention to his conscience, he effects a union between his heart and his head, between holding a truth and living it. Endure For a While Newman then gives a key argument showing how propositions or dogmas are essential to religion. A theology may endure for a while without the aid of religion. But true religion cannot long survive without the aid of theology. The emotions of man are ever in want of direction. A father is an object worthy of respect for the simple reason that he is a father. God is an object worthy of devotion for the simple reason that he is God. Now it is the notional propositions which, in expressing these objects as truths, gives the ultimate direction to how mans feelings are to be engaged. Just as emotion should follow upon real objects, so religion should follow upon sound creed. On this view of the matter, the young need a clear understanding of their catechism even though much of its teaching may not immediately engage their emotions. Life itself, not some mere pedagogical presentation of a glossy book with pictures, will supply the experience to make the lessons of the catechism real. Balanced Account of Religion In showing the relationship between notional and real assent, Newman is providing the Catholic with a balanced account of religion. Just how balanced this account is may be judged from the imbalance of what has happened in the Catholic Church in America for the last thirty or forty years. There has been a great drop in the practice of confession. The teaching that men are sinners in need of redemption has been displaced in the minds of many with the notion that, since God is love, religion should become a joyful affair in which Christians can celebrate their love for one another and for God. Consequently, the severe and demanding aspects of religion are put aside in favor of sheer celebrations which are not overly concerned with dogmas or creeds--or sin. This shift in attitude is an offense against, not just revealed religion, but against natural religion. If man is not a sinner in need of redemption, why should he accept the authority of the Church as if he were a poor sheep in need of guidance? Why should he not attempt to change the old Church, which impressed an immigrant population with the darker aspects of religion like the existence of Purgatory and Hell, into a new Church with a more positive regard for educated Americans? Belief in the Holy Trinity The second belief which Newman treats is that of the Holy Trinity. Some consider this dogma to be a kind of puzzle which God imposes upon man to show the limitations
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of reason. Newman begs to differ. It is true that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is beyond the range of human reason and can be known by man only because God has revealed it through the teachings of the Church. It is also true that the Church has taught this mystery in the formula that God has one nature while being Three Divine Persons. But does that mean this dogma can be apprehended only as an abstraction? Newman answers no. He notes that the words of Father, Son and Holy Spirit have come to us through concrete illustrations in the New and even the Old Testament. Thus they supply us with images of how these divine persons operate in human affairs. These divinely revealed images, then, allow the feelings of awe, love and veneration that characterize the practice of religion. Indeed, it is these images which have provided the driving force behind Christianity. The sign of the cross, which is made numberless times in the liturgy of the Church and in the lives of Catholics provides a common instance of how the truth of the Holy Trinity may permeate the lives of those who have but a shadowy notion of what is meant by the terms one nature and three persons. Further, the sign of the cross, which unites the mystery of Christs death on the cross with the Holy Trinity, is distinct to Christianity, marking it off in different ways from the religion of the pagans, Jews, and Moslems. The reverent making of the sign of the Cross, then, is testament to how a belief notionally apprehended may also be really apprehended. Here is another example of how the faith of a believer can be explained by using the precise terms formulated by a philosopher drawing upon ordinary human experience. Belief in Dogmatic Theology The third belief which Newman sets out to explain is belief in dogmatic theology. Because the Church demands that every Catholic give his full assent, not just to the common truths which he has learned, but to truths which he knows nothing about, critics object that the Church is imposing a great burden upon the ordinary believer and even upon learned theologians. For even the learned do not know of all the pronouncements that the Church has made on complicated theological issues throughout the centuries. Thus, the objection goes, all believers are subject to an intellectual tyrant which imposes blind faith upon them. Newman answers by noting the definition of faith. Faith is believing in what the Church teaches because God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived, revealed it. If one, then, accepts the teachings because God has revealed them, he believes implicitly in all that the Church has pronounced throughout the centuries. God of course has not
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explicitly revealed each and every one of these doctrinal pronouncements. Rather he has revealed the main teachings which have then been explained, elaborated, and defended by the Church. Thus a Catholic is no more burdened by the command to believe all that the Church teaches than the child was burdened by the advice of his mother to revere the words of Shakespeare. Supernatural faith is essentially an act of trust in the word of Divine Authority even if that word is not comprehended to any great extent. Thus faith enables the believer to accept the inapprehensible because he accepts the authority of the Church. In this case so called blind faith is perfectly rational. It gives reality to a religion on earth which reaches into the mystery of heaven. Looking Back Having completed Newmans argument in Part One, we can see that his argument is one big analogy. It takes the experience of ordinary belief and compares it to the experience of religious belief. These are different acts because belief in the seen is distinct from belief in the unseen. But they are also similar in that they are both acts of belief. Hence the argument by analogy, which is defined as showing the similarities between things that are basically different. In the first four-fifths about ordinary belief, he has shown from ordinary experience that notional and particularly real belief in what is true or what is taken to be true is a fact of life. Indeed, real belief is the key factor in the formation of character, whether it be that of the individual or of a community. A believer aware of the facts, then, can clear his mind of the uncertainties generated by the atmosphere of modern culture. Though he could previously exercise his faith amid this influence, he was more like a like a man eating a sandwich while flies were buzzing all about his head. The flies did not actually get the sandwich-- but they sure were a nuisance. After the believer faces these difficulties, he can exercise his faith with more peace of mind. When the unbeliever takes the high ground by insisting that only he is rational, the believer can respectfully point out that all men are believers whether they admit it or not. Obstacle Cleared Having cleared away the obstacle Newman then invites his readers to review their own experience of belief in religious matters without being haunted by the objections that may ring in their ears because of the influence of modern culture. When they review their experience they will be inclined to see it as well within the context of an exercise of reason, thus avoiding the trap of trying to defend their belief as something that is true but goes against reason. There is something rather grand and defiant in the
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cry that one believes because it is absurd. But the Catholic sense is both quieter--and even more daring. It is quieter because it speaks of children believing in the word of their mother. It is daring because it speaks in the same breath of man believing in the word of their God. A Personal Comment Let me close with a personal comment. Taken as a whole there is nothing particularly new in Newmans discussion of conscience. He is simply laying out the Catholic teaching embodied in the tradition of faith and reason. Since it is this tradition which has framed his own experience and that of his readers, we should not expect him to say anything new. Yet there is one thing I have found in reading his account that has impressed me as new as far as I was concerned. It is Newmans unvarnished, unqualified, down right assertion that the first lesson of conscience is to place man as a sinner before the Judge. This kind of assertion did not surprise me when it is said by St. Augustine. Having laid out his life in his Confessions, the reader can see why he at least made such a big thing of conscience. He had avoided its voice for many a year before finally giving into it and becoming baptized. If the reader is open, he will identify with the saint. If he has been more like me, he will perhaps read the philosophical parts and skip lightly over the moral account because he does not have the track record of an Augustine either for good or for evil. But I have never been able to accomplish that feat in reading Newman. Here is a good man who is always precise and careful in anything he says. And yet he says with all deliberation and precision that, if one is to have the first principle, the first self-evident start in attaining religious truth, one must have the kind of conscience which declares peremptorily, unequivocally, magisterially that one is a sinner before the Judge. Here Newman is not hanging the reader on a spider threat held in the hands of an angry God over the flames of hell. Rather he is stating as a plain matter of fact that the conviction of being a sinner before the Judge is the first step which all men must take and embrace with real assent if they are to be on the path of religious truth. Now what do you suppose a fairly decent man--perhaps a philosophy or theology professor--would say if he were asked to consider his total experience as an orthodox Catholic and pick out the single feature which captures that experience in a nut shell? I can imagine many different answers which would be more or less to the point. So when Newman, a holy man and careful thinker, actually does answer this question, I have to sit up and notice because somehow the fear of the Lord has gotten to me.

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The Subject of Conscience This point will come up later when we consider the further thoughts that Newman has on the subject of conscience. So I will conclude with this observation. The antidote which Newman proposes for all men, particularly those intellectuals who will live in the infidelity of the future, is that they give real assent to the proposition that they are sinners before God. This is the foundational belief meant to hold out against, not just the idea of total unbelief, but the presence of it in their hearts and imaginations. This is the practical lesson, a universal norm laid down by a wise man to guide the life and thinking of his fellow believers in the community. Rsum How far are we along the path that leads to Newmans final destination of showing by reason alone that the Church has the truth because it has been founded by Christ, who is God as well as man? We are halfway there. Newman has just finished putting in place the proposition that man is a sinner before the Judge. It is this real apprehension that will serve as the starting point for the investigation by any man, literate or illiterate, into the truth that the Catholic Church is the institution which God set up at a particular time and place in the history of man. Clearly, this principle is quite personal. Thus when any man takes up his investigation, he will be taking his soul as well as his mind in hand, certainly an awesome enterprise which those who have no firm notion of God are not ready to handle. Conscience doth make, if not cowards of us all, at least uneasy walkers on sacred ground.

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Chapter Eight
Assent Considered As Unconditional
1

Let us now take up Part Two, where Newman shows that assent is unconditional despite the fact that it follows upon probable inference. This is the big question which he now takes off the shelf. His discourse on conscience has shown us that this investigation is not being made just in order to solve a problem about reasoning in general. It certainly will deal with that problem for the next four-fifths of the argument. But this exploration into the topic of unconditional assent is intended as preparation for how that act takes place in the religious matter of the truth of the Catholic Church. In this chapter Newman will begin round two with his opponents. In round one he has already shown that they are simply unreal in their demand that men conduct their affairs by the use of inferential reasoning. Now he will get into the question of whether they speak the truth or not. Is it or is it not the truth that assent is illegitimate? Is it or is it not the truth that unconditional assent arises from probable inference? Is it or is it not the truth that real assent follows upon merely probable reasoning and, indeed, must follow upon that type of reasoning? Up to this point Newman has simply assumed that his opponents are wrong and has devoted himself to the question of how assents may be either notional or real. He did this on the presumption that his view is in accord with the facts of human reasoning, thus putting the burden of the proof on his opponents who, after all, are the prosecutors putting man in the dock for the crime of thinking that his beliefs are true. Like a good defense attorney, Newman has prepared us, the jury, by developing the premise that assent is a legitimate exercise of reason in general even if it turns out to be wrong in particular instances. He has especially emphasized that real assent or belief is the heart of true religion. Having set up his opponents in round one, he now starts round two which, as we will see, he finishes off his opponents with a knock out. John Locke Newman examines the views of John Locke, a noted English philosopher of the late Seventeenth Century. Noted for his balance and common sense, Locke is
1

In this chapter we will cover in a general way the argument of The Grammar of Assent, Chapter Six, Assent Considered as Unconditional. 103

not typical of what I have described broadly as Newmans opponents. As Newmans sermon indicates, they are radicals who do not believe in God and reject totally the role of all belief, both religious and non-religious. John Locke was far from being that radical. He was considered by the public as a kind of English Aristotle noted for his common sense. Nevertheless Newman takes exception to this philosophical icon. In the following I will summarize the pages in which Newman, quoting liberally from the writings of Locke, dissects the great mans position, taking the regretful tone of one English gentleman having to point out to another a serious flaw in his argument. He concludes that Locke is urging a mere theory about how man should reason rather than explaining how man actually reasons and does so quite legitimately. The Argument At first Locke seems to agree with Newman, saying that there are times when men accept conclusions which, though they cannot demonstrate them, accept them

as if they have been demonstrated. Here Locke seems to agree with Newman that
assent is legitimate in certain cases even when it is based only on probable reasoning. But in another section, where he has religious matters in mind, Locke argues that anyone who gives assent to the results of inference is guilty of leaping beyond the evidence. In the language of his day Locke accuses such men of being religious enthusiasts. On this view assent is an illegitimate act, an example of the willingness to believe overcoming the requirements of reason. It is the act which explains the fanaticism of believers who try to base their lives on supposedly rigid certitudes rather than upon reasonable probabilities. Locke will scorn the untutored masses, who persist in their religious beliefs because they are in the habit of indulging their feelings rather than using their heads. But critical thinkers like himself will know for a certainty that, since inferences are only probable, religious assents must be illegitimate. Such is the argument of Locke and his supporters. Newmans Refutation Newman does not get into the religious argument but simply considers the ordinary facts of experience. There are many more cases of assent than Locke seems to think there are. Newman gives examples of the belief that there are such places as London, Paris and Madrid. Men who have no direct experience of these cities nevertheless hold to their existence as absolute truths, not as probabilities or even as high probabilities. Another common belief is that we live upon a globe with

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vast tracts of land and water. Ordinarily we do not see these matters as beliefs but rather as plain facts. Since, however, many of us have not flown or sailed around the world, we have accepted these propositions as true because of the testimony of those who have done so. We believe them, despite the fact that eyewitnesses can be mistaken or even lie. We judge that they have not lied or been mistaken in these cases. But this is an assent of belief, not a result of strict demonstration or of being an eye witness. Though our reasoning about these concrete matters is still only probable, our assent to them is unconditional. Other Examples Here are other examples Newman gives: We laugh to scorn the idea that we had no parents though we have no memory of our birth; that we shall never depart this life, though we can have no experience of the future; that we are able to live without food though we have never tried; that a world of men did not live before our time or that that world has had no history; that there have been no rise or fall of states, no great men, no wars, no revolutions, no art, no science, no literature, no religion. 2 We cannot demonstrate any of these matters. Yet we firmly believe in them as if they had been demonstrated. The above is an example of how Newman explodes a theory by examining the facts. If one is a realist, one will see that this answer of Newmans to Locke finishes off the position of the moderns. They make the broad claim that all assent in concrete matters is illegitimate. The logicians tell us that, to refute such a universal claim, one simply has to come up with a single counter-example. Newman has given many counter-examples. As far as the basic point is concerned, the debate is over. We do have beliefs that are certain though we may not be aware of how we arrived at them. This is the knock out. Indirect Here Newman is justifying inference indirectly. He is saying that, however men reason in order to arrive at the belief in these truths, they do get there-- they believe as firmly as they have seen the facts for themselves. So mans power of reasoning even in probable matters cannot be all that bad. What Newman has done is to expand the notion of reason from an exercise in the formal reasoning that the educated have learned in the schools, an entirely legitimate thing, to the informal
2

G.A., p. 149
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exercise of reasoning that everyone does in the streets, even the educated in their everyday lives. Snobbery There is real snobbery involved in the view that assent is an illegitimate use of reason. It disenfranchises not only the common people but the educated as well if they considered the matter deeply enough. It is a view that promotes the illusion that, if ones reasoning cannot be explicitly stated and formally defended, it cannot be reasoning at all. This illusion promotes the corruption of the Public Square where only those who speak like experts carry any weight, a kind of triumph of the appearances over reality. The schools and the public forum, of course, must put a premium on the explicit statement of reasons to insure that there is a common ground of discourse. In public it is not a good thing that people be expected to read each others minds. They have to learn how to express themselves in as clear and precise a manner as possible when, for example, in discussing matters of law or of philosophy. True enough! But when the public culture begins to assume that all belief in truth is illegitimate and that people have to go only by formal inference, I think the observer can conclude that he is seeing, not an evolution of man to some higher rational state, but a dissolution of man to some lower state. It cannot be a good thing for men to deny the legitimacy of belief; belief, either in truth or apparent truth, lies at the heart of any community. Procedure of a Realist The strategy Newman has employed in this argument is the same any philosophical realist will employ. He first concentrates upon the fact that men do indeed give assent to propositions like the island status of Great Britain. Here is a definite object, a fact, a thing as real as a rock or a tree. He then shows it is eminently reasonable to believe this even if one cannot yet justify the process of inference which led men to this conclusion. Having established the legitimacy of the act, he can then take up later the justification of the inferences which have resulted in this correct use of reason. If, however, the reader is intent on examining the problem from the way man reasons, he will want to see in detail how probable inference leads to unconditional assent. Having been conditioned by the modern approach, he will try to focus on the many and mysterious ways that human reason operates, a very difficult feat of introspection. Instead, Newman starts his argument

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with the acknowledgement of a fact, an activity which without any doubt takes place in the real world. He can do this because he is certain that a real world exists out there. Having established the truth of the fact, he can then turn later to the very tricky analysis of inference, that activity which goes on within the minds and hearts of men. If a philosopher tries to start the other way, he will get lost in all the complications endemic to a direct analysis of inference itself and so never arrive at the fact out there. This is a poor way to examine inference because it looks at the mechanism, so to speak, without taking into account its purpose. In contrast, Newman starts with its purpose, the production of the assent that, for example, Great Britain is an island, assuming that the way of arriving at that conviction must be reasonable. It is for this reason that I give the victory to Newman by knock out. He has cleared out his opponents, leaving the way open for us the jury to explore in more detail how probable inference leads to unconditional assent. An Objection Some try to counter this argument about belief in the existence of London by saying it is a far different matter than belief in the truth of the Church. I grant that. Then they go on to say that they could if they wished check out the matter for themselves and travel to London. I grant that. Then they go on to say that they cannot take the same kind of trip to verify the truth of the Church. I grant that. They then conclude that belief in London is justifiable while belief in the truth of the Church is not. I do not grant that. The point is that, if a man has not actually gone to London and seen the fact for himself, he is still in the realm of belief. The mere possibility of checking out the matter does not change his belief into direct sight of the fact. His confidence that he can check the matter out is still only a motive for believing. He is still a believer until he does check out the matter for himself. Then he will no longer be a believer--he will be a knower. The point, then, is that he is a believer in Londons existence. He has given unconditional assent to this proposition. Whether he can check the matter out later for himself is beside the point. Even he lives by unconditional assent in a great many matters. Belief, then, is a far more common phenomenon than Locke or his followers seem to realize. As far as the truth of many matters is concerned, they too live on belief. Newman of course will still have to show that belief in the Church is true, a far more difficult matter than justifying belief in the existence of London. But that is a question he will face much later. At this point Newman contents himself with
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puncturing that great balloon of a presumption that all assents to the truth of concrete matters are illegitimate. Simple and Complex Assent Newman then proceeds to look more deeply into the reasoning that leads men to assent. He adopts the usual procedure of a realist philosopher to look at the assent first and then to conclude about the inference that produced it. This is the only safe way to analyze things. Assents are definite statements of a truth. We can more easily recall them than we can the reasoning that has led us to them. He introduces the distinction between simple and complex assent. Simple assent is the type that we give as school children to the word of teachers that, for example, Great Britain is an island. Since the young take in a great deal of information about the world in this fashion, they also take in falsehoods and mere prejudices as well as truths. Does man have any resources to remedy this situation? He does. He has the experience of life. As he experiences more of the world, he naturally begins to sort out his beliefs, reaffirming some and rejecting others. Complex Assent Man now enters the realm of complex assent. Concerning beliefs like Great Britains island status, he has no doubts at all. Yet he may still look for reasons which support that belief if he has been challenged to do so. For example, he might reflect that no serious person has ever cast doubt upon Great Britains insularity; that it would be impossible for all the map makers to be wrong on this point; that it is a basic presumption of English history that Great Britain is an island; or that it is impossible for the prevalence of this belief to be the result of some dark conspiracy. Having put together all of these separate reasons, which in themselves are each only probabilities, he will now consider it reasonable to reaffirm his original assent to the truth of the proposition that Great Britain is an island. In other words, he will give complex assent to this proposition. Here we have the process of moving from simple to complex assent. Simple assents are given without much reflection. Complex assents are given only after reflection. The former puts one in possession of a truth without being that conscious of it. The second gives ones certitude about ones possession of a truth after thinking about it. By focusing on such examples as Britain being an island, we have gained more insight into how probable reasoning leads to assent. When one sees all the reasons which, though each only probable in themselves, converge upon the truth of
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a particular belief like Britain being an island, one should accept the belief as if it were demonstrated. Here probable inference leads to definite belief. Here reasoning itself, not some desire to go beyond the evidence, supplies certitude about the truth of a belief. A Closer Look Let us look more closely into this distinction between simple and complex assent in order to solve this objection; namely, that believers are necessarily dishonest when they propose to give reasons for their belief. How can believers, the objection goes, be objective in presenting their reasons when they are already committed to their beliefs? Should they not start by being perfectly open minded, perfectly neutral at the start? To answer this objection Newman makes a distinction between an investigation and an inquiry. Ordinarily the terms mean pretty much the same thing but Newman gives them a special meaning in order to make his point. For example, we launched an investigation when, after stating our simple belief that Great Britain is an island, we began to consider some of the intellectual difficulties in holding that belief. The fact that we launched this investigation by no means implied that we doubted our assent to the truth of this particular fact. We did not even suspend our assent in order to meet some standard of becoming detached or objective about the matter to be investigated. Nevertheless we did face the difficulties we imagined might be urged against this belief and saw that each of them was unlikely. We then reaffirmed our original simple assent, arriving at a complex assent which now gave us absolute certitude about the belief in question. This is an advance because we now have an explicit intellectual foundation for our original belief. It was not absolutely necessary for us to make this advance. Whether we explicitly looked to justify our belief or not, we would still believe that Britain is an island. Nevertheless, we have followed the natural drive of man to support his simple beliefs by further and more conscious inferences. The fact, then, that we launched an investigation into difficulties about our original belief does not brand us as being intellectually dishonest. Santa Claus Let us suppose that a child is presented with problems about his original belief in the existence of Santa Claus. To speak of a child starting an investigation into some intellectual difficulties about this belief is being rather pedantic. But
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children do reason in their way; so allow me to be a bit stuffy here. In the course of investigating some intellectual difficulties about this belief, he may begin to have some doubts about it. Some of his companions may have told him that Santa Claus is not real because they have discovered that the presents which their parents stored in a closet a few days before were the same presents which Santa Claus had put under the Christmas tree. The child may then reflect upon his own experience. Eventually, he will give up his own former belief in Santa Claus and reduce it to a mere fable told by his parents. Here he has pursued an inquiry in order to resolve a doubt. He resolves the doubt, concluding that Santa Claus does not really exist. Here the notion of an inquiry involves the notion of trying to resolve a doubt, a very different operation from launching an intellectual investigation in order to support a belief. The child may have started with an investigation, feeling that the story told by his parents, teachers and companion could not be wrong. But eventually he grows up. He launches an inquiry to resolves a doubt. He resolves it by concluding that Santa Claus does not exist. He has a new belief based upon reflection. He now gives complex assent to the truth of the non-existence of Santa Claus. More Serious Examples We may illustrate the difference between an investigation and an inquiry with more serious examples. Upon entering college a youth may be urged by his teachers to launch an investigation into the question of Gods existence. It may be that he has given the notional assent of credence to this proposition as part of his upbringing. While he may have started his investigation with no doubts, he may have begun doubt and as he pursued the question. At that point he ceased to investigate and began to inquire. He is now trying to resolve a doubt about his original belief, not simply unravel some intellectual difficulty. He has suspended his original assent. Whether he regains that belief or lets it go altogether depends upon his inquiry. Newman of course would hope that the student regain his belief. So too will the teachers who led him to what they considered to be an intellectual investigation. But the fact remains that what may have started out as an investigation may turn into an inquiry. Investigation Now common sense recognizes this distinction between an investigation and an inquiry. Surely it must be legitimate for school authorities to teach that Britain is an island and to expect assent from the students about this belief. Surely, it must be
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legitimate for the students to investigate this belief while being committed to it. It would be ridiculous for a modern philosopher to demand that the students be so open-minded that they must suspend or cast doubt upon their original assent so that they could conduct a more honest investigation. In this case the notion of investigating intellectual difficulties as a way to deepen belief is a common place in the education of the young. Implications for a Catholic Why then is it not legitimate for religious authorities to require that their students keep their beliefs while they are investigating them? If the authorities really believe that they posses the truth revealed by God and known by nature, should they and the students not hold to it with even more certitude than Englishmen have about Britain being an island? For the Church, then, it is plain common sense to wall off the notion of perfect open mindedness from the students while at the same time urging them to face intellectual difficulties with honesty. This distinction between an investigation and an inquiry underlies the general procedure of Aristotle and Newman in a practical approach to morality or belief. The investigation of intellectual difficulties requires the student to remain committed to virtue while he seeks to explain it. If he begins to doubt, he falls outside the scope of the investigation and then must launch an inquiry to resolve his doubts. These are two very different uses of inferential reason. Loss of Faith Yet it does happen that a youth may begin an investigation into his beliefs and then lose them in the process. This is not possible in the case of beliefs like Great Britain being an island. For someone to lose his certainty here would mean, not that he lost certitude, but that he lost his mind. But it is quite possible in the case of religious beliefs in which the investigator is not grounded by religious practice. The student may have had only the notional belief of profession or credence, having believed because he went along with his family or race. He may have never made a real assent as a child to religious belief because the adults around him were only conventionally religious. Or he may have tampered with his conscience, committing sins of impurity, thus giving himself a motive for casting doubt on the beliefs of his youth. He may begin to doubt that sins of impurity are really mortal sins. Or he may never have been taught that such acts were grievous sins. Nevertheless, these acts may still affect him so deeply that, when he becomes aware of the teaching that
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such acts are mortal, he may reject that teaching as being outrageously Puritanical. Whatever the explanation, it is a fact that students sometimes lose their belief in the process of investigating it. Suspension of Belief Some students may not go so far as to reject their former beliefs but rather suspend their assent without taking on a new one. They may not be sure that the Church is right; at the same time they may not be sure that it is wrong. But this too is a loss of faith. Or perhaps it is a sign that they never had the faith. At any rate, one cannot suspend his assent while at the same time hold it. At this point we can say that, if the student is to regain his faith, he is obliged to resolve this doubt. Here we are in the presence, not of an investigation into difficulties, but of an inquiry to resolve a doubt about the original belief. Practical Investigation The difference between an investigation and an inquiry gives us more insight into the kind of practical investigation that both Aristotle and Newman begin. They assume that their students are already good and experienced men. They also assume that men should give their beliefs a solid intellectual footing. Hence they do not launch their investigation for the purpose of throwing doubt upon basic beliefs. Neither are they creating arguments to change the mind of skeptics or doubters. Rather they are proceeding upon the assumption that the students must preserve their commitment to virtue while they investigate its nature. Consequently, many readers today, not understanding this ancient distinction between an investigation and an inquiry, accuse Aristotle and Newman of always begging the question, of always assuming the truth of a matter that they are supposed to prove. These accusations would be correct if Aristotle and Newman were addressing their works to skeptics and doubters. But the realists are not doing this. They are conducting a practical investigation into beliefs already held, not a theoretical inquiry to resolve the doubts of those who never held such beliefs in the first place. Degrees of Assent Before closing this section on assent, I wish to highlight another point which Newman makes. In denying the legitimacy of assent, Locke suggests that there are degrees of assent. Since he holds that all reasoning in concrete matters is probable, he holds that one should agree to conclusions only to the extent that the evidence warrants. Since the evidence is always more or less probable, the agreement with it
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should vary to the same degree. Thus we have a kind of sliding scale of assent to match the sliding scale of inference. Hence Locke speaks of degrees of assent. Here is the modern ideal of perfect open-mindedness, of perfect neutrality in the face of any question. The thinker is always carefully weighing his agreement to a proposition to the precise degree that the evidence warrants. Thus he can never lay down the law on any matter, never hold anything unconditionally, never say he believes with certitude in Britains insularity. Plausible There is some plausibility to this view. An Irishman may not give two hoots about England being an island. An Englishman, however, may feel quite passionate about this belief. But the emotional intensity with which one assents to a belief does not make an assent any less or more a truth. A person assents to a proposition either as true, false, probable or improbable. If he holds it as a truth, then he has assented to it though he may not have strong feelings about it. If he holds it as a probability, he has not assented to it as a truth even if he feels very strongly about the matter. Newman deals with this situation of emotional intensity by his distinction between assents which are real and those which are notional. Both are assents to a truth and allow of no degree in this respect. Either one assents--or he doesnt. If his assent is real, he does so because of real apprehension. If his assent is notional, he does so because of notional apprehension. The degrees, then, do not reside in the act of assent. Rather they reside in the apprehension of them. Accordingly, Locke is misusing the term assent in saying that it has degrees. An assent to what is taken to be a truth is either true or not true. A vigorous assent is real. A cool assent is notional. Both are unconditional statements of what is taken to be true. The Knock Out Punch I have said that Newman has delivered the knock-out punch to the moderns. Yet I have to admit that I know many intelligent people, especially those who have some knowledge of philosophy, who will doubt the insularity of Great Britain, calling it a very high probability but not a definite truth. As far as they are concerned, the fight is not over. Now my initial reaction to this situation is to put a curse on Descartes for introducing that detestable habit of introducing doubt into basic principles. I would like to burn all his books to save students from confusion. But the fact is that, if one wishes to philosophize, one has to consider what philosophers
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have said. Thus my mentors in the past have insisted that I must seriously consider all opinions because in the long run I will have a better grasp on the truth. Let us see why. Their Ideal There is a great deal that one can learn from his opponents. For instance, moderns in general take as their ideal the certitude which mathematics allows in its demonstrations. Since the subject matter here is abstract, perfect certitude about its conclusions is attainable. Agreed. They go on to point out that strict demonstration about such truths as the existence of God is impossible because this is a conclusion about a real state of affairs, not one about the status of propositions existing only in the mind. Their assumption is that there can be no connection between universal ideas in the mind and things in the real world. I do not agree here but that is a problem about strict demonstration, which is not our concern here. Our concern is with the next point. The moderns go on to say that in concrete matters strict demonstration is impossible. Agreed again. They go on to point out that in concrete matters there is always room for a theoretical doubt about the insularity of Great Britain. Also agreed. Then they go on to claim that belief with certitude in such matters as England being an island is illegitimate. Not agreed. What the modern is trying to do is to apply the same standard of certitude in abstract matters to concrete matters. But is this reasonable? Does the fact that one may always urge some theoretical doubt about the testimony of others rule out the possibility of ever attaining certitude about the England being an island? No. The fact is that we have certainty in this matter even if we cannot demonstrate it. A Gap Realists recognize that there must always be some kind of gap between inference and assent in concrete matters. The assent cannot be compelled, as in strict demonstration. Hence, one must either give it or withhold it, not in an arbitrary fashion, but according to what one sees as reasonable. Is it reasonable to withhold assent from the proposition that the external world exists because one may urge some theoretical doubts about it? Here we are not even talking about belief but knowledge in the strict sense. Is it reasonable to withhold assent from propositions like the insularity of Great Britain or the reality of London on the basis that witnesses can either lie or be mistaken? Realists answer no, holding that such restraint in withholding assent is irrational.
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A Consistent Cartesian A consistent Cartesian, however, will see things differently. Let us suppose that he no longer has the religious piety of his master but has developed the method of doubt to a high art form. If he is a bold type he will not be embarrassed by doubting the existence of the external world but rather see it as a path to mans glory. Social planners will not be embarrassed when someone like Newman points out that they believe in their schemes with the same fervor as the early Christians believed in Christ. They are revolutionaries intent upon a new world order. Why should they respect the fact that people commonly assent to a great many things? They will simply answer that men should not be so careless. Sometimes they may even confess that in moments of weakness they too share the common belief that London exists even though they have never been there. But then they go on to explain this weakness away as the remnants of their faulty upbringing or training. In the name of trying to be a critical thinker, they then resolve to take more vigorous steps in ridding themselves of this conditioning so that they will not fail in the future to live up to their high ideal of never believing in anything as a truth. Sometimes Descartes speaks of his realist instincts as if they were some kind of disease which recurs when he relaxes from his strenuous efforts to methodically doubt himself out of the real world. I imagine that a committed idealist would feel the same way. I would accuse them of substituting mere theories for facts in an effort to embarrass them. But might they not rejoin that their whole aim is to do away with all the presumed facts which former ages took for granted and replace them with better models of how men should think? Rsum Confronted with these objections, I, a former aspirant to becoming an imperial intellect, begin to see that truth is not easily vindicated in debate with skeptics. Newman, however, was quite familiar with these difficulties in answering objections. Consequently at critical stages in his exposition he will point out that, in matters where thinkers differ in their first principles, there is no way to settle the difference by argument. The differences are too deep and personal. I think that there is this same chasm between realists and Cartesians. They start from one set of first principles; realists start from another. In view of this Newman will insist that he is arguing upon his own first principles because that is all that anyone can expect of a thinker. This is not a sign that Newman is a relativist, holding that there is no such thing as objective
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truth. Certainly, there are right and wrong first principles. Rather it is a sign that argument has it limits, that questions are ultimately decided in that mysterious depth in which mans first principles live, whether consciously realized or not.

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Chapter Nine
Certitude

Newman then takes up the question of certitude 1 in more detail. When I was younger I used to welcome discussions on this topic. Was not the search for certitude what philosophy was all about? But after a while I began to moan whenever the topic came up. Its discussion seemed to bring out the insanity in everybody, myself included. I would listen to graduate students vigorously trying to contradict Aristotles principle of contradiction as if it were some kind of universal prohibition designed to crush all originality. I would find myself looking at a tree for five minutes at a time, trying to figure out whether I was certain it was there. And then when I got to the field of religion, things really got interesting. Granted that I believed in the teachings of the Church because they came from God. But could I be certain that I had met God, the lynch pin of my belief? And then there were many of my friends who, having studied philosophy, began to see the Church as some kind of oppressor who had no respect for their intellects. So I got sick of the topic. But here was Newman who would now devote a whole chapter to certitude, the great thorn patch, the open door to crazy discussions! Entering the Maze In entering this maze I have adopted one simple rule. I will see to it that I am carrying with me at least two of the certitudes that I have consciously acquired. One is that the tree on the lawn is really there. Thus I am certain of at least one particular piece of knowledge. The other is that Great Britain is an island. Thus I am certain of at least one belief I have attained by reason alone. Thus whatever else I meet in Newmans argument, I will check it out using my two charms. If the reader is a hardier soul than I, he is welcome to read Newman for himself and see what a genius with a special gift of introspection looks like in action. But perhaps he might find my little warm up for the expedition helpful. To Begin Certitude is a state of mind which comes only after one has reflected on, say, simple assent to Great Britain being an island. Before the arrival of certitude one takes
1

G.A., Chapter Seven on Certitude, p. 173.

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this truth for granted because all the teachers and maps say so. If however one reflects upon this assent and confirms it in a complex assent, he has attained certainty of a truth. Thus there is a difference between the possession of a truth and certitude about that truth. A man may possess the truth without having met the occasion which prompts him to reflect upon it. But if a man does meet such an occasion, he naturally presses on to attain certitude about it. Thus the quest for certitude is natural to man. It represents the desire of man to put his beliefs on a solid basis in reason though the whole matter is still one of belief. Note, however, that the certainty of the truth of any particular matter is vested in that particular matter and in no other. In other words it is attached to the particular thing in question, and to the particular method by which it was obtained. To be certain, then, of Great Britains insularity is not to be certain of other things like the guilt or innocence of an accused or the reality of Alexander the Great. I state this very obvious truth just to keep ourselves straight on just where certitude resides. Undercutting Belief Now if one rules out the possibility of attaining certainty in belief, one has undercut the whole notion of belief in truth. What good is it to say that one can believe in a truth but yet never be certain of it? It is like saying that there are truths out there--but man can never be sure he has any of them. Practically, that amounts to saying that there is no truth at all. Newman, then, must take up the matter of certitude despite all the difficulties that attend this thorny subject. As I have already noted, it can bring out the worst in anyone. Indeed, many religious people avoid the whole question, saying that they know in their hearts they have the truth on the basis of some non-rational intuition. They really are abandoning the use of reason. Others maintain that to believe is a desperate leap into the dark which cannot sustain rational investigation, another flight from reason. In particular cases a believer might well leave these questions alone because he has neither the time, talent nor the duty of dealing with them. But the educated believer does have this duty because, if they do not think about these matters, they will swallow down many opinions which will eventually undermine their beliefs. Content With Probability in Religion Newman is quite aware of this modern spirit rejecting certitude, observing that many men who are decent enough in their religious profession do not ask for certitude but are content with probability. They aim to live their religion like gentlemen as they fulfill their duties towards themselves and toward society. Secure of their place in this world, they leave to probability their place in the hereafter. Let me add the note that,
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since they consider God to be reasonable, they are confident that He will give the proper gentleman his reward as a due recompense for his proper life below. The gentleman, then, can concentrate his attention on this life with heaven as a kind of after-thought, though a pleasant one. And he need not concern himself with hell at all because, if there is one, it is reserved for scoundrels like Hitler and Stalin, not for proper gentlemen like himself. A Reasonable God A Catholic, however, cannot be so sure of how reasonable God will be. If he listens to the Church, he is to stake his whole life, body and soul, upon the promise that, if he takes up his cross and follows Christ in this life, he will be with God in the next. To get to heaven, however, he must pray constantly, fast periodically, give his life in defense of the faith if called upon. Going on mere probability is not enough for him; he must go by certainties. Even then the path is not easy. But there is at least the certitude that there is such a path. On this view of the matter, certitude is not a luxury; it is the common staple of true religion. Being a Catholic, then, forces one to nail his courage to the sticking point and tackle the maze whether he wishes to or not. Common Staple of Life Yet if one finally looks steadily at the facts, certitude is a common staple of life. Modern elders who hold in theory that their sayings should be accepted by their subordinates, not as truths, but only as probabilities, will often change their tune when they are dealing with subordinates whom they love. The path of life is rugged and filled with many dangers as well as opportunities. Having found this out by hard experience, the elders have had a certain amount of wisdom ground into their hides and so wish to be trusted, to be believed by those who depend upon them. Knowing that some things are definitely true, they would not like to see their charges coolly assess their sayings and grant that they might even be highly plausible. In theory elders might profess the ideal of being perfectly open minded about all matters. But in practice they are like every other parent, teacher or mentor. They want to be believed because they have spoken definite truths that, if believed, will save their charges from a great deal of grief. Indefectibility of Certitude 2 Next we will observe how Newman tackles a particular feature of certitude, namely, its indefectibility. He argues that once a person attains certitude about a truth,
2

Here we will touch upon the argument of Chapter Eight of The Grammar of Assent in pages 173-208. 119

that certitude will not fail him. In other words, once a real certitude, always a certitude. Considering how common it is for men to vary in what seems like their certitudes almost from month to month, especially in religious matters, we may think this claim of Newmans is too extreme. Indeed, one may wonder how Newman himself could make this claim since, after all, he was a convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. 3 Yet Newman must make this claim in order to be consistent with the logic of the position he has taken. Since it is true that a man may attain certitude in the belief of Great Britains insularity, it is true that he will reject peremptorily an opposite claim. Should he contemplate in imagination the prospect of ever giving up this claim, he would consider it his personal misfortune. Why? Because he knows that the truth itself will never change. Even the improbable situation of Great Britain losing its status as an island at some future date can not do away with the fact that England has been an island for a very long time. If he should imagine losing his certitude, then, it will be a sign that something very bad has happened to him--a brain tumor for instance. Great Devotion It might be difficult to imagine the man holding to this certitude with great devotion, ready to fight any attacks on it at a moments notice. But let us say that he, an Englishman with great devotion to history and a love of the Royal Navy, is attacked by some lunatic fringe that hates the ruling classes. They start a campaign urging that Britains insularity is a myth propagated by the ruling class to dupe the masses into supporting the navy, that famous fortress of wooden walls that has kept Britain free for centuries. We can then imagine the Englishman being quite devoted to his certitude, cherishing it as if it were life itself. So one cannot say that, if a man holds to a certitude with a great amount of emotion, he must really be in doubt about it. Sometimes that is the case. But why should it be always the case? Not Doubtful So the fact that the Englishman may be quite ferociously devoted to his belief is not necessarily a sign that he is doubtful about it. He may love this truth. This is useful to keep in mind when one hears the old rejoinder that anyone who vigorously upholds his

Newman deals with the problem of certitude presented by the conversion of people from one religion to another at great length from pages 196-204 in The Grammar of Assent.

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beliefs must be like the lady in Shakespeare who protests too much. As for myself I have noted over the years that I am eager and ready to fight anyone who dares to suggest that my tree on the lawn is not really a tree but perhaps could be a spirit or a mere projection or any number of things, depending on how one wants to look at it. While I do not wish to look like some kind of fanatic, I think the tree is worth a fight and will not be put off by any suggestion that I am protesting too much like the woman in Shakespeares play. The Holocaust Another example is the belief of most people that the holocaust in which over twelve million Jews and Christians died actually happened. For those who were not actually in the death camps, they have a belief. Further, they hold this belief with certitude about its truth. Consequently, they react with outrage at the claim of a lunatic fringe that the holocaust is a mere invention of the Jews designed to manipulate world opinion. In seeing this belief as a truth, people consider that it will not change because truth cannot change. Should they for a moment even consider that they might lose this certitude, they would consider it as a base betrayal of their own honor, to say nothing of the memory of those who have perished by the millions. In short, the indefectibility of certitude is a definite truth. People will hold onto it as to life itself. The fact, then, that a Catholic is admonished by the Church to hold onto the certitude of faith and even be willing to die for it follows a natural logic. Such devotion to certitudes is the stuff of life, both natural and supernatural. Must Man Be Infallible? Newman then deals with several objections of which we will only treat a few in a cursory way. One is that man must be infallible before he can be certain. If man is not infallible, the objection goes, he will never be secure in his certitude but always wonder if he has not made some mistake. On this view of the matter, there is no such thing as certitude about any truth. Newman answers that this view is simply not true. He says: I am quite certain that Victoria is our Sovereign, not her father, the late Duke of Kent, without laying any claim to the gift of infallibility, as I may do a virtuous action without being impeccable. 4 By the same token, we claim certainty about the truth that Great Britain is an island without claiming at the same time that we are infallible. Though incertitude about everything else might overwhelm us, we can still wave the banner of
4

G.A., p. 184.
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certitude about the insularity of Great Britain. This certitude may not seem like much of a consolation--but at least it will contribute to our sanity. Newman then applies his view to a religious matter: I may be certain that the Church is infallible, while I am myself a fallible mortal. Otherwise, I cannot be certain that the Supreme Being is infallible, until I am infallible myself. 5 The key point here is that we are speaking about certitude as it attaches to particular propositions like the reign of Queen Victoria, the island status of Great Britain, or the infallibility of the Pope. Infallibility, on the other hand, attaches to a person like God or to a man like the Pope. God is infallible because He cannot be mistaken about anything. The Pope is infallible in faith and morals only because Christ has promised to keep him from error when he speaks formally on these matters. The point, then, is this: if men can be absolutely certain about propositions like the insularity of Great Britain without being infallible, there is no necessity for him to be infallible when he believes in the infallibility of the Church. Whether the Church is infallible or not must be decided on its own merits and not ruled out by the illicit assumption that one must be infallible about everything before he can be certain of something. Another Objection Another objection is that man cannot have certitude because he has made many mistakes in the past. The memory of these mistakes supposedly makes it impossible for man to be certain about anything. But this objection proves too much. Why should our memory of the mistakes we have made in the past shake our certitude about, for example, the insularity of Great Britain? Cannot we at least get some things right even though we have gotten many things wrong in the past? Newman gives the example of a man walking in the woods at night who is certain that he sees another man standing still in the shadows. He moves closer and addresses the figure but gets no answer. He steps closer, still thinking he is approaching a man. Then he finally sees that the man is really a peculiar combination of the branches and shadows of the woods creating the image of a man. He is now absolutely certain that there is no man there at all. Why should the fact that that he has previously misjudged the report of his senses make him lose confidence in the fact that a man is not really there? Newmans Conclusion Newman devotes a great deal of effort to answering other objections to the
5

G.A., p. 185.
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proposition that certitude is indefectible. I will, however, pass them over in order to keep to the main lines of the argument. Newman summarizes the matter as follows: It seems then that there are three conditions of certitude: that it follows on investigation and proof, that it is accompanied by a specific sense of intellectual satisfaction and repose, and that it is irreversible. If the assent is made without rational grounds, it is a rash judgment, a fancy or a prejudice; if without the sense of finality, it is scarcely more than an inference; if without permanence, it is a mere conviction. 6 From where did Newman get his three conditions? Like a proper realist he got them from his experience of arriving at certitude in particular cases like belief in the insularity of Great Britain, in the existence of great cities like Madrid, and in the certainty of his own death. From these and other experiences he then drew out three generalizations: first, for a belief to be certain it must have been preceded by an investigation. Second, for a belief to be certain it must be held with a sense of finality or of intellectual completeness. Third, for a belief to be certain it must be held permanently. In the case of our investigation into the island status of Great Britain, we have met the first condition by searching for the various reasons supporting our simple assent that Great Britain is an island. Now meeting this condition alone does not entitle us to say that our belief is certainly true. Others have investigated their beliefs and have also found them to be true although as a matter of fact they were mistaken. However, those who have not investigated their beliefs may be accused of holding them, not because of reason, but because of rashness, fancy or mere prejudice. The standard performs the negative function of excluding them. It still leaves in contention those who, whether correctly or incorrectly, have investigated their belief. The second condition is that the certitude must be a result of complex assent. Such an assent has finality to it. It comes as a result of weighing various probabilities and reaching a final judgment about the truth of the belief in question. Thus it gives emotional and intellectual satisfaction by giving the investigation an end point, a rest, a final destination. We met that condition when we arose from our investigation and finally proclaimed that Great Britain indeed is an island, waving this truth over our heads like a banner in the face of those who would deny the legitimacy of all assent. There is certainly an emotional and intellectual satisfaction there. But if this conclusion is held,

G.A., pp. 207-208.

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not as a truth but as a mere probability, it is a sign that one has merely inferred the proposition, not assented to it. Hence there will not be the same sense of finality, the same sense of having brought the discussion to a close. Of course those who have merely inferred the proposition may still wave their conclusion like a banner to confound their enemies. But their conviction is still suspect no matter how triumphant they may wish to feel. Their conviction is still only a probable inference, not a straight declaration of a truth. They may say in words that Great Britain is an island; but they will not mean it in the same sense as one who has assented to this proposition as a truth. Again, the second condition operates by way of a negative standard. If one has not ended his investigation with an assent, he does not posses true certitude no matter what he says. Truth Guaranteed? Does that mean that those who have met the second condition are thereby guaranteed that they have certainty about a truth? Not necessarily. To determine that matter we move onto the third condition which Newman lays out; namely, that true certitude is permanent, indefectible, everlasting. In our reflection upon our belief in the insularity of Great Britain, we see that we have met this third condition. That we lose this certitude is unthinkable. How can we have any doubt that England is an island or at least was so up until the present day? Thus if one should lose this conviction at some point, it may be taken as a sign that such a one never had it in the first place. Or if he did have it once, he must have suffered some kind of a mental breakdown. Once again, we see the negative use of the standard. One who loses what he thought was a certitude cannot have been certain in the first place. Can one then conclude that a person who maintains his convictions to his dying day has true certitude? Not necessarily. People have lived and even died for convictions about all sort of wild and outrageous beliefs. Sheer stubborn, blind and absolute prejudice also carries the air of indefectibility. The Three Conditions Now let us suppose that a man has subjected a belief he holds certain to an examination of whether it meets the three conditions laid out by Newman. He has investigated the matter, thus meeting the first condition. He has assented to the matter, thus meeting the second condition. He has acknowledged that his belief is permanent, thus meeting the third condition. Does he now have in hand a logical formula which he can then apply to any of his other beliefs in order to guarantee that he is right in those as well? The answer is no. Fulfilling the requirements of some abstract standard cannot do the job. The only rational exercise that can do the job is to consider each case one by
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one and reach a judgment. We have done this in the particular case of Great Britains insularity. We know we cannot be wrong in this case though we may be wrong in many others. In matters like these the whole focus must be on the truth of the particular object in question, not on any abstract standard of reasoning. Here the reality of the thing is primary. And when we have become convinced about the reality of Great Britains insularity we do not by the same token become convinced of a host of other facts about the world. We do not have a method in hand. We just have the truth of a particular fact. If we wish to attain certitude about other facts, we have to do so through the same step by step process. There are no high roads to truth in these matters. The Root Cause As straight forward and natural as is Newmans position about certitude, we may wonder why it does not admit of easy acceptance today. I think the root cause of all the suspicion we meet today in others and, perhaps, even in ourselves, is the habit of mind sanctioned by the Father of Modern Philosophy, Descartes. His method of philosophizing starts with initial doubt, not just about some belief we have reasoned to, but about the very fact that the world exists. As we saw, he did try to rescue us from total skepticism by pointing out that, since we think, we must exist. From there he then tried to reconnect us to the real world by an elaborate chain of reasoning, a carefully forged connection of clear and distinct ideas that met his mathematicians need for certainty. Thus Descartes began the modern practice of doing away with mans natural certitude about things out there and trying to substitute certitude about the truth of some basic principles in his mind. But how can a philosopher, having suspended his assent to the existence of a tree on his lawn and then engaging in a long and complicated process of reasoning, regain the reality of that tree and, in effect, the reality of all the rocks, animals and men surrounding that tree? He has broken a natural bond between himself and the world and all the reasoning in the world will not fix it. And neither will the reasoning of his successors fix it. It simply cannot be fixed once a thinker gives priority to the truth of his own thoughts rather than to the truth of things themselves. A philosopher must begin either with the primacy of things existing in the real world or with the primacy of his own thoughts or impressions about these things. If he starts with things, he starts with facts which, though he has no doubt that they exist, he still has plenty of questions about their nature. He starts with the fact that there are certainly men out there in the world. He then spends the rest of his time in trying to discover the full truth about these men. But if he starts with his own impressions or thoughts about things, all the certainty he has is that
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they exist in his mind. That may at first appear to be quite satisfying. Instead of being confronted with the brute fact that there are rocks, trees, animals and men out there and then trying to figure out their nature, he instead encounters his own thoughts and is quite sure that they exist. He even has instant insight into some of these thoughts as, for instance, the notion of geometrical or mathematical objects. Here he has a far more intelligible world than the world of actual things. But even he realizes that he cannot stay in this world of the mind but must then try to reconnect himself to the real world. He must build some kind of a bridge with the material he has available to him. Now Descartes felt that he had succeeded, that he had somehow imposed his theories upon reality and made a fit. Here we have the spectacle of a man finally reaching certitude about the existence of a tree on his lawn because has previously demonstrated that the exterior world exists. Is there something wrong with this picture? 7 An Intellectual Standard Some critics are disappointed by the fact that Newman has not solved the problem of certitude by giving us a clearer intellectual standard. But he did not try to do this for the simple reason that it cannot be done. And if some thinker does come up with such a standard, as Descartes thought he did, we can be sure he is wrong. One either accepts the humble fact that the tree is really there on the lawn as the ultimate basis for certitude or gives up altogether the notion of having certainty about anything that occurs in the real world. Modern thinkers have opted for the latter. They have destroyed belief and left us only with probabilities. Summary We have seen how Newman takes one side of the couplet of assent and inference, and then negates the view of the moderns that assent is illegitimate. He then goes on to further our insight into assent by showing that simple and complex assent to such propositions as England being an island are facts of life. The big point here is that Newman gives us a clearer notion of inference; it is part of the process of consciously reasoning about a belief in order to attain certitude. He closes with a discussion of
Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas certainly expend a great deal of effort in explaining how man knows the things in the world around him. But they start with the fact that they do know these things. What they are trying to explain is how they know them. Thus the realist starts with the real tree as a fact and ends up exploring its mystery for the rest of his life. The idealist starts with an idea of the tree as his starting point because he is afraid that he might be making a mistake if he starts with the reality of the tree itself. But in giving precedence to the clarity of an idea over the dense reality of the tree he creates the difficulty which insures that he will never get back to the real tree again. The idealist once had the tree as a child but lost it when he began to philosophize. 126
7

certitude, his basic point being that there is no grand method of attaining it in general. When it is attained, it is only by a case by case analysis of each particular belief that comes under question. Rsum Where does the argument stand now in reference to Newmans goal, which is to show that man can attain belief with certitude in the truth of the Church? He has cleared away the modern objection that all assent is illegitimate. Whatever the outcome of our further investigation into the truth of the Church, we at least know this: we believe with certitude by the power of reason alone that Great Britain is indeed an island. That is the kind of fact we hold onto as we approach the difficulties of explaining our certitude in the truth of the Church. Newman has also given us a precise term to describe the kind of argument he is formulating. It is an investigation into intellectual difficulties; it seeks the explanation of beliefs to which one is already committed. As Newman has said, ten thousand difficulties do not constitute even a single doubt. It is not an inquiry meant to resolve ones doubts about a belief. Newman is already committed to his beliefs and is addressing himself to those with the same commitment. Such an approach cannot be branded as intellectually dishonest. It is natural for man to solidity his beliefs by the use of both formal and informal inference. Rather it is an investigation into the truth of a belief in order to arrive at certitude in that belief.

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Chapter Ten
Formal, Informal, and Natural Inference 1
In this chapter Newman will deepen our insight into inference. To do this he must engage in a philosophical analysis of inference in general. While we already have had experience of the fact that probable inference leads to complex assent in cases like the island status of Great Britain, we need a better understanding of inference in general to deal with the harder cases of how we may reason to true belief in matters of law, medicine, science and religion. The thrust of Newmans argument will be to underline the truth that all inference in concrete matters leads only to probability. Now here Newman seems to be digging his own grave. It is on these very grounds that his opponents reject the legitimacy of assent. Why then will he expend so much effort in emphasizing the probable nature of inference? Because it is out of this analysis that Newman will show that man is eminently reasonable in proceeding by probable inference to attain definite truths. The Magician In setting up this argument Newman reminds me of a magician. Before the performer does his act of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he shows his empty hands. When the audience protests, challenging him to let them examine his top hat, he lets a kid come up to check it out. Then he invites another kid to check the stage. After the audience is satisfied that the performance is not rigged, the magician then proceeds to take, not only a rabbit from his hat, but a dozen scarves followed by a dove that flies away. Thats drama! Well, Newman is being the dramatist here. He will prove definitively that inference in concrete matters leads only to probability and then show how it can lead to definite belief. (1) Formal Inference Ratiocination In his analysis Newman will divide inference into three types: the formal, the informal, and the natural. It is through this analysis that Newman will pull the rabbit out of the hat. To begin: Newman defines the reasoning in general as holding to

This chapter will cover the main line of the argument in Chapter Eight of The Grammar of Assent. 128

something as true in virtue of something else. 2 In abstract matters one holds that the conclusions are certainly true in virtue of premises that are certainly true. In concrete matters one holds conclusions that are probably true in virtue of premises that are probably true. Here reasoning contrasts with sight. By sight man grasps the truth of the things before him without reasoning. By reasoning man reaches for the truth about the world which lies beyond his immediate sight by moving from what he knows to what he hopes to know. Sight Repeating a refrain, let us delve into this distinction between sight and reason for a moment. Sight or sense knowledge forms the foundations of reason. Starting as a blank tablet, man takes in the world around him, a world which immediately impresses itself upon him; it is an active element in forming his mind, which at this stage is a more or less passive receiver. All men, then, start their intellectual journey with the basic knowledge that there are rocks, trees, animals and men in the world around them. This is knowledge, not belief, that puts all men solidly in the same world. It is acquired naturally; men do not have to go to school to learn it although they do need others to learn the words necessary for expressing their thoughts. This knowledge is also personal because it is through the use of his own senses that man knows the world. Yet this knowledge is also narrow because it is restricted to what man experiences for himself. If he is to enter a larger world, he must use his reason. In other words, he must move intellectually from what he knows immediately (without a medium) about the world to what he can discover by reasoning about the world. Thus reasoning is as natural to man as sensing. Man does not have to go to school in order to learn how to do it. The Universe Newman continues. In using his reason man takes for granted that the world is a universe, that is, a single whole which has various parts to it. He sees order in the parts closest to him and assumes that the world beyond his experience is just as ordered. Thus he can like Columbus consider his part of the world and infer that there must be some great continent on the other side of that mysterious ocean which sailors have never crossed before. The majority do not make that inference but are content to stay on the shore. But Columbus does make that inference and
2

We reason when we hold this in virtue of that. G.A., p. 209. 129

backs it up by action, showing an amazed world that he has been right after all. Yet ordinary people also use inference in their dealings with the world even if not in the spectacular way of a man like Columbus. They move beyond their immediate experience of the world by trusting in the word of others, thus expanding their knowledge of the world by the act of belief. Similarly they move beyond their experience by a combination of selective trust in the authority of tradition and of trust in their own insight. Particularly Gifted But to reason in the manner of Columbus a man would have to be particularly gifted and courageous. Consequently, man eventually developed a method of reasoning which would enable men in general to reason well. They would create an intellectual tool which men could acquire in their schooling. The ancient Greeks, for instance, invented the science of geometry. While other peoples certainly had a sophisticated knowledge of various geometrical figures, it was the Greeks who developed it into a science. Geometry takes the random insight of genius and places it on the rails of demonstration so that even students of later generations may easily arrive at truths which required the efforts of genius to discover. Another invention of the ancient Greeks came to mankind through the efforts of Aristotle, who invented logic. Here was an even more ambitious tool than geometry because it would seek to organize reasoning in all fields, not just the mathematical. The secret of this tool would be that it would take words, ideas, sentences and patterns of inference and turn them into symbols. It would standardize reasoning so that it would not be the preserve of only the talented few but a skill acquirable by the many. Thus we have the syllogism. Words and Concepts The use of this logical form would require men to take their own experience, which, though deep and personal, is necessarily limited, and put it into words and concepts which all men could then judge, thus making knowledge common property. Here the goal was to avoid the misunderstandings which occur in the discussion of public matters like philosophy and politics by forcing all the participants to use words and concepts in the same way. It would also provide an easy way that students could master in order to arrive at truths which their talented predecessors had discovered. This logical form would be similar to the tool that man had already invented to aid his memory; namely, the tool of writing. Here
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things would be put down in writing, which would not be the record of what happened in the past. The logical form would also be similar to the rules of arithmetic which even children could learn. If they followed a few rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, they would be able to come out right in calculations that once required the efforts of learned scribes. Here we have, then, Newmans account of the birth of the scientific method. The success of this method depends of course upon the presumption that mans experience of the rich reality of the world can be reduced to words, concepts, and propositions that in turn can be translated into the symbols of the As, the Bs and Cs of the syllogism. To the extent that this translation can take place, the use of the syllogism will be a success. To the extent that this translation cannot take place, the syllogism will be far less useful. Two Ways Now we have already seen earlier that there are two ways that men have used the syllogism. They have filled its symbolic form with abstract material, thus giving us the strict demonstrations of geometry and philosophy. They have also filled its symbolic form with concrete material, thus giving us the non- demonstrative syllogism. The example of this type we used at the beginning of this book was that of the economist concluding that Free Trade was beneficial to the poor. While both of these ways aim at knowledge about the real world, the first is about the nature of things and the second is about the truth of individual things themselves. Newman summarizes his argument as follows: Such are the characteristics of reasoning, viewed as a science or scientific art, or inferential process, and we might anticipate that, narrow as by necessity is its field of view, for that reason its pretensions to be demonstrative were incontrovertible. In a certain sense, they really are so. While we talk logic, we are unanswerable; but then, on the other hand, this living universal scene of things is after all as little a logical world as it is a poetical; and, as it cannot without violence be exalted in poetical perfection, neither can it be attenuated into a logical formula. 3 Here Newman contrasts the use of the demonstrative with that of the nondemonstrative syllogism. The field of view of strict demonstration is relatively narrow because, thought it considers all of reality, it does so from the narrow
3

G.A., p. 215.
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perspective of the necessities involved in the nature of things. From this perspective its demonstrations are incontrovertible. This is true only so as long as the discussion is kept to the nature of things. Yet reality itself is not composed of things which just have natures. Things also have properties and actions which throw them into relationship to each other in an almost infinite number of ways. Throw in the working of chance, which plays a role in the real world, and we have a complexity that is beyond the reason of man to reduce into clear definitions or, to use Newmans expression, to attenuate them into a logical formula. Though man may ascertain that he has the nature of a rational animal, his thirst for knowledge goes beyond this insight into the variable realm of the truth about persons and things which need not exist as they do but nevertheless do exist in all their amazing variety and complexity. To repeat the refrain, he seeks the truth about the innocence or guilt of the accused, about the status of historical figures in the past, about the state of nature in the past. In this realm of the concrete, then, he simply cannot pour his experience into the form of the syllogism, turn the handles, so to speak, and arrive at necessary truths. At best, he can arrive only at probabilities. Now this is the point which Newman strives to show in this whole section about formal inference. Slighting Aristotle and St. Thomas? In reading Newman, however, the reader might get the impression that he is slighting the scientific way embraced by such figures as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Starting with Francis Bacon, English philosophers have a long history of despising the use of the syllogism by the medieval schoolmen. But to read Newman in this light is to misread him. Not Concerned Now Newman is not concerned with exploring this use of the syllogism, as I have so often pointed out. Rather he is concerned with the syllogism as it is applied to concrete matter. And here the syllogism is inadequate because the nature of the concrete subject matter that is to be poured into this form cannot be reduced or trimmed down with the necessary precision. That means that the conclusions of any inference in concrete matters can result only in probability. And a probability, no matter how highly probable it is, never adds up to a definite truth. Thus a probable inference never compels assent, never quite closes the gap. This is the point that Newman is striving to show by the use of many examples.
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All Men Will Die Let us consider one of them. A careless student of logic may be led to say that, because all men are mortal, all men will die. Newman strenuously resists this stand. For the conclusion that all men are mortal is simply a truth about the nature of man. While it is absolutely true that all men are by nature capable of dying, one cannot conclude to a statement of fact that all men will actually die. That all men will die is only a probability, a very high one, but still a probability. Newman gives the example of Elias 4 , who, as scripture reports, was taken up into heaven without dying. Undoubtedly this is an exception to the rule, an improbable event. But it happened. Thus one cannot take the generalization that all men will die as an absolute truth. Even if one does not accept the exegesis of Newman on this story in the Bible, one has to accept the logical point he is making. To prove that man is mortal is not the same as proving that all men will die. The first is an essential truth about man which holds for all men. But the tenet that all men will die is only a high probability about an event that happens most of the time but not always. Thus Newman vigorously resists the effort to turn the truth about mans morality into a law governing all that would happen to men. Strongest Terms To put Newmans point in its strongest light, we can say that even God cannot dispute the truth of the demonstration that man is mortal. He did not do this in the Garden of Eden, where he promised man that he would live forever. Whether men would live forever or not did not change the truth that he has the nature of a man, not that of an angel. Having the nature of a living body, he was mortal by nature. Thus whether man would actually die or not depended upon the particular circumstance of whether he obeyed God or not. Again, God did not change the nature of Elias whether he was taken up into heaven or not. He was still mortal by nature. So when a thinker is aware of the great distinction between the nature of a thing and its actual history, he will be aware that the realm of the concrete has its own surprises that place it beyond the power of the syllogism to predict. If the logician is not sufficiently alert to this difference between the realm of the abstract and the concrete, he will be blinded by the power of his own tool. He will miss out

G.A., 224-225.
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on the richness of reality and so may be properly charged with trying to boil it down, starve it out, and take all the color out of creation by reducing it to the black and white of a logical formula. In brief, he will not consider individual things themselves but instead to go on to spin mere theories about it. And this, by the way, will be the fault that the physical scientists will be prone to, not the fault of theologians and philosophers. For the Church has always kept a keen eye on her gifted children who, in their exuberance about the power of logic, have trespassed upon doctrines of the Church, substituting their own theories about what God should have said instead of listening to what God actually did say. Newman certainly knows this. A Summary At one point Newman summarizes his view about the nature of formal inference by saying that in concrete matters the syllogism is open at both ends. 5 At the beginning it lacks a proper first principle. At the end it lacks a definite conclusion. Thus it differs from the truly demonstrative syllogism which, as we saw, starts with a self-evident first principle and ends in a definite truth. The first principle that living bodies are mortal necessitates the conclusion that man is mortal. Now instead of using Newmans many other examples to prove the point that formal inference in concrete matters is open-ended, let me use my own example to make the discussion easier without taking away from the point that Newman is making. The Insularity of Great Britain Let us turn to our old workhorse, the insularity of Great Britain. Here we have a truth which, though we cannot demonstrate it, we hold with the same certitude as the fact that a tree exists on our lawn or that two plus two is four. Though the ways we have attained these two truths differ--one being from sense knowledge and the other from mathematical insight--it makes no difference as far as the assent we have given to Great Britains island status. An assent with certitude is an assent, no matter whether it has been attained by belief or any other method. Yet when we try to put the concrete material involved in Great Britains insularity into the confines of a syllogism, we will see exactly what Newman means by saying that such inferences are open at both ends. The Search for a Middle Term

G.A., p. 216.
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Since the conclusion we are aiming at is the insularity of Great Britain as a truth, we have to come up with a middle term which connects the predicate of truth with the subject of Britains insularity. In other words we have to locate the cause of why this conclusion is true. The best middle term I can come up with is this: whatever the vast majority affirm and few deny must be the truth. The next step is that the vast majority etc. say that Great Britain is an island. When we put these two premises together, we have to conclude that the insularity of Great Britain is the truth. Hence we have the following syllogism: B) What the vast majority affirm and few deny is (C) the truth. A) The insularity of Britain is (B) what the vast majority affirm and few

deny.
Therefore, A) the insularity of Britain is (C) the truth. We have met all the formal requirements of a syllogism. As far as form is concerned, we must recognize this syllogism as valid. Now we already recognize the conclusion as true, not because of the syllogism, but because we have already learned that truth by other means. But that is not the question. The question is whether the truth of the conclusion really follows upon the truth of the premises. The basic premise states that whatever all people affirm and few deny is the truth. Now this generalization may be good enough as a probable statement of truth but it does not have sufficient power to generate the truth like a proper first principle. Let us press the statement that whatever all affirm and few deny is an infallible sign that it is the truth. It does not hold. Since when is the agreement of most people an infallible sign of truth? Yet this is the principle one must hold if the syllogism is to do its work. So let us then back off and say that the opinion of the vast majority is a highly probable indication of the truth. Even here, however, we might feel that we are on shaky ground. We might recall a time in history when the vast majority held that the world was flat. Let us then reformulate the major premise. Recalling that educated people since the time of the Greeks knew that the world was round, let us now say: what ever educated people affirm and few deny is most probably the truth. Will this major premise hold? But then we may think of how most of the educated people in the classical world rejected Christianity. We could go on in this way, trying to erect a foolproof major premise which would be even highly probable. But that
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effort is impossible because there is no single premise that will make the insularity of Great Britain a high probability. No matter how hard we attempt to fix up our major premise, it turns out at best to be some kind of probability. At this point it is obvious that our major premise is not much of a starting point. It keeps shifting about, not giving us the solid footing we need to conclude to a matter of fact. If we consider the syllogism just as it stands, it leaves us at best with a high probability. But even a very, very high probability does not add up to one truth. It is for this reason that Newman holds as certain that formal inference in concrete matters is open at both ends. It starts with no solid foundation; it ends with something probable, truth-like, a verisimilitude--but not a definite truth. Complicated Matters Since this is true even in a relatively simple matter like the insularity of Great Britain, it is even more dramatically true in more complicated questions. To illustrate this point Newman pulls down a folio from his book shelf and looks for an example. He alights on a discussion among critics about the legitimacy of certain changes made in the text of one of Shakespeares plays. 6 The question is whether the changes in question should be accepted. One point brings on a counterpoint until the discussion ranges over the whole field of literary interpretation. Since Newman is not giving this example to indicate how these critics will find the truth of the matter, he only follows the details of the discussion without taking sides. He thus makes it perfectly obvious that, if there really is any position which is right, it cannot be expressed within the confines, not just of a single formal syllogism, but even a whole host of them. The matter is too complicated to press into the engine of the syllogism and come out with the plain truth or even with probable truth. The Definition of Man I will give one other example to show the limitations of formal reason, not just in syllogisms, but in the very terms that make them up. Any syllogism depends upon a definition of terms. One of the most ancient and revered of those definitions is that man is a rational animal. The implication is that man, having the faculty of reason, is capable of reasoning, of interacting socially, and of being progressive. But if a rash logician tries to apply this abstraction to man in the concrete, he runs
6

G.A., p. 217.
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into the fact that John is stupid, Peter anti-social, and Richard regressive. The fault, however, is not in the abstraction but in the application. The truth that man is by nature rational, social and progressive means that men are capable of being so because they are men, not animals. But they do not have to fulfill their capacities; they have the choice of descending to a level more bestial than the beasts. 7 These facts do not destroy the truth about mans nature but only the faulty application of this truth to actual men. Conclusion About Formal Inference Newman closes this section on formal inference with the following: Inference in the sense of verbal argumentation determines neither our principles nor our ultimate judgments--that it is neither the test of truth nor the basis for assent. 8 On this point the moderns agree with Newman. They go on, however, to conclude that there is no truth or assent which can come from reasoning in concrete matters. Here they are presuming that the formal is the only legitimate form of reasoning. Consequently, they reject the reasoning of the unschooled, demanding that if a man has the truth he should be able to defend it using the precise word and the correct logic. They suppose that, if the learned cannot find a rational basis for assent, how can the unlearned possibly find it? Hence they attribute the beliefs of the ordinary man to ignorance at best or blind prejudice at worst. Now let us see how Newman draws the opposite conclusion in his discussion of informal inference. (2) Informal Reasoning Using our old workhorse, the insularity of Great Britain, we have a good example of informal reasoning in action. We have already seen that one cannot
Let units come first, and (so called) universals come second; let universals minister to units, not units be sacrificed to universals. John, Richard, and Robert are individual things, independent, incommunicable. We may find some kind of common measure between them, and we may give it the name of man, man as such, the typical man, the auto-anthropos. We are justified in so doing, and investing it with general attributes, and bestowing on it what we consider a definition. But we think we may go on to impose our definition on the whole race, and every member of it, to the thousand Johns, Richards, and Roberts found in it. No! Each of them is what he is, in spite of it. Not one of them is man, as such, or coincides with the auto anthropos. Another John is not necessarily rational, because all men are rational, for he may be an idiot; nor because man is a being of progress does the second Richard progress, for he may be a dunce;--nor because man is made for society must we therefore go on to deny that the second Robert is a gypsy or is bandit, as he is found to be. G.A., p. 224. Aristotle himself could not have said it any better.
8 7

G.A., p.229.
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account for the certitude we have about this proposition by the use of the syllogism. How then did we come to certitude about this belief? We did not put our reasoning into a single syllogism and leave it at that. We circled round and round the question, posing problems and then answering them. We did not trust the matter to paper logic but moved about, imagining all kinds of objections and answering them as they came. We pursued many different avenues of thought, none of them being absolutely conclusive when taken separately. But when taken together they all converged upon the truth of the fact in question. They converged upon the truth-but never quite touched it. An idealist rejects the conclusion on the basis that, since it is conceivable that human testimony be mistaken, the critical thinker can never give his assent to Britains insularity. But we brushed that view aside, considering it unreasonable. So each of the many strands of our reasoning is only probable and their union is still only a very high probability. But it is enough to justify the certain belief of a philosophical realist that Britain is indeed an island. High Degree of Intelligibility In a way, then, informal inference does supply such a high degree of intelligibility even in concrete matters so that it does bring about the assent--but this is the assent of a reasonable man. It is not the assent of the mathematical or philosophical mind whose assent is compelled when all the steps of the argument are understood. It is the assent of the reasonable man. But men vary very much in how reasonable they are. A cobbler knows shoes so we may trust him to know what he is talking about when he speaks of them. A detective knows criminals and so we may trust him to know what he is talking about. Both are reasonable men in their

fields. So the term reasonable does carry a definite meaning. But the meaning
varies according to the variety of men and the variety of their fields of endeavor. That is the best that philosophical reason can do when faced with the task of describing how man attains the truth in concrete matters. Is the term too vague? Of course it is. But if a philosopher tries to make it more precise, we have a sign that he does not know what he is talking about. Or if he is aware of what he is saying, we can be sure he is not living in the world the rest of us are living.. Completes the Efforts Newman uses the term informal inference to describe the way the living mind of man completes the efforts of formal reasoning by a method that may not
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easily be marked down in other syllogisms or formal expressions. It is relatively formless but therein lies its effectiveness. It does not disdain the use of formal reasoning but rather supplements it. But in supplementing formal reason it leads us off the clear line of a path marked with the definite sign posts of logic into a forest of paths which only the experienced traveler can negotiate. Newman makes a mathematical analogy to this process. Assume that geometrical lines have length but no thickness. Also assume that we inscribe a hexagon within a circle so that its six points touch the inside of the circle. Now if we double the sides of the hexagon, we have twelve points touching on the inside of the circle. If we keep doing that on to infinity, the transformed hexagon will gradually approximate the shape of the circle--but never get there. So too, if one takes a question of fact and sees how it is probable from many different angles, one approaches absolute truth but never gets there. Nevertheless, reason, noting this convergence of many probabilities towards the same point, gives its unqualified assent to the truth of the fact. If belief with certitude has any rational foundation, it must be on the basis of informal reasoning about converging probabilities. First Step Newmans view of converging probabilities is the first step he takes in showing how inference operates in such concrete matters of fact like the insularity of Great Britain, the innocence or guilt of an accused murderer, the fact that Christ founded the Church, the fact of Alexander the Greats conquests etc. These things may or may not be facts. But if we determine that they are facts, it is not by the use of formal inference. It is by the use of informal inference that one takes many different strands of probability, sees how they all converge about the truth of a matter of fact, and judges it to be certainly true. Here we begin to see the rabbit emerging from the hat. First Principles Again Understanding the informal method of using converging probabilities makes it easier to understand how the mind attains the truth about concrete matters through belief. But it also brings up the complication of the role of first principles. Though his theory of converging probabilities helps us, it is not by itself the complete solution to all the intellectual difficulties about belief. Newman gives many

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examples dramatizing this fact about which I will give one instance. 9 The issue concerns the report in the Gospels that Peter, James and John worked miracles. Here is a question about a factual matter. Did the Apostles work miracles or didnt they? How is one to decide the question? Hume does so in the following way. First, he maintains that men judge the testimony of others by experience. Newman would agree. Second, it is also by experience that men grasp the regularity of nature. Newman would also agree. Hume puts the two lines of experience together and concludes that it is more probable that men are mistaken rather than they are correct when they report about an exception to the regularity of nature. Thus the truth of the report of miracles is improbable. Again, Newman would agree. On this Hume seems content to rest his case. But has he proven his point? If one is an atheist, he has proven it. If there is no God, then he cannot be around to work any miracles. In view of this first principle the high improbability of miracles adds up to the impossibility of miracles. But here the first principle of the atheist is at work. The inference that miracles are highly improbable is by itself just an inference. If a Hume wishes to turn that inference into a truth, then he is free to do so. But by that act he thereby puts himself in the category of a believer, a conclusion which atheists do not care for very much. What happens, however, when one starts with the presumption that God exists? Newman grants that miracles are improbable. But so what? He can still remain open to the fact that God may have worked them. But being open to the possibility that Peter, James and John worked miracles is not the same as proving that they did. If Newman were to establish miracles as a fact, he would have to weigh the testimony of those claiming to be eyewitnesses. To verify this testimony he would have to show that this report of miracles has affected the history of the world in a way that would not be possible if there were no miracles. But now we have a long and difficult argument using the method of informal reasoning. We would have a proliferation of probabilities which would grow larger as we tended them. Very Difficult The point is that establishing matters of fact is very difficult and relies upon the inquirer having the right first principles. But how does one determine that? First
9

G.A.., p. 242-243.
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principles are what people take to be self-evident and so differences about them cannot be settled by argument. 10 We have seen this problem before in the argument of the realist and idealist about the existence of the external world. Newman has indeed advanced the argument by showing how an inquirers use of converging probabilities can lead him to true belief. But the man noting this convergence is doing so from a particular viewpoint, which is from his first principles of what he considers to be self-evident. Hume starts from one and Newman starts from the opposite. They have no common ground on which they can conduct an argument which will prove that one is right and the other wrong about the starting point. Other Examples of First Principles In these examples Newman illustrates the place that first principles have in inquiry. The differences among men are not to be explained simply in terms of differences in their reasoning powers but rather by differences in their first principles, which involves their mental and moral condition. It is these that determine ultimately how a man reasons. A skeptic like Montaigne, 11 a man living in easy circumstances, takes delight in showing all the difficulties involved in religious belief. A dying factory girl cries out that she would go mad if she thought that all the injustices of the world were not lifted in the next life. In brief, the ultimate tool of reasoning is to be found in the particular person doing the reasoning and not in any formal instrument. A Mighty Effort In concluding this section on informal inference, Newman makes a mighty effort to bring up examples dramatizing that his notion of converging probabilities is not his invention but is recognized by experts in their various fields as the only way to explain how they arrive at certitudes which they nevertheless recognize as nondemonstrable. He cites a treatise by an eminent astronomer 12 who shows that the rotation of the earth, held as a fact by all the experts, does not admit of strict
10

Here I am speaking of argument, not in theory, but as it actually takes place in the real world. And in the real world the will of man plays a large role. One who does not wish to be convinced will not be convinced.

11 12

G.A., p. 246-247. G.A., p. 252.

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demonstration but only allows of proof by converging probabilities. He cites the words of an eminent physicist 13 who states that the laws of motion, which constitute a basic truth in the field, do not allow of strict demonstration but are only the result of converging probabilities. He goes on to list the testimony of learned judges, noted literary critics, great mathematicians. All bear witness to the fact that they, the most hard headed and logical of men, confess that in matters most central to their field, they give their unqualified assent to truths even though they cannot demonstrate them. Making a Point I have made a point of the way in which Newman lines up the testimony of experts in other fields to dramatize the reason why I have not treated them in any great detail. Much of this testimony is over my head. I am not a genius like Newman who can range over all these other fields and speak with insight about how other experts agree with him. So I simply hold onto my certitude that Britain really is an island while trying to negotiate the material that Newman presents. That truth, I believe, I have mastered. Concerning the rest, I take Newmans word for it. Now I have been taught that in philosophy using the words of authority is the weakest of arguments. I thereby confess that in many places I have used the weakest of arguments. But, lest the reader suppose that I have had a sudden attack of humility, I will add that any one else with sense would have to do the same. The subject matter of belief entails showing how particular truths are attained by probable reasoning. The argument of Newman is designed to show that, if we examine the particular beliefs we have attained, it has been by probable reasoning. Thus he appeals from his experience in the matter to our experience. But his experience is far wider than that of most others. So if they are like me they cannot decide these complicated matters just on the basis of their own personal experience because they would have to be masters of the innumerable ways of how inference in concrete matters works. So they do well to give his words or those of anyone like him a great deal of authority. As we will see, Newman had to do the same even though he is a genius. But in the final analysis even he had to adopt mentors because the complexity of the subject matter demands it.

13

G.A., p. 255.
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Natural Inference Newmans discussion of inference finally comes to its source, the living intellect of man. And here we see why it is so difficult for men to track their own reasoning. Much of it happens below his direct consciousness. In a sermon 14 Newman once compared the movement of a mans intellect moving towards a concrete truth to a mountaineer climbing up a steep precipice. In general he knows what he must do to get to the top and to avoid getting himself killed. But in particular he must leave it to his instincts, honed from past experience, to find the proper places for his hands and feet as he deals with the particular problems of the ascent. Somehow he arrives at the top but without a precise idea of every movement he has made to get there. Such is a good analogy for the highly personal and mysterious way in which man arrives at belief in a truth. Directly With Things Newman describes this kind of reasoning as dealing directly with things, not so much with words and concepts. In the matter of womans intuition, for example, a woman may not trust a particular stranger because she senses an unsavory character behind the charming exterior. If she has had a great deal of experience in noting the way that men speak, dress and carry themselves, she has acquired a great deal of knowledge which comes to bear upon the particular man in front of her. Thus her intuition will often prove to be correct though her husband might accuse her of jumping to conclusions. The Illative Sense After one attains a great deal of experience in any particular field, his informal or natural reasoning gets better with practice. Thus one acquires what Newman calls an illative sense in those particular matters. It is a kind of good habit or perfection of natural reasoning developed in a particular field over a period of time. Let me use the example of a veteran detective attaining certitude about his belief in the innocence of an accused even when all the circumstantial evidence seems to point the other way. The investigator may know that he cannot prove his case in a court of law. Yet from his experience in questioning the accused, the kind of experience gained in thousands of interrogations in the past, he may be certain
14

John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, pp. 256-257.

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that he is still right although no one agrees with him. The detective is an instance of the illative sense in action. A Horde of True Believers One should not think that Newman by his doctrine is letting loose upon the world a horde of true believers who know in their hearts that they are right. As if to ward off this impression, Newman closes his chapter with a citation and commentary upon the words of Aristotle, the secular source of his doctrine. Aristotle, the inventor of the syllogism, is well acquainted with its merits and yet he says the following: We are bound to give heed to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions of the experienced and aged, not less than to demonstrations; because, from their having the eye of experience, they behold the principles of things. 15 Aristotle Here Aristotle lays down the teaching that Newman has been advocating. Since formal reasoning in concrete matter leads only to probabilities, the only instrument left to decide such matters is the judgment of experienced men, the elders. Experience has given them an eye for the particular. Since the particular in the case of belief is not an object of sight, it is beyond immediate personal experience. Therefore, it must be an object of ratiocination. Since it is not a necessary or abstract object, it must be contingent or concrete. Consequently, it is neither the metaphysician nor the scientist that can determine the truth of a particular fact. It is only the man who has had great experience in dealing with the various particulars in his own field. This is so because chance is always a factor in determining a particular state of affairs. Therefore it takes experience in order to take this factor into account. That is why those inexperienced in a particular field of inquiry, even though they are brilliant mathematicians or good metaphysicians, are not adequate in the situation. They deal with universal certainties. Belief deals ultimately with contingent facts. 16 Hence the inexperienced in any field must serve
15

G.A., p. 268.

It occurs to me that, while the beliefs themselves can encompass abstract truths like the existence of God or the truth of natural law, the reason for the belief is found in the contingent circumstances which lead the believer to accept the word of some authority on these matters or to think that these truths are likely. This is not so in the case of one who demonstrates the truth of Gods existence or of the natural law. Here the circumstances in which he reasons makes no difference because he is thinking solely in terms of universal principles. 144

16

an apprenticeship to those who have experience if they are to arrive at the right beliefs. Restricted To Specific Subject Matters The effectiveness of the illative sense is restricted to the subject matter in which the investigator has experience. This follows from the fact that the truth of a particular fact cannot be determined by the use of general principles. Thus the existence or non-existence of the fact in question determines how one is to approach it. Only the experienced man knows how to do this. Further, since an historical event is different from a judicial event, a geological fact from a psychological characteristic, a miracle from an ordinary occurrence, each event requires special preparation in approaching it. Each has come into existence as the result of many different causes which happened to come together in a particular time and place. To be successful, then, in locating this reality, the inquirer must be already experienced in searching for this type of thing. Thus the illative sense of a geologist is worthless in determining the guilt or innocence of an accused. The inquirer must already have an eye for the thing he is looking for. In short, the very nature of a particular thing as an object of belief is a first principle which determines how and by whom belief in that truth will be attained. Newmans Commentary The paragraph above has been my commentary on Aristotle. Let us now read Newmans: Instead of trusting logical science, we must trust persons, namely those who by long acquaintance with their subjects have a right to judge. And if we wish ourselves to share in their convictions and the grounds of them, we must follow their history and learn as they have learned. We must take up their particular subject as they took it up, beginning at the beginning, give ourselves to it, depend upon practice and experience more than on reasoning, and thus gain that mental insight into truth, whatever its subject matter may be, which our masters have gained before us. By following this course, we may make ourselves of this number, and then we rightly lean upon ourselves, directing ourselves by our own moral or intellectual judgments, not by our skill in argumentation. 17 The eye of experience is to be attained, not by formal reasoning, but by serving as an apprentice to those experienced in the field. In other words, for one to
17

G.A., p. 268.

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attain this deeply personal gift which, having been acquired, enables a person finally to stand by his own judgment, he must have been in personal relationship to his elders in that field. He must have come from a community of men with a tradition. There he has absorbed the communal wisdom by means of profession, credence and especially by contact with men whose minds and hearts have already been formed by real assent to certain truths. Only with the experience of others and himself will he be able to approach the matter of belief with the right first principles and with the right way to proceed from them. Consequently, it will be no surprise to him that others do not share these principles because others have different masters and are from different communities. It will be no surprise to him that he may not be able to win many arguments with these people. Attaining the truth is not necessarily the same as being able to win an argument. These facts do not frighten him into being a relativist for whom there is no such thing as truth. Nor do they freeze him into being a fanatic or bigot for whom reasoning does not make any difference. Rather it turns him into a man who is aware that, if belief in the truth of some concrete event is not attained in this way, it cannot be attained in any other way. Out of the Hat Newman, then, has pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Accepting the condition that all inference in concrete matters is only probable, he has shown nevertheless how it accounts for definite belief, not just in simple matters like the insularity of Great Britain, but in any of the larger matters also requiring non-demonstrative inference. It was easy enough for Newman to justify legitimacy of informal inference in the case of a simple matter like the island status of Great Britain because the reader could take in the whole process and check it out for himself. But it was impossible for Newman to describe the process of inference in more complicated matters with the same ease, though he does give many long examples. The reason is that the field of the concrete is infinitely variable. So there is no fixed method, no fixed path which a reader can follow to justify, for example, the reasoning of a juror, historian, police investigator or any other man experienced in his field by laying it out clearly before the readers gaze. Yet Newman does tie down this process as much as he can by introducing the thought of Aristotle. His generalization is that man can and does attain true belief in concrete matters by developing his illative sense under the mentorship of elders experienced in the field.
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Rsum In this chapter Newman has gone a long way down the trail leading to his destination of showing the truth of the Catholic Church. He has shown the condition necessary for reasoning correctly in any field is to have the proper experience in that field. To do that one must apprentice himself to those with long experience in that field. They will be his mentors. The apprentice will believe what they say and imitates how they act. He will be like the child who accepted the words of his mother about the greatness of Shakespeare. Traveling along these grooves of the best in the tradition, he will eventually see this truth for himself. In this kind of training the acquisition of the formal instruments of argument, while important, is not primary. What is primary is the real assents he gives to the truths of his experience along the way. He thereby acquires his first principles, the most decisive elements of thought. In short he acquires an illative sense which enables him to move through the complexities of non-demonstrative inference with assurance. If the field in question is how to live life as a human being, he need not have the advantage of higher education. He may even be illiterate. Seeing that this is the case in ordinary matters of belief makes it easier to see how the ordinary man is still capable of discovering the truth about such a complicated matter as the truth of the Catholic Church.

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Chapter Eleven
The Illative Sense 1
As far as Newman is concerned, the argument of Part II is over. He set out at the beginning to refute the theory of his opponents that assent to the truth of any concrete matter is illegitimate and has done so to his satisfaction by considering the facts of the case. From those facts he draws the conclusion that, if one wishes to attain the truth by the act of belief, he must cultivate an intellectual habit, the illative sense. As we have seen, however, even those who have this sense in their fields can still differ widely among themselves. This is just the kind of conclusion that makes one nervous. It certainly has made me nervous as I, like a defense attorney with a difficult case to argue, have to resist the temptation to keep explaining and let the matter rest. I imagine that Newman felt the same way if we are to judge by the many examples he piles on each other, examples I have not even touched upon. He can show easily enough all that is involved in a simple case like the island status of England. But to show how the method of converging probabilities works in the harder cases he has to resort to examples which only the experts in this fields will be familiar. But finally Newman rests his case, saying at the beginning of this chapter: Everyone who reasons, is his own center; and no expedient for finding a common measure of minds can reverse this truth; --but then the question follows: is their any criterion [his italics] of the accuracy of an inference, such as may be our warrant that certitude is rightly elicited in favor of the proposition inferred, since our warrant cannot, as I have said, be scientific? Here we get a straight question. And he immediately gives us a straight answer: I have already said that the sole and final judgment on the validity of inference in concrete matter is committed to the personal action of the ratiocinative faculty, the perfection or virtue of which I have called the Illative Sense, a use of the word sense parallel to our use of it in good sense, common sense, a sense of beauty, etc; --and I own that I do not see any way to go further than this in answer to the question. However, I can at least explain my meaning more fully; and therefore I will now speak, first of the sanction of the Illative Sense, next of its nature, and then of its range. 2

1 2

This chapter will cover the main argument in Chapter Nine of The Grammar of Assent. G.A., p. 271. 148

So Newman rests his case and I will do the same. Let us now proceed to Newmans discussion of the sanction of the illative sense. The Sanction of the Illative Sense Concerning the term sanction, the word implies authoritative approval. The first authority which Newman appeals to is that of nature. We must note, however, that he views nature in the manner of Aristotle, who sees it as a design put into the world by divine authors. If one, however, views nature as the accidental result of the operations of chance, one will not consider it as a power which blesses or legitimizes the way in which man reasons. Here nature will simply be a blind force which imposes certain physical and mental necessities upon him. On this view there will be opposition between the spirit of man and the world in which he lives. Man will be a Prometheus 3 who must resist the necessities imposed upon him in order to attain his dignity as a human being. Here his duty will be to fight rather than to yield to nature. Descartes provides a good example of this attitude. Initially, he will not accept the witness of the world to itself but puts it under suspicion by his methodical doubt. Finally, he does accept the existence of the external world but only because of his own long chain of reasoning. He will allow the external world to exist again because he has reasoned it into existence. If, however, one takes nature as it presents itself to him, one is accepting it, not as a brute necessity, but simply as the way the divine has designed man and the world around him. The acceptance of the realist, then, is an act of piety to the gods. Things Precede Understanding Human experience shows that, before man understands very much about the world and his own cognitional powers, he uses the things of the world and his own powers because that is all that has been given to him. Here the use of things and his powers precedes his understanding of those things and his powers. If man is to understand more fully, he must accept as true the way that nature presents itself to him and then sort out illusion from truth. This acceptance is no great burden because it is natural to man. We have seen, however, that a man like Descartes is deeply suspicious about the validity of mans natural knowledge and so approaches it with doubt, with a sense that it may well be the source of all illusion. Hence he puts aside the external world as his starting point, opting for the starting point of the consciousness of himself.
3

Prometheus, a semi-divine figure, steals fire from the gods in order to benefit mankind. The gods punish him by chaining him to a rock where vultures eat out his liver for all eternity. 149

On this view of the matter men like Aristotle and Newman are simply naive in their approach, never having taken into account the supposedly more sophisticated or critical view of nature which the moderns describe as the great turn to the subject. God as the Sanction Newman goes on to invoke God as the ultimate sanction for the illative sense. Granting that the use of the illative sense is a path fraught with difficulties, he considers it an act of impiety to reject it in favor of some easier and man-made instrument. It is an axiom among Aristotelians that the subject matter of any inquiry determines its method, which is the way a reality is to be approached. Newman appropriates this axiom and attributes its ultimate truth to the mind of God. He says: It is He who teaches us all knowledge; and the way by which we acquire it is His way. He varies that way according to the subject-matter; but whether he has set before us in our particular pursuit the way of observation or of experiment, of speculation or research, of demonstration or of probability, whether we are inquiring into system of the universe, or into the elements of matter or of life, or into the history of human society and past times, if we take the way proper to our subjectmatter we have His blessings upon us, and shall find, besides abundant matter for mere opinion, the materials in due measure for proof and assent. 5 In brief, I think that God will bless Aristotle because the old pagan put in words what God intended; namely, that different things requires different methods of reasoning if we are to understand them. The Requirements After placing the approach of Aristotle as a kind of divine directive located in the nature of things, Newman goes on to consider the requirements laid upon the inquirer when he approaches religious matters. Here he does not require that the inquirer be a highly trained philosopher, mathematician, historian or scientist because the nature of religious and ethical matters calls for a different approach. To these matters an inquirer cannot bring an intellect only trained in other fields. He must bring a religious mind and heart. As Newman says:
4 4

While teaching at a seminary, I heard a great deal about this turn to the subject from the theology department, which was very enthusiastic of this contribution by Descartes but much less enthusiastic about my treatment of that philosopher. My villain was their hero.

G.A., p. 275.
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And especially, by this disposition of things [that the nature of the subject matter determines the approach that one must take] shall we learn, as regards religious and ethical inquiries, how little we can affect, however much we exert ourselves, without that Blessing; for, as if on set purpose, He has made this path of thought rugged and circuitous above other investigations, that the very discipline inflicted upon our minds in finding Him may mould him into due devotion to Him when He is found. Verily Thou art a Hidden God, the God of Israel the Savior is the very law of his dealings with us. Certainly we need a clue into the labyrinth which is to lead us to Him; and who among us can hope to seize upon the true starting-points of thought for that enterprise, and upon all of them, who is to understand their right direction, to follow them out to their just limits, and duly to estimate, adjust and combine the various reasonings in which they issue, so as safely to arrive at what it is worth any effort to secure, without a special illumination from Himself? First Principles In the account above Newman had displayed the first principles in whose light he has conducted his whole inquiry. Here he speaks as an honest man quite aware that many do not share those principles. To them he extends the courtesy of showing where he is coming from. But to those who share his first principles, he is performing the intellectual service of making explicit what they hold in an implicit and vague way. The Nature of the Illative Sense Newman now proceeds to treat the nature of the illative sense. It is an intellectual perfection which enables its possessor to acquire the truth in concrete matters. Thus, it contrasts with the intellectual perfection which enables one to find the truth about abstract natures in demonstrative reasoning, a matter fully explored by Aristotle. Though Aristotle never explored what Newman calls the illative sense, he did have a great deal to say about an intellectual virtue which is similar in that it develops from experience in the concrete order so that it might be used in that order. This is the intellectual virtue of prudence, which Aristotle discusses fully in the Nicomachean Ethics. Consequently, Newman shows great interest in this ancient work. This is what he says: He [Aristotle] calls the faculty which guides the mind in matters of conduct by the name of phronesis [prudence], or judgment. This is the directing, controlling and determining principle in such matters, personal and social. What it is to be virtuous, how we are to attain the just idea and standard of virtue, how we are to approximate in practice to our own standard, what is right or wrong in a particular case, for the fullness and accuracy in answering these questions, the philosopher refers us to no code of laws, moral treatise because no science of life, applicable to the case of an individual, has been or can be written. Such is Aristotles doctrine, and it is undoubtedly true. 6

G.A., p. 277.
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Such too is St. Thomas Aquinass doctrine. 7 Prudence is an intellectual virtue with a moral complement which a man acquires only by practice. It must be part of his character before he takes upon the study of the science of morals because it is from the experience of the prudent man that the generalizations of moral science are drawn and by this experience that he applies these generalizations to his moment to moment actions of his life. Newman continues, explaining the role that moral science does play in the life of the prudent man: An ethical system may supply laws, general rules, guiding principles, a number of examples, suggestions, landmarks, limitations, cautions, distinctions, solutions of critical or anxious difficulties; but who is to apply them to a specific case? whither can we go, except to the living intellect, our own, or anothers? What is written is too vague, too negative for our need. It bids us avoid extremes, but it cannot ascertain for us, according to our personal need, the golden mean. 8 Moral philosophy is certainly an intellectual instrument. But it will be useless in the hands of a man lacking the practical virtue of prudence. Only prudence can discern the golden mean in each occasion for action. Only prudence can direct a man to perceive the right mark in each situation, veering neither to excess nor defect but acting in just the right way at the right time with the proper emotion in the right circumstances. By itself, knowledge of universal norms alone does not give man the ability to perceive what and how a deed should be done in the particular. Newman continues to expound upon the marvelous thing that is prudence: The authoritative oracle which is to decide our path, is something more searching, more manifold than such jejune generalizations as treatises can give which are most distinct and clear when we least need them. It is seated in the mind of the individual, who is thus his own law, his own teacher, and his own judge in those special cases of duty which are personal to him. It comes of an acquired habit, though it has it first origin in nature itself, and it is formed and matured by practice and experience; and it manifests itself, not in any breadth of view, any philosophical comprehension, but is a capacity sufficient for the occasion, deciding what ought to be done here and now by this given person, under these given circumstances. 9

7 8 9

See R. Geraghty, The Object of Moral Science According to St. Thomas Aquinas.

G.A., p. 277 G.A., p. 278.

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There is no requirement in the classical or the Christian tradition that the prudent man must necessarily be a man of wide learning or a philosopher. His particular strength is to be able to act well in the here and now whether he be rich or poor, literate or illiterate. If men happen to acquire the other intellectual virtues giving breadth of mind, well and good. But if these further gifts are not grafted upon the foundations of a solid character, they become merely the source of vanity. Hence the good man does not need the philosopher to come along and tell him how to live. He already knows that. What he does need the philosopher for is to learn how to articulate his implicit sense of the world into universal norms which will equip him to make wise laws for the whole community. The political needs of a whole community of any size outstrip the experience of a single man just as the physical needs of a whole community outstrip the experience of the most skilled medical practitioner. So just as the prudent man will welcomes the intellectual training imparted by a philosopher, so the practitioner will welcome the theory of a doctor who supplies the reasons why particular cures work and others dont. Newmans Interest I think the account above makes it clear why Aristotles discussion of prudence aroused the interest of Newman, giving him a general place in the tradition into which he could locate his notion of the illative sense. Newman is looking for an intellectual virtue which enables man to find the truth in concrete matters in general, not just moral matters. In other words, he is looking for a virtue which perfects one in the realm of experience, which is the necessary prelude to all scientific reasoning. Thus he finds a great parallel between his teaching about the illative sense and Aristotles description of prudence. Similarities and Differences Let us note the similarities and the differences between the two. Just as prudence controls ones estimate of the first principles of moral action in the real world, so the illative sense controls ones estimate of first principles in any field of inquiry. Here, however, the fit is not perfect because prudence is always correct in its choice of first principles while the illative sense is not. Again, just as prudence is attained by the personal interaction of men within the context of a community, so the illative sense is acquired through apprenticeship of the inexperienced to the experienced in a field of study. Again, just as prudence controls the

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process of deliberation and action from beginning to end, so does the illative sense control reasoning from its first principles to its conclusions in concrete matters. 10 Again, just as the possession of prudence precedes the acquisition of science, so does the illative sense precede and control the use of such instruments as words and concepts in the construction of a science. Again, just as prudence is preeminently an intellectual virtue employed in the realm of moral experience, so the perfection of the illative sense is preeminently an intellectual virtue in discovering the truth in the realm of the concrete. Again, just as the prudent man may not be able to justify to others the path of deliberation he has taken in making a certain choice, so the man of the illative sense may not be able to justify his belief to others in argument. Winning an argument is one thing; being right is another. The Difference Between the Practical and the Speculative To put Aristotles discussion of ethics in it proper perspective, one has to recall the distinction he makes between practical and speculative philosophy. This radical nature of this distinction governs the way in which both St. Thomas Aquinas and Newman approach philosophical argument. In the purely speculative or theoretical sciences like metaphysics, the philosopher approaches reality simply for the sake of attaining the truth about it. If the question is about the existence of God, he cannot assume that God exists as a first principle. Rather he must start with a principle which everyone should grant; namely, the existence of the world. He must then demonstrate Gods existence and then take into account every objection that can be urged against this proof. Thus we have the amazing and often tedious detail into which Aristotle and St. Thomas enter in their theoretical discussions. No objection is left unanswered; no first principle is left unexamined. Their whole treatment is about as explicit as the human mind can make it. Even the most outrageous and even stupid objections are considered. This is what a purely speculative or contemplative approach to the truth demands. The Practical Sciences The practical sciences like ethics and politics are quite another matter. Here the goal is to seek the truth for the sake of action. This goal requires that one seeking to
10

Sometimes Newman seems to imply that the use of the illative sense is not necessary in abstract fields like metaphysics. This is true in secondary thinkers who follow formal arguments in a mechanical way. But I remember a man of great learning and insight into metaphysics who vigorously maintained that the expressions of great metaphysicians like Aristotle are as personal and unique to them as the fingerprints on a mans hand. At bottom, then, metaphysics is deeply personal and requires its own version of the illative sense. 154

acquire this science must already have the experience of life before he seeks to analyze it. He must already know in a practical way the facts he is seeking to put into a scientific form. That is why Aristotle does not preface his Nicomachean Ethics with a demonstration of the gods existence. Now some may be surprised at this omission because the existence of the gods is the key factor upon which his ethics depends. But Aristotle has already done that in his long and complicated work of the metaphysics, using all the detail and subtlety which such a project demands. But such detail is out of place in a practical science because the ultimate goal is action. Thus if a student does not believe in the gods, there is no point in arguing with him about the matter; he has not been brought up well and should be sent back to his parents and schoolmasters in order to get his head and heart straight. He must straighten out his bent character. Otherwise he will be incapable of benefiting from the knowledge acquired in ethics because he does not yet know how to live. Highhanded? The modern observer may consider such an approach to be very high-handed indeed. But that means he has lost his sense of reality sense of the distinction between the theoretical and the practical. If he wishes to engage in purely theoretical discussions, he is invited by Aristotle to consider his works on the speculative or theoretical sciences where he can find all the details that one might wish for. But if he wishes to engage in a practical inquiry, he must take for granted the first principles of that inquiry, which are the correct religious and social beliefs.In his argument in The Grammar of Assent Newman is pursuing a practical approach. He takes for granted at least a notional belief in the existence of God and seeks to show how it may be turned into a real belief. He takes for granted the reality of conscience and seeks to show how paying heed to it is the basic requirement for discovering the truth of the Catholic Church. He is being practical in the grand tradition of thinkers like Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. A Reflection What Newman is attempting to do in his defense of belief has already been done by Aristotle in his discussion of prudence. The ancient Greek has laid it down that, before one engages in the formal reasoning of moral philosophy, one needs the proper preparation, which takes place only in the realm of experience. Here Aristotle, the great apostle of formal reasoning, gives experience an essential role in his epistemology. Here the life of ordinary men living in a community, of parents raising children, of elders ruling
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a clan, of political leaders governing a nation involve the acquisition of many practical truths. If there ever was a philosopher who gave such importance to the realm of experience, it is Aristotle. The truth of the great structure of formal reasoning that he raises upon this foundation depends upon the truth attained by experience. Experience operates before men utilize the great tool of science in all its forms. The Range of the Illative Sense Having treated the nature of the illative sense, Newman now discusses its range. Its range covers the truth of all concrete matters and, consequently, the truth of all the sciences because they originate from the facts. It is true that sense knowledge also covers the facts. But these facts are known immediately without proof. The illative sense covers the kinds of facts which man must reason to if he is to possess them. Thus belief has a wider range. First Principles The illative sense also covers first principles or presumptions, not in their forms as universal statements, but in their forms in the concrete order. For example, both a realist and idealist have already made certain assumptions about the status of the world before them before they have attempted to articulate them in notional first principles. It seems that those with the inclinations of a realist will acknowledge the reality of a fact even though he may not be able to encompass it in a clear and distinct idea. For example, the existence of the tree itself on the lawn takes priority over understanding its nature. One can know it is there without knowing very much about its nature. In contrast, an idealist seems to place trust in his ideas, giving priority to what is clear and distinct and distrusting the comparative opacity of material things. Thus we have the contrast between Aristotle, whose father was a physician, and Descartes, a great mathematician. Physicians have to observe closely the patient before acquiring the facts that lead him to a diagnosis. The intellectual movement is from the outward reality to the mind and then back to the reality. In contrast, the mathematician is concerned with making sure that his ideas are clear and precise enough to warrant his deductions. If he has the hardihood of Descartes, he will then apply them to a material world according to his own conception of it. This conception is that of a machine, which is more susceptible of mathematical treatment than the dense world of Aristotle. The basic movement is from the mind to outward reality. In whatever way one tries to explain how men arrive at their first principles in
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philosophy, science, politics, and religion, they do arrive at them from their own experience of the world. Some explicate them in formal study, thus creating an explicit philosophy. Others do not articulate their assumptions, remaining unaware of them even as they proceed under their light. In any event first principles control how men approach the world. Supervising the Whole Process of Reasoning Newman proceeds to illustrate two points. The first is how the illative sense supervises the whole argument about some concrete matter. The second is how the illative sense provides the key to a mans selection of his first principles. Concerning the first point, he gives an extended example of how various historians argued about the prehistoric situation of Greece and Rome. 11 The historians only had the evidence supplied by the various legends that came down from the past in the poems of Homer and Virgil. It is an obvious fact that the Greeks and Romans had ancestors in prehistoric times. But whether they actually engaged in the Trojan War is not easy to say because the evidence is supplied by myths and perhaps some archeological remains. Newman records the various approaches that the historians took in the way they handled the evidence. Who among them is right? Newman does not venture to say because his point to illustrate how the illative sense of experienced men provides contradictory explanations of the matter at hand. The Selection of First Principles Having shown how as a matter of fact the illative sense directs the course of any argument about a concrete matter, Newman then gives a brief review of first principles which have determined the cultural history of modern man. Again, he is not trying to determine which are right and which are wrong but merely describing what has happened. Newman gives the example of Francis Bacon, 12 whose insight set modern science upon its course. Up until Bacons time the typical approach to the study of nature was through Aristotles notion of the four causes, particularly the final cause. The presumption was that the world was a thing of design. Bacon initiated the practice of leaving out of consideration final causes and concentrating only upon the efficient or moving causes and then checking the results by experiment. Newman does not
11 12

G.A., pp. 284-290. G.A., p. 290.

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elaborate on this matter. But he does give the background of modern times in which Aristotles quest for intelligibility was tossed aside in favor of a use of reason which has given man great power over the physical world. It also explains why those trained in the physical sciences today will resist any effort to seek any overall design to the world, a project which demands consideration of final causes. These are the scientists to whom Newman was referring in his Sermon 13 analyzed at the beginning of this book. In burying Aristotle, they buried any talk of final causes. The Philosophy of Doubt The next point we wish to comment upon is Newmans discussion of the place that doubt has in philosophy. 14 As we have seen, Descartes initial stance was to doubt everything and then try to rebuild the world on new foundations. Hence his advice that one should start philosophizing by not assuming anything. Of all assumptions, Newman considers this to be the greatest of all. He does not see how its use can avoid utter skepticism as one digs deeper and deeper for presumption which will hold. Then Newman lays out his own presumption. If he had to choose between believing in nothing or believing in everything, he would choose to believe in everything on the assumption that such a believer would in the course of life discard many of the beliefs of profession and credence because they turned out to be unreal. The Bible Alone Another example. 15 Protestants take as their first principle the tenet that all religious truth is to be found in the Bible. So when they challenge Catholics to support their claims, they automatically judge them to be wrong because they cannot produce a clear text proving the truth of such doctrines as Purgatory, the Immaculate Conception, or the Real Presence. It makes absolutely no impression on them when the Catholic protests that not all religious truth can be found clearly and explicitly in the Bible. Here we have an example of a collision between first principles. When the Protestant approaches Catholic beliefs, for instance, his illative sense is informed by one principle. He has grown up or taken on the presumptions of one type of community. When the Catholic approaches this belief, his illative sense is informed by a different principle. He
13 14 15

See Chapter One above, note 14.

G.A., p. 294. G.A., p. 296.

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has grown up in another type of community. Now there is no question that Newman considers the illative sense of the Protestant to be wrong. Nevertheless, he does attribute the stand of the Protestants to their use of the illative sense. If the illative sense were exactly parallel to prudence, it could not be mistaken in the matter of first principles. But Newman does not take this position. Rather he maintains that Protestants are mistaken in their use of the illative sense. Nevertheless it still has great power today, as one will know who has any dealings with evangelical Protestants. The Realist What Newman is doing here is being eminently realistic about what happens to experienced men who are formed by different elders in different traditions. They take into themselves in a personal and intimate way principles or assumptions which dictate how they will approach any concrete matter. These principles are so deep in them that they may not even consciously recognize their existence. And when they do recognize them, they immediately judge that they are correct without arguing about it. They take its truth for granted and are shocked to discover that others may not agree. Clearly first principles are the single most important factor controlling any judgments a man might make in the concrete order. Newmans Case Newman himself may be taken as a good example of how the illative sense controls an argument from the selection of its first principles to the development of the argument and to its final outcome. Though his ancient and medieval predecessors had a very clear idea of how probable inference can lead to the truth in concrete matters, it was he who took those principles and used them to give a long and sustained argument to meet the needs of a particular age. It took him years of intense searching and thought to see that the whole matter of belief turned on the relationship of inference to assent. When he finally saw that about four years before he got to writing the book he had so long desired to write, he proceeded rather quickly. The argument itself was no mere syllogism put on rails but rather an argument based upon taking various probabilities and showing how they all pointed to the conclusion that man does attain certitude about the truth of concrete matters. Rsum Newman has almost completed what he set out to do in Part Two of his work, which was to show the relationship between inference and assent about belief in
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ordinary matters. What remains to be done in the next chapter is to show the relationship between those two acts of the mind in arriving at belief in the truth of Christianity or, to be more precise, in the truth of the Catholic Church. 16 What is the main lesson which Newman brings to his project in the next chapter? It is the fact that when anyone tries to reason to the truth of some concrete matter in any field, he must have the proper experience in order to be successful. This experience is acquired, not primarily by study, but by first submitting oneself to the experienced in that field before attaining the right to trust his own judgment. His judgment in this field it directed by his illative sense, which fixes upon the right first principles and guides him through the complexities confronting him in his search. Since this is the pattern for all belief, it should be the pattern for arriving at a rational belief in the truth of the Church. In the next chapter we will see how Newman illustrates that point.

16

Newman usually speaks of the truth of Christianity since Christianity existed before the division of Protestant and Catholic in the Sixteenth Century. But the fact is that, when Newman speaks about Christianity, it is the Catholic, not the Protestant version. So I have often adopted the practice of referring simply to the Catholic Church when Newman speaks of Christianity. 160

Chapter Twelve
Assent and Inference in Religious Matters 1

Newman now proceeds to the goal at which he has been aiming all along; namely, to apply his philosophical principles to the religious matter of belief in the truth of the Catholic Church. Since he has been conducting a practical, not a theoretical inquiry, he has assumed that his readers stand in the same community as he does. Hence all parties accept by supernatural faith that the Church is the true Church and that this belief is eminently rational. But to accept by faith is not the same as accepting by reason alone the truth of the Church. So Newman, having considered this matter as one who has apprenticed himself to the elders of this community for many years, seeks to make explicit what his readers already hold implicitly. In other words he will fill in the outline supplied by the Catholic tradition of faith and reason by depicting the wing of reason. A Factual or Contingent Matter We have placed the truth of the Church in the category of factual or contingent matters like Alexander the Great conquering the world, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, an accused being guilty of a crime, or the poor benefiting from Free Trade. They all have the feature of being contingent, things that might or might not have existed. If we discover that they exist, it is because we have employed non-demonstrative reason in our use of the illative sense. Newman now wishes to apply this doctrine to the far more complex question of whether the claims of the Catholic Church can be verified by reason alone. Earlier 2 Newman noted that even some religious thinkers do not accept the notion that belief has anything to do with human reason. They assume with Newmans opponents that reasoning attains only probabilities, not certitudes. At the same time they hold that certainty in religious belief is legitimate. To justify this stand, they bring in a factor which is outside of reason, that factor being a kind of direct intuition into the truth. In other words, they hold that believers somehow know in their hearts that they are right in spite of rather than because of human reason. Here belief is like a blind leap into the unknown for which one can give no rational account. Newman rejects this approach. He
1 2

This chapter will cover the first half of the argument in Chapter Ten of The Grammar of Assent.

G.A., p. 270
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has expanded the notion of reason to include, not just formal reason, but the illative sense as well. Since, however, the use of the illative sense is no guarantee that its possessor has started with the right first principles, its use varies widely with different seekers. In the face of this difficulty, Newman still insists that the use of the illative sense is rational. How then will he proceed in presenting his case to a world which is widely pluralistic in its basic philosophical and religious views, holding many different first principles close to its heart? Egoism Is True Modesty Newman answers by stating that egoism is true modesty when a man is engaged with presenting the evidence for his own ethical, metaphysical or religious beliefs. Here Newman is being provocative in using the term egoism. But he wishes to make a point. There are some like myself who would wish to have at hand an argument so irresistible that the listener would have to agree--if he only listened to me. Newman is wiser. Faced with wide differences, Newman sees his duty as giving an account of what he thinks. Since he is responsible for his own belief, it is his account that the world has a right to expect. Consequently, he feels no call to set up formal arguments designed to convince others that they are wrong while he is right. He has already insisted that the illative sense does not provide a common measure between the minds of men but rather places each in his own center. Consequently, Newman will settle for the modest project of giving an account of his own reasons for belief. The Egoism of a Realist The egoism, however, is that of a realist whose illative sense has been formed in a community, not that of an idealist who by his own admission is initially confined to his own consciousness. Further, Newman is definitely a Catholic among Catholics. Thus he can expect that the same evidence which has moved him has also moved others. Yet he can also hope that those who do not share his faith might respect his approach. After all, he is not attacking them at every turn but rather providing an honest account of his own beliefs for those who may be curious about them. This was his approach in writing the

Apologia Pro Sua Vita. He laid open his mind and heart to a public notoriously hostile to
his faith, risking a great deal of abuse in order to appeal to the fair mindedness of that public. His gamble worked. The public acknowledged that, though it still did not agree with him, it considered him an honest man. This is quite an achievement in a religiously pluralistic culture. But Newman could hope for more from Catholic intellectuals who,
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while sharing his basic beliefs, would still wish to understand them better by following the lead of an elder. Intellectual Grace It is due to his notion of the illative sense that he can show intellectual grace in dealing with those who differ from him. Though he does not back off in the least from his own convictions, as we will soon see, he leaves others to their own sense of things while giving his. There is nothing more aggravating to the general reader that to see a writer trying to lay down the law by constructing an intellectual engine designed to flatten everyone. This is not to say that there is no truth that each man is bound to seek. It is to say that truth is either accepted or rejected in the inarticulate recesses of each mans heart. Formal reasoning, even in demonstrative philosophy, cannot give the whole picture of the way human reason works. Indeed, no explicit account, which of its nature uses language and precise concepts, can. What is left, then, is the work of the illative sense, which differs in each man. Hence the maxim that egoism is true modesty when speaking about personal beliefs. The Object of Newmans Belief Having seen the approach that Newman will employ in giving the reasons for his belief, let us now examine the precise object of his belief, which is the truth of Christianity. Newman explains that it is not a philosophy somehow spread among the various opinions of men and left to make its own way as other philosophies and religions have. Rather [Christianity] is a definite message from God to man distinctly conveyed by His chosen instruments and to be received as such a message; and therefore to be positively acknowledged and embraced, and maintained as true, on the ground of its being divine, not as true on intrinsic grounds, not as probably true, or partially true, but as absolutely certain knowledge, certain in a sense in which nothing else can be certain, because it comes from Him who can neither deceive nor be deceived. 3 The fact in question is the claim of the Catholic Church that it comes from God. Obviously, this is the claim of a community. Now the choice of the investigator is either to believe this claim or not. He is not entitled to change the question and substitute his own notion of Christianity and then lay down what he chooses to accept or reject of its teachings. Since Newman is defining the object of his belief, he has the right to lay it out as he sees it. And he sees it as no private matter but in the way the Church has defined
3

G.A., p. 302.
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itself. Considering the many different notions of Christianity that are current in the world today, particularly after the Protestant Reformation, we can see that it is Newmans illative sense which selects the precise nature of the fact in question and thereby sets the path of the inquiry. He does not debate this matter, which he might have in another kind of work, but simply lays it out. It is his belief as a Catholic Christian for which he is giving an account. The Approach A full description of the purported fact in question also entails the path the investigation should take. Christianity is a public thing on the stage of history. It came into the world at a certain time and place and, therefore, is open to the scrutiny of historians. Moreover, it claims to carry within it the evidence that it comes from God. For anyone to judge these claims, then, he must first follow the evidence as given in historical accounts. The case is analogous to a jury listening to the accusations of the prosecutor and to the explanations of the defense before passing judgment. The juror cannot be detached because he must be intensely concerned that justice be done. To do this he must pay attention to the evidence. Thus a concern for the facts is united with a desire for justice. So too, the seeker has to examine the evidence presented by the Church, not as a disinterested spectator, but as one seeking salvation. At the same time he must let the facts speak for themselves. The Claims of the Church The Church maintains that, after the fall of Adam and Eve at the beginning of human history, God promised he would send a Redeemer to save men from their sins. Further, the explicit signs of this redemption are to be found in Gods revelation first to Abraham, the Father of the Jewish nation, and finally to Christ, who is God become man. The question for the historian is whether there is any evidence observable in human history which supports or discredits the claims of the Church. He must consider the data contained in the reports of anthropologists, of the pagan historians of classical times, and of the writers of the Old and New Testaments. He can then judge whether the claims of the Church can be rationally justified or not. Is the story he sees before him the effects of God working through human history? Or is it merely an account of some vision which men have created for themselves? Newman maintains that men can come to belief in the Catholic Church by a strictly rational investigation, rational in the broad sense which he has established in his philosophical discussion of belief. So he divides the evidence
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to be examined into the periods of natural religion and then of revealed religion, which is further divided into Judaism and Christianity. Consequently, he proposes to weigh the historical record left by pagans, Jews, and Christians as evidence for the proposition that the unseen God is the cause behind these events in history resulting in the existence of the Church. The Illative Sense We have seen that the crucial function of the illative sense is to pick the right starting point in the chosen field of inquiry. If its possessor has the right experience in the right community, he will be able to make the right presumptions, which is key to the success of the enterprise. So what is the key presumption in religious matters? What is the first principle which determines the light under which the evidence is to be weighed? As we have already seen, Newman lays down that it is to be found in conscience, that natural endowment given to each man by the fact that he is a man. The first step of Newmans account, then, is to portray the information given to man by conscience, not any conscience, but one developed in the right way. What does this internal standard tell man about God? Newman answers: Now conscience suggests to us many things about that Master, whom by means of it we perceive, but its most prominent teaching, and its cardinal and distinguishing truth, is that he is our Judge. In consequence the special Attribute under which it brings Him before us, to which it subordinates all other Attributes, is that of justice--retributive justice. We learn from its informations to conceive of the Almighty, primarily, not as a God of Wisdom, of Knowledge, of Power, of Benevolence, but as a God of Judgment and Justice; as One, who, not simply for the good of the offender, but as an end good in itself, and as a principle of government, ordains that the offender should suffer for his offense. If it tells us anything at all of the characteristics of the Divine Mind, it certainly tells us this; and, considering our short comings are far more frequent and important than the fulfillment of our duties, and that of this point we are fully aware ourselves, it follows that the aspect under which Almighty God is presented to us by Nature, is (to use a figure) of One who is angry with us and threatens evil. 4 Newman does not argue the matter. He simply lays it down as his first principle. Though others think differently, he holds that the initial aspect under which a man should meet God is that of the Judge, the reason being that men more frequently fall short of following their conscience rather than succeed in abiding by it. Further, this Judge has for his governing principle, not only justice, but retributive justice. God does not simply
4

G.A., pp. 304-305.

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leave sinners to be punished by their own folly, though He does do this; nor does He only punish sinners so that they might be healed, though He does this too. Rather He also punishes sinners because they have disturbed a divine balance which can be restored only by the suffering of the sinner. For this reason the notion that unrepentant sinners will suffer for all eternity in an afterlife has a place in the religious scheme of things. Such is Newmans stark view of the information supplied by conscience. Here he has described his primary informant about the relationship of man to God. This voice has the primacy; it will be the judge of the evidence supplied by the two other informants of natural religion; namely, the voice of mankind and the course of the world. The Narrow Gate The voice of conscience, then, is the standard, the narrow gate of the argument. It provides the basic experience which selects and judges from among the other informants of natural and revealed religion. It accepts what agrees with conscience as a sign of God and rejects what offends it as a corruption of evil. Formed in the context of a community, it nevertheless appeals finally to its own judgment. In short, it provides a man, educated or not, with the illative sense in religious matters. The Voice of Mankind Let us now consider the second informant about natural religion, the voice of mankind. For his facts Newman draws upon a book called Penny Cycolpaedia 5 , an account which passed for general knowledge in the educated world of his day. In his selection of the facts, Newman gives much more weight to the testimony of barbaric religions than to those of civilized peoples like the Greeks and Romans. Why? Despite its excesses, primitive religion gives witness to the fear of man before the Judge. They have priests to offer sacrifice in order to intercede for them with God. They enact rites of atonement to make up for past offenses. On the other hand, the religion of a civilized people has substituted for the dark intimations of conscience a brighter picture of the gods on Mount Olympus worked into graceful myths by the poets. Newman cites the poet Lucretius as a cultivated man who simply hates the old barbaric religions and chooses the more graceful reign of Alma Venus. 6 Not New to Newman This judgment about civilized societies in not new to Newman. In a sermon given
5 6

G.A., p. 306. G.A., p. 305

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in 1834 he proclaims: I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction, that it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be. 7 As we saw earlier in his sermon about The Infidelity of the Future, the total infidelity will be that of a civilized society which will totally reject traditional religion. This total unbelief is the logical outcome of the civilized mans effort to substitute reason for the voice of conscience. It particularly rejects as an insult to human dignity the notion of eternal punishment in hell. The Course of the World When Newman comes to examine the course of the world as the third informant of natural religion, he speaks of the history of the human race. Certainly, there are many different ways in which this history can be interpreted. For example, a secularist, holding that mens brutal behavior to each other is caused by their religion, will see the solution to these evils by getting rid of religion and making way for science. Newman of course differs. His illative sense is guided by one set of principles. The illative sense of others is guided by a different set. In the following account of Newmans view, then, we will see how the same historical facts lead to vastly different interpretations. Absence of God Newman points out that the man of conscience, holding to the belief that God created man, is appalled by the seeming absence of the Creator from the affairs of men. Though men in the past usually professed some kind of religion, they did not seem to be deterred in the least from the ruthless pursuit of their own ambitions. Most men acted as if there were no God while still professing some kind of belief in the Divine, an instance of secret 8 infidelity. It seems, then, either that there is no God or that he has hidden himself from His own creation due to some primordial offense committed by man. The believer concludes that the Deity is a Hidden God who does not seem to rule but nevertheless does, a truth known only to those trying to follow their conscience. Facing the same impression that God is absent from the world, the modern unbeliever will conclude that He is absent because of the simple reason that he does not exist in the first place. He holds, then, that since primitive men could not live as enlightened atheists,

The Religion of the Day from Parochial and Plain Sermons, by John Henry Newman, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1987, p. 203.

Newman regards secret infidelity as the usual practice of man up until the modern period, when infidelity becomes open. 167

they projected upon the world the image of an angry God intent on the punishment of sin. Since, however, modern man can take heart from the progress of science, he no longer needs this projection. The famous Death of God proclaimed by Nietzsche has prepared the way for the adulthood of man. Man, then, is not a guilty creature naturally. Rather he is a naturally good person who has been made to feel guilty by superstitious belief. Suffering Again, Newman points to the vast amount of suffering in the world in which the innocent suffer as well as the guilty in physical disasters. Further, the just suffer from the unjust in human affairs. Echoing the thoughts of the primitives, he concludes that there must be another powerful but malignant intelligence operating in the world at crosspurposes to the Creator. Consequently, mankind is the battle ground on which good and evil, light and darkness engage in a titanic struggle. For the modern unbeliever, however, the existence of the Devil is simply a projection of mans own worst impulses. Again, Newman notes the fact that there has always been some form of priesthood in the past as a sign of mans desire to atone for his sins through the intercession of someone whom he considered to be holier than himself. Here the special few intercede for the sinful many, attesting to a natural sense of hierarchy in religious matters. In contrast, the modern unbeliever often interprets the fact of priesthood as an expedient devised by the ruling class to maintain its hold over the populace. Again, Newman notes that in human affairs the few by their actions bring benefits upon the many. Soldiers die for the fellow citizens, parents sacrifice themselves for their children, and even some heroic rulers lay down their lives that the nation might live. But the few can also bring disaster upon the heads of their dependents. Cowardly soldiers betray their fellow citizens, spendthrift fathers impoverish their descendents, and rulers use their people for their own ambitions. The fact is, then, that human beings are part of a community both for good and for evil. Consequently primitive men have little difficulty with the notion of intercession in religious matters. Priests can intercede with God to save their people. Modern men, perhaps influenced by the Protestants of the Sixteenth Century who rejected all kinds of intercession, be it that of priests offering sacrifice or of people praying to saints, insist that man stands alone. If one is religious, he deals with God directly, doing away with all mediators. If he is not religious, he takes the pose of being existentially responsible only to himself.
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Brighter Side Again, Newman notes that primitive religious practices have, despite their dark side, a brighter side as well. Otherwise, why would men bother with religion at all if it held no hope for them? They have experience of the bountifulness of nature and of the tranquility of family life. Why should not a man of conscience, then, hope for better things from God who is good? In the light of these same facts, the modern unbeliever might take them as a sign that man has been happy even in the midst of superstition. How much happier, then, would man be if he eliminated the notion of religion altogether and, relying upon his own efforts, constructed utopia with the aid of science? Again we see how important first principles are when men evaluate the course of the world. An Admission If I followed Newmans maxim that egoism is true modesty, I would have to admit that until about fifteen years ago Newmans discussion of natural religion never registered with me. Even when I sat myself down, determined to grasp his argument by writing outlines of it, I would find the argument going in one ear and out the other. That was until I learned more about natural religion from a Samoan man who was one of my students in the seminary. 9 Because he was a Catholic from a nation that had only converted to the faith in the eighteen fifties, I got a living picture of what natural religion looks like in the context of a strong community. Religion was not just in the community. Rather it made the community. God, called Atua in the Samoan language, was the author of the land and of the living creatures in it. From his authority flows the authority invested in the chiefs and tribe, dictating the family structure, ceremonies, and customs. For at least over a thousand years this people on two small islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean lived upon this belief right up until the middle of the nineteenth century. Then they converted to the Catholic Church, acknowledging that Atua was God the Father who had sent Christ his Son to them. Thus they effected a union between natural and supernatural religion which is still evident today. Rsum Newman has set the intellectual and moral foundations for his search into the truth of the Catholic Church in the traditions of natural religion. At this point, then, there is no longer any great mystery of how the ordinary man can attain true belief about this complex matter. Here a man, though he may be ordinary from the viewpoint of modern
9

See Appendix I for more on Samoa. 169

education, is extraordinary in this respect; namely, that he has acquired an illative sense within the context of a community which has embodied the best traditions of natural reason. He is a religious man looking for a religious answer, a rather extraordinary man after all.

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Chapter Thirteen
The Truth of Revelation 1

So far Newman has, after laying down the voice of conscience as his first principle, sorted through the evidence supplied by the history of natural religion and listed the types of expectations the good man has as he searches for a definite revelation from God. Just as men in general are equipped with the illative sense to discover the right beliefs in their chosen fields, so the man of conscience is equipped to discover whether God has revealed Himself. He is looking for a remedy for his sins. Has God offered a remedy, not just to individuals one by one but to all of mankind collectively? Before Newman begins his account of this search, however, he reflects upon his method of argument: In thus speaking of Natural Religion as in one sense a matter of private judgment, and that of proceeding from it to a 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... . 2 Nevertheless Newman will stick to his own method of argument. The Procedure of Paley But what does Newman have in mind when he speaks of the method of demonstration? He has in mind the procedure of Paley as illustrated in the book

Evidences for Christianity 3 . Newman describes this work as an effort to create a formal
or scientific argument which requires very few presumptions on the part of the reader. The author asks only that his readers be open-minded. Hence he constructs an argument almost mathematical in its precision by drawing especially upon the evidence that miracles play in supporting the case for revelation. While admitting that there is something that looks like charity in Paleys effort to
1

This chapter will cover the second half of the argument in Chapter Ten of The Grammar of Assent.

G.A., p.318. G.A., pp. 329-332.

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go out to the highways and hedges in order to compel people to come in, Newman nevertheless criticizes this approach. He points out that such arguments operate on the presumption that the reader can approach religious truth in a perfectly detached way with little to hope or fear about the outcome. On the contrary, Newman maintains that a man facing the truth of Christianity is a sinful creature, not a judge sitting comfortably in his armchair coolly weighing the evidence to see whether God has made his case. It is up to man to seek God in fear and trembling, not up to God to meet the canons of rationality set up by armchair philosophers. Newmans goal is to make an argument for a real religion with roots rather than a surface religion based on sheer inference, which is always open for revision when new intellectual trends present themselves. Another Criticism Another criticism that Newman levels at this demonstrative approach of Paleys is that it prevents an author like himself from using the elements of his personal experience and puts him into the straight jacket of fitting his argument into a quasimathematical form. For instance, Paley will concentrate upon compiling an exhaustive account of miracles as if to overwhelm the reader with proof of the supernatural origins of Christianity without taking into account that the reader might have no experience of a miracle in his own life. Newman cries out: If I am asked to use Paleys argument for my own conversion, I say plainly that I do not want to be converted by a smart syllogism; if I am asked to convert others by it, I say plainly that I do not wish to overcome their reason without touching their hearts. I wish to deal, not with controversialists, but with inquirers. 4 Antecedent Probability Let us now consider a few other observations which Newman makes upon his method of argument. He acknowledges that, after he has framed the beginning of his argument in the context of natural religion, he has gone a long way towards making his case. A man of conscience has the strong antecedent presumption that God will reveal himself in a special way. So when he reflects upon his own experience and looks out upon the world, he weighs these events with the hope that he will find a special revelation from God. Thus what may look like a violent improbability to one man will seem most probable to him. Why should a man who stumbled over the truth that God

G.A., p. 330.
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exists ever look for any special revelation from God? Why should a man who is satisfied with himself be looking to change his heart? He is quite content with himself as he sits upon the heads of other men, considering his position as the natural order of things. But the man looking to change his heart will be predisposed to look out upon the world for any signs that God has revealed Himself to save him from his own pride. Little Positive Evidence Newman gives an example of just how strongly this personal sense of antecedent probability works. ...very little positive evidence seems to be necessary, when the mind is penetrated by the strong anticipation which I am supposing. It was this instinctive apprehension, as we may conjecture, which carried on Dionysus and Damaris at Athens to a belief in Christianity, though St. Paul did no miracle there, and only asserted the doctrines of the Divine Unity, the Resurrection, and the universal judgment, while, on the other hand, it had no tendency to attach them to any of the mythological rites in which the place abounded. 5 Some might accuse these two listeners of St. Paul as being so credulous that they were ready to believe in anything. But there were many beliefs in Athens which they might have swallowed down if they were so credulous. Then why did they believe St. Paul? Might it not have been that they saw the convergence of three distinct religious teachings in the preaching of one man as a sign of the truth? The teachings of the Unity of God and the universal judgment were not new to a Greek listener. But the teaching of the Resurrection in which men were to be reunited with their bodies was new and indeed repulsed many of St. Pauls listeners--but not Dionysius and Damarius. Now these two, apparently the type of Greeks who hung around the public forum listening to philosophical discourses of every description, had been raised upon the same beliefs of credence that their fellow citizens had. Why did they not reject the resurrection of the dead as the others had? Newman conjectures that they converted because they had real belief in the existence of God as a reality and so were able to see the convergence of probabilities in the words of St. Paul. Others saw only an improbable tale told by a wandering Jew. Who was being more rational? Believers hold that the pair reasoned correctly and the others were wrong. What constitutes the proper use of reason looks like irrationality
5

G.A., p. 329.

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to the world. Again, we see the operations of first principles under the heading of antecedent presumptions. Logically presumptions about what is probable cannot themselves prove a fact. But they do determine the attitude of the man who looks out into the world for indications of the fact in question. If he judges that enough of these probabilities converge towards the truth he is seeking, he attains belief. Though St. Paul worked no miracles, the two Athenians saw St. Paul as a messenger from God. Newman Begins His Argument Lets now consider Newmans argument for the truth of Christianity. He observes that, if Christianity is not the fulfillment of the expectations of conscience, then God has not yet revealed himself to man. This is a very strong claim. He goes on to deny that he is speaking as one who has been brought up a Christian but as one who has taken into account the outline of natural religion. I believe many Catholics would hesitate to take such a stand because, having been raised in the Church, they cannot easily distinguish between the natural and the supernatural order. Their notions of conscience, of natural religion, of the Old and the New Testaments, of the teachings of the Church, are all mixed together so that they cannot sort out the elements that belong to reason alone and those which belong to faith, the result being that they are uncertain about how to proceed in a strictly rational argument. Newman intends to lead the way in this matter. A Priesthood He has already shown that a dominant feature of natural religion is the institution of a priesthood offering sacrifice as a mediator between God and man. This institution is communal. Since it is subject to many corruptions, as can be seen in the practice of human sacrifice and of the religions of the classical period, the good man has nevertheless the expectation that God will reveal himself more directly. Though Newman does not bring up this specific point here, I have interjected it because it very forcibly dramatizes the claim that, if one considers all the religions in the world today, he will see that Christianity, specifically the Catholic Church, is the one religion which has a priesthood interceding for the whole world by offering the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass. The point that Newman does bring up in this section is the ethical continuity between the heathen moralists and the Fathers of the Church. Since the Fathers were close to the fact of paganism, they had a clear idea of the strengths and weaknesses of natural religion so that they would be able to see how the supernatural religion of Christianity completes and perfects it. Thinkers without intimate acquaintance with natural religion
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are not able to argue in this way. At any rate Newman specifically mentions here Aristotle among the pagan moralists, whom he acknowledges as his secular master. 6 The History of the Jews Newman then takes up the history of the Jews because one cannot speak intelligently about Christianity without doing so. Christianity claims that it arose from and was first preached by members of the Jewish nation. Now the noteworthy thing was that the Jews, alone among ancient peoples, had preserved the belief in the One God when all others had descended into polytheism. From the very beginning of their history the Jews recounted in their sacred books how their natural belief was confirmed by an explicit revelation from God that He and no other was the One God. Further, their records tell of how God promised Abraham that he would be the Father of a people who would bring blessings to the whole world. Newman emphasizes this feature of a universal benefit to all of mankind as being unique. Other nations took for granted that each had their own gods who would look after them. While the Jews considered themselves as specially chosen, they nevertheless had the teaching that God, being Creator of all peoples, had a plan for all peoples. Further, they also had the expectation, which had been instilled in them by the prophets, that the plan of God would be fulfilled through the coming of a Messiah who would be of their own flesh and blood. It was through the coming of this Messiah that all nations would be blessed. The Records The records of both the Jews and of the pagans show that at the time of Christ the Jews expected the coming of the long awaited Messiah. To verify the fact Newman quotes several Roman historians, one of whom I will present here. A persuasion had possession of most of them says Tacitus, speaking of their resistance to the Romans, that it was contained in the ancient books of the priests, that at the very time the East should prevail, and that men who should issue from Judea should obtain the Empire. The common people, as is the way with human cupidity, having once interpreted in their own favor this grand destiny, were not even by their reverses brought round to the truth of facts. 7 History also shows that Christ, who announced Himself as the Messiah, was rejected by many of the Jewish people. Though this people alone had preserved the
6

G.A., p. 334. G.A., p. 344

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belief in One God for two thousand years, they had expected a Messiah who as a conqueror would restore the Kingdom of Israel before the eyes of the world. Instead Christ came preaching of a kingdom that was not of this world. The Jewish leaders crucified him as a blasphemer though it was the Apostles, all Jewish, who accepted the crucified Christ as the savior of the whole world. About forty years later the Romans destroyed the Temple and scattered the Jewish people to all ends of the earth where they have somehow survived from that day to this as a people without a nation. 8 The Point The objection could be raised that the history of the Jews shows how a people could be misled in their belief in God. But not all were misled, the Apostles and the Jewish Christians being an example. For those who were misled, their history shows that the promise of God hinged upon the condition that the Jewish people would be faithful to their covenant with God. Since a man of conscience realizes that man has free will, he knows that his rejection is quite possible if he fails to choose properly. At the same time he also knows that, if he believes properly, he will fulfill the prophecy that salvation will come to the whole earth through the story of the Jewish people. Subsequent History The history books show that in about three centuries the Jewish followers of Christ dispersed over the known world, converting the Gentiles to belief in their Master. The promise given to Abraham was fulfilled. The Roman Empire, which had done all that it could to resist this new religion, became officially Christian in 313 with the coming of Constantine. Newman does not mention this last point because his argument is intent on portraying preceding rapid spread of Christianity in its three centuries of struggle against the Empire.The rapid spread of Christianity is such a gigantic phenomena that even an atheistic historian like Gibbon, the author of the famous work The Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire, had to attempt an explanation. An historical fact is, after all, a fact no
matter how people interpret it. Newman reviews the explanation, points out its inadequacy, and then suggests the reason why this great writer was incapable of dealing properly with this subject. In giving his reasons for the spread of Christianity Gibbon
8

The irony today is that, although the Jewish people have a nation today, it is a secular state bound together by the notion of race or blood, not religious belief in the One God. Yet is may well be that this state may play a role in the future plans of God to fulfill his promise to the Jewish people. At least this state shows that the Jewish people still exist after three thousand years, surely a remarkable fact. Who knows what the future may bring to this awesome story? 176

never looked into the account supplied by the Christians themselves. The Christians explained their success in the fact that they preached a Christ who was not only crucified but was God himself. How could an atheist enter into this kind of a religious explanation for the spread of Christianity? Two Things To explain the spread of Christianity Newman will do two things. He will show from the accounts of the early Christians themselves that the principle of their conversion and of their fellowship was the Image of Christ working within them. 9 And he will show that the success of this fellowship took place mainly in the lower classes, who had no power, influence, reputation or education. Again we have reference to community, which functions according to the notional beliefs of credence and the real beliefs of assent. Concerning the first point, Newman cites the words of the Apostles and St. Paul to the effect that their message is about the crucified Christ. They all proclaim that it is the Image or Thought of the Crucified which worked a moral conversion in themselves and provided the basis for their fellowship. Now an inquirer can either accept or reject this testimony. But the testimony is there. Seeing how Newman uses this testimony in his argument, we can see why he so carefully laid down in previous chapters the distinction between notional and real assent. Notional assent is given to the truth of a proposition. Real assent is given to a Reality which impresses itself upon a man as a living Image. Newman is intent to show, then, that as a matter of fact real apprehension was at work in the preaching and acceptance of that Image by the early Christians. Second Point Newman then goes on to elaborate on his second point, namely, that it was largely the poor and the dispossessed who took this Image to their hearts. Here again is a community or class which tends to have a very different view of life than their betters. Newman devotes many pages recording the historical testimony of those who were converted to the Image as well as those who despised it. He cites the testimony of pagan authors, who characterized the members of the new religion as weak minded and uneducated. These well educated officials, simply could not understand what has gotten

G.A., pp. 465-466.

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into those people who would undergo unspeakable torments rather than go through the formality of giving homage to the Emperor and denying their Christ. Newman goes on to relate accounts of the martyrs from the Christian records, telling story after story about ordinary men and women, the young and the old maintaining their faith amid grisly torments. They accept all the tortures that the ingenuity of an outraged Empire can devise in order to preserve its own idea of order. Finally, the Empire gives way in exhaustion, the persecutors more weary of slaughtering than their victims of being slaughtered. Here is an indication that the common people can attain real belief with certitude even in the face of unspeakable suffering. The Explanation of the Christians What Newman has done is to take the historical fact that Christianity did triumph over Imperial Rome and then to record the Christians own explanation for this triumph. What judgment will the inquirer make on this testimony? If he is skeptical, he need not accept this testimony, arguing that a solely religious motivation cannot be powerful enough to explain a social revolution. He may look for an economic interpretation like the Marxists. Or he may attribute the success of Christianity to the fanatical spirit that seems to dominate the masses in certain periods of history as in the spread of the Moslem religion. In any case each inquirer will have to wrestle with the fact that Christianity did spread with amazing rapidity. His explanation of the fact will be determined by his own first principles. Not Miracles Some Christian apologists place a great deal of stress upon the miracles that attended the story of Christ. Newman is certainly not opposed to the truth of these miracles and indeed spent a great deal of effort in other works to defending the reality of miracles. But in his argument he is looking for a more personal way to provide the evidence for the reality of the supernatural. He has one in the fact that Christ did not come down from the cross, a miracle that surely would have impressed everyone there. Yet a thief suffering for his sins on a cross performs the super human act of seeing in the innocence of a fellow suffering the face of God. That is the kind of miracle that Newman wishes to note. The Last Section In the last section of his book Newman makes a grand summary. I will cite a large section of it to show how this philosopher looks back upon his own effort:
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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. 10 [my italics]

I have been forestalling all along the thought with which I shall close these considerations on the subject of Christianity; and necessarily forestalling it, because it properly comes first, though the course which my argument has taken has not allowed me to introduce it in its natural place. Revelation begins where Natural Religion fails. The Religion of Nature is a mere inchoation, and needs a complement,--it can have but one complement, and that very complement is Christianity. 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 moral impotence, is found in the central doctrine of Revelation, the Mediation of Christ. ... Thus it is that Christianity is the fulfillment made to Abraham, and of the Mosaic revelation; 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. It has with it that gift of staunching

Newman follows this declaration with a more specific description of how the Catholic Church does deal with the wounds of mankind. First, it has a priesthood which reenacts Christs death upon the cross everyday throughout the world in the Sacrifice of the Mass. Next, there is in the Eucharist the entrance of God himself, body, soul and divinity, into the body and soul of believers who have more intimate contact with Christ here than those who actually saw Christ in his sojourn upon earth. Next, there is the Real Presence of Christ in churches throughout the world. The expectation of religious men and women that God reveal himself in a special way has been fulfilled beyond anything they might have dared to expect. Conclusion Perhaps the best way to conclude is to give the next to last paragraph of The Grammar

of Assent.
Here I end my specimens, among the many which might be given, of the arguments adducible for Christianity. I have dwelt upon them, in order to show how I would apply the principles of this Essay to the proof of its divine origin. Christianity is addressed, both as regards its evidences and its contents, to minds which are in the normal condition of human nature, as believing in God and in a future judgment. [italics mine]. Such minds it addresses both through the intellect and through the imagination; creating a certitude of its truth by arguments too various for direct enumeration, too personal and deep for words, too powerful and concurrent for refutation. Nor need reason come first and faith
10

G.A., pp. 486-487.

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second (though this is the logical order), but one and the same teaching is in different aspects both object and proof, and elicits one complex act of both inference and assent. It speaks to us one by one, and is received by us one by one, as the counterpart, so to say, of ourselves, and is as real as we are real. 11 It is important to note that all along Newman has been dealing with the natural type of assent that reason is capable of giving to the truth of the Church. Here reason includes conscience, thus making man naturally religious and putting him in the condition which Newman regards as normal. Yes, he says that the normal or natural condition of man is to believe in God and in future judgment. Even a Catholic may be shocked at it. Though he may be used to accepting the general teaching of the Church that human reason is capable of belief in the One God without the aid of revelation, he may not have realized that human reason itself is such a powerful instrument. This is what an American Catholic has to realize. He has to renew his confidence in reason again because it provides the natural foundations for supernatural belief. Cut out the foundations and the Church is merely a thing of the past offering a remedy which men no longer need because they are no longer sinners. Put in the foundations and Church is a two-winged creature which flies up to heaven and back to earth again, a real thing in a real world that carries mankind with it. This view of full bodied reason in no way undermines the teaching of the Church that the assent to the truths of supernatural faith is solely a gift of God. By reason alone man is not capable of giving this kind of assent. God Himself has to supply both the content of faith (otherwise man could not know of the existence of the Holy Trinity) and the grace to accept it. Thus it is one thing to assent to the truth of the Church by reason alone and quite another to assent to these truths because of supernatural grace. This is why the Church has always insisted that human reason itself establishes the preambles upon which supernatural faith arises. Without the presumption that there is One God who will judge sinners in the afterlife, there is no reason why men should look for a refuge of sinners in the Church. Once a person believes that there is One God, he can then be prompted by grace to make the act of faith, which states that he believes in the teachings of the Church BECAUSE God has revealed them. If he has no real or personal sense that there is a God, a conviction given to him by conscience, how can he see God
11

G.A., p. 378.

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as the guarantee for the truth of the Church? He will only see the Church as a collection of sinful human beings (which it is) without seeing that God in his mysterious ways has given to those human beings the duty of speaking and acting in his name. It is upon this view of the matter that Pope John Paul II has written his encyclical

Faith and Reason. He has included reason in this couplet because it is truly a wing
complementing the wing of supernatural faith. The great danger for modern man is the collapse of his reason, as paradoxical as that may seem. In denaturing himself he becomes incapable, not only of recognizing the Church for what it is, but even of acting like a human being. He then becomes a deadly menace to himself, an enemy of the human dignity he professes in his charters but degrades in his practice.So the Pope and Newman aim at mans reasserting human dignity by respecting reason. In these efforts they may seem to some like Don Quixote tilting against wind mills. There is truth to this. How will an encyclical like the Popes or a book like Newmans give back to men their reason? Nevertheless, these Captains send out their challenge to good Christian men and women to take up the fight which they always seem to lose, just as Christ seemed to lose when he died on the cross. The End of the Book In our investigation of belief, we began with a sermon from Newman. This is the way he ends The Grammar of Assent: In the sacred words of its Divine Author and Object concerning Himself, I am the Good Shepherd, and I know Mine and Mine know Me. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. And I give them everlasting life, and they shall never perish, and no man should pluck them out of my hand. 12 The Church is Christ the Good Shepherd leading his flock. Yet the Good Shepherd sees a division in mankind which, though he came to mend it, will persist to the end of the time and beyond. There will always be this terrible difference among men--that they will always have to choose between fidelity and infidelity. Perhaps this sobering picture is the reason why Pope John Paul II always closes his encyclicals with a prayer to Mary, the Mother of God. Apocalyptic cataclysms are frightening, sending the thoughts of brave men and women up to Mary as if they were children again running back to their mother. It is a kind of Catholic habit. So I ask her in the words of the Hail Mary to pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
12

G.A., p. 378.

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182

Afterward
In the Forward I promised to tell the reader what happened in my long trip from those college days in the early fifties to this first decade of the Third Millennium. It has been a story of receiving a heritage from my Catholic forebears, neglecting it for over twenty-five years, and then regaining it. I think the story will be helpful to the reader in his effort to find out who he is and what the world around him is. As I mentioned, in my college years I took Newman as my mentor in showing me what a man of faith with a philosophical habit of mind looked like. I did this in the context of being a Brother in a congregation devoted to the common life for the purpose of teaching in the various grammar schools, high schools, and colleges throughout the country and, indeed, throughout the world. We took the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in honor of the Blessed Virgin and lived together, following a regular routine of prayer and work. We were especially proud of our community life, the way we stuck together in running a good school no matter where it was. It could be an orphanage for kids in trouble with the courts, a high school in a fancy area, a tough mill town, or even a village in Africa. So when I graduated from college I was sent by my superiors to various schools around the country to learn my trade and then practice it. Thus I had far more practical things on my mind than developing a philosophical habit of mind. I would learn practical habits like not getting run out of the classroom and actually teaching the students something whether they happened to be inspired at the moment or not. Thus I learned the art of teaching from the veterans. When it comes to teaching boys and young men, the art amounts to a judicious mixture of firmness, kindness, mob control and intimidation. The field of education, then, was very precious to us. It contained the only children we men would ever have. It was our way of handing on to the next generations what we had been given. I lived this way in community till the end of the Sixties. Then the changes came. The Council of Vatican II had ended a few years before, setting off earthquake tremors felt by all the religious congregations of priests, brother and sisters in the nation. In the case of my order a split arose between a minority who wished to preserve the traditional way of life and a majority who were more or less for change. The debates centered around such concrete matters as wearing the habit, living in community, and educating the young. Though we all had had the same experience of living this life in common, a very disciplined kind of life which was not easy, we each had very different reactions to it. On the one hand, a minority saw it as essential to the mission of the order. On the 182

other hand a majority saw it as something that had to be changed in order to meet the new challenges of the modern world. The minority saw the majority as chasing after dreams that looked good but were not real. The majority saw the minority as sticking to the past out of fear for the future. This kind of disunity was unprecedented. It tore us apart. Siding with the minority, I opted for the tradition. But then dissensions arose in that community due to the tensions involved in being so different from the rest. Something had died in our notion of community. In the midst of the turmoil I got permission to go off and get a doctorate in philosophy in order to study St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle while also getting acquainted with modern philosophy. I had this vague sense that I had to learn more about my roots when many of the people around me were busy digging them up and burning them on a great wood pile. While I grieved over the past, I looked to the future for a better day. I also did not mind exploring the great world much more on my own. After getting my degree I was assigned to the college that had been founded and run by the congregation since 1850. I soon found out, however, that the Order did not have any power to place its own men in a teaching position. Those who had this power were not very interested in Brothers with any devotion to St. Thomas Aquinas. I was outraged at this. But that was life! So I was assigned to another college run by a different Order that was interested in someone with my background. While I was quite happy teaching there, I was living out of community as they used to say. I began to feel quite lonely. This was not the life I had been trained to live. For a while I had enjoyed my freedom from community but now I felt out of place. Eventually, I applied for dispensation from my vows and was given them. This was not lightly done. When the Church grants a dispensation from final vows, it states that the religious is free to go without necessarily endorsing his decision. It is still up to the religious to determine what he will do about the vows he offered to the Blessed Virgin on his profession day. At any rate, I left the order at about the age of fifty-seven determined to launch out on my own. But I would have to get a new job though the prospects of getting a position in some Catholic college did not seem likely due to the fact that they all were not very enthusiastic about the tradition. Perhaps I would end up teaching high school again in some place. Or whatever. I had to make a living. So far we have the story of someone living in a broken world where the communities and educational institutions he had relied upon were in varying degree of disintegration as far as the Catholic tradition was concerned. Then by some kind of 183

miracle I was offered a position of teaching philosophy at a college seminary. I readily accepted, delighted to have the chance to teach young men studying for the priesthood. By this time I was surprised that such an institution still existed and that young men were still presenting themselves for the priesthood. Unfortunately, after two years the administration that had hired me was totally replaced by another that had totally different ideas about what type of philosophy was suitable for future priests. Thus ensued a nine year struggle between an administration that would not have hired me if it had been in power and a professor who, no matter how desperate his situation, would not have joined them if they had been in power when he signed on. Today that institution has been defunct for about three years. It is not my purpose, however, to speak about the disasters that have befallen the Catholic community since the mid-sixties and my first hand experience of them. Rather I wish to tell about that relatively short period between the time I left my congregation and the time I joined the teaching staff at the college seminary. I see now that I was at a dangerous period in my life. I was determined to leave what I knew and head out for the unknown, feeling a combination of guilt at leaving and of determination to survive. I was in no mood for reflection. But when I got the news that my application for a position had been accepted at the college seminary, I brightened up again. I now knew where I was going again. It was at this point that I did some soul searching. Perhaps some people do their soul searching when they feel that they dont know where they are going. I dont but just lower my head and move forward. That is not a very intelligent approach but that is the way I do it. Anyway, after I got the good news I started to relax and do some thinking about what it was to be a Catholic. After all, I would be teaching young men at a seminary preparing themselves for a life similar to the one I had left. In a way I pitied them. They were getting themselves into a war without fully realizing it. I was proud of them that they wanted to do this. By this time I had realized that the vision of the Catholic Church without the priesthood was ridiculous. I hoped that I would be able to help them succeed. straight on this matter. So I started to read Newman again after a twenty-five year absence from my old mentor. I was shocked to find that over the years I had somehow slipped away from him. At any rate, the particular issue I had in mind was the condemnation of artificial 184 But what exactly was a Catholic? Since there were many competing and contradictory notions floating about, I figured that I had to get my head

contraception by the encyclical Humanae Vitae of Pope Paul VI in 1968, an issue I never paid much attention to because I was neither a priest nor a married man. It had seemed to me that this was a question for the hierarchy to sort out with the theologians. I am not excusing my indifference to the question but merely telling about the way I had looked at it. As I reread Newman I recalled his old refrain on how closely the Church is identified with the Voice of God. I took down from my bookshelf a book I had bought but had not read, which was a collection of talks by Pope John Paul II on the topic of artificial contraception. Marking the index, I noted about twenty five places where he explicitly referred to his predecessors encyclical, speaking as if the dissenting theologians had never existed. Though I still did not know much about the issue, I figured that the Pope must be right. And thats when I got my first clear indication of what a Catholic is. A Catholic takes the Pope seriously and obeys him. The matter is that simple. It seems, then, that I still had enough of the old reflexes from my early days where I had learned that the Pope was the Vicar of Christ. Those reflexes, sharpened by a good dose of fear of the Lord, were still there. I was not about to make some theologians my Pope or, even worse, to take over the role myself. During that period I began to reflect about exactly what I had been doing over the past decades since the mid-sixties. I had been a conservativebut of sorts. It was a good thing to hold for the traditional way of life but not such a good thing to lead so much of it outside of community. It was a good thing to study St. Thomas but not such a good thing to skip over his very detailed questions on sin, purgatory and hell. It was a good thing to read St. Augustine but not such a good thing to feel he was a bit too heavy about all that sin business. It was a good thing to still respect the vows of religious and priests but perhaps not such a good thing to have been dispensed from my own vows. My reflections were rather sobering. Added to that was the memory that I had become rather expert in fudging the distinction between mortal and venial sin, leaving aside the Sacrament of Reconciliation for very long periods. I concluded that it was quite possible for a respectable fellow like my self to offend God mortally, not just in deed, not just in word, but in ones thoughts, and end up in hell. I figured that I had better start doing something about that. After this short period, which was a kind of conversion I attribute to the fact that the Blessed Mother had seen to still use me, I had two years of great teaching surrounded with harmony on all levels. Then, as I mentioned, the administration

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changed and the war began. Wars are not fun. But they have a lot more meaning when one knows what he is fighting for. But that is another story. So whats my point? The point is that when I finally came across Newmans sermon on The Infidelity of the Future I had no trouble in understanding it. He had predicted an unprecedented catastrophe for the Church, isolating it as it had never been isolated before. Not only had hatred for the Church grown in American society due to the culture wars; these wars had also succeeded in dividing Catholic from Catholic with the animosity characteristic of a family feud. All of this had happened and was beginning to get worse. He had also predicted that the cause would be philosophical, not theological. That had also happened. For example, the conflicts in the Sixties had initially focused upon a natural law question, that of artificial contraception, an issue that concerned all human beings and not just Catholics. At the time I was not very aware of this conflict but had been focused upon the nuts and bolts considerations of community life in the order. Having become more aware of what was going on over the years, I could see that initially the theologians had not been pushing for a new religion, as had been the case in the Sixteenth Century. They were differing with the Pope about a matter of natural law, a notion they had abandoned a good many years before the closing of Vatican II. Initially, they disputed with the Pope on the narrow issue of artificial contraception. Later they broadened their attack to the whole issue of sexual morality. These were all philosophical matters turning upon the question of whether human reason alone was capable of arriving at the truth in these matters. It seems that the theologians had all grown skeptical about the ability of human reason to attain either by demonstration or by belief the truth that artificial contraception was an offense against the very nature of man, not just an offense which Catholics should condemn. In his sermon, however, Newman said nothing about sexual morality. But he did point out the cause of the future infidelity. It was the denial of the very basis upon which all natural law thinking was based; namely, the denial that the One God existed as the Judge of mans sins. Here we have unbelief directed against natural religion, a matter open to human reason. Could it be that at this stage of the history of the Church in the middle of the twentieth century that this belief could be in question? Certainly this was an issue for American society in general. Anyone who could read the newspapers could see how deep was the growing hatred for the notion that there was such a thing as sin and such a thing as a God who would judge all men at the end of their lives. But could this really be the basic issue for Catholics within the Church? Could this have been the 186

basic issue beneath the debates within the Order between the majority and the minority about the nuts and bolts of community life? My newly awakened memory of how I had developed a distaste for St. Augustine and had avoided Newman for so long showed that the answer might well be yes. Though I had been on what may be called the conservative side of this debate, I would not have said that I shared either St. Augustines or Newmans vision of God as the Judge of the sins of all men. Though I had certainly accepted the validity of belief and demonstration about the existence of God, I had little realization of the implications of that belief. But was it not real belief in the news of conscience that God was the Judge the insight that provided the standard for reaching truth in all religious matters? Was this not the first principle that Newman had so vigorously and forthrightly laid down? The real apprehension of God, then, was the great issue, not just for the world at large but for Catholics in particular. But in this matter I did not have to go only on my own experience because I had plenty of company in my distaste for the topic of sin and judgment. Was not God now often preached as the God of unmitigated Love? And did not those who still went to Mass on Sunday go up to Holy Communion en masse without any thought of confession? And did not we think that God would be quite understanding if we had happened to take the wrong view on the issue of contraception and a host of other matters connected with purity? Did not most American Catholics of my generation, one brought up in a less harsh and more educated world than that of our parents, begin to feel that God couldnt be a Puritan, couldnt be a hater of the flesh. Only rigid conservatives were. What right thinking American Catholic wanted to be a rigid conservative? Not me and not anyone else. I am sure that there were also many American Catholics who had preserved throughout all the talk of change a healthy sense that they were still sinners. But I for one would not have listened to them. If I had avoided Newman and St. Augustine on this topic of sin, why should I listen to anyone else? Realizing this, it has became much easier for me to see how the Church of the forties and fifties could wilt so rapidly in the ensuing decades. It became much easier to see how priests, religious and laypeople, the most highly educated that the American Church had produced, were in danger of becoming practical atheists in their rejection of sin and its Judge. It became easier to see how a failure in natural religion could take the heart out of supernatural faith, leaving many Catholic parishes, dioceses, churches and schools still standing as real estate but quite empty as the home of The Faith. There is 187

simply no point to a faith which claims that God has come to save man from their sins if man is not a sinner. Why should sinless men, women and children put up with the authority of Shepherds who keep insisting that they need redemption? Further, why should they leave the Church and go on their own when they may still feel a kind of nostalgia for the days of their innocence? Why not just pressure the shepherds to get up-to-date, to get more positive? Indeed, why shouldnt the shepherds not exhort their people to get up-to-date and get more positive? Is this not the path that American Catholics, the best educated of generations of Catholics, should pursue? Why should Catholics listen to the voices of gloom and doom, behaving as if some kind of apocalypse was upon them when all the signs of the times were showing that the difficulties the Church was experiencing were but the darkness preceding a new and glorious dawn? Should one not expect that a great institution like the Church would have difficulties in handling the challenge of change brought about by the dynamism of the modern world? Before I went to teach in the college seminary, I had the answer to all those questions above. I had the conviction that the cause of the destruction within the Church was not the efforts of some government to kill us off, as was the case in many other countries. Nor could the destruction be blamed on a culture of unbelief. The destruction was wrought by our own hands. We were the victims, not of murder, but of attempted suicide. Some symptoms of this attempt were evident in the lightening quick way my generation dumped St. Thomas Aquinas from the college curriculum, the Baltimore Catechism from the grammar school program, and the old parish devotions of novenas and Benediction from the evening services. Extremists among us even considered that they had come from a Ghetto Catholicism, a narrow and suffocating world cut off from the mainstream of American life. That is what communal suicide looks likea concerted and sustained effort to condescend to everything in the past as pre-Vatican II and to embrace everything that happened as post Vatican II. The trouble is that sin does not seem to follow this before-and-after distinction. I finally saw that Newman was absolutely right in his prediction. And this is what gave me a definitive answer to what the man of faith and reason looked like. It is the man who takes care to confess and repent of his sins, thus keeping alive in him the conviction that he does indeed need the Church, not as she is supposed to be in his dreams, but as she actually exists on this earth. Should his way of life allow him to 188

cultivate a philosophical habit of mind, well and good. But it will be a mind humble enough to follow the Church and wise enough to pick out mentors from the past like Newman, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. With such mentors the student will spend most of his life exercising the lowly act of belief, of imitation, of trusting until he eventually discovers that he can finally trust his own thinking, that he finally has some handle on what he is talking about. Thats what an Imperial Intellect looks like. It would be well for any generation of educated Catholics to learn this lesson. Reading The

Grammar of Assent is a good start.

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Appendix
Samoa
The philosophical argument for the validity of natural belief depends upon an appreciation for traditional culture. Traditional cultures insist that the primary virtue of the young is to believe in the word of their elders if the community is to endure. Thus it promotes the discipline which is required for conformity. It has a no-nonsense attitude about enforcing this conformity because of its view that life is difficult and requires virtue on the part of all. The elders must be honorable, using their authority, not to promote their own interests, but rather those of the whole community. The subjects must be obedient, many times putting aside their own wishes for the sake of obeying the elders. Since virtue is not easy to acquire because of the egoism of man, there is always a struggle within any society between the demands of virtue and the wayward inclinations of the human heart. Those of us who have been raised in the thirties, forties and fifties, have some sense of a traditional culture. Our parents did not behave as buddies but as parents. Our teachers, especially if they were Nuns or Brothers, laid down the law and were obeyed, not only because of reverence on our part, but also because of a lively sense of selfpreservation. Since our elders saw ordinary life as a struggle, we had to be prepared for it by discipline, which our elders generously administered. Since the Church saw life ultimately as a war between good and evil, we were also disciplined in the life of the spiritual. The Church taught, not only in her official documents but in her everyday preaching, that impurity was a mortal sin which, if unrepented, puts ones immortal soul in hell. My generation, then, was quite familiar with the no-nonsense feel of a traditional culture in action. Despite this experience, however, very many of us were swept up in the euphoria of the early Sixties, which seemed to hold before Catholics a more positive vision of life in the world. The signs of the times, a phrase lifted from the documents of Vatican II, seemed to point to a future in which Catholics would move from being children of immigrants to full fledged Americans on the secular level and from being a Ghetto Church to a fully American Church on the spiritual level. As I mentioned in the Introduction, it took a while before I began to doubt the wisdom of this project. The passage of time seemed to be indicating that the evil in the
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hearts of men, particularly myself, was still a very real factor in life. And so I began to take another look at the traditional culture in which I had been raised. Rereading Newman was part of this project. About fifteen years ago I was reading a section of Grammar of Assent to a seminary class in which there were two Samoan young men. At the end of the reading the two began to talk excitedly to each other in Samoan. Curious about such an unusual outbreak, I asked them what all the fuss was about. They told me how the passage just read reminded them of some old Samoan proverbs they had known from their childhood. I asked them to explain. And that is how I entered a world in which the words of an English gentleman from Oxford met the enthusiastic approval of two young men from a small island in the middle of the vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean, 1 which is three thousands miles south of Hawaii and about nine thousand miles southwest of California. Since this outbreak of enthusiasm on the part of students was unusual, I pursued the matter after class. The student, Nico by name, explained how he loved reading Newman because his words made him feel proud to be a Samoan. Since he was in the process of adjusting to the culture of a theologically liberal seminary, he often got the impression that, despite all the talk about respect for diversity, he would have to do all the adjusting. He didnt quite express it that way. What he said was: The people in this place really think I am some kind of spear-slinging savage from the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Actually, he had spent six years in the military, most of them in the Airborne, in which he was a scout in the Persian Gulf War. I laughed, explaining to him that he was after all not only from a traditional culture but from one which had enthusiastically embraced what most of the teachers would call a pre-Vatican Two theology. Since I came from the tribe of Irish Catholics residing in Queens, I had some idea of what he was talking about. At any rate, he told me how his reading of Plato, Aristotle and Newman was giving him a great lift. Later I saw that he instinctively understood things which his classmates merely wrote down in their notes. Surprised and touched, I encouraged him to tell me more about his people, especially about their religious beliefs before the coming of the missionaries. While he knew his catechism backwards and forwards, he also knew about the stories of his ancestors, which he learned as a child at the feet of the High Chiefs

American Samoa, an American Protectorate, is a little island west of a larger island once called Western Samoa, which was a Protectorate of New Zealand but is now an independent country. The islands are about three thousand miles south of Hawaii and nine thousand miles south west of California. So far the Samoan way (their expression) is relatively intact. But it is hard to say how long that will last. 191

and as a young man asking his father. Though the father was a hard-working carpenter, he was a very High Chief in the affairs of the island and, therefore, a living depository of the traditions of his people. Somehow Nico, who was always getting himself into trouble on the island, had still preserved a reverence for his father that was a mixture of fear and love. So as he grew older, however, he spoke more and more with the old man to find out about his ancestors. Consequently, he had little difficulty in grasping Newmans distinction between the natural religion of a people and the supernatural religion of the Catholic Church. It was one of his family ancestors who welcomed a French missionary to the island, paved the way for the priests acceptance by the other High Chiefs, and inspired the conversion of his clan to the Church. Ten years later I had the privilege of staying with Nico and his family for two weeks. The four of us--the father, the mother, and himself--would sit down to a meal three times a day. Two of his sisters, who lived on the property, one married and the other not, served the meal with the help of five grandchildren ranging in ages from seven years old to fourteen. A young man also attended table, a relative who lived on the property in order to help out the grandparents in their old age. Because the setting was outdoors, there was a young boy and girl standing at each end of the table, gently waving a fan to keep whatever flies there were off the food. As young as the children were, there was no fooling around, no poking each other or getting into fights. They were as dutiful as pages at the banquet of a king. At the end of the meal two children would bring bowls of water and a towel so that those sitting at the table could rinse their hands. When the adults left, the children then ate, but not at the table. Instead they sat around each with their own plate, lightening up a bit since the adults were no longer around. Later I discovered that this whole ritual was observed, not just by the household of a High Chief, but by any Samoan household. About thirty yards from where we dined, there was a yard filled with about twenty graves or so, each marked by a head stone and a large white concrete slab that looked like the top of a coffin. It was situated towards the front of the main house, a common situation with other Samoan families. Among the graves were those of two Marist Brothers who had died on the island after many years of service. About two or three hundred yards towards the village was the Parish Church, build on land donated by this particular extended family. Further on was a great statue of the French missionary situated on the seashore he had first touched over a hundred and sixty years ago. Not too far away was a kind of open-air platform with a cone-shaped roof supported by white
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pillars all around. This was where the High Chiefs transacted the more serious business of the clan. Similar structures were all over the village. For a poor people, I thought, the Samoans certainly had a lot of land. This household was situated in the village of Leone, which contains about three thousand people. The Church bell rang every night at nine oclock announcing the curfew in which everyone must be off the street if they had no serious reason to be on it. The assumption was that those in the early and late teens, males especially, had no such reason. There was no police force. Instead, men appointed by the Chiefs saw to it that the curfew was enforced. If anyone was caught breaking it, their family was fined and suffered the shame that they could not control their own children. There were not many fines. The account above makes it clear that the question of belief has a dramatically different meaning in this traditional setting than it does in a modern setting. In Samoan society belief in the traditions of the elders, both living and dead, is the heart of the culture. Central to this belief is that life is difficult and therefore demands order and discipline if the community is to continue in the ways of their ancestors as laid out by Atua, the Samoan word for God. There is no question, then, about the power of natural reason to create a stable and moral society. There is also no question of how the supernatural order can complete and perfect the natural order. A people with an already strong sense of hierarchy, authority and tradition have accepted the Church with its own distinct hierarchy, authority and tradition. The two harmonize without either losing its distinct character. The Samoans live much as their ancestors did. But in this village their descendants have Mass every day at six in the morning so that working people may attend. When I was there they also added Adoration from five to six in the morning to prepare for the feast of Corpus Christi. I felt as if I had stumbled into a monastery, not an ordinary family. Since the old chief wended his way in the dark to the Church every morning as regular as the dawn, the son and myself followed. We missed a day or two of the adoration periods-- but did get there for Mass every day. The example of old Chiefs has great power. The dominant impression I carried away from my visit was surprise that this traditional way of life was still going on. The old chief reminded me of my father, a milkman in regular life but with the aura of an Old Irish King. As he grew feebler in his later years, I held his arm as he struggled the three blocks to the Parish Church for daily Mass. I had thought that those days were dead and gone. But they arent. This is a big
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world. The old ways are more durable than I had thought, probably because human nature itself is so durable. Newman closed his book giving the assurance that the Church would endure through all time because it alone had the power to staunch the wounds of sin. This is not only an assurance that the Church will get souls to heaven. It will also be the rallying point for any people aspiring to preserve its humanity despite the infidelity of the modern age.

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