Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent, An

By John Henry Newman and Nicholas Lash

This classic of Christian apologetics seeks to persuade the skeptic that there are good reasons to believe in God even though it is impossible to understand the deity fully. First written over a century ago, the Grammar of Assent speaks as powerfully to us today as it did to its first readers. Because of the informal, non-technical character of Newman's work, it still retains its immediacy as an invaluable guide to the nature of religious belief. A new introduction by Nicholas Lash reviews the background of the Grammar, highlights its principal themes, and evaluates its philosophical originality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 1992
• ISBN: 9780268087661

John Henry Newman

British theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) was a leading figure in both the Church of England and, after his conversion, the Roman Catholic Church and was known as "The Father of the Second Vatican Council." His Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834-42) is considered the best collection of sermons in the English language. He is also the author of A Grammar of Assent (1870).

Book preview

AN ESSAY IN AID OF A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT

By John Henry Cardinal Newman

with an Introduction by Nicholas Lash

Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum.

Saint Ambrose

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

NOTRE DAME

Copyright © 1979 by University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

E-ISBN 978-0-268-08766-1

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

To

EDWARD BELLASIS,

SERJEANT AT LAW,

In remembrance of a long, equable, sunny friendship; in gratitude for continual kindnesses shown to me, for an unwearied zeal in my behalf, for a trust in me which has never wavered, and a prompt, effectual succour and support in times of special trial, from his affectionate

J.H.N.

February 21, 1870.

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I. Assent and Apprehension.

CHAPTER ONE: Modes of holding and apprehending Propositions

1. Modes of holding Propositions

2. Modes of apprehending Propositions

CHAPTER TWO: Assent considered as Apprehensive

CHAPTER THREE: The Apprehension of Propositions

CHAPTER FOUR: Notional and Real Assent

1. Notional Assents

2. Real Assents

3. Notional and Real Assents contrasted

CHAPTER FIVE: Apprehension and Assent in the matter of Religion

1. Belief in one God

2. Belief in the Holy Trinity

3. Belief in Dogmatic Theology

PART II. Assent and Inference.

CHAPTER SIX: Assent considered as Unconditional

1. Simple Assent

2. Complex Assent

CHAPTER SEVEN: Certitude

1. Assent and Certitude contrasted

2. Indefectibility of Certitude

CHAPTER EIGHT: Inference

1. Formal Inference

2. Informal Inference

3. Natural Inference

CHAPTER NINE: The Illative Sense

1. The Sanction of the Illative Sense

2. The Nature of the Illative Sense

3. The Range of the Illative Sense

CHAPTER TEN: Inference and Assent in the matter of Religion

1. Natural Religion

2. Revealed Religion

NOTES

1. On Hooker and Chillingworth

2. On the alternative intellectually between Atheism and Catholicity

3. On the punishment of the wicked having no termination

Introduction

Nicholas Lash

On February 13, 1870, Newman wrote to Richard Hutton: For twenty years I have begun and left off an inquiry again and again, which yesterday I finished. . . . I began it in my Oxford University Sermons; I tried it in 1850—and at several later dates, in 1859, in 1861 . . . but, though my fundamental ideas were ever the same, I could not carry them out. Now at last I have done all that I can do according to my measure.¹ Five days later, writing to his old friend Maria Giberne: I have done five constructive works in my life, and this is the hardest . . . my Prophetical Office, which has come to pieces—my Essay on Justification, which stands pretty well—and three Catholic—Development of doctrine—University Education, and the last which I have called an Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent.²

The publication of Henry Mansel’s 1858 Bampton Lectures, The Limits of Religious Knowledge Examined, created quite a stir. They frightened and angered F. D. Maurice, and there were widespread mutterings of atheism.³ Newman’s reaction was interesting. In January 1860 he wrote to Charles Meynell, who had been trying to persuade him to republish the University Sermons, that he derived exceeding pleasure, not only from Meynell’s interest in the sermons, but also from the fact that you corroborate my own impression, that what Mr. Mansel has said, I have said before him.⁴ If, nevertheless, he hesitated about republishing the sermons, this was partly because a dear friend "wishes me to write a book, on what would really be the same subject expanded.⁵ The object of the book would be to show that a given individual, high or low, has as much right (has as real rational grounds) to be certain, as a learned theologian who knows the scientific evidence."⁶ The friend was William Froude, a distinguished scientist and the younger brother of Hurrell Froude, Newman’s closest friend at Oxford. The book, ten years later, would be the Grammar of Assent.⁷

The University Sermons remain the indispensable companion to the Grammar of Assent. From some points of view, the treatment of central questions concerning the epistemology of religious belief and, in particular, the rationality of personal faith, is more satisfactory in the Oxford sermons than in the later work.⁸ In saying this, I have in mind the contrast between the treatiselike, sometimes excessively systematic mood of the Grammar, and what D. M. MacKinnon has called the profoundly interrogative character of Newman’s explorations in [the] sermons.⁹ And yet, the contrast is perhaps misleading. If we read the Grammar with one eye on the notebooks in which, from 1858 onwards, Newman worked away at the problems,¹⁰ we begin to appreciate that it is indeed this note of interrogative subtlety that is the true characteristic of Newman’s method as a philosopher of religion.¹¹

BACKGROUND: NEWMAN AND FROUDE

Perhaps the best way of introducing some of the principal themes in the Grammar is to turn to the correspondence with that dear friend, a correspondence which did much to shape and clarify Newman’s views and which ended only with Froude’s death in 1879.¹² Not the least of the advantages of taking this route into the Grammar is that we are thereby reminded that even this most theoretical and technical of Newman’s works was provoked and stimulated by personal considerations: by his love for a lifelong friend the fundamental currents of whose thinking had drifted ever further from his own, and whose seventeen-year-old son Newman (who was the boy’s godfather) had received into the Catholic Church on Christmas Eve 1859. On that day, Newman wrote to William: I do not believe, and never will believe, that in the bottom of your mind you really hold what you think you hold.¹³

In his lengthy reply, Froude sought to explain how it was that, especially as a result of his experience as a natural scientist, his views had come increasingly to differ both from Newman’s and from those that his brother Hurrell had held. Making no attempt to understate the depth of their disagreement, he located its source in the very principle of ‘thinking’ and of ‘concluding’ and in the very nature of ‘thoughts’ and of conclusions.¹⁴ Immediately putting his finger on what was to become the central issue in the Grammar, he went on: More strongly than I believe anything else I believe this. That on no subject whatever . . . is my mind, (or as far as I can tell the mind of any human being,) capable of arriving at an absolutely certain conclusion. . . . Our ‘doubts’ in fact, appear to me as sacred, and I think deserve to be cherished as sacredly as our beliefs.¹⁵

There may be philosophers for whom the selection of an epistemological strategy appears to be a merely technical or theoretical affair. It is clear from the tone of this passage, however, that for Froude, as for Newman, such selection engages the deep springs of personal integrity. The difference between Froude and Newman is, in Van Harvey’s phrase, a difference between two ethics of judgment.¹⁶ It may be, however, that the ethic of judgment appropriate in scientific inquiry is quite unsuited to that dimension of our quest for truth which finds expression in personal relations. What counts as becoming tentativeness and caution in scientific inquiry would be regarded as mistrustful boorishness in personal relations. Conversely, the trustfulness which leads to mutual understanding between persons would signal the abandonment of intellectual standards in academic research. Thus it is, for example, that replying to Froude on January 2, 1860, Newman foreshadows the distinction which he will draw, in the Grammar, between religion and theology: Much lies in the meaning of the words certainty and doubt—much again in our duties to a person, as e.g. a friend—Religion is not merely a science, but a devotion.¹⁷

On January 15, Froude replied: I do most heartily wish . . . that you would really and fully work out this question.¹⁸ One point, in particular, puzzled him. Newman had said that Froude’s view seemed to him a sophism.¹⁹ Froude now wants to know whether you meant that it is so in reference to the pursuit of truth generally or only in reference to the pursuit of Religious truth.²⁰ Newman’s reply is to the effect that the scientific pursuit of truth in secular matters and (according to the theologians) the theological pursuit of religious truth proceed in the manner described by Froude, but that the scientific proof of Christianity is not the popular, practical, personal evidence on which a given individual believes in it.²¹

Here we touch on a matter of fundamental importance for understanding Newman’s approach to problems of faith and reason. At one level, he is pressing his distinction between the personal and scientific forms of the quest for truth, a distinction which corresponds to that which he will draw, in Part One of the Grammar, between real and notional apprehension and assent. We are reminded of a famous passage in the University Sermons: If children, if the poor, if the busy, can have true faith, yet cannot weigh evidence, evidence is not the simple foundation on which faith is built.²² And yet, at another level, if Newman thus argues for the rationality of simple faith, he is able to do so precisely because he refuses to admit that there is any such thing as a uniquely religious mode of apprehending truth. For Newman, the structure of personal religious faith is the structure of personal knowledge in respect of any subject matter whatsoever. Hence, as we shall see, the importance attributed by him, in Part One of the Grammar, to imagination. Hence it is, also, that—in spite of the apologetic character of the Grammar—the argument, in both parts, consists of a general phenomenological analysis of belief and certitude, which is then applied to, or illustrated in respect of, the matter of Religion at the end of each part, in chapters 5 and 10.

In other words, the contrast between faith and reason is not, for Newman, a contrast between belief and unbelief, or between irrationality and rationality, but between two modes of rationality. Thus, although Faith may be viewed as opposed to Reason . . . it must not be overlooked that Unbelief is opposed to Reason also.²³ Or, as he put it in one of his Parochial Sermons: When faith is said to be a religious principle, it is . . . the things believed, not the act of believing them, which is peculiar to religion.²⁴

On January 25, Froude took up the distinction between the personal and scientific modes of apprehending truth: "So far . . . as I understand you rightly, I do admit that I think scientific proof, or certainty derived from it, far more certain than the Personal certainty—Not however because I think the former so very certain, but because the latter seems to me so very doubtful. . . . For I suppose you would admit that multitudes of those who experience the sensation of personal conviction, are nevertheless in error."²⁵ Newman’s reply suggests that he had not yet worked out the distinction between certitude and certainty;²⁶ it also suggests that he did not yet appreciate how much trouble he would have with the problem of false certitude: "If I used the term ‘personal certainty,’ it was a bad expression—I meant to have said ‘personal proof,’ I have no faith in ‘sensations.’"²⁷

In December 1860, Froude visited Newman, who made notes on their conversation which can serve as a summary of where the correspondence had so far brought them: He said that no truth had been arrived at without this habit of sceptical caution—it was the parent of discovery. I said no great thing would be done without the very reverse habit, viz that of conviction and faith. . . . I agreed [that] scepticism and faith were both good in their place, and both admitted of abuse . . . faith being necessary in matters of practice and conduct, scepticism in matters of speculation.²⁸

In 1864, we find Froude still trying to persuade Newman to develop his views on the problem of certitude.²⁹ With rare exceptions, however, their correspondence turned to other matters. It was only in 1879 that it returned to the themes of the Grammar, and Froude died before receiving Newman’s final comments on the long letter he had written in March of that year, comments which are of some importance for the interpretation of the Grammar.³⁰ Froude seems to have lived just long enough, however, to receive Newman’s brief note of acknowledgment agreeing with him that truth sinks slowly into the mind, and that therefore paper argument is most disappointing—indeed this is one of the ‘morals’ of my Essay on Assent.³¹

PREPARING THE GRAMMAR

Newman’s journal entry for October 30, 1870 lists nineteen distinct separate beginnings between June 1846 and the summer of 1866.³² The breakthrough came while on holiday in Switzerland that summer. There, by the Lake of Geneva, he hit upon the idea: ’You are wrong in beginning with certitude—certitude is only a kind of assent—you should begin with contrasting assent and inference.’ On that last I spoke, finding it a key to my own ideas.³³ But, although he later remarked that my first pages stand pretty much as I wrote them in August 1866,³⁴ four years hard work still lay ahead of him before he could say, in January 1870: Rejoice with me, I have written the last sentence of my book.³⁵

By March 1868, Newman was transcribing the first part of my Essay,³⁶ and in July he gave a progress report to Henry Wilberforce: "Don’t mention it, but I have written my first book, it is on Assent—then would come Certitude—then Proof. . . . I consider there is no such thing (in the province of facts) as a perfect logical demonstration; there is always a margin of objection. . . . Yet on the other hand it is a paradox to say there is not such a state of mind as certitude. . . . I think it is φρόνησις which tells us when to discard the logical imperfection and to assent to the conclusion which ought to be drawn in order to demonstration, but is not quite. . . . but I am arguing against the principle that φρόνησις is a higher sort of logic.³⁷ Wilberforce was in correspondence with William Froude, and the following month Newman writes: I don’t recollect his [Froude’s] ever putting to me so pointedly his difficulty about two modes of reasoning, that of common sense and that of religion; though I have often used with him the saying of Aristotle, which you virtually use, that it is the same fault to demand demonstration of an historian as to be content with probabilities from a mathematician."³⁸

In an intellectual climate in which post-Enlightenment rationalism is presumed to be normative for the exercise of human rationality, Newman’s lifelong hostility to rationalism is bound to be misunderstood. In such a climate, emphasis on the personal conquest of truth is invariably misconstrued as subjectivism. It is therefore not surprising that, from the Modernist crisis to our own day, Newman has frequently been charged with irrationalism, fideism, and cognate vices.³⁹ And if one Frenchman, Henri Bremond, bears considerable responsibility for this morass of misunderstanding,⁴⁰ the credit must go to another Frenchman, Maurice Nédoncelle, for helping to set the record straight. Nédoncelle said of the University Sermons (and his observation is equally applicable to the Grammar) that one of their incontestable merits was to broaden the concept of intelligence, too narrowly defined by classical rationalism.⁴¹

It is not difficult, however, to discover the sources of confusion. When, as in a letter of 1869, we find Newman saying that, if there is a way of finding religious truth, it lies, not in exercises of the intellect, but close on the side of duty, of conscience, in the observance of the moral law,⁴² it is perhaps not surprising that he should have been suspected of adopting a fideist or voluntarist standpoint. And yet, even within the same letter it becomes clear that this is not the case: "You must not suppose that I am denying the intellect its real place in the discovery of truth; but. . . . It ever needs points to start from, first principles, and these it does not provide. . . . In physical matters, it is the senses which gives [sic] us the first start. . . . In like manner we have to ascertain the starting points for arriving at religious truth. The intellect will be useful in gaining them and after gaining them—but to attempt to see them by means of the intellect is like attempting by the intellect to see the physical facts which are the basis of physical exercises of the intellect, a method of proceeding which was the very mistake of the Aristotelians of the middle age, who, instead of what Bacon calls ‘interrogating nature’ for facts, reasoned out everything by syllogisms. To gain religious starting points, we must in a parallel way, interrogate our hearts . . . interrogate our own consciences, interrogate, I will say, the God who dwells there."⁴³

I have quoted that passage at some length because, although the phrasing is sometimes awkward, it seems to me to bring out very clearly the way in which Newman’s insistence on the primacy of religion in respect of theology, of faith in respect of reason, of action in respect of reflection, has its roots in his participation in the complex tradition of British Empiricism.⁴⁴ It is in the life of the spirit, in the interrogation of our hearts, in the practice of loving obedience, that we are brought to a real apprehension of those symbols of transcendence which serve, analogously to sense-experience, as the starting points for Christian reflection. The mode of rationality appropriate to such apprehension is—in its concreteness and irreducible complexity—closer to personal knowledge, or to literary and aesthetic cognition, than it is to the linear rationality characteristic of theoretical deduction.

It may also be worth pointing out that thus to describe the starting points of Christian reflection brings together two of the major themes of the Grammar—the problem of religious certitude and the problem of the mode of cognition characteristic of living faith—in a manner that evokes that intensely paradoxical account of the relationship between faith and sight which occupies so central a place in the Fourth Gospel, and in much patristic and medieval theology, but which was largely lost sight of when (from the seventeenth century almost to our own day) Catholic theology fell victim to an impoverished rationalism.

Perhaps, in the light of these hints, a passage such as the following, from a letter of January 1868, may help to illuminate otherwise puzzling aspects of Newman’s treatment, in the Grammar, of the real apprehension of, and assent to, the object of faith: Can a man be as sure to himself of the fact that Christ once was on earth and was God, as I that my friend is alive and is a second self to me? Catholics say that a man can; that . . . he can apprehend the Object of faith, as men in general apprehend objects of sight.⁴⁵

From July 1869 until shortly before the book’s publication on March 15, 1870 Charles Meynell, a secular priest who taught philosophy at Oscott College (and who, as we have seen, had ten years earlier urged Newman to republish the University Sermons) read and commented on the proofs. Several of his suggestions were incorporated into the final text.⁴⁶ In November 1869 Newman wrote to him: "I quite agree with you that the deepest men say that we can never be certain of any thing—and it has been my object therefore in good part of my volume to prove that there is such a thing as unconditional assent.⁴⁷ In the months that followed, there are several more such instances of Newman offering his correspondents general indications of the overall purposes and main themes of the work. Taken together, they constitute an intriguing, if sometimes tantalizing, set of clues to the interpretation of the text. Thus, for example, to an Anglican priest, an old friend from Oxford days, he wrote: My new book is a semi-logical fancy; not therefore phil- or the- or other ology.⁴⁸ To the publisher, B. M. Pickering, who had guessed that the book would be about the reasons of a man of goodwill for believing as opposed to a sceptic’s reasons for doubting, Newman replied: You have exactly hit upon the subject of the second and larger Part of my new volume."⁴⁹

To a Lancashire steel magnate with philosophical interests Newman remarked that My main proposition, in my Essay is, that by the nature of the human mind we assent absolutely on reasons which taken separately are but probabilities;⁵⁰ to the convert Jesuit, Henry James Coleridge: My book is to show that a right moral state of mind germinates or even generates good intellectual principles;⁵¹ and, in his last letter to Froude (to which we have already referred) he said: Nothing surely have I insisted on more earnestly in my Essay on Assent, than on the necessity of thoroughly subjecting abstract propositions to concrete. It is in the experience of daily life that the power of religion is learnt.⁵² Finally, it is worth mentioning the note which Edward Caswall, a priest of the Birmingham Oratory, wrote in his copy of the Grammar, after discussing it with Newman in 1877: Object of the book twofold. In the first part shows that you can believe what you cannot understand. In the second part that you can believe what you cannot absolutely prove.⁵³

IMAGINATION AND CERTITUDE

The Grammar of Assent is a seminal work in the philosophy of religion. And yet, if misunderstanding is to be avoided, it is necessary immediately to add that its primary purpose is apologetic, and its standpoint personal. Newman undoubtedly wished his arguments to be subjected to philosophical criticism,⁵⁴ and yet, if we would catch the weight and significance of those arguments, we must continually bear in mind that here, as in all his major writings, Newman speaks as a controversialist. He seeks to prove by persuasion, rather than to persuade by proof.

A good illustration of this is the discussion of conscience and the knowledge of God in chapters 5 and 10. In these passages, which apply the philosophical argument of the Grammar to the matter of religion, and do not themselves constitute a stage or element in that argument, Newman is not attempting a formal or theoretical proof of God’s existence. His concern is with persuasive illustration rather than formal proof, and the selection of the theme of conscience is partly dictated by tactical considerations.

This comes through clearly in a letter he wrote, in April 1870, to the convert William Brownlow, who was later to become Bishop of Clifton: "I have not insisted on the argument from design, because I am writing for the 19th century, by which, as represented by its philosophers, design is not admitted as proved. . . . I believe in design because I believe in God; not in a God because I see design. You will say that the 19th century does not believe in conscience either—true, but then it does not believe in a God at all. Something I must assume, and in assuming conscience I assume what is least to assume, and most will admit."⁵⁵

We have seen that, for Newman, the structure of that personal knowledge of God revealed in Christ which is the fruit of living, active, self-committing faith, has certain common features with the structure of our common-sense knowledge of empirical reality.⁵⁶ This latter way of knowing: engaged, experiential, prereflexive, is—and the concept is central to the argument of the Grammar—imaginative. It is difficult, if not impossible, says Newman, to imagine mental facts, of which we have no direct experience.⁵⁷ If we are to believe what we cannot understand (where belief refers to a mode of knowledge⁵⁸ that, in the ordinary way, affects our conduct⁵⁹) then we must be able in some sense to give an affirmative answer to the question: Can I rise to what I have called an imaginative apprehension of the mystery of God? Or, as he puts it with misleading succinctness: Can I believe as if I saw?⁶⁰

Because the phenomenon of conscience is at once the most generally acknowledged and the most authoritative of the channels of communication between God and man,⁶¹ Newman concentrates on it in an attempt to explain to his reader how we gain an image of God and give a real assent to the proposition that He exists.⁶² The reader who goes along with the argument of the first part of the Grammar will thus have been brought, by reflection on his own experience, to discover the scope and significance of the distinction between real and notional apprehension and assent in general and, in particular, between religion and theology.

In its general epistemological character, Newman’s approach in this first part of the Grammar is not wholly dissimilar from that adopted by Professor John Macmurray in his 1953 Gifford Lectures.⁶³ Professor H. H. Price is not the only person to have been puzzled by Newman’s use of the concept of imagination.⁶⁴ It also puzzled Newman. In his notebook, we find him confidently declaring, in 1861: We can imagine things which we cannot conceive. . . . In like manner we can believe what we can imagine, yet cannot conceive.⁶⁵ Two years later, he jotted on the opposite page: "Imagination is the habit or act of making mental images.⁶⁶ Later, he seems to have realized that this was not very helpful because, in 1868, he added: I have not defined quite what imagination is. I began by saying ‘making images.’"⁶⁷ And there he left it.

Is there, then, some radical incoherence in Newman’s account of imagination and conception, and hence of the relationship between real and notional apprehension and assent? I do not think so. John Coulson puts his finger on the central issue when he suggests that to speak of an appeal to imagination as being one to a distinct mental faculty is a trap to be avoided.⁶⁸ Newman’s distinction is not between rational cognition and some other activity which is nonrational, merely subjective or irrational. It is rather, as I have already suggested, between two modes of rationality or, in his own words, between two habits of mind.⁶⁹

Too often, nineteenth-century debates concerning the rationality of Christian belief and practice were restricted to the field of notional apprehension and assent. Newman was as unhappy with this restriction as he was with the alternative strategy which would settle for the noncognitive character of religious discourse. Thus, although he agreed, in 1882, that it is of the first importance of course to show that there is no contradiction between scientific and religious truth, he added: yet it was not there, I fancied, that the shoe pinched.⁷⁰ Or, as he put it in an earlier letter to the same correspondent: it is not reason that is against us, but imagination.⁷¹

It follows that, if there is a true philosophy of religion,⁷² it will have to insist that, in religious as in secular affairs, "for genuine proof in concrete matters we require an organon more delicate, versatile, and elastic than verbal argumentation."⁷³ Thus we are brought to the theme of Part Two of the Grammar, to the claim that certitude is possible in concrete matters, and hence to the problem of verification.

That we do attain such certitude is indisputable. We are not fairly sure that Great Britain is an island (to take Newman’s favorite example). We do not think that is probably, or almost certainly, the case. We are, quite simply, certain of it. And yet, in this case, as in all concrete matters, if we try to formulate a theoretical, logical demonstration, the conclusion of which would be that Great Britain is an island, we find that there is a margin . . . intervening between verbal argumentation and conclusions in the concrete.⁷⁴ The conclusion of such argumentation is never more than probable, and yet—we are certain. How is the margin to be cancelled, the gap closed?

Here, as so often, it is the metaphors to which Newman has recourse that best illustrate the character of his reply. The structure of proof in concrete matters is not linear: "proof in concrete matters does not lie (so to say) on one line, as the stages of a race course, (as it does in abstract) but is made up of momenta converging from very various directions, the joint force of which no analytical expression can represent."⁷⁵ Or, again: "An iron rod represents mathematical or strict demonstration; a cable represents moral demonstration, which is an assemblage of probabilities. . . . A man who said ‘I cannot trust a cable, I must have an iron bar,’ would, in certain given cases, be irrational and unreasonable."⁷⁶

The structure of proof in concrete matters is such as to resist formal, analytical expression. Thus, in a letter of 1861 to Sir John Symeon, Newman compares the proof of Religion to the proof the proposition, ‘I am certain that I, JHN, shall die,’⁷⁷ and says: I liken it to the mechanism of some triumph of skill, tower or spire, geometrical staircase, or vaulted roof, where ‘Ars est celare artem:’ where all display of strength is carefully avoided, and the weight is ingeniously thrown in a variety of directions, upon supports which are distinct from, or independent of each other."⁷⁸ The metaphor here is static: it is an image of achievement, not of process. In the Grammar, Newman’s most illuminating metaphor for the process of proof is that of the movement whereby a regular polygon, inscribed in a circle, its sides being continually diminished, tends to become that circle, as its limit. . . . a proof is the limit of converging probabilities.⁷⁹ It is a matter of daily experience that such proofs work, that the limit is reached, but they do not and cannot work except by the personal action of our own minds.⁸⁰

You will be sadly disappointed in my ‘illative sense,’ wrote Newman to Meynell, which is a grand word for a common thing."⁸¹ In a way, he is right. For the illative sense, that is, the reasoning faculty,⁸² is but a branch of judgment, and judgment . . . in all concrete matter is the architectonic faculty.⁸³ One of the reasons why chapter 9 is comparatively short is because it is to some extent recapitulatory, bringing into explicit focus matters that, before the introduction of the technical term illative sense, have already been under discussion in the earlier chapters of Part Two.⁸⁴

If one asks, as I did earlier: How is the ‘margin’ to be cancelled, the gap closed? it is tempting to answer in terms of a jump into certitude, a leap of faith. One of the most serious weaknesses of Pailin’s study is that he simply takes for granted that assent is to be leapt into, and criticizes Newman for holding that the leap is to be performed, the gap . . . bridged by an act of will, rather than of intellect.⁸⁵ But Newman never leapt anywhere in his life. If we keep in mind the image of the polygon expanding into the circle, our question more appropriately becomes: Is it or is it not the case that we discover the margin to have been cancelled, the gap to have been closed? Newman’s analysis of assent is, as Coulson says, retrospective; he is trying to understand backwards what has been lived forwards.⁸⁶ We grow, rather than leap, into conviction. We do not say: Today I am a capitalist (or an apolitical animal); tomorrow I shall be a committed communist. The discovery that we have come to hold a certain belief, or set of beliefs, may be sudden, but, on reflection, we can usually see something of the process whereby those beliefs were cumulatively, slowly, and often painfully acquired.

Toward the end of chapter 6, Newman opens the all-important question, what is truth, and what apparent truth? what is genuine knowledge, and what is its counterfeit? what are the tests for discriminating certitude from mere persuasion or delusion?⁸⁷ As we follow Newman in his attempts to answer this question,⁸⁸ we may well feel that some of them are distinctly unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, I believe that he was doing himself an injustice when, in 1876, he said (if von Hügel’s memory may be trusted): I cannot see my way to any absolute tests of false certitude and true. I quite see that this is the weak point of ‘the Grammar.’⁸⁹ Were such "absolute tests" available, Part Two of the Grammar need never have been written, for judgment in respect of concrete particulars would then lack that personal character on which Newman insists, and faith would cease to be a venture, pregnant with risk.⁹⁰ Newman, like all of us, sought security. And yet, if the Grammar of Assent speaks as powerfully to us today as it did to its first readers, this is in no small measure due to its author’s insistence that, in matters of religious belief, as in personal relationships and, indeed, in all concrete matters, such security—which is the fruit of costly personal engagement, rather than its precondition—is, in the last resort, received as gift. Thus it is that, however shocking it may be to those who prefer more compartmentalized patterns of reflection, the tone of Newman’s phenomenological analysis is never far removed from the mood of prayer, as in the surprisingly sudden reference, in chapter 9, to our need for the interposition of a Power, greater than human teaching and human argument, to make our beliefs true and our minds one.⁹¹

THE GRAMMAR OF ASSENT TODAY

In introducing the background and principal themes of the Grammar, I have concentrated on Newman’s letters because he is, in many ways, his own best commentator. I have, however, referred in passing to a number of other studies of the work, and it may be helpful briefly to review the more important of these.

The distorting filters through which, for over half a century, the Grammar of Assent was read bear eloquent testimony to the arduous struggle that was necessary before the intellectually and spiritually sterile apologetic rationalism that had dominated official Catholic thought from the seventeenth century onwards could be sufficiently put in its place as to enable the Grammar to be given a sympathetic hearing. Few studies of Newman’s philosophy of religion produced before 1950 are now of more than historical interest. As exceptions I would single out Wilfrid Ward’s Last Lectures⁹² and Maurice Nédoncelle’s La Philosophie Religieuse de John Henry Newman.⁹³ Boekraad’s Personal Conquest of Truth⁹⁴ and The Argument from Conscience to the Existence of God According to J. H. Newman⁹⁵ are still of considerable interest, as in J. H. Walgrave’s Newman the Theologian.⁹⁶ David Pailin’s The Way to Faith, although uneven and sometimes highly misleading, nevertheless contains some useful material. The limitations of H. H. Price’s painstaking and illuminating chapters on the Grammar in his Gifford Lectures, Belief, are perhaps the limitations of the philosophical tradition in which he stands. Edward Sillem may have been overconcerned to stress the consistency of Newman’s thought (and we have noticed his blind spot where Newman’s relationship to the tradition of British Empiricism is concerned) but his General Introduction to the Study of Newman’s Philosophy is unlikely to be surpassed for many years.

Some years ago, J. M. Cameron claimed that "Newman’s philosophical originality has been underestimated."⁹⁷ For that underestimation to be corrected, certain widespread assumptions concerning what is to count as philosophical argument in general, and, in particular as argument in the philosophy of religion, had first to be called in question. In recent years, we have seen some rather fundamental shifts begin to take place in the assessment of the range and variety of modes of human rationality, shifts of which the widespread interest shown, across a broad spectrum of disciplines, in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and in works such as T. S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions⁹⁸ and H. G. Gadamer’s Truth and Method⁹⁹ may be taken as signals and indicators. A central issue concerns what we might call the rationality of aesthetics. We are perhaps better placed than were our predecessors to appreciate the seminal character of such a work as the Grammar which, as a number of recent studies have shown,¹⁰⁰ stands in an English tradition of reflection that until recently was presumed to be merely concerned with literary criticism, and (therefore) not at all with philosophical or epistemological practice.

In view of the occasional, informal, nontechnical character of Newman’s work—even in the Grammar—to claim so much for its philosophical significance may seem excessively pretentious. And yet, may it not perhaps be just this lack of theoretical systematization which makes the thought of a Newman, as of an Augustine, ever and again available as guides and stimulants, as aids to reflection? It is for the reader to discover, as he seeks to accept the challenge offered by the "irregularity, the tortuous difficulty, and the explosive suggestiveness of the Grammar of Assent."¹⁰¹

1. C. S. Dessain and Thomas Gornall, S.J., eds., Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman (henceforth L&D), vol. 25 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 29.

2. L&D 25, p. 34.

3. Cf. B. M. G. Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore; A Century of Religious Thought in Britain (London: Longmans, 1971), pp. 223–42.

4. L&D 19, p. 294.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. On the narrower scope of the Grammar, as compared with the more extensive study in the philosophy of religion that Newman originally planned, cf. E. J. Sillem, The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, vol. 1, General Introduction to the Study of Newman’s Philosophy (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1969), pp. 245–48.

8. Cf. C. S. Dessain, John Henry Newman (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1966), p. 87.

9. D. M. MacKinnon, Introduction, Newman’s University Sermons (London: S.P.C.K., 1970), p. 9.

10. E. J. Sillem (ed.), The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, vol. 2, The Text (henceforth P.N.) revised A. J. Boekraad (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1970).

11. J. Coulson, Belief and Imagination, Downside Review 90 (1972), p. 8.

12. Cf. G. H. Harper, Cardinal Newman and William Froude, F.R.S., A Correspondence (Baltimore, 1933). Harper’s interpretation of the correspondence is often gravely misleading, because he took for granted just that restricted, monochrome notion of human rationality which, in the Grammar as in the University Sermons, Newman sought to undercut. Remarks such as The illative sense is in part dependent upon emotion (p. 60) help to explain why Boekraad roundly asserted that Harper’s account is in all points the exact opposite of the explanation given here (A. J. Boekraad, The Personal Conquest of Truth According to J. H. Newman [Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1955], p. 294).

13. L&D 19, p. 259.

14. Ibid., p. 269.

15. Ibid., p. 270.

16. V. A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (London: SCM Press, 1967), p. 104.

17. L&D 19, p. 273. Cf. Grammar, pp. 62, 93, 108–9, 122, 127.

18. L&D 19, p. 283.

19. Ibid., p. 273.

20. Ibid., p. 284.

21. Ibid., p. 285.

22. Newman’s University Sermons, p. 231.

23. Ibid., p. 230.

24. J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1 (London: Rivingtons, 1868), p. 191. The title of the sermon from which that quotation is taken is, significantly, Religious Faith Rational.

25. L&D 19, p. 297.

26. Cf. Grammar, pp. 162, 271.

27. L&D 19, p. 299.

28. Ibid., p. 441.

29. Cf. L&D 21, p. 245.

30. Cf. L&D 29, pp. 109–20.

31. Ibid., p. 106.

32. H. Tristram, ed., John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writings (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), pp. 269–70.

33. Autobiographical Writings, p. 270.

34. L&D 25, p. 35; cf. pp. 155, 199.

35. Ibid., p. 9.

36. L&D 24, p. 53.

37. L&D 24, pp. 104–5. For the discussion, in the Grammar, of Aristotle’s concept of "phronesis, or judgment," cf. Grammar, pp. 277–78.

38. L&D 24, p. 119. The passage from the Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 1, chap. 3, to which he refers, was a favorite of his: cf. Grammar, p. 322.

39. For some of the documentation, cf. my Newman on Development (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975), pp. 11, 148–49.

40. Sillem, General Introduction, p. 19.

41. Cf. M. Nédoncelle, Le Drame de la Foi et de la Raison dans les Sermons Universitaires de J. H. Newman, Etudes, 247 (1945), p. 75.

42. L&D 24, p. 275.

43. Ibid., pp. 275–76.

44. The sense in which this is so is brought out beautifully in MacKinnon’s Introduction to the University Sermons, and the failure to appreciate it is a major weakness in Sillem’s otherwise excellent study.

45. L&D 24, p. 12, Cf. Grammar, pp. 62, 95–96.

46. The correspondence between them can be found in L&D 24, pp. 292–389.

47. L&D 24, p. 375.

48. L&D 25, p. 33.

49. Ibid., p. 51.

50. Ibid., p. 266.

51. Ibid., p. 280.

52. L&D 29, p. 116, Cf. Grammar, pp. 69, 85, 106.

53. Dessain, Newman, p. 148. On those two propositions, cf. Grammar, pp. 128, 209.

54. He would surely have appreciated Professor H. H. Price’s lucid analysis of his critique of Locke in chapter 6—on which Price’s judgment is that Newman and Locke are in much closer agreement than Newman thinks, and that, where they differ, Locke was more nearly right than Newman was—and Price’s painstaking exploration of the distinction between real and notional assent, which he describes as Newman’s most original contribution to the epistemology of belief, H. H. Price, Belief (London: George Allen and Unwin, New York: Humanities Press, 1969), pp. 152, 315–16.

55. L&D 25, p. 97. Cf. Grammar, pp. 109–11.

56. Cf. Grammar, p. 68.

57. Cf. Grammar, p. 43.

58. Cf. Grammar, p. 77.

59. Cf. Grammar, p. 87.

60. Grammar, p. 96.

61. Cf. Grammar, pp. 304, 309–10.

62. Grammar, p. 97.

63. Cf. J. Macmurray, The Self as Agent (London: Faber and Faber, 1957); Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1961).

64. Cf. Price, Belief, pp. 322–48.

65. P.N., p. 153.

66. P.N., p. 152.

67. P.N., p. 154.

68. Coulson, Belief and Imagination, p. 1.

69. Grammar, p. 93. Cf. Newman’s University Sermons, pp. 176–201.

70. L&D 30, p. 162.

71. Ibid., p. 159.

72. L&D 25, p. 250.

73. Grammar, p. 217.

74. Grammar, p. 282.

75. L&D 26, p. 41.

76. L&D 21, p. 146.

77. Cf. Grammar, pp. 237–39.

78. L&D 19, p. 460. Cf. P.N., p. 133.

79. Grammar, pp. 253–54.

80. Grammar, p. 242.

81. L&D 24, p. 375.

82. Grammar, p. 283.

83. Grammar, p. 269.

84. Cf. Grammar, p. 283.

85. Cf. D. A. Pailin, The Way to Faith: An Examination of Newman’s Grammar of Assent as a Response to the Search for Certainty in Faith (London: Epworth Press, 1969), pp. 196, 190.

86. Coulson, Belief and Imagination, p. 13.

87. Grammar, p. 162.

88. Cf. e.g., Grammar, pp. 181–91, 205–6.

89. R. K. Brown, Newman and von Hügel. A Record of an Early Meeting. The Month 212 (1961), p. 28. From the context it is clear that, in the terminology of the Grammar, it is certitude rather than certainty that is in question.

90. To appreciate the centrality of the concepts of risk and venture in Newman’s phenomenology of belief, it is necessary to look outside the Grammar (which concentrates on the element of certitude in belief) to the sermons: cf., e.g., Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 295–306 (The Ventures of Faith), vol. 6, pp. 114, 259: University Sermons, pp. 202–3, 215, 219, 224, 239, 249, 292–93. To a correspondent who objected to his speaking of "venturing in matters of faith, Newman replied: did not Abraham, my dear Sir, make a venture, when he went out, not knowing whither he went?" (L&D 12, p. 168).

91. Grammar, p. 293.

92. London: Longmans Green, 1918.

93.