Nay, so alert is the instinctive power of an educated conscience, that by some secret faculty, and without any intelligible reasoning process […], it seems to detect moral truth wherever it lies hid, and feels a conviction of its own accuracy which bystanders cannot account for; and this especially in the case of Revealed Religion, which is one comprehensive moral fact.1
Let us observe that conscience in this passage is “some secret faculty” and it leads us “without any intelligible reasoning process.” An educated conscience, i.e. well-informed, helps “to detect moral truth.” Such a conscience is like an instrument of high definition. In this sense, it is coequal to natural inference and the Illative Sense. Conscience has rights because it has (transcendent) duties—as Newman put it—hence the judgments of a well-informed conscience are not mere private views.
Their conscience still speaks, but having been trifled with, it does not tell truly; it equivocates, or is irregular. Whereas in him who is faithful to his own divinely implanted nature, the faint light of Truth dawns continually
brighter; the shadows which at first troubled it, the unreal shapes created by its own twilight-state, vanish; what was as uncertain as mere feeling, and could not be distinguished from a fancy except by the commanding urgency of its voice, becomes fixed and definite, and strengthening into principle, it at the same time develops into habit.2
In order to portray the situation of a man who has trifled with his conscience, let us use a literary example. The classics are always helpful. The most impressive degeneration of conscience, the result of numerous rationalizations, we find in Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Richard iii. What philosophers seek to describe in long theoretical passages, the writer’s genius can put in a few words. We are in Richard iii’s tent. The bloody king has just woken up from his dream, in fact a nightmare, in which he was harassed by the ghost of his former ally, Buckingham. King Richard begins this penetrating soliloquy with himself:
Indeed, few lines in world literature can compare to the above powerful description; it is like Newman’s functional disarrangement in its starkest form. Psychology would call this description cognitive dissonance, a term we have already mentioned here. King Richard’s rationalized conscience speaks “several thousand tongues,” and each tongue brings a different story. Thus, we obtain an excellent picture of a disordered personality. The king loves himself and hates himself; he knows he is a liar, and denies being a liar. A person who has thus rationalized his conscience contradicts himself: praising himself for the same thing for which he is rebuking himself. When the two murderers from the play talk to each other about the murder with which they have been commissioned, one of them says: “Some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.”4 And if we go back, we find in Act i, Scene ii, yet another fascinating example of Shakespeare’s genius of penetrating observation. Lady Anne has just learned that Gloucester (King Richard iii) killed her husband, nevertheless, when she is offered a ring by the murderer, she accepts it, saying: “To take is not to give.” What an excellent portrayal of conscience’s rationalization in its practical application!
Richard iii experiences cognitive dissonance, so he is trying to assuage this discrepancy between what he really thinks and feels, and what he is actually saying by an attempt at rationalization. Such may be human concrete dilemmas which can wreak havoc on one’s personality. This is what Newman meant by the well-known phrase shadows and images. To use the Kantian idiom we could say that the transcendental ‘I’ is incapable of guiding the empirical “I,” so that we could accede to Kantian formalism. Newman was interested in the empirical and concrete ‘I’, and that ‘I’ is capable of distancing himself from what is useful and expedient. For him, such a distance can be found in conscience understood as the voice of God. Therefore only on condition that it is well-informed and free from rationalized hypocrisy. Shakespeare brilliantly painted a picture of rationalized conscience in his tragedy. Richard is in despair because he cannot bear his empirical ‘I’, and at the same time he finds no respite in his conscience because he has worked hard to hush its voice. Paraphrasing Eliot’s Waste Land (cited before), we might say: “between conscience and I falls the Shadow.” That is why Richard ascribes his grievous and justified remorse to
The issue of rationalization is extremely important; rationalization is destructive for conscience, and it renders the human being unreal. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979), in his book Peace of Soul, paints a beautiful and persuasive picture of what we are talking about here, where we read: “We often justify ourselves by saying that we are following our consciences, when we are only following our desires. […] We try to keep religion on a speculative basis in order to avoid moral reproaches on our conduct. We sit at the piano of life and insist that every note we strike is right—because we struck it.”5 This example shows clearly the distinction between subjectivity and subjectivism; Newman naturally focused on subjectivity when he wrote that we have to use ourselves, and he rejected subjectivism when he warned his readers against having their own way. Now, coming back to Sheen’s illustration, striking the note is subjectivity, but claiming that it is the right note is subjectivism. What germinates in my individual action is all that matters—this is subjectivism; we are the authors of our own actions—this is subjectivity inherent in the reality of our persons.6 Newman’s “egotism is true modesty” equals with subjectivity, not with subjectivism.
Newman’s focus on the person had nothing to do with individualism or subjectivism. Rather, it was his clear vision that freedom is not only given to us, but that we are called to fulfil it. This was also the personalistic position of John Paul ii. As Newman beautifully put it in one of his parochial sermons, that the feelings of believers should “retire deep into their hearts and there live.”7 They should be living principles of their lives, not merely topics for enlightened discussions.
…
Newman puts it clearly that he is not afraid of the facts that may come from the world of science. He says it would “ill become” him if he were “afraid of truth of any kind, to blame those who pursue secular facts, by means of the reason which God has given them, to their logical conclusions: or to be angry with science, because religion is bound in duty to take cognizance in its teaching.”10 He is well aware of these various ways by which Christianity is being attacked. And he knows that many people are perplexed on account of that, but he does not criticize them, for he can also see that the picture of the opponent is hazy. Therefore, he states that “at the moment it is so difficult to say precisely what it is that is to be encountered and overthrown.”11 The opponent,
Newman does not feel like standing up to the dangers from the field of science because it might look like a quixotic fight against phantoms. If an alleged theory is still at the stage of being a mere hypothesis, no one knows whether it will be transformed into a theory at all. The Catholic should rather be patient than alarmed or upset. His conduct shows clearly how collected and reasonable a person he was. And Newman surrenders to the authority of the Church in her principle of reserve, so that she should not act too rashly. Her position saved him, as he ascertains, from being a controversialist.
Education is the cultivation of the intellect and heart, and Useful Knowledge is the great instrument of education. It is the parent of virtue, the nurse of religion; it exalts man to his highest perfection, and is the sufficient scope of his most earnest exertions.12
To know is one thing, to do is another; the two things are altogether distinct. A man knows he should get up in the morning,—he lies a-bed; he knows he should not lose his temper, yet he cannot keep it […], the consciousness of a duty is not all one with the performance of it. There are, then, large families of instances, to say the least, in which men may become wiser, without becoming better. Mr. Bentham would answer, that the knowledge which carries virtue along with it, is the knowledge how to take care of number one—a clear appreciation of what is pleasurable, what painful, and what promotes the one and prevents the other. An uneducated man is ever mistaking his own interest, and standing in the way of his own true enjoyments. Useful Knowledge is that which tends to make us useful to ourselves.
Now, without using exact theological language, we may surely take it for granted, from the experience of facts, that the human mind is at best in a very unformed or disordered state; passions and conscience, likings and reason, conflicting,—might rising against right, with the prospect of things getting worse. […] Not a victory of the mind over itself—not the supremacy of the law—not the reduction of the rebels—not the unity of our complex nature—not an harmonizing of the chaos—but the mere lulling of the passions to rest by turning the course of thought; not a change of character, but a mere removal of temptation.
Such being the case with the human mind, it is futile to employ it in serious matters which should be preceded by respective preparation. It is like, to use a sporting metaphor, encouraging an unprepared man to take part in a marathon. Therefore Newman says that Sir Robert Peel “makes no pretence of subduing the giant nature, in which we were born, of smiting the loins of the domestic enemies of our peace, of overthrowing passion and fortifying reason; he does but offer to bribe the foe for the nonce with gifts which will avail for that purpose just so long as they will avail, and no longer. […] They will countenance, with his high authority, what in one form or other is a chief error of the day, in very distinct schools of opinion,—that our true excellence comes not from within, but from without; not wrought out through personal struggles and sufferings, but following upon a passive exposure to influences over which we have no control.
Now, independent of all other considerations, the great difference, in a practical light, between the object of Christianity and of heathen belief, is
The ascendancy of Faith may be impracticable, but the reign of Knowledge is incomprehensible. […] Science gives us the grounds or premises from which religious truths are to be inferred; but it does not set about inferring them, much less does it reach the inference;—that is not its province. It brings before us phenomena, and it leaves us, if we will, to call them works of design, wisdom, or benevolence; and further still, if we will, to proceed to confess an Intelligent Creator. We have to take its facts, and to give them a meaning, and to draw our own conclusions from them. First comes Knowledge, then a view, then reasoning, and then belief. This is why Science has so little of a religious tendency; deductions have no 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 ‘certain about’. […] I have no confidence, then, in philosophers who cannot help being religious, and are Christians by implication. They sit at home, and reach forward to distances which astonish us; but they hit without grasping, and are sometimes as confident about shadows as about realities. […] Logicians are more set upon concluding rightly, than on right conclusions. […] To most men argument makes the point in hand only more doubtful, and considerably less impressive. After
all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise.
Life is not long enough for a religion 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 further and further […] Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.13
This passage is a precise exposition of Newman’s views, which he will later develop in his Grammar of Assent. I called it an encapsulation of his position, indeed, a résumé of the most important points of his personalism; we could even say that the above words compose the heart of Newman’s doctrine, that they are his trademark. Let us focus on selected elements to bring home to mind their significance. His stylistic capacities are indeed at their best. To begin with, Newman is against ethical intellectualism—the untenable view we know from the school of Socrates—for he states that knowledge is not virtue. The Greek philosopher maintained that human vice resulted from human ignorance. Newman follows Horatio and St. Paul14 in pointing out the discrepancy between moral knowledge and moral behaviour, i.e. man “knows he should not lose his temper, yet he cannot keep it.” He emphasises the importance of imagination (images) and examples as worthy incentives for personal conduct. Virtue does not arise where there are no temptations, but where temptations are overcome; we can put this even more bluntly, following Aristotle’s argumentation: the more temptations, the better, for virtue takes shape through adversity; besides, training the intellect is not the same as training the will. Brougham and Peel, therefore, propose a stoic rather than Christian agenda with a strong positivist and scientific background. Unruly nature, so argues Newman, should be trammelled and placed under control, not soothed by
It is interesting to note that at that time Newman was against Peel because Peel was in favour of Catholic emancipation; the latter became part of the liberal programme. The prime minister regarded it as a matter of expediency; as Zeno noted, “he preferred emancipation to an Irish civil war.”15 Politicians, for pragmatic reasons, often prefer political motives to moral ones, and mere political motives are usually supposed to gratify some calculated purpose. Newman in general was very critical about motives resulting from expediency. Moreover, as we have said, he “considered Catholic emancipation a fruit of Liberalism.”16 These two facts, paradoxically, emphasise Newman’s value of the purity of motives. He abhorred double-dealing and political calculation. And, let us add, as he had not acquired the right grounds to accept it, he rejected the decision.
Newman criticises Bentham’s utilitarianism with its dominant interpretation of human nature ruled by two masters: pleasure and pain. He describes the “disordered state” or, as we have already defined it here, the functional disarrangement of the human mind, hence a mere calculation of pros and cons will not suffice to arrive at the right conclusion. In other words, the human mind is not a ready-made mechanism for correct thinking in practical matters, such as religion and morality, e.g. man cannot arrive at the right conclusions in the matter of virtue if he does not seek to be virtuous. Therefore he will resort to inferior motives. Especially if we remember that which is useful is frequently not virtuous, at least these two objectives do not come together. The mind is part and parcel of the whole human being, and it should strive at making the human being an integral creature. As such, it cannot be disconnected or isolated from the rest, i.e. the intellect cannot be disconnected from morality. Horatio and St. Paul noticed this fundamental cleavage in human nature that introduces conflicts. Such is the human condition, the mind no
We must begin from principles, not conclusions, and these principles should be accepted on faith. The sphere of religion and morality is not primarily an intellectual activity. Demanding evidence leads to an unending process of analyzing, going backward, and, ultimately, scepticism. We assume faith without waiting for proof. Newman’s conclusion does not mean, as I have already noted, that he was an anti-intellectual, just as he was an anti-naturalist. He simply took man as a real creature, neither invented nor imagined, therefore he could not agree that theoretical knowledge is sufficient for his right conduct. Newman rightly observes that “deductions have no power of persuasion” that would lead to action.
Only a person can translate a formal truth into a living example. Man possesses an immediate apprehension of the unity and totality of his “I,” whereas the sciences divide the human beings into various aspects and examine them from their separate points of view. But the person grasps his being as a whole. The person grasps the unity of this being in an internal experience; it is not a successive enumeration of the individual parts of one’s being, but an intuitive grasp of the whole. Individual sciences can, and do, study numerous aspects of the person, but they cannot provide an overall system of the whole being. Sciences cannot, nor are they interested in, for instance, the explanation of the origin and ultimate end of human life, the definition of man’s ultimate destiny or the profound sense of his life. This is a task for philosophy and religion. If the sciences seek to do so, they fall into contradictions.
Let us leave such considerations aside. The only thing that I would like to stress is Newman’s realism. He did appreciate the positive fruits of scientific endeavours, but opposed an unqualified admiration for their advantageous effects in all spheres of human life. And he vehemently protested against replacing religion with science, and ridiculed the simplistic belief in the moral prowess of science. Newman’s reaction then to Brougham’s and Peel’s statements was not his evaluation of the sciences as such (he himself was interested in their research, especially in mathematics), but rather a critique of the two gentlemen’s idolizing attitude. And, last but not least, Newman, despite the climate of romanticism, would never accept flight from the present; the present, be it so unwelcome in its complexity, is always a task for the concrete human being.
From considerations such as the foregoing, it appears that exercises of Reason are either external, or at least only ministrative, to religious inquiry and knowledge: accidental to them, not of their essence; useful in their place, but not necessary. But in order to obtain further illustrations, and a view of the importance of the doctrine which I would advocate, let us proceed to apply it to the circumstances of the present times. Here, first, in finding fault with the times, it is right to disclaim all intention of complaining of them. To murmur and rail at the state of things under which we find ourselves, and to prefer a former state, is not merely indecorous, it is absolutely unmeaning. We are ourselves necessary parts of the existing system, out of which we have individually grown into being, into our actual position in society. Depending, therefore, on the times as a condition of existence, in wishing for other times we are, in fact, wishing we had never been born. Moreover, it is ungrateful to a state of society, from which we daily enjoy so many benefits, to rail against it. Yet there is nothing unbecoming, unmeaning, or ungrateful in pointing its faults and wishing them away.19
Amid the utopian dreams of socialists and communists, so popular in the nineteenth century, Newman’s voice sounded reasonable. Note, too, that in writing this he was coming to terms with his Anglican position, as if to say that this was his starting point, his subsequent development, so that it would be pointless and fruitless to complain about or reject it. He might as well renounce his life. An attitude such as this perfectly shows that, for Newman, his individual life was not so much a burden, but a task. It must be added that the present is not the last resort, but it unveils a more profound sense endowed on it by the Creator. In like manner, man, contrary to Hegel’s view, looks to the otherworldliness from his present. Unfortunately, however, such statements may, at most, point to a “Divine Intelligence” or a “great architect of nature,” in themselves descriptive terms in keeping with the deistic approach, but they will not refer us to the “Moral Governor,” the belief vital for theism. And we need to remember one important thing: Newman never thought about religion as a political programme. Therefore, when he is writing about Anglicanism and its slide into secularist tendencies, he only wishes to restore its religious and dogmatic
Let me explain what is meant here. By doing the right thing, I open myself to the influence of the religious Truth even without being aware of it. We should repeat here what has already been said, namely Newman’s precaution against the intrusions of an unchecked intellect or the influence of “unconscious holiness.” It is a consequence of the empiricist approach that the intellect seeks to have all of its ideas under control. Ultimately, it is open only to its own immanent logic or to the universal and closed to that which transcends its comprehension. Such are the personal underpinnings of the person’s acceptance of truth. Such were Newman’s attempts to debunk the theories of naturalism, utilitarianism, and scientism.
The only thing that worried him was that such views supported a non-denominational Christianity, i.e. they undermined the dogmatic, or, in other words, the doctrinal foundation of Christianity. Now, if Christianity is only a theory which hoards numerous private opinions, without any doctrine or system, it ceases to be a religion, but rather resembles a club to which anyone can have an access or leave at will; such a religion has no claims to universal truths about human nature, human life, or human destiny. It is true that Christianity may help support social order or attend to social cohesion. As positive as such a purpose may be, it is not Christianity’s main goal, for that goal ultimately transcends all mundane and expedient prospects. Newman’s tenacity at perceiving Christianity as a doctrine independent of a political body’s aspirations holds good.
US, 80.
Ibid., 95.
W. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard, London: Henry Pordes, 1984, Act v, Scene iii.
Ibid., Act i, Scene iv.
F. J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, New York: Permabooks, 1954, 101.
See more on this in K. Wojtyła (John Paul ii), The Acting Person, trans. by A. Potocki, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979, 56–59.
pps, 1232.
British statesman and Lord High Chancellor who played a prominent role in passing the 1832 Reform Act and 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.
British prime minister in the years 1834–1835 and 1841–1846; he was well-educated, the first Oxford man to take First Class Honours in both Classics and Mathematics; and the Dean of Christ Church, associated with the ruling class.
Apo., 176.
Ibid.
da, 215.
Ibid., 262–295. The pamphlet was then published in a volume of collected texts entitled Discussions and Arguments.
I am referring to the famous quote from his Letter to the Romans: “What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. […] For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.” (Rom 7:15, 19).
Zeno, John Henry Newman and his Inner Life, 53.
Ibid.
The image of deeds which inflame to emulation evoke the atmosphere of the medieval inhabitants of the Anglo-Saxon world. We could say that Newman’s method of personation was at work among those gathered in the halls around their lord. Then the bard would sing edifying stories about heroic deeds. It will suffice to mention the most classic example of the heroic Beowulf, who fought against the evil monster Grendel, a story which most probably the Anglo-Saxons borrowed from some Germanic legends. I am sure it was not only the mead they drank from their cups that inflamed them, but the examples of disinterested sacrifice, loyalty, and solidarity that made them wish to follow suit. Christian missionaries could easily translate such stories into religious exemplars of the eternal struggle against the devil. The listeners resonated with the trembling voice of the scop, their hearts melted and opened.
S. Gilley, Newman and his Age, 197.
US, 80–81.