[In the following essay, Ker probes Newman's philosophical and literary approach to the existence of God.]

In a recent study of the arguments from human experience for the existence of God, Newman has been criticized by Aidan Nichols, OP ‘for concentrating his energies so exclusively on one aspect of our experience, our awareness of moral obligation’, for ‘a unilateral concentration on moral experience’, that is, ‘our experience of conscience’.¹

Presumably there could be no objection to Newman placing the major emphasis on conscience since in doing so he would only be reflecting the whole thrust of the Bible and the Christian tradition, summed up in the words of St Paul on the law of God that is engraved on the hearts of human beings enlightened by conscience if not by revelation.² But how far is it true that Newman confines himself to the moral argument for God's existence?

It is certainly true that in the Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) he calls conscience the ‘great’—though not the sole—‘internal teacher of religion’. It is the great teacher since it ‘is a personal guide, and I use it because I must use myself’, and since it ‘is nearer to me than any other means of knowledge’. In other words, what is so important about conscience is that it is both personal to the individual and a form of knowledge that is accessible to others through their consciences. As, then, conscience is both experiential and cognitive, it has a special philosophical importance for effective apologetics. And Newman says that if he had to ‘prove the Being of a God’, this is where he would ‘look for the proof of it’. He argues that just as we become aware of the physical world through our senses:

so from the perceptive power which identifies the intimations of conscience with the reverberations or echoes (so to say) of an external admonition, we proceed on to the notion of a Supreme Ruler and Judge, and then again we image Him and His attributes in those recurring intimations, out of which, as mental phenomena, our recognition of His existence was originally gained.

Giving to conscience its ordinary and primary meaning of ‘a sense of duty’ or a ‘magisterial dictate’, rather than merely ‘a moral sense’, Newman explains that

conscience does not repose on itself, but vaguely reaches forward to something beyond self, and dimly discerns a sanction higher than self for its decisions … And hence it is that we are accustomed to speak of conscience as a voice … and moreover a voice, or the echo of a voice, imperative and constraining, like no other dictate in the whole of our experience.

Conscience, Newman continues:

always involves the recognition of a living object, towards which it is directed. Inanimate things cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear … If the cause of those emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which [our] perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the phenomena of Conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive, and is the creative principle of religion, as the Moral Sense is the principle of ethics.³

It has been remarked that Newman does not here ‘argue to a law of binding force and from thence, in the old style, to a lawgiver’.⁴ He himself denied that he was trying to employ an ‘abstract argument from the force of the terms’, such as that ‘a Law implies a Lawgiver’, but that he was responding to ‘the peculiarity of that feeling to which I give the name of Conscience’.⁵ His earlier writings, however, do give some credence to the idea, as when he preaches that ‘a law implies a lawgiver, and a command implies a superior’. But this quotation from a fairly early sermon (1834) is followed by the words, ‘Thus a man is at once thrown out of himself, by the very Voice which speaks within him.’⁶ By the time Newman came to write his novel Callista (1856), the argument has become completely personalized:

‘… it is the echo of a person speaking to me. Nothing shall persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from a person external to me. It carries with it its proof of its divine origin. My nature feels towards it as towards a person … An echo implies a voice; a voice a speaker. That speaker I love and I fear.’⁷

Conscience frees a person from the narrowness of self by opening up interpersonal communion with the person of God: ‘its very existence throws us out of ourselves, and beyond ourselves, to go and seek for Him in the height and depth, whose Voice it is.’⁸

In the last great chapter of the Apologia (1864), where Newman offers a general defence of Roman Catholicism, he says, ‘Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world.’⁹ This reference to the heart as well as the conscience suggests that Newman did not confine an experiential awareness of God to the moral life. It seems rather the case that he regarded the argument from conscience as the most effective philosophical argument, not that he did not also think that there were other compelling reasons for believing in God's existence apart from the traditional proofs and evidences.

This is shown very vividly in Callista where the pagan heroine is deeply impressed by the fact that the different Christians she meets all make Christianity ‘consist in the intimate Divine Presence in the heart’:

It was the friendship or mutual love of person with person. Here was the very teaching which already was so urgently demanded both by her reason and her heart, which she found nowhere else; which she found existing one and the same in a female slave, in a country youth, in a learned priest.¹⁰

In other words, what really draws Callista to the Christian faith is not primarily her awareness of conscience but of the deepest need of the human heart, which cannot ultimately be satisfied by another human person but only by the Person of God.

Indeed, what makes Callista receptive to hearing the gospel in the first place is not a guilty conscience but a profound sense of personal unfulfilment:

‘Here am I a living, breathing woman, with an overflowing heart, with keen affections, with a yearning after some object which may possess me. I cannot exist without something to rest upon. I cannot fall back upon that drear, forlorn state, which philosophers call wisdom, and moralists call virtue … I must have something to love; love is my life.’¹¹

In answer to her objection to the doctrine of hell, Cecilius the priest shows that far from the dogma being an obstacle to faith it is actually involved in Callista's own existential understanding. For if there is a life after death, then

‘you will still be you. You will still be the same being, but deprived of those outward stays and solaces, which, such as they are, you now enjoy. You will be yourself, shut up in yourself. I have heard that people go mad at length when placed in solitary confinement. If, then, on passing hence, you are cut off from what you had here, and have only the company of yourself, I think your burden will be, so far, greater, not less than it is now …’

‘Assuming, then, first, that the soul always needs external objects to rest upon; next, that it has no prospect of any such when it leaves this visible scene; and thirdly, that the hunger and thirst, the gnawing of the heart, where it occurs, is as keen and piercing as a flame; it will follow there is nothing irrational in the notion of an eternal Tartarus.’

But if, on the other hand, Cecilius argues, on exactly the same existential lines as Callista,

‘all your thoughts go one way; if you have needs, desires, aims, aspirations, all of which demand an Object, and imply, by their very existence, that such an Object does exist also; and if nothing here does satisfy them, and if there be a message which professes to come from that Object, of whom you already have the presentiment, and to teach you about Him, and to bring the remedy you crave; and if those who try that remedy say with one voice that the remedy answers; are you not bound, Callista, at least to look that way, to inquire into what you hear about it, and to ask for His help, if He be, to enable you to believe in Him?’¹²

The argument from conscience already quoted only appears towards the end of the novel just prior to Callista's conversion, and here too it is part—albeit a major part—of a more general awareness of the ‘Person she was seeking for’: ‘Here was that to which her intellect tended, though that intellect could not frame it. It could approve and acknowledge, when set before it, what it could not originate. Here was He who spoke to her in her conscience; whose Voice she heard …’¹³

Without this Person life on earth is portrayed by Newman as a kind of living hell for anyone who has, like Callista, the capacity both to love to the full and to be aware of that need. The hellish fate for the heart deprived of the supreme object of love is in effect Newman's definition of hell: ‘“You cannot escape from yourself!”’¹⁴ And so Callista is drawn to the Christian God not just because of the voice echoing in her conscience, but because ‘the more she thought over what she heard of Christianity, the more she was drawn to it, and the more it approved itself to her whole soul, and the more it seemed to respond to all her needs and aspirations …’¹⁵

Aidan Nichols is disappointed by the Grammar of Assent, since, ‘Having held out to us the appropriate form for argument to God's existence, a form at once rational and imaginative, Newman's content seems thin gruel in comparison.’ For while conceding that the moral argument for the existence of God is not ‘dead’, Nichols rejects the notion that ‘moral experience alone’ can provide a basis for belief in God.¹⁶ As already indicated, there are three answers to this criticism: first, Newman does not restrict the relevant human experience for theistic belief to moral experience; second, he does, however, regard, like Kant, the moral argument as the best philosophical argument; third, it is a well-known fact that it is the human sense of sin which is the most universal ground in fact for religion. It is precisely this feeling of guilt that Newman says in the last chapter of the Grammar of Assent is the basis of natural religion, which ‘is founded in one way or other on the sense of sin; and without that vivid sense it would hardly have any precepts or any observances’. The fact that God appears to be so strikingly absent from his world is another very good reason why Newman stresses the moral argument:

I see only a choice of alternatives in explanation of so critical a fact:—either there is no Creator, or He has disowned His creatures. Are then the dim shadows of His Presence in the affairs of men but a fancy of our own, or, on the other hand, has He hid His face and the light of His countenance, because we have in some special way dishonoured Him? My true informant, my burdened conscience, gives me at once the true answer to each of these antagonist questions:—it pronounces without any misgiving that God exists:—and it pronounces quite as surely that I am alienated from Him …

It is, after all, the eloquent silence of God which is the most fundamental argument against his existence:

It is a silence that speaks. It is as if others had got possession of His work. Why does not He, our Maker and Ruler, give us some immediate knowledge of Himself? Why does He not write His Moral Nature in large letters upon the face of history, and bring the blind, tumultuous rush of its events into a celestial, hierarchical order? Why does He not grant us in the structure of society at least so much of a revelation of Himself as the religions of the heathen attempt to supply? Why from the beginning of time has no one uniform steady light guided all families of the earth, and all individual men, how to please Him? Why is it possible without absurdity to deny His will, His attributes, His existence? Why does He not walk with us one by one, as He is said to have walked with His chosen men of old time? We both see and know each other; why, if we cannot have the sight of Him, have we not at least the knowledge? On the contrary, He is specially ‘a Hidden God’; and with our best efforts we can only glean from the surface of the world some faint and fragmentary views of him.¹⁷

But it is conscience which provides the answer to the objection, as Newman had already made plain in the last chapter of the Apologia, where again he had evoked the sense of the absence of God with an eloquence of which an atheist would be proud:

… I look out of myself into the world of men, and there I see a sight which fills me with unspeakable distress. The world seems simply to give the lie to that great truth, of which my whole being is so full; and the effect upon me is, in consequence, as a matter of necessity, as confusing as if it denied that I am in existence myself. If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion of its Creator … I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society and the course of history, but these do not warm me or enlighten me: they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice. The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll, full of ‘lamentations, and mourning, and woe’.

In response to this ‘profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution’, Newman answers, ‘either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence’. But since, in words already quoted, Newman cannot ignore that ‘voice’ which speaks ‘so clearly in my conscience and my heart’, it is after all conscience that explains the human condition by making us aware of original sin.¹⁸

Although, however, Newman surely rightly regards the moral argument from conscience as absolutely basic and integral to any kind of theism, he does, as I have tried to show, possess a wider sense of the human heart and its reasons for believing in a personal God. To appreciate this, we need to turn away from his more formal philosophical and theological writing, not to a novel this time but to his pastoral preaching.

In one of the finest sermons he ever preached, ‘The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul’ (1837), Newman, as the title suggests, maintains in effect that a true humanism implies theism. The more deeply we understand human nature the more we see that its ultimate needs demand a divine fulfilment. Without God, the human person ‘has faculties and affections without a ruling principle, object, or purpose’. Arguing that ‘the happiness of the soul consists in the exercise of the affections’, then ‘here is at once a reason for saying that the thought of God, and nothing short of it, is the happiness of man’, for ‘the affections require a something more vast and more enduring than anything created’.¹⁹ We are reminded of St Augustine's famous words, ‘our hearts are restless till they rest in you’,²⁰ when we read the equivalent in Newman: ‘He alone is sufficient for the heart who made it.’ Other human beings cannot satisfy us, partly because they are transient and unreliable in their frailty: ‘our hearts require something more permanent and uniform than man can be … Do not all men die? are they not taken from us? are they not as uncertain as the grass of the field?’ But even apart from this, ‘there is another reason why God alone is the happiness of our souls’, as Newman explains:

the contemplation of Him, and nothing but it, is able fully to open and relieve the mind, to unlock, occupy, and fix our affections. We may indeed love things created with great intenseness, but such affection, when disjoined from the love of the Creator, is like a stream running in a narrow channel, impetuous, vehement, turbid. The heart runs out, as it were, only at one door; it is not an expanding of the whole man. Created natures cannot open us, or elicit the ten thousand mental senses which belong to us, and through which we really live. None but the presence of our Maker can enter us; for to none besides can the whole heart in all its thoughts and feelings be unlocked and subjected.

The friendship and sympathy of those closest to us cannot rival the intimacy we can enjoy with God alone:

It is this feeling of simple and absolute confidence and communion, which soothes and satisfies those to whom it is vouchsafed. We know that even our nearest friends enter into us but partially, and hold intercourse with us only at times; whereas the consciousness of a perfect and enduring Presence, and it alone, keeps the heart open.

It is God, then, who liberates the human heart by freeing it from the imprisonment of self:

Withdraw the Object on which it rests, and it will relapse again into its state of confinement and constraint; and in proportion as it is limited, either to certain seasons or to certain affections, the heart is straightened and distressed. If it be not over bold to say it, He who is infinite can alone be its measure; He alone can answer to the mysterious assemblage of feelings and thoughts which it has within it.

This is why true happiness depends on belief in God, as otherwise ‘We are pent up within ourselves, and are therefore miserable’:

we need a relief to our hearts, that they may be dark and sullen no longer, or that they may not go on feeding upon themselves; we need to escape from ourselves to something beyond; and much as we may wish it otherwise, and may try to make idols to ourselves, nothing short of God's presence is our true refuge; everything else is either a mockery, or but an expedient useful for its season or in its measure.²¹

In Callista Newman was writing on the level of practical apologetics; here he is writing in a spiritual vein. But what is so striking is how, outside the philosophical context, it is not the existence of conscience that demands the existence of God but rather it is the ego that is depicted as finding liberation from its own self-imprisonment in the only object external to itself which can offer personal fulfilment, for the plain psychological reason that a person cannot properly ‘live without an object’—and so either we live in the unhappiness of the prison of our own ego or we try vainly to find self-fulfilment in other ephemeral finite beings and things. Thus a person

fancies that he is sufficient for himself; or he supposes that knowledge is sufficient for his happiness; or that exertion, or that the good opinion of others, or (what is called) fame, or that the comforts and luxuries of wealth, are sufficient for him. What a truly wretched state is that coldness and dryness of soul, in which so many live and die. Many a great man, many a peasant, many a busy man, lives and dies with closed heart, with affections undeveloped, unexercised. You see the poor man, passing day after day, Sunday after Sunday, year after year, without a thought in his mind, to appearance almost like a stone. You see the educated man, full of thought, full of intelligence, full of action, but still with a stone heart, as cold and dead as regards his affections, as if he were the poor ignorant countryman. You see others, with warm affections, perhaps, for their families, with benevolent feelings towards their fellow-men, yet stopping there; centring their hearts on what is sure to fail them, as being perishable. Life passes, riches fly away, popularity is fickle, the senses decay, the world changes, friends die. One alone is constant; One alone is true to us; One alone can be true; One alone can be all things to us; One alone can supply our needs; One alone can train us up to our full perfection; One alone can give a meaning to our complex and intricate nature; One alone can give us tune and harmony; One alone can form and possess us.²²

Although it is not the moral argument that Newman relies on in either the novel or the sermon, but what we might call the affective argument, nevertheless we should not rigidly separate the two, as Newman indicates in a passage in another sermon where he places conscience within the larger context of the whole human person:

There is a voice within us, which assures us that there is something higher than earth. We cannot analyze, define, contemplate what it is that thus whispers to us. It has no shape or material form. There is that in our hearts which prompts us to religion, and which condemns and chastises sin. And this yearning of our nature is met and sustained, it finds an object to rest upon, when it hears of the existence of an All-powerful, All-gracious Creator.²³

It looks as if Newman chose to stress the strictly moral element in his more philosophical writings, as apparently offering more of a formal proof of God's existence, while in his more informal works he emphasises rather the implications and significance of the ‘affections and aspirations pent up within’ the human heart.²⁴

What is really fundamental to Newman's approach to the existence of God is the existence of the self. It is when we begin to understand the true nature of the human person that we begin to understand that there must be a personal God. This at any rate was how Newman felt in the depths of his being when in his youth he rested ‘in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’.²⁵ But in one of his Anglican sermons he recognized it was more normal to ‘look off from self to the things around us, and forget ourselves in them’. The self either has to turn in on itself or seek some external reality to rest in, and in its fallen state humankind naturally inclines to ‘depending for support on the reeds which are no stay, and overlooking our real strength’. But disillusion with the world can turn the self to its true and only source of happiness, when we come to realize ‘We still crave for something, we do not well know what; but we are sure it is something which the world has not given us.’ And Newman powerfully evokes a sense of transitory vanity of the things of this world:

And then its changes are so many, so sudden, so silent, so continual. It never leaves changing; it goes on to change, till we are quite sick at heart:—then it is that our reliance on it is broken. It is plain we cannot continue to depend on it, unless we keep pace with it, and go on changing too; but this we cannot do. We feel that, while it changes, we are one and the same … and we begin, by degrees, to perceive that there are but two beings in the whole universe, our own soul, and the God who made it.²⁶

We could really argue from Newman's works as a whole that he puts as much emphasis on the deep need of the person for relationship with other persons and on the impossibility, aside from the infinite Person of God, of the kind of self-fulfilment that human nature seems to crave, as he does on the implications of conscience. It is above all the affectivity of the human person that Newman wants to emphasize: the need to love and to be loved, the need for a mutual sympathy that cannot be broken and that is all-satisfying: ‘the soul of man is made for the contemplation of its Maker; and … nothing short of that high contemplation is its happiness’. And ‘if we are allowed to find that real and most sacred Object on which our heart may fix itself, a fullness of peace will follow, which nothing but it can give’.²⁷

Notes

1. Aidan Nichols, OP, A Grammar of Consent: The Existence of God in Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1991), 1, 19, 35.

2. Romans 2:15.

3. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (GA; 1985) 251, 72-6.

4. Martin C. D'Arcy, No Absent God: The Relations between God and Self (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 37.

5. The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman. 2 vols. (1969-70) ii. 59.

6. Parochial and Plain Sermons (PS). 8 vols. ii. 18.

7. Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (Call.) 314-15.

8. Sermons Preached on Various Occasions 65.

9. Apologia pro Vita Sua (Apo.; 1967) 216-17.

10. Call. 293.

11. Call. 131-2.

12. Call. 219-21.

13. Call. 326.

14. Call. 265.

15. Call. 292.

16. Nichols, op. cit., p. 37.

17. GA 253, 256.

18. Apo. 216-17.

19. PS v. 314-16.

20. Confessions, I.1.

21. PS v. 316-19, 324-5.

22. PS v. 325-6.

23. PS vi. 339-40.

24. PS iii. 124.

25. Apo. 18.

26. PS i. 19-20.

27. PS v. 315, 321.