SOURCE: “Newman's Assent to Reality, Natural and Supernatural,” in Newman Today: Papers Presented at a Conference on John Henry Cardinal Newman, Ignatius Press, 1989, pp. 189-220.

[In the following essay, Jaki analyzes the philosophical and logical merits of Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.]

On Tuesday, March 15, 1870, Newman's Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent was published and sold out on that same day.¹ A week later, to Newman's great surprise, there followed a second edition.² Still another ten days later a long review of it was carried in the Spectator throughout the intellectual and literary world. The reviewer, Richard Holt Hutton, began with a reference to the title as “superfluously modest” and a “deprecation by Dr. Newman of extravagant expectations on behalf of his readers”.³ Pressed by a correspondent about the title, Newman pointed in its defense to the difference between an essay and a grammar. The word “essay” mainly meant an “analytical” probing, which his book was, instead of being a “systematic” work, which any grammar was supposed to be.⁴ Another justification he offered was that as it stood, the title “would prepare people for a balk”⁵ and diminish thereby the measure of their disappointment.

Whatever the defense of the title, Newman's remark that the book was a “semi-logical fancy” was subtly to the point. In the Grammar Newman aimed at unfolding the distinction between mere assertions and assertions that were so many assents, not so much from the logical as from the phenomenological or psychological viewpoint. Not that he put this clearly when, six weeks before its publication, Newman warned Bishop Ullathorne that the Grammar was about a “dry logical subject, or semi-logical. Assent”.⁶ However, insight into the logical peculiarity of assent was, in Newman's own admission, the factor that enabled him to write the book. In his letter of February 21, 1870, to his sister Jemima, he recalled his having been seized, while on vacation in Switzerland, with the meaning of assent: “We went up to Glion, and then suddenly the idea came into my head, which have [sic] been a clue to the treatment of my subject; and my first pages stand pretty much as I wrote them in August 1866.”⁷

In those first pages of the Grammar Newman offers some distinctions, almost pedantic at first sight. He tells his reader that a verbal proposition is either a question, or a conclusion, or an assertion. But then he warns that when we conclude we still argue, but when “we assert we do not argue”.⁸ In other words, he warns that we must be most logical with words, that we must take them in their pristine meaning, a point that should seem prophetic in this age when respect for meaning is being victimized by advertising, the media, and analytical philosophy. Newman then lists the three mental acts—doubt, inference, and assent—corresponding to those three verbal propositions. The Grammar, he states, will deal almost entirely with assent, with inference hardly, and with doubt not at all. Finally he points out the difference between assenting to a notional or abstract proposition and assenting to a concrete fact, especially to one vividly visual. Throughout the Grammar Newman lays much emphasis on the primacy of the sense of vision over the other senses. Indeed, from the very start he stresses the superiority of single facts as objects of sight over universal notions, a strategy that has not failed to perplex philosophically sensitive minds.

Another and rather different account given by Newman about the genesis of the Grammar is worth recalling for two details in it. One shows Newman's own recurring perplexity: “I felt I had something to say upon it [assent], yet, whenever I attempted, the sight I saw vanished, plunged into a thicket, curled itself up like a hedgehog, or changed colours like a chameleon.” The other is the importance that Newman attributes to his having found the right start after so many tries. Once more he refers to the visit to Glion, where “a thought came into my head as the clue, the ‘Open Sesame’, of the whole subject, and I at once wrote it down, and I pursued it about the Lake of Lucerne. Then when I came home, I began in earnest, and have slowly got through it.”⁹

Newman's references to the Grammar as “disappointing”,¹⁰ as a “Lenten reading for one's mortification”,¹¹ as a “dry and humdrum” discourse,¹² that would make people ask “what is it all about?”¹³ could be disappointing to not a few. Even more so his warning that the book would not be a refutation of rationalism on a grand scale. To be sure, instead of combating Huxley, Tyndall, Lyell, or other chief representatives of the day “or anything necessarily of this day”, the book was on a “far more abstract level”. But then, almost as if to contradict himself, he added that the book “combats views of friends of my own rather than any popular orthodoxies”.¹⁴ As will be seen, those views were quite rationalistic and very much the product of the day.

That in writing the Grammar Newman had some friends of his in view was an almost open secret in the circle of his confidants. Few of them knew, however, the long story of the making of the Grammar. In that letter to Jemima, already quoted, Newman speaks of a most laborious tunneling process;¹⁵ elsewhere he describes it as a work that, unlike many of his other writings, was a toil for him.¹⁶ He expected its reading as well to be a toil.¹⁷ To a correspondent who read it twice, he wrote: “To have read it once is a real kindness; I take it as a personal one—but it is more than kind to have read it twice.” Then he indulged in another superfluously modest self-deprecation: “Of course I can't tell the worth of it myself.”¹⁸ Yet, Newman never for a moment doubted the importance of the Grammar. He kept telling his correspondents that time will prove the full worth of so laborious a work.¹⁹

A labor it was, and a labor of love that excels by patient endurance. Newman spoke to Jemima about the half a dozen versions dating back to 1846, 1850, 1853, 1854, and 1865.²⁰ Even from 1866 on he rewrote parts of the Grammar several times. He spoke of those years as a particularly taxing period in his life. But his resolve to resume the ever heavier task of writing had more to it than the urge to accomplish: “All I know is that I was unhappy till I had done it. I felt it a sort of duty on my conscience.”²¹ Rarely was conscience invoked in a fuller sense. For, as will be seen, Newman rested the objective truth about assent more on the objectivity he ascribed to the voice of conscience than to the objective truth of the external world. Such an esteem of the voice of conscience called for a heroic measure, both in sensing the magnitude of responsibility and in the resolve to live up to it. Once more the burden assumed proved the truth of his often-quoted words: “I have not sinned against light.”²²

Indeed, he never refrained from taxing himself if he could save a soul. The one who kept saying in later years that he was neither a philosopher nor a theologian was wont to identify himself as a mere “controversialist”.²³ Such was a touch of saintly modesty on the part of the shepherd of souls he was. In the entire “General Staff” of the Oxford Movement, he alone engaged in down-to-earth pastoral work. Newman senior, a banker, was shocked on learning that his son, an Oriel don, regularly visited the often-illiterate working-class families of Littlemore. In doing so, Newman pursued the same goal that he did in writing, publishing, and disseminating the Tracts. They were to alert souls to their being called to holiness as the sole reason for the existence of the Church. It was most logical that the Grammar should come to a close with an encomium on holiness. Newman presented it as the chief characteristic of the assent given by the first Christian martyrs to the truth, natural as well as supernatural, of the existence of God the Creator but especially the Moral Lawgiver.

Working with simple souls, Newman, great logician as he was, could not help noticing the difference between their vast ignorance of the proofs of the Christian Faith and their firm, unshaken attachment or assent to it. They were never absent from his mind as he struggled in writing the Grammar, which in fact is aimed at defending the mass of the faithful against the accusation of fideism. In making this appraisal of the Grammar, Fr. Charles Stephen Dessain could have quoted not a few passages from it. Fortunately for those far away from the manuscript treasures of the Birmingham Oratory, he quoted from a draft of the Grammar dated January 5, 1860: “Mrs L comes and says, ‘I want to be a Catholic.’ Her catechist is frightened, for he can find no motivum. … A factory girl comes and can only say, ‘So and so brought me,’ etc … a boy comes and says he wishes to get his sins forgiven.”²⁴

For all his concern for these simple folk, Newman did not expect them to read the Grammar. Its readers were to be above all some of his friends who, the more they had learned about the proofs of Christian Faith, the more they refused to give their assent to them. One of those friends was William Froude (1803-79), a prominent civil engineer, who saw his wife and later his four children, one after the other, become Catholic. For Froude this was a protracted trial, which he bore with great tactfulness. Although everybody expected him to become a Catholic, and countless prayers were said for his conversion, he stuck by his argument that the complete assent implied in Catholic faith presupposed absolutely certain proofs that no theologian could provide.²⁵ Such was as rationalistic a posture as there could be.

Newman was very much privy to the spiritual drama enveloping the Froudes. For over twenty years he hoped to work out an argument to his own satisfaction to help the conversion of Froude and others trapped in the fallacy of that rationalist argument. The counterargument was to show that absolute assent is given on countless occasions in daily life as well as in general intellectual and moral domains, though absolute proofs are not on hand. Dispensing with “absolute” proofs would but invite a shift toward tactful persuasion. Thus Newman did not send a copy to William Froude, but rather to his son, Edward. “Thank Eddy”, he wrote to Froude, “for his letter, for me—and tell him I mean to send him my book—I don't send it to you, lest I should seem controversial.”²⁶

Still another point, very important for understanding the Grammar, is that it may appear a systematic abdication of scholarship. Today, the very first thing expected from a scholar is to serve evidence that he has indeed read everything available on the subject. Newman was resolved not to read anything that others had written on a number of subjects pertaining to the Grammar, although, to quote his words, “there has been much written in this day”. Newman gave two reasons for this rather unusual policy. One was that he would have been drawn too much into controversies with others to the detriment of clarity. The other was outspokenly personal and personalistic: “My own work would vanish.”²⁷ In the words of the Grammar, it was his most personal book, in which he wanted to offer arguments that moved him personally. A consequence of this, again pointed out by him, was that far from being systematic, the Grammar contained seemingly unnecessary digressions.²⁸ He could not, therefore, mean systematic philosophical strength as he listed the Grammar as one of his five “constructive” books that do not have a controversy for their chief aim.²⁹

A book with many digressions, unnecessary or not, is bound to appear obscure. This is one of the reasons why the Grammar has remained Newman's least-read, and hardly ever digested, major work. Half a century after its publication, Father Francis Joseph Bacchus of the Birmingham Oratory, an authority on Newman's thought, felt the need to write an article to facilitate the reading of the Grammar. He recalled that there had been some who spoke of it as “one of the most obscure books ever written” and that some “distinguished philosophers” had openly avowed that “they could make nothing of it”. Fr. Bacchus admitted that the book was obscure “by its outward appearance” and because “of the eagerness with which its critics fasten upon irrelevant side issues when discussing it”.³⁰

In trying to dissipate the apparent or real obscurity of the Grammar, Fr. Bacchus urged one to concentrate on the enormous degree of its originality, for which, as he rightly put it, most of its readers were unprepared. This unpreparedness should seem even greater in these times, when more than ever science is viewed as the exclusive source of rational certainty. A much broader and deeper view of certainty was, according to Fr. Bacchus, the Grammar's chief contention as well as originality. Warnings, such as the one by the editor of the Month, one of the earliest reviewers of the Grammar, that Chapter Seven on certitude holds the book together,³¹ may, because of that unpreparedness, remain ineffective in allaying the perplexity caused by the Grammar.

Another and very different source of that perplexity is a series of barbs in the Grammar at metaphysics that must have given some pleasure to Newman himself. Otherwise Charles Meynell, professor of theology at Oscott College, near Birmingham, who helped in reading the proofs of the Grammar, would not have thought of congratulating Newman for having defied the scholastic system of argumentation:

Since you look at man in the concrete, it is not so much for you to reconcile yourself with metaphysics as for the latter to reconcile itself with you. If metaphysics doesn't account for the concrete man, I say so much the worse for metaphysics! as for the writer who says that the book does not follow the scholastic system, I say What is the scholastic system? I never heard of it. The ultra-realism of the writer who considers the ideas as separate entities was not held by all the scholastics, nor is it held by the modern Catholic metaphysicians. And Liberatore and the Sacred congregation suspect it.³²

All this can only whet one's curiosity about Newman's handling in the Grammar basic philosophical or epistemological questions, especially that of the universals, the chief target of Meynell's remarks. Newman did not handle the universals with gloves in hand or with much consistency, except for the consistency that whenever he felt himself being carried to the edge of the precipice of unorthodoxy, he resolutely pulled back. If he had the strength to do so, the strength has much less to do with philosophy, or with logic for that matter, than with his quest for holiness, a quest anchored in his enormous sensitivity and faithfulness to the voice of conscience, a principal point in the Grammar. But this is to anticipate. Thus the very same Newman who repeatedly and emphatically stated that assent was an intellectual act, that the illative sense (a term that he did not invent but certainly made popular) was an intellectual operation, and that certitude was supremely intellectual,³³ also claimed personal dislike, in fact plain incompetence, for his not giving philosophical answers to essentially philosophical and fundamentally epistemological questions. Thus at the very start of Chapter Nine on illative sense, in a sense the philosophical finale of the Grammar, Newman invokes a sort of philosophical agnosticism as he tries to defend the very objective of the Grammar:

My object in the foregoing pages has been, not to form a theory which may account for those phenomena of the intellect of which they treat, viz. those which characterize inference and assent, but to ascertain what is the matter of fact as regards them, that is, when it is that assent is given to propositions which are inferred, and under what circumstances.³⁴

In the hands of most present-day phenomenologists, this passage might serve as their endorsement by that very high authority that Newman has become. The phenomenologists in question are, of course, those who forget that the methodical avoidance of ontological and metaphysical questions does not prove the nonexistence of those questions. But those forgetful of the inevitability of metaphysics may derive ample support from Newman's apparent agnosticism as he hints at the impossibility or unfeasibility of epistemology (the genesis of reasoning that gives a hold on the real insofar as it is intelligible) on the ground that even the “acutest minds”³⁵ could not convince their opponents. Did Newman remember, as he wrote this, that he repeatedly argued in the Grammar against those who took widespread disagreement for an impossibility of reaching the truth and with certainty?

In the same context Newman, who certainly opposed those philosophers who admitted only probabilities but no certainties, refused to accept the aid of philosophers who held high the trustworthiness of intellectual certainty about realities, physical and spiritual. He was not impressed by their efforts whereby “in order to vindicate the certainty of our knowledge they make recourse to the hypothesis of intuitions, intellectual forms, and the like, which belong to us by nature, and may be considered to elevate our experience into something more than it is itself”. As he distanced himself, firmly and almost contemptuously, from even the good philosophers, Newman made an appeal, most unphilosophical on a first look, to public opinion: “In proof of certainty, it is enough to appeal to the common voice of mankind.”³⁶ An ironical appeal it was and easily to be turned into a boomerang, a point of which Newman could hardly be unaware.

The Grammar is a storehouse of evidences not only of Newman's keeping some very good philosophers out of sight but also of his strange choice of philosophical heroes. Not once does he quote Aquinas. His sympathy is not for Aristotle, the master of syllogisms, but for the Aristotle who in the Nichomachean Ethics makes much of the personal characteristics of each intellect, according to its aim and profession.³⁷ In none of the three different occasions when he speaks of Francis Bacon, “our own English philosopher”, does Newman note the chinks, very fateful ones, in the intellectual armor of Lord Verulam. He praises Bacon for having inculcated the maxim that “in our inquiries into the laws of the universe, we must sternly destroy all idols of the intellect”³⁸ but fails to note that Bacon's empiricism could not lead to a single law and much less to the assurance that there is a universe ruled by laws.³⁹ As he recalls Bacon's separation of mechanical from teleological causes,⁴⁰ Newman does not as much as hint about the disastrous consequences of that separation for natural theology, which for Newman very much includes a purposeful Providence, which, philosophically at least, is nonexistent for Bacon.

One wonders whether Locke was ever put on a higher and more undeserved pedestal than the one provided by Newman. Clearly, if Newman had “so high respect both for the character and the ability of Locke, for his manly simplicity of mind and his outspoken candor” and if there was “so much in Locke's remarks upon reasoning and proof with which he [Newman] wholly concurred”, then disagreement with Locke on any point could be but painful for Newman. Newman, the great logician, did not seem to perceive anything of the chain that made one particular point (very fateful in Newman's eyes) a logical consequence of Locke's basic presuppositions. Newman merely deplored Locke's “slovenly thinking” for not seeing a contradiction between two claims of his. One was that it was not only illogical but also “immoral to carry our assent above the evidence that a proposition is true” or to have a “surplusage of assurance beyond the degree of evidence”. The other was that some first principles, though only most probable, were to be allowed “to govern our thoughts as absolutely as the most evident demonstration”.⁴¹

Yet Newman did not probe into either of two most pertinent aspects of the inconsistency that Locke espoused. One aspect related to the very root of that inconsistency, the other to its moral. There was more to that inconsistency than, as Newman put it, Locke's animus, or resolve to form men or human thinking “as he thinks they ought to be formed, instead of interrogating human nature as it is”.⁴² To give a glimpse, however brief, of the root of that inconsistency, would have been rather easy, as Locke himself plainly stated and prominent admirers, such as Voltaire, loudly repeated that he wanted to chart the human mind in the light of Newton's physics.⁴³

Newman's failure to probe this point was all the more surprising because, both in the Grammar and many years beforehand in a still not sufficiently appreciated writing of his, Newman spoke prophetically of the limitations of the quantitative method.⁴⁴ There he decried the fashionable infatuation with that method as a cultural curse and as the chief mental obstacle to the recognition of spiritual and ethical realities. But he would not on that score inculpate Locke in the Grammar, although Locke was most instrumental in spreading Newtonianism as the only sound form of philosophy.⁴⁵ There the quantitative method ruled supreme, with the consequence that complete certainty in any formal assent was legitimate only if a mathematical proof was on hand—the very opposite to Newman's chief contention in the Grammar that on that basis human life would be both impracticable and unthinkable. Would it not have been most logical to exploit Locke's inconsistency as a striking evidence of the traps opened up by mechanistic philosophy taken for reasoning? In fact, it would have been most philosophical, but this was the very posture Newman was not too eager to take in the Grammar.

Newman's disagreement on a particular point with Bishop Butler, his third favorite British philosopher, is equally revealing, though in a positive sense. In speaking about the range of illative sense, a particular aspect of prudent judgment, Newman considers among various objections to its validity in matters religious the rationalist Thomas Paine's claim that if there is a divine revelation, it should be as clear “as if it were written in the sun”. The claim, Newman noted, appeals to common sense through an assumption that Butler would not admit because it is unphilosophical. The assumption is part of that probabilism with respect to the real that follows from Locke's seeking in philosophy full certainty in terms of quantitative or Newtonian exactness. While Newman here parts ways with Butler, he does not see that above all he is parting with Locke as he turns the tables on Paine and does so by endorsing “philosophical cogency”. The Visible Church, Newman says, “was at least to her children the light of the world, as conspicuous as the sun in the heavens”. Newman was willing to admit at most that “owing to the miserable deeds of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”, some clouds may have come over the sun, yet he would not allow that “the Church fails in this manifestation of the truth any more than in former times”. While the countenance of the Church, Newman continues, “may have lost something in her appeal to the imagination, she has gained in philosophical cogency”.⁴⁶

Rarely in the history of philosophy did a great mind speak so emphatically of “philosophical cogency” and speak with so little conceptual cogency about its very foundation. The foundation, here as in many other cases, is the question of universals. The answer to that question controls whatever generalization is offered about the real as universal truth. This point is forcefully brought home in our times by the reluctant awakening of Darwinists to the fact that all talk about species, genera, classes, phyla, and kingdoms is talk about universals before it becomes scientific talk. Another modern aspect of the fateful presence of universals relates to the impossibility of talking rationally about such ethical problems as abortion and euthanasia, without coming to terms with the reality of human nature as a universal. Much less can certitude be claimed about universal truth (Newman's chief task in the Grammar), without setting forth the truth about the universals.

To be sure, Newman holds high universal truth throughout the Grammar, and especially in that pivotal chapter on certitude: “Truth cannot change; what is once truth is always truth.”⁴⁷ In the section on complex assent leading to the chapter on certitude, Newman defines certitude as “the perception of a truth with the perception that it is a truth”.⁴⁸ Newman is defending the universality of truth when he distinguishes it from the “conclusiveness of a proposition”.⁴⁹ Even when he extols probability as the practical guide in life and reasoning, he takes pains to point out that “probability does presuppose the existence of truths which are certain”.⁵⁰ He has no patience with the claim that “truth need not be universal”.⁵¹

Yet, the “universals”, without which there can be no consistent discourse about universal truths, fare badly in the Grammar. Newman does not refer to the word itself, as he states that comparing and classifying things are among the “most prominent of our intellectual faculties”. There he also states that those functions act “instinctively” and “spontaneously”, even before we set about apprehending “that man is like man, yet unlike; and unlike a horse, a tree, a mountain, or a monument, yet in some, though not the same respects, like each of them”. Without having studied Thomas' doctrine on universals and the analogy of being, Newman almost articulates them. Yet almost in the same breath he almost undercuts his insights. By being reduced to the class man, he states, the individual man is “made the logarithm of his true self, and in that shape is worked with the ease and satisfaction of logarithms”.⁵²

The remark is a descriptive marvel and a philosophical near-disaster. Well in advance of their times logical positivists received in that remark a devastating portrayal, but at the same time neo-Thomists too were dealt a great injustice. In the latter respect the only saving grace was Newman's admission about his remark as being a “harsh metaphor”. For when Newman explicitly speaks of universals, he comes very close to denying any real content in them. “There is no such a thing as a stereotyped humanity”, he declares.⁵³ He has little use for general man, which he calls the auto-anthropos. For him universals are wholly subservient to individual things: “Let units come first, and (so-called) universals second; let universals minister to units, not units be sacrificed to universals.” A middle road could not seem important to the one who declared, “What we aim at is truth in the concrete.”⁵⁴

Newman was taken up so much with the concrete, tangible facts as to create time and again the momentary impression of being a latter-day follower of Ockham, if not a replica of Mister Gradgrind teaching but facts and nothing but facts. “Experience”, Newman declares, “tells us only of individual things.”⁵⁵ He ties belief “to things concrete”.⁵⁶ His stated preference is “to go by facts”, not by abstract reasoning.⁵⁷ The weak point of logic is, according to him, that “it does not give us to know even one individual being”.⁵⁸ Newman's world is a “world of facts, and we use them; for there is nothing else to use”.⁵⁹ On a cursory look it is a world of empiricism that beckons, not surprisingly, also in the Apologia, which Newman wrote by putting aside momentarily the writing of the Grammar. The latter comes to a close with an apotheosis of Roman Catholic religion as not so much a religion of notions as a religion of facts, and for this reason the only true religion. Even less than in the Grammar is that insistence on facts as pregnant with universal truths put by Newman in the Apologia into a coherent philosophical proposition.

Resolute insistence on facts may have immediate advantages. Thus in dealing with Gibbon's famous “five causes” of wholesale conversions to Christianity in late imperial Rome, Newman certainly scores with his question: “Would it not have been worth while for him [Gibbon] to have let conjecture alone, and to have looked for facts instead?”⁶⁰ Yet, how would Newman have countered the objection that the lopsided imbalance between his praises of facts (individual things) and plain suspicion about universals makes him a mere conceptualist? Did he realize that conceptualism failed to prevent Protestant thought from being fragmented and caught in subjectivism? Was it not the very fragmentation and subjectivism that he tried to overcome first by reading Catholicism into the Thirty-nine Articles? Did he not recognize that the Via Media was a mere system on paper, precisely because it was ultimately an exercise in conceptualism? Would he not have protested from all his heart the claim that in espousing Roman Catholicism, he did not espouse a universally valid reality?

As the author of the Grammar, Newman would have been entitled to offer two answers. Although philosophically neither could be satisfactory, both could be forceful to the point of dissipating any doubt about his orthodoxy, philosophical and theological, and could cut short any future attempt (by modernists, neomodernists, and phenomenologists) to misconstrue his true position. One of his answers would have been his pointing out some forceful statements in the Grammar, though, if I may say so, they amount to a series of rescue operations. Time and again, when he seems to commit himself to mere empirical facts, he reasserts, and in a matter-of-fact way, the validity of objective truths transcending those facts. The most telling of such cases occurs when he insists on the personal conditions that decide whether a proposition is assented to or not. But he immediately balances his act by asking, as if to prevent any misreading of his train of thought: “Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth and error?”⁶¹

All those personal features, color as they might one's assent to a proposition, are subordinated to the truth of the proposition: “Assent is the acceptance of truth and truth is the proper object of the intellect.”⁶² Newman had no use for the principle of universal doubt, perceiving as he did its contradictory character. He held, and did so most reflectively, that the starting point in reasoning was a plain surrender to the obvious, an assent “to the truth of things, and to the mind's certitude of that truth”. Ultimately there was no other criterion for recognizing truth in the real as that sense that was primarily a good or common sense rather than scientific. Behind that position of his there lay a most considered stance: “I owe I do not see any way to go further than this.”⁶³

A particular aspect of that sense was that illative sense that Newman defined as a judgment of prudence in which he saw a preeminently personal characteristic. Whenever he noted that the illative sense opened the door to subjectivism, he right away shut that door: “Duties change, but truths never.”⁶⁴ The recognition that “the rule of conduct for one man is not always the rule for another” did not prevent him from stating in the same breath: “The rule is always one and the same in the abstract and in its principle and scope.”⁶⁵ Again, the fact that “men differ so widely from each other in religion and moral perceptions” does not prove, he warns, “that there is no objective truth”.⁶⁶

Newman could, in addition, refer to more than one place in the Grammar where the human mind is celebrated as made for truth, objective truth, that is. Of course, he knew that the human mind was not infallible. But if its errors were not to land one in a wholesale doubt about reasoning, one had to have the highest esteem for the mind's structure pivoted on truth: “It is absurd to break up the whole structure of our knowledge, which is the glory of the human intellect, because the intellect is not infallible in its conclusions.”⁶⁷ This passage is from the section “Indefectibility of Certitude”, where he anchors that indefectibility not in some intangible subjective disposition but in objective truth insofar as the human mind has an intrinsic affinity for it:

Now truth cannot change; what is once truth is always truth; and the human mind is made for truth, and so rests in truth, as it cannot rest in falsehood. … It is of great importance then to show … that the intellect, which is made for truth, can attain truth, and, having attained it, can keep it, can recognize it, and preserve the recognition.⁶⁸

Newman must have been thinking of that passage when, after Leo XIII redirected, with the Aeterni Patris, Catholic philosophers to the doctrine of Aquinas, he has asked about an eventual Thomistic scrutiny of his ideas: “I have no suspicion, and do not anticipate [any suspicion] that I shall be found in substance to disagree with St. Thomas.”⁶⁹

Newman certainly opposed doctrines irreconcilable with basic Thomistic positions. Newman's thinking is poles apart from Kantianism, and even from that Aquikantianism that is transcendental Thomism, as shown by his flat declaration: “By means of sense we gain knowledge directly.”⁷⁰ The Kantian principle whereby the mind's categories create reality is contradicted by Newman's statement: “We reason in order to enlarge our knowledge of matters, which do not depend on us for being what they are.”⁷¹ His most devastating anti-Kantian declaration is in a note that he attached from one of his early Catholic sermons to the Grammar ten years after its first publication. In that sermon Newman urges that assent to natural and supernatural truths or realities (which may appear sheer mysteries to rigid logicians) is based on the same, we would say today, epistemological considerations. Without ever having read Kant's Critique, Newman hit its very core by his emphatic declaration: “When once the mind is broken in, as it must be, to the belief of Power above it, when once it understands that it is not itself the measure of all things in heaven and earth, it will have little difficulty in going forward.”⁷² Newman rejects mind as the measure of all things not only because he has the moral sensitivity about a fallen human nature but also because of his readiness to assent to natural reality and truth as given independently of man.

Since Newman did not have Kant in mind, why did he make statements so forcefully anti-Kantian? The answer is simple. In philosophy in general, and epistemology in particular, the basic options are few. Actually, there are only two fundamental alternatives. In one the starting point is the objective thing, in the other the subjective ego. By casting his lot with the former, Newman inevitably had to censure the latter. This is why one finds in the Grammar gemlike phrases that cast a devastating light on such latter-day intellectual preoccupations as artificial intelligence, the subconscious, logicism, and the information explosion.

When Newman denounces the claim that “whatever can be thought can be adequately expressed in words”,⁷³ a basic assumption of artificial intelligence is denounced in advance. The same is true when Newman asserts that the acts of man's intellectual growth are “mental acts, not the formulas and contrivances of language”,⁷⁴ or when he notes that we arrive at our most important conclusions not by “a scientific necessity independent of ourselves, but by the action of our own minds, by our own individual perception of the truth in question, under a sense of duty to those conclusions and with an intellectual consciousness”.⁷⁵ In fact, Newman sees intellectual activity in such a nonmechanical perspective (of which the “sense of duty to conclusions” operative in any assent is a graphic reminder) as to endorse what in our times has become spoken of as “tacit knowledge”. He does so as he notes that in performing acts of the illative sense, the mind often perceives the connection of data with first principles “without the use of words, by a process which cannot be analyzed”.⁷⁶ But this absence of explicit analysis did not mean a general falling back on the subconscious. On assent that comes unconsciously, Newman states, “I have not insisted, as it has not come in my way; nor is it more than an accident of acts of assent, though an ordinary accident.”⁷⁷

Great logician as Newman was, he did not miss an opportunity to put logic in its place. If logical positivists had an advance antagonist, it was Newman. Close as was the connection between assent and logical conclusions, it was not more than the one “between the variation of the mercury and our sensation; but the mercury is not the cause of life and health, nor is verbal argumentation the principle of inward belief. If we feel hot or chilly, no one will convince us to the contrary by insisting that the glass is at 60. It is the mind that reasons and assents, not a diagram on paper.” Then he points out the rank inconsistency of a “class of writers” who keep acting on many a truth as do their unsophisticated neighbors while pretending “to weigh out and measure” truths and warning them that “since the full etiquette of logical requirements has not been satisfied, we must believe those truths at our own peril”.⁷⁸ It is not certain whether he meant by that “class” the followers of J. S. Mill or of Whateley, but his strictures certainly apply to the claims and behavior of logical positivists.

Present-day academics, fond of dissecting and wary of assenting, are aptly described in Newman's reference to the claim of some in the academies of Greece of old who claimed that “happiness lay not in finding the truth, but in seeking it”. Their abdication of finding the truth was as much an evasion of the duty to assent to truth as the claim, fashionable among modern academics, that all intellectual pursuit is a mere game. Newman grants that in matters that do not “concern us very much, clever arguments and rival ones have the attraction of a game of chance or skill, whether or not they lead to any definite conclusion”.⁷⁹ But in matters of grave human concerns the claim, Newman argued, was as hollow as the alleged happiness of Sisyphus.

Taking all intellectual pursuit for a mere game, as an excuse for dispensing with assent, had in part to do, according to Newman, with what is called today the information explosion: “The whole world is brought to our doors every morning, and our judgement is required upon social concerns, books, persons, parties, creeds, national acts, political principles and measures. We have to form our opinion, make our profession, take side on a hundred matters on which we have but little right to speak at all.”⁸⁰ Such is a prophetic anticipation of our educational and public situation. There any and all are continually invited to offer their opinionated judgments as if they were so many assents. The result is the general feeling that assents can be readily reversed, the very point that Newman held to be impossible.

The very fact that Newman was writing the Grammar when he took out ten feverish weeks to write the Apologia may in itself suggest that the Grammar too was autobiographical, in a sense of being very personal. The Grammar contains Newman's most personalist philosophical statements. He spoke of a sentiment that came over him habitually “about egotism as true modesty” as he turned to discussing inference and assent in the matter of religion, natural and supernatural: “In religious inquiry each of us can speak only for himself, and for himself he has a right to speak.” Of course, here, too, he immediately went to the rescue of objective truth. The individual “knows what has satisfied and satisfies himself; if it satisfies him, it is likely to satisfy others; if, as he believes and is sure, it is true, it will approve itself to others also, for there is but one truth.”⁸¹

Precious and all important as are Newman's almost instinctive moves to safeguard objectivity and the universal validity of truth, those moves were never systematic. The Grammar is as much more than a treatise as concrete life is far more than a book. Books come and go, and their arguments will forever be controverted. Such a perennial pattern would least surprise the one who once spoke about the “wild living intellect of man”.⁸² The phrase is from the concluding part of the Apologia, which has so much in common with the theme of the Grammar, namely, that religion is not about notions but about facts. No fact commanded Newman's assent more than the fact of what he called “the giant evil”, or original sin.⁸³ A chief evidence of it was, in Newman's eyes, the cacophony of the human scene. To reconcile it with the evidence of God (“if there be a God, since there is a God”), one had no choice but to assent that “the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.”⁸⁴

In the Grammar the last argument on behalf of the supernatural origin of Christian religion is that “it has with it that gift of stanching and healing the one deep wound of human nature, which avails more for its success than a full encyclopedia of scientific knowledge and a whole library of controversy, and therefore it must last while human nature lasts. It is a living truth that never grows old.”⁸⁵ Newman would find exceedingly illogical the present-day emphasis on the Church's healing power, which underemphasizes to a shocking degree the existence of that deep wound. This is certainly true about the intellectual part of that wound, the result of man's desire to become, through knowing, like God. In trying to rise above everything, man becomes bewildered by the variety of things, all of which clamor for assent but to none of which is the fallen man able to give it with certitude.

Certitude, in this fallen state, was therefore for Newman more than a question of epistemology. It was a question of healing grace, which could not operate except in an ambience that constantly reverberated with the call: “Your whole nature must be re-born, your passions, and your affections, and your aims, and your conscience, and your will, must all be bathed in a new element, and reconsecrated to your Maker, and, the last not the least, your intellect.”⁸⁶ The call was the call of that Church that alone, among all churches, showed similarity with the Church of the Apostles and of the Fathers. This is why Newman became a Catholic. Once a Catholic and a priest, he saw closely other priests and found two things about them. One was their unaffected outspoken manners. The other was that they had certitude about all mysteries of the Creed, and that certitude was never a burden for them. Sharp-sighted an intellect as he was, Newman would even today spot the large number of priests, perhaps not in this or that particular country but on a global scale, who still exude certitude and feel none unhealthier for it. He would also easily note the obvious, or the certitude carried all over the world by the occupant of that chair that he once apotheosized as “cathedra sempiterna”.⁸⁷

He would spot that obvious partly because his perception was eminently visual. Although an excellent violinist, he celebrated the sense of sight throughout the Grammar. Its thirty or so analyses of particular cases of assent are so many graphic portrayals of psychological processes true to life. Above all he paints his own mental portrait, and therein lies the lasting instructiveness of the Grammar. The picture shows him as a great mind even in the ordinary sense. One of the first reviews of the Grammar, the one in the Spectator, a prominent and widely read British weekly, came to a close with a homage to that greatness: “The work of a really great man may fairly be allowed, for some time at least, to speak for itself, before smaller men begin to praise or censure.”⁸⁸

Most of those who praised the Grammar, let alone those who censured it, failed to see his real greatness and the reason why the Grammar was to remain a great book. For the culture, national and ecclesiastic, into which Newman was born and which educated him and which he hoped to restore to its ideal vigor, was vigorous only in producing opinions that could not encourage assent. Most of those who labored with Newman in the Oxford Movement were unable to assent to the truth of that fatal symptom. Thus by the time Newman set forth in twelve public lectures, delivered in London in 1850, his penetrating diagnosis of the national church,⁸⁹ it was clear that his hopes for a mass conversion among the intelligentsia were unrealistic. Men of unquestionably vigorous intellect and of more than average good will refused to follow him and his few dedicated associates on the path to Rome. They bemoaned Newman's conversion as the error of an overzealous conscience, without pondering the nature of their own “zeal”.

Others not so close to him, such as the undergraduates who listened in awe to his university sermons in which several themes of the Grammar had been anticipated, conveniently forgot his message in the measure in which they became part of the establishment. That the lay as well as clerical factors of that establishment kept undermining, however unwittingly at times, genuine Christianity had become crystal clear to Newman by the time he finished the Development. But he, the Apologia is the witness, had to go through many shadows and free himself of many illusory images, such as the Via Media, before he could see the light. His chief accomplishment was that he could state with no touch of boasting that on that arduous quest for light he never sinned against the Light, or the voice of God speaking through man's conscience. The epitaph—ex umbris et imaginibus ad veritatem—he wrote for himself could just as well be a reminder of his spiritual odyssey. Little of this was seen by the established order, which, steeped as it was in Locke's “common sense”, had eyes only for opinions, however opinionated, but not for real assent even in worldly matters. Much less had it eyes for that assent that is to be given to the most challenging aspect of human existence, the voice of conscience speaking continually of matters otherworldly and eternal.

Newman's sensitivity to that voice was so great as to put him on the path to sainthood from his late teens on. On that path all signposts—actual and historical, personal and social—were reminders of a God who, if he is truly God, has to reveal above all his holiness to sinful man. Hence Newman's search for that Church in which the standards of revealed holiness have always been held high, whatever the failures of those whose duty is to proclaim those standards. If he said that the Fathers made him a Catholic, it was only because he had eyes for the holiness of the Fathers.⁹⁰

Newman's relentless quest for personal holiness is the explanation of the fact that in articulating his epistemology or grammar of assent he keeps going back to the reality of the voice of conscience. He would have been trapped in subjectivism had he centered on the voice itself and not on the objective moral content of that voice. No wonder that he always finds his way to the external objective world and even to that witness of that world which sustains the cosmological argument.⁹¹ Though not particularly fond of it, he would have been the last to deny its validity. Yet for all his readiness to go to the objective external reality and to endorse, at least in principle, all that is implied in its knowledge, he failed to the end to see clearly the epistemological nature of that road.

Yet how close he could be to seeing the obvious. A passage in his Philosophical Notebooks has it in a nutshell. There he argues that the sense of consciousness is not immediate but “external” to his sensing it. From his hypothetical opponent, who sees in his insistence on consciousness a straight road into utter scepticism or solipsism, Newman asks but one concession: “You must allow something—and all I ask you to allow is this—that it is true that I am—or that my consciousness that I am represents the fact external to my consciousness (viz) of my existence. Now see what is involved in this one assumption. Viz My consciousness.”⁹² Taken up so much with his consciousness, Newman could not see that he was mistaken in using the word “external” in the context. He was entitled to no more than to use the word “different”. Most importantly, he did not see the obvious. The very fact of arguing with an opponent provided him with the external world as an indispensable condition for arguing at all, an act securing him the external objective world and with it the only safe basis for working out one's philosophy.

This is not to suggest that Newman necessarily would have found that philosophy had he been born a Catholic. But philosophical clarity, which has never been a permanently widespread commodity even within the Church, may seem simply nonexistent in non-Catholic Christian ambiences. No less extraordinary should therefore seem the fact that he kept adhering to that clarity even though little enlightenment could come to him from inside that Church, which was still to be reawakened to the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. A chief instructiveness of the Grammar may therefore lie in the disproportionality between Newman's philosophical resources and his philosophical achievement. The point was already made in far more graphic terms, which Newman, so keen on graphic portrayals, would have no doubt greatly cherished. There he is described as “the genius who, following the gleam, cut his way through the undergrowth of a jungle where the weaker Pusey, with perhaps equal piety and goodwill, remained lost in umbris”. His intellectual odyssey, which is inseparable from his spiritual quest to find the proper place and object for a final and supreme assent, remains indeed “one of the most palpitating dramas in the history of the human soul. It tugs at the heart-strings like that of Augustine, and is surely not less beautiful because there is nowhere in the early background any trace of those aberrations which are so frankly revealed in the Confession.”⁹³

What remains to be done is to sketch briefly the bearing of all this for the intellectual aspects of our own ecclesiastical times. Seeing it with Newman's eyes, the first thing to be noted is the status of the Church of England. Today he would be immensely saddened, though not surprised, on seeing that church go not so much the way of all flesh but all the way of the flesh. He would see in the performance of the latest Lambeth conference on homosexuality and polygamy an illustration of a principal contention of the Grammar: Breaking with an assent is a proof that the assent has never been truly present. He would point out that it was for the same reason that the same church could not see that its own male ordinations lost the last shred of credibility when the ordination of its females was not seen above all as a question of validity.⁹⁴ Newman could certainly see the intimate connection between dissent from truth relating to sacramental ontology and dissent from truth relating to morals or holiness.

After that Newman would direct his gaze to the Catholic Church. He would again be saddened, though not surprised, that assent to truth has been all too often replaced by disputes about inferences in order to justify dissent. As the author of the Grammar he would engage in passionate controversy with many priests, theologians, nuns, and laymen. He would show them that they have destroyed the faith of much of an entire generation of Catholics. He would show them that by withholding their assent to the teaching of the Church, they incapacitated themselves for the task of eliciting in their youthful charges that assent that is the backbone of faith. He would show them that their game with assent was a result of their unwillingness to give assent to the fact that there is sin in the strict spiritual sense, the very fact that, as he insisted in the Grammar, is the basis of natural as well as of revealed religion.

On one point he would cross swords with the world at large, just as he did when the moral integrity of the Catholic clergy was called in doubt. He would not mind that just as in the secularist court he lost his case, he would lose again today in the kangaroo courts of the media. He would be satisfied for making it clear that Catholics cannot obtain justice in the supreme courts of publicity. The darlings of those courts are those Catholic clergymen and religious (if they still have religion) who use his personalistic philosophy of assent as their noblest excuse for refusing their assent to legitimate Church authority. He would challenge them to appear with him in the Court of Conscience, which he rightly held high as the ultimate and supreme forum, provided it was not a mere fancy, whim, and social fashion. There he would ask them whether it was not he who wrote in connection with the See of Peter that even when it speaks outside its special province and errs, “it still has in all cases a claim to our obedience”.⁹⁵

That Newman has become a battleground and possibly the great intellectual battleground within the Church shows more than anything else his greatness. Just as in Arian times, when both orthodox and unorthodox parties tried to secure the vote of Anthony, the saint of the day, so today both parties try to claim Newman to themselves. It seems that the unorthodox Catholic and the non-Catholic parties have better perceived the monumentality of his vote. Newman was still to become a cardinal when Gladstone, a chief Anglican opponent of his in the disputes about infallibility, admitted the monumentality of Newman's assent to it. “In my opinion,” Gladstone wrote in 1876, “his secession from the Church of England has never yet been estimated among us at anything like the full measure of its calamitous importance. It has been said that the world does not know its greatest men; neither, I will add, is it aware of the power and weight carried by the words and by the acts of those among its greatest men it does know.”⁹⁶

Today, on the eve of the centenary of Newman's death, his fellow Roman Catholics still have to go a long way toward realizing the magnitude of the gain they may derive from his assent to reality, natural and supernatural. The longer they go along that way, the better prepared they will be to play a constructive role in the great contestation between the prince of lies and the angel of Truth. Newman's account about that contestation, or about the coming of the Antichrist, was prophetic because he, as did any true prophet, gave his full assent to his God-given role to explain and help implement assent to Truth.

Notes

1. As stated in the entry for that day in Newman's diary. See Letters and Diaries, vol. XXV, p. 54.

2. To Mrs. Mozley (Jemima Newman), Mar. 21, 1870, ibid., p. 59.

3. “Dr. Newman's Grammar of Assent”, The Spectator, Apr. 2, 1870, p. 436.

4. To Canon J. Walker, Apr. 8, 1870: “You see I called it an Essay, as it really is, because it is an analytical inquiry—a Grammar ought to be synthetical.” Letters and Diaries, vol. XXV, p. 84.

5. To Jemima, Feb. 21, 1870, ibid., p. 35.

6. To Bishop Ullathorne, Jan. 28, 1870, ibid., p. 19.

7. To Jemima, Feb. 21, 1870, ibid., p. 35.

8. See pp. 25-31 in the Image Book (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1955) edition of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, which, in addition to being its most widely available edition, also has the extra feature of a penetrating introduction by Etienne Gilson.

9. To Aubrey de Vere, Aug. 31, 1870, Letters and Diaries, vol. XXV, p. 199.

10. Ibid., pp. 24, 35, 43, 46.

11. Ibid., pp. 38 and 39.

12. Ibid.

13. To Jemima, Feb. 21, 1870, ibid., p. 36.

14. To Canon Walker, Jan. 25, 1870, ibid., p. 14, and also to Bishop Ullathorne, Jan. 28, 1870, ibid., p. 19.

15. Ibid., p. 35.

16. Ibid., pp. 10 and 12.

17. Ibid., p. 65.

18. To Sir Frederic Rogers, June 30, 1870, ibid., p. 155.

19. Ibid., pp. 160 and 279.

20. Ibid., p. 35. Newman gives elsewhere (p. 155) the years “1846, 1847, 1850, 1853, etc.”

21. Ibid., p. 155.

22. In the context of his first reminiscences on his almost fatal sickness in Sicily. See Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman during His Life in the English Church, ed. A. Mozley (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1890), vol. I, pp. 365-66.

23. Letters and Diaries, vol. XXV, p. 100.

24. Quoted from a draft (Jan. 5, 1860) of the Grammar by C. S. Dessain, John Henry Newman (new ed.; Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 152-53.

25. See P. Flanagan, Newman, Faith and the Believer (London: Sands, 1946), pp. 92-95. Froude's argument was called “equationism” by F. R. Ward in his review of the Grammar in The Dublin Review (17 [April 1871], p. 255), of which he was the editor.

26. To W. Froude, Jan. 31, 1870, Letters and Diaries, vol. XXV, p. 22.

27. Ibid., p. 36.

28. Grammar, p. 172.

29. Letters and Diaries, vol. XXV, p. 11. He refers to them as 2 Protestant and 3 Catholic. In another letter (ibid., p. 35) he begins describing them with the Grammar as “the hardest, though all have been hard—my Prophetical Office [Via Media], which has come to pieces—my Essay on Justification, which stands up 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”.

30. F. J. Bacchus, “How to Read the Grammar of Assent”, The Month 1 (1924), p. 106.

31. The Month, 1 (1870), p. 360.

32. May 24, 1870, Letters and Diaries, vol. XXV, p. 39.

33. Grammar, p. 86.

34. Ibid., p. 270.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Of the eight references in the Grammar to Aristotle, four deal with the shortcomings of syllogisms and four with the Nichomachean Ethics. It is among the latter that one finds Newman endorsing Aristotle as “my master” (p. 335).

38. Ibid., p. 275.

39. On fatal defects in Bacon's philosophy with respect to natural science, see chap. IV, “Empirical Scouting”, in my Gifford Lectures, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

40. Actually, Newman speaks of Bacon's separation “of the physical system of the world from the theological” (Grammar, p. 282), which is a signal misunderstanding on Newman's part of Bacon's rejection of the “teleological”.

41. See Grammar, pp. 137-39. The quote is from Locke's Essay on Development of Doctrine, chap. VII. Later (p. 251) Newman remarks that Locke “does not tell us what these propositions are”.

42. Grammar, p. 139.

43. For details on both Locke and Voltaire, see chap. 6, “The Role of Physics in Psychology”, in my The Absolute beneath the Relative and Other Essays (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America and Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1988).

44. The importance that Newman attached to that writing, “The Tamworth Reading Room”, a long critique addressed to the editor of the Times apropos a speech by Sir Robert Peel at the dedication of a public library in Tamworth in early 1841, can be seen from Newman's quoting from it at length in the Grammar (pp. 88-92).

45. A fact all the more ironical as Locke had to gain assurance from Huygens that the Principia contained not only good mathematics but also reliable physics.

46. Grammar, p. 295.

47. Ibid., p. 181.

48. Ibid., p. 162.

49. Ibid., p. 158.

50. Ibid., p. 192.

51. Ibid., p. 196.

52. Ibid., pp. 44-45. Whereas some of the first Catholic reviewers, Fr. Harper, S. J., in particular, expressed deep concern about Newman's cavalier treatment of the universals, little trace of such concern is found in the studies of the Grammar written recently by Catholics who cannot be suspected of anti-Thomist preferences. That Newman was inconsistent on the problem is set forth in some detail by Dr. Zeno, the Dutch Capuchin Newmanist, in his John Henry Newman: Our Way to Certitude: An Introduction to Newman's Psychological Discovery: The Illative Sense and His Grammar of Assent (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1957), pp. 63-75. The problem, which Dr. Zeno calls “Newman's inconsistency”, is passed over by E. J. Sillem in his long study preceding his edition of John H. Newman: The Philosophical Notebook (New York: Humanities Press, 1969) and is not discussed by I. T. Ker in his long introduction to his meticulous critical edition of the Grammar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

53. Grammar, p. 224.

54. Ibid., p. 223.

55. Ibid., p. 44.

56. Ibid., p. 87.

57. Ibid., p. 136.

58. Ibid., p. 226.

59. Ibid., p. 272. Such and similar emphases put by Newman on objective truth found no echo in N. Lash's introduction, which disgraces the edition of the Grammar by the University of Notre Dame Press (1979). Lash sees in Newman's thinking an anticipation of T. S. Kuhn's evaluation of all intellectual process as a series of paradigm shifts without noting its irrationalist character. The latter point was made in my Gifford Lectures, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978; 3rd paperback edition, 1986), and subsequently by the professedly nonreligionist D. Stone, of the University of Sydney, in his Popper and after: Four Modern Irrationalists (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982), where Kuhn is described as a greater threat to rationality than Popper, Lakatos, and Feyerabend!

60. Grammar, p. 358.

61. Ibid., p. 247.

62. Ibid., p. 145.

63. Ibid., p. 271.

64. Ibid., p. 278.

65. Ibid., p. 279.

66. Ibid., p. 293.

67. Ibid., p. 187.

68. Ibid., p. 181.

69. In a letter of Dec. 10, 1878, to Fr. R. Whitty, S.J., Letters and Diaries, vol. XXVIII, p. 421. Fr. Whitty's reply of Jan. 19, 1879 (ibid.), to a subsequent letter of Newman is expressive of Newman's concern for philosophical orthodoxy and also prophetic in view of the great popularity of transcendental Thomism among Fr. Whitty's latter-day confreres: “My own impression I confess was just what you mention—that the Pope having himself been brought up in the Society's teaching—knowing that some of our Professors in Italy and France were leaving St. Thomas in certain points of Philosophy, and feeling that these were important points against the errors of the day—had expressed a wish that our teaching should return to the old lines.”

70. Grammar, p. 210.

71. Ibid., p. 222.

72. Ibid., p. 385. Newman considered this so characteristic of his thinking that he gave in italics part of the remainder of the quote, which is from his sermon “Mysteries on Nature and Grace”, where he argued the epistemologically most pivotal point that “belief in God and belief in His Church stand on the same kind of foundation”. See Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1902), p. 260.

73. Grammar, p. 212.

74. Ibid., p. 275.

75. Ibid., p. 252.

76. Ibid., p. 282.

77. Ibid., p. 157.

78. Ibid., p. 151.

79. Ibid., p. 171.

80. Ibid., p. 191.

81. Ibid., p. 300.

82. Apologia pro Vita Sua (Image Book; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), p. 322.

83. Ibid., p. 326.

84. Ibid., p. 320.

85. Grammar, p. 376.

86. Apologia, p. 325.

87. He did so as Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland. The address is reprinted here as an Appendix for two reasons. One is the rarity of his posthumously published My Campaign in Ireland. Part I. Catholic University Reports and Other Papers (printed for private circulation only by A. King & Co., Printers to the University, Aberdeen, 1896) in which it first appeared (pp. 211-14). The other reason relates to the striking anticipation in it of the substance and tone of his sermon. “The Pope and the Revolution” (Sermons Preached on Various Occasions [3rd ed.; London: Burns & Oates, 1870], pp. 263-98), preached on the feast of the Rosary, Oct. 7, 1866. Systematic oversight of this sermon, although easily available, by “liberals” is, of course, understandable as it casts in proper light Newman, who at that time was just beginning his theologically mistaken foot-dragging about the advisability of the definition of papal infallibility (see on this my paper “Newman's Logic and the Logic of the Papacy”, Faith and Reason 13 [1987], pp. 241-65). Far from being a quasirationalist sowing the seeds of disloyalty in the guise of specious distinctions, he was, as the sermon shows, consumed with a burning loyalty for the person sitting in the chair of Peter. It is doubtful that any Ultramontane has ever stated as touchingly as Newman did in that sermon that we Catholics have the duty “to look at his [the Pope's] formal deeds, and to follow him whither he goes, and never to desert him, however we may be tried, but to defend him at all hazards, and against all comers, as a son would a father, and as a wife a husband, knowing that his cause is the cause of God” (p. 269). The sermon also gives a priceless glimpse of the depth of Newman's Marian devotion, and in particular of his love for the Rosary. About the latter Father Neville, the Oratorian who was most closely associated with Newman during his last years, recalled “his ready reply to a condolence on his loss of the power to say it [the Breviary] being, that the Rosary more than made up for it; that the Rosary was to him the most beautiful of all devotions and that it contained all in itself. … From far back, in the long distance of time, memory brings him forward, when not engaged in writing or reading, as most frequently having the Rosary in his hand.” Quoted in W. Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1912), vol. II, p. 533.

88. The Spectator, Apr. 2, 1870, p. 439.

89. Those twelve lectures constitute volume I of Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1891). If Newman felt any dislike in writing those lectures it was merely because he did not wish to waste any more time on the Church of England and not because, as often alleged, that he did not fully agree with the devastating thrust of the portrayal there of the Church of England as a mere by-product of political and nationalistic, that is, essentially naturalist, aspirations. Newman would be pained but not surprised by the compromise that the Lambeth Conference of Aug. 1988 adopted on polygamy. He would merely note the preservation of type, which he held high in the Development, as evidenced by the courage of John Paul II, who fearlessly denounced polygamy a month later in the presence of an African head of state with four official wives, in addition to some unofficial ones.

90. In Newman's reply to Pusey's Eirenicon in Certain Difficulties, vol. II, p. 24.

91. See Grammar, p. 68.

92. Entry dated Feb. 9, 1860, in The Philosophical Notebooks of John Henry Newman, vol. II, p. 78. Tellingly, the context in Newman's reflections on his reading the Historical Development of Speculative Philosophy from Kant to Hegel by H. M. Chalybäus, professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel (trans. A. Edersheim; Edinburgh: T. T. Clark, 1854). Half of the pages of Newman's copy of Meiklejohn's translation of Kant's Critique were left uncut! See ibid., vol. I, p. 229. The reason behind this was that, as Newman put it, “I do not think I am bound to read them [the German idealists] in spite of what Chalybäus says, for notoriously they have come to no conclusion” (ibid.).

93. J. Gannon, S.J., “Newman and Metaphysics”, The Irish Ecclesiastical Record 69 (1947), p. 386. This article, possibly the best on the Grammar and on the various problems raised by Newman's philosophy, came to my knowledge only after this paper's conclusion was reached. There is no reference to it in the works of Flanagan and Sillem, or in the editions of the Grammar quoted above.

94. A position of the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. See The Times, Aug. 2, 1988, p. 18, col. 8.

95. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Image Book; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), p. 104. Newman is quoted six times in defense of dissent from Humanae vitae in Dissent in and for the Church: Theologians: Theologians and Humanae vitae by C. E. Curran et al. (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969). Of the four letters to the editor, published in the Sunday, Sept. 14, 1986, issue of the New York Times in connection with the Vatican's declaration that Fr. Curran was no longer a Catholic theologian, two were in support of the Vatican. The writers of the two other letters buttressed their support of Fr. Curran with reference to Newman! A detailed study of the exploitation of Newman by advocates of dissent would pay well the effort.

96. Quoted from G. B. Smith, The Life of the Right Honorable William Ewart Gladstone (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1880), p. 499. Gladstone's words seem to have made no impression on Prof. Owen Chadwick's interpretation of Newman, a chief in his eyes among Roman Catholic modernists and, therefore, an Anglican malgré lui.