Reason and Religion
A Reply to Cardinal Newman
[The Contemporary Review,
December 1885]
I.
{842} IT is simply a duty,
which I owe alike to Cardinal Newman and the readers of this REVIEW,
to ask, whether, in the light of his statement and the rigorous
criticism of Dr. Barry, I have anything to retract or modify in the
judgment which has provoked these replies. It would, in some respects,
be much more pleasant for me to allow the matter to stand where the
Cardinal has left it, and were it simply a personal matter between him
and me, it would, so far as I am concerned, be allowed so to stand. It
costs a very peculiar kind of suffering to conduct a controversy,
after his personal intervention, with the one man in all England on
whose lips the words of the dying Polycarp sit with equal truth and
grace. Not that Cardinal Newman has been either a hesitating or a
soft-speaking controversialist. He has been a man of war from his
youth, who has conquered many adversaries—amongst them the most
inveterate and invincible of English prejudices. He was one who not
only changed sides when the battle was hottest, but led a goodly
company, with him; yet the change, so far from lessening, increased
the honour and admiration in which he was held. He has, as scarcely
any other teacher of our age, made us feel the meaning of life, the
evil of sin, the dignity of obedience, the beauty of holiness; and his
power has been due to the degree in which men have been constrained to
believe that his words, where sublimest, have been but the dim and
imperfect mirrors of his own exalted spirit. He has taken us into the
secret places of his soul, and has held us by the potent spell of his
passionate sincerity and matchless style, while he has unfolded his
vision of the truth, or his quest after it. He has greatly and
variously enriched the religious life of our people, and he lives in
our imagination as the last at once of the fathers and of {843} the
saints. Whatever the degree of our theological and ecclesiastical
difference, it does not lessen my reverence for the man, or my respect
for his sincerity.
It is, then, with real pain that I enter the
lists against so venerable an opponent. Before, the issue was more or
less historical; now, without ceasing to be such, it is burdened with
a personal element painful to the younger man. But I have no choice:
the issue is too vital to allow me to be silent.
2. Frankly, then, and at the outset, the sum of
the matter may be stated thus: Cardinal Newman has done two
things—he has repudiated and denounced what my criticism never
affirmed, and he has contributed new material illustrative of the very
thesis it maintained. He has represented me as describing him as "a
hidden sceptic," [Note 1] and as "thinking,
living, professing, acting upon a wide-stretching, all-reaching
platform of religious scepticism." [Note
2] I never did anything of the sort; it would require an energy
and irony of invective equal to the Cardinal's own to describe the
fatuous folly of the man who would venture to make any such charge.
What he was charged with, and in terms so careful and guarded as ought
to have excluded all possible misconception, was "metaphysical" or "philosophical"
scepticism. This did not mean that he was other than sincere in word
and spirit, especially in all that concerned his religious
convictions—his good faith in all his beliefs is, and ever has been,
manifest to all honest men; but it meant what it said, that he so
conceived the intellect that its natural attitude to religious truth
was sceptical and nescient. Scepticism in philosophy means a system
which affirms either, subjectively, the impotence of the reason for
the discovery of the truth, or, objectively, the inaccessibility of
truth to the reason; and such a scepticism, while it logically
involves the completest negation of knowledge, has before now been
made the basis of a pseudo-supernaturalism, or plea for an infallible
authority, that must reveal and authenticate truth, if truth is ever
to become or remain man's. This was the scepticism with which Cardinal
Newman was charged, and it was held significant, not simply for his
personal history, but also for the movement so inseparably connected
with his name; and his last paper is as signal an illustration of its
presence and action as is to be found in all his writings. The attempt
to prove this will be my reply to Dr. Newman, and it will also include
a reply to Dr. Barry's vigorous defence of him.
II.
Dr. Newman's reply, then, is so without relevance
to the original criticism, save in the way of illustration and
confirmation, {844} that it may be well to attempt to make the real
point at issue clear and explicit. He speaks of me as having been "misled
by the epithets which he had attached in the 'Apologia' to the Reason."
[Note 3] The epithets had nothing
whatever to do with the matter; all turned on the substantive or
material idea. The criticism was simply an endeavour to determine, on
the one hand, how Cardinal Newman conceived the Reason and the
Conscience in themselves and in relation to the knowledge of God; and,
on the other hand, how these conceptions affected or regulated the
movement of his mind from Theism to Catholicity. Stated in another
form, the question is this: How is knowledge of religious truth
possible? What are the subjective conditions of its genesis and
continuance? How and whence does man get those principles which are
the bases of all his thinking concerning religion? and in what
relations do they and the reason, at first, and throughout their
respective histories, stand to each other? It is the old problem,
under its highest and most complex aspect, as to the grounds and
conditions of knowledge, how it is ever or anywhere possible? The
older empiricism said: All knowledge is resolvable into sensuous
impressions and the ideas which are their faint image or copy. There
are no ideas in the mind till the senses have conveyed them in; it is
but a sheet of white paper till the outer universe has by the finger
of sense written on it those mysterious hieroglyphs which constitute
our intelligible world. But the critical transcendentalism replied:
The impression explains nothing—must itself be explained: how is it
that it becomes rational, an intelligible thing? The mind and the
sheet of white paper differ thus—the paper receives the character,
but the mind reads it; indeed the character would have no being save
in and through the reading of the mind. It is clear, therefore, that
we must get before and below the impression to thought, which is by
its forms and categories constituted, as it were, the interpreter of
the impression, the condition of its being intelligible. Without a
constitutive and interpretative Reason, the world that speaks to the
senses would be no reasonable world.
Now, Cardinal Newman may be described as, by
virtue of his doctrine of the Reason, an empiricist in the province of
religious truths. The Reason is, as he is fond of saying, "a mere
instrument," unfurnished by Nature, without religious contents or
function, till faith or conscience has conveyed into it the ideas or
assumptions which are the premisses of its processes, and with
religious character only as these processes are conducted in obedience
to the moral sense or other spiritual authority. It is to him no
constitutive or architectonic faculty, with religious truth so in it
that it is bound to seek and to conceive religious truth without it;
but it is as regards Religion simply {845} idle or vacant till it has
received and accepted the deliverances of conscience? which stand to
it much as Hume conceived his "impressions" and their corresponding "ideas"
to stand related to mind and knowledge. But, then, to a reason so
constituted and construed how is religious knowledge possible? How can
religion, as such, have any existence, or religious truth any reality?
What works as a mere instrument never handles what it works in; the
things remain outside it, and have no place, or standing within its
being. And hence my contention was and is, that to conceive reason as
Dr. Newman does is to deny to it the knowledge of God, and so to save
faith by the help of a deeper unbelief.
III.
1. I repeat, then, the doctrine of the reason
Cardinal Newman stated in the October number of this REVIEW
is precisely the doctrine on which my criticism was based, and it is
essentially, in the philosophical sense, a sceptical doctrine. But let
us see how he formulates it. Here is what may be regarded as his
earliest statement, with his later notes incorporated:—
"There is no necessary connection
between the intellectual and moral principles of our nature1
[1That is, as found in individuals, in the concrete.]; on
religious subjects we may prove anything or overthrow anything, and
can arrive at truth but accidentally, if we merely investigate by what
is commonly called reason2 [2Because we may be
reasoning from wrong principles, principles unsuitable to the
subject-matter reasoned upon. Thus, the moral sense, or 'spiritual
discernment' must supply us with the assumptions to be used as
premisses in religious inquiry.], which is in such matters but the
instrument, at best, in the hands of the legitimate judge, spiritual
discernment." [Note 4]
Here is his latest statement, which will be found
in everything material identical with the earliest:—
"In its versatility, its
illimitable range, its subtlety, its power of concentrating many ideas
on one point, it (the reason) is for the acquisition of knowledge
all-important or rather necessary, with this drawback, however, in its
ordinary use, that in every exercise of it, it depends for success
upon the assumption of prior acts similar to that which it has itself
involved, and therefore is reliable only conditionally. Its process is
a passing from an antecedent to a consequent, and according as the
start so is the issue. In the province of religion, if it be under the
happy guidance of the moral sense, and with teachings which are not
only assumptions in form, but certainties, it will arrive at
indisputable truth, and then the house is at peace; but if it be in
the hands of enemies, who are under the delusion that its arbitrary
assumptions are self-evident axioms, the reasoning will start from
false premisses, and the mind will be in a state of melancholy
disorder. But in no case need the reasoning {846} faculty
itself be to blame or responsible, except if viewed as identical with
the assumptions of which it is the instrument. I repeat, it is but an
instrument; as such I have viewed it, and no one but Dr. Fairbairn
would say as he does—that the bad employment of a faculty was a 'division,'
a 'contradiction,' and 'a radical antagonism of nature,' and 'the
death of the natural proof' of a God." [Note
5]
2. Now, I do not wish to be minute in my
criticism, and argue that if reason, "in every exercise of it, depends
for success on the assumption of prior acts similar to that which it
has itself involved," then the genesis and very being of reason are
inconceivable, for we are landed in the notion of an infinite series.
As to Hume, man was a succession or series of "impressions and ideas;"
so to Newman, reason, as mere faculty of reasoning, is a series of "antecedents
and consequents;" the difficulty in both cases is the same, to find
how the series began, and how, having begun, it has developed into
what it is. But without resorting to minute analysis, we may begin
with the last sentence of the above quotation; and concerning it, it
is enough to say, Dr. Fairbairn never said any such thing, or, meaning
what he did and does, could have said it. His criticism referred not
to the employment of the faculty, but to the doctrine of the faculty,
which determined its use; and this latest statement seems expressly
designed to elucidate and justify the criticism. For reason, as here
described, is condemned, in all that concerns the higher problems and
fundamental verities of thought, to incapacity and impotence. It is
emptied of those constitutive and constructive qualities that make it
a reason, and by being reduced to a mere ratiocinative instrument, its
very ability to handle religious principles, even in a ratiocinative
process, is denied. For the reasoning process, to be valid, must
proceed from principles valid to the reason; but to be so valid they
must be more than deliverances or assumptions coming to it ab extra;
they must have a root in its own nature, and be inseparable from the
very being of thought. To use principles truly, one must be able to
judge concerning their truth, and how can a reason truly and justly
act, even as a mere instrument of inference, on the basis of premisses
it neither found, nor framed, nor verified, being indeed so
constituted as to be unable to do any one of these things. Reason,
then, can be ratiocinative only as it is constitutive; we must have
truth of thought that we may know or possess truth of being. The
getting of principles is a more vital matter than the reasoning
concerning them, and if the constitutive or formulative and
determinative factor be made not only distinct from, but independent
of, the dialectic and deductive, how can they ever be made to agree,
save by the subordination or {847} enslavement of the one to the
other? And even then they will not agree, for the principles cannot
signify the same thing to faculties that are not only distinct, but,
as realized in the living person, without "necessary connection." The
dictate of the conscience changes its nature when it becomes the axiom
of the reason; the "categorical imperative" ceases to be the moment it
is translated into a speculative or intellectual truth. It may—it
must—be true that the man who is deaf to the voice of conscience
cannot reason rightly in religious matters; but it is no less true
that the man who doubts or misuses his reason cannot hear or be
enlightened by his conscience. The only justification of Cardinal
Newman's doctrine would have been the reduction of conscience and
reason to a higher unity; his last condemnation is his distinction and
division of the faculties, for it involves our nature in a dualism
which makes real knowledge of religious truth impossible; there is
unity neither in the man who knows nor in the truth as known. For,
make a present of true premisses to a faculty merely ratiocinative,
and they will be to it only as algebraic symbols, not as truths of
religion; its deductive process may be correct, but it will have no
religious character. But to a reason without religious character,
unable to construe religious truths for what they really are, there
can be no legitimate reasoning concerning religion; truth is
inaccessible to it, and it is incompetent to the discovery and
determination of truth. This is philosophical scepticism, and if, to
avoid the logical issue, the truth denied to the reason is granted to
the conscience, and is, on its simple authority, to be accepted as a "magisterial
dictate," then a "division," or "radical antagonism of nature," is
introduced, which is "the death of the natural proof" for the being of
a God, and of all the primary truths of religion. This, and no other,
was my original criticism of Cardinal Newman, and this, confirmed and
illustrated by his latest statement, is my criticism still.
IV.
1. Now, this very doctrine of the reason, with
its varied limitations and applications, is the heart and essence of
the whole matter; it is, in the proper philosophical sense, both
empirical and sceptical. It is a doctrine of impotence; the reason is
by its very nature disqualified from ever attaining the knowledge of
religious truth, as religious; it is a doctrine of nescience, for
religious knowledge is, from its very nature, unable to get within,
and be really assimilated by, a reason which is a mere inferential or
syllogistic instrument. Dr. Newman is very angry at my speaking of his
"ultimate ideas, or the regulative principles of his thought," or
simply his "underlying philosophy;" and he declares that from "leading
ideas" and "fundamental principles" he has "all through his life
shrunk, as {848} sophistical and misleading." [Note
6] Well, it may be so, and if it is so, many things that have been
a perplexity to people would be explained. But it is possible that if
Dr. Newman had been described as a person without "fundamental" or "regulative
principles," he would have been angrier still, and, with more reason.
However, the matter need not be any further disputed; what meant by
his "underlying philosophy" is just this doctrine which he has anew
stated and maintained. What was meant by it as "a regulative principle
of his thought" was that it exercised over his mind, its dialectic and
dialectical method, precisely the sort of influence he has endeavoured
to explain and illustrate. Now, what I ventured to say before, I am by
the new light the more emboldened to repeat, that this fundamental
principle determined, in a way not written in the "Apologia," his
whole inner history. He not only doubted the reason, but he mocked and
scorned all who sought to enlist it in the service of religion [Note
7]. It was to him no witness or oracle of God, but simply a
servant, whose duty was to obey, and whose only virtue was obedience.
Here from the critical year 1841 is a significant passage, one out of
many, illustrative of how little the empirical and instrumental
reason, as he conceived it, had of God, and how little it could find
Him in the Nature it was called to interpret:—
The whole framework of nature is
confessedly a tissue of antecedents and consequents; we may refer all
things forwards to design, or backwards on a physical cause. Laplace
is said to have considered he had a formula which solved all the
motions of the solar system; shall we say that those motions came from
this formula or from a Divine Fiat? Shall we have recourse for our
theory to physics or to theology? Shall we assume Matter and its
necessary properties to be eternal, or Mind with its divine
attributes? Does the sun shine to warm the earth, or is the earth
warmed because the sun shines? The one hypothesis will solve the
phenomena as well as the other. Say not it is but a puzzle in
argument, and no one ever felt it in fact. So far from it, I believe
that the study of Nature, when religious feeling is away, leads the
mind, rightly or wrongly, to acquiesce in the atheistical theory, as
the simplest and easiest. It is but parallel to that tendency in
anatomical studies, which no one will deny, to solve all the phenomena
of the human frame into material elements and powers, and to dispense
with the soul. To those who are conscious of matter, but not conscious
of mind, it seems more rational to refer all things to one origin,
such as they know, than to assume {849} the
existence of a second origin, such as they know not. It is religion,
then, which suggests to science its true conclusions; the facts come
from knowledge, but the principles come of faith [Note
8].
In this passage, where statement and argument are
alike logical results of the implied philosophy of mind, the attitude
of the intellectual sceptic is admirably stated; either alternative is
consonant to reason, though the negative is rather the more consonant.
If reason stands alone, the conclusion will be nescience. It is all a
matter of feeling or faith; if it be away, "the study of nature" will
lead to acquiescence "in the atheistical theory;" if it be present,
the reference will be to the being of God. Dr. Newman elsewhere quotes
a doctrine which Hume "has well propounded," though he did it but "in
irony":—"Our most holy religion is founded on faith, not on
reason." [Note 9] The irony of
Hume is the good faith of Newman; while their creeds so differ, their
philosophies so agree, that if the sceptic had ever attempted an
apology for religion, he would have made it in the manner and on the
lines and with all the implicates and inferences of the Catholic.
2. Nature, then, had not simply to the logical
and inferential reason, but, even so far as he allowed it, to the
constructive and interpretative, no necessary theistic meaning. As he
himself says, "Take the system of nature by itself, detached from the
axioms of religion, and I am willing to confess—nay, I have been
expressly urging—that it does not force us to take it for more
than a system." [Note 10]
Whence, now, the axioms of religion which were needed to make our view
of nature theistic? As they had no ground in the reason, they had to
be given—i.e., received on the authority either of conscience
or of revelation. If it accepted their dicta, it was religious;
if it was without or averse to them, it was atheistic. This is the
thesis of the most remarkable of his "University Sermons;" it comes
out in his account of what he calls the Divinity of Traditionary
Religion, which explains what is true in the various faiths by all men
having had "more or less the guidance of tradition, in addition to
those internal notions of right and wrong which the Spirit has put
into the heart of each individual." [Note
11] It appears too instructively in his doctrine of private
judgment, whose province {850} he defines as being to exercise itself
upon this simple question, "What and where is the Church?" We are not
to think of gaining religious truth for ourselves by our "private
examination," but ought only to ask, "Who is God's prophet, and where?
Who is to be considered the voice of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic
Church?" [Note 12] It obtained
its perfect and logical expression in the argument which proved an
infallible authority necessary alike to the being of religion and the
Church:— [Note 13]
"As the essence of all religion is
authority and obedience, so the distinction between natural religion
and revealed lies in this, that the one has a subjective authority and
the other an objective. Revelation consists in the manifestation of
the Invisible Divine Power, or in the substitution of the voice of a
Lawgiver for the voice of conscience. The supremacy of conscience is
the essence of natural religion: the supremacy of Apostle, or Pope, or
Church, or Bishop, is the essence of revealed; and when such external
authority is taken away, the mind falls back again upon that inward
guide which it possessed even before Revelation was vouchsafed. Thus,
what conscience is in the system of nature, such is the voice of
Scripture, or of the Church, or of the Holy See, as we may determine
it, in the system of Revelation. It may be objected, indeed, that
conscience is not infallible; it is true, but still it is ever to be
obeyed. And this is just the prerogative which controversialists
assign to the See of St. Peter; it is not in all cases infallible, it
may err beyond its special province, but it has ever in all cases a
claim on our obedience." [Note
14]
Now, these are only the logical sequences in the
process which compelled Dr. Newman to hold Catholicism and Atheism the
only real alternatives; but the compulsion came at every point from
which he must allow me to call his "underlying philosophy," or simply,
his doctrine which made the reason a mere ratiocinative faculty or
deductive instrument, by nature void of God, and never able to know
him directly or for itself [Note 15].
Its knowledge of religion being always indirect and inferential, "on
grounds given," the supreme difficulty was with "the grounds," how to
get them, then how to have them accepted, ratified, and obeyed. They
were always giving way beneath analysis, or being departed from, or
being superseded by "false," or "wrong," or "secular" premisses, which
indeed ever seemed to be more easy of acceptance than the religious:
in short, his principles of reasoning had no organic connexion with
the principles of knowledge or reason. Reason to him had so little in
it of the truth that it was as ready to become the instrument of "the
false prophet" as of the true; to speak for the one was as congenial
to its nature as to speak for the other. And so its natural inability
was the source and basis {851} of its historical hostility to
religion; the more it was degraded into an instrument, the more it
revenged its degradation by becoming unstable, intractable, inimical.
The more critical, "aggressive," or "captious" the reason became, the
more imperial had to become the authority which supplied it with the "assumptions
"or "axioms of religion;" and, as was inevitable, the more imperious
the authority grew, the more "rebellious" grew the reason. The result
was the one he has so well described in the now classic passage:
"He came to the conclusion that there was no
medium in true philosophy between Atheism and Catholicity." [Note
16] But it was the philosophy that did it all, and on its truth
depends the validity of the conclusion. Where reason is conceived as a
mere instrument, so by nature without the knowledge of God that all it
ever knows or determines concerning Him must proceed from principles
given "on the simple word of the Divine Informant," named now
Conscience, and now Tradition or the Church, then the
alternatives—absolute authority or absolute negation—are
inexorable. Nay, more, this doctrine, as is so well illustrated by his
latest utterance, with its despair of all secular forces and his blind
hope in ecclesiastical, is doubly determinative: it yields the theory,
on the one hand, of the Church, and, on the other of "the False
Prophet," or "human society," by whose action "error spreads and
becomes an authority." The subjective is reflected in an objective
dualism; the authoritative Church has its counterpart and
contradiction in the authoritative world; each succeeds as it has its
premisses or assumptions accepted by the reason as data for reasoning.
And thus the notion that loses the immanence of God from the reason,
loses the active presence of God from the collective history and
society of man. The scepticism of the theory on its subjective side
has its correlative in the false supernaturalism of the objective; to
dispossess reason of its divine contents is to deprive man, in his
concrete historical being, of the natural presence and knowledge of
God, and to limit God's action and activity to means that are all the
more mechanical that they are conceived and described as supernatural.
V.
1. So far we have been concerned with the
doctrine of the Reason—first in its intrinsic, and next in what may
be termed its biographical significance; now we must look at it in its
dialectic or apologetic. Cardinal Newman has of course challenged my
interpretation of the "Grammar of Assent," and Dr. Barry thinks it "wanting
in insight," and "decidedly, though not intentionally, unjust," due to
my not having thrown myself "into the spirit of the work," or {852} "viewed
it from within." Now, it was because the work was criticised from the
most internal of all standpoints, the biographical, that the criticism
was what it was. The work cannot be understood alone; it were simply
unintelligible to the man who did not know the writer and his history.
It is, in a far deeper sense than the book that bears the title, an "Apologia
pro Vita Sua"; and is as remarkable for what it does not as for what
it does state and attempt. It holds the place in Newman's collective
works that the "Logic" does in Mill's. In the latter, Mill applies his
metaphysical doctrine to the discovery and determination of truth; in
the "Grammar," Newman uses his philosophical doctrine to explain and
vindicate the processes that involve and justify religious belief. He
explains, indeed, his object as not "to set forth the arguments which
issue in the belief" of certain doctrines, "but to investigate what it
is to believe in them, what the mind does, what it contemplates, when
it makes an act of faith." [Note 17]
But he confesses that to show what it is to believe, is, in a measure,
to show "why we believe;" the one problem, indeed, is but the other in
its most radical form. Now, the argument from first to last, and in
all its stages, reposes on Cardinal Newman's distinctive doctrine of
the reason; its inability to be more or other than a formal instrument
is the keynote of the book. Reason is to him individual; "every one
who reasons is his own centre; and no expedient for attaining a common
measure of minds can reverse this truth." [Note
18] In discussing "first principles," or "the propositions with
which we start in reasoning on any given subject-matter," he says—
"Sometimes our trust in our powers
of reasoning and memory—that is, our implicit assent to their
telling truly—is treated as a first principle; but we cannot
properly be said to have any trust in them as faculties. At most we
trust in particular acts of memory and reasoning. We are sure there
was a yesterday, and that we did this or that in it; we are sure that
three times six is eighteen, and that the diagonal of a square is
longer than the side. So far as this we may be said to trust the
mental act by which the object of our assent is verified; but in doing
so we imply no recognition of a genera1 power or faculty, or of any
capability or affection of our minds, over and above the particular
act. We know, indeed, that we have a faculty by which we remember, as
we know we have a faculty by which we breathe; but we gain this
knowledge by abstraction or inference from its particular acts, not by
direct experience. Nor do we trust in the faculty of memory or
reasoning as such, even after that we have inferred its existence; for
its acts are often inaccurate, nor do we invariably assent to them."
[Note 19]
Now, it were a curious point to determine how
trust of a "particular act" is possible without trust of the faculty
that performs its. If we know a given act to be true, we must have a
standard of truth; it is through the truthfulness of the faculty that
we know the falsity or truth of its "particular acts." But the
significance of the passage {853} does not lie in its inconsistencies,
but in its positive doctrine. Reason is but an instrument, a faculty
of reasoning, trustworthy in particular acts, not trustworthy
throughout. Being so restricted a faculty, we owe to it little, not
even the knowledge "that there are things existing external to
ourselves." That is due to "an instinct" which we have in common with "the
brute creation," and "the gift of reason is not a condition of its
existence." [Note 20] As with
the belief in an external world, so with the belief in God; reason has
nothing to do with either. "We begin to learn about God from
conscience." [Note 21] "Now
certainly the thought of God, as theists entertain it, is not gained
by an instinctive association of His presence with any sensible
phenomena; but the office which the senses directly fulfil as regards
creation, that devolves directly on certain of our mental phenomena as
regards the Creator. Those phenomena are found in the sense of moral
obligation." [Note 22]
2. Here, then, on the one hand we have the
impotent and instrumental reason, which can never get to God, and is
to be trusted only in "particular acts;" and, on the other hand, the
capable and authoritative conscience, in which God directly is, and
which is to be implicitly obeyed. And this dualism penetrates and
pervades the whole book; its argument may be said to be its logical
articulation. It is expressed in the distinctions between "notional
and real apprehension," "notional and real assent," and between "inference
and assent," and it underlies the cardinal doctrine of the "illative
sense." [Note 23] That doctrine
means that religion can never be handled on universal principles by a
reason that may truly be termed universal, but must be left to the man
so compacted of conscience and imagination as to have a sense for
religion and for the determination of religious questions. If the idea
of the reason had been larger and worthier, or if the relation between
the reason and the conscience had been more organically conceived, so
that, the two had appeared as a unity, the whole argumentative
structure, and the principles on which it is built, would have been
different. As it is, religion never gets inside the reason, nor the
reason inside religion. They are but formally related, never really or
vitally connected. Dr. Newman may have a perfect right to limit the
province and define the idea of reason in his own way; but then, the
exercise of the right has laid him open to a criticism which
apparently he has not understood, and which certainly he has said
nothing to invalidate. If the reason plays no part in the genesis of
the idea of God, it can play no part in its proof; but this position
{854} involves the converse; the idea of God and the proofs of His
being can never be real possessions of the reason. They remain without
it, grounds or premisses for its dialectical exercise; they do not
live within it, principles and laws of its very life. The philosophy
that so construes the reason as to involve these consequences is
sceptical; and this is the philosophy of "The Grammar of Assent."
VI.
But what significance has this extended criticism
of Cardinal Newman? Dr. Barry has warned me not to identify him with
the Catholic Church, for it cannot be identified with "any individual
genius however great." [Note 24]
I never did nor ever meant so to identify him. The Catholic Church is
greater than any theologian, but a theologian may also be greater than
the Catholic Church. The Fathers do not belong to Rome, but to
Christendom. Rome may have been in them, but more than Rome was there,
elements larger and richer than she was able to assimilate. The
earlier Greek Fathers had a nobler catholicity than she has reached;
the men of the heroic age of the Greek Church had another and more
generous anthropology, a freer and loftier ecclesiology than hers.
Augustine, too, was greater than Catholicism, for while its
developments have done the amplest justice to his ecclesiastical
doctrine, they have failed to do equal justice to his theological. The
official theology of Rome has more semi-Pelagian than Augustinian
elements; the Augsburg Confession expresses in its doctrine of sin
more truly and nearly the mind of Augustine than the Tridentine
Canons; and Calvin is a better and more faithful exponent of him than
either Bellarmine or Petavius. The Schoolmen, too, are in many ways
ours: they are, in the widest sense, Catholic divines: the exclusive
property of no Church, but the common possession of all. Nor would I
identify too closely any modern official or apologetic divine with
Catholicism. It has its own history of variations, and it would be no
grateful task to write it. The distinction between Rome and Cardinal
Newman was an explicit point in my criticism, necessary indeed to its
force, and emphasized by the contrast between the causes of the
Catholic revival in England and on the Continent. But he was selected
as the leader and representative of that revival in the special form
it here assumed—its real author and true embodiment, the man without
whom it either would not have been, or could not have been what it
was. If it is to be understood and critically appraised, it must be
through the man that made it. The {855} causes and influences that
determined his mind, belong, as it were, to its very essence—help us
to see what meaning and worth it has for the spirit and thought of our
time. He has told us by act and speech, in every variety of subtle
argument and eloquent phrase, that Catholicism is the only secure and
open haven for the doubt-driven and storm-tossed soul, that without it
the faith and hope of the Christian centuries must be engulphed by the
rising tides of negation and godlessness; but when we examine the
reasons of his act and his peculiar speech, the bases of his argument
and apologies, we find that they proceed from as deep a scepticism as
the one he invites us to escape. He has lost God out of the reason and
the realm of the reasonable, and thinks He is to be got back only as a
Deus ex machinā. To build a supernatural faith on a natural
impotence seems to us a suicidal proceeding. We prefer to find God
where he has not found Him, and build faith on the sanity of a human
reason which is full of God and akin to the divine.
VII.
But now we are glad to escape from the ungracious
work of analysis and criticism to freer and nobler fields of
discussion. The questions which Dr. Barry has raised and so ably
handled deserve a fuller treatment than is here possible; but this
paper must not close without an attempt to meet the difficulties
started by so frank and courteous an opponent. These may be reduced to
two points: the relation, first, of the Church or Churches to
religion; and next, of authority to religion, on the one hand, and to
reason, on the other.
1. Dr. Barry criticizes severely some remarks of
mine as to the Churches, and the idea of the Church [Note
25]. We differ here indeed radically. To him the Church is
equivalent to religion, co-extensive and identical with it; to me,
whether it be conceived as one or as a multitude, it is but a means or
agency for the realization of religion, to be judged by its character
as means and its relation to its end. He says: "The Christian
religion, as hitherto conceived, has been whatever else you please,
but certainly an organized system of teaching, one Church or a hundred
Churches, but always a body requiring from its members submission to
Articles, or to the Bible as {856} cutting short disputes by virtue of
its inspiration." [Note 26] The
Christian religion may indeed be so conceived, but not the religion of
Christ. The Churches have given the former historical being, but they
have been only attempts at the latter. Here, if anywhere, "the best is
yet to be;" the conditions of realization, rather than the realization
itself, are in process of becoming. In the New Testament no two ideas
are more distinct than those of the kingdom of heaven or of God, and
of the Church; they differ not only formally, but materially. The one
is the idea Jesus most loves to state and to explain, that he has most
often and variously illustrated by metaphor and parable, that He has
steeped in the most august associations, made glorious to hope,
beautiful by its promises, awful by its threatenings; the other He has
but twice expressed, once in a casual way, and once solemnly in the
address to Peter, yet in words that almost seem chosen with the view
of accentuating its difference from the Kingdom. He builds the Church,
but He founds the Kingdom; human agency may help in the one, but He
alone is active in the other. The apostles plant churches, but not
kingdoms; they ordain elders, but do not anoint kings. The Kingdom is
universal, ethical, ideal, invisible, what already is, yet what is
still to be. Men are to come from the East and West, and are to sit
down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of God; the
little child is in it as well as the grown man; the publican and
sinner may enter before the Pharisee or Scribe. It is the possession
of the poor in spirit and the persecuted; it is righteousness, joy,
peace in the Holy Ghost [Note 27];
it is inner, abides within men—is outer, working secretly like the
leaven hidden in the meal; it is here and now, yet men are to pray, "Thy
kingdom come." It ever moves in a circle of ideas that imply the sole
sovereignty of God, the sphere where He reigns and men obey, and His
rewards are unto the meek and the obedient. But to all this the idea
of the Church stands in contrast: it is vast, visible, instrumental,
the scene of varied human activities and agencies—a society men may
constitute, order, and administer. The Church is a body, a building, a
community. There are many churches; each city may have one or several;
in them differences may emerge and disputes rage; man may rule or be
ruled, excommunicate or be excommunicated. The Church was the
favourite apostolic idea, as the Kingdom was Christ's; while He
founded the Kingdom, the Apostles planted, not a Church, but churches.
And while these were the means, Christ's was the end; the Kingdom was
the religion, but the churches the method of its realization. It is an
eternal ideal, ever in process of embodiment, doing its work by virtue
alike of the immanence which makes it everywhere present and active,
and of the {857} transcendence which makes it a goal to be ever
approached, yet never reached; they are historical facts and factors,
working in the interests and for the realization of the ideal,
creating the conditions needed for it, exhibiting the successive and
progressive attempts at its achievement. To identify the churches with
the religion is to commit a blunder of the first order; it is to lose
the ideal of Jesus, to materialize the spiritual, to reduce to the
forms of space and confine within the limits of time the infinite and
the eternal. Such a view may be false—that has yet to be proved; but
its idea of religion, its work and possibilities, are sublime enough
to stand without shame in the presence of the most exalted doctrine of
historical Christianity; and it does not lie open to Dr. Barry's
criticism—nay, it deprives it of all its relevance. Means that
become ends are mischievous; churches may claim to be "the Christian
religion," but we cannot allow them to be the religion of Christ.
2. But the other is the greater and graver
question: How does authority stand related on the one hand to
religion, and on the other to reason? Dr. Barry says that I have made
an assault "upon authority itself, considered as the basis of revealed
religion." And he argues, in effect, thus: "If you admit the authority
of Christ, you admit in principle the very thing you have been
contending against." "There is no argument against an infallible
Church that may not be directly turned against a visible Christ." "If
a dogmatic Church is unreasonable, a dogmatic or inspired Christ is
unnecessary." [Note 28] Your
position, therefore, is illogical, and from it there are only two
logical issues: either maintain your polemic against authority as
embodied in Rome, and reduce it to consistency and completeness by
denying the authority of Christ; or, maintain the authority of Christ,
and follow the principle to its legitimate and complete and most
august expression in the Church of Rome. This is a fair argumentum
ad hominem, and deserves careful and dispassionate discussion.
(i.) The whole argument is vitiated by an initial
assumption—this, viz., that the two authorities are in nature and
quality identical and equivalent. While in both cases the one word is
used, it expresses two distinct and even opposed notions. There is no
sense in which Rome is an authority that Christ is one; and no sense
in which Christ is an authority that Rome is one. He is an authority
in the sense that conscience is; it is an authority in the sense that
the law and the legislature are authorities. His is personal, moral,
living; its is organized, definitive, determinative, administrative.
The authority which springs from a person, and is exercised through
conscience, is the basis of freedom; but the authority of a judicial
{858} tribunal or determinative conclave is its limitation or even
abrogation. The one presents matter for interpretation and belief, but
the other decides what is to be believed, and in what sense. The
attribute or essential characteristic of Christ's authority as
exercised and accepted is Sovereignty, but the attribute and note of
the papal authority is Infallibility. Christ is not infallible in the
papal sense, and the papal is not sovereign in the sense predicated of
Christ. Christ defines no dogma, formulates no ex cathedrā
judgment concerning the mode in which his own person and the relation
of the two natures must be conceived, or concerning the rank and
conception of his mother, or indeed on any of those things on which
Rome has most authoritatively spoken; while the methods of Rome in
enforcing her decrees are those of a legal or judicial or
institutional sovereignty. So absolute is the difference and so
emphatic the contrast between the two authorities that we may say, to
allow the sovereignty of Christ is to disallow the infallibility of
Rome, and to adopt the latter is to exchange a moral supremacy, which
permits no secular expediencies or diplomacies, for one legal and
deliberative, which must be now rigid and now elastic as the public
interests or the expediencies of the hour may demand. If, then, there
is to be argument from the principle of authority, it must conduct to
an entirely different conclusion from Dr. Barry's. If we accept
authority as embodied in Rome, we cannot admit it as personalized in
Christ; if we admit it as personalized in Christ, we cannot accept it
as embodied in Rome. That we admit His, is no argument why we should
admit another, but rather why no other should be admitted, especially
as that other is entirely distinct in nature, opposite in kind, and
incompatible in action. To supplement Christ by the Church is to
substitute the Church for Christ, to pass from the freedom of a moral
sovereignty to the bondage of a judicial infallibility. And so the
most conclusive argument against an infallible Church is a sovereign
Christ.
(ii.) "But this, it may be said, is to admit the
very principle of authority against which you so strenuously
contended; it is authority all the same, whether it be of Christ or
the Church." But, as has just been argued, the difference between
Christ and the Church makes their authorities altogether different.
They can be compared only to be contrasted, and are related as the
incompatible and the mutually exclusive. And this relation is due not
to the antagonism of rival or opposed authorities akin in order or
nature, but to the radical difference or essential incompatibility in
character and kind of the authorities themselves. Authority as
organized, legal, definitive, judicially, and officially infallible,
embodied in an episcopate or conclave or church, is one thing, and the
authority, personal, moral, religious, which Jesus claimed, is another
thing altogether; and the {859} very arguments which proved the former
a violation of God's own order, prove the latter its highest
expression or manifestation. I cannot allow, indeed, in Dr. Barry's
sense of the word, that authority is "the basis of revealed religion."
Revelation, but not authority, is the basis of all religion. Without
the presence and action of God in nature, through reason, and on man,
I could not conceive religion as existing at all. That it exists
anywhere is to me evidence that God has been active there, seeking
man, as man has been seeking Him. Whatever truth is at any place or
any moment found, comes from God, and reveals the God from whom it
comes. But all His truth comes through persons, and the degree and
quality of truth that so comes is the measure of the persons'
authority. Belief is not grounded on authority, but authority is
realized through belief. Jesus has authority over me because I believe
in Him; I do not believe in Him because of His authority. His words
become authoritative through faith; faith does not come because His
words are authoritative. His sovereignty is felt to be legitimate and
absolute because His absolute truth is recognized; and to this
recognition, authority, in the Roman sense, not only does not
contribute, but is through and through opposed. To believe in Christ
because of the Church's decrees and determinations is to believe in
the Church, not in Christ, and to accept its infallibility instead of
His sovereignty. The authority based on truth as believed and loved,
is in harmony with reason; the authority that claims to be the basis
and infallible judge of truth, is contrary to it.
It is impossible indeed, in the few pages allowed
me by the grace of the editor, to discuss these large questions.
Enough to say, the Bible never was to Protestants an authority in a
similar or even a kindred sense to that in which Rome was to
Romanists. The difference comes out in its most manifest form in the
so-called principle or doctrine of private judgment, which means that
the Bible was, by its very nature, not a body of formal ex cathedrā
determinations, but, as it were, the home and source of the material
that was to be determined by the living Christian spirit, as illumined
and guided by the indwelling Spirit of God. To this position the
exercise of the reason was a necessity; truth could be authoritative
only as it was believed, and belief was possible only as the mind was
convinced and satisfied. This does not mean that men must follow an
argumentative process before they can believe, but it does mean that
it is always their right and in certain cases may be their manifest
duty so to do. In saying this we say that religion is truth, and has
as truth nothing to fear from the freest exercise of the reason,
though much to fear from the partial or prejudiced or sluggish
intellect; that the only authority possible to it, or the persons who
bring and realize it, is the sovereignty that comes of its {860} and
their imperial and imperative truth. Such an attitude seems to me the
only attitude that has living faith either in God or religion, either
in Christ or His kingdom. If I read His mind aright, He would rather
have His Church live face to face and contend hand to hand with the
questioning and critical reason, than see it hedged round by the most
peremptory and invulnerable infallibility. It is too wide and too
comprehensive to be so hedged in, for now, as of old, God does not
leave Himself anywhere without a witness. His lines have gone out
through all the earth, and His word to the end of the world.
I wish it had been possible to end this paper
here and thus. I have now, as before, studiously endeavoured to speak
of Cardinal Newman, even while profoundly differing from him and
severely judging the philosophic principles on which he has based his
special Catholic apologetic, with all the respect and even reverence
due to his great age, great services, and eminent saintliness; but he
has been pleased to adopt in this case a method and style of
controversy that might well provoke, and even justify, speech of
another sort. He is the best judge of the spirit and manner that in
such circumstances most become him, but I cannot follow him into the
postscript he appended to his paper without a distinct and solemn
protest. Passion, invective, and inuendo are things easily repaid in
kind; but if the original use of them were unworthy, any imitation
were unworthier still. What has to be said in correction will be said
in the plainest possible way, in full remembrance that the person
corrected is Cardinal Newman.
He says: that I have "after all" selected for
adverse notice (over and above the "Apologia") only "some clauses in
an Oratorian and two sentences in an Oxford Sermon" (p. 466). The
facts are these: On the six pages which, in the May number of this REVIEW,
are more specially devoted to the discussion of Dr. Newman's position,
there are twenty-four references to his works, the list including the "Apologia,"
"The Grammar of Assent," "University Sermons," "Discourses to Mixed
Congregations," and the "Letter to the Duke of Norfolk." Every one of
these references seemed and seem to me necessary to the criticism.
He says of the criticism on the "Grammar of
Assent," "not a shred of quotation is given to support this charge,
not a single reference" (p. 467). True, so far as the selected
sentences are concerned; but on the preceding pages there are, bearing
directly on the criticism and leading up to it, nine references to the
"Grammar."
He says again: "At the end of it, instead of such
necessary proof, a sentence is tacked on to it, which after some
search I found, not in the essay on Assent, but in one of my sermons,
written above {861} thirty years before, taken out of its context, and
cut off from the note upon it which I had added in its Catholic
edition." At the bottom of the page a reference to the sermons, in the
Catholic edition too, is given, and a further reference for comparison
to a remark by Mr. Lilly on the passage and its note.
I feel humiliated at having to notice at the end
of a grave discussion such things as these, but they were the weapons
Cardinal Newman used, demanding and receiving notice only because they
were his. Worthier are the five instances of what he considers
specific misconception or misrepresentation; but if, instead of
attempting to rebut the criticisms of a man "whose own opinions, to
tell the truth," he had "not a dream of" (p. 461), he had done
something to understand the critic and his criticism, even these
charges would not have been made—at least, not in their present
form. In no one of these five instances would I allow his construction
to be correct. It was in Dr. Newman's choice to intervene or not in
this controversy, but it is not in his choice to be allowed,
unchallenged, to intervene on false grounds. He has closed with one
epilogue, I might retort with another; but, instead, I will utter no
word that would rebuke the feeling, which has never, amid all this
severe and adverse criticism, died from my heart, of grateful
reverence for John Henry Cardinal Newman.
A. M. FAIRBAIRN.
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Notes
1. Contemporary Review, October, p. 457.
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2.
Ibid. p. 466.
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3.
Contemporary Review, p. 460.
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4.
"University Sermons," p. 55. The notes are added, for here, as
elsewhere throughout the volume, they are significant by their very
limitations. They may qualify the text, explain a term or a phrase,
protest against a given inference or result; but they never either
modify or alter the radical doctrine. These notes are needed to
elucidate the criticism, for nothing has been more helpful to it than
a minute and comparative study of them.
Return to text
5.
Contemporary Review, pp. 459-460. A few more instances from the "University
Sermons," of Dr. Newman's use of the term Reason, maybe added to
those he has himself given; they ought to be studied with the "Catholic
Notes," pp. 58, § 4; 60-61, § 7; 65, 67, 70, 73, 88, 179, 194-195,
214-215.
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6.
Contemporary Review, p. 467.
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7.
See, for example, as applying the principles of the "University
Sermons" to contemporary mind and literature, the following Essays:—"Introduction
of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion" (1835). This is
practically a review, hard and unsympathetic, of Jacob Abbott and
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. "Apostolical Tradition" (1836); "Milman's
View of Christianity" (1841), a review of his "most dangerous and
insidious" History; "Private Judgment" (1841). This latter is, in
particular, instructive and suggestive. These are reprinted in the "Essays,
Critical and Historical." Another and even more illustrative paper
is "The Tamworth Reading-room": in "Discussions
and Arguments," art. iv. This contains the famous letters of "Catholicus
'against Sir Robert Peel and Lord Brougham.
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8.
"The Tamworth Reading-room": "Discussions and Arguments," pp. 299-300,
4th edition. To this remarkable passage Dr. Newman has appended the
following note:—"This is too absolute, if it is to be taken to mean
that the legitimate, and what may be called the objective conclusion
from the fact of Nature, viewed in the concrete, is not in favour of
the Being and Providence of God" (vide "Essay
on Assent," pp. 336, 345, 369; and "Univ. Serm.," p. 194). But
this, like the other "Catholic Notes," changes the doctrine in no
material respect; it simply protests what the author did not wish to
mean.
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9.
"University Sermons," p. 60.
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10.
"Discussions and Arguments," p. 302. The italics are his own.
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11.
"The Arians in the Fourth Century,"
pp. 79-80 (4th ed.).
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12.
"Private Judgment" (1841). "Essays
Critical and Historical," vol. ii. pp. 353-355 (5th ed.).
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13.
"The Development of Doctrine,"
pp. 124-125 (2nd ed.).
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14.
"Essay on Development." 2nd edit. London, 1846. Pp. 124, 125.
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15.
"The knowledge of God is the highest function of our nature, and as
regards that knowledge, reason only holds the place of an instrument."
(Note in "University Sermons," p. 7.)
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16.
"Apologia," p. 198.
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17.
"Grammar of Assent," p. 99.
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18.
Ibid. p. 345.
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19.
Ibid. pp. 60-61.
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20.
"Grammar of Assent," pp. 61, 62.
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21.
Ibid. p. 63.
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22.
Ibid. pp. 103, 104.
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23.
It is impossible to summarize here, or illustrate in needed detail,
the significant positions in the chapters on Assent, Certitude,
Inference, and the Illative Sense: an opportunity of developing their
metaphysical basis, and illustrating its bearing on the argument, may
yet be furnished.
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24.
Contemporary Review, November, p. 662. There
are many things in his paper which I cannot accept, whether as
representing my position, or in the reply to what it is supposed to
be. In the remarks, for example (pp. 670-671), on the parallel and
contrast between Newman and Kant, he has quite misapprehended Kant's
position, and, as a consequence, the argument which was based upon it.
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25.
Dr. Barry is too honourable a critic wilfully to misrepresent the man
he criticizes, but here is an admirable example of the art of
controversial quotation. He represents me (p. 657) as saying—"That
religion must be emancipated from the churches, since these have, on
the whole, 'become simply the most irreligious of institutions,
mischievous in the very degree of their power.'" Now here is the
rather tame original of this rash and atrocious deliverance:—"The
Churches are the means, but Religion is the end; and if they, instead
of being well content to be and to be held means, good in the degree
of their fitness and efficiency, regard and give themselves out as
ends, then they become simply the most irreligious of institutions,
mischievous in the very degree of their power." (Contemporary Review,
March, 1884, p. 354.)
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26.
Contemporary Review, November, p. 657.
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27.
Rom. xiv. 17.
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28. Contemporary
Review, p. 600.
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