As
we saw in the previous posting on this subject, John Henry Newman tended to
rely on absolutes discerned by faith and reason instead of transitory popular
fads, expedience, or even earthshaking changes in society in forming his
opinions. Newman had, in the best sense,
the extreme disadvantage of being an unworldly person in an increasingly materialistic
society. This explains many things that
have baffled modern commentators as well as Newman’s own “failures” in carrying
out projects that relied in any degree on matters outside of the realm of personal
faith and reason.
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| John Henry Newman |
The
rather turgid, even silly modern (and modernist) efforts to psychoanalyze
Newman or assign motives to him in light of whatever fashions or theories have
seized the fancy of the moment can therefore be seen in their proper light. It is only necessary to understand that this
world was essentially irrelevant to him except insofar as it assisted or
hindered someone’s personal path to God.
In
social justice terms, then, Newman failed to account for human nature except as
it relates to religion and was thus the quintessential individualist —
religiously and philosophically speaking (an observation Father William J.
Ferree made concerning Fulton J. Sheen).
He had no real grasp of man as a political animal, and therefore no true
appreciation of the importance of institutions.
As
a result, Newman quite properly rejected any consideration of the abstraction
of the collective as being on the same level as actual human beings. An abstraction, after all, is a human
construct that has no existence apart from the human mind. It cannot be said by any stretch of the
imagination said to be put on the same basis as human beings created by God.
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| Fr. William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
Unfortunately,
Newman then “threw the baby out with the bath” and assumed it is only necessary
that someone be guided by faith and reason to be personally virtuous, a
conclusion confirmed by his own essentially solitary, even lonely path into the
Catholic Church. (Ibid., 30-40.) He did not
take into consideration the possibility that the institutions of the common
good within which human beings as political animals normally subsist can and do
inhibit and even prevent virtuous behavior.
Of
course, institutions are not in and of themselves sinful or virtuous. How institutions are structured, however,
determines whether it is difficult or easy for those subsisting within those
institutions to be sinful or virtuous, depending on their own inclinations and
consciences. Institutions are therefore
structures of sin, or structures of virtue, and subject to reform or
“restructuring” when they no longer meet human wants and needs within
acceptable, virtuous parameters. (Cf.
the “real” title of Quadragesimo Anno:
“On the Restructuring of the Social Order.”)
In
his Grammar of Assent, therefore,
Newman set out to defend accepting faith as true as fully consistent with the
human person’s nature as a rational animal, that is, as not contradicting
reason, even though faith necessarily goes beyond reason. He began, naturally enough, with the
manifestly true observation that scientific knowledge can be understood and is
susceptible to objective proof.
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| John Locke |
In
the school of British Empiricism, however — which is what Newman was confronting
with his Grammar of Assent — assent ceases
to be legitimate once it gets beyond that which is not manifestly true. According to John Locke (1632-1704), David
Hume (1711-1776), and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the possibility of assent
to belief of any kind depends on the strength of the empirical evidence
advanced in support of a proposition. Empiricism
precludes the possibility of “knowledgeable opinion” and mere opinion as valid
in the natural order, as well as the validity of all religious belief in the
supernatural order.
Not
that the empiricists necessarily regarded themselves as atheists — although
their thought logically moves one in that direction, or at least to
agnosticism. Instead, finding a sort of
common ground with fideists (those who assert the validity of faith without reason
or claim that faith can and does often contradict reason), the empiricists
tended to separate faith and reason, putting them in separate boxes, as it
were.
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| G.K. Chesterton |
In
this, the empiricists made the same mistake as Siger of Brabant (cir. 1235- cir. 1285)
in the Middle Ages, often miscalled “the Age of Faith” when it was really “the Age
of Faith and Reason.” By separating
faith and reason, the empiricists in effect declared there are two kinds of
truth; that there are circumstances in which truth becomes falsehood, and falsehood
becomes truth. As G.K. Chesterton
described this belief, possibly with the empiricists in mind,
Siger of Brabant said this: the Church must be
right theologically, but she can be wrong scientifically. There are two truths,
the truth of the supernatural world, and the truth of the natural world, which
contradicts the supernatural world. While we are being naturalists, we can
suppose that Christianity is all nonsense; but then, when we remember that we
are Christians, we must admit that Christianity is true even if it is nonsense.
In other words, Siger of Brabant split the human head in two, like
the blow in an old legend of battle; and declared that a man has two minds,
with one of which he must entirely believe and with the other may utter
disbelieve. To many this would at least seem like a parody of Thomism. As a fact, it was the
assassination of Thomism. It was not two ways of finding the same truth; it was
an untruthful way of pretending that there are two truths. (G.K. Chesterton, Saint
Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”. New
York: Image Books, 1956, 92-93.)
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| Siger of Brabant |
In
other words, those who separate faith and reason are on the wrong track. This is so whether they, like the
empiricists, demote or reject faith in favor of reason, or — like the fideists
— degrade or disregard reason in favor of faith. The drift (or headlong leap) into agnosticism
or atheism becomes inevitable. As Ralph
McInerny (1929-2010) of the University of Notre Dame explained, suggesting that
empiricists are actually fideists under a different name,
[T]o suggest that in
these circumstances one could go on believing is to make a mockery of both
faith and reason. The believer would be someone who believes that A is
true but who knows — thanks to Scripture scholarship — that -A
[Opposite-A] is true, and who still thinks it is all right for him to go
on believing that A is true. That is fideism with a vengeance. (Ralph M. McInerny, Miracles: A Catholic
View. Huntington, Indiana, 1986, 22.)
Newman’s
Grammar of Assent therefore begins
where Adler’s examination ended (at least in Ten Philosophical Mistakes): with an analysis of the validity of
religious faith, i.e., why faith is
as legitimate — and as true — as any other truth. In furtherance of this end the Grammar is divided into two parts.
“Assent and Apprehension,” the first part of
the Grammar, deals with how one
believes as true that for which there is empirical proof, but which is not
understood. “Assent and Inference,” the
second part, addresses the issue of how one believes as true that which does
not have empirical proof, but also which does not contradict that which is
manifestly true.
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| Algernon Sidney |
In
other words, in refutation of what Chesterton called “the Double Mind of Man” (Chesterton,
Saint Thomas Aquinas, op. cit.,
92-93, 141), Newman
realized he was not dealing with two types of truth as, e.g., today’s modernists like E.F. Schumacher have claimed in order
to circumvent Newman’s logical thought (viz.,
Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed,
1979). That would be impossible in any
event, for truth is a unity, as the first principle of reason attests: “that
which is true is as true, and is true in the same way, as everything else that
is true.”
Rather,
what Newman did was analyze the different ways of accepting truth, of giving
assent. That is an entirely different
thing from saying that there are different kinds of truth.
Fortunately,
the actual arguments are not relevant to this discussion; they are extremely
complex and intricate. The important
thing is that Newman dealt with a serious challenge to religious faith in a
manner that still holds up under close examination, as Adler and others have demonstrated.
What
is of concern is that, while Newman rendered the empiricism of Locke and others
invalid, he also seems to have let his refutation of Locke’s and other’s
theories in one area color his understanding of Locke’s thought in quite
another area entirely, that relating to American type liberalism. This was unwise, for America’s founders
relied heavily on Thomist political philosophy, albeit in most (but not all) cases
filtered through Locke by way of his Treatises
on Government (1690) and Algernon Sidney (1623-1683) in his Discourses Concerning Government (1698)
. . . which brings us back to the question of how American type liberalism
differs from the European and English variety, which we shall address in the
next posting on this subject.
#30#
