Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (44 page)

If one is already aware, naturally, from childhood of the presence of God in the voice of conscience, Newman argues, then the moment of
assent
to revealed religion is the moment when one recognizes that primal inner voice to be the selfsame voice of the Lord discovered in Christianity. Hence it is a
moral
assent, and a personal assent.

FROM GOD’S EXISTENCE IN NATURE TO GOD’S REVELATION

For all its impressive beauty as a work of prose, the
Grammar
is a difficult book to follow. It is easy to be discouraged because of its discursive style and lack of

signposting. Most commentators, moreover, seek to elucidate the
Grammar
by offering explanatory ‘hints’ and ‘clues’ to its meaning outside of the text itself, reinforcing one’s conclusion that the book fails to deliver Newman’s intended argument.

I began reading the
Grammar
, aged nineteen, when the Catholic theologian, the late Doctor ‘Ikey’ Davis, then parish priest in Bearwood, Birmingham, placed it in my hands, intending that we should study it together over tea on Thursday afternoons during the winter of 1960. After a month of increasing confusion, I said to him: ‘It would help if I had just a brief general idea of where Newman is trying to take us.’ Ikey explained that it was not appropriate to produce a brief summary, precisely because Newman’s arguments about assent to faith are so subtle, mysterious, complex and resistant to analysis. Nevertheless, for better or worse, he threw me a lifeline. It went something like this: ‘Newman is saying that certitude in the truth of Christianity occurs when one finds it to be a perfect fit with one’s heart.’ Religion, he went on, like loving someone, is a matter of total engagement – emotions, intellect, experience, imagination. One does not assent to science in this fashion. So one does not approach the truth or otherwise of religion as one would attempt to prove or disprove a scientific hypothesis. After that we did not always follow Newman’s precise sequence of arguments, but maintained priorities that Ikey thought might help. We started with Newman’s discussion of the early discovery of God, from childhood.

It had been common for theologians from the eighteenth century to attempt to ‘prove’ the existence of God through philosophical arguments about the design of the universe and arguments about causation. Newman was not happy with such ‘proofs’. He wrote in the
Grammar
: ‘I do not want to be converted by a smart syllogism; if I am asked to convert others by it, I say plainly I do not care to overcome their reason without touching their hearts.’
⁸
The theists’ no-tion of God, he maintains in the
Grammar
, ‘requires but a cold and ineffective acceptance, though it be held ever so unconditionally’.
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Newman declares that the natural encounter with God, which he found in his youth through the voice of conscience, is comparable to our possession of reason, memory, and the perception of the beautiful. It requires no ‘proof ’. He goes on to explain that he is not referring to conscience as a set of specific judgments of right and wrong, but an underlying conviction that we ought to
do
what is right and
avoid
what is wrong. He adds that this does not depend on an impersonal abstract idea, but comes with a sense of emotion. There is an awareness of a voice that is personal. As the heroine of his novel
Callista
says:

You may tell me that this dictate is a mere law of my nature, as is to joy or to grieve. I cannot understand this. No, it is the echo of a person speaking to me. Nothing shall persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from a person external to me. It carries with it its proof of its divine origin.
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The mind is conscious of ‘one to whom he is amenable, whom he does not see, who sees him’. One hears echoes of ‘a Moral governor, sovereign and just’. At other times he wrote of the ‘echo of the living Word’, and ‘the echo of a person speaking to me’, and ‘our great internal teacher …’ This, for Newman, is God’s echo in nature, and, consciously or unconsciously, we are seeking the ultimate source of His voice, from very childhood, in the God of Revelation:

To a mind thus carefully formed upon the basis of its natural conscience, the world, both of nature and of man, does but give back a reflection of those truths about the One Living God, which have been familiar to it from childhood.
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Looking forward to the book’s conclusion, Newman is saying that Christianity makes a perfect fit with the human heart when varied experience of revealed religion finds unity with the God of nature experienced in the depths of one’s conscience. As he would write, feelingly, prayerfully, in his
Meditations and Devotions
¹²
: ‘By nature and by grace Thou art in me. I see Thee not in the material world except dimly, but I recognize Thy voice in my own intimate consciousness. I turn round and say Rabboni. O be ever thus with me.’

REAL AND NOTIONAL ASSENT

The
Grammar
is a book about different ways of knowing, rather than different ways of thinking. How do we
know
the faith? Newman makes an important distinction between what he calls ‘notional’ knowledge, by which he means knowledge of abstract ideas or concepts in science and philosophy, for example, and ‘real’ knowledge, by which he means knowledge that is encountered holistically with all one’s faculties engaged: senses, emotions, intellect, imagination. This real knowledge of the faith can include a broad span of encounters: prayer, lives of the saints, the sacraments, religious art, Scripture, the Eucharist, the living communities of the Church and awareness of its history.

He then describes two ways in which we ‘assent’, or come to accept what we know: ‘
notional
assent’ and ‘
real
assent’. ‘Notional assent’ involves acceptance of the truth of abstract ideas attained through linear, logical inferences. He classes this kind of knowledge as second-hand. ‘Real assent’ involves acceptance of truth through first-hand evidence, the ‘real knowledge’ of religion across a broad span of experience encountered with the whole of one’s being. Notional assent is a consequence of a prospective process of reasoning moving logically forward with a proposed goal in mind; real assent is retrospective, a realisation that follows a variety of parallel evidences and experiences. Real knowledge of religion, he argues, is supported by the strength of many strands (he calls them ‘accumulations of probabilities’), a complexity of encounters ‘too fine to avail separately,

too subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms, too numerous and various for conversion, even were they convertible’.
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3
Religion, he goes on, defies ‘the rude operation of syllogistic treatment’, just as a portrait is different from a sketch in ‘having, not merely a continuous outline, but all its details filled in, and shades and colours laid on and harmonized together’.

Taking the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as an example, Newman argues that the mystery (‘which is addressed far more to the imagination and the affections than to the intellect’) is apprehended by the faithful through devotions rather than by theological study. In the Creeds, moreover, it is encountered in prayer. ‘For myself ’, Newman writes, ‘I have ever felt [the Creed] as the most simple and sublime, the most devotional formulary to which Christianity has given birth, more so even than the
Veni Creator
or the
Te Deum
’.
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This leads him to a point where he employs a striking metaphor to illustrate his claim that it is possible to believe without understanding:

Break a ray of light into its constituent colours, each is beautiful, each may be enjoyed; attempt to unite them, and perhaps you produce only a dirty white. The pure and indivisible Light is seen only by the blessed inhabitants of heaven; here we have but such faint reflections of it as its diffraction supplies; but they are sufficient for faith and devotion. Attempt to combine them into one, and you gain nothing but a mystery, which you can describe as a notion, but cannot depict as an imagination.
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Hence members of the faithful address the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, imaginatively as individual, separate realities. Whereas ‘theology has to do with the Dogma of the Holy Trinity as a whole made up of many propositions, religion has to do with each of those separate propositions which compose it, and lives and thrives in the contemplation of them’.
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‘ILLATIVE SENSE’

It is not possible to practise religion, Newman declares, without certitude. ‘Without certitude in religious faith’, he maintains, ‘there may be much decency of profession and of observance, but there can be no habit of prayer, no directness of devotion, no intercourse with the unseen, no generosity of self-sacrifice.’ Certitude, moreover, requires perseverance. It is ‘essential for the Christian; and if he is to persevere to the end, his certitude must include in it a principle of persistence’.
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He goes on: ‘If religion is to be devotion, and not a mere matter of sentiment, if this is to be made the ruling principle of our lives, if our actions, one by one, and our daily conduct, are to be consistently directed towards an Invisible Being, we need something higher than a mere balance of arguments to fix and control

our minds.’
¹⁸
Or as he puts it succinctly in the
Apologia
: ‘Who can really pray to a Being, about whose existence he is seriously in doubt?’
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As he explores the nature and necessity of arrival at certitude, real assent (or the eureka moment), he appeals to the term ‘illative sense’, which, in an earlier draft, he had called ‘illative imagination’. Newman had expressed the thought behind this term in different ways down the years. Thirty years earlier he had employed the metaphor of a mountaineer:

The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out, and advances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another.
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The climber has reached the summit through an accumulation of disciplined manoeuvres, chance discoveries, training, memories, physical fitness, ropes, grappling irons, courage. He knows that he has reached the summit through an accumulation of factors operating in parallel, but looking back he cannot tell you precisely how the summit was achieved.

Elsewhere Newman employs the alternative, telling metaphor of a ‘cable’. Writing to a correspondent in 1864 he explains his reference to ‘probability’ in the
Apologia
. It was not that he was arguing that God is a probability rather than a certainty, but that he believes in God, in Christianity, in Catholicism,
on
a probability – ‘a cumulative, a transcendent probability, but still probability; inas-much as He who made us has so willed, that in mathematics indeed we arrive at certitude by rigid demonstration, but in religious inquiry we arrive at certitude by accumulated probabilities’.
2
1
Newman is not talking here about probability in the conventional sense, but a narrative of probabilities leading to certainty within the personal and moral domain: ‘The best illustration of what I hold is that of a
cable
which is made up of a number of separate threads, each feeble, yet together as sufficient as an iron rod.’
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