Newman on Faith and Reason

Cynthia Nielson has written on Michael Polanyi’s notion of “tacit knowledge”. Polanyi held that all knowledge is an affair of the whole person and that even in the sphere of natural science all rational knowledge includes certain faith based elements. I was struck by the parallels between Polanyi’s “tacit knowledge” and Newman’s “illative sense” which he employs in the specifically theological context of how people come to know God.

Newman devoted a great deal of effort to resolving the question of faith’s relation to reason. This was a particularly acute issue in his time with the growing rise of sceptical attitudes towards religion. In particular he wished to challenge the view of reason maintained by the British empiricist tradition that placed it squarely within a rationalist and empirical context. Newman felt Locke in particular had simply misrepresented the facts of experience in order to make them fit into his arbitrary theory. Newman wanted to show his contemporaries that faith and reason do not conflict but also that reason (conceived in a narrow rationalistic sense) cannot be seen as being above faith and the arbiter of all truth. Instead he offers the following statement: “Reason need not be the origin of Faith, as Faith exists in the very persons believing, though it does test and verify it.” This follows in the tradition of Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding.” Reason has a role to play but faith is in no way subordinate to it, in fact it has primacy.

Newman’s view of faith’s assent to the truths of Christianity was influenced by the work of Bishop Butler and his insistence on taking the mind in “the particular constitution of our actual human nature”. Newman was interested in how people actually come to hold certain beliefs, not some theory which has little to do with reality. He did not see much value in syllogistic proofs for the existence of God, for he was well aware that the average person in the pew simply does not come to believe in such a manner. He expressed his incredulity at the thought of anyone coming to faith through logical argumentation in the following manner: “first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism.” For the vast majority of people faith is a far less clear-cut affair. Nevertheless, Newman could not therefore conclude that most Christians do not actually have faith but are rather merely prey to superstition: “If children, if the poor, if the busy can have true faith, yet cannot weigh evidence, evidence is not the simple foundation on which faith is built”.

Newman’s theory was that people came to believe for various different reasons, any one of which taken separately would not suffice to establish faith, but taken as a whole were enough to propel someone towards faith. If one reflects on one’s own faith, it becomes clear that this idea will often accord with one’s own experience – it is difficult to say just why one believes exactly, for there exist a whole host of ‘lesser’ reasons. Yet the assent cannot be therefore dismissed as irrational. As Newman states: “Assent in reasonings not demonstrative is too widely recognized an act to be irrational”. Newman thus sees faith as rationally grounded (that is to say, it is not simply a purely volitional act), but not a wholly rationalist enterprise if that is taken to mean the intellect’s assent to doctrinal propositions. Faith must thus be seen as a ‘venture’, for reason alone cannot propel the person towards Christianity. The certainty of faith cannot annul the element of risk inherent in the act of faith. Newman called the coming together of various strands of argument to create certitude the “illative sense”. This faculty of the reason works in a spontaneous manner and so it may seem like there is no truly reasoned process going on, it is ‘unconscious’. Newman himself puts it this way: “Faith is the simple lifting of the mind to the Unseen God, without conscious reasoning or formal argument.” One could almost say that Newman’s work on faith and reason is like an extended discussion of Pascal’s saying that “the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.” This does not mean that faith is irrational, merely that ‘reason’ must be interpreted in a wider sense than ‘rationality’. Newman also stressed the role of conscience in faith and believed that conscience provided the greatest ‘proof’ for God’s existence. This is so because conscience automatically looks to something above itself for its sanction. This ‘something higher’ is a moral law-giver ultimately identified as God.

Newman’s insistence that the act of faith was an affair of the whole person, heart as well as mind, was an impetus towards making faith a truly life-changing affair and constitutive of one’s actions. Newman makes this clear in his discussion of the ‘Spiritual mind’. The person who has truly made the Christian faith his own will be entirely transformed; he will be made in the form of Christ so to speak. This acting Christianly is something quite different from those with a ‘religious’ attitude that may well be full of civic virtue. Newman does not deny that such people do much that is good and yet this obedience “yet hardly deserve[s] the title of Christian.” Christian faith is demanding, it requires “an utter and absolute captivity of [one’s] will to His will.”