Newman on the Grounds of Faith

An epistemological issue that preoccupied John Henry Newman was the conditions under which Christian belief can be considered rational. As he sought to offer a broader and more refined account of faith and reason, he focused, for example, on the informal nature of reasoning and on the role of personal judgment in assessing evidence. In particular, his approach homed in on how the mind actually works and the conditions under which people reason within various contexts and fields of knowledge.

Along these lines, an important, though complex, issue involves clarifying Newman's position on the grounds of faith. In this respect, Anthony Kenny says the University Sermons contain some of Newman's "very best work on the nature and justification of faith."¹ However, Newman's position on the grounds of faith in some of the University Sermons is difficult to capture and, perhaps, prone to misunderstanding (e.g., serm. 10). As I hope to show, Newman provides greater clarification of his own position on the grounds of faith in sermon 13 (see also serm. 14).

Accordingly, I will structure this essay in the following way. First, I will identify some potential misunderstandings in the University Sermons concerning Newman's position on the grounds of faith. Second, I will show how the distinction between implicit and explicit reason in sermon 13 shapes both his rejection of a particular kind of hard rationalism (a religious belief is rational if and only if it can be articulated or demonstrated formally) and his alternative understanding of the grounds of faith. Implicit reason, for Newman, is a spontaneous, unconscious, or unargumentative process of reasoning by which people form beliefs without appealing to explicitly stated grounds; explicit reason is a second-order activity that works out whether beliefs are true rather than false; the former is unreflective, while the latter has a reflective component.² Third, I will argue constructively that Newman is best construed as a soft rationalist insofar as he thinks that (1) faith is subject to rational analysis, (2) its process of reasoning is cumulative, though not necessarily formal, in nature, and (3) judgment plays an irreducible role in evaluating evidence and forming arguments. Fourth, I will briefly place Newman's proposal within the contemporary debate between fideism and rationalism.

Potential Misunderstandings

In the University Sermons, Newman offers some rich epistemological insights concerning the conditions under which Christian belief can be considered rational. However, the polemical edge of these sermons may contribute to (or result in) some misleading conclusions.³ To do constructive justice to them, one has to tease out and develop the relevant epistemological hints. As Newman himself points out, the discourses on faith and reason show a progression and development of thought, especially in terms of providing precise definitions and clarifying the relationship between faith and reason. They "are of the nature of an exploring expedition into an all but unknown country, and do not even venture on a definition of either Faith or Reason on starting. As they proceed, however, they become more precise, as well as more accurate" (US pref.; see also US 10.45). For instance, one gets a clearer sense of Newman's own position on the grounds of faith in sermon 13 but not necessarily in sermon 10.

While Newman clearly thinks that faith is rational, some passages in the University Sermons seem to complicate things on this front. For example, Newman says that faith is "mainly swayed by antecedent considerations . . . by previous notices, prepossessions, and (in a good sense of the word) prejudices" (US 10.26). In terms of "when the mind savingly believes, the reasoning which that belief involves, if it be logical, does not merely proceed from the actual evidence, but from other grounds besides" (US 11.10). The "desire" of faith "is its main evidence . . . Not that it has no grounds in Reason, that is, in evidence; but because it is satisfied with so much less than would be necessary" (US 10.34). These passages seem on the surface to suggest that Newman thinks that faith is not based primarily on evidence but instead on...