Religious Morality in John Henry Newman: Hermeneutics of the Imagination by Gerard Magill (review)

Gerard Magill’s book on religious morality in John Henry Newman is the product of impressively meticulous research. One gets the impression that Magill has read virtually all of the recent secondary literature relevant to the topics he covers in this monograph. In fact, if a graduate student in Newman studies were compiling a bibliography for a thesis, Magill’s book would be an excellent place to start. Magill clearly conducted careful and detailed research in preparation for writing this book, and the final product offers a panorama of the key secondary literature related to Newman’s treatments of epistemology, morality, conscience, liberalism, and ecclesiology.

That is not to imply that Magill’s compiling of bibliographic data somehow represents the sole virtue of this book. To the contrary, his argument is both substantive and thought provoking, and any scholar involved in conversations about Newman’s philosophical ideas will want to have this volume in her library. Magill’s goal, as stated in the introduction, is to unpack the concept of religious morality in Newman’s writings. “Religious morality,” Magill clarifies, has to do with “the religious significance that [Newman] attributed to the natural perception of morality” (1). This phenomenon was important to Newman because he saw the natural perception of moral truths as a preparation for receiving the content of divine revelation. Conscience plays a key role in this process. Insofar as non-believers heed the stirrings of conscience, they will be drawn ever closer to the place where they can recognize the reality of God and his activity in the world. But the natural perception of morality was significant for Newman not simply with respect to extra-ecclesial concerns, but also because it provided a starting point for giving an account of the reasonableness of faith. When Newman wrote on the topic of faith and reason, he did not fall back on scholastic arguments. Rather, he sought to develop a phenomenology of religious belief, which could describe how the human mind normally comes to accept supernatural truths.

Magill is forthright in his introduction that he intends to adopt a systematic approach for studying Newman’s understanding of religious morality. “To pursue the discussion in a systematic manner,” Magill analyzes several “foundations of religious morality,” which he perceives in Newman’s writings. He lists three theoretical foundations: namely, (1) Newman’s commitment to truth and holiness, (2) Newman’s religious epistemology of reason and belief, and (3) Newman’s hermeneutics of the imagination. Alongside these, Magill covers three practical foundations: (1) the moral law, (2) moral conscience, and (3) church tradition. The three practical foundations, then, are concrete. They are the resources upon which humans draw to navigate ethical questions, both large and small. The theoretical foundations are more like interpretive devices. They are akin to lenses by which Newman analyzes and explains the ways persons receive and apply the contents of the moral law and sacred tradition. Part of Newman’s goal in integrating these theoretical and practical foundations is to provide an account for the reasonableness of faith—one that is holistic, not reductive, and attentive to the role that conscience plays in coming to recognize God’s presence in our lives. Conscience, in Newman’s view, is just as important as intellect for coming to see the world rightly and thereby learning to live well.

Some seasoned Newman scholars may have concerns about Magill’s decision to adopt a systematic approach. Magill himself observes that Newman had a “non-systematic way of writing” (2), which was related to the fact that most of Newman’s works were responses to a specific controversy or occurrence. Particularly after becoming Roman Catholic, Newman was insistent that he was a controversialist, not a (systematic) theologian. The question naturally arises then whether systematic treatments of Newman’s corpus are methodologically problematic on account of their standing crosswise to Newman’s own modus operandi. In my...