This is the text of the 45th Maronite Podcast
We have already seen that, in the seven letters comprising The Tamworth Reading Room of 1841, St John Henry Newman was, in answering comments made by Sir Robert Peel at the opening of the said Reading Room, addressing the questions: Will studying science make the average person any better? Does such secular study lead us to be more religious people? St Newman said: No, religion points us to the need for a victory of the mind over itself … (bringing) unity (to) our complex nature –… an harmonizing of the internal chaos. As he said, Sir Robert’s assumption was that: “our true excellence comes not from within, but from without; not wrought out through personal struggles and sufferings, but following upon a passive exposure to influences over which we have no control.”
Also, to raise secular knowledge above all else may result in losing the virtues people had from their religious culture. St Newman went on to say:
Christianity, and nothing short of it, must be made the element and principle of all education. Where it has been laid as the first stone, and acknowledged as the governing spirit, it will take up into itself, assimilate, and give a character to literature and science. … But if in education we begin with nature before grace, with evidences before faith, with science before conscience, with poetry before practice, we shall be doing much the same as if we were to indulge the appetites and passions, and turn a deaf ear to the reason. In each case we misplace what in its place is a divine gift. If we attempt to effect a moral improvement by means of poetry, we shall but mature into a mawkish, frivolous, and fastidious sentimentalism; —if by means of argument, into a dry, unamiable long-headedness (274-5)
This is incisive. I have long believed that it is a major error to insist upon seminarians studying philosophy before they study theology: it too often results in their losing the faith, because they then judge theology from the perspective of philosophy. Now I am not entirely enamoured of modern theology. But apart from that, I would say that literature, history, medicine, languages, art, agriculture, and diverse arts, crafts, trades, and sciences are better trainings for the mind than philosophy – but I would not make the further mistake of thinking that they therefore lead to religion and the supernatural. As St Newman says, science is good in its own place, but not out of it.
Not only is science put in a position and allocated a work which is not right, but Christianity is also misunderstood:
Christianity is faith, faith implies a doctrine; a doctrine propositions; propositions yes or no, yes or no differences. Differences, then, are the natural attendants on Christianity, and you cannot have Christianity, and not have differences. (284)
This makes sense, after all, the faith is a “sign of contradiction.” But we have lost the sense of the great difficulty and hence the nobility of the faith:
Faith, viewed in its history through past ages, presents us with the fulfilment of one great idea in particular—that, namely, of an aristocracy of exalted spirits, drawn together out of all countries, ranks, and ages, raised above the condition of humanity, specimens of the capabilities of our race, incentives to rivalry and patterns for imitation. (288)
Too much, Christianity has been subject to a bleaching, a de-naturing, so that it loses its flavour, the taste which Our Lord said we must not lose. (Matthew 5:13-14) It can become so inclusive that it contains nothing, because a container necessarily has barriers: were there no barriers, no impervious guards, flies would get into our water, air would rot all our food. What would a refrigerator be worth if it became inclusive, or an over?
So the faith is a coherent unity, and must be respected as such, else it becomes something foreign. But is that feasible in today’s world? The objection that it was not was being bruited about in St Newman’s day, hence he wrote:
People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity should regain the organic power in human society which once it possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. … I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence. … do not attempt by philosophy what once was done by religion. The ascendancy of Faith may be impracticable, but the reign of Knowledge is incomprehensible. (292)
Against Peel’s optimism that education in the natural disciplines could lead to a spiritual development, St Newman countered: “Science gives us the grounds or premises from which religious truths are to be inferred; but it does not set about inferring them much less does it reach the inference; – that is not its province.” (292-293). Further, deductions by themselves do not have any power of persuasion: the heart has to be reached through the imagination, impressions, and through human influence. As St Newman states: “No one … will die for his own conclusions; he dies for realities.” (293) He continues: “ … man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal.” (294) A “mere notion” of God is of no value, you might as well try and “warm yourself by the Moon.” (304) That is why he could say:
I have no confidence … in philosophers who cannot help being religious, and are Christians by implication. They sit at home, and reach forward to distances which astonish us; but they hit without grasping, and are sometimes as confident about shadows as about realities. They have worked out by a calculation the lie of a country which they never saw, … and like blind men, though they can put a stranger on his way, they cannot walk straight themselves, and do not feel it quite their business to walk at all. (294)
There is so much penetration here that it is easy to miss it. He speaks, for example, of “philosophers who cannot help being religious …”, that is, the sort of person we have all met who makes you wonder why on earth he considers himself a Christian. He is so weak in the faith, so willing to compromise with the world, to put political views on a higher level than spiritual ones, that we wonder what his true religion actually is: after all, religion is a question of doing more than it is of saying; of faith more than speaking. The belief that identifies Christians is not in theories, but in the heart – the conviction of a truth to live and to die for. He then goes on to brilliantly describe the perils of a philosophical approach to the existence of God:
Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism. Tell men to gain notions of a Creator from His works, and, if they were to set about it (which nobody does), they would be jaded and wearied by the labyrinth they were tracing. Their minds would be gorged and surfeited by the logical operation. Logicians are more set upon concluding rightly, than on right conclusions. They cannot see the end for the process. … To most men argument makes the point in hand only more doubtful, and considerably less impressive. After all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise. (294)
He continues:
Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof. We shall ever be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences … We shall never get at our first principles. Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyse your elements, sinking further and further, and finding “in the lowest depth a lower deep,” till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism. I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral governance from the physical world. Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith. (295)
This is so true it is a wonder we all do not realise it, but the reality is, something in us does not want to realise it. Let us go over it. If religion depends upon proofs, then we can never find a solid enough position to start, because every proof has itself first to be proved. This leads easily enough to scepticism for, as we have seen in life, many people will not remain unsure for ever – they seek intellectual stability, and would rather accept disbelief as a first principle than to have no first principle at all – and that is where the civil wars within modern philosophy leave them too often. And at the risk of stressing a strong point to tiresomeness, let me repeat that St Newman produces one of the most concise descriptions of faith to be found outside the Scriptures: “Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.” (295) Otherwise, as he says of certain teachings, they: “came to nothing, (but were) dissipated in thoughts which had no point, and inquiries which converged to no centre, that it ended as it began, and sent away its hearers as it found them;—whereas the instruction in the Church, with all its defects and mistakes, comes to some end, for it started from some beginning. Such is the difference between the dogmatism of faith and the speculations of logic.” (296-297)
This last point was to be a feature of St JHN’s work, reaching a memorable form in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, although that book, unfortunately, is often so difficult to follow that it does not fully realise its aim, which means that we have to do our small parts to continue that work. Briefly, it is to so proclaim the faith that people not only receive ideas, but also feel the reality of the faith, that they see it as a powerfully desirable goal in life.
He is saying that faith is not a fantasy, a dream, or an escape; faith, not argument or even knowledge is the foundation of really fruitful action. (p. 296) St Newman says:
Now I wish to state all this as matter of fact … Why we are so constituted that Faith, not Knowledge or Argument, is our principle of action, is a question with which I have nothing to do; but I think it is a fact, and if it be such, we must resign ourselves to it as best we may … this practically been understood in all ages of the world, that no Religion has yet been a Religion of physics or of philosophy. It has ever been synonymous with Revelation. It never has been a deduction from what we know: it has ever been an assertion of what we are to believe. It has never lived in a conclusion; it has ever been a message, or a history, or a vision. (296)
Christianity tells a supernatural story: it is not a deduction from what we know but an assertion of what we are to believe. (p. 296) What we are taught by the Church, imperfect as it may be, still comes to some good end, because it started from a clear and solid beginning – revelation. (p. 297)
In the next podcast we examine the masterly seventh letter in this series.