Faith, Reason, Conscience and Truth

Rationalism brought with it a rejection of both authority and transcendence, while fideism turned from the challenges of history and the tasks of this world to a distorted dependence upon authority and the supernatural. In such a world, Newman came eventually to a remarkable synthesis of faith and reason, which were for him “like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth.[1]

Pope St John Paul II

Newman brought a new clarity and realism to Catholic thought about the relation between faith and reason. Born in an age of religious questioning, the young Newman had been tempted by Enlightenment dismissal of any belief not backed by hard evidence as superstition. The Christian communities of his day, Catholic and Protestant, responded to this challenge by insisting that Christianity could be proved, by arguments from the order and harmony of nature, from the reality of miracles, or from the testimony of witnesses. Newman did not altogether dismiss such “evidences”, but questioned their decisiveness. He understood that we reach the certainties we live by, not by accumulated evidences, but by much less clear-cut routes.

Building on Bishop Joseph Butler’s dictum, “Probability is the guide of life”,[2] he argued that all the convictions that really matter, come not from purely logical or empirical proofs, but arise from the various evidences spread throughout one’s life. Faith is the reward of a longing heart earnestly searching for truth. Our hearts are stirred to faith “through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us”.[3] For Newman, it is the entire life of the Christian—worship, charitable deeds, study of scripture and tradition, and dialogue—which features converging probabilities. Such aspects of our lives might be individually inconclusive, but collectively result in certitude, the way a reliable rope is comprised of many strands. In fact, our ‘exertion’ and ongoing training in religious life yield a capacity for growth and judgement in religious matters. The characteristic process of all human thought is thus like ‘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.’[4] Faith is therefore in no sense irrational. 

For Newman the most persuasive evidence for the existence of God was not external proof, but the reality of conscience, the inescapable witness in every human heart that speaks of the objective reality of right and wrong. Of course, individual consciences may be mistaken, misled by upbringing or education - conscience is ‘the highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous’[5], and needs illumination by the Gospel and the Magisterium of the Church. Βut its very existence and its peremptory demands point us beyond ourselves, to seek the God whose goodness and righteousness conscience reflects.

In his own lifetime Newman was accused of reducing the motives for faith to purely subjective feeling, but his subtle exploration of the psychology of belief, culminating in the Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), has since been recognised as far truer to human experience than the arid intellectualism he combatted, and anticipates some of the insights of philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein. His teaching on conscience gave strength and purpose to members of the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany, and underlay the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae.

For Newman, religion was essentially a question of truth, which he called the “dogmatic principle”. In his address on the occasion of his creation as a Cardinal in 1879, known as his “Biglietto speech”, he recalled his lifelong opposition to ‘the spirit of liberalism in religion’, by which he meant the increasingly prevalent idea that ‘there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another’.[6] In a prophetic way, he foresaw the increasing leanings to relativism and the danger this would pose to the principle of religious truth, as well as to the right conception of the human person and the common good of society.

[1] “Letter of the Holy Father John Paul II on the Occasion of the 2nd Centenary of the Birth of Cardinal John Henry Newman” (22 January 2001), in L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), 7 March 2001, 2.

[2] See Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (J. Buckland and G. Keith, 1796), xiv. This text was originally published in 1736.

[3] John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), 92-93.

[4] John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, between A.D. 1826 and 1843 (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 257.

[5] John Henry Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 254

[6] For the full speech and quoted material, see: W. P. Neville, ed., Addresses to Cardinal Newman with His Replies (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905), 61-71 (at 64).