John Henry Newman, Natural Religion, and the Mystery of Faith

Editor’s note: On Monday, November 1st—All Saints’ Day—St. John Henry Newman will be proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIV. This essay is published here in honor of that proclamation and the remarkable life and thought of Newman.

I

In February 1825, Charles Newman sent his brother John a letter that became something of a milestone in both their lives.

“I am glad to say I have come to a satisfactory conclusion with regard to religion, sooner than could be expected,” Charles announced. After “a great deal of preparatory thought,” he confessed that he had “come to a judgment which no doubt will surprise you; for it is entirely against Christianity . . .” He had assumed Christianity to be “synonymous with wisdom and knowledge,” but found it “far otherwise.”

And the upshot could not have been more decided: “I think Mr Owen . . . beats St Paul hollow.” Here, of course, Charles was referring to Robert Owen, the utopian socialist. Subsequently, Newman encapsulated his brother’s objections to the Christian faith:

You say that ‘for practical motives to action Mr O. [Owen] beats St Paul hollow whose ‘doctrines’, tho’ ‘ingenious’ are unsuitable’ to this present race of men.’ —that knowledge is the great remedy for moral evil—that revealed religion ‘brings evil most abundantly into the world’, and gets praise when it merely cures some portion of that which it has caused. Again, it gets praise from the instances of great men who have believed it; tho’, instead of being improved by it, these in reality have ennobled it by their own excellence; —and further, that its effects have been unfairly estimated by the standard of right and wrong which itself proposes. Lastly, that the doctrine of eternal punishment (according to a statement of it of your own) is ridiculous.

Here we can see the barristerial aplomb with which Newman captured the points of view of those who opposed his own to refute their untenability—a piece of clairvoyance that must have galled his younger brother.

In adopting Owen’s anti-Christian philosophy, Charles set himself apart not only from his brother but from his entire family. Indeed, Robert Owen and his socialist ideas would affect nearly every aspect of Charles’ life, from his relations to his family and his associates, to his livelihood and his very sense of identity. But most of all, it would cause him to abandon his Christian faith, which Charles threw over when he was 23 and never recovered.

The letter would also be a milestone for Newman because it would be the first personal inkling he would have of what he called that “great apostasia,” which he described so memorably in the speech he gave in 1879 when he was made a cardinal:

Hitherto, it has been considered that Religion alone with its supernatural sanctions, was strong enough to secure submission of the masses of our population to law and order; now the Philosophers and Politicians are bent on satisfying the problem without the aid of Christianity. . . As to Religion, it is a private luxury, which a man may have if he will; but which of course . . . he must not obtrude on others, or indulge in to their annoyance. The general character of this great apostasia is one and the same everywhere [though] in detail, and in character it varies . . .

In attempting to repel this “great apostasia” Newman would often resort to natural religion, especially in a society in which revealed religion was scarcely credited, let alone understood. After all, knowing the vapidity of nominal Christianity, which is as prevalent in our own day as it was in his, he knew that uncatechized Christians often “have nothing to contemplate but their own failings; and these surely are numerous enough, and fit to make them dejected.” Indeed, in his sermon, “The State of Grace” (1836), he characterized these poor souls as “reduced to the state of natural religion, in which God’s Law is known without His Gospel. Under such circumstances, religion becomes little more than a code of morals, the word and will of an absent God, who will one day come to judge and recompense, not the voice of a present and bountiful Saviour.”

It was in this context that Newman took up the natural religion of Joseph Butler (1692-1752), the author of The Analogy of Religion (1736). “Butler’s doctrine that Probability is the guide of life,” Newman wrote in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) “led me…to the question of the logical cogency of Faith, on which I have written so much,” though he also insisted that probability still left open the question of how certainty is attained. “The danger of this doctrine,” he conceded, “in the case of many minds, is its tendency to destroy in them absolute certainty, leading them to consider every conclusion as doubtful, and resolving truth into an opinion, which it is safe indeed to obey or to profess, but not possible to embrace with full internal assent. If this were to be allowed, then the celebrated saying, “O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul!” would be the highest measure of devotion: —but who can really pray to a Being, about whose existence he is seriously in doubt?”

In showing how certainty could be attained by an apprehension of “converging probabilities,” Newman took a theory of natural religion and made it illumine the far richer terrain of Revelation. In this essay, I shall endeavor to show how it was Newman’s epistolary exchange with his brother Charles that first set the saint on the road to the composition of his great work of Christian epistemology, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), which would, at once, draw on and show the limitations of natural religion.

II

If Robert Owen sought to establish an atheist new order based on cooperation between capital and labour, in which capital, playing a paternalist role, would reform and improve labour, Newman tried to warn his brother against the appeal of specious novelty, which could never produce the warrant of tradition:

Alas, how many have been overset by certain fancies, that they had discovered new principles. Do not suppose yourself the first who has imagined truth hid almost from the whole world till he rejected it. Fresh theories of morals and religion are no uncommon thing; every projector flatters himself that now at least he has hit the mark; yet in time the bubbles break and vanish: thus whether your theory be a bubble or not, you have no right to feel confident in its truth from its being different from any theory yet invented.

There were clear parallels here to the Jacobin impostures that Edmund Burke exposed in his writings on the French Revolution. Of the French projectors who brought about such lasting mischief, Burke wrote: “They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery.”

Robert Owen proved himself an apt pupil of the Jacobins in boldly pronouncing that “the past ages of the world present the history of human irrationality only, and . . . we are but now advancing towards the dawn of reason, and to the period when the mind shall be born again.”

Newman charged Charles with crediting a rationalism that claimed to know more than it could prove, but at the same time, he was careful to stress that he had no proofs of his own to offer for the doctrines of Christianity. In his sermon, “The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively” (1830), as James David Earnest and Gerard Tracey argue in their introduction to their superb critical edition of the Oxford Sermons, one can see the “spearhead” of “Newman’s prolonged attack on English evidential theology, which, as he foresaw, would be inadequate for the changing religious needs of the nineteenth century and beyond.”

For Newman, “The evidences were already failing to engage the imagination and affections of religious questioners in an age swayed by Romanticism and less and less satisfied with purely intellectual… religion.” Such reservations about the intellectual proofs for God’s existence–such intellectual humility–would become one of Newman’s abiding hallmarks. Although intellectually formidable, he looked askance at what he considered the brittleness of intellectual explications of the Faith.

“The most powerful arguments for Christianity do not convince, only silence,” he wrote his refractory brother; “for there is at the bottom that secret antipathy for the doctrines of Christianity, which is quite out of reach of argument. I do not then assert that the Christian evidences are overpowering, but that they are unanswerable; nor do I expect so much to show Christianity true, as to prove it rational; nor prove infidelity false, so much as irrational. When I consider too the present flurried state of your mind to which I alluded in my last letter, I am still more bound to state these preliminary cautions.”

Yet Charles would not listen to reason, and Newman had no alternative but to go on the offensive. “Prejudice may have had great effect in forming your opinion, it cannot sharpen your arguments or blunt mine,” he wrote, “I am not allowed to convince you, I must now attempt to confute you.”

He then presented his brother with a kind of scoffer’s catechism to see where his real objections to Christianity lay:

1. Are the Gospels and Acts as ancient as pretended?

2. Were they written by the Jews who had been concerned in the occurrences related?

3. Did the circumstance of the death of Jesus occur as they represented?

4. Was the cause the same?

5. Were any of his miracles believed by the Pharisees etc. to have been really wrought?

6. Is it true that the great men among the Jews constantly opposed his pretensions?

7. Did the people in general, and among them the apostles . . . expect (before his death) a temporal Messiah?

8. If so, why did not Jesus indulge them?

9. Would not his insight into the real meaning of the prophecies . . . inform him that the spiritual Messiah was to be put to death?

10. If so, what tempted him to assume that character?

11. Was his conduct enthusiasm or imposture?

And so on for a total of 35 fairly pointed questions. Against this fusillade, many might have sent up the white flag, but Charles dug in. Newman saw an unhappy augury in his brother’s obduracy. “I sorrowfully prophesy waverings of opinion, wanderings, uncertainty, continual change,” he told Charles. “Or if you appear at all consistent, the only maxim in which you will be so (however you may attempt to disguise it from yourself by spreading it out into a system) is, that Christianity is wrong. Almost every other principle will be fluctuating and transitory.”

Here was Benedict XVI’s “tyranny of relativism” in prototype, an adjunct of agnosticism that would extend its influence ever more widely throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. “But even admitting you arrive at some certainty in principles, peace at least you will never have,” Newman wrote.

In spite of the all sufficiency of knowledge, you will find it a cold and bleak state of things to be left carelessly and as it were unkindly by the God who made you, uncertain why you are placed here, and what is to become of you after death. Truth indeed is to be preferred to comfort; I only warn you not to expect more than you will find. Your greatest peace will be the calm of hopelessness.

Such good counsel was prescient, for Charles’s life was one of continual wanderings and uncertainty, culminating in a Tenby boarding house where, after years of blithe utopian irresponsibility, he became the ward of an angelic landlady and her daughter who did what they could to make “the calm of hopelessness” tolerable. When Charles died in March 1884, Newman wrote the editor of his Anglican letters, Anne Mozley, “He must have had some curious natural gifts, for eccentric, violent and self-willed as he was, he attached to him the mother and daughter with whom he lodged, and, the mother having died, the daughter has refused a nurse and has nursed him day and night through his last illness. It is more than sixty years that he embraced and acted on the principles of Owen the Socialist.”

In Charles’ case, we can see the aridity of logic when it comes to faith. “Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism,” Newman would write in The Tamworth Reading Room (1841). “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.” For the man of action in Newman:

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, and divines into textuaries. We shall never get at our first principles. Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proof and analyze your elements, sinking further and further, and finding ‘in the lowest deep a lower deep,’ till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism. I would rather be bound to defend the assumption that Christianity is true, than to prove a moral governance from the physical world. Life is for action. If we insist on proof for everything, we shall never come to action; to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.

III

If Newman’s distrust of syllogistic logic in the apprehension of Christian Truth arose from his trying to repatriate his brother, it also confirmed his deep sense of the mysteriousness of Christian faith, about which he is eloquent in his sermons. “Let us consider such difficulties of religion…” he writes in “The Christian Mysteries” (1829), with a nod to William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), which sought to prove the existence of God from the beauty and coherence of the natural world:

How excellent is this world! how very good and fair is the face of nature! how pleasant it is to walk into the green country, and “to meditate in the field at the eventide!” [Gen. xxiv. 63.] As we look around, we cannot but be persuaded that God is most good, and loves His creatures; yet amid all the splendour we see around us, and the happy beings, thousands and ten thousands, which live in the air and water, the question comes upon us, “But why is there pain in the world?” We see that the brutes prey on each other, inflicting violent, unnatural deaths. Some of them, too, are enemies of man, and harm us when they have an opportunity. And man tortures others unrelentingly, nay, condemns some of them to a life of suffering. Much more do pain and misery show themselves in the history of man;—the numberless diseases and casualties of human life, and our sorrows of mind;—then, further, the evils we inflict on each other, our sins and their awful consequences. Now why does God permit so much evil in His own world? …It was a mystery before God gave His revelation, it is as great a mystery now…

In his famous analogy, William Paley had contended that it was our knowledge of the design of the watch that proved the existence of the watchmaker. Newman, by contrast, would never take so sanguine a view of the powers of knowledge. “It is indeed a remarkable circumstance, that the very revelation that brings us practical and useful knowledge about our souls, in the very act of doing so, nay… in consequence of doing so, brings us mysteries. We gain spiritual light at the price of intellectual perplexity…”

Newman adduced several examples of these mysteries. “[H]ow infinitely important and blessed is the news of eternal happiness? but we learn in connexion with this joyful truth, that there is a state of endless misery too. Now, how great a mystery is this! yet the difficulty goes hand in hand with the spiritual blessing. It is still more strikingly to the point to refer to the message of mercy itself. We are saved by the death of Christ; but who is Christ? Christ is the Very Son of God, Begotten of God and One with God from everlasting, God incarnate. This is our inexpressible comfort, and a most sanctifying truth if we receive it rightly; but how stupendous a mystery is the incarnation and sufferings of the Son of God! Here, not merely do the good tidings and the mystery go together, as in the revelation of eternal life and eternal death, but the very doctrine which is the mystery, brings comfort also. Weak, ignorant, sinful, desponding, sorrowful man, gains the knowledge of an infinitely merciful Protector, a Giver of all good…” Yet “at what price? at the price of a mystery.”

Newman’s sense of mystery suffuses his epistemology of belief. It is why he can make use of natural religion with such discriminating acuity. Apropos the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, he says in the sermon of 1829 just quoted that

as we draw forth many remarkable facts concerning the natural world which do not lie on its surface, so by meditation we detect in Revelation this remarkable principle, which is not openly propounded, that religious light is intellectual darkness. As if our gracious Lord had said to us; ‘Scripture does not aim at making mysteries, but they are as shadows brought out by the Sun of Truth. When you knew nothing of revealed light, you knew not revealed darkness. Religious truth requires you should be told something, your own imperfect nature prevents your knowing all; and to know something, and not all, —partial knowledge, —must of course perplex; doctrines imperfectly revealed must be mysterious.’

Nevertheless, it is amusing to note that Newman did concede the force of knowledge in one sense in the Grammar where he says: “…Catholics, perhaps the majority, who live and die in a simple, full, firm belief in all that the Church teaches, because she teaches it,—in the belief of the irreversible truth of whatever she defines and declares,—but who, as being far removed from Protestant and other dissentients, and having but little intellectual training, have never had the temptation to doubt, and never the opportunity to be certain. There were whole nations in the middle ages thus steeped in the Catholic Faith, who never used its doctrines as matter for argument or research, or changed the original belief of their childhood into the more scientific convictions of philosophy. As there is a condition of mind which is characterized by invincible ignorance, so there is another which may be said to be possessed of invincible knowledge; and it would be paradoxical in me to deny to such a mental state the highest quality of religious faith, —I mean certitude.”

Here, it is important to stress that Newman, unlike the writers of the Enlightenment, never exalts intellect at the expense of faith. His mind has a balance and well-roundedness that hearken back to a time before Montaigne’s scepticism arrived on the scene to muffle the native hue of resolution and puzzle the will. He respects the credulity of ordinary men, in whose non-intellectual lives he sees not only a dignity but a confirmation of the vitality of the Church’s tradition of faith and reason.

This is why he can say with wonderful authority, “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.” It is also why the academy often misreads Newman. At heart, for all his learning and powers of ratiocination, he transcends their number.

IV

Newman’s nineteenth-century critics–James Fitzjames Stephen and Andrew Fairbairn come to mind— would often see in his distrust of the intellect a covert scepticism. Yet what must always strike the judicious reader about Newman’s appreciation of the limitations of knowledge is its realism.

“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,” he wrote in his criticism of Sir Robert Peel and his ‘march of mind,’ non-denominational library in Tamworth from which all books of theology would be excluded. “I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence. Let Benthamism reign if men have no aspirations; but do not tell them to be romantic, and then solace them with glory; do not attempt by philosophy what once was done by religion. The ascendancy of faith may be impracticable, but the reign of knowledge is impossible.”

Certainly, if there is one thing that has proven the impossibility of the “reign of knowledge,” it is our own increasingly tragic experience of the 21st century, in which we have entrammeled ourselves in the most barren, unavailing knowledge. What are those lines from T.S. Eliot, which now exhibit so ghastly a prescience?

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Forty years after Newman’s great sermons of the 1830s, he returns to the theme of mystery in the Grammar of Assent, in which he says of the Trinity:

It is plain of course even at first sight that the doctrine is an inscrutable mystery, or has an inscrutable mysteriousness; few minds indeed but have theology enough to see this; and if an educated man, to whom it is presented, does not perceive that mysteriousness at once, that is a sure token that he does not rightly apprehend the propositions which contain the doctrine.

The “devotional mind,” however, will perceive this inalienable mysteriousness straight off and “lovingly appropriate it, as involved in the divine revelation,” and “will it dwell upon the Mystery of the Trinity with awe and veneration, as a truth befitting, so to say, the Immensity and Incomprehensibility of the Supreme Being.”

Since the Grammar’s charge is epistemological, Newman is at pains to question whether it is possible to apprehend such immensity and incomprehensibility, and the convert who had once sought to reclaim his brother for the faith with such saintly assiduity is constrained to admit that “it is not possible…” Why?

While we can image the separate propositions, we cannot image them all together. We cannot, because the mystery transcends all our experience; we have no experiences in our memory which we can put together, compare, contrast, unite, and thereby transmute into an image of the Ineffable Verity;—certainly; but what is in some degree a matter of experience, what is presented for the imagination, the affections, the devotion, the spiritual life of the Christian to repose upon with a real assent, what stands for things, not for notions only, is each of those propositions taken one by one, and that, not in the case of intellectual and thoughtful minds only, but of all religious minds whatever, in the case of a child or a peasant, as well as of a philosopher.

Here is why conscience is so paramount in Newman’s understanding of the relation between natural and revealed religion. “When… religion of some sort is said to be natural,” he says in his Oxford University Sermons (1843), “it is not here meant that any religious system has been actually traced out by unaided Reason. We know of no such system, because we know of no time or country in which human Reason was unaided. Scripture informs us that revelations were granted to the first fathers of our race, concerning the nature of God and man’s duty to Him; and scarcely a people can be named, among whom there are not traditions, not only of the existence of powers exterior to this visible world, but also of their actual interference with the course of nature, followed up by religious communications to mankind from them. The Creator has never left Himself without such witness as might anticipate the conclusions of Reason, and support a wavering conscience and perplexed faith.”

It followed from this that “Conscience implies a relation between the soul and a something exterior, and that, moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power. And since the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become, and the standard of excellence is ever outstripping, while it guides, our obedience, a moral conviction is thus at length obtained of the unapproachable nature as well as the supreme authority of That, whatever it is, which is the object of the mind’s contemplation.”

The vitality of conscience was here made clear, and Newman returns to the point In the Grammar: “Certainly we need a clue into the labyrinth which is to lead us to Him; and who among us can hope to seize upon the true starting-points of thought for that enterprise… who is to understand their right direction, to follow them out to their just limits, and duly to estimate, adjust, and combine the various reasonings in which they issue, so as safely to arrive at what it is worth any labour to secure, without a special illumination from Himself?”

That special illumination can only be supplied by conscience, the voice of God in one’s heart, and, while some glimmering of it might be present in natural religion, it acquires its full refulgence in revealed religion.

V

While composing the Grammar, Newman said that what he was after in his essay was an argument for Christianity that would appeal to both “philosophers and factory girls.”

In this regard, he was not entirely unlike Paley, whose son commended his father’s writings on the grounds that “Christianity [was] treated [therein] as it would offer itself to the illiterate fisherman, or the ignorant natural man,” though Newman would always scorn the facile faith of the Broad Church. “Some persons,” he wrote in one of his best sermons, “The Religion of the Day” (1832), “consider religion itself to be an obstacle in the advance of our social and political well-being. But they know human nature requires it; therefore they select the most rational form of religion… they… discard (what they call) gloomy views of religion; they… trust themselves more than God’s word, and… are ready to embrace the pleasant consoling religion natural to a polished age. They lay much stress on works on Natural Theology, and think that all religion is contained in these; whereas, in truth, there is no greater fallacy than to suppose such works to be in themselves in any true sense religious at all.”

Richard William Church, the historian of the Oxford Movement, one of Newman’s best contemporary critics, recognized why Newman was so opposed to this pseudo-faith:

Here was a Church, a religion, a “Christian nation,” professing to be identical in spirit and rules of faith and conduct with the Church and religion of the Gospels and Epistles; and what was the identity, beyond certain phrases and conventional suppositions? He could not see a trace in English society of that simple and severe hold of the unseen and the future which is the colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of the New Testament life. Nothing could be more perfect, nothing grander and nobler, than all the current arrangements for this life; its justice and order and increasing gentleness, its widening sympathies between men; but it was all for the perfection and improvement of this life; it would all go on, if what we experience now was our only scene and destiny. This perpetual antithesis haunted him, when he knew it , or when he did not . Against it the Church ought to be the perpetual protest, and the fearless challenge, as it was in the days of the New Testament. But the English Church had drunk in, he held, too deeply the temper, ideas, and laws of an ambitious and advancing civilisation; so much so as to be unfaithful to its special charge and mission. The prophet had ceased to rebuke, warn, and suffer; he had thrown in his lot with those who had ceased to be cruel and inhuman, but who thought only of making their dwelling – place as secure and happy as they could. The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate, liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions, and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor, open handed in its gifts; a willing fellow – worker with society in kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. All this was admirable, but it was not the life of the New Testament, and it was that which filled his thoughts. The English Church had exchanged religion for civilisation, the first century for the nineteenth, the New Testament as it is written, for a counterfeit of it interpreted by Paley.

Paley and his friends, in other words, were no more successful in responding to the true God than the pagan philosophers had been.

“The God of philosophy was infinitely great, but an abstraction,” Newman says in “The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively” (1830); “the God of paganism was intelligible, but degraded by human conceptions. Science and nature could produce no joint-work; it was left for an express Revelation to propose the Object in which they should both be reconciled and to satisfy the desires of both in a real and manifested incarnation of the Deity.”

Still, in the Grammar, Newman quotes a passage from Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, North and South (1855), in which the novelist gave voice to the despairing cry of a factory girl.

“I think,” says the poor dying factory-girl in the tale, “if this should be the end of all, and if all I have been born for is just to work my heart and life away, and to sicken in this dree place, with those mill-stones in my ears for ever, until I could scream out for them to stop and let me have a little piece of quiet, and with the fluff filling my lungs, until I thirst to death for one long deep breath of the clear air, and my mother gone, and I never able to tell her again how I loved her, and of all my troubles,—I think, if this life is the end, and that there is no God to wipe away all tears from all eyes, I could go mad!”

Newman’s gloss on the girl’s distress shows how he could take advantage of natural evidence to make a profoundly supernatural point. “Here is an argument for the immortality of the soul,” he writes. “As to its force, be it great or small, will it make a figure in a logical disputation, carried on secundum artem? Can any scientific common measure compel the intellect of Dives and Lazarus to take the same estimate of it? Is there any test of the validity of it better than the ipse dixit of private judgment, that is, the judgment of those who have a right to judge, and next, the agreement of many private judgments in one and the same view of it?”

Here is a good example of accumulating probabilities. If there are many factory girls in the cotton mill whose desolation brings them closer to the God whom they fear has abandoned them the improbability of God looks less and less likely. In the Apologia, Newman reconfirms this point when he asks whether the argument of probability can merit assent, and he answers that “Mr. Keble met this difficulty by ascribing the firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, not to the probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of faith and love which accepted it. In matters of religion, he seemed to say, it is not merely probability which makes us intellectually certain, but probability as it is put to account by faith and love.” Here is striking proof of how Newman first received the Church’s gift of faith and reason — not from St. Thomas but from the least donnish of Oxford Fellows whom he described as having “the purity and simplicity of a child.”

In looking at Newman’s response to natural theology, we can see more and more the practical character of his thinking. On the question of whether we can know religious Truth, Newman was always intent on uncovering how we actually experience such Truth. In this regard, he is the reverse of the intellectual infatuated with theory. The practicable commands all his loyalty. “There is much instruction conveyed in the circumstance, that the Feast of the Holy Trinity immediately succeeds that of Whit Sunday,” he told his good friend and convert, Mrs. Catherine Froude, the wife of the naval engineer William Froude. “On the latter Festival we commemorate the coming of the Spirit of God, who is promised to us as the source of all spiritual knowledge and discernment. But lest we should forget the nature of that illumination which He imparts, Trinity Sunday follows, to tell us what it is not; not a light accorded to the reason, the gifts of the intellect; inasmuch as the Gospel has its mysteries, its difficulties, and secret things, which the Holy Spirit does not remove.”

Why? For Newman,

The grace promised us is given, not that we may know more, but that we may do better. It is given to influence, guide, and strengthen us in performing our duty towards God and man; it is given to us as creatures, as sinners, as men, as immortal beings, not as mere reasoners, disputers, or philosophical inquirers. It teaches what we are, whither we are going, what we must do, how we must do it; it enables us to change our fallen nature from evil to good, “to make ourselves a new heart and a new spirit.” But it tells us nothing for the sake of telling it; neither in His Holy Word, nor through our consciences, has the Blessed Spirit thought fit so to act.

The contrast here between Newman and his rationalist contemporaries could not have been starker. Of course, for Newman, “the desire of knowing sacred things for the sake of knowing them is not wrong. As knowledge about earth, sky, and sea, and the wonders they contain, is in itself valuable, and in its place desirable, so doubtless there is nothing sinful in gazing wistfully at the marvellous providences of God’s moral governance, and wishing to understand them. But…. since men are apt to prize knowledge above holiness… it is most suitably provided, that Trinity Sunday should succeed Whit Sunday; to warn us that the enlightening vouchsafed to us is not an understanding of “all mysteries and all knowledge,” but that love or charity which is “the fulfilling of the Law.”

Indeed, as late as 1883, he would tell a correspondent who had enquired after the Atonement, that it “is a mystery, a glorious mystery, to be gloried in because it is a mystery, to be received by a pure act of faith, inasmuch as reason does not see how the death of God Incarnate can stand instead of, can be a Vicarious Satisfaction for, the eternal death of his sinful brethren.” If natural religion sought to demystify faith, revealed religion reveled in its mysteriousness. Indeed, for Newman, it was “the want of this faith in most men (for which ordinarily a deep sense of sin is required, which the multitude of sinners have not, not to speak of the need of an initial love of God) … [that] made St Paul give utterance to his glorying in the Cross, which was to the political Pharisee and Sadducee a stumbling block and to the proud, supercilious Greek foolishness. It was indeed the great proof and instance of God’s love to man, but he gloried in it, not on this account, but because it was wisdom and love in a mystery, spoken against by the world, but the life of the believer. ‘You, Corinthians,’ says St Paul ‘must begin by humbling your intellect to a mystery, and your selfishness to mortification of soul and body, for in your pride and sensuality you have forgotten your pattern Christ crucified.’”

VI

Here, Newman reaffirmed how the mystery of revealed religion is, if anything, greater than that of natural religion precisely because it is a mystery rooted not in perplexity but love, a love about which he is so eloquent in his sermon “Mysteries of Religion” (1834):

What has been now said about the Ascension of our Lord comes to this; that we are in a world of mystery, with one bright Light before us, sufficient for our proceeding forward through all difficulties. Take away this Light, and we are utterly wretched,—we know not where we are, how we are sustained, what will become of us, and of all that is dear to us, what we are to believe, and why we are in being. But with it we have all and abound. Not to mention the duty and wisdom of implicit faith in the love of Him who made and redeemed us. What is nobler, what is more elevating and transporting, than the generosity of heart which risks everything on God’s word, dares the powers of evil to their worst efforts, and repels the illusions of sense and the artifices of reason, by confidence in the Truth of Him who has ascended to the right hand of the Majesty on high? What infinite mercy it is in Him, that He allows sinners such as we are, the privilege of acting the part of heroes rather than of penitents? Who are we “that we should be able” and have opportunity “to offer so willingly after this sort?” [1 Chron. xxix. 14.]—”Blessed,” surely thrice blessed, “are they who have not seen, and yet have believed!” We will not wish for sight; we will enjoy our privilege; we will triumph in the leave given us to go forward, “not knowing whither we go,” knowing that “this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” [1 John v. 4.] It is enough that our Redeemer liveth; that He has been on earth and will come again. On Him we venture our all; we can bear thankfully to put ourselves into His hands, our interests present and eternal, and the interests of all we love. Christ has died, “yea rather is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from His love? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through Him that loved us.” [Rom. viii. 34-37.]

The emphasis on the primacy of action here is characteristic. In Newman’s understanding of Christian discipleship, those who accept and act in accordance with God’s Love are to consider themselves as “acting the part of heroes.” The man whose first memories were of the triumphant Nelson naturally warmed to the life of heroic action.

“Men are too well inclined to sit at home, instead of stirring themselves to inquire whether a revelation has been given,” he wrote in the Grammar; “they expect its evidences to come to them without their trouble; they act, not as suppliants, but as judges. Modes of argument such as Paley’s, encourage this state of mind; they allow men to forget that revelation is a boon, not a debt on the part of the Giver; they treat it as a mere historical phenomenon.”

For Newman, such supinity was at odds with the stakes of salvation–stakes which are at the very heart of the difference between natural and revealed religion. “Natural Religion is based upon the sense of sin,” he writes in the Grammar: “it recognizes the disease, but it cannot find, it does but look out for the remedy. That remedy, both for guilt and for moral impotence, is found in the central doctrine of Revelation, the Mediation of Christ.”

Having drawn this lively distinction, Newman went on to say something that might very well have been written to give one last nudge to Charles, who, after all, suffered grievously from the “moral impotence” that afflicts us all. “Christianity is the fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham, and of the Mosaic revelations,” Newman wrote; “this is how it has been able from the first to occupy the world and gain a hold on every class of human society to which its preachers reached; this is why the Roman power and the multitude of religions which it embraced could not stand against it; this is the secret of its sustained energy, and its never-flagging martyrdoms; this is how at present it is so mysteriously potent, in spite of the new and fearful adversaries which beset its path. It has with it that gift of staunching and healing the one deep wound of human nature, which avails more for its success than a full encyclopedia of scientific knowledge and a whole library of controversy, and therefore it must last while human nature lasts. It is a living truth which never can grow old.”