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Shooting round corners: Newman and Anselm
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Extract
It is beyond the scope of this short paper to compare the views of Newman and Anselm on faith and reason. Lengthy debate continues to surround our understanding of both. My purpose is to understand a comment of Newman’s concerning the interpretation of Anselm, and in so doing to address the possibility of agreement between the apparently disparate views we would expect Newman and Anselm to have concerning the particular question: is it possible to ‘convert’ by rational argument? To this end, I will (1) look at what little Newman had to say about Anselm, in the context of his views concerning the use of logic in matters of faith, (2) address the issue of the relation of Thomas and Anselm, as raised by Newman, (3) consider the role of the Fool (Psalm 14) and the notion of ‘natural words’ in shaping how Anselm thought about God, and (4) identify a degree of congruence between Anselm, Thomas and Newman.
What did Newman know of, think of, Anselm? There is little reference to Anselm’s intellectual work in Newman’s writings. Yet, Anselm has an important place in the development of Christian theology and understanding. Newman refers, in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, to the fact that Anselm is interpreted by Thomas, going on to say, “in no case do we begin with doubting that a comment disagrees with its text, when there is a prima facie congruity between them”. We might infer from this statement that Newman is happy to take his reading of Anselm from Thomas. However, in a letter addressed to Pope Leo XIII, in response to his encyclical on the philosophy of Thomas, Newman writes:
“All good Catholics must feel it a first necessity that the intellectual exercises, without which the Church cannot fulfil her supernatural mission duly, should be founded on broad as well as true principles, that the mental creation of her theologians, and of her controversialists and pastors should be grafted on the Catholic tradition of philosophy, and should not start from a novel and simply original tradition, but should be substantially one with the teaching of St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas, as those great doctors in turn are one with each other.”
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- Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The thesis of this paper derives its impetus from a letter written by Newman to Pope Leo XIII, which may never have been sent, and a manuscript addition to Newman's unpublished work, the ‘Proof of Theism’. Such sources should be treated cautiously, of course, but it seems to me legitimate to argue that they may provide us with privileged access to Newman's thought in its ‘raw state’.
2 J.H.Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2nd edition, 1846, p. 149.
3 See W.Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, Vol II, 1912, pp.501 f. My emphasis.
4 Summa contra Gentiles I, 10; Sumtna Theologiae la, 2, 1.
5 See Proslogion 15.
6 A.J. Boekraad and H. Tristram, The Argument from Conscience to the Existence of God according to J. H. Newman, with the text of an unpublished essay by Newman entitled ‘Proof of Theism’, Louvain 1961, pp103–125.
7 Ibid, p. 104.
8 In their notes the editors seek an explanation of the presence of Anselm's argument in Newman's list, “perhaps he was not aware of the fundamental difficulty raised against this argument as totally remaining in the logical order or as implying an illegitimate transit from that order to reality”(ibid, p. 133). Or perhaps they have not correctly understood Anselm. In any case they are concerned to distance Newman from the suggestion that he accepted the Anselmian argument.
9 Ibid, p.57. See also the comment on p.68: “We have to attribute the greatest power of argumentative force in any argument to the elements of our intellectual and moral nature, which cannot be expressed in words, but are nevertheless always implicitly, i.e. not reflexively present in all argumentation.”
10 J.H. Newman, An Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent, 5th edition, 1881, p.94.
11 Ibid, p.93.
12 Ibid p.96.
13 ST la, 3, 4 ad 2: “The verb ‘to be’ is used in two ways: (1) to signify the act of existing and (2) to signify the mental uniting of predicate to subject which constitutes a proposition. Now we cannot know the existence of God (Dei esse) in the first sense any more than we can clearly know his essence. But in the second sense we can, for when we say ‘God is’ (Deum esse), we frame a proposition about God which we clearly know to be true”.
14 Grammar of Assent, p.95.
15 Proslogion, 3.
16 See, for example, Richard Law, The Proslogion and St. Anselm's Audience' in Berthold, G.C. (ed.), Faith Seeking Understanding, Manchester (New Hampshire) 1991, p.224Google Scholar.
17 See on this point, Evans, G.R., The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages, Cambridge 1984, pp. 17–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 See Monologion, 48.
19 Something Newman himself was alive to, see ‘Proof of Theism’, p.7, in Boekraad and Tristram, p. 109.
20 Monologion, 10: “where they cannot be, no other word is useful for manifesting the object”. They are “the proper and principal words” for objects. See also, Evans, G.R., Anselm and Talking about God, Oxford 1978Google Scholar, passim, esp. p.75: naturalia verba are “crucial to Anselm's own thinking about the language in which we can talk of God”.
21 ST la, 2, 1 sed contra.
22 ScG, I, 5.
23 This point has been made previously by Leslie Armour, who went on to draw out a suggestive case for the proximity of Anselm's argument and Newman's argument from conscience in the ‘Proof of Theism’. See Armour, L., ‘Newman, Anselm and the Proof of the Existence of God’ in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 19 (1986) 87–93, p.87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 See Grammar of Assent, p.284: “As to Logic, its chain of conclusions hangs loose at both ends; both the point from which the proof should start and the points at which it should arrive, are beyond its reach; it comes short both of first principles and of concrete issues.”