1. Introduction
On what was Newman’s conviction for the existence of God principally grounded? In an 1864 entry in his notebook, he lists six argumentsFootnote 1 for the ‘Being of God’. The first argument – from the extreme connaturality to the mind of the being of God ‘as in the case of a little child praying’ – gets a sympathetic echo in the Grammar. Footnote 2 But it is made of a piece with the second argument on the list, the ‘argument from conscience’, ‘a proof common to all, to high and low, from earliest infancy’.Footnote 3 This argument is central for Newman. For him, conscience is one with the mind, ‘nearer to me than any other means of knowledge’.Footnote 4 He takes up a powerful line of thinking in ButlerFootnote 5 and brings out more fully the phenomenologicalFootnote 6 and psychological concomitants of conscience that, he argues, prompt an image rather than a notion of God – as he puts into the mouth of his character Callista ‘[a]n echo implies a voice; a voice a speaker. That speaker I love and I fear’.Footnote 7 What of the other arguments on Newman’s list? Presumably, he would have been in sympathy with parts of Bossuet’s argument from the objectiveness of the moral law (as espoused in Bossuet’s Treatise on the Knowledge of God and Self). He goes on to list a fourth, an argument from archetypal perfection, then fifth, ‘St Anselm’s argt’, and lastly, ‘Dr Clarke’s … (a work implies a worker)’.Footnote 8 However these weighed in Newman’s thinking, there is little doubt that his argument from conscience anchored his apologetic for Natural Religion, as a dictate the principle of religion and as a moral sense the principle of ethics (cf. GA, 110).Footnote 9
This paper is in four parts. Part 1 offers a context for this enquiry, briefly surveying the debate over design arguments from antiquity to Newman’s time, whilst observing how Newman’s epistemological commitments set him at odds with the British Empiricist epistemological mainstream of his day. Part 2 discusses in detail how these commitments prompted in him misgivings about the Christian Evidences, specifically as these latter were articulated in the writings of William Paley, such as View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1809). Part 3 sketches how the change from scholasticism to the modern era ushered in a new intellectual horizon against which questions theistic and epistemological began to shape themselves differently. This is discussed specifically in consideration of the reception history of an argument ostensibly along the same a posteriori lines as Paley’s argument – that of Aquinas’ Five Ways. Part 4 brings into conversation Newman’s argument from conscience and Aquinas’ Five Ways, arguing that – for all the surface differences between the two – there can be discerned a spiritual kinship between them.
2. Context
2.1. Arguments from design
What have come to be called arguments from design have remote provenance. Their conceptual possibility arises when thinkers begin to divide reality according to passive matter and a governing intelligence. For example, in western antiquity the pre-Socratic thinker, Anaxagoras, proposed a cosmic mind (nous) ordering matter. In reaction, one sees the rise of strictly materialist accounts, such as that of Democritus, which explained phenomena and the semblance of order according to the movement and arrangement of atoms in the void. There then opens the rift between two explanations – the one having recourse to an ordering mind, the other to mindless flux of matter – which has endured through the ages and, indeed, resurfaces in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, posthumously published in 1779. Hume’s Dialogues were fashioned upon the model of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, an ancient work that brought into critical conversation the religious thought of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Academic Scepticism.
It might be thought that Hume had put paid to the kind of arguments Paley would later advance in Natural Theology (1802). Philosophical luminaries, such as Bernard Williams and John Hick, seemed to be of this mind.Footnote 10 I think there is reason to push back against this assessment. It seems implausible that Paley had no knowledge of Hume’s Dialogues or that he simply talked past them.Footnote 11 In his Natural Theology, Paley refers to Hume and ‘his posthumous dialogues’,Footnote 12 suggesting at the very least an acquaintance with the work.
The watchmaker example that opens Natural Theology tempts the assessment that Paley, for all his copious exemplification, was resting upon an argument from analogy of the kind already demolished by Hume in the mouth of Philo, a character in the Dialogues. Contemporary scholars are apt to see more in Paley’s intent than mere argument from analogy. Some suggest his endeavour in Natural Theology was overall an inference to the best explanation or even a deductive argument from order.Footnote 13 Elliott Sober, a philosopher of science, comments, ‘if the [Paley’s] argument is, as I maintain, an inference to the best explanation, Hume’s criticisms entirely lose their bite’.Footnote 14 What seems clear is that Paley’s meticulous accretion of arguments in favour of theism (from all his major works) range over a whole corpus of objections raised by his sceptical predecessor as if to answer them roundly. His Natural Theology impressed the young Charles Darwin.
Assuming, then, Paley to be a much more sophisticated defender of theism than some have credited him, what was Newman’s disquiet over Paley and his writings? As will be detailed subsequently, his disquiet mingled a general disdain for the rationalist temper he and his fellow Tractarians associated with Paleyan evidentialism alongside fundamental disagreement with some signal Paleyan doctrines, such as his theological utilitarianism, his settlement between reason and faith, and his Latitudinarian leanings.
2.2. Oriel Noetics
Some principal figureheads of Tractarianism were fellows of Oriel College. Centred at Oriel too was an Anglican school that came to be called the Oriel Noetics. Thinkers of this school tended to see themselves as orthodox proponents of sensible reform within Anglican Christianity. Heirs to the Paleyan tradition, they sought to employ rigorous reason to meet head-on the contemporary challenge of agnostic rationalism to Christian faith. A leading mind of this school, Richard Whately,Footnote 15 took Newman under his wing. The shy, young don found it a great mental stimulus to be in Whately’s garrulous presence and to be a quiet foil for the latter’s rigorous, wide-ranging intellect. In time, though, the young Newman would find his own voice – one in profound opposition to Whately’s on key theological questions, such as to effect estrangement between the two.
For Newman, whose ‘antennae were uncommonly sensitive to the music of the age’,Footnote 16 there was a note of dissonance in Paleyan evidentialism that still sounded in the Oriel Common Room, a room which ‘was said to have “stunk of logic”’.Footnote 17 Though solidly orthodox in representative figures such as Edward CoplestonFootnote 18 and Richard Whately, the Oriel Noetics’ penchant for rigorous argumentation – as ‘the school of speculative philosophy in England’Footnote 19 – attracted men of various theological stripe, such as Thomas Arnold, Renn Dickson Hampden, and Blanco White.Footnote 20 Looking back, Newman was to recognise in this the danger of ‘pride of reason’ to which he almost succumbed – ‘I was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral’Footnote 21 – until drawn another way by Hurrell Froude.Footnote 22 In an 1828 letter to Blanco White, he summed up the danger and the remedy:
For words are not feelings – nor is the intellect ηθος Footnote 23… I have Froude’s authority for lowering the intellectual powers into handmaids of our moral nature.Footnote 24
Such emphasis on, for example, Catholic ethos, the sacramental principle, and patristic ressourcement helped define Keble’s circle against the Noetics and was to prove a ferment in later disputes between the Noetics and Tractarians over, for example, tutoring practices. Later, it provoked open war with Hampden and his theology, by which time the Oriel Noetics were marked in Tractarian eyes with the triple taint of liberalism, Latitudinarianism, and Whiggism.
‘Newman’s erstwhile Noetic mentors were cast as suspect in their loyalty to Church and university, allies of a hostile spirit of Latitudinarianism and ‘indifferentism’ by which both were threatened’.Footnote 25
2.3. Epistemological dissonance
All of this worked out into Newman’s distinct epistemological stance. Ostensibly an empiricist, even an ‘eloquent empiricist’,Footnote 26 he found himself profoundly at odds with an empiricist tradition descending from Locke, a tradition ‘preoccupied, almost obsessively, with questions of epistemology’.Footnote 27 Though he took much from Locke, he explicitly rejected the latter’s ‘love of truth’ thesis.Footnote 28 Newman was also somewhat chary about the evidentialist tendency championed by Christian rationalists, such as Whately, for the same reason he was not enamoured of their philosophical predecessors (Paley most prominent among them). It already granted too much to a Lockean approach, to ‘paper logic’, to the ‘duty to doubt’ until evidence could afford otherwise.
So though in British empiricism, Newman was not of British empiricism. He and his friends retained the importance of reason as a ‘communal wisdom, to be associated closely with the tradition of the Church’Footnote 29 and, hence, paid great attention to the sources, the wellsprings of faith and understanding, As Burrell puts it: ‘Newman’s work offers a paradigm example of “tradition-directed inquiry” … a sense that philosophical inquiry proceeds best when it imbeds itself in a tradition, always critically but never presuming to “go it alone”’.Footnote 30 In contrast to the immersive or embedded approach of Newman is a detached approach of Locke and his disciples. Instead of the critical credulity that might be said of Locke’s way, it was a credulous criticality: it believed in order to know and judge.
Newman’s complaint about Paleyan evidentialism is as much over the detached posture it sponsored in its adherents as over its doctrines. Writing to a friend in 1836, he lay the blame on Paley’s school of thought for baleful trends in education wherein ‘young men … approach serious subjects, as judges … The study of the Evidences now popular (such as Paley’s) encourages this evil frame of mind – the learner is supposed external to the system’.Footnote 31 Decades later, he complained in the Grammar how a Paleyan mode of argument encouraged a judge’s state of mind towards revelation rather than a suppliant’s.Footnote 32
2.4. Epistemological recovery
When Newman opened his assault on Lockean inspired rationalism from the University Sermons through to the Grammar and onwards, he was really – though perhaps unwittingly – committing himself to a programme of epistemological recovery. In a sense, he could not help but do that because he had caught the vision of an encompassing religious holism in which the ‘unity of truth’ had first made the sense it did in thirteenth-century scholasticism, from a conviction arising from a vision backlit by belief in God. It is not a surprise, then, that his epistemological outlook bears some affinity with medieval epistemological stances.
Tractarian epistemology resembles medieval in proceeding out of epistemic humility before revered sources. Aquino speaks of a ‘principle of credulity’Footnote 33 undergirding Newman’s account of assent, to ‘begin with believing everything that is offered to our acceptance’.Footnote 34 Newman’s epistemological emphasis on the ‘common voice’Footnote 35 bears witness to a mind accoutred in modern terminology but evoking a medieval way. He chides Locke for not going by the ‘testimony of psychological facts’.Footnote 36 His opponent’s thesis, Newman asserts, is ‘invalidated by the testimony of high and low, young and old, ancient and modern, as continually given in their ordinary sayings and doings’.Footnote 37 Likewise, common testimony should ordinarily be admitted as knowledge. As Newman pointed out, a great many of our assents depend directly on testimony.Footnote 38
In addition, Newman argued for what might be called a ‘social epistemology’, something that last obtained in the high medieval era. That is, he accepted that what one ordinarily thought one knew (e.g., that this wall is white, or that that cat is plump) was properly knowledge rather than opinion. Ockham includes in this level knowledge from undoubted testimony (for example, knowing that Rome is a large city though we have not seen it ourselves, or knowing who our parents are). In Ockham, these things are entitled to be called ‘knowledge’ because they are true and because they are held without fear of mistake. As the medievalist, Pasnau, remarks:
… it seems clear to Ockham, as it did to Grosseteste and others, that in some sense we clearly do know these things [contingent objects of apprehension]. It is not just that the folk commonly talk this way, but that they are right to do so.Footnote 39
‘From Locke forward’, Pasnau continues, ‘the question has been whether the grasp we have of the world around us is good enough – good enough, that is, to count as knowledge’.Footnote 40
2.5. Newman and Roman scholasticism
This opens on another question: how much did Newman know of Roman scholasticism? There are commentators who dismiss or downplay any influence of Roman scholasticism on Newman. Gilley opines that ‘Newman knew little of Roman scholasticism, which had still been familiar to seventeenth century Anglicans. There had been no Anglo-Catholic library of medieval theology to complement the library of the ancient Fathers’.Footnote 41 Meszaros cites a remark by Yves Congar that Newman was ‘foreign to the genuine Thomistic tradition’ in some aspects of his thinking on conscience.Footnote 42
Against this, there are more positive assessments. Morris-Chapman sees similarities between Newman’s account of natural reason and what the Spanish philosopher-priest, Jaime Balmes referred to as ‘passive reason’.Footnote 43 In Evans’ assessment it was ‘Aquinas’ treatment of the Augustinian notion of ‘thinking with assent’ that prompted Newman to make the first deliberate beginning on a work that was to occupy him for more than twenty years’.Footnote 44
It is beyond doubt that his time at Propaganda occasioned an intense process wherein he calibrated his own thought against Roman scholastic orthodoxy (as he met it) with a view to harmonising with it. Importantly, he adjusted his understanding of faith to correspond fully with Roman Catholic understanding.Footnote 45 It might be held that Newman’s continuing preference for setting his thoughts out in essay rather than treatise suggests that he was not deeply touched by Roman scholasticism. Yet the fact that an essay such as the Grammar abounds in careful distinctions and definitions could also suggest that he had imbibed something of the soul, if not the style, of Roman scholasticism.
2.6. Why the comparison matters
The Thomist account aligns with Newman’s in powerfully endorsing the personal in knowing. Each resisted the Averroism of their day. The Averroism of Aquinas’ time asserted that individual human minds know by passive participation in a common intellect. Aquinas doggedly maintained the contrary: that the cognitive powers of each human soul are entirely one with each human soul. Smith and Jones come to know that the wall is white by a distinct act of mind, each their own. Cognition is not, as it were, outsourced to a single uber-intellect that feeds us back its results.
By Newman’s time, Averroes’ ‘common intellect’ had been reified in theses that purported as absolute – there for minds passively to fall in with. In place of a medieval thesis that had troubled the intellect was a full-born propositional presence troubling the Victorian imagination, a canonical enforcer shadowed by its twin – a corrosive, unsettling scepticism. One’s ideas and beliefs had either to be pressed into an acceptable paper-credentialled form or suffer the permanent harry of doubt.
Hitherto a man was allowed to believe till it was logically brought home to him that he ought not to believe: but now it seems tacitly to be considered that a man has no liberty to believe, till it has been brought home to him in a rational form that … he has a right to do so …Footnote 46
3. Paley’s Christian evidences
As ‘exercises of Reason in proof of [Christianity’s] divinity, explicit and à posteriori’,Footnote 47 the Evidences were as vast as the Five Ways were succinct. They were much occupied with establishing the reliability of the scriptures and especially the veridicality of the Gospel miracles. In this body of Christian apologetics, the writings of William Paley stood central. In discussing the Evidences henceforth, it will be in reference to Paley’s works – for two main reasons. The first is, as mentioned, the central place Paley’s works occupied in the whole corpus of writings comprising the Evidences. The second is that when Newman is taking the Evidences to task in his Oxford University Sermons, it is Paley’s views that he has principally in mind.
The Evidences had still significant purchase on Anglican mindsFootnote 48 in the days of Newman’s youth. However, the thrall in which they had held the eighteenth-century intellect would begin to weaken before the incipient evolutionism of the next century. Charles Taylor writes of a new cosmic imaginary that, he conjectures, helped prepare the way for Darwin’s thesis as it exploded onto the mid-Victorian scene, no doubt, painfully for many, plausibly for some (including Newman), and persuasively for others.
Nonetheless, the Evidences still retained some power to enlist minds as theologically apart as A M Fairbairn’s, a prominent Congregationalist, and H E Manning’s, a cardinal archbishop of Westminster. According to Lytton Strachey, the latter wrote of his schoolboy encounter with Paley’s Evidences: ‘I took in the whole argument … and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it’.Footnote 49 All the same, Newman never gave them more than a restricted imprimatur. His University Sermons generally manifest his ambivalence towards an approach that other apologists readily took up not only in defence of Christianity but also in defence of the harmony of faith and reason. Newman noted their prominence in the ‘last [18th] century, a time when love was cold’.Footnote 50
That being so, it was not Newman’s habit to reach for the Evidences for intellectual armour against rationalists and sceptics. In his first Essay on Miracles, there are the makings of his mature critique of Paleyan theology and of his growing reserve towards the Evidences. Drawing on Paley’s arguments for the scriptural miracles, Newman emphasised their cumulative force and yet acknowledged the persuasive impotence of miracles (which were but a branch of the Evidences) before one who is ‘deliberately, and on principle, an atheist’.Footnote 51
The following nine elements were among the abiding features of Newman’s mature reflection on these matters. First, natural theology in contemplation of the cosmos bespeaks the power, wisdom, and goodness of God. It does not reveal God’s moral will. It was a grave error, Newman thought, to extrapolate from the benignity of Providence a grandfatherly indulgence on the part of the Creator towards humans and their behaviour such as would bless doctrinal latitude and indifference, commend religious sincerity simply for its being sincere, and forswear that which would make for human eschatological discomfiture. Second, natural theology in reflection upon the universal experience of conscience intimates the moral will of God in its chime of holiness, its peremptory condemnation of sin, the presage of judgment, and the hope of mercy. As the young Newman preached: ‘the most striking evidence we have of … [God’s] moral attributes … independent of that afforded by revelation, is one lodged within us, the voice of conscience’. Third, revealed theology is the dispensation of God’s moral will – ‘in those [doctrines] which relate to our own recovery by Him from our fallen condition’Footnote 52 – for the deliverance from that awful state prospected by conscience.
Fourth, Newman allowed the logical force of the argument from order in the physical universe. He wondered that ‘that there should be such a universal order, until we refer it to the will of one and but one Maker’.Footnote 53 Nearly fifty years later, he wrote:
Did we see flint celts, in their various receptacles all over Europe, scored always with certain special and characteristic marks, even though those marks had no assignable meaning or final cause whatever, we should take that very repetition, which indeed is the principle of order, to be a proof of intelligence.Footnote 54
Fifth, Newman disallowed the logical force of the argument from final causes. He summed up his misgivings about it (referenced as ‘argument from design’) in a letter to William Brownlow, a recently ordained priest: ‘I believe in design because I believe in God; not in God because I see design’.Footnote 55 Newman’s caution about the argument persisted through his entire intellectual life, even as it attracted persistent suspicion that such caution verged on the unscriptural, as ostensibly against Romans 1:20.
Sixth, Newman always tried to give the Evidences their due. In Sermon 10, US, he allowed, after strongly cautionary lines, their place and usefulness: a ‘test of honesty of mind … a rallying point for Faith’Footnote 56 for perplexed believers, a source of gratitude and a way of confirming faith and hope. In Sermon 14, US, he argues that Evidences are the reward, not the basis, of faith, noting that faith is the first gift of the Spirit and wisdom the last. They were too serviceable to the demands of paper logic, of the belief that no cogent grounds could be had unless they could be given.
Seventh, in general, there is no ‘evidence’ in the Evidences that could or should have automatic ‘conviction-making’ efficacy. A deity that began as a paper proposition would remain there. The Evidences could be ‘warmed up’ if they moved from paper to person, to the reasons why people really believe. Neither miracles nor the beauty of the cosmos may claim a heart independent of its moral disposition. In his University Sermons, he noted that the Evidences tended more at confuting objectors than at convincing enquirers. They suffered for want of that lively personal force that really convinces, persuades, inspires, and encourages. Newman noted that ‘antecedent considerations, presumptions, and analogies that, vague and abstruse as they are, still are more truly the grounds on which religious men receive the Gospel’.Footnote 57
God … desires and imposes it as a duty on men that they should seek Him … and that being the case He will bless imperfect proofs, which there is no reason to show that He will go [do] in matters of science.Footnote 58
Eighth, religious faith harmonises with but does not answer to ‘secular’ human reason. We should not ‘mistake of a critical for a creative power … Reason need not be the origin of Faith, as Faith exists in the very persons believing, though it does test and verify it’.Footnote 59 Hence, faith does not resolve itself into a species of ordinary rational enquiry. Neither is it fideism as commonly understood. Religious faith is itself a principle of knowledge whose appeal to the ready heart is such as does not require the logician’s standard, rather the ‘blessed’, albeit syllogistically-averse, proofs that parallel those implicit proofs that avail in ordinary life. To require otherwise is a mistake grounded in an impatience with how things – and we—are.
Ninth, in certain circumstances the Evidences could do damage to the cause they were intended to serve. They may not sway the unconverted, perhaps even hardening them in unbelief in the measure that the Evidences were unsound. Newman wondered whether ‘phenomena of the physical world … taken by themselves’Footnote 60 could as well sponsor atheism as theism, depending on the intellectual and moral disposition of the enquirer. They might do worse than this. Newman averred that they might be viewed as a creature of a usurping reason, which having stirred putative difficulties, then pretends to answer them through the same office. This would then lend an improper authority to rationalists within the Church.
4. A survey of the reception of the Five Ways into the modern era
Among the different apologetics for the existence of God, why focus on the Five Ways? A principal reason is that in tracking its reception history into modernity, one can clearly note epistemological shifts that, I argue, were germane to Newman’s discomfiture with Paley’s Evidences. Another reason is that the Five Ways continued to be relevant in both Catholic and Reformed Christianity, in spite of Luther’s disgust with scholasticism.
Aquinas’ arguments featured significantly in Descartes’ attempts to repudiate charges of atheism brought on him by Reformed theologians from Utrecht. Descartes’ project took shape against a backdrop of concerns directly or indirectly religious.Footnote 61 However, in this transition the question of God’s existence could be asked in a new way as voices dissenting from presumed faith gradually gained a hearing. As Agostini says:
It is well known that the demonstration of God’s existence is a crucial problem in early modern theology and philosophy… in the seventeenth century atheism became not only an individual standpoint, but a true philosophical and epistemological position.Footnote 62
This dispute manifests an important feature of modern apologetics: the gradual eclipsing of one logical paradigm by another, when both had a place in medieval logic. In general, this manifested itself as a preference for demonstration proceeding by asking ‘what is it?’ (quid sit) rather than ‘is it?’ (an sit). In scholasticism this corresponds to demonstration propter quid (from known cause to effect) in search of the reasoned fact, rather than demonstration quia (from known effects to a cause) in search of the simple fact. Descartes held that one could not prove that God exists (an est) without knowledge of that essenceFootnote 63 (quid est) (formulated, for example, as the possessor of all perfections) which one was setting about to establish.
In any event, that tradition of argumentation that would see itself in descent from St ThomasFootnote 64 attracted revived interest in the post-Renaissance era. Dominican luminaries, such as Cajetan, Vitoria, and Soto, made common cause with Jesuits, such as Vasquez, Lessius, and Suarez in defending and advancing the thought of St Thomas, but in a neo-Thomism not ‘as exclusive, as unalloyed, or as authentically Thomistic as it may appear to look at first glance’.Footnote 65 I argue below that the Five Ways speak with a very different persuasive force according as they breathe a medieval or modern air.
Aquinas’ Five Ways were in their own day conducted in a world where the life of the mind was a practical affirmation of God. Their reception into the modern era seems to disclose as much about a fundamental shift in intellectual horizons as about the arguments themselves.Footnote 66 In advancing them, Aquinas believed he was steering a middle way between ‘God is self-evident’ and ‘God cannot be known except by faith’. Although later commentators invoked the Five Ways in religious disputation, this was far from the Dominican’s intent when setting them down near the beginning of the Summa Theologiae. His overall purpose was to give a primer in theology for beginners. This must begin with establishing, at the very least, that God exists, hence affording the possibility of a sacred science.
Although the arguments as a whole answer to an Aristotelian syllogistic structure, it is with the justification of the minor premise that the Five Ways concern themselves.Footnote 67 Each of the ways presumes upon a nominal definition of God (unmoved mover, etc.) forcing the middle term to proceed quia rather than propter quid. Aquinas takes the quia route in the Five Ways Footnote 68 on the basis that we do not have an essential definition (of the what-it-is of God) to start with in the major premise. Thus there is not the possibility of generating a middle term ‘on account of which’ (propter quid) to glue the subject of the conclusion to its predicate.
Tracking the reception of the Five Ways into the modern era, one notes a disquiet among commentators who wonder whether ‘this we call God’ could lawfully terminate each of the Five Ways. Cajetan saw the Five Ways as establishing God’s existence quasi per accidens – that is, of demonstrating properties (unmoved mover, first efficient cause, necessary uncaused being, maximal being, and first governor of the world) as coincident with one we call God but not in themselves establishing ‘this we call God’. It is left to subsequent arguments to affirm these five descriptors converge on ‘this we call God’. ‘Unmoved mover’ might mean the ‘soul of the world’ or the ‘soul of heaven’, the ‘uncaused cause’ might be corporeal or incorporeal, the ‘uncaused necessary being’ of the third way might be one or more, and so on. The Five Ways are a job only half done: they need to rely on further arguments to make them properly converge on the ‘this we call God’ conclusion. The per accidens thesis gained some ascendancyFootnote 69 in the early modern era so much as to create an impression that Aquinas’ arguments were deficient in themselves. In consequence, something of a rift in Thomism opens in early modern treatments of the Five Ways. Footnote 70
Wittgenstein was reported to have criticised Newman’s Grammar in that the latter supposed that the grammar supported the faith, whereas it was the faith that was supporting the grammar.Footnote 71 One could feel the same towards the Five Ways: the ascent to its intellectual heights is reached by a first step on a glass rung of faith – a sort of well-disguised fideism. Grant me this and I’ll show you the rest. However, it could be maintained that the per accidens thesis misreads Aquinas’ argument within its own setting. Where Aquinas gathers to one terminus – ‘this we call God’ – from movement, cause, contingency, perfection, and telos, the per accidens thesis would posit five truncated termini that must await further justification to make them properly converge on that one terminus: ‘this we call God’. From where, if not ‘from things more known to us’, are these critics to procure this? They leave themselves open to suspicion of sourcing their completing considerations (one, unique, spirit, etc.) from the ideal not the real. Its advocates may be projecting the reordering of their post-scholastic intellectual imagination as deficiencies of the scholastic text.
How might Aquinas’ arguments have struck Newman? As Thomism revived under Pope Leo, Newman put at ease a Jesuit correspondent: ‘I have no suspicion, and do not anticipate that I shall be found in substance to disagree with St. Thomas’.Footnote 72 Furthermore, as sketched above, there is much in Newman’s philosophical way that tended unawares towards medieval recovery. One might conjecture that Newman spoke medieval in a Lockean accent. He found himself aspiring to a synthesis of life, faith, and intellect that has spiritual kinship with scholasticism.
5. Newman, the Five Ways, and the Evidences
Things were never set fair for Newman to receive arguments, such as the Evidences, with enthusiasm. It would appear a small step to the presumption that he felt the same about the Five Ways. Ford puts it this way:
Newman [was] dissatisfied with the customary proofs for the existence of God. For example, the Five Proofs (Five Ways) of Aquinas may well demonstrate the theoretical existence of a Prime Mover, but how personally satisfying is it to say: ‘I profess belief in a Prime Mover’? Similarly, on the basis of the Argument from Design, who really feels drawn to professing: ‘I believe in the Master Architect of the World’?Footnote 73
Thus, the argument goes on, Newman’s articulation for the existence of God is situated within the sphere of the real rather than the notional, within that which really motivates, inspires, touches the imagination, and so forth – ultimately, the personal.
Still, Newman profoundly resisted the settlement between faith and reason such as would cordon faith inaccessibly within a person’s intuition and feeling; he wanted to give rational grounds for theism in a settlement that still respected a fundamental harmony between faith and reason. For all his duelling with Paleyan evidentialism, Newman does not simply condemn without commending an alternative. Faith, as Newman has it, proceeds upon eikota (probabilities) more than sēmeia (signs) – ‘less by evidence, more by previously-entertained principles, views, and wishes’.Footnote 74 Evidence defective to the logician may be more than ample to the living organon of a mind properly disposed.Footnote 75
Newman’s approach to God’s existence seems infused with the personal whilst the Thomistic approach seems impersonal, as though the thirteenth century was like the eighteenth – ‘a time when love was cold’. Against this it could be maintained that this does little justice to Aquinas’ argument in its own setting. For a start, the Dominican’s conception of being fizzed with life and dynamism. Just as a runner, a currens, is a someone plus their running (their currere), so too a being, an ens, is a thing plus its act of existing, its esse. Footnote 76 Aquinas’ argument did not start with a ‘God on paper’. Lifting his eyes and glancing out through a scriptorium window, the thirteenth-century friar could perceive of a moment that all was grounded in ‘this we call God’. In the Five Ways, he is articulating as a chain of inferences what could be apprehended in a noetic instance.
At heart, Newman is protesting against such a denaturing, de-individuating tendency of what is to for a person to know and to believe. Newman’s dissatisfaction with the Evidences was their unseating from their first home all acts of mind in the mental life of a particular individual. Faith is a principle of reason; secular reason may critique but not create it. Morality is principle of reason; secular reason may critique but not create it. Reasoning itself goes before reason; secular reason may critique but not create it. Newman would not allow the fact of cognition to be deconstructed by a formal account of cognition. In order of priority, thinking as a concrete act goes before and grounds any structured description of what is going on in ‘thinking as a concrete act’.
That said, the contemporary mind tends, as Professor Ford remarked, to receive the Five Ways in a dry, notional way. If we want to progress our knowledge bypassing ‘an sit?’ (is it?) and going straight to ‘quid sit?’ (what is it?), we risk demanding that we should have a real theoretical handle on things before we even begin to engage with them. Early exponents of this new way, such as Descartes, would see no risk in proceeding upon a definition of God of whom it is impossible to conceive of any imperfection. Compared to the old ‘proceeding from effects’ way of the Five Ways, it would seem to have an ambition and grandeur appropriate to the subject matter. The molten sense of being by which the Five Ways could irrupt into a consciousness was thus cooled by a theoretical air imparted to them in later reception, making them appeal merely notionally, if at all.
Because the modern era effectively talks past the scholastic, it sharply delineates Newman’s difficulty. Newman cannot create the backlit, implicit acceptance of God’s existence on which the scholastic age reposed. What he can do is unsettle the implicit rationalism by acute appeal to the personal phenomena of coming to believe. Small wonder that Newman takes an inward turn so as to establish an entirely different harmonisation between natural theology and epistemology. Thereby, he can stimulate the rationalist’s imagination to reconnect with affective, personal sources of knowing. He can build a bridge to the sacral nature of knowing and thereby perhaps invite good will and a change of posture.
Newman is like Aquinas in exhibiting epistemic humility towards the things of God. As mentioned, there were apologetic approaches which vexed Newman: arguments from design. In words such as ‘design’, a semantic hardening could collude with human estimation of the excellences of Victorian design as the acme of what-it-is to design. Thus could arise the tendency to think it a praise that the deity adheres to standards like these, only on a larger scale. Human ingenuity would subtly have had the last word. The Creator could thereby be essentially bound in a ‘finite idea’, as Newman noticed:
… the very intricacy, vastness, perfection of nature which takes it out of parallelism with human work … if there is God, design is a finite idea to include in the notion of Him.Footnote 77
Of a piece with this is reading nature as a machine rather than a work. Criticising Peel’s belief that knowledge could of itself effect moral and religious improvement, Newman avers: ‘if we come to it [nature] with the assumption that it is a creation, we shall study it with awe; if assuming it to be a system, with mere curiosity…’.Footnote 78
Once released from the straitening imposition of a modern social imaginary, Aquinas’ argument from things and Newman’s argument from conscience appeal much more compellingly. For both, in treating God, we have to start from that which is more known to us and move from the particular to general in a journey epistemically kenotic. For Aquinas, a proper handle on the ‘whole being of things’ includes ourselves as beings and knowers. The journey outward ends with an ellipsis not a full stop. What perforce remains is that the ‘whole being of things’ is an effect in need of explanation (i.e., a primal ‘be-er’ who causes and sustains all this ‘be-ing’). Far from being unwarranted, it is the only thing we can say. Everything else – ‘the universe just is’ or ‘thereof we must remain silent’ or ‘there could be many gods’, etc. – betrays a posture that would pretend to be outside of the whole of which it must be a part. From where can words and concepts be recruited once given up as sense-originated in consideration of the whole?
Regarding Newman’s argument from conscience, it has the power to appeal as an ‘interior cosmological argument’. Following Butler, Newman asserted interior ‘movements’ or ‘stirrings’ ‘are’ in respect of our moral acts. They too resolve on the conclusion of the existence of One to whom we are accountable. But whereas the exterior argument is typically reached by inferential steps (although it could be realised by nous), the interior argument is received holistically, albeit explained inferentially. A child understands God as Father, protector and judge in this way. Butler’s argument from conscience asserts that it ‘would be as little liable to exception’Footnote 79 to go to truth from apprehension of exterior objects as to go to God from interior apprehension. Newman elaborates upon this thus:
As then we have our initial knowledge of the universe through sense, so do we in the first instance begin to learn about its Lord and God from conscience … [we] have as good a warrant for concluding the Ubiquitous Presence of One Supreme Master, as we have, from parallel experience of sense, for assenting to the fact of a multiform and vast world, material and mental.Footnote 80
Although this argument is claimed untenable after Freud (according to Anthony Kenny) or Nietzsche (according to John Milbank),Footnote 81 the power of their critiques seems to draw on a sense of self atomized in an absolute landscape. Conscience can then be ‘merely subjective’ in a way dismissible by analysis. For Newman, for whom a unity sense of self is prior to a unit sense of self, the only absolute ‘outside’ is God. The rest, for Newman, is aspectual.Footnote 82
6. Conclusion
All along, Newman simply could not avail himself of the Evidences, even granted their sophistication and appeal to many of his day. He fights shy of anything that purports to work on the convictions in spite of the moral dispositions of a person. He also rejects a depersonalized understanding of cause.Footnote 83 Whenever we disallow a person to engage with reality as a person, we risk imposing on them an alien epistemology. Nothing, neither Gospel miracles nor the evidence of physical phenomena, should be thought to carry intrinsic conviction-making efficacy in itself. To think otherwise is effectively to leave no space for our knowing, humanly speaking. It is to raise the ghost of Averroism. Unfortunately for Newman, this spectral presence had long haunted religious apologetics. Even the Five Ways had suffered reprogramming in the changed intellectual horizons of modernism and the demand that essential concepts be at the vanguard of our theorizing. It is no accident that Newman includes in the Grammar an articulation of his argument from conscience. It is offered in the spirit of a cosmological apologetic. In this interior cosmology, he found one place safe from the epistemological adulteration suffered on the great tradition of a posteriori apologetics as they passed into the modern philosophical era.
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