Loving God With the Mind -
Christian Discipleship and the Role ofthe Intellect:
Insight fromJohn Henry Newman
Cheryl Clemons, OSU, Ph,D.
My presentation today will focus on two of the three terms of its title:
I.First, there is the theme of discipleship,a Christian way of life that ideally integrates theology, spirituality, and ministry - head, heart, and hands - and that might be summed up in Ephesians 4:15: "Living [or doing] the truth in love."
II.The 2ndterm is the importance of the intellectin that life of discipleship. Linking these two realities may surprise some Christians, but when he was asked about the most important commandment, Jesus' answer included, "Love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and with all your mind." I believe that "loving God with the mind" as Jesus directed us in the synoptic gospels is among the most neglected element of Christian discipleship today, especially in the face of the anti-intellectual bias of much of Western culture today.
III. The 3'h term of the title, Cardinal Newman, will be discussed within the framework of discipleship and the intellect, since a basic knowledge of Newman's life is presumed in today's setting.
I.(The importance of reason or the intellect in Christian discipleship)
We start with the question: What can John Henry Newman tell us about how to integrate loving God with the mind into our living out of the gospel? In other words, what does the intellect have to do with being a good Christian?
A.(Introduction)
1.First of all, the Christian use of the intellect is rooted in the New Testament.
a. Jesus' command to love God with all our "heart and soul" implies an affective love of God. However, the command to love God "with all our mind" makes it clear that Christians can never be satisfied with, affective love - we can't love what we don't know! Loving God with the mind is to adopt the attitude of Newman: "It is our duty to search diligently after every jot and tittle of the Truth graciously revealed to us."'
b.However, Newman chose other texts to call his listeners to integrate their minds into their faith life. As the topic for his 13 Oxford University sermon, he chose 1 Peter 3:15:
Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts; and always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for the reason for your hope.
Newman claims that this text
implies ... a careful exercise of our Reason.... We are not only to "sanctify the Lord God in our hearts," not only to prepare a shrine within us in which ... Christ may dwell, and where we may worship Him [ the faith - or heart - part]; but we are so to understand what we do, so to master our thoughts and
feelings, so to recognize what we believe, and how we believe, so to trace out our ideas and impressions,. .. that we may be "ready always to give an answer to every [person] that asketh us an account of the hope that is in us" [the reason - or mind - part].Z
c.For his final Oxford sermon in 1843, Newman chose the Lukan verse, "Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her. heart" (2:19). Like Pope John Paul II in his encyclical on Mary3 and the Catechism of the Catholic Church,4Newman considers Mary as well as Abraham a model of faith. Her question to the angel, "How can this be?" according to Newman, "shows that there is a questioning in matters revealed to us compatible with the fullest and most absolute faith."5 Thus, "Mary is our pattern of Faith .... She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon [Divine Truth]; ... not enough to assent, she developes it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it."'
2.(Definition of Terms)
What does Newman mean by these words "faith" and "reason"? As com-, monly understood, according to Newman, reason exercises itself in the use of these principles: it is "(1) explicit, (2) a posteriori [meaning inductive reasoning based on evidence], and (3) based on secular assumptions. "7 Facts are given, and reason analyzes to ascertain the relationship between the facts and proceed to new ideas by means of such facts.'
On the other hand, faith is "a principle [that is unique]... ; distinct from those which nature supplies."9 In contrast to reason, its principles are that it is (1) implicit, (2) a priori [deductive reasoning based on general principles and independent of
sense experiencel, and (3) based on the "antecedent probability of a Revelation."" However, faith and reason aren't separate and opposites: our lives are full of truths that we take for granted although we can't "prove" them, such as the daily sunrise and another presidential election in 2004. Rather than being "the reasoning of a weak mind," for Newman faith is "the reasoning of a divinely enlightened one,... which acts upon presumptions [and probabilities] rather than evidence, which speculates
and ventures on the future when it cannot make sure of it.„11
B.(Positive Importance of the Intellect in Christian Discipleship)
Although reason is a "servant" or "instrument" of faith12 for Newman, it plays several important roles in Christian life. Though the following categories are somewhat arbitrary, they highlight important points. (The most important of Newman's writings for each category will be noted.)
1.Reason can. teach us HOW to think (The Idea of a University) a. (IDEAL)
Newman is painfully aware of what unfortunately continues to be true: Many of us don't think well about many areas of our lives, including religion. To
counter this, Newman advocates developing the intellect - "training the mind to be accurate, consistent, logical, orderly. "13 He presents a vision of intellectual maturity
in passages such as the following: "Something more than merely admitting [information] ... into the mind is necessary.... It must not be passively received, but .. .
actively ... embraced.... The mind must go half-way to meet what comes to it
from without. ',14
b.. (Knowledge-in-relationship Wisdom)
In Newman's view, then, "the mere addition to our knowledge" is not
what enlarges the mind and leads to wisdom. True education, he preaches, comes "when we not only learn something, but when we also refer it to what we knew before," giving us "a connected view of the old with the new. "i5It's "a digestion of what we receive.""' This point seems especially important today in our Information Age when the sheer volume of data can be paralyzing.
c.("Define your terms!")
People who do not reason well tend, in Newman's view, to speak inaccurately or too generally for their words to have meaning. He cautions against reliance upon "household words" that may in the user's mind stand for something "very glorious indeed, but very misty," like 'civilization.'17 Today he might use "family values" as an example! During the presidential debates of the last election, the phrase "fuzzy math" was repeatedly used. In our life of Christian discipleship, the problem can often be "fuzzy religion."We would do well to listen to Newman's advice to us across the years: "Really know what you say you know ... try to ascertain what
your words mean."18
A mature intellect attaches a definite sense to words. According to Newman,
half the controversies in the world are verbal ones; and could they be brought to a plain issue, they would be brought to a prompt termination. Parties engaged in them would then perceive, either that in substance they agreed together, or that their difference was one of first principles [and therefore
5
irreconcilable].... In the present age,. .. we need not dispute, we need not prove, - we need but define. At all events, let us, if we can, do this first of all; and then see who are left for us to dispute with, what is left for us to prove.... When [people] understand each other's meaning, they see, for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless.'
Toward the end of his life he drew out the logical implication of these remarks, telling a critic, "It is no good our disputing; it is like a battle between a dog and a fish - we are in different elements."20
2. Reason can help express, clarify, and further shape faith our spirituality (Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and Oxford University Sermons, #10-15)
a.(Relationship Between Faith and Reason)
The content of Revelation wasn't simply given to humanity full-grown. In scriptural and historical terms, the first Christians, because of the EXPERIENCE they had of the historical Jesus and his resurrection, began to REFLECT on that experience in light of the Old Testament and the PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORKS of their day, leading to an ever-new cycle of experience, reflection, cultural modification. In other words, rational reflection upon spiritual experience - theology - can -express, clarify, and further shape spiritual experience - or spirituality.
b. The Development of Doctrine
Newman spells. out this same process of experience-reflection-cultural influence in describing the development of doctrine through history, giving a significant role to human reason. He asserts that, "whatever be the risk of corrup
tion ... , such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and
... fully exhibited. [The great ideal is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy.... It changes . . . in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.''
3.Reason can help defend faith, and give "reasons for our hope"
(Apologia Pro Vita Sua and An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent)
To deal with the problem of unbelief, not only to express but to defend faith,
the use of reason or intellect is critical.
a.In his Apologia, Newman notes the following points helpful for using our minds to defend our faith:
1)Christian (and Catholic) teachings contain intellectual difficulties but these need not lead to doubt. ("Ten thousand difficulties do not
make one doubt. ")22
2)Like Jesus and the Bible, the church is both divine ("the oracle of God") and human (containing an "enormous mass of sin and
.error which exists of necessity in [it])."23
The infallibility of the church is a gift to humanity from the Godof truth - all of us together, cannot err, even though individuals among us can and do, since freedom of thought is both "one of the greatest of our natural gifts" and capable of "suicidal ex
cesses." 24
4)Church authority and human reason exist in a tension that isnecessary, permanent, and life-giving.Newman never resolves this paradox whose difficulty. remains to this day - a paradox
that explains why most Catholics opt to abandon one pole or the other - or both! - rather than live with the tension of maintaining them both. Newman's description in the Apologia is one of his most powerful literary passages and deserves reading in full:
The energy of the human intellect 'does from opposition grow;' it thrives and is joyous, with a tough elastic strength, under the terrible blows of the divinely fashioned weapon, and is never so much itself as when it has lately been overthrown. It is the custom with Protestant writers to consider that, whereas there are two great principles in action in the history of religion, Authority and Private judgment, they have all the Private Judgment to themselves, and we have the full inheritance and the superincumbent oppression of Authority. But this is not so; it is the vast Catholic body itself... which affords an arena for both combatants in that awful, never-dying duel It is necessary for the very life of religion, viewed in its large operations and its history, that the warfare should be incessantly carried on. Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a re-action of Reason against it .... Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide; - it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of [God], - into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purpose.... [Thus, infallibility's] object is, and its effect also, not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagence.
In exploring the role of the intellect to defend faith, several points in Newman's An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent may be helpful:
1)Newman discusses 5 kinds of "notional assent,"26 the descriptions of which are beyond the scope of today's presentation. Suffice it to say that most people, in Newman's words, "confuse together the probable, the possible, and the certain.... They have no clear view what it is they know, what they presume, what they suppose, and what they only assert. They make little distinction between credence, opinion, and profession; [giving]them all perhaps the name of certitude."27
2)A second point from the Grammar concerns certitude. For Newman, the all-important question for both faith and reason is Pilate's "What is truth?"and further, How can I be sure about it? Newman defines certitude as "the perception of a truth with the perception that it is a truth, or the consciousness of knowing,
as expressed in the phrase, 'I know .that I know. ,',,28 Newman
affirms that the mind, made for truth, can attain and hold on totruth29 Religious certitude, therefore, secures for us "landmarks of thought" by which we can navigate our lives." Such certitudemay be reached by means of what Newman calls "an accumulation of probabilities" that, though not logical proofs, are "sufficient for certitude. "M A later analogy is even clearer: a cable composed of a number of separate threads that together can be stronger than an iron rod.32
According to Newman, then, if we reason wisely about our faith, we can reach the joy and peace of religious certitude.
4.[The 4th role for Reason is to] (Reason can) help internalize and integrate faith into mature Christian discipleship (On Consulting the
Faithful in Matters o f Doctrine)
Newman was aware of the breach between "the intellectual" and "the affective"- theology and spirituality. His preaching and later writings sought a midpoint between the post-Schleiermacher "religion ... of the heart and feelings" AND rationalism."' In addition, Newman was also aware of the need for right doctrine to be matched with right practice, an insight sometimes mistakenly assumed to have originated with contemporary liberation theology! Newman challenged both his Anglican and later his Roman Catholic readers and listeners with the same deep ethical insight: "It is nothing to know what is right, unless we do it."34 The integration of mind, feelings, and conduct envisioned by Newman was a direct result of the grace of the indwelling Holy Spirit and excluded what he called "proud intellects, and cold hearts, and unclean hands" as harmful to the church.35 He sums up this ideal of balanced integration by saying that "Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical, all at once."36
According to Newman, the process of internalizing and integrating faith into
mature Christian discipleship enables Catholics to strengthen not only our own personal faith but also the faith of the entire church, provided that the hierarchy and the rest of the Catholic faithful work together in this endeavor. He describes this process in his 1859 article, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, a controversial essay that, according to Newman editor John Coulson, "gained the Pope's personal displeasure, the reputation at Rome of being the most dangerous man in England, and a formal accusation of heresy preferred against him by the Bishop of Newport."37 I note here only two points from that text:
First, Newman asserts that it's appropriate and even necessary to consult the fidelium census, or sense of the faithful.38 Why? "Because the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine, and because their consensus through Christendom is the voice of the- Infallible Church"39 and "a direction of the Holy Ghost "41 who dwells in the church. It seems evident, then, that the more the body of the faithful have internalized and integrated their faith, the more helpful our personal faith will be for the good of the larger church..
Newman makes a second point quite simply:
I think certainly that the Ecclesia docens is more happy [we might now say "healthy"] when she has such enthusiastic partisans about her ... than when she cuts off the faithful from the study of her divine doctrines and ... requires from them a fides implicita in her word, which in the educated classes will terminate in indifference, and in the poorer in superstition.41