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JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
ON TRUTH AND ITS
COUNTERFEITS
S a c r a D o c t r i n a S e r i e s
Series Editors
Reinhard Hütter
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
This book has grown over the course of numerous years and in the con-
text of many conversations with friends and colleagues. I would like to
record my thanks especially to Jaime Antúnez Aldunate, Nicanor Aus-
triaco, OP, Christopher O. Blum, Talbot Brewer, Giuseppe Butera, Car-
los Casanova Guerra, Fernando María Cavaller, Romanus Cessario, OP,
Mark Clark, Paul Connor, OP, John F. Crosby, Joseph E. Davis, David
DeLio, Michael Gorman, Paul J. Griffiths, Raymond F. Hain IV, Joseph
Henchey, CSS, Judith Heyhoe, Nancy Heitzenrater Hütter, Matthew
Levering, Guy Mansini, OSB, Bruce D. Marshall, Andrew Meszaros, Mi-
chael Pakaluk, Thomas Pfau, Rodrigo Polanco, R. R. Reno, Philip Rol-
nick, Michael Root, Richard Schenk, OP, Mary Katherine Tillman, Luca
Tuninetti, Candace A. Vogler, and Thomas Joseph White, OP.
It has been a privilege to work with Mary Tonkinson and Paul Hig-
gins in their judicious editing of the text. Special thanks go to David L.
Augustine and Meghan Duke for their competent editorial assistance, and
to David L. Augustine for preparing and Vincent Birch for completing the
indexes. I am indebted to two anonymous peer reviewers for their help-
ful criticisms, corrections, and suggestions. I thank the editors of Chicago
Studies and Nova et Vetera (English edition) for granting me permission to
reprint material that is included here.
Earlier versions of the first three chapters were delivered as Paluch
Chair Lectures at the University of Our Lady of the Lake/Mundelein Sem-
inary during my 2015–16 tenure there as the Chester and Margaret Paluch
Chair of Theology. I would like to express my gratitude for this intellectu-
ix
ally stimulating and spiritually rewarding appointment to the then-rector
and now-bishop Robert Barron, who invited me to the university, and to
Rector John Kartje and Dean Thomas A. Baima for their warm welcome.
My thanks also to the university faculty and staff for their cordial hospi-
tality, to the STL and STD students, as well as Patricia Pintado-Murphy
for a stimulating graduate seminar on John Henry Newman’s Oxford Uni-
versity Sermons and Grammar of Assent, and to Matthew and Joy Levering
for the gift of their friendship.
I dedicate this book to the memory of Don J. Briel. A noted Newman
scholar and passionate Newman disciple, Don Briel founded the Catholic
Studies Program at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota,
in 1993, and in 1997 he founded the journal Logos: A Journal of Catholic
Thought and Culture. From August 2014 until his death in 2018, he held
the Blessed John Henry Newman Chair of Liberal Arts at the Univer-
sity of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota. Don Briel had a keen and ever-
growing awareness of John Henry Newman’s importance for our own day
and age. Nourished spiritually and intellectually by John Henry Newman,
Don Briel succeeded at nothing less than creating, despite the formidable
cultural challenges of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
the “idea of a university” that animated his great spiritual mentor. Over
the course of the past generation, no one in the United States has done
more than Don Briel to realize John Henry Newman’s theological and
pedagogical vision of Catholic higher education.
x P re fa c e
A c k n owl ed gm e nts
Ac k n ow l edg ments
Acknowledgments
xi
versity of Virginia and again at New York University. An extended ver-
sion was published in Nova et Vetera (English edition) 11, no. 4 (2013):
1017–56. A briefer version appeared in English in Acta Philosophica:
Rivista internationale di filosofia 22, no. 2 (2013): 235–56; and in Spanish
in Humanitas: Revista de Antropología y Cultura Cristianas 72 (Spring
2013): 752–75.
The epilogue draws on my article “Relinquishing the Principle of
Private Judgment in Matters of Divine Truth: A Protestant Theologian’s
Journey into the Catholic Church,” Nova et Vetera (English edition) 9,
no. 4 (2011): 865–81.
xiii
}
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
ON TRUTH AND ITS
COUNTERFEITS
P rolog u e: N ew ma n a nd U s
P rol og u e: N ew m an an d Us
}
PROLOGUE
Newman and Us
1
it ever has been, but hidden; but in this age exposed to view and unblushingly
avowed—I mean, that spirit of infidelity itself which I began by referring to as
the great evil of our times. . . . The elementary proposition of this new philosophy
which is now so threatening is this—that in all things we must go by reason, in
nothing by faith, that things are known and are to be received so far as they can
be proved. Its advocates say, all other knowledge has proof—why should religion
be an exception? . . . Why should not that method which has done so much in
physics, avail also as regards that higher knowledge which the world has believed
it had gained through revelation? There is no revelation from above. There is no
exercise of faith. Seeing and proving is the only ground for believing. They go on
to say, that since proof admits of degrees, a demonstration can hardly be had ex-
cept in mathematics; we never can have simple knowledge; truths are only prob-
ably such. So that faith is a mistake in two ways. First, because it usurps the place
of reason, and secondly because it implies an absolute assent to doctrines, and is
dogmatic, which absolute assent is irrational. Accordingly you will find, certainly
in the future, nay more, even now, even now, that the writers and thinkers of the
day do not even believe there is a God.1
In order to realize that Newman is describing the age we live in, one
need not read Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, Dostoevsky’s Demons,
Nietzsche’s The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, or Sartre’s Being and Nothing-
ness—let alone works by the recent “new atheists” Dawkins, Dennett,
Hitchens, and Harris.2
1. John Henry Newman, Sermon 9, “The Infidelity of the Future: Opening of St. Bernard’s
Seminary, October 2, 1873,” in John Henry Newman, Faith and Prejudice and Other Sermons, ed.
Birmingham Oratory (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 123–24.
2. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Mineola, N.Y.: Do-
ver, 2008); Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Robert A. Maguire (New York: Penguin Classics,
2008); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings,
ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005); Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology,
trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956); Richard Dawkins, The God Delu-
sion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural
Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion
Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and
the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2004). The most comprehensive and profound philo-
sophical analysis of atheism is still Cornelio Fabro, God in Exile: Modern Atheism from Its Roots in
the Cartesian Cogito to the Present Day, ed. and trans. Arthur Gibson (Westminster, Md.: Newman
Press, 1968). For a clear and incisive philosophical critique of the arguments made by Dawkins,
Dennett, Hitchins, and Harris, see Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New
Atheism (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008).
2 Pr ol og ue : New m an an d Us
More than a century later, in the final homily he gave in 2005 before
becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger famously char-
acterized this predicament as the “dictatorship of relativism that does not
recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely
of one’s own ego and desires.”3 It is this—the emergence, establishment,
and exaltation of the sovereign subject—that Newman saw commencing
and our age sees completed. In his Confessions, St. Augustine might very
well have used the following words to praise God: “In the beginning is
you, in the middle is you, and in the end is you.” Yet nowadays a tea com-
pany celebrates with these very words the consumer as the sovereign sub-
ject, as the center of a sovereignly constructed world of meaning with as
many parallel worlds of meaning as there are sovereign subjects. What the
tea-company logo expresses in three brief phrases, Supreme Court Justice
Anthony Kennedy felt moved to render in misplaced metaphysical terms
in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to
define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of
the mystery of human life.” The liberty endorsed in these words is noth-
ing but the unfettered autonomy of the sovereign subject, the ruling self-
image of the present age.
The theological program that the spirit of liberalism in religion sets
in motion consists in the infusion of the Christian faith with the era’s
prevailing self-image and the consequent reconstruction of the Christian
faith’s content in light of this new self-image. In his famous “Biglietto
Speech,” delivered in 1879 in Rome on the occasion of his appointment as
cardinal, Newman stated that the unifying theme of his career had been
his consistent opposition to “the spirit of liberalism in religion.” Because
the matter Newman addresses has now become a predominant reality,
this crucial passage from the “Biglietto Speech” is worth citing in full:
I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For
thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of Liber-
alism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely
than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth;
3. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice,” Vatican Basilica, April 18,
2005; available at www.vatican.va.
says Horace of the writers of his day. In our day the saying applies in
most force to that class of poemata, which pretends to narrate the
epic of life in the form of prose. For the docti as well as the indocti—
men the most learned in all but the art of novel-writing—write
novels, no less than the most ignorant; and often with no better
success. One gentleman wishing to treat us with a sermon, puts it
into a novel; another gentleman, whose taste is for political
disquisition, puts it into a novel; High Church and Low Church and
no Church at all, Tories and Radicals, and speculators on Utopia,
fancy that they condescend to adapt truth to the ordinary
understanding, when they thrust into a novel that with which a novel
has no more to do than it has with astronomy. Certainly it is in the
power of any one to write a book in three volumes, divide it into
chapters, and call it a novel; but those processes no more make the
work a novel, than they make it a History of China. We thus see
many clever books by very clever writers, which, regarded as novels,
are detestable. They are written without the slightest study of the art
of narrative, and without the slightest natural gift to divine it. Those
critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analysed
the laws of æsthetic beauty, concur in maintaining that the real
truthfulness of all works of imagination—sculpture, painting, written
fiction—is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to
represent the positive truth, but the idealised image of a truth. As
Hegel well observes, “that which exists in nature is a something
purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially
destined to manifest the general.” A fiction, therefore, which is
designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination, sins
against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope
to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters
ecclesiastical, political, or moral, his work may or not be an able
treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.
Religion and politics are not, indeed, banished from works of
imagination; but to be artistically treated, they must be of the most
general and the least sectarian description. In the record of the Fall
of Man, for instance, Milton takes the most general belief in which all
Christian nations concur,—nay, in which nations not Christian still
acknowledge a myth of reverential interest. Or again, to descend
from the highest rank of poetry to a third rank in novel-writing;
when Mr Ward, in his charming story of ‘Tremaine,’ makes his very
plot consist in the conversion of an infidel to a belief in the
immortality of the soul, he does not depart from the artistic principle
of dealing, not with particulars, but with generals. Had he exceeded
the point at which he very wisely and skilfully stops, and pushed his
argument beyond the doctrine on which all theologians concur, into
questions on which they dispute, he would have lost sight of art
altogether. So in politics—the general propositions from which
politics start—the value of liberty, order, civilisation, &c.—are not
only within the competent range of imaginative fiction, but form
some of its loftiest subjects; but descend lower into the practical
questions that divide the passions of a day, and you only waste all the
complicated machinery of fiction, to do what you could do much
better in a party pamphlet. For, in fact, as the same fine critic, whom
I have previously quoted, says, with admirable eloquence:—
“Man, enclosed on all sides in the limits of the finite, and aspiring to get beyond
them, turns his looks towards a superior sphere, more pure and more true, where
all the oppositions and contradictions of the finite disappear—where his
intellectual liberty, spreading its wings, without obstacles and without limits,
attains to its supreme end. This region is that of art, and its reality is the ideal. The
necessity of the beau-ideal in art is derived from the imperfections of the real. The
mission of art is to represent, under sensible forms, the free development of life,
and especially of mind.”