A Contentious, Contemplative Cardinal

John Henry Newman exemplified the fact that the history of apologetics is very much a story about epistemology, a theme that will recur throughout this book. His rich epistemological insights served as the foundation of his moral argument. His broad epistemology and expansive empiricism recognized that we’re more than narrow logic choppers. He likened the quest for truth to a vaulted ceiling that ingeniously throws its weight in a variety of directions. We gradually come to the conclusions we do through a complicated process of considering a great number of evidences, not just through tight discursive analyses. The phenomenology of conscience, in particular, he thought, can prove telling as we have direct experience of One to whom we’re responsible, before whom we’re ashamed, whose claims on us we fear, making possible what he called a real assent and a sense of deep assurance.