Newman on the Grounds of Faith

An epistemological issue that preoccupied John Henry Newman was the conditions under which Christian belief can be considered rational. As he sought to offer a broader and more refined account of faith and reason, he focused, for example, on the informal nature of reasoning and on the role of personal judgment in assessing evidence. In particular, his approach homed in on how the mind actually works and the conditions under which people reason within various contexts and fields of knowledge. Along these lines, an important, though complex, issue involves clarifying Newman’s position on the grounds of faith. In this respect, Anthony Kenny says the University Sermons contain some of Newman’s “very best work on the nature and justification of faith.”1 However, Newman’s position on the grounds of faith in some of the University Sermons is difficult to capture and, perhaps, prone to misunderstanding (e.g., serm. 10). As I hope to show, Newman provides greater clarification of his own position on the grounds of faith in sermon 13 (see also serm. 14). Accordingly, I will structure this essay in the following way. First, I will identify some potential misunderstandings in the University Sermons concerning Newman’s position on the grounds of faith. Second, I will show how the distinction between implicit and explicit reason in sermon 13 shapes both his rejection of a particular kind of hard rationalism (a religious belief is rational if and only if it can be articulated or demonstrated formally) and his alternative understanding of the grounds of faith. Implicit reason, for Newman, is a spontaneous, unconscious, or unargumentative process of reasoning by which people form beliefs without appealing to explicitly stated grounds; explicit reason is a secondorder activity that works out whether beliefs are true rather than false; the former is unreflective, while the latter has a reflective component.2 Third, I will argue constructively that Newman