John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent - otherwise thought is but an idle amusement

By chance I have been spending some time with some of England’s Catholic writers – Coventry Patmore, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and, for a couple of months, John Henry Newman in his 1870 apologia An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.  It was tough climbing with Newman, so I took it slowly, a couple of months for a book that is not 400 pages, and early on I wondered if I should turn back:

Reverting to the two modes of holding propositions, conditional and unconditional, which was the subject of the former Section, that is, inferences and assents, I observe that inferences, which are conditional acts, are especially cognate to notional apprehension, and assents, which are unconditional, to real. (Ch. I, “Modes of Apprehending Propositions”)

This looks rather more like formal philosophy than I had been expecting or can handle, but fortunately after establishing some terminology Newman relaxes into something I could read if not necessarily understand.  A Grammar of Assent is a subtle and tolerant essay on the psychology of belief, more akin to William James than to theology.  Though Newman, in the end, wants to make the case for Christian belief (and that is how he spends the last fifth of the book), he first wants to know how we believe anything at all.  Or, to switch back to his term, how we assent to a belief.  Newman takes true belief as an act, something we do.

Such as I am, it is my all; this is my essential stand-point, and must be taken for granted; otherwise, thought is but an idle amusement, not worth the trouble.  There is no medium between using my faculties, as I have them, and flinging myself upon the external world according to the random impulse of the moment, as spray upon the surface of the waves, and simply forgetting that I am.  (IX.1)

The end of the argument, to summarize hundreds of pages, is that assent comes from a combination of our conscious, logical, and sensory capacities with our imagination.  Much of the argument is about the role of the imagination in leading to belief.  Newman’s argument is in many ways about literature, which is why I was led the book.  When we “believe” in a book, when we assent to its ethos and language and nonsense, we are deliberately imitating the process, perhaps unconscious, that created our more fundamental beliefs.  Our imaginative encounter with art in turn might change or more likely reinforces our beliefs.

If I understood Newman’s book better I think that is the argument I would pursue.  He gives a nice example (VIII.2.) comparing Pascal, Montaigne, and a scene from Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South on the immortality of the soul (the “fluff filling my lungs” scene).  The logic of the deep thinkers has its role, but its Gaskell’s dying factory worker who wins converts.

Newman is one of the finest prose writers in English, and especially fine for a prose writer who does not have a strong voice like Thomas Carlyle or John Ruskin.  A writer could actually learn how to write by studying Newman and not come out sounding like a barking lunatic.  I will just put one example here, amusing because it is about the internet.  I put the wisest bit in boldface:

In this day the subject-matter of thought and belief has so increased upon us, that a far higher mental formation is required than was necessary in times past, and higher than we have actually reached.  The whole world is brought to our doors every morning, and our judgment is required upon social concerns, books, persons, parties, creeds, national acts, political principles and measures.  We have to form our opinion, make our profession, take our side on a hundred matters on which we have but little right to speak at all… except in abstract truth, no judgment rises higher than probability.  (VII.3.)

What I omitted is just as accurate.

The plungings and the snortings, the sportings and the buffoonings - Newman loves literature

My town’s public library has a Religious Fiction section, over by the Mystery and Science Fiction shelves, and about the same size.  I have no idea what is in it.  I have looked, but that was not much help.  Every book I glanced at was, more or less, terrible, but I suspect that the outcome would have been statistically similar in any other part of the library, controlling for publication date and so on.

John Henry Newman, in his discourses on “Literature” and “English Catholic Literature,” does not argue against religious fiction, not exactly, but he is suspicious, even though he himself was the author of a Catholic novel (Loss and Gain, 1848).  He defends non-Catholic, and even anti-Catholic, literature.  He defends their place in the Catholic university, and is not convinced that the Catholic university will have much of a role in creating something called “Catholic literature.”

Newman’s ecumenicism is a delight, although it has its limits – he does not hesitate to call Hobbes and Hume “evil” and a “disgrace” (“ECL,” 276), but he does not then say a Catholic should not read them or authors like them:

They [Milton and Gibbon] are great English authors, each breathing hatred to the Catholic Church in his own way, each a proud and rebellious creature of God, each gifted with incomparable gifts.

We must take things as they are, if we take them at all. (“ECL,” 268)

Newman’s keenest argument is that even if we would like to insulate ourselves from writers of dubious belief, it is too late.  Our language is suffused with theirs.  The English Catholic’s ordinary speech is already full of Shakespeare and Gibbon, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.  “English Literature will have ever been Protestant” (272, emphasis Newman’s) and “Man’s work will savour of man” (274).  I will admit that I am almost always attracted to arguments against purity, that one must accept impurity as a fact of the world and act accordingly.

Does this sound familiar?

This is not a day for great writers, but for good writing, and a great deal of it.  There never was a time when men wrote so much and so well, and that, without being of any great account themselves. (284)

Newman blames periodicals, not MFA programs.  The complaint is perpetual.  Was it ever true?  Was it ever not true?

One last quotation, which tips Newman’s hand.  He has to defend literature, classical, English, or otherwise.  He loves it too much:

National Literature is, in a parallel way, the untutored movements of the reason, imagination, passions, and affections of the natural man, the leapings and the friskings, the plungings and the snortings, the sportings and the buffoonings, the clumsy play and the aimless toil, of the noble, lawless savage of God’s intellectual creation. (“ECL,” 275)

Now that sounds like fun.  It is fun.

John Henry Newman and neighborly, safely antagonistic book blogging

A recent John Henry Newman argument, step by step.  Roger Scruton, in The American Spectator, argues for “a wholly new kind of university” based, somehow, on the principles of The Idea of a University.  Good luck with that!  Miriam Burstein warns Scruton, and me, that Newman’s argument is founded on his Catholic faith, even, at times, when he specifically claims otherwise.  Reader beware.  When Newman defends knowledge for its own sake, one of the “aims” he leaves unspecified is certainly a strengthening or even discovery of Catholic religious principles.  Not sharing those principles myself, I am left dangling.

D. G. Myers asks if anything is then recoverable from Newman for anyone outside of a Catholic university or a similar institution.  His central point, as I understand it, is correct, that the educators and administrators of the modern university do not have a cohesive purpose, not like Newman envisioned, and are often openly antagonistic.  One could defend this state of affairs, but not with Newman’s arguments.

Burstein plucks a single quotation from Newman, almost a single word:

[R]eally, Gentlemen, I am making no outrageous request, when, in the name of a University, I ask religious writers, jurists, economists, physiologists, chemists, geologists, and historians, to go on quietly, and in a neighbourly way, in their own respective lines of speculation, research, and experiment, with full faith in the consistency of that multiform truth, which they share between them.  (“Christianity and Scientific Investigation,” 341, emphasis mine)

I have made an excerpt from Prof. Burstein's excerpt of a marvelously long, twisty sentence.  My slice makes Newman’s idea seem outrageous simply because he denies it is.  Still – quietly, neighborly.  I prefer, as more achievable, a similar metaphor from a bit earlier in the same discourse:

In this point of view, its several professors are like the ministers of various political powers at one court or conference.  They represent their respective sciences, and attend to the private interests of those sciences respectively; and, should dispute arise between those sciences, they are the persons to talk over and arrange it, without risk of extravagant pretensions on any side, of angry collision, or of popular commotion.  A liberal philosophy becomes the habit of minds thus exercised; a breadth and spaciousness of thought, in which lines, seemingly parallel, may converge at leisure, and principles, recognized as incommensurable, may be safely antagonistic. (337)

“Safely antagonistic” – even that, I would not want to take for granted, but it seems possible.  My PhD is from a program based on, known for, its seminar model.  All research of any seriousness was presented at safely antagonistic public seminars.  The professional standards were impeccable.  The audience, every member, typically, had read the paper in advance.  We played havoc with any intended presentation or slide show.  We skipped straight to the good stuff, by which I mean, the weakest arguments and evidence.  We were brutal.  To the extent that I am a competent professional in my field, it’s because of these seminars.

I have wondered if this safe antagonism can be replicated on book blogs.  It seems so difficult.  In the seminar room, every participant knew the rules and the limits of combat.  On the internet, I’m afraid not.  I try to respect the signals bloggers send about how aggressively they want to be challenged, but I’ll bet I misread them a lot, so mostly, I play it safe and try not to be a jerk.  Too big of a jerk.  Perhaps a more explicitly collaborative model makes more sense.

I have imagined digital stickers pasted to the top of the blog – “Have at me” (I’d use that one) or “Play nice” or “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” 

Have at me!  I'll thank you later. Maybe, ha ha, a lot later. It’s for my own good, the furthering of my liberal education. Maybe for your good, too.

Lingering in the vestibule of knowledge - Newman on professional knowledge, with a case study from my own education

Have I ever mentioned that I have an undergraduate English degree?  I do.  Or – one of my undergraduate degrees is an English degree.  I’m a social scientist.  The English degree was pure consumption, knowledge for its own end.  I should not have completed the requirements but rather spent that time studying German or French.  Or I should have finished my math degree.  No,no, the languages.  I took plenty of math.  One of those math classes was perhaps the most important I ever took.

It was Calculus III.  I believe there were about fifteen of us at the beginning.  Seven at the end.  I think I was the only social scientist in that group.  The rest were engineers, scientists, and maybe just one mathematician.  This was the hardest undergraduate class I ever encountered, by far, by so far.  I now know that it was a deliberate screen, driving off the insufficiently serious.

John Henry Newman devotes a chapter of The Idea of a University to “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill” – knowledge that is by no means for its own end.  By the end of the speech, he has cleverly turned the argument back into a defense of a broad, liberal education, but he understands the necessity of professional training, too.  How should a university engage in professional training?

[I]t is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth, nor the reading many books, nor the getting up many subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, nor the attending many lectures.  All this is short of enough; a man may have done it all, yet be lingering in the vestibule of knowledge – he may not realize what his mouth utters; he may not see with his mental eye what confronts him; he may have no grasp of things as they are; or at least he may have no power at all of advancing one step forward of himself… (134-5)

That’s where I and my classmates were, on the vestibule of knowledge, Good At Math but unable to advance a step without assistance.  I’m not sure how he did it – the difficulty of the class was necessary, but not sufficient to the task – but he taught us how to study math.

Six of us marched on to the same professor’s spring class (Differential Equations, I think), where we were joined by a new crop of recruits, all of whom found the course brutally difficult.  Not the veterans, though. We thought it was a breeze.  A powerful, difficult, laborious breeze, yes.  But no big deal.  We had already  learned how to learn about math.  I did not have another class so difficult, in math, or anywhere else, until I went to graduate school, which was a whole ‘nother ball game.

At this time last year, I was actually teaching a math class, to graduate students.  Much of the material was exactly what we covered in that crucial Calculus III class, although I’m not sure that’s relevant.  I was able to teach the class, I realized what my mouth uttered, because of Calculus III, twenty years in the past.  I was able to finish my PhD because of Calculus III.  I don’t want to guess how much of my professional success can be traced to this one course.

Newman argues that even professional training requires “the intellect” to be “disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture.”  He calls this “the business of a University” (135).  That’s what this math professor, a true practitioner of liberal education, did for us.  I don’t remember his name.

Freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom - I ask John Henry Newman, why read?

Elif Batuman has developed a little specialty in attacking creative writing programs and contemporary fiction.  Some of her slashing is in The Possessed, especially the first chapter, but interested parties should track the wastes of the internet for her recent London Review of Books (TLS?) essay on the subject.  I didn’t read it myself – it’s 8,000 words on a subject I don’t care much about by a writer I don’t quite trust.

What should a budding young writer do, then?  If I understand her, the answer is to go to graduate school in comparative literature, allowing the writer, having accumulated the relevant quantity of experience, to write a hybrid memoir-novel about graduate school.  I don’t just mean that this is the answer for Batuman, but for everyone. I must misunderstand her advice.  If someone wants to brave those 8,000 words and report back, please, do.**

Please note that the pursuit of knowledge has become purely instrumental.  We acquire knowledge in pursuit of our novel.  Grad school seems like a dang costly way to get to that point, but different paths for different writers, right Elif?  Maybe even, for some, a creative writing program.

I, as narcissistic as Batuman, wonder why I pursue knowledge.  Meaning, useless knowledge.  Knowledge about literature.  My nickname, Amateur Reader, is meant seriously.  For the Professional Reader, literary study of some sort is the point of the exercise, professionally necessary.  And it’s easy enough to make practical arguments, for everyone, about the value of some reading.  I don’t know any reason for the amateur to read so much, though.  My reading goes far beyond any practical purpose.  Why, for example, did I recently read John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University (*)?

Newman’s book is a collection of speeches aimed at convincing suspicious Irish Catholics of the value of founding a Catholic University.  I have no plans to found a university, Catholic or otherwise.  I want to spend the rest of the week thinking about this book, but I find an easy clue to my purposeless purpose in the title of one of the speeches: “Knowledge Its Own End.”

Newman has to argue in two directions – first, fending off the Utilitarians who demand a measurable outcome to all study, measurable, typically, in currency, and second, reassuring the Catholics who want all pursuits to be in the clear service of religious truth or moral improvement.  I’m not sure that Newman succeeds, and don't see how he could.  If a liberal education creates “[a] habit of mind… which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom” (90), which sounds great, how are these things not also both useful in the practical world and morally improving?

Potentially, at least, which is key.  Newman recognizes that the history of attempts to educate men to virtue has been a history of failure, that “such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason” are poor tools for “contend[ing] against those giants, the passion and the pride of man” (107).  Newman concludes: “we perfect our nature, not by undoing it, but by adding to it what is more than nature, and directing it towards aims higher than its own” (109).

This is exactly right, or at least it is what I see in my own reading, my own writing, excepting a nervous rejection of the word “perfect.”  Still unanswered, by Newman, or me: what aims?

* The book went through many iterations.  The first version was published in 1852; the final version in 1873.  I’m using the 1947 Longmans, Green and Co. edition, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold.  Page numbers from this book.

** Please read the comments for the report. Thanks!