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John Henry Newman and the Illative Sense: A Re-consideration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Aidan Nichols
Aidan Nichols
Affiliation:
25 George Square, Edinburgh
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Extract

The aim of this article is to provide an historical description of an important piece of Victorian theology, and subsequently to suggest a new context, or rather a new content for a familiar theme. Firstly, it will consider in what sense Newman may be called a ‘natural theologian’; secondly, it will give an account of the notion of the illative sense within the developing pattern of Newman's thought; finally, it will suggest that, by a unilateral concentration on moral experience — the ‘voice of conscience’ — Newman failed to do justice to the full significance of his own argumentation. The point of the illative sense is not that it helps us to identify any one experiential content, or area of reflection, which might lead us to theistic belief, but that it provides an overall context in which a variety of experiential strata and argumentative strategies may be displayed. Newman was, perhaps, too dominated by an autobiographical sense in the realm of fundamental belief in God to identify and correct the individualism which in dogmatic theology proper he would have avoided. Our theistic materials do not lie simply within our own breasts, but in an inter-rogation, Gadamer-like, of the entire theistic tradition as that is mediated to us by the classic texts of our predecessors.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , August 1985 , pp. 347 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1985

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References

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13 ibid., p. 187.

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15 The lifelong concern with apologetics that this implies may be related not only to the contemporary situation of the Anglican and Catholic Churches, but also to the chief sources of Newman's theology: the Alexandrian church fathers and the Anglican divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a glance at the representative figures of Clement of Alexandria and Joseph Butler will show.

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