Oxford University Sermon, n. 14, Faith, Wisdom & Bigotry

St. John Henry Newman preached his 1841 sermon “Wisdom, as contrasted with Faith and Bigotry” on the Feast of Whitsunday (Pentecost), the Anglican liturgy for which included a Collect Prayer invoking the Holy Spirit. Newman highlights a line from that prayer, asking the Holy Spirit to give “a right judgment in all things,” which, in the life of a Christian, he calls “Wisdom,” “Philosophy,” or “Enlargement of Mind” in a religious sense. Newman was concerned, throughout his life, that many in the 19th century were incorrectly viewing faith as opposed to intellect (fideism), or as requiring rational proof prior to belief (rationalism), or as irrational and dispensable (modern atheism). Newman witnessed some friends, such as William Froude, as well as his own brother Francis Newman, slide from rationalism into unbelief. Newman’s defense of the relationship between faith and reason was not only consistent with Scripture and great voices from tradition, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, but it also anticipated teachings from the first and second Vatican Councils, as well as that of 20th century popes like St. John Paul II (see Fides et Ratio). Two essential principles summarize the perennial relevance of Newman’s approach: faith does not require prior rational proof or demonstration in order to be warranted; and, at the same time, faith includes real knowledge of divine things—it is not ignorance.

FAITH

There are many things which we know without demonstration or proof and which we believe with certainty: that I was born in my hometown, that my bank won’t steal my money, that an eyewitness to a crime is trustworthy, and so on. These basic acts of trust in relationships are fundamental. We not only know and believe them, but we would be wrong not to. If I trust someone, I will also believe the contents of what they tell me. Just so, religious faith “proposes simple obedience to a revealed command,” and starts out by “putting reasoning aside as out of place” in order to trust God, whose ways are beyond our prior human judgments. This is because faith is “exercised under a sense of personal responsibility.” That is, if I trust someone, I will sense a duty to believe what he says. Faith “believes an informant amid doubt, yet accepts his information without doubt,” and thus acquires knowledge of divine things by trusting that what God says is true, since he is supremely trustworthy.

But many in the modern age think that religious belief is “narrowness of mind,” closed off to the things of human nature and science. While there are some bad examples of men of faith who deny other truths, this is in fact not faith at all, but a faulty one. Faith is not opposed to reason. It is a unique and religious kind of knowledge “distinct from argument, discussion, investigation,” or “philosophy.”  Faith remains constantly open to learning more from wherever divine truths arise. To the eyes of faith, all things in nature, the world, and the history of Christ’s Church are “full of sacred principles” that disclose ever deepening truths. Faith seeks unity in the midst of diverse studies and systems, which “alone is able to accept [truth] as one and the same under all its forms.” In this way faith is never self-satisfied, but looks outward at the things and persons it trusts in a bond of allegiance (see Dr. Matthew Bates on this topic) that grows into knowledge, rational intimacy, and love. Faith remains open to continuous progress in deeper understanding.

WISDOM

If faith is the seed, wisdom is growth and maturation. If faith is a foundation, wisdom “builds her house” (Prov. 9:1), developing “orderly and mature… thought, which in earthly language goes by the name of science and philosophy.” The work of this maturation includes reasoning and argumentation, both “implicit and explicit,” as the believer examines, meditates on, elaborates, and understands the truths of faith disclosed by revelation. The mysterious truth of the Incarnation, that Christ is fully God and fully man, leads us on to reflection on its relation to and illumination of other mysteries: of the Trinity, of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s role, of the Paschal Mystery, of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church which extends Christ’s teachings across space and time, and of the Holy Sacraments which extend and apply Christ’s presence and grace. Since “grace does not supersede, but uses” or raises our natural virtues and powers, “We gain Truth by reasoning, whether implicit or explicit,” in the life of nature as well as in the life of grace. Reason allows us to move from mystery to mystery, coordinating them, meditating on them, and falling in deeper love with them as we glimpse more deeply their unity in God’s work and plan for salvation. 

Reason also clarifies things in the order of nature and in the order of grace by drawing analogies between them. We naturally experience growth of intellectual habits when we travel to new lands, look through a telescope, witness foreign and exotic animals, study the physical sciences or history, or encounter customs beside our own. When I was a young boy, friends from Australia came to stay in our home, and I was mystified to observe them eagerly taking pictures of squirrels and deer in our yard. What to me was extremely ordinary backyard wildlife was completely new to their eyes, and I was left wondering at the mystery of how, to Australians, kangaroos and bandicoots are ordinary and unremarkable. Newman would say that, in this moment, my mind endured “growth” or “enlargement” as I saw my world from a new, wider angle. The point is, religious faith, too, “has its own enlargement,” undergoes growth, and must expand itself through intellectual habits. He notes the experience of conversion as proof—men who were unserious about God but who, turning to God, look into themselves, reform conduct, study Scripture and Church History: “they seem to become, in point of intellect, different beings from what they were before.”

True men of faith will ordinarily experience such progressive intellectual growth. The Holy Spirit’s gifts cooperate with active intellectual inquiry. Development of knowledge through rational engagement is integral to growth in faith unto wisdom, of which Solomon and St. Paul are exemplars. To Newman, knowledge is not just “mere addition,” but is a “movement onward” where the things known are related to all else known, developing a “connected view of the old with the new.” This is supremely true of the Christian faith, in which a “connected view” is also “knowledge, not only of things, but of their mutual relations”—in this case, knowledge of divine things. This knowledge will always transcend our human capacity and our reason, but it is still, in the measure our minds can receive by God’s grace, real knowledge. Pope Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi confirms Newman’s view. The Pope quotes from the first Vatican Council: “reason illumined by faith, if it seeks earnestly, piously and wisely, does attain under God, to a certain and most helpful knowledge of mysteries, by considering their analogy with what it knows naturally, and their mutual relations, and their common relations with man’s last end.” Reason is “never capable of understanding those mysteries” in the same manner that it can understand natural things. But just as Mary pondered the events of Christ’s life in her heart (Luke 2:19), so the believer recruits reason in order to examine each mystery of faith in relation to other mysteries, coming to a fuller understanding of and a closer approximation to Divine Wisdom, putting on “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16)

BIGOTRY

Faith’s use of reason to expand its view and understanding of things divine is in stark contrast to what can plague both the unbeliever and the falsely pious: bigotry. A person of faith remains open and docile to deeper insight into truth, but bigotry remains stagnant by grasping one partial truth to the exclusion of others. Bigots are those “whose minds are possessed by some one object, take exaggerated views of its importance, are feverish in their pursuit of it, and are startled or downcast on finding obstacles in the way of it.” The bigot presumes to have arrived at the fullness of wisdom when he in fact falls far short, and loses real faith, reason and wisdom altogether. Bigots make truth seem quick and easy: “They do not see difficulties… they conceive that they profess just the truth which makes all things easy.” They forget that, like all kinds of human growth, arriving at wisdom through faith is laborious, difficult, and progressive, and thus requires much grace and divine assistance. So long as we remain in this life, wisdom will not arrive instantaneously or be easily kept; it will require perseverance and vigilance to cultivate religious, moral, and intellectual habits.

Newman’s sermon provides good material for self-examination. There is always more to learn, and we must not stop at half-truths. We must preach the whole truth, or no truth at all. We must maintain the posture of faith as we humbly pursue deeper knowledge and wisdom, until “we see things as God sees them, with the judgment of his Spirit, and according to the mind of Christ.” Newman is a great teacher and role-model of maintaining a child-like posture of true faith that seeks to know God and his mysteries more deeply, in the measure that He gives. But we must be very careful that, presuming to have arrived at the end, presuming to have finished prematurely, presuming to have attained truth easily and completely, we then begin refusing the wider view or further gifts that God wants to give. To see things as God sees them brings lasting peace, joy, and an inexplicable hope amidst even the most trying of circumstances, because we will be open to God’s gifts that are beyond us and yet truly given, bathing our lives in the light of eternity.