Sermon Blog
Oxford University Sermon 4: Usurpations of Reason
November 9, 2024
(by George Richmond)
St. John Henry Newman delivered the Oxford University Sermons at St. Mary’s, some by appointment as “select preacher” for the university and others in his preaching turn as a college Fellow. These sermons were delivered over a span of years from 1826 to 1843. Although called sermons, they were more like lectures on religious subjects.
The fourth of these sermons, entitled the “Usurpation of Reason” was preached on December 11, 1831. In this sermon, Newman expounds on the abuse of reason in matters of faith. He begins by asserting that the Old Testament seldom speaks about human reason and the New Testament, when referring to Jesus who grew in wisdom and stature, does not speak of reason in terms of argumentative skill.
For Newman, a man “viewing the world as it is, and the Bible in connexion with it, what would he see in the actual history of Revelation, but the triumph of the moral powers of man over the intellectual, of holiness over ability, far more than of mind over brute force?”
He maintained the notion that for Christians “unlearned Faith, establishing itself by its own inherent strength, ruled the Reason as far as its own interests were concerned, and from that time has employed it in the Church, first as a captive, then as a servant; not as an equal…”
In the sermon, Newman examines the relation between reason and faith, and the usurpations or misuses of reason on the one hard and Church authority on the other.
“This opposition between Faith and Reason takes place in two ways, when either of the two encroaches upon the province of the other. It would be an absurdity to attempt to find out mathematical truths by the purity and acuteness of the moral sense. It is a form of this mistake which has led men to apply such Scripture communications as are intended for religious purposes to the determination of physical questions.” This would constitute an error on the part of schools of theology. Although he does not mention the Galileo affair, this would be an example of such an error.
He goes on to describe the other type of usurpation “…when Reason is the aggressor, and encroaches on the province of Religion, attempting to judge of those truths which are subjected to another part of our nature, the moral sense.” He offers as an example of this, attempting to decide which doctrines are necessary for salvation on human reason, or deciding what type of reverence should be practiced on the Lord’s Day.
Newman admits that reason assists the senses by arranging the evidence they supply, and deducing conclusions from facts, etc. Next, however, he compares one who relies primarily on reason to a blind man who lectures on light and color.
“Unhappily the blind teacher in morals can ensure himself a blind audience, to whom he may safely address his paradoxes, which are sometimes admitted even by religious men, on the ground of those happy conjectures which his acute Reason now and then makes, and which they can verify.” In this manner, persons reach heresies, which are errors of reasoning and conclusion in matters of faith.
In this sermon, Newman is somewhat negative or at least excessively cautious in the use he grants to reason. He will be more nuanced in later Oxford University Sermons. Here, his principle intention is to criticize the reliance of intellectual arguments to prove Christian doctrines, what was called Evidences for the divinity of Christ and revelation by classical Protestant apologists such as William Paley.
He counters: “how many men do we suppose, in a century, out of the whole body of Christians, have been primarily brought to belief, or retained in it, by an intimate and lively perception of the force of what are technically called the Evidences?”
Towards the end of the sermon, Newman advances what years later he termed the illative sense in his Grammar of Assent: “so alert is the instinctive power of an educated conscience, that by some secret faculty, and without any intelligible reasoning process, it seems to detect moral truth wherever it lies hid and feels a conviction of its own accuracy which bystanders cannot account for; and this especially in the case of Revealed Religion…”
Newman closes by asserting that reason often usurps the place of faith in questions of morals and religion, and faults Protestantism with its overthrow of the legitimate ecclesiastical power as the external evidence for revealed religion.
The once Oxford don will return to this idea and expound on it in his defense of theology in the Idea of a University. In other texts, including later Oxford University Sermons he will focus on the healthy relation between faith and reason.
