The relationship of religion and ethics: A comparison of Newman and contemporary philosophy of religion

Heythrop Journal - Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology

Volumn 46, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 435-449

  Wynn, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 61149513381     PISSN: 00181196     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2005.00267.x     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are taken from John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979; first published 1870.)
2. J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism. Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
3. Mackie does acknowledge that on Newman's view, this moral argument is rarely the original ground of religious belief; rather, it is the actual experience of conscience which constitutes that ground (Miracle, p. 104). However, he neglects to say more about the role of our experience in this regard, and instead directs his comments to the argument.
4. Mackie, Miracle, p. 105.
5. Alvin Plantinga, 'Is Belief in God Properly Basic?', reprinted in W. Rowe & W. Wainwright (eds.), Philosophy of Religion. Selected Readings (Orlando FL.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1998), p. 477.
6. That Alston includes moral experience within his treatment of perception of God is evident from his suggestion that God may be identified in religious perception as the 'moral lawgiver', cf., Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 29. However, Alston is explicit that I can perceive God without taking myself to do so (see pp. 38-9), and on this point his view is akin to Newman's.
7. But see also this comment: 'When men begin all their works with the thought of God, . . . and see Him in every event, . . ., they will find everything that happens tend [sic] to confirm them in the truths about Him which live in their imagination . . . Then they are brought into His presence as that of a Living Person, and able to converse with Him, and that with a directness and simplicity, with a confidence and intimacy, mutatis mutandis, which we use towards an earthly superior; so that it is doubtful whether we realize the company of our fellow-men with greater keenness than these favoured minds are able to contemplate and adore the Unseen, Incomprehensible Creator' (pp. 106-7).
8. William Wainwright, Reason and the Heart. A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
9. Hence Wainwright remarks that 'Newman's position appears to be this. Faith rests on evidence. But some of it cannot be easily recovered or stated, and the evidence as a whole is likely to seem weak to those with some moral temperaments' (Reason, p. 81).
10. Compare Wainwright's discussion of Newman's sermon 'Faith without Sight', and the role of felt need of revelation in bringing a person to recognize it (Reason, pp. 76-7).
11. Michael Stocker with Elizabeth Hegeman, Valuing Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 94.
12. Ronald de Sousa, 'The Rationality of Emotions', in Amélie Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1980), p. 139.
13. Compare Oatley and Jenkins' comment that we need the emotions because we are neither ticks nor gods: if we were ticks, we would respond to a limited range of environmental stimuli in a relatively mechanical manner; if we were gods, we would have perfect information; instead, as humans, we are confronted by a broad range of stimuli (unlike ticks) but without sufficient understanding to make sense of it all at once (unlike gods), and accordingly we need some way of prioritising what to think about or heed. And this is the role fulfilled by the emotions: pre-reflectively, they direct our attention to some matters rather than others. See Keith Oatley and Jennifer M. Jenkins, Understanding Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 257.
14. In this connection, it is worth emphasizing the emotional character of conscience in Newman's conception of it. Conscience, he writes, 'is something more than a moral sense; it is always, what the sense of the beautiful is only in certain cases; it is always emotional' (p. 100).
15. Stephen Wykstra, 'The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of "Appearance"', in M. M. and R. M. Adams (eds.), The Problem of Evil (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 152.
16. Wainwright does quote the phrase 'alienated from Him' (see Reason, p. 76), but he does not draw out the meaning of the larger passage in the way proposed here.
17. Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity. Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), p. 30.
18. Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 51.
19. Recall that in the passage I cited above (from pp. 103-4) Newman writes that the child 'has in his mind the image of an Invisible Being, . . . who is heart-reading, heart-changing, ever-accessible, open to impetration' (my emphasis).
20. Newman includes the following emotions among the 'various perturbations of mind which are characteristic of a bad conscience': 'self-reproach, poignant shame, haunting remorse, chill dismay at the prospect of the future' (p. 100).
21. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 59-60, emphasis in original.
22. Other recent defences of the intrinsic intentionality of feeling thesis include John Deigh, 'Cognitivism in the Theory of the Emotions', Ethics 104 (1994), pp. 824-54
23. and Geoffrey Maddell, 'What Music Teaches About Emotion', Philosophy 71 (1996), pp. 63-82.
24. However, this is not to say that Newman's proposal on this point is without precedent. Notably, Jonathan Edwards advances a view that is similar on certain points in his essay 'Religious Affections'
25. reprinted in C. H. Faust and T. H. Johnson (eds.), Jonathan Edwards. Representative Selections (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. 206-54. See also footnote 24 below.
26. Indeed, Newman subscribes to the view, dubious on Wittgensteinian grounds, that 'images' may precede 'notions' (p. 105). At the same time, Newman insists, as one would expect, that Christians may not consider credal, propositionally articulated understanding as dispensable. He cites this analogy: 'We feel gratitude and love, we feel indignation and dislike, when we have the informations [sic] actually put before us which are to kindle those several emotions. We love our parents, as our parents, when we know them to be our parents; we must know concerning God, before we can feel love, fear, hope, or trust towards Him' (p. 109). This may sound like the add-on theory again, but given the passages I have discussed above, we should rather suppose that he sees doctrine as coming before certain religious emotions, while allowing that the feeling component of these emotions may pick out some further content, beyond what can be captured in any purely notional account of God's reality.
27. Compare Rudolf Otto's approachin The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, translated by John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).
28. In fairness to Plantinga, it is important to note that he does not want to treat affection as devoid of any intellectual component: he adds in a footnote that 'I don't mean to suggest for a moment that an affection is simply a feeling of some sort, as if it had no intentional component': see Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 297. However, allowing that affection has an intellectual component, Plantinga still wishes to treat affection and cognition as dialectically related - see below - rather than drawing on this insight to allow that affections may themselves be forms of understanding.
29. Plantinga, Christian Belief, p. 301.
30. See for instance Peter Byrne's discussion of motivated irrationality in matters of religious belief in his review of Richard Swinburne's Revelation, 'A Defence of Christian Theism', Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 381-94, especially pp. 385-6. Byrne suggests that a person of lesser moral commitment may be deterred from embracing the claims of religion by the thought that the moral demands of such a life may prove too onerous. This suggests one way of tying sincerity or seriousness of religious commitment to moral seriousness.
31. See John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion. Human Responses to the Transcendent (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), ch. 19.
32. That Newman thinks there is a connection between quality of moral life and openness to the voice of conscience is implied in this remark: 'Men transgress their sense of duty, and gradually lose those sentiments of shame and fear, the natural supplements of transgression, which, as I have said, are witnesses of the Unseen Judge' (p. 105).
33. A version of this paper was presented at a conference on Religion and Ethics, hosted jointly by the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion and the Society of Christian Philosophers, in Oxford, August 2003. I am grateful for some helpful discussion of the paper on that occasion.