Abstract

Few have attempted a thorough exposition of Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent for the purpose of clarifying the essential contents of the work and evaluating its philosophical implications and contributions. I have attempted to provide a thorough exposition of the Grammar, but neither the commentary nor the philosophical evaluation is complete. My commentary focused primarily on clarifying what I see are the four essential successive stages of the Grammar: An attempt to refute the errors implicit in the claim that people cannot believe what they cannot understand; An attempt to justify, in light of the role of the will and the conscience in the act of belief, that the mental state of certitude may accompany belief--especially as exercised upon a cumulation of proofs; An attempt to apply this justification of certitude to a proof of Theism; An attempt to apply the conclusions of this application to a proof of the divine origin of Christianity. The philosophical evaluation consisted primarily in an attempt to describe the more important metaphysical/epistemological presuppositions operative in, and tightly interwoven with, the Grammar's essential stages. In particular, I tried to reveal Newman's realism and his moderate empiricism--both of which are characterized by a considerable tendency toward nominalism and radical empiricism. I have suggested that the Grammar made a contribution to philosophy in general, and to Christian philosophy in particular. In regard to the former, his critique of Locke's theory of assent seeks to show that Locke's epistemology leads to a kind of scientism that holds that certainty in formal assent can be justified only by mathematical proof. Newman's critique sheds light on the relationship between the Liberal Rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the phenomenon of Deism in the nineteenth. In regard to Christian philosophy, his emphasis on the role of the will and the conscience in religious assent complements the scholastic emphasis on the intellect, and on formal reasoning--especially regarding the abstract principles of metaphysics--so important in that tradition for arriving at a natural knowledge of God. Newman preferred the argument for the existence of God from conscience because he was wrestling with how it was that one finally gives assent to that which the intellect has already come to accept as true