Newman Studies Journal

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 96 tropes and emphases of English-language Patristic studies have been, since Newman, Newman’s. His accounts of Athanasius’s person and work, in particular, have continued to inform scholarly accounts of the theological history that unfolded at and after the council of Nicea. Whether the bishop of Alexandria should continue to enjoy the status he has in Newman’s writings, for the reasons Newman adduced, is a question that King thinks is worth asking. He does not presume to answer it completely. He does identify the interpretive issues that an answer would have to take into account. Charles Hefling Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind: Reason in Religion, Science, and the Humanities. By Jane Rupert. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. Pages: 128. Cloth: ISBN 0–7391–4047–7. $55.00. Newman’s reputation as a champion of reason has extended far beyond the English-speaking world. It was especially prevalent in southern Germany when a young seminarian named Joseph Ratzinger was studying theology. Ratzinger was introduced to Newman’s writings by his prefect, Alfred Läpple, who was writing a doctoral thesis on Newman’s understanding of conscience. Ratzinger’s interest in Newman should come as no surprise, given that he was much more impressed by Romanticism’s engagement with history and emphasis on the affective dimension of faith than he was with the dry scholasticism that had become the staple seminary diet. Although it is not Rupert’s task to examine the connection between Newman and Ratzinger,the parallels rightly emerge from her analysis.Her main goal is to show that Newman was deeply concerned about our habituation to a single method of inquiry.“The modern crisis in faith,” she writes, is “rooted in a narrow idea of the mind” (111).This rings a chord with Pope Benedict’s invitation to cultivate the “vast potential of human reason” which is “purified by faith” and thus “emboldened to pursue its noble purpose” (Meeting with Muslim Religious Leaders, 9 May 2009).“I believe a particularly urgent task of religion,” the pope insists,“is to unveil the vast potential of human reason” (Meeting with Muslim Community, 19 March 2009). In this book,Rupert reviews the main writings in which Newman shows himself a great defender of this more expansive idea of reason in an age narrowly constricted to empirical inquiry. She shows that Newman had an abiding concern to retrieve scientific reason as understood prior to the modern era. This “verbal theoretical thought” begins with “ideas, accepted universals” and “assumed principles” (2). It functions in conjunction with the imagination and feelings as can be seen in the thought patterns of religion and poetry. Rupert explains that the Empiricists were sorely mistaken in thinking that literature pertains only to “tastes” and “feelings” understood in a narrow sense.To the contrary,literature expands the power of reason by a nuanced use of language best acquired during childhood and adolescence.There will always be time to probe first principles later. At a more tender age, the most important thing is to have a competent teacher who approaches his or her art as an Newman Journal V9 Issue 1_Newman Journal V9 Issue 1 2/1/12 10:13 AM Page 96 97 interpersonal process allowing the pupil to connect subconsciously what he or she learns through the humanities to the deeper principles underlying them. Rupert fleshes out the distinction between reasoning in empirical science and Newman’s broader notion of reasoning by focusing on the principles isolated by the former and the cool, neutral judgments to which they lead. Newman pointed to the insufficiency of these principles for effective moral deliberation.To cultivate the latter one must employ rhetoric, which examines a given issue from several different angles. Principles are by no means absent from this process, as rhetoric necessarily uses contradictions, opposites, and negative cases.Yet unlike the empirical sciences, honing the skills of moral deliberation does not require superior intelligence insofar as imagination, the faculty at the core of the process, is available to the educated and uneducated alike. Imagination particularly relies on analogy, which is why words like “Father” and “Son...