Read on Twitter
It occurs to me that John Henry Newman says much better than I could—partly because I get insolent, but also because he is smarter than I am—why essays about “why” to be, become, or remain Catholic are mostly nonsense. They just don’t approach the nature of human assent.
This logic, because it is Newman’s, could apply to *any* human assent, and not just to the Catholic Church, since Newman insists that “Christianity is addressed...to minds” (Grammar, 379). And the nature of human assent and human certitude is, for Newman, not that of a conclusion
We mainly do *not* arrive at certainty the way a Geometric proof might. Newman’s genius is to not only notice this, which is an achievement given his context, but also to say that it works, that it is rational (so, not an intuition), and real.
The illative sense is that ability of the mind to know when evidence for the hypothesis is sufficient. And for Newman, it’s not a single piece of evidence that tips the scale, but the whole set, and the way that the whole is “more” than any single fragment.
A very young Bernard Lonergan says on Newman: it’s not the *objects* that do the judging, it’s the mind, and the measure *is* the mind. And Newman says outright that the assembled evidence even in retrospect is more for us to remember the judgment, not to supply for it.
So anyway, this means that any assent given consciously, knowing that we are coming to certitude as we come to it (Newman’s complex assent, if I remember) can’t be laid out on a platter even for the mind that does it. For anything. Let alone in a damn essay about Catholicism.
That’s not because it’s not real, but because it is real. And it’s not because “the real” is very big or something for our tiny brains, like the number pi, but because our grasp of the virtually unconditioned (Lonergan) can’t be confused with the phantasms that make it possible.
Yeah, so. Those essays are agitating AF. (To me.) And no wonder. It’s like explaining being alive by drawing a stick figure. I hate it. (You don’t have to.)
Thus ends my rant against “Why Catholic” essays, as I very clearly make notes about a Newman essay I am working on.
Thus ends my rant against “Why Catholic” essays, as I very clearly make notes about a Newman essay I am working on.
