THE P RTAL
June 2014
UK Pages - page 14
Thoughts on Newman
Newman on Real Assent
The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan examines Newman’s ideas
If Lectures
on the Prophetical Office of the Church was the most significant of Newman’s works as an
Anglican and the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine the most significant work associated with
that hinge of his life, his conversion to Catholicism, then An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent must, surely,
rank as the literary pinnacle of his life as a Catholic.
paper logic is unequal to the task
Published in 1870, Newman told his friends that
the Grammar of Assent had taken him twenty years to
write. Newman was to show that scientific methods
and standards (which were as often accepted as the
only way of knowing the truth in the late-nineteenth
century as they are in the early-twenty first) for
evidence and assent are too narrow to be universally
useful in real life.
way we believe. It is the latter, ‘real assent’, which is,
for Newman, the character of ‘belief ’, and this is, he
argued, a precondition for the communication of faith.
notional assent to the claims of Rome
I suspect that, for all of us who have, like Newman,
made the decision to join the Catholic church - either
from another Christian confession or from other
religions or none - have had to engage with both of
these concepts. For many who were once Anglicans
validity of assent
of the Catholic tradition, their conversions are often
He argued that logic and its conclusions are not preceded by extended periods of notional assent to the
readily transferrable to real life decision-making claims of Rome: many years spent accepting, in theory,
without significant adaptation. As a result, he felt that the claims of the Papacy, whilst remaining outside that
it was inappropriate to judge the validity of assent communion which the Pope leads as Christ’s Vicar.
in concrete faith by conventional logical standards We remained outside for a whole variety of reasons,
because paper logic is unequal to the task. “Logic is good or otherwise.
loose at both ends”, he said, meaning that the process
of logic initially depends on a set of restrictive events, dear boy, events
assumptions which only partially reflect the totality of
Yet the time has come, for many of us, when various
reality and so is unable to fit its conclusions neatly into exigencies (what the former Prime Minister, Harold
real world situations.
Macmillan, was wont to call “events, dear boy, events”)
have led us to move beyond that notional assent
concentration and serious reflection
to a real assent that has compelled us to seek fullAlthough the Grammar of Assent is a very significant communion with the Successor of Peter.
contribution to the world of philosophy and theology,
it is not a particularly difficult book to read - even if
It is an assent - concrete with the power of the
it does, at times, require concentration and serious concrete - that has cost many of us much. We should
reflection - and it introduces two concepts that can be thank God for the gift of this assent and for its costs,
of great use in the life of faith: notional and real assent. which, as Newman came to see for himself, are part of
God’s work of grace in our lives.
Newman described and contrasted these two distinct
ways in which we give our agreement to propositions.
Acts of notional assent ‘tend to be mere assertions
A man would do nothing
without any personal hold on them on the part of
those who make them’, whereas those of real assent
if he waited until he could
‘representing as they do the concrete, have the power
do it so well that no one
of the concrete upon the affections and passions, and
by means of these indirectly become operative’.
could find fault.
‘
‘Real assent’ is that assent which, when we give
it to a proposition, changes the way we behave, the
contents page
’
Bl John Henry Newman