John Henry Newman

Abstract

The nature of faith and reason and their proper relation was a preoccupation of John Henry Newman throughout his long writing career, beginning with his Oxford University Sermons and carrying on long after the publication of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. In both classic sites of his religious epistemology, Newman wrote out of the British naturalist tradition, which gave sanction to the normal workings of the human mind in religious as well as non-religious affairs against the universalistic tendencies of Lockean epistemology. In so doing, Newman defended religious belief as a form of knowing. Accordingly, this chapter will not only present Newman’s religious epistemology from these important texts but will also show the influence of Newman’s thought on later epistemology as well as the problems, arising from Newman’s writings, that require further epistemological attention.