Newman and Paley

[Back after a long break.]

So right now I am working through parts of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity (1794), mainly so that I can understand the marginalia John Henry Newman left in his copy. He marked the book up a good deal in preparation for his first Essay on Miracles (1826), and relied upon Paley as an initial guide in responding to Hume's critique of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). However, by the time he wrote his second Essay (1843) more than fifteen years later, Newman had come to think of Paley's evidence-based approach (similar to some apologetics still practiced today) as tending toward rationalism, misguided in its insistence on the priority of rational proof over the grounds provided by rational faith.

In one of the remarkable notes written inside his copy of the Evidences, Newman wrote this:

NB. Jan. 13. 1836
* Paley assumes a miracle is the only way of ascertaining a rev [revelation]. -- true, ascertaining--but why need for ascertain? faith lies in acting upon what is before one, before ascertaining -- vid [vide] St Antony’s remarks. This seems to be in its consequences, etc., the evil of such a line of argument as Paley’s, leading one to rely on reason {later inserted in place of reason: “a more explicit reason or argt. [argument]}, which is a slow and carnal principle. “I will not believe, till it is proved to me, etc., etc.” --

Hinting at the argument he would make a few years later in the Thirteenth University Sermon, Newman holds that Paley relies too much on "explicit reason," overlooking the priority of that deeper, more foundational faculty, "implicit reason," a faculty allied with faith.

Francis Oakley on Divinity and Rule

I've been reading Francis Oakley's new trilogy on The Emergence of Western Political Thought in the Latin Middle Ages, and have been very impressed. Oakley is making an argument similar to that of Remi Brague in The Law of God, though in a more pointed fashion: that the modern phenomenon we call "liberalism," frequently understood to have its roots in sixteenth and seventeenth-century political theory, really grew and developed in the soil of medieval Christianity. In fact, both Oakley and Brague argue, several of the major tenets we associate with liberalism--e.g. natural rights, popular sovereignty, individualism, the "secular" sphere, etc.--could only have developed within Christianity, and Western Christianity at that.

This account sure beats the sloppy Machiavelli-invents-modernity account I have heard bandied about so often.

After Virtue, Again

I recently discussed the first sixty pages of After Virtue with a group of students (we're going to go through the whole thing piece by piece this semester), and one fellow brought up an interesting question. MacIntyre carries out his moral-philosophical investigation within a certain historical framework, a narrative which he believes makes the best sense of the history of moral philosophy over the last several centuries. But this student remarked that MacIntyre's historical narrative fails to be credible, as it is yet another "meta-history," an account governed by a certain moral view: in this case, a kind of ethical Aristotelianism. The student's question was whether any meta-history, a story of the past (obviously) arranged in explicit relation to the present, can be trustworthy. Is it not better to try for a (more) objective view, giving an account of each historical period according to its own self-understanding?

MacIntyre himself would answer (and does, in the pages of After Virtue), that this critique can only be made on the basis of Enlightenment presuppositions about our capacity for seeing the truth  objectively, without reference to our own moral positions. And this sort of Enlightenment stance is precisely what MacIntyre is writing to rebutt: we cannot think about the past, or about anything (he says), without making moral judgments. There is no such thing as a perfectly objective standpoint from which to view what has gone before us.

So who's right? I take it (for now) that the truth lies between the two positions: that it must be possible to make some kinds of "objective" judgments sometimes--judgments which are true without respect to our moral stances--but, on the other hand, that we really do this much less than we think. Surely we can, that is, make objective assertions about whether this or that happened in the past, and to whom and with respect to what, just as we might make similar assertions about the chemical structure of certain elements, etc. (MacIntyre, in other places, seems to deny even this sort of claim.) But as soon as we begin to think any larger sorts of thoughts, to make any larger kinds of theories--certainly about history or causality in human affairs, we are necessarily going to have to rely upon our moral understanding: our view of human nature, its ends, its principles, etc. Because we must, it seems, judge human events in terms of what humans are, and "what humans are" cannot be defined without reference to what humans ought to be--without reference to our status as moral beings.

That, at least, is where I find myself just now. Closer to MacIntyre than to the student, I suppose, though I'm still trying to negotiate the space.

Newman on Utilitarian Moral Theory

Reading Newman, The Tamworth Reading Room (1841) in preparation for teaching it later this semester. It's the most satiric thing I've read of Newman's, outside The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), and that crazy chapter at the end of Loss and Gain--Part 3, Chap. 7 (1848). In the course of describing the Utilitarian view of the relation between knowledge and virtue, he says this:

"Mr. Bentham would answer, that the knowledge which carries virtue along with it, is the knowledge how to take care of number one--a clear appreciation of what is pleasurable, what painful, and what promotes the one and prevents the other."

Now, is it me, or is Newman the first to refer to the egoistic self as "Number One"? Is anyone aware of a prior such usage?

Filmer, Eliot, and Paleo-Conservatism

On the side (how many sides can one have?), I've been reading/collecting research on a very interesting pair of figures, whom I am beginning to think are more closely related than we have heretofore thought: Sir Robert Filmer, the seventeenth-century traditionalist political philosopher, and T.S. Eliot, the twentieth-century poet and conservative social thinker.

The interesting thing about Filmer is not (at least at first blush) his direct influence, which has been negligible, but the extent to which he has been misunderstood by the Lockeans, whose contractarian liberalism certainly carried the day against Filmer's patriarchalism. Famously, Locke responded to the argument of Filmer's Patriarcha in the first of his Two Treatises of Government, and Lockean contractarians have frequently defined themselves against a kind of Filmerian patriarchalism up to the present day: indeed, I heard exactly this opposition declared at a seminar panel earlier this year. Filmer represents for present-day Lockeans a kind of proto-paleo-con, and this is not an unreasonable construction, as a few influential paleo-cons have claimed Filmer as an important influence. I think, for instance, of M.E. Bradford, who took the side of Filmer, over against his erstwhile nemesis, Harry Jaffa, who took the side of Locke (see Bradford's "A neglected classic : Filmer's Patriarcha," in Saints, Sovereigns, and Scholars [1993]).

Interestingly, it now seems that the influence of Sir Robert on the paleo-conservative tradition has been mediated through T.S. Eliot, who appears to have written a couple of unsigned reviews of Filmer in 1828, a fact unearthed a few years back by David Bradshaw, a British scholar of modernism (see "Lonely Royalists: T.S. Eliot and Sir Robert Filmer," Review of English Studies 46.183 [1995]). As Bradshaw's argument suggests, Eliot's political thinking seems to have been influenced by Filmer's thought at a critical junction in his career, and in ways we haven't adequately realized yet. This could be an interesting trail to follow, because T.S. Eliot exerted a great influence on the American conservative Russell Kirk, and thus on what became the paleo-conservative movement as a whole (esp. important here are his Idea of a Christian Society [1939] and Notes Toward the Definition of Culture [1948]). So the historical tension between (Lockean) neo-conservatism and (Filmerian) paleo-conservatism does seem to go back at lest to the earlier Twentieth Century, even if we can't see much of it in the Nineteenth.

I said originally, though, that the Lockeans misunderstood Filmer, and here is what I meant: as a number of scholars have shown over the past few decades, Filmer was responding in the Patriarcha, not to Hobbes or some other proto-Lockean political thinker (though he did write against Hobbes, Milton, and others elsewhere), but to the late-scholastic political philosophy of Robert Bellarmine and Francisco Suarez, who had been developing Thomistic theories of natural rights, regicide, etc., over the half-century prior to Filmer's work. So while Locke's followers (and perhaps Locke himself) have tended to see the political-theoretical choice as between Filmerian patriarchalism and their own brand of secularized contract theory, that binary now seems too simple. Certainly, it was not so simple at the time Filmer and Locke were writing. So now, since we could very much use a fresh (yet theoretically dense and historically grounded) view of human nature and how to think about it in the modern world, it seems we might do well to look at Suarez and Bellarmine, and consider the extent to which they provide a tertium quid, a third way for those of us not entirely satisfied with either paleo- and neo-conservatism.

Stegner's English Professorly Novel

Just finished Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety last week, which struck home for at least three reasons (aside from being very pleasantly written and constructed):

1. It is an English professor's novel: about the challenges, pleasures, and injustices of the academic world (I remember one line to this effect: "Sure, Jesus was a great teacher, but what has he published?"). That said, it made think of what a large percentage of our intelligent contemporary novels are written by professors. Sure, I (an English professor) enjoyed Stegner's subject matter a great deal, but I'm not sure everyone would catch fire with it in the same way.

2. It is a book about getting used to New England yankees, an experience I have also had, as I married a Lexington, Mass. girl. Stegner's depiction of a strong, old-model New England woman is remarkable.

3. It is a book about being married to a strong woman, and this is another way of life about which I know a few things (and to be clear, I wouldn't trade my own strong wife for the world). Again, delicious insights into the way a powerwife operates: Charity Lang, the novel's central strongwoman, will be emblazoned on my memory from hence, a kind of archetype of her kind.

Belloc on the Early Years of Chesterton's Marriage

"Frances and Gilbert have a little flat
At eighty pounds a year and cheap at that
Where Frances who is Gilbert's only wife
Leads an unhappy and complaining life:
While Gilbert who is Frances' only man
Puts up with it as gamely as he can."

--scribbled on the wall of Chesterton's first study (which was lined all round with brown drawing paper, so C. could illustrate the room as he worked)