Carlyle and Newman on Denominators

In Sartor Resartus (1833-34), Thomas Carlyle issued a new prescription for how to deal with late-modern unhappiness and epistemic disappointment: "Man's happiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite." This, for example, is why the common shoeblack has but a poor chance of being happy, even if "the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe" were to join together to make him so. "For the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanant satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and no less: God's infinite Universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose." As Carlyle explains it, there is a cavernous desire, or vacuum, within each of us, that will only be satisfied with infinite knowledge and fulfillment, and that knowledge, that fulfillment, is impossible. We only ever really know and possess a small fraction of what we inwardly want to know and possess, and the relative tinyness of that fraction, the finite reality divided by an infinite desire, is the reason so many late-moderns are unhappy.

What to do about it? For Carlyle, there is only one way: "the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages of zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time [by which he means Goethe] write 'It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.'" As we can see then, Carlyle's command is "Lessen thy denominator." Stop going for the infinite, and you will find yourself much more easily satisfied with the finite. For that matter, if you can avoid going for anything at all, you'll feel yourself to be embarrassingly rich. This line of thinking is what J.S. Mill would later call "the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle" (Autobiography, Ch. 5).

The observation I would like to make here is that the numerator/denominator relationship in which Carlyle was interested is roughly the same as the relationship of explicit to implicit reason in Newman's thirteenth University Sermon. Newman was trying, then, to account for that great interior knowledge that Carlyle, wounded as he was by the arrows of rationalism, could not believe was possible. Newman's great rejoinder was that, in fact, Carlyle would never have any numerator at all if he were not already, antecedently, in possession of the whole denominator. One cannot possess explicit, finite knowledge, without an implicit, a priori grasp of the whole, in which the finite particulars are grounded. On Newman's terms, then, there is something absurd about Carlyle's proposition. It means teaching ourselves to deny something we always already have.

Group Personhood

I want to say that Newman develops an Aristotelian view of group personhood in the Essay on Development (1845), laying out a theory of the way groups develop their self-understanding on the model of the way individuals do the same. His view of individual character and knowledge is Aristotelian, so his theory of group character and knowledge is as well. But of course Aristotle (as far as I know) didn't think of groups in this way. Where, then, did Newman become comfortable transferring the ethical characteristics of individuals to groups? One answer is that he is simply working within a peculiarly modern frame of reference, building on the tradition of Hobbes (in the Leviathan (1651)) and Rousseau (in the Social Contract (1762)), neither of whom balked at the idea of making one group person out of many individuals. As Karl Popper argued, this way of thinking played a fundamental role in the formation of nationalism. Still, Newman would have found their contract-based views of social unity bizarre and uncompelling. I wonder whether his own conception of the relation between the personal and the social (or group-personal) is not influenced more by Patristic conceptions of the Church as the Body of Christ?

Newman and MacIntyre on Traditions of Rationality

Both J.H. Newman and Alasdair MacIntyre are frequently acknowledged as critics of modern liberalism, but what usually goes unnoticed is that their critiques of liberalism (both classical and progressive) are mounted upon the same basis, namely an Aristotelian anthropology. In fact, I'm beginning to think that Newman's Aristotelian thought on the character of human knowing in history, as seen especially in the Oxford University Sermons and the Essay on Development, fundamentally influenced MacIntyre's view of tradition. Indeed, MacIntyre seems to admit as much in the "Preface" to the third edition of After Virtue (2007), and in one of the later chapters of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). As I work out some of the details, I'll post them here.

Eliot and Newman on Character and the Liberal Anthropology

Both George Eliot and John Henry Newman understood character more or less on the Aristotelian model, as the all-important key to both thought and action. Poor character leads to poor reasoning and a limited range of action; good character allows for the reverse. This means that both place a tremendous emphasis on the right kind of community and tradition, for these in all their interrelation make up the medium within which character is formed. Moreover, neither understands community or tradition as static, presuming rather that the two develop through history.

The difference: Eliot does not see a telos in history; Newman does. While she flirts with the secular, rationalist eschatology of the Comteans, Eliot is not in the end convinced that we're inevitably moving forward. Certainly the theology-to-metaphysics-to-positivism progression is the path which individuals follow toward enlightenment, but Eliot is too naturalistic to accept a rosy view of some future state of universal, millenial positivism. So she takes a view more like Darwin: we're evolving, and doing our best at it, but that doesn't mean we're getting anywhere objectively better than where we've been before. While Newman might accept some form of this vision as true for the unbeliever, he understands Christian history as directed toward fuller and fuller understanding of our faith in Christ: a clearer and clearer image of the Person we've already grasped through faith. For Eliot, history is change, and to know this is is to know the truth; we have to find a way to be happy and peaceful in such a world, caring for one another in spite of the fact that there's no ultimate point to it. Newman, of course, sees Christ as the key to history, and participation in him (and through him, the Trinity) as its end, so that the goal is to make our way toward and into him at all costs.

The consequence: Eliot thinks that a community-based, traditional Christian faith is damaging, breeding personal characters that rely upon falsehoods, characters which will put them in conflict with one another, leading away from sympathy, peace, and happiness; Newman, on the other hand, supports such a faith as breeding characters that rely on both natural and supernatural truth, allowing persons to reach their end in Christ. For Eliot, then, the few who know best (i.e. those who have really achieved rational distance from their traditions) ought to remake the myths--the communal traditions--that so define the lives of the ignorant masses. They'll have to do this, moreover, in every generation, as human nature is in a state of flux, so that our myths will require regular adjustment. All this must be done, out of sympathy for the peasants (and we're almost all of us peasants). For Newman, however, we've already got a true myth in which to live--the communal tradition of the Church--and we had better bring as many into it as possible, for their own sakes.

An interesting point in all this: both Eliot and Newman strain against the usual individualism of modern liberal thought, instead viewing character (and therefore thought and action) as necessarily, integrally related to habit, community, and tradition. Still, Eliot has in the end to imagine at least her few illuminati as radical individuals, abstracted from the mythology of their lives, for otherwise, who would be rationally fit to weave the ever-evolving myths for all the rest? Newman, on the other hand, avoids the insufficiencies of the liberal anthropology altogether, by imagining even the most brilliant (e.g. himself) to be inseparable from the traditions that give them life, and for the faithful, life abundantly. He thus successfully promotes a postliberal view of character in its relation to historical life.

Thumos Speaks to Thumos

Newman's cardinalatial motto, cor ad cor loquitur, appears to have arisen from his (slight) misremembrance of a line from St. Francis DeSales, a line he quotes in his lecture on "University Preaching" in the Idea of a University: "Quantumvis ore dixerimus," says St. Francis, "sanè cor cordi loquitur, lingua non nisi aures pulsat." (See also Newman's note to A.W. Hutton in Letters and Diaries 29.108--especially n.2.) Now, this motto--"Heart speaks to heart"--has touched many, no doubt causing some to rescind all their judgments on Newman as a stiff, emotionally cold Victorian. Nevertheless, it is often interpreted as a sort of sweet, Romantic turn by the aging Newman, rather than a reflection or indication of one of the deepest, most fundamental principles of his thought.

Sed contra, I would like to suggest (no surprise here) that Newman's motto reflects yet another element of his broad and deep appropriation of Aristotle's ethical thought. Specifically, I think St. Francis' "cor cordi loquitur" struck Newman as it did because he was already thinking enthymematically. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle describes enthumema--the enthymeme--as a "rhetorical syllogism," noting that it is in a way at the center of all persuasive speech. Thus, he calls it "the body of proof," or the "substance of rhetorical persuasion," in the sense that it carries within it all the human elements--logos, ethos, and pathos--which make rhetoric persuasive. The enthymeme does this because it presumes certain premises will be supplied by the audience, leaving them out of the syllogism presented in speech. The speaker, in other words, knows that the audience will associate such and such a thought, such and such an emotion, such and such a prejudice, to this or that assertion. He knows his audience, so he knows what they hold en thumois--in their hearts--and thus he knows what he doesn't need to say. In other words, he knows how to think (and speak) enthymematically.

Fast forward to Newman, who was quite the student of the Rhetoric (see, e.g. LD 7.139). I assert that Newman's view of everyday rationality was fundamentally formed through his reading of Aristotle's Ethics and Rhetoric as a young student and tutor at Oxford. When I look at Newman's treatment of Implicit and Explicit Reason in the University Sermons, for instance, I see the enthymeme, in which much more is maintained implicitly than explicitly. Implicit Reason, for Newman, relies on probable knowledge gained through the Illative Sense, which perfectly lines up with Aristotle's account of implied premises as deriving from eikota, the probabilities of ethical life, grasped by means of the faculty of phronesis. (In the Grammar of Assent, of course, it is clear that Newman's Illative Sense is a sort of adjusted view of phronesis.) In the enthymeme, then, I think Newman saw how to make sense of the way unspoken apprehension relates to what is spoken--the way implicit reason relates to what is explicit.

The motto on his coat of arms, then, seems to me to refer to Newman's old Aristotelian rhetorical principle: that a person's explicit speech relies upon what is left unsaid. By the same token, a person's explicit reason (episteme), relies upon the rational process we leave undefined (phronesis). In every ethical situation, Newman understood, most of our understanding is implicit--most of the iceberg lies beneath the water. At that level, thumos speaks to thumos. Cor ad cor loquitur.

Newman on Energy

Edward Sillem, in the midst of an otherwise fine piece of scholarship, remarked that he saw in Newman “no traces of the Aristotelian ideas of Potency and Act” so prized by the medieval schoolmen (Philosophical Notebook 1.157). For Sillem, this was a serious lack in Newman's philosophy: Newman seemed, to Sillem, to owe a good bit to Aristotle, and yet he seemed to have failed at picking up Aristotle's most important concepts.

Au contraire. Newman was a serious student of Aristotle, and he had a real understanding of potency and act, only under different terms. Unlike Sillem, Newman was not formed in the post-Leonine Thomist tradition; he read Aristotle at Oxford in Greek, and therefore familiarized himself with dunamis and energeia, rather than the potentia and actus of Thomistic Aristotelianism. Furthermore, Newman discovered the mechanics of these concepts in Aristotle's ethical works--the Ethics, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics, rather than the Physics, Metaphysics, and De Anima, which have been the staple for Catholic Aristotelians of the last hundred years. Given these two facts, Newman's way of speaking about dunamis and energeia (especially the latter) hasn't ever really caught the attention of intellectual Catholic readers.

Listen more closely. If I am right, Newman commonly--in fact, most of the time--uses the "energy" and "energize" with Aristotle's energeia in the background. I think, actually, that it fundmentally structures the way Newman thinks of the human person, in great part because energeia is a crucial structural idea within ethos, or character, as Aristotle describes it in these works. Energeiai are the ways of being-at-work--the activities--that carry out the principles (archai) of one's character in real time; when habituated, they become the living, active facets of one's character, defining a person for the world, at least insofar as his "second nature"--his ethos--is concerned. This view of human character, I want to say, is foundational for Newman's view of personhood: in it, ethos is defined by energeiai according to certain archai. Listen more closely to the way Newman speaks of "character," "energy," and "principle," and I think you'll find that his usage usually fits into this Aristotelian structure.

While I could really tire us all out with proof-texts, I will fall back on two or three passages that demonstrate Newman's familiarity with Aristotelian energeia, and show his proclivity for thinking of "energy" with it in mind. One is in "Professors and Tutors," from Rise and Progress of Universities. In that essay, he gives a free translation of Aristotle's definition of virtue, according to which "man's chief good is an energy of the soul according to virtue"; here, "energy" is a translation of energeia. Second is a note he included in the marvelous second volume of the Select Treatises of Athanasius--a note in which he defines and provides examples for the theological term theandrike energeia. The first thing he does is define his understanding of energeia by itself, and his definition could come straight from the pages of Aristotle. In the course of the note, he repeatedly uses "energy" as a stand-in for the Greek term. Third, in an 1833 letter to S.F. Wood, he spoke in distinctly Aristotelian terms of the "anxiety" he felt "when composing (e.g. a sermon or any[thing] else)—something, viz, which I wish to have got thro’ which is an irritation while it lasts, and which has its enjoyment and telos in the ergon produced, which is subsequent to the energeia" (LD 3.254-55). Here Newman depicts his own character on Aristotle's model, energizing toward a certain telos or end.

It's my contention that, with the structure of ethical energeia in mind, we can do a better job of reading Newman's references to "energy" and "energizing," words he uses frequently, and in ways that reach beyond a simple, modern, post-Newtonian view of "energy."

Some may be asking, "why is this important?" To avoid losing the attention of those few who have gotten this far, I'll save that explanation for Part 2.

What one needs in order to study religion

"Religion has, as such, certain definite belongings and surroundings, and it calls for what Aristotle would call a pepaideumenos investigator, and a process of investigation sui similis."

--Grammar of Assent, "Note II" (386-87)

Investigating religion without a certain kind of upbringing or education or enculturation, then, will necessarily yield unreal "findings."