John Henry Newman Quotes on God

John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), and the autobiographical Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) gave Victorian Catholic theology its most philosophically rigorous engagement with the question of how religious truth claims about God can be rationally affirmed. The central thesis of the Grammar of Assent is that the strong assent of religious faith is reached through the convergence of independent probable considerations whose cumulative force the trained moral and intellectual sense (the illative sense) is able to recognize — a kind of practical reasoning irreducible to the formal demonstrative model the Enlightenment had taken as paradigmatic. The framework, integrating the patristic and broader Catholic theological tradition with the empirical psychology of Newman’s Anglican Oxford training, shaped the modern Catholic engagement with religious epistemology through Maurice Blondel, the nouvelle théologie, and the late twentieth-century revival of Newman scholarship.