Newman Today: After Kant and Aquinas
If Aquinas’s solution emerges from all of Kant’s problems, in what sense, then, can there be a resurrection of Thomas? Is the only possible characterization of Aquinas one where his philosophy and theology resemble to no small degree the artistic world of his fellow Dominican Fiesole, both of whose clearly drawn lines are transfigured, elevated out of the chaos of concrete life? To ask the question is already to provide the answer. For the Church herself places the great “doctor communis,” as the formulary for his feast day says, “in medio ecclesiae”—i.e., amidst the starkly, individually differentiated variety of her other great teachers, such as the volcanic Jerome or the noble Anselm of Canterbury. And she places him, in a very special sense, alongside the saint she almost celebrates as the incomparably greater. That is, she places the Dominican friar—who was removed from all the pressures of worldly life from the outset—alongside Augustine, the ardent seeker of God who rose only with anguish from the confusion of the world.
So, the Church herself does not forbid us should we prefer to listen to a “voice of wisdom” amidst the fractured riddles of modernity—riddles that only find their unsettling expression, if not their resolution, in Kant’s tragic solution. Again, the Church does not forbid us should we prefer to listen to someone who, in all honesty, sees himself only as a faithful disciple of Aquinas, yet is an heir to his wisdom through a life of restless seeking and who therefore imparts Thomas’s wisdom to us in the language of Augustine. Of course, I am speaking of the Augustine of our modern times, John Henry Cardinal Newman.
First, Newman’s entire line of inquiry arose from the problem for which Kant had no solution but tragic unity. His youth itself was permeated by the irreconcilable antitheses that, only in a more continental form, presented themselves to the philosopher from Königsberg. On the one side lay the rationalism of the logicians as encountered by the young student at Oxford. [Richard] Whately is an example of this. On the other side lay Hume’s empiricist skepticism, something Newman genuinely wrestled with. Again, on one side lay the rationalist theology of reason, present in Anglican theology itself, against which the leader of the Tractarians wrote in his Catholic letters in the Tracts for the Times. On the other side lay the religious irrationalism of the “religion of feeling” kindled by Coleridge and the revivalist sects, against which the preacher of St. Mary’s did not tire of fighting and in response to which his own path of development within Anglicanism increasingly led to the strictest dogmatic religion.
Thus, on the one hand (in response to philosophical antitheses), his inquiry arises concerning the relationship between conceptual thought and its form of certainty (notional thought) and experiential thought and its form of certainty (real thought). But similarly (in response to theological antitheses), his inquiry arises between a more insightful faith of ideal dogmatic connections and a more vital faith of blind surrender to the God of incomprehensibility who alone “sees.” And just as the works conducted by the Anglican (the Oxford University Sermons) or by the Catholic (the Discourses to Mixed Congregations, Idea of a University, and Grammar of Assent) not only complement each other in their particular lines of inquiry and in the tendency of their responses but also demonstrate the vitality of his ceaseless questioning even into old age, so too do the diaries of the Anglican from his Oxford days and the final philosophical-theological sketches of the aged Oratorian of Birmingham converge on the same point: the relentless quest toward unfathomable mysteries. He is the Augustinian seeker of truth in modern times.
Newman is also, second, the Augustinian seeker of truth in modern times who trod the essential paths of Aquinas.
His response to the philosophical question concerning the problem of knowledge is twofold: [1] the theory of the ordered relationship between the pure thought of immediate experience, which indeed has the advantage of proximity to things, but the disadvantage of only providing a partial account for the connections between things, and [2] the pure thought of concepts. While the latter mode of thinking avoids the shortcomings of the former by offering an explicit account of itself, it trades away the advantage of proximity to things for the disadvantage of lesser proximity to them. Since conceptual (notionale) thinking is presented as an explication (explicit reason) of experiential (real) thinking (implicit reason), they are one in the living unity of the thinking personality, as well as in the enduring nature of the truth conceived. But what is this if not the revival of the fundamental idea of Thomas Aquinas’s epistemology in a modern context? For Thomas, is not thinking first of all internally bound to the proximity of the fully concrete world of experience, to the extent that his axiom declares “nihil in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu”? Yet, at the same time, does not thinking as an analytic-synthetic process imply an abstraction of the internal connections that are only implicitly contained in the unity of simple, lived experience? And is not his other axiom, “agere sequitur esse,” that such unity of experience and pure thought ultimately reveals itself as an expression of the essence of the living human being? And doesn’t this unity of experience and thought also express the “unum esse” of the formal unity of spirit-soul and body? And yet again, through this unity of person, doesn’t the unity of experience and thought also express the essence of truth, which appears twofold within the creature, on the side of receiving from things and on the side of the creativity of thought?
We will probably have to say the same when we examine Newman’s answer to the question of the nature of man and the world. It is characterized by a duality. The first is the motif of “change,” which is expressed most forcefully in his two statements “My unchangeableness here below is perseverance in changing” and “To be perfect is to have changed often.” While the first statement comes toward the end of his life, the second is found in the work that marks the pivotal midpoint of his life—The Development of Christian Doctrine. This motif is the confession of the fundamental state of becoming and therefore changeability of the creature, which ultimately has in it a relative unchangeability, in that it (in the knowledge and living acceptance of the depth of this changeability) becomes the pliant and malleable tool in the hand of the Unchangeable One: “Oh, support me, as I proceed in this great, awful, happy change, with the grace of Thy unchangeableness!” as Newman rightly prays. The world and changeable humanity in the unchangeable God—this is the primary feature of Newman’s worldview.
The second feature represents something like a darker shading of the first. In it, “change” as a phenomenon of the fading transience of the sub-spiritual world is differentiated from “change” as a phenomenon of positive, dynamic life in the immortal spiritual world. For Newman, the world of spiritual life is the “true” world, so that for the dreaming gaze of the young person, as well as, to some extent, for the seclusion of the old man, the sub-spiritual world fades away like an insubstantial, fluttering veil to the world of spirit. He is the thinker of a constant yearning for a pure life of the spirit, although (or, indeed, perhaps because) his senses possessed a heightened sensitivity to the colorful abundance of the visible world in all its extent. But we ask again: Is Newman’s “change” not a true revival of the “actus in potentia,” the dynamic nature of becoming (“être dynamogénique” [dynamogenic being] or “devenir” [becoming], as recent Thomists say), of Aquinas’s metaphysics? And doesn’t Newman’s emphasis on the spirit also have a true precedent in that aspect of the saint’s metaphysics where the world appears as a downward “materialization” of the spiritual, from the pure “actus immaterialis” of angelic spirits to the “formae materiales” of natural bodies? And doesn’t this happen such that the realm of “materia” (in its primal essence as “materia prima”) appears as “pura potentialitas” in contrast to the “actualitas” of the realm of spirits, as a being-less “pure potentiality” contrasted with ontologically rich “pure actuality”? Considered thus, mustn’t the world of matter then be regarded as ‘unreal’ in comparison to the world of forms and spirits as what is “real”?
So, we come to the final point of agreement: in their image of God. Both Thomas and Newman emphasize God as the Incomprehensible through an increasing transcendence of the senses. For both, there is accentuation on the human aspect of our thinking—i.e., its connection to the senses. But for both, there is also the surging inclination toward the purely spiritual. In Thomas, this inclination is realized in the serene flight of contemplation; in Newman, in the painful melancholy of self-detachment. Thus, they both ultimately rest in the Spirit-God beyond all comparisons: “Deus tamquam ignotus” (Thomas), “Incomprehensibleness” (Newman). Both the opposing tendencies from which our study proceeded are harmonized in a tranquil yet lively unity: the joyful contemplation of the eternal symbols suspended in the awe of distance, but also the restless movement of creative life transformed into the serenity of worship before the One who alone is perfect—beyond reach, unattainable—for all eternity, surpassing all contentious striving for perfection. The “incomprehensible God” frees the arms that cling tightly to him in self-surrendering contemplation so that the creature may praise and glorify him in liberated vitality. Yet he also lowers the lofty image of his primal perfection, which demands worship, into the soul wearied by life’s struggle so that the humility of worship may be the “inner freedom” of this life’s vitality, its ability to find “rest” in “action.”
So, if we now survey our problem from Newman through Kant and Thomas back to Augustine, we find that the solution to the antithesis of the two tendencies that shape philosophy and theology lies in the One. It lies in the One, as Augustine expressed it in the words: “Quaeritur inveniendus, quia occultus est, et invenitur quaerendus, quia immensus est,” “He is sought in order to be found, because he is hidden, and is found in order to be sought, because he is immense.” The contemplation that immerses itself in God and in God’s world is, indeed, worship of God’s greatness. But when it relinquishes the dynamic rhythm of “seeking to find, and finding to seek” for a malignant grasping (the “anapausis” against which Augustine fought), it offers such scant worship to the “ever greater God” that, instead, in this desire to merge into the original sin of “you will be like God,” it plunges, having forsaken the reverence of “standing at a distance” (see Exod 3:5). True contemplation can only occur in the unclouded vitality of creaturely life. In this respect, the striving, dynamic life, directed toward God and within his world—the antithesis to the former tendency—is truly sustained by reverence before the towering immensity of God, whose inexhaustible depths precisely demand a constant “seeking to find, and finding to seek” as an attitude of worship and love on the part of the creature. But when it adopts such a “seeking to find, and finding to seek” mentality because it believes, in the inner universality of this disposition, that it can somehow exhaust the transcendent universality of God or even contain it within itself, it degenerates into a form of self-idolatry that is as bad as, or perhaps even worse than, the first tendency. The “seeking to find, and finding to seek” of the movement of life is only genuine by virtue of the unchanging, unmoving act of humble submission before the truly transcendent God, who is “exalted above all things that exist or can be conceived beside him,” as the Vatican Council says. It is genuine through the intact quia [because] of the explanatory clauses: “Because he (God) is hidden . . . , because he is immense.”
That is the mysterious foundation for both the harmonious resolution of our question in Thomas and the tragic one in Kant, as well as the revitalization in Newman of Augustine’s quest for God. It is faith in a God who is truly “mystery” and “immensity,” the faith of surrender and devotion to a God “ineffably exalted above all things that exist or can be conceived beside him.” It is faith in the God of “infinite perfection,” faith thus as unchanging unity with the Unchangeable. This faith, which seems to extinguish all movement of life, is precisely the innermost condition of universal movement, the movement of eternal life through the heights and depths of God’s mysteries, fundamentally the movement of not-resting in full possession, the movement of “seeking to find, and finding to seek.” For to find God is to find the ever-newly-discoverable, to grasp him is to grasp the ungraspable, to understand him is to understand the incomprehensible—God who is “ever greater” for eternity.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted with permission from Kant Today: A Survey, translated by David Augustine (Word on Fire Academic, 2025). All rights reserved.