Newman Studies Journal

This essay examines the complementarity between Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), which provided an autobiographical account of his conversions, and his Grammar of Assent (1870), which described three types of inference—formal, natural, informal—that provide three paradigms for different types of religious conversion.

This word study, prompted by Newman’s statement that the church “superintends” the university, indicates that Newman, both as an Anglican and as a Roman Catholic, used “superintend” and its cognates in a variety of contexts: educational and ecclesiastical, theological and epistemological, as well as personal and parental.

This study traces the history of Newman’s personal papers that are archived at the Birmingham Oratory. Newman was the “master archivist” who spent considerable time during the last two decades of his life in assembling his papers. Subsequently, three major catalogues of Newman’s papers were prepared: the first began in 1920, under the supervision of Richard Garnett Bellasis and Henry Lewis Bellasis; a second catalogue was compiled in the mid-1950s by Yale University Library for microfilming Newman’s papers; the third catalogue was compiled by Gerard Tracey in 1980.

In 1839 and 1840, Newman preached four Oxford University Sermons, which critiqued the evidential apologetics advocated by John Locke (1632-1704) and William Paley (1743-1805) and subsequently restated by Richard Whately (1787-1863). In response, Newman drew upon Whately’s earlier works on logic and rhetoric to develop an alternative account of the reasonableness of religious belief that was based on implicit reasoning from antecedent probabilities. Newman’s argument was a creative response to Whately’s contention that evidential reasoning is the only safeguard against superstition and infidelity.