Promise and Peril

This chapter undertakes a comparison of John Henry Newman’s reflections on faith and reason with those of his French contemporary, Louis Bautain, and the German writer, Georg Hermes. Both writers faced scrutiny from ecclesiastical authorities on the issue of faith and reason in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that Newman shared affinities with both thinkers on the level of technical language and teachings regarding faith and reason. Newman’s view of implicit reason was at times strikingly similar to Bautain’s notion of raison, and Newman’s passing statements on proofs for the existence of God and use of Butler’s language of probability bore close and sometimes misleading resemblances to Hermes’s notion of Wahrscheinlichkeit. There were also key differences between Newman and these writers, which are shown in later chapters to have played a role in the early reception of the Essay on Development.