‘The Real Thing’

How do we come to believe what we believe? That’s the question asked and, with varying degrees of success, answered by every narrative of conversion. For John Henry Newman, “paper logic” could never fully explain such matters. As he writes in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, “It was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather.” In order to understand how a celebrated Anglican theologian became a Catholic, for instance, we must consider the man in full: “It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it.” Human reason is an embodied thing because humans are embodied creatures. History shapes our intellect; language informs our feeling; both help constitute our beliefs. To truly understand belief, it is not enough to be a good logician. We must also be good biographers and good critics, attending to “the whole man” as he lives and speaks and, through these things, believes.