One hundred years after St John Henry Newman’s death, Basil Mitchell could write that until recently, his work had ‘seemed simply irrelevant to the dominant concerns of either philosophers or theologians.’Footnote ¹ Yet as the Oratorian saint himself intimated, healthy academic disciplines must change and grow. Recent years have witnessed increased academic and ecclesial attention to Newman, culminating in his welcome recognition by Pope Leo XIV as a Doctor of the Church. Among scholars who have laboured in this field, Frederick Aquino deserves special recognition for bringing Newman’s work into conversation with contemporary systematic theology and analytic epistemology, in part through editing volumes including Receptions of Newman (2015), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (2018), and John Henry Newman and Contemporary Philosophy (2025).

In this new collection of ten original essays by philosophers and theologians, Aquino and co-editor Matthew Levering afford readers fresh insight into the Grammar’s historical meaning and current relevance. The contributions are uniformly well written and researched, although a few pieces approach the text from somewhat niche historical perspectives. As a Critical Guide, the essays offer detailed reflections on particular themes in the Grammar, rather than providing a line-by-line commentary. However, the chapters roughly follow the Grammar’s structure and content, so that one can profitably read the two texts in tandem, or else simply consult particular essays on topics of interest. Still, it is unfortunate that authors cite different editions of the Grammar in each essay, so that page numbers given in citations of Newman’s work are not consistent across chapters.

Anyone interested in the Grammar’s reception history will benefit considerably from Aquino and Levering’s introduction, which provides what amounts to a concise bibliography of engagement with Newman’s essay from the twentieth century onwards. Equally, those unfamiliar with the Grammar’s genesis in Newman’s idiosyncratic philosophical and theological background will enjoy Geertjan Zuijdwegt’s masterful exposition of the work’s context. In addition to highlighting the influence of Anglican apologetic traditions on Newman, Zuijdwegt judiciously notes the importance of his encounter with Late Scholastic religious epistemology when studying for the priesthood at Rome in 1846–7. Plausibly, this impressed upon Newman the importance of accounting for faith’s rational certainty, although, as Zuijdwegt hints, the influence of Juan de Lugo and Domenico Viva (et al.) on Newman is presently under-researched. One might, for instance, wonder whether the Late Scholastic distinction between the evidence-based ‘judgement of credibility’ and the act of faith itself helped Newman to arrive at his own separation of inference and assent.

Newman scholars will recall Edward Caswall’s summary of the Grammar’s contents: the first part ‘shows that you can believe what you cannot understand’, whereas the second demonstrates ‘that you can believe what you cannot absolutely prove’. The first part is sometimes overlooked in discussions of Newman’s epistemology, not least because some philosophical commentators are confused by Newman’s pivotal distinction between ‘notional’ and ‘real’ apprehension or assent. It is salutary, therefore, to find two essays dedicated to just this distinction.

John Crosby first tries to explain the difference between notional and real apprehension by analogy with Husserl’s distinction between empty and fulfilled intentions, and the Scholastic concepts of propositional and connatural knowledge. Whilst Crosby makes a strong case for the importance and irreducibility of real apprehension, as he perhaps realises, neither comparison is entirely adequate. For example, connatural knowledge essentially involves desire, whereas for Newman real apprehension generates affective attitudes. One might wonder whether real apprehension comes closer to what analytic authors call ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. In the following chapter, Lorraine Juliano Keller adopts a different approach: painstakingly working through three difficulties that philosophers may have in accepting Newman’s explanation of real and notional apprehension and assent. She carefully parses Newman’s idiosyncratic use of terms us as ‘proposition’ and ‘sense’, offering a persuasive clarification of the Grammar’s meaning which will be especially useful to readers with analytic training.

Discussion of the first part of the Grammar continues with chapters on dogma, conscience, and faith. Andrew Meszaros gives a convincing interpretation of Newman’s insistence on the religious significance of doctrine, highlighting his Anglican defence of the Athanasian Creed and making helpful connections with his discussion of real assent. This is followed by Christopher Cimorelli’s essay on conscience, which gives a similarly clear explanation of its importance for Newman’s apologetic project, albeit without subjecting his thought to much critical scrutiny. Francesca Aran Murphy’s chapter on faith, whilst witty, is less persuasive in its exegesis. Murphy claims that all ‘secular and sacred’ certitudes are, for Newman, grounded in faith in God as encountered in conscience (p. 131). This seems to imply that those without such faith do not assent to any propositions. Yet Newman nowhere upholds this claim in the Grammar; indeed, it would have undermined his argument that sceptics should accept the legitimacy of assent.

Surprisingly, this volume includes only four pieces dedicated to themes from the second half of the Grammar, if one includes Thomas Hibbs’s comparison of Newman and Pascal, which is detailed and insightful but feels a little out of place. The next two chapters, however, are models of analytic engagement with Newman’s epistemology. Stephen Grimm examines Newman’s vital distinction between assent, inference, and inquiry as modes of holding propositions. In dialogue with recent accounts of credence, he commendably emphasises the ‘all in’ commitment of assent and responds to potential analytic criticisms of Newman’s view that such commitment is common and legitimate. As Grimm rightly insists towards the end of his piece, Newman’s views ‘cannot be neatly mapped onto a Bayesian framework’ (p. 181). One wonders whether Frederick Aquino and Logan Gage might profitably have considered this observation in their otherwise excellent contribution on the ‘illative sense’. They model the illative sense as a faculty which non-consciously perceives ‘support relations’ between evidence and propositions. One difficulty with this interpretation is that it perhaps assumes (with many Bayesians) that the strength of one’s belief in a proposition should track its ‘objective’ probability according to one’s evidence. This risks compromising Newman’s insight that ‘the measure of probability necessary for certainty var[ies] with the individual mind’ (Letters and Diaries, pp. xi, 289). More importantly, it remains unclear how the illative sense can produce certain belief (assent) to some propositions through the mere recognition that the proposition is rendered highly probably by the available evidence.

The volume concludes with a paper by Cyril O’Regan, which traces Newman’s treatment of natural and revealed religion in the Grammar’s final chapter. Whilst O’Regan’s contribution is characteristically erudite, its approach to the topic – a detailed historical analysis of Newman’s views in relation to Gibbon, and their reception by Louis Bouyer – strikes this reviewer as rather obscure. O’Regan himself observes that many commentators ignore Newman’s own apologetic for Christianity at the end of the Grammar, perhaps out of embarrassment at its shaky historical foundations and traces of supersessionism in Newman’s treatment of Judaism. It would have been nice to see that lacuna filled in this volume through a critical evaluation or updated presentation of Newman’s case.

In sum, although there are a few topics in the latter half of the Grammar which would profitably have received further attention, this volume is an important contribution to Newman scholarship that deserves to be widely read. Its strength lies not just in the high quality of its scholarship, but in the fact that it engages the Grammar from so many perspectives: historical and systematic; analytic and continental. By consulting this Critical Guide, new readers of the Grammar can gain a sense of its richness, whilst experts may discover fresh avenues for scholarly enquiry.