Newman and Christian Platonism in Britain

Abstract

With the beatification of John Henry Newman by the Roman Catholic Church (in September 2010), it may be timely to recall a strand of Newman’s Anglican inheritance that is sometimes overlooked. Within philosophical theology, the habit of reading Newman pretty exclusively against the background of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume has notably eclipsed the possibility that there are other apt historical figures for shedding light on his thought. Consider the following example (from the mid-1830s) in Newman’s sermon “The Invisible World”: “Green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all, and we would not take up the part for the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness, which is God himself; but they are not His fulness; they speak of heaven, but they are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of His Image.” Against a post-Lockean landscape, such language can easily sound merely romantic, an escape from a religious discourse becalmed in a little pool of “evidences” and arguments over logical warrants. The alternative I explore here (pursuing a fertile observation made by Louis Dupre) uncovers the insights gained from reading Newman in conversation with some crucial opponents of Hobbesian and Lockean thought—and how this line of reading Newman helps explain in newly clarifying ways the importance of his contributions. In particular, this essay considers the implications of Newman’s Christian Platonism for his understanding of the natural world and his corresponding anxieties