Newman as a Critic of Modernity

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In this essay I juxtapose Newman and Kierkegaard as two examples of 19th-century prophetic discourse diagnosing and lamenting what both take to be an evacuation of historical Christianity and its substitution by a rationalist counterfeit accommodated to the prestige of reason and its protocols. In both cases the unveiling of the counterfeit is not one feature among others, but definitional of both of their work from beginning to end. In both cases also it is not simply that they question a particular epistemological position, but uncover the ravages down to Christianity at a societal level by what is nothing less than a newly emergent social imaginary. Given the relative transparency of his discourse in Newman's case it is fairly easy to isolate some of the more basic features of this rationalist surrogate. These include the rejection of doctrine and tradition, the avoidance of any sense of divine otherness, and a depiction of human being as fundamentally twisted and stunted because of sin. In Kierkegaard's case the species of rationalism he calls out betrays his continental context. While Kierkegaard calls out the damage caused to Christianity by the infiltration of the scientific method, he is more exercised by the mode of speculative reason advanced by German Idealism in general and Hegel in particular. In contrast, Newman is troubled by the procedural mode of rationality that has come to be hegemonic and that is largely a Lockean inheritance. In addition to this formal correspondence, there are also substantive overlaps in terms of what aspects of Christianity need to be recovered. Given Kierkegaard's Lutheran backdrop it makes sense that he is not motivated as Newman is in recovering Christian doctrine and tradition. His focus is on recovery the total otherness of God who is received in fear and trembling by human beings doubly incapacitated, first by their creaturehood, second, by their sinfulness that goes all the way down.