KIERKEGAARD AND NEWMAN

August 28, 2006

On this feast of St. Augustine, I will begin by citing a passage in SK’s journals from 1847 in which he tells us that “Augustine has done incalculable harm. The whole system of doctrine through the centuries relies essentially upon him – and he has confused the concept of ‘faith.’” How so? He sees faith as bearing on certain truths, and thus thinks of it as intellectual, as opposed to a person relating to a person. Nothing could be more foreign to Newman, for whom the first great religious realization was the dogmatic character of Christianity. We are indeed to be doers of the word, but this presupposes that we are first hearers of it.

1. The 19 th century

In the wake of 1789, an assault on the Church, an attempt to make it, in France, subservient to the government. The quarrel with the Pope. Napoleon’s devastating intrusion into Church affairs. The imprisonment of the pope. The resorimento in Italy, the loss of the papal states, the flight of Pius IX to Gaeta.

Later in Prussia, the kulturkampf, a concerted effort by Bismarck to uproot the Catholic Church.

The revolutions of 1848.

The rise of biblical scholarship.

Both SK and JHN respond to all this, but as it must seem to us in quite intellectual ways. There is little evidence in Newman that he knew of the commotion caused by the Industrial Revolution, the Luddite revolt, etc.

The two men are constitutionally aristocratic: and in a way this is their strength.

In England, JHN will oppose the established church, and the assumption that Parliament governs it.

From 1833, the Oxford Movement.

2. SK and Copenhagen

The Golden Age in Denmark

philosophy, theology, literature, art, music

The Major Factors in SK’s life

* his relationship with his father

* his engagement to Regine Olsen

*the affair of the Corsair

*the attack on the Danish Lutheran Church

3. The Kierkegaardian Liteterature

The Point of View of My Work as an Author

From first to last a religious author: what does it mean to be a Christian.

The pseudonymous works through PS

The spheres of existence: aesthetic, ethical, religious

Fear and Trembling and faith as a movement in virtue of the absurd.

Xty stands in contradictory opposition to the universally human

*the teleological suspension of the ethical absolute

Away from the poet!

Away from philosophy!