Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Søren Kierkegaard (in the Climacus writings) and John Henry Newman have starkly opposed formulations of the relation between faith and reason. In this essay I focus on a possible convergence in their respective understandings of the transition to religious belief or faith, as embodied in metaphors they use for a qualitative transition. I explore the ways in which attention to the legitimate dimension of discontinuity highlighted by the Climacan metaphor of the ‘leap’ can illuminate Newman's use of the metaphor of a ‘polygon inscribed in a circle’, as well as the ways in which Newman's metaphor can illuminate the dimension of continuity operative in the Climacan appreciation of qualitative transition.
1 ‘Unreal Words’, Parochial and Plain Sermons V (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1868), p. 45.
2 ‘Kierkegaard-Newman’, Przywara, Erich, Newman-Studien, vol. 1, pp. 77–101 (Nurnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1948), p. 96, my translation.Google Scholar
3 Religion and Imagination: ‘in aid of a grammar of assent’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), p. 71.
4 An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), p. 320; hereafter page references within the text, unless otherwise qualified, are to this work.
5 Coulson, , Religion and Imagination, p. 49;Google Scholar see also pp. 69–70.
6 Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and Certainty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), p. 126. Hereafter TP.
7 More detail on this revisioning can be found in my ‘The Grammar of the Heart: Newman on Faith and Imagination’, in Discourse and Context: An Interdisciplinary Study of John Henry Newman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 129–43.
8 Theological Papers, p. 124; also Grammar of Assent, p. 174.
9 Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. XXVII (27 11 1874), pp. 161–2; I provide more warrant and detail in Scepticism and Reasonable Doubt: The British Naturalist Tradition in Wilkins, Hume, Reid, and Newman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), esp. pp. 186–8.
10 Burrell, , ‘Religious Belief and Rationality’, in Rationality and Religious Belief, ed. Delaney, C. F. (Notre Dame, In.: Notre Dame University Press, 1979), p. 107, pp. 98–112 passim.Google Scholar
11 Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (1826–43) (London: SPCK, 1970), pp. 182–4; hereafter OUS.
12 Burrell, , ‘Religious Belief and Rationality’, p. 108.Google Scholar
13 Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, ed. Hong, H. V and Hong, E. H (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), vol. 4: I A 313, 24 Dec. 1836, p. 274.Google Scholar
14 The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard's Writings, II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 21.Google Scholar
15 Journals, vol. 2: III B 14, n.d., 1840–1, p. 232.
16 Barrett, Cyril, Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1991), p. 154.Google Scholar
17 Evans, C. Stephen, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 116.Google Scholar
18 The remaining discussion of the leap and paradoxical choice draws and depends on the fuller account given in my Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), Chaps I–III.Google Scholar
19 Journals, vol. 3: VII2 B 261: 22, n.d., 1846–7, p. 21.
20 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard's Writings, XII.I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 12, 381. Hereafter CUP.Google Scholar
21 Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard's Writings, VII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 43, 62; hereafter PF.Google Scholar
22 Journals, vol. 2: V B 56: 2, n.d., 1844, pp. 61–2; also see the following note (23).
23 Journals, vol. 2: VII1 A 181, n.d., 1846, pp. 62–3; I A 5, 19 Aug. 1834, p. 56; X2 A 428, n.d., 1850, p. 68; X3 A 618, n.d., 1850, pp. 70–2.
24 Journals, vol. 2: X4 A 175, n.d., 1851, p. 73; X2 A 243, n.d., 1849, p. 67; III A 48, n.d., 1840, p. 59; IV C 39, n.d., 1842–43, p. 59.
25 Journals, vol. 2: X4 A 177, n.d., 1851, p. 74; X2 A 428, n.d., 1850, p. 68.
26 Journals, vol. 3: V C 7, n.d., 1844, p. 19; VI A 33, n.d., 1845, p. 20.
27 Journals, vol. 3: V C I, n.d., 1844, p. 17.
28 Journals, vol. 3: V C 7, n.d., 1844, p. 19.
29 Grammar, pp. 396–8; TP, p. 156; Philosophical Notebooks, II (Louvain: Nauwelaerts Publ., 1970), p. 125.Google Scholar
30 Journals, vol. I: X6 B78, n.d., 1850, p. 6.
31 Banner, Michael C., The Justification of Science and the Rationality of Religious Belief (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), pp. 91, 93.Google Scholar
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