Newman and Kierkegaard

Ralph McInerny, Ph.D.

International Catholic University Classics Collection, recorded in 2003

We discuss the complementarity of John Henry Newman, a convert to Roman Catholicism from Oxford, and Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish Protestant, each of whom made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. This course examines their different theological approaches within their common intellectual context in the nineteenth century.

"In this course I am interested in Newman and Kierkegaard as Christian thinkers for whom the Christian vocation was the central fact of life. How then can a mere philosopher presume to offer such a course? With fear and trembling, needless to say, but also in the realization that both men make fundamental contributions to our understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. (It is no accident, as the Marxist used to say, that Newman is cited by name in John Paul II's Faith and Reason.) I shall be stressing what each man had to say of the knowledge of the ordinary human being and how each of them, because of their confidence that knowledge was not confined to the campus, became critics of the turn that had been taken by modern philosophy - however much each of them was influenced by modern philosophy. Newman will speak of the relation between Natural and Supernatural Religion, indeed this is a kind of leitmotif the Grammar of Assent. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, will in the Protestant way, reject the project of natural theology." -Lesson 1