On the Kinship of Spirit and Thought: John Henry Newman and Edith Stein
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chapter 1 A Gloss to the Biographies They that are whole can heal others […]. John Henry Newman … Only the person who renounces self- importance,, who no longer struggles to defend or assert himself, can be large enough for God’s boundless action. Edith Stein ∵ John Henry Newman lived in the turbulent period of the nineteenth century that saw the rise of socialism and communism, in an era that made people look with awe at the encroachment of science onto the time- honoured territories of, for example, religion (let it suffice to mention the theory of evolution that had seemingly undermined the hitherto beliefs). When analysing the nine- teenth century, one cannot forget about two, apparently contradictory, trends. On the one hand, there are the high hopes awakened by scientific endeavours which, in turn, give rise in the romantic era to popular robustness, in political life characterised by the ideas of expansionism and nationalism; but, on the other, it is a time when the human psyche often feels at a loss, when it suf- fers from emotional inadequacy and fragility. It senses an incongruity amid this inhuman technological milieu of the “brave new world.” The modern mind, deprived of the traditional fulcrums of stability and armed solely with individual choice, but no criteria as to which choices are good and which are bad, loses its course like a ship tossed about on a stormy sea. The theory of evolution added momentum to this feeling, especially since the authoritative voice of the institutional Church was long wanting.1 The British biographer of Newman, Meriol Trevor (1919–2000), rightly observes that it “so shocked and 1 Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859. © Jan KŁos, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004466227_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-nd 4.0 license. Jan Kłos - 9789004466227 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:18:10AM via free access 2 Chapter 1 alarmed the majority of Christians, who thought it contradicted the truth of the Bible,” but Newman was in no way disturbed, for “he had been ponder- ing his own evolutionary theory— of the development of ideas, and especially those ideas which activate the Christian society within the larger society of mankind.”2 One English writer and newspaper columnist has said of Newman “that he was the only Victorian intellectual of the first rank who had not been disabused of Christian faith by the theories of Charles Darwin […].”3 Newman had long been reconciled with the idea of evolution, for the con- cept of growth, and its attendant changes, were of utmost importance for him. He himself had experienced it in his own life and had long adopted a dynamic view of the world. Obviously, the dynamic nature of life must respect its constant ontic factor. If an octogenarian places in front of him two pho- tos of himself: one aged five and the other aged eighty, he will naturally say: I have changed, but at the same time he must say: it’s me, it’s the same person. Therefore, should one try to stop and scrutinize some moments from one’s life, forgetful of its entire continuity or in isolation from others, one will surely fail to understand the person. If growth is the essence of human life, as Newman would often repeat, there is no point in directing one’s attention on a selected episode. Such a procedure may be true for the biologist who focuses his micro- scope on a selected strain of bacteria. But human life in its entirety cannot be fragmented into tiny and disconnected pieces, but should be considered in its integrated whole, if we seek to understand individual human actions. All of these revolutionary modifications in the scientific picture of the world had started with the birth of modernity. Descartes (together with Galileo and Bacon) broke with the medieval world of spirits and ushered in the mechani- cal world of physics and chemistry; the world came to be understood as having been constructed rather than found. Just like then, so now in the romantic era it was a task for great minds to effect a religious, moral, and emotional read- justment. We are describing here a world of disenchantment in which “there is no more ontological room” for “demons and spirits.” The human being is “in a sense super- buffered.”4 The decomposition of the world in which man and his earth had lost their central position must have been restored at a higher level. 2 M. Trevor, The Pillar of the Cloud, London: MacMillan & Co Ltd, 1962, 4. In one of his prayers, Newman acquiesces: “Through you the earth was brought into its present state, and was matured to be a habitation for man” (J. H. Newman, A Newman Prayer Book, Birmingham: The Oratory, 1990, 7). The phrases that the earth “was brought into its present state” and “was matured” undoubtedly suggest a certain evolutionary and temporal development. Newman’s Challenge 3 See S. L. Jaki, , Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000, 265. 4 C. Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007, 136. Jan Kłos - 9789004466227 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:18:10AM via free access A Gloss to the Biographies 3 In the nineteenth century, the task was even more urgent, for the circulation of information was much faster due to the development of the press. The nineteenth century is a fascinated period to study. I call it a laboratory, in which the intellectual and universal tenets of the Enlightenment clashed with the personal and idiosyncratic elements of Romanticism, creating a very dynamic amalgam. Some elements were modified, some eliminated, and still others formed a unique composite. The advent of Romanticism did not mean a total or immediate permeation by entirely new elements which began to dom- inate from the start. It was rather a gradual process in which the two rushing currents— the intellect and imagination— flowed side by side, erupting from time to time with their menacing rumbles. At the dawn of modernity we have two proposals: Cartesian disengaged reason and Locke’s punctual self. The first one puts forward the duality of the body and spirit and a distanced relation to the world of the senses; the sec- ond carries further this mechanization of the world. In short, the point is that “a human agent […] is able to remake himself by methodical and disciplined action.”5 Disengagement and rational control became the main driving forces of modernity. In this new approach, the human being employs his instrumen- tal reason to create himself. Disengagement here undoubtedly refers to us being non- judgmental, i.e. to suspend our judgment about reality. We thereby objectify reality and deprive it of its normative force. Reality no longer appeals to us in its aspect of being good or bad, but only as an object of curiosity, an object of investigation and experimentation. Because Descartes had transferred our experience onto our mind, our sec- ondary qualities are ideas in the mind caused by the properties of the organ or object. We want to gain control over our reservoir of ideas. Therefore “dis- engagement involves our going outside the first- person stance and taking on board some theory, or at least some supposition, about how things work.”6 Descartes then proposes what Taylor calls radical reflexivity. It is necessary for the reconstruction of the conceptual interior of the mind. Procedural reason is employed, that which suggests the right method. In the face of such con- clusions, Newman proposes the restoration of the first-person stance instead of objectification. For Newman, the first- person stance cannot be objectified. Taylor’s words, that “it is not always true that the road to surer knowledge lies through disengagement and procedural reason […],”7 fit well with Newman’s 5 C. Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, 159. 6 Ibid., 163. 7 Ibid. Jan Kłos - 9789004466227 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:18:10AM via free access 4 Chapter 1 message that— if I may paraphrase the previous quote— the road to surer knowledge lies through the person. Indeed, Taylor’s criticism continues: “an epistemology which privileges disengagement and control isn’t self- evidently right.”8 Newman, for his part, believed in a universe of meaningful order rather than in a mechanism, and God was the foundation of this order. The main purpose of personal growth is to accomplish certitude. Newman defines certitude, of which we shall be talking at length, as “a deliberate assent given expressly after reasoning.”9 It is true that very often we give assent to things which later on, on reflection, turn out to be false. This fact, however, does not nullify the main purpose, i.e. that it is worthwhile to strive after cer- titude. What is the difference between Cartesian certainty, when confronted by clear and distinct ideas, and Newmanian certitude? To my mind, the main difference is that, for Descartes, certainty comes, in a sense, from without. I have written “in a sense” because we know that the French philosopher based certainty on innate ideas, but we must remember that these innate ideas have nothing to do with the person’s innermost life in Newman’s sense. Rather, they respond to the inherent logic of a given proposition that strikes the mind and tolerates no objection; for Newman, certitude results from a personal process, it is the personal response to a given truth. The personal response provides a broader capacity for apprehension.