It was the youthful conviction of John Henry Newman, at the age of 15, that there were ‘two and two only, absolute and luminously self-evident beings – myself and my Creator.’ This conviction stayed with him all his life as something of a ‘guiding light’. In this he revealed himself to be a part of that long Western intellectual tradition reaching back past Saints Anslem and Augustine to Plato. It was a conviction that, regardless of other ‘conversions’, stayed with him and was perfectly summarised at the end of his life by the memorial epitaph he composed for his grave at Rednal Hill: Ex umbris et imaginatibus in veritatem (‘Out of the shadows and phantasms into the truth’). This is the Platonic vision with its implicit duality.
But from at least the time of Spinoza’s Monism in the seventeenth century, the understanding of Modernity has been that this view is mistaken, an illusion, and that there is no such ‘externality’ of mind to matter; a view encapsulated by the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger when, decrying the Greek legacy, he wrote, ‘The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived.’
The explosion of new knowledge, technologies and modes of understanding in the nineteenth century provided the essential backdrop to Newman’s own life. Together with the unprecedented growth of industrialisation and the whole new way of urban living that accompanied it, often in squalid and depressing circumstances, life took on a more disturbed, even apocalyptic, dimension. Newman wrote of an age, ‘different in kind from any that has been before,’ in that it was ‘simply irreligious’. In this context the churches tended to look back for inspiration to a Gothic idyll and medieval Age of Faith. Newman’s novel understanding of the development of Christian doctrine – which itself reflected something of the new evolutionary thinking – was perhaps an expression of belief in that ‘kindly Light’ that would lead the faithful on as in the early days of the Church.
This conflict of darkness and light, belief and unbelief, is often presented in terms of religion versus secularism as a legacy of Newman’s writings and of their value in addressing modern secularism. But this is misleading. It was only later in Newman’s lifetime, after the 1850s, that the word secularism began to enter into circulation as a neologism. Nor was its meaning explicitly anti-religious. Rather, as explained to readers of the journal the Reasoner, it meant, ‘the issues that can be tested in this life.’ It was about the free and unencumbered search for knowledge, something Newman had always advocated and would be the cornerstone of his Idea of a University.
A further problem with the religion versus secularism paradigm is the use of the word ‘religion’, when what was at issue was more specifically the institutional Christianity of the various churches. In this more focused context one can see the emergence of secularism, not in opposition to but rather as the outcome of Christianity, or more specifically, a mutation from the form of Christianity that evolved in late Classical and medieval Europe that we know as ‘Christendom’. Far from opening the door to rampant immorality and irreligion, the new secular understanding could also be accompanied by a moral sense directed by conscience.
Within this context, it is not a ‘kindly Light’ from beyond that leads us through the darkening world of shadows but each mind that is a source of illumination, together with the human spirit and the values it can bring into the world. This is not a vision of inevitable darkness but, as that other modern ‘saint’, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote, the characteristic of a world that has ‘come of age’. Though he wrote of ‘religionless Christianity’ perhaps better would have been ‘Christian humanism’, something that was implicit in the teaching of Jesus from the outset: an understanding of humanity embedded in this world.
This is the point of understanding that sapiential Judaism had reached in the later writings of scripture (such as Qoheleth and Ecclesiastes) and was reflected in the teachings of sages such as Hillel the Elder: ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,’ as being the summation of the Torah. It is the world to which modern secularism has redirected us. This is a world very different from the neo-Platonism that would reshape Christianity into an other-worldly asceticism, the tradition of Platonic dualism that views this world as an externality, an excrescence, or an illusion from which we can one day be liberated. Though in many ways his writings are outstanding and their composition an inspiration, in so far as this was essentially Newman’s conviction, his canonisation only serves to perpetuate an illusion.
Dominic Kirkham’s book From Monk to Modernity was published in Britain by SOF in 2015 and a second edition is now out in the US. His latest book Our Shadowed World is published by Wipf and Stock (Eugene OR, 2019).