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Leaps and Circles: Kierkegaard and Newman on Faith and Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

M. Jamie Ferreira
M. Jamie Ferreira
Affiliation:
Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 379 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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2 ‘Kierkegaard-Newman’, Przywara, Erich, Newman-Studien, vol. 1, pp. 77–101 (Nurnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1948), p. 96, my translation.Google Scholar

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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.

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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.

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