The Atheist, the Cardinal & The Liberals
John Henry Newman, the cardinal, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the atheist, may not seem to have much in common. But both were great writers, and both were opponents of the religious liberalism that was lapping at the foundations of European Christianity in the 19th century. This is the hundredth year since Nietzsche’s death (the hundred and tenth since Newman’s), and it is instructive to read the two men side by side, while one sits in one’s editorial chair waiting — and waiting — for today’s high tide of religious liberalism to wash back out.
When these two wrote against liberalism, of course, Newman wrote out of his belief and Nietzsche out of his unbelief. But which of them wrote the following? “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet…. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things…. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands…. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent;…it has truth only if God is the truth — it stands and falls with faith in God.”
Newman might have written it, but it comes from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols.
Both men also dissected, with razor-sharp rhetoric, the intellectual class’s smugness about orthodox Christianity. (Nietzsche’s attitude toward Christianity was one of feral hatred, but, to do him justice, it was not smug.) The following passages are typical of many in their writings.
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Through the joys and perils of liberal learning we must ever recollect that only faith seeking understanding properly disposes the intellect toward conformity to Christ.
Newman was a good man before he became a Roman Catholic; his goodness motivated his conversion, and the conversion inspirited his goodness.
Men must approach the propagation of truth by seeing it as the Gospel sees it: war between the children of light and the children of darkness.