Getting a Conversation Going
The word "and” is the lowliest, clunkiest, and most forgettable word in the English language. It has just about no saving graces: it is at best mechanical, at worst irredeemably embarrassing. Admittedly, this word—its promiscuous use often associated with children—has a number of different functions, not all of which are absolutely facile. Its most basic function is to link together things that have no essential relationship with each other in the perceptual or conceptual field (e.g. mat and hand, tiger and TV). In addition, there is the more complex narrative “and” in a chronicle, sometimes with and sometimes without the complement of the narrative “then” (the winter of 1296 was harsh, then came a very mild Spring). And finally, “and” functions to announce the internal relation between two phenomena, for example, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity in a unifying field theory of reality or the significant relations between Dante and Catholicism, on the one hand, and Protestantism and the value of everyday life, on the other.
I want to address and assess what is the sense of “and” when we put MacIntyre and Newman together, whether it veers towards metonymy, narrative sequence (one Catholic thinker after another), or towards something like a deep and substantive positive relationship, the excavation of which illuminates both thinkers, while also throwing their differences into relief. I want to argue for the last-named option, but understand given the brevity of my treatment, that the case will fall well short of demonstration.
Now, for the treatment of this relationship to be worthwhile, importantly, it does not have to be genetic, that is, it does not have to involve the claim that the later thinker (MacIntyre) is dependent on the earlier thinker (Newman) for fundamental elements of his thought. This said, however, if the relationship is worth pursuing, then at a minimum we would need to find some non-insignificant overlaps between the two Catholic thinkers either in terms of theme or problematic (preferably both), as well as—if luck will have it—a kind of textual quilt point (point de capiton) provided by the latter (MacIntyre) in order to show that MacIntyre on some occasion in his long and distinguished career has engaged Newman on some important point of his thought, which if it is illustrative of Newman’s thought on a particular topic, may also bear on the other elements of Newman’s thought with which it is connected, thereby suggesting a broader and deeper connection between these two thinkers than at first blush might have been apparent.
To get a conversation going between the two thinkers, one could do worse than beginning with the theme of modernity or more specifically modernity as a “dis-aster” in the Nietzschean sense of losing a lodestar that provided the parameters of individual, social, religious, and political belief, practice, and form of life. Of course, where Nietzsche might welcome such a dis-aster, Newman and MacIntyre manifestly do not: their operative mode is not that of celebration (Nietzsche), but that of lament. Though their register of “dis-aster” too is apocalyptic in its own way, it is more muted and definitely less showy: what is unveiled as catastrophe is the loss of a given view of God, world, self that hollows out the Christian symbols and practices that expressed a unified understanding of the world and established the vocabulary of response for individuals and communities. For both, the elevation of a particular view of reason that uplifts demonstration leads to skepticism, characterized by drift and erring and ironically, despite the wrapping in the metaphor of light, the emergence of a kind of night and an inability to see our way. What is presented for our attention in both cases is a narrative of decline that arose from a complex of religious, political, philosophical choices in the early modern period in tandem with the historical, political, and economic circumstances that conspired to sanction the leaving behind of a previous world of assumption that underwrote particular Christian beliefs and practices, and provided the ground of hope for both self and community.
Yet, to leave matters thus would leave Newman and MacIntyre both fragmented and misunderstood. The purpose of the decline narrative in both cases is not simply to diagnose where Western intellectual culture went awry, as this is measured by a pre-modern world in which the functioning and scope of reason, the nature of the self and the divine and the relations between them, were understood differently, but to point towards the prospect of reconstruction that, nonetheless, is unlikely to be a mere repetition of what preceded the catastrophe. In the philosophical jargon of the moment, we might say we are talking in both the case of Newman and MacIntyre of a “non-identical repetition” of what modernity has jettisoned and made past. Newman’s work is not simply about the choppy seas of modernity of which liberal Christianity is the arising beast, but, as Newman points out in Chapter 6 of the Apologia, the destination that provides a safe haven, which in an Augustinian manner he thinks is provided by the historical Catholic Church that he has come to be believe is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. MacIntyre is even more spectacularly dramatic: this is captured in the Gaelic epigraph to After Virtue: gus am bris an la, which roughly means “until the day breaks.” Of course, the signified is “dawn,” but the Gaelic registers the miracle of coming to be of light after the dark, the upswing of day after night. As a Celt, with allegiances to both Ireland and Scotland, MacIntyre has a more dynamic and eschatological sense of daybreak than plain English “dawn” might allow, perhaps something like Morgenröte in German (morning redness). The word in German is both more literal—as is the Gaelic—and more eschatological, as figures such as Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) both testify, one at the very beginning of the modern age, the other at what he perceives to be its end and productive nadir.
Importantly, the stated need in both Newman and MacIntyre to effect a break from modernity is neither determined by nostalgia nor by a love affair with the past as such (e.g. Joseph de Maistre, Chateaubriand), but rather because of their shared conviction of the intellectual, spiritual, and practical benefit of the Western Christian tradition that carries forward a comprehensive understanding of reason, faith, their relation, and promoted a thick and relational sense of selfhood and obligations to one’s community and to God. Thus, the motive for Newman to continually return to the Church Fathers as upholding a unified field of thought and action, worship, and deep theological reflection, and a sense that the Church provided definition to the selves that served it and made it real. Thus, the motive for MacIntyre’s excavation of the Western intellectual tradition, whether the classical tradition that achieves its apex in Aristotle (while not leaving behind Plato or Greek tragedy), or the Christian tradition in which the Schools (universities) played a major part, but perhaps also the monasteries, which might be construed either as the alternatives to the larger community of the Church or its leaven.
The monumental change that defines modernity, which involves a rupture with the past, can go under different labels, for example, liberalism (Newman) or secularism (MacIntyre). What is crucial, however, is that we are talking about a change that is as comprehensive as it is radical, thus not a change in understanding of a particular idea, or a change in a specific practice or understanding of a practice, or even changes in multiple ideas and practices. Rather, we are speaking of a change of a framework for understanding the world and oneself and our social practices, as well as our understanding of the reality (God) who makes sense of the matrix. To put it in a quasi-Wittgensteinian way—but in a way that also recalls Nietzsche—we are talking not so much about changes in vocabulary items in science, ethical theory, philosophy, and theology, but of a fundamental change in grammar.
The question for both is whether we can retrieve and recharge a tradition or traditions that were left for dead, and whether and in what way the critique of a modernity, whose low-water mark is complacency and whose high-water mark is its celebration of its leaving behind the past, might help us to see the point of going back, though necessarily going back with the view to enabling us to go forward. Both Newman and MacIntyre communicate a sense that, despite all the talk of dynamism and progress that is ingredient in modernity’s discourse of legitimation, the overall experience of all within its sway is disorientation and doubt, lack of agency, and inability to see beyond the present. Again, while Newman and MacIntyre in the end suggest that this tradition is “catholic” as well as “Catholic,” we will have to assess critically what level of overlap there is between their conceptions of the tradition that they recommend or—to leave the question open at this preliminary stage—even whether there is much by way of overlap.
A superficial look at the manner of their apocalyptic-prophetic construction of modernity, the central importance for both of the theme of tradition, and at what first sight appears to be a similarity in terms of the basic problematic of their discourse as a whole, suggests that further exploration might be worth pursuing. Still, even though no claim of actual dependence of MacIntyre on Newman is being advanced, it would lend more reality to the exploration if we could produce a textual quilt point in which our two “Catholic” thinkers can be tied together. It so happens that we can. In his essay in God, Philosophy, and the Universities (Ch. 16) in which he articulates his position on the nature and task of the university, MacIntyre provides a very appreciative review Newman’s Idea of a University (1852). He supports Newman’s arguments against the view that the goal of the university is the acquisition of particular kinds of socially useful forms of expertise, while also sanctioning Newman’s paideia model of the university in which it is less the actual subject matter that is fundamental (though it is not unimportant), than the capacitation of the students to become able judgers in matters in which they precisely do not have expertise. This essentially involves making connections between different orders and forms of knowledge.
Now, this single point of overlap is more important than it seems. For as it is the case in Newman, in MacIntyre the inculcation of judgment in the student is connected with his general view of reason as having its analogue in Aristotle’s notion of phronesis as intellectual excellence that requires formation and his depiction of the modern world as more or less bereft of it. Thus, against what might be regarded simply as a very local set of disagreements about the intrinsic validity of knowledge versus its utility and about whether reason is field-specific (thus analogical) as Aristotle said or invariant across disciples (thus univocal), MacIntyre, as well as Newman, is at least hinting at the broader issues of knowledge and practice that he details in his major constructive texts, that is, certainly in After Virtue (1981), but also Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (1990). In this central band of texts MacIntyre expresses his dissatisfaction regarding the modern view of reason and its relation to practice, as well as its understanding of the relation of the self to the common good of the community that it pretends can be secured not only without the past, but precisely because of its rupture with it.
Having laid the ground for a conversation between the two “Catholic” thinkers, the first having recently come to be celebrated as a doctor of the Church, the other a Catholic intellectual eminence of longstanding who has recently left us and for whom many sorely grieve, it is time to turn to do some actual knitting between the two when it comes to their vision of modernity as disaster, their naming and characterization of it, their prophetic gestures of how with difficulty we can escape its incoherencies by the operationalizing of traditions of discourse and practice that are repressed but still available to us. The “us” is important here. The audience for both of these thinkers is in principle all of us who feel the constant—even if subtle—weight of modernity in all walks of our lives and experience deeply what it takes from us and what it makes impossible, and who are also linked—whether happily or unhappily—to the Christian tradition which, if it rests on the Bible, also appropriated, recalibrated, and energized the classic tradition of philosophical, ethical and inquiry. While, doubtless, both are involved in a running commentary on and argument with a variety of rival philosophical discourses, their public is not simply these specialists. This is so neither because they have acquired the estimable virtues of clear prose and not talking down to people—they have—but rather because of the fact that all of us together are contending with the new world of assumption and trying to find some foothold or handhold whereby we might move on.
John Henry Newman
In his Biglietto speech of 1879 Newman famously provided a shorthand for interpreting his entire work, namely his concerted resistance against liberalism over his whole career. Whatever an interpreter’s plausible suspicions about retrospective simplification, this judgment is consistent with Newman’s account of the integrity of his intellectual career he provides in the Apologia (1864), and meshes well with the appendix he adds to the second edition in 1878. Of course, there is the issue of the range of Newman’s anti-liberalism. If for the most part the range is fairly narrow and specifically concerns liberalism or rationalism to the degree to which it distorts historical Christianity, there are moments of a wider-angle view being taken on the phenomenon, and in the appendix on Liberalism in the second edition of the Apologia the criticisms of liberalism in religion are nested within a broader set of criticisms of the modern age that seem to go beyond his complaints about the sorry state of Christianity—with the exception of Catholicism—in the nineteenth century. (I am thinking in particular of Newman’s objections to the State making ecclesiastic appointments, dispose of Church property, but also its interests in discouraging people taking seriously Christianity’s mandates against usury and its mandates for charity).
This nesting in particular raises the question of whether Newman had a deeper and broader view of liberalism as naming modernity as a whole a dis-aster within which he could place what he saw was the deformations on Christianity that he was dealing with from the very beginnings of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s. I will not pursue this issue here, and will focus solely on Newman’s prophetic calling of liberal religion or what he calls in Book 10 of the Grammar of Assent the religion of civilization. This is justified on theoretical as well as pragmatic grounds. Even if as a regime modernity included deformations in excess of the rationalistic distortions of Christianity, the change in substance of Christianity was not only Newman’s central interest, but even independently of Newman has to be thought to be at the center of what is nothing less than a mutation.
For Newman, the problem that liberal religion presents in the nineteenth century is different in kind than problems presented to and by religion in the prior centuries, for example, the nature of scripture and how properly to interpret it, the cogency of particular doctrines, and issues of Church rule. It is not as if these problems do not continue, and especially the issues raised in the late seventeenth century by Locke as to how faith ought to be regulated by a reason committed to evidence and the question of the relative probability of particular truth claims made on behalf of Christianity and the ethics involved in avoiding overclaims. They do. Argument being his thing, Newman in particular argues against the Lockean epistemological tradition in texts such Oxford University Sermons (1828-1843) in his Anglican period and the Grammar of Assent (1870) in his Catholic period. Yet, the very force of Newman’s arguments in Oxford University Sermons, for example, seems to suggest that the ground has shifted under the arguers’ feet, as it were. Whereas once the presumption was on the side of historical Christianity, now it is on the side of the rationalist. In other words, there has been a tectonic shift and more specifically a shift in the burdens of proof on to those who espouse historical forms of Christianity. At least such is the case in Anglicanism. Newman does not have the twentieth- and twenty-first-century vocabulary of Charles Taylor, but what he seems to be grasping is precisely what is covered by Taylor’s notion of the “social imaginary.” What once was novel is now old hat, what once was argued by the brightest has now trickled down into second-rate minds and operate as assumptions that do not see daylight and thus become subject to scrutiny. This is the dis-aster that Newman sets before his eyes (apocalypse) and wishes to understand. In this respect, if he has a sympathetic familiar in the nineteenth century, it is Kierkegaard.
For Newman, the shift in religious culture or underlying assumptions that constitute it effects an entire system of exclusions that include beliefs, practices, and forms of life. I will focus primarily on beliefs in this paper, but throughout his oeuvre Newman worries about the credibility of liturgy that seems to have been reduced to aesthetic spectacle and utility, has deep concerns as to how prayer has become relatively inconsequential in Christian life, the sinner come to be understood along the lines of Aristotle’s moral weakness (akrasia), and the saint expelled from the commonwealth or doctored as a moral exemption whom, however, we are under no obligation to imitate. The eclipse of the “saint” from a place of reverence is, for Newman, especially interesting from a diagnostic point of view, since throughout Christian history the saint effectively disturbs the peace of a society constituted quite literally by moral mediocrities, that is, good enough selves calculated not to inhibit economic development.
Still, the crisis presented by modernity centrally affects belief and three of its most important components and their relation. At the level of fundamental “principles” liberal religion does not admit as having warrant for a religious believer’s commitment to doctrine, tradition, and espousing any form of knowing other than that predicated on the production of evidence for a truth claim, whether that truth claim has demonstrative or merely probabilistic properties. In effect, each of these three exclusions are themselves principles, thus the “anti-dogmatic” principle, the anti-tradition principle, and what might be called the epistemic reduction principle. I will speak to each of these in turn.
Doctrine
Against the pervasiveness of the prejudice against doctrinal formulations in the Anglican Church, Newman recalls in the Apologia that from the beginning of his life as a public intellectual the notion of a “creedless religion” struck him as incoherent. Doctrines exist either as elucidations of scripture and conclusions to real arguments that obviate the need for going over old ground, thereby allowing Christians to move forward in history and attend to new needs in a Church that requires new witnessing. In this sense, doctrines, while binding, are ecclesially productive. At the same time, Newman refuses to limit the number of doctrines, which is the diktat of both the rationalists and evangelicals. Nor is he prepared to concede to more moderate versions of Anglicanism, which hold that licit doctrinal formulation belongs solely to the early centuries of the common era.
Tradition
As is well-known, not only when an Anglican, but also in his conversion process, Newman was a determined defender of the prerogative of tradition in religious matters. Newman’s task in The Development of Doctrine (1845) is to render intelligible the warrant that religious tradition has, where religious tradition involves more than explicitly formulated beliefs and doctrines, but asceticism, devotional practices, and Church polity. In making his case Newman engages in three different kinds of argument against a coalition of anti-traditionalists in which, arguably, the rationalists are now pulling the strings: the first defensive or forensic, the second evidentialist, and the third hypothetical. Newman’s defensive strategy is to point to the blatant incoherence in the anti-traditionalist stance. He points out that the very persons most opposed to tradition in Christianity are all in on it when it comes to precedent in law and tradition in politics. Newman, however, operates in evidentialist mode when he considers the issue of the antiquity of the papacy that both rationalists and evangelicals have tied to its validity—they, of course, being convinced that it is a late doctrine and thus invalid. While Newman admits that the doctrine of the primacy of Rome only becomes common, at the earliest, in the fifth century, he finds the evidence for the implicit understanding of the primacy of Rome in the early Church compelling. Finally, Newman operates in hypothetical mode, when on the basis of sustaining the validity of early doctrines such as the doctrine of the Trinity that moves from convictions about the divinity of the Christ and the divinity of the Holy Spirit to explicit formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, to pointing out that it is reasonable to suppose that developments in other areas of doctrine can occur outside the arbitrary timeline of the early centuries.
Amplified Reason
The third liberal principle Newman argues against is the principle of explicit reason or reason funneled into the narrow mode of logical inference such as illustrated in his mentor Richard Whately. As the Lockean tradition lays it out, reason is different from and superior to faith in that essentially it presupposes nothing: its business is to vet and bring in a verdict as to whether a religious truth-claim can be advanced as such or advanced more tentatively or not at all, having, of course, scrupulously paid attention to the amount and quality of the evidence that can be adduced on its behalf. The upshot conforms to the intention: the only truth-claims that can be advanced with certainty—and even here with moral rather than demonstrative certainty—are the existence of God, that God is the moral governor of the universe, and that there will be eternal reward for a good or good enough life. Here certainty and validity are more or less synonymous. Newman famously argues that the rationalists are involved in self-deception. They are claiming to be empiricists but willingly ignore the fact that reason often—perhaps usually—operates from assumptions.
No rationalist would deny the truth of the proposition “Great Britain is an island,” yet equally almost none have walked around the whole island to provide the evidence for such a truth. The rationalist is the odd creature who likes to burden the believer with excessive epistemological obligations without looking at how reason works in its natural state. Newman then dismisses the absolute distinction between faith and reason predicated on the logical and evidentialist matrix of the latter, and does so by pointing to the fiduciary component of reason itself. Newman comes to his conclusion about reason during the middle to the late 1830s, and the record of this is provided by sermons 9-14 of the Oxford University Sermons. Though technically, Newman is far sharper on all the relevant epistemological points in his later classic Grammar of Assent, his overall anti-rationalist position does not change substantially over a thirty-year period. Most interestingly, he brings forward Aristotle’s phronesis as an analogue of the kind of fiduciary feature of reason that operates more implicitly than explicitly, or more tacitly than focally, to use the language of the great twentieth-century philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi.
Against the principles of anti-doctrine, anti-tradition, and anti-reason to the extent to which it collaborates with assumption, Newman argues the principles of doctrine, tradition, and what might be called the principle of amplified reason that accounts for its fiduciary component. As the rationalist principles form a compact core, so also do Newman’s set of three counter-principles, which compact also marks the pre-modern religious world, the compact being in operation, Newman is convinced on either side of his conversion ion, in his Anglican years in the Church Fathers and the Anglican divines of the seventeenth (Laud, Bull, Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes) and eighteenth centuries (Bishop Butler whose Analogy of Religion [1736] proved foundational for his refutation of the Lockean tradition), and in his Catholic years by the great medieval thinkers, Aquinas in particular, and his continual reception from the Reformation on.
Alasdair MacIntyre
For the purpose of this essay, which is to get a conversation going between Newman and MacIntyre, I am going to focus, in the main, on MacIntyre’s classic text, After Virtue. One of the many geniuses of the text is that it combines analytic rigor and detailed social analysis with apocalyptic insight and prophetic declamation, all in the service of producing a narrative of decline that itself is pointing to what a repair would look like. Though, I commented in my introduction on the framing of this diagnosis of modernity and the hope of its overcoming, in reference to the epigraph of After Virtue, I would like to recur to it again as I think it both deepens the mourning and sharpens the hope that we find in Newman.
Recall what we said there about gus am bris an la (until daybreak or the break of day) and its apocalyptic resonance. The epigraph is often read as a salute to Nietzsche’s text of the same name that celebrates a new way of thinking and living after rationalistic modernity has run aground. Given how Nietzsche’s diagnostics of modernity is put to use in the second part of After Virtue, the association has support. Yet, the Nietzsche association cannot really explain the recourse to Gaelic. Something in excess of Nietzsche is indicated by the recourse to the Gaelic language in which MacIntyre was proficient.
It seemed to be a bearer of the experience of the Scots. MacIntyre was, undoubtedly, aware that this expression is simply the first part of a longer saying tied together by the conjunction “and” (agud). The unabbreviated saying is as follows: Gus am bris an la agud an teich na ngaillean. This allows us to see that MacIntyre is being biblical and incredibly poignant at once. First, the whole phrase is a Scotish Gaelic translation of a passage from the Song of Songs (4:6; see also 2:17): “Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.” In the Christian use of the phrase in Scotland it bore on Christian burial and hope. It was a commonplace on gravestones in Gaelic speaking areas in Scotland and pointed to the last judgment and the resurrection of the dead, one example of which are the gravestones of the soldiers who died in droves in the trenches in WWI at the battle of the Somme that MacIntyre mentions apparently in passing in After Virtue. Not a few of the myriad Scottish dead had the name Alasdair. This makes clearer that MacIntyre’s epigraph is essentially both epitaph and protest, against war but also against a modernity that is not only Eliot’s “heap of broken images” but the land of death or the dead, the dead in ethos as well as body.
The analytic brilliance of After Virtue, together with the deftness of its historical accounts which, after the manner of Newman, refuse at all times to draw attention to its learning, perhaps tends to disguise the catastrophic nature of the situation from which we would break which, ironically, of course, casts itself as a break from a past that it defined as the “dark ages.” For MacIntyre, way more is involved here than the pot calling the kettle black. In a reversal, modernity is the darkness to the light (and coherence) of the so-called dark tradition that it displaced. Though there may be a day-break (bris an la) beyond the dark of modernity, modernity was a break in the sense of the breaking of the pre-modern day and ushering in fragmentation and incoherence and interminable arguments whose usefulness as guides to practice is haphazard at best and completely absent at worst. While MacIntyre acknowledges the religious rivet of the pre-modern Western tradition and acknowledges that in terms of practices as well as discourses it reorders or at least recalibrates the classical tradition, practically speaking his focus is on classical ethical discourse as a discourse of virtue. The story he tells is not simply a story about how this discourse was supplanted by other ethical discourses in the modern period, for example, utilitarianism, deontic ethics, prescriptivism, but that essentially it is cut off at its root by an unacknowledged agreement among rival discourses that we lack the means successfully to gain consensus, which would only be possible if we could link up—as was the case in the pre-modern period—our ethical language with human nature and more specifically come to a decision wherein lies the telos of human nature.
In After Virtue, the label that MacIntyre provides for the base logic of modernity is “emotivism,” though he shows that he is not married to “emotivism” as a diagnostic category when he suggests “relativism” and “individualism” as functional equivalents. This underlying logic or grammar admits of plural expressions, but at a limit it allows the generation of “doubles” or counterfeits of the normative and naturalist ethic it displaced, because of the fact that at a surface level it rails against the various forms of prescriptivism that are abroad, whether of English or German pedigree. Again, without the general theory for generating doubles that MacIntyre seems to possess, Newman provides an example that he takes to typify modern approaches to Christianity. In a justifiably famous sermon 14, “Faith, Wisdom, and Bigotry” in Oxford University Sermons, Newman asks the question as to whether the modern world demonstrates precisely its lack of understanding of the underlying logic of the major contests of the day. One of these major contests is that between religious rationalism and religious fundamentalism or bigotry. Newman understands why a reasonable person might be inclined to think of this as a battle between rationalism and a form of irrationalism. Such is not the case, however, as Newman argues, for fundamentalism is based on an intellectual decision that abstracts out of a complex living religion what is supposed to be its essence and then proceeds to use this abstracted and contracted element of Christianity as a measure for belief. It may be that with the advent of fundamentalism, there is a connection between Christianity and violence, but the ultimate cause is not religious passion as such, but the misplaced use of reason itself that decides to take a part for the whole.
Now, one has to admit that the concerns of MacIntyre and Newman, while related, are different. MacIntyre is concerned with the coherence of ethical language that makes for a determinate self and a society that operates in terms of the common good regulated by a grasp of the telos of human being as actor, judger, and social being. In contrast, Newman is focused expressly on the religious believer as neither a rationalist nor an irrationalist, but rather someone who takes a tradition of belief and practice for granted and thinks or acts out of it relatively unconsciously, without necessarily thinking, however, that this is a weakness or indicative of an irrationalist stance towards reality. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that the believer’s intellectual habit looks very like MacIntyre’s articulation of virtue, and as a matter of fact, Aristotle’s notion of phronesis or practical reason provides the mediating term between the areas of religion (Newman) and ethics (MacIntyre).
Similarly, as with Newman, MacIntyre is more interested in the fact and nature of the paradigm shift that is modernity than in meticulously plotting its origin, or even deciding definitively how it devolves over the centuries to come increasingly less visible. For the most part, he leaves the first task to the likes of a Louis Dupré and the second to the likes of Charles Taylor, two thinkers he demonstrates he admires in his reviews. Like Newman also, he gives priority to English thinkers, while, unlike him, he attempts to justify his choice by arguing that they are further along than their French (Voltaire, Diderot et al) and German counterparts (if we except Kant) when it comes to sedimenting “emotivism” or relativism as the fundamental basis underlying rival theories while justifying and promoting new forms of life that hold authority and have persuasive power in society (e.g., therapist, manager). In doing so, he suggests that his command of the relevant philosophical material is more nearly of the order of a Dupré and Taylor than a Newman. Though even here it would be wise not to overestimate Newman’s disadvantages vis-à-vis MacIntyre. If we add Newman’s divagations on the rise of the authority of modern science, and the spurious claims made on its behalf, in the Idea of a University to Newman’s attacks on the rationalism of Locke and his epigones and also his arguments against religion based on feeling that he makes in Oxford University Sermons and the Grammar of Assent, then the gap between MacIntyre and Newman lessens considerably, even if it does not disappear.
Though not focused, as I have said, on discerning a punctiliar moment of rupture with the past and perhaps its pre-modern preparation, similar to Newman, MacIntyre intimates at least that were that to become the issue, then the event of the Reformation would be a prime candidate. This is suggested on a number of occasions when he seems to label modernity as the “secularization of Protestantism.” It is not a little uninteresting that in A Secular Age—though not necessarily dependent on MacIntyre for the point—Charles Taylor accepts the Reformation not only as the crucial point of rupture, but as laying down the fundamental terms of the novum that will secularize religious terms in such a way as to prioritize immanence. Of course, unlike MacIntyre and Newman, in Taylor there is no mourning for the pre-modern dispensation of belief and practice that has been left behind, as well as little by way of declamation against the emergent discourses that compete with each other: in a Hegelian manner they can be seen to be relatively adequate and lead, as in Hegel’s Phenomenology, to ever more comprehensive and more humanely satisfying formulations. Without denying that there are downsides to modernity, for example, the breakup of community, the devastation of the environment, the escalation of misery, Taylor asserts appreciatively that modernity seems to have an inbuilt logic of self-correction. This, in turn, means that Taylor is more sanguine about rival discourses in modernity than either Newman or MacIntyre and also far less suspicious concerning the logic that underwrites their beliefs and reform practices. Newman and MacIntyre see things differently than Taylor: even the most apparently benign beliefs and practices of reform may simply hide the fact that their logic has not broken with the immanence of secular modernity and that in our approval of the ways in which there are attempts to create community, handle poverty, and avoid ecological devastation we may be accepting doubles or counterfeits of their more integral pre-modern exemplars.
I turn now to the question of recovery, common to MacIntyre and Newman, and more specifically to the question of the extent to which the apparently defeated pre-modern tradition can be marshalled against the new episteme with a view to regenerating selves and communities that can be both sponsors and examples of the unveiling and excising of the assumptions of modernity which, precisely as assumptions, remain invisible most of the time to most people. Though Newman is fundamentally apocalyptic in his judgment of modernity as a disaster and swerve, and quite literally thinks of rationalist versions of Christianity such as provided by Locke as simulacra, it turns out that he is far more sanguine than MacIntyre about wholescale repeal of the dispensation of modernity. As the Apologia suggests, the overcoming lies ready at hand in the nineteenth-century Catholic Church, that is, according to Newman, the repository of the Christian tradition and all that is good of the non-Christian. It contains everything he loves in the Church Fathers, their formation through the reading of scripture, everything they adapt from philosophical wisdom, literature, and rhetoric. After his conversion, he is prepared to accept that the great thinkers of the medieval period added intellectual refinement and complexity to the ancient store without fundamentally changing the nexus between belief and worship, belief and practice, belief and form of life.
As indicated quite a few times already, MacIntyre is no less apocalyptic in his figuration of modernity. It is no less a disaster for him. Yet, noticeably, MacIntyre does not appear to accept the Catholic Church as the solution, thereby signalling that he does not understand the Catholic Church to be the kind of massive counter-society to the society constructed by the modern episteme. Thus, an available portal of escape to another place or state in the here and now does not seem to be on the table. MacIntyre does not say why. When faced with the question of repairing the present by retrieving the past, MacIntyre is far more piecemeal and incrementalist than Newman, and perhaps in the end far more eschatological.
I will not go down the rabbit hole of the controversy concerning the “Benedict option,” not will I opine as to whether in After Virtue we are to understand Benedict along exceptionalist or exemplary lines. There is something to be said for both options, but the evidence cuts both ways, though I admit that such evidence is somewhat asymmetrical in that there does seem to be more evidence for the former than the latter. Whatever his reservations about Weber, MacIntyre continues to hold to some version of the distinction between Gesellshaft and Gemeinde, the difference between them not only being that of scale, but intention, identity, and solidarity. Still, though thinkers who were influenced by MacIntyre may have interpreted him to be an apostle of intentional communities, MacIntyre does not give us a final word. MacIntyre does not disambiguate in the figure of the old and the new Benedict between exception and exemplar. Perhaps it behooves us to ask as to whether he might have had his reasons.
Relatedly, MacIntyre is more eschatological in his projection of the recovery of the tradition that has been lost. While it is possible to interpret MacIntyre to be suggesting the existence or potential existence of intentional communities—as kinds of holy remnants of a tradition—as sites of resistance to the hegemony of modernity, the one thing certain is that the dispensation of modernity has not been overcome. Thus, in MacIntyre we find no evidence of the tendency we find in Newman to suggest that the Catholic Church stands apart from modernity, and though corrupted, and capable of corruption, has integrity enough to function as a counterweight. Newman, of course, is simply being Augustinian in his ecclesiology, and he does not mean to suggest anything like a realized eschatology. Even so, the not-yet dimension in the overcoming the modern episteme is considerably more pronounced in MacIntyre. Moreover, one of the functions of MacIntyre’s appeal to Greek drama and to Nietzsche is to indicate that history is an agon in which there are no guaranteed outcomes because of human will and systemic unpredictability.
Conclusion: Reading Together
As suggested from the outset, the essay is an attempt to get a dialogue between Newman and MacIntyre off the ground by sketching at least some of its parameters. I have emphasized what they have in common as:
- The unveiling of the catastrophe of modernity as an emergent episteme that involves a fundamental rupture with the pre-modern world of assumption and its knitting of reason and faith, theory and practice, and individual and community;
- A prophetic denunciation of its multiple attenuations and incoherencies; and
- A hope for recovery of forms of reason, practices, and forms of life not because they belong to the past, but because they represent a more satisfying and realistic account of how human beings think and act and live in relation to each other. If their treatments of education provide the necessary textual quilt point, perhaps Aristotle’s notion of phronesis provides the conceptual hinge.
As one would expect in an essay that is exploratory, the emphasis fell on similarity, though throughout I did underscore differences of emphasis. None of this is to gainsay that Newman and MacIntyre are quite different thinkers who address the catastrophe of modernity with very intellectual backgrounds, one a Christian thinker and eventually a Catholic thinker, who loves the Church Fathers and in due course becomes familiar with medieval giants such as Aquinas, the other a moral philosopher with vast competence in the history of ethics, a political philosopher who engages Marx and critical theory, and an admirer of Aquinas, especially his work on virtue, but one who does not engage either his metaphysics and only very sparingly his vast theology. Nor is it to say that their agenda is precisely the same. Though Newman initially asked the question what ideally the Church would look like if it were to jettison the Enlightenment cargo it has taken on in the modern period, his move towards Rome was facilitated by changing the question to which of the available Churches—warts and all—provides the best chance to overcome modernity or at least not to be overcome by it. Thus, the discovery of the Catholic Church and recovery of a holistic form of Christianity is coincident.
Not so in After Virtue. Though Aristotle is the major player in the recovery, MacIntyre admits that the adaptation of a certain Aristotle by Christianity will mean that its recovery will necessarily have a Christian complexion, whether provided by Aquinas or Benedict or unnamed others. Yet, Aristotle is doing the bulk of the work. Certainly, one does not need to be a Thomist, a Catholic, or even a Christian to be convinced of MacIntyre’s argument. Newman, on the other hand, though he harassed his rationalist opponents with Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom and clearly thought of intellectual formation as well as moral formation on Aristotelian lines, argued for a far thicker retrieval of the Christian tradition. He thought that Christian identity requires reading of the biblical text, acceptance of a complex matrix of doctrines, participation in practices such as liturgy that bear on the community in a different way than manifest social actions such as alms-giving, attitudes to war, and Christian hospitality. Their agendas are sufficiently different that should we be taken more by one than the other, it would not be surprising that the other might come off as deficient and lacking in some way. This is to be expected given their different agendas, as well as their different archives.
Our task, however, may be less to decide between them, than learn from both as we now are challenged by the frailty of the modern, the incoherence of its discourses, the alternating pattern of vacuousness and viciousness, and tasked with moving beyond it in a persuasively Christian way. They are both physicians of the soul and polity, spiritual guides in the giddiness, aimlessness, of a dispensation that must be broken (bris) if we are to heal from our individual and community breaking (bris). If there is to be a dawn, a daybreak (bris an la), then the darkness and night that is modernity must be borne away in order for Christians to imagine the future of our past and contribute to its realization not only against the forces that aim to cripple it, but also the accidents and slippage that threaten all our aspirations and mar all of our hopes.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was originally delivered at the 25th Annual Fall Conference of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, November 2025.
