John Henry Newman, Knowingness, and Victorian Perfectionism

The following pages have several aims, both historical and philosophical. First, I want to bring to consideration a particular character trait or disposition of our moral psychology, one I will call "knowingness," and to suggest as I do that the study of moral psychology itself, quietly taken by cultural critics to be an outmoded, perhaps obsolete sort of concern, is worthy of renewed attention. I will be studying this knowingness as it has been anatomized with special power by John Henry Newman, and the second of my aims, then, will be to place both Newman and the knowingness he dissected within a larger conceptual and historical environment, one which, following Stanley Cavell, I describe as "perfectionist." Pursuing this second task, which I can only begin here, will require that I go over some historical ground familiar to Victorianists, but my hope is that this expository stretch of the essay (in section III) will present those familiar regions under a fresh light, illuminating relations among disparate figures and texts in a novel fashion. There, as throughout the essay, I hope to do justice to the specifically theological dimensions of Newman's writing, while simultaneously situating those dimensions amid his other concerns and those of the period. Newman's writing has suffered, as Geoffrey Tillotson wrote thirty years ago, from our lack of adequate interpretive tools, inviting both theological scholarship and cultural analysis but not a criticism responsive to both. "The literary critic," Tillotson writes, "can take on historians (say Gibbon) and politicians (say Burke) and art critics (say Ruskin) more comfortably than he can take on Newman. And the reverse is true. The ecclesiastical writer is usually far from being the literary critic" (8). Similarly, in her recent writing on Newman, Gauri Viswanathan has remarked that engaging "in discussions about belief, conviction, or religious identity in a secular age of 'postmodern skepticism,' is already fraught with infinite hazards, not least of which is the absence of an adequate vocabulary or language" (xiv). If two such wildly different critics acknowledge these hazards, surely anyone writing on Newman is liable to feel exposed. But such feelings of exposure and inarticulacy are richly thematized in Newman's writing, as in perfectionist narratives more generally, and the opportunity to render explicit the dynamics of such hazards is one motivation to risking them. Of course, another and perhaps more obvious "hazard" in studying Newman lies in his apparent distance from pressing contemporary critical concerns. But, again, in taking up the idea of knowingness, Newman studies exactly such assurance, our confident beliefs concerning what will be of consequence to us and what will not.

I

By knowingness, I mean the disposition to intimate suavely or proclaim brashly that, whatever it is you are about to say, whatever it is I am about to read, whatever I might hear, it's nothing new, I know it already, I heard it myself sometime last week, if not before. It is the stance of a college freshman who already knows what, say, Othellomeans, having been told the truth of the play by her high school English teacher; or of a first year graduate student who has already read and knows the value of, for instance, The Psychic Life of Power.I recognized my own interest in this topic on reading Jonathan Lear's essay, "Knowingness and Abandonment: An Oedipus for Our Time," where knowingness is seen as the defensive form Enlightenment rationality takes when it becomes too uncomfortably aware of our existential isolation. We have been abandoned by the gods and, in Lear's psychoanalytic framework, by their secular avatars, our parents, and knowing things is how we, thus bereft, render our solitude habitable:

If Descartes ushers in the modern world with the dictum, "I think therefore I am," Oedipus offers this anticipation: "I am abandoned, therefore I think." He acts as though thinking could compensate him for his loss, but since there...