ABSTRACT
Born in 1801, Newman was inevitably part of the Romantic Age, though, of course, he lived right through the partially reactionary Victorian Age, dying in 1890. Jean Guy Saint-Arnaud has pointed to the radical religious choices required in the New Testament, especially by St. Luke, as a source for Newman’s later disjunction between atheism and Catholicism. But at the same time, Newman often insisted that reason was the true instrument of controversy and should be employed in religious questions and in arriving at the truth of Catholicism. Newman seemed partially aware that his shocking disjunction and his insistence on logic would appear to be a trick of false rhetoric designed to frighten or force others to a decision for Catholicism. Newman did note that there is an ascending logical movement towards Catholicism and a descending movement towards atheism, with Anglicanism and Liberalism as half-way houses but not logically intermediate positions.
