KUYPER, DOOYEWEERD, ROMANTICISM

Here are several hints that some of the central themes and motifs of the Cosmonomic Philosophy can be helpfully understood as the reformation of a 19th-century Romantic political spirituality. Actually, Dooyeweerd had made much of this clear in his _In the Twilight of Western Thought_ (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1960), but the significance of these connections became clearer in retrospect, when I had learned more explicitly of the "diagnostic characteristics" of the Romantic Movement, which in its most secular form was "Natural Supernaturalism" (M. H. Abrams). Romanticism set the stage for some of the key points to which Kuyper, Bavinck, and Dooyeweerd were concerned to respond as culturally-concerned Christians.

Kuyper's famous concern for "the little people", for example, was typical of the Romantic intellectual, and the profound spiritual influence on him of the peasant woman, Pietronella Baltus, well suited the temper of his times. Then again, he was profoundly moved for the rest of his life by the spirituality of the Oxford Movement (Anglican-Catholic) through his reading of Charlotte M. Yonge's novel, _The Heir of Redclyffe_ (1853), as he convalesced from the journey to the edge of his mind induced by the intensity with which he had pursued his study of Johannes a Lasco, becoming even more appreciative of the Religion of the Heart so dear to the Romantics. Typical of mystics and Romantics, this collapse-recovery cycle, which James T. Bratt has noticed in Kuyper, became henceforth for him a pathway to his very productive creativity in many areas of endeavour.

This religious romanticism, I would daresay, also helps to explain the noted similarity of Kuyper's ideas to the ideas of Cardinal Newman. The translator of Kuyper's _To be Near Unto God_ commented on his more than two thousand devotional meditations that "They are well said to form a literature by themselves, and are in line with the best works of Dutch mystics, such as Johannes Ruysbroek, Cornelius Jansinius, and Thomas à Kempis. ". "Sphere-sovereignty", of course, is not unrelated to the "ethnic nationalism" ("tribalism", "phyletism") typical of the political spirituality of Conservative Romantic Nationalism and Utopianisms, of which it is both an expression and a Reformed-Christian antithetic response. The Idea of "spiritual roots" is not unrelated to the Romantic notion of culturally-informing Volk spirits.

"Sovereign Spheres" in Kuyper's context cannot be fully understood apart from the Romantic motif of Organicity and Integral Wholes and Kuyper's challenge to evolutionary (organological) reductionism in both Darwinianism and Historicism. These "Sovereign Spheres" also imply a contextuality related to the Romantic anticipations or roots of modern trends in the Sociology of Knowledge (Dooyeweerd, T. S. Kuhn, Polanyi, et al.). The Biblical religious ground-motive of "Creation, Fall, and Redemption in Jesus Christ in the Communion of the Holy Spirit" at the heart of Dooyeweerd's life- and world-view and philosophy restores Christian content and direction to the Romantic motif of the "circuitous journey" and the radical mystical descent and ascent via the heart in the transcendental direction of time. His expansion of the "Spheres" into a theory of time with an architectonic order of modal aspects related to the "central self" and interconnected by an analogical system of correspondences between the levels, is very typically Romantic in pattern, yet is also an antithetic, Reformational response to Romanticism. There are echos here of Paracelsus!

Abraham Kuyper, _To be Near Unto God_, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979 [(c)trans. John H. De Vries, 1925], pp. 13, 15, 16, 22, 23.

Frank Vanden Berg, _Abraham Kuyper A Biography_, St. Catherines, Ont.: Paideia Press, 1978 [(c) Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1960], Chapter 3: _Books and a Book_; Chapter 4: _Village Clergyman_.

Stanley M. Wiersma, _Curtmantle and the Philosophy of Law_, The Reformed Journal 27(6): 6-10 (June, 1977). Dr. Wiersma writes, "Henry Zylstra, former chairman of the department of English at Calvin College and co-founder of the *Reformed Journal*, used to remark in his course on "Victorian Prose" on the similarity between the ideas of Cardinal Newman and Abraham Kuyper. My colleague George Graham Harper, who was not only Zylsta's student but his colleague, reports that Zylstra confided to him the intuition (none the worse for that, mind you!) that there must have been correspondence between Kuyper and Newman. How else account for the similarities in their ideas?" Kuyper's connection with the spirituality of the Oxford Movement and with the Catholic Revival through religious Romanticism goes a long way towards explaining the similarities even if there were no correspondence.

James T. Bratt, _Raging Tumults of Soul The private life of Abraham Kuyper_, The Reformed Journal 37(11):9-13 (November, 1987). Kuyper's discovery of the spiritual depths took the form of the classical conversion pattern of *descent* and *return* which manifested itself dramatically in his first serious collapse or "nervous breakdown" ("prostration" or "weakness of the nerves") in 1859-60, and is a central feature in various degrees of Patristic Orthodoxy and High Calvinism. "Kuyper had no followers at the time of his first collapse, but when they later read his account of it (in *Confidentie*, 1873) they surely applauded. This was the type of fall they expected, a classic Reformed-pietist conversion from pride to humility, liberalism toward orthodoxy, self-seeking to reliance on Christ"(Bratt, p. 9). In the terminology of Dooyeweerd, who elaborates this *labour-breakdown- recovery* cycle philosophically the *faith* function leads the *opening-process* (transcendentally) for which the *historical moment* (akin to a Romantic or so-called "timeless" moment -- but culturally-oriented and lawful) is the *nodal point* (foundationally). Kuyper's "collapse", then, was both personal and societal *history* in the making, following through the typical 19th-century Romantic / Classical *circuitous journey* or *completion of the circle* motif, which is expanded in Dooyeweerd to become the Biblical basic motive of Creation, Fall, and Redemption in Jesus Christ in the Communion of the Holy Spirit. Kuyper's "worst" or most profound "collapse" into himself, (*descent* into the heart and *ascent* to God occurred just after the mid-1870's, coming shortly after his encounter in England with the Moody-Sankey revivalist and Keswick holiness/perfectionist stream of spirituality which he attempted to combine with his cultural (*historically-forming*) activities back home. Dr. Bratt observes a similar breakdown / collapse pattern in the careers of Max Weber and William James who also came from a Calvinist background. I would note also here the structure of an experienced *phenomenological reduction* characteristic of these "breakdowns" (cf. James' place as a forerunner/source for Husserl, and Dooyeweerd's Husserl connection and reformation).

Prof. Dr. H. Dooyeweerd, _Vernieuwing en Bezinning_, Zutphen: J. B. Van den Brink & Co., 1963. "Abysmal depths" -- "Slechts Gods Geest kan ons de radicale zin van de Woord-openbaring onthullen, die ons in afrondelijke diepten tegelijk de *waarachtige God en ons zelven* ontdekt"(p. 9).

McKendree R. Langley, _The Political Spirituality of Abraham Kuyper_, International Reformed Bulletin, No. 76, 1979, pp. 4-9. Kuyper's development of a Christian "political spirituality" was given a strong impetus by his encounter with the progressive-Romantic, Anti-Revolutionary, not Counter-Revolutionary, response to the French Revolution set forth by Groen van Prinsterer.

Ernst Benz, _The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy_, Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1983 (Translated from the French by Blair R. Reynolds and Eunice M. Paul. Pittsburgh Theological Monographs, N.S. no.6. Dikran Y. Hadidian, general editor).

Henri F. Ellenberger, _The Discovery of the Unconscious The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry_, New York: Basic Books, 1970, reveals many of the details of Romantic spirituality.

M. H. Abrams, _Natural Supernaturalism Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature_, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971.

Suzanne R. Kirschner, _The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis Individuation and Integration in Post-Freudian Theory_, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Gerald T. Hanratty, _Jung and the Gnostics_, Milltown Studies 23:54-70(1989). Dooyeweerd's cosmonomic system of "Law-Spheres" speaks to the claim of the Romantics "that they understood the correspondences between the levels of reality and that the opposing forces, which were present in all these levels, were reconciled in the light of their all-embracing imaginative syntheses"(p.58).

Kuyper, Dooyeweerd and the Reformational Vision: Theosophy Reformed