Frederick Kinsman On Agnosticism

I found Frederick Kinsman's Reveries of a Hermit enormously stimulating, and as I said the other day, its title is misleading. His main argument is that the varieties of Protestantism are all actually versions of agnosticism:

The aim of these lectures is to compare and relate three points of view from which the Christian religion is regarded. The first looks on it as something based on unreliable legends, and therefore negligible, except as myth expressive of picturesque fantasies. The second professes to hold its essentials but is ever ready to relegate component parts into the category of non-essentials, is eclectic; and the successive stages of its history are chracterized by rejections rather than by retentions. The third regards it as the one great fact in human history, to be retained intact and given dominant place in human life. Common names for these points of view are, the Agnostic, the Protestant, and the Catholic.

. . . One main purpose of the investigation here undertaken is to point that the three points of view are reducible to two. In practical consequences as well as in many presuppositions, Protestant view-points tend to become identical with Agnostic. There is truth in the broad generalization that there are two attitudes of mind in regard to religion, the Catholic and the non-Catholic, if this be modified by the recognition that many individual non-Catholics start with the Catholic point of view, and make many of its presuppositions, though not making full deductions from these. Hilaire Belloc has somewhere said, "We have in Europe today, among those who make mind, two moulds of intelligence, one a philolsophy, the other a mood. The first, the philosophy, is Catholic doctrine; the second, the mood, is Modern Thought, and covers all that is opposed to the faith." (pp 10-11)

He breaks Protestantism down into three parts, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism, and from a career spent in part as a professor of Church history, he has remarkable insights to offer on all three. What he says on Anglicanism bears directly, I think, on reasons for the failure of Anglicanorum coetibus, which I'll cover tmorrow, in one or possibly more posts.

Although he was appointed professor of Church history at Catholic University following his conversion, I don't know at this point if this was just some type of honorary position, or if he ever taught there. He was clearly of independent means and didn't need the money, while he spent most of his time after resigning as bishop in seclusion in Maine, so I simply don't know if he would have wished to commute to Washington to teach there.

As far as I'm aware, there was no course available to me as either an undergraduate or graduate student that would have covered Church history as Kinsman saw it. I do assume that any course he taught at CU would probably have been quite similar to the material in Reveries of a Hermit.