In 1851 Archbishop Cullen of Armagh wrote to John Henry Newman, since 1845 the most celebrated English convert to Catholicism, asking his advice on appointing staff to the proposed Catholic University of Ireland, adding that he hoped Newman “could spare time to give us a few lectures on education.” This was a natural request, Newman having been, in his Anglican days, a renowned (and not entirely popular) tutor at Oxford, who had agitated for reform of the system there, so as to make tutors more directly the moral guardians of their pupils. Cullen could hardly have foreseen how amply his invitation would be answered. The volume published in 1873 as The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated was a composite of the original lectures--delivered in 1852 and printed with some alterations and additions later that year—and Lectures and Essays on University Subjects (1858). There have been two major scholarly editions of The Idea in recent years, by Ian Ker (Oxford, 1976) and Martin J. Svaglic (Notre Dame, 1982); Ker has also given us, in his John Henry Newman: A biography (Oxford, 1988), the best account of Newman’s inner life we are ever likely to have. This Yale edition, acknowledging indebtedness to those predecessors, prints all the discourses from the last revision of the text Newman made, together with four of the Lectures and Essays. There are also an editorial preface, with questions for students, and five interpretive essays which display a mixture of admiration and bafflement as instructive, in its way, as the lectures themselves.

To appreciate the importance of The Idea we must recognize the limits as well as the scope of Newman’s undertaking. Oxford was his Platonic ideal of a university but he was not so naïve as to hope for a simple transplant. Moreover, Oxford was an Anglican institution, and Newman’s brief was to devise a Catholic one. This, in his view, entailed two things: the advocacy of a sovereign place for theology in the curriculum, and the inculcation, within that framework, of a spirit of intellectual liberalism—Oxford manner and Catholic matter, one might say.

Consciously faking the etymology, Newman began from the point that a university without theology is a self-contradiction because its scope is not universal: “such an Institution cannot be what it professes, if there be a God.” Theology is not merely one among many academic subjects, it is their fountainhead. Yet if it is above them, it is no less their equal as a discipline—an exercise of the reason, not a pious effusion of sentiment, and dealing in dogma, not opinion: “Religious doctrine is knowledge, in as full a sense as Newton’s doctrine is knowledge.” Each academic subject searches in its own way for truth, but truth in its highest sense is an organic whole: hence theology, which is both an individual subject and the center of coherence for all other subjects, is the most comprehensive route to truth, “not only a portion, but a condition, of general knowledge.” Newman does not deny the multifacetedness of the university curriculum, but seeks to prevent its collapse into undifferentiated pluralism. He would have been disappointed at the way things have turned out, for “the idea of a multiversity,” as George M. Marsden remarks in his essay, “seems a contradiction in terms,” particularly when we remember that Newman uses the word “idea” in a technical sense explained in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, published in the year of his conversion.  

The idea which represents an object or supposed object is commensurate with the sum total of its possible aspects, however they may vary in the separate consciousness of individuals; and in proportion to the variety of aspects under which it presents itself to various minds is its force and depth, and the argument for its reality.

The last six words mark the difference between this vision and an acceptance that knowledge is merely subjective or relative. Newman holds that theology completes and keeps in equilibrium all other branches of knowledge: conversely, without theology those branches will attempt to pass beyond their bounds, arrogating to themselves that power of stating ultimate ends and universal truths which belongs to theology alone. As Ian Ker notes, Newman’s image for the relationship between theology and other subjects is not a ladder but a circle; their synthesis depends on their symbiosis.

Thus, when we come to the fifth and most famous discourse, “Knowledge Its Own End,” we have to read it in light of this preceding train of thought. At first it seems free-standing, abounding in formulations and insights which have become classics of pedagogy: the advantage to the student that he “profits by an intellectual tradition which is independent of particular teachers”; the description of liberalism as “a habit of mind … of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom”; the insistence that “such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward”; the ardent evocation of such knowledge as “not a mere extrinsic or accidental advantage, which is ours today and another’s tomorrow, which may be got up from a book, and easily forgotten again” (so much for examinations!) but rather as “an acquired illumination … a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment.” The close is a hymn to the goal of a genuine education:

To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression …

Owen Chadwick, in his brilliant short study Newman (1983) —unaccountably omitted from the bibliography of this edition— pithily says of this discourse that “no one ever sang a lovelier song in praise of education for its own sake. And in the same moment no one ever denied so eloquently its natural crown.” For here Newman forces us to see the limitations of the argument that such knowledge is sufficient in itself; the cultivation of intellect, he warns, if “an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue,” is yet “absolutely distinct from it.” Here we need to notice a passage, again from the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, in which he characterizes theological liberalism with such force, mercilessness, and vigorous compactness of expression that we reel as if stunned by a physical blow. Liberals, he says, variously believe

that truth and falsehood in religion are but matter of opinion; that one doctrine is as good as another; that the Governor of the world does not intend that we should gain the truth; that there is no truth; that we are not more acceptable to God by believing this than by believing that; that no one is answerable for his opinions; that they are a matter of necessity or accident; that it is enough if we sincerely hold what we profess; that our merit lies in seeking, not in possessing; that it is a duty to follow what seems to be true, without a fear lest it should not be true; that it may be a gain to succeed, and can be no harm to fail; that we may take up and lay down opinions at pleasure; that belief belongs to the mere intellect, not to the heart also; that we may safely trust to ourselves in matters of Faith, and need no other guide.

That is Newman’s warning to the Church of England. It would give him no pleasure to know that he had prophetically composed its obituary.

Newman’s view of the function of liberal knowledge is then utterly unlike Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light”—Arnold whose serene confidence in himself as a theological thinker, displayed in books whose pitiful inadequacy makes them an embarrassment, enabled him to dismiss Newman’s view of the world as “impossible”! For liberal knowledge confers “the power of viewing many things at once as one whole”; its nature is organic. Mere accumulation of information is not real knowledge; the educated mind analyzes and synthesizes its materials rather than passively receiving them; philosophy is a higher intellectual activity than pragmatism. Frank M. Turner aptly remarks that Newman believes in the “transcendent uselessness” of the university—a position now beyond the comprehension of most people but one for which Newman feels no need to apologize, taking for granted the error of utilitarianism and retorting unanswerably that “what has its end in itself, has its use in itself also.” Not that he advocated dilettantism; he insists that a truly educated individual is also, because of his breadth of experience and flexibility, potentially an invaluable member of society.

Education is seen by Newman, as by many other Victorian social critics, as a means of enlightenment and moral improvement for the masses; but the inadequacy of philanthropy per se is suggested by the well-known description of the “gentleman,” which closes the eighth discourse. This is too often quoted out of its context, which makes plain that Newman finds the gentlemanly ethic fundamentally flawed; as Ian Ker puts it in his biography, Newman distinguishes not between “intellectual culture and religion” but between “the religion of intellectual culture and religion itself.” Liberal knowledge, he concludes, must be conditioned and directed by the Church; without this safeguard the search for truth will become mere secular enlightenment, and the search for the beauty of holiness mere aestheticism. Science and literature, although not inimical to the Catholic faith, are no substitutes for it (which puts into perspective Darwin on the one hand and Arnold on the other); science has no business with morality, literature no business with perfection.

Some of these thoughts are taken up in two of the later lectures. In “English Catholic Literature” Newman concedes the ineradicable Protestant character of English letters. It must be admitted that his literary-critical powers are not strong, and, strangely, he does not seem to have considered the possibility that Shakespeare himself might have been a Catholic; nor does Sara Castro-Klarén, who wonders in her essay how a Catholic student can read “the greatest writer of the English Protestant tradition.” However that may be, the Chair of English Literature at the Catholic University was established as early as 1856, well ahead of Oxford and Cambridge (its first occupant, ironically, was Thomas Arnold, Jr., a recent convert to Catholicism). In “Christianity and Physical Science” Newman develops a particularly subtle account of the compatibility of scientific discoveries with the principle of revelation. Physics has nothing to say about final causes, while the deductions from the doctrines of the early Church are not additions because they are, at however many removes, implicit in the premises. He would have been fascinated by the current theory that time did not exist before the Big Bang—a suggestion essentially anticipated by St. Augustine in Book XI of the Confessions, written in around A.D. 400.

The Idea of a University is not, then, just a classic in the history of educational thought; it is as much a theological work as any Newman wrote. This point is taken by the Yale commentators with varying degrees of clarity. Indeed, their anxiety and perplexity about his assumptions verge sometimes on the comic. Martha McMackin Garland is happier once she has established him, after his conversion, as “a member of a discriminated-against minority.” She is impatient of his rejection of utilitarianism, which she calls “a peculiar inversion of common sense”; she cannot understand why he showed so little interest in research (which has practical consequences—such as tenure). Frank M. Turner, as hinted above, is more open to Newman’s reasoning, noting wryly that this one man performed for the Catholic University the functions which would now be put into the hands of a team of public-relations consultants and appeals directors—with what results we can guess only too well. “His concepts and ideals,” Turner ruefully adds, “stand like Banquo’s ghost at the feast of the modern university community.” In that community the humanities are often dominated by a phalanx of theorists who hate and fear human personality, and have no belief in beliefs. George M. Marsden quotes from The Chronicle of Higher Education an academic historian’s statement that “the notion that scholars’ personal beliefs are compatible with their academic interests is ‘loony.’” Theology will not stand much chance against that attitude. Yet George P. Landow’s essay reminds us that Newman’s ideals have a more implacable enemy, and one whose advance seems unstoppable—the electronic university, that parody of Newman’s “intellectual tradition independent of particular teachers,” which abolishes collegiality and positions each scholar in monastic isolation before a computer screen, interfacing with hundreds of faceless fellow keyboarders. No glib reaction to this development is possible. One remembers Isaac Asimov’s prophetic story “The Fun They Had” in which a brother and sister, tired of being educated at home by computer, discover one of the few remaining textbooks and contemplate it with awe and wonder.

Like many another theorist, Newman found the realization of his ideals taxing. He became Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1851 and held office for seven turbulent years. The university did not formally open until 1854. Newman divided his time between Dublin and Birmingham, where he was Superior of the Oratory. Cullen, who had originally enlisted his support, became Archbishop of Dublin and his enemy, maligning him to the Roman authorities as so many among the hierarchy, suspicious (and jealous?) of his credentials, were to do. Student numbers and quality of teaching staff at the University fluctuated; there were political as well as religious pressure groups to propitiate; the existence of the rival, and more prestigious, Trinity College was a constant threat; there were financial difficulties. Yet Newman established the University and made it work. When he resigned the rectorship he still had thirty-two years to live; he had yet to write the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) and The Grammar of Assent (1870), both, on any showing, more important works than The Idea. Nonetheless he included that book, along with The Grammar (but not the Apologia) in 1869 among the five “constructive” works he had written.

It is only the complete lack of interest in theology, which is one of the most depressing characteristics of our time, that has prevented Newman’s being recognized as one of the greatest minds the nineteenth century produced. Almost certainly he would fail to be appointed even to a junior faculty post in a modern university.

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