Introduction
[In the following introduction to The Idea of a University, Shuster explores Newman's thoughts on the intersection of religion and liberal education, and highlights the continuing importance of Newman's text.]
On the twelfth of November, 1851, John Henry Newman, then a priest of the Birmingham Oratory, became Rector of the newly created Catholic University of Ireland. Seven years later, to the very day, he resigned from the post. The story of what he accomplished during his tenure of office hardly constitutes a notable page in the history of university administration. No new Harvard, Louvain, or Göttingen was established in Dublin. It may even be somewhat ironical that the greatest practical achievements of this unusual Rector, who was concerned above all with the relationships between theology and what he called “liberal education,” were the development of a School of Medicine, which for the first time gave young Irish Catholics ample opportunity to become masters of the art of healing, and the establishment of a pioneer chair for Celtic studies.
If, however, Newman had not shouldered this heavy responsibility, the Idea of a University would in all probability never have been written; and so we should have been deprived of precious and profound insights into what was central in his life and thought—the interpenetration of religion and the university. No doubt the book has done more than any other to stimulate reflection on the character and aims of higher education. It is not a treatise but a series of very carefully reasoned theses about one of the oldest and most necessary of human arts. One may liken it to a folio of X-ray pictures of the awakening intelligence, with interpretive commentaries. These are nevertheless held together in a quite remarkable unity by the force of Newman's mind. Walter Pater in his time thought the Idea of a University “the perfect handling of a theory”; and men and women of every subsequent generation have echoed this judgment. Yet it is by no means mere schoolman's fare. Newman was committed with all his heart to the quest of sanctity and with this none of his other writings is more zealously concerned. He was likewise a Catholic as loyal and ardent as any Breton peasant. Therefore this book is one of three or four in Christian literature which most successfully discuss dedication to holiness within the framework of culture.
When Newman accepted the call to Ireland he acted in the missionary spirit which long before had moved the great Irish and Scottish monks of the early Middle Ages to serve the Court of Charlemagne. True enough, he seems to have slipped into the rectorship without foreseeing the quite insurmountable difficulties he was destined to encounter. For the “idea” of a Catholic University he had, however, been prepared by many years of experience at Oxford. There he had concerned himself with the “reform” of an illustrious seat of learning to such an extent that it became, as Professor A. Dwight Culler has recently shown, the central business of his life. The major question under debate there was the interdependence of religion and education. This could not be for Newman merely conventional or formal. On the one hand, faith could not exist fruitfully apart from the cultivated reason. The life of the mind, on the other hand, would become progressively more shallow unless it was rooted in the soil of Christian truth.
What, then, was the Catholic University of Ireland? By the middle of the nineteenth century Irish Catholics were at long last able to give effective voice to their diverse discontents. Famine had led to the exodus of youth on a scale hitherto unimagined, thus demonstrating the inadequacy of the traditional agrarian economy. The demand for home rule, for the individuality of the Gaelic tongue, and indeed for complete independence could no longer be suppressed. At the moment, however, it was the right to educational opportunity which was most strongly underscored. A young Catholic could not proceed from Trinity College to the university without having made, however perfunctorily, a profession of the Anglican faith. The British Government endeavored to meet the demand by offering to establish the Queen's Colleges after the fashion of Continental institutions operated by the state independently of religious affiliations. Some of the Catholic bishops of Ireland favored this plan. Others did not and succeeded in obtaining from Pope Pius IX declarations of opposition to the Queen's Colleges which virtually precluded Catholic participation.
There remained the possibility of bringing into being an avowedly Catholic University. To this Dr. Paul Cullen, later on Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, gave his vigorous support. Him Newman had come to know in Rome and rightly considered a friend, so that a request to join a committee which was to discuss plans for such a university could not be refused. This body moved on towards its goal at a speed less than that of eagles, but by November, 1851, it unanimously agreed that Newman was to be invited to become “the first president” of a university to be patterned after Louvain, the seat of Catholic higher learning in Belgium. Of course no one was sanguine enough to suppose that the new university would come into being suddenly, with a shining array of lecture halls and laboratories thronged by thousands of students eager to listen to a great array of distinguished professors. All there really was to start with was a series of “discourses” which the new president was supposed to have prepared during the preceding summer.
The task was completed under harrowing difficulties. During 1850 Newman had delivered the series of addresses subsequently published as Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. The fifth of these was a superlatively sardonic oratorical scourging of Giacinto Achilli, an unfrocked Dominican friar who had been sentenced to prison by the Roman Inquisition for preaching against the Church and then been released at the request of the British Government. When Achilli arrived in England to lecture, he profited on the one hand by Lord Palmerston's pride in the diplomatic achievement and on the other by the ovations tendered by advocates of No Popery. But, as Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman had pointed out in the Dublin Review, Achilli was in reality a lecherous Don Juan on a minor scale, for whose scalp a startling number of deluded women were clamoring. The evidence they supplied turned into whips and scorpions at Newman's bidding. But Achilli sued for libel; and for months the trial dragged on under the direction of a judge in whose eyes a ton of lewd behavior did not equal an ounce of Inquisition. In the end Newman was not subjected to a prison sentence, as had been feared, but was ordered to pay a fine and bear the costs of the trial. The considerable sum required was raised by Catholics throughout the world. Their generosity is commemorated for all time to come in the stirring dedication with which the Idea of a University begins.
This action was for Newman proof of Catholic solidarity. Peter, through the person of Pope Pius, “had spoken” in favor of the university, and now there was conjured up also the possibility that Catholic students from all English-speaking lands would come to Dublin for their education. But, alas, a chill was on the Irish air. Many in all groups of the population, from the bishops to the patriotic laymen who had rallied to the support of the Young Ireland movement, favored the Queen's College idea. If Ireland was to grow into a nation, must not its young people be educated together? Others did not believe the country could give Newman's university the students it needed, for the “gentlemen” would go elsewhere and the peasants nowhere. More formidable, however, were the crosscurrents at work among the powerful friends of the new institution.
Dr. Cullen had been Rector of the Irish Seminary in Rome. He was a learned and holy man who found it quite impossible to believe that intellects could be fostered and souls saved simultaneously in establishments different from seminaries. Newman's theory of education was bound as time went on to seem to him worldly and tinged with laicism. How should such a prelate have come to believe that out of England an idea would emerge superior to any discussed in the Roman colleges? Or to realize that in the years ahead the Universal Church would ponder the writings of an Oratorian who was a convert from Anglicanism almost as often and fondly as she would the works of the Angelic Doctor himself? Gradually a gulf opened wide between the Cardinal of Dublin and the spirit of Oxford. Quite different in character was the critical aloofness of John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam. Though he was a foe of Fenianism and kindred chauvinistic activities, it was impossible for this prelate to conceive that England could conjoin with Ireland even in the making of an academic institution. Newman had accepted the post in the conviction that, despite the unhappy past, the two countries could unite in the service of Catholic groves of academe. The archbishop was too aware of the rebellion in his blood against Elizabeth, Cromwell, and their successors to be able to serve such a dream with even half a heart.
In retrospect it is almost impossible to speak without a trace of sentimentalism of the mansion at 86 St. Stephen's Green, to which Newman welcomed on November 3, 1854, a group of twenty lads, all of whom doubtless wondered what would befall them. They slept on the top floors, took their meals in the cellar, and went to classes in the intervening spaces. During the four years which followed, the university spilled over these narrow boundaries, and Newman even acquired what he most ardently desired, a university chapel. What memories of St. Mary's, Oxford, where he had held a generation breathless while he urged the service of his Lord and Master, must have come to his mind! With his associates he taught elementary courses and as many beyond them as circumstances permitted. Like a modern American university president, he went about drumming up such financial support as could be obtained in a country never a step removed from poverty. And all the while there hovered over his writing table the towers and spires of the university he so much hoped would come to be, more radiant even than Oxford, in which all the saints of Ireland and England would have not only their niches but their hours of living commemoration. And if in the end he gave up the task, having in the Irish historian Stockely's opinion accomplished a number of good things, he proved himself, despite the native sensitiveness of his character, a truly great man. He said that the task had been given up because he had been away from Birmingham for seven years and the Oratory needed him. With these words he drew a veil over his bitter disappointment and the years of harrowing toil.
The nine lectures which form the core of the Idea of a University were first published in 1853 in a volume entitled Discourses on University Education and attracted considerable attention. Five years later a second volume appeared, entitled Lectures and Essays on University Subjects. Meanwhile Newman contemplated a revision of the Discourses which would strike out all references to the Catholic University and most of the treatment of theology, so that the resulting book would be a sort of manual about education proper. But when in 1873 he published the edition which is before us and which he considered definitive, he retained the original nine discourses, after having revised and refined them. The Lectures and Essays now became Part II of the volume. It is of some interest to note that in the final revision of the Dedication, he placed Great Britain before Ireland, thus reversing the original order. His other writings on educational subjects appear as Volume III of Historical Sketches.
As has been indicated, the unity which binds the various parts of the Idea of a University together is the force of Newman's mind. The basic question was, how can religious asceticism and intellectual discipline conjoin in the creation of a valid culture? The human situation as he saw it was this: the tide of scientific knowledge, for the ushering in of which Sir Francis Bacon had served as a prodigious moon, had brought to man a sense of power which made Divine Providence seem remote and even, in some strange way, incomprehensible. Religion was something one “felt” rather than knew. On the other hand, seeing this development or rather, perhaps, having an almost unconscious awareness of it, faithful Christians tended to retreat from the struggle with the spirit of the age. Inside the Church there was salvation, and so it was better to remain just there—to submit loyally perhaps even without understanding of what the act of submission involved, clinging to the Communion of Saints as an augury of the life to come rather than as a marshaling of hosts for the conquest of the here and now.
It was Newman's genius which gave him a complete, often agonizing insight into the strength of both positions. He foresaw, with remarkable prophetic realism, what the climate of culture would some time be—the climate to which Erich Heller has since given the label of “Disinherited Mind,” in which the springs of man's spirit would go dry, so that the soil which nurtured him would produce, as it were, no fruit or flower but only weird, often exhilarating chemical concentrates of literature and art. We may note that his preview of these things, the anxious, awesome awareness for which the Germans use the wonderfully descriptive word Ahnung, supplements the prophetic insights of the great Russian Christians, Dostoevski and Tolstoi, who wrote out of other moods and with dissimilar gifts. For the author of The Brothers Karamazov man's adoration of himself, taking the place of his worship of God, would spawn a race of demons whose pride would fully reveal the potential cruelty of the intelligence. And it was the vision of the barbarian turned engineer which in the end drove a frightened old Tolstoi into monastic seclusion. For Newman, on the other hand, the specter was that of the truncated inner life of the educated, product of the disuse of all the nobler muscles of the mind, unable any longer to give the masses an example suggesting something better than “the holyday of resourceless ignorance.”
These are warnings like those of Jeremiah and Amos, or indeed in a measure akin to that given by Christ Himself weeping at the sight of Jerusalem's towers. It was in 1927 that Bertrand Russell, writing also On Education, would say, “The Church led men to think that nothing mattered save virtue, and virtue consists in abstinence from a certain list of actions arbitrarily labeled sin.” And thirty years later, speaking a few words of gratitude for the Nobel Prize, the great French writer, Albert Camus, would rally artists for “an art of living in times of catastrophe, in order to be reborn before fighting openly against the death-instinct at work in our history.” We have indeed seen a panorama of the war against virtue which justifies with implacable thoroughness Newman's words in the Apologia pro vita sua: “… all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.” Camus speaks, as has been noted, of a “death-instinct at work in our history,” and Georges Bernanos wrote of the “secret hatred” which man has in his heart for himself and others, remediable only through the divinely ordained affection for his own person and for his neighbor.
We of this generation therefore approach the reading of the Idea of a University in a mood quite different from that which prevailed in Dublin a century ago. We have seen what was then foreseen. We cannot forget the insane holocausts of the First World War, the gas ovens of Theresienstadt, the murder of Polish officers in Katyn Forest, the trial of a Cardinal, the suppression of Hungarian freedom, the millions upon millions who have pushed out of their homes into strange lands. To us Newman speaks from a more tranquil, in some ways a holier, vantage point in history. He can still talk deftly and ironically of the “gentleman.” A whole essay is concerned with schoolboys learning to read Greek authors instead of exploring their complexes. And we must also note that the style of his discourses is in the tradition of Cicero, the great Roman. It sometimes moves along with lusty strides of eloquence, taking in whole landscapes at a glance; and then again it can walk with leisurely ease as if through a garden, pausing to dissect a flower or a weed of thought with the patience of a botanist. Here is the great prose of the English eighteenth century, colored sometimes with rhythms native to writers of the time before Dryden, and still also fired upon occasion by the Romantic passion of the days which Coleridge ushered in. Yet what in the final analysis makes his writing keep its effectiveness is its skill as the medium of almost forensic debate. In it there can be found the wit fired by the great logicians of Oxford.
The book opens with a sonorous prelude in which three things are made plain. Who am I, John Henry Newman your orator, and why do I assume that there is power in me to discuss the problems of university education? For what reasons do we believe that a resolution of such problems in the spirit of the Church can be effected? Does it make any sense to attempt to work out the solution in Ireland, with the help of one haling from a country identified with oppression and conquest? The answers are given with candor, though to be sure they are likewise designed to win over an audience in some need of persuasion. The new university was in all truth a daring venture, and it was necessary to make as many as possible feel that they could share in it with confidence. Newman therefore carefully explained that the lectures were not simply made to order for the occasion but presented ideas he had worked out during many years of reflection and discussion. They were, in short, the distillation of his whole life at Oxford which, though spent in a non-Catholic environment, was rich and significant for the Church also. No different use would be made of them now than had customarily been made during ages past. In the early Christian period the “gravest Fathers recommended for Christian youth the use of pagan masters.” It was through using the best secular knowledge it could find that the Church had created a noble culture. And, finally, England and Ireland had been associated, in the persons of illustrious monks and teachers, in the hallowed effort to preserve and disseminate such a culture at a time when Europe was slowly recovering from the effects of the fall of Rome, and when the two islands lived side by side in peace under the aegis of the Papacy.
How far it now seems from the scene of that address, which Newman fondly hoped would be the first page in a bright new educational story! The room provided was, he reported, “very small,” and therefore to his liking since (in an era without microphones) he could not have been understood in a large hall. But more than three hundred were actually in the audience, including “a great many clergy” among whom were “eight Jesuits.” He added: “There were a number of ladies, and I fancied a slight sensation in the room when I said, not Ladies and Gentlemen, but Gentlemen.”1 On the whole the lecture was favorably received and commented upon. Some thought, to be sure, that it was rather abstract, or that it was concerned with an inordinate number of topics. The text we have is not that of the first edition, which appeared in pamphlet form. Newman took careful note of the criticisms, as was his custom, but in general his mood was one of satisfaction, if not elation. Though the Irish may not have been won over, they seemed at least persuaded that their guest was not some new Cromwell in disguise.
The subsequent eight discourses constitute the first part of the Idea of a University as we know it, the second part consisting of glosses on them. They may be said to present and defend four major theses, though minor points are scored in plenty. Newman held that a university could not profess to be the exponent of universal knowledge unless it had a Faculty of Theology; that the purpose of “liberal education,” the primary business of the university, is neither to inculcate virtue nor to prepare for a vocation, but rather to train the mind; that the values served by such mental training are not absolute but are none the less good in themselves; and that the inculcation of a philosophical temper is of great service to society. Since they were presented there has been so much discussion of them that they may seem less novel than they did in the 1850s, but the dynamite which is latent in them has by no means lost its explosive power. Indeed, they are so admirably devoid of platitudes that the untutored in such matters are still astonished by the discovery of what their author really has to say.
Newman's argument for the inclusion of theology in the university course of study is subtle and many-sided. He did not contend that a thorough knowledge of dogmatic teaching will make men good, as no doubt Cardinal Cullen and many others since his time may have wished he had. To his mind only a faithful, loving, but austere practice of the religious life will slowly accustom men to virtue, and above all supplement natural motivation, through grace, with a desire for what is transcendent. One needs to remember that Newman was thoroughly schooled in asceticism before one reads such words as these: “Knowledge is one thing, virtue another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith.” Observe the range of the moral commitments stressed—virtue, conscience, humility, faith. No one ever knew more completely how desperately needed these are. In a passage charged with emotion, Newman declares: “Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.”
The contention is rather that reality can be grasped only if it is understood, through whatever glass darkly, as a whole. Modern man is tempted to exclude consideration of the truths of religion because these are not arrived at through the process of induction by which he sets such great store. Many in Germany had concluded that faith, for which they still professed to have profound respect, was after all “feeling”—that is, a matter of sentiment to be associated with music and poetry. Newman tersely and vigorously combated this view as being designed to narrow the horizon of man. Theology, to be sure, uses the method of deduction. It is a science which lays bare the impact of Revelation on human destiny by drawing every useful inference from doctrine once made known. It lies completely outside the realm of the natural sciences but cannot therefore be treated as nonexistent. If it is so to be treated, no other academic discipline will fail to be threatened. “You will break up into fragments the whole circle of secular knowledge,” Newman says, “if you begin the mutilation with the divine.” Therefore the Catholic University must have an energetic School of Divinity.
But this school must remain active in the area appointed unto it. Accordingly the second of his theses, which outlines and advocates a theory of liberal education, is of central importance in his discussion and gives his book most of its originality and pertinence. Through this kind of education, he pleads, a “habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.” One can, perhaps, best come to understand the formation of such a “habit” if one considers educational methods which, though popular, produce quite different results. There are those who believe in a “profusion of subjects,” selected in order to make learning attractive and easy. By reading a little of this or that one may, it is argued, in the end come to achieve a dazzling success on a quiz program, but still be as devoid of “moderation and wisdom” as any common victims of urbanism, who have no protection from evil. “Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, … but it is not education,” says Newman. Nor is the objective in the first instance the inculcation of information designed to prepare a man for useful service in the world. One who has learned how “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze … will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician … but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings … with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success.”
Finally liberal education is not an enterprise which prepares a person to have “views” about everything under the sun. We of today would here use the word “opinions.” It is true that as human beings we are generally tempted to have some sort of “view” even at the risk of putting up with an illusion “when we cannot find a truth.” Thus there are always many thousands who, without ever having shared in any effort at diplomatic negotiation, are certain that the nation would be quite safe if they were Secretary of State. The assumption that by inducing students to discuss matters of current civic moment one is preparing them to hold sound “views” about the tariff or military preparedness is a pleasant but unfortunately also possibly a fatal illusion. One of Newman's illustrations is of special interest because it permits one to look deep into the stream of his thought. The Gothic, he surmised, is a noble form of art, but from this fact one cannot draw the conclusion that it could be the most satisfying contemporary medium. “An obsolete discipline,” he wrote bluntly, “may be a present heresy.” Here one can note a very characteristic unwillingness to get caught by a dictum or tied to something which, while having no right to be a dogma, still purports to be one.
It must be admitted that when one tries to determine precisely what a “liberal education” is, as Newman conceived of it, a number of grave difficulties present themselves. He says that “the intellect must have an excellence of its own, for there was nothing which had not its specific good,” and he held that this good was “the discovery and contemplation of truth,” in the sense that mankind has traditionally used these words. Then, in a passage of sovereign importance, he goes on to say:
That only is true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence.
That perfection of the intellect, which is the result of education, and its beau ideal, to be imparted to individuals in their respective measures, is the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it.
This is unquestionably difficult doctrine, and many have said that they did not see how it could be realized in practice. One can only comment that Newman had a more profound insight into human nature than do many of his critics.
His “liberal education” relies upon three things in the main—contagion, method, and the natural creative drift of the mind. First there is contagion. He said boldly of the students he had in mind: “though they cannot pursue every subject which is open to them, they will be the gainers by living among those and under those who represent the whole circle.” This truth is no doubt better demonstrated on some European university campuses than it is on our own. An earnest young person is not likely to forget that on Wednesdays and Fridays theologians and philosophers were lecturing to whom a good part of the world listened. One has only to think of the Parisian professor Alain and Simone Weil, his student. About method I shall have something more to say later on. For the moment it will suffice to note that Newman clung firmly to what the French call explication des textes, as the fourth chapter of Part II, entitled “Elementary Studies” clearly indicates. In addition there was a special form of contagion, namely, that provided by the students themselves. If in what he says about this nostalgia for Oxford is plainly revealed, the argument nevertheless rests on its own merits. Finally, a word must be said about “creative drift.” Newman, speaking of the discipline of the mind, makes this point very clearly: “The enlargement consists, not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas, which are rushing upon it.”
But were the human creature to forget that the proper end of education is only one end, and that there remains in the foreground always the opportunity and the obligation to know, love, and serve Him Who is our Master and Beloved, he would find a rather stern taskmaster in the author of the Idea of a University. One need only adduce as testimony the famous description of the Gentleman, often quoted and almost as frequently misunderstood. This Gentleman has splendid natural traits. Inflicting pain is for him the most painful of undertakings—a natural virtue that our time, in particular, which has brought agony to countless millions, ought above all others to appreciate. And yet must it not be said that this Gentleman's inner hollowness, being “without God in the world,” has sired the monstrous evils we have witnessed? He was one who wished to remand “religious knowledge to the parish priest, the catechism and the parlour.” He deplored not merely the commitments of religion but any commitment whatsoever. There could be no morals because human beings have conceived differently of morality round the globe. Perhaps it was the very essence of his nature not to burn with what Walter Pater called a “hard, gem-like flame,” and so to end up with nothing in his ethical bank account save a mortgage on his own futility.
Nevertheless (and therewith we are to consider Newman's fourth thesis), teaching the citizen to acquire a philosophical temper is to render a great service to society. On this topic nothing is needed save to quote his own words, as memorable and revealing as any in the history of the language:
… we see at once a momentous benefit which the philosopher is likely to confer on the pastors of the Church. It is obvious that the first step which they have to effect in the conversion of man and the renovation of his nature is his rescue from that fearful subjection to sense which is his ordinary state. To be able to break through the meshes of that thraldom and to disengage its ten thousand holds upon the heart, is to bring it, I might almost say halfway to Heaven. … But that foe knows too well that such seasons of repentance are wont to have their end: he patiently waits, till nature faints with the effort of resistance, and lies passive and hopeless under the next access of temptation. What we need then is some expedient or instrument, which will at least obstruct and stave off the approach of our spiritual enemy and which is sufficiently congenial and level with our nature to maintain as firm a hold upon us as the inducements of sensual gratification. It will be our wisdom to employ nature against itself. … You will perhaps say in the words of the Apostle, “knowledge puffeth up”: and doubtless this mental cultivation, even when it is successful for the purpose for which I am applying it, may from the first be nothing more than the substitution of pride for sensuality.
Thus speaks an ardent priest and director of souls, strangely associated in these words once more with the great Russians to whom we have referred.
Let me add a brief comment on Newman's educational method. The burning practical question always is, what shall the content, the course of study, of a liberal education be? He is refreshingly free of references to the trivium and quadrivium, which are behind us and seem generally to be adduced only when a contemporary commentator, appalled by the messy state of educational affairs, reaches for a life-plank. To be sure, Oxford in Newman's day retained some of its medieval legacy, but in essence its outlook was humanistic as that of the Jesuits had also been, though with a difference. The basic concerns were literature and science, both fused by the philosophic temper. Newman's educated person was to have awareness of all three. What he himself says about literature in the second part of his book remains as admirable as it was at the time he wrote. It is “man's history.” Not until the whole human race is fashioned anew will the story in this sense be pure and true. He differs from the great Jesuits in his unwillingness to believe that Catholics can turn literature into effective apologetic in one mighty swoop. Like François Mauriac, of a later time, he would purify the source and meanwhile take advantage of the free market of ideas. It may be said in criticism that he made English literature out to be more Protestant than it actually is. For example, like the indefatigable anthologist Alexander Chalmers, he seems not to have known that Crashaw existed.
As for science, he foresaw with extraordinary keenness what the future would bring. There could be “no real collision with Catholicism.” But the scientist might well be so enamored of his methodology that, looking for the truths of Revelation at the other end of the microscope, he would become blind to the fact that the ways of the soul are not that of the laboratory—that the experience of mystical contemplation, or indeed of reverential acceptance of the Divine Will, is one of finding oneself “alone with the Alone.” It was for this reason, Newman surmised, that the scientist could be tempted to become, like Julian the Apostate, “the mere philosopher.” His ilk might thus persuade themselves: “When they do wrong, they feel not contrition, of which God is the object, but remorse and a sense of degradation.” In short, they would turn round the axis of the human self and not round the Divine Center of the Universe.
In the final analysis, we judge a book by its meaning for ourselves and the time in which we live. Let us limit the time and the place. What does the Idea of a University say to us of the United States in an age of guided missiles and atomic energy? Perhaps the easiest way to answer is to compare Newman's doctrine with what until relatively recently passed muster with us as wisdom on the subject. Did this not tend to place in the foreground views about and conceptions of education to which Newman objected with all the vigor he could command—concern with a smattering of subjects, temporarily highlighted by what was unsystematically termed the elective system; a pandering to “useful knowledge,” outlined in a bewildering variety of vocational goals; and a widespread lack of interest in the training of the mind as well as in the development of the “philosophic temper”? It is at all events incontrovertible that a pedagogical doctrine was widely supported which held that “how to teach” was more valuable than one which held that “what to teach” remained the principal consideration. Moreover, it became the enforced practice of public schools, colleges, and universities, as a result not of any reasoned commitment by educators but rather of a manifest, often combative desire on the part of religious leaders to maintain a truce between themselves, to remove every vestige of theology from the curriculum. Other strictures may be advanced.
There can be little doubt that the practice of teaching literature through the explication des textes gave way generally to wide, conglomerate, and desultory reading, or that for many young Americans the study of science became a series of adventures in amateur technology, ranging from the sprouting of seeds in waterless sand to the operation of “ham” radio reception sets. No doubt these practices had quite interesting utilitarian results. Yet it is instructive to observe that after the Russians had sent into outer space the interesting device they dubbed Sputnik, our major complaint seemed to be that there was a shortage of “sprouters” and “operators,” or at least that these addicts insisted on working an eight-hour day.
But if one probes somewhat more deeply, there would seem to be less difference between sound theory and our practice than is customarily assumed. Perhaps nothing about Newman's educational doctrine is more impressive or novel than the extent to which student participation is coveted. He felt that the intellectual tugs of war which gave young people opportunities to pit their wits one against another, to question asserted facts, and to spin out conflicting hypotheses, constituted at least half of the challenge held out to them by education to achieve a measure of maturity. In Dublin the care he expended on a relative handful of young people enrolled in the university was akin to what would have been their lot in an affectionate family. If one isolates what has been said on this subject in the United States by a long line of educators extending from Horace Mann to John Dewey, and if one resolutely removes from consideration philosophical and religious views which Dewey in particular sponsored during the final period of his life, one sees that the cardinal tenet is to create as one basic pattern of American life the school and college “family”—that intimate association of students one with another and with their teachers which characterizes our educational procedure and enriches our campuses with genuine companionship. This at least Newman would have approved in us.
Our weakness of course grows out of the inchoate and to a considerable extent anti-intellectual character of the underlying study plan. It is this which has been under probing and often acrimonious discussion. The outlines of the debate can be readily seen if one compares the Report of the President's Commission on Higher Education, published in 1947, and General Education in a Free Society, prepared by a committee of the Faculty of Harvard University and issued in 1945. The first, one may say frankly, is almost a compendium of educational doctrines which Newman would have held in abhorrence. It advocates not “liberal” but “general” education, by which is meant a process of introducing students to “generalizations” about knowledge and human behavior which they will presumably find in some sense “useful” in their lives. These “generalizations” are to have “content that is directly relevant to the demands of contemporary society.” What Newman would have asked is, what are these demands and what is to be said of their import and value? Concerning such questions, the President's Commission seems to have reflected with what may be termed a “wholesome attitude” but without much equally wholesome, more realistic thought. The attitude was one of desire to develop a sound social ethic. Confronting a world which had spawned the most vicious war in man's history by reason of a commitment to a still more vicious Totalitarianism, the authors wished to use American education as a great force to prevent the recurrence of such disasters. What they appear to have forgotten was that the final educational result might have been the creation of the right attitude and little else that was tangible. Certainly, in so far as the underlying philosophy is concerned, that has been the result. The country is full of people who have “attitudes” even as in Newman's time their counterparts had “views.” But what else they have is by no means apparent.
General Education in a Free Society is a statement of antithetical doctrine. The primary question it considers is, what ought man to be and how can education proceed to rear such a man? That such a query had to be put at all is due to that disintegration of the “liberal” intelligence which Newman had so clearly foreseen. For this all things had grown relative save only that a person who held that something is “absolute” was necessarily wrong. One culture decrees that cows are sacred, while another avers that they are delicious when slain and eaten; and therefore there can be nothing which is sacred. These and sundry comparable obiter dicta of the “liberal” culture were challenged by the Harvard Faculty. The whole of human experience, as recorded in the intellectual history of the race, indicates, they said, that “Man … has his norm.” This they did not attempt to formulate in any clear way, nor did they express even a nostalgic desire for theology. But it followed that since there is a “norm,” the proper concern of education is to find out about it. No longer could the teacher agree that the student's self-generated “attitudes,” however relevant to contemporary society, properly determine what the university and its branches were to offer. What is good in the elective system was to be conserved, but the faculty would determine what the menu would provide.
Since that time higher education in the United States has absorbed more and more of the spirit of the Harvard Report, which incidentally did not recommend an “aristocratic” training, presumably for the benefit of gentlemen studying in Boston, but held that all citizens should be educated “by exactly the same ideals of schooling as everyone else, yet by means which shall be as meaningful to them as are more abstract means to the more abstract-minded.” Three decades ago such a discussion “of necessities in modern American education” as President Gordon Keith Chalmers' The Republic and the Person would have been dismissed as a fairly sinister exposition of educational views based on the “Humanism” once propounded by Irving Babbitt. But it has been welcomed during recent years as a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay on the relationships between education and what Newman termed “literature and science.” Indeed, its principal purpose was to advocate the “philosophic temper.”
Catholic higher education also has begun to drink more of the wine of the Idea of a University. To be sure, not a few institutions conducted under the auspices of Religious Orders continue to be little more than aggregations of machine shops and schools of commerce into which a drop or two of religious teaching is sometimes able to intrude. But at such universities as Notre Dame, Loyola, and Marquette (to name just a few) earnest and promising efforts are being made to foster liberal education. It may well be regrettable that none of these has a Faculty of Theology. In due time, however, it may come to be just as commonplace to associate the training of theologians with such centers of study as it now is to confine that training to seminaries. A ferment is at work in this realm which mounting concern with the development of scholarship will assuredly intensify. It has taken many Catholic educators a long time to realize with Newman that “Knowledge is one thing, virtue another.” They have staked far too much on the claim that their colleges and universities are safeguards of the faith and inculcators of virtue. Not infrequently it has been sadly obvious that their graduates bitterly and wrongly attributed a mediocre educational experience to the assumed mediocrity of religion as such. Always taking a stand against has also sometimes failed to make intelligible what a stand for would mean. The truth is gradually taking hold that a Catholic University is good only when it also is a good university.
Enough has been said to reveal the continuing significance of the Idea of a University. Perhaps one should attempt to sketch in conclusion certain ways in which the intellectual interests and concerns of the present time depart from the path so carefully and skillfully traced by the first president of the Catholic University of Ireland. These are, I think, not in any real sense theological in character (though some theologians might hold a different view), but are the products rather of different philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic experiences. Let us take the last first. For Newman music and art were peripheral. Despite his love for the violin, the musician's skill seemed to him a delightful pastime, except when employed to beautify Divine service; and there is nothing to indicate that his response to great art was in any sense an evocation of solidarity with it. Today, however, one cannot easily imagine a liberal education which would not be as deeply concerned with aesthetic values in the training of the mind as with any others. Almost all well-educated young people of the present time could not conceive of themselves as being so had they not made the journey from Michelangelo to Picasso, or from Brahms back to Bach and his precursors. This journey would not seem to us of the present to have been taken in the realm of “feeling,” as Newman would have said, but rather in the land of a discipline as rigorous as any.
It may at first sight seem strange to say that as philosophers we are more conscious of, and also more appreciative of, Newman's importance as a critic than as an exponent of a position. But were this not so it would be even more extraordinary. He lived at a time when the ground was shifting—when he could tell with uncanny prescience where the human mind would be once the quake had ceased. Two of his most influential books—the Grammar of Assent and the Development of Christian Doctrine—were both dubbed by him “Essays.” They are quite unparalleled efforts, at least in the English-speaking world, to prepare Christian minds for the future. Their value is beyond price. But we who are the heritors of generations of scientific inquiry are no longer certain that an “accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them,” is a possible beau ideal of liberal education. To us it must seem that the scholar, however much of a fledgling he may be, can only take the position that while struggling to acquaint himself with the known, he must be humbly aware of the unknown. Our conception of higher education will of necessity be dominated by the fact that a synthesis of knowable is possible only with God.
The principal reason why this is so is the changed mood of the scientists, who as never before are masters of the earthly destiny of the human race. They no longer subscribe to the theory that the universe is a machine which runs along pretty much as if it were self-sufficient and needs a Deity, at best, only to set the wheels in motion. The scientist is knee-deep in mystery. What concerns him above all, as he unlocks the treasure chambers of the cosmos, is the ability of the race to avoid intoxication by reason of the power which is its to use. Therefore some of the ablest of scientists are now numbered among the most religious of men. Not many of them, however, have any deep, personal awareness of Revelation. Their legacy is that of an era without theology, during which indeed nearly everything written in both Testaments was widely held to be obscurantist myth. It is almost heart-rending that this should be the case. Still, we cannot look upon science any longer as Newman looked upon it. We are unable to forget, for example, that in the darkest days of Nazi tyranny it was Germany's foremost physicist, Max Planck, who proclaimed his belief in God because in no other way could he challenge the assumptions of Totalitarianism.
These changes of intellectual position substantiate rather than weaken Newman's contentions. I shall say of them only that they are demonstrations of what he saw at work in the bosom of man, despite all the tawdriness of history and the desultory sensuality of the day. The best of human beings still resemble him in that they would move out of the shadows and the twilight of images into Truth. Indeed I would say finally of this book that it is above all a challenge to and an advertisement of the best of man. He is God's likeness. Sometimes at least that likeness must be discernible.
Note
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Cf. The Imperial Intellect. By A. Dwight Culler (New Haven: 1955), pp. 146-47.
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