Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (30 page)

had come a long way since his time as reforming tutor at Oriel, or critic of Robert Peel’s ideas on scientific and technical education at the opening of the Tamworth Reading Room. By 1851 he would source his idea for a Catholic university from a wide range of influences.

Newman’s task in the first nine discourses was to keep Archbishop Cullen, and his paymasters, the Catholic bishops, happy. He agreed that theology must form a crucial part of any university worthy of the name, let alone a Catholic one; but he opposed the idea of a university dominated by religion, even Catholicism. A university, he believed, could not be a seminary for lay people; it must be a place in which each discipline reaches its own level of perfection unhindered and uninfluenced by any prevailing theology or ideology. Such a notion was in accord with aspects of secularization and liberalism that seemingly went against his own grain, let alone that of Catholic officialdom. The vision whereby he reconciled the apparent paradox is contained in the totality of the published texts that make up the
Idea of a University
.

Newman starts, however, by emphasizing the importance of Catholic theology, and thus setting out his credentials as a responsible Catholic Rector in whom the hierarchy could have confidence. Yet, as he wrote to Robert Ornsby in April 1852, those first lectures ‘were suggested by high authority, and I think may please those whom I most wish to please, if I begin with them … After these I shall go on to give a normal idea of a University.’
⁸
Not that Newman denied the importance of a faculty of theology in the university, but he was far from arguing for its pre-eminence as a subject or discipline. Nor did this mean that he was leaning towards a mainly secular ideal of education. The paradox is reconciled by his declaration that knowledge, or philosophy, or ‘science’ in its wider European sense, as an end in itself, is underpinned by a profound theological principle – that all being, all truth, is sustained by God; an altogether different consideration from the place of theology courses in a university curriculum.

He had argued in his letters on the Tamworth Reading Room that the sciences, technology, and the exercise of reason do not bring people to God, make people better. The
Idea
confirms, again, that the university does not contemplate a ‘moral impression’. In a powerful metaphor he reinforces this insistence: ‘Quarry the granite rock with razors or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then you may 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.’
⁹
While this may have pleased his hierarchical audience and readership, the subtext is not an argument for the primacy of religion in the university, but the denial of such an expectation.

Meanwhile, Newman raises, although hardly settles, a problem with theology as a university discipline for his day, and for ours. His sadness on this point was

registered in a letter to John Capes of the
Rambler
on the deplorable dearth of academic Catholic theology in Europe following the ‘miserable state of the Church from 1780 to 1830’:

At this moment, where are our schools of theology? a scattered and persecuted Jesuit School — one at Louvain – some ghosts of a short lived birth at Munich – hardly a theologian at Rome.
10

NEW JERUSALEM ON EARTH

For Newman the ideal university is neither a set of vocational courses, nor a research institute; it is a community of scholars and students in pursuit of philosophy in its widest sense – ‘a Knowledge that is capable of being its own end

… liberal knowledge’ through the ‘intercommunion’ of all the principal academic disciplines, including medicine and the natural sciences. All disciplines should be pursued without domination by any other since ‘everything has its own perfection … and the perfection of one is not the perfection of another’. Education must not be ‘merely a means to something beyond it’. Knowledge, or ‘philosophy’, is ‘something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea’.
1
1
Reminiscent of the Hellenistic academy at the origins of Western civilisation, Newman insists that the decisive attribute of a university is its disinterested intellectual creativity and enquiry: the opportunity and capacity to think
uselessly
. It is this notion of liberal philosophy, seen as ‘the perfection of the intellect’, that marks out the civilised and mature individual. He declares: ‘not to know the relative disposition of things is the state of slaves or children; to have mapped out the Universe is the boast, or at least the ambition, of Philosophy.’
12

What the university ideally creates, he writes in the sixth discourse, 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. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from little-ness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.
13

The peculiar feature of this remarkable passage, which brings the ideal university closer to a kind of New Jerusalem on earth, or Philosophical Religion, than Newman had ever previously dared articulate, is the employment of the word ‘almost’ no less than five times. If Newman had reaffirmed his conviction

of fallen nature, the human tendency to idolatry and self-idolatry, in the ‘quarry the granite rock with razors’ passage, he comes close, nevertheless, to seeing the university as analogous to what the late Professor Adrian Hasting is termed ‘the realm of grace’.
1
4
Although, again, only
almost
. To complete yet another layer of paradox, Newman, for all his insistence on knowledge for its own sake, urges that the university should indeed prepare students for practical life, ‘training good members of society … cultivating the public mind’. He writes: ‘If a liberal education be good, it must necessarily be useful too.’
¹⁵
Yet he is unrelenting in his articulation of the crucial overarching idea:

Educated men can do what illiterate cannot; and the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a taste or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger.
16

Given that Newman was attempting to establish a university under the auspices of a hierarchy that had determined ideas about control and ownership, his insistence is courageous:

The University … has this object and this mission; it contemplates neither moral impression nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this. It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.
17

The subtlety of the language is striking, emphasising the active engagement of the student, rather than the student as an object or recipient of instruction: educates, reaches out towards,
grasps
.

A token of the prophetic, timeless and universal nature of Newman’s vision is its adoption by writers and thinkers generations on, and far removed, from the circumstances of nineteenth century tertiary education in Catholic Ireland. Universities ‘will be modified in detail’, he wrote in the
Catholic Gazette
for 17 August 1854, ‘by the circumstances, and marked by the peculiarities, of the age to which they severally belong’.
1
8
A hundred and fifty years on, Edward Said, an agnostic of Palestinian origins, who strove to correct false Western impressions of ‘Orientalism’, would declare Newman’s university discourses both true and ‘incomparably eloquent’:

The profound truth in what Newman says is, I believe, designed to undercut any partial or somehow narrow view of education whose aim might seem only to reaffirm one

particularly attractive and dominant identity, that which is the resident power or authority of the moment.
19

Said, moreover, grasps the dynamic nature of Newman’s intellect and genius as a writer and thinker, his ability to create paradoxical echoes beyond the matter, time and context in hand. While placing the highest value on English, European, or Christian values, Newman expresses in his rhetoric ‘another thought at odds’ with what he is saying, ‘and in effect criticizes it, delivers a different, and less assertive idea than on the surface he might have intended’. Reading Newman, Said declares,

we realize that although he is obviously extolling what is an overridingly Western conception of the world, with little allowance made for what was African or Latin American or Indian, his words let slip the notion that even an English or Western identity wasn’t enough, wasn’t at bottom or at best what education and freedom were all about.
20

Inherent in Said’s appreciation of the
Idea
is his acknowledgment as a political scientist of Newman’s robust plea for the university as a focus and exemplar of secular humanism and pluralism. Newman writes that the university should ideally express:

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.
21

This is a large, imaginative vision of the university as a community of unity in diversity, as opposed to an ill-assorted assembly of unrelated, segregated disciplines, or a meaningless set of relativisms, still less a constituency of conflicts and disparities. In his novel,
Loss and Gain
, Newman had expressed disapproval of the involvement of Oxford University in ‘party’ politics. It anticipates his view in
Idea
of the university as a place of ideological amnesty, in which cultural and political clashes, unequal power relationships, and national prejudices, are not so much set aside as reduced through understanding. It is arguable, moreover, that the vision establishes the principle whereby smaller, neglected, less popular disciplines or subjects should be assisted and succoured by the larger and more popular disciplines for the contribution the less popular make to the ‘whole’.

Is it possible that the fostering of pluralism in Newman’s
Idea
might yet contribute to the reduction of conflict, especially in those parts of the world, in the Middle East, for example, where perceptions of historic injured national identity dominate education? Said writes:

A single overmastering identity at the core of the academic enterprise, whether that identity be Western, African, or Asian, is a confinement, a deprivation. The world we live in is made up of numerous identities interacting, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes

antithetically. Not to deal with that whole – which is in fact a contemporary version of the whole referred to by Newman as a true enlargement of the mind – is not to have academic freedom. We cannot make our claim as seekers after justice that we advocate knowledge only of and about ourselves. Our model for academic freedom should therefore be the migrant or traveler: for if, in the real world outside the academy, we must needs be ourselves and only ourselves, inside the academy we should be able to discover and travel among other selves, other identities, other varieties of the human adventure.
22