Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (31 page)

THE GENTLEMAN

So how was religion to relate to the wholeness of ‘knowledge’ or ‘philosophy’ in Newman’s university? As Newman sees it, a successful university, by enlargement of the mind, and ‘illumination’, encourages a goodness, not only comparable to religion, but rivalling it:

The educated mind may be said to be in a certain sense religious; that is, it has what may be considered a religion of its own, independent of Catholicism, partly cooperat-ing with it, partly thwarting it; at once a defence yet a disturbance to the Church in Catholic countries, – and in countries beyond her pale, at one time in open warfare with her, at another in defensive alliance.
23

Within this context Newman writes his famous description of a ‘gentleman’. Apart from ‘Lead Kindly Light’, it is perhaps the most quoted passage of all his works, and possibly, taken out of context, the least understood:

Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; – all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home.
24

If this sounds like an active disposition to give others space in which to flourish, the positive theological underpinning of Christian
agape
(unconditional love) entirely absent. From the first sentence – ‘It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain’ – Newman reveals in his choice of syntax and language the negative qualities of philosophy in the wider sense of the word. The gentleman
removes
objects, he
concurs
, he
avoids
, he
guards against
. And he

has already anticipated the irony of the passage by the proposal that Julian the Apostate is the perfect exemplar of ‘the pattern-man of philosophical virtue’:

Weak points in his character he had, it is true, even in a merely poetical standard; but, take him all in all, and I cannot but recognize in him a specious beauty and nobleness of moral deportment, which combines in it the rude greatness of Fabricius or Regulus with the accomplishments of Pliny or Antoninus. His simplicity of manners, his frugal-ity, his austerity of life, his singular disdain of sensual pleasure, his military heroism, his application to business, his literary diligence, his modesty, his clemency, his accomplishments, as I view them, go to make him one of the most eminent specimens of pagan virtue which the world has ever seen.
25

Newman, however, goes on to lament Julian’s ‘insensibility of conscience’, his ignorance ‘of the very idea of sin’ in the ‘Religion of Reason’, the ‘serene self-possession, in the cold, self-satisfaction, we recognize the mere Philosopher’.
²⁶
And yet, Newman has expended much eloquence suggesting that it is the business of the university to encourage a proliferation of graduates precisely in the mould of Julian – Apostate and ‘Anti-Christ’. The striking paradox inherent in Newman’s counsel here, aimed, after all, at an audience of presumably perplexed Irish Catholic bishops, was that the Church as educator, and the university as educator, are two different entities; capable of collaboration, yet not one and the same thing. The civilizing auspices of the university, he is saying, ‘can bring one half way to Heaven’,
2
7
almost
, and in that sense should not be seen as an enemy of the Church. But the university should be left to perform its task without control, interference, or hindrance, from religion. Just as the university should not be a tool of the state, so it cannot be the tool of the Church; it is to be viewed ‘in itself, and apart from the Catholic Church, or from the State, or from any other power which may use it’.
2
8
The ‘other power’ anticipates contemporary tensions between the university and the sorts of situations cited by Edward Said. In the 1850s, and subsequently, Newman was principally concerned with pleading for a proper university in Ireland free to conduct its civilizing influence in its own time and space.

He is nevertheless clear as to what the ‘Religion of Philosophy’ can do and what it can not do. Newman elsewhere
²⁹
contrasts the civilised, Oxford-educated, non-religious philosopher with a scabrous, diseased and filthy Sicilian beggar-woman, such as he himself had encountered on his Mediterranean journey. What the gentleman humanist fails to grasp, for all his civilisation, is that she would be saved, and that he might be damned. Philosophy might well prepare a person to be ‘good’ in society; but it does not prepare one to seek the face of God. On the other hand, while the beggar woman might be favoured in the sight of God, she might be distinctly unfavourable in the eyes of society. The resolution of the paradoxical contrasts and comparisons Newman makes in the
Idea

is that, spiritually, he must extol the circumstance of the beggar-woman; yet he appears to be saying now, in the presence of the Irish bishops, that the choice, or dilemma, is not between one or the other. He is promoting humanism, but his preference is for a Christian humanism that calls for a perfection of nature that rises to an acknowledgment of God as the author of all.

It is arguable that he saw in this kind of perfection, or wholeness, a human fulfilment more apt for the coming age. In other words, the radical, wounding and self-wounding model of holiness (of a Saint Catherine of Genoa, or Saint Francis, or Saint Teresa of Avila), must give way to a different kind of saint. Not for nothing does Newman end the discourses with a veneration of St Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratorians. In his early life St Philip had been a courtier and a philosopher who became a student of theology. Philip was a saint of the age of the sixteenth-century, who had grown to maturity in Florence and Rome. ‘He lived’, wrote Newman, ‘at a time when pride mounted high, and the senses held rule … when medieval winter was receding, and the summer sun of civilization was bringing into leaf and flower a thousand forms of luxurious enjoyment; when a new world of thought and beauty had opened upon the human mind, in the discovery of the treasures of classic literature and art.’ He goes on to observe: ‘He preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt.’
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JAMES JOYCE’S UNIVERSITY

Newman was particularly optimistic about the faculty of medicine he had founded by 1856. ‘Our principal success’, he wrote in June of that year, ‘is and will be our Medical School, which promises to be the first in Dublin.’
³¹
The faculty survived and thrived in conjunction with the founding of the new St Vincent’s Hospital, built in 1857. While other faculties in the humanities were to lose the spirit of the founder, the survival of Newman’s ideas in the field of the arts is to be found in some unusual contexts – not least his influence on one of the university’s most illustrious students, James Joyce.

There is a passage in
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
where the hero, Stephen Dedalus, depicts himself as being drawn beyond the allure of the ‘oils of ordination’ towards a ‘new adventure’ – to ‘forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’, to reject his Irish Catholic identity for the life of the literary artist. He hears ‘notes of fitful music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth, upwards a tone and downwards a major third, like triplebranching flames’. He seems to hear wild creatures ‘racing, their feet pattering like rain upon the leaves … until he heard them no more and

remembered only a proud cadence from Newman: “
Whose feet are as the feet of harts and underneath the everlasting arms
”.’
32

Attention to the wide-ranging influences of Newman’s ideal of the university, and the dialogue between secular and religious knowledge expounded in the
Idea
, aids our understanding of its essential paradoxes and literary genius. One of the more remarkable examples is the frequent citation of Newman’s writings in Joyce’s autobiographical novels (
Stephen Hero
and
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
). Joyce arrived in 1898 as a student at Dublin’s University College, the successor institution to Newman’s Catholic University of Ireland which had effectively died in the 1870s.

As a result of mounting frustrations, including lack of funding, Newman had resigned his post in 1858 and returned to the Birmingham Oratory. The institution, situated in a large house on St Stephen’s Green next to the church New-man built, languished until 1879 when a government Universities Act provided an injection of funding after it was agreed that the university’s qualifications would be authorised by an outside body – the Royal University. The name was changed to University College and the Jesuits took over the teaching faculty in 1882 on the understanding that they would offer vocational courses preparing students for the civil service and the professions.

Newman’s ideas, and indeed his form and style of writing, haunt Joyce’s early novels, which bear striking parallels with
Loss and Gain
. The contexts are similar – the main actions consisting of conversations between students and between the heroes and their teachers as they walk gardens, streets and tutorial rooms of their separate university cities. Stephen’s debates with the Jesuit ‘embassy of nimble pleaders’ points back to Charles Reding who encounters parallel tempters on the eve of his conversion. Reding’s almost mystical apparition of a pilgrim kneeling before a roadside crucifix anticipates Stephen’s visionary encounter with a girl on the seashore: ‘Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy … A wild angel had appeared to him … to throw open before him … the gates of all the ways of error and glory.’
³³
Despite the civilizing influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who spent four years of ‘exalted misery’ at the college in the 1880s, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus finds a university in which Newman’s vision of students in pursuit of ‘knowledge for its own sake and nothing else’ has been abandoned for useful knowledge and for religious indoctrination:

I found a day school full of terrorized boys, banded together in a complicity of diffidence. They have eyes only for their future jobs: to secure their future jobs they will write themselves in and out of convictions, toil and labour to insinuate themselves into the good graces of the Jesuits.
34

Stephen in both early novels reveals a subtle and wide-ranging grasp of New-man’s
Idea of a University
, the
Apologia
, and key sermons; while the Jesuits pay

mere lip-service to the Cardinal’s writings, which they neither know nor understand. Like Charles Reding in
Loss and Gain
, Stephen sees the university as an opportunity for, and a process of, alteration, conversion, metanoia. In Stephen’s case, the conversion is to literature; not in the manner of a Walter Pater or a Matthew Arnold – as ‘art for art’s sake’, or in order to seek moral goods, but according to the deeper principles expounded in the
Idea of a University
.