Newman and Education: The Idea of a University

Newman and Education is the theme of our discussion this morning on the Son Rise Morning Show (7:50 a.m Eastern.6:50 a.m. Central). Anna Mitchell and I will continue our Santo Subito! series leading up to Blessed John Henry Newman's canonization later this year (perhaps in October?). Please listen live here.

These introductory paragraphs from a Cardinal Newman Society post summarize Newman's educational career very well, since they are written by Father Ian Ker, who wrote a great biography of Newman:

In 1863, sixty-two-year-old John Henry Newman wrote, “from first to last, education … has been my line.” His career at Oxford had begun with his election in 1822 to a fellowship at Oriel College, “at that time the object of ambition of all rising men in Oxford.” After that he “never wished any thing better or higher than … ‘to live and die a fellow of Oriel.’”[1] In fact, the Oxford or Tractarian Movement might never have begun but for Newman’s dispute with the Provost of Oriel over the role of a college tutor, Newman wanting, as a pioneer of the Oxford tutorial system that was to develop later, a more direct, personal teaching relationship with undergraduates. As a result of being deprived of his tutorship, his teaching career at Oxford—in which his “heart was wrapped up”—came to an end, and he turned to research into the Church Fathers and the history of the early Church. After becoming a Catholic, he was opposed to the restoration of the English hierarchy on the ground that “we want seminaries far more than sees. We want education.”[2]

So when the chance came of helping to found the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin, he jumped at it, since he had “from the very first month of my Catholic existence … wished for a Catholic University.” Later, he was naturally attracted by the idea of founding the Oratory School in Birmingham; as an educational work, it fell “under those objects, to which I have especially given my time and thought.” And as an old man of sixty-three, he so enjoyed filling in for an absent teacher that he declared that, “if I could believe it to be God’s will, [I] would turn away my thoughts from ever writing any thing, and should see, in the superintendence of these boys, the nearest return to my Oxford life.” He was proud to claim that the school had “led the way in a system of educational improvement on a large scale through the Catholic community.”[3]

Newman's foundation of the Catholic University of Ireland and the discourses he presented in Dublin to describe the kind of educational experience he wanted to develop there resulted in The Idea of a University, one of his greatest works. He envisions--because he had experienced it at Oxford--a university as a place of universal knowledge. 

He believed it was a community of scholars and students: the idea of community was important to him and the image some present of Newman as a reclusive scholar in an ivory tower is false. He thought that students helped each other learn, understand concepts, apply their knowledge, etc. He thought the tutors and teachers in the university community benefited from living in community too.

He believed a university taught more than knowledge as points of data: it taught students how to think, how to learn about something, how to apply the skills of research and understanding to any subject they encountered. He called this a cultivation of mind that gave the students a connected view of all things, a philosophical method for understanding and progressing in knowledge.

He believed a university had to teach Theology: Theology is a body of knowledge that must be included in the curriculum of a university--not comparative religion, not religious studies, not the Bible as literature, not the culture of religion, etc--as a subject with a body of knowledge. Newman argued that even Natural Theology is based upon knowledge: once you admit that God exists, you must study what that means for humanity. Once you admit that God has revealed Himself, and has revealed that He has become Incarnate among us in time as a Man, you must study what this fact means to human history, to morality, and to society.

If a university leaves Theology out of its curriculum another subject will take its place: science, or literature, or economics, or aesthetics will serve as the organizing basis of all the knowledge presented at the university. Once God and what we know of Him from Creation and Revelation is eliminated, something man made will take its place.

This is a great challenge to all the secular universities here in the USA: they do not teach Theology as a body of knowledge. Even Catholic colleges and universities struggle with teaching Theology as Newman envisioned it, being part of all the other sciences and subjects, influencing how ethics and morality are taught, how the natural and social sciences are researched and developed, how the students learn to think and see the world. A Catholic college or university can have an excellent and faithful Theology department but what it teaches may not be integrated into the rest of the subjects at all. They could be taught as if the truths of God's Creation and Revelation mean nothing to them or the students. I think that Newman would say that neither a secular university nor such a compartmentalized Catholic university was teaching its students true knowledge or the true philosophical method of thinking and learning.

Newman also offered a great warning: even a complete university education with Theology in its proper place has its limits. It can produce what he called a gentleman, it may or may not produce a saint.

Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with silken thread; 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. 

That's why the first thing he built at the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin was the university chapel: Mary, Seat of Wisdom. Only the Grace of God can "contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man."

Preview: Newman and Education

On Monday, June 3, Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim and I will continue our Santo Subito! Newman series on the Son Rise Morning Show with a discussion of Newman and Education (about 7:50 a.m. Eastern DST/6:50 a.m. Central DST).

In the first half of his life, the Anglican half, Newman participated as a student, tutor, and fellow in England's great educational institutions. He lived and studied at Great Ealing School in London and then at Trinity College at the University of Oxford. Famously, he barely passed his final exams, having overworked and crammed too much in preparation, nevertheless, he was selected as tutor and fellow at Oriel College.

At the same time he had been preparing for ordination in the Church of England. As a minister and a tutor, Newman felt he had a pastoral and clerical obligation to his students, not merely academic. When conflict arose about this idea, he resigned as tutor and remained as fellow.

Newman loved Oxford; he hoped to spend his whole life there. In his novel Loss and Gain, Charles Reading reflects Newman's affection:

There lay old Oxford before him, with its hills as gentle and its meadows as green as ever. At the first view of that beloved place he stood still with folded arms, unable to proceed. Each college, each church—he counted them by their pinnacles and turrets. The silver Isis, the grey willows, the far-stretching plains, the dark groves, the distant range of Shotover, the pleasant village where he had lived with Carlton and Sheffield—wood, water, stone, all so calm, so bright, they might have been his, but his they were not. Whatever he was to gain by becoming a Catholic, this he had lost; whatever he was to gain higher and better, at least this and such as this he never could have again. He could not have another Oxford, he could not have the friends of his boyhood and youth in the choice of his manhood. He mounted the well-known gate on the left, and proceeded down into the plain. There was no one to greet him, to sympathise with him; there was no one to believe he needed sympathy; no one to believe he had given up anything; no one to take interest in him, to feel tender towards him, to defend him. He had suffered much, but there was no one to believe that he had suffered. He would be thought to be inflicting merely, not undergoing, suffering. He might indeed say that he had suffered; but he would be rudely told that every one follows his own will, and that if he had given up Oxford, it was for a whim which he liked better than it. But rather, there was no one to know him; he had been virtually three years away; three years is a generation; Oxford had been his place once, but his place knew him no more. He recollected with what awe and transport he had at first come to the University, as to some sacred shrine; and how from time to time hopes had come over him that some day or other he should have gained a title to residence on one of its ancient foundations. One night in particular came across his memory, how a friend and he had ascended to the top of one of its many towers with the purpose of making observations on the stars; and how, while his friend was busily engaged with the pointers, he, earthly-minded youth, had been looking down into the deep, gas-lit, dark-shadowed quadrangles, and wondering if he should ever be Fellow of this or that College, which he singled out from the mass of academical buildings. All had passed as a dream, and he was a stranger where he had hoped to have had a home.

As Newman wrote in the Apologia pro Vita Sua:

I left Oxford for good on Monday, February 23, 1846. On the Saturday and Sunday before, I was in my House at Littlemore simply by myself, as I had been for the first day or two when I had originally taken possession of it. I slept on Sunday night at my dear friend's, Mr. Johnson's, at the Observatory. Various friends came to see the last of me; Mr. Copeland, Mr. Church, Mr. Buckle, Mr. Pattison, and Mr. Lewis. Dr. Pusey too came up to take leave of me; and I called on Dr. Ogle, one of my very oldest friends, for he was my private Tutor, when I was an Undergraduate. In him I took leave of my first College, Trinity, which was so dear to me, and which held on its foundation so many who have [Note 123] been kind to me both when I was a boy, and all through my Oxford life. Trinity had never been unkind to me. There used to be much snapdragon growing on the walls opposite my freshman's rooms there, and I had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence even unto death in my University.

On the morning of the 23rd I left the Observatory. I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway. [Note 124]

Newman did return to Oxford in 1878 when Trinity College offered him its first honorary fellowship: he met with his old tutor, Thomas Short, who was 90; visited Pusey and Keble College. He returned again in May of 1880 after being named a Cardinal.