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The Fullness of God: Catholics and Religious Exclusiveness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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One hundred and fifty years ago this Spring, John Henry Newman gave a series of lectures that eventually became the collection of those lectures and other occasional essays we know as The Idea of a University. Newman was a nineteenth century English thinker who became modernity’s most famous Catholic convert. He was born at the beginning of the century (1801), died at the end (1890), and converted from the Church of England at mid-century (1845), just seven years before he gave the lectures that concern us. He gave the lectures that formed the basis of his book because an Irish bishop asked him to, as part of an effort to establish a new Catholic University of Ireland. Newman gave the talks, re-wrote them, combined them with other essays he wrote during the 1 850s and published them as The Idea of a University in 1873. The university no longer exists. His book does exist, but (as the essays that accompany the abridged 1996 Yale edition suggest), there is little agreement about whether it points us backward or forward—where “us” includes students and faculty but also university administrators and university labourers and even donors.
One of the curious features of this classic work on Catholic education is that Newman makes little explicit reference to the religious orders who were the founders of most Catholic colleges and universities—Benedictine or Augustinian, Dominican or Franciscan, Notre Dame or Jesuit. Yet, as I hope to show, these orders were clearly in the back of Newman’s mind in ways that shed light on the argument of The Idea as well as on our own circumstances.
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- Copyright © 2002 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated. I. In Nine Discourses delivered to the Catholics of Dublin. II. In Occasional Lectures and Essays addressed to the Members of the Catholic University, ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). I will refer to The Idea of a University by part (I or II), discourse (1–9), and paragraph (i‐x) and bracket page number (e.g., I, 1, i [1]. The page numbers are usually to Frank Turner's somewhat abridged edition (Yale University Press, 1996) because it is easily accessible; page references to Ker's critical edition are followed by his name [1 Ker].
2 Newman thinks this is a frequent phenomenon in the development of ideas: “[the history of philosophy or belief] changes with them [old principles] in order to remain the same”(An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine [New York: Image/Doubleday, 1960], Part I, Chapter 1. Section 1, paragraph 7, p. 63. Jaroslav Pelikan argues (with little reference to Newman's Catholic theology) that Newman's claims about “research” also require such “development of doctrine” in The Idea of The University. A Reexamination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992)
3 I am being generous to Newman so I do not get distracted from Newman's knowledge of “the whole” by his mistakes about the parts (his “acquirements”, he would call them) in matters religious. Newman says that “the first race of Protestants, as with Mahometans, and all Theists” could agree that “God” contains a whole comprehensive theology (I, 2, vii [36]). Elsewhere it is clear that Newman shares the (correct) traditional Christian conviction that the God of Israel is identical to the God of Jesus Christ but he also shares the (incorrect) traditional Christian conviction that the Church replaces (in some sense) the synagogue. Further, he clearly distinguishes the sixteenth century Protestant reformers from contemporary Protestants, who (he seems to presume) are not usually faithful to their forebears (“the first race”)—although Newman's Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838) is perhaps the clearest brief for re‐integrating Catholic and Protestant theologies ever written. Still further, “Mahometanism is essentially a consecration of the principle of nationalism”, although he seems to admire the way “this superstition is… still a living, energetic principle in the Turkish population, sufficient to bind them together in one, and to lead to bold and persevering action” (“Lectures on the History of the Turks, in their Relation to Europe” in Historical Sketches (New York, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), volume 1, pp. ix–238 (here, pp. 203,226). And his kindness to Theists (not to mentions Deists) is also limited. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science began their meeting with a profession of their Theism, Newman objected: “I argued if they began with Theism, they would end with Atheism” [Ker 5761. We do not (always? usually? sometimes?) mean the same thing by “God”.
4 “1852 Discourse V. General Knowledge Viewed as One Philosophy” in Ker's critical edition, pp. 419–34 (here 428–29). Newman is speaking here of Catholic and Protestant “religions”.
5 “The Mission of St. Benedict,”Historical Sketches, new impression (London, New York, and Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903), vol. 11, pp. 365–430 [originally written 1857 and published 1858], here pp. 365–366. See also “The Benedictine Schools [January 1859]” in Historical Sketches, new impression (London, New York, and Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903), vol. 11, pp. 431–487. This is an important essay on how the poetical but a‐political (non‐Ignatian) and non‐intellectual (non‐Dominican) Benedictines became involved in politics and schools, with both gains and losses.
6 “The Mission of St. Benedict,” p. 368.
7 “The Mission of St. Benedict,” p. 369.
8 “The Mission of St. Philip Neri [15 and 18 January 1850]” in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (New York, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), pp. 199–242 (here, p. 228). Compare “Jesuit Fathers are part of a whole, but each Oratorian stands by himself and is a whole, promoting and effecting by his own proper acts the wellbeing of the community” in Newman the Oratorian. His Unpublished Oratory Papers, ed. Placid Murray, O.S.B., D.D. (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan Ltd. 1969), pp. 203–216, here p. 210 [1848]
9 The other place is II, 6, iii where Newman says that “in St. Ignatius's Exercises, the act of the intellect precedes that of —the affections”—the Dominican Ignatius, I am tempted to say (except that Ignatian/Aristotelian prudence is also Dominican).
10 “The Mission of St. Benedict,” pp. 407,409, 453 (on Virgil); p. 427 (on wild, irregular beauty). A tame, regular beauty would always threaten to dominate the Dominican “truth” and the Ignatian “good”.
11 “An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation.” (I, 5, i [77]) Newman does not expect us to be peaceful at the expense of our rivalries. We are rivals. We aim for peace. In the meantime, we “adjust”—but without denying our rivalries, until our intellectual swords are beaten into intellectual plowshares.
12 “Rise and Progress of Universities,”Historical Sketches (New York, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., new impression 1909 [original 1872]). vol. 111, pp. 1–251 [originally written 1854 and published 1856], here pp. 6, 13, 62, 70, 98, 72. The narrative is a fascinating contrast of university and college, Greece and Rome, feminine and masculine, liberal and conservative, Ireland and England, Influence and System as “two great principles of action in human affairs”. “A university embodies the principal [sic] of progress, and a College that of stability; the one is the sail, and the other the ballast; each is insufficient in itself for the pursuit, extension, and inculcation of knowledge; each is useful to the other. A University is the scene of enthusiasm, of pleasurable exertion, of brilliant display, of sinning influence, of diffusive and potent sympathy; and a College is the scene of order, of obedience, of modest and persevering diligence, of conscientious fulfilment of duty, of mutual private services, and deep and lasting attachments. The University is for the world, and the College is for the nation. The University is for the Professor, and the College for the Tutor; the University is for the philosophical discourse, the eloquent sermon, or the well contested disputation; and the College is for the catechetical lecture. The University is for theology, law, and medicine, for natural history, for physical science, and for the sciences generally and their promulgation; the College is for the formation of character, intellectual and moral, for the cultivation of the mind, for the improvement of the individual, for the study of literature, for the classics, and those rudimental sciences which strengthen and sharpen the intellect. The University being the element of advance, will fail in making good its ground as it goes; the College, from conservative tendencies, will be sure to go back, because it does not go forward. It would seem as if an University seated and living in Colleges, would be a perfect institution, as possessing excellences of opposite kinds. But such a union, such salutary balance and mutual complement of opposite advantages, is of difficult and rare attainment. At least the present day rather gives us instances of the two antagonistic evils, of naked University and naked Colleges, than of their alliance and its benefits. The great seats of learning on the continent, to say nothing of those in Scotland, show the College of Colleges to complete the university; the English, on the contrary, show us the need of a university to give life to an assemblage of Colleges.” (“Rise and Progress of Universities,”Historical Sketches, p. 228—29)
13 “Rise and Progress of Universities,” p. 180 [brackets are my own]; ep. pp. 100, 170.
14 Aristotle, Ethics I, vii 1098a20 and 1099a31.
15 For example, II, 7, 2 [430 my old ed] and II, 8, 3 [461 my old ed.]
16 “The Mission of St. Benedict,” p. 369.
17 “The Mission of St. Benedict,” p. 369.
18 I have also left a number of issues unresolved in relation to Jesuit practice, Dominican science, and Benedictine poetry. For example, Jesuit practice raises a number of questions about the relationship between knowledge (science) and practice, including the Jesuit university's specific ways of integrating justice and service‐learning into its university (curriculum) and college (financial practices, etc.). Further, I have not pursued the relationship between the Baconian (utilitarian, for Newman) science Newman opposes and Newman's Aristotelian science—not to mention other conflicting philosophies of science. Finally, Newman says that “[p]oetry may be considered to be the gift of moving the affections through the imagination, and its object to be the beautiful” (“Poetry, with reference to Aristotle's Poetics” in Essays Critical and Historical [New York, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907], volume I, pp. 1–29 [here p. 29, in the context of a retraction of an earlier view of poetry]); but he also says that poetry provides no view of “the whole”—and therefore “what are we doing all through life, both as a necessity and as a duty, but unlearning the world's poetry and attaining to its prose!” (It, 4, introduction [Ker's critical edition 272]). Pursuing the limits of poetry would involve Newman's idea of death. Thus, Benedictines (Newman says) lived out a mortification of the reason and sense that Dominicans and Jesuits would later elevate (“The Mission of St. Benedict,” pp. 375ff). Death is the limit of Ignatian exercise and Dominican knowledge—as we can learn from Virgil's Georgics as well as the Bible. Can “the poet” say what death is? Not entirely. Expressed in a postmodern pun: what if the whole is death, the whole a hole? And what if even the idea of death was dead, i.e., what if there was no intelligibility to death at all? There would be no “idea” of death, or “ideas“— and certainly no “idea of the university” (much less “The Idea”). Such poetic, hyper‐inflated claims to know that knowledge amounts to nothing must be deflated. Newman does this in his theology of the Lamb of God taking away the sin of the world, the death of one saving the whole, dying our death to defeat authentic post‐modem insights about death.
19 “We cannot tell exactly what the Catholic University ought to be at this era” (“Rise and Progress of Universities,”). “The Idea” is, apparently, not “exact”. It takes Aristotelian and Ignatian prudence to enact.
20 There is nothing clear and distinct about how God is working on us in these matters. “Divine grace, to use the language of Theology, does not by its presence supersede nature; nor is nature at once brought into simple concurrence and coalition with grace. Nature pursues its course, now coincident with that of grace, now parallel to it, now across, now divergent, now counter, in proportion to its own imperfection and to the attraction and influence which grace exerts over it.” (I, 8, ii [128]; ep. I, 9, i [149]).
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