Paul Shrimpton (Ed)
Gracewing 2021
St John Henry Newman’s biographers, Wilfrid Ward (1912), Ian Ker (1988) and Sheridan Gilley (1990), cover the story of the great man’s attempts to establish a Catholic university in Ireland in the space of a chapter or two. Paul Shrimpton himself, the editor of this substantial volume of Newman’s reports and papers relating to this (for Newman) disappointing and frustrating episode, tells the tale at length in his The ‘Making of Men’: The Idea and Reality of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin (2014). The contents of My Campaign in Ireland Part I, published originally privately by William Neville, Newman’s private secretary in 1896, produced now as the sixteenth volume of the Newman Millennium Edition, gives all the detailed backstory (or at least much of it) to the summaries of the biographers.
We knew from Ward that by 1850 “the new secularist education was then suspected in the eyes of the Irish Bishops by reason of its results in England” and that Newman “did not share [the Archbishop of Armagh] Dr Cullen’s dread of the whole modern and liberal movement.” Gilley points out that Newman’s difficulties lay fundamentally “in the divisions among the Irish bishops: Cullen wanted a safely Catholic and denominational university; his archenemy in the hierarchy, John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam…wanted a solely Irish university; and there were still bishops who looked wistfully to the non-denominational ideal of the state-funded Queen’s College.” As Ker says, “somehow Newman had to satisfy all three parties.” Inevitably he failed to do so.
The documents included in this volume demonstrate above all else that Newman had throughout his adult life thought seriously about education, what it is and what it should be, and that he had a clear practical plan for the implementation of his doctrine of education for the Irish university. We can trace his reflections on knowledge through the Parochial and Plain Sermons, preached through the 1830s: theological knowledge is not without its dangers and practical knowledge has its own fruitful and useful ends yielding revenue. In Discussions and Arguments (1911), a collection of Newman’s expositions from the 1830s through to the 1870s, there is a continuing theme that secular knowledge is no sure vehicle of moral improvement. In the Idea of a University (1852) he asserts that a “smattering of knowledge” may be “a graceful accomplishment, but not education”, “brilliancy without knowledge makes ephemeral books”, acquisition of knowledge is not the same as largeness of mind. There were new kinds of knowledge that did enlarge the mind, and there was knowledge “void of philosophy” – “knowledge becomes science, or philosophy, when it is informed and impregnated by reason.” Ignorance is the root of all littleness. These themes are treated in Discourse V from The Scope and Nature of University Education (1852), included in this volume, of particular value because Newman did not include it with the other discourses that make up the Idea of a University.
In the University Sermons, preached through the 1830s and 1840s, and more spaciously in the Idea, Newman points outthat “liberal education makes the gentleman, not the Christian, that it is not the end of liberal education to make men virtuous”. A key distinction in his doctrine of education is that between useful knowledge and liberal knowledge: the former gives truth a practical power, the latter the apprehension of truth as beautiful. A university must teach particular knowledge, though transfer of particular knowledge is not its ultimate purpose.
Newman was a nineteenth-century liberal, but he was not a liberalist: he was emphatically anti-liberalist. Liberalism in religion, he explained in Essays Critical and Historical, means that scripture has no authorised interpreter and that dogmatic statements have no part of revelation. In Loss and Gain (1848) he exposes the difference between the idea of Christianity as a set of principles and Christianity as a set of doctrines. In Sermons on Various Occasions (1857) he rejects the notion that different religions are simply our different modes of expressing everlasting truths. In the Apologia (1865) it is the liberalists who are halfway to atheism, those who had failed to recognise the necessary limits of the liberal university reform he had supported, and who eventually drove him away from Oxford: the liberalism “that was a theological school, dry and repulsive, not very dangerous in itself, though dangerous as opening the door to evils which it did not itself comprehend.” In Discussions and Arguments he defines latitudinarianism as allowing that “where there is sincerity, it is no matter what we profess.” In the Idea liberalism is “a rebellious stirring against miracle and mystery, against the severe and the terrible.”
When it came to the practical task of creating a Catholic university in Ireland it was with clear principles of what a liberal university in the modern Catholic tradition should look like and feel that Newman approached his work. The syllabus for a course in Catholic religious knowledge consists in what is desirable in an educated Catholic, which will keep knowledge of the natural and the supernatural distinct: to Catholics, revelation remains a matter of knowledge. If the Idea gives the impression that Newman’s abilities were purely intellectual, merely abstract, the contents of My Campaign in Ireland make the necessary and essential adjustment. It should be remembered that during the sevenyears of his engagement in the university project he was constantly crossing the Irish sea, forming the Birmingham Oratory in England and then battling with the myriad obstructions put up by Archbishop Cullen and his associatesin Dublin. Newman had an astonishing capacity for hard work and impressive administrative abilities. Proof of this is abundant from pages 202 to 260 of this volume, where can be found his educational principles and objectives, a constitution for the university, a guide for faculty and student discipline, the structure of the academic year, rules for examinations, the syllabus itself and rules for professorial expenses.
Paul Shrimpton has prefaced what is really a reference book with an admirably clear and succinct overview of how this collection of documents lies behind a rather sad tale of mission unaccomplished and how it elucidates Newman as a Catholic educationalist. These documents also give insight into Newman’s personality. We know that Newman was a complex character, a man for all seasons. The book’s contentsalso confirm him as no pushover, ready to speak truth to power (as Dr Cullen discovered), but at the same time remarkably patient and long-suffering. They confirm him as a man of scrupulous conscience, an intellectual liberal yet a traditionalist, faithful to the Church yet ready to challenge its hierarchy and its clericalism. And they confirm his vision for a Catholic university education consistent with his ambitions recorded in Present Position of Catholics in 1851 for the vocation of the lay person and the sensus fidelium,. “I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it.”
Shrimpton has edited this useful disparate material with exhaustive precision and provided a comprehensive index..
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