Newman goes so far as to state that theology,
the queen of sciences, “is not only
a portion, but a condition of general knowledge.”

Newman’s idea of a university

By John Paul Meenan

There is a crisis in our universities. Many of us have heard of it, many even experienced it. Large class sizes, little emphasis on individual instruction, too much emphasis on the skill of taking multiple-choice examinations and the handing on of facts (sometimes dubiously verified), no systematic structuring of the curriculum or tying one subject to another, to say nothing of the absence of any reference to God or religion in class and outside of class, are at least some of the problems facing our modern campuses. Yet universities continue to be amongst the most successful institutions in the modern world. Are universities whose mission, the Holy Father has declared, concerns “the very future of humanity,”2 doing the job they are meant to do? Are they fulfilling their mandate, as universities? An excellent place to turn for answering these questions is John Henry Cardinal Newman’s (the 200th anniversary of whose birth we celebrate this year) Idea of a University, a sort of broad, architectural outlook on what a university should be. Newman saw 150 years ago many of the problems that now face our centers of intellectual culture. The Idea is rightly considered a classic and foundational work in educational philosophy.

Newman was particularly qualified to speak on the nature of the university. Born February 21, 1801 in London, England,3 he early on showed strong academic aptitude, and, at what we might now consider the rather tender age of 16, he went off to Oxford to make his own way amongst the ‘gentlemen’ of England. He was to spend the next 19 years here, as student, tutor, and fellow, working his way up through the ranks, so to speak. Although Newman was always to hold fond memories of his beloved Oxford, his stay there was not always easy. He fell prey to the deficiencies of the system, with its emphasis on exam-taking ability, rather than, as Newman saw it, truly learning the material; this was compounded by the heavy drinking and socializing which ate up so much of the students’ time and resources, and which scandalized the idealistic young Newman. After over-studying for his final, Newman finished his undergraduate degree with a second-class “under the line,” which was not indicative of his intellectual gifts. He managed to pull things together with further study, however, and was chosen as fellow of Oriel college in 1822, before being named tutor the next year. It was his task, in this capacity, to lead and guide students through their studies, and prepare them for examinations. Newman always approached his duties with a pastoral emphasis; he saw his role not only to give the students facts to memorize, but to teach them to study, to relate what they were studying into a larger picture, to come to love what they were studying, and to see it as intrinsically useful.

In the midst of his occupations, Newman felt an ongoing call to devote himself completely to pastoral duties. He entered the Anglican clergy, but his intellectual honesty eventually led him to the Catholic Church, and on October 9, 1845, he was received into the Church by the saintly Passionist missionary Dominic Barberi. We may be familiar with Newman’s subsequent spiritual journey, his stay in Rome, and his eventual decision to be ordained a priest of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, bringing the Oratory to England at Birmingham and becoming its first superior. In the midst of these pastoral and community duties, however, Newman continued to be interested in education, which he saw, quite rightly, as vitally important. He always cherished the dream of a university along the lines of Oxford, but without its deficiencies, and with the full light of the Catholic faith to guide and inform it.

In 1852, Newman was to have the opportunity to fulfill this dream, for it was in this year that Dr. Cullen, Archbishop of Armagh, later Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin, asked Newman to consider the post of rector of a new Catholic university to be founded in Ireland. Now, Ireland at this time was, by and large, under English dominion, and if an Irishman wanted to go to university, and could gain admittance, he had to attend a Protestant university. Many Catholics opposed their young people studying with non-Catholics in a highly charged intellectual atmosphere during one of the most formative periods of their lives. The tension between English and Irish, between Protestant and Catholic, was not conducive to pleasant mixing. There was a move to found a non-sectarian university, Queen’s, from which religion would be excluded from the lecture room and from any consideration in the appointment of professors. This seemed to answer one part of the problem, namely, the controversy over religion. Some bishops and other Catholics supported this plan. Others, however, including Newman, argued that a university, whose task, as we will see, is to teach all the truth, could not exclude religion, either from campus life or from the curriculum, without compromising its very mission.

Thus, there was a large ground-swell movement for a Catholic university on Irish soil. We will not go through all of the historical details of Newman’s work as rector of this idealistic project to get the so-called Catholic University of Ireland off the ground. What is central to the topic of this essay is that in 1852, prior to being offered the rectorship, Newman, fulfilling a promise made to Archbishop Cullen, was asked to deliver a series of discourses upon the nature of university education. Newman gave a series of nine discourses in all, often in a state of extreme anxiety and tiredness; it was at this time that Newman was being sued for libel by an apostate Dominican priest, Dominic Achilli. Yet what has emerged from his efforts is a masterpiece of educational philosophy. It is one of the few tracts we have on the nature and the ideal of university education. Together, these discourses comprise what is now known as the Idea of a University. Though Newman modified the lectures for their written presentation, the work was not composed as a book. Therein, Newman presents his idea of what a university should be, what is its primary purpose, and how it is to carry out its mission in the world under the guidance of the Church. The key to understanding Newman’s work may be found in the first sentence of his own preface, where he writes that the task of a university is to teach universal knowledge. This simple definition, these three words, provide a summary of Newman’s argument, and they will provide the context for our own discussion.

First, a university is primarily a place of teaching, which is to say, it is not a place of scientific or philosophical discovery; otherwise, as Newman asks, why should it have students?4 One could point to an inversion of this principle in the so-called “publish-or-perish” anxiety of the modern university, which leads professors to view teaching as time and energy taken away from the more important and rewarding activities of research and writing. It is difficult to overemphasize Newman’s insistence upon the value and centrality of teaching at a university. His experience at Oxford had been marred by uninterested, apathetic instructors, who had either taken little or no interest in their students’ progress, or merely ensured that they did well on examinations. Obviously, as Newman saw it, teaching is a reciprocal relationship, which requires that someone learn from the teacher. It is the task of the student to enter deeply into the material, mastering and appropriating “a system consisting of parts, related one to the other, and interpretative of one another in the unity of the whole.”5 It is this teacher-student relationship that defines a university, whose primary task is education and learning: a university should be “student-centered.” Students are the primary focus of the whole endeavor; without them, the university, qua university, would cease to exist.

We next turn to the question of universal knowledge. This means, at one level, that knowledge is whole, or one. Thus, the separate sciences taught at a university should be seen as part of this whole, and should be taught as such. Each science should be viewed in its relation to every other science, and should neither be compartmentalized, nor seen as entirely autonomous. True, each science must utilize its own methods and procedures, but these must not be seen as the only valid means of arriving at truth. In his first discourse, Newman addresses the question of the place of theology in the university curriculum. As we saw above, there was a strong current of opinion in Newman’s day (as in our own!) clamoring for the exclusion of theology, and religion in general, from the university campus. Newman, however, rightly argues that theology is one of the sciences, having a body of doctrine, an historical background, and an objective set of criteria. “Religious doctrine is knowledge, in as full a sense as Newton’s doctrine is knowledge.”6 Once theology is deliberately excluded or ignored, some other subject will close in to take its place. Biologists and astrophysicists would begin pronouncing dogmatically on subjects such as the origin and destiny of man, and on the nature, or even non-existence of God. In fact, Newman goes so far as to state that theology or religious truth, which has been called the queen of sciences, “is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge.” To exclude it from the curriculum “is nothing short . . . of unraveling the web of university teaching.” 7

This universal knowledge, therefore, which the university should hand on, must not be seen as an accumulation of facts, or even a specialization in a given field, as valuable as this may be. On the contrary, the knowledge offered to the student by the university should be ordered, systematic and comparative, demonstrating the “real relations” of one idea or fact to another,8 and all of these facts to a final end. In Newman’s apt analogy, the student should see where his science stands “from a height,”9 as if looking down upon a map and knowing where Toronto is in relation to Washington, or Taiwan. It is the task of the university to give the student an over-arching view of everything he studies, a kind of “meta-science,” which examines each science in relation to other sciences. The name that Newman, and many others before him, gives to this science is philosophy.10

It is philosophy which provides the mind with its proper perfection. We are rational beings: this rational nature is God’s image in us. Thus, man reaches his perfection first through the intellect. The course of studies at a university, before all else, should “educate the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.”11 This ability to perceive and apprehend truth, in all of its great depth and myriad relations, requires long discipline, and is not gained, in Newman’s words, and he is speaking here from experience, “without much effort and the exercise of years”12 but the reward is more than worth the price. Our intellect is a God-given power, which must be honed and sharpened to perfection. Newman uses a rather startling image when he defines philosophy as knowledge when it has been “impregnated by reason.”13 As we saw earlier, the student is not a passive recipient of knowledge, but must make the knowledge offered him at university his own, and by mastering such knowledge, he himself becomes perfected.

The product of this process of education, and the ultimate purpose of the university, is therefore a cultivation of the mind, a perfection of the intellect or, in Newman’s famous phrase, a “philosophical habit of mind.”14 The possessor of this habit “apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and little.”15 Its attributes are “force, steadiness . . . comprehensiveness and versatility . . . the command over its own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things,”16 to which Newman later adds “freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom.”17 This, as Newman states, is the “special fruit of the education furnished at a University.”18 Would that universities delivered what they ought!

Such an education, Newman continues, is often called “liberal,” not as opposed to “conservative,” but as derived from the Latin verb “liberare, “to free” or “to set something free.” This philosophical education, besides perfecting its possessor, also makes him free, free from the shackles of ignorance and opinion, and free to form a true estimate of the world around him. Such knowledge, furthermore, is free also in the sense that it is not ordered to anything outside of itself, but is intrinsically valuable for its own sake. That is, it is not sought for any other extrinsic end or purpose.19 Newman is very definite on the principle that in no way can the value of knowledge be reduced to practical, or worse yet, economic utility. It is intrinsically worthwhile, just like health, beauty, and life itself. True, as Newman points out, society indirectly benefits from having citizens with well-formed minds, and the student benefits in that he will be able to approach any subject with an ease and facility. This, however, is not the primary consideration of the university as such; its sole function, its direct scope is “intellectual culture,”20 through which the intellect can reach its natural perfection.

At this point, we have come as far as nature can take us, in the perfection of the intellect through philosophy. Newman, however, does not stop here, but devotes the last of his discourses to the relationship among knowledge, religion, and the Church. As Newman rightly points out, a university, qua university, is not by nature religious. The University of Athens in the fourth century produced both a Julian the Apostate and a Saint Basil the Great. Reason, powerful as it is, can only give us access to part of the truth. The Church’s role, according to Newman, is to steady and guide the university in its office of intellectual education. Reason has a tendency to usurp the role of Revelation and religion; for, as Newman states, “knowledge exerts a subtle influence in throwing us back upon ourselves, and making us our own center, and our own minds the measure of all things.”21 Furthermore, since knowledge is a whole, the Church, as the guardian and expositor of God’s Revelation, has her own contribution to make to this body of knowledge. For these reasons, the ideal university must be Catholic. The Church serves as a bulwark and guide in the university’s role of teaching, safeguarding the institute from the prideful tendency inherent in each one of us. Obviously, the Church will be more intimately involved in the direction of some subjects, such as theology, than others. But, as we saw earlier, knowledge is a whole, and it is the task of Church is to defend the crucial balance between that knowledge that is of faith, and that which is of reason in every subject that pertains to man.

Thus far, we have spoken about the end or function of a university, but not about what in fact should be taught. On this, Newman seems to be deliberately vague, since the curriculum is not the focus of his discussion. In the final lecture, he lists the three great subjects upon which human reason, and therefore the university, can employ itself: God, Nature and Man, which correspond to the subjects of Theology, Science and Literature. This apparently short list covers every subject conceivable! The university should concern itself with every branch of human knowledge, with all, to paraphrase St. Paul, that is true, good and beautiful.

It should be emphasized that Newman, in these lectures, was not asked, nor did he intend, to convey a systematic and comprehensive treatise on the nature of university education. He has simply painted in broad the principles that should underlie and govern universities, with a view to the setting up of the Catholic University of Ireland. For various reasons, including his often tumultuous relationship with Archbishop Cullen and other members connected with the university, the dearth of pupils and poverty of the land, Newman’s dream of a great university on Irish soil did not materialize.22 Only the medical school flourished, and it was eventually absorbed into the National University in 1908.23 Yet Newman’s idea over the past century and a half deeply influenced the development of the modern university. The recent Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae embodies much of his thought.24 There, the Holy Father emphasizes the importance of a renewal in Catholic Universities in our times: Pope John Paul states that it is “(his) deep conviction that a Catholic University is without any doubt one of the best instruments that the Church offers to our age which is searching for certainty and wisdom.”25 They are essential to the growth of the Church, and “to the development of Christian culture and human progress.”26 Certainly, if we look around us, we see that a renewal is sorely needed if we are to bring about the culture of life and civilization of love for which our Holy Father has so often called. Anyone who has attended a modern university campus will soon realize that the problem is not just academic, but spiritual. Newman states in his final discourse that for a university to preserve its Catholicity, the Church must breathe “her own pure and unearthly spirit into it . . . fashion and mould its organization . . . watch over its teaching . . . knit together its pupils, and superintend its action.” 27 Or, as the Holy Father proclaims, the university must be born “from the (very) heart of the Church.” 28 Only thus will the Catholic university become what it is meant to be.29

1 Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Apostolic Constitution of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on Catholic Universities, August 15, 1990. Conclusion.
2 I am indebted to A. Dwight Culler’s excellent book, The Imperial Intellect, (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1955), for this biographical summary of Newman’s intellectual development.
3 It is true that in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Church defines the university as “dedicated to research, to teaching and to the education of students” (par. 1). Newman was not against research, but held that this was not the primary task of a university as such, and that those who made the best teachers often were not the most original thinkers and researchers. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, and a balance between research and teaching in the institution itself is an ideal for which one should strive. See the insights by Fergal McGrath, S.J. in his masterly work Newman’s Idea of a University (1981, revised by Msgr. Wm. J. Doheny, C.S.C.), especially chapter 7, pp. 222-226.
4 Idea of University, John Henry Cardinal Newman, (ed. Charles Frederick Harrold). Longmans, Green and Co., New York , London, Toronto, 1957. Discourse VII, section 1, p. 159.
5 Ibid., II, 9, p. 38.
6 Ibid., III, 10, p. 62.
7 Ibid.,VI, 5, p. 119.
8 Ibid.,VII, 6, p. 147.
9 Ibid., VI, 1, p. 111.
10 Ibid., VI, 5, p. 119.
11 Ibid., preface, p. xxxiii.
12 Ibid., V, 6, p. 99.
13 Ibid., V, 1, p. 90.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., preface, p. xxxiii.
16 Ibid., V, 1, p. 90.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., VII, 1, p. 135.
19 Ibid., VI, 1, p. 111.
20 Ibid., XI, 2, p. 192.
21 Cf., Culler, pp. 169-170.
22 Ibid., p. 160.
23 Cf., for example, par. 4, after quoting Newman’s Idea, Ex Corde Ecclesiae states: “. . . a Catholic university is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God”; cf. also par. 23, which quotes the Pastoral Constitution on the Church Gaudium et Spes, n. 59: “the human spirit must be cultivated in such a way that there results a growth in its ability to wonder, to understand, to contemplate, to make personal judgments and to develop a religious, moral and social sense.”
24 Ex Corde Ecclesiae, par. 10.
25 Ibid., par. 11.
26 Idea, IX, 2, p. 191.
27 Ex Corde Ecclesiae, par. 1.

Mr. John Paul Meenan double majored in physiology and psychology before completing a graduate degree in neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario. He also earned degrees in Thomistic theology and philosophy at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Toronto. He is currently Executive Director of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy (www.seatofwisdom.org) in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, which, in its second year of operation, offers students from all over North America a one-year foundational program in liberal arts in the Catholic tradition.