by Roy Jenkins
John Henry Newman and the Idea of a University
This is a lightly edited version of a lecture given in the Examination Schools at Oxford in February 1990. It was part of a series organized for the centenary of Newman’s death. All the other participants were considerable Newman and/or theological scholars. I was asked as Chancellor of the University: hence the occasionally defensive tone.
I Have Found the preparation of this lecture one of the most formidable tasks I have ever undertaken, and am inclined to the view that my sense of cancellarian duty to the University -which I interpret as meaning that I should not refuse a serious engagement which it is physically possible for me to fulfil - has led me to take leave of my senses. A few months ago I knew little about Newman, beyond the facts he was a Trinity undergraduate, an Oriel fellow in the years when that college led the awakening from the Oxford slumber of the eighteenth century, and Vicar of St Mary’s. I had some vague knowledge of his part in the launching of the Oxford Movement and of his retreat to Littlemore.
Forty years ago, which is nearly a third of the time back to his sojourn there, I addressed an election meeting in the Anglican schoolroom at Littlemore, but got little response from the small and stolid audience for what I hoped was my felicitous reference to their former parish priest. I think I would have got the correct year for his conversion to Rome, but I was hazy about the exact date of his move to Birmingham, although during my long years as an MP for the other end of that city I was aware of the presence of Oratory and the Church of St Philip Neri and of their Newman connection. I knew that Pope Leo XIII had shown that he was not Pope Pius IX by making Newman a cardinal, and I thought that was a good thing, rather like Cinderella being taken to the ball, and one in the eye for Cardinal Manning, although whatever else may be said about Manning he was neither ugly nor a sister. I had read Apologia Pro Vita Sua as a very young man and had found it surprisingly easy going. But that was about it.
I therefore found myself committed to spend quite a lot of time immersed in Newman, in the Discourses that make up The Idea of a University in particular, and in the circumstances in which they were delivered and/or composed. This concentration left a number of impressions, some of them contradictory, upon my mind. First (a blinding truism) that Newman was a man of exceptional interest. There seems to me to be more room for argument about his piety, although I would hesitate to pronounce on that, his charity, his simple niceness, or even his modesty, than about his fascination. This stems partly from his brilliance as a stylist, even though his imagery could be lush and his use of words was rarely economical, as an ironist, and as a polemicist. But it was more than that. He could write dull passages, sometimes it seems almost intentionally so, because he was getting round a corner in his argument with which he did not feel wholly at ease. But whether or not it was intentional he was always conscious that he had written a relatively dull passage. You can almost feel him waiting in slack water, hardly moving his paddle, yet preparing to swoop into the next stage of the argument as soon as a favourable current developed.
He had star quality, as surely as did, amongst his contemporaries, Gladstone or Tennyson or Carlyle. It is possible to confuse Keble with Pusey, or Pusey with Keble and to wonder which was doing what at a particular time. It is never possible to confuse Newman with anyone. It is possible to be irritated or to be muddled by Newman, but very difficult to be bored by him. This is the more striking because I felt throughout that Newman’s mentalité (my excuse for using the French rather than the English word is that I fondly imagine it to embrace not only the working of his own mind but also the intellectual climate in which he operated) is an ocean away not only from my own but from that of almost anyone, inside or outside the University, with whom I have frequent contact.
Next week these centenary celebrations culminate with a Newman sermon (from the Archbishop of Canterbury) and service in St Mary’s. It will be a notable occasion, but I doubt if any service can recapture the atmosphere in which Newman, having slipped across the cobbled and trafficless High from Oriel, or in later days walked in from Littlemore, and then, in Matthew Arnold’s words, ‘after gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles [of St Mary’s] [and] rising into the pulpit, in the most entrancing of voices breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music - subtle, sweet, mournful’. Yet we are told from another source that Newman’s ‘sermons were read, with hardly any change in the inflexion of the voice and without any gesture on the part of the preacher, whose eyes remained fixed on the text in front of him’. The two descriptions are only superficially incompatible, and whatever was or was not the histrionic quality of Newman’s sermons there was a still more remarkable quality about the later ones, and that was their capacity to excite and divide the University. What would the Vice-Chancellor think? Would the Regius Professor of Divinity retaliate? What would the Heads of Houses do? How might the Provost of Oriel navigate between his peers and his turbulent fellow? Would Convocation censure Tract Ninety, which was a Newman sermon in print, or would dedicated Tractarian Proctors, as happened in February 1845, veto the censure being put to the vote? What would be done by poor Bishop Bagot of Oxford, a High Church sympathizer, who liked a quiet life and found himself presiding over the cockpit of whether or not Anglicanism could be Catholicism.
Even the Duke of Wellington, as Chancellor of the University, and the last who was not himself an Oxonian, could not remain entirely remote from these quivering controversies. In the mid-thirties he had inclined to the High Church side, at least to the extent of being hostile to R. D. Hampden, another member of the Oriel constellation of circa 1820 and Melbourne’s nominee as Regius Professor of Divinity. But he soon thought the Tractarians went too far in trying to torment Hampden. Schism was the great evil, he admonished the Vice-Chancellor, worse even than heresy or impiety. And by 1844 Wellington was determined, to the brink of threatening to resign, that his nomination of the Evangelical Warden Symons of Wadham as the new Vice-Chancellor should be accepted. The Tractarians forced a vote but were overwhelmingly defeated in the Sheldonian, and Wellington responded to this victory with suitable lack of magnanimity by announcing that he would never allow such a vote again. The power of the Chancellor to nominate the Vice-Chancellor is now temporarily in abeyance, but I have found looking into these matters very instructive.
All this was well past and it was nearly nine years since Newman had last entered St Mary’s and six years since he had seen Oxford, except from the railway, when he went to Dublin in May 1852 and delivered on five successive Monday afternoons the lectures that became the first half of The Idea of a University. He records at the end - a sympathetic thought to me today - that they ‘have oppressed me more than anything else of the kind in my life’. However, he did not allow this to put him in a compromising mood towards his audience. Ladies, to his surprise it appears, were present. But he did not pay too much attention to them and wrote: ‘I fancied a slight sensation in the room when I said, not Ladies and Gentlemen, but Gentlemen.’ This may have owed less to a sense of affront at female presence, although Newman was certainly capable of feeling that, as to the fact that he constantly employed the word ‘gentlemen’ as a sort of alpenstock to lever him up the hill of an important stage in his argument. Perhaps it was to remind himself of the difference between delivering a lecture and preaching a sermon. Indeed he carried it to the almost ludicrous extent of spattering the texts of the last few Discourses, which were never publicly delivered but form to my mind the more interesting half of the whole, with this form of address.
The five delivered lectures themselves were a considerable on-the-spot success. They were listened to by high-quality attendances of about four hundred, and Newman was delighted with the quick perception of the Irish audience, just as they were with the distinction of the lecturer and the elevation of his thought. This was as well for the book for which they were written, which Newman called ‘one of my two most perfect works, artistically’ (a str
ong statement for any author), attracted much less critical notice and much smaller sales than his previous recent works. By contrast, its long-term resonance has been enormous, so much so that it has become impossible to dissociate from Newman the evocative phrase of The Idea of a University. John Sparrow made some attempt in his 1965 Cambridge Clark lectures to divert it on to Mark Pattison, who had a more solid influence in nineteenth-century university life than did Newman, but who lacked his capacity to arouse excitement. But Warden Sparrow, who allowed Newman, together with Matthew Arnold, a status equal to Pattison in the relevance to contemporary problems of his mid-Victorian pronouncements on universities, did not succeed in his diversionary attempt. Pattison stands with Jowett as one of the two dominating Heads of Houses of the second half of the nineteenth century, but ‘the idea of a university’ belongs to Newman, even though he never set foot in the only university that he understood between 1846 and 1877, between the ages of forty-five and seventy-six, which was by any standards a substantial and significant segment of his life. And when Professor Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale published The Idea of the University in 1992 the choice and slight variance of title was a deliberate obeisance to the persistent centrality of Newman’s thoughts on the subject.
The circumstances of Newman’s Dublin sojourn were unfavourable from a number of points of view. Just over a year earlier the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Britain, with its panoply of territorial bishops, had been established. Newman was unenthusiastic. He thought seminaries and education were more important than sees. But he was far too new a convert to be able to protest, even though he bore some of the brunt of the reaction against what was widely regarded as aggressive Catholic presumption. The Achilli case in which he was prosecuted for criminal libel against an unfrocked Dominican, who had subsequently been taken up by the Evangelical Alliance and had toured the country denouncing the corruption of Rome, is one of the most curious and ill-fitting episodes in Newman’s life. In a Birmingham lecture in the summer of 1850 Newman had drawn, without checking, on an anonymous pamphlet (in fact written by Bishop Wiseman, later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster) which denounced the personal immorality of which Achilli had been convicted by a papal court in Rome. Achilli, with his Low Church sponsors, got Newman indicted. The evidence that was essential for his defence was constantly on the point of arrival from Rome, but in spite of a special mission by two Birmingham Oratorians, it was never there when it was needed.
There were a series of portentous court hearings before the very anti-Catholic Chief Justice, Lord Campbell. It must have been a great cause célèbre. Newman’s counsel, as was permissible in those days of private fees for Government Law Officers, was the Attorney-General, Cockburn, who was later to be Chief Justice himself and to achieve fame by inventing the definition of obscenity as ‘a tendency to deprave or corrupt those into whose hands [the complained of publication] may fall’, which subsequently stood for ninety years. Cockburn was almost as full of anti-Catholic prejudices as was Campbell, and only attempted to defend Newman by holding the complained-of passage like a piece of soiled linen in his fingertips. In Dublin in 1852 Newman thought that the main hearing would come on at any moment, and faced the real prospect of imprisonment for a year or so. On 24 June the verdict was given against him, but the sentence, for which he had to wait another seven months, was only a fine of £100 (the equivalent of about £4000 today), which led Newman’s supporters to proclaim, almost as though he were a modern Sunday newspaper editor, that the result was a moral victory. But all this lay heavy on his mind in Dublin. In addition, he was barely settled into the new Oratory in Edgbaston. To deal with these concerns he made the inconvenient journey across St George’s Channel and by the new railway between Birmingham and Holyhead several times during the series.
More important, however, was the fact that Newman had embarked on a largely impossible task in Ireland. In 1851 he had accepted an invitation from Archbishop (later Cardinal) Cullen of Armagh to become founding Rector of a Catholic university in Ireland. Cullen, after many years in Rome, where he had developed an authoritarian cast of mind, had returned to Ireland only in 1849, had been appointed apostolic delegate for the foundation of the university, and was to be translated to the see of Dublin in 1852, which meant that he had still more opportunity to interfere with Newman’s plans, although not apparently to reply to his letters. And he was interested only in the new university providing a strictly religious education. He attended at least some of Newman’s lectures, but he must have regarded them as containing a good deal of froth, some of it dangerous.
The position was even more complicated than that. There were also two powerful factions in the Irish hierarchy (and Newman was in some sense responsible to the bishops as a whole) which diverged from Cullen in contrary directions. Archbishop Murray of Dublin (until 1852) was attracted by the London government’s scheme for Queen’s Colleges (one of which in Belfast has survived both in fact and in name, while two others, in Cork and Galway, have survived under different names), which would be open equally to Catholics and Protestants. And Archbishop MacHale of Tuam wanted an Irish Nationalist university, a Fenian college as those of a different view, including Cullen and Murray, might have described it.
What did Newman want? Essentially, he wanted a Catholic Oxford on the banks of the Liffey. And the Catholicism, while it was to infuse its heart, was not to be restrictive of the movement of the limbs, as Dr Cullen might have wished. Nor really was the Dublin location important to Newman. Outside the city might have been better, outside Ireland would have done had the Papal authority not been given for a Catholic university in Ireland. Newman was free of much nineteenth- (and twentieth) century educated English Catholic impatience with the Irish, but he was not much interested in Irish nationalism, and certainly not in a nationalist university. He wanted his university to be for Anglophone Catholics, for England as much as for Ireland. (I am not sure if he embraced the thought of America.) And he wanted it to be a university for gentlemen. In Discourse VIII he came as near as could be to saying that gentlemanliness was next to godliness. Admittedly, he defines (or rather describes) gentlemanliness in a peculiarly self-effacing way. After stating ‘that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain’, he goes into a famous description of high but gentle good manners:
The true gentleman … carefully avoids whatsoever 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. He has eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours when he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip … He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny.
The tests sound as though they would leave most of us to fall by the wayside. In Discourse V, however, he gives a more succinct account of the relation of gentlemanliness both to a liberal education and to religion:
Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gent
leman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life; - these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but still they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless …
Yet for all Newman’s stress on self-effacement and his insistence that refinement is not saintliness (although it ‘may set off and recommend an interior holiness just as the gift of eloquence sets off logical argument’), he leaves us in no doubt that it is not rough diamonds with hearts of gold or ‘nature’s gentlemen’ that he is talking about. It is those who have acquired their urbanity through the traditional processes of a privileged liberal education. In 1856 he put it even more sharply when he wrote that he had gone to Dublin because ‘the Holy See had decided that Dublin was to be the place for Catholic education of the upper classes in these Islands …’
So the conflicts between the desires of the different sponsors, and between aspiration and what was realistically possible, pile up. Newman wanted an idealized version of collegiate life under the dreaming spires, undefiled by the Reformation, trans-shipped to Leinster. And he wanted it to be filled with devoutly Catholic young men who combined the Whig virtues of an easy-going and cultured tolerance with the Tory virtues of a natural acceptance of authority and revealed truth. But neither economically nor sociologically was there room for a Christ Church on St Stephen’s Green, within a quarter of a mile of Trinity moreover, and Archbishop Cullen would not have dreamt of letting him have it even had it been practicable. And to compound the contradictions much of Newman’s thought was conditioned by the pluralism of Oxford, while the minds of others and the constitution with which he had to work were much more influenced by the model of the centralized and professorially controlled Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.
