About Newman

1. His Early Years

To fully recognize the salience of Newman's achievement for the 21st century, it would be helpful to consider the situation in which he found himself. Newman was born on 21 February 1801 in London. He grew up as the eldest of six children in the home of a middle-class banking family. They were well connected on his mother's side. According to some authors, his parents were Evangelicals. However, Ker (1994) contests this. He offers as proof Newman's own testimony suggesting that they were straight-forward adherents of "the national religion of England."

His infancy and boyhood was lived out in a time when the ferment of the radical social and political thinking of Paine (1969), Godwin (1976), Wollenstonecraft (1992) and the early Colderidge (Morrow 1991) was a fading memory. The first phase of the French Revolution, with its heroics, hubris and horrors, was now past. The various Napoleonic misdaventures had begun to be elaborated on the European continent and to influence the English towards a more conservative bent.

Furthermore, English industry and science had been rising for some time as a force unparalleled in human history. The commercial interests that so disturbed both the young and mature Coleridge continued to go from strength to strength (Morrow 1991). The substantive might and tactical brilliance of the British military now "protected" the global empire that its exploits had helped to gain for the nation. However, the loss of the American colonies was still fresh. War with the newly formed nation would errupt again as Newman approached his teenage years.

Religious liberalism and skepticism regarding the "eternal verities" of religion were on the rise among both clergy and laity alike. In many ways, the majority of the popoulation that either no longer attended Divine services or was serviced by the newer traditions deemed the Established Church irrelevant. Additionally, the government would eventually come to the conclusion that the financial arrangements for supporting such a church and its institutions were both anachronistic and inefficient. The lands and monies could be used elsewhere. Thus, there would be need of a drastic overhauling.

Yet, British nationalism was strong and the Established Church did play an integral part in the bulwark arrayed against enemies from without and within. This perspective was somewhat different than viewing the Church as a hospital to cure the powerful of their sins or a home to care for the dispossessed as the New Testament Letter of James might have put it. The enemies within included the English Catholics and the various ethnic groups seeking an equitable political and cultural order, such as the Irish agitators who supported the likes of Napoleon.

Like many other adolescents approaching a major change in life circumstances, such as Marian Evans (George Eliot), Newman had, through the influence of a schoolmaster, an "evangelical" experience when he was fifteen. This experience affected him significantly for some eight years. It would remain a counterpoint to his thinking for the rest of his life. Within the year, Newman entered Trinity College at Oxford. He was a very young and immature man by his own admission.

2. His Transition to Oxford

Oxford, on the other hand, was the English fruit of an ancient tradition adapted from Paris and Salamanca. The roots of this tradition in Bologna extended back almost to the time of William's Norman invasion of England (Harris et al. 1983). Both academic and moral standards were variable between the colleges of Oxford. They were often quite lax and disengaged from the surrounding communities and nation according to some (McGrath 1962). However, an impetus for change was in the air.

Unfortunately, those reforms did not arrive early enough to spare Newman the trials and trepidations of having to organise and execute most of his undergraduate studies for himself. Although he read and studied for long hours and did gain a pass, this lack of supervision, developmental guidance and personal support had its effects. It resulted in a failure to achieve the honours level for which he was capable of achieving. To everyone but Newman, this appeared to end both his academic aspirations and his cherished hopes for embedding his life among the spires of Oxford.

To the astonishment of those around him and through a prodigious effort, a more mature Newman redeemed his academic career. He became a Fellow at Oriel College which brought him great personal relief and satisfaction. It also gave him the security of tenure. As a committed celibate, he would be able to maintain the conditions of a Fellow thoughout his life after taking Holy Orders.

Oriel was considered relatively progressive in terms of its intellectual endeavours and achievements. The Fellows made every effort to personally engage Newman. They sought to draw him out of his shell of deference into the broader world of collegial intellectual endeavour and scholarship. Newman was supported on many sides and encouraged by his engagement with keen minds and generous hearts. This was quite different from his earlier experience.

During his time at Oriel and St. Mary's, Newman had many opportunities to reflect on pedagogical issues. He learned about various university teaching, research, administration, pastoral and financial functions during his years as a vice-principal, research assistant, public tutor and examiner, bursar, editor, musician, dean, proproctor and author. He became keenly concerned about the religious and moral, as well as intellectual and social development of his charges. Newman and his small band of tutors sought to provide personal support for students beyond the regular timetable without charging additional fees.

They systemised their approach to engaging the materials. Critically, they attempted to ensure that the students understood the underlying relationships between the various topics of study as well as the various dimensions of each topic. Newman and his peers sought to restrain the excesses of the profligate and deliberately cultivated the serious minded and promising students. They refused to show partiality to the wealthy and powerful on the one hand or treat the students as an undifferentiated mass on the other. The band sought more equitable relationships with their students and each other.

Upon the elevation of his mentor and friend to the position of Provost of the College, Newman was made the rector of the University Church, St. Mary's. He was a select preacher of the University who attracted a wide following. To his amazement, this included numbers of women. However, his unwillilngness to compromise his sense of integrity on some of the points relating to college tutorship led to his Provost no longer providing him with new students in 1830.

3. His Founding and Loss of a Movement

By 1833, Newman had finished with his last charge. For all his love of teaching and pastorally supporting students, he looked back on this as a "God-send". The relief from his pedagogical duties allowed him to address an issue of growing concern. During his time at Oxford as a clergyman and academic, Newman had gravitated towards the inchoate Anglo-Catholic coterie as he looked for the authentic roots of the Church of England.

The Calvinism of his earlier "evangelical" experience and tutelage was now an insufficient support for the pastoral realities that he faced. So were the emotionally cathartic worship services and the ostensibly otherwordly oriented guides that increasingly rubbed shoulders with the prominent among the "wordly." New sources for sustaining faith and a holy life were required.

Before this new phase of his life was to unfold, Newman spent some time touring through Europe both with friends and by himself. Although he endeavoured to steer clear of the Roman Catholics, he met the English Monsignor Wiseman in Rome. He also managed to observe Mass in a number of places during his journey. During his time away, he had an increasing sense of destiny with regards to the issues arising in England. Although frequently ill, sometimes seriously, he knew that he would not die as he had important work for God to do back home. He was almost feverishly impatient to begin.

Upon his return to England, Newman started and was a key mover in the Tractarian Movement at Oxford. The aim of the movement was to establish a solid theological foundation for Anglicanism between "Protestantism and Popery". It was intended that this foundation would withstand the rising flood of religious liberalism and the general resolution of life to merely practical affairs and personal gain alone.

For their part, Newman and his peers sought to resolve a reasonable faith to guide life lived to the fullest. It would avoid an unreasoning fideism (fundamentalism) on the one hand and an unreasonable relativism (rationalism) on the other. In Newman's mind, Protestantism was derivative and ultimately unable to stand on its own. Popery was accretive and unworthy of consideration in its corruption.

In referring to the original impetus for the Oxford Movement, Newman suggested that something more than committees, letters and associations were needed. He held that, while systems arise from the endeavours of individuals, nothing novel and of great import arises from a system. It required the work of individuals who would influence other people whose own zeal of heart and intellect would, then, create in turn a movement.

Newman considered a university to be the ideal epicenter of such a movement. To build the movement's foundations, Newman drew stones from the quarry of unsystematised wisdom received from the 17th century Anglican Divines and drove piles down to the spiritual and theological "soundness" of the 5th and earlier centuries. As the well-intentioned and social justice minded "evangelicals" were both somewhat friendly and effectively a theological effervescence, Newman located the Movement's main antagonists in another quarter. Their opponents were to be found in the powerful adherents of the "high and dry" wing of the Church whose major well-spring was the Book of Common Prayer.

As a result of the Movement's success in galvanising a strong following among both the general reading populace and persons of eminence in the Church of England, Newman's personal and professional fortunes soared. He continued to champion what might be termed a Via Media for a number of years. However, his illusions were shattered by the generally hostile public response to what would be his last tract, Number 90. This tract sought to show that there was nothing in the Thirty-nine Articles which had established the Church of England that was against the essence of Catholic faith extending back through the "Fathers of the Church" to the Founders.

This came too close to Popery in the minds of many. As a result of the consequent charges brought against him from an ever-expanding number of Bishops, Newman experienced a deep crisis. It was not a crisis of personal faith so much as a sense of rootlessness or lack of groundedness within the Anglican tradition. His earlier admission that the Via Media was merely a paper religion compared to the concrete realities of "Protestantism and Popery" would remain the case. People generally refused to profess and act in such a way as to make the Via Media a real option as a religious system.

4. His Transition to Roman Catholicism

In 1843, at the age of forty-two, Newman left his familiar world of the academic grove and university parish life to enter a retreat that he had prepared apart. Here he, again, considered his intellectual stance and the pilgrimage that had led to his position. His continued study of the history of the Church and its theological disputes and his circulating through and around the key issues convinced him that he could neither go backwards nor stay put. Yet, he felt that he could not turn to Rome due to scruples he held relating to his misunderstanding of Roman veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Saints.

Newman was helped to understand that, while many expressions of veneration were beyond the pale of English taste and some were beyond the authorisation of the Church, authentic veneration did not interpose between the soul of a person and his or her Creator. Instead, proper veneration was like the respect Newman had shown to all of the friends and supporters who had helped him throughout the development of his life of mind, faith and action. Indeed, Newman had had his personal experience of the Communion of Saints, including Mary.

There was more than a little pride and prejudice influencing Newman's previous reasoning and reluctance. When reflecting on why he had been so implacably opposed to the Roman Catholic Church, even when he found so much in its favour, he writes something of significance. It highlights for us the depth of the moral, as well as psychic and intellectual, conversion that Newman had been experiencing over the years which was the fruit of his earlier "religious" conversion (Blehl 1963:75-76):

The words in which I made my retraction have given rise to much criticism. After quoting a number of passages from my writings against the Church of Rome, which I withdrew, I ended thus: "If you ask me how an individual could venture, not simply to hold, but to publish such views of a communion so ancient, so widespreading, so fruitful in Saints, I answer that I said to myself, 'I am not speaking my own words, I am but following almost a consensus of the divines of my own Church. They have ever used the strongest language against Rome, even the most able and learned of them. I wish to throw myself into the system. While I say what they say, I am safe. Such views, too, are necessary for our position.' Yet I have reason to fear still that such language is to be ascribed, in no small measure, to an impetuous temper, a hope of approving myself to persons I respect, and a wish to repel the charge of Romanism."

In 1845, Newman entered into the worldwide communion of the Roman Catholic Church with its continuity to the ancient Christians. This meant soon leaving his beloved Oxford and its rich historical tapestry, security and status. By refusing to compromise his position, he also left the power and prestige of his position in the Established Church. He resided abroad for a time and became a Catholic priest in 1847. This year has become known as "Balck Forty-seven" among some of the Irish because of the social and cultural devastations that lead to the famine and the decline that extended beyond it.

5. His Founding of a Priestly Society and a University

Indeed, during this time, Europe again whirled round in a pervasive foment for technological, economic, political, cultural and religious emancipatory change that exploded into a utopian hope for genuine democracy and equality among the people. Yet, such hope was brutally repressed by the governments of the European nation-states in 1848. Newman returned to England and established a Congregation of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Birmingham during 1849. The Oratory was a society of priests who worked and lived together without vows. They cared for the social, intellectual and spiritual well-being of the common folk, as well as the rich.

In 1851, Archbishop Cullen contacted Newman and requested him to found a Catholic university in Dublin. The request came at a time when many of the Irish Catholics had made an accomodation with the powers that be. They were sending their offspring to mixed schools that disallowed any religious instruction that did not inclucate a growing distain for religious thought and life. This distain was increasingly popular among the powerful and well educated of England. The Catholic parents hoped that their children would benefit materially and socially from such an educational association (Svaglic 1960:xvi-xvii). This had been satisfactory at the earlier levels of education; why would it not be acceptable at the higher?

In seeking to help the populace to understand the intention of the new Catholic university, to gain the support of the middle and upper classes among the Irish Cathlics, as well as the goodwill of the English rulers, Newman developed his discourses. The Idea of a university was a rhetorical masterpiece in that it sought to meet each audience on its own terms. In it, Newman sought to persuade each audience to move towards a deeper understanding of the fundamental issues involved. He also sought to aprise them of the potential consequences of failing to both understand and engage the realities within which they found themselves.

The oratorical delivery of the discourses ended mid-way through their number, as Newman was required to face charges of libel in England (Svaglic 1960:xiii). Ironically, an ex-Dominican friar who had become an anti-catholic lecturer for the "evangelicals" had had the charges brought against him. Newman had prepared, at great expense, a defense that substantiated what he had written. The media of the time deemed that the charges were spurious in the light of Newman's evidence. Yet, the anti-papist courts upheld the charges.

Newman was no longer in the camp of the politically and economically powerful. He was ordered to pay an exorbitant sum in terms of damages and court fees. This was on top of the expenses that he had incurred already in preparing his defense. Telling what he deemed to be the truth and defending it always seemed to cost Newman dearly. Had Catholics around the country and, indeed the world, not subscribed to pay off these debts, it is possible that Newman would have come face-to-face with a Dickensian prison system. The middle-aged priest expressed his gratitude in a dedication on the front-peice of the Idea that was dated, The Feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 21 November 1852.

After his return to Dublin, Newman would spend several yars seeking to administer the Catholic University. He would continue to write on the educational issues facing him there. Even after his resignation and return to England in 1858, he continued to write and support his successor with advice and understanding (McGrath 1951). He returned to Birminham and worked to educate both the youth and adults of that city in the Catholic Faith along side his peers.

His achievement, though seemingly a failure in the eyes of the world, has continued to influence Catholic educators such as myself.

The above has been adapted from a draft of a Lonergan Workshop (Melbourne) paper that I presented in 2003. It is the appendix to "Education for Cosmopolis" and the Australian Academic in the Twenty-first Century, or Solve for x. Unless otherwise indicated, the material was drawn from Newman's (1956a,b) writings and my general knowledge of Newman's life and times.