The Idea of a University

In his second discourse, Newman begins by addressing whether it would be proper for a university to exclude the study of theology and to focus solely on other sciences and branches of knowledge. He suggests that excluding theology would go against the nature of a university, the very name of which suggests universal knowledge. The mission of a university (as opposed, for instance, to a trade school) is to offer teaching upon every branch of knowledge.

To defend the place of theology within a university, Newman makes the case that the content of theology is indeed a form of knowledge. He believes that most of his contemporaries will accept that premise on its face and agree that “such an Institution [that excludes theology] cannot be what it professes, if there be a God” (18). He also anticipates the objection that knowledge might only consist of those things that our senses can directly detect and verify (i.e., the discoveries of physical science). Newman points out, however, that such a definition would exclude disciplines like philosophy, ethics, and much of history. Against those who might portray religion as personal sentiment rather than objective knowledge, he presents the longstanding Catholic position that faith is an objective affair, not simply subjective: “Faith was an intellectual act, its object truth, and its result knowledge” (21). He concludes that if there is a God of the sort envisioned by the classic Christian creeds, a God who exists beyond mere personal sentiment or the spirit of the age, then seeking knowledge regarding his existence and attributes is just as objective a goal as the knowledge of any other science.

Newman begins his third discourse by proposing the unity of all knowledge. Since knowledge seeks to ascertain truth about all that exists, its object is a unified totality, and every academic discipline is necessarily interconnected because of that unity. No single person or discipline can encompass all of this knowledge, and so the various disciplines rely on each other to keep the unified whole in view, while scholars research their own particular subset of that whole. There are even some disciplines whose exclusive focus is the very unity of the whole, disciplines that examine “the comprehension of the bearings of one science on another” (38). Philosophy, for instance, engages to understand issues of truth that bear on the union of all knowledge. Theology would be one step above philosophy, in that it seeks knowledge of the One who made all truth and holds it all together. As such, the knowledge of theology has bearing on every other discipline.

Newman presents a scenario in which a hypothetical university proposed to study only those sciences explainable by physical and mechanical forces, and that denied any place to human volition. Such an institution might develop an idea of truth that suggested that the interactions of human beings and even nations are entirely reducible to physical causes that could be replicated in a laboratory. Newman takes such a view to be ridiculous, and he warns that this is precisely what those universities that exclude theology are doing. By removing a discipline that has explanatory power over all other disciplines, the conclusions of each subset might end up warped and unreliable. The fundamental claims of theology are essential to a full understanding: “[Theology is] not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out is nothing short […] of unravelling the web of University Teaching” (53). If theology, the science that examines the ultimate cause of all things, is removed from the unified circle of knowledge, then the circle cannot hold together.

In his fourth discourse, Newman explores what he considers another likely aspect of the fallout of removing theology: Namely, any discipline might be tempted to exert its method beyond its proper place if other disciplines are removed. The experimental sciences, for instance, might begin to suggest theories on the nature of reality for which no experiments can even be performed. If theology exercises a proper discipline that bears upon the unified knowledge of all things, then its removal will tempt other disciplines to move into the void and attempt to answer theology’s questions by their own methodologies, partial and limited though they are: “[This] is not only the loss of Theology, it is the perversion of other sciences. What it unjustly forfeits, others unjustly seize” (58). By making the assumptions and methods of their own disciplines the measure of all things, these other sciences end up with a misjudged view of reality; instead of seeing the unified whole of knowledge, they are attempting to comprehend the whole from the vantage-point of just their own little subset.

Newman uses analogies to make his point. An economist, for instance, might be led to assume, based on the features of his science, that the growth of wealth is an ultimate good for both persons and nations. This conclusion, however, is contradicted by many religious and philosophical traditions, which hold that far from being an ultimate good, the growth of wealth as its own end can be a serious moral danger. The conclusions of the practitioner of a particular science may be true within their own discipline, but those truths may not be the whole truth, and they cannot serve as the measure of all things. Since theology deals with ultimate truths, it is a necessary part of university teaching. If its spot is vacated, other disciplines, which do not deal in ultimate truths, will try to fill that gap with their own methodologies simply because the human mind seeks to synthesize and make sense of all knowledge in an orderly system.