The Idea of a University

These chapters are critical for understanding Newman’s context in delivering his nine discourses in Part 1 (“University Teaching”). Whereas many of the previous discourses could easily have been delivered to any audience, these two directly address the concerns of Newman’s primary audience: Roman Catholics. Here he speaks as a Roman Catholic to Roman Catholics and devotes himself to addressing some of their hesitancies regarding his proposed university system. These two discourses’ tone and rhetoric indirectly suggest that his audience is not entirely convinced by Newman’s model of education. Newman’s use of polemic, then, shifts into the related discipline of apologetics (the defense of a system of ideas). One of the implicit concerns Newman addresses is whether his model of education leaves any significant place for the Catholic Church. While his earliest discourses argued for the necessity of theology to university teaching, the preceding section (Chapters 5-7) so extolled the benefits of intellectual formation that some of his audience may have wondered about the remaining relevance of religious ministry.

Newman addresses that concern in two main ways. First, he describes the limitations of intellectual formation when people treat it as a substitute for religion. Newman claims that if a person is formed by a university education such as the one he describes (including its theological education) yet is not a religious person, they will effectively turn their conscience and their philosophical perspective into a personal religion of their own. To the Catholic mind, such a “philosopher’s religion” must be found wanting, because it does nothing to address the human need for salvation; it may paper over some sins with a cultivated veneer, but it has no access to divine grace to address the roots of sin. By this line of reasoning, the Catholic Church will always remain necessary, if only because it is the means of salvation. Second, Newman points out that while a university education aims for the perfection of the intellect, the intellect is not the whole of the human person. A university education does not entail moral perfection, and so there remains a need for training in virtue.

Another concern of Newman’s audience is the relationship between science and religion. Throughout his discourses, Newman seeks to reassure his hearers that all truth is God’s truth, and so if science is a vehicle for discerning certain truths, then Catholics should have nothing to fear from it. In Discourse 9, Newman contextualizes both science and literature within university life and explains why the teaching of the Catholic Church is a necessary complement to them. In the case of science’s relationship with religion, Discourse 9 is one of Newman’s clearest explications of this theme: essentially, that science and religion proceed by different intellectual methodologies (inductive and deductive, respectively). Both methodologies are appropriate to their fields, but because they are different, each set of practitioners sometimes view the other methodology with suspicion.