The Blessed Newman

On Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI officially beatified one of the greatest writers of English prose. John Henry Newman has now taken three of the four steps toward canonization by the Church of Rome. Till now only Thomas More among great English writers has been recognized as a saint, although he wrote his greatest books in Latin.

In his homily, the Pope dwelled on what he called Newman’svision for education, which has done so much to shape the ethos that is the driving force behind Catholic schools and colleges today. Firmly opposed to any reductive or utilitarian approach, he sought to achieve an educational environment in which intellectual training, moral discipline, and religious commitment would come together. The project to found a Catholic University in Ireland provided him with an opportunity to develop his ideas on the subject, and the col­lec­tion of discourses that he published as The Idea of a University holds up an ideal from which all those engaged in academic forma­tion can continue to learn.On the same day, in another part of the English-speaking world, Miriam Burstein (better known to those of us who cherish her blog as The Little Professor) made a strikingly similar point.

Replying to this article in September’s American Spectator by the English philosopher Roger Scruton, who seeks to recover Newman’s vision of a liberal arts education “liberated from the phony subjects and dubious social mores that have occupied the American campus,” Burstein observes thatNewman’s ideal university really is a Catholic university. Not a Baptist university, not an Anglican university, not a secular liberal arts college, but a Catholic one. Newman would certainly not endorse Scruton's decapitated version of the argument, inasmuch as he would claim that, far from lending itself to the kind of conservative stability that Scruton seems to imagine, it actually generates social instability, immorality, and discontent. . . .Burstein’s is not merely a historical argument, correcting a present-minded misinterpretation of a nineteenth-century text. She is also pointing out that Scruton belongs to the educational camp that he criticizes, because (in Newman’s words) he envisions an education in which “the human intellect, self-educated and self-supported, is more true and perfect in its ideas and judgments than that of Prophets and Apostles. . . .” His vision is liberal, not only in seeking to “liberate” the mind from “phony subjects and dubious social mores,” but also from Revealed Religion, which (on Newman’s showing) is more likely to achieve such liberation than unaided reason.

What Burstein does not say is whether Newman’s conception of education must be abandoned as a relic of the past (and the peculiar treasure of Catholics), or whether it can be adapted at all to a secular setting like her own state university. The Pope claims that “all those engaged in academic forma­tion can continue to learn” from Newman—all, not just nineteenth-century Catholics. I’d be interested to hear what Burstein thinks.