This was a timely Festschrift. The pieces were gathered together and edited in the short space of ten months, so says the Editor in his Introduction, in order to be presented to Fr Ian Ker on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Fr Ker died just two months later; in some fashion, then, the book stands as a eulogy, an offering to the memory of an acknowledged giant of Newman scholarship.
While most of the essays treat of John Henry Newman, the collection opens with three biographical or character sketches of Ker. Two of them paint him unabashedly after the likeness of Newman’s own characteristics and ideals, without becoming hagiographical. Homage is more effectively paid throughout the volume by way of its approach to Newman himself. The Newman that appears here is recognisably Ker’s, in two senses. First, a distinguishing strength of Ker’s scholarship and of these papers is the attention they lavish on the non-theological aspects of Newman’s lifework and legacy: his literary prowess, his interest in education, his devotional hinterland, and pastoral versatility. Second, just as Ker is chiefly renowned for his biography of the saint, so several of the contributors here elect to examine Newman diachronically, tending to highlight the continuity-in-development of his life and thought as he moved into the Catholic Church.
On the whole, the contributions cohere very well; they gain considerably from being read alongside one another, as common themes emerge under different lights. One recurrent leitmotif, for example, is Newman’s ambivalent ideal of the educated gentleman. The gentleman, as presented in The Idea of a University, is a noble and refined product of civilisation, but not therefore guaranteed as regards moral fibre, and certainly not therefore a Christian. Fr James Reidy discerns a parallel tension between cultural-aesthetic and moral values in the novels of Henry James, vividly illustrating from The Ambassadors a conflict between highbrow worldliness and unenlightened integrity. Andrew Nash’s essay draws attention to the satire of Newman’s Anglican years, when in the British Critic he deployed his wit against the substitution of respectable, bourgeois for truly Christian values; later, Newman would lampoon Robert Peel’s simplistic equation of scientific knowledge with moral progress in The Tamworth Reading Room.
Other essays, by contrast, clarify how Newman thought the life of grace could capitalise on and elevate the benefits of natural refinement. Keith Beaumont’s paper traces and explains the fascination that St Philip Neri held for Newman. Philip is well-known for having been in many respects thoroughly unworldly, yet the qualities that drew Newman to him were his humour and affability, his human sympathy, his openness to learning, art, and culture. In the case of Philip, also of St Paul, Newman found humanistic virtues invigorated and made fruitful by grace. (Another essay on ‘Newman’s Vision of St Paul’ quotes more material to this effect, without offering much in the way of analysis.) Analogously, Edward Short’s enjoyable contribution on ‘Newman, Gibbon, and the Criteria of Style’ finds Newman insisting that such qualities as truthfulness and humility transfigure merely aesthetic criteria of good prose writing by enlarging and ennobling the objects on which a writer may discourse.
Andrew Meszaros brings some theological light to these issues, reading Newman’s writings on university education with the sensibility of a systematic theologian. Specifically, Meszaros asks how in Newman’s vision the ‘direct end’ of a university education – namely cultivation of the intellect – is to be related to the ‘indirect end’ of religious, moral-spiritual formation. Meszaros discerns seven principles of thought that Newman seems to have considered necessary for cultivating a genuine ‘philosophical habit of mind’: these include the propositions that ‘Reality is intelligible’ and ‘Truth does not contradict truth’, as well as several tenets of a theistic worldview. While these principles might be notionally assented to on a natural philosophical basis, the gift of faith may transform this into a real assent, one that finds integral expression in Christian living: liturgy, prayer, the cultivation of virtue, the exercise of charity. A Catholic university, therefore, provides an appropriate home-context for intellectual endeavour. In view of the fundamental human unity of mind and heart, opportunities for moral and spiritual growth in a university setting should by no means be relegated among the extracurricular optional add-ons. Without adverting to the fact, Meszaros highlights the Aristotelian bent of Newman’s thinking and its convergence with at least some Thomist understandings of the relationship of nature and grace, reason, and faith.
Paul Shrimpton, addressing Newman’s idea of the tutor, helpfully showcases a key element in Newman’s concrete methods for cultivating intellectual and moral virtue in tandem. On the basis of his experience learning and teaching at Oxford, Newman came to conceive of the tutor as one who by close personal influence, even friendship, with his charges would teach them how to think and direct their passage into adult maturity. The tutor was a much-needed counterpart to the professor, whose task was to impart knowledge systematically through less personal lectures and classes. Despite the failure of Newman’s attempt to integrate tutorial and professorial teaching at the Catholic University in Ireland, Shrimpton suggests that the model was elsewhere vindicated by a Royal Commission of 1852, which recommended a basically similar proposal for the University of Oxford: those recommendations laid the basis for the distinctive teaching method of Oxford and Cambridge to this day.
Shrimpton introduces and concludes his essay with an eye on post-Covid pedagogy, advocating greater awareness of the interpersonal and pastoral dimensions of a fully human education. Granted, there is a lesson here for universities especially, which are so much driven by the demands of research and academic administration, but it strikes me that the intensity of Newman’s approach would raise eyebrows nowadays for other reasons than sheer effort or cost. The profound intimacy Newman envisaged between tutors and students could be perceived in an age of suspicion as a form of indoctrination, a promotion of cult-following, a danger to good safeguarding practice. Currently prevailing conceptions of ‘pastoral’ care aim for risk aversion and some sort of neutrality as regards the character and views of its charges. While Newman confronts modern education with the question of higher ideals – friendship, truth, moral excellence – modern educationalists would no doubt raise their own questions about the safeguards in Newman’s methods and, indeed, whether in practice they can be applied outside a strictly confessional context.
Analogous remarks could be made in all the instances where the writers in this volume stray into cultural critique. In the opening line of his first contribution, Edward Short declares: ‘While St John Henry Cardinal Newman never lacked for admirers in his own time, he had few critics, though, then, as now, many detractors masquerading as critics’. On the whole, the contributors take Newman’s would-be critics more seriously than this avowal might suggest. They tend nonetheless to sidestep questions that contemporary readers really ought to pose. The principles of thought identified by Meszaros rely on a traditional metaphysics hardly palatable in a post-Kantian, let alone a post-Derridean academy: does Newman’s theory of education therefore demand a rolling back of the modern philosophical tradition? Stephen Morgan presents an interesting if too-brief discussion of Newman’s improving attempts to apply the findings of Church history to contemporary questions, between his early work on the Arians and The Development of Christian Doctrine. Yet Morgan does not sufficiently consider the critique this developing practice might imply of Newman’s historical method.
Fr Ker always insisted on Newman’s relevance to the Church and society in our own time. These essays admirably follow that lead, though they often end up indicating how far the revered Cardinal stands at a remove from the 21st century situation. Critical awareness of this distance should allow questioning between present and past to go both ways.
