The Fullness of God: Catholics and Religious Exclusiveness

Abstract

One hundred and fifty years ago this Spring, John Henry Newman gave a series of lectures that eventually became the collection of those lectures and other occasional essays we know as The Idea of a University. Newman was a nineteenth century English thinker who became modernity’s most famous Catholic convert. He was born at the beginning of the century (1801), died at the end (1890), and converted from the Church of England at mid-century (1845), just seven years before he gave the lectures that concern us. He gave the lectures that formed the basis of his book because an Irish bishop asked him to, as part of an effort to establish a new Catholic University of Ireland. Newman gave the talks, re-wrote them, combined them with other essays he wrote during the 1 850s and published them as The Idea of a University in 1873. The university no longer exists. His book does exist, but (as the essays that accompany the abridged 1996 Yale edition suggest), there is little agreement about whether it points us backward or forward—where “us” includes students and faculty but also university administrators and university labourers and even donors.One of the curious features of this classic work on Catholic education is that Newman makes little explicit reference to the religious orders who were the founders of most Catholic colleges and universities—Benedictine or Augustinian, Dominican or Franciscan, Notre Dame or Jesuit. Yet, as I hope to show, these orders were clearly in the back of Newman’s mind in ways that shed light on the argument of The Idea as well as on our own circumstances.