The habit of rebuking those whom he considered were betraying the Church grew on him. What others called intolerance he called adherence to principles. He was jeered when he refused to conduct the marriage of a parishioner called Jubber because she was the daughter of a Baptist pastry-cook and had not been baptised according to the rites of the Church of England. Arnold, by now headmaster of Rugby, was a special target for his jokes – Arnold had once published an ill-judged book on reform of the Church so that Dissenters (but not Quakers, Unitarians or Roman Catholics) might be deemed to be in communion with Anglicans. Newman was reported as saying – his throwaway lines were quoted everywhere – ‘But is Arnold a Christian?’ He had not in fact quite said that. Someone had said of a German theologian who the Tractarians suspected was unorthodox, ‘Arnold said he was a Christian’: to which Newman replied with a laugh, ‘Arnold must first show that he is a Christian himself.’ After Newman’s campaign against Hampden an article came from the School house at Rugby. It was titled ‘The Oxford Malignants’, and it stigmatised Newman and his followers as persecutors.
By 1839 Newman had lost the support of the old High and Dry party. In 1841 he scandalised Oxford beyond hope of redemption. That was the year when he published Tract 90, just before his fortieth birthday. In it he declared that the Thirty-Nine Articles in the Prayer Book, though they were conceived in an uncatholic age, could be ‘subscribed by those who aim at being Catholic in heart and doctrine’. Newman still believed that the Church of Rome was wrong in practice. But in dogma? Even though some of the articles expressly condemned Roman beliefs, Newman argued that a way could be found to reconcile the two churches. Indeed the articles required re-casting. ‘Let the church sit still,’ he wrote, ‘let her be content to be in bondage … let her go on teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies.’ The time would come, so Newman’s reader inferred, when the Church would be reunited with Rome.
Tract 90 confirmed what High Churchmen as well as Evangelicals had feared. It convinced them that Newman was a popish agent infiltrating the Church of England to bring it over to Rome. All but two of the heads of houses condemned it, bishop after bishop penned charges denouncing it. The row was not a theological dispute alone. It penetrated to the heart of academic life. The Provost of Oriel refused to write testimonials for those candidates for ordination known to admire Newman and Pusey. The new brand of High Churchmen had little hope of being elected to fellowships. Colleges changed the hour of hall dinner on Sunday to prevent their undergraduates from attending St Mary’s, where Newman preached. Tittle-tattle about the latest Tractarian perversions replaced urbane conversation. A lady in an omnibus turned to the clergyman next to her and asked him whether he realised that each Friday Dr Pusey sacrificed a lamb. ‘My dear Madam, I am Dr Pusey, and I assure you I do not know how to kill a lamb.’ Tell-tale informers flitted about the streets insinuating, intriguing and whispering that so and so was unsound, another a known Romaniser, a third had been seen going to Littlemore, where Newman was conducting a retreat in which each day was governed by monastic discipline from Matins and Laud to Vespers and Compline. Newman had become the most notorious don in Oxford.
In 1842, the year after Tract 90 was published, Newman in effect retired as a don. He moved to Littlemore, a village outside Oxford, to lead a life governed by monastic rules and even penances such as hair-shirts and whips. The country, as well as Oxford, waited for him to convert to Rome. They waited for three years. Then at last he took the fatal step.
When Newman went over to Rome, the effect was cataclysmic. Dozens followed him – to the grief and fury of their families. He left behind him far more who felt betrayed. They believed he had found in Anglicanism the via media between vulgar Protestantism and Roman idolatry. For him, too, it was tragic: Keble and old Dr Routh, the President of Magdalen, did not shun him, but many of his closest friends broke with him for ever. Of his own family all were estranged except for one sister.
Yet Newman had one further contribution to make as a don. Some years later as a Roman Catholic priest he was appointed President of the new Catholic university in Dublin. Was that university to be a denominational university for Roman Catholics as one bishop wanted? Or was it to be, as another wanted, solely for Irishmen and a spearhead against the English ascendancy? Newman wanted neither. He soon resigned but the experience inspired him to write his academic utopia, The Idea of a University.
‘For all the complicating effect of its religious setting,’ wrote Anthony Quinton,* ‘there is still no more eloquent and finely judged defence of intellectual culture than Newman’s.’ Pater thought it perfection in its own sphere, just as Lycidas was the perfect poem. G. M. Young considered that all other books on education could be pulped so long as we were left with Aristotle’s Ethics and Newman’s Idea.†
The university, Newman argued, was a temple for teaching universal knowledge. Students should study the sciences that advance knowledge and the arts and professions relevant to everyday life. But not vocational subjects; nor subjects that lack general ideas – antiquarianism is not history. The university did not exist to create knowledge. Its purpose was to disseminate ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’, to use his admirer Matthew Arnold’s words. Of course, the teachers should ‘study’, but the notion of systematic research did not swim into Newman’s ken. Originality, discovery, students dedicated to a single branch of learning, were contrary to his idea of a university. He accepted that some scholars want to devote themselves exclusively to study: let them do so – but in an institute. Nor did he sanction students studying whatever took their fancy – what the Germans called Lernfreiheit.
Students will graduate cack-handed unless they are taught how to relate their own specialism to every other and what the meaning is of the totality. That is why everyone must study philosophy. Philosophy will teach them the difference between scholarship and ‘viewiness’, i.e. journalism or the kind of education – so Newman and most Oxford dons considered – the University of London offered.
Learning is not the sole function of a university. It is also a milieu, a place where a spell is cast over the student that binds him to it for the rest of his life. The college inside the university was the sorcerer that cast the spell. Without the spirit of a college, run by tutors who regarded their office as a calling and not another step in the journey to rich livings or benefices in the Church, a university becomes a mere examining machine. A university is nothing unless it is a place where a student lives, eats and converses with other students, learns to socialise, to understand human beings other than himself. If you specialise and grind away at a subject you may become egotistical, self-centred, uncivilised. The true university taught a man to be a gentleman, one ‘who never inflicts pain … avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast … guards against unseasonable allusions or topics which may irritate. If he be an unbeliever, he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion …’ A university is an assemblage of learned men [who] ‘adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect, to consult and to aid each other.’
The satirical will observe that this was hardly a description of the role Newman had played in Oxford; what is more Newman did not hesitate to call the habit of mind that he was advocating ‘liberal’ (a word which in his Oxford days was synonymous with sin). It was a habit that inculcates ‘freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom’. It will not be acquired unless the student first learns the idea of rule and exception, and the scientific method of assessing evidence. Nor will he acquire it merely by reading books. The cultivation of the intellect is a goal in itself. Newman had no