The “Making of Men”: The Idea and Reality of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin by Paul Shrimpton (review)

AFTER PONDERING THIS STUDY of Newman’s work at Oxford to salvage, and in Dublin to create, a Christian and Catholic understanding of higher education, one is left with an appreciation of how difficult it has been for Christians to enter into the reality of what Newman understood. The difficulty in his own day was the failure of Anglicans to correspond to, and the failure of Catholics to want, what he aspired to. In the case of Oxford, the heart of the matter was the resistance to a tutorial system geared to educating the minds of the young in the service of “faith, chastity and love”: “These may be called the three vital principles of the Christian student … because their contraries, viz., unbelief or heresy, impurity and enmity, are just the three great sins against God, ourselves, and our neighbor, which are the death of the soul” (Historical Sketches, vol.3, p.189, n. 42).

Newman’s triple requisite for a life rooted in the great truths of Christian dogma, a life capable of living with loss for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, goes to the heart of the resistance to Newman’s tutorial presence at Oriel College Oxford. In the case of Dublin, it was the opposite: not the failure of the Church to understand the call to sanctification, but the failure of the clergy to understand the education of minds in “the making of men”; that and the fact that, as Newman realized, many Catholics did not want anything more than a secular education for secular advancement. The understandable failure of the laity to want an education not chartered by the government may be considered, by comparison, a significant but secondary reality.

Newman’s hopes for a charter may not have been as unreasonable as has been commonly assumed. What Shrimpton makes clear is that the failure of the government to offer a charter was rooted in its clear appreciation that the Church in Ireland did not want what Newman was proposing: a Catholic laity educated in the virtue of the intellect. The long and painful experience of Dublin shaped what Newman’s later experience confirmed: that the Church “must be prepared for converts”; not just converts for the Church.

Shrimpton reminds us that in “the making of men” there is “no reference to women at the university … for the simple reason that women were admitted only gradually into higher education towards the end of his life” (p. 478). One might add that women seem to have understood Newman’s Idea rather better than men. Women, after all, are the makers of men. The Oxford Movement was promoted to a very high degree by women in the parishes who recognized the help of male celibate priests in “the making of men.” The movement became what it was because of that. Newman’s vocation to the (arduous and difficult) celibate and virginal service of God was (and still) is the sine qua non of his commitment to the (arduous and difficult, Christian) love of family and friends—a commitment that Edward Short has profoundly illuminated in his study of Newman and his family. This calls for emphasis.

Newman as an adolescent recognized his calling by God to “such a sacrifice as celibacy might involve.” The word to underline is “sacrifice.” His commitment to that vocation was confirmed only under trial and temptation, as is every Christian vocation. His understanding of sacrifice in the service of God is essential to his understanding of the Idea of a University that might foster that commitment among adolescents. Men who could sacrifice sexual self-indulgence in fidelity to God’s calling were men who could be trusted to a life of fidelity in face of the infidelity of the day. Women understood that. What Shrimpton’s book does so well is to show us how Newman’s Idea is intelligible...