The Theocentric Foundation of John Henry Newman's Philosophy of Education

Jane Rupert The Theocentric Foundation of John Henry Newman's Philosophy of Education In his long career spanning die nineteendi century, John Henry Newman ( ? 80 1—? 890) bore testimony to the invisible world tiirough his sermons, books on religion, and lectures and writings in defense of liberal education and on the unity ofknowledge.Whether this invisible world pertained to matters offaith or ideas on education, it was ultimately grounded in God as the Source ofan objective, intelligibly unified universe. In Newman's earliest sermons at Oxford; in An Essay on the Development ofChristian Doctrine (1 84c) in which he examined the coherent development of doctrine; in The Idea ofa University (1 8c2) in which he defends the unity ofsubject matters and the importance of theoria; in The Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) where he traces the continuous elements in his religious formation; in his final work, An EssayinAid ofa Grammar ofAssent (1870) where he describes how we arrive at indemonstrable truths through probabilities from various quarters, Newman affirmed a view of the world as unified, objective, intelligibly connected, and ultimately grounded in God. This consistent and luminous view of the world stood in polar opposition to other contemporary forces that had been gathering LOGOS 3:2 SPRING 2000 NEWMAN S THEOCENTRIC GROUND OF EDUCATION momentum in religion, philosophy, and education. A fundamentally different perspective was to be found in what Newman referred to as liberalism in religion with a subjectively selective view of God and an emphasis on emotional response rather tiian on the intelligible Object to which the response was made; radically different perspectives were represented in the philosophical world of Locke, Hume, and Bentham; and in education, new systems had a diminished sense ofintelligible connections, providing disconnected information displayed like wares in a bazaar, remaining oblivious to what the Greeks had called theoria, the underlying speculative thought that links particulars and completes or makes fully human our understanding ofphenomena.1 To explore Newman's view ofthe world as objective and intelligibly unified, I shall consider briefly his testimony to the invisible world before proceeding to an examination of the way tins world informs his views on education and is ultimately grounded in God. Newman records in the Apologia his sense of the reality of the invisible world from a very early period in his life. In the history of his religious opinions he remarks ofhis school days: I used to wish theArabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans. . . . I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world. He refers to his inward conversion at the age offifteen as continuing this sense of the invisible world. He tells us tiiat his conversion had some influence on my opinions, in die direction ofthose childish imaginations . . . viz. in isolating me from the objects which surrounded me, in confirmingme in my mistrust ofdie reality of material phenomena, and making me rest in the 119 [2? LOGOS thought oftwo and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator. (Apologia, ? 27) The intellectual foundation of Newman's sense of the reality of the invisible was strengthened though his reading as a young man at Oxford. He describes the intellectual truths broughthome to him by Bishop Butler's Analogy and by John Keble's influential collection of poems, The Christian Year (1 827).We are told that one ofthese truths was "what may be called, in a large sense of die word, the Sacramental system; that is, the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments for real things unseen" (Apologia, 139). Finally, he remarks that in his study of the church fathers begun in 1828 there was much"in correspondence with die thought which had attracted me when I was young, and with . . . the Analogy and the ChristianYear." He mentions "the various Economies or Dispensations ofthe Eternal,"which he understood as meaning"that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the outward manifestation ofrealities greater than itself" (Apologia, 146...