Newman, Ireland, and Universality

. . . dazzled by phenomena, instead of perceiving things . . .

Non judicavi me scire aliquid inter vos, nisi Jesum Christum, et hunc crucifixum.¹

1. Irish Souls

On November 12, 1851, John Henry Newman, a doctor of divinity but not yet a cardinal, was formally appointed rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, the institution that would open formally almost exactly three years later, on November 3, 1854. In Dublin, almost immediately, he began what he called his "campaign in Ireland" with a series of "Discourses"—lectures "On the Scope and Nature of University Education"—that would eventually become the first part of the completed text of The Idea of the University. Published initially in fortnightly installments during 1852, more or less exactly contemporaneously with their oral delivery, the Discourses caused some small stir in their immediate audience and more widely abroad. Central to these texts is Newman's view that, in a fundamental sense, the phrase "Catholic University" is a tautology. What is often taken in Newman's writings after 1851 simply as the ecumenism that one might expect from a convert is, in fact, more precisely his militant alignment of Catholicism with a totalizing Universalism.²

For Newman, globalization—had he ever had the opportunity to comment on the term—would have described the process by which the world would come to accept and to practice Catholicism. In some respects, Catholicism is to Newman what the neoliberal market economy is to the contemporary globalist: something that ostensibly diminishes the importance of local laws and allegiances in the interest of some immanent and transcendent condition. However, the strict opposition that is implied in this—between Catholic and Protestant, or between "universalizing global" and "localist" (with all that this latter implies: historically located, geographically located, geopolitically located, individualizing, and so on)—is not, in fact, quite so clear-cut as the rhetoric of the opposition might imply. Newman, on occasions, resembles a pragmatist thinker such as Richard Rorty, who once explained his "postmodern bourgeois liberal" stance by arguing that the sociopolitical arrangements of the "western democracies" were "right" in the sense that those arrangements allowed us to live in the way that we were choosing to live: they were right because, in effect, they were suitable and adequate to our concerns. Rorty then argued for a kind of "frank ethnocentrism," in which "we await . . . the time when the Cashinahua, the Chinese and (if it should prove that there are any) the Martians will take part in the same social democratic community."³ In some ways, Newman, too, expects that insofar as humans will fulfill themselves, then they will emerge as Catholics on a global stage.⁴

A more direct comparison of Newman's thinking might be made with that of George Soros, who is unapologetically a "globalist" but who sees that there are at least two orders of globalization always in question: the economic and the political.⁵ Soros is at pains to distinguish between what he calls the economic triumph of global capitalism, on the one hand, and the failures of global political emancipation, on the other. In what for many outside of the business audience he addresses would be an obvious truism, Soros writes, "Capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go hand in hand."⁶ Indeed, he points out that one of the major threats to freedom and democracy in our time is precisely the overintimate relation between business and government, the relation that (in other times and places) has been a major characteristic of fascism. The key to the position adopted by Soros is one that would not be entirely anathema to Newman. Newman is also well aware of these two distinct realms, noting that the business realm in his time is effectively dominated by Protestants and Protestantism; but in his case, the question of government is primarily an issue concerning the "government of the self" and, as such, is for him primarily a theological and not merely a political one, though no less universal for that...