The beatification of John Henry Newman

Another challenge to religious belief in Newman’s time came from Charles Darwin’s radical new theory of evolution. Newman sought ways to accommodate the varieties of human experience and knowledge within his philosophy rather than exclude them. He took the view that there is no incompatibility between science and religion as each was a vital branch of human knowledge. “I believe in design because I believe in God, not in a God because I see design”, he wrote.

Ian Ker writes that fundamental to Newman’s rejection of the notion that religion could simply be replaced by secular education in a pluralist society was his belief in faith “as the foundation of individual and social morality”.

When he converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, Newman left behind a comfortable life as a country vicar and Oxford insider and worked among the poor in Birmingham.

Later Newman was invited to establish the first Catholic university in Ireland, the forerunner of such institutions as the present day University College Dublin, whose most famous alumni include the novelist James Joyce. Newman sought to extend the higher education franchise to those who were otherwise denied access by religious affiliation or poverty.

“Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman”, Newman argued. “It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life.”

In addition to his work as an educationalist, Newman is cited as one of the greatest prose writers of the Victorian era, ranked as a rhetorician with Thomas Carlyle, who was a bitter opponent of Newman’s ideas. In response to attacks on his motives and character by Anglican activist Charles Kingsley, Newman in 1864 published the Apologia pro vita sua, in which he describes the process of conversion he underwent.

The book, which was a best-seller when published and is now regarded as a classic among autobiographies, is said to have moved many English readers to convert to Catholicism, and even Kingsley acknowledged its power.

The following year Newman published another of his best-known literary works, the long poem The Dream of Gerontius. A vision of the afterlife, the poem was made into an oratorio by the composer Edward Elgar. The verse “Praise to the Holiest in the height” forms part of one of the best known hymns in the English language.

In the introduction to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens asserts that all of the great religious thinkers of the past, including Newman, are now redundant. There are, however, few religious thinkers more influential today than John Henry Newman, at least in the English-speaking world.

Moreover the importance of Newman’s thought in the secular world is cemented by his idea of the university as inclusive rather than exclusive, and as a place where the student’s intellect is developed rather than simply a degree factory or research facility. A university, Newman believed, should be more than the some of its parts. “The educated mind”, he wrote, “may be said to be in a certain sense religious”.