This is an extract from the Introduction to the book by Jane Rupert entitled John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind: Reason in Religion, Science and the Humanities (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), appearing here by kind permission of the author and publisher. All rights reserved.
s John Henry Newman prepared the discourses of The Idea of a University in 1852, he was very aware of the changing intellectual culture in the period. Increasingly, the exclusive domain of empirical thought and its suppression of other kinds of reasoning led to an outright dismissal of the cultivation of two kinds of verbal reason pertaining to the moral and social domain of humankind that was the province of the liberal arts. Newman addressed an audience that included those who accepted neither literature nor theoretical thought as legitimate paths of reason. Literary studies were viewed as a frivolous cultivation of the feelings and imagination only; theoretical thought transgressed the accepted law of reason by beginning at the opposite end of reason from empirical science. In order to defend the kinds of thought taught through liberal studies before a tribunal that did not recognize them as reason, Newman had to plead their cause by describing how reasoning works in the two domains of literature and theoretical thought.
As a defender of these two distinct kinds of reason increasingly under siege in the modern era, Newman turned to the pre-modern period when the liberal arts were cherished as a training ground for reason and considered important for their development of persons as persons rather than for any immediate material benefit they provided.
Newman finds matter for his defense in the luminous articulation of the nature of reasoning in Greece, the source of the liberal arts in the west. Like Isocrates (436-338 BCE), the father of literary education, he suggests the nature of literary thought through exploring the significance of the word, logos, the Greek word for reason. He describes the nature of theoretical reasoning by drawing on Aristotle’s articulation of it in the Nicomachean Ethics, a text long familiar to Newman from his student days at Oxford.
To those who would dismiss literature as feeling and imagination unconnected to reason, then, Newman claims the opposite by identifying literature with logos, or reason. In its application to literature, logos refers to thought that begets words in such a way that words resonate with a writer’s interiority, making thought and word indissolubly one. The textured, personal use of language which defines literature also reflects the nature of literature’s personal thought and judgment. Newman observes that this literary rationality is antithetical to the impersonal thought and judgments of science as reflected in science’s impersonal, univocal use of language.
In literature, the whole of who a writer is as a thinking, feeling, imagining being converges and is brought to bear on the subject matter. Newman refers to the unmistakably personal voice in the literary use of language that reflects a personal centre of thought and that establishes a personal connection to the subject through drawing on all the writer’s own knowledge and experience. The student instructed in the liberal arts through literature is engaged in this personal mode of reasoning through which we understand matters pertaining to the human and divine. A gain in a command of language as used in literature is a gain in the command of thought and personal judgment characteristic of literary reasoning.
In describing the second kind of reason that pertains to the liberal arts’ interior domain of judgment, Newman again turns to a Greek word which also has no exact English equivalent for the idea it conveys. When he elaborates the meaning of theoria, a scientific reasoning from first principles or ideas which includes an understanding of their consequences, he speaks to those who consider such reasoning both suspect in itself and irrelevant to an empirical age. The theoretical or speculative thought that Aristotle prized as the most authoritative kind of knowledge, because it sees the principles that control and direct matters, is antithetical both to literary rationality that seeks to fully understand particular matters through the exercise of personal judgment and to modern science which begins from the opposite pole of thought in its sense observation of particulars. Theoria’s explicit understanding of universal, underlying ideas independent of personal or party interest is what makes its reasoning scientific -- and is exactly what Newman himself sought in his articulation of the archetypal idea of liberal studies.
Related Material
Bibliography and Further Reading
Marrou, Henri-Irénée. Histoire de l'Éducation dans l'Antiquité. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1950.
Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.
Rupert, Jane. John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2011.
_____. "Newman and Bacon." The Downside Review 118:410 (2000) 45-67.
_____. "Newman on Pedagogical Practice." Newman Studies Journal 17:1 (2020) 103-16.
_____. "Newman and the Tyranny of Method in Contemporary Education" in Newman, Doctor of the Church. Oxford: Family Publications, 2007.
_____. "The Theocentric Foundation of John Henry Newman's Philosophy of Education." Logos 3:2 (2000) 118-44.
Created 2 August 2023