This is an excellent study of Newman on education. The opening chapter identifies what falls under the description ‘Dublin Writings’. They are all connected with the project of the Catholic University, were intended as public or official statements, and are concerned with Newman's ‘Dublin period’ (September 1851 to August 1859). They include The Idea of a University (the Lectures and Essays as well as the Discourses), the papers gathered in Rise and Progress of Universities (2001), some sermons, reports, and other papers, as well as articles that appeared in two publications of the Catholic University, its Gazette and Atlantis.
The first chapter identifies the relevant works, contextualises them in the events of Newman's time in Dublin, and summarises the thinking they contain. His understanding of the human person is central because it is fundamental to his philosophy of education.
The second chapter considers Newman's interlocutors in developing his ideas on the human person. In descending order of importance, and ascending order of critical reception by Newman, they are Aristotle, Cicero, and Locke. Bottone shows how in these writings Newman depends significantly on Aristotle. Most important are Nicomachean Ethics, Rhetoric, and Poetics, the old Oxford curriculum of Newman's undergraduate days which, curiously, he did not use again until after he became a Catholic. Newman admires Aristotle for what he says about the human person while making original use of his ideas, applying them to the social body that is a university and developing his comments on intellectual virtue. Representing the liberal, educated man, Cicero, whose rhetoric also contributes significantly to the philosophy of education, helps Newman to show the achievements and limits of pagan humanism. Newman believed that philosophies of education based on utility undervalue the human person and he regarded Locke as the ultimate source of all such philosophies. By comparing their divergent approaches to the study of ancient and foreign languages, Bottone shows that Newman is correct in this view of Locke.
The third chapter is a systematic reflection on the idea of the human person as developed by Newman under the influence of these interlocutors and in view of the project of a Catholic University. The constitutive elements of the human person are intellectual, moral, and aesthetic. The direct object of a University is the development of the mind. Intellectual virtues are needed if human beings are to acquire knowledge, unify it appropriately, and use it wisely. A common-sense realist in epistemology, Newman presumes the possibility of knowledge and is more interested in its meaning.
The relationship between knowledge and morality is not straightforward. Newman's gentleman is not yet a Christian saint: the famous portrait is ironic since the gentleman might yet place his knowledge and ‘virtue’ at the service of purposes that are less than Christian. Newman is critical of utilitarian, deontological, and sentimentalist approaches to ethics, Bottone claiming him (plausibly) as a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicist who anticipates Anscombe and MacIntyre. Certainly Newman is interested in the kind of character developed through education. He rejects utilitarian reductions of the purpose of the University, saying that whereas the good is always useful, the useful is not necessarily good. Knowledge is something desirable for itself and not just for the uses to which it can be put or for the consequences it might be presumed to entail. As well as knowledge and morality, Newman speaks also of the aesthetic. For Newman, rhetoric is not just about sophistry, nor is poetry an outsider to the quest for truth. Assigning poetry to the Benedictines, science to the Dominicans, and practical action to the Jesuits, Newman says the educated person will have something of each, though the first seems to be the one he personally found most congenial.
The fourth chapter develops what Newman says about knowledge, morality, and ‘the religion of philosophy’. Bottone describes Newman's answer to the question of faith and reason as complex. On the one hand there is a natural, secular, level of knowledge and morality, served by what the University is in its essence. On the other hand there is what the University in its integrity can achieve. This distinction of essence and integrity (being and well-being) is Newman's version here of nature and grace. He relates it to the direct object of the University (knowledge) and its indirect objects (the formation of character). The full flourishing of the University comes when philosophy and theology are accorded their proper place. Without them a University loses its claim to the name since it would exclude some kinds of knowledge. Philosophy is ‘the science of sciences’, a unifying activity. Theology clearly does not replace the work of other sciences but ‘steadies’ them in their work. The gentleman is not dismissed when his limits are recognised since the saint will also be a gentleman. But for Newman these limits are real and concern motivation and action, depth and consistency. The integrity, or flourishing, of the gentleman is possible only by God's grace: what he still needs is the help of grace to resist temptation and to make actual the virtues to which he aspires.
The final chapter reflects further on the paradox and failure of Newman's idea of the educated man. The ‘philosophical habit of mind’ is the ability to unify knowledge and for Newman the University is the place where such unification takes place. It can only be done in this kind of community of learning and teaching. For Newman the greatest danger is fragmentation, already increasing in the 19th century and making the unification of knowledge ever more difficult. Newman began to think of modern cities as ‘virtual Universities’, the ‘atmosphere of intellect’ having moved from the seats of learning to the centres of civil government, to the literary world, and (we will now add) to the media of social communication. For Bottone Newman's ideal is impossible in the contemporary world but remains necessary as a regulative ideal. When compared with alternative ideas of the university – the nationalist one of Humboldt, or the techno-bureaucratic one of ‘excellence, performance and productivity’ – it seems clear that Newman's is best because of the value it gives to the human person and to the project of knowledge as such. Perhaps the term ‘university’ should no longer be used since, as thinkers like Derrida and MacIntyre argue, the institutions that currently claim this title are so far from representing what its (medieval and Catholic) originators had in mind. Newman's idea continues to fascinate, and Bottone's book is an intriguing consideration of it.
