John Henry Newman (1801–90) famously and with great difficulty converted from the Anglican Church to the Roman Church in 1845. He would not have guessed that the conversion marked the halfway point of his life. Indeed, before the conversion he had begun to fear the possibility of suddenly dying outside the Roman Church, which he had concluded was the one true church. Beginning in 1839 Newman had had several signs leading him to doubt the truth of the Anglican Church—the Monophysite and Arian analogies and Augustine's “Securus judicat orbis terrarum” being especially important and now well known. However, Newman was nothing if not cautious, and, as he tells us in his Apologia, he determined to be guided in his decision not by his imagination but by his reason.

This is the same John Henry Newman who, Jane Rupert argues, gave imagination primacy of place in his explication of how the mind functions in the domain of religion. Rupert explains Newman's position this way: “In the way the mind operates in poetry and in religious experience, there is a reversal of the magisterial role of reason in its relation to the imagination that obtains in empirical science,” where “imagination is merely the messenger of sense for the reason to judge.” In poetry and religion, she continues, “the imagination is foremost. The imagination is the locus for illumination; its images harbor thought within them in such a way that thought and image are experienced as one” (3).

By raising up imagination, Newman had effectively expanded the narrow Enlightenment view of reason to include not only science but also religion and the humanities. Faith, for example, was no longer opposed to reason, but seen as a form of reason. Although Newman had come to this view by the years of his conversion process, the pressures he felt during that period likely forced him to rely not on imagination, as he said, but on an explicit analytic exercise of faith's implicit reason. Such intellectual activity, after all, was his daily bread and butter.

In her first chapter Rupert summarizes Newman's presentation in The Idea of a University of empirical philosophy and science's “closing of the mind,” from Epicurus and Lucretius to Locke and Hume: reason is restricted to “judgments based only on sense and experience” (10). In chapter 2 she then traces how Newman, in various works ranging from the Oxford University Sermons to A Grammar of Assent, “validated to a scientific age a nonscientific kind of reasoning as the instrument proper to religious belief”: reasoning linked to imagination and feeling moving toward convergent probabilities (33). Rupert devotes chapter 3 to laying out how, for Newman, “in the immediate, direct relation between the soul and God, the faculty of the imagination occupies a primacy of place” (47). In chapter 4 she turns to liberal education as portrayed by Newman in The Idea of a University. Showing Newman's dependence on Aristotle, she emphasizes the two operations of the mind cultivated by liberal education: theoretical reasoning (theoria) and literary rationality (logos), both dismissed from the realm of reason by the Enlightenment. This chapter is a fine guide to the essence of Newman's often misunderstood Idea. In chapter 5 Rupert explains Newman's ideal of a university that “took responsibility not only for the intellectual education of its students but also for the cure of their souls,” an ideal of unity. “Both the unity among the disciplines . . . and the personal interior unity which is at the heart of sanctity . . . were rooted in God” (87). Overall, readers looking for an accurate exposition of Newman's view on all these important issues will be well served by Rupert.

In 1989 Ian Ker edited The Genius of John Henry Newman—a nicely timed edition, as the centenary of Newman's death approached—to function as a reader along with his 1988 John Henry Newman: A Biography, which has become one of only a few major lives of Newman. Genius has now been reissued by Oxford, just in time to serve as a handy collection of texts for use with Rupert's volume. It contains, for example, lengthy selections from The Idea of a University, Oxford University Sermons, A Grammar of Assent, and Parochial and Plain Sermons. These and many more selections are organized in five sections: Newman as educator, philosopher, preacher, theologian, and writer. The texts are from the standard Longmans edition. Ker provides brief excellent introductions to each section

These two volumes, along with a good biography, will be valuable companions for anyone setting out in search of Newman.