Abstract
Newman once wrote, ‘Now from first to last, education … has been my line’ (quoted on p. 284). It would seem that the author of John Henry Newman: Man of Letters shares this line; and those who read the book will benefit from it.
Mary Katherine Tillman, Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies, has taught the Great Books for decades. As both seasoned instructor and perennial student of the classics, Tillman is more than equipped to identify intersections between Newman and other great figures in the western intellectual tradition. In Man of Letters, we enjoy not only the first fruits of her study (e.g., ‘Plato said A, B, and C …’) but also the more penetrating ‘second fruits’, as it were: e.g., ‘Reasoning is like X, Y, and Z’ (pp. 74–75).
Man of Letters is a collection of Tillman’s essays. Newman scholars might have come across a few of the essays, given that more than a dozen of the book’s chapters have already been published. That said, the collection reads well, with some of the unpublished material segueing remarkably well with previously published material.
The virtue of this book lies in the fact that Newman is approached by a lover of the Great Books. While a dogmatic-theological approach to Newman is dominant in Newman studies (for understandable reasons!) Tillman shores up the less-represented but no-less-important philosophical-pedagogical strand of Newman studies that approaches Newman, not with systematic-theological concerns, but with meta-questions such as What is the good life?
Unconstrained by the desire to trace the precise historical strands of Newman’s thought, Tillman is able to pursue more constructive questions and put Newman in dialogue with the Greek philosophical patrimony, or as Tillman calls it, the phronesis tradition. Going further, Tillman situates Newman alongside figures ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Pascal and Dilthey. The applications are diverse: in Chapter two, for example, we discover the import of Newman’s one-year journey to the Mediterranean (1832–33) in light of the great epics of Homer and Virgil. Chapter 12 puts Newman into dialogue with Dilthey, comparing their appeals to experience and their respective attempts to avoid the pitfalls of certain epistemological extremes. In Chapter three, Tillman uses Monet’s art to illuminate Newman’s approaches to investigation and inquiry. Chapter six provides the reader with a highly readable and informative sweep of the genesis of, divisions within, and tensions between the liberal arts.
We also find multiple discussions of Newman’s pedagogy, with some essays stressing his insistence on the personal, moral, and religious influence of the instructor (Chapter14); others the objective of liberal education: the cultivation of the intellect (Chapters 7, 15, and 16). Still more, Chapter 15 examines closely the meaning of Newman’s Oratorian ideal, thereby putting paid to all the interpretations of Newman’s celebrated ‘gentleman’ that either unduly inflate its importance or misplace it in the constellation of Newman’s thought.
Some chapters (or portions of them) would serve well as supplementary or introductory reading to Newman’s works. For example, Chapters 8, 16, and 18 are helpful guides to discovering the main lines of Newman’s educational ideal. Chapter 11 on development (with Marvin R. O’Connell), also is helpful, leading with a very succinct but useful and chronologically sensitive background to the Essay on Development. It also supplies the reader with helpful commentary on Newman’s argument in his Essay, notwithstanding their citing without demur Ian Ker’s statement that Newman ‘already recognized the principle of doctrinal development’ in his Arians (1833), more than a decade before the Essay (1845). In this instance, one wonders whether this statement of Ker’s (along with its repetition here without any qualification) does justice to the radical shift in Newman’s own thought concerning development of doctrine from 1833 to 1845.
Others chapters (or parts therein) might cause a bit of confusion for the uninitiated or untutored student of Newman. For example, in Chapter four, Tillman’s statement on pp. 62–63 that Newman follows Aquinas in describing faith as ‘the reasoning of a religious mind’ is not obvious, especially if no reference to Thomas is provided. These issues, however, pertain more to dogmatic theology than to the liberal arts, which is at the heart of Tillman’s contribution.
Tillman’s book is both useful and edifying. It enriches Newman studies by expanding our view of Newman, and drawing our attention to Newman the thinker, the philosopher, the pedagogue, and champion of the liberal arts, the reader of the Great Books; in a word, the Man of Letters.