Abstract
Since the mid-1830s never has a year passed without some publication on or by John Henry Newman. Indeed, following the publication of his autobiography, the Apologia pro vita sua in 1864, his reputation gained new life, as it were, and a popularity which remained in both Anglican and Catholic circles.
Receptions of Newman comprises eleven essays in five sections, the first on the Essay on Development, written while an Anglican, although clearly Roman Catholic. This first section treats the Protestant and Catholic receptions of the essay by Benjamin J. King and by Kenneth L. Parker and C. Michael Shea respectively. King’s paper covers the approaches to the Essay from its first publication in 1845 to 1925, Parker’s and Shea’s dealing with Catholic approaches to it from its beginning to the Vatican II era.
This pattern is generally followed in the second section on the Grammar of Assent, although in this part the first paper, by Frederick D. Aquino, treats a narrower perspective, i.e. philosophical receptions of the Grammar from 1960 to 2012, whereas Mark McInroy approaches theological receptions of the work, focusing on the work more generally, with particular emphasis on the attention given to the work by Catholic Modernists, the effect of Pius X’s 1907 condemnation of Modernism, “the rise of the Neo-Scholastic Newman” as a result, and closes with a review of the work’s “enduring reception” in the thought of the Transcendental Thomists, Pierre Rousselot, Karl Rahner, and Bernard Lonergan.
Part three, on The Idea of a University, turns more directly from this historical approach and focuses on contemporary approaches to the Idea. John Sullivan’s piece reviewing generally “the need for comprehensiveness in university education, giving priority to a sense of the whole and unity and comprehensiveness among the disciplines” (96), reviewing earlier uses of the Idea in the work of Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture (first translated by Alexander Dru and published with an introduction by T. S. Eliot; London: Faber and Faber, 1952) and above all by A. Dwight Culler, The Imperial Intellect: A Study of Newman’s Educational Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), before proceeding to the use of the work by Alasdair MacIntyre and by Jane Rupert in her John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011) and summing up his study by reviewing some of the “challenges and issues” arising from the work in the modern “secular” climate. Colin Barr, in his “Historical (Mis)understandings of The Idea of a University,” broadens his review of the Idea with a closer study of Newman’s Irish stay and the interpreters of this period. Barr’s study bristles with insights on numerous aspects of the “complex reality” (see p. 125) of Newman’s programme, some of which, for example, are well taken in the short analyses of the studies by Fergal McGrath in Newman’s University: Idea and Reality (London: Longmans Green, 1951) and A. Dwight Culler, and in his several suggestions for the “alternative reading” (see pp. 130 and 131, for example) of Alfred O’Rahilly, “The Irish University Question …” (Studies: An Irish Historical Review 50, Winter 1961: 353–370), who writes that there is “little or nothing to support” the idea that Cullen was continually interfering with Newman’s project.
The fourth and fifth sections of the work review Newman’s thought more broadly, beyond these three works specifically. Peter Nockles writes a striking, insightful paper on the reception of Newman’s work among the Tractarians before his turn to Rome, his Apologia, and after that point. Keith Beaumont reviews the impact of his work among the French during the Modernist Crisis, Daniel Lattier the Orthodox reception, and closing the volume William Abraham and Cyril O’Regan provide papers, the first on Newman and Divine revelation, the second, a stimulating piece on “Newman the Saint.”
Unfortunately, the volume is limited, in that each of the papers tends to survey the whole of the impact of Newman in the time during and following his life, and the German approach, except for references to the interest of Benedict XVI, is missing.