The Gentleman in Newman’s Idea of a University: A Genderless Model for Irish Catholics

Abstract

The Idea of a University (1858) comprises ten public lectures John Henry Newman gave in Dublin on the occasion of the establishment of the first Catholic University of Ireland in 1852 when he was invited by the Irish Catholic hierarchy to assume the role of rector. The publication also includes a series of discourses and articles written during his tenure at the university from 1854 to 1858. In the preface Newman defines the nature and aims of a university, stressing that it is a place not so much for the advancement of knowledge through research as the diffusion of knowledge and the acquisition of wisdom through teaching and learning. He advocates a traditional curriculum including the medieval liberal arts, that is grammar, rhetoric, logic and mathematics, and he adds the sciences and theology to create a comprehensive ‘circle of knowledge’ where students of specific disciplines can benefit by ‘living among those and under those who represent the whole circle’. 1 Newman describes this wide knowledge as an ‘end in itself’ and distinct from being necessarily useful. A university education is always ‘in process’ and its primary aim is not to produce a good scholar but to foster the creation of an ‘ethical character, which the cultivated intellect will form’. 2 Newman makes it clear in his preface that he has written his Idea of a University primarily to address Catholics, and specifically Irish Catholics. He declares at the outset that while he advocates that this ‘liberal education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman’, that the gentleman that he espouses is distinctly different to ‘any narrow or fantastic type, as, for instance, that of an “English Gentleman” may be called’. 3 Newman’s ‘gentleman’ is distinct from that problematic type of gentleman he sees being groomed in the ‘English idea of a University… the production of that antiquated variety of human nature and remnant of feudalism’. 4 By tracing the distinctive contours of Newman’s gentleman we are not only able to better understand the values that inspire Newman’s ideal university, we can also appreciate how he wished to astutely position the Catholic University of