Wisdom and Scholarship

THE on Cardinal Newman and the university:

Wisdom should be pursued for its own sake, alongside its attendant virtues of patience, forbearance and magnanimity. This general cultivation of mind was, Newman believed, the best way a university could promote professional and scientific study and serve wider society.

He saw knowledge not as accumulated facts, still less argumentative ability, but as an "acquired illumination...a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment". This was attained by enlargement of mind: the "power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence". To instrumentalise knowledge would be self-defeating, producing students unable to find their feet or make a contribution in the real world - better, Newman suggests, the rounded if mundane education of a poor farming boy...

The university was, for Newman, primarily a place of teaching and scholarship. Research also had value, but could not be equated with the pointless proliferation of low-quality debate and comment. A better model for research is Newman's own work on early Christian writers: intelligent, intense reflection on primary sources that, avoiding both utilitarianism and dogmatism, interrogates questions of fundamental importance to life.