Introduction
This paper engages with an example of Newman's reception in 20th Century thought which is not high on the agenda of most Newman scholarship, and one for which a connection with Newman might seem a little surprising. This is partly because the territory under discussion here was not a recognisedly discrete sphere of intellectual endeavour in Newman's own day, nor for half a century or so after his death: namely, Cultural Studies. As will be seen shortly, a text credited with having stimulated the formation of this discipline, Raymond Williams's Culture and Society, gives some attention to Newman's The Idea of a University. There, Newman states:
“It were well if the English, like the Greek language, possessed some definite word to express, simply and generally, intellectual proficiency or perfection”.
But, because there is no specific word for intellectual perfection, he says:
“many words are necessary, in order […] to bring out and convey what is surely no difficult idea in itself – that of the cultivation of the intellect as an end;”Footnote 1
Williams says of these comments, that “[t]he most surprising fact about this paragraph is that Newman does not meet the want of “some definite word” for intellectual perfection with the word “culture”.Footnote 2 For Williams, the gap in English usage in the 1850s could easily have been filled with the word “culture”, as indeed related ideas tended to be around the same time and after.
This paper explores this juncture between Newman and 20th Century thought, to undertake two tasks. Williams situates Newman in the long trajectory of what he considers an English tradition of reflection on what “culture” is. The first task is, then, to inquire as to whether Williams is right to locate Newman where he does in this tradition. On this front, we shall see there are some problems with his interpretation of The Idea of a University, particularly in terms of how Williams relates the text to the idea of “culture” as an alternative to religion. This in turn presents a second task, related to the question of whether the word “culture” could have been used for the “intellectual perfection” described by Newman in the Idea. Here, there are grounds to suggest that elements of what we relate to the term “culture” can be detected in Newman's work, in a way which suggests a much broader definition for that term than intellectual perfection. These elements pertain, not to Williams's English tradition, but to something we might term a “sensibility”; a set of tendencies, predispositions, and qualities. This will be seen to resonate with certain contemporary approaches in Cultural Studies, showing how Newman can contribute to intellectual discussions beyond his own primary spheres of interest.
Culture and Society: 1780–1950
Raymond Williams is certainly not the first thinker who comes to mind in discussing Newman's influence on intellectual history. Williams is an impressive figure, who was initially trained in dramatic literature, and then went on to write various works which have had considerable influence on the academy in diverse areas. This influence is attested to by the formation of a “new” academic discipline, Cultural Studies, which, it is said, “emerges” from a particular “moment, [in Britain], in the mid-1950s”,Footnote 3 and for which Williams's Culture and Society 1780–1950 is considered seminal. The book follows the complex trajectory of what Williams considers an English tradition. It begins by claiming that “in the last decades of the 18th Century, and in the first half of the 19th, a number of words, which are now of capital importance, came for the first time into common English use, or, where they had already been generally used in the language, acquired new and important meanings”.Footnote 4 Culture is, unsurprisingly, the paradigmatic keyword in this process. By means of a careful semantic analysis of its use, Williams tracks “a general pattern of change” in meaning, which “can be used as a special kind of map” ‘He considers the questions “concentrated in the meanings of the word culture” to be “questions directly raised by…great historical changes”,Footnote 5 namely industrialisation and the widespread social upheaval it brought with it from around 1780 onwards.
The book proceeds by way of close readings of specific texts often taken in pairs, in an interesting methodical and hermeneutical move. Williams states, “the growth of the new society was so confusing, even to the best minds, that positions were drawn up in terms of inherited categories, which revealed unsuspected and even opposing inclinations”. This, he says, is “no more than one would expect in the early stages of so great a change”.Footnote 6 The point seems to be that by embarking on dual, or comparative, close readings, precise variations in the uses of terms can be disclosed in proximate contexts, which reveal the morphing and metamorphosing of particular words like “culture”, thus reflecting and giving voice to the pressure they are being put under by the “great historical changes” of industrialisation.
In order to hone in on what Williams says of Newman, important aspects of the preceding discussion need to be touched upon. In Edmund Burke, Williams finds a “basis” for what was to become a quintessential definition of culture in Matthew Arnold's work “seventy years later”. This basis is found in Burke's oft-repeated statement: “the stock [of reason] in each man is small, and… individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and ages”.Footnote 7 Burke is of course critiquing some of the thinking associated with the French Revolution, with “reason” as an abstract and totalising faculty authorised to carve-up and discard tradition and long-established praxis.Footnote 8 Wisdom might be a better word to give voice for what Burke includes in the concept of reason. He is pointing to an intergenerational reserve of “wisdom” ‘which, says Williams, was immediately after Burke called “the spirit of the nation” and by the end of the 19th Century, ‘“national culture”.’Footnote 9 But note the important point: the word “culture” is not at Burke's disposal in the late 18th Century.
Subsequently, Williams points out how William Wordsworth was influenced by Burkean social theory, to hold to a ““embodied spirit” of a People's knowledge, as something superior to… the actual run of the market”.Footnote 10 Williams sees Burke's “general bank and capital” of a nation's wisdom, morphing into a “court of appeal in which real values were determined, usually in opposition to the “fictitious” values thrown up by market-driven operations. Williams reminds us that in the 18th Century, the adjective “cultivated” had meant the “general state of habit of the mind” having been trained in something. But, after Burke, Wordsworth, and then Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it develops into two nominal forms which are “abstracted” from any particular form of training in a specific skill, but rather gesture toward some vaguely articulated state of human perfection. The nouns “cultivation” and “culture” then emerge as things involved in seeking after some moral or intellectual perfection, which for Williams means that the word “culture” becomes “the normal antithesis to the [economic] market”.Footnote 11 Presumably, economics as it was understood in these writers, lacked any intrinsic directedess; it lacked agency, and was seen as haphazard or thoughtless.
The move shown by Coleridge's use of “cultivation” and “culture”, can also be seen in the writings of J. S. Mill, and his attempts to restrain or correct the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Williams claims Mill was provoked by Coleridge, who critiqued the “accepted [utilitarian, social] practice of… considering only what seems expedient for the occasion, disjoined from all principle”.Footnote 12 Mill takes this critique to argue that straightforward expedience is not enough for healthy social organisation, which we can see in his attempts in On Liberty to preserve “the rights of individuals and minorities against Public Opinion”.Footnote 13 That is, Mill recognises that there needs to be a repository of values, a place for moral safeguards and decency, which can preserved somehow from the brute force of the will of the greatest number of people. In searching for this, Mill decides that “Man…[is] a being capable of pursuing spiritual perfection as an end”.Footnote 14 That is, the human being is not mere automaton that gravitates toward pleasure over against pain. The word “culture” emerges again here; as a safeguard against the new world, having its telos in human perfection, not material satisfaction.
Williams then moves on to Thomas Carlyle, whom he credits with taking the Burkean reserve of a nation's wisdom, and combining it with Wordsworth's spirit of such a nation as “a body of values superior to the ordinary progress of society”. Carlyle's famous fondness for the heroic is of course involved in this, insofar as he “never failed to emphasise [the] conception of a “spiritual aristocracy”, a highly cultivated and responsible minority, concerned to define and emphasise the highest values at which society must aim”.Footnote 15
Newman in Culture and Society
Having given attention to these foundational elements of Culture and Society, we can now turn to Newman's arrival in the book. The Carlyle text under discussion is “Signs of the Times”, from 1829. Some twenty years later Newman was invited to act as rector for the founding of the Catholic University in Dublin. The next text for Williams is Newman's VI Discourse from what was later published as The Idea of the University. Williams embarks on a dual reading with Matthew Arnold, showing the afore mentioned comparative method: to disclose “unsuspected…inclinations” between two proximate thinkers. The inquiry begins with the statement of Newman's which I drew attention to at the outset: “[i]t were well if the English… [language] possessed some definite word to express, simply and generally, intellectual… perfection”. And, as we have seen, because there is no specific word for this, Newman decides that “many words are necessary, in order […] to bring out and convey what is surely no difficult idea in itself – … the cultivation of the intellect as an end”.Footnote 16 Williams works with this passage on the basis of his key contention about Newman: that the intellectual perfection spoken of in the Idea can be slotted in to his scheme of development in the English tradition around “culture”. Or, in his own words, “[t]he… surprising fact… that Newman does not meet the want of “some definite word” for intellectual perfection with the word “culture”.Footnote 17
Before evaluating this, we need to discuss how this chapter of Culture and Society proceeds in dialogue with Matthew Arnold. First, recall that Williams is tracking the development of the word “culture” as referring originally to having been trained in some specific skill, before moving onto something related to “the idea of human perfection”. He will then go on to argue that the term subsequently morphs into meaning “the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole”, before eventually getting to culture as “a whole way of life”.Footnote 18 The key point is that he seems to consider Newman and Arnold to occupy a cusp between culture as related to “human perfection” and its subsequent phase, “the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole”. Arnold is central in this, for he moves away from human perfection as the preserve of an elite few determined by traditional class structures (Carlyle's “spiritual aristocracy”), into a relatively more democratised approach. Between Newman and Arnold, says Williams, a new consideration has come on the horizon: “the general reaction of the social effects of full industrialisation, and in particular to the agitation of the industrial working class”.Footnote 19 The old pre-industrial order had, in Burke, been accepted with a strong sense of providential rationale apportioned to it. With Arnold, “culture” is no longer the preserve of a social elite (i.e. the aristocracy), for “in each class”, he claims, there is “a minority” or “remnant” “led…by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection”.Footnote 20
Newman and Arnold are seen as occupying a peculiar diversion in the English tradition related to religion. Williams considers that Arnold holds explicitly to the idea of culture as “a process and not an absolute”, meaning a seeking after perfection (or “becoming”), and not a some realm of stable perfection in itself. But, Williams claims that, implicitly (in Arnold's actual “emphasis” in the “detail” of his argument), “[c]ulture at times seems very like… Salvation; a thing to secure first, to which all else will then be added”. When Arnold states, “culture hates hatred, culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light”,Footnote 21 Williams says: “it is difficult not to feel the pressure of Saint Paul's description of Christianity, and it seems not impossible that there has been a… transference of emotion from the old concept to the new”.Footnote 22 Williams is critical of this transference. He argues that “culture as a substitute for religion is a very doubtful quantity”.Footnote 23 Arnold, he says, is “caught between two worlds”, and “snatches towards an absolute” – “culture” as surrogate religion.Footnote 24
Williams clearly prefers Newman to Arnold, saying “[t]he description of human perfection, in Newman, comes through with remarkable purity that commands respect even where assent is difficult”, whereas in Arnold, he finds “a kid of witty and malicious observation better suited to minor fiction”.Footnote 25 Nonetheless, Williams implies that Newman inhabits roughly the same juncture in the developing tradition. This arises from an interpretation of Newman's comments on the beauty of the cultivated mind, and that beauty's “furthest extent and its true limit” can mean one is led to “the Eternal and Infinite”. So the question for this paper is not only whether or not Newman's description of the perfection (or “cultivation”) of the intellect in the Idea could just as well have been called “culture”, but also whether Newman is gesturing toward some sort of religious or pseudo-divine authority to this unnamed complex of human striving. Is Newman merely a “purer” example of the same stage of the English tradition as Arnold; witnessing to the emergence of culture as a rival or even replacement of what was once the preserve of religion?
The idea of a particular mode of cultural expression serving as surrogate religion is a common trope of the mid-late 19th Century scene. Richard Wagner famously apportioned it to his operatic Gesamtkunstwerken, but in Arnold it is poetry which is given this supreme status. As T.S. Eliot pointed out, while “Wordsworth and Shelley [saw] poetry [as] a vehicle for one kind of philosophy or another” in Arnold we reach a new stage, whereby “the best poetry supersedes both religion and philosophy”.Footnote 26 Similar sentiments are seen in Walter Pater's famous The Study of Poetry from 1880, which concludes that “most of what now passes for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry”.Footnote 27 Pater himself draws on Newman in a way not entirely dissimilar to Williams. He claims that “[t]hose who maintain the…older and narrower forms of religious life against the claims of culture are often embarrassed at finding the intellectual life heated through with the very graces to which they would sacrifice it”, He then names “Dr. Newman” as one in whom a “modern aspirant to perfect culture seem[s] to find the expression of the inmost delicacies of his own life”.Footnote 28 To say that Newman's writing in The Idea of a University is so beautiful, that it exemplifies one in whom culture threatens usurp religion, might seem permissible at first glance. Newman holds that appreciating intellectual cultivation “as a good in itself” is ultimately to see it as something “beautiful”, and, as we have seen, the apprehension of beauty, when “pursued to its furtherst extent”, is described as leading to “the Eternal and Infinite, [that is] the intimations of conscience and the announcement of the Church”.Footnote 29
Edward Short argues that it was Newman who actually “first suggested that poetry might be a substitute for religion”. He finds this in Newman's comments on John Keble's Lyra Innocentium of 1846. Newman states that “[a]ctual England is too sad to look upon” so the “poet seems to turn away from the sight; else, in his own words, it would “bruise too sore his tender heart”.Footnote 30 Pointing back to Keble's The Christian Year, Newman says that book “did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do: he made it poetical”, that, “[c]lear as was his perception of the degeneracy of his times” Keble “threw the poetry of his own mind” on it by turning “to the memory of better days”.Footnote 31
On reflection, however, Williams, Pater et al are quite far off the mark in relating the 19th Century view of culture as surrogate religion to Newman. As Short states, they “are so far off the mark it is funny”.Footnote 32 In the Idea, yes, Newman connects intellectual cultivation with the beauty that at its “furthest extent” can see one being led to “the Eternal and Infinite”. But the important point is that we are led to the Eternal and the Infinite, we cannot cultivate ourselves up into heaven. Williams and others are mistaking a natural tending toward perfection in the sphere of the intellect, for the graced perfection of sharing in divine life, which for Newman is of course something radically different. As put by C. F. Harrold: “Newman is un-Romantic insofar as he fought the implicit or explicit Pelagianism of his day”.Footnote 33 Louis Bouyer's forward to the Parochial and Plain Sermons says that Newman's Oxford preaching brought “all… aspects of Catholic theology” into “constant reference to the cultural situation of the day”, and claims that it is in the Idea that Newman “elaborated a full analysis of the relation between culture and the Christian religion”.Footnote 34 If we turn to those sermons, we find repeated recourse to the qualified and relative status of what we would today term “culture” over against the unqualified and absolute status of Christianity. Let us follow Bouyer and take these sermons as offering, in nuce, important orientation for the Idea. In one sermon, for example, Newman suggests the intended message of Christ's washing of the feet was that the disciples “should be full of lowly services one to the other”.Footnote 35 But, he notes they might have said to themselves, “we have heard this before”, and so Christ acted “by way of an example”, for “their minds would not [otherwise] rest sufficiently on the practical direction of the instruction vouchsafed to them”.Footnote 36 The disciples are said to have loved and reverenced Christ “as their Lord and Teacher”, but would have gravitated toward love and reverence as notions or convictions, not stimulative prompts for obedience to God's will.
Newman goes on to say “[t]he multitude of men even who profess religion are in this [notional or passive] state of mind”, and this is particularly true of those “who are in better circumstances than the mass of the community”. These people “are well educated …and… they go on respectably and happily, with the same general tastes and habits which they would have had if the Gospel had not been given them”. Therefore, “their religion is based upon self and the world, a mere civilisation”. Such people “adopt…a certain refined elegance of sentiments and manners” and often “love religious poetry and eloquent preaching”.Footnote 37 They may even have “turned their attention to… promoting the happiness of their fellow creatures, and have formed a system of morality and religion of their own”.Footnote 38 He concludes that we “live in an educated age. The false gloss of a mere worldly refinement makes us decent and amiable. We all …think ourselves wise”.Footnote 39 Footnote 40
It should be clear from this that intellectual cultivation and sophistication are certainly not to be seen as imbued with a religious or pseudo-divine status. In the earlier sermons the emphasis is rather on how this cultivation will more commonly work against our sharing in God's grace. Interestingly for this paper, this negative stance is present in the Idea too, although it seems to have been missed, or deemed superfluous, by Newman's cultural commentators. In the Idea, Newman states that intellectual cultivation “concurs with Christianity in a certain way”, but then “diverges from it; and consequently proves in the event, sometimes its serviceable ally, sometimes, from its resemblance to it, an insidious and dangerous foe”.Footnote 41 Here, what was termed earlier “a mere worldly refinement” which causes us to form systems “of morality and religion” of our own, corresponds to a point where Newman describes the benefits of a Liberal Education in the Idea. He says such an education exerts “a subtle influence in throwing us back on ourselves, and making us our own centre, and our minds the measure of all things.” Then, he says, “the “perception of the Beautiful becomes the substitute for faith”.Footnote 42 Again, intellectual cultivation “has a special tendency…[in] beings such as we are, to impress us with a mere philosophical theory of life and conduct, in the place of Revelation.”Footnote 43
A Broader Understanding of Culture
A modest gain for this paper has thus been made. Newman cannot be inserted into the Williams' trajectory in the development of English cultural criticism, insofar as he is not oneof those apportioning culture a pseudo-divine status. This isn't any great surprise, really. Even when writing on matters not directly about faith, what Newman says can only be genuinely understood from a faith-centered perspective, a perspective which writers in Cultural Studies might not share. As put by Mary Katherine Tillman, there are times when Newman is “humanly speaking”, “[b]ut we…know that all Newman's “humanly speaking” views really stem from his faith-filled vision”.Footnote 44 But, we are left with the question of whether Williams is right to maintain that the word “culture” could have served Newman's end of describing intellectual perfection. At bottom, this question involves what we might be able to surmise about Newman's understanding of matters which we would today relate to “culture”, or more exactly, whether culture, in Newman's work, is merely about the intellect.
The first observation to made on this front, is that Newman uses the word “civilisation” in the Parochial and Plain Sermons. Civilisation is described as closely related to education, but it is broader than formal learning. As we have seen, he mentions “general tastes and habits” as well as a “refined elegance of sentiments and manners”. This points us to aspects of what we today term “culture”, which Williams, if he is concerned about them at all, would situate in the closing parts of the book. That is, culture is not about the intellect alone, but also certain enduring characteristics or qualities pertaining to a particular people, that is, elements of a “whole way of life”. Let us make a further observation with Newman's comment that Anglicanism “has come down to us [i.e. the English]…as the religion of a nation, adapted to its temper”.Footnote 45 This would suggest that, in Newman's own words, there is a question of temperament or “sentiment” involved in identity, what he calls in the Oxford sermons a “temper of mind” and a “manner of life”.Footnote 46 After all, this is surely how to understand Newman's comments in the Apologia about Thomas Scott and Hurrell Froude, one being “a true Englishman”, and the other “an Englishman to the backbone”,Footnote 47 or his comment to Gerald Manly Hopkins, that “the Irish character and traits are very different to the English”.Footnote 48
Time will not permit me to go into the various aspects of what Newman includes in this English “temper” or “habit” of mind, but an affection for reserve is surely central, as indeed is a tendency toward empirical reality over against the grand idealist speculation of the Continental mainland. Another importantly valued characteristic is is termed in the Idea, “moderation”, or in the Oxford sermons, the habit of mind of being “temperate”.Footnote 49 Overall, certain elements of what we would today term “culture” are, I contend, very important for Newman's work, but are not matters of intellectual perfection per se, rather, a linking of identity with Characteristic tendencies. Indeed, it is salient that it is just this sort of thing which Arnold mentions as Newman's enduring influence on him: “nothing can ever do away the effects you have produced in me, for it consists in a general disposition of mind rather than in a particular set of ideas”.Footnote 50
This is not unrelated to my earlier discussion about Newman in relation to Cultural Studies, because this latter understanding of culture resonates with much more recent approaches to culture, which have come to the fore due to contested issues of cultural and national identity in recent years. Paul Langford, for example, speaks of a developing notion of “Englishness” taking place in Newman's day. He says the word originates in 1805, and was established by the … middle of the 19th Century.Footnote 51 Englishness, in Langford's work, means “those distinctive aspects of national life that strike either outsiders or insiders… as characteristic”,Footnote 52 something that came increasingly to be described as a “national character”.Footnote 53 Terry Eagleton speaks of the notion of an “English sensibility” emerging in the 19th Century.Footnote 54 Peter Ackroyd charts the development of what he calls “the English imagination”, or “English sensibility”, right back to the earliest instantiations of native literature.Footnote 55 He writes, “a native spirit persists though time and circumstance, all the more powerful for being generally unacknowledged”.Footnote 56
Indeed, recalling the classically English quality of “moderation” or “temperance”, this is certainly to be found in writers like Ackroyd. He speaks of an English “instinct for compromise”,Footnote 57 mentioning William of Malmesbury for saying, the ““best is ever mete”“, meaning “moderation in all things”.Footnote 58 He also mentions the medieval mystic Richard Rolle for recommending “moderation” even in “penitential exercises”.Footnote 59 He situates this “instinct” right back in the language of Middle English, as a tongue which combined and balanced two languages, arguing that “it is in the nature of English language… to reside at [a] nodal point where two languages or perceptions meet”.Footnote 60 Such a quality he claims is seen in Shakespeare too, as a master of “the play of oppositions”.Footnote 61As Samuel Johnson notes, Shakespeare wrote plays which are strictly speaking neither “tragedies nor comedies” but which mingle both “with endless variety and proportion”.Footnote 62 Even the Coverdale Bible is mentioned here, as exhibiting “a pragmatic and conciliatory nature”, which “took the middle way”, along with English music, which, says Ackroyd, may itself “spring out of moderation and conciliation”.Footnote 63
While Langford acknowledges that ideas of a national character threaten to seem “repugnant to the liberal conscience of the West”,Footnote 64 Ackroyd offers a promising way to avoid making such notions in anyway implicative of ethnicity, by suggesting that this sensibility is somehow rooted in and shaped by natural and environmental factors: i.e. rooted the lands of Britain, and not in any particular set of people who may inhabit it at any given time. Robert Winder has more recently taken this much further, to deal with the difficult question of how classically English “values” like “fair play” or “tolerance” are obviously not “exclusively English”, and also, like Ackroyd, to give due attention to the deeply ethnically diverse nature of the inhabitants of England from the earliest of times to the present.Footnote 65
The point is that any discussion of a distinct national “sensibility” can never present certain qualities as belonging exclusively to any one people, nor pretend that such qualities belong to every person within that people. From a theological perspective, this need for language of a certain “sensibility” always to be qualified and limited is rendered more acute, in that theology's subject matter must, to some extent, be applicable to people of any culture, and – somehow – able to articulate a transcendence pointing “beyond” culture too. On this front, I think Newman could be a promising interlocutor for these discussions, because his own relationship with which I would term an “English sensibility” is, obviously, not straightforward, and is frequently wrought with tension.
On the one hand, Newman seems relatively ambivalent about the English “temper of mind” he mentions at various points. In one text, for example, he praises Pius IX for restoring the English hierarchy, and thus preparing a way for the Church “to develop according to…our habits of mind” and “our own tastes”.Footnote 66 That is, he seems to think this “temper of mind” is something the Church can be fitted to, notwithstanding its relative and qualified status. As put by Ian Kerr, “dignity and good taste were not necessarily qualities one found in Catholicism”.Footnote 67 On the other hand however, Newman can make statements of the English like, “[w]e must beg God to change our tastes and habits”,Footnote 68 presumably for when such considerations threaten ultimately to usurp the truth of Revelation. Nowhere are such sentiments more prevalent than when the mature Newman is discussing Anglicanism, of course; “the decorous pieties of what Thackeray once called Church-of-Englandism”.Footnote 69 In the Present Position he speaks of Anglicanism as “a religion which indulges [the] natural [English] turn of mind”.Footnote 70 Insofar as the sensibility of the people is unavoidably linked to the national Church, Newman's relationship with it is very difficult. After all, as put by Short, “Newman left behind…an entire English way of life” in converting,Footnote 71 for “Roman Catholicism…was…profoundly un-English”.Footnote 72
An obvious example of this two-sidedness of Newman's relationship with an English sensibility arises from relating his Anglican via media to the afore mentioned “instinct for compromise”, balance, proportion, and moderation. It is quintessentially English – but Newman's conversion, by his own description, is closely linked to his realisation that the moderate path is not necessarily that most aligned to God's will. The semi-Arians are those he claims, in the early Church, that took the “middle way” between Arius and Athanasius, and they were, strictly speaking, just as heretical as Arius himself. In short, by setting great store on the human value of moderation, he would have been as guilty as those he describes as forming their own systems “of…religion”, of being “thrown back on” themselves, making themselves their “own centre”, and their minds the “measure of all things”. Newman's difficult relationship with the English sensibility is well described by Harold Weatherby, who charts the tendency toward various types of “middle way” evinced by people like Edmund Spencer, Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Donne, in order to bring out “Newman's departure from the old orthodoxy of England”.Footnote 73 He can thus conclude that ““Newmanism” is…the name of a new sensibility in English theology… determined by two movements: that of loss and that of gain, of exile and homecoming…”Footnote 74
Conclusion
To bring all this to close, there are three outcomes to be made explicit here, giving some pointers for understanding Newman's place in 20th Century Cultural Studies In the first place, Newman does not fit comfortably into Raymond Williams's scheme, insofar as he cannot really be included along with Arnold as someone apportioning religious status to the developing notion of “culture” as a repository of values. Secondly, Williams's confidence that the word “culture” could have been inserted into The Idea of a University is also questionable, for Newman's own use of a myriad of terms (“civilisation”/“sentiments”/“temper of mind”/“manner of living”) and his connection of certain qualities with the “English”, would suggest he considers there to be something much broader than just intellectual perfection at stake, and we might term this a “sensibility”. Thirdly, and interestingly, I suggest, this aspect of Newman actually makes the possibility of a discussion with contemporary Cultural Studies potentially fruitful; insofar as language of an English “imagination” or “sensibility” is been on that horizon in the last few years. Moreover, because Newman has such a vexed relationship with his own Englishness, he promises to enable an honest appraisal of the limits within which such a thing as a “sensibility” should be framed. He thus promises to inform Cultural Studies itself to this day, particularly with his abandoning of the via media. Because, for Newman, it is always: “holiness before peace”.
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