The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of DublinNewman, John Henry
Religion
The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin
Newman, John Henry
Education, Higher; Universities and colleges
There are three great subjects on which Human Reason employs itself:—God,
Nature, and Man: and theology being put aside in the present argument, the
physical and social worlds remain. These, when respectively subjected to
Human Reason, form two books: the book of nature is called Science, the
book of man is called Literature. Literature and Science, thus considered,
nearly constitute the subject-matter of Liberal Education; and, while
Science is made to subserve the former of the two injuries, which Revealed
Truth sustains,—its exclusion, Literature subserves the latter,—its
corruption. Let us consider the influence of each upon Religion
separately.
3.
I. As to Physical Science, of course there can be no real collision
between it and Catholicism. Nature and Grace, Reason and Revelation, come
from the same Divine Author, whose works cannot contradict each other.
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that, in matter of fact, there always
has been a sort of jealousy and hostility between Religion and physical
philosophers. The name of Galileo reminds us of it at once. Not content
with investigating and reasoning in his own province, it is said, he went
out of his way directly to insult the received interpretation of
Scripture; theologians repelled an attack which was wanton and arrogant;
and Science, affronted in her minister, has taken its full revenge upon
Theology since. A vast multitude of its teachers, I fear it must be said,
have been either unbelievers or sceptics, or at least have denied to
Christianity any teaching, distinctive or special, over the Religion of
Nature. There have indeed been most illustrious exceptions; some men
protected by their greatness of mind, some by their religious profession,
some by the fear of public opinion; but I suppose the run of
experimentalists, external to the Catholic Church, have more or less
inherited the positive or negative unbelief of Laplace, Buffon, Franklin,
Priestley, Cuvier, and Humboldt. I do not of course mean to say that there
need be in every case a resentful and virulent opposition made to Religion
on the part of scientific men; but their emphatic silence or phlegmatic
inadvertence as to its claims have implied, more eloquently than any
words, that in their opinion it had no voice at all in the subject-matter,
which they had appropriated to themselves. The same antagonism shows
itself in the middle ages. Friar Bacon was popularly regarded with
suspicion as a dealer in unlawful arts; Pope Sylvester the Second has been
accused of magic for his knowledge of natural secrets; and the
geographical ideas of St. Virgil, Bishop of Saltzburg, were regarded with
anxiety by the great St. Boniface, the glory of England, the
Martyr-Apostle of Germany. I suppose, in matter of fact, magical
superstition and physical knowledge did commonly go together in those
ages: however, the hostility between experimental science and theology is
far older than Christianity. Lord Bacon traces it to an era prior to
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