Campion, Newman and the Intellectual Apostolate

Edmund Campion and John Henry Newman can stake a large claim to importance in the idea of a Catholic university: Newman very plainly and recognisably as a result of his classic work The Idea of a University; yet Campion as well, as the existence of Campion College in Sydney, named in his honour, testifies, as Australia’s first—and at this stage only—institution of higher education in the liberal arts. Edmund Campion embodied a vital part of the Catholic educational tradition, even if his contribution is less amply documented and less widely known.

I will be suggesting that both Campion and Newman are foundational figures of Catholic higher education—comparable in the sphere of the university to the pivotal role played by Sts Peter and Paul in the historical development of the Church. They were born three centuries apart—Campion in the sixteenth century, amid the religious and political turmoil of the English Reformation, and Newman in the nineteenth century, a period of great religious and intellectual controversy.

I imagine each of them, characteristically, in a cell. Campion at first occupied the secret cell where he was found and captured, the special hiding place at that time in English Catholic houses used by priests, during this period of persecution, in the event of a sudden raid by the authorities; and finally, the prison cell to which he was consigned in the Tower of London—a cell understatedly described as the “Little Ease” because of its cramped shape that prevented its occupant from standing or lying comfortably. From these cells in Elizabethan England, Campion, still a relatively young man, radiated energy and inspiration—the energy of a scholar and lecturer, a man of learning; the inspiration of an apostle and martyr, a man of faith. I imagine him in his pain—not only physical pain, having been tortured on the rack and now facing the horror of being hanged, drawn and quartered, but also the mental and emotional anguish of a priest trying to shepherd his people in the midst of persecution.

John Henry Newman, too, I picture in a cell—in his case, a scholar’s cell, composing tirelessly at his desk, producing many memorable works. In these writings, especially his private letters and diaries, I sense his pain as well—the pain of isolation, both religious and cultural, and of frustration of his talents, especially during the last half-century of his life as a Catholic. Newman lived to a formidable age—he was almost ninety when he died—by contrast with the relative youth of Campion at his martyrdom (he was only forty-one).

In each case, the cell they inhabited was a symbol of their religious fidelity. It was a consecrated place in which they lived out their vocation of witness to the truth. We can, perhaps, see it as, in Campion’s case, a consecration of the martyr’s heart, and in Newman’s, a consecration of the teacher’s mind.

In each case, I like to imagine them in their cells as they lived out their last days, and to wonder if they called to mind the mission they had carried out to exalt the truth in their time, and to build the “idea” of a university for our time; indeed, all time. My aim is to compare the contributions of Campion and Newman to an understanding of Catholic higher learning, both philosophically and institutionally; and then to consider the ways in which Campion and Newman epitomised the Catholic intellectual vocation, and carried out in the university sphere the leadership exerted more broadly in the life of the Church by Peter and Paul.

Campion and Newman were both born in London, but they were, I think, quintessentially men of Oxford. Each was the outstanding Oxford figure of his time. Campion was a person of precocious brilliance. Several years after he left Oxford, he was described by Lord Cecil, an architect of the English Reformation (and close adviser to Queen Elizabeth), as “one of the diamonds of England”.[1] At Oxford, he was appointed a Fellow of St John’s College at the age of seventeen. He attracted a personal following, and exercised an intellectual influence, that was not rivalled for another three centuries—until John Henry Newman did the same, attending Trinity College, Oxford, as an undergraduate and becoming a Fellow of Oriel College at the age of twenty-one. Newman called Oxford “the most religious university in the world”[2], and the institution played a decisive part in forming the religious and intellectual sensibilities of Campion in the sixteenth century and of Newman in the nineteenth century.

Speaking of the members of the Oxford Movement, Newman said that Catholics did not influence their conversion to Catholicism. “Oxford,” he said, “made us Catholics.”[3]

Campion and Newman each delivered memorable sermons in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. Campion did so indirectly when his work of apologetics called Ten Reasons was secretly printed and left on the pews of the church, arousing the hostility of the authorities and causing a massive search for him—said to be the largest manhunt at that time in English history—which culminated in his capture and execution. Newman also spoke at the University Church: he did so in person, and frequently, when he served as vicar, from 1828 to 1843, during his Anglican years.

Both men loved Oxford, and the Oxford experience shaped their philosophy of education and their devotion to the university as an institution.[4] Each tried to establish a Catholic university in Ireland—and each was unsuccessful at the time. Campion sought to revive a university that had lapsed, a papal foundation of the fourteenth century, which was later to materialise as Trinity College, Dublin. Newman became deeply engaged in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland; and while it, too, did not really flourish in Newman’s lifetime, it inspired the lectures which he delivered in Dublin and formed the foundation of his famous work The Idea of a University.

What was Newman’s “idea” of a university? It was at once a positive concept shaped and sharpened by negative forces. The positive content was the study of various subjects or branches of knowledge—commonly called the “liberal arts”—so as to enlarge and cultivate the mind and produce an integrated understanding of knowledge and truth. In this Newman stressed the compatibility—even more, the necessary interdependence—of religion and learning, of faith and reason, of revelation and the imagination, as forming the unity and universality of truth.[5]

Newman’s account of a liberal education—the education that befits a free man, and particularly a free lay man, since Newman had a deep desire to foster an educated laity[6]—is heightened by the defects and distortions of higher education, which have remained to our own time, and indeed intensified; especially the utilitarian view which confuses education with vocational training, and the clerical attitude which mistakes a university for a seminary.[7]

Edmund Campion, too, had a deep sense of a liberal education, though, by comparison with Newman, only fragments survive to illustrate his outlook. After leaving Oxford, he spent some time in Ireland, and his writings of that period reflect his rich understanding of university culture, combining habits of mind and demeanour that constitute the ideal student[8]. A discourse he wrote in Ireland titled The Academic Man was described by the English Jesuit Fr. C.C. Martindale as anticipating Newman’s Idea of a University[9]. Campion stressed, for example, the blending of morals and manners with the cultivation of learning, and the importance of piety and humility as well as healthy habits of study and recreation. He offered this advice to a student:

bury yourself in your books, complete your course … keep your mind on the stretch … strive for the prizes which you deserve … Only persevere, do not degenerate from what you are, nor suffer the keen eye of your mind to grow dark and rusty.[10]

In an oration he delivered in France, at the seminary of Douai, he was even more explicit on what was required of a student. The ideal student must keep his mind subtle, his memory active, his voice resonant; he should cultivate his pronunciation; his recreations are to be painting, playing the lute and writing music; and he should be devoted to languages—Latin, Greek and his own tongue, in which he must compose verses and epigrams; by his sixteenth year, he must be able to produce Greek iambic verse.[11] (One wonders what the comparable demands on the contemporary student might be!)

When Campion later arrived in the city of Prague, after his ordination as a Jesuit and before his return to England and eventual martyrdom, he engaged largely in educational activities. He taught the liberal arts—especially philosophy and rhetoric at a Jesuit school in Prague—and gave displays of oratory and writing as well as producing plays. To a decisive extent, Campion embodied the qualities that Newman would readily identify, three centuries later, with his “idea of a university”. And they both embody, I would argue, the Catholic intellectual vocation, which consists of a cluster of distinctive attributes—a devotion to truth, the synthesis of faith and reason, an attitude of spiritual sacrifice and fidelity, a zeal for souls, and a certain daring in challenging the status quo. These qualities have registered an impact on our religious and educational culture, not least in the names of Campion and Newman being invoked by various institutions (colleges, university clubs and residential halls, and secondary schools).

This combination of intellectual and spiritual qualities is strikingly evident in both Campion and Newman. In his biography of Campion, Evelyn Waugh describes the process by which the Elizabethan scholar and saint came to realise what he believed God was asking of him—in his fidelity to the truth, and to God:

Only by slow stages was it revealed to Campion how complete was the sacrifice required of him. He had powerful friends and a brilliant reputation. Surely with these it must still be possible to make a career in the world, without doing violence to his religion? Surely it was not expected of him to give up all.[12]

In the case of Newman, too, the process of realisation was slow and yet remorseless. He was acutely conscious of the sacrifices, both personal and social, he made in becoming a Catholic, and he lamented the loss of old associations and the displacement of memories.[13] His last sermon as an Anglican was called “The Parting of Friends”.[14] He felt few personal consolations or rewards in the years following his conversion to Catholicism; having to endure, on the one hand, grievous misunderstanding, and on the other, repeated neglect of his talents and his potential value to the Church.[15] In this, no doubt, he suffered a continuing torment, somewhat similar to the one experienced in the following century by another priest-convert from Anglicanism, Ronald Knox, who, in the words of a recent reviewer, suffered “a mild martyrdom”.[16] Even the pangs of intellectual confession were sharply felt by Newman: in writing Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), he reported being “constantly in tears, and constantly crying out with distress”.[17]

Campion and Newman understood that the Catholic intellectual vocation involved suffering—suffering for the truth, and suffering for souls. One mark of this was the battle for truth—conducted in the various controversies in which both men engaged. Campion showed his willingness and skill in the work of apologetics he produced, Ten Reasons, and in Brag, the short but crucial manifesto he wrote of his purpose in returning to England, as well as, following his capture, in the verbal defence he offered, during his trial, of the Catholic mission he and others undertook to England.

Newman, for his part, revealed at an early date his taste as well as his talent for controversy. Like Campion, he was greatly influenced as a controversialist by the example of Cicero. As his biographer Ian Ker has observed, Newman had a strongly logical mind and great powers of irony and sarcasm, which were especially effective in his satirical writings.[18] A major target of his satire, for example, was the religious and spiritual shallowness that he saw in middle-class England during the Victorian era, and in this Newman bears ready comparison with Charles Dickens and Matthew Arnold for the effectiveness of his critical prose. At the same time, Newman always appreciated some elements of the established English church, recognising the signs of religious awakening during the nineteenth century, not only in the Tractarians but also in some of the Evangelicals, especially the social reformers such as the Clapham Sect (within which William Wilberforce figured importantly in the fight against slavery).

The involvement of Campion and Newman in controversy—in the great debates of their times—is of instructive interest in relation to their contrasting personalities. Campion was a remarkably attractive figure. At Oxford he gained a loyal following among students: they flocked to his lectures and even imitated his mannerisms and dress style. He was a man of gentle courtesy but not reserved, delighting in oratory and the theatre. Evelyn Waugh describes him as “magnetic and inspiring”.[19] Across the centuries, he comes to us as a man of unmistakable flair.

Newman appears as a different personality—reserved, even shy; lonely and highly sensitive, though also robust in the face of adversity; and, living as he did so much longer than Campion, affected by the enfeeblement of age.

I have emphasised, in exploring the witness that Campion and Newman gave to the Catholic intellectual vocation, their readiness to suffer for the truth. But a further dimension of their vocation was their willingness to suffer for souls. These are commonly seen to be organically linked, in imitation of Christ’s own statement, that “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6), and they are treated in The Idea of a University, where Newman argues that, while the direct end of a university is knowledge, the indirect effects of a university are religious.[20]

In Campion’s case, there is his heroic virtue as a priest, at first during his six years at Prague, where he not only served an academic role but was also preacher and confessor and provider of succour to those in prison and in hospital; and then on his return to England where he faced the hazards of a hunted priest as he ministered to his persecuted flock. One incident in particular, I think, epitomises his pastoral ardour—and that is his forgiveness of George Eliot, the man who betrayed him to the authorities. (Shades here, perhaps, of St Pope John Paul II, forgiving the man who tried to assassinate him in 1981—Mehmet Ali Agca—in his Rome jail cell. It’s been reported that Agca, now released from jail, recently visited the Vatican to lay flowers at the tomb of the Pope he tried to kill.) George Eliot visited Campion in his prison cell and confessed that, after his Judas-like act, he feared for his life. Campion urged him to seek God’s mercy and do penance for the sake of his salvation. He then offered to provide for Eliot’s safety by recommending him to a Catholic duke in Germany. This overture did not have the desired effect—Eliot returned to spying for the Protestant authorities—but it did have another result. Campion’s jailer was present at his meeting with Eliot and was so swayed by Campion’s greatness of heart that he became a Catholic.

Newman, too, exhibited a readiness to suffer for souls. His conversion to Catholicism did not loosen his bonds of sympathy with his Anglican friends. He recalled with feeling the long years where they worshipped side by side, but he acknowledged that his very outspokenness was due to his conviction that “the Catholic Church is the one ark of salvation”[21]—and due also to the love that he harboured for their souls. As a priest he had a deep pastoral sense, which his fame and his final elevation to Cardinal did not impair. Those, he said, whom God “singularly and specially loves, He pursued with His blows, sometimes on one and the same wound, till perhaps they are tempted to cry out for mercy”.[22] Newman thought the very act of belief was not only intellectual but also moral. It depends on “a right state of heart” and “is perfected, not by intellectual cultivation, but by obedience”. In short, he noted, “We believe, because we love.”[23]

An important factor in the zeal for souls exhibited by both Campion and Newman, I believe, was their exposure to popular Catholic culture and ordinary Catholic people. As Edmund Campion wrestled at Oxford with his mind and conscience over his religious allegiance, it proved significant that he moved to Ireland. There he lived in the family home of a friend and, Evelyn Waugh records, “for the first and last time in his life, he tasted the happiness of a normal, cultured household”.[24] He experienced the tribal life of the Irish people, and the dependable routines and rhythms of a deeply Christian culture.

Newman was also exposed to this Irish culture, during the seven years of his effort to establish the Catholic University in Dublin. He felt an enduring gratitude to the Irish people for the kindness they had shown him over the years—from his first visit in 1851. But at an earlier stage, both before and after his conversion, he had visited Italy and Sicily. He was profoundly impressed by the quality of popular faith—“everywhere a simple certainty in believing which to a Protestant or Anglican is quite astonishing”.[25] Newman also understood the nature of popular faith which, while it was often intermingled with pagan traditions and carried superstitions requiring purification, was nonetheless far preferable to scepticism:

he who believes a little, but encompasses that little with the inventions of men, is undeniably in a better condition than he who blots out from his mind both the human inventions, and that portion of truth which was concealed in them.[26]

The culture of popular belief and practice is central to the contributions of Campion and Newman to the cause of Catholic higher education. Both were engaged in disputes that seemed ecclesiastical and political—appearing to be essentially a conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism. They were, however, actually far more profound, involving conflicts that were spiritual, and even apocalyptic. Both men recognised that new forces were menacing the Christian faith and, by extension, its institutions such as the Catholic university. Like Thomas More before him, Campion saw, at least in a germinal form, the great threat posed by the power of the state, which would re-order the priorities of belief and commitment and jeopardise religious liberty and the rights of religious institutions.

Newman, on the other hand, was acutely alive to the looming danger of secularism—a threat to the fundamental viability of religious belief in Western society, which was not only becoming irreligious but anti-Christian. As Christopher Dawson pointed out:

Newman was the first Christian thinker in the English-speaking world who fully realised the nature of modern secularism and the enormous change which was already in the process of development, although a century had still to pass before it was to produce its full harvest of destruction.[27]

In a remarkable sermon Newman preached in 1873, “The Infidelity of the Future”, he foresaw the magnitude of the threat posed by a militant secularism. “Christianity”, he said, “has never yet had experience of a world simply irreligious”:

the trials which lie before us are such as would appal and make dizzy even such courageous hearts as St Athanasius, St Gregory I, or St Gregory VII. And they would confess that, dark as the prospect of their own day was to them severally, ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it.[28]

It was no longer possible to depend on the orthodox faith of Protestants, while Catholics in England were likely to be seen as “the enemies” of “civil liberty” and “national progress”, and to face discrimination, particularly since they were too prominent to be ignored and yet seemingly too weak to defend themselves.[29]

Both Campion and Newman possessed a prophetic sense that remains sharply relevant to our own times—and to the future of a Catholic university in our society. The Australian author and publisher Frank Sheed said that Campion was “the first modern man in English history … He was of 20th century cast”.[30] He was sensitive to the problem of the state in relation to the Church, especially when it came to the enforcement of false religion. No doubt the people of the sixteenth century were feeling their way on the precise relationship of religious and political institutions, especially when these institutions fell into conflict over the primacy of a citizen’s loyalty. But it may be argued that Campion had an early intimation of the extent to which the state could subject the prerogatives of God to the power of Caesar, and lead to the twofold outcome of a politicised church, on the one hand, and a desacralised or secularised state, on the other, a condition with which we are much more familiar today. A politicised church brings the power of the state into the very bosom of the church, so that the state determines, and dictates, religious faith, which leads to a fatal confusion of sacred and secular loyalties. There are abundant examples of this confusion in present-day Western society, particularly in the sphere of law, whether it is the legislature or the court; but perhaps the most striking instance of a politicised church is present-day Islam, which compounds religion and politics in a social order consecrated by nationalism.

The lack of distinction in Islam between church and state, between God and Caesar, is serving as a direct and often violent confrontation to the complacent yet tenacious secularism of the contemporary West. The resurgence of Islam in the twenty-first century may give new relevance, and new urgency, to the events and consequences of the sixteenth-century English Reformation. If Islam poses the great threat to Christianity in the twenty-first century, as communism did in the twentieth century, we can appreciate even more sharply the combined importance for our time of the prophetic insights of Edmund Campion and John Henry Newman.

Campion may, perhaps, be seen as a precursor of Newman, for, if the state can determine religion, it can also determine irreligion. It can impose apostasy. A politicised church, in which the temporal displaces the transcendental, does in fact pave the way for a secularist culture, in which temporal loyalties are elevated to timeless, and totalitarian ideology becomes a substitute for transcendental faith.

These principles are of direct relevance to the university as an institution, and specifically the Catholic university; for the university cannot maintain its integrity, its essential mission, as an educational institution, if it is at first politicised and then secularised. As Christopher Dawson noted in The Crisis of Western Education, the Catholic Church in a secularist culture must not only deal with Catholic colleges and universities. It must attend to secular institutions of learning as well.[31] So, in exploring the idea of a Catholic university in the twenty-first century, we must also address, I believe, the idea of a university.

I would venture to describe Campion and Newman as the Peter and Paul of Catholic higher education. There is a degree of dramatic licence in such a claim; but, in pondering the importance of Campion and Newman, for their own time and for ours, I have been struck by certain parallels with the lives and contributions of St Peter and St Paul.

In their sense of intellectual vocation, Campion and Newman may be seen to resemble St Paul—their facility with ideas and language, their deep convictions founded in faith as well as reason, and their devotion to learning. Paul was a convert, as were Campion and Newman; and, just as Paul provided a theological foundation and an intellectual architecture for the Christian faith, so Campion and Newman supplied the intellectual underpinning for the Christian university.

In certain other ways, Campion and Newman resemble St Paul—in their preaching and power of oratory, and in their daring, a brave eagerness to take on the prevailing intellectual order and challenge it with Christian truth. To this might be added Campion’s personal prowess—a physical daring, an undeniable verve, manifested by St Paul in his perilous journeys, and by Edmund Campion in his period of constantly evading the English authorities until, like St Paul, he was captured and martyred.

Newman, too, displayed Pauline qualities. For one thing, Newman and Paul were great letter-writers. For another, they both sought to adapt the Church to new conditions—Newman’s grasp of secularism helping to prepare the Church for a different culture, mirroring St Paul’s role in developing the Church beyond its cradle in Judaism to meet the different circumstances of a Gentile world. Newman had a special respect for St Paul because of his humanity:

his intimate sympathy and compassionateness for the whole world, not only in its strength, but in its weakness; in the lively regard with which he views everything that comes before him, taken in the concrete.[32]

Campion and Newman resemble St Peter in the unmistakable qualities of leadership that each displayed. They embodied and projected a vision of learning, of the intellectual apostolate, of the university, that bears respectful comparison with the broader leadership in the Church exercised by St Peter. They also showed a capacity for organisational development—one of the qualities of a leader—as revealed in their desire to found universities in Ireland, and in Newman’s case, in his establishment of the Birmingham Oratory as an institutional centre of Christian humanism.

An incidental link of St Edmund Campion with St Peter is that the day on which Campion resigned from Oxford in 1569 and embarked upon the path that finally led to his martyrdom was the feast of St Peter in Chains—a symbolic prefigurement, indeed, for Campion himself. Following his return to England in 1580, Campion chose the feast day of St Peter and St Paul, June 29, to speak on the Papacy (under the title “Tu es Petrus”) before a large audience in London.

It would, I believe, be appropriate that, if John Henry Newman, now beatified, is finally declared a saint, he share the feast day of St Edmund Campion, December 1—in a graceful echo of the combined feast day of St Peter and St Paul (on June 29).

Karl Schmude is a Founding Fellow of Campion College, Sydney, and a former university librarian at the University of New England, Armidale. This article is adapted from a paper given at a conference of the Australian Chesterton Society at Campion College on October 31, 2015.