BOOK REVIEWS

503

reads the poems in terms of that theological vocabulary and religious psychology. The poet never joined a church nor yielded to pressures for conversion at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary or in Amherst's First Church, and VanZanten's background commentary on Dickinson's biography acknowledges the unorthodoxy of her spiritual history Yet I have no doubt that she concurs with Edward Dickinson's clergyman who, after an awkward conversation with Emily that he undertook chiefly to relieve her father's anxieties, pronounced the daughter spiritually "sound." VanZanten somewhat undervalues other religious influences in her introductory chapter, where she consigns Unitarianism to a distinct minority status in the religious culture of the United States in 1860 even though Emily Dickinson's close circle of friends included such Unitarians as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Bowles, and her Norcross cousins. There were other disturbing intellectual influences, including trends in scientific and scriptural study, to which the poet responded. For that matter, the 1860 census was the first to show Roman Catholicism as the largest denomination in the United States. Dickinson grew up in a homogeneous religious culture but matured into one far more complex and unsettling. This book seems to be directed mainly to readers today who share in the Dickinsons' Calvinist culture and who, like Van Zanten herself, flnd that the flnal letter in the acronym TULIP "has often been a great comfort" (38), but her meditative approach to the poems also provides substance for reflection among readers grounded in other Christian traditions or even those whose spiritual energies flnd a home in no church. What is required is a willingness to engage energetically in the give-and-take of Emily Dickinson's strenuous spiritual exercises. VanZanten shows herself a gifted teacher in these commentariesboth professor of poetry and spiritual counselor. The book will accomplish its purpose if it helps others find courage, insight, and mended faith through reflection on Emily Dickinson's poems. Jane Donahue Eberwein Oakland University

The Philosophical Habit of Mind: Rhetoric and Person in John Henry Newman's Dublin Writings. By Angelo Bottone. Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2010. ISBN 978-9731997-61-2. Pp. 247. 22. Newman and His Contemporaries. By Edward Short. New York: T&T Clark, 2011. ISBN 978-0567026897. Pp. 530. $32.95. It is a strange fact of long standing that while today's universities bear little relation to John Henry Newman's educational theory, nevertheless educators of all stripes name his Idea ofa University (1873) as a foundational guide to what college should really be about. In the world of the overcapitalized, hyper-specialized

504

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

postmodern university, Newman's Idea, with its dazzling picture of liberal education, represents a kind of Golden Age for us to look back upon, both for inspiration, and for grounds upon which to complain about the present. We are inspired by the discourses, lectures, and essays that Newman wrote in the 1850s, as he led the effort to form a new school in Dublin, the Catholic University of Ireland. WhUe Newman's actual university lasted only a short while, his Idea has remained with us, influencing a century and a half of educators and students, and inspiring a good deal of scholarly activity. A great part of the interest in Newman's educational thought has been directly related to the strange fact of his allure, the attractiveness of his ideal, as set against the sobering reality of university education on the ground. Why do we yearn so after Newman's "Knowledge Its Own End," his Circle of Sciences, his "Philosophic Habit of Mind"? A. Dwight Culler was the first to give a satisfactory account ofthe Idea's unique vision, in his 1955 work. The Imperial Intellect. Cufler's account situates Newman's ideal university squarely within the historical and intellectual traditions of Oxford, where Newman had learned, taught, and worked for more than twenty years. More recently, the polymathic Jaroslav Pelikan wrote his own Idea of a University: A Reexamination (1994), in which he sought both to appreciate Newman's contribution to liberal studies, and to reconcile it with the German model embraced by contemporary research universities. Nevertheless, the basic human roots of Newman's continuing attraction have eluded many scholars. What is it about his Idea that draws us so? Answering this question is the burden of Angelo Bottone's new book. The Philosophical Habit of Mind. Bottone's thesis is that we are drawn to Newman's educational ideal because we find its vision of the human person so compelling. That is, as Bottone explains it, the higher-educational world we have created for ourselves here in the modern and postmodern West (and which we have eagerly marketed to the East and the developing global South), is based upon an unsatisfactory anthropology. Maddeningly, the most basic questions we have when we go to university"How can we study the human being? How can we understand the human being?" remain unanswered when we leave (225). Yet these are questions that Newman can answer, and with great gusto. His interpreter, Bottone, a philosopher by training, seeks to bring out the difference between Newman's view of the human person, and the view that has come to dominate the mainstream since Newman's day. Each view of what it means to be a person has ramifications for what it means to know as a person, and these of course exercise a critical influence on the way we imagine universities. By re-presenting Newman's educational teaching in the context ofthe growth of modern anthropological thought, Bottone shows us why we flnd Newman so refreshing, and yet so other. To put it into a few words, Bottone sees Newman advancing an Aristotelian, virtue-ethical presentation of human nature, over and against the widespread, modern liberal point-of-view, staked out by Francis Bacon and progressively defined by figures such as John Locke and the Utilitarians. Thus, for Bottone, Newman ought to be understood as an early vanguard of the neo-

BOOK REVIEWS

505

Aristotelian critique of modernity taken up witb so mucb vigor in tbe second half of tbe twentieth century Newman, tben, strikes bome for tbe same reasons Alasdair Maclntyre's anti-liberalism bas bit us witb sucb peculiar force: in returning to Aristotle, eacb bas proposed a more satisfactory view of buman life. Bottone's account falls into five basic parts, tbe first of wbicb discusses tbe bistory of tbe Idea and Newman's otber works connected to tbe Catbolic University of Ireland (togetber, Bottone calls tbem Newman's Dublin Writings). Tbis cbapter, tbougb tedious at times in its exhaustive coverage, performs tbe mucb-needed service of linking tbe Idea, in all its abstraction, to Newman's otber major work on education. The Rise and Progress of Universities {1872), a more imaginative, historical narrative. Tbe same tbemes Newman analyzes in tbe former, be dramatizes through bistory in tbe latter. If some of Newman's readers bave found bis pbilosopbical views unrealistic, tbey migbt profitably consult bis bistorical accounts of places wbere tbe same ideas bave actually worked. Cbief among Bottone's guides bere are Culler's Imperial Intellect, Fergal McGratb's Newman's University: Idea and Reality (1951), and Mary Katherine Tillman's superb "Introduction" to ber edition of tbe Rise and Progress (2001). Bottone's second cbapter turns from tbe Dublin Writings' publication history to tbeir intellectual bistory, tracing tbe lines of Newman's tbought back to bis beloved classical predecessors, Aristotle and Cicero, as well as to Newman's declared "opponent," tbe early-modern pbilpsopber Jobn Locke. It was especially in relation to tbese tbree tbinkers, Bottone argues, tbat Newman's pbilosopby of education took sbape, for it was tbey wbo most influenced bis view of tbe buman person, and tberefore wbat it meant to be personally educated. If be was drawn to classical etbics and anthropology by tbeir very attractiveness, Newman was equally driven toward tbem out of disgust at Locke's proto-consequentialism. In particular, Bottone sbows Newman cboosing Aristotle's man of virtue, ratber than Locke's, as tbe basis for bis antbropology. In so doing, be cbooses a view of buman life conditioned by community and natural teleology, and crowned witb a gratuitous bappiness tbat accompanies virtuous cbaracter; at tbe same time, Newman rejects tbe Lockean view of eacb life as radically individuated and defined by no natural ends, witb no higher happiness tban pleasure. Tbe first life calls for a liberal education, tbe second for a servile, utilitarian course of instruction. By drawing out tbe antbropological tensions between tbese influences, Bottone brings us mucb closer than we bave yet been to tbe drama of education as Newman saw it unfolding in bis time. Wbile tbe unfolding tragicomedy of modern educational bistory is evidently of interest to all wbo participate in the contemporary academy, specialists in Victorian and Modernist studies will find Bottone's account particularly engaging as a fresb view of botb tbe stakes and tbe major players in tbe nineteentb century's great antbropological sbift. " If tbe first two cbapters lay out tbe background for Newman's tbougbt, Bottone's tbird cbapter gets mucb deeper into tbe Dublin Writings tbemselves, discussing

506

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

the intellectual, moral, and artistic dimensions of human personhood that undergird Newman's educational thought. In discussing each of these dimensions, Bottone is most concerned to show that Newman's scheme for the universify is not an abstraction to be impressed onto students' rfiinds, but rather a well-ordered reflection of what human persons actually desire and are made for: a unified view of realify, in all its interrelated complexify. The fourth chapter then addresses the tension between Newman's famous "Gentleman" and the kind of "Educated Man" he actually wanted to produce at the Irish Universify. Here, Bottone pointedly addresses the fraught relation between knowledge and morality, and how the two are to function relative to one another as separate ends ofthe university experience. Last of all, the fifth chapter brings Newman's educational and personal thought into the twentieth century, and up to the present day. While the Catholic Universify of Ireland, despite Newman's best efforts, eventually failed, Bottone holds that Newman's educational visionthe "philosophic habit of mind" he wanted to form in his students, and the ordered search for integrated understandingremains a viable, and indeed crucially necessary model for human education. Bottone's volume increases the likelihood that this vision will be more widely seen and understood. For all its strengths, however, there are a few weaknesses to The Philosophical Habit of Mind, some more substantial than others. At the level of style, Bottone (like all of us, frankly) sometimes falls short of the high standard set by Newman's lucid prose. The different sections of his fine argument do not always hang together as well as they might, with the result that it is not always clear what one line of reasoning or exegesis has to do with the book's overarching thesis. At a more substantial level, there are a couple of fascinating strains to the. argument that have not been adequately woven together. In Chapter Three, Bottone holds, following Walter Jost {Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman [1989]), that the philosophy of rhetoric played a key role in forming Newman's understanding ofthe intellectual dimension of human personhood (151-53). A worthy point, but Bottone fails to connect Newman's rhetorical frame of mind to his overall Aristotelianism. This would seem to be a crucial, potentially very deep connection, for in the Aristotelian corpus, the Nicomachean Ethicsfitshand-in-glove with the Rhetoric, each refining and deepening the claims of the other. Bottone's argument could only be made stronger by a more thoroughgoing ressourcement of the Aristotelian texts that influenced Newman most. Still, Bottone's work does a great deal to direct our ever-more-dispersed attention back to one of the great funds of our tradition: the wealth of human wisdom discovered by Alasdair Maclntyre, John Henry Newman, Thomas Aquinas, and Cicero before him, namely the dynamic view of the human person laid out by Aristotle. It was not for nothing that Newman bestowed such remarkably high praise on the Philosopher in the Idea of a University:

BOOK REVIEWS

507

While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians, for the great Master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind. He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. In many subject-matters, to think correctly, is to think like Aristotle; and we are his disciples whether we will or no, though we may not know it. (qtd. in Bottone 59-60) Angelo Bottone's new book has brought us much closer to understanding what Newman meant by this eulogy, and what exactly Aristotle's legacy has to do with liberal education. If The Philosophical Habit of Mind uncovers Newman's relation to Aristotle, Gicero, Locke, and the Utilitarians, Edward Short's new volume, Newman and His Contemporaries, examines Newman's relationship to almost everyone else. To be sure. Short has limited his field of reference to the Victorian intellectual world, and to those in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have looked back on it for inspiration, but within that field. Short moves with great facility and aplomb, drawing out the remarkableand remarkably complicatedstrands of friendship that made the fabric of Jobn Henry Newman's long nineteenth-century life (18011890). The book is a history of Newman's influence, not only on the faithful of the Tractarian movement in 1830s Oxford, or on the wider world of Anglican and Gatholic theology, but on the personal lives of Victorian intellectuals of all types. As Short explains, Newman understood "personal influence" to be the critical means by which God has chosen to advance his truth, and the chapters of Short's work show how fully Newman lived his life in accordance with this conviction (21). In sermons, novels, histories, periodical pieces, and above all else, in letters, he bore an unequalled influence on tbe men and women of his time, including many with whom he had relatively little in common, on the face of it. This latter, less frequently noticed set receives the lion's share of Short's attention: in addition to the resolute Anglo-Gatholics John Keble and E. B. Pusey, he casts light on the agnostic scientist William Froude, who watched as every last member of his family followed Newman into the Gatholic Ghurch; the great liberal prime minister, William Gladstone; the satirical novelist W. M. Thackeray; the Unitarian journalist R. H. Hutton; and the uncomfortable apostates Matthew Arnold and A. H. Glough. Each member of this stellar cast of characters, caught up within a broader constellation of Victorian literary figures, follows their own narrative arcs in Short's book, but never without feeling the gravitational pull of Newman's dynamic personality. Thus, Newman and His Contemporaries successfully returns one ofthe great nineteenth-century public intellectuals to his natural habitat. That someone needed to write this bookneeded to resituate Newman within his broader set of friends and intellectual associatesis evident from the fact that most of the Newman scholarship of the past fifty years has been carried out by

508

CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE

theologians, who have understandably presented him as one of their own (though he himself sought to avoid the label). While Ian Ker's standard John Henry Newman: A Biography (reissued, 2010) does not ignore the literary context, it understandably emphasizes Newman's relation to his closest companions and collaborators, most of whom were clergymen. Sheridan Gilley's excellent Newman and His Age (1990) takes a somewhat broader view, but nevertheless pays most attention to Newman's positions vis--vis other Anglicans and evangelical Christians. Within the Victorian Studies guild, on the other hand, literary and historical scholars have largely remained content to let the theologians have Newman, with the noteworthy exception of Frank M. Turner"scurrilous Frank Turner," as Short calls him (19) who repeatedly sought (in works such as John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion [2002]) to revise the man into a consummate dissembler, smoldering with psychosexual repression and irrational political vendettas. Thank goodness, then, for Edward Short's work. Victorianists and scholars of late-modern religion and culture will enjoy every page of Newman, and His Contemporaries. Dwight A. Lindley III
Hillsdale College

Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill By David-Antoine Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 0-19-9558354-6. Pp. xi + 240. $110.00. Simone Weil in The Need for Roots wntes ofthe close affinity" between politics and art: "A poet, in the arrangement of words and the choice of each word must simultaneously bear in mind matters on at least flve or six different planes of composition" while "[pjolitics, in their turn, form an art governed by composition on a multiple plane" (211). "Whoever finds himself with political responsibilities," she says, "if in his heart he hungers and thirsts after justice, must desire to possess this faculty of composition on a multiple plane" (212). In Defending Poetry, David-Antoine Williams is concerned with just such affinities between poetry and politics as they appear in the work of three poets Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hillfor whom poetry is neither an aesthete's rarefled pleasure ("a purely aesthetic 'artefact with no attestable significance beyond the singular moment of enjoyment") nor simply a tool of political power structures ("an artefact of prevailing power systems to be judged mainly on political criteria") (3). All three poets "came of age in the period following the Second War, as humanity was coming into a new consciousness of its own potential for evil" (50)after the revelation, as George Steiner has it, that a person, could "read Goethe or Rilke in the evening ... and go to his day's work at

Copyright of Christianity & Literature is the property of Christianity & Literature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.