Tillman, Mary Katherine. John Henry Newman: Man of Letters.

Quinn, John F.

TILLMAN, Mary Katherine. John Henry Newman: Man of Letters. Marquette Studies in Philosophy. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2015. 353 pp. Paper, $29.00--In this book, Mary Katherine Tillman brings together twenty essays that she has written over a period of thirty years on Newman's life and works. Several have been published previously in academic journals such as Communio and the Newman Studies Journal. A professor emerita in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Tillman is both a Newman authority and enthusiast. In her preface, she notes that the book "celebrates the breadth of Blessed John Henry Newman's thought" and his "extraordinarily energetic mind and his tender sympathetic heart, suffused as they were by the kindly light and grace of God."

Newman is well known for his interest in the Church Fathers. It was Newman's study of the controversies that roiled the early Church that led him to conclude that Rome had constantly been the defender of orthodox Christianity. As he became more convinced of Rome's claims, he gradually and reluctantly concluded that the arguments he and other leaders of the Oxford movement had made for Anglicanism were untenable. Tillman includes an informative article on this subject that she coauthored with another eminent Newman scholar, Marvin O'Connell.

She devotes much more time, however, to tracing Newman's classical interests. In an essay on Newman's Mediterranean tour of 1832-33, Tillman notes that he took with him Homer's Odyssey, Virgil, and Thucydides, and was profoundly moved by reading them, remarking that the "sights and works of antiquity all spoke to him of God." Of all the classical thinkers, Aristotle had the greatest appeal to Newman. As a student and then a tutor at Oxford, Newman immersed himself in Aristotle, reading his Poetics, his volumes on logic carefully, and his Nicomachean Ethics over and over again. In his own writings, Newman referred to Aristotle as the "great Master."

While a close reader of the ancients, Newman was not always in agreement with them. For example, Tillman notes that Newman in The Idea of a University rejects the Platonic/Socratic claim that virtue can be taught: "Knowledge is one thing, virtue another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility." In Newman's view, liberal education produces cultivated gentlemen who may or may not be good men.

Newman's liberally educated gentleman has much in common with Aristotle's magnanimous man. As Tillman indicates, Newman was quite ambivalent about this sort of person. The gentlemen he identified with were Christian scholars like St. Francis de Sales and St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratorian community that Newman joined after his conversion to Catholicism. Sts. Francis and Philip were learned and polished men and yet "humble and gentle souls, whose humanity and urbanity is more immediately Christian than Athenian."

Readers of The Review of Metaphysics will no doubt be especially interested in those essays of Tillman's that show Newman in dialogue with Plato and Aristotle and other classical thinkers. However, all of the essays in this wide-ranging collection have insights to offer and are very much worth reading.--John F. Quinn, Salve Regina University