The Idea of a University

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a leading 19th-century figure in both the religious and academic worlds. He began his career as an Oxford scholar and a clergyman, influenced at first by the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church. At the time, the Anglican Church was divided between a low-church movement, which preferred less ritualism and fewer connections to the sort of theology held by the Roman Catholic Church, and a high-church movement, which wanted to see more changes in the opposite direction. Over time, Newman moved in a distinctly high-church direction. He became a prominent figure in the Oxford Movement, a group of influential high-church scholars, many associated with the University of Oxford. This was also called the Tractarian Movement, named after their program of publishing a series of tracts that set forth their views on theology and the relationship between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. Newman authored some of these tracts, culminating in his theologically inflammatory “Tract 90” in 1841, which argued that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches were theologically reconcilable. After a significant Anglican backlash against this opinion, Newman decided that his views could find a home in only the Roman Catholic Church.