About Newman
When Faith Meets the University: St. Monica, St. Newman, and the Mortification of the Intellect
August 30, 2026
(Universidad de San Pablo, Arequipa, Peru)
The feasts of St. Monica and St. Augustine fall on August 27 and 28, beautifully appropriate dates. These dates coincide in many places with the beginning of the Fall semester at university, which presents the ideal time to reflect on St. John Henry Newman’s sermon, “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training,” preached at the University Church in Dublin on the feast of St. Monica in 1856, during the first year of the Catholic University of Ireland. Newman is well known for his Idea of the University, but this sermon has a different focus, and with a bit of adjustment, can be applied to the experience of today’s college student. This sermon while specifically speaking of St. Augustine illustrates the subtle danger that might befall any young student today, who, with eager mind, encounters all there is to experience at university: new and fascinating ideas while interacting with different students from varying backgrounds; a mental shift can slowly occur when the student’s intellectual development becomes separated from religious formation.
As a professor who has been involved with students for nearly 30 years, I have a front row seat to observe what can happen. Students arrive with different degrees of religious commitment. Some have a deep and mature faith; others have only the beginnings of one. Many have never thought very seriously about what they believe. But there are others, too, those who have already developed an antagonism against religion. And then all these young students encounter the university.
For some students, this encounter can deepen their faith. If they are fortunate to form friendships with like-minded Christians, say, at a Newman Center, they discover that Christianity can withstand intellectual examination and that the questions raised in the classroom can help sharpen their understanding of what they believe. But for other students, the opposite happens. They begin college accepting what they have learned at home or church, but unfortunately, they leave believing that their faith is intellectually impossible, or at the least, unnecessary. This is more than likely not the result of any active attack against religion per se, but something more insidious. What changes is the student’s idea of what it means to be an intellectual person. Some students can become intoxicated with the expansion of their minds and understanding of the world of the intellect, much like when St. Augustine discovered Manichaesism while studying rhetoric at the university in Carthage.
This is where St. John Henry, preaching on St. Monica, presents a remarkably contemporary way of thinking about the situation. Of course, St. Monica’s university student was St. Augustine, whose brilliant mind and curiosity made him ripe for the very thing that happened to him.
Newman’s description of St. Augustine is compelling. He doesn’t portray him simply as a sinner but instead as a brilliant young man whose intellectual powers had not been properly ordered. He writes that St. Augustine was,
“educated, yet untaught; with powers strengthened, sharpened, refined by exercise, but unenlightened and untrained.” In other words, his intellect had become separated from seeking the truth. St. John Henry describes what happened to St. Augustine, and it is easy to apply his observation to a student today:
“And still, again and again does Augustine rush forth again and again, with his young ambition, and his intellectual energy, and his turbulent appetites.” St. Augustine then falls “the victim of heresy and sin” according to Newman.
St. John Henry observes that St. Monica felt herself unable to cope with “the violence and the artifices of the world.” She saw that something had happened to her son, but she couldn’t identify the intellectual process by which it happened.
This is a very common reaction with devout parents who witness their own children falling away from their faith at university. Newman explains that the Church must take St. Monica’s place: “to restrain and reclaim those whom passion, or example, or sophistry is hurrying forward to destruction.”
Because of this, the sermon becomes another astute teaching on the philosophy of education. Newman’s concern was that modern education had divided things that properly belong together. His purpose, then, was to enable “the same roof to contain both the intellectual and the moral discipline” so that “things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man” might be reunited.
Newman understands being an intellectual since he himself was so. He understands that a faith which cannot survive enquiry is not mature. The problem arises when students are taught, implicitly or explicitly, that to think is to reject faith, something Newman observed in his own day. He denounces those who would “set knowledge against itself” and “make truth contradict truth,” persuading the world that “to be religious, you must be ignorant, and to be intellectual, you must be unbelieving.”
This brings us to the original situation. A student may come into a classroom believing that Christianity is true. But if the intellectual culture around him continually communicates that sophisticated people do not believe such things, he may gradually come to understand his faith as an obstacle to intellectual maturity. He has not necessarily consciously rejected Christianity but instead, he thinks Christianity is incompatible with being an intellectual. Ideally, the university should correct this but instead, the opposite happens.
St. John Henry then presents the necessity of the mortification of the intellect. This is a discipline that can be applied to all of us in this world of immediate information. Human reason and intellect must always be voluntarily subjected to divine truth and authority. Ultimately, it is the sin of pride which invades the person who has begun to live in the intellectual world, a type of self-sufficiency and intellectual vanity that of necessity must be tempered. Newman teaches that intellect must be joined to virtue.
Here, mortification means bringing the intellect under discipline, that is, refusing to make one’s own reasoning the absolute measure of what can be true. The saint says that the “proud intellect” must be in submission when God reveals something that the intellect cannot itself comprehend.
Newman saw the Catholic University as an answer to this fragmentation, that the university should become another Monica, by providing the intellectual and moral environment in which the intellect can be directed toward truth. The danger comes not from a student learning to think but from not properly telling the student what the thinking is for. St. Monica could not compete with the dazzling ideas that her brilliant and charismatic son encountered, but she could pray.
Again, according to Newman, when a student is at university, “the influence of intellect is greater at the moment;” however the influence of sanctity, he says, is greater “on the long run,” but “in the case of the young, whose education lasts a few years, where the intellect is, there is the influence.” The university should be an Alma Mater, a nourishing mother. That is why Newman founded a university.
Newman’s prayer at the end of his sermon on St. Monica on the intellect and faith is appropriate for our own students. He asks St. Monica to intercede that those engaged in education may recognize that “God’s grace is all in all,” while also asking that they might “excel in intellect as we excel in virtue.”
In today’s world, a parent must choose carefully where a child goes to college. Faithful Catholic colleges are not always an option. But parents who are armed with the faith of St. Monica, who realize what their child is up against, can be prepared to help by gently teaching them to go deeper in the truths of faith, reminding them what the intellect is for.
