John Henry Newman's Critique of Liberalism: Lessons from the Aristotelian Tradition – Prof. Joshua Hochschild

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🗓️ 13 February 2026

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Joshua Hochschild shows how St. John Henry Newman’s lifelong “struggle against liberalism” is best understood as an Aristotelian critique of false views of knowledge, in which liberalism reduces religion to private sentiment and denies the knowability of first principles, rather than as a merely political or ecclesiastical stance.

This lecture was given on October 9th, 2025, at University of Michigan.

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About the Speakers:

Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Keywords: Aristotelian Epistemology, Conscience And First Principles, Development Of Doctrine, Intellectual Virtue And Noûs, John Henry Newman, Liberalism In Religion, Newman’s Grammar Of Assent, Newman’s Idea Of A University, Reason Faith And Dogma

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.0	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:21.7	visit us at Thomisticinstitute.org. St. John Henry Newman's critique of liberalism,
0:28.4	lessons from the Aristotelian tradition. When St. John Henry Newman was beatified in 2010,
0:37.3	and again when he was canonized in 2019,
0:41.1	an old dispute flared up. The question, whether or not Newman was a liberal, and, depending on
0:49.5	one's perspective, whether that label is a compliment or a condemnation. Many who celebrate St. Newman do so
0:56.8	remembering that he described himself as a critic of liberalism. But some highly traditionalist
1:02.9	Catholics remain suspicious. Newman advocated liberal positions, and they even criticized Benedict
1:10.1	the 16th support of Newman in 2010.
1:13.9	Meanwhile, some progressive Catholics believed that Benedict the 16th didn't sufficiently
1:18.6	acknowledge and advance Newman's liberalism. Some who accused Benedict of hijacking
1:25.3	Newman's beatification for conservative purposes,
1:28.6	were reassured that Pope Francis, in canonizing him, set a different tone.
1:35.0	In his own lifetime, Newman was accused of being a liberal by many Catholics.
1:40.4	Newman's writings contained ideas that seemed to imply a Protestant or liberal ethos.
1:46.6	In the idea of a university, among other places, we find a strong commitment to the power of reason and the importance of intellectual inquiry apart from church authority.
1:56.2	In the grammar of assent and elsewhere one can find a strikingly modern defense of conscience.
2:02.9	And more than anything else, his essay on the development of Christian doctrine, which defended
2:08.1	change in the church's understanding and articulation of the faith, provoked intense criticism
	...

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