Literary Giants Literary Catholics Page 2
Let folly praise that fancy loves, I praise and love that Child
Whose heart no thought, whose tongue no word, whose hand no deed defiled.
I praise him most, I love him best, all praise and love is his,
While him I love, in him I live, and cannot live amiss.
Love’s sweetest mark, laud’s highest theme, man’s most desired light,
To love him life, to leave him death, to live in him delight.
He mine by gift, I his by debt, thus each to other due,
First friend he was, best friend he is, all times will try him true.
In Campion’s and Southwell’s day, the Catholic faith was illegal. Today, in our own darkened age, it is no longer illegal but is considered illegitimate. It is, however, in the very midst of this darkness that beauty enlightens the gloom. Great art. Great music. Great literature. They are all great weapons. Giotto, Raphael, Michelangelo, Fra Angelico. Weapons! William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, Anton Bruckner, Arvo Part. Weapons! Dante, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Tolkien, Waugh. Weapons! We might live in a land of exile and a valley of tears, but we are not lost. The whole unfolding of human history might be, as Tolkien called it, a “Long Defeat with only occasional glimpses of final victory”, but we remain undefeated. Even in the Long Defeat there is the promise of victory. We are not lost and we have not lost. Nor are we left undefended. Christ brings us a Sword—the Sword of Truth. It is a magic sword. It has three razor-sharp edges: the cutting edge of Reason; the cutting edge of Love; and the cutting edge of Beauty. (Saint John will, I trust, grant me the literary license!) No, we are not defenseless. We have been given the weapons we need. All we need is to use them well. And to return to our rustic Irishman, he is right to muse that he wouldn’t start from here. We have wandered a long way from Eden in the years since our first parents’ first sin. No, indeed, we wouldn’t have wanted to start from here. But here is where we are, and Home is closer than we realize.
PART ONE
TRADITION AND CONVERSION
I
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TRADITION AND CONVERSION
IN MODERN ENGLISH
LITERATURE
ANYONE WISHING TO UNDERSTAND the relationship between tradition and conversion is confronted at the very outset with an inescapable paradox. Tradition, of its very nature, requires the tacit acceptance by those in the present of the ideas, beliefs and customs of the past. Tradition seems to require conformity. Conversion, on the other hand, requires the conscious rejection of the ideas, beliefs and customs that have been tacitly accepted in the past in order to embrace the creed to which one is converting in the present. Conversion seems to require nonconformity. Yet, in spite of this apparent contradiction, tradition and conversion are far from mutually exclusive. On the contrary, and as we shall see, they are ultimately in harmony.
A paradox, as G. K. Chesterton never tired of reminding us, is not simply a contradiction, but only an apparent contradiction signifying a deeper unity. At its deepest level, every conversion is not merely a rejection of a tradition to which one had previously subscribed but is, at the same time, the acceptance of another tradition that seems to make more sense than the one rejected. Conversion is, therefore, the acceptance of a tradition perceived as authentic in contradistinction to one perceived as false.
This is not simply a question of semantics. Since the Reformation, the received tradition of the majority of people in non-Catholic countries has been at loggerheads with the authentic tradition of the Church. In consequence, every conversion to Catholicism is a conscious rejection of the traditions of the non-Catholic majority in favor of the traditions of a minority. It is the rejection of prevailing fashion in the name of providential faith. As such, and contrary to the assumptions of many “progressive” thinkers, authentic tradition’s relationship with the modern world is both radical and revolutionary. It is radical in the sense that it counters the accretions of post-Reformation tradition in order to remain in communion with the roots of Christendom, that is, the apostolic tradition of the Church. It is revolutionary in the sense that it seeks the repentance of post-Reformation society and its return to the faith of its fathers. All revolution, properly and radically understood, requires a return by definition. It is this understanding of the word that Chesterton must have had in mind when he wrote that evolution is what happens when everyone is asleep, whereas revolution is what happens when everyone is awake. Many so-called revolutions in the past have been, in reality, either iconoclastic revolts against the status quo or else violent reformations of it. Neither are revolutionary in the true sense of the word. True revolution requires a return to basic truths, a return to authentic tradition. This revolution, in individuals and societies alike, is normally called conversion. Thus, authentic tradition and conversion are seen to be in sublime harmony.
Writing of the Victorians, Chesterton spoke of “the abrupt abyss of the things they do not know”. This “abrupt abyss” was the result of chronological snobbery, the assumption, at least implicitly, that the age in which the Victorians lived was more advanced and enlightened than any preceding era in history. With unquestioning faith in the concept of inexorable progress, the Victorians equated the wisdom of the ages with the superstition of the past. Thus, medievalism was mere barbarism, scholastic philosophy was dismissed as being little more than an obsession with counting angels on the point of a needle, and the holy sacrifice of the Mass was mere hocus-pocus.
The poetic counterstance to this cold rationalism and its supercilious religious scepticism emerged several decades before the dawn of the Victorian era with the publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, coedited by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In this ground-breaking volume, which served as the de facto manifesto of the romantic movement in England, the poets asserted their faith in the integrity of the human soul and derided the spiritual sterility of the sceptical philosophers. Coleridge and Wordsworth both embraced Christianity, and Coleridge, in particular, became an outspoken champion of religious orthodoxy.
In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” there were early glimpses of Coleridge’s later orthodoxy in the Marian invocation at the beginning of Part V:
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
In this, as in his beautiful translation of “The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn”, a short Latin verse he had discovered in a Catholic village in Germany, Coleridge was seeking a purer vision of Christianity untainted and untarnished by the embryonic scepticism of the more puritanical of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His defense of orthodoxy in both poetry and prose was an earnest endeavor to bridge the “abrupt abyss” of the age in which he was living. In the course of his life’s pilgrimage, his journey in faith, he had scaled the schism of sects and the chasm of secularism to rediscover the wonders of Christendom.
I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs,
Loving the God that made me!
Coleridge was one of the first “moderns” to cast aside the “progressive” traditions of the post-Enlightenment in order to rediscover the authentic traditions of the Church. He would by no means be the last. In many respects he blazed a trail that many others would follow.
The year before Coleridge died, the Oxford movement was born. Those at the forefront of this traditionalist revolution in the Anglican church—Keble, Pusey, Newman and others—were inheritors of Coleridge’s orthodox mantle and shared his desire for a purer Catholic vision of Christianity beyond the fogs of puritanism. Nowhere was the plaintive cry of the Oxford movement heard so starkly as in the opening lines of a hymn by John Mason Neale:
Oh, give us back the days of old! oh! give me back an hour!
To make us feel that Holy Church o’er death hath might and power.
A similar vision was the inspiration for a young architect, Augus
tus Pugin, who converted to Roman Catholicism, probably in 1833, and set about promoting the hugely influential Gothic revival. The combined effect of the Oxford movement and the Gothic revival changed the metaphysical atmosphere considerably. As Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the medievalist winds of change were sweeping across England.
The prophet of neomedievalism in the mid-nineteenth century was John Ruskin, whose influence on his contemporaries was gargantuan in its scope and impact. His art criticism developed into a spiritual history of Europe, epitomized by his famous essay “On the Nature of the Gothic”, and his love for the Italian Renaissance was infectious, introducing whole new generations to the art of the Church. For Ruskin, aestheticism and morality were inseparable. Thus, he argued, the beauty of early Renaissance art flowed freely from its creative source in the moral foundations of medieval Christendom. Consequently, aestheticism inevitably suffered when the humanism of the late Renaissance weakened the link with this Christian source. The more the Renaissance bloomed, he believed, the more it decayed.
Ruskin was an early champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, a brotherhood of artists who shared his aesthetic vision. Seeking a purer perspective untainted by the decay of the late Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites chose Catholic religious themes and scenes of mythic medieval chivalry as their subjects, painted in vivid color and detail. Their opposition to the fashionable conventions of Victorian modernism, both in art and morals, was itself a dissatisfaction with the drabness of the Victorian spirit and a quest for the purity and adventure of a healthier age. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, perhaps the greatest of the Pre-Raphaelites, chose Marian themes such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and The Annunciation, or Dantean allegories such as Beata Beatri, to convey a Catholic vision to a sceptical world. He also wrote fine religious verse, overflowing with medieval spirituality, akin to Coleridge’s earlier poetic quest for pre-Reformation purity. Yet Rossetti, unlike his sister, was not an orthodox believer. Neither was Ruskin, who spent several months in a monastic cell in Assisi, basking in the Franciscan spirit, before declaring that he had no need to convert since he was already more Catholic than the Church.
Ruskin’s vision, and that of the Pre-Raphaelites, was, at best, a baptism of desire into the Catholic spirit; at worst, their vision lacked any ultimate reality. It would take a remarkable man to unite the vision with the reality.
John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism in 1845 sent shock waves through the Anglican establishment. Already well known as a leading protagonist of the Oxford movement, Newman’s reception into the Church was a courageously decisive act by a catalytically incisive mind. His act of conversion united the Catholic vision with the Catholic reality, the artistic word with the flesh of the Divine Artist, and the creative mind with the Body of the Church. In Newman, the convert and the authentic tradition became one.
Newman endeavored to explain the process of conversion in his first novel, Loss and Gain, a fictionalized semiautobiographical account of a young man’s quest for faith amid the scepticism and uncertainties of early-Victorian Oxford. It remains one of the classic Victorian novels. The novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward believed that it was one of the works to which “the future student of the nineteenth century will have to look for what is deepest, most intimate, and most real in its personal experience”. Newman also addressed the issue of conversion in his historical novel Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century. Although the setting had changed drastically, the same perennial questions confronted the characters of the third century as had beset Charles Reding, the youthful hero of Loss and Gain, sixteen hundred years later. A similar novel, Fabiola: A Tale of the Catacombs, had been published the previous year by Cardinal Wiseman, who was somewhat less subtle than Newman in his use of the fictional medium for propaganda purposes:
We need not remind our readers, that the office then performed was essentially, and in many details, the same as the daily witness at the catholic altar. Not only was it considered, as now, to be the Sacrifice of Our Lord’s Body and Blood, not only were the oblation, the consecration, the communion alike, but many of the prayers were identical; so that the Catholic hearing them recited, and still more the priest reciting them, in the same language as the Roman Church of the catacombs spoke, may feel himself in active and living communion with the martyrs who celebrated, and the martyrs who assisted at, those sublime mysteries.
Whereas Fabiola remains Cardinal Wiseman’s best-known work, much of Newman’s finest work was still to come. His Apologia, first published in 1865, remains probably the finest exposition of a religious conversion ever written in the English language. Its candor and clarity of vision won over many who had previously been hostile to Catholicism, and perhaps no book published since has been quite so instrumental in the popularizing of the Catholic faith in England.
In his Sermons Addressed to Mixed Congregations, published in 1849, Newman conveys with pyrotechnic profundity the fact that the modern world faces a stark choice between authentic tradition and the abyss of nihilism:
Turn away from the Catholic Church, and to whom will you go? it is your only chance of peace and assurance in this turbulent, changing world. There is nothing between it and scepticism, when men exert their reason freely. Private creeds, fancy religions, may be showy and imposing to the many in their day; national religions may lie huge and lifeless, and cumber the ground for centuries, and distract the intention or confuse the judgment of the learned; but on the long run it will be found that either the Catholic Religion is verily and indeed the coming in of the unseen world into this, or that there is nothing positive, nothing dogmatic, nothing real in any one of our notions as to whence we come and whither we are going. Unlearn Catholicism, and you become Protestant, Unitarian, Deist, Pantheist, Sceptic, in a dreadful, but infallible succession.
Newman’s message to his contemporaries, and to future generations, is clear: relearn Catholicism; that is, convert, or perish. Perhaps the inextricable link between tradition and conversion has never been put so forcefully, either before or since.
Reading these lines, it is easy to concur with the critic George Levine’s judgment that Newman is “perhaps the most artful and brilliant prose writer of the nineteenth century”. Such a judgment should not, however, detract from Newman’s achievement as a poet. His most ambitious poem, and arguably his finest, is The Dream of Gerontius, which presents the vision of a soul at the moment of death, and its conveyance by its guardian angel to the cleansing grace of Purgatory. Although it is steeped in Catholic doctrine, itself something of a novelty in Victorian verse, Newman’s poem has been compared with Paradise Lost. “It reminds us at times of Milton,” suggests the critic A. S. P. Woodhouse, “and it strikingly anticipates T. S. Eliot in its presentation of Christ as the surgeon who probes the wound in order to heal.” There is, however, none of Milton’s deformed, darker spirit in Newman’s poem. Instead, it resonates with the hopeful spirit of Dante’s Purgatorio and the glory of Dante’s Paradiso, which it resembles in faith, if not in form. The Dream of Gerontius is not a lament over a paradise lost but the promise of a paradise to be gained.
Newman returns to the purgatorial theme in “The Golden Prison”, in which Purgatory is described as “the holy house of toil, / The frontier penance-place”. As in all else that he wrote, it seems that Newman is more intent on instructing his readers than with entertaining them. Poems such as “The Sign of the Cross” and his hymn “For the Dead” are deliberately designed to elucidate those aspects of Catholicism that aroused the ire and suspicion of his non-Catholic or anti-Catholic contemporaries.
Paradoxically perhaps, Newman is at his most charming when he is at his least Victorian. In “The Pilgrim Queen”, subtitled “A Song”, he throws off the formalities of Victorian verse to unleash his muse on the simplicity of medieval rhythm and rhyme.
I looked on that Lady,
and out from her eyes
Came the deep glowing blue
of Italy’s skies;
An
d she raised up her head
and she smiled, as a Queen
On the day of her crowning,
so bland and serene.
“A moment,” she said,
“and the dead shall revive;
The Giants are failing,
the Saints are alive;
I am coming to rescue
my home and my reign,
And Peter and Philip
are close in my train.”
Newman’s choice of this particular and uncharacteristic verse-form to convey the story of England’s rejection of the Mother of God is intriguing. The jauntiness and joyful rhythm is reminiscent of pre-Reformation religious verse. It evokes England’s Catholic past, the mythic Merrie England that still had the power to move Newman’s contemporaries to feelings of nostalgia for a lost pastoral paradise in which people were united by a sure and simple faith. The jollity of the pre-Chaucerian meter serves as a counterpoint to the Pilgrim Queen’s sorrowful lament that England had betrayed and deserted her to erect “a palace of ice”:
“And me they bid wander
in weeds and alone,
In this green merry land
which once was my own.”
The betrayal, the desolation, the melancholy are all reminiscent of the anonymous verse “The Ballad of Walsingham”, which laments the destruction of England’s Marian shrine, once the most prestigious in Christendom, under Henry VIII. Yet unlike the sorrowful and plaintive passion of the “Ballad”, Newman’s “Pilgrim Queen” transcends and transforms the sorrow with the promise of future glory. Beyond the Passion is the Resurrection. The Queen will rescue her people, and, aided by the company of heaven, she will be restored to her rightful throne.
The balance and symmetry of “The Pilgrim Queen” is the balance and symmetry of the Rosary. England’s destiny, past, present and future, is reflected in the Rosary’s mysteries. From joy, through sorrow, to glory. As such, England emerges as a subplot in a far greater mystery play. The lost paradise of Merrie England is the lost Eden of humanity’s primeval past. The paradise has been lost through betrayal, and all that remains is the deep sense of exile at the broken heart of humanity. The brokenhearted can only look with hope for the promised glory—the conversion of humanity, and of England, through the restoration of the King and Queen to their rightful place. In tapping into authentic tradition, and calling for conversion, Newman had tapped into a wellspring of faith and hope.