 Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority. I'm Joseph Pierce. Thanks as always for joining me. This time we're actually going to be looking at a saint. I think this is the second time we've looked at a saint who also happens to be a literary giant. An earlier episode of The Authority was on St. Robert's South. What if you prefer the Jesuit martyr and great poet and the influence on Shakespeare from the 1590s. Now we're moving into the 1800s to the mid 19th century and late 19th century, but another great saint who is also a literary giant and that is the great saint John Henry Newman. So we're going to put him in context. You will know from various episodes of The Authority of the importance of the Romantic Revolution and the Romantic revival that began in English culture at least with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. And this brought forth romanticism in its reaction against the Enlightenment sought to find alternative ways of seeing reality to the cold, empiricism, materialism, the lack of spirituality of the Enlightenment. And so what began to happen in the wake of romanticism was a rise of neo-medievalism in various manifestations. So these cultural movements in 19th century England that leapfrogged over the whole of the period of the Enlightenment and rediscovered the splendour of the Middle Ages. And the three major movements in English culture that were manifestations of neo-medievalism were the Gothic revival in mostly in architecture, but in other aspects of art as well, the Gothic revival. So again, the leapfrog over the whole period of the neo-classicism which came in with the Enlightenment. And again the Enlightenment, it's what I call playing leapfrog. The Enlightenment leapfrogged over the whole period of Christendom and rediscovered pre-Christian Roman and Greek antiquity, thus we have neo-classicism. Well in the 19th century that the Gothic revival leapfrogged over the whole of the neo-classical movement and rediscovered the Gothic architecture of the Middle Ages. The most famous example of Gothic architecture is the houses of parliament in London. You might think that's as old as the Tower of London, which is a thousand years old. But in actual fact, it's only 150 or so years old, a little bit more than that, under 200 years old, designed by Augustus Pugin who was a convert to the Catholic faith. A second manifestation of neo-medievalism was the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the pre-Raphaelites. And again, as the name suggests, they leapfrogged over the whole period of post-Renaissance art and even late Renaissance art to a period of what they considered purity in early Renaissance and medieval art, which was pre-Raphael. So before the artist Raphael, the pre-Raphaelites. But the third manifestation of neo-medievalism and the one that's most pertinent to our discussion here of Saint John Henry Newman was the Oxford movement. And the Oxford movement was a movement within the Church of England. Newman was an Anglican clergyman. And he led this group, which became known as the Oxford movement. And this group leapfrogged over the whole period of the Enlightenment, but also the whole period of the Reformation and tried to rediscover the Catholicism of the English Church prior to the Reformation. So again, this neo-medievalism and they claimed that the Anglican Church was in continuum. It's a continuation of the medieval Catholic Church. And therefore, the Anglican Church was Catholic. And so this part of the Church became, the Anglican Church became known as the High Church and also the Anglo-Catholic part of the Church. And this was within the Anglican Church this course of divide because you had the Low Church who were Protestants and the High Church who saw themselves as Catholics. This is not at the place to get in a long discussion about that, but just say that the Oxford movement was at the forefront, the avant-garde of the Anglo-Catholic High Church. And Newman was the leader of this movement in the 1830s in Oxford and early 1840s. And Newman through his study of history and theology, particularly the history and theology of the early Church, came to the conclusion that the Anglican Church was not part of the Catholic Church, that there was not a continuum. There was not a seamless continuity between the medieval Church in England and the Anglican Church. And having realized that there was in fact a rupture and that the Anglican Church was not part of the Catholic Church, he followed his conscience and his reason and became a Catholic. And he was received into the Church in 1845. And we really do need to try to understand the impact that that made on Victorian culture, this Victorian England. Newman was highly revered as an intellect and as a man of virtue, a man of eloquence, one of the great writers, one of the great preachers, one of the great scholars, and a good man. And he was seen as probably going to go to the highest echelons of the Anglican Church, the sky's the limit, you know, archbishop of Canterbury or what have you. So when he becomes a Catholic, and we have to understand that the Catholicism had been illegal in England for 300 years until Catholic Emancipation in 1829, so only a few years earlier, that the Catholic hierarchy had not yet been restored in England, that would not happen for another five years, when Newman is received in 1845. We can't really overemphasize the shock that Newman's conversion caused within the Anglican establishment, and within the British establishment generally, because how could this man who was so highly admired become part of a church that had been so despised by at least the higher echelons of British culture for centuries at this point. So in the wake of Newman's conversion, it became actually quite fashionable for intellectuals and aristocrats to follow in his footsteps. There were a wave of converts to Catholicism in the wake of Newman's conversion in 1845, so all of a sudden we have this intellectual and blue-blooded, if you like, presence of Catholicism, this religion that had been persecuted and personally despised for three centuries, and at the same time, and you have to see this as providential, 1845, the year of Newman's conversion was also the year of the potato famine, the Irish repaid potato famine, and one consequence of that potato famine, of course, and the widespread starvation in Ireland that was the consequence of it, so that was the Irish diaspora. So the Irish left Ireland in their droves and went to various parts of the world, because many came here to the United States, many went to Australia, but many came to England and they became the working class, they built the railways, they built the roads, they built the canals. So simultaneously we have, from the Catholics being a very small presence in the country of a few tens of thousands, we now have these converts in the higher levels of society coupled with the Irish immigrants providing a large working class Catholic presence, and this was the birth of the Catholic cultural revival, so we can say that the conversion of St John Henry Newman was really the birth of that revival. I sometimes speak about the period from the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1848 to Newman's conversion to 1845, that 47-year period as a gestation period for the revival, but the definitive moment of its birth was the conversion of Newman. So now let's move on to Newman's achievement and illiterary sense as this is about authors. He is certainly a great preacher and his published sermons are still very highly revered amongst theologians, not only for the content of the theology but also for the quality and beauty and splendor of the prose. The critic, George Levine, described Newman as the greatest prose stylist of the Victorian era. Now considering that the Victorian age in literature, which was the title of a book that Chesterton wrote, the Victorian age in literature was a golden age in literature, that the fact that a reputable critic can say that the greatest prose stylist of this golden age was St John Henry Newman says something about the quality of Newman's prose. It's not easy. He can compose sentences that are a couple of hundred words long containing several semicolons, etc. But they are masterpieces of construction. So Newman is a preacher and as a prose stylist. He also has a theologian, probably his most important work, which makes him one of the foremost theologians of all ages, is his work essay on the development of Christian doctrine. And the best way I would explain this, because I'm not a theologian and we don't have a lot of time, is with using a metaphor that the great J.R.R. Tolkien used. He said that when there was a mania in the 1960s for getting back to the so-called purity of the early church, Tolkien said, and bear in mind, by the way, as regards Newman's influence on Tolkien, that the Tolkien's guardian following the death of his father, Diabon, he was very young, his mother Diabon, he was 12, that his his guardian after that was father Francis Morgan, who was a member of the Birmingham Oratory, which is the religious community that Newman founded and father Morgan knew Newman. And so there's this direct correlation. But Tolkien said that I can't understand the mania for looking for the searching for the purity of the early church, because I don't understand why a sapling should be considered superior to the foreground tree. They said that even if the sapling were superior to the foreground tree, if you chop down the tree looking for the sapling, you don't find the sapling, you merely kill the tree. So this understanding of the Catholic Church's understanding of theology and philosophy and history and in and of itself ecclesiology, something which develops through time. So this essay on the development of Christian doctrine that it's always the same in the sense that it's always the tree, right? It doesn't become something else, but it does groan and it branches out through the centuries and has to respond to different climates, revolutionary climates, philosophical climates, political climates, heretical climates, and respond to these these challenges whilst always remaining the same. That's the essence of what Newman teaches in his essay on the development of Christian doctrine. Now Newman as a philosopher is probably best known for his work on the grammar of ascent. And basically what he teaches in that essay is that truth is connected to goodness and beauty and that these, because they're ultimately triune, converge in something that allows us to ascent to their presence and that the good is something which we feel not merely through our reason but through our conscience. And again, this is the connection between virtue and the ability to perceive reality. So having a healthy conscience will allow us to have our eyes opened rather than closed to the reality that's beyond us. So this connection between goodness, conscience, and reason. But also this idea of circumstantial evidence like a court of law that you may not be able to have absolute proof of the truth of something. But if there are convergence of factors pointing towards it, then this is the grammar of ascent. This allows us to ascent to some things being true and to assert its truthfulness without an absolutely empirical way of proving it merely because of the convergence of evidence, the circumstantial evidence if you like, and the convergence of this being enough for us to ascent to the truth of something. Okay, the other thing about Newman, so if you like the higher brow, the cerebral aspect of his reputation is as a theologian and as a philosopher, but he's also a great apologist. An apologist, of course, is one who defends the faith in the culture and most notably is his apologia. So in the 1860s, he wrote an account of his conversion. So it's crazy autobiographical. A full autobiography is something which tells the whole life story. Hopefully, as objectively and honestly as possible, that's what an autobiography is. One tells one's own life story. So a conversion story is not strictly speaking autobiography because that's not what Newman's doing. Newman is actually giving the account of the various things that happened in his life and the various ideas that he had to come to terms with in his life, the philosophical or theological forces that he had to grapple with in order to come to conclusions, which ultimately led to the conclusion that the Catholic Church was the true church and his conversion. So his Apologia Provita Suas, written in the 1860s, the Apology of Defense for his life, was written because of some scandalous attacks against him in the media and he wanted to suggest that his conversion was somehow dishonest, an act of intellectual dishonesty. So Newman wrote this magnum opus, this marvelous Apologia, which for me arguably, I haven't read every Apologia and I haven't read every autobiography ever written, but from those that I have read, Newman's Apologia is the greatest after St Augustine's Confessions. So here he outlines the reason that led to faith and the convergence of faith and reason in harmony, how the two go hand in hand and that Newman's acceptance and embrace of Catholic faith was a consequence of his acceptance of reason. Newman was also a significant novelist. He only wrote two novels but they're both very good. One is a novel called Callista, which is a novel set in the early church in the times of persecution and it's a conversion story. You'll see a motif working on here in the Apologia, the work of non-fiction, conversion story, historical novel, Callista, also a conversion story and then his novel Loss and Game just published in 1848, just three years after his conversion, which parallels his Apologia because there is an autobiographical dimension to this. The character, the protagonist of the novel Charles Reading is a fairly thinly veiled portrayal of the author Newman himself, but in fictional terms we see how Charles Reading in Oxford in the 1830s or earlier comes across these various ideas that force him to reconsider his position as an Anglican and ultimately to his decision to embrace Catholic Christianity. So they go hand in hand, if you want a good exercise you could read, I would probably suggest reading the first book first, in other words the book was written first, the novel is called Loss and Game published in 1848 and then afterwards read the non-fictional account, the Apologia Pravita Sua, it was written about in the 1860s, forgot the exact date off hand. But I want to actually move on now to Newman as a poet because I love Newman as a poet, see this man is a man of so many gifts and talents, right, preacher, theologian, philosopher, novelist, and poet. Probably his greatest work of poetry and certainly the most ambitious is a long poem called The Dream of Gerontius or The Dream of Gerontius, I've heard it pronounced both ways and I think I'm not a classicist but I think both pronunciations are legitimate and The Dream of Gerontius is an account of the death of a soul and the soul's journey guided and helped by his guardian angel from his death to the cleansing, purging fires of purgatory. So we have similarities here with great works of literature such as The Divine Comedy, this vision of the afterlife, in fact if you want to go back to pagan antiquity we see the visions of the afterlife in Homer and Virgil as well, but obviously Newman's Dream of Gerontius has much more in common with Dante than with those earlier works. He also, some of his poetry, some of the poetry from The Dream of Gerontius has actually turned into hymns and some of his early poetry also were turned into hymns so we might know at famous hymns lead kindly light and praise to the holiest in the height which is actually from The Dream of Gerontius. These two wonderful hymns, you'd be pleased to know that I'm not going to sing them, you'd be very pleased to know that I'm not going to sing them if you knew how badly I sung, but what I thought I would do with a little bit of time we have left now I'll also have a few concluding comments, but I want to give a few examples of some of Newman's shorter poetry. The Dream of Gerontius is say he might be considered as a magnum opus in terms of ambition, length, it was turned into an oratorio by the great English classical composer Sir Edward Elgar. He was commissioned actually to write it on New Year's Day 1900 that was nine years after Newman's death but anyway that's on the side but I want to look at some of his shorter poems it's easy to read here so you get a feel. One thing about Newman he was always a teacher and a priest and an apologist so some of his poetry is actually controversial in the best sense of the word it's dealing with with theological controversy though those aspects of Catholic belief that are that distinguish Catholics from say for instance Anglicans or other non-Catholic Christians and he sort of teaches if you like about the importance of these within the context of very very good poems. So there's a poem called The Sign of the Cross I would like to read perhaps and also a poem called Guardian Angel but that's not necessarily controversial but The Golden Prison is a poem about purgatory and then there's another poem called For the Dead hymn which is obviously a defense again of purgatory that the fact that the praying for the dead and my favorite of Newman's poems is probably a poem called The Programme Queen which is a history of England in the space of a very short poem which I love and it's kind of sort of almost a medieval feel about it we talked about neo-medievalism as one of the facets of 19th century culture that led to the Catholic revival so I think I might end with that before a few final comments about Newman but let me see what I have time to read here let me begin with The Sign of the Cross The Sign of the Cross by St John Henry Newman When air across the sinful flesh of mine I draw the holy sign all good thoughts stir within me and renew their slumbering strength divine till their springs up a courage high and true to suffer and to do and who shall say but hateful spirits around for their brief hour unbound shudder to see and wail their overthrow while on far heathen ground some lonely saint hails the fresh odor though its source he cannot know this idea The Sign of the Cross being a prayer a wordless prayer if you like that's so powerful it doesn't just strengthen us strengthen the person who makes that prayer but somehow rather in the economy of grace in God's miraculous salvific way of reaching us that that power of that prayer might help some lonely holy soul somewhere else that this strength the spiritual strength that comes through the prayer overflows mystically to others to our neighbors and I think we'll I'm gonna have read The Golden Prison as well because I like that and then when we the pilgrim queen then we'll have our concluding comments for The Golden Prison by St John Henry Newman Weep not for me when I am gone nor spend thy faithful breath in grieving over the spot or hour of all enshrouding death nor waste in idle praise thy love on deeds of head or hand which live within the living book or else are it in sand but let it be thy best of prayers that I may find the grace to reach the holy house of toll the frontier penance place to reach that golden palace bright where souls elect abide waiting their sword certain call to heaven with angels at their side where hate nor pride nor fear torments the transitory guest but in the willing agony he plunges and is blessed and as the fainting patriarch gained his needful halt midway and then refreshed pursued his path where up the mount it lay so pray that rescued from the storm of heaven's eternal ire I may lie down then rise again safe and yet saved by fire he's a great poet and again my favorite poet is subtitled the song The Pilgrim Queen and it's basically a history of England ending with a prophecy and it's a dialogue between the poet and the Blessed Virgin Mary who is the Pilgrim Queen the Pilgrim Queen a song by Saint John Henry Newman there sat a lady all on the ground rays of the morning circled her round save thee and hail to thee gracious and fair in the chill twilight what woods thou there here I sit desolate sweetly said she though I am a queen and my name is Marie robbers have rifled my garden and store foes they have stolen my air from my bower they said they could keep him far better than I in a palace all his planted deep and raised high it was a palace of ice hard and cold as were they and when summer came it all melted away next would they bar to him him the supreme for the spice of the desert and the gold of the stream and me they bid wonder in weeds and alone in this green merry land which once was my own I looked on that lady and out from her eyes came the deep glowing blue of Italy's skies and 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 some marvelous poems sort of speaks for itself but you might not when you might wonder why at the end of the poem there he refers to two particular saints St Peter and St Philip St Peter of course is St Peter the first apostle the first pope and this epitomizes of course symbolizes the catholic church but Phillips not actually St Philip the apostle the apostle but St Philip neary so Newman was very very much a devoted to the oratory movement movement which was founded by St Philip neary in the 15th century and he brought that oratory movement to England founded the Birmingham oratory and then subsequently other oratories were founded in England the London oratory Brompton oratory and now there's an Oxford oratory so he's referring there to to the the oratory and spirituality of St neary which he would champion in England okay so to to wrap up our discussion of St John Henry Newman one thing I haven't mentioned and I'm only going to mention now in passing as part of his legacy is what the role he played in in revitalizing a Catholic liberal arts education he wrote a wonderful book called the idea of the idea of a university and he where he sets out the principles for the philosophy behind a good solid liberal arts Catholic liberal arts education and his legacy has made manifest not only in the rise of liberal arts institutions but the Catholic student centers on campuses and secular and other universities like the United States are called Newman centers in his honor because of the role he played in the restoration and revival of Catholic education and there's the Cardinal Newman society which works for the the revival of good solid Catholic education and they produce the Newman guide to Catholic colleges allowing parents and prospective students to take a look at which colleges and universities out there are still being faithful to the to the authentic Catholic education as outlined and taught by Newman so it's true that all of us and all of history that we are only see as far as we are able because we stand on the shoulders of giants we also we know as Catholics that we see further and we see further more of the point not just into history but into eternity into that those things with heavenly by standing on the shoulders not many of giants but of those giants who are saints we stand on the shoulders of saints in that case we should we should be very very pleased to stand on the shoulders of a literary giant who's also a saint Saint John Henry Newman Saint John Henry Newman pray for us thanks so much for joining me in this episode of the authority please do join me next time until then goodbye god bless and good reading this has been an episode of the authority with joseph pierce brought to you by tan for updates on new episodes and to support the authority and other great free content visit the 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