 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. And this week we will be focusing on John Dryden, one of the greatest poets in the history of English literature, whom I nonetheless suspect that some of you might not have heard. So we've obviously been saying something about who he is as a person as regards to his life, but also perhaps why he's not so well known today. Partly it's because the poets of the 17th and 18th century, certainly Dryden and Alexander Pope, became very unfashionable following the rise of the Romantic poets and the Romantic movement at the end of the 18th century in the early 19th century. And so they were largely eclipsed and became unfashionable. And as Romanticism has largely held the high ground since then they really haven't come out of the eclipse, but doesn't mean they're not wonderful poets who warrant our attention and indeed warrant being rediscovered. So we've spent some time actually in the 17th century, in the 1600s, the last few episodes of the authority. We had Shakespeare, of course, and he lived 16 years into the 17th century and many of his best plays came from the early part of that century, Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, etc., Othello, and so on. We then looked at Richard Cresshaw, whose father, William Cresshaw, was a great enemy of Catholicism, a great enemy of Shakespeare, a great enemy of the theatre. But Richard Cresshaw becomes a Catholic and in consequence during the turbulent time of the 17th century, the English Civil War was forced into exile. Then we looked at John Dryden, who was a contemporary of Richard Cresshaw, who, unlike Richard Cresshaw, was a very faciferous supporter of the Puritans and supported Cromwell during the Civil War and advocated the execution of the King and wrote Paradise Lost, as we know, and he was the focus last time. Well, John Dryden again, you know, we obviously see we're living in very perilous times, the 17th century, the 1600s, a time of persecution, of civil war, and John Dryden is very interesting because he actually lives through all of this and he changes his perspective, he changes his position, he changes his religious beliefs, his creed, on more than one occasion. Some people think this is just self-serving, moving with the times, going with the flow, taking the path of least resistance in order to gain the most in a world descents, but we'll see whether or not that's true and then we will actually see that it isn't true ultimately. So as a young man, he was born in 1631, so he's only a teenager, in fact, not even a teenager when the Civil War begins and a teenager when it ends. In 1658, on the death of Cromwell, when most people were rejoicing at the dissolution of the Puritan tyranny, on the contrary, John Dryden wrote a poem of heroic stanzas on Cromwell's death, eulogizing Oliver Cromwell. That was in 1658 and then years later, in 1682, he wrote a poem called Religio Lacy, in which he advocated support for the Anglican church, for the established church, and this was certainly a switch from his earlier Puritanism to basically the perspective of the king who had been beheaded. So this is certainly a change of perspective and we'll look at that poem a little bit later on. And then in 1685, he conversed to Catholicism and this is at the time that the Catholic king, James II, comes to the throne. So it's often said that this was a cynical self-serving conversion just as he had waxed lyrical about Cromwell when the Puritans were in power and had supported the Anglican church during the reign of Charles II, that upon the accession to the throne of James II, the Catholic king, 1685, he becomes a Catholic. In other words, he changes his religion depending upon who has the power. And yet he remains a Catholic, even after the revolution in which the Catholic king, James II, is overthrown and forced into exile and another anti-Catholic regime is put in this place in 1688. Then until the end of his life, 12 years later in 1700, that John Dryden remains a Catholic and his persecuted inconsequence loses his status, his position. He was the first poet laureate of England. He's replaced as poet laureate. He's forced to earn an income purely through the labors of his pen. So he accepts a great deal of suffering by remaining a Catholic and it's significant perhaps that one of his sons would go on to be a Catholic priest. So irrespective of whether his conversion to Anglicanism was genuine. And I suspect it was. I suspect what we see in place here is a journey. Each of our lives is a journey, a pilgrimage ultimately towards heaven, hopefully, but not necessarily. Of course, we can choose to go to the other place if we insist, but certainly we're called to take the path to heaven, the pilgrimage of grace to heaven. And I would see that we see an ascent of Dryden from a sort of low church Puritanism to a higher church Anglicanism and then ultimately an embrace of Catholicism. But I want to look at some of the main features of his life and work. So in 1668 he was appointed England's first poet laureate and actually I returned from England recently and amongst other things we went to Westminster Abbey and to Poets Corner and John Dryden is indeed enshrined there in Poets Corner. Chaucer as the father of English poetry has pried a place perhaps and but certainly John Dryden's bust is there prominently as the first poet laureate. And during the period of the 18th century, 17th century and even in the 18th century, so it dominated the literary life of England, of restoration England. In other words, restoration England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 following the fall of the Puritan tyranny. The period became known in literary circles as the age of Dryden. That's how prominent he was. It was the age of Dryden and Romanticist writer Walter Scott, the great Romantic, called him Glorious John. So he made his name following and say the Puritan's band, the theatre closed down the theatres. But following the restoration of the monarchy, there was a great opening of theatres and the period of restoration drama, restoration comedy, some of which were very bawdy and debauched. That is often the case. Reaction is often an overreaction. We saw it, for instance, in the Soviet Union, following the fall of the, shall we say, the Puritanism in terms of various things of the Soviet communism. We had a hedonistic debauch, what we might call one hell of a party, but the mafia taking over in the Soviet Union following the fall of communism. So the same sort of thing happened in England, following the strict regime of the Puritans. We had this hedonistic outpouring in the restoration period in terms of restoration comedies. Dryden, to his credit, was not as debauched as many, but he certainly made his name as a dramatist and wrote many plays. But there's a theme that we see throughout his work, which is very important to us, because he was one who helped to restore the canon of great literature to return to the public's perception and enjoyment, some of the great works of antiquity. So he wrote, for instance, an adaptation of Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, and of course that's fairly modern in his time, but certainly it's part of the restoration of Shakespeare's reputation in adapting The Tempest in the late 1660s. He also adapted Sophocles's great tragedies, the Oedipus cycle, Oedipus of Tragedy, as an adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. He did a modern adaptation, a modern dramatization of Troilus and Cressida, the ancient story which Geoffrey Chaucer had written about several centuries before, and this was all during his period as a Protestant, and following his conversion to Catholicism, he wrote fewer plays and started working more on the classical literature, but he did write a play on King Arthur, which is significant. He was a critic of the hedonism of his time. He criticised Charles II for his mistresses and his courtiers and his licentious lifestyle, and he also attacked the Earl of Rochester who was a notorious womanizer, and in return the Earl of Rochester seems to have paid a gang of thugs to beat Dryden within an inch of his life. He was severely beaten for that when the ward was put out for the culprits and they were never caught. That was in 1679, but again he paid for his moral start if we like against the decadence of the time. But following his conversion to Catholicism, he spent a lot of time translating the great works of antiquity, so he translated the works of Horace, Juvenile, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theacritus. In 1697 he translated the works of Virgil. He translated the Aeneid into couplets, turning Virgil's 10,000 line poem into a poem of almost 14,000 lines, and as a translator he made greatly three works in the older languages available for readers of English. So those of us who are love and admire classical education have a great deal to thank Dryden for, not just as a playwright but as a translator of these epic works that are so much a part of the canon of Western civilization. But I want to turn now to say the three poems that show the turning points, the moments of conversion in his life. So again from this book, Poems Every Catholic Should Know, published by Tan Books, which I compiled and we go through chronologically. I quote just two stanzas from Religio Lisi. Thus man by his own strength to heaven would soar and would not be obliged to God for more. Vain wretched creature, how art thou misled to think thy wit these godlike notions bred? These truths are not the product of thy mind, but drop from heaven and of a nobler kind. Revealed religion first informed thy sight, and reason saw not till faith sprung the light. Hence all thy natural worship takes the source, to his revelation what thou thinkst discourse. But if there be a power too just and strong, to wink at crimes and bear unpunished wrong, look humbly upward, see his will disclose, the forfeit first, and then the fine impose. A mocked thy poverty could never pay, had not eternal wisdom found the way, and with celestial wealth supplied thy store. His justice makes the fine, his mercy quits the score. See God descending in thy human frame, the offended suffering in the offender's name. All thy misdeeds to him imputed see, and all his righteousness devolved on thee. This is actually quite a deep poem theologically and what we need to understand here, this is a defence of faith from the emergent age of reason so called. And so I think it was the 19th century art historian and esthete John Ruskin who said that Venice descended from being a medieval virgin to being Renaissance Venus. So this is a literally an erotic fall from the virgin to Venus from the pagan goddess of love. The early Renaissance was very much a product of medieval Christendom. You look at early Renaissance painting and the emphasis is upon scripture, upon the crucifixion, upon Madonna and child, etc. And by the late Renaissance there is this neoclassicism. And it's what I call playing leapfrog because we cannot create anything ex nihilo from nothing. If we want to escape from the status quo from that which is present to us, we rediscover something that's gone before it. We pay intellectual history, leapfrog over history. So the late Renaissance and the early Enlightenment, and this is the period we're talking here, the beginnings of the Enlightenment in the 1600s in England, there's a rejection of Christendom, a skepticism towards Christianity. And hence the leapfrogging over the whole period of Christendom from the time of Christ to rediscover pre-Christian antiquity. Hence the discovery of Venus and more and more paintings with mythical gods and goddesses and a return to pagan myths and less and lesser finding inspiration in scripture. This was the culture that was in the ascendant at the time that Dryden is writing, that which would call itself superciliously the age of reason. And again you can judge something by what it calls itself. The very fact that this was the age of reason suggests that the reason didn't exist prior to this age and that great philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas were not rational but were superstitious. This is what C. S. Lewis calls chronological snobbery. Another name that this movement would give to itself later, not in Dryden's time, but is the Enlightenment. In other words, that we are the enlightened ones and everybody before us was in the dark. So this superciliousness, this arrogance, this looking down our prideful noses at the past and everybody in it. This is the ascendant mood, if you like, of aspects of the intelligentsia here. So we see in these stanzas from Lysi, Dryden's insistence that reason isn't separable from faith, that Fidesz at Ratio, that faith and reason are indissolubly bonded. So just to reiterate some of these lines here, these truths are not the product of thy mind but drop from heaven and of a nobler kind. Revealed religion first informed thy sight and reason saw not till faith sprung the light. Hence all thy natural worship, capital N, capital W, takes the source, tis revelation, what thou thinkst discourse. So we know the ideas that Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, that this makes philosophy, knowledge, reason, egocentric. It begins with the self which thinks whereas of course that an old understanding which we see epitomized here in Dryden's verse is that on the contrary we think because he is. That we are made in the image of God with the Amargo Dei and we reason because God is the Logos, God is reason, we love because God is goodness, God is love, we create because God is the creator. In other words, we are because he is, we think because he is, ultimately reality is deocentric. It is centred on God not egocentric. So this is basically he is fighting against this new rise of what would become known as rationalism in this poem. So this marks 1682, his conversion to Anglicanism. But then in 1685 he becomes a convert to Catholicism and he writes this long allegorical poem called The Hind and the Panther of which I just select a short passage which we'll read presently. So The Hind and the Panther basically is a fable if you like. It's a story in which beasts are used to convey deep truths. Obviously we see it in the Esops fables. We obviously see it for instance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in The Nun's Priest's Tale with the fable of Chanticleer the Rooster and Pertilote's favorite hen by which the story of the Ford is retold. Well in The Hind and the Panther we have this description of contemporary England and this by the way is another reason why John Dryadon and Alexander Pope and others are not as accessible because they wrote a great deal about the state of their own time, the problems of their own time. They were addressing things which were very topical and of course if you're writing about something which is very up to date it's going to be out of date. That's why the greatest writers tend to be those that write about timeless things and Dryadon is writing about timeless things but he's doing it within the context of topicality. So the Hind and the Panther of the poem's title, the Hind is the Catholic Church, the Panther is the Anglican Church and although the Hind certainly is the true church, the Panther is seen as an ally against the various other beasts which represent other philosophical and theological perspectives, other denominations of Christianity but also other philosophical ideas and the purpose of the poem ultimately is that the Hind and the Panther should unite in an alliance of true religion against these new ideas and these theologically dubious Christian denominations. So this obviously there's a political approach here, the Catholic Church is still of course, the time the Hind and the Panther is written James II on the throne but that is not going to last the following year. James II overthrown and anti-Catholicism comes back in. So at the time it's written the Catholic Church is in the Ascendant and it's the Hind so he's writing about the Hind from from a perspective of of worldly power. The King is a Catholic but he's not turning on the Panther, he's not turning on the the Church of England, the established Church. In fact he's calling for a union that the Anglican Church now should if you like become an ally of and ultimately be infused with and even ultimately encapsulated by the Hind by the Catholic Church. This is written in 1687, the following year we have the Revolution where the King is forced into exile and then of course the Panther hunts the Hind again. The Hind is no longer in a position to to to protect itself and goes on the run with the Panther in pursuit and irony there perhaps. So but as I said that Dryden remains a loyal Catholic, one of his sons becomes a priest, he loses his position as poet Laureate because of his refusal to reject his Catholicism and as we say he earns money by translating some of the classics of of ancient literature for which we are the recipients of the beneficiaries. So I'm going to finish by reading from the Hind and the Panther, just the short extract I selected for poems every Catholic should know. What weight of ancient witness can prevail if private reason hold the public scale? But gracious God, how well dost thou provide for o'ering judgments and unearing guide? Thy throne is darkness in the abyss of light, a blaze of glory that forbids the sight. O teach me to believe thee thus concealed and search no farther than thyself revealed. But her alone for my direct to take whom thou hast promised never to forsake. My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires, my manhood long misled with wandering fires, followed false lights and when their glimpse was gone my pride struck out new sparkles of her own. Such was I, such by nature still I am, be thine the glory and be mine the shame. Good life be now my task, my doubts are done, what more could fright my fight faith than three in one. Can I believe eternal God could lie disguised in mortal mould and infancy, that the great maker of the world could die, and after that trust my imperfect sense which calls in question his omnipotence? Can I my reason to my faith compel and shall my sight and touch and taste rebel? Superior faculties are set aside, shall their subservient organs be my guide? Then let the moon usurp the rule of day, then let the moon usurp the rule of day, and winking tapers show the sun his way. For what my senses can thyself perceive, I need no revelation to believe. So here we see in this passage from the hide and the panther Dryadon's confession, an autobiography there of his own journey, of his youthful vanity, of his obstinate pride, that kept him from the one true church, but then now basically that of course that in terms of reason his human faculties are unable to fathom mysteries such as the trinity or the incarnation, but would God's truth be something which is subsistent within human reason? The way I sometimes talk about this by the way anecdotally is that to see us, it might be appropriate to finish with a fable as the hide and the panther is a fable, where I see if you like that our reason is a bit like a dog. So if you imagine a dog, the dog is waiting for its master to come home because when its master comes home, it will be fed and perhaps taken for a walk. It's excited. So when the master comes home, it's very excited, jumping around all over the place, wagging its tail, hoping to be fed or taken for a walk. And then to its disappointment, the master rather than doing either of those things sits down and picks up a big piece of paper which we know is a newspaper. The dog does not know what a newspaper is. A dog can never know what a newspaper is and certainly a dog will never be able to read the newspaper. All that the dog knows is that while the man is sitting there with this piece of paper in front of him, he's not going to be fed nor taken for a walk. In other words, that there's a limit to finite reason and that our position with respect to the logos, to divine reason, to the reason that creates the cosmos at every moment in its omniscience and omnipotence and omnipresence, everything being present to it is so infinitely larger than us. The abyss that separates us from divine reason, the logos, is much greater than separates the reason of the dog from the reason of its master. And that's basically what John Dryden is saying in this poem that he needs ultimately to accept revealed truth as revealed by Jesus Christ and as given in the teaching authority of the Church, as given by Christ to Saint Peter, that this is where his reason needs to reside. It's not that the Church teaches anything irrational, but it teaches some things which supersede our finite capacity to fully comprehend. And on that note, and on this, in the company of this convert to the faith in very perilous times who suffered for his conversion in the presence of this great poet John Dryden, we will now leave you and thank you once again for joining me in the authority. Do join me next week as we continue with the discussion of these great authors of the Western Canon. Until then, goodbye and God bless. 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 theauthoritypodcast.com to subscribe and use coupon code authority25 to get 25% off your next order, including books, audio books and video courses by Joseph Pierce on literary giants such as Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis, Shakespeare and Bellach, as well as Tan's extensive catalog of content from the saints and great spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life. 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