 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, I'm Joseph Pierce and welcome to this episode of The Authority and The Authority that we're going to be looking at this week is Oscar Wilde, one of the most controversial characters in English literature. And we'll have a look at what it is that Oscar Wilde can show us or teach us. Who was he? That question is asked but answered in very different ways. Was he, for instance, has he sometimes seen as a gay icon, as a martyr for the homosexual lifestyle? Or should we treat him as a pariah for his decadent lifestyle and the way that he preached, if you like, a sort of moral iconoclasm? Well, what lessons in other words can we learn from him? Well, I encapsulate this in the preface. I wrote a biography of Oscar Wilde called The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. And in the preface, I set up the two extremes in people's attitude towards Oscar Wilde and then we will, in the remainder of the program, look at the way we should be looking at him. So the problem stems from inability to see Wilde except through the lens of either Puritan or Prurient motives. The Prurient see Wilde as a subversive hero who undermines traditional values. For this school of thought, his value is not primarily in his art, but in the licentious life encapsulated in the lurid title of a Melisthenoxy study as Wilde's long and lovely suicide. Against the Prurient is counterpoised the Puritan, who believes that Wilde's work lacks value because of his immoral life. The Prurient and the Puritan are both blinded by their bias. To one, Wilde is a war cry. To the other, he is a warning. One betrays him with a kiss. The other with a curse. There's a choice between Judas and the Pharisee. We are all in the gutter, says Lord Darlington in Wilde's play, Lady Windermere's fan. But some of us are looking at the stars. To look for Wilde in the gutter, whether to wallow with him in the mire, or to point the finger of self-righteous scorn, is to miss the point. Those wishing a deeper understanding of this most enigmatic of men should not look at him in the gutter, but with him at the stars. So the first thing you have to realise about Oscar Wilde before we go into it is how he ended. Oscar Wilde was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed in 1900. And for all of his mistakes in life and his immoral decisions and his betrayals of loved ones, that immoral decisions invariably lead to, his reception of the Catholic Church on his deathbed was the consummation of a lifelong love affair. Now, admittedly, he wasn't very faithful lover on occasions. But it was not something that came out of the blue. It's something that got his attraction to Catholicism went right back to his undergraduate days. So if we want to understand Oscar Wilde, we need to try to get beyond the masks. That's why my book is called The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde self-consciously wore masks to conceal himself, conceal himself sometimes to reveal himself. But if we want to get beyond those, the best way of doing it is to find what Wilde wrote when he was in prison. And during his prison sentence, he wrote a long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, who was the friend with whom he had the homosexual relationship. Well, let's get that out of the way first to make sure we know what we're talking about here. It's often said that Oscar Wilde was sent to prisons hounded down and sent to prison because he of his homosexual practices. That was not why he went to prison. What exactly happened was that Lord Alfred Douglas, his father, the Marquess of Queensbury, who was a somewhat pugilistic character, which shouldn't surprise us because the rules of boxing, the Marquess of Queensbury rules are named after him. He left a note in Oscar Wilde's club saying to Oscar Wilde posing as a sodomite. And at the behest of Lord Alfred Douglas, who despised his father, hated his father, he Lord Alfred Douglas persuaded Oscar Wilde to sue his father for libel. And in order to defend himself, the Marquess of Queensbury hired private detectives, private investigators, and they found ample evidence that Wilde was not just posing, but was practicing. Now because nobody was hunting down homosexuals in Victorian England, but it was homosexual practice was against the law. So now because of the stupidity of bringing that libel case, there's all this evidence of illegal activity that's been brought before the court, leaving the crown, leaving the government with no choice but to pursue a criminal investigation. Wilde lied from the jury box, even minor things such as his age, which meant he lost all credibility in the eyes of the jury. There was only going to be one outcome and that was a prison sentence. He spent two years in prison from 1895 to 1897. When he was in prison, he wrote along and for the most part, angry letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, basically saying that Lord Alfred Douglas had brought him down to betray his true loves to pursue basically assorted prideful lifestyle. And Lord Alfred Douglas's own ego and narcissism was the problem. Of course, Wilde should perhaps have looked a bit more hardly, a bit more honestly, earnestly at himself. But what you find in this this manuscript, they published after he came out of prison, as they performed this from one of the penitential Psalms out of the depths. But they expunged from it, it took out all references to the relationship Lord Alfred Douglas and just kept the musings on art and religion. And when you read the whole thing, and I was blessed to do that, I went to the British Library and got the access to the original handwritten manuscript. And it's very interesting when Wilde is writing about the beauty of Christianity, the beauty of the Catholic Church or the beauty of Renaissance art, about beauty in general and truth in general, his handwriting is very neat and tidy. And then when he thinks about Lord Alfred Douglas and where that that lifestyle had left, he gets angry and is wanting to become much, much larger. So ironically, that the religious dimension of they performed this has largely been ignored now and left out and only the sort of sorted aspects of it are spoken about. But what's interesting about Oscar Wilde and it's something which we can't avoid is he described his homosexuality as his pathology, as his sickness. And it's ironic that he's held up as a as a as a warrior for that lifestyle, that in many countries now he would actually be charged with a hate crime for saying that for being homophobic. So there's all sorts of ironies going on here. So what is it about Oscar Wilde that leads ultimately through the gutter, where he could keep somehow to keep looking at the stars that he should be received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. Well, first of all, there's no doubt at all about the authenticity of of Wilde's conversion. The only one of his friends that was there in his final days and hours was Robert Ross. And it's Robert Ross at Wilde's request that got the priest, priest that neither of them knew before Father Cuthbert Dunn to come and administer the last rights and receive Wilde into the church. And both Robert Ross and Father Cuthbert Dunn never met each other again after this evening. And they both independently decades later wrote their accounts of what happened, and they conform and dovetail. So there's no doubt at all about that it happened, as they say. So where the roots of this we have to go right back to Wilde's undergraduate days, Trinity College Dublin. And Wilde as an undergraduate falls under the influence of John Henry Newman, Saint John Henry Newman. And again, you can watch another episode of the authority on Newman to find out more about his importance. And also he had many friends who were priests, Trinity College Dublin. And his father, who was very anti Catholic Oscar Wilde's father, in order to save him from the clutches of these Catholics, removes him from Trinity College Dublin and places him in Oxford. Now, if his father knew anything about what was happening in Oxford at that time, he would know that he was removing his son from the Catholic frying pan and placing him in the Catholic fire, because Oxford was a flame with Catholicism and many converts amongst the, amongst the undergraduates, this was the afterglow of the Newman effect in Oxford, the Oxford movement that Newman led the Oxford that Newman's conversion in Oxford. We've been in a previous episode of the authority, we looked at how Newman received the poet, Jeremiah Hopkins in Oxford. So this was a Wilde went from from one hot bed of Catholicism to another hot bed of Catholicism. And once again, he started to attend mass during his time as an undergraduate at Mordland College, Oxford, which are looking for connections. That's the college at which C.S. Lewis would teach for many years. This was obviously several decades later. What was very interesting, what was happening in Oxford at the time, and Wilde was there as an undergraduate in the 1870s, was that there were two giants in the field of aesthetics, in other words, the philosophy of beauty, shall we say, John Ruskin and Walter Pater. And they were sort of civil war going on between the two and people chose what side they believed in. So John Ruskin, for want of a better word, was the conservative voice. And he taught, for instance, about the Renaissance, how the Renaissance, they wrote art historians, amongst other things, how the Renaissance decayed from being a Christian thing at the beginning to becoming this neoclassicist, neo-pagan movement by the end of the Renaissance. And he likened it to that Venice changed from being a medieval virgin to being a Renaissance Venus. And this, of course, is a fall, and it's an erotic fall, in fact, right? Venus's son is Eros, where we get the word erotic. Venus is where we get adjectives such as venereal. So this sort of erotic lustful type love that we got rid of the blessed virgin and replace it with this different sort of love. And this was for Ruskin, Ruskin evidence of a decadence, a decay, a fall. Walter Pater, his rival, a younger man, agreed with that critique, that analysis, except that he said that it was that the decay was a good thing, that it liberated art from the constraints of religion and allowed it to explore new things, including the erotic. What's interesting is that the Wilde studied both, admired both, but in this civil war, he came down decidedly on the side of Ruskin. He was a disciple of John Ruskin, even if he, even if he was fascinated by Walter Pater, he would later say that some of Pater's ideas had poisoned him. So he was influenced by them in a negative sense, but he knew that his better side, the more virtuous side, should be and did agree with Ruskin. This is the other thing you have to understand about Oscar Wilde, is he's at war with himself, his better and worst self. Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously said, the battle between good and evil takes place in each individual human heart. Well, this battle takes place in all of our hearts. It was certainly taking place in the heart of Oscar Wilde and this war between Ruskin and Pater was that between the battle between good and evil in Oscar Wilde's heart and mind. But where he stood as an undergraduate was interesting because at the time there were sort of two, should we say, strands or flows of Catholicism. There was the more liberal view and the more, should we say, a hard line view and the liberal view was that the church in England, especially in this obviously where Wilde is, should go with the flow of the times and should distance itself from the Pope. The Pope at the time was Pio Nono, Pius IX, the very defiant Pope, who following the reunification of Italy in 1870 became prisoner of the Vatican, is basically living as a prisoner within the Vatican, within a hostile Italian government surrounding him, but very defiant, very holy, very devout, very orthodox. And those who followed the Pope in his defiance and unwillingness to compromise with secularism were known as the ultramontanes. The ultramontane means beyond the mountains, so beyond the Alps, so those who took their lead from Rome, as opposed to the Cisalpines, those who were this side of the Alps, who trying to create some sort of distance between themselves and Pius IX. The leader of the ultramontanes of the one of the better, the conservative pro-Pope party, if you want to put it that way, in the church, Catholic Church in England was Cardinal Manning. So it's interesting, who does Oscar Wilde choose to have portraits of, on the walls of, on the wall of his rooms, as a student in Oxford, he has on his wall Pope Pius IX and Cardinal Manning, so he's not just, he hasn't become a Catholic, he's going to mass regularly, he has many Catholic friends, many other friends who convert into Catholicism. He is on the side of the ultramontane, so like the pro-Pope party. So in 1878, he visits Father Bowden at the London Oratory, the Brompton Oratory in Kensington, and again the Oratory Movement were introduced to England by Saint John Henry Newman. Wilde always remained very devoted to Newman, Newman's writing, Newman's spirituality. So he visits Father Bowden and he's an interesting priest in his own right, but we are not going to go off on that tangent. And then a long talk, and Father Bowden's letter, which if I had time I would read, shows great psychological insight, basically saying that Wilde is allowing himself to be led by his weaker nature, and this is leading him into bad habits, lifestyles, and that the only answer was Christ, was conversion. And they make another appointment, and Wilde, instead of showing up, sends Father Bowden a bouquet of flowers by way of an apology, he got cold feet, not for the first or last time. I think that Wilde knew that taking up this cross of conversion would mean a change of life, but it would be more than that, it would mean major sacrifice, because his father was so hostile that his father actually made it clear that should Wilde convert, he would be disinherited. So Wilde also had to make the choice. Does he follow his conscience and convictions, or does he follow the path of least resistance, and look after his financial interests and creature comforts? That's the choice, he chose the latter, and the rest would become history. I should talk about his first love affair, there's no suggestion by the way of Wilde indulging in any homosexuality at any of this stage, this comes later, but his first love affair is with a woman called Florence Balcom, and they seem to be very serious, maybe talking about marriage, but Wilde, again not for the first time, neglects responsibilities, does not make himself available in the relationship, he just disappears for long periods of time, so he's certainly very much in love with her, but not prepared to live responsibly in accordance with that love. So in his absence, he discovers to his horror that she's become engaged to another man, and subsequently marry that other man, he's heartbroken, in actual fact some of the most moving and real, as in revealing, poetry that Wilde ever wrote was the poetry he wrote when he was heartbroken following the breakup of his relationship with Florence Balcom in my book, there's a chapter on it, I'm going to call it his Florentine verse, because it's obviously inspired by Florence. What's interesting from a literary perspective is the man who Florence Balcom will marry was Bram Stoker, who was the author of Dracula, and it worked in the theatre, and Florence Balcom was an actress. So then we have Wilde meets his wife Constance, and she really for me in many ways, and she's an interesting figure, a complex figure, but nonetheless she's the real heroine of the whole story I think of Wilde's life, she's certainly the victim of Wilde's selfishness as are his two sons. It's she that shows the reality of the lifestyle that's sometimes lionized by our do-your-own-thing culture, that Wilde would desert not just his wife, but his two young sons, and the tragedy is that he was very close to his sons, and some of his most charming writing were fairy stories, such as the happy prince and the selfish giant, these wonderful fairy stories, which he wrote for his own children, there's a charming connection here of Tolkien, who wrote the Hobbit for his own children in the initially before it's published. So we have their stories of Wilde playing on the floor of the nursery with his sons, and this is unusual in Victorian England, normally the nurse plays in the nursery with the children, you know the Victorian children would be seen but not heard, and in fact it's often is not seen either, they were up in the nursery with nurse and the parents go on with their own thing. Wilde was actually much more hands-on than many Victorian parents when his boys were very young, and yet he deserts his wife and both his sons to pursue a sordid lifestyle, and we see the beginning of this in as early as his honeymoon, there's a bad way to start off a marriage, on their honeymoon in Paris, Wilde picks up a book by a novelist called Joris Colchismans called Arabeur, it's normally translated as against the grain or against nature, and he's fascinated by this book, in fact in his own novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, this is clearly the book that's being referred to as the yellow book which poisons Dorian Gray. In essence, it really is a parable for her own age, in essence the novel is about a man who has no connections and unlimited resources, in other words he's very wealthy and he has no social relations with people that prevent him from doing whatever he wants, so he does do whatever he wants, the whole novel is basically a catalogue of sensual self-indulgence, he wants to indulge all the various senses in any way that he can, so it's almost if you know what would happen if you were completely at liberty to do your own thing, what would happen? Well at the end of the novel we had this creed occur, this cry from the heart, from the from the protagonist's novel to a god he doesn't even know exists asking for help, in other words the first and worst lie is if we do what we want we will be happy, do your own thing and you'll be happy, it's a lie, that if we do our own thing we become miserable, that those who willingly take up their cross and live lives of self-sacrificial responsibility end up building loving relationships and actually much more content than those who refuse to do so and this actually proved out, it proven by the author of that book Huismans, his subsequent novels tell the story of someone who descends into the hell of satanic practice, a horrific description of the black mass and then in the next book that that book's called La Bar down there and the next book's called Enroute on the Way, which is the sort of so La Bar is like the inferno descending into hell, Enroute is like purgatorio purgatory through suffering and experience moving closer to Christ and then the third book's called La Catedral, the Cathedral and it's the conversion of the protagonist. So Huismans ends up spending the last years of his life as a sort of on the edge of a monastery, never actually becoming a monk but sort of living in that monastic milieu. The other great leaders of the French decadence which are very, all very influential upon wild, Scholl Baudelaire, Baudelaire who wrote a volume called Le Fleur de Mal, The Evil Flowers, Flowers of Sickness, when those, when those, when that poetry was published a critic said there's only one choice left now between, for Baudelaire he had to choose between either the foot of the cross or the end of the barrel of a gun, so suicide or repentance and conversion. Baudelaire is received into the church in his deathbed, Paul Valen, another leader of the French decadence who, well I won't tell you about his sordid lifestyle, but again he is received into the church in prison and publishes a volume of poetry called Sagesse. So the French decadent movement was the influence upon wild, wild becomes the godfather of the English decadent movement and he ends up in exactly the same place as the leaders of the French decadent movement and we'll see it perhaps best in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray where Dorian Gray is poisoned by the cynical philosophy of Lord Henry Watten who tells him that the only thing worth living for is beauty and youth and so Dorian Gray basically sells his soul so that the painting of him gets old and shows the ugliness of his sin and he stays young. So he sells his soul for immortal youth and the story then unfolds and at the end the moral of it is when you kill your conscience which is what Dorian Gray tries to do in the novel you end up ultimately killing yourself. So wild as with the other decadence and just look at some of the other leaders of the decadent movement before we come to an end here is that wild certainly was the leader of the English decadence but other leaders of it Robert Ross who's the person who allegedly introduced wild to the homosexual lifestyle he becomes a Catholic and is the only one of wild's friends loyal enough to remain with wild and be there on his deathbed. John Gray, handsome young man who has said to have been the physical model for for Dorian Gray, wild's character, he does not only just become a Catholic but he becomes a Catholic priest. Ernest Dawson the decadent artist also becomes a Catholic. Lionel Johnson decadent poet becomes a Catholic. Ernest Dawson or not a wonderful wonderful poet he becomes a decadent poet becomes a Catholic. Even Lord Alfred Douglas world's nemesis this narcissistic young man who got wild at least partly responsible for world's downfall he becomes a Catholic. So what we see here and this is the the the the the two paths if you like to Christ there's the high road of sanctity and there's the low road of the Mary Magdalene path if you like of repentance of the of the miserable sinner and what's necessary is suffering and wild world encapsulates this in prison when he writes the one work he writes when he gets out of prison the battle of the redding jail he says but God's eternal laws are kind and break the heart of stone for how else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in. Thank you for being with me in this episode of the authority we've looked at the the wild life of Oscar Wilde himself and his penitential Mary Magdalene type repentance and conversion at the end until next time thanks a lot for joining me and until then goodbye God bless and good reading. 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