Part 11
THE IMAGINATION AND THE ‘METROPOLITAN INTELLECT’
Newman wrote his Apologia pro Vita Sua to defend himself from the charge of ‘Untruthfulness’. Charles Kingsley, in a review in Macmillan’s Magazine, had claimed that ‘truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole, ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage.’1 Newman – not, initially, realizing that Kingsley was the author of the review – wrote a letter of protest to the publishers of Macmillan’s Magazine, to ‘draw the attention’ of the publishers ‘to a grave and gratuitous slander’.2 Kingsley then wrote to Newman, declaring himself the author of the review, and claiming that the ‘document’ to which he ‘expressly referred’ – in justifying his claim that Newman did not consider ‘truth, for its own sake’ a ‘virtue’ – was the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in Sermons on Subjects of the Day (1844).3 After an exchange of letters between Kingsley and Newman, Kingsley offered to write a letter of retraction, a letter which Newman considered unsatisfactory: Kingsley remarked, in the letter, that ‘Dr Newman has … expressed in the strongest terms, his denial of the meaning which I have put upon his words’; Newman considered that this implied that ‘I have set before Dr Newman, as he challenged me to do, extracts from his writings, and he has affixed to them what he conceives to be their legitimate sense’.4 Newman then published the correspondence between himself and Kingsley, adding a satirical commentary on it. (‘“Well,” says Mr. Kingsley, “if you are quite sure you did not say it, I’ll take your word for it; I really will.” My word! I am dumb. Somehow I thought that it was my word that happened to be on trial. The word of a Professor of lying, that he does not lie!’)5
Kingsley was provoked into writing a pamphlet, What, then, Does Dr Newman Mean? in which he sought to defend the claim that Newman was not committed to ‘truth, for its own sake’. He censures the sermons on ‘The Apostolical Christian’ and ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, as ‘most dangerous and misleading’ (and as warranting his claim that, according to Newman, ‘cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage’).6
In the sermon on ‘The Apostolical Christian’, Newman suggests that ‘the humble monk and the holy nun, and other regulars, as they are called, [are] Christians after the very pattern given us in Scripture’.7 In the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman attempts to account for the ‘suspicion’ with which the early Christians were regarded by ‘the world’, by suggesting that the ‘world’ could not understand the effectiveness of Christian virtue: the early Christians seemed to have certain virtues which – in the judgement of ‘the world’ – were very unlikely to make for effectiveness; as the early Christians were, nevertheless, a ‘match’ for the world, ‘the world’ took it that there was something more to them than was apparent – these virtues could not account for their successes, so their appearance of having these virtues was mere dissimulation, ‘craft’; yet ‘innocence, simplicity, implicit obedience to God, tranquillity of mind, contentment, these and the like virtues are in themselves a sort of wisdom; I mean, they produce the same results as wisdom, because God works for those who do not work for themselves; and thus they especially incur the charge of craft at the hands of the world, because they pretend to so little, yet effect so much’.8 Newman asks, ‘What … though we grant that sacramental confession and the celibacy of the clergy do tend to consolidate the body politic in the relation of rulers and subjects, or, in other words, to aggrandise the priesthood? For how can the Church be one body without such relation?’9 Newman was an Anglican when he preached these sermons; he considered that monasticism, and ‘celibacy’ were traditional Christian forms of life that could be revived within the Anglican Church; he considered that ‘sacramental confession’ was still recognized (in principle, if not always in practice) by the Anglican Church; he suggests, in this sermon, that there is a certain analogy between the mistrust of such things – as occasioning ‘priestcraft’ – and a ‘worldly’ mistrust of Christian virtue.
Priestcraft has ever been considered the badge, and its imputation is a kind of note of the Church; and in part, indeed, truly, because the presence of powerful enemies, and the sense of their own weakness, has sometimes tempted Christians to the abuse, instead of the use of Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless; but partly – nay, for the most part – not truly, but slanderously, and merely because the world called their wisdom craft, when it was found to be a match for its own numbers and power.10
Newman acknowledges, then, that ‘priestcraft’ – the ‘abuse … of Christian wisdom’ – may well have occurred, in some cases, when Christians were ‘tempted’ to it by ‘the presence of powerful enemies, and the sense of their own weakness’; but he maintains, equally, that many of the accusations of ‘priestcraft’ made by ‘the world’ were ‘slanderous’, arising from an incompre hension, on the part of the ‘world’, of how Christians might be ‘a match for its own numbers and power’ when they seemed – to appearance at least – to be destitute of anything that the ‘world’ could recognize as making for power. Newman, then, sets out a scheme of interpretation: accusations of ‘priestcraft’ – through history, and at the present time – might arise from a ‘worldly’ incomprehension of the effectiveness of ‘innocence’, or Christian virtue. (Hence, one may take it, the characterization of such things as ‘celibacy’ or monasticism or ‘sacramental confession’ as implicated with ‘priestcraft’ might not be justified; the revival of such things, in the Anglican Church, need not be regarded as a revival of ‘priestcraft’.)
Kingsley maintains that the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’ is a ‘Romish’ sermon. He claims that ‘the broad meaning and the plain practical result of a sermon like this, delivered before fanatic and hot-headed young men’ was to make them ‘think that they obeyed him, by becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments and equivocations’, or to make them ‘consider the same chicanery allowed to them which they found practised but too often by the Mediaeval Church’.
The natural result of the sermon on the minds of his disciples would be, to make them suspect that truth was not a virtue for its own sake, but only for the sake of the spread of “catholic opinions,” and the “salvation of their own souls;” and that cunning was the weapon which Heaven had allowed to them to defend themselves against the persecuting Protestant public.11
Newman maintains that many of the accusations of ‘craft’, made against Christians, might well have been ‘slanderous’; Kingsley maintains that the ‘natural result’ of this, on ‘fanatic and hot-headed young man’, was to make them think certain forms of craft might be permissible. Kingsley takes it that, in maintaining that some of the accusations of ‘priestcraft’ made against the Church were ‘slanderous’, Newman licensed ‘hot-headed young men’ to think that certain instances of ‘chicanery … practised … by the Medieval Church’, recorded in history, and widely regarded as ‘priestcraft’, were not, in fact, priestcraft: the stigmatizing of such behaviour as ‘priestcraft’ was a misunderstanding, a mark of ‘worldly’ incomprehension. If to act in such a way was not priestcraft, then one might act in such a way without being culpable – ‘becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments and equivocations’. Kingsley maintains that Newman is ‘denying or explaining away the existence of that priestcraft which is a notorious fact to every honest student of history; and justifying (as far as I can understand him) [the] double-dealing … [of] prelates, in the middle age’.12 Kingsley presents a dialogue between Newman and ‘the world’.
If he told the world, as he virtually does in this sermon, ‘I know that my conduct looks like cunning; but it is only the ‘arts’ of the defenceless’: what wonder if the world answered, ‘No. It is what it seems. That is just what we call cunning; a habit of mind which, once indulged, is certain to go on from bad to worse, till the man becomes – like too many of the mediaeval clergy who indulged in it – utterly untrustworthy.13
Kingsley suggests that those who consider ‘truth’ to be a ‘virtue … only for the sake of the spread of “catholic opinions”’, identify those opinions (alone) with truth, and consider that anything that makes for the ‘spread’ of those opinions is consistent with truth. (There is, in this, a suggestion, as well, that for those with this attitude, it is only those with ‘catholic opinions’ who have understanding, and it is, therefore, only the judgment of those with ‘catholic opinions’ which should be regarded or solicited: there is the community of those with ‘catholic opinions’, the community of ‘truth’, with whom truthfulness is to be observed, and there is the community of those without such opinions, with whom rhetorical strategems and ‘chicanery’ are permissible.) Kingsley asks, ‘how was I to know that the preacher … was utterly blind to the broad meaning and the plain practical result of a sermon like this, delivered before fanatic and hot-headed young men … [and] that he did not foresee that they would think that they obeyed him, by becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments and equivocations?’ Newman would retort to this – ‘How should he know!’ What! I suppose that we are to think every man a knave till he is proved not to be such.
Know! had he no friend to tell him whether I was “affected” or “artificial” myself? … ‘How should he know’ that I was not sly, smooth, artificial, non-natural! he should know by that common manly frankness, if he had it, by which we put confidence in others, till they are proved to have forfeited it; he should know it by my own words in that very Sermon, in which I say it is best to be natural, and that reserve is at best but an unpleasant necessity.14
The way in which one gets a sense of the truthfulness of another person is by encountering that person oneself; and if one is to encounter that person properly, then one must have a certain ‘frankness’, whereby one ‘puts confidence’ in that person. The vision of Newman as an ‘equivocator’, whose ‘use of words’ is designing, untrustworthy, dissipates ‘confidence’ in any ‘words’ Newman might use to defend himself. Newman suggests that Kingsley himself, in taking (or feigning to take) such an attitude of suspicion, is taking an attitude at odds with ‘frankness’: if one has ‘common manly frankness’, then one is disposed to have ‘confidence’ in others.
Kingsley presents Newman as intellectually corrupt. He suggests that Newman, licensing the use of any means of promoting ‘catholic opinions’ (any sort of argument, however sophistical), and taking this to be, ultimately, consistent with ‘truth’ (for whatever makes for ‘catholic opinions’ must be consistent with truth) thereby corrupted his own sense of what constitutes a proper means of attaining to the truth. In carrying out ‘tours de force’ of argument, and interpretation, with ‘that subtle brain of his’, Newman ‘would either destroy his own sense of honesty – i.e. con scious truthfulness – and become a dishonest person; or he would destroy his common sense – i.e. unconscious truthfulness, and become the slave and puppet seemingly of his own logic, really of his own fancy, ready to believe anything, however preposterous, into which he could, for the moment, argue himself’.15
Kingsley then declares that he is ‘in doubt and fear, as much as an honest man can be, concerning every word Dr. Newman may write. How can I tell that I shall not be the dupe of some cunning equivocation, of one of the three kinds laid down as permissible by the blessed St. Alfonso da Liguori and his pupils?’ Newman observes that Kingsley ‘desires to impress upon the public mind the conviction that I am a crafty, scheming man, simply untrustworthy; that, in becoming a Catholic, I have just found my right place; that I do but justify and am properly interpreted by the common English notion of Roman casuists and confessors; that I was secretly a Catholic when I was openly professing to be a clergyman of the Established Church; that so far from bringing, by means of my conversion, when at length it openly took place, any strength to the Catholic cause, I am really a burden to it – an additional evidence of the fact, that to be a pure, german, genuine Catholic, a man must be either a knave or a fool’.16 Newman observes that if ‘I demonstrate that I am not a knave, he may exclaim, “Oh, but you are a fool!” and when I demonstrate that I am not a fool, he may turn round and retort, “Well, then, you are a knave.”’17 Kingsley suggests, in fact, that he is a ‘knave’ and ‘fool’ together – that he is a ‘fool’ who has become such through a knavery whereby he has corrupted his own intellect: ‘His simpleton is one who has become such, in judgment for his having once been a knave. His simpleton is not a born fool, but a self-made idiot, one who has drugged and abused himself into a shameless depravity.’18 More than that, though, Newman maintains, Kingsley – in professing to fear that he might be the ‘dupe of some cunning equivocation’ – ‘has attempted (as I may call it) to poison the wells’: he has attempted ‘to infuse into the imaginations of my readers, suspicion and mistrust of every thing that I may say in reply to him’.19 Could a ‘fool’ perpetrate an ‘equivocation’? A ‘self-made’ fool might do so, perhaps. One who has corrupted his sense of truth, by arguing dishonestly – by consulting his sense of what is rhetorically effective, in forging arguments, rather than his sense of what is true – might persist in arguing dishonestly on habit. To be in the habit of deceitfulness is to vitiate the ‘reason’ by which one might recognize that deceitfulness for what it is, the ‘reason’ by which one might reflect on oneself, recognize faults in oneself, and resolve to amend oneself. There is, in this corruption of the ‘reason’, a kind of dissolution of the self; if Newman presents the appearance of having a coherent self, an appearance of integrity, this is merely an appearance created by his mastery of rhetoric.
There is a story of a sane person being by mistake shut up in the wards of a Lunatic Asylum, and that, when he pleaded his cause to some strangers visiting the establishment, the only remark he elicited in answer was, “How naturally he talks! you would think he was in his senses.” … . If Mr. Kingsley is able thus to practise upon my readers, the more I succeed, the less will be my success. If I am natural, he will tell them, “Ars est celare artem;” if I am convincing, he will suggest that I am an able logician; if I show warmth, I am acting the indignant innocent; if I am calm, I am thereby detected as a smooth hypocrite; if I clear up difficulties, I am too plausible and perfect to be true. The more triumphant are my statements, the more certain will be my defeat.20
In his review in Macmillan’s Magazine, Kingsley had attacked Newman in the course of an attack on ‘the religion of Rome’: he maintained that ‘Roman religion had, for some time past, [at the time of the Reformation] been making men not better men, but worse’, and its ‘demoralization’ of ‘Europe’ had been ‘brought on … by the dogma that the Pope of Rome had the power of creating right and wrong; that not only truth and falsehood, but morality and immorality, depended on his setting his seal to a bit of parchment’.21 Truth was ascertained by the Pope ‘setting his seal to a bit of parchment’. The inner sense of truth, the consciousness that something was true – the inner testimony of the mind to truth – was to be subordinated to the declarations of the Pope. Kingsley maintains accordingly that ‘Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy’: the ‘seal’ of the Pope – not the inner sense of truth – was the rule of the ‘Roman clergy’; for these ‘clergy’, anything that promoted the acceptance of the declarations of the Pope – any sort of rhetoric, or ‘chicanery’ – was in conformity with truth; every statement was to be considered, not ‘for its own sake’, as having truth (and worth) in itself, but in relation to the declarations of the Pope – as an instrument for promoting assent to those declarations.
Kingsley presents Newman, then, as an instance of a type, or a class; Newman suggests, accordingly, that in defending himself, he is, equally, defending the ‘Roman clergy’. In a letter to Alexander Macmillan, who had interposed between Newman and Kingsley, Newman observes that ‘I suppose, in truth, there is nothing at all, however base, up to the high mark of Titus Oates, which a Catholic may not expect to be believed of him by Protestants, however honourable and hard-headed’.22 Newman suggests that Kingsley makes use of a certain notion of ‘Catholics’, as Antichristian, which is sustained by tradition in England. He had reflected on this tradition in The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), observing that it arouses a suspicion of Catholics which makes it difficult – for those possessed by this suspicion – to apprehend Catholics, when encountered, as they are. For Catholics, in these circumstances, it is as if they live in a ‘vast enchanted palace’.23 When ‘the Prejudiced Man’ encounters individuals, once Protestant, who have converted to Catholicism, he ‘simply forgets that Protestants they ever were.
They cease to have antecedents; they cease to have any character, any history to which they may appeal: they merge in the great fog, in which to his eyes every thing Catholic is enveloped; they are dwellers in the land of romance and fable; and if he dimly contemplates them plunging and floundering amid the gloom, it is as griffins, wiverns, salamanders, the spawn of Popery, such as are said to sport in the depths of the sea or to range amid the sands of Africa … he has no duties to their names.24
The ‘Prejudiced Man’ apprehends, not a person, but a figment; the person, with a ‘name’, is replaced with a chimera. In the Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman observes that his exchange with Kingsley has made him appreciate that ‘I must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes.’25
In The Present Position of Catholics in England, Newman insists that Catholics must counter the suspicions entertained about them by presenting themselves as they are. ‘They must be made to know us as we are; they must be made to know our religion as it is, not as they fancy it; they must be made to look at us, and they are overcome.’
Protestantism is fierce, because it does not know you; ignorance is its strength; error is its life. Therefore bring yourselves before it, press yourselves upon it, force yourselves into notice against its will. Oblige men to know you; persuade them, importune them, shame them into knowing you. Make it so clear what you are, that they cannot affect not to see you, nor refuse to justify you.26
He observes, though, that Catholics should aim at affecting, not ‘metropolitan’ opinion, but ‘local’ opinion: they can affect ‘local’ opinion, because such opinion arises from ‘personal knowledge’, from personal acquaintance; but this is not the case with ‘metropolitan’ opinion.
The great metropolitan intellect cannot be reached by us, and for this simple reason, because you cannot confront it, you cannot make it know you. I said your victory was to be in forcing upon others a personal knowledge of you, by your standing before your enemies face to face. But what face has a metropolitan journal? How are you to get at it? how are you to look into it? whom are you to look at? who is to look at you? No one is known in London; it is the realm of the incognito and the anonymous; it is not a place, it is a region or a state. There is no such thing as local opinion in the metropolis; mutual personal knowledge, there is none; neighbourhood, good fame, bad repute, there is none; no house knows the next door. You cannot make an impression on such an ocean of units; it has no disposition, no connexion of parts. The great instrument of propagating moral truth is personal knowledge. A man finds himself in a definite place; he grows up in it and into it; he draws persons around him; they know him, he knows them; thus it is that ideas are born which are to live, that works begin which are to last. It is this personal knowledge of each other which is true public opinion; local opinion is real public opinion; but there is not, there cannot be, such in London. How is a man to show what he is, when he is but a grain of sand out of a mass, without relations to others, without a place, without antecedents, without individuality? … . And this impersonality, as it may be called, pervades the whole metropolitan system. A man, not known, writes a leading article against what? – things? no; but ideas. He writes against Catholicism: what is Catholicism? can you touch it? point at it? no; it is an idea before his mind. He clothes it with certain attributes, and forthwith it goes all over the country that a certain idea or vision, called Catholicism, has certain other ideas, bad ones, connected with it. You see, it is all a matter of ideas, and abstractions, and conceptions. Well, this leading article goes on to speak of certain individual Catholic priests; still, does it see them? point at them? no, it does but give their names; it is a matter, not of persons, but of names; and those names, sure enough, go over the whole country and empire as the names of rogues, or of liars, or of tyrants, as the case may be; while they themselves, the owners of them, in their own persons are not at all the worse for it, but eat, sleep, pray, and do their work, as freely and as easily as before. London cannot touch them, for words hurt no one; words cannot hurt us till – till when? till they are taken up, believed, in the very place where we individually dwell.27
In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman sought to defend his ‘name’, by presenting his ‘face’ to ‘metropolitan’ opinion. He sets out to defend his own ‘truthfulness’. (Kingsley had suggested more than this – that he was not only deceitful, but corrupted in his ‘reason’, so as to be scarcely capable of truthfulness; but Kingsley had, equally, suggested that this corruption had arisen from habitual untruthfulness, licensed by vitiated notions of truth.) Newman maintains that Kingsley – in characterizing him as deceitful and dishonest – appeals to an ‘impression’ which had been entertained about him by ‘large classes of men’ – namely, that he was a ‘conscious Roman Catholic’ while still a clergyman in the Church of England, and that he had exploited his position of trust, as a clergyman in the Church of England, to do ‘the work of a hostile Church in the bosom of the English Establishment’.
There has been a general feeling that I was for years where I had no right to be; that I was a ‘Romanist’ in Protestant livery and service; that I was doing the work of a hostile Church in the bosom of the English Establishment, and knew it, or ought to have known it … . Many of the doctrines which I professed were popularly and generally known as badges of the Roman Church, as distinguished from the faith of the Reformation. Next, how could I have come by them? … Beyond a doubt, I was advocating certain doctrines, not by accident, but on an understanding with ecclesiastics of the old religion … . Indignation arose at the knavery of a conspiracy such as this: – and it became of course all the greater, in consequence of its being the received belief of the public at large, that craft and intrigue, such as they fancied they beheld with their own eyes, were the very instruments to which the Catholic Church has in these last centuries been indebted for her maintenance and extension … . There was another circumstance still, which increased the irritation and aversion felt by the large classes, of whom I have been speaking, as regards the preachers of doctrines, so new to them and so unpalatable; and that was, that they developed them in so measured a way. If they were inspired by Roman theologians, (and this was taken for granted,) why did they not speak out at once? Why did they keep the world in such suspense and anxiety as to what was coming next, and what was to be the upshot of the whole? Why this reticence, and half-speaking, and apparent indecision? It was plain that the plan of operations had been carefully mapped out from the first, and that these men were cautiously advancing towards its accomplishment, as far as was safe at the moment; that their aim and their hope was to carry off a large body with them of the young and the ignorant; that they meant gradually to leaven the minds of the rising generation, and to open the gate of that city, of which they were the sworn defenders, to the enemy who lay in ambush outside of it.28
As his ‘doctrines’ were considered to be ‘badges of the Roman Church’, so his promulgation of those doctrines was regarded with the suspicion with which the ‘Roman Church’ was regarded – as an act of ‘craft and intrigue’. ‘When after all, after my arguments and denunciations of former years, at length I did leave the Anglican Church for the Roman, then they said to each other, “It is just as we said: I told you so.”’29 Newman observes that Kingsley asks about his ‘meaning’ – ‘What does Dr Newman mean?’ ‘He asks what I mean; not about my words, not about my arguments, not about my actions, as his ultimate point, but about that living intelligence, by which I write, and argue, and act.’30 To answer Kingsley, he will have to show something of ‘that living intelligence’.
I will draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind … I must show, – what is the very truth, – that the doctrines which I held, and have held for so many years, have been taught me (speaking humanly) partly by the suggestions of Protestant friends, partly by the teaching of books, and partly by the action of my own mind.31
He would show that his writings, of that period, were not ‘inspired by Roman theologians’, and that he had not been aiming to ‘leaven the minds of the rising generation’ with ‘Roman’ ideas. Those writings were not duplicitous; they were, rather, expressions of his ‘living intelligence’. If those writings are construed as duplicitous, then they are not construed as expressions of ‘living intelligence’: the ‘living intelligence’ expressed in them is obscured (replaced with a ‘phantom’, which ‘gibbers’). If, though, they are construed as expressions of ‘living intelligence’, then they can be (or rather, they demand to be) engaged with as such (and they might, as such, exert the influence that ‘living intelligence’ can exert – and they might be instrumental in moving others toward Rome). Newman observes, at one point, that the Tracts he wrote as an Anglican, were written on ‘the principle of personality’ – as ‘expressions’ of personal opinion.32 Whatever effectiveness those Tracts might have, at the present time, requires that they be construed as expressions, to some extent, of ‘personality’: in defending his name, his reputation, Newman is resisting the nullification, of his writings. If all his writings are construed as duplicitous – as expressions of the ‘word’ of a ‘Professor of lying’ – then the ‘living intelligence’ expressed in them is obscured – and he cannot present himself (his ‘living’ self) to ‘metropolitan’ opinion in, or through, his writings.
The first couple of pamphlets which Newman wrote, in response to Kingsley, Mr Kingsley’s Method of Disputation, and True Mode of Meeting Mr Kingsley, are, for the most part, an account of the rhetorical techniques which Kingsley had used against him. Kingsley accuses him of being a mere rhetorician, corrupt and dishonest, and in response, he analyses the rhetoric of Kingsley – noting that he has made some illegitimate rhetorical moves (his ‘mode of arguing’ is ‘dishonest’).33 In this analysis, Newman does not merely show that Kingsley is a rhetorician; he shows that he is a rhetorician as well: Newman shows his own ‘living’ rhetorical ‘intelligence’ and understanding, in identifying the rhetorical moves of Kingsley. By portraying Newman as an arch-sophist, Kingsley suggests that there is ‘always something put out of sight or hidden in [his] sleeve’.34 Newman puts his rhetorical ‘intelligence’ into ‘sight’ (it is not ‘hidden in [his] sleeve’). He observes that ‘controversies should be decided by the reason’ rather than by an ‘appeal to the misgivings of the public mind and to its dislikings’ but he does not repudiate rhetorical skill, per se.35 He puts into ‘sight’ his own reflections on what sort of rhetorical moves he will need to make, in his own defence: as Kingsley has a single ‘positive idea to illuminate his whole matter, and to stamp it with a form, and to quicken it with an interpretation’ – namely, that Newman is a ‘liar’ – so Newman himself must have ‘a corresponding antagonist unity in [his] defence’; as Kingsley has availed himself of ‘the bias of the court … [and] that prepossession against me, which takes it for granted that, when my reasoning is convincing it is only ingenious, and that when my statements are unanswerable, there is always something put out of sight or hidden in my sleeve’, so Newman himself ‘must break through this barrier of prejudice’.36 The precepts of rhetorical art suggest, in his case, that honesty is the best ‘policy’. Newman shows in these pamphlets his rhetorical ‘intelligence’ in his analysis of the rhetoric of Kingsley and of what sort of rhetorical moves he might make in response; and he shows, equally, intense feeling – he shows indignation at the aspersions cast on him, and at the illegitimate means used in casting those aspersions. This show of indignation was itself a rhetorical move (even if the indignation was truly felt). In a letter to John Duke Coleridge, written in October 1864, after the Apologia was completed, he observed that
I felt that, unless I wrote with the keen feeling which I really had, though it is ordinarily one’s duty not to show it, people would not believe me; they would say that my book was written for me, or corrected by revisers, or that I was not in earnest, but exerting myself in an intellectual fence. So that I might as well not write at all, if I didn’t give out, as my thought, so my feelings.
What is more, ‘if I was making a manifestation, as I professed to do, I should not be doing this fully and consistently, if I did not manifest the deep sense, which possessed me, of that injustice which lay at the root of those charges, of which Mr Kingsley was the accidental spokesman’. It was, moreover, ‘some excuse to myself, and some apology to the world for [this manifestation], to bring out forcibly the gravity of the provocation which I had received, and the indignation which it was adapted to rouse in me’. The show of indignation had a rhetorical function; it was, equally, genuine; and his claim to be ‘manifesting’ himself, required that he manifest ‘as [his] thought, so [his] feelings’.
The Apologia was published in weekly instalments. The autobiographical part of the work consists of four parts – covering the period up to 1833, then from 1833–39, then from 1839–41, then from 1841–45 – succeeded by a ‘General Answer to Mr Kingsley’ – covering the period from 1845 to the present, and aiming to counter ‘the suspicion with which so many Protestants start, in forming their judgment of Catholics, viz. that our Creed is actually set up in inevitable superstition and hypocrisy, as the original sin of Catholicism’.37 While the structure is chronological, each part is concerned with different topics, so chronology is not strictly observed – as when he reflects on his essay on ecclesiastical miracles (published in 1843) in the first part, or when he reflects on Tract 90 (published in 1841) in the second part. The first part considers some of the core principles involved in his understanding of ‘religion’ generally (in particular, his ‘sacramental’ or ‘economical’ sense of reality, and his sense of the function of ‘probable’ argument, in making for religious belief). The second part considers his efforts to ‘bring out in a substantive form, a living Church of England in a position proper to herself, and founded on distinct principles’ – it considers his formulation of a ‘theory’ setting out a ‘position proper’ to the Church of England, and the way in which he conducted himself ‘as earnestly preaching it and influencing others towards it’.38 The third part considers how he came to recognize certain difficulties in his ‘theory’ of the Church of England. The fourth part considers how he sought to resolve his intellectual confusion, and how he conducted himself, while in this state of confusion.
Newman maintains that the change in his ‘religious opinions’, with regard to Rome, was not a matter of ‘paper logic’, not a matter of ‘abstract’ argumentation. As an account of the ‘history’ of the ‘opinions’ of Newman, the Apologia is concerned less with showing how Newman was actuated to have those ‘opinions’ (with showing all the considerations that moved him, at the time, to form those opinions) than with what those ‘opinions’ were, and how he was ‘taught’ them (whether ‘by the suggestions of Protestant friends … by the teaching of books … [or] by the action of my own mind’). It characterizes the ‘history’ of his mind, the forming of his opinions, mostly as a cumulative process: the move to Rome is not a rupture, a repudiation of all his previous beliefs. Newman observes, in this regard, that ‘divine faith’ began in him with his ‘inward conversion’ at the age of fifteen to a form of Evangelical Christianity – an ‘inward conversion … of which I still am more certain than that I have hands and feet’ – when he ‘received into [his] intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured’.39 (‘While I am now as clear in my acceptance of the principle of dogma, as I was in 1833 and 1816, so again I am now as firm in my belief of a visible Church, of the authority of Bishops, of the grace of the sacraments, of the religious worth of works of penance, as I was in 1833. I have added Articles to my Creed; but the old ones, which I then held with a divine faith, remain.’)40 His change of view, with regard to Rome, was not merely a matter of being moved by ‘logic’, by argumentation: it involved a tension between his ‘imagination’, ‘feelings’, and ‘reason’. Of his attempts to resolve his difficulties in relation to Rome, Newman observes that ‘I had a great dislike of paper logic’, not least ‘because there is great difference between a conclusion in the abstract and a conclusion in the concrete, and because a conclusion may be modified in fact by a conclusion from some opposite principle’.41
For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome than I did.42
How could one show, on ‘paper’, all the considerations by which ‘the whole man moves’? One is not aware of all the ‘reasons’ actuating ‘the concrete being’; one is not aware of all the reasons that move one to believe what one believes; and if one is not aware of these ‘reasons’, how could one put them on ‘paper’? What is more, they are ‘reasons’ that are concerned with the ‘concrete’, and ‘a conclusion [“in the concrete”] may be modified in fact by a conclusion from some opposite principle’: a great number of ‘principles’ might be pertinent to a single ‘concrete’ reality, and one of the difficulties involved in reasoning about such a reality, is in determining which ‘principles’ are pertinent to it (and this cannot be ascertained merely by ‘abstract’ reasoning, or by ‘all the logic in the world’ – it is something that is ascertained through some sort of encounter with that ‘concrete’ reality). With regard to the move to ‘Rome’, that move involved an encounter between the ‘concrete being’, the ‘whole man’ of Newman himself, and the ‘concrete’ reality of the Roman Catholic Church (though his ‘personal’ acquaintance with Catholics was negligible): there is more, in the ‘concrete being’ of Newman himself, in the reasoning of the ‘whole man’, than can be represented in ‘paper logic’; and there is more, in the ‘concrete’ reality of Rome – a reality animated by the Holy Spirit – than any ‘logic’, or any ‘reasoning’, can comprehend. Kingsley accuses Newman of having ‘always something put out of sight’, in his writing; he asks about his ‘meaning’ – about the ‘living intelligence, by which’ he writes, and argues, and acts; but for Newman himself, the ‘living intelligence’ involves a fullness of ‘meaning’ that cannot be fully ‘put’ into ‘sight’, or adequately presented; and his forming of ‘impressions of dogma’ involves an encounter with a ‘meaning’ that is, in itself, illimitable, inexhaustible: ‘Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the world, only a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her mysteries are but the expressions in human language of truths to which the human mind is unequal.’43 In the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman suggested that ‘Religious men are a mystery to [the world]; and, being a mystery, they will be called by the world, in mere self-defence, mysterious, dark, subtle, designing … . All the reasons which religious men allege, seem to the world unreal, and all the feelings fantastical and strained; and this strengthens it in its idea that it has not fathomed them, and that there is some secret to be found out … and there is a secret; but it is the power of Divine grace, their state of heart, which is the secret; not their motives or their ends, which the world is told to the full.’44 How could a ‘religious … state of heart’ be represented, to the ‘metropolitan’ world?
Newman sets out his principles, in the first autobiographical part of the Apologia, in a succinct, almost abrupt manner. He quotes from a paper of his own, which he wrote in the early 1820s, setting out his recollections of his ‘school days’: ‘“I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans … I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world ... I was very superstitious, and for some time previous to my [Evangelical] conversion ... used constantly to cross myself on going into the dark.”’45 He adds, to this, no comment or explanation. He observes that in the early 1840s he recognized that since ‘there had been already great miracles, as those of Scripture, as the Resurrection, [this] was a fact establishing the principle that the laws of nature had sometimes been suspended by their Divine Author; and since what had happened once might happen again, a certain probability, at least no kind of improbability, was attached to the idea, taken in itself, of miraculous intervention in later times.’46 He reflects on how he was moved by ‘the philosophy of Clement and Origen’, which was ‘based on the mystical or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various Economies or Dispensations of the Eternal’, and which ‘came like music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long’ – a philosophy according to which ‘Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the world, only a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity’.47 He notes that ‘it was to the Alexandrian school and to the early Church that I owe in particular what I definitely held about the Angels. I viewed them, not only as the ministers employed by the Creator in the Jewish and Christian dispensations, as we find on the face of Scripture, but as carrying on, as Scripture also implies, the Economy of the Visible World. I considered them as the real causes of motion, light, and life, and of those elementary principles of the physical universe, which, when offered in their developments to our senses, suggest to us the notion of cause and effect, and of what are called the laws of nature.’48 He observes that he even ‘considered there was a middle race [of angelic beings] neither in heaven, nor in hell; partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. They gave a sort of inspiration or intelligence to races, nations, and classes of men.’49
Newman reflects on how these disclosures – about his speculations on the ‘heavenly facts which fill eternity’ – will be taken by ‘many men’.
I am aware that what I have been saying will, with many men, be doing credit to my imagination at the expense of my judgment – ‘Hippoclides doesn’t care;’ I am not setting myself up as a pattern of good sense or of any thing else: I am but vindicating myself from the charge of dishonesty.50
It was a truism of the art of rhetoric that one should cultivate ethos as a means of persuasion: one would be more persuasive, if those whom one sought to persuade considered one to have a good character – to have ‘good sense’, and a good will. Richard Whateley observed, in his Elements of Rhetoric, that to cultivate a reputation for ‘good sense’, one needed to express ‘sentiments’ that accorded with what those to whom one addressed oneself considered ‘good sense’.
When it is said that good Sense, good Principle, and Good-will, constitute the character which the speaker ought to establish of himself, it is to be remembered that every one of these is to be considered in reference to the opinions and habits of the audience … . In proportion as the speaker manifests his dissent from the opinions and principles of his audience, so far, he runs the risk at least of impairing their estimation of his judgement.51
The phrase ‘Hippoclides doesn’t care’ refers to a story in Herodotus, about an Athenian nobleman, Hippocleides, who – attending a dinner party at the house of Cleisthenes, whose daughter he wished to marry – became drunk, stood on his head, and kicked his legs in time to the music; when Cleisthenes told him that he had ‘danced away his marriage’, he replied ‘Hippocleides doesn’t care’. Newman is showing that he is well aware that he is differing from the ‘opinions and principles of his audience’. His ‘audience’ might be saying ‘Hippocleides doesn’t care’, when presented with the spectacle of Newman, behaving as one intoxicated with ‘imagination’, or Newman himself might be saying ‘Hippocleides doesn’t care’, when confronted with the disapproval of his ‘audience’. Newman acknowledges, then, that he is giving the appearance of not ‘caring’; that he is aware of this appearance, suggests that he is not presenting this appearance undesignedly. There is, perhaps, a show of parrhesia – of bold frankness – in the way in which he describes his ideas, and principles – with precision, brevity, and with little effort to show why they seemed plausible to him (or to make them seem plausible to others); and as he does not seem to be soliciting the agreement of others, so he does not seem solicitous of, or to have designs on, the good opinion of others. There is, equally, very little that is ‘fanciful’ in the way he sets out these ideas and principles. (One exception to this, is in his account of the ‘philosophy of Clement and Origin’, but, there, he is setting out the ‘philosophy’ of others; and he is giving an account of how it affected him (‘like music to my inward ear’), and he observes that his sense of it involved something of the ‘zeal and freshness’ and the ‘partiality of a neophyte’.) In the 1865 edition of the Apologia, Newman replaced ‘I am but vindicating myself from the charge of dishonesty’ with ‘I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means’.52 An ‘intelligible’ process of thought may, indeed, be a process of thought quite at odds with ‘good sense’; but the more he can show that his opinions ‘come’ from ‘intelligible processes of thought’, the less they seem to be actuated by mere ‘fancy’. The terse style, then, is far from ‘fanciful’, and his use of it conveys the impression that his ‘reason’ is not oppressed by his ‘fancy’. The terse style seems, moreover, to involve an eschewal of rhetorical ‘art’. Newman seems to be observing, in this regard, another of the rhetorical maxims of Whateley.
Of intellectual qualifications, there is one which, it is evident, should not only not be blazoned forth, but should in a great measure be concealed, or kept out of sight; viz. Rhetorical skill; whatever is attributed to the Eloquence of the speaker is so much deducted from the strength of his cause … The Orator attains his End the better the less he is regarded as an Orator; if he can make the hearers believe that he is not only a stranger to all unfair artifice, but even destitute of all Persuasive skill whatever, he will persuade them the more effectually, and if there ever could be an absolutely perfect Orator, no one would, at the time at least, discover that he was so.53
Newman makes use of a terse, spare style, in presenting principles that might seem to do ‘credit to [his] imagination at the expense of [his] judgement’. In his use of this style (eschewing ‘Eloquence’) and in his avowal of that which does not seem to his ‘credit’, he creates an impression of frankness, candour. In his use of this style (eschewing ‘fancy’) he shows that his ‘judgement’, his capacity for clear, ‘intelligible’ thought, is not impaired, is not the ‘slave’ and ‘puppet’ of his imagination. Newman does not make use of a ‘poetical’ register, in presenting these principles; yet these principles, nevertheless, suggest that what the ‘poetical’ imagination apprehends – in impressions that are ‘like music to [the] inward ear’ – might be truth: if the world is a ‘symbol’ of ‘heavenly facts’, then vision is a means to truth. He is concerned, in the first part of the Apologia, with two main principles: the principle that ‘probability is the guide of life’ (the ‘certitude which we were able to possess, whether as to the truths of natural theology, or as to the fact of a revelation, [is] the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities, and that, both according to the constitution of the human mind and the will of its Maker’);54 and the principle that there is ‘an analogy between the separate works of God [which] leads to the conclusion that the system which is of less importance is economically or sacramentally connected with the more momentous system, and of this conclusion the theory, …[of] the unreality of material phenomena, is an ultimate resolution’.55 As assessments of ‘probability’ are very much a matter of ‘implicit’ reasoning, so the notion that ‘probability is the guide of life’, and of religious belief, is connected to the sense that there is more, in the ‘living intelligence’, in the apprehension that actuates religious ‘opinion’, than can be represented in ‘paper logic’. These considerations, taken together, suggest that the fullest insight into the ‘system’ of reality might be in visions – whereby ‘material phenomena’ are made into ‘figures’ and ‘types’ of ‘more momentous’ realities. There is more, in visionary apprehension or perception, than can be represented in ‘paper logic’; and there is more in reality than any sort of apprehension or perception – visionary or otherwise – can apprehend. ‘Those two principles of my teachi ng … have led to a charge against me both of fancifulness and of scepticism.’56 If these ‘two principles’ suggest that ‘vision’ can be a means to truth, then this would suggest Newman, in accepting these principles, would be willing to accord his own experiences of ‘vision’ a certain credit, so that those experiences would have some influence on his ‘opinions’, and would have a part in the ‘history’ of his opinions.
2.
Newman suggests, in the Apologia, that his understanding of his own life, his ‘work’, his ‘mission’, was, in 1833, animated by a ‘vision’.
We set out [on the tour of the south of Europe] in December, 1832. It was during this expedition that my Verses which are in the Lyra Apostolica were written; – a few indeed before it, but not more than one or two of them after it. Exchanging, as I was, definite Tutorial labours, and the literary quiet and pleasant friendships of the last six years, for foreign countries and an unknown future, I naturally was led to think that some inward changes, as well as some larger course of action, was coming upon me. At Whitchurch, while waiting for the down mail to Falmouth, I wrote the verses about my Guardian Angel, which begin with these words: ‘Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend?’ and go on to speak of ‘the vision’ which haunted me: – that vision is more or less brought out in the whole series of these compositions … . Especially when I was left by myself, the thought came upon me that deliverance is wrought, not by the many but by the few, not by bodies but by persons. Now it was, I think, that I repeated to myself the words, which had ever been dear to me from my school days, ‘Exoriare aliquis!’ – now too, that Southey’s beautiful poem of Thalaba, for which I had an immense liking, came forcibly to my mind. I began to think that I had a mission. There are sentences of my letters to my friends to this effect, if they are not destroyed. When we took leave of Monsignore Wiseman, he had courteously expressed a wish that we might make a second visit to Rome; I said with great gravity, ‘We have a work to do in England.’ I went down at once to Sicily, and the presentiment grew stronger. I struck into the middle of the island, and fell ill of a fever at Leonforte. My servant thought that I was dying, and begged for my last directions. I gave them, as he wished; but I said, ‘I shall not die.’ I repeated, ‘I shall not die, for I have not sinned against light, I have not sinned against light.’ I never have been able to make out at all what I meant … . I was aching to get home; yet for want of a vessel I was kept at Palermo for three weeks. I began to visit the Churches, and they calmed my impatience, though I did not attend any services. I knew nothing of the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament there. At last I got off in an orange boat, bound for Marseilles. We were becalmed a whole week in the Straits of Bonifacio. Then it was that I wrote the lines, ‘Lead, kindly light’, which have since become well known. I was writing verses the whole time of my passage. At length I got to Marseilles, and set off for England. The fatigue of travelling was too much for me, and I was laid up for several days at Lyons. At last I got off again and did not stop night or day till I reached England, and my mother’s house. My brother had arrived from Persia only a few hours before. This was on the Tuesday. The following Sunday, July 14th, Mr. Keble preached the Assize Sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published under the title of ‘National Apostasy’. I have ever considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious movement of 1833.57
The ‘verses’ which ‘speak of “the vision” which haunted me’ are the verses on ‘Guardian Angels’ in Lyra Apostolica.
Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend,
His footprints, and his vesture-skirts of light,
Who, as I talk with men, conforms aright
Their sympathetic words, or deeds that blend
With my hid thought; – or stoops him to attend
My doubtful-pleading grief; – or blunts the might
Of ill I see not; – or in dreams of night
Figures the scope in which what is will end?
Were I Christ’s own, then fitly might I call
That vision real; for to the thoughtful mind
That walks with Him, He half unveils His face;
But when on common men such shadows fall,
These dare not make their own the gifts they find,
Yet, not all hopeless, eye His boundless grace.58
In the Apologia he suggests that the ‘vision’, mentioned in ‘Guardian Angels’, is a vision ‘brought out’ in the ‘series of compositions’ making up Lyra Apostolica; and he connects this ‘vision’ to the expectation ‘that some inward changes, as well as some larger course of action, was coming upon’ him. Then he observes that the forming of his sense of ‘mission’ involved recollections of ‘Southey’s beautiful poem of Thalaba’: he was thinking of himself, his ‘mission’, his ‘work’, in a way informed by ‘poetical’, visionary images. He fell ill of a fever, and though others thought he was dying, he declared, ‘I shall not die, for I have not sinned against light, I have not sinned against light’ – and of this he observes, ‘I have never been able to make out at all what I meant.’ Did he have, in his delirium, some insight that he cannot ‘make out’, and cannot represent, or can he not ‘make out’ what he ‘meant’ because there was nothing to ‘make out’ (perhaps his preoccupation, in delirium, with ‘light’, merely shows how much his sense of having a prophetic ‘mission’ was ‘haunting’ his thoughts)? He parallels his experience of having visions of a ‘mission’, with his experience of delirium; in each state, he makes certain quasi-prophetic utterances (‘we have a work to do’, ‘I shall not die’) which mean more, perhaps, than he understands. He does not attempt to characterize what the ‘vision’ that ‘haunted’ him was like – he refers only to the ‘series of compositions’ in Lyra Apostolica, as setting out that vision. ‘That vision’ is, equally, not ‘brought out’ in ‘Guardian Angels’: it is referred to; but nothing definite is revealed as to what ‘that vision’ is about, or what it is like. Of the circumstances in which he composed these ‘verses’, Newman remarks, ‘Exchanging, as I was, definite Tutorial labours, and the literary quiet and pleasant friendships of the last six years, for foreign countries and an unknown future, I naturally was led to think that some inward changes, as well as some larger course of action, was coming upon me. At Whitchurch, while waiting for the down mail to Falmouth, I wrote the verses about my Guardian Angel, which begin with these words: “Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend?”’59 He suggests that the mood in which he expected that some ‘inward changes, as well as some larger course of action’ were ‘coming upon’ him, was to some extent a ‘natural’ effect of his circumstances. He was ‘naturally led’ to expect ‘inward changes’ and a ‘larger course of action’ (‘naturally’ here suggests a commonsensical way of understanding the ‘inward’ effect of outward circumstances); and, on his travels, the ‘strangeness of foreign life threw [him] back into’ himself’ – making him meditate on his ‘vision’. Certain circumstances ‘naturally’, he suggests, have certain effects on how one thinks. Were his circumstances, at that time, really such as to make him ‘naturally’ expect that a ‘larger course of action’ was ‘coming upon’ him? He had just finished a book; he no longer had any duties as a tutor (indeed he had, in effect, been removed from his tutorial duties). Were these circumstances such as to make it ‘natural’ to expect a ‘larger course of action’? (This is, as a matter of fact – to judge from his letters – how he did feel at the time.) If his ‘presentiment’ of a ‘mission’ was not a ‘natural’ effect of his circumstances, what was it an effect of? How, more generally, does that which is ‘inward’ relate to outward circumstances? The ‘verses’ on his ‘Guardian Angel’ suggest that he is in relation, not simply to what is outward, perceptible, but to ‘unearthly’ realities which impinge on him in ways that he cannot quite make out. There is an incongruity between the circumstances in which he ‘wrote the verses’ on his ‘Guardian Angel’ – the circumstances of contemporary England, of the ‘down mail to Falmouth’ – and the matter of the ‘verses’ themselves: it was far from usual or ‘natural’, in the England of 1832, for young clergymen of the Church of England to contemplate ‘Guardian Angels’, as Newman was well aware: his circumstances were not such as ‘naturally led’ to thoughts of angels. (Preaching on angels in 1831, in a sermon on ‘The Powers of Nature’, he remarked that ‘we are not accustomed to such thoughts’, to thoughts of ‘unearthly’ presences – ‘the sin of what is called an educated age, such as our own … [is] to account slightly of [the angels], or not at all; to ascribe all we see around us, not to their agency but to certain assumed laws of nature’ – and he claimed that this ‘is likely to be our sin, in proportion as we are initiated into the learning of this world’.)60
How does the ‘inward’ vision relate to outward circumstances or influences? How is the ‘inward’ vision formed? In the first part of ‘Guardian Angels’, Newman reflects on how an ‘unearthly Friend’ might affect his ‘inward’ life. He is affected, in ‘talk with men’, by ‘sympathetic words’, and by ‘deeds that blend’ with his ‘hid thought’. The ‘sympathetic words’ of ‘men’, or ‘deeds that blend’ with his ‘hid thought’ seem to be ‘words’ or ‘deeds’ with which he feels sympathy, with which he concurs, which accordingly ‘blend with’ his ‘thought’ – affecting, and becoming part of, his ‘thought’, his understanding of the world. Newman suggests that the ‘unearthly Friend’ might ‘conform aright’ these ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ – which would suggest that the ‘Friend’ ensures that he is presented with ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ that affect his ‘hid thought’ in the ‘right’ way, forming his mind ‘aright’ (and, perhaps, it might suggest that the ‘Friend’ ensures that these ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ are conformed to his ‘hid thought’, adapted to his understanding, in such a way that they are ‘sympathetic’ to him, and are such that they can ‘blend’ with his thought). It is not at all clear how he would take the agency of this ‘Friend’ to relate to the agency of the ‘men’ who say these ‘words’ and do these ‘deeds’. (Is there a sense here of something like ‘angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world’?) Then again, the ‘unearthly Friend’ might be acting, not on, or through, the ‘men’ with whom Newman ‘talks’, but on Newman himself – causing him to feel a certain ‘sympathy’ with certain ‘words’ and ‘deeds’, disposing him to concur with them. (What Newman considers ‘sympathetic’ will be determined, presumably, by his character. How, though, the agency of the ‘Friend’ might be involved in his responses of ‘sympathy’, and how this agency relates to all else that is involved in his responses of ‘sympathy’, is not clear.) Newman suggests that the ‘unearthly Friend’ might form in him ‘dreams of night’ – acting in some way on his imagination – ‘dreams’ which figure ‘the scope in which what is will end’. These ‘dreams’, which are concerned with the ‘scope in which what is will end’, the final end, the telos, toward which the present state of things tends, resemble the ‘poetical’ visions that Newman reflects on in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, the visions that ‘delineate that perfection which the imagination suggests … to which as a limit the present system of Divine Providence actually tends’.61 Newman seems to be suggesting that his ‘unearthly Friend’ might be forming his mind, his ‘hid thought’, in ways that he ‘sees not’, and that the imparting of ‘dreams’, visions, might be one of the means by which that ‘Friend’ forms his mind. How might the question ‘Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend?’ relate, then, to the question of whether a certain ‘vision’ is ‘real’? Is he asking whether he can discern ‘unearthly’ influences, in certain of his experiences, such that he could determine whether a particular ‘vision’ is itself marked by those influences, whether it has on it traces or ‘tracks’ of ‘unearthly’ influences (and so is ‘real’, trustworthy)? He seems to envisage ‘unearthly’ influences as being exerted to form his ‘hid thought’, his mind, to ‘conform’ it to the truth; and, in this regard, a ‘vision’ might be a means of forming his mind, and of manifesting something of the truth, something ‘real’.
Newman contrasts ‘Christ’s own’ and ‘common men’. The contrast is not that where ‘Christ’s own’ have visions, ‘common men’ do not (for ‘such shadows fall’ on ‘common men’). The contrast is that where ‘Christ’s own’ may ‘fitly … call’ a ‘vision’ of this kind ‘real’, ‘common men … dare not make their own the gifts they find’. Again, though, this contrast is not straightforward: it is not that where ‘common men … dare not make their own the gifts they find’, ‘Christ’s own’ do; rather, ‘Christ’s own’ may ‘fitly call’ their visions ‘real’. The juxtaposition of how Christ’s own ‘fitly … call’ a ‘vision real’, and of how ‘common men … dare not make their own the gifts they find’, suggests a certain connection between ‘calling’ a vision ‘real’, and making it ‘[one’s] own’. A vision is a ‘gift’; it is beneficial; and it is beneficial when one makes it ‘[one’s] own’. One makes it ‘[one’s] own’ when one ‘calls’ it ‘real’ – and this might mean that one takes it to present certain realities (such that it shows what is ‘real’), or it might mean that one recognizes it to be a ‘real’, authentic, vision, in that it has an ‘unearthly’ rather than an earthly origin (such that it is trustworthy): the difference, here, is in whether one is concerned with what the vision presents – with whether or not it seems to present realities – or whether one is concerned with the provenance of that vision – with whether or not it has marks or ‘tracks’ on it of an ‘unearthly’ provenance. Either way, if one takes the vision to be ‘real’, then one assents to the account of reality that it presents; and if one assents to that account of reality, then it contributes to the forming of whatever overall sense of reality one has – it forms the ‘hid thought’ by which one makes sense of the world, by which one assesses what is, and is not, ‘probable’. That sense of reality is what is most ‘[one’s] own’, what is innermost in oneself. If one makes a vision ‘[one’s] own’, then one takes it in, one makes it a part of oneself, one lets it inform the way in which one views the world. If one assimilates a vision, in this way, it will inform how one acts, how one ‘walks’ in the world.
When Newman presents the contrast between ‘Christ’s own’ and ‘common men’, he might be intimating that he is himself a ‘common man’. (‘While Christ’s own might fitly call their visions real, it is not for common men for myself to do so – though I am not “all hopeless” that I might have had something like a vision, as God sends “such shadows” even to such as myself.’) He might be suggesting that one might take up an attitude of half belief, that is not ‘all hopeless’, and that is not without some salutary effect. Then again, one need not interpret the contrast in this way: he does not commit himself to a decision as to what to ‘call’ his own vision. He might, after all – after these reflections – take his vision to be ‘real’.
Why is it that ‘Christ’s own’ may ‘fitly call’ a ‘vision’ – of the kind that is being reflected on – ‘real’? It is because to ‘the thoughtful mind / That walks with Him, he half unveils His face’.62 What does this mean, though? If one takes it that Christ ‘half unveils His face’ by imparting a ‘vision’ of His ‘face’ – if one takes ‘half unveils His face’ to mean ‘imparts “that vision”’ – then this would suggest that ‘Christ’s own’ may fitly take their visions to be real, because Christ imparts visions to those who are His ‘own’, and ‘Christ’s own’ know this: ‘Christ’s own’ are among those who are likely to have visions, so they know that any visions they have are likely to be ‘real’. (The difficulty with this, is that Newman suggests that it is not only ‘Christ’s own’ who have visions – ‘such shadows’ can ‘fall’ on ‘common men’. What is more, would ‘Christ’s own’ always be aware of being ‘Christ’s own’, such that, in knowing themselves to be ‘Christ’s own’, and likely to have ‘real’ visions, they might have confidence that their visions were ‘real’?) One might, equally, take the ‘half unveil[ing]’ of the ‘face’ of Christ to be something different from ‘that vision’. It might be a manifestation of Christ, making ‘Christ’s own’ fit to distinguish ‘real’ from unreal visions – forming in them a sense of the ‘unearthly’, and making them fit to distinguish what is genuinely ‘unearthly’ from what is not. What might this manifestation of Christ (distinct from ‘that vision’) be? To ‘walk with’ Christ involves living in reference to an idea or image of Christ: the idea of Christ animates the way one li ves, if one would live in accordance with the will of Christ, or live a Christ-like life. As the virtuous, who attend, in their ‘walk’, to the conscience, to the intimations of goodness presented by the conscience, form an ever clearer apprehension of goodness, so perhaps ‘Christ’s own’, who ‘walk’ with Christ, who attend to Christ as they act, day by day, form an ever clearer apprehension of the ‘face’ of Christ. The ‘unveil[ing]’ of the ‘face’ of Christ might, then, consist in the forming of an ever clearer apprehension of Christ, through the living of a life animated by an awareness of Christ. That ‘unveil[ing]’ is, equally, a free, gratuitous act on the part of Christ: it is Christ Himself who ‘half unveils His face’. Christ only ‘half unveils His face’ to those who ‘walk with’ Him. If it is Christ who ‘half unveils His face’ – if the initiative of Christ is supreme in this – it might, equally, be the case that He makes use of the (ordinary) development of awareness, involved in ‘walk[ing] with’ him – the development of an awareness that animates a life of ‘walk[ing] with’ Him – as a means of half unveiling ‘His face’: the unveiling might be ‘in’ this ordinary formation of the mind, as disposed by Christ (a formation of the mind that is distinct from the experiencing of a ‘vision’). (The agency of Christ, in this regard, does not compete with ‘nature’: Christ can act in, or through, ‘nature’, disposing it with utter freedom. As Newman observes, in a British Critic article on ‘Milman’s View of Christianity’, since ‘there is a particular Providence, so of necessity that Providence is secretly concurring and co-operating with that system which meets the eye … . This is the one great rule on which the Divine Dispensations with mankind have been and are conducted, that the visible world is the instrument, yet the veil, of the world invisible, – the veil, yet still partially the symbol and index: so that all that exists or happens visibly, conceals and yet suggests, and above all subserves, a system of persons, facts, and events beyond itself.’63 ) Then again, the development of awareness – the development of an apprehension of Christ – involved in ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, might itself be characterized as ‘visionary’: to ‘walk with’ Christ is to live a life that is animated by a vision, an image, of Christ, and that vision, or image, develops, becomes clearer, the more that it is lived from. This would suggest, again, that such an experience of the ‘unveil[ing]’ of the ‘face’ of Christ might itself be ‘that vision’, and that the ‘vision’ would be in continuity with, or would be an expression of, the ordinary development of the imagination: Christ ‘half unveils His face’ in or through the acts of the imagination, acts which arise from a life of devotion to Christ, and ‘that vision’ consists in these acts of the imagination. When ‘Christ’s own’ call a ‘vision … real’, this might not be so much a matter of reflecting (self-consciously) on that vision, as a kind of object – attempting to discern the ‘tracks’ or traces of the ‘unearthly’ on it – as it might be a matter of considering the meaning of the vision, its account of the ‘real’, and of recognizing, or of being disposed to recognize, that account as true: in calling a vision ‘real’, they take in, and assent to, its meaning, so that it contributes to their overall vision of what is ‘real’, and they ‘make [it] their own’. One who is ‘Christ’s own’ may ‘fitly’ do this, as one who is ‘Christ’s own’, who has ‘walk[ed] with’ Christ, has an imagination that is disposed toward the ‘real’, an imagination that has been informed by the image, the vision, of Christ. The forming of the ‘visionary’ imagination, here, might, again, be analogous to the forming of the conscience: as the conscience – the more it is attended to, and acted on – becomes clearer, and its ‘informations’ more convincing, as the ‘dictates’ of the conscience become clearer, more authoritative, more definite, the more they are attended to – ‘the faint light of Truth dawns continually brighter’ and ‘the shadows which at first troubled it, the unreal shapes created by its own twilight-state, vanish’, so that the ‘light’ becomes ‘fixed and definite, and strengthening into principle, it at the same time developes into habit’ – so the ‘vision’ of Christ, involved in ‘walk[ing] with’ Him, becomes clearer, more certain, the more it is acted on; and one who habitually acts in accordance with this ‘vision’, becomes more ‘fit’ to ‘call’ this vision ‘real’ – acquiring an ever more assured sense of which visionary intuitions manifest the ‘face’ of Christ. (The instinctive recognition of a vision as ‘real’ might be akin to the ‘sympathetic’ response to the ‘words’ of ‘men’, by which those words ‘blend’ with the ‘thought’ of the one who is ‘sympathetic’ to them. The instinctive judgment involved in this would be a judgment formed by experience – by the experience of ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ – and it might not, as such, be a judgment that could be properly represented, and justified, in ‘common’ terms.) The three possibilities here, then, are: ‘Christ’s own’ know they are likely to have visions, and so, knowing this, they can ‘fitly’ take whatever visions they have to be ‘real’; ‘Christ’s own’ have, in ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, an apprehension of the ‘face’ of the Christ, by which they are ‘fit’ to distinguish ‘real’ from unreal visions (they assess their visions in relation to this apprehension of the ‘face’ of Christ); ‘Christ’s own’, have, in ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, an apprehension of the ‘face’ of Christ, and this apprehension is itself their ‘vision’, and they take it as ‘real’ without being particularly self-conscious about it – what they experience is an ever clearer apprehension of the ‘face’ of Christ, as they ‘walk with’ Him. In ‘Guardian Angels’, it is evident, at any rate, that Newman would connect ‘vision’ with the formation of the mind – he would regard visions as ‘gifts’ that one can ‘make [one’s] own’ – and he would connect salutary ‘vision’ with a certain ‘walk’ or way of living. One may take it that it is not possible to ‘walk with’ Christ, without some kind of apprehension, or vision, of Christ, and this would suggest that the ‘vision’ Christ imparts of ‘His face’ would be pertinent to, and would affect, the way in which the one who has that vision ‘walks’: it would be a vision one could ‘walk with’, or live from.
Newman would not regard any ‘real’ vision, of the kind with which he is concerned in ‘Guardian Angels’, a personal or private vision, as comparable, in authority or importance, to the ‘vision of faith’, animating the life of the Church. A personal vision might, in this regard, be something like a supplement to the ‘vision of faith’; if a vision of this kind is something that emerges from the imaginative sense of Christ involved in ‘walk[ing] with’ Him, it might be something developed out of the ‘vision of faith’ animating the life of the Church, in an application of the ‘vision of faith’ to matters of everyday life. One forms a ‘vision’ of Christ for oneself, so to speak, in living a life animated by the ‘image’ of Christ one acquires from the Church; and this ‘vision’ will be determined by the character of the life that one lives (it will be an expression of that life, even as that life will be an expression of that vision). In a ‘Legend of St Gunleus’ (one of the Lives of the English Saints, which was published anonymously, but which was attributed to Newman by R. H. Hutton), Newman observes that the ‘Christian lives in the past and in the future, and in the unseen; in a word, he lives in no small measure in the unknown. And it is one of his duties, and a part of his work, to make the unknown known; to create within him an image of what is absent, and to realise by faith what he does not see.’ It is ‘Meditation which does for the Christian what Investigation does for the children of men’, and such meditation – ‘the way of the divinely illuminated mind’ – is an exercise of the imagination: ‘If we would meditate on any passage of the gospel history, we must insert details indefinitely many, in order to meditate at all; we must fancy motives, feelings, meanings, words, acts, as our connecting links between fact and fact as recorded.’ If such an exercise of ‘fancy’ is involved in an attempt to make sense of a ‘passage of the gospel history’, to ascertain the ‘links between fact and fact’, so there must be such an exercise of ‘fancy’ in the attempt to apply that ‘history’, and the image of Christ presented in that ‘history’, to the circumstances of everyday life, in ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ. (In a sermon on ‘Unreal Words’, Newman suggests that to make the ‘solemn truths’ of the faith ‘our own’ is to ‘act upon’ them: such truths ‘should be acted upon … should be made our own inwardly’.)64 One might regard the various acts, making up a life that is a matter of ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, as contributing, bit by bit, to the forming of a ‘vision’ of the ‘face’ of Christ: that personal ‘vision’ arises from a life that consists in ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, and, once it is formed, it animates that life – those who form such a ‘vision’ act in accordance with it. If one is to ‘walk with’ Christ, then it might be that one cannot but form a personal ‘vision’ of the ‘face’ of Christ. As a holy life is a movement toward the beatific vision – the full ‘unveil[ing]’ of the ‘face’ of Christ – so that life involves the forming of a personal vision of Christ; and perhaps this forming of a personal vision of Christ is a kind of ‘preparation’ for the beatific vision. In a sermon on ‘Worship, a Preparation for Christ’s Coming’, preached in 1838, Newman maintains that participation in the liturgical life of the Church – participation in prayer, and in the sacraments – is a ‘preparation’ for ‘personal intercourse [with] the Creator’ – ‘He will look on us, while we look on Him’: ‘we are destined to come before Him; nay, and to come before Him in judgment; and that on our first meeting; and that suddenly.’65 For those who must endure such an encounter, ‘direct intercourse with God on their part now, prayer and the like, may be necessary to their meeting Him suitably hereafter: and direct intercourse on His part with them, or what we call sacramental communion, may be necessary in some incomprehensible way, even for preparing their very nature to bear the sight of Him’.66 For those who live under the Gospel Covenant, ‘we have a sight of God … [but] Christ does not visibly show Himself. He has put a veil on, and He sits among us silently and secretly. When we approach Him, we know it only by faith; and when He manifests Himself to us, it is without our being able to realize to ourselves that manifestation.’67
A thick black veil is spread between this world and the next. We mortal men range up and down it, to and fro, and see nothing. There is no access through it into the next world. In the Gospel this veil is not removed; it remains, but every now and then marvellous disclosures are made to us of what is behind it. At times we seem to catch a glimpse of a Form which we shall hereafter see face to face. We approach, and in spite of the darkness, our hands, or our head, or our brow, or our lips become, as it were, sensible of the contact of something more than earthly. We know not where we are, but we have been bathing in water, and a voice tells us that it is blood. Or we have a mark signed upon our foreheads, and it spake of Calvary. Or we recollect a hand laid upon our heads, and surely it had the print of nails in it, and resembled His who with a touch gave sight to the blind and raised the dead. Or we have been eating and drinking; and it was not a dream surely, that One fed us from His wounded side, and renewed our nature by the heavenly meat He gave. Thus in many ways He, who is Judge to us, prepares us to be judged.68
Newman associates certain ‘marvellous disclosures’ of a ‘Form’ that is ‘behind’ the ‘veil’ with the sacraments: baptism (‘we have been bathing in water’, ‘a mark signed on our foreheads’); ordination or confirmation (‘a hand laid upon our heads’); the Eucharist (‘eating and drinking’). He describes participation in the sacraments in a dream-like, phantamagoric way – ‘we know not where we are’, ‘it was not a dream, surely’. In this, he is making use of the symbolism of the rites themselves: he is calling attention to the symbolic mode of the rites. Participation in the sacraments is, evidently, something different from the forming of a personal ‘vision’ of the ‘face’ of Christ. The sacraments have an authority – as instituted by Christ, and as mediating the presence of Christ – which no personal ‘vision’ c ould have. The sacraments, equally, make ‘marvellous disclosures’, pertinent to how one is to live. If one would live in accordance with these ‘disclosures’, then one must ‘apply’ them, in some sense, in living: one must regard these ‘disclosures’ as revealing something like the ultimate reality within which, or in relation to which, one lives, and one must attempt to discern that reality in, or through, the situations in which one acts, applying those ‘disclosures’ to the here and now; and this ‘application’ of the ‘disclosures’ must involve a use of the symbolic ‘language’ in which those ‘disclosures’ are made: one acts in reference to that, which one can conceive of only by making ‘types’ and ‘figures’ from the stuff of experience, so that those ‘types’ and ‘figures’ inform, and determine the meaning of, how one acts. One makes symbols of the things encountered in experience, apprehending through these symbols the reality in relation to which one acts. (As Newman observes, in ‘Unreal Words’, ‘It is not an easy thing to learn that new language which Christ has brought us. He has interpreted all things for us in a new way; He has brought us a religion which sheds a new light on all that happens. Try to learn this language. … That a thing is true, is no reason that it should be said, but that it should be done.’)69 In ‘The Greatness and the Littleness of Human Life’, a sermon preached in 1836, Newman maintains that ‘to those who live by faith, every thing they see speaks of [the] future world.
The very glories of nature, the sun, moon, and stars, and the richness and the beauty of the earth, are as types and figures witnessing and teaching the invisible things of God. All that we see is destined one day to burst forth into a heavenly bloom, and to be transfigured into immortal glory. Heaven at present is out of sight, but in due time, as snow melts and discovers what it lay upon, so will this visible creation fade away before those greater splendours which are behind it, and on which at present it depends … Above and below, the clouds of the air, the trees of the field, the waters of the great deep will be found impregnated with the forms of everlasting spirits, the servants of God which do His pleasure.70
One should, Newman maintains, regard this life as ‘a sort of dream, as detached and as different from our real eternal existence as a dream differs from waking’, ‘a kind of shadow without substance, a scene set before us, in which we seem to be, and in which it is our duty to act just as if all we saw had a truth and reality, because all that meets us influences us and our destiny’.71 The soul ‘submits itself to things of time so far as to be brought to perfection by them, that, when the veil is withdrawn, and it sees itself to be, where it ever has been, in God’s Kingdom, it may be found worthy to enjoy it’.72 ‘Our present state … is precious as revealing to us, amid shadows and figures, the existence and attributes of Almighty God and His elect people. … The one desire which should move us should be, first of all, that of seeing Him face to face, who is now hid from us; and next of enjoying eternal and direct communion, in and through Him, with our friends around us, whom at present we know only through the medium of sense, by precarious and partial channels, which give us little insight into their hearts.’73 When ‘the veil is withdrawn’, then, the ‘real … existence’ that will be revealed will be the ‘existence’ of spirits, in ‘immortal glory’ – whether that be the (angelic) ‘everlasting spirits’, by whose ‘forms’ the things of the natural world are ‘impregnated’, or the spirits of ‘our friends around us’; but, in the present state of things, the ‘veil’ is not ‘withdrawn’. The acts, and the ‘tracks’ of the ‘everlasting spirits’, are not perceptible. To live with a sense of this ‘future world’ – the ‘future world’ where one ‘ever has been’ – is to become ‘worthy to enjoy it’. In a sermon on the ‘Moral Effects of Communion with God’, preached in 1837, Newman maintains that ‘prayer, praise, thanksgiving, contemplation’ are the ‘mode of [the Christian’s] intercourse with the next world’, by which ‘our own tastes, likings, motives, and habits’ are made fit for that world: ‘as consciousness tells us what they are, reason tells us whether they are such as become, or correspond with, that heavenly world into which we have been translated’; ‘the man who has not accustomed himself to the language of heaven will be no fit inhabitant of it when, in the Last Day, it is perceptibly revealed’.74
A habit of prayer … has what may be called a natural effect, in spiritualizing and elevating the soul. A man is no longer what we was before; gradually, imperceptibly to himself, he has imbibed a new set of ideas, and become imbued with fresh principles. He is as one coming from king’s courts, with a grace, a delicacy, a dignity, a propriety, a justness of thought and taste, a clearness and firmness of principle, all his own … As speech is the organ of human society, and the means of human civilization, so is prayer the instrument of divine fellowship and divine training.75
In a sermon on ‘The Humiliation of the Eternal Son’, preached in 1835 Newman suggests that it might be possible to be ‘impressed’ by the presence of God in some way, without having the ‘power of reflection’ on this impression – the impression being in some sense an ‘unconscious’ apprehension or ‘seeing’ of the presence of God.
Who can say that all of us, or at least all who are living in the faith of Christ, have not some strange but unconscious life in God’s presence all the while we are here, seeing what we do not know we see, impressed yet without power of reflection, and this, without having a double self in consequence, and with an increase to us, not a diminution, of the practical reality of our earthly sojourn an d probation? Are there not men before now who, like Elisha, when his spirit followed Gehazi, or St. Peter, when he announced the coming of Sapphira’s bearers, or St. Paul, when his presence went before him to Corinth, seem to range beyond themselves, even while in the flesh? Who knows where he is ‘in visions of the night’?76
Newman is concerned, in this, with ‘where’ the soul is. The soul is connected to the body, and it animates the body, but as it has a mode of existence different from that of the body – it is immaterial, while the body is material – so it might not have those limitations – with regard to location in space – which the body has, in its materiality. He relates this question, though – as to ‘where’ the soul is – to the question of what the soul ‘sees’: as sensory perception involves the presence of the thing sensed to the senses, whereby it makes an impression on the senses – such that the presence of one thing to another involves an ‘impressing’ of that thing on the other – so, perhaps, the soul in ‘God’s presence’ is somehow ‘impressed’ by that presence; but where impressions on the senses involve a consciousness of those impressions, and a ‘power of reflection’ on them, impressions on the soul, or on whatever part of the soul is in ‘God’s presence’, do not involve this consciousness. If such impressions of ‘God’s presence’ might occur, and if they are ‘unconscious’, how might they relate to, and affect, what is conscious – how might they affect the conscious life of the mind, involving sensory perception, ‘reason’, faith, and the like? Newman does not speculate about this; and his reflections on the ‘strange but unconscious life in God’s presence [we might have] all the while we are here’ are, themselves, a digression – the main function of which is to call attention to how little is known, or understood, about the ‘life’, presence, and powers of the soul; he does not make any definite claims in relation to these speculations. Yet his question, ‘who knows where he is “in visions of the night”?’, suggests that there might be a connection between these speculations about the ‘unconscious life’ of the soul, and the speculations about ‘unearthly’ influences in ‘Guardian Angels’ – occasioning ‘dreams of night’ presenting visions of ‘the scope in which what is will end’, or occasioning ‘that vision’. Could those ‘dreams’ be ‘impressions’ of the ‘unearthly’, or could they derive from, and reveal something about, such impressions? Could those who have such impressions be affected – in some imperceptible, unknowable way – in their sense of what is ‘real’, so that ‘Christ’s own’ (‘who are living in the faith of Christ’) have a sense of what is ‘real’ that disposes them to recognize what is ‘real’ in ‘dreams’ or ‘visions’? Imaginative ‘vision’ can be experienced as a sheer ‘gift’. While one can choose to imagine something, or to stop imagining something, just as one can choose to think about something, or to stop thinking about something, one can, equally, have the experience of thoughts, and imaginings, simply occurring to one – seeming to occur of themselves, as ‘gifts’. When a vision is experienced as something that spontaneously occurs, as if of itself, it is experienced as something emerging into consciousness from ‘elsewhere’, even as it is experienced as something subject in certain respects to consciousness (in that one can choose to dismiss it from consciousness, or one can choose to attend to it, to contemplate it). The ‘elsewhere’, whence the vision emerges, might be taken to be something inward, interior to the self (though not accessible to consciousness); but as this ‘elsewhere’ is not accessible to consciousness, nothing can be known about it by introspection. In asking, in ‘Guardian Angels’, about the provenance of ‘dreams’ and visions, wondering whether an ‘unearthly Friend’ might be inspiring certain visions so as to present, in ‘figures’, certain truths, Newman seems to be wondering whether the ‘elsewhere’, from which visions emerge, might be itself ‘unearthly’. To ‘call’ a vision ‘real’ is not necessarily to make any particular claims about the ‘unearthly’ provenance of that vision: it might be simply to recognize that the vision presents something one takes to be ‘real’ or true – to recognize that something ‘real’ is manifest in it or through it. So to ‘call’ a vision ‘real’ is not necessarily to take it that it has an ‘unearthly’ origin (and it is certainly not to claim that one can tell that it has an ‘unearthly’ origin). If, though, one were to ‘call’ a vision ‘real’, to have an impression that it presents certain insights into the ‘real’, so one might be willing to countenance the possibility of its having an ‘unearthly’ provenance – one might be willing to regard the unknowable ‘elsewhere’, from which the vision has emerged, as ‘unearthly’. One need not, though, be assured that a vision is ‘unearthly’, if one is to recognize truth in it, and to act on it. If one lives with, or from a vision of this kind, one does not thereby transcend all that is ‘earthly’: the ‘drudgery of ordinary, everyday obedience’ (as Newman puts it, in ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’) is not transformed into something else;77 but (as Newman maintains in ‘The State of Grace’) ‘the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which flesh cannot but feel, sorrow, pain, care, bereavement, these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the intensity with which faith gazes upon the Divine Majesty’.78
When Newman refers to ‘Guardian Angels’, in his Apologia, he suggests that the poem is about his own visionary experience (about the vision which ‘haunted’ him). He was, in 1833, ‘haunted’ by a certain vision, and ‘began to think’ that he ‘had a mission’. As his return to England was delayed, he felt ‘impatience’; he was ‘aching to get home’. He relates this experience of ‘impatience’ to another of his poems, ‘Lead Kindly Light’, which he wrote while ‘becalmed a whole week in the Straits of Bonifacio’.
Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene, – one step enough for me.
I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path; but now,
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those Angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.79
In ‘Guardian Angels’, he suggests that the hesitation, as to whether one might ‘dare’ to ‘make [one’s] own’ certain ‘unearthly’ gifts – calling a vision ‘real’ – is something that characterizes ‘common men’: it is ‘common men’ who do not ‘dare’ to recognize visions for what they are. ‘Christ’s own’, by contrast, seem less hampered by such hesitations, inhibitions, and so on. If one takes it that Newman would identify himself with ‘common men’ (‘it is not for common men such as myself to dare to call a vision real’) – though one need not interpret ‘Guardian Angels’ in this way – then the contrast between ‘common men’ and ‘Christ’s own’ might involve a certain self-rebuke, and a certain impatience at his own limitations: if he were more like ‘Christ’s own’, perhaps, then he would not respond with such uncertainty, such hesitation, to a vision. ‘Lead Kindly Light’, by contrast, involves a certain acceptance of his own limitations, a sense that he might be ‘blest’ in them: ‘I do not ask to see / The distant scene, – one step enough for me.’ He cannot ‘see’ everything, but he can see ‘enough’.
Newman suggests, in ‘Lead kindly Light’, that chafing at his limitations, with regard to what he can ‘see’ and what he cannot see, might involve a desire for mastery and independence that is connected with ‘pride’. In the first stanza, he asks to be led; in the second, he observes that, in the past, he ‘loved to choose and see [his] path’, ‘Pride ruled [his] will’: the desire to ‘choose and see’ the ‘path’ is, he suggests, connected to ‘pride’ – to a desire for mastery (a desire not to rely on another). A contrast is established, between different kinds of light: there is the ‘Kindly light’, which orients him in the ‘encircling gloom’; and there is the light of ‘garish day’. This contrast of kinds of ‘light’ suggests a contrast between kinds of seeing – between the ‘seeing’ that is the perception of the sensible world (and perhaps the mastery of the sensible world, by the intellect) and the seeing that is an apprehension of a higher, spiritual world: the ‘Kindly light’, by which he orients himself, is a ‘light’ by which he ascertains the next ‘step’, a light by which he recognizes how he should act, in the here and now, how he should live, and it is, as such, a ‘light’ concerned with spiritual realities, a ‘light’ of moral understanding. According to the imagery used – the imagery of ‘garish day’ and of ‘night’ – the ‘Kindly light’ would not be perceptible, in the light of ‘garish day’ (as lesser lights are concealed by daylight): it is not perceptible, perhaps, amid worldly distractions – not perceptible to those who attend overmuch to the world, and to the worldly realities they can ‘see’ and master. ‘Lead Kindly light’ was included, in Lyra Apostolica, in a section entitled ‘Faith’: the ‘Kindly light’ would seem to be the ‘light’ of conscience, and the ‘light’ of faith – the faith that is a ‘practical perception of the unseen’ (involving ‘enough’ of a perception of the ‘unseen’, to enable the next ‘step’ to be discerned). If the ‘Kindly light’ is visible only in the ‘gloom’, then the ‘gloom’ itself is, in a sense, ‘Kindly’: the ‘gloom’ (which is a kind of restriction on his ‘sight’) itself makes something – the ‘Kindly light’ – perceptible (even while the ‘gloom’ makes the passage ‘o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent’ more perilous). The ‘gloom’, the darkness, then, is not mere privation or restriction: it makes the ‘Kindly light’ more perceptible. What is more, the ‘gloom’ makes him more attentive to his ‘step’: he attends to the next ‘step’, not the ‘distant scene’, and this is ‘enough’ (and this might well be the best way to traverse ‘moor and fen’, ‘crag and torrent’ – excessive confidence would be unwise). The metrical pattern of ‘Lead Kindly Light’ involves an alternation of long and short lines – the longer lines in iambic pentameter, the shorter lines consisting of just two ‘feet’, a spondee, then iambus. In the first stanza, there is a pause, in each line, after the first four syllables; the pattern of the short line ‘Lead thou me on’ is carried over, reiterated, in the longer lines; so there is a sense of constrained (careful) movement: the short lines – ‘Lead thou me on’ – determine the pattern (or ‘keep’ the ‘feet’) of the longer lines. The last two lines make use of a heavy assonance, chiming with the rhyme words (‘keep’, ‘feet’, ‘see’, ‘scene’, ‘me’): the repertoire of sounds is limited. The desire to be ‘led’ is, in part, a desire to have certain limitations put on what one might ‘choose’. He declares that a limited perception – limited to what is required for the next ‘step’ – is ‘enough’. Where the first rhyme of the stanza – ‘gloom’ paired with ‘home’ – was a half rhyme, in the last two lines, there is an abundance of rhyme – suggesting, perhaps, a return of harmony – a harmony between himself and his circumstances, an acceptance of his circumstances (and the limitations they involve). (This metrical pattern of a heavy pause after the first four s yllables is broken in the second stanza – corresponding, perhaps, to his errant movement when he ‘loved to chose’ his ‘path’ – only to return in the last line of that stanza – ‘Pride ruled my will’, the stress pattern of which matches the stress pattern of the recurring short line, ‘Lead thou me on.’ And there is, again, in the third stanza, a more unconstrained metrical movement – and the sense of unconstrained movement is enhanced by the use of enjambment in the first line, and the rhyming of the last word of the first line – ‘still’ – with the first word of the second – ‘will’. He has confidence in the ‘power’ that has ‘blest’ him – moving more freely, in his confidence; he has more assurance that he will be able to make the journey, that he will be able to pass ‘o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent’, unhindered, until ‘the night is gone’.)
If the contrast between ‘garish day’ and the ‘Kindly light’ suggests a contrast between different kinds of seeing, it suggests, equally, a contrast between past and present: the ‘garish day’ is in the past, and it is now ‘night’, but he still has a journey to make, and he must pass over ‘moor and fen’, ‘crag and torrent’, to get to his destination; there is a sense that he has lost time – he did not use the ‘garish day’ well; but he is now on his way, and he is being led toward where he needs to get to; and he expects a ‘morn’, where he will encounter ‘those Angel faces … / Which I have loved long since, and lost a while’. If the ‘garish day’ and ‘night’ suggest earthly time, the ‘morn’ suggests eternity: the ‘Kindly light’ is, it seems, a ‘light’ cast from somewhere ‘unearthly’; it is a light other than the light of the sun, dividing earthly times; it is a ‘light’ that is, perhaps, the first glimmering of a ‘morn’ that is outside time. What he encounters in the ‘morn’ will be something familiar – something ‘loved long since and lost a while’. There is only one rhyme word in ‘Lead kindly light’ on which there is a half rhyme, rather than a full rhyme – ‘home’ (rhymed with ‘gloom’). When ‘home’ occurs, the withholding of a full rhyme suggests a withholding of closure; the rhyme does not come ‘home’, so to speak; and he is, after all, ‘far from home’, in the ‘gloom’: the homecoming is deferred, until the ‘morn’. This homecoming is, equally, an encounter with ‘Angel faces’. Why are these ‘Angel faces’ familiar – faces ‘loved long since and lost awhile’? Has his soul existed (as a Platonist might maintain) prior to his life in time, so that he has seen these ‘faces’ before, in his existence prior to his earthly life? Are these ‘Angel faces’ the faces of those he has ‘loved’ and ‘lost’ in life – friends, family members – the faces of those who, now glorified, are as ‘Angels’? Are these ‘Angel faces’ a kind of symbol for a ‘lost’ vision (a vision of the ‘unseen’ entertained in childhood, before the ‘shades of the prison house’ closed ‘upon the growing boy’)? What is most important, perhaps, is the sense that the encounter with the ‘Angel faces’ – the encounter, in ‘our real eternal existence’, with the ‘everlasting spirits’ (as Newman puts it, in ‘The Greatness and the Littleness of Human Life’) is something that will occur, but not yet. The contrast between ‘long since’ and ‘awhile’ suggests different ways of experiencing time (different ways of experiencing the deferral of the encounter with the ‘Angel faces’): that which lasts ‘long’, in time, is – when compared to eternity – but ‘awhile’; that which was lost ‘long since’ has, then, been lost for but ‘awhile’; and as everything in time – when considered in the ‘morn’, in eternity – will seem to have taken but ‘awhile’ – so perhaps to anticipate the ‘morn’ is to make everything in time, here and now, feel less ‘long’. That everything earthly, everything in time, is for but ‘awhile’, means that everything earthly is limited, ephemeral, fragile – to live is to suffer loss. That everything earthly, everything in time, is for but ‘awhile’ means, equally, that eternity is not ‘long’ deferred. In ‘Guardian Angels’, there is a sense that to act from a ‘vision’, one must ‘dare’ to transcend what is ‘common’ – one must move beyond the limitations of ‘common men’. The end of ‘Guardian Angels’ is ambiguous. It presents a contrast between ‘Christ’s own’ and ‘common men’ (who ‘dare not make their own the gifts they find’); one might take the remarks about ‘common men’ to imply ‘common men such as myself’ – and if one takes these remarks in this way, then ‘Guardian Angels’ end with an expression of ‘not all hopeless’ resignation (he ‘eye[s]’ wistfully the ‘boundless grace’ of God); one need not, though, take the remarks about ‘common men’ to imply ‘common men such as myself’ – and if one takes these remarks in this way, then ‘Guardian Angels’ ends in suspense; he might still ‘call’ his vision ‘real’, accept it as a ‘gift’, and be transformed by it – but this act is yet to occur. In ‘Lead Kindly Light’, there is a sense that the ultimate vision, the ‘morn’, is yet to occur, but there is, equally, an assurance that the ‘Kindly light’, discernible in the here and now, is from God and that it is ‘enough’. He does not question whether the ‘Kindly light’ is of God (whether the ‘vision’ of things he has, in that ‘light’, is ‘real’). He does not ‘ask to see’ more. Since he would be led, and since to be led is to accept certain restrictions on how one moves – it is not to ‘choose … [one’s] path’ – so, perhaps, the restrictions on what he can ‘see’ are related to his being led (one cannot ‘choose and see [one’s] path’ if one cannot ‘see’ a number of different ‘paths’): the restrictions on what he can ‘see’ limit his options for the next ‘step’; and so these restrictions might be there to ensure that he takes the next ‘step’ rightly; he can accept those restrictions with patience, and even trust that they might be a means by which he is ‘blest’.
In the Apologia, Newman acknowledges that he accepted certain principles, according to which visions might be accorded some credit, as a means to truth. He intimates, in the first autobiographical part of the Apologia, that he was ‘haunted’ by a vision – making him feel he had a ‘work to do’, a ‘mission’. He does not attempt to represent this vision, however – alluding, instead, to the ‘verses’ in Lyra Apostolica, and suggesting that the vision is ‘brought out’ there: he acknowledges, without attempting to represent, his visionary experience; and the poem to which he refers, ‘Guardian Angels’, likewise, does not represent the ‘vision’ with which it is concerned. Newman does not, for the most part, advert to, or attempt to represent, his experiences of vision in the Apologia, but there are a couple of exceptions – relating to his apprehension of the Church. Just before giving his account of his Mediterranean travels, in which he developed a sense of having a ‘mission’ in ‘England’, Newman gives an account of his attitude toward the Church of England, and how it was affected by his researches into the history of the early Church.
With the Establishment … divided and threatened, thus ignorant of its true strength, I compared that fresh vigorous power of which I was reading in the first centuries. In her triumphant zeal on behalf of that Primeval Mystery, to which I had had so great a devotion from my youth, I recognized the movement of my Spiritual Mother. ‘Incessu patuit Dea.’ The self-conquest of her Ascetics, the patience of her Martyrs, the irresistible determination of her Bishops, the joyous swing of her advance, both exalted and abashed me. I said to myself, ‘Look on this picture and on that;’ I felt affection for my own Church, but not tenderness; I felt dismay at her prospects, anger and scorn at her do-nothing perplexity. I thought that if Liberalism once got a footing within her, it was sure of the victory in the event. I saw that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination; still I ever kept before me that there was something greater than the Established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and organ. She was nothing, unless she was this. She must be dealt with strongly, or she would be lost. There was need of a second Reformation.80
The first quotation – ‘Incessu patuit Dea’, ‘the true goddess was revealed in her step’ – is taken from the Aeneid, from the scene in which Aeneas, having spoken with his mother, Venus, without realizing who she was, suddenly – as she turns and leaves him – recognizes her: it is a moment of visionary rapture, and of longing (for the goddess is recognized at the moment of her disappearance); Aeneas cries out, ‘Quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis / ludis imaginibus? Cur dextrae iungere dextram / non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?’ (in the translation of Dryden – ‘Unkind and cruel! to deceive your son / In borrow’d shapes, and his embrace to shun; / Never to bless my sight, but thus unknown; / And still to speak in accents not your own.’) Aeneas desires a ‘true’ exchange of ‘voices’ – not false images. The second quotation ‘Look on this picture, and on that’, is taken from Hamlet – from the scene in which Hamlet urges his mother, Gertrude, to compare her first husband with her second. Her first husband was the father of Hamlet; her second husband – his brother – had killed her first (unbeknownst to her) so that he might usurp the throne. When Hamlet confronts his mother, he would ‘set up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you’ – asking her how she could ‘leave’ a ‘fair mountain’ (her first husband) to ‘batten on a moor’ (taking up with her second).81 When Newman quotes, ‘Look on this picture, and on that’ in the Apologia, he is alluding to a contrast between a true, rightful king, and a usurper. Is the English Church the usurper, which has taken power from the rightful king?82 Is the English Church (like Gertrude) ‘wed’ to a usurper (the state) – having forgotten its true ‘husband’ (Christ). The Church is often imaged as a ‘mother’; and the contrast of the quotation from the Aeneid with the quotation from Hamlet suggests a contrast between two ‘mothers’, two Churches – one divine, the other, allied to a usurper. When Newman counterposes the scene from the Aeneid with the scene from Hamlet, he is contrasting a scene of rapture, longing, hope (Venus has told Aeneas that he is not ‘unbelov’d of heaven’, and has urged him to ‘have courage’ – she is urging him toward his destiny, Rome) with a scene of grief, fury, disgust, confusion. Hamlet, during his confrontation with Gertrude, experiences a vision of his own – he sees the ghost of his father – but Gertrude cannot see the ghost, and thinks he is ‘mad’ – ‘This is the very coinage of your brain, / This bodiless creation ecstasy / Is very cunning in.’83 Hamlet has himself experienced certain doubts about the trustworthiness of his visions – ‘The spirit that I have seen [which seemed to be the ghost of my father] / May be the devil, and the devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps, / Out of my weakness and my melancholy – / As he is very potent with such spirits – / Abuses me to damn me.’84 The world of Hamlet is a world of uncertainty, confusion, deception, intrigue, corruption. The contrast between the scene from the Aeneid and the scene from Hamlet is a contrast between an encounter with a ‘divine’ mother, and an encounter with earthly, frail mother (who needs – as Hamlet thinks – to be ‘dealt with strongly’ lest ‘she … be lost’). In the Aeneid, the vision is a manifestation of a ‘divine’ reality – Venus appears, at first, as a ‘Spartan’ maid, and her divinity is apparent only as she turns and leaves (the ‘falsis ludis imaginibus’, or ‘borrow’d shapes’, are the appearances that suggest something merely everyday – an ordinary woman – is present): something higher, more glorious than the everyday is present, concealed by everyday appearances; the truth of this higher reality – when it manifests itself – is unquestionable. In Hamlet, the vision of the ghost is, equally, a vision of reality – the ghost reveals the truth; but the experience of the vision involves uncertainty – vision and ‘ecstasy’ are associated with ‘melancholy’, with delusion (‘the devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape’); and the vision reveals, not a blessedness concealed by everyday appearances, but a wickedness concealed by everyday appearances – it shows that everyday appearances (those of the Danish court) conceal ‘corruption, mining all within’ which ‘infects unseen’. If Newman is like Aeneas in experiencing – in his visionary apprehension of the early Church – an intimation of something ‘unearthly’ (and an intimation, perhaps, of his destiny, as one ‘called’ toward Rome); he is, equally, like Hamlet, in his experience of doubts, hesitations, uncertainty, anxiety: when he first suspects that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’, he feels ‘on consideration a positive doubt … whether the suggestion did not come from below’.85 Has the devil assumed ‘a pleasing shape’?
Newman experiences another vision – ‘the heavens … opened and closed up again’ – or at least a ‘vivid impression upon [his] imagination’, when, on encountering certain ‘palmary words of St Augustine’, he feels the suspicion that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’.86 In the summer of 1839, Newman was researching the ‘history of the Monophysites’, when he became ‘seriously alarmed’.
My stronghold [in defending the Anglican via media, against Rome] was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position of the Oriental communion, Rome was, where she now is; and the Protestants were the Eutychians.87
While in this state of ‘alarm’, he was presented, by a friend, with an article by a Catholic Bishop, Nicholas Wiseman, arguing against the ‘Anglican Claim’, and comparing Anglicans to the Donatists (North African heretics of the fourth century). Newman did not consider the comparison between Anglicans and Donatists just, but his friend pointed out a phrase from St Augustine, quoted in the article – ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’ – and this phrase made a ‘vivid impression upon [his] imagination’.88
My friend, an anxiously religious man, now, as then, very dear to me, a Protestant still, pointed out the palmary words of St. Augustine, which were contained in one of the extracts made in the Review, and which had escaped my observation. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum.’ He repeated these words again and again, and, when he was gone, they kept ringing in my ears. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum;’ … . They gave a cogency to the Article, which had escaped me at first. They decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of Antiquity; nay, St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of Antiquity; here then Antiquity was deciding against itself. What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church! … The deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede. Who can account for the impressions which are made on him? For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. To take a familiar instance, they were like the ‘Turn again Whittington’ of the chime; or, to take a more serious one, they were like the ‘Tolle, lege, – Tolle, lege,’ of the child, which converted St. Augustine himself. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum!’ By those great words of the ancient Father, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized … . After a while, I got calm, and at length the vivid impression upon my imagination faded away … . I had to determine its logical value, and its bearing upon my duty. Meanwhile, so far as this was certain, – I had seen the shadow of a hand upon the wall. It was clear that I had a good deal to learn on the question of the Churches, and that perhaps some new light was coming upon me. He who has seen a ghost, cannot be as if he had never seen it. The heavens had opened and closed again. The thought for the moment had been, ‘The Church of Rome will be found right after all;’ and then it had vanished. My old convictions remained as before.89
The ‘palmary words’ of St Augustine, ‘ringing’ in the ‘ears’ of Newman, seem to have in themselves a mysterious life, and force. The ‘words’ of Newman himself, here, seem to take on their own life: the ‘ringing’ in the ‘ears’ of Newman becomes the (literal) ‘chime’ of the bells, heard by Dick Whittington, and these tolling bells become ‘tolle lege’; and there is a kind of re-enactment of the ‘ringing’ in the repetition of the ‘words’ of St Augustine, ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’. What the ‘imagination’ of Newman registers, here, is a view of the Church, and its ‘judgement’ – a view according to which a ‘sentence’ must be passed against the Anglican Church, as a ‘portion’ of the universal Church that ‘protest[s] and secede[s]’. The ‘imagination’ apprehends a ‘light’ that illuminates ‘every controversy in the Church’; and this ‘light’ is a matter of having a certain apprehension of the Church of Rome, as the orbis terrarum, as the true exponent of the ‘universal’, the Catholic. In the scene in the Confessions, in which Augustine hears the words ‘tolle lege’, ‘take and read’, Augustine is sitting in a garden, contrite at his sins, but feeling inc apable of abandoning them, incapable of taking up a more ascetic form of life – ‘I felt [my sins] were my tyrants’; in this state, he ‘heard a voice, as if from a house near me, of a boy or girl chanting forth again and again, “take up and read, take up and read!”’; and he ‘began intently to think whether boys used them in any game, but could not recollect that [he] had ever heard them’.
I left weeping and rose up, considering it a divine intimation to open the Scriptures and read what first presented itself. I had heard that Antony had come in during the reading of the Gospel, and had taken to himself the admonition, ‘Go, sell all that thou hast’, etc., and had turned to Thee at once, in consequence of that oracle. I had left St. Paul’s volume where Alypius was sitting, when I rose thence. I returned thither, seized it, opened, and read in silence the following passage, which first met my eyes, ‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences’. I had neither desire nor need to read farther. As I finished the sentence, as though the light of peace had been poured into my heart, all the shadows of doubt dispersed. Thus hast Thou converted me to Thee, so as no longer to seek either for wife or other hope of this world, standing fast in that rule of faith in which Thou so many years before hadst revealed me to my mother.90
Augustine registers a ‘divine intimation’ in the ‘chanting’ he hears; he takes up the Scriptures, reads ‘put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh’, and takes the verse as something addressed to him, personally – as the utterance of a ‘divine’ voice, addressing him, calling him to an ascetic ‘rule’ of life – and ‘all the shadows of doubt dispersed’. Augustine opts to ‘take and read’ the Scriptures in this way, while recalling how St Antony ‘had taken to himself the admonition [in the Gospel] “Go, sell all that thou hast”’; he is imitating St Antony. There are, then, a number of things that coincide, making for an impression of a ‘divine’ significance: that Augustine is in a contrite mood, ‘weeping’; that he hears the ‘voice of a boy or girl … chanting’, eliciting a sense of ‘divine intimation’; that he recalls the example of St Antony, and decides to ‘take and read’ the Scriptures; that the Scriptures are nearby; that he alights on a passage of the Scriptures pertinent to his personal difficulties. Augustine sets out the combination of circumstances which make for an impression of ‘divine’ meaning; if this impression is an effect of these circumstances, these circumstances are, in turn, for Augustine, disposed by Providence; what is more, Augustine wonders whether the phrase he hears – ‘tolle, lege’ was ‘used … in any game’, and he is unable to ‘recollect that [he] had ever heard them’; he expresses some uncertainty as to where the ‘voice’ he hears comes from – the ‘voice’ is ‘quasi pueri an puellae, nescio’, ‘as if that of a boy or of a girl, I do not know’ – with ‘as if’ and ‘I do not know’ suggesting that it might have been either, or that it might have been neither – it might have been an unearthly ‘voice’. There are several scenes, in the Confessions, in which individuals ‘take to’ themselves certain statements, changing their lives, in ways that were not foreseen or intended by those who had made those statements: there is a moment when Monica, the mother of Augustine, takes a spiteful reproach from a servant as an occasion for self-amendment; there is a moment when the friend of Augustine, Alypius – who has started to attend the games in the circus – takes a diatribe of Augustine against the games as a rebuke aimed at himself, and then ceases to attend them. When particular persons ‘take to themselves’ certain statements – so as to be changed by how they ‘take’ those statements – their responses are a function of their personal circumstances, and condition. (Newman, from his studies of the ‘Monophysite controversy’ is disposed to receive an ‘impression’ from the phrase ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’; the article which contains the phrase is shown to him by an ‘anxiously religious’ friend; where Newman is, ultimately, converted by the ‘impression’ which he receives, his friend is ‘a Protestant still’.) In the Confessions, those who ‘turn’ toward holiness, in taking to themselves certain statements, are disposed by their circumstances, and condition, to register, in these statements, an ‘intimation’ that they should amend something about themselves, and as the registering of such an ‘intimation’ is a means toward moral and spiritual purification, so the Spirit is at work in the registering of such an ‘intimation’: one is registering the ‘voice’ of the Spirit, when one attends to a ‘call’ to holiness. At the beginning of the last book of the Confessions, Augustine addresses God, declaring that God has called him with ‘voices of many kinds’ (‘multimodis vocibus’); and there is a sense that, in making sense of his own past – in the autobiographical account, making up the first nine books – he is registering the ‘voices of many kinds’ by which God has been ‘calling’ him. He is registering the ‘word’ that God has been presenting to him (and through him) in his life; and in registering this ‘word’, he registers what his life has really meant (and, as he recognizes what is life has really meant, so he can perceive his life rightly, and present a true account of it). When Newman refers to ‘tolle lege’, in the Apologia, he is referring to an experience of ‘divine intimation’ – certain ‘words’ are experienced as having an authority that seems almost ‘divine’. He likens his experience to the more ‘familiar instance’ of Dick Whittington (‘turn again Whittington’). The comic contrast of the lower (Whittington) with the higher (Augustine) suggests that Newman would avoid giving the impression of being self-important, or self-aggrandizing (‘familiar’ comparisons are as apt as ‘more serious’ comparisons); yet ‘turn again’ is a translation of convertere – the image of Whittington, turning again, is an i mage of conversion. Newman likens his experience to seeing a ghost – ‘He who has seen a ghost, cannot be as if he had never seen it.’ There is, again, in this, an allusion to ‘familiar’, popular tales. Yet there is, equally, perhaps, a recollection of the ghost which haunted Hamlet – to which Hamlet responded with such uncertainty, and anxiety (comparable to the indecision and anxiety of Newman himself, in response to his own ‘ghost’). (The ghost in Hamlet, incidentally, is a very ‘Catholic’ ghost: it declares that it must spend time in Purgatory – that it is ‘for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away’.91 Appearing on the Elizabethan stage, the ghost would have seemed a revenant from an older world, a world of traditional Catholic piety, which was at that time being suppressed. Newman would have been sensitive to these resonances.)
Where the ‘doubts’ of Augustine ‘disperse’, after his experience of vision – ‘the light of peace had been poured into my heart, all the shadows of doubt dispersed’ – Newman does not, on receiving his ‘vivid impression’, experience the ‘light of peace’. The perception that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’ was, for Newman – committed as he was, to the Anglican via media – a ‘dreadful misgiving’. How, on becoming ‘calm again’, was he to make sense of his ‘new thoughts’?
First, I will say, whatever comes of saying it, for I leave inferences to others, that for years I must have had something of an habitual notion, though it was latent, and had never led me to distrust my own convictions, that my mind had not found its ultimate rest, and that in some sense or other I was on journey. During the same passage across the Mediterranean in which I wrote ‘Lead kindly light,’ I also wrote the verses, which are found in the Lyra under the head of ‘Providences,’ beginning, ‘When I look back.’ This was in 1833 … But, whatever this presentiment be worth, it was no protection against the dismay and disgust, which I felt, in consequence of the dreadful misgiving, of which I have been relating the history. The one question was, what was I to do? I had to make up my mind for myself, and others could not help me. I determined to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason. And this I said over and over again in the years which followed, both in conversation and in private letters. Had it not been for this severe resolve, I should have been a Catholic sooner than I was. Moreover, I felt on consideration a positive doubt, on the other hand, whether the suggestion did not come from below. Then I said to myself, Time alone can solve that question. It was my business to go on as usual, to obey those convictions to which I had so long surrendered myself, which still had possession of me, and on which my new thoughts had no direct bearing. That new conception of things should only so far influence me, as it had a logical claim to do so. If it came from above, it would come again, – so I trusted, – and with more definite outhnes.92
Newman observes that he ‘determined to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason’. This was not simply a matter of setting ‘reason’ against ‘imagination’, but of determining the ‘logical force’ of a certain imaginative ‘impression’. His impression that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’ coexisted in him with the impression that Rome was Antichrist, and the Church of Rome corrupt. The impression that the ‘Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John’ had been formed in him at a young age, and it abided in him as a ‘stain’ on his imagination (his ‘imagination was stained by the effects of [the] doctrine up to the year 1843’ – it ‘remained upon [him] as a sort of false conscience’): he ‘thought the essence of [the] offence [of the Catholic Church] to consist in the honours which she paid to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints’.93 Even while his ‘imagination was stained’ by the idea that Rome was Antichristian, he had formed other impressions of Roman Catholicism, from his witnessing – on his travels to the south of Europe – scenes of Catholic worship, which ‘impressed’ his ‘imagination’ and ‘touched’ his ‘heart’.
When I was abroad, the sight of so many great places, venerable shrines, and noble churches, much impressed my imagination. And my heart was touched also. Making an expedition on foot across some wild country in Sicily, at six in the morning I came upon a small church; I heard voices, and I looked in. It was crowded, and the congregation was singing. Of course it was the Mass, though I did not know it at the time. And, in my weary days at Palermo, I was not ungrateful for the comfort which I had received in frequenting the Churches, nor did I ever forget it. Then, again, her zealous maintenance of the doctrine and the rule of celibacy, which I recognized as Apostolic, and her faithful agreement with Antiquity in so many points besides, which were dear to me, was an argument as well as a plea in favour of the great Church of Rome. Thus I learned to have tender feelings toward her; but still my reason was not affected at all. My judgment was against her, when viewed as an institution.94
The imagination of Newman, then, was marked by contradictory ‘impressions’ of Rome. He ‘determined to be guided, not by … imagination, but by … reason’; but there is a sense in which his efforts to make use of his ‘reason’ were instigated by his imagination: it is his imagination which registers a certain pattern in the history of the Church (‘I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite’); and it is his imagination which registers a significance in a single phrase from St Augustine – ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’ – by which his theory of the via media is ‘pulverized’ – registering this significance before his ‘reason’ fully ascertains the ‘logical claim’ of his ‘new conception’. There is a tension in him between a visionary imagination, which apprehends ‘the goddess’ – ‘Incessu patuit Dea’ – and a ‘stained’ imagination, which acts as a ‘false conscience’ (making for Hamlet-like suspicion, anxiety, indecision). His imagination seems to register the truth before his ‘reason’, and it instigates the enquiries which his ‘reason’ undertakes.
When reflecting on how he responded to his visionary ‘impression’ that the Catholic Church might be ‘right after all’, Newman attempts to characterize his general state of mind at the time he received that impression, and how he was disposed to respond to such an impression; he suggests that something of his state of mind is apparent in certain ‘verses’ he had written in 1833 which, in his view, show that he ‘must have had something of an habitual notion’, which was ‘latent’ and which did not make him ‘distrust [his] own convictions’, that his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest, and that in some sense or other [he] was on journey’.
When I look back upon my former race,
Seasons I see, at which the Inward Ray,
More brightly burned, or guided some new way;
Truth, in its wealthier scene and nobler space
Given for my eye to range, and feet to trace,
And next I mark, ‘twas trial did convey,
Or grief, or pain, or strange eventful day,
To my tormented soul such larger grace.
So now, whene’er, in journeying on, I feel
The shadow of the Providential Hand,
Deep breathless stirrings shoot across my breast,
Searching to know what He will now reveal,
What sin uncloak, what stricter rule command,
And girding me to work His full behest.95
The poem, called ‘Discipline’ in Lyra Apostolica, is included in a section ‘under the head of “Providences”’, together with ‘Guardian Angels’. ‘Discipline’ and ‘Guardian Angels’ are concerned, in different ways, with how the mind – the ‘Inward Ray’ – is formed by ‘unearthly’ influences, working in or through the imagination, and through various experiences (whether ‘trial’, or ‘talk with men’): the mind is being formed, continually, by a variety of influences that it cannot master, or register; and these influences – Newman would suggest – are subject to ‘Providence’, to ‘unearthly’ ordering. One cannot but be formed by influences that one cannot fully ascertain or master; but if one takes it that these influences are subject to Providence, then one can entrust oneself to them (even if one cannot discern the ‘tracks’ of Providence for oneself). One must, in any case, trust the ‘Inward Ray’ – one has no other ‘Ray’ to judge things by – but if one takes it that one is being formed by Providence, that the ‘Inward Ray’ is being formed by Providence, then one can have more confidence that there is truth in what one senses to be true, in what one intuits as true. One can, perhaps, have more confidence in some of the more instinctive acts of the mind – in intuitions, momentary insights, visions. In the other poem in the ‘Providences’ section, ‘Warnings’, Newman asks ‘Can science bear us / To the hid springs / Of human things? / Why may not dream, / Or thought’s day-gleam, / Startle, yet cheer us?’96 He seems in this to be suggesting that, as ‘science’ cannot register the ‘hid springs’ of the mind, so it cannot claim to master, and to determine the truth of, all the acts of the mind; ‘dream’, or ‘thought’s day-gleam’, momentary intuitions, reveries, and so on, might present certain truths (which ‘science’ cannot compass); and if ‘dream’ or ‘thought’s day-gleam’ were to have their ‘springs’ in certain unearthly forces, or in an encounter with certain unearthly realities, then they might reveal certain unearthly truths – and so, might ‘cheer us’. Newman observes that ‘Discipline’ shows that he had a sense his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest, and that in some sense or other [he] was on a journey’. He observes that he wrote ‘Discipline’ at about the same time as ‘Lead kindly light’ – and each of these poems make use of ‘journey’ imagery. In ‘Discipline’ and ‘Lead kindly light’, ‘truth’ and ‘light’ illuminate a ‘scene’, through which he ‘journeys’. In ‘Discipline’, ‘Truth’ is likened to a ‘scene’; when the ‘inward Ray’ burns ‘more brightly’, ‘Truth, in its wealthier scene and nobler space [is] / Given for my eye to range, and feet to trace’: he is given a clearer view of the ‘scene’. In ‘Lead kindly light’, while he does not ‘ask to see’ the ‘distant scene’, he recognizes that he has enough ‘light’ to travel by. Newman suggests, in the Apologia, that ‘Discipline’ shows that he must have had a sense that his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest’ (and he relates this to his not having ‘found’ his ‘ultimate rest’ in Catholicism). There is certainly, in ‘Discipline’, an expectation that God might ‘now reveal’ to him something new; but the revelation that he is expecting seems to be concerned, not with anything pertinent to the differences between the churches, but with the ‘rule’ of morality: he waits to discover what ‘sin [God will] uncloak, what stricter rule command’. ‘Discipline’ is concerned with the development of the conscience (understood as the ‘voice’ of God) – rather than with any sort of development in the perception of matters of doctrine. Newman certainly – at the time he wrote ‘Discipline’ – took the development of the conscience to be connected to the development of a clearer perception of matters of doctrine,97 yet, to expect – as in ‘Discipline’ – a certain development in moral perception, is not, in itself, to expect a development in the perception of matters of doctrine (such as to make for a different view of such matters). By the time he wrote the Apologia, though, Newman seem to have felt that his expectation, in 1833, that God ‘will now reveal’ something new to him – an expectation that, at the time, he took to be concerned with a fuller revelation of the ‘rule’ of morality – was, in fact, an inchoate awareness that his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest’, with regard to matters of doctrine. That is, he regards his imagination as intuiting a certain truth about himself, and his ‘journey’, of which he had not yet become fully conscious.
In the Apologia, Newman refers, briefly, to several of his poems, ‘Guardian Angels’, ‘Lead kindly light’, and ‘Discipline’ – all of which are concerned, in different ways, with ‘vision’, or the ‘Inward Ray’, all of which involve, in different ways, attempts to make out what ‘vision’ might reveal about the ‘real’, and all of which involve a sense that ‘vision’ is connected to ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, and to the requirements of ‘the journey’ toward Christ. He observes that the poems express, or are related to, some of his intuitions about his own ‘journey’: he relates ‘Guardian Angels’ to his sense that ‘inward changes, as well as some larger course of action’ were ‘coming upon’ him; he suggests that ‘Discipline’ expresses his sense that his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest’. Newman evidently looked over some of the poetry in Lyra Apostolica, at the time he wrote his Apologia, giving particular attention to the poems in the ‘Providences’ section: reflecting on the pattern of his life, its ordering under Providence, in writing his Apologia, he may well have looked back at some of his poems about Providence to ascertain from them whether he had any intimations of where Providence was taking him, or whether he had any ‘visionary’ insights which, at that time, his ‘reason’ had not yet recognized; he may have considered his own poems – arising from certain experiences of ‘vision’ – to have involved insights that exceeded in certain ways the insights of his ‘reason’ – for if, after all, ‘Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the world, only a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity’, then his sense of ‘those heavenly facts’, acquired by ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, may have become ‘conform[ed] aright’ to ‘Holy Church’, before his ‘reason’. In one of the first things he wrote, after becoming a Catholic, an article on the poetry of John Keble, he declared that ‘poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to flee to and repose upon, for the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets … . Her very being is poetry; every psalm, every petition, every collect, every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the thurible, is a fulfilment of some dream of childhood, or aspiration of youth.’98 In the Apologia, he suggests, in his account of his response to the ‘palmary words’ of St Augustine – ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’ – that his ‘imagination’, in certain respects, apprehended more than his ‘reason’; he resolved ‘to be guided, not by [his] imagination, but by [his] reason’, but ‘had it not been for this severe resolve, [he] should have been a Catholic sooner than [he] was’.99 He does not suggest, in this, that he was mistaken in resolving to be ‘guided’ by his ‘reason’ rather than by his ‘imagination’; but he suggests that his ‘imagination’ was swifter than his ‘reason’ in apprehending the truth. Newman refers, then, in the Apologia, to several poems that are concerned with his visionary imagination; and he suggests that this visionary imagination was involved – not without, or against, ‘reason’ – in his move toward ‘Rome’. He acknowledges, then, that his ‘visionary’ imagination was involved in his conversion; but he does not reveal much about it, to the ‘metropolitan intellect’, the metropolitan ‘audience’ of the Apologia. He acknowledges his visionary experience, but it is, in certain respects, ‘hid’: he mentions certain of his poems, concerned with ‘vision’, with moments when the ‘Inward Ray / More brightly burned, or guided some new way’, but these poems themselves do not represent the ‘visions’ with which they are concerned, or attempt to convey what those visions conveyed. That the visions are not revealed, is itself evocative: it might suggest that the visions were such that they could not be revealed, that they were suffused with a fullness of meaning that could not be transposed into, or rendered in, the ‘human language’ that Newman characterizes as ‘incommensurable’ with ‘moral Truth’; they had more in them than ‘human language’ could convey. Newman would be suggesting, then, that, in his experience of these visions, his own ‘Inward Ray’ had apprehended a fullness of meaning that ‘human language’ could not convey – an ‘Inward Ray’ comprising a sense or intuition too ‘inward’, too personal, to express in ‘human language’ (or in the ‘language’ marked by the ‘impersonality … [which] pervades the whole metropolitan system’).
In his sermon, preached in 1836, on ‘The Greatness and the Littleness of Human Life’, Newman would remark that ‘the one desire which should move us should be, first of all, that of seeing Him face to face, who is now hid from us; and next of enjoying eternal and direct communion, in and through Him, with our friends around us, whom at present we know only through the medium of sense, by precarious and partial channels, which give us little insight into their hearts’.100 Will it be that the ‘medium of sense’ will no longer be required, or used, in the eschaton, or will that ‘medium’ be transfigured, such that spirit will be perfec tly expressed in it, fully apparent? If the final state of the creation involves a transfiguration of matter in this way, then the ‘scope in which what is will end’, will be a state in which the ‘heart’ will have ‘channels’ for its expression that will be wholly adequate, so that there can be a ‘direct communion’ with ‘friends’, nothing in the ‘heart’ being incommunicable. As one will be capable of ‘direct communion’ with others, so one will no longer be opaque to oneself: the ‘heart’ will be fully manifest. In ‘Guardian Angels’, Newman wonders whether, in certain of his ‘dreams of night’, an ‘unearthly Friend … . Figures the scope in which what is will end’: perhaps these ‘figures’, as a mode of ‘communion’, are, to what is figured – ‘the scope in which what is will end’, in which there will be a ‘communion’ in and through Christ – as ‘human language’, or even ‘poetical’ language (wherein a ‘spirit of beauty breathes through every part of the composition’, and ‘every part of the composition’ is suffused with meaning) is to these ‘figures’; perhaps there is a kind of hierarchy in the ‘channels’ of ‘communion’ – from ‘human language’, to unearthly ‘dreams’, to the ‘communion, in and through’ Christ, in the eschaton, when Christ Himself will be the means of ‘communion’.
Just a few months after writing his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman wrote The Dream of Gerontius – experiencing the impulse to write it as a kind of ‘gift’, being moved to write by ‘a sudden impulse’, and completing it in a few weeks – a poem that represents the ‘journey’ of a soul, after death, toward the vision of the ‘face’ of Christ. The soul of Gerontius is ‘borne forward’ by its Guardian Angel, and, on becoming aware of the presence of the Angel, Gerontius addresses it.
I would have nothing but to speak with thee
For speaking’s sake. I wish to hold with thee
Conscious communion.101
When Gerontius asks how it is that he seems to ‘hear’ the ‘personal intonation’ of the Angel, the Angel replies:
Nor touch, nor taste, nor hearing hast thou now;
Thou livest in a world of signs and types,
The presentations of most holy truths,
Living and strong, which now encompass thee.
A disembodied soul, thou hast by right
No converse with aught else beside thyself;
But, lest so stern a solitude should load
And break thy being, in mercy are vouchsafed
Some lower measures of perception,
Which seem to thee as though through channels brought,
Through ear, or nerves, or palate, which are gone.
And thou art wrapped and swathed around in dreams,
Dreams that are true, yet enigmatical;
For the belongings of thy present state,
Save through such symbols, come not home to thee …
So will it be, until the joyous day
Of resurrection, when thou wilt regain
All thou hast lost, new-made and glorified.
How, even now, the consummated Saints
See God in heaven, I may not explicate.102
In The Dream of Gerontius, Newman imagines a fulfilment of the desire which animates ‘Guardian Angels’ – the desire for ‘conscious communion’ with an ‘unearthly Friend’. As this ‘communion’ surpasses anything experienced in this life, so it will itself be surpassed by the communion that will be experienced on the ‘joyous day / Of resurrection’, when the ‘channels’ of communication will be ‘new-made and glorified’.103 The soul of Gerontius is in an intermediate state; and that state has a certain continuity with his earthly experience: if the soul, in this life, might have ‘dreams’, in which unearthly realities are presented in ‘figures’, so the soul, in the intermediate state, is made aware of its ‘present state’ by ‘dreams that are true, yet enigmatical’, ‘signs and types’, ‘symbols’. (The verse that represents the experiences of Gerontius, is itself presented as a transposition or translation of a ‘language’ of ‘dreams’, ‘symbols’, and the like.) In the Apologia, exhibiting himself to the ‘metropolitan intellect’, Newman acknowledges that he accepted the ‘principle’ that ‘material phenomena’ present ‘signs’ and ‘types’ of ‘heavenly facts’, and he acknowledges that certain ‘impressions’ on his ‘imagination’ were conducive to his conversion to Catholicism (in a way that did not conflict with his ‘severe resolve’ to be ‘guided’ by ‘reason’) – but he does not reveal much about his own experiences of ‘vision’. Shortly after writing the Apologia – having vindicated his ‘honesty’ to the ‘metropolitan intellect’, and having shown that he had attained to his religious views by ‘intelligible processes of thought’, not by a sophistry that made his ‘intellect’ the ‘slave’ and ‘puppet’ of his ‘fancy’ – he then presented to the ‘metropolitan intellect’ an expression of his ‘fancy’ – a vision or ‘dream’, concerned with Purgatory, with matters of Catholic belief which the ‘metropolitan intellect’ of England was disposed to consider merely ‘fanciful’. Having reflected on his life, in the Apologia, he reflected on the next life, in the Dream. Having presented, in the Apologia, something of his ‘living intelligence’, and the ‘position of [his] mind’, as a Catholic, with regard to various matters, Newman then presented, in the Dream, something of his ‘living’ imagination; and, in the portrayal of the soul of Gerontius, he presented an image of what is ‘innermost’ in the self – of that which abides, when all ‘conscious communion’ with the ‘metropolitan intellect’ has ceased.
3.
When Newman was an Anglican, he considered the ‘Roman’ doctrine of Purgatory to be one of the doctrines which resulted from ‘Romanist’ corruption, presenting an obstacle to reunion between Rome and England (unless Rome was willing to ‘retract’). He observes, in the Apologia, how he ‘had seen the pictures of souls in flames in the streets of Naples’, and how he regarded such ‘pictures’, the expression of ‘popular beliefs and practices’, as manifestations of a corruption that the ‘decrees’ of Rome – in the Council of Trent, for instance – did not enforce, but which Rome, in ‘her ordinary teaching’, permitted: ‘I saw that the controversy lay between the book theology of Anglicanism on the one side, and the living system of what I called Roman corruption on the other.’104 In Tract 79 (1836) Newman maintains that the ‘Roman’ doctrine of ‘Purgatory’ is not properly ‘Catholic’, as it is not supported by ‘Antiquity’, by a consensus of ancient writers, attesting to the doctrine as something received from Apostolic Tradition. Newman suggests, in Tract 79, that the popular ‘corruption’, associated with the doctrine, might be regarded as the (inevitable) expression of the ‘decrees’ of the Roman Church, and as thereby revealing the error involved in the decrees. While the Council of Trent may have declared merely that there was such a place, or state, as Purgatory, ‘and that souls there detained are aided by the suffrages of the living, and above all by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar’, the catechism of that Council referred to the ‘fire’ of Purgatory, and Bellarmine – one of the main authorities of the Tridentine Church – referred to the ‘prison’ of Purgatory. (And from the images of the ‘fire’, and the ‘prison’, there arises the ‘pictures of souls in flames on the streets of Naples’.)
The pictures of Purgatory so commonly seen in countries in communion with Rome, the existence of Purgatorian societies, the means of subsistence accruing to the clergy from belief in it, afford a strange contrast to the simple wording and apparent innocence of the decree by which it is made an article of faith. It is the contrast between a drug in its lifeless seed, and the same developed, thriving, and rankly luxuriant in the actual plant.105
Newman observes, in Tract 79, that ‘popular stories of apparitions witnessing’ to Purgatory were involved in the ‘introduc[tion]’ of belief in it.
The argumentative ground, on which the belief in Purgatory was actually introduced, would seem to lie in the popular stories of apparitions witnessing to it. Not that it rose in consequence of them historically, or that morally it was founded in them; only that when persons came to ask themselves why they received it, this was the ultimate ground of evidence on which the mind fell back; viz. the evidence of miracles, not of Scripture, or of the Fathers.106
If Newman maintains in Tract 79 that ‘popular stories of apparitions’ were the ‘argumentative ground’ for the doctrine of Purgatory, he maintains, equally, that it was not ‘founded’ ‘morally’ or ‘historically’ on them. With regard to the ‘historical’ origins of the doctrine, Newman quotes, in Tract 79, from his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church.
How Almighty God will deal with the mass of Christians, who are neither very bad nor very good, is a problem with which we are not concerned, and which it is our wisdom, and may be our duty, to put from our thoughts. But when it has once forced itself upon the mind, we are led in self-defence, with a view of keeping our selves from dwelling unhealthily on particular cases, which come under our experience and perplex us, to imagine modes, not by which God does (for that would be presumptuous to conjecture), but by which He may solve the difficulty. Most men, to our apprehensions, are too unformed in religious habits either for heaven or for hell, yet there is no middle state when Christ comes in judgment. In consequence it is obvious to have recourse to the interval before His coming, as a time during which this incompleteness might be remedied; as a season, not of changing the spiritual bent and character of the soul departed, whatever that be, for probation ends with mortal life, but of developing it in a more determinate form, whether of good or of evil … . Various suppositions have, accordingly, been made, as pure suppositions, as mere specimens of the capabilities (if one may so speak) of the Divine Dispensation, as efforts of the mind reaching forward and venturing beyond its depth into the abyss of the Divine Counsels. If one supposition could be produced, sufficient to solve the problem, ten thousand others are conceivable, unless indeed the resources of God’s Providence are exactly commensurate with man’s discernment of them. Religious men, amid these searchings of heart, have naturally gone to Scripture for relief; to see if the inspired word anywhere gave them any clue for their inquiries. And from what was there found, and from the speculations of reason upon it, various notions have been hazarded at different times; for instance, that there is a certain momentary ordeal to be undergone by all men after this life, more or less severe according to their spiritual state; or that certain gross sins in good men will be thus visited, or their lighter failings and habitual imperfections; or that the very sight of Divine Perfection in the invisible world will be in itself a pain, while it constitutes the purification of the imperfect but believing soul; or that, happiness admitting of various degrees of intensity, penitents late in life may sink forever into a state, blissful as far as it goes, but more or less approaching to unconsciousness; and infants dying after baptism may be as gems paving the courts of heaven, or as the living wheels of the Prophet’s vision; while matured Saints may excel in capacity of bliss, as well as in dignity, the highest Archangels. Such speculations are dangerous when indulged; the event proves it; from some of them, in fact, seems to have resulted the doctrine of Purgatory. Now the texts to which the minds of the early Christians seem to have been principally drawn, and from which they ventured to argue in behalf of these vague notions, were these two: ‘The fire shall try every man’s work’, &c, and ‘He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire’. These texts, with which many more were found to accord, directed their thoughts one way, as making mention of ‘fire’, whatever was meant by the word, as the instrument of trial and purification; and that, at some time between the present time and the Judgment, or at the Judgment … . That this is the origin of the notion of a Purgatorial fire, I gather from these circumstances: first, that they do frequently insist on the texts in question; next, that they do not agree in the particular sense they put upon them. That they quote them shows that they rest upon them; that they vary in explaining them; that they had no Catholic sense to guide them. Nothing can be clearer, if these facts be so, than that the doctrine of the Purgatorial fire in all its senses, as far as it was more than a surmise, and was rested on argument, was the result of private judgment exerted, in defect of tradition, upon the text of Scripture … . As the doctrine, thus suggested by certain striking texts, grew in popularity and definiteness, and verged towards its present Roman form, it seemed a key to many others. … Moreover, there were … texts of obscure and indeterminate bearing, which seemed on this hypothesis to receive a profitable meaning; such as our Lord’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Verily, I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing;’ and St. John’s expression in the Apocalypse, that ‘no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book’.107
In Tract 79, Newman observes, of the ‘speculations’ from which ‘the doctrine of Purgatory’ emerged, that ‘the safeguard of Catholic Tradition … keeps us from immoderate speculation upon Scripture, or a vain indulgence of the imagination, by authoritatively declaring the contents and the limits of the Creed necessary to salvation and profitable to ourselves’.108 By the time he wrote his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, however, Newman conceived of these ‘speculations’ rather differently. He quotes the same passage from his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, and observes that where he had once considered ‘the growth of the doctrine as an instance of the action of private judgment … . I should now call it an instance of the mind of the Church working out dogmatic truths from implicit feelings under secret supernatural guidance.’109 Of the doctrines of ‘Penance as the complement of Baptism, and of Purgatory as the explanation of the Intermediate State’, Newman observes, in his Essay on Development, that these doctrines emerged ‘when the nations were converted and offences abounded … [and] the Church came out to view, on the one hand as an establishment, on the other as a remedial system’: when ‘offences abounded’, some account of the ‘remedial system’ for post-baptismal sin was required; and this account was developed from certain Scriptural texts which, in the earliest period of the Church, when ‘offences’ after baptism were rarer, were ‘of inferior account’, but which became of greater moment ‘when the nations were converted and offences abounded’.110 Newman even observes that ‘in whatever sense the need and its supply are a proof of design in the visible creation, in the same do the gaps, if the word may be used, which occur in the structure of the original creed of the Church [with regard to the remedies for post-baptismal sin] make it probable that those developments, which grow out of the truths which lie around them, were intended to complete it’.111 In the 1878 edition of the Essay on Development, Newman retained the quotation from his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (excising some of the remarks about the ‘dangerous’ character of the ‘speculations’ which were involved in the ‘growth’ of the doctrine), and he added the remark – ‘When then an answer had to be made to the question, how is post-baptismal sin to be remitted, there was an abundance of passages in Scripture to make easy to the faith of the inquirer the definitive decision of the Church.’112 He presents reflection on, or inquiry into, the Scriptures, as something attendant on ‘the definitive decision of the Church’. He does not, in this, deny that the ‘definitive decision’ may have been informed, in certain ways, by inquiries into the Scriptures, but he does not present that ‘decision’ as a mere ‘result’ of those inquiries. In the 1877 edition of the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman added a couple of notes to his account of the ‘growth’ of the doctrine of Purgatory – observing that this account concerns ‘an instance of the process of its development’; of the remark that the doctrine was ‘the result of private judgement’, he observes, in a note, that ‘in proportion as the Church took up and recognized the doctrine, it ceased to be “the result of private judgment”’. In certain ‘private’ enquiries, there was, he maintained in his Essay on Development, an expression of ‘the mind of the Church working out dogmatic truths from implicit feelings under secret supernatural guidance’: in his Essay on Development, Newman maintains that the ‘process’ of the development of an idea ‘is carried on through individuals and bodies of men; it employs their minds as instruments, and depends upon them while it uses them’.113 In his 1878 edition of the Essay on Development, he suggests that, once that ‘definitive decision’ of the Church about the doctrine had been made, the inquiries that identified, in certain Scriptural texts, indications of the doctrine of Purgatory, were ‘easy’. In Tract 79, he observe s that the Scriptural texts, adduced in support of the doctrine, are of ‘little cogency critically’, but that they have ‘influence’ because ‘the doctrine of Purgatory professes to interpret texts which God’s word has left in obscurity’; yet ‘whatever be the joint force of such arguments from Scripture, in favour of the doctrine, it vanishes surely, at once and altogether, before one single clear text, such as the following: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours.”’114 In his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman recurs several times to the doctrine of Purgatory, as an instance of various sorts of ‘Romanist’ error: it involves a ‘neglect’ of ‘antiquity’; it proceeds from an excessive theological systematization, in which a ‘fictitious illumination … is poured over the entire Dispensation’, and a ‘technical religion’ is created ‘which destroys the delicacy and reverence of the Christian mind’ (in a manner comparable to the way in which ‘criticism’ extinguishes ‘poetical fervour and imagination’); and it involves an ‘abuse’ of ‘private judgement’ – in which the results of speculations on the Scriptures are treated as authoritative, as matters of revealed doctrine, though they do not have the sanction of ‘Tradition’.115
On becoming a Catholic, Newman regarded the doctrine of Purgatory as a doctrine that had developed out of meditation on the Creed (a doctrine ‘grow[ing] out of the truths which lie around’ it in the Creed), and out of meditation on the Scriptures, with these ‘speculations’ being animated by ‘implicit feelings under secret supernatural guidance’; and it was a doctrine that had developed in response to the circumstances of the Church ‘when the nations were converted and offences abounded’, so as to make the question of how post-baptismal sin was to be ‘remedied’ a question requiring urgent resolution. As an Anglican, Newman had observed that the doctrine was ‘introduced’ on the ‘argumentative ground’ of ‘stories of apparitions witnessing to it’ – on ‘the evidence of miracles’. Of these apparitions, Newman remarks, in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, that ‘the appeal to these seems to have come after the belief in it, when people felt that some clear sanction was necessary, as a substitute for Tradition’.116 Newman did not, as a Catholic, comment on these ‘stories’ of ‘apparitions’, relating to Purgatory. He was willing to grant that miracles could occur in the Church after the time of the Apostles; and he may have considered some of these ‘stories’ genuine. If, though, he regarded many of these stories as legendary, he could, nevertheless, have regarded them as an indication of the ‘mind of the Church’ – as imaginative visions, animated by the ‘implicit feeling’ that was involved in the formation of the doctrine of Purgatory: the ‘feeling’ that, ‘under secret supernatural guidance’, animated the meditations on the Creed and on Scripture by which the doctrine was formed or apprehended, may have, equally, animated certain experiences of imaginative ‘vision’. The creativity exercised by Newman himself, in The Dream of Gerontius, might itself be regarded as an expression of a certain ‘implicit feeling’, present in the ‘mind’ of the ‘Church’, serving to illuminate certain aspects of the doctrine of Purgatory: his own vision would then be animated by an ‘implicit feeling’ accordant with (or even identical to) the ‘implicit feeling’ which informed the development of that doctrine (an ‘implicit feeling’ partially but not fully expressed in that doctrine).
As an Anglican, Newman had felt that the doctrine of Purgatory presented certain difficulties; the vision of Purgatory, in The Dream of Gerontius, shows that the doctrine of Purgatory does not present the difficulties which, as an Anglican, Newman had felt it to present.
As an Anglican, Newman had regarded the doctrine as implicated with a ‘technical religion’, created by excessive systematization, inimical to ‘delicacy and reverence’, overly ‘familiar with mysteries’ – as ‘criticism’ is inimical to ‘poetical fervour and imagination’. In The Dream of Gerontius, he presents a ‘poetical’ vision. The representation of Purgatory, in The Dream of Gerontius, presents nothing to the sense of ‘sight’. Gerontius is ‘sight-bereft’; and, as Gerontius reflects on how he is ‘sight-bereft’, deprived of that ‘princely sense / Which binds ideas in one, and makes them live’ – he suggests that to be deprived of that ‘sense’, is to be deprived of a capacity to bind ‘ideas in one’, to form a system, to master things.117 In a note in the 1871 edition of the Oxford University Sermons, Newman remarks that the ‘senses convey to the mind “substantial truth,” in so far as they bring home to as that certain things are, and in confuso what they are’.
But has a man born blind, by means of hearing, smelling, taste, and touch, such an idea of physical nature, as may be called substantially true, or, on the contrary, an idea which at best is but the shadow of the truth? for, in whichever respect, whether as in substance or by a shadow, the blind man knows the objects of sight, in the same are those things, in ‘which eye has not seen, nor ear heard’, apprehended by us now, ‘in a glass darkly’, per speculum, in aenigmate.118
The ‘heavenly facts’ with which the Dream of Gerontius is concerned, are presented as experienced by one who is ‘blind’ to them; and, what is more, it is suggested that the ‘sense’ experience of Gerontius, is itself different from earthly sense experience (he ‘hear[s] a singing’ but ‘cannot of that music rightly say’ whether he ‘hear[s], or touch[es], or taste[s] the tones’).119 The poem makes use of images of earthly experience, in representing unearthly experience, while equally insisting that all such images are inadequate to unearthly experience; it does not make what it represents ‘familiar’ to the imagination.
Newman exercises a certain freedom, in the way he imagines Purgatory in the Dream, and in this he shows that the ‘decrees’ of Rome, with regard to the doctrine, do not constrain the intellect and the imagination, but, rather, stimulate the intellect and the imagination. In the last part of the Apologia, he had maintained that the infallible authority of the Church was not inconsistent with ‘Reason’ and ‘private judgement’: ‘every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, from within and without, and provokes again a re-action of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but it presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide’; the ‘object’ of the gift of Infallibility is ‘not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance’.120 In his imagining of Purgatory in the Dream, Newman shows a certain ‘freedom or vigour’ of ‘thought’: what he presents is something quite other than the ‘pictures of souls in flames on the streets of Naples’.
In Tract 79, Newman had maintained that the Roman doctrine of Purgatory was inconsistent with such Scriptural texts as ‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours’; he cited passages from the Fathers ‘in favour of the peace and rest of the intermediate state to true believers’; and he alluded to the view of the Greeks, at the Council of Florence, to the effect that the ‘Intermediate State’ is characterized by ‘substantial blessedness’, where the ‘souls of all saints’ were present, not only those who still had to undergo a certain purification.121 He maintained, that is, that the Roman doctrine of Purgatory was inconsistent with a sense that the ‘Intermediate State’ was a state of ‘rest’, of ‘blessedness’, and the like. In the Dream, when the soul of Gerontius is first aware of its ‘severance’ from earthly existence, it is conscious of a ‘deep rest, so soothing and so sweet’ that nevertheless ‘hath something too of sternness and of pain / For it drives back my thoughts upon their spring / By a strange introversion, and perforce / I now begin to feed upon myself’.122 ‘Deep rest’ is not inconsistent with ‘sternness’ and ‘pain’; and, indeed, the ‘rest’ that is a ‘severance’ from all earthly existence involves, of itself, the ‘pain’ of solitude – a ‘pain’ that, in the case of Gerontius, is assuaged by the presence of his Guardian Angel, and by the ‘measures of perception’ he is accorded ‘lest so stern a solitude should load / And break [his] being’.123 After Gerontius has a ‘sight’ of Christ, and is ‘scorched, and shrivelled’ by the ‘sanctity’ of Christ, he asks to be taken away to the ‘lowest deep’ where, ‘motionless and happy in [his] pain’, he will ‘sing [his] absent Lord and Love’: he will be simultaneously ‘motionless’ (at rest), ‘happy’ (in a state of ‘substantial blessedness’) and ‘in pain’.124 At the close of the poem, the soul of Gerontius is ‘lower[ed]’ into ‘penal waters’ – ‘waters’ that are ‘penal’, but which nevertheless are a place of rest, and healing, in which ‘Angels … Shall tend, and nurse, and lull’ him.125
The Dream of Gerontius is takes place in an ‘immaterial world’, in which that which is ‘immaterial’ – the soul, the spirit – is manifest. On his first waking from the ‘sleep’ of life, Gerontius declares ‘I feel in me / An inexpressive lightness, and a sense / Of freedom, as I were at length myself, / And ne’er had been before’;126 and there is a sense in which his experiences, after death, manifest, and reveal, various aspects of his ‘self’. The Angel suggests that purgatory itself, or the ‘veriest purgatory’, consists in a state of the soul, in the experience of a tension between contradictory desires – the desire to be in the presence of Christ, and the desire to ‘hide’ from that presence.
There is a pleading in his pensive eyes
Will pierce thee to the quick, and trouble thee.
And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself; for, though
Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinned,
As never thou didst feel; and wilt desire
To slink away, and hide thee from His sight
And yet wilt have a longing aye to dwell
Within the beauty of his countenance,
And these two pains, so counter and so keen, –
The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not;
The shame of self at thought of seeing Him, –
Will be thy veriest, sharpest purgatory.127
The soul of Gerontius, throughout most of The Dream, is not ‘self-moving, but borne forward’, held ‘fast’ within the ‘ample palm’ of his Guardian Angel.128 Yet, when Gerontius asks what hinders him from ‘going to’ his ‘Lord’, the Angel replies that he is not hindered, but with ‘extremest speed’ is ‘hurrying to the just and holy Judge’;129 the sense he has of delay, of time passing, is created by his own ‘living thought’ – for ‘in th’immaterial world’, ‘intervals in their succession’ are ‘measured by the living thought alone’.130 So, the impression of delay (and constraint) seems itself to be a creation, in some sense, of the ‘living thought’ of Gerontius himself. ‘It is thy very energy of thought / Which keeps thee from thy God.’131 What happens ‘to’ Gerontius is, equally, something that happens ‘within’ Gerontius. If time is ‘measured by … living thought’, so must movement be. The ‘movement’ of the soul of Gerontius, towards and into the ‘Hall of Judgement’, passing by different spirits – demons, and angels – might be a movement of ‘living thought’, in which he encounters the spirits around him as he takes in or apprehends them, so that the ‘movement’ corresponds to a development in his capacity to take things in: the more he can take things in, the more things ‘show up’ for him, so to speak, present themselves to him; it is the movement, the change, in ‘living thought’, the change in apprehension, which makes for the encounter with the spiritual realities (and this movement tends towards an encounter with, a ‘sight’ of, Christ Himself). ‘Movement towards’ something, would, then, correspond with the ‘taking in’ of that thing, so to speak (and this ‘taking in’ would involve the development of a capacity to take in, to apprehend, that thing). The realities which Gerontius encounters are really there; and in his experiences of them, they really impinge on him; but they are, equally, there for him, only as he acquires the capacity, in his ‘energy of thought’, to register them. The ‘movement’ of the soul of Gerontius, then, could be an expression of an internal ‘energy of thought’. Yet Gerontius is moved by others – above all by his Guardian Angel, by whom he is ‘borne forward’. What is more, his ‘perception’ of the spiritual realities by which he is encompassed is something that is ‘vouchsafed’ to him, not something that he accomplishes by his own powers. The soul of Gerontius, of itself, has ‘by right / No converse with aught else besides’ itself; but as the ‘load’ of such ‘solitude’ is too much for it, it is ‘in mercy vouchsafed’ some ‘lower measures of perception’: its ‘perception’ of what is external to it, is ‘vouchsafed’ to it. It is accorded certain ‘measures of perception’ in ‘mercy’, as it cannot bear the ‘load’ of ‘severance’ from all else; it is accorded ‘means of converse’ that correspond with what it is capable of, with what it can bear. There is a sense, in this, that the experiences of the soul of Gerontius, are accommodated to the capacities (and limitations) of that soul. If divine ‘mercy’ accords perceptions to the soul of Gerontius, according to the capacities of that soul, then changes in those perceptions – admitting different aspects of the spiritual reality, with which Gerontius is encompassed – must accord with changes in the capacities of the soul of Gerontius: what it is given to Gerontius to perceive, is given according to his capacity. The ‘movement’ experienced by the soul of Gerontius involves, then, a ‘movement’ in ‘energy of thought’, a movement that is a development, an increase, in ‘perception’. That movement can, equally, be taken as an expression of desire. The soul of Gerontius, throughout, is ‘borne forward’ by a Guardian Angel, but there is one moment, in the poem – when the soul of Gerontius is brought into the ‘veiled presence’ of God – in which it seems to move itself: having ‘darted’ from the ‘hold’ of his Guardian Angel’, ‘with the intemperate energy of love’, it ‘Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel’; the movement corresponds to an inner ‘energy of love’.132 Yet, having been ‘scorched’ by the ‘keen sanctity’ of God, the soul is ‘passive and still’, and is carried by his Guardian Angels to the ‘waters’, where it will await ‘the truth of everlasting day’.133 There is not a sense, in this, that the soul of Gerontius moves itself, out of ‘shame of self’, from the ‘countenance’ of God; yet Gerontius, equally, asks to be taken from that ‘countenance’ – ‘Take me away, and in the lowest deep / There let me be.’134
The soul of Gerontius is ‘vouchsafed’ certain perceptions, and experiences, in ‘mercy’, according to its capacity to take in, and endure, the ‘load’ of those experiences. The ‘succession’ in those experiences is correlative to a ‘succession’, a development, in the capacities, the ‘energy of thought’, of the soul of Gerontius; and those experiences are ordained, in ‘mercy’, to make for an increase, a development, in those capacities. As the ‘Inward Ray / More brightly’ burns (as Newman puts it in ‘Discipline’) so ‘Truth, in its wealthier scene and nobler space’ is ‘Given, for [his] eye to range, and feet to trace’; and this ‘larger grace’ involves ‘grief, or pain’.135 The ultimate vision, the unveiling of ‘the face of the Incarnate God’, affects the soul with a ‘keen and subtle pain’, and yet the memory of that vision is a ‘sovereign febrifuge to heal the wound’, even as it ‘will the wound provoke’.136 According to the notion of the ‘Economy of the Visible World’, which Newman took from the Greek Fathers, what one experiences of reality, in this life, is something ‘vouchsafed’ to one, according to whatever capacity one has to take in, and to benefit from, what one is ‘vouchsafed’: the experiences one has of the realities of the ‘Visible World’ are a means of forming the soul, that it might be made capable of apprehending (and existing among) higher realities; one has intimations of those higher realities, in the here and now, in the ‘types’ and ‘figures’ of the ‘Visible World’; those higher realities are behind the ‘veil’ of ‘Visible World’, because one does not yet have the capacity to ‘bear’ the unveiling of them. The realities of the ‘invisible world’ are most fully manifest, in this life, in the sacraments of the Church (which are, nevertheless, merely ‘symbols’ of ‘heavenly facts’). For those who participate in the liturgical life of the Church, ‘direct intercourse with God on their part now, prayer and the like, may be necessary to their meeting Him suitably hereafter: and direct intercourse on His part with them, or what we call sacramental communion, may be necessary in some incomprehensible way, even for preparing their very nature to bear the sight of Him’.137 What happens to the soul of Gerontius, in the ‘intermediate state’, the movement toward Purgatory, is a continuation, an intensification, of what happens to every soul, in this life, with the intensification of the ‘Inward Ray’ which makes use of ‘reason’, as an instrument, but which is something more than ‘reason’, and which ascertains, as if intuitively, the ‘presentation of most holy truths’ in, and through, the deliverances of ‘reason’ and imagination. In a sermon on ‘The Tears of Christ at the Grave of Lazarus’, Newman remarks that ‘our Saviour’s words are not of a nature to be heard once and no more; but … to understand them we must feed upon them, and live in them, as if by little and little growing into their meaning’.138 A mind that grows ‘into their meaning’ acquires a sense of the divinity of that ‘meaning’.
When we contemplate Christ as manifested in the Gospels, the Christ who exists therein, external to our own imaginings, and is as really a living being, and sojourned on earth as truly as any of us, then we shall at length believe in Him with a conviction, a confidence, and an entireness, which can no more be annihilated than the belief in our senses. It is impossible for a Christian mind to meditate on the Gospels, without feeling, beyond all manner of doubt, that He who is the subject of them is God.139
As the mind ‘grows’ into the ‘meaning’ of the Gospels, it apprehends a ‘holy truth’ in, or through, the image of Christ ‘manifested’ in them. Gerontius encounters the reality of Purgatory in, or through, a ‘world of signs and types’; he experiences Purgatory as a ‘world of signs and types’. For Newman, the reality of Purgatory, as attested by the doctrine of the Church, was itself registered by ‘the mind of the Church’, in or through the various ‘signs’ of the Scriptures – as a part of the process of assimilating the unitary ‘truth lying hid under the tenor of the sacred text as a whole, and showing itself more or less in this verse or that as it might be’.140 As Gerontius is presented with various ‘signs and types’ of reality, ‘signs’ that are ‘in mercy’ correlative to the intensification of his ‘Inward Ray’ – such that he apprehends more, the more he has the ‘inward energy’ to apprehend it – so, perhaps, those of the early Christians, whose ‘Inward Ray’ burned ‘brightly’, had a fuller apprehension of what was ‘lying hid’ in the ‘signs and types’ of Scripture. ‘There are’, Newman maintains in Arians of the Fourth Century, ‘minds so gifted and disciplined as to approach the position occupied by the inspired writers, and therefore able to apply their words with a fitness, and entitled to do so with a freedom, which is unintelligible to the dull or heartless criticism of inferior understandings.’141 Gerontius apprehends more of the ‘truths’ of Purgatory, in ‘signs and types’, as his ‘Inward Ray’ intensifies, tending toward ‘sight’, and the intensification of that ‘Inward Ray’ involves a kind of ‘happy … pain’; the intensification of the ‘Inward Ray’ is a movement, in ‘energy of thought’, towards a ‘sight’ of Christ that is, in itself, purgatorial, such that the intensification of that ‘Inward Ray’ seems to involve, in itself, a (purgatorial) ‘happy … pain’; perhaps the ‘gifted’ souls in the early Church that registered the reality of Purgatory, did so as registering something of the reality of Purgatory, in inchoate form, within themselves, in the intensification of the ‘Inward Ray’.
‘All the Christian ideas’, Newman observes in the Apologia, ‘were magnified in the Church of Rome, as time went on … . The whole scene of pale, faint, distant Apostolic Christianity is seen in Rome, as through a telescope or magnifier.’142 The ‘waters’ of Purgatory, in the vision of Newman, might be regarded as a ‘magnified’ presentation of the waters of Baptism (the ‘waters’ of Purgatory and Baptism, equally, purge sin). The ‘Angel of the Agony’ – the angel that was present with Christ in His agony in the garden of Gethsemane – pleads for the souls in Purgatory. The ‘Angel of the Agony’ comforted Christ in Gethsemane when, in His holiness, He suffered on encountering sin; that ‘Angel’, in Purgatory, comforts the souls who, in their sinfulness, suffer on encountering the ‘sanctity’ of Christ: Gethsemane becomes a ‘type’, of sorts, of the ‘agony’ involved in the encounter between sin and holiness (and so, a ‘sign’ revealing something of the reality of Purgatory); the scene of Gethsemane is ‘magnified’ in the vision of Purgatory. The representation of the ascent of the soul of Gerontius is counterposed, in the Dream, with a representation – in the songs of the ‘Angelicals’ – of the ascent of ‘man’, the ‘recreant’, who ‘lost his heritage of heaven / And fellowship with light’, after the ‘fall’, when ‘taught by Angel-vistings, / At length he sought his God’, and was redeemed by the ‘second Adam’, who ‘The double agony in man / For man [would] undergo’, ‘in the garden secretly, / And on the cross on high’: there is, in death and in Purgatory, a kind of recapitulation of the movement of redemption, a participation in the ‘double agony’ of Christ.143
In the Dream of Gerontius, Newman attempts to combine various stray insights, or intuitions about Purgatory, present in the works of the Fathers, insights which he had, at one time, taken to contradict each other. Some of the materials for his vision in the Dream of Gerontius are present in Tract 79: the idea that ‘the very sight of Divine Perfection in the invisible world will be in itself a pain, while it constitutes the purification of the imperfect but believing soul’; the idea that ‘penitents late in life may sink forever into a state, blissful as far as it goes, but more or less approaching to unconsciousness’; the idea – taken from St Gregory – that the ‘pains of Purgatory’ consist in the ‘pangs and shudderings of intellectual natures, when their Judge was approaching, and disclosing themselves in a supernatural agony’.144 Newman adheres closely to the Catholic ‘decrees’ about Purgatory, and makes use of images present in authoritative texts (the ‘fire’, mentioned in the Catechism, is suggested in the way the soul of Gerontius is ‘scorched, and shrivelled’, and the ‘prison’ mentioned by Bellarmine, becomes the ‘golden prison’, the ‘gates’ of which make ‘sweet music, as each fold revolves / Upon its ready hinge’).145 His own imagining of Purgatory can be regarded as an attempt to apprehend, by meditation, a ‘truth lying hid under’ various ‘signs’, various texts, forming from those ‘signs’ and texts a ‘whole’ that is a unitary vision. He engages, in this, in the kind of meditation that he characterizes as ‘mystical’ – the meditation that is the activity of the ‘Inward Ray’, in its apprehension of the ‘whole’ that is manifest in the ‘holy truths’ of the revelation. To present a personal vision to others, for Newman, is to present what is innermost in oneself, and it is to engage that which is innermost in those to whom one presents the vision – eliciting in them certain intuitions of the ‘holy truths’ beneath the ‘veil’ of that vision: it is ‘heart speaking to heart’.
Notes
1 Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua: The Two Editions of 1864 and 1865, ed. by Wilfrid Ward (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 6. (In this edition the texts of the 1864 and 1865 editions of the Apologia are presented simultaneously. In quotations here from this edition, the text of the 1864 edition has been used, unless otherwise indicated.)
2 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 7.
3 Ibid., 8.
4 Ibid., 16.
5 Ibid., 20.
6 Ibid., 28.
7 ‘The Apostolical Christian’, in SSD, 290–1.
8 ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in SSD, 298–9.
9 Ibid., 306.
10 Ibid., 298.
11 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 34.
12 Ibid., 33.
13 Ibid., 35.
14 Ibid., 390–1.
15 Ibid., 37.
16 Ibid., 71.
17 Ibid., 72.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 80–1.
20 Ibid., 82.
21 Ibid., 5.
22 Ibid., 10.
23 Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 82.
24 Present Position of Catholics in England, 245.
25 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 99.
26 Present Position of Catholics in England, 372.
27 Ibid., 380–2.
28 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 95–6.
29 Ibid., 96.
30 Ibid., 99.
31 Ibid., 99–100.
32 Ibid., 143.
33 Ibid., 71.
34 Ibid., 97.
35 Ibid., 82.
36 Ibid., 97, 98.
37 Ibid., 333.
38 Ibid., 171.
39 Ibid., 108.
40 Ibid., 153.
41 Ibid., 264.
42 Ibid., 264.
43 Ibid., 128–9.
44 ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in SSD, 300–1.
45 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 105–6.
46 Ibid., 123.
47 Ibid., 127–9.
48 Ibid., 129.
49 Ibid., 129–30.
50 Ibid., 131.
51 Richard Whateley, Elements of Rhetoric (Oxford: John Parker, 1828), 150.
52 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 131.
53 Richard Whateley, Rhetoric, 154–5
54 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 122.
55 Ibid., 113.
56 Ibid., 114.
57 Ibid., 133–6.
58 John Henry Newman, ‘Guardian Angels’, Lyra Apostolica (Derby: Henry Mozley and Sons and J. G. and F. Rivington, 1836), 33. The version considered here is that which was published in the first edition of Lyra Apostolica, though a couple of other versions, with minor variants, exist – one of which is included in a letter Newman wrote to his mother in December 1832, the other of which is included in Verses on Various Occasions, published in 1867.
59 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 133.
60 John Henry Newman, ‘The Powers of Nature’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 358.
61 ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in ECH i, 9.
62 The first version of ‘Guardian Angels’ – included in a letter from Newman to his mother – had ‘waits on’ instead of ‘walks with’. ‘Wait on’ might suggest more of passivity than ‘walks with’: one can ‘wait on’ someone without being particularly active, without being called on to act, whereas ‘walking’ is a form of activity; but ‘wait on’, equally, implies ‘service’, which involves various kinds of activity.
63 ‘Milman’s View of Christianity’, in ECH ii, 192.
64 ‘Unreal Words’, in PPS v, 45.
65 ‘Worship, a Preparation for Christ’s Coming’, in PPS v, 4, 3.
66 Ibid., 8.
67 Ibid., 8–9.
68 Ibid., 10–11.
69 ‘Unreal Words’, in PPS v, 45.
70 ‘The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1838; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 223–4.
71 ‘The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life’, in PPS iv, 221–2.
72 Ibid., 222.
73 Ibid., 222–3.
74 ‘Moral Effects of Communion with God’, in PPS iv, 228, 229.
75 Ibid., 230–1.
76 ‘The Humiliation of the Eternal Son’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iii [hereafter PPS iii] (1836; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 168.
77 ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, in PPS ii, 374.
78 ‘The State of Grace’, in PPS iv, 146–7.
79 ‘Light in the Darkness’, in Lyra Apostolica, 28.
80 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 133.
81 Hamlet, 3.4. ll.19–20, ll.65–6.
82 Newman likens the English Church to a ‘usurper’ in Difficulties of Anglicans, (mis)quoting from ‘The Bard’ by Thomas Gray. The original has ‘spare the meek usurper’s holy head’; Newman quotes it as ‘spare the meek usurper’s hoary head’ (taking the epithet ‘holy’ from the ‘usurper’). See Lectures on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 3.
83 Hamlet, 3.4. ll.128–30.
84 Hamlet, 2.2. ll.600–5.
85 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 215.
86 Ibid., 213.
87 Ibid., 210–11.
88 Ibid., 212, 213.
89 Ibid., 212–4.
90 The translation used here is that used by Newman in his account of the ‘Conversion of St Augustine’, in The Church of the Fathers. (The passage quoted is in Historical Sketches, ii, 157). In a note in the ‘Conversion of St Augustine’, Newman observes that ‘most of [the] translations are from the Oxford edition of 1838’ – the translation of E. B. Pusey.
91 Hamlet, 1.5., ll.11–13.
92 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 214–5.
93 Ibid., 110, 154.
94 Ibid., 154–5.
95 ‘Discipline’, in Lyra Apostolica, 35.
96 ‘Warnings’, in Lyra Apostolica, 34.
97 In his 1830 sermon on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he characterizes the Christian revelation as manifesting the ‘moral scheme of the world’, with the image of Christ ‘concentrat[ing] truths concerning the chief good and the laws of our being, which wander idle and forlorn over the surface of the moral world, and often appear to diverge from each other’; in his 1831 sermon on ‘The Usurpations of Reason’, he maintains that the ‘contemplation’ of the ‘revelation’ – the proper awareness of it – is a matter of ‘moral perception’, or ‘divine perceptions’, and he characterizes the ‘revelation’ itself as a ‘moral revelation’; in his 1832 sermon on ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagatin g the Truth’, he maintains that ‘acting rightly’ is implicated with the development of a clearer perception of ‘the standard of faith and morals’ – suggesting that ‘faith’ and ‘morals’ are subject to a single ‘standard’.
98 ‘John Keble’, in ECH ii, 442–3.
99 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 215.
100 ‘The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life’, 223.
101 The Dream of Gerontius (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1917), ll.324–6.
102 Dream of Gerontius, ll.532–66.
103 Ibid., ll.562–4.
104 Ibid., 202, 203.
105 Tract 79: On Purgatory (London: J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1840), 3.
106 Tract 79, 14.
107 ‘Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church’, in The Via Media of the Anglican Church i [hereafter VM i] (1837; 1877; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 174–9
108 Tract 79, 32.
109 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1846), 417.
110 Essay on Development, 101.
111 Ibid., 101–2.
112 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 393.
113 Essay on Development, 37.
114 Tract 79, 19.
115 VM i, 91.
116 Ibid., 177n.
117 Dream of Gerontius, l.528, ll.531–2.
118 ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in OUS, 349n.
119 Dream of Gerontius, ll.234–5.
120 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 344.
121 Tract 79, 19, 42, 61.
122 Dream of Gerontius, ll.189–93.
123 Ibid., ll.539–41.
124 Ibid., l.856, l.860, l.864, l.872.
125 Ibid., ll.898–9, ll.905–6.
126 Ibid., ll.172–5.
127 Ibid., ll.736–47.
128 Ibid., l.232, l.226.
129 Ibid., ll.338–9.
130 Ibid., 356–7.
131 Ibid., 367–8.
132 Ibid., ll.850–2.
133 Ibid., l.856, l.852, l.857, l.875.
134 Ibid., ll.860–1.
135 ‘Discipline’, in Lyra Apostolica, ll.2–3, ll.4–5, ll.7–8.
136 Dream of Gerontius, ll.719–22.
137 ‘Worship, a Preparation for Christ’s Coming’, in PPS v, 7.
138 ‘The Tears of Christ at the Grave of Lazarus’, in PPS iii, 130.
139 Ibid., 131.
140 ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 286.
141 Arians of the Fourth Century (1833; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 63.
142 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 289.
143 Dream of Gerontius, 643, 644–5, 807, 819–20, 821–2.
144 Tract 79, 30, 47.
145 Dream of Gerontius, 876–8.