Part 6
1.
Newman wrote most of the poetry he would write in his life during the winter of 1832, and the spring and summer of 1833, while touring the Mediterranean. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, he reflects on how, during that tour, he became convinced he had a ‘mission’, a ‘work to do in England’, with this conviction rousing in him ‘vehement feelings’. His sense of ‘mission’ was connected to his recollections of ‘Southey’s beautiful poem of Thalaba’ – a poem, set in a world created from the materials of Islamic myth, about a young man called by God to fight evil: ‘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.’ It was on this ‘expedition that [the] Verses which are in the Lyra Apostolica were written’. ‘The strangeness of foreign life threw me back into myself.’1 He would form a ‘vision’ that would suggest the ‘object’ of his efforts over the next decade.
The ‘vision’ animating the poetry of Lyra Apostolica is a vision of strife – strife between the Church, and the world. The Church in England must be restored. It is in a state of decline. Where, in former times, the Church had been sustained by the nation, and accorded worldly power, it is now being rejected and opposed by the nation. The Church must, then, be restored, but that restoration will not, in itself, be a matter of reassuming worldly power: it will, rather, be a resumption of the proper work of the Church – a work that involves confronting the world. Those who undertake this work will be the ‘few’, but the ‘might of Truth’ has ever been ‘lodged in the few’, its ‘watch-flame’ has ever been ‘rear’d on lone heights’.2 The Church that is to be restored is the Church of England – a church established by the nation. Yet the Church is envisaged as something contrary to the world – a ‘pilgrim’ in the world. The life of the Church is a ‘hid’ life, possessed by the ‘few’ – ‘Christ rears His throne within the secret heart / From the haughty world apart.’3 There is, in Lyra Apostolica, a near apocalyptic sense of a conflict between the ‘haughty world’ and the Church. Newman would maintain, in a series of sermons preached in Advent, a few years later, that to recognize this conflict is to recognize the ‘place’ of the Church in the world.
What we want, is to understand that we are in the place in which the early Christians were, with the same covenant, ministry, sacraments, and duties; – to realize a state of things long past away; – to feel that we are in a sinful world, a world lying in wickedness; to discern our position in it, that we are witnesses in it, that reproach and suffering are our portion, – so that we must not ‘think it strange’ if they come upon us, but a kind of gracious exception if they do not; to have our hearts awake, as if we had seen Christ and His Apostles, and seen their miracles, – awake to the hope and waiting of His second coming, looking out for it, nay, desiring to see the tokens of it; thinking often and much of the judgment to come, dwelling on and adequately entering into the thought, that we individually shall be judged.4
The vision of a conflict between the Church and the world, in Lyra Apostolica, involves a sense that the Church is not an earthly institution: it is, rather, an institution established by Christ – subject, as such, to no earthly authorities – an institution which, in its sacraments, is instinct with the power of Christ.
While most of the poems in Lyra Apostolica were by Newman, there were a number of other contributors, chief among them John Keble; Lyra Apostolica can be regarded as the work of a ‘party’. The poems collected in Lyra Apostolica were published initially in the British Magazine, and when Newman first proposed to Hugh Rose a ‘poetry department’ for the British Magazine he suggested that the ‘object’ of the poetry should be ‘to bring out certain truths and facts, moral, ecclesiastical, and religious, simply and forcibly, with greater freedom, and clearness than in the Christian Year’.5 The differences between The Christian Year and Lyra Apostolica are more striking than the similarities. Lyra Apostolica, unlike The Christian Year, is mostly concerned with the conflict between the Church and the world: it presents an account of the wider world, in which the Church exists, and it characterizes the Church as in a state of antagonism with various forces in that wider world. The Christian Year, by contrast, is mostly concerned with life within the Church; it consists, for the most part, of meditations – on Scriptural passages, connected to the liturgical cycle. For Keble, in The Christian Year, to meditate – discerning the divine, in or through the events of life – is to attain to a state of patience, receptiveness, and resignation; it is to be consoled; it is to be purged of agitation, disquiet. In Lyra Apostolica, by contrast, the spiritual life is taken to involve conflict – in, and with, the world: in ‘The Zeal of Jehu’, Newman recognizes an obligation to ‘wax fierce / In the cause of the Lord.’ In ‘Love of Quiet’, after asking ‘Why should our fair-eyed Mother e’er engage / In the world’s course and on a troubled stage / From which her very call is a release?’ he then insists – ‘rough is the holy hand; / Runs not the Word of Truth through every land, / A sword to sever, and a fire to burn?’ Newman insists that the Christian life is not a life of ‘r elease’ from the ‘troubled stage’ of the ‘world’ – a life of meditation, in a ‘garden’, ‘in meekness and in love … waiting for the blissful realms above’ – but a life of toil. In ‘The Prospects of the Church’, Newman maintains that the life of the ‘Christian warrior’ – striving to ‘rid’ the Church ‘of her present chain’ – is a ‘work of grace’ which will never be completed – ‘Christ only, of God’s messengers to man / Finished the work of grace which he began.’
List, Christian warrior! thou, whose soul is fain
To rid thy Mother of her present chain; –
Christ will unloose His Church; yea, even now
Begins the work, and thou
Shalt spend it in thy strength, but, ere He save,
Thy lot shall be the grave.
In ‘Scattered Sheep’, addressing the Dissenters – ‘Poor wanderers’ – Newman declares that ‘Christ’s Church … now shall lift her from the dust, / And reign as in her youth’. How, though, will the Church ‘lift her from the dust’, and what should the ‘Christian warrior’ do, to make this happen? What would the ‘reign’ of the Church be like – what sort of power would be exercised in that ‘reign’?
2.
If the contributors to Lyra Apostolica maintained that the Church owes its existence to no earthly state, this was connected to a sense, on their part, that the British state was becoming inimical to the Church. As the life of the nation was something other than the life of the Church, conflict between the nation and the Church was not surprising (even if such conflict was not inevitable). For the contributors to Lyra Apostolica, it seemed that the nation, the state, was coming to regard itself as wholly independent of the Church, and supreme, and that it was subjecting the Church to itself, regarding the Church as merely an aspect of itself. In the late 1820s, various laws which prevented Dissenters and Catholics from taking part in the British government had been repealed. The state was not comprehended, so to speak, by the church. Yet the state still presumed to legislate for the church – it purported, in this, to comprehend the church. In the early 1830s, the Whig government sought to initiate reforms of the established church – and in the Church Temporalities Act of 1833, it instituted certain reforms in the Irish church (reducing the number of bishoprics in Ireland, and altering the ways in which the Irish church was supported – abolishing the church rate, by which the Catholic population of Ireland was obliged to support an alien institution). For the contributors of the Lyra Apostolica this ‘spoliation bill’ was ‘sacrilege’ – an attempt on the part of the secular power to subject the church to itself. In ‘National Property’, John William Bowden suggested that the way the English nation was acting was as if Israel were to take that which had been consecrated to the worship of God, and bestow it on the worship of Baal – ‘What kings have given, kings again may claim. / Then onward! To the Temple! In the name / Of David’s line, of Judah’s kingly throne, / Tear down th’inlaying gold of Solomon … Speak ye of rights? What right, in reason’s eye, / Outweigh’s the sanction of a nation’s nod? / Who shall condemn a people?’ The ultimate ‘sanction’ (having the authority of the ‘nod’ of Zeus) consisted in the will of the ‘people’. (The hostility to the authority of the church was, Bowden suggests, only one form of a hostility to any sort of established authority, which relied for its legitimacy on something other than ‘a nation’s nod’.) In ‘National Degradation’, Bowden maintained that those who should be ‘faithful guard[s], before Thy vineyard’s gate’ had ‘bid the forest boar / Uproot thy cherished vine on green Ierne’s shore’. The attempt to subject the church to the secular power proceeded – the contributors to Lyra Apostolica suggested – from a sense that the church was to be used as an instrument of the state, securing certain social goods: it proceeded from an attitude that made such worldly goods supreme. In ‘Liberalism’, Newman accused ‘men of presumptuous heart’ of recognizing that the ‘Word refines all natures rude, / And tames the stirrings of the multitude’ (securing social order) but of neglecting to recognize ‘zeal and quick-eyed sanctity / And the dread depths of grace’, so that such men ‘halve the Truth’, and ‘in heart, / At best, are doubters whether it be true.’ There was, in the nation at large, a decline of true faith (what John Keble would term, in a sermon that Newman considered to be the inauguration of the Oxford Movement, a ‘national apostasy’). This decline of faith, this lack of awareness of what the church offered – grace, communion with God – attested to a failure, on the part of the church, to present its true nature to the nation, to undertake its proper work. Many years later, in his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850), Newman maintained that the ‘first principle’ of the ‘movement of 1833’ was ‘ecclesiastical liberty; the doctrine which it especially opposed was in ecclesiastical language, the heresy of Erastus’ – the heresy that the church was subject to the state, that it was a part of the state.
The writers of the Apostolical party of 1833 were earnest and copious in their enforcement of the high doctrines of the faith, of dogmatism, of the sacramental principle, of the sacraments (as far as the Anglican Prayer Book admitted them), of ceremonial observances, of practical duties, and of the counsels of perfection; but, considering all those great articles of teaching to be protected and guaranteed by the independence of the Church, and in that way alone, they viewed sanctity, and sacramental grace, and dogmatic fidelity, merely as subordinate to the mystical body of Christ, and made them minister to her sovereignty, that she might in turn protect them in their prerogatives. Dogma would be maintained, sacraments would be administered, religious perfection would be venerated and attempted, if the Church were supreme in her spiritual power … . Erastianism, then, was the one heresy which practically cut at the root of all revealed truth … . The whole system of revealed truth was … to be carried out upon the anti-Erastian or Apostolical basis.6
The contributors to Lyra Apostolica were concerned with a spirit, an attitude, alien to the church – with a way of thinking that could not recognize the dist inctiveness of the life of the church, the supernatural quality of that life. They regarded that spirit as working not just overtly against the church, but as working covertly within it (in ‘Liberalism’, Newman asks ‘what if it extends / O’er our own camp, and rules amid our friends?’). If they felt that the prevalent hostility to the church might result in the disestablishment of the church, and if they could regard such disestablishment as, in itself, sacrilegious, they could, equally, regard it as, potentially, beneficial: by being separated from the state, the church might be induced to recognize its true nature. In ‘Sacred Places’, Newman observes that as ‘Christ’s Church was holiest in her youthful days / Ere the world on her smiled; / So now, an outcast she would pour her rays / More keen and undefiled’, and he suggests that while churchmen should ‘shrink to share / The curse of breaking down’ (disestablishing the church), and should ‘toil in [their] old place to stand’, nevertheless they could ‘calmly’ await ‘the spoiler’s hand’.
The situation of the late 1820s and early 1830s – the sense, felt by some English churchmen, that their church might forfeit its legal privileges – occasioned a certain clarification for those churchmen – an attempt to understand the true nature of the church to which they belonged, and an inclination to regard it as deriving its existence from something other than the state. In the very first of the Tracts for the Times, Newman asked the English clergy, ‘should the Government and Country so far forget their GOD as to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claim of respect and attention which you make upon your flocks?’
Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must CHRIST’S Ministers depend? Is not this a serious practical question?
The ‘practical question’ is not so much, or not merely, the question of how one is to live, if one is without ‘temporal … substance’ – it is the question of how one is to claim ‘respect and attention’; and this ‘respect and attention’ is a means to an end, a means of accomplishing the true ‘office’ of ‘Christ’s Ministers’.
Look at the Dissenters on all sides of you, and you will see at once that their Ministers, depending simply upon the people, become the creatures of the people. Are you content that this should be your case? Alas! can a greater evil befall Christians, than for their teachers to be guided by them, instead of guiding? How can we ‘hold fast the form of sound words,’ and ‘keep that which is committed to our trust,’ if our influence is to depend simply on our popularity? Is it not our very office to oppose the world? Can we then allow ourselves to court it?
If the ‘office’ of the Church is to ‘oppose the world’, then is it not likely that the ‘Government and Country’ are always susceptible of becoming hostile to the Church? As the ‘office’ of the Church is to ‘oppose the world’, so the Church does not derive its being from the world.
We have neglected the real ground on which our authority is built, – our APOSTOLICAL DESCENT. We have been born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of GOD … . If you have the Spirit of the Apostles on you, surely this is a great gift. ‘Stir up the gift of GOD which is in you.’ Make much of it. Show your value of it. Keep it before your minds as an honourable badge, far higher than that secular respectability, or cultivation, or polish, or learning, or rank, which gives you a hearing with the many. Tell them of your gift. The times will soon drive you to do this, if you mean to be still any thing. But wait not for the times. Do not be compelled, by the world’s forsaking you, to recur as if unwillingly to the high source of your authority. Speak out now, before you are forced, both as glorying in your privilege, and to ensure your rightful honour from your people.
Newman presents this ‘rightful honour’ as a means to an end – a means of discharging a ‘trust’.7 How much, though, might the ‘respect and attention’ connected to ‘birth … education … wealth … connections’ have truly functioned as a means to an end that consists in ‘oppos[ing] the world’? Are those who revere ‘secular respectability, or cultivation, or polish, or learning, or rank’ disposed to revere those who announce themselves to be the successors of the Apostles? How does convention, ‘respectability’, and the like, relate to the proper ‘honour’ of the Church? How does the life of the ‘nation’ relate to the life of the Church?
3.
Lyra Apostolica begins with ‘Home’, a sequence of poems by Newman. The first of the ‘Home’ sequence, ‘Family Affections’, is about a distinctive ‘English’ culture of home life.
Where’er I roam in this fair English land,
The vision of a temple meets my eyes:
Modest without; within, all glorious rise
Its love enclustered columns, and expand
Their slender arms. Like olive-plants they stand,
Each answering each, in home’s soft sympathies,
Sisters and brothers. At the Altar sighs
Parental fondness, and with anxious hand
Tenders its offering of young vows and prayers.
The same and not the same, go where I will,
The vision beams! ten thousand shrines, all one.
Dear fertile soil! what foreign culture bears
Such fruit? And I through distant climes may run
My weary round, yet miss thy likeness still.
Newman is concerned with the culture of ‘home’ life, and its ‘soft sympathies’, as something distinctively ‘English’, and precious in itself, a ‘fruit’ of a ‘fertile soil’, and, equally, he seems to be concerned with this culture as involving religious education – ‘Parental fondness … Tenders its offering of young vows and prayers’: parents, out of love for their children, educate them in the faith, so that the ‘fondness’ of parents, for their children – actuating them to instruct their children in the faith, out of an ‘anxious’ concern for their welfare – issues in an ‘offering’ of the ‘vows and prayers’ of those children (‘tenders’ here has the primary sense of ‘presents for acceptance’, but it suggests, too, the ‘tenderness’ of parents for their children, a tenderness inducing them to instruct them in the faith, to tend to their children, to instruct them with tenderness). If home life is connected to the life of religion, it is, equally, a feature of a wider, ‘English’ culture – the culture of ‘this fair English land’: there are ‘ten thousand shrines, all one’, across this ‘land’, ‘go where I will’. This appreciation for home life is, he suggests, distinctively English; it is one of the features of English culture that he will ‘miss’ when in ‘distant climes’: to be with others who share that appreciation, is to be, in a sense, at home with them – his sharing of this appreciation is one of the things that makes him at home in English culture; and this common public culture is constituted by common private experiences, such that this public culture – with the ‘Altar’ of the English church at its centre – is itself animated by something like ‘home’s soft sympathies’. Newman begins the poem by presenting the home as a ‘temple’; this occasions the expectation that he is to proceed by presenting a kind of emblem – the features of the ‘temple’ are to emblematize features of ‘home’ life. With an emblematic image, one would expect each feature of the image to emblematize something of what is being emblematized. What, though, of the image of the ‘Altar’? Is it an ‘Altar’ in an emblematic temple, or is it the ‘Altar’ of the true ‘temple’, where actual religious worship happens, and true ‘vows and prayers’ are offered? If the image of a temple were to be used consistently as an emblem, then all the images of worship would refer, not to actual religious worship, but to something else – to that which is ‘like’ worship, in whatever it is that is being emblematized. The ‘columns’ could be the love of ‘sisters and brothers’, for instance, and the ‘Altar’ (the centre, or animating principle) ‘parental fondness’. Is the home ‘like’ a ‘shrine’ – devoted to ‘home’s soft sympathies’ – or is it an actual ‘shrine’, a place where actual worship is offered? How do ‘home’s soft sympathies’ relate to religious worship (to that worship which involves a sense that there is no true ‘home’ in this world)? In ‘Autumn’, Newman contrasts those, ‘self-trusting’, who a ‘household Baal rear’, with those who seek the ‘Tree of Life’, the truths of the ‘faith’.
Now is the Autumn of the Tree of Life;
Its leaves are shed upon the unthankful earth,
Which lets them whirl, a prey to the winds’ strife,
Heartless to store them for the months of death.
Men close the door, and dress the cheerful hearth,
Self-trusting still; and in his comely gear,
Of precept and of rite, a household Baal rear.
But I will out amid the sleet, and view
Each shrivelling stalk and silent-fading leaf;
Truth after truth, of choicest scent and hue,
Fades, and in fading stirs the Angel’s grief,
Unanswered here; for she, once pattern chief
Of faith, my Country, now gross-hearted grown,
Waits but to burn the stem before her idol’s throne.
To seek the ‘leaves’ of the ‘Tree of Life’, ‘truth after truth’, is to go ‘out amid the sleet’, to leave the ‘cheerful hearth’. Could not ‘home’s soft sympathies’ become an object of worship in themselves, such that the ‘Altar’ of the home involves a worship of the home itself, a ‘self-trusting’ worship of a ‘household Baal’? The second poem in the ‘Home’ sequence, ‘Wanderings’, is concerned with leaving home, and with a diminishment of ‘home’s soft sympathies’.
Ere yet I left home’s youthful shrine,
My heart and hope were stored
Where first I caught the rays divine
And drank the Eternal Word.
I went afar; the world unrolled
Her many-pictured page;
I stored the marvels which she told,
And trusted to her gage.
Her pleasures quaff’d, I sought awhile
The scenes I prized before:
But parent’s praise, and sister’s smile
Stirred my cold heart no mor e.
So ever sear, so ever cloy
Earth’s favours as they fade,
Since Adam lost for one fierce joy
His Eden’s sacred shade.
He suggests that, having ‘quaff’d’ the ‘pleasures’ of the world, he has lost his appreciation for the different pleasures of ‘home’. He has lost what was, to him, an ‘Eden’. It is his experience of the world that ‘cloys’, making his heart ‘cold’: having experienced the ‘fierce joy[s]’ of the world, he has lost his taste for the milder joys of home. There is a move from innocence to experience, which is a kind of ‘fall’: that is, there is a parallel between leaving home, and leaving Eden – and what makes him unapt for the pleasures of home (his experience of the ‘pleasures’ of the world) is itself a kind of ‘fall’ – he mistakenly ‘trusted’ to the world. He observes that his ‘heart and hope were stored / Where first I caught the rays divine / And drank the Eternal Word’. Home life, for him, involved religious instruction; home was a ‘shrine’. While, though, it is his experience of the world that ‘cloys’, what has ‘faded’ in him is his pleasure in home life, and if ‘Earth’s favours … fade’, then this would suggest that his home life was itself one of ‘earth’s favours’. That is, his home life is shown to be – once his pleasure in it ‘cloys’ – one of ‘earth’s favours’. His earthly home is not, after all, ‘Eden’s sacred shade’: like the ‘world’, it is a part of a fallen creation. (This itself might be regarded as a rather ‘cold heart[ed]’ way of regarding ‘parent’s praise and sister’s smile’.) He suggests that he loved his home for the ‘Eternal Word’ that he encountered there, and his ‘heart and hope were stored’ at his home, as it was the place where he ‘first … caught the rays divine’. He does not maintain that his loss of ‘heart’ for the pleasures of home life, for ‘parent’s praise and sister’s smile’, involves a loss of ‘heart’ for the ‘rays divine’ or ‘Eternal Word’. He implies that his turning to the ‘world’ was a (sinful) turning away from the ‘Eternal Word’ – struck by the ‘marvels’ of the world, he ‘trusted’ to the ‘gage’ of the world (rather than trusting only God). Having turned to the world, though, and its pleasures, his taste for all ‘earthly’ pleasures eventually ‘cloys’ – and his taste for ‘home’ life as well; and if a pleasure in home life is shown, in this, to be an ‘earthly favour’, then a turning from ‘earthly’ pleasures will not involve merely a turning back to the pleasures of home. There can be no going back to how things were before (and, in this, his loss of home is, again, parallel to the loss of Eden). If, though, his love of home was occasioned by his encountering the ‘Eternal Word’ there – if his ‘heart and hope were stored’ at his home, as it was the place where he ‘first … caught the rays divine’ – then, would not a turning to the ‘Eternal Word’, a turning away from the ‘world’, be a recovery of what he truly loved in his home life? His true home is in the ‘Eternal Word’.
‘Distance’, the next poem in the ‘Home’ sequence, is about leaving his earthly home – leaving his earthly life, on ‘Death’s unaverted day’ – and making his abode with the ‘Eternal Word’.
My home is now a thousand miles away;
Yet in my thoughts its every image fair
Rises as keen, as I still lingered there,
And, turning me, could all I loved survey.
And so upon Death’s unaverted day,
As I speed upward, I shall on me bear,
And in no breathless whirl, the things that were,
And duties given, and ends I did obey.
And, when at length I reach the Throne of Power,
Ah! still unscared, I shall in fulness see
The vision of my past innumerous deeds,
My deep heart-courses, and their motive-seeds,
So to gaze on till the red dooming hour.
Lord! in that strait, the Judge! remember me!
Though his ‘home is now a thousand miles away’, it is still, in memory, present to him. So, at his death, when he ‘speed[s] upward’, his life will be present to him. He will ‘bear … the things that were’, not simply in memory, but in who he is – for the ‘duties given, and ends I did obey’ will have made him who he is. He will, on that ‘day’, still be the person he is – he will be the person he has become, by living through ‘the things that were’. As he will still be the person he is – as he will continue in his own, unique being – so his experience then will resemble his experience now: his experience of remembering, on that ‘day’, will resemble his experience of remembering now. Yet there will be a difference – he ‘shall in fulness see’ the ‘vision’ of his ‘past innumerous deeds’, his ‘deep heart-courses, and their motive seeds’. He associates his experience of remembering, now, with a kind of power: he overcomes distance (‘turning me, could all I loved survey’) and he overcomes time (‘as I still lingered there’). His remembering is associated with a kind of self-possession. If, on ‘Death’s unaverted day’, he will remember with greater ‘fulness’, then there is a sense in which this will involve an accession of power, a greater self-possession.8 Yet, if he does not discern, in ‘fulness’, now, his own ‘deep heart-courses’, then how much does he know his own ‘heart’, how much does he know himself? If it will be comforting, reassuring, to think of the ‘ends I did o bey’, how will it be to remember the ‘ends’ he did not ‘obey’? How will it be to ‘gaze’ on ‘heart-courses’, inward impulses, of which he was not aware? He is, in a sense, at home with a certain sense of himself, sustained by a certain way of remembering ‘the things that were’, the things he has done, and the things he has experienced (and this way of remembering is itself something he is at home with, and a part of who he is). He suggests, though, that his sense of himself may be delusive. When, ‘upon Death’s unaverted day’, he remembers ‘in fulness’ his ‘past innumerous deeds’, he will see something different from what he sees now when he ‘surveys’ his life. He then turns away from himself – he cannot rely on himself – and he turns to God: ‘Lord! in that strait, the Judge! remember me!’
‘Distance’ is structured as a series of statements or phrases connected by ‘And’ – each new sentence begins with ‘And’ – and many of the phrases within the sentences are connected by ‘and’. An ‘and’, in recital, calls for a half breath, not a full breath, not a full pause, as it indicates something more to be said, a certain incompleteness: a series of ‘ands’ makes for a kind of breathlessness, and a sense of unrelenting onward movement. When he moves ‘upward’ on ‘Death’s unaverted day’, in ‘no breathless whirl’, he will have no more breaths to breathe: he will no longer experience breathlessness; he will move beyond the constraints of his earthly existence; he will remember things in ‘fulness’; the ‘innumerous’ things of his memory will present themselves, and he will have unlimited time, so to speak, in which to remember – unlike now, where he can allot only a little time to remembering, since he must act, he must live his life, and can scarcely take a ‘breath’ to reflect on things. To experience breathlessness now is to experience a constraint that will no longer be present on ‘Death’s … day’. When he characterizes his remembering, now, as presenting his ‘home’, as if ‘I still lingered there’, and ‘could all I loved survey’ – he associates remembering with ‘lingering’, with staying put, overcoming the onward movement of time, a movement that can involve the loss of much that is ‘loved’. Yet ‘Death’s … day’ is ‘unaverted’ – cannot be averted: remembering cannot overcome time. There is a contrast between the ‘whirl’ of life now, and the time to ‘gaze’ he will have on ‘Death’s unaverted day’. There is a tension between a sense that ‘Death’s … day’ involves a kind of enhancement of the self – a sense that the self attains to a kind of ‘fulness’ and integrity unattainable in life, a fullness in the powers by which the self possesses itself – and a sense that ‘Death’s … day’ involves a kind of loss of the self, a sense that the self will become, on this ‘day’, something quite other, in certain respects, to what it now is (the self one would hold on to is shown to be something illusory) and this loss of the self one would hold on to, the self one is ‘at home’ with, is something that cannot be ‘averted’. The structuring of the sonnet, as a series of statements connected by ‘And’, makes for an effect of unrelenting, onward movement, but this movement is interrupted by a couple of interjected phrases – ‘Ah! still unscared’, and ‘the Judge!’. These phrases register anxiety, a resistance to the ‘upward’ movement toward the ‘red dooming hour’. He fears ‘the Judge’. What will be judged will be the ‘vision’ which he will himself ‘gaze’ on – his ‘innumerous deeds’ and ‘deep heart-courses’. What the ‘Judge’ will see will be what he then, in ‘fulness’, remembers. He appeals, from the ‘Judge’, to his ‘Lord’, asking his Lord to ‘remember’ him – ‘remember me’ here meaning ‘do not abandon me’. His ‘Lord’ and his ‘Judge’ are the same person – Christ. In the ‘vision’ of his ‘innumerous deeds’ and ‘deep heart-courses’, he will see himself as ‘the Judge’, sees him: this ‘vision’ will be a manifestation of the ‘memory’ of God, so to speak. He will be condemned, unless Christ ‘remembers’ him – unless Christ is with him, such that ‘the Judge’ sees him ‘in’ Christ. He hopes, then, that the memory, not of the ‘Judge’, but of his ‘Lord’ – the ‘remembering’ that is the mercy of God in Christ – will determine his final state: one kind of ‘remembering’ will save him from another.
In ‘A Foreign Land’, the next poem in the ‘Home’ sequence, Newman addresses ‘Britons! now so brave and high’, asking ‘How will you weep the day / When Christ in judgement passes by / And calls his Bride away’, and observing ‘Your Christmas then will lose its mirth / Your Easter lose its bloom: – / Abroad, a scene of strife and dearth / Within, a cheerless home.’ The difference between the Church, the ‘Bride’, and the nation – ‘Britons’ – is presented starkly; there is a suggestion that national prosperity, and pride – ‘Britons’ now are ‘brave and high’ – might be connected to the ‘call[ing] away’ of the Church; and yet the presence of the ‘Bride’ is connected to national prosperity, to ‘mirth’ and ‘cheer’ at ‘home’. In the last poem of the ‘Home’ sequence, ‘Return’, ‘home’ is, and is not, identified with the presence of the ‘Bride’.
Banished the House of sacred rest,
Amid a thoughtless throng,
At length I heard its Creed confessed,
And knelt the Saints among.
Artless his strain and unadorned,
Who spoke CHRIST’s message there;
But what at home I might have scorned,
Now charmed my famished ear.
LORD, grant me this abiding grace,
Thy Word and Sons to know;
To pierce the veil on Moses’ face,
Although his speech be slow.
The ‘Home’ sequence is about travelling from home, and returning: in the first poem, ‘Family Affections’, he anticipates how ‘through distant climes’ he will ‘run’ his ‘weary round’; in ‘A Foreign Land’, he is in ‘distant climes’, unable to keep his ‘Christmas feast / In its due festive show’; in ‘Return’, he is ‘Banished the House of sacred rest / Amidst a thoughtless throng’, and is still not ‘at home’. That he is not ‘at home’ is not clear, initially, in ‘Return’ – not until he observes how ‘what at home I might have scorned, / Now charmed my famished ear.’ There is a sense, then, that the return from ‘banish[ment]’ is a return to the ‘House of sacred rest’ – and, in this, there is a certain identification of that ‘House’, the church, with home. Some of his ‘famished’ appreciation of the ‘House of sacred rest’ could be owing to his missing his ‘home’: participation in the liturgy, in the ‘House of sacred rest’, is a part of his ‘home’ life, involved in the customs, and habits, that make up that life, so to take part in the liturgy, while ‘banished’ from ‘home’, is to experience something of the ‘home’ life that he misses. Yet, if it is so that ‘what at home I might have scorned / Now charmed my famished ear’, if that which ‘at home’ he ‘might have scorned’ is something of great worth – the presentation of ‘CHRIST’s message’ – then would this not suggest that the way he looks at things, while ‘at home’, is somewhat faulty? He suggests that he would have ‘scorned’ the ‘artless … strain’ of the preacher. Would he, in this, have been overly concerned with matters of ‘art’? If, in the way of life with which he is ‘at home’, the ‘message’ of Christianity is connected with various customs, conventions, and the like, has his experience of the ‘message’, while ‘at home’, become too much a matter of convention, or custom? He would ‘scorn’ an ‘artless’ kind of preaching ‘at home’, perhaps, as he is accustomed to artful preaching. Yet does this distinction between ‘artless’ and skilled preaching itself involve a deficient way of responding to ‘CHRIST’s message’ – an excessive concern with the incidental?
4.
The ‘Home’ sequence is concerned with the relationship between the customs, or culture, of ‘this fair English land’, and the life of the Church: the customs and the culture of ‘this fair English land’ are implicated with the life of the Church, but that life is something other than, something more than, those customs, or that culture. What of Lyra Apostolica, as a contribution to the culture of ‘this fair English land’? What did Newman understand himself to be doing, in writing these poems? In a letter to Frederic Rogers, written in early 1833, while the poems making up Lyra Apostolica were being composed, Newman remarked that one ‘may write useful lines (useful to others) without being a poet’, and that ‘ten thousand obvious ideas become impressive when put into metrical shape; and many of them we should not dare to utter except metrically, for thus the responsibility is, as it were, shoved off of oneself, and one speaks [as if in play] though serious’.9 One may, ‘metrically’, ‘utter’ certain ‘ideas’ that one ‘should not dare to utter except metrically’ – as the ‘metrical shape’ is such that the utterance will be taken to be a kind of pretence, or ‘play’ (even if this is not so). In a sermon on ‘Unreal Words’ preached in 1839, Newman would maintain that ‘literature is almost in its essence unreal’, for it is a ‘saying without doing’, such that when a ‘man of literature … proceeds forward into action, he is thought to lose his position … becoming a politician or partisan’;10 in this, Newman seems to be suggesting that, in ‘literature’, what is aimed at is simply the ‘saying’, and this is not taken to involve a commitment to what is said, a commitment that would involve ‘doing’ certain things. Would Newman suggest, though, in his letter to Rogers, that while ‘one speaks [as if in play] though serious’, there are some who might discern that one is ‘serious’, though one ‘speaks [as if in play]’ – there are some who might discern the ‘serious’ intent, namely, those who themselves take the ‘ideas’ of which ‘one speaks’ seriously, living by them, or fitting themselves, by the way they live, to appreciate them. There is a kind of reserve in this: ‘one speaks’ in a way that will be understood by those with whom one shares certain principles and attitudes; others will take it that one ‘speaks’ only in ‘play’. The ‘lines’ will be ‘useful’ to those who recognize the ‘serious’ intent: they will recognize that there are others who think as they do, who share certain ‘ideas’ with them (and they will be fortified in their commitment to those ideas). How ‘serious’, though, is Newman about poetry itself? He characterizes poetry as a matter of putting ‘ideas’ into a ‘metrical shape’ (conferring ‘impressiveness’ on the ideas so presented). Does he show, in this, much of a sense of the significance of the ‘shape’? The ‘shape’, in many of the poems in Lyra Apostolica, is often realized, or ‘impressed’, through the use of a conventional ‘poetising’ diction; and this shows a certain inattentiveness to that ‘shape’, and its significance (if not to the ‘ideas’ that have been ‘put into metrical shape’). With regard to the ‘ideas’ in Lyra Apostolica, Newman suggests, in his letter to Rogers, that his ‘lines’ might be ‘useful to others’ in making certain ‘ideas’ impressive – and, in this regard, the poetry of Lyra Apostolica aims to present, to impart, a certain idea of the Church. Newman suggests, though, in several poems in Lyra Apostolica, that a right sense of the Church is formed, not by taking in ‘ideas’ – however ‘impressive’ the presentation of those ideas – but by forming relationships with those who are actuated by the ‘light’ present in the Church: in Lyra Apostolica – as in his sermon on ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagating the Truth’ – Newman suggests that the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ is transmitted through personal relationships, personal encounters. In ‘The Course of Truth’, Newman observes how Christ did not present ‘His secret’ to ‘the multitude’, or to the powerful (to ‘Tetrach’s eye’), or to the accomplished (Christ disdained ‘the world’s winning grace, or proofs from learned school’) but, instead, ‘He told / His secret to a few of meanest mould; / They in their turn imparted / The gift to men pure-hearted’; and now ‘Truth’ is ‘Reared on lone heights, and rare’, ‘And the mad world sees the wide-circling blaze, / Vain-searching whence it streams, and how to quench its rays.’ There is a tension, here, between a sense of the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ as being something ‘secret’ – apparent only to the ‘pure-hearted’ – and a sense that it is a ‘blaze’ apparent to all the ‘world’ (even if the world cannot discern ‘whence it streams’): Newman would suggest that while the Church is apparent to all, as an established institution, nevertheless its true life is something ‘secret’. In a sermon on the ‘Witnesses of the Resurrection’, preached in 1830, Newman had observed that the witnesses to the Resurrection, who were charged with presenting the truth of Christ to the world, were few, as ‘the real object of His rising again [was] the propagation of His Gospel through the world by means of His own intimate friends and followers’, and ‘this preference of the few to the many seems to have been necessary from the nature of man, since all great works are effected, not by a multitude, but by the deep-seated resolution of a few; – nay, necessary too from man’s depravity, for, alas! popular favour is hardly to be expected for the cause of Truth’.11 What is more, ‘a few were selected, because only a few could (humanly speaking) be made instruments …. To be witnesses of His resurrection it was requisite to have known our Lord intimately before His death. This was the case with the Apostles; but this was not enough. It was necessary they should be certain it was He Himself, the very same whom they before knew.’12
Newman suggests that this ‘intimate’ knowledge of Christ, on the part of the Apostle, was needed, if they were to certify that Christ, resurrected, was ‘the very same whom they before knew’; and he suggests, further, that, in their intimate relationship with Christ, the Apostles were formed by Him – ‘He formed them unto Himself, that they might show forth His praise.’13 This ‘show[ing] forth His praise’ could be taken to be a matter of showing forth His proper glory. That is, Christ ‘formed them’ in such a way that they could apprehend him rightly: their relationship with Him formed them in such a way that they could perceive Him rightly. To perceive Him rightly, it was necessary to have a certain sort of character, and Christ ‘formed’ this character, in those who were to ‘witness’ to Him, ‘that they might show forth His praise’. What is more, this character in His witnesses, was itself an expression of His influence, and presence; so that something of that presence, and its nature, was shown forth in those ‘formed’ by Christ. Newman then maintains that ‘we too, though we are not witnesses of Christ’s actual resurrection, are so spiritually’.
He who obeys God conscientiously, and lives holily, forces all about him to believe and tremble before the unseen power of Christ. To the world indeed at large he witnesses not; for few can see him near enough to be moved by his manner of living. But to his neighbors he manifests the Truth in proportion to their knowledge of him; and some of them, through God’s blessing, catch the holy flame, cherish it, and in their turn transmit it. And thus in a dark world Truth still makes way in spite of the darkness, passing from hand to hand. And thus it keeps its station in high places, acknowledged as the creed of nations, the multitude of which are ignorant, the while, on what it rests, how it came there, how it keeps its ground; and despising it, think it easy to dislodge it. But ‘the Lord reigneth.’14
Newman suggests, here – as in ‘The Course of Truth’ – that the ‘holy flame’ of ‘Truth’ is maintained in the world by the witness of those who live ‘holily’; and he suggests that it is by the influence of those who live ‘holily’ that the truth ‘keeps its station in high places, acknowledged as the creed of nations’. (The public ‘blaze’, the established institution, is, then, connected to the ‘secret’ light) In ‘The Course of Truth’, he suggests that the ‘blaze’ of the light of ‘Truth’ is apparent to the ‘mad world’ (presumably when it is ‘acknowledged as the creed of nations’ – when the church is established) but the world cannot discern ‘whence it streams’. How much, though, could poetry ‘transmit’ the kind of ‘light’ that is transmitted ‘from hand to hand’, through ‘near’ relationships – particularly if, as Newman suggests in his letter to Rogers, poetic utterances are taken to be a kind of ‘play’, and ‘the responsibility is, as it were, shoved off of oneself’?
There are several poems by Newman in Lyra Apostolica about ‘personal influence’, and about the difficulty of being ‘near enough’ to another person, to discern holiness in that person. ‘St Paul’ presents a contrast between imagining holiness (a holiness that ‘fancy strives to paint’) and encountering real holiness.
I dreamed that, with a passionate complaint,
I wished me born amid God’s deeds of might;
And envied those who saw the presence bright
Of gifted Prophet and strong-hearted Saint,
Whom my heart loves, and fancy strives to paint.
I turned, when straight a stranger met my sight,
Came as my guest, and did awhile unite
His lot with mine, and lived without restraint.
Courteous he was, and grave, – so meek in mien,
It seemed untrue, or told a purpose weak;
Yet in the mood, he could with aptness speak,
Or with stern force, or show of feelings keen,
Marking deep craft, methought, or hidden pride:
Then came a voice – ‘St Paul is at thy side!’
‘St Paul’ is about how ‘fancy’ is not adequate to reality: while his ‘fancy strives to paint’ the saints, and his ‘heart loves’ what his ‘fancy’ presents, he is unprepared to recognize a saint at his ‘side’ when he is presented with one. ‘St Paul’ is, equally, an attempt to ‘paint’ in ‘fancy’ St Paul – to imagine what it would be like to encounter him. Newman presents himself as being puzzled by his ‘guest’: the characteristics of his ‘guest’, at once ‘meek’ and ‘stern’, seem almost contradictory, so that there seems to be something ‘untrue’ about him; he suspects him of ‘craft’ or ‘hidden pride’. Yet his ‘guest’ is St Paul. There is something self-chastening in this: he would be better, perhaps, at recognizing the virtue, the holiness, of his ‘guest’ if he were himself more virtuous. He maintains that his ‘heart loves’ the saints, whom his ‘fancy strives to paint’. As, though, he does not recognize the reality of holiness, when presented with it, then is it really holiness which his ‘heart loves’, or is what his ‘heart loves’, in truth, a kind of simulacrum of holiness, which his ‘fancy … paint[s]’? The narration of events – the recounting of how a ‘stranger’ appeared, the recounting of how a voice ‘came’ – is not in harmony with the ‘metrical shape’: the mentioning of the ‘stranger’ happens, not at one of the natural breaks in the pattern, at the beginning of an octet, but halfway through the second octet; the ‘voice’ is mentioned halfway through the final couplet. In the discord between the order of the ‘metrical shape’, and the order of the narration, there is a miming of the discord between ‘fancy’ – the pattern which ‘fancy strives’ to create – and reality. The discord is, equally, an effect of art, ‘fancy’. If there is, in ‘St Paul’, a certain chastening of the ‘fancy’ or imagination, this chastening is itself effected by the imagination – by an attempt to imagine what it would be like to encounter St Paul. The encounter with the ‘stranger’, with an unexpected reality, is presented as something that is ‘dreamed’: a ‘dream’, an activity of the imagination, chastens the ‘fancy’. Newman, some years later, would describe ‘St Paul’s epistles’ as ‘literature in a real and true sense, as personal, as rich in reflection and emotion, as Demosthenes or Euripides’, such that ‘without ceasing to be revelations of objective truth, they are expressions of the subjective notwithstanding’.15 Taking those ‘epistles’ as ‘expressions of the subjective’ – expressions of character – they manifest, variously, ‘stern force’, ‘feelings keen’, gravity, meekness: the portrait Newman presents in ‘Saint Paul’, is a portrait taken, so to speak, from the writings of Saint Paul. There is evidently an effort of ‘fancy’ involved in taking this portrait from the writings of Saint Paul – making use of those writings to imagine what it would be like to be presented, in the here and now, with Saint Paul. Newman presents himself, in ‘St Paul’, as wishing to be in the ‘presence bright’ of a ‘strong hearted saint’, whom his ‘fancy strives to paint’, and then not recognizing (or liking) that ‘presence’, when unexpectedly presented with it. Could the very ‘striv[ing]’ of his ‘fancy’ – wishing to encounter a holiness which he envisages as something of another time, another age – be connected to his imperceptiveness, when presented with holiness, in the here and now? To be wishing oneself elsewhere, to be ‘striving’ to imagine a holiness that is thought of as being elsewhere, is, it would seem, to be less than fully attentive to the here and now. In its self-correcting movement – above all, in representing the self-correction in a ‘voice’, heard unexpectedly, perhaps a divine ‘voice’ – ‘St Paul’ is reminiscent of the poetry of George Herbert. There is frequently, in the poetry of Herbert, a self-correcting or self-purifying movement. One of the more Herbert-like poems in Lyra Apostolica is ‘Restlessness’, by Newman, in which, realizing that his past efforts to ‘buy [his] interest’ with God with ‘scourge and penance’ or ‘gift of cost’ were merely forms of ‘artifice’ which ‘heaven’s peace would antedate’ (false ways of assuring himself of his own salvation) he then hears a voice which urges him to ‘deny’ his ‘own fears and wait the end’, and he resolves to ‘learn to kneel before the Omniscient Ray’. The art of Herbert, often enough, aims at exposing the ‘artifice’ associated with certain ways of relating to God (in ways of addressing God, or of conceiving of Him) – undoing the ‘artifice’ that the truth of how one is related to God may become apparent. God, for Herbert, is always greater than any images one might form of him; and one cannot ‘buy’ an ‘interest’ with God, because one can give God nothing, and God gives one everything. ‘St Paul’ is an attempt to realize, to imagine, what it might be like to encounter a holy person and, in this, to purify the imagination, clearing away that, in the ‘fancy’, which might make one less apt to recognize holiness, when presented with it. ‘St Paul’ is, moreover, an attempt to realize the fact that the history of the Church is a history of particular persons, ‘gifted individuals’. In a sermon, which he preached many years after writing ‘St Paul’, Newman remarked, ‘I can fancy a man magisterially expounding St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians or to the Ephesians, who would be better content with the writer’s absence than his sudden re-appearance among us.’16 To ‘magisterially’ expound the writings of St Paul might be to treat those writings as a means of sanctioning, promoting, illustrating a particular theological system; and, where the writings of St Paul are so treated, the name of St Paul can become something like a mere label, affixed to a system of ideas. ‘St Paul’ attempts to imagine the particular ‘gifted individual’ from whom those writings came, the individual ‘whence’ the ‘light’, apparent in those writings, ‘streams’. Those who ‘magisterially’ expound the writings of St Paul are, ultimately, seeking the ‘light’ that is present in them – the ‘light’ of the revelation, regarding which St Paul is an authoritative exponent. Th at ‘light’, as present in St Paul, was not there in a form that could be set out fully in a number of ‘propositions’: it was a vision, which animated his mind, and which made him who he was. In his account of Christian tradition, in Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), Newman characterized tradition as ‘the Church’s unconscious habit of opinion and sentiment, which she reflects upon, masters, and expresses according to the emergency’, such that to ask for a ‘complete collection’ of the traditions of the Church, in a ‘set of propositions’, is to ask for the impossible. ‘As well might we ask for a complete catalogue of a man’s tastes and thoughts on a given subject. Tradition in its fullness is necessarily unwritten … and it cannot be circumscribed any more than a man’s countenance and manner can be conveyed to strangers in any set of propositions.’17
Newman imagines, in ‘St Paul’, how an Apostle, encountered as a ‘stranger’, in the ordinary course of things, might not have a particularly ‘impressive’ appearance: ‘God’s deeds of might’ need not have an ‘uncommon or striking’ appearance. Preaching, in 1831, on the ‘Secrecy and Suddenness of Divine Visitations’, and reflecting on the occasion when Christ was first presented, as a child, in the Temple, Newman observes how this moment was the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy – ‘the Lord whom you seek shall come suddenly to his Temple’ – and yet there was nothing ‘great or impressive’ about how this happened.
A little child is brought to the Temple, as all first-born children were brought. There is nothing here uncommon or striking, so far. His parents are with him, poor people, bringing the offering of pigeons or doves, for the purification of the mother. They are met in the Temple by an old man, who takes the child in his arms, offers a thanksgiving to God, and blesses the parents; and next are joined by a woman of a great age, a widow of eighty-four years, who had exceeded the time of useful service, and seemed to be but a fit prey for death. She gives thanks also, and speaks concerning the child to other persons who are present. Then all retire.18
The phrase ‘then all retire’ – reminiscent of a stage direction – calls attention to how ‘undramatic’ the scene is. Yet the ‘thanksgiving’ of the ‘old man, who takes the child in his arms’, the Nunc dimittis of Simeon, would become a part of the daily liturgy of the Church – in the English Church, it formed part of Evensong: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word. / For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, / Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; / To be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.’ The ‘salvation’ which Simeon apprehends, when he ‘takes the child in his arms’, is not ‘before the face of all people’, but is something almost ‘secret’. Yet the prophecy of Simeon, the Nunc dimittis, will become a part of the liturgy, with his words being recited ‘before the face of all people’; he declares that the ‘child in his arms’ will be the ‘glory’ of ‘Israel’, and a ‘light to lighten the Gentiles’, and there is a kind of fulfilment of this, when his declaration is recited in a liturgy performed ‘before the face of all people’, in which God is glorified in, and through, that child. There is, once again, a sense that ‘Truth’ is ‘secret’, and that its ‘wide-circling blaze’ is apparent to the ‘world’, which cannot ascertain ‘whence it streams’. To recognize ‘whence it streams’ is to recognize it as present in that which seems to have ‘nothing … uncommon or striking’ about it. That which seems to have nothing ‘uncommon’ about it, may nevertheless, be an expression of ‘God’s deeds’.
In the ‘Revival of the Priesthood’, Newman presents an image of the ‘priest’, which differs markedly from images of the Anglican priest as having ‘secular respectability, or cultivation, or polish, or learning, or rank’ – as having a role, and function, within society. Newman attempts to envisage, beneath the worldly exterior, that which is other-worldly; he attempts to envisage the priest as ‘cast … forth’ from the world.
Say, who is he, in deserts seen;
Or at the twilight hour?
Of garb austere, and dauntless mien,
Measured in speech, in purpose keen,
Calm, as in heaven he had been,
Yet blithe when perils lower.
My holy Mother made reply,
‘Dear Child, it is my Priest.
The world has cast me forth, and I
Dwell with wild earth and gusty sky;
He bears to men my mandates high,
And works my sage behest.
Another day, dear child, and thou
Shalt join his sacred band.
Ah! well I deem, thou shrinkest now
From urgent rule and severing vow;
Gay hopes flit round, and light thy brow: –
Time hath a taming hand!’
Newman once asked, in an essay on St Ambrose published in 1833 – ‘might not St. Ambrose and his brethren have as reasonably disbelieved the possible existence of parsonages and pony carriages in the nineteenth century, as we the existence of martyrs and miracles in the primitive age?’19 He then suggested ‘perhaps miracles and martyrs go together’. However that may be, it would seem that ‘parsonages and pony carriages’ and ‘martyrs’ do not ‘go together’; and ‘personages and pony carriages’ and ‘urgent rule an d severing vow’, equally, do not seem to ‘go together’. In the first of the Tracts for the Times, Newman declared ‘we could not wish [our Bishops] a more blessed termination of their course, than the spoiling of their goods, and martyrdom’. In ‘The Revival of the Priesthood’, Newman envisages the ‘sacred band’ of the English clergy – a ‘band’ which, at that time, was associated with ‘parsonages and pony carriages’ – as ‘dwell[ing] with wild earth and gusty sky’. Newman envisages the Church in England as in a state in which ‘the world’ has ‘cast’ it ‘forth’, ‘spoiling’ its ‘goods’; and he suggests that this might make for a purification, a ‘revival’ of its proper nature and function; it might, in such circumstances, encounter the world from without, ‘bear[ing] to men … mandates high’ (without being entangled, compromised, by worldly commitments). The landscape in which Newman places his ‘mother’, the Church, is featureless, elemental – ‘wild earth and gusty sky’. This setting might, for Newman, be symbolic of a kind of restoration of what is elemental, a purification. Yet the featurelessness of the landscape cannot but suggest, equally, a certain blankness, or vacuity. What would the purified Church in England be like, and how would it act in the here and now – in the England where Newman had his ‘work to do’? The featureless landscape in ‘The Revival of the Priesthood’ seems to have little to do with the ‘fertile soil’ of ‘this fair English land’. If the landscape were more evidently ‘English’, would images of ‘parsonages and pony carriages’ obtrude, images which could not be set, without incongruity, alongside images of ‘garb austere and dauntless mien’, ‘urgent rule and severing vow’? The priest, with ‘dauntless mien’, ‘Calm, as in heaven he had been / Yet blithe when perils lower’ – possessed of fortitude, a certain indifference to ‘perils’, and what Newman would characterize as the ‘chivalrous spirit’20 of the martyrs (and perhaps something of the ‘spirit’ of the Romantic outsider-hero) – is not a figure belonging to the world of ‘parsonages and pony carriages’; the priest is ‘in deserts seen’, on ‘wild earth’, not cultivated ‘earth’. How, then, do the figures in this landscape – ‘mother’ Church, the priest – relate to, and act on, places of cultivated ‘earth’, places of dwelling? How do these figures relate to the culture, the customs, of ‘this fair English land’? If the Church acts upon this culture from without – presenting ‘mandates high’ that have their origin, ultimately, in that which transcends any culture – can it not, nevertheless, have some kind of place within, or expression within, that culture? Is there some kind of antagonism between the Church and civilization or culture, cultivated ‘earth’? Is the Church fully itself only in the ‘wild’? By imagining a Church that exists in ‘deserts’, Newman could be trying to suggest not that the Church is somehow at odds with culture, but that it has within it a life that is something more than the life of a culture: while certain forms of culture can harmonize with, or even be instruments of, the life of the Church, that life is, nevertheless, something more than the life of those forms of culture; the Church can endure in ‘deserts’, without being sustained by civilization. For the most part, though, the poems by Newman in Lyra Apostolica do not envisage ways in which the life of the Church, the life of the Spirit, might be present and active within that which is communal, customary, or distinctively ‘English’. Most of his poems are concerned with isolated, prophetic figures. Figures such as Moses or David – who created, or consolidated, political orders – are considered, not so much in their public as in their private qualities. In a poem on ‘The Call of David’ (included, not in the first, but in the second edition of Lyra Apostolica) Newman imagines the ‘Angels’ of David, ‘circling round’ him, at the moment of his anointing for the kingship by Samuel, contemplating the ‘road’ he will take in his life – in which his ‘Loftiest aims [will be] by earth defiled’ – and reflecting that those public acts which confer ‘fame’ are of little moment: the angels declare that ‘we take thee in thy blindness / And harass thee in kindness; / Little chary of thy fame, – / Dust unborn may bless or blame, – / But we mould thee for the root / Of man’s promised healing fruit, / And we mould thee hence to rise, / As our brother to the skies.’ The earthly exploits of David – the ‘praise’ he will ‘attain’ in ‘royal court and battle plain’, as a great king – matter little: what is of importance about him is that he is the ‘root’ of Christ, and that he has an immortal soul, making him ‘brother’ to the ‘Angels’. In ‘Melchizedek’, Newman contemplates those who ‘feel their loneliness’, who are in a state in which they are ‘fatherless, homeless, reft of age and place’, detached from an earthly life which they apprehend as a mere ‘veil’. Melchizedek, king of Salem, is a figure who appears briefly in Genesis, 14 – he ‘brings forth bread and wine’ and blesses Abraham. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, he is described as ‘without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually’. The priesthood of Melchizedek is treated, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, as a type of the priesthood of Christ; though Christ was not of the ‘highborn Hebrew line’, the Levites, he was, nevertheless, a priest; that there can be a priesthood of this kind is shown by Melchizedek, who was a priest, and who blessed Abraham, before the ‘highborn Hebrew line’ had been established. The relationship of Melchizedek to the ‘highborn Hebrew line’ – whereby Melchizedek seems in some way prior, and superior – figures that of Christ. (The priesthood of the ‘highborn Hebrew line’, unlike that of Melchizedek, was restricted to the Levites, descendents of Levi, son of Jacob: the conferral of priesthood was determined by, and subordinate to, familial ‘descent’.) Newman suggests, in ‘Melchizedek’, that those who ‘feel their loneliness’ in a ‘blest’ way experience a certain detachment from ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘descent’ – a detachment from life within the order of the family, and the order of the community – and a participation in that which has ‘neither beginning of days nor end of life’.
Thrice blest are they who feel their loneliness;
To whom nor voice of friend nor pleasant scene
Brings that on which the saddened heart can lean;
Yea, the rich earth, garbed in its daintiest dress
Of light and joy, doth but the more oppress,
Claiming responsive smiles and rapture high:
Till, sick at heart, beyond the veil they fly,
Seeking His presence, who alone can bless.
Such in strange days, the weapons of Heaven’s grace;
When passing by the highborn Hebrew line
He forms the vessel of his vast design;
Fatherless, homeless, reft of age and place,
Severed from earth, and careless of its wreck,
Born through long woe His rare Melchizedek.
Newman suggests that to be a ‘Melchizedek’ is to be in a certain state of mind or spirit, a state of mind ‘born through long woe’; to be in this state of mind is to be ‘homeless’, ‘reft of age and place’, and this state of mind arises from a certain experience of the world, from a sense of being unable to ‘lean’ on anything in this world. This sense of being unable to ‘lean’ on anything in this world, involves the apprehension that nothing in this world wholly satisfies the soul: nothing in this world – ‘nor voice of friend, nor pleasant scene’ – is something that the soul can love completely, such that all its capacities for love are expressed, realized, satisfied. What the soul requires is a relationship of mutual love with God – who is changeless, and to whom everything in the soul is ‘open’. In a sermon on ‘The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul’, preached in 1839, Newman maintains that ‘the happiness of the soul consists in the exercise of the affections’, involved in a relationship of mutual love with another person, but ‘our hearts require something more permanent and uniform than man can be’; ‘none but the presence of our Maker can enter us; for to none besides can the whole heart in all its thoughts and feelings be unlocked and subjected’; ‘even our nearest friends enter into us but partially, and hold intercourse with us only at times; whereas the consciousness of a perfect and enduring Presence, and it alone, keeps the heart open’. It is only in a relationship with God that there can be an exercise of the ‘affections’ in a relationship of mutual love that is ‘permanent’, and entirely without reserve. In a sermon on ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, which Newman preached in 1833, only a few months after writing ‘Melchizedek’, he maintains that ‘to understand that we have souls, is to feel our separation from things visible, our independence of them, our distinct existence in ourselves, our individuality, our power of acting for ourselves this way or that way, our accountableness for what we do’, and this appreciation of ‘our separation from things visible’ involves an awareness of ‘the nothingness of this world’. A ‘child’ is, at first, in a state in which ‘this outward world prevails’: ‘we look off from self to the things around us, and forget ourselves in them.’ But then God ‘visits us’.
When He visits us, then in a little while there is a stirring within us. The unprofitableness and feebleness of the things of this world are forced upon our minds; they promise but cannot perform, they disappoint us. Or, if they do perform what they promise, still (so it is) they do not satisfy us. We still crave for something, we do not well know what; but we are sure it is something which the world has not given us. And then its changes are so many, so sudden, so silent, so continual. It never leaves changing; it goes on to change, till we are quite sick at heart: – then it is that our reliance on it is broken. It is plain we cannot continue to depend upon it, unless we keep pace with it, and go on changing too; but this we cannot do. We feel that, while it changes, we are one and the same; and thus, under God’s blessing, we come to have some glimpse of the meaning of our independence of things temporal, and our immortality. And should it so happen that misfortunes come upon us, (as they often do,) then still more are we led to understand the nothingness of this world; then still more are we led to distrust it, and are weaned from the love of it, till at length it floats before our eyes merely as some idle veil, which, notwithstanding its many tints, cannot hide the view of what is beyond it; – and we begin, by degrees, to perceive that there are but two beings in the whole universe, our own soul, and the God who made it.21
This state involves a certain detachment even from ‘voice of friend’: ‘As to those others nearer to us, who are not to be classed with the vain world, I mean our friends and relations, whom we are right in loving, these, too, after all, are nothing to us here. They cannot really help or profit us; we see them, and they act upon us, only (as it were) at a distance, through the medium of sense; they cannot get at our souls.’22
In the poems by Newman in Lyra Apostolica, earthly relationships, earthly friendships, are presented as fragile and uncertain. In ‘David and Jonathan’, reflecting on how David had experienced great ‘woe’ when his friend, Jonathan, had died, Newman observes that ‘had he lived, before thy throne to stand, / Thy spirit keen and high. / Sure it had snapped in twain love’s slender band, / So dear in memory; / Paul’s strife unblest its serious lesson gives, / He bides with us who dies, he is but lost who lives.’ In ‘Prosperity’, Newman reflects on the transience of all earthly goods, friendship included.
And when thine eye surveys,
With fond adoring gaze,
And yearning heart, thy friend,
Love to its grave doth tend.
All gifts below, save Truth, but grow
Towards an end.
While Newman presents life with others, in Lyra Apostolica, as unsatisfactory, he presents a solitary life as inconsistent with the state of the ‘Christian warrior’. The desire for repose, for seclusion, is to be resisted; the desire for solitude is to be resisted. In ‘The Desert’, he observes that ‘Adam e’en, before his sin, / His God a help-meet found; / Blest with an Angel’s heart within, / Paul wrought with friends around.’
Lone saints of old! of purpose high,
On Syria’s sands, ye claim
’Mid heathen rage our sympathy,
In peace ye force our blame.
The ‘lone saints of old’, the anchorites, were justified in retreating from the world to escape persecution by ‘heathen rage’; but such a retreat is not justified in a time of ‘peace’. In ‘Jeremiah’, Newman maintains that the ‘peaceful prophet’ Jeremiah ‘erred’ in desiring to be removed from a ‘troubled life’, from the ‘sacred strife’ of encountering ‘man’s wrath’, and ‘school[ing] his pride’.
‘O place me in some silent vale,
Where groves and flowers abound;
Nor eyes that grudge, nor tongues that rail,
Vex the truth-haunted ground!’
If his meek spirit erred, opprest
That God denied repose,
What sin is ours, to whom Heaven’s rest
Is pledged, to heal earth’s woes?
‘Earth’, in Lyra Apostolica, is generally presented as a place of ‘strife’, with ‘peace’ being something deferred till ‘Heaven’s rest’. Peace in this life, Newman suggests in ‘The Haven’, is a ‘rare guest’.
Whence is this awe, by stillness spread
O’er the world-fretted soul?
Wave reared on wave its boastful head,
While my keen bark, by breezes sped,
Dashed fiercely through the ocean bed,
And chafed towards its goal.
But now there reigns so deep a rest,
That I could almost weep.
Sinner! thou hast in this rare guest
Of Adam’s peace a figure blest;
’Tis Eden seen, but not possessed,
Which cherub-flames still keep.
In this life, the soul is ‘world-fretted’; and to be a ‘Christian warrior’ is in to be a state of ‘strife’, encountering ‘man’s wrath’ and ‘pride’.
Newman insisted, all his life, that only in communion with God could the ‘heart’ be fully ‘opened’: the deepest of all desires, for him, was the desire for communion with God. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua he observed that he could not countenance becoming a Catholic until he recognized that ‘the Catholic Church allows no image of any sort, material or immaterial, no dogmatic symbol, no rite, no sacrament, no Saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, to come between the soul and its Creator. It is face to face, “solus cum solo”, in all matters between man and his God. He alone creates; He alone has redeemed; before His awful eyes we go in death; in the vision of Him is our eternal beatitude.’23 Yet, on becoming a Catholic, he equally had a sense of the Church as a place in which Christ is not ‘at a distance … we are surrounded by an atmosphere and are in a medium through which his warmth and light flow in upon us on every side’.24 In Lyra Apostolica Newman does not present the Church as a place in which this ‘atmosphere’ can be encountered, or in which this ‘light’ is manifest; he is concerned, rather, with the Church as countering the world, and with the ‘Christian warrior’ as engaged in ‘sacred strife’ with the ‘pride’ of the world. In Lyra Apostolica he presents images of isolated, prophetic figures, engaging in ‘sacred strife’; but he does not present definite images of a Church, or communion, which sustains them, and he does not present definite images of how they might act within the Church (as against how they might act, in encountering the ‘haughty world’). In ‘The Cross of Christ’, declaring how ‘whene’er across this sinful flesh of mine / I draw the Holy Sign, / All good thoughts stir within me’, he imagines certain effects of this action, and the ‘good thoughts’ it ‘stir[s]’ – perhaps ‘hateful spirits around … wail their overthrow’, and perhaps ‘on far heathen ground / Some lonely Saint hails the fresh odour, though / Its source he cannot know’. He imagines, here, a kind of spiritual communion between Christians, but it is something that cannot be discerned; those who participate in it ‘cannot know’ how they affect one another. In a sermon on the ‘Ceremonies of the Church’, preached in 1831, a couple of years before he wrote the poems in Lyra Apostolica, Newman observed that there is no such thing as abstract religion.
Scripture gives the spirit, and the Church the body, to our worship; and we may as well expect that the spirits of men might be seen by us without the intervention of their bodies, as suppose that the Object of faith can be realized in a world of sense and excitement, without the instrumentality of an outward form to arrest and fix attention, to stimulate the careless, and to encourage the desponding … . Granting that the forms are not immediately from God, still long use has made them divine to us; for the spirit of religion has so penetrated and quickened them, that to destroy them is, in respect to the multitude of men, to unsettle and dislodge the religious principle itself … . How intimately great and little matters are connected together in all cases.25
Newman is concerned, in this, with the established, set forms of prayer and worship; but it pertains to all customs, conventions, cultural forms which the ‘spirit of religion has … penetrated and quickened’. In Lyra Apostolica, Newman presents almost an ‘abstract’ Church, a Church without a ‘body’ – in a featureless landscape of ‘wild earth and gusty sky’, and he seems to have difficulty in discerning, in the cultural forms of ‘this fair English land’, something more than what is earthly, the ‘spirit of religion’.
Notes
1 John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. by Wilfrid Ward (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 135, 133.
2 ‘The Course of Truth’, in Lyra Apostolica (Derby: Henry Mozley and Sons, and J. G. and F. Rivington, 1836). All quotations from Lyra Apostolica are taken from this edition.
3 ‘Hidden Saints’, in Lyra Apostolica.
4 John Henry Newman, ‘The Patristical Idea of Antichrist’, in Discussions and Arguments (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 75–6.
5 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain et al. [hereafter LD] (London: Nelson, 1961–72; Oxford: Clarenon, 1972–2008), iii, 120.
6 Diff i, 101–2.
7 This ‘rightful honour’, it has been suggested, may have been more than that, for Newman and other likeminded churchmen – it may have been more like the end itself, sought in compensation for a loss of ‘secular respectability … or rank’. See Frank. M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge of Evangelical Religion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), particularly 168–80. Turner’s work is the strongest, in recent times, of those which present the ‘case against’ Newman. (Worthy predecessors include Oxford Apostles by Geoffrey Faber and Apologia pro Charles Kingsley by P. J. Fitzpatrick; and A. N. Wilson presents a spirited case against Newman – as a dreamer, disengaging from the realities of Victorian England, in an attempt to live in an imaginary ‘primitive’ church – in The Victorians.) Turner presents the Oxford Movement, and the experiences of Newman – experiences which led him to become a ‘cultural apostate’ – as the effect of various sociological and psychological imperatives. Beneath the speciously ‘universal’ rhetoric of Newman, Turner maintains, certain personal drives were at work: an aversion from domesticity, and an inclination toward a life of companionship with men; a drive toward status; a drive toward penance (involved with a certain denigration of, or even hatred for, the body). In this way of interpreting Newman, things which Newman himself declared to be means (for instance, the ‘honour’ accorded the priesthood) are deemed to be, in fact, the ‘ends’ aimed at (with Newman being unaware of this).
8 ‘Distance’ is comparable, in this respect, with a passage in the Dream of Gerontius, when the soul of Gerontius first wakes from the ‘sleep’ of earthly life. ‘I went to sleep; and now I am refreshed. / A strange refreshment: for I feel in me / An inexpressive lightness, and a sense / Of freedom, as I were at length myself, / And ne’er had been before. How still it is! / I hear no more the busy beat of time, / No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse; / Nor does one moment differ from the next.’ Dream of Gerontius, ll.171–8.
9 LD iii, 236.
10 ‘Unreal Words’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons v [hereafter PPS v] (1840; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 42.
11 ‘Witnesses of the Resurrection’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons i [hereafter PPS i] (1834; 1868; London, Longmans Green & Co., 1907), 290.
12 ‘Witnesses of the Resurrection’, in PPS i, 286.
13 Ibid., 287.
14 Ibid., 292–3.
15 John Henry Newman, ‘Literature’, in The Idea of a University (1852; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 290.
16 John Henry Newman, ‘Faith and Private Judgement’, in Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 200.
17 ‘Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church’, in Via Media i [hereafter VM i], (1837; 1877; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 32.
18 ‘The Secrecy and Suddenness of Divine Visitations’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 109.
19 John Henry Newman, ‘Primitive Christianity’, in Historical Sketches i (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 365.
20 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 481.
21 ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in PPS i, 19–20.
22 Ibid., 20–1.
23 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 288.
24 LD xii, 224.
25 ‘Ceremonies of the Church’, in PPS ii, 75.