Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (42 page)

it would be quite a tyranny, if, in an art which is the expression, not of truth, but of imagination and sentiment, one were obliged to be ready for examination on the transient states of mind which come upon one when homesick or sea sick, or in any other way sensitive or excited.
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Newman, of course, emphatically did not believe that imagination and truth are mutually exclusive. He was more likely expressing a grumpy version of Wordsworth’s salutary warning: ‘We murder to dissect.’ Yet, much as he had a poet’s sensibility, frequently manifested in his letters and diaries, his priorities and preoccupations as a religious writer inhabited a different dimension of the mind and heart. When he was walking one summer with the poet Aubrey de Vere in the Wicklow Mountains, he refused to visit a nearby lake, despite its legendary beauty, because, he told de Vere, life is ‘full of work more important than the enjoyment of mountains and lakes’.
⁷
De Vere, in defence of Newman, went on to comment that while the poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ celebrates the beauty of the scene, the poet fails to ponder the history and the spirituality of the ruined monastery itself. The comment of course tells us more about Newman and de Vere than about Wordsworth.

‘Obstinate questioning/Of sense and outward things’ in his youth, had drawn Wordsworth towards a visionary apprehension of ‘the still, sad music of humanity’, a panentheistic ‘spirit that rolls through all things’, and his peculiar version of Platonic pre-existence – increasingly lost as the ‘shades of the prison house’ gather with age. Wordsworth would be troubled only in late middle age by what

he came to see as his earlier departures from Christian doctrinal orthodoxy. Newman from his very childhood enjoyed a similar interiority, a similar interplay of dream and reality; but his imagination was essentially, constitutionally, wedded to a passion for human virtue as a prelude to the quest for the God of Revelation; as if virtue and religion were somehow in competition with nature. He made this plain in his famous Second Spring sermon:

… Fair as may be the bodily form, fairer far, in its green foliage and bright blossoms, is natural virtue. It blooms in the young, like some rich flower, so delicate, so fragrant, and so dazzling. Generosity, and lightness of heart and amiableness, the confiding spirit, the gentle temper, the elastic cheerfulness, the open hand, the pure, affection, the noble aspiration, the heroic resolve, the romantic pursuit, the love in which self has no part, – are these not beautiful?
8

Newman’s imagination is constantly in play as an explanatory tool. The dominant imagery is of light and luminosity; the total, subtle effect chiaroscuro. In contrast to the light, he resorts to shades, shadows, ghostly images. If he appeals to natural forms it is to elucidate an argument, as when he explicates the development of doctrine with the image of a stream broadening to a river, becoming ever purer and truer to itself : a paradoxical conceit worth an entire chapter of abstract exposition. He favours simple illustrative objects, contrasting for example two paths to religious certitude, by comparing an iron bar (as a single, linear logical proof) with the many-stranded strength of a rope (as the multi-tudinous experience that leads to assent to faith). He employs a variety of metaphors to grasp the journey to faith: the action of a mountain climber, the relationship of a proliferating polygon to a circle, the dynamic accumulation of arches supporting a gothic vault each separately inadequate to the task, yet together dynamically strong. His elastic imagination appropriates imagery across the widest range of exemplars, from mathematics to astronomy, from music to architecture, from steam engines to the industrial landscapes of his day. He likens Catholic Christendom to ‘some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes’.
⁹
What eccle-siologist before or since has described the Church as a resounding, smelting, clashing factory or foundry?

Newman’s stated, as opposed to exemplified, view of the central importance of imagination waxed and waned throughout his writing life, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge exerted the strongest influence from 1835 onwards. Newman, long suspicious of Coleridge’s thought (he deplored his defence of the Established Church, and even more the fact that Mr Coleridge was not in residence with Mrs Coleridge) confessed himself ‘surprised how much I thought was mine, is to be found there’. Imagination, in Coleridge’s view, was essentially vital,

it ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially
vital
.’

Newman appears to have maintained both a Lockean view of the mind, as a blank sheet or receptacle, while adopting, alternately and even at times in striking parallel, a Coleridgean image of imagination as a living organ of digestion, which assimilates, grows and develops by what it feeds on. Coleridge favoured the word ‘coadunation’, a biological term that would now be close to our understanding of symbiosis. Newman at times brought the images of the capacity of a receptacle and digestive organs together as if to combine the contrasts in creative tension. The broadening of the mind, he wrote on one occasion, is ‘a digestion of what we receive, into the substance of our previous state of thought; and without this no enlargement is said to follow!’
¹⁰
The duality confirms Newman’s tendency to combine empirical and Romantic perspectives, as if attempting to reconcile intellectual and aesthetic tensions that tended to subvert each other in the first half of the nineteenth century. Artistic truth, through authentic imagination, is living, organic, possessed of a truth potentially sublime and unsusceptible to analysis (‘We murder to dissect’). Scientific, empirical truth is machine-like, driven by direct sense impressions and logic.

Newman’s early tendency to understand Christianity in imaginative terms was evident in his mid-twenties when he wrote the essay for Blanco White on Aristotle and the art of poetry, concluding that every Christian is essentially a poet. At the time of the Tamworth Reading Room dispute, we saw the importance he placed on imagination in apprehension of religious truth. Again: ‘The heart is commonly reached not through the reason, but through the
imagination
[my italics] …’ It is a thought that anticipates his chosen motto, on becoming a Cardinal, ‘Heart speaks unto Heart’. In his
Essay on Development
(1845), he had endorsed not only the idea of the Christian as poet, but Christianity itself, the person even of Christ through history, as analogous to a living ever expanding poem, or fugue. And he repeats the notion in his essay on Keble published the following year: ‘The Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets …’
¹¹
Newman had used this notion of living imagination to devastating, almost callous, effect in his
Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans
(1850), suggesting that the Church of England lacked a life of its own, being ‘no body politic of any kind’, but a ‘department of government’.
1
2
In Newman’s view, moreover, the Anglican Church lacked conscious, intelligent life: ‘Nor can it in consequence be said to have any antecedents, or any future; or to live, except in the passing moment. As a thing without a soul, it does not contemplate itself, define its intrinsic constitution, or ascertain its position.’
¹³
The latter thought combines with an extraordinary conceit that exploits imagination itself as

metaphor:

Thus it is that students of the Fathers, antiquarians, and poets, begin by assuming that the body to which they belong is that of which they read in time past, and then proceed to decorate it with that majesty and beauty of which history tells, or which their genius creates … but at length, either the force of circumstances of some unexpected accident dissipates it; and, as in fairy tales, the magic castle vanishes when the spell is broken and nothing is seen but the wild heath, the barren rock, and the forlorn sheep-walk: so it is with us as regards the church of England, when we look in amazement of that which we thought so unearthly, and find so common-place or worthless.
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Newman appeared convinced in a guarded and frequently qualified fashion that imagination has primacy not only in our apprehension of religion, but in the Church’s living knowledge of itself – themes that will be picked up in the next chapter on the
Grammar of Assent
. In the meantime, writing for no reason but to please himself, and with no combative purpose, he embarked on a poem about the moment of death and the soul’s journey into eternity. ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ provides yet another glimpse into the imagination of John Henry Newman.

GERONTIUS

The narrative is composed of soliloquies and dialogues spoken by a dying Catholic, Gerontius (the ‘Old Man’), and his Guardian Angel, punctuated by interventions from death-bed attendants, angelic hosts, demons, and the Angel of the Agony. Gerontius is destined for Purgatory since he has led a good life yet is not sufficiently perfect to go straight to Heaven: he is no Blessed, no Saint. We are allowed no information about his background, or profession, although it seems likely that it was Newman’s sustained meditation on his own death, a fantasy indulged perhaps with some frequency.

While the idea of the poem has resonances of other journeys to the under-world, the ambiance is distinctly, religiously, Roman Catholic. We meet no known personalities in the poem, in this life or the next. There are doctrinal expositions in the form of prayers, hymns, and the Creeds; the poem is preoccupied with the nature and function of angels. A segment of the poem, ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height’ (sung by the ‘Fifth Choir of Angelicals’), is popular among Catholic and Anglican congregations to this day, as are the verses that begin ‘Firmly I believe and truly’. There are two high points of drama, demonstrating the difficulty of even a venial sinner encountering the face of God without purgation.

The quality of verse in the opening section hardly lives up to the drama of the soul approaching death: there is, says Gerontius, ‘a visitant … knocking his dire summons at my door. The like of whom … Has never, never come to me before …’ It is an idealised, sanitized death-bed scene; an absence of pain and

fear, neither sorrow for those he leaves behind nor regrets at departing this world; no illness, no pain. He refers in passing to ‘O loving friends’ – indicating not those
he
loves, so much as those who love
him
, and whose main purpose is to pray for him ‘who have not strength to pray’. The friends embark on the rituals for the dying, beginning with a Litany that includes ‘holy Hermits’, and ‘all holy Virgins’, giving the poem a Medieval tone. There is no thought in the poem for the corruption of the body in the grave, or morbid funereal accompaniments familiar to the Victorian culture of death. In fact, strictly speaking, the point of the poem is that Gerontius does
not
die. His Cartesian-like soul continues to live on a different plane, his presence surviving, according to New-man’s ingenious speculation, in the way that phantom-limb sufferers experience sensation in their absent members.

The verse at last bursts into life with a recasting of the De Profundis and a rendering of the Psalm 90 sung by all the Souls in Purgatory: ‘A thousand years before Thine eyes are but as yesterday’ (a rewording of ‘For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday’), in which the poetry is carried on the original Hebrew parallelisms. The dying man’s soliloquies are peppered with adjectival epithets – ‘dizzy brink’, ‘vast abyss’, ‘loathsome curse’, ‘hideous wings’ … mounting to his plaint that he feels ‘wild with horror and dismay’. At the moment of death, however, the verse begins to attain imaginative power:

This silence pours a solitariness Into the very essence of my soul;

And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet, Hath something too of sternness and of pain.

His Guardian Angel appears, announcing that his ‘work is done’, his ‘task is o’er’, and Gerontius, now called ‘Soul’, is accompanied to the ‘Judgement House’. On the way they are verbally abused by a horde of demons, who hurl ‘uncouth and sour’ insults. Jeering at human holiness, they describe a saint as ‘a bundle of bones,/Which fools adore, Ha! Ha!’