Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (43 page)

There are interesting speculations about time and space beyond the material universe:

Divide a moment, as men measure time, Into its million-million-millionth part, Yet even less than that the interval

Since thou didst leave the body …

A note on eternal punishment, added to the
Grammar of Assent
, ponders the ‘temporary absence of the lost soul of the consciousness of its continuity or duration’. He goes on to relate the story of a monk for whom three hundred years passed as if no more than an hour while in an ecstasy. ‘Now pain as well

as joy, may be an ecstasy, and destroy for the time the sense of succession.’
¹⁵
While he rejects the idea that he is attempting to ‘explain away’ the severity of eternal punishment by the abolition of time, it is clear that he has problems with an eternity without pain as much as eternal suffering. ‘Mere Eternity, though, without suffering, if realized in the soul’s consciousness, is formidable enough; it would be insupportable even to the good, except for, and as involved in the Beatific Vision; it would be perpetual solitary confinement. It is this which makes the prospect of a future life so dismal to our present agnostics, who have no God to give them “mansions” in the unseen world.’
16

Meanwhile the suffering of Purgatory, as manifested in the
Dream
, consists of the briefest of glimpses of the face of Jesus, and the painful realization of the Soul’s unworthiness, reminiscent of the wounds of mystical love experienced by Saint Teresa of Avila. The Angel says:

There is a pleading in His pensive eyes

Will pierce thee to the quick, and trouble thee. And thou will hate and loathe thyself; for, though Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinn’d, As never thou didst feel; and wilt desire

To slink away, and hide thee from His sight …

Newman’s Purgatory is not a place of physical suffering (although the phantom-limb speculation leaves the question open). The temporary suffering of Purgatory, and hence the eternal suffering of Hell, is the mental agony of shame and frustrated longing for the absent Lord. Not since the expression of his love for Hurrell Froude had Newman written of love in such anguished terms. In the ‘Presence Chamber’, mediated by the Angel of the Agony (the angel that attended Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane), Newman is finally granted, or is afflicted with, that briefest vision of the beloved Lord. The Soul cries out:

I go before my Judge. Ah! …

If the reader feels let down by this abrupt exclamation, the line is more strikingly expressed in Elgar’s oratorio as a thrilling, climactic cry. The Angel explains:

… the keen sanctity,

Which with its effluence, like a glory, clothes And circles round the Crucified, has seized, And scorch’d, and shrivell’d it; and now it lies Passive and still before the awful Throne.

The conclusion of the poem sees the Soul accepting his departure into Purgatory, where he will ‘throb, and pine, and languish’, singing of his ‘absent Lord and love’. The Angel then delivers these arresting lines:

Softly and gently, dearly-ransom’d soul,

In my most loving arms I now enfold thee, And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,

I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.

And carefully I dip thee in the lake,

And thou, without a sob or a resistance, Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take

Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.

Gerontius acquiesces without ‘resistance’ in the intensely physical, controlling affection of the angel, the entire fantasy expressed as a combination of dominance and submission. The Angel enfolds, lowers, and dips him – ‘softly … gently …’ in those ‘most loving arms’. There is no indication in Newman’s writings, despite the huge artistic and intellectual energies expended through his life, that he somehow displaced his sexual libido through the practice of ‘sublimation’ – the mental discipline whereby sexual desires are elevated imaginatively to a spiritual plane. It appears rather, as argued earlier, that he had a lifelong aversion to what he called sensuality. The
Dream
confirms this aversion when the Angel characterises sexual generation as a form of seminal contamination through Original Sin:

O Man, strange composite of heaven and earth! Majesty dwarf ’d to baseness! fragrant flower

Running to poisonous seed! and seeming worth Cloking corruption!

The closing lines express abandonment with ambivalent echoes of Eros and Thanatos – consummation as death. Accustomed as a child to creating fantasies of a world peopled by angels, it is as if he sees himself as a passive human love-object, enveloped by a dominant angelic lover as he sinks with pleasurable pain into a Lethe-like Purgatory. Newman, again, seems imaginatively engaged both as the Angel and Gerontius. That final easeful abandonment, anticipated through the poem – ‘innermost abandonment … deepest abyss … infinite descent … falling … solemn consummation …’ – is experienced both actively and passively.

Does the
Dream
suggest an authentically mystical meditation? The poem certainly expresses, albeit unevenly, resonances of the three classic stages of the ‘mystic way’, purgation, illumination, and union, which would have been familiar to Newman in Christian writings influenced by the Neoplatonists. While Gerontius gives the impression of being detached from the world, there is very little indication of his penitence, remorse, sense of sinfulness. The momentary purgation experienced briefly before the face of Christ, ‘scorch’d and shrivel’d’, is

reported by the Angel rather than confessed by Gerontius. Yet the poem confidently proclaims the second step of ‘illumination’, repose in the certitude of God’s reality, as does so much of Newman’s writing throughout his life. Finally, the third step of ‘union’, described by Evelyn Underhill as that ‘perfect and self-forgetting harmony of the unregenerate will with God’
¹⁷
, is promised rather than portrayed. As Gerontius’s soul is launched into the deeps of Purgatory, the oceanic impression familiar in so much mystical writing is unmistakeable.

CHAPTER 15
‌‌

The Grammar of Assent

‘… the human mind is made for truth …’

J. H. NEWMAN,
THE GRAMMAR OF ASSENT

‘In these latter days’, Newman had written in the
Apologia
, ‘… things are tending … to atheism in one shape or another.’
¹
The spread of atheism, he warned, was happening ‘with far greater rapidity’ than at any time in history. What had begun during the days of the Paris Enlightenment of Rousseau and Voltaire as salon scepticism was by the mid-nineteenth century a rising floodtide of religious scepticism across Europe. As science and technology expanded, so inductive perspectives on human nature flourished. In the second half of the eighteenth century in England, David Hartley’s best-selling
Observations on Man
, a materialist, determinist theory of ‘everything’, found popular appeal among radicals and Unitarian dissenters alike for its promotion of a Christianity free of dogma, not least Original Sin. The perfectibility of man and society was now a prospect achievable by social and political change, and the Utilitarianism of Bentham and John Stewart Mill – the greatest good for the greatest number – offered practical social solutions. In the decade before the publication of the
Apologia
, Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
and Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
had been published with further potential for materialist explanations of history, society and human nature. Meanwhile, throughout Europe the formation of nation states continued to drive the pace of secularism. England’s poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley – had signalled their troubled despondency ahead of the religious disillusionment of Matthew Arnold, Arthur Clough, and Tennyson. More than twenty years before Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’, and forty years ahead of Thomas Hardy’s ‘God’s Funeral’, Newman had predicted ‘what a scene, what a prospect, does the whole of Europe present at this day … and every civilization through the world, which is under the influence of the European mind!’
²
What was to be done?

DRAFTING THE GRAMMAR

After returning from Rome as a Catholic priest, Newman began to draft notes towards a detailed argument to justify belief in God and Christianity. This was a

book, he thought, that could turn the tide of unbelief. He wrote of it: ‘I had felt it on my conscience for years, that it would not do to quit the world without doing it.’
³
But as time passed, he complained of the difficulties. He was ‘too old’, he wrote, ‘too weary, too weak, and too busy’.
⁴
He found it a sheer slog, like ‘tunnelling through the Alps’.
⁵
In 1866, the year before Matthew Arnold published
Dover Beach
, echoing what had now become a general sense of spiritual crisis – ‘Nor certitude … we are here as on a darkling plain’, Newman was convinced at last that he had found the key. And yet, ‘the work was not less like tunnelling than before’. Then, on 3 February 1870, he could write to a friend: ‘for twenty years I have begun and left off an inquiry again and again, which yesterday I finished … Now at last I have done all that I can do according to my measure.’
⁶
As with other books, the
Grammar
was given shape by a personal correspondence, in this case a discussion, starting in 1859, with the distinguished scientist William Froude, brother of Newman’s long-dead friend Hurrell. The nub was the attainment of certitude of knowledge, and the status of scepticism. Newman could see the relationship between ‘scientific’ method in both secular and theological matters, but he wanted to clarify a distinction which showed that ‘the scientific proof of Christianity is not the popular, practical, personal

evidence on which a given individual believes in it’.
7

As we accompany Newman through a series of beautifully written reflections, and meditations, he explores how Christian believers arrive at certitude in faith. We do not reach that certitude, he is saying, by employing logical arguments or proofs – like following the clues to solve a crime, or conducting a complicated experiment to prove a scientific hypothesis. It is an ‘assent’, a kind of ‘eureka moment’, literally a ‘feeling towards’, or a ‘yes’, not as a result of a
leap
of faith, or a blind act of the will, but in consequence of encountering the Christian religion, its people, its objects, and its practices over time. That acquaintance with religion involves imaginative apprehension of its prayers and sacraments, its rituals and Scriptures, its Creed, and all the tangible, visual and concrete expressions of the Christian faith. Above all it involves the presence of Jesus Christ in our imaginations, in the Eucharist, and in the community of the Church.