Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (32 page)

In
A Portrait
Stephen debates the crucial contrast between art and religion with the Jesuit Dean of Studies who has been laying a fire – demonstrating, as it were, the ‘useful’ arts. Unlike Newman, the Dean has become atrophied by his failure to change and to grow: ‘his very soul had waxed old in that service without growing towards light and beauty or spreading abroad a sweet odour of her sanctity.’
³⁵
They talk. The Dean argues that the beautiful should be marked by its utility and ethical value; while Stephen, quoting Aquinas, the heart and soul of Catholic orthodoxy under the recent influence of Pope Leo XIII, challenges the notion: ‘Aquinas, answered Stephen, says
Pulcra sunt quae visa placent
’ [Those things are beautiful that please on being seen].
³⁶
By the same token, Stephen is following Newman, who himself follows Aristotle, in declaring that art should be regarded as enjoyable for its own sake: ‘All I have been now say-ing is summed up in a few characteristic words of the great Philosopher’, writes Newman, ‘“Of possessions”, [Aristotle] says, “those rather are useful which bear fruit; those
liberal, which tend to enjoyment
. By fruitful, I mean, which yield revenue; by enjoyable, where
nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using
.” ’
³⁷
At a deeper level Joyce identifies himself with Newman as a hero of apostasy and rebellion in his abandonment of the established Church of his nation, as well as friends and family.
³⁸
Like Newman, Joyce is rejecting patriotism, Ireland’s Catholicism and family, in order to embrace exile on the continent of Europe. In a paradox worthy of Newman himself, Joyce’s motives for rejecting Catholicism find parallels with Newman’s path to Rome. Irish Catholicism means narrow xenophobia for Joyce, while literature signifies pluralism, universalism, a wide ranging civilization. When Stephen is accused by his friends of preferring the oppressors’ language of English to the study of Gaelic, he retorts that English literature and language are Aryan rather than merely English. It is reminiscent of Newman’s criticism of the Church of England: ‘You do not communicate with any one Church besides your own’, whereas the Church of Rome ‘has flourished through so many ages, among so many nations … in

such contrary classes and conditions of men.’
39

The gulf between the Jesuit Dean and Stephen is exemplified by their unequal capacity to employ multidimensional language and dynamic metaphors. Stephen attempts to demonstrate this gulf by citing a sermon of Newman’s:

• One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace.
  

  I remember a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different.
  I hope I am not detaining you
  .
  

• Not in the least, said the dean politely.
  
• No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean …
  
• Yes, yes: I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point:
  detain
  .
  40
  

Again, Stephen shows himself to be a disciple of Newman in his conviction that religious faith is a question of individual conversion and conviction, ‘real assent’, as opposed to mere group membership, or ‘notional assent’, according to Newman’s discussion in the
Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent
. While Newman points out, in chapter four of the
Grammar
, that the distinction between ‘notional’ and ‘real’ assent is not concerned primarily with ‘assent in the matters of Religion’, Stephen fears that his own peculiar hell would consist in giving ‘comfortable assent to propositions without in the least ordering one’s life in accordance with them’.
4
1
Stephen’s process of ‘conversion’, moreover, runs parallel to Newman’s in his tendency to follow ‘intuition’, a sense of ‘strange unrest’, the exercise of imagination, and conscience in the form of private judgment.

For Newman and Stephen metanoia is akin to rebellion, apostasy, acting against the tide (small wonder Newman has an ironic admiration for Julian the Apostate). Stephen finds it harder to ‘merge his life with the common tide of other lives … than any fasting or prayer’.
4
2
Both sacrifice family and community identity in order to follow private judgment and conscience. Newman writes: ‘The resolution I speak of has been taken with reference to myself alone

… without reference to success or failure other than personal.’
43

Newman’s influence on the young Joyce is theoretical, and even, by analogy, theological in structure. Above all it is stylistic in the deeper sense of style expounded in the
Idea
, anticipating the high modern in literature. For Newman style is not a superficial gloss on writing; it is the deepest expression of personality. The style of the literary genius, Newman writes, is:

the faithful expression of his intense personality, attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow: so that we might as well say that one man’s shadow is another’s as that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself. It follows him about
as
a shadow. His thought and feeling are personal, and so his language is personal.
44

THE
IDEA
AND DISSENT

Newman characterised Anglo-Catholicism as a paper Church, as we have seen; and there is a sense in which his idea of a university is a paper university: an ideal rather than a reality. The structures, funding, and expansion of major universities in the West have become ever more remote from the possibility of the ideal

university Newman had in mind. Not only are universities today heavily biased towards research rather than teaching, but the smorgasbord of vocational courses offered at undergraduate level could never have been envisaged in the mid-nineteenth century: degrees in sports technology, hospitality, shoe-craft, business studies, journalism,
etc.
At the same time, academics are now governed by monetarist business models – the application of the market to the curriculum and research ‘outcomes’; the survival of disciplines based on ‘client’ choice. Distance learning expansion, moreover, takes universities ever further from the kind of ideal face-to-face ‘college’ communities of Newman’s day.

Given the changing times, the sheer size of such universities, and the enormous contrast in backgrounds of students, it is difficult to see how Newman’s vision could be anything but a remote overview, such as Edward Said invokes. In his preface to Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind
(a book that contains many echoes of Newman’s
Idea
), Saul Bellow confirms, at least negatively, the central need Newman predicts and anticipates for our time. Bellow’s strongly autobiographical fictional character, Charlie Citrine in
Humboldt’s Gift,
attends Chicago University. He tells us: ‘I meant that novel to show how little strength “higher education” had to offer a troubled man.’
⁴⁵
Published in 1973, the novel describes the period of the Vietnam War, student protests, dissent in academe. Where do literature, poetry, the university, stand in the era of the industrial-military complex?

The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing.… Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system.
46

But the channel is always there, Bellow argues, in the kind of university which enables students to ‘make final judgments and put everything together’. Bellow refers to this as ‘that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness…. The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune

… from the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about.’ He concludes:

The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.
47

Would Newman have deplored the sacking of Berkeley academics during the McCarthy era? Or applauded the student protests in the 1960s against the Vietnam War? Newman sets the scene of an academic community with passion, commitment, and potential for activism as a place

in which the intellect may safely range and speculate, sure to find its equal in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the tribunal of truth … where the professor becomes eloquent and is missionary and a preacher, displaying his science in its most complete and most winning form, pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, and lighting up his own love of it in the breasts of his hearers.
48

Zeal gives rise to radicalism, or dissent, where members of the community feel ‘a disgust and abhorrence, towards excesses and enormities of evil, which are often or ordinarily reached at length by those who are not careful from the first to set themselves against what is vicious and criminal’.
49

CHAPTER 12
‌‌

Tribulations, heresy, and the faithful

‘What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain. These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right

at all … Dr Newman is the most dangerous man in England …’

LETTER FROM MONSIGNOR GEORGE TALBOT TO MONSIGNOR HENRY MANNING

‘I listen, and I hear the sound of voices, grave and musical, renewing the old chant, with which Augustine greeted Ethelbert in the free air upon the Kentish strand.’ Newman preached these words at Oscott College on 13 July 1852.
¹
The occasion was the first synod of the newly restored Catholic hierarchy; the sermon was entitled ‘The Second Spring’. ‘Something strange is passing over this land, by the very surprise, by the very commotion, which it excites’, he went on. ‘It is the Coming in of a Second Spring; it is a restoration in the moral world.’
²
The college chapel, recently furnished by Pugin, was filled to capacity with bishops, clergy, and representatives of the religious orders. He spoke of the magnificence of Oscott’s buildings, and the procession through its cloisters of vested, chanting clergy in due precedence. He pulled out all the rhetorical stops as he reflected on the dark days of persecution when Catholics in England had survived, like the persecuted early Christians, ‘in corners, and alleys, and cellars, and the housetops, or in the recesses of the country; cut off from the populous world around them, and simply seen, as if through a mist or in twilight, as ghosts flitting to and fro …’
³
A Second Spring had come, but he offered a warning, exploiting the vernal conceit with a characteristically paradoxical flourish. This Spring, he reflected, might ‘turn out to be an English spring, an uncertain, anxious time of hope and fear, of joy and suffering, – of bright promise and budding hopes, yet withal, of keen blasts, and cold showers, and sudden storms.’
⁴
It was not among the best of his sermons, but there was a touch of the old magic in his words and the delivery; many in the congregation wept openly, including Cardinal Wiseman. They crowded around him affectionately in the college cloisters, offering their congratulations. Yet it would not be long before Newman himself would experience ‘cold showers’ of that spring time.