NEWMAN SOCIETY, AUCKLAND

New Zealand Tablet, 14 January 1915, Page 11

NEWMAN SOCIETY, AUCKLAND

NEWMAN'S 'APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA.'

PRIZE ESSAY BY MISS M. C. CALLAN, AUCKLAND.

There is, I think, no lover of literature who has

not often felt the strong vitality inherent in a real book, as distinguished from what Charles Lamb calls

' books which are no books,' ' things in book's clothing.' Towards the making of every real book has gone a largo portion of human vitality, and as we turn at random the pages of such a volume, they seem to glow with life, until their very presence near us on the shelves is companionship. This mysterious life is possessed in full measure by Newman's famous Apologia Pro Vita Sua. In reading it, one comes very close to the wan old man, writing at his desk, sometimes through the hours of a long night, at the close of which he would be found weeping like a child, bowed down by the weight of the sad memories he had evoked. For around him as he wrote stood the infinitely sad phantoms of his early hopes and dreams, the stern spectres of long abandoned ideals. And as we read, these ghosts of

an earlier time live again for us in its pages. Overshadowing the childhood or youth of most of us, loomed up the mighty figure of John Henry Newman. About his serene and noble personality there hung still the dust and smoke of a great conflict, dimly recognised by us, the children of a later generation. Early in our memories came the end of that lengthy and full life, laid down at last, we may think, with almost the words of his own Gerontius :—■

Novissima hora est; and I fain would sleep, The pain has wearied me .... Into Thy hands,

O Lord, into Thy hands. . : . ~.'

To one who has grown up from childhoood in the vague tradition of this great figure, and of the profound upheaval of the mid-nineteenth century, in which he was the central figure, the Apologia is a work of intense and absorbing interest. It is the account of the life-and-death struggle of a soul, and a soul of no ordinary calibre. Browning says:

‘ When the fight begins within himself, A man’s worth something, God stoops o’er his head, Satan looks up between his feet —both tug He’s left, himself, in the middle: the soul wakes and grows.’ But the waking and growing of the soul is often a painful process, and to the last page, the impression made by the Apologia is one of intense pathos. Though this be the history of the noble victory of a noble soul, it is yet no triumphal record. For it is the conscientiously told story of perhaps the most terrible mental tragedy which can possibly overtake a human being, the gradual and sensible withdrawal of early ideals. This loss, even if it is only a transmutation, as it was in Newman’s case; is always a sore trial to a man of pure and generous soul, who has laid upon the

altar all that is most precious to him in lifehis future, his genius, his leisure, his position, and his powers of leadership. All-'these things were cheerfully offered by the young Oxford clergyman in the cause which he had chosen to espouse, that of the Church of his youth. And, with the faith and patience of a modern Elias, he looked for the sacred fire to come down from heaven and consume his offering, kindling into life the smouldering ashes of the English Church. But behold the altar so laboriously heaped with the treasures of his youth, remained cold and unvisited of heaven, while before his incredulous eyes., the sacred spark grew more visibly bright upon what he had thought to be the altars of Baal. For God asked of him the ultimate sacrifice. Following the call of Duty, that ' stern daughter of the voice of God,' his sensitive and affectionate nature was to tear itself away from the home of his youth, and to pass into a strange laid; this proud spirit, so long a banner-bearer in the strife, was to own its error, and in the sight of the opposing armies, to cross to the ranks of the enemy. It was a man of forty-four who came into the fold of the Catholic Churcha man in the prime of life, as the ages of men go. But it was a man wjio knew that the youthful fire, which burns only once in a lifetime, had been quenched in him.

Almost exactly fifty years Inter, another distinguished convert from Anglicanism, Robert Hugh Bensou, gave his story to the world, and it is interesting to compare the two documents. Is it putting the case too strongly to say that, looking to the exact meaning of the words, Benson's attitude of mind is that of a convert, while the older writer's is that of a pervert, a man who was repelled, step by step, from Anglicanism, by the sheer overwhelming logic of facts, without being attracted towards Catholicism ? He was turned away from the object of his youthful love, expelled from his Eden by an angel bearing the flaming sword of Truth that flame which was to him the pillar of fire in the night of this life. Benson's autobiography, on the other hand, shows an attraction towards Rome, increasing until further resistance became incompatible with good faith : and his concluding chapter is a paean of joy and gratitude for the blessings of his new-found home. There is nothing akin to this in the Apologia, which produces on the reader rather the painful impression of one who sees a climber gradually losing his foothold on a slippery mountain slope, and falling inert and powerless to the plain below. Newman's great work is divided into five chapters or sections. The first deals with his childhood and

youth up to the time when he decided upon his vocation. It is perhaps the pleasantest part of the book, for it is instinct with youthful enthusiasm, and read in conjunction with his earlier poems, it betrays the intensely spiritual and austere cast of his mind, and his rare singleness of heart. It is not by chance that Newman's first poem, written at the age of 17, should be in praise of solitude:

' There is in stillness oft a magic power To calm the breast, when struggling passions lower:

Touched by its influence, in the soul arise Diviner feelings, kindred with the skies. It is not solely in the freedom given To purify and fix the heart on heaven ; There is a Spirit singing aye in air, That lifts us high above all mortal care.'

His mind was undoubtedly that of a natural contemplative, drawn by a strong attraction, to solitude, silence, and meditation. Traces of this are found all through his writings and had he been born a Catholic, it is easy to picture him finding happiness in one of the ancient contemplative Orders of the Church. He himself fully recognised his natural aloofness from the ordinary pursuits of humanity. .His conviction of his vocation to celibacy came very early in life; and in 1833 he wrote the following lines:

Thrice blessed are they, who feel their loneliness, To whom no voice of friends nor pleasant scene Brings ought on which the saddened heart can lean.'

And his birthday prayer at 18 was: ' Give to me, Great Lord, the constant soul, Nor fooled by pleasure, nor enslaved by care. What, though alone my sober hours I .wear, No friend in view, and sadness o'er my mind Throws her dark veil—Thou but accord this prayer And I will bless Thee for my birth, and find That stillness breathes sweet tones, and solitude is kind. Each coming year, O grant it' to refine All purer motions of this anxious breast, Kindle the steadfast flame of love divine, And comfort mo with holier thoughts possest, Till this worn body slowly sink to rest, This feeble spirit to the sky aspire.'

He little knew by what hard and devious ways his 'constant soul' was to find its God, nor what poignant sadness was to throw its dark veil over his mind. For the ideal of his youth was a reformation within a reformation, the glorious resurrection of the ' Ecclesia Anglicana ' to the fullness of spiritual life. ' Wait the bright advent that shall loose thy chain,' says the eager young Levite to his Mother Church.

' E'en now the shadows break, and gleams divine Edge the dim distant line.'

Alas, that such pure and disinterested zeal should have been expended in such an ungrateful task. Newman and his friend, Hurrell Froude, returned to England full of high hopes, choosing for their motto the proud line of Homer—•

' You shall know the difference, now that I am back

again.'

It was during this early period of his life that Newman wrote his best-known poem, 'Lead, Kindly Light,' and indeed his whole mind at that time was evidently bent on the idea of supernatural light. In the midst of the fever and delirium with which, he was stricken in Sicily, he repeated again and again: ' I shall not die, for I have not sinned against light.' This utterance, which he admits that he cannot explain, might well have been an unconscious prophecy of the future course of his life. Because he never, during the whole of his long career, sinned deliberately against the light, his soul did not taste the atrophy and death which inevitably follows upon unfaithfulness to grace.

From 1838 to 1839 came six years of generous toil, described in detail in the second chapter of the work. Newman and his friends set themselves to stem the tide of liberalism which then first threatened to engulf the English Church. Newman endeavoured to erect against it three barricades or break-waters—belief in the necessity of dogma for the existence of true religion, belief in a visible Church, based on that foundation of dogma, and belief in the Anglican Church, as the via media between the gross errors of Popery on the one hand, and religious laxity and unbelief on the other. These were the years of Newman's closest and most intimate friendship. For, in spite of a certain austerity and spirituality of character, which came between him and the ordinary whole-hearted and forbearing friendships of men, he had an almost womanly craving for affection and companionship. He addresses more than one of his men friends as ' Carissime ' in his letters. And yet between him and all the intimate friends of his youth, there fell in the end the pall of death or alienation of sympathy owing to divergent views. Newman's unfeigned conviction that the things of the soul far outweighed all other considerations in life, and his unhesitating obedience to the dictates of his conscience, caused many a breach between him and those who had been his companions. As Francis Thompson puts it in the ' Hound of Heaven ' — „

'I pleaded, outlaw-wise, * By many a hearted casement curtained red, / Trellised with intertwining charities, But if one little casement opened wide, The gust of His approach would clash it to. 7 -

Towards the end oj ' this ' second chapter of the Apologia, there creeps into the story a tinge of that deep melancholy which is henceforth its dominant note. For failure was dogging the footsteps of the youthful enthusiasts, -- and its icy breath froze the courageous , warmth of their spirits. They strove so hard to infuse a portion of their own vitality into the Anglican Church, that had the vital spark still lingered within her, they must have succeeded.- But life was gone, drowned in the floods of error which for centuries had rolled over England since she lost her secure foothold on the rock of Peter. To the horror of Newman, it began to be evident to him that they were endeavouring »to restore circulation to the limbs of a corpse. The third section embraces the critical period from 1839 to 1841, two years during which he strove by every means in his power to find a logical basis for his affection for the English Church. The chapter commences with what is, I think, the most perfect passage in the book, a passage which is probably unsurpassed in English prose for simplicity, nobility, pathos, and unerring discrimination in the use of words. As an example of Newman at his very best, it: is worth quoting as a whole:— /

And now that l/am about to trace, as far as I can, the course of that great revolution of mind,, which led me to leave my own home, to which I was bound by so many strong and tender tics, I feel overcome with the difficulty of satisfying myself in my account of it, and have recoiled from doing so, till the near approach of the day, on which these linos must be given to the world, forces me to set about the task. For who can know himself, and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him, and who can recollect, at the distance of 25 years, all that he once knew about his thoughts and his deeds, and that, during a portion of his life, when even at the time his observation, whether of himself or of the external world, was less than before or after, by very reason of the perplexity and dismay which weighed upon him, when, though it would be most unthankful to seem to imply that he had not all sufficient light amid his darkness, yet a darkness it emphatically was? ... as to that calm contemplation of the past, in itself so desirable, who can afford to be leisurely and deliberate, while ,he practises on himself a cruel operation, the ripping up of old griefs, and the venturing again upon the "infandum dolorem" of years, in which the stars of this lower heaven were one by one going out?"

This is not, like John Ruskin's language at his best, ' poured at once forth in a burning flow,' nor like Macaulay's eloquence, is it ' piled up in a grand array of words.' But there is a jewel-like purity and clarity in it which is entirely characteristic of the mind of Newman. Notice, too, his sure and delicate touch ,011 the subtlest vibrations of literary association, in the way he almost unconsciously makes us recall with him, Virgil's beautiful lines, Jain nor in umida ratio I'raccipitat, siHtdetitque cadentia- side/a sonuios.

Newman goes on to describe in powerful and touching words his first glimpse-of the real status of the modern English Church, a vision which indeed faded from the surface of his mind for a lime, but never again left the depths of his soul to their former tranquillity. Light came to him first through'his veneration for the primitive Church, and his almost adoring heroworship of her mighty champions:

' It was difficult to make out how the Eutychians or Monophysites were heretics, unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also . . . the principles and proceedings of heretics then, were those of Protestants now. I found it so, almost, fearfully : there was

an awful similitude, more awful, because so silent and unimpassioned, between the dead records of the past and the feverish chronicle of the present. The shadow of the fifth century was on the sixteenth. It was like a spirit rising from the troubled waters of the old world, with the shape and lineaments of the new.

What was the use of continuing the controversy, or defending my position if, after all, I was turning devil's advocate against the much-enduring Athanasius and the

'.'■"."'■■'. .'V'.'"--' K. : : "..;)■ |'f.'i'-. : -.-: '";■:■•' .' : . '. v '- v " ' majestic Leo. Be my soul w with : the ' saints! ' and shall I lift up my hand against them ? Sooner, may my right hand forget her cunning, and wither outright, as his who once stretched it out 'against, a. prophet of God ! Anathema. to a whole tribe of Cranmers, Ridley Latimers, and Jewels! perish the names of Bramhall, Ussher, Taylor, Stillingfleet, and Borrow from the face of the earth, ere I should do ought but fall at their feet in love and worship, whose image was continually before my eyes, and whose musical words were ever in my ears and on my tongue !'

\ Newman in another place speaks wonderingly and somewhat unsympathetically of a convert who was first attracted towards Catholicism by his love of architectural beauty, but it is quite evident that his first and perhaps his only real attraction towards Rome was her historical identity with the Church of the Fathers, and his personal veneration of the Fathers. The words of St. Augustine, Securus judical orbis terrarum, quoted by Cardinal Wiseman in an article in the Dublin Review, rang in his ears, and to his mind, interpreted and summed up ecclesiastical history to the complete destruction of the Anglican theory. Those simple words proved the death-blow to Newman's Anglican convictions, lie himself compares what followed in the years between 1841 to 1845 to the record of a deathbed. ' A deathbed,' lie says truly, 'has scarcely a history; it is a tedious decline, with seasons of rallying and seasons of falling back : and ... it has little interest for the leader, especially if he has a kind heart.' Yet this section of the book is much the longest of any, nor does it pall upon the reader ; for the working of an abnormally lucid and acute mind can never become wearisome. By every device in his power, Newman strove to reconcile the affections of his heart with the ever-advanc-ing and pitiless logic of his head. He, indeed, speaks impatiently of those who rely upon paper logic. Non in dialectia complacint Dens salvum facere populum mum, he quotes. But to the reader of his autobiography it seems as though nothing but the most resistless logic could have driven him forth from the dwelling place of his heart. Less than a year before he was actually received into the Church, he wrote to a friend:

' I have no existing sympathies with Roman Catholics : I hardly ever, even abroad, was at one of their services : I know none of them, I do not like what I hear of them.'

And so evident is his unmitigated dislike of the Catholic Church that it is a distinct shock when he writes abruptly: ' I am this night expecting Father Dominic, the Passionist. . . . He does not know of my intentions, but I mean to ask of him admission into the One Fold of Christ.' The 'postscript is highly significant: ' This will not go till all is over.'

A deathbed, indeed ! Yet who can wonder if Newman felt indeed as if the springs of hope and effort were dry in him ? Worn out by his intense and protracted mental strain, harassed by friends and enemies to declare his intentions before he knew them himself, dazzled by the blinding glare of publicity which beat upon his actions, torn by scruples as to the possibility of his retaining office as an Anglican minister, and racked "by heart pangs of separation from all that was dear to him, what room was there in his mind for hope and joy in the future? Hence, I think, the mental effect of the last chapter of the Apologia, The Position of my Mind Since 1845.' The central idea of the book is a positive inspiration, a definite statement of the ideals and the aims which had shaped his life, and formed it to adult stature. Challenged and calumniated, he had flung back response and denial ; but he had done more, as he himself put —'l must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me.' And in so far as he substituted a positive picture for a negative denial, he did well and wisely. But the last chapter is essentially negative. It is void of enthusiasm, of spontaneity, though not because Newman had no enthusiasm for the Catholic faith. By the time he wrote the Apologia, 20 years after his reception into the Church, his mind and his heart were both fully

* enlisted in the cause which he espoused,, as-is shown bqth in his life and his other literary works. . But the effort of writing the earlier chapters evidently recalled so vividly to him the deep depression and hopelessness of those bygone days, that the chapter on his position * in the Catholic Church lacks those positive qualities which, written under happier auspices, it • would probably have possessed. There is, indeed, a fine bit of constructive/Writing in which Newman bases his belief in the infallibility of the Church on the very idiosyncrasies' and weaknesses of our fallen human nature. But as a whole, it' partakes too much of the character of a defence to be truly inspiriting. One feels that the author never once lets himself go, that he has too much sense of responsibility as counsel for the defence, to preach a worthy panegyric. It may be, of course, that the natural characteristics and training of the Oxford graduate forbade any other treatment of his present religious position in a work which was so emphatically intended for the outside world. The Catholic Church is undoubtedly divinely fitted to be the home of all men’s souls. But whole types and classes of men’ may, by process of heredity and training, gradually drift away from that Universal Home. Who can doubt but that John Henry Newman, the highly specialised product of an English Protestant University, was an example of such a type ? By the sheer force of logic, by the aid of the mighty brain God had given him, and by his faithful and courageous following of supernatural light, he at length, found his true home; but there were many natural affections and prejudices which had to be conquered before he became a citizen of that great City. The Apologia Pro Vita Sua is the story of the gradual subduing of those prejudices, the gradual weakening of those affections. It is the strange history of the mental and moral processes by which the Rev. Mr. Newman, the highly cultured and spiritual young English clergyman, who in all sincerity spoke of the Pope as anti-Christ, and Rome as the Scarlet Woman, changed his restrained and sober black for the imperial purple of a Prince of the Church of God.