Literary Giants Literary Catholics Read Free Page A

volume, which served as the de facto manifesto of the romantic movement in England, the poets asserted their faith in the integrity of the human soul and derided the spiritual sterility of the sceptical philosophers. Coleridge and Wordsworth both embraced Christianity, and Coleridge, in particular, became an outspoken champion of religious orthodoxy.
    In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” there were early glimpses of Coleridge’s later orthodoxy in the Marian invocation at the beginning of Part V:
         Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
         Beloved from pole to pole!
         To Mary Queen the praise be given!
         She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
         That slid into my soul.
    In this, as in his beautiful translation of “The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn”, a short Latin verse he had discovered in a Catholic village in Germany, Coleridge was seeking a purer vision of Christianity untainted and untarnished by the embryonic scepticism of the more puritanical of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His defense of orthodoxy in both poetry and prose was an earnest endeavor to bridge the “abrupt abyss” of the age in which he was living. In the course of his life’s pilgrimage, his journey in faith, he had scaled the schism of sects and the chasm of secularism to rediscover the wonders of Christendom.
         I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs,
         Loving the God that made me!
    Coleridge was one of the first “moderns” to cast aside the “progressive” traditions of the post-Enlightenment in order to rediscover the authentic traditions of the Church. He would by no means be the last. In many respects he blazed a trail that many others would follow.
    The year before Coleridge died, the Oxford movement was born. Those at the forefront of this traditionalist revolution in the Anglican church—Keble, Pusey, Newman and others—were inheritors of Coleridge’s orthodox mantle and shared his desire for a purer Catholic vision of Christianity beyond the fogs of puritanism. Nowhere was the plaintive cry of the Oxford movement heard so starkly as in the opening lines of a hymn by John Mason Neale:
         Oh, give us back the days of old! oh! give me back an hour!
         To make us feel that Holy Church o’er death hath might and power.
    A similar vision was the inspiration for a young architect, Augustus Pugin, who converted to Roman Catholicism, probably in 1833, and set about promoting the hugely influential Gothic revival. The combined effect of the Oxford movement and the Gothic revival changed the metaphysical atmosphere considerably. As Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the medievalist winds of change were sweeping across England.
    The prophet of neomedievalism in the mid-nineteenth century was John Ruskin, whose influence on his contemporaries was gargantuan in its scope and impact. His art criticism developed into a spiritual history of Europe, epitomized by his famous essay “On the Nature of the Gothic”, and his love for the Italian Renaissance was infectious, introducing whole new generations to the art of the Church. For Ruskin, aestheticism and morality were inseparable. Thus, he argued, the beauty of early Renaissance art flowed freely from its creative source in the moral foundations of medieval Christendom. Consequently, aestheticism inevitably suffered when the humanism of the late Renaissance weakened the link with this Christian source. The more the Renaissance bloomed, he believed, the more it decayed.
    Ruskin was an early champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, a brotherhood of artists who shared his aesthetic vision. Seeking a purer perspective untainted by the decay of the late Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites chose Catholic religious themes and scenes of mythic medieval chivalry as their subjects, painted in vivid color and detail. Their opposition to the fashionable conventions of Victorian modernism, both in art and morals, was itself a