Literary Giants Literary Catholics Read Free Page B

dissatisfaction with the drabness of the Victorian spirit and a quest for the purity and adventure of a healthier age. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, perhaps the greatest of the Pre-Raphaelites, chose Marian themes such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and The Annunciation , or Dantean allegories such as Beata Beatri , to convey a Catholic vision to a sceptical world. He also wrote fine religious verse, overflowing with medieval spirituality, akin to Coleridge’s earlier poetic quest for pre-Reformation purity. Yet Rossetti, unlike his sister, was not an orthodox believer. Neither was Ruskin, who spent several months in a monastic cell in Assisi, basking in the Franciscan spirit, before declaring that he had no need to convert since he was already more Catholic than the Church.
    Ruskin’s vision, and that of the Pre-Raphaelites, was, at best, a baptism of desire into the Catholic spirit; at worst, their vision lacked any ultimate reality. It would take a remarkable man to unite the vision with the reality.
    John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism in 1845 sent shock waves through the Anglican establishment. Already well known as a leading protagonist of the Oxford movement, Newman’s reception into the Church was a courageously decisive act by a catalytically incisive mind. His act of conversion united the Catholic vision with the Catholic reality, the artistic word with the flesh of the Divine Artist, and the creative mind with the Body of the Church. In Newman, the convert and the authentic tradition became one.
    Newman endeavored to explain the process of conversion in his first novel, Loss and Gain , a fictionalized semiautobiographical account of a young man’s quest for faith amid the scepticism and uncertainties of early-Victorian Oxford. It remains one of the classic Victorian novels. The novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward believed that it was one of the works to which “the future student of the nineteenth century will have to look for what is deepest, most intimate, and most real in its personal experience”. Newman also addressed the issue of conversion in his historical novel Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century . Although the setting had changed drastically, the same perennial questions confronted the characters of the third century as had beset Charles Reding, the youthful hero of Loss and Gain , sixteen hundred years later. A similar novel, Fabiola: A Tale of the Catacombs , had been published the previous year by Cardinal Wiseman, who was somewhat less subtle than Newman in his use of the fictional medium for propaganda purposes:
We need not remind our readers, that the office then performed was essentially, and in many details, the same as the daily witness at the catholic altar. Not only was it considered, as now, to be the Sacrifice of Our Lord’s Body and Blood, not only were the oblation, the consecration, the communion alike, but many of the prayers were identical; so that the Catholic hearing them recited, and still more the priest reciting them, in the same language as the Roman Church of the catacombs spoke, may feel himself in active and living communion with the martyrs who celebrated, and the martyrs who assisted at, those sublime mysteries.
    Whereas Fabiola remains Cardinal Wiseman’s best-known work, much of Newman’s finest work was still to come. His Apologia , first published in 1865, remains probably the finest exposition of a religious conversion ever written in the English language. Its candor and clarity of vision won over many who had previously been hostile to Catholicism, and perhaps no book published since has been quite so instrumental in the popularizing of the Catholic faith in England.
    In his Sermons Addressed to Mixed Congregations , published in 1849, Newman conveys with pyrotechnic profundity the fact that the modern world faces a stark choice between authentic tradition and the abyss of nihilism:
Turn away from the Catholic Church, and to whom will you go? it is your only