Chesterton and Newman on English Catholic Literature

Our Wichita chapter of the American Chesterton Society will meet next week at Eighth Day Books to conclude our discussion of The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, reading the last three essays. The first of those three is titled "If They Had Believed" (Chapter 33) and Chesterton brings up John Henry Newman's summing up of English Literature:

ONE of the things our enemies do not know is the real case for their own side. It is always for me a great matter of pride that the proudest, the most genuine and the most unanswerable boast, that the Protestants of England could ever make, was made for them by a Catholic. Very few of the Protestants, of his time at any rate, would have had the historical enlargement or enlightenment to make it. For it was said by Newman, when that great master of English was surveying the glorious triumphs of our tongue from Bacon and Milton, to Swift and Burke, and he reminded us firmly that, though we convert England to the true faith a thousand times over, "English literature will always HAVE BEEN Protestant." 

That generous piece of candour might well be represented as even too generous; but I think it is very wise for us to be too generous. It is not entirely, or at least not exclusively true. The name of Chaucer is alone enough to show that English literature was English a long time before it was Protestant. Even a Protestant, if he were also English, could ask for nobody more entirely English than Chaucer. He was, in the essential national temper, very much more English than Milton. As a matter of fact, the argument is no stronger for Chaucer than it is for Shakespeare. But in the case of Shakespeare the argument is long and complicated, as conducted by partisans; though sufficiently simple and direct for people with a sense of reality. I believe that recent discoveries, as recorded in a book by a French lady, have very strongly confirmed the theory that Shakespeare died a Catholic. But I need no books and no discoveries to prove to me that he had lived a Catholic, or more probably, like the rest of us, tried unsuccessfully to live a Catholic; that he thought like a Catholic and felt like a Catholic and saw every question as a Catholic sees it. The proofs of this would be matter for a separate essay; if indeed so practical an impression can be proved at all. It is quite self-evident to me that he was a certain real and recognisable Renaissance type of Catholic; like Cervantes; like Ronsard. But if I were asked offhand for a short explanation, I could only say that I know he was a Catholic from the passages which are now used to prove he was an agnostic.

Then Chesterton poses an intriguing question: What "If They Had Believed" in Catholicism?:

But that is another and much more subtle question, which is not the question I proposed to myself in starting this essay. In starting it, I proposed to grant the whole sound and solid truth of Newman's admission; that there has indeed arisen out of the disunion of Europe a great and glorious English Protestant literature; and to make some further speculations upon the point. And I think that nothing could make clearer to the modern English, the one supreme thing that they don't know (which is what our religion really is and why we think it real) than to put this rather interesting historical question. What difference would it have made to the great masters of English literature, if they had been Catholics?

He discusses a few examples, Bunyan, Milton, the Romantics, and then comes back to Milton and even Sir Walter Scott:

I take it that the imaginative magnificence of Milton's epic, in such matters as the War in Heaven, would have been much more convincing, if it had been modelled more on the profound mediaeval mysteries about the nature of angels and archangels, and less on the merely fanciful Greek myths about giants and gods. PARADISE LOST is an immortal poem; but it has just failed to be an immortal religious poem. Those are most happy in reading Milton who can read him as they would read Hesiod. It is doubtful whether those seeking spiritual satisfaction now read him even as naturally as they would read Crashaw. I suppose nobody will dispute that the pageantry of Scott might have taken on a tenfold splendour if he could have understood the emblems of an everlasting faith as sympathetically as he did the emblems of a dead feudalism. For him it was the habit that made the monk; but the habit would have been quite as picturesque if there had been a real monk inside it; let alone a real mind inside the monk, like the mind of St. Dominic or St. Hugh of Lincoln. "English literature will always have been Protestant"; but it might have been Catholic; without ceasing to be English literature, and perhaps succeeding in producing a deeper literature and a happier England.

Coincidentally, Father C. John McCloskey provides more insight into Newman's appreciation of Catholic Literature in The Catholic Thing (get it: Chesterton's The Thing, Father McCloskey in The Catholic Thing--too perfect for coincidence!) and its influences:

Blessed John Henry Newman gave a classic justification for paying attention to such works. In his lectures to the students at the Catholic university that he founded in Dublin in the mid-1800s (later published as The Idea of the University), he discusses the meaning and purpose of Catholic literature. And he draws very interesting distinctions – and lessons from them:

When a “Catholic Literature in the English tongue” is spoken of as a desideratum, no reasonable person will mean by “Catholic works” much more than the “works of Catholics.” The phrase does not mean a religious literature. “Religious Literature” indeed would mean much more than “the Literature of religious men;” it means over and above this, that the subject-matter of the Literature is religious; but by “Catholic Literature” is not to be understood a literature which treats exclusively or primarily of Catholic matters, of Catholic doctrine, controversy, history, persons, or politics; but it includes all subjects of literature whatever, treated as a Catholic would treat them, and as he only can treat them.

Newman was clearly trying to stake out a particular kind of writing that would not be the usual apologetics or spiritual works or theology. In his day, he could assume most people would understand what he was getting at: “Why it is important to have them treated by Catholics hardly need be explained here. . . .For it is evident that, if by a Catholic Literature were meant nothing more or less than a religious literature, its writers would be mainly ecclesiastics; just as writers on Law are mainly lawyers, and writers on Medicine are mainly physicians or surgeons.”

The point has a bearing far beyond what might apply in professional groups or academic disciplines: “if this be so, a Catholic Literature is no object special to a University, unless a University is to be considered identical with a Seminary or a Theological School.”

For Newman, the importance of literature stems from our very nature and God-given powers as human beings, especially language:

if by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated,—if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each other,—if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and prophets of the human family,—it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study; rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we master it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the ministers of like benefits to others, be they many or few, be they in the obscurer or the more distinguished walks of life,—who are united to us by social ties, and are within the sphere of our personal influence.

Here is the source for Newman's comments on Catholic Literature.

I think I will bring Father McCloskey's article to our meeting next Friday, November 21, at 6:30 p.m., gathering around the table on the second floor of Eighth Day Books--along with the Maple Bacon and Pumpkin Spice cookies I'm going to bake! If you are in Wichita, drop by and join the group! There will certainly be other refreshments and libations!

This a Job for an English Major!

When I majored in English Language and Literature and then went on to earn an M.A. in the same subject, the question often was--"What are you going to DO with those degrees?" or  "How are you going to get a job?" The common argument for the "usefulness" of the Liberal Arts was that I was going to know how to think, how to do research, how to write, how to express ideas--to teach, to persuade, etc. Now I find out that I--were I a recent graduate--could help airlines apologize, according to this article in The Wall Street Journal, as "Carriers Deploy Software, English Majors to Tell Angry Fliers They're Sorry for Mistakes in Flight":

United Airlines, which had the highest rate of complaints filed at the DOT among major airlines the past three years, has a team of about 450 customer-care agents handling general issues and refunds. Add to that 400 people handing (sic) frequent-flier program issues and about 100 answering baggage-related letters and emails.

Delta Air Lines employs 150 people in Atlanta and Minneapolis to email answers to angry—and complimentary—customers. Many get letter-writing training and are experienced airport agents used to dealing directly with customers.

Airlines say they try to make responses conversational and personal. They aim to apologize and acknowledge the problem, providing more information about the particular situation after research, then offering some compensation as a goodwill gesture, such as some frequent-flier miles. Letters are signed by an employee, though many use pseudonyms.

Complaints are sorted by complexity and by the value of the customer—top-tier frequent fliers and big spenders get priority. A low-level customer may get 3,000 frequent-flier miles for a canceled flight, while a high-value customer who complains is soothed with 10,000 miles.

Agents research incidents to verify and provide explanations. Complaints also are tracked so airlines can peg frequent complainers trawling for extra miles or discounts.

Customer feedback is compiled into reports for top executives, and individual letters—complaint or compliment—do get forwarded to supervisors and employees, airlines say.

American Airlines uses a library of responses built over the years that agents can search and then customize. That allows for consistency and accuracy in responses. "We've gone completely away from corporate-speak to personally showing empathy," said John Romantic, American's managing director of service recovery.

The print article contains additional detail about Southwest Airlines, which employs 200 agents just to respond to customer complaints and compliments. "It's an entry-level job for college graduates. Southwest also employs proofreaders, often English majors."

My first job out of the graduate school as as a proofreader at an advertising agency.

As I was pursuing those degrees, however, my ideal was Blessed John Henry Newman's--that a liberal education was a good in itself, as knowledge is a good in itself, without needing application or usefulness to prove its worth. I'm certainly not sorry about that.

Becoming Jane Austen, 21st Century Style

From The Wall Street Journal, Joy Y. Wang writes about her attempt at time travel, including wearing clothing from Jane Austen's era:

IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a spare room must be in want of a lodger.

That was the case, at least, with the room in London I booked through the home-rental website Airbnb. My host was an attractive 33-year-old Australian solicitor, and for a spell I imagined a romance playing out like a Jane Austen plotline.

Such an encounter would fit neatly into the story arc of the trip. Days before my 30th birthday, I was on a mission: to experience Jane Austen's England and decide if that world holds any relevance for a single woman of today—especially one who, by the standards of Austen's time, would be considered positively spinsterly.

I've been an Austen devotee since first reading "Pride and Prejudice" at the age of 15, and my milestone birthday felt like the right time to explore a country I'd read about extensively but never visited. I'd see if the mineral waters of Bath could cure me of too many hours spent in front of a computer screen and too few spent at the gym. Perhaps a visit to Jane Austen's house in the village of Chawton, where she lived when "Pride and Prejudice" was first published 200 years ago, would fire up my writerly ambitions. I would wander the grounds of Chatsworth, the grand estate in Derbyshire that is thought to have inspired Austen's description of Pemberley in "Pride and Prejudice."

Read the rest here.

The word "devotee" intrigues and puzzles me. Merriam-Webster's on-line dictionary defines "devotee" as  being "an ardent follower, supporter, or enthusiast (as of a religion, art form, or sport)". I am not a devotee of Jane Austen: I am a reader of Jane Austen; I have written about Jane Austen (I wrote my M.A. thesis on "Jane Austen's Persuasion and Hugh Blair's Rhetoric"); I appreciate Jane Austen's art and ability; I enjoy watching adaptations of Jane Austen's works--but I am not "ardent follower, supporter, or enthusiast". I will stipulate that I am odd, but I don't think that Austen needs me to follow, support, or enthuse about her.

On the other hand, the question of Jane Austen as "an ardent follower, supporter, or enthusiast" of Christianity is a topic seldom addressed in criticism of her work, because, as this author notes, her works seem so secular and her clerical characters are so often mocked. Yet, he concludes his analysis of religion in her works in the context of her age:

I read Jane Austen’s novels against a “long eighteenth century” in which Austen firmly stood; against the intellectual prisms that dominated the period—neoclassical hermeneutics, British Empiricism, and Georgian Anglicanism; and against the pervasive and unrelenting reality of unregulated capitalism. My reading does not seek to make theological that which is not theology; but it does seek to make religious that which, for too long, has been misunderstood as secular. In Austen’s world, religious issues are indivisible from secular issues; and religious observance still has a public importance and is not a matter of private observance or psychological journey as it is now considered to be.

If we have become so dedicated to understanding Austen’s novels in the context of their period, then recognizing the unity of Austen’s social and religious vision, whether we choose to believe in it or not, is an urgent critical task. Austen is a Christian humanist who belongs to the neoclassical Enlightenment. She is not a secular humanist whose work can be appropriated to validate the post-Enlightenment critique of the traditional western and Christian world-view. Austen may be a feminist and a capitalist but she is also an Anglican who writes Christian stories. If we—her readers, biographers, and literary critics—fail to grasp the centrality of that fact, and do not rise to the challenge that it presents to reading, biography, criticism, then we will misunderstand her life and misread her novels at their most profound level of interpretation.

Michael Giffen has written a book about Jane Austen and religion, titled Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England, available from Palgrave Macmillan in the UK (Print on Demand):

Jane Austen is often thought of as a secular author, because religion seems absent from her novels, because she satirises her clerical characters, and because history and literacy criticism - and the literary sensibility of the twenty-first century reader - is overwhelmingly secular. Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's published novels against the background of a 'long eighteenth century' that stretched from the Restoration to the end of the Georgian period. He demonstrates that Austen is a neoclassical author of the Enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. His focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order; and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation and reflection on experience. His reading suggests there is a thread of neoclassical philosophy and theology running through and between each of Austen's novels, which is best understood in its cultural context.

Book Review: The Holy Bible, Knox Version

Baronius Press contacted me and asked me to review their new edition of The Holy Bible in the Knox Translation:

The Knox Bible is the ideal translation for those looking to deepen their understanding of the Holy Scriptures. It was hailed as the finest translation of the 20th Century, approved for liturgical use and was endorsed by Pope Pius XII, Archbishop Fulton Sheen and many more.

In the early 20th century, Msgr. Ronald Knox embarked on an entirely new English Bible. He wanted a Bible that did not merely translate the original but made it read as if an Englishman had written it. His translation is spiritual and literary, graceful and lyrical, making it one of the most beautiful vernacular versions of the Holy Bible.

The unique features of the Knox Bible are:

~Translated from the Latin Vulgate and compared with the Greek and Hebrew texts single handedly by Ronald Knox over nine years.
~Uses timeless English, which is both sacral and reverent.
~Set in a single-column format with verse references placed at the side of the text in order to provide a clear and easily readable Bible.
~The full Bible is now available again for the first time in over 50 years, in an edition from Baronius Press, beautifully bound in leather with gilt edges.
~Included with this new edition is a paperback edition of On Englishing the Bible (5.5" x 8", 72 pages) in which Msgr. Knox describes his account of the ordeal, which manages to be both illuminating and full of his wit. Anyone wishing to know more about Knox's translation – and the problems involved in rendering the sacred Scriptures into the vernacular – will be fascinated to hear from the translator himself how he tackled this mammoth project.

So, it's another mammoth project for me to review this Knox version of The Holy Bible--how do I review The Holy Bible? To start, some comments on the quality of the published book produced by Baronius Press. The book as an object is beautiful: from the elegant endpapers to the weight of the paper and its gilt edges, well-bound and pleasing to hold and read. I have had to get used to the single-column format. In the Book of Psalms, I missed the poetic formatting of centered, broken lines.

As to the Knox version and translation, I sampled several favorite passages: The Twenty-Third Psalm, the Suffering Servant verses in Isaiah, the Book of Job, the infancy narrative of St. Luke's Gospel, the Passion narrative in St. John's, and many passages in the Epistles of St. Paul. And I read his book On Englishing the Bible--I liked his comment about the King James Version of The Holy Bible: "The Authorized Version is good English only because English writers, for centuries, have treated it as the standard of good English. Of itself, it is no better English than the Douay . . ." ("Some New Testament Problems", p. 21).

I think Knox achieved what he set as his goal in the Epistles; he comments on the length of St. Paul's sentences and he manages that length well, bringing clarity to some difficult passage of the Epistles. This is beautiful edition of The Holy Bible and one I look forward to using in my devotions for the Year of Faith!

Communion with the Spirit of the Writer

I hope you're having a wonderful Labor Day if you're in the U.S.A., relaxing and maybe reading a good book. Thanks to this blog, I found about this author, Emily Hickey, and her book  Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days. In that Project Gutenberg resource I read this brief chapter:

A man who made many a man and woman love literature and helped them to study it, the late Professor Henry Morley, has said that one who thinks that a bookroom is not a part of the world; one who thinks that, in leaving his books and going forth to commune with nature he is, as it were, passing from death to life, is one who has not yet learned to read. The good Professor saw that books have souls in them, so to speak, and that to love a book really and truly is to hold communion with that which is living and is a part of the great, beautiful scheme of God's great, beautiful world. To love one part of what Our Father has given us should never lead us to despise, or even undervalue, other parts. And we must remember, too, must we not? how one thing helps us to understand another; how great painters and great poets help us to understand the beauty of nature as we might not have understood it without them, just as they help us also to know men and women, and help us to know better some of the fair things in our great and glorious religion; things which God can and does teach without their help when He chooses, though He graciously and lovingly often uses their help—the help He has given them the power of giving—to teach others of His children. Our Father, being Our Father, not just your Father and my Father and his Father and her Father, but Our Father, the Father of us all as one big family of His, brothers and sisters in Him, wills that we all help one another with the gifts He has given us; and the more we can realise that all separate gifts are parts of one great harmonious whole, the more fully we shall live and feel and enjoy.

There is, of course, a delight in exquisite typography, and hand-made paper, and binding into which the soul of a true artist has gone. People may be willing to give large sums for these things, independently of the value of what is under them; or people may value books for their age, or because they are rare, or because they are records of facts which it is well to know and good to be able to verify.

But there is a better way of love than all of these. One may love the book through which one holds communion with the spirit of its writer, being ready to learn from him by direct learning, or by the learning received through suggestion, or through the rousing of the spirit of enquiry, or the spirit of opposition. Is not this the best kind of love, the love by which the thought of man is used by man, the spirit of man holds communion with the spirit of man?

All through the ages, great things have been handed down by written words, and people of all nations have shared one another's national heritage of written thought, and in that sharing made it larger and greater. We are now considering the earlier story of English Catholic literature, and it is surely well that people should know something of what things were said and sung in the olden time; the time when all art, all literature was fed by the great Mother of all Christian art and all Christian literature, the Holy Catholic Church.

As The Catholic English Teacher's main source for his post wrote in The Guardian:

A talented and complex writer, scholar and translator, Emily Henrietta Hickey, 1845-1923, was the daughter of a Protestant rector of Goresbridge, County Wexford. She eventually become a lecturer at Cambridge University, and a Catholic convert. Her history of English Catholic literature is still well worth reading for its lucidity and enthusiasm. She translated verse and tales from the Irish, and might seem to belong to the movement known as the Irish Literary Revival; however, she had a wide-ranging interest in languages and literature, and her contribution to the Revival doesn't seem to have had a nationalist motivation. She was a campaigning feminist, yet became, in her later life, primarily a religious writer. Probably her best-known work is her translation of the late Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon.

"One may love the book through which one holds communion with the spirit of its writer, being ready to learn from him by direct learning, or by the learning received through suggestion, or through the rousing of the spirit of enquiry, or the spirit of opposition."--that's what I love about reading! Happy Labor Day!

Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland

Thanks to Peter Freeman, I'll put this in the file labelled "You Learn Something New Everyday"! From the new on-line crisismagazine, the story of Lady Elizabeth Falkland, playwright and Catholic convert. She was born in 1585, married Henry Cary, 1st Viscount Falkland in 1600 and died in 1639. According to the article, Lady Falkland is

the first known woman to publish an original play in English with the Tragedy of Miriam the Fair Queen of Jewry in 1613. Raised a Protestant, she was something of a celebrity convert in her day.

Despite the intervening four hundred years of history, aspects of Cary’s life after her conversion will seem familiar to modern Catholics. Reportedly, she gave up sugar for Lent; her Protestant husband had to remind her not to eat fish on Fridays, and she was perpetually worried about her children’s faith while raising them in a country that was openly hostile to her religious beliefs.

Yet much of her life also seems quite alien. Perhaps a few of us have been estranged from our families on account of our faith; fewer have kidnapped our own children to prevent them from falling under the influence of Protestant wards. Fewer still have had the king of England place them under house arrest for converting to papism.

That we can say so much about her personal life gives Cary a distinct advantage over Shakespeare in these religious debates. Whereas Shakespeare’s biography is largely lost to time and confined to a few legal documents, Cary’s biography has been preserved for us in a manuscript — The Lady Falkland: Her Life — purportedly composed by her own daughter, another Catholic convert and a Benedictine nun.

The manuscript not only recounts Cary’s conversion to Catholicism, it also offers a kind of how-to guide for inspiring faith in a new generation of Catholics through “indirect evangelization.”

Her method of evangelization, with the aim of bringing her children to the Catholic faith, was to invite both Protestant and Catholic guests to dinner whose conversation would naturally turn to religion and whose conversation stayed measured, rational, and fair. She believed that hearing both sides, her children would choose the right church! Four of her daughters became Benedictine nuns (one wrote her biography) and one of her sons became a Catholic priest, so it worked.

Her husband was honored by both James I and Charles I with important offices--including Lord Deputy of Ireland--but according to the wikipedia article, it does not seem he was a very effective adminstrator at all.