Preview: Gerontius and the Four Last Things

Matt Swaim and I will talk about Blessed John Henry Newman's great poem about the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell on the Son Rise Morning Show, Monday September 9 in our Santo Subito Series! (6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern)

The plot of Blessed John Henry Newman's poem The Dream of Gerontius is simple:

1) Gerontius is on his deathbed and receives Last Rites and prays before he dies
2) Gerontius dies and experiences the afterlife as a disembodied Soul
3) Gerontius' Soul meets his Guardian Angel
4) His Soul encounters the demons of Hell on his way to Judgment
5) The Soul hears the choirs of heavenly Angels on his way to Judgment
5) The Soul is judged and sent to Purgatory
6) The Soul's Guardian Angel deposits him in Purgatory and promises to come back to convey him to Heaven

Newman wrote this poem, the longest he'd ever written, on 52 scraps of paper between January 17 and February 7, 1865. One of his biographers, Wilfrid Ward, describes its composition:

Now, after the abandonment of the Oxford scheme gave him leisure for it, he set down in dramatic form the vision of a Christian's death on which his imagination had been dwelling. The writing of it was a sudden inspiration, and his work was begun in January and completed in February 1865. "On the 17th of January last," he writes to Mr. Allies in October, "it came into my head to write it, I really can't tell how. And I wrote on till it was finished on small bits of paper, and I could no more write anything else by willing it than I could fly." To another correspondent [The Rev. John Telford, priest at Ryde] also, who was fascinated by the Dream, and longed to have the picture it gave still further filled in, he wrote:

"You do me too much honour if you think I am to see in a dream everything that is to be seen in the subject dreamed about. I have said what I saw. Various spiritual writers see various aspects of it; and under their protection and pattern I have set down the dream as it came before the sleeper. It is not my fault if the sleeper did not dream more. Perhaps something woke him. Dreams are generally fragmentary. I have nothing more to tell."

The Oxford Scheme mentioned by Ward (son of William George Ward, the ultramontanist) was the plan to found an Oratory in Oxford to serve Catholic men attending one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford. At last, Catholics could attend and earn degrees at Oxford (and Cambridge) because they did not have to swear oaths to uphold the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England any more. 

Catholics could attend and earn degrees but the English hierarchy did not think it was a good idea. Although Newman was back in favor--both in Rome and in Oxford--after the publication of the Apologia pro Vita Sua, the College of Propaganda Fide and the hierarchy still didn't want him at Oxford again. Newman himself wasn't sure he wanted to be in Oxford again. Nevertheless, Newman, the Birmingham Oratorians, and his friend James Hope-Scott had started work to buy five acres in Oxford and plan an Oratory. The difficulties of this venture continued for several months and then opposition to his involvement led Newman to stop trying to make it work. 

Perhaps after such strain of confusion, controversy, and confrontation, it was restful to contemplate the certainties of God's justice and mercy when a man dies. No more secrecy and indirection; the soul meets Jesus, knows Him, knows himself, and looks forward to being with the Holy Trinity and the saints in Heaven after his purgation. Newman explored the Church's dogmatic teachings about death and judgement, heaven and hell in a mystical, dreamy poem, harking back to his childhood love of fantasy and wonder--his sense that life was somehow a dream--while reflecting his assent to the certainties of divine revelation and his faith in the reality of God. He also includes liturgical and devotional prayers for the dying and the death, including the Litany of the Saints and the Proficiscere prayer ("Go forth, Christian Soul") in a supremely, confidently Catholic poem.

The Dream of Gerontius was then published in The Month, a periodical founded in 1864 by the convert Frances Margaret Taylor (Mother Magdalen of the Sacred Heart, Poor Servants of the Mother of God). The Jesuits in England bought The Month in 1865 and Father Henry James Coleridge, another convert (great nephew of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge), became the publisher and editor. It was then included in Newman's Verses on Various Occasions in 1867.

The poem was very well received by Catholics and some Anglicans alike. Charles Kingsley, his recently vanquished foe, William Gladstone, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, the decadent school poet, admired the poem's verse and power. Francis Hastings Doyle, the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, gave a lecture on The Dream of Gerontius in 1868. News that General George Gordon, "Chinese Gordon", had a copy of the poem with him at Khartoum--and that he had annotated it--when he was attacked and killed in January 1885 gave the poem even greater notoriety. As Ian Ker notes in his biography of Newman "interest in the fate of Gordon of Khartoum" was so intense that William Neville transcribed Gordon's annotations into copies of The Dream of Gerontius! (p. 741).

Those annotations would play a role in Edward Elgar's setting The Dream of Gerontius to music for the Birmingham Music Festival in 1900--but that's another topic. We'll talk about the poem in the context of the Four Last Things, Catholic doctrine, and the liturgy on Monday.