Preview: Part Two of Three: Newman on "The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life"

On Monday, June 17, we'll continue our discussion of Newman's "The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life" on the Son Rise Morning Show. I'll be on at my usual time about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

To remind you of last week's introduction to this Parochial and Plain Sermon: Newman had answered one question: why Jacob spoke of his life, at his advanced age, as being shorter than his ancestors, and in spite of the blessing of many sons and wealth, as being "evil". That's just how human life is, Newman concludes, full of promise, disappointing, and yet inspiring the hope for something more. 

In this next section, he helps someone who has never thought of this idea before imagine it by describing how we might see it happen before our eyes:

This is a thought which will come upon us not always, but under circumstances. And many perhaps of those who at first hearing may think they never felt it, may recognize what I mean, while I describe it.

And then Newman does he does so well: he helps us picture an event and our thoughts about it so it becomes real to us!

Newman fleshes out the circumstances of one human life--of one person we think well of--who is dying and what we might think of him or her:

I mean, when one sees some excellent person, whose graces we know, whose kindliness, affectionateness, tenderness, and generosity,—when we see him dying (let him have lived ever so long; I am not supposing a premature death; let him live out his days), the thought is forced upon us with a sort of surprise; "Surely, he is not to die yet; he has not yet had any opportunity of exercising duly those excellent gifts with which God has endowed him." Let him have lived seventy or eighty years, yet it seems as if he had done nothing at all, and his life were scarcely begun. . . . His days have been but few and evil [like Jacob's], and have become old unseasonably, compared with his capabilities; and we are driven by a sense of them, to look on to a future state as a time when they will be brought out and come into effect. . . . The very greatness of our powers makes this life look pitiful; the very pitifulness of this life forces on our thoughts to another; and the prospect of another gives a dignity and value to this life which promises it; and thus this life is at once great and little, and we rightly contemn it while we exalt its importance.

And Newman has been at deathbeds and knows the truth of them: 

True Christians die as other men. One dies by a sudden accident, another in battle, another without friends to see how he dies, a fourth is insensible or not himself. Thus the opportunity seems thrown away, and we are forcibly reminded that "the manifestation of the sons of God" [Rom. viii. 19.] is hereafter; that "the earnest expectation of the creature" is but waiting for it; that this life is unequal to the burden of so great an office as the due exhibition of those secret ones who shall one day "shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." [Matt. xiii. 43.]

Reading the next paragraphs, I cannot help but think of Newman's later (Catholic) poetic meditation on death and the afterlife, The Dream of Gerontius:

But further (if it be allowable to speculate), one can conceive even the same kind of feeling, and a most transporting one, to come over the soul of the faithful Christian, when just separated from the body, and conscious that his trial is once for all over. Though his life has been a long and painful discipline, yet when it is over, we may suppose him to feel at the moment the same sort of surprise at its being ended, as generally follows any exertion in this life, when the object is gained and the anticipation over. . . . Such, but without any {221} mixture of pain, without any lassitude, dulness, or disappointment, may be the happy contemplation of the disembodied spirit; as if it said to itself, "So all is now over; this is what I have so long waited for; for which I have nerved myself; against which I have prepared, fasted, prayed, and wrought righteousness. Death is come and gone,—it is over. Ah! is it possible? What an easy trial, what a cheap price for eternal glory! A few sharp sicknesses, or some acute pain awhile, or some few and evil years, or some struggles of mind, dreary desolateness for a season, fightings and fears, afflicting bereavements, or the scorn and ill-usage of the world,—how they fretted me, how much I thought of them, yet how little really they are! How contemptible a thing is human life,—contemptible in itself, yet in its effects invaluable! for it has been to me like a small seed of easy purchase, germinating and ripening into bliss everlasting." . . . 

The regenerate soul is taken into communion with Saints and Angels, and its "life is hid with Christ in God;" [Col. iii. 3.] it has a place in God's court, and is not of this world,—looking into this world as a spectator might look at some show or pageant, except when called from time to time to take a part. And while it obeys the instinct of the senses, it does so for God's sake, and it submits itself to things of time so far as to be brought to perfection by them, that, when the veil is withdrawn and it sees itself to be, where it ever has been, in God's kingdom, it may be found worthy to enjoy it. It is this view of life, which removes from us all surprise and disappointment that it is so incomplete: as well might we expect any chance event which happens in the course of it to be complete, any casual conversation with a stranger, or the toil or amusement of an hour.

After death, the Soul of Gerontius speculates:

I went to sleep; and now I am refresh'd,
A strange refreshment: for I feel in me
An inexpressive lightness, and a sense {332}
Of freedom, as I were at length myself,
And ne'er had been before. How still it is!
I hear no more the busy beat of time,
No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse;
Nor does one moment differ from the next.
I had a dream; yes:—some one softly said
"He's gone;" and then a sigh went round the
room.
And then I surely heard a priestly voice
Cry "Subvenite;" and they knelt in prayer.
I seem to hear him still; but thin and low,
And fainter and more faint the accents come,
As at an ever-widening interval.

And after the Soul has become conscious of the presence of the Angel:

Now know I surely that I am at length
Out of the body; had I part with earth,
I never could have drunk those accents in,
And not have worshipp'd as a god the voice
That was so musical; but now I am
So whole of heart, so calm, so self-possess'd,
With such a full content, and with a sense
So apprehensive and discriminant,
As no temptation can intoxicate.
Nor have I even terror at the thought
That I am clasp'd by such a saintliness.

Next week: The conclusion of the sermon.

Image credit (Public Domain): "The Death of the Good Old Man" by William Blake

St. John Fisher and His Biographer, Father Vincent McNabb

Father Vincent McNabb, OP, the Irish-born Dominican who championed the Distributist cause, died on June 17, 1943. CatholicAuthors.com offers this biography:

Father McNabb was born in 1868 in Portaferry, County Down, Ireland, within a few miles of the rock that covers the bones of St. Patrick. "My father," wrote Father McNabb, "was a master 'Mariner' (to give him his noble title) and my mother, a dressmaker." Vincent, who was proud he was the seventh son and the tenth of eleven children, spent his schooldays at the diocesan seminary of St. Malachy's College, Belfast. When asked by the editor of The Catholic Times to lend assistance to Ireland during one of the last crises, Father McNabb wrote in his scalpel-like way that both peoples alike, the people of England and the people of Ireland have been martyred by the same imperious few. He said that he loved Ireland like a mother and England like a wife.

Except for a period of study at the University of Louvain, Father McNabb's Dominican life had been identified with the English province for which he was ordained in 1891. On November 10, 1885, he had joined the novitiate of the English Dominicans at Woodchester in Gloucestershire. He walked about London in habit and army boots. A born controversialist, he often spoke in Hyde Park for the Catholic Evidence Guild. He had a fine sense of humor and a soaring eloquence. A zealous priest, he did a lot of work among the poor. In St. Pancras, London slum, he actually lived the extreme poverty enjoined by the gospel. An admirer wrote, while Father Vincent was still alive: "It is wonderful to see that happy lace with its look of smiling quizzical inquiry come from among a swirl of anxious self-absorbed London faces, the habit billowing from the lean, alert old figure like the drapes of winged victory.' He practiced a rigid asceticism. While he had a chair and a bed in his room he never used them. He either stood or knelt. There were just about four books in his room, a Bible, a Breviary, the Dominican constitutions, and the Summa of St. Thomas.

Father McNabb was a prolific writer:

He is the author of about thirty books. Among them are: Infallibility; The New Testament Witness to St. Peter; Oxford Conferences on Prayer; Oxford Conferences on Faith; Our Reasonable Service; Frontiers of Faith and Reason (thirty scholarly papers on Scripture); The Catholic Church and Philosophy; Thoughts Twice Dyed. Father McNabb's The Church and Reunion, shows a long interest in the subject. On this topic he wrote numerous articles between 1902 and 1936. An authority on economics, he had long been an advocate of the "Back-to-the-Land" movement and treats of it in his book, The Church and the Land. The city, he said, is the graveyard of religion and the machine age is the doom of mankind. His book Old Principles and the New Order has for its main theme the principle that true economics must rest on true faiths and morals. During the first World War, he learned practical farming in his leisure, as a recreation. He had been, also, a shining light in the Distributist Movement.

Father McNabb was, however, not only a polemic writer, but an informal essayist of undeniable charm, as shown particularly in: Francis Thompson and Other Essays; The Wayside, and the lovely Path of Prayer. Many people not of the Catholic faith read Blackfriars, the Dominican literary monthly published in Oxford, for which he was a regular contributor. His words are racy [?] of the soil. Writing with his capuche on, he used the back of old letters and envelopes for his manuscript. His motto was, "produce as much as you can, consume as little as you need." He urged the scrapping of all machinery and wanted people living as members of family-owned subsistence farms. The reader is never permitted to forget that here is a son of St. Dominic, a follower of St. Thomas. His vocabulary smacked of pre-Norman times, even in such a title as The Craft of Prayer. More recent books have been in the field of hagiography-on St. John Fisher or on St. Elizabeth of Portugal, the patroness of peace, who rode upon her little mule between embattled armies. In A Life of Jesus Christ Our Lord, hitherto shadowed places in the divine chronicle are illumined by a penetrating flash.

So Father McNabb died on the 408th anniversary of St. John Fisher's trial for treason in Westminster Hall. As Mediatrix Press, who reissued his 1935 biography of the Cardinal martyr describes it:

Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P., a prolific Dominican known for his humility and preaching, takes advantage of the historical research of his contemporaries to weave the drama of St. John Fisher’s amazing life.

This is a short work, rather than a detailed historical analysis, that is both endlessly enjoyable as literature-even a work of art, yet at the same time pious and inspiring to faith. McNabb’s life of Fisher traces the saint’s early days from his childhood to his enrollment in Cambridge, his becoming a priest, a chaplain to Lady Margaret Beaufort, and at last, being appointed Bishop of Rochester, in which office he would be cruelly put to death by Henry VIII, the exemplar of tyrants.

Fisher is an important study for us today, not only because he died for the Catholic Faith, but also because he died for not believing as the monarch would have him believe. Henry VIII, in his quest to divorce his wife to marry his mistress, created the model of the Totalitarian state. Fisher is for us, a witness both of solid adherence to faith, as well as the courage to speak out when most others are content to get along. The perfect antidote to Wolf Hall!

The original Sheed & Ward edition is online here.

On June 17, 1535, John Fisher was tried for treason, with Sir Richard Rich as the main witness against him, and have been found guilty, was sentenced to death by being hanged, drawn, and quartered. He spoke to the court:

My lords, I am here condemned before you of high treason for denial of the King’s supremacy over the Church of England, but by what order of justice I leave to God, Who is the searcher both of the king his Majesty’s conscience and yours; nevertheless, being found guilty, as it is termed, I am and must be contented with all that God shall send, to whose will I wholly refer and submit myself. And now to tell you plainly my mind, touching this matter of the king’s supremacy, I think indeed, and always have thought, and do now lastly affirm, that His Grace cannot justly claim any such supremacy over the Church of God as he now taketh upon him; neither hath (it) been seen or heard of that any temporal prince before his days hath presumed to that dignity; wherefore, if the king will now adventure himself in proceeding in this strange and unwonted case, so no doubt but he shall deeply incur the grievous displeasure of the Almighty, to the great damage of his own soul, and of many others, and to the utter ruin of this realm committed to his charge, wherefore, I pray God his Grace may remember himself in good time, and harken to good counsel for the preservation of himself and his realm and the quietness of all Christendom.

St. John Fisher, pray for us!