"Newman's Epic Journey in the Mediterranean" and "Christmas Without Christ"

On the Fourth Sunday of Advent, a full week before Christmas Day so that we celebrate a whole fourth week of Advent this year (in 2023, December 24--aka Christmas Eve--is also the Fourth Sunday of Advent, and Monday is Christmas Day!), our Lovers of Newman group met at the IHM Convent in Colwich, Kansas. We read a Parochial and Plain Sermon, "The Mystery of Godliness" and enjoyed a vibrant discussion, both spiritual and theological. Our hostess, one of the IHM Sisters, also offered us a Christmas verse by Saint John Henry Newman, written while he was on his great Mediterranean voyage/pilgrimage with Richard Hurrell Froude and Froude's father, Robert Froude, the Archdeacon of Totnes.

The poem is number 49 in Newman's Verses on Various Occasions, composed on Christmas Day, December 25, 1832, while Newman was in Malta:

Christmas Without Christ

HOW can I keep my Christmas feast

In its due festive show,

Reft of the sight of the High Priest

From whom its glories flow?

I hear the tuneful bells around,

The blessèd towers I see;

A stranger on a foreign ground,

They peal a fast for me.

O Britons! now so brave and high,

How will ye weep the day

When Christ in judgment passes by,

And calls the Bride away! {99}

Your Christmas then will lose its mirth,

Your Easter lose its bloom:

Abroad, a scene of strife and dearth;

Within, a cheerless home!

In December of 2020, Father Juan Velez provided some context to the poem on the Saint John Henry Newman website:

St. John Henry Newman reminds us of the emptiness of Christmas without Christ. He titled some verses with these words on December 25, 1832, when he found himself quarantined in Malta, unable to attend the Christmas service.

Newman was quarantined and had a bad cold--and was on a very Catholic island. As The Malta Independent explains, he wouldn't have any Protestant, English church in which to pray or preach on Christmas Day, even if he could have left his hotel:

He caught a bad cold there and was forced to convalesce in the Beverly Hotel in West Street, Valletta. Because of his illness he was only able to visit Valletta and St Paul’s Bay before departing for Messina, in Italy, on 7 February. He was impressed by the kindness of the Maltese, the ringing of the church bells, the many images of saints – especially those of the Madonna – adorning our streets and, of course, the magnificence of St John’s Church – now Cathedral. He remonstrated with the Protestant authorities here why such a magnificent church was not turned into a Protestant church as the Protestants had nowhere appropriate in which to pray. . . .

Reading the poem again later, I was reminded of Mary Katherine Tillman's essay on ""Realizing" the Classical Authors: Newman's Epic Journey in the Mediterranean" originally published in the Newman Studies Journal, 3:2 (Fall, 2006) but included in her 2015 volume of articles and essays, John Henry Newman: Man of Letters. I've been dipping in to this volume as I read Lead Kindly Light, the festschrift for the recently deceased Father Ian Ker.

She explains how Newman, as a reader of the Greek and Latin classics, had prepared for this great journey by bringing Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, Homer, and Virgil--no guide books written for tourists--but books whose historical and literary highlights Newman experienced not just as a reader of the classics, but as a visitor to their sites, in a way never before. Tillman notes that Newman's letters were filled with poetic descriptions of these locations, Patras, Ithaca, Gibraltar, Mount Vesuvius, Virgil's tomb in Naples, Corfu, etc. He wrote 31 poems during the days of his journey, which were published as the "Lyra Apostolica" in the British Magazine. Tillman uses this greater appreciation of the classics as an example of how Newman uses the imagination to move from a notional apprehension of a subject to a real knowledge of it.

Even in the midst of that appreciation of the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, however, Newman was still thinking of religious matters, and thus his poems about Saint Paul, Moses, David and Jonathan, the Greek Fathers, and indeed, troubles in the Christian world, including in the Church of England.

In these last two days of Advent, I wish you a very Merry Christmas season. 

Professor Mary Katherine Tillman, RIP

While I learned of Father Ian Ker's death on the very day, I just found out about the death of another Newman Scholar, Professor Emerita Mary Katherine Tillman of the University of Notre Dame. She died on October 21 of complications associated with esophageal cancer and her funeral Mass was celebrated at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame on Friday, October 28. Her obituary, posted by the University of Notre Dame is found here. The South Bend Tribune obituary adds the detail that she married another Professor Emeritus just 12 years ago and that she and her husband, Phillip Sloan, resided in Holy Cross Village at Notre Dame, a senior living community sponsored by the Holy Cross Brothers. 

The Notre Dame obituary highlights her study of Newman:

Tillman was a scholar of St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, writing a book and several extended commentaries on the works of the 19th-century English priest, as well as the history and philosophy of liberal education.

She published widely in scholarly journals and gave lectures throughout the U.S. and Europe, and in 2019 received the Gailliot Award for Lifetime Achievement in Newman Studies from the National Institute for Newman Studies.

According to my records, she visited Wichita twice to give presentations on Newman, focusing on university education and the relationship between faith and reason. In 1995 at the Newman School of Catholic Thought at the Newman Center at WSU, she provided a comprehensive explanation of the works Newman wrote during his "campaign in Ireland" to establish the Catholic University in Dublin, describing how they help us see how he realized his notional ideas of university education, thus demonstrating the "unity of idea and image" in his reflections on education. Tillman provided an overview of Newman's Idea of a University, and the Rise and Progress of Universities, the first presenting the idea, the second the image through descriptions of places of universal knowledge in Athens, Paris, and Oxford, among others. She also spoke on Faith and Reason at that 1995 Newman School of Catholic Thought, in which she compared Newman's Grammar of Assent and Fifteen University Sermons, noting of the latter that they sowed "the seeds of all Newman's future writings".

And she wrote the introductions for critical editions of the Fifteen Sermons and the Rise and Progress of Universities.

In 1998, she presented a lecture at Newman University on "Catholic Higher Education at the Millennium". I know that I attended that lecture but I have no surviving notes from it.

And in 2015, Marquette University Press published a collection of her works on Newman titled John Henry Newman: Man of Letters.

In this collection of essays spanning thirty years of her work in Newman Studies, Tillman elaborates the broad reach of Newman's philosophical, educational, historical and classical acumen. Attentive to his philosophical methodologies and to recent Newman scholarship, she compares Newman's views on a wide range of issues with those of other thinkers, classical and modern. Included in the essays are such topics as Newman's meaning of 'views', of relations between faith and reason, of imagination, on the college in relation to the university, on research, on whether virtue can be taught, on the development of ideas, on prepredicative experience and on phronesis, on 'the gentleman' in relation to the Oratorian, on human nature, and on worldly wisdom in relation to holy wisdom. Newman, Man of Letters, is seen as unique in his prolific and wide-ranging genius.

Eternal rest grant unto her O Lord and may her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace. And may she rest in peace.