Robert and Clara and Friedrich

A major gap in my cultural education is German Romanticism. The BBC Music Magazine CD this month is helping me fill that gap with this recording of songs by Robert and Clara Schumann, setting poems of Friedrich Ruckert. I did recognize one of the lieder, however, because I've listened often to Mahler's Ruckert Lieder: "Liebst du um Schönheit".

If I had studied German, that might help too!

Classical Net describes Robert Schumann:

Robert Schumann (June 8, 1810 - July 29, 1856) was the arch-Romantic composer, thoroughly committed intellectually and emotionally to the idea of music being composed to register the feelings, thoughts and impressions garnered by a sensitive spirit on its journey through life. . . .

He married Clara Wieck, herself a talented pianist, but two careers in one family caused difficulties:

Throughout this period Schumann had composed almost exclusively for the piano. Now there was a tremendous outburst of lieder and the following year, much to the approval of the ambitious Clara, Schumann buckled down to compose his first symphony. Their close working relationship, and the arrival of their first child in 1841 (they produced seven in all), meant that Clara's career suffered. Although she continued her concert tours (they needed the money), she willingly suspended her other musical activities. The marriage at this time was blissfully happy. In the spring of 1841 Schumann's Spring Symphony was premiered. By the following year Clara was on tour again: as women did not travel alone at that time, Robert had to accompany her. Deeply insecure away from domestic routine, his health deteriorated and he began to resent his wife's addiction to the pleasures of concert-giving.

His professional career was still in the ascendant, and in 1843, when Mendelssohn provided the impetus for the founding of the Leipzig Conservatory, he also insisted that Schumann be given a teaching role there. Schumann, however, proved to be a diffident teacher; unable to communicate his ideas, he would often sit through an entire lesson without saying a word to his students. He resigned his post in 1844. By then his bouts of depression (he called them "melancholy") were more severe and more prolonged.

Nevertheless, he supported and encouraged his wife's efforts as a composer. They had eight children! The lieder on this disc are all about love and nature, beauty and youth, passion and and song.

Schumann died in an asylum for the insane. 

Miguel Cervantes, RIP

We should be celebrating Miguel Cervantes today on the 400th anniversary of this great novelist's death, but we aren't celebrating it as much as we are William Shakespeare's 400th anniversary tomorrow (April 23), as least according to the BBC:

Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died days apart, 400 years ago, each of them a giant in his own language and literary tradition. But a difference in the scale of quatercentenary [sic] celebrations in their respective countries and around the world is leading some fans of the author of Don Quixote to cry foul.

While "all the world's a stage" for the British bard thanks to the rollout of the massive Shakespeare Lives programme of arts events around the globe, celebrations of the life of his Spanish contemporary are perhaps "more honoured in the breach than the observance".

Shakespeare Lives aims to reach half a billion people worldwide - the first screenings of The Complete Walk, 37 short films to represent the complete body of the bard's stage plays, took place at the weekend. The Spanish government's action plan for Cervantes, on the other hand, seems far less ambitious... and leans heavily on exhibitions and conferences in big city museums and libraries.

This has provoked some rather unchivalrous comments from bigwigs in the field of Spanish culture.

"We've had 400 years to prepare for this," said Dario Villanueva, director of the Spanish Royal Academy, shortly after a letter from UK Prime Minister David Cameron introducing Shakespeare Lives was published in major newspapers around the world.

"There are a few events lined up but the figure of Cervantes deserves a major gesture on the part of our top institutions."

The Spanish Culture Ministry has admitted that the programme remains a "work in progress" and that some events will not emerge from the pipeline until 2017.

Read the rest here. 

Since I have Chesterton on my mind, here's a snippet of his Lepanto--Cervantes was there at the great victory of the Holy League--and Cervantes is already thinking of his great hero:

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

And, Chesterton wrote his own homage to Cervantes in his last novel, The Return of Don Quixote!

Finally, here's the great anthem from The Man of LaMancha, "To Dream the Impossible Dream", sung by the original Broadway Don Quixote, Richard Kiley!

May Miguel Cervantes, hero and author, rest in the peace of Christ, having reached the reachable Star of Heaven!

Saint Anselm, the Reluctant Archbishop of Canterbury

The late, great Ralph McInerny wrote this about St. Anselm of Canterbury, today's saint:

Saint Anselm was born near Aosta in 1033. His education commenced under the tutelage of the local Benedictines. When his mother died, Anselm knew a period of grief and sadness and, after three years of wandering, came to the monastery at Bee, drawn there by the reputation of Lanfrane. He became a monk of Bec in 1060 and, when Lanfranc went to Caen in 1063, succeeded him as prior of the abbey. He was a teacher in the monastery and became abbot in 1078. After fifteen years in this post he was summoned to England in 1093 to become the archbishop of Canterbury. His years at Canterbury were filled with controversy, and it was in that post that death overtook him in 1109. A rather extensive biography by his pupil Eadmer has come down to us.

This skeletal outline of the life of Anselm seems to present us with a busy ecclesiastic. Despite this impression, it is generally held that Anselm was a reluctant administrator and that he had no real relish for the many controversies into which he was drawn. He seems to have been prompted by a sense of obligation rather than by any deep inclination of his own nature. His essential self, it would seem, was inclined to withdraw into study and contemplation. Eadrner suggests that Anselm was so intent on the life of a teacher that he considered leaving Bec because Lanfranc already occupied the teaching post there. Later Anselm was to chastise himself for this worldly ambition, which he felt to be incompatible with the cloistered vocation that was his. Nonetheless, that ambition symbolizes his deep-seated desire for study, for teaching, for the calm of contemplation. Anselm's dislike for administration and active posts was based on his conviction that he had no real competence for leadership. Twice he asked the pope to relieve him of the see of Canterbury. He sought to return to the peace and tranquillity of the cloister, to prayer, meditation, and the teaching that awaited him there. Although he was a reluctant archbishop, his troubles in the post seem not to have been due to any incompetence of his. He was nonetheless twice exiled from his see, something that caused him no little anguish, but perhaps he derived a kind of ambiguous pleasure from those absences, for during those periods he recaptured in some measure the life he truly desired. But even in his active periods as archbishop he was as much theologian as spiritual administrator, composing some of the works on which his fame was to repose. . . . 

Just as the sketch of his life can mislead us into thinking that in Anselm we are confronted principally with a Church leader, so this seemingly meager list of writings could cause us to think that we will not find Anselm to be a significant thinker. He is a major figure nonetheless. His teaching represents one of the highest points reached by what may be referred to as the Augustinian tradition. It has often been suggested that Anselm has suffered unfairly from the tendency of students to hurry past him in order to arrive at the giants of the thirteenth century. But Anselm is a man of the eleventh century, and it is in its terms that he must be viewed. Thus regarded, he looms above the men of his own time. If we must say, as we must, that the men of the thirteenth century knew much more than Anselm, we may add that Anselm was one of the sources of their knowledge.

Read the rest there, for more information about his theological works.

O God, who led the Bishop Saint Anselm
to seek out and teach the depths of your wisdom,
grant, we pray,
that our faith in you may so aid our understanding,
that what we believe by your command
may give delight to our hearts.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Seven (7) Martyrs on April 20: 1584, 1586, 1602

Even though there are seven Catholic martyrs today, Annie Mitchell and I are only able to discuss two of them this morning on the Son Rise Morning Show: Blessed James Bell and Blessed John Finch, a priest and a layman executed in Lancaster on April 20, 1584. Blessed James Bell was born during the reign of Henry VIII! ordained during the reign of Mary I! I'll be on during the National EWTN hour.

Blessed James Bell: Priest and martyr, b. at Warrington in Lancashire, England, probably about 1520; d. 20 April, 1584. For the little known of him we depend on the account published four years after his death by Bridgewater in his "Concertatio" (1588), and derived from a manuscript which was kept at Douay when Challoner wrote his "Missionary Priests" in 1741, and is now in the Westminster Diocesan Archives. A few further details were collected by Challoner, and others are supplied by the State Papers. Having studied at Oxford he was ordained priest in Mary's reign, but unfortunately conformed to the established Church under Elizabeth, and according to the Douay manuscript "ministered their bare few sacraments about 20 years in diverse places of England". Finally deterred by conscience from the cure of souls and reduced to destitution, he sought a small readership as a bare subsistence. To obtain this he approached the patron's wife, a Catholic lady, who induced him to be reconciled to the Church. After some time he was allowed to resume priestly functions, and for two years devoted himself to arduous missionary labours. He was at length apprehended (17 January 1583-84) and, having confessed his priesthood, was arraigned at Manchester Quarter-Sessions held during the same month, and sent for trial at Lancaster Assizes in March. When condemned and sentenced he said to the Judge: "I beg your Lordship would add to the sentence that my lips and the tops of my fingers may be cut off, for having sworn and subscribed to the articles of heretics contrary both to my conscience and to God's Truth". He spent that night in prayer and on the following day was hanged and quartered together with Blessed John Finch, a layman, 20 April, 1584.

Blessed John Finch: A martyr, b. about 1548; d. 20 April, 1584. He was a yeoman of Eccleston, Lancashire, and a member of a well-known old Catholic family, but he appears to have been brought up in schism. When he was twenty years old he went to London where he spent nearly a year with some cousins at Inner Temple. While there he was forcibly struck by the contrast between Protestantism and Catholicism in practice and determined to lead a Catholic life. Failing to find advancement in London he returned to Lancashire where he was reconciled to Catholic Church. He then married and settled down, his house becoming a centre of missionary work, he himself harbouring priests and aiding them in every way, besides acting as catechist. His zeal drew on him the hostility of the authorities, and at Christmas, 1581, he was entrapped into bringing a priest, George Ostliffe, to a place where both were apprehended. It was given out that Finch, having betrayed the priest and other Catholics, had taken refuge with the Earl of Derby, but in fact, he was kept in the earl's house as a prisoner, sometimes tortured and sometimes bribed in order to pervert him and induce him to give information. This failing, he was removed to the Fleet prison at Manchester and afterwards to the House of Correction. 
When he refused to go to the Protestant church he was dragged there by the feet, his head beating on the stones. For many months he lay in a damp dungeon, ill-fed and ill-treated, desiring always that he might be brought to trial and martyrdom. After three years' imprisonment, he was sent to be tried at Lancaster. There he was brought to trial with three priests on 18 April, 1584. He was found guilty and, 20 April, having spent the night in converting some condemned felons, he suffered with Ven. James Bell at Lancaster. The cause of his beatification with those of the other English Martyrs was introduced by decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, 4 Dec., 1886.

They were both beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929.

Blessed Richard Sargeant and Blessed William Thomson suffered on April 20, 1586. Find their stories here.

Blessed Thomas Tichborne, Blessed Robert Watkinson, and Blessed Francis Page all endured martyrdom at Tyburn in London on April 20, 1602. These five martyrs were beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987.

Blessed James Bell, pray for us.

Blessed John Finch, pray for us.

Blessed Richard Sargeant, pray for us.

Blessed William Thomson, pray for us.

Blessed Thomas Tichborne, pray for us.

Blessed Robert Watkinson, pray for us.

Blessed Francis Page, pray for us.

Holy martyrs of England and Wales, pray for us.

Holy confessors of England and Wales, pray for us.

With Chesterton on the Middle Ages

Preparing for my presentation for the Catholic Culture Conference this weekend at the Spiritual Life Center ("Cobbett and Chesterton on Merry Old England"), I've been reading books and essays by Chesterton. Registration closes today at noon, so you'd better call in now!

Throughout his Short History of England, his study of Chaucer, and many essays in which he mentions the Middle Ages, Chesterton notes that the twentieth century Englishman (or woman) knows nothing about the Middle Ages except what prejudices he or she has received about the darkness and obscurity of that Catholic era. As an example, The American Chesterton Society posts this essay from the Illustrated London News, November 15, 1913, "Getting to Know the Middle Ages":

It is quite natural that the prosperous people in our time should know no history. If they did know it, they would know the highly unedifying history of how they became prosperous. It is quite natural, I say, that they should not know history: but why do they think they do? Here is a sentence taken at random from a book written by one of the most cultivated of our younger critics, very well written and most reliable on its own subject, which is a modern one. The writer says: “There was little social or political advance in the Middle Ages” until the Reformation and the Renaissance. Now I might just as well say that there was little advance in science and invention in the nineteenth century until the coming of William Morris: and then excuse myself by saying that I am not personally interested in spinning-jennies and jelly-fish – which is indeed the case. For that is all that the writer really means: he means he is not personally interested in heralds or mitred abbots. That is all right; but why, when writing about something that did not exist in the Middle Ages, should he dogmatise about a story that he has evidently never heard? Yet it might be made a very interesting story.

A little while before the Norman Conquest, countries such as our own were a dust of yet feeble feudalism, continually scattered in eddies by barbarians, barbarians who had never ridden a horse. There was hardly a brick or stone house in England. There were scarcely any roads except beaten paths: there was practically no law except local customs. Those were the Dark Ages out of which the Middle Ages came. Take the Middle Ages two hundred years after the Norman Conquest and nearly as long before the beginnings of the Reformation. The great cities have arisen; the burghers are privileged and important; Labour has been organised into free and responsible Trade Unions; the Parliaments are powerful and disputing with the princes; slavery has almost disappeared; the great Universities are open and teaching with the scheme of education that Huxley so much admired; Republics as proud and civic as the Republics of the pagans stand like marble statues along the Mediterranean; and all over the North men have built such churches as men may never build again. And this, the essential part of which was done in one century rather than two, is what the critic calls “little social or political advance.” There is scarcely an important modern institution under which he lives, from the college that trained him to the Parliament that rules him, that did not make its main advance in that time.

Read the rest there.

Also from The American Chesterton Society, Dale Ahlquist writes about Chesterton on Chaucer:

Chesterton has often been dismissed for blindly idealizing the Middle Ages, but the real problem is quite the opposite. The modern world automatically attacks the Middle Ages as something backwards, dark, and superstitious, the enemy of reason and liberty. Chesterton merely defended the truth that reason and liberty enjoyed a high point in medieval times that the world has not really seen since. He acknowledged that there were still problems in those times, and there are certainly many things that we can rightfully regard as improvements. But history is not a story of progress. Our fortunes move both backward and forward. While technology provides a kind of liberty, it also provides a kind of slavery. While the experts are useful as servants, they are unbearable as masters.

In the Middle Ages the peasant class, according to Chesterton, was still successfully fighting off the rise of the Aristocratic state. He refers to a famous peasant uprising where they “killed the lawyers; a comprehensible and (relatively) even commendable course; though they also showed some disposition to hang anybody who could read or write; which is perhaps carrying the distrust of professionalism too far.”

The most difficult thing for us to understand about that culture is that it was purely Catholic, there were no Reformers or Rebels to contend with. The theology was solid and widespread. The criticisms of the Church came in the form of making fun of stuffy Roman officialism, or, in the case of Geoffrey Chaucer, making fun of friars.

As I recall, though dimmed by years, when I studied The Canterbury Tales in college, it was as if the Reformation had already happened in Chaucer's time: the Church was corrupt; Indulgences were for sale; we were as anti-clerical as Lollards or Voltaire; Martin Luther came far too late to the ball! After this project, I think I need to read Chesterton on Chaucer and then re-read The Canterbury Tales without jaundice. After all, April is not over yet!

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunturbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for the seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Father O'Connor/Father Brown

Our G.K. Chesterton group discussed the first three chapters of Nancy Carpentier Brown's biography of Frances Chesterton Friday night and decided to assign the rest of the book for our next meeting on Friday, May 13 (the second Friday of the month instead of our usual third Friday).

Several of us commented on the friendship between Frances Chesterton and Father John O'Connor, which was first demonstrated through a correspondence filled with spiritual advice and consolation. Because Brown wrote a biography of Frances and not of Gilbert, she only hints that Father O'Connor was Chesterton's model for Father Brown.

This biography, The Elusive Father Brown: The Life of Mgr John O'Connor by Julia Smith, published by Gracewing Press, may fill some of the necessary gaps left by Nancy Carpentier Brown:

G. K. Chesterton’s much-loved priest-detective, Father Brown, was based on his friend John Joseph O’Connor, born in Ireland and ordained a Catholic priest in 1895. Mgr. John O’Connor became known for possessing one of the finest intellects in early twentieth-century Europe, friend and confidante of statesmen, writers and artists, his own literary output was prolific. He collected fine works of art, the sale of which part funded the building of his first church, and through his friendship with Eric Gill he commissioned the Stations of the Cross for his Bradford church. This, the first biography, aims to introduce the shadowy figure who was involved in so many different worlds.

K.V. Turley reviewed the biography on June 13, 2015 for The Catholic World Report:

Crime fiction fans are well aware of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and his place in the Pantheon of great detectives. Nevertheless, in contrast with the seemingly endless speculation as to the ‘real Sherlock Holmes’, there has been little such debate about the origin of the priest sleuth. However, a recent book, The Elusive Father Brown(Gracewing, 2010), by Laura [sic] Smith, goes some way to rectifying this, detailing as it does the life of the cleric who formed the basis upon which Chesterton’s characterization was based, and who played a part in at least two very public conversions. . . .

Monsignor O’Connor, as he was to become, unlike his fictional alter ego, was very much a priest with a parish and one he was to remain attached to for most of his priestly ministry. Although unmistakeably an Irish man, in accent and manner, he was to live the majority of his life in Yorkshire, more precisely Bradford. In that city he was to gain the status of a local celebrity. He seems to have known the great and the good—Catholic or not—while never neglecting his own flock to whom he was very much an old-fashioned parish priest. He was familiar with the social and political currents that played out around this West Yorkshire municipality as much as they did other British cities. Whereas, at times, Fr. Brown appears ‘other worldly’, this could never have been said of Mgr. O’Connor who was in the thick of things at all times.

In fact, his reach was well beyond the city limits of Bradford, then a place known for heavy industry rather than culture. It was through his influence that all sorts of contemporary cultural figures were to descend upon it, writers like Chesterton and Belloc, and artists such as David Jones and Eric Gill. They came hardly knowing the priest, only, in some instances, to leave as friends and, for some, more deeply Catholic. In Chesterton’s case, he began writing Fr. Brown stories as Anglican only to end those adventures as Catholic, the writer’s conversion in no small part to the influence of Mgr. O’Connor.

Read the rest there.

St. Robert Southwell's Influence

Next month, from St. Augustine's Press: Southwell's Sphere: The Influence of England's Secret Poet by Dr. Gary Bouchard:

Once feared by Queen Elizabeth I and admired by William Shakespeare, Robert Southwell, s.j. (1561–1595), clings today to a thinning canonical presence in English literature among a sphere of other writers incongruously called the metaphysical poets. Southwell’s Sphere lifts this sixteenth century Jesuit priest and prolific writer from the obscurity in which he too often resides and places him instead at the center of a sphere of English poets upon whom his life and works exerted an observable influence. As he weaved his religious content into the familiar loom of Elizabethan form and style, this young missionary priest was seeking not just to catechize those whom he regarded as the faithful and the fallen, but to intentionally reform the verse of his native England. Remarkably, during his brief six-year mission, he actually managed in many respects to do so. Surviving for six years by successfully navigating and fostering a complicated underground Catholic network in and around London before being captured, tortured and imprisoned, Southwell was brought to trial and executed at Tyburn at age 33. He therefore never knew most of the “skillfuller wits” that he called upon to direct their poetic skills to the service of God. And like the marks upon his tortured body, the poetic marks of influence that his work left upon individual writers of this era were in many cases deliberately concealed. Southwell’s Sphere seeks to rediscover those marks and offer the reader a renewed appreciation for this subverted and subverting literary force in Early Modern England. In individual explicative chapters this book examines works by six poets whose verse may be appreciated differently in light of Robert Southwell’s life and work. The author makes the case that Southwell’s works, posthumously and prolifically published, instructed William Alabaster, provoked Edmund Spenser, prompted George Herbert, haunted John Donne, inspired Richard Crashaw and — two and a half centuries later — consoled Gerard Manley Hopkins, s.j. With the exception of Spenser, all of these poets were, like Southwell, ordained ministers. The particular personal, political and religious complexities of each of their lives notwithstanding, what they most shared in common with Southwell was their priestly vocation, their talent as English poets and the inevitable and inextricable joining of these two activities in their lives. While it would have made little sense for any of these poets to acknowledge Southwell as a poetic peer, each of them authored important verse that can best be appreciated within the sphere of this improbably successful and influential English poet.

Professor Bouchard wrote about Southwell and his legacy in the July/August 2014 St. Austin Review and he will be speaking later this month at the Catholic Literature Conference in New Hampshire:

“Hanged, Drawn, Quartered and Published: Robert Southwell and the Reformation of English Poetry”

Dr. Gary Bouchard - Dr. Bouchard is a professor in the English Department of Saint Anselm College, Manchester, NH. Since 1987, he has served the College in a variety of capacities, including a five-year term as the College’s Executive Vice-President from 1998 to 2003. He currently serves as secretary of the Executive Board of New Hampshire Catholic Charities, as a trustee of Catholic Medical Center, and on boards at Bishop Brady High School and The Villa Augustina. Dr. Bouchard specializes in Early Modern lyric and narrative poetry. His book Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet (due out in January 2016) [sic?] discusses Southwell’s influence on seventeenth-century poets.

A poem by St. Robert Southwell, "Look Home"--could it have influenced John Donne?

Retired thoughts enjoy their own delights,
As beauty doth in self-beholding eye ;
Man's mind a mirror is of heavenly sights,
A brief wherein all marvels summed lie,
Of fairest forms and sweetest shapes the store,
Most graceful all, yet thought may grace them more.

The mind a creature is, yet can create,
To nature's patterns adding higher skill ;
Of finest works with better could the state
If force of wit had equal power of will.
Device of man in working hath no end,
What thought can think, another thought can mend.

Man's soul of endless beauty image is,
Drawn by the work of endless skill and might ;
This skillful might gave many sparks of bliss
And, to discern this bliss, a native light ;
To frame God's image as his worths required
His might, his skill, his word and will conspired.

All that he had his image should present,
All that it should present it could afford,
To that he could afford his will was bent,
His will was followed with performing word.
Let this suffice, by this conceive the rest,
He should, he could, he would, he did, the best. 

An Idea for Book Clubs and Authors

I am on the Speakers Bureau list for the Catholic Diocese of Wichita and I participated recently in a parish's reading group because they had chosen Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation as their book for the spring semester.

I first met with the group before they started to read and discuss the book at their meetings, presenting an overview of my book and my purposes of writing it.

Then, in the past week, I met with them after they had finished reading it and answered their questions about the history of the English Reformation. Our discussion ranged far beyond the English Reformation in fact as we talked about the Protestant Reformation on the Continent, Catholics in United States history, and even our own diocese.

With the technology of free on-line long distance and video conferencing, an author would not even have to be on-site to participate in such reading groups!

If you are in a book group and want to read Supremacy and Survival, please let me know if you'd like my participation. In the Wichita Diocese, please contact the Speakers Bureau and then we'll coordinate the schedule, etc. Outside of the Wichita Diocese--or even outside of Wichita and its immediate environs--we could set that up too!

The Catholic Enlightenment: Yes, There Was One

From The Imaginative Conservative, Bradley Birzer reviews another book I'd love to read someday:

The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement, by Ulrich L. Lehner (Oxford University Press, 2016)

The Catholic Enlightenment is a great book. Indeed, no recent academic work on Catholicism has raised my hopes this high for the current level of scholarship since first having encountered the writings of Christopher Dawson a decade and a half ago. And, while I am no expert (nor do I even know enough to pretend to be) on the history of European Catholicism between the Counter Reformation and the French Revolution, Dr. Lehner’s latest book, The Catholic Enlightenment, not only raises some of the most important questions about the faith and about the West, but it also fills in some critical gaps in our understanding of each.

The sum of Dr. Lehner’s argument is this: contrary to popular and secular mythologies, the Church possessed a number of critical personalities and intellectual leaders who actively engaged the ideas of democracy, individualism, liberalism (properly understood), and what would be called, ultimately, modernity. All of this happened between the Council of Trent and the end of the French Revolution. Surprisingly, at least to me, Catholic scholars and theologians considered, studied, and digested the importance of the thought of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and even Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Indeed, they not only took the ideas of non-Catholic scholars seriously, they actually attempted to meld secular thought with Catholic theology. Dr. Lehner, much to his credit, never over-makes his case. He recognizes that there were many, many “Enlightenments” during the few centuries leading up to the French Revolution, just as our own John Willson stresses the need to acknowledge many “Foundings” in the American Founding period. Additionally, Dr. Lehner never claims that these Catholic Enlighteners—as he calls them—dominated scholarship or the thinking of the Church as a whole. Rather, he notes, time and time again throughout his book, they attracted attention, bonded with one another, and changed, shaped, and delimited the philosophical and theological discussion within the Church.

Read the rest there. Dr. Lehner has a rigorous publication schedule ahead of him, per an interview Dr. Birzer conducted:

Birzer: Second, what’s the next book?

Lehner: My first follow up comes out in July with Fortress Press: On the Road to Vatican II: German Catholic Enlighteners and Reform of the Church, where I explore in more detail the German scene.

Birzer: Third, and after that?

The next book is an edited collection of essays on Women, Catholicism and Enlightenment—because nobody has paid much attention to the female Enlighteners who were Catholic (out next year with Routledge). Simultaneously, I am writing two monographs, one a systematic study on asceticism and moral formation, and a book on Catholicism during the Nazi time.

Oxford University Press posts this description of The Catholic Enlightenment:

"Whoever needs an act of faith to elucidate an event that can be explained by reason is a fool, and unworthy of reasonable thought." This line, spoken by the notorious 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, illustrates a deeply entrenched perception of religion, as prevalent today as it was hundreds of years ago. It is the sentiment behind the narrative that Catholic beliefs were incompatible with the Enlightenment ideals. Catholics, many claim, are superstitious and traditional, opposed to democracy and gender equality, and hostile to science. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Casanova himself was a Catholic. In The Catholic Enlightenment, Ulrich L. Lehner points to such figures as representatives of a long-overlooked thread of a reform-minded Catholicism, which engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. Their story opens new pathways for understanding how faith and modernity can interact in our own time.

Lehner begins two hundred years before the Enlightenment, when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the hegemony Catholicism had enjoyed for centuries. During this time the Catholic Church instituted several reforms, such as better education for pastors, more liberal ideas about the roles of women, and an emphasis on human freedom as a critical feature of theology. These actions formed the foundation of the Enlightenment's belief in individual freedom. While giants like Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire became some of the most influential voices of the time, Catholic Enlighteners were right alongside them. They denounced fanaticism, superstition, and prejudice as irreconcilable with the Enlightenment agenda.

In 1789, the French Revolution dealt a devastating blow to their cause, disillusioning many Catholics against the idea of modernization. Popes accumulated ever more power and the Catholic Enlightenment was snuffed out. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that questions of Catholicism's compatibility with modernity would be broached again.

Ulrich L. Lehner tells, for the first time, the forgotten story of these reform-minded Catholics. As Pope Francis pushes the boundaries of Catholicism even further, and Catholics once again grapple with these questions, this book will prove to be required reading.

Doctor Lehner has also posted on the OUP blog, discussing the quality of Catholic mercy through the centuries.

Restoring a Reputation: NOT Mary I's

Major League Baseball is far from the topic of this blog, but the theme of historians revising received history and setting the record straight is. In justice to the dead, I want to see our views corrected if they are wrong and personal reputations restored if they are unjust: Ty Cobb's no less than Mary I's.

The latest biographer of Ty Cobb found out that there was a reputation to restore. We don't really know the truth about Ty Cobb at all. Charles Leerhsen writes for Imprimis at Hillsdale College, noting how everyone accepted the "truth" that Cobb was a dirty player and terrible racist:

Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era*. He played in the major leagues—mostly for the Detroit Tigers but a bit for the Philadelphia Athletics—from 1905 to 1928, and was the first player ever voted into the Hall of Fame. His lifetime batting average of .366 is amazing, and has never been equaled. But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person—a racist and a low-down cheat who thought nothing of injuring his fellow players just to gain another base or score a run. Indeed, many think of him as a murderer. Ron Shelton, the director of the 1995 movie Cobb, starring Tommy Lee Jones in the title role, told me it was “well known” that Cobb had killed “as many as” three people.

It is easy to understand why this is the prevailing view. People have been told that Cobb was a bad man over and over, all of their lives. The repetition felt like evidence. It started soon after Cobb’s death in 1961, with the publication of an article by a man named Al Stump, one of several articles and books he would write about Cobb. Among other things, Stump claimed that when children wrote to Cobb asking for an autographed picture, he steamed the stamps off the return envelopes and never wrote back. In another book—this one about Cobb’s contemporary Tris Speaker—baseball historian Timothy Gay wrote (implausibly, if you think about it) that Cobb would pistol-whip any black person he saw on the sidewalk. And then there were the stories about how Cobb sharpened his spikes: before every game, numerous sources claim, he would hone his cleats with a file. In the 1989 film Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson says that Cobb wasn’t invited to the ghostly cornfield reunion of old-time ballplayers because “No one liked that son of a bitch.” The line always gets a knowing laugh.

When I pitched my idea for a book on Cobb to Simon and Schuster, I was squarely in line with this way of thinking. I figured my task would be relatively easy. I would go back to the original source material—the newspaper accounts, documents, and letters that previous biographers had never really looked at. I would find fresh examples of Cobb being monstrous, blend them with the stories that Al Stump and others wrote, and come up with the first major Cobb book in more than 20 years. But when I started in on the nuts-and-bolts research with original sources—the kind of shoe-leather reporting I had learned working at Newsweek in its heyday—it didn’t even take me ten minutes to find something that brought me up short.

Leerhsen then describes how much that we thought was true, and much that has been repeated and repeated--including by Ken Burns in his PBS series on Baseball--is wrong. Cobb was certainly not a racist and those who played with him did not consider him a dirty player. *Leerhsen refers to "the so-called Deadball Era" before Babe Ruth and other sluggers came along, hitting home runs and driving up the score. Major League Baseball B.R. (before Ruth) was probably much more exciting to watch because it was all about base running, stealing bases--Cobb, Leerhsen reminds us "still holds the record for stealing home, doing so 54 times. He once stole second, third, and home on three consecutive pitches, and another time turned a tap back to the pitcher into an inside-the-park home run." Now, that's thrilling. But MLB changed some rules and the equipment (the ball, especially), and baseball play changed.

Cobb was no angel (who but an angel is?) but it's not right that his reputation should be as abused as it is. If documentary maker Ken Burns reads this book, he should revise his presentation of Cobb in his Baseball series, since it's not true. Leerhsen notes that Burns casts Cobb as the "anti-Jackie Robinson" when in fact Cobb was all in favor of integration in Major League Baseball. Even though he has a nice narrative going, he should eschew the legend and broadcast the fact. As Leerhsen points out, when people start saying things like "it's well-known fact" and then can't cite any source to prove that "well-known fact", they should admit that they might not know what they are talking about!