This is the text of the 47th Maronite Podcast: Loss and Gain, Pt 1
It is now time to turn to Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, which was St John Henry Newman’s first novel. First published in 1848, within three years of his conversion to Catholicism, it was conceived as a response to a novel by Elizabeth Harris named From Oxford to Rome, and how it fared with some who lately made the journey, about a young man named Eustace, who converts to Catholicism from the Anglican Church, and dies in Italy, far from home.
Although it is preachy to the last degree, and as heavy-handed as an angry navvy with a sledge-hammer, one should not underestimate the extent to which Loss and Gain is an answer to that novel. For example, the dedication of From Oxford to Rome implies that those who convert to Rome should rather have waited for the Lord, who will come suddenly. St Newman’s dedication quotes Hebrews 10: “For yet a little while, and he that shall come shall come, and will not tarry. My just one shall live by faith.” He is responding to her sentiments by tacitly saying that it is precisely because Christ shall return soon, and that the just shall live by faith, that one must join the Church of God. The sixth and penultimate chapter of From Oxford to Rome is headed: “The Dream Dispelled, and the Opening of the Real.” Both novels are dominated by Oxford and Rome. Perhaps more deeply, St Newman decided against following Harris into hectoring his readers with sentimentally dramatic warnings of heartbreak and catastrophe. He fashioned, instead, an enduring novel, which allows the narrative to do much of the heavy-lifting.
The real goal of the hero heart of the novel, young Charles Reding, who shares more than a few features with the young John Henry Newman, is to find his true heart’s desire, God. And God is to be understood as the ground of the ultimate reality. To come to the real necessarily involves awakening to dreams. This theme is exemplified in this exchange between Charles and Mary, his sister. He says to her: “There’s one text which has ever dwelt on my mind, ‘Rejoice with trembling’. I can’t take full unrestrained pleasure in anything.”
“Why not, if you look at it as God’s gift?” asked Mary.
“I don’t defend it,” he replied; “it’s my way; it may be a selfish prudence, for what I know; but I am sure that, did I give my heart to any creature, I should be withdrawing it from God. How easily could I idolise these sweet walks which we have known for so many years!” (104)
In real life, St Newman had a great love for his sister Mary, who died suddenly and tragically young. It can be no accident that the beloved sister of the novel shares her name, and that walking and speaking with her is so pleasant to Charles that he could, as he says, “idolise” them. But the point here is that he felt he could give his heart to someone, but that if he did, he would – to some degree – be removing it from God. This is accentuated when, at the end of that chapter, he recites some poetry by Cowper, an English poet:
Thou art the source and centre of all minds, / Their only point of rest, Eternal Word. / From Thee departing, they are lost, and rove / At random, without honour, hope, or peace. / From Thee is all that soothes the life of man, / His high endeavour and his glad success, / His strength to suffer and his will to serve. / But oh, Thou Sovereign Giver of all good, / Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown. / Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor, / And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away. (104)
When, much later in the novel, he is again speaking to Mary, she remarks on how he has changed and lost the jolly manner he had. He explains the alteration by saying: “I suppose it is coming out of shadows into realities”. (255) In comparing Reding to his earlier friend Sheffield, from whom he is now drifting apart, St Newman writes that Sheffield:
… had no perceptible need within him of that vision of the Unseen which is the Christian’s life. He was unblemished in his character, exemplary in his conduct; but he was content with what the perishable world gave him. Charles’s characteristic, perhaps above anything else, was an {231} habitual sense of the Divine Presence; a sense which, of course, did not insure uninterrupted conformity of thought and deed to itself, but still there it was—the pillar of the cloud before him and guiding him. He felt himself to be God’s creature, and responsible to Him—God’s possession, not his own. (230-231)
The novel shows Reding cooperating with God’s claiming His possession of His soul, by coming into the Catholic Church. And with that, you have the essence of the novel’s story. Neither should what St Newman says about the Catholic Mass should be downplayed. Not Charles Reding, but another Oxford man, Willis, who converts before Reding, says this of the Mass:
“I declare, to me … nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses for ever and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words, {328} —it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity.
Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick; for they are all parts of one integral action. Quickly they go; for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon; as when it was said in the beginning: ‘What thou doest, do quickly’. Quickly they pass; for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass; because as the lightning which shineth from one part of heaven unto the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass; for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the Name of the Lord as He passed by, ‘the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth’.
And as Moses on the mountain, so we too ‘make haste and bow our heads to the earth, and adore’. So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, ‘waiting for the moving of the water’. Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his {329} own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation;—not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God’s priest, supporting him, yet guided by him. There are little children there, and old men, and simple labourers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving; there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and scope of it.”
It is a lengthy statement, but it is perhaps the finest and fullest description of the powerful impact the Mass, and attending the Mass, can make on someone. The highlighting of the small things which awaken the feeling, those things which one sees out of the corner of one’s eye, are what makes this account different and moving.
This is the key to St Newman’s approach in this novel. He did not wish to write a philosophical or theological treatise, or launch such arguments. He wanted to, and he did produce something which would reach hearts and spirits. He averts to this, but through the narrative of his novel. Early on, one person says to another: “those who have found the truth are the very persons to argue, for they have the gift.” And the reply comes: “And the very last persons to persuade,” said Sheffield; “for they have the gift all to themselves.” The discussion does not get very far, until Mr White says: “”It would be a dull world,” he said, “if men went by reason: they may think they do, but they don’t. Really, they are led by their feelings, their affections, by the sense of the beautiful, and the good, and the holy. Religion is the beautiful; the clouds, sun, and sky, the fields and the woods, are religion.” (43) And that, I am sure, was St Newman’s position, although he did not put it into the mouth of his alter ego, Charles Reding.
Mr White, an Irishman, goes on to speak of the sublimity of the Catholic ritual, which in those days, was the Traditional Latin Mass: “The celebrant, deacon and subdeacon, acolytes with lights, the incense, and the chanting—all combine to one end, one act of worship. You feel it is really a worshipping; every sense, eyes, ears, smell, are made to know that worship is going on. The laity on the floor saying their beads, or making their acts; the choir singing out the Kyrie; and the priest and his assistants bowing low, and saying the Confiteor to each other. This is worship, and it is far above reason.” (44)
Later on in the novel, White says that a friend “spoke a good deal of the necessity of faith in order to be a Catholic. He said no one should go over merely because he thought he should like it better; that he had found out by experience that no one could live on sentiment; that the whole system of worship in the Romish Church was different from what it is in our own; nay, the very idea of worship, the idea of prayers; that the doctrine of intention itself, viewed in all its parts, constituted a new religion.” (186)
This is a substantial part of the message which St Newman wants to convey to Anglicans in this novel: that Catholicism is fundamentally different from the Anglican, and that its Mass can be contrasted, but cannot be compared to the Anglican liturgy. But the Catholic Church has to be felt and understood as a whole. In the very conclusion, it is Sunday morning, and Charles Reding has been that very morning received into the Church. When we find him:
… still kneeling in the church of the Passionists before the Tabernacle, in the possession of a deep peace and serenity of mind, which he had not thought possible on earth. It was more like the stillness which almost sensibly affects the ears when a bell that has long been tolling stops, or when a vessel, after much tossing at sea, finds itself in harbour. It was such as to throw him back in memory on his earliest years, as if he were really beginning life again. But there was more than the happiness of childhood in his heart; he seemed to feel a rock under his feet; it was the soliditas Cathedræ Petri. He went on kneeling, as if he were already in heaven, with the throne of God before him, and angels around, and as if to move were to lose his privilege.
I would not doubt that that is St Newman’s own story. So now we have described the essence of Loss and Gain, a novel which was – although unknowingly – a sort of dry run for what was to become the Apologia pro vita sua, arguably his masterpiece. But in the next podcast we will start to work through the narrative of the novel.