Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint by John Cornwell

Author:John Cornwell [Cornwell, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Leaders & Notable People, Religious, Catholicism
Amazon: B00OG4DXZK
Publisher: Continuum
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Stephen in both early novels reveals a subtle and wide-ranging grasp of New-man’s Idea of a University, the Apologia, and key sermons; while the Jesuits pay

mere lip-service to the Cardinal’s writings, which they neither know nor understand. Like Charles Reding in Loss and Gain, Stephen sees the university as an opportunity for, and a process of, alteration, conversion, metanoia. In Stephen’s case, the conversion is to literature; not in the manner of a Walter Pater or a Matthew Arnold – as ‘art for art’s sake’, or in order to seek moral goods, but according to the deeper principles expounded in the Idea of a University.

In A Portrait Stephen debates the crucial contrast between art and religion with the Jesuit Dean of Studies who has been laying a fire – demonstrating, as it were, the ‘useful’ arts. Unlike Newman, the Dean has become atrophied by his failure to change and to grow: ‘his very soul had waxed old in that service without growing towards light and beauty or spreading abroad a sweet odour of her sanctity.’ 35 They talk. The Dean argues that the beautiful should be marked by its utility and ethical value; while Stephen, quoting Aquinas, the heart and soul of Catholic orthodoxy under the recent influence of Pope Leo XIII, challenges the notion: ‘Aquinas, answered Stephen, says Pulcra sunt quae visa placent ’ [Those things are beautiful that please on being seen].36 By the same token, Stephen is following Newman, who himself follows Aristotle, in declaring that art should be regarded as enjoyable for its own sake: ‘All I have been now say-ing is summed up in a few characteristic words of the great Philosopher’, writes Newman, ‘“Of possessions”, [Aristotle] says, “those rather are useful which bear fruit; those liberal, which tend to enjoyment. By fruitful, I mean, which yield revenue; by enjoyable, where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using.” ’ 37 At a deeper level Joyce identifies himself with Newman as a hero of apostasy and rebellion in his abandonment of the established Church of his nation, as well as friends and family.38 Like Newman, Joyce is rejecting patriotism, Ireland’s Catholicism and family, in order to embrace exile on the continent of Europe. In a paradox worthy of Newman himself, Joyce’s motives for rejecting Catholicism find parallels with Newman’s path to Rome. Irish Catholicism means narrow xenophobia for Joyce, while literature signifies pluralism, universalism, a wide ranging civilization. When Stephen is accused by his friends of preferring the oppressors’ language of English to the study of Gaelic, he retorts that English literature and language are Aryan rather than merely English. It is reminiscent of Newman’s criticism of the Church of England: ‘You do not communicate with any one Church besides your own’, whereas the Church of Rome ‘has flourished through so many ages, among so many nations … in

such contrary classes and conditions of men.’ 39

The gulf between the Jesuit Dean and Stephen is exemplified by their unequal capacity to employ multidimensional language and dynamic metaphors.

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