Lessons from Newman: Reading As an Act of Homage

During St. John Henry Newman’s lifetime,[1] his personal library at the Birmingham Oratory housed about 13,000 volumes organized loosely along the lines of the library he accessed as a fellow at Oriel College, Oxford.[2] We know that he did not read each book in his collection. Some occupied the shelf without occupying his mind. One such volume is mentioned in his “Autobiographical Memoir I” wherein he states that “nothing came” of his oft stated desire of “get[ting] up the Persian language,” in consequence of which his mother had gifted him an Arabic and Persian Vocabulary during that 1821-22 interlude between attaining his BA at Trinity College and winning his Oriel Fellowship.[3] So, we might surmise that this book, alongside like volumes in the collection, was lightly or never used.

While we cannot know how many volumes Newman read, or how completely he read the volumes he took up, or how quickly he read, it is probable that he read a great many completely and returned to some more than once. So, as a plumb line of Newman’s lifetime investment in the act of reading, let us very modestly hypothesize that he spent two hours reading each volume. This represents 26,000 hours or 1,083 days or just shy of 3 years of his life, without accounting for those moments in which he read outside this collection. In view of Newman’s dedication to the act of reading, and his desire for holiness, I ask of him: might reading, under some circumstances, be considered as “an act of homage”? Initially, I ponder this question and then seek guidance from Newman in constructing an answer, after which I apply that guidance to my own reading of Joseph Pearce’s biography, Old Thunder, concerning the most celebrated graduate of Newman’s Oratory School, and a man of letters himself, Hilaire Belloc.[4] Finally, I remark upon this spiritual, literary, and philosophical exercise in terms of my own self- appropriation.

Can Reading be Considered as an Act of Homage?

At first blush, this seems a strange question. We regularly read for the sake of leisure and learning, but aside from overtly religious pursuits—such as Lectio Divina, proclamation or pious reading of the Word of God, studying theology and chanting of the Divine Office—the surface answer seems to be “no.” Certainly, it is hard to conceive of reading a Twitter feed, the Google search page, advertisements, pulp fiction, or the like, as acts of homage. Acts of penance . . . perhaps! Despite the place which reading occupies in my daily round, I do not remember ever having previously entertained this question, though I recall that Newman disparages “schools of this world” in his sermon, “Faith and Reason, contrasted as Habits of Mind,” precisely for inculcating the disposition that “truth is to be approached without homage.”[5] Rather, my reflections are spurred by re-reading an intriguing passage by the Trappist, Thomas Merton, (1915-1968) in one of his early writings, Thoughts in Solitude.

Reading ought to be an act of homage to the God of all truth. We open our hearts to words that reflect the reality he has created or the greater Reality which he is. It is also an act of humility and reverence towards other men who are the instruments by which God communicates his truth to us . . . . Books can speak to us like God, like men or like the noise of the city we live in. They speak like God when they bring us light and peace and fill us with silence. They speak to us like God when we desire never to leave them. They speak to us like men when we desire to hear them again. They speak to us like the noise of the city when they hold us captive by a weariness that tells us nothing, give us no peace, and no support, nothing to remember, and yet will not let us escape . . . . [They] reduce us to despair by the sheer weight of their emptiness. They entertain us like the lights of city streets at night, by hopes they cannot fulfill.[6]

While acknowledging that some reading brings weariness, noise, and emptiness (for like other human endeavours it is touched by the effects of original sin) Merton contends that it “ought to be an act of homage.” His evaluation of the relationship between reading, reality, and “the greater Reality” of God is an instance of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s counsel to “find God in all things.” Significantly, Merton underscores that humility is required to see things as they are, especially the self. For no matter how travelled, learned, accomplished, cultured, or talented we may be (or not be), all of us are beggars of the most provincial sort relative to the richness of existence and, especially, the One Who Is. Humility consists in recognizing the chasm between our poverty and this richness, between the utter givenness of our existence and the lavishly infinite generosity of the Giver. In the memorable words of Catherine of Siena, “I am she who is naught, and he is the One Who Is.” Of course, specifying “how” our awareness of this chasm informs the enterprise of reading is a subtle, complex topic exceeding the limits of this article. But I can make a dint.

Newman on Reading

Over his life, Newman’s reading and writing spanned many genres—poetry, plays, novels, editorials, lectures, journals, diaries, letters, essays, sermons, histories, autobiographies, meditations, devotions, and theological treatises. Like most people, his reasons for reading were myriad: for example, to fulfill educational requirements, to satisfy the eros of the mind in its quest for truth, to be au courant regarding cultural and societal events, to prepare for controversy, to entertain, to serve his Oratorian community and the Church, or simply to ensure he boarded the train on time. Indeed, we can assert without hyperbole that reading and writing were co-extensive with his existence. As an author crafting a text, Newman surely formed an inner sensibility as how to achieve his end which affected how he himself read texts. In short, reading and writing mutually conditioned the activities of his mind.

On the Catechetical Nature of Reading

In a lecture to Irish gentlemen attending evening classes at the Catholic University in Dublin called “Discipline of Mind,” Newman contrasts the absorption of information by those frequenting Mechanics’ Institutes with the personal formation these gentlemen were receiving.[7] Deborah Mays describes these institutes as emerging from the “demand” generated by the Industrial Revolution “for a workforce to manage its machinery, to tend, repair and improve the complex mechanisation that revolutionised our output” via an “education for the working man through lending libraries, lecture theatres, class rooms and laboratories [which] . . . often included in the mix of courses and technical material, wider opportunities for learning and betterment.”[8] In this Irish lecture, Newman acknowledges the legitimate contributions of Mechanical Institutes while underscoring their limitations:

Now this is no fault, Gentlemen, of the books or the lectures of the Mechanics’ Institute. They could not do more than they do, from their very nature. They do their part, but their part is not enough. A man may hear a thousand lectures, and read a thousand volumes, and be at the end of the process very much where he was, as regards knowledge. Something more than merely admitting it in a negative way into the mind is necessary, if it is to remain there. It must not be passively received, but actually and actively entered into, embraced, mastered. The mind must go half-way to meet what comes to it from without.[9]

For him, then, the conveyance of information is never the neutral act of injecting content into the learner but always, at some level, consists in a communion of minds: a communion between those conveying and those receiving. As he comments to the Irish gentlemen in this night class:

This, then, is the point in which the institutions I am speaking of fail; here, on the contrary, is the advantage of such lectures as you are attending, Gentlemen, in our University. You have come, not merely to be taught, but to learn. You have come to exert your minds. You have come to make what you hear your own, by putting out your hand, as it were, to grasp it and appropriate it. You do not come merely to hear a lecture, or to read a book, but you come for that catechetical instruction, which consists in a sort of conversation between your lecturer and you. He tells you a thing, and he asks you to repeat it after him. He questions you, he examines you, he will not let you go till he has proof, not only that you have heard, but that you know.[10]

Indeed, such catechetical influence marked Newman’s own life of reading. Notably, in his letters, autobiographical writings, and the Apologia, we read of how his beloved Ealing school master, Mr. Walter Mayers, encouraged him to read works which left a lasting impression: e.g., the Force of Truth and the biblical commentaries by Evangelical spiritual writer, Thomas Scott, and the devotional work, Private Thoughts, by William Beveridge, Bishop of St. Asaph (1637-1708), a divine of Calvinist leanings and High-Church liturgical sensibilities.[11] Newman’s words shed light upon his view of reading in three ways. First, he perceives reading as an active rather than a passive activity. Second, he recognizes the rounded practice of reading a text to “[consist] in a sort of conversation” between the initiated and uninitiated aimed at inaugurating the reader into a hermeneutical tradition. Third, he sees the goal of the guided, communal conversation as preparatory to an act which is personal, subjective, and sui generis: that is, appropriating the meaning of the text.

Catechetical Reading and Personal Influence

In his sketches of the Church Fathers, alongside his marshalling of the requisite facts of time, place, and event, Newman recounts how their spiritual heroism illustrates the life of virtue, underscores the drama of orthodoxy and the cost of discipleship, speaks to the scope of spiritual warfare, and enlivens faith by recounting God’s merciful and mighty acts through those cooperating with his grace. At one juncture, Newman distinguishes hagiographies which reveal from those that obscure. To this end, he lauds histories which draw upon the correspondence and personal writings of saints and criticizes moralistic biographies because the latter show forth the minds of biographers, whereas the former offer readers insight into the inner, spiritual journey. This preference mirrors Newman’s firmly “expressed wish”—as recalled by Henry Tristram in his introduction to Newman’s Autobiographical Writings—“that the history [of the Cardinal’s] life should be told as far as possible, in his own words.”[12]

Clearly, Newman privileges the reading of personal communications, especially of the saints, since these display “the secret heart of such favoured servants of God, unveiled to their devout disciples in such completeness and fidelity” as to reveal “the real, hidden but human, life, or the interior as it is called.” Indeed, says Newman, “when a Saint is himself the speaker, he interprets his own action . . . his words are the index of his hidden life, as far as that life can be known to man”; his words serve as “an unstudied self-manifestation.”[13] For example, according to Newman, St. Martin of Tours, at prayer in his monastic cell, vanquishes Satan guised as Christ in “glittering clothing, and radiant with a diadem as Christ” with the Pauline protestation, “I will not believe that Christ is come, save in that state and form in which he suffered, save with the show of the wounds of the Cross.” Here Newman extols us to test the spirits of the age by imitating Martin, imitating Paul, imitating Christ: “Christian, look hard at them with Martin in silence, and ask them for the print of the nails.”[14] He employs hagiography shimmering with actual words from the saintly to address the discernment of spirits in the inner life which, in turn, has real life outer consequences for believers asking, “how then ought we to live?”[15]

Belloc

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was, in his turn, a scholar, soldier, and sailor, a president of the Oxford Union, a parliamentarian, a prodigious and pugnacious writer, a proud Roman Catholic, an inveterate traveller and debater, and a husband and father. In 1890, a few years after Belloc graduated Newman’s Oratory School (1887), he spoke eloquently about how Newman’s spirituality and personalism shaped generations of boys on the precipice of manhood:

They [the boys] were taught to be as free—as self-reliant and free—as any of the young Englishmen who were growing up around them in the great public schools; but with it all there was an atmosphere of healthy religion, an unconstrained frequency in the approaching of the Sacraments, a sincere faith and a high code both of morals and honours, which appeared so natural and so native to the place, that is would have been called spontaneous by anyone who did not know the founding of the school, its influence and its spirit were due to Cardinal Newman.[16]

Like many writers, Belloc claims that much of what he wrote was out of financial necessity rather than joy. His immense and varied literary output includes novels, lectures, pamphlets, essays, poetry, newspaper and journal articles, historical biographies, social commentary, and a personal journal of his walking pilgrimage to Rome. He so closely collaborated with G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) on personal, religious, literary, artistic, intellectual, and political matters that their chief public adversary, the witty Irishman of letters, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), coined the term, “the Chesterbelloc,” to capture the symbiotic character of their relationship. Indeed, I read Joseph Pearce’s biography, Old Thunder, to understand who Belloc was relative to G.K. Chesterton. By the end of my read, I was shot through with wonder about the English Catholic revival of which these men were a part, their dedication to social justice articulated as distributism, the link between Belloc and the most formative influence in my own thought, St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), and the manner in which lasting insights about faith, truth, beauty, goodness, and justice are achieved through, manifested in, and upheld by, such fellowship. I marvelled at how creative endeavors are necessarily personal but, ultimately, not atomistic; and, at how the most creative of personal labor sustained by such fellowship is, finally, not literary, but spiritual. Belloc’s estimation of Chesterton’s place in English literature aptly fits himself.

In the appreciation of a man rather than of a writer virtue is immeasurably more important than literary talent and appeal. For these last make up nothing for the salvation of the soul and for an ultimate association with those who should be our unfailing companions in Beatitude; the Great Company. Of that Company he now is; so that it is a lesser and even indifferent thing to determine how much he shall also be of the company, the earthly and temporal company, of the local and temporarily famous.[17]

Belloc’s life was hardly perfect. He is a controversial figure who loved to stir up trouble, and some draw a much less flattering portrait of the man than Pearce. But I believe what is uncontroversial is that his life was a litany in praise of sacramentality. Taking St. Ignatius’ advice to heart, he found God in all things—not like the pantheist or new age creation spiritualist, but like a Catholic. He loved the created order (whether nature itself, or its greatest boast, the human person) for its beauty and goodness and its capacity to speak about and, at some level, mediate an encounter with the living God without ever confusing or reducing the latter to the former. Amongst his works we find The Path to Rome (his personal favorite), which is an account of his spiritual pilgrimage on foot traversing 1,200 km. from his birthplace in Toul, France to the home of Roman Catholicism in 26 days, and The Four Men, which is an account of what Pearce terms his “secular pilgrimage conveying a soul’s love for the soil of his native land. Home, like Rome, was ‘a holy place’ and The Four Men is full of spiritual premonitions and of ‘the character of enduring things amid the decay of time.’” As Belloc wrote,

And as a man will paint with a peculiar passion a face which he is only permitted to see for a little time, so will one passionately set down one’s own horizon and one’s fields before they are forgotten and have become a different thing. Therefore, it is that I have put down in writing what happened to me now so many years ago. . . . Sussex, did I not know that you, who must like all created things decay, might with the rest of us be very near your ending. For I know very well in my mind that a day will come when the holy place shall perish and all the people of it and never more be what they were. But before that day comes, Sussex, may your earth cover me, and may some loud-voiced priest from Arundel, or Grinstead, or Crawley, or Storrington, but best of all from home, have sung Do Mi Fa Sol above my bones.[18]

In view of his sacramental sensibility, it is not surprising that critics consider “Heroic poem in Praise of Wine” (1928) as perhaps his finest; or, that the neophyte politician supported a Private Members Bill to permit private brewing against the wishes of party brass. Belloc’s unswerving attachment and unwavering commitment to the things of the earth, like his Sussex home, King’s Land, was surpassed only by love of his wife, Elodie, and of his Catholic faith. As a young man, without promise of success and in the face of an initial rebuff, he followed Elodie across the ocean to California to court her. Lack of funds meant that he had to traverse North America by every means imaginable. After her death, he always kissed her door as a gentle sign that their love had survived the grave and pierced the veil. As a bi-lingual, English Catholic, proudly born of a French father near Paris, he campaigned for a seat in Parliament against an opponent who conjured up the double demons of religious prejudice and xenophobia. Belloc ignored the advice of local clergy, arranged a public meeting on the grounds of a Catholic school, and addressed the overflowing audience saying: “Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.”[19]

Conclusion

That Hilaire Belloc was a man of unusual faith and letters, whose life has been skilfully set forth by his biographer drawing extensively upon his own words, made it relatively easy to suggest how reading about him, at times, constitutes an act of homage. Entering the drama of his life our horizons fused: my second-hand experience of his friendships and his sacramental vision led me to embrace him and, in turn, to exalt in the One whose image and likeness he reflected. In the process, I caught a glimpse of him, of others I knew, and had come to know, and, even, on occasion, of what I am called to be as we strove, albeit inconsistently and imperfectly, to be a part of that “Great Company” pilgrimaging through history.

Echoing Newman’s approach, this required an active investment of self in the reading of the biography rather than a passive reception of biographical information. Employing my judgment, I engaged in “a sort of conversation” with Belloc courtesy of the catechetical mediation of Pearce who himself worked within an interpretive, literary, biographical tradition.

Finally, this guided, communal conversation led to my personal, subjective, sui generis appropriation of an essential strand of the text: that is, we are to see our lives as utterly lavish gifts from God which we should freely, lovingly, wisely, and gratefully return to our Creator as a graced work of art, fashioned and refashioned over the arc of our existence. In this instance, Merton’s words are sterling: “Reading ought to be an act of homage to the God of all truth. We open our hearts to words that reflect the reality He has created or the greater Reality which He is. It is also an act of humility and reverence towards other men who are the instruments by which God communicates His truth to us.”

Church Life Journal | Articles

Tags: from Homage Lessons Newman Reading