Newman Interrogating Catholic Imagination
Just about everything Newman wrote on any topic over a long career of writing is controversial in some way, or another, and engenders strong responses, whether of outrage or acclaim, frustration or elation, the emotion of being hard-done by or quiet vindication. The experience of reading Newman—either The Idea of a University or other texts—is rarely if ever, however, that of disappointment, an experience in which enemies and friends of Newman alike feel deflated, where one side is deprived of their seething anger at a forensic and sophistical Newman and the other loses the privilege of celebrating their hero who brings the opposition to grief.
At first blush, one of the few exceptions to the above rule seems to be Newman’s reflection in Appendix 3 of The Idea of a University, where, in the context of creating an English Literature curriculum for the Catholic university that is the common hope of Newman and the Irish Catholic bishops, the former Oxford don, who has entered into something like a contract of mutual misunderstanding with the Catholic authorities, comes to pose the question of whether now, and going forward, there is such a thing as a “Catholic literature.” This is a brave and bold question, one that we should be grateful to Newman for asking.
Yet, to an unusual extent the analysis that parses the question seems to lack the usual Newman sharpness and, to avail of a nineteenth-century word used with respect to explorers and geographers, to be oddly “circumlittoral,” that is, to hug the shore or the peripheral and never cut a swathe inland towards the center. That Newman finally answers in the negative, even going so far as to suggest that “Catholic literature” is an oxymoron, seems at once to be a piece with the general impression of squinting and to crown what friends and enemies alike would think to be a pedestrian piece in which Newman’s intellect, for once confounding difficulties with impossibility—which is something Newman suggests that we never do—yields prematurely to making a judgment that he did not need to make and is the worse for having made.
Just how spectacularly bad the judgment is comes into view when one accounts for the following two considerations. First, that a critic with the brain of a tomtit or fruit fly would be capable of coming up with a long list of counterfactuals from Newman’s time and going forward—e.g. G. M. Hopkins, James Joyce, Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh; a host of other Irish writers writing in the shadow of Joyce such as John McGahern, Colm Tobin; others writing in the shadow of Hopkins such as Seamus Heaney and John F. Deane; and Patrick Kavanagh entirely himself. And this is not to speak to the American representatives, the standards such as Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, a lesser author such as J. F. Powers, but non-standards such as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and maybe even the divisive Cormac McCarthy, gifted with a Catholic vision of hell on earth and whose language seems to move towards the condition of liturgy, even if an inverted and infernal one.
Suffice it to say that the list is still only getting started. More names can be added. Moreover, the looser the criteria, the more the population grows, and in due course, having a similar size directory, might plausibly move towards getting state recognition after the manner of the Pacific island nation of Vanawatu. The second, and supporting, consideration is that an irrepressible champion of Newman such as Ian Kerr, who will not hear a bad word about his hero or even admit a reservation, after speaking about Newman’s denial of a Catholic English literature in The Catholic Revival in English Literature, jauntily proceeds to speak deliberately and incisively about Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Green, and Waugh as Catholic authors, and to make matters even more bizarre, puts Newman to the front of the list of the more than plausible counterfactuals. It is almost as if Kerr gives us license not to take Newman seriously, maybe even to presume that Newman made a joke that we are all now in on.
From Hapless Conclusion to Interrogation
The prospects, then, seem dim with regard to us taking anything of positive value from what Newman says about Catholic literature in The Idea of a University. Indeed, a closer reading of the offending appendix hardly improves the prospects of getting anything positive, and in all likelihood would make matters worse. Yet, this is where we should start and in the process make things worse before we make them better. And make them better, we will. For Newman’s mistakes are not just anyone’s mistakes: they are brilliant and telling mistakes, mistakes which, if we pay attention to other things he says in this appendix and the other two appendices on literature that precede them, may, in fact, help us to restate the problem of Catholic Imagination and perhaps even suggest criteria as to where we might find it. In any event, and more particularly, while we cannot redeem Newman’s conclusions, we can be instructed by the reasons he does not provide as well as those he does provide for problematizing the notion of “Catholic literature.” The reasons he does not provide can be classed as symptoms.
To get this analysis off the ground, first let us begin with the two hinge propositions of Appendix 3. (1) English literature is Protestant; and (2) whether or not there were Catholic authors in the past (Chaucer, maybe Shakespeare, and others?), going forward there will not be great Catholic authors—that is, authors of such literary excellence that they will admit of being made part of the canon—since literature has standards internal to itself that will reject the Diktats of Catholicism.
How are these propositions supposed to relate to each other? There are at least two difficulties. The first difficulty is formal, and concerns the difference in the nature of the propositions themselves: the first proposition—albeit with a few qualifications—advances a historical thesis to the effect that, as the English canon of literature evolved, it is Protestant or at least became such; the second, in contrast, is a statement of principle concerning the fundamental lack of fit between English literature—fated to insist on its own integrity—and Catholicism equally fated to insist on its own dogmatic truths.
The second difficulty is material or substantive. If Newman is doubtful about the prospects of a non-antagonistic relation between Catholicism and literature worthy of the name, why is he not equally worried about the prospects of a non-antagonistic relation between Protestantism and literature worthy of the name? The question becomes more urgent when one acknowledges that historically speaking it is Protestantism that far more routinely held itself apart from culture that was either presumed to lack moral seriousness or to function as a temptation. Here Newman seems to have skirted the difficulty by being able to identify the majority of writers in the English canon as Protestant. (But not all—Shakespeare is not obviously so, and Pope is Catholic, as evinced by the fact that as a Catholic he is required to live ten miles outside London). He does not ask the question whether they made it into the canon because or despite the fact that their faith commitments were Protestant.
If Catholic beliefs get in the way of the integrity of literature, why do Protestant beliefs not get in the way of the integrity of literature such that there can in principle be no Protestant literature either? The puzzle is twofold: how or why does Protestantism not interfere in the autonomy of literature in a way that Newman thinks Catholicism does and doubtless would continue to do going forward; and does this putative lack of pressure of belief exercised by Protestant authors in the English canon mean that we have found the link between the two propositions? For, it certainly looks as if “Protestantism” is functioning not as something that has gotten aligned with literature in a positive way—as exercising, strengthening, and stretching the imagination—but as something negative or privative—that is, a set of ideas or stances that do not get in the way of literature being literature and maintaining its desired independence and integrity that is hallowed in modernity.
I want to suggest that there are two lines of supposition that Newman does not adduce which serve as the key to understanding his judgments and which also might prove helpful towards a deeper and sharper understanding of what routinely gets referred to as “Catholic Imagination.” The first of these is exogenous, that is, it comes from outside Newman. I am thinking here, more specifically, that in his legerdemain towards English literature as “Protestant”—and having Milton, Southey, and Byron as exemplars—Newman shows himself open to the influence of the Romantic narrative of the coming to independence and integration of literature as grounded in the unfettered imagination. The second is internal to Newman’s understanding of Protestantism that proved instrumental in his conversion almost a decade prior to his writing of this appendix.
Regarding the first, this concerns the story that English Romanticism told itself about its origins as the defender, executor, and chief exhibitor of the prerogatives of imagination and its freedom from tradition and religious confession. More specifically, the Romantic story that Newman plausibly buys into has to do with Milton, the arch-Protestant, setting the terms for later English literature, especially poetry, in articulating a poetic code confident with regard to creativity and insistent upon freedom, even if, as a committed Calvinist, he could be cast as retarding what he had opened by his commitment to Protestant beliefs about the absolute sovereignty of God, election, and justification by faith. By claiming in the proem to Paradise Lost not only to have outbid all prior epics with regard to scale and importance of poetic theme, but also effectively to supplement Scripture in his rendering of the Fall of the angels as the supposition of both the creation and Fall of human beings, Milton opens up the prospect of human creativity being taken to substitute for divine creativity, indeed, to supplant it altogether.
Even if all Romantics were not equally assertive concerning Milton’s role in their release into a creativity that is not answerable to pre-given religious or ethical norms, still it is quite evident that some of the more important Romantics supposed that Milton made possible what their age made necessary, that is, the jettisoning of the cargo of Protestant beliefs deemed accidental to poetic construction and judged to have delayed the proper self-understanding of the poet as instantiating a creativity co-extensive with human desire for expressing all that is true and beautiful and thereby contributing to the formation of elevated individual selves and authentic human communities.
Shelley provides one of the best examples. In prose as well as poetry, in pamphlets on art and creativity as well as lyric poems (e.g. “Ode to the West Wind,” “Skylark,” “Mount Blank”), he relentlessly argued and illustrated a form of divine-human creativity that is untrammeled by superstition, servility, and rule. In his verse drama Prometheus Unbound, filling in the gaps left by the loss of Aeschylus’ cycle dramatizing the reconciliation of Zeus and Prometheus, he images a human creativity taking the place of a divine creativity marked by arbitrary rule and psychologically riven by hate and vengeance. Of course, as the play can be understood as a kind of divine cathexis in which the divine comes to recognize just how vacuous it really is, it can also be understood as Milton wising up to what his true commitments are: and manifestly they are not to the wrathful and self-justifying God of Calvinist belief.
Now, if Shelley is tantalizingly indirect in evoking Milton in the process whereby the creativity of God as sovereign yields to the more expansive and humane creativity of human beings, Milton’s unshackling of himself from his Calvinist beliefs is the very subject of what, arguably, is the greatest of Blake’s poems, the epic Milton. Coincident with the purification of creativity that the divine undergoes in the displacement of Urizen (transcendent and uncreative divine) by Los (the creative divine-human), Milton also undergoes the same process of dispatching the qualities of caprice, legislation, and vindictiveness that distort his own creativity. Of Blake in general, and of the poem Milton in particular, we can with a significant measure of confidence say that Newman knew nothing.
Yet, Newman did know something of Coleridge, had read a number of his texts, including Aids to Reflection (1826) and his Treatise on Method (1817), and had found congenial Coleridge’s confession of having a disposition towards the otherworld and his view of conscience as opening us on the divine. Still, as far I am aware, there is no mention of Coleridge in the appendix, though it is difficult to think, given the subject matter regarding the history of English literature, that the table had not been set by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria (1817), in which Coleridge had plotted the line of modern English literature from Shakespeare to Wordsworth or from Milton to Wordsworth, who succeeds in The Lyrical Ballads, according to Coleridge, in liberating the productive Imagination that represents an echo in time and the finite order of the eternal and infinite “I AM.” Newman famously affirms the imagination in the A Grammar of Assent pays homage to it. Faced with Coleridge’s actual claim, however, doubtless Newman would have found it exorbitant. Even if Coleridge keeps the analogical structure between creature and creator officially intact, it seems evident that, defined as productive rather than reproductive, imagination will not brook any pre-given content, religious or otherwise.
To sum up: when Newman spoke of English literature being Protestant, he had to be supposing at the very least the Romantic account of the English canon that is motored by the Protestant principles of autonomy that over time successfully dislodged as inessential those inherited Protestant beliefs that derogate from the status of human beings and downplay their potential as capax infiniti. This is the exogenous or externalist reason for thinking that Protestantism in a way capacitated the dislodging of its particular beliefs embodied in literature that could and would in due course yield to a literature in which the values are entirely aesthetic and internal to the work of art as a work of imagination.
As suggested already, Newman’s own views regarding the trajectory of Protestantism in the modern world also come into play in his sketch of the history of English literature. Newman saw that Protestantism had undergone profound changes from the time of Elizabeth and Granmer (1489-1556) and, given the emphasis on private judgment, was capacitated to do so. It did so on two overlapping tracks. On one track, the rationalist track, Protestantism underwent a filtering in which private opinion was ensconced as pivotal and doctrines such as predestination, justification by faith, the wrath of God, and a host of others could be sanitized or set aside. This seemed to receive both wide and vivid expression in the Augustan age of poets with their moralism and their interest in the role of directing manners and ennobling society (though inconveniently both Dryden [1633-1700] and Pope [1688-1744] are Catholic).
On another track, the more evangelical track that received its apogee in the writing and preaching of the Wesley brothers, doctrines were also set aside, even though not with the same level of prejudice as illustrated in the rational camp. Still, what was crucial now was no longer the doctrines themselves and their possible shaping function but the experience itself. Personal experience, whether expressed in judgment or feeling, became self-authenticating. In the latter case, the effects were felt in eighteenth-century literature with perhaps the Wunderkind and Romantic favorite, Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), the main example. The doctrinal cargo of Protestantism had become sufficiently light to be borne without compromise to the autonomy and integrity of literature that increasingly was deemed essential for the ascription of literary greatness and acceptance into the canon. Throughout Newman’s career, but especially in the Apologia (1864), he made plain his opposition to both strains, both of which shifted the center of gravity from the divine as transcendent object of worship to the self-certifying of human experience both in its rationalist and affective modes.
Obviously, the internalist and externalist constructions of the unfolding of Protestantism are mutually supporting. They illustrate how and why it is that Protestantism could sponsor the independence of literature rather than Catholicism. This can be assumed to be the background of Newman’s underscoring of how in contrast Catholicism has no such history and thus that in a “Catholic” literature, confessional beliefs would count. Thus, the insistence that a “Catholic literature”—dare one say a “Catholic imagination”—would be dogmatically inflected, which, of course, Newman realizes entails the destruction of the integrity of literature. It is hard to cavil with Newman, but he has in fact misstated the issue, even on his own terms.
He tells us in Appendix 2, which concerns literature more broadly, that great literature is an irreducible personal exercise or inflection of language. To use the more technical language he forges later in the Grammar (1870), he is pointing to the writer as exercising his or her own irreducible and irreplaceable illative sense, which is to the ability to make informed judgments on the fly as it were without appealing to rule. This obviously bears on the issue of whether a Catholic writer as a writer would be dogmatic in the strict sense, that is, would defend in and through writing determinate Catholic beliefs. This would be the work surely of the magisterium, the Catholic theologian, or the controversialist. To be a writer is not necessarily to deny that one has beliefs, but one’s beliefs or assumptions now operate in a horizon in which they are not argued, but rendered, dramatized, and put under pressure to be experientially and linguistically persuasive.
Newman himself aids significantly towards this revision when he makes the distinction between religion and theology earlier in The Development of Doctrine (1845). In contrast to theology, religion is the response of the person to the truths of faith that form an ethos and that shape and inform decisions in life. Religion has determinacy and shape, yet it is neither explicitly theological nor dogmatic. Religion operates largely through images, metaphors, characters, and narrative. The question to be asked is not whether literature and dogma can go together, but whether literature can be religiously “weight-bearing” to any significant degree. If we are allowed this emendation, which has proceeded on Newmanian grounds, then, going forward at least, there is no reason to deny this prospect to Catholicism, as long as the integrity of literature is preserved by avoiding the devolution into didacticism and harangue.
It is by means of this correction that is internal to Newman’s thought that we can move towards something like a criterion for Catholic literature in general and poetry in particular. To state it more bluntly perhaps than I ought: for a literature to be “Catholic,” it requires that its symbols, metaphors, and narrative have a relatively saturating effect on the poetry or prose that is its basic linguistic form. Catholicism is a mode of seeing the world and parsing its contradictions. Belief can be suspended or problematized, and attention can be paid to gaps in understanding and feeling, but it cannot be denied. It can be satirized mercilessly, but not ironized out of existence. Even its displacement and replacement by the secular can be contemplated, even made thematic, but not easily sanctioned, indeed, not sanctionable at all if the displacement and replacement of Catholicism is entirely complacent. An agonized displacement-replacement is liminal.
I want to test this newly minted Newmanian perspective with a view to seeing how it works regarding two authors whom typically we have no problem calling Catholic, G. M. Hopkins and James Joyce. Both of them are indebted to Newman, in the former case Newman being essentially the reason for his conversion and in the latter case because of the elective affinity on which Joyce insists when it comes to prose style. Both also were occupants of Newman House, where Newman stayed when he was giving the lectures that make up The Idea of a University.
I would want to argue the following: first, that it would be difficult to come upon a more Catholically saturated writer than Hopkins, indeed, that the Catholic saturation is such—despite the late sonnets that represent Hopkins dealing with his despair—that Hopkins’s poetry plausibly represents a kind of limit as to what literature can religiously bear. Second, and contrariwise, I will argue that, according to these newly minted criteria, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not a Catholic text, but a belated Romantic text in which Catholicism serves as the symbolic-narrative husk of a perfection only realized in the derangements and epiphanies provided by the secular world.
Catholic Imagination: Hopkins and Joyce
I take it that only the truly unserious would deny that Hopkins is a Catholic poet, and more particularly, that his poetry is thoroughly and insistently incarnational. With respect to this point, we could offer a bundle made up of the following poems as evidence: “God’s Grandeur,” “Spring,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Hurrahing the Harvest,” and “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” It should be noted, first, that in Hopkins incarnation differs from a Parnassian such as Bridges in being more nearly performative than thematic. It should be noted, second, that Hopkins’ notion of the incarnation differs from that of high Romantics such as Wordsworth and Shelley in that the divine power that suffuses the physical world is not vague and impersonal and indicative of our own greatness, but signifies rather the person and energy of Christ that ties together the world of unique particulars in all their irreplaceable uniqueness (haecceitas) and integrity.
Indeed, one can see a profound pushback against a Romantic ideology in which, even if the incarnation of Christ is not always dismissed, it is transposed into a more general idiom in which Christ is a possible element of a large incarnational vocabulary, but fails to supply the grammar. Perhaps this aspect of Hopkins’s poetry, what we might call—following Derrida—the restricted economy of incarnation as opposed to the general economy of incarnation, is most successfully captured in “God’s Grandeur” and “The Windhover.” Hopkins’s determinate frame for epiphany and theophany is presented in the opening lines of “God’s Grandeur”:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed!
With respect to incarnation in these opening lines, Hopkins manages at once to be thematic and performative, that is, the very imagery in which his general view of the world is couched, that is the imagery of “flame out,” “shining from shook foil,” “ooze of oil,” performs that of which it speaks. As he does so, he suggests a move beyond Parnassianism, but also beyond high Romanticism where the merging of the thematic and the performative does happen, though it tends to be exceptional. Still, superficially, it is not evident from the outset that Hopkins has distanced himself from the best examples in high Romanticism of unity of theme and performance or worldview, for instance, the opening lines of Mount Blanc in which Shelley expounds his view of Spirit as the river Arve tumbling down the mountain. There is the concreteness of image that renders the worldview. Moreover, in an ecstatic mode similar to what we find in Hopkins, there is a surcharge of sublime energy that excites and incites participation.
Yet, even with Mount Blanc as a measure of what can be achieved in high Romanticism, the differences between Hopkins and High Romanticism impress themselves. In the term “grandeur” Hopkins’ poem obviously recalls the Psalmist singing the glory of God that shines through nature as well as on Mount Sinai and in the Holy of Holies and which in Christian reading might be associated with Christ. But even more directly “grandeur” or “greatest” is an expression of Christos, Christ our King. Again, the addition of “crushed” to “ooze of oil” evokes the Christ who is “crushed” for our sake, and “oil” is obviously sacramental and most likely evokes the oil of baptism and the entrance into the living Christ. The commitment to determinate particulars and the orientation towards persons rather than principles is carried in the sestet of the sonnet in which “the dearest freshness deep down things” (l 10) is presided over by the brooding Holy Spirit—reminding of a relation with Christ—suggesting a connection of the Spirit of God hovering over the chaos (tohu va bohu) in the act of creation, while also recalling those passages in Hebrew Scripture that capture divine solicitude a brooding bird has for her chicks. This latter connection is cemented in the final line of the poem of the poem, when Hopkins speaks of covering wings (l 14). “God’s Grandeur” renders a poetry that is incarnationally saturated and possibly sacramentally saturated as well, while making sure that neither Christ nor the Holy Spirit, as creative and sustaining forces, are evacuated of their concrete personae and etherized into principles.
“The Windhover,” dedicated explicitly to Christ our Lord, is with “God’s Grandeur” a poem that effects the return of Christ into nature poetry from its exile in Romanticism that had succeeded in being incarnational, epiphanic, and sublime without him. Christ, inescapably particular, though a particular paradoxically of universal reach, is caught in the image of “dappled-dawn drawn Falcon” who essentially in a Scotistic way “contracts” him. If the octave presents the epiphany, the sestet unpacks the meaning of the brilliance, loveliness, and dangerousness of the kinetic Falcon mastering the air as both symbol and synecdoche of Christ’s capacity to use and master all the elements. Now, while Hopkins’ focus on Christ’s incarnation is central to his work, nonetheless, it is only one aspect of a complex oeuvre that overall is Eucharistic and involves the drama of loss and alienation from God as presupposition for resurrection.
“The Wreck of the Deutschland” is a poem of apocalyptic terror, as a ship carrying nuns, already in exile, goes down near the Devon coast. The insertion of the Eucharist into the poem occurs as early as line 2, where God is recognized as the God who gives bread as well as breath. The question of the poem is what response this manifestation of the terrible, associated with God, wrings from those overwhelmed by the storm, whether acceptance or rejection, blessing or curse, aversion and admiration, and what kind of seeing it prompts in extremis, whether of God’s wrath or God’s mercy. The nun is a cipher of the suffering Christ and because such she is “inlaid into Christ” and thus into his resurrection. She and four other nuns, as all is lost, break out in the acclamation: “Let him easter in us.” This is stated just as the leading nun in one of her last breaths has placed herself in the book of Revelation, the book of the Lamb, by citing its ending, maranatha, “Christ come quickly.”
Of course, it is open to the reader of Hopkins to take his or her point of view of Hopkins’ poetry from the dark sonnets that bring the curtain down on a small oeuvre in which glory is be found everywhere, in the meanest thing and moment, even in the darkness. On the surface these poems seem to speak to the disappearance of God of which Hillis Miller speaks and which Matthew Arnold dramatizes in the penultimate stanza of “Dover Beach”:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
The nightmarescape of the sonnet “Carrion Comfort” and the five sonnets that follow it seem more like a winnowing and a test of belief than Arnold’s nostalgia for a God who is now irrevocably absent. “Carrion Comfort” leans into both: the test is that of “fighting” (L 13) and “wrestling” with God (I 14), and the winnowing in that the purpose of the disappearance of God is “That my chaff my fly” (L 9). There is the nadir beyond grief without the experience of the Comforter who might give consolation, the loneliness beyond imagining that leads to a kind of de-creation (“a lonely began”), and phrases such as “heavens baffling ban” and “God’s deep decree” speak to being outside God’s favor. A cry goes up for a God who might reveal himself in “delicious kindness,” yet is accompanied by the let it be that joy comes in God’s season in the right measure or “size.” The absence of God can no more be taken for granted than God’s presence. It is real and tensile. In the manifold of the priest-Christian who has appropriated his Christianity or been appropriated by it, everything is dramatic, everything is act. This applies to the nature and origin of epiphany, as it does to the experience of the absence of God which is still religious because it speaks to a relation (religare), in this instance God’s sovereign act of withdrawing that remains mysterious, which is granted a limited space in the Exercises of Ignatius Loyola but is front and center in the “dark night” of John of the Cross.
This brings me to the other denizen of Newman House, James Joyce, perhaps the most famous man of letters that our small island has produced and who largely succeeded in expropriating the English language from the conqueror by first writing it perfectly in Portrait of the Artist, deranging it in Ulysses, and rearranging it entirely in Finnegans Wake. Here we focus only on Portrait, which is Joyce’s Bildungsroman in and through which he became an artist in and through his struggle with Catholicism, whose control of behavior and minds was ubiquitous in Irish society and whose legacy was self-hatred and guilt that depressed intellect, repressed imagination, and made human flourishing impossible. Throughout the novel, in his protagonist Steven Daedalus, Joyce shows his distaste for its clerical vanguard (the Jesuits), horror at some of its figures (Fr. Dolan and the Redemptorist who delivers the marvelous hellfire sermon that comes across as the kind of improvisation of imagining religious places and states recommended in Week 1 of the Exercises), and contempt for the low-ceiling of bourgeois expectation under which Catholicism and politics do their dance. Excoriation and exposure are inevitable in such an anti-Catholic text, which turns out to be so damning precisely because Joyce has as his hero-anti-hero a character who speaks the language of Catholicism so well.
Of course, if the effective takedown of the Catholic Church was all that was achieved, one might well wonder why the text enjoys such a high reputation. Yes, there is the perfection of its language, and the great set pieces that feature the beginning of language (“the moo cow down the road”), the hellfire sermon, the epiphany of the young woman on the beach, and the use of a motto—to mirror the motto of the Jesuits—of silence, exile, and cunning that concludes the growing of the damaged and unhappy youth into an author, the demiurge of his own life and a proprietor of words. Yet more, much more, is going on than this. Stephen’s semi-divine status, his role as a mediator between the eternal and the temporal, is given in his very name, and is enacted in and through his expropriating of this mediatorial function from the Catholic priesthood that seemed to have a monopoly on it. While the exercise of Catholic power can be raw and brutal, much of the power is soft and more insidious. It is embodied in litanies, sermons, the words of forgiveness, and above all in the entire ritual of the Eucharist, its pacing, its gestures, its cadences and above all the words of institution: this is my body and this is my blood, wherein language generates its objective correlative.
If one could say that Stephen adopts the role of prophet in protesting against the Church’s raw power, one could equally say that he liquidates by liquefying its soft power by taking on the role of priest whose words have sacramental power. That the power of language is derivative with regard to another helps with his elevation to the role of mediator, since priests are at best mouthpieces for Christ, who is the real agent of metamorphosis and of the transmutation of the visible into the invisible. The artist, emerging from his chrysalis, has come to recognize that at its best Catholicism has been a code for a more general economy of sacramentality relevant to all of physical and sensory reality and each and every one of our experiences, whether superficially sacred or profane. There is something of Prometheus about Joyce’s Stephen; he is a thief who steals fire and gives it away to those other heroes of language who would be brave enough to empty heaven, sideline Christ, while taking on his obscurantist supporters and experientially bankrupt institutions that dare to speak in his name. Joyce’s preferred Romantic in the text— maybe because of the license provided for transgression—is Byron.
Yet, the novel gives the unmistakable feel of Shelley in the muted recall of Prometheus Unbound, but more nearly of the manifesto for the artist laid out in The Defense of Poetry in which the poet is at once mediator, prophet and priest, and the master presider over a language that is original rather than secondary or tertiary, alive rather than dead, a language that might create a community correlative to its creativity and replace the dead language of the dead. Indeed, as the Portrait leans towards its Bildungsroman conclusion, it not only rebuts Catholicism, but leaves it drained of all authority and bereft of its linguistic power, which now belongs to Stephen.
Thus, the question, and maybe a payoff, from this journey through Newman towards criteria for Catholic ascription to an author’s work: does Joyce provide us with an example of Catholic imagination in the Portrait, thereby setting up the prospect of Catholic ascription of his work as a whole? Of course, it could not grade out as Catholic in the way that Hopkins’ poetry grades out, but then very few pieces of literature are going to hit the level of Catholic super-saturation in image, metaphor, and narrative we find in Hopkins, in whose poetry, we noted, the experience of the dark night of God’s absence is an aspect of the vocabulary of Catholic experience and expressive of its grammar. Now, if the novel were to be defined by the presence of Catholicism as a theme, then the Portrait is a Catholic text and an example of Catholic imagination. Yet, this is precisely what Newman’s emended definition does not allow. “Catholic” ascription is not based on theme, but on the perspective of the author who is formed by Catholic symbols and metaphors, and shapes the world through them, sometimes comfortably, sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes in crisis, sometimes joyously, yet always experimentally and searchingly. Joyce’s Bildungsroman has the very determinate results that prominent Catholic signifiers are discovered to have always been bereft of their corresponding signifieds.
Happily, however, the arrival of the artist meant that the signifiers now signify properly in the secular world marked by power, struggle, sensation, desire, sex, and riddled by flux. Catholicism is the world from which the secret has been wrung: its signs and symbols evoked an otherworld that emptied this one of its reality. Happily there is a cure. With Stephen we can perceive that its signs and symbols were signifying otherwise, forms of transcendence in this world, forms that involve neither a personal God, nor transcendent real beauty, nor inviolable is-ness. Beauty and reality at its most potent, dense, and fully alive are defined by here and now, rather than then and elsewhere. The novel tasks us with unlearning the distinction between sacred and profane language, while coming to grapple with truly important difference, that is, the manifest difference displayed in the different imaginative capacities and different levels of linguistic power that we bring to the world to construct and receive it. In this sense, the Portrait represents a belated form of Romanticism that insisted on the divine power of human imagination. Indeed, if we think of Newman’s sense of Protestantism as summed up in private judgment, then we may even say—however counterintuitive it may seem—that the Portrait is an exercise in “Protestant” imagination.
I realize that this is a very provocative conclusion, but it does follow from the criterion of “Catholic literature” that followed on a re-reading of what Newman could have said, according to his own principles in the text; but, responding to the pressure of bishops, he was forced into the hyperbole of insisting that English literature was Protestant and that the mingle of Catholic doctrine and literature proposed by the bishops was not literature. In my reconstruction of Newman’s fundamental criterion of the Catholic point of view in experimental form, conveyed dominantly in and through image, metaphor, and narrative, having Catholicism as an explicit theme did not count. In addition, there might very well be cases that while the language evokes a Catholic perspective on the world, it does not perform it to a significant degree. Just as Hopkins’s poetry would represent a super-saturated Catholic imagination, other texts and other authors might represent a Catholic imagination in a weak or unsaturated way. These would be the liminal cases. One can expect there would be a felt correspondence between Romantic and Catholic inclinations, while recognizing that the connection can be ratified only to the extent that the Romantic element has not etiolated divine figures and elevated human beings to divine heights.
Or, to generalize, and perhaps get overly dramatic about it, Catholicism can abide Romanticism under the following conditions: as long as it has not killed God by erasing him or the horizon in which he is actual or possible; as long as it has not depleted the alterity and singularity of Christ by tapering him into a figure of the imagination; as long as we do not present as demonstrated that, properly understood, Christianity in general is a mythic code now cracked and that we owe thanks to the Romantics and those writers in their wake, for finding the human correlatives for the signs that failed to signify properly and thus failed to signify. Above all else, Newman, a lover of Aristotle and definition, asks us in the appendices on literature in The Idea of a University to pay a price for the category of “Catholic imagination.” We have to decide whether we are willing to pay it.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was originally delivered as a keynote lecture at the Fall Conference of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, “Ever Ancient, Ever New: On Catholic Imagination,” November 2024.
We would also like to congratulate Professor O’Regan on receiving the Ratzinger Prize on the day this essay was published!