“Bless the Lord for all his works; ascribe majesty to his name and give thanks to him with praise, with songs on your lips, and with lyres; and this you shall say in thanksgiving: ‘All things are the works of the Lord, for they are very good, and whatever he commands will be done in his time.” (Ecclesiasticus 39.14-16)
In 1816, John Henry Newman as a teenager found himself in a crisis. His father’s bank had been declared bankrupt, the family had to move, and the young Newman at school in Ealing fell ill. He had a deep religious experience, what he called ‘a great change of thought’. ‘I received into mind’ he said, the awareness of ‘two and two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident realities – myself and my Creator.’ From the Evangelical commentator on Scripture, Thomas Scott, he took two phrases – ‘Holiness rather than peace’ and ‘Growth the only evidence of life.’ All these were to remain with him throughout his life.
In September of this year here in this country Pope Benedict will beatify John Henry Newman. He will declare him ‘Blessed’, and that means for the Roman Catholic Church, that he is someone whose outstanding holiness of life, and whose teaching, is an example to the faithful, that he is one so aligned with the will of God that he draws others into that same faith, alignment and pattern of life. Some will see this as a piece of Roman Catholic triumphalism, celebrating a famous convert and great intellect, who saw the error of his ways, and left the Church of England for the Church of Rome. That should surely not be the case, for when Newman left the Church of England, Edward Bouverie Pusey who stayed, spoke of him as simply transplanted to another part of the Lord’s vineyard, and who could tell what would be the consequence of ‘one so formed and brought up among us’ now bringing that shaping of his life into the Roman Catholic Church. In another sermon and in the context of another topic there would be much to say in this connection, but here let me simply observe that part of the shaping of Newman, and Keble, and of the inheritance of the Oxford Movement, was its concern for poetry. It is no accident that Keble and Newman were both priests and poets, and those who believed deeply that there was an intrinsic connection between poetry and Christian faith and worship. They would have resonated with a comment by a much later French writer that ‘the image strikes the depth before it breaks the surface.’
When John Keble died in 1866 Newman wrote that ‘he did for the Church of England what only a poet could do – he made it poetical.’ What did he mean? A number of things. (1) that the poet sees and knows the imaginative depth of language; (2) that the reduction of things to the utilitarian, and the aridity of a reasoning without imagination, is a diminution of what it means to be human. As Newman put it in his knockabout attack on Sir Robert Peel for praising the reading room at Tamworth for only including books of ‘useful knowledge’: ‘After all man is not a reasoning animal, he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating acting animal.’ (3) that deep feeling, our emotional life, in which the truths of our human condition come home to us is essential. As the angel tells Gerontius in Newman’s most well-known poem because of Elgar’s oratorio (though these words are sadly not included in those set by Elgar): For thou art wrapped and swathed around in dreams, Dreams which are true, yet inexpressible, For the belongings of thy present state save through such symbols come not home to thee. (4) that poetry is about catharsis, the disciplining of powerful feelings, and that Christian poetry is therefore the expression of the ascesis (the discipline and training) of the Christian life. (5) that the poet and the prophet are closely related, so that when Newman speaks of ‘the prophetical office of the Church’ he is thinking of the church in its preaching and teaching role, communicating the Gospel in the words that Newman chose as his cardinal’s motto – cor ad cor loquitur – heart speaks to heart. (6) and there is a close link likewise between poetry and the sacramental. The Oxford Movement recovered a sacramental vision, not only in the restoration of the sacraments to their proper centrality in the life of the church, but as seeing the whole world as sacramental. They would have approved of both the title and contents of the book by the Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, The World as Sacrament.
Newman himself wrote: ‘Revealed religion should be especially poetical…With Christians a poetical view of things is a duty – we are bid to colour all things with hues of faith, to see a Divine meaning in every event, and a superhuman tendency. Even our friends around are invested with unearthly brightness.’ Was he thinking of the lines from John Keble’s morning hymn?
Old friends, old scenes will lovelier be,
As more of heaven in each we see,
Some softening dream of love and prayer
Shall dawn on every cross and care.
In another context Newman told his sister, Harriett, that ‘poetical language was but the vehicle of deeper thought, a conveying it more powerfully to the mind.’ Both Keble and Newman saw the danger to the Church and Christian faith of utilitarian, secularising pressures. Keble wrote: ‘whenever the revolutionary or mercenary passion prevails, forthwith a certain unreasoning contempt for poetry possesses men.’ Newman foresaw the consequences of the secularising pressures of his own day. He wrote in 1835 ‘Is there not an opinion avowed and growing, that a nation has nothing to do with Religion; that it is merely a matter for each man’s own conscience?…is there not….an attempt to make numbers, and not the Truth, the ground of maintaining, or not maintaining, this or that creed…to confine [religion] to our inward feelings, and thus, considering how variable, how evanescent our feelings are, an attempt in fact to destroy Religion?’ Some thirty years earlier another poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, told his friend, Thomas Poole: ‘I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank and they saw nothing….and called the want of imagination Judgement, and the never being moved to Rapture, Philosophy.’ Poetry, imagination, faith, religion, education, the great questions – all were under threat (as they are now) from utilitarian attitudes and the cult of the measurable. The poetry of the Oxford Movement was part of the recovery of the religious imagination and a sacramental understanding of the world – the world is charged with the grandeur of God – as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, or, as the psalmist much earlier, the heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
John Keble’s world is God’s creation, a sacramental universe, speaking to those whom read it with the eye of faith of the pattern of God’s being and activity. It is most powerfully expressed in the poem for Septuagesima Sunday (the Sunday which in the Book of Common Prayer has biblical readings about creation), and which became sung as a hymn: There is a book who runs may read. In The Christian Year the poem is prefaced by a quotation from Romans 1.20, from one of the lessons for the day: The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things which are made. The book who runs may read is the created order, but to see that order aright. Such sight was not a matter of intellectual ability but of moral sense, what Aristotle called phronesis or the intuition of moral judgement. Moral awareness was a common possession, you did not have to be a university don in order to be saved or to be holy.
Blessed are the pure in heart
For they shall see our God;
The secret of the Lord is theirs,
Their soul is Christ’s abode.
So John Keble’s poem for Candlemas, and it is echoed in the beginning of his Septuagesima poem:
There is a book who runs may read,
Which heavenly truth imparts,
And all the lore its scholars need,
Pure eyes and Christian hearts.
Keble follows the Fathers of the Church in their use of typology, and Bishop Joseph Butler, whose Analogy of Religion also teaches a sacramental understanding of the world. Keble’s sermons, preached largely to his village congregation at Hursley, also use the common experience of the world around to point to some truth of the Christian faith.
The works of God, above, below,
Within us, and around,
Are pages in that book, to show
How God Himself is found.
The glorious sky embracing all
Is like the Maker’s love,
Wherewith, encompassed, great and small,
In peace and order to move.
The dew of heaven is like Thy grace,
It steals in silence down;
But where it lights, the favoured place
By richest fruits is known.
And so:
Two worlds are ours :’tis only Sin
Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth within,
Plain as the sea and sky.
And so, as often, Keble ends with a prayer:
Thou, who has given me eyes to see
And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out Thee,
And read Thee everywhere
.
A very important word for the Oxford Movement was ethos. Newman had no doubt that Keble’s combination of poetry, devotion and personal holiness had been transforming for the Church of England. A recent writer tells us that ‘Keble saw the search for truth as an ascending spiral movement; moral rectitude influences discovery of truth; truth discovered should commit the person vitally; this commitment, in turn, would bring with it a clearer perception of revealed truth.’ So education in its broadest and truest sense was the formation of a right ethos. Poetry had a central part in this – as he put it poetry’s mission is ‘the awakening of some moral or religious feeling, not by direct instruction (that is the office of morality or theology’, but by a process of imaginative associations. Religion and poetry were closely related, ‘for God has used poetical language to communicate himself to humanity, employed symbolical associations – whether poetical, moral, or mystical – to reveal a world beyond sense perception.
When Keble published The Christian Year in 1827 it was in a church where hymns were not sung only metrical versions of the psalms. The only hymn in the Prayer Book is the Veni creator – Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire which Bishop Cosin added to the Ordinal in 1662. The poems of The Christian Year were intended for devotional reading, not singing – and there were those who thought that Keble would be taken for a Methodist. Keble himself thought that a new and more vigorous metrical version of the psalms was what was needed, and did indeed translate the psalter in this form, though was overtaken by the increasing use of hymnody, also stemming from Oxford Movement influence. Hymns Ancient and Modern was first published in 1861 – a piece of private enterprise, as all Church of England hymn books have been, unlike Methodists, and unlike the Episcopal Church in America. Some of Keble’s psalms are powerful. Here are two verses from Psalm 22 – verses 9 and 10 which run in the Prayer Book version: But thou art he thank took me out of my mother’s womb : thou was my hope, when I hanged yet upon my mother’s breasts. I have been left unto thee ever since I was born : thou art my God even from my mother’s womb. So Keble:
Thou from the womb didst set me free:
When on my mother’s breast I hung,
My trusting heart was all of Thee,
A foundling in Thy kind arms flung.
Flung from the birth, to live or die,
My God from mine own mother’s womb!
O go not far, for grief is nigh,
And none at hand to stay my doom.
The repetition of the powerful word ‘flung’ – from my mother’s womb, into the arms of God is compelling. Often in Keble’s poems there lurk powerful hidden phrases – vows to pure to be performed and, speaking of God, the one who measures Life by love.
His Morning hymn, New every morning is the love takes its starting point from words from the Book of Lamentations which speak of the mercies of God which are new every morning.. Each waking up is an anticipation of the resurrection: through sleep and darkness safely brought, restored to life and power and thought. Like Jean-Pierre de Caussade who taught the practice of the sacrament of the present moment Keble knew that it was
The trivial round, the common task,
will furnish all we ought to ask.
Room to deny ourselves,
a road to bring us daily nearer God.
Poetry in its ordering of deep feeling, became the natural handmaid of religion, t was part of the shaping of the spirit by prayer and the common worship of the liturgy.
Newman, though having a high doctrine of poetry, was not as prolific as Keble, and in some ways it is the poetical prose of his sermons and the vigour of his writing, with crisp, memorable phrases that it important. But he left us the Dream of Gerontius, written in the 1860s when he though he was near death (he lived for another quarter of a century), and from that we have two well-known hymns – Praise to the holiest and Firmly I believe and truly. From thirty years earlier we have Lead, kindly light, the poem with the title ‘The Pillar of the Cloud’, written in the straits of Bonifacio between Sardinia and Corsica as Newman took an orange-boat back to Marseilles having been in Sicily, where he had almost died from typhoid. He had been in a poetry-writing mood when in Sicily, and many of his poems come from this journey. Stirring times, he said, bring out poets, and he hoped by his poems to create a ‘quasi-political engine,’ because ‘ten thousand obvious ideas become impressive when put into a metrical shape.’ The other poems were indeed polemical – a poem called Liberalism begins Ye cannot halve the Gospel of God’s grace, Men of presumptuous heart. He notes the attraction and the difficulty of the Roman Catholic church: Would that thy creed were sound, For thou dost soothe the heart, Thou Church of Rome, By thy unwearied watch and varied round Of service in thy Saviour’s holy home. Lead, kindly light, is more personal, and when it became a hymn some objected – it could be sung by Unitarians; it was not Evangelical enough – and one Evangelical, Edward Henry Bickersteth, who became Bishop of Exeter, added a compensating verse:
Meantime along the narrow rugged path
Thyself hast trod
Lead, Saviour, lead me home in childlike faith,
Home to my God,
To rest for ever after earthly strife
In the calm light of everlasting life.
Newman told Bickersteth when he owned up to adding the extra verse, which had comforted his dying daughter, that he had never thought the verses were a hymn, but did not rebuke him for the added verse. Princess Alexandra read the unamended verses to her husband, Edward, the Prince of Wales, when he was thought to be dying, and Queen Victoria read the last verse to her dying son, the Duke of Albany. It somehow resonated with Victorian piety, and became a favourite at funerals. ‘The angel faces of the last couplet, understood in a particular way were enough to keep people’s love of it as a hymn of departing.’ What did Newman himself say about it? Owen Chadwick recounts how when Newman was very ill the year before he died, he asked the Oratorians to sing a strong hymn of hope and faith, Fr Faber’s Eternal Years. They brought a harmonium and sang. Newman then said:
Some people have like by Lead, kindly light, and it is the voice of one in darkness asking for help from our Lord. But this (Eternal Years) is quite different; this is one with full light rejoicing in suffering with our Lord so that mine compares unfavourably with it. This is what those who like Lead, kindly light have got to come to – they have to learn it.
I do not ask to see the distant scene, one step enough for me. The pilgrim comes to the fullness of faith, which yet does not cease to be also a mystery, but a mystery that is not a puzzle to the mind, but to be encountered, and prayed and lived in the communion of the Church, a church which is indeed poetical, because the faith it proclaims is sacramental, and the heart, as Newman said, ‘is commonly reached, not through reason, but through the imagination.’ The Christian imagination, the Christian symbolic universe, the images that strike the depths before they break the surface, the worshipping community in which God leads us, as Newman again says, ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, ‘out of shadows and images into truth’ – the saving truth of the Gospel.