The Conversion Novels of John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman owned a “long view,” especially in relation to the development of Christian doctrine over the centuries. Much lesser known, and fitting nicely with his doctrinal works, are two novels which own equal importance for Newman scholars: the semi-autobiographical “Loss and Gain,” and the historical romance “Callista.”

Now it must be observed that the writings of St. Alfonso, as I knew them by the extracts commonly made from them, prejudiced me against the Roman Church as any thing else on account of what was called “Mariolatry”….

In 1843, I took two very important steps:—1. In February I made a formal Retraction of all the hard things which I had said against the Church of Rome. 2. In September, I resigned the Living of St. Mary’s, Littlemore, inclusive….

Littlemore, October 8, 1845. I am this night expecting Father Dominic, the Passionist, who, from his youth has been led to have distinct and direct thoughts . . . . He does not know of my intention; but I mean to ask him admission into the one Fold of Christ….

—APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

I. When I was fifteen a great change of thought took place in me….

—“History of my Religious Opinions unto 1833”

It might be hyperbolic to suggest that Saint John Henry Newman is the “Father” of Vatican II, but there are ecclesial efforts arguing just so. The Reverend Dr Ian Ker, an Anglican convert and Oxford theology professor, has written in his brick-of-a-book biography that Newman compared the church to a boat that has over time since its founding been buffeted by waves and storms.^[i] History records corruption also from the beginning even with the apostles—Judas Iscariot surely comes to mind—and again through the centuries with the corruption of the clergy. Newman’s argument? It’s what life feels like when faith is lost and what life feels like when faith is regained.

It’s part of British history and the object of the Oxford Movement, which was an attempt to bring spiritual renewal to the Church of England by reviving certain Roman Catholic doctrines and rituals lost during the Protestant Reformation. Those “tractarians” who made up the Oxford Movement argued that the doctrinal authority of the catholic church is absolute and by catholic they meant to be faithful to the teachings of the early and undivided church, albeit in this case the Church of England. St John Henry Newman was an effective organizer and intellectual leader and along with John Keble early in 1833 began to publish a series of pamphlets, The Tracts for the Times.

Newman owned a “long view” especially in relation to the development of Christian doctrine over the centuries^[ii] Much lesser known and fitting nicely with the Apologia pro Vita Sua and The Grammar of Assent are two novels which own equal importance for Newman scholars: the semi-autobiographical “tractarian” Loss and Gain in 1848 and the historical romance Callista in 1855.

II. “This voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart.”

—“General Answer to Mr Kingsley”

Loss and Gain was published seven years after The Tracts for the Times and is Newman’s look back to the religious culture of Oxford University. It’s a theological novel that parallels Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. He “displaces” his life experiences onto Charles Reding, a young student experiencing Oxford and its various factions or “parties” surrounding him during the Oxford Movement.

The chapters are short but the narrator’s remarks serve as clues to the issues soon to confront young Charles, the only son of a clergyman and intended by his father “for orders.”^[iii] Sending him to University is worrisome since doing so could plunge Charles into excesses.

When the story opens, Charles has been enrolled at Eaton where an excellent tutor has instructed him in Church of England principles to give his mind religious impressions meant to secure him against the “allurements of bad company” (2). Following Eaton, Charles enters St. Saviour’s College, a fictional Oxford college where he is now in his sixth term. His mind is pliable and his selection of William Sheffield as a friend suggests Charles could be “easily led.”

The narrator is concerned that gentle and affectionate Charles has fallen into what Newman references in the “Advertisement” for Tracts for the Times as “an increase in sectarianism” removed from “a more influential discipline.” The consequence has led to the loss of an apostolic form of teaching at the University for a “more secular method of teaching.”^[iv] In other words, there were dangerous “thoughts” abounding since all denominations laid claim, as Christopher Hollis has written, “to a total possession of revealed truth, which had, as they alleged, been entrusted to them once and for all, to which nothing could be added and from which nothing could be subtracted.”^[v]

The losing result, so the “Advertisement” argues, is “feverish minds desirous only to vent feelings and injunctions given to the young students to depend solely upon their private judgment . . . cruel in itself . . . doubly hurtful” and a multitude of young men who cannot “guide themselves.”

Chapter III in Loss and Gain, for example, begins with the claim that “Neither of [Charles’] friends had what are called views in religion; by which expression we do not here signify that neither had taken up a certain line of opinion, though this was true also; but neither—how could they at their age?—had placed his religion on an intellectual basis” (14).

As that chapter or “tract” progresses, the narrator critically notes that

at Oxford during these times “the students do not know what happened ten years ago, much less the annals of a century; the past does not live with them in the present; they do not understand the worth of connected points; names have no associations for them, and persons kindle no recollections . . . everything comes and goes like the wind . . . nothing penetrates, nothing has its place in their minds . . . . Thus they have no consistency in their arguments [and] they argue one way to-day, and not exactly the other way to-morrow at random . . . . nothing comes to a point; there is no one centre in which the mind sits” (15).

And Charles’ influential friend, Sheffield, who had no more a real view of things than Charles, was fond of hunting for views and more in danger of taking up false ones. That is, he was “viewy” in a bad sense of “the word.” More so neither of the young men felt any interest in the controversy “going on in the University and country about high and low church. Sheffield had a sort of contempt for it” and wished “there was less of fudge and humbug every where . . . one might shovel off cartloads from this place and not miss it” (19, 20).

The dormitory room conversation continues with Sheffield arguing that he sees religious “shams everywhere.” He goes to Convocation and hears unmeaning Latin. He goes to various proctors and they “tell us that we ought to put up crucifixes by the wayside, in order to excite religious feeling” (20).

The novel dramatizes these religious climate forces as they would have been found at Oxford during the mid-Victorian era and which contend through the various factions surrounding Charles and to which he is daily influenced and encouraged to “assent.” There are Protestant doctrines intending to liberalize the Church of England and there is the Oxford Movement advocating a Catholic interpretation which those in the Movement argued that the Church and its cultural traditions were authoritative and in need of restoration.

The figure in the carpet that appears in the novel is the Roman Catholic Church generally held up to ridicule and virulent criticism.  More so, Tract Number 2, “The Catholic Church,” and which Charles argues early in Loss and Gain, “ Chapter IV, Roman Catholicism,” is a “mode of teaching [not] best suited to his own country” (23). Sheffield questions Charles as to whether the “Romanists are shams, because they . . . use crucifixes” while believing that there is “virtue in images” and they “in good downright earnest worship images as being more than they seem, as being not a mere outside show” (23).

As the scholars seat themselves for breakfast, a “flighty youth” by the name of White, makes the observation as to how beautiful “the Catholic custom of making eggs the emblem of the Easter-festival” (32). Sheffield, the breakfast host, remarks that such is “so pretty, so sweet.” The conversation then digresses into “how things change their nature altogether, when they are taken up by the Catholic church” (33). That’s how we are allowed to do evil, that good may come and according to White the Catholic Church makes evil good. Mr. Freeborn, an Evangelical Master, suspends his breakfast and sits back in his chair when White continues his biases: “[Is] not idolatry wrong? Yet image worship is right.” Freeborn responds with emotion that such is a mere Jesuitical distinction.

Relief comes when the cook’s boy brings in a dish of hot sausages. But Charles who is silent during breakfast later makes the interesting Newman-like point that “reason is a general gift, though faith is a special and personal one” (38). If faith is really rational, all ought to see that it is rational; else from the nature of the case, it is not rational. And how are we ever to arrive at truth except by reason which is the appointed method for our guidance. “Brutes go by instinct, men by reason.”

It’s a thoughtful moment in Loss and Gain for Charles, who is in his way wrestling with much the same epistemological issues found in A Grammar of Assent. Charles does not give such a name but for Newman the name is “illative sense” which he argued is a faculty of the human mind to achieve certitude, a peculiarity of our nature, less by the intellect and more by the logic of the heart and by which believers apprehend matters of faith.

At which point the narrator intrudes by noting that the scholars had fallen on a difficult subject and all were puzzled except White, who was simply wearied. His Catholic leanings are more aesthetic than not, but he interposes that “It would be a dull world . . . 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.” He adds that Calvinist teachings are cold and dry whereas Catholic worship as found in European cathedrals is “far above reason” (39).

The concluding point is that Roman Catholic icons have been made into instruments of some kind of invisible grace but such is more superstitious than not. There are also such moments in Tracts for the Times, Number 71 as an example, “On the Controversy with the Romanists.” “Strictly speaking,” the tract argues, “and in the eye of soberly religious men [Romanism], ought not to be embraced, even could it be made to appear in some points superior to what is now practically the Anglican system.” As for the worship of images, the tract argues that such is an instance of a grievance “which Christians endure in the Communion of Rome [and] were it not that in England its rulers seem at present to have suspended the practice out of policy.”

Such may have been the course and state of Newman’s mind when the Tracts were appearing but Loss and Gain and the Apologia combine less to refute the Oxford Movement’s religious quibbling which makes up much the whole of Loss and Gain and can at times be tiresome reading. Charles, however, “was not a person to let a truth sleep in his mind, though it did not vegetate very quickly,” even if Sheffield’s preachments made impressions upon him.”

Hanging as it were upon the horns of a dilemma, Charles ruminates upon whether contradictions could “not both be real; when an affirmative was true, a negative was false. All doctrines could not be equally sound: there was a right and there was a wrong. The theory of dogmatic truth, as opposed to latitudinarianism (he did not know their names of their history or suspect what was going on in him), had, in the course of his first terms, gradually began to energize . . . . Let him but see the absurdities of the latitudinarian principle, when carried out, and he [would] likely to be more opposed to it.”^[vi]

One might be moved at such a moment in the narrative to pause and make literary comparisons with Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus suffering much the same at his own Irish university’s suffering his own baffled desires.

So much that surrounded Stephen seems to surround Charles and seems to be confusion rather than clarity, if not evasion. But slowly throughout the novel, Charles rejects all that swirls about him including the subjectivity of his own consciousness and assents to his Roman Catholic faith. And it’s in this regard that there are again good comparisons to Newman’s Apologia, especially the chapters on his religious opinions, and his Grammar of Assent, especially Chapter Nine, “The Illative Sense.”

Chapter XVI begins with “The thought came across Reding, whether perhaps, after all, what is called Evangelical Religion was not the true Christianity” (122).  It’s a long chapter in which the reader is invited to follow conversations on what it means to be “savingly converted.” Freeborn, again another of Charles’s friends, takes up the evangelical argument: “Faith . . . is a divine gift, and is the instrument of our justification in God’s sight. We are all by nature displeasing to Him”; to which he adds “You see, then, how important it is to have a right view about justification by faith only” (124).

Faith not only justifies but regenerates.

Charles thinks such is simple and clear but tends to sweep theology clean away. Faith he argues in return “must be some particular kind of apprehension,” which annoys Freeborn, and although Charles is touched by his “warmth,’’ he continues with his “belief” that we still “ought to act by reason; and I don’t see that I have more, or so much, reason to listen to you, as to listen to the Roman Catholic, who tells me I cannot possibly have that certainty of faith before believing which on believing will . . . divinely stiffen me.”

To which Freeborn responds with a grave face: “[Y]ou would not compare the spiritual Christian, such as a Lutheran, holding his cardinal doctrine about justification, to any such formal, legal, superstitious devotion as Popery can make, with its carnal rites and quick remedies, which never really cleanse the soul or reconcile it to God? I don’t like you to talk so.”

Charles’ response is telling: “I know very little about the real nature of Popery but when I was a boy, I was once by chance in a Roman Catholic chapel; and I really never saw such devotion in my life” (130).

The two part company, but what is converging in Charles’ heart and mind is the idea of apprehension in matters of faith—Newman’s one grand word for a common thing, which when awakened becomes the bridge to the state of faith.

Charles—suffering what has to be akin to a dark night of the soul—near the novel’s end, finds himself at one moment even unable to respond to a Swedenborgian but he rouses himself, his “heart full, but his head . . . was wearied and confused, and his spirits sunk” (373).

But the church door was opened, and he entered. Looking attentively, he made out the image of Our Lady and the Child. A procession with lights passed from the sacristy to the altar and something went on “which he did not understand, and then suddenly began what, by the Miserere met and Ora pro nobis, he perceived to be a litany, a hymn followed” (381). Charles says to himself, “This is a popular religion…. [and] How wonderful . . . that people call this worship formal and external; it seems to possess all classes, young and old, polished and vulgar, men and women indiscriminately; it is the working of one Spirit in all, making many one” (382).

And so the truth flashes upon him, “fearfully yet sweetly; it was the Blessed Sacrament—it was the Lord Incarnate, who was on the altar, who had come to visit and bless His people. It was the Great Presence, which makes a Catholic Church different from every other place in the world; which makes it, as no other place can be, holy” (383).

The chapter goes on with Charles gathering his thoughts and his heart beating with joy. With the aid of a priest, Charles begins to prepare his confession and thus to be received into Catholic communion.

From that moment on and into the concluding chapter of Loss and Gain, Charles is admitted into the communion of the Roman Catholic church. Kneeling in the church, Charles is in possession of a deep peace and serenity of mind, which he had not thought possible on this earth. “It was more like a stillness which sensibly affects the ears, when a bell which had long been tolling stops, or when a vessel, after much tossing at sea, finds itself in harbor” (384-385).

Charles threw himself back into memory, where he laments the loss of time before his conversion but then rejoices in his gain, his happiness in the present such that he had not thoughts either for the past or the future in this moment of complete surrender.

It’s a remarkable moment in the novel, this coming into port after a rough sea, even though with his own conversion Newman lost many of his friends from the Church of England. Of that moment he would later write in the Apologia that he “was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral . . . in my mind. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of Revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervor but it wad like coming into port.”^[vii]

Like St Philip Neri, that second Apostle of Rome, Charles, like Newman, was becoming a cheerful witness at home in his own Congregation of the Oratory.

The rest is history….

III.  Of A Particular Kind: Callista: Christianos ad leones while grace formed her out of sinful dust^[viii]

Like Newman’s own experiences, there are moments in Loss and Gain in which Charles’ friends argue that if he joins the Roman Church he will be quite thrown away. Much of the argument sends Charles to bed with a bad headache.  Near the end of the novel, however, Dr. Kitchens directs vituperative comments toward the “case of Popery” and “all the trash about sacraments, saints, penance, purgatory, and [that] good works [should] be dislodged from the soul at once” (367).

It’s one instance of many in Loss and Gain illustrating Catholic persecution, biases dating to the Elizabethan Age and a time in which Catholic Mass was illegal with hefty penalties levied on those “recusants.” There were no executions in Newman’s time, but under Queen Elizabeth the English House of Lords passed a bill abolishing the Mass and which required an oath of belief in royal supremacy over the church. English Roman Catholics who refused the oath were guilty of high treason. Those found guilty could be drawn and quartered.

In Newman’s own time, Loss and Gain portrays widespread heightened religious tension despite the Emancipation Act in 1829 which did not dampen prevailing biases. And Newman’s Apologia owns a lengthy response to Charles Kingsley’s anti-Catholic book Hypatia.

It’s into this context that Newman published Callista, a tale of the third century and thus a metaleptical novel asking the reader to draw parallels between ancient Roman society and the lingering persecution and prejudice against Roman Catholics in British history and Newman’s own time.^[ix] The novel’s characters find themselves in troubled and ambiguous times and obliged to make a choice for or against the fledgling Catholic Christian faith and likely martyrdom.

As the title indicates, Callista is the central character, and her memorial is April 25; her Catholic portrayal is that of a martyr, i.e., faith and a conversion to die for. Apart from Calllista, who does not appear in the novel until Chapter 10, “The Divine Callista,” another primary character is Agellius, a young Christian infatuated with Callista but about whom he has “worries.” His apprehension is that she is not yet a Christian but a pagan and thus he could not marry. As that chapter develops, she is at work and in colloquy with her brother Aristo, who pleads the cause of Agellius, whose “purse is full”; he may be a Christian but with little left in him that is Christian, suggesting an easy reversion back to paganism. Thus with all her beauty she might blow his remaining Christianity away with her sweet breath.

She responds, “One might do worse than be a Christian . . . if all is true that I have heard of them.” “I mean,” she says, “if I were a Christian, life would be more bearable” (71).

Agellius the suitor also has a pagan uncle, Jucundus who owns a shop selling statues of pagan gods many supplied by Callista. During the novel’s time, Agellius also meets a mysterious Christian priest, Caecilius who becomes a close friend, if not a father figure, and who strengthens his faith, which had weakened. There’s some ambiguity regarding Caecillus, but it’s likely he’s Cyprian of Carthage, a notable early Christian and known for his pastoral skills. During the course of the Decian persecution, for example, a plague afflicted the Roman Empire. Newman treats this historical episode in superb imaginative detail in Chapter 15, “A Visitation,” likely drawing on Cyprian’s own word picture commentary in De mortalitate, which defends those who stood in righteousness and showed forth their faith. History records that with the onset of the plague the consequence was the criminalization of Christians who refused to take the loyalty oath, incensed as the gods were.

Thus the novel treats early Roman Catholic Christian history and Roman Empire history in conflict in the mid-3rd century and set in the city of Sicca Veneria, a Roman province in Africa. The Roman emperor of the time was again Decius, who during his short time in power attempted to revive the Roman Empire and its pagan religion.

The issue for Newman, which informs the novel’s plot, was the edict by Decius that every person in the Roman Empire was obliged to perform sacrifices to the Roman pagan gods, which legally had to be performed in the presence of a Roman magistrate who would then confirm such with a signed and witnessed document. We would understand such these days as a “loyalty” oath.  Prior to this time the Roman government held a tolerant policy toward Roman Catholic Christianity, but with the Decius persecution the policy was a required obligation to offer incense to pagan cult images of “gods”—such as those sculpted by Callista—representing the Roman Empire at an historical time in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed. History tends to record this as a stabilizing period for Roman citizens, but professing Christians, on the other hand, took the First Commandment against idolatry seriously. Pope Fabian, for example, perhaps the major opponent to Decius, was imprisoned and likely died in prison early 250 of the Christian era.

Newman’s novel is again plotted against this historical background, with characters too scared or unwilling to go against Decius and those who did not capitulate to Decius’ pagan edicts.

As for Sicca Veneria, the novel opens with a beautiful pastoral narrative of the countryside where in “no [other] province of the vast Roman empire in the third century, did Nature wear a richer or a more joyous garb than she displayed in Proconsular Africa [where] Sicca might be considered the centre.”^[x] At varying distances “over the undulating surface, and through the woods, were seen the villas and the hamlets of that happy land” (5). If a spectator took a stand on a hill or knoll, “Sicca would be radiant in the sun.”

That pastoral moment is compromised by a disturbing element, since on an elevated table land a viewer could also discern the Colonia Scillitana, famous about “fifty years before the date of which we write for the martyrdom of Speratus and his companions, who were beheaded at the order of the proconsul for refusing to swear by the genius of Rome and the emperor.”^[xi]

Newman’s narrator mentions the martyrdom likely because when called to swear by the name of the emperor, Speratus replied that he would not serve the emperor of this world but rather God. Newman brings his imagination to bear in the novel’s introduction because—though few Pagan-Christian conflicts had occurred in recent times—the suggestion is that the pastoral peaceful living in Christian Sicca during that fifty-year peace is near an end, persecution is in the offing, as the following chapters make clear.

Although a pagan at the time, Agellius had attended to the scene of that earlier martyrdom and fears for his own time, more so since he had in the past few years converted and become a Christian, so that that he could end his days in tranquility. Many more “men of sense,” furthermore, were scorning Christianity less and becoming more understanding as to the “reasonableness” of the faith. On the other hand, with the signs of the times leading to the anticipation of the Decian persecution, that fear was having an unhappy effect on Christian Sicca. But it must also be “confessed,” the narrator argues that the faithful were also losing their discipline—the conduct bequeathed by the Apostles. Rash swearing could be heard, and men and woman were becoming entangled in seductive snares. Such a relaxation could either contract or extinguish or consume “the generations which had survived the flourishing old days of the African Church,” and it was generally felt that rather than suffering torments and lose one’s life, better to reject the Catholic faith which had become at best a graceful, touching, trifling observance sanctioned only by the tradition of the ages.

Chapter 6 serves two purposes: First it continues the plot element of persecution in the offing and second introduces the reader to the “work of the divine Callista.” The scene is the shop of Jucundus who sells pagan statues and various specimens of idolatry many of which again have been sculpted by Calllista. We learn she’s Greek and there’s some question as to whether or not she has become a Christian.

The joking dramatic scene turns to discourse on a “ new policy, a new era . . . coming upon Christianity” and an edict calling for the “extermination of the name and religion of Christ.” Authorities in the provinces were “threatened with heavy penalties” if “they did not succeed in frightening or tormenting Christians into the profession of paganism.” One could save one’s self by throwing water, not incense, on the sacrificial flame, but how to bait the hook and prove that Callista was not a Christian but a beautiful woman upon whom the sun of Greece shone forth (36-37).

Questions abound, then, not only about Callista but about others who appear to be Christian in good earnest but given the increasing persecution by enemies of the faith find themselves exposed and live in the shadow of reproach. In Chapter 9, titled “Jucundus Baits His Trap,” Jucundus and Agellius gossip about the circumstances surrounding Calllista. It’s a serious matter, especially for Agellius who is curious to know more about Christianity and appears to be on the way to a deeper conversion but finds Callista attractive, she of the “sweet trilling voice and [who could] accompany herself on the lyre” and “touched the very chords of poor Agellius’ heart,” but who kept her silence when questions about the customs and practices of Christianity emerged (57).

The question that swirls is whether she would make a good Christian wife and if Callista could be converted, which suggests that some “test” needs to be created to make certain that she is in fact a bona fide Christian with a bona fide conversion, since Agellius could not marry her as a heathen. If she has been converted, “they would be both of them under the rules of the Catholic Church” (63). Was there any prospect, though, that such was a happy event or was Callista merely a clever girl who “could throw herself into the part of Alcestis, or chant the majestic verses of Cleanthes, or extemporize a hymn upon the spring or hold an argument about the pulchrum and utile, without having any leaning towards Christianity?” (63).

What sort of living intelligence does Callista hold and what can the reader make of her intentions?

There’s the beginning of a good answer in Chapter 11, “Callista’s Preaching and What Came of it.” Newman’s narrator begins the chapter with, “It is undeniably a solemn moment, under any circumstances, and requires a strong heart when anyone deliberately surrenders himself, soul and body, to the keeping of another while life shall last; and this, or something like this, reserving the supreme claim of duty to the Creator . . .” (73). Here, though, Christianity is still a marginal faith and thus unlike the dominant culture in Newman’s own time albeit with its denominational controversies. Loss and Gain does not own moments in which Christians of any stripe are obliged to make offerings to Jove or swear allegiance to an emperor. But as Chapter 11 makes clear, the phrase, “So help me God” becomes as important in Callista’s time as it does in Newman’s own time.

Callista is not, however, on a street corner or at a lectern in front of an audience. Her “preaching” is rather with her suitor, Agellius, where she confesses that the Greek forms have become for her a dream and not a reality. She owns an overflowing heart and keen, yearning affections for some object that could possess her: “I cannot fall back upon that dream, forlorn state, which philosophers call wisdom, and moralists call virtue. I cannot enroll myself a votary of that cold Moon, whose arrows do but freeze me. I cannot sympathize in that majestic bank of sisters whom Rome has placed under the tutelage of Vesta. I must have something to love; love is my life” (78).

For the moment, then, Callista is absorbed in her own misery and an intense sense of degradation. As to her self-reproach, Agellius responds with words that take root in Callista’s heart and lead to her conversion: “Do not for an instant suppose that what you thought of the Christian religion is not true. It reveals a present God, who satisfies every affection of the heart yet keeps it pure . . . . I serve a Master whose love is stronger than created love. . . . You are destined for His love” (79).

So the novel, then, still belongs to its own historical period and when the plague of locusts descends, one of the most awful visitations to which the countries included in the Roman empire were exposed, the fate of the day became “Christians to the lions,” and there was the edict and revenge became the motivating principle: the extermination of all Christians. In Chapter 22, Jucundus offers his view of the situation to Agellius “And now mark my words, by this day, five years, five years at the utmost—I say by this day five years there will not be a single ragamuffin Christian in the whole Roman world “ (141).

As mentioned above, however, Newman plotted this novel as an historical romance, which establishes the poetic nature of the novel and the tropological strategy especially its mode of emplotment, its argument, and its ideological implication. At this point the reader would best be served by following Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism, where he makes the point that a romance is fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence over the world of experience, “her” victory over it, and “her” liberation from it. Callista faces the dark force of death, but true to “her” desire for a deeper knowledge of God, “her” conversion is a conversion to die for. Confined, then, in the “utter darkness, the heat, and the stench” of a Roman prison and then what’s worse, the “stifling Robur, or inner prison” (210). Visited, however by Caecilius, also imprisoned, Callista begins to sense an intimate Divine presence” in her heart which by argument and implication is Christ’s incarnate love for mankind.

Caecilius hands her a “blessed parchment,” the Gospel of Luke, and when she asks his name he writes in chalk on the dank prison wall, “Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus, Bishop of Carthage” (131). Outside the prison the Roman soldiers are commencing the massacre of Christians, who do not offer one blow in return. The world had gone mad.

Inside the prison, Callista begins to read St. Luke’s Gospel, and as the novel makes clear feels deeply “an intimate Divine Presence in [her] heart” and the “very teaching which . . . was so urgently demanded both by her reason and her heart” (169). In these hours before her martyrdom she finds herself in “loving intercourse [with] Him” and surrenders herself.

With her baptism then and by Caecilius, and in the darkness of her last hours, Newman writes that she remained on her knees” but then “lay down on her rushes and slept her last sleep” (204). What follows is Newman’s imagination at its immaculate best.

Callista dreams, and in her dreams wanders on and finds herself among majestic mountains illuminated tenfold by heavenly glory. There are myriads of bright images and then she senses before her a “well-known face, only glorified,” and the presence of One who was simply distinct and removed from anything that she had, in her most imaginative moments, ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection.

The voice in the “blessed parchment” has become the voice of a personal God who speaks to her conscience; this extraordinary moment of “transcendence” displayed by Callista, mere hours before the moment of her martyrdom, illustrates the role eternity and salvation have at play in man’s earthly existence. It’s Caecilius who has again visited her in the darkness and stench of her prison cell. They speak of Callista’s fear of eternal punishment. The bishop describes such as a kind of eternal selfish loneliness, a gnawing hurt and thirst.

But there’s a remedy, which Newman states in romantic words. The remedy to eternal punishment is also the answer to one’s desires, God, the God who is Love, a Lover of souls, incarnate in Christ who comes to fulfill man’s deepest longings for eternal happiness.

In her dream she comes close to the gracious figure but there was a change:

The face and the features were the same, but the light of divinity now seemed to beam through them, and the hair parted and hung down   long on each side of the forehead; and there was a crown of another fashion . . . round about it, made of what looked like thorns.  And the palms of the hands were spread out toward as if towards her, and there were marks and wounds in them. And the vestment had fallen and there was a deep opening in the side. And as she stood entranced before Him, and motionless, she felt a consciousness that her own palms were pierced like His, and her feet also. And she looked round, and saw the likeness of His face and of His wounds upon all that company. And now they were suddenly moving on and bearing something or someone, heavenwards; and they too began to sing and their words seemed to be “Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep,” ever repeated. They went up through an avenue or long grotto, with torches of diamonds, and amethysts, and sapphires, which lit up in spars and made them sparkle. And she tried to look, but could not discover what they were carrying, till she heard a very piercing cry, which awoke her (205).

What “they” are carrying is Callista’s soul, which has passed from her life in the inner Roman prison; yesterday without God but as St. Cyprian says before Callista is laid to rest, “today a martyr with a green palm and golden vestment, worshipping before the Throne . . . drinking . . . the never-cloying torrents of bliss everlasting” (218).

Not long after Callista’s martyrdom, Decius was killed, and the persecution ceased. The story concludes with Agellius becoming bishop but suffering in old age under the Diocletian persecution. The circumstances that animate the history suggest that this bishop removed the body of St Callista from her original interment and had it placed under the high altar at which he said mass daily, After Agellius’ martyrdom, St Agellius’ own earthly remains were placed under the same altar—the final chapter to Newman’s historical romance.

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Notes:

^[i] See Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography; see also “Newman key to understanding Vatican II and ecclesial movements,” Angelus News, October 10, 2019.

^[ii] See An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. According to Newman, “Christianity has been long enough in the world to justify us in dealing with it as a fact in the world’s history. Its genius and character, its doctrines, precepts, and objects cannot be treated as matters of private opinion or deduction…”, p. 69.

^[iii] Loss and Gain, p. 1; a scholar’s selection republication of the James Burns 1st edition; all subsequent citations are by page number.

^[iv] Tracts for the Times, Project Canterbury, 1834.

^[v] Newman and the Modern World, Doubleday & Company, 1968, p. 9.

^[vi] See Chapter Six, Loss and Gain. During a walk, Charles and Sheffield debate the theory of dogmatic truth with the latitudinarian argument which avows no preference among the various creeds and forms of worship. In the 17th century when such practices appeared among Anglican clerics, conservatives argued that such”views” were unorthodox, or at best, heterodox. Bateman, another friend of Charles, argues that bringing persons of contrary sentiments together “was the likeliest way of making a party agreeable, or at least useful.”

^[vii] Apologia . . . , p. 314. .Newman’s biography suggests that it took six years of prayerful consideration before he opted to be received into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.The Apologia records the date of his reception as October 9, 1845. And done without pomp and circumstance; it was, rather, a cold and windy night at Littlemore and in a converted farm shed for a chapel.

^[viii] See Chapter 36, Lux Perpetual Sanctis Tuis, Domine where Newman writes that the faithful took up alternately the verses of a hymn: “Grace formed her out of sinful dust; /She knelt a soul defiled;/She rose in full faith and trust/And sweetness of a child.”

^[ix] I use the term metaleptical as a literary device in which a past period in history aids understanding a more present period in history. In other words, the narrative history in Callista shares, albeit indirectly, the British history in Newman’s own history in Loss and Gain and the Apologia.

^[x] Blessed John Henry Newman, Calllista, Aeterna Press, p. 4. All subsequent citations are from this edition and are by page number.

^[xi] Acts of martyrdom are of historical interest. Speratus and others were martyred during the time of Marcus Aurelius after which persecution ceased for a period of time. See “Speratus:” in Clyde Smith Curry, Dictionary of African Christian Biography.

The featured image is a photograph of John Henry Newman reading a book (no later than 1890), from Sermon Notes of John Henry Cardinal Newman, by Henry J. Whitlock. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.