THE P RTAL
September 2018 Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Despair
Dr Stephen Morgan
Several years ago in this column , I wrote of my delight at attending Choral Evensong in the wonderful church of St Edmund , Southwold and the hymnody to which we were treated . Amongst the hymns we sang that evening was ‘ Jerusalem the Golden ’, sung to the classic tune ‘ Ewing ’.
The words of the hymn itself will be well known to readers , perhaps more about that and the translator of genius , John Mason Neale , who rendered the twelfth century Latin text into such memorable English , but it is that tune that connects the dots for me this month .
The Norwegians have an expression , ‘ earworm ’, to describe a tune that you can ’ t get out of your head and Ewing is just one such for me . Once heard , or even recalled , and the tune simply will not shift from my mind : not for hours , sometimes days even .
Repeated failure in the tasks that come our way is apt to inculcate a sense of frustration and even hopelessness . Some characters are more naturally robust and resilient than others ; we all know individuals for whom disasters that would stop us in our tracks are treated like so much water off a duck ’ s back .
They seem possessed of an inner disposition that allows them to rise above failure and move onto the next challenge entirely undaunted . Others , of what might be thought to be a more sensitive or fragile nature , appear completely crushed , shattered , depressed .
It is no secret that Newman often looked back on the conspicuous failure of the various endeavours upon which he had been engaged and struggled to remain hopeful . As the Episcopal Charges rained down upon Tract XC , he could see before him the ashes of the intellectual enterprise that he had embarked upon in the publication of the Tracts .
The Bishop of Oxford ’ s Charge was felt particularly keenly since he was Newman ’ s own superior . His letters at the time record how keenly he felt the failure . In the years after his conversion , he set his hand to a number of ventures , which , despite early promise , in the modern argot ‘ crashed and burned ’. The attempt to establish a Catholic University in Ireland was perhaps the most conspicuous .
It wasn ’ t the practicalities that , in the end , brought Newman ’ s immediate efforts to naught but , rather , the opposition of those in the Irish Episcopacy who had , at first , seemed set to be supporters of the project . Again many of Newman ’ s letters at the time have a melancholic tone to them . Newman was clearly a man of great sensitivity – Manning thought him ‘ highly-strung ’ and ‘ thin-skinned ’ – and occasionally both the correspondence and the devotional notes he made display something approaching a Job-like hopelessness , yet he never quite tips over into despair .
The key to Newman ’ s resilience at these times is , I think , to be found in those words in the Apologia where he records the effect of his first conversion , at the age of 15 in the autumn of 1816 . He wrote ,
I fell under the influences of a definite Creed , and received into my intellect impressions of dogma , which , through God ’ s mercy , have never been effaced or obscured … making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings , myself and my Creator ’. ( Apologia , p5 ).
Newman ’ s intellectual conviction of the truth of Christianity gave him an assurance that , whatever the temporary checks and set backs , whatever the failures , his soul was in the hands of God and , in the words of that great medieval English Mystic , Julian of Norwich , ‘ all shall be well ’.
My earworm has returned but the words this time are not from Jerusalem the Golden – although their origin is in the same Latin poem .
This time , as I survey a number of personal disasters and , perhaps more acutely the various scandals affecting the Church at the moment , it is the words of ‘ The world is very evil , the times are waxing late .’ that drift into my consciousness . All shall , indeed , be well .