THE P RTAL
October 2013
Page 14
Thoughts on Newman
Newman and the Holy Souls
by Stephen Morgan
One of the finest Catholic
contributions to British Culture in
the twentieth century must surely
be Edward Elgar’s setting of John
Henry Newman’s great poem The
Dream of Gerontius. Elgar’s music,
written for the Birmingham Music
Festival in 1900 (which the pedants
amongst us, me included, know is really
part of the nineteenth century), perfectly
complements Newman’s words.
The poem itself tells the story
of an old man (the eponymous
Gerontius) as he dies, and it charts
the journey of his soul through his last agony and
on to the merciful judgement of God, the experience
of Purgatory and the assurance of eternal life. Elgar
was not the first composer to wish to set Gerontius to
music. Dvorak proposed to do so and even exchanged
letters with Newman in the mid-1880s. We can only
speculate about what the Czech composer’s richly
textured music, drawing, as it does, so heavily on the
folk tunes of central Europe, would have brought to
Newman’s verbal imagery, because, sadly, nothing
came of the correspondence. Instead, we are left with
Elgar’s setting, a piece of undoubted greatness with its
unmistakably English feel.
a figure of suspicion
It is hard to imagine that the composer of the Cello
Concerto in E-minor or the Pomp and Circumstance
marches could have been thought to be, somehow,
not quite English, but Elgar’s Catholicism made him
a figure of suspicion for much of his life. The religious
atmosphere into which Gerontius was launched
was quite unlike today’s ecumenical landscape
and the Dean of Gloucester at first banned its
performance at the 1901 Three Choirs Festival and
then allowed its performance, after 1903, only on
the condition that those aspects of Catholic dogma
most offensive to Establishment sensibilities were
removed. It received its first Catholic performance
at Westminster Cathedral in 1910, where, in the
absence of Protestant doctrinal scruples, the full
majesty of Elgar’s music and the beauty of Newman’s
words were given full range.
From the beginning of the Oxford
Movement, Newman had been
convinced that it was essential to
any religious life that all aspects of
the human mind were fully fed. It
was not enough for faith to appeal
only to the intellect, it had to feed
the imagination: it had to create an
ethos of intellectual and imaginative
richness that led into religious life and
practice, charity and virtue.
We saw last month how he used poetry
in the early years of the Movement to try
to create this affective landscape and,
in Gerontius, we are reading the words of Newman
the Catholic priest, in his mid-sixties, doing precisely
the same in a sublime poetic expression of Catholic
doctrine. The imagery is fed by the language of the
liturgy and is replete with the figures of the Angels and
the Saints striving to assist the journey of a man’s soul
from this world to the next.
Holy Souls
October is traditionally the month of the Holy Souls.
Catholic devotion to praying for the Church suffering
has declined in recent years but remains an important
part of our faith. Newman’s imagery of Purgatory,
through the voice of Angel, should be a consolation
to us all.
SOFTLY and gently, dearly-ransomed soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,
And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.
And carefully I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance,
Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.
Angels, to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;
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