ABSTRACT Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem: Wilfrid Ward and the Art of Newman Mary C. Frank, Ph.D. Director: Stephen Prickett, Ph.D. This dissertation investigates John Henry Newman's understanding of the imagination and its role in religious and aesthetic experience. Newman’s fictional and poetic works fell into the background in scholarly discussions of his life and works shortly after his death. This, I suggest, was in part because the relationship between art and orthodox religion became strained during the crisis precipitated by Catholic Modernism. The Church’s response to Modernism was an affirmation of the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and a crackdown on intellectual activity outside of its supervision and control. Wilfrid Ward’s 1912 Life of Cardinal Newman, written under close scrutiny by the Catholic hierarchy during the Modernist controversy, established a precedent for the relative neglect of Newman’s fictional and poetic works. However, an examination of Newman’s treatment of the imagination and his exercise of it in his own poetry and fiction reveals the vital importance of this term to his mature understanding of religious experience. Though he begins with an attitude of suspicion toward the power of the imagination and advocates—even in his poetry—an attitude of contemptus mundi to counter the world’s siren song, he eventually comes to describe the imagination as the primary means by which the human mind encounters reality. Whereas in his early works he attempts to make great works of the imagination “safe” by requiring that they also express a standard of moral excellence, he gradually abandons this criterion to argue instead that the imagination is that which recognizes and submits to what exceeds it, whether that be divine and morally perfect or human and wildly unsafe. In either case, the act of submission has value in itself, by drawing the imaginer into relationship with something greater than him or herself and prompting a response of devotion and love. Therefore, Newman’s mature understanding of the imagination, emphasizing openness and the willingness to engage with what exceeds one’s control, goes directly to the heart of the deep anxieties of the late nineteenth-century Catholic Church. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem: Wilfrid Ward and the Art of Newman by Mary C. Frank, B.A. A Dissertation Approved by the Department of English Dianna Vitanza, Ph.D., Chairperson Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved by the Dissertation Committee Stephen Prickett, Ph.D., Chairperson Phillip J. Donnelly, Ph.D. David L. Jeffrey, Ph.D. Joshua King, Ph.D. Kristen Pond, Ph.D. Ralph C. Wood, Ph.D. Accepted by the Graduate School August 2013 J. Larry Lyon, Ph.D., Dean Page bearing signatures is kept on file in the Graduate School. Copyright © 2013 by Mary C. Frank All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Abbreviations vi Acknowledgments vii Dedication x Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: Wilfrid Ward and the Art of Newman 9 Chapter Three: Imagination and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy, 1850-1912 45 Chapter Four: The Imagination in Newman’s Nonfiction Prose 91 Chapter Five: Newman’s Imagination at Work 134 Chapter Six: Conclusion 195 Works Cited 197 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Apo. Apologia pro vita sua and Six Sermons, ed. Frank M. Turner Call. Callista DA Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects Dev. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Diff. Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Ess. Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols. GA An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent HS Historical Sketches, 3 vols. Idea The Idea of a University LA Lyra Apostolica LD Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain LG Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert Moz. Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman during his Life in the English Church, ed. Anne Mozley, 2 vols. OS Sermons preached on Various Occasions PS Parochial and Plain Sermons Pre. Pos. Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England TP The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and Certainty, ed. Hugo M. de Achaval and J. Derek Holmes US Fifteen Sermons preached before the University of Oxford VV Verses on Various Occasions vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to extend my deepest thanks first to my mentor and dissertation director, Dr. Stephen Prickett, whose profound knowledge and wise guidance have helped me at every stage of this project, both before and after his move across the ocean. During his time in Waco, he showed me how a shared love of literature can bring people together, whether as students in one of his graduate seminars, audience members to one of his Shakespeare productions, or simply friends and colleagues who sit and drink coffee together each morning in the beautiful Armstrong Browning Library. After his move to the University of Kent, he taught me that mere distance is no obstacle to one who is really interested in teaching. There are not many professors who can make a student feel as important from over four thousand miles away as when she lives in the same town. Making the most of the digital age, he has always found time for my questions, read my work with attention, and treated me as one of his top priorities. Through his direct guidance in my research he has given me a model for what a teacher and researcher should be. Further thanks are due to Dr. Bernadette Waterman Ward, my undergraduate professor of Victorian literature and the first to introduce me to Newman’s works. It was in her seminar on Newman that I discovered the interest that has carried me through the past many years, and her thorough knowledge of and insight into Newman’s thought continues to inspire me to seek an ever deeper understanding of his works. She also introduced me to the work and meetings of the Venerable John Henry Newman Society, and I am vii grateful to this organization for promoting Newman scholarship in the United States and for bringing Newman scholars together at their annual meetings, which I consistently found to be welcoming and informative gatherings where beginning students could interact with some of the foremost researchers in the field. I am also grateful to Monseigneur Richard Liddy for his excellent course on Newman’s theology of belief during my summer study in Oxford. My thanks also go to the research staff at the Armstrong Browning, Moody-Jones, and Wheaton Buswell Libraries. Likewise I am deeply grateful to the Baylor English Department and its faculty for providing me not only with an excellent graduate education but also with a supportive and challenging environment in which to grow as a student and a scholar. In particular, I would also like to thank Drs. David Lyle Jeffrey and Joshua King for their participation and advice in the review of my dissertation prospectus, as well as Drs. King, Jeffrey, Phillip Donnelly, Kristen Pond, and Ralph Wood for their feedback on my dissertation and participation at my oral defense. Their comments and willingness to devote their time to my project are deeply appreciated. To my fellow-travellers through the Baylor graduate program, I extend heartfelt thanks for countless conversations, discussions, debates, and moments of kindness and support, all of which helped me to learn the true meaning of collegiality. In particular, my gratitude goes to Dr. Bethany Bear, with whom I explored the intricacies of Coleridgean prose though many late nights and early mornings, as well as Drs. Bethany Smith and Ellen Condict, and Denise and Michael Crews. I am also sincerely grateful to Sarah Freeland who, both as a viii fellow graduate student and later as a research librarian, has been a great help and a true friend. Finally, I am profoundly grateful to my family for their loving encouragement throughout my graduate career. I owe my interest in literature to my parents, who have always inspired me by their love for books, poetry, and the English language. I am also deeply grateful to all of my grandparents, especially Benjamin and Helen Homan, whose generous financial support allowed me to pay for my last few dissertation hours after I became a long- distance student. To my extended family on both sides of the Atlantic, I offer my warmest thanks for their unflagging support, prayers, and good wishes. Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, Martin, without whose patience, love, and steady encouragement, not to mention keen sense of humor, this dissertation would never have been completed. He, my daughter Claire, and our second daughter, to be born later this year, have been a constant reminder to me of what is truly important and truly beautiful. ix This work is dedicated to my husband, Martin, in deepest gratitude for his faithful love and unfailing support CHAPTER ONE Introduction Both before and after Kingsley’s famous accusation that “[t]ruth, for its own sake, has never been a virtue with the Roman clergy,” John Henry Newman struggled against accusations of equivocation and dissimulation (Newman, " Mr. Kingsley and Dr. Newman" 358). His choice to publish fiction and verse shows his confidence in the potential that fictions, fables, and images have to communicate a truth beyond the literal. Yet he, like his protagonist in Loss and Gain (1848), displays a lifelong preoccupation with the distinction between reality and unreality and a constant frustration with the unreal.1 Sometimes words themselves are unreal to him; passages in his works suggest a skeptical attitude toward language itself.2 Those who would emphasize his sanctity may be tempted to downplay his engagement with images, symbols, and the phenomena of concrete experience: “he detected, even as he admired [the world] most, the danger it involved for him, the danger, in a word, that he would rest content with it, making an abiding-place of that which he himself had called .