As a writer, struggling to synthesize my Catholic identity with my desire to write believable fiction, I’ve long been a fan of the following quote from the Venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman: “It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature about a sinful man.”

I haven’t ever read any Newman, though, so I didn’t know where it came from. I decided recently that it was time I looked it up, because, after all, context is king. I found that the quote belongs in Newmans’ Idea of a University, and the section in which it resides speaks directly to our debate over whether to engage or withdraw from the culture. Permit me, please, to quote at some length Newman’s brilliantly eloquent analysis (with my emphasis):

Some one will say to me perhaps: “Our youth shall not be corrupted. We will dispense with all general or national Literature whatever, if it be so exceptionable; we will have a Christian Literature of our own, as pure, as true, as the Jewish.” You cannot have it:—I do not say you cannot form a select literature for the young, nay, even for the middle or lower classes; this is another matter altogether: I am speaking of University Education, which implies an extended range of reading, which has to deal with standard works of genius, or what are called the classics of a language: and I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man. You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than any Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all. You will have simply left the delineation of man, as such, and have substituted for it, as far as you have had any thing to substitute, that of man, as he is or might be, under certain special advantages. Give up the study of man, as such, if so it must be; but say you do so. Do not say you are studying him, his history, his mind and his heart, when you are studying something else. Man is a being of genius, passion, intellect, conscience, power. He exercises these {230} various gifts in various ways, in great deeds, in great thoughts, in heroic acts, in hateful crimes. He founds states, he fights battles, he builds cities, he ploughs the forest, he subdues the elements, he rules his kind. He creates vast ideas, and influences many generations. He takes a thousand shapes, and undergoes a thousand fortunes. Literature records them all to the life,

Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,
Gaudia, discursus.

He pours out his fervid soul in poetry; he sways to and fro, he soars, he dives, in his restless speculations; his lips drop eloquence; he touches the canvas, and it glows with beauty; he sweeps the strings, and they thrill with an ecstatic meaning. He looks back into himself, and he reads his own thoughts, and notes them down; he looks out into the universe, and tells over and celebrates the elements and principles of which it is the product.

Such is man: put him aside, keep him before you; but, whatever you do, do not take him for what he is not, for something more divine and sacred, for man regenerate. Nay, beware of showing God’s grace and its work at such disadvantage as to make the few whom it has thoroughly influenced compete in intellect with the vast multitude who either have it not, or use it ill. The elect are few to choose out of, and the world is inexhaustible. From the first, Jabel and Tubalcain, Nimrod “the stout hunter,” the learning of the Pharaohs, and the wisdom of the East country, are of the world. Every now and then they are rivalled by a Solomon or a Beseleel, but the habitat of natural gifts is the natural man. The Church may use them, she cannot at her will originate {231} them. Not till the whole human race is made new will its literature be pure and true. Possible of course it is in idea, for nature, inspired by heavenly grace, to exhibit itself on a large scale, in an originality of thought or action, even far beyond what the world’s literature has recorded or exemplified; but, if you would in fact have a literature of saints, first of all have a nation of them.

[snip]

“…Why do we educate, except to prepare for the world? Why do we cultivate the intellect of the many beyond the first elements of knowledge, except for this world? Will it be much matter in the world to come whether our bodily health or whether our intellectual strength was more or less, except of course as this world is in all its circumstances a trial for the next? If then a University is a direct preparation for this world, let it be what it professes. It is not a Convent, it is not a Seminary; it is a place to fit men of the world for the world. We cannot possibly keep them from plunging into the world, with all its ways and principles and maxims, when their time comes; but we can prepare them against what is inevitable; and it is not the way to learn to swim in troubled waters, never to have gone into them. Proscribe (I do not merely say particular authors, particular works, particular passages) but Secular Literature as such; cut out from your class books all broad manifestations of the natural man; and those manifestations are waiting for your pupil’s benefit at the very doors of your lecture room in living and {233} breathing substance. They will meet him there in all the charm of novelty, and all the fascination of genius or of amiableness. Today a pupil, tomorrow a member of the great world: today confined to the Lives of the Saints, tomorrow thrown upon Babel;—thrown on Babel, without the honest indulgence of wit and humour and imagination having ever been permitted to him, without any fastidiousness of taste wrought into him, without any rule given him for discriminating “the precious from the vile,” beauty from sin, the truth from the sophistry of nature, what is innocent from what is poison. You have refused him the masters of human thought, who would in some sense have educated him, because of their incidental corruption: you have shut up from him those whose thoughts strike home to our hearts, whose words are proverbs, whose names are indigenous to all the world, who are the standard of their mother tongue, and the pride and boast of their countrymen, Homer, Ariosto, Cervantes, Shakespeare, because the old Adam smelt rank in them; and for what have you reserved him? You have given him “a liberty unto” the multitudinous blasphemy of his day; you have made him free of its newspapers, its reviews, its magazines, its novels, its controversial pamphlets, of its Parliamentary debates, its law proceedings, its platform speeches, its songs, its drama, its theatre, of its enveloping, stifling atmosphere of death. You have succeeded but in this,—in making the world his University.

When facing the question of retreat from society, those of us called to be in the world (read: families) aren’t exactly going to sit in divine contemplation on top of poles in the desert or live out our days in the silent, contemplative work/prayer cycle of Monte Casino.

We have a right to erect barriers, a firewall, if you will, between us and the world, so that we may guard against what comes in. I find, however, that it is unrealistic and perhaps even irresponsible to throw in our hand and say, “I’m done. All of it is garbage, we will be corrupted, so none of it may enter these gates.” Nor is it sufficient to merely draw what was good from the past and ignore entirely what is going on in the present.

As Newman says, if you proscribe secular literature, if you forbid your students (or children, when they are old enough) out of contempt for the world, “its newspapers, its reviews, its magazines, its novels, its controversial pamphlets…its Parliamentary debates, its law proceedings, its platform speeches, its songs, its drama, its theatre…its enveloping, stifling atmosphere of death” within the confines of their education and formation, they will enter the world and find that experience becomes their university.

I’ve watched this happen. I’ve watched strong Catholic families forbid too much, withdraw too much, attempt to use the faith as a barrier and shield and at times a cudgel to keep the spirit of the age out of their homes and away from their children. I’ve watched then, as those children became adults, fall prey to as they encountered things which, due to the insufficiency of their formation, they were unable to discern as “”the precious from the vile,” beauty from sin, the truth from the sophistry of nature, what is innocent from what is poison.”

Some abandoned their faith. Others became schismatic. Others still became apathetic, and indulged in the delights which, sheltered from, they were never adequately fortified against (lots of unwed mothers in this category).

Of course, this won’t always be the case, but the tendency is strong. Newman encourages us to filter what our chilren receive, but as we grow to adulthood and face real education, we need to be ready to engage the world. That doesn’t happen in a vaccuum. It doesn’t happen unless the approach, even through the filters of childhood, is one that prepares us for the real education. Because by the time we get to University it may be too late to start forming the defenses that allow us to exist in the world and not of it.

Filed under: Culture Wars