"In search of the one that went astray..."

“Faith is illuminative, not operative; it does not force obedience, though it increases responsibility; it heightens guilt, but it does not prevent sin. The will is the source of action.” - St. John Newman

By and large, there are all manner of religious people in the world who claim to be Christians; some of them are Catholics, and very many of the others are Protestants. In both these groups, there are all kinds of men, some academics, others dyed in the wool evangelicals who despise the Church of Rome, a few laggards and dawdlers who only go to church for the free donuts, and even a handful of those who really love others and try to be virtuous; never in history, however, was there such a Christian as St. John Henry Newman. He began as an evangelical Calvinist, then was a student and then a fellow at Oxford in the midst of the great debates between England and Rome in the 1820s, and eventually was convicted of the truth of the Catholic faith and became a priest and then a cardinal. Immediately after he converted, he wrote a book called Loss and Gain, which we will be looking at briefly today; it is a strange work because while Newman himself warned against thinking of the story as an autobiography, it is what might be called an intellectual autobiography: a tale of the converting mind lived through a fictional character in fictional circumstances. Newman created a man named Charles for this task, a fictional man who had his own fictional life, and yet, perhaps, felt and thought some of the same things as Newman did leading up to and during Newman’s conversion.

Over the course of Loss and Gain, the reader is thrown almost violently back and forth between conversations indicative of the great struggle between the true faith and the false, ranging from tentative intellectual exploration to tender and generous conversation between friends, and back again to raging debate and fierce disagreement. Some scenes feel nearly Socratic in nature, with Charles Reding, our curious protagonist, frequently asking questions in an attempt to find truth, or else listening to another pursue a line of questioning. Many questions in this book are bound to cause great discomfort if spoken aloud today, as they indeed were to some in the story; but to Newman’s central characters, truth is the goal and is worth the discomfort of probing questions and incisive criticism. Even when Reding is preparing to sit down to a comfortable luncheon, he is prepared to relinquish the impending comfort in the form of tea and sandwiches, and interrogate his friend, recently converted to Catholicism, to find out his state of mind: “A thought struck Reding. "Tell me, Willis," he said, "your exact position; in what sense are you a Catholic? What is to prevent your returning with me to Oxford?”¹ 

So, then, we have conversation as one of the driving principles of this drama. The other, perhaps even more important, is the internal struggle of faith that Reding deals with during his whole journey and the terrible pain that he endures because of his eventual conversion to the Roman Catholic religion. For an Anglican Oxford student in Reding’s position (or Newman’s, in real life) there were two particular groups that would feel betrayed by such a conversion: his family, and his university. A fellow reviewer of this book, Adam Shaeffer, speaks to the grief of Oxford:

And the ideas Reding wrestles with through the story’s progress reveal the very perplexity Newman experienced during his arduous and painful conversion from the Church of England to the Church of Rome. For ‘Reding’s conversion to Rome is ... like Newman’s, no sudden enlightenment but a hard-won intellectual struggle, in a religiously divided Oxford, in which theological controversy and argument count’ (Gilley, p. xix). And they count because the Oxford of Loss and Gain is primarily religious. It served as the ‘intellectual powerhouse of the Church of England, and as the chief place, beside Cambridge, for the training of its clergy’ (Gilley, p. xviii). This is why Reding’s conversion, like Newman’s, was widely perceived as a betrayal of all that Oxford was supposed to be. And for one who loved Oxford and felt truly loyal to it, this perceived betrayal could only be excruciating.²

 Not only did Reding’s former classmates and teachers speak about him behind his back, malign his name, and charge him with unbelief, but even those academics who had known his father (Mr. Reding having been a parson before his untimely death) sought him out to try and shame him away from Rome:

'Well, Charles,’ said Mr. Malcolm, not looking at him, "I have known you from this high; more, from a child in arms. A frank, open boy you were; I don't know what has spoiled you. These Jesuits, perhaps.... It was not so in your father's lifetime….Silly boy,’ he went on, ‘you have not a word to say for yourself; it's all idle fancy. You are going as a bird to the fowler.'³

Now, as much as Reding experienced vexation from his colleagues and teachers over his conversion, the distress of his family (primarily his mother and his sister Mary) was much more difficult to bear. Indeed, Reding was the best of friends with Mary since his childhood, and had always been able to speak to her about everything; and yet, when he spoke to her of his qualms about the Anglican church, she recoiled and could hardly trust him anymore. After Reding had chosen to cross the Tiber, he attempted to say goodbye to his mother, and though she sent him off after a time with tears, most of their interaction was bitter and harsh: 

There was another silence; then she said, 'You have had everything in your favour, Charles; you have been blessed with talents, advantages of education, easy circumstances; many a deserving young man has to scramble on as he can.’ Charles answered that he was deeply sensible how much he owed in temporal matters to Providence, and that it was only at His bidding that he was giving them up. ‘We all looked up to you, Charles; perhaps we made too much of you; well, God be with you; you have taken your line.⁴

What sorrow must have been in Newman’s heart to be able to write these lines, and to understand the gutting desolation of rejection.

Loss and Gain is a testament to the resilience and buoyancy of a heart seeking God, and it is a testament to faith. Though not much is made of Reding’s prayer life, we know that he prayed for guidance, and began to develop a relationship with God that allowed him to almost breathe in the aroma of faith; 

'O happy times,’ he cried, "when faith was one! O blessed penitent, whoever you are, who know what to believe, and how to gain pardon, and can begin where others end! Here am I, in my twenty-third year, uncertain about everything, because I have nothing to trust.’ He drew near to the Cross, took off his hat, knelt down and kissed the wood, and prayed awhile that whatever might be the consequences, whatever the trial, whatever the loss, he might have grace to follow whithersoever God should call him.⁵

St. Francis de Sales spoke eloquently on the nature of the quiet spirit, such as Newman himself possessed, and both men were great proponents of the idea that God and man, the Creator and the created, were meant to speak to one another always if it were only for a brief moment, and that this communion of the two hearts is what faith lies in: 

Truly the chief exercise in mystical theology is to speak to God and to hear God speak in the bottom of the heart; and because this discourse passes in most secret aspirations and inspirations, we term it a silent conversing. Eyes speak to eyes, and heart to heart, and none understand what passes save the sacred lovers who speak.⁶

For Newman, this is all that mattered; to lose this was to lose all, and to gain this was to gain God.

¹ John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, 8th ed. London: Burns and Oates, 1881, 108.

² Adam B. Shaeffer, “Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert,” Reviews in Religion & Theology 24 (1): 155–56 doi:10.1111/rirt.12865, 2017.

³ Newman, 416-417.

⁴ Newman, 346. 

⁵ Newman, 291.

⁶ Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, Book Six, Chapter 1.