Of Heart and Brain in Loss and Gain

 

People love conversion stories. The doctor who sparks a revolution in medicine by humbly discarding the old theories he once vigorously defended; the politician who repents of his corruption and throws away his career to do the right thing; the man who conquers his drinking addiction and is transformed into a caring husband and father; these stories delight and inspire us. Sometimes they emphasize the subject’s intellectual life, a change of mind from one idea to another; other times his moral life of action and habit, where there is a reformation of character or way of life. Which of these predominates will likely be determined by the unique personality of the convert and the kind of conversion. But these two essential components of human life, the head and the heart, are usually both featured in a conversion story, since ideas influence behavior, and feelings affect thought. This is especially true of religious conversion.

In the English-speaking world, the most famous religious conversion story of modern times is arguably that of John Henry Newman.[1] During the middle of the nineteenth century, Newman was an influential Anglican clergyman and university don who helped spearhead the popular yet controversial Oxford Movement, which challenged the status quo of the Church of England. In widely circulated pamphlets called Tracts for Our Times, Newman and his colleagues pointed to the early Fathers of Christianity and demonstrated serious inconsistencies between the beliefs and practice of the early church and those of conventional Anglicanism. After a long process of study, reflection, writing, and self-examination, Newman converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845. This caused a tremendous stir, and while many of his countrymen followed him into the Roman Church, others attacked him with various publications. One of these was in the form of a novel written by Elizabeth Harris, which tells the story of a young Oxford student who becomes Catholic and later dies miserably as a monk, crushed by the authority of Rome. Besides the insulting allusion to Newman’s own conversion and its absurd ignorance of university life during the Oxford Movement, the novel also included sharp criticism of his writings and convictions, prompting Newman in 1948 to respond with a novel of his own: Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert.[2]

After a brief introduction to the protagonist, Charles Reding, and a fleeting glance at his upbringing and education, we are spirited away to Saint Saviour’s College at Oxford, where most of the story takes place. It is truly a university novel, one of the first of its kind, and much of the book consists of intellectual conversations between Reding and his fellow students. Dr. Geoffrey Vaughan has suggested that “the attentive reader of this novel may come away with more theology than any student in a semester long course”![3] Reding encounters the various religious factions under the umbrella of the Church of England, each represented by one of his college peers or tutors: High Church Anglicans (Bateman), Low Church Anglicans (Sheffield), Anglo-Catholics (White), Evangelicals (Freeborn), and Latitudinarianism (Dr. Brownside and Mr. Vincent). He gradually realizes that the arguments presented by each of these parties are contradictory and necessarily exclude each other. He is attracted by the consistent system of Catholicism, and at the same time repelled by his prejudices. However, throughout this grueling process he remains open to the truth wherever it may lead, yet still confused and unsure: “What if, after all, the Roman Catholic Church is the true Church? I wish I knew what to believe; no one will tell me what to believe; I am so left to myself.”[4] Reding uses his reason as best he can but learns the hard way about its limitations, and after many of these theological discussions he is described as “puzzled,” “painfully perplexed,” “pleading ignorance,” or just “tired.”[5]

By this development Newman seems to be indicating that religious conversion is more than a rational experience, more than a mere progression from premise to conclusion, because humans are more than just the faculty of reason, indeed, the virtue of religion transcends it. As the very title of the book suggests, there is also the matter of the heart: the will and the emotions that move it to action. Reding is connected by strong bonds to his family, the university, and the Church of England; this is his life and his family’s generational milieu, and his habits, desires, and preferences have all been shaped accordingly. While his good upbringing has enabled his dedicated pursuit of truth, he also foresees that his conversion to the Roman Church will ostracize him from his family and friends and destroy his career. After a painful struggle with temptation, he receives the grace-filled conviction he has been waiting for and makes his decision public despite the bitter consequences. And now, his feelings mastered and redirected, his reasons sufficient, and his conscience clear, he sets his hand to the plow and does not look back. As he tells Carleton, “Those habitual and ruling convictions, on which it is our duty to act, will remain before our consciousness every moment, when we come into the hurry of the world, and are assailed by inducements and motives of various kinds. Therefore I say that the time of argument is past; I act on a conclusion already drawn.”[6]

One modern critic has postulated that this novel illustrates Reding’s psychological progression from feminine qualities to masculine, from shy and frightened blushing to manly determination. He describes this as “a process of conversion in the full context of how the Victorians reconsidered and redefined themselves. It is a novel that is fully alert to, while never endorsing, the new early to mid-Victorian sense of the importance of the individual self.”[7] This strange assessment not only appears to omit the centrality of God in the process of religious conversion, something Newman would have abhorred, but it also seems to divorce the feminine from the masculine, the passive (receptive) from the active, the heart from the head. He even goes on to claim that between these two “no dialogue is possible, for the word of God and the language of Victorian individualism exist alongside each other with no common ground.”[8] This seems a tenuous conclusion, and one that does not do justice to Newman’s presentation of conversion. Reding’s newfound faith is the fruit of a marriage between his soul and God, a spiritual union of both the masculine and the feminine, which are symbolized by the heart and the head. At the beginning of the novel Reding’s mind and will are disjointed, and this produces an uneasiness of conscience that propels him forward. When at last he opens his soul and receives the Holy Spirit’s kindly light, his head and his heart become one, and conviction and faith are born.

[1] John Vidmar, The Catholic Church through the Ages (New York: Paulist Press, 2014), 290.

[2] Trevor Lipscombe, introduction to Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (San Francisco: Ignatius Critical Editions, 2012), xviii.

[3] Geoffrey Vaughan, “Reading for a Conversion,” in Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, ed. Trevor Lipscombe (San Francisco: Ignatius Critical Editions, 2012), 380.

[4] John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (San Francisco: Ignatius Critical Editions, 2012), 82.

[5] Herman Servotte, “Loss and Gain: A Grammar of Conversion?” Louvain Studies vol. 15, no. 2–3 (1990), 259.

[6] Newman, Loss and Gain, 302.

[7] Peck, John. “Newman and the Victorian Self: From Loss and Gain to the Apologia,” New Blackfriars vol. 78, no. 912 (1997), 94.

[8] Peck, “Newman and the Victorian Self,” 94.