Contents

Loss and Gain – St. John Henry Newman

This was the Ignatius Critical Edition. The cover was a photograph (at first glance thought painting) of Oxford taken by Fr. Lawrence Lew OP.

I was not very pleased with the footnotes. For example, Part II, ch. 16, p. 235, the footnote says that the famous Miserere from the Sistine Chapel that Mozart copied down from memory was by Palestrina, when it’s famously Allegri’s. Another example, Part III, ch. 2, p. 288, Charles is travelling from Devon to London via Bath and Oxford; it says that he stops at Bath to visit a bookshop on “Danvers Street” and buy some books that he needs; the footnote for this says “Danvers Street: between Cheyne Walk and the Chelsea Embankment [in London]” which doesn’t make sense because Charles is not yet in London. I can tell by googling that Bath has a Manvers Street, which even has a bookseller on it to this day, George Bayntun.

I like Newman’s inscription below the title on the frontispiece:
“ADHUC MODICUM ALIQUANTULUM, QUI VENTURUS EST, VENIET, ET NON TARDABIT. JUSTUS AUTEM MEUS EX FIDE VIVIT.”

Introduction

• 1778 Papists Act (first repealing of any Penal Laws) and 1780 Gordon Riots; the Empire has forced liberalism, in a similar vein to the Quebec Act (1774)
• Newman as a boy enjoyed Sir Walter Scott: “an instrument in the hands of God for the revival of Catholicity”
• At age 15, he had his first marked encounter with the Divine, as recounted in the Apologia; this first step on his journey endowed him with a lifelong certainty in the existence of God
• Newman’s wide reading is evident throughout Loss & Gain, and he alludes to or even quotes many varied works, evidently from memory
  • This includes popular works such as Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, possibly the first historical novel
• On October 21, 1866, at the Birmingham Oratory, Newman received the young Gerard Manley Hopkins into the Church

Letter to Dr. Russell

Loss and Gain is dedicated to Dr. Russell.
This was Charles W. Russell, a theologian and scholar at Maynooth Seminary in Ireland. In the Apologia Newman says that he had more to do with his conversion than anyone else. Newman was aware of his writings in the Dublin Review and met him for the first time at Oxford in 1843.

Part I

Chapter 1

• Multiple quotations from the poems of John Keble’s The Christian Year, these appear on p. 1, 25, 87, and 215
• Charles Reding’s father wants his son’s education to give him the best chance for a life of virtue, and so sends him to public (in the British sense of the word) rather than private school, so that although he may have “more of trial” there, he will at least gain “self-command, manliness, and circumspection”, and be the more ready for the greater liberty that he will have later at college

Chapter 3

• Describes Reding and Sheffied’s initial lack of a view upon arriving at Oxford, and compares this to some who remain in this unanchored state their whole lives
  • “When, then, men for the first time look upon the world of politics or religion, all that they find there meets their mind’s eye as a landscape addresses itself for the first time to a person who has just gained his bodily sight.”
  • I.e. they do not yet know how the world works, they have no science or system for it, their arguments are inconsistent, they hear and forget things quickly, etc.
  • “This is the state of many men all through life” (not just those looking on politics or religion for the first time); “and miserable politicians or Churchmen they make, unless by good luck they are in safe hands, and ruled by others”.
  • Such people like to take refuge in being free thinkers, “no party men”, unfettered by any system, “when they are, in fact, the most helpless of slaves; for our strength in this world is, to be the subjects of the reason, and our liberty, to be captives of the truth.”
• Charles’ maxim was to see the best in people
  • He would walk along the road, seeing labourers, horsemen, gentlemen, beggars, and say to himself, “That man is a Christian.”
  • Whoa! Could not do this today!

Chapter 4

• Sheffield is complaining about shams (Bateman’s rood-lofts without roods, niches without images, candlesticks without lights, etc.), and about the idea suggested by some that crucifixes ought to be put up by the waysides in England to excite religious feeling
  • This would not work, he says, the English would not been inspired to greater religiosity as it would offend them; this mode of teaching would be a sham
  • Charles then cites one of their lectures on Aristotle, “that habits are created by those very acts in which they manifest themselves when created … we learn to swim well by trying to swim”, things are ex opere operato
• Sheffield objects to Catholic externals, but cannot defend those that still remain in the Church of England, e.g. surplice and stole, or simply having clergymen; these are the very points Jeremy Bentham was raising at this time, and Sheffield admits he doesn’t know how to answer them
  • The departure from Catholicism leads inevitably to Jeremy Bentham!

Chapter 8

• White, despite his enthusiasm for Catholic externals in this chapter is revealed later, in Part III Ch. 2, to not have become a Catholic and to have married the silly Louisa Bolton
• Sometimes silly characters speak truths though:
  • White does say to the girls, “No one is his own master; even the Pope cannot do as he will; he dines by himself and speaks by precedent.”
  • Miss Charlotte describes to her mother the Catholic manner of praying as “something much more beautiful, this continued concourse, flowing and ebbing, changing yet full”
• Mrs. Bolton can’t understand her daughters affection for Catholic things, she is a very old-school, prayer-book Christian, for which I think Newman had a certain respect:
  • “Give me good old George the Third and the Protestant religion. Those were the times! Everything went on quietly then.”
  • “I value the Prayer Book as you cannot do, my love, for I have known what it is to one in deep affliction.”

Chapter 9

• “Some persons fidget at intellectual difficulties, and, successfully or not, are ever trying to solve them. Charles was of a different cast of temper; a new idea was not lost on him, but it did not distress him if it was obscure, or conflicted with his habitual view of things. He let it work its way and find its place, and shape itself within him, by the slow spontaneous action of the mind.”
  • I think I am similar to Charles (and Newman?) in this respect
• Charles can’t respect White and Bateman (Anglo-Catholics), their way of speaking is unreal, which means inconsistent; they are shams, as Sheffield would say
  • If the system they believe in is untrue, then no amount of being a fine fellow will make it real, make it not a sham

Chapter 12

• Charles is at home with his family during the Long Vacation
• Sense of smell is Charles’ favourite sense
  • “Sounds and scents are more ethereal, less material; they have no shape—like the angels.”
  • Scents have an immediacy and atomicity:
    • Flowers, fruits, spices, foods, all have scents, perfectly distinct from each other, communicated in an instant, they are specific and complete, yet indivisible

Chapter 13

• “At a university you have so many inducements to fall in with the prevailing tone of thought” — how much worse today!!

Chapter 14

• Charles’ father is dead, a fidelis servus et prudens
  • Description of him on p. 134
  • A kind father who left his family well provided for
  • Respectable clergyman of the old school, who fulfilled his duties to God and his Bishop, lamented by his parishioners
  • No great reader or seeker of theological or doctrinal knowledge
  • Sincere belief in the Prayer Book, and moral duties
  • Charitable and hospitable to the poor
  • Staunch but not violent Tory
  • Esteemed by the great houses about him

Part II

Chapter 1

• Carlton (tutor of Reding and Sheffield) says, after Aristotle, that the role of party politics is to supply defects in the law, implying that the same is true of parties in the Church
• Agitation and protests of the masses is another growing influence in politics
  • Carlton: “I really am not politician enough to talk of it as good or bad; one’s natural instinct is against it; but it may be necessary.”

Chapter 5

• Charles tries to explain to Carlton his call to celibacy, but he can’t comprehend it
  • Carlton: “You began by saying that celibacy was a perfection of nature, now you make it a penance; first it is good and glorious, next it is a medicine and a punishment.”
  • Reding: “Perhaps our highest perfection here is penance.”
  • Like the Jesus Prayer?

Chapter 6

• Those outside the Church must begin to seek the Truth using their own private reason but after a point can dispense with it
  • Cf. Part III, Ch. 5
  • A parable of reason and faith
  • A man uses a lamb to find his way on a dark night, but he puts it out once he gets home
  • “What would be thought of his bringing it into his drawing-room? What would the goodly company there assembled before a genial hearth and under glittering chandeliers, the bright ladies and the well-dressed gentlemen, say to him if he came in with a great-coat on his back, a hat on his head, an umbrella under his arm, and a large stable-lantern in his hand? Yet what would be thought, on the other hand, if he precipitated himself into the inhospitable night and the war of the elements in his ball-dress?”
  • “When the king came in to see the guests, he saw a man who had not on a wedding garment,” Matthew 22:11
  • That is a man determined to live in the Church the same way he had lived out of it

Chapter 7

• Sheffield doesn’t like how Carlton said the Athanasian Creed in the Sunday morning service
  • Call’s him a party man
  • “Charles did not see how obeying in so plain a matter the clear direction of the Prayer Book could be a party act.”
  • Anglican version of saying the black, doing the red

Chapter 11

• CHarles and his sister Caroline talk about memorization
  • Memorization was an important part of learning even in Victorian times
  • A mnemonic device was called a memoria technica
  • Charles thinks his sister might have used memoriae technicae to remember historical dates better

Chapter 12

• Charles sister Mary can’t understand Charles’ melancholy and he responds with, “I suppose it is a coming out of shadows into realities.”, ex umbris et imaginibus

Chapter 13

• Mary’s incomprehension of Charles, and the beauty of the Prayer Book year:
  • “Going to church was a pleasure to her. She liked to hear the Lessons and the Collects, coming round year after year, and marking the seasons. The historical books and prophets in summer; then the “stir-up” Collect just before Advent; the beautiful Collects in Advent itself, with the Lessons from Isaiah reaching on through Epiphany; they were quite music to the ear. Then the Psalms, varying with every Sunday; they were a perpetual solace to her, ever old yet ever new. The occasional additions, too—the Athanasian Creed, the Benedictus, Deus misereatur (Ps. 66), and Omnia opera (Daniel 1:29–69, paraphrasing Ps. 148), which her father had been used to read at certain great feasts; and the beautiful Litany. What could he want more? Where could he find so much?”
• Newman mentions frequently the Athanasian Creed in this book; he must have had a great admiration for it

Chapter 17

• The mysterious, anonymous letter, full of questions about the Church for Charles to consider
  • Charles remembering it the next morning wishes very much to be settled somewhere, whether in or out of the Church of England
  • “But it’s a work of time; all the paper-arguments in the world are unequal to given one a view in a moment. There must be a process.”
  • “Conviction is the eyesight of the mind, not a conclusion from premises; God works it, and His works are slow.”
  • Cf. Ch. 20, Willis says Charles has proof enough, but still needs the faith that only God can supply
  • Cf. Part III, Ch. 6, the priest on the train: “You must make a venture; faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a gift after it.”

Chapter 18

• Talking about what luxury means, grapes are not a luxury in naples; wild ducks, however delicious, are no luxury amid the Oxford fens
• Campbell (Anglican priest friend of Bateman, and a new acquaintance to Charles at this point) on the rapid pace of technological and political change and its effects in this time
  • “Steamers and railroads were making strange changes; time and place were vanishing, and price would soon be the only measure of luxury.”

Chapter 20

• Bateman is trying to get Willis to agree that the Mass as it is performed abroad is unreasonable, “all parties conspire to gabble it over as if it mattered not a jot who attended to it, or even understood it”
  • Willis: “To me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses for ever and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words,—it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick; for they are all parts of one integral action. Quickly they go; for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon; as when it was said in the beginning, ‘What thou doest, do quickly’. Quickly they pass; for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passes along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass; because as the lightning which shineth from one part of the heaven unto the other, so is the the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass; for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the Name of the Lord as He passed by, ‘the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth’. And as Moses on the mountain, so we too ‘make haste and bow our heads to the earth, and adore’. So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, ‘waiting for the moving of the water’. Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation; not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginningto end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God’s priest, supporting him, yet guided by him. There are little children there, and old men, and simple labourers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving; there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and the scope of it. And oh, my dear Bateman, you ask me whether this is not a formal, unreasonable service—it is wonderful! quite wonderful. When will these dear good people be enlightened? O Sapientia, fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia, O Adonai, O Clavis David et Expectatio gentium, veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster.”
  • Willis quotes St. Paul before King Agrippa to Bateman: “I would to God, that not only thou, but also all who hear me this day, were both in little and in much such as I am, except these chains.” (Acts 26:28)
• Later as Willis and Charles are walking away together, Willis talks about how conversion works:
  • “What you want is faith. I suspect you have quite proof enough; enough to be converted on. But faith is a gift; pray for that great gift, without which you cannot come to the Church; without which you cannot walk aright when you are in the Church.”
  • Cf. Ch. 17, “God works it, and His works are slow.”
  • Cf. Part III, Ch. 6, the priest on the train: “You must make a venture; faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a gift after it.”

Part III

Chapter 1

• Campbell thinks Charles’ grounds for conversion are a delusion, he will bind himself to a foreign creed and then discover it is all a delusion
  • Charles: “I consider that all reason comes from God; our grounds must at best be imperfect; but if they appear to be sufficient after prayer, diligent search, obedience, waiting, and, in short, doing our part, they are His voice calling us on.”

Chapter 3

• Beholding Oxford once again, he realizes both his Loss and Gain:
  • “Whatever he was to gain by becoming a Cathic, this he had lost; whatever he was to gain higher and better, at least this and such as this he never could have again. He could not have another Oxford, he could not have the friends of his boyhood and youth in the choice of his manhood.”
  • A pearl of great price, of great cost
  • “All passed as a dream, and he was a stranger where he had hoped to have had a home.”

Chapter 5

• Charles tells Carlton he has read all the Anglican divines as requested and found that the Catholic Church is the Church most like the Apostolic Faith that they described
  • “And seeing it to be like the Apostolic Church, I believe it to be the same. Reason has gone first, faith is to follow.”
  • Cf. Part II, Ch. 6
• Carlton: “An English clergyman is a gentleman; you may have more to bear than you reckon for, when you find yourself with men of rude minds and vulgar manners.”
  • I believe there is a lot about being a gentleman in The Idea of a University

Chapter 6

• The mysterious Catholic priest that sits across from Charles on the train into London
  • David Paul Deavel, in his essay Beyond Autobiography: Loss and Gain as Theological Satire (p. 361), says that this is the intellectual dénouement
  • Charles: “Do you mean that before conversion one can attain to a present abiding actual conviction of the truth?”
  • Priest: “I do not know, but, at least, he may have habitual moral certainty; I mean a conviction, and one only, steady, without rival conviction, or even reasonable doubt, present to him when he is most composed and in his hours of solitude, and flashing on him from time to time, as through clouds, when he is in the world;—a conviction to this effect, ‘The Roman Catholic Church is the one only voice of God, the one only way of salvation.’”
  • Priest: “You must make a venture; faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a gift after it.”
• On the lack of faith among Englishmen
  • “Individuals may display a touching gentleness, or a conscientiousness which demands our reverence; still, till they have faith, they have not the foundation, and their superstructure will fall. They will not be blessed, they will effect nothing in religious matters, till they begin by an act of unreserved faith in the word of God, whatever it be; till they go out of themselves; till they cease to make something within them their standard, till they oblige their will to perfect what reason leaves sufficient, indeed, but incomplete. And when they shall recognise this defect in themselves, and try to remedy it, then they will recognise much more;—they will be on the road very shortly to be Catholics.”

Contemporary Criticism

Beyond Autobiography: Loss and Gain as Theological Satire – David Paul Deavel

• Newman captures the fact that theology was, if not still queen of the sciences, then at least the talk of the town, in 1840s Oxford
• The story is as much about the shaping and forming of Charles’ mind, heart, and will, as it is about the final destination of Catholicism
• Ultimately Loss and Gain is satire, that is, the exposition of vice or folly
• Also points out Newman’s sympathy for an older Anglicanism and its adherence to the Prayer Book

Truth as Convergence and as Conviction in Loss and Gain – Mitchell Kalpakgian

• I found this to be a very good summary
• Charles Reding is on a quest for truth, while so many of his companions settle for lesser things, and this truth ultimately brings him to a peace that passes all understanding
• Skepticism is the prevailing doctrine at Oxford
  • Man does not have natural knowledge
  • Truth is subjective, cultural, and relative
  • Oxford does not seek the truth
• “Charles is led to Rome by a process of convergence and conviction that provide certitude and remove all doubts and assure him of God’s will.”
• Charles gains because he ventures, he finds truth because he seeks, he loses some things in his venture but gains something much greater
• There is a sermon of Newman’s called “Truth Hidden When Not Sought After”

Oxford Lost, Rome Gained, Brideshead Previsited – J. C. Whitehouse

• Parallels with Brideshead Revisited include
  • The enclosed but somehow exotic setting
  • An enquiring young man unsatisfied with prevailing ideas
  • Fascination with a new way of seeing the world
  • Final acceptance of Catholicism by the protagonist
• Differences include
  • Newman’s platonic discourse
  • Relative plainness and archaicness of style
  • Oxonian technical jargon