The Golden Fleece

by Muriel Spark

  Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks? or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?

  Which leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in the dust …

  Hast thou given the horse his strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? …

  He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains; and the shouting …

  God points to the eagle; he specifies his mighty creature behemoth:

  Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee: he eateth grass as an ox …

  His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron …

  Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.

  Next comes a sea-monster:

  Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? …

  Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee? …

  I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportions.

  And it is truly a healthy thing to sometimes meditate, as Job was obliged to do, on the wealth of created life around us. The animal creation ennobles us; we cannot survive without it; it makes us whole.

  [1999/2000]

  * Could Muriel Spark have meant ‘sparrows’? Swallows don’t sit on the ground, as they appear to be doing in the fresco with St Francis, since they apparently can’t fly from that position and must drop off from something – a wall, a tree. See St Francis Preaching to the Birds at Assisi, etc.

  The Sermons of Newman

  Over the past twelve years, at times when I have felt my mind becoming congested from hearing too many voices, including my own, I have turned to the sermons which Newman delivered to the undergraduates of Oxford when he was Vicar of St Mary’s. His voice from the pulpit was, by all accounts, something very special indeed. I am sure nothing has been lost in the past hundred and twenty years, only gained; for if there is one comprehensive thing that can be said about Newman’s writings, it is that he has a ‘voice’; it is his own and no one else’s. To me, at least, it is a voice that never fails to start up, radioactive from the page, however musty the physical book.

  If I can help it, I never read books for information only. I don’t like books that are designed for spiritual improvement unless they are well written. I wouldn’t touch the Bible if it wasn’t interesting in historical, literary, and other ways besides its content. I read Newman’s sermons because they are Newman’s, not because they are sermons. He was as sincere as light. ‘Every thought I think is thought, and every word I write is writing,’ he said.

  His reasoning is so pure that it is revolutionary in form. He does not go forward from point to point; he leads the mind inward, probing the secret places of the subject in hand. You can never anticipate, with Newman, what he is leading up to. Occupied entirely with the penetrable truths of his subject, he turns his argument with simple freedom, regardless of the moral direction it seems to be taking. He was out for the psychological penetration of moral character, and he achieved it.

  I take as an example his sermon, ‘Obedience without Love, as instanced in the character of Balaam’, because I think it shows not only his typical habits of thought and expression, but more noticeably than in any other sermon, the theme of the love of God, which I think can be called Newman’s basic one. It is, indeed, basic to the Christian religion that from the love of God all other movements of charity proceed. But Newman, who at an early age, conceived the thought ‘of two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’, seems to me to have had an immediate relation to that one idea, the love of God, throughout his life and work.

  This is the idea that he is directly investigating in the Sermon of Balaam. Balaam, he points out, is

  a high-principled, honourable, conscientious man. He obeys as well as talks about religion; and this being the case, we shall feel more intimately the value of the following noble sentiments which he lets drop from time to time, and which, if he had shown less firmness in his conduct, might have passed for mere words, the words of a maker of speeches, a sophist, moralist, or orator. ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his’ … and so on.

  It is not an ironic portrait. It is true there is a fine hair’s breadth of irony in the phrase ‘the following noble sentiments which he lets drop from time to time’, but that is by the way. It is Newman’s manner always to praise the good in what he is bound to depart from. He goes on to elaborate and establish the delightful and noble aspects of Balaam, with as much sincerity as he employed in portraying the English Gentleman in his Idea of a University. And with as much sincerity, too, as he gave to the lovely outlines of his Oxford years in his Apologia. The Apologia Pro Vita Sua is the saddest love story in the world; it tells of his love for a beautiful idea of the spirit, the Anglican tradition in the setting of Oxford, and of his parting with this spiritual creature for the love of God. Balaam, he goes on to show, citing verse after verse in every perplexity of meaning, was a marvel of gracious, upright, pious living, lacking only the vital thing for the prosperity of his soul: the love of God. It was Newman’s conviction that the nature of God was vastly misunderstood by his fellow countrymen when they assumed divine approval for the outward standards that they themselves approved. There was a moral movement in Newman’s day, there is a moral outcry in our own times, there is worse to come: ethical, germ-free citizens will be springing up all over the place to prosper more and more visibly in public reward for their virtues. Newman declares:

  But if Scripture is to be our guide, it is quite plain that the most conscientious, religious, high-principled, honourable men (I use the words in their ordinary, not in their Scripture sense) may be on the side of evil, may be Satan’s instruments in cursing, if that were possible, and at least in seducing and enfeebling the people of God.

  Charles Kingsley’s famous cry, ‘What then does Dr Newman mean?’ was typical of the Christian moralists of the time. It is the doctrine of all Christians that without charity we are as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. But Newman points out some of the alarming implications of this nice poetry. What did he mean? He meant that God had not been educated at Rugby; that is more or less what he meant. Serious-minded people still call, from time to time, for a ‘return to the moral standards of Christianity’, by which they mean those codes of decency which have evolved in the chivalrous West from the Christian faith. Many hold that it is the morals that count; Christianity can go. I am not an expert in such matters, but I always sense, underlying these moralistic appeals and urges, a demand for something showy. Let us show the spirit of service, people say, let us have some austerity, work harder, clean up our streets; morality must not only be done, it must be seen to be done; let us return to the hypocrisy of our forefathers – God used to like it so much when everyone went to church and didn’t commit adultery….

  Newman’s contribution to this field of study is to say that conscientious people of high moral principle may be on the side of evil. He says that, however inspired, however honourable, they may be Satan’s instruments in seducing and enfeebling the people of God. Moreover, those who are genuinely pleasing in God’s sight, only God knows. The disposition of every soul is a secret matter, not easily discernible.

  I spend most of my reading time with Newman’s books. I find every Life of Newman irresistible, even if it is the same story over and over again. When I am not reading Newman, the books stand in peaceful reflection on the shelves, reading and revising themselves, so to speak, for the essays, lectures, sermons and letters all give out something new at each reading.

  I have noticed that to those who have been attracted by Newman his personality continues very much alive. It is one of his gifts. He is far less dead, to me, than many of my contemporaries; and less dead, even, than Socrates, for whom, in the day-dreams of my young youth, I thought it would be love
ly to lay down my life. Socrates, too, had the love of God at heart; like him, Newman was said to be a ‘corrupter of youth’. It was by way of Newman that I turned Roman Catholic. Not all the beheaded martyrs of Christendom, the ecstatic nuns of Europe, the five proofs of Aquinas, or the pamphlets of my Catholic acquaintance provided anything like the answers that Newman did.

  In his own time his persuasive power was greatly feared. But what did it consist of? Simplicity of intellect and speech. Simplicity is the most suspect of qualities; it upsets people a great deal. I think it was this, more than his actual doctrine, that caused suspicion to gather round the Vicar of St Mary’s. James Anthony Froude, an undergraduate at the time, has left one of the least ecstatic accounts of Newman’s pulpit manner, and so I will quote him:

  I attended his church and heard him preach Sunday after Sunday; he is supposed to have been insidious, to have led his disciples on to conclusions to which he designed to bring them, while his purpose was carefully veiled. He was, on the contrary, the most transparent of men. He told us what he believed to be true. He did not know where it would carry him.

  [1964]

  Newman’s Journals

  Portions of Newman’s autobiographical papers have already appeared in various bulky ‘Lives and Letters’. They have been carefully arranged and introduced by Newman’s late executor, Fr Henry Tristram, whose successor, Fr Stephen Dessain, now gives the collection in its entirety. It is an enlightening contribution towards any attempt to understand Newman.

  Among the various miscellania stand the Journals from 1816 to 1876, a record of misgiving, introspection, scruple, tortured pride, fear of God, and other manifestations of Newman’s unique and touchy inwardness. At the end of his last Journals he wrote, ‘I am dissatisfied with the whole of this book. It is more or less a complaint from one end to the other.’ So it is. ‘But it represents,’ he continues, ‘what has been the real state of my mind, and what my Cross has been.’ Newman’s Cross was a sort of capacity for misunderstanding: in the Anglican period of his life, his failure to understand others; as a Catholic, his failure to make himself understood.

  Strangely scarce among his reflections are references to the great popularity he enjoyed in the Victorian world at large after the appearance of the Apologia. He dwells rather on his immediate environment with which he was perpetually at odds, exiled by his superior intellect and exacting ethical standards. From this distance of time his enemies appear as a set of cranks and mediocrities, memorable only in that they opposed Newman.

  His personal development took such an agile form that no phase recorded in these writings represents the total man. They are not in the category of ‘wisdom’ journals; one does not get from them, as from Kierkegaard or even Simone Weil, a consummate spiritual utterance, or chance aphoristic glory, though in his critical mentality Newman resembles both. His Journals are applicable only to himself, to his fluent and fascinating personality.

  [1956]

  An Exile’s Path

  About the middle of his life, John Henry Newman remarked: ‘Even those who think highly of me have the vaguest, most shadowy and fantastic notions attached to their idea of me, and feel a respect, not for me, but for some imagination of their own which bears my name.’ Already the myth was rife, which associates Newman with gentle, monastic sweetness, and holds him to be the writer of beautiful prose. This is true, but incomplete. The myth has not, on the whole, been put about by Newman’s biographers; his friends, and, later, superficial readers of the Apologia, were at fault.

  Newman’s Way deals with the first, the Anglican, half of Newman’s life. Sanity, eloquence, humour, informed judgment, are amongst what Newman would have called its ‘notes’. The Newman family are traced back and forth in their pedigrees, followed in their flittings from house to house, and richly described. The father, first a banker, later a brewer, last a bankrupt, is at his prime as a member of the ‘Beefsteak Club’, bearing the motto ‘Beef and Liberty’. The second son, Charles, was reputed mad, being an atheist, a socialist, an unemployable, and a lifelong nuisance. Francis Newman was of the stuff which precipitates itself to Persia, hoping to convert the adherents of Mahomet to the Plymouth Brotherhood. The three girls were girlish; and the mother the general mediator and upholder of tone.

  Sean O’Faolain has fun with them all, and skilfully extricates from this scene of budding heterodoxy the eldest son, John Henry, who lived to become a Cardinal.* Engaged from boyhood in a specialised and unique interest in himself, Newman was, from the start, an exile on earth, speculating whether ‘life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me’. Throughout his life he personified the type and condition of the Romantic exile, with the controlling difference that he was never exiled from God, of whose existence he was as certain as of his own. Time and again he disengaged himself from the people and places he most loved. He withdrew from his family. He forced his break with Oxford at the height of his influence. Passionately as he valued friendship, he tore himself from his dearest intimates. He left the Church of England. And in the Church of Rome, too, he was exiled as only a greatly advanced mind, and a greatly misunderstood man, can be; for it was the vast obtuseness of his critics from all factions – liberal, Roman, Anglican – which finally confirmed him in his isolation from the ways of nineteenth-century thought. And yet he was a monolith.

  O’Faolain gives rewarding attention to Newman’s growth at Oxford. As a new Fellow of Oriel, Newman heard, with trepidation, that the Common Room stank of logic; in the end he presented the Common Room with something to exercise logic upon thereafter. And he elevated logic; he distinguished the faculty from rationalism. He reinstated its alliance with language, for the celebrated grace and light of his prose is nothing but the beauty and power of his logic, which he never ceased to perfect to the end of his long life, and of which The Grammar of Assent, one of his last works, is perhaps his most luminous example.

  As Sean O’Faolain shows, Newman’s writings were a means of self-development. But their influence extends beyond his own purpose and time. His thought, denounced by his contemporaries as narrow, seems to broaden as time proceeds, yielding fresh aspects of his far-sighted spiritual discernment. Sean O’Faolain, with characteristic light malice, does not spare Newman’s foibles, but leaves his essential nobility intact.

  [1952]

  * Pope Benedict XVI beatified Cardinal Newman in 2010.

  A Sleep of Prisoners

  This new play by Christopher Fry was written with more than one special purpose: it was written for the Religious Drama Society who are promoting religious plays for the Festival of Britain. And Fry has used the opportunity to experiment in some new directions. His meaning is conveyed more firmly than ever before, probably because his dialogue is less exuberant and his reliance on action more confident.

  At St Mary’s Church, Oxford it was not easy to grasp all the underlying allusiveness of the work. The acoustics of St Mary’s are notoriously weak for dramatic purposes. But it was clear that within the self-imposed limits of a church play, Fry succeeded in gripping his audience.

  To judge the play from standards of the theatre would be to miss a great deal of its force. A Sleep of Prisoners is not theatre drama. The time has not yet arrived when religious festival plays can be properly synthesised with modern stage requirements, and so, to those who look for the swift dovetailing of events which the stage demands, the play is certain to appear awkwardly constructed. It is arranged in one long act without interval, and carries only four characters, all male. The action occupies one night, during which four prisoners-of-war are confined in a church in a foreign country. The theme rests on a succession of four biblical incidents, occurring in the dreams of one of the men; the other three prisoners are the protagonists of these dream-flashes.

  First the story of Cain’s murder of Abel is presented. (It seems to be Fry’s intention to date the Fall of Man from that act.) N
ext comes the story of Absalom’s treachery and death; then, Abraham’s reprieve from the sacrifice of Isaac; lastly, Jonah and the whale. Each story is approached in a highly original manner with emphasis on its present-day significance. The Pilgrim Players – Denholm Elliott as Pte Peter Able was particularly good – succeeded in interpreting the piece as a modern miracle play. Their miming, where the austerity of stage-scenery required it, was excellent.

  [1951]

  Psychic Searchlight

  People are more apt to be haunted by spiritual theories than by spirits. An extra-normal happening may be proved an illusion or a fraud, but susceptible minds cling obstinately to those ideas which might have been valid had the thing been true. Real spooks are easier to exorcise than hypothetical ones. In Psychical Research To-day Dr D.J. West brings due respect and decent scepticism to the lores of clairvoyance, telepathy, elevation, mediumship, stigmatisation, haunting, rappings and all manner of divinings. Special attention is given to the department of psychical phenomena known as ESP.

  ESP experiments have yielded the most acceptable and fruitful results so far. But Dr West warns the theorist that the basic facts are few. The book is enlivened by illustrations which include fake spirit-photographs and other trophies testifying to the vigilance of the Society for Psychical Research.

  [1954]