An Unexamined Death is not Worth Dying

The Dream of Gerontius—a masterful mix of lyricism and theology—was written in 1865 by John Henry Newman, who, having left the Anglican communion twenty years before, straightaway became England’s most famous convert to the True Faith, which he could only find in the Church of Rome. Set down in a series of seven rhymed sections numbering fifty-plus pages, the book became an immediate bestseller, testifying to the great hunger among Victorian readers for certitude and consolation concerning the Last Things, of which Newman’s poem provides moving and copious examples.

Chief of which being the figure of Gerontius himself, who is an old and most wonderfully recollected Catholic soul, about to embark upon his final journey home to God. And yet, however sure of where he wishes to be when dead, he remains understandably anxious to get it all right before he actually does die. He is determined to identify, in other words, those few necessary things he must affirm in order to arrive safely on the other side.  

On what basis, then, will he ground the faith and the hope and the love that have defined his life? He is a Catholic, after all, and around that unifying center Newman has cobbled together a half-dozen truths without which the center will not hold. So expressive is the arrangement, in fact, that by the end of the century England’s greatest living composer, Sir Edward Elgar, will have turned it all to music, a choral production which continues to be performed on both sides of the Atlantic.  

Here, then, is the heart of the confession spoken by Gerontius, who will not go gently into the next world until both he and the chorus of friends who have come to assist him in his final ordeal give witness to what Newman has elsewhere called, “the Circle of the Articles of the Faith,” at the center of which stands the Self-Revealing God. “Firmly I believe and truly,” it begins:

God is Three and God is One;   
And I next acknowledge duly     
Manhood taken by the Son.   
And I trust and hope most fully    
In that Manhood crucified;    
And each thought and deed unruly     
Do to death, as He has died.    
Simply to His grace and wholly   
Light and life and strength belong,    
And I love, supremely, solely,     
Him the holy, Him the strong.       
And I hold in veneration,     
For the love of Him alone,    
Holy Church as His creation,   
And her teachings, as His own.    
And I take with joy whatever 
Now besets me, pain or fear,  
And with a strong will I sever     
All the ties which bind me here.    
Adoration aye be given,    
With and through the angelic host,    
To the God of earth and Heaven,     
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

How one wishes we all had such presence of mind to state the obvious! Of course, a century and a half ago it was pretty nearly obvious to most people. To Christians, certainly, of whom most of the English-speaking peoples were. The ravages of Darwinian doubt had yet to overwhelm the faith of ordinary men and women. That “headlong flight into infidelity,” of which Newman had warned, had not yet fully come to pass. But it will, of course; and when it does, it will be the world as we know it.

But getting back to the poem, there are a handful of points which fairly leap off the page. To begin with, there is the recognition that a quite genuine Creed has been put together by the poet. That is to say, a coherent and systematic collection of beliefs. Something—or rather Someone—is being professed, an Objective Other to whom Gerontius, presented by Newman to the reader as a representative figure of all the baptized, is being asked to hand over his entire subjectivity. To yield up his very self to this sacred Other, to God. 

And then, point two, we notice a very high level of certitude surrounding the beliefs; there is nothing vague or vaporous about any of them. They are each a matter of sheer fact, not feeling, to which the two adverbs, firmly (will) and truly (intellect), plainly testify.  

Third, there is a sequence of things in which we are asked to believe, each set out in order of intrinsic importance. Which means, of course, that the rhyme scheme of the poem has been conscripted to conform to reality, not the other way around. And in what does that reality consist but the following truths: Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption, Grace, Church, Worship.  

And, finally, there is the fourth point, which is that everything circles back to the beginning, from Trinity to Trinity. How else are we to unpack the Great Confessional Paradigms if not from those two bookends, that of a God without beginning to a God without end? And between the two, the two eternities, what else is there but time, the medium through which the whole of the Christian Story is told? 

It is on the claim of historicity, indeed, the scandal of particularity, that everything finally depends. Remove the evidence of existence, of Mystery entering into history, of the Church’s dogged insistence that certain events actually took place in time, and what you are left with is an abstractionism no better than a hot air balloon untethered from the earth on which God walked and talked, lived and died. It is on the claim of historicity, indeed, the scandal of particularity, that everything finally depends. Tweet This

“Jesu, Maria,” so begins the final, heartfelt prayer of a man dying. “I am near to death,” he announces. “And thou are calling me…” He thus entreats others to pray for him; for death, “a visitant / Is knocking his dire summons at my door, / The like of whom, to scare me and to daunt, / Has never, never come to me before…

Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss,
That utter nothingness, of which I came:
This is it that has come to pass in me;
O horror! this it is, my dearest, this;
So pray for me, my friends, who have not strength to pray.

And so they do, lifting up their petitions alongside so many angels and saints, who no less than Gerontius long for his safe passage to the world where death and sadness are no more. It is a moving tale, one of Newman’s best, told in dramatic verse that will stir the soul of anyone who reads it.