Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century

by John Henry Newman, Michael D. Greaney (Foreword by)

Overview

Recently "beatified" by the Catholic Church - one step away from official recognition as a saint - the life of John Henry Newman (1801-1890) paralleled the return of Catholicism to England as a legally recognized religion. As a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, an effort that sought to return the Church of England to its historical roots, and later as one of the more important Catholic writers, Newman worked to present his own position to his co-religionists, and to give an understanding of Catholicism to non-Catholic English men and women. His efforts are, in large measure, credited with making Catholicism acceptable, even respectable, in quarters where there had previously been only hostility. People of every faith mourned his death in 1890. "Callista" is a "Catholic" version of the "Early Christian Romance" genre that was popular in the nineteenth century. Most such productions rarely rose above the quality of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The Last Days of Pompeii" or Charles Kingsley's "Hypatia." Some authorities credit Kingley's jealousy over the success of "Callista" and the obvious quality of Newman's novel in contrast to his own as the source of Kingsley's later violent attacks on Newman, to which Newman responded with his monumental "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," one of the greatest "spiritual autobiographies" ever written. "Callista" not only exhibits a high degree of literary accomplishment and historical accuracy, but is entertaining. This edition features a foreword by Michael D. Greaney, Director of Research for the Center for Economic and Social Justice in Arlington, Virginia, USA.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781602100046
Publisher:	Once and Future Books
Publication date:	10/05/2011
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.63(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER Vin. THE MEW GENERATION. Jucundus, then, set out to see how the land lay with his nephew, and to do what he could to prosper the tillage. His way led him by the temple of Mercury, which at that time subserved the purpose of a boy's school, and was connected with some academical buildings, the property of the city, which lay beyond it. It cannot be said that our friend was any warm patron of literature or education, though he had not neglected the schooling of his nephews. Letters seemed to him in fact to unsettle the mind; and he had never known much good come of them. Rhetoricians and philosophers did not know where they stood, or what were their bearings. They did not knpw what they held, and what they did not. 'He knew his own position perfectly well, and, though the words "belief" or "knowledge" did not come into his religious vocabulary, he could at once, without hesitation, state what he professed and maintained. He stood upon the established order of things, on the traditions of Rome, and the laws of the empire; but as to Greek sophists and declaimers, he thought very much as old Cato did about them. The Greeks werea very clever people, unrivalled in the fine arts; let them keep to their strong point; they were inimitable with the chisel, the brush, the trowel, and the fingers; but he was not prepared to think much of their calamus or stylus, poetry excepted. What did they ever do but subvert received principles without substituting any others ? And then they were so likely to take some odd turn themselves; you ne?er could be sure of them. Socrates, their patriarch, what was he after all but a culprit, a convict, who had been obliged to drink hemlock, dying under thehands of justice ? Was this a reputable end, a respectable commencement of the philosophic fam...