/lit/ - Literature

>>15586275
Why don't you just cut to the chase and join the Church that Newman eventually joined? We recently declared him a saint. We had a big party about it.

>>14799790
Highly regarded, incredibly brilliant Anglican bishop and minister who wrote a lot about a lot of things. He was constantly trying to find the true, authentic Christianity, the one that had both kept and advanced the true Faith of Christ and the Apostles.

He gradually came to realize that this was the Catholic Church, so he left his posting in the Church of England and converted to Catholicism. It was a big scandal at the time since Newman was one of Anglicanism's rising stars.

He eventually was made a cardinal. Pope Benedict beatified him and Pope Francis canonized him just a few months ago.

Some of his biggest and most famous works include the Grammar of Ascent and his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

He was also a poet, and wrote many poems. The longest and most famous is "The Dream of Gerontius."

What Catholic writers have you guys been reading lately?

I've been reading some John Henry Newman ever since he was declared a saint. He's a very penetrating and insightful thinker. He's one of those guys where, even though he wrote so long ago, what he says seems pertinent to the modern world.

As much as I love Chesterton, there is in fact a more based Englishman. He was just proclaimed a saint this Sunday.

>>13918756
>>13918772
Ironically, Joyce himself thought that John Henry Newman had the prettiest prose in the English language.

Joyce said that Newman's prose was the greatest in English. Is this true? Let's see:

>I HAVE said that our apprehension of a proposition varies in strength, and that it is stronger when it is concerned with a proposition expressive to us of things than when concerned with a proposition expressive of notions; and I have given this reason for it, viz. that what is concrete exerts a force and makes an impression on the mind which nothing abstract can rival. That is, I have argued that, because the object is more powerful, therefore so is the apprehension of it.

>I do not think it unfair reasoning thus to take the apprehension for its object. The mind is ever stimulated in proportion to the cause stimulating it. Sights, for instance, sway us, as scents do not; whether this be owing to a greater power in the thing seen, or to a greater receptivity and expansiveness in the sense of seeing, is a superfluous question. The strong object would make the apprehension strong. Our sense of seeing is able to open to its object, as our sense of smell cannot open to its own. Its objects are able to awaken the mind, take possession of it, inspire it, act through it, with an energy and variousness which is not found in the case of scents and their apprehension. Since we cannot draw the line between the object and the act, I am at liberty to say, as I have said, that, as is the thing apprehended, so is the apprehension.

>And so in like manner as regards apprehension of mental objects. If an image derived from experience or information is stronger than an abstraction, conception, or conclusion—if I am more arrested by our Lord's bearing before Pilate and Herod than by the "Justum et tenacem" &c. of the poet, more arrested by His Voice saying to us, "Give to him that asketh thee," than by the best arguments of the Economist against indiscriminate almsgiving, it does not matter for my present purpose whether the objects give strength to the apprehension or the apprehension gives large admittance into the mind to the object. It is in human nature to be more affected by the concrete than by the abstract; it may be the reverse with other beings. The apprehension, then, may be as fairly said to possess the force which acts upon us, as the object apprehended.