Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert

ISBN-13: 9780268036133 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 500 str.

John Henry Newman; Sheridan Gilley

Opis

It may seem surprising to discover that a Catholic cardinal was a novelist, and Newman advanced this as an obstacle to his own canonization: Saints are not literary men, he wrote, they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales. He was only fit to black the saints shoes if Saint Philip uses blacking, in heaven.
The background toLoss and Gainwas a controversial one. Newman wrote the book in part to provide a title for publication by James Burns, of the later celebrated firm of Burns and Oates, who had lost his stable of Anglican authors by converting in 1847 to Catholicism.
An understanding of the novel requires some knowledge of its Oxford background, of the university setting, which was compared in the fierceness of its loyalties by Newman s friend Richard Church to a Renaissance Italian city, implying an assassin with a stiletto round every corner. In short, there is a sense in which, in spite of its fictional character, Loss and Gainis a work of controversy, full of echoes of old battles over whether the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and theBook of Common Prayershould be interpreted in a Catholic or a Protestant sense. It is a response, like Newman s other works, to a challenge, and so its hero, Charles Reding, as a student in Oxford, passes through the hands of the representatives of a number of Anglican parties and schools of theology before resolving his doubts in Rome."