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Introductory Notes by John O'Donovan
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Created: By Patrick Augustine Sheehan (1852–1913) (1904)
Beatrix Färber (ed.)
Benjamin Hazard (ed.)
Beatrix Färber (ed.)
John O'Donovan (ed.)
Benjamin Hazard (data capture)
Many of the themes Canon Sheehan dwelt upon in this lecture at Maynooth in December 1903 recur again and again in his later novels. It is for this reason that this essay is of exceptional importance, as it provides us with the first clear cogent glimpse into his thought. This lecture was also reprinted in The Literary Life: Essays, Poems ed. Edward MacLysaght (Dublin 1923), pp. 121–150.
This lecture came at a time when Canon Sheehan had been under attack for his portrayal of the clergy in his novels, culminating in Luke Delmege, which received vitriolic criticism from some quarters, most notably Monsignor Hogan, then editor of the Irish Ecclestiastical Record. Canon Sheehan did not have a good relationship with Maynooth nor the staff there, with the possible exception of Robert Browne, who was later appointed Bishop of Cloyne. Sheehan's own time there as a student was unhappy: a combination of poor health, financial problems in the college as a result of Gladstone's Irish Church Act of 1869 (which removed the permanent endowment granted to the College, substituting for it a temporary subsidy), and upheavals in the syllabus taught there all combined to make the place, in his own words ‘dry and uninteresting’. 1 In Luke Delmege Sheehan has his title character immersed in theological controversies of the 16th century, without any thought as to their practical import for the current day. 2 In the words of another Sheehan biographer: ‘the author indulges in some wholesome criticism on the educational equipment of the Irish priesthood and the defects of old-time pastoral methods.’ 3
Sheehan focuses on the critical aspects of ‘the intellectual world to-day’, in particular on the critical stance which many intellectuals have taken towards religion, and in particular the Catholic Church. [p. 13] Many of these, of course, were Protestant. It is a feature of Canon Sheehan's writings in general that Catholic priests are presented as both spiritual and cultural guides. In an set of unpublished articles entitled 'Clerical Studies', Sheehan imparts his thoughts on the exclusivity of ecclesiastical training: ‘The general verdict on our Irish Ecclesiastical Colleges is that they impart learning, but not culture—that they send out learned men, but men devoid of the graces, the ‘sweetness and light’ of modern civilization.—It may be questioned whether, in view of their mission and calling, this is not for the best.’ 4
In another part of this manuscript he dwells on the question of learning: ‘The success of the Catholic collegiate institution, if it is to be measured by its adaptability to the end for which it is founded, consists in its implanting principles and habits of piety, which will be proof against the world's seductions; and principles of theology and philosophy, which will serve in the delicate and mysterious work of the salvation of souls. The principles of piety must be not only an armour of defence, but strong and keen weapons of zeal; and the principles of learning must not only serve in the pulpit and confessional, but be also the foundation of newer and higher studies which will always put the secular priest far in advance of his flock, even in worldly learning.’ 5
For Sheehan, then, ‘The priest must always lead the flock. And his spiritual instructions will carry all the more weight when it is understood that the pastor is a man of culture and refinement, and that his condemnation of new and fanciful theories comes from his belief founded on fair and exhaustive reading, that they are utterly untenable.’ 6
In the second half of the lecture Sheehan makes the attempt to bring some practical forecasting of the future of ‘modern fact and thought’. [p. 16] His forecast is for a world in constant flux, the ‘rushing together of thoughts, feelings, and principles, chaotic and confusing enough’. [p. 17] In this world, Ireland is, and continues to be, a beacon of light, of ‘pure minds ... keen intelligence, and ... personal love of God, that are the constituents of a religous vocation.’ [p. 18] Yet Ireland is alone in this. Modern priests must be aware of the challenges facing them inside and outside of Ireland. Sheehan exhorts his audience not to ‘hide our light under a bushel’ [p. 23] but engage with this new world: ‘Study that you may know, know that you may understand, understand that you may communicate your knowledge to others. ‘Let your light shine before men!’’ [p. 19]
Sheehan analyses the world facing these graduates as being divided into ‘the easily recognised classes of Transcendentalists and Empiricists—the mystic and the scientist, the vague dreamer of dreams, and the hard, unimaginative reasoner.’ [p. 20] He uses stories from America quite often in this section. America, to Sheehan, was the great unknown. Perhaps it was his experiences in Queenstown from 1881 to 1889 that conditioned him to think of the plight of the Catholic Irish multitudes that were crossing the Atlantic to this land where a Protestant ethic of ‘manifest destiny’ held sway. In his later novels Sheehan dwelt on the plight of these emigrants. In Miriam Lucas, for example, when Miriam travels to New York in search of her mother, she is enticed to a brothel-house. This would not have been unusual for emigrants arriving into the city and advertising in local papers for lost relatives; in 1890 Jacob Riis published a study of the slums of New York entitled How the Other Half Lives. It is quite probable that Canon Sheehan used this as a source for many of his later writings. 7
A final aspect touched upon by Sheehan in this lecture and worthy of comment is his linking of Empricism and Socialism. In his Whiggish analysis, the nineteenth century saw a progression away from the Church worldwide: first to Transcendentalism, then via ‘a momentus change [which] swept over human thought’, ‘it leaped to the opposite extreme’ i.e. Empiricism. [p. 10] Men such as Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (whom Sheehan wrote about in an essay published in the Irish Ecclestiastical Record in October 18848) saw their worlds demolished in favour of a set of theories which proved that ‘all things are made for man; and that man alone is the Omnipotent and Divine.’ [p. 11] Technology advanced at breakneck speed. Empires disintegrated. The transhumance from the field to the factory floor swept millions into towns and cities under the force of the Industrial Revolution. Theology, philosophy and religion were all flung to one side. However, it was soon discovered that soulless buildings and ‘progress’ had killed off ‘every noble quality that distinguishes man’. [p. 12] Into this vaccuum rushed a ‘new belief in the terrible destructiveness of a Godless science ... the very offspring of the science they had worshipped—the spectre of socialism and anarchy.’ [p. 12] This brought into the world the spectre of murder and killing between those of inequal material wealth. This inequality, and the Church's attitude towards it, is a key feature of at least three of Sheehan's later novels: Glenanaar (1905), Lisheen: or, the Test of Spirits (1907), and Miriam Lucas (1912). In all three novels, Sheehan explores, in the style of the French novelists Charles Peguy and Rene Bazin, ‘those virtues which he regarded as the antidote to materialism and the social collapse which it promoted under various guises. The drama which he works out is one of redemption through suffering ... the protagonists embrace the reality which has to be raised up and, in so doing, always bear in mind that the deeper the degradation of that reality the higher the possibility of its resurrection.’9
I propose this evening to put before you a limited, but let me hope, a clear, well-defined view of that outer intellectual world, in which you will soon be called to take your place, and an important one; and with that view to stimulate you to more zealous and earnest preparation for the part you will have to perform. For it is sometimes wise for us all to pause and think and look around us; to wait till the smoke clears away from the field of battle, that we may the better see the alignments of the enemy, arrange our own forces, and make such dispositions that we may gain at least an advantage; for the ultimate victory, I presume, is not for us, nor for any soldiers of Christ, until the day when the great Captain Himself shall come. And measuring as I do the vast energies that lie hidden, and as yet bounded and locked, in the assemblage which I have the honour to address to-night, I feel a certain sense of responsibility—so great, that were it not for the deference I owed to the courteous invitation of your late President, repeated by your present Superior; and at the same time an ambition, I hope a lawful one, of addressing at least once in my life, the young minds and hearts, that are to control the future destinies of the Church in Ireland, I should have hesitated about assuming a duty, which might be left in more capable and zealous hands. Nevertheless, I may be able to give you a glance into the outer world, its forces, its movements, its processes of thought, which may awaken new ideas, and perhaps larger conceptions of your vocation; and with these, fresh determinations that in the serious and solemn duties that lie before the Catholic priesthood in our time, you at least will quit yourselves like men.
All life is a process. Things do not hurry, neither do they
What, then, has the ‘Dawn of the Century’ to show? What are the manifestations that we have to study; and how are we to forecast the future from the symptoms of the present?
Travellers who have ventured to climb the steep ascent and dread escarpments of Vesuvius tell us of the feeling of utter solitude and desolation they experience when they have reached half-way up the mountain. They walk ankle-deep in hot ashes; the half-cooled streams of lava, ridged and smooth, are here and there on every side; the air is dark and sulphurous, and difficult to breathe; the guides are timid and uncertain about proceeding further. All around is horror upon horror; and their hearts are chilled with a sense of loneliness and fear. Yet, looking upward
The great intellectual forces of the nineteenth century resolved themselves into two movements, known to historians as the transcendental and empirical. The former sprang from the writings of Rousseau; affected, even created, the French Revolution, broadened out and developed into the great German systems of philosophy, passed into England and coloured the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, generated in France a whole tribe of soliloquists and dreamers, and finally was caught up and crystallised in the half-prophetic, half-delirious preachings and rantings of Carlyle. Thence it crossed the Atlantic, inspired and originated New England Transcendentalism through the Concord School of philosophy, of which Emerson, a pupil of Carlyle's, was chief prophet. The essential characteristics
- And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?10
Then, somewhere about the middle of the century, men began to ask whether there was any rule of conduct, any code of ethics, under all this cloudy verbiage. Men are known by their works. Systems are judged by their results. What have you to show for all this transcendentalism? How does it affect human life, human relations, human progress? How do such doctrines influence the political commonwealth by educating statesmen into higher ideas of political advancement and social amelioration? What do your prophets say? And lo! it began to be whispered that the sentimental Rousseau did actually send his children away to be shut up in an orphan asylum; and that Carlyle,
Suddenly, a momentous change swept over human thought. With one bound, it leaped to the opposite extreme. ‘We are tired of abstractions,’ it cried. ‘We want facts! No more intuition, but demonstration! Reason shall be omnipotent. There is Nature under our eyes and hands. We will question her; and she will
And then? — well, then, at the very height of all this pride, men suddenly discovered that under all this huge mechanism and masonry, they had actually driven out the soul of man; and they began to ask themselves: Is this
The attitude of the intellectual world to-day, then, is an attitude of waiting; and in waiting, an attitude of indifferentism. Not indifference, because it is actually aware of its critical condition, and looks forward with anxious eyes. Nay, from time to time, it turns around and gazes towards the Eternal City and the Supreme Pontiff; and in view of the powerlessness of states and governments to conquer the anarchy that seethes in every Empire, it is watching the Church with a ‘perhaps’ upon its lips. Great Kings have already gone thither, and their royal pilgrimages were universally interpreted as an admission that Rome alone could battle with the new forces which irreligion had let loose on the world; and the peoples, following their royal masters, and in view not only of shattered faith, but of shattered beliefs in human systems, that promised so much and performed so little, are beginning to ask if, after all that has been said and suggested, Rome alone held the secret of the stability of Empires, and the safety and happiness of the individual in those doctrines and precepts which she preaches so uncompromisingly to an unbelieving and scoffing world. Across the Atlantic, where she has more freedom than in older and more conservative states, she is making rapid progress. There, too, the distinction of classes is more sharply drawn, because there wealth and poverty reach greater extremes than in older countries. And there is wanting in America that
But you will reasonably ask, what has all this to do with us who are destined to work within the four seas of Ireland? Tell us something about our own country, its wants, its aspirations, its capabilities, its dangers. We pity the world, stranded there on the mountain heights, unable to go backward, afraid to go forward, its guides dumb and impotent under the spell of modern agnosticism. But we are more deeply concerned about our own people with whom all our best interests are identified. Well, you have a right to ask the question, although, as I shall show you, you have need, too, to be much interested in the attitude of the intellectual world beyond the seas.
I have said, that the breath of a new life has been breathed on our old land. The eternal vitality of our race, not to be extinguished by rack or gibbet, Penal Law or Grecian gift, has broken out these last few years in a vast intellectual revival, the consequences of which it would be difficult to measure to-day. It would seem as if whilst the population waned, the intellectual forces of the country became concentred in a great effort towards national regeneration. All the best elements of the country seem to unite in a forward movement, that promises well for the future of our country and our race. Our poets have given up the ballads and battle-songs which were so familiar a half-century ago; and gone back to Pre-Christian times for inspiration, A National Theatre has been established for the stage reproduction of dramas, founded on the epics, or
Then, of course, with the advance of education, and the creation of the class of the ‘educated-unemployed’, there must be a certain amount of restlessness, and chafing under control, and a spirit of criticism and censoriousness, which can only be dissipated by larger educational training, or the judicious employment of those who have won distinction in our Colleges and Intermediate Schools. A few weeks ago, on the occasion of the apostasy of a certain realistic novel-writer, one of our Irish papers had the following paragraph:—
The personality of Mr. Moore would not be worth even a contemptuous reference, were it not that there are thousands of young Irishmen in some of our big cities, whose minds are being slowly and gradually, and very surely, poisoned by influences which lead directly towards the abysmal gulf of George Mooreism. Speeches have been delivered and paragraphs have been printed quite recently which indicate that the speakers and writers are drifting, perhaps imperceptibly, but none the less
steadily, towards a frame of mind, doubting, carping, hypercritical, which will not in the end be distinguishable from Continental Atheism.
And as if to emphasize and corroborate these words, we had, a few days after they appeared, an expression of opinion from the highest quarters to the same effect — that there were probably here amongst ourselves certain thinkers, too small of stature and too limited in numbers to form a school, but whose antipathies and desires seem to run parallel with those of the unhappy men who are bringing ruin upon Catholic France. These things are not alarming, but signicant. They are symptoms which we cannot disregard.
Such then is the vision of the world as it is shown to us here in the dawn of our century. But I should not have travelled one hundred and eighty miles to reveal to you what might be unfolded from every page of modern literature, if I had not the larger object of applying to your own needs the lessons that may be derived from such a review of modern fact and thought; and of forecasting your own part in their future developments. In making such a practical application, I should feel less scrupulous if I were speaking to older heads than yours. Mind I do not say ‘wiser’ heads, for I am one of those who think that sometimes the splendid disdain of youth is more than the cautious and careful feeling forward of age. But I should feel then that my words were merely tentative and experimental. But here I feel that I am casting seminal ideas into souls whose principles have not yet hardened in the mould of experience; and which, therefore, owing to this very plasticity, need to be formed on lines that shall be drawn altogether right and fair and well-proportioned. I feel, too, that, as time goes by, each of you will be perforce compelled to try my words at the bar of experience; and there are many counsellors there, and in the multitude thereof there is not much wisdom. Nay, you will be tossed hither and thither by every wind of opinion in your latter lives. You will have to see principles
I doubt if there be a more dramatic scene in all human history than that which took place on a certain mountain in Judaea some twenty centuries ago. A young man, apparently a mere carpenter's son, had just dismissed a wondering, admiring crowd, who had begun to speak of Him as the ‘Prophet of Nazareth’; and had gathered around Him a few of His disciples, to whom He had to say more solemn and sacred things. They, that handful of men, were raw, illiterate, unkempt, half-naked; their hands rough from toil, their scanty clothes glistening with the scales of the fish they had pulled from the lake beneath them. And what was his message? After quietly setting aside all hitherto-recognised principles of human wisdom, He suddenly addressed them:—
‘You are the light of the world! You are the salt of the earth!’
What! A lot of half-clad, semi-savage Israelites — the light of the world? Hear it, O ye sophists over there in Athens, listening to the calm, cultured wisdom of one of your rhetoricians, as he expounds and develops the ever-new beauties of the master-minds of Greece! And hear it, O ye Romans, listening in your white togas in the Forum to the greatest of your orators, and the most profound of your philosophers! Hear and wonder at this sublime audacity —
And if our Lord were justified in pronouncing and prophesying such a sublime vocation for His disciples, am I not right in saying to you, the future priests of Ireland: You are the Light of the World! You are the Salt of the Earth? Yes! the pure white light that strikes here from Rome is broken up into a hundred, a thousand rays that penetrate even to the ends of the earth. Maynooth is the Propaganda of the West, and you are its Apostles! Now what does that connote?
Although primarily intended for the training of priests of the Irish mission, this great College has become of late years as much a Foreign College as All Hallows, — it is, let me repeat it, for I glory in the title and all its vast significances — the Western Propaganda! Yes! we cannot suppress our instincts — we cannot deny our vocation — we cannot refuse our mission. We are the Apostles of the world to-day. Even in my own remote village, within the last few months, we had three or four deputations of nuns from Cape Colony, from Dakota, from Los Angeles, seeking amongst our Irish children what apparently cannot be found elsewhere on this planet — those pure minds, that keen intelligence, and that personal love of God, that are the constituents of a religious vocation. The same is true all over Ireland. And you, gentlemen, many of you, may — must go abroad, to other countries, and amidst a people different from your own. Instead of the happy, religious, sunny children of Faith, you will have to speak to the people on the gloomy hillside, their feet in the hot ashes, the desolation of unfaith around them, and their guides as dumb and panic-stricken as themselves. You will meet them everywhere. They will come
In one of Rudyard Kipling's earliest books he tells of how a raw regiment of British troops was brought up from the lowlands to the Afghan hills to break up and destroy an Afghan horde that were hidden in a gut or ghaut of the mountains. They marched gaily, to the sound of fife and drum, into the valley, deployed, advanced in close formation, saw the enemy grouped ahead, were ordered to fire. They shut their eyes and fired—a half ton of lead into—the bodies of the Afghans? No! Into the ground! In an instant the Afghans were upon them, slashing them, right and left with their terrible triangular knives, and in a moment the British regiment was in full flight, whilst the
Well, you must not waste your forces thus; but always have a clear and well-defined objective before you in all your studies. And to-day, as in the century just dead, you will find that those whom you have to contend with, and those you have to enlighten, divide themselves into the easily recognised classes of Transcendentalists and Empiricists — the mystic and the scientist, the vague dreamer of dreams, and the hard, unimaginative reasoner. And if it pleases God that abroad you shall be called upon to defend your faith in public or in private, by sermon, lecture, or newspaper, see that you quit yourselves like men; and give honour to God, your country, and your faith. But here, in these sacred halls, your preparation must be made. This is your gymnasium, your training-ground. And, if you prove worthy of yourselves, you will have your reward even here below.
That was a sublime moment, when Ingersoll, the Atheistic lecturer, was suddenly called to account by a young Irish Catholic in his audience. He was going on gaily, demolishing Churches, and Revelations, and Christianity, when the young man shouted: ‘What does Father Lambert say to that?’ And the hardened atheist stopped suddenly, and after a long pause replied: ‘Yes, friend, I admit that if there be any Revelation it is that which Father Lambert has defended; and if there be any Christianity, it is that of the Church he represents!’11 And that was another sublime moment when another young Irish priest in another American city took up the cause of Holy Church against six or seven ministers, and defended himself, week after week, against their combined assault. It was a brave, nay, almost, a perilous act. For every day, the city was moved, as at a Presidential election. The labourers, at their dinner hour, cut short the time and rushed the cafés, hotels, and newspaper offices with the cry: ‘Is Father —— on to-day?’ And when they found he was ‘on,’ one mounted a barrel, and read the priest's defence to the admiring multitude. And when at last, in spite of every effort to compromise and
But, with all that I must not forget that the great majority of you, gentlemen, are destined to spend your lives in the service of your own people, and in your native land. Happy are you beyond the apostles of your race abroad, for you will have the most faithful and deeply-religious people on earth to minister to — a people, who will look up to you with a kind of idolatry as the representative of all they revere in time and eternity. I am speaking now of the great masses of the people, especially the poor. There is nothing like them on the earth. Your chief work will be to lead them on to the higher life; and I am rather sorry that this part of our ministry is not so well understood. What I mean is, that the people need only direction, I mean ascetic direction, to spring at once into the highest and most heroic sanctity. And I earnestly hope, that some at least of you, gentlemen, will find time from other studies to examine the principles and practices of ascetic theology, the direction of souls into the higher life, and such holy mysticism as you will find in the works of St. Teresa or St. John of the Cross. This is the transcendentalism which the Church acknowledges, and which has been the practise of all the saints.
But, as I warned you before, you will have another class to deal with—the semi-educated, the critical, the censorious. Some of these will dislike you, because their
With that class, and, indeed, with all others, one safe principle may be laid down — that the Irish priest must be in advance of his people, educationally, by at least fifty years. The priests have the lead, and they must keep it. But the right of leadership, now so often questioned, must be supported by tangible and repeated proofs; and these proofs
But there is one thing in which, above all others, we must keep ahead of our people — the supreme matter of priestly holiness. And this takes me away from your outer duties to address yourselves. I have kept the good wine to the last; and, alas! I have left you but little time to drink it. But, probably, these, my first, will also be my last words to you; and I desire to throw into them all the emphasis of which I am capable. In after life you will increase your intellectual stores; you will enlarge your intellectual horizon. By large reading and much reflection you will find yourselves, in ten or twenty years, in quite a different sphere of thought from that in which you are placed to-day. Your education will only commence the day you leave college and enter the larger life. But in one department you shall never advance or improve — I mean the department of spiritual science. The principles taught now by your professors and spiritual guides are fixed and unchangeable; if ever you change or abandon them, it will be to your temporal detriment and eternal ruin. What do I mean?
You are taught now that on the day when the Pontiff
Hence the necessity of acquiring here, and developing hereafter, a certain phase of character, which I can only designate as ‘individualism.’ You must study to be self-centred, self-poised on the strong summits of conscience, not moving to left or right at every breath of opinion. This is quite compatible with that modesty, that humility, that gentleness that always characterize thoughtful minds — minds that move on a high plane, and that will not descend to the vulgarities or commonplaces of ordinary men. Priests of this class or calibre never forget their college lessons. But whilst striving in remote hamlets, as Workhouse Chaplains, or even in the slums of large cities, to develop themselves intellectually by wholesome and judicious studies, they are ever sensible of the gentle whispers of their Master, first heard here, never to be stifled in after life — ‘You are the light of the world! You are the salt of the earth.’ ‘You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you!’ ‘I do not any longer call you servants, but friends.’ ‘Filioli mei.’ Ah, these are the ‘burning and shining lights’ of the Church of Christ, within whose rays men shelter themselves for warmth and illumination; who cannot be extinguished in life by envy or hatred or criticism; who even in Death leave behind them in memory a certain twilight or aurora, for their words and works survive them; and many a soul, recalling them from the peace of eternity, justifies the presumption in the words of the Psalmist:
Here I what you have to strive after; here is what you have to attain, if you desire to maintain the traditions of the Irish Church; and to be, in very deed, the leaders of your people, the shepherds of your flock!Thy Word was a lamp to my feet;
And a light along my ways!14
And so I, passing rapidly into the evening of life, say