An anger image

Katie van Schaijik | Nov 15, 2009

A chapter about the passing of Cardinal Newman I came across tonight concludes with some description of his reputation among his Victorian English contemporaries. Some were dismissive or contemptuous. Others—clerics, men of letters and statesmen like Gladstone, revered him for his moral stature and literary genius.

But it is with the name of a poet, the only one of the Victorian converts to the Church with a vision in literature transcending his own, that I shall end my list of the lovers of Newman—even as in a procession the greatest figure is the last:

Sweetly the light
Shines from the solitary peak at Edgbaston,

sang Coventry Patmore, who understood that even the polemical disputant had “peace in heart” if “wrath in hand,” and that in his most trenchant moods he but displayed “the gold blazonries of love irate,” never “the black flag of hate.”

How I love that phrase “the gold blazonries of love irate” as a description of holy wrath!