I.  Review for Barnes and Noble Dot Com

Like very many other readers, I suspect, of the prolific works of John Henry Cardinal Newman, I began nearly five decades ago with one or two ad hoc or specialized works which I was required to tackle in college. In my case the first was THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY needed for a B.A. degree in secondary education. The second was Newman’s GRAMMAR OF ASSENT, studied for its theory of knowledge (especially the “illative sense”) in pursuit of an M.A. degree in philosophy. The only contextual reading I did to flesh out these specialist chores was John Henry Newman’s “spiritual” autobiography, APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA. 

In recent months, however, while immersed in as many works of Newman across the board as time permits, I have concluded that even education majors who are required to read THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY or musicologists who look into Elgar’s rendering of THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS would do well first to read some other more imaginative and popular works of the great English churchman. 

People who have never read Newman at all might, I believe, do well to devote a fair amount of the rest of their lives hovering over his myriad-minded texts--many admittedly tough going. For any beginner I recommend that she or he begin with Newman’s 1855 second novel CALLISTA: A TALE OF THE THIRD CENTURY. Alan G. Hill’s Notre Dame University Press edition and introduction of the year 2000 is currently the best buy in the market.  The follow-on book for any novice student of the Oxford Movement, 19th Century English novels, politics and religion should then be Alan G. Hill’s edition of Newman’s earlier novel: LOSS AND GAIN: THE STORY OF A CONVERT. For, one way or another, the seed of every major preoccupation of Newman’s long life (1801-1890) is sketched in these two novels. CALLISTA is the easier read and a rollicking tale it is!

Both CALLISTA and LOSS AND GAIN are about religious conversion: a divine call from this-worldly preoccupations upwards toward and into a higher reality revealed by God. CALLISTA sketches such a movement of soul in a 17 year old pagan Greek artisan in north Africa who becomes Saint Callista after a vicious martyrdom in 250 A.D. during the persecution of Decius. LOSS AND GAIN is about the six year search by an Oxford student for a religion less worldly and uncertain than the Church of England of the 1840s. 

CALLISTA’s hard core readers will be people who take their religion seriously. “Christian Romance” fans in particular may find Newman’s classic the greatest ever written in that genre. And that although (contrary to the standard Christian Romance script) the two earthly lovers, Callista and Agellius, find God almost in spite of each other and without sexual union. When the Christian Agellius asks for the pagan (but seeking) Callista’s hand, she rejects him because she had expected he would teach her to love his God. Instead she sees him as using her curiosity about the Christian God as a means to attach her to his own selfish, earthly love. 

On the other hand, it is Agellius’s copy of the Gospel of Luke read in prison by the proud Greek which finally and decisively makes it evident which God it is her heart has always ached for. Saint Luke led her into “the presence of One who was simply distinct and removed from anything that she had...ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection. Here was that to which her intellect tended, though that intellect could not frame it. ... Here was He who spoke to her in her conscience; whose Voice she heard, whose Person she was seeking for” (p. 326). 

The novel is lushly detailed and convincing in other respects: its geographic and political setting in Roman Africa, the clash of pagans and Christians, a plague of locusts, the mad frenzy and demonic possession of Agellius’s free thinking brother Juba and a powerful but rejected case made by the philosopher Polemo to the doomed Callista for standing by her inherited religion and the glories that were Greece. 

Like Newman himself, Callista senses that her movement into faith is organic. Conversion is not so much radical discontinuity as rather reversion to her truest earliest self. Callista's soul grows and unfolds in concentric circles. Newman uses similar images in ARIANS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY and THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE to argue that truth is not static but develops, always deepening  and true to its best original insights. 

One of Newman’s central views is that God cares for each individual. God  allows each to be born at a concrete time and place, of definite parents, with a certain inherited culture and religion. But His voice is present in each conscience from the beginning, inviting “Friend, come higher,” with no two spiritual journeys the same. CALLISTA is a novel of specifically Christian conversion. But it has much to say to men and women of any faith tradition as they reach honestly for a better life. 

-OOO-

TPK Swannanoa, NC 9/19/2002 

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II. For Amazon.com 
 

John Henry Newman’s CALLISTA, especially as introduced in this fine edition year 2000 by Alan G. Hill, stands on its own merits as a rollicking good love story, almost gothic in its plague of locusts, demonic possession of the young North African Juba, realistic depiction of mob violence, state torture and intolerance of the rising Christian religion whose adherents refused in the year 250 to worship the persecuting emperor Decius.

It is the story of a beautiful 17-year old Greek orphan who finds work as an artisan in Roman Africa, mainly fashioning statues and other adornments of various pagan cults. The evils of third century Roman imperial life depress her. She is tempted by the beauty of Christianity as hinted to her years ago by a Christian slave. Later she is wooed by the Christian Agellius who gives her another slant into his religion--though he fails to persuade Callista to marry him. Finally, Saint Cyprian, bishop of Carthage and the Gospel of Luke which he persuades her to read in a prison where she languishes falsely accused of being a Christian, tip the scales. She is baptized, confirmed and takes the Eucharist in one ceremony in prison. Shortly thereafter she is brutally martyred. The story stands on its own feet. It is a great read independently of any external impact or pedagogical uses.

But CALLISTA is also, in my opinion, the first and most illuminating book which any serious or prospective student of ALL the works of John Henry Newman should read or (now re-read). For CALLISTA opens the door to Newman’s spiritual autobiography of conversion, APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA. It adumbrates DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, RISE AND PROGRESS OF UNIVERSITIES, his sermons and his many musings on the echo of God’s voice definitively heard in conscience. And what CALLISTA does not lead into, Newman’s earlier novel LOSS AND GAIN most certainly does lead into: ARIANS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY, THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY, A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT and literally every serious thing the great Cardinal ever penned. Fortunately, the best edition of LOSS AND GAIN is by Alan G. Hill who gives us the best edition of CALLISTA as well. 

CALLISTA, perhaps the greatest of “Christian Romances,” indeed deserves to be read both internally for itself and also as a first step into the huge ocean of Newman’s essays, poems (e.g. “Lead Kindly Light”), sermons, histories, satires, educational theory, philosophy, theology and more than 20,000 letters. CALLISTA, set in long ago Africa, paradoxically invites readers to step into the almost as little known spiritual world of 19th Century England, one of the most creative times and places the world has yet known.

-OOO-

Patrick Killough
Swannanoa, NC 9/19/2