| (9) Catholic historian Christopher Dawson’s THE SPIRIT
OF THE OXFORD
MOVEMENT was written in 1933 for the centenary of the Oxford Movement. It was reissued 2001 by London’s Saint Austin Press. Dawson tried to understand the Movement as it was taking form in the minds of its founders, especially Froude, Keble and Newman. Those men were theological and speculative in ways not immediately open to us in our more secular age. Newman, in particular, wrote profound historical and theological works. But at a deeper level he and his other co-founders were poets. Hence one way to grasp Newman is to begin with his more accessible poetic and imaginative works. As Dawson said: "The language of poetry, even though it be minor poetry, is more universal than the language of theological controversy, and the Lyra expresses the spirit of the Oxford Movement even more clearly and directly than the Tracts for the Times themselves." In our coming introductory course, therefore, our emphasis, especially in the first half of the series, will be on Newman’s imaginative writings. |