Spring Lecture Programme

The four lectures in this year's Spring programme promise to be both  topical and informative. 

Our first speaker, on 12th March, will be Fr Thomas Morrissey SJ. In this centenary of the  1913 Dublin strike and lockout, Fr Morrissey will discuss the event from the perspective of Dublin's Catholic archbishop, clergy and religious. 

Turning to the Year of Faith, we will focus on the Fathers of the Church with a talk by Fr Finbarr Clancy SJ on how the Fathers continue to inform Catholic belief and practice. Fr Clancy will speak on 19th March. 

In tune with ongoing debates about the relationship between religion and science, Dr Don O' Leary of University College Cork will offer a presentation entitled "The Roman Catholic Church and Science: conflict or complexity?"  This talk will be on 9th April. 

And finally, on 23rd April, historian Patrick Maume will present his research on the founder of the Tablet, Frederic Lucas, and the ways in which Lucas reported on the Great Irish Famine. 

All four lectures will take place at 6.30pm in the library. 

At Work in the Republic of Letters

“And without letters what is life?” once asked the great sixteenth-century humanist scholar Erasmus, whose contribution to European literary culture includes biblical translation, works of devotion, educational texts, satire and social commentary. Originally from Rotterdam, his true home, as James McConica has said, was “the one he constructed with his pen”.

The image shows the first page of our copy of John Jortin’s biography of Erasmus, published in two volumes in 1758-60. The copy is in a rather orphaned state, lacking its cover and title page. The author and publications details were established following a lead from a publisher’s catalogue bound in with the text. The copy contains the original two volumes bound as one; badly bound, as one block of pages has been inserted in the wrong place.

Nevertheless, the sewn binding, the quality of the watermarked paper, and the layout of each page, all make this 250 year old book a pleasure to look at and read.

One of the interesting additions to the text is a two-page spread displaying samples of the handwriting of Erasmus and some of his many correspondents. The language in which they wrote to each other was Latin: also the language of Erasmus’s works. Jortin comments in the biography that Erasmus “...had spent all his days in reading, writing, and talking Latin”, and notes that “Erasmus, in the earlier part of his life, carefully studied the Greek and Latin grammar, read lectures upon them, and translated Greek works into Latin”. As a humanist scholar, devoted to the wisdom of classical antiquity, Erasmus saw Greek and Roman literature as part of God’s divine plan: its significance completed in Christ’s Incarnation as defined and explored in Scripture.

Erasmus signs the note by him included in the samples with “Erasmus Rott. mea manu”: a fitting signature also to the entire body of work from the hand of this dedicated citizen of the Republic of Letters.

Aloysius O'Kelly Lecture

Professor Niamh O'Sullivan of the National College of Art and Design will give the last in our current series of lectures on 16th November at 6.30 pm in the library. Her topic will be the Dublin-born painter Aloysius O'Kelly (1853-1936).

Professor O'Sullivan's extensive research on O'Kelly culminated this year in the publication of her book Aloysius O'Kelly : Art, Nation, Empire which combines a biography of the painter with an illustrated catalogue of his work.

O'Kelly's Mass in a Connemara Cabin (shown above) is perhaps one of his most familiar images today. The story of how an Edinburgh priest, alerted via an internet article that Prof. O'Sullivan was trying to locate this painting, contacted her to say that he had a work signed by O'Kelly hanging in his sitting-room, is well known. The archbishop of Edinburgh, once the work had been identified, generously offered it on permanent loan to the National Gallery in Dublin.

Interestingly, as Fintan Cullen has noted, the painting was originally exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1884: the first painting of an Irish subject to be included since the Salon's inauguration in the early 18th century.

Our Newman Lecture

As announced in my last posting, Dr Teresa Iglesias was due to give a lecture on Newman on October 19th. She had to withdraw at the last moment, and Dr Angelo Bottone kindly agreed to replace her. (Copies of Teresa Iglesias's edition of Newman's Idea of a University are available for loan from our Lending department).

Dr Bottone focused on Newman's Dublin writings, and on his general experiences as founding rector of the Catholic University. The talk drew on Dr Bottone's recently published book The Philosophical Habit of Mind : rhetoric and person in John Henry Newman's Dublin writings". If you would like to know more about Angelo's work as a lecturer and author, see his blog at www.bottone.blogspot.com

Our Newman exhibition, with a number of first editons and some interesting visual material on display, continues until 21st November, due to public interest.

Newman's Literary Workmanship

The Central Catholic Library is marking the recent beatification of John Henry Newman with two events. The first of these is an exhibition of early editions of Newman's writings, and is a collaboration between our Honorary Librarian, Peter Costello, and Newman scholar Dr. Angelo Bottone. (1st - 22nd October).

Secondly, Professor Teresa Iglesias (a founding member of the Newman Society) will give a lecture in the Library on 19th October. She will speak about her editorial work on a new edition of Newman's The Idea of a University, published to mark the 15oth anniversary of University College Dublin.

The essays contained in The Idea of a University are of perennial interest. They are also a very good introduction to Newman's work for those readers who are not sure par quel bout prendre this prolific thinker. To focus on just one aspect, the essays offer a perfect example of Newman's "silver-veined prose" (as Joyce called it). And in fact, they also contain a commentary on that prose, encapsulated in the concept of "literary workmanship".

Newman uses the phrase in the essay entitled "Literature", as he works out a theory of literary creativity. He understands the act of writing as being aligned with plastic arts such as sculpture. The writer works words into texts as a potter works clay. For why, asks Newman "should not language be wrought as well as the clay of the modeller?" He imagines the writer shaping a text, drafting, correcting, redrafting, "taking pains", constantly learning his craft, devoloping a personal style as he thinks his way in words. For style, as Newman defines it, is "a thinking out in language", and the dedication to faithfully and appropriately expressing his thought is the essence of the writer's creative integrity.

This understanding of the literary act underpins Newman's achievements as a literary stylist and hence, we might say, as a thinker. One of his biographers, Brian Martin, describes the cardinal as one of the greatest of English nineteenth century prose stylists, and this is a judgement shared by many, including Joyce.

Ireland's Foremost Romantic

SIBERIA

In Siberia's wastes
The Ice-wind's breath
Woundeth like the toothèd steel.
Lost Siberia doth reveal
Only blight and death.

These lines are from the poem by James Clarence Mangan (1803-49), who has been called Ireland's foremost Romantic poet. Mangan's handling of rhyme and metre fuse with his dramatic imagery to give his poem the intensity which Yeats considered Mangan's most important characteristic.

Mangan will feature in the library's exhibition for Culture Night, which takes place later this month. Our exhibition, curated by the hon. librarian Peter Costello, will focus on "Writers and Artists of the South Georgian Quarter". Mangan was associated with the area through his early training as a scrivener in York Street, and his work on the staff of the library at Trinity College. One of the items on display will be a 1904 edition of "Irish and Other Poems" by Mangan.

Mangan's reputation was greatly enhanced by the publication of a new scholarly edition of his complete works between 1996-2002. These seven volumes include a full bibliography by Jacques Chuto, and a fascinating biography by Ellen Shannon-Mangan.

In a life marked by financial distress, periodic unemployment, illness and alcoholism, Mangan's prolific literary output shows his skills as a linguist, and his love of game-playing (with language and with identity). Also evident is his knowlege of English and continental Romanticism, and the ways in which he appropriated the themes and idioms of this movement for his own use.

Baptized simply James, he used the added "Clarence" constantly to sign his poems during the eighteen years of his professional life, quoting Shakespeare's Richard III: "Clarence is come, false, fleeting, perjured Clarence". As James Clarence Mangan, he was free to pursue the "perfection of the work", both expressing and transcending the suffering that marked his life.

New Books 1

This year has seen the publication of new titles by three regular contributors to religious debate in Ireland. They are Michael Paul Gallagher SJ, Mark Patrick Hederman OSB, and journalist John Waters.

Fr Gallagher's book is called Faith Maps : ten religious explorers from Newman to Joseph Ratzinger. The idea of a "map of faith" is a potent one. The historian of cartography G.R. Crone once defined the purpose of map-making as being "to express graphically the relations of points and features on the earth's surface to each other". The key term here, feeding into map-making in the figurative sense, is "relation". Through what might be called "conceptual" maps we can detect, define, observe and create relationships. We can show where one element is in relation to others. We can plot an emotional, intellectual or spiritual landscape.

Fr Gallagher explains that each chapter of Faith Maps "takes a major religious thinker and asks how he or she would point us in the direction of Christian faith". His ten "map-makers" range from John Henry Newman to the present Pope, and include theologians such as Hans Urs Von Balthasar, artists such as Flannery O'Connor and philosophers such as Charles Taylor. Fr Gallagher is addressing both reflective believers and questing unbelievers. His book is an invitation to enrich our theological awareness, or (as he puts it), our knowledge regarding "the long tradition of pondering the strangeness and surprise called God".

The value of a "thinking faith" is to the fore also in the books by Fr Hederman and John Waters. In Underground Cathedrals, Fr Hederman assesses the role that art and artists could have in the renewal of religious faith in Ireland. In Beyond Consolation, Waters takes as his starting point the radio interview given by Nuala O'Faolain a month before her death from cancer in 2008. The bleakness of O'Faolain's despair prompts Waters' exploration of what we believe as Christians, why we believe, how we believe. On of this major themes is the impoverishment of the language with which faith is discussed in contemporary Ireland.

These are three very different books, but each one in its own way encourages us to maintain a state of faith through reflection, never taking belief for granted, never resting on the laurels of tradition, working on our own "faith maps".

All three titles are available for borrowing here in the library. For details of these and other recent accessions click on the Library Thing link in our accessions page at http://www.catholiclibrary.ie