Several older editions of the Oxford Book of English Verse include the following poem, lauded by some of its early readers as “the finest sonnet in the English language.” Comparatively few of today’s readers will be familiar with it, let alone be able to identify its author.
Mysterious
Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo! Creation widened in man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind!
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?
Its argument as summarized in its concluding couplet is rather simple. It makes the following analogy: the fall of night’s darkness over the earth makes visible sparkling and shining of the skies invisible to the sunlit world. The coming of death may reveal beauty not visible to the living. So do not fear death.
The author of this poem was an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. Joseph Blanco White. Behind his remarkable name lay a remarkable story. José María Blanco y Crespo had been born in Spain in 1775. Blanco in Castilian “White” in English. White was the surname of an Irish Catholic refugee who, fleeing from English persecution, had emigrated to Spain. The Joseph Blanco White of whom I write was his son. A young man of unusual intelligence and ability, he almost inevitably became a priest, the priesthood being the most obvious avenue for a commoner of his abilities. He never seems to have been excessively pious or even deeply spiritual, but he was ruled by an uncompromising intellectual honesty. He lived by Kant’s famous dictum, which has become the unofficial Horatian “motto” of the Enlightenment: Aude sapere.“ Dare to know”. Serious doubts concerning the dogmas of Roman Catholicism assailed him. Furthermore, during the period he came to maturity Spain was still in turmoil at the political level. In the late Napoleonic era the peninsula had become the battleground in which the French warred against a coalition led by the English. It is possible to get some sense of the horrors and obscurantism of that era of Iberian history from the haunting paintings of Goya or from George Barrow’s, The Bible in Spain (1843), a fascinating book I can recommend to you on many grounds. As the century progressed, Spain became ever more of a shambles. Eventually Blanco White, a fiercely independent thinker, abandoned everything and fled to England. England was the asylum to which so many persecuted Frenchmen had fled. Why not a Spaniard?
An English-speaking Spanish Roman Catholic clerical exile was quite a novelty in England. Almost immediately he became a cultural treasure. As he had already been ordained as a Roman priest, he could be an Anglican priest with minimal bureaucratic fuss. As an immigrant whose story flattered several English prejudices, he became an instant social success. In particular, he soon became the intimate friend of a remarkable circle of his spiritual peers at Oriel College, Oxford, among them a young Anglican priest named John Henry Newman. Newman and several of his friends were causing quite a stir in the English national church—known to history as “the Oxford Movement”--by trying to revive the Church’s sacramental emphasis of the pre-Reformation period. Eventually they came to be called Anglo-Catholics as distinct from Roman Catholics, whose subservience to the Pope they rejected.
I first became interested in Blanco White several years ago when I was writing my book called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment. At that time I could find little secondary information about him, though he has a highly informative autobiography. I now see that a couple of recent books—one of them a collection of essays mainly in Spanish—have appeared. I shall hope to get my hands on them at some point and learn more. My interest here is the striking contrast of the spiritual journeys undertaken by the two men, journeys that seem to exemplify the complexity of nineteenth-century intellectual life. Oversimplifying wildly but usefully, one man was fleeing the Middle Ages while the other was hoping to recreate them.
In his philosophical and theological thinking Blanco White was halfway to a kind of Unitarianism when he arrived in England and accepted orders in the Anglican Church, which was already so “broad” that his increasingly relaxed theological views were by no means exceptional. Just as in Catholic Iberia so also in the Protestant north the clerical professions were among the few that well educated men were expected to follow. Like seeks our like. Blanco White eventually became the right-hand man to the eccentric Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, who had been a fellow of Oriel College and who was among other things an eminent logician. The adjective “eccentric” could perhaps serve to describe all of the extraordinary circle of friends and colleagues that came together at Oriel in the period, for they all combined what most of us might regard as odd personal behavior with undeniable genius. Whately published a number of books including one, Erotetics (a fancy made-up terms meaning the linguistic analysis of questions and answers) that can still be read today, and another that should be read today, Historical Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte. This is a quite tongue-in-cheek spoof of what he took to be an unwarrantedly skeptical turn in biblical criticism. Whately’s amusing jeu d’ésprit may be one of history’s most widely published pamphlets. It pretends to call into question the reality of an “historical” Napoleon. What proof is there that the man ever actually existed? But Blanco White was quite serious about his own growing religious skepticism, eventually repenting of the “transcendental” premise of his very famous sonnet.
