Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/02/2025
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Location
The Rose Battersea
Dmitry Usenco will speak on and Robert Browning’s poem ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ and Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman see below
Men have outgrown the shame of being fools’: Browning’s retaliation against ‘papal aggression’
In this talk we shall first concentrate on the figure of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman (1802-65), the official leader of the Catholic Church in England during the mid-Victorian period. Specifically, I want to dwell on two events that involve him more or less personally:
-
- Cardinal Wiseman’s sermon of 1839 delivered at the inauguration of St Mary’s Church, Derby, which reputedly anticipated, if not directly influenced, the nascence of John Henry Newman’s concept of religious development. Development does not seem a pretty new idea as such. Yet it is quite possible that Wiseman and later Newman managed to endow it with an extra dimension which subsequently allowed both of them to argue the Catholic case more efficiently.
- The Holy See’s act of 1850 that re-established the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, which, beside the naturally expected squall of indignation from the mainstream media, also provoked a remarkable response from the poetic camp – ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, a dramatic monologue by Robert Browning whose speaker, according to the poet’s own admission, was based on Cardinal Wiseman.
The two events may appear to be only loosely connected. However, I believe that the ‘game strategy’ enacted by Wiseman in the 1839 sermon closely mirrors the polemic devices used by Bishop Blougram to convert a generic atheist – his silent interlocutor Mr Gigadibs whom he treats to a sumptuous dinner and no less substantive ‘apology’ at his official residence in Southwark on Corpus Christi Day. Browning thus seems to have correctly identified the main development in the Catholic line of argumentation and brilliantly employed to his own moral and aesthetic purposes.
Time allowing, we shall also compare Browning’s portrayal of a Catholic controversialist with another famous depiction of the Catholic ‘soul’ – that by Dostoyevsky in the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. While the accusations Dostoyevsky brings against Catholicism are much more serious compared to Browning’s relatively amiable mockery, it can easily turn out that both authors equally aim at exposing the Catholics’ aggressive but ultimately self-defeating ‘apologetics’.
The poem can be found in the attached PDF Bishop Blougram’s Apology – Robert Browning.pdf
Cardinal Wiseman’s sermon at the opening of St Mary’s Catholic Church is also attached Wiseman_St_Mary_sermon.pdf
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky can be found online or hard copy on Amazon or free of charge on the Project Gutenberg site
Dmitry will give his talk in Battersea but the meeting will also be on Zoom see SLPC Zoom Meeting
We always welcome new speakers. If you would like to give a talk on a philosopher or a philosophical topic please contact Adrian Carter at southlondonphilosophy@gmail.com