Dreaming Spires

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IF YOU VISIT England, be sure to go to Oxford, which is the most beautiful city in the country. Indeed you may conclude, especially if you see it under the snow, that it is the loveliest town on earth. Everywhere you look, as you stroll the winding cobbled lanes between medieval walls, is wild stone beauty – dramatic and harmonious towers, belfries, spires and domes bursting against soft gray sky. One classic phrase about Oxford is ‘dreaming spires’, but there is nothing dreamy about this energetic skyline: it makes elderly visitors feel sprightly as the endlessly youthful students; the local stone, golden-brown by day, flushed with pink in the evening, rockets upward, it explodes with joy, it calls to mind the New Jerusalem, mankind’s eternal proper home. A short walk from the riotous loveliness of the old town you find yourself in the water-meadows, where the Isis and the Cherwell flow together to create the River Thames: and looking back through the fields and flowering chestnuts, you see the cupolas and towers uncountable, jumbled, like an enormous fleet riding at anchor.



       Towery city and branchy between towers;



       Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded…



That is how one product of Oxford, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (first great Modernist in English poetry), writes of the place: with dizzy ecstasy. That’s the way to see it.





A Catholic creation





Everyone has heard of the University of Oxford, which produced this matchless physical beauty. Not everyone grasps that it is a Catholic creation. The University evolved from the monasteries of medieval Oxford, and for its first centuries functioned as the brain or theological core of the realm. After the Reformation, Oxford preserved the rudiments of the Faith, and for the last few centuries it has been the spring from which a river has come, steadily flooding and reconverting all England. So it is a holy place, too, which began with a princess and a rapist.



Frideswide was the daughter of a petty king back in the seventh century, when the English were divided into many kingdoms. She founded a nunnery for herself and twelve companions, but a prince named Aelfgar wanted her for his wife. She fled to a wood, and hid in a pig-sty; he pursued; but at the moment of seizing her, was miraculously struck blind. Frideswide bathed his eyes with water from a well that had emerged at her prayers, and he was healed.



Frideswide’s tomb and well became centres of pilgrimage; the village where she lay, Oxenaforda, became Oxford, one of the great towns of England, rich with Cistercian, Dominican, Carmelite, Augustinian, Trinitarian and, of course, Franciscan houses. And gradually these monasteries and friaries centred round Frideswide developed into a full-blown centre of advanced study.





Doctor Mirabilis





By the thirteenth century, Oxford University was a federal concern, composed of many colleges, vying with each other in brilliance and beauty. All the teaching scholars were in holy orders, and the vast majority of graduates were themselves made priests, passing out into the counties to share the blessings of their university with all English Christians. But it was not just a glorious seminary. The best minds in England, and sometimes in all Europe, came to Oxford to teach and to learn. Oxford, with its peers of Bologna, Paris and Salamanca, was an engine of that unified Continental culture, entirely Catholic, Latin-speaking, speculative, confident, orthodox, which was the splendour of the High Middle Ages.



Perhaps the most spectacular Oxford mind of those years was a Franciscan, Roger Bacon, OFM, the first European to practise what we could call science. He discovered the spectrum of light four centuries before Isaac Newton; he was a master of mathematics and astronomy; his work anticipates steam-ships, telescopes, spectacles, microscopes, flying machines, hydraulics; they called him Doctor Mirabilis.



It was not a perfectly golden age. Riots by the townsfolk drove away some scholars, who fled and founded lesser universities at Stamford (but this soon perished) and Cambridge (which has staggered on, fitfully, into modern times). There were the usual crises and corruptions of all academic life. But nonetheless Oxford was still the glittering heart and mind of English Catholicism when, in the 1530s, the disaster of the Reformation arrived.





A bright note





In the sad story of the overthrow of the Church by Henry VIII of England, the resistance of Oxford is a bright note. The University would not bend to the royal will, although its monasteries were suppressed and robbed, its scholars deprived and sometimes martyred, its libraries ransacked, its parish churches looted. The Shrine of Frideswide was smashed up in 1541, the valuables thieved, the saint’s body hidden. Very nearly the University perished. To the end of the century whole colleges were being purged because they were loyal to the Catholic Faith. But Oxford survived.



And in the centuries that followed, Oxford proved astonishingly resilient. It preserved as much as could be preserved of the Faith in the new environment of England. Under the new Stuart dynasty, the separated Church of England began to turn back to Catholic doctrine and practise, and Oxford provided the intellectual muscle – and not only that! When extreme Protestants revolted against this trend, and began the English Civil War, Oxford served as the King’s headquarters against the Protestant extremists through the appalling years of fighting. It suffered terribly when the Stuarts lost, and endured another sack by bigots; but when the Stuarts were restored in 1660, Oxford was restored to greatness too. The Stuarts, now openly Roman Catholic, lost their throne for their faith a generation later, but Oxford remained loyal to these kings in exile for generations.





The Oxford Movement





England often persecuted Oxford. Oxford often pulled England back towards the truth. In the early nineteenth century this influence burst into flower. The Oxford Movement revolutionised religion in England, stressing the continuity of the Church of England before and after the calamity of Reformation, recovering the full richness of Catholic teaching and ritual. Many of the leaders of the Oxford Movement became Roman Catholics in the end: the greatest of them, John Henry Newman, was made a Cardinal, was proclaimed Venerable in 1991, and is soon to be beatified. But even those followers of the Oxford Movement who remained and remain in the Church of England are committed to drawing on their Communion until re-union with Rome becomes possible – no, inevitable!



The Catholic bishops embraced Oxford in the 1890s, and allowed Catholic young men to study there. The Old Palace of the Catholic diocese is once again a centre of worship for Roman Catholic students. The shrine of Frideswide has been repaired, her relics replaced; she once more attracts pilgrims. If he came back today, Roger Bacon would recognise his old home – and not just by the spires and domes!





City of aquatint                                                        





The last century has been a golden age, and a Catholic age, for Oxford. Newman and Hopkins were only the start of a great renaissance of Catholic literature.



There was Mgr. Ronald Knox, perhaps the funniest and most brilliant student of his day, who translated the Vulgate Bible, wrote some of the best detective stories in English, and for many years served as the University’s Catholic chaplain.



There was J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic all his life, and for almost all his life a student and professor at Oxford. In his spare time he invented Middle Earth and wrote The Lord of the Rings. The whole genre of fantasy literature descends from Tolkien, and ultimately from Tolkien’s love of the strange towers and hushed woods of Oxfordshire.



And there was Evelyn Waugh, an Oxford undergraduate in the 1920s who later converted to Catholicism and became one of the greatest fiction-writers of his age. He wrote that most loved of all Oxford novels, Brideshead Revisited, in which the hero follows up the clue of love – love of Oxford, then of his Oxford friend, then of her sister – until at last he discovers the love of God, and finds himself within the universal Church.



Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s days; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days, when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.



By all means go to Oxford, rush there next summer, and luxuriate in its loveliness and quiet. But remember that those spires were put there for one reason. They are witnesses to a truth that lasts through all shocks and clamours and innovations of thought. They are hints of a wider happiness and beauty, a joy that will be unending. Here have we no continuing city, cautions the New Testament: but we seek one to come.