The Dream of Gerontius Part 4: The Soul and the Guardian Angel

The Dream of Gerontius is Newman’s crowning poetic achievement in that it depicts, beautifully, the realities of the next life that are sometimes difficult to concretely imagine or, in his own term, realize: the eternality of our souls, angels, demons, God, judgment, heaven, hell. He brings us before these as vivid realities, present, pressing, and ultimate. In Newman’s time, many were making claims about what was most essential, of ultimate reality. The Romantics sought it in Nature and poetry, the Rationalists in the human mind, the Pragmatists in social labor. Newman consistently chose to seek the highest reality, which animates all these things and gives them meaning: God and His revealed truths, Christ, His Church, His teachings, and His rule and ordering of the next life.

In the poem, the soul of Gerontius has a heavenly experience of true life given by God, not “by thought supplied,” since Gerontius experiences true “freedom, as if I were at length myself.” This fullness of self unfolds into an intimate awareness of other beings, especially the Guardian Angel. Newman goes on to make these and other heavenly realities strikingly alive. The dramatic epic spans the four last things, from the “trial-state” through the “demons on their raid” to the “very pavement made up of life” before “judgment” in the “veiled presence of our God.”

After dying in the company and prayers of his friends and entrusting his soul to the “vast abyss” of the next life, Gerontius enters eternity and is alone. But it is not a lonely solitude; it is a “deep rest” in which he “feeds upon” himself, because [he] has nought else to feed upon.” He is wrapped in “one symmetry” as if he were “a sphere.” This is not narcissistic, but is evidence of God’s grace sustaining the integrity of his selfhood beyond bodily death. He senses himself as whole, complete, at rest and peace with himself, but does not stop there. He is ready for a journey beyond himself. His Guardian Angel arrives to escort him higher, just as in life on earth Guardian Angels point us to higher things by assisting our consciences in resisting sin and discouragement.

When Gerontius first meets the angel, he exclaims, “It is a member of that family / Of wondrous beings, who, ere the worlds were made, Millions of ages back, have stood around / The throne of God.” The unfallen angels are thus described as a divine family, into which fallen man is invited and incorporated. The angel praises God’s providential work in the history of mankind, and expresses love toward Gerontius, calling him “my child! / My child and brother.” Guardian Angels are, in Newman’s wonderful earlier poem “Angelic Guidance,” called “unearthly friend[s]” whose subtle “foot-steps” along our life’s journey comfort our griefs, assuage our doubts, and by a true and definite spiritual friendship assist us to deeper union with God. The angel explains Gerontius’ disembodied sensations and altered sense of time, since he can still hear his friends praying “Subvenite” [Latin, come to our help] around his expired body although he died what seems ages ago. Newman wishes us to really imagine what it will be like to experience what theologians teach—that in heaven we will join a society of angels and humans, together worshiping God forever, in a mysterious transcendence of mere temporal sequence.

The Guardian Angel also helps Gerontius withstand temptation to despair. They pass through a throng of scoffing devils—a sort of wilderness trial for Gerontius’s soul—who clamor in a din of disdain and disgust at the prospect of human persons in heaven. They describe men as “Low-born clods / Of brute earth” who “aspire / To become gods, / by a new birth.” Compared to the flowing lyrics of angelic hymns and dialogues, Newman has the demons speak in cacophonous, broken fragments of half-lines in a limping meter, emphasizing their annoying “impotence” as they try to mock Gerontius’ “holy clay.” They simply appear petty and silly to his soul bound for beatitude. The Angel assures Gerontius that while on earth in the “trial state of life” the demons appear mighty and dangerous, but that it is the mark of a sanctified soul to see their true powerlessness. Gerontius’ heavenly guardian helps him discern demonic from angelic spirits, an essential assistance that our guardian angels also give us in this life.

Then, they discuss why Gerontius has retained all of his senses except sight: it is a temporary blindness preparing him for the glorious Beatific Vision. Gerontius’s reaction is important: he says, “His will be done!” Nothing happens in the poem without Gerontius’s willed consent, his on-going “yes” to God’s will, including the later approach to the throne of God, the reception of judgment, and the entrance into the purgatorial waters. The ministrations of the guardian angel are oriented toward moving Gerontius to make this act in his will. It is not superstitious to believe in Guardian Angels—they guide us to properly interpret God’s will for us in this life and the next. This is the mystery of human cooperation in the divine will heard in Gerontius’s statement, “My soul is in my hand,” for which reason he has no fear, but is flooded with “a grand, mysterious harmony” that God would give him such grace to rise higher and higher into blessedness with God. It is his love for God that inspires him to trust this strange and mysterious process.

May we, with St. John Henry and Gerontius, come to fully believe in the realities of heaven, especially the divine graces that God really pours into our souls, and the divine assistance of our present mysterious friends, our Guardian Angels. These truths can assist us in realizing that there is no Christian glory without Christian suffering, and give us boldness and courage to have peace, hope and joy in the midst of whatever troubled waters we must pass through unto eternal life. Let us not neglect to daily recite the traditional prayer to our Guardian Angel, perhaps alongside our daily examination of the state of our souls:

Angel of God, my Guardian dear,

To whom God’s love entrusts me here,

Ever this day be at my side,

To light and guard, to rule and guide.

Take me by the hand, I promise,

Docile obedience to thy guidance,

That I may attain eternal happiness.

Amen.