In other words, evolution could continue into the afterlife, an idea that accommodated both emerging scientific concepts of gradualism and eschatology. Theological models of development therefore provided both an important counterpoint and an often-overlooked complement to evolutionary models of change; evolutionary theory and eschatology both evoke a central “mystery” in insisting that change can be subtle enough not to appear as change at all. Nevertheless, evolution describes growth in fundamentally material terms. Changes witnessed on the time scale of eons can be observed in manifest evidence: bodies, features, mutations, markings. In Newman’s conception of purgatory, all change was rendered intangible, bodiless, and abstract. A dramatic shift in temporal thinking is also similarly required by both models, each describing transformations that exceed the humble frame of an individual life span with parousia providing the limit of time and history in theological visions of the “last things.”28 Yet once again, theological models of growth, such as those innovated by Newman, adamantly resist invoking the sensory as a measure for individual change. Belief in afterlife maturation defied even the heightened insight provided by the microscope, that iconic instrument in Eliot’s fiction, demanding a more abstract conception of “putting all the action inside,” to quote D. H. Lawrence’s praise of Eliot’s ability to capture the inner life.29
This intermediate state of Judgment was notoriously difficult to represent in narrative form, eventually coming to be labeled “the problem child of theology” by theologians.30 Victorians struggled to understand the basic storyline for purgatorial change. For example, in a piece titled When a Man Dies Where Does He Go? or, Some Things about the Intermediate State, one clergyman named John Thomas Pickering insisted, “Rest does not necessarily mean inaction. Rest of mind and soul does not imply cessation from energy and activity.”31 The idea that “rest” could equal “activity,” while preferable in some circles to trial by fire, remained conceptually difficult to grasp and, furthermore, difficult to explain. It also raised ethical questions about the proper role of acts and trials in achieving spiritual betterment. In questioning what kind of “activity” takes place in Judgment during a state of “soul sleep,” believers in the intermediate state came to be divided into two main factions: those who believed in a period of total unconsciousness while waiting for the Second Coming and those who believed in the soul’s growth through lucid dreaming in the afterlife.32
On one side of the argument, the prospect of indeterminate, changeless waiting left little to the imagination. As Archbishop Richard Whately, Newman’s former tutor at Oxford, observed, the main “objection” to this model “is that it seems as if there were a tedious and dreary interval of non-existence to be passed, by such as should be supposed to sleep, perhaps for some thousands of years, which might elapse between their death and the end of the world.”33 On the other side of the argument, theologians such as Pickering insisted that soul sleep was the highest form of action in the afterlife, a view similar to the one Newman expressed in Tract 90. In another tract on the subject, a Catholic woman named Sophia Scott sided with Newman in insisting that “souls are in a state of more activity and clearer consciousness”; she laments, “What shall we say to convince you that in that blessed separate state kept and guarded by the Good Shepherd Himself, there is a great work going on, and no inactivity?”34 Anglicans such as William Ince, Canon of Christchurch, coincided with many Catholics in further expressing the need for a conception of the afterlife that “allows room both for thought and [for] action,”35 a position supported by one of the most high-profile Victorian writers on the subject, millenarianist E. H. Bickersteth, who described the intermediate state as “in the first place . . . a state of rest. . . . Secondly, it is a state of consciously living to God. . . . The rest of those who sleep in Christ is no condition of unconscious inactivity, but of intelligent fellowship with God and fruition of His love.”36
This ideal of restful action and “consciously living” (despite being dead) raised a number of confounding paradoxes. Time in Judgment was conceived as being both terminal, or “intermediary” and hence leading to another state, and also immeasurable in quantifiable terms. Consequently, believers were faced with the prospect of dailiness without days, of endurance of the prosaic without a sense of the diurnal, and with an abstract idea that their souls would benefit from experiential learning without undergoing anything understood as an “experience” per se. Changes in the intermediate state could not readily be conveyed through trials and dramatic turning points, as in Dante’s Purgatorio, but only through a more understated model of plotting. In Newman’s conception, prolonged contemplation becomes tantamount to the highest form of action, an inward action not readily translated into narrative “events” but instead registering as a subtle accretion.
Newman on the Poetics
This kind of contemplative action, as Newman conceives it, runs counter to Aristotle’s definition of “action” in the Poetics. Before Newman wrote Tract 90 and The Dream, he approached the problems of describing eschatology in explicitly narrative terms in his essay “Poetry with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics.”37 In this essay, he insists, “Seldom does any great interest arise from the action” (2). Arguing against Aristotle for the precedence of character over action, Newman’s essay is curiously replete with references to the afterlife. Modern critics have been nonplussed by Newman’s repeated and incongruous invocations of the afterlife, most often dismissing this tangential focus on eschatology as Newman’s imposition of Victorian morality on the Poetics. Yet rather than reading these passages as cultural artifacts or as strains of Newman’s moral agenda, I read these intrusions of eschatology in another light. Indeed, underneath Newman’s insistence that Greek tragedy be read in light of a Christian afterlife, there lies a provocative model of how we weigh actions—and inactions—in narratives. The afterlife occupies an important role in the essay, surfacing at critical points when Newman delves into what happens during plot lulls, or what he terms the “stationary” and “irregular” (2) parts of a composition, and why he finds these parts most satisfying. Connecting these lulls to a kind of development he associates with change in the afterlife, Newman begins to think through a model of inward action that receives its fullest treatment in his subsequent works, notably The Dream of Gerontius, a poem that both explicates and itself performs uneventful development.
As Newman insists in his essay on Aristotle’s Poetics, the “charm of Greek Tragedy does not ordinarily arise from scientific correctness of plot”:
Seldom does any great interest arise from the action; which, instead of being progressive and sustained, is commonly either a mere necessary condition of the drama, or a convenience for the introduction of matter more important than itself. It is often stationary—often irregular—sometimes either wants or outlives the catastrophe. . . . The action then will be more justly viewed as the vehicle for introducing the personages of the drama, than as the principal object of the poet’s art; it is not in the plot, but in the characters, sentiments, and diction, that the actual merit and poetry of the composition are found. (2)
Newman provides an early incarnation of Markovits’s present-day argument that character precedes action in nineteenth-century literature in focusing on those places where a plot is “often stationary—often irregular.”38 Grand turning points or “catastrophes” do not necessarily mark the most important parts of a composition for Newman. Instead, he asserts that the plot often continues onward and “outlives” them. In one place, he even posits the need for Christian belief in the “afterlife” to make sense of tragedy: “It is scarcely possible for a poet satisfactorily to connect innocence with ultimate unhappiness, when the notion of a future life is excluded. Honors paid to the memory of the dead are some alleviation of the harshness. In his use of the doctrine of a future life, Southey is admirable. Other writers are content to conduct their heroes to temporal happiness;—Southey refuses present comfort to his Ladurlad, Thalaba, and Roderick, but carries them on through suffering to another world” (17).39 The injustice of tragic endings troubled Newman, who found the need for
