Literary Giants Literary Catholics
LITERARY GIANTS
LITERARY CATHOLICS
JOSEPH PEARCE
LITERARY CATHOLICS
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO
Cover art by John Herreid
Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum
© 2005 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 1-58617-077-5
Library of Congress Control Number 2004114951
Printed in the United States of America
To Giovanna Paolina
INTRODUCTION
Converting the Culture: The Evangelizing Power of Beauty
PART ONE: TRADITION AND CONVERSION
1. Tradition and Conversion in Modern English Literature
2. Twentieth-Century England’s Christian Literary Landscape
PART TWO: THE CHESTERBELLOC
3. The Chesterbelloc: Examining the Beauty of the Beast
4. Chesterton and Saint Francis
5. Shades of Gray in the Shadow of Wilde
6. Fighting the Euro from Beyond the Grave: The Ghost of Chesterton Haunts Lord Howe
7. Catholicism and “Democracy”
9. G. K. Chesterton: Champion of Orthodoxy
10. Hilaire Belloc in a Nutshell
12. A Chip off the Old Belloc: Bob Copper In Memoriam
13. Maurice Baring: In the Shadow of the Chesterbelloc
14. R. H. Benson: Unsung Genius
15. Maisie Ward: Concealed with a Kiss
16. John Seymour: Some Novel Common Sense
PART THREE: THE WASTELAND
17. Entrenched Passion: The Poetry of War
18. War Poets: Cutting through the Cant
19. Siegfried Sassoon: Poetic Pilgrimage
20. Emerging from the Wasteland: The Cultural Reaction to the Desert of Modernity
21. Edith Sitwell: Modernity and Tradition
22. Roy Campbell: Bombast and Fire
23. Roy Campbell: Religion and Politics
25. Evelyn Waugh: Ultramodern to Ultramontane
26. Beyond the Facts of Life: Douglas Lane Patey’s Biography of Evelyn Waugh
27. In Pursuit of the Greene-Eyed Monster: The Quest for Graham Greene
28. Cross Purposes: Greene, Undset and Bernanos
PART POUR: J. R. R. TOLKIEN AND THE INKLINGS
31. From the Prancing Pony to the Bird and Baby: Roy “Strider” Campbell and the Inklings
32. J. R. R. Tolkien: Truth and Myth
33. The Individual and Community in Tolkien’s Middle Earth
34. Religion and Politics in
The Lord of the Rings
35. Quest and Passion Play:
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth
38. Tolkien and the Catholic Literary Revival
39. True Myth: The Catholicism of
The Lord of the Rings
40. Letting the Catholic Out of the Baggins
41. A Hidden Presence: The Catholic Imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien
42. From War to Mordor: J. R. R. Tolkien and World War I
43. Divine Mercy in
The Lord of the Rings
44. Resurrecting Myth: A Response to Dr. Murphy’s “Response”
45. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Successes and Failures of Tolkien on Film
46. Would Tolkien Have Given Peter Jackson’s Movie the Thumbs-Up?
47. The Forgotten Inkling: A Personal Memoir of Owen Barfield
PART FIVE: MORE THINGS CONSIDERED
48. The Decadent Path to Christ
50. Making Oscar Wild: Unmasking Oscar Wilde’s Opposition to “Pathological” Gay Marriage
51. Truth Is Stranger Than Science Fiction
52. Hollywood and the “Holy War”
53. Three Cheers for Hollywood
54. Purity and Passion: Examining the Sacred Heart of Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ
55. Paul McCartney: A Grief Observed
56. Above All Shadows Rides the Sun: The Poetry of Praise
60. Shakespeare: Good Will for All Men
61. Modern Art: Friend or Foe?
62. Salvador Dali: From Freud to Faith
63. Mr. Davey versus the Devil: A True Story
64. Totus Tuus: A Tribute to a Truly Holy Father
66. Our Life, Our Sweetness and Our Hope
67. The Presence That Christmas Presents
Most of the chapters in this volume have been published before in a variety of journals on both sides of the Atlantic. My memory is no longer equal to the task of remembering which articles appeared in which journals, but I can, I think, list the names of the journals in which they appeared. These include, in no particular order and with apologies for any sins of omission, the
Catholic Herald
, the
Tablet, Crisis, Gilbert Magazine
, the
Chesterton Review, Lay Witness, This Rock, Christian History, Catholic Social Science Review
, the
Review of Politics, Faith and Reason
, the
National Catholic Register, Catholic World Report
, the
C. S. Lewis Journal, Chronicles
, the
Nicaraguan Academic Journal
, the
American Conservative
, the
Naples Daily News
and
National Review On-Line
. My thanks are proffered to those many individuals who were responsible for commissioning and accepting these articles for the journals listed. I suspect, however, that the list is not complete and apologize, once again, for any lapses in memory.
Many of the chapters in Part V were originally published as articles in the
Saint Austin Review (StAR)
, the Catholic cultural journal of which I am coeditor. The article on Belloc’s
Path to Rome
was originally written for, and published in, the
Encyclopedia of Catholic Literature
, edited by Mary R. Reichardt and published by Greenwood Press in 2004.
Grateful acknowledgements are due, and are wholeheartedly rendered, to Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., for his continuing faith in my work and for his valued advice during the preparation of this volume. Similar gratitude is due to Father Fessio’s colleagues at Ignatius Press, each of whom has worked tirelessly to bring this and my other volumes to fruition.
Final acknowledgement, as ever and always, goes to my ever-patient wife, Susannah, for all the support she gives and is, and to our two children: to Leo, our firstborn, and to little Giovanna Paolina, who rests in the arms of God.
CONVERTING THE CULTURE:
The Evangelizing Power of Beauty
There is a story about an American tourist somewhere in the wilds of rural Ireland. He is hopelessly lost. Desperate for reorientation, he is relieved to see a rustic Irishman, sitting on a fence and sucking a straw. This man has probably lived here all his life, the American thinks to himself; he will surely be able to help. “Excuse me”, he says. “How do I get to Limerick?” The Irishman looks at him for a while and sucks pensively on his straw. “If I were you,” he replies, “I wouldn’t start from here.”
Although one can obviously sympathize with the irate frustration that our lost American must have felt at the unhelpfulness of such a response, there is more than a modicum of wisdom in the Irishman’s reply. Indeed, if the characters are changed, the whole story takes on something of the nature of a parable. Instead of an American tourist, imagine that the hopelessly lost individual is the present writer and that the rustic Irishman is Saint Patrick in disguise. The year is 1978 and I am in the Northern Irish city of Londonderry. I am there because, as an angry seventeen-year-old, I have become involved with the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland and with a white supremacist organization in England. I am angry. I am bitter. I am bigoted. I hate Catholicism and all that it stands for (although, of course, I have no idea what it really stands for, only what my prejudiced presumption believes that it stands for). Shortly afterward I will join the Orange Order, an anti-Catholic secret society, as a further statement of my Ulster “loyalism” and anti-Catholicism. During this visit to Londonderry, I take part in a day and a night of rioting during which petrol bombs are thrown and shops are looted—all in the name of anti-Catholicism. It is then, at least in the mystical fancy of my imagination, that I meet the rustic Irishman who is really Saint Patrick in disguise. “I am lost”, I say to him (though I am so lost that I don’t even know that I am lost). “How do I find my way Home?” “If I were you,” the saintly Irishman replies, “I wouldn’t start from here.”
Wise words indeed, though at the time they would have fallen on deaf ears. Deaf, dumb and blind, I had a long way to go. The long and winding road that would lead, eventually, eleven years later, to the loving arms of Christ and His Church would be paved with the works of great Catholic apologists such as Newman, Chesterton and Belloc. Newman’s masterful
Apologia
and his equally masterful autobiographical novel,
Loss and Gain
; Chesterton’s
Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man
and
The Well and the Shallows
; and Belloc’s stridently militant exposition of the “Europe of the Faith”—each of these was a signpost on my path from homelessness to Home. There were, of course, others: Karl Adam’s
The Spirit of Catholicism
, Archbishop Sheehan’s
Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine
and Father Copleston’s
Saint Thomas Aquinas
. I am, therefore, deeply indebted to the great apologists and, in consequence, retain the strongest admiration for those who continue the work of apologetics in our day. I hope and pray that the great work being done by
This Rock
and
Catholic Answers
will bring about a bumper harvest akin to that which was reaped by these great apologists of the past.
Although my own approach to evangelization is somewhat different, I share the same desire to win souls for Christ as do Karl Keating, Tim Ryland and Jerry Usher. I would, in fact, call myself an apologist, albeit an apologist of a different ilk. I would say that I am a
cultural
apologist, one who desires to win converts through the communicating power of culture.
Perhaps a short theological aside will serve as a useful explanation of how cultural apologetics is both different from, and yet akin to, the more conventional field of apologetics. Truth is trinitarian. It consists of the interconnected and mystically unified power of Reason, Love and Beauty. As with the Trinity itself, the three, though truly distinct, are one. Reason, properly understood, is Beauty; Beauty, properly apprehended, is Reason; both are transcended by, and are expressions of, Love. And, of course, Reason, Love and Beauty are enshrined in, and are encapsulated by, the Godhead. Indeed, they have their
raison d’être
and their consummation in the Godhead. Remove Love and Reason from the sphere of aesthetics and you remove Beauty also. You get ugliness instead. Even a cursory glance at most modern “art” will illustrate the negation of Beauty in most of today’s “culture”. Once this theological understanding of the trinitarian nature of Truth is perceived, it follows that the whole science of apologetics can be seen in this light. Most mainstream apologetics can be seen as the apologetics of Reason: the defense of the Faith and the winning of converts through the means of a dialogue with the “rational” and its sundry manifestations. On the other hand, the lives of the saints, such as the witness of Mother Teresa, can be seen as the apologetics of Love: the defense of the Faith and the winning of converts through the living example of a life lived in Love. Finally, the defense of the Faith and the winning of converts through the power of the beautiful can be called cultural apologetics or the apologetics of Beauty.
