LITERARY GIANTS
LITERARY CATHOLICS
JOSEPH PEARCE
LITERARY GIANTS
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
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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”
8. Fascism and Chesterton
9. G. K. Chesterton: Champion of Orthodoxy
10. Hilaire Belloc in a Nutshell
11. Belloc’s The Path to Rome
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
24. Campbell in Spain
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
29. Muggeridge Resurrected
PART POUR: J. R. R. TOLKIEN AND THE INKLINGS
30. Inklings of Grace
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
36. True North
37. The Once and Future King
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
49. The Quest for the Real Oscar: A Century after His Death, Is the Real Oscar Wilde Finally Emerging from the Shadows?
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
57. The Magic of Technology
58. Russian Revelations
59. Dante: Assent’s Ascent
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
65. Faith and the Feminine
66. Our Life, Our Sweetness and Our Hope
67. The Presence That Christmas Presents
Notes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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.
INTRODUCTION
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.
Throughout history, the Faith has been sustained by, and has built upon, each of these pillars. Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas and other giants of the Church have laid the philosophical and theological foundations upon which Christendom has towered above superstition and heresy, creating an edifice of Reason in a world of error. Numerous other saints have lived lives of heroic virtue and self-sacrificial love, showing that there is a living, loving alternative to all the vice and hatred with which humanity has inflicted itself. Similarly, numerous writers, artists, architects and composers have created works of beauty as a reflection of their love for God—and, through the gift they have been given, of God’s love for them.
It is in the last of these three spheres of apologetics, the apologetics of Beauty, that I have found my own vocation, and it has become my aim, indeed my passion, to evangelize the culture through the power of culture itself.
In recent years, with the possible exception of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, the greatest opportunity to evangelize the culture through the power of culture itself has been the release of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As the author of Tolkien: Man and Myth and as the editor of Tolkien: A Celebration, both of which were published before the release of Jackson’s movie, I found myself in the privileged position of being able to surf the wave of Tolkien enthusiasm that followed in the wake of the release of each of the films in the trilogy. In spite of the efforts of Jackson and others to play down the importance of the Catholic dimension of Tolkien’s masterpiece, I found myself giving talks on the Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings to audiences from all four corners of the United States, not to mention Canada, England, Germany, Portugal and South Africa. I have spoken to very large student audiences at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and several state universities. How else in this agnostic-infested age could an avowed Catholic give a lecture at a secular institution on Catholic theology to a captive, and for the most part captivated, audience? Although very few of those in attendance would have dreamed of attending a lecture on “The Theology of the Catholic Church”, they were happy to attend a lecture entitled “Tolkien: Truth and Myth” at which they received unadulterated Catholic theology. Such is the power of art to evangelize.
In the knowledge that art has an enormous power to win souls for Christ, it has been my desire to play a part in the nurturing of a Catholic cultural revival in the twenty-first century to parallel the revival that characterized the first half of the last century. With this in mind, I am honored to be coeditor of a Catholic cultural journal, the Saint Austin Review, or StAR, which aims to act as a catalyst for such a revival in Christian culture. Launched in England in September 2001, StAR represents a unique voice in the world of Catholic publications, and my work on the journal is truly a labor of love.
Currently I find myself embroiled on the front line of the culture war as a result of the publication of my new book, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. My research revealed, among other things, that Wilde had a lifelong love affair with the Catholic Church and that he considered his descent into homosexuality as his “pathology”. Having recovered from his homosexual “sickness”, Wilde finally succumbed to the true love of his life when he was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. This hard evidence, combined with the orthodox Christian morality of the vast majority of his work, destroys the popular image of Wilde as a gay icon or as a pioneer of sexual (that is, homosexual) liberation. Needless to say, this unmasking of their idol has led many homosexuals to question their attitude toward Wilde; it may also, one may hope, lead some of them to question their attitude toward homosexuality itself. Either way, the book is receiving considerable attention in the homosexual media and has given me the opportunity to discuss the whole issue of Wilde’s moral position at public debates on Wilde in both London and San Francisco. Once again, as with Tolkien, t
he successful application of cultural apologetics reaches audiences who would never dream of attending an overtly Catholic meeting. May such encounters prove catalytic and fruitful!
In these sad but exciting times, apologists of every shade should unite in the battle to win a doubting world to the timeless truth. Many years ago, in even sadder and even more exciting times, the Jesuit martyr Saint Edmund Campion stated defiantly that he would never recoil from his efforts to convert the English nation back to the faith of their fathers, “come rack, come rope”. Campion’s example speaks to us across the abyss of the centuries. He was a great and indomitable apologist who should perhaps be adopted as a model and patron of apologists everywhere. These days, in our hedonistic anti-culture of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll”, the barbarism is more likely to find expression in rock and rape than in rack and rope. The enemy is, however, the same. His name is Legion. We might not face the martyrdom suffered by Saint Edmund Campion (though who knows what awaits future generations of Catholics if the totalitarian tide of intolerant “toleration” continues to rise), but we can be as dauntless as was he in our efforts to win our faithless or erring brothers and sisters back to the faith of their fathers. Another English Jesuit, Saint Robert Southwell, wrote some of the finest poetry of the Elizabethan age in an effort to woo his fellow countrymen back to the Faith. He too was martyred, but not before his verse had captivated the nation and not before it had influenced the work of a certain William Shakespeare. As such, Southwell should stand alongside Campion as the model and patron of apologists, particularly for those who choose cultural apologetics as their means to win souls for Christ. As with other Christian writers, before and since, Southwell employed the beauty of language as a means of conveying the beauty of the Faith. Today, four centuries after his heroic death, his poetry shines forth as a lucid testament to the truth for which he died.
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