Lasting Genius
Joseph Pearce, English author of acclaimed biographies of G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien, has written—as the inside cover explains—a “biographical exploration into the spiritual lives” of several twentieth-century converts, including many whose literary efforts remain as influential today as when they were first written.
Literary Converts opens with Oscar Wilde’s dramatic deathbed baptism in 1900 and winds its way through a century of spiritual conversion, cultural upheaval, and literary greatness that concludes with the death of Scottish poet George Mackay Brown in 1996. In between these two deaths, Pearce weaves together sketches and biographical snapshots of Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Ronald Knox, Christopher Dawson, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, Malcolm Muggeridge and, surprisingly, actor Alec Guinness. In addition to these more famous names, Pearce introduces a number of less familiar converts, such as Maurice Baring, journalist and close friend of Chesterton and Belloc; Siegfried Sassoon, poet and hero of the first World War; and Alfred Lunn, long-time anti-Catholic and eventual Catholic apologist.
While the men and women in Literary Converts range from Anglican clergy to Welsh poets to German-born economists, their respective journeys to the Catholic Church were marked by common features and influences. Perhaps most important was the realization that the theories and schemes of secularism were not only flawed but inherently opposed to life and truth.
As Evelyn Waugh noted in 1930, reflecting upon the growth of secularism and the loss of basic morality in European society, the issue was no longer between Catholicism and Protestantism, “but between Christianity and Chaos.” Pearce explains that converts such as Waugh recognized that political utopia, social order, and personal fulfillment could never be founded upon the fads and fashions of the times––these spiritual seekers were dissatisfied with empty cliches:
“Above all, there was a deep disillusionment with ‘the world’ and what it had to offer, a longing for depth in a world of shallows, permanence in a world of change, and certainty in a world of doubt. To many of these twentieth-century literary converts, an acceptance of God went hand in hand with a rejection of ‘the world’ and its materialism.”
Acknowledging the profound influence of John Henry Newman and his Development of Christian Doctrine, Pearce shows that the phenomenon of high-profile Catholic converts in the British Isles during the 1900s was largely influenced by the writings of Chesterton, Belloc, and Knox. The impact of their work––especially that of Chesterton––is traced throughout Literary Converts, demonstrating the lasting genius and insight of these great Catholic apologists. Orthodoxy, Chesterton’s brilliant defense of Christianity against secular “progress” and atheism, and The Everlasting Man, his examination of the Incarnation, are referenced often by a variety of converts, including C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. (Lewis, of course, was a convert to Anglicanism; his friend Tolkien chalked up Lewis’s unwillingness to make the leap to Catholicism to his boyhood in anti-Catholic Northern Ireland. Though this view may have had some truth in it, it was a gross oversimplification.)
Pearce offers balanced ideas about the motives and thinking of the converts, always backed up by selections from their writings, including many illuminating quotes from letters, journals, and other unpublished works. He does not sugarcoat his subject matter, documenting various flaws and failings, such as Belloc’s harshness, Waugh’s bitterness, Eliot’s cold detachment, and C. S. Lewis’s anti-Catholic sentiments.
The drama of conversion and the mystery of faith is especially poignant in the chapters dealing with journalist Malcolm Muggeridge and novelist Graham Greene. Their lives, Pearce notes, “serve almost as parallel parables of the century itself.” Muggeridge, a skeptic who had been involved with Communist causes as a young man, did not enter the Catholic Church until late in life. Greene became a Catholic as a young man but increasingly doubted the Catholic faith as he grew older. Muggeridge was a hedonist for much of his life, but died revered as a mystic. Greene wrote powerful novels of faith early in his career, but later succumbed to adultery and the lure of Communism.
These and many other remarkable contrasts and stories fill this book, providing both an entertaining and compelling look at those who have gone before us in the faith.
— Carl E. Olson
Literary Converts
By Joseph Pearce
Ignatius Press
452pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0-89870-790-0
Stalker and Companion
On April 25, 1995, a runaway car killed Gregory Floyd’s six-year-old son, John-Paul, while he was playing in his own front yard. A Grief Unveiled: One Father’s Journey through the Death of a Childis a difficult book to read, but worth the effort.
A veil often covers something too personal or too sacred to be made public. Grief is both those things. Floyd tears the veil away with such candor it is like watching someone revisit a raw wound that seems to be healing until some unexpected jag tears it open anew, again and again. But it is not morbid curiosity that gives this book its power. It is its witness to a rock-bottom belief in God that the author continually finds himself dashed against by tidal waves of sorrow.
A Grief Unveiled is a father’s story, and yet Gregory’s wife, Maureen, and their then six (now seven) other children dwell there with him. It is as much their tale as his, and Floyd recounts with great tenderness how each member of the family finds his own way through the gaping hole in their lives.
Members of large families will find familiar vignettes of grief and recrimination and joy. And Floyd lets us in on the most intimate details of the long, slow healing process, such the morning after Mother’s Day:
“Slowly, silently, tenderly, we made love for the first time since the accident. Heart to heart, flesh to flesh, deep calling to deep. For better or worse, in joy and in pain, as close as possible—Maureen offering this moment to me to remind me that there is more to reality than the death of John-Paul. Our embrace was a profound, extended moment of intimacy and grace: grace to carry on, to bear the burden, to surrender to God in the unbearable mystery of his having allowed this, knowing that he is not with us to remove suffering but to redeem it” (p. 41).
Floyd has the soul of a poet, and it shines through his prose: “There is a difference between early grief and later grief. . . . Early grief smacks, stings, punches; later grief is more gentle. Early grief is a stalker; later grief is a companion. Early grief is crags and crevices; later grief is furrows softened by the passage of time” (168).
I have a daughter who is the age John-Paul was when he died and a son named John Paul. As I read, the Floyds’ dead child became an emotional amalgam of my own daughter and son and my other children as well. I could not read long passages without pausing to put the book down and walk out to feel the sun on my face. Often my breath caught in my chest, and the pages swam before my eyes. I found myself offering prayers of thanksgiving for the health of my children and interceding to their guardian angels to keep them safe.
I quote long passages because I can find no better way to communicate the beauty of this book than to let the author himself speak:
“Don’t grieve like those who have no hope, St. Paul tells us (1 Thess. 4:13). I have hope, terribly profound hope, absolute certainty, that Johnny is alive in heaven and that we will be reunited if we live in God’s love for the rest of our earthly journey home. . . . I dare to grieve, to let myself feel all the sorrow and pain precisely because I have hope. I can drink the cup to the dregs. I am not afraid to drink it to the dregs. Why? Because Christ rose from the dead. Because he conquered death. . . .
“The sacrifice of Christ has assured Johnny a safe passage into everlasting life. The Lord is coming back to take us home. There will be a reunion. We will be together. These are truly words of comfort. They do not say, ‘Stop grieving.’ They do not say, ‘You should be feeling better.’ They do not say, ‘Snap out of it.’ They say, ‘A better day is coming.’ And that assurance of a better day has the power to console me in the midst of my pain. We are knit together with Johnny in Christ and in the Church. We are still family and will be forever” (123–124).
Such is the power of this book that you will find yourself echoing the words of Thomas Howard in the foreword: “I have never met Gregory and Maureen Floyd. And yet I consider them to be among my most cherished friends.”
— Tim Ryland
A Grief Unveiled
By Gregory Floyd
Paraclete Press (1999)
194pages
$13.95
ISBN: 1-55725-215-7
Smells and Bells
More than any modern Scripture scholar, Scott Hahn unearths biblical paradigms and mines them for more than you would think possible. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with his written or spoken work knows the great theme of God’s covenant love that Hahn finds pervasive throughout Scripture. In The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth, Hahn is at it again interpreting big-picture themes, this time correlating the liturgy of the Mass with the book of Revelation, sometimes called the Apocalypse.
Many don’t know quite what to make of Revelation, the Bible’s last book. The rest of Scripture fits our expectation of a narrative account with plots and protagonists and antagonists we can identify with. But Revelation hops from here to there, from heaven to earth, from past to future (or does it?); it is filled with demonic frogs and seven-headed dragons and a seven-eyed, seven-horned lamb (and he’s a good guy). But Hahn finds in the liturgy of the Mass a parallel to Revelation in both theme and structure.
As fantastical as they seem at first, it’s hard to argue with the author’s insights, especially when he shows that the Church Fathers held the same views. And it’s not just ancient-Church stuff; it’s there also in the documents of Vatican II (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium 8).
Hahn points out how the details of the liturgy, from the high priest, altar, and vestments to the chalice, incense, and prayers—what we sometimes call “smells and bells”—are woven throughout Revelation. Indeed, he writes, the very structure of the Mass is mirrored in the structure of the Apocalypse. Hahn divides the book into two parts that correlate with the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. His conclusion: Whenever we go to Mass, what we do at our earthly altar is caught up to heaven’s altar, and we worship alongside the heavenly hosts of saints and angels.
“Now, you may reply that your weekly experience of Mass is anything but heavenly,” the author writes. “In fact, it’s an uncomfortable hour, punctuated by babies screaming, bland hymns sung off-key, meandering, pointless homilies, and neighbors dressed as if they were going to a ball game, the beach, or a picnic.
“Yet I insist we do go to heaven when we go to Mass, and this is true of every Mass we attend, regardless of the quality of the music or the fervor of the preaching. This is not a matter of learning to ‘look at the bright side’ of sloppy liturgies. This is not about developing a more charitable attitude to tone-deaf cantors. This is all about something that’s objectively true, something as real as the heart that beats within you. The Mass—and I mean every single Mass—is heaven on earth” (p. 5).
At the book’s conclusion, Hahn explains how to incorporate this knowledge into one’s spiritual life by waging spiritual warfare against evil. It’s inspiring stuff, especially if you’re not yet a Hahnhead (an affectionate term used by some to describe the legions of the good Doctor’s fervent disciples).
Unfortunately, the goofy subheads throughout the book are at odds with the serious content, especially when they are bad punning references to profane culture. (For instance, an account of Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice up a mountain in the land of Moriah has the subhead “Moriah Carry,” a non sequitur reference to singer Mariah Carey, whose scantily clad image seems ubiquitous in pop-music culture.) This carries on the tradition of Hahn’s previous book, A Father Who Keeps His Promises (Servant Publications, 1997), where, for instance, an account of the creation of Eve is titled “Prime Rib.” Hahnheads might find this clever, but it’s a device that should be rethought.
The previous paragraph, though, is a quibble. The Lamb’s Supper is exegesis that will inspire and encourage apologists to a deeper appreciation of both sacred Scripture and our sacred Tradition of the Mass.
— Brian Kelleher
The Lamb’s Supper
By Scott Hahn
Doubleday (1999)
174 pages
$19.95
ISBN: 0-385-49659-1
Available from Catholic Answers Item B0379