Converts of the Catholic Literary Revival - Featuring Joseph Pearce

well the literary revival depending upon how you want to define it began either in 1798 perhaps or certainly by any stretch of the imagination with the conversion of Cardinal Newman in 1845 so and and and it sort of certainly began in 1845 by any stretch of the imagination my book on literary converts begins and a completely random date in 1900 and really it's a citydata.city time to to start it because it certainly doesn't start there I chose that date because if you want to convince a secular publisher to publish your work they're only interested in money and it was 1997 so I it was originally called literary converts of the 20th century which is why I started in 1900 and they just dropped off the in the 20th century bit but as I say 1900 the conversion of Oscar Wilde is not really starting in the middle of the story however we need to go back even further because we can't really start in 1845 without understanding what was what was happening that led to numerous conversion and the other things happening in England at the time which launched this revival so very briefly I want to go right back particular as this is a conference on the theme of history I want to go right back to to the Reformation in England to 1534 when Henry the eighth declares himself head of the church in England and that's of course the establishment of the Church of England and of course in the following year we have the martyrdom of sin Thomas More and cynjohn Fisher and this was the beginning of what are called the penal times a period of a hundred and fifty years right through to the 1680s when it was illegal to be a Catholic it was illegal to practice your faith in England and if you were priests it was punishable by death and not merely punishable by death but punishable by a particularly smaller slow and excruciating ly painful death hanging drawing and quartering when they basically hang you until you're not quite dead because that would be too easy and then they then they cut you down and they cut you open while you're still alive and at some stage when they're removing your organs to throw them into the fire you die I suppose if you're particularly resilient you hold on to the final climax which is the removal of your heart which is then thrown on the fire so this was the punishment of a Catholic priest in England from the 1530s and to the 1680s there are now 40 canonized martyrs of England and Wales and 85 beatified martyrs of England the Wales from that period and yet this is a time of great religious turbulence in England because you had on the one hand the Church of England doing then what it's been doing ever since which is compromising all its principles for the sake of whatever is convenient and it's always had within its ranks out-and-out Protestants and people that think at least that are out and out Catholics then you had everything in between and it's always been the case William Lord became Archbishop of Canterbury and he was an early leader of the the high church party the anglo-catholics he was beheaded as the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury for attempting to overthrow the Protestant religion so a very very turbulent times in sickness in the 1640s it led to the English Civil War where the basic the Puritans and Calvinists under Oliver Cromwell defeated the Anglicans or the higher church Anglicans under King Charles the first so we had this period 150 years and it doesn't even end there oh thank you doesn't even end there because you have the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 things become a little bit easier for Catholics but as I say the last martyrdoms of catholics were in the 1680s and then beyond that there was always this they had the so-called Glorious Revolution in 1616 88 1689 1690 when James the second the legitimate King of England by William Prince of Orange who came into England with a mercenary army backed by by wealthy merchants who were not over keen on the idea a claim James ii was known to be catholic of the prospect maybe of all this land that these people had gained from the church over the previous hundred and fifty years being given back to the church so before that could happen on the assumption it ever would but but before that could even possibly happen they overthrow him and that and then from that moment onwards you have until the next 50 or 60 years the Jacobites trying to get the true King back onto the throne of England and that's finally defeated in 1745 at the Battle of Culloden when the the the English army defeats the Jacobite army mostly Scots but many northern English were Jacobite as well the mainly Catholic army and that defeat nurse 1745 seems to have sealed the fate of England that any hope of it it's Catholic faith being restored so if we have a 200 year period from 1534 to 1745 of this struggle for the heart and soul of England finally defeated on the battlefield of Culloden in 1746 and we don't believe in final defeat because there's always the promise of resurrection but by the end of the 18th century the Catholic Church was at its lowest point ever in England the number of Catholics practicing their faith in England was down to just tens of thousands but these tens of thousands of real heroes they're what known as that they're what they're what are known as the wreckers and families and a wreck isn't family were those that refused to go to Anglican services now in England it was illegal not to go to church on Sunday but it had to be the Anglican Church if you went it to anywhere else if you were Catholic or nonconformist you were fined so what many Catholics did was do go to the Anglican service or to avoid the fine and then go to secret Catholic masses to continue to practice their faith but the requisites were those that eat that even refused to do to do that they refused to even go to the Anglican services and paid the fines the fire fines were incremental so only the really wealthy families could do this and many really wealthy families became considerably less wealthy over the two hundred years as a result so these tens of thousands were a hard core of of heroes and heroines but nonetheless it looked as if England could be called a Protestant country for many times now these are beaten times when they recording England a Protestant country it wasn't a very very large number of the population of England where Catholics right through this period I'm talking about but by the end of the 18th century it had been it had been largely defeated except for this group of heroes and what you have in the 18th century is an age in many respects of cynicism the the so called enlightenment which in many respects should be should be called the end document if we were to speak English properly and also was called the age of reason and again if he were to speak English properly it would be the called the age of nonsense but basically what it was is a period of religious cynicism the growth of agnosticism and even atheism and what I call really the period of the worship of the head or the idolatry of their head that everything can be explained up here or through empiricism through science and then you had in 1798 we shall say which may be where you can say at least the beginnings of the Catholic literary revival began you had the romantic revolution if you like and that was really heralded in England and I'm by the way I'm only concentrating on England here the subject becomes too huge if I was to take in France and Germany and Italy etc so this is the Catholic Lee - revival in England I'm talking about and in England in 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both formally agnostic come atheist revolutionary supporters of the French Revolution and very anti-christian published their volume of poetry lyrical ballads and this really was a reaction against this idolatry of the head romanticism was in many respects the idolatry of the heart it was reacting against this I mean with this and of course the church talks about fetus at rat co faith and reason the two are united they're not there shouldn't be at war but what happened in England is you had the whole of society at this intellectual society veering towards this idolatry of their head the romantics reacted with this idolatry of the heart however the the original two Romantic poets words within Coleridge eventually through their looking at aesthetics at the nature of beauty etc discovered God and both of them became practicing Anglicans started going back to to church and his Samuel Taylor Coleridge's case he really was for the eighth for the nineteenth century the first third of the 19th century exactly or in many respects exactly the same as Chesterton was in the first third of the 20th century he even called himself STC Cheston hakuna self gkc so you have these nice convenient acronyms for both of them but he worked out that truth ultimately was to be found in its fullness in Orthodox Christianity now he didn't he never became a Catholic but then you know we have to be careful because Chesterton wrote orthodoxy a book which I defy anybody to describe as anything but Catholic 14 years before he became one so the fact that Coleridge didn't make the official step doesn't mean that what he was writing wasn't profoundly Orthodox in many ways so these lay the foundations of the light romantics I couldn't the light romantics I'll explain why in a moment needless to say it's not romantic slight not like Bud Light or heaven forbid the light couldn't the light romantics because it was a romanticism in search of the light groping towards the light and largely finding the light but there was another group of romantics in England that I call the dark romantics and this was certainly Byron and Shelley and and although Keats might roll his eyes a suggestion he should be put in the same group to a degree Keats as well Byron Shelley and Keats is the dark romantics and these are people that they also reacted against this rationalism this idolatry of the head of the eighteenth century with with this worship of the heart except whereas with words within Coleridge this worship of the heart made them understand beauty and the beauty took them out of themselves towards objective truth towards the faith in the case of Byron and Shelley and Keats this our idolatry of the heart took them into themselves and this was it was it became interior that all of this the action against rationalism became a bundle of emotions inside their conscience or their consciousness so you have this sort of almost knee allistic almost despairing desperate romanticism very beautiful poetry but a lot of the animus very desperate and I mentioned those as well because you know what happ in the catholic literary revival is this you might think from our Lord's parable that Wordsworth and Coleridge that's the seed that's planted in fertile soil and it will grow many fold and by mentioning Keyes was the seed planted in barren soil and it will bear no fruit well that's not what happens that's why I mentioned both because what actually happens then in the nineteenth century is that the Catholic little revival when it starts has the two strands the light strand and the dark strand so I'll go into those now the light strand the the the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge led to various movements in England they were all neo medievalist they all harped back to the time before the Reformation that's why I've given the whole background for 1534 this neo medievalism wanted to leap the three hundred years back to in the 1830s it was at its height so from the 1830s I want the leap back to before the 1530s okay back to before the Reformation and neo medievalism and it found expression in three distinct movements the earliest of which was the Gothic Revival and the Gothic Revival was a movement principally in architecture but in art in a more general sense a principle in architecture and the most notable member of that group and they'd the spearhead of it or someone could Augustine pujan PU GI n now he was a convert to Catholicism and probably the best known example of his work of this neo neo gothic architecture is going back onto our tour bus of London if you look out to your right now you'll see the houses of parliament because that was a result of this Gothic Revival in architecture in London but also Augustine pujan being a Catholic in the 1830s was the time that for the first time in 300 years it was legal again to build Catholic churches in England now there were certain restraints they couldn't be prominent buildings that could have huge towers and they mustn't have bells he wasn't allowed to call the faithful to church but if you earth discretes you could build catholic churches and many of the oldest Catholic churches except for the ones that were stolen from the Catholic Church which is most of them of course in England all of those wonderful Anglican churches are of course Catholic churches that were just literally what the modern word for it as we were mugged but when these new Catholic churches were being built in the 1830s onwards Augustine Fujian was the principal architect of these new Catholic churches going up so a lot of them are in this beautiful resplendent neo-gothic architectural style so Neo medieval going back to the medieval and it was this love of the medieval which was planting seeds everywhere at this time people beginning to see the value of of this period that had been dismissed prior to that so then you had to say you had the Gothic Revival and then the other thing that happened in a little bit later also principally in the arts was the pre-raphaelites rather hood or the pre-raphaelites movement the pre-raphaelites as their name suggests pre Raffaele was to get that they they sought a vision in art that went back to the medieval again to before Raphael so there they're painting try to capture this medieval spilitt and the pre-raphaelites were very powerful they saw themselves as um as a response and a repost to Impressionism now Chesterton said about the about Impressionists thinking I think in the man who was Thursday but it might be the ball in the cross so then he Chester's next bursts out there I'm sorry if I've got it wrong that the Impressionism represented in art what in philosophy was this final skepticism and doubt about reality this real skepticism in other words there were no definitions it was all a blur now I happen to like quite a lot of impressionist art and I'm not completely sure I agree with Chesterton as we his analysis of the Impressionist movement but certainly his analysis of Impressionist philosophy the idea that there's no defined meaning to reality is certainly true but the pre-raphaelites were the opposite to this they're their paintings were brightly colored primary colors very highly realistic with clear definition so again anyway and it was meant to capture the medieval spirit so you had this medieval revival basically happening in England and then the third movement that arose out of this romanticism this light romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge was the Oxford movement so the Gothic Revival mainly architectural the pre-raphaelites mainly the visual arts but also poetry and then the Oxford movement which was principally liturgy and theology and the Oxford movement were comprised principally clergyman of the Anglican Church during the 1830s and one of the three leading members of the Oxford movement was John Henry Newman say an Anglican clergyman and these the Oxford movement said that the Anglican Church had to become Catholic had to be be part of the Catholic Church and that means the liturgy had to be Catholic it's thinking had to be Catholic so the only issue was the authority of the Pope everything else they consider myself to be Catholic and Newman in his own study of things and this was I think which what inspired Marcus Grodi to to come up with the theme of this conference came up with the realization that when you become deep in history you cease being Protestant so is his study of history which made Newman realized that there was the Fathers of the Church did were responsible for succession and the same their Catholic Church of the 19th century was the same church or as the Church of the father's and through his study of history realized that so in 1845 Newman becomes a catholic and i say this is the definitive start point you can look upon all the others as this is the things happening in england this rise of medievalism that led to the Oxford movement that was the Newman was part of but Newman's conversion 1845 was the definitive moment the start of the Catholic let's have a revival and many people consider Newman to be one of the finest prose stylists of the of the 19th century I say we don't have time to discuss any of these figures that integrate length unfortunately but the point is that both as a prose writer in the apologia pro Vita sewer his memoirs his novel loss and gain one of his novels the two novels lost in game being one of them and his poetry that Newman is considered to be one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era even by non-christians he just is a giant figure and the 19th century produced many many good writers so that's a great compliment the Newman's influence led to he actually received into the church the person who I certainly considered to believed to be and I know I'm not alone in this the greatest poet of the 19th century Gerard Manley Hopkins now Jarrett Mannie Hopkins was received by the way I've this is just in case that we have all these scholarly historians in the audience that I've made no effort to check any of my dates before giving this an all from memory and I think they will right but this is very I'm following a Chester Tony and Chester Chester Tony in the tradition here G K Chesterton never checked any of his facts and it may be before he wrote them down at least I checked them before I put them on within writing but here I'm these are memories I think they're accurate but forgive me if they're not Chesterton by the way it's a little anecdotal aside here Chesterton was so careless of getting the facts right in his in his work his long his long poem The Ballad of the white horse which was about King Alfred the Great's defeat of the pagans the pagan Vikings in England he was pointed out is pointed out to him in his poet and this is long poem he said that the right-hand side of King Alfred's army faced the right-hand side of the Viking army now unless the Viking arm we were running away that doesn't make much sense however it's it said it says much about Chesterton that he didn't even bother to correct it for the second edition so I'm in good company of some of my dates all wrong here but I think it was 1860 when when John Henry Newman received gerard manley hopkins into the church and jarred many hopkins went on to become a Jesuit priest and also of course to become one of the if not the greatest poet one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century now there's a phrase as a trite phrase that's used far too often to say that someone is ahead of their time and when you hear that normally you you should sneer heartily however if one person actually deserves that that accolade of being ahead of his time he still had many Hopkins because none of his poetry was published in his own lifetime and even his friends robert bridges and commentary packed more the latter of which was also a very important poet of the nineteenth century who is a convert to the Catholic faith who was very influential upon CS Lewis and says a good poet in his own right no time to talk about him beyond that but he was a friend of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert bridges was another friend of Hopkins and they sort of admired Hopkins and they admired his poetry and one of those two said to the other on a common which way around it was that that Hopkins is poetry is like priceless gems embedded in impracticable quartz in other words there's a little teeny bits of it that are amazing but the whole is it's just he can't fathom it so he was not understood by his contemporaries at all and in many years after his death over 20 years after his death in 1919 his poetry was was published for the first time by Robert bridges and immediately he became seen as one of the great avant-garde modern poets of the 20th century now you could certainly have the right to claim to be ahead of your time when everybody else discovers how ahead of your time you are 25 years after you're dead and which is the case with Gerard Manley Hopkins and the two key avant-garde poets of the 20th century Jarod Manley Hopkins if you can call him that to say she died in the previous century and TS Eliot were both converted to Catholicism Eliot to Anglo Catholicism but I'll come to that in a moment they're getting quite interesting that the the idea that religious orthodoxy cannot be at the cutting edge of culture we obviously see that these two great cutting edge poets were religiously Orthodox okay so that's the light side if you see that the light side led to Gothic Revival pre-raphaelites movement the Oxford movement the conversion of Newman the conversion of Hopkins dis great poetry of Hopkins when it after he's a Jesuit priest this is the light side and a dark side what happens for the dark side is that it crosses the channel into France and Lord Byron particularly one of these dark romantics is extremely influential upon upon the French decadent movement decadence you don't necessarily think decadence and Catholicism well you know I am I like being a little bit controversial and I want you to start thinking about it but basically the French decadent movement the the father of it was Scholl boda Bart Baudelaire and the other two Signet significant figures a network Paul Verlaine and your is called Eastman's first two were poets the third was a novelist but the thing is that what happened is that these short Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine and we sment took this dark romanticism of Byron and Shelley this Byronic darkness this Byronic decadence but in in France this decadence was planted in a Catholic culture so whereas Byron and Shelley where England throughout the 18th century had become more and more agnostic and cynical towards religion so their culture was not Christian they just rejected Christianity in France what happens this decadence becomes in many respects satanic now you think well surely that's worse well I suppose it is except you know they say that the the devil the first and the devil wants you to be is to stop believing in him he can operate much more effectively and efficiently if you don't think he's there but in one of I think his Baudelaire says in one of his poems or in one of his letters that the devil is a Catholic Wow season while the other thing to be saying they're coming home network conference when but what Baudelaire saying there he's saying that the devil believes in the real presence in the Blessed Sacrament the devil obviously believes in God the devil obviously believes in the Incarnation the devil obviously believes in the Trinity he hates it all he's rebelling against the door but he is not an agnostic he's not an atheist and instead of them why the warped logic sort of an example to gives the sort of thing that Baudelaire was writing about in his poetry in his most famous collection of poetry today fleur de mal was sort of really sort of Baudelaires aware that he's committing mortal sin and he's both disgusted with himself and yet cannot seem to bring himself to stop doing it and someone said a critic said that after Lafleur Dhamaal there's only two things left for sure Baudelaire the foot of the cross or the end of a revolver ie penance and conversion or suicide Baudelaire pleased to say on his deathbed became a Catholic was received into the church Paul Verlaine became a Catholic living a very decadent life before that became a Catholic and wrote some wonderful religious verse and Adam called says yes for instance wisdom and again but still continued to struggle with alcoholism stood at the rather disparate dissolute and and desolate life and died in Garret poverty in in in Paris but maintained and retained his faith and then you always call Huysmans the novelist became very very influential with the publication of his first novel our bure which was translated basically as against the grain or against nature and this novel was yep satanic is not too strong a word the hero of the novel just wants to experience everything there are no limits and so that the novel goes through this and at the end of the novel when he's done everything to just gratify his desires at the end of the novel he is suffering from ennui from boredom from desolation and desperation and begins to realize that it doesn't matter how much he lives a life of debauchery and self gratification his life is empty there's no joy ultimately there's not even any pleasure because the pleasures he seeks are just transitory they come they gone and he's back to his desperate situation and then a second novel it's a sort of it's a series second novel is called lab bar down there we see the same person in Paris in the 1880s 1880s where there's a rise of Satanism in Paris at this time decadence and and the black mass is being practiced and this and you see the hero there is that at once both morbidly fascinated by this and absolutely disgusted and horrified by it and it's the disgust and the horror they gets that they upper hand and in the third novel on loot on the way we see that the conversion of this central character to Catholicism and eurisk all heisman spends the last years of his life in a monastery so you have this dark side but the dark side is like it's the decadent path to Christ it's a paradox it's the Mary Magdalene Road if you like it's not necessarily the road that we should be encouraging him to the snake but where people are there there is if there was a need of salvation as the people living the virtuous lives of Newman or Hopkins now Baudelaire Verlaine and and Hui Simone's were very very influential upon Oscar Wilde and Oscar Wilde somewhat perversely and this shorty has to be perverse on his honeymoon after getting married in Paris what does he do well he goes out and buys a Berber the first and most decadent the satanic of we sins novels reads it on his honeymoon bizarre that's the best that you can find to do on your honeymoon there's something wrong with you said I can say and he reason and he becomes completely fascinated by this book and doesn't escape from it so that over ten years later when he writes his own novel the Picture of Dorian Gray he says that Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book and this was wilds own reference to his own being poisoned by this book so wild brings the French decadence back over the channel to England and the English decadence are perhaps the most prominent literary movement of the 1890s I don't have too much time to talk about it except that the wilds work belies his decadent reputation and particularly the Picture of Dorian Gray that was attacked attacked in in England and it's published as being decadent and disgusting and what if a she is about is about a man who end of his paints his portrait and the portrait is beautiful and Dorian Gray realizes he's going to get old and the painting is going to stay young and the painting he realizes going to mock him as he gets older and his he ages and he says he foetus facedown and says and the world says whether it's a wish or a prayer so world's making it clear if only the portray could grow old and I could stay young and the prayer is answered now it's in keeping with the the decadent sort of way of warped where thinking was the prayer answered by Satan or was answered by God was answered by both mr. sort of questions that you sort of it led to ask but basically his player has answered them he he lives a life of debauchery culminating ultimately in causing the suicide of a girl who's in love with him and ultimately he murders the artist of the painting and the more sin he commits the uglier a more hideous looking the painting becomes he stays young and after commits murder there's blood on the hands of the paint of the portrayed and several occasions Dorian Gray nearly repents gets to the verge of repentance and then doesn't for whatever reason and in the end he says the only way I can be rid of this foul painting is to destroy the painting and I destroy the painting I'll be free to then live a life of debauchery without this thing reminding him of his soul life if you like because the portrait of his soul and Wilde uses those terms and when he goes out he knows to stab the painting and they hear a scream and when they break into the room they see a beautiful portrait and an ugly deformed man dead on the floor so course leading moral is that when you tried to kill your conscience you kill yourself and this is very much where the decadence were about and their end they were shocked by the the the the realism but it's very very moralistic Wilde describes his homosexuality you met through a homosexual phase of unit may know in when he went to prison at his pathology as his sickness and when he came out of prison he wanted to enter a monastery and when he died three years later his very young man still only forty six years old he was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed now the other decadence English decadence Lionel Johnson obli Beardsley John Gray who was supposed to be the least the physical model for Dorian Gray and Ernest Towson these ki-- English decadent writers poets and all be busily an artist all became Catholics most of them died young they're all became Catholics John Gray he was the only one of that group that didn't die young became a priest and was the parish priest in Edinburgh in Scotland until he died I think in the 1930s so we see this light path the Christ the path of sanctity if you like and then his dark part of the Christ the path of sin of course even those taken apart the sanctity of sinners so he must be pharisaic or judgmental but this dark path in this light path okay then it was a wonderful poet around in the 1890s that doesn't really fit easily into either camp the dark or the light and that's the poet Francis Thompson and he was a wonderful poet but a bit of a very weak character for instance here both his parents were convert to the Catholic faith they were received into the church in the sort of afterglow of Newman's reception and and when see when Newman Newman was tipped to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury he was seen as a giant figure when he becomes a Catholic all of a sudden Catholicism becomes respectable intellectually as well as spiritually and that this whole Catholic Lee revival really starts getting going on the figure or the figurehead of Newman himself so Thompson's parents were two of these converts so Thompson's a cradle Catholic and he tried to train for the priesthood and fails fall drops out of seminary and he tries to trying to be a doctor and fails and drops out he wants to get in the army and he's rejected because of his health and he ends up living a life of poverty homelessness streets of London befriended by prostitutes again living this sort of life yet there's not a hint of decadence in any of his poetry his poetry is full of the love of Christ and his most famous plan some of you may know is the Hound of heaven you know it basically is about a man trying to escape Christ throughout his life and he runs everywhere inside his head everywhere in the world into one sin after another trying to escape Christ the Christ is just walking up behind him it doesn't matter how fast he Wireless crisis still walking up behind him the Hound of heaven is Christ he's how did by heaven and eventually he's saved from opium addiction and goes into a monastery in England and watch some of his best poetry there and then we have we move into the 20th century and this is where about 10 minutes left I start sounding like a horse racing commentator I have 20 minutes okay you're saved except for those who have fed up already that they're going oh no no none extra ten minutes but the three key figures for me the the Catholic literal revival is is in sort of three segments the first third from 1845 to 1890 when he when he died is that is they the era of Newman is the period of Newman Newman is the the key and the figurehead of the Catholic theater revival in that first third in the next third obviously at the 1890s and this decadent aberration in in England but in nineteen when 1896 Hilaire Belloc is first published in 1900 GK Chesterton his first published and to me the second period the lasts from about 1900 she would say to the start of the Second World War 1939 I'll be precise 1936 the death of Chesterton that 36 year period is the period where Chesterton and Bella are the two giant figures in the Catholic who to a revival and again I don't have too much time to say too much about them except that Chesterton's work was very much a reaction against the decadence the best thing to do if you ever have time is to read Wilde the Picture of Dorian Gray and in Chesterton's the man who was Thursday immediately afterwards because the man was Thursday is a response to and a repost to the decadent the decadence of Wilde and the other decades of the 1890s and what Chesterton is really saying is that these decadence have a dark view of reality they see reality is somehow morbid as evil as warped as deformed and the line if it if it exists at all is difficult to find Chester to Mister complete opposite on the contrary the light is there for everyone to see and if we don't see it is because we blinded ourselves Chesterton says once that we don't live in the best of all possible worlds we live in the best of all of all impossible worlds did you think about it this world is not possible it's impossible God has brought it into being and keeps it in being miraculously so the key thing which has to turn is that this robust defense of the light so he very much in the on the the side of the the the light side of this revival Belloc almost single-handedly took on the the distorted view of history with which English people are brought up now they say that history is written by the victors and that's certainly true and the the Protestants one in England in this struggle and that the history that English people get is very much the the Protestant version the Whig history as as it's known the Whig historians and I know because I was brought up with that that's so I had to overcome all this residual anti-catholicism that had been ingrained in me through my understanding of English history which was a warped understanding and Belloc wrote dozens of books mostly about so he wrote a hundred and fifty books I'm talking about his historical books now he wrote a certainly a couple of dozen historical books most of which were about the Reformation in England and panoramic studies such as how the Reformation happened or characters of the Reformation through two individual studies of leading figures in it Oliver Cromwell Thomas Cranmer chose the first James the second he took on the Whig historians to put the other side of the story now it seems to me there are two ways of looking at Belloc's role here and that's that you can look at Belloc's role as being biased that's the worst you can put it are you looking at it as being objective now my attitude is if he's biased and a lot of people dismissed Belloc's historical basis well he's a Catholic he's biased history England had had 200 years of biased history Belloc's putting the other side of the story at least people now can read both sides of the story and form a judgment before they could only read one side of the story that's the worst case scenario but Phillip Guardiola who is a leading historian of Belloc's generation not a Catholic considered Belloc a major historical figure and our Spurlock's advice in his own work and more recently in the 1990s the man's name escapes me as a professor of modern history at Oxford University who again as far as I know is not a Catholic they said if he really wanted to know what happened in England at the time of the Reformation he wouldn't go to McAuley and the other Protestant historians he would go to Hilaire Belloc and Lord Acton both Catholics so perhaps Belloc and Lord Acton were getting closer to the objective reality of what happened and of course I'm very very briefly on this aside that it's not just Catholics that say this william Cobbett who never became a catholic wrote a book with the history of the Protestant Reformation where he saw that a Protestant Reformation in many respects was a means by which the aristocracy became very rich very quickly on church land and and also a way in which the common men the common land was stolen from them as part of this process william Cobbett was a great friend of the working man and a Protestant and he wrote this so perhaps bellick was getting on to something but also though for me is more than anything else a great poet and I just would admire you to sorry I would try to encourage you to check out some of Belloc's poetry because it's absolutely beautiful and best and a couple of anecdotes about Chesterton I have said nothing about chess students work on time as them I can be just I since I moved to America I've become a shameless salesman so if you if you very frustrated about the absence of any real chess that are in this talk then don't buy my book but there's two wonderful anecdotes about Chesterton because he he was very robust and rotund man as you know and during this first world war some of you may know this story about telic is funny it makes me laugh anyway he was on a bus and in the first world war if he didn't if you didn't enlist to fight in the first world war you were called a coward and you were given a white feather Cheston was sitting on the bus his corpulent figure sitting on a bus and this woman comes up to him I says to him sir why you're not out at the front he says madam if you go around to my side you will see that I am and the other one is worse story when he was in America in one of his lecture tours of America and he's struggling to get into a taxi and the taxi drivers trying to help him get into the back of the taxi he's having difficulty getting in and the taxi driver says to him sir why don't you try to go in sideways and Chester says sir I have no sideways you get some idea of Chesterton's humor which does manifest itself in his work something he might I must remember very very quickly and that's Morris pairing who is another great figure that sadly neglected and largely forgotten these days though I detect there might be a bit of a ripple of a of recognition coming back for him there's a very famous painting of Chesterton Belloc and bearing which is on the cover of the copy that's an Austen review which on sale out there I told you I'm getting very shameless but if you want to if you want to see this this painting it's in the National Portrait Gallery in London and has Chesterton and Bella seated at a table and a boarding man standing behind that's Morris Bering and we always hear about Chester's Annabelle och George burnisher while the wittily referred to them as the Chester Belloc because they were seen so synonymously they were like two halves of a pantomime elephant but we seem to forget bearing so III always tried to say instead of saying Chesterton and bellick I always try to say Belloc bearing a Chesterton which which translators the BBC and he he wrote he wrote wonderful novels I look upon them as a sort of cross between Jane Austen and Dostoevsky that set your thinking isn't it some of your pretty thinking heaven forbid I'm not saying he's as good as either but they are really really good he spoke many languages including Russian and spent a lot of time in Russia as a diplomat then his novels sort of a bit like a game of chess like a Russian novel they take along while to get going buddy all the pieces are put in place but it's worth the wait as it were RH Benson I must mention very very briefly he was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury so when he became a Catholic it was probably the most shocking conversion since Newman when our expenses became a Catholic in the first years of the 20th century because obviously the Archbishop of Canterbury is the top figure in the Anglican Church apart from the the monarch so it's very shocking but he's wrote some wonderful novels and I would just mention about maybe about three of them here Lord of the world which is now back in print which to me is a far more prophetic work of science fiction if you want to call it that then then 1984 by George Orwell or even things like that hideous strength by by Lewis because he talks about creeping secularism that makes religion illegal by the backdoor not a really harsh brutal totalitarianism but a creeping secularism and he wrote this in the first decade of the 20th 20th centuries 100 years ago he also a historical novels about the Reformation period come wrack come rope which is about the life of someone who becomes a priest in the penal times and how he wishing to spoil the novel for you how he ends up being martyred at the end but a great great novel based loosely on the life of sin Edmund Campion apparently in another book Richard rain or solitary which captures the religious life of medieval England so I admire you I admire it I admire you if I believed in Freud I'd be worried and I must mention Waddell knocks baby briefly this is so many people here but one old Knox again he was the son of an anglican bishop as well the Bishop of Manchester becomes a Catholic and he was he was at scene as a genius he was president of the Oxford Union a great poet that could write poetry in Greek or Latin or English or other languages and he really in many respects never fulfilled his potential and I think the reason for that was that he said one of my favorite sayings he said there are two types of Catholic he said though there are the hooks and the clocks I said the hook of the fisherman and the crook of the shepherd and he said I'm more of a crook than a hawk so in other words he was more interested in being a good priest and looking after his flock than in winning converts to the faith which is why I think he didn't feel a great need to to to write books after his conversion in fact the main literary work was the translation of the Bible into what he hoped would be a timeless English and then we have again in in the 1920s we have TS Eliot I say in in the 1920s and 1930s Eliot and Hopkins were the two leading poets any it wants the wasteland another you could spend an hour and a half talking about the wasteland you'd be pleased to know I'm not going to if you if you unlucky enough to sit in one of my classes at Ave Maria you and I'm doing 20th century literature you can have about four and a half hours on it if you like but basically it's septa found poem and it was seen at the time as being ultra decadent this was the real new anti-religious poetry that was iconoclastic it was great sort of the punk rock of poetry and that's how they saw it but it's because they all misread it because what we see here is is Eliot he's attacking modernity for being corrupt for being decadent for being nihilistic for having a death wish for being death it's the culture of death the culture of the desert there's no life as the imagery of water throughout his imagery of baptism the imagery of life and ends with hope it ends with the peace that passeth all understanding and as six years after the publication of that of that poem Eddy it becomes and anglo-catholic remember the Church of England but the the high Catholic part of it Kathleen inverted commas but why did TS Eliot never become become a Catholic well it was the Jacques Maritain the French Thomas said that the reason that TS Eliot never became a Catholic was he used up all of his power of conversion when he became an Englishman but again probably the finest part of the 20th century finest about the 19th century finest about the 20th century Orthodox thinkers the greatest novelist I think of the 20th century was evil in war and the greatest novel in my opinion was Brideshead Revisited I would add I don't consider the Lord of the Rings to be a novel and again he was receiving earth at a Catholic Church in the 1930s and in many respect he's the Flo's equivalent of what TS Eliot's doing in poetry attacking modernity and seeing the church is the only hope for modernity the only hope for the world for the modern world what ta said is saying that in verse even in war saying the same thing in his fiction his novel a handful of dust the title was even taken from a line in the wasteland by Elliot and his novel Dwight had revisited he says the purpose of the novel the inspiration for it was to show the workings of divine grace in the lives of a group of very different people and he I think he achieves it immensely and then the third section of the Catholics revival which gets about two minutes is I think the two key figures there are talking and CS Lewis so basically Chesterton dies in 1936 CS Lewis writes publishes the program's regress in 1933 so there's this overlap and the Hobbit by Tolkien's published I think at 36 or 37 so the net than the next until the 1960s when they stopped in 1970 early 1970s when talking dyes if you like it's the third period of the catheters literally viable someone you'll be thinking well hold on for second Luis wasn't a Catholic well that's true and it's impossible for me to say in the two minutes remaining in fact I do give talks just on CS lewis and the catholic church 45 minutes so and again i my latest book is CS lewis in the catholic church there's a whole book on looking at the complex relationship between lewis and the church but what i would say very briefly is that by the time he died he believed in all seven sacraments he went to the Anglican equivalent of conversion the Anglican of confession and I was I would guess the far fewer than one percent of Anglicans go to confession he believed he started calling the Eucharist the Blessed Sacrament he started referring to the Eucharist liturgy as the mass he believed in purgatory so the man walked up to the doors of the church not didn't actually go in and tolki and of course wrote the greatest book of the 20th century not just my belief but the belief of numerous opinion polls and of course now he's been read by more people than ever before and I think the key thing about the Lord of the Rings and again I give talks just on the Catholicism the Lord of the Rings that there's no time to talk about that either is that it's profoundly Catholic talking himself says that Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally Catholic and religious work unconsciously in the writing consciously in the revision and the key thing about it is that when you more you understand the Lord of the Rings the more you realize that not only was it written by a Catholic but only a Catholic could have written it the more you understand the works so we've seen the me just to finish off then just to conclude that the greatest poem of the 20th century and this again is not just me this is you know you could take a consensus I'm not even not even Christian literary critics greatest poet of the poem of the 20th century either the wasteland or Four Quartets both by TS Eliot say an Anglo Catholic the greatest novel the whites had revisited evening wore a Catholic and the greatest book that all of the Rings by talking a Catholic so what happened really with this Catholic it's a revival the Catholic literally revival was that that not only now was Catholicism at the center of English culture it was at its very summit at the top of English culture and again just want to finish because when I wrote literary converts the book literally convert he was because I realized in my own conversion Chesterton was crucial to my conversion and then so was Belloc and and CS Lewis and Tolkien with none of us are Islands be part of a network of minds and a network of grace and that's why we're here today because this is the coming home network that all of us are called to ensure that the 21st century achieves the great things that the 20th and 19th centuries did thank you you

Channel: The Coming Home Network International

Views: 17,037

Rating: 4.8983049 out of 5

Keywords: Joseph Pearce (Author), Catholicism (Art Period/Movement)

Id: KLtirMhHcUA

Length: 60min 52sec (3652 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 12 2014