Posted on 07/06/2002 4:31:56 PM PDT by JMJ333
Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.
These words of Evelyn Waugh, written in "intense delight" to Edward Sackville-West after the latter had informed him of his intention to be received into the Catholic Church, represent perhaps the most succinct and sufficient description of the process of conversion ever written. Waugh's own conversion from the "absurd caricature" of ultramodernity to the "real world" of Catholic orthodoxy was greeted with astonishment by the literary world and caused a sensation in the media.
His reception into the Church on September 29, 1930 prompted bemused bewilderment in the following morning's edition of the Daily Express. It seemed incomprehensible that an author notorious for his "almost passionate adherence to the ultramodern" could have joined the Catholic Church. In the gossip columns his latest novel, Vile Bodies, had been dubbed "the ultramodern novel." How could the purveyor of all things modern have turned to the pillar of all things ancient?
The paradox was both perplexing and provocative, prompting the Express to publish two leading articles on the significance of Waugh's decision. Finally, three weeks after Waugh's controversial conversion, Waugh's own contribution to the debate, entitled "Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me," was published. It was given a full-page spread, boldly headlined.
Waugh's article was so lucid in its exposition that it belied any suggestion that he had taken his momentous step lightly, or out of ignorance. He dismissed the very suggestion that he had been "captivated by the ritual" of the Church, or that he wanted to have his mind made up for him. Instead, he insisted that the "essential issue" that had led to his conversion was a belief that the modern world was facing a choice between "Christianity and Chaos":
"Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization — and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe — has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state . . . It is no longer possible . . . to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests." Waugh concluded by stating his belief that Catholicism was the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity.
The debate continued in the next day's edition of the Express with the publication of an article by a Protestant member of Parliament, which was followed, a day later, with an article by the Jesuit Fr. Woodlock entitled "Is Britain Turning to Rome?" Three days later an entire page was devoted to the ensuing letters. Seldom has a religious conversion prompted such a blaze of national publicity.
Part of the reason for the extensive interest in Waugh's conversion, apart from his own celebrity status as a fashionable young author of best-selling satirical novels, was the growing awareness that his reception into the Church was only the latest of a long and lengthening list of literary converts to the Catholic faith. On October 8, 1930, the Bystander observed of Waugh's conversion that "the brilliant young author" was "the latest man of letters to be received into the Catholic Church. Other well-known literary people who have gone over to Rome include Sheila Kaye-Smith, Compton MacKenzie, Alfred Noyes, Fr. Ronald Knox, and G.K. Chesterton." The list was impressive but far from exhaustive. By the 1930s, the tide of converts had become a torrent, and throughout that decade there were some 12,000 converts a year in England alone.
A similar mood prevailed in the United States. A few weeks after the controversy in the Daily Express, a debate between G.K. Chesterton and the famous Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow on the question, "Will the World Return to Religion?" attracted an audience of 4,000 to the Mecca Temple in New York. At the close of the debate a vote was taken. The result was 2,359 for Chesterton's point of view and 1,022 for Darrow's.
Waugh's particular path to Rome had been influenced by a number of the literary converts who had preceded him, particularly Chesterton and Knox, the latter of whom would be the subject of a biography by Waugh published in 1959. When Waugh was only 11 his father had read Knox's anti-Modernist satire, "Reunion All Round," and was "dazzled" by its brilliance. "Since then," Waugh wrote to Knox years later, "every word you have written and spoken has been pure light to me." In 1924 Waugh had been impressed by Knox's oratory prowess at the Oxford Union. On that occasion, Knox had been among several well-known speakers to debate the proposition "that civilization has advanced." In Waugh's opinion, Knox had stolen the show by showing that "we were rapidly approaching the civilization of the savage." In Waugh's public confession of faith in the Express there are clearly discernible echoes of Knox's brilliant oratory from six years earlier.
The most striking example of Chesterton's influence on Waugh is to be found in the way that Chesterton inspired Brideshead Revisited, arguably the finest of Waugh's novels and undeniably one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. The novel's central theme of the redemption of lost souls by means of "the unseen hook and invisible line . . . the twitch upon the thread" was taken from one of Chesterton's Fr. Brown stories. Waugh told a friend that he was anxious to obtain a copy of the omnibus edition of the Fr. Brown stories at the time he was putting the finishing touches on Brideshead, and a memorandum he wrote for MGM studios when a film version of the novel was being considered confirmed the profundity of Chesterton's influence:
"The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G.K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman's line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a 'twitch upon the thread' draws the fish to land." The Chestertonian metaphor was not lost on Ronald Knox when he first read Brideshead Revisited: "once you reach the end, needless to say the whole cast — even Beryl — falls into place and the twitch upon the thread happening in the very bowels of Metroland is inconceivably effective."
In many respects, Waugh's finest novel is a reiteration of the theme found in his article for the Daily Express. It is a tale of hope among the ruins of a vanishing civilization in which the light of Christianity shines out amidst the chaos.
Brideshead Revisited sold exceedingly well on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, the Tablet acclaimed it "a book for which it is safe to prophesy a lasting place among the major works of fiction." In America, Time described Waugh as a stylist unexcelled among contemporary novelists.
The praise was tempered by a vociferous minority who disliked Brideshead Revisited on both political and religious grounds. In particular, the American critic Edmund Wilson criticized the religious dimension in the novel. "He was outraged (quite legitimately by his standards) at finding God introduced into my story," Waugh replied. "I believe that you can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions." Modern novelists, Waugh continued, "try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character — that of being God's creature with a defined purpose. So in my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular: a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which to me means only one thing, man in his relation to God."
With the publication of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh completed the metamorphosis from ultramodern to ultramontane, and in so doing passed from fashion to anti-fashion. As with so many of the other converts at the vanguard of the Catholic Literary Revival, his work was an act of subcreation reflecting the glory of creation itself. As Waugh himself put it: "There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art." What is true of art is as true of the artist. In the works of Waugh, as in the works of the other literary converts, a tiny gleam of Christ is always reflected.
Joseph Pearce. "Evelyn Waugh: Ultramodern to Ultramontane." Lay Witness (May 2001).
This article is reprinted with permission from Lay Witness magazine. Lay Witness is a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968 to support, defend, and advance the efforts of the teaching Church.
"The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, with all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle."--Men At Arms (1952)
From the link:
In January of 1931, during his second trip to America, Chesterton did indeed debate with Clarence Darrow, at New York City's Mecca Temple. The topic was "Will the World Return to Religion?" There is no known transcript of the proceedings, but perhaps the following clippings will give you the flavor.
THE FOLLOWING is a passage from "Chesterton As Seen by His Contemporaries," complied by Cyril Clemons, Webster Groves: International Mark Twain Society, 1939, pp. 66-68.
Mr. Joseph J. Reilly attended a debate at Mecca Temple in New York City, between Chesterton and Clarence Darrow, which dealt with the story of creation as presented in Genesis.
It was a Sunday afternoon and the Temple was packed. At the conclusion of the debate everybody was asked to express his opinion as to the victor and slips of paper were passed around for that purpose. The award went directly to Chesterton. Darrow in comparison, seemed heavy, uninspired, slow of mind, while G.K.C. was joyous, sparkling and witty .... quite the Chesterton one had come to expect from his books. The affair was like a race between a lumbering sailing vessel and a modern steamer. Mrs. Frances Taylor Patterson also heard the Chesterton-Darrow debate, but went to the meeting with some misgivings because she was a trifle afraid that Chesterton's "gifts might seem somewhat literary in comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the famous trial lawyer. Instead, the trained scientific mind, the clear thinking, the lightning quickness in getting a point and hurling back an answer, turned out to belong to Chesterton. I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle-headed."
Although the terms of the debate were determined at the outset, Darrow either could not or would not stick to the definitions, but kept going off at illogical tangents and becoming choleric over points that were not in dispute. He seemed to have an idea that all religion was a matter of accepting Jonah's whale as a sort of luxury-liner. As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, and the latter kept sparring with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be fixed. Whereupon G.K.C. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, "Science you see is not infallible!" Whatever brilliance Darrow had in his own right, it was completely eclipsed. For all the luster that he shed, he might have been a remote star at high noon drowned by the bright incandescent are light of the sun. Chesterton had the audience with him from the start, and when it was over, everyone just sat there, not wishing to leave. They were loath to let the light die!
"Clarence Darrow wrote the author shortly before his death, "I was favorably impressed by, warmly attached to, G.K. Chesterton. I enjoyed my debates with him, and found him a man of culture and fine sensibilities. If he and I had lived where we could have become better acquainted, eventually we would have ceased to debate, I firmly believe."
THE FOLLOWING is excerpted from the February 4, 1931, issue of The Nation. Here Henry Hazlitt gives his impressions of the debate:
In the ballot that followed, the audience voted more than two to one for the defender of the faith, Mr. Chesterton of course, and if the vote was on the relative merits of the two debaters, and not on the question itself, it was surely a very just one. Mr. Chesterton's argument was like Mr. Chesterton, amiable, courteous, jolly; it was always clever, it was full of nice turns of expression, and altogether a very adroit exhibition by one of the world's ablest intellectual fencing masters and one of its most charming gentlemen.
Mr. Darrow's personality, by contrast, seemed rather colorless and certainly very dour. His attitude seemed almost surly; he slurred his words; the rise and fall of his voice was sometimes heavily melodramatic, and his argument was conducted on an amazingly low intellectual level.
Ostensibly the defender of science against Mr. Chesterton, he obviously knew much less about science than Mr. Chesterton did; when he essayed to answer his opponent on the views of Eddington and Jeans, it was patent that he did not have the remotest conception of what the new physics was all about. His victory over Mr. Byran at Dayton had been too cheap and easy; he remembered it not wisely but too well. His arguments are still the arguments of the village atheist of the Ingersoll period; at Mecca Temple he still seemed to be trying to shock and convince yokels.
Mr. Chesterton's deportment was irreproachable, but I am sure that he was secretly unhappy. He had been on the platform many times against George Bernard Shaw. This opponent could not extend his powers. He was not getting his exercise.²
Aiming for a reprise of his earlier success in scoring points off the buffoon William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes "monkey" trial.
Needless to say, the gatekeepers of knowledge have ensured the widest possible broadcast of Jennings's humiliation, while seeing to it that the sound spanking administered by GKC plunged bang down the memory hole.
I think there's something to this. Though Brideshead represents an organic development of Waugh's gift for personal caricature and social satire directed at institutionalised fraudulence and spiritual sterility, the decision to deal explicitly with Christian themes is new. What's wonderful about this novel is that in its writing Waugh does not abandon his earlier talents, but builds on them.
There's no doubting that the disillusionment Waugh suffered during the war -- ultimately developed in the Sword of Honour trilogy -- had much to do with the decision to transcend his earlier writings' superficial association with the Bright Young Things and to embark on a more considered examination of spiritual maturation. Being perhaps the greatest prose stylist of the 20th century, Waugh sacrificed nothing in artistic integrity as he embraced these new themes.
JF: Looking back now, what would you say is the greatest gift in terms of tranquillity or peace of mind or whatever, that your faith has given you?
EW: Well, it isn’t a sort of lucky dip that you get something out of, you know. It’s hard without using pietistic language to explain, but it’s simply admitting the existence of God or dependence on God or contact with God; the fact that everything in the world that’s good depends on Him. It isn’t a sort of added amenity of the Welfare State that you say, “Well, to all this, having made a good income, now I’ll have a little icing on top of religion,” it’s the essence of the whole thing.
JF: You say all that is good in the world comes from God; you don’t seem to find very much which is good in the modern world - you’ve seen it consistently as a decadent world, have you not?
EW: But there’s good in a decadent world.
JF: Yes, but your purpose in life is what? To castigate or to chronicle the decadent world? Do you see a purpose in your books - are you trying to scourge us into reform?
EW: Oh no, no, no, no, no. No, I’m just trying to write books.
=)
As I recall, the populist windbag Bryan (acting in some capacity for the prosecution, though not being a Tennesseean, I'm not sure what), having put himself forward as an expert on matters of literal biblical inerrancy on the question of evolution, allowed himself to be sworn as an expert witness, whereupon Darrow made great sport of exposing the bankruptcy of his fundamentalist understanding of scripture informed not by theology or sacred tradition but merely by a rigid literalism.
Notwithstanding Darrow's humiliation, Scopes was convicted and I believe was fined some trifling sum.
Thanks again for your contributions.
I like to use an example from the 1500s right before the revolt to illustrate something that I think Waugh would have understood.
What partly brought about the Protestant revolt was corruption. Churches provided high incomes, which led to the practice of simony. Nepotism was also common. Many bishops at that time neglected their spiritual duties and used their positions to gain as much wealth as possible.
One Pope named Rodrigo Borgia, who basically bought his office had his illegitimate children running the halls of the vatican. It was a disgrace.
Most people were loyal and faithful Catholics, and the church was free from heresy, but with the corruption and a Pope such as that it is easy to see why people could forget that Christ made a careful distinction between the powers he gave the head of His church and the morality of the Pope himself. It is one of the reasons why Christ chose the apostle who denied Him to be the first Pope: to show that Christ would protect the church even when the Pope acted wrongly. You can apply this same logic to the current situation with corrupt heirarchy.
Glad you enjoyed the post. =)
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