The English spring of Catholicism

The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones, by Adam Schwartz, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005. 431 pp.

THIS IS A REMARKABLE, indeed a staggering book. Each of the four sections, on G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones, taken alone, would have made it worthwhile. Taken together, they offer an illuminating analysis of the vigorous Catholic revival that took place in Britain during the early and middle years of the twentieth century--but which had largely failed by the end of it. This revival was literary and artistic in form, and the four exemplars selected for study were among the best writers of their generation. It was a revival largely led by converts, by men who had rejected the principles of the modernity that they had imbibed with their mothers' milk and who in adulthood attempted to build a "counter-modernity" under the sheltering mantle of the Catholic Church.

Other books have tackled this subject--notably Patrick Allitt's Catholic Converts (2000) and Joseph Pearce's Literary Converts (2000), both mentioned here. But these have largely been forced to sacrifice depth for breadth of coverage, since the field is a large one. Nearer, perhaps, is Ian Ker's The Catholic Literary Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, which appeared two years earlier than the book under review but is strangely not mentioned in the otherwise very extensive bibliography. Ker's book covers two of the same writers as Schwartz (Chesterton and Greene), but it also extends back to the period of John Henry Newman and Hopkins and is concerned less with the details of biography than with developing a literary judgment of the works themselves. Father Ker's starting point is Newman's assertion that "Catholic literature" is an impossibility within the English culture of his day, an assertion that Ker rejects and attempts to disprove.

Schwartz's book too, of course, begins with Newman. The title is a reference to the famous sermon of 1852, "The Second Spring," which celebrated with incandescent rhetoric the re-establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales after centuries of suppression, looking forward to an "English spring" of Catholic civilization in years to come. Schwartz takes that prophecy as having been fulfilled in the later nineteenth century, leading him to christen the subsequent twentieth-century revival a "third" spring. (By contrast I have always taken the longer view, for if the first springtime of Christianity in Britain lasted centuries, the second may also take some time to unfold. Certainly we have experienced no summertime as yet.)

Schwartz's introductory chapter makes sense of the four biographies he is about to present by explaining the context for this peculiarly modern reaction against modernity. The cultural prestige and influence of traditional or dogmatic Christianity had declined still further than in Newman's day. The force of secularism had become overwhelming. The certainties of Victorian rationalism began to unravel at the fin de siecle in decadence and spiritualism; they were laid finally to rest in the two World Wars. The distinguished converts found not merely refuge, but an armory, in the resurgent Italianate Catholicism of Cardinal Wiseman and the Thomistic revival promulgated by Pope Leo XIII. It seemed to them--and perhaps it was--the only intellectual and social force strong enough to challenge secularism.

As the book argues, these Roman converts rejected modernity so radically that they rejected even those modern ideologies that offered another kind of certainty: Communism and Fascism. They sought a more profound critique, and found it in a tradition that pre-dated modernity altogether. Yet the fact that this was a living tradition--and not merely living, but vigorous--meant that their retreat was a strategic withdrawal for the purpose not of escaping but ultimately of transforming modern civilization. The Catholic Church contained the power to create culture, the power of continual renaissance. The converts functioned--at times self-consciously--not just as critics but as prophets. And though their Anglican fellow-travellers found enough of the tradition left still in the Church of England to stand against modernity without changing their allegiance, the Roman converts felt that "the Anglican church was finding it increasingly difficult to establish definitive doctrines at a time when they considered such certainty imperative." Schwartz adds: "Radical, corporate resistance to secularising mores was thus a constituent element of Roman Catholic identity in the century's young years, but was not a necessary facet of the Anglican outlook."

Chesterton is the first of the four authors to be examined in detail, and as an account of his trajectory from Unitarian-ism and Spiritualism to Anglicanism and finally to the Roman Catholic Church, it could hardly be bettered. Schwartz rightly lays more emphasis than is usual upon Chesterton's early crisis at the Slade, where he came close to madness (the madness of his age), and on his novel The Man Who Was Thursday, which he interprets as a disguised description and working-out of that crisis. It is a theory that accords well enough with the evidence, and does much to deepen our appreciation of that spirituality of gratitude and confident rejection of pantheism that mark the mature Chesterton.