When The League was started a few months ago, I included in the blog masthead the subtitle, "A raucous celebration of authentic Catholic culture".
Now, because your humble blogmaster has been so cruelly hampered by the demands of real life, we have not been so raucous yet as I hope for us to be. But today I'm pondering more exactly what it was I meant by the words "authentic Catholic culture".
I am an adult convert, of very limited learning, and so my progress toward an authentic Catholic culture in my own life has been a kind of lurching forward in fits and starts. I had absolutely no template to follow from friends or family, and living as I do in the Bible Belt, there is little of Catholic cultural influence to be detected. In that sense, I envy both cradle Catholics and those who live in areas of the country where there is a more visible Catholic history.
When I started reading Chesterton, several years ago, I began to get the sense of what a living Catholic culture might look like, or ought to look like. Not that it would be easy to put into a few words.
I mention all this because it might appear to the casual visitor that my idea of Authentic Catholic Culture™ is simply a kind of idealized fantasy of British culture a century ago, with a Christian gloss. That might be somewhat excusable, given that the Four Patrons of The League are all British writers from the last century... but it would be incorrect.
Here are some reasons why the Four Patrons - Tolkien, Lewis, Belloc and Chesterton - are so pivotal, I think;
For one thing, I am an American, and our heritage in the United States is English to a large degree, so it's natural that we would find familiar territory in the writing of the Big Four. English is our native tongue (as much it may pain the English to be reminded of that) and these are some of the most affective and influential Christian writers who ever communicated in the English language. Not that you can't find many better or more important writers in English, or more holy Christians to study. These Christian men were not just at home in the English tongue, but knew how to wring the most out of it in ways that might be opaque to those not born to the language. Many modern readers in English might find Chesterton nearly opaque, anyway, as our culture and his grow further apart.
In addition, because of their relative position in history and their classical learning, the Big Four were in a sort of unique position to witness the great cultural shift that occurred from the Medieval world to the Modern world, and to describe with great clarity how the fruit of modernism - existential despair, hubris, the industrial age - ripened and then began to rot. There was, in England at the end of the nineteenth century, still a great deal of the Old World - of Medieval Christendom - preserved in the culture. This is not true of the United States, which was founded on Enlightenment principles and which breathed the very air of the Reformation and modernism. Quite literally, the New World.
Chesterton, in particular, saw this great upheaval - this slow-motion tidal wave - and perceived its true nature, narrating the changes with astonishing clarity. The New World was not only antagonistic to Christianity, but to the organic paganism that Christianity had largely supplanted and in fact, to anything that had up until that time been conceived of as human. Modernism is simply opposed to humanity by any previously and commonly accepted definition of the word.
Tolkien translated this vision into a monumental work of artistic imagination that brought these truths to an audience that might never otherwise have picked up a book of theology or religion.
The plain-spoken Lewis made the observations and arguments lucid and accessible to a wider scope of modern readers. Chesterton is simply brilliant, and anyone willing to read him enough to grow familiar with his style will be rewarded many times over for their work, but Lewis expounded these truths in everyday language, for which many people are grateful. Not everyone gets Chesterton's poetic sensibility, Belloc's rhetorical fire, or Tolkien's fantastic vision. If not for Lewis, I might never have read Chesterton. He served as a gateway to all the rest (though I had read The Hobbit before I read anything by Lewis. I was familiar with LOTR, but not very aware of its Christian themes). As a knuckle-headed twenty-something, Chesterton would have been pretty deep wading.
By virtue of their place and time - their particular vantage point of culture, language and history - the Four Patrons are able to give modern readers - most especially native English speaking Westerners - a true account of the arc of history, especially as it concerns the root causes of the accelerating decay of Western civilization.
Though an authentic Catholic culture could be found in any sort of society (it favors peasant culture, I think), we in the modern West will naturally be more concerned about what an authentic Western Catholic culture should look like. It's no good me trying to be an authentically African Catholic or Chinese Catholic. Their own ideas of Authentic Catholic Culture will be for them to work out. It would be fascinating to sit down and winnow out the common grains, though.
Finally, Chesterton/Belloc and Lewis/Tolkien are two great examples of the kind of male friendship which encompasses all that is essentially and vitally human, from the ground up, celebrating all the goodness of the Creator and His created world, baptizing every aspect of human endeavour and relationship in the the light of the Incarnation, and resurrecting every nobly exuberant impulse of genuine pagan gratitude.
Between our astringent Puritan religious roots and our bleak, post-modern industrial culture, we could use a bracing blast of baptised, resurrected and purified Pagan joy;
'Tho times be hard and fortunes tough,
The ways be foul and the weather rough;
We are of stout south country stock
Who cannot have strong ale enough
Hilaire Belloc - from Sussex Drinking Song
In fact, though we commonly hear how Catholicism is the true flowering or living fulfillment of the Old Testament Jewish faith, it is just as much the living fulfillment and effluorescence of all that was good and true in every kind of honest and ancient paganism. What's tragically funny is that what is now called the New Paganism turns out to be either the lifeless embalming of, or else a parody of, the more noble Old Paganism. The real vitality of the old Paganism is preserved now only within the Church.
That's confirmed in Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, somewhere, I'm sure of it. I'll look it up.
Recent Comments