Seen and Unseen: When converts cracked open the culture’s polished surface

My latest article for Seen and Unseen is 'When converts cracked open the culture’s polished surface' in which I explore how faith’s outsiders disrupted the scene with unexpected force:

'Converts by Melanie McDonagh has been described a ‘thought-provoking examination of the literary stars who became Catholic’ in the twentieth century. Kathryn Hughes, in her review of the book, notes that: ‘In the five decades between 1910 and 1960, more than half a million people in England and Wales became Catholics. Among them were a clutch of literary stars: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and Graham Greene.’ But there were also a whole host of other poets, artists and public intellectuals who are less-well known to us today, although, perhaps, no less interesting.

The book offers 16 biographical sketches interspersed with analysis of some of the reasons for this phenomenon, including the impact of earlier converts such as John Henry Newman, migration, the influence of prominent Catholic clerics, and the traumas caused by two World Wars. In his review, Dan Hitchens suggests that Converts, ‘in its cheerfully unsentimental way’, demonstrates ‘not only why the floodgates [of conversions] opened for a few decades, but also why the stream has never quite dried up’.'

For more on the period explored by this article see the following:

• There were giants in those days (1)
• There were giants in those days (2)
• There were Giants in those days (3)
• There were giants in those days (4)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (1)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (2)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (3)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (4)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (5)
• The poetry of connection
• Debate: Has Fiction Lost It's Faith?
• Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction
• Endo & Scorsese: Approaching Silence
• Contemporary Fiction and Christianity
• Debate: Has Fiction Lost It's Faith? (2)
• Jack Clemo: The Invading Gospel
• Dealing with faith and with secularism is difficult but necessary now
• The poet’s eloquently passionate struggle at the junction of doubt and devotion
• Christian Arts renaissance: Major or minor?
• T.S. Eliot: Christianity, fragmentation and reconciliation
• Jesus Novels & Films: The Greatest Story Ever Told
• Acts of the Assassins and Jesus Novels
• Czeslaw Milosz, Oscar Milosz and Simone Weil
• Blogs: cryingforavision & Stride magazine
• Tasos Leviaditis: The Blind Man with the Lamp
• Religious concerns in Greek poetry
• Thomas Merton and Latin American poets
• American Catholic poets & writers
• Connections of Sister Corita Kent and Norman Nicholson
• Ernesto Cardenal RIP
• Czeslaw Milosz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Oskar Milosz, and Aleksander Wat
• Faith, Mystery & Poetry
• Elizabeth Jennings & David Gascoyne: Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems
• Roots of the Catholic Literary Revival
• 5 - Gauguin and Bernard
• 6 - Vincent Van Gogh
• 7 - Maurice Denis
• 8 - Symbolism II
• 9 - Jacques Maritain
• 10 - Albert Gleizes
• 11 - Sérusier, Severini and Gleizes
• Moreau, Rouault and Chagall in Paris
• Cocteau Chapel: Notre Dame de Jerusalem
• Matisse Chapel: Chapelle du Rosaire Vence
• Musée National Marc Chagall
• Notre Dame de France and the murals of Jean Cocteau

See also 'Art and Faith: Decades of Engagement: Introduction, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

My first article for Seen and Unseen was 'Life is more important than art' which reviews the themes of recent art exhibitions that tackle life’s big questions and the roles creators take.

My second article 'Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey' explores inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia for Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, which is an atlas of capacious faith.

My third article was an interview with musician and priest Rev Simpkins in which we discussed how music is an expression of humanity and his faith.

My fourth article was a guide to the Christmas season’s art, past and present. Traditionally at this time of year “great art comes tumbling through your letterbox” so, in this article, I explore the historic and contemporary art of Christmas.

My fifth article was 'Finding the human amid the wreckage of migration'. In this article I interviewed Shezad Dawood about his multimedia Leviathan exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral where personal objects recovered from ocean depths tell a story of modern and ancient migrations.

My sixth article was 'The visionary artists finding heaven down here' in which I explored a tradition of visionary artists whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds.

My seventh article was 'How the incomer’s eye sees identity' in which I explain how curating an exhibition for Ben Uri Online gave me the chance to highlight synergies between ancient texts and current issues.

My eighth article was 'Infernal rebellion and the questions it asks' in which I interview the author Nicholas Papadopulos about his book The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel.

My ninth article was 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' in which I review Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death and explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose.

My 10th article was 'Theresa Lola's poetical hope' about the death-haunted yet lyrical, joyful and moving poet for a new generation.

My 11th article was 'How to look at our world: Aaron Rosen interview', exploring themes from Rosen's book 'What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World'.

My 12th article was 'Blake, imagination and the insight of God', exploring a new exhibition - 'William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum - which focuses on seekers of spiritual regeneration and national revival.

My 13th article 'Matthew Krishanu: painting childhood' was an interview with Matthew Krishanu on his exhibition 'The Bough Breaks' at Camden Art Centre.

My 14th article was entitled 'Art makes life worth living' and explored why society, and churches, need the Arts.

My 15th article was entitled 'The collective effervescence of sport's congregation' and explored some of the ways in which sport and religion have been intimately entwined throughout history

My 16th article was entitled 'Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d' and reviewed the ways in which artist Richard Kenton Webb is conversing with the blind poet in his former home (Milton's Cottage, Chalfont St Giles).

My 17th article was entitled 'Controversial art: how can the critic love their neighbour?'. It makes suggestions of what to do when confronted with contentious culture.

My 18th article was an interview entitled 'Art, AI and apocalypse: Michael Takeo Magruder addresses our fears and questions'. In the interview the digital artist talks about the possibilities and challenges of artificial intelligence.

My 19th article was entitled 'Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us'. In the article I highlight alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

My 20th article was entitled 'Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs'. In the article I highlight folk musicians capturing both the barbaric and the beautiful in the hymn Amazing Grace and Christianity's entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade more generally.

My 21st article was entitled 'James MacMillan’s music of tranquility and discord'. In the article I noted that the composer’s music contends both the secular and sacred.

My 22nd article was a book review on Nobody's Empire by Stuart Murdoch. 'Nobody's Empire: A Novel is the fictionalised account of how ... Murdoch, lead singer of indie band Belle and Sebastian, transfigured his experience of Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) through faith and music.'

My 23rd article was entitled 'Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion'. The article explores how popular music conjures sacred space.

My 24th article was an interview with Alastair Gordon on the artist’s attention which explores why the overlooked and everyday capture the creative gaze.

My 25th article was about Stanley Spencer’s seen and unseen world and the artist’s child-like sense of wonder as he saw heaven everywhere.

My 26th article was entitled 'The biblical undercurrent that the Bob Dylan biopics missed' and in it I argue that the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey.

My 27th article was entitled 'Heading Home: a pilgrimage that breaks out beauty along the way' and focuses on a film called 'Heading Home' which explores how we can learn a new language together as we travel.

My 28th article was entitled 'Annie Caldwell: “My family is my band”' and showcased a force of nature voice that comes from the soul.

My 29th article was entitled 'Why sculpt the face of Christ?' and explored how, in Nic Fiddian Green’s work, we feel pain, strength, fear and wisdom.

My 30th article was entitled 'How Mumford and friends explore life's instability' and explored how Mumford and Sons, together with similar bands, commune on fallibility, fear, grace, and love.

My 31st article was entitled 'The late Pope Francis was right – Antoni Gaudi truly was God’s architect' and explored how sanctity can indeed be found amongst scaffolding, as Gaudi’s Barcelona beauties amply demonstrate.

My 32nd article was entitled 'This gallery refresh adds drama to the story of art' and explored how rehanging the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery revives the emotion of great art.

My 33rd article was an interview with Jonathan A. Anderson about the themes of his latest book 'The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art'.

My 34th article was an interview with 'Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak'.

My 35th article was a profile of New York's expressionist devotional artist, 'Genesis Tramaine: the painter whose faces catch the spirit'.

My 36th article was a concert review of Natalie Bergman at Union Chapel - a soul-soaked set turned personal tragedy into communal celebration.

My 37th article was based on the exhibition series 'Can We Stop Killing Each Other?' at the Sainsbury Centre. In it I explore how art, theology, and moral imagination confront our oldest instinct.

My 38th article article was 'The dot and the dash: modern art’s quiet search for deeper meaning' in which I argue that Neo-Impressionism meets mysticism in a quietly radical exhibition at the National Gallery.

My 39th article was 'From Klee to Klein, Wenders to Botticelli: angels unveiled' in which I explore how, across war, wonder and nativity, artists show angels bridging earth and heaven.

My 40th article was 'When Henry Moore’s Madonna shocked Northampton' in which I explore how a modernist mother and child stirred outrage, then lasting wonder.

My 41st article was 'Turner and Constable: storms, salvation and the sublime' in which I discussed how Tate Britain reveals how rival visions shaped art and spirit.

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John Gray - Ad Matrem: I

Decadent Catholicism and the postwar Catholic revival

Stephen Schloesser’s Jazz Age Catholicism shows how a postwar generation of Catholics refashioned traditional notions of sacramentalism in modern language and imagery.

Following the Great War’s devastation, innovative movements in France offered competing visions of a revitalized national body and a new world order. One of these was the postwar Catholic revival or renouveau catholique. Since the church had historically been the dominant religious force in France, its turn of the century separation from the state was especially bitter. For many Catholics, the 1914–18 sacrifices made on the Republic’s behalf necessitated its postwar ‘re-Christianization.’ However, in their attempt to reconcile Catholicism with culture, revivalists needed to abandon old oppositions and adapt religion’s rigging to the prevailing winds of modernity.

Stephen Schloesser’s Jazz Age Catholicism shows how a postwar generation of Catholics refashioned traditional notions of sacramentalism in modern language and imagery. Jacques Maritain’s philosophy, Georges Rouault’s visual art, Georges Bernanos’s fiction, and Charles Tournemire’s music all reclothed ancient tropes in new fashions. By the late 1920s, the renouveau catholique had successfully positioned Catholic intellectual and cultural discourse at the very centre of elite French life. Its synthesis of Catholicism and culture would define the religiosity of many throughout Western Europe and the Americas into the 1960s.

Schloesser begins  with a prologue examining the roots of the postwar renouveau in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Decadents, Symbolists, and others rebelled against the dominant secular positivist ideology of republican France and its artistic counterpart, the realist insistence on vraisemblance and exact, “scientific” depictions of reality.

Romantic writers had found in Christianity a poetic cult of the imagination, an assertion of the spiritual quality of beauty in an age of vulgar materialism. The decadents, a diverse movement of writers, were the climax and exhaustion of this romantic tradition. In their art, they enacted the romance of faith as a protest against the dreariness of modern life. In Decadence and Catholicism, Ellis Hanson teases out two strands--eroticism and aestheticism--that rendered the decadent interest in Catholicism extraordinary. More than any other literary movement, the decadents explored the powerful historical relationship between homoeroticism and Roman Catholicism. Why, throughout history, have so many homosexuals been attracted to Catholic institutions that vociferously condemn homosexuality? This perplexing question is pursued in this elegant and innovative book.

Late-nineteenth-century aesthetes found in the Church a peculiar language that gave them a means of artistic and sexual expression. The brilliant cast of characters that parades through this book includes Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Paul Verlaine. Art for these writers was a mystical and erotic experience. In decadent Catholicism we can glimpse the beginnings of a postmodern valorization of perversity and performativity. Catholicism offered both the hysterical symptom and the last hope for paganism amid the dullness of Victorian puritanism and bourgeois materialism.

Martin Lockerd's Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism traces the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation. 

His book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst.

Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

See also my post on the 'Roots of the Catholic Literary Revival' and my series on 'Art and faith: Decades of engagement'.

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HolyName - Fall On Your Knees.

Thomism, Creativity and the Arts: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain

I recently attended Thomism, Creativity and the Arts: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, a symposium on artistry, religion and culture in the modern world. The symposium drew together philosophers, theologians, musicians, poets, liturgists and other artists, to converse around the theme of human creativity. The conference included plenary talks, panel discussions, poetry reading, music and film, and gathered a rich and diverse range of presenters from across the UK and USA, with the final keynote talk given by Sir James MacMillan, renowned Scottish composer and conductor. I particularly appreciated input on Raïssa Maritain's journal and poetry, as well as the opportunity to also discover the poetry of James Matthew Wilson.

The Maritains remain at the heart of a dialogue around the theme of human creativity, being uniquely well-situated to confront the problems, principles and complexities of artistry in the modern era – illuminated by the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas. Jacques Maritain’s belief in the artist’s mission to ‘shelter the prayer, instruct the intelligence, and rejoice the eyes and the soul,’ provides an inspiring mandate to investigate art-making in the present age, in all its depth and variety. 

What was frustrating about this symposium was a denigrating and dismissive attitude on the part of some in the audience towards modern and contemporary art on the basis that such art was not beautiful and had no interest in beauty. Such attitudes which, in this context seek to draw on some of Maritain's writings about transcendentals, generally look primarily to a past "golden age" in their definition of beauty and therefore struggle to deal adequately with the paradox that the Suffering Servant, who had "no beauty that we should desire him" accomplished the most beautiful act through the most horrific torture. Modern and contemporary art often addresses this paradox with great depth and insight in ways that accord with Maritain's writings, particularly in Art and Scholasticism. For a different take on beauty and transcendentals see here.

What is also frustrating about this denigratory attitude towards modern and contemporary art is that it was not held by the Maritain's themselves. They not only wrote about contemporary art but also deliberately met and dialogued with a very wide range of contemporary artists, drawing some into Thomistic study circles and influencing, while also being influenced by, their work. 

Jean-Luc Barré writes in Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven of how poets, painters and musicians began gravitating around the Maritains, “most of whom they met in the company of Léon Bloy.” This journey of significant influence began for the Maritain’s with Bloy. The reading of his novel Le Femme pauvre led on to their meeting with the man himself. A period of examination by the Maritains of “the life, the doctrines, and the sources of Catholicism” ensued before, on 5th April 1906, “the couple, at the end of “long conversations” confided to Bloy their desire to become Catholics.” The artist Georges Rouault, who they also came to know, made a similar journey to that of the Maritains, first reading Le Femme pauvre before meeting Bloy. Barré writes that Rouault “seems to have come to the home of this prophet of malediction seeking for other reasons, and always more painful ones, to question himself and to set out towards the unknown.”

William Dryness writes in Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation that, “Jacques and Raïssa Maritain met Rouault for the first time in November of 1905, and Raïssa recalls evenings when she and her husband would sit and listen to Rouault and Bloy discuss “every important question about art.”” Rouault was, for the Maritains, “the first revelation of a truly great painter” and it was in him that they perceived “the nature of art, its imperious necessities, its antinomies and the conflict of very real demands, sometimes tragic, which made up perhaps the theatre of the artist’s mind.”

Following their discovery of Georges Rouault was, “then of Pierre van der Meer de Valcheren, a Dutch novelist who was presented to them in 1911, two days after his own conversion … Then, during the war, they met the young seventeen-year-old composer, Georges Auric, soon a frequent visitor at Versailles …”

Barré goes on to describe how these friendships led to the formation of Thomistic study circles at the Maritain’s home in Meuden “where close friends of the couple came together – Abbé Lallement, Roland Dalbiez, Doctor Pichet, Noële Denis, the eldest daughter of the painter Maurice Denis, Vitia Rosenblum, the brother-in-law of Stanislas Fumet.” Barré continues, “The year 1921 would see the first circle grow larger: a Romanian prince converted to Catholicism, Vladimir Ghika, a young orientalist eager to bring together the Muslim and Christian worlds, Louis Massignon, the philosopher Henri Gouhier, the writer Henri Ghéon, the future Abbé Altermann, among others, joined the study group.

In the 1930s, Marc Chagall became part of the circle around the Maritain's. The Chagalls were regular attendants at the Maritain's "weekly Sunday gathering in Meuden, where the agenda was how to return secular France to spiritual awareness." The Maritains "made their home ... a centre of spiritual enlightenment for Paris's disillusioned writers and artists such as Rouault and Max Jacob." "Thanks to them, many converted or rediscovered their Catholic origins, most noisily Jean Cocteau."

In The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer note that: “the French poet, writer, and surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau converted under the influence of Maritain. For the painters Gino Severini, a pioneer of Futurism, and Otto Van Rees, one of the first Dadaists-both converts - Maritain played the role of spiritual counselor. And when the promoter of abstract art Michel Seuphor embraced Catholic faith in the 1930s, he, too, had extensive contact with Maritain. For all of them, the dictum of the Irish poet Brian Coffey, once a doctoral student under Maritain, applied: modern art needs a Thomist conceptual framework.”

The Maritain's initial approach, Barré writes,“to [Rouault] this “true and great artist” in his imperious confrontation with the first demands of the creative act … then took form and developed into a reflection which ended with the publication in 1920 of Art et Scolastique.” Art and Scholasticism:

“set itself to demonstrate the autonomy of the creative act, the particular responsibility that falls to artists. Directed to beauty as to its very own absolute … art has “an end and a set of rules and values, which are not those of men, but of the work of art to be produced.” … Nor does the nature of art consist in imitating the real, but rather in “composing or constructing” by delving into the “immense treasure of created things, from sensible nature as from the world of souls.” In this way the creator becomes “an associate of God in the making of beautiful works.” … In praise of pure art, Art et Scolastique can be read as the manifesto of a new classicism, founded on “the simplicity and purity of means,” aspiring to nothing more than the veracity of the work itself. In modern art Maritain disclosed the first steps of search in this direction and noticed in cubism “the infancy, still toddling and screaming, of an art that is once again pure.” … it contained a kind of call, inviting philosophers and artists to enter into a “conversation” that would lead to an escape from “the immense intellectual disarray inherited from the nineteenth century.””

As Barré notes the book “was closer to Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie than to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas” and, as a result, in the 1920s and 1930s, Maritain’s cultural criticism (Antimodern, 1922, Religion et Culture, 1930) and his reflections on aesthetics in Art and Scholasticism enjoyed wide interest in artistic and intellectual circles.

One example of this response can be found in Gino Severini’s The Life of a Painter. Severini writes of his encounter with Maritain as marking an important point in his life, in part because Maritain loaned him money to set up his own art school. During his initial meeting with Maritain it was clear to him that he was being submitted to a thorough examination on the part of those present (which included Ghéon, as well as the Maritains) and that his every word was significant to them. As he left, Maritain put a book into his hands, “saying: “Take a look at it when you have the time.”” On the electric train back to Paris, Severini discovered that he had been given a first edition of Art and Scholasticism and “was amazed at the extent to which it agreed with the most modern goals, and at the profound sense of freedom, from what supreme heights of intelligence, the author could observe, put in order, and clarify, everything related to art.”

Severini continues: “… what a great sense of joy I felt upon discovering, in Maritain, the confirmation of certain thought patterns, certain ways of clarifying these to myself and to others, and, what I considered most important, of discovering a friendship and human comprehension of the most profound sort. Later the formidable significance of Art et Scolastique became clear to everyone, as did the caliber of the author, the transparency and clarity of whose soul recalls the purest of rock crystals.”

Severini reconverted to Catholicism in the 1920s. He claims that his thinking on this decision began prior to the conversions of the poets Jean Cocteau and Pierre Reverdy and before meetings with Maurice Denis and Jacques Maritain. He highlights the writings of the Benedictine Desideratus Lenz as an influence of the direction of his work but not his conversion. The most significant influence on his decision seems to have been the Abbé Sarraute who Severini met at Denis' home and who conducted the Severini's marriage ceremony.

These artists and other French-speaking ecclesiastics were in touch with and inspired by the writings of Jacques Maritain and the practice of Maurice Denis. "Maritain played a part in the next stage of Severini's career by suggesting that the Swiss painter Alexandre Cingria visit Severini and encourage him to enter a competition for the decoration of a Church in the Fribourg Canton of Switzerland. Severini did so, won the competition and went on to work on several Swiss churches over the latter period of his career. So much so, that Denis spoke of him as "the most famous decorator of Swiss churches."

Denis first worked with some of these artists when he was commissioned to work on the renovation of Notre-Dame Geneva and also became artistic director for the construction of Saint-Paul Grange-Canal, also in Geneva. Together they dreamed of "creating a movement of rebirth of religious art in France and in all Catholic countries." This ambition resulted in 1919 in the formation by Cingria of The Groupe de Saint-Luc et Saint-Maurice in Switzerland and also of the Ateliers d'Art Sacré by Denis and Georges Desvallieres in Paris.The Groupe de Saint-Luc et Saint-Maurice which he founded, built, restored and decorated more than 70 churches in Switzerland during the interwar years.

Severini writes that Jean Cocteau was chief among the “somewhat atheist poets” that Maritain transformed into Christian artists but notes too that this period “was all too brief.” Similarly, Rowan Williams considers in Grace and Necessity that “Maritain’s relations with Cocteau … constituted an important if inconclusive episode in the lives of both.”

Although Cocteau’s subsequent life seemed, from the perspective of Maritain, to be “going deeper “into the caves of death” and to be dealing with the “powers of darkness”, the influence that Maritain and Catholicism had had on Cocteau was not altogether lost. Something of this can be sensed in the church decorations that Cocteau undertook.

In 1960 he painted murals in one of the chapels of Notre Dame de France, London. According to eye witnesses, he always began by lighting a candle before the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes and spoke to his characters while he worked on the mural. For instance, he is reported as telling the virgin of the Annunciation, “O you, most beautiful of women, loveliest of God’s creatures, you were the best loved. So I want you to be my best piece of work too… I am drawing you with light strokes… You are the yet unfinished work of Grace.” Cocteau is buried at the chapel of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples, where he had also painted decorations. Before his death, he had also been making sketches to paint a chapel in Frejus which was actually decorated, after his death, by the gardener that Cocteau had trained as an artist shortly before he died.

Jacques and Raïssa Maritain moved to Meudon in 1924, where Jacques started his famous Thomistic Study Circles. Peter A. Redpath writes, in a review of The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain, that: 
‘Their fifteen years there were tumultuous. Maritain attempted to rival the negative literary influence of André Gide in French culture and came into public conflict with Jean Cocteau. Among the things that [Ralph] McInerny tells us caused conflict among Gide, Cocteau, and Maritain was Gide’s celebration of homosexuality in the book Corydon, and Cocteau’s flamboyant lifestyle as a homosexual drug addict and his overall character as “an enfant terrible of artistic innovation”.’

One result of this period was Art and Faith, the book which Maritain published in 1926 as a treasury of insights on the broad and interrelated topics of art and faith revealed in the correspondence of letters between he and Cocteau. Maritain wrote, ‘We merely claim that these two can love each other and remain free.’ Cocteau went on much later in his life to decorate several churches and chapels, including the chapel of Saint-Blaise des Simples near his home in Milly-la-Fôret where he was buried amidst the murals he had prepared for this purpose himself. His self chosen epitaph was 'Je reste avec vous' or 'I remain with you'.

His chapel murals, including those at Notre Dame de France in London, are, perhaps, a late flowering of the French Catholic Revival within which Maritain had played such a key role. These murals, newly restored and protected behind a glass screen, are unique examples of the art of the French Catholic Revival within the UK.

 
Robert Fallon has also written about this same connection in an essay entitled Composing Subjectivity which explores Maritain 's poetic knowledge in Igor Stravinsky and Messiaen:

'Maritain and Stravinsky first met after a concert on 10 June 1926, at the time that Stravinsky was writing his first work with a religious text, a Pater Noster for four-part chorus. That year, Cocteau published his Lettre a Jacques Maritain and Maritain his Reponse a Jean Cocteau; both volumes are dedicated to Stravinsky. By the end of April 1927, Stravinsky had returned to the Orthodox faith that he had abandoned in his youth. He later wrote that "Jacques Maritain may have exercised an influence on me at this time [ 1926]. "Though Stravinsky denied that Maritain played a role in his conversion, his assistant Robert Craft says that Maritain did exert some influence on his return to the Church. In May 1927, Stravinsky's opera oratorio Oedipus Rex, a collaboration with Cocteau, premiered in Paris. 

Following Oedipus Rex, however, Stravinsky's attitude toward Maritain became ambivalent. In 1928, he wrote to one of his patrons, Victoria Ocampo, that Maritain's entourage nauseated him. In another letter he describes Maritain as: 

"one of those people of superior intelligence who are lacking in humanity, and if Maritain himself does not deserve this judgment, certainly it applies to a great deal of his work.

Maritain is still attached to the nihilism of his youth, and this can be sensed in all of his books, despite the great value of his work in Christian and Thomist thought."

Stravinsky's famous Norton Lectures of 1941, delivered at Harvard University and later published as Poetique musicale, refer several times to Maritain and borrow his neo-Thomistic definition of a composer as a medieval artisan who orders and disciplines his craft. The book's considerable debt to Maritain includes quotations from the very same passages from Baudelaire, Poussin, Bellay, and Montaigne that Maritain had used in Art et Scholastique two decades earlier ...

Unlike Stravinsky, Messiaen never met Maritain, though by his own account he did read one book (probably Art et Scholastique) by him in 1927. He said it was "a book of high philosophy that seemed very difficult to me," but admitted having benefited from it. Maritain's influence is suggested in Messiaen's views on artistic imitation, his skeptical attitude toward science, his apparent interest in Emmanuel Mounier's personalist movement, and his rhetorical use of terms such as "poetic intuition."

Among Messiaen's early works, La Nativite du Seigneur (1935) most strongly suggests Maritain's influence in its Thomistic theme of truth. Like Oedipus Rex, La Nativite opens a window onto Messiaen's epistemology. Comprised of nine movements for solo organ lasting twice as long as any composition he had yet written, La Nativite quickly entered the organist's repertoire and remained one of his favorite works. Though it bears no dedication, Messiaen later said it was written in homage to his teacher Paul Dukas.'

Fallon also notes that 'Olivier Messiaen's father, Pierre Messiaen, did know Maritain, whose books quote English Romantic poetry in the father's translations.'

Stephen Schloesser's 'Jazz Age Catholicism offers an original, insightful, and penetrating analysis of an important moment in the cultural history of modern France. It argues that pervasive collective bereavement in the aftermath of World War I prompted a profound cultural shift in elite French society that made Catholicism—dismissed only a few years earlier as retrograde, essentially out of step with the modern world, and archaic—a vibrant and consoling cultural option for many of France's most innovative and creative minds ... prominent French Catholic thinkers and artists embraced modernity not by wholesale rejection of the past but by effecting a synthesis of medieval and modern philosophical principles and artistic forms. At the forefront of this experiment in Catholic renewal and redefinition were Jacques Maritain, Georges Bernanos, Georges Rouault, and Charles Tournemire. Refusing to abandon the philosophic and aesthetic traditions of the Catholic past—whether Scholasticism in philosophy (in the case of Maritain) or Gregorian chant in music (as was Tournemire's striking accomplishment)—each of Schloesser's subjects "formulat[ed] traditional Catholic ideas in modernist guise" ...

Schloesser's ... willingness to think about how sexual modernity (epitomized in the 1920's by homosexuality) often coincided with a deep respect for cultural order—most evident in Jean Cocteau's abiding friendship with, and respect for, Jacques and Raissa Maritain—offers us a new way to understand the modernist initiatives of inter-war Catholicism: "la main tendue,"once understood only as the outstretched hand that hoped to bring Catholics and Communists together, emerges here as another form of cultural rapprochement, equally unexpected by the standards of the pre-war era, by which Catholics and homosexuals could find common ground.

Schloesser also notes that, 'Maritain's extended argument in Art and Schlasticism made two principal points: first, religion and the avant-garde are eminently compatible as they meet in the artistic and aesthetic arenas; second, there is no particularly "religious" form of art.' As a result, 'Maritain gave a Catholic artist licence to jettison received external forms and set out on an avant-garde path. One thing alone mattered: the eternal formal principle that radiated clarity ... from within and gave unity and meaning to the organic whole.'

The failure of Maritain's relationship with Cocteau came at a time in which more than one of those whose conversions he had won wandered away from their regained faith and in which he became suspect in the eyes of Catholics in general. He questioned whether he had been wrong and mistaken to bother himself with all these literary people. Reflecting these new problems confronting him, Barré writes that new and different friendships formed around him with his network becoming “more open to philosophers, professors, French and foreign religious.”

Maritain’s greatest influence on an artist was perhaps not on one of those that was a part of his immediate circle. Art and Scholasticism was important, as Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel write in The Maker Unmade, to the thinking in Eric Gill’s establishments at Ditchling, Capel-y-ffin and Pigotts as well as to David Jones’s thinking about art. 

Rowan Williams writes in Grace and Necessity that: “Jones’ exposure to Maritain came through his participation in Gill’s project. After demobilization in 1919, Jones studied first at the Westminster School of Art, where it appears that a catholic friend introduced him to Fr. John O’Connor. He became a Roman Catholic in 1921 and, prompted by O’Connor, joined Gill at Ditchling later that year … Thus, he was alongside Gill and Gill’s colleagues … during the crucial period during which they were all reading Maritain; and it is very clear that for Jones … this made sense of what he had assimilated at the Westminster School of Art.”

As Rene Hague later wrote, ‘the Post-Impressionist attitude to the arts fitted in very well with Maritain’ and ‘Thomism’. Miles and Shiel write that: “The philosophy of Maritain explored two related questions that are of importance for David Jones: signification and epiphany. By rigorous habit, the artist would not only be able to reveal this or that object under the form of paint but also make an epiphany, make the universal shine out from the particular. Thus, what is re-presented also becomes a sign of something else and if that something else is significant of something divine, then the art can claim to have a sacred character or function, a sacramental vitality.”

Similarly, Williams argues that what preoccupies Jones from the beginning is “precisely what so concerns Maritain, the showing of the excess that pervades appearances.” As his work develops, Jones comes to see that you paint ‘excess’ by: “the delicate superimposing of nets of visual material in a way that teases constantly by simultaneously refusing a third dimension and insisting that there is no way of reading the one surface at once. As in the Byzantine icon, visual depth gives way to the time taken to ‘read’ a surface: you cannot construct a single consistent illusion of depth as you look, and so you are obliged to trace and re-trace the intersecting linear patterns.”

Williams notes that in several respects Jones takes Maritain a stage further. Firstly, in that “the half-apprehended consonances of impressions out of which an artwork grows has to be realized in the process of actually creating significant forms which, in the process of their embodiment, in stone, words, or pigment, uncover other resonances, so that what finally emerges is more than just a setting down of what was first grasped.”

Secondly, in “the way in which a life may become a significant form – as, decisively and uniquely; in the life of Christ.” He: “illustrates a point Maritain does not quite get to. Jones implies that the life of ‘prudence’, a life lived in a consciously moral context, however exactly understood, is itself an act of gratuitous sign-making; moral behavior is the construction of a life that can be ‘read’, that reveals something in the world and uncovers mystery.”

Both are exemplified by Jones’ life and practice as he turns away “from one mode of representation in which he excelled in order to include more and more of the interwoven simultaneous lines of signification and allusion” in “an attempt to embody a more radical love in what he produces, a love that attends to all the boundary-crossing echoes that characterize the real, which is also the good.”

In doing so, he embodies in his art Maritain’s view that “the joy or delight of a work of art is in proportion to its powers of signification”: “the more there is of knowledge, or of things presented to the understanding, the vaster will be the possibility of joy; this is why Art, in so far as ordered to Beauty, does not, at least when its object permits, stop at forms or at colours, nor at sounds, nor at words taken in themselves and as things, but it takes them also as making known other things than themselves, that is to say as signs. And the thing signified may itself be a sign in turn, and the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty”.

Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that the development of the Catholic Novel involved "the appearance of an entirely new kind of fiction in French, English and American literature":
"... metaphysics, ontology, and particularly the power of the historic Roman Catholic apocalyptic "matrix" of heaven, hell, and purgatory as deeper realities framing, enclosing, and terminating ostensible "reality" were never the touchstone of novels until the time of Bernanos and Greene. And all the long complex development from the time of Barbey d'Aurevilly was required before the work of Greene and Bernanos became possible. The work in aesthetics of Maritain, Claudel, and Mauriac was necessary to establish the critical premises of such a radically new form. Maritain made his distinction between an "individual," a human being as a social or political unit, and a "person," a man or woman with a soul to save or lose. Claudel asserted the possibility of dramas concerned with ontological problems and developmas for the stage. Meanwhile Mauriac claimed that the "romanticism" of stories about "individuals" was exhausted and declared that writers should examine the "eternal Tartuffe" or the "eternal Harpagon" to create a gallery of spiritual "types," as in his own fiction he proceeded to do."

In Art and Scholasticism Jacques Maritain writes that Christian art is not impossible but is: "difficult, doubly difficult - fourfold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another: for it is the difficulty of harmonizing two absolutes." He says that the "difficulty becomes tremendous when the entire age lives far from Christ, for the artist is greatly dependent upon the spirit of his time" and then asks "whether courage has ever been lacking on earth." 
'Two difficulties multiplied' would, I think, make a great title for a survey of modern and contemporary Christian Art. Maritain, and his wife Raïssa, helped generate that courage in many artists, musicians, poets and writers. 

Jean-Luc Barré writes that: "They invented "a style of full freedom in the faith," based on friendship, on "person-to-person influence," on chance encounters, "what each one brings, in the depths of his heart, from his coming and going in a house where he was loved, from the peace of God that he felt there, but of which he had no idea ..." What took place there [in Thomistic Study circles at the Maritain's home in Meuden] was derived from no institution and hearkened back to no known model, and became the target of multiple conversions and a prey of just as many qui pro quo's and misunderstandings."

Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism includes an appendix describing the banning, by the Roman Catholic Church, of Stations of the Cross created by the Belgian artist Albert Servaes. Servaes played a significant role in a renewed interest in ecclesiastical art in Belgium. This renewal also had links to the revival of religious art in France in which Maurice Denis played a significant role. Maritain's comments can be read, together with background information on Servaes, at this blog - idle speculations: The Banning of the Stations of the Cross.

Servaes' banned Stations are reproduced in Ecce Homo: Contemplating the Way of Love together with meditations by Titus Brandsma. The publisher's state that: "Albert Servaes (1883-1966) is the leading representative of Expressionism in Belgian painting. Here we have a great piece of Flemish art matched with the spiritual thoughts of Brandsma. Titus meditating on the passion of the Lord, and calling attention to the place of the cross in prayer. These meditations on the passion stand wholly in this tradition of the vivid use of the imagination in order to evoke the reality of Jesus' sufferings. The details of his thoughts are determined by the artist's black on sepia drawings and are completely understood only by reference to them. No doubt the grim expressionist statement of the theme brought home with extra force to Titus' mind the frightful nature of the crucifixion."

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Olivier Messiaen - La Nativité du Seigneur

Roots of the Catholic Literary Revival

Joseph Pearce writes that the gestation period for the Catholic Literary Revival lasted from 1798 to 1845 and: ‘saw the rise of neo-medievalism, beginning with Coleridge’s Mariner and Scott’s chivalrous heroes, and ending with Pugin’s Gothic Revival and Newman’s Oxford Movement. After its 47 years in the womb of neo-mediaeval culture, the Catholic Literary Revival could be said to have been born, in 1845, amid the controversial pangs of Newman’s conversion. This heralded what may be termed the Newman Period in the Revival, dating from 1845 until the great man’s death in 1890. Apart from Newman himself, this period was graced with the presence of other eminent convert literati, including the poets, Coventry Patmore and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the latter of whom is perhaps the finest and most important poet of the whole Victorian period.’ (https://www.ncregister.com/blog/whatever-happened-to-the-catholic-literary-revival)

In his writings on the Catholic Literary Revival Pearce usually claims Anglo-Catholics, such as T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis, for the movement. Unusually, here he overlooks Christina Rossetti in his list of eminent literati. As Elizabeth Huddleston notes: ‘Rossetti spent her life in London, where she attended Christ Church, Albany Street, which was known as the leading Oxford Movement church in London. Along with her sister, Maria, Rossetti supported many Anglican sisterhoods, including The Society of All Saints, of which Maria would become a fully professed sister in 1876. Rossetti’s regular religious, devotional practices were encouraged by members of the Oxford Movement (such as confession and receiving Holy Communion) and would play a major role in her life and writings.’

Huddleston also helpfully summarises the Tractarian influences on Rossetti’s work: ‘Noted in the introduction to the 1925 edition of Rossetti’s Verses is that “Her [i.e., Christina Rossetti’s] religious views were Tractarian, that is to say, Anglo-Catholic without any leaning toward Roman Catholicism and strongly Puritan.” Seen in her private library is that she carefully illustrated her own copies of Keble’s Christian Year, as well as Isaac Williams’s The Altar. According to Diane D’Amico and David A. Kent, Rossetti held the writings of Isaac Williams in special esteem during the last years of her life, and in 1892 as she convalesced from cancer surgery, she enjoyed having her brother read from the Autobiography of Isaac Williams.

Elizabeth Ludlow demonstrates how “Tractarianism informed the early Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic and how Rossetti took this aesthetic forward and, in turn, used it to inform and disseminate Anglo-Catholic theology, contributing to the maturing of the Movement’s theology rather than being simply an [and I quote from Tennyson] ‘inheritor of the Tractarian devotional mode in poetry.’” This dissemination is demonstrated when, as Ludlow explains, “a number of her poems appeared in seminal Anglo-Catholic anthologies,” particularly, Orby Shipley’s Lyrica Mystica: Hymns and Verses on Sacred Subjects (published in 1865) and Lyrica Eucharistica: Hymns and Verse on the Holy Communion (1864). Ludlow argues that “the fact that Rossetti’s first volume of devotional prose was authorized by Burrows, a key Tractarian figure in mid-nineteenth-century London, strengthens the association between her writing and the Movement’s teaching still further.”

Much of Rossetti’s religious poetry can be seen as a typological depiction of “the church as a space prepared for an experience of divine revelation.” This is seen prevalently in the final lines of Rossetti’s unpublished poem “Yet a Little While”:

“We have clear call of daily bells, 

A dimness where the anthems are, 

A chancel vault of sky and star, 

A thunder if the organ swells: 

Alas our daily life—what else?— 

Is not in tune with daily bells 

You have deep pause betwixt the chimes 

Of earth and heaven, a patient pause 

Yet glad with rest by certain laws: 

You look and long: while oftentimes 

Precursive flush of morning chimes 

And air vibrates with coming chimes.”

According to James Pereiro, much of the ethos of the Oxford Movement “considered religion and poetry closely related, for God has used poetical language to communicate himself to man, employing symbolical associations—whether poetical, moral, or mystical—to reveal a world beyond sense perception.” This interplay between the earthly and the mystical can be seen in these lines of Rossetti’s poem.’ (https://www.newmanreview.org/rethinking-newman-s-influence/)

Claire Masurel-Murray has set out how in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites - of which Christina Rossetti was part - in particular the early paintings and poems of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘religious references convey a desire to escape the fluctuations of Victorian scepticism and to hark back to the spiritual certainties and unmitigated fervour of mediaeval times.’ 

Masurel-Murray explains how: “Rossetti’s Italian origins, his Tractarian upbringing, his love for Dante, his passion for the poets of the early Italian Renaissance and his mediaevalism all seem to have contributed to shaping his interest in Pre-Protestant Christianity. In 1847, he sent to William Bell Scott a series of poems that he entitled Songs of the Art Catholic. The title of this first collection is extremely significant. It does not reveal so much a sense of religious belonging as a form of aesthetic attraction, a cultivated nostalgia for gone-by days … The phrase “Art Catholic” refers to an aesthetic discipline, to the study of the religious imagery of the Middle Ages and of the works of Raphael’s predecessors, and to the contemplation of religious painting as an artistic model. For Rossetti indeed, both painting and poetry aspire to the condition of sacred art. He frequently uses Christian images in his visual and literary works, but ornamentally rather than functionally, as in the Marian paintings The Girlhood of the Virgin Mary (1849), which is full of Catholic elements (the stone altar, the embroidered ecclesiastic ornaments, and other liturgical objects such as the lamp and the organ to the right of the picture) with its two accompanying poems entitled “Mary’s Girlhood,” written two decades apart in 1849 and 1870, and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), a representation of the Annunciation. Generally speaking, Rossetti’s work, particularly his poetry, is permeated with Catholic motifs—Marian images in particular—inherited from the Italian Primitives, and filtered through the mythical vision of the Middle Ages, seen as an age of unanimous fervour and faith. This is apparent in such poems as “The Blessed Damozel,” in the sonnets he wrote to comment on pictures such as “A Virgin and Child, by Hans Memmeling,” “Our Lady of the Rocks, by Leonardo da Vinci,” or “For An Annunciation, Early German,” and in his translations of Italian religious poems from the Middle Ages such as “To the Blessed Virgin Mary” (from a poem by Fra Guittone d’Arezzo). The artistic use of Catholicism by Pre-Raphaelites had a lasting influence on fin de siècle writers, as was noted by David G. Riede, still writing about Rossetti: “His Art-Catholicism shows the temptation, which became increasingly powerful toward the end of the century, to embrace Christianity, particularly Catholicism, for the sake of its aesthetic tradition.”’ (https://journals.openedition.org/cve/528#:)

It is worth noting at this point that, as Whitney Robert Mundt has explained: ‘At Oxford University [Gerard Manley Hopkins] developed an interest in the [Pre-Raphaelite] Brotherhood and in Christina Rossetti. He met her and Holman Hunt and was encouraged to work seriously in both poetry and painting. His artwork reveals the specific influence of John Ruskin, a close associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the influence of John Everett Millais, a member of the original Brotherhood. Hopkins transcribed a number of poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founding member of the Brotherhood, and also by his sister, Christina Rossetti. Hopkins' letters and diaries reveal admiration for other Pre-Raphaelite associates, notably William Morris, who founded the Oxford Brotherhood after the model of the original group.’ (https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3484&context=gradschool_disstheses) 

Masurel-Murray also notes that another main source of inspiration came from across the Channel, the second half of the 19th century being ‘a period of intense exchanges between the French and English literary worlds.’ This included ‘the Catholic works of Verlaine, such as Sagesse (1881), a collection which has as its central theme the poet’s conversion during his time in jail in 1873–1874, and Liturgies Intimes (1892), a series of variations on the different moments of the Mass.’ Also included was ‘Baudelaire, whose poetic work is haunted by Catholic motifs, liturgical metaphors.’ Additionally, ‘One last name that has to be mentioned is that of J.-K. Huysmans, whose influence on English writers has been the subject of several studies.’

Masurel-Murray explains that: ‘His novel À rebours (1884), which is indirectly referred to in Chapters X and XI of The Picture of Dorian Gray, was called by Arthur Symons “the breviary of the Decadence”. The prayer that concludes the book (“Seigneur, prenez pitié du chrétien qui doute, de l’incrédule qui voudrait croire, du forçat de la vie qui s’embarque seul, dans la nuit, sous un firmament que n’éclairent plus les consolants fanaux du vieil espoir!”) was full of foreboding, as the year following the publication of his satanic novel Là-bas (1891), Huysmans converted to Catholicism. Là-bas, a novel characterised by its extreme and disoriented mysticism, focuses on the spiritual quest of Durtal, who is torn between his carnal obsessions and his search for what lies beyond the visible world. Huysmans’s next novel En route (1895) was a clearly Catholic work, chronicling the spiritual progress of a man obsessed with Christian art, with Romanesque and Gothic architecture, with the great religious writers of the Middle Ages and with Gregorian plain-chant. Both novels share a number of characteristics with the works of Huysmans’s English counterparts, in particular a taste for religious art and for the liturgy, a ruthless critique of modernity, a regressive and nostalgic movement toward mediaeval supernaturalism, an inner tension between the weight of the flesh and the temptation of mysticism.’

Pearce notes that: ‘Following Newman’s death there was the Decadent interlude of the fin de siècle in which a host of Catholic converts, such as Wilde, Beardsley, Dowson and Lionel Johnson, came to the Church via the dark and dangerous path of sin. In doing so, they were following in the footsteps of a previous generation of French converts, such as Baudelaire, Verlaine and Huysmans, each of whom had also taken the same dark path to conversion.’ Masurel-Murray notes that: ‘These writers all inherited from Walter Pater a taste for the splendours of religious rite. They were also influenced by their Pre-Raphaelite predecessors’ interest in the Catholic Middle Ages as well as by their emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of religious experience, and claimed their kinship with the art for art’s sake creed of French Parnassians and Symbolists.’

She also helpfully summarises the main members of the group:

‘In the last decade of the 19th century, a significant number of English writers chose to become members of the Roman Catholic Church. What is called the “Decadent” movement probably counts in its ranks more converts than any other school in the history of British literature. Among them (in the order of their conversions) Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913), also known as “Baron Corvo,” who wrote novels, short stories and poems, and converted in 1886; the poets John Gray (1866–1934), who was received into the Church in 1890 and ordained into the priesthood in 1901, Lionel Johnson (1867–1902, converted in 1891), and Ernest Dowson (1867–1900, converted in 1891); Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie (1867–1906), who wrote novels under the pseudonym “John Oliver Hobbes” and converted in 1892; Wilde’s friend Robert Ross (1869–1918), an art critic and essay writer who converted in 1894; André Raffalovich (1864–1934), a friend of John Gray and Aubrey Beardsley, a minor poet and theoretician of homosexuality, who became a Catholic in 1896; the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898, converted in 1897); Henry Harland (1861–1905), the literary editor of The Yellow Book, who converted in 1898; Oscar Wilde (1856–1900), who received the sacraments of the Church on his deathbed in 1900; Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), who wrote poetry under the shared pseudonym “Michael Field” and converted in 1907; and finally Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945, converted in 1911).’

Pearce concludes his summary of the main features of the Catholic Literary Revival as follows: ‘The period from 1900 to 1936 could be called the Chesterbelloc Period, in which the giant figures of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc presided over a golden age of literary converts, including R.H. Benson, Ronald Knox, Maurice Baring, Christopher Dawson, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and T.S. Eliot. (Although Eliot was technically an Anglo-Catholic who never crossed the Tiber his work is, to all intents and purposes, as Catholic as anything written by his Roman contemporaries.) From 1936 to 1973 we enter the Inklings Period, in which the formidable presence of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis dominate. (Lewis, like Eliot, was an Anglican and not a Catholic, but his work, which is overwhelmingly orthodox, sits very comfortably alongside the work of his Catholic contemporaries.) Eminent literary converts during this period include Roy Campbell, Edith Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon, Muriel Spark, Dunstan Thompson and George Mackay Brown. In America, this period also saw the emergence of those two fine writers, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.’

Summing up developments in France, Theodore P. Fraser writes, in The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:

"The Catholic novel in Europe as we know it today originated in French literature of the nineteenth century. Originally part of the neo-romantic reaction against Enlightenment philosophy and the anti-religious doctrines of the Revolution, the Catholic novel attained fruition and became an accomplished literary form spearheading the renouveau catholique, or Catholic literary revival. This literary movement contained in its ranks a number of brilliant writers (Bloy, Péguy, Huysmans, Bernanos, Mauriac, Claudel, Jacques Maritain, and Jacques Rivière, to name the most important) who reached maturity at the century's end or during the decade of World War I, and it essentially took the form of a strong, even violent, reaction of these French Catholic writers against the doctrine of positivism that had gained preeminence in French political and cultural circles in the last third at least of the nineteenth century."

For more on the Catholic Literary Revival and the French Catholic Revival with its influence across the Arts, see https://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2020/04/airbrushed-from-art-history-update.html and https://joninbetween.blogspot.com/search/label/art%20and%20faith.  

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Francis Poulenc - O Magnum Mysterium.

Christian Arts renaissance: Major or minor?

In 1983 former pupil of C.S. Lewis, the literary historian, Harry Blamires, wrote:

'Lewis began writing just at the point when this minor Christian renaissance in literature was taking off. His Pilgrim's Regress came out in 1933. And the 1930s were a remarkable decade in this respect. Eliot's Ash Wednesday came out in 1930, The Rock in 1934, Murder in the Cathedral in 1935 and Burnt Norton in 1936. Charles Williams's War in Heaven was published in 1930, The Place of the Lion in 1931, The Greater Trumps in 1932, and his play Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury in 1936. Helen Waddell's Peter Abelard came out in 1933. Meanwhile on the stage James Bridie had great popular successes with his biblical plays Tobias and the Angel (1930) and Jonah and the Whale (1932). Then by 1937 Christopher Fry was launched with The Boy with a Cart. That same year saw Dorothy Sayers's The Zeal of Thy House performed, and David Jones's In Parenthesis and Tolkien's The Hobbit published. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet followed in 1938, along with Williams's Taliessin Through Logres and Greene's Brighton Rock. Eliot's Family Reunion followed in 1939, Greene's The Power and the Glory in 1940. During the same decade Evelyn Waugh was getting known and Rose Macauley was in spate. Edwin Muir, Andrew Young and Francis Berry appeared in print.

So when the literary historian looks back at the English literary scene in the 1930s and 1940s he is going to see C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, not as freakish throwbacks, but as initial contributors to what I have called a Christian literary renaissance, if a minor one.'

This summary, which is accurate as far as it goes, illustrates some of the reasons why a Christian renaissance in the Arts during the twentieth century and into the present is not more widely recognised and acknowledged.

Blamires, like many whose writings touch on this renaissance, reaches his conclusion regarding a minor Christian literary renaissance as part of a different focus i.e. his interest in C.S. Lewis, Lewis' circle and its influence. In other words, he didn't write about this Christian renaissance per se and, therefore, did not explore it in depth. We still await an Arts historian willing and able to do.

As a result, there is much that Blamires misses, as well as much that he includes. He neglects to mention that Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were primarily responsible for the entry of modern fantasy fiction into the mainstream of publishing or that Lewis made a significant contribution to the development of science fiction or that many of the writers and works he lists formed the core of the Verse Drama movement. Awareness of this latter movement also brings writers such as Gordon Bottomley, Ronald Duncan, Norman Nicholson and Anne Ridler onto the stage. This movement was partly facilitated by George Bell's founding of the Canterbury Festival, when Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, which led to the formation of the Religious Drama Society of Great Britain under the directorship of E. Martin Browne.

Bell was also active in the visual arts, particularly in the Diocese of Chichester, where his commissioning and appointments, such as Walter Hussey to be Dean of Chichester Cathedral, resulted in significant commissions at Berwick Parish Church, Chichester Cathedral and the Chapel of the Ascension at Bishop Otter College. These commissions essentially began an engagement with the visual arts that continues into the present and which has resulted in artist residencies, exhibitions, installations and commissions, both temporary and permanent, in churches and cathedrals throughout the UK.

So, by his focus on literary works alone, Blamires also misses the bigger picture of the wider renaissance. Again, this is a common shortcoming in those who touch on this renaissance because of the other agendas they are primarily pursuing.

Similarly, Blamires neglects an international dimension. From a literary perspective, had he explored the international dimension the minor renaissance he notes might, again, have appeared more significant. In this respect he could have noted the emergence of the Modern Catholic Novel as part of the French Catholic Revival. Theodore P. Fraser writes, in The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:

"The Catholic novel in Europe as we know it today originated in French literature of the nineteenth century. Originally part of the neo-romantic reaction against Enlightenment philosophy and the anti-religious doctrines of the Revolution, the Catholic novel attained fruition and became an accomplished literary form spearheading the renouveau catholique, or Catholic literary revival. This literary movement contained in its ranks a number of brilliant writers (Bloy, Péguy, Huysmans, Bernanos, Mauriac, Claudel, Jacques Maritain, and Jacques Rivière, to name the most important) who reached maturity at the century's end or during the decade of World War I, and it essentially took the form of a strong, even violent, reaction of these French Catholic writers against the doctrine of positivism that had gained preeminence in French political and cultural circles in the last third at least of the nineteenth century."

Marian E. Crowe noted in 2007, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that "the past eighty years have seen high-quality Catholic novels by Maurice Baring, A. J. Cronin, Compton Mackenzie, Antonia White, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Braine, Rumer Godden, and Anne Redmon" and that "... Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, and Piers Paul Read ... do not hesitate to include the "craggy" and "paradoxical" parts of Catholicism."

Citing over two decades of experience publishing a who’s who of what he calls “believing writers” (Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Elie Wiesel, Mark Helprin, and Mary Karr (a Catholic convert), Gregory Wolfe has asserted: "The myth of secularism triumphant in the literary arts is just that—a myth. Yet making lists of counterexamples does not get at a deeper matter. It has to do with the way that faith takes on different tones and dimensions depending on the culture surrounding it."

So, from a literary perspective, writers such as W.H. Auden, Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Rhidian Brook, Jack Clemo, Shusaku Endo, U.E. Fanthorpe, William Golding, Geoffrey Hill, P.D. James, Elizabeth Jennings, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, Czesław Miłosz, Nicholas Mosley, Les Murray, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, James Robertson, R.S. Thomas, Salley Vickers, Niall Williams and Tim Winton, can all be cited, among others, as of relevance to the wider ongoing renaissance. In 'popular' fiction, John Grisham, Susan Howatch, Mary Doria Russell, Piers Paul Read, Ann Rice and Morris West, among others, can be noted. Theological themes and practices of faith also continue to be explored in contemporary fiction. The work of Douglas Coupland or novels such as Patrick Gale's A Perfectly Good Man and Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry being a few examples. Additionally, novelists have been re-examining the life of Christ and his followers through novels such as: Jim Crace's Quarantine, Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son, Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Ann Rice's Christ the Lord series, Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary, and Niall Williams' John, among others.
Joseph Pearce suggests in Literary Converts that: "[G. K.] Chesterton's 'coming out' as a Christian had a profound effect, similar in its influence to Newman's equally candid confession of othodoxy more than fifty years earlier. In many ways it heralded a Christian literary revival which, throughout the twentieth century, represented an evocative artistic and intellectual response to the prevailing agnosticism of the age. Dr Barbara Reynolds, the Dante scholar and friend and biographer of Dorothy L. Sayers, described this literary revival as 'a network of minds energizing each other'. Besides Chesterton, its leading protagonists included T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Siegfried Sassoon, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Williams, R. H. Benson, Ronald Knox, Edith Sitwell, Roy Campbell, Maurice Baring, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Dorothy L. Sayers, Alfred Noyes, Compton Mackenzie, David Jones, Christopher Dawson, Malcolm Muggeridge, R. S. Thomas and George Mackay Brown. Its influence spread beyond the sphere of literature. Alec Guinness, Ernest Milton and Robert Speaight were among the thespians whose lives were interwoven with those of their Christian literary contemporaries."

All this reflects primarily Western literature and does not touch the visual arts which in both Western and non-Western forms saw and see significant engagement between Christianity and modern art. I have sought to document much of this engagement in my series of posts entitled 'Airbrushed from Art History' and 'Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage'.

It may well be that all this engagement between the Arts and Christianity is still judged to be a minor renaissance. My point, however, is that the significance of this ongoing renaissance cannot be properly assessed and judged until it is considered and documented historically as a whole. While our record of it remains fragmentary, its significance cannot be fully or fairly evaluated.

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T.S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday.