Status Updates From Converts: From Oscar Wilde ...

“In the 1930s, [Graham] Greene was explicitly struggling with the problem of how a Catholic sense of the soul and of providence altered the craft of fiction…Graham’s sense of craft is shaped by his faith — the faith and the craft are not separate” (207).

“Greene felt that a disaster had set in for the English novel after the death of Henry James; whereas traditional novelists had always conceived of their characters as being somehow under the eye of God…Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions…[the] characters are defective because ontologically adrift” (207).

Really interesting passage on page 196 about the Waugh’s thoughts on being a Christian and an artist. “The failure of modern novelists…is one of presumption…they try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character—that of being God’s creatures with a defined purpose” (196).

Ooh didn’t know Waugh wrote a biography of Edmund Campion!

“‘The Break’…it seems to us that the Reformation, the age of Revolution and Industrialization had eroded the territory of the sacral in daily living: modern man was losing a vital dimension in his life…the new civilization had stripped humanity of an awareness of that world of signs. The Catholic idea of sacrament is precisely to do with the notion that real things represent other things…” (183).

David Jones is another new name to me. I love that he had one of his most numinous experiences when stumbling upon Mass being celebrated on the Western Front in a derelict old barn. One never knows what means God will use. I’d like to revisit this chapter. It had a lot of Jones’ thoughts on the Sacraments and Art.

An interesting description of Beauty: “…it was the satisfaction of the soul in the presence of reality” (147).

“Chesterton was a reactionary in the strict sense that he was reacting against the orthodoxy of his Victorian youth, which was agnosticism” (132).

So fascinating. I think of the Victorian age as such a Church Going age but obviously the story was much more complex. I want to learn more.

The Benson family is like the Knox family in my mind. Both fathers were very high up Anglican clergymen and both families had six children with two girls and four boys. All the children were incredibly smart and verbal and eccentric. The youngest in each family become Catholic, which was very shocking in the day.

Sheila Kaye-Smith gets a mention!! I think my Victober reading may be leaning towards a John Henry Newman theme this year. This chapter about his influence on later Catholic converts is really interesting.

I hadn’t heard of Gwen John before but now I am very curious about her art.

“Conversion to Catholicism marked the strongest rejection of the Victorian spiritual crisis. In a world whose religious certainties had been undermined by Darwinism—to which the intellectual classes had responded with a shift towards agnosticism—the spiritual sensibility of the aesthetes of the nineties was wilfully at odds with the skeptical and materialist mood of the preceding generation” (15).

This is such a fascinating topic for me. I can’t wait to keep reading!