Elizabeth’s Reviews > Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century > Status Update

“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).