Return of Christian Humanism

The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History by Lee Oser, 165 pages

One of the three seems not to fit - Chesterton, the English fabulist who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, Tolkien, the English fantasist and all-but-cradle Catholic, and Eliot, the American Modernist poet who converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism.  Of course, put another way, Eliot was only four years older than Tolkien, but Chesterton was fourteen years older than him.  Or it could be pointed out that while Chesterton flourished a short time before, during, and after the First World War and Eliot did his best work between the wars, The Lord of the Rings wasn't published until the '50s.  Yet none of them seem as out of place as Oser's untitled fourth subject, 19th century Deist critic Matthew Arnold.  Oser describes Arnold as having recognized a central problem for an agnostic humanism - an inability to balance the anarchic tendencies of romantic progressivism with the rigidity of neo-classicism.

According to Oser, the proof of that inability can be found in the exhaustion of the humanist tradition with Beckett and the anti-humanism that has subsequently ascended to power within the academy, with the collapse of the humanities as a consequence.  To rebuild it is necessary to embrace the "romance of history", which means meaningfully engaging with religion generally and Christianity particularly, especially the more-than-mere Christianity of the romantic reactionaries Chesterton, Eliot, and Tolkien.