The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community

The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community 1910-1950 by James Lothian, 383 pages

From the late eighteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, many English intellectuals felt the pull of the Catholic Church.  There are many reasons for this, including the Romantic predilection for the Middle Ages, the search for a secure authority in a time of change, dissatisfaction with the Erastianism of the Church of England, admiration for the coherence of Catholicism, and attraction to continental Catholic culture.  A number of books have been written about the various figures involved (Literary Converts), as well as a number of studies published about the literature they produced (The Return of Christian Humanism).  James Lothian, however, seeks to fill a void by concentrating on English Catholic intellectual life during the period roughly bounded by the World Wars, when it was dominated by a circle centered on Hilaire Belloc, a circle which included such luminaries as GK Chesterton, Eric Gill, Evelyn Waugh, and Christopher Dawson.

The story of how Belloc's influence waxed and waned is well worth studying, but there are some major problems with Lothian's approach.  One is the of narrowness of scope.  For excellent reasons, Lothian chooses to concentrate on the intellectual development of English Catholicism during a four decade period.  This is all well and good.  But history cannot be so neatly divided, and Lothian's brief synopsis of nineteenth century English Catholicism, while it cannot justly be expected to be comprehensive, nonetheless seems to fall short by failing to even mention the Catholic undercurrents among the Gothic Revivalists, the Pre-Raphaelites, or the Decadents, still less contemporary Anglo-Catholic figures such as CS Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and TS Eliot, or even Christopher Dawson's involvement with Triumph or Belloc's influence on Dorothy Day and EF Schumacher.  Even worse, Lothian's understanding of intellectualism too often seems to be limited to social and political ideas - this is particularly egregious when studying thinkers who themselves insisted that such ideas could never be isolated from ethical, aesthetic, philosophical, or theological concerns.

Another problem is connected to the major theme of the book, the strengths and weaknesses of Belloc's approach.  Unfortunately, despite an apparent attempt to be even-handed, Lothian cannot help but frame the history of "Bellocianism" in a manner that reveals his particular biases.  Early on, noting St Pius X's condemnation of Modernism, he defines Modernism as "the common desire to adapt Catholicism to the intellectual, moral, and social needs of today", and goes on to regret that the "Bellocians" had little sympathy with it.  On the surface, this seems inexplicable, since it is difficult to imagine interviduals more fixated on examining "the intellectual, moral, and social needs of today" than Belloc, Chesterton, and McNabb.  The truth is, of course, that the Modernism condemned by Pius was far more than Lothian's facile description suggests.  By casting it in this superficial way, however, he is able to indulge in the treasured myth of a paradoxically insular "fortress Catholicism" which somehow managed to attract a number of brilliant converts and spark an intellectual renaissance despite being entirely inward-looking and "sterile."  The post-war Church is then praised as being open and involved in the world, despite having nothing distinctive to say.  In this backhanded way, Lothian unfairly faults Belloc's circle for turning their collective back on modernity, when the real issue is not whether the Church should engage with the world, but how.  Once again, the difference is between two visions of the Church: as a fundamentally supernatural body teaching eternal truths both in and out of season, or as an essentially human institution which must struggle to get along in the world as best it can.

Belloc and his admirers believed that capitalist democracy would ultimately prove as incompatible with the Catholic belief in the dignity of the human person as socialism and Nazism.  As a result, they presented a distinctly Catholic critique of contemporary Britain.  This was largely abandoned during the War, both as a result of the pressures of wartime and the efforts of a government-employed propagandist, and not resumed afterwards.  For Lothian, this embrace of the status quo, and thus the entire "unmaking of the English Catholic intellectual community", somehow represents a victory rather than a defeat.