The ‘Old Western Men’: A Religious Mode of Response to the Conditions of ‘Secular’ Modernity, 1900-1970 Daniel Michael George Frampton Ph.D. University of East Anglia School of Art, Media and American Studies Submitted September 2017. “This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution.” 2 Abstract This thesis forwards the concept of the ‘Old Western Men’, a phrase borrowed from C. S. Lewis, who used this term to assert the presence of a ‘Great Divide’ in history. Modernity, he believed, was essentially secular, unlike what had preceded it. In this sense, he was in opposition to it as a Christian. This thesis’s unique contribution to the current literature is that it applies Lewis’s identification of the Old Western Men to a broader spectrum of intellectuals and artists, previously referred to, more narrowly, as the ‘Catholic literary revival’. This Ph.D. locates such a revival within a broader ‘religious mode of response’ to modernity, which such men of letters as Lewis believed to be fundamentally materialistic; meaning that modernity denied the existence of an objective spiritual reality. Chapter one describes the general concept of the Old Western Men, including how it confronted secular modernity by attempting to reconcile mind with matter as part of an intellectual via media (middle way); it will also examine the importance that some intellectuals invested in the concept of imaginative understanding. Chapter two focuses on an Old Western emphasis on the ‘More-Than-World’ within the world, one that was essentially sacramental, having come to reconcile reason with the imagination. Chapter three forwards the Old Western notion of thinking ‘christianly’ by cultivating a divine indifference to worldly catastrophe. This also entails examining the concept of self- sanctification, as well as how the Old Western Men responded to the violence of their century by inviting the supernatural into their lives. Chapter four concludes the thesis by examining the spiritual/cultural device of Christendom as a redemptive discourse combatting European nationalism and racialism. 3 4 For my grandparents, George and Elizabeth “Betty” Frampton. 5 6 Contents List of Illustrations ............................................................................................................ 10 Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... 11 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 12 Afterword ..................................................................................................................... 33 Chapter One: Via Media – A Thomist ‘Middle Way’......................................................... 35 De Descriptione Temporum – the ‘Great Divide’ ......................................................... 35 ‘Old Western Men’ ....................................................................................................... 36 The ‘Western’ Element: ‘to think christianly’ ............................................................... 40 Thomism and the ‘word made flesh’ ............................................................................ 42 Losing the Sacred .......................................................................................................... 46 The ‘Chelsea Group’ ..................................................................................................... 48 Via Media ...................................................................................................................... 53 Evelyn Waugh’s St. Helena ........................................................................................... 55 Christopher Dawson ..................................................................................................... 57 Method vs. Ideology ..................................................................................................... 59 Romantic Religion ......................................................................................................... 60 The Influence of G. K. Chesterton on C. S. Lewis .......................................................... 66 The Historical Imagination ............................................................................................ 68 Chapter One Conclusion ............................................................................................... 88 Chapter Two: The ‘More-Than-World’ within the world ................................................. 89 A Thomist Sense of Wonder ......................................................................................... 89 A Loss of Enchantment ................................................................................................. 92 Reaffirming ‘Faërie’ .................................................................................................... 101 Tolkien’s ‘Perilous Realm’ ........................................................................................... 103 Mirkwood ................................................................................................................... 108 Paul Nash .................................................................................................................... 113 ‘Legend’ ...................................................................................................................... 122 ‘The Ethics of Elfland’: The Meaning of the Sinister ................................................... 125 Montague Rhodes James ........................................................................................... 126 Chapter Two Conclusion ............................................................................................. 137 Chapter Three: Cultivating the Eternal Perspective ....................................................... 139 Divine Indifference ..................................................................................................... 139 Christopher Dawson and Augustine of Hippo ............................................................ 141 Dawson’s ‘Theology of History’ .................................................................................. 144 7 The ‘Long Defeat’ ....................................................................................................... 147 Enduring the ‘Long Defeat’ ........................................................................................ 150 Middle-earth’s Theology of History: Providence and Free Will ................................. 153 Self-Sanctification ...................................................................................................... 158 Aspiring to Sanctity: Faramir ...................................................................................... 161 The Song of Roland .................................................................................................... 165 Roy Campbell ............................................................................................................. 168 Dawson and the Oxford Movement .......................................................................... 169 Campbell’s Fierceness ................................................................................................ 171 Toledo, 1936 .............................................................................................................. 175 Eusebio ....................................................................................................................... 176 Enlistment into the Catholic Church .......................................................................... 180 Guy Crouchback: il Santo Inglese ............................................................................... 182 Gervase Crouchback .................................................................................................. 186 A Flame Burning Anew ............................................................................................... 189 Saint Chesterton ........................................................................................................ 192 Chapter Three Conclusion .......................................................................................... 194 Chapter Four: The Redemptive Discourse of Christendom ........................................... 195 T. S. Eliot ..................................................................................................................... 198 Notes towards the Definition of Culture ................................................................... 199 Fear of the State ........................................................................................................ 201 A Question of Loyalties .............................................................................................. 209 Christendom: ‘the only league of nations that ever had a chance’ ........................... 211 A Very English Catholicism ......................................................................................... 216 Roman Britain vs. Teutonic Britain ............................................................................ 221 Dawson and Eliot ......................................................................................................