Truth and Triumphalism

A series examining the newly released book by journalist and author Melanie McDonagh titled "Converts."

There are three ways of writing a book about the Catholic Literary Revival and the many literary converts who graced it. The first way of doing so is to write an historical narrative which shows the revival and the conversions as a cultural phenomenon unfolding through time. This was the approach that I chose to take with my book, Literary Converts, which begins with Oscar Wilde’s deathbed conversion in 1900 and ends with the death of George Mackay Brown in 1996 and the triumph of The Lord of the Rings as the “greatest book of the twentieth century” in a nationwide poll in 1997. The second way of writing such a book is to provide separate chapters on each of the most prominent literary converts. The first approach paints an historical landscape in which the panoramic scope of the Catholic Revival is set forth chronologically; the latter approach presents a portrait gallery in which the individual converts are shown separately. There is, however, a third option, which might be considered the hybrid approach, which blends the two other approaches, presenting portraits within an historical landscape. This is the approach that Mrs. McDonagh adopts in Converts. Thus, there are individual chapters on a host of individual converts: Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, John Gray, Gwen John, Lord Alfred Douglas, R. H. Benson, Maurice Baring, David Jones, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Anscombe and Siegfried Sassoon. Surprisingly and oddly, one of the most important converts, G. K. Chesterton, does not get a chapter of his own but shares billing with Hilaire Belloc. In between these individual biographical portraits are chapters offering historical context. These include chapters such as “The 1890s”, “The Church in 1900”, “The Church and the War”, “Between the Wars”, “Gain and Loss: After the War” and, finally, “Gain and Loss: The Second Vatican Council”.

Having surveyed the table of contents, we’ll proceed to Mrs. McDonagh’s introduction. She begins with the deathbed reception of Oscar Wilde into the Church in 1900 and then presents a litany of literary and artistic converts from the preceding decade. This is followed by a quote from an 1890 issue of The Tablet, a Catholic journal, which proclaimed the “decrepitude” of the Anglican Church and celebrated the number of converts entering the Catholic Church: “Until the sea give up the dead that are in it, no rendering-up shall be quite so marvellous as that made by Protestantism to Catholicism during the last fifty years. From the Dead Sea of Anglicanism have arisen, in that period, multitudes to be the passengers and the mariners of St Peter’s bark.” Mrs. McDonagh describes these celebratory words as representing “a moment of exuberant, if tactless, triumphalism”.

Mrs. McDonagh’s alliterative juxtaposition of “tactless” and “triumphalism” reveals her own approach to the writing of the book, which treats any hint of triumphalism as not merely tactless but also impolite and perhaps even offensive. Without wishing to fault her thoroughly English politeness, it might be well, nonetheless, to begin our own reading of her book with a tactless defense of “triumphalism”.

Although “triumphalism” often denotes a sense of gloating arrogance, which is of course reprehensible, there is another sense of the word which needs to be acknowledged and understood. For a Catholic, all reality is seen from the perspective of the triumph of Christ and from the perspective of the Church Triumphant in heaven. There is no true way of seeing life except in the light of the eternal life promised us in Christ. A Catholic is called to be triumphalist in the sense that he is called to see the triumph of Christ through triumphant eyes and to see reality triumphantly in the light of that triumph. This might seem tactless or impolite, or perhaps even offensive to those who see things differently, but it is the truth nonetheless. Furthermore, it is the triumphant truth to which the literary converts subscribed and which changed their lives so radically. If we are unable to see this, or are unable to accept it, we are not seeing the converts in the light with which they see themselves.

Such is the view of the converts who form the subject of Mrs. McDonagh’s book, but is it the view of Mrs. McDonagh herself? If it is, she seems too polite to say so.

Since truth and triumphalism are inseparable, we cannot have the one without the other. In turning our backs on the triumph of Christ and all that it implies, we are left with nothing but the perspective of Pontius Pilate and the question he asks. Quid est veritas? What is truth? And if it is tactless to answer the question unequivocally in the affirmative, declaring joyously and triumphantly that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, it is tactful not to answer it at all. This leaves us with nothing but an agnostic approach to the truth and, in consequence, a relativist understanding of Catholicism and of those who convert to Catholicism. This is the spirit that appears to prevail and which seems to permeate Mrs. McDonagh’s book. It is this coyness about the triumphant life of Christ which casts a shadow over its pages. Our purpose in the following articles will be to shed some necessary light on the literary converts on whom Mrs. McDonagh focuses, dispensing truth and dispelling the shadows of doubt or indifference. The goal is to see these great converts to the Faith as they saw themselves and each other. It is to see them in the light of Christ.