Converts:
From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century
by melanie mcdonagh
yale university press, 368 pages, $38
Conversion is a gift of grace, yet human hands participate in God’s providence. In her new book, Melanie McDonagh provides a narrative for the rise of converts between the 1890s and the 1950s. Similar accounts have been given before—notably Joseph Pearce’s Literary Converts—but McDonagh’s book is peculiarly ambitious in bringing to light the conversion stories of all kinds of artists and intellectuals: writers, painters, poets, philosophers.
The book covers the most likely factors: the influence of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement; the search for meaning prompted by the horrors of the two world wars; the desire for a connection to one’s national past as England entered the modern age. And though she plays the role of broad-stroke sociologist, McDonagh’s forte lies in meticulous biography. She chooses fifteen influential figures, from artists to writers to academics, and recounts their stories in light of the single most defining event of their lives: conversion.
For most of the twentieth century, becoming a Catholic was seen as an eccentricity at best; at worst it resulted in ostracism. In a Daily Express article “Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me,” Evelyn Waugh listed some of the standard charges against converts: “The Jesuits got hold of him,” or “He is captivated by the ritual.” A certain kind of twentieth-century existential dread is often cited as another catalyst: George Orwell thought that, for idealists, Catholicism had a similar appeal to communism. The charge of sentimentalism was a common one, too.
McDonagh tells stories of conversion that don’t square with these stereotypes. Many of the characters in Converts, like Graham Greene, explicitly characterized their Catholicism as intellectually rather than emotionally motivated. Lord Alfred Douglas claimed that “The ritual, although I had always liked it and thought it beautiful, did not influence me in the very slightest degree”; Maurice Baring was “less interested in the aesthetic aspects of the faith . . . than in the rational arguments” and declared that “candles and incense never did . . . affect me”; Evelyn Waugh, according to his friend Christopher Sykes, had a “rational” approach to his faith, “remarkable for a lack of emotion”; similarly, Muriel Spark insisted that her faith was “dogmatic rather than emotional.”
This kind of intellectual conversion often had something to do with the trauma of the two world wars. McDonagh observes that conversion numbers were particularly high in times of political uncertainty. Catholicism provided not only an eschatological sense of hope but also a tie to a forgotten national identity. The priest and writer R. H. Benson was one of many who became disillusioned with the Church of England’s variety of beliefs and was attracted to Catholicism’s “continuity with the pre-Reformation church”; Baring, McDonagh tells us, “was moved by the sense that he was returning to the old religion of England.”
Perhaps no one was as incisive as Waugh, who went as far as to say that, in the 1930s, it was “no longer possible . . . to accept the benefits of civilisation and at the same time to deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests . . . Christianity is essential to civilisation.” Around a decade later, T. S. Eliot would make a similar claim in The Idea of a Christian Society, but he would emphasize that society couldn’t be saved from collapse if it meant instrumentalizing the Christian religion. “To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.” Almost a century on, such debates about the role of cultural Christianity are as relevant as ever.
McDonagh’s book ends with the decline of conversions: “Whether in reaction to the liturgical changes following the [Second Vatican] Council . . . or to the endless arguments about contraception . . . or to a sense that the Church was in disarray, the number of converts dropped dramatically. . . . The numbers have never recovered.” Yet now many are talking about a “Quiet Revival,” and it seems there is cause to hope that the next generation is returning to faith—to Catholicism in particular. McDonagh’s narrative of post–Vatican II decline, while convincing, may turn out to be overly pessimistic after all.
So much for the “why” of turning to Christianity, and especially to Rome. But there’s another—in my opinion, more interesting—discussion happening in Converts, and that is the issue of the relationship between art and faith, creation, and contemplation. What does it mean, in other words, to think, make, and write as a Catholic? Some of the figures in McDonagh’s account actively disliked the label of “Catholic writer” or “Catholic artist.” Graham Greene famously didn’t want to be referred to as a “Catholic novelist”; neither did Muriel Spark, who maintained that “there’s no such thing as a Catholic novel, unless it’s a piece of propaganda”—precisely what R. H. Benson has often been accused of in his own works, such as the apocalyptic Lord of the World.
Spark and Greene may have felt that it is possible for a certain kind of pietistical religiosity to stifle artistic production, but they were also adamant that the very concept of the artist—even the very “sense of craft”—is inseparable from belief in God. According to Richard Greene, Graham Greene’s biographer, the latter thought that “Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions . . . this was . . . a failure of craft—[Woolf’s] characters are defective because [they are] ontologically adrift.” Waugh passed a remarkably similar judgment, this time with Henry James and other secular writers as the target of his critique: “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.”
Dorothy Sayers argued in her seminal book The Mind of the Maker that humans have an impulse to create because we’ve been made to participate in God’s own creativity. McDonagh proves that Sayers’s intuition was right: Artistic production is not in conflict with but is rather fueled by belief in God. “I think that even if the Catholic religion weren’t true,” concluded the poet and painter David Jones, “you’d have to [as an artist] become one.” Perhaps, if the Quiet Revival is real, there is another Catholic artistic revival on its way.
