T. S. Eliot among the Converts
It was in 1922 that a portly, wild-haired British journalist, poet and detective fiction writer named G.K. Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church. In the wake of his conversion, Chesterton would pen perennially influential books such as The Everlasting Man, Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Well and the Shallows, and his immortal Autobiography. Unfinished in explaining his turn to Rome, Chesterton would compose an essay “Why I Am Catholic.” In it, he would offer six of his “ten thousand reasons” for joining the Church. One reason, in particular, stands out to me:
“[The Catholic Church] is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”
In 1931, a tutor of English Language and Literature at Oxford converted from atheism to Anglican Christianity. Just when Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis had convinced himself of his logical and righteous abstention from a religious creed, he found his world upended by friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien and books crafted by George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton. In retrospect, Lewis would puckishly warn,
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere…God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”
Lewis’ conversion would inform his classics Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Chronicles of Narnia.
In 1930, a fashionable and peerless British novelist would make a decision that would rock the sophisticated and snooty British literary world. How the modern (and edgy) Evelyn Waugh, author of wildly popular satire, could countenance joining the Catholic Church was beyond comprehension. When speculation ran rampant on the front pages of the English dailies, Waugh offered this,
“It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on the one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos.”
It was Waugh’s embrace of Catholicism that gave life and spirit to his incomparable classics, Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honor.
Chesterton, Lewis, Waugh. Brilliant men, prolific writers…and Christian converts whose faith deeply informed and unquestionably shaped their lives and works. Not to be omitted from this pantheon of literary luminaries is American-turned-British poet and critic, Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot.
A well-born American, Eliot was raised Unitarian and educated at Harvard. Soon, he would pass into Oxford and British high society. Though he struggled personally in a turbulent and troubled marriage, Eliot would achieve greatness as a poet, playwright, essayist, and literary critic.
It wasn’t long, however, before Eliot would upset the neat order of his literary world. In 1928, he wrote a preface to an essay, For Lancelot Andrewes, in which he described himself as a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion.” Eliot was becoming a Christian. And while modernist writer and Bloomsbury intellectual Virginia Woolf was nearly apoplectic at the news of Eliot’s conversion, declaring him “dead to all of us from this day forward”, his Christian transformation was not altogether unpredictable.
Eliot had already leveled sharp criticism at the literary elite’s misguided efforts to make the surrogates of truth (like art and culture) into Truth itself. He saw foolishness in pretending that the ephemeral was, in fact, the permanent. Eliot illustrated how an embrace of materialism and utilitarianism leads to a black void empty of meaning and haunted by despair. And he ultimately championed a life of authenticity enriched by the experience of both joy and suffering. We are to accept no substitutes as we reckon honestly and fiercely with the Eternal.
Tod Worner is a practicing internal medicine physician and writer.
