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  • The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones
  • Jay P. Corrin
The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones. By Adam Schwartz. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 416. $64.95.)

Adam Schwartz uses the metaphor of a "Third Spring" to describe the blooming of Roman Catholic conversions in Britain in the early twentieth century. Although these resonated in some ways with what Newman called the "Second Spring" (fellow converts W. G. Ward, George Tyrrell, and others), the Catholics highlighted by Schwartz were less interested in integrating Catholicism with their times than in using it as a means of attacking the cultural distortions of modernization. And unlike Newman's generation, they found comfort in Vatican authority. This study focuses on the conversion experiences of four prominent intellectuals: journalist, man of letters G. K. Chesterton, novelist Graham Greene, historian Christopher Dawson, and poet David Jones. Although these [End Page 837] writers came to Catholicism from varying backgrounds and experiences, what they had in common was the need to find authoritative spiritual and moral security in a world of vanishing standards and beliefs. All four embraced Catholicism not only because it provided an answer to these personal longings, but its ancient verities also could serve as the source of rejuvenation for an age rapidly sliding into the miasmic confusions of cultural relativism.

Catholicism had a special appeal to these converts because it had an Italianate feel to it (both Chesterton and Dawson were profoundly moved toward the faith by their visits to Rome), which served to separate those who embraced it not only from the other "inadequate religions" of the day but also from what was deemed an increasingly post-Christian modern culture. Dawson, for instance, asserted that Protestantism "possessed no inherent principles capable of withstanding the pressure of secularized culture." This comfort in separation and pining for authoritative grounding stood in sharp contrast to the mind-set of a later generation of British Catholic intellectuals who chaffed under the traditional rigidities of Rome. Terry Eagleton, for example, an influential voice in younger, post-Vatican Council II circles, claimed that being a Catholic made one feel "part of a weird, whispered-about minority," like being "a petty bourgeois black or homosexual Tory." Where the subjects of Schwartz's study eagerly submitted to the monarchical hand of Rome, Eagleton's generation demanded a more democratic Church, one where clerical hierarchy would make way for "progressive" laymen undertaking social and religious experiments more relevant to a post-industrial age. Such attitudes would have been anathema to the Third Spring. Indeed, Arnold Lunn, whose Catholicism was largely shaped by Chesterton, claimed he never would have converted to a Church defined by Vatican Council II. Greene, Dawson, and Jones, who lived through the papacy of John XXIII, never wholly reconciled themselves to the reforms of that Council. As Schwartz makes clear, those of the Third Spring were hostile to modernity itself, believing more in rinnovamento through the revival of traditional teachings, than what Pope John XXIII called aggiornamento.

Schwartz inaugurates his study with G. K. Chesterton, arguably the most influential and deepest thinker of the Third Spring. Like the other converts, Chesterton's path to Rome was initiated by a youthful mental and moral crisis while a student at the Slade School, in this case a shock encounter with the collapse of values and standards redolent in modern art. Chesterton eventually found the order he craved and what he believed the age needed in the dogmatic certainties of Roman Catholicism. As opposed to the doctrinal timidity of Anglicanism and its willingness to accommodate itself with modernity, the Roman Church stood firm, its papal court constant and uncompromising in support of the core teachings of Christ. After his conversion, Chesterton became an advocate of Thomism and used its system to battle the false prophets of his age. Chesterton recognized that Thomas's balancing of faith and reason as allies in the search for truth could save the West from the "dreadful gloom" of "abstract spirituality," insisting that the Incarnation meant the merging of soul and senses in the realistic...

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