Literary Converts

by Joseph Pearce

Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly. EVELYN WAUGH

‘distributism’.

Small is Beautiful.

Nietzsche had died in 1900, after twelve years of insanity, the most outspoken philosophical foe of Christianity to emerge in the late nineteenth century.

Wilde, on his deathbed, had been received into the Catholic Church.

due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic.

The artistic side of the Church and the fragrance of its teaching would have cured my degeneracies.

Church in his autobiography, En Route.

Wilde responded approvingly that ‘it must be delightful to see God through stained glass windows. I may even go to a monastery myself.

‘the Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone.

For respectable people the Anglican Church will do.’

To them it was evidently real.

you read En Route by Huysmans, his fight at the end with his reason is word for word what I have twice experienced detail for detail.’

Confessions of a Convert,

As regards depression . . . I meant that the cause of depression is subjectivity, always. The Eternal Facts of Religion remain exactly the same, always. Therefore in depression the escape lies in dwelling upon the external truths that are true anyhow; and not in self-examination, and attempts at ‘acts’ of the soul that one is incapable of making at such a time. .

‘finally and supremely’, it was the reading of the Scriptures that satisfied him ‘as to the positive claims of Rome’.

He endeavoured in vain to explain that his decision to become a Catholic had nothing to do with any like or dislike of customs, but was linked to a solid belief that the Catholic Church was the Church of God.

He intended, he stressed, to ‘go to Rome not as a critic or a teacher, but as a child and a learner’.

It appeared to him impossible that faith and open-mindedness should survive conversion.26

the natural craving for human sympathy and support, and particularly ‘that tenderest sympathy and support which a happy marriage would bring’, would impede his ability ‘to attend upon the Lord’.

‘There were but two paths - the way of faith and the way of unbelief, and as the latter led through the halfway house of Liberalism to Atheism, the former led through the halfway house of Anglicanism to Catholicism.’

It was a classic example of emptying out the baby with the bath. The reformers revolted against the externalism of medieval religion, and so they abolished the Mass. They protested against the lack of personal holiness, and so they abolished the saints. They attacked the wealth and self-indulgence of the monks and they abolished monasticism and the life of voluntary poverty and asceticism. They had no intention of abandoning the ideal of Christian perfection, but they sought to realise it in Puritanism instead of Monasticism and in pietism instead of mysticism.27

a living tree whose roots are in the Divine nature and whose fruit is the perfection of the saints . .

How The Reformation Happened

Church as a heavenly chariot ‘thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect’.

Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary out of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.

‘the man who believes in himself most consistently, to the exclusion of cold facts, must be sought in a lunatic asylum’.

if a thing is left alone it does not remain the same but becomes open to a torrent of change.

‘there is in the last second of time or hairbreadth of space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the unfathomable forces of the universe. The space between doing and not doing such a thing is so tiny and so vast.’

tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher. Night shall be thrice night over you, And heaven an iron cope. Do you have joy without a cause, Yea, faith without a hope?

welcome every birthday because I find it an approach to the grave . . . whereas few men seek death, all after a certain age desire to be rid of life.’

faith was an act of the will subject to the grace of God which did not require any ‘feeling

Let me remind you once again that my quarrel with you people is not that you refuse to take Christianity seriously, but that nothing will stop you from criticising a creed which you are too idle to study.

Life never became a habit with either of them, it was always a miracle.

‘One has to accept sorrow for it to be of any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in the world . . . A Priest once said to me, “When you understand what accepted sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life.”

‘The most noticeable thing about this gradual development,’ Sayers wrote, ‘is that the more man knows, scientifically, the less he understands the purpose of existence, and the less is his individual importance in the scheme of things.’

The only respectable reason for reading a book is that you want to know what is in it.

After the war these talks were published as The Mass in Slow Motion, The Creed in Slow Motion and The Gospel in Slow Motion, becoming perhaps the most popular of all his writings.

She had long been ‘dissatisfied with the answers or the lack of answers to her quest for happiness’:

Ronald Knox’s What Catholics Believe,

Every hour you spend outside the Church is an hour lost . . .

you can have no conception of what the Church is like until you see it from inside.

If the unequal distribution of private property led to great injustice it didn’t necessarily mean that private property was wrong, as the Marxists claimed, but merely that its unequal distribution was wrong.

I Believed, Hyde’s autobiography.

Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-glass-World, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.

‘Well, considering Our Lord had the wisdom to be born as a man at the time when he was on earth, I think probably the whole thing is left better as it is’.

‘no one among those who dislike the proposal is maintaining that women are less capable than men of piety, zeal, learning and whatever else seems necessary for the pastoral office’.

Blessings in Disguise

‘Once one knows what really matters one tends to stop talking’.

Active participation” doesn’t necessarily mean making a noise. Only God knows who are participating. People can pray loudly like the Pharisee and not be heard.’