Free Literary Giants Literary Catholics by Joseph Pearce Page A

Übermensch ), who would overcome human weakness and vanquish the meek. (In Tolkien’s mythical world, Nietzsche’s shadow emerges in the “will to power” of the Enemy, most specifically in the designs of Sauron and Saruman but also in the pathetic ambition of Boromir and Gollum.)
    Oscar Wilde, who died on 30 November 1900, was the inheritor of the dark and decadent romanticism of Byron and Baudelaire. He flouted traditional morality and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment as a result of his homosexual affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, the sordidness of which scandalized late Victorian society.
    Nietzsche’s pride found deadly “fruition” in the Nazi death camps and in the rise of the abortion clinics. Wilde’s prurience found its sterile “fruition” in the sexual “liberation” of the ‘sixties, the AIDS epidemic of the ‘nineties and, yes, in those same abortion clinics. Nietzsche died impenitent, insane and, one would imagine, condemned for his sins; Wilde was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed, died as a penitent and, one would hope, was forgiven his sins.
    The pernicious influence of Nietzsche and Wilde on the secular culture prompted a healthy reaction among many of the Christian literati in England, so much so that their influence would help to shape the Christian literary landscape of the century that followed their deaths.
    G. K. Chesterton, the most important figure in the Christian literary revival in the early years of the century, had fallen under the spell of Wilde and the Decadents as a young man at London’s Slade School of Art during the early 1890s but had very quickly recoiled in horror from the moral implications of the Decadent position. Much of his early work, particularly his early novel, The Man Who Was Thursday , was an attempt to clear the Wildean fog of the 1890s with the crisp clean air of Christian clarity. Chesterton also crossed swords with Nietzsche, most particularly in his refutation of the neo-Nietzschean ramblings of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. “Nietzsche’s Superman is cold and friendless”, Chesterton wrote in Heretics . “And when Nietzsche says, ‘A new commandment I give to you, be hard ’, he is really saying, ‘A new commandment I give to you, be dead .’ Sensibility is the definition of life.” In the light of the “hardness” of the Nazis and the communists during their mass extermination of millions of “dissidents” and “undesirables”, Chesterton’s words, written more than ten years before the Bolshevik Revolution and almost thirty years before Hitler’s rise to power, resonate with authenticated prophecy.
    Chesterton’s influence on the Christian literary revival was so central and catalytic that only the giant figure of John Henry Newman in the previous century matches him in terms of stature and importance. Those literary figures who have expressed a specific and profound debt to Chesterton as an influence on their conversions include C. S. Lewis, Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers and Alfred Noyes. Thus, without Chesterton, it is possible that the world would have never seen the later Christian poetry of Noyes, the subtle satire of Knox, the masterful translation of, and commentary on, Dante by Sayers, and the multifarious blossoming of Lewis’ prodigious talents. Clearly we, as the inheritors of this cultural treasure trove, have much for which to thank Chesterton.
    If Chesterton, along with his friend Hilaire Belloc, was the giant figure of the Christian literary revival during the first twenty years of the century, the figure to emerge as a Christian literary giant and inspirational catalyst in the next twenty years was undoubtedly T. S. Eliot.
    Eliot’s The Waste Land , published in 1922, is probably the most important poem of the twentieth century, and arguably the greatest. Although grotesquely misunderstood and misinterpreted by modernist and postmodernist critics, The Waste Land is profoundly