Further Up and Further In

Further Up and Further In: Understanding Narnia
© 2018 Joseph Pearce
200 pages

”The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets.” - The Last Battle

Christendom and Narnia are never far removed from one another, and in Further Up and Further In, Joseph Pearce takes us through the thin veil between them. He pores over the literary and theological references that deepen the world of Narnia, relying on his previous research into the life of Lewis, as well as his work on Lewis’ influences, Tolkien and Chesterton. Both are companions not just of Lewis, but of the reader here, as the three dwelt in the same moral and literary universe.

Most anyone who has visited Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe realizes its Christian connection. Aslan’s deliberate self-sacrifice to destroy the power of Death and revive not only Narnia, but redeem the withered soul of young Edmund, makes that obvious -- as does the Garden of Eden story seen in The Magician’s Nephew where the same white witch leads to the corruption of Narnia seven hours into its creation. And if anyone was missing the point, then in Voyage of the Dawn Treader Aslan explicitly tells the children that he is known by another name in their world, and that they were brought to Narnia so that they would know him better there.

Although Pearce expands on the multitude of links to Christian culture -- Aslan’s repeated use of “I am”, a la God’s reply to Moses in the desert, his treble use of the same phrase and other sets of three to bring to mind the Trinity, and so on -- Pearce also understands Lewis as a man deep in history, and particularly in medieval history. He points out Lewis’ allusions to other figures, like El Cid and Charlemagne, based not on dry history but on legends about these men, like “The Song of Roland”. Commentary stretches to the modern age, too, as Pearce points out how Eustace Scrubbs’ parents are caricatures of George Bernard Shaw, who loved “humanity” but disliked most people, and believed in progress for its own sake, rather than people for theirs.

More than anything else, Pearce shines a light on the moral universe that was Lewis’ made ‘physical’ in the land of Narnia. There delivered were his convictions about heroism and temptation, of the self-defeating nature of evil, of the dignity of creatures both great and small, both simple and clever. In The Magician’s Nephew we see condemned the will to dominate; in Voyage of the Dawn Treader we experience again Tolkien’s “dragon sickness”, the madness brought on by fixating on materials -- gold, in Eustace’s case, and secret knowledge in Susan’s. Each book has its lessons, and those who have experienced Narnia’s story and loved it will almost surely appreciate his look deeper into the wardrobe.

Wisdom and Innocence

Wisdom and Innocence: A Life Of G.K. Chesterton
© 1996 Joseph Pearce
540 pages

"I cannot help but thinking you were England -- the Merry, chivalrous, simple-hearted, fearless England that I loved." - an old friend's letter to Chesteron

Mention the name G.K. Chesterton today, and most who have a glimmer of recognition will venture that he was a Christian apologist. Chesterton was no theological pendant, however; at the peak of his career, which he still occupied at the time of his death, he was a bestselling author, editor, and journalist  recognized by many as something unique.  More than that, however, he was fun, with an amiability that led even his antagonists to maintain warm relations with him even as they heatedly debated through public newspapers. Pearce's title, Wisdom and Innocence alludes to a core dynamic expressed in the life of Chesterton -- the embrace of romance and reality, wonder and wisdom, faith and reason. The same man who could earn praise from medieval scholars for his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas and hold public debates against H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell might just as easily entertain a house of small children single-handedly the same night, with equal joy. 

Although Chesterton was baptized into the Anglican church, his parents were  merely bowing to social convention when they brought him before the fount and priest;  they were hazy Unitarians and spiritualists. In his youth, Chesterton experimented with the occult, becoming convinced that there was something more than the material world, and had a distinct appreciation for what we might now call the divine feminine.  Chesterton did not write a Surprised by Joy equivalent about his embrace of Christianity via the Anglican church, but the tipping point occurred when he was beginning to teach and met a young nihilist who believed in nothing, not even the possibility of truth. Judging by letters Chesterton wrote thereafter, encountering this man was a staring-into-the-abyss movement that set him searching for meaning and order. He found it in the Anglo-Catholic movement of the Anglican church, and his sympathy for Catholicism would only strengthen over the years, until he finally converted and became one of the Church's most vocal champions.

Chesterton didn't unsheath his pen only to defend the Church on  theological grounds, however. For him, the Catholic faith undergirded western civilization, and even the material expression of society – the organization of the means of production, for instance - -had a religious importance. From an early age Chesterton held the large industrialists of the day in contempt, and critiqued capitalism first from the left, and then later from Catholic theology.  Marx may have cheered the fact that the family had been destroyed as an economic unit, but for Chesterton this was the crux of the problem.  He objected and resented to the fact that so much land and property were pooling into the hands of a few titanic industrialists and their bankers. To take away a man's economic independence, to reduce him to a proletarian laboring for nothing but money – to force him  and his children to abandon a home for a hovel, and spend their energy for another besides improving their own home and familial enterprise, was to undermine human dignity and tarnish a creature made in the image of God.  In general, Chesterton found modernity absurd, unhealthy, and (in the case of fascism) regressive.   He regarded the strident nationalism of the early 20 century as a return to tribal barbarism, and a betrayal of the cosmopolitan aura of the Roman and Catholic world.   His early denouncement of Hitler, at a time before democratic leaders were eying the ill-shaven Austrian with envy for his energy, earned Chesterton kudos after the evils of Hitler's regime became apparent. 

Wisdom and Innocence is an incredible biography, a review of not only GKC's life, but his work.  Pearce is exhaustive, poring into Chesterton's poetry and smaller stories as well. Pearce also visits Chesterton in the company of his friends and rivals.  Chesterton and an Anglo-French writer named Hillaire Belloc were especially close, united in their love for their faith, literature,  and wine, and Chesterton himself inspired many who became friends  His two chief friendly antagonists were George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, who shared his concern about the power of tycoons but little else.  This book is nearly as big as its subject, and well worth reading for anyone who has a serious interest in Chesterton.  The depth which it goes into may be a little much for very casual readers, however:  it had chops scholarly enough to merit Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  granting Pearce an interview for his later biography, Solzhenitsyn: A Life in Exile. 

Literary Converts

Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief
© 2000 Joseph Pearce
452 pages

            

Literary Converts is a historical survey of the 'second spring' of Anglo-Catholic literature and all that followed, covering most of the twentieth century.  Its author would call it a history of grace acting through literature, and Joseph knows about the power of literature; his own soul was rescued through it. In his youth he was the publisher of Bulldog, a vicious racial newspaper in the U.K, but while exploring economic debate he encountered Chesterton, and through Chesterton the redemptive power of the Christian faith.   In Literary Converts, he takes on nearly a century of English literary society, focusing on a group of authors  whose paths brought them closer to Rome, even as the rest of society became more secular. While the 32 sections appear to be miniature biographies, they are in fact intertwined; Pearce tells here the story of a multi-generational community, one decade’s converts inspiring the next through literature and personal conversation.  There are many familiar names here, the greatest being G.K. Chesterton, but some have passed into obscurity.  Many caused scandals when they converted, either because of their social status (R.H. Benson, the son of an Anglican archbishop), or because of their long-respected stature as libertines, like Evelyn Waugh.   What did they see in tradition and the Catholic church, amid increasing material prosperity?

 In an age of dehumanizing work and political machines, of eugenics and social 'darwinism'*,  they saw an institution which insisted on the dignity of the human person, regardless of the ideology of the hour; when populations were being shifted from the fields to the cities, when everything seemed chaotic and new, they saw stability in a  tradition that had weathered the storms of centuries and would, most likely, stand fast through these,As  monstrous factories belched smoke, armed mobs brawled in the streets, and ugliness was enthroned,  they saw in the west's tradition a preserve of beauty, truth, and love. The work produced by these authors -- a lifetime's worth of reading --  wasn't mere spiritual dabbling. Chesterton and Belloc, for interest, provided works of political economy in The Servile State, What's Wrong with the World, and An Outline of Sanity;  T.S. Eliot created The Waste Land, and Christopher Dawson contributed insightful history. Even if they did not join the Catholic church, as was the case with C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, they still drew very near it, and did so through literary engagement – and often through engagement with one another. To read this book is to eavesdrop on a great conversation, a century of  passionate and introspective men and women grappling with the fundamental question of meaning.     

While Pearce is an accessible writer, this is a book of density, and may fall on the obscure side for those who aren't passionate about -- even smitten by -- literature.  I only heard of it while listening to Pearce  lecture on the 'English spring' following the Romantic period in literature. 

Related:
Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis
The Fellowship: the Literary Lives of the Inklings, Phillip Zaleski
The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and Davis Jones; Adam Schwartz


* With apologies to Charles Darwin, since that pernicious social policy owes its name to Herbert Spencer. 

The Quest for Shakespeare

The Quest for Shakespeare: the Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome
© 2008 Joseph Pearce
275 pages

Although April 23rd is, historically, the feast of England’s patron saint George,   it is also the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s  death.  2016 marks the 400th year since England’s most famous author went to his grave, and in way of honoring him I read Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare. I’ve heard Pearce speak on Shakespeare before, rebutting arguments that other personalities wrote the plays and that Shakespeare is just given credit for them, like Homer.  I’d assume Quest  would follow the same tack, which it does in its introductory chapter, but the real heart of Quest is Pearce’s case for Shakespeare being Catholic.  Although there’s no direct evidence, Pearce argues that the Bard’s loyalties can be inferred from various connections and relationships.

Shakespeare’s religion isn’t just interesting trivia: he lived in the age of Elizabeth, when Henry VIII’s divorce from Rome was visiting the land with terror and blood.  As covered in Come Rack! Come Rope! and Faith and Treason, those who did not attend Anglican services were fined heavily, and Catholic priests were brutally executed. After the Pope’s bull declaring Elizabeth an unlawful monarch, Catholicism had the same ring as treason.   Shakespeare’s father and daughter were both listed and fined as ‘recusants’, establishing the Shakespeare family as Catholic, if not William himself.  His close associations with other Catholics, like a hanged Jesuit priest named Southwell, and the Arden family who were damned in the Somerset plot,  throw a Roman light on him, as does his purchase and maintenance of a house used for hiding priests and performing illegal Masses. That last was compelling for me, especially when combined with the fact that he went out of his way to  engage a crypto-Catholic priest to perform his wedding ceremony.

Pearce's underlying argument is that Shakespeare is not some empty vessel to be filled with the values of his critics, but a man in his own flesh whose values shaped his work. He writes that if Shakespeare were Catholic, this would give the plays a certain moral tone, and closes the book with two appending sections which offer a guide to the moral interpretation of Shakespeare, and an example of it in "King Lear".  Though Pearce flirts with seeing his own desires in Shakespeare himself,  he errs on the side of caution more often than not.  He does have a marked enthusiasm for the central idea, at one point speculating that the lack of information about Shakespeare's early life in London might indicate that he was living a quiet moral life free of scandal.  Well, perhaps, but presumably Anglicans are just as capable of living quiet, moral lives free of scandal. Even if there were an overt Christian theme in the plays, that wouldn't necessitate an overt Catholic theme.  At best in "King Lear" there are characters complaining about the times they lived in, but if someone isn't complaining you're not in the real world, you're in the first version of the Matrix, the one that failed because no one believed in it.

Although too little is known about Shakespeare's life to declare his beliefs or politics with surety -- and interpreting plays is tricky, as anyone can read anything into them --  the amount of connections suggests that even if Shakespeare wasn't an observant Catholic himself, his sense of drama and justice would be influenced by the spectre of his friends being persecuted and even killed by the court...and that is an aspect wholly missed by every teacher on Shakespeare I've ever had.

Bilbo's Journey

Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning of the Hobbit
©  2012 Joseph Pearce
147 pages

The Hobbit begins with the sudden arrival of a pack of dwarves at Bilbo Baggin’s house. Though he is very much the quiet homebody, they have arrived expecting him to both play host an then join them on a dangerous quest – which he does, grudgingly, because he has little choice against a band of strangers and the stern wishes of the wizard Gandalf. His resulting adventure is a coming-of-age story in which the hobbit  learns to look outside his hobbit-hole and appreciate the world at large. Bilbo’s Journey expounds on the moral aspects of this travel into maturity, and sees in its conclusion a Bilbo who has learned to look outside himself.   Pearce relies on Tolkien’s myth-saturated scholarship to stress that the Dragon is not merely a large reptile whose lair was disturbed, but a creature of evil who is utterly craven. The Dragon feasts on innocents and hoards gold not because it is hungry and wishes to put something by for its retirement, but because it is wicked, and its presence makes real our own craven consumerism and selfishness. Tellingly,  when near the end the Dragon is loosed on the town and swoops down, shining in the moonlight, its lone piece of unarmored flesh is its black heart, open to one well-shot arrow.  As with Return of the King, the defeat of the monster is not the end of evil;  the wealth-obsessed dragon sickness leads to a war between various factions, and when Bilbo returns home he finds his distant relations greedily pawing at his own possessions. Having grown throughout the adventure, however, Bilbo is not nearly as wrecked by having lost his ‘precious’ possessions as he once was.  As with Frodo’s Journey, Pearce comments on other aspects of the story – the development of the ring, Thorin’s kingship vs Aragon’s  -- but the virtue against evil, charity vs selfishness theme is predominant.   There’s a fair bit of redundancy between this and Frodo’s Journey,  but this one has broader appeal.

Frodo's Journey

Frodo's Journey: The Hidden Meaning of the Lord of the Rings
© 2015 Joseph Pearce
158 pages

Noting that Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring trilogy is rich with symbolism is rather akin to observing that the Pacific Ocean is big. The description is accurate, but weightless. Frodo’s Journey examines much of its symbolism in detail, chiefly elaborating on Tolkien’s observation that it was, “of course, a deeply religious work”. The religion is present not in the trappings of a Church, as with Asimov’s Foundation series, but in the epic’s core story of grace against evil.   Pearce informs his argument by studying the details of the story in the context of Tolkien’s mythic background, drawing from the Simarillion. Although his focus is on Tolkien’s Christian symbolism, Pearce also touches lightly on Tolkien’s love for the language and lore of pre-Norman England.

In the Simarillion, Pearce writes, Tolkien establishes a celestial atmosphere not unlike the Christian one. There is one central deity, the Iluvatar, who creates the Cosmos by conducting music. One heavenly musician refuses to play in harmony, and is struck down to Middle-Earth, but is told that no matter how much discord he attempts to introduce,  the grand master will always restore harmony..  Central to the story of the Lord of the Rings is, of course, the Ring, which is far different from the ring of The Hobbit. There it was a mysterious but powerfully helpful object;  in the Ring trilogy, it dominates the minds and hearts of those who wear it, and exposes them to attack by dark forces.   The ring, writes Pearce, is Sin – not only is it burdensome, but taking it on distances the wearer from the good world which was divinely created, and makes them more visible to the Dark Lord – Sauron,  Morgoth’s chief servant.  The coup de Grace:   according to Return of the King,  the ring was destroyed on March 25, the same day that Catholic tradition maintains was the date of the historic crucifixion.  The whole story has the stamp of Providence on it, writes Pearce, for Gandalf muses that Bilbo was meant find the Ring, so that it might be destroyed.  Although Pearce’s brief work shines a light on many of Tolkien’s other little allusions – the Charlemagne-like crowning of Aragon, the linguistic fun Tolkien has with the “far-seeing” stones that dispirit Sauron’s enemies and have the same etymological structure in Elvish as Television and Fernsehen do in English and German,   the Christian connection is the most broadly developed.

This meaning is not nearly as overt as C.S. Lewis’ own Narnian chronicles,  in which the Christ-figure Aslan announced to the children that he was known by another name in their world, but it definitely registers.  Being as Tolkien was a practicing Catholic, some degree of the inspiration could have been accidental, like the Mary-like veneration of Galadriel, but the use of dates has the stamp of deliberation.  For the Fellowship to have started out on December 25 (by Tolkien’s appendix) and triumphed on the same date of the first Good Friday makes clear that Tolkien was paying homage at the very least.   While this is my first foray in reading books about the Ring trilogy, it won't be the last, and I'm eager to see if other authors share or differ from Pearce. I'm sure the trilogy has tremendous depths to plumb!

Race with the Devil

Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love
© 2013 Joseph Pearce
264 pages

How does a neo-Nazi become a Catholic literary critic?  An act of God?   Joseph Pearce would surely make the claim, his life having become a miserable shambles before he heard the booming voice of Gilbert Keith Chesterton from beyond the grave (albiet through books).  In his youth, Joe Pearce was an influential white supremacist, rising through the ranks of the National Front through his one-man newsletter, Bulldog. Building success by appealing to football hooligans  and punk rockers, it caught the attention of not only the National Front, but of the British government, which twice threw Pearce into prison for inciting racial hatred.  His first time in chains only deepened Pearce's conviction that the state was out to ruin the English race; by his second imprisonment, Pearce was already in turmoil, already doubting the path he had chosen. Turning prison into a spiritual retreat, he emerged from bars and from his own dark night of the soul to a new life.

In his new life, Joseph Pearce is a distinguished author and scholar, having held positions at institutions like Ave Marie University, Thomas More College, and Aquinas College. He has produced not only biographies of men like G.K. Chesterton and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but works that delve into the deeper meanings of The Lord of the Rings and Shakespeare. This hunger to know the human soul through literature is partially responsible for Pearce's salvation. Although as a teenager he was caught up in reaction against the upswell of immigration, and the enervating influence of modernist politics,  he found little to build on there. His life was filled with passion as he roamed the streets looking for migrant gangs or football clubs to mix it up with, and even some purpose as he became a shaper of the nationalist thinking, but pessimism was a bitter gall to sallow.  Works like Orwell's 1984 diverted his course from fascism, awaking him to the danger of an all-power state,  but unsettled him with its dark vision of Winston Smith's defeat, the spirit of humanity crushed underfoot.  Pearce could not live with it, but an abiding thirst for literature would offer him glimpses of a better world -- particularly Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a retelling of the author's years spent in the Soviet prison-camp system, which he survived, humanity intact.

 Pearce spent four hours a day reading on trains as he traveled for his duties with the National Front,    but literature took him places he surely never meant to go, like Rome. So against popery was Pearce that he traveled to northern Ireland to work with the Ulster Loyalists and joined the Orange Orange, dedicated to ensuring Protestant supremacy over Irish Catholic culture. As much as Pearce despised the Catholic church, he had a grudging respect for John Paul II’s fight against the Soviet system. It was G.K. Chesterton who coaxed him into the Tiber, however, by presenting an argument against the centralizing tendencies of both capitalism and socialism.  Chesterton offered a third way in which the ownership of the means of production – of shops, farms, tools, and the like – is widely as distributed as possible. Pearce, having grown up in ‘the shire’, a quiet arcadian community far removed from much of modernity, saw in Chesterton an argument for what he longed for.  Pearce’s love for his country, warped by racism,  was redeemed by Chesterton, refashioned into ideals of peaceful cooperation.  Delighting in Chesterton’s personality, Pearce  read everything he could by the man, and through his study came to appreciate the Catholic faith and its transcendent moral order that shed insight on not only personal morality, but our socio-economic structure.

Race with the Devil is a powerful story human redemption, part biography and part literary reflection. While the aspects on British culture were fascinating in themselves, particularly the political loyalties of football clubs and musical subcultures,  Pearce's journey itself is the wonder. Consider how powerful ethnic nationalism can be, that potent mix of primal clannishness and modern ideology; it intoxicates both the brain and the blood. Yet Pearce resisted. Having approached the abyss, he stepped back. Despite all of the anger and fear he subjected himself to, there still remained some shades of grace, memories of that childhood steeped in ordinary decency.  When racial turmoil still fills American papers, it is a comforting notion that there still remains some escape route to sanity and healing.

Race is an extraordinary read.