During Russell Kirk’s fruitful lifetime
I regularly took his sage advice concerning
books I ought to read. Dr. Kirk
had seemingly perused everything worth
perusing. Thus, on his say-so in 1968, I
read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested
T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian
Society (1939).

I hate to tell you, but many things are
even worse than in annus horribilis ’68:
manners, morals, cultures, systems of belief,
ideals of authority. But, I admit, it’s easier
to get fresh seafood and a smooth shave.

The idea of a renewed look at Eliot’s
premises commended itself to me recently
due to the deteriorating outlook
for a moral recovery. I thought, “Could
we maybe return to the Christian outlook
on life, to something like its intended
brilliance and relevance to the human
enterprise?” Eliot approached this question
in a series of three lectures at Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, in the years
between the Munich debacle and the Nazi
invasion of Poland.

He wasn’t trying to gin up enthusiasm
for government takeover of the church.
Anything but. All the same, he recognized
paganism as the alternative to “the formation
of a new Christian culture.” How to
build such a culture was the question. It
could be done, he suggested, by “consciously
and thoughtfully practising Christians,
especially of intellectual and spiritual
superiority.” He called these folk “the
Community of Christians.” They would
collectively form “the conscious mind and
the conscience of the nation.” They would
know that “truth is one and that theology
has no frontiers.” Necessary tension between
church and state would mark the new
endeavor, preserving it from paganism.

“We need to know,” said Eliot, “how to
see the world as the Christian Fathers saw
it; the purpose of reascending to origins
is that we should be able to return, with
greater spiritual knowledge, to our own
situation. We need to recover the sense of
religious fear, so that it may be overcome
by religious hope.”

The 21st-century reader will remark
how little in the practical sense has come of
Eliot’s diagnostics and prescriptions. That
might, ironically, be the point of greatest
cheer for us. A lot of cultural brush has
been cleared since 1939, and 1968 for that
matter. These include “protections”—laws,
folkways, institutions—much devastated
by the sociopolitical hurricanes of the
past half-century. Their loss leaves serious
Christians in that state acutely described
by Dr. Johnson: “[W]hen a man knows he
is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates
his mind wonderfully.”

Eliot’s book on the revival of Christian
witness provides a worthy subject on which
to concentrate the still-undaunted human
mind.

—William Murchison

I have been rereading a couple of the
works of the Catholic novelist Heinrich Böll
(1917-1985; Nobel Prize 1972), Germany’s
most prominent storyteller from the rubble
and the ruins after WWII. One novel
in particular is especially noteworthy, Und
sagte kein einziges Wort (1953), available
in Engish translation as And Never Said
a Word. Böll derives his title from the refrain
of a Negro spiritual, referring to the
silence of Jesus when we men nailed him
to the cross. Böll, himself a soldier during
the war and a witness to its misery, usually
chose protagonists possessed of profound
spiritual sensitivity, of whom the
institutions of church, business, and state
cannot make use.

Yet they are not what you might call
“good” people. Hans Schnier, the titular
hero of Ansichten eines Clowns (The Clown,
1963), is selfish, prodigal, often deliberately
hurtful, contemptuous of social conventions,
yet strangely innocent, an unbeliever
who loves the Catholic Mass, and a man
for whom “what men and women do together,”
as he puts it, implies as a matter of
course a commitment for the rest of their
lives. He cannot understand it when his
mistress, Marie, whom he considers to be
his wife, leaves him to marry an upstanding
Catholic man and thus to be reconciled
to the Church.

The hero and heroine of And Never
Said a Word are separated. The man has
left their one-room flat after the pressure
of poverty caused him one day to beat his
children. He scrambles up a wage as a tutor
and a telephone operator for the diocese,
blows some of it on cigarettes and drink,
and uses the rest to meet his wife weekly
at fifth-rate flophouses fit for whores. The
turning point comes when the wife goes
to confession, and the priest—a muscular
and gruff man from the country and
obviously unfit for ecclesiastical advancement—
tells her he can absolve her only after
she takes her husband back.

Böll was arguably the best Catholic novelist
of his generation: a better storyteller
than Bernanos, a more profound ironist
than Waugh, a deeper analyst of the human
condition than Greene, with a broader
scope than Mauriac. His liberalism was of
an old, manly sort that seems inconceivable
now; expecting little from mankind, less
from princes, prelates, and politicians, but
always upholding the dignity of men and
women who do not run away from suffering,
and who, in usually small and unconsidered
ways, work for justice and mercy.
He left the Church in 1976, but he insisted
that he had not left the faith. And, in
fact, one cannot understand him without
that faith, so much more commonly battered
in our time than in his. But the Lord
took the buffets and the spitting, “and never
said a mumbaling word.”

—Anthony Esolen