Daniel Frampton

This paper examines and seeks to explain G. K. Chesterton's negative view of English intellectuals as "mostly fools". Chesterton's humorous and often savage critique of the intelligentsia focused in particular on its snobbery and dismissal of patriotism. What appalled Chesterton most, however, was the detachment of the modern intellectual from the “charities of Christendom", or Christianity more broadly. This paper also compares Chesterton's patriotism and dislike of intellectuals to George Orwell, with whom he shared similar sentiments. Despite Orwell's criticism of Chesterton and Catholicism, his own patriotism and willingness to bash intellectuals resembled Chesterton's own pugilist style and instinct.

Examining the art of the Graham Sutherland, Dr Daniel Frampton argues that the noted British artist’s oft-quoted title “Neo-romantic” has obscured the true nature of his art, which Dr Frampton argues is “essentially religious and especially Catholic”. What was the effect of Sutherland’s faith on his art? Dr Frampton, reflecting on Sutherland’s most significant works, including Crucifixion (1946), Pastoral (1930) and Thorn Head (1947), shows that we may seriously consider these works “as a protracted series of religious icons invested with a newfound modernist vocabulary of forms borrowed most obviously from Picasso”. Such paintings, influenced in part by the thought of the noted neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, communicated a Catholic sense of order. As Sutherland said: “The Church objectifies the mysterious and the unknown. It gave my aspirations towards certain ends a more clearly-defined direction than I could ever have found alone.”

This essay posits that M. R. James’s ghost stories display an “English Catholic sensibility”, or at least a sense that was haunted by a medieval, hence Catholic, vision of the universe, pre-dating the Reformation and its aftermath, which was essentially sacramental. In this sense, such stories as “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, “Number 13”, “An Episode of Cathedral History,” and “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”, exhibit a supernaturally-charged reality that was “terrifyingly alive”. Accordingly, his ghosts are novel in that they are "embodied terrors" that can be touched. And it may be said that James’s ghost stories are themselves a spectral manifestation of an English sensibility that has come to realise that something vital really was lost as a result of the Reformation.

This essay explores G. K. Chesterton’s meditations on the nature and virtue of courage, as well as how he believed it complemented Christianity, especially its notion of sanctity, in which, in Chesterton’s eyes, the saint and the solider are seen to be synonymous. Tackling George Orwell’s criticism of Chesterton, too – that he suppressed “both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda”, especially in terms of his “silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war” – this piece argues, to the contrary, that Chesterton’s elevation of the virtue of courage was in fact an affirmation of his own personal philosophy of “heroic jollity”, combatting worldly struggle in an altogether subtler way than Orwell gave him credit for. However, while Orwell never understood Chesterton’s Catholic faith, he did at least recognise his fellow writer’s solidierly aspect, that “at least he had courage.” In this sense, both men were kindred spirits.

This thesis forwards the concept of the ‘Old Western Men’, a phrase borrowed from C. S. Lewis, who used this term to assert the presence of a ‘Great Divide’ in history. Modernity, he believed, was essentially secular, unlike what had preceded it. In this sense, he was in opposition to it as a Christian. This thesis’s unique contribution to the current literature is that it applies Lewis’s identification of the Old Western Men to a broader spectrum of intellectuals and artists, previously referred to, more narrowly, as the ‘Catholic literary revival’. This Ph.D. locates such a revival within a broader ‘religious mode of response’ to modernity, which such men of letters as Lewis believed to be fundamentally materialistic; meaning that modernity denied the existence of an objective spiritual reality. Chapter one describes the general concept of the Old Western Men, including how it confronted secular modernity by attempting to reconcile mind with matter as part of an intellectual via media (middle way); it will also examine the importance that some intellectuals invested in the concept of imaginative understanding. Chapter two focuses on an Old Western emphasis on the ‘More-Than-World’ within the world, one that was essentially sacramental, having come to reconcile reason with the imagination. Chapter three forwards the Old Western notion of thinking ‘christianly’ by cultivating a divine indifference to worldly catastrophe. This also entails examining the concept of self-sanctification, as well as how the Old Western Men responded to the violence of their century by inviting the supernatural into their lives. Chapter four concludes the thesis by examining the spiritual/cultural device of Christendom as a redemptive discourse combatting European nationalism and racialism.