Upon learning in 1928 of T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Christianity, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister:

I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.¹

Woolf’s dismissal of belief in traditional Christianity as a distressing obscenity...

One of Chesterton’s many complaints about modern society was that its journalism told people that a man had died before they knew that he had lived. Yet in his own case, his end is the best beginning for understanding his life and work. On 27 June 1936, thirteen days after his death, a stately memorial service was held at Westminster Cathedral. Ronald Knox (one of the two people whom Chesterton credited most for his reception into the Catholic Church) preached a panegyric that attempted to assess Chesterton’s significance to his culture. Against frequent dismissals of Chesterton as a “master of...

One convert who was “thinking Chesterton” was Graham Greene. Greene was impressed by Chesterton even before Greene became a Roman Catholic, as the only autograph he sought as a youngster was “when I ran, in my school cap, after G. K. Chesterton, as he labored like a Lepanto galleon down Shaftesbury Avenue.”¹ Though not an uncritical admirer, Greene retained this esteem for Chesterton throughout his long career. In 1944, for example, he rebutted the portrait of his predecessor as an ephemeral verbal prankster, asserting that Chesterton’s religious writing saw what “was most lacking in our age”;² and he remained faithful...

While lecturing in America in the early 1930s, Greene’s mentor, T. S. Eliot, was asked which of his contemporaries was the most powerful intellectual influence in Britain. He could have selected such still esteemed figures as his Bloomsbury friends, Chesterton, Auden, or Shaw; but Eliot chose a different name: Christopher Dawson.¹ Dawson’s sway spanned the ideological and theological spectra, and also extended across the Atlantic. Barbara Ward, Russell Kirk, the Catholic Worker movement, Lewis Mumford, agnostic Arnold Toynbee, and even the deeply anti-Catholic Dean Inge all saluted his work. In recent decades, though, and especially since his 1970 death, Dawson’s...

Shortly after Dawson’s 1970 death, David Jones, a friend of four decades, wrote that “I not only am greatly indebted to him, but had a great affection for him…. I was astonished at the lack of appreciation he received.”¹ Jones’s eulogy was the climax of a long-standing admiration for Dawson. In the preface to his 1952 poem, The Anathemata, for instance, Jones gave Dawson primary acknowledgment, claiming to feel “especially indebted” to the historian.² He reiterated this conviction often, as when he exclaimed a year later that “Christopher D. has taught me so much of what very little I know.”³...

Jones once reiterated his belief that causes that seem lost in modernity are right from the standpoint of transcendent truth with a nod to a fellow cosmic optimist: “nothing succeeds like failure, as Chesterton might say.”¹ This epigram is an apt epitaph for the entire Third Spring. As verdant a flowering in many fields of intellectual activity as this twentieth-century revival of British Roman Catholicism was, these converts’ shared hope of routing out modern secularism from their culture’s soil and planting anew a traditional Christian ethos failed to strike deep roots. Within both Britain and the Church itself, the beliefs...