Christian Requisition and the Second World War

Abstract

W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark converted or reverted to Anglo- or Roman Catholicism in the interwar period or just after the Second World War. In some of their most distinguished work, these writers widen the imaginative scope of their faith to wartime culture. This dissertation takes its theoretical cue from Eliot’s April 1941 call on the BBC for the “conversion of social consciousness” of wartime Britain. For Eliot, the Second World War is a crucible of faith on a social scale. He points to exemplary “men who have not merely kept the faith through the dark age, but who have lived through the mind of the dark age, and got beyond it.” Sheltering civilians in the London Underground resemble clandestine Christians in the catacombs of the Roman Empire. “Prophets,” Eliot argues, can arise in the twentieth century as well as in the first fledgling centuries of the Church. They live and think through their time, however “dark” it is, rather than against it. In keeping with Eliot’s public call for “the conversion of social consciousness,” this dissertation develops the idea of Christian requisition. In political terms, “requisition” defines the military conversion of peacetime infrastructure, as in the calling-up of fishing ships for the rescue of stranded soldiers at Dunkirk, the shift to tank production by General Motors, or the mobilization of physics faculties for the Manhattan Project. Under the conditions of total war, political conversion acts imaginatively as well as materially, causing citizens to think of themselves as “civilians” and of their society in terms of “the struggle” or “strategy.” This dissertation substitutes “requisition” for “conversion” because its Catholic writers transfigure the secular infrastructure of wartime for the sake of what Spark calls “unselfconscious” theological intelligibility. “Requisition” captures the sometimes surprising, sometimes deflating, but always ironic way in which these writers decommission the secular forms of war for Christian purposes. They view the secular world as spiritually unselfconscious, not atheistic, and inhabit mixed lifestyles and literary forms. In each chapter, I tie my close reading of poetry and fiction to a telling aspect of the forms of life of the secular world: espionage, the blackout of the Blitz, drug-use, air power. The liturgical and theological interests of these writers—Saint Augustine’s distensio animi, omniscient narrative providence, Pentecost, the Rule of Saint Benedict—are always seen through a secular lens. Christian conversion is typically personal in scope. According to the influential account of Saint Augustine, the Christian convert discards a dissolute (or secular) life and takes refuge in the plan of God for her regenerate future. While this dissertation acknowledges the relationship between conversion and literary form, as in Spark’s claim that Catholicism enabled her novelistically to see life as a “whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings,” it prioritizes the literary imagination as an electric point of contact between Catholic practice and the secular wartime public. The lines of communication between polis and parish are frayed, but not cut, in wartime. The dissertation defines Christian requisition as a category of wartime religious literature that depends upon its historical circumstances but transfigures them with a literal remainder: conversions between the secular and sacred, this dissertation argues, are not an all-or-nothing matter.