James G. Chappel
“The Roots that Clutch: An Intellectual History of British Catholicism, 1920-1980”
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Abstract
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Perhaps the most surprising feature of modern British intellectual life is the unexpected prominence of Roman Catholics: from John Henry Newman to J.R.R. Tolkien to Alasdair Macintyre, Catholics have occupied a significant place in the cultural field of modern Britain. This fact, however, has been largely unexplained. British intellectuals typically define themselves as sensible empiricists, immune from the putatively wild metaphysics of Continental figures. This self-perception, which also pervades the extant historiography, is based on a selective appropriation of the historical record, and one that ignores the contributions of Catholic intellectuals, who have throughout the century been more attuned to philosophical developments on the Continent than their secular counterparts. The majority of prominent Catholic intellectuals have been converts, implying that they saw the Church as an answer to specifically modern, and specifically British, questions. Through a close investigation of the Catholic intellectual scene between 1920 and 1980, I hope to discover what those questions were. My project examines the nature of the cultural space occupied by the Catholic Church in Britain, and attempts to grapple with the consequences of the Church’s perennial attraction to intellectuals, even as the nation itself rapidly secularized. A rehabilitation of the tradition, which puts it back into dialogue with secular thought, will illuminate a crucial episode in modern British history and, more broadly, provide insight into the increasingly crucial and complex relationship between modernity and religion.
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