Liturgical Conservatism and the Modern Novel

The reason is that their literary tastes were formed by the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and the Traditional Liturgy is all three.

From The European Conservative

By Roy Peachey, MA

The greatest Catholic writers of the 20th century drew on the deep riches of the liturgy to speak to the secular age.

The conservatism of some of the greatest Catholic writers of the 20th century has often baffled, and sometimes enraged, their literary critics, with Evelyn Waugh and J. R. R. Tolkien in particular coming under sustained attack. Writing in The Guardian, for example, Damien Walter complained that “Tolkien’s myths are profoundly conservative” and so aren’t to be trusted. Maybe Sauron wasn’t evil at all: “Isn’t it more likely that the orcs, who live in dire poverty, actually support Sauron because he represents the liberal forces of science and industrialisation, in the face of a brutally oppressive conservative social order?” As for the dragons, “a balanced telling might well have shown Smaug to be much more of a reforming force in the valley of Dale.” Evelyn Waugh has been similarly chastised. One critic protested his “excessive conservatism” and another, clearly irritated by The Sword of Honour’s critical success, argued that it was a triumph only “for pessimism and conservatism.” Writing in the New Statesman recently, Will Lloyd could not hide his exasperation: “Why the passing decades cannot diminish him ought to trouble our creaking, secular, liberal age.” Well, quite.

If Waugh’s social and political conservatism has been difficult to swallow, his liturgical conservatism has proved to be utterly inexplicable. Many critics seem to believe that the liturgical changes enacted after (not, despite popular belief, by) the Second Vatican Council were proof of the Catholic Church’s belated but inevitable acceptance of the modern world. Waugh’s heartfelt criticism of these changes was, therefore, clear evidence of his reactionary nostalgia: “An ardent traditionalist,” Mary R. Reichardt wrote, “Waugh especially deplored the liturgical changes of Vatican II, sadly convinced that his beloved Church was merely giving in to modernity.” 

Waugh wasn’t the only conservative author to be damned with faint adverbs. David Jones, the great modernist writer and artist, has suffered the same fate. According to one otherwise sympathetic critic, “One of the key changes of The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1962-1965) was permission to celebrate most of the Mass in vernacular languages. Jones was deeply opposed to the changes: he wrote several letters to The Tablet and discussed them, at times obsessively and at length, in correspondence to friends.” That this liturgical obsession enabled Jones to write some of the greatest literature of the century is, it seems, an irony lost on this critic.

Like Jones, Waugh took his critics’ liturgical incomprehension seriously and used it to shape his own writing, his imagined readers being not unlike the Yugoslav partisans in Unconditional Surrender who pressed forward for the sermon to check that the Serbo-Croat priest was not voicing politically subversive views before retiring to the back of the church when the liturgy resumed. Time and time again, Waugh’s narrators foreground secular incomprehension in the presence of the liturgy. In Officers and Gentlemen, we are told that, “all over the world, unheard by Sprat, the Exultet had been sung that morning. It found no echo in Sprat’s hollow heart.” In Unconditional Surrender, Arthur Box-Bender “kept his eyes on Angela and Guy, anxious to avoid any liturgical solecism.” In Brideshead Revisited, it is the boorish, fascistic platoon-commander, Hooper, who is the first to stumble on “a sort of R.C. Church” at Brideshead: “I looked in and there was a kind of service going on—just a padre and one old man. I felt very awkward.” And then, of course, there’s Charles Ryder. 

When, late in Brideshead Revisited, Cordelia tells Charles about the closing of the chapel at Brideshead, she asks him if he has ever been to Tenebrae. He has not. “Well, if you had you’d know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas … it’s a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear.” Charles waves the suggestion away but, as the great angler reels him in from the ends of the earth, we hear in passing that he has now “heard that great lament, which Cordelia once quoted to me in the drawing-room of Marchmain House, sung by a half-caste choir in Guatemala, nearly a year ago.” The liturgy remains hidden in the narrative but its effects—as expressed again on the last page of the novel with the repetition of Quomodo sedet sola civitas (How lonely the city sits)—are undeniable. For Waugh, it is what happens outside the confines of the narrative that truly matters. Novels give way before the liturgy, which draws his characters upwards towards the inexpressible worship of heaven. 

Much the same is true of J. R. R. Tolkien. Priscilla Tolkien reminds us that “My father loved the monastic tradition of Gregorian Plain Chant and was much concerned with the giving up of Latin in Church services, since it had been for so many centuries the universal language of Western Christianity.” This receives further confirmation from Simon Tolkien, who was acutely embarrassed by his grandfather making “all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English” when they attended a post-Vatican II vernacular Mass together.

Writing to his son Christopher during the Second World War, Tolkien suggested that it was “a good and admirable thing to know by heart the Canon of the Mass, for you can say this in your heart if ever hard circumstance keeps you from hearing Mass.” Serving at Mass before the liturgical changes of the 1960s and ’70s meant that Tolkien developed a deep familiarity with the words, actions and structure of the Roman Rite from childhood, when “Hilary [his brother] and I were supposed to, and usually did, serve Mass before getting on our bikes to go to school.” Tolkien continued to serve at Mass until at least 1963, so it would have been surprising if the liturgy itself had not worked its way into his fiction in some form or other, either consciously or subconsciously.

An unexpected point of contact between liturgy and fiction is suggested by Priscilla Tolkien who remembers Donald Swann coming to their house to perform his song cycle, The Road Goes Ever On: “when it came to the Elvish poem ‘Namárië, Galadriel’s Lament and Farewell,’ my father demonstrated how he wished this to be sung in the mode of Plain Chant.” The link between Galadriel’s song and Gregorian Chant may not be obvious from The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien clearly saw this elven song in a liturgical light or, to be more accurate, heard it with a liturgical rhythm. In Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings, he explains that High-elven or Quenya “had become, as it were, an ‘Elven-Latin’, still used for ceremony, and for high matters of lore and song, by the High Elves who had returned in exile to Middle-earth at the end of the First Age.” This implicit link between Quenya and liturgical Latin was made explicit in The Notion Club Papers when Lowdham explained to the rest of the club that Avallonian (an earlier name for Quenya) “is to me beautiful, in its simple and euphonious style. And it seems to me more august, more ancient, and, well, sacred and liturgical. I used to call it the Elven-Latin. The echoes of it carry one far away. Very far away. Away from Middle-earth altogether, I expect.” For Tolkien, as for Waugh, the liturgy always led to a greater reality beyond the words on the page.

Tolkien also used liturgical time to structure his narratives, in short stories such as Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham, but also in The Lord of the Rings. It was no coincidence that the Ring was destroyed on 25 March (the Feast of the Annunciation) or that the Company set out from Rivendell on 25 December. As Tolkien wrote in Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings, “Dec. 25 (setting out) and March 25 (accomplishment of quest) were intentionally chosen by me.” While Tolkien rightly resisted allegorical readings of The Lord of the Rings—neither Frodo nor Aragorn represents Christ in any straightforward sense—there is clearly a mythical echo, or, to be more precise, a foreshadowing, of the salvific work of Christ in the events of the final book. This Gandalf himself suggests when, echoing St Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:15, he tells Frodo and Sam that “in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of March when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King.”

Unable to consider the possibility that Tolkien might actually have been onto something, some critics have retreated into their own consoling fantasies, seeing Tolkien as “a traditionalist English Catholic notorious for resisting Vatican II’s liturgical modernizations” and his “traditionalist conservatism” as a refuge in which he and his fellow Inklings could shelter “from the invasive modernity that dominated their conflicted time.” In reality, Tolkien, like Waugh, drew on the deep riches of the liturgy to speak to the secular age in which he was writing, eschewing the largely secular conventions of the novel as he did so.

Unlike Tolkien, who never went public with his liturgical distress, Alice Thomas Ellis was jolted into very public action by the changes to the Church. In fact, it was her liturgical conservatism that made her a novelist: “I was so annoyed that in 1977 I stirred out of my habitual indolence and wrote a book called The Sin Eater: I put it in the form of a novel, since novels give better scope for ungoverned rage than more sober works and I had to do something rather than sink into despair.” Rose, the flawed protagonist of the book, expressed many of  Ellis’s own convictions when she complained about her parish priest “facing the congregation, standing behind his table and joining in the singing of the negro spirituals and the pop songs and Shall-we-gather-at-the-river. … They seem to regard Our Lord as a sort of beaten egg to bind us all together.” Searching for the right image to describe these horrors, she decided that it was “as though one’s revered, dignified and darling old mother had slapped on a mini-skirt and fishnet tights and started ogling strangers. A kind of menopausal madness, a sudden yearning to be attractive to all.” Of course, as  Ellis wryly noted, the novel “was written before Political Correctness arrived on our shores.”  

George Mackay Brown was another novelist who agreed that “the majesty of Latin has been cast aside for a dull drab contemporary English” in the new Mass, telling a correspondent that he missed “the grave and lovely dialogue of priest and acolyte, and those mysterious silences when each silent heart was a loom of prayer.” Like Ellis, he channelled his concern into fiction, placing the sacrifice of the Mass at the heart of his greatest novel, Magnus: “The fires at the centre of the earth, the sun above, all divine essences and ecstasies, come to this silence at last—a circle of bread and a cup of wine on an altar.”

And then there’s Martin Mosebach, whose rousing denunciation of the new Mass in The Heresy of Formlessness: the Roman Liturgy and its Enemy became a rallying cry for a new generation of liturgical conservatives. One of the most striking features of this book is the inclusion of an extended passage from Mosebach’s novel, A Long Night, in which the old Mass is eventually recognised as a force for renewal in the Church. 

Georg Lukács believed that the novel was the “epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” At the risk of baffling or enraging more critics, I would argue instead that an attentive reading of the works of Evelyn Waugh, J. R. R. Tolkien, Alice Thomas Ellis, George Mackay Brown, and Martin Mosebach suggests that the liturgy, and the traditional Latin Mass in particular, has been the hidden source of much literary, as well as spiritual, renewal. The novel—the epic of a world that is still enchanted by God—has been reinvented for a secular age.