The Christian World of Agatha Christie

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:11:00 -0400

In 1971, a group of British notables, both Catholic and non-Catholic, petitioned for the retention of the Tridentine Rite in England and Wales. As the story goes, Pope Paul VI read the petition and, arriving at the name of Agatha Christie, shrugged and agreed to the request. Such are the mysterious workings of providence, as manifested in the field of cultural history. The “Agatha Christie Indult” may be the only occasion of a detective novelist influencing Vatican policy, although, given the popularity of the genre, it may not. When Patriarch of Venice, Pope John Paul I addressed G. K. Chesterton as one of his illustrissimi , primarily as the creator of Father Brown, the sacred response to Sherlock Holmes.

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The Neglected Legacy of John Buchan

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Author, administrator, historian, politician, mountaineer, and Governor-General of Canada, John Buchan is long overdue for rehabilitation as a genuine Christian intellect of the early twentieth century. A son of a minister, his favorite book after the Bible was Pilgrim’s Progress . Buchan’s progress was marked by a strong faith and catholicity of vision, and he deserves to be known for more than the ripping yarns that he fondly termed his “shockers.”

Against the approved literary tradition, Buchan’s childhood was perfectly happy. His father’s religion, although rigorous, did not inflict crushing guilt on Buchan or any of his siblings. “Our household was ruled by the old Calvinistic discipline,” wrote Buchan in his memoir Memory Hold-the-Door ( Pilgrim’s Way in the U.S.). “That discipline can have had none of the harshness against which so many have revolted, for it did not dim the beauty and interest of the earth.” Buchan never lost his inspiration that the world was to be respected and life was deadly serious; eternally serious, in fact. Even if one was a mere nothingness in the grand scheme of the cosmos, one was a unique speck of nothingness; even if God had predestined you for damnation, you still owed him thanks for your lost soul.

Studies at Glasgow and Oxford took the edge from Buchan’s Calvinism, the most obvious literary remnant being over-reliance on providence as a narrative device. This was partly slack plotting, but it can also be attributed to a belief that life really was lived in the hand of God. Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps and Buchan’s most famous creation, was particularly prone to crediting Providence with his success. In one of his weakest novels, The House of the Four Winds , Buchan provides an unintentionally humorous illustration of his philosophy, as a character admits “I don’t quite know why any of us are here,” although on an existential level she echoes her creator by insisting that “here we are, and we must do something.”

In 1929 Buchan became a Tory M.P”rather late in life. Since he was not a “Party man,” he never achieved office. He identified himself as a moderate conservative; writing to the left-wing author J.B. Priestley, Buchan insisted that, while he “believed in the progressive socialization of the state,” it was vital to insist upon “the spiritual integrity of the individual.” Buchan never had to square this particular circle in a secular age, as we are now being forced to attempt: By spiritual he meant spiritual; freedom, in other words, was rooted firmly in a conception of man as a divine being.

Without this assurance, man was in danger of falling for the blandishments of such men as Andrew Lumley, the mastermind behind The Power-House . Lumley denies that he is entirely hollow: “I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never foresworn.” Edward Leithen, the hero and a much better candidate than Hannay for Buchan’s literary ego , calls Lumley “a brain stripped of every shred of humanity.” The dominant theme of Buchan’s fiction is the fragility of civilisation. Those with power are not necessarily to be trusted more than anyone else; they may be weak or evil, and the Luciferian villain looms large. Civilization was contingent on sinful humanity, and could be nothing less than insecure.

Although Buchan feared the possibility that the strong would choose evil, his belief in the spiritual integrity of the individual ensured that his greatest wrath was turned against those who attempted to enforce uniformity of conscience. One of the few bodies he ever excoriated was the Scottish Kirk”at least, the seventeenth-century version. In his novel Witch Wood and his biography of Montrose, Buchan lambasted the Presbyterian Kirk for its tyranny and assertion of mastery over men’s souls. It is a Catholic priest in The Blanket of the Dark who speaks with Buchan’s voice:

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Dorothy Sayers and Economic Society

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The casual observer might wonder how a pre-war English detective novelist could possibly be relevant to a twenty-first century economic crisis. That would be to underestimate Dorothy L. Sayers.

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The Christian World of Agatha Christie

The Neglected Legacy of John Buchan

Dorothy Sayers and Economic Society