Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism

T.S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim and the Moot

Jonas Kurlberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350090538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

With fascism on the march in Europe and a second World War looming, a group of Britain's leading intellectuals – including T.S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim, John Middleton Murry, J. H. Oldham and Michael Polanyi – gathered together to explore ways of revitalising a culture that seemed to have lost its way. The group called themselves 'the Moot'. Drawing on previously unpublished archival documents, this is the first in-depth study of the group's work, writings and ideas in the decade of its existence from 1938-1947. Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism explores the ways in which an important and influential strand of Modernist thought in the interwar years turned back to Christian ideas to offer a blueprint for the revitalisation of European culture. In this way the book challenges conceptions of Modernism as a secular movement and sheds new light on the culture of the late Modernist period.

1

Introduction: The Moot and Modernism

Brief overview of the Moot

Amidst heightened national and international political tensions, J. H. Oldham, a theologian and leading ecumenist, published a letter for The Times in October 1938 predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization. For Oldham, the threat facing British society was not confined to the rise of Nazi Germany, but ultimately sprang from the cancerous growth of paganism.¹ By then, he had already assembled an exclusive group of intellectuals with the aim of producing a road map for a countervailing Christian cultural revolution. With a great sense of urgency, ‘the Moot’ gathered regularly for almost a decade to strategize for a new lay Order that would act as a catalyst for a neo-Thomist Christian social and political movement.

As a tool to investigate the Moot, this study examines the hypothesis that the core project of the Moot may be described as a Christian variant of ‘Programmatic’ or ‘Political Modernism’. While the discussion engages a number of theorists, this claim conceptually derives from combining Frank Kermode’s coupling of Modernism with historical patterns of ‘decadence and renovation’, Anthony Wallace’s conception of ‘revitalization movements’ and Roger Griffin’s further development of these ideas in his analysis of ‘Programmatic Modernism’ in his Modernism and Fascism.²

Apart from making preliminary remarks, and outlining the contours of how the argument will evolve in the coming chapters, the introduction serves to provide an overview of Griffin’s theory, how it relates to existing notions of Modernism and what it brings to an analysis of the Moot. It is worth noting at the outset that this conceptual framework is being tested here rather than assumed. Given the variety of archival and other documentation examined in this thesis, it is not to be expected that the hypothesis will necessarily account for every voice or problem within a multifaceted and evolving organization such as the Moot. Indeed, the documents suggest that the Moot failed in important respects to implement the more radical aspects of its ‘Modernist’ programme.

Prior to this theoretical discussion, a brief overview of the establishment, organizational structure, general aims and principal membership of the Moot itself is in place. The Moot was a direct product of the 1937 Oxford Conference on Church, Community and State, organized by Oldham. The conference gathered 425 Christian intellectuals, churchmen and theologians from around the world to articulate a ‘common mind’ and provide a Christian sociopolitical response to totalitarianism.³ In a letter sent to the delegates a few months after the conference, Oldham encouraged the formation of ‘cells’ that would gather ‘for the purposes of discovering what Christian action implies in the concrete situations in which [individuals] have to live and act’.⁴ The Moot can be seen as Oldham’s attempt to realize this undertaking. Several of the Moot members to be, including Eric Fenn, T. S. Eliot, Walter Moberly, Adolf Löwe, Christopher Dawson, Herbert H. Farmer and Eleanora Iredale, played leading roles in the conference.⁵ The fact that many of the members had participated in the conference ensured that its ethos had a lasting influence on the Moot.

The diversity of the Moot’s core membership accounts for some of its dynamics. As Eliot wrote in a letter to Oldham, this ‘variety is what has given the Moot its zest, and even its cohesion’ and made it ‘so very fecundating’.⁶ The Moot was very much J. H. Oldham’s venture, something the members readily recognized.⁷ Eliot, for example, repeatedly spoke of the Moot as ‘Joe’s group’ in correspondence with friends.⁸ Oldham was, indeed, firmly in control of the agenda and proceedings of the Moot, and during the meetings he was literally at the centre of attention. Since Oldham was by this time half-deaf, the members had to take turns to speak into his hearing aid, which was shuffled around the room. This arrangement no doubt gave the meetings a peculiar character.⁹

Amongst the most regular participants were secular Jew and eminent sociologist Karl Mannheim and his fellow émigré economist Adolf Löwe. To this group also belong educationists Sir Walter Moberly, Sir Fred Clarke and Walter Oakeshott. Poet T. S. Eliot, who was at the time highly engaged in social criticism, was also a regular member. Eliot was instrumental in bringing fellow literary critic John Middleton Murry into the group. Philosopher H. A. Hodges of Reading University produced more written contributions than any other member. Another philosopher was Hector Hetherington, at the time Principal of Glasgow University. The Moot consisted primarily of laypersons, but the ordained were represented by reformed theologian John Baillie of New College, Edinburgh; Anglo-Catholic clergyman Alec Vidler; and Anglican Gilbert Shaw. Eric Fenn was also ordained but would be appointed Assistant Director of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC in 1939. Three women were members of the Moot: Eleanora Iredale, who had acted as an assistant on several of Oldham’s ventures; Cathleen Bliss, who was the assistant editor and later editor (1945) of the Moot-sponsored Christian News Letter; and Mary Oldham.

There were also those who only attended two to four meetings but were nevertheless considered members. This group includes Cambridge theologian H. H. Farmer, Presbyterian minister Lex Miller, Daniel Jenkins and Oliver Tomkins – both of whom worked for the Student Christian Movement (SCM) – and Geoffrey Vickers, a lawyer and social activist.¹⁰ Roman Catholic historian Christopher Dawson only attended three meetings but corresponded regularly with the group and had a significant influence on the thought of its members. In the final years of the Moot, scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi and theologian Donald MacKinnon became key contributors.

Furthermore, Oldham regularly brought in guests who he felt could contribute to the discussion. These include American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; editor of New English Weekly Philip Mairet; theologian and missionary Lesslie Newbigin; William Paton, who was instrumental in the formation of the World Council of Churches; Frank Pekenham, the assistant of William Beveridge; acclaimed historian R. H. Tawney and others. In addition, the group dialogued with a network of prominent Christian thinkers both in Britain and beyond, such as William Temple, C. S. Lewis, Arnold Toynbee, Jacques Maritain and Paul Tillich, to mention a few.¹¹

During 1–4 April 1938, the Moot gathered at High Leigh, Hertfordshire, to analyse the state of the Western world. It was to be the first of a total of twenty-four weekends over nearly a decade.¹² The procedures of the Moot typically followed the pattern of two to four discussion papers being circulated amongst members prior to the meetings. Members were then given the opportunity to critique these papers in writing. The comments were also pre-circulated. On a fairly regular basis, Oldham posted articles by non-members either to stimulate the discussion further or because he felt they were informative, but these were not discussed at the meetings.¹³ Although all the Moot papers and minutes are marked ‘Private and Confidential’,¹⁴ the large network Oldham had established through the ecumenical movement was used as an international sounding board for some of the Moot papers.¹⁵

The meetings themselves usually took place two to four weekends annually at various locations in southern England. The fact that members travelled from as far as Edinburgh (as in John Baillie’s case) at their own expense and throughout the war bears witness to the level of commitment many members felt towards the Moot. During the latter part of the war, members were even asked to bring their own food rations.¹⁶ The last Moot weekend took place during 10–13 January 1947. Karl Mannheim’s unexpected death a few days later was a major contributing factor to the Moot’s discontinuation, but it was also apparent that by then it had run its course.¹⁷

Political Modernism: Decadence and revival

Modernism and crisis

This monograph sets out to recount the intriguing story of the Moot through the lens of Roger Griffin’s ‘Programmatic Modernism’. Considering the plural and sometimes conflicting conceptions of Modernism, it is necessary at the outset to lay out some definitional boundaries clarifying how the term will be appropriated.¹⁸

‘Modernism’ has primarily been associated with the arts and literature as a label for a range of aesthetic expressions in Western societies roughly from the mid-nineteenth century until around the end of the Second World War. On one level then, the term Modernism, as understood by critics and historians of literature and the arts, points towards the striking fact of the proliferation of experimental and challenging new artistic techniques in this period. Accordingly, Maurice Beebe lists four defining features of ‘Modernist’ art and literature: formalism; an attitude of detachment and non-commitment or irony; the use of myth as a structuring device; and the progression from impressionism to reflectivity.¹⁹ Nevertheless, this approach, via style and technique alone, does not sufficiently address the extent to which Modernism is rooted in ideological and social concerns. Semantically, of course, ‘modern’ suggests an opposition to tradition. In his survey of Modernist paradigms, critic Astradur Eysteinsson writes that the ‘principal characteristic of modernism is the rage against prevalent tradition’.²⁰ What unites these diverse movements and personalities is the attempt to overcome a perceived oppressiveness or decadence in the prevailing tradition and culture, though there may be little agreement between Modernists themselves about precisely how the dominant paradigm is to be defined and battled. In his attempt to identify common attributes, Peter Gay speaks of this drive to confront the status quo as ‘the lure of heresy’.²¹

Much of the debate surrounding the concept emanates from how to understand this rebellion in its relation to sociopolitical processes of modernization. Again, Eysteinsson writes that Modernism has been understood ‘as a kind of aesthetic heroism, which in the face of the chaos of the modern world sees art as the only dependable reality and as an ordering principle of a quasi-religious kind. The unity of art is supposedly a salvation from the shattered order of modern reality.’²² In this conception, the emphasis is placed on Modernist formalism as seen in the new critical paradigm with its idealization of the autonomy, isolated whole and internal unity of art.²³

The notion of aesthetic autonomy has, however, resulted in ahistorical readings of Modernism. As Leon Surette writes, ‘[t]o be “modern” in the Modernist sense is to have transcended history, to have climbed out of history into an unmediated, incorrigible realm of knowledge, and in that sense to have fulfilled history’.²⁴ Nevertheless, the immediate social ...