Book Review: The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien, and the Romance of History

Abstract

Oser contrasted Arnold and Pater to launch his argument. Their differences serve well to end these remarks. He finds in Arnold's criticism the ideas about human nature and commonly shared ethical values that are, in his view, needed to qualify the Victorian as an eminent Aristotelian. He finds in Pater a retreat to solitary aesthetic consciousness that set an anti-Aristotelian paradigm for modernist writers. But that scheme does not play out so neatly in the collected works of either writer. In the Preface to his 1853 collection, Arnold, at his most Aristotelian, explained why he omitted Ernpedocles on Etna, the long title poem of an earlier volume: it failed to deliver on his own philosophical demands. Indeed, in his poetry Arnold keeps returning the theme of his age's, and his own, inability to articulate precisely the socially shared values that Oser seeks.Where imaginative literature is concerned, I think we are more likely to find them most closely approximated in Pater-not in The Renaissance (1873), arguably the founding text of the Aesthetic Movement, but in Marius the Epicurean (1885). Dismissed by Oser as one of Pater's "Imaginary Portraits;' Marius is better viewed as a novel of development whose protagonist, rather than abandoning his aesthetic sense, integrates it into a maturing moral consciousness. The body plays a key role: Marius parts company with the Stoic Aurelius in that "the philosophic emperor was a despiser of the body" (Ch. XVIII); Marius, "the humbler follower of the bodily eye" (Ch. XIV), strives "to live in the concrete" (Ch X). The entire novel traces Marius's quest for a community where moral ideals can be found in a form accessible to the eye. He successively discards the "unseen celestial city" of Aurelius and his tutor the rhetorician Pronto, the ideal republic of Plato, or the neo-Platonist Apuleiuss "fantastic visions" (Ch. XX) of a vague intermediary realm. Though he does not formally become a member, Marius is able to see his ideals realized among the Christians who gather at Cecilia's house, where beauty and morality are concretely embodied in community life. At last, despite himself, Marius performs a supremely moral act of self-sacrifice to save the life of his friend Cornelius. In Pater's novel-and in varying degrees among the modernist masters-relations between ethics and aesthetic are charged with paradox and complexity. Its clear and distinct conceptualizations notwithstanding, Oser's book leaves our questions about them far from closed.