Essays

A Language Full of Ghosts, (Preface to Calif. Poems) Dana Gioia

“The wind of nothingness” the Persian poets say, Franz Liszt, The Emperor Jahangir and Nur Jahan Meet for the First Time, Dick Davis

Death, Thou Shalt Die, Elijah Perseus Blumov

Deconstruction, “What Did You Do During the War?”, Amit Majmudar

Azazel, Elijah Blumov

The Craft of Persuasion, Michael R. Gonzalez

Canzonierie, 18 & 21, A. M. Juster

Two Epigrams from Martial, Thomas Banks

Self-Sabatoge, Alex Rettie

Notes Towards a Poetic Metaphysics, Michael Martin

Palm Sunday, Before the Eclipse, Steve Knepper

Table Settings, Carla Galdo

On Holy Silence, Dom Odo Casel, tras. Andrew Rickard

My God Came Leaping, Plein Air,  Paul Pastor

Seeing Into the Middle of Things, Ron Hansen

The Gaze of the Other, Steven Searcy

At Ithaka: A Dog’s Nunc Dimittis, William Edmund Fahey

Dante’s Poetic Knowledge, Andrew Frisardi

Dante in Paradise, Paul Mariani

Pindar’s Olympian XI, Fred Fraser

Fiction

The Splash, Katy Carl

On the Motions of the Earth, Metamorphic, Ernest Hilburt

Two Trees, The Judas Tree, Sally Thomas

St. Gertrudes, Joseph Bottum

Postcard to Ted Kooser, David Mason

South Wind, To the Tune of “The Rose in Flowering”, To the Tune of “So Dark Over the River”, Kevin Hart

Springtime Idyll, Nicholas Hannon

Lithopaedian, JD Smith

Working From Home, Christoper Edwards

Windfall, George Witte

Reviews, etc.

The Weight of the Word, Carla Galdo

The Unpierced Pearl, Benjamin Rose

Locusts and Honey, Michael Yost

Wine

Keats and Claret, Ambrose Bean

Night Walk, Timothy Steele

Bradley Birzer

In this edited excerpt from Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, Bradley Birzer retells the history of the original Colosseum journal that lends its name to Colosseum Books and to this journal.

Historian Christopher Dawson was not about to give up Essays in Order, his sixteen part series for Sheed and Ward, which he considered essential to the continuance of the Catholic Literary Revival of the 1930s. When his co-editor Tom Burns began to disassociate himself from Sheed and Ward, however, Dawson turned to his friend and disciple, Bernard Wall. Burns approved of Wall as his successor, to “inaugurate ESSAYS IN ORDER NEW SERIES with BW as [your] assistant (if he wants the job).” It would have been hard for Dawson to find a better partner than Wall, at least in terms of intellectual compatibility. Though only aged 25, Wall had just founded the anti-Communist, pro-Catholic journal, Colosseum. Certainly, Wall was brilliant. He had spent a considerable amount of time with Dawson’s Order men, a group of Christian Humanists, akin to the Inklings of Oxford, while still attending Oxford, having lived with Burns in Chelsea, and he had a deep intellectual and spiritual drive. Wall’s friend Rene Hague remembered him as “a great extender of horizons.” Another friend, artist and poet David Jones, recalled in 1974, “His proficiency in modern languages was considerable, but the popular nature of much of his published work kept him from being appreciated in the academic world.”³ Equally important, Wall saw himself as Dawson’s protégé. In an obituary of Dawson, Wall admitted that “Christopher was a full twenty years older than I which is the right distance between a master and an inept pupil.” And referring to the Order men, Wall wrote, movingly, “A little group of intimate friends, whom Christopher has now left behind him, has often mourned his illness: for he was our prophetic and natural leader—of a stature to head the way through the chaos of half-truths and half-knowledge in religion and culture through which we still have to live.” Wall not only excelled at languages, but he and his wife, Barbara, also traveled constantly throughout Europe during the late 1930s, and his correspondence, articles, books, and memoirs provide some of the best insight into European culture and politics of that time period. He is probably one of the most important unknown figures of the Catholic Literary Revival of the previous century.

The list of contributors and friends of Wall’s Colosseum was a “who’s who” of the prominent European Christian Humanists of the 1930s. Dawson, E.I. Watkin, Nicholas Berdyaev, Jacques Maritain, and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn all wrote path-breaking articles for Colosseum. The review greatly resembled Burns’s original conception for the journal Order rather than the more respectable Essays in Order of Sheed and Ward. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Wall’s Colosseum continued the ideas of Dawson’s Order men, but in a more dogmatic and polemical form than the now respectable Essays in Order allowed. Despite the clear anxiety found not only in the title and the articles of the journal, Wall believed the new effort to be an attempt “to keep one’s head clear in the tumult of passions.” The traditional western and Roman Catholic view, he thought, was the one objective voice in a sea awash with ideologies, Left and Right. And, just as with the original Order, Colosseum was hated by numerous Catholics, both on the more modernist and more conservative sides of the faith.⁷ Unlike the original Order, though, Colosseum represented a pan-European Christian Humanism, rather than an English one. Wall even edited the journal from various European cities—Fribourg, London, and Paris.⁸ Throughout the journal’s five-year run, Wall relied on Dawson’s advice, support, and articles, though Dawson never served in any official capacity on the journal.

The title of Wall’s journal revealed much, as he viewed Roman Catholics of the twentieth-century as being in the same position as the martyrs under the iron fist of imperial Rome. But in case readers missed the intent of the title, Wall’s opening pages of the first issue revealed everything about his goals. “The Colosseum will not be a polite review,” Wall conceded. “We hold that in our time silence would be inexcusable; and our belief in what we intend to say is too sincere for us to sit back and pay scholarly compliments.” Further, Wall argued following Dawson in Christianity in the New Age, true Catholic scholars must no longer hide in the monasteries or accept penance in the desert. Instead, they must fight against the “shrieking contradictions of Capitalism, Bolshevism, Yogi, Democracy, Usury, Determinism, Freudianism, Starvation and Advocates of Poison Gas.” The human person “has been defaced and is now exploited and commercialized.” The world of the 1930s, shaped and delimited by the ideologues and their creation of the machine to mechanize man, offered only the false Manichean choice of “the sub-human mediocrity of the bourgeois world” and the false errors of the Bolshevists and Fascists, Wall argued. Because of the errors of the modern world, “crooks and demagogues like Stalin, Göring and Goebbels are enabled to exploit it.” To counter these falsehoods and the propagators of ideologies, Wall continued, Dawson, Maritain, Watkin, and the other writers of Colosseum would fight for a proper definition of the human person. Man, they argued, finds himself only in a religious and familial context. The twentieth-century Catholic must recognize the beginning of modern errors—that is, the new, elevated understanding of man in the Renaissance—and attempt to push him back into his proper place in the “hierarchy of beings.”¹⁰ Dawson thrived within the format of the journal, and he wrote some of his most innovative and, not surprisingly, most pointed and incisive pieces for Colosseum, each following one of Wall’s most significant themes and ideas for the journal. He wrote, for example, articles on Catholicism’s relationship to liberalism, the meaning of pacificism for the Catholic, and the need for—but also the barriers to—a reunion of Christian branches and denominations.

But the events of the day overtook the intentions of both Wall and Dawson as realized in both Colosseum and Sheed and Ward’s Essays in Order, New Series. Though continuing the tradition of building a “Republic of Letters” between English and Continental Catholics, this second series only saw the publication of two works: Francois Mauriac’s God and Mammon (1936) and the German liturgical reformer Johannes Pinsk’s Christianity and Race (1936). There were numerous problems with the New Series. First, with the editorial assistance of Burns missing, Dawson was at an almost total loss. Dawson was the ideas man, and he needed an effective organizer. As brilliant as Wall was, he was too extended already in his own personal comings and goings, especially in his extensive traveling and already-established commitment to editing Colosseum. Even alone, the job of editing the journal proved itself nearly impossible, and Wall simply shut down Colosseum in 1939. He had gone into considerable debt to keep the journal going, and he was very keen on getting someone to assume the debts and relieve his financial burden. Second, events in Europe were so tumultuous in the second half of the 1930s that it became difficult to recruit continental Catholics to write for the English series. Third, simple health problems prevented the series from taking shape. Dawson, for example, had attempted to recruit C.C. Martindale and Eric Gill to write for the New Series, but each became too ill to do so. Dawson had also hoped to enlist Maritain for a second book as well as enlist books by Erich Pryzwara and Dietrich Bonhofer, thus extending the Catholic Republic of Letters to Protestants with the latter choice.¹³ Fourth, Sheed complained that Dawson and Wall lacked tenacity and fortitude. “It is not unthinkable that they might get bored with the whole show after a few years,” Sheed wrote to his second in command, E.H. Conner, when Dawson and Wall proposed a new series for Sheed and Ward in 1944. “That indeed was the sole reason why the new Essays in Order petered out.”

It had been a noble effort, as there had been a line of publications: Order, Essays in Order, Colosseum, and Essays in Order, New Series. Each, however, while individually effective, became simply too burdensome to produce, especially as Europe devolved into war. Still, each had served the glorious purpose of maintaining and leavening Christian humanism during Europe’s interwar period and critical decade of the 1930s. They were of a piece.