Catholic Modernism and the Irish “Avant-Garde”: The Achievement of Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and Thomas MacGreevy
By James Matthew Wilson.
Catholic University of America Press, 2024.
Paperback, 488 pages, $29.95.
Reviewed by David Weinberger.
Although poetry and philosophy may seem like strange bedfellows—the former often seen as emotional and creative, the latter as abstract and cold—some of the most distinguished poets in history have in fact been deeply influenced by philosophy. More than that, they have also been influenced by faith. A new book, in fact, explores three such poets. In Catholic Modernism and the Irish “Avant-Garde”: The Achievement of Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and Thomas MacGreevy, author and literary scholar James Matthew Wilson illustrates how three Irish poets combined reason and faith with modern artistic practices to achieve a synthesis of modernism in the Catholic vein.
Before examining that, however, it is worth noting that Modernism blossomed in the early twentieth century as a movement challenging traditional norms. Prior to that time, the purpose of art was widely held to be the contemplation of beauty. Artistic expression, in other words, was seen as good for its own sake. Modernism, however, transformed this understanding by emphasizing action rather than contemplation. As Wilson explains, modernism strove to “overcome theoria, the contemplation of art as a good in itself,” and instead stressed “praxis, that loosely Marxist notion that the point of thought is not to understand the world, but to change it.” Thus, modernism tended to oppose conventional ideas, including the traditional ideas of both philosophy and religion. Yet, not all writers who swam in modernist currents adopted such a stance. As Wilson describes, Irish poets Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Thomas MacGreevy “represent the most sophisticated, extensive, and compelling fusion of Roman Catholic religious thought with modern literary practices that we may find in the modernist period.”
Of course, part of the reason they were able to achieve this synthesis is that they were steeped in the perennial philosophical tradition—the tradition, that is, that spans nearly 2,500 years and which has its roots in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and which runs through Augustine and Aquinas in the Middle Ages, and Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and Bernard Lonergan in the twentieth century, and which continues to flourish as the core of Western thought to this day.
This tradition, in fact, empowered Coffey, Devlin and MacGreevy to recognize beauty, truth, and goodness wherever it existed, including within the modernist movement itself. As it turned out, they identified numerous areas where modernism overlapped with Catholicism. Consider, for example, MacGreevy, who seized upon the tendency in modernist art to portray inner depth rather than appearance. This, he recognized, was similar to the philosophical understanding that the “form” or intelligibility of a thing is more fundamental than its “accidents” or non-essential outward features. As Wilson puts it, “MacGreevy identifies artistic form with the account of ontological form in St. Thomas Aquinas, which views form above all as the active principle of being, and which further distinguishes the essential form of a substance from the various accidents that may adhere to it but do not inhere in its reality.” In other words, meaning, including the meaning of an artistic work, lies within rather than without, so the surface appearance is largely inconsequential as long as its inner intelligibility conforms to reality.
Moreover, Wilson observes other areas of harmonization that these writers identified too, such as the desire to show forth reality as a whole. Modernist art, after all, sought to shatter conventions it regarded as limiting to artistic expression. Similarly, Catholicism, which translates literally to “of the whole” or “universal” or “all-inclusive,” is by its very nature open to the fullness of reality, including the bad and the good, the ugly and the beautiful, the ordinary and the sublime. Hence why MacGreevy himself favored depicting all of existence, including its unsavory and evil elements, and why he was critical of even fellow Catholics who shied away from doing so. The “besetting sin of converts,” he fulminated, “is religious priggishness and they ought to be warned against it.”
Nor was MacGreevy alone in combining the Catholic faith with modernism. Wilson, for example, demonstrates how Coffey, disturbed by “the cult of unintelligibility” that plagued certain strands of modernism, also turned to neo-Thomism, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, to “transform modernist art from within” by restoring to it both depth and meaning. Coffey’s “interest in science, Marxism, and neo-Thomism,” writes Wilson, “with its suggestion of openness to modern thought but also a readiness to counter or correct it with the wisdom of Aquinas,” is a key “feature of Coffey’s work.” For example, consider the metaphysical insights weaved into the following verses of a poem of his: “She is one part of all; as I am as I hold all; as no stone does; mine in her way; hers in mine.” In short, Coffey’s point is that we can transcend our particular form of embodiment through our intellects, which grasp universal forms and thus, in a very real sense, become all things. Stones, on the other hand, lack intellects and are therefore restricted to their particular mode of being (i.e., that of being a rock).
Devlin, too, shows similar integration of faith and modernist technique, though drawing from a somewhat different strand within the perennial tradition. For instance, many of his writings adduce early modern philosopher Blaise Pascal, who, while recognizing the greatness of human reason, opposed attempts from contemporaries like Descartes to reduce reason to mathematical certainty and to strip philosophy down to what it enabled us to control—that is, to modern science. In reacting against this cold form of rationalism, Pascal urged us to look within and to recognize that in our eros or desire for happiness lies a clue to both who we are and what our final destination is. Our inner drive for being, he maintained, or our yearning for the absolute and the unconditioned, points to the fact that we are made for union with the fullness of being itself. And that fullness of being just is the infinite love of God. So, while the cold calculation of rationalism cannot deliver us the ultimate answers we seek, interior reflection, or “knowledge from the heart,” can provide clues, if only we pay attention to it. This theme, of course, runs through the surrealism of Devlin. As Wilson explains, “Devlin’s divine light exceeds and refuses every name…and the soul that rises to God experiences just the kind of self-certainty by way of self-transcendence in ecstasy that Devlin has put at the center of his surrealist apologetics of interior experience.”
In sum, for Devlin, as for MacGreevy and Coffey, the purpose of art, including that of literary expression, was to call forth wonder, beauty, goodness, and truth, which required drawing from the rich stores of both philosophy and faith. The result of this synthesis was the elevation of modernism and the vivification of Catholicism. And for that, they merit the overdue acclamation of literary achievement that a book of this quality finally gives them.
David Weinberger formerly worked at a public policy institution. He can be found on X @DWeinberger03.
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