The Unknown God

Abstract

MR. ALFRED NOYES is one of a not inconsiderable number of literary intellectuals who, having begun thirty or forty years ago as agnostics, have become in their maturity orthodox and practising Catholics. This spectacle of agnostic poets leaving the waste land and returning ad limina is a sign of the times. Now that the traditional European culture, which was predominantly literar, is in danger of being displaced by a new scientific dulture with its strange products, human and material, the poet may experience a very natural distaste. He sees, or thinks he sees, the world being rapidly decivilised by the mass barbarian, who is a deplorable byproduct of scientific developments. He is appalled by the prevalent vulgarity and insensitiveness to the values he cherishes, and repudiates modernity; and who shall say that he is altdgether wrong? Compare the shallow philosophy, or philosophies (since there is a Babel of conflicting tongues) of modernity with the philosophic, perennis of traditional Catholicism—with its richness, its comprehensiveness, its sweep and power of speculation, its nobility and depth of emotional content, and its rationality.

The Unknown God.

By Alfred Noyes. Pp. 383. (London: Sheed and Ward, 1934.) 7s. 6d. net.