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Allen Tate and the Catholic Revival: Trace of the Fugitive Gods (Isaac Hecker Studies in Religion and American Culture,)

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Huff's book is a well-written and honest overview of the Catholic Revival through the conversion narrative of protagonist poet Allen Tate. Huff's thesis is that Tate's "attraction to the values of the Catholic Revival contributed to his acceptance of the Catholic religion as well as, ironically, to this eventual sense of alienation from the church"(5).

Caught up in the excitement of the late 19th and early 20th century Catholic revivalism in England - embodied by such luminary converts as John Henry Newman, Christopher Dawson, Ronald Knox, and G.K. Chesterton - Tate promoted a more distinctly religious solution to the problems in American society than that found in the New Agrarians of Vanderbilt. Through, among other influences, a relationship with Catholic writer Jacques Maritain, Tate was exposed to a Catholicism that married Aristotle with Aquinas in a New-Thomistic vision of reality. In this Tate created an idealistic vision with which to both approach literature in a consistent, concrete way - a la the incarnation - and also to see all of life in an integrated kind of medievalism.

As Huff points out, however, Tate's idealism as played out through his eventual conversion to Catholicism and career thereafter were met with three difficult and painful realities: 1) the Catholic Church in America - exemplified in Vatican II reforms - was headed in the very opposite direction of the Catholic Revivalism that had attracted Tate into the fold; 2) the seeming lack of receptiveness and responsiveness among the American Catholic intellectual establishment to recognizing him as a kind of "Catholic Matthew Arnold"; and 3) the demons of Tate's own personal life - including marriage, divorce, and remarriage several times over - which would, in a tragic twist, cut this convert off from the very sacramental life into which he had been baptized.

In concluding his study on the Catholic Revival and its best known American convert, Huff quotes from Tate's own reflections on his life as poet and pilgrim: "As I look back up on my own verse, written over more than twenty-five years, I see plainly that its main theme is man suffering from unbelief; and I cannot for a moment suppose that this man is some other than myself." This side of glory perhaps those who follow the divine are bound to suffer as fugitives, those for whom their lives, save their poetry and occassional studies, virtually vanish without a trace. And thus, like the Church herself, the protagonist of this story is at once the antagonist.