Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture

Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936), the noted writer of ghost stories, took an especial interest in the apparent supernaturalism of an obscure, but vitally Catholic, English past. Although James, the son of a Church of England clergyman, was himself Anglican, I want to suggest that what underscored his imagination was the specter of England prior to the great upheavals brought about by the Reformation. Indeed, James's pronounced medievalism was part of a modern revival of interest in the Middle Ages that went beyond the aestheticism of such nineteenth-century individuals as John Ruskin and Augustus Pugin. In this way, James was part of a broader, as well as theologically deeper, reconsideration of what England had once been before the stripping of the altars.¹ What had been lost, James's work appears to imply, was a sense of the supernatural that the men and women of the Middle Ages had essentially taken for granted—a sense of what Adrian J. Walker has termed "the More-Than-World from within the world."² The question that this article will set out to answer, then, is whether M. R. James was in possession of an "English Catholic sensibility" that was haunted by an altogether more medieval, hence Catholic, vision of the universe that was essentially sacramental.³ [End Page 111]

It is worth noting here, at the outset, the context in which James was to work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is the well-known proposition, forwarded most notably in the work of Max Weber, positing the notion that modernity constitutes a radical "disenchantment" of the world.⁴ David Torevell's book Losing the Sacred: Ritual, Modernity and Liturgical Reform (2000) expounds this interpretation particularly well: that "the Middle Ages' overriding involvement with an embodied experience of the sacred," which he argues was "rooted in the centrality of the body as a site and route for an experience of the sacred," was superseded by "a far more cerebral approach to the sacred" based around the "Protestant emphasis on the word coupled with the emergence of a highly suspicious," arguably Cartesian, "attitude to the body."⁵ Glenn W. Olsen agrees, citing "Descartes's separation of mind from matter," as well as "the non-sacramental (by Catholic definition) Christianity of Calvin," which he believes "prepared the way for the disenchantment of the world." As an example of this, Olsen forwards the "Pre-Protestant" doctrine of "the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist," which "kept the visible and invisible worlds connected. … For literally in the Eucharist each world was present to the other."⁶ In this way, too, Peter L. Berger, the noted sociologist and theologian, believed that "Protestantism served as a historically decisive prelude to secularization." For "the Protestant believer," he wrote, "no longer lives in a world ongoingly penetrated by sacred things and forces." Consequently, Protestantism really ought to be regarded "in terms of an immense shrinkage in the scope of the sacred in reality, as compared with its Catholic adversary," since the former divests "itself as much as possible from the three most ancient and most powerful concomitants of the sacred—mystery, miracle, and magic." It is vital, then, that we note this "shrinkage," since this was the world to which James essentially belonged, especially in his Anglicanism, and which he would, I think, attempt to extricate himself, through his ghost stories, in favor of what Berger deemed "the 'fullness' of the Catholic universe"—pre-dating, it has been argued, the Reformation and its aftermath.⁷ [End Page 112]

"Old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning" was how George Orwell characterized Anglicanism in the twentieth century.⁸ This wistful, if somewhat reductive, summation of the culture of the Church of England is a beguiling vista, perhaps, but one devoid of all supernatural content. As the English Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh once complained, the Anglican chaplains he had known in the army "seemed to have no sense of the supernatural at all."⁹ This observation, especially relevant when we come to consider the work of...