Best-selling author and literary scholar Joseph Pearce looks for beauty in places as diverse as the works of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky to ripples on a Monte Carlo biscuit in a Sydney school office.
He has known plenty of ugliness in his life though, and says it was mostly within himself before his conversion to the Catholic faith.
With his tweed suit and lilting accent, Pearce looks and sounds like he was never anything but a scholar.
Yet Visiting Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University in Florida and Visiting Chair of Catholic Studies at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, New Hampshire, Pearce was a completely different person in his 20s.
Then a member of the National Front, a British nationalist, white supremacist group, he was twice imprisoned for publishing material with the capacity to incite racial hatred.
“I was a man full of hatred. My motto was ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ and I hated my enemies,” he said.
Pearce toured Australia for the first time this month at the invitation of Hartford College, Sydney’s first liberal arts-focused high school. His packed schedule included St Michael’s church, Belfield, The University of Notre Dame Australia, and Campion College, where he discussed everything from his dramatic conversion to Solzhenitsyn and Shakespeare.
Speaking to The Catholic Weekly while visiting Hartford College in Daceyville, Pearce said perhaps his most important message to impart here is to endorse a liberal arts education for helping students discover the good, truth and beauty of Christ.
“I think the West is starting to realise the destructiveness of a secularised, relativist education,” he said.
“To see institutions like [Hartford] College, Notre Dame over in the states and here, Campion College where we were last night, rediscover classical education, the teachings of Jerusalem and Athens, is significant and perhaps shows that people have a yearning for a liberal arts education.”
Pearce believes that a liberal arts education is a significant formative tool for adolescents and young adults wanting to think deeply about topics outside the typical limits of school curriculums and classroom timetables. And it is also a means for encountering the ultimate good: Jesus Christ himself.
“Pontius Pilate himself asked Christ, ‘What is truth?’” he said.
“Studying philosophy and great literature provides learners with the ability to think beyond their normal capacity and ask that very question itself, and, as Christians, these disciplines provide a rational explanation of our faith, that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.”
Race with the Devil: My journey from racial hatred to rational love is Pearce’s memoir about his conversion to Catholicism. He said being jailed a second time and discovering G.K. Chesterton’s essays and stories in prison was a “moment of clarity.”
“Reading Chesterton, I recognised over time that faith and reason are indissolubly married,” he said.
“If you embrace reason, then you also have to embrace that you can’t know it all. And in that moment, my desire for conversion accelerated, and I realised that to be religious and faithful it was necessary to be rational.”
Chesterton was the author that convinced Pearce to dedicate his life studying “great literature, and great art as well.” Chesterton holds great company in Pearce’s collection of who he considers to be the best authors.
“Homer, [William] Shakespeare, [J.R.R] Tolkien, [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn, C.S Lewis, these were men that even today still ignite a passion and a desire within their readers,” he said.
“They all have this beauty in their works that points to something beyond our understanding, which to me is divine.”
Pearce’s love for literature and art can be found in the St Austin Review, an online Catholic magazine he co-edits with literary scholar Robert Asch, discussing all things music, art and literature, and cultural ideas and works spanning past and present.
For Pearce, the Review is his way showing its readers that art, and the very creation of art, speaks to the divine itself.
“When you look at a sculpture or listen to a piece of classical music, read a book, there is something beautiful and good about it,” he said.
“But we can also perceive a presence in these artworks, something divine in that sense. And when we do that, we not only perceive beauty in [ourselves] and in the art we are beholding, we also perceive the truth, something beyond our senses.
“The most important things—truth, goodness, beauty, love—we can’t cut it up, put it on a scale and quantify empirically. We have to experience it and learn from and about it.”
Apart from his immediate family—wife Susannah, daughter Evangeline and son Leo, who has Down Syndrome and autism—and his literary heroes, Pearce’s ultimate inspiration is Christ himself.
“Everything I do is a consequence of his grace. It’s his pouring of his life into me, what motivates me to bring his kingdom as far as possible to this world to get my neighbour and myself to Heaven,” he said.
As our time drew to a close, Pearce lingered over a proffered plate of biscuits. He had already indulged in the Monte Carlo and set his eye on a shortbread.
“Now, that’s beautiful that. You Australians know how to make a good biscuit don’t you?”
