JOHN FRY
Sir Arnold Lunn was renowned for his skiing enthusiasm, and his work to establish the sport internationally. But he had an even greater enthusiasm: the Catholic faith to which he turned in his mid-forties. One nourished the other in a remarkable way
Paths to faith are many, and they can be eccentric. Such was the conversion of Arnold Lunn in 1933. Lunn was already famous in the skiing world for his invention of the slalom race, and was an avid climber as well. Mountaineers from time to time experience a supernatural, even a profoundly religious, feeling when they gaze upon the beauty of snow-capped peaks and the shadowed valleys below. Skiers enjoying a special day of deep-powder snow have been known to shout, “My God, it’s like I went to heaven!” Lunn profoundly shared that poignant experience. “The mountains were my door to the supernatural,” he wrote. “Their visible beauty was the initial impulse which led me to devote so much time in the years which followed to the most important of all problems, the real nature of man.” He was the eldest son of Henry Lunn, Methodist lay preacher and author as well as visionary entrepreneur. In 1892, Henry organised a conference of ecclesiastics at Grindelwald, focused on reuniting the splintered Protestant Churches – Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists. It was an effort with little chance of success, but it led him to become a premier travel agent.
“The result of the Grindelwald Conference,” recalled Arnold, “was not – alas – the reunion of Christendom, but the foundation of a travel agency, later know as Sir Henry Lunn Ltd.” Lunn Travel ran tours to such Swiss resorts as Adelboden, Klosters and Grindelwald’s neighbours, Mürren and Wengen. Ten-yearold Arnold donned his first pair of skis when he accompanied his father’s earliest organised sports party to Chamonix in 1898.
The young man’s initial step towards supernatural awareness occurred in Switzerland when he was 19 years old, and a student at Oxford. During the previous year, by his own description, he had become “an agnostic if not an atheist by belief”. Then it struck him. “I was resting on an Alpine pass after a climb [and] a sunset of supreme beauty,” he recalled. “Suddenly I knew beyond immediate need of proof that a beauty which was not of this world was revealed in the visible loveliness of the mountains. From that moment I discarded materialism for ever.” Following his Oxford studies, he took up a writing career, and between 1907 and 1968 produced more than 50 books – a title nearly annually. In addition to 15 books on skiing and mountaineering and six travel guides, he wrote 30 serious books ranging across religion, philosophy, politics and autobiography. The alpine wonderment that propelled him from sceptical agnostic to fervent believer is scattered through his work, including Roman Converts, Difficulties, Now I See and The Third Day.
His first authorial accomplishment, The Harrovians, scandalised upper-class British society by lifting the veil on the life of a schoolboy in an elite public school. Lunn loved controversy. The noted editor and writer J.R. Ackerley recalled encountering him for the first time. “I met in Switzerland a mocking and amusing fellow with whom I became very thick. His name was Arnold Lunn, and with his energetic, derisive, iconoclastic mind and rasping demonic laugh he was both the vitality and terror of the community.” Lunn’s enthusiasm for skiing was bound less. He originated the timed slalom race in 1922 at Mürren, Switzerland. In 1927, he and Austria’s most famous skier, Hannes Schneider, invented the Arlberg-Kandahar competition, having a combined result in downhill and slalom that exists to this day. For years, he edited the British Ski Year Book, one of the more literate sports periodicals ever published. So encompassing and detailed was Lunn’s writing and organisational work in skiing that it’s difficult to imagine he had time for anything else.
Lunn was influenced by the nineteenthcentury writers, poets and artists who articulated the beauty of the high mountains. In 1816, the young Byron, high on the Kleine Scheidegg in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, positively swooned at what he beheld: “Clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide ... the glaciers like a frozen hurricane.” The august Victorian author, critic and artist John Ruskin had “a genius for expressing his passionate love of mountain scenery”, wrote Lunn. It found expression not only in Ruskin’s prose but also in his painting. And Lunn was not alone in observing how the revival of Gothic architecture had aroused Victorian England’s appreciation of the Gothic landscape of soaring Alpine peaks.
Lunn once described his experience on a ledge high above Zermatt, as he watched “the first wayward hints of colour creeping back into the rich gloom of the valley. And then, just as the sun leapt above the distant bar of the Oberland, a church peeled out ... a joyous carillon ... re-echoed until the whole long valley ... overflowed with spontaneous melody.” Despite his spiritual arousal in 1907 at the age of 19, Lunn for the next 26 years was consistently disappointed by Protestantism, and decidedly unsympathetic to the arguments for conversion to the Roman Church. England was witnessing an extraordinary number of conversions – as late as the 1930s, some 12,000 a year. The Anglican Church was in decline. Should not one become a Catholic? It was a popular discussion topic, and furnished a ready market for book publishers, and an opportunity for a professional writer like Lunn. His Roman Converts openly criticised Cardinal John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton and leaders of the Oxford Movement who had become converts. Lunn was daunted neither by Newman’s fame nor by his arguments, which he compared to misguided mountaineering. “For all their brilliance, [they] are too often like the tracks of an Alpine party wandering around a mistcovered glacier. Perhaps this does not matter,” remarked Lunn acerbically, “for all roads lead to Rome, even those which go around in a circle.” So persuasive was his writing that in 1932 his London publisher commissioned a book, Difficulties, co-authored by Lunn and Monsignor Ronald Knox, himself a convert. Difficulties concerned the awkward problems faced by people attracted to Rome. In each chapter, Lunn furnished examples – such as the Inquisition, indulgences, the treatment of Galileo, papal infallibility – for why people should not join the Roman Church, while Knox sought to destroy Lunn’s line of reasoning.
Knox should have been a formidable opponent. Author, Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford, translator into English of the St Jerome Latin Vulgate Bible, he had played a role in G.K. Chesterton’s conversion. Knox’s writing, in Difficulties, however, comes across as rather pallid alongside Lunn’s noisy prose.
Yet, less than a year after the publication of Difficulties, a remarkable thing happened. Lunn himself became a convert, receiving his instruction from none other than his old opponent Knox – an extraordinarily abrupt reversal of belief. Or was it so abrupt? His son Peter – today 95 and living in Sussex – recalls that his father was inordinately preoccupied at the time he was writing his part of Difficulties. He asked his mother why. “The priest is winning,” she replied. Knox may have been winning, but Lunn’s conversion almost certainly was a result of his having examined the other side of the coin for so many years in his criticism.
His conversion, Lunn confessed, was not a blind leap of faith. “I haven’t much religious emotion,” he told his intimate Italian friend, Countess Etta Bonacossa. “That God exists is a certainty and that God wants us to enter into communion with him a truism which follows quite obviously from his existence. (I think we can prove this too.)” His decision to accept the articles of the Roman Catechism and Christ’s miracles and Resurrection, he claimed, was founded on research and reason. He likened the scientific logic that he employed in studying snow surfaces and avalanche conditions to the historical analysis he used in proving Christ’s bodily Resurrection. “The mental process in both cases seemed to me much the same.” It may have seemed much the same to him, but not to critics. Lunn’s penchant for logical reasoning to confirm articles of faith exposed him to attacks from fellow intellectuals whose arguments led them to conclusions quite at odds with Lunn’s. When he sent a copy of his Now I See to a friend he received this response: “My Dear Lunn, It was very kind of you to send me your book. I have often observed [that] when a writer goes over to Rome his work falls to pieces ... I would have given all your pages on the Infallibility of the Pope, a theme not worth arguing about, for one paragraph on the argument which induced you to believe that bread and wine can be turned into the actual flesh and blood of a man who died nineteen hundred years ago ... The fact is that you haven’t argued yourself into Rome. You have emotionally collapsed into it.” None of this deterred Lunn. He relished counter-attacking the secularists and atheists who denigrated Christianity. He was a brilliant debater, controversialist, and a tack-sharp logician. His style of arguing was the same – whether exposing the underlying illogic of the Norwegian opposition to downhill and slalom, or ofthe claims to benignity by a Church that had tortured under the Inquisition. Lunn not infrequently fuelled his arguments from his experiences in skiing. Two weeks before his death in 1974, at the age of 86, he wrote: “A country ceases to belong to Christendom when the architects of public opinion begin to preach what they practise ... I have seen the process at work in my own sport, skiing ... Olympic shamateurism began with the highly paid Nazi ‘amateurs’ at the 1936 Olympics ... What was of ultimate significance about Hitler and Stalin was not that they were anti-democratic but that they were anti-God and, therefore, anti-truth.” Lunn was ahead of his time in attacking the failure of fashionable intellectuals to identify Stalinist Communism as a form of totalitarianism. His mistrust of the Soviets later came into play when he fought the International Olympic Committee over the amateur status of athletes. IOC president Avery Brundage wanted to bar alpine ski racers from the Olympics for their acceptance of money from commercial sponsors. Lunn argued that state-employed Eastern bloc athletes competing in the Olympics were just as professional as the Western “shamateurs” taking payments under the table from businesses. In Lunn’s mind, the Soviets were as ruthless in the telling of lies to defend their version of ski competition as they were ruthless in their closing of Christian churches.
Lunn’s Christian faith – erected as it was on an infrastructure of syllogistic reasoning, premises matching or not matching conclusions – left him feeling deprived. He envied the mystic on the one hand and the simple peasant on the other. “I envy the mystical just as the tone-deaf envy the musical,” he remarked. “It has always been a distress to me that I have so few religious feelings. I have little feeling, far too little feeling of being in contact with God when I say my prayers or even when I receive Communion.” But a commitment to religion as firm as Lunn’s is not established without an emotional component. “I should probably still be an agnostic,” he wrote to a priest friend in 1969, “if I had not felt an urgent need to explain the sense of worship which mountains arouse in me, and if it were not for the mountains, my religion would be much too arid, a synthesis ofintellectual conclusions rather than a personal relationship with my creator ...There are moments in the mountains when the words of the Sanctus rise unbidden to my lips.” It was easy for the alpinist Lunn to sense a bond with his contemporary Hilaire Belloc, whose words Lunn often cited. “It is only among the mountains,” wrote Belloc in The Path to Rome, “that I have experienced something which is at least analogous to mystical experience. From the heights of the Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion ... These, the great Alps seen thus, link one in some way to one’s immortality.” Lunn believed that writing about the mountains surpassed the literature of any other sport. “It is impossible to describe snow and peaks without unconsciously betraying your attitude to the invisible and mystical ... Mountain literature is unique in sport, unique for its immense range of interests, physical and metaphysical.” Arnold Lunn was knighted in 1952 for his contributions to skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations. The honour should have cited his contributions to the literature of religion as well.
■ John Fry is a past president of the International Skiing History Association, and the author of The Story of Modern Skiing (2006). Lunn’s correspondence is in the Special Collections of the Georgetown University Library in Washington, DC.