One day in 1933, Simon Elwes (pronounced El-wez), a young socialite painter who was visiting friends in Yorkshire, decided to have a look at the local ruin, Fountains Abbey. He expected to see a heap of charming and tedious rubble. He saw a heart-touching sweep of Norman, Gothic and Jacobean stone, lichenous and somnolent in great gardens beside the fleet little River Skell. The 814-year-old abbey (desecrated by order of Henry VIII) is England's noblest monastic ruin. Yet it was not its ruinous beauty that most moved Elwes, but his sudden realization of the vivid religious life which once had flourished there. "Beauty," says he, "ought to live. Ruins, as ruins, always make me want to vomit. It seemed to me then that the stones of Fountains were bleeding."
Simon Elwes did not realize it but a seed had been planted in him. At the time, however, he all but forgot the experience. "The world of the flesh and the devil," he says, "took me back." In that world he prospered. He married a daughter of Lord Rennel of Rodd, fathered three sons. In London's Mayfair and on Manhattan's Park Avenue he established himself as a stylish portraitist. During World War II, Elwes served as a lieutenant colonel in the Tenth Hussars. Then last year, suddenly, blood clotted on his brain, paralyzing the right half of his face and body, including his painting hand. (By great effort, he has since learned to paint as well with his left.)
Stricken Building, Stricken Man. Believing that he was about to die, Elwes received the last sacraments. Instead, he slowly recovered. Over & over, during his recovery, the ruined man dreamed of the ruined abbey.
It was always the same dream. In this dream he saw Fountains Abbey restored, saw and heard robed monks chanting in their ancient choir. And in this dream, Elwes saw himself, standing beside a gatehouse, talking with one of the monks. This was strange, for no gatehouse is there now. Nor did Elwes then know that such a building had once stood there.
Constantly, in this persistent dream, Elwes and the monk kept saying: "It was built for God; it must be returned to God." Constantly, as he recovered, the conviction grew upon Elwes that God had ruined him physically because he had made ruinous use of his talent as an artist. God had prepared him to become responsible for a great work of art—the restoration of Fountains Abbey and its rededication as a monastery.
Anti-Gods v. Pro-Gods. Elwes planned the purchase and restoration of the abbey as a world project. It would be, first of all, a world memorial to the Roman Catholic dead of World War II. It would be inhabited and used by Benedictine monks. It would be a work by, and for, what he called the "seven English-speaking Catholic nations" (Britain, Eire, the four Dominions, the U.S.). It would be a retreat and meeting place for Catholics of all nations and for men of all Christian faiths. And it would be a bastion. "The world," Elwes says, "is dividing into the anti-Gods and the pro-Gods." By anti-Gods he means not only Soviet Russians and Communists everywhere but materialists in general, who, in his opinion, are driving the world to its atomic hell. "I like to think of Fountains Abbey," he says, "as field headquarters for the anti-materialists."