![]()
Part I
READING
(AND WRITING)
LIKE A CATHOLIC
![]()
1
Between a Record of Man in
Rebellion and the Beatific Vision:
Imitating Conversion in
Catholic Literature
All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, brutal, etc.
—Flannery O’Connor
Seeing the Situation of Catholic Literature
WHEN ST. JOHN Henry Newman sat down to write his lectures that would become The Idea of a University, the newly christened St. Stephen’s Green buildings showed nothing of the “deep dilapidation” that poet and fellow convert Gerard Manley Hopkins would describe to the aging cardinal thirty years later. Beautiful ideas are not like beautiful buildings.
In spite of this natural decay, this inevitable withering of stones and wood, Newman’s ideas lived in and guided Hopkins’s mind. They obtained that “life” of which he writes in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: “When some great enunciation, whether true or false, about human nature … is carried forward into the public throng of men and draws attention,” the minds who encounter it do not do so passively. Rather, “it becomes an active principle within them, leading them to an ever-new contemplation of itself, to an application of it in various directions, and a propagation of it on every side.”
It is my hope that Newman’s idea of literature as the study of human nature, and largely of man in rebellion, can enter into a marriage with approaches to literature that overemphasize and misrepresent its relation to the beautiful; through his insistence upon the limits of literature, Newman helps us refine our understanding of literature’s nature and its dangers, its possibilities and its graces. His idea, though insufficient in itself, becomes an “active principle,” leading us to both purify the source of our stories (that is, ourselves) and stand soberly before the problem of compelling conversions that both build on nature and originate beyond it.
Newman wrote long before the twentieth century’s Catholic literary boom, which brought to the fore such great authors as Leon Bloy, Georges Bernanos, Paul Claudel, and Francois Mauriac in France; Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh, J. R. R. Tolkien, and G. K. Chesterton in the United Kingdom; and Flannery O’Connor, J. F. Powers, and Walker Percy in the United States. He therefore did not have at hand a broad body of modern literary works written by Catholics, a body of works charged with what Father Andrew Greeley would come to call the “Catholic imagination.” The modern Catholic literary tradition simply did not exist—although its first shoots were blooming not far from Newman himself.
Twenty-seven years before Newman’s idea of literature, the once Voltairian anti-Catholic Italian author Alessandro Manzoni had composed the first great modern “Catholic novel,” I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). In 1859, Francis Thompson, son of a doctor who converted to the Catholic faith under the indirect influence of Cardinal Manning, would be born; Thompson’s age of innocence would soon fade into one of overmuch experience when, as a longtime homeless opium addict, pockets stuffed with William Blake and Aeschylus, he would come to dramatize the “labyrinthine ways” of his wrestling with God in the great Catholic long poem “The Hound of Heaven.” And of course, in the 1860s, several years after Thompson’s birth, both Coventry Patmore and that singular Catholic priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins converted to the Catholic faith. Buckling a bit under his parents’ wrath over his recent conversion, the soon-to-be Jesuit would receive words of consolation from Newman himself: “It is not wonderful that you should not be able to take so great a step without trouble and pain.”
Hopkins’s own poetry is often cited for its exemplification of the Catholic “sacramental” comprehension of the world. Poems such as “God’s Grandeur” or “Pied Beauty” speak of a natural world “charged with the grandeur of God,” even as they contain tacit critiques of untethered industrialization that would find more explicit condemnation in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. But Hopkins’s work contains another vein, one whose tributaries share a source much closer to the theory of literature Newman develops in Idea of a University. In “Carrion, Comfort,” for instance, Hopkins writes of “the mind, mind [that] has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer.” Here literature plumbs the horrifying abysses of our human nature.
And yet, again, Newman does not directly consider a “Catholic” literary canon. His scope is vast. His consideration of literature’s place in the world at large and in the republic of letters in particular begins with that “Apostle of Civilization” Homer, a “blind old man” who “wandered over the islands of the Ægean and the Asian coasts.” Newman assumes an unflinchingly universal aim; his characterization of literature is itself guided by Christian concerns, but he needs his judgment to hold for all works of the literary imagination. Literature, he writes, is a study of human nature, and therefore a “Christian literature” is impossible. By “literature,” Newman, writing with the university curricula in mind, means primarily the great classical works of literature, those works that preceded or were written in tense relation to Christian revelation: Homer, the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, etc. Still, his judgment concerning literature will rightfully unsettle those familiar with the Christian virtue of hope: “You cannot have a sinless Literature of sinful man.”
The modern Catholic literary tradition’s dominant interpretive approach is rooted in the via pulchritudinis; according to “the way of beauty,” literature is justified and even considered good because in its sacramental dimension, it contains a foretaste of the Beatific Vision, and in its beauty, it is also full of truth. In its 2006 concluding document, The Via Pulchritudinis, Privileged Pathway for Evangelisation and Dialogue, the Pontifical Council for Culture (PCC) proclaims, “The Way of Beauty seems to be a privileged itinerary to get in touch with many of those who face great difficulties in receiving the Church’s teachings, particularly regarding morals. Too often in recent years, the truth has been instrumentalised by ideologies, and the good horizontalised into a merely social act as though charity towards neighbour alone sufficed without being rooted in love of God. Relativism, which finds one of its clearest expressions in the pensiero debole, continues to spread, encouraging a climate of miscomprehension, and making real, serious and reasoned encounters rare.”
The PCC goes on to position Christ as the paradigmatic incarnation of Beauty. Christ the Beautiful “invites contemporary Augustines, unquenchable seekers of love, truth and beauty,” to come to eternal Beauty by way of perceptible beauty.
In the first volume of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s multi-volume The Glory of the Lord, the author argues that beauty, unlike the other two transcendentals, is “disinterested.” Whereas truth and goodness give rise to innumerable self-interested debates, he claims, beauty is disinterested. In a central passage, he writes, “Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name, as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
Von Balthasar’s argument is partially compelling: Lives, conversations, social orders shaped by truth and goodness but bereft of beauty will end up shrill, falsely pious, unpersuasively moralistic. But beauty will not save the world. Even Dostoevsky, who coined the phrase, “beauty will save the world,” demonstrates the insufficiency of beauty throughout the novel The Idiot. Such an idea is oftentimes a hyperbolic assertion, uttered on behalf of practitioners of beauty, who mistake their good work as the only or primary means of salvation.
This enunciation of the beautiful can be traced back to Augustine’s “Late have I loved you, beauty so old, beauty so new,” and it finds a companionable argument in Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s “Address to Artists,” where he writes that “an essential function of genuine beauty, as emphasized by Plato, is that it gives man a healthy ‘shock,’ it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum—it even makes him suffer, piercing him like a dart, but in so doing it ‘reawakens’ him, opening afresh the eyes of his heart and mind, giving him wings, carrying him aloft.”
Note, though, that for Pope Emeritus Benedict the beautiful is—at least not first and foremost, and in a sense not even intrinsically—evangelical, Christian, or doctrinal. Even as, toward the end of his address, the Holy Father references literary giants such as Dostoevsky and Hesse in order to establish the way in which literature can lead the reader to God, he nevertheless introduces a caution concerning the beautiful, noting that “too often … the beauty that is thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful, superficial and blinding, leaving the onlooker dazed.” Rather than bringing man out of himself, failing to open him up “to horizons of true freedom as it draws him aloft, it imprisons him within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy.” Nonetheless, Pope Benedict preserves beauty as the fundamental mark of good art.
But beauty ought not to be the sole end which we seek to apprehend and co-create in art. The great Catholic poet Dante Alighieri advanced our application of a “four-fold method” or “allegory of the theologians,” which he famously outlines in a letter to his patron and protector Cangrande I, Lord of Verona. Dante explains how his work ought to be read; it is not merely beautiful or merely moral or merely spiritual:
Rather, it may be called “polysemous,” that is, of many senses. A first sense derives from the letters themselves, and a second from the things signified by the letters. We call the first sense “literal” sense, the second the “allegorical,” or “moral” or “anagogical.” To clarify this method of treatment, consider this verse: When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people: Judaea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion [Psalm 113]. Now if we examine the letters alone, the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is signified; in the allegory, our redemption accomplished through Christ; in the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace; in the anagogical sense, the exodus of the holy soul from slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory … they can all be called allegorical.
This interpretive framework, inherited from medieval biblical exegesis, trains the mind to see a given literary work as saturated with meanings—literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. As Umberto Eco jocularly remarks, here Dante “tak[es] a way of reading the bible as an example of how to read his own mundane poem!” Revolutionary as Dante’s move may have been, his insistence that “mundane” or non-sacred literature can contain an anagogical sense continues to ripple through Catholic readers, writers, and educational institutions today.
Still further, although beauty may be a part, a means, even one of the ends of literary art, literature—especially the modern novel—does not take beauty as its object in the same manner as the plastic or visual arts. As Jacques Maritain makes plain, “The novel differs from other forms of literature in having for object not the manufacture of something with its own special beauty in the world of arte/acta, deriving only its elements from human life, but the conduct of human life itself in fiction, like providential art in reality. The object it has to create is human life itself; it has to mould, scrutinise and govern humanity. Such seems to me to be the distinctive characteristic of the art of the novel. (I mean the modern novel of which Balzac is the father.)”
In much poetry, in the novel, in fiction, beauty is neither subject nor object; rather, it located at the level of the line—in well-made sentences—and in the unity that forms the whole, and in the clarities and epiphanies that radiate forth.
In The Arts of the Beautiful, Etienne Gilson insists that the first cause of poesy is not beauty but “that man is an imitating animal. Mimicry is part of his nature, as we observe it in children…. The second cause is that everybody enjoys imitations. This is verified by the fact that we like even ugly things to be well represented.” Although literary art is not defined exclusively by representations of ugly things, literature—and especially modern fiction, Catholic or otherwise, but in Dante’s Inferno also—typically contains beautiful representation of ugly things.
Although a novel may contain beautiful souls, in the words of Francois Mauriac, “It’s a long way from hagiography to the novel. We can write the life of a saint … but it is impossible to imagine writing a novel about a saint, that is, creating a saint. Grace is not invented. Bernanos is the only man who has known how to create all those martyrized priests of his from his own substance, without borrowing anything from hagiography. But precisely because he is a novelist and not a biographer, their cross is always rooted in muck.”
If a novelist is to take saintliness as his theme, “He nails his country priest to a scaffold outlined against shadows swollen with crime.” Why? Because “sin is the writer’s element; the passions of the heart are the bread and wine he savors daily.” Here Mauriac brings us from the “beauty will save the world” of the via pulchritudinis to Newman’s idea of literature, in which the latter is defined as an inevitably problematic record of man’s sinfulness.
If, in defining poetry as a record of human sinfulness, Newman is not defending it merely as a record of human sinfulness for its own sake, it is necessary that we probe the ways in which that record of human sinfulness has been interpreted and that we consider what end toward which a study of this record ought to strive.
A Record of Rebellion and Grace
In his Confessions, Augustine momentarily conducts a poetics of concupiscence: “I was captivated by theatrical shows
… [because] they were full of representations of my own miseries and fueled my fire. Why is it that a person should wish to experience suffering by watching grievous and tragic events which he himself would not wish to endure? Nevertheless, he wants to suffer the pain given by being a spectator of these sufferings, and the pain itself is his pleasure.”
Augustine does not mention the delight in mimesis that Gilson emphasizes. Instead, he considers theatergoing an “amazing folly” in that when one is moved by such scenes, she enslaves herself to similar passions. For Augustine, fiction (specifically theatrical, but—and I am not here unduly taking his particular experience of Roman theater for the whole of fiction—we can expand his consideration) is problematic precisely because it represents sins and because it is an invented dramatization of passions and others’ sufferings; the fallen human heart will imitate the very sinfulness portrayed, if not in action then at least through the impassioned imagination. When one suffers in reality this is called misery, and when one feels compassion for others this is called mercy. Beholding fictions of tragic human existence, however, the audience’s own sinful appetites are piqued and fostered, and, crucially, the audience is not excited to offer help, for the object of their attention is fictional, but is simply invited to grieve. Augustine seems to close the door to the possibility of purgation of these passions, and thus departs from Aristotle, who, in his Poetics, infamously posits that fictional representation of tragedy, “through pity and fear,” effects “the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.”
Although John Henry Newman finds kinship with Augustine insofar as both articulate the problematic character of fictionalized representations, he sees more in its messiness than an occasion of sin. In The Idea of a University, he posits literature as related to man in the same way that science is related to nature. Literature, he argues, is man’s history. He “thinks and he acts; he has appetites, passions, affections, motives, designs; he has within him the lifelong struggle of duty with inclination; he has an intellect fertile and capacious; he is formed for society, and society multiplies and diversifies in endless combinations his personal characteristics, moral and intellectual.”
Literature is the expression of all of this, a sort of autobiography of man. Newman’s definition of literature keeps the literary distinct from the theological; it is a study of man, not God. Although Hebrew literature is “simply theological,” having, as it does, a character impressed upon it that is above nature, remember that Newman is striving to account for all literature, not, say, works of fiction written by authors who are Catholic or Christian, or whose rendered characters and plots are steeped in the Judeo-Christian vision. As literature is the record of man, and man is intelligent, sentient, creative, and operative independent of supernatural aid from heaven, independent of any religious belief or sanctifying grace, literature represents him as such. Literatures are “the voices of the natural man.”
Newman establishes the aforementioned account of literature in part to lay out its disadvantages. Because literature is the reflection of nature both moral and social, and because nature moral and social is endowed with a will, is self-governed and never abides in a “mere state of innocence,” he is “sure to sin, and his literature will be the expression of his sin, and this whether he is heathen or Christian.” Christianity has only converted certain specimens of man, Newman contends, and thus has not altered the character of his history or of his mind. Here we see most clearly that in developing his theory of literature, Newman is not referencing solely those works written before revelation or written in traditions outside of or in tension with the influence of Revelation. Because literature can only reflect man as he is “in proportion as there has been an abuse of knowledge granted and a rejection of truth,” literature is the science or history “partly of man in rebellion.” Whereas physical science is dangerous because it is intrinsically indifferent to the idea of moral evil, literature is even more perilous because it is inclined to understand and recognize evil too well, to become excessively focused upon the abyss, and, as Nietzsche observes in Beyond Good and Evil, “when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”
Newman contends that as literature is a study of human nature, a “Christian literature” is impossible: In his famous formulation, “you cannot have a sinless Literature of sinful man.” This is not to say that it is impossible for a maker of literature to represent something grand, something great, but that when one achieves such a thing, this thing, whatever it may be, is not literature. Such an author or artist will have departed from the delineation of man as such in favor of possible man or purer man, in favor of man as he might be under particular vantages. Newman asks that one who undertakes such a task should “not say that you are studying him, his history, his mind and his ...
