Recently, a discussion among alumni of my undergraduate institution prompted some thoughts about how Catholic literature has affected us and our maturation in the faith. The following are my comments as they were sent out to the group.
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As to how Catholic writing has influenced me, my instinct is to approach it from my current situation as a seminarian immersed in theological study. While on vacation—as I am now—my impulse is to set aside the often speculative and abstract world of theology in favor of the particular and concrete. My leisure time is characterized by an immersion in narrative. While on some level I see this as "recreation," in the sense that it recharges me to return to my studies with renewed enthusiasm, there is a fundamentally more important reason that I am drawn to fiction (especially the kind of epic fiction that takes up a person's story from life till death): it is an enfleshment of the beauty, goodness, and truth that is presented through academic study.
I find that stepping into a world where human persons are treated from a Catholic point of view renews my confidence that pressing into theology deeply is no obstacle to reality, but a doorway to it. Given the fact that so much of priesthood is the prophetic interpretation of the presence of God's grace in the lives of people who on some level or another are blind to it, being able to take up the language and imagery of the best of Catholic fiction would enable the priest to present that perspective in a convicted way. As one of my teachers puts it, the persuasiveness of religious language is derived from the conviction with which it is spoken and lived; anything that contributes to my ability to sustain and charm the lives of others (in the most positive, grace-filled sense of those words) should be an important part of my own life.
I find that stepping into a world where human persons are treated from a Catholic point of view renews my confidence that pressing into theology deeply is no obstacle to reality, but a doorway to it. Given the fact that so much of priesthood is the prophetic interpretation of the presence of God's grace in the lives of people who on some level or another are blind to it, being able to take up the language and imagery of the best of Catholic fiction would enable the priest to present that perspective in a convicted way. As one of my teachers puts it, the persuasiveness of religious language is derived from the conviction with which it is spoken and lived; anything that contributes to my ability to sustain and charm the lives of others (in the most positive, grace-filled sense of those words) should be an important part of my own life.
There was a time when I really wanted to study fiction, to read and write about it—I wrote my thesis on War and Peace. And the time I spend thinking and writing about fiction is very rewarding, but on the whole I've shifted to an attitude of enjoyment rather than intellectual intentionality. Not an unreflective, visceral enjoyment, but one that is ordered to the thing itself and not to what has been said about or in response to it. In a way, that has let fiction be fiction again, and allowed me to enter into it on its own terms rather than from an a priori system that has already determined what stepping into this author's world is to be and to mean—thereby sapping it of the sources of its own vitality and beauty.
Life hands us the raw material of our experience, but it's up to us to discover its meaning. Fiction is like experience with the meaning infused in such a way that the receptive reader can appropriate it—discover it—more readily. Good literature is something like a "school of life" in which we are trained in the proper ways of interpretation of our experience. Wasn't it Henry James who said that the morality of a piece of fiction depended on the amount of "felt life" in it? That's something like what I'm getting at—to "feel" life is to be sensitive to the depth of reality that impinges upon us at every moment. Catholic authors write from the perspective that this fundamental reality to which we are sensitive is God, and not just any version of Him, but a personal being that has acted and continues to act in the incarnate Word to address our deepest human need. That doesn't mean everything valuable in literature has to be explicitly related to a deeper religious faith, but that it must be true to reality, true to life. That includes true depictions of the nature of sin as well as of faith, goodness, and life well lived. I am reminded of the words of a Dominican by the name of Gregory Vann around the 1950s, I believe:
It's a bit strong, and may come across as haughty and snobbish, but I find I agree with his fundamental point. Catholics are more free to write the truth as they see it because, at bottom, it is the Word of Truth they serve.
For some better perspectives, I would highly recommend reading Flannery O'Connor's letters and essays. They're available in the Library of America edition of her novels, as well as an independent volume I think is entitled "Mystery and manners". Sometimes reading what she says about her writing is more fascinating than her writing itself. She carried on a number of different conversations with folks on any number of different subjects, including people who caught wind of her Catholicism and wrote asking for an account of the hope that was in her. A good introduction to her extra-literary endeavors is the "Modern Spiritual Masters" volume dedicated to her (though she would have found that title laughable).
Again and again a great book or film or painting will be denounced as immoral while the mawkish, the moronic, the aesthetically meretricious will be extolled because its message is regarded as edifying or at least safe. In the end those who are docile to this sort of guidance acquire an affinity not with what is good and real but what is bad and false, not with genuineness and integrity but with the debased and ignoble. And the element of falsity in particular needs to be stressed: a novel, play, or film which communicates a profound insight into the nature of the church will be denounced because it contains a 'disedifying' portrayal of a priest; another book or film on a similar theme will be praised because it makes everything in the ecclesiastical garden lovely, even though this is a falsehood and the sentimentalized picture of religion in general is a distortion and falsification of the very stuff of religion. Grace builds on and in nature; it is no service to religion, and no part of prudence, to turn potentially mature human beings into morons, and we cannot claim to serve and worship truth if we acquiesce in or encourage the distortion or falsification of truth....
It's a bit strong, and may come across as haughty and snobbish, but I find I agree with his fundamental point. Catholics are more free to write the truth as they see it because, at bottom, it is the Word of Truth they serve.
For some better perspectives, I would highly recommend reading Flannery O'Connor's letters and essays. They're available in the Library of America edition of her novels, as well as an independent volume I think is entitled "Mystery and manners". Sometimes reading what she says about her writing is more fascinating than her writing itself. She carried on a number of different conversations with folks on any number of different subjects, including people who caught wind of her Catholicism and wrote asking for an account of the hope that was in her. A good introduction to her extra-literary endeavors is the "Modern Spiritual Masters" volume dedicated to her (though she would have found that title laughable).
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