Once, during the crack cocaine epidemic the ‘80s, I came back to Stanford from the war-zone neighborhood across the freeway. At the English department, another grad student was explaining why moral bleakness was the ideal in literature; the crudeness of graffiti tags made them high art; and the hero for our times was the one wh0 understood the fraud at the heart of our culture: “You want to know what a real hero is? He’s some street person who’s sitting on top of a trash heap muttering to himself.”
That weekend I had watched a rock climber ease a terrified woman off a cliff. Catholics across the freeway were saying their last priest had been murdered by drug lords; at Mass, I’d listened to the new little priest preach against gangs anyway. Twice that week—as in every week that year — undergrads I knew had bicycled past crack houses to tutor immigrants.
I suggested that moral excellence was possible.
My postmodern classmate sneered. Spiritual life was delusion; charity was self-indulgence; outdoor adventures were merely artificial thrills manufactured by the privileged.
Young, brilliant, healthy, sensitive and longing for truth, he had learned not to commit admiration. He had eyes, but had been trained to be unable to see moral beauty, not within two miles of him, or even to enjoy the gardens dreaming within the sandstone colonnade. Postmodernism permitted political or sexual or economic motives, but forbad as impossibly naïve, or self-indulgently nostalgic, reverence for beauty, wisdom or noble action. Lovers might create a temporary refuge–but the only sure satisfaction was smug superiority to those who still had hope. This was, by the way, in the Bay Area when it was gorged with prosperity.
9/11 briefly checked the moral and aesthetic posing, but arbiters of literature still prefer the gaze of a chilly psychotic eye reflecting loveless sexual hookups, emotionally flat violence—or pleasure if it’s self-directed enough. We open literature hoping to find life within, or at least nourishment, and find instead the scorpion sting forbidding all joy: the certainty that there is no answer to questions about evil, justice, beauty, or aspiration.
Catholic fiction doesn’t claim to know that. Catholics can still ask. So Catholic fiction can treat loveless sex or soulless violence, but it does not caress the prejudice that depth and reality mean bleakness. These are evils, and the mystery of evil is great; but the mystery of good is greater.
That mystery, the gift and mystery of grace, gathers to a greatness, as the poet says– gives us a world charged with the supernatural, weighty with God.
Of course secular literati enjoy supernatural tropes, too-if they are kept within harmless bounds. Postmodern fiction delights in ghosts, supernatural beings, and alternative planes of existence–as, of course, private political or psychological metaphors. Fiction of the second rank may seriously propose some spirituality–self-discovery; or perhaps an irrational sense of the persistence of the dead; or some mystic group identity. Public religion is allowed for people of a sufficiently alien ethnic culture. But modern Americans must do without love, desire, sacrifice, exaltation, the call to sanctity or the grandeur of repentance.
None of this tame, packaged spirituality is half as interesting as God; none half as passionate, half as dangerous as the Incarnation. No personal emotional realization fascinates like a doctrinal mystery. God is threatening; He calls to a craving that cannot be quelled, because it is the craving of our whole being. We want to find the sense in the world, the justice, the delight. Rationality springs from the Logos; justice wrestles down serious evil only in the Crucifixion of God. These all Christians share. God is concrete for all of us: a young Jew under the Roman occupation, voluntarily enduring the worst of human viciousness. But as a source of joy, Catholics have more: the Mystery of the Eucharist brings Him here where we live. In and through His people He still offers His human face in His Body: public, alive, demanding, beautiful and creative of beauty.
Not all religion is as embodied as Catholicism. Our culture preserves vestiges of a Christianity where Faith is a set of statements believed–and deficient charity is conclusive evidence against the reality of that belief. Ever since Hawthorne, American literature has been unable to resist the pleasure of knocking down Christian hypocrites to exalt instead a private, emotional, undogmatic spirituality. Within this soft shell hides the scorpion that finally allows God to demand nothing.
The only novelist who has been proclaimed Blessed, John Henry Newman, pointed out that Catholics do not understand Faith as a set of propositions, to be tested by moral effect. Catholic Faith consists of an awareness of spiritual realities. Knowledge of one’s catechism doesn’t affect the reality of one’s guardian angel. A Catholic can believe in the Real Presence and skip Mass–or lie, cheat and steal. It’s analogous to a smoker buying a pack of cigarettes although he firmly believes he got his emphysema from smoking. Catholics understand how faith is separable from charity. For temporary pleasures, we can give up Hope—a virtue which names our desire to pursue the ultimate good. We often persuade ourselves that the satisfactions of lust or revenge or even gluttony are worth it. That doesn’t mean we give up the idea that fidelity or public order or health exist, or that they are good things.
Catholics acknowledge that some things in the world–marriage, for instance, or baptism, or the Eucharist–have a meaning that is spiritual and public. In a culture that imagines spirituality as far more private than sex, public revelation is as much a fact in the Catholic consciousness as a mountain, or as one’s ribs. Actually, it’s more of a fact; one can dynamite a mountain or remove a rib; that’s not possible with God’s reality in our world. So we can talk about it, and especially reason upon it, in the midst of a culture where the very idea of dogma with intellectual content is treated like an oxymoron. It gives us a lot more to say.
And it makes good stories. One of the principles of fiction is that ideas are more moving when they are made concrete in the physical world. Catholics kneel to an edible God in the tabernacle. They scramble to get to Mass even in languages they don’t know. They feel the pull of sacraments when they feel no particular emotion about them, even when they don‘t know the words, much less understand the symbols, of the ritual. It’s there whether we understand it or not. Catholic fiction is inescapably conscious of the mystery of God–intrusive, demanding, joyous, and more solid than our bones. Public dogmas and rituals take on the factuality of a table or a tree. Certainly, like other writers, Catholics craft private symbols aplenty—witness Graham Greene and Flannery O‘Connor, Walker Percy, Michael O’Brien, Annie Dillard and Alice Thomas Ellis. Nevertheless they recognize some things in the world as simply having spiritual meaning and effects. Marriage may mean a lot of things to a lot of people; but it never stops meaning the relationship of Christ with the Church. Grace is a thing we have to assume under certain circumstances, as we assume the functioning of gravity or of digestion. It’s among the things we can’t edit to suit ourselves.
Catholic fiction may involve priest and sacraments and rituals; it may not. It may or may not present heroic deeds or noble motives or sexual fidelity or the perception of beautiful spiritual truths. What Catholic fiction cannot do is ignore the possibility of virtue, sanctity, or divine action. That would be cowardly. Catholic fiction always involves sinners and the presence, even if ignored or wished away, of the bewildering, infinite Love that gives and demands everything.
The atmosphere of grace breathed by Catholicism is enigmatic, even opaque, to secular critics. It affords them an almost comic degree of opportunity for speculation as to its real causes. This is because when a Catholic writer is working at the pitch of talent, doing the right kind of fearless job, readers encounter things both visible and invisible, the ordinary and the supernatural life of the Catholic, whether or not they have the Faith themselves. What they encounter there is that which will ultimately move hearts, che move il sole el‘altre stelle.
Professor Bernadette Waterman Ward teaches English Literature at the University of Dallas.
