Decadent Catholicism and the postwar Catholic revival

Stephen Schloesser’s Jazz Age Catholicism shows how a postwar generation of Catholics refashioned traditional notions of sacramentalism in modern language and imagery.

Following the Great War’s devastation, innovative movements in France offered competing visions of a revitalized national body and a new world order. One of these was the postwar Catholic revival or renouveau catholique. Since the church had historically been the dominant religious force in France, its turn of the century separation from the state was especially bitter. For many Catholics, the 1914–18 sacrifices made on the Republic’s behalf necessitated its postwar ‘re-Christianization.’ However, in their attempt to reconcile Catholicism with culture, revivalists needed to abandon old oppositions and adapt religion’s rigging to the prevailing winds of modernity.

Stephen Schloesser’s Jazz Age Catholicism shows how a postwar generation of Catholics refashioned traditional notions of sacramentalism in modern language and imagery. Jacques Maritain’s philosophy, Georges Rouault’s visual art, Georges Bernanos’s fiction, and Charles Tournemire’s music all reclothed ancient tropes in new fashions. By the late 1920s, the renouveau catholique had successfully positioned Catholic intellectual and cultural discourse at the very centre of elite French life. Its synthesis of Catholicism and culture would define the religiosity of many throughout Western Europe and the Americas into the 1960s.

Schloesser begins  with a prologue examining the roots of the postwar renouveau in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Decadents, Symbolists, and others rebelled against the dominant secular positivist ideology of republican France and its artistic counterpart, the realist insistence on vraisemblance and exact, “scientific” depictions of reality.

Romantic writers had found in Christianity a poetic cult of the imagination, an assertion of the spiritual quality of beauty in an age of vulgar materialism. The decadents, a diverse movement of writers, were the climax and exhaustion of this romantic tradition. In their art, they enacted the romance of faith as a protest against the dreariness of modern life. In Decadence and Catholicism, Ellis Hanson teases out two strands--eroticism and aestheticism--that rendered the decadent interest in Catholicism extraordinary. More than any other literary movement, the decadents explored the powerful historical relationship between homoeroticism and Roman Catholicism. Why, throughout history, have so many homosexuals been attracted to Catholic institutions that vociferously condemn homosexuality? This perplexing question is pursued in this elegant and innovative book.

Late-nineteenth-century aesthetes found in the Church a peculiar language that gave them a means of artistic and sexual expression. The brilliant cast of characters that parades through this book includes Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Paul Verlaine. Art for these writers was a mystical and erotic experience. In decadent Catholicism we can glimpse the beginnings of a postmodern valorization of perversity and performativity. Catholicism offered both the hysterical symptom and the last hope for paganism amid the dullness of Victorian puritanism and bourgeois materialism.

Martin Lockerd's Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism traces the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation. 

His book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst.

Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

See also my post on the 'Roots of the Catholic Literary Revival' and my series on 'Art and faith: Decades of engagement'.

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HolyName - Fall On Your Knees.

Roots of the Catholic Literary Revival

Joseph Pearce writes that the gestation period for the Catholic Literary Revival lasted from 1798 to 1845 and: ‘saw the rise of neo-medievalism, beginning with Coleridge’s Mariner and Scott’s chivalrous heroes, and ending with Pugin’s Gothic Revival and Newman’s Oxford Movement. After its 47 years in the womb of neo-mediaeval culture, the Catholic Literary Revival could be said to have been born, in 1845, amid the controversial pangs of Newman’s conversion. This heralded what may be termed the Newman Period in the Revival, dating from 1845 until the great man’s death in 1890. Apart from Newman himself, this period was graced with the presence of other eminent convert literati, including the poets, Coventry Patmore and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the latter of whom is perhaps the finest and most important poet of the whole Victorian period.’ (https://www.ncregister.com/blog/whatever-happened-to-the-catholic-literary-revival)

In his writings on the Catholic Literary Revival Pearce usually claims Anglo-Catholics, such as T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis, for the movement. Unusually, here he overlooks Christina Rossetti in his list of eminent literati. As Elizabeth Huddleston notes: ‘Rossetti spent her life in London, where she attended Christ Church, Albany Street, which was known as the leading Oxford Movement church in London. Along with her sister, Maria, Rossetti supported many Anglican sisterhoods, including The Society of All Saints, of which Maria would become a fully professed sister in 1876. Rossetti’s regular religious, devotional practices were encouraged by members of the Oxford Movement (such as confession and receiving Holy Communion) and would play a major role in her life and writings.’

Huddleston also helpfully summarises the Tractarian influences on Rossetti’s work: ‘Noted in the introduction to the 1925 edition of Rossetti’s Verses is that “Her [i.e., Christina Rossetti’s] religious views were Tractarian, that is to say, Anglo-Catholic without any leaning toward Roman Catholicism and strongly Puritan.” Seen in her private library is that she carefully illustrated her own copies of Keble’s Christian Year, as well as Isaac Williams’s The Altar. According to Diane D’Amico and David A. Kent, Rossetti held the writings of Isaac Williams in special esteem during the last years of her life, and in 1892 as she convalesced from cancer surgery, she enjoyed having her brother read from the Autobiography of Isaac Williams.

Elizabeth Ludlow demonstrates how “Tractarianism informed the early Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic and how Rossetti took this aesthetic forward and, in turn, used it to inform and disseminate Anglo-Catholic theology, contributing to the maturing of the Movement’s theology rather than being simply an [and I quote from Tennyson] ‘inheritor of the Tractarian devotional mode in poetry.’” This dissemination is demonstrated when, as Ludlow explains, “a number of her poems appeared in seminal Anglo-Catholic anthologies,” particularly, Orby Shipley’s Lyrica Mystica: Hymns and Verses on Sacred Subjects (published in 1865) and Lyrica Eucharistica: Hymns and Verse on the Holy Communion (1864). Ludlow argues that “the fact that Rossetti’s first volume of devotional prose was authorized by Burrows, a key Tractarian figure in mid-nineteenth-century London, strengthens the association between her writing and the Movement’s teaching still further.”

Much of Rossetti’s religious poetry can be seen as a typological depiction of “the church as a space prepared for an experience of divine revelation.” This is seen prevalently in the final lines of Rossetti’s unpublished poem “Yet a Little While”:

“We have clear call of daily bells, 

A dimness where the anthems are, 

A chancel vault of sky and star, 

A thunder if the organ swells: 

Alas our daily life—what else?— 

Is not in tune with daily bells 

You have deep pause betwixt the chimes 

Of earth and heaven, a patient pause 

Yet glad with rest by certain laws: 

You look and long: while oftentimes 

Precursive flush of morning chimes 

And air vibrates with coming chimes.”

According to James Pereiro, much of the ethos of the Oxford Movement “considered religion and poetry closely related, for God has used poetical language to communicate himself to man, employing symbolical associations—whether poetical, moral, or mystical—to reveal a world beyond sense perception.” This interplay between the earthly and the mystical can be seen in these lines of Rossetti’s poem.’ (https://www.newmanreview.org/rethinking-newman-s-influence/)

Claire Masurel-Murray has set out how in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites - of which Christina Rossetti was part - in particular the early paintings and poems of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘religious references convey a desire to escape the fluctuations of Victorian scepticism and to hark back to the spiritual certainties and unmitigated fervour of mediaeval times.’ 

Masurel-Murray explains how: “Rossetti’s Italian origins, his Tractarian upbringing, his love for Dante, his passion for the poets of the early Italian Renaissance and his mediaevalism all seem to have contributed to shaping his interest in Pre-Protestant Christianity. In 1847, he sent to William Bell Scott a series of poems that he entitled Songs of the Art Catholic. The title of this first collection is extremely significant. It does not reveal so much a sense of religious belonging as a form of aesthetic attraction, a cultivated nostalgia for gone-by days … The phrase “Art Catholic” refers to an aesthetic discipline, to the study of the religious imagery of the Middle Ages and of the works of Raphael’s predecessors, and to the contemplation of religious painting as an artistic model. For Rossetti indeed, both painting and poetry aspire to the condition of sacred art. He frequently uses Christian images in his visual and literary works, but ornamentally rather than functionally, as in the Marian paintings The Girlhood of the Virgin Mary (1849), which is full of Catholic elements (the stone altar, the embroidered ecclesiastic ornaments, and other liturgical objects such as the lamp and the organ to the right of the picture) with its two accompanying poems entitled “Mary’s Girlhood,” written two decades apart in 1849 and 1870, and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), a representation of the Annunciation. Generally speaking, Rossetti’s work, particularly his poetry, is permeated with Catholic motifs—Marian images in particular—inherited from the Italian Primitives, and filtered through the mythical vision of the Middle Ages, seen as an age of unanimous fervour and faith. This is apparent in such poems as “The Blessed Damozel,” in the sonnets he wrote to comment on pictures such as “A Virgin and Child, by Hans Memmeling,” “Our Lady of the Rocks, by Leonardo da Vinci,” or “For An Annunciation, Early German,” and in his translations of Italian religious poems from the Middle Ages such as “To the Blessed Virgin Mary” (from a poem by Fra Guittone d’Arezzo). The artistic use of Catholicism by Pre-Raphaelites had a lasting influence on fin de siècle writers, as was noted by David G. Riede, still writing about Rossetti: “His Art-Catholicism shows the temptation, which became increasingly powerful toward the end of the century, to embrace Christianity, particularly Catholicism, for the sake of its aesthetic tradition.”’ (https://journals.openedition.org/cve/528#:)

It is worth noting at this point that, as Whitney Robert Mundt has explained: ‘At Oxford University [Gerard Manley Hopkins] developed an interest in the [Pre-Raphaelite] Brotherhood and in Christina Rossetti. He met her and Holman Hunt and was encouraged to work seriously in both poetry and painting. His artwork reveals the specific influence of John Ruskin, a close associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the influence of John Everett Millais, a member of the original Brotherhood. Hopkins transcribed a number of poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founding member of the Brotherhood, and also by his sister, Christina Rossetti. Hopkins' letters and diaries reveal admiration for other Pre-Raphaelite associates, notably William Morris, who founded the Oxford Brotherhood after the model of the original group.’ (https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3484&context=gradschool_disstheses) 

Masurel-Murray also notes that another main source of inspiration came from across the Channel, the second half of the 19th century being ‘a period of intense exchanges between the French and English literary worlds.’ This included ‘the Catholic works of Verlaine, such as Sagesse (1881), a collection which has as its central theme the poet’s conversion during his time in jail in 1873–1874, and Liturgies Intimes (1892), a series of variations on the different moments of the Mass.’ Also included was ‘Baudelaire, whose poetic work is haunted by Catholic motifs, liturgical metaphors.’ Additionally, ‘One last name that has to be mentioned is that of J.-K. Huysmans, whose influence on English writers has been the subject of several studies.’

Masurel-Murray explains that: ‘His novel À rebours (1884), which is indirectly referred to in Chapters X and XI of The Picture of Dorian Gray, was called by Arthur Symons “the breviary of the Decadence”. The prayer that concludes the book (“Seigneur, prenez pitié du chrétien qui doute, de l’incrédule qui voudrait croire, du forçat de la vie qui s’embarque seul, dans la nuit, sous un firmament que n’éclairent plus les consolants fanaux du vieil espoir!”) was full of foreboding, as the year following the publication of his satanic novel Là-bas (1891), Huysmans converted to Catholicism. Là-bas, a novel characterised by its extreme and disoriented mysticism, focuses on the spiritual quest of Durtal, who is torn between his carnal obsessions and his search for what lies beyond the visible world. Huysmans’s next novel En route (1895) was a clearly Catholic work, chronicling the spiritual progress of a man obsessed with Christian art, with Romanesque and Gothic architecture, with the great religious writers of the Middle Ages and with Gregorian plain-chant. Both novels share a number of characteristics with the works of Huysmans’s English counterparts, in particular a taste for religious art and for the liturgy, a ruthless critique of modernity, a regressive and nostalgic movement toward mediaeval supernaturalism, an inner tension between the weight of the flesh and the temptation of mysticism.’

Pearce notes that: ‘Following Newman’s death there was the Decadent interlude of the fin de siècle in which a host of Catholic converts, such as Wilde, Beardsley, Dowson and Lionel Johnson, came to the Church via the dark and dangerous path of sin. In doing so, they were following in the footsteps of a previous generation of French converts, such as Baudelaire, Verlaine and Huysmans, each of whom had also taken the same dark path to conversion.’ Masurel-Murray notes that: ‘These writers all inherited from Walter Pater a taste for the splendours of religious rite. They were also influenced by their Pre-Raphaelite predecessors’ interest in the Catholic Middle Ages as well as by their emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of religious experience, and claimed their kinship with the art for art’s sake creed of French Parnassians and Symbolists.’

She also helpfully summarises the main members of the group:

‘In the last decade of the 19th century, a significant number of English writers chose to become members of the Roman Catholic Church. What is called the “Decadent” movement probably counts in its ranks more converts than any other school in the history of British literature. Among them (in the order of their conversions) Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913), also known as “Baron Corvo,” who wrote novels, short stories and poems, and converted in 1886; the poets John Gray (1866–1934), who was received into the Church in 1890 and ordained into the priesthood in 1901, Lionel Johnson (1867–1902, converted in 1891), and Ernest Dowson (1867–1900, converted in 1891); Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie (1867–1906), who wrote novels under the pseudonym “John Oliver Hobbes” and converted in 1892; Wilde’s friend Robert Ross (1869–1918), an art critic and essay writer who converted in 1894; André Raffalovich (1864–1934), a friend of John Gray and Aubrey Beardsley, a minor poet and theoretician of homosexuality, who became a Catholic in 1896; the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898, converted in 1897); Henry Harland (1861–1905), the literary editor of The Yellow Book, who converted in 1898; Oscar Wilde (1856–1900), who received the sacraments of the Church on his deathbed in 1900; Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), who wrote poetry under the shared pseudonym “Michael Field” and converted in 1907; and finally Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945, converted in 1911).’

Pearce concludes his summary of the main features of the Catholic Literary Revival as follows: ‘The period from 1900 to 1936 could be called the Chesterbelloc Period, in which the giant figures of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc presided over a golden age of literary converts, including R.H. Benson, Ronald Knox, Maurice Baring, Christopher Dawson, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and T.S. Eliot. (Although Eliot was technically an Anglo-Catholic who never crossed the Tiber his work is, to all intents and purposes, as Catholic as anything written by his Roman contemporaries.) From 1936 to 1973 we enter the Inklings Period, in which the formidable presence of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis dominate. (Lewis, like Eliot, was an Anglican and not a Catholic, but his work, which is overwhelmingly orthodox, sits very comfortably alongside the work of his Catholic contemporaries.) Eminent literary converts during this period include Roy Campbell, Edith Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon, Muriel Spark, Dunstan Thompson and George Mackay Brown. In America, this period also saw the emergence of those two fine writers, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.’

Summing up developments in France, Theodore P. Fraser writes, in The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:

"The Catholic novel in Europe as we know it today originated in French literature of the nineteenth century. Originally part of the neo-romantic reaction against Enlightenment philosophy and the anti-religious doctrines of the Revolution, the Catholic novel attained fruition and became an accomplished literary form spearheading the renouveau catholique, or Catholic literary revival. This literary movement contained in its ranks a number of brilliant writers (Bloy, Péguy, Huysmans, Bernanos, Mauriac, Claudel, Jacques Maritain, and Jacques Rivière, to name the most important) who reached maturity at the century's end or during the decade of World War I, and it essentially took the form of a strong, even violent, reaction of these French Catholic writers against the doctrine of positivism that had gained preeminence in French political and cultural circles in the last third at least of the nineteenth century."

For more on the Catholic Literary Revival and the French Catholic Revival with its influence across the Arts, see https://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2020/04/airbrushed-from-art-history-update.html and https://joninbetween.blogspot.com/search/label/art%20and%20faith.  

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Francis Poulenc - O Magnum Mysterium.

Christianity and literature

Following on from my recent post on American Catholic poets & writers I thought it would be worthwhile bringing together links to posts on this blog which explore the links between Christianity and literature.

My ‘Airbrushed from art history’ series surveys the Christian contribution to the Visual Arts which is broad and significant but is far from having been comprehensively documented. My co-authored book The Secret Chord explored aspects of the interplay between faith and music (and the Arts, more broadly). I have also posted an outline summary of the Christian contribution to rock and pop music

To explore the contribution made by Christianity to the Arts is important because the story of modern and contemporary Arts is often told primarily as a secular story. To redress this imbalance has significance in: encouraging support for those who explore aspects of Christianity in and through the Arts; providing role models for emerging artists who are Christians; and enabling appreciation of the nourishment and haunting which can be had by acknowledging the contribution which Christianity has made to the Arts.

My key literature posts are:

• There were giants in those days (1) 
• There were giants in those days (2) 
• There were Giants in those days (3) 
• There were giants in those days (4)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (1)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (2)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (3)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (4)
• The Modern & Contemporary Catholic Novel (5)
• The poetry of connection
• Debate: Has Fiction Lost It's Faith?
• Jesus is having a moment in literary fiction
• Endo & Scorsese: Approaching Silence
• Contemporary Fiction and Christianity
• Debate: Has Fiction Lost It's Faith? (2)
• Jack Clemo: The Invading Gospel
• Dealing with faith and with secularism is difficult but necessary now
• The poet’s eloquently passionate struggle at the junction of doubt and devotion
• Christian Arts renaissance: Major or minor?
• T.S. Eliot: Christianity, fragmentation and reconciliation
• Jesus Novels & Films: The Greatest Story Ever Told
• Acts of the Assassins and Jesus Novels
• Czeslaw Milosz, Oscar Milosz and Simone Weil
• Blogs: cryingforavision & Stride magazine
• American Catholic poets & writers

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Michael McDermott - The Great American Novel.

American Catholic poets & writers

‘Mark Van Doren (June 13, 1894 – December 10, 1972) was an American poet, writer and critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, Whittaker Chambers, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.’

'This was the time of Vatican II and Ed Rice's Jubilee magazine when a springtime of the church was celebrated in art, poetry and deep spirituality extending to all faiths - all this jubilation aided and abetted by Merton and Lax.' (Ned O'Gorman, blurb for 'Merton and Friends')

Van Doren taught that only religious poetry can be truly great. David Zlotnick reported on an address given by Van Doren to an Undergraduate Newman Club audience where he argued that "if poetry is about the world, religious poetry is about the universe":

‘"Today," he said, "we have narrowed and specialized the function of poetry," and tend to think of the Hymn as being symbolic of religious poetry. Professor Van Doren, however, finds it "the weakest and least moving form of religious poetry," because it is a limited form. Great religious poetry, he indicated, is poetry or prose which has emerged after struggle, conflict, and "terrific drama" have taken place in the souls of the authors, as they search for God. Expanding his thesis that those who initially fight most within themselves are, after coming to the truth, the most religious of people, Professor Van Doren emphasized that "God is very difficult to understand." "God did a tremendous thing when he made us free to hate him—he could have made us unfree to hate him. Yet," Professor Van Doren went on, referring to Lucretius' criticism of religion, "there is nothing like an attack on religion to reveal its power.”'

‘Van Doren was an English professor who offered, according to Merton, explorations “about any of the things that were really fundamental – life, death, time, love, sorrow, fear, wisdom, suffering, eternity.” But Van Doren's influence was felt beyond the classroom as well. It was he who proposed to Merton that the door to the ordained priesthood might not be closed after his rejection by the Franciscans.’

Merton, Lax, and Rice ‘were college buddies who became life-long friends, literary innovators, and spiritual iconoclasts. Their friendship and collaboration began at Columbia College in the 1930s and reached its climax in the widely acclaimed magazine Jubilee, which ran from 1953 to 1967, a year before Merton's death. Rice was founder, publisher, editor, and art director; Merton and Lax two of his steadiest collaborators. Well-known on campus for their high spirits, avant-garde appreciation of jazz and Joyce, and indiscrimate love of movies, they also shared their Catholic faith. Rice, a cradle Catholic, was godfather to both Merton and Lax.’

‘Merton, who died some 30 years before the other two, was the first to achieve fame with his best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven-Story Mountain. Lax, whom Jack Kerouac dubbed "one of the great original voices of our times," eventually received recognition as one of "America's greatest experimental poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words" (New York Times Book Review). He spent most of the last 35 years of his life living frugally on one of the remotest of the Greek isles. After Jubilee folded, Rice wrote 20 books on world culture, religion, and biography. His 1970 biography of Merton, The Man in the Sycamore Tree, was judged too intimate, forthright, and candid by those who, in Lax's words, "were trying so hard to get pictures of [Merton's] halo that they missed his face." His biography of the 19th century explorer and "orientalist" Sir Richard Burton became a New York Times bestseller.

Despite their loyalty to the church, the three often disagreed with its positions, grumbled about its tolerance for mediocrity in art, architecture, music, and intellectual life and its comfortableness with American materialism and military power. And each in his own way engaged in a spiritual search that extended beyond Christianity to the great religions of the East.’

‘From 1948, when he wrote his first letters to Evelyn Waugh, who was editing The Seven Storey Mountain, until his death in 1968, Merton corresponded with writers around the world, developing an ever-widening circle of friends … [including] Czeslaw Milosz, Henry Miller, Walker Percy, Boris Pasternak, and others.’

‘Famed Trappist monk Thomas Merton corresponded with an extraordinary range of writers, among them Evelyn Waugh, Henry Miller, Jacques Maritain, Walker Percy and William Carlos Williams. He spoke out boldly against political oppression, social injustice, racism and nuclear weapons, and expressed solidarity with Boris Pasternak, Czeslaw Milosz and James Baldwin. His letters to Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and to Argentine feminist Victoria Ocampo reflect his deep love of Latin American culture.’

‘… it is Merton’s correspondence with Ernesto Cardenal … which really stands out. Cardenal had entered Gethsemani in 1957 and was a novice there under Merton until he left in 1959 to return to Latin America. Merton encouraged Cardenal whilst at Gethsemani to keep up his interest in Latin America and in the political events in his own country. Cardenal had a profound influence on Merton and the enormous changes in Merton’s view of the world dating from the late fifties were no doubt partly due to his contact with Cardenal. Merton’s interest in Latin American poets and literature was also encouraged by his contact with Cardenal.

Cardenal also fed Merton's desire to travel, especially to visit Latin America and was central … in attempts Merton made to leave Gethsemani in the late fifties and early sixties.’

Robert Giroux writes that one of Flannery [O’Connor]'s ‘admirers was Thomas Merton, who became more of a fan with each new book of hers. Over the years I came to see how much the two had in common—a highly developed sense of comedy, deep faith, great intelligence. The aura of aloneness surrounding each of them was not an accident. It was their métier, in which they refined and deepened their very different talents in a short span of time. They both died at the height of their powers.’

Robert Lax ‘attended Columbia University and graduated in 1938, where he interacted with artistic and literary geniuses such as Ad Reinhardt, Thomas Merton, Edward Rice, Robert Giroux, James Loughlin and John Berryman (all beneficiaries of the great mentor Mark van Doren). Lax converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1943, following an extensive study of St. Thomas Aquinas and dialogue with his Columbia classmate and “soul-friend,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (who converted to Catholicism upon graduation from Columbia in 1938 and entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941).’

Lax ‘is one of the great enigmas of American letters. A classmate of John Berryman '36 and a mentor of Jack Kerouac '44, his poetry has been admired by writers as diverse as John Ashbery, William Maxwell, James Agee, Allen Ginsberg '48, E.E. Cummings, Richard Kostelanetz, and Denise Levertov - yet he remains very largely unknown …’

‘Jack Kerouac (the “Beat” writer influenced by Lax and his contemporaries, who entered Columbia University two years after Lax’s graduation) dubbed Lax in a dust jacket blurb for his earliest published book, The Circus of the Sun, as “...one of the quiet original voices of our times… simply a Pilgrim in search of a beautiful Innocence, writing lovingly, finding it, simply, in his own way.”’

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill wrote a moving article on John Berryman and his late "Eleven Addresses to the Lord." ‘The article recounted Berryman's struggles with alcoholism and despair and how a conversion experience in a rehab center had led to the "Addresses." Tragically, the conversion didn't take, nor did the alcoholism cure, and Berryman killed himself by leaping off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.’

‘Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill's piece places Berryman as one those spiritual seekers who swerve between great doubt and great faith. His "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," found in his 1970 "Love & Fame," … reflect that conflict.’

‘Many of the poets of Berryman's generation were known for their personality extremes. While Berryman wasn't medically diagnosed as manic depressive like his sometimes admirer Robert Lowell, Berryman showed all of the erratic behavior and mood swings of his peers.’

‘Berryman's longing for religious grace and spiritual healing was among his most admirable features, along with his handling of the vernacular as a poet and his depth as a scholar and critic.’

Thomas Andrew Rogers ‘describes the representation of Christianity in the writings of John Berryman - his struggle with the faith being the most central and incessant preoccupation of his verse …

In The Dispossessed the issue of faith is evident, but obscured; however, much of his unpublished verse of the period is characterised by a more transparent confessional idiom, frequently expressing his dilemma of conscience over the question of religious commitment. His failure to develop an effective poetic voice is the main reason why his religious poetry of the 1930s and 1940s remained in the private sphere. He achieved his stylistic breakthrough with Berryman's Sonnets, where the struggle with his conscience is depicted as a religious conflict, in which his adultery means a confrontation with the Law of God.

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet features a more developed representation of a similar conflict; the two alternative life choices before him are personified in the characters of Anne Bradstreet and the 'poet'. Difficulties of faith continue to play a major role in The Dream Songs, where the poet, adopting the persona of Henry, directly confronts God and Christianity with the problem of evil and the historical quest for Jesus. His poetry portrays a perceived conflict between faith and reason, and an intellectual pursuit for the truth epitomised by his poem 'The Search'. However, the poet's 'conversion experience' during the composition of Love & Fame is depicted as a response to the direct intervention of God in his life. His subsequent devotional poetry is dominated by his new sense of relationship with the' God of Rescue', who increasingly becomes associated with the full Christian conception of Jesus Christ the Saviour.’

Dana Gioia sums up the literary and intellectual environment in which these poets and writers participated as follows:

'Sixty years ago, Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture. Indeed, they played such a significant role that it would be impossible to discuss American letters in the mid-twentieth century responsibly without both examining a considerable number of observant Catholic authors and recognizing the impact of their religious conviction on their artistry. These writers were prominent across the literary world. They included established fiction writers — Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O’Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Fr. Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.) There were also science-fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr., whose A Canticle for Leibowitz remains a classic of both science fiction and Catholic literature.

There was an equally strong Catholic presence in American poetry, which included Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel. These writers represented nearly every aesthetic in American poetry. There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio.

Meanwhile the U.S. enjoyed the presence of a distinguished group of Catholic immigrants, including Jacques Maritain, Czeslaw Milosz, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Henri Nouwen, René Girard, John Lukacs, Padraic and Mary Colum, José Garcia Villa, Alfred Döblin, Sigrid Undset, and Marshall McLuhan. Some of the writers came to the U.S. to flee communism or Nazism. (Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin came here, late in life, to flee the European Catholic hierarchy.) These writers were supported by engaged Catholic critics and editors with major mainstream reputations, such as Walter Kerr, Wallace Fowlie, Hugh Kenner, Clare Boothe Luce, Robert Giroux, William K. Wimsatt, Thurston Davis, and Walter Ong. The intellectual milieu was further deepened by “cultural Catholics” whose intellectual and imaginative framework had been shaped by their religious training— writers such as Eugene O’Neill, John O’Hara, J. V. Cunningham, James T. Farrell, John Fante, Mary McCarthy, and John Ciardi, as well as — at the end of this period — John Kennedy Toole and Belfast-born Brian Moore.

The cultural prominence of mid-century American Catholic letters was amplified by international literary trends. The British “Catholic Revival” led by writers such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, J. R. R. ­Tolkien, Edith Sitwell, Ronald Knox, Hilaire Belloc, David Jones, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Jennings, and Anthony Burgess provided a contemporary example of how quickly a Protestant and secular literary culture could be enlivened by new voices. (G. K. Chesterton had died in 1936, but he continued to exercise enormous influence on both British and American writers.) At the same time in France, another Catholic revival had emerged, guided by novelists Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac and poets Paul Claudel and Pierre Reverdy, all of whom were widely read in the U.S. Another factor inspiring American Catholic authors, a disproportionate number of whom were Irish-American, was the rise of modern Irish literature. Long the province of Protestants, twentieth-century Irish letters suddenly spoke in the Catholic accents of writers such as James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Frank O’Connor, and Flann O’Brien. Not surprisingly, American Catholic writers of this period saw themselves as part of an international movement.'

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Robert Lax - is was - was is.

Endo & Scorsese: Approaching Silence

'Shusaku Endo is celebrated as one of Japan's great modern novelists, often described as "Japan's Graham Greene," and Silence is considered by many Japanese and Western literary critics to be his masterpiece.

Approaching Silence is both a celebration of this award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endo's other works as well as to the fiction of other authors.'

In his essay for Approaching Silence Martin Scorsese writes: 'Endo’s novel confronts the mystery of Christian faith, and by extension the mystery of faith itself. Rodrigues learns, one painful step at a time, that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that He is always present … even in His silence.'

'Adapting Silence ... has been a passion project percolating in Martin Scorsese’s mind for decades. For a while, it looked like the film would never get done. But with the release of a full cast, a first still, and a brand new essay and storyboard courtesy of The Film Stage, [Matthew Becklo says,] Scorsese’s Silence is well on its way to its scheduled 2016 release.

In an early forward for the novel, Scorsese wrote:

“How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? There have been many great twentieth century novelists drawn to the subject – Graham Greene, of course, and François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos… [Endo] understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture… That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe that they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.”

Similarly, as David Ehrenstein writes, Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, released in 1988 and adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the life of Christ, takes as its subject this same struggle between the spirit and the flesh - 'the “temptation” is simply that to be only human—to forgo divinity and martyrdom in exchange for a normal life':

'Kazantzakis’s novel had long fascinated Scorsese, who saw in it an opportunity to create a religious epic like no other, a “Passion project” if ever there was one. Written in 1951, The Last Temptation of Christ, according to its author, shows that the “part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand and love him and to pursue his passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives.” And so instead of dealing with Christ as a remote icon, Scorsese’s film would explore what it meant for him to be fully human as well as divine—as the Gospels say it was Jesus’ unique condition to be.'

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Peter Gabriel - The Feeling Begins.

Father Andrew Greeley: An Irish weakness for words gone wild

I was interested to read the Guardian's obituary for Father Andrew Greeley:

'Once described by America's National Catholic Register as "the dirtiest mind ever ordained", Father Andrew Greeley, who has died aged 85, was a prolific writer who found that his bestselling popular fiction often overshadowed his serious work on theology, politics and society. As arguably the most visible voice of Catholicism in America, he assumed the position of prophet without honour within a church he often saw as corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of its laity. Although he was possibly America's most influential Catholic sociologist, Greeley himself recognised that he was more likely to be remembered for his fiction, forecasting that his obituary would be headlined "Andrew Greeley, priest: wrote steamy novels".'

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Luxury - Biography-Autobiography.

Debate: Has fiction lost its faith?

There is a very interesting debate currently under way about how and if belief figures into contemporary fiction. The debate to date has been summarised well by David Griffith who explains how the debate began with Paul Elie’s New York Times Op-Ed piece, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?”:

"Elie reveals something I had never known about Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, one of the first works of literature I read on my own: In a 1973 lecture (over a decade after the book’s publication), Burgess “describes his best seller as a work about free will written from a Catholic perspective.” Elie goes on to write:

This, in short, is how Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time: as something between a dead language and a hangover. Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature.

Less than a month later, Image’s Gregory Wolfe, writing in the Wall Street Journal, rebuts Elie’s exaggeration. Citing over two decades of experience publishing a who’s who of what he calls “believing writers” (Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Elie Wiesel, Mark Helprin, and Mary Karr (a Catholic convert), Wolfe asserts:

The myth of secularism triumphant in the literary arts is just that—a myth. Yet making lists of counterexamples does not get at a deeper matter. It has to do with the way that faith takes on different tones and dimensions depending on the culture surrounding it.

I see it both ways.

I agree with Elie that these days, when writers reference scripture and theology, or evoke explicitly religious imagery and symbols, it often falls on deaf ears and blind eyes. I also agree that we’ll never again see a confluence of writers like O’Connor, Merton, and Percy having such a broad cultural impact.

I’ve found sustenance in the community of writers and readers of Image and enjoy acceptance among a group of writers my age who are not religious.

That renaissance of Catholic writing I once hoped for may not have happened, but however secularized our culture has become, issues surrounding faith have not been, and will never be banished from literature.

Karen Swallow Prior, Professor of English at Liberty University, writing in response to Elie’s article, is excellent on this point. Prior, whose scholarly work centers on the novel, reminds us that as a form, the novel has always been about unbelief.

She writes that the novel “was the outgrowth of the passing of the age of belief into the age of unbelief…. It is the form of an unbelieving epoch, even if it took a few centuries for that latent feature to surface.”

In other words, the kind of search for meaning that the novel offers has, over time, naturally and understandably drifted away from religious ways of understanding who were are and why we are here, just as the culture has.

Perhaps this is why I, a writer with an MFA in fiction, have turned almost exclusively to the personal essay and memoir. My first publication appeared in the “Confessions” section of Image, a section that is set apart from the “Essays” section. While I never asked about that distinction, it seems clear to me that it is a nod to spiritual autobiography, the genre started by St. Augustine.

My sense is that confessional nonfiction helps the writer (and the reader) to examine his conscience."

One thing to note about the limitations of this debate to date is that it is primarily US-centric; where is the mention of writers such as Rhidian Brook, P.D. James, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, Nicholas Mosley, James Robertson, Salley Vickers, Niall Williams and Tim Winton, for example? This same focus is found in the 'golden age' of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy to which some of this debate looks back without much by way of reference to the European Modern Catholic Novelists, the Inklings, Shusaku Endo and William Golding, among others. 

Second, its focus is predominantly about 'literary' fiction and therefore it also misses much that is viewed as 'popular' fiction e.g. John Grisham, Susan Howatch, Mary Doria Russell, Piers Paul Read, Ann Rice and Morris West, among others.

Third, there is limited mention of the extent to which theological themes and practices of faith continue to be explored in contemporary fiction. The work of Douglas Coupland or novels such as Patrick Gale's A Perfectly Good Man and Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry being a few examples.

Fourth, there is the extent to which novelists have been re-examining the life of Christ and his followers through novels such as: Jim Crace's Quarantine, Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son, Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Ann Rice's Christ the Lord series, Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary, and Niall Williams' John, among others. Jesus remains a figure of fascination for many contemporary novelists.

I would also want to add that in my view some of these novelists - such as Nicholas Mosley, Marilynne Robinson and Tim Winton - stand shoulder to shoulder with past greats such as O'Connor, Greene, Endo, Golding and others. We are not therefore entirely bereft of great novelists dealing consistently with issues of faith.

As a result, I line up with Greg Wolfe in this debate when he states that "the myth of secularism triumphant in the literary arts is just that — a myth."

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Michael McDermott - Great American Novel.

Contemporary Fiction and Christianity

I have several books on order exploring issues of spirituality and faith in modern and contemporary literature.

In The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850-2000 Richard Griffiths examines why some of the most outstanding writers of recent times have been Catholics - often converts, such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and David Jones. Griffiths is concerned also to relate his story to movements on the continent and examines on his way the impact of French Catholic writers such as Huysmans, Peguy and Mauriac on their British counterparts and the influence of British Catholic writers such as Newman, Faber and Chesterton on Europe. Griffiths' book looks as though it should be one of the most comprehensive studies of the modern Catholic novel - a phenomenon about which I've posted here, here, here, here and here.

In Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 Amy Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch.
While in Contemporary Fiction and Christianity Andrew Tate examines the work of more than a dozen contemporary Anglo-American novelists, including John Updike, Douglas Coupland, John Irving, Michèle Roberts, Don DeLillo and Jim Crace. He shows how the 'sacred turn' in western culture is manifested within the novel from the 1980s to the present, paying particular attention to representations of such theological ideas as the miraculous, the heretical, the apocalyptic and the messianic.

Tate's book, which has arrived, looks to be a genuinely comprehensive survey taking in, in addition to those mentioned above: Sara Maitland - "perhaps the most combatively theological British prose writer of the last 25 years"; Donna Tartt - "a 'constant tension' between her committed Christian faith ... and her 'vocation as a novelist"; James Robertson - his "sensitive and intensely theological novel The Testament of Gideon Mack"; John L'Heureux - "a former Jesuit priest - examines the fragile division between faith and unbelief in The Miracle; Jonathan Coe - "suggests that the sacred is found in the midst of the profane"; David Maine - "The Flood ... the first of his series of biblically themed novels"; Rhidian Brook - "a relatively rare novel of religious conversion"; Yann Martel - "challenges the notion that the journey of faith ... is necessarily detrimental to morally complex, demanding fiction"; Pat Barker - "Christ is a startling, defamiliarizing and unique presence"; Norman Mailer - "curiously reverent The Gospel According to the Son";  Salley Vickers - "rewrites the myth of the angel in disguise"; Bernard Malamud - "reclaimed the tradition of the holy messenger"; Jodi Picoult and David Guterson - "focus on figures who claim to have seen and to have been spoken to by celestial beings"; Nick Hornby - explores miracle healings; Frederick Buechner - envisages a "liberating eternal or kairotic moment"; and Jon McGregor - "a celebration of the miraculous possibilities of the quotidian".

No survey, though, can be fully comprehensive and these don't seem to discuss the following: Tom Davies - "the core of all his books is religious"; Shusaku Endo - "compelling but profoundly flawed Christian protagonists"; Catherine Fox - "an exploration of fanaticism and salvation"; Susan Howatch - "known for ... religious and philosophical themes"; John Grisham - "The redemptive power of faith is a strong theme in The Testament"; P.D. James - "a writer whose work is imbued with deep Christian convictions"; Nicholas Mosley - "novelist whose work [is] often philosophical and Christian in theology"; Morris West - "writer whose deep interest in and commitment to Catholicism provided the central theme for nearly all of his thirty novels", Niall Williams - "takes spiritual issues seriously – and continues to write compellingly about them" or Tim Winton - "'to ignore Winton's Christianity is to ignore the elephant in the room", among others.

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Bruce Springsteen - Land of Hope and Dreams.

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (5)

Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that the development of the Catholic Novel involved "the appearance of an entirely new kind of fiction in French, English and American literature":
"... metaphysics, ontology, and particularly the power of the historic Roman Catholic apocalyptic "matrix" of heaven, hell, and purgatory as deeper realities framing, enclosing, and terminating ostensible "reality" were never the touchstone of novels until the time of Bernanos and Greene. And all the long complex development from the time of Barbey d'Aurevilly was required before the work of Greene and Bernanos became possible. The work in aesthetics of Maritain, Claudel, and Mauriac was necessary to establish the critical premises of such a radically new form. Maritain made his distinction between an "individual," a human being as a social or political unit, and a "person," a man or woman with a soul to save or lose. Claudel asserted the possibility of dramas concerned with ontological problems and developmas for the stage. Meanwhile Mauriac claimed that the "romanticism" of stories about "individuals" was exhausted and declared that writers should examine the "eternal Tartuffe" or the "eternal Harpagon" to create a gallery of spiritual "types," as in his own fiction he proceeded to do."
Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the critical literature on the Modern Catholic Novel suggests:

"... the highest achievements in the genre of the Catholic novel were possible only because a window of opportunity appeared as Catholicism was venturing out from its defensive posture and entering into conversation with the secular world yet still maintained a clear and robust sense of its own identity. If this thesis is correct, we are unlikely to see again Catholic novels of the quality of the best of Mauriac, Bernanos, Greene, and Waugh or other European Catholic novelists in the years preceding Vatican II.

The Catholic writers who produced the flowering of the Catholic novel faced the perennial challenges of all Christian novelists: how to show the workings of grace and allow for the miraculous and supernatural without violating psychological credibility or the canons of realism, how to make salvation or damnation seem important to a secular reader, and how to convey a worldview based on a deeply held personal faith without appearing to engage in underhanded apologetics and evangelization ... not all critics agree that they met all these challenges successfully, yet some novelists found ways to navigate these difficulties and produce fiction of exceptionally high quality and wide appeal for secular as well as Christian readers. To what extent these extraordinary achievements in Catholic fiction were the result of the uncommon situation of the Church - an unprecedented openness to secularity while still retaining a clear and strong sense of its own identity - and to what extent they were the result of the appearance of several extraordinarily gifted Catholic writers must remain a matter for speculation."

Many of those discussed as Catholic novelists in this series of posts have, in the words of Theodore P. Fraser from The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, "adamantly shunned for themselves the nomenclature of "Catholic novelist" and have insisted that as artists they possess their own angle of vision and unique literary universe":

"Ultimately they view themselves not as writers consciously writing novels with specific "Catholic" content but as Catholics who happen to be novelists. François Mauriac has perhaps best explained the intention and intellectual disposition of Catholic novelists who are creative creative artists in their own right: "Being a Christian," he says, "my Christian beliefs dominate my novels, not because I want to make propaganda for Christianity, but because it is the deepest part of my nature ... I am a christian first and last, which means a man responsible to God and to his conscience for the epoch he lives in ... he has been put here to play a certain role among his fellow men. He is engaged; it isn't a question of deliberately engaging himself.""

David Lodge, in The Novelist at the Crossroads, insists that:

"in their appraisal of Catholic novelists critics would do well to follow the wise dictum of Henry James: that artists must be granted the right to use their ideas, their artistic vision, their donnée as their inspiration directs them, and that the proper role of critics is to comment on the use that authors have made of their donnée through an evaluation of the craft of their work (Lodge 1971, 88) ...

Using James's sensible critical principal as his point of departure, Lodge grants that Greene indeed makes frequent use of Catholic symbolism to create his "metapoesis." Yet in doing so his intention, Lodge insists, is not to proselytize or to present "a body of belief requiring exposition and demanding categorical assent or dissent" but to see his fiction as "a system of concepts, source of situation, and reservoir of symbols ... to dramatize intuition about the nature of human experience" (Lodge 1971, 89). Hence, Lodge contends, Catholicism as a system of dogma and laws is not in or by itself an adequate key to understanding and interpreting the meaning of Greene's works, and these are, Lodge argues, as accessible to most readers as any other works of art that possess a unique vision and aesthetic patterns. These Catholic novels can therefore be appreciated as authentic pieces of literature above and beyond the doctrinal or confessional elements of faith contained therein."

Fraser believes that what Lodge says of Greene can be applied to other novelists considered as "Catholic".

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Bruce Cockburn - Understanding Nothing.

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (4)

Theodore P. Fraser writes, in The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, that:
"Heinrich Böll was born of a Catholic family of craftsmen whose ancestors had left England to settle in the Rhineland during the reign of Henry VIII. The Catholic identity of the family was strong, and Böll was brought up in close-knit, supportive Catholic environment of working class people living in tenements ... Böll's early works, which use the war as living metaphor of universal evil, also have deep religious themes of guilt and the need for repentance - for both individual and collective sins of aggression and cruelty ... Böll's later novels are much broader in scope and more morally explicit and engaged in regard to social, political, and religious problems ... Böll became increasingly outspoken in his criticism of the Catholic Church in Germany in the 1960s ... Despite his sharp attack against the German Church, Böll never denied being spiritually Catholic and insisted that he should receive a Church burial at his death. Like Péguy, whom he much admired, Böll was always careful to distinguish between the mystical body of the Church extending above and beyond the human institution and the essentially worldly and political corporation for the wealthy social classes that he judged the Church in West Germany to be."
Gene Kellogg, writing in 1970 in The Vital Tradition, commends the development of Japanese and Indian Catholic literary movements:
"Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (1914) compares favorably with the work of most Japanese writers working today. Similarly, in India the best work of M. R. Anand can be read quite comfortably even in such company as R. K. Narayan's masterpiece, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962), particularly if one turns to Anand's zestful and humane short stories such as "The Barbers' Trade Union" (1936)."

Doug Cummings, in his essay accompanying the film Silence, writes that, during the period that the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo studied at the University of Lyon, "Catholic thought in postwar France was in the midst of intellectual revival and reform" - "Philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier grappled with theology and modernity" while Endo "focused on writers he called the "grande écrivaines of French literature" ... François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green ... Catholic novelists who specialized in vivid descriptions of personal struggles, religious doubts, and dark nights of the soul. (Their novels were later direct influences on Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor.)"

Endo was born in Tokyo in 1923. After his parents divorced, he and his mother converted to Roman Catholicism. Following study at Keio University and in Lyons, his novels established him the leading writer of his day in Japan. He has been called the Japanese Graham Greene because he is a Catholic novelist whose writings depict both the anguish of faith and the mercy of God. A central theme of his writings has been the clash between Japanese culture and a very Western mode of religion. Novels like Silence and The Samurai suggest that Christianity must adapt itself radically if it is to take root in the “swamp” of Japan. Cummings notes a "deep bifurcation within Endo that would remain a part of him and his writing throughout his life: the Western-Christian side and the Eastern-Japanese side, both psychological hemispheres yearning for solidarity but refusing cohesion." As a result, the reigning motifs in his work become "philosophical rifts, religious fervour and weakness, suffering innocents, martyrs and apostates, and the clash of cultures."

Steve Scott notes, in Crying for a Vision and Other Essays, that:

"Endo's characters, both eastern and western, are haunted by a specific Christ - a paternal, Judicial figure in the West and a maternal, forgiving figure in the East. In this haunting they bear some resemblance to the "fundamentalists" of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. Endo has repeatedly registered his conviction that a gospel centered on the forgiving, nurturing Christ is far more appropriate for his homeland than the stern, judgemental model imported from the West."
Endo writes in his Preface to the American Edition of A Life of Christ that the "religious mentality of the Japanese ... has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them ... the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father." In Endo's classic novel Silence, for example, as Adrian Pinnington notes in his interesting paper on Endo, "Rodrigues, the priest who finally betrays the Church and apostasizes, actually first learns true humility through this action." It is only, Pinnington notes, "after he has abandoned the false absolutes of European culture that he can recognize the action of Christ in his own life, and begin to hear the voice of Christ."
Other novelists considered within the critical literature on the Modern Catholic novel include: Mary Gordon, Carmen Laforet, Elisabeth Langgässer, Gertrude von Lefort, Giovani Papini, and Sigrid Undset. The popular novels of Morris West can also be considered in this context.

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Tōru Takemitsu ~ Itinerant.

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (3)

Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that:
"... in the United States, the tendency of American Catholics to adopt the secular community's values of social meliorism without spiritual reservations gave rise rise to Flannery O'Connor's brilliant satires, in which social meliorists were depicted as blind victims of illusion, who did not understand that without spiritual dedication social meliorism was powerless to reach even those it sought to help. J. F. Powers had already exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of the "golfing priests" and the "regular fellows," who had abandoned spiritual values to go over to secularism on secularism's most superficial terms."

Kellogg also suggests that:

"Flannery O'Connor and J. F. Powers ... represented the two tendencies we had seen in the work of the European Catholic novelists, criticism of the secular environment and criticism of "religious" people, but in criticism of the environment the approach was milder than the European. When Powers or Flannery O'Connor criticized non-Catholics, or nonreligious people, the criticism had nothing to non-Catholicism or anti-Catholicism. Powers tended to attack some general characteristic inhumanity as in "The Old Bird" or racial prejudice as in "The Trouble." Flannery O'Connor tended to attack broadly prevalent patterns of human behaviour, such as meliorism (Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away) or the need to dominate (Mr Head in "The Artificial Nigger")."

O'Connor and Walker Percy introduced ideas on ways of communicating Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:

“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

The problem as O’Connor saw it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.

Percy wrote about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ. What O’Connor and Percy both seemed to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God deliver a central Catholic priest who is wonderfully himself despite the extremities of situation and suffering into which he is placed. They are a brilliant demonstration of the difficulties of communicating the Gospel in another culture and, as such, are on a par with Endo's Silence and The Samurai. Emilio Sanchez, its Jesuit central character, is an engaging central character who is honest about the deficiencies and the inspirations of his faith. The split narrative works well before meshing at the conclusion to bring together the events of the central crisis and the response to it. This central crisis is genuinely shocking although its resolution is probably a little too easy and dealt with too briefly but the novel, as a whole, provides an engaging and challenging exploration of God's presence and guidance in human exploration and suffering.

Ann Rice was brought up a cradle Catholic but exchanged her belief in God for the belief that there is no God while at University in response to her imperative need to read authors that were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. She married a convinced atheist and became famous as the author of popular Vampire novels. Her novels, however, reflected her search for meaning within a personal life touched by tragedy. The combination of her personal search and the research for her novels returned her to the history of Rome and beyond this to the mystery of the survival of the Jews. In 1998 she returned to the Catholic Church. Eventually this led to her own search for the historical Jesus as she read extensively on the subject with the result being the first two novels in her Christ the Lord trilogy.

The first of these, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, is written in simple, sparse prose with the story told in the first person. The storyline incorporates some of the miracles found in the apocryphal infancy gospels but these are mainly restricted to the period in Egypt. The remainder is an imaginative fleshing out of the minimal Gospel stories of Jesus' childhood. Very little happens in terms of action but Rice's dramatisation of Jesus' growing understanding of who he is and what he has to do is effective and moving. In Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, Rice creates a pre-history for Christ which seems consistent both with the Gospel narratives and with the character and personality of Christ which emerges from those narratives. The fictional pre-history of The Road to Cana is also dramatic and engaging; which is itself a considerable achievement. Rice is clearly a novelist who is well read in Biblical Criticism with a real understanding of the Gospel narratives.

"The American Catholic Ron Hansen ... has effectively transposed the story of the Prodigal Son to our own day in Atticus," writes Crowe. His novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, is the senstively told story of a young postulant given the stigmata and the varied reactions to her from her convent. Elmore Leonard's Bandits and Pagan Babies both have a focus on issues of Catholicism and organized religion with more invested in their questions of doctrine and faith. Touch provides a wry take on fame and the miraculous when Juvenal, a former brother of a Catholic order in Brazil who now helps alcoholics in a Detroit rehabilitation centre, performs a miracle cure on a woman who has been beaten by her husband. The story contrasts the love Juvenal finds with the business and church zealots who seek to exploit his gift.
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M Ward - Epistemology.