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.

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 (2)

Joseph Pearce suggests in Literary Converts that:
"[G. K.] Chesterton's 'coming out' as a Christian had a profound effect, similar in its influence to Newman's equally candid confession of othodoxy more than fifty years earlier. In many ways it heralded a Christian literary revival which, throughout the twentieth century, represented an evocative artistic and intellectual response to the prevailing agnosticism of the age. Dr Barbara Reynolds, the Dante scholar and friend and biographer of Dorothy L. Sayers, described this literary revival as 'a network of minds energizing each other'. Besides Chesterton, its leading protagonists included T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Siegfried Sassoon, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Williams, R. H. Benson, Ronald Knox, Edith Sitwell, Roy Campbell, Maurice Baring, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Dorothy L. Sayers, Alfred Noyes, Compton Mackenzie, David Jones, Christopher Dawson, Malcolm Muggeridge, R. S. Thomas and George Mackay Brown. Its influence spread beyond the sphere of literature. Alec Guinness, Ernest Milton and Robert Speaight were among the thespians whose lives were interwoven with those of their Christian literary contemporaries."
Chesterton provided a model for the engaged and engaging journalist (to be followed by the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge and Tom Davies). Engaged because of the breadth of topics to which he jointly applied his pen and his faith. Engaging because of the good-humoured wit that characterised his satire and sugared the tough arguments that he doled out. It was this combination that first caught the attention of C. S. Lewis. In Surprised by Joy Lewis makes it clear how much Chesterton's writings and, in particular The Everlasting Man (a history of mankind's spiritual progress - "[I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense", said Lewis), helped him become a Christian. He then took Chesterton for a model in many of his own attitudes to his faith, particularly in his combative approach to apologetics.

Another Inkling, Charles Williams, was influenced by Chesterton in his early poetry while an early novel War in Heaven draws on both The Man Who Was Thursday in its treatment of the supernatural and on Chesterton's detective priest Father Brown in the character of the Archdeacon. W. H. Auden wrote that Chesterton's Greybeards at Play "contains some of the best pure nonsense verse in English, and the author's illustrations are equally good". A whole string of topical versifying satirists - Nigel Forde, Stewart Henderson, Adrian Plass, Steve Turner - have followed in Chesterton's train down through the century.

Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the influence of Chesterton and Belloc came primarily through their non-fiction - "especially their vigorous defense of Catholicism" - but that they did write some fiction which had bearing on the development of the English Catholic novel:

"Chesterton used allegory and fantasy to express religious themes, a technique that would be utilized by later novelists. Although weak in terms of character development, his novels like Napoleon of Nottinghill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Ball and the Cross (1909), and The Return of Don Quixote (1927) effectively convey Chesterton's sense of Christianity as a robust, life-affirming religion, and a vision of humanity as flawed and unable to improve without supernatural help ...

There is a possibility that Belloc, who spent a good part of his youth in France (his father was French), may have read Huysmans and some of the other French novelists, for in his novel Emmanuel Burden (1904), a satire on the moral debasement of a mercantile English family, he writes with the kind of interiority and emphasis on the salvation of one's soul typical of the French Catholic writers."

Crowe continues that "Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, both of whom started publishing fiction in the late 1920s, were the most important English Catholic novelists of what is referred to as the golden age of the Catholic novel":

"Perhaps because of his robust enthusiasm for his new faith and his pugnacious disposition, Waugh made no apology for the less salient aspects of Catholicism ... By making that choice, Waugh produced novels that arouse repugnance in secular readers (as well as in some Catholics), but also provide for many Catholic readers a fiction that explores with great depth and subtlety the religious world in which they live. Although Waugh's approach alienates some, it is possible that his boldness in unabashedly insisting on Catholicism as a supernatural entity gives his fiction a depth and intensity that resonates with many readers, even many secular ones ...

Whereas Waugh looked to the Church as a principle of order in the chaotic decadence of modern life, Greene was more focused on the personal drama of good and evil, sin and grace. Also, although Greene had no illusions about the depravity to be found in the secular world and depicted it in stark detail, he was also attentive to a critique of the Catholic community. Perhaps for this reason, he did not arouse as much ire among critics as did Waugh. Like Mauriac, whom he very much admired, Greene is particularly hard on self-righteously pious Catholics who keep the letter of the law but have little charity."

Joseph Pearce writes on CatholicAuthors.com that:

"Graham Greene is perhaps the most perplexing of all the literary converts whose works animated the Catholic literary revival in the 20th century. His visions of angst and guilt, informed and sometimes deformed by a deeply felt religious sensibility, make his novels, and the characters that adorn them, both fascinating and unforgettable.

His fiction is gripping because it grapples with faith and disillusionment on the shifting sands of uncertainty in a relativistic age. His tormented characters are the products of Greene's own tortured soul, and one suspects that he was more baffled than anyone else at the contradictions at the core of his own character and, in consequence, at the heart of the characters that his fertile and fetid imagination had created."

Crowe writes that:

"Muriel Spark ... is one of the most important English Catholic novelists after Waugh and Greene ... Spark believed that her conversion enabled her to write: "Nobody can deny that I speak with my own voice as a writer now, whereas before my conversion I couldn't do it because I was never sure what I was. ... I didn't get my style until I became a Catholic because you just haven't got to care, and you need security for that." One critic refers to Spark's Catholicism as her "rock," a position from which the believer can survey the human condition. She herself said that Catholicism helped her become a satirist. "The Catholic belief is a norm from which one can depart. It's not a fluctuating thing." Spark's narrative voice is sure and confident, able to survey the foolishness in a fallen world without ever quite falling into cynicism. The irony, though sharp, is open to the possibility that God may bring good out of sin and evil."

Crowe wrote in 2007 that "the past eighty years have seen high-quality Catholic novels by Maurice Baring, A. J. Cronin, Compton Mackenzie, Antonia White, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Braine, Rumer Godden, and Anne Redmon":

"... Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, and Piers Paul Read ... do not hesitate to include the "craggy" and "paradoxical" parts of Catholicism. Yet ... they have produced highly accomplished fiction in which religious meaning emerges from and is inextricably entwined with human experience. Some of their novels make extensive use of explicitly Catholic material. Others are deeply informed by a Catholic vision without much use of explicitly Catholic material ... Clearly they have not been doing the same kinds of things that Mauriac, Bernanos, Waugh, and Greene did, yet their fiction exemplifies exciting possibilities for the Catholic novel ... they have more than most contemporary English novelists, allowed their faith to inform their writing and have exemplified very different and interesting ways of integrating Catholicism into their work in ways that are substantial, imaginative, and serious."

Crowe concludes regarding Ellis, Lodge, Maitland and Read:

"These novelists do not hesitate to delineate with trenchant irony, biting satire, or simply devastatingly realistic description the ways in which the Church fails. Their angles of vision diverge and their critiques are distinctly different, focused on sexual teachings (Lodge), patriarchy (Maitland), or post-Vatican II developments (Read and Ellis). Yet they still see their world through the categories, the symbols, the stories, and the rituals of Catholicism - not just because they are literarily useful, but also because they undergird the story with a meaning that transcends the secular."

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James Macmillan - On Love.

Modern Catholic novels

I'm currently reading Marian Crowe's Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth which is an excellent analysis of four contemporary Catholic novelists - Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland and Piers Paul Read - demonstrating that the demise of the Catholic novel has not yet occurred in the UK, at least.

Crowe also provides a useful summary of the beginnings of the Modern Catholic Novel in the French Catholic Renaissance. She writes:

"An impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures followed the same pattern as Barbey d'Aurevilly. Having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, they reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood. Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of the saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of santification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy's novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in future Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern world. These converts were leading figures in the revitalized Catholicism of the early twentieth century ..."

Crowe then describes the work of François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, the greatest novelists of the French Catholic Renaissance, before surveying the work of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark to give the background in the UK for the contemporary Catholic novels of the four novelists analysed in this book.

All of which is useful preparation for the Big Picture 2, a Diocese of Chelmsford Eastertide course which starts this Tuesday evening in Waltham Forest and in which I share the leadership with Philip Ritchie and Paul Trathen. How can Christians respond to controversial art: protest or engagement? How have Christian artists expressed their faith through popular culture? How has Christianity influenced popular culture? How does popular culture portray or critique Christianity? These are some of the questions the course will explore using multi media resources with plenty of opportunity for discussion and practical response.

In one of my sessions I use the thoughts of US Catholic novelists, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, to introduce ideas on how to communicate 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 sees 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 writes 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 seem 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.

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Woven Hand - Tin Finger.

Needing things incarnated

Interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter about Image. In the article Image's founding director, Greg Wolfe, speaks about the influence of the Arts in his conversion:

"He converted to Catholicism when he was 23 and a graduate student at Mansfield College, Oxford University. He said that the two main highways leading him toward the church were art, including literary art, and ethics.

“I’ve never been a very good abstract thinker. I tend to need things incarnated, made concrete. So for me, art and ethics take the big ideas and make them concrete in a very palpable, powerful way,” he said. “I began to be interested in issues to do with human life, and life and death, and sexuality and marriage and what seemed to me to be an increasingly coherent and unified cluster of moral understandings on the part of the Catholic church. ...

“And then of course there was the great art and literature of the Catholic tradition,” he said, naming 20th-century French writers Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac; Americans Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy; British writers Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo as people who “had a huge impact on my journey toward the church.”

Mr. Wolfe said that he sees the Incarnation “as a model of balance, that it brings together those two poles of human and divine, justice and mercy, all these different tensions in which we live,” he said. “It’s hard to be balanced in that way. Sometimes we even tend to valorize being on one side or the other as if that makes us somehow more pure, more committed.”"

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Rachmaninov - Vespers (Nyne Otpushchaeshi)