Catholicism’s literary tradition is the envy of many other religions. It extends from medieval verse epics right through to modern novels. Pope Francis acknowledged this earlier this month in an interesting letter on “the role of literature in formation,” primarily with reference to priestly formation but extending, in Francis’s words, “to the formation of all those engaged in pastoral work, indeed of all Christians.”
I found these paragraphs particularly enriching:
36. When we read a story, thanks to the descriptive powers of the author, each of us can see before our eyes the weeping of an abandoned girl, an elderly woman pulling the covers over her sleeping grandson, the struggles of a shopkeeper trying to eke out a living, the shame of one who bears the brunt of constant criticism, the boy who takes refuge in dreams as his only escape from a wretched and violent life. As these stories awaken faint echoes of our own inner experiences, we become more sensitive to the experiences of others. We step out of ourselves to enter into their lives, we sympathize with their struggles and desires, we see things through their eyes and eventually we become companions on their journey. We are caught up in the lives of the fruit seller, the prostitute, the orphaned child, the bricklayer’s wife, the old crone who still believes she will someday find her prince charming. We can do this with empathy and at times with tenderness and understanding.
37. As Jean Cocteau wrote to Jacques Maritain: “Literature is impossible.We must get out of it.No use trying to get out through literature; only love and faith enable us to go out of ourselves”. Yet can we ever really go out of ourselves if the sufferings and joys of others do not burn in our hearts? Here, I would say that, for us as Christians, nothing that is human is indifferent to us.
38. Literature is not relativistic; it does not strip us of values. The symbolic representation of good and evil, of truth and falsehood, as realities that in literature take the form of individuals and collective historical events, does not dispense from moral judgement but prevents us from blind or superficial condemnation. As Jesus tells us, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Mt7:3).
39. In reading about violence, narrowness or frailty on the part of others, we have an opportunity to reflect on our own experiences of these realities. By opening up to the reader a broader view of the grandeur and misery of human experience, literature teaches us patience in trying to understanding others, humility in approaching complex situations, meekness in our judgement of individuals and sensitivity to our human condition. Judgement is certainly needed, but we must never forget its limited scope. Judgement must never issue in a death sentence, eliminating persons or suppressing our humanity for the sake of a soulless absolutizing of the law.
There is a long history of Catholic novels dealing with plotlines, themes, or types of character that deeply bother a certain kind of easily-scandalized Catholic reader. For some reason this is an especially persistent feature of Catholic science fiction and fantasy; we could cite Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb, even The Lord of the Rings when one considers the Classical-over-against-Christian treatment of suicide in the Númenor narratives (as J.R.R. Tolkien himself acknowledged in a letter to a Jesuit friend). There is a well-known passage from Flannery O’Connor’s essay “The Church and the Fiction Writer” dealing with this:
It is popular to suppose that anyone who can read the telephone book can read a short story or a novel, and it is more than usual to find the attitude among Catholics that since we possess the truth in the Church, we can use this truth directly as an instrument of judgment on any discipline at any time without regard for the nature of that discipline itself. Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels they don’t have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit.
It is when the individual’s faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life, and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the sense of the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost. Fiction, made according to its own laws, is an antidote to such a tendency, for it renews our knowledge that we live in the mystery from which we draw our abstractions.
Yet O’Connor, in a way that tends to confound scholars (especially secular scholars) of her work, did not always practice what she preached on this; like many very punctilious Catholics of her time, she did in fact ask priests for permission to read certain kinds of writing. (I have been an O’Connor acolyte for much of my life—I get a lot of hate mail over my writing for Where Peter Is and it normally slides off me like water off a duck, but one attack that did hit hard was someone saying a while back that my review of the PBS documentary on O’Connor was pat and uninteresting—and I find this hard to understand myself.)
So the censorious impulse and the anti-censorious impulse are both present within Catholicism, even within the same great Catholic artist. I’m generally on the anti-censorious side, personally; when I want to wind these people up I say that my favorite “contemporary Catholic media” is Warrior Nun, and when I really want to wind them up I say it’s Showgirls. Yet I don’t think it’s a good thing that I get motivated by the desire to wind people up. I don’t recommend it to others. Moreover, there are some subjects and some ways of addressing those subjects that really bother me as well.
This reflection is running on the Solemnity of the Assumption, which is a bit arbitrary, but perhaps not entirely; after all, with the Assumption something of humanity is elevated body and soul into the divine; so too, in a metaphorical way, with literature, perhaps.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution. He works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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