Why Catholic Art- Literature in Particular-Matters: Part III

BY: Gracjan Kraszewski

Part 1 of this series explained why a society that reads good books, consumes good art, understands the objective reality of truth and falsehood, the fall and redemption, salvation and damnation but that this type of society does not act like our society acts today. Part II discusses why true Catholic art and literature matter because they can be one tool, and a powerful one, in a larger project of raising the consciousness of a society slumbering in sin.

If there is one Catholic artist who does the showing sin in all its ugliness for the purpose of bringing people to God genre best, it is Walker Percy.

Your Catholic imagination sees in the Incarnate Spirit a sacramental meaning. The imaginative artist is the custodian of our language and you have fashioned it to uses beyond the ordinary. Like Kierkegaard, you have been a spy in the service of the Almighty, casting a rye eye on the current state of Christendom and you have looked with care on a sadly secularized society and have seen a death wish in the assertion of a right to decide when human life is worthwhile and when it is not. Your writings explore from within the flaws in our nature, our sense of alienation from our true selves, but always with that unforced note of hope.

Such was the citation given at Walker Percy’s 1989 Laetare Medal reception ceremony at the University of Notre Dame, the oldest and most prestigious award given to American Catholics in recognition of outstanding service to the Church and society. Percy, God’s spy, did indeed, and brilliantly, speak of our post-fall sense of alienation from our true selves. He did so through characters like Binx and the physician Thomas More—star of Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome—a self-professed bad Catholic lapsed into alcoholism, misogyny, maybe even polygamy who cannot, despite himself, escape that which Flannery O’Connor called ‘the God-haunted state.’ Try as he might, he cannot escape God, cannot escape the unforced note of hope God offers to each one of us should we just repent and set out seeking salvation.

The depth of Percy’s Catholic espionage quality was on full display in his 1983 book Lost in the Cosmos, a humorous if not a hilarious parody of New Age self-help literature clearly showing that man’s sin-induced alienation cannot be escaped or remedied but by Christ. If novels are not your thing, I encourage you to read two books, and as soon as possible: G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and this book, Lost in the Cosmos. Although written fairly far apart in time—1908 and 1983, respectively— and by different authors, the two read like a series, as if Lost in the Cosmos is the sequel to Orthodoxy.

Chesterton begins Orthodoxy by showcasing original sin, calling it the most obvious and provable aspect of human nature. And when he concludes that utopias never work because the world cannot be perfected by fallen man, the reader has long slipped into a state of pleasurable mental exhaustion, verifiably battered by polemic after polemic denunciations of so many heresies one cannot believe that, in fact, so much error abounds. Chesterton is funny, and witty. He might be a genius, but he does not sugarcoat; Catholic writers on the make take note: just tell it like it is. And because, not despite, his directness in treating sin and redemption he has been long regarded as one of the most successful apologists of modern times. Lost in the Cosmos builds off Orthodoxy in treating the roots of modern depression, the neo-gnostic splitting of man’s inherent body-soul unity, the false, ‘sophomoric’ as Percy calls it, debates between faith and reason, and the crushing alienation and sense of loss all people experience, a disjunction that can be repaired, healed, either by the Cross and Redemption of Christ or not at all.

Catholic art and literature matter because they are in short supply today, and therefore in need of replenishment, but not enough people know how to present this message, and not knowing how means not doing means not helping means, tragically, not giving something that to someone might just be the one thing they need to repent, to try to start again. Allow me to return to Binx one final time. He spends the entirety of The Moviegoer trying to fill his God-shaped hole with everything but God. He is promiscuous, he loves making money, and while he feels the interior push to start out on the search, to get serious and start seeking the truth, he just can’t do it, can’t find the catalyst to finally get going. And so he confesses, near the very end of the book, that the mammon worshipping, post-truth, post-Christian society of scientific positivism has left him cold.

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit…and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies…living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

‘Nothing to do but fall prey to desire;’ how sad, and sadder still how true that attitude often is. Do we understand Percy’s point here? Do we? We should, we need to if we want to both understand and appreciate Catholic literature and, far more importantly, be able to apply the lessons therein. God is Logos. From God flows all order, logic, right reason, and rightly ordered behavior. Cling to Him, remain in a state of grace, i.e. avoid the forbidden fruit in favor of humble obedience—God knows best, not me. I don’t know how to explain this concept more simply—and we will thrive, we will flourish in the full spectrum of our lived experience, relationships included. But be like Binx, ignore God, generally speaking, in favor of ‘doing it my way’ and see how long it takes you to conclude that life is worthless, meaningless, merde capital M. But hey, consolation prize here I come, at least I can give into all my desires. Even if life is meaningless and I hope the bomb soon falls directly on my head, at least I can drown in a pool of matching meaningless sex day after day until I die. Because, what else is there? And that’s precisely it. That’s where the enemies of the faith and family want us all to arrive: life is nothing, I am nothing, there is nothing, but at least I can do this. And this same it is what makes Percy an all-time great Catholic artist. He beats them to the punch, he, our Virgil-like guide emerging out of the dark wood of modernity, he takes us there before they or we ourselves do; to warn us. Are we heeding the warning? Do we even perceive the ever-present danger around us? What are you going to do about it, know that you know?

Binx is surely down in the dumps and about to be down for the count. But then, because the book is not yet fully over, and perhaps like those beautiful deathbed conversions where decades of sin are melted by an instant flash of grace-induced repentance, Binx has a moment; maybe now he will be able to finally begin the search, at last quit all his depressed idleness and start the journey towards redemption. For just as he is done feeling sorry for himself, done pondering the terrifying potentiality that contemporary life is so insufferable better an atomic bomb fall on us than continue on living such a horrid existence, he sees a man emerge from a Catholic church across the street, ashes fresh on his forehead, and realizes that today, this day, is Ash Wednesday.

I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dazzling trick of grace, coming for one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say.

The word importunate means ‘persistent to the point of annoyance.’ You want to write good Catholic fiction, be a good Catholic artist? Be importunate yourselves, showing sin in all its awful reality, indefatigably, showing the disaster and self-destruction of men and women who try to make their own earthly utopias without God.   Be annoying about it, bring your readers to see these same men and women reduced to nothing, ready for the bomb to fall on them rather than continue on as they have only to, at the last possible moment, fall prey to safe harbors, finally back home where they belong by, and in, God’s importunate grace.