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

BY: Gracjan Kraszewski

‘What do you seek—God? you ask with a smile? I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the matter for themselves, and to give such an answer would amount to setting myself a goal which everyone else has reached—and therefore raising a question in which no one has the slightest interest.’ Binx Bolling, protagonist-pilgrim of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel, The Moviegoer, cannot escape the invisible yet crushing weight of life’s most pressing question.  

As everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker. Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them? On my honor, I do not know the answer. What is the nature of the search, you ask? The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life…to become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair (The Moviegoer).

Binx eventually commences the search; his own, personal search. It is something we all must do, set out to find ultimate reality, truths, and the Truth itself if we have any designs on lasting happiness and fulfillment. Not much has changed in the fifty-eight years since Percy penned these words. Religion, we are often told, is a private matter. People have long decided whether to believe or not to believe and as such wouldn’t it be nice to just not think, not talk, and not fight about religion? It does not matter if you believe or not, just keep it to yourself. And, by the way, what do you mean ‘seeker’? Sounds like some New Age, used bookstore, self-help guru shtick. Seeking what, exactly? Don’t you know there is nothing to find? No truth, no meaning, no purpose. Maybe we’d all be happier if we just followed the advice of Richard Dawkins’ ‘Atheist Bus Campaign,’ which plastered the following slogan on buses about London: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ (Sarah Lyall).

Put aside the fact that if God does not exist life is nothing but worry and the complete lack of enjoyment for since there is no good or evil there is no moral standard neither here nor in a next life judgment that will never come and, alas, as Dostoevsky is reported to have said (Andrei I. Volkov), ‘without God, all is permitted;’ genocide, ethnic cleansing, infidelity, robbery, each morally equivalent to feeding the hungry or curing diseases or baking cookies for the Main Street Bazaar, for the categories ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do not exist outside of their relative, pragmatic utility. Good becomes what works, bad what does not. Joseph Stalin and Mother Teresa are both people who ‘did things,’ equally good, or equally bad, or equally nothing or everything or something or anything, whatever you want it and them to be. For what is then mistakenly called ‘evil’ is nothing more than an offended party unhappy that an idea or group opposed to them has seized ground they wished to claim for themselves.

And this is precisely the outlook of the Nietzsche-Foucault postmodern acolytes who have scuttled the rational program of 2,500-year-old Platonic wisdom counseling subordination of the passions to a will guided by a well-formed, rational intellect in favor of putting the passions in the driver’s seat, passions which should they be found to be destructive will be claimed to be all the more useful. Speaking of useful, as in idiots, those of the general masses, us, you and me, duped into accepting naked will to power as a ‘scientifically accurate’ model for life, we should not complain about the spilled milk later when those who pushed acceptance of such behaviors as some kind of norms exploited the new norms, and us most of all, assured that we would have no recourse to anything when awaking from our stupor to protest. Protest against what, you puppet-morons have long agreed with us that there is no God, no morality, no universal standards, no truth outside grabbing what you can grab on greasy ladders via greasier consciences in an ant farm of human meaningless. ‘Evil’ is nothing but a hollow defense mechanism in a ruthless will-to-power world where, as the overused adage goes, the strong take what they like and the weak suffer what they must. If there is no God, never stop worrying and forget about enjoyment in life. I wonder what the bus people would say about putting that message on their vessels?

But let’s put this aside and pretend Dawkins’ advice is feasible, that one can ignore God and just get on with life. What general observations do we have concerning the last half-century since the publication of The Moviegoer? Have 98% of Americans already found what is to be found and so are happy, fulfilled, and for our specific interest as Catholics, practicing members of the faith fully alive in loving relationships with God and neighbor? No, it seems. Percy, many years ago, astutely diagnosed a very 2019 problem, a disease of the soul manifesting symptoms of a lukewarm, apathetic detachment from everything and everyone that the historian Brad Gregory terms ‘The Kingdom of Whatever.’

Does God exist or not? Who cares? Is there absolute truth? Impossible to say. Is there an overarching moral code, a standard of behavior all people in every place are bound to follow? Yes. No. I don’t know. Whatever. Maybe it was Pope Pius XII who beat Gregory to the punch when saying, in 1946, ‘the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.’ That ‘greatest sin’ can today be termed hyper-apathy, special variant of chronic spiritual sloth syndrome. For what do the visible realties around us proclaim? What is the balance sheet of the Kingdom of Whatever? Drug abuse is rampant, evidenced by the conspicuous attention daily heaped on the opioid epidemic, significant abasements in acceptable public behavior and basic standards of public morality have long decimated that most important social unit, the nuclear family, and this marches lockstep with the desensitization surrounding violence, alarming rates of suicide, the ongoing abortion holocaust, and the growing normalization of the ‘death with dignity’ movement putting the finishing touches on a full bore ‘culture of death.’

What of religion in America, the Catholic Church in America, and the current state of the Catholic Church worldwide? Between the sexual abuse scandals, the across-the-board mass exoduses from religious orders, some experiencing a near 99% decrease in vocations over the past century, social issues statistics showing Catholics have stopped being the salt of the earth and are almost indistinguishable from secular society on moral questions, and the embarrassing state of former Catholic bastions like Ireland and France, it is better not to dwell too long on these realities lest one risk falling into despair.

If you’re wondering what exactly this has to do with Catholic art and literature let me assure you, a lot. A society that reads good books, consumes good art, understands the objective reality of truth and falsehood, the fall and redemption, salvation and damnation, this type of society does not act like our society acts today. This type of society understands that knowing the truth—above all the Personified, Incarnate Truth Himself, He who is also the Way and the Life—is not the end but the beginning. Then it’s time to start acting, start living, properly orientated towards the fixed eternal goal. This type of society, fortified by good books and good art, does not pretend God doesn’t exist so as to justify their favorite sins, does not deny sin, period, and does not live in the Kingdom of Whatever but, instead, seeks citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven.

It’s not like we arrived here overnight. Descartes’ 1639 cogito, ‘I think therefore I am,’ turned orthodox theology—‘I am, therefore I think’—on its head, transferring the start point of ontological reality from the Creator to his creation, severing the res cogitans from the res extensa and finishing the attack on universals, knowable absolute truth, and free will. (Work which began with William of Ockham, Martin Luther, and John Calvin).

The Enlightenment rationalism that followed Descartes and the deterministic scientism that followed that and all the secular religions of the 19^th century downstream still, from nationalism to socialism to positivism, worked in tandem with an artistic devolution from Catholic posters like Duccio’s Madonna and Child, painted in the year 1300, whose logical message was as clear as it was beautiful to, slowly but surely, moving Christ off to the side of the frame, as in Ciseri’s 1864 Ecce Homo, to not having Christ present at all as the canvas blurred unto incomprehensibility through the Impressionists, the Expressionists, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock (Modern Art and the Death of Culture).

It took men of faith two centuries to build Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris convinced this work could save the world; a grand monument to a living faith, with the living God truly present within to be adored and consumed healing a broken humanity. Centuries later, in 1974, another artist also claimed his work could heal and save; America, actually. The German performance artist Joseph Beuys flew to New York and, dressed in a full-length brown habit of sorts, spent three days locked in a room with a coyote; starting at it, pacing, poking the animal, prodding it, listening to it and trying to be listened to, learning, he said. Beuys claimed I like America and America likes Me might just be the balm a post-1960s broken and divided society was looking for. Hearing him explain the intent behind his work—‘I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote’—one can’t help feeling perplexed as to why he failed. If truth and reality are solely what we make them, and make of them, the view that Notre Dame Cathedral is of a higher spiritual and sensual caliber than a guy in a room poking an animal with a stick is nothing more than personal opinion, subjective belief. Because, look, who cares? As a master practitioner of relativism, Pontius Pilate, put it himself: Quid est veritas ? (Shira Wolfe).

So, no, to answer Walker Percy’s question, no, it would seem things aren’t going that well in society and within the Church today, AD 2019, and that most people haven’t found what they’re looking for. Catholic art, and Catholic literature, matters now more than ever because we are living in the midst of a significant moral and artistic problem-thicket. Whether or not things are worse in the fields of art and literature, and within society writ large, than ever before is a debatable proposition. But that things are ‘not going well’ is self-evident. Furthermore, it is possible to say that maybe the only thing that matches our general lack of artistic imagination is an inverse, nearly endless reservoir of false confidence and arrogant assurance that we’re doing just fine, thank you.

Gracjan Kraszewski’s bio: Author of a novel entitled The Holdout (Adelaide Books, 2018) and a Civil War history Catholic Confederates (Kent State Univ. Press, 2020). Thermonuclear Mirth, a novel, under contract and forthcoming with Arouca Press. Selected fiction has appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Riddle Fence, Nashwaak Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Eclectica Magazine, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, New English Review, The Southern Distinctive, PILGRIM, Bull: Men’s Fiction, Black Bear Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Scriberlus. Selected articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Catholic Historical Review, The Polish Review, the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of Southern Religion, Idaho Magazine.

Read Part II