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

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.

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 to consider the source of our maladies and then search for a cure, a way out, a way back. What is ‘true’ Catholic art and literature? It is nothing more or less than the truth. It is avoiding the false presumptions of Neo-Pelagianists that say nothing is wrong and sin isn’t real and people are not only doing good but great so, like Richard Dawkins counsels us, just sit back and enjoy life, don’t worry. Within yourself, and without the help of God or religion, you have all the necessary components to live a good life and be a ‘good person.’

It is also avoiding the despair on the other extreme of the spectrum, populated by nihilists who are assured that life is nothing but senseless pain and suffering driven by random, chance chemical reactions of unconnected atoms bouncing about in a dark and meaningless universe, dive headlong into sin not just accepting it but celebrating it. Like Dawkins, once again, they too tell us don’t worry, get all the pleasure you can while you can, because you’re doing to die, and then that’s it. There is nothing more. There is nothing but the bottomless and eternal void.

True Catholic art and literature tell us a much different story, the only story worth telling: that God is all good and all-loving, that life is worth living, as Fulton Sheen often reminded us, but that this value comes not from a denial of sin but because of redemption from it. ‘Oh happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer.’ Felix culpa, indeed. To show the world and sin in all its ugliness and horror without forgetting that love—divine love as Dante explained in The Divine Comedy, the glue binding all of existence harmoniously together—triumphs, in the end, is to touch the very nerve center of what Catholic art and literature should and needs to be. Only then, once intact and sensibly structured, can this most pressing message be conveyed to a postmodern, post-Christian culture in a ‘sly like serpents’ way; subtly, softly, and thus with devastating effect. Nothing can be a higher triumph in this initiative than for a reader to pick up a book confident in seeing support for and celebration of ‘postmodern secular values,’ the apathy and the sin and the meaningless sex plus more sex and the sleepy ambivalence to it all, only to find, more than halfway done and enjoying the book, that the evangelical wool has been pulled over his eyes. But now, it’s too late. Once you know, you cannot not know, cannot un-know or non-know, cannot feign ignorance any longer.

The same secular reader who, like Binx, would never pick up anything remotely resembling a religious book:

My unbelief was invincible from the beginning. I could never make head or tail of God. The proof of God’s existence may have been true for all I know, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. If God had appeared to me, it would have changed nothing. In fact, I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head (Walker Percy, The Moviegoer).

Binx has found himself agreeing with the message, has found his false and foolish preconceptions about God and religion irrevocably smashed, and all because the Truth was presented in a familiar and disarming way. That set the dominos in motion, now the harvest can be reaped. That’s true Catholic art and literature.

If you are a Catholic artist or writer wanting to participate in this mission then, first, tell the whole truth about sin and redemption. Secondly, do it slyly, gently enough to make your readers, your critics, think you’re telling them the story they want to hear and then, when it’s already too late, inundate them, bombard them, with Christian truth. Want to be a bad Catholic writer and artist? Deny original sin, tell people not to worry, bless their sins and tell them they’re perfect as they are. Or, forget any nuance and go 100% devout Catholic from the starting blocks and see how many atheists, agnostics, and seekers make it past the first page and arrive in that middle section that just might lead to their conversion.

I will say it again: the whole truth but do it slyly. Create a story that shows the full reality of human weakness and sin but, unlike a secular culture which venerates perversion as virtue, leave room for that artistic turn where your story reveals these things for what they are and demonstrates how and why living in such a way betrays not just God but humanity, and that the deepest meanings and ultimate happiness all seek, the very thing Binx sets out to find on his search, Christ alone can give.

Dostoevsky, a Russian Orthodox Christian, was a master of this genre. Consider his novel Crime and Punishment. The protagonist, a young, brilliant, and handsome man named Raskolnikov, thinks he is smarter than God, that he doesn’t need God, that like Nietzsche’s uberman his greatness set Fyodors him above, beyond, good and evil. (Not without reason did John Paul II say that man, on the spiritual battlefield of existence, could never be beyond good and evil but only between it ( John Paul II, The Way to Christ: Spiritual Exercises). The rules do not apply to him. God does not exist. Original sin does not exist.  If this sounds a little like ‘God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods knowing good and evil,’ you’re on the right track (Genesis 3:5).

Raskolnikov murders a pawnshop owner because he’s convinced morality is fiction and, being a superior being, his psyche can handle what lesser men cannot. Dostoevsky shows us what nonsense this is, that denying God and sin in no way makes these realities less real. In a work of tortuous beauty, Raskolnikov only, and finally, escape the living hell he has created by confessing his crime and accepting punishment for his actions. Dostoevsky could have tried to bring his readers to Christ by telling them not to worry, just be happy, that all God wants is for you to find your own, personal truths and passions, that dogma and rules are irrelevant, just ‘love,’ be ‘nice.’ Perhaps he knew people who hear such messages soon lose their supernatural faith. So instead he told us a horrifying story about the darkness of sin, a story about a man who thought he was above God but soon found out he was nothing without God. Maybe he knew these are the kind of stories that lead to conversions, that these are the ones worth telling (Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment).

Flannery O’Connor was the same way. The protagonist of Wiseblood is a man named Hazel Motes, a non-believer who founds an atheist ‘church,’ the ‘Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.’ Motes’ visceral hatred of Christianity leads him to, near the end of the novel, murder an itinerant preacher with his car, running over the man multiple times in rage. His car was supposed to mark his liberation from God and morality, a Raskolnikov-like ‘beyond good and evil’ quality that would allow him speedy trips from town to town preaching his anti-gospel. Instead, the car becomes the instrument and symbol of his downfall, the literal tool with which he performs his horrendous crime and, soon thereafter, is brought to ruin when a police officer, following a routine traffic stop, kicks the vehicle over a cliff simply because he finds Motes’ appearance displeasing.

Motes has failed. Now what? You guessed it, redemption. Motes finally surrenders to God and starts doing penance, filling his rocks with shoes and sleeping with barbed wire across his chest in the fashion of Middle Age ascetics, hoping that somehow he can expiate the wrongs of his troubled life. And all this after beginning the road to redemption by blinding himself with acid, so strongly had his conscience, that aboriginal Vicar of Christ as John Henry Newman termed it, revolted against his behavior ( Roy Heusel, Conscience – the “Aboriginal Vicar of Christ”). Maybe O’Connor could have told us a ‘nice story’ instead of this disturbing one. But maybe it’s disturbing stories that properly show sin for what it is and give us the greatest chance to seek redemption and salvation (Wiseblood).