Note: the following appears on our “Books” page in slightly different form, with information on O’Connor’s works & works on her.
What makes art “Christian” or “Catholic”? Much has been said in the attempt to go further than “It glorifies God” or “It is made by people trying to glorify God.” In prepping for a course on Art & Catholicism I’ll be teaching next year at Xavier I’ve been looking over the proposals of artists & commentators. Ron Hansen has helped; his essays in A STAY AGAINST CONFUSION: ESSAYS ON FAITH & FICTION are clear & to the point, & are also the result of being a Catholic artist who takes both parts of that phrase with equal seriousness. The essays of Makoto Fujimura are also good. Check out his website, as well as his book REFRACTIONS: A JOURNEY OF FAITH, ART, & CULTURE. The blog entry below on CS Lewis also indicates an important source, while classics like Madeleine L’Engle’s WALKING ON WATER: REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & ART are classic for obvious reasons. Just about every book I’ve read on the fine arts contain some suggestions, while the internet contains a wealth of resources that occasionally hit the mark.
The artist who I’ve leaned on the most, however, & who will form the central core of my course, is Flannery O’Connor. She is what I call a “tough” writer, in that she is never sentimental, she detested what she considered over-pious attempts by writers to be spiritually relevant, & her stories & novels deliver that kick-in-the-gut feeling that leaves you troubled & curious for more. A surface reading of her stories can leave the impression that her world is a despondent one, filled with freaks, horrible accidents, & little more than cruelty feeding on the ridiculous. The end of “The Lame Shall Enter First” still leaves me unsettled, long after I first read it. The fact that she was known to laugh robustly while reading her stories out loud makes me like her all the more, for her stories are not the dark, foreboding things they may appear to be. They are shot through with a recognition that God’s grace is never far from even the most recalcitrant sinner, a fact which in fiction, as in real life, produces wildly improbable characters & scenarios.
She also spent time thinking about the theological dimensions of her work. Her letters reveal someone who was familiar with a range of authors, including Jacques Maritain, who helped her to think through some of St. Thomas. Her essays on fiction contain numerous jewels, such as the following:
“The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, & the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian & the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.
Whatever the novelist sees in the way of truth must first take on the form of his art & must become embodied in the concrete & the human. If you shy away from sense experience, you will not be able to read fiction; but you will not be able to apprehend anything else in the world either, because every mystery that reaches the human mind, except in the final stages of contemplative prayer, does so by way of the senses. Christ didn’t redeem us by a direct intellectual act, but became incarnate in human form, & he speaks to us now through the mediation of a visible Church. All this may seem a long way from the subject of fiction, but it is not, for the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.”
This is found in her essay “Catholic Novelists & Their Readers,” found in Mystery & Manners, a collection of essays & addresses that complements her stories, novels, & letters. O’Connor is one of God’s gifts to not only the Church, but to what is sometimes still called “letters,” meaning literature or, more broadly, erudition. Why she is not better known by Catholics is a good question. I’ve heard people lament how modern culture has gone pagan & is attacking the faith of the Church & leading our youth astray, all the while never bothering to check out O’Connor & other authors who are serious Christian artists. At times lunacy follows, as when a Bishop (!) actually forbids O’Connor’s use in high school courses (check out this story for the gruesome details).
In her essays on fiction O’Connor highlights her conviction, dramatized in her fiction, that one of the principal ways God speaks to us is through our encounters with the at times odd & unsavory characters that populate our surroundings. As Pope John Paul II emphasized so often in his lectures on the Theology of the Body, the natural world we inhabit is not insignificant for our “spiritual” lives, but is in fact the means by which have spiritual lives at all. Grace does not bypass nature, but works through and perfects it. This is the incarnational logic of Christianity, which compels us, in O’Connor’s view, to portray the natural world more clearly. The Catholic novelist is thus concerned “with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.” This view explains why O’Connor could express such impatience with Catholic authors of little ability writing in hope of edifying their readers. Their works often “leave out half or three-fourths of the facts of human existence & are therefore not true either to the mysteries we know by faith or those we perceive simply by observation.” The Catholic novelist, &, by extension, the artist who is a Christian seeking to be faithful to God, has an obligation to the natural, not just the spiritual. The two are not opposed, as John Paul II emphasized in his critiques of the dualism that still haunts Catholic thought & life. While O’Connor is talking about a different set of topics, she shares John Paul’s concerns to preserve the sacramentality of the world that, though fallen, is “charged with the grandeur of God,” in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yes, things are bad. O’Connor’s presentation of nature includes some of the oiliest & most repulsive characters you’re likely to find in modern fiction, & many of her stories end with the horrible consequences of a life lived badly. As Hopkins writes,
“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”
Yet “nature is never spent”, for reasons Hopkins goes on to describe & O’Connor illustrates throughout her work. Again, grace doesn’t work outside of or against nature, but in & through it, perfecting it, in part through helping us to see it more clearly. Thus, the Catholic novelist, poet, dramatist, filmmaker, painter, etc. has a greater obligation than the materialist to portray the natural artfully & realistically, since he understands the universe to be a far more expansive reality than something that can be simplistically reduced to natural laws working on mere physical matter. The materialist does a disservice to physical matter by so reducing it, as the hedonist fails to understand physical pleasures by limiting their scope to the moment. “We are far too easily pleased,” CS Lewis preached in “The Weight of Glory.” We often fail to acknowledge the fuller significance of the earthly pleasure we enjoy in drink, sex, whatever, & thus fail to truly enjoy or understand it. Sensible delights urge us beyond themselves, & in what appears as a mysterious act of vengeance turn sour on us when we refuse their deeper call.
What makes art “Catholic” or “Christian”? This is a broad question, one O’Connor wrestled with in several of her essays & letters. One important feature of all Christian art, however, is its honesty in engaging with life as lived in its quotidian routines. Consider the following painting, by Jean-François Millet (1814-75). It’s called “The Gleaners”, & it shows 3 peasant women working in the fields.
Is this a “Christian” painting? In what way? Do the religious beliefs of the painter decide the question? Does the fact that Millet is consciously echoing Old Testament themes & characters matter? The French public was none too thrilled with this work, apparently associating it with pleas to the mob & democratic ideals. Gleaning, is, after all, a sloppy-seconds affair, at the time hardly a popular subject for art appreciation. Other works by Millet may help us understand his life & work, but shouldn’t each work of art stand on its own? In other words, how much of a difference should authorial intent or social context make in our understanding of a work of fiction, art, film, etc.? Likewise, do we consider the effect of the work on the viewer? Problems multiply as the questions do, for an author or painter who rejects the faith may produce a work that is explicitly Christian in subject matter, while a devout believer may not. What about abstract art, which requires some time, effort, &, for me at least, guesswork? And who can predict how or if a work will impact us? Some recognized classics of Christian art don’t move me much, while some “secular” works do. Part of this is the result of the sensibilities or mood of the viewer. Part of it a mystery, for who can predict how the Spirit will move? O’Connor’s stories are illustrations of this unpredictability, as they show God working most visibly right at the moment when one would think him most absent. With regard to Millet’s painting, one could state that his decision to highlight “common” workers makes a statement about the God-given dignity of the work that the poor must do in order to survive. Even if this general point is accepted, I wonder how many churches today would ever feature a work like this in any way, in any setting. How many catalogs in Christian book stores would feature prints of this painting under the “Christian art” section? The answer, I suppose, has a direct correlation to how these churches understand what we often dismiss as “the ordinary,” which for O’Connor is anything but. It is the arena in which we encounter the transcendence of God, as well as our own. And precisely because this is a thorny theological & spiritual problem, it stands to reason that it will lead to muddled logic about art.
There aren’t any easy answers to these questions. Even drawing attention to “incarnational logic” & “the sacramentality of nature” is only a beginning, even if an important one. Perhaps we should abandon the concept of Christian art & just speak of art. O’Connor herself showed discomfort with labels. “People are always asking me if I am a Catholic writer,” she wrote in a letter, “& I am afraid that I sometimes say no & sometimes say yes, depending on who the visitor is. Actually, the question seems so remote from what I am doing when I am doing it, that it doesn’t bother me at all.” Elsewhere she wrote: “I am not very sure that I think the business of the Catholic writer is to reflect anything but what he sees the most of; but the subject of what is & what isn’t a Catholic novel is one I give a wide berth to. Ultimately, you write what you can, what God gives you.” Wise advice, I think; give wide berth to the question, & don’t get too too satisfied with one’s answers. Her fiction raises many questions for readers, filled as it is with the “ordinary” things that so much great art portrays, even if odd things occur to odder people. But there aren’t a whole lot of explicit markers saying, “Praise be to Jesus Christ” to satisfy the type of reader who equates that message with Christian art. There are no Catholic or Christian exclamation points. This is not subterfuge on her part, a sign of embarrassment for being Catholic. In an editorial in Image, reprinted in his INTRUDING UPON THE TIMELESS: MEDITATIONS ON ART, FAITH, & MYSTERY, Gregory Wolfe discusses how Christian artists of the 20th century often “resorted to the stratagems of silence, cunning, & exile in order to embody their faith in a transcendent God.” He then goes on to quote O’Connor on how a Christian writer communicates in a secular world: “to the hard of hearing you shout, & for the almost-blind you draw large & startling figures.” There is some paradox here, for O’Connor does sneak up on you, but with a bullhorn. She’s not quoting the Baltimore Catechism or citing the Gospels, but she is bludgeoning her characters in other ways, especially at the end of her stories when God blazes into view. She felt it necessary to write the way she did because her stories dramatize the ability of grace to blast through the barriers we, & her characters, erect against it in a world grown weary of the gospel. If her stories shock us, so much the better, in her view. The theological message is there for those with ears to hear above the din of the violence & death that often occurs in her work. Hers is not the only way, of course, to portray our world or God’s actions within it. But in her avoidance of the pretty, the Christianity-lite, or what she saw as the over-pious in much that was classified as Catholic fiction, she provided an example for all aspiring Catholic artists.
More needs to be said about all this; comments are welcome.
Check out the “Books” page for bibliographical information.
—Anthony DiStefano
Emeth Society Musings 