Contemplative Realism: Catholic Literature for the Twenty-First Century
Introduction: Some Catholic Writers Today
If nearly two decades of studying the question of the Catholic writer (with hopes of becoming one myself) have conduced to one conclusion more than another, it is that no easy formula exists to define “the Catholic writer.” Dana Gioia’s seminal essay The Catholic Writer Today comes closest in recent years, and his categorization or taxonomy of various kinds of Catholic writing still remains valid and clarifying. Yet when it comes to the literary landscape, significant changes have taken place even within the ten years since that essay was in production. So instead I speak of “some Catholic writers” in the clear recognition that any complete picture will have to be much bigger than that sketched here.
This essay will deal more with fiction than with poetry, both because fiction is my own specialty and because it is the focus of the nascent contemplative realist movement in literature. Yet anyone familiar with Catholic literary traditions, fictional or otherwise, will instantly think of Flannery O’Connor’s maxim that “the Catholic novelist does not have to be a Catholic; he does not even have to be a Christian; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist.” By “novelist” O’Connor here means, broadly, a craftsperson trained in some manner in the art of making fiction (or, by extension, one’s own chosen genre). Strength of belief alone will not make for worthwhile reading. And the history of the Catholic influence in literature includes many writers whose backgrounds include significant Catholic influences but whose adulthood relationships with the Church and devotion have ranged from the oppositional or tendentious to the obscurely defined, on-again/off-again, or merely deeply private. We could list litanies: James Joyce and Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison, among many others. Such writers remain worth studying for their extraordinary contributions to literary craft and human wisdom. Any reader serious about engaging literary tradition in the present day must take writers in these contemporary categories, as well as writers of the more distant past, into account.
That said, belles-lettres do not seem to rise to the top of every mind, even of many minds, when we discuss what is popularly thought of as “Catholic literature” over coffee after Mass. Perhaps this tendency follows the example of St. Francis de Sales, patron of writers, who says of his own Introduction to the Devout Life that he had “no time” to give it a “polished style” (ironically making for better, clearer, and more elegant reading than was at all popular among the ornate, baroque constructed decorations of his day). Or perhaps when we turn toward the leisure and recreation that literature often represents, then, worn out from dealing with a thousand other matters, we simply tend to ignore whatever might pose a greater intellectual or emotional challenge than we are willing at that moment to face. Either way, blurred distinctions muddy the waters of many conversations. When I talk of “Catholic literature,” I am imagining neither primarily scholarly nor primarily devotional work (though the Catholic writer may also, and often does, possess such qualifications in addition to literary bona fides). Instead I am exploring work where the fine art of writing meets the deep human concerns, both material and spiritual, that inform and motivate the Catholic worldview. That many in both literary and Catholic circles feel some tension at this locus seems to be enough justification to ground an inquiry. Whether this tension has a source in underlying reality, or only in the distortions of vision that beset our human vulnerabilities, may be a question on which we can begin to throw light.
The Catholic Literary Revival: “Here Comes Everybody”
Today readers interested in fiction and poetry by Catholic authors are witnessing a tremendously exciting resurgence of contemporary voices, frequently but not always influenced by the earlier “Catholic revival” of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century as well as by the finest novelistic tradition of the past. The year 2014 marked an annus mirabilis for a twenty-first-century flowering of fiction shaped by Catholic experience and worldview: Phil Klay’s National Book Award–winning Redeployment, a rawly forthright examination of moral injury done in the course of duty to those most directly responsible for protecting American interests; the initial publication of many of the stories collected in Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas, whose treatment of conflicts with and within Catholic-influenced cultures garnered 2015’s National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize; and Christopher Beha’s Arts & Entertainments, a trenchant satire of contemporary celebrity culture that nevertheless posed the same deep questions about human attention, devotion, and the nature of genuine freedom, on which Beha meditated more seriously through his debut What Happened to Sophie Wilder.
To explore this newer generation of writers, we also should seek to comprehend the achievements of what I have come to think of as the “quiet generation” of Catholic fictionists, who according to editor and critic Gregory Wolfe largely worked in “whispers” and not “shouts” throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. At that time, prominently featuring questions of faith in fiction could easily lead to a writer’s being seen as out of step with trends in mainstream publication, sales, and readership. Yet in this period Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (1994), Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (1996), and Tobias Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981) all succeeded in using fiction to explore the nature of Catholic belief and to present unironically viewed Catholic characters in serious situations that test their faith. Other exemplars of the “quiet generation” might include Fanny Howe, Paul Horgan, Don DeLillo, Richard Bausch, and Edward P. Jones, among a multitude of interesting corner cases too complex to explore here. (For example, Alice Thomas Ellis, working in this generation and bridging the divide between fictional “whisperers” and fictional “shouters” of faith, deserves her own in-depth study well beyond the scope of this essay.) That such writers’ work is now meeting with a broader reception and appreciation among Catholic readers is cause for celebration, not only as it may lead to a deeper understanding of the cultural and historical moment, but as each writer’s work represents its own valuable benchmark of artistic achievement.
Perhaps farther out of the mainstream, yet traveling very much in the theological and aesthetic paths of Catholic writers of the initial Revival, there has been a recent blossoming of outlets and markets either founded specifically for, or widely open to, Catholic-influenced fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. These include Angelico Press, Chrism Press, Cluny Media, Colosseum Books, Dappled Things magazine, Ignatius Press, Loyola Books (an imprint of Ignatius), Paraclete Press, Slant Books, Windhover magazine, and (my own publisher) Wiseblood Books. I can only speak to this trend as a participant in it: I have worked on the editorial board of Dappled Things magazine since 2007, the same year I began in earnest to draft my own “contemplative realist” debut novel, As Earth Without Water.
Over many years of working directly with writers and editors who share similar interests, I have become deeply committed to establishing locales within the literary ecosystem where Catholic writers can more fully explore our identity, tradition, and relation to other literary forms and expressions. These locales are what artist and critic Makoto Fujimura in his book Culture Care calls “estuaries”: protected, but not completely secluded, environments where writers and artists of faith can grow, gain experience, and test their powers and limitations before seeking to engage in forums where their core concerns and aspirations are less likely to be supported, valued, or even understood. In these environments, whole new approaches to a creative field can be born—as we see happening with contemplative realism, the emerging movement described by Joshua Hren in his Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto. Texts like Culture Care and Contemplative Realism can themselves become places of encounter in which writers and readers see and recognize themselves and each other.
Another way estuary-like environments can support emerging creatives of faith is by a deepening engagement with artists who have sought to address similar themes or achieve similar goals. This helps to explain the move in recent years toward expansion of the Catholic canon to include global voices whose literary work, though deeply consonant with a Catholic worldview, has not been previously accessible to English-speaking readerships—often because translations have not been widely available or because those translations that do exist are not widely enough discussed. A sampling of international voices would include Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, whose epic achievement Kristin Lavransdatter was done a terrible disservice by its initial rendering into English but is now available in a beautifully accessible translation by Tiina Nunnally, and whose less-known yet deeply deserving novels are also now appearing in English in editions from University of Minnesota Press, Ignatius Press, and Cluny Media; Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō, whose work is available in wonderful translations from Picador and New Directions among others, yet who has been done a different kind of disservice by contemporary interpretations that read more ambiguity and doubt than actually subsist there into Endō’s sensitive explorations of the tensions between his native Japanese culture and his adopted Catholic faith; and Martin Mosebach, living and working now, whose novel What Was Before has been well-received in English translation and whose contributions to fiction were honored with Germany’s prestigious Georg Buchner prize in 2007, but who most American readers will likely only know for his essay collection The Heresy of Formlessness and related writings on Church and culture. An accomplished literary writer with a publicly prominent attachment to the traditional Latin Mass is truly a rara avis, and one whose example merits closer attention.
Then, for both international and English-speaking writers, we often lose access when worthwhile works fall out of print. If not renewed, these works are lost to memory. Cluny and Wiseblood are among the presses currently striving to prevent these losses, as well as CUA Press, which recently initiated a series of new editions of nearly-lost work by Catholic women writers spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
What “Catholic Literature” (Probably) Isn’t
To draw even the broadest boundaries into which we may assort “the Catholic writer,” we cannot engage, as other contexts might allow, in gatekeeping based on a scrupulous examination of writers’ own religious views—which cannot anyway be assumed, presumed, or surmised even from the well-formed reading of a fictional text. And it is worth noticing that writers’ religious views can shift not only farther away from, but closer to, recognizable faith within the process of the work itself, as a forthcoming memoir by novelist Christopher Beha narrates as having happened during the writing of What Happened to Sophie Wilder. After all, the art of fiction routinely explores profound realities that objectively exist outside of both writers’ and characters’ relationships to them. If fiction directly reflects any religious views at all, it is first responsible for accurately reflecting the views of its characters or those common in the milieux it describes. Higher effects are achieved only indirectly, through the “controlling intelligence” or implicit perspective of the narrator. The best of the emergent Catholic literary tradition will resist merely relativized conceptions of religious belief, instead reading the truths of observation and those of Revelation as ultimately consonant and not in tension with one another—though apparent tensions may make themselves felt, with significant consequences.
The Catholic creative writer must trust that the truths of Revelation are strong enough, in themselves, not to require defense by means of our anxious efforts to adduce experience as evidence. As St. Augustine has it, “God does not need my lie.” Yet the truth of experience, or what Henry James called “felt life,” contains for many powerful reasons to believe—reasons that fiction can, at times, reflect with honesty and accuracy.
Fiction is a form of truth-telling that, to ring true, must take adequate account of the characters’ own limitations, perspectives, and capacities. We come to a piece of fiction not in direct search of reasons for believing, but primarily in search of the texture of experience itself. We look for authentic expressions of “truth, taste, and intelligence,” which literature both forms and appeals to. We desire sometimes to ratify, sometimes to test our previous perceptions, always to relate them to those of the writer and character.
Readers ask themselves, consciously or not: Are things in life really like this (or can I be successfully convinced, for the moment, that they are?). Does this story reflect or challenge my innate feeling of what it is to live in the created world? Does it express or reveal something about the self, humanity, nature, or the life of the spirit, which I have never heard articulated in this precise way before? Does it make me, somehow, less alone in the best aspects of my being?
The best narrative art seeks this connection and, to that end, refuses polemicism or didacticism. Provided it succeeds at this, it can then, after the words of Catholic poet Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960), “contribute to spiritualizing man, to making him more ready to receive the natural and supernatural contemplative life, and to bear, through grace, savory fruits for eternal life” (Four Notebooks, 69) simply by being technically excellent art that offers implicit bases for the acceptance of Truth that transcends and encompasses any individual human experience. This contribution does not preclude the literary artist’s engagement in other contexts where a more abstract language is both necessary and desirable, but it preserves a distinction between spheres of discourse: The more fully a fictionist of faith embraces that faith, the more likely that fictionist grows to let the art retain its own distinct identity, rather than to distort art by forcing it to do the work of theory, theology, or apologetics.
François Mauriac, a Catholic writer of the twentieth century whose work remains under-read and underappreciated in the United States, arrived at this conclusion experimentally. A talented fictional artist with a deep love for the Catholic traditions of his youth in pre–Vatican II France, Mauriac exercised a significant influence on Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene as he worked alongside French existentialist writers like Sartre, Gide, and Camus. Mauriac rose to prominence in the French literary mainstream between the two World Wars, and in 1952 he received the Nobel Prize for literature, joining Sigrid Undset on the (admittedly short) list of publicly Catholic laureates. Throughout much of his career, Mauriac felt deeply the potential for division between his spiritual training and his artistic discipline. Caught between Catholic critics of his subject matter and literary critics of his style and commitments, he worried that his detailed and sensitive explorations into his characters’ “abnormal” psychological states could lead him—or, still worse to his mind, his reader—into a connivance with sin on the one hand or an acceptance of substandard art on the other.
Mauriac’s long essay God and Mammon, really a short book, wrestles in depth with this fear until it arrives at the conclusions also reached by Thomist luminary Jacques Maritain: that the surest solution for a fictionist seeking to avoid damage to his own and his readers’ souls is to “purify the source” of the story—that is, to pursue holiness. For Mauriac, ultimately depiction of sin does not equal excuse-making for sin but, instead, works in fiction to the degree that the artist achieves “altitude” (Maritain’s term) between the controlling intelligence and the erring character’s action. The demand for this altitude, which Mauriac first feels as an intolerable restraint on his artistic freedom, later turns out always to have been the precondition of a higher liberty, the ability to create precisely as he does: “to show the element which holds out against God in the highest and noblest characters . . . and also to light up the secret source of sanctity in creatures who seem to us to have failed” (God and Mammon, 79). Through the process of literary invention Mauriac discovers that, without the convincing depiction of evil, neither there can be any convincing depiction of redemption. Or, as St. John Henry Newman—our only known novelist-saint, to date—would have it, “you cannot have a sinless literature of sinful man.” This does not by any means denote that literature leads us into sin—a thought that would horrify Newman, whose deepest-held desire was desire for holiness. On the contrary, Newman believed a canny engagement with quality literature was much likelier to have the protective effect of putting the student on guard against harm, making sheltered minds aware of the world’s harsher realities in a safe, controlled mode before asking them to sail in shark-infested waters.
What then can we say of the temptation that spoils so much religious fiction, namely the desire to bend or force narrative arcs toward sanitized conclusions that feel unnatural to previous developments of theme and character? Maritain, following St. Thomas Aquinas, says that the virtue of art is “the appetite straightly tending toward the perfection of the thing made.” The thing made—even if well made—may, or may not, tend toward the perfection of the artist or of the reader. Whether it does so depends much more on the prior dispositions of both maker and receiver than on the inherent qualities of the fabulated article. Yet the virtue of art provides this safeguard: Any well-made thing is less likely to cause harm than is its counterfeit or slipshod imitation. While a writer whose convictions are firmer than her grasp on the virtue of art might well attempt to force the reader’s response, this forcing—essentially a falsehood—may do more harm to the minds involved than would a premature encounter with “too much reality.”
Catholic literature is not and cannot be coterminous with the kind of sanitized, bowdlerized, overly tidied depictions that would falsify observed reality—as though falsification were not a radical disservice to the complexity of our life among the layered orders of created goodness, fallen evil, and redeemed glory. That said, we can recognize more than one way of falsifying reality, and contemporary secular fiction can at times also be complicit in characteristic distortions and omissions. Contemporary novelist Jonathan Franzen calls out these complicities when he resists a “depressive realism”—the reductive, brutalist view that “You are, after all, just protoplasm, and someday you’ll be dead”—in favor of a “tragic realism” that recognizes a deep brokenness in human frailty but refuses to despair over that vision. This “tragic realism,” in some expressions compatible with Christian modes of tragedy identified by Fr. William Lynch in his magisterial study of faith and the literary arts Christ and Apollo, stands closer to a position that John Gardner in his classic On Moral Fiction might have called “life-affirming”—even if for some such writers, the life they affirm is not a life of the soul but is limited to strictly sensory and biological human survival and thriving. Catholics can still likewise affirm the goodness of this natural life, even as we resist the reductionism of affirming only the natural at the expense of the human experience of God, even as we hold out hope for something higher. As Joshua Hren writes in Contemplative Realism, to write as though “the unseen is taken to be unreal” is a “needlessly restrictive,” even a misleading, position.
Still, Catholic writers of the future will attentively study non-Catholic mainstream writers wherever the latter display mastery of technique. Anyone interested in fiction can learn much from Willa Cather’s framing of a scene, Honore de Balzac’s presentation of a conflict, Virginia Woolf’s use of atmospheric detail, or Emile Zola’s inclusion of a thread of argument between characters. This continual learning is important for contemplative realists who seek to embody (or experience) in prose the characteristically Catholic insight that the highest does not stand without the lowest. If you are looking for Truth everywhere you cannot afford to neglect truth anywhere, be it found where it may. This leads not to a dichotomy but, rather, to a multiplicity of realisms, all casting what light they can on a reality that contemplative realists see as stably present and meaningfully existent regardless of how much or little light a particular writer may have to see it by. But because of the variation of angle, a writer coming from one perspective may see important facts that another, differently positioned writer would miss—which makes it worth the time to keep one’s ears and eyes open, to listen, and to study the technique of writers with whom we may not, on many matters, fully agree.
What Catholic Literature Might Become
At the same time, we must not be deceived into thinking that, given a clean slate and an ideal state, the bedrock human brokenness that ruins art and love and all that makes life worth living would magically, automatically vanish from our midst. It may be entertaining, but I submit it is not ultimately constructive, to dream of what a Catholic literary tradition might have looked like without the fragmentation incurred first by Protestant and then by Enlightenment intellectual traditions—the separation first of church and then of community from individual conscience, leading to the romanticization of Faustian antiheroes and a tendency to elevate the lyric mode to an authority beyond its stature in literature. We have the literary tradition we have—and the wounds of human nature, too—and yet Catholics have always found ways to produce quality literary work within, or despite, those constraints. For evidence, look no further than to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387), whose rich, rollicking, overwhelmingly secular—and yet also overwhelmingly Catholic—rhythm is the beating heart of the literary tradition from which the modern English prose narrative has taken its shape. Every one of the individual tales told by Chaucer’s rowdy crew is framed inalienably within both the identity of the teller and the broader context of pilgrimage to a holy place. The stories may be concerned with mundane and even vulgar matters, but they are told precisely by pilgrims, in via, along a path toward an otherworldly destination. This framing cannot help but color the way the stories are told, as well as how we think and feel about the telling. It also does not prevent the pilgrims from encompassing in their narrations a cacophony of lust, greed, violence, prejudice, falsity, and other all too human failings. Through the lens of the Canterbury Tales we can begin to see what Cardinal Newman meant by calling literature “a record of man in rebellion” against the grace and the glory of God. Often, literature makes clear how this rebellion is always and simultaneously an outrage against the rebel’s own inherent dignity and goodness as well as those of others. Such was humanity even while the great prophetic voices of the medieval Church were actively calling out to it; such humanity remains today, despite our wildly divergent historical and socioeconomic contexts, leaving us room to hope that a worthwhile literature and a doubtless very different constellation of prophets may rise up at the same time—perhaps even in some of the same places.
What Is Contemplative Realism?
This literary movement, first consciously articulated by Joshua Hren and arising from a cultural estuary where the intersection of Catholicism and literature is explored, aims to restore a vision of what is truly real to our efforts to depict a contemporary life blurred and blinded by various forms of distortion. The contemplative realist agrees with Josef Pieper that “man’s ability to see is in decline” and proposes an integration of spiritual and artistic vision as a remedy. Contemplative realism, at once a literary style and an artist’s spirituality, aligns authentic insights of Catholic tradition on the interior life with great aesthetic gains made in the art of realist fiction in modern and contemporary times.
The contemplative realist seeks to dramatize the intersection between the vertical axis of human experience, most fully realized in the aspiration toward God, and the horizontal axis, represented by our common and embodied life in the world. A contemplative realist work pursues a sensorially vivid, painterly rendering of the sensory world and strives to situate the human condition in relation to those natural and supernatural realities that exist both below and above the human. Such work tends toward a deepening of moral and spiritual vision, avoiding all easy tropes, false pieties, Gnostic or Manichean tendencies, and anything else that smacks of what might be called, after O’Connor, “Instant Uplift” or, after Bonhoeffer, “cheap grace.” Contemplative realism holds out hope for redemption while never forgetting that the true cost of grace is Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection and our own carrying of our crosses after Him. These transcendent centralities may not be directly “presenced” or “rendered” in a contemplative realist text, but as they are the recognized source and summit of existence, these realities will remain none the less positioned at the center of the contemplative realist’s attention—even as, in acknowledgement of the demands of art, the text continues to honor the limitation of an audience that, like each of the characters (and like the artist), is human and “cannot bear very much reality” (T.S. Eliot).
A word on this human limitation is warranted here. Too often in common life, abundant exterior evidences of devotion appear to be linked to less, not more, ability to bear reality. Appears is the right word: A devotion that cannot countenance reality as we find it is too likely to be an apparent devotion only. One thinks of St. Louis de Montfort’s careful distinctions between true devotion and several different facsimilies of devotion that manage to create some of the right appearances, yet miss the mark in the depths of the heart. As fiction’s proper realms of exploration are the worlds around us and the worlds within us, fiction can help us to see the depths of the heart and their reflections in our environment more clearly—doing us the great service of pointing the way to greater self-knowledge, both of our tremendous imperfections and of our deep inherent goodness rooted in the goodness of the One who made us as we are. Well-crafted, truly humane fiction tends to increase our capacity to see truly, and to accept prudently, both our actual faults as individuals and the inherent goodness of our lives as creatures in a created order. Like any other pursuit engaged in the right spirit, the writing and reading of fiction can be offered to God. To borrow the words of Dostoyevsky, chosen by Hren as an epigraph for the Contemplative Realist manifesto, “Realists do not fear the results of their study.” A central tenet of contemplative realism is the thought that many people (whether believers or the reverse) frequently see not what is real but what we think to be real—and the literary art of fictional narrative offers one way of providing much-needed correctives to vision. Contemplative realism, seeing to “dramatize mystery’s hiddenness,” takes as truth the equal reality of the unseen with the seen and proceeds from that reality as from a first premise. At the same time, contemplative realism aims for a range of aesthetic goals: a multisensory approach to what is seen, an emphasis on the interior life and the movements of the human heart, a willingness to countenance things as they are, a preference for mystery over ambiguity.
Contemplative realism challenges readers to remain open to ways of seeing that have the potential to refine, refresh, and clarify their own; contemplative realism challenges writers to continually serve the ends of art, the better to arrive at truth. The creative writer who wants to make a worthwhile contribution to literature must begin simply by seeing and rendering clearly—yes, without the blinders of ideology, but often even without the more correct yet still complicated and abstract languages and vocabularies with which in other contexts we label and denominate our adult worlds. The contemplative realist seeks to see and render reality with at once childlike freshness and consecrated clarity. The ideal is a vision characteristic of saints’ ways of seeing, a recognition that not only are holiness and creativity not necessarily incompatible, but that the two qualities, situated within the same character, could rise hand in hand to heights commonly found difficult and left unimagined.
That said, contemplative realism does not present itself as the sole or even as the best way to be a “Catholic writer.” That category admits of as many solutions as there are writers of good will who seek to engage the depths of Catholic thought and practice. Contemplative realism represents one aesthetic solution among many, but one that is deeply consonant, as others may also be, with the best of the Catholic intellectual and spiritual traditions. It can be fruitfully situated among a multiplicity of “Christian realisms” that nevertheless differ from contemplative realism, a multiplicity which would include O’Connor’s grotesque “prophecy of distances.” It can be fruitfully distinguished from, for example, the stylized and often satirized worlds of Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and Randy Boyagoda, or the fantastic realms of J.R.R. Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, and Walter Miller, all of which are no less identifiably Catholic, but which noticeably differ from realist and naturalist models inspired by European and American literary fiction of the past 150 years.
Within that strain, however, contemplative realism remains distinct from what Hren calls “materialist-realist” traditions that limit the knowable to the visible and sensorially tangible, as well as from a different type of “supernatural realism” that still tends to ratify materialism’s sense of the “gritty underbelly” as the hallmark or signature of what is most real—as though spiritual truth were only to be found at the abject depths of human extremity. Rather, contemplative realism seeks to find and to presence the spiritual dimension of the full range of human realities, from the depths to the heights and everywhere in between.
As we saw above with Mauriac, many literary Catholics may tend to suffer, in their work or reading or both, from the scrupulous fear that such a wide-ranging journey as literature demands will somehow lead us farther away from, rather than toward, God. Those with delicate consciences may want to avoid encountering even a whisper of sin’s depiction, but in the long run this very avoidance restricts our ability to perceive truth and speak it into the lives of those more deeply wounded by the effects of Original Sin and personal sin:
That is, what once seemed sweet to a weak imagination may, under the stronger light of a literary writer’s ability to unfold all sin’s uglinesses and ramifications, turn sour when we see it in its totality. A frequent trick of temptation is to make us forget precisely the context of our actions, isolating the brief relief afforded by a pleasure or an escape while concealing its full human cost. By holding space for the entirety of context, and enabling us to see that entirety with characteristic completeness, a literary artist may spread a stronger light of vision among a greater number of minds. Mauriac himself, as a recovered sufferer of scruples, frequently achieves exactly this clarifying effect in his own fiction.
The contemplative realist’s firm conviction remains that our subjective experience of reality neither changes reality’s nature nor makes reality unknowable. Rather through the mystery of perception, multiple subjectivities provide unique and ever-widening windows on the human and divine scope of what can be seen and known by the soul, even through Henry James’ fabled “million windows” of the “house of fiction.” Truly, we have good reason to trust that the God of truth will lead us into all truth. We have good reason not to fear the results of our study.
TITLE IMAGE: Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691–1765), Modern Rome, 1757.
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