Acts of Faith and Imagination: Theological Patterns in Catholic Fiction 0813236657, 9780813236650

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Acts of Faith and Imagination

Acts of Faith and Imagination Theological Patterns in Catholic Fiction BRENT LITTLE

FOREWORD BY MARK BOSCO, SJ

T H E C AT H O L I C U N I V E R S I T Y O F A M E R I C A P R E S S WA S H I N G TO N , D. C .

Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Little, Brent (College teacher), author. | Bosco, Mark, author of foreword. Title: Acts of faith and imagination : theological patterns in Catholic fiction / Brent Little ; foreword by Mark Bosco, SJ. Identifiers: LCCN 2023035639 (print) | LCCN 2023035640 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813236650 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813236667 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—Catholic authors—20th century—History and criticism. | American fiction—Catholic authors—21st century—History and criticism. | Catholic fiction—History and criticism. | Catholic Church—In literature. | Theology in literature. Classification: LCC PS153.C3 L58 2023 (print) | LCC PS153.C3 (ebook) | DDC 813.5409921282—dc23/eng/20230809 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035639 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035640

To Pauline, with gratitude and love

CONTENTS FORE WORD BY MARK BOSCO, SJ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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1 • Patterns of Faith in the Catholic Literary Imagination • Some Additional Clarifications • A Glance Ahead INTRODUCTION

4 8 12

C H A P T E R O N E 17 A PAT T E R N O F C O N V E R G E N C E : FA I T H , F I C T I O N , A N D F R A G M E N T

• • • •

What Is Faith? Catholic Fictional Works as Theological Texts Encounters with Doubt: Greene’s Monsignor Quixote Fragments of Faith in the Catholic Literary Imagination

17 25 34 45

C H A P T E R T W O 51 A PAT T E R N O F C O N T R A S T : G R A C E A N D FA I T H I N MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORIES

• Secular Faith Overturned: O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” and “The Enduring Chill” • Contemporary Fiction’s Postmodern Context • Uncertain Faith: Grace in the Contemporary Short Stories of L’Heureux, Klay, and Quade

55 67 75

C H A P T E R T H R E E 95 FA I T H A S R E S I S TA N C E T O E V I L

• Spark’s Hidden Sacramental Imagination in The Girls of Slender Means • Conversion from the Perspective of Evil in Percy’s Lancelot • Can Evil’s Existence be Defended? • Innocent Suffering in L’Heureux’s The Shrine at Altamira: Hope or Despair? vii

97 107 123 125

C H A P T E R F O U R 137 SACRIFICE AND GRACE

• Sacrifice as Vicarious Suffering: Greene’s The Power and the Glory • Martyrs, Both Reluctant and Willing: Solidarity in Sacrifice in Endo’s The Samurai • Sacrifice and the Suffering of Children: Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them

140 147 162

C H A P T E R F I V E 179 WOUNDEDNESS AND COMMUNIT Y

• Community as a Source of Grace • The Turn toward Mystical Community: O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away • Community Reconfigured: Woundedness in Gordon’s The Company of Women • The Surprise of Grace-Filled Community: A Sacramental Reading of Morrison’s Paradise

182 184 195 207

C H A P T E R S I X 229 S A C R A M E N TA L I T Y I N C AT H O L I C F I C T I O N : S O M E T H O U G H T S O N A PAT T E R N O F C O N T R A S T

• A Subtle Sacramental Correction: Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie • Grace Both Extraordinary and Ordinary: Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy • Searching for Glimmers of Sacramentality: McDermott’s The Ninth Hour • A Step Back from the Pattern of Contrast: Some Final Remarks

230 236 242 250

C O N C L U S I O N 255 A PAT T E R N O F C O N V E R G E N C E R E V I S I T E D : A THEOLOGICAL REFLEC TION

• Snapshots of Faith in Western Theology • A Pattern of Convergence: Some Final Observations BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX viii

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FOREWORD

The novelist Graham Greene, when asked in an interview about the imaginative role that Catholicism played in his long writing career, alluded to the short story “The Figure in the Carpet” by his literary hero, Henry James. Greene replied that “there does exist a pattern in my carpet constituted by Catholicism, but one has to stand back in order to make it out.” Over the last quarter century, scholars have been standing back, as it were, mapping out the various ways that Catholicism is produced in culture, whether in poetry, fiction, music or film. The sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley was one of the first to suggest the phrase in his study The Catholic Imagination (2000). In his study, Greeley used sociological and statistical data to argue for a Catholic imagination in contrast to a Protestant imagination found in the founding narratives of the United States. Since then, numerous works have engaged in identifying the predispositions in artists and their relationship with Catholicism, whether the obsession with the effects of the doctrine of the Incarnation on human life, the philosophical and scholastic understanding of personhood, the sacramental reality that stresses divine immanence in concrete reality, or the biases and prejudices of gender that pervade the Catholic tradition. Taken together these tendencies exhibit a pattern in artists engaged with Catholic faith and culture, a way of seeing and valuing reality that shapes the imaginative contours of their work. Brent Little’s Acts of Faith and Imagination is a welcome addition to this ongoing conversation exploring the pattern of a Catholic literary imagination. While there have been many investigations into the influence of Catholic history and cultural attitudes upon a novelist’s work, there have been few studies that examine specifically how faith itself is portrayed. ix

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Little’s central argument is that Catholic fiction depicts faith fundamentally as an act of the imagination shaped by a person’s central sources of meaning and value, a worldview that conditions how a person imagines themselves, others, and creation. To this end, he retrieves the thought of the 20th century Jesuit thinker, William Lynch. Lynch has been somewhat neglected of late, but during his life, he was read by no less than Flannery O’Connor amongst others. Little brings Lynch’s work into conversation with more than a dozen Catholic authors over the past several decades, reminding the reader that theology has much to learn from Catholic fiction about how we articulate and conceive of faith. In recent papal writings, such as the encyclical Lumen Fidei (jointly authored by our two most recent popes), faith is described as an “encounter” with the living God. Without discounting the validity of such ecclesial Catholic discourse, Little explores how Catholic fiction demonstrates faith as an act of the imagination, often pre-theoretical and thereby present prior to any formally articulated beliefs or conscious awareness. By examining so many Catholic authors throughout his study, Little sees a pattern in the literary carpet that details the diversity and creative depth of the Catholic literary imagination. What is most distinctive about Little’s approach is how he organizes this conversation around dialogues between older and better-known Catholic authors such as Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor, with more recent ones, such as Ron Hansen, John L’Heureux, Uwem Akpan, and Alice McDermott. In this way Little steps back to see the larger pattern of Catholic fiction. At the same time, he offers an initial wave of scholarship of recent stories by contemporary writers such as Phil Klay and Kirsten Valdez Quade. Reading this excellent study of the theological patterns of Catholic fiction provokes a deeper consideration about the future of the Catholic literary imagination. Readers who are aware of the debates surrounding the imminent death of the

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“Catholic novel” will discover much food for thought. Those wishing to deepen their knowledge of such well-known authors as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and Muriel Spark will still find much to consider in these pages. But Little invites us to read these better-known writers not in the context of their historical moment, but as in a dialogue with contemporary, recent voices. In this regard, there is an historical trajectory charted in these chapters, including the transition between late modernity and our postmodern era, as Little observes with works by Walker Percy, Mary Gordon, and Shusaku Endo. Earlier Catholic fiction thus is read in the light of its literary progeny. Yet despite the differences between Catholic authors, there still is, as Little notes, a consistent pattern in their depictions of faith as an imaginative worldview. Interestingly, even though his focus is on Anglo-American literature, his inclusion of Endo and Akpan provoke further questions for scholars to explore. For example, is the form of the Catholic literary imagination detailed in this book only possible from authors who have come into contact with a Greene or an O’Connor, or, to delve deeper into the past, the Francophone heritage of Mauriac or Bernanos? In addition, does the Catholic literary imagination take on different hues and nuances when it emerges from a culture that was traditionally a Catholic majority population? As Little details, one point of convergence between the various authors discussed in this book is that they are somehow a “minority” voice within their wider cultural contexts. What one can appreciate most in this study is the nuances of a Catholic theological pattern in fiction. It is true that since the Second Vatican Council there have been multiple ways to embrace Catholic belief and practice, and Little shows the dialogical nature within the very heart of Catholic faith—a nimble pattern of thought and feeling in artists today. This is a fresh perspective in which to chart how the discourse of Catholicism adds a surplus of meaning beyond the merely political, economic, and

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cultural ideologies that abound in much of contemporary literary criticism. Mark Bosco, SJ, PhD Georgetown University Author of Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination and the producer and director of the documentary film Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During my childhood, I often held the romantic image of a writer and scholar—one who struggles in isolation to produce insight on the page. Of course, nothing could be further from reality. And I would be remiss without acknowledging the expansive community of support surrounding this project. The seeds for this monograph stem from my dissertation at Loyola University Chicago, and I owe the greatest gratitude to my director, Mark Bosco, SJ, not only for shepherding my dissertation to completion, but also for guiding me throughout the years with expertise, patience, insightfulness, faith, and humor. It is because of him that I came to love the fiction of Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and many others; our conversations about the Catholic literary imagination continue to be a source of inspiration. While at Loyola, I was also blessed to be shaped by a community of scholars. I am enormously grateful to Kimberly Rae Connor, not only for her time as a constant reader of my work, but also for her wisdom as I transitioned from a graduate student to a faculty member. Michael Patrick Murphy for his mentorship both during the dissertation stage as well as his advice and support during the years since. My work continues to build on the coursework of many wonderful teachers at Loyola, often in ways that surprise me, and among whom I must especially thank Jon Nilson, Susan Ross, John McCarthy, Michael Schuck, Hille Haker, and Peter J. Bernardi, SJ. I am also deeply grateful to my friend Dan Cosacchi for his constant encouragement and the numerous conversations on the latest Catholic news from our student days till now—often over burgers and fries (and a few beers here and there). To all my Loyola Chicago friends, thank you: you continue to shape me as a scholar, a teacher, and a human being. Of course, no one begins life as a doctoral student without a debt of gratitude to numerous previous mentors. I cannot posxiii

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sibly mention everyone, but I owe a special thank-you to two former professors: Susan Youens, who, while guiding me through the beauty of Franz Schubert’s Lieder, taught me how to be a close reader of texts and an academic writer—I will always treasure our conversations on art, music, literature, and life. And Richard Lennan, who guided my transition from wayward musicologist to nascent theologian, all while shaping my theological imagination with an indelible, Rahnerian stamp. In the here and now, it would have been impossible to complete this book without the support, patience, friendship, and invigorating conversations of my colleagues in the Department of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University. To Michelle Loris, Dan Rober, Jill Plummer, Charlie Gillespie, Chelsea King, and Callie Tabor: I continue to be amazed at my good fortune to work with you all. As I developed this project, I was also thrilled to discover other colleagues at Sacred Heart who share my enthusiasm for the Catholic literary imagination. On that note, I would like to thank Peter Sinclair for our conversations on Catholic literary modernism, especially his numerous insights on the fiction of Muriel Spark. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Michael Higgins, both for his guidance during the early stages of the book proposal and for his enriching conversations and wealth of knowledge on all things Catholic. And a thank-you to all the many people at Sacred Heart—staff, faculty, administrators, and students—who have made it so enjoyable to come to work over the past few years. Despite the weirdness of trying to teach and complete a book during a pandemic, my vocation as a teacher continues to be a joy. Thank you also to John Martino, acquisitions editor of Catholic University of America Press, for his time, guidance, and patience throughout this process. I also owe a note of gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who challenged me to think more deeply about my subject. As is so often the case, my own faith was nurtured first and foremost through the endless love and support of my parents. To

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them: I will always be grateful for your patience over so many years and for your modeling of faith. To my sisters: I have certainly enjoyed the spoils of being your only brother, and the youngest at that—thank you! Thank you also to my nieces and nephews who have been a constant source of joy and have kept me grounded in a life outside academia. Finally, one difference between my dissertation and the book is that the former was written before I met my wife, Pauline; her constant partnership, love, and faith have made the years completing the latter so much more enjoyable than I could have imagined.

INTRODUCTION

This book wagers that fiction written by Catholic authors assists theologically inquisitive readers to reflect critically on the question “What is faith?” While colloquially the term “faith” often refers to a set of beliefs, good Catholic fiction calls the reader to consider faith holistically, that is, the way faith informs one’s affections, desires, and conceptions of—and interactions with— the world. In short, this investigation’s Catholic fiction reveals that we live out faith as embodied beings, not disembodied intellects. Literary fiction uniquely captures dimensions of Christian faith that sometimes elude conceptual rhetoric, and by so doing, assists readers—whether professional theologians or not—to reflect upon both their articulated understandings of faith as well as the act of living it. Fiction provides an imaginative space by which the believer subjects their faith to critical interrogation. As a narrative form, literature can potentially illustrate the dynamics of faith, because to speak of a person’s “faith-life” is to speak of change and development. In so doing, Catholic fiction frequently captures how faith is inevitably intertwined simultaneously with uncertainty. For example, in Graham Greene’s last major novel, Monsignor Quixote (1982), Quixote, a naïve Catholic priest, finds himself on an unlikely road trip with his staunchly communist friend, Sancho. After a series of episodes, both comical and serious, he asks himself, “How is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?”1 But Quixote arrives at this insight after a long journey in which he interrogates his faith due to his numerous adventures and dialogues with Sancho. “It’s 1. Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 173.

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odd,” Quixote reflects at one point, “how sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith.”2 Quixote’s faith was both critiqued and affirmed in his journeys with Sancho, for a good story reminds us that faith is not a static thing, even if the limits and failings of language imply otherwise. Because human beings must possess faith in something (whether religious or not), and faith remains in flux over the course of life, faith inevitably has a narrative structure—it ebbs and flows, flourishes, and decays, shapes a person and is molded in turn by experiences; sometimes one’s faith is untroubled, and other times it is fragile before numerous assaults of doubt. The tense relationship between faith and uncertainty appears consistently in this study’s Catholic fiction, and, to speak broadly for a moment, it is a tension that rarely is resolved in the story. Faith may deepen, but it does not extinguish doubt. In this, Catholic novels and short stories often resonate with the musings of recent pontiffs. In an interview, Pope Francis cautions believers from seeing faith simply as the vanquisher of doubt; instead, he encourages us to remember that uncertainty remains always in tension with faith, since faith needs this check against the wayward tendencies of the human ego. Francis casts doubt in largely positive terms, for “in this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty.”3 The desire for certainty risks the danger of placing faith in one’s self above God; hence, a mature faith must allow room for uncertainty. Francis’s insights are echoed in his apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate, when he remarks that God “is full of surprises. We are not the ones to determine when and how we will encounter him; the exact times and places of that encounter are 2. Greene, Monsignor Quixote, 55. 3. Pope Francis, “A Big Heart Open to God,” by Antonio Spadaro, SJ, America, September 30, 2013, trans. Massimo Faggioli, Sarah Christopher Faggioli, Dominic Robinson, SJ, Patrick J. Howell, SJ, and Griffin Oleynick, 30.

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not up to us.”4 To live without doubt is a futile attempt to control the Divine. Francis is not alone in his remarks on uncertainty. Years before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, in his Introduction to Christianity, evocatively insists, “Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole.”5 Both the believer and the nonbeliever, then, must confront the reality that neither will banish uncertainty from their lives. Yet, this “unceasing” mutual experience creates imaginative possibilities for the believer and the nonbeliever to dialogue. As Ratzinger remarks, the “basic pattern” of our existence—one that fluidly moves between faith and doubt—“opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer.”6 This insight—that uncertainty forms a meeting point between believer and nonbeliever—aligns with Greene’s Monsignor Quixote. Both pontiffs’ observations on the irresolvable tension between faith and uncertainty are thematically echoed in this study’s novels and short stories. As Paul Lakeland perceives: The strength of fiction’s value to the religious imagination depends not only on its reluctance to eschew ambiguity but also on its steady focus on the complexity of the human person. . . . [F]iction is there to receive the believer back into the real work of the imagination, where ambiguity and complexity and indirectness hold sway.7 4. Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (March 19, 2018), 41. Papal and ecclesial documents are available at the Vatican’s website (www.vatican.va). 5. Joseph (Cardinal) Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 45. 6. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 47. 7. Paul Lakeland, The Wounded Angel: Fiction and the Religious Imagination (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017), 93–94.

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Fiction’s ambiguity insists that the believer should live imaginatively in tension with uncertainty; it is a fool’s errand to seek certainty. Such a faith, as Francis observes, is a false faith, one based on the desire to control God’s grace. Instead, we should allow God to surprise us. Likewise, good Catholic fiction often presents a God who disrupts human desires and certainties. This disruption can occur not only within the story itself (i.e., a character’s certainties), but also with a reader’s expectations, often as a challenge to see grace in unexpected places. Paul Giles argues that “fictional art can show us where religious sensibility lingers and manifests itself in less obvious, even strange and unpredictable ways.”8 Indeed, in much Catholic fiction, this religious sensibility emerges over the course of a narrative to reveal the startling presence of God’s grace, thus evoking an expansive sacramental imagination. Patterns of Faith in the Catholic Literary Imagination The present investigation is limited to fiction composed approximately from the middle of the twentieth century to contemporary fiction published in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This fiction was produced by Catholic authors who were formed by Catholicism’s liturgical, historical, literary, and theological traditions to various degrees and, at least in their fiction, maintain the possibility of some form of Christian faith during the late modern and postmodern eras, as those historical periods are generally understood in the academic discourse of the Western world. The selected writers in this study are not representative of the kind of committed atheism often associated with certain well-known “lapsed” Catholics, such as James Joyce. In other words, the present authors demonstrate an openness, even if a critical one, to Catholic faith in their fiction. I offer no evaluation

8. Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 25.

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of their individual piety or convictions—a near-impossible task to do justly given the diversity of authors’ beliefs and the reality that personal faith is not a static thing. The title of this book, Acts of Faith and Imagination: Theological Patterns in Catholic Fiction, identifies my intention to discern patterns amidst various Catholic novels and short stories. These patterns are not intended as an exhaustive study. After all, other patterns—other points of convergence or contrast between stories—are certainly possible, and readers will no doubt see their own. My task, however, is akin to wandering around a museum and noticing how various works of art portray similar symbols and imagery in ways that interlock with one another, and yet are unique. To this end, my limited survey of Catholic novels and short stories over the past several decades yields patterns. In so doing, it brings living authors into fascinating dialogues with their better-known literary forebearers. Further, each story captures— sometimes clearly, sometimes not—the “basic pattern” described by Benedict XVI above, the tension between faith and uncertainty that exists as an existential reality for believers and nonbelievers alike. To some extent, this remark is probably obvious to any reader of Catholic fiction. After all, do not numerous stories feature central characters who experience upheaval in their lives? This observation aside, the book’s structure is built around two interrelated patterns. The first—and primary—pattern is a pattern of convergence between the various short stories and novels: namely, Catholic fiction depicts faith—at its most fundamental level—as an act of the imagination formed by a person’s central sources of meaning and value, a worldview that shapes how a person imagines themselves, others, and creation. A person’s fundamental faith thereby structures their behavior and interactions in the world, often unconsciously. Fiction frequently includes characters who, over the course of a story, find their conscious faith deconstructed to reveal underlying distortions both to religious and nonreli-

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gious (or secular if one prefers) forms of faith. No story completely answers the question “What is faith?” for each story presents experiences of faith only as fragments, partial glimpses into the action (or seeming absence) of grace amidst the messiness of human life. Nonetheless, a reader can find threads between these stories and discern patterns, such as the pattern that a person’s primary faith emerges out of their imagination. This first pattern depends on several issues, such as what I mean by “faith,” whether fictional literature adds anything distinctive from theological reflection, and finally, what it means to describe the stories as “fragments.” I describe this pattern of convergence as the primary pattern of the book, because it is this consistent portrayal of the nature of faith by which this study’s Catholic fiction challenges much theological rhetoric in the Western Christian tradition. I defend this thesis explicitly in chapter 1 and the conclusion, yet this claim undergirds my interpretations of the stories throughout the book. The second pattern, which depends on the first but complicates it, is akin to a pattern within a pattern. This second pattern, one of contrast, observes that Catholic fiction produced prior to the 1970s tends to present Christian faith as a corrective to a secular faith; this disruption of a character’s life is a divine disruption through God’s grace. To this end, I look at pre-1965 fiction by Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and Muriel Spark, each story of which features a character’s conversion to Catholicism or, more broadly, Christianity as either the plot’s climax or narrative resolution; conversion, then, is a guide for the reader to see grace jarring the characters’ lives. Of course, differences between stories must be recognized—for example, I read O’Connor’s portrayal of grace as more dramatic and insistent than Spark’s prose. Nonetheless, both authors, along with Greene, present grace as a response to the disenchantment of Western secularity, a disruption of a social imaginary that prizes the modern, autonomous individual and human sources of meaning over revelation. (See chapter 2 for a discussion of Western modernity.) My focus on

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Greene, O’Connor, and Spark is not to deny that these claims may also apply to other Catholic authors. As Paul Elie astutely notes in his speculations on O’Connor’s literary formation, many early to mid-twentieth century Catholic English novelists, along with their French counterparts, regarded “religious faith as a source of fixity and independence in a world of shifting alliances.” Consequently, Catholicism bears a certain firmness in their work, a stable center by which to observe and critique.9 Elie’s observation is certainly true for the pre-1965 stories in this study, each of which offers a Catholic sacramental imagination as a lens by which to view the modern Western world. In contrast, fiction produced from the 1970s onward rarely offers Christian faith as a narrative resolution. Instead, a character’s pre-existing faith (usually a Catholic one) is increasingly interrogated, thereby allowing space for great ambiguity regarding the presence (or absence) of grace. The contrast between Catholic faith and disenchanted secularity is not as sharp as before, if this concern even exists. Sometimes the dialectic of late, modern Catholic fiction (Christian faith versus Western modernity) is absent; often, Catholic faith is interrogated within different cultural frames of reference. In post-1970 Catholic fiction, disruptions to a character’s previous modes of imagining, believing, and living still occur, but the tension between faith and uncertainty not only remains, but, in comparison to earlier fiction, is even heightened. Recent fiction often portrays the presence of God’s grace in a more muted key; sometimes a story implies sacramentality’s absence. In either case, such texts allow the reader great interpretative freedom to discern or not the action of grace. There is a spectrum, of course, and each story must be evaluated on its own terms. In addition, one must recognize that the Catholic literary imagination is fluid, constantly shifting to reflect and respond to the signs of the times. My argument that patterns 9. Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 153.

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exist is not a dogmatic insistence that there is only one interpretation of these stories, or that other patterns do not exist, especially if one considers stories not included in this book. Instead, I am trying to capture notable patterns over the last several decades. In much contemporary Catholic fiction, the reader often struggles to perceive if the disruption to the characters’ previous faith indicates supernatural grace. In this sense, my investigation informs a debate—explained more fully in chapter 2—whether Catholic fiction is still created (in the spirit of an O’Connor or Greene) and, if so, whether it is of the same quality. My own reading very much affirms the creativity and great literary value of living Catholic writers’ work but insists that their explorations of faith require a somewhat different hermeneutical language than earlier authors’. Some Additional Clarifications A few more qualifications are necessary: First, in the context of this study, terms such as “Catholic fiction,” “stories,” “literature,” and so forth, refer to a group of novels and short stories published approximately from the mid–twentieth century until this past decade, written by authors who have been shaped by the Catholic literary tradition that—if this was a historical study and not primarily a theological one—would begin with French writers such as François Mauriac and George Bernanos. There is always a certain amount of convenience in any description of historical lineages. But as Greene’s protagonist remarks in The End of the Affair, “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”10 Although such French authors are not a significant focus of my investigation, the writers contained herein stand within their literary heritage, either directly (as in the case of Greene or O’Connor), or indirectly. Of course, it would 10. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 7.

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have been an impossible task to explore every Catholic author or text that could fall under this description, and I certainly do not claim to have produced an exhaustive study of modern and contemporary Catholic fiction. Further, I am also not claiming that the patterns described in this book would be appropriate for every story by a Catholic fiction writer. My intent is simply to capture threads that interlace this group of authors, authors who share certain features in their depictions of Christian faith. Admittedly, my descriptions such as “Catholic fiction,” “Catholic novel/novelist,” “Catholic writer,” and so forth, are controversial, since many of the theological themes included in this body of literature (sin, grace, conversion, etc.) apply also to authors and texts of other Christian traditions.11 My recourse to these and similar terms, such as “the Catholic literary imagination,” is in the spirit of Mary R. Reichardt, who, after noting the near impossibility of constructing a definition of Catholic literature that will please everyone, suggests that: A work of Catholic literature is that which employs the history, traditions, culture, theology, and/or spirituality of Catholicism in a substantial and informed manner. Whether 11. For example, Bernard Bergonzi argues that while the term “Catholic novel” may be useful as a “loose” description, it is also misleading; he notes that Muriel Spark, for example, believes that a novel cannot be described as Catholic unless it serves as propaganda. See Bernard Bergonzi, “The Catholic Novel: Is There Any Such Thing?” Commonweal 134, no. 9 (May 4, 2007): 12. Cecil Jenkins likewise considers the term unhelpful, since a novel speaks from individual experience and “can never adequately be viewed as the expression of a collective orthodoxy.” Quoted in Malcolm Scott, The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists, 1850–1970 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 5. Scott disagrees and sees the French Catholic novel as sharing a different side of the same coin with Realism in that both share “the struggle between two opposed visions of the real, expressed in and through the novel form” (Scott, The Struggle, 5). Many critics regard the term as outmoded at best and irrelevant to literature written in recent decades. For example, see Toby Garfitt, “What Happened to the Catholic Novel?” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 66, no. 2 (April 2012): 222–30.

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it involves Catholic subject matter or not, and whether its author is a Catholic or not, such literature is substantially grounded in a deep and realistic understanding of at least some aspects of the Catholic faith, Catholic life, or the Catholic tradition.12

I take Reichardt’s description of Catholic literature as a heuristic tool, not a strict definition; it is another pattern, so to speak, a way of bringing authors together into dialogue with each other around a shared frame of reference. That said, while I group these pages’ thirteen authors as Catholic writers, many of them would chafe under that term, while others would not object.13 Language is not static, and the literary landscape is always changing. Descriptions are limited at best. My recourse to terms such as “Catholic fiction” may carry nuances and overtones in this context that would be lacking in another. In addition, this book’s Catholic-centric focus is not intended to insult or downplay fiction inspired by other religious traditions, Christian or otherwise. This limitation to Catholic authors (and mostly American Catholic authors at that) reflects my own interests, limitations, and spiritual background. Nonetheless, I hope readers of various faith traditions find these pages useful and will supplement and correct my own deficiencies. Further, the “faith” that forms the focus of this study is the subjective faith of the individual believer, not ecclesial faith. Traditional theology has resorted to the language of “fides qua” and 12. Mary R. Reichardt, introduction to Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature, ed. Mary R. Reichardt (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 3. 13. For example, Greene declared the label a “detestable term”: “Many times since Brighton Rock I have been forced to declare myself not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic.” See Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 77. In contrast, Walker Percy seems to have at least tolerated the description. See Walker Percy, “Questions They Never Asked Me,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 416.

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“fides quae” to describe the distinction between subjective faith and the objective truth of faith, whether this truth stems from revelation, Church dogma, or tradition. In a similar vein, Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica noted the distinction between the objective certainty of faith, insomuch as its cause is divine authority, and a human being’s more fallible, subjective faith (II.II, q. 4, a. 8).14 Catholic fiction, however, rarely concerns itself with these kinds of theological distinctions, for its dominant focus is the subjective experiences of its characters. (Admittedly, one perhaps finds hints of the contrast between objective divine authority and subjective human faith in instances of strong sacramentality, such as in O’Connor’s fiction.) More commonly, Catholic fiction explores how a person’s subjective faith is not formed in a vacuum, but shaped and repeatedly reshaped amidst an interlacing network of communities. Finally, a linguistic clarification: In colloquial English, there is often little difference between the terms “uncertainty” and “doubt.” But in theological discourse, the former tends to denote an openness to a proposition or a belief, whereas the latter veers toward disagreement, or at least deep skepticism. One finds this distinction in John Henry (Cardinal) Newman’s famous line that “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”15 Doubt, though, carries a negative connotation for Newman, understandably, considering his era often regarded the doubt of religious truth-claims as oriented towards unbelief. But Newman’s distinction between doubt and uncertainty is not universally shared. Paul Tillich, for example, defines “doubt” as a constitutive dimension of faith when he argues that “doubt is not a permanent experience within the act of faith. But it is always present as an element in the structure of faith.”16 An additional problem 14. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II, q. 4, a. 8. 15. John Henry (Cardinal) Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. Ian Ker (New York: Penguin, 1994), 214. 16. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 24.

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is that many texts—both in the theological and the literary spheres—use “uncertainty” and “doubt” interchangeably. Generally, my analysis follows without further comment the language of the specific text under discussion. Otherwise, I strive to use the term “uncertainty,” or similar phrases such as “uncertain faith,” to indicate that an authentic, critical faith never achieves absolute certainty. To resort to a colloquialism, if one knew with absolute certainty, faith would not be needed. In this sense, the Catholic literary imagination resonates with Anne Lamott when she writes, “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”17 This tension in faith’s relationship with uncertainty—this portrayal of certainty as the true opposite of faith—plays out in Catholic fiction repeatedly. A Glance Ahead The first chapter, “A Pattern of Convergence: Faith, Fiction, and Fragment,” has three goals: First, I clarify what I mean by the term, “faith.” In so doing, I offer a preliminary justification for my claim that there is a consistent tendency in Catholic fiction, namely, that Catholic fiction depicts faith—at its most fundamental, often unconscious level—as an act of the imagination. One’s faith is how a person imagines themselves, others, and creation. Second, I turn to the thought of Martha Nussbaum and William Lynch to consider how literature can provide a source for theological thinking distinctive from conventional forms of theological discourse. To illustrate these two points, I return to Greene’s last novel, Monsignor Quixote, as an exemplar. Finally, I lay out a theoretical and methodological foundation for the remainder of the book, and what I intend by my description of the various stories as “fragments” of faith. 17. Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 256–57.

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In the second chapter, “A Pattern of Contrast: Grace and Faith in Modern and Contemporary Short Stories,” I begin to explore a development in the depiction of sacramentality between Catholic fiction prior to 1970 and contemporary fiction. In earlier stories, a character’s conversion signals to the reader to look for the presence of grace, but the conversions in recent stories are often more ambiguous, thereby complicating how faith is depicted in contemporary Catholic fiction. Further, earlier fiction depicts Christian faith as overturning a previous faith grounded in a modern Western secularity that prizes autonomy and an immanent worldview. There is then a stark dialectic between faith and disenchanted modernity. In contrast, later Catholic fiction still portrays faith as possible, but there is less the dramatic twist of earlier fiction; instead, faith is challenged and uncertainty remains. To chart this contrast, I first explore short stories by O’Connor, and then turn to stories by John L’Heureux, Phil Klay, and Kirstin Valdez Quade. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 develop further this pattern of contrast between late modern and postmodern Catholic fiction. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme and highlights the work of three authors. A chapter’s first novel is by O’Connor, Greene, or Spark. This Anglo-American triumvirate demonstrates that pre-1970 Catholic fiction tends to depict faith as a critique of Western secularity in which faith deconstructs disenchantment, insisting on the limitations of modernity and the need for Christian faith. The middle novels of these three chapters were published between 1977 and 1980 and serve as a transition to a chapter’s last book, one published since 1990. In these “transition” novels, Catholic faith is set antagonistically against some other dominant cultural matrix (American white, mainstream society of the 1970s, for example, or traditional Japanese culture), but Catholic/Christian faith does not provide the same kind of clear response as before; there is considerably less certainty regarding faith, and the sacramentality becomes fainter. Meanwhile, in the novels after 1990, the degree to which sacramentality is portrayed or implied ranges from a quiet one, to grace’s seeming absence, to an explicit supernaturalism. In

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either case, postmodern fiction cares less about seeing Catholic or Christian faith as a stark contrast with some other belief system. Instead, this more recent Catholic fiction increasingly portrays faith as fragile, even though it remains a source of hope and meaning. Chapter 3, “Faith as Resistance to Evil,” begins with Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. As in much O’Connor and Greene fiction, Spark’s novel portrays a character’s conversion to faith as a reaction to evil. Conversion to faith, specifically Catholic faith, provides a correction to a previous, modern worldview. Meanwhile, Walker Percy’s Lancelot hints at this same trajectory with a secondary character whose conversion is also spurred by an encounter with evil. But because the central first-person narrator is an embodiment of evil, the reader struggles to see sacramentality. The conversion is no longer the central plot development. This renders the relationship between evil and grace murkier than it is in Spark’s novel. Ambiguity is further heightened in John L’Heureux’s The Shrine at Altamira, whose depiction of child abuse raises the question of whether religious faith is even possible in the face of innocent suffering. Grace, if it exists, is unseen by its characters, and likewise even more difficult for the reader to discern than it is in Lancelot. Chapter 4, “Sacrifice and Grace,” turns to the frequent theme of sacrifice in Catholic fiction. In pre-1970 Catholic fiction, such as that found in Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a character’s sacrifice becomes the catalyst for conversion—further, a conversion to faith is a response to disenchanted modern forms of materialism. Meanwhile, Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai likewise features the theme of conversion to Catholicism, but places it in a cultural context that renders the conversions with heightened ambivalence. Finally, Uwem Akpan’s short story collection Say You’re One of Them is told from the perspectives of children, who often endure shocking violence and must undergo great sacrifices just to survive. The conversions to Catholicism found in Greene and Endo are missing. The possibility for faith is thereby problematized. As a result, Akpan’s stories lack the grand ideological battle that so often characterizes earlier Catholic fiction.

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Chapter 5, “Woundedness and Community,” turns to the communal dimension of faith. In O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, the protagonist’s insistence on his autonomy is deconstructed, and he is turned by the end toward community, specifically the mystical community of the blessed in heaven. In true O’Connor fashion, however, this conversion occurs only after violence disrupts the protagonist’s faith in his autonomy. Mary Gordon’s The Company of Women casts a more critical consideration of community, for she investigates how community can mis-form faith. The dangers of modern secularity are no longer as clear-cut as in O’Connor. The importance of community is upheld, but through a critical lens. Meanwhile, Toni Morrison’s Paradise contrasts an oppressive community with a liberating one. Ironically, although Morrison is not often considered a Catholic author, her novel presents supernatural interference as explicitly as an O’Connor story. But this supernaturality is expressed through a symbolism of such fluidity and ambiguity that a Catholic reading is only possible if analogies for grace are expanded and seen in tandem with nonCatholic symbols. Chapter 6, “Sacramentality in Catholic Fiction: Some Thoughts on a Pattern of Contrast,” offers concluding remarks on the pattern of contrast highlighted in chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5. Once again, the grand ideological fight against secularity of earlier fiction is decentered in more contemporary Catholic fiction. As a final group of examples, I contrast Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy and Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour. Admittedly, this grouping might seem a little strange for my argument. First, Spark’s depiction of sacramentality is murkier compared to the fiction of Greene and O’Connor. Second, Hansen’s novel presents an explicit sacramentality that could not be further from the quiet ambiguous grace of McDermott’s story. Yet, the rough historical trajectory of chapters 2–5 still holds, for Spark’s earlier work presents Catholic faith as a clear response to secular disenchantment, whereas this dialec-

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tic between faith and modernity is softened in Hansen’s work and virtually disappears in McDermott’s novel. Finally, in the conclusion, “A Pattern of Convergence Revisited: A Theological Reflection,” I circle back to the issues raised in chapter 1, but now with the benefit of the Catholic fiction discussed throughout the book. First, I briefly highlight well-known representatives of Western theological writing on faith, both Catholic and Protestant. Although these various theologies align with certain aspects of faith as depicted in Catholic fiction, there is a marked difference: Christian theologies tend to emphasize a particular dimension of faith, such as the movement of the will toward intellectual assent (Thomas Aquinas), obedience (Karl Barth), or trust (H. Richard Niebuhr). Amongst these well-known theologians, Paul Tillich’s thought comes the closest to my description of faith in these pages. Catholic fiction, however, compels theological reflection on the holistic, imaginative nature of faith, and thereby is more in the spirit of William Lynch’s theology of faith. After this brief glance at the theological tradition, I then return to offer several concluding remarks on my primary thesis: that this study’s Catholic fiction consistently portrays faith as an act of the imagination, prior to any acceptance of doctrine or dogma. There are countless ways to organize the following stories, but I trust that the reader will keep in mind that practical decisions had to be made amidst the multiple intertextual readings that these novels and short stories inspire. Hopefully, though, a mosaic will emerge in the following pages, a pattern of faith as an existential, imaginative component of human living, one that involves a person’s emotions, articulated beliefs, unconscious assumptions, and actions. The Catholic fiction in this investigation helps the believer to navigate the uncertainties of life, the inevitable crises, the hopeful dreams, the griefs and joys, reminding us that if faith gives us hope, it is a future-oriented hope, not an avoidance of evil and pain. At its best, Catholic fiction disrupts any facile thinking, any easy answer, that denies faith and uncertainty as constitutive dimensions of human life.

CHAPTER ONE

A Pattern of Convergence FA I T H , F I C T I O N , A N D F R AG M E N T

This study argues that Catholic fiction’s holistic, multifaceted depictions of faith—in which faith encompasses intellect, emotions, and embodied actions in the world—reveal that faith at its most fundamental level is imaginative before it is conceptually articulated. In this chapter, I provide a preliminary justification for this argument, beginning with an overview of what I mean by “faith.” After this sketch, I consider how Catholic fiction presents a unique theological resource on thinking about faith, one that enriches traditional, more conceptual theological rhetoric. As a literary exemplar, I return to Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote. Finally, the chapter concludes with a description of my methodology for the rest of the book, that is, my assertation that Catholic fiction should be read as “fragments” of faith—fragments in that no single story can provide a complete picture of the complicated, messy, multivalent nature of faith itself. What Is Faith? My use of the term “faith” in this book is not typical for colloquial English, which prompts the question “What do I mean by faith?” At this point, I can merely sketch a response to this question and hope that the reader finds this answer justified by subsequent discussions of the stories. The question “What is faith?” is easy to articulate, but much harder to answer. For example, when a believer speaks of faith in God, is this merely the same kind of faith as when one says, “I have faith in my spouse”? Is the word a synonym for trust? Of course, a believer should trust God, and analogously trust other 17

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human beings at times, but believers also speak of articles of faith, beliefs that have been conceptually articulated in some manner, perhaps none more famously than the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. In this sense, to speak of faith—to say this creed describes my Catholic faith—implies an intellectual assent to specific doctrines or dogmas. This is not to say that one is expected to understand completely a particular dogma—after all, the point of the dogma of the Trinity is that it is an incomprehensible mystery— but rather that a person holds it firmly as essential to their faith insofar as this person is capable. Yet as theologian Terrence Tilley observes, such an approach to faith—based on intellectual assent to conceptually formulated propositions—risks defining faith as “the same thing as believing a proposition.”1 In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, faith is articulated in a diversity of ways. This is not the place to give a detailed consideration of this topic, but a few broad observations can be made. For example, texts in the Hebrew Bible often stress God’s faithfulness to the covenant with ancient Israel, while the prophets consistently urge the Israelites to trust in Yahweh and remain obedient to Yahweh’s commandments. This trust of faith is often inseparable from hope in the future, such as Abraham’s trust in God’s oath to him. In the New Testament, meanwhile, the relationship between faith and hope is perhaps most famously described in Hebrews 11:1. Faith, the epistle writer asserts, grants assurance in things currently unseen. At the same time, the New Testament also speaks of faith in the language of persuasion or conviction. In the Gospels, such persuasion occurs at the sight of Jesus’s miracles or exhortation. To encounter Jesus is also to “see” God (cf. John 12:45), an illumination that gives knowledge in that only those who know Jesus can know God (cf. Matthew 11:25–27 or Luke 10:21–22). Indeed, the New Testament frequently describes faith as coming into divine light or gaining new sight. 1. Terrence W. Tilley, Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 10.

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One finds it in the epistles for example, either by Paul or other authors (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:6; Ephesians 5:7–9; or 1 Peter 2:9). And of course, the New Testament epistles also exhort their audience to remain faithful to the knowledge of the risen Christ that has been handed on to them.2 Given that scriptural texts accentuate various aspects of faith, it is little wonder that theologians of the Western theological tradition have articulated faith in differing ways. In The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith, Avery Dulles observes seven categories, or “models,” for Western theological descriptions of Christian faith. The “Propositional” model considers faith an intellectual assent to propositions articulated by an ecclesial community. (Dulles refers to the 1910 “Oath against Modernism” as one Catholic example.) A second model is the “Transcendental” model, most famously represented by Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, in which a person, via grace, is oriented toward a new horizon that allows them to assent to truths normally impossible to perceive. Meanwhile, Dulles associates the “Fiducial” model with Protestant theologies (Luther comes to mind) that stress faith as trust in God’s forgiveness of one’s sins. The fourth model, the “Affective-Experiential,” considers faith through the category of experience, a theological frame associated, of course, with Friedrich Schleiermacher. Protestant theologies are also well represented in Dulles’s fifth, “Obediential,” model through the work of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer; here, faith’s core dimension is obedience to the revelation of the Gospel. More recently, various liberation theologies offer a theology of “Praxis,” in which a believer commits to the uncovering of systematic and social injustices. Finally, the “Per-

2. This brief overview is a synthesis of the following: Avery (Cardinal) Dulles, SJ, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7–18; and Louis Roy, OP, The Three Dynamisms of Faith: Searching for Meaning, Fulfillment, and Truth (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 47–69.

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sonalist” model emphasizes faith as a new relationship which guides one’s life in the world, a model Dulles connects to the thought of Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar. That said, Dulles recognizes the limits of each model, and advocates that theologies of faith should synthesize all seven models so that one may be corrected and supplemented by the others.3 Although this is not the context to evaluate Dulles’s models in detail, his overall observation concerning the models’ limitations holds true. Western theological rhetoric often considers faith in a way that emphasizes a dimension or characteristic of faith. I discuss this issue in more detail in the conclusion. For the moment, I would merely point out that my argument is in the spirit of Dulles’s conclusion—different ways of thinking about faith must be held in tension with each other, as they often capture one dimension over another. One advantage to thinking about faith in conjunction with Catholic fiction is that a character may display more than one of Dulles’s models of faith simultaneously. Dulles, unsurprisingly, defines faith itself with Christian faith as the starting point. In other words, the question “What is faith?” is more specifically “What is Christian faith?” One sees a similar approach in the writings of Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, such as in their joint encyclical, Lumen Fidei, a text composed with “four hands,” in Francis’s description, for Benedict began the encyclical, and Francis finished and promulgated it only a few months into his papacy.4 Here, the pontiffs write, “Faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for building our lives.”5 That faith itself is defined 3. Dulles, The Assurance of Things Hoped For, 170–82. 4. For some initial reactions to the encyclical, see Drew Christiansen, Robert P. Imbelli, James Martin, SJ, Peter Folan, SJ, and Christiana Zenner, “Francis on the ‘Light of Faith’: First Responses to ‘an encyclical written with four hands’,” America, July 4, 2013, and last accessed online on January 19, 2022 at https://www.americamagazine.org/light-faith. 5. Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Lumen Fidei (June 29, 2013), 4.

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as an encounter with God is certainly understandable for Christian theologies. But here, as in Dulles’s models, there is very little consideration of the appropriateness of the term “faith” in nonChristian contexts. Catholic fiction, in contrast, often presents a character struggling with a faith prior to grace, a faith that may be false and idolatrous to some extent, but nonetheless is a kind of faith. The stories may portray an encounter with God’s grace that aligns with Lumen Fidei, but good fiction often complicates traditional theological discourse. As a result, Dulles’s typologies are useful as a guide for Catholic fiction, for they provide a lens to consider how a story may emphasize multiple aspects of faith— faith as trust, or hope, or intellectual reasoning, for example. His models shine a light on good fiction’s engagement with the multifaceted nature of faith; this helps the reader to resist the temptation to think about faith simplistically, such that only a particular dimension is emphasized. Indeed, many of Dulles’s various models of faith would be deemed reductionistic by Tilley. To Tilley, the term “faith” has been misused to reduce faith to moral behavior, feelings, religious practice, or intellectual assent to propositions of belief, descriptions that overlap with Dulles’s typologies. As Tilley remarks, these characteristics are all components of faith, but they are not faith in its entirety.6 As for Tilley’s own definition, he describes faith as “the relationship between one and the irreducible energizing source of meaning and center of value in one’s life.”7 For Tilley, one’s god or gods is one’s fundamental relationship to these “irreducible source(s) of meaning and center(s) of value in one’s life.”8 Tilley’s definition is useful for the context of literature as it casts faith in terms that do not reject any components of faith— such as trust, hope, emotional experience, intellectual assent, 6. Tilley, Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t, 3–25. 7. Tilley, Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t, 26; italics in the original. 8. Tilley, Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t, 32; cf. 39–41.

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and so forth—and instead, defines a person’s faith as rooted in their most important, most “irreducible” relationship (or relationships) to one (or more) centers of meaning. This relationship forms the bedrock for how a person lives one’s life. Further, Tilley recognizes that a person may not know one’s “irreducible” relationship. For example, someone may claim to be a Christian, but their authentic faith lies in money or power or a political ideology. One’s true, “irreducible” faith “is the ultimate source of meaning and value.”9 Interestingly, when Tilley argues that believers should discover their ultimate god or gods, he turns to narrative: Characters portrayed in novels, dramas, and biographies often display what they live for. Some authors make the point of their work to show how a character—typically the hero or villain—comes to realize what he or she lives for. Others show the faith of a character more or less in passing.10

Tilley’s observation about the narrative arts describes a consistent trajectory for the stories analyzed throughout this book. Since the plots portray conversions of some kind, the characters consistently undergo a deconstruction of their god or gods. Often these centers of meaning are initially unconscious and need to be discovered. Invariably, these “irreducible” relationships are interrogated, are found wanting, and allow the potential for a new faith to form. As useful as Tilley’s definition is, I prefer to articulate faith more explicitly in terms of the imagination to better reflect how Catholic fiction portrays faith. In the words of theologian William Lynch, “Faith is a form of imagining and experiencing the world.”11 9. Tilley, Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t, 36; italics in the original. 10. Tilley, Faith: What It Is and What It Isn’t, 37. 11. William F. Lynch, SJ, Images of Faith: An Exploration of the Ironic Imagination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 5; italics in the original.

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When Tilley claims that literature helps to uncover unconscious gods, he is touching upon the fact that how a person imagines the world—the worldview derived from one’s sources of meaning and values that guide beliefs and actions—is a person’s true faith. Imagination here is not fantasy. Or as Lynch’s fellow Jesuit, Adolfo Nicolás, remarks, “Fantasy is a flight from reality, to a world where we create images for the sake of a diversity of images. Imagination grasps reality.”12 Imagination, as Lynch defines it, “refers to the total resources in us which go into the making of our images of the world. It is, therefore, all the faculties of man, all his resources, not only his seeing and hearing and touching but also his history, his education, his feelings, his wishes, his love, hate, faith and unfaith, insofar as they all go into the making of his images of the world.”13 Catholic fiction often begins with characters whose foundational faith—their central relationship to their god or gods—is assumed by them; their imagination—their “images of the world” (in Lynch’s description)—are held uncritically. This unthinking faith defines their sources of meaning and determines their behavior. For Lynch, then, a specifically religious imagination envisions “things with God” and “finds itself rearranging patterns of facts and evidence into new patterns, according to its own information, its own forms, its own history.”14 Many characters do indeed undergo a conversion in which that person rearranges the “patterns of facts and evidence” in their lives to grant the reality 12. Adolfo Nicolás, SJ, “Depth, Universality, and Learned Ministry: Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education Today,” in Shaping the Future: Networking Jesuit Higher Education for a Globalizing World, Report of the Mexico Conference, April 2010, Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, ed. Frank Brennan, SJ, 4; italics in the original. Last accessed on January 19, 2022 at http://www. sjweb.info/documents/ansj/100423_Mexico%20City_Higher%20Education%20 Today_ENG.pdf. 13. Lynch, Images of Faith, 18. 14. William F. Lynch, SJ, Christ and Prometheus: A New Image of the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), 23.

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of God’s grace. But Lynch’s comment on the religious imagination is helpful for this study only with a qualification. This is because not all characters in more contemporary Catholic fiction undergo the kind of shift such that they are imagining “things with God.” Yet, even with such a conversion, a character’s imagination “finds itself rearranging patterns of facts and evidence into new patterns, according to its own information, its own forms, its own history.” Lynch’s remarks on the imagination therefore hold in general, regardless of whether a character is explicitly religious or Christian. Thus, to synthesize Tilley and Lynch: for this study, faith is a form of imagining the world that stems, whether consciously or unconsciously, from one’s center(s) of meaning. So far my discussion has been focused on an individual’s faith, but this is only part of the story, for a person’s imagination is never formed alone, but always with a greater community—cultural, ecclesial, or otherwise. In his sweeping A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor describes secularity in Western society as a collective “social imaginary,” by which he means, “the way that we collectively imagine, even pretheoretically, our social life in the contemporary Western world.”15 A social imaginary encompasses the ways in which people “imagine” their social existence, often without recourse to theoretical reflection or articulation, how they relate to each other, what expectations there are, and the norms that ground those expectations.16 Such a social imaginary frames how people act and relate in the world; it is, as Tilley might have put it, a source of meaning, one that is often unconscious and assumed. Perhaps most fundamentally, a social imaginary shapes whether one views the world with a disenchanted faith—that is, apart from grace and without supernatural interference or presence—or within an enchanted faith, a worldview open to the possibility of the Divine in creation and human actions. 15. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 146. 16. Taylor, A Secular Age, 171–72.

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Like Taylor’s “social imaginary,” the characters of Catholic fiction often begin their stories with a faith that is pretheoretical and culturally conditioned; this faith in their social imaginary is simply assumed, often blindly. A character’s conversion, then, involves some shift in the imagination, often accompanied by a greater awareness (and critique) of their previous conceptions of the world, a shift that may put them at odds with their culture’s larger social imaginary. Bernard Lonergan defines conversion as “existential, intensely personal, utterly intimate,” such that “it is as if one’s eyes were opened and one’s former world faded and fell away.”17 A person thus undergoes a “movement into a new horizon.” But Lonergan’s definition needs to be adapted since not all conversions in this study match his description that conversion involves “an about-face.”18 Many characters in earlier Catholic fiction do adopt a completely new source of meaning (as Tilley might have put it), when they pivot from a more secular, disenchanted view of the world to one that sees the world as infused with God’s presence. Yet another kind of conversion is when a character’s previous faith is challenged, critiqued, and thereby deepened, but there is not a new conversion to Catholicism. This kind of conversion is common amongst contemporary stories. A character, for example, may begin and end a story still Catholic, even if their faith has developed in some way. These remarks, of course, are broad observations—patterns—but not necessarily true of every story. Catholic Fictional Works as Theological Texts Since this is primarily a theological investigation into the issue of faith—and only secondarily an exercise in literary criticism— one may wonder why turn to literature at all. If one hopes to come

17. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 130. 18. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 237–38.

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to a greater understanding of what faith is, what value is there in turning to modern and contemporary short stories and novels, particularly stories written for a largely non-Catholic readership? I have already begun to answer this question above, but it warrants repeating: Catholic fiction portrays the complicated, ambiguous, multifaceted nature of living faith. In this investigation’s stories, there is no single answer to the question “What is faith?” But there are patterns. To see these patterns, the reader must remember that fiction exposes its truths of human existence through concrete circumstances and not in abstract propositions. Fictional literature is a classic example of the idiom “the universal through the concrete.” To relate this idiom to the present context, a reader may journey with a character as they discover that their faith is at least partially an illusion, that the real center of one’s faith (as Tilley might put it) lies in something else. The reader then analogically applies this journey to their own faith. In this dialogue between text and reader, a person potentially engages in a similar interrogation of one’s faith. In a little-discussed essay entitled “On the Theology of Books,” Karl Rahner encourages Catholics to engage the world through literature, even literature that falls under the rubric of “secular” literature. To develop one’s faith only in the explicitly Christian world is to risk impoverishment, Rahner argues, for one’s faith develops in the world. This requires trust that God is present even in contexts that are not explicitly Christian, and that no human reality is irredeemable by divine grace. Literature, then, can further a person’s knowledge, not only about the world or humanity in general, but about oneself. When we authentically engage literature, we undergo a “double-bent,” in Rahner’s description, a going-out of oneself to encounter another, but then a return to the self in reflection. This trajectory is a mark of a mature Christian for Rahner, one that must be practiced repeatedly.19 19. Karl Rahner, SJ, “On the Theology of Books,” in Mission and Grace, vol. 3, trans. Cecily Hastings (London: Sheed and Ward, 1966), 110–21.

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Rahner’s insight is echoed in the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes: In their own way literature and art are very important in the life of the church. They seek to penetrate our nature, our problems and experience as we endeavor to discover and perfect ourselves and the world in which we live; they try to discover our place in history and in the universe, to throw light on our suffering and joy, our needs and potentialities, and to outline a happier destiny in store for us. Hence they can elevate human life, which they express under many forms according to various times and places.20

The Council, like Rahner, affirms the importance of literature (along with the other arts) to believers, yet both the Council and Rahner leave open the question of exactly how literature is a source for self-reflection in the life of faith. In many ways, the Catholic fiction of this investigation does not fit neatly into the category of “secular” literature, as that term is often understood, due to its frequent depictions of God’s grace. At the same time, a novel’s portrayal of grace may seem incongruent with that genre’s historical development. As the literary critic Terry Eagleton describes, the novel traditionally “portrays a secular, empirical world rather than a mythical or metaphysical one. Its focus is on culture, not Nature or the supernatural.”21 The novel develops within the milieu of Western modernity’s new sense of the human subject, who is not confined to reiterate beliefs and values derived from supernatural revelation, family lineage, or cultural tradition. In the novel, the modern subject is no longer acting out “the grammar of God.”22 (I discuss further the 20. Gaudium et Spes, 62. For this translation see: Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations, ed. Austin Flannery, OP (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing, 1996), 239. 21. Terry Eagleton, The English Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 3. 22. Eagleton, The English Novel, 17.

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concepts of modernity and secularity with recourse to Taylor’s thought in the next chapter.) Eagleton is hardly alone in his association of the development of the novel with the disenchanted world of Western modernity. Georg Lukács, in his 1920 The Theory of the Novel, argues that “the novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.”23 In this sense, much Catholic fiction appears to be at odds with the novel’s conventions. Nonetheless, in its presumption of an educated readership that is not exclusively, or even primarily, Catholic, and in its frequent portrayal of events, characters, and symbols that are not explicitly Christian, Catholic fiction also participates in a broader literary culture. In other words, Catholic fiction blurs the line between the sacred and secular. Consequently, it may be easier to say what this fiction is not—that is, it is not a form of apologetics. Literature that attempts such a defense of Catholicism may too easily, in the words of T. S. Eliot, “come under the heading of Propaganda.”24 But beyond the issue of propaganda, my greater concern with apologetical fiction would be its portrayal of faith. Would such fiction depict faith too simplistically? Catholic fiction, insofar as its concern is the action of God’s grace in the world, needs to avoid the danger noted by Flannery O’Connor: “We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of 23. Georg Luká cs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 88. 24. T. S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” in The New Orpheus: Essays toward a Christian Poetic, ed. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), 226. That said, Eliot’s strict polarity between a Christian and a secular worldview does not correspond with many of the authors in this study. Consequently, his descriptions are often unhelpful as a starting point for an investigation, such as this, that desires to let stories explore the relationship between the sacred and the secular with much greater fluidity. 25. Flannery O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 184.

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mystery.”25 Catholic fiction that attempts the “Instant Answer” fails to capture the complexity of the faith-life. The mystery of which O’Connor speaks is ultimately Divine Mystery, a mystery that disrupts one’s false conceptions of faith, idols of the world, and illusions about the self. To read a story with an openness to mystery requires a certain amount of humility on the part of the reader—an awareness that one must surrender an all-toohuman desire for certainty. This runs counter to the modern ethos, which, as Rahner points out, prizes an intellect that gathers knowledge to master and control an object. Instead, a proper understanding of the intellect is one that is open to the truly incomprehensible. We give ourselves over in love to this Divine Mystery, Rahner argues, through “the act in which a person can face and accept the mystery of God (and therein the comprehensive meaning of his own existence) without being shattered by it and without fleeing from it into all the banality of his clear and distinct ideas, the banality of looking for meaning that is based only on such knowledge and what it can master and control.”26 When Rahner refers to the reader as undergoing a “doublebent” in one’s dialogue with literature, he implies that good fiction may serve as an avenue for insights on faith, insights that can then be integrated into one’s relationships with the self, others, God, and the world. But does not a reader ideally perform this dialogue with any text, including a theological one? Yes, but fiction is different from conventional theological texts in its engagement with a reader’s emotions. (I am, of course, bracketing the thorny question of how certain theological texts, such as Augustine’s Confessions, may appeal to a reader’s emotions similarly to fictional literature.) As philosopher Martha Nussbaum observes, “Literature is in league with the emotions,” and while other forms of discourse may provoke strong emotional 26. Karl Rahner, SJ, “Theology and the Arts,” Thought 57, no. 224 (March 1982): 22; cf. 19–20.

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responses, literature depends upon emotions since they are the means by which a work elicits interest.27 Nussbaum admits that this does not mean that emotions should not be subject to criticism, or that they cannot lead to false judgment, but she insists that emotions demand attention since they possess a cognitive dimension.28 Emotions indicate what one believes about the world, and, by extension, how one observes the world. Emotions both insist on the importance of the object as well as manifest the person’s commitment to the object as part of one’s “scheme of ends”: “emotions look at the world from the subject’s own viewpoint, mapping events onto the subject’s own sense of personal importance or value.”29 A person’s lack of emotion about a particular object or event may indicate the opposite of their articulated belief. For example, if a person is not disturbed at the death of a beloved, they possibly have not yet accepted the tragedy, or the beloved is not of as great an importance as previously believed. In addition, emotions are influenced by the freedom of the agent such that the objects deemed as important may change throughout the individual’s life. As a person shifts what one regards as important objects in life, emotional relationships to other objects change. To a degree, one is no longer the same person.30 This indicates that emotions possess “a narrative structure” in that they change and develop over time, a trajectory that is mirrored in literary fiction. Nussbaum argues that

27. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 53. 28. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 41–42. 29. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 33. 30. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 40–41, 83–84; cf. Love’s Knowledge, 41–42.

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The understanding of any single emotion is incomplete unless its narrative history is grasped and studied for the light it sheds on the present response. This already suggests a central role for the arts in human self-understanding: for narrative artworks of various kinds (whether musical or visual or literary) give us information about these emotionhistories that we could not easily get otherwise. This is what Proust meant when he claimed that certain truths about the human emotions can be best conveyed, in verbal and textual form, only by a narrative work of art: only such a work will accurately and fully show the interrelated temporal structure of emotional ‘thoughts,’ prominently including the heart’s intermittences between recognition and denial of neediness.31

Fiction requires readers to evaluate emotions dynamically, that is, in recognition of emotions’ fluidity and instability. The narrative arts thereby create a “potential space,” a protected area created by the “aesthetic activity” that allows one to investigate the possibilities of life. Even when a narrative involves painful content, it allows us to explore our limitations with relative safety.32 Further, emotions expose our vulnerabilities to the world and to the uncertainty of life. To confront my emotions is to confront the reality that I live in a world always beyond my control.33 If Nussbaum is correct that literature offers a means through which to explore emotions in a physically safe, aesthetic space, then literature possesses the potential to provide a unique kind of opportunity for critical reflection regarding faith. A reader’s reaction to a story’s particular vision of faith may be marked by ambivalence and uncertainty, perhaps emotionally as well as 31. Nussbaum makes this argument in her analysis of the role of emotions during childhood. She writes that “storytelling and narrative play are essential in cultivating the child’s sense of her own aloneness, her inner world.” See Upheavals of Thought, 236; cf. 2–3. 32. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 242–44. 33. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 19–22.

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intellectually. At the same time, a reader approaches fiction differently than more conceptual discourses. “Before a literary work,” Nussbaum writes, “we are humble, open, active yet porous. Before a philosophical work, in its working through, we are active, controlling, aiming to leave no flank undefended and no mystery undispelled.”34 There is less impulse to “solve” a story, and more allowance for ambiguity. With a literary work, we are more trusting and willing to accept the invitation to engage in the play of the imagination, to exercise the “ability to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another. We might therefore also call it the metaphorical imagination.”35 Novels and short stories, for example, are often intentionally open-ended. Fiction demonstrates that the human experience “is a series of happenings, some more, some less, mysterious. But to dispel their mystery altogether would be to control them; and this we can never, to this extent, do.”36 If Nussbaum is correct, if literature allows some mystery to remain, this gives literature a power to disrupt conceptual or systematic certainty. Nussbaum thereby values how literature can disturb reductive theories of morality, a capacity that makes literature potentially “subversive.”37 For the present context, literature’s disruptive power grants it the ability to interrogate and problematize conceptualizations of faith. If one attempts to articulate in a propositional manner a definitive definition of what faith is, Catholic fiction may throw a wrench in the attempt. The reader is thus invited into a self-reflection on faith that must contend with the cognitive dimension of emotions. There are limitations to Nussbaum’s thought for a theologically-minded reader, since she does not engage with the dialogue 34. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Love’s Knowledge,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 282. 35. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 36. 36. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Fictions of the Soul,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 258. 37. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 2; cf. “Introduction,” 22.

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between literature and theology. But several years before her work, Lynch remarks that literature holds theological significance through its finite, concrete images. He would agree with Nussbaum that literature is an avenue for knowledge, yet he emphasizes literature’s value specifically for reflection on Christian faith. For Lynch, as Gerald Bednar points out, “Images embody thought. Images are compact with cognition, truth, and knowledge. Put simply, images think. They possess a cognitive value that is only dimly perceived at first.”38 To discern the theological dimension of a story, the reader descends into a story’s finiteness through a Christocentric analogical imagination, a descent that follows a parabolic trajectory such that our imagination travels a direct path through the finite and then “shoots up into insight.”39 Lynch argues “that it is in Christ we come to the fullest possible understanding of what analogy means in the fullest concrete, the facing relentlessly into the two poles of the same and the different and the interpenetrating reconciliation of the two contraries. He who is the Lord of all things is the lord of the imagination.”40 An analogical imagination for Lynch allows similarities and differences to remain in tension, similarities and differences between the story’s world and the world of the reader. Further, this dialogue between text and self, between the story and one’s faith, must be mutually critical. The reader should interrogate the text according to their understanding of Christ’s revelation, but the reader should also be open to subjecting their faith to critical interrogation by the text. Otherwise, one falls into the trap that fiction’s value is to uphold or strengthen an already existing faith. There would be, then, nothing new for fiction to add to theological reflection. As Lynch insists, “Only when theology and literature come to have mutual respect for 38. Gerald J. Bednar, Faith as Imagination: The Contribution of William F. Lynch, SJ (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1996), 60. 39. William F. Lynch, SJ, Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004), 21–23. 40. Lynch, Christ and Apollo, 211.

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each other, not as sets of standards or morals versus orders and guardians of sensibility, but as vision aiding vision and creativity aiding creativity will the next step in collaboration become possible.”41 As an example of this collaboration, I would like to return to Greene’s novel, Monsignor Quixote; for the story invites a reader to reflect upon one’s own understanding of the irresolvable tension between faith and uncertainty through dialogue with the title character’s spiritual journey—a concreteness that engages the reader emotionally as well as intellectually, which is to say, a concreteness that engages the reader imaginatively. Encounters with Doubt: Greene’s Monsignor Quixote As briefly discussed in the introduction, Monsignor Quixote, Greene’s last major novel, depicts doubt as a catalyst for dialogue between the two main characters: the title character, a Catholic priest, and his atheist, Communist friend, Enrique Zancas. Quixote regards himself as a descendant of the original Don Quixote in Cervantes’s landmark novel, and in this spirit, nicknames Zancas as Sancho, a reference to the servant of Cervantes’s Don. During their travels around post-Franco Spain, Quixote admits his doubts about his faith to his unlikely friend. His doubt thereby allows ideological and spiritual opposites to grow in community and reciprocal love, a friendship in which the doubt of one provokes the other to question his beliefs. The relationship between faith and doubt features significantly in Greene’s personal life. Upon Greene’s conversion to Catholicism, he took the name of Thomas, after Jesus’s famous doubting apostle, and indeed, Greene’s faith waxed and waned for most of his life.42 His Catholic characters are likewise beset by uncertainty. As 41. Lynch, Images of Faith, ix. 42. Greene famously admitted that his conversion to Catholicism was motivated by his desire to marry the Catholic, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, and described his conversion as initially more of an intellectual conversion. A fuller emotional and imaginative conversion would not occur for another dozen years

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Michael Higgins observes, “Greene’s Catholicism provides no guarantees against the assaults of doubt; it is no citadel of certitude.”43 But these fluctuations occurred within his distinction between belief and faith. In an interview published a year after Monsignor Quixote, Greene claims that the former is based on reason, while the latter is a gift from God. “On the whole I keep my faith while enduring long periods of disbelief,” Greene remarks.44 Greene’s doubts over his faith informed his camaraderie with the Catholic priest, Leopoldo Duran, and their series of travels around Spain proved to be the catalyst for the novel. As Duran recalls, many of their conversations engaged with faith’s relationship to doubt. Duran states that “Graham Greene’s faith was in a state of constant inner struggle with itself and that it obsessed him. He would say that his conversion to Catholicism, to being ‘baptized again, conditionally’ imprinted on his faith a certain character which would never leave him.” According to Duran, despite Greene’s uncertainties, he never completely abandoned faith. “The trouble is I don’t believe my unbelief,” Greene once insisted to Duran.45 However, one should not map the plot and characters of Monsignor Quixote too closely onto its author. If Quixote’s doubts with his 1938 visit to Mexico’s Chiapas and Tabasco, the trip that inspired Greene’s most famous novel, The Power and the Glory (1940). For Greene’s reflections on his conversion, see both A Sort of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 164–70, and Ways of Escape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 77– 80, 84–90; for an overview of his conversion, see Norman Sherry, 1904–1939, vol. 1 of The Life of Graham Greene (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 254–65. 43. Michael W. Higgins, “Greene’s Priest: A Sort of Rebel,” in Essays in Graham Greene: An Annual Review, vol. 3, ed. Peter Wolfe (St. Louis: Lucas Hall Press, 1992), 11. 44. Graham Greene, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, by Marie-Françoise Allain, trans. Guido Waldman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 163. 45. Leopoldo Duran, Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by his Closest Friend and Confidant, trans. Euan Cameron (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), 97.

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about his Catholic faith are a kindred spirit of Greene’s struggles, Sancho’s political ideology stems to some degree from his creator’s sympathies. The conflict between Catholicism and Communism in the novel takes on a very different dynamic than in Greene’s earlier, and much more celebrated, novel The Power and the Glory (1940).46 I discuss The Power and the Glory further in chapter 4, but for now, I will only note that the earlier novel presents Communism as a sharp adversary whereas the latter book engages Communism more dialogically. Monsignor Quixote has not received as much critical praise and attention as The Power and the Glory, possibly because its lighthearted prose easily misleads the reader to underestimate it.47 This is unfortunate, however, for beneath the comic tone, the novel not only insightfully engages in a dialogue between Catholicism and Communism, but also reflects upon the nature of epistemology. As the monk Father Leopoldo says toward the end, “Fact or fiction—in the end you can’t distinguish between them— you just have to choose” (207).48 Greene plays upon the relationship between fact and fiction throughout the novel, such as when Quixote insists that his ancestor is indeed the original Don Quixote. As Quixote’s bishop wonders, “How can he be descended from a fictional character?” (16).49 46. That said, as Higgins notes, Quixote shares certain characteristics with both the whiskey priest as well as Father Rivas in The Honorary Consul. See Higgins, “Greene’s Priest: A Sort of Rebel,” 9–23. 47. Michael G. Brennan notes that early commentators often viewed the novel as a sign of the diminution of Greene’s skill, an assessment Brennan rejects: Michael G. Brennan, “Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote: A Pilgrimage of Doubt and Reason toward Faith and Belief,” in Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature, ed. Mary R. Reichardt (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 155. 48. All parenthetical references to the novel are from Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 49. For a comparison between Cervantes’s and Greene’s stories, see Zenia Sacks DaSilva, “Don Quixote, Monsignor Quixote, and the Dynamic of Doubt,” in Don Quixote: The First 400 Years, ed. Zenia Sacks DaSilva (Lima: Universidad

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Quixote, however, is a reluctant pupil of doubt, for he must be prompted to leave his rural parish community of El Toboso by others. After he offers hospitality to the stranded bishop of Motopo, the bishop encourages Quixote to travel out into the world like his literary ancestor. Father Quixote should tilt at windmills like Don Quixote, for, “it was only by tilting at windmills that Don Quixote found the truth on his deathbed” (25). To press his case, the jovial bishop of Motopo has the Vatican elevate Quixote to the position of Monsignor, much to his surprise and his bishop’s chagrin (28–29). Shortly thereafter, Sancho, no longer mayor, suggests that a contemporary Quixote should once more ride forth with trusty Rocinante, Quixote’s name (after the Don’s horse) for his antiquated car. What follows is a plot characteristic of a picaresque, a genre structured around a series of comical episodes.50 During his travels with Sancho, Monsignor Quixote innocently blows up condoms like balloons, unwittingly views an erotic film (caused by a misunderstanding of its title, A Maiden’s Prayer), and assists a robber with escaping from the Guardia. But these shared experiences augment the already existing bond of friendship between Quixote and Sancho, which allows them to confess to each other their doubts about their respective beliefs. As Mark Bosco observes, “doubt is not an end in itself but a beginning point of engagement, revealing a common claim for the necessity of negotiating and constructing meaning.”51 Sancho initially regards Quixote as a person without doubts, an attribute Sancho finds appealing. Quixote corrects him, however: “I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even

Nacional Mayor de San Marcos—Hofstra University, 2009), 309–19. See also Mark Bosco, SJ, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 141–47. 50. Murray Roston, Graham Greene’s Narrative Strategies: A Study of the Major Novels (Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 143–45. 51. Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, 140–41.

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of the existence of God, but doubt is not treachery as you Communists seem to think. Doubt is human” (180). Sancho claims to hold his Communist ideology with certainty, but even he sometimes questions whether he holds “complete belief.” Perhaps Sancho’s tinge of uncertainty stems from his previous studies as a young seminarian at Salamanca; there, he encountered the famed philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.52 Sancho credits Unamuno with his “half belief” that kept him in the Church during his youth (98), and he convinces Quixote to visit Unamuno’s grave, a small humble site in contrast to the cavernous burial chamber of Franco. But Sancho desires ideological certainty. When Quixote remarks that he hopes his friend also doubts on occasion, Sancho replies, “I try not to doubt” (55). Meanwhile, Quixote comes to recognize the necessity of doubt, for only with doubt can one have a faith worth living. In a dream, the priest sees Christ descend from the cross on Golgotha and emerge victorious. Consequently, “there was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all. The whole world knew with certainty that Christ was the Son of God.” Quixote wakes up in despair and prays that he and Sancho are saved from belief that gives no space for uncertainty or mystery (69–70). In another scene, Sancho and Quixote discuss what would happen if one did not need belief, but knew with certainty, such as if Communism in the future triumphed and faith in Marxism was no longer required. Sancho claims he would be happy that his ideology would be vindicated, but Quixote argues that to live without faith and doubt would be to live in a desert with nothing for which to hope: “it’s an awful thing not to have doubts” (73– 74). As Quixote and Sancho agree pages earlier, to have faith is to hope (46–47). 52. For a discussion of Unamuno’s influence upon Greene’s theological imagination, see Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, 141; Brennan, “Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote, 169–70; and Roston, Graham Greene’s Narrative Strategies, 150–51.

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One should note that Quixote’s doubt is not doubt about the fundamental story of Jesus Christ. Quixote insists upon the “historic fact” of Christ’s death and resurrection (77); instead, Quixote’s doubt is akin to the existential doubt of the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, that is, doubt about one’s own Christian faith.53 For example, Quixote faults himself for an unintentional heretical metaphor for the Trinity (49–51). And when he bids a final goodbye to his housekeeper, Teresa, he tells her that “for a Christian there’s no such thing as goodbye forever,” yet shortly thereafter, Quixote remarks to himself, “I believe it of course, but how is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?” (173). Doubt then is not necessarily a temptation to turn completely from faith, but an avenue to self-knowledge. He remarks to his exasperated bishop that his journeys with Sancho have given him a new freedom (167), and he admits to his companion, “in your company, Sancho, I think more freely than when I am alone” (180). Yet, despite a faith plagued by doubt, Monsignor Quixote still acts from his faith. When he discovers a procession that raises money for local priests, and disrespects the Virgin Mary in the process, he halts the procession with as much certainty and chivalry as, but with a greater grasp on reality than, Don Quixote’s fidelity to Dulcinea. Such an affront to Mary’s dignity enrages Monsignor Quixote, who is injured in the resulting chaos. Sancho rescues him, and the two are pursued by the Guardia, a pursuit that leads to a car accident in front of a nearby Trappist monastery. A delirious Quixote is taken into the monastery. Shortly thereafter, under the influence of sedatives, he sleepwalks to the monastery’s chapel and begins to perform an invisible Mass, intoning key passages from his beloved Tridentine liturgy.54 In the end, he 53. Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, 141–42. 54. Quixote’s preference for the Tridentine liturgy over the post–Vatican II liturgy reflects Greene’s own tastes. See Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, 93–94, 144–45.

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approaches Sancho and instructs his friend to kneel; then, “the Mayor opened his mouth and felt the fingers, like a Host, on his tongue” (217). Quixote shortly thereafter collapses and dies. But before his death, Quixote’s final words to Sancho are “by this hopping” (217). “Hopping” refers back to Quixote’s comment as he begins walking deliriously to the chapel: “By this hopping you can recognize love” (214). Linguistically, “hopping” plays on “hoping,” which both Quixote and Sancho agree is the essence of belief. Without hope, there is no belief.55 Additionally, “hopping” serves as a metaphor that relates to an earlier conversation between Professor Pilbeam and Father Leopoldo about the former’s reluctance and the latter’s willingness to make the leap, or “jump,” into faith, a metaphor literalized when Professor Pilbeam jumps at the sound of the car accident (207). When Quixote gives Sancho his invisible communion, “by this hopping you can recognize love,” Quixote himself becomes the sacrament, for Quixote’s actions reveal God’s grace to Sancho in an act of love. In enacting his final liturgy, Quixote’s life becomes eucharistic.56 Quixote’s embodied sacramentality jars his witnesses, prompting them to experience uncertainty about their own beliefs. In the words of Robert Hoskins, “Greene’s Quixote is restored at the end of life to the fullness of his dream, his ideal, with a force that overpowers the ordinary reality around him and leaves his beholders to ponder the meaning of his remarkable actions.”57 By Quixote’s actions, by his “hopping,” Sancho may recognize Quixote’s love 55. For a discussion of the “hopping” metaphor, see Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, 148–49; Brennan, “Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote, 170; and Brannon Hancock, “Pluralism and Sacrament: Eucharistic Possibility in a Post-Ecclesial World,” Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory, and Culture 19, no. 3 (September 2005): 266. 56. Several commentators have remarked on Quixote’s Eucharistic transformation. As examples, see Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, 150– 52; Higgins, “Greene’s Priest: A Sort of Rebel,” 17–20; Hancock, “Pluralism and Sacrament,” 272–73. 57. Robert Hoskins, Graham Greene: An Approach to the Novels (New York: Routledge, 1999), 280.

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for him and, hopefully, the love of God. Quixote’s earlier doubts lead him to become a sacrament for others. Further, Quixote communicates this hope such that the metaphysical meaning behind his liturgical gestures must be grasped with the imagination. As Brannon Hancock argues, “The ‘infinite mystery’ of this imaginative (which is perhaps not to say imaginary after all) eucharist becomes for the unbeliever a true sacrament in his communion with and remembrance of his friend the priest, and in the possibility of salvation extended not in spite of but by virtue of imagination.”58 The imagination, then, becomes an epistemological avenue to discern a reality beyond mere empiricism. Admittedly, to trust one’s imagination in such a way is itself an act of faith, for one can never live with certainty that such trust is justified. The novel thereby implies that Quixote’s actions reveal truths that can only be grasped with a sacramental imagination, but an ambiguity lingers nevertheless. In other words, Monsignor Quixote affirms faith while acknowledging that doubt will always remain. Unlike Father Leopoldo, Sancho prefers to believe that there was no real Eucharist, for to do so would compel him to confront uncertainty. To Sancho, doubt causes a loss of freedom, and consequently a loss of action (220). But Sancho finds himself plagued by uncertainty despite himself. And in the novel’s final lines, he asks, “Why is it that the hate of a man—even of a man like Franco—dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he [has] begun to feel for Father Quixote, [seems] now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence—for how long, he [wonders] with a kind of fear, [is] it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?” (221). Sancho’s love of Quixote, and conversely Quixote’s love for him, have prompted fear and uncertainty, and the reader is left to wonder whether Sancho will adopt Quixote’s faith that doubt can be an epistemological journey to truth—albeit a kind of truth beyond mere “fact.” 58. Hancock, “Pluralism and Sacrament,” 266; italics in the original.

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In the world of Monsignor Quixote, uncertainty is necessary for belief to be worthwhile. The tension between religious faith and doubt points to the nature of belief itself, even in navigating the blurriness between fact and fiction. Our “truths” stem from our acceptance of a story, and how we enact this story reveals our faith. For Quixote, the embodiment of his faith indicates his acceptance of multiple stories, whether his belief in his lineage from Cervantes’s Quixote, or, more fundamentally, his belief in the story of Christ. As Bosco argues, Greene’s “leap of faith is more a negotiated trust in a story, a trust that such a story takes the individual somewhere adequate to the full range of human experience.”59 In an encounter with a story, one moves beyond disbelief and trusts that some kind of truth emerges imaginatively. This trust, like Quixote’s faith, navigates the tension between belief and doubt. Several themes emerge from Greene’s Monsignor Quixote that reoccur repeatedly in my discussions of other works later in this book. Most obviously, the novel illustrates faith’s relationship to doubt, specifically that authentic faith cannot grant absolute certainty. Indeed, the only worthwhile faith is a faith that lives in tension with uncertainty. But the novel reveals additional interconnected dimensions of faith: 1. Faith is a constitutive component of a human life. Although the above discussion focused on Quixote’s Catholic faith, one could also speak of Sancho’s Communist faith. In this latter example, “faith” refers to Sancho’s trust in a worldview that shapes his entire life. Above, I described, via the thought of Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, faith as an encounter with God’s grace. Their insights harmonize with Quixote’s final liturgy (see below); in his eucharistic offer to Sancho, Sancho is indeed encountering God’s grace mediated through his priestly friend. But Sancho’s Communist faith is a faith in a political ideology, a faith in materialism, a faith in a vision of reality untouched by grace. Since 59. Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, 154.

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Sancho’s faith is atheistic, he cannot imagine a reality beyond the empirical world. In other words, the physical universe alone exists. Any claims to a supernatural presence are fantastical, even if beautiful. As discussed throughout the book, the Catholic literary imagination frequently depicts a character’s conversion as a shift from one form of faith to another. Faith is therefore revealed as a constitutive part of human life, even if it is not religious faith. A person simply cannot know with absolute certainty whether one’s most important beliefs are completely accurate to reality; consequently, faith and uncertainty are inevitable to some degree for any thinking person. Although these claims need further elaboration, for the moment, I will merely add that faith is not simply one’s intellectual grasp of reality; rather, faith is also embodied in one’s actions. Consequently: 2. Faith is performative. Quixote’s final invisible Mass is less about demonstrating that Quixote resolves his doubts rationally (after all, he is in a state of delirium), and more about enacting his faith. Likewise, a believer can reveal one’s faith in a way that is different from intellectual articulation. Indeed, Quixote does not have full awareness of his actions on a rational level, but his behavior testifies to his faith that the gift of God’s love and grace extends to his nonbelieving friend. Quixote thus reveals that a primary characteristic of his faith is a sacramental imagination: Physical reality reveals God’s presence. In one of his defenses against Sancho, Quixote insists, “I don’t just believe in Him. I touch Him” (141). Quixote’s fidelity to the traditional Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist takes on an ironic dimension in his final liturgy. If in an ordinary Mass, Quixote touches the body of Christ in the Eucharist, in his invisible Mass, he becomes a sacrament for his friend. Thus, Quixote’s liturgical performance also divulges that: 3. One’s faith is formed and performed in community. Quixote’s struggles with his faith develop due to his friendship with Sancho. This is not to disregard or downplay the ecclesial formation of Quixote’s faith during the many years before their

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road trip; it is simply to observe that one’s faith—whatever faith this may be—is shaped in community. A person does not work out their faith alone. Even when Quixote takes solace in his readings of the great spiritual masters of the Catholic tradition— such as Teresa of Ávila or John of the Cross—this manifests his embrace of the Catholic belief in the community of saints. Appropriately, Quixote’s journey of faith ends inside a monastery—a traditional symbol of a faith-community. For Sancho, however, his journey continues, although not because of any rational argument that Quixote makes, but because Sancho is shaken by grief and love for his friend. This points to the fact that: 4. Faith is inseparable from one’s emotions. One can rationally assent to a proposition, but emotionally still hesitate. In such a situation, a person should wonder whether they truly have faith or simply accept a belief as a theoretical possibility. (Here, one may recall Cardinal Newman’s distinction between “notional” and “real” assent in his Grammar of Assent.) Stories such as Monsignor Quixote point out that such “nagging feelings” should not simply be ignored. Because of our emotions, we are forced to interrogate and reconsider our beliefs. Sancho is jolted by uncertainty about his atheism and Communism at the end of the novel, not because of any argument based on philosophical reason or scientific evidence, but because his love for Quixote resonates even after his friend’s death. Emotions then are not simply animalistic impulses but are in fact epistemological resources to spur spiritual growth. This last point reminds us of Nussbaum’s argument above that emotions themselves have cognitive dimensions, dimensions that literature can help readers to discern. If Sancho begins to question his Communist faith due to his emotional uncertainty, the reader, be they a religious believer or not, may likewise interrogate their faith as a response to their emotional engagement with the story. The believing reader may question Quixote’s embrace of doubt, or the efficacy of his final, invisible Mass. The nonbelieving reader may struggle over Sancho’s apparently new-

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found uncertainty. Both groups of readers may consider the frequent debates between the two men over epistemology and story, Quixote’s faith in institutional religion despite its numerous historical failures, and, for similar reasons, Sancho’s faith in Communism. Of course, one hopes that the reader’s response is more than boredom. But if a work of fiction provokes a reader to reflect on personal faith, the reader’s emotions thereby become a path for self-knowledge. A final comment about Monsignor Quixote: The novel is the story of two conversions that display the complicated conditions within which a person’s faith develops—one’s culture, relationships, education, even chance, to name a few. A believing reader such as myself would also insist that these conversions involve God’s grace. Yet, the novel should not be read as portraying every aspect of faith; it is merely one fragment of faith. By “fragment,” I am referring to the fact that a story’s concreteness also points to its limitations. A novel or short story may possess a theological dimension, but it can never capture the full breadth and depth of Christian faith. It is inevitably a glimpse into a particular experience of grace, one that may have universal significance but be limited nonetheless by its particularities: setting, characters, plot, and so forth. Each story, then, is a “fragment” of faith that the reader must bring into dialogue with other stories, other fragments, of grace’s action (or grace’s seeming absence) in the world. Fragments of Faith in the Catholic Literary Imagination My description of Monsignor Quixote and subsequent Catholic fictional texts as “fragments” of faith draws upon the thought of theologian David Tracy. Tracy is best known for his earlier monographs, such as Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (1975), The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (1981), and Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (1987). But after 1990, Tracy begins to develop his

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language of “fragment” due to his long-running interest in issues of hermeneutics for postmodern theology. My readings of Catholic fiction as fragments are reminders that grace disrupts human certainties, that no absolute answer to the challenge of doubt is to be expected, and that theology must always recognize the limits of its own rhetoric for, and conceptual claims about, God. Tracy argues that theologians should approach texts saturated with religious phenomena as fragments, that is, as glimpses into human encounters with the Divine. He approvingly notes that Rahner’s emphasis on the ultimate mystery and incomprehensibility of God “frees the Christian to become, as Rahner insisted, the most radical skeptic in modernity—skeptical, above all, about modernity’s pretensions to certainty.”60 Tracy argues that theologians must approach the task of hermeneutics with a similar willingness to give up a desire for certainty; to do otherwise would be to replicate the faults of modernity, which attempted to achieve certainty through totality. Fragments demonstrate that authentic religious phenomena cannot be subsumed and controlled under modern rationality.61 More recently, he has clarified that “the most powerful fragments” are “frag-events,” his word for events that “negatively shatter or fragment all totalities, even as they are positively open to Infinity”; such fragments are not “period pieces,” but remain “events opening to Infinity.”62 60. David Tracy, On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 56–57. 61. Tracy’s writings on the fragment are spread out amongst several essays. A good overview of his understanding of fragment can be found in David Tracy, “African American Thought: The Discovery of Fragments,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 29–38. See also David Tracy, “This Side of God: A Conversation with David Tracy,” by Scott Holland, Cross Currents 52, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 54–59. See also William Myatt, “Public Theology and ‘The Fragment’: Duncan Forrester, David Tracy, and Walter Benjamin,” International Journal of Public Theology 8, no. 1 (2014): 91–96. 62. David Tracy, introduction to Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time, vol. 1 of Selected Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 1–2.

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Amongst contemporary thinkers in general, Tracy sees three approaches to fragments: radical conservatives, who view fragments with nostalgia at what has been lost; postmoderns, who view fragments as possibilities for liberation; and those who see fragments as bearers of hope and glimpses of the divine.63 Tracy situates himself in this last group. As Nathan Crawford observes, “Through the interruption of the system, the fragment opens a way into the impossible and the infinite. . . . [The] fragment is that form that shows the impossibility of any theological discourse to systematize God, while also revealing God as infinite within the world through the breaking of the whole.”64 A fragment, then, does not conceptualize Divine Mystery through definitive interpretations of what or who God is. Stephen Okey remarks that fragments “are particular expressions, including texts, symbols, and rituals, yet they carry the possibility of disclosing the infinite, the mysterious, and the beyond to their interlocutors.”65 That said, Andrew Prevot’s caution must be noted. He worries that Tracy’s language of fragment erroneously denotes certain texts (such as those by James Cone, Cornell West, and Toni Morrison) as not having universal significance for theology.66 In the present study, my own adaption of Tracy’s language is intended only to emphasize that no single text—whether a theological or literary 63. Tracy, “African American Thought,” 32–36; cf. “This Side of God,” 56; and “Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Times,” in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 173. 64. Nathan Crawford, “Theology as Improvisation: Seeking the Unstructured Form of Theology with David Tracy,” Irish Theological Quarterly 75, no. 3 (2010): 309. 65. Stephen Okey, A Theology of Conversation: An Introduction to David Tracy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2018), 93. 66. Andrew Prevot, Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality Amid the Crises of Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 324. To give some context to this critique: Tracy credits Cone, West, and Morrison with teaching him the importance of fragments for theology. See Tracy, “African American Thought,” 29–38.

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one—can fully capture faith in Divine Mystery, much less Divine Mystery itself. Amidst the ambiguity of postmodernity, the theologian attempts a “gathering of fragments.”67 Tracy insists that this gathering occurs around Christ as the primary analogue, or the “formof-forms,” for the theologian.68 But what does it actually mean to say that the theologian gathers fragments? Here, it is helpful to recall Lynch’s argument above that theologians should approach fiction Christocentrically through an analogical imagination, one that allows the story to be brought into dialogue with the Catholic sacramental principle. Broadly speaking, the Catholic sacramental principle indicates that all reality is created through Christ, that the Son of God entered into fallen human nature, and that this nature is inherently blessed by God’s grace, even amidst the reality of sin and evil. Or to put it more succinctly, Christ’s life and death teach that God’s grace is active in our world. This sacramental principle is the center of the “gathering of fragments.” Consequently, some stories are closer to this center than others. Some stories, particularly those written prior to 1970, depict a strong sacramentality, one that violently wrenches human assumptions; other stories, such as those written more recently, often hint at grace more subtly or consider its apparent absence. This possible absence does not necessarily reject Christian belief, but it certainly heightens ambiguity and uncertainty. (The sacramental contrast between older and newer stories is explored in more detail in the next chapter.) Regardless, each story enters this discussion as a fragment of religious experience. The novels and short stories make no claim

67. David Tracy, “Form and Fragment: The Recovery of the Hidden and Incomprehensible God,” in The Concept of God in Global Dialogue, ed. Werner G. Jeanrond and Aasulv Lande (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 107–8. 68. David Tracy, “Forms of Divine Disclosure,” in Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals, ed. James L. Heft, SM (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 54.

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to possess the final word on faith. One text’s portrayal of faith may contradict another, for every work offers a concrete experience rooted in a specific context. In short, a Catholic novel or short story speaks not as a theological system but as a fragment, a fragment that often depicts an encounter with God’s grace amidst fallen humanity. It is left to the reader to gather the fragments and discern patterns in the Catholic literary imagination. The stories discussed in subsequent chapters deepen and complicate my thesis that there is a pattern of convergence in Catholic fiction, i.e., that many Catholic novels and short stories, despite their numerous differences, intersect in their depiction of faith as an act of the imagination. Tracy’s thought on the “fragment” undergirds my methodology for chapters 2–6, in which I bring together novels and short stories from different decades; in this way, further patterns emerge. As promised in the introduction, chapter 2 focuses on the crucial question of sacramentality, but also articulates a second pattern, that is, one of contrast between earlier, modern fiction prior to the 1970s, and postmodern/contemporary fiction thereafter. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 explore texts organized around the subjects of evil, sacrifice, and community, and reinforce this second pattern of contrast between modern and postmodern/contemporary fiction. Chapter 6 offers final remarks on this pattern of contrast before I return in the conclusion to the present chapter’s pattern of convergence. In this way, there is a rough mirroring structure to the investigation as a whole. What emerges in this survey of Catholic fiction is that each story presents a fragment of—a glimpse into—what faith is, a fragment that makes no claim of totality in its particularity. Needless to say, my analyses of the stories are not an attempt to say that every work of Catholic fiction published over the last century affirms my patterns. Nonetheless, I argue that various tendencies of the Catholic literary imagination emerge through this survey, patterns that enrich theological reflection on the imaginative, embodied act of faith.

CHAPTER TWO

A Pattern of Contrast: G R AC E A N D FA I T H I N M O D E R N A N D CO N T E M P O R A R Y S H O R T S TO R I E S

Greene’s Monsignor Quixote, the literary centerpiece of the last chapter, portrays two competing faiths—Quixote’s Catholicism and Sancho’s Communist materialism. Their adventures together create a space that allows each to interrogate the foundational sources of meaning that shape how they imagine, and interact with, the world. Their faith thereby is fundamentally portrayed as an act of the imagination that molds the character’s vision of the world—be that Quixote’s sacramental, enchanted imagination or Sancho’s disenchanted one. This depiction of faith as an imaginative frame is a reoccurring pattern of Catholic fiction throughout this book. The present chapter describes another pattern, one that recognizes a difference between stories written prior to the completion of the Second Vatican Council, such as the well-known stories of early Greene, O’Connor, and early Spark, with post-conciliar fiction. Often, the contrast between older and younger authors lies in differing depictions of sacramentality. As Mary Reichardt points out, sacramentality, based on the traditional dogma of the Incarnation, is one of the defining characteristics of Catholic fiction.1 A text’s sacramental vision shapes its portrayal of faith, and indeed, contemporary Catholic fiction’s depictions of grace reveal a very different engagement with the nature 1. Mary R. Reichardt, “Literature and the Catholic Perspective,” in Ethics, Literature, and Theory: An Introductory Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen K. George (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 176–78.

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of faith than earlier writers’. If earlier Catholic fiction frequently presents the gift of grace as a firm, even hard, rebuttal to a disenchanted worldview, this sacramentality implies that faith offers the reader an objective point of reference to rebuke Western secularity. In contrast, contemporary fiction frequently contains a more ambiguous sacramentality, one that consequently casts faith as fluid, unstable, perhaps still desirable, but often marked with the specter of uncertainty. Some scholars have bemoaned the state of contemporary Catholic fiction in comparison to that of the mid-twentieth century. In 2012, Paul Elie lamented that recent stories portray Christian belief “as something between a dead language and a hangover.”2 Elie charged that while characters might value their Christian faith, the stories themselves are not particularly concerned with exploring or depicting the nature of belief. One year later, Dana Gioia made a similar complaint. While “many Catholic authors follow their faith quietly,” he noted, “most young writers no longer see their religion as a core identity—in spiritual or aesthetic terms. Their faith is something to be hidden or discarded in order to achieve success in an arts world that appears hostile to Christianity.”3 Gioia does not deny that Catholic writers still exist, but he doubts the impact of their faith on their literary output. In contrast, Gregory Wolfe describes contemporary Catholic authors as “less ambitious” regarding issues of belief than older ones, in part because younger writers depict “more intimate and familiar worlds.” If O’Connor insisted that a Catholic writer needs to jolt her secular audience, current writers take a less confrontational approach.4 This different engagement with their readers, 2. Paul Elie, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?,” The New York Times, December 19, 2012, last accessed on January 25, 2022 at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/ 12/23/books/review/has-fiction-lost-its-faith.html. 3. Dana Gioia, “The Catholic Writer Today,” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life 238 (December 2013): 37. 4. Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011), 14.

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Wolfe remarks, results in less “indirection and irony,” but is appropriate for today’s readership. “In a time where all master narratives are under suspicion,” Wolfe argues, contemporary Catholic writers “have taken a quieter and more intimate path. By and large, contemporary writers have felt more freedom to depict their characters’ religious experiences and tensions directly, and more often in whispers rather than shouts.”5 Although I find Elie’s and Gioia’s observations thoughtprovoking, I am closer to Wolfe’s conclusions. This makes Monsignor Quixote a fascinating work to consider within this debate. It is a late Greene work, and reflects Elie’s and Gioia’s desire for fiction to confront issues of belief while also demonstrating Wolfe’s point that later Catholic writers are less confrontational with their audience. Monsignor Quixote has a more invitational approach to the intersection of Catholic and non-Catholic belief than Greene’s earlier so-called “Catholic novels,” such as Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951). The last novel of this celebrated quartet depicts Sarah’s conversion to the Catholic faith as beginning with a literal explosion. But Sancho’s spiritual journey is left uncertain by the final page of Monsignor Quixote. This results in quieter depictions of grace and conversion. If contemporary authors whisper to their audiences, as in Wolfe’s description, this whisper is often in the form of an invitation; just as Quixote calls to Sancho to share in his imaginary Eucharist, so readers are invited to look for grace amidst ambiguity. Elie’s, Gioia’s, and Wolfe’s arguments are not exactly new. They echo a long-running debate whether Anglo-American Catholic fiction can ever again produce stories that rival the seeming golden age of the 1930s to the early 1960s, an age that witnessed the fiction of Mauriac, Bernanos, Waugh, Greene, Spark, O’Connor, and Powers. Even as early as 1970’s The Vital Tradition: The Catholic Novel in a Period of Convergence, Jean Kellogg laments 5. Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World, 54.

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that “the Catholic novels of the highest quality virtually ceased to appear after the mid-1960s,” a remarkably hasty judgment considering the publication date of Kellogg’s book.6 With the benefit of hindsight, I would argue that the Catholic novel was simply transforming into something distinct from its late modern exemplars. Yet Kellogg cannot be so quickly dismissed, for she recognizes remarkably early something that has become increasingly obvious over time, particularly regarding American Catholic fiction. Earlier stories often reflected that Catholicism was a unique, minority identity within the larger Protestant-shaped American culture, a tension that formed much literary creativity. But this identity weakened as the 1960s progressed and Catholics (or at least, white Catholics) became more integrated into mainstream society.7 Kellogg senses the early stages of Western culture’s development into the increasingly diverse and fragmented postmodern world in which contemporary Catholic fiction now resides. In what follows, I explore Catholic fiction’s contrasting patterns of sacramentality through a comparison of five American short stories, each of which depicts a priest as either a protagonist or a pivotal secondary character. Because of their brevity, short stories allow the reader to discern patterns across multiple authors more quickly than they can with novels. A central figure in this dialogue is, unsurprisingly, Flannery O’Connor, a master of the genre. Her stories “The Displaced Person” and “The Enduring Chill” present the action of grace as a sharp, violent corrective to atheistic or agnostic modern forms of faith. The priests in both stories are secondary characters, but their presence and actions disrupt the protagonists’ prevailing ideology. I then turn to three contemporary short stories by authors who have acknowledged the influence of O’Connor: “The Expert on God,” by the late John 6. Gene Kellogg (pseudonym of Jean Kellogg), The Vital Tradition: The Catholic Novel in a Period of Convergence (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1970), 225. 7. Kellogg, The Vital Tradition, 226–29.

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L’Heureux, and two more recent stories: “Prayer in the Furnace” by Phil Klay, and Kirstin Valdez Quade’s “Ordinary Sins.” Although differing in tone, each story depicts a sacramentality that is more difficult to discern than that in O’Connor’s fiction, rendering faith with much greater ambiguity. These short stories point to trends in the Catholic literary imagination. Whereas O’Connor’s earlier fiction presents Catholic faith as a bold rebuttal to disenchanted, Western modernity, contemporary fiction is less concerned with this ideological conflict. Further, O’Connor depicts faith with a firmness and confidence lacking in contemporary short stories. Faith remains intertwined with uncertainty in L’Heureux’s, Klay’s, and Quade’s fiction. Nonetheless, a critical faith is upheld as not only possible, but also as a source of hope. Secular Faith Overturned: O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” and “The Enduring Chill” Amongst American Catholic writers, there are few who have achieved the literary prominence of Flannery O’Connor, a prominence that has only increased since her unfortunate death at thirty-nine in 1964 from complications of lupus. As her posthumously published A Prayer Journal attests, O’Connor intertwined her Catholic faith with her vocation as a writer remarkably early in her professional life.8 To read O’Connor’s essays and lectures in Mystery and Manners or The Habit of Being, her collection of letters, is to encounter a singular literary and theological vision, one that insists that a Catholic author needs to “shout” to a readership who does not share her Christian faith.9 To her, many of her contemporaries are akin to “wingless chickens” who lack 8. Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 9. Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 34.

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“moral sense.”10 When cultural Christianity appears in her stories, it is often a lukewarm, cheap, and sentimental Christianity. O’Connor therefore believes she must resort to “violent means” in her stories to depict her sacramental vision of grace as active in a world besotted with sin. She argues that if the novelist “is going to show the supernatural taking place, he has nowhere to do it except on the literal level of natural events.”11 A Catholic writer should depict reality as encompassing the supernatural as well as the natural. This means that a Catholic writer should have a “prophetic vision” so as “to distort appearances in order to show a hidden truth.”12 The presence of grace is thereby revealed underneath the ostensibly grotesque and violent. Pride is the most common sin in O’Connor’s literary universe, and it is found in spades in both “The Displaced Person” and “The Enduring Chill.” To pinpoint the source of the characters’ pride is to pinpoint their initial faith, faith not as religious belief, but faith as the center of meaning that shapes one’s life. In that sense, Asbury’s faith in “The Enduring Chill” is in an artistic aesthetic that he has idealistically constructed in his head, an aesthetic in which the artist determines life’s fundamental meaning only through their individual artistic endeavors and apart from grace.13 Meanwhile, “The Displaced Person” features two conversions: the first, Mrs. Shortley, the confidant and farm worker of Mrs. McIntyre, the landowner destined for the second conversion. “The Displaced Person,” with its more complicated racial dynamics, is less straightforward than “The Enduring Chill” and 10. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 90. 11. Flannery O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 176. 12. O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” 179. 13. As John F. Desmond observes, Asbury “has made art his god—an idol to worship.” Desmond, Risen Sons: Flannery O’Connor’s Vision of History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 75.

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is structured around characters’ idolatry of the racist and xenophobic social structures of the rural South. Both stories feature a priest as a secondary character who disrupts the protagonist’s initial faith. Like so many of O’Connor’s stories, “The Displaced Person” and “The Enduring Chill” feature characters shaped by Western modernity’s faith in human constructions of meaning divorced from a transcendent ground or horizon. According to Charles Taylor, the rise of Western secularity in the modern age emerges from a new conception of human agency that develops when the natural world comes to be seen as “immanent,” that is, nature could be explicated without recourse to a supernatural source.14 Within this immanent frame, the individual becomes increasingly conceived as a “buffered” person, a shift away from the traditional, premodern conception of the self as “porous.” Taylor defines the “porous” self as one with no clear boundary between the individual and the enchanted world. An enchanted world is filled with a “whole gamut of forces” that impose meaning, whether those forces are demons or sacramentals. Indeed, the entire cosmos itself is enchanted, for it indicates a divine origin. In other words, meaning comes from a reality external to the self’s mind.15 In contrast, the modern self is a “buffered” self, one who is the primary source of meaning and capable of ordering the world. This exclusive humanism—with the buffered self at the center— gives the greatest impetus to the rise of modern unbelief. Unlike the porous self, the buffered self creates the criteria by which one lives, for meaning originates within the human mind. The buffered self orders the world primarily according to its ability to assist human flourishing based upon human capacity and sources, not divine ones.16 In other words, a new “social imaginary” develops 14. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 14–16; cf. 91, 284, 773. 15. Taylor, A Secular Age, 32–33; cf. 34–39. 16. Taylor, A Secular Age, 27–28.

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in Western culture, a term that describes the various ways in which people “pretheoretically” imagine social existence, how they relate to each other, their expectations, and the underlying norms of those expectations (see chapter 1). Secularity does not necessarily mean that religion is discarded, but a secular age is one in which unbelief and the buffered self are recognized as legitimate choices, perhaps even preferable ones. Secularity in this sense arises when a purely self-sufficient form of human living becomes a viable option.17 O’Connor’s protagonists align with Taylor’s description of “buffered” individuals, for they uncritically live this secular social imaginary through worldviews oriented toward human ends divorced from a relationship with the divine. In “The Displaced Person,” the last story in O’Connor’s first collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955), the characters’ social imaginary exalts a particular definition of whiteness over both white Catholic Europeans and, much more obviously, AfricanAmericans.18 The story begins with the arrival of the Guizac family to a segregated, Southern farm, an arrival organized by the local Catholic priest, Father Flynn. The Guizacs are a Polish refugee family, displaced from their home due to the turmoil and strife of the Second World War. “The Displaced Person” has its origin in the sad reality that many Europeans were indeed displaced after the war, and some made their way to America due to the Displaced Persons Act.19 These political events involved 17. Taylor, A Secular Age, 18–21, 84, 146, 171–72. 18. The subject of O’Connor and race has been a catalyst for much scholarly scrutiny, and I discuss it further in chapter 5. That said, for an overview of the issue, see Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015), 102–9. 19. For an overview of this history as it relates to O’Connor, see Stephen Schloesser, SJ, “Revelation in History: Displaced Persons, Léon Bloy, and Exegesis of the Commonplace,” in Revelation and Convergence: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, ed. Mark Bosco, SJ, and Brent Little (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 10–50.

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O’Connor personally, for her mother helped to resettle the Matysiaks, a displaced Polish family, on the O’Connor family farm, Andalusia, in 1953.20 As noted above, “The Displaced Person” depicts two conversions, Mrs. Shortley’s and Mrs. McIntyre’s. Both women display Taylor’s “buffered” selves in that neither of them seeks a divine justification for their behavior. Christianity is either dismissed or corrupted for their own ego. For instance, Mrs. Shortley regards the priest as a reminder that Europeans do not have as advanced a religion as Southern, Protestant Americans (295–96).21 But she also derisively regards religion in general as “essentially for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it” (294). Curiously, when she does turn to the Bible, it is to justify her paranoia that the efficient Mr. Guizac will replace both herself and her husband (300). Her own ego determines scripture’s meaning. Father Flynn’s actions disturb Mrs. Shortley’s faith in her provincial world, a world in which she sits as Mrs. McIntyre’s most important worker. She disdains the priest’s Catholic faith as an old religion, unchanged for a thousand years (297). Likewise, Mr. Guizac cannot be trusted as he stems from a primitive, European society (290). And if Mr. Guizac is the disruption of her everyday world, the priest is the mastermind, for Mrs. Shortly suspects that he is trying to convince Mrs. McIntyre to hire more Polish refugees (300). When Mrs. Shortley overhears Mrs. McIntyre tell the priest that she will fire the Shortleys, since Mr. Guizac is far more productive, Mrs. Shortley promptly decides to leave the farm with her husband and children. But outside on the road, she is seized by a stroke and, astonished, realizes that she is now “displaced in the world from all that belonged to her.” She wonders wordlessly what 20. Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 239–46. 21. All references to O’Connor’s short stories are from: Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works (New York: The Library of America, 1988).

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her children ask aloud in the car: What is their destination? Only now, with her previous faith destroyed, does Mrs. Shortley begin “to contemplate for the first time the tremendous frontiers of her true country,” one that lies beyond this physical world (305).22 However, although Mrs. McIntyre initially fires the Shortleys to retain Mr. Guizac, such utilitarian logic becomes secondary next to a cultural faith in her white supremacy. Like Mrs. Shortley, Mrs. McIntyre’s primary way of imagining and structuring the world stems from a society ordered according to the systematic racism entrenched by Jim Crow laws. After the Shortleys leave, Mrs. McIntyre discovers to her horror that Mr. Guizac has arranged an interracial marriage between his teenage Polish cousin and the young African-American farmhand, Sulk; consequently, she now considers Mr. Guizac to be a “monster.” The text is clear: her main objection is that the marriage muddles the racial order. If Sulk marries a white woman, it will “excite him,” or in other words, it will make him think he is better than his rank in the segregated South (313–14). Although she claims she is “practical” to the priest, she paradoxically insists to Mr. Guizac that she can run the farm without him, but not without her African-American workers, despite the fact that Mr. Guizac is more efficient. As she insists to the priest, Mr. Guizac “doesn’t fit in” (316). It is not simply that Mr. Guizac tries to blur the boundary separating black from white; it is also that he threatens Mrs. Shortley’s understanding of whiteness. Alan Taylor argues that Mrs. McIntyre’s “sudden necessity” for her Black farmworkers “stems from the turbulence the immigrant has begun to initiate in the color line, as his white-but-not-white body destabilizes a putatively monolithic whiteness and threatens an erosion of 22. On this image of the “true country,” see O’Connor’s letter from January 17, 1956 in The Habit of Being, 132. Christopher Wachal points out that O’Connor in “The Displaced Person” rewrites what it means to be a Southern writer, for O’Connor redraws the lines of identity and connects the South to the world. See Christopher Wachal, “Tremendous Frontiers—Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Writer’s ‘True Country,’” Renascence 67, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 219–21.

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color-based methods of identity formation.”23 Before Mr. Guizac, Mrs. McIntyre held her whiteness uncritically, particularly as a white, Southern, culturally Protestant landowner. (For a further discussion of O’Connor and race, see chapter 5.) As with Mrs. Shortley, the priest also disrupts Mrs. McIntyre’s previous faith. She is annoyed not only with his frequent habit of talking about Catholic doctrines, but also with his fascination at the beauty of a wandering peacock, a beauty as disposable as the displaced Mr. Guizac. After all, what does beauty produce economically? And just as the peacock and Mr. Guizac are disposable, so, as she exclaims in a moment of frustration, “Christ was just another D. P.” (320). This analogical association of Mr. Guizac and the peacock with Christ demonstrates the blindness of Mrs. McIntyre to the presence of grace on her farm.24 She believes she can toss both aside, as well as Christ, when they interrupt the social and economic fabric of her farm. Over the priest’s protests, she sees no necessity to follow a higher divine authority. Mrs. McIntyre is not alone in her desire to reestablish the status quo; at the story’s climax, Mr. Guizac is murdered under the guise of a tractor accident. As he attempts to fix a tractor while lying underneath it, Mrs. McIntyre and her workers know that it is about to roll over him due to the actions of Mr. Shortly. Yet no one warns Mr. Guizac in an act of silent complicity. O’Connor describes how the eyes of Mr. Shortly, Sulk, and Mrs. McIntyre “come together in one look that froze them in collusion forever” (325–26). Randy Boyagoda remarks that “the white southern overseer, the white southern lady, and the black southern worker abandon whatever internal differences they may have and ‘come together,’ arrayed against the foreign presence who, in his Old 23. Alan C. Taylor, “Redrawing the Color Line in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person’,” The Mississippi Quarterly 65, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 78. 24. Paul Elie makes an interesting connection between O’Connor’s depiction of Mr. Guizac and the writings and life of Dorothy Day: see The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 225.

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World ways, has been upsetting the balances on their farm.”25 The rural Southerners unite to expel the immigrant who challenges their faith in their own society. Yet, for Mrs. McIntyre, life cannot revert to the past. When the priest arrives on the scene to administer Last Rites to Mr. Guizac, Mrs. McIntyre feels as if she is “in some foreign country” (326). She has become displaced herself, like Mrs. Shortley and Mr. Guizac, but her displacement occurs ironically on her own farm. Her sense of self has crumbled, and the closing pages find her abandoned on a dysfunctional farm, health failing, with only the priest as a reoccurring visitor: “He came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the Church” (327). While O’Connor leaves Mrs. McIntyre’s life beyond the last sentence unclear, at the very least, Mrs. McIntyre’s previous faith has been dismantled through a sacramental vision that has reoriented her imagination. In this, O’Connor casts Catholic faith as firm—a point of reference by which to judge disenchanted modernity. Catholic faith thereby assumes a degree of certainty, for it is not questioned. Certain critics take O’Connor to task for judging Mrs. McIntyre, but then not casting this same critical eye on the institutional failings of Catholicism. For example, Sarah Gordon argues that in the case of a character like Mrs. McIntyre, “what matters most to O’Connor appears to be the bringing of the soul to the one true Church”; Catholicism itself escapes judgment.26 Indeed, the depiction of grace in the story implies an objective truth by which to discern the idolatry of Mrs. McIntyre’s previous faith in her social imaginary. Further, Mrs. McIntyre’s vision of her true country aligns with the priest’s performance of the sacramental rite; 25. Randy Boyagoda, “A Patriotic Deus ex Machina in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person,’” Southern Literary Journal 43, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 71. 26. Sarah Gordon, Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000), 188.

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both make explicit the grace that O’Connor believed present in her Christ-haunted South. Like “The Displaced Person,” “The Enduring Chill,” included in the posthumously published Everything that Rises Must Converge (1965), also features a protagonist with an idolatrous faith. But Asbury in “The Enduring Chill” exemplifies Taylor’s modern, buffered self even more explicitly than Mrs. Shortley or Mrs. McIntyre, for he seeks to live according to his own definition of meaning. Asbury’s illusionary faith in his artistic idealism distorts his perception of himself and others. As John Desmond points out, “to art he has attributed the power of salvation through human effort alone, a power invested in human imagination capable of transforming reality and the self.”27 Asbury’s dreams, however, are thwarted by reality; his failure as an artist and his physical health force him to leave New York City and return to his family’s farm in the South. (I count myself among the many readers who see echoes of O’Connor’s own homecoming due to her lupus.)28 Asbury, convinced that he will die from his mysterious illness, bears no desire to reconcile with his mother (or his antagonistic sister for that matter). He writes a final letter for his mother to read after his death, a long diatribe, in which he accuses her of killing his imagination and talent over the course of his childhood. He expects his letter to give his mother “an enduring chill” so that she can “see herself as she [is]” (554–55), an ironic bit of foreshadowing for Asbury’s own journey. But Asbury provokes his mother even prior to his death. He makes two demands: first, that the local doctor, the kindly Dr. Block, not treat him; and second, that his mother find him a priest, preferably a Jesuit, not out of any desire for conversion, but because he believes it will 27. Desmond, Risen Sons, 75. 28. For examples of such readings, as well as an overview of O’Connor’s lupus-induced return to Georgia, see Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, 190–93; and Gooch, Flannery, 189–95.

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offer the only possible meaningful conversation during his last days—his family is not worth his dwindling time. Indeed, his approach to death displays his idolatrous faith in his artistic idealism: “He had failed his god, Art, but he had been a faithful servant and Art was sending him Death. He had seen this from the first with a kind of mystical clarity” (563–64). Asbury’s faith in his conception of art has become his exclusive source of meaning, even regarding his anticipated demise. Ruthann Knechel Johansen observes that “death is an abstraction for Asbury,” and his “refusal of personal attention suggests the extent to which he has merged his personality with idealizations or collectivities.”29 Desmond observes that Asbury is O’Connor’s response to Stephen Daedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, specifically a critique of the belief that “the artist can create the world in his own image, transfigure it solely by human imagination, and thereby become godlike in his creative actions.”30 Asbury’s distortion of reality is revealed in multiple ways, perhaps most noticeably in his attempts to bond with the AfricanAmerican farm workers, Randall and Morgan. The year before, he smoked in the milking barn with them, but this moment of community was short-lived as it ruined the day’s milk. His hopes of repeating his fleeting triumph are dashed when the workers act mystified by his claims to be on the verge of death. For readers today, Randall and Morgan’s dialogue disturbingly clunks on the ear like racial stereotypes, similar to Sulk’s and Astor’s language in “The Displaced Person.” That said, O’Connor intends here to demonstrate Asbury’s disconnection from others, encased in his quixotism.31

29. Ruthann Knechel Johansen, “Simone Weil’s Ethic of the Other: Explicating Fictions through Fiction, or Looking through the Wrong End of the Telescope,” CrossCurrents 60, no.1 (March 2010): 75. 30. Desmond, Risen Sons, 75–76. 31. Cf. Gooch, Flannery, 243.

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Asbury’s request for a priest further demonstrates his illusionary idealism. He hopes for an intellectual, sacerdotal sparringpartner based on his brief encounter with a Jesuit in New York City. While he nervously waits for the priest’s arrival in his bedroom, he glances “irritably up at the ceiling where the bird with the icicle in its beak [seems] poised and waiting too” (564). This water stain has plagued him since childhood as if the bird is “about to descend mysteriously and set the icicle on his head” (555–56). These hints of the Holy Spirit’s presence indicate a grace unrecognized by Asbury due to a false faith that distorts his vision. But instead of an erudite priest, elderly and cantankerous Father Finn arrives, and what follows is one of the most humorous scenes in O’Connor’s fiction. When Asbury asks him about his opinion on James Joyce, the priest dismisses that question with a quick, “I haven’t met him” (565). He then launches into a series of questions and answers that mirror the format of the Baltimore Catechism, which O’Connor would have memorized as a child.32 “Who made you?” the priest asked in a martial tone. “Different people believe different things about that,” Asbury said. “God made you,” the priest said shortly. “Who is God?” “God is an idea created by man,” Asbury said, feeling that he was getting into stride, that two could play at this. “God is a spirit infinitely perfect,” the priest said. “You are a very ignorant boy. Why did God make you?” (566)

Toward the end, the priest asks Asbury if he knows the Holy Ghost; when Asbury responds that this “is the last thing I’m looking for,” the priest retorts, “And He may be the last thing you get.” But then the priest adds salt to the wound with an admonishment: the Holy Spirit will not come to Asbury until he sees himself truthfully, that is, as “a lazy ignorant conceited youth!” (567). Like “The Displaced Person,” the priest here represents a firm 32. Gooch, Flannery, 32–33.

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faith, one that reveals an objective truth that eludes Asbury’s distorted vision. After the priest leaves, Asbury sits in bed “with large childish shocked eyes” (567), but the priest’s visit, although pivotal, is not the breaking point. In the final pages, Dr. Block informs Asbury that he is not dying, but merely suffering from undulant fever, probably the result of drinking untreated milk. By O’Connor’s standards, this climax is not particularly violent; nonetheless, grace breaks Asbury’s final illusions about his idolatrous faith in his artistic idealism. Unable to speak, something inside Asbury’s eyes seems to struggle “feebly” at this news (571–72). It is only now that his modern worldview has collapsed that he is open to grace: “The old life in him was exhausted. He awaited the coming of the new.” The Holy Spirit then makes its long-anticipated descent: “The fierce bird which through the years of his childhood and the days of his illness had been poised over his head, waiting mysteriously, appeared all at once to be in motion. . . . [T]he Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.” (572) In a letter, O’Connor identifies Asbury’s enduring chill as humility.33 With his corrected vision, his pride crumbles before the hardness of grace, and Asbury realizes “that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror” (572). In “The Displaced Person” and “The Enduring Chill,” a priest upsets the protagonist’s faith in their disenchanted sources of meaning. Catholic faith serves as a corrective to some prior ideology shaped by Western modernity. Likewise, in the next three chapters, I will discuss how Catholic faith plays out in an identical trajectory in novels by Spark, Greene, and, again, O’Connor. What emerges is a pattern in this era of Catholic fiction: these novels sharply contrast the world of Catholicism or traditional Christianity and the modern, secular world. Grace in each novel disrupts a character’s prior faith, and their subsequent conversion heralds a story’s narrative resolution. 33. O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 261.

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In other words, O’Connor’s short stories, like the late modern Catholic fiction of subsequent chapters, do not deal with a believer’s crisis of faith from the inside. Of course, even during O’Connor’s generation, one finds stories that depict an individual Catholic’s struggles with faith. For example, J. F. Powers’s short story “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does” (1943) depicts a priest, Father Didymus, who suffers from uncertainties about his faith. But one notes that, again, Catholic faith itself is not the problem; instead, Father Didymus stresses over his salvation, aware that his outwardly pious actions are often performed out of pride. Or to offer another example: Powers’s novel Morte d’Urban (1962) satirizes a priest’s pride and ambition, but here, as in many pre-1965 stories, Catholic doctrines and traditions are spared critique. Thus, despite their differences, O’Connor is not so different from Powers in this sense. The Catholic faith provides a standard by which to judge modern culture. Several decades later, however, the reader encounters very different depictions of faith. Contemporary Fiction’s Postmodern Context Below, I turn to consider three contemporary authors, all of whom acknowledge O’Connor as an influence. In these stories, a character’s fundamental faith still conditions how she or he imagines the world, but faith of any kind—religious or secular— is marked by great uncertainty. Yet although Christian faith does not provide certainty, it offers a measure of hope and fragile consolation. The possibility for religious belief is not rejected, even if there is an awareness that one cannot find a firm foothold upon which to stand. Doubtlessly, part of these depictions of faith are shaped by contemporary authors’ cultural situation. In A Secular Age, Taylor describes those who are “cross-pressured,” that is, those who seek an alternate to the sharp dichotomy of traditional, religious orthodoxy and Western, secular nonbelief.34 Likewise, 34. Taylor, A Secular Age, 302.

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the faith of many characters in contemporary Catholic fiction is “cross-pressured.” If O’Connor’s stories evince a hard sacramentality that breaks in upon the modern ego, the following short stories depict faith as living inevitably with ambiguity. Contemporary American Catholic fiction bears the mark of a very different milieu than fiction from six or so decades ago. Contemporary writers do not work out of the same stances of marginalization that conditioned their literary forebearers. The British authors Greene, Waugh, and Spark knew that their faith was a small minority of the general British population and that, as such, would be treated with great suspicion. O’Connor, meanwhile, wrote as a threefold minority: an American writer who was Catholic, Southern, and a woman. Further, her early childhood was marked by Catholic parochial schools, which as Elie remarks, “made separateness a source of unity and pride, instilling in young Catholics the belief that their way of life was separate from, and superior to, the Protestant one.”35 In addition, contemporary Catholic culture of America is no longer the pre-1960s immigrant Church. True, the American Church is still very much an immigrant Church, but the increasing number of believers with Asian and Latin American heritages render it a different ecclesial community than O’Connor would have encountered as a child in the 1920s and 1930s. Catholics of O’Connor’s generation were formed within a thick, pre–Vatican II culture that has largely disappeared, not only because of liturgical and theological consequences of the Council, but also because of the integration (and concomitant suburbanization) of white Catholics into the broader economic and political fabric. American Catholic historian Leslie Woodcock Tentler notes that while the decrease in Church attendance in the 1960s is often blamed on the Council, the reality is probably much more complicated. Catholics, for example, stopped being a “subculture” of American society—the election 35. Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, 22. For an overview of O’Connor’s childhood, see also O’Donnell, Flannery O’Connor, 11–19.

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of John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic president is emblematic of this development. Even before the Council, white Catholics’ increasing presence in the suburbs of the 1950s exposed more of them to mainstream, Protestant-inflected culture, and, simultaneously, white Catholics began attending public schools in higher numbers than before. Of course, this was also the era in which the Civil Rights Movement’s call for greater integration of schools and neighborhoods challenged Eurocentric, Catholic ethnic enclaves. Finally, while the backlash against 1968’s Humanae Vitae had a lasting impact on the American Church, this backlash occurred within the larger cultural shift concerning sexuality and authority during the Vietnam war era.36 Often, Western culture post-1970 is described as “postmodern,” a term admittedly controversial. The limitations of this investigation prevent a detailed discussion of whether postmodernity even exists, whether it has ended, or whether we, in fact, live in a hypermodernity.37 Taylor, meanwhile, questions the very logic of much postmodern critical theory: if postmodern thought is supposed to reject all narratives of totality, is this not also a hegemonic narrative in itself? “ONCE we were into grand stories,” runs Taylor’s parody of certain tendencies in postmodern thinking, “but NOW we have realized their emptiness and we proceed to the next stage.”38 For my context, the phrase “postmodern” is a loose descriptor based on various critical discourses. For David Tracy, postmodernity claims that “modernity and tradition alike are now 36. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, American Catholics: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 305–9. For a discussion that connects this historical development to the Catholic literary imagination, see Anita Gandolfo, Testing the Faith: The New Catholic Fiction in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 1–22. 37. Carl A. Raschke, for example, wonders if postmodernity ended with 2008’s Great Recession. See Postmodern Theology: A Biopic (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books/Wipf and Stock, 2017), 1. 38. Taylor, A Secular Age, 717; emphasis in the original.

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exposed as self-deceiving exercises attempting to ground what cannot be grounded: a secure foundation for all knowledge and life.”39 Postmodern thought deconstructs the modern, autonomous ego as an illusion. In other words, postmodernity rejects the modern belief that the autonomous individual can have itself as its primary foundation for meaning.40 (O’Connor would certainly agree with the latter.) As a theologian, Tracy, of course, departs from some currents in postmodern thought. For instance, he argues for a postmodern theology that does not jettison its faith in a transcendent reference, i.e., God, but does strive to let God be heard again, specifically, the hidden and revealed God of the cross.41 Out of these concerns, Tracy turns to the concept of the fragment (see chapter 1). As just noted, much of the rhetoric surrounding postmodernity is the suspicion of “grand narratives” that can explain not just all of reality but also the human person’s place therein. Gerard Mannion notes that this new historical era poses several challenges to Catholic ecclesiology. Without a grand narrative, there is an increase of “relativism” and “emotivism” amongst some, as well as the emergence of “moral fragmentation,” to use his phrase. Instead of a debate between what is morally good or evil, the individual determines what is “best” for themselves. This focus on the individual undermines the importance of community.42 Mannion is not alone in his concerns. The Protestant theologian Miroslav Volf likewise observes that suspicion of the grand narrative is a hallmark of postmodernity and describes the postmodern “social arrangement” as one in 39. David Tracy, On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 3. 40. David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 82–83; cf. Tracy, On Naming the Present, 15–16. 41. Tracy, On Naming the Present, 36–37, 43–44. 42. Gerard Mannion, Ecclesiology and Postmodernity: Questions for the Church in Our Time (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), 4, 17–18.

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which people “flee both universal values and particular identities and seek refuge from oppression in the radical autonomy of individuals.”43 These theological and philosophical descriptions of postmodernity resonate in interdisciplinary discussions of religion and literature. Postmodernity, Michael Patrick Murphy observes, is characterized by a deconstruction of metanarratives and its rejection of any transcendent reference, but this reveals postmodernity’s lack of faith in language itself. He argues that “any cleavage between the theological imagination and postmodernity boils down to faith, which, in turn, is largely a matter of grammar. As Balthasar describes, faith is a vision and an imagination.”44 Despite this disparity between postmodernity and theology, Murphy argues for a robust engagement with postmodernity via an interdisciplinary theological aesthetics, which he believes can help recover an interdisciplinary “theology of language.”45 Murphy’s emphasis, via the thought of Balthasar, on the imagination’s cognitive dimensions resonates with my own characterization of faith in chapter 1.46 From the standpoint of literary criticism, John A. McClure observes that the works of many prominent American authors over the past few decades (including Toni Morrison, discussed in chapter 5 of this book) often feature characters who return to religiosity, but one that very much is impacted by Western secularity. This return is not to traditional, confessional forms of piety or doctrine, even if the return also bears the influence of orthodox religion. Instead, characters tend to intermingle the sacred and 43. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 20, cf. 105–10. 44. Michael Patrick Murphy, A Theology of Criticism: Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9. 45. Murphy, A Theology of Criticism, 156. 46. Murphy, A Theology of Criticism, 156–57.

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secular.47 Although this return is often marked by the portrayal of the supernatural, it also eschews belief in a judgmental God who demands unquestioning obedience; in fact, the text and its characters may even synthesize elements of various religious traditions.48 Although such stories depict “reenchantment,” this return “also must be seen as fraught with risk and uncertainty and these texts as emphasizing not only the false promises of secularism and religious fundamentalism but also the profound difficulties of any life, including that lived within the mysterious precincts of the spirit.”49 Amy Hungerford, meanwhile, observes that American literature over the past several decades has resisted certain trends in postmodern critical thinking. She argues that writers have frequently turned to various forms of literature to sustain a “belief without meaning,” which she clarifies may be “belief for its own sake, or belief without content, or belief where content is the least important aspect of religious thought and practice.”50 American literature then draws upon religious language to buttress the possibility of belief itself (even one without a specific doctrinal content) to resist a postmodern pluralism that would negate the relevance of literature, particularly literature’s implicit faith that language can speak with meaning. She argues against many critical theorists’ descriptions of postmodernism with her insistence that “sincerity overshadows irony as a literary mode when the ambiguities of language are imagined as being religiously empowered. Writers in this mode see fracture and materialism not as ends in themselves but as the conditions for transcendence.”51 47. John A. McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 3–4. 48. McClure, Partial Faiths, 16–19. 49. McClure, Partial Faiths, 7. 50. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), xiii-xiv. 51. Hungerford, Postmodern Belief, xix.

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Although the term “postmodern” can be controversial, my use of it intends to capture the way contemporary Catholic fiction emerges out of a cultural milieu that is more diverse and fragmented than before. O’Connor, Spark, and Greene (in the latter pair’s earlier novels) are predominantly confronting one narrative of Western secularity in their fiction. There is an ideological dichotomy at work—disenchantment versus the possibility of reenchantment through a Catholic sacramental vision of reality. One notes a clear “either/or” logic that shapes this fiction—either one assumes or accepts the underlying anthropology of modernity and the reduction of reality to pure positivism, or one turns to Christian (and often Catholic) faith as a means to reassert not only the superiority of belief in the Divine, but also divine presence through grace. O’Connor’s short stories discussed above certainly demonstrate this pattern. But increasingly after the 1970s, Catholic authors write with an awareness of cultural fragmentation in which there are multiple narratives of truth, multiple religious traditions to consider, multiple possibilities to dialogue with various spiritual or scientific sources of meaning. Consequently, the following short stories portray faith with much less confidence than O’Connor’s fiction does; it is no longer the stable, firm source by which to evaluate the wider cultural milieu. Here, I would remind the reader of Wolfe’s argument that contemporary Catholic writers are more likely to whisper to their readers than to thrust a sacramental worldview upon them by an O’Connor-esque “shout.” Ross Labrie’s 1997 description of American Catholic fiction makes a similar, and still relevant, observation on this development in Catholic fiction: More than ever, recent Catholic writing reflects the place of Catholics who no longer perceive themselves in a dominantly Protestant culture but rather in a thoroughly secular culture that is dismissive toward religion in general. For this reason the salient atmosphere of recent Catholic writing has been that of the diaspora. In such an atmosphere the char-

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acters in novels by Catholic writers have generally had a new set of preoccupations. Less concerned about their transgressions from ecclesiastical practice and authority and considerably less focused on the church’s role in transforming society, they are instead self-conscious about their upbringing as Catholics and tenuous about their beliefs as adults in a society inclined to scoff at the persistence of religious belief. The effect has been, on the whole, to shift the drama of that belief ever more toward the psychological and ever less toward the spiritual.52

As Labrie points out, although American Catholic writers today are not the beleaguered minority out of which O’Connor, Greene, and Spark consciously wrote, this does not mean that the US is a more religious country than before (which certainly is not true with the decline of confessional identification). But it does mean that today’s intersection between the Catholic writer and American society runs along different fault lines. Indeed, these fault lines have become increasingly complicated, more so than Labrie’s description may indicate, for there is no longer a single Protestant majority or a dominant frame of Western secularity against which American Catholicism defines itself. American society is ever more spiritually and ideologically diverse. Taylor describes contemporary faith in the West as “fragilized,” in that religious believers are often haunted by, even attracted to, the beliefs of those who are more likely to identify as nonbelievers.53 At the same time, this fragilized faith runs a spectrum of beliefs and practices—a person may identify with a traditional religion, but not formally practice it; or one may practice regularly but openly disagree with certain dogmas or doctrines; or one may adapt spiritual beliefs and practices that are nontraditional, such as are often 52. Ross Labrie, The Catholic Imagination in American Literature (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 277. 53. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 57.

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lumped under the so-called “New Age” category. In addition, people are more inclined to synthesize various religious and spiritual sources. For, as Taylor points out, our contemporary situation is marked by an extension of the “buffered self” developed in modernity—the dominant belief that the individual determines their sources of meaning, not an external authority.54 Within this milieu, if contemporary Catholic fiction portrays a sacramental worldview, it is frequently a sacramentality quieter, subtler, and harder to perceive than that in previous fiction. This in turn nuances how faith is depicted. Transcendence, if present, is increasingly buried, perhaps even seemingly absent. (Occasional exceptions to this general observation will be made in latter chapters.) In this sense, Labrie’s comment that contemporary writers are more likely to depict psychological than spiritual factors remains true, perhaps increasingly so. Further, the characters, like readers, often have trouble discerning grace. They may desire religious faith, but their faith is fraught with ambiguity. In L’Heureux’s “The Expert on God” and Klay’s “Prayer in the Furnace,” the protagonists are priests who have doubts about their faith due to the reality of suffering. Meanwhile, Quade’s “Ordinary Sins” flips the script on O’Connor; instead of the priest’s effect on the protagonist, the story is about what the protagonist does for the priest. Despite these differences, the stories indicate a common pattern for postmodern Catholic fiction: the difficulty of perceiving grace renders faith fragile and uncertain, yet nonetheless a source of hope and endurance. Uncertain Faith: Grace in the Contemporary Short Stories of L’Heureux, Klay, and Quade Chronologically, John L’Heureux forms a bridge between O’Connor’s fiction and that of Klay and Quade. Raised prior to Vatican II, L’Heureux entered the Society of Jesus in 1954. Ordained a priest 54. Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 98–107.

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in 1966, he was subsequently laicized in 1971 to pursue his aspirations as a writer.55 Director of the creative writing program at Stanford University for several years, he has perhaps thus far been more influential as a teacher than a writer. Despite L’Heureux’s long career, serious scholarly evaluations of his work are scant, although several book reviews and interviews are available. In one interview, L’Heureux references the influence of O’Connor, Greene, Waugh, and Spark, or “the Catholic mafia” as he quips at one point.56 On O’Connor specifically, he praises her as “the finest short story writer of the twentieth century,”57 and there is something O’Connor-esque about the intersection of violence and grace in L’Heureux’s (very) short story “The Expert on God.” Yet, although L’Heureux’s stories are laced with theological resonances, they lack the hard depiction of sacramentality of O’Connor’s fiction. When L’Heureux passed away in April 2019, The New York Times obituary noted that his “fiction grappled with matters of morality, redemption and transcendence” and that critics noticed “his continued attempts, in his fiction, to redeem the unredeemable.”58 But this redemption is often buried and difficult for the 55. L’Heureux is clear in interviews that he did not leave the Jesuits because of any disillusionment with the order or doctrinal disputes with the Catholic Magisterium, but simply: “I left because it was too hard to be the kind of priest I wanted to be and it was too important to do any other way.” See John L’Heureux, Conversations with John L’Heureux, by Dikran Karagueuzian (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2010), 131. For a fascinating insight into L’Heureux’s time as a Jesuit, see his early book Picnic in Babylon: A Jesuit Priest’s Journal 1963–1967 (New York: Macmillan, 1967). L’Heureux makes multiple references in his journal entries to authors who form an important part of this investigation, such as Lynch, Rahner, O’Connor, Greene, and Spark. A particularly enjoyable passage is his opportunity to meet Spark over lunch in New York City (254–55). 56. L’Heureux, Conversations with John L’Heureux, 37–38. 57. L’Heureux, Conversations with John L’Heureux, 99. 58. Katharine Q. Seelye, “John L’Heureux, Whose Novels Wrestled With Faith, Dies at 84,” The New York Times, April 25, 2019. Last accessed on Feruary 10, 2022 at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/obituaries/john-lheureuxdead.html?searchResultPosition=1

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reader to discern. As discussed in chapter 3 with The Shrine at Altamira, the reader is often left wondering if evil and tragedy have the final word. In his review of Comedians, the collection that includes “The Expert on God,” Michiko Kakutani writes, “God is not dead in John L’Heureux’s stories; He’s simply absent, joking, or malicious.”59 If grace exists, this grace is indiscernible by the characters. Mark Bosco observes that since L’Heureux’s fiction is “more settled in the ambiguous terrain of late twentieth century postmodernity” than O’Connor’s work, it implies “that the best one can hope to do is to map out possible routes of meaning through the tragedy and chaos that constitutes so much of life.”60 Bosco’s remark captures the dilemma of the unnamed Jesuit priest in the ironically titled “The Expert on God.” In reality, the priest frequently questions central sacramental and Christological Catholic doctrines; these doubts, however, last “only for a while, and only one at a time.” Indeed, his doubts give no certainty either, for he eventually becomes skeptical about each. There is, however, one exception: “In the end he doubted the love of God, and that doubt did not pass” (32).61 He continues to do his work, but in isolation from other Jesuits and with seemingly unanswered prayers for faith and hope. The climax of the story takes place on Christmas Day, yet, with postmodern self-awareness, the narrator attempts to undercut that significance: “It was Christmas Day, not because 59. Michiko Kakutani, “Job-Like Ordeals and Episodes of Grace,” The New York Times, January 30, 1990. Last accessed on February 10, 2022 at https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/30/books/books-of-the-times-job-likeordeals-and-episodes-of-grace.html?searchResultPosition=2. Or, as John V. Long remarks, L’Heureux’s fiction explores “the presence of God in a world hostile to the sacred.” See “John L’Heureux,” in American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Fourth Series, ed. Patrick Meanor and Joseph McNicholas (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), 221. 60. Mark Bosco, SJ, “John L’Heureux: Charting a Post–Vatican II Literary Imagination,” Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 40, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 82. 61. All parenthetical citations to the story are from John L’Heureux, “The Expert on God,” in Comedians (New York: Viking, 1990), 31–35.

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Christmas is symbolic, but because that is when it happened” (32). On his drive back from Mass, the priest sees a car accident caused by the slippery winter roads. After much struggle, the priest works himself into an upturned car, where he discovers a teenage boy, slowly dying. He quickly anoints the boy with oil and absolves him of his sins. But nothing happens, neither additional help, nor the boy’s death; instead, the boy continues to suffer, while the priest holds him in his arms in silence. His attempts to turn to prayer are “foolish,” for, “What could he say at such a moment? What would God do at such a moment, if there were a God?” (34). When he challenges God to “say something,” he is predictably met with silence. Now “his doubts [become] certainty and he [says], ‘It doesn’t matter,’” but even at this moment, doubt does not endure for, “it [does] matter and he [knows] it.” Then, the boy turns, dying, but “trusting, like a lover” in the priest’s arms. The priest remains “faithless, unrepentant,” but he also “[gives] up his prayers,” and repeatedly “[whispers], fierce and burning, ‘I love you’” (35). It is, in some ways an image that calls to mind Michelangelo’s Pietà, in which Mary cradles the crucified Christ. Here, the doubt-filled priest manifests love amidst the teenage boy’s suffering and death. Yet the sacramental moment is held in tension with the fact that the priest remains “faithless, unrepentant” and also abandons prayer. Is this a sign of his despair in the face of life’s uncertainty and injustice? An abandonment of his belief in God? Or his acceptance that suffering is a mystery that he can never explain? Regardless, L’Heureux’s story invites the reader to perceive that grace quietly manifests itself in the priest’s embrace of the boy, even if the priest does not notice it. But this grace does not resolve suffering, nor does it challenge a modern ideology, nor does it imply a firm and stable Christian faith as in an O’Connor story. The strongest indication of grace is that the boy does not die alone; no doubt this is weak consolation for one who suffers. Just as Wolfe describes contemporary Catholic writers as whispering

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to their audiences, so the priest’s whispers to the dying boy provide only a glimmer of divine, kenotic love. Our last two stories come two decades after “The Expert on God,” Phil Klay’s “Prayer in the Furnace,” published in Redeployment (2014), and Kirstin Valdez Quade’s “Ordinary Sins,” from Night at the Fiestas (2015). In both, as in L’Heureux’s story, the reader must discern a divine presence amidst murky circumstances. “Prayer in the Furnace” is at the center of Redeployment (winner of the National Book Award in 2014), perhaps to situate it as the spiritual heart of the book. The story is told from the firstperson perspective of a Catholic priest serving as a military chaplain. However, the story eschews cheap sentiment or the theologically easy answer. As the protagonist says, “a prerequisite . . . to any serious consideration of religion” is that the believer must be “stripped of the illusion that faith, or prayer, or goodness, or decency, or the divine order of the cosmos, would allow the cup to pass” (154).62 Redeployment is a collection of short stories on the second Iraqi war, during which Klay served as a Marine, deployed as a public affairs officer in Iraq’s Anbar province in 2007–08.63 Given the newness of Klay’s work, serious scholarly consideration of his fiction is unsurprisingly still in its infancy. (The same observation applies to Quade.) But the interpreter does have some guidance from various interviews of the author. For example, Klay admits his debt to such Catholic literary luminaries as Chesterton, O’Connor, Mauriac, Greene, Waugh, Percy, and Endo.64 He 62. All parenthetical citations to the story are from Phil Klay, “Prayer in the Furnace,” in Redeployment (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 129–67. 63. Klay has written movingly about his own experiences with the Lutheran chaplain assigned to his base in the Anbar Province during his deployment. See “Tales of War and Redemption,” in Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), 187–203. 64. George P. Matysek Jr., “Catholic Faith Shapes Best-Selling War Author Phil Klay and His Writing,” Crux, July 13, 2020. Last Accessed on February 10,

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openly identifies himself as Catholic, but his preferred religiosity begins with doubt and moves “towards more and more difficult questions.”65 One of these questions perhaps is, what is the value of prayer in a combat zone if it will not prevent one from harm? In an interview with America magazine, Klay, referencing Augustine, remarks that prayer, both inside and outside of war, serves as a check upon “the things we crave in the temporal world.”66 As a different chaplain in Klay’s “After Action Report” instructs a soldier, prayer is not about avoiding harm or death, but about one’s relationship to God.67 “Prayer in the Furnace” similarly interrogates the value of prayer, not only unanswered individual prayers, but also communal prayers, such as the Mass or the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Consequently, the story’s setting of wartime suffering and sin obscures, but does not eliminate, the possibility of grace; faith is assailed but not dismissed. The story opens with the marine Rodriquez approaching Father Jeffrey after his best friend, Fujita, is killed. Father Jeffrey is the chaplain for Charlie Company, stationed in Ramadi at the height of violence. Rodriguez, clearly agitated, wants to talk to the chaplain, but under the guise of seeming to go to Confession, thereby implying that he wants a cover for his real purpose (130). After Fujita’s funeral, Rodriguez admits that Fujita was contact 2022 at https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2020/07/catholic-faith-shapesbest-selling-war-author-phil-klay-and-his-writing/; cf. Phil Klay, “In ‘Redeployment,’ Former Marine Explores the Challenges of Coming Home,” by Terry Gross, Fresh Air (NPR), March 20, 2015. Last accessed on February 10, 2022 at https://www.npr.org/2015/03/20/394280459/in-redeployment-former-marineexplores-the-challenges-of-coming-home. 65. Klay, “In ‘Redeployment,’ Former Marine Explores the Challenges of Coming Home.” See also his description of his return to faith in his essay “Man of War,” in Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), 204–27. 66. Phil Klay, “Souls at War: An Interview with the Iraq Veteran and Writer Phil Klay,” by Kevin Spinale, SJ, America, July 20–27, 2015, 24. 67. Phil Klay, “After Action Report,” in Redeployment (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 46.

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bait—for the enemy to reveal their position, a soldier strips naked atop a roof and screams insults in Arabic. Fujita, acting under orders, was killed with a single sniper bullet. Then, the conversation takes an unexpected turn when Rodriguez asks the chaplain if a person is sent to hell for killing others. At first, the chaplain thinks Rodriguez is suffering from guilt over his friend’s death, but Rodriguez insists, “I mean, not Marines. I mean, out in the city. . . . And, if other people did it, too, when you’re out there, and you don’t stop them. Do you go to hell, too?” (139). When the chaplain presses him, Rodriguez insists that he is not admitting to anything; curiously, he then points out that this is not a Confession, and that the chaplain is not bound by the confessional Seal. The chaplain, suspicious over the soldiers’ treatment of civilians, becomes increasingly frustrated and despondent when his concerns are brushed aside by military authorities. Later, during the Divine Office, the chaplain “stopped reading and tried to pray with my own words. I asked God to protect the battalion from further harm. I knew He would not. I asked Him to bring abuses to light. I knew He would not. I asked Him, finally, for grace.” When he turns back to the Divine Office, it is “with empty disengagement” (147). Still, in a journal entry, the chaplain wonders if the bleak situation, the closeness of hatred and death, does not in fact provide a clearer spiritual horizon. He writes, “I have this sense that this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialist home, where we’re too lazy to see our own faults. At least here, Rodriguez has the decency to worry about hell” (151). Or, as Nick Ripatrazone remarks, “What interests the priest about Rodriguez is that the soldier is at least willing to entertain the possibility that evil exists.”68 War throws into sharp relief the reality of sin and undercuts 68. Nick Ripatrazone, Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2020), 196.

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cheap assertations about faith. The chaplain muses that many people believe that “if God is real, there must be some consolation on earth as well. Some grace. Some evidence of mercy” (154). War, in contrast, reminds one that a faith that seeks certainty and safety fails in the face of violence. In a letter, the chaplain’s former Jesuit mentor, Father Connelly, reminds him that the soldiers’ individual transgressions are a consequence of sin, but not sin itself. Sin is isolation from others, and of course, from God. Interestingly, Connelly quotes the Catholic, French novelist Georges Bernanos that “divine love . . . passes vainly” over the sickness that is human loneliness (156). Connelly’s reference comes from Bernanos’s most famous novel, The Diary of a Country Priest (1936), in which the title character counsels a young woman, “The world of sin confronts the world of grace like the reflected picture of a landscape in the blackness of very still, deep waters. There is not only a communion of saints; there is also a communion of sinners.”69 Sin, while manifested in individual acts, is very much a communal affair. This theme of isolation and community, the paradox that sin displays both, gives an interpretative frame for the chaplain’s homily to the soldiers shortly after Connelly’s letter. He tells the gathered soldiers the story about an Iraqi father who comes to American soldiers for help with his injured daughter. The daughter’s life was saved by American doctors, but instead of feeling gratitude, the father harbors deep resentment, for he accuses America of creating the environment that produced the insurgency. The chaplain then upsets several Marines when he asks if any Marines would trade their lives for the father’s situation. But he continues, “All of us suffer. We can either feel isolated, and alone, and lash out at others, or we can realize we’re part of a community. A church. . . . But being Christian means we can never look at another human being and say, ‘He is not my 69. Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1983), 138–39.

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brother’” (159; italics in the original). He concludes with the exhortation that “we are part of a long tradition of suffering. We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie. . . . Do not suffer alone” (160). Although he is pleased with his homily, several Marines are not, and refuse to receive communion, thereby signifying a break in community—the very opposite of the chaplain’s intent. But the chaplain’s warning on the dangers of isolation is not necessarily isolation from one’s immediate community. After all, Charlie Company seems to become more united in its disregard for civilian casualties. But this disregard is just another form of isolation—one community isolated from another—that thereby creates a community of sinners (to use Bernanos’s phrase).70 Several months later, after the chaplain and the soldiers have returned to the States, Rodriguez visits him to deliver a suicide note from a deceased member of Charlie Company. After reading the note, the chaplain reminds Rodriguez that he did not want God’s forgiveness through the Sacrament of Reconciliation during his deployment in Iraq, but, the chaplain asks, does he feel differently now? Further, the chaplain, in his unspoken thoughts, is no longer bothered if Rodriguez does not identify as a believer, because “belief can come through process.” He then points at the cross around his collar and asks if Rodriguez knows this was a form of torture. His final words in the story are, “in this world, He only promises we don’t suffer alone”; in reply, Rodriguez spits and simply says, “Great” (167). Like “The Expert on God,” the reader is left with an interpretative choice regarding the presence (or not) of grace. When 70. In the NPR interview, Klay notes that he imagined the chaplain reflecting on the reality that prayers for safety will not be answered. Klay remarks, “And how do you reach across within the context of a very violent place, a very terrible place, within the sort of isolated, angry suffering that some of the people feel lost in? And how do you find a kind of crack to reach out and commune with another individual?” See Klay, “In ‘Redeployment,’ Former Marine Explores The Challenges Of Coming Home.”

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Rodriguez spits on the ground, is this a sign of disdain? Or is it posturing, and Rodriguez does indeed desire the sacrament? Perhaps one clue is that Rodriguez twice raises the idea of Confession earlier in the story. Rodriguez then may have wanted to confess before but could only bring himself to do so after he was outside the combat zone. If so, this is not the hard grace of O’Connor. It is wrapped with violence and suffering like an O’Connor story, but there is no sharp ideological turn, no protest against a prior belief in, say, the modern idol of the autonomous self. Faith, the chaplain implies, is often seen in action before conscious belief. Faith, to return to the pattern of chapter 1, guides one’s actions before it becomes articulated. Rodriguez’s conversion is not a dramatic one. But as the chaplain instructs, the only promise that the revelation of the Gospel makes, the only consolation of faith, is that we will not suffer alone. This is a fragile faith that nonetheless clings to hope. Like Klay’s collection, Quade’s Night at the Fiestas received much critical acclaim upon its publication, and, to the author’s surprise, also attracted attention in the Catholic media. Issues of faith are woven throughout Quade’s stories, but she notes in an interview that “I’m still figuring out what I think and I believe. So I don’t always feel like I’m the best person to actually talk about it.”71 Yet, she is drawn to Catholic themes, and Catholicism’s paradoxes fuel her stories, tensions “between selflessness and ego, between belief and doubt, between the human and the divine, the transcendent and the mundane, between the individual and the massive edifice of the Church, between humility and power, violence and love.”72 In Fiestas, Catholic symbols and characters 71. Jenny Shank, “Investigating Mystery: The Fictional Journeys of Kirstin Valdez Quade,” America, January 22, 2018, 46. 72. Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Kirstin Valdez Quade on Medieval Saints and Sisters,” by Willing Davidson, The New Yorker, July 24, 2017. Last accessed on February 10, 2022 at https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-kirstin-valdez-quade-2017–07–31.

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emerge organically; the stories are set in New Mexico, a setting based on the author’s upbringing, and often depict communities mixed with indigenous peoples, immigrants, and descendants of the original Spanish settlers. While Quade’s father was an atheist, her great-grandmother’s and grandmother’s Catholic religiosity meant that she lived “between absolutes” during her childhood. Because of her family lineage, she still identifies herself as a Catholic, but this identity is fraught with ambivalence: as she describes, “there are a lot of ways in which I feel that it’s a pretty inhospitable religion for me. I think that’s another tension that I keep returning to. What does it mean for me to love this religion that I don’t always feel wants me?”73 Finally, Quade’s literary formation is aligned with other Catholic authors’ in this study. She studied with L’Heureux at Stanford University, and her fiction often contains characters who, like L’Heureux, struggle with their Catholic faith.74 Further, reviewers have noticed the influence of O’Connor. When asked about the comparison, Quade remarked how O’Connor “liked to write about ‘freaks and folks,’ and she gives them deep inner and spiritual lives, and allows them to achieve grace.”75 “Ordinary Sins,” however, deals not with the grotesque, but with the mundane location of a parish office; the story’s setting harmonizes with its gentle, muted sacramentalism. A parish office is a place, where, Quade observes, great issues of life and faith are discussed, but one that is also an everyday workplace.76 73. Shank, “Investigating Mystery,” 44. 74. To listen to Quade discuss the influence of L’Heureux on her work, see Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Kirstin Valdez Quade Reads John L’Heureux,” by Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker, July 1, 2019. Last accessed on February 10, 2022 at https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/kirstin-valdez-quade-reads-johnlheureux. 75. Kirstin Valdez Quade. “‘Writing into Uncertainty’: An Interview with Kirstin Valdez Quade,” by Dominic Preziosi, Commonweal, May 7, 2015. Last accessed on February 10, 2022 at https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/interview-kirstin-valdez-quade. 76. Quade, “‘Writing Into Uncertainty’: An Interview with Kirstin Valdez Quade.”

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Crystal, unmarried and pregnant with twins, works as a receptionist at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows. The kindly Father Paul serves as the pastor, assisted recently by Father Leon, a sterner, more traditional priest from Nigeria. Crystal’s office colleague is the self-righteous, emotionally abusive Collette, but even without Collette’s insults, Crystal feels troubled over her pregnancy, not because she regards her actions as sinful, but because she doubts her readiness to be a mother. For example, the images from the last ultrasound of her twins appear “terrifying and unreal” (200).77 Crystal is the opposite of an O’Connor protagonist. In O’Connor’s fiction, the trajectory is from a character’s certainty about themselves to uncertainty, whereas Crystal’s journey begins with self-doubt. Further, unlike O’Connor’s prideful characters, Crystal possesses an awareness of her faults. Over the previous weekend, she had another hook-up with a stranger, and felt “for the first time in seven months, unburdened” (199). But the next day she worries about whether she has put the babies in harm’s way. Still, Crystal tries to dismiss the episode as “nothing more than a last hurrah” (200). But it nags her, and she marvels at how “her subconscious [tallies], [dismantles], and [blends] together her sins, molding them all into a tidy and disturbing little narrative as persistent and irksome as pine sap” (199). This curious description indicates that Crystal flattens out her sins, so that all of them are of the same importance, yet these sins seem to stick like “pine sap” despite her efforts to dismiss them. She may not be laden with guilt like a stereotypical Catholic, but her deeds trouble her. Crystal confronts the reality of her pregnancy in conjunction with her relationship to Father Paul. She is grateful for Father Paul’s support, but his demeanor and piety often irritate her. Crystal is “enraged” when Father Paul gives her a Santo Niño 77. All parenthetical citations to the story are from Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Ordinary Sins,” in Night at the Fiestas: Stories (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015), 198–221.

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prayer card, and she throws it away in anger (209). Her relationship to Father Paul demonstrates a search for a source of stability in her life. He, unlike her hook-ups, does not abandon her. (One notes that Crystal’s father is absent.) And even though Father Paul confesses his faults openly, whatever sins he admits “[are] so vanilla that you almost [have] to wonder whether he committed them just to have something to talk about on Sundays.” Even Father Paul’s struggles with his alcoholism, and his many years of sobriety, have been “wrung of any possible drama by how thoroughly and publicly he [has] examined them” (203). As the story progresses, Crystal discovers how much she wants to believe in the kindness of Father Paul, as if her faith in human goodness requires regarding Father Paul as a near saint. Father Paul’s sincerity both attracts and repels her. When she goes to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation, at Father Paul’s encouragement, her experience is ambivalent. She is surprised that she had ever believed that sex was simply ordinary: “The sudden sense of her own remorse had made her words waver, and she was overcome by the vastness of her insult to God.” But her contrition is cut short when Father Paul falls back into the cliché that one can hate the sin but love the sinner: “Crystal must have been seeking punishment, humiliation, shame. She must have been trying to hold tight to her guilt or to shock him out of his infuriating tenderness, because what else could explain what came out of her mouth next?” She then discloses that her hook-up also involved anal sex, as if to disturb Father Paul’s pious stereotypes (207). Consequently, Crystal felt “ambushed and stupid” for weeks after the Confession, a combination of guilt and protestation (208). She seems to resist any narrative that reduces her to a simplistic tale of conversion—the “bad” girl turned “good” through grace. While in the rectory, Crystal hears Father Paul calling for her help from his bedroom. Father Paul then requests that she secretly dispose of a suitcase full of empty vodka bottles. He compounds the guilt of his relapse with possible slander, for he claims that his bishop sent Father Leon to the parish to spy on

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him, and, more bizarrely yet, he speculates that perhaps he has not drunk the vodka; perhaps Father Leon hid the empty bottles where Father Paul would find them. Taken aback, Crystal wonders if he is demonstrating a shared sinfulness, as if to declare his ordinary sins more significant than her own. Yet this faith in Father Paul’s kindness—one that had served as a source of stability—is tested when Father Paul turns upon her. He confirms her suspicion—the stern Father Leon wishes to fire her because of her unwed pregnancy. Yet, “the real surprise . . . was that Father Paul wanted to hurt her. . . . She’d thought she could disdain Father Paul’s kindness, and that it would somehow remain intact: unconditional, holy, and inhuman. Astonishing that she had been capable of such faith” (217). Crystal’s faith in Father Paul is not simply trust; it is also intertwined with her search for a foundation of basic human decency, a foothold amidst the upheaval brought by her pregnancy. Further, Father Paul’s attempts to claim Crystal’s loyalty only increase her disdain. As they stare at each other, Crystal realizes that she “[doesn’t] know the first thing about this man” (217–18). Her faith in Father Paul’s goodness is, if not false, at least naïve. After Father Paul abruptly apologizes, she tells him—at his request—that she forgives him, although “her voice [is] cold.” Father Paul, referencing the empty vodka bottles, then remarks, “Forgiveness is a drug, too. Believe me. You can forgive and forgive until you’re high on it and you can’t stop. It’ll numb you as much as any of that stuff” (218). In other words, excessive forgiveness can be an addiction like alcohol, an addiction that cheapens relationships. It is an authentic relationship that Father Paul craves from Crystal, not superficial forgiveness. Even though he believes that she does not like him, he nonetheless asks her to hold him. She sits next to him, somewhat neutrally for she does not reach out, and the priest leans his head against her. To her surprise, she does not feel revulsion at his touch. Fascinatingly, at this point, “the babies stirred.” If the dynamic of Confession had earlier inverted and Father Paul

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revealed his “ordinary sins” to her, so now, the dynamic flips again. He does not speak for the rest of the story; instead, she articulates a deeper, more authentic confession than was possible during the sacramental ritual. Her shame at the past weekend comes to her mind, and she wonders at her lack of concern for the twins’ safety. In addition, she puzzles over why she has not seriously reflected on their names. Then, her thoughts return to the image of the Santo Niño, and she fantasizes about the Christchild leading her away from her mistake over the weekend, instead of a taxi (219). Yet this thought prompts Crystal to realize Father Paul’s intention in giving her the Santo Niño card. It was not an illusion that she was a better person than she regarded herself; instead, his request for her to pray was to protect the children from her mistakes. Surprisingly, this insight does not make Crystal reject Father Paul. Now that she has seen a greater depth of his sinfulness, she becomes more honest about her own failings. His confession triggers a better confession from her. Referring to the babies, she admits, “I don’t even talk to them” (219). Father Paul’s weakness becomes a moment of insight about herself. Their act of sharing their own brokenness with each other—although unintentional—allows a moment of authenticity in their relationship. Similar to Klay’s “Prayer in the Furnace,” there is an intersection between sin and isolation: Father Paul’s secret alcoholism isolates him from his parish and Crystal’s constant hook-ups isolate her from genuine relationships. Only when Crystal sees Father Paul’s vulnerability does she become more authentic with him and herself. This moment of authenticity also shifts her faith in herself as an expectant mother. After Father Paul issues “a deep, shuddering breath, like a child calming himself after a long cry,” there is an O’Connor-esque image of sunlight that signifies a moment of insight: “The sun filtered through the lace curtains above their heads. The window’s reflection was a mottled square of light on the glass of the framed poster [a faded poster of the Pietà],

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obscuring the image.” Crystal realizes that she is an archetype in Father Paul’s imagination, like Mary Magdalene, or the Virgin Mary. Instead of resentment, ironically “the relief was astonishing, that Crystal could be the kind of person who might meet another person’s need” (220). A priest might sometimes console in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but she now comforts the priest in an image, as in L’Heureux’s story, that recalls the Pietà. Crystal’s moment of conversion is her realization that she is capable of authentic relationships. As she comforts the childlike Father Paul, “she [watches] the square of light in the glass. She [breaths], and Father Paul [breaths], and she [feels] the babies shift, navigating the tight space inside her.” There is a quiet grace in this alignment of Crystal’s most important relationships in the story. It is a grace that will not be seen by an unimaginative Father Leon if he discovers them sitting next to each other. He would misplace her guilt’s true nature, for this is a guilt she is unable to “deny or put into words” (220). This guilt goes beyond sexual acts; Crystal’s sin is lodged deeper in her sense of self. Her grace-filled insight, then, is both like and unlike that of O’Connor. On one hand, the moments of grace for O’Connor’s characters are when the characters are stripped of their illusions. This certainly describes Crystal’s illusions about Father Paul’s perfection or about herself, but there is also a consolation that O’Connor’s hard sacramental vision often lacks, at least as it pertains to the present, earthly life. When she continues to comfort Father Paul, Crystal says, “You’re fine . . . but she [is] picturing her babies. Sheer skin, warm tangled limbs, tiny blue beating hearts” (221). Through her ministrations to Father Paul, she discovers a previously unknown dimension of herself—she can be a mother to her twins. Her search for a faith—a foundation for meaning and values in her life—leads her to a newfound faith in herself. Above, I discussed the idea that O’Connor’s characters have a particularly modern faith, in Taylor’s sense of secular modernity, that is, a faith that the autonomous individual can construct

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their own ordering of the world, their own values and meaning, within a disenchanted worldview. Characters’ faith is disrupted in part through the interference of a priest. This is O’Connor’s shout to her audience, a shout that calls her readers to abandon their modern faith and recognize the need for divine revelation. O’Connor’s stories match Tilley’s argument that one’s faith is determined by her or his relationship to the god or gods in one’s life, that is, those energizing sources of meaning out of which action springs. In O’Connor’s short stories, the gods of Western modernity, the gods of the autonomous ego, are deconstructed through the action of grace. This clear pattern of divine disruption will be seen again in chapter 5 with the discussion of her novel, The Violent Bear It Away. But what can we say about the pattern of faith in contemporary short stories? L’Heureux’s “The Expert on God,” Klay’s “The Prayer in the Furnace,” and Quade’s “Ordinary Sins” depict grace as a quiet presence. The stories’ sacramentality is thereby hard to discern. This observation aligns with Wolfe’s contention above that more recent Catholic authors tend to whisper to their readers. This whisper occurs through characters who isolate themselves from others. L’Heureux’s doubting Jesuit stays apart from other Jesuits; Rodriguez and his fellow soldiers remain detached from the suffering of ordinary Iraqi civilians because of their constant brush with death; Quade’s Father Paul hides his addiction, while Crystal seems to both desire and reject authentic relationships. The greater problem is not the individual actions, but a flawed way of imagining one’s relationships that is embodied in choice and act. These stories do not center on a grand ideological struggle—none of O’Connor’s challenge to modernity in which a character’s conversion signals that the grace of Christian faith serves as a needed corrective to disenchantment. Instead, faith is not firm and solid in these stories, but shifting and fragile. If this is true, how then should the theologically-minded reader understand the action of grace amidst such ambiguity? One possible theological hermeneutic is Karl Rahner’s argument

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that the Incarnation revealed nature and grace as inescapably intertwined. There is no such thing as pure grace (in terms of its presence in the created world) or pure nature. Further, each person is an insolvable mystery as a being created in the image of Divine Mystery. Our acceptance of grace, then, occurs when we accept our transcendental orientation toward this Divine Mystery. Grace, in Rahner’s description, is God’s self-communication to the creature. But this communication may occur without conscious, thematic reflection on the part of the recipient. Ideally, of course, a person hears the Christian Gospel and awakens to articulated faith. But before such moments, indeed before any moral decision, grace is already present. In either case, grace is not confined to explicit sacraments or the justified believer, but is intertwined with the life of every person, because human nature was created by God to be a receiver of grace.78 Consequently, in one’s life, a nonbeliever may reveal an “anonymous” faith (to use his controversial term) when one acts morally in a way that aligns with their innate transcendence and orients the person toward God.79 Or as Rahner muses from the teachings of Vatican II, even an atheist may receive “the grace of a radicalization and orientation of his moral activity toward God’s immediacy (which includes God’s self-revelation) and the historical mediation of the free acceptance of the subjectivity that has thus been raised by grace.” The atheist remains an atheist, but this mediation of God’s self-communication to the atheist in their par78. Karl Rahner, SJ, “Nature and Grace,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), 173–83; and “Theology and Anthropology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 9, trans. Graham Harrison (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 35–37. Rahner’s writings on nature and grace are, of course, a landmark of twentieth-century Catholic theology. For an overview, see Daniel A. Rober, Recognizing the Gift: Toward a Renewed Theology of Nature and Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 29–36. 79. Karl Rahner, SJ, “Anonymous and Explicit Faith,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 16, trans. David Morland, OSB (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979), 56–58.

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ticular circumstances, “despite its seemingly natural character, transforms the moral decision, elevated by grace, into an historical revelation.”80 A person thus can become oriented toward God without (or at least before) an explicit conversion to Christian belief. Although L’Heureux’s, Klay’s, and Quade’s characters are not necessarily atheist, Rahner’s theology of nature and grace provides a hermeneutical frame for contemporary fiction’s tendency to portray characters who do not receive a firm, clear sacramental vision, or whose struggles with, or search for, faith are left unresolved. In the three stories above, the characters’ movements toward more authentic relationships suggest a grace-prompted shift in their imaginations. In this Rahnerian-inflected reading, grace is always present in every human life, but this presence is often unseen, and a character may act due to grace with or without the explicit sacramental vision that O’Connor bestows on her characters. Instead, the reader must discern this ambiguous sacramentality. Thus, although Rahner uses the term “faith” usually to refer to Christian faith specifically, he also recognizes a kind of faith that is the realization of authentic freedom due to grace. He argues that when “a person does not reject himself in a final denial, and does not utter an ultimate protest in total scepticism [sic] or despair, even though this acceptance is mediated and obscured by categorial objects of choice, then there is present what Christians call ‘faith.’”81 Read through this lens, one discerns the conversion of the characters in the stories above. L’Heureux’s unnamed priest, Klay’s chaplain and Rodriguez, even Quade’s Crystal, accept their finite creatureliness in a way that resists, as Rahner might have stated it, “total scepticism or despair.” Unlike an O’Connor character, their initial faith is not completely replaced, but there is a 80. Karl Rahner, SJ, “Faith and Sacrament,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 23, trans. Joseph Donceel, SJ, and Hugh M. Riley (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 187. 81. Karl Rahner, SJ, “Faith between Rationality and Emotion,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 16, trans. David Morland, OSB (New York: Seabury, 1979), 65.

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decentering of themselves that broadens their horizons and moves them toward more authentic relationships with others, and possibly with God. This is a much subtler sacramentalism than in O’Connor’s stories. These stories lack a clear religious conversion to guide the reader, such as in “The Displaced Person” or “The Enduring Chill,” yet grace is possibly active in a character’s life even if they do not arrive at a greater articulation of Christian faith. Part of this unrecognized acceptance of grace occurs when the characters accept life’s uncertainties without despair. Uncertainty plagues the stories’ protagonists, such as L’Heureux’s and Klay’s characters in the face of suffering. But even in Quade’s “Ordinary Sins,” Crystal’s self-doubts open her to reflect on her responsibilities to her unborn babies. None of the stories offer certainty, although all offer some measure of hope amidst suffering, sin, and confusion. These examples of contemporary Catholic fiction gesture toward transcendence, but their focus is on a character’s inward psychology and insight more than clear, objective depictions of grace’s manifestation. As chapters 3–6 demonstrate, this hallmark of postmodern Catholic fiction distinguishes their sacramentality from their literary forebearers’. Of course, a sacramental reading of these stories is very much an act of interpretation on the part of a reader. One can read these stories without recourse to a sacramental referent. But this is merely to observe what is true in any situation. How often does grace come blazing into a person’s life with clear, inescapable irruptions that prompt one to say yes, without any hesitation, “God’s grace is absolutely here”? Further, even when a believer identifies an experience as grace, it remains an act of interpretation for others to accept or reject this narrative. So, if the question is, why bother to offer a sacramental reading of contemporary fiction that does not insist upon it, then one might as well ask whether it is ever worth trying to discern grace’s presence in a situation marked by ambivalence. Good fiction revels in the ambiguity of faith—that is a gift to theology.

CHAPTER THREE

Faith as Resistance to Evil Despite their differences, the short stories of the previous chapter share a theme not only with each other, but with the Catholic fiction featured throughout this investigation: the interrogation of grace’s presence amidst the reality of sin and evil. Yet regardless of whether a story is modern or postmodern, Catholic fiction approaches the “problem of evil” differently than the various, classical theodicies, such as those famously criticized by philosopher David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.1 In short, theodicy often revolves around the question “Why would a perfectly good God allow innocent suffering and evil in the world?” Such debates frequently focus on whether such a God would ever be justified to create a world in which evil not only exists, but even seems to flourish. Traditional theodicies, then, consider the problem of evil logically. In contrast, this book’s Catholic fiction makes an imaginative appeal to readers to reflect upon how one resists evil, or the difficulty of even defining evil without a transcendent reference. Many stories implicitly pose the question of how one can name evil without some basic faith that the categories of goodness and evil not only exist, but also derive from a supernatural ground. Faith in Catholic fiction is often an existential necessity to maintain hope and resist despair; it is not a conceptual solution to the problem of evil. That the Catholic literary imagination confronts the reality of evil is no surprise to any reader. Fiction of all genres is structured around conflict, and evil often functions as a source of conflict. But the Catholic literary imagination’s engagement with evil is 1. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings, ed. Dorothy Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 73–88.

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frequently rooted in the traditional Christian doctrine of Original Sin. This observation is not simply a matter of scholarly hermeneutics but admitted by some authors. Graham Greene, for instance, agrees with Cardinal Newman’s remark that good literature should always be about humanity in its “fallen state.”2 Flannery O’Connor, meanwhile, insists that Catholic novelists engage with certain Christian fundamentals such as the reality that human beings live in the aftermath of the Fall and, tainted by Original Sin, stand in need of redemption by grace.3 Greene’s and O’Connor’s fiction offer numerous examples of encounters with evil that prompt conversions to the Christian faith. One thinks of Greene’s The Power and the Glory (see chapter 4) and The End of the Affair or O’Connor’s novels and short stories (see chapters 2 and 5). In short, older Catholic fiction frequently presents evil as a clear path to faith, the primary catalyst for conversion. When a character comes to recognize evil, the only clear alternative, narratively speaking, is a turn to Christian faith. Meanwhile, contemporary Catholic fiction often seems more concerned with the existential problem of evil, that is, an experience of evil that challenges faith. One need only glance back at Klay’s “Prayer in the Furnace” in chapter 2 for a clear example. Faith might be upheld as a source of hope and resistance to evil, but there remains great ambiguity. Faith no longer provides the same certainty and clarity as before. To demonstrate these patterns, this chapter focuses on three authors: Muriel Spark, Walker Percy, and John L’Heureux. The Scottish Spark, of course, belongs to the same generation of Catholic writers as Greene and O’Connor. In her early novel The Girls of Slender Means (1963), a character’s experience of evil orients him toward Christian faith, a pattern found in Greene’s and 2. Graham Greene, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, by Marie-Françoise Allain, trans. Guido Waldman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 150. 3. Flannery O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 185.

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O’Connor’s fiction. Meanwhile, Percy’s Lancelot (1977) depicts this same trajectory, but heightens the reader’s encounter with evil by narrating the story from the point of view of an unrepentant murderer. Conversion thereby is decentered away from the protagonist, who is the symbol of evil, and upon a secondary character. Finally, I return to L’Heureux with his shocking novel, The Shrine at Altamira (1992). This is easily the most ambiguous novel of the chapter, if not the book. L’Heureux’s story confronts the classic conundrum of traditional theodicy, which is how a good God can allow innocent suffering. Yet, despite that, the novel hints that some semblance of a supernatural reference is necessary to survive the trauma of evil—survive and even resist, but not rationally explain. Faith may provide consolation, but this consolation is a weak one. With great ambiguity, evil becomes a catalyst for a tentative faith, not because faith gives easy answers but because evil is unbearable without some source for hope. These novels collectively form a pattern on the relationship between faith and evil in the Catholic literary imagination: evil might prompt or challenge faith, but the very possibility of naming and resisting evil lies in faith’s hope that God’s grace is present in a sinful world. Spark’s Hidden Sacramental Imagination in The Girls of Slender Means Spark’s and Percy’s novels overlap in their depiction of a kind of evil rooted in the disenchantment of Western modernity. In other words, modern secularity rejects a sacramental imagination and instead prefers an immanent world stripped of a supernatural referent for meaning. (See chapter 2 for a discussion of modernity via Charles Taylor’s thought.) In the case of Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, beauty in Western modernity has been perverted by the human ego and disenchanted secularity, which in turn misshapes notions of the good and the true. Meanwhile, Percy’s Lancelot explores how a lack of faith in language’s ability to

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identify objective moral truth can tragically embolden justifications for acts of evil. Both authors thus depict evil as a kind of privation, whether of beauty or language. Literary portrayals of evil as a privation play with the long Catholic intellectual tradition that begins with Augustine. In the Confessions, Augustine argues that if a perfectly good God is the creator of all things, then all creation must be inherently good. Evil, then, is not created but rather stems from the privation of what is inherently created good by God.4 Augustine’s legacy can be seen throughout the history of Catholicism. Thomas Aquinas, for example, insists in the Summa Theologica that evil lacks being in and of itself and depends on the corruption of a created good to be known.5 In Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means and the much better known The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), the novels depict evil through a specific privation—the corruption of beauty. I will focus on the former in the present chapter but will highlight the latter in chapter 6. Both novels depict the danger of beauty when it is conceived unmoored from the other transcendentals, the good and the true. Because beauty does not have a divine foundation, what is good and true subsequently becomes distorted. All three transcendentals thereby become merely extensions of human arrogance. Spark’s novels align with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s famous theological aesthetics in The Glory of the Lord, the first volume of which was originally published the same year as Miss Brodie. Balthasar argues that modern theology has deleteriously forgotten the importance of beauty. The good without beauty “loses its attractiveness,” while “the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency.” The good and the true are simply not persuasive without beauty.6 Spark’s novels mirror Balthasar’s argument by 4. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 123–25. 5. Summa Theologica, I, q. 48, a. 1–2. 6. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 2nd ed., ed. Joseph Fessio, SJ, and John Riches, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 19.

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exploring how beauty without the good and the true become the means for evil. Like both O’Connor and Percy, Spark’s intellectual formation occurred within the Anglo-American Catholicism of the 1940s and 1950s, one influenced by theologians like John Henry Cardinal Newman and Jacques Maritain. Spark’s work fascinatingly converges and diverges with the work of O’Connor. As Thomas Haddox observes, Spark, like O’Connor, always acknowledges the influence of Catholicism, but she is more circumspect about how this influence should guide readings of her work. Although her novels contain more explicit references to Catholicism than O’Connor’s, they are also presented with greater obscurity.7 Haddox further argues that whereas “O’Connor assumes the hostility” of her readership, “Spark dramatizes her complicity with it.”8 Thus, despite Spark’s dark humor and scathing critique of modern secularity, she paradoxically presents more flexibility regarding Christian faith than O’Connor. Her work thereby exhibits greater sympathy for a nonreligious reader. Helena M. Tomko remarks that Spark and O’Connor might link moments of violence with the act of conversion, but Spark’s “‘violent means’ of showing near things far and far things near will resist the lingering spectacle of the grotesque and instead stifle the shock and awe of epiphany that O’Connor seeks to elicit.”9 In addition, Spark acknowledges the rough edges of faith amidst a character’s conversion; Christians, Catholics or otherwise, are not without their own flaws. Thus, while The Girls of Slender Means (and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), depict evil and human sin as a prompt for conversion, the sacramental vision is more subdued than it is in O’Connor’s short stories in chapter 2 or in her novel The Violent Bear It Away (see chapter 5).

7. Thomas F. Haddox, Hard Sayings: The Rhetoric of Christian Orthodoxy in Late Modern Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 52. 8. Haddox, Hard Sayings, 54. 9. Helena M. Tomko, “Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means at the Limits of the Catholic Novel,” Religion and Literature 47, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 46.

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Spark, like Greene, was a convert to Catholicism. As Cairns Craig notes, Spark’s theological imagination was shaped by the resurgence of Søren Kierkegaard’s thought in 1940s and 1950s Britain. In this Christian existentialism, belief comes from “the act of choosing and not as the outcome of reasoning or reflection”; as a result, “belief is never a settled matter—it is a continuous and ongoing test of what one has chosen, of what one must again choose on a daily basis.”10 Spark admits the connection between her conversion and her writing, claiming that it provides “a norm from which one can depart.”11 Additionally, she remarks, “I find that much of my literary composition is based on the nevertheless idea. . . . It was on the nevertheless principle that I turned Catholic.”12 In the words of Joseph Hynes, “the ‘nevertheless principle’ underlies Spark’s imaginative scope as well as her consistent efforts to express paradox, oxymoron. Spark is decidedly a ‘both/and’ writer, rather than an ‘either/or’ writer.”13 Indeed, Spark revels in the paradox that truth can come from fiction. She describes her work as “a pack of lies,” but lies “out of which a kind of truth emerges.”14 In particular, Spark favors fashioning her “lies” through incisive satire, for, as she sees it, “ridicule is 10. Cairns Craig, Muriel Spark, Existentialism and the Art of Death (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 7. 11. Muriel Spark, “My Conversion,” in Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, ed. Joseph Hynes (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 26. For an overview of Spark’s life and works, see Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: The Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). The issue of Catholicism in Spark’s work is often contested. Many critics prefer to downplay the relevance of her personal religion on the interpretation of her fiction. For one example, see Martin McQuillan, “Introduction: ‘I Don’t Know Anything about Freud’: Muriel Spark Meets Contemporary Criticism,” in Theorising Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction, ed. Martin McQuillan (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 4–6. 12. Muriel Spark, “Edinburgh-born,” in Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, ed. Joseph Hynes (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 22. 13. Joseph Hynes, introduction to Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, ed. Joseph Hynes (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 2. 14. Muriel Spark, “Muriel Spark’s House of Fiction,” Frank Kermode, in Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, ed. Joseph Hynes (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 30.

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the only honorable weapon” that remains to twentieth-century authors to pierce the shell of sentimentality behind which many readers hide.15 Spark critiques Western modernity in a style uniquely her own through biting satire of her characters’ illusions that they can fashion their life according to their desires.16 Often in this critique, a sacramental vision is implied, but the vision is blurred behind ridicule. As Alan Bold observes, “Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spark subscribes privately to the notion that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. Still, she prefers to manipulate characters indifferent to this grandeur.”17 Her characters may experience uncertainty and come to some degree of religious faith, but conversion does not solve the problem of evil. As Gerard Carruthers notes, “Spark, operating from within the most orthodox Catholic epistemological traditions, nonetheless suggests that good and evil are constantly in collision and that humans never have an entirely absolute sense of these things.”18 Spark mocks the arrogance of her characters, who believe they control their fate apart from God; yet, the sacramental world is only briefly glimpsed, lest a too heavy-handed depiction dull the satire. In The Girls of Slender Means, a character’s conversion to faith occurs after they discern evil’s corruption of beauty. As Robert Ellis Hosmer observes, the reader finds “Spark’s preoccupation with manipulation and the themes of good and evil, particularly with the presence of evil as a paradoxical moment of grace for 15. Muriel Spark, “The Desegregation of Art,” in Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, ed. Joseph Hynes (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 35. 16. Perhaps the most shocking example of this satire is 1970’s The Driver’s Seat, in which the protagonist plots her own murder. See Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (New York: Perigee, 1984). 17. Alan Bold, “Poet and Dreamer,” in Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, ed. Joseph Hynes (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 101. 18. Gerard Carruthers, “Muriel Spark as Catholic Novelist,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark, ed. Michael Gardiner and Willy Maley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 80.

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conversion.”19 Although like Miss Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means portrays a conversion after the witness of evil, the conversion in Slender Means is prompted by a dramatic event, and in this regard, is more akin to O’Connor’s stories than Miss Brodie.20 Spark centers Slender Means on the conversion of Nicholas Farringdon, a conversion that will lead to his martyrdom in Haiti, an event that in typical Spark fashion is mentioned by the third page. The novel begins with a parody of a fairytale (“Long ago in 1945 . . .”) and signals a generational contrast between the novel’s publication date (1963) and the story’s context, which occurs between V-E day and V-J day (1).21 V-E day begins a period in which the populace starts to recover from the trauma, grief, and deprivations of the European war, but without the finality of V-J day. The title refers to a group of young women and adolescents who, due to their lack of financial resources, live together in the May of Teck Club in London. One of the women, Jane Wright, works for a publisher, and through her, Nicholas, an aspiring author, becomes acquainted with these women of slender means. Nicholas lives in a state of uncertainty. He is described by one character, Rudi Bittesch, as a failed anarchist, who disturbs other anarchists when he discusses Original Sin (45). “He will finish up as a reactionary Catholic, to obey the Pope,” declares Rudi (37). Rudi likewise informs Jane that Nicholas changes his preference for women or men, wonders whether to live in France or England, and alternates between the temptation to commit suicide or to convert under the influence of the famous Catholic priest, Father D’Arcy (42). Jane describes him as “still feeling his way” regarding his publishing career (27), but this just as appropriately describes his life. 19. Robert Ellis Hosmer, Jr., “Muriel Spark,” in The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 205. 20. Haddox, Hard Sayings, 63–64. 21. All parenthetical references refer to Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (New York: Avon Books, 1990).

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Nicholas’s uncertainty is rooted in his idealism. He projects onto the May of Teck Club the ideal of a nurturing community free of materialistic corruption. Jane feeds his vision of her home: She told him things, in her clever way of intuition, which fitted his ideal of the place. In fact, it was not an unjust notion, that it was a miniature expression of a free society, that it was a community held together by the graceful attributes of a common poverty. He observed that at no point did poverty arrest the vitality of its members but rather nourished it. Poverty differs vastly from want, he thought. (70)

Another woman of slender means is an elocution teacher named Joanna Childe, who intrigues Nicholas with her recitation of Hopkins’s famous poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Joanna is described by Jane as having little regard for her own talent, and by Nicholas as “the slightest bit melancholy on the religious side” (94). That said, it is difficult to know the depth of Joanna’s spirituality, in part because much of the character is filtered through the lens of others. Her fondness for poetry seems to derive more from the joy of recitation than any great sensibility of meaning. Joanna could recite most of the Book of Common Prayer by memory, and, when younger, would attend her father’s Anglican services, although beyond that, her faith seems shallow (68–69). Perhaps this is because Joanna, like Nicholas, also clings to a problematic form of idealism. She had once fallen in love with a young curate, but “it had come to nothing. Joanna had decided that this was to be the only love of her life” (14). Nicholas saves his greatest idealism for his sexual relationship with Selina, a young woman described succinctly as “extremely thin” (23). Selina enhances her attractiveness by her comportment, as she explains in her daily recital of a formula learned in a “Poise Course”: “Poise is perfect balance, an equanimity of body and mind, complete composure whatever the social scene. Elegant dress, immaculate grooming, and perfect deportment all contribute to the attainment of self-confidence” (39; italics

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in original). Nicholas is not content with Selina’s physical beauty; he also desires to form her character according to his ideals. Or as Spark wryly describes, “he wanted her beautiful limbs to obey her mind and heart like intelligent men and women, and for these to possess the same grace and beauty as her body. Whereas Selina’s desires were comparatively humble, she only wanted, at that particular moment, a packet of hairgrips which had just then disappeared from the shops for a few weeks” (77). Selina’s beauty is part of Spark’s critique that post-war British society harmfully fosters a culture in which female beauty is defined as thinness. Kelly M. Rich points out that during the war, food rationing was a patriotic duty driven by economic and military necessity, but after the war, thinness becomes an oppressive ideal foisted upon women.22 The women in the story have interiorized this ideal at a cost to their own dignity, for it renders the women’s sense of self-worth dependent upon male approval. As Joori Joyce Lee comments, in Selina’s unhealthy obsession with her thinness, she has “surrendered herself to the gaze of male spectators who treat her body as an aesthetic object, devoid of corporeal qualities.”23 Nicholas, of course, is only one of Selina’s male admirers. That said, Nicholas, although fascinated by Selina’s physical beauty, is not clueless about her: “It was incredible to him that she should not share with him an understanding of the lovely attributes of dispossession and poverty, her body was so austere and economically furnished” (77). He is baffled at the dissonance between Selina’s physical appearance—which conforms to his ideal of a certain kind of poverty—and Selina’s behavior. Or as 22. Kelly M. Rich, “‘Nowhere’s Safe’: Ruinous Reconstruction in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means,” ELH 83, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 1189. 23. Joori Joyce Lee, “Discipline and Slenderness: Docile Bodies in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 29, no. 4 (2016): 252.

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Balthasar would point out, beauty is divorced in Selina from the good and the true. Nicholas thus finds himself moved by two different aesthetic experiences: Joanna’s poetic deportment and Selina’s physical attractiveness. This contrast further widens in the novel’s climax. A buried bomb, unknowingly left from an earlier air raid, detonates behind the house and spawns a fire due to a subsequent gas-main explosion. As a result, many of the girls find themselves trapped in a bathroom, but the single window is too narrow for most of them to climb through to the adjacent roof. Meanwhile, firemen try desperately to pry open a bricked-up skylight to lower a ladder down to the trapped girls. Nicholas, atop the adjacent roof, assists Selina, one of the few women thin enough to escape, while Joanna is trapped along with the others. However, Selina climbs back into the house only to emerge once more onto the roof clutching her prized possession: a beautiful Schiaparelli dress. “Poise is perfect balance,” ironically comments the narrator about Selina’s display of indifference regarding her still-trapped friends. But her actions impact Nicholas: “Later, reflecting on this lightning scene, he could not trust his memory as to whether he then involuntarily signed himself with the cross. It seemed to him, in recollection, that he did” (105). Selina’s selfish actions contrast with those of Joanna, who sings to her fellow women from the Anglican evening psalter. She remains behind and continues to sing as others scramble up the ladder in the now opened skylight, and her final words before the house collapses reference Psalm 130, a prayer of hope for reconciliation with God: “Out of the deep have I called . . .” (109; italics in original). Joanna’s actions, like her dramatic recitations of Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” point the reader towards a sacramental vision. As noted above, the depth of Joanna’s religiosity is difficult to discern—she can, after all, have a shallow idealism like Nicholas—but in a moment of crisis, her earlier recitations of poetry and Anglican prayers perhaps give her a spiritual frame that others lack. In either case, Spark nudges

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her readers to see that grace can objectively be present regardless of subjective intent.24 The sight of Selina’s selfishness and the tragedy of Joanna’s death become catalysts for Nicholas’s conversion. Amongst his writings, Jane finds the comment that “a vision of evil may be as effective to conversion as a vision of good” (118). Grace is only possible if one first recognizes the sight of evil and sin. Selina, meanwhile, seems unable to face the consequences of her actions; she afterwards screams in horror at the sight of Nicholas (116–17). In the world of Spark, good and evil are always intertwined. The bomb destroys the Teck club shortly before another bomb—an atomic one—causes much greater suffering and grief, even if the war finally ends.25 And indeed, joy and tragedy mingle in the celebration of V-J Day, as a jubilant crowd cheers before the royal family while simultaneously a fight breaks out between the previously unified American and British military personnel; the narrator ironically comments, “It was a glorious victory” (120). There is no such thing as an unadulterated good, Spark reminds her readers. Meanwhile, Nicholas’s vision has already been altered by the sight of evil; he alone notices a seaman stabbing a woman (118–19). The narrative then abruptly ends with little description of Nicholas’s conversion to Catholicism, his vocation to the priesthood, or his eventual martyrdom. Indeed, Spark’s language on a literal level seems to undermine a sacramental reading of her text, as if Spark is daring the reader to ask, “Is that it?” But Spark is playing. After Nicholas is jostled in the crowd, he finds himself near the stabber with his victim not to be found. The narrative cryptically describes how 24. For an interesting connection between Spark’s writing in this scene and Hopkins’s poem, see Tomko, “Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means at the Limits of the Catholic Novel,” 59–60. 25. I would like to thank my friend and colleague Peter Sinclair for pointing out to me this connection between the novel’s climax and the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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“Nicholas, waiting to move, took the Charles Morgan letter from his pocket and thrust it down the seaman’s blouse, and then was born onwards [by the crowd]. He did this for no apparent reason and to no effect, except that it was a gesture” (119). This brief reference to a forged letter, one written by Jane at the request of Nicholas to assist his publishing career (52), may make no significant impact on the surface, but underneath, the gesture implies that Nicholas is forgoing his literary ambitions. Nicholas’s pairing of his fake letter with the seaman binds his lie to an act of greater evil, the stabbing of an innocent woman. The gesture then is a repudiation of his past desires, a recognition of evil, both his own and others’. Amidst this ambiguity, Spark eschews an obvious affirmation of sacramentality, and dares the reader to seek meaning from Nicholas’s actions. With her typical paradoxical style, Spark depicts a sacramentality difficult to discern. The reader catches brief glimmers of grace before the action moves on, as if he or she is being teased to look quickly. Like her contemporaries Greene and O’Connor, Spark reveals the Catholic faith as a literary lens through which to evaluate a late Western modern society unmoored from traditional religious sources that previously defined beauty and truth, good and evil. Additionally, her novel’s association of violence with conversion certainly recalls Greene or O’Connor. Yet, although Spark implies that an event of evil can paradoxically lead to a sacramental imagination, her novel manifests a greater degree of ambiguity that foreshadows later Catholic fiction. Conversion from the Perspective of Evil in Percy’s Lancelot In scholarly studies, Walker Percy is most often compared to Flannery O’Connor, and for good reason. Percy’s life and work shares with O’Connor a similar formative Southern setting. He also frequently notes his deep admiration for O’Connor, and upholds O’Connor’s claim that the traditions of the South, particularly the lingering presence of a Christian culture, benefit the

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fiction writer.26 Yet Percy is also akin to Spark and Greene for being a convert to Catholicism, and he counts as influences many of the theologians widely read by Catholic authors in the mid– twentieth century, theologians such as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Romano Guardini. As Kieran Quinlan observes, Percy’s literary worldview was shaped by a particular kind of late modern Catholicism of the 1940s.27 But despite Percy’s chronological overlap with Spark, Greene, and O’Connor, I would tend to characterize much of his work as straddling the late modern and postmodern eras, and Lancelot in particular reflects a more postmodern milieu than O’Connor’s, Greene’s, and Spark’s earlier works. Hence, I have considered it as a transition between The Girls of Slender Means and the more contemporary world of L’Heureux’s The Shrine at Altamira. In addition, many scholars have noted features of Percy’s work that distinguish him from O’Connor.28 For example, Farrell O’Gorman explains that “Percy’s interest in the novel as a ‘scientific’ tool and his explicit postmodern concern with language as such are worlds removed from O’Connor’s implicit faith in the power of the word.”29 Percy tends to focus more on the break-

26. Walker Percy, “How to be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 175–78. 27. Kieran Quinlan, Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 5–6. 28. For comparisons between Percy and O’Connor, see Haddox, Hard Sayings, 125–27; L. Lamar Nisly, Wingless Chickens, Bayou Catholics, and Pilgrim Wayfarers: Constructions of Audience and Tone in O’Connor, Gautreaux, and Percy (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2011) 137, 159–62; Peter S. Hawkins, The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch (New York: Seabury Classics/Church Publishing, 2004), 54–59; and John D. Sykes, Jr., Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 1–6. 29. Farrell O’Gorman, Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 115.

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down of language, and less on specific theological concerns, an interest in language intertwined with larger existential anxieties about postwar American life. Percy, like O’Connor, assumes his audience would not share his religious concerns, but he seems not to regard his readers with as much suspicion. His approach mirrors Spark’s, in my reading, in that he raises religious concerns less directly. Percy, like O’Connor, is not afraid of being identified as a Catholic writer, but he expects readers to react more with indifference than hostility, an indifference born by the distraction of the consumerist culture of post-war America. As he remarks in the short essay “The Holiness of the Ordinary,” “there are two ways of being both a Catholic and a writer. One is being a member of a society so thoroughly Catholic that it does not occur to one to write as a ‘Catholic.’ . . . The other is being a Catholic in a hostile or indifferent society.”30 Finally, Percy may share with O’Connor a similar understanding of the Catholic writer as providing a kind of vision of grace amidst sin, but this sacramentality is generally more muted than it is in O’Connor’s work and more akin to that in Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. Yet differences aside, Percy shares with O’Connor a sense that the dogmas of the Catholic Church form a creative catalyst for the Catholic writer and are not limits on one’s freedom. In the essay “How to be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic,” he writes that to say one believes in dogma is to affirm the “central Christian mysteries” as true: “dogma is a guarantee of the mystery of human existence and for the novelist, for this novelist anyhow, a warrant to explore the mystery.”31 The Catholic writer then tries to capture this presence of mystery through the portrayal of characters who are unconsciously moving in a sac30. Walker Percy, “The Holiness of the Ordinary,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 368. 31. Percy, “How to be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic,” 177–78.

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ramental world. There is, he writes, “a necessary sensitivity to the hidden dimensions and energies of his characters and of the presence of the mystery which may always erupt in their lives and which, for want of a better word, we may call grace.”32 Like O’Connor, Percy regards the Christian narrative of sin and redemption through Christ’s Incarnation as central to the Catholic writer, for “the Christian ethos sustains the narrative enterprise,” fundamentally because the dogmas of Original Sin and the Incarnation reveal human life “as a wayfaring and a pilgrimage.”33 A Catholic writer seeks to evoke a larger vision of reality against which his characters journey. As he describes, “you have a man in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery; a pilgrim whose life is a searching and a finding.”34 It does not take a great leap of imagination to speculate that O’Connor would agree. Percy’s use of the term “postmodern” to describe his own historical context is similar to mine. Under the influence of Guardini, he argues in his essay “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise” that “the modern world has ended,” specifically the rational, scientific world of the West, that is, the old Christendom. The traditional Christian notion of the person as a wayfarer no longer has resonance in Western culture. “In its place,” he writes, “what most of us seem to be seeking are such familiar goals as maturity, creativity, autonomy, rewarding interpersonal relations, and so forth.”35 But to Percy, this pursuit of self-fulfillment has not led to greater contentment. The present postmodern and post-Christian age is defined by a “consciousness” marked “by impoverishment 32. Percy, “How to be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic,” 184. 33. Percy, “How to be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic,” 178. 34. Percy, “The Holiness of the Ordinary,” 369. 35. Walker Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 208.

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and deprivation and by the paradoxical language of the so-called existentialists, terms like loss of community, loss of meaning, inauthenticity, and so on.”36 As he pointedly begins his essay “The Delta Factor,” “Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use?”37 Percy’s analysis of postmodern American life continues to find resonance, even decades later. Charles Taylor notes that since the 1960s, new forms of individualism have developed, in which the desire for self-expression and happiness has prompted people to turn away from traditional sources of community, and to construct their lives from an evergreater availability of consumer goods.38 Similarly, Paul Lakeland defines the “postmodern sensibility” as marked by the saturation of consumerism. Consequently, “the postmodern human being,” he writes, “wants a lot but expects little. The emotional range is narrow, between mild depression at one end and a whimsical insouciance at the other.”39 As Percy might have asked, despite material abundance and remarkable technological developments, why is American life in the late twentieth century characterized by discontent? (And on that note, one could ask the same question in the third decade of this century.) Percy depicts an American culture stuck in a malaise, in which many individuals are unconsciously bored with postmodern life, always seeking new diversions because they lack the sources of meaning and transcendence that Western society once possessed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The existential 36. Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” 210. 37. Walker Percy, “The Delta Factor,” in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 3. 38. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 80–81. 39. Paul Lakeland, Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 8–9; cf. 3–7.

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dilemma of boredom (or living death) is central to Percy’s work from its beginning. Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), undergoes his “search” to break the mysterious monotony of everyday life. As Haddox observes, Percy hopes readers will come to share his critique that the average day in America is saturated by dreariness and boredom.40 (One should note, however, that Percy assumes a certain degree of social and economic privilege in his assessment that Americans suffer from boredom in postmodern life. If one suffers from economic deprivation, racial oppression, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and so on, then the average day may be far from boring.) In Lancelot, Percy depicts evil from the inside, that is, from the title character who embodies it. Lancelot regards himself as in a predicament, but he refuses to acknowledge his own responsibility. Instead, he blames his adulterous wife, her lovers, and more broadly, American society of the mid-1970s. In an interview, Percy remarks that “Lancelot might have come from an upsidedown theological notion, not about God but about sin, more specifically the falling into disrepute of the word ‘sin.’”41 Lancelot’s search is for the very foundation of language itself; in other words, do words like “sin” or “evil” refer to anything in reality, or are they disposable words that signify nothing? Lancelot’s pilgrimage is not driven by a physical quest, like that of his namesake, but a quest for certainty that sin exists; yet he erroneously narrows the criteria of his search to empirical data. Consequently, he fails to understand that faith in language is necessary, that is, faith that language can manifest, at least to a limited degree, non-empirical truths. In Lancelot’s twisted logic, if sin does not exist, then one has freedom to follow the biological and emotional impulses according to individual 40. Haddox, Hard Sayings, 127–28. 41. Walker Percy, “An Interview with Zoltán Abádi-Nagy,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 383.

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wishes. If there is no sin, he may murder the lover of his adulterous wife, or for that matter, rape as he desires, and then set about to create a world according to his delusions. Although he lacks faith in metaphysical and religious language, Lancelot does have a misguided faith in himself as the only worthwhile source of meaning and morality. In this way, he matches Taylor’s “buffered self,” albeit an extreme example of one. The epigraph, from Dante’s Purgatorio, warns the reader of a descent into sin: “He sank so low that all means / for his salvation were gone, / except showing him the lost people.”42 In the words of Sykes, “Lancelot represents Percy’s attempt to draw a portrait of desperation so stark that it will point the reader toward his only salvific alternative.”43 Percy orients the reader to this “salvific alternative” through Lancelot’s near-silent dialogue partner, Percival, yet another Arthurian reference, although this nickname disguises Percival’s identity as the Catholic priest Father John. The book is Lancelot’s first-person diatribe told to Father John from Lancelot’s cell in a psychiatric ward, during which he justifies his multiple murders at his family’s former plantation, Belle Isle, one year before. Percy implies that Father John has undergone a kind of crisis of faith, for he initially appears to Lancelot as a “failed” priest (4–5). Lancelot recognizes the irony of his quest. He is a self-described “Knight of the Unholy Grail” (138), seeking “for something rarer than the Grail. A sin” (140). If sin, “a purely evil deed, an intolerable deed for which there is no explanation,” could be proven to exist, then we would have “a new proof of God’s existence” (52). To compound Lancelot’s problem further, he disbelieves that proof of sin can be found in conventional notions of evil. Hitler is dismissed as a madman, and everyone else simply obeyed orders. Sin can be psy42. All quotations and parenthetical references are from Walker Percy, Lancelot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). 43. Sykes, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation, 137.

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chologically dismissed, and moral relativism has triumphed: “For everything and everyone’s either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil” (138). As Sykes points out, Augustine would discern a fundamental problem with Lancelot’s quest—without God as a signifier, one fails to realize that sin is the corruption of the good; what is evil is defined by what is ultimately good, namely, God.44 The breakdown of language is one that haunted Percy. He remarks in his essay “Why are You a Catholic?” that religious language has been exhausted because of its overuse in the public sphere; specifically “the word sin has been devalued” to the point that it does not refer to an actual metaphysical reality that people believe in and live their life accordingly. A saint in the contemporary world then has the task “to renew language,” but the novelist “has a humbler task,” for the writer must use every means available “to deliver religion from the merely edifying.”45 Percy blames language’s postmodern quandary on nominalism, that is, the philosophical argument that regards words as separated from the objects that they signify; he also criticizes the Cartesian split between mind and matter as the origin of the problematic legacy bequeathed to the Western world by modernity, particularly the rift between words and reality, both physical and metaphysical.46 44. Sykes, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation, 139–40. 45. Walker Percy, “Why are You a Catholic?,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 306. 46. Walker Percy, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 278. Percy regarded the renewal of language as requiring a retrieval of a triadic theory of language, one he based on the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of realism, that is, his argument that language can indeed accurately describe reality. For an overview of Peirce’s influence on Percy, see John F. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 16–26. See also Percy’s argument for the “Delta phenomenon,” i.e., his belief that words and reality are coupled together in a bond that does not depend solely on human subjectivity. See Percy, “The Delta Factor,” 42–45.

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Lancelot’s quest for sin is also implicitly a search for a foundation of faith in language, yet he narrows this search to two illusions, that is, the idols of sex and scientism. C. E. Smith remarks that “Lancelot’s search is a religious one. At its heart, his quest for the unholy Grail is an attempt to affirm the existence of absolute good,” but the problem lies in the fact that Lancelot “refuses to acknowledge any absolute outside the realm of the sexual.”47 Lancelot’s journey is the inverse of a conventional religious one, for he attempts to verify an objective good by proving that sexual sins exist. Puzzlingly, Lancelot dismisses the tragic genocides of the twentieth century as proof of sin’s existence and regards sex as the location in which he may discover sin. Robert Lauder notes that “the awareness of the mystery of sexuality provides Lancelot an opening, however small, for the possibility of a choice.”48 Perhaps the reason lies in Lancelot’s experiences. At one point, he describes the first time he had sex with Margot as a “communion” (171). Further, his wife’s adultery is more painful to imagine than her death (16). As Jessica Hooten Wilson observes, “for Lancelot, sex assumes religious significance and the potential for transcendence.”49 Lancelot’s quest to verify empirically sin’s existence reveals his second idol, that of scientism, a frequent topic for Percy’s critique of the contemporary world. Percy does not dispute the scientific method itself, or its many discoveries; instead, he deplores when science is used to reduce the human person to just another biological organism. The problem, in other words, comes when the natural sciences attempt to “address man himself.”50 To Percy, there is a logical gap in such endeavors, for any attempt to 47. C. E. Smith, “The Unholy Grail in Walker Percy’s Lancelot,” Religion and the Arts 3, no. 3–4 (1999): 392. 48. Robert E. Lauder, Walker Percy: Prophetic, Existentialist, Catholic Storyteller (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 93. 49. Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading Walker Percy’s Novels (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018), 79. 50. Percy, “The Fateful Rift,” 273.

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flatten human existence into a scientific theory is inherently contradictory, regardless of its claims to objectivity.51 For his part, Lancelot seeks to discover sin by gathering empirical data as if trying to solve a physical conundrum. When he first wonders if his daughter, Siobhan, was fathered by someone else, Lancelot notes, “I can only compare it, my reaction, to that of a scientist, an astronomer say” (19). The confirmation of his wife’s infidelity occurs through a careful, methodological comparison of the different blood types (27–33). This discovery does not provoke jealousy or hatred but “a sense of suddenly coming alive” (90). But his empiricism is the wrong place to look for a metaphysical reality such as sin. He asks, “why, knowing the truth, did I have to know more, prove more, see? Does one need to know more, ever more and more, in order that one put off acting on it or maybe even not act at all?” (89; italics in original) Lancelot’s comments reveal unintentionally the limits of empirical data. It will not prove or disprove sin’s existence, whether there is a mystery at the heart of sexuality, or indicate how one is to “act.” But Margot’s infidelity is not only in the past. Lancelot’s family home, Belle Isle, is the location for a movie production, and Lancelot is suspicious that she is having an affair with one of the filmmakers, the appropriately named Merlin.52 Lancelot elicits the help of his assistant Elgin, first to spy on them, and then to videotape their bedrooms secretly. But Percy hints at the limits of scientism when Lancelot views the tapes. Due to a technical error, the picture and audio are distorted as if to suggest that empirical data only gives a partial glimpse of reality (181). Lancelot sees the facts of infidelity, but not the greater metaphysical meaning underneath, not, that is, whether such actions truly are sinful. 51. Percy, “The Fateful Rift,” 276–77. 52. Lancelot curiously treats Merlin with greater respect than the other actors and filmmakers, even before he discovers that Merlin is no longer having an affair with Margot. For a discussion of this topic, see Lauren Sewell Coulter, “The Problem of Merlin’s Pardon in Walker Percy’s Lancelot,” The Southern Literary Journal 33, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 99–107.

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Still, Lancelot learns more than he expects. First, he discovers that his wife’s current affair is not with Merlin but with another filmmaker, Janos Jacoby. Second, he also sees his older daughter, Lucy, have a sexual affair with the actors Raine Robinette and Troy Dana (191–92). The videotapes spur Lancelot to action. During the height of a hurricane, he first releases a methane valve in the house before sexually assaulting the drugged Raine while Troy is passed-out next to them (235–36). He then enters the bedroom of Margot while she is having sex with Jacoby. Lancelot’s description of his family bed where the infidelity takes place is ironically religious, for he describes it like a Gothic cathedral, complete with spires, gargoyles, flying buttresses, and an altar screen (237). This mixture of the divine imagery and adulterous sin foreshadows Lancelot’s questions shortly thereafter: “Why does love require the absolute polarities of divinity-obscenity? . . . Who else but God arranged that love should pitch its tent in the place of excrement? Why not then curse and call on God in an act of love?” (238). This description further highlights Lancelot’s frightening tendency to think in sharp dialectics; at the same time, it reveals that Lancelot cannot be easily classified as an atheist. Lancelot blames God for creating sex so that it mixes “divinity” with “obscenity,” such as when he curses God for corrupting the innocence of childhood through the onslaught of sexual desire during puberty (176). Lancelot does not reject the existence of God so much as he rejects God’s creation. At the book’s climax, Lancelot encounters the most direct empirical evidence one could desire of his wife’s adulterous sin. He witnesses her affair in-person, unmediated by a video. He delays no further, and after a brief fight, slits Jacoby’s throat, “casting about for the feeling and not finding one” (242). Shortly thereafter, Lancelot causes Belle Isle to explode by lighting a match in the methane-flooded house, thereby killing Margot, Troy, and Dana. Even a year later, he describes his feelings during his evil actions as “nothing,” neither good nor bad. Lancelot,

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however, misinterprets this nothingness with the claim that “there is no unholy grail just as there was no Holy Grail” (253). Yet Lancelot’s claim indicates a lack of self-awareness. As L. Lamar Nisly astutely observes, Lancelot feels nothing at his murders, because he “has become the unholy grail that he has sought.”53 His scientism and dualistic thinking have so splintered his personhood that he is divorced from any felt presence of good or evil. He can therefore describe his murder empirically as “steel molecules entering skin molecules” (254). Lancelot’s statement to Father John that he felt “nothing good, nothing bad . . . except a certain coldness” alludes to the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition that evil lacks its own ontological existence. Lancelot experiences his evil as a moment of nothingness, and nothingness implies a lack of reality. In other words, Lancelot hopes to find positivistic proof of evil’s existence when the very concept of evil’s origin is inherently metaphysical. Grant Kaplan remarks that Lancelot’s “madness derives from his already having granted natural science the last say in a reality that becomes reductionist.”54 Scientism cannot reveal that sin actually exists; consequently, scientism cannot reveal the fundamental existential necessity that human beings live with a faith in language, a faith that words may indeed reveal a reality beyond the merely positivistic. A year after his sins, Lancelot claims he has made an important discovery; he may not have found a true sin, but he realizes that he “cannot tolerate this age” (154). Lancelot then spews out a preposterous plan to begin a new world order, a “Third Revolution” (157). But Lancelot’s dream is obviously flawed, not only for its absurdity, but for its moral vacuity. He desires to jettison the contemporary world and rebuild society according to his own will and desire. He insists that his utopian vision will commence in Virginia 53. Nisly, Wingless Chickens, Bayou Catholics, and Pilgrim Wayfarers, 181. 54. Grant Kaplan, “Diagnosing Modernity: Eric Voegelin’s Impact on the Worldview of Walker Percy,” Religion and the Arts 15, no. 3 (January 2011): 354.

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with Anna, a victim of rape and his neighbor in the facility (219). This, of course, is merely an extension of the illusion that the modern autonomous person, tricked by scientism, believes that “a new Eden is always on the horizon,” as Allen Pridgen argues.55 If anything, Lancelot’s imagination has become even more bifurcated since his murders. To him, women can only be either “a lady or a whore” in his new order (179). Lancelot throughout the novel describes his attempts to communicate with Anna to Father John. Yet Lancelot has constructed an ideal of Anna—his new Eve—divorced from Anna herself. Wilson points out that his description of sex relates to his classification of human beings into strict gender categories, a dichotomy that also misshapes his vision of reality, for “he adheres to his either/or way of seeing the world.”56 Indeed, Lancelot asserts to Father John his insistence that men have biologically evolved to dominate women, even if that means justifying rape. Whereas once he looked at sexuality as still possessing an air of mystery, Lancelot now believes that humanity’s original sin is that human beings are either made to commit sexual assault, or to submit to sexual assault, to be either a rapist or a rape victim (222–24). By the end, Lancelot’s depravity is opposed by Father John. Toward the beginning of the story, Lancelot wonders if Father John has lost his faith; and indeed, the reticent priest can only look at Lancelot in silence “with that same old hooded look” (61– 62; see also 107). But further into the narrative, Lancelot remarks that Father John appears differently than before, even if he is “pale as a ghost” at Lancelot’s story (160). Right after this, Father John returns, but this time garbed in his priestly attire (163). What provokes this transformation? Desmond points out that Percival’s adopted priestly name, John, carries not only prophetic 55. Allen Pridgen, Walker Percy’s Sacramental Landscapes: The Search in the Desert (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses/Susquehanna University Press, 2000), 26. 56. Wilson, Reading Walker Percy’s Novels, 83; cf. 79–80.

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overtones (like John the Baptist), but also incarnational ones (such as the Logos language of the Gospel of John).57 Percy implies that Father John’s incarnational beliefs counter Lancelot’s vision. An incarnational vision views the flesh and its activities as possible locations of grace. After Lancelot ironically prompts Father John to renew his vocation to the priesthood, the priest is ready to embark on a new assignment. Lancelot notes, “So you plan to take a little church in Alabama, Father, preach the gospel, turn bread into flesh, forgive the sins of Buick dealers, administer communion to suburban housewives?” (256). Father John has once again dedicated himself to the sacerdotal life, believing he can perform sacraments in a tiny Alabama church amongst suburban banality. In contrast, Lancelot prefers the “old Catholic way,” that is, a form of Catholicism that portrays a militaristic Christ with a sword who has come to judge the world (176–77). “I might have tolerated you and your Catholic Church,” Lancelot at one point admits to Father John, “and even joined it, if you had remained true to yourself. Now you’re part of the age. You’ve the same fleas as the dogs you’ve lain down with” (157). One could read this passage as a reflection of Percy’s own concerns with the American Catholic Church of the 1970s.58 But another, more sacramental reading is to see Lancelot’s rejection as a refusal to think in sacramental “both/and” categories as he stubbornly retains his “either/or,” dialectical thinking. Sacramentality rests on the belief that the finite and the infinite are joined, that God’s grace abounds in a fallen, sinful world. No wonder, then, that he would refuse to embrace a Church that would dare to mix with the “fleas” of the world. But perhaps there is a sign of hope in Lancelot’s awareness of Father John’s own transformation.59 Lancelot notes, “At last you’re

57. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community, 146. 58. For a discussion of this issue, see Nisly, Wingless Chickens, Bayou Catholics, and Pilgrim Wayfarers, 152–58. 59. For a similar observation, see Sykes, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation, 142.

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looking straight at me, but how strangely!” (256) Father John finally speaks for the first time in the story, in one-word, yes or no, responses that indicate his rejection of Lancelot’s delusional worldview. In his final question to Father John, Lancelot asks, “Is there anything you wish to tell me before I leave?”; to this, Father John speaks the novel’s last word, “Yes” (257; italics in original). Regardless of whether conversion does indeed take place after the narrative, Father John rebuffs Lancelot’s vision and justification. At the very least, Lancelot’s word is not final. As Percy himself insists in an interview, even Lancelot is not beyond redemption.60 Michael Patrick Murphy observes that “the novel is ultimately an endorsement of the incarnational imagination precisely because it discloses the heavy price paid for our estrangement from such an imagination.”61 Lancelot’s extreme, dialectical thinking stems from his disenchanted vision of creation that refuses to see grace in finite reality; even the mystery of sex collapses by the end. If, as in the Augustinian tradition, sin is privation, this privation only occurs if creation is inherently good. The novel thereby hints at the need to see the world as sacramental. Further, there is an implied sacramentality in that Father John’s conversion, like Nicholas’s conversion, follows a witness of evil, but the grace of conversion is even more oblique than it is in Spark’s novel, and certainly far more than in O’Connor’s fiction. An incarnational imagination encompasses a faith that analogical language can be sacramental, that is, it can provoke the reality of what it signifies. Or as Percy puts it in the essay “The Mystery of Language,” “the word names something. The symbol symbolizes something.”62 There is a reality captured in the anal60. Percy, “An Interview with Zoltán Abádi-Nagy,” 386. 61. Michael Patrick Murphy, A Theology of Criticism: Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 66. 62. Walker Percy, “The Mystery of Language,” in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 153; italics in the original.

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ogous logic of language. The reader, then, must wrestle with whether one trusts language, a trust akin to religious faith itself. By this, I mean that Percy’s way of framing the necessity of trust in language mirrors the reality of faith. Percy notes that for the Danish philosopher-theologian Kierkegaard, faith requires trust in the messenger. In other words, faith is like good news; it must be communicated by one, like an apostle, who has an authority through which the listener may receive the good news and assent to it trustingly.63 For Percy, Desmond remarks, “once the traditional religious and philosophical sources of meaning have been abandoned, the postmodern human is left to his own resources of reason and willpower to claim a self, with disastrous personal and social consequences.”64 Ultimately, then, Lancelot’s failure of faith is a failure of trust. He lacks the vision to realize that both language and faith are something received from others. Language, like faith, emerges out of a community. To believe that the word “sin” does indeed signify the objective reality of evil, and that evil is defined by a transcendent reference, one must have faith in language itself. This requires trust of older sources of meaning. But Lancelot cannot reconcile himself to the past, either that of traditional JudeoChristianity or his own. His goal to create a new human order is an avoidance of moral responsibility—an avoidance to accept that one’s freedom is also a freedom to commit sin. Father John’s final “yes” thereby provokes the reader to make a personal response to Lancelot’s narrative. Sykes argues that Percy’s “books include and sometimes conclude with a broken conversation—a demand or request that is not supplied by the text. Thus the novel is a kind of fragment in David Tracy’s sense—a literary agent provocateur

63. Walker Percy, “The Message in the Bottle,” in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 145–48. 64. John Desmond, “Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy and the Demonic Self,” The Southern Literary Journal 44, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 90.

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that teases a response from the reader.”65 In this novel, the reader then is left with a question: Are they more like Lancelot or Father John in their fundamental conception of evil? Can Evil’s Existence Be Defended? Spark’s and Percy’s novels wager that their readers have an intuition that evil exists, even if the reader does not consciously define evil according to traditional Christian doctrines. Thus, in The Girls of Slender Means, a reader hopefully reacts to Selina’s behavior during the climax as selfish, even if they would not follow Nicholas’s response to it. The power of Lancelot depends on the submersion of the reader into the deranged justifications of a murderer. But even here, Percy gambles that the reader has at least the moral compass to recognize the firstperson narrator as immoral. These novels compel the reader to confront their own faith, their own sources of meaning, that determine how they define evil. Narratively, evil in the novels becomes a catalyst for discerning the supernatural, a spur to look for grace by its seeming absence. One does not reach grace with any certainty, of course, but a movement toward faith signals a rejection of evil, even if the rejection is indicated with no more than the “yes” of Father John. As mentioned above, in the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition, evil is defined as a privation of the created good. The novels dovetail with this tradition, but they also depict a far blurrier boundary between good and evil. Herein lies the benefit of good fiction to traditional theological thinking. If, as Nussbaum points out, conceptual rhetoric strives for clarity, fictional literature often allows a certain degree of uncertainty to remain. To shed some light on this point, I would like to turn to Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of 65. Sykes, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation, 5.

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Suffering. Stump is committed to defending the Augustinian-Thomistic understanding of evil as a corruption of the good. Although I cannot do justice to her book in these pages, I would like to highlight certain strands of her thought that inform the present conversation between theology and literature. Stump insists that she is not writing a theodicy, but rather a defense of the Thomistic (via Augustine) tradition on evil. In Stump’s defense, evil, in the broad sense, is not a mystery and can be rationally explained, at least in general if not all the particular forms of evil. (I should also point out that she refers to evil both as acts of human agency and as suffering caused by natural events.) Stump’s argument is an appeal to reasonableness. She believes that Thomas Aquinas’s theology, critically retrieved, defends God’s allowance for suffering in a fallen world due to the benefits it may bestow, such as growth in love of God and neighbor, although she notes that even for Thomas, individual acts of evil are a mystery. Yet, she insists that one can theologically mount a defense for reasonable faith in a good God; such a defense is not a comprehensive explanation of every act of evil, but it is nonetheless sufficient if the defense can regard most suffering as not pointless.66 In addition, Stump turns to various scriptural narratives, such as Job, or the Psalms to illustrate that the Judeo-Christian tradition has long refused to regard suffering as meaningless if this suffering leads to the insight that one’s ultimate end lies beyond this world in friendship with God. Suffering that orients a person to this ultimate destination therefore is beneficial, no matter how painful. The desires of the present world are reordered through suffering to become of secondary importance next to the desire for union with God in heaven. Yet, she reiterates often that no specific suffering can be explained, and she acknowledges that some kinds of evil lie beyond words. She argues, “To explain suffering is not to explain it away; the 66. Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 2010), 21–22, 452–57.

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suffering remains and the grief over it ought also to remain, no matter how successful the justification.”67 For Stump, evil’s existence is understandable, if one’s language of God is correct. One cannot explicate evil in every case, but there is a certain logic to evil’s existence. I admire Stump’s integrity in admitting the limits of her defense of the Thomistic tradition. In so doing, she reminds her readers that no matter how carefully articulated a theology of evil is, it will always be limited and never comprehensive. In so doing, her argument allows the space for literature to speak. For literature reminds us of the existential gap between our rational explanations for evil and our actual experience. In this, Catholic fiction grants more space to regard evil as a mystery, no matter how well our language is articulated. Catholic novels and short stories consequently focus on how one confronts concrete acts of evil so as to resist despair. They do not offer a rational defense of the reasonableness of evil’s existence. The novels above have replied to evil with depictions of conversion, but what if such appeals to conversion are inadequate responses to the suffering depicted in a story? To explore this question, I turn next to L’Heureux’s The Shrine at Altamira. Innocent Suffering in L’Heureux’s The Shrine at Altamira: Hope or Despair? Spark’s and Percy’s novels depict characters whose conversion to faith is a response to evil. Catholic faith may not provide absolute certainty, but it provides a better place from which to evaluate evil than a kind of disenchanted modernity that leaves moral reasoning entirely to the individual. John L’Heureux’s The Shrine at Altamira, on the other hand, interrogates the basic trajectory of conversion so common in the modern Catholic novel. A significant character does turn to Catholic faith in the final pages as a 67. Stump, Wandering in Darkness, 16; cf. also 476–79.

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response to evil, but this conversion does not offer a clear insight into the mystery of evil. In this sense, it shares with Spark’s and Percy’s stories that faith’s relationship to evil is an existential dilemma much more than a rational one, but L’Heureux confronts the reality that even if one turns to faith as a space to resist evil, this resistance remains fraught with pain. The mystery of evil— never denied in Spark’s and Percy’s works—is intensified in The Shrine at Altamira, for its theme of child abuse faces head-on the classical challenge of theodicy, that is, why a good God would allow innocent suffering. At the same time, it forces the reader to wonder if the classical language of evil as the privation of the good provides much solace when challenged by actual suffering. In the chronology of L’Heureux’s fiction, The Shrine at Altamira (1992) comes at the end of a string of books, such as Jessica Fayer (1976), A Woman Run Mad (1988), Comedians (1990), and An Honorable Profession (1991), that their author describes as considerations of “the way God meddles in our lives to call our attention away from ourselves to something larger than ourselves.”68 L’Heureux places the origins of the novel in a true tragedy: The Shrine at Altamira came to me—whole—one day after I’d seen on television that a man had set fire to his son to get even with his wife. They flashed the boy’s picture on the screen, and it was so upsetting and horrible that I actually got up and turned off the television. But over the next weeks the story kept coming back, and I never watched it, but I recall thinking that some fool is going to write a novel about this when in fact there is no human way to comprehend it. You’d have to be God or have knowledge of God’s intentions. Some inexplicable, redemptive act. And as soon as I thought that, I knew the ending of the novel. It’s the only novel I’ve ever begun knowing clearly 68. John L’Heureux, Conversations with John L’Heureux, by Dikran Karagueuzian (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2010), 53.

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what the ending would be, but of course I had no idea how to get there. I knew only that it would have to end in an act of complete renunciation of the self. . . . An act as apparently senseless as submitting to crucifixion.69

However, L’Heureux’s seeming alignment of the novel’s tragedy and “renunciation of the self” with the crucifixion may mislead first-time readers into expecting a clear theological statement on why God permits such suffering to exist. The novel offers none. The Shrine at Altamira begins with a brief introduction that describes the shrine of the title as dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Hope, a pilgrimage site where people come to offer their gratitude. The narrator warns the reader immediately that “this is not a shrine where miracles occur.” Indeed, traditional mementos of piety are juxtaposed against descriptions of syringes and discarded liquor bottles; yet even here, a note of uncertainty is interjected, for “no one knows if these are tokens of the saved or the last hope of believers too far gone to pray” (3).70 Curiously, this last phrase is ambiguous, for are the drugs and alcohol a sign that the shrine is littered with the detritus of indifference, an insult to a pilgrimage site? Or, are these tokens left behind by pilgrims who are surrendering them as a “last hope” that they can begin anew, a desperate act from believers who can no longer pray? If the latter, then the comment implies that actions against despair—a resistance to evil— survive beyond verbal piety; hope endures through action even if words fail. My own reading below tends towards the latter, but such a reading must recognize the blunt warning in the introduction that “this [story] will be terrible; do not deceive yourself,” a story that in our daily lives, we would rather quickly dismiss. Pain, in other words, will not be sentimentalized; nor will an easy answer 69. L’Heureux, Conversations with John L’Heureux, 19. 70. All parenthetical citations to the novel are from John L’Heureux, The Shrine at Altamira (New York: Viking/Grove Press, 1992).

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be provided. Amidst the written vows to the Virgin, one note does not make promises; instead, this note “simply asks a question: ‘Why?’ It is signed Maria” (4; italics in the original). It is the question that returns on the novel’s last page. The novel begins by trafficking in the trope of high-school romance. Maria’s attraction to Russell seems to be based on her hope that Russell’s white privilege will help her escape both her working-class status as well as her Mexican-American ethnic heritage (34–35). For his part, Russell considers Maria a path to escape the trauma of child abuse at the hands of his alcoholic father (37). The couple’s romance plays out in tandem with Maria’s relationship to her more pious, Catholic mother, Ana Luisa. The widowed Ana Luisa possesses a small shrine in her home to the Virgin around which she places mementos of significant people and events in her life. Maria, meanwhile, rejects her mother’s piety, refuses to have a Catholic marriage, and desires to be liberated from Catholicism’s rules and “superstitions” (32–34). Superficially, The Shrine at Altamira is a novel of childhood abuse’s cyclical nature. Russell bears the mark of early trauma in the form of a scarred hand, a mark caused by his father burning him on a stove. This event foreshadows Russell’s abuse of his own child, John. After John’s birth, Maria’s increasing absorption with the baby causes Russell to erupt in moments of violence as he grows increasingly frustrated and feels discarded. Eventually, Russell concludes that Maria only has love for John, and he vengefully burns the now four-year old John alive. John survives, and the remainder of the book details the consequences of Russell’s action. The novel weaves the theme of evil and innocent suffering with questions of conversion, forgiveness, and redemption. For example, the possibility of forgiveness in the novel is complicated by Russell’s seeming admission of his guilt, his acceptance of the punishments heaped upon him in prison (symbolized by the loss of one eye in a fight), and his attempts to reconcile with his son

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once he is released from prison on parole.71 But such repentance is complicated by the fact that Russell only desires to atone for his sin to John, and not Maria (209). To skirt the conditions of Russell’s parole, a twelve-year old John and Russell begin to meet secretly. In the course of their time together, Russell admits the insufficiency of a verbal apology, and instead grants John power over him, including acts of violence. Despite his previous hatred of his father, John can never entirely escape the desire to see Russell. His curiosity makes more sense in the context that his severe disfigurement obstructs his relationship with Maria; she grows distant from her son because he is a constant reminder of Russell. Yet Russell remains steadfast in his unconditional offer to give anything for John in atonement. As if to test him, John requests that his father reenact his crime and burn himself alive in a bed. Right before Russell strikes the match, John stops his father. This may seem to end the cycle of violence and retribution, but John’s severe disfigurement still provokes guilt in Russell. When they go outside to the car, Russell feigns that he has forgotten his keys. In hindsight, the reader realizes that Russell has decided to fulfill John’s request (253–54). Still outside, John, struggling with his own guilt, comes to realize that he can love his father without expecting that his father ever do anything to provide adequate recompense for his crime. John’s insight is not only an act of forgiveness but an act of love that has eluded Russell and Maria, whose love was always one of demand upon the other. L’Heureux, however, refuses to let the novel offer a tidy tale of sin and redemption. When John suspects something is awry, and discovers his father’s fire, he plunges into the flames to join his father with a frightening awareness: “He knew well what it meant to burn. He knew exactly what he was doing. And then, with a terrible cry, he 71. For discussion of this issue, please see Brent Little, “Forgiveness and the Limits of Language in The Shrine at Altamira,” Renascence 67, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 167–80.

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plunged into the fire. ‘I love you,’ he said.” Sin, guilt, and love are further fused in the prose’s symbolism when, after their deaths, Russell’s and John’s “chests had melted together, and there was no recognizing the faces” (256). The evil of child abuse appears victorious; John’s terrible leap into the burning bed renders his horrifying solidarity with his father a misguided expression of guilt and love. Before the shrine’s return in the closing pages, L’Heureux frequently hints at traditional Catholic pieties, but their significance is ambivalent in the face of evil. For example, Ana Luisa attempts to interpret events as God’s will, a faith that both allows her to keep her hope and see Russell not as a monster but as a “poor sinner” (202). No doubt, Russell is indeed a “poor sinner,” but to render the events as God’s will implies that God would want John to suffer horribly. At the same time, Ana Luisa’s frequent prayers often go unanswered, and her piety appears unhelpful to an actual victim of evil like John. She gives him a book of saints’ lives, but this causes John confusion; he cannot understand why anyone, like Joan of Arc, would willingly burn alive for God (175). Later, she tells him, “Someday . . . I’ll take you to the shrine at Altamira. Then you’ll understand” (202). But a reader is hard-pressed to know how this cryptic comment could have been true. Is she implying that John could have discovered the grace of forgiveness? Hope? Increased faith? One does not have to be an atheist to wonder if such a comment in fact burdens John with an illusion. Maria, meanwhile, tries to escape the consequences of Russell’s crime through her career, sexual partners, and alcohol. One exception is when she attends Mass for the first time in years. The narrative shows Maria’s oscillation between reverence and outright dismissal of the Eucharist. She finds herself praying afterward, but this moment of apparent grace is undercut when she decides that she just needs sex (218–19). But when her next sexual encounter turns sour, she returns to John with unusual affection. John notes that “this [is] the first time she [has] ever

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looked at him without that pain in her eyes, and he [is] happy, happier than he [has] ever been in his whole life” (224). Yet this moment is fleeting, for Maria soon seeks new sexual partners. L’Heureux’s narrative then depicts how grace’s efficacy is often blunted by an individual’s deep flaws. Clarity is impossible for the characters, for glimmers of hope never last. Still, the novel provokes the reader to consider their own sources of hope to resist despair in the face of innocent suffering. When John’s nurse, Peggy, presses his surgeon, Dr. Clark, about his beliefs, Dr. Clark simply says, “I believe nothing. I hope nothing. My work is just work” (229). But despite his seeming resignation, Dr. Clark gradually finds himself obsessed with John’s situation. He visits Russell in prison in the hope that the mystery of evil will be revealed, but instead miserably concludes that Russell “[is] just another man” (166). Out of desperation, Dr. Clark visits a monastery on Holy Saturday. There he confesses his fears to a monk, but any consolation provided by the monk comes wrapped in great ambiguity. He tells Dr. Clark: Our salvation never comes in the form we would have chosen . . . God sanctifies us—he makes us saints—in his own way. Not in our way. It never looks like sanctity to us. It looks like madness, or failure, or even sin. We don’t know how we stand with God, and we want to know. We want some evidence that we are loved, that we are saved, but all we have is our own darkness, and God’s darkness. But sometimes, in that darkness, there is a single act of love, some selfless gesture, an aspiration, and we see that it’s not been all waste, all hopeless, and we can . . . well . . . go on. (238–39)

Instead of providing a response to evil based on some kind of doctrine (such as Original Sin) or reassurance (the promise of heaven), the monk simply reminds Dr. Clark, and the reader by extension, that moments of grace are often impossible to see; sal-

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vation comes, if at all, unexpectedly. Even love cannot provide certainty, but only the will to endure. His comment that “in that darkness, there is a single act of love” that can help us “go on” provides no rational solution to the problem of evil; nor does it provide much comfort in the moment to the victim. Instead, the best that can be hoped for is that hope itself is not in vain; even if hope is fragile, it helps us to continue the difficult act of living. Fittingly, Dr. Clark’s visit is on Holy Saturday, for John’s trauma is the pain and mystery of innocent suffering embodied in Jesus’s crucifixion, but the novel provides no clear demonstration of the Resurrection. Left only with the act of evil, we have a choice to despair or to cling to hope. In the light of the monk’s remarks, one can interpret Maria’s concluding pilgrimage to the shrine at Altamira without the expectation of a comforting conclusion. As noted above, the shrine is dedicated to the Mother of Hope, but hope here is not a happy ending as much as a refusal to let evil triumph. For as misguided as Russell’s and John’s love for each other is, does that mean we are to give up on love? Do we turn, like Maria and Peggy, to sensual pleasures to distract ourselves from suffering? But the novel reminds us that when we inevitably face the mystery of evil, Maria’s question will then come to our minds also: “Why?” Maria could not pose this question to God at the shrine immediately after Russell’s and John’s death. She pilgrimages to the shrine nearly two years later, and only after she has “transformed in personality and character and—finally—in soul, a change so absolute that nobody seeing her would recognize the old Maria” (259). Once at the shrine, Maria, Job-like, demands that Mary and God give her an account for why they allowed this tragedy to occur: “I ask you [Mary] now, and I will ask you at the day of judgment, I will raise my voice before the throne of God and shout and will demand an answer: Why?” (260). But after time passes, only this last word— “why?”—remains at the shrine. Likewise, the story ends with a question, “From what, the pilgrims wondered, had she been saved?” (261). This is also the question that confronts the reader.

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Yet Maria’s journey to the shrine indicates her resistance to despair. The mere ability to pose a question in the face of pain and grief signals an openness to the future. “Why?” then is a question that defies meaninglessness in life, even if rational and theological answers to the problem of evil do not offer much solace. “Why?” points to the universal human impulse to seek meaning where no meaning seemingly exists. In this, one lives with pain but lives nonetheless in hope that meaning remains possible. If before, Maria dismissed the Catholic faith and her mother’s pieties, her imagination now at least is open to the possibility of faith. L’Heureux’s insistence on ending the novel with Maria’s question of “why?” presents a paradox: evil both eludes and seems to demand a response from language. In other words, the formation of Maria’s question also indicates that resistance to evil, to unjustified suffering, occurs fundamentally through language. As Toni Morrison remarks in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so,” but despite those limitations, “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”72 (On a related note, see chapter 5 for a discussion of Morrison’s novel, Paradise.) Part of the human struggle with formulating a language for evil is the gap between rationality and the actual experience of extreme evil and suffering. It is this gap that philosopher Paul Ricoeur explored in his late essay, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology.” “On the level of theoretical thinking,” Ricoeur argues, “the problem of evil remains a challenge that is never completely overcome”; there is an “aporia” between conceptual thinking and the question of “why.”73 Ricoeur’s essay 72. Toni Morrison, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature,” in The Source of SelfRegard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 2019), 106, 108. 73. Paul Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 258.

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harkens back to his earlier work, The Symbolism of Evil, in which he argues that primal experiences of guilt and defilement gave rise to myth because such experiences needed the mediation of symbolic language to explain the origin of evil.74 Years later, in his essay, Ricoeur reconsiders the limits of myth to address an individual’s response to unjust suffering. To the question of “Why?” Ricoeur remarks that “myth brings only the consolation of order . . . But it leaves unanswered one important part of the question, which is not just Why? but Why me?”75 In addition, Ricoeur remains skeptical of Augustine’s classical doctrine of Original Sin, for “it leaves unanswered the protest of unjust suffering, by condemning it to silence in the name of a massive indictment of the whole of humanity.”76 Ricoeur, in other words, argues that the classical Christian doctrine of Original Sin brushes aside the individual concrete experience of evil with its broad indictment of humanity’s evil. Similarly, Maria’s grief reminds one that however much one analyzes evil generally, evil often remains a mystery in a specific experience. Maria’s question of “why” reminds one of the biblical genre of the lament, a genre that Ricoeur explores to consider the aporia between theory and experience. This gulf, he insists, does not make one a passive observer, condemned to be only a victim and never an agent. Instead, “it is to this aporia that action and the catharsis of feelings and emotions are called upon not to give a solution but a response, a response able to render the aporia productive.”77 The action of lament keeps one from caving to despair in the face of unthinkable evil. A lament’s first stage is to integrate the awareness that one always remains ignorant in the 74. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 169–71. 75. Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” 252. 76. Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” 254. 77. Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” 258. Cf. also B. Keith Putt, “Indignation toward Evil: Ricoeur and Caputo on a Theodicy of Protest,” Philosophy Today 41, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 463–64.

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face of unjust suffering. Thus, a grieving person rightly asks why a beloved died, but a complete answer remains elusive. The best that one can say is that God did not want such things to happen, but the world always operates with chance. The second stage is to turn the lament into a complaint against God. Referencing the Psalmists’ cries to God, Ricoeur believes that “our accusation against God is here the impatience of hope.” Finally, one realizes in the third stage that faith in God lies beyond the human desire to explain the origin of evil and suffering. “In other words,” he writes, “we believe in God in spite of evil.”78 I would speculate that Maria, at the end of The Shrine at Altamira, seems nearer to the second than the third stage, but her question does not quite fulfill the genre of the lament. For example, Bryan Massingale describes the tradition of the lament in African-American spirituals as music that embodies “a paradox of protest and praise.”79 As Massingale observes, laments are not a rejection of God, even if they are a complaint, for any complaint is intertwined with worship. Maria’s “why” is certainly a protest, but I doubt one could say it is a form of praise. Yet, the very formulation of the question also implies her desire to believe in God’s existence. Further development remains unknowable. However, Maria’s action indicates a search for some hope against hopelessness, and implicitly a tentative openness to the Divine in her imagination, even if she has not yet embraced specific religious beliefs. In other words, she is looking, as the monk might have said, for something that allows her to “endure.” L’Heureux eschews a conventional, clear conversion in his novel, concluding it with an ambiguity even greater than that in Spark’s or Percy’s works. The reader then is invited to reflect on their own basic faith, that is, their worldview regarding their sources of 78. Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” 260; italics in original. 79. Bryan N. Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 108.

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meaning, so as to resist the despair provoked by senseless abuse and death. In their distinctive ways, this chapter’s novels manifest the constant human need to look for meaning in our lives despite the mystery of evil. To describe evil as a mystery is not to equate it with the kind of mystery theologians and believers ascribe to Divine Mystery. As Neil Ormerod and Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer observe, evil’s mystery “resists our understanding because its essence lies in its lack of meaning, its meaninglessness.”80 Yet despite evil’s meaninglessness, a human determination remains. Philosopher Susan Nieman remarks that while evil stretches the very limits of our thought, nonetheless, we have an innate drive to articulate a response to it. As she writes, “Meaning is a human category, and must be won against a background. A life that was inevitably meaningful would defeat itself from the start. Between the adult who knows she won’t find reason in the world, and the child who refuses to stop seeking it, lies the difference between resignation and humility.”81 Even if specific acts of evil elude clear, rational explanations, the need for meaning continues, continues, that is, as long as we do not cave to “resignation.” Each novel in this chapter depicts a character who tries to find some glimpse of meaning in the face of evil. This journey is in itself an act of faith. Of course, most of the works throughout this study interrogate the problem and mystery of evil. Likewise, one could consider this chapter’s novels through the lens of sacrifice and community, the themes of chapters 4 and 5 respectively. But this observation merely points to the numerous ways that Catholic novels and short stories dialogue around certain central themes. For, as the next chapter highlights, Catholic fiction often considers how evil compels sacrifice.

80. Neil Ormerod and Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer, Foundational Theology: A New Approach to Catholic Fundamental Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 137. 81. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 328.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sacrifice and Grace Readers should not be surprised that Catholic fiction creatively examines the issue of sacrifice, considering that Christianity’s paradigmatic symbol is the cross. In much traditional Christian piety, a believer’s sacrifice would be deemed a good one insofar as it participates in Christ’s sacrifice, for Jesus commanded his disciples to take up their cross to follow him (Matthew 16:24). There is perhaps no clearer example of this than the saints and martyrs, who epitomize discipleship with the sacrifice of their lives for Christ. Yet like any symbol and historical event, the cross must be interpreted, and in Western Christianity, the influence of Anselm of Canterbury’s eleventh-century Cur Deus Homo is unavoidable. Anselm’s atonement theology sees the Crucifixion as necessary to address the great damage done to God’s honor as a result of Original Sin. The death of the sinless Christ renders satisfaction for the debt that humanity owes to God, a satisfaction that simultaneously affirms divine justice and mercy. The cross atones for humanity’s sin, and bestows the gift of salvation to baptized believers. More recent theologies, meanwhile, have often challenged traditional understandings of the cross that would seem to support unjust forms of suffering. Jon Sobrino, for example, argues for a more expansive understanding of the cross’s salvation than simply salvation from sin. Jesus’s death is not primarily because God demands satisfaction for a debt, but is a sign of solidarity with the victims of evil and oppression, a solidarity with all victims of unjust suffering throughout history.1 Because of Jesus’s sacrifice, the cross is a sign of hope. 1. Jon Sobrino, SJ, Jesus the Liberator: A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Paul Burns and Francis McDonagh (Tunbridge Wells,

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Interestingly, Catholic fiction engages in these various forms of thinking about sacrifice and suffering. It can take a more traditional route in which a character’s suffering participates in Christ’s suffering, thus directing the reader to Christ. As discussed below, this trajectory aligns with the basic pattern of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology of sainthood, that is, his argument that the saint’s life points others to the life of Christ. On the other hand, the Catholic literary imagination may also confront the reality that sacrifice is not inherently good, even if done out of faith or good intentions. Further, a question arises, what good is sacrifice if the suffering caused by evil remains? In this regard, the theme of this chapter is a companion to the topic of the last chapter. Below, I seek to explore the theme of sacrifice in Catholic fiction by Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo, and Uwem Akpan, each of whose stories highlight the cross in their work. Greene’s famous novel The Power and the Glory (1940) challenges conventional Catholic notions of sainthood through the presentation of a troubled and deeply flawed priest, yet his sacrifice becomes the catalyst for the conversions of others. In this sense, he is analogous to O’Connor’s priests in chapter 2—a disruptive presence that spurs others toward faith. In addition, the novel upholds modern fiction’s pattern of representing Catholicism as an opponent to Western secularity and atheistic materialism. In contrast, the stories of the Japanese Endo and the Nigerian Akpan lack the strong ideological challenge to disenchanted secularity found in The Power and the Glory. Their concerns are elsewhere, and consequently they are both exemplars of the Catholic literary imagination outside the Western world. Endo’s The Samurai (1980), with its sixteenth-century Japanese setting, may seem an outlier from the other middle novels of chapters 3 Kent: Burns and Oates, 1994), 244–45. For a more recent rebuke of Anselm’s atonement theology, see Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018).

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and 5, even though it was published the same year as Gordon’s The Company of Women and only three years after Percy’s Lancelot. Yet The Samurai, like Percy’s and Gordon’s novels, presents sacramentality and faith in a more muted and fragile key than O’Connor’s or Greene’s older fiction. Endo’s historical novel also shares another characteristic with its contemporaries, one that shows the influence of modern Catholic fiction. The Samurai, like Lancelot and The Company of Women, is built on an ideological dialectic that pits Catholic faith against a dominant cultural matrix. But if Greene, O’Connor, Spark, Percy, and Gordon all explore the clash between Catholicism and Western modernity/postmodernity, Endo situates the Catholic tradition against the Buddhist heritage of his Japanese culture. In other words, Endo mirrors the underlying dynamic of his fellow British and American Catholic authors: Catholicism is opposed by another social imaginary. Hence, The Samurai is a transition novel between the literary framework of Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them (2008), for the latter completely lacks this literary structure. Catholicism in Akpan’s short stories is not opposed by a dominant cultural matrix; like in much postmodern Catholic fiction, the Catholic faith is simply part of the characters’ spiritual imaginations. Space will not allow a deep-dive into all the stories, but I highlight the first and last short stories of the collection: “An Ex-Mas Feast” and “My Parents’ Bedroom.” Grace in these stories is even more ambiguous than in Endo’s The Samurai, and they lack clear moments of sacramentality. In this regard, Akpan’s fiction, despite its very different context, aligns with a pattern in American contemporary Catholic fiction—the seemingly (but not quite) invisible presence of grace. One final linguistic note: My use of the term “sacrifice” is non-technical, and not the pure, biblical notion of sacrifice. Etymologically, of course, sacrifice means to make holy an object, usually through a ritual, that is then offered to God or the gods. (The thought of René Girard leaps to mind here.) That said, Cath-

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olic fiction compels us to think analogically, and so if a mother sacrifices her life for the sake of her children (to give one literary example discussed later), this sacrifice of course may be an act of holiness, but it is not a religiously ritualistic one. Sacrifice as Vicarious Suffering: Greene’s The Power and the Glory The convergence between sacrifice and grace in modern AngloAmerican Catholic fiction bears a francophone imprint. Of particular note is the French Catholic writer Léon Bloy, whom Greene references in his epigraph to The End of the Affair.2 But Greene is not an outlier. Bloy’s portrayal of “vicarious suffering,” that is, suffering that becomes redemptive for others, also influenced O’Connor’s fiction.3 O’Connor’s belief in vicarious suffering is laced throughout her fiction and her letters. (One example is “The Displaced Person,” discussed in chapter 2.) As she remarks in a 1956 letter, “The Communion of Saints has something to do with the fact that the burdens we bear because of someone else, we can also bear for someone else.”4 Vicarious suffering, of course, cannot be seen apart from the suffering and sacrifice of Christ on the cross; if the latter is God’s gift of redemption and salvation offered to humanity, the former is the belief that these divine gifts can be given to an individual through the petitions and actions 2. For an overview of Bloy’s influence on Greene, see Mark Bosco, SJ, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 40–41. 3. For an overview of Bloy’s thought, see Stephen Schloesser, SJ, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 64–70. For Bloy’s influence on O’Connor, see also Schloesser’s “Revelation in History: Displaced Persons, Léon Bloy, and Exegesis of the Commonplace,” in Revelation and Convergence: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, ed. Mark Bosco, SJ, and Brent Little (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 10–50. 4. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 178.

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of another. A person sacrifices for another’s salvation, but this is not because the person earns and then gives away justification and salvation—that would veer into the same danger as Pelagianism; one does not substitute for Christ’s death on the cross. Instead, one’s vicarious suffering participates in Christ’s sacrifice in the hopes that another receives the assistance of God’s grace. One prominent Franco-literary example of vicarious suffering is the Viper’s Tangle (1932) of François Mauriac, who himself was an influence on Greene. Greene praises Mauriac as “a writer for whom the visible world has not ceased to exist, whose characters have the solidity and importance of men with souls to save or lose, and a writer who claims the traditional and essential right of a novelist, to comment, to express his views.”5 In Viper’s Tangle, Mauriac captures the central issue at the heart of vicarious suffering, that it is indeed a matter of “souls to save or lose.” The first-person narrator, Louis, recounts in his diary his plan to swindle his family out of their inheritance, although in hindsight, the reader realizes that ultimately the journal becomes an account of a conversion to faith. In this act of memory, Louis recalls his love for his long-deceased daughter, Marie. Upon her deathbed due to illness, the young Marie, seemingly delirious, exclaims “for Papa!” (98).6 Years later, toward the end of his journal, Louis writes, “at her bedside the secret of death and of life had been revealed to me. . . . A little girl had been dying for me” (198). Marie’s death is akin to a sacramental seed buried in Louis’s imagination, only to bear fruit years later. Her sacrifice and death for his eventual redemption, relates to Mauriac’s belief that, as Patrick Sherry observes, “Christians who share in Christ’s

5. Graham Greene, The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (New York: Viking Press, 1952), 70. 6. All parenthetical citations refer to François Mauriac, Viper’s Tangle, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987). 7. Patrick Sherry, “Novels of Redemption,” Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory, and Culture 14, no. 3 (September 2000): 255.

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agony cooperate in the redemption of the world.”7 Marie’s death follows Incarnational logic, in the sense that the innocent suffer and die for the sinful. Admittedly, this is a troubling path by which redemption occurs since a child, like Marie, does not possess the same freedom of choice as Christ. Greene plays with this idea of vicarious suffering in his Catholic novels, yet he intertwines it tightly with his characters’ sinful actions. For example, Sarah Miles, in The End of the Affair (1951), at one point begs God to let her suffer to relieve the pain of her husband, Henry, and her adulterous lover, Maurice Bendrix. Or, as she prays, “Dear God, if only you could come down from your Cross for a while and let me get up there instead. If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.”8 But perhaps a more famous example in Greene’s literary oeuvre is in The Power and the Glory. The novel is based on Greene’s travels to the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas in 1938 when Catholic worship was severely restricted.9 The protagonist is the last practicing priest in a region where Catholicism is banned from public worship; priests are either killed or forced to apostatize, and those who shelter them face execution. But this is not a simple pious tale of martyrdom, as the unnamed priest is tarred with the moniker “whiskey priest.” More troublesome for the priest’s conscience is that he sired an illegitimate daughter, a mortal sin that he cannot confess as there is no other priest to hear his confession. Ideologically and dramatically opposed to the whiskey priest is the local lieutenant, likewise unnamed, who pursues the fleeing priest with a dogmatic certainty in his Communist philosophy. The novel depicts a series of sacrifices in which laypeople risk 8. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 120. 9. The Lawless Roads (1939) is Greene’s “travel book” of his trip. He discusses the Mexican trip as the basis for The Power and the Glory in his second autobiography, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 84–90. See also Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 1, 1904–1939 (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 651–725.

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their lives on the priest’s behalf; by the story’s end, at least three innocent people have been executed in the hunt for him (198).10 On a more evocative note, Greene intertwines the central symbol of Christian sacrifice with the innocence of a child. The whiskey priest accompanies an indigenous mother and the corpse of her dead child—accidentally shot in a conflict between the police and an American fugitive—to the top of a remote mountain. The mother leaves the child at the foot of a cross, a poignant analogy between the child’s unjust death and the crucifixion of Christ. When the priest returns to the cross, he finds that the mother has left a small lump of sugar with her dead child. With eucharistic overtones, the starving priest eats it, the child’s death literally sustaining his physical life (149–57). The whiskey priest meanwhile possesses a tragic certainty in his own damnation. As he recognizes, the faithful Catholics helping him are making the true sacrifice, one that merits a better priest than himself. “These people are martyrs—protecting me with their own lives,” he reflects at one point. “They deserve a martyr to care for them—not a man like me, who loves all the wrong things” (95). Even the curious dream the night before his execution gives him only a fleeting hope, which instantly evaporates upon waking. In the dream, Coral Fellows—a young girl who had once helped him flee the lieutenant—serves him wine in front of a eucharistic service, but he believes the service does not concern him, nor does he understand her reference to the Gospel when she tells him that the meaning of the Morse code sounding around him stands for “News” (209–10). Between the Word and the eucharistic banquet, the whiskey priest’s dream symbolizes a Catholic Mass succinctly. But he unfortunately does not connect this celebration to himself. Upon waking, “he felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew 10. All parenthetical references are to Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).

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now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint” (210). But what the priest really misses is not the happiness of the dream, but its hope. Several pages before, while overnight in jail, the whiskey priest insists to a pious prisoner that they cannot see the beauty in suffering because they do not have the vision of a saint; shortly thereafter, he reflects, “hate was just a failure of imagination” (130–31). The whiskey priest’s most severe failure is similarly a failure to imagine God’s grace and mercy as extended to him. Alas, he does share the belief of the priest in Greene’s earlier Brighton Rock (1938), who says, “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God.”11 The whiskey priest faces his execution with an unresolved conflict between the beauty caused by his sin—the birth of his daughter—and his own conviction that he is a condemned sinner. “I don’t know a thing about the mercy of God,” he tells the lieutenant shortly after his capture, “But I do know this—that if there’s ever been a single man in this state damned, then I’ll be damned too” (200). But Greene’s narrative subverts the whiskey priest’s narrow sacramental imagination and instead suggests a more expansive conception of grace. For example, Greene implies in a conversation between Coral’s parents that the whiskey priest opened her to the possibility of faith (214). Even the lieutenant falls under the priest’s influence and becomes less certain of himself after the priest’s capture: “The spring of action seemed to be broken. He looked back on the weeks of hunting as a happy time which was over now for ever” (207). The whiskey priest’s most explicit impact occurs upon a son of a pious family, who had previously shown disdain regarding religion, particularly in rejection of his mother’s sentimental stories of martyrdom and sainthood. The family, like Coral, endangered their lives to harbor the whiskey priest, despite the 11. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 268.

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mother’s stern judgment that he was a bad priest. Yet the mother has a change of heart upon learning of the priest’s execution. Not only does she admit that the whiskey priest is now a martyr, but also “he may be one of the saints” (219). Although her piety insists that they must wait for a miracle to determine his sainthood, she misses that a miracle has already occurred in her son. The priest’s life and death has inflamed his imagination. The boy now willingly risks his safety for his faith when he welcomes into the house a newly arrived priest (221–22). Pointedly, the boy lets the priest into his house without bothering to hear his name. Like the whiskey priest, this new priest remains nameless, for his sacerdotal role is more important than his individual identity. The novel affirms a traditional theology of ordination—a theology that claims that a priest, by the ontological change caused by his ordination, is a conduit of grace in his performance of the sacraments; yet Greene expands this sacramental theology such that the priest’s life is a kind of sacrament, albeit oftentimes unknowingly so. The whiskey priest’s insistence that he seek out the American fugitive to hear his dying confession, even though he knows he will probably be caught by the lieutenant, exemplifies his Christ-like willingness to sacrifice himself for others. In this regard, the priest performs the form of Christ, manifesting God’s grace to others, even though he himself believes he has failed to fulfill what God calls each to do: become a saint. Greene’s complicated depiction of the priest’s flaws renders him an unlikely saint, thereby challenging conventional notions of sainthood. As Mark Bosco observes, the whiskey priest embodies Balthasar’s theology of the saint in that the priest has become a form of Christ for others, for “the whiskey priest becomes the Christ, the objectification of the Christ-form, participating in that form by being emptied of his bourgeois Christian piety and sacrificing himself for his criminal brother.”12 Balthasar 12. Bosco, Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination, 53; italics in the original; cf. 51.

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describes the saint as one who is “transparent to Christ,” a person who freely surrenders their entire being to Christ in obedience, and with the gift of grace grows into “Christ’s existence.”13 Further, the beauty of a saint is never limited to the saint themselves, but always points or directs the beholder to the beauty of Christ. A true saint possesses humility; consequently, a saint is the best apologetic for a Church besotted by sin, for they make the form of Christ visible to others, especially when they become a martyr. In Balthasar’s eyes, the Church’s “sole credibility” lies with the lives of the saints.14 He also recognizes that there are both canonized saints and living saints. The saintlier a person is in serving others, Balthasar argues, “the more a Christian has succeeded in expressing in his life the form of Christ, that is to say, the pro-existence, the unselfishness of love.”15 Such people, Balthasar believes, are members of the communion of saints on earth. Or as he stresses in Love Alone Is Credible, members of the communion of the saints provide an encounter with divine love to others and are “a representative of the whole,” for their lives always point away from themselves to the Body of Christ.16 How does this align with the whiskey priest? Greene’s decision to leave his protagonist unnamed beyond “whiskey priest” highlights that the priest’s moral character seems a poor apologetic for the Gospel of Christ. As he believes, he is a less than ideal martyr, much less a saint. His performance of the sacraments, one could argue, are little more than what a believer would expect from any priest. But in so doing, the descriptor “whiskey priest” 13. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 2nd ed., trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Joseph Fessio, SJ, and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 208, 218. 14. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, trans. D. C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 122; cf. also Balthasar, Seeing the Form, 223, 586–87. 15. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Catholicism and the Communion of Saints,” Communio 15, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 168. 16. Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible, 119–20.

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emerges as ironic, for he comes to exemplify Balthasar’s argument that a saint in their life points away from themselves to Christ. The whiskey priest’s sacramental duties allow him to transcend his individual transgressions such that he becomes more than the sum and consequence of his sins. His lack of self-awareness that his life manifests grace recalls Greene’s contemporary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A couple years prior to the novel, Bonhoeffer argues in The Cost of Discipleship that “the saints are unconscious of the fruit they bear,” for they “are only conscious of the strife and distress, the weakness and sin in their lives.”17 At the same time, the whiskey priest fulfills Balthasar’s argument that the saint gives others “a representative of the whole” in that he orients the boy (and to some degree, his mother) along with Coral to look beyond his individual moral character and toward the faith that he signifies. He is an imperfect representative, no doubt, but in his own misguided way, a successful one. Still, many readers would hesitate to consider the whiskey priest a saint, at least in the conventional way; a martyr, perhaps, but a saint? Yet Greene is asking us to stretch our imaginations, to look passed the whiskey priest’s failures, and to recognize the failure of the whiskey priest’s own imagination. He can neither discern his sacramental impact upon others nor imagine himself as the recipient of God’s mercy and forgiveness. Martyrs, Both Reluctant and Willing: Solidarity in Sacrifice in Endo’s The Samurai Endo, one of Japan’s most celebrated twentieth-century fiction writers, moves this investigation of Catholic fiction outside the English-speaking world. In the US, Endo is best known for his 1966 book Silence, which was adapted into a 2016 film by Martin Scorsese. Silence was inspired by Graham Greene’s The Power 17. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Touchstone/ Simon and Schuster, 1995), 285.

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and the Glory, and Greene himself praised Silence as better than The Power and the Glory. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Endo is often regarded in the Western world as the “Japanese Graham Greene,” a description that has been criticized for flattening the unique theological and literary voices of each author. Further, Greene was not the only Western Catholic writer to shape Endo’s literary career. He also studied the fiction of Mauriac and Bernanos as an exchange student in France and consequently was well aware of the theme of vicarious suffering in both its French and British varieties.18 Like Greene, Endo was a convert, but one who converted at the prompting of his mother around the age of eleven, an event that Endo describes as the equivalent to putting on very ill-fitting clothes due to the association of Christianity with Western culture and colonialism.19 Like Silence and the late novel Deep River (1994), The Samurai examines Japan’s historic mistrust of Catholicism. The Samurai, set in the seventeenth century shortly before Japan’s prohibition of Christianity, oscillates between the ambitious Spanish Franciscan Father Pedro Velasco and the Japanese samurai of the title, Hasekura Rokuemon, or Roku for short. In so doing, the novel presents two forms of sacrifice as Roku 18. For an overview of Endo’s influences, see Mark Bosco, SJ, “Charting Endo’s Catholic Literary Aesthetic,” in Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Classic Novel, ed. Mark W. Dennis and Darren J. N. Middleton (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 77–92. In that same volume, see also Darren J. N. Middleton, “Endo and Greene’s Literary Theology,” 61–75. For an example of a critical reaction to the description of Endo as “the Japanese Graham Greene,” see Mark Williams, “Endō Shūsaku: Death and Rebirth in Deep River,” Christianity and Literature 51, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 219–39. 19. For biographical information on Endo—and his struggle to be a Christian as a Japanese novelist—see Shusaku Endo, “Mr. Shusaku Endo Talks about His Life and Works as a Catholic Writer,” by Kazumi Yamagata, The Chesterton Review: A Newsletter of the G. K. Chesterton Society 12, no. 4 (November 1986): 493–506; Philip Yancey, “Japan’s Faithful Judas: Shusaku Endo’s Struggle to Give His Faith a Japanese Soul,” Books & Culture: A Christian Review 2 (January–February 1996): 3, 6–7; and Mark B. Williams, Endō Shūsaku: A Literature of Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 1999), 30–34.

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and Velasco are both martyred. Roku’s martyrdom is ironic, as he is a reluctant convert who unexpectedly comes to Catholic faith by sacrificing his own autonomy to obey the commands of his political authorities. Eventually, his imagination shifts such that he sees his sacrifice through the lens of Jesus’s crucifixion, a kind of nascent, culturally bound theology of the cross. Velasco’s journey, meanwhile, conforms to the basic contours of a traditional martyrdom of a missionary—one who arrives in a non-Catholic land to evangelize, only to face execution odium fidei. But it is in abandoning his ambition that his missionary zeal becomes purified and he develops a solidarity with Roku and another Japanese samurai, Nishi. Similar to the modern-to-postmodern “transition” novels of chapters 3 and 5, The Samurai demonstrates a shift to the more muted sacramentality increasingly common in post-1970 Catholic fiction. Yet in this muted sacramentality, The Samurai both continues and critically examines forms of sacrifice depicted in The Power and the Glory. Like the whiskey priest returning to danger with the near certainty of his capture and execution, so Velasco likewise returns to Japan. In the details of the plot, of course, the whiskey priest’s and Velasco’s journeys are very different, but their journeys, broadly considered, align. Both returns seem foolhardy, all but sealing the priests’ fates as unnecessary martyrs. Yet the novels indicate that their lives are not failures but have nurtured the seeds of faith amidst hostile circumstances. As discussed above, Greene depicts this dramatic irony in the novel’s final pages through a series of tableaus that portray the unwitting effect of the whiskey priest on others. Endo is more oblique; yet his novel still aligns with the pattern of Balthasar’s theology of the saint. Velasco’s death points to Christ, even if this pointing is more difficult to see. Endo, however, adds a dimension of complexity with his title character. The samurai becomes an unwilling martyr, one who converts to Catholicism for pragmatic reasons more than doctrinal or dogmatic ones, and who is not even sure how fully he understands or believes in the faith for which

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he is dying. Above, I briefly mentioned Sobrino’s argument that the cross is the sign of God’s solidarity with those who are unjust victims of violence and oppression. Although Endo is not a liberation theologian, his portrayal of Roku’s spiritual development indicates a similar understanding of the crucifixion, for Roku comes to imagine the sacrifice of the cross as a sign of Jesus’s solidarity with him. Yet even here, the samurai’s death only makes sense if the reader sees his sacrifice as directing the reader’s gaze to Christ, akin to the way the whiskey priest’s and Velasco’s do. Although Endo’s Catholic faith makes him a member of an historically minuscule minority in Japan (Catholics number less than one percent of the overall population), he should also be seen in the context of larger global shifts of the 1960s and 1970s after the Second Vatican Council, the Church’s first ecumenical council to feature Asian bishops. Theologian Peter Phan notes several significant developments for Asian Catholicism after the Council. For example, the establishment of the Federation of Asian Bishops Conference in 1972 was an outgrowth of the November 1970 meeting between Asian bishops and Pope Paul VI during his historic trip to the Philippines. More theologically, Phan observes a contrast between Latin American and Asian theologies after the council. If the former are most noteworthy for their call for economic liberation, the latter more likely emphasize the importance of both interreligious dialogue and the need for inculturation, particularly in the liturgical rites. (This is not to say that issues of justice are absent in Asian Catholic praxis; Phan is merely making broad observations.)20 Although Endo is not a missionary or a theologian, his work displays an analogous concern for inculturation and religious pluralism. Mark Bosco and Christopher Wachal point out that Endo’s interest in interreligious dialogue develops in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate and Ad 20. Peter C. Phan, In Our Own Tongues: Perspectives from Asia on Mission and Inculturation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 203–11.

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Gentes, documents that shaped Endo’s literary imagination in the subsequent decades. Silence, written before the Council was complete, still reflects the “vertical” Catholic understanding of “looking up to God” that was common during Endo’s upbringing and young adulthood. After the Council, this vertical conception of the human-God relationship becomes more horizontal, thus opening space for interreligious engagement, an impetus later furthered by the pontificate of John Paul II.21 Thus, Endo develops his concerns for inculturation and religious pluralism amidst a similar shift in official Catholic teaching. In the three novels mentioned above, one sees this development of Endo’s thought particularly through his depiction of God as “weak,” which for him is the primary insight of the Incarnation. In Silence, Father Rodrigues apostatizes after he believes he hears the voice of Christ telling him to trample on him, that is, on Christ’s image engraved in the fumie, the Japanese icons that believers stepped upon to prove their apostasy. This scene aligns with Endo’s own belief that Japanese culture would respond to depictions of God and Christ that emphasize divine mercy, weakness, and forgiveness over judgment. In the US edition of his A Life of Jesus—his interpretation of the Gospels, published a few years before The Samurai—Endo remarks that “the religious mentality of the Japanese is . . . responsive to one who ‘suffers with us’ and who ‘allows for our weakness,’ but their mentality has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them.”22 This emphasis on a merciful, forgiving God—one who accompanies us in our suffering and failings—achieves its most interreligious

21. Mark Bosco, SJ, and Christopher Wachal, “Catholic Convergences in Deep River,” in Navigating Deep River: New Perspectives on Shūsaku Endō’s Final Novel, ed. Mark W. Dennis and Darren J. N. Middleton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), 133–36. 22. Shusaku Endo, A Life of Jesus, trans. Richard A. Schuchert, SJ (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 1.

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and universalist manifestation in Deep River through the character of Ōtsu, a heterodox Catholic priest, who carries the impoverished and abandoned dying or dead Hindus to the Ganges river in the city of Varanasi. The Samurai occupies a middle space between Silence and Deep River in the development of Endo’s theological concerns. Endo’s insistence on a weak Christ may strike some Western Catholics as a bit of an overkill, but Endo should be situated as part of a generation of Christian theologians and writers who were confronted by the national trauma of Japan’s defeat in World War II.23 Japanese Christians lived within a culture of lingering distrust; after all, to be a Christian during World War II was particularly suspect, considering that its Western enemies were culturally Christian nations. Endo was part of a tendency in postwar Japanese Christianity to turn away from Euro-centric understandings of the Christian tradition in order to seek a more authentic Japanese one, often by constructing a non-triumphalist Christianity. As Emi Mase-Hasegawa explains, “the image of the powerless Christ is rooted in the failure of the postwar Christian mission in Japan. Instead a non-triumphalist theology appeared in various shapes by different theologians.”24 Endo is not alone amongst his generation. A few years before the publication of The Samurai, the Protestant theologian Kosuke Koyama argues that a missionary, especially in an oft-colonized land, needs to harbor and live out a “crucified mind” and not a “crusading mind.” Koyama believes that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and service to others through love demonstrates a “crucified mind.” A missionary who models such a mind is one who is able 23. For a discussion of Endo’s post-War Japanese literary context, see Williams, Endō Shūsaku, 14–24. For a fascinating perspective on Endo and the collective trauma suffered by Japanese culture because of World War II, see Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016). 24. Emi Mase-Hasegawa, Christ in Japanese Culture: Theological Themes in Shusaku Endo’s Literary Works (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 127.

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to surrender one’s ego such that the Gospel of Christ and the missionary’s own life become one.25 Endo’s The Samurai aligns with Koyama’s argument in two ways. First, the character of the Catholic missionary, Velasco, must undergo a deconstruction of his own colonizing ego, from one whose missionary zeal furthers his own ambition to one who stands in solidarity with the persecuted Japanese Christians. Second, Koyama’s call for the missionary to model Christ’s own brokenness through weakness converges with Endo’s concern for a “weak” Christology. Although Velasco does not recognize this until it is too late for his mission, Roku comes to accept the Catholic faith, albeit imperfectly, once he sees an analogical relationship between his weakness and that of Christ on the cross. Since he culturally is a Buddhist, Roku’s initial faith stems from his family’s heritage, which the novel depicts as the foundation of the samurai’s worldview. At the same time, he has a kind of faith, in the sense of trust, in his Japanese superiors. Initially, his obedience to his lord, Nancy Ann Watanabe remarks, is “a matter of faith,” albeit a “naïve political faith in a unified Japanese government.”26 Christianity, as the novel repeatedly makes clear, seems irrelevant to Roku, and he encounters it only because he is instructed by his local lord to accompany Father Velasco to “New Spain” (i.e., Mexico) in order to help establish trade. Roku has no wish to undertake such a difficult journey but does so obediently with the hope of regaining his family’s former ancestral lands. For much of his journey, he regards Christianity with bewilderment, a reaction often depicted in his encounters with the cru25. Kosuke Koyama, “What Makes a Missionary? Toward Crucified Mind, Not Crusading Mind,” in Mission Trends No. 1: Crucial Issues in Mission Today, ed. Gerald H. Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 117–32, esp. 130–32. 26. Nancy Ann Watanabe, “The Contemporary Catholic Bildungsroman: Passionate Conviction in Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai and Mary Gordon’s Men and Angels,” in Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature, ed. Mary R. Reichardt (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 194.

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cifixes in numerous Christian buildings. The crucifix, with its portrayal of Christ as an “emaciated man,” is repellant initially. Why would anyone worship such a weak person? Roku’s faith only becomes authentic when he comes to see the symbol of the crucifix stripped of any European, colonial associations such that he can relate to the crucifix analogically. This involves a twofold conversion of his imagination: first, his trust in his Japanese leaders is deconstructed as a consequence of his humiliation and betrayal at their hands; second, he slowly relates the cross to his servant Yozō, his most faithful retainer. Endo’s narrative implies, then, that authentic Christian conversion involves an imaginative transformation when the foundational symbols of Christianity, such as the crucifix, speak to one’s culture. But this conversion takes an arduous journey of several years. At the beginning, Roku expects to live and die in the marshland that his family now runs on behalf of their local leader, Lord Ishida. In this harsh and isolated landscape, Roku is detached from the larger internal efforts of Japan to control (and eventually eliminate) Catholic missionary activity, which government authorities regard as too closely allied with Spanish colonialism. Roku therefore dismisses Christianity as irrelevant to his life (16– 17).27 Surprisingly, a local government council, headed by Lord Shiraishi, summons him and orders him to accompany three other samurai and a group of Japanese merchants to New Spain to deliver a message to local Spanish authorities in the hopes of opening trade. Their ship is built and sailed by shipwrecked Spanish sailors. Serving as their translator is the ambitious Franciscan Father Velasco, who is trying to reestablish legal missionary activity in Japan and hopes to be rewarded for his efforts by becoming the bishop of Japan (42). To the provincial Roku’s confusion, Lord Shiraishi orders Roku to “follow Lord Velasco’s instructions in all matters”; further, Roku “must not cling to Japa27. All parenthetical citations are from Shusaku Endo, The Samurai, trans. Van C. Gessel (New York: New Directions, 1982).

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nese customs if they stand in the way of your mission” (49). What follows is a disorienting journey for Roku and his fellow Japanese travelers to colonial Mexico City. Although their diplomatic overtures are obstructed by the city’s viceroy, as Velasco secretly predicts, Velasco cunningly manipulates three of the samurai into believing that the best and quickest alternative is for them to travel to Spain themselves. Although this infuriates the Japanese, they feel they have no choice, as Velasco is their sole translator and they are therefore ignorant of Velasco’s true intentions. Consequently, the three samurai continue to Spain with the belief that this is the best method to achieve their mission to establish trade with Spain. Unbeknownst to them, Velasco hopes that the delay will give him time to convince the Japanese that they cannot complete their mission unless they are baptized. This grand gesture—to present the Japanese envoys as new converts—may convince ecclesial authorities to risk sending more of his fellow Franciscans to Japan, and not his archenemies, the Jesuits. Further, he dreams that they will additionally appoint him the leader of missionary activities. Until their arrival in Madrid, more than a year after their initial departure, Velasco seems on the verge of achieving his ambitions. In Madrid, he convinces the samurai and their willing retainers to be publicly baptized. But then the ecclesial authorities receive word via the Jesuits that Japan has expelled all remaining missionaries and begun anew to persecute Christians. Velasco’s request to return to Japan is now rejected. In a last desperate attempt to achieve their mission, both Velasco and the samurai travel to Rome to appeal to the pope, who rejects their pleas for assistance. Velasco then is ordered to live quietly in a monastery in Manilla, while the Japanese begin a depressing journey home. Before I turn to the novel’s conclusion, there are a few things to note concerning Roku. First, until Rome, Roku consistently maintains faith in his Japanese overlords and remains faithful to his family’s Buddhist heritage. Regarding the former, one sees

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this in his loyalty to his mission. For example, before making the unexpected journey to Madrid, he remarks, “All I can do is believe what Lord Shiraishi told me,” a belief that recalls Shiraishi’s command that he was to follow Velasco’s instructions (108). Roku rejects the advice of his fellow samurai, Matsuki, who counsels that they are caught in political machinations beyond their control and that it would be best to return to Japan. Matsuki follows his own words and does not travel to Madrid. But Roku, along with two remaining samurai, soldiers on obediently. Indeed, even after they begin their return journey to Japan, Roku still voices trust that the Council of Elders—the council of lords that devised their mission—would understand all their efforts. Curiously, then, it is not Roku’s loyalty to his political authorities that most obstructs his conversion. After all, if Velasco informs him that the best way to complete their mission is to be baptized, and Roku is under orders to follow Velasco, why then does he still hesitate to be baptized in Madrid? The text is clear: “To become a Christian was to betray the marshland. . . . The ancestors and relatives of all the living silently kept watch over the marshland. So long as the Hasekura house continued, the samurai’s deceased father and grandfather would be a part of the marshland. Those dead souls would not permit him to become a Christian” (160). In other words, the samurai’s primary loyalty is to his family heritage, a heritage that he would insult if he became Christian. The very thought of worshipping the God on the crucifix washes him with “an unbearable feeling of shame” (160). Roku’s hesitation is culturally understandable, as clarified in a debate between Velasco and an aging Jesuit, Father Valente. Valente warns the Spanish bishops that the Japanese regard their family heritage as their fundamental faith, and that the Japanese do not think as individuals but as a collective, a community, centered primarily around their family lineage (164). The theologian Nozomu Miyahira would concur with Valente’s assertion, as he describes the Japanese concept of humanity fundamentally as

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much more relational than the anthropology of Western modernity; in Japanese culture, the definition of the self depends on its relationship to others.28 Interestingly, Roku is caught in shame—shame at the thought of betraying his family, and shame that his own hesitation prevents him from receiving Baptism, and thus delaying his servants’ return to their home. The latter causes the samurai to relent and become baptized in a mistaken wager that they will be able to complete their mission. But the former shame remains. During the Baptism ritual, even while he is saying “I believe,” the Samurai insists in his thoughts that he will not worship Christ. Still, he feels that he has already betrayed his family. The narrative meanwhile comments ironically: “That was baptism. A mere formality to the envoys, an irrevocable sacrament to the Church” (175). Roku may be officially part of the Catholic community, but his loyalty remains to his Buddhist heritage. During the ritual, Roku sees the “emaciated man” on the crucifix and vows that he will never worship him. Although Roku does not articulate a coherent description of divinity based on his cultural Buddhism, he is mystified that anyone would put their faith in a God so weak as to be crucified on the cross; the weakness of the cross upends his understanding of authority. Further, he rightly asks, what good does the Christian faith do in this world? Christ’s sacrifice, despite Velasco’s claims that it brings salvation, has done nothing to free the burden of the peasants in Roku’s marshland (172–74). The samurai first sees a crucifix on the rosary of his retainer, Yozō, who had received it from Velasco. The samurai confiscates the rosary with a stern warning about the Franciscan, but when alone, he looks at the rosary: The row of beads was made from seeds, and a crucifix dan28. Nozomu Miyahira, Towards a Theology of the Concord of God: A Japanese Perspective on the Trinity (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 2000), 124.

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gled from one end of the string. The naked figure of an emaciated man had been carved on the crucifix. The samurai gazed at this man, whose arms were outstretched, and whose head drooped lifelessly. He could not understand why Velasco and all the other foreigners called such a man ‘Lord’. To the samurai, only His Lordship could be called ‘Lord’, but His Lordship was not a wretched, emasculated figure like this. If the Christians really worshipped this emaciated man, then their religion seemed an incredibly bizarre sort of heresy. (83–84)

The phrase “emaciated man” occurs like a leitmotif throughout the novel, and his rejection of the cross during his Baptism simply continues behavior seen repeatedly during his journey. However, upon the samurai’s return to Japan, he discovers that the Baptisms of himself and Nishi—the only other surviving samurai—now make them untrustworthy in the eyes of the Japanese authorities. Roku and Nishi further learn from Matsuki that the emperor never intended to establish trade with Spanish colonies, but merely used their mission as a pretense to learn about Spanish navigation techniques and shipbuilding methods. Lowranking envoys such as themselves were chosen because they were disposable (236–37). In further humiliation, Roku and Nishi are subjected to a serious of increasingly punitive measures, even though they clarify that their Baptism was motivated by their desire to complete their mission (231–34, 240–41). As the samurai reflects at one point, everything was due to that “emaciated man” whom he never wanted to worship: “That man was trying to alter the samurai’s destiny” (233–34). While destroying his mementos from his travels, Roku stumbles across a note from a former Japanese monk, a Catholic convert who dedicated his life to the poor indigenous peoples of Mexico, separated from both his native Japan and the institutional Church. The expatriate insists that Christ is “always besides us” and suffers with us. (Readers of Deep River will notice similarities to the character, Ōtsu.) Roku realizes that he no

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longer harbors “the same contempt” for Jesus as before, because he now sees “that wretched man” as “much like himself” (242). Roku has come to regard the crucifix without its colonial associations, and analogous to his own life. Indeed, Christ becomes embodied for Roku when he realizes that his loyal retainer, Yozō, hangs his head like a crucified Jesus. Further, it is Yozō to whom he confesses that he now understands the universal human desire to believe in one who accompanies people in their suffering (245). Yozō’s analogical association to Christ is also depicted several months later when Roku is summoned to Lord Ishida’s castle, where he is quickly arrested with the expectation that he will be executed. True to his samurai training, Roku does not resist. Yozō is his sole consolation; Yozō, and not Roku’s wife, son, uncle, or deceased ancestors, is present here at the end. The samurai’s two loyalties upon which his life was built—his obedience to his local lords, and his loyalty to his family’s Buddhist heritage—have been undermined when he, like the crucified Christ, is betrayed and executed. Now, as they part for the last time, Yozō says, “From now on . . . He will be beside you. . . . He will attend you.” To this the samurai “[nods] his head emphatically,” then turns “towards the end of his journey” (262). As MaseHasegawa remarks, Roku “saw Jesus Christ in his own Japanese Buddhist context as an ever-faithful retainer, who accompanied him at any time, at any place, and even to his death. At last, the samurai understood Jesus Christ as a savior and the eternal companion of the despised, poor, neglected, and abandoned.”29 Yozō, Roku’s social inferior, has become a symbol of the solidarity and consolation of Christ. But Yozō is not the only one with whom Roku comes to an unexpected solidarity, for, toward the end of his journey, he begins to form a kinship with Father Velasco, his previous manipulator. I have noted above Velasco’s ambition for mission29. Mase-Hasegawa, Christ in Japanese Culture, 106; italics in the original.

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ary glory, an analogue to Koyama’s warning about the colonizing mind of a missionary. But once Velasco experiences the same rejection as the Japanese samurai—once he begins to accompany them in their suffering instead of simply using them as a means to his end—he develops a surprising affinity with them. Roku observes that he now sees Velasco as similar to himself (195). Velasco’s original goal was to widen the missionary activity in Japan, with hopefully himself in charge. But after his shared rejection and despair from their journey to Rome, Velasco now sees his mission as accompanying the samurai, even at the risk of his life (188). Similar to Rodrigues of Silence, the seeming failure of his missionary journey prompts him to interrogate critically his Catholic faith, particularly after the baptized samurai, Tanaka, commits ritualistic suicide due to the dishonor of failing at his mission. Velasco refuses to believe that God would abandon him, despite his commitment of a mortal sin. Although this is certainly a heterodox view for his time, Velasco justifies it through his faith in the orthodox Catholic doctrine that Baptism produces an ontological change in a person, regardless of their conscious faith. In other words, he insists on the objective presence of grace in each samurai’s Baptism, despite their personal intentions (168, 215, 255). If Roku comes to discern the cross as a sign of Jesus’s accompaniment, Velasco’s journey is to model the cross’s sacrifice in his own death, a martyrdom that shows the growth of his spiritual kinship with Roku and Nishi. Earlier in the novel, Velasco sees a crucifix on his desk, and its Jesus seems to regard his complaints “sadly” (140). But by the end, Velasco echoes Christ’s passion, for his sweat is “like drops of blood” and he prays to God that this “cup of death” be removed (Luke 22:42–44). Shortly before his martyrdom, he reflects that his entire journey was meant to lead him to the insight that the God whom he worshiped was the God who became incarnate so as to enter into the world’s muck and sin: “All existed for the purpose of shattering everything that I had idealized, so that I could see the true state

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of the world” (254). (As if to further demonstrate that God is the God of irony, Velasco awaits his death with a Jesuit; his old animosity now seems absurd.) Further, Velasco’s martyrdom displays his solidarity with Nishi and Roku when he exclaims just before his execution, “Now I can join them!” (266). On one hand, this is a little troubling, for does not Velasco bear much guilt for their deaths? On the other hand, Endo is indicating not only Velasco’s newfound faith in God’s mercy and forgiveness, but also Velasco’s growth into a missionary who possesses a crucified mind. In The Samurai, Endo emphasizes a Christ of accompaniment, a weak God, who becomes immanent in our suffering and extends mercy and loving forgiveness regardless of the failings of our faith. Roku certainly does not understand much about Catholic dogma, or Christ for that matter.30 But he is baptized, and at the end, he finds that the God revealed in Yozō’s faithfulness to him is the God of the Crucifixion. Roku now trusts that emaciated man on the cross whom he once rejected, because he has likewise been rejected. If the Japanese authorities ask him to sacrifice his life out of political and cultural loyalty, it is also a sacrifice that ironically manifests his incipient Catholic faith. Further, his suffering reveals an unexpected solidarity with his fellow martyr, Velasco. At the same time, Yozō’s survival indicates that the seeds of the Catholic faith survive, even if buried and nearly invisible in the soil of seventeenth-century Japan. Roku’s, Yozō’s, and Velasco’s experiences of sacrifice form a surprising bond of solidarity between them. The Samurai demonstrates the “transition” period of the 1970s and early 1980s in the Catholic literary imagination. It plays with

30. Mark Williams argues that “the sole concern of Endo’s narrator at this juncture [i.e., Roku’s acquiescence to his execution] rests solely with the potential for self-determination with which the samurai is now invested, his actual reaction at the moment of death consequently scrupulously avoided.” See Williams, Endō Shūsaku, 117; italics in the original.

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sacramental themes and symbols akin to those in earlier Catholic fiction, such as the close connection between grace and evil. Additionally, Endo’s insistence that grace occurs through morally compromised characters reminds one of Greene’s whiskey priest. But in terms of my pattern of contrast, Endo’s novel also foreshadows a trend in later Catholic fiction: Grace, if a reader can discern it, is less about deconstructing the sin of pride, and more a source of consolation and hope amidst unjust suffering. Sacrifice and the Suffering of Children: Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them The Samurai is representative of a shift in the Catholic literary imagination that increasingly occurs after the 1960s. If Mauriac, Waugh, Greene, and O’Connor throughout the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s portray sacrifice as a catalyst for Christian conversion, later Catholic authors are often more critical. Endo’s Silence and The Samurai, for example, present a complicated picture of martyrdom. To give an American example, Mary Gordon’s work, highlighted in the next chapter, often interrogates traditional Catholic beliefs and customs that foist expectations of sacrifice upon women. Her first two novels Final Payments (1978) and The Company of Women (1980) both feature female protagonists who question their upbringing by authoritative Catholic men. This trend holds in more recent Catholic authors’ work, particularly with Uwem Akpan. His stories lack modern Catholic fiction’s tendency to depict sacrifice as a clear catalyst for conversion. Sacrifice is no longer a dramatic means to depict a character’s conversion from disbelief to belief. Further, Akpan’s young characters complicate the issue of sacrifice since the children’s freedom is truncated by age, at the very least, and often by poverty. In this sense, his stories overlap, without perfectly aligning, with various contemporary theologies that seek to rebuke any theology of sacrifice that would seem to valorize oppression and cast unjust suffering as ordained by God.

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For example, the womanist theologian Delores S. Williams insists that authentically Christian theologies must reject rhetoric that regards the sacrifice and suffering of African-American women during slavery and the Jim Crow era as somehow justified by Jesus’s death on the cross. Instead, she advocates that the cross should be seen as a sign of resistance to forms of violence upon black bodies.31 For Williams, this shifts the location of redemption from the cross to Jesus’s life so as to prevent exploitation from being deemed “sacred.”32 A different critique of sacrifice comes from James Alison who, channeling the thought of Girard, urges Catholic theology to recognize the cross as a rebuttal to forms of sacrifice that continue destructive and unjust acts of scapegoating that stem from harmful mimetic desires. As Alison believes, “all Christian living can be described as a movement away from the world of idols and sacrifice by which we make ourselves good and safe by excluding others, and towards a world in which we share in Jesus’ un-frightened self-giving for others.”33 Of course, Akpan is not writing as a theologian, but I offer these comments to stress that the reader should never regard Akpan’s fictional analogies to Christ as justifications for the children’s sufferings. Like Greene’s and Endo’s, Akpan’s stories also feature characters who sacrifice for others, and some of these sacrifices may be “Christ-like,” but in stark contrast to Greene’s and Endo’s fiction, Akpan’s stories depict sacrifice as a cry against exploitation and violence. Akpan’s stunning debut collection Say You’re One of Them (2008) returns us to the genre of short stories. Akpan’s book received great critical acclaim upon its release in 2008, such as 31. Delores S. Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience and the Christian Notion of Redemption,” in After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of the World Religions, ed. Paula M. Cooey, William R. Eakin, and Jay B. McDaniel (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 8–12. 32. Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience and the Christian Notion of Redemption,” 12–13. 33. James Alison, “We Didn’t Invent Sacrifice, Sacrifice Invented Us,” Concilium no. 4 (2013): 57.

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the honor of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa region. Part of the curiosity surrounding Akpan’s work is his unusual background for a writer, for he joined the Jesuit order at nineteen and is ordained a priest. In interviews, Akpan frequently credits the Jesuit tradition of composition of place as a resource that helped him imagine the lives of children who live in situations and African countries different from his own context.34 Akpan often remarks that he sees a priest also as a poet, a designation that calls to mind Rahner’s identical formulation.35 But, as many readers have noted, there is no proselytization in Say You’re One of Them. Instead, Akpan is concerned with the much more existential questions of how children simply stay alive and find hope against overwhelming odds. These can be theological matters, of course, but Akpan provides no clear answers. Sacrifices abound, but what these children achieve is left as an open question. Situating Akpan in relationship to the Anglo-American Catholic literary tradition is a difficult one and provokes the question of whether we need a different understanding of the Catholic literary imagination than the one defined in chapter 1. This is not as much of an issue with Endo considering the influence of Greene and French Catholic authors upon his work. Further, Endo, despite his very different culture from Western Catholic authors’, shares one important similarity. He, like the French34. For examples of his comments, see Uwem Akpan, “Author Gives Voice to Plight of African Children,” Tell Me More, by Michel Martin (NPR), June 23, 2008. Last accessed on March 9, 2022 at https://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=91794531; and Uwem Akpan, “Uwem Akpan, Interview,” by Jeremiah Chamberlin, Granta, November 14, 2008. Last accessed on March 9, 2022 at https://granta.com/interview-uwem-akpan/. 35. For examples of this remark, see Akpan, “Uwem Akpan, Interview”; and Uwem Akpan, “Uwem Akpan,” by Jon M. Sweeney, Explorefaith.org, 2008. Last accessed on March 9, 2022 at http://www.explorefaith.org/resources/ books/author_interviews/uwem_akpan.php. Cf. Karl Rahner, SJ, “Priest and Poet,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1967), 294–317.

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British-American literary tradition of Mauriac, Bernanos, Waugh, Greene, O’Connor, and Spark, is aware that he writes as a minority voice within the larger culture. Akpan, however, was born and raised in Nigeria, a country that is approximately split between a Muslim north and a Christian south. While statistically, Catholics are far from being a majority of the population, even amongst Christians, the reader should hesitate to classify his fiction under the same “minority” Catholic description of a Greene or an O’Connor. His concerns and cultural location mean that he is not writing to navigate or confront certain intellectual currents of Western secularity. Curiously, this means that Akpan does align with contemporary American authors in the sense that he is not writing to demonstrate faith as a bold alternative to modernity, for faith is woven into the characterization of his protagonists from the onset. There is not the dramatic, climatic conversion of earlier Catholic fiction. That said, Akpan is certainly aware of both the American theological as well as literary mainstream. His formation included studies at both Creighton University and Gonzaga University, and he holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. In addition, he clearly expected American readers as among his initial audience, as is evidenced by the fact that his stories were first published in The New Yorker, and Say You’re One of Them was not published in Africa until two years after its American debut. Still, he is coy in interviews about his literary influences (outside the Bible), but he has made brief remarks regarding Flannery O’Connor. For example, he notes, “I feel if the stories don’t work first as stories, they may not be worth much. You have lost your readers. I think it is Flannery O’Connor who said, ‘Before a chair works at the level of symbolism in stories, it has to exist first as a chair in the story.’”36 There is a similar focus on concreteness in Akpan’s writing, filled with specific dialects, idioms, and historical details of the various African cultures. But perhaps more 36. Akpan, “Uwem Akpan, Interview.”

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tellingly, Akpan admits that he shares O’Connor’s penchant for intertwining evil and grace tightly in his fiction. As he remarks to Jon Sweeney: It’s not a good thing to compare me with O’Connor. The lady was a genius. I like her stories a lot. But you cannot talk of grace without talking of evil and vice versa. These are twin concepts. How do you show how grace is present in the world? Who are the courageous ones among us? The loving ones? What odds do we overcome to remain faithful, loving? Yes, I agree with O’Connor that sometimes you need to shock people into seeing these things. Sometimes gentle reminders would not do.37

Like O’Connor, Akpan’s attempt to shock readers urges them to see the world from a different perspective. In addition, he captures the messy ambiguity of grace’s presence, despite his characters’ suffering and their frequent all-too-human failings—we have certainly seen examples of this latter point in Greene’s and Endo’s fiction above. As he notes, “I hope I am able to reveal the compassion of God in the faces of the people I write about. I think fiction has a way of doing this without being doctrinaire about it.”38 The scholarly literature on Akpan’s fiction (such as it exists so far) has generally fallen into a few categories. Often, his readers regard his stories as examples of trauma literature through the eyes of children; other critics note the stylistic techniques by which Akpan generates a connection between the (most likely) Western reader and the young African protagonists; 37. Akpan, “Uwem Akpan.” 38. This interview was originally printed in The New Yorker and is reprinted at the end of the paperback edition of Say You’re One of Them. See Uwem Akpan, “A Conversation with the Author of Say You’re One of Them,” by Cressida Leyshon, in “A Reading Group Guide,” in Say You’re One of Them (New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 5. 39. For examples of readings related to trauma and cross-cultural issues, see John Kearney, “Say You’re One of Them: Uwem Akpan’s Collection of Short

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occasionally, scholars offer more explicitly theological readings.39 The following discussion aligns the most with this last category through a focus upon the collection’s first and last stories, “An Ex-mas Feast” and “My Parents’ Bedroom,” both of which depict sacrifice in heart-wrenching situations. If Greene’s and Endo’s novels prominently feature the cross, “An Ex-mas Feast,” which commences the book and is set in Nairobi, Kenya, ironically considers another central event of Christ’s life—his incarnation. (The prominence of the cross, though, returns below in “My Parents’ Bedroom.”) Set on Christmas Eve, the joy and celebration usually associated with Christmas is juxtaposed with the abject poverty of the story’s characters. Although Akpan, like Greene or Endo, asks the reader to see Christ in unexpected places, he provocatively implies that the story’s most Christlike analogy is a sister’s sacrifice of her body to sex work in part to further her younger brother’s education. However, Akpan never romanticizes the poverty, and grace’s efficacy seems blunted by the brother’s ultimate rejection of his sister’s gift. The sister, in this case, is twelve-year-old Maisha, who,

Stories,” English Studies in Africa 54, no. 2 (2011): 88–102; Edgar Fred Nabutanyi, “Affect in Representations of Children’s Experiences of Mass Violence: Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them and Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Secrets no More,” in Matatu 45, no. 1 (January 2014): 101–17; Isaac Ndlovu, “Satire, Children, and Traumatic Violence: The Case of Ahmadou Kourouma and Uwen [sic] Akpan,” Matatu 45, no. 1 (January 2014): 71–100; Seiwoong Oh, “Cross-Cultural Narrative Interventions by Ha Jin, Junot Díaz, and Uwem Akpan,” English Language and Literature 61, no. 3 (2015): 415–32; H. Oby Okolocha, “War and Absurdity: Viewing the Manifestations of Trauma in Uwem Akpan’s ‘Luxurious Hearses,’” Matatu 40, no.1 (December 2012): 159–72; and Ayobami Onanuga, “Violence and Its Linguistic Framing: An Exploration of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, The Book of Bones and Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them,” Journal of Literary Studies 34, no. 1 (March 2018): 21–37. For examples of more theological readings, see Stephen M. Szolosi, “Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them: Invitations to Solidarity,” Christianity and Literature 61, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 443–64; and Michael Vander Weele, “The Human Effort to Exchange Stories and Uwem Akpan’s Child Narrators,” Religion & Literature 47, no. 3 (Autumn 2015): 119–140.

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much to her parents’ consternation, has become a “street girl” in Nairobi (5).40 She, however, has not forgotten about her family and passes along money to them. She also remains close to the story’s first-person narrator, her eight-year-old brother, Jigana, who is regarded as the family’s best chance to complete school and climb the economic ladder. Maisha saves her earnings to purchase Jigana’s uniform, which will allow him to return to school. The mother and father, meanwhile, are unemployed, in debt, and also bear responsibility for other children, a ten-year-old sister— who is preparing to follow her sister Maisha into sex work—a young set of twins, and Baby, the only name given to the youngest child, who is tragically used as a prop to beg for money. Amidst this poverty, the family must celebrate Christmas in a tent with little to eat. (The characters frequently sniff glue to stave off the pangs of hunger.) Despite it all, the family clings to faith and holds their own Christmas worship. Of particular importance is the family Bible: “The front cover had peeled off, leaving a dirty page full of our relatives’ names, dead and living. . . . Baba’s [their father’s] late father had insisted that all the names of our family be included, in recognition of the instability of street life” (18). The mother proceeds to read the names from this list in a manner akin to how one would at a memorial prayer service. The Bible is more than an heirloom; it is also a way of honoring the dignity and memory of those who would otherwise be forgotten. Afterwards, the mother “praised God for blessing Maisha with white clients at Ex-mas” (20). Although the mother’s gratitude for Maisha’s success in her dangerous work is disturbing, it is also understandable given their near starvation. Indeed, her prayers mix gratitude with hope for the future; for example, she prays in thanksgiving that their landlord merely evicted them and did not seize their belongings in compensation. In addition, she asks “Christ, you Ex-mas son,” to bestow blessings on Jigana for 40. All parenthetical references are to Uwem Akpan, Say You’re One of Them (New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2009).

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school. Jigana himself replies to his mother’s prayers to Jesus and Mary with liturgical phrases such as “have mercy on us” or “pray for us” (20–21). Hope born of faith lingers amidst this impoverishment, despite the ever-present reality of sin and suffering. Akpan gives such full depictions of the family dynamics that they prevent the reader from simply seeing the characters as the pious, innocent downtrodden. Their imperfections, bad judgments, and tempers are on full display. But he is also careful to alert the reader that their poverty is not simply due to poor choices or bad luck. Structural forces shape their lives, not only in the lack of educational and economic opportunities, but also in the gap between the developed and the developing world. As mentioned above, Maisha receives more money from wealthy, white tourists than from Kenyans; additionally, the efforts of international charities produce mixed results. Her choice to become a sex worker is tragically logical in her context. She is also fully aware that her life is dangerous, as when she warns her sister against violent men (5); poignantly, she also desires to return to school some day (16). Maisha’s sacrifice of her body thus is also a sacrifice of her aspirations. As Mary Bauer observes, Maisha “has traded her own future for the hope that her family members will live to have a future.”41 Because of wealthy tourists, she is able to bring home the Christmas “feast” of the story’s title. That this food is an abundance of easily accessible junk food only highlights symbolically the irony between a conventional Christmas feast and the family’s nutritionally poor meal. Indeed, the twins vomit their food, but eat again without hesitation (34). At the same time, Maisha’s arrival confirms the family’s fear—she is moving to a brothel so that she can become “full-time.” “The full irony of ‘Ex’ in the title,” writes John Kearney, “thus becomes apparent: the way in which the family’s condition disempowers them as family 41. Mary L. Bauer, “Sacrificial Women: The Unlikely Heroes of Uwem Akpan’s Stories,” AFRREV LALIGENS: An International Journal of Language, Literature and Gender Studies 6, no. 1, serial no. 13 (February 2017): 17.

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so that the feast becomes a virtual mockery of genuine family togetherness and celebration.”42 Maisha’s sacrifice here is ambivalent—she may be able to earn more money, but her new living situation fractures the family. Although the parents protest, it is Jigana—the greatest recipient of Maisha’s sacrifice—who most rejects her choice and becomes consequently the second person to exit; the irony of the title’s “ex” deepens further. Jigana’s anger at her decision, a rupture in their close relationship, compels him to reject her gift. He ignores the new uniform, destroys his few school supplies, and runs away from the family. In hindsight, Jigana recalls, “My last memory of my family was of the twins burping and giggling” (35). In essence, the story presents a kind of tragic parody of the Catholic Mass: The Bible and the petitionary prayers are followed by the food and drink of the family’s feast, a parallel to the liturgy’s scriptural readings, prayers of the faithful, and the Eucharist, but the result is the opposite of the Mass’s ideal. Communion is broken by structural and personal sin. Jigana’s rejection of his sister’s gifts means that the theme of sacrifice is interrogated differently than in Greene’s and Endo’s novels. The whiskey priest’s sacrifices (or Sarah’s for that matter) are imperfect, but they still prompt conversions. Endo’s The Samurai presents the hope of faith amidst sacrifice, a hope that stems also from characters’ conversions. But what is the reader to make of Jigana? Does his action nullify Maisha’s sacrifice? Does it not increase the tragedy by further rupturing the family? The story’s last line is clear—he never sees them again. If the Incarnation is the irruption of grace into a world of sin, where is the grace amidst this Christmas Day? Grace is most likely in Maisha’s good intentions, yet the sacrifice of her body and Jigana’s flight in the end make the reader wonder what good is grace, or the family’s faith for that matter, if it offers no clear assistance to those who suffer. If anything, Akpan intensifies that question in the last story 42. Kearney, “Say You’re One of Them,” 93.

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of Say You’re One of Them, but he also hints at a response. Set at the beginning of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, “My Parents’ Bedroom” is narrated by nine-year-old Monique, who is the daughter of a Tutsi mother and a Hutu father. Initially, she is not aware of the imminent danger, although she senses that her beautiful mother, referred to as Maman, is acting “strange today” (326). When Maman leaves Monique alone with her toddler brother, Jean, she instructs Monique to “say you’re one of them,” regardless of who asks (327). Although Monique is too young to understand the pretense of Maman’s instructions, the reader detects a note of foreboding. In order for Monique and Jean to stay safe, they have to claim whatever identity, Hutu or Tutsi, that protects them in a given moment. The mother’s anxiety is explained later in the story when Monique recalls her mother’s fear of Monique going out in public even prior to the genocide, as Monique looks too much like the minority Tutsis (339). Monique’s and Jean’s mixed background is mirrored in other characters. Their father’s brother, Tonton André, also marries a Tutsi woman, Tantine Annette, and the children’s great-uncle, while technically a Hutu, has skin that is “milk with a little coffee,” apparently the result of a “complicated” intermarriage (327–28). Nicknamed the Wizard, he is also feared, not only because of his appearance but because he is regarded as a pagan who can curse people. The Wizard is the most ambivalent symbol in the story. He is anti-Christian, and yet extends a surprising protection to Monique. When a mob of Hutus arrive at their house, the Wizard sees the glowing crucifix on the family’s altar, a crucifix dear to Monique who both cares for the altar and will inherit the crucifix. He breaks the crucifix, splintering the body of Christ from the cross, and steals Jesus’s body (331–32). The Wizard’s sacrilege mirrors the brokenness both of Rwandan society as well as the wider ecclesial community—Catholics are killing other Catholics. The cross, though, survives the Wizard’s onslaught, and continues to glow. Yet despite the Wizard’s blasphemy, he also protects Monique when she is sexually assaulted. Although his exact

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motivations are unclear, he alone of the mob shows any semblance of concern and warns her afterward that these are “bad days” and that she needs to “be strong” (333). The next day, waking to her parents’ return, Monique tries to talk about her trauma from the previous night, but neither parent wants to listen to her. On one hand, Maman, as Bauer points out, is probably trying to prepare her daughter psychologically for more imminent danger.43 At the same time, the parents are enduring their own grief, although Monique does not understand the “secret things” that Papa and Maman discuss, nor Papa’s claim that he cannot do what Monique insists he must do (343). The dramatic tension heightens further by the appearance of blood and water dripping down the walls—a eucharistic reference perhaps—which Monique at first believes comes from ghosts hiding in the ceiling. Only when the parents hide Monique’s classmate, Hélène (a Twa, but still a target of violence), in the ceiling does Monique realize that her parents are secretly harboring injured and frightened Tutsis (348–49). Akpan reminds the reader of the broken but still glowing crucifix, subtly foreshadowing the sacrifice on the cross that is about to be performed analogically. After Maman prays in front of the altar, she demands that Papa swear by the cross that he “won’t betray the people who’ve run to us for safety” (347). Maman then gives a wad of money and her nuptial ring to Monique. But Monique, confused by the circumstances, instinctually leaves “everything on the altar.” Monique is the most explicitly Catholic of all Akpan’s young protagonists. In her innocence, she encourages her mother to go to Confession, and even wonders if she needs to remind her parents that lying is a sin (348–49). At the same time, she notes that the day is Sunday, but that the family is not attending Mass like normal. The celebration of Christ’s sacrifice in the Mass is narratively about to be replaced and embod43. Bauer, “Sacrificial Women: The Unlikely Heroes of Uwem Akpan’s Stories,” 22.

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ied by the Christlike sacrifice of Maman. The climax comes quickly. When the mob of Tutsis return, along with Tonton André and the Wizard, the reader’s worst suspicions are confirmed. Papa must prove his loyalty to his Hutu lineage by killing Maman, just as Tonton André has recently murdered his pregnant Tutsi wife; otherwise, the Hutus will kill the entire family. Maman’s final words are, “My husband, you promised me” (350). Christlike, Maman goes willingly and knowingly to her death in order to sacrifice her life for both her children and those they have hidden.44 To relate this scene to the last chapter—evil stretches theological discourse and makes the reader recognize the limits of conceptual language to describe the actual experience of evil. Was Maman justified to encourage her husband to murder her even if it helped to save the lives of others? Likewise, how great a responsibility should we attribute to Papa? It is easy enough to say you should not kill an innocent life for any reason—but what if the lives of others, especially of one’s children, are doomed otherwise? After the mob has left with Papa, Akpan graphically details that Jean innocently tries to put together the “two halves” of his mother’s head that were split by his father (352)—an image that echoes how Papa has splintered his own humanity with his murder. Indeed, Monique earlier says that when her mother’s face is bloody from her mortal wound, Maman “sees Papa become a wizard” (350). If Maman has sacrificed her life, has Papa sacrificed his soul? After the mob leaves, the hiding Tutsis praise Maman for saving their lives, but also urge Monique and Jean to run. Unfortunately, Maman’s money and ring have also disappeared. Further, once they run outside, anonymous UN soldiers walk away from them, a clear commentary on Western indifference and 44. Of course, I am not the only reader to observe the analogical similarity between Maman’s submission to her murder for the sake of others and the crucifix. For example, see Szolosi, “Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them,” 460.

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inaction. The children are now bereft of any conventional means of safety. They have only themselves and the glowing cross, the only item that Monique takes with them (353–54). Yet the story ends before we know where the children go. They cannot rely on shelter from either side of their heritage. If the Hutus just murdered their mother, they also hid before a vengeful mob of Tutsis. How can they be trusted? Tragically, the Tutsis discover Maman’s dead body and angrily set the house on fire, thereby inadvertently killing their fellow Tutsis hiding in the ceiling. The cycle of violence continues. The children have only each other and their faith, symbolized when they hide atop the cross to keep its glow from the passing Tutsis. When Monique whispers to Jean, “Maman says do not be afraid,” one cannot but hear the echoes of Christ to his disciples. That Monique must certainly be afraid herself would seem to question the relevance of the Gospel reference. But it is more about Monique becoming the new Christ figure after Maman’s Christlike sacrifice. As Kearney notes, “Her reminder to him, ‘Do not be afraid’, is a direct echo of Christ’s words to his disciples . . . after His resurrection, as they prepare to face the world without his direct guidance.”45 Monique now knows that she must protect her brother: “We want to live; we don’t want to die. I must be strong.” The day might be Sunday, but the joy of the Resurrection is far away. Instead, the story ends with the darkness and symbolism of Good Friday: “Everywhere is dark, and the wind spreads black clouds like blankets across the sky. My brother is playing with the glow of the crucifix, babbling Maman’s name” (354). The story thereby ends with one final analogical connection between Maman and Christ. What, then, is the good of faith amidst such barbarity? Faith provides no clear escape from the danger that Monique and Jean face, but it also provides the only source of consolation and strength. In essence, when the siblings lose everything else, the 45. Kearney, “Say You’re One of Them,” 97.

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broken crucifix remains with them. The darkness of the sky mirrors the genocide around them, but the glow of the cross—and Akpan is careful never to identify the source of the glow—is the only visible source of hope for Monique. Jean’s age protects him from the horror. But for Monique’s faith to continue, she must now imagine it as something more than enjoyable family traditions. Amidst such death, it is her foundation for hope. The reader, of course, may find this poor comfort considering that the children remain in the genocide. Perhaps a measure of hope, as in Akpan’s other stories such as “An Ex-mas Feast” above, lies in the first-person perspective. After all, to whom is she speaking? Is it to herself—an attempt to narrate the sequence of events to process her trauma? Is it to a refugee worker? Is she speaking as an adult? The reader is unsure, but there may be a sign of hope that Monique’s recollection reflects a depth of insight that seems missing from her actions in the moment. Michael Vander Weele remarks that “it is the listener’s privilege to hear or overhear this process of reconstruction, experience part of its pain, catch some glimmer of hope even in the child’s efforts to piece her story together—to find some way to incorporate its events into her life through telling them.”46 Although we do not know at what age Monique recalls her trauma, at least some time has passed since the initial outbreak of the genocide. In this, her memory of the glowing cross signals a sense that this symbol became significant for her in hindsight. Or, as Szolosi puts it, the broken but still glowing cross indicates that one can live without imitating the world’s violence: “Akpan suggests that the alternative to the violence surrounding the two children is to be found in the solidarity of others and that opening oneself to such solidarity takes courage.”47 The dramatics of conversion that figured in Greene’s earlier work (as well as Spark’s and O’Connor’s) is missing from Akpan’s fiction, 46. Vander Weele, “The Human Effort to Exchange Stories and Uwem Akpan’s Child Narrators,” 129. 47. Szolosi, “Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them,” 460.

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not just in this story, but in his collection as a whole. In this sense, “My Parents’ Bedroom” is a fitting conclusion to Say You’re One of Them, for it is the summation of various themes that have developed through the collection. It returns us to the drama of a sister’s sacrifice for her brother, akin to “An Exmas Feast” and “Fattening for Gabon.” At the same time, it intensifies the violence caused by conflicting identities—whether religious or ethnic—depicted in “What Language is That?” and “Luxurious Hearses.” Yet despite their very different cultural contexts from Anglo-American Catholic fiction, Akpan’s stories demonstrate that faith is fundamentally an existential vision that shapes one’s sense of self and one’s place in the world. It thereby converges with a significant legacy of the Anglo-American Catholic literary heritage—that faith is preliminarily an act of the imagination before it is any doctrinal or dogmatic understanding. The whiskey priest’s impact on others’ spiritual imaginations is primarily because they witness his fidelity to his vocation despite persecution, not from any proselytizing. Similarly, Endo’s Roku comes to see the relevance of the cross to his life because of an imaginative grasp that it manifests Christ’s solidarity with him in a time of suffering and sacrifice. For her part, Monique clings to the cross to find the strength to endure the evil and trauma around her. This chapter’s three authors each depict the cross as a prominent symbol in their fiction. That observation is not particularly surprising for Catholic fiction, since, after all, the cross is the central symbol of sacrifice in the Christian tradition. But in the stories, the sacrifice of Jesus manifested on the cross becomes a hermeneutical lens for the characters’ imperfect sacrifices, each of which is questionable, to say the least. One can wonder if the whiskey priest made the correct decision to return to danger and hear the dying convict’s confession, even though he knew it was most likely a trap; Velasco’s insistence on returning to Japan means he cannot continue his ministry in other capacities; and Maisha’s and Maman’s sacrifices are done out of love of family,

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but occur in morally complex (and tragic) situations. These sacrifices manifest analogical resonances to the Crucifixion, but they are not allegories for it. Similar to Endo’s The Samurai, Akpan’s fiction, more explicitly than Greene’s early Catholic novels, places front and center the tragedy of unjustified suffering. In this, Akpan takes the theme of vicarious suffering and deconstructs it, for suffering in his short stories does not provide a clear conversion or redemption in this life. And the reader may well wonder if grace is impotent amidst the horrors of the world. But “My Parents’ Bedroom,” like much Catholic fiction, portrays the cross as a source for meaning and hope amidst the often-cruel sufferings compelled by sin. His characters’ sacrifices still point to Jesus’s death, but with a critical ambiguity that asks the reader to linger within the tension between hope in God’s solidarity and the very real violence of the world.

CHAPTER FIVE

Woundedness and Community In the remarkable short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” Flannery O’Connor creatively blends certain theological themes often emphasized in various Protestant ecclesial traditions—the preaching of the word, the personal relationship to Jesus Christ— with eucharistic symbolism. Through this Catholic-Protestant synthesis, a near-adolescent Catholic girl’s imagination expands, and she discerns her surprising solidarity with an intersex person wounded by marginalization, a solidarity revealed in their mutual dignity as temples of the Holy Spirit. The intersex person thus becomes a source of grace by which the young protagonist confronts her sin of pride. O’Connor’s story dovetails with a broader pattern in Catholic fiction: the intersection between faith, community, conversion, and woundedness. As exemplars, each novel of this chapter— O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960), Mary Gordon’s The Company of Women (1980), and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997)— explores this intersection: faith emerges out of community, but this community is grounded in, or revealed by, brokenness and vulnerability. In fact, the pretense of independence, power, and strength frequently obstructs authentic relationships. Within this pattern, woundedness then often becomes the unlikely foundation and catalyst for conversion and community. Yet a more specific pattern binds the novels together: each novel features a central character whose faith is shaped through resistance to a particular cultural matrix, or what Taylor would describe as a social imaginary. These characters’ resistance, ironically, still affirms the necessity of community in the end, although exactly how this theme develops is idiosyncratic to each book. “A culture,” defines the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, “is 179

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simply the set of meanings and values that inform the way of life of a community.”1 Lonergan stresses that these meanings, such as those of actions and symbols within a culture, are often unconsciously imprinted in a person’s imagination. As he relates: All human doing, saying, thinking occurs within the context of a culture and consists in the main in using the culture. But cultures change; they wax and wane; meanings become refined or blunted; value judgments improve or deteriorate. In brief, cultures have histories. It is the culture as it is historically available that provides the matrix within which persons develop and that supplies the meanings and values that inform their lives.2

Further this culture imparts a set of meanings to a person that are embodied through human action more than clearly articulated. Lonergan notes that “on all cultural levels there are rites and symbols, language and art” yet their exact significance “is felt and intuited and acted out . . . like the meaning already in the dream before the therapist interprets it.”3 A person’s initial faith, then, depends on the way this culture has unconsciously shaped it, yet this matrix is not stagnant, and this instability continues to shape the individual’s reception of cultural symbols and rituals. Each of this chapter’s novels poses a different, but related, question about faith’s relationship to community. O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away asks what happens when the very idea of community is rejected; the protagonist (Young Tarwater) attempts to live a faith grounded in the assumptions of his surrounding cul1. Bernard Lonergan, SJ, “Revolution in Catholic Theology,” in A Second Collection, vol. 13 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, 2nd edition, ed. Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 196. 2. Lonergan, “Revolution in Catholic Theology,” 197. 3. Bernard Lonergan, SJ, “The Absence of God in Modern Culture,” in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 13 of A Second Collection, 2nd edition, revised and augmented, ed. Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 87.

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ture, particularly the culture’s exaltation of the autonomous individual through disenchanted rationality. Gordon’s The Company of Women, meanwhile, considers what happens when a person rejects one’s original community in favor of another, only to return to it. What changes in this return—the person, the community, or a bit of both? In addition, The Company of Women shares with Morrison’s Paradise an interrogation of the dangers of exclusivity and ideology in which a community is defined primarily by “othering.” Although Gordon’s and Morrison’s works both consider this issue through the lens of gender, Morrison’s novel also explores “othering” within the larger historical tapestry of American racism and colonialism. Further, her story captures a community’s frightening justification for violence when a defenseless minority is deemed a threat to the community’s very survival. In all these stories, communities of faith—and the formation of an individual’s faith—occur within or against a specific cultural matrix. Read in dialogue, these books form certain patterns. First, salvation and healing from evil, sin, or trauma is worked out through brokenness that affirms the necessity of community, even if a larger social imaginary needs to be resisted. Second, these novels affirm a pattern that we have seen in previous chapters—O’Connor’s work, like Greene’s and Spark’s earlier fiction, is structured around the distinction between the enchanted worldview of the Catholic faith and the immanent one of Western modernity. Gordon’s The Company of Women represents a transition between the confrontation with modernity in earlier Catholic fiction, and the more dialogical consideration of secularity and plurality found in contemporary Catholic fiction, such as Morrison’s Paradise. (Although Gordon is a younger novelist than Morrison, my chapter’s placement of The Company of Women is based on the book’s much earlier publication than Paradise.) Like earlier Catholic fiction, The Company of Women affirms Catholic sacramentality more explicitly than Paradise, but the tension between secularity and Catholic faith, so common in O’Connor, Greene, or Spark, is not resolved entirely. This tension laces the novel’s sac-

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ramentality with a critical lens, despite the affirmation of grace. Morrison’s sacramentality, meanwhile, is diffused across symbols both Christian and otherwise, but nonetheless possible to discern. At the same time, Paradise, like much contemporary Catholic fiction, lacks a strong confrontation with secular disenchantment. The supernatural clearly intervenes, but Morrison, unlike O’Connor, does not center her story around the ideological tension between sacramentality and modernity; her concerns are elsewhere, namely the harmful, intergenerational consequences of American slavery. That said, the novels of O’Connor, Gordon, and Morrison surprisingly intersect in their depiction of community as grounded in woundedness and weakness. Community as a Source of Grace One of the oft-noted hallmarks of the Second Vatican Council is its description of the Church itself as a sacrament. As Lumen Gentium states, “All those, who in faith look towards Jesus, the author of salvation and the source of unity and peace, God has gathered together and established as the church, that it may be for each and everyone the visible sacrament of this saving unity.”4 This dogmatic constitution converges with the numerous theological discussions of the twentieth century about how to articulate the mediation of grace through ecclesial community. One prominent theologian who also describes the Church itself as a sacrament is Karl Rahner. In Foundations of Christian Faith, Rahner offers a basic definition of Church as “the historical continuation of Christ in and through the community of those who believe in him, and who recognize him explicitly as the meditator of salvation in a profession of faith.”5 But there is an underlying 4. Lumen Gentium 9. For this translation see: Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations, ed. Austin Flannery, OP (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing, 1996), 13–14. 5. Karl Rahner, SJ, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1978), 322.

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anthropological foundation for Rahner’s ecclesiology: human beings have been created in which “interpersonal communication . . . co-determines the whole breadth and depth” of a human life; concomitantly, faith depends not just on community between a handful of people, but on community as this plays out in society as a whole.6 Each person has an individual history embedded within and shaped by a larger human history; one cannot encounter salvation from God unmediated, but only as the Gospel of Christ is proclaimed and lived ecclesially in historical continuity with Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. The Church, insofar as it manifests the grace of God’s self to humanity, can be described as “the basic sacrament of salvation.” Rahner is careful, however, to note that the Church is “a sign of salvation, and is not simply salvation itself,” since of course salvation alone comes from Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, “as the ongoing presence of Jesus Christ in time and space,” Rahner writes, “as the fruit of salvation which can no longer perish, and as the means of salvation by which God offers his salvation to an individual in a tangible way and in the historical and social dimension, the church is the basic sacrament.”7 It is against this ecclesiology that one can regard the seven sacraments as the means by which the Church addresses individuals at various points of their lives.8 Rahner’s thought both converges with and diverges from this chapter’s Catholic fiction. First, Rahner reminds the reader that grace does not come to an individual directly from God, but is always mediated to a person both by their individual history of interpersonal relationships and within a larger communal history. 6. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 322–23. I read Rahner’s argument that “interpersonal communication” is a defining feature of the human person within his broader Trinitarian and Christological thought, but this is not the space to go into this topic. For my own take, please see “Anthropology and Art in the Theology of Karl Rahner,” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 6 (November 2011): 939–51. 7. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 412. 8. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 412–13.

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In the following novels, the grace of healing, conversion, forgiveness, and transcendence likewise is made within a community. Individuals never work out their liberation from sin and evil on their own. Second, the three novels act as a foil to Rahner’s ecclesiology. Despite the very different theological and spiritual outlooks of O’Connor, Gordon, and Morrison, each author considers communities at their most basic level—two or three people in O’Connor, a few more in Gordon and Morrison. The stories thereby remind one of Jesus’s teaching that “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20 [NAB]). In this sense, each novel considers how faith is formed within the smallest forms of community, although admittedly, larger ecclesial contexts—whether Protestant or Catholic—shape these characters’ spiritual journeys. Within these small communities, each novel features a central character who struggles to accept, reject, or imaginatively rework the Christian faith handed on to them by a mentor, a mentor who functions as a parental figure in their lives. At the same time, these close relationships highlight the role of woundedness in community with a concreteness that would be difficult in more conventional, conceptual forms of theological rhetoric. Although the novels do not present grace through traditional sacramental rituals, each novel draws upon sacramental imagery and themes, sometimes explicitly as in O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, and sometimes more critically or subtly, as in Gordon’s The Company of Women and Morrison’s Paradise. Thus, the novels explore how community mediates grace to an individual. The Turn toward Mystical Community: O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away In O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, the fourteenyear-old Francis Tarwater is raised on the farm of Powderhead by his great-uncle, Mason Tarwater, or Old Tarwater. After Mason’s death, Francis travels to the nearby city only to return to the farm

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after a tragic attempt to resist his vocation. Powderhead, the beginning and end of Francis’s journey, signifies the start and narrative resolution of Francis’s journey of faith, but Francis’s trajectory is not from atheist to believer. Rather, he struggles to accept the Christian faith as taught to him by Mason, for Francis wants to live faith according to his own desires. Michael Bruner describes conversion in The Violent Bear It Away as “one of obedience, not faith, and it is an obedience to God’s overwhelming will that confronts and challenges.”9 Thus, Francis differs from, for example, Bendrix and Sarah in Greene’s The End of the Affair, or Nicholas in Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, or for that matter O’Connor’s own Hazel Motes in her first novel, Wise Blood, all of whom turn to faith from a stance either of atheism, agnosticism, or indifference. Francis’s development, then, is an interrogation of his initial faith, which is not discarded entirely, but revealed to be flawed and eventually transformed by God’s grace. If one reads The Violent Bear It Away through Charles Taylor’s rich description of modernity (see chapter 2), Francis Tarwater emerges as a variation on a modern form of a “buffered” person, that is, one who tries as autonomously as possible to construct meaning apart from a supernatural reference. Francis does not align with this description exactly, as he does not dispense with God altogether. Rather, Francis disdains the need for an incarnational mediator, for he wants his prophetic call to stem from God directly with “a voice from out of a clear and empty sky . . . untouched by any fleshly hand or breath” (343).10 In other words, Francis resists the central insight of the Incarnation—that grace is mediated through physicality. He hesitates to let his gaze linger on an object for too long, 9. Michael Mears Bruner, A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O’Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 208. 10. All parenthetical references are to Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away, in Collected Works, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 329–479.

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fearful “that the thing would suddenly stand before him, strange and terrifying”; consequently, he attempts “to avoid this threatened intimacy of creation” (343). Further, Francis fits Taylor’s description of modern anthropology in that he desires to live as detached from community as possible. In other words, Francis shows little inclination to live with responsibilities toward others. Broadly speaking, Francis’s conversion occurs through an imaginative shift to a more sacramental worldview that compels him to see that he is part of a larger mystical community that depends upon Jesus Christ as its source and foundation. My own reading of the novel aligns closely with that of Susan Srigley, who observes that the novel considers “the relation between life and death, or, more precisely, the relationships between the living and the dead and the spiritual ties that bind them.”11 In addition, Francis’s conversion lacks an embrace of concrete ecclesial community. I do not mean to suggest that one expects the Protestant Francis Tarwater to become Catholic—that would break with the realism of O’Connor’s rural, Southern setting. But one cannot help but note that Francis’s human community remains limited at best, despite Francis’s momentous conversion to a deeper, richer, and more sacramental vision. I raise this issue because when The Violent Bear It Away is placed in dialogue with The Company of Women and Paradise, one notes that the theme of community in O’Connor’s novel is overwhelmingly concerned with the communion of the saints, in the broadest sense of the phrase. In contrast, there is more concern for earthly community in The Company of Women and Paradise. Although Mason raises his great-nephew to be a prophet (338), the young Tarwater initially uses his vocation to justify his ego. His birth in a car accident fills him with pride, as if he had 11. Susan Srigley, “Asceticism and Abundance: The Communion of Saints in The Violent Bear It Away,” in Dark Faith: New Essays on Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, ed. Susan Srigley (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2012), 186; italics in the original.

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been uniquely marked by God (355). He approves of his greatuncle’s appearance after Mason “thrashe[s] out his peace with the Lord” in the woods and returns “as if he had been wrestling a wildcat,” but the boy has little interest whenever Mason comes back, hungering for the “bread of life” (334).12 In other words, the boy’s interest in prophecy lies in its violent, dramatic actions that exalt the individual, but he prefers to dispense with Jesus. Indeed, young Tarwater is disturbed at his great-uncle’s hunger to spend eternity eating the bread of life—“the loaves and fishes” of the Lord—afraid that such madness was passed on to him (342).13 Francis fears that following Jesus would curtail his autonomy and distinctiveness. He worries that “the old man’s words had been dropping one by one into him and now, silent, hidden in his bloodstream, were moving secretly toward some goal of their own.” Whenever Mason would teach the boy that their heavenly reward would be “the Lord Jesus Himself, the bread of life,” Francis recoils at the thought of them “sitting forever . . . on a green bank, full and sick, staring at a broken fish and a multiplied loaf” (369). His rejection of his great-uncle’s teaching is also a rejection of community, for community would render him unexceptional. Francis’s non-sacramental faith is exacerbated through his relationship with the voice, “strange and disagreeable,” which he hears almost immediately after the death of his great-uncle (337). While grudgingly digging a grave for Mason, young Tarwater comes to view the voice as a sign of liberation (352). This invisible 12. George A. Kilcourse, Jr. argues that Francis often mistakes for prophecy what is in fact Mason’s depression, or even drunkenness: see Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001), 215–16. 13. As J. Ramsey Michaels notes, “Tarwater fears the materiality of [Mason’s] vision, the sheer physical hunger it summons within him.” See J. Ramsey Michaels, “Eating the Bread of Life: Muted Violence in The Violent Bear It Away,” in Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace, ed. Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010), 60.

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stranger soon encourages Francis to assert his own independence by rejecting Jesus: “It ain’t Jesus or the devil. It’s Jesus or you” (354; italics in the original). The voice, identified as the devil by O’Connor, changes identifiers as the novel progresses, from stranger, to friend, to adversary, and even becomes embodied at a key point.14 Under the voice’s influence, Francis attempts to deny his vocation as a prophet, for he resists Old Tarwater’s instructions before he died, instructions that signal Francis’s obligations toward others. First, he stops digging Old Mason’s grave and attempts to burn him instead, along with the house, despite Mason’s earlier insistence that he be buried (361). When afterward Francis insists “you don’t owe the dead anything,” he is disavowing his previous source of community—his great-uncle (362). But Francis also disdains a more important command from Mason: that Francis baptize the young, developmentally disabled child, Bishop (335). Bishop is often read as the story’s Christ figure, reminiscent of Mr. Guizac in “The Displaced Person” (see chapter 2), that is, he is the innocent person marginalized from society, but through whom Divine Mystery is manifested.15 Francis has no wish to begin his vocation with such a commonplace action as a Baptism, and of an unglamorous child at that. Bishop symbolizes Francis’s struggle over his prophetic vocation, for to baptize Bishop would acknowledge a vocation of commonplace service to others.16 Baptism is not an unusual event—it is a basic act of eccle14. “I certainly do mean Tarwater’s friend to be the Devil,” she writes in a letter. See Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 367. For a fuller discussion of the significance of the voice, see Jessica Hooten Wilson, Giving the Devil his Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 80–117. 15. As examples, see Christina Bieber Lake, The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005), 147–48; and Gary M. Ciuba, Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 149–51. 16. For an extended discussion of Bishop, see Kilcourse, Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination, 234–39.

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sial community. His life then would lack distinction, and he would become like his uncle, following Jesus as the bread of life. Meanwhile, Bishop’s father, Rayber, had once been baptized by Mason as a child, but now is an ardent atheist. His twisted rationalism evaluates human beings according to their practical use and capabilities. Rayber would be emblematic of Taylor’s “buffered self” of modernity, which regards a mature adult as an autonomous self who creates one’s own identity under a rational paradigm. But Rayber’s rationality is challenged by the presence of Bishop. Rayber describes Bishop as “useless forever” (351), in sharp contrast to when Mason stares at Bishop like “an unspeakable mystery” (350). Yet Rayber realizes that he has not “conquered the problem of Bishop” but has “only learned to live with it” and has “learned too that he could not live without it” (400). The child’s presence provokes attacks of a “hated love,” which Rayber attempts to suppress through sheer willpower; indeed, he too attempted to drown Bishop, only to abandon the act at the thought of a life without him (418–19). As Christina Bieber Lake observes, “Accustomed to seeing love only as a tool that can be used to transform psychological ‘cases’ when nothing else works, Rayber recognizes his own love for Bishop as of another order entirely.”17 Yet this experience runs counter to Rayber’s belief that love is not a mystery to be embraced but rationally explicable according to psychological causes. One might expect that Rayber’s insistence on living apart from Tarwater’s teaching would appeal to Francis’s drive to assert his independence, but Francis shows little desire to embrace Rayber’s worldview, and is plagued by indecisiveness. For example, when he hitchhikes to the city, he admits to the driver, Meeks, that he will wait to see if something happens in the city, and if nothing happens, “I’ll make it happen . . . I can act” (381). At the same time, his insistence on his ability to perform his vocation independently from Mason (and by extension, God) is under17. Lake, The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor, 155.

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mined from the beginning. Once he arrives at Rayber’s house, Tarwater’s vocation is confirmed at the sight of Bishop when he realizes that he is “expected to baptize the child” and “that the ways of his prophecy would not be remarkable” (388–89). Tarwater’s rejection of Bishop mirrors his rejection of a sacramental faith, and, concomitantly, a sacramental community. Indeed, the voice deters Francis from baptizing Bishop and insists that Francis drown the child instead, inverting Baptism’s symbolism so that water gives death and not life (429–32). When Francis sits with Bishop alone in a boat after dark, he can hear his friend, with his “violet-colored” eyes, encouraging him (461): “No finaler act than this . . . In dealing with the dead you have to act. There’s no mere word sufficient to say NO” (462). Tarwater’s defiant “no” is a “no” to a vocation that demands humble service to others. But Tarwater’s “no” is undermined when he murders Bishop while simultaneously baptizing him. Despite the exertion of his will, Francis discovers that complete autonomy is elusive. Nonetheless, Francis remains enthralled to the voice. As Francis travels back to Powderhead after Bishop’s murder, the voice becomes incarnate as a strange driver who picks up the hitchhiking boy, an event that fulfills Mason’s prophecy about Francis: “‘You are the kind of boy . . . that the devil is always going to be offering to assist, to give you a smoke or a drink or a ride, and to ask you your bidnis’” (367). The driver’s appearance looks familiar to Tarwater, and indeed, his lavender shirt and car recalls the voice’s violet eyes during Bishop’s murder (469). After drinking the devil’s drugged whiskey, he quickly passes out. Tarwater wakes to discover that he has been raped, and that his hands are “loosely tied with a lavender handkerchief which his friend had thought of as an exchange for [Francis’s] hat” (472). The devil metaphorically binds Francis with the devil’s own color. As if to purify himself, Francis sets fire to the site of sexual violence, but with eyes that look as if they have been “lifted out, scorched, and dropped back into his head” (472). The rape, as Srigley points out, is certainly not a moment of grace, but it does

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purify his vision.18 Francis then slowly begins his trek home as if “destiny [is forcing] him on to a final revelation”; yet, he now walks with “scorched eyes” that, “touched with a coal like the lips of the prophet . . . would never be used for ordinary sights again” (473). His “friend,” however, is still with him, but Tarwater now reacts in horror, and feels his “presence” like “a violet shadow hanging around his shoulders.” Only with fire is his companion, now named “his adversary” (a traditional name for the devil), “consumed” (475).19 Throughout his time with Rayber, Francis has trouble eating, but as he approaches the house, his hunger increases, indicating that his faith is transforming. As Lake notes, Francis has a sacramental hunger, a craving for the union between matter and grace.20 Only at the end of his journey does he acquiesce. After he discovers that his uncle was buried by his African-American neighbor, Buford Munsion, Tarwater has a vision in which he sees his uncle, along with countless dead, being fed from “a single basket” (477). Francis becomes “aware at last of the object of his hunger, aware that it was the same as the old man’s” (478). Tarwater now sees himself in a line of prophets that stretch as far back as Abel. And like many biblical prophets, he hears a commandment from God: “GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY” (478; capitalization in original). Stooping on his great-uncle’s grave, the boy smears dirt on his forehead in a manner akin to the sacrament of Confirmation’s action of anointing. He then moves off “toward the dark city, where the children of God [are] sleeping” to fulfill his vocation as a prophet (479). 18. Susan Srigley, Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 131. 19. Like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, Francis, as an agent of violence, experiences violence in return. Gary M. Ciuba notes, “Having felt in his own flesh the agony of victimization, the victimizer of Bishop turns his heart instead to the God of nonviolence.” See Ciuba, Desire, Violence, and Divinity, 159. 20. Lake, The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor, 171.

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In The Violent Bear It Away, Francis’s insistence that one must act—and not simply believe conceptually—points out the holistic nature of faith, whether belief or unbelief. Rayber tries to live out his unbelief primarily through his intellect. In contrast, Francis intuits—albeit problematically—that authentic faith requires the intellect and the emotions to converge and produce action in the world. Rayber’s failure to drown Bishop, and his frequent bursts of love for his son, imply that his faith in his atheistic rationality is not complete, at least affectively. For his part, Francis attempts to perform his unbelief, but, even after Bishop’s murder, his self-justifications indicate his lingering uncertainty. Further, if through violence he believes he can obstruct his vocation, so it is through violence that his now-traumatized imagination recognizes the repercussions of his actions. If before he rejected Bishop because of the boy’s perceived brokenness, so now, because of his own woundedness, Francis’s vision clears. The violence upon his body opens his eyes to his sins and the need for grace. Only after this reorientation of his vision can he fully embrace his great-uncle’s Christian faith. Throughout the novel, O’Connor notably focuses on the sacraments of Baptism and Communion, both of which impress upon the recipient that one is a member of an ecclesial community. In a letter, she explains, “There are two main symbols in the book—water and the bread that Christ is. The whole action of the novel is Tarwater’s selfish will against all that the little lake (the baptismal font) and the bread stand for. This book is a very minor hymn to the Eucharist.”21 If Baptism is how one becomes a member of an ecclesial community, the Eucharist is a reminder that believers collectively are part of the mystical body of Christ. Personal freedom does not exclude obligations to others, but Young Tarwater learns this insight only after his autonomy is violated by sexual assault. As Srigley notes, Francis realizes at the end that “the living and the dead come together, the personal and 21. O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 387.

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the communal are entwined, all separations are dissolved and yet the individual person comes to completion.”22 However, although Tarwater eventually discerns his obligation toward the community of saints, his sense of earthly community is less clear. O’Connor provides a counterpoint to Francis in the form of a young girl, whom Rayber and Francis witness preaching at a missionary fundraiser (408–15). One could speculate that Francis becomes an itinerant preacher upon his reentry into the city, but O’Connor herself was skeptical. In a letter, she writes that “the children of God I daresay [sic] will dispatch him pretty quick. Nor am I saying that he has a great mission.”23 More critically, Sarah Gordon notes that there is a consistent pattern throughout the novel in which authentic relationships are undermined.24 She argues that, even with his acceptance of his vocation, “Tarwater will never experience the intimacy of creation that is community and communion with others.”25 Gordon raises the issue about the limitations of Francis’s conversion. He may accept himself as a member of the mystical community of the saved, but there seems to be little hope, in either O’Connor’s or Gordon’s reading, that Francis has the skills or the desire to be a member of an earthly community of believers. This issue becomes even more fraught when considered within the deeply entrenched racism and segregation of O’Connor’s context. In the beautiful ending of her short story “Revelation,” the white, landowning protagonist receives a vision of African-Americans and poor whites entering heaven before her; O’Connor at her theological best upholds an expansive and inclusive conception of heavenly communion. But in terms of a faith community here on earth, the issue is much more complicated. In

22. Srigley, “Asceticism and Abundance,” 203. 23. O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 342. 24. Sarah Gordon, Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000), 217–19. 25. Gordon, Flannery O’Connor, 224.

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addition, a reader must confront O’Connor’s depiction of AfricanAmerican characters in her stories, as well as her racist jokes and remarks in her personal correspondence. In a wonderful study, Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell explores the “double-mindedness” of O’Connor: O’Connor intellectually and in her fiction acknowledged racism as sinful and critiqued the segregation of the South, but she was also less critical of herself in her letters and personal relationships, which frequently contain racist remarks.26 Or, as O’Connor put it in an unpublished letter a few months before her death, “I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste.”27 This observation compels us to reconsider Buford, the most prominent African-American character in The Violent Bear It Away. In the fascinating essay “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor,” Alice Walker describes both her love and struggles with O’Connor’s fiction. Walker regards O’Connor’s black characters as “shallow, demented, and absurd,” but at the same time, she appreciates that O’Connor in her more mature fiction always maintains a distance from her black characters, and never tries to go into their “inner workings.” This leaves these characters “free” for a reader’s interpretation.28 Walker also astutely notes that “essential O’Connor is not about race at all, which is why it is so refreshing, coming, as it does, out of such a racial culture.”29 Her comments seem to align with 26. Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 21–23. 27. Quoted in O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence, 19. O’Donnell argues for a “‘both/and’ inclusive approach, rather than an ‘either/or’ exclusive one,” regarding O’Connor’s work, one that “attempts to honor O’Connor’s complexity—and the complexity of the imagination—by offering multiple angles and perspectives from which to consider her treatment of race without totalizing any one of them.” See O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence, 24. 28. Alice Walker, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), 52. 29. Walker, “Beyond the Peacock,” 53; italics in the original.

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Buford. The reader never enters his “inner workings”; he is always narrated in terms of his interaction with Young Tarwater. At the same time, his presence is not essentially (to improvise on Walker’s observation) about race, for although Young Tarwater initially treats him and his wife with the conventional prejudice of a young, rural white boy, by the end, it is Buford who demonstrates one’s obligation to the dead, thereby instructing Francis in what he has been avoiding: his communal obligation to a fellow believer and teacher of the faith. It is Buford who buries Old Tarwater and confronts Francis upon the latter’s return. At the same time, there is something different about Buford compared to other African-American characters in O’Connor’s stories. O’Donnell points out that Buford “is transparent . . . He speaks as one human being to another, creating communion, and inviting us into communion as well.”30 As we saw in chapter 2, the African-American characters in “The Enduring Chill” and “The Displaced Person” always maintain a certain distance from, and caution toward, the white characters. But Buford speaks with authority to Francis, the authority of a spiritual teacher disciplining a wayward student. Appropriately, as soon as he turns away from Francis, Francis’s vision of the redeemed feasting on the Bread of Life begins, the climax of his conversion to seeing himself as part of a mystical community. Community Reconfigured: Woundedness in Gordon’s The Company of Women Unfortunately, O’Connor’s death precludes us from knowing her reaction to the upheaval in the Catholic Church after Vatican II, but one Catholic novelist whose fiction is marked by this history is Mary Gordon. Her first two novels, Final Payments (1978) and The Company of Women (1980), both depict the transition in American Catholic culture from the pre– to the post–Vatican II worlds. Perhaps 30. O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence, 140.

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unsurprisingly, given Gordon’s context, her fiction makes a much greater critique of the Catholic faith than that of the more orthodox O’Connor. As for O’Connor herself, Gordon deeply admires her yet finds her form of Catholicism often unsettling, marked by certainty and a too-pessimistic portrayal of human nature. “Whereas the theological center of her [O’Connor’s] life is the mystery of the Incarnation, the emotional one is the doctrine of original sin,” Gordon writes in an essay on O’Connor.31 One senses that Gordon sees a Jansenist tinge in O’Connor’s literary vision. Gordon’s fiction is shaped by the tension between her pre– Vatican II Catholic childhood and the great changes in American society in the 1960s and 1970s, a transition that parallels her drift from the Catholic faith as an adolescent. She recalls that her parents raised her not just to take Catholicism seriously but “to be a saint.”32 Her subsequent movement away from Catholicism in the aftermath of Vatican II echoes in spirit (if not in details) those of the female protagonists in Final Payments and The Company of Women. As she writes, “the great changes in the Church coincided—unfortunately, perhaps—with the great changes in my body. I became at puberty properly irreligious, and I say ‘properly’ with great advisement.”33 As an adult, Gordon’s personal faith continues to be marked by ambivalence. On one hand, she affirms herself as a Catholic and welcomes the openness of Vatican II and the papacy of Pope John XXIII, yet she finds fault with the liturgical changes, describing the new Mass as lacking the beauty of the pre–Vatican II Mass. 31. Mary Gordon, “Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being,” in Good Boys and Dead Girls and Other Essays (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), 39. 32. Mary Gordon, “Getting Here from There: A Writer’s Reflections on a Religious Past,” in Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 39. Gordon movingly explores the complicated figure of her father (who died when she was young), and the impact of his Catholicism on her life in her The Shadow Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 33. Gordon, “Getting Here from There: A Writer’s Reflections on a Religious Past,” 50.

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At the same time, she disagrees with official teaching on issues of sexuality and gender, and therefore does not share the politics of many believers who advocate for a return to the Tridentine Rite. In short, she mourns a lost aesthetical tradition, yet yearns for a more progressive Church doctrinally.34 “No contemporary Catholic writer has sought access to a wider world,” John Waldmeir writes about Gordon, “yet none has insisted more ardently upon wearing the lenses of her pre–Vatican II Catholic upbringing to view the post–Vatican II reality.”35 Yet, she has not abandoned Catholicism and credits it as central to her formation as a writer.36 Like Feminist theology, Gordon frequently critiques the Catholic cultural expectation that women sacrifice according to norms established by male authority; in this regard, her fiction fits in easily with the topic of chapter 4. Shortly before the start of Gordon’s career, Mary Daly argued that the traditional imitation of Christ is one that demands sacrifice, an imitation that has often encouraged the scapegoating of women.37 She insisted that “the qualities that Christianity idealizes, especially for women, are also those of a victim: sacrificial love, passive acceptance of suffering, humility, meekness, etc. Since these are the qualities idealized in Jesus ‘who died for our sins,’ his functioning as a model reinforces the scapegoat syndrome for women.”38 A more recent form of this critique can be found in Elizabeth Johnson’s famous She Who Is, in which Johnson observes that “feminist theology repudiates an interpretation of the death of Jesus as 34. As an example of Gordon’s remarks on these issues, see a 1987 interview in “Mary Gordon,” by Annie Lally Milhaven, in Conversations with Mary Gordon, ed. Alma Bennett (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 42–57. 35. John C. Waldmeir, Cathedrals of Bone: The Role of the Body in Contemporary Catholic Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 42. 36. For a discussion of this issue, see her essay, “Getting Here from There: A Writer’s Reflections on a Religious Past,” 25–53. 37. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 75–76. 38. Daly, Beyond God the Father, 77; italics in the original.

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required by God in repayment for sin. Such a view today is virtually inseparable from an underlying image of God as an angry, bloodthirsty, violent and sadistic father, reflecting the very worst kind of male behavior.”39 However, unlike Daly, Johnson sees Jesus’s death as one of solidarity with those who unjustly suffer, an event of resistance and protest against sinful forms of power and domination.40 In her early Catholic fiction, Gordon stands closer to Johnson in the sense that she is much more willing to dialogue with the Catholic tradition than Daly. As Marian Ronan observes, Gordon refuses to accept a false choice “between Catholicism and the rest of life.”41 The Company of Women marks a transition between modern and postmodern Catholic fiction similarly to Endo’s The Samurai and Percy’s Lancelot. Like Percy’s, Gordon’s novel also bears the marks of 1970s American culture after the sexual revolution of the previous decade. But, unlike Percy, she explores religious belief beyond stark, either/or categories of traditional Catholic faith versus Western disenchanted secularity, and in this, she more resembles Endo, despite her and Percy’s shared American background. At the same time, The Company of Women, Lancelot, and The Samurai each offer a less dramatic form of sacramentality than many earlier Catholic novels. If young Tarwater only recognizes the need for community after becoming wounded himself, the characters in Gordon’s The Company of Women come together because of woundedness. The novel’s central drama is the relationship between Felicitas Maria Taylor and the charismatic but dogmatically inflexible Father Cyprian, whom Felicitas regards with adulation as a child, but against whom she rebels as a young woman. Her eventual reconciliation with Cyprian—and thereby with the community as a 39. Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1992), 158. 40. Johnson, She Who Is, 158–59. 41. Marian Ronan, Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 72.

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whole—comes only after her own wounding, but a wounding that does not bring her back to the Catholic faith. However, Father Cyprian does undertake a critical examination of his previously impoverished sacramental imagination in response to Felicitas’s spiritual journey. Felicitas’s relationship with Cyprian unfolds within a community of women who become acquainted during one of Cyprian’s retreats. Once a popular speaker, Cyprian has watched his adoring crowds dwindle to this group, one member of whom is Charlotte, Felicitas’s mother. The women remain devoted to Father Cyprian because of his spiritual guidance during periods of grief, trauma, and brokenness, despite his increasing pessimism. An outcast from his original community of Paracletists, Father Cyprian lives in rural New York, virtually alone except for the constant care of Muriel, the most bitter yet devoted of the company, and the less frequent ministrations of the other women. Despite Cyprian’s bitterness, he has a keen pastoral sensibility, a willingness to counsel the women and develop close, personal relationships amidst their struggles. Elizabeth, for example, endured an abandonment by her husband and death of a child, and Mary Rose credits Cyprian with saving her life by intervening in an abusive marriage, although true to his orthodox principles, he refuses to support future sexual relationships. As with any community, there are complicated interpersonal dynamics. Clare is the only member who comes from money and is a businesswoman, and whom Cyprian regards as thinking more like a man than the others. Charlotte, Felicitas’s mother, harbors suspicion of Muriel, for she intuits Muriel’s jealousy of Felicitas because Cyprian lavishes so much affection and time upon the child. Despite this tension, “there was something between them,” as Charlotte reflects at one point, “between all of them. They were connected to something, they stood for something” (18).42 42. All parenthetical references are to Mary Gordon, The Company of Women (New York: Random House, 1980).

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As a child, Felicitas basks in the attention given to her by Cyprian, who functions as her surrogate father in the aftermath of her biological father’s early death. He considers Felicitas “our only hope,” a gifted child whom he intends to school as a bulwark of Catholic truth against the corruption of contemporary America (7). (Readers of Final Payments will recognize an echo of Isabel Moore’s relationship with her father.) Felicitas becomes confident of her intellect under his tutelage, and she delights in a sense of entitlement. Cyprian and the company of women “required her. It was her life they needed. How could they fail to love her best? She was the only one” (69). The novel’s first part ends with Felicitas’s certainty in her fidelity to Cyprian: “She was perfectly happy. She would never leave him” (83). Felicitas’s early adolescent faith thus depends upon her relationship to Cyprian, a confidence and unquestioning trust that he is correct. With this faith in Cyprian, she imbibes the priest’s religious imagination. “Cyprian . . . told her to remember that the cross was at the heart of everything; we were not put on earth to be happy, we were put on earth to know, love and serve God and to be happy with Him forever in heaven” (80). Similarly to Feminist theology, Gordon critiques how a prominent Christian symbol can be used to justify gender expectations dictated by a male authority figure. At the same time, Cyprian’s sacramental imagination is limited at best. He warns his young mentee that “it is a great temptation to mistake nature for the God of nature” (36). Love of nature ensnares one to love the world and forget one’s duty to God. Any hint of pantheism must be avoided. Grace and nature must clearly be separated, even if the beauty of nature stems from its creator. The path of authentic Catholic faith is to stick with what is deemed “orthodox,” for Felicitas “must hate the world and love God” (44). Further, Cyprian demonstrates his contempt for secular reason. He declares that “our age has put its trust in reason, and reason is a whore. She goes with anyone” (40). Cyprian is Gordon’s response to older Catholic fiction. Like O’Connor, she establishes a clear opposition between Catholic

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faith and secular disenchantment, an opposition that she then interrogates when an older Felicitas begins to rebel against Cyprian. Gordon occasionally foreshadows Felicitas’s future independence in the novel’s first part. When she is in a hospital following a car accident, she disagrees with Cyprian’s kindness and attention toward her roommate, whom Felicitas sees as a vapid annoyance (67–69). But this independence blossoms in the novel’s central second part, which charts the collapse of Felicitas’s fidelity to Cyprian, provoked by her opposition to the Vietnam War and increasing interest in progressive politics. Felicitas’s rebellion against Cyprian also changes her assessment of the community of women, which she comes to regard as a cult of personality: “now she perceived that the women had forgotten themselves, forgotten what they stood for. Now they stood for Cyprian, they stood around him, because he was a man and wounded” (97). Gordon thus acknowledges that community built around woundedness can become problematic, even if, as becomes evident later in the book, community can also be a source for healing. Although Felicitas abandons her faith, she unfortunately transplants her desire for male affirmation from Cyprian to her sexual partners, beginning with her Columbia University professor Robert Cavendish, who cares little for the gap between his stated progressive political views and his self-indulgent, sexist behavior toward women. Like Cyprian, Robert also compels Felicitas to conform to his wishes and ideals. Both men, as Margaret Hallissy remarks, possess “desire to play Pygmalion to her [Felicitas’s] Galatea, to mold Felicitas into their idea of the perfect woman.”43 Cavendish’s deleterious influence on Felicitas ushers her into another insular community, a stifling one of lovers and young adults, at the risk of her education. 43. Margaret Hallissy, “‘The Impulse of a Few Words’: Authority, Divided Self, and Language in Mary Gordon’s Final Payments and The Company of Women,” Christianity and Literature 50, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 283.

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During this period, Felicitas’s rebellion against Cyprian disrupts her original community of women, most notably during the tense Christmas holidays, although Felicitas never completely abandons the women or Cyprian, for whom she still secretly harbors remnants of childhood affection (156–61). Further, it is this community to which she ultimately returns in a time of turmoil after Felicitas unexpectedly becomes pregnant and wavers at the last minute from having an illegal abortion. That said, her return to her original community is not a return to faith. The novel’s third part switches from a third-person narrative to the diverse first-person perspectives of Father Cyprian and the company of women. Now, Felicitas’s daughter, Linda, is the one who bonds the community together. The women settle in upstate New York near Cyprian and prepare a home for Felicitas to raise Linda. Felicitas recognizes that her pregnancy has renewed her commitment to the group, a pregnancy that also has spurred the community to enter a new phase, one marked by greater kindness and generosity: “I now see that my pregnancy, my illegitimate motherhood, was the only thing that could have kept me near him, near to all of them, in fact. Nothing could, in that way, have served them better” (249). All of them dedicate their lives to Linda’s care. This is not to say nothing else has changed—Mary Rose has finally married again—or that all is perfect; Muriel still feels the outsider, and fears that with Cyprian’s death, the other women will regard her as a burden. But even here, she lacks the animosity toward Linda that she once held for Felicitas, and Linda herself believes that she alone willingly talks to Muriel (272, 289). Meanwhile, although neither Cyprian nor Felicitas is content with the spiritual views of the other, there is an eventual reconciliation. Felicitas, for example, sees the limitations of Father Cyprian’s theology, and yet loves him nonetheless: “I am over my childish adoration and my adolescent rage. I know his mind is not firstrate. He had three ideas: the authority of the Church, the corruption induced by Original Sin and the wickedness of large-scale government. All the rest is instinct and effusion. Yet there is no

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one I revere more” (263–64). Felicitas observes that it took several years before they could love each other again despite their disagreements. Over time, Felicitas learned how to balance her independence from Cyprian with admiration, and if time heals her relationship with Cyprian, so time brings her to embrace her daughter. Felicitas does not immediately accept Linda as a gift of grace; she struggles to make the transition from a self-centered young adult to a responsible parent. But “What a mystery the heart is,” she later reflects. “The mind is simple by comparison. How can I describe the process of love that overcame me, the gravitational pull of the baby I hadn’t wanted to touch? By her first birthday, she interested me passionately; by the end of the following spring, it was a grief for me to leave her in the afternoon” (254). Yet although she renews her relationship to Cyprian and comes to love her daughter, she does not return to faith. Felicitas cannot conceive of faith apart from the childhood terms established by Cyprian: And I cannot talk about God. Of all of them [the company of women], I alone have no spiritual life. It is Cyprian’s fault; he trained me too well, trained me against the sentimental, the susceptibility of the heart. So I will not accept the blandishments of the religious life; I will not look to God for comfort, or for succor, or for sweetness. God will have to meet me on the high ground of reason, and there He’s a poor contender . . . I will not open my heart to God. . . . I will wait. But I will wait for light, not love. (264–65)

Problematically, Felicitas cannot conceive of God through any other framework than an intellectual one. She disallows the possibility that faith should be considered also through affective categories. She wants God to speak through “light,” that is, the light of reason, not “love,” that “mystery” which she acknowledges moves her regarding her daughter. In this sense, her failure to return to faith is a failure of the imagination to see faith outside

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the strictly rational, intellectual categories impressed upon her in her youth. Cyprian for his part believes that he will die a failure in his vocation (277). Yet his relationships to Felicitas and Linda nonetheless prompt him to reexamine his sacramentality. If before, Cyprian had little regard for basic human pleasure, fearing it as a trap of worldliness and sin, a nighttime walk expands his sacramental imagination: One night, I did leave the house and walked for hours, wishing to disencumber myself. But my bones failed me and the lights of an all-night diner were irresistible. I entered the steamy, greasy warmth, felt the meat smell cling to my clothing. I sat down at the counter and picked up a matchbox. On it was printed ACE 24-HOUR CAFE—WHERE NICE PEOPLE MEET. And tears came to my eyes for the hopefulness, the sweetness, the enduring promise of plain human love. And I understood the incarnation for, I believe, the first time: Christ took on flesh for love, because the flesh is lovable. (284–85)

Cyprian glimpses that the Incarnation indicates that ordinary materiality is a location for grace; there remains after the Fall an inherent goodness to creation. His imagination shifts from one that emphasizes God’s separation from creation to one that recognizes God’s grace active in the physical world. Cyprian’s conversion occurs not rationally—as Felicitas would insist—but affectively, through a seemingly simple moment that provokes Cyprian’s emotions and shifts his imagination of the world. Like O’Connor’s work, Gordon’s upholds sacramentality, yet it is a gentler depiction. Cyprian’s reconfigured incarnational imagination becomes an ironic foil to Felicitas’s intellectual and rational conception of faith. In this sympathetic contrast, The Company of Women affirms an ambiguous sacramentality—one more muted than that of earlier Catholic fiction, a quietness that will become common in contemporary Catholic fiction.

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Cyprian’s new openness is reflected in his relationship to Linda, which lacks the certainty and inflexible dogmatism found in his previous childhood instruction of Felicitas. When the nearly seven-year-old Linda asks Cyprian to pray that one day the Church will ordain women, the orthodox priest—who still prefers to say Mass in Latin—startlingly agrees: “I said I would, but it must be a secret between us. And so each morning, at my mass, I pray for the ordination of women” (288). Thus, the novel illustrates two contrasting spiritual trajectories: a former believer who does not return to faith but does return to her local faith community; and a believer who reconfigures his faith, abandons previous certainties, and opens himself to possible new avenues to experience the transcendence of God’s grace in the world. In contrast to many of O’Connor’s stories, Gordon hints at a sacramental imagination not through the central protagonist, but through the character who, during much of the story, serves more as an antagonist. Further, the stark disparity between Catholic faith and Western modernity of earlier Catholic fiction is replaced in The Company of Women by the mutual respect of both a sacramental imagination and a disenchanted one, the latter shaped by the social imaginary of American secularity. Unlike O’Connor, who shouts at her reader to choose a Catholic worldview over a modern one, Gordon does not insist that the reader elect one over the other. The Company of Women thus remains open-ended; the community has ideologically broadened, reconfigured so that diverse perspectives are tolerated, loved, and supported—theological agreement is no longer an absolute requirement. Nonetheless, community is necessary for an individual’s conversion toward ever deepening love.44 Admittedly, there is not perfect harmony in the group, but nor is there stasis. Linda is allowed the final word, and her voice implies hope that she may be able to mediate the conflicts between her mother and Cyprian. In Linda’s voice, 44. Cf. Anita Gandolfo, Testing the Faith: The New Catholic Fiction in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 173–75.

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Thomas Haddox notes, Gordon signals to the reader that we should be skeptical of Felicitas’s stance on faith, despite the many affirmations of the character’s journey.45 Linda recognizes that each person in their community loves her, and in fact, she wishes to tell them, “Don’t love me so much,” for she fears she may fail them by not loving them enough in return (290). Linda still possesses an openness to faith, and her spirituality is not built upon the fidelity to Cyprian and the entitlement that marked her mother’s childhood faith. Her concluding words, “we are not dying,” simply affirm hope for the future (291). Seen against the sweep of Catholic fiction since the 1930s, The Company of Women fits into the overall pattern as a transition between modern and contemporary Catholic fiction. As John Waldmeir notices, “The movement toward the more ‘openended’ narrative structure that begins with The Company of Women is significant for Gordon, for it places her more firmly within the context of other authors writing about the Church after Vatican II.”46 Like Percy’s Lancelot and Endo’s The Samurai, Gordon’s novel does not feature a dramatic, climactic conversion as in earlier fiction by Greene, O’Connor, and Spark. At the same time, both Percy’s and Gordon’s fiction during this period demonstrates a clear dialogue with Catholic concepts and themes, a feature that they share with pre-1970s Catholic fiction, and one that becomes less explicit in Catholic fiction in the years afterwards. That said, despite the similar publication dates of The Company of Women with The Samurai and Lancelot, Gordon demonstrates a greater ambivalence toward the Catholic faith itself than Endo and Percy. Afterall, Lancelot ends with Father John’s “yes” as a rebuke to Lancelot’s narcissistic and murderous atheism, and the Samurai goes to his execution with a newfound faith in the solidarity of Jesus Christ. But Gordon’s The 45. Thomas F. Haddox, Hard Sayings: The Rhetoric of Christian Orthodoxy in Late Modern Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 181–82. 46. Waldmeir, Cathedrals of Bone, 56.

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Company of Women, like much of her fiction, is more conflicted about Catholicism, leaving readers to navigate this tension in their own lives. The Surprise of Grace-Filled Community: A Sacramental Reading of Morrison’s Paradise Gordon’s The Company of Women interrogates how community is both formed and reshaped. The five women originally develop relationships with Father Cyprian and each other due to their woundedness, but by the story’s end, the group’s center is transferred from Cyprian to the child, Linda. The community’s mission pivots from fidelity to a male authority to hospitality and care. Gordon’s novel forms a fascinating dialogue with Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997). The latter novel likewise depicts woundedness as a foundation for community. But unlike The Company of Women, Paradise contrasts two communities that emerged from various structural evils, such as racism, misogyny, colonialism, and poverty. If The Company of Women shifts the nexus of community from male authority to hospitality, Paradise establishes this contrast from the beginning: an exclusive and patriarchal town at odds with an inclusive community of women who reside in a former Catholic orphanage and school. Paradise explores the lingering trauma of racism on a more expansive canvas than that of Morrison’s most famous novel, Beloved (1987), yet both novels share a similar interest in how the imagination can lead to transformation. Kimberly Connor remarks that Morrison in Beloved “invites her uninitiated readers to understand the legacy of slavery by asserting how the power of an imagination informed by love can lead to a state of grace.”47 47. Kimberly Rae Connor, Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 48. For a fascinating exploration of Catholic sacramentality in Beloved, see Erin Michael Salius, Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018), 45–61.

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Morrison similarly invites the reader of Paradise to see how “an imagination informed by love” can lead to liberation from the social sin of racism. The degree to which Morrison, the recipient of the 1993 Nobel prize for literature, can be claimed as a Catholic writer has been the subject of debate.48 But my reading of Morrison’s work as Catholic fiction is not a comment on her personal piety or opinions on specific doctrines—after all, such a purity test would eliminate other authors in this study. Part of the controversy surrounding Morrison’s relationship to Catholicism is that she often describes herself as a lapsed Catholic without much elaboration; she speaks more frequently about other issues related to her work (such as the intertwined relationship between language, racism, and patriarchy). Yet she has always been open about her childhood conversion to Catholicism at the age of twelve under the influence of a cousin. Originally born Chloe Wofford, she became known as “Toni” to friends and family as a shorthand reference to her baptismal saint, St. Anthony of Padua. Morrison, in an NPR interview, notes that her younger religious imagination blended both her mother’s African Methodist Episcopal heritage and Catholicism, and that she took her adopted Catholic faith “seriously for years and years and years.”49 48. For two contrasting viewpoints, see Nadra Nittle, “The Ghosts of Toni Morrison: A Catholic Writer Confronts the Legacy of Slavery,” America Magazine, November 13, 2017, 44–48 (also available at: https://www.americamagazine. org/arts-culture/2017/11/03/ghosts-toni-morrison-catholic-writer-confrontslegacy-slavery [last accessed on March 15, 2022]); and Julia Yost, “Spirituality of the Suburbs,” First Things, 296 (October 2019): 12–14 (also available at: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/spirituality-of-the-suburbs [last accessed on March 15, 2022]). 49. Toni Morrison, “‘I Regret Everything’: Toni Morrison Looks Back On Her Personal Life,” by Terry Gross, Fresh Air (NPR), April 20, 2015, last accessed on July 28, 2020 at https://www.npr.org/transcripts/400394947. For an overview of Morrison’s theological imagination, see Nadra Nittle, Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision: Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in her Life and Literature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021), 1–15.

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Similarly to Gordon, Morrison considers the aesthetic dimension of pre–Vatican II Catholicism as central to her early spirituality. She describes having “a moment of crisis” in the aftermath of Vatican II, for “I suffered greatly from the abolition of Latin”; nonetheless, Morrison is an example of a self-described lapsed Catholic who still retains great respect for Catholicism and Christianity in general: as she claims, “I still find the revolution of love that replaced the idea of justice astonishing.”50 Nick Ripatrazone notes that Morrison “retains a distinct nostalgia for Catholic ritual, and feels the ‘greatest respect’ for those who practice the faith, even if she herself has wavered.”51 Indeed, this openmindedness includes a certain amount of self-deprecating humor, such as when she told the Washington Post in 2015, “I am a lapsed Catholic, but Pope Francis is impressive enough to make me reconsider my error.”52 In the following, I offer an incarnational and sacramental reading of Morrison’s Paradise. In the novel, several traumatized women undergo a supernaturally charged healing that reforms their community. In this sense, Paradise aligns with a pattern laid out with O’Connor’s and Gordon’s fiction—weakness and vulnerability become foundations for surprising solidarity. My Catholic reading should be regarded as supplementing (and not supplanting) more dominant interpretations of Paradise that focus on the novel’s critique of patriarchy, its rejection of exclusionary depictions of paradise, and the interrogation of race in American his50. Toni Morrison, “Toni Morrison: The Search Is More Important Than the Conclusion,” by Antonio Monda, Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 2007), 118. 51. Nick Ripatrazone, Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2020), 120. 52. Neanda Salvaterra, “The Pope in America: Voices,” The Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2015, last accessed on March 15, 2022 at http://graphics.wsj. com/image-grid/pope-francis-in-US-2015/1295/toni-morrison-author-and-nobellaureate-in-literature. Morrison makes a similar comment in her 2015 NPR interview; see Morrison, “‘I Regret Everything.’”

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tory. Morrison’s symbolism is rife with ambiguity, and frequently multivalent. That she draws on ideas and images outside the Catholic tradition, such Gnosticism and Candomblé, has been well-documented.53 But Catholic/Christian symbols dance with the symbols of other spiritual traditions, not in antagonism, but in a richly creative dialogue. In this sense, Morrison is like a jazz artist in that she improvises on a traditional image or theme in surprising ways.54 Many readings of the novel downplay its Catholic dimensions. Sometimes, the result is to read the novel as only a critique of Christianity. More troublingly, certain readings fail to see how the most prominent symbol of Christianity—the cross—unfolds in the text, or they misunderstand Catholic/Christian tradition. For example, the narrator describes a painting, mislabeled as St. Catherine of Siena, with a “I-give-up face” and with “pudding tits exposed on a plate” (74).55 Many readers identify this image as a critique of a kind of Christian religiosity that emphasizes spiritual purity or women’s obedience to male authority.56 These readings are only correct up to a point. The description indicates that the painting is actually Agatha of Sicily; an earlier painting of Catherine is presumably replaced with a depiction of Agatha’s torture during her martyrdom. Further, the historical Catherine of Siena not only wrote a mystical theology brimming with 53. For an example, see Maha Marouan, “Candomblé, Christianity, and Gnosticism in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” in The African Diaspora and the Study of Religion, ed. Theodore Louis Trost (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 111–27. 54. For a richer discussion on the metaphor of jazz for Morrison’s fiction, see Amy Frykholm, “Improvising Freedom: Toni Morrison’s Religious Vision,” Christian Century, October 9, 2019, 30–33. 55. All parenthetical references to the novel are from Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Vintage Books, 2014). 56. For examples, see Channette Romero, “Creating the Beloved Community: Religion, Race, and Nation in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” African American Review 39, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 416; and Shari Evans, “Programmed Space, Themed Space, and the Ethics of Home in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” African American Review 46, no. 2–3 (Summer/Fall 2013): 392.

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sensual imagery but also famously rebuked the pope in her correspondence to him. In that sense, she’s not quite the caricature of the obedient saint. That Catherine’s icon was switched with Agatha’s is probably a critique of a kind of disembodied, patriarchal spirituality upheld by the religious sisters in the story. But even the symbol of poor Agatha is not as simple as it looks. She was, after all, tortured and martyred because she resisted male authorities’ attempts to force her to marry.57 Morrison’s symbols are astounding in their synthesis of critique and affirmation of Catholic religiosity. By design, Morrison constructs Paradise to provoke a dialogue between the reader and the text such that the reader must become an active participant in constructing meaning. In her essay “Literature and Public Life,” she notes that her novels Beloved, Jazz (1992), and Paradise each feature a coda to the main narrative that compel the reader into “a meditation, debate, argument that needs others for its fullest exploration.”58 The novels contain a fluidity and ambiguity that allow multiple appropriate interpretations amongst a community of readers. This is particularly the case regarding Paradise, in which, as Jean Wyatt believes, “more than in any other Morrison novel, the burden of making meaning shifts from writer to reader.”59 My reading of Paradise is intended in the spirit of Morrison’s claim that good art is incarnational. In a 2012 conference at the 57. For readings of this image that more closely align with my own than those in the previous note, see Shirley A. Stave, “From Eden to Paradise: A Pilgrimage through Toni Morrison’s Trilogy,” in Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning, ed. Adrienne Lanier Seward and Justine Tally (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 115; and Deborah M. Mix, “Enspirited Bodies and Embodied Spirits in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Studies in the Humanities 41, no. 1–2 (March 2015): 169. 58. Toni Morrison, “Literature and Public Life,” in The Source of SelfRegard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 2019), 100. 59. Jean Wyatt, Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 70.

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Harvard Divinity School, Morrison commented that when art is “doing its job, it can put those two things [together], the divine and the human and . . . you don’t see the cracks, you don’t see the separation.”60 Morrison was certainly familiar with the sacramental dimensions of prominent Catholic authors. Sometimes, her comments leave much to be desired, such as her cursory remark that she yearns for an interview in which she could discuss Gerard Manley Hopkins (a sacramental poet if ever there was one).61 More frequently, she describes O’Connor as “a great artist who hasn’t received the attention she deserves.”62 On an anecdotal note, Nick Ripatrazone recalls a fascinating remark by Morrison’s friend Cornell West, in which West comments that similar to O’Connor, Morrison also “has an incarnational conception of human existence. We Protestants are too individualistic. I think we need to learn from Catholics who are always centered on community.”63 West’s beliefs are doubly fascinating, not only because he insists on Morrison’s incarnational imagination, but also because he notes that such an imagination forms the basis of Morrison’s sense of community. Finally, Morrison crafts a novel that remains authentic to the characters’ Christian heritage, given that most of the plot occurs from the 1940s to the early 1970s but is set against an historical 60. Harvard Divinity School, “Have Mercy: The Religious Dimensions of the Writings of Toni Morrison,” YouTube, last accessed on March 15, 2022 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HxbrD8sQfI. 61. Toni Morrison, “Goodbye to All That: Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell,” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 2019), 334. 62. Morrison, “Toni Morrison: The Search Is More Important Than the Conclusion,” 121–22. See also The Origin of Others (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2017), 19–24; and, more cursorily, Toni Morrison, “Invisible Ink: Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading,” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 2019), 347; cf. also Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1993), 68. 63. Quoted in Ripatrazone, Longing for an Absent God, 117.

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backdrop that extends a couple centuries into the past. In the essay “God’s Language,” Morrison insists that the historical period of Paradise demanded a certain kind of artistic integrity, for “the history of African Americans that narrows or dismisses religion in both their collective and individual life, in their political and aesthetic activity, is more than incomplete—it may be fraudulent.” Her unironic approach to Christianity should give pause to those readings that simply regard the text as a kind of postmodern deconstruction of Christianity. Morrison admits that the novel critiques traditional Western notions of paradise that are dependent on the exclusion of others, an exclusion almost always dictated by male voices. But she does not dismiss her characters’ Christianity, and she avoids religious language that resorts “to a kind of late-twentieth-century environmental spiritualism, or to the modernist/feminist school of the goddess-body adored.” At the same time, she challenges a readership that may wish to dismiss a belief in transcendence in favor of a “highly secularized, contemporary, ‘scientific’ world,” certainly a trait that she shares with many Catholic fiction writers.64 With this novel, she challenged herself both “to write religion-inflected prose narrative that does not rest its case entirely or mainly on biblical language,” and “to make the experience and journey of faith fresh, as new and as linguistically unencumbered as it was to early believers, who themselves had no collection of books to rely on.”65 Morrison achieves her goals by reworking tropes and symbols of the Christian tradition in a way that indicates the possibility of a more inclusive, fluid, and earth-bound ideal of paradise. The novel famously begins, “They shoot the white girl 64. Toni Morrison, “God’s Language,” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 2019), 248–49. See also Morrison’s essay “The Trouble with Paradise,” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 2019), 271–79. 65. Morrison, “God’s Language,” 253.

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first,” a line that establishes the racial dynamics at play (3). The opening pages set the stage for the plot’s climax in 1976 nearly three hundred pages later. In between, we discover that the setting for this frightening opening line is a former “convent,” technically, a now-closed Catholic religious school for Native American children, run by the Sisters of the Sacred Cross. But by the time of the late 1960s and 1970s, the convent has become the unintended home to five women, who live mostly apart from the larger world, other than their interactions with the inhabitants of nearby Ruby, an all-black Oklahoma town organized and dominated by the male elders of eight founding families.66 As Morrison notes, Paradise inverts the typical American dynamic of racial hierarchy; instead of whiteness as the hallmark of what defines the “other,” now “the ‘stranger’ is every white or ‘mixed-race’ person.”67 The women in the convent form a community that runs counter to the racially pure and misogynistic town of Ruby. Morrison never in fact indicates which of the five women is the “white girl” of the opening line. In this sense, she has crafted, as she describes, “race-specific race-free prose.”68 In other words, this is a community where differences are recognized, but do not became a means to “other” or exclude. The women of the convent threaten Ruby’s male authorities, for they live and act outside the confines of Ruby’s form of Christianity. The men fear the women’s influence on the town’s wives and children.69 When tension between the men—both young and old—reaches a boiling point, they scapegoat the women under the accusation of witchcraft and plot to murder them to reestab66. Oklahoma was in fact home to several all-black towns after the Civil War. For Morrison’s discussion of this historical backdrop, see The Origin of Others, 55–59. 67. Morrison, The Origin of Others, 31. 68. Morrison, “The Trouble with Paradise,” 272. 69. Cf. Wyatt, Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels, 81–82.

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lish control. But Morrison’s text is considerably more complicated and thought-provoking than this brief schematic sketch, for it adds a theological and spiritual depth with the central character of Consolata. Consolata was born to a destitute mother in Brazil and found alone when she was nine by Sister Mary Magna. Exactly why Sister Mary was drawn to Consolata is unclear, but perhaps it was her “green eyes,” “tea-colored hair,” and “smokey, sundown skin” (223). (Consolata is the only convent woman to be described with such physical details, and the only woman who cannot be the “white girl” in the opening sentence.) Eventually, Consolata travels to Oklahoma with Sister Mary to live at the Christ the King School for Native Girls. With this name, Morrison subtly critiques Sister Mary’s triumphalist and colonizing form of spirituality, further indicated by Sister Mary’s refusal to allow her young residents to learn about their indigenous cultures (241). Consolata embraces the religious sisters’ spirituality and forms of worship, but her greatest fidelity is to Sister Mary, whom Consolata “worshipped” (224). If in The Company of Women, Felicitas’s childhood sense of God is conditioned by her loyalty to Father Cyprian, Consolata similarly understands God though her loyalty to Sister Mary. Consolata’s religious imagination is thereby limited by her uncritical acceptance of Sister Mary’s spirituality. For example, Consolata learns about the Incarnation’s emphasis on God’s solidarity with human creatureliness, that Jesus became “human so His suffering would mirror ours”; however, Sister Mary ill prepares Consolata for her actual bodily desires, with the result that “those thirty years of surrender to the living God [crack] like a pullet’s egg when she [meets] the living man” (225). When given the opportunity, Consolata begins an adulterous affair with Deek, one of the leading patriarchs of Ruby’s founding “8-rock” families. Interestingly, Morrison twice describes this affair in eucharistic language—Consolata “ate him” out of desire, and she tried to lick Deek’s blood at one point (239, 263). This latter incident

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ends their affair—Consolata’s sexuality threatens his control over the situation.70 Later, Consolata prays in the chapel in shame after meeting Deek’s wife, Soane. After Consolata leaves the chapel with Sister Mary, “a sunshot [sears] her right eye, announcing the beginning of her bat vision, and she [begins] to see best in the dark. Consolata [has] been spoken to” (241). Consequently, Consolata, newly sensitive to light, often wears sunglasses outside. But is Consolata’s woundedness divine judgment, her own sense of shame, or a mark that in her guilt, she has rededicated herself to Sister Mary’s problematic faith? Indeed, a local elderly midwife named Lone identifies a flaw in Consolata’s spiritual imagination. She recognizes Consolata’s unique gift—her ability to raise people from near-death—and instructs Consolata to see this gift as divine in its origin: “Don’t separate God from His elements. He created it all. You stuck on dividing Him from His works” (244). Scholars have noted that Lone’s teachings and Cosolata’s gift seem inspired by Candomblé and West African spirituality.71 At the same time, the line between “Christian” and “magic” is not a clear one, as Nadra Nittle points out. Morrison was formed by a spiritual heritage within which Christian believers did not divide their faith completely from West African beliefs that European Christians derided as “magic.” “In Morrison’s fiction,” Nittle argues, “the use of magic is not a literary device but her way of highlighting the enduring belief systems of Black Americans.”72 To complicate the symbolism even further, Consolata’s gift also resonates with the numerous stories of the saints, such as Peter (Acts 9:36–43), who raised people 70. Mix, “Enspirited Bodies and Embodied Spirits in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” 177–78. 71. For two such readings, see Marouan, “Candomblé, Christianity, and Gnosticism in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” 120; and Anna Hartnell, “Exodus and Redemption in Toni Morrison’s Paradise: A Magical Encounter with the Bible,” in Subverting Scriptures: Critical Reflections on the Use of the Bible, ed. Beth Hawkins Benedix (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 120. 72. Nittle, Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision, 37.

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from the dead. Jesus, in fact, instructs his followers to do so (Matthew 10:8). Regardless of Morrison’s original source of inspiration, Lone’s instruction analogously aligns with sacramentality: don’t separate God from God’s works, she teaches; or in other words, do not separate grace from nature, spirit from body. However, Consolata’s gift also becomes a source of her greatest guilt, for she keeps Sister Mary alive in her elderly years “out of the weakness of devotion turned to panic” (247). After Sister Mary’s death, Consolata, now fifty-four, becomes “wary of God” and seems to shrink her life into a wait for death. Her guilt-fueled depression is hidden from four other women who arrive at the convent. They seem to regard her as a nice older woman who is a good listener, even if a little eccentric, preferring to confine herself to a room next to the former convent’s wine cellar. The first woman to join Consolata is Mavis, burdened with guilt from accidentally killing her baby twins by leaving them in a locked car; she flees from a husband who treats her body merely as an avenue for satisfying his sexual cravings. Gigi, originally named Grace by her mother, arrives after failing to meet her jailed former lover; Seneca was abandoned by her mother and most likely sexually abused by a stranger; and the teenage Pallas has fled her parents after discovering that her mother was the lover of Pallas’s boyfriend. Pallas is also pregnant, possibly from a sexual assault. Although these women value Consolata (or “Connie”), none of them know the depths of Consolata’s depression or guilt, or that they are a burden to her (223). Consolata’s transformation, and the start of her healing, occurs when she encounters a traveler, a stranger who resembles her appearance, with the same color ears and eyes, and who initially also wears sunglasses. In the secondary literature, the stranger provokes various interpretations, such as a symbol of 73. For readings of the stranger, see Marouan, “Candomblé, Christianity, and Gnosticism in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” 116–17; Megan Sweeney, “Racial House, Big House, Home: Contemporary Abolitionism in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 4, no. 2 (2004): 58; James M.

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Consolata’s subconscious, a “god,” or death.73 (Notably, Consolata is not the only person in the novel visited by a stranger.)74 Immediately before his appearance, Consolata is outside shortly after sundown when her vision can withstand the light. Fascinatingly, she complains to the deceased Sister Mary with a Latin phrase (“non sum dignus”) that is uttered immediately before reception of the Eucharist at a Mass. Then, as the narrator describes: Mary Magna had nothing to say. Consolata listened to the refusing silence, more wondering than annoyed by the sky, in plumage now, gold and blue-green, strutting like requited love on the horizon. She was afraid of dying alone, ungrieved in unholy ground, but knew that was precisely what lay before her. How she longed for the good death. “I’ll miss You,” she told Him. “I really will.” The skylight wavered. (251)75

Some readers regard Consolata here as dismissing God—or at least a traditionally Western Christian image of God.76 Although this interpretation may be true to a certain extent, a more complicated reading lies in the recognition that there is something O’Connor-esque in the description of the skyline. In O’Connor’s fiction, such moments are often an indication of Mellard, “The Jews of Ruby, Oklahoma: Politics, Parallax, and Ideological Fantasy in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 56, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 366. More often than not the stranger/traveler is simply ignored, an observation that would apply to some of the other sources in these notes. 74. As examples, see Dovey’s mysterious, unnamed friend (91–93), and the “walking man” who leads the original 8-rock families (97–98). 75. Nittle notes that the description of the skyline “invoke[s] a Yorubabased religion like Candomblé.” Nittle, Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision, 159. 76. As one example, see John A. McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 105. 77. In this remark, I am referring to O’Connor’s habit of depicting moments of sacramentality through images of sunlight, especially at the end of her stories. Three examples would be “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “Parker’s Back,” and “Revelation.”

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divine grace, and a similar reading is possible here.77 Consolata still regards herself as unforgiven, despite the fact that she wonders at the “requited love” manifested in the sky’s beauty above her; perhaps then this is the source of her wonder, for “requited love” indicates that no payment or action is required on her part—perhaps she marvels at the free gift of the beauty. Meanwhile, she maintains enough of her traditional Catholicism to mourn that she will not be buried on “holy ground,” but who is the “You” that she will miss? Since she addresses “Him,” it is clearly not Sister Mary, and indeed it could be Christ or God more generally. In either case, at the sound of her complaint, the “skylight wavered,” indicating that transcendence has broken into her vision. The stranger appears immediately after this event, and informs her that “you know me,” and identifies himself as a traveler with the claim, “I’m far country” (252). This latter, curious description may be the stranger’s way of saying he is “far country,” or, he is transcendence himself, now embodied before her, a transcendence with whom she is well acquainted. Morrison is possibly playing with biblical allusions to Christ. His insistence that she alone should give him a drink (and not one of the other women) reminds this reader of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in the Gospel of John (4:4–26). Further, he indicates a close intimacy with her through the same eye and hair color, but his eyes are “green as new apples.” This intimacy is a healing one that not only restores her vision, but also is a reminder of her inherent sacredness, one that was previously wounded. Even Sister Mary Magna unconsciously notes this woundedness shortly before her death when she bemoans that Consolata’s eyes are no longer “green as grass” (47). Now, Consolata’s vision is restored, not just her physical vision, but her sacramental one as well. Morrison here may be merging two Christian images: the apple as the traditional representation of the fruit that Adam and Eve disobediently ate in the Garden of Eden, and Christ as the one who healed this original breach with

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God. Regardless, Morrison is casting Christ here not as King (like the nuns’ name for their school), but Christ as a lover in the way that “he was looking at her—flirtatious” (252). Some readers may protest at the thought of a flirtatious Christ, but to describe Christ as a lover would hardly be unique to Morrison. Catherine of Siena would certainly be familiar with it, as would an earlier medieval saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, who interpreted the most erotic book in the Bible, the Song of Solomon, as an allegory on the intimate relationship between the soul and the Word (that is Christ). At the same time, Morrison would have been aware of the long tradition of the intercession of the saints. (According to legend, St. Anthony of Padua, her baptismal saint and the patron saint of lost things, was visited by the Christ child.) None of this is to deny that Morrison might also be synthesizing Catholic imagery and themes with other spiritual traditions. It is merely to say that the novel’s various symbols echo the Catholic tradition of saintly or divine intercession. After the stranger’s scene, Consolata carefully makes a meal for the other women. But when “the table is set,” she gives the women a choice—either leave, or “follow me,” an echo of Jesus’s command to his disciples (262). Critics have noticed that this scene seems to be a kind of reworking of the Last Supper in the Gospels, thereby rendering Consolata as an analogy for Christ.78 Further, Consolata models an authority around which nurturing, healing community becomes possible. Unlike Ruby, she does not diminish the women’s individuality, but she requires them to face their wounds and trauma, a process of healing that involves the tracing of their silhouettes on the cellar floor and performing “loud dreaming.”79 Con78. As examples, see Stave, “From Eden to Paradise: A Pilgrimage through Toni Morrison’s Trilogy,” 116; and Sweeney, “Racial House, Big House, Home,” 57–58. 79. Sean Grattan notes that “we should imagine the loud dreaming in the Convent as a form of community and communication that eschews the rigidity of self and other.” See “Monstrous Utopia in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Genre 46, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 380.

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solata thereby teaches an embodied spirituality, one that values the sacredness of both the self and the other—a spirituality that fosters communal healing through which the women confront their own trauma and rework their relationships to each other. In the process, Consolata instructs them neither to be like Sister Mary, who valued the spirit over the body, nor like her love affair with Deek or her attempts to keep Sister Mary alive—both of which prized the body over the spirit. Instead, she counsels, “never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve” (263). As for Consolata herself, she begins to teach the women stories of her mother, Piedade, but she imagines her mother, “who sang but never said a word,” amidst a mystical community with “scented cathedrals made of gold where gods and goddesses sat in the pews with the congregation,” while nature itself seems transformed, for snakes are “aroused by poetry and bells” (263–64). Now, Consolata, “like a new and revised Reverend Mother,” guides the women’s healing, a healing that binds their community, such that a visitor might notice that “the Convent women [are] no longer haunted” (265–66). With Consolata as their spiritual leader, the women learn the sacredness of themselves, and form a community around vulnerability and solidarity, a community that is the antithesis of the rapidly disintegrating, fractious community of Ruby.80 Indeed, the previously querulous women dance together at night in the rain. “In places where rain is light the thrill is almost erotic. But those sensations bow to the rapture of holy women dancing in hot sweet rain. They would have laughed, had enchantment not been so deep” (283). Analogous to Baptism, the rain’s water is a sign of the 80. Cf. Sandra Cox, “‘Mother Hunger’: Trauma, Intra-Feminine Identification, and Women’s Communities in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Paradise and A Mercy,” in Contested Boundaries: New Critical Essays on the Fiction of Toni Morrison, ed. Maxine L. Montgomery (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 98–99. 81. I am certainly not the first commentator to note Morrison’s reworking of baptismal imagery in this scene. See as examples Mix, “Enspirited Bodies and

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women being washed with a healing that binds them together.81 At the same time, the women’s transformation and subsequent murder must be read in dialogue with the symbol of the cross. The cross appears most prominently in one of Ruby’s churches around the middle of the novel. Amidst increasing strain within Ruby, two young people marry, more to ease animosity between their families than out of any desire on their part; in addition, tension in the town has intensified between the older male leaders and their children. As a bridge between the two families, two pastors from different churches give the homily. The first sermon is by the exclusive traditionalist, Reverend Pulliam, who depicts God as demanding obedience, a pointed message to the rebellious younger generation: they—and by extension Ruby—must earn God’s favor. But he is followed by the progressively minded Reverend Misner, who takes the cross away from the backwall—a place of distance that mirrors the belief in a distant God—and moves it immediately in front of the congregation. Then, he holds the cross silently for several long, awkward minutes. Too angry to speak after hearing the depiction of God as judgmental and exclusive—a God who justifies the closed theocracy of Ruby—Misner preaches a silent sermon, holding the cross before the congregation, wondering to himself if the congregants will be able to see that in Jesus’s crucifixion, “this execution made it possible to respect—freely, not in fear—one’s self and one another. . . . All of which testified not to a peevish Lord who was His own love but to one who enabled human love” (146). In other words, the cross demonstrates that God does not gift us divine love to control others, but so that one may love others better. In this sense, Misner is reminding the congregants “that not only is God interested in you; He is you” (147; italics in original). Misner attempts to turn his congregants’ understanding of the cross away from one used to further exclusivism and fearEmbodied Spirits in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” 182; and Stave, “From Eden to Paradise: A Pilgrimage through Toni Morrison’s Trilogy,” 116.

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filled control, to a recognition that the cross symbolizes God’s solidarity in love that should turn us toward each other in hospitality. But Misner’s sermon is misunderstood and ignored, and tensions within the town continue to boil, leading to the scapegoating of the women in the convent as witches who have cursed the town. While Misner insists that the cross represents God’s hospitality and love, the climax expands the symbolism further to indicate God’s solidarity with victims of injustice and violence.82 Morrison once described Jesus’s crucifixion as “like a lynching,” language that makes an analogical connection between Jesus’s death and the tragic lynchings of thousands of black men and women in America’s history.83 Morrison’s analogy is not unique. Theologian James Cone, for example, notes that just “as Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs”; further, “both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror.”84 With its black-majority setting, Paradise reimagines the analogy between the cross and lynching. Shortly after the men of Ruby begin their attack on the convent, two men search the chapel, which seems to be transformed to reflect Consolata’s Brazilian spiritual heritage. The elusive text notes that the men discover on the wall behind the altar “The outline of a huge cross . . . Clean as 82. In this, Paradise resonates with the arguments of many theologians who insist that the cross reveals God’s solidarity with the unjust victims of misogyny, colonialization, racism, and exploitation. For one example, see M. Shawn Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018). 83. Morrison makes this comment in reaction to the controversial film The Passion of the Christ, during a conversation with Cornell West. See Toni Morrison and Cornel West, “‘We Better Do Something’: Toni Morrison and Cornel West in Conversation,” The Nation, May 6, 2004, last accessed on March 15, 2022 at https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/toni-morrison-cornel-west-politics/. 84. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), 31.

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new paint is the space where there used to be a Jesus” (12). This is ambiguous to say the least. Does the phrase “clean as new paint” mean that the women took down the cross as an act of rejection? Perhaps, but the absence of Jesus’s body—while the symbol of the cross remains “clean” and “new”—invites the reader to recognize that a new kind of lynching is happening. The lynched body of Jesus is symbolically mapped onto the bodies of the women. The men’s actions are what the cross, interpreted through a lens of solidarity, unveils and critiques—structures of power and authority oppress through scapegoating. When Consolata hears the gunshots, she leaves Pallas’s baby in her cellar bedroom, and rushes upstairs where she attempts to save the life of the mortally wounded white woman. In the nearby kitchen, the men shoot the other three (unnamed) women as they run away in a field. When Consolata enters the kitchen and sees the brothers Deek and Steward, the narrative cryptically describes how, “Consolata narrows her gaze against the sun, then lifts it as though distracted by something high above the heads of the men. ‘You’re back,’ she says, and smiles” (289). The “You’re back” seems directed not at Deek (after all, why would she smile?), but at what she sees “high above” their heads. Most likely, Consolata perceives her traveler-friend, the one who healed her vision and whose appearance indicated a startling intimacy with her.85 In his sudden return, Consolata glimpses divine solidarity despite the evil around her. The novel’s climax is a conflict between two visions of community—Ruby’s exclusiveness versus Consolata’s hospitality. Consolata’s welcome of wounded and adrift women foreshadows her eventual welcome of the supernatural stranger. Ruby’s leaders, meanwhile, are consistently suspicious of any unex85. Even McClure, whose reading differs from my more Catholic one, describes Consolata as seeing “perhaps the god who visits her regularly” (see McClure, Partial Faiths, 114). In this sense, even non-Catholic readings still highlight this moment as a glimpse of transcendence.

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plainable stranger, the women or otherwise. The novel implies that welcoming the divine stranger is inseparable from welcoming the human stranger. Indeed, the supernatural is not absent even after Deek’s twin brother, Steward, shoots her. Soane hears Consolata’s last words as she’s holding the dying woman: “He’s divine he’s sleeping divine” (291). Is this a reference to Pallas’s baby, the stranger, or some fascinating allusion to both? In either case, this mysterious comment raises a question frequently ignored by scholars—what happens to Pallas’s baby? The men never discover the infant, nor does the undertaker find either the baby or the murdered women’s bodies (292). Later, when Misner and his future wife, Anna, investigate the site, Misner and Anna both feel a presence, that Misner thinks is a window, but Anna describes as a door (305). Both images connote a connection to another reality—either as a glimpse (a window) or as a passage (a door).86 The grounds and convent have become holy ground—and the bodies of the women and the baby have vanished through a kind of divine intercession. Connor observes that “Morrison’s fiction is populated with the supernatural, the effect of which is to dislocate the reader into seeing reality in new ways, to uncover meaning often hidden but usually revealed in mythic attempts at understanding.”87 Similarly, with Misner’s and Anna’s visit to the convent, Morrison prepares the reader to be dislocated further with the appearances of the presumably dead women in the concluding pages. (In an interview, Morrison cagily describes the women as “both” dead and alive.)88 Appropriately, their reappearances leave much to the 86. For a discussion of this scene, see Wyatt, Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels, 93. 87. Kimberly Rae Connor, Conversions and Visions in the Writings of AfricanAmerican Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 182. 88. Quoted in Mark A. Tabone, “Rethinking Paradise: Toni Morrison and Utopia at the Millennium,” African American Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 140.

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reader’s imagination. As Wyatt correctly insists, “ambiguity seems fitting, a sign of respect for a metaphysical reality that is beyond human thought.”89 The degree to which these reappearances resemble the Christian resurrection story has been the subject of much debate. Hartnell argues that the relationship can only be pushed so far as the women’s appearances are not universally about reconciliation. She sees a synthesis of the Christian story and a “space” between the living and the dead found in West African religions.90 Hartnell’s point is well taken—for, with the possible exception of Consolata, the women continue to work through their woundedness. Like a reimagined, earthbound purgatory, the process that Consolata started continues, not to atone for sin as in the traditional Catholic understanding of purgatory, but to heal from the past. The women remain in motion with others—Gigi meets an unnamed lover; Seneca has a friend who cares for cuts on her hand (previously implied to be self-inflected), and Pallas departs from her mother’s house in what is most likely Mavis’s car, while Mavis briefly reconnects with her daughter. In their new state, the women’s healing continues through community. The one image of rest is on the final page, in which Consolata lies in the arms of her birth mother, a singing Piedade, on a beach strewn with litter. Consolata seems cured of her oldest trauma— her separation from her biological mother. Morrison describes this final image as a kind of Pietà, an image I have discussed before (see chapter 2), and perhaps there is a hint of this in the Marian “cerulean blue” that frames Piedade’s “black face” (318).91 It also invites seeing Consolata as a kind of analogy (not an allegory) for Christ in the sense described above—a spiritual

89. Wyatt, Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels, 93. 90. Hartnell, “Exodus and Redemption in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” 121; see also Stave, “From Eden to Paradise: A Pilgrimage through Toni Morrison’s Trilogy,” 116. 91. “Have Mercy: The Religious Dimensions of the Writings of Toni Morrison.”

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authority who brings sacramental healing and forgiveness to her community, and who is lynched by local political authorities. At the same time, Morrison is clear in her essays that her focus is to spur the imaginations of readers to work toward a paradise here on earth, a paradise that is inclusive and embracing of people in their weaknesses, flaws, traumas, and vulnerabilities. The novel’s concluding pages thus improvise on the Christian theme of bodily resurrection while insisting that images of paradise must not be lost in a heavenly ether. In Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf observes that the history of the West is a history of exclusion, which is “barbarity within civilization, evil among the good, crime against the other right within the walls of the self.”92 To move beyond the historical repetition of exclusion, Christians must find the courage “to readjust our identities to make space for” others through acts of embrace and hospitality.93 Our novels intersect with Volf’s argument. Young Tarwater strives for much of The Violent Bear It Away to exclude Bishop from his prophetic vocation—ironically, the clearest act of exclusion, Bishop’s murder, ultimately leads to the events that compel Francis to accept that he is a member of the mystical Body of Christ. Meanwhile, in The Company of Women, community is reconfigured so that different perspectives may be tolerated; grace and healing come in this transformed community, but lingering tensions are left unresolved; the wounds remain, one might say, but so does hope. Finally, Consolata in Paradise challenges Ruby to abandon their tradition of exclusion—an exclusion rooted in the historical exclusion of African-Americans from society as a whole. Although Consolata welcomes all the women into the convent with superficial hospitality, it is only after her identity as the convent’s leader is trans92. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 60; italics in the original. 93. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 29; italics in the original.

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formed that she authentically comes to embrace the women and address their sufferings. Grace surprises in these stories, calling us to live in a solidarity rooted in the brokenness, suffering, and woundedness of each other. These three, very different novels reveal the transformative, healing power of communities centered around vulnerability and weakness.

CHAPTER SIX

Sacramentality in Catholic Fiction S O M E T H O U G H T S O N A PAT T E R N O F CO N T R A S T

In chapter 2, I outlined my argument that there is a consistent pattern of contrast between modern and contemporary Catholic fiction. I will not return to my historical, theological, and literary justifications for this argument, and would refer the reader back to that chapter if need be. Instead, this chapter serves as a summation for this pattern of contrast through discussions of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (1991), and Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (2017), three novels that prominently feature women religious communities. Each novel echoes chapters 3–5 with its themes of evil, sacrifice, and community. Once again, Spark’s Miss Brodie, like Greene’s and O’Connor’s work, or Spark’s own The Girls of Slender Means, is built on the trajectory of a conversion, which alerts the reader to look for grace’s presence despite Spark’s elusive prose. And once again, Spark presents a Catholic sacramental vision in stark opposition to disenchanted secularity, a contrast downplayed in Hansen’s and McDermott’s novels. In addition, Hansen’s and McDermott’s stories align with the sacramentality of many contemporary Catholic novels and short stories: grace’s presence is, narratively speaking, less the impetus for a character to rebuke secularity and more an invitation for them to reimagine their existing Catholic faith. With these three novels as a springboard, I conclude this chapter with some final remarks on my pattern of contrast by returning briefly to the stories of the previous chapters.

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A Subtle Sacramental Correction: Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Like Greene’s or O’Connor’s fiction, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie presents the clear either/or choice of much Catholic fiction in late modernity: the choice between orthodox Christian faith or Western secularity—a choice, in other words, between an enchanted worldview of grace’s presence, or a disenchanted one that regards the human ego as the foundation of meaning. Interestingly, the charismatic title character also practices a watereddown form of cultural Christianity, and in this regard, Spark echoes O’Connor’s critique of lukewarm Christianity. Like in much of O’Connor’s and Greene’s fiction, conversion to Christian faith occurs after the witness of evil; in this case, Miss Brodie becomes a catalyst for her student Sandy to convert to the Catholic faith. But unlike Nicholas in The Girls of Slender Means (see chapter 3), Sandy’s conversion does not come in a single dramatic moment, but over many years, as she increasingly questions Miss Brodie’s ideology. Grace’s presence is still depicted but it is tempered, thereby foreshadowing the more muted sacramentality of much later Catholic fiction. In the 1930s, Miss Brodie is a teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh.1 Miss Brodie deems a small group of girls, on whom she devotes particular attention, her “set.” These lucky pupils are to be the fruits of her “prime.” Brodie expands her students’ provincial imaginations, with lessons on the Italian Renaissance painters, Mussolini, Einstein, and the Bible, while enthralling them with tales of her romances and travels (2–8).2 Unfortunately, Miss Brodie weaves her lessons with 1. Miss Brodie was inspired by one of Spark’s own teachers in Edinburgh, a Miss Kay; however, Spark cautions that this similarity must not be pushed too far. See Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 57. 2. All parenthetical references are from Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009).

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a troubling fidelity to fascist ideologies, uncritically praising, for example, Mussolini’s policies regarding unemployment (46–47). As Judy Suh notes, the novel captures how some women of Miss Brodie’s generation adopted fascism in reaction against the patriarchal status quo in order “to exercise iconoclastic forms of individualism.”3 And it is Miss Brodie’s fascism that eventually prompts Sandy, a member of her “set,” to betray Miss Brodie. Only after Sandy is disillusioned with Miss Brodie does she confide in the headmistress that Miss Brodie has encouraged another student, Joyce Emily, to travel to Spain to fight for Franco, an action that results in her death (133–34). But Miss Brodie’s fascism is also intertwined with her positive impact on her students. As David Lodge remarks, “the good and the bad are inextricably entwined” with Miss Brodie.4 For example, Miss Brodie instructs her pupils to pray for the unemployed in part because of Mussolini’s economic policies (39), and she introduces Sandy to Edinburgh’s poverty (32). Further, Miss Brodie expands the girls’ imaginations beyond their conventional studies when she teaches them art, history, and literature. As Jennifer Lynn Randisi observes, “The quality Sandy most admires is Miss Brodie’s ability to transfigure the commonplace. But she sees that this power is also Miss Brodie’s most dangerous gift.”5 Miss Brodie, in other words, deepens the girls’ awareness of the world, but at the cost that their understanding is under her exclusive control. Miss Brodie’s worldview also distorts Edinburgh’s Calvinist heritage into a form of idolatry. In time, Sandy discerns that Miss 3. Judy Suh, “The Familiar Attractions of Fascism in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Journal of Modern Literature 30, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 91. 4. David Lodge, “The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” in Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, ed. Joseph Hynes (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 161. 5. Jennifer Lynn Randisi, On Her Way Rejoicing: The Fiction of Muriel Spark (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 100.

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Brodie fashions the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination according to her own will: “She thinks she is Providence . . . she thinks she is the God of Calvin” (129). A particular strand of Calvinism—that some are elected and not others—infects Miss Brodie’s attitude about herself and others. Sandy concludes that her teacher has “elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn’t stand it any more” (116). But Miss Brodie’s Calvinism, of course, is a perversion of its source, for, after all, in Calvin’s theology, election and predestination are not dictated by the human creature but are the providence of God alone. In essence, Miss Brodie lives in a secularized version of the doctrine of predestination; she has appointed herself the providential authority over the lives of her students.6 Miss Brodie, godlike, designates certain roles for her girls: for instance, Mary is deemed stupid and serves as the group’s scapegoat,7 while Rose is to be the group’s beauty and have an adulterous affair with Mr. Lloyd, the art teacher. But this self-ordering is ultimately delusional. She never pauses to consider whether Rose wants to have an affair, nor does she display much self-reflection. In 1938, she exalts how Germany and Austria are “now magnificently organised,” but even after the war’s destruction and death, she only admits, “Hitler was rather naughty” (131; italics in the original). Miss Brodie exemplifies how the ideals of Western modernity can turn into fascism. In her control over her community of students and her perversion of Christianity to suit her own means, she resonates with Charles Taylor’s description of the modern, buffered self who believes that the autonomous individual establishes meaning and value, and who orders her life according to 6. Lodge, “Uses and Abuses of Omniscience,” 167. 7. For a discussion of Mary as scapegoat, see Peter Robert Brown, “‘There’s Something about Mary’: Narrative and Ethics in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Journal of Narrative Theory 36, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 228–53.

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these self-determined goods. But Miss Brodie’s insistence on her autonomy also turns her into a kind of fascist leader. Taylor describes fascism’s paradigm as “one which extolled command, leadership, dedication, obedience, over individualism, rights and democracy, but which did so out of a cult for greatness, will, action, life.”8 Although certainly less violent than the dictators she praises, Miss Brodie exemplifies this paradigm in her demands for her students’ unwavering loyalty. After Miss Brodie loses her job because of Sandy’s secret betrayal, she obsesses for years over discovering who reported her to the headmistress. Miss Brodie might call her students to a greatness and a life that exceeds their culture’s sexist norms, but she insists on unswerving fidelity. Meanwhile, Sandy has a capacity for self-reflection sorely lacking in her charismatic teacher. She is not wholly innocent, as many critics point out;9 for example, instead of Rose, she has the affair with Mr. Lloyd, thereby upsetting Miss Brodie’s scheme. But Sandy also comes under the spell of Miss Brodie during her impressionable adolescent years. Spark, in an interview, remarks that “I don’t put Sandy as the wise woman of the novel, I put Miss Brodie as the wiser—the thing about Miss Brodie is that she has no restraining influence whatsoever, whereas Sandy did.”10 The novel’s narrator humorously notes that perhaps only Catholicism could have “disciplined” Miss Brodie’s “soaring and diving spirit” 8. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 418. 9. Some examples: Lodge, “Uses and Abuses of Omniscience,” 171; Dorothea Walker, Muriel Spark (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 42; Bryan Cheyette, “Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000, ed. Brian W. Shaffer (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 372–73; and Patricia Duncker, “The Suggestive Spectacle: Queer Passions in Brontë’s Villette and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” in Theorising Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction, ed. Martin McQuillan (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), 76. 10. Muriel Spark, “An Interview with Dame Muriel Spark,” by Robert Hosmer, Salmagundi 146–147 (Spring–Summer 2005): 151.

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(90). At first glance, this seems an odd comment, but given Miss Brodie’s love of art, Spark implies that Catholicism’s aesthetics would have given Miss Brodie a communal ethics that could have curbed her ego. (Miss Brodie’s obsession with beauty over the other transcendentals, the good and the true, thematically recalls chapter 3’s The Girls of Slender Means.) Sandy in contrast embraces the “restraining influence” that Miss Brodie cannot—she becomes Catholic, even though this conversion is prompted by her affair with Mr. Lloyd. (One cannot help but hear an echo of Sarah and Bendrix’s adulterous affair in Greene’s The End of the Affair.) From the Catholic Mr. Lloyd, Sandy “extracted, among other things, his religion as a pith from a husk. Her mind was as full of his religion as a night sky is full of things visible and invisible. She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time” (132). Ironically, her imagination becomes sacramental amidst her affair, for she now discerns things “visible and invisible.” But this is the world of a Spark novel; good never exists apart from evil, and Sandy’s conversion is not a tidy one. After all, Sandy soon discovers after her conversion “quite a number of [Catholic] Fascists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie,” an acknowledgment that many Catholics did indeed embrace the fascist aesthetics of Mussolini and Hitler (134). Hélène Cixous notes that for Spark, “dubious motives induce spectacular conversions. Religion is smeared with hypocrisy because nothing is sacred that is not also bound for sacrilege.”11 Paradox and ambivalence remain. Indeed, at the end, Sandy greets visitors while grasping the monastic grille that separates her from the outside world. Or as Gerard Carruthers interprets, Sandy continues to struggle with the stain of evil in a world mixed with sin and 11. Hélène Cixous, “Grimacing Catholicism: Muriel Spark’s Macabre Farce (1) and Muriel Spark’s Latest Novel: The Public Image (2)” in Theorising Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction, ed. Martin McQuillan, trans. Christine Irizzary (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 206.

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grace—for in this world, “the battle between good and evil is never done and is never entirely predictable.”12 Nonetheless, Miss Brodie prompts a “transfiguration” in Sandy’s imagination, a transfiguration that ultimately leads to Sandy’s acceptance that grace exists in a fallen world. As an adult, Sandy becomes famous for a psychological book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and the title certainly describes Miss Brodie’s impact on her imagination. When a visitor to the cloister wonders if Calvinism was the most important influence upon the nun’s childhood, Sandy, now “Sister Helena of the Transfiguration,” replies, “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (137). Thus, the novel implies a sacramentality through an unlikely source, albeit a sacramentality often hard to discern. Yet Miss Brodie still aligns with the patterns of modern Catholic fiction discussed in previous chapters. Like much of O’Connor’s fiction or Greene’s The Power and the Glory (or The End of the Affair for that matter), it presents Catholicism as the clearest alternative to the dangers of a disenchanted modernity that regards the human ego as the center and source of meaning. In addition, Spark perhaps echoes late modern Catholic fiction’s tendency to depict sacrifice as a catalyst for conversion, although Joyce Emily’s misguided sacrifice of her life to the cause of Franco is more indirect than Greene’s and O’Connor’s treatment of sacrifice; after all, Joyce’s death spurs Sandy to conversion but only after years of increasing doubt about Miss Brodie. Like Greene and O’Connor, Spark also depicts Sandy’s turn to a sacramental, enchanted worldview as prompted by the experience of evil. Granted, her discernment of the dangers lurking in Miss Brodie’s ideology unfolds at a slower pace than the dramatic events of O’Connor’s fiction, but it still shares the same trajectory in which a character converts 12. Gerard Carruthers, “‘Fully to Savour Her Position’: Muriel Spark and Scottish Identity,” in Hidden Possibilities: Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark, ed. Robert E. Hosmer, Jr. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 103.

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to Catholicism after the witness of evil. Finally, Spark explores how community shapes faith, for Sandy moves from one form of community—that centered on Miss Brodie—to a Catholic one with her entrance into religious life. This theme forms an appropriate pivot to my final two novels—Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy and McDermott’s The Ninth Hour, both of which place the relationship between community and faith at their centers. Grace Both Extraordinary and Ordinary: Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy Ron Hansen, like many Catholic authors (such as Gordon, Percy, L’Heureux, and Morrison), recalls the formative power of the pre– Vatican II liturgy. He describes the rituals of his childhood as “great varieties of mystery and symbol,” and he credits this upbringing as the inspiration to become a writer, for he sensed that in Catholicism “storytelling mattered.”13 Like so many in this book, Hansen acknowledges the influence of Flannery O’Connor upon his literary imagination. In his essay “Writing as Sacrament,” he signals his agreement with O’Connor that the more sacramental a writer’s theology, the more the writer can discern divine action in the world. “Writing, then, can be viewed as a sacrament insofar as it provides graced occasions of encounter between humanity and God,” he argues.14 But he notes that good fiction must possess a certain amount of ambiguity out of respect for Divine Mystery. Catholic writers must eschew a deadening simplicity. In the best Catholic fiction, he believes, “we glimpse, if only through a glass darkly, the present and still-to-come kingdom of God.”15 Doubt must be given a prominent place in an 13. Ron Hansen, “Preface: A Stay against Confusion,” in A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (New York: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2001), xii. 14. Ron Hansen, “Writing as Sacrament,” in A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (New York: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2001), 3. 15. Ron Hansen, “Faith and Fiction,” in A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (New York: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2001), 25.

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authentic faith. As he argues, “we cannot call a fiction Christian just because there is no irreligion in it, no skepticism, nothing to cause offense, for such a fiction, in its evasions, may have also evaded, in Karl Rahner’s words, ‘that blessed peril that consists in encountering God.’”16 Rahner’s phrase certainly seems apt to Hansen’s best-known book, Mariette in Ecstasy, given that the protagonist undergoes “that blessed peril that consists in encountering God.” The novel’s sacramentality is explicitly depicted, but Hansen allows room for skepticism, and some readers may ascribe the novel’s depictions of divine inbreaking to natural causes. Hansen conceived Mariette after reading Thérèse de Lisieux’s Story of a Soul and studying the history of stigmata.17 Set in 1906– 1907 in upstate New York, Mariette brings together many of the topics of Catholic fiction around evil, sacrifice, and community. The title character is a young postulant who joins the fictional religious order the Sisters of the Crucifixion. Shortly after the death of her sister, the convent’s prioress, Mariette begins to receive the stigmata to the bewilderment of some and awe of others. But the stigmata are not the only unusual phenomenon in Mariette. Two of Mariette’s fellow nuns overhear what sounds like nocturnal attacks by the devil upon her in her room (151–52).18 But this violent manifestation merely reflects a simmering evil in the community. Some nuns demonstrate their jealousy and hatred when they petition Père Marriott, the priory’s resident priest, to stop investigating the stigmata, insisting that Mariette is a fraud (160–61). Why should she alone be blessed with such a gift? The new Reverend Mother, Saint-Raphaël, initially treats Mariette’s stigmata cautiously. But as the disturbances to the con16. Hansen, “Faith and Fiction,” 25–26. 17. Hansen, “Writing as Sacrament,” 7; cf. also Ron Hansen, “Stigmata,” in A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (New York: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2001), 177–91. 18. All parenthetical references are from Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy (New York: HarperPerennial/HarperCollins, 1992).

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vent’s life increase, so does her impatience and frustration. At one point, Mother Saint-Raphaël confesses her confusion to the postulant. Interestingly, she asks Mariette to heal her if possible “of the hate and envy” that she harbors for Mariette (160). But Mother Saint-Raphaël’s even temper breaks when Mariette is “in ecstasy” (166). In her erotic vision, Mariette describes how Christ “gives me food as I have never eaten. And fine wine from a jeweled chalice. When he tells me to sleep, I do so at once, and he holds me. And I share in him as if he’s inside me. And he is.” At that, Mother Saint-Raphaël slaps her, a violence she follows later by pressing a fork against Mariette (168–69). Although Mariette’s description jars Saint-Raphaël, the sexual imagery shows that Mariette’s faith is profoundly embodied. Nick Ripatrazone remarks that “the novel’s sexuality . . . is tied to its sacredness. Mariette’s Catholicism is not conjecture; it is lived and livid. Her faith is her skin, her mouth, her desire. Her faith is charged with the closeness of her sin.”19 Yet it is Saint-Raphaël who also undergoes the greatest conversion regarding Mariette. Many of the sisters’ initial opinions of the postulant merely deepen as the novel progresses—whether to regard her as a fraud or as a great saint and blessing. But Saint-Raphaël’s conversion remains hidden from all but Mariette. When Mariette’s father, Dr. Baptiste comes to examine her wounds, he finds no evidence of scarring, although there is some evidence that Mariette still feels pain. Pronouncing that the nuns have been duped, he reduces Mariette’s stigmata and diabolical attacks to psychological causes: “Christ talks to her . . . The Devil strikes her when she tries to pray. She is always saying preposterous things; that’s why we don’t get along” (173). But the reader should distrust Dr. Baptiste’s rigid empiricism. At home, while Mariette prepares to enter the priory, he stares outside “as if his hate were there” (9); his conclusions about Mariette’s stigmata 19. Nick Ripatrazone, Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2020), 30.

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are conditioned by his resentment of losing both his daughters to the religious life. After Dr. Baptiste’s examination, Mother Saint-Raphaël surprisingly admits to Mariette, “I personally believe that what you say happened did indeed happen. We could never prove it, of course. Skeptics will always prevail. God gives us just enough to seek Him, and never enough to fully find him. To do more would inhibit our freedom, and our freedom is very dear to God” (174). Saint-Raphaël’s comments capture the nature of faith’s everpresent relationship with uncertainty. Even if one believes in grace’s presence in creation and in human actions, God “never” gives us enough proof “to fully find him,” only “to seek Him.” Saint-Raphaël has abandoned her old suspicion, but she feels compelled to require Mariette to leave for the sake of the community’s peace. Even if Saint-Raphaël believes Mariette, “skeptics will always prevail.” The community would remain in strife, and Mariette consequently must sacrifice her desire to be a nun. As Kimberly Connor notes, what Mariette “learns is that by surrendering her own needs and her own joy to the overall good of the community is what creates the very experience she was seeking. She gets what she wants, but not the way she intended. Only when she lets go of her way and accepts God’s way does she receive both.”20 Or in other words, Mariette must abandon her desire for community for the sake of the community. Mariette then is compelled to reimagine her vocation. The last several pages of the novel give glimpses of Mariette’s postpriory life. In these intervening years, Mariette occasionally receives the pain of the stigmata, if not the physical wounds. And even though she is no longer in the convent, she mirrors the monastic life as much as possible. Just as the order follows the Rule of St. Benedict, so Mariette at home honors the vows, prays 20. Kimberly Rae Connor, “Called to the Things of This World: The Difficult Balance of Nuns in Mariette in Ecstasy and Lying Awake,” Listening: A Journal of Religion and Culture 40, no. 2 (2005): 111.

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the hours, and attends daily Mass. Her sacrifice for the sake of communal harmony has not ruptured her relationship with God. If anything, her faith has deepened, even if it is a quieter faith. Yet this faith is still tested, for the Devil tempts her with thoughts that she has wasted her life. Nonetheless, she remains Christ’s lover. As she writes in 1937 to the now–Reverend Mother Philomène, “Christ still sends me roses. We try to be formed and held and kept by him, but instead he offers us freedom. And now when I try to know his will, his kindness floods me, his great love overwhelms me, and I hear him whisper, Surprise me” (179; italics in the original). Christ’s encouragement to Mariette to “surprise me” is grounded in a freedom that only grace can give, a freedom of the imagination, a freedom to see Christ around us. It is a freedom to be surprised by a grace that shapes a person’s life in unexpected ways. Stigmata are nothing but unusual, even irrational, to the ordinary world—they are a mystery granted to the receiver. But in Mariette, the grace of the stigmata is merely the most explicit manifestation of the sacramentality that Hansen dovetails throughout the novel, from the beauty and rhythm of the nuns’ many tasks, rituals, and liturgies to the lush imagery of nature— these descriptions evoke a sense of wonder and mystery at the world. Thomas A. Wendorf observes that “Hansen’s narrator has a roving eye that shows extraordinary attentiveness to the physical world, investing objects, landscapes, and actions with significance: first, by the attention given them, and second, by the spare, poetically evocative language used to describe them.”21 Mariette’s return to her father’s house is a reminder that an extraordinary life of faith is possible in the quotidian, even for those not called to a formal religious life, even those living an “ordinary” life. In this sense, Mariette’s journey is the opposite 21. Thomas A. Wendorf, SM, “Body, Soul, and Beyond: Mystical Experience in Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy and Mark Salzman’s Lying Awake,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 7, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 44.

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of Sandy’s in Miss Brodie. The latter enters religious community following her conversion, the former leaves religious community to reimagine her vocation. But Mariette’s reborn vocation as a layperson is merely another example of the novel’s tapestry of sacramentality—grace exists throughout creation and our lives, if we have the imagination to discern it. Admittedly, my insistence on the sacramentality of the novel rests on a hermeneutic of faith. As Hansen acknowledges, “Mariette Baptiste was, for me, the real thing, a stigmatic; but I inserted an element of questionableness because in my research that seemed standard even in those instances in which the anomalies seemed authentic and all medical science could do was scratch its head in puzzlement.”22 Only a didactic novel would insist that the reader acknowledges the authenticity of Mariette’s stigmata. As Gregory Wolfe astutely observes, “the open-endedness of the narrative is not a copout, but a sign of Hansen’s respect for mystery.”23 The novel offers Divine Mystery and sacramentality to the reader, but the reader may still align themselves with Dr. Baptiste, and at least be justified in their doubts. “We are left not exactly as skeptics,” concludes Guerric DeBona, “but more like postmodern readers who must interpret a baffling parable of the cross, the crucified God.”24 Thus, although Mariette is an exception within much contemporary Catholic fiction in foregrounding the question of the Divine’s presence, it nonetheless follows the overall pattern from the 1970s onward: grace is less about the dramatic conversion to a new sacramental worldview, and more about the interrogation of an existing Catholic faith.

22. Hansen, “Stigmata,” 177–78. 23. Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011), 26. 24. Guerric DeBona, OSB, “Toward the Open Text: Ron Hansen’s Parables of Redemption and Grace,” U. S. Catholic Historian 23, no. 3, American Fiction and Catholic Culture (Summer 2005): 131.

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Searching for Glimmers of Sacramentality: McDermott’s The Ninth Hour Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy represents a trend in Catholic fiction to turn to historical fiction as a way of examining the subject of faith.25 Similarly, McDermott’s The Ninth Hour also falls within this genre, but like much of McDermott’s work, the term “historical fiction” is perhaps a bit misleading. While the bulk of the novel’s plot is set in the past, the events are told by contemporary descendants of central characters. In this sense, past and present combine, such that each relies on the other to be understood. The act of storytelling is the narrator’s attempt to find meaning in the family’s history. Michael O’Connell remarks that McDermott’s most famous novel, 1998’s Charming Billy (and the winner of the National Book Award), “is fundamentally about the power of the stories we tell and are told,” and his observation is equally apt for The Ninth Hour.26 In the essay “Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic,” McDermott claims that literature spoke to her “of the undeniable fears and longings of being human” and that “fiction made the chaos bearable.”27 Her stance sounds similar to Hansen’s belief that “the job of fiction writers is to fashion those symbols and give their readers the feeling that life has great significance, that something is going on here that matters.”28 But if Mariette in Ecstasy depicts sacramentality—Mariette’s stigmata—grace’s presence in The Ninth Hour is buried such that one could easily read it as a family history. Ripatrazone comments that McDermott “shares Ron Hansen’s ability within Mariette in Ecstasy to recreate a Catholic atmosphere in which faith suffused all things. Yet their 25. Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World, 54–55. 26. Michael O’Connell, “‘The Glorious Impossible’: Belief and Ambiguity in the Fiction of Alice McDermott,” Religion and the Arts 20, no. 4 (2016): 496. 27. Alice McDermott, “Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic: Portrait of a Novelist,” Commonweal, February 11, 2000, 14. 28. Hansen, “Writing as Sacrament,” 13.

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styles and outcomes are very different. . . . The Ninth Hour feels painfully real, the lives of its characters authentically messy.”29 Amidst this messiness, The Ninth Hour quietly suggests that grace is often only discerned in the act of storytelling. In the narration of our lives, in the search for meaning, we may discover glimmers of sacramentality. But this discernment requires faith and remains inseparable from uncertainty. In interviews, McDermott notes her struggles with doubt while affirming the importance of sacramentality. She comments to Image magazine that “the idea of sacrament—an outward sign elevated into something else, the ordinary made into occasions of grace—is essential. It becomes a way of thinking about the world, rather than just the way a religion is run.”30 Yet she also recognizes that “doubt is as much a part of faith as belief is,” because “we all dwell in the in-betweens.”31 McDermott’s sense of “the in-betweens” clarifies the title of The Ninth Hour, the traditional hour of Jesus’s death, which she describes as “an hour, perhaps, of great stillness.”32 “The ninth hour,” she believes, “resides somewhere in between faith and doubt. . . . I see the ninth hour as the moment of the whole world in doubt. The believer and nonbeliever alike.”33 In many ways, the novel guides the reader through that “in-between” space of faith and doubt. The act of storytelling is also an act of hope, a claim that the family’s story reveals shimmers of God’s presence throughout its history, even if much remains unresolved. The titles of the first and last chapters 29. Ripatrazone, Longing for an Absent God, 188. 30. “A Conversation with Alice McDermott,” by Paul J. Contino, Image 52, last accessed on March 29, 2022 at https://imagejournal.org/article/conversationalice-mcdermott/. 31. “Alice McDermott’s America is Not of a Bygone Era,” interview by Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub, October 27, 2017, last accessed on March 29, 2022 at https://lithub.com/alice-mcdermotts-america-is-not-of-a-bygone-era/. 32. “A Suicide Reverberates In ‘The Ninth Hour,’” interview by Scott Simon, NPR, September 23, 2017, last accessed on March 22, 2022 at https://www.npr. org/2017/09/23/553115121/a-suicide-reverberates-in-the-ninth-hour. 33. “Alice McDermott’s America is Not of a Bygone Era.”

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indicate this tension: “These Short Dark Days” and “Endless Length of Days,” respectively. If the former invokes the perfunctory, tragic nature of much human living, the latter implies some semblance of hope as life continues despite the sorrows. The novel opens on a gloomy February day in the early twentieth century with Sister St. Saviour, a member of the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, assisting the pregnant Annie. Annie is grief-stricken after her husband, Jim, commits suicide in their Brooklyn apartment, and Sister St. Saviour summons the resources of her community to care for the distraught and impoverished widow. Although St. Saviour dies a few months later, her good deed is memorialized when Annie baptizes her new daughter after her; the daughter, however, goes by the name of Sally. The religious sisters embody grace to Annie, Sally, and their neighborhood. The sisters provide Annie not just employment in the convent’s laundry; they also give hope and guidance. Of particular importance is Sister Jeanne, who, near in age, develops a close relationship with Annie and visits her regularly in the downstairs laundry (48–49).34 She also becomes Sally’s favorite sister, and years later the favorite of Sally’s own children (that is, the narrator and the narrator’s siblings) (73). At the same time, Sister Jeanne manifests a sacramental imagination. She describes St. Saviour’s appearance at the scene of the suicide as a “miracle,” and insists that the smell of roses miraculously appeared as St. Saviour died (74). This sacramental spirituality stems in part from her communal life, such as her regard for “the hour of Lauds” as “always the holiest” (21). Later in the novel, when she and Annie are alone, Sister Jeanne once again recalls “the odor of sanctity filling the hushed room. . . . As much of heaven’s beauty . . . as we on earth can bear” (130). Sister Jeanne’s sacramental imagination is vivid, but also limited by a strict logic of fairness. She “believed with the conviction 34. All parenthetical citations are from Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

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of an eye witness that all human loss would be restored . . . because fairness demanded it” (52). With an affectionate and charming way, she teaches children that fairness was ingrained in their conscience by God. At the same time, her rigid notion of moral justice convinces her that Jim cannot go to heaven because of his suicide (54–55). Granted, Sister Jeanne is merely following the orthodox teaching of the Catholic Church during that time. But this also problematizes Sister Jeanne’s sacramental imagination. Sister Jeanne is not uncritical of her religious imagination, for, “she [knows] herself to be a heretic of superstitions and weird imaginings” (22). Yet her imagination also gives her certainty. When she has a vision of Jim, “she [knows] that stubborn, solemn, lifeless face. It [is] lifeless still” (55). Sister Jeanne’s sacramental imagination thus comes across as somewhat impoverished, despite the character’s goodness. She is not the clear, moral guide that some readers may hope her to be. Both the narrator and reader know that the Catholic Church has become more cautious over time about declaring God’s judgment upon a person who commits suicide. There is a greater recognition of the role of mental illness in such situations, a reality hinted at when the narrator notes that their mother’s (Sally’s) “midlife melancholy was clinical depression” (241). Most likely, Jim also suffered from such “melancholy.” Further, Sister Jeanne demonstrates a failure of her sacramental imagination when she applies her strict standard of fairness to herself, for she attempts to save the soul of Sally by risking divine condemnation of herself. After the teenage Sally abandons her plan to enter the order due to an eye-opening train ride to Chicago, she discovers that her mother has been carrying on an adulterous affair with Mr. Costello, whose wife has been confined to bed for several years. Annie refuses to end her affair with Mr. Costello, even at the urgings of the sisters. Sally, meanwhile, cannot bring herself to continue living with her mother, perhaps as much out of a sense of betrayal as from any moral qualms.

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At the same time, Sally seems to believe that she can atone for her mother’s sin through a kind of simplistic “exchange” theology. When Sister Illuminata, Annie’s supervisor in the laundry, suggests that Sally do something good to save her mother’s soul, she decides to volunteer to care for the lonely Mrs. Costello (190– 91). But Sister Illuminata’s troubling piety of exchange seems to ignore the standard Catholic teaching of the time that only the sacrament of Confession could release someone from the stain of such a serious sin. A few pages later, Sally, worrying about her mother’s mortal sin, wonders, “What if the poison on Sister Illuminata’s shelves should find its way into her tea?” (195). This idea is not a passing fantasy. While working at a local hotel, Sally overhears customers planning a wedding, and she discovers the customers’ violet handkerchief (the color of which reminds this reader of the incarnate devil in The Violent Bear It Away). Sally then realizes that if Mrs. Costello died, her mother would be able to marry (211–12). Later, at Mrs. Costello’s apartment, Sister Lucy voices her disdain to Sally of a misguided belief in “a bargaining God,” a belief that one can decide how to atone for sins, either one’s own or another’s (220). Sister Lucy is a voice of conscience in the moment, for Sally is acting under just such a false hope; that is, she has decided “to exchange her own immortal soul for her mother’s mortal happiness” (223). Sally steals Sister Illuminata’s alum to poison Mrs. Costello during the ninth hour, around 3 p.m., the hour of Jesus’s death—an ironic symbolism that highlights Sally’s delusion. After all, only Jesus can atone for sin. Back in Mrs. Costello’s apartment, Sally gives the tea with the alum to the woman, but because the alum is on the bottom, Sister Jeanne intervenes before Mrs. Costello drinks it. This interruption prompts Sally to realize her “madness” (225). Yet, unexpectedly, after Sister Jeanne feeds Mrs. Costello applesauce “with its lumps and bits of peel,” Mrs. Costello starts to cough, “a sound like the beating of laundry,” a description which recalls the alum’s origin with the convent’s laundry (226, 228). When Sally cries out,

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“Sister Jeanne [knows] it [is] better to wait, to stand back, to let the fit, the nonsense, pass” (226). And “pass” Mrs. Costello soon does much to Sally’s shock. When Sister Lucy returns “like night descending,” there is an ironic play on the Pietà as the sister holds the now-dead Mrs. Costello (227). (It is astounding how many stories in this book reference the Pietà!) Appropriately, this chapter is entitled “Still,” for, like McDermott’s description of “the ninth hour,” Mrs. Costello’s passing is the moment when the stillness of death holds one between faith and doubt. Indeed, the pages linger over this scene. Sisters Lucy and Jeanne prepare the room and body amidst prayers almost ritualistically, like a “long-established routine” (227). Yet the sisters transform the room and Mrs. Costello sacramentally such that there is “a new light” and “Mrs. Costello [is] as she had been,” an implication that she is healed and at peace (230–31). The moment compels Sally to realize her own folly: “Everything she had planned, imagined, hoped for, all her fraught negotiations with herself, with God, with the future and the past, were nothing before this stillness” (231). The “stillness” of the moment is the stillness of the crucifixion, when sin and death seem triumphant, and yet grace—with the eyes of faith—remains possible to glimpse in the sisters’ respectful care of the deceased woman’s body. The ambiguity of the scene only increases moments later when Sister Jeanne returns Sally’s open pocketbook, indicating that Jeanne discovered the alum. But her words to Sally are one of consolation, “You did no harm, dear. Whatever you’d thought to do. . . . God is fair. He knows the truth” (232). The reader only fully grasps the import of Sister Jeanne’s words in hindsight. Throughout the story, the narrator recalls Sister Jeanne’s mystifying claim that she will not enjoy heaven (74, 183). Yet toward the end of the book, the nun’s claim is repeated. Sister Jeanne tells Sally’s children that she surrendered her place in heaven when the narrator’s mother was eighteen, and that she lost her place “out of love for my friends” (246). Since God knows her heart, she does not ask for forgiveness. Did Sister Jeanne slip

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alum into the applesauce to prevent Sally from committing a mortal sin herself? Did she intentionally serve Mrs. Costello lumpy applesauce in the hope that she would choke? Or did Mrs. Costello accidentally choke, and Sister Jeanne’s sin was not to help her? Regardless, Sister Jeanne intervened on Sally’s behalf. It is the piety of exchange taken to a heart-wrenching conclusion. McDermott thereby offers a subtle counterpoint to older Catholic fiction’s frequent theme of vicarious suffering (see chapter 4).35 Yet good does come out of it—at least in the eyes of the narrator. Sally’s own shaken sense of self marks the start of a deepening relationship with Patrick Tierney, the son of the family that shelters Sally after the discovery of her mother’s affair. Although space does not allow much analysis of Patrick, he is the narrator’s father. The novel thereby interrogates the mystery that good often emerges out of evil. If much Catholic fiction explores the relationship between sin and grace, The Ninth Hour compels the reader to live in the tension between these two contraries. Ripatrazone notes that “The Ninth Hour is a novel of questions, but it builds from a concrete statement: we are bound to our wounds from the past.”36 The act of storytelling, to my eyes, is an act of searching for meaning amidst these wounds. The novel points to the basic human need to arrive at a degree of clarity amongst events and circumstances outside one’s control and rational understanding. Shortly after Mrs. Costello’s death, Sally “could not trace, for the moment, what had brought her here, could not parse, for a moment, what it meant” (231). But the novel provides its own response, for its narrative offers the kind of meaning that bare facts cannot reveal. At the end, the narrator’s family discovers what Sally never knows—that Jim’s death was by suicide. As Sister Jeanne teaches, “Truth 35. I would like to thank my colleague and friend Jill Plummer for her insightful conversations regarding this scene, as well as The Ninth Hour as a whole. 36. Ripatrazone, Longing for an Absent God, 191.

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reveals itself. It’s really quite amazing” (183). But what is the truth about Jim’s suicide beyond the mere fact of the event? Can this truth reveal a deeper meaning to the event? The novel considers that question by setting Jim’s tragedy amidst a larger horizon. If the novel desires the reader to linger in this “ninth hour,” that is, the stillness between faith and doubt, it gently inclines the reader toward the former. Sister Jeanne’s conviction that God will not welcome her into heaven stems from the same limited imagination as her certainty that Jim was condemned to hell. Perhaps, like the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, her imagination simply does not allow for the depth and breadth of God’s mercy and forgiveness. At the same time, there is a bit of doubt buried behind her self-condemnation. She still asks Sally’s children to prayer for her, and her delight in them is certainly sacramental: “We felt her delight in us, which was familiar as well, delight in our presence, our living and breathing selves—a tonic for all sorrow” (247). Their presence is healing and consoling for Sister Jeanne—the outcome of all the circumstances over the years. Even if her specific act of killing Mrs. Costello (directly or indirectly) cannot be justified, her relationship with Annie and Sally has nonetheless produced the joy of Sally’s children. If she sees herself as irrevocably doomed, it is perhaps a failure of her spiritual vision. Yet, her closing remarks carry a hint of uncertainty, for “God has hidden these things from the wise and prudent, see? He’s revealed them only to the little ones” (247). In this, Sister Jeanne acknowledges that faith requires trust in a grander mystery than she can understand. The sacramentality of The Ninth Hour then is often missed by the characters, for this sacramentality is inseparable from doubt, evil, sacrifice, and suffering. Grace’s presence amidst life’s troubles, the novel indicates, is seen through storytelling. There is a temporal fluidity in McDermott’s prose markedly different from Spark’s leaps—in the latter, the narrator toys with reader’s expectations, like an assertion of omniscience. With McDermott, the fluidity is the halting journey of a voice trying to find meaning when so much

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of the past seems left to chance. As McDermott remarks regarding her earlier works, “Writing about memories and the fluidity of it and our own contribution to the recollection of events, rather than simply the events themselves, seem to give me access to those things we all need to hear. It’s a kind of spiritual yearning.”37 The Ninth Hour likewise points to a spiritual yearning in its narrative of memory. The novel is an assertion not just that stories matter, but that stories are avenues to recognize glimmers of transcendence. Although very different in style and symbolism, Mariette in Ecstasy and The Ninth Hour both are contemporary novels about a bygone era of American Catholicism in which Catholic belief and piety saturate every detail of the characters’ lives and their surrounding culture. It is not so much that modern disenchantment is missing entirely—certainly Mariette’s father gestures toward this mindset—but it does not form the central ideological conflict as it does in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Thus, even though Spark’s novel is more ambiguous in its sacramentality than, say, Greene’s Catholic novels or O’Connor’s work, its plot is still built around the same conflict between Christian faith and Western modernity. McDermott’s and Hansen’s novels thus uphold this study’s pattern of contrast, that is, that more recent Catholic fiction is less interested than its literary forebearers in offering a rebuke to secular disenchantment. The depictions of these past Catholic cultures are shaped by a postmodern awareness that the allure of Western modernity has already been, if not wholly discarded, at least greatly diminished. A Step Back from the Pattern of Contrast: Some Final Remarks Mariette in Ecstasy and The Ninth Hour both manifest a trend in contemporary Catholic fiction—grace must be discerned by the

37. Quoted in Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, “The Archeology of Yearning: Alice McDermott,” U. S. Catholic Historian 23, no. 3, American Fiction and Catholic Culture (Summer 2005): 104.

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reader without the clear guidance of a character’s conversion to Christianity (Catholic or otherwise). If in O’Connor’s, Greene’s, and Spark’s stories, the reader often detects sacramentality in a turn to Christian faith—usually from agnosticism, atheism, or indifference—contemporary fiction often lacks that narrative resolution. Consider, for example, how the image of the Pietà has reoccurred over and over again in these stories: Chrystal comforting Father Paul in “Ordinary Sins”; the unnamed priest embracing the dying teenager in “The Expert on God”; Piedade enfolding Consolata in Paradise; and Sister Lucy holding the deceased Mrs. Costello in The Ninth Hour. A reader might discern grace, but characters themselves do not necessarily view these moments sacramentally. This contrasts sharply with Asbury seeing the descent of the Holy Ghost at the end of O’Connor’s “The Enduring Chill,” Francis Tarwater’s mystical vision in The Violent Bear It Away, Sarah’s own insistence on God’s presence in her life in Greene’s The End of the Affair, or Sandy’s awareness of the “transfiguration” of the ordinary in Spark’s Brodie. In this pattern of contrast between earlier and newer fiction, The Power and the Glory is in some ways the exception that proves the rule, for it features a protagonist who regards himself as condemned, despite the dream he receives shortly before his execution. Further, the clear impact of his death upon others affirms the sacramentality of his life. Again, conversion to faith concludes the narrative. In chapter 4, I refer to Lancelot as a transition novel between older and contemporary Catholic fiction—a transition that directly engages with the themes of earlier fiction yet invokes a more ambiguous sacramentality. In the case of Lancelot, this sacramentality is suggested by its absence from the worldview of the narrator/protagonist, who refuses to see the world as bearing a transcendent reference; yet his mad ravings compel Father John’s return to his priestly vocation. In addition, Lancelot also exemplifies another transition between modern and postmodern Catholic fiction: sacramentality is depicted less through the characters’ personal journeys and more subtly through an imaginative

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vision of the story as a whole. O’Connor, for example, wants the reader to connect Christ analogically to the Polish immigrant in “The Displaced Person.” Yet, contemporary Catholic fiction allows much greater freedom to the reader’s imagination. The result is often a quieter form of sacramentality such that the reader is invited to see an ambiguous grace amidst the messiness of life. (One recalls here Wolfe’s argument in chapter 2 that earlier Catholic fiction “shouts” to its audience, and newer fiction “whispers.”) What then is this subtle sacramentality in contemporary fiction? As discussed in chapter 2, my own theologicalhermeneutical lens bears a Rahnerian tinge. But to speak here in more general terms, this quiet sacramentality is a decentering of the self, an expansion of a character’s horizon toward transcendence, even if it is unrecognized by the character(s); often, this sacramental vision unfolds over the course of the story instead of in one dramatic moment, as is common in older Catholic fiction. In this regard, both The Company of Women and The Samurai align with Lancelot as transition novels between the world of late modernity and postmodernity, despite the three novels’ extensive differences. Each book in this trio places Catholic faith in ideological opposition to another dominant social imaginary— similarly to earlier Catholic fiction—and yet each book also portrays a quieter sacramentality that is a de-centering of the self accompanied by an imaginative expansion—a hallmark of more contemporary stories. Thus, if one hallmark of earlier fiction is its focus on a character’s conversion to a new sacramental worldview, such as Sandy in Miss Brodie, both Mariette and The Ninth Hour do not focus on characters who reorient themselves to an entirely new faith or a new conception of the world. Or as Taylor might put it, later Catholic fiction is less likely to feature prominent characters who abandon an immanent frame for a supernatural one—or disenchantment for enchantment. Instead, the dramatic crux is an interrogation of characters’ existing faith. In Mariette, both Mother Saint-Raphaël and Mariette undergo a kind of conversion—the

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latter to a new understanding of her vocation, and the former to a new acceptance that God’s grace is truly present in Mariette’s stigmata—but they do not abandon or newly adopt Catholicism. Rather, their Catholic faith is deepened. Meanwhile, The Ninth Hour indicates a sacramentality greater than any character’s selfawareness, for the reader is left to question Sister Jeanne’s faith in God’s “fairness,” a faith that seems to have an impoverished understanding of divine mercy and forgiveness. In these ways, Mariette and The Ninth Hour match the consistent pattern that contemporary fiction possesses a much greater diversity in its portrayal of sacramentality. It is not necessarily a response to disenchanted modernity, and its presence allows a wider range for a reader’s interpretation. Within this diversity, contemporary Catholic fiction tends to depict an ambiguous sacramentality in at least three ways: First, perhaps most commonly, sacramentality is muted, difficult to discern, and quiet; one only sees glimmers of it. This observation applies to McDermott’s The Ninth Hour, Quade’s “Ordinary Sins,” Klay’s “Prayer in the Furnace,” L’Heureux’s “The Expert on God,” Gordon’s The Company of Women, Endo’s The Samurai, and Akpan’s “An Ex-mas Feast” and “My Parents’ Bedroom.” In many cases, it is left to the reader to see grace even if the characters do not. A second category is when sacramentality is implied by its seeming absence. Percy’s Lancelot and L’Heureux’s The Shrine at Altamira grant the possibility that faith is a source of resistance against evil and despair, but one must discern this in the final pages of the novels through characters’ brief, unexplained actions—Father John’s return to his vocation or Maria’s question of “why” before the shrine. Finally, some Catholic fiction presents explicit, seemingly irrational supernatural events. But ironically, the heightened nature of these events, far from providing clarity, increases ambiguity. Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy and Morrison’s Paradise are exemplars of this kind of Catholic fiction. With Hansen’s novel, the ambiguity comes from the possibility that one can psychologize Mariette’s stigmata, or search for purely

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natural explanations for the phenomena. In Paradise, the supernatural events do not always fit neatly within traditional Christian categories and symbols, thus giving a fluidity in meaning that exposes the reader’s own theological and spiritual perspectives. Yet no matter what category best describes these various examples of Catholic fiction, the antagonistic confrontation between Catholic faith and Western modernity is either decentered or absent in contemporary stories: Mariette nods to this issue; others, like The Ninth Hour, are even less concerned. However, both older and more contemporary Catholic fiction manifest one consistent pattern—faith is ultimately an act of the imagination. One need only return to the three novels of this chapter. Sandy in Miss Brodie adopts a more sacramental vision after she realizes that her mentor’s secular worldview leads to violence. In Mariette, the title character’s imagination shapes her struggles with her stigmata, her mystical sight, her relationships, and her vocation. In The Ninth Hour, there are rarely discussions on points of belief—Sister Jeanne’s insistence on God’s fairness, and a few other examples besides—yet faith is assumed in the characters’ very assumptions about their life, their relationships, and their sources of meaning. Again, one sees this most clearly with Sister Jeanne’s intense if limited sacramental imagination. As we have seen throughout this investigation, the characters’ faith is, fundamentally, their form of imagining the world. It is with this pattern of convergence that I now turn to conclude.

CONCLUSION

A Pattern of Convergence Revisited: A T H E O LO G I C A L R E F L E C T I O N

I now return to chapter 1’s pattern of convergence. To repeat my earlier thesis: this study’s Catholic fiction consistently portrays faith as a form of imagining the world that stems from a person’s centers of meaning, ones that are often unarticulated and unrecognized. Whether by O’Connor or McDermott, Greene or Morrison, Catholic fiction depicts conversions of faith as conversions of the imagination. Often a character discovers that they are ensconced within an enchanted creation, or perhaps their imagination’s horizon expands and their faith deepens. In some cases, the characters do not recognize this reorientation of their imaginations as grace, in which case it is left to the reader to discern what the characters do not. In this, the Catholic literary imagination differs from much theological rhetoric on faith. To justify this claim further, I turn below to prominent Catholic and Protestant thinkers so as to offer examples of different typologies of faith. Avery Dulles, as discussed in chapter 1, observed seven “models” of faith in Western Christian theology, seven models of how faith has been nuanced, framed, and defined throughout the centuries. Although my typologies are not intended as a rehashing of Dulles’s models, they are in a similar spirit—an attempt to observe cursorily different responses to the question, “What is faith?” As we shall see, Thomas Aquinas articulates faith as the action of grace that moves a person’s will to intellectual assent of Catholic doctrine; Karl Barth characterizes faith in the language of obedience to the Word of God; H. Richard Niebuhr emphasizes the dimension of trust in faith, a trust born out of an “I-Thou” relationship; and 255

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Paul Tillich famously describes faith as the unified self’s participation in their ultimate concern. Of these four, Tillich’s thought perhaps comes closest to faith in this book’s Catholic fiction, but I will argue below that the theology of William Lynch aligns even better. Afterward, I turn in the final pages to offer some reflections, through the lens of Lynch’s thought, on the pattern of convergence formed by this study’s novels and short stories. Snapshots of Faith in Western Theology In chapter 1, I argue that Catholic fiction depicts faith holistically in that emotions and intellect are inseparable, and that literature demonstrates that emotions, as Martha Nussbaum insists, are often a source of knowledge as much as conceptual reasoning. In addition, the Catholic literary imagination captures the many facets of faith in a way that overlaps with the thought of multiple theologians. If one thinker defines faith primarily in terms of one’s trust, another of the intellect, or another of passionate commitment, Catholic fiction often presents characters who simultaneously display and embody many of those features. To demonstrate this, I would like to discuss briefly certain prominent characteristics in the theologies of faith of a few influential Western thinkers. The limits of space mean that I cannot fully explore the complexity, depth, and nuance of each theologian. Nonetheless, this glance provides snapshots of different ways to articulate “what faith is.” These glimpses into thinking on faith are akin to roaming in a museum, in which the eye notices one feature of an artwork more than others. I begin with the medieval exemplar Thomas Aquinas because of his unique influence on the Catholic tradition. Part of the challenge of Thomas Aquinas’s theology of faith is the different strands of his thought in the Summa Theologica. But to speak generally, Thomas describes Christian faith as a theological virtue bestowed as a supernatural gift on a person such that the will acts upon the intellect. In this way, the intellect is “subordi-

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nate” to the will, since the intellect is moved by the will to “assent” to faith (I.II, q. 56, a. 3).1 It is easy to caricature Thomas’s theology of faith as one merely of intellectual assent to the teachings of the Catholic Church, but that would be over-simplifying the matter, since the intellect alone cannot achieve faith, and the object of faith exceeds human nature. In this sense, faith, like hope or charity depends on God’s grace (I.II, q. 56, a. 6 and q. 58, a. 3). (I am, of course, discussing only faith regarding human beings, and not Thomas’s musings on demons’ lifeless faith.) Although Thomas insists that faith is primarily an act of the will, this act inclines the intellect to assent without the banishment of its freedom. Or as he puts it, “Faith signifies the assent of the intellect to that which is believed . . . through an act of choice, whereby it turns voluntarily to one side rather than to the other” (II.II, q. 1, a. 4).2 Elsewhere, he defines faith as “a habit of the mind, whereby eternal life is begun in us, making the intellect assent to what is non-apparent” (II.II, q. 4, a. 1).3 But only a faith formed by charity is a virtue; a faith without charity is lifeless— it may be a habit, but it is not a virtue (II.II, q. 4, a. 5). That said, my remarks here are not intended to deny the role of the affections or experience in Thomas’s thinking; it is merely to observe what he accentuates. Given Catholic fiction’s frequent exploration of faith’s relationship to uncertainty, I should note that Thomas regards the gift of faith as one which frees a person from doubt; in fact, for Thomas, beliefs that lack certainty belong to the category of opinion, and not faith, at least as far as faith is properly understood (II.II, q. 1, a. 4). The certainty of faith, however, stems not from any achievement on the part of the believer, but rather from the authority of God and the preparation of the human person’s will 1. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1945), 422–23. 2. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1060. 3. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1096; italics in the original.

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through the gift of grace (II.II, q. 6, a. 1). Faith directs one to the First Truth beyond the capacity of human nature, and it is objectively certain because of its divine source, even though Thomas admits that a believer may still be in error on articles of faith (II.II, q. 5, a. 3 and II.II, q. 4, a. 8).4 Centuries later, in Church Dogmatics, the influential, twentieth-century Protestant theologian Karl Barth rejects Thomas’s characterization of faith. Because of sin, a human person’s faith does not “make any odds whether a man means by faith a mere knowledge and intellectual understanding of the divine work and judgment and revelation and pardon (notitia), or an assent of the mind and will to it, the acceptance as true of that which is proclaimed as the truth of this work of God (assensus), or finally a heart’s trust in the significance of this work for him (fiducia).”5 Instead of trust, the will, or the intellect, Barth often characterizes a justified person’s faith as obedience in humility to the call of God given through Jesus Christ. For example, within his ecclesiology, Barth argues that “to be in the Church means to be called upon with others through Jesus Christ. To act in the Church means to act in obedience to this call. This obedience to the call of Christ is faith. In faith the judgment of God is acknowledged and His grace praised.”6 This faith comes to a person through “the free personal presence of Jesus Christ in man’s action,” a presence that happens because 4. For an overview of Thomas’s context for his theology of faith, see Stephen F. Brown, “The Theological Virtue of Faith: An Invitation to an Ecclesial Life of Truth (IIa IIae, qq. 1–16),” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 221–31. See also Louis Roy, OP, The Three Dynamisms of Faith: Searching for Meaning, Fulfillment and Truth (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 71–90; and Avery (Cardinal) Dulles, SJ, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 33–36, 231–32. 5. Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, vol. IV, part I of Church Dogmatics, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1961), 616. 6. Karl Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God, vol. I, part I of Church Dogmatics, trans. G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1963), 18.

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of God’s Word spoken directly to the human creature.7 Faith is not a human capacity, but is “lent” to us by God.8 In other words, faith depends solely upon divine action. The sinful human can only hear this Word and obey its call. Indeed, even if a person “hears God speak and can still inquire about the act corresponding,” this person demonstrates that one “actually has not heard God speak.”9 Interestingly, Barth insists that God’s Word is not known only from Scripture or proclamation; rather, “the sole way we know it is as the Word directed to us, coming home to us.”10 There is, then, a directness between God’s call to the sinful human in authentic faith that does not depend merely upon mediation of the church’s proclamation of the Gospel. In faith, one’s obedience to this call is acted with a humility that destroys human pride: “Faith . . . is wholly and utterly humility. To put it negatively, it takes place in faith that man’s affirmation and approval of his pride, his satisfaction with it, is completely destroyed.”11 Barth, of course, is not denying that some semblance of pride remains in the human person because of sin. Nonetheless, a true Christian’s faith is shaped by humility and obedience, not so much as to destroy their free will, but that they will act freely with humility out of obedience to the Word’s call: “Faith is the humility of obedience. . . . Faith differs from any mere thinking and believing and knowing, or indeed from any other trusting, in the fact that it is an obeying. For that reason its humility is neither a matter of our own choice nor of an outward compulsion. It is a free decision, but made with the genuine necessity of obedience.”12 Yet there is an interesting convergence between Thomas and Barth in that both insist that believers experience God’s free and 7. Barth, Doctrine of the Word of God, 19. 8. Barth, Doctrine of the Word of God, 272. 9. Barth, Doctrine of the Word of God, 163. 10. Barth, Doctrine of the Word of God, 158. 11. Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 618. 12. Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 620.

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unmerited gift of faith as a kind of certainty. I have noted this briefly above with Thomas. As for Barth, when a justified person gives thanks to God for the unearned grace of faith, one can do so “with an absolutely unconditional and joyful certainty.”13 Of course, the differences between Thomas’s and Barth’s theologies of faith are too great to enumerate here. But for the present context, one notes that despite their belief that faith grants some form of certainty, each theologian highlights different dimensions of faith as critical. Thomas emphasizes the will and the intellect whereas Barth focuses on obedience and humility. In contrast, H. Richard Niebuhr, Barth’s twentieth-century American contemporary, more often accentuates trust as a defining element of Christian faith. To Niebuhr, faith’s structure is built upon the “constant dialogue between I and Thou or It.”14 Because of this social nature of faith, trust is a necessity; without trust between this I and Thou (or It), one cannot know something to be true. “Trusting, holding for true, and even knowing (the direct relation),” insists Niebuhr, “have their place not in that isolated situation in which a subject confronts an object but in a social situation in which a self in the company of other selves deals with a common object.”15 Thus, one can speak of faith only when this structure of trust is recognized. In this encounter with the other, a person acts in freedom to trust (and by extension to believe) the other while also recognizing the freedom of this other; there is, then, a reciprocity in the structure of faith. Niebuhr, however, is careful to acknowledge that this act of trust is not an individual only trusting another individual, but that this structure of faith between an I and a Thou unfolds within a larger community.16

13. Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, 612. 14. H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith, ed. Richard R. Niebuhr (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 30. 15. Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, 34; italics in the original. 16. Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, 47–50.

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To speak of explicitly Christian faith, then, is to say that one’s faith in God is built on Jesus’s own trust of God: Christ’s faith, Niebuhr remarks, “is first of all the faith of trust in the Lord of heaven and earth who had thrown him into existence in such a manner that he could be the object of Joseph’s and his people’s distrust.”17 In this sense, one trusts Jesus in a way analogous to Jesus’s trust of God, but at the same time, one’s trust in Jesus is in the resurrected Christ more than the historical person, a trust that commands loyalty. Or, as Niebuhr states, “When we reflect on the life of faith in and with Jesus Christ as the companion of the trusting and would-be loyal self, we find that what is present is not a Jesus of history but the Christ of faith, not Jesus incarnate, but the risen Lord.”18 If in Barth, the obedience of faith must be marked by a life lived in humility, in Niebuhr, the trust of faith gives rise to a life conditioned by loyalty. Meanwhile, Paul Tillich, in Dynamics of Faith, claims that faith “is not a matter of the mind in isolation, or of the soul in contrast to mind and body, or of the body (in the sense of animal faith), but is the centered movement of the whole personality toward something of ultimate meaning and significance.”19 Although my own language of faith focuses on the imagination (following Lynch), I nonetheless find Tillich’s “centered personality” appealing in that cognition and emotions, conscious beliefs and unconscious assumptions, emotions and rationality, all merge into the dynamic that is one’s faith in the world.20 One can imagine that Tillich would respond to the previous theologians by saying that they have all stressed elements of faith, but have not captured its true breadth as a lived reality. For example, although he acknowledges the cognitive and volitional ele-

17. Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, 94. 18. Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, 87. 19. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperOne/HarperCollins, 2009), 123. 20. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 4–9; cf. 46.

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ments to faith, faith itself “is the unity of every element in the centered self,” although, at times, one element may be more manifest than the others.21 Or to offer another example, “although trust is an element of faith,” faith exceeds mere trust because faith “is participation in the subject of one’s ultimate concern with one’s whole being.”22 If the will and the intellect are key words for Thomas’s theology of faith, and Barth and Niebuhr stress obedience and trust respectively, “courage” is the term that most comes to mind regarding Tillich. He stresses that faith never eliminates doubt since one has faith as a finite being. Tillich claims that one can speak of faith as “certain in so far as it is an experience of the holy,” yet because of human finitude, a person cannot get beyond doubt about the self; courage therefore is required in the face of this existential uncertainty: “Faith includes an element of immediate awareness which gives certainty and an element of uncertainty. To accept this is courage. In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows most visibly its dynamic character.”23 Or as he more succinctly states in another passage, “Faith includes courage. Therefore, it can include the doubt about itself.”24 Although the above discussion is admittedly limited, these brief overviews of Thomas, Barth, Niebuhr, and Tillich demonstrate how theological rhetoric often emphasizes a particular facet of faith—obedience, trust, the movement of the will toward intellectual assent, or courage, to name just a few. Of this group, Tillich’s thought perhaps comes closest to my understanding of faith with his language of the “unity” between the different elements of a centered self, language that harmonizes with my own claims that Catholic fiction throughout this study consistently portrays faith fundamentally as a person’s holistic worldview, out 21. 22. 23. 24.

Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 8–9. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 37–38. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 18–19. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 23.

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of which actions occur that include the traits of obedience, trust, intellect, will, courage, and so forth. Tillich, like much Catholic fiction, also regards doubt as an irresolvable and inseparable dimension of faith. That said, I believe that faith is best articulated in the language of the imagination, for this study’s Catholic novels and short stories portray characters’ conversions as an expansion or reorientation of the imagination, an expansion that also encompasses those dimension of faith articulated by theologians. In this broad pattern, Catholic fiction casts faith as an active paradigm of the imagination that stems from central sources of value and meaning, a paradigm that ultimately encompasses other characteristics of faith that are often highlighted in theological rhetoric. Readers of chapter 1 will recall that I referred to the writings of William Lynch, a theologian engaged with treating literature as an equal dialogue partner for thinking about faith. As a conclusion to this book, I would like to discuss his thought further and then offer some closing remarks on my previous discussions of the stories. A Pattern of Convergence: Some Final Observations In Lynch’s book Images of Faith (1973), he argues that faith is often discussed as if it adds to knowledge, but this language is misleading; Christian faith might subsequently supply knowledge, but faith, broadly speaking, exists before knowledge.25 Lynch’s claim stems from his belief that “faith is a form of imagining and experiencing the world.”26 It is helpful here to recall from chapter 1 that Lynch defines the imagination as “the total resources in us which go into the making of our images of the world.”27 These “total resources” would include an individual’s desires, affections, intellect, personal experiences, and so forth. 25. William F. Lynch, SJ, Images of Faith: An Exploration of the Ironic Imagination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 9–12. 26. Lynch, Images of Faith, 5; italics in the original. 27. Lynch, Images of Faith, 18.

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The imagination is not fantasy or daydreaming, but is the form that shapes a person’s sense of self and one’s relationship to it, a worldview that includes both assumptions and biases, as well as conscious thinking, actions, and emotions. Lynch further describes Christian faith—centered on the life of Christ—as having an “ironic paradigm.” Irony for Lynch “is a distinctive paradigm or patterning of facts, a re-composing in which a fact . . . is seen within the creative presence of a contrary.”28 There is a Christocentric foundation to Lynch’s ironic faith. An ironic imagination, through the lens of Christ, sees the Divine in the human, for irony’s “main task is to keep opposites together in a single act of the imagination.”29 Similarly, faith is ironic because “it provides a structure or a context. . . . It composes it [the world] or, if you will, it recomposes the world according to its terms.”30 In this sense, Lynch describes faith as “an activating paradigm. It generates active imagining.”31 In the course of this study, I have often referred to a character’s spiritual journey as a conversion of their imagination prior to a conversion of their conceptual beliefs, because, as Lynch describes, faith shapes how a person structures the world, reflects upon it, and interacts with it. If not in all details, Lynch’s fundamental insights align with the depictions of faith in this investigation’s Catholic fiction. The stories depict characters who adapt a new vision of the world because the reorientation of their imaginations by grace “generates active imagining.” One thinks of Greene’s Sancho, Spark’s Nicholas, or the many O’Connor protagonists who are surprised by an underlying reality that reveals the impoverishment of their previously disenchanted imaginations. Even contemporary fiction can continue this pattern: Crystal’s insight about herself at 28. 29. 30. 31.

Lynch, Images of Faith, 14. Lynch, Images of Faith, 83. Lynch, Images of Faith, 17. Lynch, Images of Faith, 19; emphasis in the original.

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the end of Quade’s “Ordinary Sins,” or the women in Morrison’s Paradise when they come to see themselves against a greater, more transcendent horizon than previously imagined. Like Lynch’s thought, Catholic fiction grounds faith in concreteness and embodiment, and in so doing, the stories reveal transcendence through human actions in challenging and surprising situations. An obvious example is Paradise, in which non-Christian symbols converse with more traditional ones, such as the cross. Catholic fiction frequently prompts its readers to see divine action in unlikely situations and characters, whether Endo’s Japanese samurai or the sacrifice of Akpan’s characters for their families. Like Lynch, Catholic fiction indicates that an impoverished faith is rooted in an impoverished imagination. Thus, since Catholic fiction depicts faith as fundamentally an imaginative frame for interacting with the world, characters may display multiple dimensions of faith (trust, obedience, courage, etc.) over their narrative journeys. These characteristics of faith may ebb and flow or occur simultaneously, or one may be more dominant than another. Nonetheless, these dimensions of faith are rooted in the imagination’s worldview. For example, although Greene’s priests in The Power and Glory and Monsignor Quixote certainly display obedience and trust in their faith, they also struggle with uncertainty and doubt; their persistence overlaps with Tillich’s insistence that courage is a consistent dimension of faith. At the same time, their faith is grounded in a strong belief in sacramentality, one that forms their imagination and counteracts the disenchanted secularity of their Communist counterparts. Young Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away likewise displays obedience in his commitment to his prophetic vocation on the novel’s last pages, but only after he commits murder and experiences sexual trauma, jarring how he imagines his vocation and himself. More subtly, Nicholas in The Girls of Slender Means demonstrates his fidelity to his newfound Catholic faith in his martyrdom, but again, this occurs as the aftermath of his imagination’s reorientation at the sight of indifference and

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evil. These characters’ faith somehow involves their intellect, but intellect is not the dominant characteristic of their Christian faith or their conversions. At the same time, what does one make of someone like Roku in The Samurai? Has his will truly been moved to assent intellectually to the doctrines of the Catholic Church, as Thomas Aquinas articulates? Does he display courage or obedience for this newfound faith? The answer to the first question is “unlikely,” and the answer to the second is unclear since his reluctant conversion and martyrdom were compelled by government authorities. Yet Roku’s imagination makes an analogical connection between his situation and Christ on the cross, even though he never consciously assents to any specific doctrines, despite his Baptism. His eventual respect for the cross stems from a sense that Christ accompanies him in solidarity, not in any specific Christological dogmas. Further, he has already in fact formally renounced his faith to his superiors, but he is executed anyway. One could speculate he experiences some kind of trust as he goes to his death, as indicated by Yozō’s final words, but again, this merely highlights how Roku’s faith is first and foremost an imaginative conversion out of which other characteristics (such as trust) flow. What about fiction in which a character either does not convert to Catholicism or was already Catholic? For example, Gordon’s The Company of Women does not feature Felicitas’s recommitment to Catholicism; nonetheless, Father Cyprian’s sacramental imagination expands to include greater appreciation of ordinary life’s sanctity. Meanwhile, Crystal in Quade’s “Ordinary Sins” does not come to a greater intellectual acceptance of Catholicism, nor does she seem inclined to trust, obedience, or courage in the sense described by Barth, Niebuhr, or Tillich. Instead, she gains greater confidence in her capability of being a mother after her encounter with Father Paul’s vulnerability. Crystal’s conversion is an example of a kind of conversion that is much more common within contemporary Catholic fiction than earlier fiction. Many characters, like Crystal, begin and end

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their stories as Catholics, or at least nominal ones. So how have their imaginations shifted in the course of their journeys? How would one describe the conversions of the narrator in Akpan’s “My Parents’ Bedroom,” the two central characters of Klay’s “Prayer in the Furnace,” Hansen’s Mariette when she is forced to surrender her vocation to religious life, the priest at the end of L’Heureux’s “The Expert on God,” or Maria in his The Shrine at Altamira? One cannot pinpoint clear expressions of assent in dogma or doctrine, nor are features such as trust, or obedience, or courage universally portrayed. For example, the question of “why” at the end of Shrine implies Maria’s lingering distrust of God even if her faith is not atheism. Nonetheless, there is a consistent trend that emerges in these stories, despite their diverse depictions of sacramentality: the characters’ imaginations have gained a more expansive imaginative frame, a greater awareness of the possibility of transcendence and grace, or a decentering of the self. Likewise, Morrison’s Paradise aligns with this pattern of contemporary fiction: even if characters do not convert to Christian faith, there is nonetheless a shift in their imaginations that opens them to healing and transcendence. In fact, despite all the ways her novel is different from others in this study, there is still a basic affirmation of the supernatural’s presence in the world. For a Catholic reader such as myself, this transcendence is a kind of grace, even if the Catholic-Christian symbolism is synthesized with other spiritual symbols. The Ninth Hour, meanwhile, implies that sacramentality is often only discerned in the act of storytelling. To tell a story, then, is an exercise in faith—that life does indeed have meaning, and a transcendent, grace-filled one at that. Further, The Ninth Hour forces the reader to live in that “in-between,” as McDermott remarks, between faith and doubt—a feature that it shares with much contemporary fiction, such as The Shrine at Altamira and Say You’re One of Them. To see, then, the possibility of grace, to see the possibility of hope amidst tragedy, evil, and ambiguity, is

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an act of faith that affirms that each life ultimately matters despite sin, suffering, and death. To use the language of David Tracy, these stories are fragments of faith in that they provide a glimpse into a concrete experience of transcendence. None of them claim to state definitely “what faith is” or to exalt a form of faith that banishes uncertainty. They instead are an invitation to share in a particular journey that encourages a reader to interrogate their faith, to discern the limitations of their own imaginations, and to allow their imaginations to open to new possibilities. To gather the fragments of the Catholic literary imagination, such as those in this study, is to insist on the importance of fictional stories for a believer. If faith is ultimately rooted in one’s imaginative worldview, this faith is revealed and critiqued through the encounter with a story—a story that expands our imaginations, and consequently our sacramental vision, so as to make it possible for us to see God’s often surprising and disruptive grace.

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INDEX

Adam, 219. See also Eve African-American spirituals, 135 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 208 Agatha of Sicily, Saint, 210–11 Akpan, Uwem, 14, 138–39, 162–70, 172–77, 253, 265, 267; fiction by: “An Ex-mas Feast,” 139, 167–70, 175–76, 253; “Fattening for Gabon,” 176; “Luxurious Hearses, 176; “My Parents’ Bedroom,” 139, 167, 170–77, 253, 267; Say You’re One of Them, 14, 139, 162–68, 170, 173–76, 267; “What Language Is That?,” 176 Alison, James, 163 America (magazine), 20, 80, 208 Analogical imagination, 33, 48 Anointing of the Sick, sacrament of, 78. See also Last Rites Anselm of Canterbury, Saint, 137–38 Anthony of Padua, Saint, 208, 220 Atomic bomb, 106 Atonement theology, 137–38 Augustine, Saint, 29, 80, 98, 114, 124, 134, 242 Augustinian (theological tradition), 118, 121, 123–24 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 20, 71, 98, 105, 121, 138, 145–47, 149 Baltimore Catechism, 65 Baptism, sacrament of, 35, 137, 155– 58, 160–61, 188–90, 192, 221, 266; baptismal symbolism, 192, 208, 220–21 Barth, Karl, 16, 19, 255, 258–62, 266 Bauer, Mary, 169, 172 Beauty, 61, 97–99, 101, 104–5, 107, 144, 146, 196, 200, 219, 232, 234, 240, 244

Bednar, Gerald J., 33 Benedict XVI, Pope, 3, 5, 20, 42 Bergonzi, Bernard, 9n11 Bernanos, George, 8, 53, 82–83, 148, 164; fiction by: The Diary of a Country Priest, 82 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 220 Bible, 18, 59, 165, 168, 170, 216, 220, 230; Logos (Gospel of John), 120; references: Acts 9:36–43, 216; Hebrews 11:1, 18; John 4:4–26, 219; Luke 22:42–44, 160; Matthew 10:8, 216–17; Matthew 16:24, 137; Matthew 18:20, 184; Psalm 130, 105; Song of Solomon, 220. See also Gospel(s) Bloy, Léon, 58, 140 Bold, Alan, 101 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 19, 147 Book of Common Prayer, 103 Bosco, Mark, SJ, 37, 38n52, 39n53, 39n54, 40n55, 40n56, 42, 58, 77, 140n2, 145, 148n18, 150–51 Boyagoda, Randy, 61–62 Brennan, Michael G., 23, 36n47, 38n52, 40n55 Brown, Peter Robert, 232n7 Brown, Stephen F., 258n4 Bruner, Michael Mears, 185 “Buffered” self. See Taylor, Charles Calvinism, 231–32, 235 Candomblé, 210, 216–18 Carruthers, Gerard, 101, 102, 234–35 Catherine of Siena, Saint, 210, 220 Catholic fiction: definition of, 4–5, 8–10 Catholic novel, 9 Cervantes, Miguel de, 34, 36, 42 Cheyette, Bryan, 233n9 Christ. See Jesus Christ

293

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A C T S O F FA I T H A N D I M A G I N AT I O N

Christiansen, Drew, 20n20 Christmas, 77–78, 167–70, 202 Christocentric, 33, 48 Ciuba, Gary M., 188n15, 191n19 Civil Rights Movement, 69 Cixous, Hélène, 234 Colonialism, 148, 154, 181, 207 Commonweal, 9, 85, 242 Commonwealth Writers Prize, 163 Communion. See Eucharist Communion of Saints, 44, 140, 146, 186 Communism, 1, 34, 36, 38, 42, 44– 45, 51, 142, 265 Cone, James, 46–47, 223 Confession, sacrament of, 80, 81, 83–84, 87–88, 90 Confirmation, sacrament of, 191 Connor, Kimberly, 207, 225, 239 Conversion, 6, 9, 13–15, 23–25, 34– 35, 43, 53, 56, 63, 66, 84, 87, 90– 91, 93–94, 96–97, 99, 100–102, 106–7, 121, 125–26, 128, 135, 141, 154, 156, 162, 165, 175, 177, 179, 184–86, 193, 195, 204–6, 208, 229–30, 234–35, 238, 241, 251–52, 264, 266 Copeland, M. Shawn, 223n82 Coulter, Lauren Sewell, 116n52 Cox, Sandra, 221n80 Craig, Cairns, 100 Crawford, Nathan, 47 Cross, 38, 46, 67–68, 70, 83, 105, 137–38, 140–43, 149–50, 152–54, 157–58, 160–61, 163, 166–67, 171–72, 174–77, 198, 200, 210, 214, 222–24, 241, 265–66; as “crucifix,” 153–57, 159–60, 171– 74 Crucifix. See Cross Crucifixion, 127, 132, 137, 143, 149– 50, 161, 177, 222–23, 237, 247 Culture, definition of, 179

Daly, Mary, 197–98 Dante Alighieri, 113 D’Arcy, Martin, SJ, 102 DaSilva, Zenia Sacks, 36n49 Day, Dorothy, 61 Dayrell-Browning, Vivien, 34n42 DeBona, Guerric, OSB, 241 Desmond, John F., 56n13, 63–64, 114n46, 119–20, 122 Displaced Persons Act, 58 Divine Mystery, 18, 29, 46–48, 92, 136, 188, 196, 241 Don Quixote, 34, 36–37, 39 Doubt. See faith, and relationship to uncertainty or doubt Dulles, Avery, SJ, 19–21, 255, 258n4 Duncker, Patricia, 233n9 Duran, Leopoldo, 35 Eagleton, Terry, 27–28 Ecclesiology, 70, 183–84, 258; ecclesial community, 3, 10, 19, 24, 43, 68, 155, 171, 179, 182, 184, 186, 188, 192 Eden, 119, 211, 219–20, 222, 226 Elie, Paul, 7, 52–53, 61n24, 63n28, 68 Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns], 28 Emotions, 29–31, 256. See also Nussbaum, Martha Endo, Shusaku, 14, 79, 138–39, 147–67, 170, 176–77, 198, 206, 253, 265; fiction by: Deep River, 148, 151–52, 158; The Samurai, 14, 138–39, 147–49, 151–62, 170, 177, 198, 206, 252–53, 266; Silence, 147–48, 151–52, 160, 162; nonfiction by: A Life of Jesus, 151 Eucharist, sacrament of, 40–43, 53, 82–83, 130, 143, 170, 172, 179, 192, 215, 218; eucharistic symbolism, 187, 189. See also Last Supper Evans, Shari, 210n56

INDEX

Eve, 119, 167, 219, 221 Evil, as theme in Catholic fiction, 95–96, 125, 135–36 Faith: definition of, 24, 255; in the Bible, 18–19; in Catholic fiction, 1–8, 42–45, 54–55, 66–67, 73–75, 253–54, 264–68; as distinct from feelings, beliefs, behavior, etc., 18, 21–22; as form of imagining world, 22–23, 254–55, 263–64; as “fragilized,” 74; theologies of, 19–22, 255–64; versus uncertainty or doubt, 2–3, 5, 11–12, 31–35, 37–39, 40–46, 48, 77–78, 80, 84, 94, 101, 131–35, 239, 243, 247, 249, 257–58, 260, 262, 265, 267–68 Fascism, 231–33 Fides qua, 10 First Things, 52, 208 Folan, Peter, SJ, 20n20 Forgiveness, 19, 83, 88, 128–30, 147, 151, 161, 184, 226, 247, 249, 253 Fragment: Catholic fiction as fragments, 12, 17, 48–49, 70, 268; Tracy’s theology of, 45–48, 70, 122 Francis, Pope, 2–4, 20, 42, 209; writings by: Gaudete et Exsultate, 2–3; Lumen Fidei, 20–21 Frykholm, Amy, 210n54 Fujimura, Makoto, 152n23 Gandolfo, Anita, 69, 205n44 Garfitt, Toby, 9n11 Giles, Paul, 4 Gilson, Etienne, 108 Gioia, Dana, 52–53 Girard, René, 139, 163 Gnosticism, 210, 216–17 Gooch, Brad, 59n20, 63n28, 64n31, 65n32 Good Friday, 174

295

Gordon, Mary, 15, 139, 153, 162, 179, 181–82, 184, 193, 195–207, 209, 236, 253, 266; fiction by: The Company of Women, 15, 139, 162, 179, 181, 184, 186, 195–96, 198– 207, 215, 227, 252–53, 266; Final Payments, 162, 195–96, 200–201; nonfiction by: “Getting Here from There,” 196–97; Good Boys and Dead Girls and Other Essays, 196; The Shadow Man, 196n32 Gordon, Sarah, 62 Gospel(s), 18–19, 84, 92, 120, 143, 146, 151–52, 174, 183, 185, 219, 220, 259 Grace, 4, 6–9, 13–15, 21, 24, 26–28, 40, 42–43, 45–46, 48–54, 56, 61– 63, 65–66, 73, 75–78, 80–85, 87, 90–97, 101, 104, 106–10, 120–21, 123, 130–31, 137, 139, 140–41, 144–47, 160, 162, 166–67, 170, 177, 179, 182–85, 187, 190–92, 200, 203–5, 207, 217–18, 227–30, 232, 235–36, 239–44, 247–53, 255, 257–58, 260, 264, 267–68; Rahner’s theology of, 91–93. See also Sacramentality Grattan, Sean, 220n79 Greene, Graham, 1–3, 6–8, 10n13, 12–15, 17, 34–40, 42, 51, 53, 66, 68, 73–74, 76, 79, 96–97, 100, 107–8, 138–49, 162–67, 170, 175, 177, 181, 185, 206, 229–30, 234– 35, 250–51, 255, 264–65; fiction by: Brighton Rock, 10, 53, 144; The End of the Affair, 8, 53, 96, 140, 142, 185, 234–35, 251; The Heart of the Matter, 53; The Honorary Consul, 36n46; Monsignor Quixote, 1–3, 12, 17, 34–45, 51, 53, 265; The Power and the Glory, 14, 35–36, 53, 96, 138–49, 235, 249, 251, 265; nonfiction by: The

296

A C T S O F FA I T H A N D I M A G I N AT I O N

Lawless Roads, 142n9; The Lost Childhood and Other Essays, 141; A Sort of Life, 35n42; Ways of Escape, 10, 35n42, 142n9 Guardini, Romano, 108, 110 Haddox, Thomas, 99, 102n20, 108n28, 112, 206 Hallissy, Margaret, 201 Hancock, Brannon, 40n55, 40n56, 41 Hansen, Ron, 15–16, 229, 236–37, 240–42, 250, 253, 267; fiction by: Mariette in Ecstasy, 15, 229, 236– 42, 250, 252, 253–54, 267; nonfiction by: A Stay Against Confusion, 236–37 Hartnell, Anna, 216n71, 226 Hawkins, Peter S., 108n28 Higgins, Michael, 35, 36n46, 40n56 Holy Saturday, 131–32 Holy Spirit, 65–66 Hope (as related to faith), 17–18, 21, 38, 40–41, 47 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, SJ, 46, 101, 103, 105–6, 212 Hoskins, Robert, 40 Hosmer, Robert Ellis, 101–2, 233, 235 Humanae Vitae, 69 Hume, David, 95 Hungerford, Amy, 72 Hynes, Joseph, 100–1, 231 Imagination, 22–25, 30, 32–33, 37– 43, 45, 48–49; Lynch’s definition of, 23, 263. See also Faith, as form of imagining world Imbelli, Robert P., 20n20 Immanent frame: See Taylor, Charles Incarnation, 51, 92, 110, 120–21, 142, 151, 167, 170, 185, 188–89, 191, 196, 204, 209, 211, 212, 215 Inculturation, 150–51

Jacobs-Vandegeer, Christiaan, 136 Jansenism, 196 Jenkins, Cecil, 9n11 Jesus Christ, 18–19, 23, 33–34, 38– 39, 42–43, 48, 61, 63, 75, 78, 89, 110, 120, 132, 137–38, 140–43, 145–47, 149–54, 157, 158–61, 163, 167–68, 171–72, 174, 176–77, 179, 182–84, 186–89, 192, 197–98, 204, 206, 215–16, 219–20, 222–24, 226, 227, 238, 240, 243, 246, 252, 258, 261, 264, 266 Jim Crow, 60, 163 Joan of Arc, Saint, 130 Johansen, Ruthann Knechel, 64 John of the Cross, Saint, 44 John Paul II, Pope, 151 Johnson, Elizabeth A., CSJ, 138n1, 197–98 John XXIII, Pope, 196 Joyce, James, 4, 64–65 Kakutani, Michiko, 77 Kaplan, Grant, 118 Kearney, John, 166n39, 169–70, 174 Kellogg, Jean, 53–54 Kierkegaard, Søren, 39, 100, 122 Kilcourse, George A., Jr., 187n12, 188n16 Klay, Phil, 13, 55, 75, 79, 80, 83–84, 89, 91, 93–94, 96, 253, 267; fiction by: “After Action Report,” 80; “Prayer in the Furnace,” 55, 75, 79–84, 89, 91, 96, 267; Redeployment, 79, 80, 83; nonfiction by: Uncertain Ground, 79n63, 80n65 Koyama, Kosuke, 152–53, 159 Kyomuhendo, Goretti, 167 Labrie, Ross, 73–75 Lake, Christina Bieber, 188n15, 189, 191 Lakeland, Paul, 3, 111

INDEX

Lament, 134–35 Lamott, Anne, 12 Last Rites, sacrament of, 62. See also Anointing of the Sick Last Supper, 220 Lauder, Robert, 115 Lee, Joori Joyce, 104 L’Heureux, John, 13–14, 55, 75–79, 85, 90–91, 93–94, 96–97, 108, 125–27, 129–31, 133, 135, 236, 253, 267; fiction by: Comedians, 77, 126; “The Expert on God,” 54, 75–79, 83, 91, 251, 253, 267; An Honorable Profession, 126; Jessica Fayer, 126; The Shrine at Altamira, 14, 77, 97, 108, 125–36, 253, 267; A Woman Run Mad, 126; nonfiction by: Picnic in Babylon, 76n55 Lodge, David, 231, 232n6, 233n9 Lonergan, Bernard, SJ, 19, 25, 179– 80 Long, John V., 77n59 Lubac, Henri de, 20 Lukács, Georg, 28 Lynch, William, SJ, 12, 16, 22–24, 33–34, 48, 76n55, 256, 261, 263– 65 Lynching, 223–24, 227 Mannion, Gerard, 70 Maritain, Jacques, 99, 108 Marouan, Maha, 210n53, 216n71, 217n73 Martin, James, SJ, 20n20 Marxism, 38. See also Communism Mary, Mother of Jesus, 36, 39, 78, 90, 127–28, 132, 221 Mary Magdalene, 90 Mase-Hasegawa, Emi, 152, 159 Mass, 39, 43–44, 78, 80, 130, 143, 167, 170, 172, 196, 205, 218, 240 Massingale, Bryan, 135 Matysek, George P., Jr., 79n64

297

Mauriac, François, 8, 53, 79, 141– 42, 148, 162, 164; fiction by: Viper’s Tangle, 141–42 McClure, John A., 71–72, 218n76, 224n85 McDermott, Alice, 15–16, 229, 236, 242–44, 247–50, 253, 255, 267; fiction by: Charming Billy, 242; The Ninth Hour, 15, 229, 236, 242–44, 248–54, 267; nonfiction by: “Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic,” 242 McQuillan, Martin, 100n11, 233–34 Mellard, James M., 218n73 Michaels, J. Ramsey, 187n13 Middleton, Darren J. N., 148n18, 151 Mix, Deborah M., 211n57, 216n70, 221n81 Miyahira, Nozomu, 156–57 Modernity, 6–7, 13, 16, 26–29, 46, 49. See also Taylor, Charles Morrison, Toni, 15, 47, 71–72, 133, 179, 181–82, 184, 207–23, 225–27, 236, 253, 255, 265, 267; fiction by: Beloved, 207, 210–11, 221; Jazz, 211; Paradise, 15, 133, 179, 181– 82, 184, 186, 207–29, 251, 253– 54, 265, 267; nonfiction by: The Origin of Others, 212, 214; Playing in the Dark, 212; The Source of Self-Regard, 212–13 Murphy, Michael Patrick, 71, 121 Myatt, William, 46n61 Mystical community, 15, 186, 193, 195, 221 Nabutanyi, Edgar Fred, 167n39 National Book Award, 79, 242 Ndlovu, Isaac, 167n39 New Yorker, 84–85, 165–66 New York Times, 52, 76–77 Newman, John Henry (Cardinal), 11, 44, 96, 99

298

A C T S O F FA I T H A N D I M A G I N AT I O N

Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, 18 Nicolás, Adolfo, SJ, 23 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 16, 255, 260– 62, 266 Nieman, Susan, 136 Nisly, L. Lamar, 108n28, 118, 120n58 Nittle, Nadra, 208n48, 208n49, 216, 218n75 Nobel Prize, 133, 208 Novel (as genre), 27 Nussbaum, Martha, 12, 29–33, 44, 123, 256 O’Connell, Michael, 242 O’Connor, Flannery, 6–8, 11, 13–15, 28–29, 51–68, 70, 73–79, 84–86, 89–91, 93–94, 96–97, 99, 102, 107–10, 113–14, 120–21, 123, 138– 40, 162, 165–66, 175, 179, 180– 82, 184–89, 191–96, 200, 204–6, 209, 212, 218, 229–30, 235–36, 250–52, 255, 264; fiction by: “The Displaced Person,” 54–66, 94, 140, 188, 195, 252; “The Enduring Chill,” 54–57, 63–67, 94, 195, 251; Everything that Rises Must Converge, 63; A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 58; “Parker’s Back,” 218n77; “Revelation,” 193, 218n77; “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” 179, 218n77; The Violent Bear It Away, 15, 91, 99, 179, 180, 184–94, 227, 246, 251, 265; Wise Blood, 185, 191; nonfiction by: The Habit of Being, 55–56, 60, 66, 188, 192; Mystery and Manners, 55–56; A Prayer Journal, 55 O’Donnell, Angela Alaimo, 58n18, 68n35, 194–95 O’Gorman, Farrell, 108 Oh, Seiwoong, 167n39

Okey, Stephen, 47 Okolocha, H. Oby, 167n39 Onanuga, Ayobami, 167n39 Ordination, sacrament of, 145, 205 Original Sin, 96, 102, 110, 119, 131, 134, 137, 196, 202 Ormerod, Neil, 136 Patriarchy, 197, 207–9, 211, 231 Paul VI, Pope, 150 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 114n46 Pelagianism, 141 Percy, Walker, 10n13, 14, 79, 96–97, 99, 107–23, 125–26, 135, 139, 198, 206, 236, 253; fiction by: Lancelot, 14, 97, 107–8, 112–23, 139, 198, 206, 251–53; The Moviegoer, 112; nonfiction by: The Message in the Bottle, 111, 121, 122; Signposts in a Strange Land, 108–10, 112, 114 Phan, Peter, 150 Pietà, 78–90, 226, 247, 251 Postmodernity, 46–49, 69–73, 110– 11; in literature, 71–73; in theology, 69–71 Powers, J[ames] F[arl], 53, 67; fiction by: Morte d’Urban, 67; “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” 67 Prevot, Andrew, 47 Pridgen, Allen, 119 Proust, Marcel, 31 Putt, B. Keith, 134n77 Quade, Kirstin Valdez, 13, 55, 75, 79, 84–94, 251, 253, 265–66; fiction by: Night at the Fiestas, 79, 84, 86; “Ordinary Sins,” 55, 75, 79, 85–94, 251, 253, 265–66 Quinlan, Kieran, 108 Racism, 56, 58, 60–61, 64, 181, 193– 94, 207–8, 223

INDEX

Rahner, Karl, SJ, 19, 26–27, 29, 46, 76n55, 91–93, 164, 182–84, 237, 252 Randisi, Jennifer Lynn, 231 Raschke, Carl A., 69n37 Ratzinger, Joseph. See Benedict XVI, Pope Reconciliation, sacrament of. See Confession, sacrament of Redemption, 76, 96, 110, 121, 128– 29, 140–42, 163, 177 Reichardt, Mary R., 9–10, 51 Resurrection, 39, 132, 174, 183, 226– 27 Rich, Kelly M., 104 Ricoeur, Paul, 133–35 Ripatrazone, Nick, 81, 209, 212n63, 238, 242–43, 248 Rober, Daniel A., 92n78 Romero, Channette, 210n56 Ronan, Marian, 198 Roston, Murray, 37n50, 38n52 Roy, Louis, OP, 19n2, 258n4 Rule of St. Benedict, 239 Rwandan genocide, 171 Sacramentality, 4, 7, 11, 13–15, 40, 48–49, 51–52, 54–56, 62, 68, 73, 75–78, 85, 89, 90–91, 93–94, 97, 99, 101, 105–7, 109–10, 119, 120– 21, 139, 141, 144–45, 147, 149, 161, 181–82, 184, 186–87, 190– 91, 198–200, 204–5, 207, 209, 212, 217–19, 226, 229–30, 234–37, 240–45, 249–54, 265–68 Sacramental principle, 48 Sacrament(s), 40–41, 43, 48, 84, 92, 110, 145, 157, 182–83, 191, 236, 243, 246 Sainthood, 138, 144–45 Saints, 82, 87, 114, 130–31, 137–38, 144–47, 149, 186, 193, 196, 208, 211, 216, 220, 238 Salius, Erin Michael, 207n47

299

Salvaterra, Neanda, 209n52 Santo Niño, 86, 89 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 19 Schloesser, Stephen, SJ, 58n19, 140n3 Scorsese, Martin, 147 Scott, Malcolm, 9n11 Seelye, Katharine Q., 76n58 Shank, Jenny, 84n71, 85n73 Sherry, Norman, 35n42, 142n9 Sherry, Patrick, 141 Slavery, 133, 163, 182, 207–8 Smith, C. E., 115 Sobrino, Jon, 137, 149 Social imaginary, 6, 24–25, 57–58, 62, 139, 179, 181, 205, 252 Spark, Muriel, 6–7, 9n11, 13–15, 51, 53, 66, 68, 73–74, 76, 96–102, 104–9, 121, 123, 125–26, 135, 139, 165, 175, 181, 185, 206, 229–31, 233–36, 249–51, 264; fiction by: The Driver’s Seat, 101n16; The Girls of Slender Means, 14, 96– 109, 123, 185, 229–30, 234, 265; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 15, 98–99, 102, 229–36, 241, 250, 252, 254; nonfiction by: Curriculum Vitae, 230n1; “The Desegregation of Art,” 101; “Edinburghborn,” 100; “My Conversion,” 100 Srigley, Susan, 186, 190–93 Stannard, Martin, 100 Stave, Shirley A., 211n57, 220n78, 222n81, 226n90 Steinfels, Margaret O’Brien, 250n37 Stigmata, 237–42, 253–54 Stump, Eleonore, 123–25 Suh, Judy, 231 Sweeney, Megan, 164, 166, 217n73, 220n78 Sykes, John D., Jr., 108n28, 113–14, 120n59, 122–23 Szolosi, Stephen M., 167n39, 173n44, 175

300

A C T S O F FA I T H A N D I M A G I N AT I O N

Tabone, Mark A., 225n88 Taylor, Alan, 60–61 Taylor, Charles, 24–25, 28, 57–58, 67, 69, 74–75, 90, 97, 111, 179, 185, 232–33, 252; “buffered” self, 57–58, 63, 75, 113, 189, 232; “fragilized” faith, 74; immanent frame, 57; modern person as “cross-pressured,” 67; “porous” self, 57; “social imaginary,” 24– 25 Tentler, Leslie Woodcock, 68–69 Teresa of Ávila, Saint, 44 Theodicy, 95, 97, 124, 126 Thérèse de Lisieux, Saint, 237 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 11, 16, 98, 124, 255–58, 260, 262, 266 Thomas the Apostle, 34 Thomistic (theological tradition), 118, 123–25 Tilley, Terrence, 18, 21–26, 91 Tillich, Paul, 11, 16, 256, 261–63, 265–66 Tomko, Helena M., 99, 106n24 Tracy, David, 45–49, 69–70, 122, 268 Trauma, 97, 102, 128, 132, 152, 166, 172, 175–76, 181, 199, 207, 220– 21, 226, 265 Tridentine Rite, 39, 197 Trinity, 18, 39 Unamuno, Miguel de, 38 Vatican Council II, 27, 39, 51, 68, 75, 77, 92, 150, 182, 195–97, 206,

209, 236; documents from: Ad Gentes, 150; Gaudium et Spes, 27; Lumen Gentium, 182; Nostra Aetate, 150 V-E Day, 102 Vietnam War, 69, 201 V-J Day, 102, 106 Volf, Miroslav, 70–71, 227 Wachal, Christopher, 60n22, 150–51 Waldmeir, John, 197, 206 Walker, Alice, 194–95 Walker, Dorothea, 233n9 Wall Street Journal, 209 Washington Post, 209 Watanabe, Nancy Ann, 153 Waugh, Evelyn, 53, 68, 76, 79, 162, 164 Weele, Michael Vander, 167n39, 175 Wendorf, Thomas A., SM, 240 West, Cornell, 47, 74, 110, 212, 216, 223n83 Williams, Delores S., 162–63 Williams, Mark B., 148n18, 148n19, 152n23, 161n30, 163 Wilson, Jessica Hooten, 115, 119, 188n14 Wolfe, Gregory, 35, 52–53, 73, 78, 91, 241, 242n25, 252 World War II, 102 Wyatt, Jean, 211, 214n69, 225–26 Yost, Julia, 208n48 Zenner, Christiana, 20n20

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