Reading Into the Church
by Deal Hudson - August 1, 2009
Reprinted with permission.
Reading, said Josemaría Escrivá, has made many a saint. In my own case it has merely made a convert, but I do continue to read ever more deeply into the mystery that is the Church. Thomas Merton, we recall from Seven Storey Mountain, was started on his road to the Church by the accidental discovery of Gilson's The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy in the Columbia University Library. We are foolish to forget the power of the written word.
It is said that people don't read much anymore, that we live in a multimedia age, and that the act of reading is on the wane. I don't take these prognostications too seriously. Nothing is likely to replace reading as the most intimate medium of enjoyment and self-examination – certainly not CD-ROM or the World Wide Web. When we want to change a person's life, we still give him a book, and wait, hoping.
Years ago a friend sent me a box of about twenty-five books with "Catholic bomb" written across the side. As I read them one by one, they exploded in my mind, leaving me disoriented and filled with an unfamiliar joy. It was the confusion of knowing that my life was changing forever; it was the joy of heading into an unknown country called the Catholic faith. (I didn't know enough then to call it a strange country, which the Church most certainly is when you enter as an adult.)
I had been raised in a Protestant home, and had become an ardent Southern Baptist in college before attending Princeton Theological Seminary. There I read the greats – Luther, Calvin, Barth, Tillich, the Niebuhrs. I began to realize that the first principle of Protestantism – ridding the faith of idolatry – had gone so far as to undermine Christian intelligence. My Catholic bomb was packed with many spiritual and theological books, from the great Dominican Garrigou-Lagrange, and Masie Ward on G. K. Chesterton, to the simple verse of St. Francis of Assisi. With every book, a strong impression received years earlier when I had read St. Augustine's On the Trinity was confirmed: Catholic Christianity embodied the fullness of God's revelation, without the narrowing refractions of other, younger Christian communions. The first principle of Catholicism was indeed the Incarnation, and that centrality shone through all my reading.
Reading myself into the Church doesn't mean that I possessed crystalline clarity at every step – bombs scatter their debris unpredictably. At this stage in my conversion, I was blessed by the good advice of my mentors; they saved me from the fate of a convert friend of mine who was led to read Christ Among Us and lived to tell the tale.
As I moved toward the Church, my reading prodded me onward with a series of vaguely related insights. Although I understood only a little of the content of the Catholic faith, I knew that it explained the limitations of the Christian traditions, both liberal Protestant and Southern Baptist, in which I was raised. It would take me years to pass through my own period of protest and grasp the inner coherence of the Church herself. I was a young college professor then, and still reeling from the effect of the bomb when I began to read a Catholic novel every week. By the time I finished this assignment – luckily I had wise and tasteful tutors – I would not have dreamed of turning back.
There are, in fact, Catholic novels, though certain learned people dispute the fact. I have no comprehensive definition of the Catholic novel, neither would I ever attempt one. However, I happily name a novel as Catholic when it presents to the reader a narrative that embodies some substantial aspect of the Catholic faith. In other words, a Catholic novel is one that ably suggests to its reader our faith's great mysteries. It is those moments of insight, where we catch a glimpse of God's ineluctable providence – as in, for example, Diary of a Country Priest – that readers can become pilgrims.
Thus, if there is a litmus test for the Catholic novel, it must be whether the novel is capable of conspiring in spiritual conversion. Even if one bears in mind that conversion is ongoing, not at all confined to a Damascus Road experience, this test flies in the face of most aesthetic niceties about the freedom of the writer, the novel, and the audience. It goes without saying that authors who consciously intend to convert their readers probably will end up doing a poor job. That's the trouble with avid readers, like myself, giving in to speculation: We risk encouraging the worst habits of young novelists.
The novels that follow helped to convert me and continue to do so, since I go back to them regularly. I have received hardly a protest from the many friends and acquaintances who have sought them out on my advice.
The still-active French-American writer, Julian Green, born of a Protestant mother from Savannah, Georgia and a French Catholic father, has riveted my attention for years. Although his novels like Moira and Each in His Own Darkness are better known, it was the obscure The Other One that left its deepest mark on me. This novel, more than any other I know, depicts the hunger for God as the source of all human appetites. I would later recognize this unquenchable desire, with its rich moral implications, in Aquinas's anthropology – I first met it in Green. Set in Copenhagen, the story follows a recently converted man who returns to a woman he had mistreated some years earlier only to find the results of his immorality much worse than expected. His penitential witness brings about a disturbing but absolutely convincing redemption. Few books have captured the painful death of spiritual rebirth, in both characters, as powerfully as The Other One.
I'm not sure if there is a greater Catholic novel than Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. If there is, it's probably her other medieval epic, The Master of Hestviken, but I still prefer the more accessible Kristin.
I was blessed with a very bad case of the flu the first time I read Undset's trilogy, which kept me in bed for the entire read. My bouts with fever only intensified my connection with the unforgettable characters of this story. Just as movie buffs will argue the comparative merits of Scarlet, Rhett, Melanie, and Ashley in Gone With the Wind, so Undset fans delight in assigning degrees of responsibility to the impetuous Kristin, her loyal father Lavrans, her warrior husband Erlend, and her jilted fiancé, the foursquare Simon. No other novel that I know explores the biblical themes of "the wages of sin" and "the sins of the father" as accurately and charitably as Kristin Lavransdatter. Its impact on the reader, as witnessed in the novel's pivotal role in the life of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, can demonstrate a moral reorientation reminiscent of Dante's Purgatorio.
Don't let it be thought that my reading into the Church was without laughter. This novel by Walker Percy provided the perfect bridge from the existentialism of my graduate school days to the treasure of Catholic humanism. I thought it uncanny that Percy had placed his main character, Dr. Thomas More, in a Dantean landscape faced with a Kierkegaardian choice that could only be mediated by the comic, sacramental resolution of a Catholic vision. It was as if Percy – and his other novels confirm this – had already experienced my philosophical and spiritual trials – he understood that demons inhabit the suburbs of my childhood, and not just the cities and the country.
If you are familiar with the South, there is also plenty to laugh about in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. John Huston's underrated film of the novel catches many of those moments perfectly, such as when Hazel Motes tells his landlady he is a preacher of the "Church without Christ." She asks suspiciously if that was "Protestant… or something foreign?" Indeed, O'Connor's novel is nothing less than a meditation on the loss of belief in Christ's active presence in the world through the Church and its sacraments. Wise Blood made it clear to me why I was no longer content with the typical Protestant quarterly communion of grape juice done "in memory of me."
If O'Connor is one of those authors who puts you in the uncomfortable presence of the supernatural, George Bernanos is another. It's too bad that Diary of a Country Priest is his only novel remaining in print, because the others are just as powerful. His Under the Star of Satan is primarily about the special vocation of the priesthood, and its sacramental blessing on all of us. We follow the protagonist Abbé Donissan, modeled on Jean-Marie Vianney, the Curé of Ars, as he struggles for the souls of his parishioners, spending hour after hour in the confessional. We see his gift of unlocking the heaviest heart and the price he must pay for it. In the midst of Donissan's battle, we are also reminded not to take the metaphysical notion of evil as privation so literally as to discount its active presence in the world. A film has also been made of this novel, but not as successfully as Wise Blood.
If there is another novel that wears its moral seriousness as lightly as Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, I don't know it. Perhaps that is why it works so well. Like Charles Ryder himself, the reader is slowly and slyly seduced into the Catholic undercurrents of the aristocratic Marchmain family. The long, final coda of Lord Marchmain's death, his sign of the cross, and the repentant confession of Julia on the staircase distill the choice we all must finally make for or against God. As Julia puts it, in refusing to leave her husband for Charles, "But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable… the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's."
Here are six of the novels that made me Catholic. There are many others from our rich cultural past I could recommend. And, in fact, we are witnessing a modest revival of good Catholic fiction – Alice Thomas Ellis, Torgny Lindgren, Piers Paul Read, and Ralph McInerny are among the best. We can only pray that books such as theirs will be found upon the path of some pilgrim finding his way home.
The Other Books That Made Me Catholic
The Catholic Vision
Augustine, On the Trinity
William F. Lynch, S.J., Christ and Apollo
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 1–13
Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ
John Henry Newman, Plain and Parochial Sermons
Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas: Angel of the Schools
Beauty & Culture
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord
Eric Gill, Beauty Speaks for Herself
Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism
Julian Green, Journals
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
Sin & Redemption
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
Correspondence of Andre Gide and Paul Claudel
Jorgen Jorgensen, Autobiography
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Dante, Purgatorio
Morley Callahan, Our Lady of the Snows
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Treatise on Sin, 1a2ae, q. 71–9
Agape & Eros
Martin D'Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone
Joseph Pieper, About Love
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy
Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Treatise on Love, 2a2ae, q. 23-46
Reason & Revelation
Aristotle, Ethics
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Treatise on Law, 1a2ae, q. 90–7
G. K. Chesterton, The Dumb Ox
Mortimer Adler, The Angels and Us
Joseph Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Cornelio Fabro, God in Exile
Church & Sacrament
Documents of Vatican II
Henri de Lubac, Catholicism
Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne
Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Doctrine
Matthias Scheeben, Mysteries of Christianity
Saints & Sanctity
Léon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute
Julian Green, God's Fool
Raissa Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together
Jacques Maritain, Notebooks
Jean Leclerq, Love of Learning and the Desire for God
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ways of the Spiritual Life
Deal W. Hudson is the director of the Morley Institute, and is the former publisher of CRISIS Magazine, a Catholic monthly published in Washington, DC. His articles and comments have been published in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, National Review, Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Village Voice, Roll Call, National Journal, The Economist, and by the Associated Press. He appears regularly on television shows such as NBC Nightly News, One-on One with John McLaughlin, C-Span's Washington Journal, News Talk, NET's Capitol Watch, The Beltway Boys, The Religion and Ethics Newsweekly on PBS, and radio programs such as "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio. He was associate professor of Philosophy at Fordham University from 1989 to 1995 and was a visiting professor at New York University for five years. He taught for nine years at Mercer University in Atlanta, where he was chair of the philosophy department. He has published many reviews and articles as well as four books: Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend (Mercer, 1988); The Future of Thomism (Notre Dame, 1992); Sigrid Undset On Saints and Sinners (Ignatius, 1994); and Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). His autobiography, An American Conversion (Crossroad, 2003), is available from Amazon.com.
