Dante’s Divine Comedy shows readers the redeeming power of beauty. This is conveyed through Beatrice, who serves as Dante’s guide through the heavens. As the woman who Dante loved in real life, her goodness and purity helped the poet glimpse the heavenly world. And so, in the Divine Comedy, a poem written in her memory, Beatrice serves as Dante’s guide to God and as a symbol of beauty.

As Dante ascends through the heavens, he sees the light of God reflected in the eyes of Beatrice. “Beatrice looks at God, Dante looks at Beatrice and sees in her, as in a clear mirror, the sign from God,” writes Hans Urs von Balthasar. “The beloved does not imprison the poet within herself; on the contrary, she opens up for him the perception of all reality.” (1) Dante might be tempted to enclose himself in the eyes of Beatrice, but as a symbol of true beauty she does not let him. Instead she reminds him that the beauty in her eyes is only a reflection of God’s splendor. It is not in her eyes that paradise is found. Beatrice says:

I can recall just this about that moment:
as I was gazing at her there, I know
my heart was freed of every other longing,

for the Eternal joy was shining straight
into my Beatrice’s face, and back
came its reflection filling me with joy;

then, with a smile whose radiance dazzled me,
she said: “Now turn around and listen well,
not in my eyes alone is Paradise.” (2)

As Dante sees beauty in Beatrice’s eyes, he finds himself ascending higher into Heaven. “Then, to the eyes of beauty my eyes turned,” says Dante in Canto XXII of the Paradiso. And as often happens after staring into her eyes, Dante ascends further upward (3). Indeed, Beatrice gives Dante the strength to complete his journey. When the pilgrim is tired, she encourages him to go on. When he is unable to see the light of God directly, her eyes give him an indirect vision. Beatrice as a symbol of beauty encourages, directs, and points the pilgrim to God.

Only the Blessed Virgin Mary has eyes that are more beautiful. As the highest created masterpiece, the Virgin Mary is the most beautiful and her eyes reflect most clearly the eternal light of God. When Dante encounters Mary in Heaven, the reader sees the same pattern of vision as was with Beatrice. The Virgin Mary looks at God, and Dante looks at the Virgin Mary. After seeing the light of God reflected in the Virgin Mary’s eyes, his vision is then clear enough for the Beatific Vision. Ad Jesum per Mariam. Dante recalls:

Those eyes so loved and reverenced God,
now fixed on him who prayed, made clear to us
how precious true devotion is to her;

then she looked into the Eternal Light,
into whose being, we must believe, no eyes
of other creatures pierce with such insight.”

for now my vision as it grew more clear
was penetrating more and more the Ray
of that exalted Light of Truth Itself (4)

Dante conveys that holiness and beauty go hand-in-hand. As Dante gets closer to God, what he experiences is more beautiful. The Virgin Mary is closer to God than any created being and therefore she is the most beautiful. On the other hand, the further Dante wanders from God in the Inferno, the uglier things are.

For this reason, Satan dwells in the dark and cold pit of Hell and embodies brute ugliness. Without the light of truth to illumine him and his surroundings, Satan does not see Dante and Virgil as they pass by him. Narcissism is the fixation on one’s own self, and Satan is the biggest narcissist of all. As a result, he fixates only on himself and his own misery, thereby inverting the pattern of sight seen with Beatrice and the Virgin Mary. Dante looks at Satan, and Satan looks at the ground weeping. His vision is not focused upward toward God, but is instead focused downward to the immediate, superficial, and passing — to anything but what is beautiful.

Dante’s Divine Comedy conveys the objectivity and redeeming power of beauty. That is, he conveys that beauty is clearly more than a pleasure as judged by the senses and that it is more than a subjective taste. Instead, beauty is a transcendental, an attribute of being insofar as it reveals the splendor of the good and true that permeate reality. As Catholics, we believe that the beauty of the Word Incarnate is seen in the beauty of created things, and especially in the Church, the continuing of the incarnation.

For whatever it’s worth, I recommend Dante’s Divine Comedy to all who love beauty. It is clear that Dante believes in the power of beauty, and this is conveyed in no clearer way than Beatrice’s role in the poem.

Darrell Falconburg teaches great books seminars for a classical Catholic high school in Denver, Colorado. He received a master’s degree in philosophy from Mount Angel Abbey and Seminary and a bachelor’s degree in history from the College of Idaho.

1 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 3: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles (California: Ignatius Press, 1986), 63-64.

2 Dante, Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso., trans. Mark Musa (repr. New York: Penguin Books, 1971), XVIII 13-21.

3 Ibid, XXII 154.

4 Ibid, XXXIII 40-42.

“There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many?” – John 6:9

It’s the smell of paint, cheap black paint, that brings me to a place I love. I was smelling it now as I carried in the last load of costumes and sank quietly into the blue “Hamlet” chair piled up with all the other chairs in the corner. And I marveled. The remnants of my entire theater company fit into this very small space.

The room was alive with the musty scent of memories. Ghosts of performances past flitted among the racks of costumes floating in the breeze from the open window. I remembered faces. Young, laughing, piquant faces chattering away as only teenagers can, half dressed in ancient finery and crowns, lounging on windowsills practicing lines, gossiping like happy magpies, or waging all-out war with plastic swords. This was my motley ensemble, these lovely, exasperating, gloriously creative teens who would one by one move on to college, the future, love, marriage, and children of their own. I remember hugging them farewell, each one, thanking them for giving me their hearts for a while.

I felt heavy with sweet but aching nostalgia. I am at an age where this must be so, this weight of nostalgia. What was it all for? we ask our older selves, not always with regret but with an eye towards understanding our place in providence. What was it for, this small theater company that ran ten years strong? I asked that question to the walls of this tiny storage room and they seemed to laugh back at me, “Well, it certainly wasn’t for fame and fortune.” True, I laughed back.

Yes, this is what it looks like. Star Wars in blank verse. R2D2 beeped in iambic pentameter

There was a time I had high ambitions for a grand, Catholic theater revival where I would bring beauty, goodness, and truth to the world through the acted word. I dreamed of stages, lighting systems, gorgeous costumes – starting small, yes, but not small for long. The world was waiting for the transforming power of theater, and I was going to set the world ablaze with it or die trying. Alas, my ambition never grew beyond small stages, small ensembles, small high schools, small budgets, no budgets. I never even achieved the dream of a proper set of theater lights – up until the end we used two duct taped workman lights and a flashlight for “special effects”. We cajoled our way into school basements, Presbyterian sanctuaries, yards, venues no bigger than a postage stamp. We ransacked living rooms for furniture. If we gathered one hundred people on opening night, we considered it a packed house. We flew by the proverbial seat of our pants. Greatness, by any stretch of the imagination, was never achieved.

As the years went on and we were some twenty odd plays in, I wondered if there might be something different at work here; a different sort of greatness, the kind that surprisingly awaits us at the end of a poor little way, lit by very poor lighting. I slowly began to discover the freedom of poverty. When you are small and poor, suddenly the art becomes enormous and beautiful. It takes its place at the center of things. I didn’t need to worry about pleasing crowds, filling the box office, keeping my reputation, pandering to patrons who always have an opinion as how things should be done – indifferent critics waiting with pencils poised for the least mistake. Our “critics” were mothers, fathers, grandparents, friends, and the good-hearted parish priest who let us use the stage in his cafeteria and showed up heroically for every single performance. You could never find a more appreciative and willing audience than this. They willed us to succeed.

The beauty of what we were doing began to take center stage. My heart began to open to possibilities unhampered by ambition. I persistently sought greatness in the art of theater and these mere children were carried along most willingly in my enthusiasm, and they caught fire. Because we were small and pretty much unknown, I could try things, things unheard of. I could experiment, and I did. I threw at these mere fifteen year old puppies Shakespeare’s unabridged Julius Caesar, Romeo, Juliet, Puck, St. Thomas More, T.S. Eliot, Pride and Prejudice just to see what would happen, and they took up the gauntlet each time and ran with it. They began to paint sets with their own designs, they composed the musical scores for each play, one young man even cheekily asked if he could rewrite Dracula the way it was supposed to be written, and we performed it. Another student who was doing a class at a technical high school, asked if he could make the swords for the fight scenes in Romeo and Juliet. They begged to light the stage with just candles once. And I said yes… and asked permission after the fact. I had new drama dads who showed up with their toolboxes asking if they could help with anything. They were put to work inventing water pumps (with running water, mind you), a nine foot in diameter Death Star, a two-story house. They gathered in little knots puzzling out the challenge with power drills at the ready. People donated all kinds of odds and ends. We became regulars at the local thrift store and achieved preferred customer status at half-price Wednesdays! We were one, huge, theatrical experiment exploding in a very small space.

Lets get this published

Every single opening night I sat there manning the workman’s lights in the darkness at stage left, watching the magic unfold before me. I saw all these amazing young men and women releasing their raw and genuine emotions so pure and strong and beautiful with uninhibited joy. I saw their wit and glorious sense of comedic timing. I saw little girls in the front row of audiences completely enchanted by dancing fairies, I saw moms on the edges of their seats waiting for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to embrace at last, sighing that, “It just never got old.” At curtain call my motley ensemble came out and bowed in exhausted glee on stages that would not quite hold the lot of them. I loved them so at that moment, I loved what we were, what we did, how we all felt one great rush of thespian exultation when a performance ended brilliantly. This. This was greatness. The greatness of the little way. The joy of art for art’s sake with no other ambition than that it should shine and be in us.

My own joy in this tiny, poorly lit theater experiment can be summed up in the words of a dad who turned to me at the end of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. His son had played St. Thomas Becket. All he could do was stammer out, “My son did that? My son did that!” in wondering gratitude to me. This is why theater exists – that sons amaze their fathers, that wonder seeps into hearts, that mere children prove their greatness when given the chance, that human creativity exists in the smallest, most cramped spaces and looms large with possibility, that a mere hundred people go their way with a new sense of the beautiful.

I learned that Beauty goes where she will. She is not married to worldly greatness. She trips lightly along her own way. She danced with us on our small but important artistic journey for the glory of God. She embraced my determined ambition and transformed it into gratitude for the little way I had been asked to walk. And that is what God was waiting for. I offered him at last my very small basket of sweet-faced, energetic, young “fish” wondering what good “these few would be among so many”. He blessed them and told me to distribute them to the world with all they had learned and loved from my small theater company. That was my simple task in His wonderful providence. And I believe those fish will feed a large and hungry world with the beauty they received, and the beauty they will give, blessed by the hand of Him from Whom all beauty springs.

I closed the door to my small, musty, nostalgia-filled storeroom. I took one last whiff of cheap, black paint, and I breathed out my heartfelt Deo Gratias for my small part in His plan. I could think of no higher ambition than that.

Denise Trull lives in St. Louis, MO with her husband Tony. She is the artistic director of a small but mighty theater company and loves the written word in all its forms.

“To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, Flaubert’s fiction is of manners without mystery.” So wrote Santiago Ramos a few years back in a perceptive article in Image. I’ve read or heard similar comments from a number of young Catholic and Christian writers. The distinction is certainly valid—O’Connor was the Catholic writer par excellence, Flaubert a nonbeliever who dissected bourgeois illusions but for the most part ignored “the action of grace.”

And yet from an artistic standpoint, driving a wedge between faith-driven American fiction and secular French novels creates unnecessary obstacles to cultural flourishing, all the more so at a time when America’s European roots are under sustained assault from an organized iconoclastic movement. And one does not need to dig very deeply to discover that the excellence of American Catholic writers in the 1950s and 1960s was based on a very different approach to the modern classics.

O’Connor with her peackocks

Take O’Connor. When she wants to get at what novels do in her essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” she turns to Flaubert. “All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder,” she writes, “but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration.” The subtext is clear: Flaubert is a master. Anyone attempting to represent reality in prose should study him.

Flaubert was of course not the only French writer O’Connor admired. To give just one example: “I read 50 pages of Proust in the hospital and was surprised how much I enjoyed it,” she wrote to “A” in 1960. A year later she received the complete seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past for Christmas, and by 1962 was able to write to Margaret Lee: “I read the whole bloody thing and liked the first books best and the last book.” Proust wasn’t an influence on her fiction, as he had been on Mauriac’s. But O’Connor’s appreciation of him suggests how widely she ranged as a reader, and how natural it was for her to familiarize herself with European writers.

Like O’Connor, Walker Percy looked beyond America for models to emulate. Jessica Hooten Wilson has shown what a deep and fruitful influence Dostoevsky exerted on Percy. Yet Percy also admired, and even revered, French literature. O’Connor makes herself Flaubert’s pupil (“The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it”); Percy claims Blaise Pascal as one of two spiritual fathers (Kierkegaard is the other). And he speaks of kneeling “before the altar of Lawrence and Joyce and Flaubert… .”

In the mid-1980s, speaking to a French audience, Percy doubled down. “I owe less to Faulkner, and Southern writers, and indeed American writers,” he said, “than to certain French writers.” He mentions Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Gabriel Marcel. Elsewhere he gives a nod to French Catholic writers Paul Claudel and François Mauriac, but says he thinks still more highly of Sartre and Camus.

Today, we repeat the names of O’Connor and Percy with mantra-like regularity, and understandably so. They are icons, quasi-legendary embodiments of the Catholic sensibility in fiction. Yet we easily forget that they became great in no small part by immersing themselves in the European—and notably in the French—tradition. They did this, I suspect, because they recognized the all-around greatness of those foreign models.

Madame Bovary

Acknowledgment of another’s superiority is the royal road to cultural achievement (the opposite attitude, a resentful iconoclasm, guarantees stagnation and sterility). As Rémi Brague observes in an interview, Rome’s recognition of Greece’s artistic and cultural excellence is archetypal:

This provided Europe with a practical version of a theoretical truth: what is mine is not necessarily better than what comes from elsewhere. We have to be ready to accept foreign goods and to prefer them to our own traditions. Hence, we should be curious and keep an eye on other cultures that might have something to teach us.

In preserving Greek and Roman literature, including many pagan works, medieval monks set the stage for the Renaissance. The earlier battle of Saint Irenaeus against marcionism anticipated this European cultural strategy. In his Eccentric Culture, Brague says the defeat of marcionism was “the founding event of the history of Europe as a civilization.”

With this thought in mind, what of the American Catholic writers who have earned mainstream recognition in the last twenty-five years? I searched Ron Hansen’s collection of essays, A Stay Against Confusion, for a mention of Flaubert, Proust, Cervantes, or Rabelais (a favorite of J.F. Powers), and found nothing. When Don Quixote comes up in Alice McDermott’s 2006 novel After This, it is in reference to the Dale Wasserman musical.

This is not to discount the remarkable achievements of these two writers, or to insist that every American author pledge allegiance to Proust. Rather, it is to highlight a shift that has taken place in the last three quarters of a century. More provocatively, it is to suggest that if the Catholic novel continues to languish today, this may be because it—like American fiction more broadly—has too often positioned itself outside the great stream of European literature.

Indeed, to the extent that the anecdotal evidence I have presented is indicative of something real (and I believe that it is), the move among Catholic writers away from European models reflects a wider trend. Several years ago a member of the Swedish Academy complained of American fiction’s self-absorbed focus on the minutiae of its own culture. He was greeted with a mixture of indignation, amusement, and dismissive acceptance: “They say we’re too insular, we’re not writing about the world, we’re only writing about ourselves,” said Jonathan Franzen in a 2013 interview.

Given how Americanized the world has become, I think they’re probably wrong about this—we probably say more about the world by writing about ourselves than a Swedish author does by writing about a trip to Africa. But even if they’re right, I don’t think our insularity is necessarily a bad thing.

Franzen went on to compare the US to Russia in the 19th century—a superficially persuasive but unhelpful parallel. In the era of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Russia was striving to catch up to Western Europe. Its intellectuals and artists were all too aware of their country’s insularity, and the besetting temptation was idolatry of all things European. Franzen’s words reflect the opposite tendency.

By way of contrast, consider a 1947 letter from Hemingway to Faulkner in which Flaubert is described as “…our most respected, honored master.” True, Hemingway speaks of surpassing Flaubert (and elsewhere of figuratively punching out Stendhal). Nonetheless, his language reflects a sincere reverence. In the wake of World War II, France had lost its prestige as a military power. Yet in the eyes of America’s writers it retained the status of cultural elder brother—a position it had by that time occupied for at least two centuries.

To look for one’s source outside oneself is to cultivate excellence, no matter its provenance (provided, of course, that the model is truly excellent, something that the winnowing process reflected in a tradition tends to guarantee). As indirect proof, take the example of German novelist Martin Mosebach. He’s better known among English-speaking readers for his essays on the Latin Mass than for his 2010 novel What Was Before. Yet he’s published about a dozen acclaimed novels and in 2007 won the Büchner Prize, Germany’s top literary award.

This devout Catholic writes on liturgy and martyrdom, yet enjoys the very heavyweight status contemporary American novelists who share his faith have failed to acquire. What is his secret? To judge from his public statements, it may well be bound up with his close familiarity with the great French realists, and with his awareness of the European novel’s Catholic roots.

“The great renewal of narration,” the German author said in an interview upon winning the Büchner Prize, “was due to the Frenchmen Stendhal and Flaubert in the 19th century.” And in an article recording a separate conversation with Mosebach, journalist Matthias Matussek writes: “The literary form of Catholicism, according to Mosebach, is the comedy, the satyr play, the grotesque gargoyle, the grotesque and the absurd, from Rabelais and Cervantes to Joyce…”

Catholics who swear by O’Connor and Percy but hold Flaubert at arm’s length seek to create an island of belief-saturated fiction in a secular literary sea. In light of the disdain with which some unknown percentage of the urban literati views religion, this is understandable. And then, there is a distinctive sanity to the incarnational vision, which lets writers embrace the concrete without dead-ending in naturalism. All the same, it is possible that we are shoring up a religious identity at the expense of becoming the best artists we could be.

Catholic writers dream of recapturing lost territory. New journals and publishing houses catering to the fold have sprung up in the last decade. But for now the subculture remains tiny. Friends, family members, a handful of sympathetic book reviewers, and a few dozen poets, artists, and novelists seem to make up most of the audience.

The literary novel is an especially tough sell. It puts heavy demands on the reader’s time, and often fails to give lasting pleasure in return. The remedy, says no less a figure than Percy, is not in the first place an injection of uplifting faith, of edification, but rather a search for truth: “…truth about the way things are, the way people are; in a word, a truth about the human condition; and a truth of such an order, both old and new, that one recognizes oneself in it. Therein lies the pleasure.” A few lines later in the same essay he asks a question to which he has already provided the answer:

Why is it that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which caused a great scandal when it was published, is a more truly Christian novel than, say, The Big Fisherman, which is about St. Peter and not only was edifying but also made a lot of money?

In recent years, Catholic new formalists have revivified the art of poetry, offering beauty and meaning in rhyme, meter, and narrative. Catholic novelists could be at the vanguard of a new classicism along similar lines. Like O’Connor and Percy, we could turn intentionally to the modern European tradition and reacquaint ourselves with Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, and others. In this way we would draw closer to our literary heroes, partaking of their tastes and influences. We might also bring the incipient Catholic literary revival toward greater maturity.

T.C. Merrill has published essays and book reviews in The University Bookman, Education & Culture, The American Conservative, and others. His novel Minor Indignities is now available from Wiseblood Books.

Having announced the Bakhita Prize for the Visual Arts earlier this summer, we’ve been delighted by the response and coverage the contest has received. The prize of $1000 ($250 to the runner up) will be awarded to a painting, illustration, photograph, or sculpture that helps us “honor and highlight the infinite worth inherent within each victim of racial violence.”

After seeing the strong interest the prize has received, we have to come to realize that the originally scheduled deadline for submissions (August 31st) was too tight, and that there are still many more artists interested in participating who need a bit more time to make their entries. For that reason, we are extending the submission deadline until September 30, with the winning entries being announced two weeks later.

If you or someone you know is interested in participating, we encourage you to make your submission soon and learn more about the prize by clicking here.