For a person contemplating conversion to the Catholic faith, there are choices to be made. Difficult choices. When I myself was contemplating my proposed conversion over a decade ago, it seemed clear that a drastic separation was being proposed between what I once was and what I hoped to become. Although my life to that point had prepared me for that moment, what lay before me was 30,000 leagues of sea beckoning I wade from shore and never look back. The Catholic Church is monolithic and mysterious, and to join her felt quite different than checking out a new protestant denominational affiliation. In my subsequent experience helping converts enter the Church, I’ve found that my experience wasn’t unusual. Even a person convinced of the intellectual coherence of the faith and who has formed a respect and desire for the Church has a certain difficulty as they approach the moment in which the decision must be made. To convert, one must become brokenhearted and impoverished. It’s a leap into a void and it requires tremendous gifts of faith God and prayers from the angels and saints. One does not convert without divine intervention.

Gertud Von Le Fort, a convert herself, has written a beautiful description of the conversion process in her book The Veil of Veronica. First published in 1931, it’s a sensitive account of how halting the process can be, marked as it is by the juxtaposition of great epiphanies and agonies.

Cluny Media has reprinted the novel in a handsome, well-bound paperback. They graciously sent me a copy and I’ve been reading it every morning in the garden with my first cup of coffee. As the Cluny website summarizes, “The story is that of Veronica: a young, motherless German girl living with her aristocratic grandmother and her religious aunt in the heart of the Eternal City. Veronica is poised between the pagan and Christian worlds, torn between zeal for life and the call of grace.” Setting the story in Rome is a stroke of genius from Le Fort, and she uses the universality and personality of the city to project the inner turmoil of her characters onto the world-historical stage. It seems to me that the salvation of the soul of Veronica is equally as important as any of the other historical events to occur in the great city.

Rome contains both the glories of the pagan age and the glories of the Church, revealing the two poles that tug at Veronica. As she navigates the city, she navigates the interior of her own heart. A stranger in a strange land, living with her grandmother above a converted cloister with a pagan temple out one window and a church out the other, she has intuitive knowledge and sees to the heart of things like a mirror, and so, for Veronica, everything has a veiled meaning. In the end, she discovers that natural beauty and divine beauty shine from the same source, and that the two worlds are not competing but rather overlapped, and that Rome herself is the world-monstrance for St. Peter’s.

Grab the book from Cluny Media.

It’s been well over a decade now since people began to murmur about a renaissance of Catholic literature. A great deal of progress has been made in that time, from the establishment of journals and publishing houses (Dappled Things remains a trailblazer; we’re a good bit more than a decade old), to the emergence of too many talented novelists and poets to list. As Joseph Pearce recently pointed out in The Imaginative Conservative, the piece of the puzzle that’s still missing is the patrons. The great writing is out there. It’s the audience that is proving elusive.

But as the movement of Catholic literature has grown, it faces another problem, which is that so many people had the same idea around the same time—to foster the growth of Catholic literature—that the various groups working toward this goal often do not know the others exist. Sometimes, they even unknowingly step on each others’ toes. For example, on September 19-21 of this year, you can attend the Catholic Imagination Conference at Loyola University in Chicago, or, on September 20-22, you can join the Catholic Writers Guild Online Conference… but you can’t do both. A little cross-pollination between the groups might result in better planning and a healthier literary culture.

This is only one example of a frustrating trend I’ve been observing for years now. From Facebook groups and blogs to conferences and guilds, the Catholic writers are getting together, but only in niche groups that often seem to operate in vacuums. You can find the high-end literary folks in one place, the sci-fi aficionados in another, the poets here, the devotional writers there, the YA writers here, the people who struggle with faith but still identify as Catholic over there… Many groups are inclusive, in the sense that they welcome all sorts of different voices, but there’s still such a multiplicity that no one can keep up with them all.

All of this is good. The more, the merrier, and it’s always been true that birds of a feather flock together. Writers need support from other writers who understand their voices and perspectives. Also, the more outlets there are for finding some kind of entrée into Catholic literature, the more people will come in. Multiplicity is beautiful. But it can also be divisive.

One solution is to rally the troops around a central organization. The Catholic Writers Guild already exists. It’s small and imperfect, but the groundwork for a real professional guild is there, and the more people who join (and volunteer!), the better able it will be to serve.  But beyond that, I see a real need for all of us to reach out—to leave our comfort zones, forget our preconceived notions of what a Catholic Literary Renaissance ought to look like, and explore what it really is. Those from traditional publishing backgrounds need to read self-published books, and vice versa. The academics need to talk the less scholarly among us, and the less scholarly need to appreciate and understand the work of academics. Those who are hosting conferences need to include voices that don’t sound like Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene, and those whose work is less traditional need to appreciate and understand tradition.

I’m aware that this proposal is vague. That’s partly because I don’t have anything more concrete to offer right now, and partly because my aim is to foster a much longer conversation. Please, join in. Use the comments box below, or bring this question out to whichever groups you belong to and propose it there. We are all the Body of Christ. Some may be called as teachers, others as apostles, others as poets, others to write children’s books, or literary criticism, or fantasy, or memoirs. But we are all one body, and without the least of our parts, we will falter. Let’s find each other in charity and work together in Christ.

Finding Bliss in Every Atom

Guest post by Jeffrey Wald.

Perhaps a 550-page unfinished novel about the mundane lives of IRS agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, does not exactly excite your curiosity, or induce you to begin reading said unfinished novel. But what if I told you that this work held the key to unlocking a famous 15-page short story by one of America’s greatest fiction writers? All in?! Maybe not. Nevertheless, I believe that David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published The Pale King, or at least what he was trying to do with the book, provides an extraordinary lens into the life and death of one Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s famous short story.

After Wallace’s death, a typed note was found in his papers that laid out The Pale King’s idea:

Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

What an extraordinary impetus for a novel! Now, Wallace is not writing from a place of systematic religious thought. His philosophy of boredom is not exactly St. Teresa of Avila’s seven mansions. However, he has hit on a Christian principle made famous by such modern saints as Therese of Lisieux and Josemaria Escriva: the sanctity of the ordinary; finding joy in everydayness. Perhaps Wallace’s insight is a secular “Little Way”; seeking and finding transcendence in the day-to-day realities of contemporary life that can seem static, ugly, and mundane. If tax returns are a gateway to the transcendent, life’s looking up! At the heart of Wallace’s secular “Little Way” is gratitude “at the gift of being alive.” An existential joy and wonder at being that at times seems so absent from our contemporary situation.

Which leads us to one Bartleby the scrivener (whatever you think of Melville the fiction writer, you must admit he had a knack for names: Ishmael, Ahab, Queequeb, Claggart, and Bartleby just to name a few). Bartleby’s tale is well-known: he takes a job for an attorney as a scrivener and at first completes his work marvelously (albeit “silently, palely, and mechanically”) working day and night copying legal texts; but bit by bit he refuses to work, always declining with the drab “I would prefer not to.” Eventually, he declines all work, declines to vacate his employer’s premises, and spends his days looking at a wall. His employer pities him, seeing that he appeared “absolutely alone in the universe,” and lets him remain in the office, unemployed, for a time, but then even his pity is spent and Bartleby is taken to the “Tombs” (aka the city jail). Bartleby dies in the Tombs, presumably from physical weakness (“I prefer not to dine today” he tells his jailers), “strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones.” This is a bleak ending, even for Melville.

What happened to Bartleby? What went wrong? Why did he literally curl up and die? There are a number of contending reasons: perhaps the sheer boredom and monotony of his job did him in (I often feared this might happen to me while working as an associate at a large law firm doing doc review); or his lack of human connection and friendship; or maybe he is the first postmodern American literary character, crippled by the sheer number of life’s choices, and thus he turns to a sort of robotic non-choice (“I would prefer not to”).

While all of these realities may have contributed to Bartleby’s demise, Melville keys us into Bartleby’s existential despair at the very end of the story when we first learn something of Bartleby’s life prior to coming to the law office. We learn that formerly Bartleby worked in a Dead Letter Office, sorting and burning letters meant for folks who have died. For hours a day Bartleby was confronted with his own mortality. One day, he too would be in the grave, just like the intended recipients of those hundreds upon thousands of dead letters he handled every day. “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity” Melville concludes, evincing Bartleby’s own hopelessness when faced with the certainty of his death.

Bartleby’s existential despair, thus, was not simply the result of a boring job, or lack of human connection, or even some mental health condition, but rather the inability to peer into existence and come out alive on the other end. For Bartleby, life meant death, and death meant nothingness. The end. But Wallace’s IRS examiners? For them, bliss is possible, joy is attainable, and life does have meaning at the moment of “gratitude at the gift of being alive.” And what does this gratitude necessitate? Transcendence. For only by looking outside oneself (for who is responsible for one’s own existence? Who self-creates? If life is a “gift,” must there not be a giver?), can one find transcendence and in transcendence meaning and in meaning motivation to not only survive but to blissfully live.

Jeffrey Wald is a prosecutor who lives and works in the Twin Cities. His postmodern epic “The Boy Who Turned Into A Troll” received favorable reviews from his children, but a tepid review from his wife.

In Graham Greene’s retrospective Ways of Escape, he takes the time between stories of smoking opium in Vietnam and visiting brothels on Caribbean islands to talk about his friend Evelyn Waugh. In the wake of Greene’s novel A Burnt Out Case, everyone was worried about Greene’s loss of faith. Waugh wrote his friend a note inquiring what in the world was going on, and as an older man Greene looks back on the correspondence and muses on Waugh as a man and an author.

On Waugh’s inner conflict:

There was always in Evelyn a conflict between the satirist and the romantic. I suppose a satirist is always to some extent a romantic: but he doesn’t usually express his romanticism. Perhaps romanticism was a weak point in Evelyn’s life and work, and in the end it helped to kill him. He had too-great expectations; too-great expectations of his fellow creatures, and too-great expectations even of his Church. I think the old expression “a broken heart” comes near to the truth, when one thinks of his reaction to the changes in the liturgy of the Catholic Church.

On Waugh’s development as a writer:

In his early books he himself was thoroughly enjoying what he satirized. Decline and Fall, Evelyn’s first book, which I admire as much as any—must have read it half a dozen times at least—is, to me, pure fun. So is the less successful Vile Bodies. He made fun out of the “bright young things” of the twenties, but he was one of them himself. Perhaps with Black Mischief…the serious satire begins to be visible below the fun. In A Handful of Dust, his most painful book, there is no fun at all.

On Brideshead Revisited:

When [Evelyn] had written to me that the only excuse for [Brideshead] was Nissen huts and Spam and the blackout I had accepted that criticism—until the other day when I reread all his books, and to my astonishment joined the ranks of those who find Brideshead his best, even though it is his most romantic.

On The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:

In Pinfold he draws a character study of himself. It reminds one a little of Freud bravely doing his own self-analysis…but in this strange book he has left out all his fine qualities: physical courage, private generosity, loyalty to friends. Pinfold, I think, shows him technically almost at his most perfect.

On Waugh’s legendary rudeness:

I was for many years puzzled by his reputation for rudeness and cruelty—I must have known him well for nearly a dozen years without seeing any example to justify it. I had even stayed with him several times in the country (a feat regarded as extraordinary by some of his friends) and had seen only an excellent and witty host, one who disguised his own inner torment in drollery rather than disturb his guest.

On Waugh’s generosity

Those who have built Evelyn up as a sort of sacred monster have left out the other side; they have ignored the man who gave up from work which was essential to him time to stay with the dying and no longer amusing Ronald Knox in the kind of hotel and the kind of resort he hated, who attended the deathbed of his friend Alfred Duggan and against all obstacles brought him the help he needed. When I come to die, I shall wish he were beside me, for he would give me no easy comfort.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently with Gertrud von le Fort’s exploration of feminism in her book The Eternal Woman. It took me a while to read it because I kept digressing as I followed the line of her thought. For instance, and relative to all of you as writers and artists, in the first chapter she touches on the role of art and symbol in understanding our contingency as created beings. “Only an age profoundly bewildered or misled in its metaphysical instincts could attribute the idea of eternity…to a creature.” The danger, she writes, is that to misunderstand our relation to eternity would be to annihilate our humanity by profoundly misunderstanding ourselves at a fundamental level. Finding our true selves and avoiding this error, le Fort says, is the impulse behind religious surrender, love, and exploring the meaning of death.

It seems to me that one of the roles of an artist is to humble us. When we stand before a Titian or hear a Victoria setting for the Mass, it is with gratitude at the mystery in which we are immersed, a mystery that has no final depths, that moves like a traveler through our heart. If our ultimate metaphysical significance is grasped only in our relation to the divine, then the world is analogical and everything finds its meaning through reference to God. In other words, if anything is beautiful, it is because it reflects, through analogical participation, the God who is Beauty. Le Fort develops this line of reasoning in order to show the eternal value of the feminine, but also gestures toward how it applies it to art.

“It is only great art in its supreme moments of inspiration that is capable of proclaiming under a transitory form the things that are unchanging,” she writes. This, precisely, is why art humbles us. To encounter great art is to encounter eternity, to savor it in the marrow of our bones. The form itself, however, is by definition transitory and veiled, making clear that we participate in such holy things as invited guests and not by right.

Le Fort goes on to argue that this is why all great art is birthed of Catholic culture. It is the Church that straddles eternity and maintains, “supratemporal aspects.” To scratch to the surface of great art is to “tread the ground of great Catholic dogma.”

Art stands for us. It humbles while it simultaneously exalts. It sets us in our proper relationship on the horizon of eternity as it veils and reveals. If art stands for us, we must stand for art.

Upon beginning to re-read Gene Wolfe’s New Sun books, they’re significantly better even than I remembered. I first read them about ten years ago before I was Catholic and clearly I wasn’t prepared for them, because although I remember enjoying them, I missed how full of enchantment they are. The trick that Wolfe pulls off is to place the novels some millions of years into the future on a planet Earth that is ruinous and rotting under the weak red light of a dying sun. Technology has waxed and waned presumably countless times between that future time and ours, and the beauty of science-fiction is that what might seem magic to us is actually the result of technology. Further, what seems at first blush to be secular science is revealed to be theology, or sacred science.

Last week, I referenced Wolfe’s opinion that Dante’s Divine Comedy is actually sci-fi. He says, “Humanists would say the Divine Comedy is fantasy, but they are wrong. It is SF, based on the soft science of theology. Theology has just as much right to that word science as sociology and the rest do.”

Here’s an example of how this works in New Sun. This shouldn’t spoil the book if you haven’t read it yet, but I hope it inspires everyone to read it because these books are an absolute gem. In New Sun, Father Inire, the mysterious sage of the House Absolute, displays and reveals his room of octagonal mirrors to a young noble named Domnina. Wolfe writes,

She realized when she saw them that the wall of the octagonal enclosure through which she passed faced another mirror. In fact, all the others were mirrors. The light of the blue-white lamp was caught by them all and reflected from one to another as boys might pass silver balls, interlacing and intertwining in an interminable dance. In the center, the fish flickered to and fro, a thing formed, it seemed, by the convergence of the light.

“Here you see him,” Father Inire said. “The ancients, who knew this process at least as well as we and perhaps better, considered the Fish the least important and the most common of the inhabitants of specula. With their false belief that the creatures they summoned were ever present in the depths of the glass, we need not concern ourselves. In time, they turned to a more serious question: By what means may travel be effected when the point of departure is at an astronomical distance from the place of arrival?”

In explaining the science of faster-than-light travel, Father Inire says that when the energy source is coherent and the mirrors are optically perfect, “the orientation of the wave fronts is the same because the image is the same. Since nothing can exceed the speed of light in our universe, the accelerated light leaves it and enters another. When it slows down, it reenters ours – naturally at another place.” It sounds like mystical nonsense, but remember, Father Inire is drawing on a half-forgotten piece of technology that developed sometime between our eras. It may seem magic to us, but it is, in fact, science. It’s the key to faster-than-light travel. The hologram (the fish), with the correct equipment, is in actuality a real creature piercing through from another dimension. In the distant future, humanity at some point figured out how to leap into these dimensions and back into ours as a way to quickly travel vast distances.

Father Inire references, “the ancients.” This is where Wolfe can be so very fascinating. The reference is to the ancient practice of catopromancy, the use of divining mirrors in ancient Greece and Rome by seers called specularii. Wolfe has linked what was considered magic with a future technological advancement. Science and magic are indistinguishable. Wolfe doesn’t want to stop there, though, because theology is science. The natural explanation is developed by and completed by the supernatural.

Here’s what I think is going on. All through the novel, Severian is being pulled along by forces that seem out of his control, and he encounters variations on the same theme. Events occur that seem vaguely familiar. I would call them echoes, or waves of light. Much like Father Inire’s mirrors, the echoes build up through the narrative and finally birth a solid reality.

Severian himself lives his life in a sort of metaphysical mirror-room in which sacramentality is coming to fruition, finally bursting into full bloom. This is the meaning of the journey he’s on, the echoes pierce through into another reality and return to ours with newfound solidity. He is finding himself, drawing newfound powers and virtues that draw on a higher dimension and taking on a more and more firm reality. It’s a picture of grace completing nature, of sacramentality, the Word become Flesh.

The genius of Wolfe is to write it in such a way that the concept is deeply spiritual but the miracle is mediated through the language of technology and magic. In fact, it’s theology the whole time.

Gene Wolfe, one of the best and most under-rated writers around – and, apparently, the inventor of the machine that makes Pringles – died on Palm Sunday. His Book of the New Sun is a challenging and beautiful read, focusing on the journey of an ex-torturer named Severian as he travels through the vast wasteland of a dying earth eons into the future. I read it about ten years ago and am desperate to read it again, a rare desire on my part since I re-read very few books.

One of Wolfe’s biggest fans is Neil Gaiman, who tells about meeting his hero:

I was as impressed and delighted by the Book of the New Sun as I was intimidated by it. Wolfe’s use of language, the grand sweep of his story, the way he used science fiction to illuminate ideas and people and to stretch my mind in ways it had never been stretched before, the way he played with memory and gave us a perfectly reliable unreliable narrator – all these things thrilled me…

I was a young journalist, and I asked for and was given an interview with Wolfe. I do not know what I expected, but whatever I imagined the author of those glittering, dangerous stories to have been, I was not expecting the genial gentleman I met.

Not only did Wolfe have a reputation as being a quiet, humble genius, he was also a committed Catholic who converted at the behest of his wife during their engagement. He made the faith his own and it shows in his work how deeply a Catholic worldview impressed itself upon him. Jeet Heer at The New Republic has an excellent write-up I highly recommend. After calling Wolfe, “The Proust of science fiction,” he comments that, like Flannery O’Connor and James Joyce, “[Wolfe] wrote analogical fiction: stories that worked at many levels as they fused the literal, the metaphoric, and the philosophic into the same narrative.” Perhaps this is why one reader describes New Sun as, “a Star Wars–style space opera penned by G. K. Chesterton in the throes of a religious conversion.”

New Sun is a novel for our disordered age. The distant future Wolfe foresaw descended upon us far more quickly and chaotically than anticipated, or perhaps it’s simply that the future is the same as the present which is the same as the past. In every age man is beset by evil. Severian was raised in the Guild of the Torturers from his early age and trained to become a passionless, disinterested killing machine. He worked without morals, and yet his disordered, stunted heart maintains a glimmer of humanity. His journey is that of a growing awareness of virtue and transcendent faith. His journey might even be compared with that of Dante through purgatory.

A torturer learns the imitation of Christ. Wolfe himself notes,

It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was “a humble carpenter” that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few seem even to have noticed that although Christ was a “humble carpenter,” the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip.

I’m going to read Book of the New Sun very soon. I hope you all will read it with me and marvel at the talent and craftsmanship of a man who was a master at the art of writing. Even if you can’t read it soon, take a minute to offer up a prayer for a brother Catholic who is now on a heroic journey of his own.

PS Here’s something controversial for all of your who like to argue about the definitions of sci-fi and fantasy, a parting gift from Gene Wolfe:

Should there be Catholic SF? Absolutely! Suppose we change that question just a little and say, “Should there be Catholic art?” Answer NO, and a lot of the world’s greatest art vanishes. Humanists would say the Divine Comedy is fantasy, but they are wrong. It is SF, based on the soft science of theology. Theology has just as much right to that word science as sociology and the rest do.

Guest post by Jeffrey Wald.

Count Tolstoy’s magnum opus War and Peace can be read on a variety of planes: historical fiction of the Napoleonic Wars; explication of Tolstoy’s theory of human history; exploration into “The Russian Soul”; etc. But perhaps the loudest narrative thread is the author’s clear disdain for Napoleon himself. One can imagine the venerable Count sitting up one day and deciding: I am going to destroy the pathetic notion that we (yes even we Russian victors) have that Napoleon was somehow a “great” man, even if it takes me 1296 pages to do it!

And so about three-quarters of the way through his masterpiece, we readers find ourselves in Moscow circa 1812. The French army has effectively been defeated. They are rushing from Russia as fast as their weary legs will take them. And Napoleon is with his army, fleeing right alongside them, or rather in front of them, until Berezina. There, he puts on his fur coat, gets into a sledge, and gallops off alone, abandoning his comrades. With scorn and disgust, Tolstoy describes this flight for what it is: cowardice, selfishness, and “the final degree of baseness, which every child is taught to be ashamed of.”

And yet, Tolstoy goes on to write, with increasing scorn and disgust, historians refuse to call a spade a spade and acknowledge Napoleon’s cowardice. Why? Because it does not fit with their notion of Napoleon’s “greatness,” and therefore his flight must be justified as something great and marked by genius:

Then, when it is no longer possible to stretch the so-elastic threads of historical discourse any further, when an action clearly contradicts all that mankind calls good and even just, historians resort to the saving notion of greatness. It is as if greatness excludes the possibility of the measure of good and bad. For the great man there is no bad. There is no horror that can be laid to the blame of someone who is great.

Is Tolstoy correct? Do we give the “great” person a pass? The genius, the inventor, the business giant, the political heavyweight – do we judge them by some extrinsic measure of good and bad, or by the vagaries of their supposed greatness? Do we at times excuse horrific behavior claiming the actor somehow exists outside the bounds of normal human conduct?

Tolstoy certainly thinks so, and cuts to the core of our weakness in doing so: “And it never enters anyone’s head that the recognition of a greatness not measurable by the measure of good and bad is only a recognition of one’s own insignificance and immeasurable littleness.”

Ouch! Every second of my life that I’ve spent thinking about Paris Hilton, or Prince William, or the like, now seems an utter waste.

And yet, our times perhaps suffers from the opposite extreme of Tolstoy’s. A deep skepticism pervades the air. Rather than excuse behavior claiming the person is “great,” we now adjudge greatness to no one. If good and bad are relative, can anyone be called good? Can anyone be called great? Is there such a thing as sanctity?

For Tolstoy, the answer is “yes,” there is at least One who can be called great, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is the Measure and the Measurer. And accordingly, the two extremes, hailing greatness where it is not and denying greatness where it is, are removed by Him. In Christ, the plague of relativism dies, for, as Tolstoy writes, “with the measures of good and bad given us by Christ, nothing is immeasurable.”

Jeffrey Wald is an attorney, husband, and father of three boys. His short fiction, poetry, and reviews have previously appeared in a variety of print and online periodicals including Touchstone, Stinkwaves Magazine, Summit Ave Review, Whistling Shade, Philosophy Now, Light, and Plainsongs.