The Four Constraints of a Catholic Novelist
The question of what constitutes a Catholic novel or a Catholic novelist has led to complex conversations within Catholic culture for some time now. Does it make a difference to how a writer works whether the writer is Catholic or not; does it make a difference to a reader whether the novels they are reading are written by Catholic authors or not? We don’t care terribly that J. S. Bach was not Catholic. Should we care that C.S. Lewis was not Catholic either? Or Dickens? Or Steinbeck? Should we ignore the question entirely and read and write whatever we like? Can we come up with a reasonable and useful definition of a Catholic novelist and a Catholic novel, or at least, a novel acceptable to Catholics?
In my career in the tech world, I learned that many questions can be most usefully addressed in terms of constraints. Constraints identify essential properties that a system—or a novel, in this case—must demonstrate, in order to be accepted for use. Just as we simplify system design, we can perhaps simplify decisions about what to write, and even what to read, by framing the question in terms of its essential constraints. Anything that meets the essential constraints will suffice for our purpose.
Can we define a set of constraints for the practice of a Catholic novelist? I believe we can, and I propose that there are just four essential constraints.
The Story Constraint
The first constraint of the novelist is to tell a story. Telling a story is different from writing an essay. An essay advances and defends a proposition. A story creates an experience. In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron cites modern neurological research to argue that story is part of how the brain processes and stores information, part of how it guides our thoughts and actions. Brain imaging shows that exactly the same parts of the brain light up when hearing a story as when experiencing something in real life. We experience stories the way we experience life. Stories allow us to shortcut the gaining of experience that enables us to function in the real world. Propositions don’t do that. We need stories, in other words, like we need food and water and oxygen. They are simply part of how the human animal works.
The novelist, whether Catholic or not, has to deal in stories. Otherwise, he is not writing novels but “some other mongrel thing,” as Flannery O’Connor put it. If a writer uses the form of a novel to try to slip a proposition by the reader’s guard, after the fashion of those abysmal “business novels” that had a mercifully brief vogue in the ‘90s, they are failing the story constraint, and this includes all theological propositions, no matter how important they may be. Telling stories is, however, entirely in keeping with Christianity, which presents the whole arc of creation as a story and professes a Bible that is full of stories. Christ himself taught using stories. Stories are integral to the faith. A Catholic novelist, like any other novelist, must traffic in stories, not in propositions. A Catholic reader should demand no less, from any novelist.
The Christ Constraint
The Church makes wide use of the arts to ornament and support human acts of divine worship. Music, painting, sculpture, and architecture all play integral parts in the liturgy. Fiction does not. Why is this? It is, I would suggest, because Christ is a singularity.
What happens in the sanctuary is itself already a story: one not merely told in the sanctuary, but eternally enacted there. It has been called the greatest story ever told, but that does not really capture its significance. Christ’s story accomplishes a universal and complete change in the relationship of mankind to God. It can never be repeated, varied, or improved upon; it is an archetype that can have no other instances. It is done once and for all, and it changes everything. It cannot be repeated, for it leaves nothing to be done. It is a singularity. You cannot invent another Christ. You cannot write another Christ story.
Romeo and Juliet is a great story, but it is a story of a type, and there can be other stories of that type. Two other teenagers can fall in love, face opposition, and end up killing themselves because of a tragic miscommunication or some other form of teenage foolishness. But despite the similarities, despite the similar archetype, Bonnie and Clyde is a different story. Romeo and Juliet does not exhaust the “foolish young lovers” genre. You can write as many “foolish young lovers” stories as you like. They will all bear some resemblance to Romeo and Juliet, but they will be different stories.
There are, of course, many ways in which we can imitate the life and example of Christ. The lives of the saints are full of heroic deaths, for example, and yet while those deaths, even though they are in service to Christ and His Church, and therefore in some significant part imitations of Christ, do not throw open the gates of Heaven to all mankind. They are open already. Peter’s storied insistence on being crucified head down, feeling himself not worthy to die the same way as Christ, hints at this difference.
The stories of saints, then, can be multiplied. We can even invent entirely fictitious saints and they will still convince us as examples of Christian sanctity. Many medieval saints were just this: fictitious. But we cannot invent an entirely fictitious story of an incarnation, death, and resurrection in the manner of Christ. That story can be retold, but it cannot become a new story.
An illustration of this is C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. We recognize that in telling the story of Aslan’s sacrifice, Lewis is telling the Christ story. Not another Christ story, but the Christ story in another form. Insofar as there is any novelty in it, though, it falls away from the Christ story. As Fr. Michael Ward has pointed out in his September 2020 Catholic Herald article, “Aslan is a brilliant representation of Jesus. But where’s Mary?”, there is no incarnation in Wardrobe. Aslan is not born, in a stable or anywhere else. He lands. Christmas is represented not by the coming of Christ/Aslan but by the coming of Father Christmas, a mixing of mythologies of which Tolkien was so critical. But I would suggest that Lewis had no choice. To make the story his own, he had to borrow as much from pagan sources as from Christian ones. To retell the full arc of incarnation, death, and resurrection would have been to produce something obviously and painfully a pale imitation of its source. To produce instead the charming and moving story of Wardrobe, with all of its hoped-for effect of preparing the imagination for the Christ story itself, Lewis had to veer away from the singularity.
You can write a pastiche of the one true Christ story, but no one will ever think of it as anything but that. There is no room for novelty in it at all, only pastiche or heresy. This is why there is no room for fiction in the sanctuary. Christ is a singularity.
I’m not suggesting that you can’t write recapitulations of the Christ story. Rather, I am saying that that is all you can do with the Christ story. You cannot write another Christ story to stand beside the Christ story that we have. You cannot plausibly invent David the Christ or Andrew the Christ. No matter what name we give, it is always the story of Jesus the Christ, because to create another Christ would be to violate the singular nature of Christ and his mission. Christ can only be singular. He needs and can admit no parallel.
But if you can’t write another Christ story, in the sense in which you can write another Romeo and Juliet story, what stories can you write? The singularity that is Christ dominates the Catholic landscape. That landscape, however, still contains millions of stories that are not singularities, stories that repeat over and over and yet are different stories each time because they happen to different people in different times and places. This includes the many other stories that the Bible tells, that Christ himself tells. One can tell another story in the pattern of Cain, of Ruth, of Jonah, of Job, of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan. Many different sons can burn up their portion in riotous living, return to many different fathers, and be resented by many different brothers, giving each story its own particularity and character. We can read a Good Samaritan story, recognize that it is a story of that type, and still feel that it is a new story with new and particular characters, just as we can with iconic stories and characters from the rest of literature, such as Romeo, Juliet, Falstaff, Ahab, Scrooge, or Gatsby. Not so with Christ.
But there is a problem here, because, in the Catholic view of creation, all of these endlessly renewable particular stories take place on a plain which is dominated by and oriented towards the singularity of Christ, the great gravity well which draws all things to itself and will one day bring all creation to itself. Every one of those stories is pulled towards Christ and exists in a universe that is oriented towards Christ, and must, if extended to its true end, meet Christ the singularity. And if that is the place that all of these particular stories end, is not the Catholic novelist obliged to follow them to their end in the singularity? And if so, does that mean that every story must end with a conversion, a reconciliation, and a desire to sin no more? Must they all, in other words, end in the confessional? Because, let us be frank about this, that would get tiresome pretty quickly. The particularity of stories is lost if they all end exactly the same way. Even biblical stories do not always work this way. It is a common practice in exegesis to attempt to show how this biblical story or that points to Christ, how the celebration of the joys of marriage in the Song of Songs, for instance, points on to the joyful union of Christ and his Church. But such exegesis exists only because the stories themselves don’t go that far. They end in the human, and in the particularity of human experience, and leave it to the reader and the scholar to connect them to the singularity.
Not every novel encompasses the entire life of its characters. Most, instead, cover a relatively short period. Most end at a point at which it would be impossible to say if the characters were now permanently oriented towards Christ. Many of them may be oriented in just the opposite direction, or off on some other angle towards some other temporary and particular state of being. This is true of a great many novels, including those commonly considered great Catholic novels.
Some Catholic novels approach the moment of reconciliation. The example of Brideshead Revisited is useful here. While it ends in some form of reconciliation or conversion for several characters, there is virtually no doctrine in it. Church teaching is briefly mocked by Charles in a couple of places, and comically misunderstood by Rex, but never really expounded or defended, even by Brideshead. It plays no part in Marchmain’s deathbed repentance, or in Julia’s change of heart, or in Charles’ conversion. All of that is represented by signs and symbols, not by doctrine. It is never about the change of the head but about the surrender of the heart. I don’t suggest that this is the only blueprint for building close to the border, but it seems a very important feature for anyone who might seek to map or to tread that landscape.
Some authors, yes, will take their characters all the way to heaven, as Lewis does in The Last Battle, but this is the exception rather than the rule. But why is an incomplete story, a story that leaves the orientation of the character askew, worth telling for a Catholic novelist or worth reading for a Catholic reader? The answer, I believe, can be found by looking at the next constraint.
The Anthropological Constraint
Humans need stories, so a Catholic novelist is simply meeting a human need, just as a Catholic chef and a Catholic plumber meet human needs for food and water. We can reasonably ask whether the phrase “Catholic novelist” signals anything more than the phrase “Catholic plumber,” which means only that the plumber happens to be Catholic and tells us nothing about how they ply their trade. If so, the question would hardly vex us as it does. But if a Catholic novelist is different from a Catholic plumber, wherein lies the difference?
A different analogy may throw some light on the question. For a Catholic, it is an absolute requirement that your priest be Catholic. The vicar, rabbi, or imam down the road may all be stalwart individuals. They may be better, wiser, more virtuous, and more able than your local priest. But they simply lack the capacities of a Catholic priest. They cannot perform the sacraments. They cannot put God in our mouths. We can accept no substitutes.
But Catholics can and do read the works of non-Catholic novelists, so a Catholic novelist is neither Catholic like a priest nor Catholic like a plumber. The third option is that the Catholic novelist is Catholic in the way a certain doctor might be Catholic. An Anglican, Jewish, Muslim, or atheist doctor can cure what ails you just as well as a Catholic doctor can, but there are certain issues for which you will be likely to trust a well-formed Catholic doctor more than the others, not because of any difference in technical competence, but because of a difference in ethics. There are certain things that a Catholic doctor of this sort will not do or will do differently than other doctors, because they see the human person in a different light.
A Catholic novelist has the same technical competence as non-Catholic novelists, and non-Catholic novelists and novels often provide wonderful reading. But there are certain things that a Catholic novelist, in light of the relation between faith and art, will not do, or will do differently.
Much like the Catholic doctor, the Catholic novelist will operate on the basis of a Catholic anthropology: that mankind was created by a loving God, is capable of reason, and is subject to original sin. You don’t have to be a Catholic doctor to treat your patients according to this anthropology, but if, as a doctor, you consider what constraints your faith places on your medical practice, you will not treat patients in a way contrary to it. Similarly, you don’t have to be a Catholic novelist to write stories that are consistent with this anthropology (whether your characters profess it or not), but if, as a Catholic, you accept this anthropology, you will not write in a way that is contrary to it.
In short, a Catholic novelist operating within Catholic anthropology will create characters who are created by a loving God, capable of reason, and subject to original sin (not necessarily characters that share this view, simply characters who are what this anthropology says they are). These characters may be wayward, since they are subject to original sin. Indeed, it would be false to the anthropology if they were not. If we write stories about people, we will be writing stories about sinners. Anything else would be a lie. Telling the stories of sinners, then, is not anathema to the Catholic novelist. On the contrary, it is a requirement.
And because most novels are not stories of an entire life from birth to death, but stories of incidents in a life, and also because not every sinner is reconciled to Christ in this life, the Catholic novelist can and should tell stories of sinners, including those who remain just as much sinners at the end of the story as they were at the beginning, or even worse. This is simply an anthropological truth about human beings: We are not always headed in the right direction.
But if a Catholic novelist is constrained to write stories about sinners, and therefore about sin, why read or write novels at all? The novelist is not a preacher. Novelists fail the story constraint if they preach. Novelists are purveyors of experiences, and experiences prepare us both to appreciate new experiences and to understand new propositions. The Christ story is, after all, a story, an experience. There are many propositions about it, but at its heart it is a story. It is not the novelist’s story to tell, at least not as part of the long labor of novel-writing. But it is a story that makes a claim: Christ saves. But saves us from what? Why do we need saving at all? We can give a propositional answer, of course, but propositions do not convince the heart the way experiences do. By telling the stories of sinners and of sin, the Catholic novelist provides the experiences that justify the need to be saved. The novelist, in other words, is the apostle of the fall.
But this does not mean that we can write only about sin. Even fallen humans are capable of love as well as hate, courage as well as cowardice, wisdom as well as folly. The doctrine of the fall tells us not only that we sin, but also that sin is a defect in our nature, rather than being the nature of our nature. It tells us what we have fallen from—those other elements of Catholic anthropology: that we are creatures of a loving God and capable of reason—as well as what we have fallen to. This is why we may write stories of love as well as hate, of heroism as well as cowardice, of wisdom as well as folly. Sin will enter into all of them somehow; there is no story without conflict. However, sin is not the whole of human reality; that too would leave the story without conflict. Both sides of the equation are implied in the title “apostle of the fall.”
The Concupiscence Constraint
But if the novelist is the apostle of the fall, there is a further difficulty and a further constraint. The novelist is a sinner, and so is the reader. A sinner writing stories of sinners to be read by sinners runs the danger of leading into temptation. Nor can the novelist get around this by adding a ringing condemnation of sin to every story. That would be preaching. It would be a proposition, and that would violate the story constraint.
Because of this, the novel occupies a somewhat uneasy place in Catholic culture. To some it seems scandalous, to others unnecessary. If taken to the extreme, the intersections of the concupiscence constraint with the other three constraints would leave no scope for fiction at all. And yet the Bible itself is not without its passages that might lead us into temptation.
O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!
For your love is better than wine,
your anointing oils are fragrant,
your name is oil poured out;
therefore the maidens love you.
Draw me after you, let us make haste.
The king has brought me into his chambers.
—Song of Solomon 1:2-4
Much of what tempts us is not things bad in themselves but things good in themselves that we covet out of proportion and out of season. If someone were tempted by this passage, the fault would be in the reader, not the text. Some might say that we should avoid reading anything that might tempt us. But what then would we read, or look at, or listen to, or eat, or drink? The world is full of good things that we might covet out of proportion and out of season. Many of these are, in proportion and in season, essential to life.
And the Bible does not only contain stories of good things. It describes the first murder, for instance. And might I not, seeing my brother preferred over me, and having read how Cain slew Abel, think how much it might relieve my feelings to hit my brother over the head with a rock and hide his body? Every story, no matter what good or evil thing it describes, may strike a chord in us that leads to temptation. And precisely because stories move us more deeply and more easily than propositions, adding a pious exhortation to virtue does little to blunt the temptation we may feel.
But if we are to prepare ourselves to understand sin and our own sinfulness, we have to grapple with the sinfulness of our nature. If we are to appreciate our need for salvation, or to make any sort of attempt at virtue, we need to understand sin. But how are we to understand sin without wallowing in it?
Human beings are wired for story. It is fundamental to how we understand the world. Stories of sin and sinners may indeed be a source of temptation and therefore occasions of sin, but they are also essential to understanding sin and sinfulness, and therefore to virtue. Nor can we make any sharp division as to which stories do one and which do the other. Any story that portrays sin truthfully is capable either of making us wiser about sin or of tempting us to sin. Equally, any story that soft-pedals the depiction of sin in an attempt to avoid leading the reader into temptation may, in so doing, give a false understanding of sin, thus potentially leaving the reader open to other temptations, including puritanism, sanctimony, and scrupulosity.
One of the functions of story is to allow readers to have experiences that they could not have in real life because they lack the time or the resources, or because the experiences are too dangerous, or because they are experiences that would require a different body or a different circumstance. They permit us to have the kind of understanding that comes from experiences without having the experiences in the flesh. If what Lisa Cron reports about how the brain processes stories as if they were experiences is correct, then stories permit men to have the experiences of women and women those of men, children those of adults, adults those of children (which we too easily forget), and the people of one culture those of another, all of which is important to building charity between people.
Yet literature is not virtual reality. Our reception of stories is much more nuanced and sophisticated than that. A great novel can allow us to stand both within the experience and outside of it at the same time, to be at once fully in the moment and fully reflective, to get our hands dirty while keeping them clean. And that is a greater thing than even experience itself can provide. Because it is a story, and we know it is a story, we can be passionate about it and dispassionate at the same time. And this is a state in which we are most open to learning and to understanding, having at once the giddiness of experience and the calmness of contemplation.
This particular kind of dual consciousness, which only a story can provide, seems to me particularly apt for the development of our understanding of sin and our sinful nature. It is a state in which we are most apt to recognize not only how we are led into temptation, but how others are led to sin as well. And this understanding may lead us to regard their failings (and our own) with charity, where memorizing a list of proscriptions might lead us only to self-righteousness and disdain—or self-hatred and bitterness. “Love the sinner and hate the sin” is a hard teaching. But the kind of experiential understanding of our sinful nature that we can get from a great story can prepare us to practice this difficult virtue.
A story can enable us to gain a better comprehension of sin and sinfulness without actually committing the sins or exposing ourselves to the dangers of those sins, to strike without wounding, to betray without ruining, to lie without deceiving, and thus to be wiser about our anger, greed, and cowardice. And here we find our justification for not taking every story to the character’s ultimate meeting with the singularity that is Christ. Each step along the pilgrim road, including the missed steps, the steps that take us back rather than forward, have something to teach us about our fallen nature: not teach as in “formulate a proposition,” but as in “make wise through experience.”
This is a tricky business, of course. Understanding and temptation walk side by side here. And yet, without understanding, we all the more easily fall prey to temptation.
The general answer to the concupiscence constraint, I think, is simply to tell the truth. Most of what leads us into temptation is lies. Pornography is a lie about sex. It is not pornographic to talk truthfully about sex. It is pornographic to lie about sex. But while sex is usually the first thing we think of when we worry about the moral truthfulness of books, it is not the only place that fiction can lie to us or lead us into temptation. To take a less obvious, and therefore more insidious, example: Literary fiction can be designed to flatter its readers, to make them think well of themselves for their erudition, their sophistication, even their cynicism. It often looks down its nose at its characters and can indulge in shock tactics whose true intent is not to shock the reader but to give them the frisson of self-satisfaction that they are not shocked at this event or statement or use of language that they believe would shock less sophisticated souls. It is the same tactic the f-bomb comedian uses to make his audience feel superior for being too sophisticated to be shocked. Yet in literary fiction this temptation to sin is unlikely to be caught by any form of censorship or disapprobation.
There are also the comfortable pious lies we like to tell ourselves, those lies that sweet and pious books can sometimes tell, like the lie that every evil deed is punished in this life. The truth is, liars and cheats often do prosper. If we must say that virtue is its own reward, that is because virtue is not always rewarded in life. The pious lie that the virtuous will always prosper or that the sinner’s deeds will always catch up with them is as vicious a lie as anything the pornographer says. And, like the lie of the sophisticate, it flatters the reader with thoughts of their own virtue and the neat little bubble of innocence within which they imagine themselves to live.
This is not to say that every novel that is truthful about sinners and sinning will or even should find a receptive audience. Readers aware of their own concupiscence may wish to steer clear of even the most truthful depiction of certain acts. Ordinary self-awareness can limit the number of things we want to, or can prudently, read about. More subtly, though, the lies that we cherish in our own hearts will make us resist truthful reading experiences that will challenge those lies.
And then again, the novelist, being a sinner, may be harboring and peddling lies themselves, living in their own bubble of imagined innocence or imagined sophistication, and the reader is entitled to suspect the same, no matter what label the novelist puts on themselves or their work.
Finally, there are the practical constraints of the publishing industry, all of which, other than the simple question of whether the book is any good or not, are tied up in one way or another with concupiscence. Publishing is a business and, like any business, it must operate in the world as it is, in the realm of the possible rather than the ideal. Publishers may have their own set of standards and their own marketing considerations that may forbid things that should not be out of bounds on a general analysis, but which they forbid based on their own beliefs and preferences of those of the market they sell to: words that must not be used, acts that must not be portrayed, opinions that lead characters must not hold. Publishers may also have to ask themselves questions about whether they will constrain themselves to the sensibilities of the most sensitive or puritanical of their readers or risk disapproval or boycotts from some part of the audience they hoped to serve. Alternatively, there may be publishers who, reflecting their audience, demand a level of shocking or even offensive material. There may be books that a Catholic novelist writes that no Catholic publisher will touch, but a secular publisher might. Or there may be books that only a Catholic publisher will publish because the mainstream won’t touch them. This division, too, is a product of the fall.
Do these constraints help us define what Catholics should be writing and reading? There are two poles to this debate, with a spectrum of nuance between. On one hand, we have the idea that Catholic books should be “safe,” that they should be free of sin and doctrinal error. The other is that Catholicism and literature are orthogonal to each other and that to call someone a Catholic writer means nothing different than calling them a Catholic plumber: that their faith does not impinge upon their craft at all. I find neither of these poles satisfactory. As I have argued above, we cannot tell true stories about fallen creatures without telling the truth about sin and sinfulness, and we cannot write truthfully about sin and sinfulness without some danger of leading the reader into temptation. The issue of doctrinal error is moot if the novel obeys the story constraint, because doctrines are propositions and a novel should deal in experiences. But if a novel removes the physical danger of experience, it does not remove its moral danger. We cannot make stories entirely “safe,” any more than we can make it entirely morally safe to walk out the front door and see the world as it is and as it acts day to day. Yet as St. John Henry Newman suggests in “The Idea of a University,” experiencing the evils and temptations of the world through stories can fortify us for the days when we meet its evils and temptations in the flesh.
The moral role of stories is to fortify us by making us wise, and by making us wise in ways propositions alone, however wise they may be, can never accomplish. Just as we cannot raise healthy and capable children by keeping them perfectly safe from all possibility of harm, we cannot make ourselves morally robust by turning our eyes from our own sinful nature. Stories give us a unique way to confront experiences of sinfulness while, if we are wise, avoiding the damages of sin.
The four constraints I have outlined in this article, I believe, create a reasonable test suite for a program of reading and of writing that is neither sweetly (but deceptively) “safe” nor morally reckless. It is a program that forbids us nothing that is true, great, and beautiful in literature, no matter what its source. But if I had to reduce the responsibilities of a Catholic novelist to a single thought, it would be this: tell truthful stories about sinners.