There’s a new Catholic literary revival on. Young Catholic writers such as Christopher Beha, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Katy Carl are winning prizes, landing book deals with Big Four publishers, and being reviewed in major publications. Small Catholic presses are bringing out excellent titles and growing in reach and significance. The Catholic intellectual landscape of magazines, media, conferences, and websites is paying more attention to contemporary Catholic writers. Almost ten years after Dana Gioia, in “The Catholic Writer Today,” asked why Catholicism has so little purchase in American letters, the Church’s voice in literature is still small. But it is larger than it was, and it is growing. 

 

Will this fresh Catholic presence endure, flourish, and speak to American literature? And will Catholic literature contribute something to a renewal of Catholic faith? 

 

Those questions are interrelated. A new Catholic literary revival can speak to people outside of the Church if—and only if—it offers insights that are not noticed by secular literary culture. And if those insights are real, they will matter for Catholics as much as for anyone. Today I want to examine one such insight, drawn from Catholic theology, that the Church needs to recover and that will be especially fruitful for writers and other artists. Catholic literature needs to remember the concept of Sacramental action, which at its most basic is the idea that actions mean things.  

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A new Catholic literary revival can speak to people outside of the Church if—and only if—it offers insights that are not noticed by secular literary culture.

 

Why Goodness is Like Writing

 

Imagine that your father enjoys handyman jobs, but his drill is old and worn out. One day you buy him a new drill, of a model that he would like to have but would never buy for himself. As an object, your drill is no different than a drill he might have bought at a hardware store. However, to buy it for him, you had to listen to him complaining about his old drill, pay attention to him when he mentioned the drill he’d really like, drive to the hardware store, buy the drill, then drive to your father’s house and give it to him. You had to perform a series of actions, each of which expresses your love for your father. The drill and your actions become a symbol of your love, but their meaning is not reducible to the words “I love you.” Meaning is most apparent in language, but it reaches beyond language to include our choices.

 

Moral theology takes seriously the idea that our actions communicate—whether we want them to or not. Surprisingly often, the Church describes moral or immoral actions like acts of communication. It even distinguishes between good and bad actions in the language with which we evaluate writing. Good actions communicate God’s truth clearly; evil actions obscure it.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks about the sacrament of marriage, for example, as a communicative action by God, saying that the call to marriage is “written in the very nature of man and woman as they come from the Creator (§1603)”. A good marriage between a man and a woman is an embodied sign by which God communicates His love for His people. Gaudium et Spes describes sins against the integrity of marriage— divorce, adultery, fornication, and everyday acts of selfishness within marriage—as “disfigurements” that “have an obscuring effect” (47). They prevent the Divine meaning of marriage from being read. The Catechism agrees: when a culture denigrates marriage, the dignity of marriage is not “transparent with the same clarity” it has in a culture that celebrates free, permanent, fruitful marriage. 

 

In other words, marriage is a language, and actions are good or evil to the degree that they communicate God’s reality. We can see this in the extremes. A husband who stays at his wife’s sickbed while she battles cancer, supporting her and taking care of the children, offers a sign to everyone around him about God’s love for his people. If instead he were to have an affair and leave her to suffer alone, he would make it harder for everyone who sees him to believe that God’s selfless love truly is at the bottom of creation. Good actions clean and polish the window through which God reaches us; evil ones smear it with mud. 

 

Literature and Lyric Christianity

 

A literature that emphasizes meaningful action will be quite different from the dominant literary tradition that has been with us since the modernists. The twentieth Century was the great era of the novel of consciousness. Henry James, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, and many others pushed the novel to new feats of representation of the mind, often to the exclusion of plot and action. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster preferred characterization and regretted that a novel must have a plot; the great postmodern novels of the mid-twentieth century are often chock-full of action but reveal that action to be meaningless in the end. In this era a chasm opened between “literary” writers who dwelt on consciousness and “popular” writers who emphasized plot. 

 

In an era when consciousness was the heart of serious literature, religious poetry and fiction characteristically emphasized religious experiences that took place within characters’ minds. Conversion deepened our ability to perceive spiritual reality, and characters were saved when God transformed their vision so that they could see His presence in the people and things of earth. Denise Levertov’s poem “City Psalm” exemplifies this mode: a speaker “breathing the fumes” of a violent and polluted city, suddenly sees, “not behind but within,/within the dull grief,” “a gleam as of dew, an abode of mercy.” The speaker sees and hears God’s love in and through the city’s violence. His love does not cancel the violence but nevertheless makes it possible to find “Paradise” there. Likewise, the protagonist of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop expresses a combination of Catholic faith and the novel of consciousness by interpreting the Miracle of Guadalupe as a refinement of perception. He says,

 

“The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

 

This mode of modernist, consciousness-driven Christianity has given rise to great art, and it is entirely orthodox and deeply rooted in Catholic tradition. But other modes are open to Catholic artists. And the novel of consciousness—whether in its Modernist or Postmodern mode—feels played out. More recent fiction is tightly plotted and filled with action, even when its concerns seem, ultimately, about internal feeling and realization. Writers turn to politics, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, in the hopes that it will make the action matter. We want the novel to go beyond consciousness, even if many writers don’t know how to make that happen. This is where Catholicism comes in. 

 

The Novel and Actions that Mean

 

In Christopher Beha’s novel The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (2020), Margo Doyle, a gifted but frustrated young woman, has taken a leave of absence from her Ph.D. program and lives listlessly with her parents. She is a classic overthinking artist. Once, she wanted to be a poet, but for years she has been unable to write anything that she trusts. She has been trying to write a poetry of consciousness, but she finds that nothing in her consciousness seems worth noticing or saying. 

 

Near the end of the novel, the “self-destructive acts” committed by all members of the Doyle family have wrecked their finances, and Margo’s father has destroyed his health through alcohol. Margo arranges to move with her father into a small apartment and become his caregiver. One day, though, he gets loose, wanders into a street, and is hit by a car; she rushes to the hospital to stay with him, although of course there is nothing she can do to help. She arrives, sits down next to her father, and says, over and over again, “I’m here…I’m here.” And then…she finds she can write poetry again. Her mind begins to write while, in her speech she could “only bring out the same two words: ‘I’m here. I’m here.’” 

 

When Margo makes a sacrifice on behalf of another person she unlocks her creative energy because she has now taken an action that means something, in the quite literal sense that we can understand its meaning when we see her perform it. We observe a young woman turn aside from her career and social life to take care of her father and we can read the love—halting, imperfect, but nevertheless real—that her action expresses. Because her action is significant, she has something to write about. She has moved away from an art—and a life—made up purely of consciousness, which took her ever further inward and made her inscrutable, first to others, and ultimately to herself. We can read her action—and because other people can read her choice, she becomes legible to herself. 

 

Beha locates creativity in a different place than many great twentieth-century writers have found it. Those writers—many of the great modernists—found creative energy and originality by separating themselves from their peoples and diving deep within themselves. But a new kind of writing will find its meaning more in sacramental actions that build up shared meaning. The Church’s theology can be read from beginning to end as a meditation on God’s communication to us, and our communication to one another, through our actions, and this theology of meaning offers the literary world an understanding of action that can breathe fresh life into the novel. More importantly, a literature of sacramental action might remind us that a Christian life is a constant effort to speak through action, as each disciple turns her actions into the signs of God’s love for His people.