The Catholic Novel and the 'Insider God'
Lauder, Robert E.
II I THE CATHOLIC NOVEL AND THE 'INSIDER GOD' ROBERT E. LAUDER The contrasting visions of Graham Greene and Walker Percy The Catholic novel is infinitely interesting. For a large part of this...
...All three novels, The Moviegoer (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1961), The Last Gentleman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1966) and Love in the Ruins (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1971 ) explore the search for a lost vision of mankind...
...In his excellent study, The Vital Tradition: The Catholic Novel in a Period o] Convergence, (Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1970), Gene Kellogg argues that for the last seventy years the Catholic novel has been converging with secular environment...
...In other words, that which Peter Berger warned about in A Rumor of Angels has become a reality: in their efforts to become relevant to secular culture Catholics have lost their self-identity...
...In his excellent, detailed study of Percy, The Sovereign Way[arer: Walker Percy's Diagnosis o] the Malaise (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1972, $10.00, p. 63), Martin Luschei sketches the landscape of Percy's fiction...
...Blondel stressed that the only truth about God that modem man would accept was a truth that corresponded to man's experience of reality, a truth that had an intrinsic relation to life...
...Ultimately, this is because, at its profoundest levels, the Catholic experience is infinitely interestng...
...While in Greene's novels the drama is centered around Commonweal: 79 theological paradox and the special actions of God, in Percy's novels the drama focuses on everyday life...
...The vocation of doctor is more humble, more ordinary, but it fits Percy's vision of man's living commitment to serve mankind...
...Thomas More has invented a machine to detect the individual effect of Original Sin and he feels it will be of tremendous service to mankind...
...but, in spite of their influence on the University of Chicago and on the two Saint John's Colleges built around their idea of the Great Books, the American educational establishment has not made the HutchinsAdler vision its own...
...This shift in Catholic understanding is already and will continue to be mirrored in Catholic novels...
...Psychiatrist Dr...
...We are discussing an emphasis, but an emphasis that is extremely important for illuminating our experience...
...The primary and defiant Catholic emphasis upon the spirit, which for so many generations had caused the creative spark between the Catholic communities and the secuIar environment, virtually ceased...
...How unlike the depiction of salvation is Percy's from Greene's...
...To represent the previous emphasis in the Catholic novel, Greene is a good choice not only because of his exceptional talent but also because the older theological vision reached its most powreful and most extreme depiction in his dramatic description of God's pursuit of man...
...Kellogg is onto something terribly important when he says that the most productive time for the Catholic novel is when the Catholic community both maintains its sense of identity and is simultaneously in close, abrasive contact with the secular environment...
...A wayfarer on a journey through life, through love for others Will may regain a lost vision...
...In an extremely fine analysis of Percy's three novels ("Percy's Reliques," Cross Currents, Vol...
...In addition to Percy, other contemporary novelists could be studied to show shifting attitudes and emphases within the Catholic community...
...Characterizing nineteenthcentury apologetics as extrinsicism, as stressing the source of Revelation rather than its relevance, and affectionately 25 October 1974:78 referring to Blondel's insights into God's presence in human history as "The Blondelian Shift," Baum stresses that the divine mystery of redemption is operative everywhere in human life...
...In "Greeneland," the more repulsive the priest, the more powerful is the presence of God...
...Guardini indicates that as the modern world ends the secularist will cease to benefit from the values of the Revelation he denies, that loneliness in faith will be terrible, that love will disappear from the public world but that the love from one lonely person to another will be all the more precious...
...The last sentence of the novel might serve as Percy's hymn to the everyday...
...Though I don't think Greene allows it to happen, his "outsider-God" comes dangerously close to being a deus ex machina...
...And, since learning is a circle, an inquiring mind can enter anywhere and follow a chain of ideas through to a total educational experience...
...While being part of the vital tradition, it mirrors the shift in theological emphasis that has taken place since Vatican II...
...The novels of such giants as Bloy, Mauriae, Bernanos, Greene and Waugh by exploring God's love affair with man have illumined the Catholic community's self-understanding...
...In the three novels mentioned the main characters, however labyrinthine the roads by which they discover God, become saints through God's special presence in the Church and the sacraments...
...The book ends with More, having returned to the sacraments on Christmas Eve, musing about the goodness of everyday life, of God's creation and of the love between him and his wife...
...The controlling insight in Percy's vision is not one of theological paradox but of God's presence in all of human life and the Catholic's awareness of that presence...
...Art o[ Getting a Liberal Education (1940, revised and updated 1972, with Charles Van Doren) or Hutchins' Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions-to put flesh on their words, to bind and box on the shelf what Truth and Value would look like if we could hold them in our hands...
...All of these writers may prove valuable in helping present-day Catholics attain a new self-image...
...In Percy's best book, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures o] a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End o] the WorM, just about every contemporary movement both within and outside of the Catholic Church is satirized...
...Greene's and Percy's visions are radically different but they fit into the same tradition...
...confluence...
...I can put God into a man's mouth just the same-and I can give him God's pardon...
...Typical of Greene's vision is that the sinner is really the saint...
...Baum declares that the foremost means of grace is life itself...
...The Macro presents "knowledge in depth," 4,207 major articles--some of them book-length, like the over 180,000-word section on Education--on the whole range of human knowledge...
...When Will Barrett joins the Vaught family at the end of The Last Gentleman, he is rejoining a stained suffering humanity with the hope that his love will make a difference...
...In what many consider to be Greene's three finest Catholic novels, The Power and the Glory, The Heart o] the Matter, and The End ol the Affair, God is present in what seems to be strangest places: the souls of a whiskey priest, an adulterous man and a promiscuous woman...
...In this post-Vatican II period which seems increasingly marked by confusion and apathy, the contribution of the Catholic novel is particularly important...
...Binx) Yes, 1'11 do that...
...In Greene's novels we have the entrances of God into time, in Percy's novels we have the rediscovery of God's perduring presence...
...He seems to find it at the conclusion of the novel by passing up a lucrative career as a stockholder, deciding to study medicine and marry Kate, who is his cousin (return to home and to vision...
...They have transformed it from a research tool, or a status symbol foisted on parents by a foot-in-the-door salesman as if it were a brain transplant for an underachieving child, to an active invitation to a liberal education...
...Thus, in the right (or wrong) hands it is a potentially radical teaching device, perhaps one of the few encyclopedias we could classify as subversive literature...
...Now, with the publication of the new, completely reconceived and rewritten fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica they have reached their seventh day, and they can rest...
...Like Albert Camus' doctor in The Plague, Percy's heroes have settled for serving man but their creator is very aware that man is more than man, that at the roots of the human is a divine mystery...
...Greene focuses on God's special action through special rites in special places with a select group ot people_9 The paradigm of all Greene's Catholic novels is that God is the outsider, though the loving outsider, pursuing sinners who eventually become saints...
...Percy is particularly interesting because of his knowledge of and affection for existentialist philosophy...
...and today's college student gets the rhetorical gi'avy but not the meat of a real Liberal education...
...In any event the choice is mine: I can languish in the malaise as a "curtailed I" or I can live transformed by the infinite passion...
...However, to the extent that Vatican 11 theology forms the Catholic community, Percy's type of novel will become more and more significant...
...Near the end of The Power and the Glory, in a discussion with the Communist leader, the "whiskey priest" articulates the type of sacramental emphasis that was typical of Greene's novels and of Catholic novels prior to Vatican II...
...Then I must assert myclaim to existence by the leap into the intersubjective communion, by which I acknowledge the claims of others upon me and within which I seek the answer to the question who am I? If I prove to be a knight of faith I may arrive at the incomprehensible faith of Abraham...
...Because God enters into the definition of man, because He is immanent to man's selfmaking, God should never be depicted as an object or even a subject totally extrinsic to man...
...In The Moviegoer, it is significant that the main character, Binx Boiling, loves to go to the movies...
...Working out of the French philosopher of action, Mauriee Blondel, Gregory Baum in his book, Man Becoming: God in Secular Language (Herder and Herder, 1970), expresses clearly the kind of shift in theological understanding which I think will characterize the Catholic novel...
...Binx has gained the vision which escapes the darkness of despair indicated in the quote from Kierkegaard which Percy uses to preface the novel: " . . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair...
...The wayfarer who is contemporary man finds himself wandering in the malaise, assailed by its deadly forms of inauthenticity and abstraction, its numbing everydayness...
...On Christmas Day, More takes his wife to bed: To bed we go for a long winter's nap, twined about each other as the ivy twineth, not under a bush or in a car or on the floor of any such humbug as marked the past peculiar years of Christendom, but at home in bed where all good folk belong...
...For a large part of this century it has been an "efficacious sign" in the Catholic community: by mirroring the experience of the Catholic community it has fed and nourished that community's life...
...Description...
...More important for our purposes is that Percy's world is not "Greeneland...
...The unattraetiveness of Greene's priests calls attention to his vision...
...Typical of Percy's vision, the possibility of a successful interpersonal relationship spells Will Barrett's salvation...
...The drama and ultimately the greatness of Greene's novels comes from his depiction of the "Hound of Heaven," entering the temporal at the strangest times and in the most unusual places...
...The 10-volume Micropaedia is the key, a glorified dictionary and index with 102,214 short entries (under 700 words) with cross references to, and capsule versions of, the major articles in the 19-volume Macropaedia...
...And there won't always be good men in your party.Then you'll have all the old starvation, beating, get-rich-anyhow...
...He wants a world where man can still be a hero or a saint...
...Percy's reading of people like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel and Sartre must have influenced his decision to convert to Catholicism a few years later...
...SCHROTH, $ . J . , who teaches journalism at Fordham and is an associate editor of Commonweal, is author of Thr Eagle and Brooklyn (Greenwood Press...
...XXII, Number One, Winter, 1972), Professor Joseph Hynes identified some of the elements crucial to Percy's vision in each of the three novels: in each the hero is a Southerner, a nonpracticing Catholic and in each book the vocation of the doctor looms large...
...Detailed studies of this shift and its incarnation in the Catholic novel should be very beneficial...
...It wouldn't make any difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me...
...For in many ways the most interesting thing about the new Britannica is not just the excellence of its scholarship but the way in which the promoters and editors have re-created what an encyclopedia is...
...The Sickness Unto Death) Percy's characters gain a vision, an insight into life's meaning that enables them to survive and even to hope for happiness in the temporal order...
...This was Evelyn Waugh's criticism of The End of the Affair_9 Waugh felt that Greene's suggestion that the childhood baptism of Sarah began to "work" in her later life was dangerously close to a magical view of the sacraments...
...Finally, the one-volume Propaedia outlines this knowledge in ten parts (Matter and Energy, the Earth, Life on Earth, Human Life, Human Society, Art, Technology, Religion, the History of Mankind and the Commonweal: 81...
...But it doesn't matter so much my being a coward--and all the rest...
...To use a metaphor that may be overworked, Greene's vision of Catholicism is vertical while Percy's is horizontal...
...To the extent that the Blondelian shift described by Baum continues to be influential in the Catholic community's self-understanding, the kind of novel Percy has written will be particularly valuable as a dramatization of the Catholic vision of life...
...i i THE SUBVERSIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA RAYMOND A. SCHROTH A look into the new 'Britannica" All of human learning, say Mortimer J. Adler and his senior colleague Robert M. Hutchins, is one...
...Prefatory to any discussion of either Greene or Percy it should be said that nothing in either vision contradicts or negates anything in the other vision...
...Percy is not yet Greene and I suspect that the Southern doctor-turned-novelist would be the first to admit it...
...Hutchins and Adler have been saying these things all their lives...
...The following brief dialogue between Binx and Kate, who has suicidal urges, depicts Binx' "leap of faith" and rediscovery of self and a saving vision: (Kate) "But I think I see a way...
...Here I will merely illustrate the shift by noting the shift in emphasis in two Catholic novelists...
...The South is a good locus for Percy because it serves as a metaphor for man's search for and rediscovery of himself...
...Furthermore, there are some unchanging truths and there is a basic intellectual loremthe so-called humanizing "liberal" arts--to which e~;eryone between 16 and 20 should be introduced...
...It is precisely the "outsider-God" image that allows for Greene's frequent use of theological paradox...
...Whatever else we may say of him, God is not boring...
...To further illustrate the contrast between Greene and 25 October 1974:80 Percy, a study could be made of Greene's priests and Percy's doctors...
...This loss of self-identity is the reason Kellogg offers why the Catholic novel has suffered...
...Kellogg uses the term "Catholic novel" in a restricted sense: Only a novel whose mainspring of dramatic action depends upon Roman Catholic theology, or upon the history of thought in one of the world's large Catholic communities, or upon "development" in Newman's sense is regarded as contributing to the flowering of major literary achievement that began to break down with the end of the nineteenth century and that tapered off--perhaps ended--when Roman Catholics, in the phrase now so widely used, "joined the modern world" after the Second Vatican Council...
...In spite of the wild satire, this novel is still an affirmation of the everydayness of religious faith and God's presence in the everyday...
...The two I have chosen are Graham Greene and Walker Percy...
...Kellogg writes: For many Catholics, confluence by the mid-1960s became so complete that they were no longer sure what the true Catholic essence was...
...From time to time these two intellectual entrepreneurs have taken their case to a more appreciative public and come up with academic and commercial devices (some would say gimmicks)--like the 1952 54volume Great Books of the Western World with Adler's Syntopicon of the "Great Ideas" and Hutchins' Great Conversations, or Adler's How to Read a Book: The RAYMOND h...
...I choose Percy to represent the new emphasis because he is, in both his talent and his vision, one of the most promising of the present crop of Catholic novelists...
...I believe that the Catholic community is moving back from confluence to convergence and that already there are hopeful signs of the birth of a new kind of Catholic novel...
...but that life is illumined by a Catholic vision...
...The sickness had interrupted his medical career in 1942...
...As a dweller in the m a l a i s e . . . I can never hope to escape its suffocation except by my own decisive act...
...No Catholic novelist has surpassed Greene in literary skill...
...It seems to me that if we are together a great deal and you tell me the simplest things and not laugh at me--I beg you for pity's own sake never laugh at me--tell me things like: Kate, it is all right for you to go down to the drugstore, and give me a kiss, then I will believe you...
...The quote from Guardini's The End o] the Modern World, which prefaces The Last Gentleman, captures the vision that animates both The Last Gentleman and the other two novels...
...Percy's amusing depiction of Bolling's movie-inspired fantasy world reveals that Binx is grouping for a vision...
...Existentialist thinkers whose insights helped form the theology that emerged from Vatican II were also the thinkers who greatly affected Percy in the years he was recuperating from tuberculosis...
...Very funny, but also multi-leveled, the book abounds with religious symbols...
...The first step is to recognize that condition for what it is...
...The editors have divided the 30-volume set into three sections...
...9 . . That's another difference between us...
...To draw back from this traditional lore in favor of pragmatic vocationalism, specialization, or a cafeteria collection of unrelated "credits"--which much of American higher education now threatens to do (egged on by Gerald Ford's observation that there is little correspondence between educational goals and the job market)-would be to succumb to the anti-intellectualism that has long been America's crippling curse...
...It's no good your working for your end unless you're a good man yourself...
...Will you do that...
...In his provocative article, "Catholic Faith and Fiction," (New York Times Book Review, January 16, 1972), Garry Wills argued that a new kind of Catholic novel was evident in the works of Wilfrid Sheed, Thomas Kenealy, Elizabeth Cullinan, Piers Paul Read and others...
...The popularity of Greene's latest novel The Honorary Consul suggests that there will always be room in the Catholic tradition for Greene's vision...
...The book is a kind of a Catholic 1984...
...When he wrote the book four years ago, Kellogg felt that the process of Catholic self-understanding in relation to secular culture had moved from convergence to 1 II FATHER ROBERT E. LAUDER teaches at Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception in Douglaston, N.Y...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 4
