The Arab Spring

One way of making sense of what has been going on in North Africa and the Middle East over the last year is to look at literature and film. Of Gods and Men, which won the Grand Prize at Cannes, for example, clearly struck a chord with a great many people and is well worth watching. (The press kit also provides some useful information which could easily be used in the classroom.)

However, great a movie as it is, it doesn't provide the last word on North African politics. Clearly there is plenty more to the Arab Spring than what is going on in Algeria. There have been some wonderful books written in Egypt, for instance, which help shed light on the difficulties faced by Coptic Christians in recent weeks and months (to pick just one important topic among many). A novel I particularly enjoyed was Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery by Bahaa' Taher (some of which can be read here). 

As the translator, Barbara Romaine, points out in her interesting introduction: "just as it is no accident that [Taher's] novel - about a remarkable alliance between a Muslim village in Upper Egypt and the inhabitants of a nearby Coptic monastery - emerges precisely when it does [in 1996], it is no coincidence that the novel has not just one chief heroic figure, but two: the one a Muslim and the other a Copt."

She further points out that "it is arguably not primarily the issue of religious identity that has historically given rise to conflict between Muslim and Coptic communities. In fact, the most serious trouble between Coptic and Muslim groups has occurred at times when external or internal political forces have disrupted Egypt's social fabric to such a degree that its citizens 
have found themselves in a struggle to assert their identity as Egyptians."

Which is why this book is so important in the contemporary climate. Taher doesn't give us the sort of novel we might want because he doesn't play on our western prejudices. What he gives us instead is something much more profound and, ultimately, something much more hopeful:

"[T]he Western reader...," he wrote in an interview with Egypt Today, "wants to read about the exotic East, and about the discrimination against women. They want to hear that the regimes are dictatorial, and that there are fierce problems between minorities. Khalti Safeyya said that things are not that bad, and this is something they do not want to hear. The BBC interviewed me about it, and the anchor kept interjecting, ‘Surely things are not really as you describe them.’ At the end I told her it is your testimony against mine. Go back to what Lucy Duff Gordon wrote, and she was a visitor to the area I write about. If I write a novel about [discrimination], it will become a best-seller tomorrow."

However, I'm not recommending this book because it's timely or because it offers a hopeful picture of life in Egypt but because it's a great piece of literature. It's short - a mere 124 pages - and yet the plot, the characterisation and the sense of place are all vividly realised. There is, admittedly, little sense of what the Coptic monks actually do in the monastery - Of Gods and Men is much better at giving us a sense of the liturgy - but we are given a wonderful portrait of ordinary village life among ordinary Muslims and their relationship with at least some of their Christian neighbours.

A few thoughts about 'Jamrach's Menagerie'

Jamrach's Menagerie, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is a fascinating book. The subject matter is, at times, grim indeed but it's worth reading for the prose style alone. I have used the section about the capture of the Ora (page 162), for example, to show my students how to make use of the senses, and especially smell, in their own writing. 

The book also raises some interesting questions for the Catholic English teacher. To explain further I need to mention some key moments in the plot so please look away now if you don't want to know what happens.

When the sailors are shipwrecked they cling at first to the vestiges of their humanity: they bury their dead at sea and pray. But as their plight and their actions become more desperate the novel's language also becomes more explicitly religious. The decision to turn cannibal creeps up on the characters and soon they are drinking blood and eating flesh:

"Drink of this," said Dan when it was his turn, raising the cup as if it was a chalice, "for this is my blood, shed for thee..."

It is the body and blood of ordinary human beings which sustain the sailors because, as one of the characters explains, "enough praying had gone on in that boat to sanctify all the holy places of the earth and it had long since become plain that God didn't answer. Not so's the average idiot could understand anyway."

However, religious questions remain to the fore as the plot begins to revolve around the notions of love and sacrifice. The last three sailors draw lots to decide who shall be shot and eaten and Jaffy, the young narrator, finds that he has agreed to kill his best friend, Tim. In a powerful but terrible inversion, Tim assures his friend that he's "got the worst of it":

"No blame, Jaf," he says. "I'd do the same for you. You're my best friend."

The novel ends not with Tim's death or with Jaf's rescue but with his return to London. Unable to face up to what he has done, he shuts himself away from everyone in the close-knit community, including Tim's mother and sister, the girl he has always loved. And yet his shame is all apparently self-imposed. When he emerges from his shell the people of Bermondsey do not reproach him for killing and eating one of their own. Even Tim's mother's verdict is: "I know it's not your fault, Jaffy ... I know it really, but it's just a very hard thing."

He lights candles for the dead in the seamen's bethel and gradually time and the understanding of those around him bring a kind of peace. But, however hard he tries to forget it, the essential question still remains: "My heart hurt, and at night I'd look up at the sky and remember the stars at sea and ask: am I forgiven?"

The answer, as far as there is an answer in the novel, seems to be yes. Tim's sister, the sister of the friend he has killed and eaten, moves in with him, in what is perhaps the book's most implausible moment, and life goes on. 

One could say that this is a book in which the goodness of God is replaced by the goodness of people, a goodness so wide it can encompass even those who have resorted to cannibalism. As Carol Birch explains: "Partly what moved me to write this novel was how much love there was in the accounts of the people who survived for the people who hadn't." 

Jaffy's world is ultimately godless and, ultimately, godless worlds do not work in the same way as God-filled ones so, although Jamrach's Menagerie is a beautiful and challenging novel, it is not one, I think, whose moral questioning can go unchallenged. 

‘Be dumb, or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to come.’

'Vesica Piscis' by Coventry Patmore

In strenuous hope I wrought,


And hope seem’d still betray’d;


Lastly I said,


‘I have labour’d through the Night, nor yet


Have taken aught;


But at Thy word I will again cast forth the net!’


And, lo, I caught


(Oh, quite unlike and quite beyond my thought,)


Not the quick, shining harvest of the Sea,


For food, my wish,


But Thee!


Then, hiding even in me,


As hid was Simon’s coin within the fish,


Thou sigh’d’st, with joy, ‘Be dumb,


Or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to come.’

From The Unknown Eros

A poem for Catholic bloggers?

The National Book Awards

The National Book Award finalists have just been announced and there are a number of books on the list which immediately grabbed my attention. One of them is The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak, a former Jesuit.


Some of what he calls, in this interesting conversation, his genealogy of faith has found its way into his first novel:


Did I, in the first-person narrative voice of the memoir, have a story to tell? That question remains open for anyone who may want to read what became A Long Retreat. Excised, however, from the middle of that spiritual memoir are facts that I would eventually weave into the fiction of The Sojourn. In my work of nonfiction, I talked a great deal about the genealogy of faith that my grandparents had passed along, and my opportunity as a Jesuit to travel to and live in Eastern Europe, so that I could taste and see the reality of the lives that populated the mythological “old country” I had heard about as a youth. But when those chapters hit the nonfiction cutting room floor, I thought, “Okay, maybe not here, but they belong somewhere, and maybe my next project ought to find out where.”

The Pen and the Cross

Some of the most interesting work about Catholicism and English Literature in the last few years has come from French specialists. I shall write about Brian Sudlow's Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England, 1880-1914 another time but today I want to mention The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature 1850-2000 by the recently retired Professor of French at King's College London, Richard Griffiths.

Griffiths is an interesting man. He is now an Anglican Priest and has written, among other things, a book about Poetry and Prayer for Lent. The best moments in The Pen and the Cross come when his sympathy for Catholicism, his French expertise and his knowledge of English Catholic Literature come together, as when he writes about Graham Greene and French Catholic writers.

There are also some wonderful surveys in this book. I particularly enjoyed the chapter about Gerard Manley Hopkins which would be a great introduction to the poet's work for 6th Formers.

However, I have to take issue with some of his judgements about Catholicism and the 20th Century novel. Griffiths is clearly more comfortable with what he calls "the heady atmosphere of the build-up to Vatican Two" than he is with the hermeneutic of continuity and so he aligns himself with those authors who, like "Greene and Lodge have shown that a new, vital, more literary Catholic novel can be created on the basis of dialogue and uncertainty".

Evelyn Waugh, therefore, has a "very rigid view of Catholic faith and doctrine" and "his work is essentially a dead-end" while Greene "stands as a rock at the centre of the Catholic literature of his time". And, like Waugh, a number of other writers "entrenched themselves in a last-ditch defence of traditional values".

So Alice Thomas Ellis gets relatively short shrift, in part because of her "predictable sideswipes against the modern Church", and Muriel Spark is a flawed genius partly her Catholicism is "of a traditional type, untouched by the modern tendencies that we have seen in so many other Catholic writers of the period."

I would argue instead that it is precisely writers like Waugh, Spark and Alice Thomas Ellis who provide the basis for a Catholic literary revival. In the years since Waugh's death, Britain may not have produced its own Martin Mosebach, a literary heavyweight and champion of orthodoxy, but it is surely only a matter of time. 

I am not writing off writers like Lodge and Greene, whom Griffiths rates so highly, but I would want very strongly to challenge the suggestion that "traditional values" are dead. The accession of Pope Benedict XVI suggests very strongly that the theological tide, and with it (ultimately) the Catholic literary tide, has turned.

But I don't want to end with criticism of The Pen and the Cross. Despite a few puzzling omissions (like Rumer Godden), Richard Griffiths has given us a fascinating book which has left me wanting to follow up a great number of novels, poems and writers. Catholic English teachers and Catholic schools will certainly want to have a copy on their shelves.

Teen Magazines

Teen magazines are really not my thing but, as these things go, t! magazine is much better than most. As well as all the usual articles about fashion, make-up and Tom Daley, there is also an article in the current edition about World Youth Day and another about Mary's Meals. Perhaps as important is what is not there. The editors are keen to leave parenting to parents.

The magazine also runs journalism courses for students. These run at various points during the year and have to be paid for but they sound as if they could be interesting.

The Translation of the Bones

There is an interesting article in today's Catholic Herald about the Orange Prize-winning novelist, Francesca Kay. Kay, who speaks positively about her convent education in the interview, has recently published The Translation of the Bones, "a novel about faith and motherhood".

The Nobel Prize for Literature: Tomas Tranströmer

"I believe in God but only when I am writing poetry." So wrote the new Nobel Laureate, Tomas Tranströmer. However, according to Bill Coyle, "Tranströmer is a Christian poet, though not a churchgoing one". 


Whatever the precise nature of his beliefs, it is clear that the new Nobel Laureate, at the very least, has a strong interest in the divine. One article which explores this further can be found in the Logos Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. 


You can read some of Tranströmer's poetry here and here. If anyone has any particular recommendations I'd be delighted to hear them.

Sea to the West

A greatly under-rated writer, I think, was the Anglican poet Norman Nicholson. Nicholson lived all his life in the industrial (and then post-industrial) town of Millom on the Cumberland Coast. He was therefore largely ignored by the metropolitan elite with the happy exception of T.S. Eliot who recognised his potential and signed him up for Faber & Faber.

My personal favourite among his books is his final poetry collection, Sea to the West, which is now sadly out of print. However, you can read (and hear) some of his poems here and here. He also wrote some wonderful prose works about the Lake District which are well worth seeking out.

Nicholson was a devout Anglican - and an editor of Pelican's wartime Anthology of Religious Verse - and there is no better example of his faith than the title poem of his final collection: 'Sea to the West'.

With one crucial change this poem provided the words for his own gravestone. He was buried with his wife and so the inscription reads:

Let our eyes at the last be blinded
Not by the dark
But by dazzle.

Tolkien and Catholicity

To return briefly to the subject of my last post ...

While there is room for a legitimate debate about Tolkien's style (though Tom Shippey and others have mounted a pretty robust defence on his behalf) there can surely be no doubt that Tolkien, almost uniquely among modern writers, realised the need for catholicity in fiction and so refused to be limited by the constraints of the all-conquering novel genre in writing The Lord of the Rings.

See Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-Earth for a much more detailed discussion.

Dante and Catholic Literature

What constitutes Catholic Literature is a question I have steered clear of on this blog, partly because of its complexity but partly because it seems to me that it's not a live issue for most Catholic English teachers. The reality, in the UK at least, is that we spend the overwhelming majority of our time teaching books that have little or no connection with Catholicism, even if we teach in Catholic schools. What I have tried to do on this blog, therefore, is suggest just a few Catholic authors whose books we might drop into our teaching.

Nevertheless, the question cannot be wholly ignored, which is why Paul Claudel's essay about Dante is so interesting.

According to Claudel, "Dante is one of five poets who, I believe, deserves the adjective sovereign or catholic". (He doesn't say who the other four are.) Dante's work has three key traits: inspiration, intelligence, and catholicity. And what Claudel means by catholicity "is that these outstanding poets have received from God such vast things to express that only the entire universe will suffice for their work."

Such a vision does not force authors away from the real. On the contrary, "a true poet hasn't the least need for grander stars or more beautiful roses. What exists already is enough, and the poet understands that his own life is too short for the lesson it gives and the respect it deserves."

It is this catholicity, this breadth of vision, which makes Dante's work truly great. It is also this breadth of vision which makes his work truly Catholic.

The natural corollary of Claudel's argument, however, is that because they are limited to the merely human most novels (and a great many poems) do not deserve the same adjective. Now this is controversial and so I want to examine the idea in greater depth in a later post.

The crisis of the 19th Century, for Claudel, was not an intellectual crisis of faith but "the drama of a starved imagination." Part of Dante's genius was to create an image of Paradise that we could imagine, for, in the words of an English author quoted by Claudel, "if we are unable to form for ourselves a real conception of the thing desired, we are inclined to let our spirit stray and place it outside the field of actual interest." If we can't imagine it we can't believe in it.

Claudel's essay ends with some wonderful comments about Beatrice, Paradise and love but I wonder if this idea of "the starved imagination" isn't the idea which might be of more practical interest to Catholic English teachers. Maybe, just maybe, it's a problem we can do something about.

American Born Chinese

I briefly mentioned Catholic Manga a little while back (click here to see the book they produced for World Youth Day) so it's now time to mention a Graphic Novel which has set new standards, Gene Yang's American Born Chinese, which was the first Graphic Novel to be shortlisted for the National Book Award.


The book deals with questions of American Chinese identity by bringing three apparently unrelated tales together with an unexpected twist. One of these tales is a fascinating reworking of the story of the Monkey King from the Chinese classic, Journey to the West.


Yang reimagines this Buddhist classic as a Christian tale because, as he explains in this fascinating interview, "there is an idea within Christianity of intention behind your identity, that there is this outside agency that actually intended you to be who you are. Asian Americans tend to be caught in a place where we don’t fit into our culture of origin and we don’t fit into the culture we find ourselves in. Thus, this idea of intention is very powerful and that was what I wanted to explore."


"[T]he two biggest pieces of my identity," he explains, "are my ethnicity and my religion [Yang is a Catholic]" but that doesn't mean that he produces Catholic propaganda. Far from it. As he has explained elsewhere his philosophy is to "live your faith and then write your life."


Yang has also published The Rosary Comic Book but American Born Chinese is his masterpiece (so far). You can see and hear him speaking briefly about it here.


So how might we incorporate this book into our lessons? I can suggest two ways. Colin Teevan's knockabout version of Journey to the West is sometimes performed in schools so American Born Chinese would fit in well here. 


At another level, I was speaking the other day to some 6th Formers who are looking at the issue of identity in novels such as Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Yang's novel would, at the very least, provide some interesting contextual material for anyone looking at this whole question of identity.


And finally, while we're loosely on the topic, it's worth remembering that Yang isn't simply introducing a western religious concept into Chinese literature. Christianity, like Buddhism, may be a foreign import into China but, like Buddhism, its been around for a very long time. If you want to explore the topic further I'd recommend Jean Charbonnier's Christians in China: AD 600 to 2000, Liam Brockey's  Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 and Jonathan Chaves' book about the Catholic priest, artist and poet, Wu Li.

Catholic Radio for Schools

This looks like it might be interesting. Here's a list of UK schools already involved.

Half Blood Blues

I have written before about the via pulchritudinis, the way of beauty, which Pope Benedict has made so much of during his pontificate.

It was Paul VI who first referred to artists as people "who are taken up with beauty and work for it".  John Paul II called them "ingenious creators of beauty" and Benedict XVI, in 2009, "the custodians of beauty".

I was reminded of these comments when I came across this passage in the Booker-shortlisted novel, Half Blood Blues. One of the Jazz musicians who suffered under Hitler is trying to explain the importance of his art towards the end of the book:


"I tell you what I know. The world's damn beautiful. But it's an accidental beauty. What we do, it's deliberate. It's the one damn consolation you can offer not just your own life, but other lives you ain't even met."


There is much here that Catholics can agree with - the beauty of the world; the importance of art; the life lived for others - even if we wouldn't accept that it's "an accidental beauty". There are some interesting discussions to be had about the philosophies of life espoused in the novel but I don't think it's too outrageous to suggest that John Paul II's words from his Letter to Artists might provide us with one interpretative tool: 

"In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption."

Writing Advice from Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway on Writing is an extremely useful and interesting book. I wouldn't encourage my students to accept Hemingway's advice uncritically but I would certainly want them to read it. 

There are problems with taking passages out of context but, nonetheless, Larry Phillips has done us a service by publishing many of Hemingway's comments about the business of writing in one volume. Take these words, for example: 

"Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies [sic] (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time)."

That should set the cat among the pigeons.

And what about these thoughts?

"I can write it like Tolstoi and make the book seem larger, wiser, and all the rest of it. But then I remember that was what I always skipped in Tolstoi... I don't like to write like God."

There was a humility about Hemingway which is sometimes forgotten. By not telling the reader everything - by not playing God - he made a virtue of our human limitations and through those very limitations created writing that was not simply spare and vigorous but, often, very beautiful too.

Paul Claudel

I briefly mentioned Paul Claudel the other day but could have said more. (To see a lot more download an interesting Communio article here.)

Claudel has not always been well served by translators but it is just about possible to track down some of his poems in English translation. They sound better in French of course. Here is a reading of the lovely 'La Vierge à Midi'. And here's another with the words.

Fortunately one or two of his prose writings are still available, including this wonderful essay which I shall write about separately another time.

And if you're looking for a slightly longer school play than usual - as analysed here by Hans Urs von Balthasar - The Satin Slipper comes in at just under eleven hours :)

Literature and Prayer

Pope Benedict recently returned to a topic which appears to be close to his heart: the role of artists in the Church.

In his weekly audience he spoke of the ways in which art "resembles a door open on to the infinite, on to a beauty and a truth that go beyond the daily routine" and specifically mentioned Paul Claudel, the great Catholic poet and dramatist.

What I really like about the pope's comments was the way in which he started his talk: "In this period I have recalled several times the need for every Christian, in the midst of the many occupations that fill our days, to find time for God and for prayer." Easier said than done? Well, it depends, at least in part, on our conception of prayer.

According to the Pope, "The Lord himself gives us many opportunities to remember him. Today I would like to reflect briefly on one of these channels that can lead to God and can also be of help in the encounter with him. It is the way of artistic expression, part of that “via pulchritudinis” — the “way of beauty”, of which I have spoken several times and whose deepest meaning must be recovered by men and women today."

Pope Benedict has spoken of the Way of Beauty before but this is, I think, the first time he has explicitly linked Art and prayer: "some artistic expressions are real highways to God, the supreme Beauty; indeed, they help us to grow in our relationship with him, in prayer. These are works that were born from faith and express faith. We can see an example of this when we visit a Gothic cathedral: we are enraptured by the vertical lines that soar skywards and uplift our gaze and our spirit, while at the same time we feel small yet long for fullness...."

"Dear friends, I ask you to rediscover the importance of this path also for prayer, for our living relationship with God. Towns and villages throughout the world contain treasures of art that express faith and beckon to us to return to our relationship with God. May the visits to places filled with art, then, not only be opportunities for cultural enrichment — that too — but may they become above all moments of grace, incentives to strengthen our bond and our dialogue with the Lord so that — in switching from simple external reality to the more profound reality it expresses — we may pause to contemplate the ray of beauty that strikes us to the quick, that almost “wounds” us, and that invites us to rise toward God."

It puts a different gloss on what we're doing as English teachers.

The Cross



Next Wednesday 14th September is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The day is being marked in one Catholic Church in London by a performance of The Dream of the Rood, the great Old English poem in which the cross on which Jesus was killed tells its own story. You can find the text (and translation) here or here. And you can hear it being read (in the original Old English) here.

The name of the poem itself is perhaps a little misleading because, as Mitchell and Robinson point out in their Guide to Old English, the poem has no title in its original manuscript: "It has also been called A Vision of the Cross," they explain, "which is perhaps more suitable."

Whatever you call it, it is a remarkable poem and has an amazing immediacy:

I remember the morning a long time ago
that I was felled at the edge of the forest
and severed from my roots. Strong enemies seized me
on their shoulders and set me on a hill.
Many enemies fastened me there. I saw the Lord of Mankind
hasten with such courage to climb upon me.
I dared not bow or break there
against my Lord's wish, when I saw the surface
of the earth tremble. I could have felled
all my foes, yet I stood firm.
Then the young warrior, God Almighty,
stripped Himself, firm and unflinching. He climbed
upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind.

Mitchell and Robinson point out that the personification of the cross could have been suggested by old English verse riddles such as Riddle 30 on this page and Riddle 53 on this page, both of which may have been riddles about the cross. These riddles (and many others like them) are wonderful resources for the English Teacher.

But what about the obvious objection that all this is just too obscure for the classroom? I would argue that Old English can be fun. Students enjoy hearing and attempting to decipher what is of course their own language. And as for the subject matter: we cross ourselves with great frequency. We have crucifixes on our walls (and maybe even round our necks) so why not bite the bullet and have a poem about this central Christian image too?

More Dickens. More Chesterton.

The fact that Chesterton is so quotable means that he has not always been taken as seriously as he should have been. Here are a couple more of his comments from his wonderful book about Dickens:

"Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night. The boy in such a case exhibits a psychological paradox; he is a little too irritable because he is a little too happy."

"[Certain Moderns] permit any writer to emphasise doubts ... for doubts are their religion, but they permit no man to emphasise dogmas. If a man be the mildest Christian, they smell 'cant'; but he can be a raving windmill of pessimism and they call it 'temperament'."

Catholicising the Curriculum - Part 2

The second part of my article on Catholicising the English Curriculum is now available online. The first part is available from the link posted here. I hope some of the ideas might prove interesting.

You can download the whole magazine here.

Faith in Fiction - James Wood in Oxford

There' an interesting article in today's Guardian, a version of James Wood's Weidenfeld lecture at St Anne's College, Oxford.

It is encouraging to see, in the secular press, the argument that "a more nuanced examination of religious belief [than that found in the works of the New Atheists] can be found in modern fiction." However, there are problems too. For a start, Wood takes a long time to get going. Because it is the New Atheists who are deemed to have set the agenda, it takes Wood over 500 words to get to the point where he can write that, "Rather than simply declaring all religious belief to be non-propositional, which is manifestly untrue, it would be more interesting to examine what might be called the practice of propositional beliefs."

Another problem with the article is that it accepts many of the New Atheistic assumptions it criticises. For example, Wood claims that "one good place ... to see religious belief seriously represented and seriously examined, is the modern novel from, say, Melville and Flaubert in the 1850s to the present day. Melville, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Tolstoy, Virgina Woolf, Beckett, Camus - and in our own time José Saramago, Marilynne Robinson and JM Coetzee have all shown sustained interest in questions of belief and unbelief".

All of which is true but look at the lacunae: Georges Bernanos, Rumer Godden, Graham Greene, François Mauriac, Martin Mosebach, Flannery O'Connor, Muriel Spark, Sigrid Undset, Evelyn Waugh, to name but a few. With the exception of Dostoevsky and Tolstory, who lie safely outside the safe Anglo-American Protestant world, the only orthodox Christian on Wood's list is Marilynne Robinson. And practising Catholics don't get a look in.

The same is true, by the way, of the Weidenfeld lectures themselves, which feature Melville, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf and Beckett.

There is an interesting critique of the original lecture in The Oxonian Review in which Tom Cutterham points out, among other things, that, according to Wood, "narrative is both an “ally and a secret enemy” of faith. He connected the rise of the novel with that of a demythologising Christological scholarship in the early 19th century; that is, an interest in a more realistic, historical Jesus, consonant with the conventions of 19th century fiction." But, as I pointed out in my last post, G K Chesterton made a very similar point in 1906, though he drew rather different conclusions. (He also had a lot more to say on the topic than I was able to include in my brief post.) There is more to literature than the modern novel.

Cutterham summarises nicely: "Wood’s central point is not that our secular fiction gets rid of God, and can have no place for him, but that it is precisely in fiction that we can best examine the hold he still has on our consciousness." Exactly. So if we're going to be intellectually open and honest, let's ensure at the very least that we consider what believing novelists have to say about the fluctuations of belief and unbelief too.

Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton and Catholicism

In his preface to Barnaby Rudge, Dickens wrote: "However imperfectly those disturbances [the 1780 No Popery riots] are set forth in the following pages, they are impartially painted by one who has no sympathy with the Romish Church, though he acknowledges as most men do, some esteemed friends among the followers of its creed."


An obvious question for any Catholic English teacher, therefore, is which side of Dickens won out: the 19th Century Protestant who had "no sympathy with the Romish Church" or the sympathetic friend who was perfectly capable of seeing Catholics as people like any others? I'll come back to Barnaby Rudge in a later post but for now I'd like to look at what G.K. Chesterton had to say on the matter. 


In one of his books, he commented that, "When [Dickens] found a thing in Europe which he did not understand, such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it an old-world superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin."


More damningly still, in his introduction to Barnaby Rudge he argued that, "Undoubtedly [Dickens] knew no history; and he may or may not have been conscious of the fact. But the consciousness did not prevent him from writing a History of England. Nor did it prevent him from interlarding all or any of his works with tales of the pictorial past, such as the tale of the broken swords in Master Humphrey's Clock, or the indefensibly delightful nightmare of the lady in the stage-coach, which helps to soften the amiable end of Pickwick. Neither, worst of all, did it prevent him from dogmatising anywhere and everywhere about the past, of which he knew nothing; it did not prevent him from telling the bells to tell Trotty Veck that the Middle Ages were a failure, nor from solemnly declaring that the best thing that the mediæval monks ever did was to create the mean and snobbish quietude of a modern cathedral city. No, it was not historical reverence that held him back from dealing with the remote past; but rather something much better -- a living interest in the living century in which he was born. He would have thought himself quite intellectually capable of writing a novel about the Council of Trent or the First Crusade. He would have thought himself quite equal to analysing the psychology of Abelard or giving a bright, satiric sketch of St. Augustine. It must frankly be confessed that it was not a sense of his own unworthiness that held him back; I fear it was rather a sense of St. Augustine's unworthiness."


In other words, Chesterton was not blind to Dickens' self-confessed anti-Catholic prejudices but that did not stop him writing, in what Ian Ker calls "probably [his] greatest work", an appreciation of Dickens as a novelist which has been scarcely equalled since.


One of Chesterton's great strengths was that he was able to see Dickens' novels in their broad historical context. In one of those marvellous, free-flowing passages of his, he argued that "for a few years our corner of Western Europe has had a fancy for this thing we call fiction; that is, for writing down our own lives or similar lives in order to look at them. But though we call it fiction, it differs from older literatures chiefly in being less fictitious." 


According to Chesterton, Dickens stood outside this tradition because he retained a link with the literature that came before the Realist revolution: "Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest." 


Dickens stood in a line of descent, through Shakespeare, with Chaucer and other great Catholic writers and so, Chesterton argued, whatever his own personal prejudices, his art drew upon all that was best in the pre-Reformation world: "He could only see all that was bad in mediaevalism. But he fought for all that was good in it."


As we approach the bicentenary of Dickens' birth next year, we do not need to be overly concerned by Dickens' lack of "sympathy with the Romish Church". As GKC puts it in his final paragraph: "The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant, and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such as Mr Pickwick travelled. But this at least is part of what he meant: that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters; and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world."


Or if that's not punchy enough, we could look at the sign that hangs at the entrance to all Dickens' novels, according to Chesterton, the sign that could equally well hang at the entrance to Chesterton's own book: "Abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here."

St John of Avila and St John of the Cross

At the end of one of his homilies at World Youth Day, Pope Benedict told the pilgrims that he would "shortly declare Saint John of Avila a Doctor of the universal Church." St John will therefore join his compatriot and namesake, St John of the Cross (and our own St Bede for that matter), as a Doctor of the Church.

Is there any chance of either writer appearing on the school curriculum? Well, maybe. As I wrote before, St John of the Cross does appear on a list of recommended reading drawn up by the English Faculty at University College, London. And his poems have been translated by the excellent (Catholic) poet, Roy Campbell. One I'll be using is 'Other songs concerning Christ and the soul' ('Otras canciones a lo divino (del mismo autor) de Cristo y el alma') [p.43] which has a wonderful twist (for a modern reader). If we teach Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert et al, surely there's room for at least one poem by this great poet and teacher.

It's going to be trickier with St John of Avila but let's hope there are more editions of his works on the way now that he is about to be recognised as a Doctor of the Church. His Audi, Filia is said to be the book to read but it is rather expensive.

A little summer reading

I sometimes include the Bible, or particular books of the Bible, on my recommended reading lists; my students usually respond with expressions of complete incredulity. But I'm glad to see I'm not alone. Here are the Pope's suggestions for vacation reading:

When we have a break from our activities, especially in the holidays, we often take up a book we want to read. It is on this very aspect that I would first like to reflect today.

Each one of us needs time and space for recollection, meditation and calmness.... Thanks be to God that this is so! In fact, this need tells us that we are not made for work alone, but also to think, to reflect or even simply to follow with our minds and our hearts a tale, a story in which to immerse ourselves, in a certain sense “to lose ourselves” to find ourselves subsequently enriched.

Of course, many of these books to read, which we take in our hands during our vacation are at best an escape, and this is normal. Yet various people, particularly if they have more time in which to take a break and to relax, devote themselves to something more demanding.

I would therefore like to make a suggestion: why not discover some of the books of the Bible which are not commonly well known? Or those from which we heard certain passages in the liturgy but which we never read in their entirety? Indeed, many Christians never read the Bible and have a very limited and superficial knowledge of it. The Bible, as the name says, is a collection of books, a small “library” that came into being in the course of a millennium.

Some of these “small books” of which it is composed are almost unknown to the majority, even people who are good Christians.

Some are very short, such as the Book of Tobit, a tale that contains a lofty sense of family and marriage; or the Book of Esther, in which the Jewish Queen saves her people from extermination with her faith and prayer; or the Book of Ruth, a stranger who meets God and experiences his providence, which is even shorter. These little books can be read in an hour. More demanding and true masterpieces are the Book of Job, which faces the great problem of innocent suffering; Ecclesiastes is striking because of the disconcerting modernity with which it calls into question the meaning of life and of the world; and the Song of Songs, a wonderful symbolic poem of human love. As you see, these are all books of the Old Testament. And what about the New? The New Testament is of course better known and its literary genres are less diversified. Yet the beauty of reading a Gospel at one sitting must be discovered, just as I also recommend the Acts of the Apostles, or one of the Letters.

'Understanding Media' - Marshall McLuhan's Catholicism

There was an interesting article on Marshall McLuhan's Catholicism in the Catholic Herald on 22nd July which I suspect is still available for website subscribers. (It's now available here. With thanks to Benjamin Robertson for letting me know.)

The authors, William Baker and Evan Leatherwood, point out that McLuhan was "a devout Catholic, who taught almost exclusively at Catholic universities and attended Mass nearly every day of his adult life."

They also point out that his Catholicism "underlay his thinking", though it is true that the impact of his faith on his work is highly complex. However, what is clear is that he was not averse to quoting Catholic authors approvingly in some of his most famous books.

Take Understanding Media, for instance. McLuhan was nothing if not eclectic and so a staggeringly wide range of authorities are referred to, including the Psalmist, Blessed John Henry Newman and, perhaps surprisingly for today's secular culture, Pope Pius XII, who said in 1950 that:

"It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual's own reaction."

The conclusion that McLuhan draws from this is that "Pope Pius XII was deeply concerned that there be serious study of the media today."

Now this raises all sorts of questions which can't be dealt with in a short blog post but I do wonder if Catholics in education - and I include myself - need to do a little more thinking about the much-maligned Media Studies. Here's an interesting article which might provide a good starting point from the excellent Holy Spirit Study Centre in Hong Kong.