Declinism Is Easy: Art, Beauty, and the Need to Make it New
In her seminal book, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry notes that the encounter between Odysseus and Nausicaa in book six of Homer’s Odyssey stands as a paradigm of the experience of both beauty and wonder. You may recall that just before this encounter Odysseus escaped from seven years of captivity on Calypso’s island. As he and his men sail away, the god Poseidon catches sight of them and, still furious that his son, Polyphemus, had been blinded by Odysseus, sends a massive storm that ends in their shipwreck.
Having washed ashore thanks to some timely help from a minor deity, Odysseus wakes up and stumbles, naked except for a carefully placed olive branch, into a group of women frolicking on the beach. At the sight of the disheveled, nearly nude man, the women scatter, as you might well expect them to. All except one. Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete, stands her ground. Odysseus is tempted to prostrate himself and embrace her knees in the traditional gesture of a supplicant, but he decides to remain still and addresses her. After wondering out loud whether she is mortal or a goddess, he says:
I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman . . .
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.
Wait, once I saw the like—in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar—
the young slip of a palm-tree springing into the light.
There I’d sailed, you see, with a great army in my wake,
out on the long campaign that doomed my life to hardship.
That vision! Just as I stood there gazing, rapt, for hours . . .
no shaft like that had ever risen up from the earth—
so now I marvel at you, my lady: rapt, enthralled,
too struck with awe to grasp you by the knees
though pain has ground me down.
Of this passage, Scarry writes: “The beautiful thing seems—is—incomparable, unprecedented; and that sense of being without precedent conveys a sense of the ‘newness’ or ‘newbornness’ of the entire world.” And yet, she continues, Odysseus does indeed rack his memory in search of a precedent, settling on the analogy of the young palm-tree. In other words, the experience of beauty moves him toward contemplation and the search for any analogy that can help him make sense of the encounter he has just experienced.
Scarry concludes her analysis of the passage by asserting that it contains the three dimensions of beauty that constitute a universal human experience. Beauty is 1) sacred, 2) unprecedented, and 3) lifesaving. Later she adds that beauty stimulates “deliberation,” which in her elaboration seems to be a state of mind inhabiting a space between rational thought and contemplation. Scarry’s use of the word “unprecedented” here is another way of saying “new.” Citing the evidence drawn from the works of Plato, Aquinas, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Dante, Scarry concludes that beauty strikes its viewer as a greeting, as if one is being welcomed to one’s true home.
Though she is not a person of religious faith, it is not difficult to sense that Scarry is grappling with something rather close to what Luigi Giussani called “the religious sense.” In Giussanian terms, the experience of beauty is an encounter that becomes for me an event, something that marks a Before and an After. My own vocation has centered on precisely this zone: where beauty and mystery meet. I sometimes say that I am the kind of person who loves the Great Indoors, so for me the most important sources of beauty have been the arts. I felt it for the first time in the art museums of New York City that my mother took me to visit. But even more powerful for me were words strung together in beautiful ways, words I heard my mother read out loud to me.
I know that for me the first strong inkling of my own path came not from Homer but from Shakespeare, as our dogged and well-meaning seventh-grade Language Arts teacher dragged us—line by line, I kid you not—through Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. One day, what had been weird, archaic language that I was being forced to translate into a comprehensible paraphrase became music. In that instant I not only heard the metrical beat of the blank verse but simultaneously sensed what Shakespeare’s wit and wordplay did to evoke layers of meaning. It was one of the first experiences I had of beauty leading me to truth. And it became clear to me, even in middle school, that when it came to a work of art beauty was not incompatible with tragedy, loss, degradation, and human brokenness. Even then I sensed that beauty resided not just in pretty things but also in the myriad ways that the carefully wrought form of an artwork could reveal the fullness of reality.
Returning to Scarry for a moment, I have found myself pondering the notion that beauty and wonder conjure up in us a sensation of newness. For me this has not been an academic exercise but the driving force behind the shape of my professional life. In other words, I have been embarked on a search for those artists and writers who attempt to create something new and beautiful in a time that has often been deemed incapable of true creativity. Starting out, I never imagined that my effort to look for enduring literature in the present would be quite so arduous, what with the parade of people hell-bent on trying to persuade me that art and literature are dead and buried. But I will come back to that point later.
What, then, is new about beauty—and, in particular, about the kind of beauty we find in great art? In asking that question of myself, and making it the subject of this reflection, I am aware that I am entering contested territory, where individual prejudices and emotions often run high. The question of what constitutes newness in art is a topic that for the last couple centuries at least has evoked scorn, anger, frustration, and even despair. And I will be the first to grant you that there is no end of fodder for these debates. Everyone has their own rogue’s gallery of idiotic, vulgar, meretricious so-called art. From Marcel Duchamps’s repurposed urinal to the abstract “painting” of a blank canvas called “white on white,” to the naked performance artist dripping chocolate on herself, to 2019’s banana duct-taped to a wall, the pipeline of aesthetic outrages never seems to run dry.
And to be honest, slagging off these sometimes scandalous but more often just pathetic artworks can be good, if perhaps morose, fun. I, too, have railed against the “cult of originality” that comes down to us from the Romantic Era. The would-be transgressive artists have transgressed every human boundary imaginable, leaving nothing sacred in their wake. They have managed to put themselves out of work. You could be pardoned for concluding that it is time to just hand over the whole artistic enterprise to AI and be done with it.
This is precisely why what I have called “the narrative of decline” has become so popular and pervasive in our culture: the belief that Western civilization (or whatever aspect of it you want to single out) has been going steadily downhill and that the best we can do is to be grateful for the glories of the past.
But pretty early on in my adult life, after I had had my share of harrumphing with the harrumphers, there remained the feeling that this sort of spectator sport is just a little too easy, like shooting ducks in a barrel. That it was, in some sense, perversely and masochistically self-congratulatory. The more deeply I studied history, the more I discovered similar laments for the decline and fall of everything sacred and civilized in other eras. Caravaggio had destroyed art because he included characters with dirty feet in sacred art; my old buddy G.K. Chesterton claiming that Impressionism was the death of painting; Richard Weaver being disconsolate because jazz had brought Western music to an end.
In other words, a little historical relativism goes a long way. The worst, most extreme forms of declinism have about them the odor of the Gnostic heresy, but instead of the ancient Gnostic belief in the utter evil of the material world, these modern declinists were Gnostic about our own time, as if nothing good, true, and beautiful could be created in these dark times—as if the Holy Spirit were locked in a cage in the dungeon of Doctor Evil’s island hideout.
It is true: encountering new artworks poses a challenge because they present us with something unknown and expect us to be changed by it. That is already asking a lot. None of us like change or take to it easily. When we read or encounter something for the first time, whether it is a person or a work of art, we tend to be on the defensive: who or what is this—and will it be good for me? Fight or flight? First impressions can be powerful but they are often partial, incomplete, and sometimes just wrong. It takes time to fully grasp the new, to be taught by the form of the work how to interpret it. The art critic Robert Hughes once made a BBC documentary about modern art, which also appeared in book form and he entitled it: The Shock of the New.
To test this out, I think it might be instructive to consider three cases from the recent past—recent enough that we now have some perspective on them. So I am going to cite the early critical responses to three twentieth-century Catholic novelists. And because we are here to consider the concepts of beauty and wonder within the Catholic intellectual tradition, I am going to focus on the early Catholic response to each of these three writers.
Exhibit 1. The conflict surrounding this author’s novel began when Ernest Oldmeadow, the editor of the prominent British Catholic weekly The Tablet, then owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Westminster in London, launched a fierce attack on a recently published work of fiction. Oldmeadow, who was a confidant of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Francis Bourne, published an editorial claiming that the novel was a “disgrace to anybody professing the Catholic name.” Its depictions not only of adultery and—brace yourselves!—cannibalism (specifically a character being “stewed to pulp among peppers”) were described by Oldmeadow as “nauseating” and violated Catholic standards of modesty. He concluded his review by questioning whether the author should even be considered a Catholic.
Exhibit 2. In 1953, the Holy Office (the Vatican department now known as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known simply as the Inquisition) formally condemned this novel. Vatican censors argued that the book was “paradoxical” and “disturbed,” claiming it injured the reputation of the Catholic priesthood by portraying a priest who was an alcoholic and had fathered a child. Church authorities initially pressured the author to make “suitable corrections” to the work and refused to authorize further reprints or translations until he did so.
Exhibit 3. The tone of the following comment was fairly typical of early responses to this author: “the recent promotion of her career indicates that she is being groomed as A Current Great Writer.” (All capital letters!) Many Catholics did not appreciate that her stories focused almost exclusively on Protestant fundamentalists. Unlike other Catholic writers of the era, it was said, this author did not include “openly Catholic ‘good’ characters” to provide moral clarity to the reader. In a 1960 review of a novel by this writer, Robert O. Bowen argued that the book offered a “deterministic and negative portrayal of life devoid of hope, redemption, and the essence of true Catholicism.”
So, how well did you score on guessing the identity of these three writers?
Perhaps the trickiest is Exhibit 1: The author is the British novelist, Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). And the novel in question is Black Mischief, which was not only controversial back then but remains so, because it is, simply put, a satire about well-meaning but profoundly wrong-headed progressive colonialist attempts to bring enlightenment to an allegedly primitive (and fictive) African nation of Azania. By definition, satire is meant to be controversial. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, satire is “the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.” Satire often works best when it is produced without providing neon signs pointing to itself: the great example here would be Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, a pamphlet proposing to ease hunger among the Irish poor by advising them to cook and eat their infant children.
But satire that does not advertise itself can often be missed by the more literal-minded. The perfect case in point in Black Mischief concerns a billboard set up by Azania’s white colonialist advisers to encourage the use of contraceptives to bring about peace and prosperity. The billboard, part of a “modernization” campaign, is divided into two scenes designed to encourage small families. One side shows a wealthy, healthy couple with one child in a comfortable setting, while the other shows a struggling couple with many children. Between them is a detailed illustration of modern birth control apparatus and the slogan: “WHICH HOME DO YOU CHOOSE?”
The Azanian inhabitants, who value large families, completely misunderstand the propaganda. They view the “contraceptive apparatus” not as a means of limiting family size, but as a magical, sacred fertility charm. Instead of embracing contraception, the natives interpret the single-child family as a miserable, unfortunate state, and the large family as a sign of happiness and human flourishing. They embrace the “birth control” campaign with enthusiasm because they believe it is a promise of increased fertility.
Perhaps it is not that hard after all to see why Cardinal Bourne might have been upset—and we have not even gotten to the cannibalism scene yet. But before you get affronted, consider this: Waugh’s satire is profoundly Catholic, and his depiction of the local inhabitants choosing fertility—even at the cost of exhaustion and poverty—is meant to promote a Catholic vision that counters the secular materialism and sentimentality of modern progressivism.
The shocking newness of Waugh’s novel stems from the sort of deadpan irony he mastered, which asks that readers do the work of interpreting what is missing. The result is a marriage of comedy, anarchy, and painful moral reckoning that is characteristic of his artistry. Perhaps it is worth recalling that beauty is not just a matter of unicorns and rainbows, that the exquisitely crafted stiletto knife that Waugh expertly slides between your ribs is a marvel and a delight. From our vantage point of perfect hindsight, we know that Waugh was a deeply conservative, orthodox Catholic, so he can be championed as a Defender of the Faith. But would the same people who champion him now have done so when that book was first published?
As a footnote, Waugh drafted a response to the Tablet review addressed to the cardinal but his friends prevailed upon him to refrain from sending it. It was only published in 1980. Reading it is hilarious because there is nothing worse than having to explain a joke.
Exhibit 2, as many of you may have guessed, is the novelist Graham Greene and in particular his novel, The Power and the Glory. Today Greene is hailed as a powerful Catholic novelist not only for this book but also for Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, and The Heart of the Matter. Yet when I was a young man, he was still a controversial figure, not only for his marital irregularities and infidelities but because he liked to hang out with his hermano, Fidel Castro, and other evil Communists.
The newness of The Power and the Glory lay in its refusal to portray a Catholic priest as either a heroic martyr or a sort of avuncular, Bing Crosby-style doer of good deeds. As the protagonist of the novel is now known to many of us, the “whisky priest” is indeed a less-than-ideal role model. And yet, living as he does under the Mexican regime’s anti-clerical persecution, he does at times rise above his sinful ways. As with all great fiction, the author wants to tempt us into making the kind of quick, moralistic judgment we are habitually tempted to make when confronted by the venality of someone we want to feel superior to. At one point the priest thinks to himself:
How often the priest had heard the same confession—Man was so limited: he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.
The other memorable line from this story that continues to echo in my mind, long after reading it: “Hatred is just a failure of imagination.” Think about that one for a minute.
As the passage just quoted indicates, the beauty of The Power and the Glory is very much of a piece with the beauty of the cross. And we might well ask ourselves why an instrument of humiliation and torture has become a source of beauty and consolation in Christian art. In Pope Benedict XVI’s brilliant reflection on the nature of beauty, written when he was still a cardinal, he noted the tension between seeing beauty as a portrayal of the ideal and beauty as a vision of grace in the midst of brokenness. “In the suffering Christ [one] also learns that the beauty of truth also embraces offense, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting suffering, not in ignoring it.” He goes on to say that beauty in the sense of a perfect, unblemished ideal is not sufficient: “a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough. It cannot stand up to the confrontation with the gravity of the questioning about God, truth and beauty.” We must, Ratzinger says, embrace “the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes ‘to the very end’; for this reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence.” The beauty of the cross, he concludes, imposes a condition: “that we let ourselves be wounded by him, and that we believe in the Love who can risk setting aside his external beauty to proclaim, in this way, the truth of the beautiful.” One wonders if this is precisely what the Holy Office meant about Greene’s novel when they panned it as “paradoxical.” Talk about irony!
As a footnote I might add that within the Church hierarchy condemnation of Greene by the Holy Office was contested by none other than Giovanni Battista Montini, who would later become Cardinal Montini and then Pope Paul VI, who many years later famously told Greene, “Mr. Greene, some aspects of your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that.”
Exhibit 3 was probably the easiest for you to recognize: none other than Mary Flannery O’Connor. So much has been said and written about her that I can be brief here. Suffice it to say that the notion that her fiction—often depicting characters who undergo violent encounters—is deterministic is a profound misreading of her vision. Her protagonists are not sinners in the hands of an angry God, but fearful and willful people who convince themselves that they can control themselves and those around them—that they can, in short, disregard the boundaries of human limitation, of reality itself. The violence in her stories is not visited from on high but stems from her protagonists running headlong into the brick wall of the world as it is. And one of the true beauties of these moments in her fiction is that it is precisely at the moment of that collision—when hubris has been defeated and the willful soul is stunned into contemplation—that the grace of God is offered to her characters. If O’Connor stories typically end before we know whether these characters accept the tendered grace or not it is not because she wants us to be in doubt about the outcome but in order for us to actually feel the question being posed to us.
But there is one aspect of O’Connor’s achievement directly relevant to questions of beauty and newness and cultural change that I think has been too little remarked upon. The truth is—paradoxical and ironic as it may seem in light of my thesis—that O’Connor is in fact less original and innovative than we realize. Her literary oeuvre did not appear out of thin air. Something Cormac McCarthy once said is relevant here: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” My guess is that McCarthy uses the word “ugly” in this context as a way of acknowledging that writers are less original than they may want us to believe.
In O’Connor’s case, she owed a tremendous debt to a writer little read these days, Nathanael West. Though he died young in a car accident, West left behind two short novels that are considered masterpieces of mid-twentieth century American literature: The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts. His protagonists, like O’Connor’s, are alienated, isolated, unable to make meaningful connections with others, and subject to sudden, impulsive decisions that put them on a path toward conflict and violence. Like O’Connor, West knew how to create dramatic gestures that border on the absurd. To take just one example, at the very end of that dark, chaotic novel the protagonist of The Day of the Locust is thrown into a police car and the story ends as he howls in unison with its wailing siren. West’s character, Tod Hackett, is in many ways the twin of O’Connor’s Hazel Motes.
What made O’Connor’s fiction original was not that it appeared out of nowhere but that it was generated from an intense engagement with both the literature and the cultural conditions of her time. We all know that O’Connor was a deeply traditional, orthodox Catholic. But she was very much of her time and she had no doubt whatsoever that her art—her pursuit of beauty and wonder—had to be made in the forge where inherited wisdom meets the conditions of the moment. As she wrote to a friend:
I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level.
Newness in art emerges out of this collision between past and present. This is as true of O’Connor and Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy as it is of Dante and Virgil and Homer, too, for that matter. But the fundamental condition for this process is the willingness of the artist to bear the burden O’Connor speaks of. Bearing that burden is risky business: it is both a form of suffering and an opportunity for grace to shine through. It can easily be short-circuited if the artist resorts to nostalgia for an earlier, allegedly happier time. But when faced with honesty and courage, beauty shines forth from the place where tradition meets the moment, where the artist creates a form that enables her to see what we are confronting now—and the truth is that in human history those circumstances change, even if the underlying themes remain the same. It is a cliché of the literary criticism world that the greatest writers achieve the universal only by being faithful to the particular. What makes the beautiful works of the past live today is that they achieved this same synthesis. This is what Ezra Pound meant when he said: “Literature is news that stays news.”
What I hope is becoming clear by now is that for created beings newness in art is never something created ex nihilo—only God is capable of that. The artist begins with the materials at hand and seeks to craft those materials into something different, something new. Remember McCarthy’s “books are made out of books.” You only have to think of the great Bard himself, William Shakespeare, to witness how an artist can draw repeatedly from multiple sources and in the alembic of his imagination fashion something new. The artist, if she is any good at what she does, works consciously within a tradition while remaining true to the experience of living in the present. The minute she attempts to pull off a work in some antiquated style her work feels dated, false.
So, the question we have to ask is: when does a work achieve newness rather than mere novelty? Why does beauty shine forth from one and not from the other? Another way to frame the question would be: what is the difference between art and artifice? I am borrowing these terms from J.F. Martel’s recent book, Reclaiming Art in an Age of Artifice (a book I highly recommend to one and all). For Martel, the difference is between “art that astonishes us by attuning us to the radical mystery of being, and art that attempts to reinforce our shared illusions, comforting or intimidating us with the notion that there is nothing to wonder at since everything has been figured out.” There is nothing new in art that reinforces shared illusions. That is the same-old, same-old. And yet the twist here is that in our human fragility and fear and cowardice and just plain exhaustion we tend to prefer the conventional, the known, the expected. Sometimes it is just a lack of energy: we just want to watch a movie with a lot of explosions.
But often we seek out artifice because we want our own convictions and prejudices confirmed. We live in a hyper-polarized society, an era of rampant ideology and near-constant virtue-signaling, after all. Naturally, we try to convince ourselves that we are above all that but we are all guilty on this account. And if you think people of faith are magically exempt from the temptation to settle for artifice then I have some land in Florida I want to sell you. Here is how Martel elaborates the distinction:
Proper art stills us, evoking an emotional state in which “the mind is arrested and raised above desiring and loathing.” Improper art does the opposite, aiming to make the percipient act, think, or feel in a certain prescribed manner. Artifice foregoes the revelatory power that is art’s prerogative in order to impart information, be it a message, an opinion, a judgment, a physiological stimulus, or a command. Whether the information is good or bad, true or false, pleasant or not is unimportant: artifice is not improper because it is immoral but because it hitches the aesthetic on intentions originating outside the aesthetic realm. . . . Proper art moves us, while artifice tries to make us move.
Or, in the pithier words of Donna Tartt, a novelist who very few people know is deeply Catholic, “Where art is unquantifiable and self-renewing, artifice can be tracked and measured: it is knowable, controllable, formulaic, repeatable.” (Tartt’s introduction to Martel’s book is itself worth the price of the book.)
Among the many sad and perverse ironies of this moment in history is that both Hollywood and the New York publishing industry have been churning out so much artifice, they are already producing the kind of slop that we have come to expect from artificial intelligence. The convergence has already happened: we have turned ourselves into AI. And of course it does not take a Ph.D. in English to see the semantic resonance between “artifice” and “artificial intelligence.”
Note the way Martel’s vision concurs with that of Elaine Scarry: art arrests us, leading us into a contemplative or deliberative state; it is not driven by any agenda so that it can genuinely be seen as dis-interested; and it has the newness of “revelatory power.” Here the words “art” and “beauty” are used interchangeably. James Joyce, Catholic to the core despite his overt rejection of the Church, called such moments of revelation “epiphanies.” Think of the epiphanies created by the three authors we touched on briefly. The stiletto poke that Evelyn Waugh delivers in his deadpan fashion when the misguided progressivist nostrums of the colonialist whites backfire because they utterly neglect the real human needs and aspirations of the African people. Or Graham Greene’s whisky priest, who as he goes to his death
felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place.
Or that instant when Mary Grace hurls a heavy textbook entitled Human Development at the head of Flannery O’Connor’s protagonist, Ruby Turpin, in the story “Revelation” and Ruby finds herself questioning all her assumptions about her place in the universe.
In an epiphany, beauty and truth suddenly come together in a new form, transforming what has been until then quite ordinary and without interest into something radiant and illuminating—and, yes, challenging, perhaps even shocking. Think of Christ transfigured on the mountaintop and Peter only able to babble about trying to capture the mystery of divine glory in tents.
The true human response to the newness of art might be likened to conversion. Not because the work has tried to tell you to change your life, but precisely because in its disinterested way it has shown you the way things truly are and because your heart has been stilled and you are invited into the experience of contemplation, you become the one to decide to change your life. You suddenly find yourself a free person, unfettered by the interests driving you to buy this or lust after that or vote for another thing, and you have become able to turn away from the habits of mind and heart that have enslaved you. It can be a disorienting experience. To encounter the new is to be stupefied like Peter, and there is something touchingly human about his confusion and desire to domesticate his encounter with the mysterium tremendum. It may be that moments of foolishness like this are the first steps on the path toward wisdom. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
Art is hard. Conversion is hard. Change is hard. Becoming vulnerable, allowing ourselves to become wounded (in Ratzinger’s phrase), is hard. Living in the present moment is hard; it is so much easier to dwell on the past or the future. Artifice is easy. It lets us off the hook. It confirms our beliefs. It reassures us.
Declinism is easy. We are superior to our times and our Gnostic knowingness knows that the only true goodness lies in the past. But maybe a few of us work in styles borrowed from that good past, so maybe a few of us Elect are still OK, still keeping the flame burning? We are the saving remnant.
But the easy way needs to be resisted. We are called to a higher life. So, in conclusion, I would like to touch on some of the practices, good and bad, relating to our search for beauty in what Jean-Pierre de Caussade called “the sacrament of the present moment.”
And to do that it will be helpful to return to the three case studies I shared with you before and to recall the type of responses Waugh, Greene, and O’Connor received from their early Catholic critics. In retrospect these responses are in the words of the younger generation, “cringe.” In my forty years as an editor, I have witnessed the same tendency on the part of Catholic gatekeepers toward moralistic condemnation of the new, the same addiction to the narrative of decline, the same reduction of beauty in all its richness—from the beauty of the flower to the terrible beauty of the cross—to what is merely pretty and noble and uplifting.
If you think that latter point is harsh, consider that a recent lengthy essay in First Things argued that Poussin was correct in stating that Caravaggio had destroyed painting because the Italian artist refused to depict the world “in the best possible light.” This reminds me of the late Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled “Painter of Light,” who boasted that he painted the world without the Fall. I think that is why so many wags have reproduced his paintings of flower-boarded cottages being invaded by imperial stormtroopers from Star Wars.
Declinism, with its Gnostic alienation from the present, urges us to see ourselves as an embattled minority, huddling together for safety in the catacombs; it seeks to recruit culture warriors to defeat the secularist enemy; it stirs up resentment, anger, and self-righteousness, all of which disguise insecurity and fear.
The demoralizing truth is that declinists shun the public square, which they see as the realm of the devil, and instead prefer to huddle within a subculture. Such subcultures may offer some warmth and comfort, but they inevitably devolve into hermetically sealed bubbles where the only preaching being done is to the choir because the congregation itself is the choir. Worse still, at least in the world of the arts, is that in these bubbles the criterion for belonging no longer becomes artistic excellence but sharing the same set of convictions. Without the fresh air from being outdoors in the public sphere, these enclaves become stifling. Standards fall; mediocrity is excused. The bland lead the bland.
If there is something I am willing to admit I am nostalgic about, it is for that mid-twentieth-century period, the age of Catholic thinkers like Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Allen Tate, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton in the public square, writers who were equally at home in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Times and Commonweal. Their rich, humanistic sensibilities—constantly renewing the tradition themselves while being on the lookout for renewal in art and literature—are sorely missed. Instead of submitting our writing to The Paris Review and The New Yorker many writers of faith settle for publishing in Catholic literary magazines and publishers of “Catholic fiction.” This is precisely the sort of inward-turning mentality that Pope Francis never tired of criticizing.
And no, in case you are thinking it, I am not being sentimental myself and arguing that we are living in a literary golden age. We are too close to be able to judge where we stand on the historical graph of greatness. The truth is that in the end it does not matter: our focus can only be on the here and now. It’s all we’ve got.
What we’ve got ain’t bad. Just to pick out a few writers of national stature who pursue beauty in dialogue with the Catholic tradition, we can be grateful for Ron Hansen, Alice McDermott, Christopher Beha, Tobias Wolff, Phil Klay, Paul Mariani, Mary Karr, Carolyn Forché, Richard Rodriguez, Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, Thomas Lynch, Stuart Dybek, Louise Erdrich, Ann Patchett, Mary Gordon, Robert Girardi, and those we have recently lost, such as Oscar Hijuelos, Barry Lopez, and Andre Dubus.
What these writers exemplify has been largely absent from the religious community in America in recent decades. I am speaking of the spirit of Christian humanism. As Catholics, we are the custodians of the tradition of Christian humanism, which embraces truth, goodness, and beauty wherever they are to be found (which often happens to be where we least expect them). A Christian humanist sensibility stands in stark opposition to the sectarian and subcultural impulse. It encourages writers of faith to participate in the mainstream literary community—even at the risk of running into hostility or just plain ideological nuttiness—because that is precisely where Christ wants us to be: out in the midst of the world. And one salutary effect of this participation is that the Catholic writer will have to compete with, and be accepted by, other writers on the basis of their craft, their ability to create art rather than artifice. Then and only then will anything resembling “evangelization” take place (and it will be an evangelization of attraction, not an evangelization of propagandizing).
Once again Flannery O’Connor comes to the rescue with the perfect encapsulation of the Christian humanist perspective: “The Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist.” When writers and readers get stuck in a subcultural bubble—even an “orthodox Catholic” subculture—they tend to be shielded from the larger literary and cultural forces that can shape them into powerful voices who can speak to our time. Those of us who are literary curators and cheerleaders need to simultaneously encourage Catholic writers to inhabit the public square but also be alert to, and supportive of, the Catholic writers out there who do not even know they are Catholic writers.
To quote the great comedian, Flip Wilson, we all belong to the “Church of What’s Happenin’ Now.” Because we meet the one who made us in one place only: the present. And he tells us, over and over again, even when we are tempted to doubt him: “Behold, I make all things new.”
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was the featured keynote, “The Church of What’s Happening Now: Art, Beauty, & the Need to Make it New,” at the 2026 Benedictine College Symposium on Transforming Culture.
