Artur Rosman

Artur Rosman’s site, Cosmos The In Lost, has become a daily read for me: sharp, smart, well-written essays ranging from Catholic theology to art to culture to literature, all delivered with a sense of humor missing from most other religious discussions. The panoply of subjects doesn’t result in slim reading: rather, the opposite. Rosman is able to introduce, elucidate, conclude, and educate; to open conversations rather than close them; to make me reconsider my assumptions about contemporary Catholicism in America and Europe. Here are some of his thoughts on the site, Milosz, Warhol, Nowosielski, American Catholicism and its political stains, and more.

1. Cosmos The In Lost is a rarity: a smart, entertaining blog about Catholic theology, literature, art, and culture. When and why did you start the site?

I started the blog out of desperation. I'm presently writing a doctoral dissertation on the poetry (and theology) of Czeslaw Milosz. This has proven to be tortuous when coupled with a several year writing block. I thought having to write posts almost daily might cure me. The blog-writing is fun; we'll see about the dissertation.

2. What attracts you to the writing and thought of Milosz?

Milosz was right in the middle of everything. He saw the worst (and the best) of the 20th century firsthand. What's more, as a poet and thinker with a profoundly Catholic imagination he wasn't afraid to talk about the neuralgic points the faith still needs to address more clearly for our generation: scientism, totalitarianism, consumerism, and the problem of evil. I like to think of him as the prolegomena to any future Newman.

3. In a recent post at Cosmos The In Lost, you use Milosz as a pivot point to discuss the almost unilateral conception that "something went wrong" with the postconciliar Church. The lines you quote are apt, and lead me to wonder: is this specifically a failure of the American Church, of the American political culture? Has it wrapped up the Church, or has the Church allowed itself to become smothered (as Mary is wrapped in the American flag, via the Diocese of Brooklyn)?

This is not an exclusively American disease. As William T. Cavanaugh has argued, the Church has ceded ground to the nation-state ever since the so-called "Wars of Religion." The nation-state is always trafficking in claims that its raison d'être is to save us from the violence of religion. All the while it's given us is the Vendee, Verdun, the Gulag, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and so on. The nation-state's record makes the Crusaders look like choirboys. Talk about blind belief!

What's unique about the US is how the political culture has managed to effectively divide and conquer the church along party lines. Most parishioners tend to be more faithful to the Democratic and Republican platforms than they are to the credo. 

What's more, I believe there must have been a massive failure in both pre- and post-conciliar catechesis, but I haven't seen much research in that direction. All I know is that I see its effects daily.

4. Does Catholic literature and art offer an alternate route, a way around the partisan divide you mention? Or is Milosz correct when he says this (culled via First Things editor Matthew Schmitz):

"The number of twentieth-century Catholic authors is negligible. So-called conversions of intellectuals are usually of a dubious nature, not significantly different from transitory conversions to surrealism, expressionism, or existentialism… . This was a period of interest in Thomism and of references to Jacques Maritain in literary discussion. It would be wrong to maintain that for all these “intellectual Catholics" literary fashion alone was at stake; one cannot reduce the clutching gestures of a drowning man to a question of fashion. But it would be equally incorrect to consider literary debates based on a skillful juggling of Thomist terminology as symptoms of Catholicism."

I do believe literature is one place to look for discussions of faith that go beyond the usual political divides. The space good creative writing opens up for interpretation does not lend itself to "us vs. them" dichotomies characteristic of politics. Politicians are usually stuck in black-and-white worlds (they are a kind of real-life fiction), whereas good literature plays within the grays.

It's a different story when writers make statements about their profession. The Milosz quote is an example of this and it needs to be read in context. It comes from the "Alpha the Moralist" chapter about Jerzy Andrzejewski in The Captive Mind. The book was published in 1953, right around the time when France and the States were having what we think of, in retrospect, as Catholic literary renaissances. The names speak for themselves: Merton, Mauriac, the Green(e)s, Flannery, Percy, the posthumous writings of Bernanos, and so on.

Writers are horrible when it comes to gauging the merits of their contemporaries, because they're competing with them. Paul Elie's seemingly scandalous "Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?" in the NYT is one recent instance of this phenomenon. He totally represses the whole constellation of top-notch Christian writers associated with IMAGE Journal, even though I know he's familiar with their work. This repression helps him create an artificial niche for the novel he's writing and plugging in that piece. In the end both Milosz's and Elie's comments are nothing more than symptoms of an almost unavoidable professional disease.

5. I'm happy that you mention IMAGE, which should be at the forefront of any conversations about this topic. You recently included an essay of your own ("Acquainted with the Night: The Art of Jerzy Nowosielski") at Cosmos The In Lost.

I enjoyed the form of this essay: anecdote to literary-theological discussion. An expansive piece that represents the great work that Gregory Wolfe publishes.

One particular sentence struck me: "If there is one thing we learn from Nowosielski’s art it’s that there is no clear distinction between the sacred and the profane, believer and atheist."

How do you feel about this blurring: is it freeing or frightening?

This is a freeing notion, because, as the next sentence would have it, "Everything can and must be taken into the eschatological realism proposed by the resurrection."

The atheist and the profane have their mysterious place within the economy of salvation. The best of modern theology (von Balthasar, de Lubac, Danielou, Rahner, Ratzinger, Congar, and Wojtyla) fought against the modern separating out grace from nature through their explorations of premodern theological traditions. Their explorations amount to saying there is no need to protect some private pious-religious sphere from incursions of an unstoppable profane.

What I mean here is captured in a darker and more personal register in the words of my friend, the singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee, "what if it's for a purpose / what if we used our battered faith / they say God He doesn't make junk / and Jesus never makes mistakes / He has never given up / on anything that He has made / He will chase you like a lover / right through heaven's gate."

6. I guess "freeing" would also make sense considering your recent attention to Sartre and others in that mini-series, "Famous Atheists Who Weren't Atheists." I'm happy that you include Warhol. For some time I was worried that I was remaking him in my own image, but there's more than enough evidence to document his strong belief, as you say to reword the Guggenheim's description of his Last Supper cycle as "an almost obsessive investment in the subject matter" into "devotion."

What is about Catholics like Warhol that confound critics (and I'd throw in John Updike here, who did his best but could only manage a Protestant reading of the artist)?

I think somebody like Warhol, much like Czeslaw Milosz and Walker Percy, is not only ironic toward his own culture, but is also ironic toward it in a manner that utilizes a Catholic imagination. This is something that David Tracy's The Analogical Imagination (a real goldmine!) helped me to see.

If you don't think from within a Catholic way of interpreting the world with the whole mind, body, and soul, then you'll get fooled a bit by these artists.

I think encountering totally off the mark responses to Catholic artists is part of the fun. That's not entirely meanspirited on my part. The idiosyncratic interpretations help me to see my own tradition, and the writers who work within it, in fresh and unexpected ways.

At the same time, if you come from the outside and engage these artists seriously enough, you'll eventually get interested in Catholicism. Shibboleths aren't only for the group in the know.

7. You mention Milosz and Percy together here. Besides the ironic mode, do you see the writing and thought of these Catholics intersecting or informing each other in further ways?

There are interesting biographical and thematic connections between Percy and Milosz. They both were enthusiasts of science early in their lives. Its elegant solutions provided them with a kind of solace for a time.

The horrors of the 20th century killed this naive faith, although, to their credit, neither one abandoned science altogether. Instead, they came to clearly see the deadly limitations of the ideology of scientism.

I believe both of them saw Catholicism as the only humane alternative to a world gone mad. I mean, what else is there?

8. What are the stakes for you, personally, in engaging Catholic art and culture at your site, and in your writing? What is the point of these investigations in a broader sense--the role of a Catholic-minded critic?

My life.

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Artur Rosman was born in Warsaw, Poland but is secretly Krakovian. He is husband, father of three, and book translator (from Polish to English). Artur resides in Seattle where he is writing a dissertation on theology in the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz at the University of Washington in the Comparative Literature department. When he's not writing he's plotting his escape to Krakow.