Joshua Hren

Joshua Hren, publisher and editor of Wiseblood Books, Managing Editor of Dappled Things, and contributor to several Catholic-themed publications, shares his expansive and intriguing thoughts on a wide variety of subjects: the state of Catholic literature today, papal considerations of art and beauty, the Catholic scholar in academia, his experiences starting a small press, the influence of de Gaulle and Dostoevsky, the essays of Arendt, the life and writing of David Foster Wallace, and more. I love interviews that send me hunting for new works to read, and that make me reconsider my stances; I expect that Joshua’s thoughts will do both for readers of this site.

1. The tendency to sound the death knell for Catholic literature is nothing new, but there has been a particular uptick of laments, including volleys from Paul Elie, Randy Boyagoda, and, most recently, Dana Gioia. Gioia's essay, "The Catholic Writer Today," makes a firm claim in the first paragraph: "although Roman Catholicism constitutes the largest religious and cultural group in the United States, Catholicism currently enjoys almost no positive presence in the American fine arts--not in literature, music, sculpture, or painting." What are your thoughts on Gioia's claim, the state of Catholic literature today, and why you think this "narrative of decline" (to use Gregory Wolfe's words) keeps returning to the Catholic literary conversation?

On the one hand Catholics who spin a "narrative of decline" make me immediately suspicious, as, I suppose, I feel compelled to first sift through their claims to be sure they are not merely lamenting—if even in a repressed manner, if even unconsciously—the loss of a "Constantinian Christendom" wherein the dominant principalities that be elevate the Catholic faith to a position of power and enforced influence. After all, only those whose culture once held a position at the peak can engage in the laments that lace a narrative of decline.

There is another reason for my suspicion. In his “Address to Artists,” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote that "an essential function of genuine beauty, as emphasized by Plato, is that it gives man a healthy 'shock,' it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum—it even makes him suffer, piercing him like a dart, but in so doing it 'reawakens' him, opening afresh the eyes of his heart and mind, giving him wings, carrying him aloft." Notice that, for Pope Emeritus Benedict, art is not intrinsically evangelical or doctrinal. Contrarily, for many "Catholic Arts" means "Art as Apologetics.” If a piece of fiction is not Newman's Apologia (which is of course a great work when measured by its own aims), it cannot be called Catholic fiction. These are the folks for whom even the writings of Flannery O'Connor might not be fit for the Catholic curriculum. I wondered if perhaps Dana Gioia had simply not read Bird's Nest in Your Hair, a brilliant novel by Brian Jobe, who is a sort of successor to Walker Percy and whose work may well go toe-to-toe with the novels of Milan Kundera. Of course, Jobe's deeply Catholic novel revolves around characters caught up in the, how shall we call it, adult film industry, and the prose is not puritanical. And so, for many Bird's Nest in Your Hair is average postmodern pagan fare. But Gioia even notes Anthony Burgess as a “Catholic Writer,” and if Burgess makes the cut, so does Brian Jobe.

And then I licked my wounds even more, having spent countless volunteer hours as first assistant editor and now managing editor of Dappled Things: A Quarterly of Ideas, Art, and Faith, a very fine Catholic literary journal whose published fiction continues to grow in artistic excellence. What about Dappled Things? I asked myself. Is it all for nothing? Indeed, many influential figures in the subculture of Christian arts will deny the reality Gioia depicts on the grounds that they themselves are creating and producing great “Catholic” writing. Indeed, my first reaction was to write Gioia and protest that Wiseblood Books, the publishing line I launched in April of 2013, is efficaciously reversing the dearth of good Catholic literature. But, my goodness, if, as he contends, even the influence of America and First Things is losing heave, how can I, on behalf of Wiseblood Books, on the periphery of American culture, disprove his overarching claim that we witness few to no Catholic writers of stature in the United States?

The grieving we witness in Gioia's "The Catholic Writer Today," this grief is not born of desperate clinging to an idealized golden age. Unlike your average reactionary moan, which is primarily fueled by bad feelings and ressentiment, Gioia's essay is founded on Aristotelian realism, is organized according to a tripartite taxonomy set forth to define what exactly this species we call “Catholic Writer” is. Further, his essay is ridden with (nine years of research worth of) facts. He documents that "between 1945 and 1965 Catholic novelists and poets received 11 Pulitzer Prizes and 5 National Book Awards (6 NBAs if one counts O’Connor’s posthumously published Complete Stories in 1972)." He offers the most comprehensive bibliography of American Catholic authors I have yet encountered.

But Gioia offers more than facts. He offers us hope. Not in the form of some “how to” guide or some “five step” program, but, first and foremost, by way of metaphor:

If the state of contemporary Catholic literary culture can best be conveyed by the image of a crumbling, old, immigrant neighborhood, then let me suggest that it is time for Catholic writers and intellectuals to leave the homogenous, characterless suburbs of the imagination, and move back to the big city—where we can renovate these remarkable districts which have such grace and personality, such strength and tradition. It is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition. Starting the renovation may seem like a daunting task. But as soon as one place is rebuilt, someone else will already be at work next door, and gradually the whole city begins to reshape itself around you. Renovation is hard work, but what a small price to pay—to have the right home.

I think that many return to a narrative of decline that ends at decline and sees no new city emerging on the horizon because they can conceive of nowhere else to live but the “characterless suburbs of the imagination.” Like the family who, having lived a middle-class life funded by profound debt and now unable to pay their mortgage, apocalypse seems like a better end than return to a rich-in-character but crime-ridden section of the city. Many are the theologically orthodox but imaginatively blasé; few have both lively imaginations and orthodox faith. A cultural critic without a lively imagination is likely to consider Gioia's call to arms “utopian,” as though renovation is synonymous with reeducation camps. In this way a narrative of decline that ends on the absolute inevitability of decline is soothing because its fatalism provides the kind of certainty that absolves the subject from working to renovate and rebuild. Yes the dominant literary culture is deeply secularized, and yes many in this culture have worked hard to eliminate an authentic literature of belief or a Catholic literature from the stage of national arts. However, it would be unjust to claim that the decline of Catholic arts is due simply to the nihilistic literati elite who during the cultural revolution of the nineteen sixties proclaimed a transvaluation of values which is now manifest in nearly every work of literature published. This would be something like blaming the rise of Nazi Germany on Nietzsche. As Eric Voegelin argues in his incisive essay “Nietzsche, the Crisis, and the War,” “identification of Nietzsche's transvaluation with the very nihilism which it expressly tends to 'overcome,' is a symptom of the strong resistance to a realization of the nature of the crisis, for such a realization would confront him, as everybody who realizes it, with the unpleasant task of contributing to its solution through self-critique and ultimately the metanoia of his person.” Again, what makes Gioia's participation in the “narrative of decline” distinct is that he insists upon a realistic apprehension of the crisis in Catholic letters. This realistic posture allows him to also have hope. To quote again from his essay, “Times are always bad. Culture is always in trouble. The barbarian is always at the gate, and some part of the Church inevitably needs a good sweeping. O tempora! O mores! is a perpetual complaint. As every Catholic knows, we live in a fallen world where—o felix culpa—we rejoice in the possibilities of redemption. For the artist, every problem represents a sort of opportunity. The necessary insight here is that history doesn’t solve problems, culture doesn’t solve problems; only people do.”

Gioia's essay is a must read for anyone who struggles with the temptation to despair in the face of so many “barbarians” at the helm of our national culture. I am thrilled to note that, amidst its rising (but still peripheral) tide of Catholic fiction and poetry, Wiseblood Books will release the only full text edition of “The Catholic Writer Today” in May of 2014, and it will be the inaugural publication in our series of “Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture,” a series devoted to doing the sort of hard work Gioia galvanizes us to do in order to have a home. 

2. You founded Wiseblood Books earlier this year. Could you talk about the genesis of this small press, your releases, and your goals for the future?

​I completed my P​h.D. in English (Theology and Fiction, Political Philosophy and Fiction) in 2012. As with so many things, the Ph.D. has a fairly high inflation value at the moment. To avoid false humility, I will acknowledge that I am an intelligent person, but I am unsure whether I would have been able to earn a Ph.D. in an age past. My good friend Jeremiah Webster once gave me an old Oxford Press edition of Sophocles' plays. The translator holds an M.A., and this degree is placed very boldly on the first page, an achievement obviously considered "laud-worthy." Now, as the B.A. is the new G.E.D., and as—so far as I can tell—identity politics favors candidates whose expertise is in “queer readings” of Henry James (if he is taught at all, the difficult ole dog), “postcolonial readings” of Paradise Lost, or racialized readings of Michael Jackson's song lyrics. It is quite challenging to find work in academia. I've submitted somewhere between 150 and 200 applications in the past two years—for professorships, high school teaching positions, waitstaff jobs, secretarial work at homeless shelters, and, last but not least a barrista job. I showed up to a group interview in which all the other candidates besides me (I'm thirty two) were eighteen to twenty two years old. I didn't get the job! And my work as adjunct professor at a nearby university dried up due to lower enrollment. Especially as I am married with two little ones, this "failure" to find work squeezed from me the most pragmatic compromises (the barrista application) and simultaneously stirred my most profound aims and goals. I assure you that if what I have written thus far borders on the genre of “sob story” (a genre perfected by the drunken Marmeladov in the early pages of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment), nothing could be further from the truth.   

At the time I launched Wiseblood Books I had been volunteering as managing editor at Dappled Things, fiction editor at Relief, and doing freelance editorial work on the side. I found this work—of helping authors to "fully form" their stories, books, and poems—some of the most fulfilling I'd done to date. Further, Providence has introduced me to some brilliant editors and luminous people through this work. To name just those with whom I've come to work most closely—Bernardo Aparicio, Katy Carl, Meredith McCann, Jeremiah Webster, and Brian Jobe. As I mentioned, “failure” in more homogenous spheres forced me to dig a new foundation—one founded upon the old, but one that is dissatisfied with arbitrary, conventional answers to the problem of Catholic culture. With one eye peering into the void, I cast the other toward heaven and did a great deal of praying. From this cloud of unknowing came the name Wiseblood Books, a name that of course pays homage to Flannery O'Connor's first novel Wise Blood. I wanted to take this novel as our flag because it was well-received by critics both Catholic and otherwise; it has broken out of the “ghetto” of Catholic culture. And so I began to train my eyes to proofread, I began to learn how to design, format, and produce books by reproducing classics. The first Wiseblood Classic I ever produced turned out to be an edition of Chesterton's Utopia of Usurers, and the first drafts came equipped with blurry-image, no text on the spine, and shoddy indentation and pagination. By the time I'd worked through Balzac's Bureaucrats, Fogazzaro's The Little World of the Past, and Dostoevsky's Demons, I started to get the hang of it, and the books grew in beauty and readability both inside and out. I also began to solicit manuscripts for the first round of Wiseblood Originals. I began to pay Dominic Heisdorf, a local graphic designer whose capacity to turn the most abstract conceptions into stunningly incarnate covers never ceases to astound both myself and others who see the fruits of his labor on our published books. At the time Dominic was working out of a local university computer lab, using an old password leftover from student days, all of which allowed him access to design programs which he was entirely versed in. I have these visions of Dominic sitting in the computer lab, constructing his outstanding covers alongside freshman hammering out last minute papers on O Pioneers! [He has since been able to purchase his own computer and design programs.] Donations began to arrive—some from friends, sure, but others from people I'd never met but who wrote with great enthusiasm in response to the Wiseblood Books website, the mission, and the contents. 

In his biography of Charles de Gaulle Jean Lacouture laboriously documents the first days in which de Gaulle, recently dismissed from Petain's French government—which, in 1940, had just signed an armistice with Nazi Germany—organized a counter-government, a new “France,” in London. Having received Churchill's sympathies even as Great Britain officially denounced, in the light of France's armistice, its former alliance with the French State, and through the aid of some prominent Englishmen, “Charles de Gaulle was allotted premises at St. Stephen's House, a large, rather dilapidated commercial building, since destroyed, that stood on the Victorian Embankment, on the bank of the Thames, close to the House of Commons. Sir Edward Spears had his offices there, and he placed the third floor at the disposal of the Free French, as the Committee came to be called. [de Gaulle] moved into a triangular room that looked on to the river; it was hastily provided with a white-wood table, a telephone and four chairs. He pinned a map of France to the wall, another of the world, and set to work.” 

I am no de Gaulle, but de Gaulle has been a source of profound insight, inspiration, and intellectual and political meditation of mine (slowly but surely I am working on a historical novel called In the Wine Press, chapters of which have appeared in Dappled Things). Wiseblood's own story is not entirely different from de Gaulle's, even if we are operating on an astronomically smaller scale, and even if, again, I am no de Gaulle. One of my former professors went on sabbatical to South Korea, and his wife and child followed soon after. He allotted the premises of his house to our family, and his wife offered me her third floor office as the sort of “headquarters” of Wiseblood Books. I hastily hauled in my books, lined the walls with them, and set up the old computer. I pinned a picture of Flannery O'Connor to one wall, a crucifix to another, and set to work. What a gift this house is! How grateful I am to my former professor, a stolid intellectual mentor, and his wife, also a professor at UW-Milwaukee. 

In October of 2013 Wiseblood published its first original, Micah Cawber's The Unfinished Life ofN. November saw the release of Amy Krohn's A Flower in the Heart of thePainting, December Geoffrey Smagacz's A Waste of Shame and Other Sad Tales ofthe Appalachian Foothills, and January Robert Vander Lugt's Sand, Smoke,Current. Though none of these authors had previously published a book-length work, they were all good writers, and working as their editor was a great grace, a gift. Each of these works embodies our broad aim to foster works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances," a realism that allows us to see near things with their extensions of meaning and thereby allows us to see far things close up. Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope. 

And then we began to garner more recognition, support, and enthusiasm from other quarters of greater stature. Little emails of encouragement from First Things and The Catholic Thing, from Image and elsewhere. We were fortunate to add Lee Oser's The Oracles Fell Silent to our publication roster (my editor-author friendship with Lee has been more blessed than I can here note, except to say (sorry Lee) that we both wept a bit when we were finished editing his MS). We added Elena Maria Vidal's historical novel The Paradise Tree, F.J. Rocca's Jamesean Master of Wednesday Night, and stepped into poetry with Charles Hughes' astute scrawlings Cave Art, into screenplay with Christopher Yates's No Time to Be Lost (a comic piece in the vein of A Confederacy of Dunces). When I say "we" I may be mispeaking. I was doing most of the work, but I received invaluable advice and help from Jeremiah Webster, Bernardo Aparicio, Brian Jobe, Katy Carl, and others. Our submissions have increased beyond my ability to respond in time. Thankfully I was able to bring on editorial intern Charles Schmitt, a very bright young man who owns his own tractor parts business and who recently completed an MA in Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas. And then came a most fruitful relationship with Villanova University, whereby we now produce a few classics—such as Pascal's Pensees—to be incorporated into their curricula. The Villanova connection came by way of James Matthew Wilson, whom Dana Gioia considers one of the greatest Catholic poets writing today. How could I refrain from bleeding enthusiasm over the forthcoming Wiseblood Books publication of James Matthew Wilson's poetry collection Some Permanent Things? I think the list should stop with Catholic fiction luminary Kaye Park Hinckley's short story collection Birds of a Feather, but the list does not end here. With the forthcoming release of Dana Gioia's “The Catholic Writer Today,” which will inaugurate “Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture,” Wiseblood Books has reached a new level. I am currently working with a lawyer to obtain nonprofit status. Just as de Gaulle was able to organize a new France from the periphery of preexisting political realities, I, we at Wiseblood are working from the periphery of culture to organize and disseminate a new literature of belief, a new Catholic literature. 

3. You completed your Ph.D. work at UW-Milwaukee. How was the experience of studying and completing religiously-informed scholarship at a secular institution?

In his My Life Among the Deathworks, Philip Rieff introduces a largely accurate—if too-neat—metaphorical division between "first world" cultures, "second world" cultures, and "first world" cultures. Rieff's divisions have nothing to do with the geopolitical first and third worlds that have become part of our vocabulary. The division, as he presents it, is between those who have faith, who believe that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing, and who live under this vast canvas, and those who have fiction, who believe that humans have created any worlds that have come into existence unaided by any supra-human being. The fight is between those who insist that there are no truths, only interpretations or readings, fictions, those who, “having abandoned their belief in God” find that, “poetry—art generally, can take its place as the style of redemption,” and those spies of the sacred order, “dedicated to the proposition that the truths have been revealed and require constant rereading and application in light of the particular historical circumstances in which we live.” 

The new Catholic cultural renaissance is and must be a site of this fight between fiction and faith. My life in the deathworks of a deeply secular academia left me with no illusions concerning the problems of nihilism, boredom, and despair which are mixed up with identity politics to create the contemporary intelligentsia. At the time I was something of a reactionary myself, stepping back from the cultural crossfire that seemed inevitable at the turn of every theory, every question, every answer. I now see this time as a gift of providence because I can see the limits of my own reactionary positions (I ended a paper on Joyce by arguing—in an entirely comic vein, of course—that Ulysses be burned as an indubitably heretical work). I can see, too, the limits of dialogue, the limits of the dominant secularist and relativistic codes or lack thereof. But I can also see lines of communication, fault lines of new culture forged where the most authentic aspects of a postmodern aesthetic comes into contact with authentic Catholic (and catholic!) vision. This even as so many in the dominant intellectual culture increasingly cry out vanity of vanities, all is fiction—all your morals, your mores, your dogmas, your doctrines, all of this is determined arbitrarily by those in power, and therefore subject to arbitrary change, as it has no link to the transcendent. I suppose that, in short, I have been shaped by, but—through sacraments, through the teachings of the Church, the person of Christ, the activity of the Holy Spirit, the love of the Father—have had to learn how to transcend the politics of contemporary academia. One of my professors, the one in whose house I and my family temporary reside, was indispensable, was entirely instrumental in my attempt to stay in the trenches when everything in me wanted to retreat into the Catholic ghetto. We shall see what comes of it. Thus far I've published mostly in Catholic scholarly journals (Logos) and Catholic literary magazines (Dappled Things). But at the very least Wiseblood has emerged from the aforementioned ghetto (we receive submissions by and enthusiasm from people of all faiths or no definite faith whatsoever). I think that studying under the professor I mentioned, who himself is a Christian deeply devoted to the study of political realities, I have come to see the political (in French the political is used to distinguish from politics, the former connoting political philosophy as it intersects with political realities, the latter connoting the “politics as usual,” or politics in a strictly negative sense) as something that needs to be recovered and preserved. Thus the study of de Gaulle and George of Kennan, of Simone Weil and Jacques Maritain, the desire to develop these historical figures into novelistic characters—in order to contribute to the long dialogue devoted to the limits to—and what Hannah Arendt calls “the promise of”—politics. 

 

4. You've written about Ernest Hemingway's Catholicism at Dappled Things; specifically, his play "Today is Friday," noting Matthew Nickel's inclusion of that work in his (excellent) recent book. Hemingway's identity as a literary Catholic is complicated, of course. Do you think there is a "type" of Catholic writer who exists in that gray area between public pronouncement and private piety?

Scholarship which interweaves interpretations of the author and his work may be necessary—and Nickel makes a compelling case to this end!—but I suppose I am more concerned with the vision, the relationship to belief which underlies and charges Hemingway's narratives. As you note, Hemingway's Catholicity is complicated. The dominant secular Hemingway myth goes something like this: Hemingway is a member of the “Lost Generation,” and his experience of the Church's affiliation with Franco in Spain left him alienated from organized religion. From this alienated position he conjured up his own code, a mixture of existentialist “realism” concerning man's fate, hedonism, and sentimental humanism. One of Hemingway's most famous works, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, begins with the following epigram:

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

One could read this in the vein of Sisyphus and come away with the supposition that Hemingway, like Camus, conceives of the search for God as futile. We witness only the leopard carcass. Does this mean that, to use the words of Percy's Binx (The Moviegoer), “the search” is over, and there is no God? Notice that Hemingway uses the word seeking, that he emphasizes “No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude,” close to “Ngaje Ngai,” the “House of God.” On the other hand, the leopard was searching, was seeking. Perhaps Hemingway wishes to articulate anxiety over whether the search will find fruition before death.

In Lumen Fidei an encyclical written by “the four hands” of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, our Holy Fathers note that 

Because faith is a way, it also has to do with the lives of those men and women who, though not believers, nonetheless desire to believe and continue to seek. To the extent that they are sincerely open to love and set out with whatever light they can find, they are already, even without knowing it, on the path leading to faith. They strive to act as if God existed, at times because they realize how important he is for finding a sure compass for our life in common or because they experience a desire for light amid darkness, but also because in perceiving life’s grandeur and beauty they intuit that the presence of God would make it all the more beautiful.

We behold this searching, this seeking as it is choked by fumes of cynicism or perhaps despair in In Our Time, which may well be my favorite of Hemingway's writings. This very powerful story is called “Soldier's Home,” and it follows “Krebs,” a soldier who went from a Methodist college in Kansas to fight in World War I. I want to stay close to the text, to try and let the text talk first. In the story's third paragraph we learn that, “by the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma, the greeting of heroes was over. He came back much too late. The men from the town who had been drafted had all been welcomed elaborately on their return. There had been a great deal of hysteria. Now the reaction had set in. People seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after the war was over.” 

Krebs soon finds that, though he “felt the need to talk” about the war, “no one wanted to talk about it.” As the story goes on, he struggles with lying, which seems to give people the fictions they desire, and love, which he cannot seem to authentically embody, in spite of the apparently false “Uh, huh,” which he utters in response to his “girl's” question” Do you love me?” And then his mother enters the room and asks to speak with Harold (Krebs) alone. She asks, not in a mean way, whether it isn't about time that he figures out what he is going to do with his life. “God has some work for everyone to do,” she says. “There can be no idle hands in His Kingdom.” “I'm not in His Kingdom,” Krebs said. “We are all of us in His Kingdom,” she counters. She goes on, offering a litany of concerns, telling him, “I pray for you all day long, Harold.” At this Krebs “looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.” Finally, for perhaps the first time in the story, he tells the truth. “I don't love anybody,” he says, only to retract it once he realizes “He couldn't tell her, couldn't make her see it. It was silly to have said it. He had only hurt her. He went over and took hold of he arm,” for she was crying. After more tense dialogue, she asks “Would you kneel and pray with me, Harold?” They kneel beside the dining room table, and Kreb's mother prays. The story reaches its highest pitch:

“Now you pray, Harold,” she says.

“I can't.”

“Try, Harold.”

“I can't.”

“Do you want me to pray for you?”

“Yes.”

Afterward, Krebs leaves the house, upset with himself for having lied to his mother because he felt sorry for her.

The story is heart-rending. Is far from sentimental. Here we have a significant contribution to what Elie calls the “literature of belief.” I am not saying that Krebs's mother's intercessory prayer will lead to his salvation. Nor am I sympathizing with Krebs to the point of comfortably assuming that God's mercy will inevitably preserve him from utter darkness. What I am suggesting is that Hemingway's story is a fully-realized dramatization of doubt and faith in the singular—in the battleground of mother and child.   

In her essay “Tradition and the Modern Age,” Hannah Arendt contends that “Kierkegaard, jumping from doubt into belief, carried doubt into religion, transformed the attack of modern science on religion into an inner religious struggle, so that since then sincere religious experience has seemed possible only in the tension between doubt and belief, in torturing one's beliefs with one's doubts and relaxing from this torment in the violent affirmation of the absurdity of both the human condition and man's belief. No clearer symptom of this modern religious situation can be found than the fact that Dostoevsky, perhaps the most experienced psychologist of modern religious beliefs, portrayed pure faith in the character of Myshkin, 'the idiot,' or Alyosha Karamazov, who is pure of heart because he is simple-minded.” Arendt's argument carries a great deal of weight—for fiction writers more than theologians or the Church's Magisterium. Although Catholic intellectual Jean-Luc Marion's caution against theology's capacity for excessive and misplaced certainty (in, for instance, God Without Being) needs to be heeded, the Magisterium operates on an entirely different plane than the fiction writer: the former must make definitive declarations of truth from a perch that transcends the opinions, emotions and ethos of all ages, even if on a pastoral level these teachings need to be integrated with great prudence. A fiction writer, even the most orthodox of fiction writers, works with the humble materials of singular human experiences. Even in a panoramic novel, one which encompasses an entire social order, a panoply of people, is comprised of so many singularities. And one would be hard-pressed to write a “modern” (and by modern I am following Catholic political philosopher Pierre Manent's suggestion that modernity really begins to settle in post-Machiavelli, post that master of suspicion) fiction that portrays belief without simultaneously portraying doubt. One thinks of Dostoevsky's assertion that “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

Lumen Fidei directly addresses the doubt-faith dilemma of modernity. Here the Holy Fathers, by way of Nietzsche, introduce a most helpful distinction between believing and seeking. It is necessary to quote at some length: 

[In] speaking of the light of faith, we can almost hear the objections of many of our contemporaries. In modernity, that light might have been considered sufficient for societies of old, but was felt to be of no use for new times, for a humanity come of age, proud of its rationality and anxious to explore the future in novel ways. Faith thus appeared to some as an illusory light, preventing mankind from boldly setting out in quest of knowledge. The young Nietzsche encouraged his sister Elisabeth to take risks, to tread "new paths… with all the uncertainty of one who must find his own way", adding that "this is where humanity’s paths part: if you want peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to be a follower of truth, then seek." Belief would be incompatible with seeking. From this starting point Nietzsche was to develop his critique of Christianity for diminishing the full meaning of human existence and stripping life of novelty and adventure. Faith would thus be the illusion of light, an illusion which blocks the path of a liberated humanity to its future.

In the process, faith came to be associated with darkness. There were those who tried to save faith by making room for it alongside the light of reason. Such room would open up wherever the light of reason could not penetrate, wherever certainty was no longer possible. Faith was thus understood either as a leap in the dark, to be taken in the absence of light, driven by blind emotion, or as a subjective light, capable perhaps of warming the heart and bringing personal consolation, but not something which could be proposed to others as an objective and shared light which points the way. Slowly but surely, however, it would become evident that the light of autonomous reason is not enough to illumine the future; ultimately the future remains shadowy and fraught with fear of the unknown. As a result, humanity renounced the search for a great light, Truth itself, in order to be content with smaller lights which illumine the fleeting moment yet prove incapable of showing the way. Yet in the absence of light everything becomes confused; it is impossible to tell good from evil, or the road to our destination from other roads which take us in endless circles, going nowhere.

Although it may be inaccurate to call David Foster Wallace a “disciple” of Dostoevsky, he certainly learned a great deal from that helplessly anti-Catholic Russian who gave to the world some of the most profoundly “Catholic” fiction extant.

What, in particular, gets in the way of contemporary fiction grappling with belief in a believable way? I think we can arrive at a partial answer to this question by turning to a David Foster Wallace, a “post-modern” writer who was not afraid to reckon with the question and problem and subject of belief. As Timothy Jacobs argues in his study of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Wallace, who took his own life in 2008, confronted the “contemporary literary ironic nihilists” just as Dostoevsky's “particular foes were the Nihilists” of the 19th century, those who openly rejected belief in anything at all, who openly rejected adherence to any moral principles. And yet, Wallace muses in an essay on Dostoevsky, “maybe it's not true that we today are nihilists. At the very least we have devils we believe in. These include sentimentality, naiveté, archaism, fanaticism. Maybe it'd be better to call our art's culture one congenial skepticism.” Wallace goes on to note that “in our own age and culture of enlightened atheism we are very much Nietzsche's children, his ideological heirs”; the contemporary arts carry on as though God is dead, but not always consciously. In his novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace calls this “enlightened self-interest” and “unconsidered atheism” (267). Existing amidst this culture, Wallace proclaims the importance of fiction that does not shy away from belief: “believing in something bigger than you is not a choice. You either do or you're a walking dead man, just going through the motions.” Sickened by a self-absorbed culture, he demands that we believe in something larger than ourselves, but doesn't know quite what he himself believes. How, then, does he tackle that something bigger than oneself, how does he tackle that weary cynicism he finds so awful?

Examining one incident in Infinite Jest, we can see that Wallace takes on this task by taking as his model Fyodor Dostoevsky's work The Brothers Karamazov. What we [via Timothy Jacobs] can call the “Loach incident” is significantly similar to the “Rebellion” chapter of Dostoevsky's great novel. “'Rebellion' opens with the nihilist Ivan's admission to his saintly brother Alyosha that he cannot understand 'how it is possible to love one's neighbors' (236) and then relates an anecdote about a saint who embraces and cares for 'a hungry and frozen passerby' who had 'asked to be made warm,' presumably by human contact, even though the ragged man was 'foul and festering with some terrible disease' (236-237); the saint lies down with him, embraces him, and even breathes into his mouth and takes the man's filth upon himself and unto himself.”

Turning to the “Loach incident” in the massive Infinite Jest, we recognize the character Barry Loach as the youngest son in a devout Roman Catholic family. The mother's fervent wish is that one of her boys enters the Roman Catholic priesthood. Eventually, the last brother before Barry enters a Jesuit seminary, to the relief of Barry, who, is studying for a career in “the liniment-and-adhesive ministry of professional athletic training.” The elder soon experiences a “sudden and dire spiritual decline” in which his basic faith in the “innate indwelling goodness of men” withers, causing a “black misanthropic spiritual outlook.” As Alyosha before Ivan, Barry tries to restore his brother's faith. His brother is wary of the “self-interested” nature of Barry's comments, and their dialogue eventually leads to a challenge in which Barry dresses himself in ragged attire and tests the possibility of human response.

If you happen to have a copy of Infinite Jest propping up your coffee table (or perhaps yours, like mine, has a hollowed out center with a secret stash of papal encyclicals in the middle), read 968-971 of that behemoth. Here we face the problem of this passage as restoring his faith in fellow men but not necessarily in God. I am torn. Often it seems that just as  like good civil laws can prepare someone to be opened to the truths of divinely revealed laws, goodly trust on a human level, can prepare the way for supernatural trust. We can ask whether restoration of trust in other humans may prepare the way for trust and faith in God, or whether the person will come to experience such trust as a substitute for God, something that supplants the desire for the transcendent.

Persons lost in the cosmos of our current cultural ethos would likely only arrive at problems of faith and belief through a far more roundabout labyrinth. The dominant cultural ethos of this world, in art as elsewhere, is irony, not Socratic irony, which aims to provoke the listener or dialogue partner toward truth, but cynical irony, a means of dealing with the dissolution and fragmentation of the world, of so many people's disillusionment with the political, the religious, etc. through a wry grin that at best provides a momentary, and quite shallow, laugh. David Foster Wallace perceptively diagnosed this ironic zeitgeist or spirit of the age in Infinite Jest, when, the narrator notes that millennial America's “weary cynicism” is essentially a mask to cover “gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naiveté,” further calling this the “last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America . . . what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human . . . is probably . . . to be in some basic interior way forever infantile.” (272).  Instead of harnessing either this irony or those contemporary cultural devices that mask this irony in our favor, we should try to ask what is behind the ironic impulse? I would suggest that at least part of what we will find behind the ironic impulse is a sort of self-protection against the hollowness of the world, against those that T.S. Eliot called "The Hollow Men":

    We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats' feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
   
    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Here Eliot diagnoses the postmodern world. The loss of hope in language's capacity to carry meaning. The loss of form and colour. Paralysis. But amidst these falling forces, this incessant gesturing (the media saturation and celebrity culture, for instance . . . art as mere self-expression or therapy), Eliot articulates the transcendent. Not outside these things, mind, you, but between them:

    Between the desire
    And the spasm
    Between the potency
    And the existence
    Between the essence
    And the descent
    Falls the Shadow
                                   For Thine is the Kingdom
   
    For Thine is
    Life is
    For Thine is the
   
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

Do not these words resonate so deeply today? Have not the collective hopes prescribed by a secular culture been collapsing now for decades, so that if we listen closely, beneath the "bangs," between the noise, we hear that whimper? Yes, but we also hear that For Thine is the Kingdom struggling, like a moth stuck in sweet but spoiled honey, to fly aloft again.

Wiseblood wants to be a site of this flight.

***

Joshua Hren, Ph.D. has worked as a freelance editor of novels, works of philosophy and theology, and full-length scholarly studies, and as assistant editor, managing editor, and fiction editor for several literary magazines. He received his Ph.D. in English from UW-Milwaukee, where his major areas of emphasis were Theology and Fiction, Political Philosophy and Fiction, and Classical Rhetoric. Joshua has published short stories, a serialized novel, poems, translations, interviews, and scholarly articles. His essay "The Genealogy of Ressentiment and the Achilles' Heel of Humanitarianism: The Politics of Love from the Iliad to The Idiot" is forthcoming in Logos. As of late, he has absented himself from the universe (the university) of academia proper to serve as a regular participant in the Local Conference on Domestic Life, which is held daily in his home. Here he and his wife Brittney moderate the contributions of their daughter Anaya and son Søren, each experts in Augustinian concupiscence (Augustine's argument that sin is evident even in the littlest ones) and "Let the Children Come to Me" (that school which locates a profound sort of wisdom accessible only to the littlest ones).  Joshua is founder and editor-in-chief of Wiseblood Books. He is currently at work on In the Wine Press, a semi-historical novel that revolves around Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Maritain, and The New Clear Winter, another that revolves around Joseph Stalin and George F. Kennan.