Among the Believers (Page 2)

Clearly, too, Elie is sympathetic to the religious beliefs of his four subjects; the question remains, by the time you get to the end of his book, whether he has accomplished what Day, Merton, Percy and O'Connor so remarkably accomplished, which is to make their faith somehow appealing and important to modern nonbelievers. The times are not as propitious as they were a half-century ago. As a culture, we have moved from an open despair at the spiritual emptiness of modern life to a Bruegel-like celebration of it. Tangible yearnings have become intangible, and so it is not clear that if you are not already captured and interested by these writers, this book will speak to you in the deep ways it speaks to those of us who are. Ultimately this is not Elie's problem to solve: He neither apologizes for nor pauses to justify the religious faith of his subjects. He examines it, with deep sympathy, and assumes the reader will be open to doing the same.

Dorothy Day was born in 1897, Merton in 1915, Percy a year later, and O'Connor, finally, in 1925. O'Connor was the only hereditary Catholic in the group; the others were, by distinct pathways, swept along in the movement that made midcentury Catholicism so attractive to intellectuals, first in Europe and later, perhaps even more forcefully, in the United States. Converts in Europe included T.S. Eliot (not technically to the Roman Church but very close to it, in an Anglican-Roman movement called Anglo-Catholicism), Auden, Waugh and Graham Greene, among many others. In the United States, in addition to Day, Merton and Percy, there were the poets Allen Tate and Robert Lowell (for whom revelation became a form of madness), and their wives, the writers Caroline Gordon and Jean Stafford.

To everyone who looks upon formal Christianity with cultural suspicion, the Catholic form of orthodoxy appears particularly pedestrian, rule-bound, proletarian in the least attractive senses of that word, hostile to free inquiry, locked in a tradition it forever declares immutable (which traditions never are, in fact), and, most offensive to the modern consciousness, sexually hysterical and misogynistic. These recognitions and deep cultural assumptions about Christianity, for the intellectually active and sensitive Catholic, are troubling and difficult to argue with. Yet for the believer, beyond these worldly failures stands God: author of beauty.

To the artists and intellectuals of the early and middle twentieth century, the Church offered a specific framework for that beauty, a framework for seeing existence that is magnificent in its completeness; gorgeous in its visual, musical and written expressions; historical in its culture and identity; and tangibly human in its vision of politics ("repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God")--perhaps the only intellectually respectable philosophical escape then available from the spiritually vacant and personally grueling dynamics of state capitalism and state socialism. The problems of modernity are the psychological stresses arising from a new knowledge of history, an unwilling acceptance of industrialization and a forced recognition of meaninglessness. Faith, of the orthodox, Roman variety, "solves" all three.

Religious belief, separate from the specifically Catholic, also proves to be personally invigorating. In a culture in which the measure of life's purpose is the acquisition of property and consumer goods (defined as desirable by mass taste), the artist is particularly vulnerable by force of his commercial uselessness. We see all around us today the cultural effects of artists having psychologically and aesthetically internalized that sense of uselessness, most uniformly expressed in a feebleness of ambition or endlessly disguised commercialism. At best, artists in this country at this time can make a childlike appeal to be allowed (c'mon, just once?) to sit with the grown-ups, having forgotten that not so long ago artists were the grown-ups. Religious belief at least allows the comfort of understanding one's exclusion to be somewhat monastic in character, rather than possibly futile and definitely hard on the pocketbook and the rest of the family. These are a few practical reasons for faith of a specifically Roman Catholic kind: They are ground softeners, as it were. However, Elie's book makes clear that for Day, Merton, Percy and O'Connor, faith was not utilitarian in these obvious ways; it was born, carried, nurtured and endured like an internal flame.

The least read but the most mythologically potent of the four is Day. She became a myth in her own time, long before her death, emerging into public life after being an unwed mother and bohemian aesthete (with a scandalous novel of abortion under her belt) who converted to Catholicism, gave up her wordly goods and opened a soup kitchen and flophouse for the poor on the Lower East Side of New York City. The flophouse grew into a significant movement--The Catholic Workers--with other kitchens and other flophouses in other places, communal farms and a newspaper (the Catholic Worker) where Day had a regular column that would become, despite her several books, her major and most influential writing, on issues of poverty, war and peace, nonviolence, the civil rights movement and much more. Day is the sole figure here who is being investigated for possible beatification, the first formal step toward canonization as a saint. She is the only one of them who ought to be so examined, for her work, serving the poor and preaching the gospel as she saw it, has about it the physical reality and presence in the world of facts that sainthood actually requires.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.