American Literature and the Catholic Faith

theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/03/american-literature-catholic-faith-joseph-pearce.html

Joseph Pearce March 31, 2019

It’s difficult to know where to start or finish in any discussion of the connection between
American literature and the Catholic Faith. The whole topic is fraught with complexity, as is
the relationship between the American nation and the Catholic Faith, or American history
and the Catholic Faith. There are few American writers who are unashamedly or unabashedly
Catholic, whereas there are many who have an ambivalent relationship with the Faith,
sympathizing in some ways and yet keeping a safe distance. Others are converts whose
embrace of the Faith radically transformed their very approach to life and literature.

One such convert, who is often seen as the American equivalent of John Henry Newman
insofar as his conversion was highly publicized and highly controversial, is Orestes Brownson
(1803-76). An almost exact contemporary of Newman, Brownson converted to the Faith in
1844, a year before Newman took the same life-changing and life-giving step. Thereafter, like
Newman, he became a tireless defender of the Faith and an outspoken controversialist on
many topics, especially through his published essays in Brownson’s Quarterly Review.

Of the same generation as Brownson were two other major American writers, Nathaniel
Hawthorne (1804-64) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), neither of whom were
converts to the Faith but both of whom were attracted to what might be called the Catholic
aesthetic. Hawthorne’s late work The Marble Faun is often seen as indicative of his
sympathetic attitude towards the Church, and his short story, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,”
conveys a timeless moral perspective entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching on original
sin and concupiscence. An intriguing connection between Hawthorne and the Catholic Faith
is the fact that his daughter, Rose, converted to the Faith, becoming a religious sister, whose
charitable work has led to calls for her canonization. As Mother Mary Alphonsa, the name
she took as Mother Superior of the order of Dominican Sisters she founded, she is now
recognized by the Church as a Servant of God.

Longfellow, like Hawthorne, his lifelong friend, would never have countenanced conversion
to Catholicism and yet his work, like Hawthorne’s, is often congruent with a Catholic
aesthetic and sometimes displays implicit or even explicit Catholic sympathies. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the marvelous narrative poem, Evangeline, in which the devoutly
Catholic heroine searches for her true love, the man to whom she had been betrothed until
they were forcefully separated on the eve of their wedding. And, of course, there is
Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, indicative of his great admiration for Dante
but also, surely, an indication of some level of sympathy and understanding of the Thomism
which informs Dante’s work.

Of the following generation of American writers, Mark Twain (1835-1910) comes to mind as
being preeminent. Like his literary predecessors, Twain would never have contemplated
conversion but his masterful study of St. Joan of Arc shows a heart and mind enamoured of
the holy maid. Furthermore, Twain himself considered his fictional account of St. Joan’s life to
be the best book he ever wrote:
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 I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it
furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation,
and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.

Unsurprisingly, his sympathetic account of a Catholic martyr has met with hostility from
those who despise the Church. George Bernard Shaw vilified Twain for writing so
sympathetically of the saint, and his pious approach to the subject continues to antagonize
and bemuse Twain’s secular admirers.

As with Mark Twain, nobody would suggest that Willa Cather (1873-1947) would ever have
contemplated conversion. Yet, as with Twain, she wrote one of the most Catholic of novels,
Death Comes for the Archbishop, an historical novel based on the real-life adventures of a
pioneering priest in the Old West who would become the first Archbishop of Santa Fe, New
Mexico.

No summary, however brief, of American literature and the Catholic Faith could omit to
mention T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), albeit only a passing and cursory mention in this case; nor
could it fail to mention the giant, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), a troubled convert whose
works are nonetheless “Christ-haunted,” or the giantess, Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), who
coined the phrase “Christ-haunted” to describe the American South of which she wrote. Nor
should such a summary, or literary roll of honour, omit Allen Tate (1899-1979) or Walker
Percy (1916-1990), though space-constraints restrict anything but a nod of deferential
reverence in their direction.

Such are the eminenti and literati who have sought and found Catholic inspiration in their
writing of American literature. Though they were in some cases not themselves believers,
each has bestowed on American culture an edifying infusion of the true Faith. For this, all
lovers of good literature should be thankful. Deo gratias!

Republished with gracious permission from The St. Austin Review (May/June 2018).

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Editor’s Note: The featured image is courtesy of Unsplash.

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