In graduate school I had a professor tell me that I didn’t necessarily need to read a lot of theory, but that it was good to be familiar with a handful of theorists that we could incorporate into our writing, so that reviewers at academic journals and scholarly presses would see those names and feel assured that we knew what we were talking about. We need to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to be heard. The American theologian David Tracy, who died this past spring, was one of those giants for me.
I studied literature, not theology, and I am not an expert on his work, but he did help shape my understanding of my vocation. His writing was smart and profound and reasonably accessible, and it dealt with the things that I cared about: religion and stories and the search for meaning. Tracy wrote about how theologians need to be conscious of writing for three distinct “publics”: the Catholic Church, the academy and the general public. The balance between writing for a public audience and a scholarly one is one of the great challenges for any academic, so his assertion that we shouldn’t turn our back on the broader culture for the insularity of our own specialized academic community was particularly encouraging to me as an emerging scholar and writer.
Catholic literature does not need to be about explicitly Catholic content. Signs of divinity are present throughout all of creation.
He also emphasized the importance of the “classics” of any religious tradition — the persons, events and texts that, across time, shape the faith. For Tracy, what we believe is not tied solely to doctrine or dogma, but to these classics that continue to disclose truths across time, and that can be, even need to be, continually reinterpreted. He claimed these classics “have an excess and permanence of meaning and do not yield to once-and-for-all explanations. They resist literal oversimplified interpretation. That is why they retain their mystery and power.” This mystery and power has always been what attracted me to studying the spiritual dimensions of literature, and his call for a method of interpretation based in conversation and exploration, rather than argument, struck me as the correct model for approaching these works.
In my own specialty of Catholic literature, Tracy’s greatest contribution was in his description of the unique nature of the Catholic imagination. In “The Analogical Imagination” (1981) and “Plurality and Ambiguity” (1987), he differentiates between the analogical imagination of the Catholic community, where relationships are built upon an understanding of “similarity-in-difference” and the dialectical imagination of the Protestant community, which exposes differences and places them in opposition.
One way of thinking of this is the difference between a worldview grounded in a sense of “both/and” (Catholic) versus one that approaches existence from an “either/or” perspective (Protestant). In the latter, things are sacred or profane, and one is saved or damned; in the Catholic conception, these lines are blurred. I think of Flannery O’Connor’s character Mrs. Turpin, in her late masterpiece “Revelation,” yelling at God: “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” People who have a developed Catholic imagination respond to this seemingly impossible situation by proclaiming, simply, “exactly!”
In a late essay on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s (somewhat controversial) show “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” Tracy, while discussing Michelangelo’s artistic practice, articulated the essence of this “both/and” worldview: “Christianity cannot in fact be understood if one ignores the beauty and goodness in all creation or the tragic elements of suffering, evil and sin in all life. That is the Catholic analogical imagination.”
Catholic theologians and writers tend to focus on the ways God is manifest in created reality, whereas Protestants understand God as being beyond the limits of understanding or comprehension. In the Protestant tradition, God is envisioned as transcendent rather than immanent, as absent rather than present, and as dissimilar rather than similar. Catholics, on the other hand, find God’s presence in all of creation.
This Catholic understanding of God gives rise to a literary tradition that seeks to make this presence manifest, primarily through the use of metaphor and symbolism. In this sense, the analogical imagination is a product of a theological view of existence (God is present and reveals himself in nature and the human realm), that gives rise to a particular literary style (the use of symbolism and metaphor as a particularly valid means of mediating objective reality).
“The Analogical Imagination” is a particularly compelling account of the Catholic conception of the limits and capabilities of language to shape and convey experience. In one of my favorite passages about how encountering art can impact us, Tracy writes:
“The actual experience of the work of art can be called a realized experience of an event of truth … when I experience any classical work of art, I do not experience myself as an autonomous subject aesthetically appreciating the good qualities of an aesthetic object set over against me. Indeed … I find that my subjectivity is never in control of the experience. … Rather the work of art encounters me with surprise, impact, even shock of reality itself.”
Tracy indicates that one’s experience of the classic work of art offers a glimpse into an objective reality beyond the limits of our own personal perspective and subjectivity.
Catholic literature, with its sacramental and incarnational understanding of existence, offers an account of the modern condition in which the individual may well be alienated and isolated, a prisoner of their own self-consciousness, but they do not need to be one. Catholic literature reflects a worldview that attempts to transcend this sense of isolation and entrapment. If the individual is imprisoned by their consciousness (which is the default position of much of contemporary literature), the Catholic writer is not content to simply depict this condition, they are interested in envisioning a way out.
How one accomplishes this will change depending on the circumstances of the individual story, but the overall pattern found in much Catholic fiction involves a sense of sacramentality, in which God’s presence permeates creation. By drawing upon Tracy’s ideas, we can see that Catholic literature, because of its analogical character, points beyond a purely deterministic understanding of human nature. It is constructed on the premise that there is something more at work in human existence than biological determinism. Central to this belief is the idea that literature itself is, in a sense, sacramental.
For those steeped in the Catholic spiritual tradition, moments of reading can be encounters with the mystery and reality of God, for God truly is present in all of creation.
Catholicism, by maintaining a belief in real presences, keeps open a space for the sacramental power of language. In the Catholic imagination, God, humanity, nature and language still participate in each other. This belief in the possibility that God is present in the everyday reality of existence is a fundamental aspect of Catholic art, particularly Catholic fiction. If a work of art lacks this dimension, it is not, in any meaningful sense, Catholic. At the same time, it is this sacramental dimension of the religious imagination that allows Catholic literature to have just about anything as its subject matter. Catholic literature does not need to be about explicitly Catholic content: Novels do not need to focus on priests and nuns, or Catholic dogma or ritual, because for artists in the Catholic tradition, any and all subject matter can reflect the divine presence. Signs of divinity are present throughout all of creation.
This Catholic intellectual tradition also stresses the phenomenon of conversion — that people can profoundly change after meaningful encounters with God and/or his word. These conversion moments can even be spurred by an encounter with the Catholic imagination at work in the written word: Think of Ignatius of Loyola reading “De Vita Christi” as he recovered from his war injury.
For those steeped in the Catholic spiritual tradition, moments of reading can be encounters with the mystery and reality of God, for God truly is present in all of creation. This is what Tracy’s work repeatedly highlights for me. As he himself explained, “The religious imagination of people is touched and comes to life in these classic lives, events and texts. They make us aware of this great mystery — that love is the basic reality. And that is what my work is all about.”