Art and culture commission

A LITERATURE OF CHRISTIAN INSPIRATION

Ferdinando Castelli

To make for a good argument - a literature of Christian inspiration - we take the actions of three modern classic authors. In the drama Spettri by Henrik Ibsen the young Osvaldo is threatened by a dark evil which brings him to delirium and to the desire of death. He must pay for the habits of his father and of the lies of his mother. Evil takes hold of him in a violent way at the rising of the sun. Immobile, his shoulders against the light, the voice deafens and calls, it invokes: «the sun...the sun». And he is immersed in the slowness of death.

In Lazzaro, Luigi Pirandello puts on the scene the little Lia, incapable of standing on her feet. Condemned to immobility? For all of her terrestrial life, yes. But on the other side, she will have wings and will be able to fly. When it comes to light that the other side does not exist, the little girl falls into a sort of desperation. «My big toe! The big toes of an angel...I was meant to have them in exchange of feet which I did not have to walk with on earth...Adieu, fly up there!...». Without the hope of the other side (and for Pirandello it was an illusion) we cannot live. Lucio, Lia’s brother, tries to give his sister back her hope (illusion) in the other side by putting on the tunic of a priest - he had abandoned priesthood - and he emulates, just as Christ who died to give us hope (illusion) in the other side.

In a story by Franz Kafka, he has one of his characters say: «Fortunately, I saw an agent in the vicinity. I ran to Him, and with bated breath I asked him the road to follow. He said to me laughing: - you want to know the direction from me? "Yes - I said - because I can’t find it by myself". Turning suddenly, like those people who want to laugh by themselves, he said, "give up, give up"».

The three episodes help us to understand the meaning at the base of literature. It is not a game, an entertainment or an evasion; it is an interrogation on man: on his destiny, on his confrontation with life and with death, on good and evil, on liberty and conscience, on God and on history: reacting to a strictly formal conception of literature, our time emphasis its revelatory and prophetic value. Literature is «a road, and perhaps the most complete road to understand ourselves, for the life of our consciences», affirms Carlo Bo (Letteratura come vita, Milan, Rizzoli, 1994); «It is an exploration of the abyss: that of the author and also our own», adds André Blanchet (La littérature et le spirituel, Paris, Aubier, 11). The American writer Flannery O’Connor believes that «the work of the narrative is to incarnate the mystery through the means (literary genre, style), the mystery of our terrestrial position and the ways which are those conventions which, in the hands of an artist, reveal that mystery» (In the Territory of a Devil, Theoria, Milan, 1993, 85).

With the magic of words, of images and of symbols, gaining leverage on the power of the soul, especially on the sentiment and on the imagination, literature points its direction to man in the attempt to understand its structure, its quivers, its nostalgia, its needs, the story. Therefore, the mystery. What are the needs most noted? In Spettri, Ibsen responds: the sun (the truth, the light, life); in Lazzaro, Pirandello indicates hope in the other side (where our fundamental desires are made into reality); Kafka speaks of the road (where are we going? What direction should we take?) But the sun, invoked by Osvaldo, is shut out in his craziness; the hope of the little Lia is only an illusion; the road which Kafka seeks either does not exist or cannot be found.

Literature unclothes the abysses which inhabit man, but it hardly ever throws on a light which reveals its significance. It describes, shows, analyses, it does not explain. How could it, from the moment that «only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man find true light?» (Gaudium et Spes, 22).

At this point, we are presented with the problem of a literature of Christian inspiration. Let’s study it clearly. The sphere of literature is certainly not dogma or faith, but life in its most vast expression; life, that is, with its ambiguities, miseries, obscurities, conquests, capabilities, experiences. Now the writer is not a machine that writes, it is a person who takes the drama from the existence. From him we ask honesty and faith in taking this drama, not that he ceases to be a person who thinks with his own head. He must not alter or rape reality, but he can interpret it and judge it. If he is a Christian, his faith and evangelical morals will give him the archetypes to interpret and judge, for as much as its is possible, the human drama.

«A writer who makes Catholicism his profession - wrote Giovanni Cristini - seems to me the most qualified to face the inferno of existence and the inferno of writing. It is precisely because of the fact that he knows that there is life somewhere else and its better able to gather with piercing participation the drama of the limits, of the end, of precariousness, therefore the drama of metaphysical evil (of the creation of being) and of original sin, in which all the possible ways and forms of existence and conscience are rooted; ways and forms which the writer covers in his fervid imagination, to grasp that conscience of good and evil which is itself the conscience of man and of his destiny» (Il ragguaglio librario, 1992, 7-8).

To become advanced in the mystery of man and to exert to understand him, Julien Green, a Catholic writer, is guided by the truth contained in the following expression: tout ce qui est vrai est aillerus. He also refutes the verité de roman (the flat reality which deceives and seduces), the verité conventionelle (which eludes the real problems and alienates the mind) and opts for the réalité de vision which can be reached only through the «look of one who knows»: knows that history is governed by God-Love, knows also of the existence of a mysterious reality, hidden in our deep selves, generated by night, knows that man is a battlefield of two enemy forces who battle for his soul; knows that in the kingdom of evil there is slavery and desperation; knows that sin is like a dam which cracks and breaks; knows that «the other country will always obsess humanity»; knows that in order for God to enter our hearts, he breaks it, knows that the «Christian needs God as the fish needs water». He knows many other things, revealed by the Spirit which lives in him. Thanks to these riches of conscience, the writer is able to project on reality which he describes a penetrating light which justifies the mystery of man. We think of the work of Dostoevksky, Leon Bloy, Charles Peguy, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Georges Bernanos, Paul Claudel, Mario Pomilio, Julien Green. For them, there do not exist two worlds, the natural and the supernatural invests all the reality, and it is explained, when possible. They are also able to present the mystery through society, the Grace through nature, the Presence through the ugliness.

Some simplification? The protagonist of Lino of Veronica by Gertrud von Le Fort lives engraved in hatred and in negating everything. The squalor of her life is impressionable. How did it happen? The Catholic von Le Fort responds, but whispering, while she accompanies her reader through the pits of hell which shows: when you negate God and in his place you put creatures, you are condemned to hell.

In Nest of Vipers, Francois Mauriac describes the hell which is the life of an old lawyer. Why an inferno? Because nothing - honors, richness, pleasures - satisfy him? The old man does not know it, and he is desperate; the Catholic Mauriac knows it: because man is created for love (especially for Love) without which life is squalor. This truth is not affirmed by Mauriac, he makes it come out in his presentation of a man who has everything but not love (Love).

There is a great need today for a literature of Christian inspiration. In the Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente, the Holy Father speaks of «the paths of evil» on which man «is lead further and further astray». And he adds: «Satan deceived man, persuading him that he too was a god, that he, like God, was capable of knowing good and evil» (no. 7). On this road, the Christian values disappeared.

We believe that the magic of the art can shake this man. Then, when this magic is filled with Christian light it can happen that the «wrong paths» are transformed into «the paths of salvation». It is an exalting and urgent goal.

In order to have a literature of Christian inspiration it is necessary to have four elements: that the writer knows his job well: to communicate emotions, to reach deep into the soul and make it feel the quivers; that he lives his faith from the inside, like a part of his being; that he is emerged in the story of today, and that he describes it just as it is, without however forgetting the religious dimension of man; that he has the art and the courage of provocation.

«The Christian provocation - affirmed Mario Pomilio in a conference on the Christian Provocation and the Writer (1975) - is to bring literature on the vertical spiral, as an expression of values, of worries, of existential interrogations, in an authentic search of finality: that is of an affirmation of principles and of proposals on the destiny of man, under the sign of hope and of the reborn faith in the Word, in a way which is torn away from opposing, poisoning, and desperate dogmatism». On the eve of the Jubilee, this of the humble and great Pomilio is a text which writers of Christian inspiration must welcome with intelligence and love.