A Little Controversy

with which to stir the cider

[Image: “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” 1550/1575, by a follower of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy of National Gallery of Art—Open Access Project (Samuel H. Kress Collection). Public domain—and, as you may remember, the cover image for Contemplative Realism.]

First, proper greetings of the proper season to all of you who celebrate, all of you who are still celebrating. In the darkness of a world not at peace, I hope you still found a way to rejoice in the newborn King, that you widened your eyes at the power of the Holy One to sustain and extend our small human light, that you marveled at how the mighty are cast down and the lowly lifted up. If it suits you, I hope you aired grievances and performed feats of strength (kidding!) (mostly).

The last couple of months at my house have been all about attending to first and last things. The foundations, you might say. So it wasn’t the case that I missed Mark Baker’s robust response to contemplative realism, “On Seeing in Literature,” but that I read it with attention and gratitude and then had to put it down for a while to do life.

Now to pick up the thread again. I encourage you to read Baker’s piece, which evokes both some things that are current in contemporary conversations about narrative art, as well as some things that are missing. I’ll pass, for now, over his contention that a sufficiently clear definition of contemplative realism hasn’t been yet provided. That could be addressed in many ways, but I think the first thing to say is that “sufficiently clear” and “winnowed down to one sentence” are not the same thing. The culture of the elevator pitch has dulled and flattened our sense of what constitutes clarity, what constitutes definition, even as our technology has keenly sharpened both visual clarity and visual definition. It’s a curious blindness.

But to return to Baker’s main point, his opposition to contemplative realism is rooted in two convictions: first, differing visions of the nature and purpose of attention; second, differing visions of the nature and purpose of narrative. His essay opens with a long argument about selective attention which is, as far as it goes, persuasive but, as we will see, also somewhat beside the point. What contemplative realism claims we have lost the ability to see is not that which defines strong specification—”a notch-eared Kurilian bobtail”—vs. weak specification—”a ragged wildcat.” Nor is it that which suggests possible plot points—the bouncing ball in the street as red herring, suggesting the child who may soon run out but in the event turns out not to do so. In quoting Pieper’s line, contemplative realism seeks to suggest a widespread loss of spiritual vision, which is upstream of and definitive of all moral vision, whether we subjectively recognize this as being the case or not.

Yet how shy Baker, a believer, still sounds of bringing spiritual concern directly into the human endeavor of narrative construction. It is almost as if he feels this would contravene the nature or purpose of storytelling, where contemplative realism contends that it would do neither. This is probably an irreducible disagreement. But there may be a way to soften it, as I hope to show later.

Baker also makes the claim that contemplative realism is a “highly academic” movement, which—if my reading of his use of the phrase is not tone-deaf—suggests that “academic” here = “irrelevant to those of us who live out here in the real world.” This is curious, since most of the writers who inspire contemplative realism were not in the least professorial: Flaubert the recluse, Woolf the gadfly, Dostoyevsky the exile; St. Teresa of Avila, the naturally brilliant theologian who is nevertheless always calling attention to her lack of education and her status as a “mere woman.” All to some extent outsiders in their day, their subsequent acceptance by the establishment still stands in tension with the challenges posed to the establishment by what they say and how they say it. To put a thing too mildly, many in the actual academy, which is not a monolithic thing, might tend to be somewhat scornful of an unironic reliance on these figures. “Might tend to be,” not “are.” I make no blanket assumptions.

[A sidebar: This is not the first time I have received this feedback about some supposed academicism in contemplative realism, and it roundly confuses me. If the original Contemplative Realism is “highly academic,” then I am not after all entirely clear on what makes a text “academic”—the use of long words and long sentences? (Guilty as charged, though of no crime.) The presence of footnotes? (This slim book eschews footnotes.) Reference to texts that the reader has not previously read? Then I suppose it would be “academic” to notice that Maritain, on whose Art and Scholasticism we rely heavily, considered academicism in art a vice, though he meant something far different by that term. Maritain meant, not that it was a problem for artists to be influenced by Big Ideas or by previous traditions of creative endeavor—he thought, rightly, that both these veins of influence were salutary and anyway inevitable. He meant, rather, that a rigid adherence to expected formulae in art would result in dry, predictable, and unprepossessing works. For Maritain’s “academic” in art, you can read the contemporary term “derivative,” without losing much meaning.

What is this “academicism,” anyway? Someone help me understand this. It can’t just mean “the state of sounding like a person who has been to college.” For love or money, I sometimes proofread actual academic papers (that I have not written) by folks with PhDs (which I do not have). In doing so I frequently, and perhaps rightly, feel that I am not smart enough—certainly, I am not adequately trained—to have written these papers. So it occurs to me that maybe this is the key thing people fear in academic, or “academic,” texts: this feeling of I’m-not-smart-enough-to-read-this, of I-don’t-have-the-background. But we shouldn’t. Reading texts that are a bit on the heavy side for us is how we grow the intellect we have. It is how we acquire background. It is also how we learn to tell the difference between high-class balderdash and the genuinely insightful. Which all of us must learn well how to do, at whatever level of education we happen to have attained.]

That said, the matter of the level of the text is always a side issue to the substance of the text. And it’s the latter that concerns us here, that concerns us most. It’s how to know and trust and understand the primacy of the spiritual, without compromising or devaluing the embodied, that is at stake. It’s the ability to distinguish body from spirit without needing to demean one or the other.

That said, there is much more to unpack in this concept of moral weight. I want to return to it soon. For now, it occurs to me to wonder whether a writer of Baker’s bent might prefer to read John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, which is equally smart and learned as Joshua Hren’s text but rarely as externally referential. On Moral Fiction also goes deeper into a clear concern of Baker’s, namely how we attach moral weight to observable realities and thus to narrative events.

Gardner seems to think that there probably is inherent moral content to acts and to realities. This might make him popular with the common reader (insofar as there is any such thing) while remaining unpopular among high priests of theory (insofar as these are not just boogeymen, like “academic” functions above as a boogey…quality). But Gardner also prescinds from any non-relative statement of transcendent value, so when we want to ascend from psychological and emotional into spiritual territory, his ability to guide us is limited. But for a writer whose art asks only to tell stories that will appeal on the natural level without challenging anyone’s metaphysics, that is perhaps enough light to see by, for the moment.

But is it enough for us as humans, finally? The last five hundred-ish years of global history, certainly the last three hundred, have functioned as an experiment in how well humanity can do without a sense of bedrock responsibility to creation and to a Creator. The answer seems to be, “better in some ways than we thought, not all that well in others.” We seem able to have pretty much any level of affluence and of control over nature that we set our minds to—as long as we are willing to trade it off against the future wellbeing of all other life, up to and including that of our souls.

That the phrase of our souls will seem extraneous fluff to many, that we have lost the ability to make common reference in common language to the principle of life that goes beyond bios into zoe, is the main reality to which Pieper points, in the line in question. That is the loss that we need to mourn or—if we are not ready for that—at least to be made acquainted with, long before we can fulfill Baker’s desideratum of “attaching moral weight” to things by “attending” to them (as if either of these acts were really so simple).

If insisting on that makes me sound abstruse or high-strung, pietistic or simplistic, so be it. For us all to get less interested in self-definitions—accruing perceived good ones, fending off perceived bad—and more interested in what is in front of our noses: this would be a good start and, what’s more, a span of common ground on which the natural storyteller and the contemplative realist could stand.