The theological-aesthetical language has made me itchy from the start. If it means, how theology can inform art, fine. Beyond giving it a basic anthropology, I am not convinced that theology has much information for art, just as it has not much information for mathematics or plumbing. But if it has more to say, fine, I'll listen. If it means how aesthetics are governed by theology, then no. If art tells the truth about human experience, it needs no restriction from theology. They are separate and co-equal.
I get similarly itch over things like: "He is not talking about “mere appearance,” nor simply about the physical—this “impossible marriage with matter…” which “spoils all man’s taste for love”—but about all the multifarious ways in which intangible goodness and truth get themselves expressed in and through the visible. He is trying to get at “the very language of light.”
Words get used to mean many things, some of which are related only by analogy. If beauty does not mean the attractiveness of physical things and experiences, this is using the same word to talk about something else entirely, an abstraction that strikes me as more romantic than informative. “the very language of light,” strikes me as just such a romantic notion that moves us by the romance of words alone without any reference to anything real or substantial. As regards beauty, it seems to mean having the feeling one gets from seeing things that are physically attractive but without the prosaic business of actually looking at an individual attractive thing. Feeling humble without actually looking at the sublime waterfall. I'll take mere prettiness over an unobtainable abstraction of absolute beauty any day.
Of course, I have not read the relevant parts of von Balthasar and am reacting only to my impression of the text before me with the haste that one necessarily brings to a comment on the web. But the dots are not connecting for me here, and I set this down only to demonstrate how far apart they seem to me at the moment.
And I'm not sure what need I have of intangible goodness and truth. The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. Goodness and truth became tangible. An intangible is an idea without an instantiation. But in Christ we have the instantiation. In those who live in the imitation of Christ we have further, if imperfect instantiations. And in the rest of humanity we have potential instantiations who are interesting to us, and worth of treatment in art, worthy of having their stories told, precisely because the are vessels designed and created to be instantiations. Christianity is a religion of instantiations, not abstractions. The eucharist is an instantiation, not a symbol or an abstraction. Don't give me intangibles. Give me instantiation and the vessels made for instantiation. Give me their real flesh and blood stories and their real flesh and blood beauty and ugliness. Because there is noting impossible about the marriage with matter. That's the point of the incarnation. (Still reacting off the cuff here.)
At very least, as artists, if we are to do anything to sharpen the reader's attention to beauty, it will be by presenting to them individual concrete beautiful things. If that leads them off into philosophical abstractions about the nature of beauty or the apprehension of the Platonic form of beauty itself, that is none of our business. Tell the philosophers that the artists say hello when you get there.
If art is concerned with seeing, then it is concerned with tangibles. We cannot see intangibles, we can only think them. Unless seeing does not mean seeing, as beauty does not mean beauty. But then what is left of realism?
Hi Mark, I get your hesitation with regard to the edging over toward Platonism, but remember that even Aristotle is a good Platonist. What we’re maybe more worried about, what’s maybe implied in the desire to “tell the philosophers that the artists say hello” but otherwise not concern ourselves with what they are doing, is an essentially immanentist way of thinking.
It’s maybe also a yielding to the dictum “no ideas but in things,” which suits artists as long as we’re in the workshop but poses problems as soon as we leave it to interact with the rest of society. Then, we have to give some account of ourselves. What have we been doing
(Continued from above, because a kid jostled me, lol)
... doing all this time, with ourselves? What makes us think that this activity is a good use of our community’s and our world’s limited resources? How do we make sense of it in relation to other ways of human thinking and knowing?
You and I are both interested in these questions. To say abstraction has nothing to do with them is to invalidate any possible answers to them that relate back to God or to ideas. That does not seem like it’s what you really want to say, at least as long as you appeal to what it means for things to be separate and coequal with each other. Those are appeals to qualities that are separable from concrete instantiations and transferred, or analogized, from one instance to another. That is, they’re abstract. And if we once admit abstract things are real, just as real as concrete and tangible ones, then as makers of things we have to be concerned with them.
As to what goodness and truth have to do with you, even as artist--really? You aren’t concerned with any evaluation even of your own work by any criteria of goodness or truth, whether by yourself or others? This seems hard to credit, though if you really want to defend that position I’d be interested in hearing how you’d go about it.
Anyway, v.B. does mean something abstract by beauty, even something transcendent, but I don’t believe that that should scare us away from what he has to say. We are smart enough to understand him, and the things he is saying are not mere human constructs made up and pasted on to reality after the fact. They are built into the structure of things, including into the structure of us. They are knowable in themselves, and they are knowable by us.
What I said was, "intangible goodness and truth". I am very much interested in the tangible goodness and tangible truth of a book I write. Intangible truth and goodness is truth and goodness that is not an observable property of a tangible thing. I have less application for that.
But here I fear we may be talking at cross purposes about abstraction and transcendence. An abstraction is something pulled out of concrete things. A transcendent reality is something equally real existing in a realm outside of the concrete world we experience, though also perhaps immanent within it. It is not an abstraction. The terms we use to describe it may be abstractions. It may be why we create abstract terms, in an attempt to get close to it, however ultimately fruitless that may be.
The human sense of beauty is an evolutionary development that helps us identify what is fruitful and what is pure. What is good to eat, where is good to live, who is good to marry. These vital life questions we detect largely on the basis of beauty. Yes, we also see barren places as beautiful (more now than we used to) but that is because beauty is also a sign of purity (a good apple is beautiful, a rotten apple is ugly) and the barren places are pure because we have not polluted them. And yes, bad things sometimes masquerade as beautiful, but that is because of the Fall.
That we should call those things that are good for us spiritually beautiful by analogy makes perfect sense. That we should call the source of life and existence itself beautiful by analogy also makes perfect sense. This is how linguistic abstraction works. Neither our spiritual nature nor the spiritual immanence with the natural world nor the transcendent God who made it are abstractions. They are realities. But our language for talking about them is abstract, because we don't have other terms for talking about them.
So I am not being immanentist when I say that the artist's job is to show the beauty of real things and leave it to the reader to decide if they want to think abstractly about it beauty. I'm not denying the transcendence of the divine. I am simply saying that as an artist I have come to the end of what art can do. No, actually, strike that, because it is too broad and I won't speak for music or painting or sculpture. As as storyteller this is where I come to the end of what a story can do.
You can argue that the beauty of the good things of the natural world is not just an evolutionary signal of fruitfulness and purity but also an indwelling sign of the immanence that points to the transcendent divine that made it. I won't argue with that in the least. But I will say that as that too it is experienced in its physical manifestation in the real world, because that is all we are given to actually see. So in as far as I, as a storyteller, can point to beauty as a real human experience, my limit is to bring to reader to it and let them look at it and experience it. As soon as I start to say, "and this is what it means..." I am no longer a professional storyteller, but an amateur theologian. And I believe a cobbler should stick to his last.
And my justification for telling stories is not more complex than this: I can, if I do my work well, bring people to that point where they start to be interested in what the theologians have to say. And in a world in which most people have no interest at all in what theologians have to say, I count that as some service.
Then again, I can get all the justification I need from three words, three words that are the motto of my alma mater, St. Francis Xavier University: Quaecumque Sunt Vera.
Right, and since beauty is both an abstraction from really beautiful things and (some argue) a transcendental, so if we talk about beauty at all we can't really be immanentist even if we want to. Nor can we if we want to evoke "quaecumque sunt vera" (whatsoever things are true).
So far, we are all on the same page. In fact, I'm having trouble pinpointing any disagreement at all, including that you're right to distinguish between a way of speaking that would seek to converse about how theology could inform the arts, and a way of speaking that would seek to enforce theology's criteria on the arts. Where we may differ is that I'd propose that contemplative realism is neither of these. It is, instead, an attempt to describe how both art and faith--more than theology, but also worship and devotion--truly have reference to the real and can coexist fruitfully with each other. The project is Maritainian in that it observes the just separation between the creative arts and the sciences of philosophy and theology, but nevertheless seeks to see the points of connection or commonality between them.
Anyway, I don't mind wearing the label "amateur theologian" if we have to start throwing around labels, because I don't see that as a threat to artistic practice (Tolstoy was an amateur theologian; Dostoyevsky was something better than an amateur). It's true that an influential cadre of artists in the early 20th century made the proposal that in order to be purely an artist, one had to keep oneself "pure" in just this way and avoid having other interests or intellectual involvements: they were wrong, I believe; but this was the same cadre to and for which, with his characteristic intellectual generosity and reverence, Maritain wrote Art & Scholasticism....
Well, I am not so concerned with my purity as an artist, nor am I above indulging in amateur theology, especially when I am trying to poke the pros to explain themselves better. But I am concerned that inserting theology, amateur or not, into my storytelling is going to lose me readers. I'm also concerned that if I start to shape my story towards some theological point I want to make I will (thought the imperfections of my craft) end up being less truthful in my storytelling.
There are also many Catholic writers today who seem to feel that their work is only "Catholic" if they use the story to make a theological or moral point, and many readers who seem to feel that Catholic fiction is only worth reading if it is clean and respectable and portrays clean and respectable behavior. And I want nothing to do with either of these approaches. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky may have been able to pull off blending art and theology, but they both wrote devastatingly about sin in a way that would not, I think, suit the current "Catholic" literary market.
The notion of contemplative realism as an attempt to reconcile art with faith and show that they can co-exist with each other explains a lot that I missed when I read it. So much of it seemed to wander off the point of creating a program for literature. Now I see why. (One of the reasons I keep harping on this is because I am never quite sure if I am arguing with what that CR says or with the way it says is. Some of each I think, but perhaps more of the latter.)
But now I find myself asking, who was saying that art and faith cannot coexist except a few puritans and fussbudgets? It is certainly true that the church in the last century seemed to lose interest in art, with lamentable consequences. But was that because they thought that art was incompatible with faith? Or was it that they were just building a lot of churches at at time when architecture was at a nadir and rewriting the mass at a time when literature and music were at a nadir. And if it was that they thought art and faith incompatible, surely that discussion should start from a different place.
And if that is the problem, why bring realism into it, a specific aesthetical movement from a previous century and certainly not the only one compatible with faith? Surely that muddies the waters if the argument is about whether art is compatible with faith. Would it not be better to separate the argument about art and faith, and then, when that argument was won, talk about how different artistic forms, such as realism and fairy tales can each in their way tell the truth about human experience?
Conflating the argument for realism as an appropriate Catholic aesthetic with the general argument that art and faith are compatible risks confusion on several points, only one of which was what confused me about it in our initial conversations where I was attempting to defend fairy tales as a valid Catholic aesthetic in the belief that contemplative realism was excluding it.
Yes, art and faith are compatible.
Yes, if someone is seriously questioning that, they need to be answered.
Yes, realism, or at very least, a detailed examination of quotidian life, is a legitimate Catholic aesthetic.
Yes, fairy tales are also a legitimate Catholic aesthetic.
Yes, professional storytellers can act as amateur theologians (or even professional ones) is they have the will and the skill, but it is perilous and even if done well may limit your ability to attract an audience, which may in the end hinder rather than help the reader's development of interest in theological questions.
But I think we would benefit greatly from treating these question separately.
All fair enough; at the same time, boiling these questions down to forms that admit only of yes-or-no answers misses a lot of the richness and expansion that is available to us.
Nowhere in this discussion of contemplative realism did I propose to start talking about what kinds of stories are "Catholic," a related but distinct question--though as the editor of a journal that explores just this latter question, I often wonder where folks are getting their impressions of "the Catholic literary market" (it often seems, not from my journal, if they are worried about things being overly sanitized or "clean and respectable").
Nor do I suggest, even remotely, that fictionists interested in theology should attempt to do theology *with their fiction*--unless they are in fact new Dostoyevskys, a possibility I don't discount. I don't, however, put myself in that category (Lord no), but simply defend the idea that conversations such as this one are worth having, and that the presence of a theological idea in the neighborhood of a fiction doesn't necessarily need to distort the quality of the fiction, if the work is done with the virtue of art.
Anyway, probably you don't need to be told, but some folks do, that it's okay to recognize that reality is always already saturated with the truth about God and to write accordingly: neither totally forgetting about that saturation, nor anxiously trying to shoehorn in superficial reminders lest the reader forget. Both would be errors, but errors of art more than of faith. And yet in America, because of our country's religious history, many writers and creators do wrestle with precisely these questions and ones related to them -- and I don't want to belittle that experience as being merely the realm of "puritans and fussbudgets," because that could shut down an incipient talent before it ever gets around to attempting what it might be capable of.
A further thought on waking: I think it is fine, and even desirable, for an author to lead the reader toward some overwhelming question, providing that they can do it without leading them through streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent, and providing that they do not actually ask what is it, but leave that for the reader. Because readers are curious beasts and they only like what they find for themselves.
"we cease to see things first of all as they are—to measure all things, even humanity, by that which stands outside of and beyond them. Instead we come to see things solely as we are, without tempering that vision by any external reference"
There's so much in this piece which is fascinating and which I need to read multiple times, but this part has really caught my attention. Thanks for this.
Glad you liked it! Von Balthasar is tough going, but rewarding. I would never have dared scale the heights if not assigned to, but am glad I was made to read him. :)
The theological-aesthetical language has made me itchy from the start. If it means, how theology can inform art, fine. Beyond giving it a basic anthropology, I am not convinced that theology has much information for art, just as it has not much information for mathematics or plumbing. But if it has more to say, fine, I'll listen. If it means how aesthetics are governed by theology, then no. If art tells the truth about human experience, it needs no restriction from theology. They are separate and co-equal.
I get similarly itch over things like: "He is not talking about “mere appearance,” nor simply about the physical—this “impossible marriage with matter…” which “spoils all man’s taste for love”—but about all the multifarious ways in which intangible goodness and truth get themselves expressed in and through the visible. He is trying to get at “the very language of light.”
Words get used to mean many things, some of which are related only by analogy. If beauty does not mean the attractiveness of physical things and experiences, this is using the same word to talk about something else entirely, an abstraction that strikes me as more romantic than informative. “the very language of light,” strikes me as just such a romantic notion that moves us by the romance of words alone without any reference to anything real or substantial. As regards beauty, it seems to mean having the feeling one gets from seeing things that are physically attractive but without the prosaic business of actually looking at an individual attractive thing. Feeling humble without actually looking at the sublime waterfall. I'll take mere prettiness over an unobtainable abstraction of absolute beauty any day.
Of course, I have not read the relevant parts of von Balthasar and am reacting only to my impression of the text before me with the haste that one necessarily brings to a comment on the web. But the dots are not connecting for me here, and I set this down only to demonstrate how far apart they seem to me at the moment.
And I'm not sure what need I have of intangible goodness and truth. The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. Goodness and truth became tangible. An intangible is an idea without an instantiation. But in Christ we have the instantiation. In those who live in the imitation of Christ we have further, if imperfect instantiations. And in the rest of humanity we have potential instantiations who are interesting to us, and worth of treatment in art, worthy of having their stories told, precisely because the are vessels designed and created to be instantiations. Christianity is a religion of instantiations, not abstractions. The eucharist is an instantiation, not a symbol or an abstraction. Don't give me intangibles. Give me instantiation and the vessels made for instantiation. Give me their real flesh and blood stories and their real flesh and blood beauty and ugliness. Because there is noting impossible about the marriage with matter. That's the point of the incarnation. (Still reacting off the cuff here.)
At very least, as artists, if we are to do anything to sharpen the reader's attention to beauty, it will be by presenting to them individual concrete beautiful things. If that leads them off into philosophical abstractions about the nature of beauty or the apprehension of the Platonic form of beauty itself, that is none of our business. Tell the philosophers that the artists say hello when you get there.
If art is concerned with seeing, then it is concerned with tangibles. We cannot see intangibles, we can only think them. Unless seeing does not mean seeing, as beauty does not mean beauty. But then what is left of realism?
Hi Mark, I get your hesitation with regard to the edging over toward Platonism, but remember that even Aristotle is a good Platonist. What we’re maybe more worried about, what’s maybe implied in the desire to “tell the philosophers that the artists say hello” but otherwise not concern ourselves with what they are doing, is an essentially immanentist way of thinking.
It’s maybe also a yielding to the dictum “no ideas but in things,” which suits artists as long as we’re in the workshop but poses problems as soon as we leave it to interact with the rest of society. Then, we have to give some account of ourselves. What have we been doing
(Continued from above, because a kid jostled me, lol)
... doing all this time, with ourselves? What makes us think that this activity is a good use of our community’s and our world’s limited resources? How do we make sense of it in relation to other ways of human thinking and knowing?
You and I are both interested in these questions. To say abstraction has nothing to do with them is to invalidate any possible answers to them that relate back to God or to ideas. That does not seem like it’s what you really want to say, at least as long as you appeal to what it means for things to be separate and coequal with each other. Those are appeals to qualities that are separable from concrete instantiations and transferred, or analogized, from one instance to another. That is, they’re abstract. And if we once admit abstract things are real, just as real as concrete and tangible ones, then as makers of things we have to be concerned with them.
As to what goodness and truth have to do with you, even as artist--really? You aren’t concerned with any evaluation even of your own work by any criteria of goodness or truth, whether by yourself or others? This seems hard to credit, though if you really want to defend that position I’d be interested in hearing how you’d go about it.
Anyway, v.B. does mean something abstract by beauty, even something transcendent, but I don’t believe that that should scare us away from what he has to say. We are smart enough to understand him, and the things he is saying are not mere human constructs made up and pasted on to reality after the fact. They are built into the structure of things, including into the structure of us. They are knowable in themselves, and they are knowable by us.
What I said was, "intangible goodness and truth". I am very much interested in the tangible goodness and tangible truth of a book I write. Intangible truth and goodness is truth and goodness that is not an observable property of a tangible thing. I have less application for that.
But here I fear we may be talking at cross purposes about abstraction and transcendence. An abstraction is something pulled out of concrete things. A transcendent reality is something equally real existing in a realm outside of the concrete world we experience, though also perhaps immanent within it. It is not an abstraction. The terms we use to describe it may be abstractions. It may be why we create abstract terms, in an attempt to get close to it, however ultimately fruitless that may be.
The human sense of beauty is an evolutionary development that helps us identify what is fruitful and what is pure. What is good to eat, where is good to live, who is good to marry. These vital life questions we detect largely on the basis of beauty. Yes, we also see barren places as beautiful (more now than we used to) but that is because beauty is also a sign of purity (a good apple is beautiful, a rotten apple is ugly) and the barren places are pure because we have not polluted them. And yes, bad things sometimes masquerade as beautiful, but that is because of the Fall.
That we should call those things that are good for us spiritually beautiful by analogy makes perfect sense. That we should call the source of life and existence itself beautiful by analogy also makes perfect sense. This is how linguistic abstraction works. Neither our spiritual nature nor the spiritual immanence with the natural world nor the transcendent God who made it are abstractions. They are realities. But our language for talking about them is abstract, because we don't have other terms for talking about them.
So I am not being immanentist when I say that the artist's job is to show the beauty of real things and leave it to the reader to decide if they want to think abstractly about it beauty. I'm not denying the transcendence of the divine. I am simply saying that as an artist I have come to the end of what art can do. No, actually, strike that, because it is too broad and I won't speak for music or painting or sculpture. As as storyteller this is where I come to the end of what a story can do.
You can argue that the beauty of the good things of the natural world is not just an evolutionary signal of fruitfulness and purity but also an indwelling sign of the immanence that points to the transcendent divine that made it. I won't argue with that in the least. But I will say that as that too it is experienced in its physical manifestation in the real world, because that is all we are given to actually see. So in as far as I, as a storyteller, can point to beauty as a real human experience, my limit is to bring to reader to it and let them look at it and experience it. As soon as I start to say, "and this is what it means..." I am no longer a professional storyteller, but an amateur theologian. And I believe a cobbler should stick to his last.
And my justification for telling stories is not more complex than this: I can, if I do my work well, bring people to that point where they start to be interested in what the theologians have to say. And in a world in which most people have no interest at all in what theologians have to say, I count that as some service.
Then again, I can get all the justification I need from three words, three words that are the motto of my alma mater, St. Francis Xavier University: Quaecumque Sunt Vera.
Right, and since beauty is both an abstraction from really beautiful things and (some argue) a transcendental, so if we talk about beauty at all we can't really be immanentist even if we want to. Nor can we if we want to evoke "quaecumque sunt vera" (whatsoever things are true).
So far, we are all on the same page. In fact, I'm having trouble pinpointing any disagreement at all, including that you're right to distinguish between a way of speaking that would seek to converse about how theology could inform the arts, and a way of speaking that would seek to enforce theology's criteria on the arts. Where we may differ is that I'd propose that contemplative realism is neither of these. It is, instead, an attempt to describe how both art and faith--more than theology, but also worship and devotion--truly have reference to the real and can coexist fruitfully with each other. The project is Maritainian in that it observes the just separation between the creative arts and the sciences of philosophy and theology, but nevertheless seeks to see the points of connection or commonality between them.
Anyway, I don't mind wearing the label "amateur theologian" if we have to start throwing around labels, because I don't see that as a threat to artistic practice (Tolstoy was an amateur theologian; Dostoyevsky was something better than an amateur). It's true that an influential cadre of artists in the early 20th century made the proposal that in order to be purely an artist, one had to keep oneself "pure" in just this way and avoid having other interests or intellectual involvements: they were wrong, I believe; but this was the same cadre to and for which, with his characteristic intellectual generosity and reverence, Maritain wrote Art & Scholasticism....
Well, I am not so concerned with my purity as an artist, nor am I above indulging in amateur theology, especially when I am trying to poke the pros to explain themselves better. But I am concerned that inserting theology, amateur or not, into my storytelling is going to lose me readers. I'm also concerned that if I start to shape my story towards some theological point I want to make I will (thought the imperfections of my craft) end up being less truthful in my storytelling.
There are also many Catholic writers today who seem to feel that their work is only "Catholic" if they use the story to make a theological or moral point, and many readers who seem to feel that Catholic fiction is only worth reading if it is clean and respectable and portrays clean and respectable behavior. And I want nothing to do with either of these approaches. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky may have been able to pull off blending art and theology, but they both wrote devastatingly about sin in a way that would not, I think, suit the current "Catholic" literary market.
The notion of contemplative realism as an attempt to reconcile art with faith and show that they can co-exist with each other explains a lot that I missed when I read it. So much of it seemed to wander off the point of creating a program for literature. Now I see why. (One of the reasons I keep harping on this is because I am never quite sure if I am arguing with what that CR says or with the way it says is. Some of each I think, but perhaps more of the latter.)
But now I find myself asking, who was saying that art and faith cannot coexist except a few puritans and fussbudgets? It is certainly true that the church in the last century seemed to lose interest in art, with lamentable consequences. But was that because they thought that art was incompatible with faith? Or was it that they were just building a lot of churches at at time when architecture was at a nadir and rewriting the mass at a time when literature and music were at a nadir. And if it was that they thought art and faith incompatible, surely that discussion should start from a different place.
And if that is the problem, why bring realism into it, a specific aesthetical movement from a previous century and certainly not the only one compatible with faith? Surely that muddies the waters if the argument is about whether art is compatible with faith. Would it not be better to separate the argument about art and faith, and then, when that argument was won, talk about how different artistic forms, such as realism and fairy tales can each in their way tell the truth about human experience?
Conflating the argument for realism as an appropriate Catholic aesthetic with the general argument that art and faith are compatible risks confusion on several points, only one of which was what confused me about it in our initial conversations where I was attempting to defend fairy tales as a valid Catholic aesthetic in the belief that contemplative realism was excluding it.
Yes, art and faith are compatible.
Yes, if someone is seriously questioning that, they need to be answered.
Yes, realism, or at very least, a detailed examination of quotidian life, is a legitimate Catholic aesthetic.
Yes, fairy tales are also a legitimate Catholic aesthetic.
Yes, professional storytellers can act as amateur theologians (or even professional ones) is they have the will and the skill, but it is perilous and even if done well may limit your ability to attract an audience, which may in the end hinder rather than help the reader's development of interest in theological questions.
But I think we would benefit greatly from treating these question separately.
All fair enough; at the same time, boiling these questions down to forms that admit only of yes-or-no answers misses a lot of the richness and expansion that is available to us.
Nowhere in this discussion of contemplative realism did I propose to start talking about what kinds of stories are "Catholic," a related but distinct question--though as the editor of a journal that explores just this latter question, I often wonder where folks are getting their impressions of "the Catholic literary market" (it often seems, not from my journal, if they are worried about things being overly sanitized or "clean and respectable").
Nor do I suggest, even remotely, that fictionists interested in theology should attempt to do theology *with their fiction*--unless they are in fact new Dostoyevskys, a possibility I don't discount. I don't, however, put myself in that category (Lord no), but simply defend the idea that conversations such as this one are worth having, and that the presence of a theological idea in the neighborhood of a fiction doesn't necessarily need to distort the quality of the fiction, if the work is done with the virtue of art.
Anyway, probably you don't need to be told, but some folks do, that it's okay to recognize that reality is always already saturated with the truth about God and to write accordingly: neither totally forgetting about that saturation, nor anxiously trying to shoehorn in superficial reminders lest the reader forget. Both would be errors, but errors of art more than of faith. And yet in America, because of our country's religious history, many writers and creators do wrestle with precisely these questions and ones related to them -- and I don't want to belittle that experience as being merely the realm of "puritans and fussbudgets," because that could shut down an incipient talent before it ever gets around to attempting what it might be capable of.
A further thought on waking: I think it is fine, and even desirable, for an author to lead the reader toward some overwhelming question, providing that they can do it without leading them through streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent, and providing that they do not actually ask what is it, but leave that for the reader. Because readers are curious beasts and they only like what they find for themselves.
"we cease to see things first of all as they are—to measure all things, even humanity, by that which stands outside of and beyond them. Instead we come to see things solely as we are, without tempering that vision by any external reference"
There's so much in this piece which is fascinating and which I need to read multiple times, but this part has really caught my attention. Thanks for this.
Glad you liked it! Von Balthasar is tough going, but rewarding. I would never have dared scale the heights if not assigned to, but am glad I was made to read him. :)