Responsibility and Love: FranCois Mauriac on the Motives of the Catholic Literary Artist
Recent conversations about the Catholic novel interest me, a novelist who is also a Catholic, more in practice than in theory. Need this beast of fabulation, “the Catholic novel,” be explicitly about characters or a milieu that are recognizably Catholic, or about themes that characteristically preoccupy some subset of Catholic minds? Does it really matter one way or another, as long as “Catholic novelists” produce work that fits recognizably into the categories of good fiction? And how do Catholic readers define those categories—any differently than readers of another stripe? (And if there are differences of definition, should there be?)
In one sense I can only say: I do not know; I’m working on it, and I’ll tell you what I think when the work is done. In this sense the only suitable answer a practitioner of fiction can give is the performative answer implicit in his or her next novel. But a novel that takes hours to read may take years to write. In the meantime, interested audiences will continue to sift the matter. One useful way of doing so is to look at the underexplored resources of the existing literary tradition.
Perhaps no Catholic novelist of the twentieth century remains as undeservedly underexplored among English-speaking readers as the French writer Franҫois Mauriac. A significant influence on Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene and a contemporary of French existentialist writers like Sartre, Gide, and Camus, Mauriac’s career spanned much of the first half of the twentieth century. He rose to prominence in the French literary mainstream between the two World Wars, and in 1952 he received the Nobel Prize for literature, joining Sigrid Undset on the (admittedly short) list of notably Catholic laureates.
Though his most acclaimed novels were produced in the period between 1922 and 1941, Mauriac continued to be active as a fictionist, dramatist, essayist, and literary correspondent until his death in 1970. His most characteristic works, beginning with A Kiss for the Leper in 1922 and rising through The Desert of Love (1925), Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927), Destinies (1928), Vipers’ Tangle (1932), and A Woman of the Pharisees (1941), attracted both praise and criticism for their frank appraisals of the French Catholic bourgeoisie’s materialism and shallowness and for their revelations of his characters’ agonized, conflicted inner lives.
The essay God and Mammon, composed in 1929, marked a period of crisis in Mauriac’s own inner life. In it Mauriac attempted to defend himself against, on one side, some Catholic critics who saw in his work a harmful obsession with abnormal psychology, and on the other, secular writers who accused him of not being a pure artist because of his Catholic beliefs. Andre Gide, in particular, claimed that Mauriac’s faith gave him an ulterior agenda apart from “art for art’s sake” and led him into a spirit of aesthetic compromise. Catholics, in their turn, accused Mauriac of impurity not in his art, but in his faith, precisely because of his concern with exploring unusual and difficult psychological territory.
Adding to this cacophony, Mauriac’s own overstrained, scrupulous conscience also rose up against him, demanding to be told if the game was worth the candle. Could a Catholic really write fiction both artfully and responsibly, matching clarity of expression with purity of intention? Could he surpass mere diversion; could he truly deserve a share in a reader’s limited, precious time and attention on this earth? Or were any such aspirations doomed to be subsumed in fiction’s concomitant worldliness, despite all the writer’s noblest efforts?
Born with a melancholic temperament, raised in a milieu colored by Jansenist leanings, and unquestionably called to an artist’s vocation, Mauriac perhaps had little hope of escaping the inner torment that led to his book-length 1929 essay God and Mammon, in which he defended himself and his priorities. Reading through this cri de coeur may force us to squirm with empathy, but that should not frighten us away from the questions Mauriac raises or the solutions he pursues. Rather, the would-be Catholic literary artist can draw strength from the knowledge that such inner dilemmas have already been faced, and successfully surmounted, by a Catholic imagination of rare capacity and refinement.
The mob of Mauriac’s accusers, as voiced by Mauriac himself in the essay, throws conflicting demands on him. His Catholic critics, he feels, would ask him to “falsify” reality, to bowdlerize experience for the sake of avoiding scandal. (From the vantage point of history, after the Long Lent of 2000, perhaps we can see the inherent harms of such a practice with greater clarity than Mauriac’s Catholic contemporaries could.) Meanwhile, the artistic circles in which Mauriac travels pressure him to jettison his sense of restraint and in so doing to “collude” with the reader’s own attraction to evil. Then, Mauriac’s own real sense of responsibility to protect other souls from the desires and difficulties that assail his own spirit—a sense rising at times to the pitch of a genuine religious terror—would tempt him to quit writing altogether.
This last temptation, he admits, does not represent a live possibility. Mauriac’s deep self-acceptance arises from the knowledge that he can no more choose to stop being either a Catholic or a writer than he can choose to stop breathing. As long as God grants him life, he must work from within the parameters he was given at birth: “The deep motive seems to me to lie in the instinct which urges us not to be alone. . . . Each of us is like a desert, and a literary work is like a cry from the desert. . . . The point is: to be heard, even if by one single person.” Although of course, as Mauriac admits, writers typically want and expect much more than one reader: rather, even the “humblest” writer wants to reach and influence as many as possible, particularly in future generations.
What motivates Mauriac to literary invention is no less than this human need, right, and duty to communicate with others. He finds himself longing to produce a reflection of vision that will supersede and outlast his own fragile, contingent, quotidian life. “Every man suffers if he is alone,” Mauriac writes, “and the artist is the man for whom and in whom this suffering takes a physical form.” Mauriac is unafraid of his own suffering, which drives him to take up the labor of artistic creation. At the same time, a sense of vocation drives him to accept one form of suffering—publicity, criticism, potential misunderstanding—rather than another, namely radical solitude. Mauriac’s lengthy discussion of the Cross in God and Mammon makes it clear that he understands the need to embrace, not run from, the causes of necessary suffering.[1] And indeed reading the essay can be like watching a man crucified before our eyes. Mauriac writhes in pain, but he refuses to capitulate.
Mauriac admires, but ultimately cannot follow, the example of French playwright Jean Racine, who at age thirty-eight gave up literary writing for a life of more exclusive, silent devotion. The example of Racine attracts but also mystifies Mauriac. All the same, Mauriac notices that devotion can as easily drive productivity as can other, baser motives. Here Racine is the exception that proves the rule: “The conversion of a literary man is usually marked by redoubled activity and effort on his part.” Mauriac also calls our attention to the inherent goods that can be shared by writers of faith and those of no specific belief: “Even if we abandon the word responsibility—which cannot have the same meaning for a skeptic as for a Christian—[the skeptic] still must feel concerned for those whose destiny he has perhaps altered. Actually I know of no writers worthy of the name who are really not concerned—however non-religious they may be.” The difference lies in the realm of philosophy. Fictionists who work outside the context of religious faith “do not agree with us about the nature of good and evil.” This is no small difference, but it occasions no divergence of technique, of matter, or of criteria for evaluation of the finished product. Whether a writer of fiction has faith or not, the nature of fiction remains the same.
This being established, Mauriac then implicitly asks: Is the nature of fiction good? He feels, with horror, that there may be a certain truth to the words of André Gide to the effect that “no work of art can come into being without the collaboration of the devil.” The “mammon” of the title is thus revealed to be not mere money, which rates hardly a mention as such in the text, but the entire apparatus of worldliness and the flesh. Following the traditional formula, Mauriac understandably associates these with the human capacity for wickedness. And insofar as our own capacity for evildoing destroys our ability to see and love each other’s inherent goodness, he reminds us, we “ought to conquer [it] at any price.”
This brings us to the deepest flaw in Mauriac’s argument, which arises from his too complete conflation of evil with the created world, the body, the senses, and the movements of the human heart. Authentic Catholic doctrine by contrast affirms sense, embodiment, and emotion as natural created goods, willed and loved by God, “subject to futility” (Rom 8:20) because of sin, but not thereby utterly ruined. Human nature is wounded by concupiscence but not totally depraved by it. Mauriac overstates the case when he paints humanity as “born defiled” and infected with a “virulent and terribly contagious element” in its “sores.” This is a view of Original Sin that skates far too close to the Calvinist-Lutheran doctrine of total depravity, humanity as snow-covered dung rather than, as Teresa of Avila would have it in The Interior Castle, tar-covered crystal.
Yes, successful literary craft relies on an appeal to the senses. But this does not mean, as Mauriac instinctively fears, that literature builds on “conniving” with the reader’s attraction to evil. “Our knowledge of the human heart” takes in, but is not limited to, awareness of “the secret source of the greatest sins.” At this depth there also lies, deeper than sin and revived by grace, the endless human need and desire for God.
Toward the end of his essay, Mauriac seems to rediscover this for himself. At the conclusion he returns to the exact place where he began as a child: prostrate before the Eucharist, with a heartfelt and passionate desire for goodness, a desire that does not refuse embodied life its place but rather orders body and mind properly within the spirit of love. In reaching into the depths of the human heart and the roots of our vision of life, the literary artist can not only reflect but can reshape our perception of a scale of values. If the artist sees rightly and applies his skill to what he sees, the most worthy things in life can also become, through art, the most attractive. The senses must not be denied their due. Their affirmation may involve risk, but no successful piece of art was ever made without risk. The artist must ask: what is it I am really afraid of? Do I really fear hurting others—or do I only fear being misjudged? Or, perhaps worse, do I fear being seen as I really am, in an access of self-centered pride? Any fear with its roots in a self-protective impulse must be rejected. Even fear that arises from a legitimate love of the other must be purified: for “perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18).
Likewise the habit of tormented self-examination, pursued almost to the point of drawing blood, may be a necessary part of some souls’ development as it was of Mauriac’s. Yet, if they are to progress to a deeper maturity in Christ, this habit must ultimately grow quiet and “decrease” so that Christ in the soul may increase. St. Teresa of Avila says that when we look at ourselves and at our own sufferings, we are like “birds with broken wings.” To rise, we must look at Christ. And Mauriac, to his credit, finally looks at Christ. He finds, in Eucharistic adoration and especially in frequent communion, a solution for the embodied soul that deeply needs real communication and real love (and this describes all of us). Toward the end of the essay, he discloses:
My instinctive Jansenism always stopped me from seeing why frequent Communion is necessary, above all for those of fiery character. The Real Presence . . . is the real occupation of our flesh, the guarding of the gates and the watching of all the weak points. The Presence which is madly desired by a creature is at last obtained. . . . It is not a question of emotional weakness. . . . A moment of recollection is enough. It is like a hand furtively pushing, a burning breath, and in the midst of the crowd a quick glance of love that the others are blind to. It is a sign of connivance, a miraculous security.
If we as humans tend to connive with each other’s evil desires, God connives all the more with whatever good desires in us will respond to the action of grace, whatever is receptive to what Mauriac calls a “spiritual miracle.” Ultimately, it is the gift of God’s Incarnation that gives us all we are and all we have, including our thoughts and passions and talents, and it is our own hylomorphically created nature that allows us to receive God’s gifts, both the gift of Himself and His gift of ourselves to us. What Mauriac first feels as an intolerable restraint on his artistic freedom turns out always to have been the precondition of a higher liberty, the ability to create precisely as he does: “to show the element which holds out against God in the highest and noblest characters . . . and also to light up the secret source of sanctity in creatures who seem to us to have failed.” Through the very process of literary invention Mauriac has discovered that, without the convincing depiction of evil, neither there can be any convincing depiction of redemption.
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[1] A word is due here about Mauriac’s discussion of cultures outside Europe, which he criticizes for their resistance to the Cross. Mauriac uses the language of “hate” for his reaction to this resistance, which, to be fair, he also finds in himself and in the French culture. While I sympathize with Mauriac’s passion for “ego-renunciation,” I find his choice of expression, as it locates the problem in cultures and races rather than in souls, inexcusable. Hate is only appropriately applied to evil, not to the persons who commit it: Mauriac may mean to say exactly this, but his articulation of it is not sufficiently precise. With this caveat, the text of God and Mammon, as far as it lays out a universal problem, is still worth studying.