In my last post I opened up one of those proverbial cans of worms: the question of whether or not something called “Catholic fiction”—or perhaps any sort of creative writing by Catholics—is alive and well, or not.

I admit it: in that post I came out swinging. One Catholic blogger thought I went too far: see Matthew Lickona’s post here, and if you’re in the mood for it, my exchange with him.

Perhaps this isn’t a burning question to you, but let me explain a bit about why it’s important to me. You see, while the current topic is specifically about Catholic writing, my approach to the issue really speaks to the whole mission of Image. I guess you might say: to my own mission.

A journal—like a book or an article—is an attempt to focus attention, to call attention to something. In the case of Image, our mandate is to demonstrate that first-rate contemporary art and literature that profoundly engage the Judeo-Christian experience can still be found, and in a goodly supply.

So for me, as a Catholic who formulated his life’s mission in response to the conservative milieu in which he was brought up, this question does hit close to home. But at the same time, it is a good test case for the broader mission of Image.

Now in my first post, I took issue with the conservative myth of decline, and in particular to the argument that the mid-twentieth century was a hey-day for Catholic literature, whereas our own time is a barren, featureless desert.

Matthew Lickona thought I was a bit skimpy on the evidence, so here are a couple other examples of the sort of thinking I’m taking on.

Take this quote, from a 2007 article in the National Catholic Register: “When I was younger, people like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor were still around contributing to the faith and literature,” said William Baer, founder of the Southwell Institute’s Literary Workshop. “That has kind of vanished.”

In his “Public Square” column in First Things addressing the same question, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote of “the dearth of bold and imaginative Christian writing” today.

Again, the issue is one of optics: what do we see, or not see?

I mean this as a compliment when I say that conservatives are much better when it comes to thinking about the past than they are in confronting the present.

The conservative mind understands how fragile a thing civilized order is, how easy it is to weaken and compromise the moral and cultural foundations of that order in a rush for innovation and progress.

In that sense, I’m still essentially a conservative.

But conservatives are more challenged when it comes to change and the ways in which ancient things may take on new forms and colorations. Edmund Burke, the great British statesman and in many ways the founding father of modern conservatism, understood this: “We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.” As Jonathan Rauch put it in a recent issue of The Atlantic: “Burkeans no more believe in a golden past than they do in a perfect future. For them, the question is not whether society should change, but how.”

To delve into the meaning of that word “how” would be a huge undertaking. What I’d like to do is take on this “how” in the very limited context of the debate over Catholic literature.

I think it has something to do with cultural change over the last half century, with the difference between “shouts” and “whispers” (see my earlier take on this in the editorial statement for Image #39, “Shouts and Whispers.”)

Speaking of her modern, secularized audience, which she felt was deaf to religious matters, Flannery O’Connor once said that “to the hard of hearing you shout.” In this she spoke for a number of twentieth-century Catholic and Christian writers. Secularization had been taking place in the West for generations but in the early twentieth century it gained momentum—and aggressiveness. The “master narrative” of the Judeo-Christian tradition was being replaced by the new Marxist, Freudian, and Darwinian master narratives.

In response, many Christian writers crafted stories with bold gestures—with “shouts,” if you will. O’Connor’s famous example was her attempt to convey the meaning of baptism by drowning one of her characters. But one could also point out the dramatic martyrdom of Graham Greene’s “whisky priest,” or Evelyn Waugh’s sweeping melodrama in Brideshead Revisited, with its large canvas of a decadent pre-war era contrasted with the cataclysm of World War II.

As I’ve argued before, these “large and startling gestures” (another O’Connor phrase) had some relationship to Modernism in the arts. Think of Joyce’s Ulysses or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, with its African masks instead of human faces—both these masterpieces of Modernism sought ancient mythic sources to provide ground the chaos of modern life.

Greene, Waugh, and O’Connor similarly sought the large gesture, even if it tended to describe an absence—the outline of the missing presence of God.

But what happened when the century moved on, past world wars and into a less overtly dramatic time? When it came to a writer like Walker Percy—whose credentials as a traditional, Mass-attending Catholic are not in question—that cultural change can be seen clearly. Percy put it quite bluntly: the world he lived in was not the stark world of his Southern friend Flannery. His was a South of golf courses and gated subdivisions, not bleak homesteads set off in the woods.

For Percy, the absence of God was still an issue, but he felt that it had been submerged by prosperity, that modern unbelief and despair had become domesticated, anesthetized by shopping malls, new-fangled pills, and inane movies.

In such a world, God is not likely to be heard in shouts but in whispers. Which is where the question of “muscular Catholicism” comes in—because for the conservative critics, shouting is strong but whispering is weak.

Next time: who are the whisperers and why ought we to know their work?

Read part three here.