Though I consider myself agnostic, a curious pattern, and a source of jest for my friends, has emerged from my reading. Most of my favorite imaginative writers are Catholic. And not just cultural or nominal Catholics but devoted practitioners like Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor and Czeslaw Milosz, who wrestled unabated with all the demands of their faith.
This curious confluence is unintentional. I would enjoy a novel or book of poems and only later learn that the author was Catholic. But it has happened too many times to be coincidental. Why are Catholic writers attractive to one such as me, who is unable to take the final leap of faith?
Greene insisted he was not a Catholic writer but a writer who happened to be Catholic. This sounds disingenuous. It would be hard to imagine a more Catholic novel than The Power and the Glory. In his introduction to the Penguin edition, John Updike wrote of 'the Roman Catholicism, which infuses, with its Manichean darkness and tortured literalism, his most ambitious fiction'.
The priests in The Power and the Glory are ineluctably compromised: Father Jose has capitulated to state pressure to marry; the unnamed whisky priest has fathered a daughter and drugs himself with alcohol.
But Greene's achievement, and a marker of his faith, is his ability to 'distinguish ... between the man and the office'; the former, hopelessly flawed, the latter, indispensable. 'What he wanted now was [sacramental] wine. Without it he was useless.' Yet with the sacrament the whisky priest becomes a symbol of resistance to terrorised villagers who are well aware of his failings.
Catholicism is a strict system, yet preaches the forgiveness of all who fail it. The Church acknowledges the universality of human experience beyond the borders of class, race and other distinguishing factors.
There is something attractive about an absolute moral order in any time, but possibly more so in our frenetic and increasingly interconnected yet isolating world. And despite what many seem to think today, religious belief can be a friend of progress. According to Greene, 'Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows'.
It is currently fashionable to say, as Les Murray does in his essay 'Some religious stuff I know about Australia', that 'the religious dimension in man is quite possibly the most dangerous thing on earth'. But for Murray this is the strongest argument in favour of organised religion. The universal impulse to religion manifests itself in many ways, some healthy, some not. Catholic writers understand that this impulse, the source of human tragedy, must be actively directed if it is not to destroy.
'My audience are [sic] the people who think God is dead,' wrote Flannery O'Connor, whose belief made her an oddity in evangelical Georgia, and indeed she made explicit the connection between her work and her religion. Almost all of her stories end in revelation yet they remain, like all good art, illuminating but not didactic. Her world speaks for itself, as it must.
An absolute moral order, as distinguished from a fanatical moral order, however it is obtained, also allows an imaginative writer to do more. This might seem paradoxical but it makes sense. When all ideas are equal, irreverence is rendered toothless. With no standard there can be no transgression.
As Evelyn Waugh said, 'all literature implies moral standards and criticisms'. The novel, if nothing else, is a world with its own, invented order. Its temporality and finitude impose order on it. It is possible to imagine a novel without order but impossible to imagine a reader for one.
As for Czeslaw Milosz, his Catholicism can be summed up in one poem. Born near what is now Vilnius in Lithuania, Milosz lived through the worst of Nazi and Soviet brutality, but his poetry meanders around the experience, rarely touching directly on it.
In 'Pierson College', Milosz is lecturing to his students at UC Berkeley. Louis is his childhood friend, lost in Eastern Europe's dismal last century. This is the end of the poem:
Quality passes into quantity at the century's end
For worse or better, who knows, just different.
Though for those students no Louis ever
existed and the old professor's passionate tone
Is a bit ridiculous as if the fate of the world depended
on truth.
A clear sense of a truth received from beyond themselves is a prerequisite to the consolation Catholic writers offer: that no one is irredeemable. What could be more attractive than that?
Lucas Smith co-edited the Melbourne University student magazine, Farrago, in 2010. His work has been published in The Lifted Brow, New Matilda and Australian Book Review.