"If the average Catholic reader could be tracked down..."

... through the swamps of letters-to-the-editor and other places where he momentarily reveals himself, he would be found to be something of a Manichean. By separating nature and grace as much as possible, he has reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliche and has become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene. He would seem to prefer the former, while being more of an authority on the latter, but the similarity between the two generally escapes him. He forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment, usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence; and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite.

We lost our innocence in the fall of our first parents, and our return to it is through the redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite. Pornography, on the other hand, is essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purposes, disconnects it from its meaning in life and makes it simply an experience for its own sake.

Many well-grounded complaints have been made about religious literature on the score that it tends to minimize the importance and dignity of life here and now in favor of life in the next world or in favor of miraculous manifestations of grace. When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete observable reality. If the writer uses his eyes in the real security of his faith, he will be obliged to use them honestly and his sense of mystery and his acceptance of it will be increased. To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God; but what is one thing for the writer may be another for the reader. What leads the writer to his salvation may lead the reader into sin, and the Catholic writer who looks at this possibility directly looks the Medusa in the face and is turned to stone.

That is from Flannery O'Connor's essay, "The Church and the Fiction Writer" (orig. published in America, March 30, 1957), from the indispensible and must-read-it-now-if-you haven't-already! collection Mystery and Manners (Farrar, Straus & Girous, 1961). Earlier today I posted Ronald Webber's 1999 essay, "A Good Writer is Hard to Find", and am pleased that many readers have expressed interest in it.

I reposted Webber's essay in part because I have been reading Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), by Farrell O'Gorman, professor at DePaul University. It is an excellent work, and I especially recommend it to anyone interested in the writing and thought of either O'Connor and Percy (I tend to think that if you like one, you surely must like the other). Among other things, O'Gorman digs deeply into the theological and philosophical works that influenced both O'Connor and Percy, showing how they shared a deep affection for the writings of Romano Guardini (The End of the Modern World) and Jacques Maritain (Art and Scholasticism), among others (Merton, Marcel, Tate, etc.). He also does a nice job examining some of the significant similarities between the two authors, as well as showing how they differ in various ways.

A bit more from O'Connor:

 Henry James said that the morality of a piece of fiction depended on the amount of "felt life" that was in it. The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery; that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.

To the modem mind, as represented by Mr. Wylie, this is warped vision which "bears little or no relation to the truth as it is known today." The Catholic who does not write for a limited circle of fellow Catholics will in all probability consider that since this is his vision, he is writing for a hostile audience, and he will be more than ever concerned to have his work stand on its own feet and be complete and self-sufficient and impregnable in its own right. When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.

Read it all on the America website.

• A Good Writer is Hard to Find | Ronald Webber
• "Traveling with Walker Percy" | Carl E. Olson