Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto

by Joshua Hren

As ever, but especially in our present age of raging post-truth unreality, we ought to heed Pope Benedict XVI's summons to "ask rather more carefully what 'the real' actually is." So-called "realism" can blind us-instead of binding us-to things as they are. "Are we not interested in the cosmos anymore?" Benedict asks. "Are we today really hopelessly huddled in our own little circle?" If this preeminent mind of our time is not wrong, and "the man who puts to one side the reality of God is a realist only in appearance," then we ought to ask with unflinching intensity and what is real? Like liturgy, literature asks this question with a range of forms that answer it very differently. At times, both art and worship seem to devolve into the manners and mood of self-referential and inconsequential play, gestures without meaning, or "bank notes" (says Benedict) "without funds to cover them." These too-closed circles of communication wall off transcendence. In living cruciform liturgy-on the contrary-"the congregation does not offer its own thoughts or poetry but is taken out of itself and given the privilege of sharing in the cosmic song of praise of the cherubim and seraphim." In living contemplative literature something analogous we suffer and praise with the whole of creation; the prose cultivates a grateful disposition, prompting us to yearn for a vision of the whole. But this manifesto on behalf of a "contemplative realism" makes no claims to create, ex nihilo, a new aesthetical species. Rather, it seeks to articulate a literary approach that exists already in diffuse books as well as in the potencies of living artists. It seeks to gather and galvanize those souls. More than anything, it yearns to quicken a contemplative realist disposition among as many comers as possible-literary chops or no. For, in a very bad way (to borrow from Josef Pieper), "man's ability to see is in decline." Joshua Hren is founder of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. His books the short story collections This Our Exile and In the Wine Press; the book of poems Last Things, First Things, & Other Lost Causes; Middle-earth and the Return of the Common J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy; How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic; and the novel Infinite Regress.

Genres: Catholic

72 pages, Hardcover

Published January 3, 2022

About the author

Joshua Hren is an novelist and critic, a father and husband. He is founder and editor of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. Joshua regularly publishes essays and poems in such journals as The Los Angeles Review of Books and First Things, America and Public Discourse, New Polity and The Hedgehog Review, Plough and Commonweal, National Review and The University Bookman, and Religion and Literature and LOGOS.

Joshua is the author of ten books: the short story collections This Our Exile and In the Wine Press; a book of poems called Last Things, First Things, & Other Lost Causes; Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy; How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic; the novel Infinite Regress; and the theological-aesthetical manifesto Contemplative Realism. Joshua's More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature and Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia's Poetics of Belief, are forthcoming. His second novel, Blue Walls Falling Down, was published in October of 2024.

Reviews

[Thomas Womack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a short book, and I read it slowly and carefully. Greatly appreciate the author's vision for a fresh stream of fiction that reflects "contemplative realism," a concept that I find very appealing and worthwhile.

[Peggy Haslar · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this slender, richly referenced proclamation, Joshua Hren first grounds his readers in the importance of fiction's school of realism, the telling of "hard-won truth instead of handing out rosy romances" or worse, the offering of what Flannery O'Connor called "pious trash." Then he insists that by its own self-imposed limitations, this realism (so-called) blinds us to the whole of reality. Within its partial vision, we attempt flight with but with clipped wings.
In joyful defiance, Hren asserts that not all morality is moralism and not all spiritual vision is "oversimplified piety." Contemplative Realism proves the point through a tour of literary history from ancient Greece to Dante and Dostoevsky to O'Connor and David Foster Wallace. Hren courageously calls for artistic vision that is "richly moral and daringly prophetic." Before we doubt that a Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto is possible in this world-weary time, we must give these pages their due. Readers and writers who ponder both the gritty and the lofty mysteries of the seen and unseen world, unite!

[Matthew Wickman · Rating 5 out of 5]

True to its title, this is a deeply thoughtful and insightful book about how a certain type of fiction helps us confront what is most real -- a category, for Hren, defined less by what is reductively material or fallen than by what is shrouded in mystery and an aura of the sacred. It's a book that wants to help us better understand fiction in the hopes of also helping us better see the divine. Smart, articulate, sensitive, and discerning.

[Maria Morfin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that nurtures mind and spirit. It is a short essay on being a realist, a full realist. It made me want to dig deeper into the subject.

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this was a lovely way to spend a Monday evening. Hren offers a spectacular vision of literature that positions literature as that which heals our ailing sense of sight. Contemplative realism is vision accompanied by love, which enables a deep attentiveness to the world around us. This kind of realism reconciles the starkly different ways Robinson and O' Connor describe how grace is operative in the world. I pray--with great sincerity--that this manifesto generates a movement of authors who, out of a sense of deep gratitude to God, help us see His world better.

"Fed by the majestic poverty of the Word [the contemplative realist] will write another novel of the nameless nobody who happens to be made in the imago Dei, numbering the hairs of her head very carefully, surprised to find in her insignificance some of the deepest drama in the cosmos" (62)

[sch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mar 2023. Trying this out with general interest (related to my dissertation) and as a preliminary to one of the author's novels.

Update: it's taking me way too long to finish this short volume, but life is suddenly busy again. Preliminary judgment (halfway through): the central idea deserves better prose, less craggy and convoluted. Contains several valuable insights into the nature of fiction and the art of various novelists.

Finished, opinion unchanged.