How do we learn? Well, of course, we are instructed
formally in educational systems, and by our families, by societies, by the
media and the culture writ large. The same messy, complicated process applies
to religious education, to evangelization, to belief and unbelief. And while
there are metrics by which our educations are formally assessed, measuring how
belief is acquired, maintained, or lost is another thing. When I was in the
government and specialized, among other things, in studying Salafi-Jihadist
propaganda, we always noted that there was no one path to belief, even to
radical belief—what enthused one person left another cold. Moreover, the
language, images, and arguments that could mobilize extremists also appealed
strongly to ordinary believers.
The idea of the way of
beauty, the via pulchritudinis, as a path for art
that is expressive of Christian faith and that can draw people to that faith
has been mentioned repeatedly by Catholic church leaders, theologians and
popes. in recent years. Saint Paul VI famously addressed artists at the closing
of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. He called on them to be allied to the
Church as “the guardians of beauty in the world,” noting that “the world in
which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair” and asking them
to be free “from the search after strange or unbecoming expressions.” A cynic
might look at the wreckovation of Catholic churches in the following years and
the sterile and strange course of most contemporary art as evidence that Paul
VI’s plea went unheeded. Subsequent popes have echoed such a fervent plea. Pope
Francis called calling on artists in December 2020 to “transmit truth and
beauty.” Perhaps no pope has spoken as much and as evocatively on beauty and
faith as Pope Benedict XVI. In 2011 he said:
Before you there stood not only matter—a piece
of marble or bronze, a painted canvas, an ensemble of letters or a combination
of sounds—but something far greater, something that “speaks,” something capable
of touching the heart, of communicating a message, of elevating the soul.
I am sure that these holy men are right, that beauty, so
much of the Church’s precious physical and artistic heritage handed down
through the ages, can indeed inspire and move, even evangelize and change
hearts. The beauty of creation, of the natural world, can also inspire, even
though in recent generations this type of inspiration seems to have been
channeled towards activism or non-Christian spirituality. We all know of
historical figures or intellectuals deeply moved by chant or the rose window of
a medieval cathedral or the works of modern Christian writers such as
Chesterton or Tolkien whose lives are changed. Pope Benedict saw art and the
lives of the saints as the two greatest sources of apologetics for the faith.
And great Christian artists who can inspire such a leap towards a spirit of
transcendence still exist: the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, the Lebanese
Maronite nun Marie Keyrouz, or the Canadian novelist Michael O’Brien.
But I feel that we sell the
path of beauty short when we think of it solely or even mostly in terms of high
culture, of art aimed at or consumed by a cultured or well-educated elite. This
is not to minimize the ability of great art to speak to common people. After
all, much of the ancient art of the Church that is justly esteemed today,
including by non-believing intellectuals, moved and inspired ordinary people
through the ages, including the unlettered and illiterate. But people, all
people, are moved by the strangest of things, and even the most humble
hackwork, intended merely to entertain, can offer unexpected glimpses of a
higher reality.
Growing up I had little
exposure to sacred art or music. I know I was baptized in the great church of
Jesús de Miramar in Havana and received my first Holy Communion at the
parish of Saint John the Apostle in Hialeah, Florida. After that whatever I had
been taught was forgotten. My family stopped going to Mass. This was amid the
turmoil that followed the Second Vatican Council and the introduction of the
New Mass, but I do not know why we ceased to attend and have no sense of
whether our departure was connected with those radical changes. In any case, I
would not return to the Church for many decades, when I was finally confirmed.
What I did do as a boy was
read. And the true, the good, and the beautiful were not what I sought out, at
least not intentionally. Like my parents before me, the first “real”
(non-children’s literature) writer I remember reading was Jules Verne. The
first book I ever purchased with my own money was an Airmont Classics paperback
of Dracula. That same inexpensive
publisher featured other favorites including the works of H.G. Wells and H.
Rider Haggard. Haggard would lead me to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Burroughs to
that prolific Texan Robert E. Howard. Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu, The Prisoner of Zenda, Dumas and Conan Doyle followed. After that I read all
sorts of things—adventure, fantasy, horror—for years. the classic writers, all
of them long dead when I read them, were succeeded by humbler bylines, by those
still living journeyman pulpsters churning out fast-paced lively tales, usually
in less than two hundred pages. In terms of sheer quantity, it was those
potboilers that consumed much of my time.
There was a paperback
series called The Guardians, by the pseudonymous Peter
Saxon, with lovely covers by Jeff Jones—fighters against the powers of darkness
in Swinging London. The Guardians were a team of laypeople with special
abilities except one was a righteous “Anglo-Catholic priest” named John Dyball.
I remember one vivid scene in which he performs an exorcism and lighting from
the heavens destroys a pagan diabolist. Good versus evil, light versus
darkness, men—it was almost always men—of action and conviction: this was
compelling.
There was the Inquisitor series by Simon Quinn (actually a young Martin Cruz
Smith just starting out). I don’t recall these books being very good—Cruz Smith
has never allowed them to be reprinted—but the premise was irresistible:
Francis Xavier Killy, a former C.I.A. man turned secret agent for the Vatican—“a
lay brother of the Militia Christi working for the Holy Office of the
Inquisition in Rome.” A James Bond type of character, but when he kills someone
in the line of duty, he has to do severe penance. The whole thing is an amusing
fictional conceit coming at a time—the mid-1970s—when what had been the Holy
Office had already been abolished.
Of higher quality (the
stories were actually in hardcover) was John Thunstone, also a fighter against
the forces of darkness—voodoo, devil worship, witchcraft—who had initially
appeared in the 1940s in the pages of the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales (famous for publishing much of the work of Lovecraft
and Howard years before). Thunstone was the creation of the Southern writer
Manly Wade Wellman. Thunstone, a dashing New York “scholar and playboy who
investigates supernatural events,” wears a crusader’s ring and carries a sword
cane with a silver blade, supposedly forged by Saint Dunstan, with the
inscription sic pereant omnes inimici tui (a
quotation from the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges). I didn’t know it at
the time but Thunstone was one of a line of fictional supernatural sleuths or
psychic detectives going back to the earlier work of scribes such as Algernon
Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson. Wellman did not belong to the Church (his
parents were Protestant medical missionaries in Africa) but as often happened
in this genre, the symbols and imagery of spiritual power were overwhelmingly
Catholic.
Even more vivid was reading
Dennis Wheatley’s famous occult adventure novel The Devil Rides
Out (first published in 1934) and his other novels
in what is usually called his “Black Magic” series. The books came with a
warning that such practices were real and to be avoided—a statement both true
and clever as marketing. I had seen the Hammer film version, called The Devil’s Bride in the United States (the name changed because the
original sounded too much like a Western), when I was a pre-teen and had
considered it the most frightening film I had yet seen. The novel made an even
greater impression. Wheatley, an English wine merchant bankrupted by the Great
Depression, had turned to writing and become the “Prince of Thriller Writers”
in the 1930s, something like an early combination of Robert Ludlum and Dan
Brown. One writer described the content of his voluminous work as “sex,
jingoism, and black magic” and his novels written decades before made a
comeback in the Age of Aquarius with Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Wheatley was no Catholic—raised as an Anglican, he
disliked orthodox Christianity and lived a life of unabashed hedonism—but this
work would not have been possible without Catholic influences. This was
especially true of Wheatley’s best fictional creation, the anti-Bolshevik,
Satanist-bashing, Franco-Russian-but-exiled-in-Britain adventurer, the Duc de
Richleau (memorably portrayed by Sir Christopher Lee in the film version).
Part of the attraction of
the early Wheatley novels today—vigorous but crude potboilers—is that patina of
a forgotten age, the Duc’s gilded life with the Hoyo de Monterrey cigars,
Mayfair flat, Hispano Suiza, and Rolls Royce touring cars, the fine wines
lovingly described. But what struck me most when young was the Catholic
symbolism and doctrine (at times mixed in with the trendy Eastern religion
stuff of the Edwardian era), which I had never seen so vividly portrayed in
real life. A woman who is being seduced by Satanism is warned that “this
promise of strange powers is only a filthy trap. At your first christening,
your godparents revoked the Devil and all his works. Once you rescind that
protection, you are completely exposed.” The heroes in confronting the supreme
evil arm themselves with ivory crucifixes, holy water from Lourdes, rosaries,
and the medal of Saint Benedict; they recite Psalm XCI, “which is immensely
powerful against all evil manifestations.”
In convincing a skeptic of
the existence of spiritual evil, Richleau appeals to religious history: “The
Roman church, whose authority comes unbroken over nineteen centuries from the
time when Our Lord made St. Peter his viceregent on earth, has ever admitted
the existence of the evil power.” The Duc later makes this statement, which
astonished me at the time, although I didn’t know quite why it did: “I only
wish we had a fragment of the Host apiece. That is the most powerful defense of
all, and with it we might walk unafraid in hell.” The soul of a recently dead
character is at one point summoned back by the heroes to be interrogated and,
to test its allegiance, is asked, “Do you acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ?”
Wheatley was nothing if not in tune with the zeitgeist. At different times in
his long writing career, his Satanists were connected to Nazis, to Communists,
and to anti-colonial movements.
I don’t really recommend
any of these mediocre, entertaining works as any sort of spiritual guide, of
course. For me, they were merely part of the youthful pleasure of reading. In
my twenties when I was mature enough for more serious things—fiction and
non-fiction—I first encountered C.S. Lewis and Chesterton, Walker Percy, the
novels of Charles Williams (who used to review thrillers in the 1920s and was
inspired to write his own by reading Sax Rohmer), Russell Kirk’s Catholic
fighter of demons Manfred Arcane (like the fictional Duc de Richleau, also an
anti-Bolshevik). It was then that I re-read and truly appreciated Tolkien.
Our popular culture is,
with few exceptions, so debased that it rarely exercises a wholesome influence
upon young minds. Social media makes it even more ubiquitous. By the time many
young people can encounter and appreciate that way of beauty so vividly
described by Pope Benedict, the Palestrinas and Fra Angelicos of our rich
heritage, their imaginations will have been colonized by a potent adversarial
successor ideology. Conversion is always possible, of course, and it is
something to pray and work for with devotion and diligence, but it is hard not
to think that art could do its part.
Modest small-scale
contemporary efforts directed at youth, such as the initially crowd funded
indie comic Soulfinder created by Douglas Ernst,
are to be welcomed. In those works, the heroes are combat veterans turned
Catholic priests and exorcists and the issues are even marketed with rosaries
on the ICONIC Comics and Rugged Rosaries websites. The positive influence of
the Catholic subtexts in more mainstream comic and graphic novel titles such as
Daredevil, Hellboy, and John Constantine is not to be discounted.
But in a seemingly
post-Christian world where popular culture is increasingly used as a vehicle to
market ideological and political agendas antithetical to orthodox Christianity,
the need for compelling, informal counter-narratives and themes embedded in
that same popular culture will only increase. Decades ago a non-Christian like
Wheatley used Catholic doctrine, symbolism, and imagery in his novels not only
because of their dramatic power but also because these things would have been
more or less understood by his general audience. Today it is harder to imagine
such a thing, in a world in which one cannot expect readers to possess an
understanding of even the most basic tenets of Christianity. Having considered
my own experience, I can only hope that some aspiring scribbler can follow in
the footsteps of Wheatley and others on the way of beauty, even, or perhaps
especially, if he sticks to the low road.
Alberto
M. Fernandez is a retired diplomat and vice president of the Middle East Media
Research Institute (M.E.M.R.I.).