Reading the Novel as a Catholic

In our club, not only do we read novels as intelligent, informed young people, but we are also attempting to read them as Catholics.  What exactly does this mean?

We are people who know that we are not just quirks of chance, but created by God to know, love and serve him in this world and to be happy with him in the next.  We celebrate this in our families and in our Catholic community.  God created us as creatures with human natures, totally unlike the rest of the "natures" that you find on this planet.  Our natures are like the blueprints for being fully and happily human.  If we do what our natures require, we thrive.  If we act against our natures, we languish.

So, this awareness of the divine is an extra layer of meaning that Catholics find in the interpretation of works of the imagination.   We do not impose our worldview upon a novel, but we understand more deeply a dimension of the way things really are, and works of literature help us identify it.   

So, how do we identify this deep dimension of human living in the novel?  We can ask ourselves five basic questions to get us started as we read:

1. What is the moral universe that the characters inhabit?  Their culture may be atheistic or Christian, hostile or helpful to being fully human.  It may be difficult or easy to have a good ethical life, given the habits and prejudices of the novel's moral universe.
2. What is the author's view of human nature? Our characters may see themselves as bound to the ethical rules of our nature, or not.   The author may approve of his characters or not, especially when they make moral choices to do good and avoid evil (or the opposite).  
3. What is the author's view of God?  God may be openly discussed, ridiculed, or simply ignored.  Clergy may be praised or mocked.  Religious people may be genuine or false, true servants of God or devils in disguise.  Religious symbols may be woven throughout, or noticeably absent.
4. Is there some hope of redemption in the novel?  Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest says of her novel, "The good ended happily and the bad unhappily.  That is what fiction means."  This is meant to be a joke, or course, because life, and the novels that reflect life, are never so perfectly just.  However, as Catholics, we have faith and hope that the human story has a happy ending.  Not a pat ending, or a simplistic one, but one in which evil is eventually overcome, pain has a purpose, and grace operates in every life.  Look for these qualities even in the darkest dystopian novel, because the way an author conveys the darkness of life may not be to approve of it, but to warn of it.
5. What is the standard in the novel for something being bad or good?  Julia, in Brideshead Revisited described her husband as "A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole."  This is not a flattering description!  What makes a good person, or a bad person?  What are the moral rules that make us whole, or make us a person who is missing a vital part of what its like to be human?  When we find these rules, are they consistent?  Do they strike you as authentic and universal?  Are they arbitrary or hypocritical?  Simplistic or naive?  These are the rules of the fictional moral universe, and they can be assessed according to our Catholic ideals of what is Good, Beautiful, and True.  These ideals are not so very complicated, but have been distilled for us very simply by Jesus:

And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40)

Happy reading!

Mrs. S.