Stirring things up …

… The Catholic Writer and the Skating Boom, Or Every Day Is Self-Parody Day. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Some good points are made here and also in Jacobs's piece, but I think that both Tushnet and Jacobs focus too much on the letter of Dana's essay and not enough on its spirit. Dana is not so naïve as to think we can have things once again the way they were half a century ago. That period came about because of a unique confluence of talent and circumstance. There have been other periods like it. Don't forget the strong Catholic influence during the decadent period at the end of the 19th century. Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, and J.-K. Huysmans were all Catholics. Oscar Wilde, as Dana notes, died a Catholic.

The difference between the postwar period Dana refers to and how things are today is not that there were prominent Catholic writers then and there aren't now. Dana makes it quite clear that is not the case. The difference is that today the literary establishment either cannot recognize or else chooses to ignore Catholic elements even in works by Catholic authors. The vast lucuna in contemporary art that this represents has had profoundly adverse consequences.

As recently as the postwar period, the Roman Catholic Church still was recognized as something of a bulwark against the State, which is what it had been throughout Western history after the fall of Rome in 470 AD. Since then, the Church has seemed to have vagued out (and also to have wallowed in the gutter a bit), and the State has been left to do what it does — take greater and greater control of human life. That is why we are said to live in a secular age.

The problem with such an age is that it is, at best, superficial, and at worst utterly vacuous, for the simple reason that it has no savor or depth to begin with. It is just a bunch of busybodies pestering everybody. Now if the function of art, music, and literature were merely to reflect society, then a trip to a gallery or the theater, a concert of much that passes for music these days, or maybe even a best-seller would be reassuring, superficiality and vacuity being so often on display there. But art is a lens as well as a mirror, and has usually had more to reveal than just the passing scene. As Dana's article sadly demonstrates, that was so even in the not-too-distant past.

Dana's focus on Catholic writers is justified because during the post-war period that he discusses, the Catholic Church was about the only component of Christianity not evidently in decline. The waning of the Mainline Protestant churches had already begun, and Evangelical Protestantism had not yet thrust itself into the political arena. Even in its current vapid state, the Roman Church is better positioned than any other ecclesiastical entity to challenge authentically these times and theirs manners, such as they are. Two thousand years count for something, especially when more and more are noticing how little the prevailing viewpoint has to offer in the way of meaning.

Art and religion both demand practice, and the two can work in synergy. Many suspect that we are living in a period of decline, and they may well be right. If they are, then a resurgent Catholic art may be just what we need. The Church, after all, has plenty of experience when it comes to decline. It was there to pick up the pieces when the Roman Empire finally fell and couldn't get up.

What Dana has discerned is that Catholic writers, precisely by virtue of their faith, have an unusually good opportunity just now to remind people that there is a great deal more to life than what our society currently has on offer.
His essay is prophetic, not nostalgic.