Sanctity and literature …

… Newman as Novelist | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip Dave Lull.)

To be clear, Newman is not the first person, canonized or beatified, to have published a work of long narrative fiction. St. Thomas More, for example, wrote the social and political satire Utopia (1516). But that book, while fictional, is not exactly a novel. What distinguishes the modern novel from its many premodern precursors is its realistic representation of social life. Some argue that the Blessed Ramon Llull may have actually written the very first novel sometime around the year 1283. Llull’s story of a fictional pope, Blanquerna, would make the Catalan mystic the first blessed novelist, but Llull has yet to be canonized. And while St. Francis de Sales serves as the patron saint of writers and journalists, all his published work falls within the category of the Catholic devotional.