On Writing Weird Catholicism When You're Not a Catholic
This first appeared in the 7 December issue of the British Catholic weekly The Tablet.
Ages ago, the New Statesman ran a writing competition, for an excerpt from a historical novel written in the future which would get the present day laughably, disastrously wrong. The wining entry, if I remember rightly, was set in “Oxford College, Cambridge” and featured a don in a doublet and ruff looking at the ‘row of battered Penguins’ on his shelf – then, ripping the wrapper off one of them, and sinking his teeth into the chocolate.
This don/don and Penguin/Penguin confusion has been on my mind lately, because the novel I’ve just published has required me to invent a form of 1920s Catholicism which, ideally, needs to strike actual Catholics as not ridiculous. And not unrecognisable either, despite belonging to a slightly different history of the world than the one we actually inhabit. In one way, of course, this is simply the problem any writer faces who sets out to represent any of the large number of things that they, individually, are not. But this particular challenge to imagination has mattered more to me, and been more anxious, than the general run of them. I’m not a Catholic, except in the small ‘c’ sense in which all credal Christians are, signed up to the one holy, catholic and apostolic church and trusting to the Holy Spirit to furnish an invisible unity beneath the visible divisions. But I’m not remote from Catholicism either. Half my family are Catholics. I sit as a Trustee on the board of a small Catholic charity. I’m a nearby outsider, an intimate sort of outsider. Therefore, it strikes me, the kind of person from whom mistakes or misapprehensions would matter more, be more embarrassing.
Did I make my life harder or easier by having the Catholicism of the novel be a syncretistic kind? I’m not sure. In the world of my novel Cahokia Jazz, the dense populations of Native American farmers in the Mississippi valley didn’t die of Old World diseases, and were still there to be converted by ingenious Jesuits. Since this didn’t really happen, I was free in one sense to create according to taste my fusion between Ignatian spirituality and leftover pieces of sun-worship. But syncretism actually exists. It has cultural rules, repeating patterns. I had a set of emblems of real syncretism to be faithful to: the slightly awkward oil paintings in Cuzco, for instance, created by a first generation of Inca artists under Dominican tutelage, where in the absence of bread as a familiar food Christ is shown breaking a roasted guinea-pig at the Last Supper. Or the artful re-presentation of Christianity in Confucian terms, by Jesuits in China. I wanted to produce, not one of the syncretisms at the fringe of Catholicism, like Haitian Vodoun, where Catholic costumes dress a West African pantheon, but something firmly within the Church Universal. Not a corruption or a contamination, but a successful localisation, of the kind that has been necessary everywhere – including Europe, during its own conversion in late antiquity – for the church of every place to exist in this particular place, between that familiar hill and these familiar trees.
The large idea, in the novel, was to show the arbitariness of the racial history of the United States as we know it, by giving the country another one, where Catholicism displaced whiteness as the most important axis of solidarity. But that’s politics, which is only an outer membrane of experience. Faith’s consequences may work out there, but faith lives deeper in. I could do the politics, but it was harder writing the slightly off-beam canticles to be sung in my imagined city. And hardest of all was my collision with that very real thing, the Latin Mass. (Inevitable for the year 1922 in any world.) I had imagined in my Protestant naivety that it would be essentially the same thing as the English Mass as I had known it from the 1970s, only in Latin. I was shocked, genuinely shocked, by the inaudibility to the congregation of virtually everything after the Sursum Corda. In fact I think I still am. The thought of the central Eucharistic prayers being, not just remoter linguistically, but actually separated from the direct attention of the faithful, gave me one of those jarring moments of estrangement where familiarity flips over, and you realise there is far more to be understood, and entered into, and sympathised with, than you ever imagined. The world: stranger than you think. Catholicism: stranger than I thought. It has all been most educational. And despite the generous help of a couple of real Jesuits, I have already spotted two embarrassing mistakes now that the book is printed and it’s too late. I leave the discovery of others as an exercise for the reader. The Catholic reader. The kindly, indulgent, forgiving Catholic reader.
Ages ago, the New Statesman ran a writing competition, for an excerpt from a historical novel written in the future which would get the present day laughably, disastrously wrong. The wining entry, if I remember rightly, was set in “Oxford College, Cambridge” and featured a don in a doublet and ruff looking at the ‘row of battered Penguins’ on his shelf – then, ripping the wrapper off one of them, and sinking his teeth into the chocolate.
This don/don and Penguin/Penguin confusion has been on my mind lately, because the novel I’ve just published has required me to invent a form of 1920s Catholicism which, ideally, needs to strike actual Catholics as not ridiculous. And not unrecognisable either, despite belonging to a slightly different history of the world than the one we actually inhabit. In one way, of course, this is simply the problem any writer faces who sets out to represent any of the large number of things that they, individually, are not. But this particular challenge to imagination has mattered more to me, and been more anxious, than the general run of them. I’m not a Catholic, except in the small ‘c’ sense in which all credal Christians are, signed up to the one holy, catholic and apostolic church and trusting to the Holy Spirit to furnish an invisible unity beneath the visible divisions. But I’m not remote from Catholicism either. Half my family are Catholics. I sit as a Trustee on the board of a small Catholic charity. I’m a nearby outsider, an intimate sort of outsider. Therefore, it strikes me, the kind of person from whom mistakes or misapprehensions would matter more, be more embarrassing.
Did I make my life harder or easier by having the Catholicism of the novel be a syncretistic kind? I’m not sure. In the world of my novel Cahokia Jazz, the dense populations of Native American farmers in the Mississippi valley didn’t die of Old World diseases, and were still there to be converted by ingenious Jesuits. Since this didn’t really happen, I was free in one sense to create according to taste my fusion between Ignatian spirituality and leftover pieces of sun-worship. But syncretism actually exists. It has cultural rules, repeating patterns. I had a set of emblems of real syncretism to be faithful to: the slightly awkward oil paintings in Cuzco, for instance, created by a first generation of Inca artists under Dominican tutelage, where in the absence of bread as a familiar food Christ is shown breaking a roasted guinea-pig at the Last Supper. Or the artful re-presentation of Christianity in Confucian terms, by Jesuits in China. I wanted to produce, not one of the syncretisms at the fringe of Catholicism, like Haitian Vodoun, where Catholic costumes dress a West African pantheon, but something firmly within the Church Universal. Not a corruption or a contamination, but a successful localisation, of the kind that has been necessary everywhere – including Europe, during its own conversion in late antiquity – for the church of every place to exist in this particular place, between that familiar hill and these familiar trees.
The large idea, in the novel, was to show the arbitariness of the racial history of the United States as we know it, by giving the country another one, where Catholicism displaced whiteness as the most important axis of solidarity. But that’s politics, which is only an outer membrane of experience. Faith’s consequences may work out there, but faith lives deeper in. I could do the politics, but it was harder writing the slightly off-beam canticles to be sung in my imagined city. And hardest of all was my collision with that very real thing, the Latin Mass. (Inevitable for the year 1922 in any world.) I had imagined in my Protestant naivety that it would be essentially the same thing as the English Mass as I had known it from the 1970s, only in Latin. I was shocked, genuinely shocked, by the inaudibility to the congregation of virtually everything after the Sursum Corda. In fact I think I still am. The thought of the central Eucharistic prayers being, not just remoter linguistically, but actually separated from the direct attention of the faithful, gave me one of those jarring moments of estrangement where familiarity flips over, and you realise there is far more to be understood, and entered into, and sympathised with, than you ever imagined. The world: stranger than you think. Catholicism: stranger than I thought. It has all been most educational. And despite the generous help of a couple of real Jesuits, I have already spotted two embarrassing mistakes now that the book is printed and it’s too late. I leave the discovery of others as an exercise for the reader. The Catholic reader. The kindly, indulgent, forgiving Catholic reader.
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