Christianity in Literary Fiction?

(Cable TV,money,the Great American Novel,boredom, the fire hose and the nukes)

Has Fiction Lost Its Faith? asked Paul Elie last winter in the NY Times. It would be better titled as Has (Literary) Fiction Lost Its (Christian) Faith. Why ask this if it is known that our culture is most definitely post-Christian? As an example of a Christian writer, he names one O'Connor (Flannery) but not the other O'Connor (Edwin) though Mr. O'Connor wrote The Great American Novel, The Last Hurrah, and, more to the point, The Edge of Sadness, winner of the Pulitzer for 1962. Both O’Connor’s were published in the 50's and early 60's.

The implications of the 60's and 70's, confirmed by cable television, ended Christian literary fiction. It ended even so much as the possibility of Christian literary fiction. The bandwidth of our un peu culture has shrunk so that it doesn't accommodate Christian literary fiction. It is plainly a waste of time or, at best, uncomfortable for the atheists in charge. There is little of the belief that could be made known. This belief, if thought, is existent and poses no concern. Should the belief become real - as written, enacted, read - the problems ensure. The prized commitment in some venues to "diversity" can't allow such a reality to become heresy.

The antecedent diversity of the 60s came in an era that had no one in charge. Students and others were taught to denounce various concepts and groups and then they had no plausible resultant. They got the transcendent, fantasy, utopia, copouts or dropouts. The 60s and 70s continued a tyranny of public opinion unchecked by Christianity and amplified by the public opinion into a worst case scenario.

They played off the concerns for conformism and participation that of the 50s were about types. The 50s were affluent but also labeled as "boring". The affluence was characterized as the longest economic Western growth ever seen including ordinary people having their wages rise faster than ever before or since.

They had the money in their life, need they any meaning in their life? Did the money buy the meaning, if needed? Or is God the best way to give meaning to life? What substitute is there, besides the money? Fiction was written to show the errors in the ways of the believers of God. But hasn't this been done in fact, not fiction, need we more of Clothide de Vaux as the Virgin? We have little morality but we still have fears, adversity, and mental monsters that seize us -especially boredom. Do we need God, after all, if people are replaced by things?

Somewhere along the way, if you got God, you got morals. If you want immortality, get a moral, apply it. If you want complete freedom, you lost God. If you are Golfing Against God, then par is morally neutral and you are putting into sadism. The greens are flattened, Flatland, with no twists into morality. Your caddie is "existence" and you can only get to the next hole without culture, even un peu culture is too much. Subtracting culture does not retain humanity that can offer some clarity otherwise you've got a biological blur.

If your golf game is getting out of hand, blame society. Rousseau wanted to blame society for individual ills. Such, via the therapeutic approach, we have accepted. Christianity need not apply to aid us. The Wild Man of Borneo was our link, not Christ. From the Pacific to Paris and from the Cross to the computer. The elites once had computers, now they are getting to the masses. They have accentuated, if not caused, the outstanding stigmata of modernity –boredom (s).

Can science and technology triumph over boredom? Can they handle not the usual boredom but the profound one of modernity and, thus, of the masses? Is it Christianity that can better combat boredom of today? Christianity has already encountered acedia (apathy in the practice of virtue that afflicted the clergy) in the Middle Ages. In the 4th century AD, monks in the desert near Alexandria battled the mid-day demon (daemon meridianus). Acedia yields to God, or work. At least Pascal thought so. He placed humankind as doomed to boredom without God. Quick, superficial diversions were and are countered by the reality of death.

Once one desires one's existence (á la Romanticism), then boredom can occur and in retaliation one may turn to science, technology, or fashion, TV, or authors. Such science and technology is about what one perceives, one is using science or technology not as the "pursuit of knowledge" and so on, but for personal need, personal function. Such science or technology is not real, nor is fashion and TV watching, nor is reading ("I like to read") not what is read, but to read, it is the reading itself and the watching of TV itself and literally "into" clothes for fashion and having the gadgets are presumed to be enough. Information is substituted for the self.

If we are of the elite or the mass, we get bored. In our un peu culture, we are less safe, more brutal, less rational, more hurried and harassed, less possessing sense and sensibility, with less God (or no God), less responsibility, less honor, less duty. So what's the point? We need to be entertained or boredom sets in, so we are entertained by torture, horror, sexual oddities, extravagance, cruelty, suffering, murder, lack of discipline, less family, no tradition, less cohesion and more chaos, and we can't control our use of money. St. Augustine stole rotten pears and feed them to the pigs. We can now choose between evils though what is evil is no longer relevant. We steal from reality and feed ourselves trash, trash in and trash out. We are pigs. We can no longer avoid the most obvious and antisocial evils, or what were once evil and sinful. Then, too, there is now no sin.

There was no sin in the literary fiction of Huxley's Brave New World. That world offered a solution to boredom which was death. In the meantime, if the life is to be lived, it was to be stable. A world state was put in place that started with the Alphas and ended with the Epsilons. That world government would have been imperiled by parents, family, home, and Christianity. The subjects were compelled by brains and butts to do soul-less what was required. For all else there was soma, Christianity without the side effects. When it came time to die you went like lights out, quick, neat, no fuss, no muss.

Actually, in Brave New World, Christianity wasn't completely gone. It was on the Savage Reservation. It was sullied by pumas, lizards, mescal, flab, sag, blotches, and wrinkles. Off the reservation was stability though it could be squalid and lacking the spectacular. They gave up the truth to be happy. The Savage in Surrey, of the Brave New World, could not be happy as a Christian.

Wars of religion loom, can we respond adequately, let alone win, if we are utterly secular? As pagans, our battle banners may be illegible. If corruption and stupidity are outed, we have a fighting chance, otherwise we will succumb. We lost Vietnam. Iraq and Afghanistan are inconclusive. Our drones and other machinery are expected to carry the day. Boredom will overtake us and we will take more drugs, not just pills, to assuage ourselves into destruction. We will be conquered. Segments of the bored are attained or a critical mass of the bored is attained. In a flash the nukes or "biologics" or something else gets activated.

Even without the wars of religion, we are losing the ability to control nuclear weapons. We gulp from a fire hose spewing the start of nuclear destruction somewhere within the flow. The start will end us all. We try to consume the start before it is too late. We are drowning in vulgarity, sadism, brutality, taboos ended, impulse completed, gratification done instantly, ecstasy, unbridled freedom, and the remnants of Christ and God. Each era we drink less and the fire hose’s flow gets faster. Greater grow the odds that we will fail. No aliens are out there in such a state that then they can rescue us. Millions of possibilities are there but they have had enough home abundance to gain time to reach out to us but they never did. But before their reach could go far, their physics, like ours - it is ours, enabled them to destroy themselves. It will be okay here too, if we all die together. Only some die now and again, how unfair. And , truly, not all of us drink at the fire hose, they don't care- atheists, the moral neutralists, the perverse. The stakes grow enormously, who will take the bet? What fool would bet against this house? A Christian believer. Others will attempt escape to other planets.

Then again, there may be no fire hose to worry about if boredom on top of boredom on top of boredom becomes extreme and they (some of us) devise a simulation of nuclear world war. Then, why not see if it works? How many people want it? How many are enough? On the day they put Him on the Cross, there was no way they could imagine such madness. It is Pascal's wager and it is lose-lose. Haven't the odds been against us for a long time? Get a clock, when it chimes, they launch. As compensation, imagine how more and more gets invested with meaning. The importance of anything at all accelerates as they close in on the chime. The End. Everyone gone, all at once. None of this malingering. Thousands of warheads are available. Earth will become unrecognizable.

Human reason has limits but it can take you up to belief, we can have at least some idea (Aquinas) of matters regarding belief. The plausibility of faith can be supported by reason. At the end of reason is belief. Hobbes did not care for the ancient prudence but he felt it prudent to not take an unnecessary risk and cast aside omnipotence. Non-believers are fools to not be on the supportive side of God. Hobbes also thought there is not much we can know about God beyond the word "God" - certainly not the abundance of knowledge some profess to have. For instance in regard to our souls, for most of us our soul disintegrates on death since it has no place to go. After all, there then need not be a "place". It is as if we had never lived. For some, the soul may persist; the place and time are not known. There would be no knowing in any event. We will never again know. Life is temporary for some. For others there is no more. A nothing of any kind becomes impossible. Belief is not the truth of propositions. It is not caused by facts. Literary fiction has an ending. The believer currently has not ended. A truth need not be factual if contained in faith.

Flannery O'Connor, a practitioner of literary fiction, drew, early on, mostly birds, some chickens. She tried to become a cartoonist. Her guardian angel had feathers. She had decided at 12 to not get any older. Milledgeville, Georgia was a bird sanctuary. She brought peacocks to Andalusia. And she caught "rabbits”. They were the starts for a story. Now, no Christian rabbits can be found. She was a 13th century Catholic. She got a sense of practicality in writing, no forcing here into guesses (a fiction within a fiction) nor was she defeated by Church doctrine. Her Christianity was more than symbols. Kazin thought she used more synonyms than metaphor. She believed in original sin and, other than that, all else is lessened. There is a lack of stasis. You get to choose ways that may slow the lessening. God has a say in it. As she lessened, she didn't have an easy life.

For many of us, life has gotten too easy. We strive to come of age without boredom but the traps are very numerous. We should be learning about it. Boredom 101. Stay youthful, get bored. Ripeness is all - Shakespeare. What is Great is beyond us, little dissipations in art, sex, drugs, alcohol, travel, literary fiction, and so on are what we do. Stavrogin, for example, never liked nor accepted his dissipations. Wanting it the easy way, Christianity is too strict, so flop into "religion “or recline into "spiritualism". For the latter two, try to work up an enthusiasm for literary fiction. Good luck, you'll need it. May you have a wide road and all that sort of thing.