A Theology of Fiction
By Cassandra Nelson.
Wiseblood Books, 2025.
Paperback, 116 pages, $10.
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl.
A bit north and then west of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, one can stumble across an unincorporated community called “Collegeville.” St. John’s University and the College of Saint Benedict are nearby. Both are grounded in Benedictine values, which leads to the two being called “Johnnies” and “Bennies,” monikers referring to shared ceremonies and traditions, and one college president overseeing both.
Catholic novelist Jon Hassler was in residency at St. Johns for many years. Catholic novelist, poet, and essayist Kathleen Norris has also frequently been in residence. People ask, “What does that mean?” And why is it so often thought to be suspect? What occurs when the adjective “Catholic” is placed before a noun much like, say, “Catholic” professor, which immediately adds a wedge of mystery or contemplative knowledge to what that professor does daily, and perhaps with a sort of fearful drabness?
I guess it depends.
My answer regarding Catholic writers is to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor and her example from the story of St. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio. Legend has it that St. Francis converted the wolf, but according to O’Connor, what’s at issue is not whether he actually converted the wolf into a Catholic but whether the wolf’s character improved. She goes on to write that Cardinal Spellman’s Catholic novel The Foundling comes up a bit short of artistry. Still, one can buy the novel and know that the proceeds go to orphans even if the book is only used as a doorstop. Something was gained for the orphans, but O’Connor remained indifferent, the novel unedifying.
One could also pluck Walker Percy’s 1961 The Moviegoer and read page-after-page and irritatingly follow Binx Bolling’s jaunts to a movie theater. The novel is, however, subversive since Bolling becomes stirred up enough by the novel’s end to walk up the steps and, one prays, open the door, enter the cathedral, and become an improved character.
All this is a lengthy introduction to Cassandra Nelson’s A Theology of Fiction, a lively piece of literary criticism. But it is also an attempt to bring to a wider audience the life and times of Sister Mariella Gable, noting for the moment that the good sister was long on the faculty at the College of St. Benedict and likely paddling over the lake to St. Johns to improve the character of the “Johnnies.”
Since her name is not well known, many will wonder who Sister Mariella is. After a Ph.D. from Cornell in 1934, she became chair of the College of Saint Benedict English Department, where she remained until 1958. She went to be with God in 1985.
Sister Mariella’s class on Dante is reputed to be legendary. So, too, are her edited anthologies of short stories, beginning with Great Modern Catholic Short Stories in 1942, Our Father’s House in 1945, and Many-Colored Fleece in 1950. Add to these her numerous essays, and one might easily argue that no one else played such an important role in promoting the cause of little-known writers of Catholic literary importance, even if those selected for inclusion in the anthologies may or may not have been practicing Catholics.
The first anthology is sadly out of print, but contains Hemingway’s “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” and Fitzgerald’s “Benediction.” Only one of the two was Catholic, but both explored themes of faith and addiction, and both wrote about the search for spiritual meaning.
Many-Colored Fleece is in print and offers the reader Steinbeck’s “The Miracle of Tepayac” and Greene’s “The Hint of an Explanation,” among other very fine short stories. Our Father’s House, also in print, expresses a broadened sense of stories she believes can properly be called Catholic. Saints and sinners alike are members of the Father’s house and fragrant with the mystery of Christ: O’Faolain, Powers, Tolstoy, O. Henry, Lagerlof, and Chesterton.
By what criteria are these Catholic? By the criteria of a Catholic theology which suggests a reader’s ability when reading a story to “muse” about the theological underpinnings of fiction.
Did the good sister suffer because of her stunningly lively perspicuity? Yes, for her defense of what she called Chekhovian realism, narrations of ordinary people, and depictions of everyday life and character. She was met with hostility from some quarters, according to Nelson, especially Bishop Bartholome, who required her to seek an imprimatur for her second anthology. He argued that the realism was an indication of Sister Mariella’s anti-clericalism.
Sister Mariella was silenced for four years. But she refused to compromise and continued to argue that Catholic fiction needs to reside above the usual didactic and sweetly pious fictions of rosary beads and crucifixes. She wrote that few people go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs. Real persons go to offices, quarrel with their wives, and eat cabbage soup. She urged seminaries to offer courses in good literature.
So, to ask a question: What’s the stance of the Catholic Church on capital punishment? It is strongly opposed and the Church views it as an attack on human dignity and life; there are no exceptions to the rule. Turn we then to a very fine short story by Hugh Dickinson, “The Reluctant Hangman,” in Sister Mariella’s anthology Many-Colored Fleece. The one note we have is that Hugh Dickinson is from Ithaca, New York. There is no evidence that he’s a practicing Catholic. There is evidence in the story that Patrick Garrett, the sheriff, is Catholic.
The story takes place in the early 1880s and is told by an unknown narrator whose great-uncle is the sheriff of a backwoods county in Pennsylvania. An aging widow bashed in the heads of her paramour and her hired girl, a crime for which she was sentenced to hang. The sheriff’s conscience is deeply disturbed since he is obliged by his office to perform the hanging.
The population relishes the upcoming execution and is unafraid to tell the sheriff that he will need a strong rope to make that old Jezebel swing.
The narrator has heard the story told and re-told, this tale of his great-uncle whose conscience was so profoundly opposed to this “professional” duty even though the woman was unapologetic. Sarah Jelm not only committed the murders but relished the fact.
Opposing him is the Greek chorus community. He takes his spiritual dilemma to the confessional, and when he recites the “Confiteor,” Father Austin interrupts him since he’s anxious to get outside for a smoke. But the sheriff asks whether performing the execution will be doing the right thing. To which the priest says that it is and always will be because of the law.
The sheriff says, “I’ll have it on my conscience.” The priest acknowledges that it’s a bad business, but where’s your courage? Go home, take a drink, and forget it.
He carries out the hanging but faints. Awakening, he goes home and to bed and never gets up again. He wastes away.
But why?
Near the end, he explains to Father Austin that he is accusing himself of taking a human life against the dictates of his conscience. He says he did so out of fear. Then he dies. What’s worse, Father Austin is silent. There’s nothing more to the story and nothing that suggests absolution from Father Austin.
As a reader, how to respond?
There’s always a braying mob, and there’s always the worldly logic of worldly law. But the Catholic Christian faith endlessly inverts and subverts worldly logic and worldly expectations. The story explains Catholicism’s opposition to capital punishment but without intrusive polemics.
Then, too, there’s the difficult story “Missis Flinders” by Tess Slesinger and also in the anthology Many-Colored Fleece. As with all the stories, Sister Mariella has prefaced the selection with head-notes. This story, she writes, is “strong meat,” but if it were not, the story wouldn’t be as good. She further warns that immature and narrow readers are warned to skip it.
The story is the answer to why the Catholic faith holds a very stringent position against abortion: gravely contrary to natural law and a moral evil.
But how to fictionalize such a position without a polemic?
Told as a stream-of-consciousness story, Missis Flinders is being dismissed from the hospital following an abortion. Here, it becomes difficult to summarize or paraphrase because the effects on Missis Flinders’s psychology quiver with a sickening revulsion as she comes to understand the enormity of the perversion she and her husband have committed, a liberty taken with natural law.
Mother Church is a hard dictator on this matter of abortion. Thus, the Church makes every effort to protect her children and those who would like to take liberties with natural law and God’s law.
Was Tess Slesinger Catholic? There’s no evidence except to note that the story is based upon her own experience. We know the story became part of a novel that satirizes the 1930s and 1940s left-wing intellectual milieu from which defenses of abortion emerged.
What does Nelson conclude as to why such a story can coexist with Catholic fiction so formulated? In one respect, fiction that artistically communicates something of the spiritual and moral mystery of the human condition may properly be designated Catholic fiction. That’s a bit cryptic, but she qualifies by suggesting what Catholic fiction is and isn’t. Fiction that is both Catholic in character and appeal but not artistically deficient and without O. Henry pyrotechnics. According to Nelson, then, Sister Mariella’s “earliest, inchoate” definition of Catholic fiction was thus a negative one.
Catholic literature had not yet come into its own.
Nelson’s point, then, is that Catholic writers are issued no exemptions for their piety (Cardinal or not) but must instead be held to the highest standards of quality, craftsmanship, and excellence. Sister Mariella deplored what she called Catholic pulps and Catholic slicks first for their deplorable low craftsmanship and often bowdlerized portrayals of the faith pouring out miracles three for a cent, cheaper than dirt and bad art.
With such a hefty rebuke, it’s clear what she believes Catholic fiction isn’t—and is. Which brings us to the middle chapters of Nelson’s lively little book.
Sister Mariella gathered stories that embraced the kind of quiet realism inspired by Chekhov and Catholic characters who go about teaching addition to children in parochial schools, drink bad coffee in the monastery kitchen, and are occasionally jealous of each other and in which the life of the spirit is for the most part revealed obliquely.
Here Nelson appropriately cites Anita Gandolfo, who confirms Sister Mariella’s judgement in Testing the Faith: New Catholic Fiction in America (1992). The argument suggests that for half a century, 1890 to 1950, Catholic fiction existed as an age of innocence when Catholic writers were driven by didacticism. With Powers and O’Connor, however, the gap between fiction of quality and fiction about faith narrowed. Perhaps this happened because Catholic writers began to train their writing on the local color of Catholic life and, with the change, became adept in their own idiom.
The end of Catholic fiction is to bring about the re-education of love through a slow and imperfect process by guiding us patiently and at our own pace toward an encounter with Christ, the Incarnate Word.
Apart from the examples anthologized by Sister Mariella, are there more recent examples that show will and intellect searching for godliness?
Near the end of A Theology of Fiction, Nelson introduces the reader to a short story by David Foster Wallace, “Good People.” The protagonist, Lane Dean, is searching for something outside himself, but while seated at a picnic table staring out at the lake, he feels himself frozen. Slowly, though, he experiences a quiet revelation, which he later understands as a moment of grace and proof of God, whose love comes to us in crooked ways.
Nelson writes that such a story of chaos, bitterness, and despair about contemporary life has left a sizable need and appetite for great fiction of spiritual affirmation, which is real art, soul-crushing but also love-binding. Stories can be like a little trail of breadcrumbs pointing the soul home.
So thought Sister Mariella Gable.
Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in English and American Studies at Hillsdale College where he taught for thirty-three years.
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