Catholic fiction is an elusive thing. It evades all easy attempts at definition. It’s not fiction about Catholicism. It’s not fiction that promotes Catholicism. And, to make matters worse, Flannery O’Connor, perhaps the foremost American Catholic fiction writer, said that “the Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic.” What on earth is Catholic fiction?

O’Connor, while confusing matters, also gives an answer. Every novelist, she says, has the obligation to create “the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it.” What differentiates the Catholic novelist (and, by extension, Catholic fiction) is that he “lives in a larger universe”: “he believes that the natural world contains the supernatural.” What makes Catholic fiction Catholic is that it acknowledges the presence of beyond-physical reality.

But as O’Connor is well aware, this is a dangerous and highly nuanced idea. There are many ways to portray the supernatural, not all of which are truly Catholic, and not all of which make good stories. (A writer’s primary duty, says O’Connor, is to “attend to his art.”) But an ideal of Catholic literature does exist, and it embodies the fundamental Catholic vision of the world.

To understand the necessity of this literature, we need to follow the trail, so to speak, of the supernatural within fiction. A specific idea is important here. When we consider works that include both nature and supernature, we have to be aware of what distance is present between them. The key movement, as we’ll see, is the shortening of the distance.

But first, it’s important to clarify that fiction which deals with mere nature isn’t necessarily bad. “A work of art is good in itself,” says O’Connor, quoting Aquinas. And, further, “what is good in itself glorifies God.” There are plenty of stories which contain no (direct) reference to the supernatural that are highly profound, even on a spiritual level. Think of Tolstoy, Dickens, and Steinbeck. And yet, they don’t reach as high as they could; they’re not Catholic fiction. The supernatural, which they lack, is an elusive element that has shown its face in an odd, telling spread of genres.

Fantasy

Fantasy is the entrance of the supernatural into the world of story. Tolkien implies this by the very name he gives fantastical stories: “fairy stories,” that is, a story which “touches on or uses Faerie.” As for Faerie, it can be “most nearly translated by Magic.” Fantasy (or fairy stories, if you’re technical like Tolkien) is defined by the presence of an inner magic, of the integrally paranormal.

There’s an important step that fantasy makes past other genres which also include magical elements. Tolkien insists that fantasy’s magic must “be taken seriously, neither laughed at or explained away”: “it is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy story” that it “be presented as ‘true.’” In contrast to psychological horror stories and dream narratives, which both, technically, include magic, true fantasy takes its supernaturalism seriously.

And yet, says Tolkien, “the magic of Faerie is not an end in itself”: it aims at “the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires.” These desires could be trivial things, like flying or turning invisible, but on a deeper level, there’s the desire “to hold communion with other living things.” There are transcendent desires in the magic of fantasy. This hints at what sets Catholic fiction apart, as we’ll see later on.

We are, of course, talking about fantasy at its best. There are many different forms of fantasy, not all of which have Tolkien’s noble vision. But this is fantasy’s ideal, and Tolkien’s own Lord of the Rings embodies it well. Middle Earth is marked by an integral, self-serious supernaturalism: there’s no doubt that the magics of rings, elves, and wizards are presented as real, and they’re baked into the world’s inner logic. And, too, they manifest “primordial human desires,” the desire to sacrifice, to destroy evil, to live in harmony with a living nature.

But fantasy has definite limits. Tolkien says that the writer of fairy stories necessarily creates a “Secondary World.” This, as he demonstrates, is a beautiful and profound thing, which has many advantages. But fantasy by nature deals with places that are not the “Primary World.” There’s a world-spanning distance between the natural and supernatural. The magic of Middle Earth is firmly in Middle Earth. Fantasy is only the first rung of the ladder.

Magical Realism

Most literary realisms, by definition, include no supernatural elements. But some realists aren’t satisfied with the merely natural. The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, from the middle of the 20th century, said “there was something missing” in his stories.

Márquez is talking about the “supernatural and fantastic.” But he doesn’t mean fantasy: his field of play is realism, the everyday world around us. And to supply that missing element, to successfully incorporate fantastic events, Márquez had to “believe in them myself,” to write them “with a brick face.”

This is magical realism. Works of magical realism bring supernatural events crashing into the normal world. As in fantasy, the magic is taken seriously: neither writer nor reader is meant to bat an eye at the paranormal narrative elements.

But magical realism goes beyond fantasy. Márquez gives an important example. “If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you.” This disbelief is why fantasy’s secondary worlds are necessary. “But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.” Magical realism incorporates the supernatural through intensely realistic descriptive detail. The distance has lessened: here, the supernatural is described as truly present in the world around us.

But the distance isn’t closed. Márquez’s brick face implies that there’s something to keep a brick face about: magical realism’s supernature is never meant to be believed outside the narrative. This results in a couple discrepancies.

The first is tension. In magical realism’s “fully-fleshed out mundane world,” says Joshua Hren, the “magical elements” are “at odds with the commonplace characters and their secular world.” Magic doesn’t merge well with realism, especially when no one really believes it. Hence why magical realism is merely a specialized niche of literary realism, occupied by a few 20th century Latin Americans (like Márquez) and divergent writers like Salman Rushdie.

But in addition, Hren says, magical realism “relishes the ambiguous.” This makes sense, given Márquez’s conviction that “anybody can write anything so long as it’s believed.” There’s a kind of deception that happens in magical realism which necessitates ambiguity. And ambiguity “projects twilight where truth can be told.” Like fantasy, magical realism isn’t sufficient.

Take, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent novel Klara and the Sun. In it, a child-companion robot, Klara, is assigned to a girl with a severe illness. It embodies much of what’s good about magical realism: Klara believes the sun has the power to heal her assignee, and spends much of the story negotiating with it. And, by the end, the girl is healed. It’s a beautiful moment, but it’s ambiguous: we’re left uncertain whether we’ve encountered real mysticism in the sun’s healing power, or whether it’s an illusory coincidence in Klara’s mind. Magical realism has its moments, but the magic is shadowy: we can go higher.

Christian Realism

In a sense, magical realism is ambiguous because it isn’t religious: its magic is merely magic because there’s no true belief. Seeing a story’s supernatural events through the lens of Christianity changes the scene, because now the events can be believed authentically.

Or, at least, they would be in an ideal world. Christian realism is fiction which incorporates the supernatural aspects of the Christian cosmos; it has a few separate manifestations, not all of which are pretty.

The first is Christian fantasy, which builds fantastical worlds around angels and demons, priests and Masses. Both Raymond Arroyo’s Will Wilder and Donal Foley’s Glaston Chronicles fall in this category. Christian fantasy isn’t really Christian realism, because it isn’t realism: it takes place in secondary (or deceptively primary) worlds, which, however Christian, are still distant.

Some stories, however, contextualize their Christian supernaturalism in more realistic surroundings. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth are wonderful examples of this: the ghost and the witches might initially indicate Christian fantasy, but they’re embedded in the bracingly real situations of the Danish prince and Scottish general. This is explicit Christian realism.

But there’s still another type: the Christian (or contemporary) realism that Joseph Pearce describes in “Notes From the Underground.” This Christian realism, he says, is “animated by the philosophical realism of Christian philosophy”: “it is set in a cosmos in which reality is not only physical but metaphysical.” So far, so good: both Shakespeare and Raymond Arroyo would agree. But, further, it “eschews the physical manifestation of the supernatural.” Instead, the Christian metaphysics is “subsumed within the narrative as a perceived but invisible presence.”

Pearce is noting something important: true Christianity isn’t mere miracles, but the presence of grace within persons. So, also, is true Christian literature: it’s not Christian because it depicts angels and exorcisms, but because it manifests (in Evelyn Waugh’s words) “the operation of divine grace” on its characters and events. This is implicit, not explicit, Christian realism.

Pearce uses the example of Brideshead Revisited; I prefer King Lear. Unlike Hamlet and Macbeth, it doesn’t include anything explicitly supernatural, and yet it’s clear that the finger of grace is present throughout.

Pearce is correct in implying that this implicit Christianity is superior in its depth. But it’s still important to note that all three types are legitimate genres. They have different purposes, and they serve them in different ways.

At the same time, Pearce’s Christian realism draws closest to the height of Catholic fiction: the distance between nature and grace is rapidly closing. But it’s precisely in its implicit quality, in the invisibility of grace, that it falls short. Joshua Hren notes this about what he calls supernatural realism (which, while distinct, is related to what we’re discussing). “The supernatural exists in a sort of antagonistic tension with the real rudeness of nature.” A dualism exists in Christian realism. The ghost of Hamlet’s father arises from the Christian otherworld; the touch of grace hides within the moral psyches of Waugh’s protagonists. An inch of separation yet remains.

Contemplative Realism

Recall the criterion Flannery O’Connor gives for Catholic fiction: it holds that the “natural world contains the supernatural.” The key word here is “contains.” In all the genres we’ve discussed, the supernatural has been present, but it’s been a foreign agent, something that doesn’t totally belong. It’s status is ambiguous; it’s not contained.

This is the distance we’ve been highlighting throughout. But Catholic fiction, that is, true Catholic fiction, doesn’t have any of this distance. It reinforces “our sense of the supernatural,” says O’Connor, “by grounding it in concrete, observable reality.”

To understand what O’Connor’s saying, we have to be familiar with sacramentality. Sacramentality is the manifestation of spiritual things within physical things. It’s the worldview that underlies Christ’s Incarnation, that allows God to take on flesh. This, of course, is continued in the sacramental Church, and in the central capital-S Sacraments which electrify tangible things (like bread and water) in order to bring us into contact with Christ. Catholicism is sacramental. It saves our souls through our bodies.

Sacramental reality, and the sacramental view of the world, are mysterious. Mystery is at the heart of the union between spirit and matter, between grace and nature, and it’s by entering into this mystery that we draw closer to Christ through the Church.

Flannery O’Connor is saying that true Catholic fiction, like true Catholicism, is sacramental. The supernatural presence within it is in no way separate from “observable reality”: it’s precisely through the physical, tangible details that supernature manifests itself.

And at the center of this is mystery, the same mystery which is at the heart of the Church. True fiction “presents mystery through manners, grace through nature,” but ultimately “there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula.” Thus says Flannery O’Connor. This, truly, is redemptive fiction.

At this point, it’s tempting to think that what we’re describing is quite similar to Joseph Pearce’s Christian realism. Grace comes through nature; grace works in the moral lives of the story’s characters.

Yes; but there’s more. Catholic sacramentality is just as bracingly exterior as it is profoundly interior. Christ suffers a brutal execution; the Eucharist is gnawed on (to use Christ’s own terminology) in our unworthy mouths. The true height of Catholic fiction necessitates outward manifestations of the supernatural, to make it fully concrete.

Now this sounds like magical realism. And yet it’s not only Catholic belief that sets this fiction apart from magical realism, but also the perfect union between matter and spirit. It’s no longer that magic is present in the everyday world. It’s that grace is no longer distinguishable from the everyday world. Matter and spirit have mysteriously mingled.

We have, of course, all this time been discussing (without referencing) Joshua Hren’s vision of contemplative realism. In it, “what cannot be seen is as realistic as what can”; the “fantastic and diabolic” are “essential dimensions of this world” (emphasis mine), not of some distant realm. In contemplative realism, the supernatural finally achieves its proper place, the place allotted it by an intensely Catholic view of reality.

Hren uses Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus as an example. In truth, I can think of no better work than Hren’s own story “Sacre Coeur.” It’s a short and deceptively simple story. A divorced father has his adult daughter home for the weekend. He walks into her room at night and sees a laceration in the form of the Sacred Heart on her skin. There’s no explanation and no moralizing. The image is simply there. In the morning the father dies of a heart attack, and the daughter finds him laid out on the floor.

And the wreathe of thorns that had been there who knew how long but which she had only of late come to feel, pricking with each breath, around her own heart, the wreathe of thorns pressed and prickled tighter than ever. Then, as with some difficulty she managed to free a long-held breath, one by one the thorns burst from her . . . Several thorns bounced from the floor and fell into her hands. Marie held the sharp things, scrutinizing each piece like a skeptical Medieval monk who, accustomed to doubting the very relics he dealt in, is finally persuaded by the faith of those who come to see them.

This is a divinely transcendent moment. This is contemplative realism; this is Catholic fiction.

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Quotes from Flannery O’Connor are taken from “The Church and the Fiction Writer” and “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers.” Both are published in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, but they can be read online here and here.

Quotes from Tolkien are taken from “On Fairy Stories,” which can be read online here.

Quotes from Gabriel García Márquez are taken from “The Art of Fiction No. 69,” which can be read online here.

Quotes from Joshua Hren (apart from the story) are taken from an excerpt of “Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto” on the Dappled Things website, which can be read here.

“Sacre Coeur” is published in a short story collection titled This Our Exile. Even though I spoiled the ending, I highly encourage you to read the entire story.