A Novel Look at Faith

In a society, now or in the past, where belief in God is taken as a given, as a natural part of life, when faith isn’t questioned publicly, constantly and reflexively, writers’ faith or lack of it isn’t usually examined much at all. It is simply assumed that a sense of the sacred is at the core of art, implicit in the work, and left at that. Except for the fanatics, who in any age will try to dissect literature or any form of the arts to see if they conform to the zealot’s idea of God, literature is pretty much left alone to express or not express the Divine. Fanatics of course have attacked literature throughout the ages—from twelfth-century wet blankets who condemned Arthurian romance, to seventeenth-century Puritans who banned the theatre, to 1960s Bible-thumpers who tried to ban C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series on the grounds it was too pagan, to the Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a death warrant on Salman Rushdie, to those who still think that J.K. Rowling is in league with the Devil. The enemies of the imagination, who think they are the champions of God, all share a depressing literal-mindedness, and they can make things very difficult for writers.

But generally, in the past, when the zealots weren’t in power, literature, like the other arts, was allowed to go on with its own business. It wasn’t just that people were scared, in times when religion was central, to engage explicitly or directly with expressions of faith in their work. It was also that there was felt no need to do so. Elizabeth I famously said, “I do not make windows into men’s souls,” and that is fairly much the attitude in pre-modern, natural-believing and non-fundamentalist societies where it is just assumed to be par for the course that writers and other artists, being a part of their society, will share in that society’s beliefs and understandings.

When religious characters were introduced in a work, it was not to affirm or challenge the existence of God but rather as some kind of device or occasionally a comment on the distance that sometimes occurred between religious belief and practice—the lecherous monk or greedy priest or hypocritical parson for instance. For in a believing society, it is hypocrisy and the distance between the religion’s core and the activities of its members which are seen as the greatest threat to religion, and not questions of the existence of God, which is simply accepted.

Writers were certainly not expected to bring God into their work; the fact that Shakespeare, for instance, did not approach religion directly did not make anyone in his time think him irreligious. (The Puritans of course thought differently.) Shakespeare’s plays are steeped in religious imagery and suffused with spiritual understanding, and sometimes they deal indirectly with questions of faith, as in The Merchant of Venice, in which neither Jew nor Christian behaves particularly well. But his work is not overtly God-bothering, as it were. That is because it was written for the theatre, not the church. People understood those distinctions. But the lack of a here-I-stand credo in Shakespeare leads some literal-minded modern critics erroneously to assume he shared their atheism or agnosticism, which to me seems far from the truth.

Elizabethan playwrights did not generally engage with explicit questions of faith because their works were, in a way, the novels of their day—essentially secular story-telling forms that, implicitly or more directly, could touch on questions of faith. But poets often engaged directly with faith—John Donne and George Herbert, for instance, and Shakespeare himself, in poems such as The Phoenix and the Turtle. Poetry, through Milton and Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins and countless others, has continued to be an area of creative literary expression that has kept a much more direct line to God.

Maybe because of its association with song and ritual and ecstatic states it seems particularly well-suited to the direct expression of the internal experience of faith and the Divine. And that still holds true. It is a strange but true fact that poets even these days in as resolutely secular a society as Australia’s still are given a good deal more licence to express such things than are, say, novelists. But then perhaps that’s because poetry, like religion, is seen as a fringe activity!

It is my feeling that the novel, which is my own chosen mode of expression, is a rather more secular form of literature than poetry, and more resistant to the direct expression of faith. On the face of it, that might seem odd, for sacred story is a central part of the three great monotheistic religions, and of course Jesus chose to frame a great deal of his teaching in parables, what you might call mini-stories. But though the Bible has nourished the imagination of countless writers, it cannot be said to be a good model for the novelist.

Even in a later believing—but beginning to doubt—society like that of Victorian England, it was still generally taken for granted that writers believed in God and thus there was no need for them to approach religion directly. The condemnation of religious hypocrisy, however, was even stronger than in former times—think of the novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and so on, and elsewhere, Tolstoy, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Hugo, to name just a few. As well, a new form of literature, children’s literature—which began to make its presence felt in the nineteenth century, at least in English-speaking countries, taking over from the wonder tales and fairy tales and legends of the past—kept a strong link to a sense of awe, wonder and enchantment which was very close to the numinous and mystical, as you can see in the work of writers such as George McDonald and Charles Kingsley.

Even in the early twentieth century, you could still get throwback novels where the implicit presence of God is very strong, such as the extraordinary saga Kristin Lavransdatter, by the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, which recreates the world of medieval Norway, complete with its religious life, in an utterly convincing and visceral way.

But as the twentieth century went on and the challenges to religion and belief grew stronger, things started to change. It was no longer religious hypocrisy only that was attacked now but the very notion of God himself and the entire validity of religion. And now a strange thing starts happening. The implicit nature of faith so present in older works begins to disappear in novels, except in areas such as children’s literature and fantasy literature where a strong sense of the numinous and spiritual remains. Much more explicit works on the subject—whether for or against—began to be written, ranging from the literary, such as the novels of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Georges Bernanos, Muriel Spark, Flannery O’Connor, Shusaku Endo, Marilynne Robinson, Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, Sally Vickers and Philip Pullman (to name just a few) to the mass-market, such as The Da Vinci Code, Vampire Chronicles novelist Anne Rice’s recent explorations of Jesus’s life, Morris West’s books, the Left Behind series, Susan Howatch’s series on Anglican life, and Phil Rickman’s crime novels with their strong flavour of religion. Some explore the interior religious experience, mysticism or struggles with conscience; others explore theology or religious philosophy, still others concentrate on the externals of religion, such as church politics and history.

Many of these writers do it very well—for instance, Bernanos’s classic, Journal d’un Cure de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), and Marilynne Robinson’s recent novel, Gilead. Others such as The Da Vinci Code or the Left Behind series—well, the less said, the better.

All too often, in my opinion, the explicit religious novel doesn’t work. It takes a very, very skilled and sensitive writer, whether believing or not, to bring off a direct novelistic portrayal of faith without doing violence to the intrinsic nature of the art of novel-writing. The 1950s and 1960s novelists still operated within a society where religion was seen as a core experience—they may be writing about doubt, about struggles with conscience and crises in faith, but it still matters to them.

But these days novelists struggle with that central concept as a valid thing. Writing about religion seems to require a kind of deliberate choice, a sort of statement, which all too often militates against a convincing portrayal.

Too often the religious are seen as a curiosity, or else as a threat. Too often the portrayal of them and the spectrum of religious experience itself is brutally ignorant or clumsily artificial or prosaically missing the point or conversely like the croaking of a grenouille de benitier (font-frog), as the French saying pungently describes people of a mawkishly pious disposition. In a frank dialogue with Philip Pullman a few years ago, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had this insightful thing to say about the problem:

What you learn, I think, about absorbing a really serious piece of fiction is not a message. Your world has expanded, your world has enlarged at the end of it, and the more a writer focuses on a message, the less expansion there’ll be. I think that’s why sometimes the most successful “Christian” fiction is written by people who are not trying hard to be Christian about it. A bit of a paradox, but I’m thinking of Flannery O’Connor, the American writer, my favourite example here. She’s somebody who quite deliberately doesn’t set out to make the points that you might expect her to be making but wants to build a world in which certain things may become plausible or tangible, palpable, but not to get a message across.

Too often there’s no sense of expansion, just a paint-by-numbers job, and a tiresomely small range of core themes. Mawkish religious sentiment might have been popular in Victorian times; these days the mawkishness is usually expressed in novel after modern novel in which characters lose their faith. Coming to faith or simply getting on with it is a much rarer thing. And it’s rare indeed to read novels in which faith, this core aspect of human experience—which incidentally is vastly more common than atheism, the world over—is actually depicted in a way that rings true. Partly of course that is allied to the idea Tolstoy encapsulated when he wrote in Anna Karenina that happy families are all alike but unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way. It’s not really the truth, of course—any social worker or policeman can attest to the fact that many unhappy families are unhappy in depressingly similar ways—but that doesn’t matter to the novelist.

Alienation is at the heart of the modern novel, and so works like Diary of a Country Priest and Gilead are very rare, especially now, in the chaos of belief that characterises our times. Incidentally, the author of Gilead, contemporary American novelist Marilynne Robinson—whose beautiful, plain and utterly convincing depictions of profoundly religious smalltown Americans have attracted many readers, and certainly not just Bible-thumpers—has also received much literary acclaim (yes, even in a secular world, such things are still recognised, when they ring true).

Mostly, though, it’s as if someone who has never been in love or is tone deaf is attempting to describe love or music. You are aware of the strings, of the scenery—you do not enter into the heart of the story, whether that purports to explore the interior or exterior landscape of religion. And that is because the writer cannot enter into the heart of the character they are attempting to bring to life. If they believe, they cannot express it in words except ones that are clichéd. If they don’t believe, and they do not know anyone who does, and they move in circles where belief in God is regarded as backward and embarrassing—then religious people are to them like shadow-puppets or stick-figures, unable to act except in cliché and stereotype, unable to take part in any story that doesn’t carry a heavy freight of moralism, whether for or against religion. On both sides, people too often want to make a point, to send a message—about fundamentalism and extremism, or guilt, or church corruption and hypocrisy, or whatever. And it kills the story, and the characters, just as much as the overtly ideological or political novel does.

For me this modern trend to explore religion in novels has only confirmed my instinctive feeling that it’s usually best to keep explicit discussion of religion out of creative fiction, and that the old way—the implicit way—is best and does most justice both to the novelistic and the numinous, to Art and to God.

Sophie Masson’s latest novel is The Madman of Venice (Hodder Children’s Books).