Joseph’s recent post (“What is Catholic Literature?”) is succinct. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but I’ve found that the singular characteristic of truth is that it’s simple, and it’s usually brief. Things that call themselves “complex” or “it’s complicated” are generally obfuscations, camouflaged avoidances or distractions. There are a few quotes I’m going to lift from his post and comment on in a furthermore fashion:

“The ethos of a work contains and supplies the timeless dimension to any work of literature, in the sense that it builds the work on an ethical foundation and within an ethical framework that transcends time or space or circumstance.”

This “ethos,” this “timeless dimension,” is the wheat separated from the chaff of space-and-time-bound culture. We all recognize it, even when it’s as old as Homer. We call it “truth.”

“Christ tells … stories, his parables, which are the means by which he conveys the deepest and most important truths. We cannot fully comprehend the cosmos in the light of the purely abstract, we need allegory and metaphor and story, the very “stuff” of which literature is made.”

Imagination is the elastic needed to expand and stretch human comprehension (not displace it). It’s limited, yes, but very strong and resilient. It provides us the means to willingly suspend our disbelief. Those who disdain imagination do so out of fear, and it’s true that the willingness to use our imagination is an act of faith. Without it, however, life (and literature) is a shrunken and brittle world of mere fact, a purely physical, impoverished, and fragile reality whose only reason to exist is to accumulate ever more data in an otherwise pointless existence.

“A religious world view always influences the arts. Atheism is a religious world view; agnosticism is a religious worldview. A religious worldview is unavoidable, in life as much as in literature. It is, therefore, not a question of the influence of religions upon the arts, which is unavoidable, but of which religion influences the arts.”

We know that the opposite of religion is not irreligion, but indifference. Like philosophy: It’s not a question of whether philosophy “interests” you, but of whether you recognize and acknowledge the philosophy that is governing you, your mind, and your life.

What is Catholic literature? It’s the product of a Catholic mind. You can’t fake it. And you can’t hide it, whether you acknowledge it or not. It’s as obvious in O’Conner’s violent southern plots as it is in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, as blatant in Shakespeare’s characters as it is in Walker Percy’s. We know it when we see it. We always know the truth when we see it. Critics can’t analyze it away. It sticks. It stays.