Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto

Joshua Hren

Let’s get real.

Counting as our companions a number of other approaches to representing reality, and making no claims
to create, ex nihilo, a new aesthetical species, we the undersigned commit ourselves to a renewed
“contemplative realism.” We do not advance this rough school of artistic fish as some preeminent or sole
“way forward” for narrative art in our time. We do, however, seek to articulate a literary approach that
exists already in diffuse books and in the potencies of living artists, to gather and galvanize those souls
who are ready and willing to render this vision for the benefit of all people of good will. We yearn to
quicken a contemplative realist disposition among as many as possible.

Contemplative realism addresses the civilizational crisis in which we find ourselves: as Josef Pieper has
it, our “ability to see is in decline.” Our very sense of life, of experience, of interior and exterior
sensation, our ability to sort between the specious and the precious—all are threatened with obscurity,
blinkered by ideologies and technological innovations that promise to provide clear windows but instead
function as unreal filters, distorting the mind’s rapprochement with reality. Such influences, all the while
claiming to expand our vision, radically hamper the soul’s depth perception.

What Bernanos so ably argued all those years ago has, unfortunately, only gained in truthfulness: “we can
witness a lethal slackening of men’s conscience that is attacking not only their moral life, but also their
very heart and mind, altering and decomposing even their imagination . . . the menacing crisis is one of
infantilism.”

To see clearly under such circumstances requires continual attentiveness, continual self-correction,
continual communal reference to the visions of others similarly engaged. Ours must be an exacting
examen that ever concludes with great gratitude to God. To this end, we wear W.H. Auden’s aphorism
like a habit: “Among the many qualities required to create or to appreciate art of any style or age, the
most necessary of all is an unlimited capacity for reverence and repentance.” To act well, we must first
see well.

What is true for all souls is particularly true for those of us pursuing the writer’s vocation. Being a
novelist, Flannery O’Connor contends, is synonymous with being “hotly in pursuit of the real,” although
the “realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.”

Therefore we should “ask rather more carefully what ‘the real’ actually is,” lest we settle for a limited
lens that cannot grasp the vastness of reality. Such a truncation of vision would falsify human and divine
being, fail to realize the link between nature and the supernatural, and sacrifice mystery to mere
ambiguity. We concur with Pope Benedict XVI when he says that “the man who puts to one side the
reality of God is a realist only in appearance.”

Facets of Realism

We must speak of “realisms” in the plural to understand what contemplative realism does and does not
aspire to. Realism—from Henry James to Willa Cather (“Realism is a protest against lies,” she wrote) and
Jonathan Franzen in our own day—has gifted literature and its readers with great gains. With its
insistence upon exacting explorations of the psychological contours of characters, with its willingness to
countenance difficulties and tragedies and move beyond the novel’s youthful proclivities towards
sentimentality, realism commits us to increasing what James calls the “felt life” that exists in the story by
telling the truth instead of handing out rosy romances. For the materialist-realist, only that which can be
seen is real—and the real is most honestly congealed in life’s undeniable, overwhelming stains, grimes,
and uglinesses. The contemplative realist dissents, in life and literature, from such a reductive and
despair-tinged view.

The association of realism with the ugly and unpleasant but accurate truth finds a political parallel in the
realpolitik of Machiavelli, who executes a severely limited depiction of what counts as reality. As Pierre
Manent points out, Machiavelli convinces us to “fix our attention exclusively, or almost exclusively, on
pathologies.” Fiction founded on a kind of Machiavellian realism unduly asserts the wickedness and
duplicity and brutality of humanity at the expense of narrating our virtues.

Psychological realists in fiction leave room for the “supernatural,” but only under the guise of the
numinous depths of our own psyches: casting God or the gods, Satan and the demons, and phantoms of
all shapes as mere projections of inner turmoil. This is the only mode through which belief is allowed to
intrude in most modern fiction.

We are heartened by the fictions of supernatural realists such as J.K. Huysmans and Eugene Vodolazkin,
who have attempted to depict the supernatural directly. Laboring alongside them, contemplative realists,
show grace through its effects on human actors.

Another close cousin, “magical realism,” combines a fully fleshed-out mundane world with fantastical,
magical elements. Instead, contemplative realism registers the supernatural as harmonious with the
natural, a poetic extension of the Thomistic understanding that though it may feel as if grace grates
against nature, in truth God’s movements build upon it.

Many, if not most, of these “realisms” end by either ignoring supernatural realists, disproportionately
representing mundanity, or peering into an abyss of despair. Jonathan Franzen, with acuity of insight,
calls out this artistic malaise as “depressive realism”—that supposedly sobering reminder that “You are,
after all, just protoplasm, and some day you’ll be dead.”

The contemplative realist concedes Franzen’s claim that “improvement always comes at a cost” (though
we call this the fear-and-trembling counterpoint of “cheap grace”), and that unalloyed goodness is rarer
than badness and evil in the heart of man. Still, balanced against this, we hold Dietrich von Hildebrand’s
resistance to formal and spiritual poverty of art that “breathes out upon us all the depressing triviality of
this milieu.” “The real” includes both the supernatural shattering instantiated through “slum naturalism”
beside those “dark holes of the poor” where St. Teresa of Calcutta prayed her Hail Marys beside the
deathbed gutters—and the glories and joys of the selfsame soul that first suffered this shattering. Beside
undeniable darknesses of flesh and spirit the summons to beauty becomes more, not less, urgent.

The contemplative realist integrates Nietzsche’s central insight that narratives bless us by granting
Apollonian beauty, clarity, and form to human hardships that are anarchic, dark, Dionysian. We embrace
Franzen’s assurance that “the formal aesthetic rendering of the human plight can be (though I’m afraid we
novelists are rightly mocked for overusing the word) redemptive.”

We know humankind has a telos toward the Good and a concupiscent talent for mucking up that
trajectory; we know there is nothing we can do, existentially speaking, about either. We know that if
nature croons with beauty it also groans for redemption. As the exiled poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote to the
troubled monk Thomas Merton:
 Every time you speak of Nature, it appears to you as soothing, rich in symbols, as a veil or
curtain. You do not pay much attention to torture or suffering in Nature . . .

Along with Oklahoma poet laureate Benjamin Myers, “seeing Christ in nature,” we “see Him crucified.”
Yet on the other side of the crucifixion, we hold a firm faith in the literal Resurrection and in all its
manifold implications.

The Loving Gaze on All That Is

Amidst mundanity and muck, only the loving gaze (ubi amor, ibi oculus) can see reality. “A new
dimension of ‘seeing’ is opened up by love alone.” The contemplative realist is keenly aware of the
difference between the necessarily clinical gaze of the scientist and the mesmerized smittenness of the
contemplative.

Contortions and conversions of bodies and souls appear to us not as they might to an objective scientific
observer, but as they do to a friend, as to one who loves both readers and characters and who loves God
still more, one who loves readers and characters all the more for seeing all in light of their connection to
Dante’s “Love that moves the sun and other stars.”

Our patron saint is St. Teresa of Avila, renowned for her assurance that “God moves amidst the pots and
pans.” Nothing was too miniscule for St. Teresa’s soul. Her lived example reassures us of O’Connor’s
firm belief that “the artist need never be ashamed of staring; there is nothing that does not require his
attention.” Parallel to this, the mystic of Avila writes, “I believe that in every little thing created by God
there is more than we realize, even in so small a thing as a tiny ant.” This “more than we realize” in turn
underwrites O’Connor’s further insistence that “life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery”
has “for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.”

No one, says St. Bonaventure, “arrives at contemplation except through penetrating meditation, holy
living, and devout prayer.” The contemplative realist surely needs these things and more.

To escape the grim vise of our time’s refusal of reality, we must seek our own way forward. A conscious
contemplative realist movement has only just begun.

We commit to the daily hard work required to train our souls to ascertain the action of Grace in and
around the contests of the human spirit.

This side of the beatific vision, the contemplative realist is content to do lowly tasks, sweeping the floor
of a decrepit cave to make room for some roofless travelers afoot. Fed by the majestic poverty of the
Word he will write another novel of the nameless nobody who happens to be made in the imago
Dei, numbering the hairs of her head very carefully, surprised to find in her insignificance some of the
deepest drama in the cosmos.

Daily we must ascend the mountain to be alone and to pray in great silence, moved by St. Bonaventure’s
promise that when the soul “embraces with love the Incarnate Word, inasmuch as she receives delight
from Him and passes over to Him in ecstatic love, she recovers her sense of taste and touch. Having
recovered the spiritual senses, the soul now sees, hears, smells, tastes, and embraces her beloved,”
capable at last of singing as the bride from the Canticle of Canticles, “which was composed for the
exercise of contemplation.”
As artists and lovers of the arts, as souls committed to the contemplation of God and of His creation, we
affirm our devotion to an ethic and aesthetic that strips off the blinders of falsehood to pursue the
demanding, daily, ascetic love of seeing ever anew.

Michael D. O’Brien, painter and author of Sophia House, The Island of the World, and many others

Jessica Hooten Wilson, Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence, Humanities and Classical Education at the
University of Dallas, author of The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of
Literary Saints and Giving the Devil His Due: Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky

James Matthew Wilson, Director of the MFA at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, and author of
The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition, The Strangeness of the
Good, and many others

Sarah Cortez, President and Founder, Catholic Literary Arts and author of Against Sky’s Warm Belly:
New and Selected Poems

Benjamin Myers, Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, author of Elegy for Trains and A Poetics of Orthodoxy:
Christian Truth as Aesthetic Foundation

Katy Carl, Editor of Dappled Things and author of As Earth Without Water: A Novel

Glenn Arbery, President of Wyoming Catholic College and author of Boundaries of Eden: A Novel

Sally Thomas, author of Motherland: Poems and Works of Mercy: A Novel

Bill Gonch, Managing Director of the Scala Foundation and Visiting Scholar at Princeton Theological
Seminary

Bernardo Aparicio García, Founder of Dappled Things

Joshua Hren, founder of Wiseblood Books, co-founder of the MFA at UST-Houston, author of Infinite
Regress: A Novel, and other books.