This morning I went looking on the internet for Joshua Hren's book Contemplative Realism, which is described at Church Life Journal as:
....a subspecies of literary realism whose characteristics have been embryonically or potentially present in realist movements from the beginning, but which was first named as such by Joshua Hren in Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto. Some salient features of contemplative realism include the acceptance of the seen and the unseen as equally valid sources of experience, knowledge, and insight, and a simultaneous close attention and high valuation of life’s sensory and material experiences as somehow reflective or communicative of the spiritual. Contemplative realism endorses, and seeks to ratify through the concrete execution of art, the view of St. Thomas Aquinas that truth is the adequation of the mind to reality, rather than the sum of observations extrapolated from purely subjective experience. This contemplative realism is consonant with the personalist philosophy of Jacques Maritain and with his observations on the nature and relation of truth, art, and the human person in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry...
I haven't read his book yet, but there is an excerpt at Dappled Things. You can find a PDF of the short form of the manifesto at the Benedict Institute. I looked for it because I thought the idea of contemplative realism has something to do with the main theme of this blog, and so I'll probably be posting about it again in future, but right now I want to follow a side trail. Perhaps it will eventually lead back in to the main current.
While reading through the Dappled Things excerpt, I found this passage:
Flaubertian realism’s dictum that we must “take things as they are” (resisting “oughts” as wishful, delusional) assigns a circumscribed meaning to that as they are: What “is” is, for the materialist-realist, only that which can be seen; the unseen is taken to be unreal.
When Henry James called Flaubert a “Benedictine of the actual” he must have meant, in part, that actual Benedictines contemplate the unreal, whereas literary realists take that ascetical devotion and aim it at things “as they are”—as they can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, tasted—intuited, too, up to a certain point but not past it.
I am a Benedictine oblate, so the phrase "Benedictine of the actual" struck me. I was a bit puzzled by the following part "actual Benedictines contemplate the unreal" -- is this what Henry James would have thought? Or at least, Flaubert, I suppose. The phrase has to refer back to the view of the materialist-realist. To a Catholic, the naturalist writers reduce reality, though some kind of intuitive recognition of meaning inevitably comes into their work as it stands.
Literary realists, Hren goes on to say, take "that ascetical devotion" and aim it at things "as they are", by this meaning material things.
Curious about the context, I searched some more, and found an article by James Wood. The article is seemingly about the negativity of literary criticism and is an interesting read and not altogether unrelated to the topic; but I was treasure-hunting specifically for a better understanding of the Henry James phrase, and I found this:
When Coleridge writes of Swift that he had the soul of Rabelais but dwelling in a dry place; when Virginia Woolf says of Dickens’s profligacy with minor characters that he is quite willing to throw a few of them onto a fire to make a scene blaze up; when James writes that Balzac, in his monkish devotion to his art, was like some “Benedictine of the actual” (a phrase he liked so much he plagiarized himself and also applied it to Flaubert); when Pritchett laments that Ford Madox Ford never fell into that “determined stupor” out of which great artistic work comes, these writers are producing images which are qualitatively indistinguishable from the metaphors and similes in their so-called “creative” work. And they are speaking to literature in, as it were, its own language. “
So besides an interesting point that critics, being authors themselves, often critique in literature's own forms, he describes Balzac (this time, rather than Flaubert) as having a "monkish devotion to his art" and this is what is indicated by the "Benedictine of the actual".
My third dive into the web surf brought Henry James' work itself, called Notes on Novelists with some other Notes. That actually works as a blog title for me, and I think Henry James would have enjoyed blogging, perhaps!
Anyway, here is the operative quote right from the source -- at least, one of the sources, because according to James Wood, he used the phrase more than once:
Balzac’s France was both inspiring enough for an immense prose epic and reducible enough for a report or a chart. To allow his achievement all its dignity we should doubtless say also treatable enough for a history, since it was as a patient historian, a Benedictine of the actual, the living painter of his living time, that he regarded himself and handled his material.
I don't know much about Henry James' life, so I don't know much about what he thought of Catholicism, but the "Benedictine of the actual" sounds basically sympathetic both to monkishness and to Balzac. He specifically talks about the devotion to history and archiving of the Benedictines in that last quote.
Here is one more quote, from a book excerpt discussing Henry James' interest in the French naturalists:
The artist must manage to reconcile the conflicting claims of art and experience, of life and knowledge......In the tale that bears his name Benvolio is divided between Scolastica (Knowledge) and the Duchess (Life), but both are equally necessary to feed his mind. When he misses the one he ceases to be interested in the other, and his work runs dry.
Unlike Benvolio, the French naturalists repudiated the Duchess and believed that they could live with Scolastica alone. They silenced the one half of themselves that was not literary and became Benedictine monks in the service of art. Apart from some exceptions like Loti and George Sand, they had no public life to speak of. Besides, by deciding from the start that a clear line should be drawn between morality and art and that “the former had no more to do with the latter than it has with astronomy or embryology,” they subjected their work to a self-mutilation of the same kind as that to which they had subjected their lives.
This seems to emphasize the renunciation aspect of the monastic vocation, and in rather a dark way; I don't think a Benedictine would think in terms of self-mutilation. Or perhaps that part of it is specifically turned to the French naturalists' discarding of morality, and the Benedictine part is the silence and seclusion of their literary discipline.
I am not especially interested in the French naturalists per se but they were part of the milieu that both Tolkien and Newman, as well as many others, were responding to, and Joshua Hren's idea of contemplative realism also involves multiple distinctions between his use of the word realism (which evokes the Thomistic philosophical tradition) and the use of the word by moderns.
Tolkien, for example, while holding that a fantasy world could attain the “inner consistency of reality", also distinguished between his view of realism and that of the typical modern man:
“It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of words, and the wonder of all things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”
And again:
For it is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of ‘escapist’ literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say ‘inexorable’, products.
This last quotes don't have much to do with the phrase I was following but it does suggest a different Benedictinism of reality .... a kind that provides space for a significance beyond brute material detail. And thus a more truly Benedictine ascetism and devotion.
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