On Seeing Spirits in Literature

A Response to Katy Carl

My recent essay, On Seeing in Literature, contained a critique of one of the main points of the literary movement known as contemplative realism. Katy Carl, editor of the journal Dappled Things and author of the contemplative realist novel As Earth Without Water, replied to that critique. Her reply deserves an answer. But as I noted in my conversation with Joseph Harris, a conversation in essays tends to spawn more issues than it can ever address, and so I am not going to try to address all of Carl’s points, which is not a sign that I don’t think they deserve an answer, but that I lack the time or the wit to answer them.

What I do want to do is to extend the discussion of vision from my original essay to incorporate the vision of spiritual things which is a central concern of contemplative realism, and which, as Carl rightly points out, I failed to address in my original essay.

Before I get to that, though, I do want to address Carl’s assertion that I am opposed to contemplative realism. I am not opposed to it. I am critical of it, which is not the same thing, and I am honestly not sure to what extent my criticism pertains to the substance of it versus the expression of it. But I want to make it clear that it was not then and is not now my purpose to attack contemplative realism as a whole. I have yet to figure out what that whole is. I’m fundamentally sympathetic to the program. I just find it hard to discern what it is actually proposing that writers should do. To crack a nut one must apply some pressure.

What I take to be Carl’s main criticism of my original essay on vision is that I seem hesitant to address spiritual subjects in fiction. She writes:

In quoting Pieper’s line, contemplative realism seeks to suggest a widespread loss of spiritual vision, which is upstream of and definitive of all moral vision, whether we subjectively recognize this as being the case or not.

She then goes on to say,

Yet how shy Baker, a believer, still sounds of bringing spiritual concern directly into the human endeavor of narrative construction. It is almost as if he feels this would contravene the nature or purpose of storytelling, where contemplative realism contends that it would do neither.

To answer the charge directly, no, I don’t think bringing spiritual concerns into narrative construction would contravene the nature or purpose of storytelling. However, I do have some concerns about the method for doing so.

I am not shy about bringing spiritual subjects into fiction. In fact, I would say it is a feature of my fiction. For example, Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight is a fairy tale about demonic possession in which (spoilers!) the main character is suffering from various forms and stages of possession throughout the main narrative.

But perhaps Carl might see a kind of shyness in the fact that I chose to explore this subject in a fairytale. Fairytales exist in what Tolkien called a subcreated world, a world with rules of its own. The reader can believe in hobbits while reading The Lord of the Rings without believing in them in the real world. Similarly, someone reading Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight can believe in demons while reading the book, and not once they put it down. And because the book is a fairytale, the reader is free to assume that I am not so gauche as to believe in demons in real life. Perhaps my alleged shyness consists in my having left myself that loophole.

Like realism, contemplative realism rejects the use of fairytales in documenting the human condition.¹ A realist novel does not take place in a subcreated world but in the real world. (That, at least, is its claim.) So Carl might reasonably argue that by choosing to write about demonic possession in a fairy tale, I was actually shying away from “bringing spiritual concern directly into the human endeavor of narrative construction.” In other words, that my use of a fairytale was a form of indirection born of shyness. After all, if you include a demon in a realist novel, this signifies that you actually believe in demons and you are attempting to portray a demon just as you would portray a milkmaid or a stockbroker. Taking this route seems to give the author no place to hide.

Or does it? This is where I think the problem of method enters the picture. There is a distinct problem when it comes to portraying a demon as you would a milkmaid or a stockbroker. In our present exile, the spiritual side of nature is less apparent to us than the physical side. Milkmaids and stockbrokers are apparent in the ordinary way of things. They reflect photons. Demons are not apparent in this way. They do not reflect photons (which may be why vampires have no reflection in a mirror). If you meet a milkmaid or a stockbroker in the street, you think nothing of it. If you meet a demon in the street, you are apt to doubt your sanity. And this is true even if you believe in demons. Even if they exist, demons don’t commonly walk down Main Street in the middle of the day in corporeal form, except, perhaps, in Sunnydale, California.

The Bible does not treat spiritual things as apparent either. When God calls to Samual, Samual does not recognize the voice of God but goes to his master Eli, and asks why he was calling him. Eli sends him back to bed. This happens three times, and only after the third time does Eli work out logically that this must be the voice of God that Samual is hearing (and that Eli seemingly is not). The spiritual may be just as real and as much, or more, important than the physical, but it is very much less apparent.

There are other things in this world that are inapparent besides spirits. The curvature of space-time is inapparent. Quantum entanglement is inapparent. You can’t see them, and it took a long time for humans to figure them out. And even now that we figured them out, there is a problem in representing them. Space-time, after all, is curved in four dimensions. We can’t form a picture of that so we draw one in two dimensions:

ND, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This diagram is helpful in making us think we understand the curvature of space-time. Whether it is actually helpful or misleading is less clear. But it does the thing that is necessary for the human mind to envision something. It takes something inapparent and makes it seem apparent.

Spirits are still more inapparent than the strange laws of physics. You can discover the strange laws of physics with well-designed experiments. You can measure their effects and make projections about them which you can test. You can share your results with others who can verify them by repeating your experiments and tests. You can do none of this with spirits. There is no litmus test for angels. Angels are pure spirit and do not have wings or bodies. Yet if you want to represent angels in art, you give them both:

Miguel Castiblanco, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I am not sure whether this image hurts or helps our understanding of angels. The diagram of curved space-time is inadequate because it shows the curvature in two dimensions instead of four. The image of the angel is entirely fanciful. This image signifies an angel to us only as a matter of cultural convention. It contains nothing of the true nature of angels. But it does the essential thing of taking something inapparent and making it seem apparent. (Madeline L'Engle plays with the problem of making angels apparent in her portrayal of Mrs. Who, Mrs. Witch, and Mrs. Watsit in A Wrinkle in Time.)

Of course, you can claim that spirits are perfectly apparent to you. I can’t refute you if you do. Angels are so inapparent that it is impossible to argue against them. How can you argue against the presence of something that would be inapparent even if it were present? And even if you see angels every day, you will surely admit that those same angels are not apparent to other people. The spiritual side of existence is fundamentally inapparent, which is why we call any manifestation of it in the physical world an apparition.

This does not mean that you cannot deduce the necessity of its existence philosophically, or learn of it as a part of a body of Church doctrine to which you ascribe, or have intimate and convincing spiritual encounters of your own. To say that something is more or less apparent is not to say that it is more or less real. We would not say that quantum entanglement is less real because it is less apparent to us. Nor should we say that angels are less real because they are inapparent to us. To say that something is inapparent to us is simply to say that our human faculties are less well attuned to perceive it. The limit is ours, not the universe’s.

From a Catholic point of view, we can understand the inapparency of spirits as a consequence of the fall. As St. Paul said, we see as through a glass, darkly. We hope and suppose that all spiritual things will one day be as apparent as physical things are now, but in this life they are not.

There is, of course, another explanation of the inapparency of spirits which some of my readers may find more convincing: they may not exist. But if that is your position, I hope you will stick with me here, not because I will try to convince you that spirits do exist, but because our concern here is literary, and the methods of depicting spirits in literature are the same whether you believe they exist or not. After all, people did not stop drawing angels as men or women with wings when they stopped believing that they exist.

In fact, whether we believe that something exists does not seem to have any bearing on how it is represented in art. You could make a good argument that the main purpose of art is to make the inapparent more apparent. But whatever art does to make the inapparent apparent is fundamentally constrained by what makes something apparent to human vision. And so it seems that the constraint is not what is real, but what can be made apparent. And whatever can be made apparent is treated by art in the same way.

Within the subcreated world of The Lord of the Rings, hobbits and horses are both real in the same way and depicted in the same way. In Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, demons, horses, and demon horses are all real in the same way and depicted in the same way. The reader will believe in both horses and hobbits while reading The Lord of the Rings, and in horses but not hobbits once they put it down. The reader will believe in horses after they put down Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, but, depending on their creed, may or may not believe in demons, or demon horses. Within a story world, all the things it contains are real in the same way and are described in the same way.

The writer can, of course, make it clear that they believe in demons when including them in a realist novel. But doing so won’t convince the skeptical reader. Indeed, the reader may respond to the presence of demons in a realist novel by reclassifying the work as one of horror or fantasy, or perhaps magical realism (all of which I would regard as species of fairytale). And this desire to reclassify the work will not be confined to nonbelievers. Demons are inapparent, and a realist work deals with the apparent. A work that inhabits the real world must make apparent that which is apparent in the real world. To represent demons in a realist work, the author would have to do something to make them apparent, and in doing so would make the work less realist, even in the eyes of a believer. And this would give the author the same place to hide that I enjoy in writing a fairytale about demonic possession.

Of course, one does not have to make demons objectively apparent to include them in a realist work. One can make them subjectively apparent. In other words, one can have a character believe that they have had an encounter with demons. In St. Agnes and the Selkie, (spoilers!) I have a scene in which Agnes, in the midst of a retreat prior to joining a religious order, sees specters and hears voices of people from her past who criticize and berate her in different ways. Are these apparitions and voices a sign that Agnes is suffering mental distress and projecting her self-doubts into the voices of others? Or are they actual demons tormenting her and trying to turn her from her path? The book does not say. It asserts that Agnes has this experience, but it does not commit itself on what caused the experience. The demons, if such they are, remain a subjective experience of the character.

If the narrator of the book, the objective voice, was to say definitively that Agnes was visited by actual demons who took the physical form of various people from her past, it would become a different kind of book, at least in the eyes of most readers. Furthermore, it would not be reflective of the fact that Agnes herself is not sure what kind of experience she has had. That, after all, is the nature of such events. There is no litmus test for demons. We cannot verify such encounters, no matter how vivid they may seem at the time. Often what we took for real in the middle of the night we will dismiss as an illusion in the clear light of day.

Of course, we could take this one of two ways. It could be that we had a genuine experience in the night and began to doubt it in the morning. Or it could be that we had an hallucination in the night and dismissed it as such in the morning. This uncertainty is in the nature of the character’s experience, which it is the novelist’s task to portray. If the book committed itself that Agnes was, in fact, visited by demons, that would make the nature of Agnes’s experience less realistic, regardless of whether the reader believes in demons or not. Once again, I, as the author, maintain plausible deniability on my belief in demons.

Even for the believer, telling a genuine religious experience from hysteria is a challenging problem. In Mariette in Ecstacy, Ron Hansen focuses on the debate about the cause and meaning of Mariette’s stigmata without ever affirming a definitive conclusion. As one Goodreads reviewer commented, “Hansen's book is a spiritual Question Mark from start to finish, as is all of Life, as is God Himself.”

The literary questions do not hinge on whether angels and demons are real, but on whether they are apparent. In the real world, they are inapparent, and thus a realist novel must treat them as inapparent. In the subcreated world of a fairytale, they can be made apparent, and within that story world, the reader will believe in them. Indeed, the reader will believe in them even when the characters express doubts. At the beginning of Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, Isabel does not believe in fairytales, but the reader, knowing that they are reading a fairytale, does believe in them. They know at once that, within the story world that Isabel inhabits, she is wrong to scoff at them. This, among other things, provides a dramatic irony to the narrative, but one that exists only because the story is set in a subcreated world with rules different from our own.

The reader’s doubts about the experience of Agnes or Mariette in their respective realist narratives is also a response to the rules of the genre more than it is an expression of their personal religious beliefs. The rules of realist narratives are that inapparent things shall not be made objectively apparent, and that subjectively apparent things are subject to doubt. Even if one believes that demons are possible in the real world, they are still to be doubted in the story, because those are the rules of the genre. Even if one believes that an ecstatic vision of God is possible, that does not mean that a particular case is not one of hysteria. What is inapparent is also dubitable.

There are different views on the relationship between what is real and what is apparent. There are those who believe that everything that is apparent is an illusion. There are those who believe that only what is apparent is real (even if some of its less apparent properties have to be teased out by experimentation), and there are those who believe that what is apparent is real, but is not the whole of what is real. And yet, any of these will believe in both hobbits and horses while they are reading The Lord of the Rings. The rules of the subcreated world are different from those of the real world and within the subcreated world, they are true. From the point of view of someone who believes that the apparent is an illusion, a realist novel also exists in a subcreated world of the author’s invention. But within that world, they will believe in its reality, as long as it obeys its own rules.

This does not mean, of course, that the reader cannot get a sense that the author intends an encounter with angels to be accepted as real, or that they intend it to be accepted as hallucinatory. To say so explicitly would violate Flannery O’Connor’s dictum “The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.” But they can certainly indicate what they intend the reader to believe in other ways, such as by establishing an oracular character and putting the words in their mouth. But if one of those ways is to make the inapparent apparent, then they have moved from realism into fairytales.

But this may be somewhat beside the point for contemplative realism. Realism as a literary movement developed as a reaction against romanticism. It wanted to replace romantic stories about princesses and pirate kings with quotidian (everyday) stories about milkmaids and stockbrokers. Encounters with angels and demons are on the romantic end of the spectrum when looking at the spiritual side of life. Like princesses and pirate kings, they may be real, but they are not beings you meet every day. Indeed, the contemplative realism manifesto makes exactly this distinction:

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.

But if the inapparent nature of angels and demons creates a problem for their depiction in realist works, at least there is an agreed way of representing them as apparent beings. You can give your angels wings and your demons horns. There is no such agreed way of making grace apparent in art.

Carl’s own novel, As Earth Without Water, certainly deals with the more quotidian side of the spiritual life and thus runs into none of the genre boundary issues that the appearance of angels and demons would involve. And yes, it does deal with transformations of conduct that among believers are commonly ascribed to the operation of grace. And yet there is no way to make it apparent to those who do not believe in grace that the operation of grace was responsible. Grace is inapparent and therefore dubitable in the same way as angels and demons are.

This leaves me wondering what sets contemplative realism apart from ordinary realism, other than that the writer is interested in spiritual matters and takes them seriously. I enjoyed As Earth Without Water, but it did not strike me as being in any obvious way different in its form or method from any other contemporary novel, other than that its theme is religious vocation, which is to say, the choice between a vocation to religious life and a vocation to a different life.

This leads me to ask, what difference does the belief of the author make to what they portray in their work? After all, one of the best and best-loved plays about religious belief is A Man for All Seasons, written by Robert Bolt, an atheist. Bolt did make mistakes about More’s views and motivations that a well-formed Catholic author might not have made, but if you ask many Catholics, including me, to name their favorite movie, they will say, A Man for All Seasons. But while its focus on a great Catholic saint is obviously part of that appeal, it is its quality as a work of literature, and the depiction of all of its characters, that makes it a favorite, and not just with Catholics. Yet if Bolt’s atheism rendered him blind to spiritual things, how could he have portrayed More so well?

This brings me back to the question of vision and of spiritual vision in particular. I can’t find a way to discuss this further without saying something of my own beliefs. This requires me to tread into areas in which I have no sort of expertise. In particular, I am no student of the science or the theology of the soul. But indulge me a little, and instruct me if I err. I will bring this back to literary technique as quickly as I can.

I am Catholic, and therefore I do believe in spirits. I believe in God. I believe in the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. I believe that my own nature is both spiritual and physical. I believe, with, I admit, some reluctance, in angels and demons. I like to say that I am Catholic because I am too skeptical to be an atheist. My sense of myself is that I have ontological epistemological freedom². That is, I possess an independence of mind that makes my thoughts and beliefs genuinely my own. Most atheists speak as if they believe that they have epistemological freedom, but they also assert a deterministic universe that provides no scope for epistemological freedom to exist. They tell me I have no free will, yet they urge me to change my mind, which seems contradictory. Thus my skepticism.

If I did not have epistemological freedom, my mind would be like a stopped clock. It might be right twice a day, but it would not be telling time. I am not able to deny my epistemological freedom. Maybe that is simply where my clock stopped. If so, I cannot change it. If it ever changes, it will be at the whim of the universe. But whether the belief is my own or is just where my clock happened to stop, I believe that I am free, and therefore that I am spirit as well as flesh.

How that works, how spirit gives freedom to flesh, I have no idea. Indeed, based on what little I understand of the universe, I have no idea how it could possibly work. But then I have no idea how mass can bend space-time or how quantum entanglement can coordinate the spin of particles at a distance. It does not seem that God willed that mankind should evolve a mind that could fully comprehend such things. I claim the epistemological freedom of my mind, not its sufficiency to understand all things. Being free does not save me from being baffled or wrong. I’m a dope, though a free dope.

Beyond that, I am Catholic because I was raised Catholic and have yet to find a better set of religious ideas. Again, I don’t pretend to understand how all Catholic claims could possibly be true. I am a free dope, but still a dope. Games of scriptural gotcha cut no ice with me.

When it comes to the spiritual element of my own mind, in whatever unknowable way it works, it seems to me so integral to the human experience and to what makes us human that dividing its influence from that of the electrochemical mechanics of the brain seems like a fool’s errand. It is clear, after all, that if the brain is broken, the mind is broken also. Whatever the spiritual element may be, it is clearly integral, not separable. And as Catholics, we believe in the resurrection of the body. The body is not merely a cocoon for the butterfly soul. The body is as much who we are as the soul.

But if the spiritual element is integral and inseparable from the operation of an epistemologically free mind, then it makes no sense to me to speak of a spiritual vision that is distinct from natural or physical vision. Rather it seems to me that spiritual and material elements of our vision must of necessity form an integral and inseparable whole. My freedom to see depends on that union of spiritual and physical faculties. Meaning precedes vision and thus spiritual and physical meaning precede an integral human vision.

I asked Carl what she meant by “spiritual vision,” and she replied:

By "spiritual vision" I mean two things: one, seeing as a person sees when they consider that certain immaterial things are as real, and at least as important, as the tangible and material; two, the content of such seeing, that which is seen, which is true and knowable and can be thought and talked about, as opposed to being vague and subjective and only able to be felt and emoted about.

I think the first point here is entirely consistent with what I have been saying about vision, both in the original essay and here. “Seeing as a person sees when they consider…” seems to express much the same thing as “a person’s vision is conditioned by the stories they believe.” What you consider in any situation is based on the story you tell yourself about that situation. If you are counting the passes of a basketball, you see the passes of a basketball. If you are waiting for a gorilla to walk across the court, you see the gorilla walk across the court. (If you don’t recall the gorilla experiment from the earlier essay, here’s a brief explanation.) If you believe in UFOs, you see flying saucers. If you don’t believe in UFOs, you see weather balloons. And if you believe in angels, you may see angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity, though also you may not.

The question of whether UFOs exist, of course, is not one we leave entirely to individual vision. We get together and study the quality of the evidence and the likelihood and feasibility of visitation by alien spacecraft. This results in what we might call the majority story on UFOs, which is that the evidence is weak and the probability low, so we are not being visited by aliens. But there also remains the minority story, which is that the evidence is compelling and the probability is high because aliens have better technology than ours. Even those who believe the minority story, however, will generally admit that sometimes a weather balloon is just a weather balloon.

The same is true of the question of whether spirits exist. We don’t rely on our individual experience alone. I have never had an encounter with an angel or a demon, nor has God ever spoken to me in a dream as he did to Samuel. I would never have come up with the idea of angels if I had not been taught it by the church. Nor did I come up with the epistemological argument on my own. These are social stories, and those social stories shape my vision because I accept those stories as true, or, at the very least, they seem to me to be better than the rival stories. As a Catholic, I submit the question of angels and demons to the Church, and I accept the doctrine of the church which then becomes the stories that provide the meaning that shapes my vision of the things I encounter each day, physical and spiritual alike. But at the same time, I don’t accept that every apparition is necessarily an angel. Sometimes swamp gas is just swamp gas.

In other words, since meaning precedes vision, our vision is shaped by the shared social stories of our civilization, and our community. Indeed, all of literature and all of art depend on this deep well of shared stories. Stories are built out of references to stories. It is stories all the way down. Without the ability to refer to shared stories, literature and art would have little to work with.

Obviously, though, our stock of shared stories is not monolithic. There are multiple communities telling different stories, and sometimes we belong to more than one of them, and sometimes this means that we are faced with trying to reconcile competing stories from different parts of our social fabric. And in this, we recognize, among other things, that the majority story is not ipso facto the true story, nor is the minority story ipso facto the false story. The history of ideas is full of examples of majority stories that became minority stories, and of minority stories that became majority stories.

Carl writes:

The last five hundred-ish years of global history, certainly the last three hundred, have functioned as an experiment in how well humanity can do without a sense of bedrock responsibility to creation and to a Creator.

I don’t subscribe to the civilization in crisis theme that is apparent in these words as it is in Pieper’s words about seeing which sparked this debate. There is a romantic element in every age that sees it as in decline and looks back to a golden age in which people were all brighter, stronger, and more penetrating of intellect and of eye. As a student of history, I don’t buy it. History is a bit like panning for gold. It separates flecks of gold from a mountain of slag. Some choose to look only at the gold and imagine a lost golden age. Some look only at the slag and imagine that the past was all horror and dirt. But the true picture is the material as it was before the prospector started panning it: mostly slag with a few flecks of gold here and there. This is a truer picture of the past, and a truer picture of the present.

What we do see in the past is that there are moments of flowering where suddenly you get the art of Renaissance Italy or the philosophy of Ancient Greece. This strikes me as selective attention operating on the scale of a civilization. Just as the vision of the individual selects things for attention based on meaning and the stories that create meaning, so civilizations will from time to time focus their attention on certain meanings created by certain stories. A brilliant new idea attracts the genius of a civilization to itself until it is thoroughly explored, focusing its vision on that area to the neglect of other things.

We are living in one of these great flowerings today, one centered around digital technology. But because attention is selective, our civilization is currently neglecting several other things, including spirituality and literature. This does not mean it has gone blind to them, merely that its attention is currently elsewhere. It is as true for civilizations as it is for individuals that if you count passes, you miss gorillas, and if you watch for gorillas, you lose count of passes.

What strikes me as unique about the West is that it seems able to indulge in these periods of captured attention, and yet avoid collapsing as a result, a trick it has managed to pull off countless times over its thousands of years of existence, emerging richer after each such period. I do not doubt that it will do so again, though I am not likely to live to see it. In short, I don’t think things are particularly bad, though they are certainly bad in some particular ways. Things are always bad in some particular ways. This is a constant of history. But the eye of a civilization moves on from time to time and what is neglected today will be obsessed over tomorrow. This too is a constant of history.

This is not at all to deny that the last few centuries have been different. For the last five hundred, or the last three hundred years, we have been telling a set of stories about how the world works that are different from the ones we told before. What was once the majority story has become the minority story, giving way to a new majority story, and this has shaped how the majority sees the world. This has caused a majority in the West to discount any experience that might be spiritual in nature and to ascribe such experiences to material causes.

In other words, people did not stop believing because they stopped seeing. They stopped seeing because they stopped believing.

But in another sense, they did not stop seeing. They saw with the same integral and inseparable spiritual and physical vision they have always had. They simply gave a different name to what they were seeing. There is, after all, an easy materialist explanation for why Robert Bolt, an atheist, was able to write a play so compelling to Catholics. He was an astute observer of human psychology and religious belief is just a psychological phenomenon that he could observe as well as anyone. There is also an easy Catholic explanation. Bolt was a complete human being with an integral physical and spiritual vision, whether he believed it or not, and he was thus fully able to observe and brilliantly trace the operation of grace in the life of St. Thomas More even if he did not himself give it this name.

Evelyn Waugh described Brideshead Revisited as tracing the operation of grace in the life of a single family, yet the book has many admirers who do not believe in grace, or its operations, and presumably admire the book as a compelling psychological portrayal of the strange phenomenon of religious belief.

Great art creates a great experience and one does not have to interpret the experience in the same way as the artist to acknowledge the authenticity of the experience itself. As noted above, whether we believe that something exists does not seem to have any bearing on how it is represented in art. Nor, apparently, on how convincing it is as an experience in art. And this, surely, is a good thing. If it were not, we would be much more alienated from each other than we currently are.

Still, it will not always be the case that we value such experiences equally or feel them as deeply. Sometimes it is only the stories that we already believe that cause an artistic experience to move us profoundly. When this happens, when someone fails to be moved by art that moves us profoundly, it is tempting to say that they are blind. But I think that is the wrong metaphor to use. Our attention is selective and is shaped by stories. Meaning precedes vision, and if someone does not see what you see, it is because their vision is shaped by different stories. You may be right that your vision is shaped by a better story than theirs, and that their life and their vision would be better if they learned your story, but the fault in them is not that they are blind, but that what they see is shaped by a different story.

Perhaps this is what Carl means when she writes:

That … we have lost the ability to make common reference in common language to the principle of life that goes beyond bios into zoe, is the main reality to which Pieper points, in the line in question.

In other words, it is no longer possible, except in select company, to have a conversation in which everyone accepts the principle that life goes beyond bios into zoe. And if it ever was possible to have that conversation in general society (which I am personally inclined to doubt) that would certainly be a loss. But if it is a loss, it is not a loss due to blindness, but due to the prevailing belief in a different set of stories. Blindness implies a disorder, an incapacity, which is at once condescending and pessimistic. It says, you could not possibly understand because you cannot see what I see. I don’t accept that. If someone does not see what I see, it is not because they are blind, but because I have not shown it to them properly yet.

This brings us back to literary theory and literary practice. We know how stories are received by the brain. Meaning precedes vision. As novelists, we have only one device, words, with which to supply that meaning that precedes vision, and so again, whatever physical or spiritual realities we attempt to portray must be received by that singular and integrated faculty of vision which is, like every aspect of our mind, both physical and spiritual, integral and inseparable.

And so I come back again to the idea that contemplative realism is somehow about seeing more intensely, and I am as unsatisfied by this as I was before. Meaning precedes vision, and so if we are to correct vision, we must correct meaning. The antidote to the wrong story is simply to tell the right story.

Ultimately, my feeling is that if we hope, through literature, to help inculcate a renewed belief in the spiritual aspect of human nature and human experience, the key is not to be literal about it but to be truthful about it. Indeed, being literal about it may be counterproductive, at least in some cases. People always have their guard up against having their minds changed. They are always wary when someone challenges the fundamental societal stories that shape their understanding and their vision. After all, this challenge requires not only a change of ideas but a change of communities. A literal approach can set all those alarm bells ringing. A fairytale, on the other hand, can slip past their guard, and there, if it is very good and very true, perhaps begin to shift their vision, and the stories that shape their vision.

Not that it is a contest in which it is necessary to declare a winner. We can write fairy tales or realist novels as it suits our style and purpose. When it comes to the romantic vs. the quotidian, I seem to prefer to tell stories in which ordinary people are ripped out of their quotidian lives and forced to deal with princesses and pirate kings. And perhaps that gives me a measure of romantic impatience with realism’s determination to plod rather than soar. But it’s not shyness, particularly when it comes to dealing with the spiritual side of nature. It is rather a matter of choosing the tools that seem to fit best in my hand when I do wish to address it.

I have probably revised this essay more times than anything I have written³, and still, I am not certain quite that even now I’ve got it right. But there comes a moment in the quest for understanding when one must publish one’s misunderstandings to the world and wait for correction. Tell me a story so that I may understand.

1. Rejects it as its own method. It does not argue that it is wrong to write fairytales.

2. I mix up ontological and epistemological every time I use them. Which isn’t often. But you would think I would have learned to check by now. The original email version had it wrong. (I could try to find a way to spin it so that ontological fits, I suppose. But that would be exhausting!)

3. Except The Wistful and the Good, but that’s another story.