From Chesterton to Percy: Christianity and Literature

Clearly, the main task of apologetics for the novelist is the defense of man and not the defense of God.

God is completely able to handle himself.

I have thoroughly enjoyed our class this semester. The books we have read have all (save for Perelandra) brought major issues and questions that modern man must wrestle with in order to be able to see clearly the Gospel and man's need for God. Whether its Chesterton's crazy anarchists, Greene's whiskey priest, Williams' Stanhope the poet, Tolkien's triumphant King, O'Connor's Haze Motes, or Percy's crazy greenhouse Allie, there has been a constant stream of good literature (interrupted by the ridiculous Perelandra) that has served to defend man and to defend him well.

So, in my final blog for the class; I wanted to go through each book (even Perelandra) and give some brief thoughts.

GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday

This book was perhaps one of most bizzare books/plots I have ever read up until Charles Williams' Descent into Hell (more on that later). What I gathered mostly from this book is that things are rarely as they seem and that sometimes we need a real rockin' party at the end of the novel to help us to be reconnected with God. Even though it is hard to draw alot from it, this book was a very decent story in its own right.


Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory

This was my second favorite novel and one that I think spoke powerfully and clearly. The whiskey priest is not a very admirable individual until the end of the book when he is brought to the light of salvation and he finally accepts the destiny he has of being the last priest and the last fireworks of God in an age of a triumphant secular humanism. Greene goes right for our complacency and our comfort by teaching us that if we really believe something to be true, then to be authentic we must be willing to pay the price, to step forward and die for it. He also shows us how God uses pathetic, broken human beings to make a statement about grace to the entire world. At the same time, Greene reveals the heart of corrupt; work-less religion that takes stipend for the government to save its own skin and no longer is a prophetic voice against madness and oppression. Magnificent book.


Charles Williams' Descent into Hell

I like some of ideas Williams expresses in the novel, but the plot of the novel is so bizzare that I simply cannot connect with it. This was the second worst novel in the whole bunch. I did like the idea of sharing one another's burdens in the literal sense and what Williams did with that. I also like how Williams commentated on authenticity over facade; how withdrawing from the real will doom one to an increasingly hellish, idealistic existence, while embracing the real (and even somewhat strange and creepy) will be the way to life and true human existence. I liked those themes but the book was too hard to read.


CS Lewis' Perelandra

Horrible, simply wretched like every other attempt Lewis at fiction. This novel was not just bizzare, it was utterly ridiculous with space travel being achieved through Medieval thought rather than Eistenian physics; which is just plain stupid. The novel was obvious and the character rather incredible. It seems rather idiotic to me to devote so much of one's time to rebuking Milton for his satan and for literally having Ransom (I wonder what his name means...) fight the "Un-man." This book was so blatantly obvious and CS Lewis tries to describe God and just starts babbling incoherently to the point where one wants to hurl their book at the window to escape the abyss that has formed around one's mind.


Tolkien's The Return of the The King

Tolkien is the opposite of Lewis; which is probably why I like him. Tolkien, as Dr. Mitchell pointed out, shows God as a pinpoint of light in a very seemingly hopeless and often turmoiled world. Good and evil clash in an epic battle for the fate of Middle Earth. Hope while apparent always hangs by a thread; a constant reminder that were it not for divine help all hope would perish. Tolkien creates a truly fantastic, and immersive world; something that Lewis fails miserably at with Narnia.


Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood

O'Connor delivers with the grotesque and how grace is somehow dirty and not clean cut. Haze Motes is haunted by Jesus Christ the entire novel until he is forced into the recognition that despite his attempt at having a "Church without Christ," that he is unclean. O'Connor's grace is not sentimental and we are allowed to see evil as it really is and the way out. Good book.


Walker Percy The Second Coming

To be honest, I have not finished reading this, but I have been doing a paper on Walker Percy and Dr. Mitchell is right, I am alot like him. Time has robbed me of full enjoyment of his novel, but I like Percy the most because he speaks to our condition the best. O'Connor can truly bring out grotesque evil, but Percy brings out our lostness and our need to find our way home. He also has the amazing ability to point out the absurd and to point out that perhaps we, not the "crazies," are the insane ones.