In his last two posts, Joseph Bottum has mused on Catholicism and literature. Yesterday, he asked the question many of us ask, daily – What happened?

And yet, aesthetics is not a sufficient explanation for earlier Catholic moments. John Henry Newman speaks of the loss of beauty he experienced in moving from the high Anglican world to the Catholic in the 1840s. The same 1950s that saw Robert Lowell’s hunt for beauty in Lord Weary’s Castle also saw the construction of that concrete monstrosity of a cathedral up Charles Street in Baltimore.

Robert Lowell is, in fact, a good case study. It wasn’t an aesthetics the young convert Lowell needed for his poetry; he had plenty of his own. And it wasn’t a morality; to read Ian Hamilton’s biography is to realize that Lowell wouldn’t know an ethics if it whacked him upside the head. What he needed was a metaphysics, an ontology, a thickening of the world by a meaning that lies outside the world. What he needed was a cosmology—a cosmology of sufficient intellectual coherence that it could inform a serious art, and sufficient social force that it could inform a popular art. He needed structure and he needed readers, and he thought that he could find them both by becoming a Catholic.

In this artistic desire for a cosmology, I think that we can see something that Catholicism is not giving much these days. Except for an op-ed in the New York Times by Cardinal Dulles, there was almost nothing in the mainstream press during the news cycles about the priest scandals that referred to the principle on which Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry once built entire novels—namely, “Once a priest, always a priest.” The spiritual life through the 1990s was seen primarily through a lens of ethics rather than a lens of metaphysics. And where we once got public Catholicism as high artistry, we have it more recently perceived in the public eye as something like the intellectual wing of the Republican party at prayer.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it ought to send us back to think about that moment around 1962 or 1963 when Catholicism looked ready to take over the highbrow world. Major book awards had gone to the likes of J.F. Powers, and Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, and Jean Stafford. Seriousness was all on the side of Catholics. Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson were recognized names. Even popular fiction had Morris West’s bestsellers. Mystery magazines were filled with Catholic stories. There was something in the air—and within five years, it had all been swept away.

My shorthand answer, tossed out as I see my plane is starting to board – is that the Church was, immediately and deeply absorbed in, devoured by and sundered by internal issues. Those became the issues that occupied Catholic intellectual life and drained it of its life. Constantly looking inward and battling about identity does not provide good grounding for that metaphysic of which he speaks.

And then, today – Muriel Spark

Real individuality, in other words, is reserved in Muriel Spark’s fiction for those who manage to forget their individuality. Each small success human beings have at disappearing from themselves is unique, and each small revelation that a human life can lose itself is a story never told before. But our supposedly unique failures are in fact merely universal, and our supposedly individual lives are actually indistinguishable participations in the common arc of fallen man.

There is considerable irony in a novelist taking such a view of things, for what the novel as an artform typically undertakes—illustrating the universal human condition by drawing a picture of a particular human being—is exactly the opposite of what Spark attempts. This is perhaps the irony that made all the Catholic fiction of the 1940s and 1950s—the Graham Greene books, for instance, of the era in which Spark was formed as a writer and a convert—so peculiar. But in Spark’s case, the irony of fiction’s inverted purpose produced a set of simultaneously witty, elegant, satirical, and macabre novels, each extremely short, each dominated by the calm detachment of a very distant third-person narrator, and each ruled by a sternly deliberate structure designed to conceal the key incident until the novel’s end.

But then, language and structure are everything for Spark because they have to be. In the world long after Vatican II, we can forget both the enormous wave of famous converts in the 1940s and 1950s and the extent to which Catholicism appealed to those converts precisely because what it offered was a structure and a language with which to express what they, in Spark’s words, “had always felt and known and believed” about the world. Personal faith in the truth of that structure and language was somehow simultaneously too obvious for Muriel Spark to bother putting in a novel and too hidden to be reached by literature. “When I am asked about my conversion, why I became a Catholic,” she once explained, “I can only say that answer is both too easy and too difficult.”