A fugitive catholicism: the work of Richard Rodriguez, Dave Eggers & Czeslaw Milosz.

After Czeslaw Milosz died earlier this year, it was pointed out to me that he was being eulogized variously as a poet, a Nobel laureate, a Lithuanian in long exile, a survivor and anatomist of communism, but not, alas, as a Catholic writer. I was invited to feel indignation over this omission--which was taken to be some fresh sign of an old bias--but I could not. For Milosz, by his own account, was not a Catholic writer so much as a "crypto-Catholic" or "crypto-religious" writer.

He introduced the term in his correspondence with Thomas Merton, who wrote him a fan letter in 1957 after reading his great book The Captive Mind. In reply--aware that his correspondent was a Catholic celebrity--Milosz confessed that he himself was best described as "crypto-religious." In a later letter he explained: "few people suspect my basically religious interests and I have never been ranged among 'Catholic writers.' Which, strategically, is perhaps better. We are obliged to bear witness. But of what? That we pray to have faith? This problem--how much we should say openly--is always in my thoughts."

For Milosz, the term "crypto-religious" had a literal sense: in Soviet-era Warsaw, as in imperial Rome, one risked one's life in confessing one's faith. There is no such danger in contemporary America. And yet it seems to me that much of what we encounter in our religious life may be called "crypto-religious": elusive, inconstant, hard to define, and yet genuine even so.

Here and now, the expression "crypto-Catholic writer" suggests an underground movement of Catholic writers, working out of the glare of publicity and the scrutiny of the hierarchy, making work that will startle us with its truth and originality once it comes to light. I wish I could announce the discovery of such a movement, but I cannot. So I'd like to consider the cryptic or secret life of recent writing that is in plain sight--to examine the Catholic dimension in the work of Milosz and two other contemporary writers: Richard Rodriguez, known for his trilogy of memoirs and his commentaries on PBS's NewsHour, and Dave Eggers, author of a recent bestseller that boasts, only half in jest, of its staggering genius.

They are not generally thought of as Catholic writers, and I am not proposing that they should be. They seem rather to be expressive of three distinct "crypto-Catholic" sensibilities; and it seems to me that these are more expressive, and more revealing, than the usual generalities about "Catholic sensibility." With that in mind, I'd like to set aside the question of whether these three writers are "essentially" or "sufficiently" Catholic--important as it is--and consider their work as three varieties of "crypto-Catholic" experience.

Richard Rodriguez might be called "enigmatically Catholic"--manifestly shaped by his faith and yet cagey about the profession of it. Eggers is "spasmodically Catholic," prone to fits of religiosity welling up from his Catholic up-bringing. Milosz is "dialectically Catholic," always putting forward a Catholic point of view alongside its seeming opposite.

These three men have certain traits in common apart from a crypto-religious outlook. They are essentially autobiographers, each fashioning an ongoing portrait of the artist. Unlike many of their contemporaries, who see their life stories in terms of the church's coming of age with Vatican II, they stand off to the side of the council and its story. And they all write from San Francisco, which appears in their work as at once a city of wooden houses and a frontier town for gay life and the digital society; a pagan place and the city of St. Francis; a place that is still, as Joan Didion put it in 1968, applying Yeats to Haight-Ashbury, "slouching toward Bethlehem."

In my view, these writers tell us more about "crypto-Catholic" experience than a poll or symposium can. They are our experts; in their work, the Catholic dimension of our own lives and times is clarified.

Enigmatically Catholic: Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez, born in 1944, has been called Didion's successor: a native Californian whose work is at once personal essay, high-polish feature writing, and cultural criticism that seeks to understand us and our society. His three books have their basis in the story of a Spanish-speaking Mexican American boy's coming of age as an English-language writer--but give it three different emphases. Hunger of Memory stresses class; Days of Obligation emphasizes ethnicity; Brown obsesses on race and the current "browning of America."

The great strength of Rodriguez's writing is that one feels the presence of a whole person on the page. That is his objective. All his work is an attempt to achieve such wholeness and so shake off tags such as "minority" and "underprivileged." Each of his books might carry the subtitle of Milosz's Native Realm: "A Seach for Self Definition." And yet the reader suspects there is more to the story. Rodriguez's first book, Hunger of Memory, concludes with a chapter called "Mr. Secrets," and its placement at the end of the book suggests the limits of public self-examination. This sense of something withheld seems to characterize the enigmatic Catholicism that animates his books.

Hunger of Memory has the subtitle The Education of Richard Rodriguez--and that education, which led him to Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, and the reading room of the British Library, was, first of all, a Catholic education. His family's first house in Sacramento was "a gaudy yellow in a row of white bungalows," and at the parochial school nearby he was a Mexican Catholic among Irish Catholics. The nuns, forcing him to speak English, set going his assimilation. He tells this as a conversion story, an account of his discovery--note the slight religious emphasis in the language--"that education requires radical self-reformation."

A whole chapter of Hunger of Memory--"Credo"--is devoted to Catholicism. It begins familiarly, as a recollection of a pre-Vatican II Catholic childhood, where "in our house on Good Friday we behaved as if a member of our family had died." But what sets his account apart from most is that his coming of age as "a Catholic defined by a non-Catholic world" left him at once more religious and more ambivalent about his religion. "If I should lose my faith in God," he declares, "I should not know where to go to feel myself a man." Good hotels and Sunday brunches make him feel his Catholicism as a difference. And yet he confesses that "I do not know myself, not with any certainty, how much I am really saying when I profess Catholicism." He likens himself to the Puritan divines he studied in graduate school, whose religious scruples were part of their confession of faith.

Days of Obligation--subtitled An Argument with My Mexican Father--is an argument between what Rodriguez calls the competing theologies of American history, those of "Catholic pessimism" and "Protestant optimism." The key to the book is the essay "Late Victorians," one of the strongest essays by any American writer in recent years. It is, first of all, an essay about San Francisco, which Rodriguez characterizes as an "earthly paradise" with an "eschatological tang." In the 1970s, of course, the city became a place of pilgrimage for gay men, who fled the Puritan culture of the heart-land for "the Mediterranean, the Latin, the Catholic, the Castro, the Gay" spirit of San Francisco. As it happened, many of them settled in that symbol of American--some would say American Protestant--domesticity, the Victorian house, even as they were in flight from home and family.

Then came the AIDS epidemic, and "the gay community of San Francisco, having found freedom, consented to necessity." In time, the Catholic "eschatological intuition" of the city of St. Francis made itself felt. "If gays took care of their own, they were not alone. AIDS became a disease of the entire city. Nor were Charity and Mercy only male, only gay. Others came. There were nurses and nuns and the couple from next door, co-workers, strangers, teenagers, corporations, pensioners. A community was forming over the city," even in the Catholic churches, even, Rodriguez coolly observes, at a time "when the Roman Catholic Church pronounced the homosexual a sinner." The city of St. Francis, of late Victorian houses, became city of latter-day saints: not the outsized figures of Renaissance frescoes but city dwellers with their names listed in the phone book, people who came to "know the weight of bodies," who "learned to love what is corruptible."

Published the year after a New York Times series on "black and white in America," Brown--the third book in the trilogy--is an act of witness on the part of "the third man," the Hispanic. It is also, more overtly than its predecessors, a gay man's book and a literary performance, written in an extemporaneous, declamatory style. In these ways it seems Rodriguez's voyage out, his passage beyond the gated city once and for all. But at its root, Brown is Rodriguez's most Catholic book. In celebrating "brownness," Rodriguez is singing the song of impurity as the source of true life; and impurity, in his vision of things, is a Catholic attribute. Puritanism was an effort "to clean the ceiling" of Christendom. Catholicism is essentially brown, for brown is the color of catholicity, of incarnate life, of old things, of ruins, of transcendence found in historic time.

Rodriguez is as Catholic as he is brown. Yet his Catholic faith is dramatized or alluded to more than declared outright. It is not hard to guess why. A direct profession of faith would be insufficiently impure, a denial of the brownness of real life. It would undo his self-definition and entrap him once more in category. A passage in Brown--the closest he comes to calling himself a Catholic--is a sportive reminder of the ways categories can come to stand in the way of self-definition. He is, he tells us, "a queer Catholic Spaniard Indian, at home in a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation."

Spasmodically Catholic: Dave Eggers

In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers explains how he and his sister, bringing up their younger brother after their parents have died, celebrate Christmas. Their father was an atheist; their mother was a Catholic, and what Eggers calls "a Christmas extremist." Now "at Christmas, as with all holidays we still bother with, we celebrate it in a way that's at once a homage to our parents and their way of going about things, but more often a vicious sort of parody." At first glance the passage would seem to capture Catholicism in his work: something so remote as to be nonexistent, present only in parody.

Eggers came to attention through Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal that seemed to be a parody of a literary journal. When his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius came out, it was thought to be no deeper than its attention-seeking title. So I was surprised to find that it is a great and searching book, and even more surprised to find it studded with references to Eggers's Catholic upbringing--erupting spasmodically out of nowhere and just as suddenly subsiding, yet putting the whole story in a fresh light.

It is the story of orphans making a new life for themselves. Their father dies of a heart attack shortly before their mother dies of stomach cancer. Suddenly alone in their Chicago suburb, the two boys go west in the time-honored fashion. The older brother--Dave--raises the younger one, a responsibility that gives him a perpetual sense of life's urgency and precarity.

The true story of the book lies in its ecstatic-ironic style. Here is Eggers's vision of San Francisco Bay shortly after their arrival:

   The sky out here is bigger than anything we've ever seen--it goes on
   forever .... We see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge,
   straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue
   between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the
   Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San
   Francisco .... It's a lobotomizing view, which negates the need for
   movement or thought ... too much view to seem real, but then again,
   nothing really is all that real anymore, we must remember, of course,
   of course. (Or is it just the opposite? Is everything more real?
   Aha.)

On the face of it, that is a vision of the transcendence afforded by a choice piece of real estate. But Eggers's question is how to respond to the reality of suffering and death; and he answers it in a spasmodically Catholic fashion.

The explicit Catholic references in the book can be summarized in a paragraph. Eggers's father expelled a priest from his hospital room rather than receive the last rites. "But my mother was very Catholic, far more romantic, emotional, superstitious even maybe" about things like the need for a proper burial. As for Eggers himself, during an audition for MTV's Real World program he tells the talent scout, "I'm Irish Catholic and can definitely play that up if you want."

That's hardly the stuff of spiritual autobiography. But in a preface to the paperback edition, a digression on roads not taken, Eggers jests that he might have called the book Memories of a Catholic Boyhood--and the remark calls attention to the book's Catholic undercurrents.

A year after his mother's death--to take one example--Eggers returns to the church of his childhood. As a boy, he'd worried that the sculpted Jesus suspended over the altar "would land on the priests, the altar boys ... it was just so precariously hung, just those two thin wires." In the church for the first time since his mother's funeral, he remembers the way he envisioned the service beforehand--a packed church, an endless testimonial, after which "the church's huge wooden cross supports would fly up and away .... The church would double in size, would triple, the space expanding, suddenly taking in all those waiting outside, and then become bigger, would take in everyone she had ever known." It is a vision of his mother's resurrection and ascension and her welcome into the company of the saints, and of a kind of general resurrection as well.

It didn't happen. But Eggers holds to his hope that suffering and death will bring about a kind of communion. He and his brother go west, confident that their suffering is redemptive. They have been called, even chosen, and granted a glimpse of human interdependence. Eggers's image is "the lattice"--made up of "people like me, hearts ripe, brains aglow ... responsible to one another, because no one else is." His calling, as he understands it, is to bring the lattice into being in his own life. He petitions the Real World talent scout in terms that recall the prayer of St. Francis: "Let me be the lattice, the center of the lattice. Let me be the conduit ..."

Eggers didn't get the Real World role, but he claimed the role of representative figure through his writing. His brother tells him: "You struggle with a guilt both Catholic and unique to the home in which you were raised. Everything there was a secret." Now, in telling their story, he puts the secrets out in the open, shows us the lattice in which we are joined.

Since the book's success, Eggers has acted on his calling by other means. His journal, The Believer, aims to publish writing about books that really takes account of their importance in our lives. And 826 Valencia, a storefront in San Francisco, offers writing workshops to the teenagers of the Mission District.

Yet fame has set Eggers apart from the very people to whom he is now joined through his writing. You Shall Know Our Velocity!--his first novel--dramatizes this quandary. It is the story of two friends' quest to travel around the world in one week and give away $32,000 along the way. The narrator has come into money, and as he encounters poor people he cannot suppress his urge to do away with "the imagined and impossible barrier between myself and these strangers with fumbling hands, to engage them and fix things."

Last year Eggers wrote an introduction for a new edition of Edward Lewis Wallant's 1963 novel The Tenants of Moonbloom. There would seem to be little in common between Eggers's work and this overlooked writer's novel about a depressed rent collector. But Eggers's tender, earnest introduction reveals him as a writer of traditional aspirations. In his account the novel is a religious allegory and the rent collector Norman Moonbloom "becomes something like a cross between a psychiatrist making house calls and the tenants' father confessor" who in the end offers a kind of salvation to his tenants. "Which brings us to the question: Is Norman a kind of Jesus?" Eggers leaves the allegorico-religious question there, at the threshold. But he has identified the book as a slender entry in the literature of human interdependence; and he has given us a key to unlock his own work, an account of the human search for connections that are at once unreal and more real than most.

Dialectically Catholic: Czeslaw Milosz

The outlines of Czeslaw Milosz's life make him the century's emissary to posterity: childhood in Lithuania; wartime in the Polish resistance; an uneasy rapprochement with the Communist government; diplomatic work in Washington; an unhappy exile among the existentialists of postwar Paris, followed by a long, more congenial exile in Berkeley; a final return to Poland before his death.

Milosz put forward a view of himself as witness to the century of Hitler and Stalin, of Pasternak and Robert Frost, of Simone Weil and Karol Wojtyla. In my view he is less a figure of his age than one above it, characterized by his constancy and the ritual repetition of certain themes. The self in his work is set apart, both eyes beneath those famously assertive eyebrows fixed on last things. This self is whole like Rodriguez's but stylized for permanence, grandiose like Eggers's but without the self-deflating irony. "I am here," he declares. "Those three words contain all that can be said--you begin with those words and you return to them. Here means on this earth, on this continent and no other, in this epoch I call mine, this century, this year. I was given no other place, no other time, and I touch my desk to defend myself against the feeling that my own body is transient."

In Milosz's work it is the self that abides and the world that changes--the world of his "native realm" of Eastern Europe, and of the religious imagination as well. "I lived at a time when a huge change in the contents of the human imagination was occurring," he wrote late in life. "After two thousand years in which a huge edifice of creeds and dogmas has been erected, from Origen and St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Cardinal Newman, when every work of the human mind and of human hands was created within a system of reference, the age of homelessness has dawned."

The tone of that passage suggests that he regrets the passing of the Catholic world view, and he does. But it is not as simple as that. Catholicism in his work is not all-encompassing or worthy of unconditional assent. It is always in conflict with something else. There are two sides to the matter, and the dialectic between them runs right down the spine of the man, down the spinal column of narrow lines that we call poetry.

Milosz begins with the conviction that he is religious but not spiritual, a carnal man with a Catholic imagination. He also called himself a Manichaean, and he meant, I think, that the opposing impulses in him are not congenially mingled, not spiritual phases of the moon so to speak, but are at war with each other. His is an age of "new religious wars" and his "hymns and odes" are war poetry.

Milosz's dialectically Catholic outlook has some abiding characteristics. For one thing, the divided self is a historical fact, not a personal choice but a condition not of his own making. Here is a person divided by exile, whose country was divided by the great powers. It is not for him to join what others have torn asunder, only to undergo such division as a spiritual exercise.

In a great poem called "My Faithful Mother Tongue," Milosz writes:

   You were my native land; I lacked any other ...
   Now, I confess my doubt.
   There are moments when it seems to me I have squandered
       my life.
   For you are a tongue of the debased,
   of the unreasonable ...
   a tongue of the confused,
   ill with their own innocence.
   But without you, who am I?
   Only a scholar in a distant country,
   a success, without fears and humiliations.
   Yes, who am I without you?
   Just a philosopher, like everyone else.

He isn't happy to find himself outside his native realm, speaking a foreign language, but his homesick longing takes the form of self-reproach. For inward division, if not of his own making, is a mark of the species, a consequence of our offense. Though he did not choose it, and cannot do away with it, he is somehow responsible.

Milosz's many poems grounded in carnal experience are thick with contrition; while he wouldn't be without those experiences, he doesn't see them as an unmixed good. After telling of a Fr. Chomski, who "had been beaten by thugs of the Empire / Because he refused to bow before the world," he goes on: "And I? Didn't I bow? The Great Spirit of Nonbeing, / The Prince of this World, has his own devices"--and suddenly the surrender of Catholics to the secret police in Poland after the war is akin, in Milosz's mind at least, to his surrender to sexual experience in California in the 1960s: "not a spiritual man but flesh-enraptured .... And disobedient, curious, on the first step to Hell .... Did I toil then against the world / Or, without knowing, was I with it and its own?"

Unlike the confessional poets of postwar America, in his examinations of conscience Milosz is not obscure or ambiguous. And divided though he is, he is not irresolute. He concludes the poem about Fr. Chomski by remarking that "I could not understand from whence came my stubbornness / And my belief that the pulse of impatient blood / Fulfills the designs of a silent God." Though he doesn't understand, he knows where he stands.

This is perhaps the most important thing to say about Milosz's outlook. Divided though he is, the religious man generally has the last word. Against the age, he speaks to angels: "All was taken away from you: white dresses, / wings, even existence. / Yet I believe you, / messengers." He tells of a night when he and a woman friend, after love-making of "vehemence and triumphant laughter," went out walking in the city and found "our breath held by amazement and silence, porosity of worn-out stones and the great door of the cathedral."

Late in life, Milosz took the side of religion with spectacularly searching eloquence. He wrote a long essay developing the thought "If only this could be said: 'I am a Christian, and my Christianity is such and such.'" He put forward a portrait of "A Philosopher," who, while an atheist, thought "the only preoccupation worthy of a philosopher" was "meditating on the meaning of religion." This philosopher esteemed Christianity in particular, for "What could be more human than the God of Christianity, taking the shape of a man, and aware that the stony world would sentence Him to death?" This philosopher "bowed his head before the Pope" and "did not hide the fact that, though he was refused the grace of faith, he would like to be counted among the workers in the Lord's vineyard."

What they have to tell us

What do these three "crypto-Catholic" writers, each distinct yet representative, have to tell us about Catholic life in America, such as it is? No small number of insights comes to mind. Let me venture just three.

First of all, these writers suggest that, for better and for worse, in our place and time the self is the point of entry for religious experience. This is not to say (for they would not) that the self is sufficient, only that the self--or as John Paul II might put it, the human person--should not be scanted or derided in our account of Catholicism in general, and any account of Catholicism's place in the "public square" must take account of the garden of forking paths that is the individual believing character.

Second, for these writers, "crypto-Catholic" religiosity is distinguished by its depth, not its lack of it. We are often told how shallowly rooted the faith of contemporary Catholics is. But these three writers suggest that such faith is not shallow so much as submerged, that the religious dramas of our people are taking place in the depths of the self, far from where any pollster dares venture.

Third, these authors' "crypto-Catholic" outlook, with all that it claims and refuses to claim, is not simply a surrender to this world and to this time but a sign of respect for our tradition and its promises. Cagey, perhaps, it is never glib; of little faith, perhaps, it is not despairing but full of yearning.

In a poem called "On Prayer," Milosz ventured outside the self, outside ordinary public life, to offer an image of religious faith that lies beyond division, in the realm of reconciled opposites that is the native realm of poetry and religion. The poem suggests the way of the crypto-religious writer in our time, going to God not so much in faith perhaps as in aspiration. I like to think that the bridge it puts in mind is a certain rust-red bridge with which we are familiar:

   You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
   All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
   And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
   Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
   Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
   That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
   Where everything is its opposite and the word is
   Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
   Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
   Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
   And knows that if there is no other shore
   We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

Paul Elie is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This article is adapted from a lecture given at the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.