Novels and the Gravest Concern

I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of our times. It's hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now. There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

—Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (letter dated September 13, 1959)

Is it not enough to believe?

It is often said: Why philosophize about the divine matters; is it not enough to believe in them and feel them? Certainly, it is enough ... in the absence of intellectual interest on the part of him who believes and feels. It is equivalent to saying: Is it not enough to believe that the sun exists, and to delight in its light and warmth? Why should we have any physical or astronomical theories about the sun or the solar system? They are not, of course, necessary for those who have no scientific interest. But on what grounds should the limitations of some people be made a law for all? If man has faith in the divine matters, and if at the same time he has the capacity as well as the need for thinking, then of necessity he must think about the objects of his faith ...

—Vladimir Soloviev, Lectures on Godmanhood (1878)

Her faith is a mountain

“Will and George were doing well in business, and Joe was writing letters home in rhymed verse and making as smart an attack on all the accepted verities as was healthful.

Samuel wrote to Joe, sayings, "I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you'd take a cookie on a full stomach. But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother. Your last letter only made her think you are not well. Your mother does not believe there are many ills uncurable by good strong soup. She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache. It worries her. Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven't even got a shovel yet.”

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

John Henry Newman's Personal Terror

Discovering no external assurance that history was guided by the hand of God, he looked out upon society and saw suffering, disease, squalor, misery, men falling away from Christianity and not returning, the long procession of the world, its Babel of languages, the astrologers of Chaldaea and the chariots of Egypt, and he shrank away with a sensitive horror. This bogy of skepticism was no bogy; it was his personal terror, the dead hand which scrabbled at him in the night when his faith was sleeping.

—Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (1957)

The Spirit and Wonder World

We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medicine and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. And if we suppose that we can do so ourselves, we must be clear that we can represent this as the attitude of Christian faith only by making the Christian proclamation unintelligible and impossible for our contemporaries.

—Rudolf Bultmann, "The New Testament and Mythology" (1941)

dreamers, utopians and holy fools

But the merit and the whole significance of such people as Dostoevsky reside precisely in that they do not bow down before the force of fact and they do not serve that force. Set against this crude force of 'that which exists', they possess the spiritual force of faith in truth and goodness - in 'that which ought to exist'. Not to be led astray by the apparent domination of evil, and not to renounce the inapparent good on account of it, is a feat of faith. Man's entire strength resides in this. Whoever is incapable of this feat will achieve nothing and will have no word to address to humanity. Those people who acknowledge fact [alone] live by the grace of others, but it is not they who create life. It is the people of faith who create life. These are the people known as dreamers, utopians and holy fools - these are the prophets, truly the best people and the leaders of humanity. Today we commemorate such a person.

—Vladimir Soloviev, Three Speeches in Memory of F. M. Dostoevsky (1882)

a theology of writing

...we have to go on speaking/writing about God, allowing the language of faith to encounter fresh trials every day, and also fresh distortions and refusals. In writing fiction in which no formula is allowed unchallengeable victory, Dostoevsky has implicitly developed what might be called a theology of writing, specifically of narrative writing. Every fiction is at its most fictional in its endings, those pretenses of closure and settlement. Even morally and religiously serious fiction has to project something beyond that ending or otherwise signal a level of incompletion, even in the most minimal and formal mode, indicating an as yet untold story.

—Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (2008)

The Dead Letter and the Appalling Command

I certainly do not wish to consider as witnesses of my inner and living faith the scribes and pharisees of our age, men who turn the dear holy Bible into a cold twaddle that destroys heart and soul...Only I do not like to give myself and my heart where it is misunderstood; so I am wont to keep silence before those who are theologians by profession..., just as much as before those who do not wish to know anything at all of the whole business because every kind of religion, which is after all the first and final need of man, has been marred for them from their earliest days by the dead letter and by the appalling command to believe.

—Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke (January 1799)