One of the more obscure chapters in American literary history is the role Catholicism played in the development of southern letters. Everyone knows of the Georgia fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor, who remains the best-known American Catholic novelist of the last century. She was a Catholic born and raised in a Protestant region. Everyone once knew of Allen Tate (1899-1979), the influential poet, critic, and sometime novelist whose career began at Vanderbilt, championed “southern agrarianism,” and converted to Catholicism in 1950. Almost nobody has heard, however, of John Finlay (1941-1991), an Alabama poet who lived and died in obscurity and yet wrote some of the most compelling poetry and illuminating literary criticism of the last twentieth century. Most of his work was composed between the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1980 and his death from AIDS in 1991.
Finlay discovered he had contracted the fatal virus in the same year that he was received into the Church and indeed those two things—the Church and the mortal disease—define the tension that wracked his life and led him to become the sort of poet he did. He knew there was something deeply wrong with the hidden actions of his life and, through the influence and inspiration of Allen Tate, he came to understand the divisions that tore him apart and to give powerful, if indirect, representation to it through his essays and poems on the subject of what Tate had called “Gnosticism.”
The Catholic Agrarianism of Allen Tate
Tate had first risen to fame as a member of the Fugitive poets at Vanderbilt University, in the 1920s. Along with his professor and fellow Fugitive, John Crowe Ransom, Tate helped establish an ironic, dense, impersonal, and formally taut mode of lyric poetry as the predominant style of the period. Also in concert with Ransom, Tate later helped rally a group of writers to declare themselves the Southern Agrarians and to launch an entirely literary campaign against the incursion of an industrial economy and the chambers of commerce into southern life.
The agrarians first announced themselves with the volume, I’ll Take My Stand, in 1930.1 Tate’s essay stood apart from the others in the volume in one crucial respect. It defended the “feudal,” agrarian traditions of the South, but somewhat obliquely argued that the South’s great cultural weakness had been its failure to embrace a suitably “feudal” religion, that of Catholicism. This was among the first indications that Tate, who excelled at identifying the weaknesses of modern culture, would find the solution to those weaknesses exclusively in the Catholic Church—to which he converted in 1950.
In his twenties, Finlay met in person both Ransom and fellow agrarian writer, Andrew Lytle, but it was the figure of Tate that held his imagination. This must in part have been due to the religious character of Tate’s life and work. Finlay was always a confessing Christian, but his conversion to Catholicism came about through an intellectual sense of the Church’s necessity that resembled Tate’s. The Church was the answer to the reductive rationalism and disorder of the modern age.
Finlay met Tate twice in 1966, including when the older poet visited the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, where Finlay completed his bachelors and then masters degrees in English literature. Finlay was probably behind the invitation, was photographed with Tate, and introduced him from the podium, quoting Lytle in observing that “Mr Tate’s theme is nothing more or less than what is left of Christendom.”2 That same year, Finlay wrote to Tate to say that his poems “are so much a part of me, have helped me to see so much of my own life that I can not imagine what I would be without them.”3 In his copy of Tate’s Collected Essays, he inscribed an epigram to the poet who helped “our now lean language” to “sing / Of laurel and the rough dogwood / Caught in the single glow of faith.”4
At the most general level, Tate’s southern origins and concerns were what inspired Finlay. Finlay was raised on the family farm and sympathized emotionally with the agrarian ethic even as he sought to escape living it; he found the “reactionary” attitudes of Tate appealing. Despite his testimony to Tate himself, Finlay thought Tate’s poems difficult to comprehend, as indeed have most people, but, he surely appreciated the appearance of classical austerity and the rich patterns of allusion and symbol in Tate’s work. To speak, as Finlay does, of “lean language” is a term of praise not impoverishment.
Modern Gnosticism
Tate’s influence on Finlay’s work is all but ubiquitous. I will attend to just one of the most conspicuous aspects of it here. In a late lecture, “Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller,” Tate draws together in especially clear terms three ideas with which he had been concerned throughout his career. The first, and central, such idea is what C.P. Snow described as the contest of the “two cultures,” science and the humanities, in modern western intellectual life. Tate, along with his fellow agrarian writers, had long argued that the culture of the sciences was a totalizing project that would conquer the world only by means of stripping away and denying the reality of whatever did not fit into the paradigm of the physical sciences. The realm of value or quality was the first to go. While the experimental physicals sciences posed a significant threat, it was the “behavioral sciences” that were most dangerous.5 Modern chemistry merely replaced earlier theories of matter. But the behavioral sciences, such as psychology and sociology, sought to replace the wisdom of metaphysics and ethics with an empirical, purely materialist account of “behavior.” It was here that science most aggressively encroached on the terrain of the humanities.
In the lecture, Tate cites Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, where the philosopher argues that each subject of study must seek only that level of precision that is appropriate to that subject. Agreeing with this, Tate argues that Aristotle “seemed to know a social science is impossible.”6 This is not, in fact, the case. Everything Aristotle discussed in his corpus was a science as he understood that term, that is to say, it was a study of causes. Science is the knowledge of causes, and we may have more or less precise knowledge of them, depending on the relative composition of necessary and contingent elements in the subject.7
According to Tate, however, only exact knowledge constituted science, and so everything that transcended its empirico-mathematical methods could not be known scientifically or classified as science. Such things could, however, be known through literature and religion, neither of which were sciences, but both of which were transcendent ways of knowing.8 This conclusion helps explain Tate’s best known concerns: his agrarian arguments in favor of the culture of the South and his literary-critical arguments in favor of the study of poetic form. In the former, traditional cultural life, independent of scientific reasoning, fostered religious life and made humane value possible. In the latter, artistic form—the realm of quality—provided a specifically non-scientific means of knowing the world. This account of religion and literature constitutes Tate’s second long-standing argument.
In the context of Tate’s contest between science, on the one hand, and literature and religion on the other, he introduces a third note in the lecture—one to be found implicit in his earlier writing but made explicit only here. He draws on the celebrated work of the philosophers Eric Voegelin and Hans Jonas to propose that modern poetry has followed the experimental sciences in one way: it has elevated poetry to “a kind of Gnosis, accessible to the few who were lucky enough to be among the Elect.”9 He contrasts the orthodox Christian understanding of the “theological virtues” as everyone’s means of salvation with the gnostic claim that a secret knowledge will save the few.10 That secret knowledge divides the world in two, argues Tate. It claims “the natural world is beyond redemption, for it was created by the powers of evil” and the gnostic Christ “gives us the central mythical figure for this alienation of man from God and nature.”11 For Tate, Gnosticism was the modern scientific project reconceived as an esoteric spiritual religion. It stripped away the richness of the world not by reducing it to matter but by dismissing matter as evil, and it re-described salvation as a secret exact knowledge, as opposed to the freely given wisdom of faith of orthodox Christianity. On this scheme, poetry could be a form of gnostic knowledge, but only insofar as Hart Crane and other modernists rejected inherited wisdom and tradition in favor of “Doorways and world-structures beyond the common reach.”12
Finlay was much impressed by these final words of Tate’s. They spoke to his conviction that the true account of the world was the one that justified his admiration for what he called those “good Thomistic animals,” the cows in his barnyard: natural being was good in itself and sin and evil were mere defects of the good rather than realities unto themselves.13i Tate’s compact theory, fruitful in itself, also caused a problem. Once one defined Gnosticism in the loose way he did, it became easy to see versions of it hidden just about everywhere in modernity—or simply everywhere. Indeed, Tate’s account of Gnosticism helped give shape to Finlay’s account civilization in both his essays and his poems to such an extent that no small portion of his work consists of sniffing out gnostic heresies. He came to do so in such a manner that it seemed practically everything that was not clearly and explicitly as “Thomistic” as the barnyard cows Finlay milked every day came to be suspect. Gnosticism became the blanket term of condemnation for anything that was not Aquinas as Finlay understood him. Gnosticism was everywhere.
This criticism is most apt in regard to Finlay’s one finished book of essays, Flaubert in Egypt and Other Essays. Each essay shows Finlay’s lithe narrative style of criticism, leading us through the interior workings of a different figure’s life. The essays as a whole show that, while he follows Tate in drawing on Hans Jonas’ classic The Gnostic Religion to define Gnosticism as a doctrine proclaiming “an ontological alienation of God from both the natural and human world,” this is not sufficiently rigorous a definition to sustain the volume. After Finlay’s death, the poet and critic Helen Pinkerton would make a strong case that Finlay’s argument was in line with the arguments of Jonas and Voegelin, and was more or less a just one.14 Gerald Hartnett, in contrast, would find Finlay’s use of the term “Gnosticism” ahistorical and, further, judge Finlay’s account of Aquinas narrow, rationalist, and more clearly derived from Aristotle than the scholastic theologian.15
I will offer a brief account of just one chapter, where Finlay applies his theory of Gnosticism to a Catholic figure with whom we would expect him to be in concord. Finlay’s revisionist account of John Henry Newman is striking in its boldness, insight, but final inadequacy. Finlay’s point of departure in discussing Newman is the great convert’s conviction that “the human intellect . . . is ‘actually and historically’ hostile to the operations of God’s grace.”16 To explain and critique this conviction becomes Finlay’s task; in doing so he delivers a crucial insight on Newman but does so in a manner that is insensitive to the details of intellectual history. Newman, he rightly observes, could only have perceived the intellect as hostile to religious belief if he took Enlightenment rationalism, from Locke and Hume to Mill, as descriptive of the intellect per se. And this Newman did. Indeed, a common way of understanding Newman’s extended series of reflections on the nature of knowledge and belief is that he deliberately starts with the psychology of Locke and attempts to broaden it sufficiently to defend and preserve the reasonableness of Christian faith. For lack of a clear alternative, Newman grants modern assumptions and then tries to lead them back to orthodoxy.
For Finlay, such a project was doomed from the start and was unnecessary. Enlightenment rationalism did not provide a true account of the nature of reason. It was in fact essentially anti-intellectual, with its various reductions of knowledge to sense experience, instinct, and psychology each walling off the intellect from truth in a different theoretical manner. Authentic intellectualism leads by “logical inevitability” to “theism.”17 From Plato and Aristotle to the doctors of the Church, that the mind could know universal truths, separate from sensation and unconditioned by sensation, entailed also that one could know real ideas and the cause of all things, which is God.
Newman’s remaining within the ambit of Enlightenment reason and his failure to embrace the more venerable realism and intellectualism of the Church were signs that, despite his conversion, Newman remained a “Protestant” of the mind.18 More damning, Finlay contends, “Newman brought into the Catholic Church this strain of Protestant anti-intellectualism, and I do not think his northern eyes ever accustomed themselves to the rational clarities of Aristotle and Aquinas. Assenting completely and sincerely to its theological dogma, he nevertheless fretted under the philosophical tradition of his adoptive church.”19
Here is where Finlay’s history lacks sensitivity. Newman praised Aristotle in the highest terms, though his understanding of the philosopher was probably one corrupted by the theory of moral sentiments of the Scottish Enlightenment.20 And so, here, Finlay has a point: Newman’s Aristotle was most likely not the real thing. But, after his conversion in 1845, Newman visited Rome and was disappointed to find a general depreciation and ignorance of Aristotle and Aquinas both.21 That would change by the end of his lifetime, as the revival of Thomas Aquinas began to take hold in the Church, but it was a long process in coming. Aeterni Patris, which for a time seemed to establish Aquinas as the sole philosopher of the Church, was promulgated in 1879. During most of Newman’s career, therefore, other Catholic theologians were in no better a position to think with the intellectualism of Aquinas than was the early Newman. The Aquinas with whom Finlay rightly and favorably contrasts Newman’s thought was not really on the menu anywhere in Newman’s day. There simply was no contemporary Catholic philosophy of a kind that might make him “fret.” In fact, some Continental Catholic philosophers of the day, including Antonio Rosmini, advanced ideas very similar to Newman’s.
Finlay was himself the beneficiary of the Thomistic revival, but his version of Aquinas is somewhat simplistic and distorts a key feature of Aquinas’ thought. As we noted above, Finlay’s Aquinas was a jolly rationalist who embraced the goodness of being, including the flesh. He was the Ox of God who loved cows, as it were, and this much is correct. But while Finlay’s Thomism gives a generous respect to natural reason and being, it dismisses every trace of mysticism—including that found in Newman—as a symptom of anti-intellectualism and a basis for the charge of Gnosticism.22 In consequence, the range of natural discursive reason (ratio)—which, for Finlay, excludes the intellectual basis (intellectus) of most Catholic mystical theology—gets unduly enlarged and mistaken for the whole of the intellect. This leaves a figure such as Newman looking like more of an outlier than he really was. While Gnosticism is a heresy, there is inevitably a gnosis at the heart of Christianity and, in its highest forms of contemplation, even a certain “esoterism.”23
Finlay’s criticism, nonetheless, lays the groundwork for his poetry’s attempt to critique the destructive flight from being of modern art and thought even as it also seeks to reaffirm the goodness of natural being. The Gnosticism of modern literature is detailed in a small group of poems including “The Faun,” “The Illumination of Arthur Rimbaud,” “Baudelaire in Belgium,” and “Flaubert in Egypt.” The central concern of these poems is expressed in two lines from the Rimbaud lyric:
He gazed into its objectless pure style,
Hermetic light destroying common earth24
The modernist practice of making the work of art a kind of autonomous, in some sense religious, absolute, even as it is reduced to pure form, in effect leads the modern artist to worship a god of the void, a formal nothingness. It is an artificial god, no less, and one that is hermetic (part of a secret gnosis brought about by the artist’s intuition) and so alienating from, and destructive of, the goodness of natural being, that “common earth.” “Flaubert” and “The Faun” both suggest this gnostic tendency is a consequence of disordered desire and shame at recollected sin, “The half-forgotten wreckage” and “buried images” in the mind “Of women he had forced or gulled into / The brief and awkward void of his lust.”25 The artist misuses the world, as a desired but worthless thing, and misattributes to the little world of the art-work an absolute value. It is impossible not to see Finlay, with his secret and disordered sexual life, accused by these words. Indeed, Finlay is specifically accusing himself.
Perhaps the best Finlay poem exploring the modern gnostic impulse is “A Portrait of a Modern Artist.” Its setting is contemporary and so the poem feels less like a study of literary history than do the others in this group. Furthermore, the psychology of the poem is more perceptive. Awake, the woman artist, whose portrait the poem gives us, “writes hard fiction” whose “characters burn out on sex and drugs”; she is a novelist of the Brett Easton Ellis mold who provides a “clinical” depiction of “A World of sex and death shot up on coke.”26 In her sleep, however, human nature reasserts itself and a desire for more than the grind of the flesh on flesh, a desire for “form and being” appears.27 Most poems of such a darkly critical vein, including the others just mentioned, simply paint a damning portrait and leave the reader to make the final judgment. The “Portrait” is distinctive in giving us a character with sufficient depth that she can at least glimpse “her disowned humanity.”28
In poem and essay alike, Finlay followed closely Tate’s late Catholic critique of modern Gnosticism. His insights on both the alienation of modern culture from God and the need to preserve a proper understanding of the goodness of natural being are themselves provocative and compelling. If he does less than justice to Newman, in his interpretation of that saint, we should also note that Finlay did one of the most difficult things of all in these pages. He explained in damning and incisive critical language the weakness, the fault, what he would even call the “demon” that had infected his soul, and then his blood, and which finally killed him.
Endnotes:
1 Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).
2 John Martin Finlay, Dense Poems and Socratic Light: The Poetry of John Martin Finlay (Eds. David Middleton and John P. Doucet. Belmont, NC: Wiseblood Books, 2020), 191.
3 Finlay, Dense Poems and Socratic Light, 187.
4 Finlay, Dense Poems and Socratic Light, 191.
5 Tate, “Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller [sic],” (Poetry 135.2 (November 1979), 93-102 93.
6 Tate, “Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller,” 94.
7 Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora 71b.8-12 (in Richard McKeon, ed. The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Modern Library 2001).
8 Tate, “Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller,” 94.
9 Tate, “Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller,” 96.
10 Tate, “Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller,” 96.
11 Tate, “Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller,” 97.
12 Tate, “Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller,” 96
13 Finlay, Dense Poems and Socratic Light: The Poetry of John Martin, 208.
14 Helen P. Trimpi, “Finlay on Winters’ ‘To the Holy Spirit,’” in In Light Apart: The Achievement of John Finlay (Ed. David Middleton. Glenside, PA: The Aldine Press, Inc., 1999), 136-151.
15 Gerald Hartnett, “Finlay’s Thomism,” in Light Apart, 100-107.
16 John Martin Finlay, “With Constant Light: The Collected Essays and Reviews (Eds. David Middleton and John P. Doucet. Belmont, NC: Wiseblood Books, 2020), 47.
17 Finlay, With Constant Light, 62.
18 Finlay, With Constant Light, 67.
19 Finlay, With Constant Light, 68.
20 Newman writes, “While the world lasts, will Aristotle’s doctrine on these matters last, for he is the oracle of nature and truth. While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians” (John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 82-83. On the Scottish Enlightenment’s misinterpretation and appropriation of Aristotle see—a text Finlay cites—Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 209-240.
21 Ernest L. Fortin, “‘Sacred and Inviolable’: Rerum Novarum and Natural Rights” (Theological Studies 58 (1992)), 230.
22 Finlay, With Constant Light, 66. See, Middleton, In Light Apart, 102.
23 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord (Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, trans. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998) 1.34.
24 Finlay, In Light Apart, 97.
25 Finlay, In Light Apart, 95.
26 Finlay, In Light Apart, 101.
27 Finlay, In Light Apart, 101.
28 Finlay, In Light Apart, 101.
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I have, so to speak, two dogs in this fight. (Not that I’m trying to start one, I should hasten to add.)
The first is Allen Tate on whose poetry I wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled “Myth and Speculation in the Poetry of Allen Tate” (1975).
I decline to comment on the issues engaged in the essay except to say that most of us who read and then write on Aristotle, Aquinas, and even John Henry Newman are bound to get a number of things wrong even as we, at times, get a few things right. That shouldn’t stop us from trying, I suppose, but sometimes such commentary is best left to the scholarly experts who devote their whole careers to their subjects.
Regarding John Finlay, I knew him when I was a senior at the University of Montevallo (Alabama College), where he taught briefly in the mid-1960’s. While I never took a course from him, he was signal influence on my own development as a student of poetry and a minor practitioner. I recall his passing on to me three books: a collection of W.C. Williams’ poetry, a book on poetic forms, and one more whose title escapes me after almost 60 years.
More memorable than that was the occasion on which he introduced me and another student to the 7th Symphony of Beethoven in his apartment near the campus. I had never heard it before and hearing it for the first time complete on John’s stereo was, as I remember it still, a transcendent experience. I recall also that in my inexperience and naivete, I asked when the last note sounded if we could hear it again. Rightly, as I came to see, John declined, saying something like, “It will really not do to repeat it now.” I accepted what he said at face value, and it rang true as time passed. (Perhaps both Aristotle and Aquinas could shed light on why it is the case.)
In any event, I remember John Finlay with affection, gratitude, mixed with sadness, for all that he was: a most generous teacher, a vibrant spirit, a gifted poet and essayist, among others.
His last poem (I believe), written while completely blind and on his death bed, is one of his best and most characteristic. It is entitled “A Prayer to the Father.” It is an eloquent locution of a man at peace with himself, his gifts, and most importantly with his God.
It [modern poetry] claims “the natural world is beyond redemption, for it was created by the powers of evil” and the gnostic Christ “gives us the central mythical figure for this alienation of man from God and nature (James Wilson on Tate). Finlay, homosexual, finds in Catholicism his refuge from a conflicted life. That shown in Wilson’s following paragraph, “ the cows in his barnyard: natural being was good in itself and sin and evil were mere defects of the good rather that [than the correction of Wilson’s misspell] realities unto themselves”.
Wilson’s assessment that “Gnosticism became the blanket term of condemnation for anything that was not Aquinas as Finlay understood him. Gnosticism was everywhere” – is preferable to that of his critics. There is in the intellectual homosexual a form of Gnosticism, a secret knowledge inspired by the daemonic. Apparently his conversion convinced him that Gnosticism is everywhere. In view of today’s world and the continued increase in disordered sexual behavior Finlay’s opinion has credibility.
I do not personally know anything about Finlay (I will soon remedy that) so I would like to our two PHD scholars who led off this discussion if his homosexuality is assumed from the fact that he was an AIDS victim or not. I ask because the 80’s were a time when there was no blood test for it at first .Many innocent people got it that way.