The novel is one of the great resistors of secularism, precisely because it is a secular art, author Christopher Beha said in a lecture hosted by the English department’s Visiting Writers Program.

In his lecture on Oct. 17, “The Statues in the Temple: Notes on the Novel as a Secular Art,” the former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine framed the novel as a secular art which, by turning the reader’s attention toward the imminent, illustrates the insufficiencies of the secular life when separated from the transcendent. 

Secularism, Beha said, is the elevation of ordinary human flourishing as the only and highest possible good.

“It is remarkable how many great novels concern the quixotic theme of the character who makes a botch of secular life because they try to make a romance of it,” Beha said. “In each case the novelist himself set out to write a mockery of these romantic themes, and in each case wound up writing in spite of himself a portrait of tragic heroism which suggested that attempting to live according to these elevated values was one of the few routes to real dignity in the secularized world.” 

Beha resigned this October from his position as editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine, the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States. He is the author of several books, and his most recent novel “The Index of Self-Destructive Acts” was nominated for the 2020 National Book Award.

In his lecture, Beha drew a distinction between the secular and the religious, but said they are complementary rather than opposed. 

“The secular is that realm of human life and behavior that concerns itself with the here and now, that which is present within the natural order of things,” Beha said. “The greatest good of this secular realm is ordinary human flourishing.”

The distinction between the religious and the secular is not one of essence, Beha said, but of orientation. While the secular involves what is imminent, the religious orients man toward the transcendent and the pursuit of higher goods.

According to Beha, Christian tradition honors the secular, the realm of ordinary human flourishing, but places it in its proper relation to the higher transcendent goods.

“Herein lies the origin of the concept of the secular not as something hostile to the religious but as something complementary to it, that must be kept in a certain balance,” Beha said.

The majority of Christians, Beha said, live a secular life concerned with ordinary human flourishing but remain oriented toward the divine through devotional practice.

Turning to art, Beha used the image of Constantine, who stripped pagan temples from across the Roman Empire of their religious statues in order to decorate Constantinople. While in the pagan temple, these statues were understood as a kind of religious art that mediated between the people and the gods. 

“When we call the statues religious or devotional artwork don’t simply mean that they are depictions of the divine,” Beha said. “In some very real sense, the divine is not just their subject but their intended audience. In another sense, of course, they are meant to stand in for the god question.”

When Constantine removed these statues from the temple and placed them out in the street, they became merely decorative, secularized, and lost their power to mediate with the divine. 

Christian religious art can also be stripped of its meaning like the statues taken out of the temple, Beha said, when considered only for its beauty rather than its true role, which is to orient the viewer toward the divine.

According to Beha, the novel as an secular art form does not rely on religious context to give it meaning because it developed alongside the modern age. 

“It is not a statue in the temple, nor is it a statue that has been ripped from the temple and given a decorative function,” Beha said. “Whatever meaning it is going to have must be brought with it. It must build a temple around itself.”

The novel cannot be taken out of the temple because it was never in the temple in the first place, he said.

According to Beha, great novelists like Miguel de Cervantes, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust attend to the experience of secular life in their work, but by doing so indirectly reveal the need for the transcendent. 

“One of the themes of ‘Don Quixote’ is the tragic insufficiency of the secular when it is made to stand on its own rather than to serve as a complement to the transcendent,” Beha said. “The approach is comic ironic, but again the effect is the expression of profound dissatisfaction with the secular when taken in isolation.”

Beha said Christians can and should enter into the novel as a secular art that truthfully represents the imminent.

“These authors, none of whom would be described as religious believers in a straightforward fashion, have committed themselves to the secular art,” Beha said. “But the religious believer who’s smart enough to recognize the intimate relationship between the secular and the transcendent will find powerful companions here.”

Quoting George Steiner, Beha said we live in the long Saturday between the cross and the resurrection, and it is from this human experience of waiting that secular art has arisen.

“An art that speaks consistently of this experience of waiting is a way of passing the time,” Beha said. “That sounds deflating, but I mean it in the most elevated sense. For this time – this ordinary, secular time – it must indeed pass.”

Sophomore Jonathan Williams said he appreciated Beha’s perspective on how Christians should engage with the novel on its own terms as secular art. 

“I was definitely interested in his emphasis on how Christians engage with art that’s not necessarily religious and balancing how we aim to recognize truth and meaning there,” Williams said. “You can’t have truth without the Christological perspective, but also can’t aim to force that on to the work itself.”

Associate Professor of English Benedict Whalen said he found Beha’s argument and characterization of the novel compelling and an important argument for students to grapple with as they approach literature.  

“I loved Beha’s emphasis upon the fact that fiction is not simply an ornamental way of conveying a philosophy or theology,” Whalen said. “Beha stressed that the novel is representative — the novelist looks hard at the world, and represents what he sees to the reader. This position respects the integrity of literature as a mimetic and representational art, not reducing it to a delivery system for philosophy.”