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242 Chapter 14 Restoring the Imago Dei Transcendental Realism in the Fiction of Michael D. O’Brien Dominic Manganiello Catholic fiction in Canada has often been marked by a strong integral humanism. Contemporary Canadian writers such as Morley Callaghan and Hugh Hood both acknowledged the seminal influence the philosophy of Jacques Maritain exerted on their work, especially his emphasis on the dignity of the human person rooted in the Incarnation. Michael D. O’Brien’s recent novels in The Children of the Last Days series reflect the same personalism espoused by his predecessors, but with some important nuances. While Morley Callaghan expressed his fascination with the struggle between good and evil that stirs continually in the human heart, literary critics have pointed to the “flabbiness” of his moral vision.1 The sympathetic treatment of the sinful individual who shuns divine grace prompted Callaghan, in this view, to shift his focus gradually away from a theocentric to an anthropocentric humanism. As Barbara Helen Pell puts it, “Too often [Callaghan’s] Christian humanism, with its emphasis on human identification, is not balanced by a clear vision of the Christian Gospel.”2 Hugh Hood adopted a clearer ethical position than his mentor had in an attempt to be “more ‘real’ than the realists , yet more transcendent than the most vaporous allegorist.”3 Despite his use of traditional Christian allegory, however, Hood’s religious optimism led some reviewers to accuse him of failing to engage adequately the truth of original sin. For example, Pell comments that, on account of his “religious 1. Desmond Pacey, Creative Writing in Canada, 2d ed. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1961), 211. 2. Barbara Helen Pell, “Faith and Fiction: The Novels of Callaghan and Hood,” Journal of Canadian Studies 18, no. 2 (1983): 7. 3. Hugh Hood and John Mills, “Hugh Hood and John Mills in Epistolary Conversation,” Fiddlehead 116 (Winter 1978): 145. 243 Transcendental Realism in the Fiction of Michael D. O’Brien optimism,” Hood “finds it difficult to depict imaginatively sin and evil.”4 Michael O’Brien, however, avoids the potential pitfalls of such Manichaeism on the one hand and Pelagianism on the other by grounding his depiction of human nature in what Maritain calls “transcendental realism,” or in the “spiritual resemblance” that exists between the Creator and his creature.5 In a 1997 talk, “The Vocation of the Christian Novelist,” O’Brien commented on the formative influence Maritain’s work has exerted on him.6 He identifies the Imago Dei, lost when Adam fell and restored to the original unity of image and likeness with Christ’s redemption, as providing the “hidden dynamic ” that sustains the Western literary imagination.7 In what follows, I examine the trajectory of the search for “man’s complete identity”8 in what are perhaps the two most distinctive novels of O’Brien’s project, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (1996) and Strangers and Sojourners: A Novel (1997). The first shows the adverse effects of an atheistic humanism in a supernatural thriller set in the Vatican, while the second charts Anne Delaney’s journey to British Columbia and her discovery that “a hidden and sacred image [lies] within the icons of [human] faces.”9 Father Elijah The renewal of culture occupies a central place in Michael O’Brien’s critical writing. In an incisive article published in 1997 devoted exclusively to the subject, the writer invokes a host of prominent Catholic thinkers to help him diagnose the present spiritual malaise of Western civilization and to provide a timeless antidote in timely fashion. At the end of his masterly survey of the history of the artistic imagination, O’Brien echoes Pope John Paul II’s emphatic warning against the dangers of a pervasive materialism that “seeks to erase ‘the whole truth about man,’” especially concerning his transcendent origin.10 (The timbre of the late pontiff’s voice resonates throughout the 4. Pell, “Faith and Fiction,” 12. 5. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays, trans. J. F. Scanlan (London: Sheed and Ward, 1943), 96. 6. Michael D. O’Brien, “The Vocation of the Christian Novelist,” talk given at St. Paul University, Ottawa , Canada, November 18, 1997. 7. Michael D. O’Brien, “Historical Imagination and the Renewal of Culture,” in Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History, ed. Stratford Caldecott and John Morrill (Edinburgh , Scot.: T. and T. Clark, 1997), 164. 8. Ibid. 9. Michael D. O’Brien, Strangers and Sojourners: A Novel (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997), 445. 10. O...

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