SOURCE: “The Look of Religion: Hemingway and Catholicism,” in Renascence, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Winter, 1964, pp. 77-81.

In the following excerpt, Hertzel discusses how Hemingway's extensive knowledge of Catholicism can be found in his work even though his fiction has no supernatural dimension.

No one can deny that Ernest Hemingway writes of modern despair. Cleanth Brooks in The Hidden God, a recent study of modern writers, says: “The Hemingway hero finds in the universe no sanctions for goodness; he sees through what are for him the great lying abstract words, like glory, patriotism, and honor; and he has found that the institutions that pretend to foster and safeguard the traditional moral codes are bankrupt.”

Yet Hemingway has also used the Catholic tradition extensively in his fiction, a fact that heretofore has received very little attention from his critics. Catholicism is an element of some importance in all of the...