You converted to Catholicism in the 1940s. What was the motive behind that decision?

PERCY

There are several ways to answer the question. One is theological. The technical theological term is grace, the gratuitous unmerited gift from God. Another answer is less theological: What else is there? Did you expect me to become a Methodist? A Buddhist? A Marxist? A comfortable avuncular humanist like Walter Cronkite? An exhibitionist like Allen Ginsberg? A proper literary-philosophical-existentialist answer is that the occasion was the reading of Kierkegaard’s extraordinary essay: “On the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle.” Like the readings that mean most to you, what it did was to confirm something I suspected but that it took Søren Kierkegaard to put into words: that what the greatest geniuses in science, literature, art, philosophy utter are sentences which convey truths sub specie aeternitatis, that is to say, sentences that can be confirmed by appropriate methods and by anyone, anywhere, anytime. But only the apostle can utter sentences that can be accepted on the authority of the apostle, that is, his credentials, sobriety, trustworthiness as a newsbearer. These sentences convey not knowledge sub specie aeternitatis but news.

INTERVIEWER

I noticed that you rarely refer to other converted novelists like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh when discussing your ideas. Or if you do, it is rarely, if ever, in this context.

PERCY

Maybe it’s because novelists don’t talk much about each other. Maybe this is because novelists secrete a certain BO, which only other novelists detect, like certain buzzards who emit a repellent pheromone detectable only by other buzzards, which is to say that only a novelist can know how neurotic, devious, underhanded a novelist can be. Actually I have the greatest admiration for both writers, not necessarily for their religion, but for their consummate craft.