AMERICAN NOVELISTS may be divided into two camps. There are “painters” and there are “sculptors.” The painters use words as pigments to capture the shadows and sheen of daily life. Their stories render the surfaces of the world with a shimmering profundity. They can be as entertaining as Norman Rockwell or as complex as Vermeer, as brilliant as Andrew Wyeth or as competent as Rockwell Kent. This diverse guild includes the likes of young Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, Willa Cather, Reynolds Price and Philip Roth.

A very few novelists are sculptors. Language for them possesses weight and density. Words provide them a three-dimensional medium to be hammered, chiseled, and filed. Their stories explore buried worlds brought into light with violent force. These novelists are our best metaphysicians. Among this elite we find Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, the older Henry James and William Faulkner, and, in our own day, the incomparable Cormac McCarthy.

For much of his 55-year career McCarthy suffered from being known as a writer’s writer, a kind way of saying that his books were demanding if not inaccessible. It seemed that apart from a small coterie of devoted readers McCarthy’s only other audience were academics who swarmed over his words like ants at a picnic. But with the widely acclaimed Border Trilogy, in the 1990s, and his last two novels on The New York Times bestseller list, McCarthy’s place in American letters seems finally established. The recent success of the Coen brothers’ near flawless film No Country for Old Men, based on his 2005 novel, means that he has also become a writer that people feel they should read.

But much like our responses to Melville and Faulkner, writers to whom McCarthy owes a profound (and self-acknowledged) debt, I wonder whether we will extol his place in the canon but choose to overlook his vision. Like his two mentors’, McCarthy’s is a vision cross-grained to everything that passes nowadays for a good read.

The vision is there in outline with his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. There is the landscape of Appalachia, rendered in terms of a primal beauty before the human eye had profaned the earth. Like Robert Penn Warren and Ted Hughes, McCarthy sees with the unsentimental objectivity of God. From his early novels set in Tennessee to those set in Texas and Mexico, his physical terrain is brutally glorious. There were also his characters, rural, marginal, caught in a nexus of blood, love and ancestral guilt. McCarthy’s spiritual terrain is that of a world that has collapsed in on itself, through whose visible darkness men and women pick their way.

Most importantly, there is the endless and agonizing embrace of human freedom with a divine predestination. To many readers McCarthy’s vision will seem violent, his coincidences contrived. But in the embrace of freedom and predestination, violence is inevitable, and nothing — absolutely nothing — is coincidental.

Born in Providence, McCarthy moved to Knoxville, Tenn., as a child. And like most Southern males McCarthy seems to have imbibed a certain Christian Manicheanism, that most attractive of heresies where light and darkness, spirit and flesh, are joined in an endless cosmic battle. Good and evil locked like lovers in a sacred mandala. For such Southerners any story worth telling is about redemption and damnation, or it’s not worth a damn.

No other story fits this description more than McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th Century. It is impossible to summarize. That the novel recounts the 1840s exploits of bounty hunters after Apache scalps tells you nothing. Its violence, comparable to that in The Iliad or The Bhagavad Gita, is impossible to paraphrase. The horrors of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which could only be suggested by shades and shadows, are here laid out in the sun. And to say that McCarthy’s language rivals the 17th Century euphuism of Robert Burton or Sir Thomas Browne is to make him sound derivative, pedantic.

McCarthy’s words stand on the page like stones carved by Henry Moore. A single sentence can dazzle the eye and demand to be reread and reread.

It’s the theme of Blood Meridian, though, that remains indelibly etched in the mind’s eye, a theme at odds with everything we imagine about ourselves. We’re fond of picturing the emergence of moral insight in Mark Twain’s folksy way. A contemplative Huck Finn escaping down the Mississippi with a runaway slave. But McCarthy’s young hero, the nameless “kid,” achieves his epiphany in the midst of the very carnage in which he has been a participant. The road of excess really does lead to the palace of wisdom.

Moreover, in McCarthy’s universe, evil, in which all of us are implicated, can never be defeated; we may, at best, recognize and perhaps name it. But if we are able to name it, the same evil that brought us to self-awareness is just as likely to destroy us. Huck ends up back home with Aunt Polly and the possibility of being “sivilized.” But the “kid” ends up sodomized and murdered in a saloon’s privy on the Texas frontier.

This bond between evil and good not only entangles individuals. It is also the dynamic that has driven (and will always drive) culture. And this is McCarthy’s most devastating insight. Every culture rests on a foundation of violence. And no sooner does a culture name its evil, than evil adapts itself to resemble its accuser. It’s not that a culture becomes morally better over time. It simply becomes more sophisticated at disguising the omnipresence of violence.

Cain is not only the first fratricide. He is also the first founder of a city. He is the ancestor of those who work in copper and iron and play the lyre and pipe — the cultured ones. The blood of Abel has always been the mortar and paste of the most accomplished civilizations.

Some admirers of McCarthy are fond of reading him as showing us the brutal arrogance of America’s Manifest Destiny. Perhaps. But I think that what McCarthy shows us is far more complex than one more politically correct assault on the imperialism of white men. In his long move from the Tennessee hills to the Mexican desert, McCarthy has journeyed deeper and deeper into the human soul. And what he has found there is unlike anything we usually find in a good read. He finds staring back at him a spirit hungry for salvation, but whose very hunger makes it all the more dangerous, all the more toxic. In the words of Faulke Greville, the human soul created sick and commanded to be sound.

Cormac McCarthy has finally achieved the success he deserves. His books sell in airport kiosks. Ridley Scott’s film of Blood Meridian is reportedly scheduled for release next year. And his vision? As a nation we are beginning yet again our charade of original innocence, this time even with the continuation of war. People are enthusiastically clambering aboard something called the Straight Talk Express. And stadiums fill with thousands who find solace in the mantra “Yes, we can!” I suspect that McCarthy’s vision, sober and monitory, will have to wait. It always has.

The Rev. David Lewis Stokes Jr., an occasional contributor and a Catholic priest, is an associate professor of theology at Providence College.