Earlier this year I decided I wanted to get a little closer to the Christian Mystics and so I bought myself a collection of extracts from their work by Bernard McGinn. The variety of their writings left me staggered, which is one reason why I have not yet managed to put something together on them for the blog. But one particular type of writing has already made a huge impact on me – the various extracts from the lives of the saints. These works are intended to inspire, and in my experience they often do. There’s a moment when the future St Anthony hears he must abandon his worldly possessions to follow Jesus, and rather than make excuses for himself he simply gets up and goes. There could be no more powerful statement of what is meant and expected than this, nor anything more revealing of our own cowardice.
The weakness of such narratives is the mirrored image of their strength. They are drearily predictable. We know how they end – with sainthood and heavenly glory. And furthermore, the modern reader knows how much the text in front of her is likely a piece of considered propaganda, a well-meaning fabrication, one created in the shadow of church censorship. There may be doubt, but it is sanitised. Even a modern Christian, I imagine, must admit there’s only so many lives they can handle in a row.
I thought about the lives of the saints and my mystics as I read Death Comes for the Archbishop, a 1927 novel by the American writer Willa Cather. This is a luminous piece of fiction, centring on the lives of two missionaries in New Mexico during the second half of the 19th century. Father Latour is our bishop, later archbishop, while Father Vaillant is his vicar and friend. Though French, their destiny is to be missionaries in the New World, first in Canada, and then New Mexico.
Cather’s novel is broken up into many “books” and represents the two men’s mission through a series of discrete episodes rather than a continuous narrative – and it was this that first made me think back to my reading on the saints. To give one example, one day the fathers are on a trip where they are forced to break their journey by staying the night with a stranger. That night the man’s wife comes and warns them that they are at risk of murder, so they flee and return with help. The man is caught, previous murders are uncovered, and his wife is freed. In another story, one of the priests is able to persuade a rich man to give him two mules for free, seemingly using his priestly power to awaken the man’s conscience.
Compared to a proper saint’s tale, the first and indeed even the second of these episodes might seem a little anaemic – they tells us little about the priests, except that they could be under a kind of divine protection. There are also no obvious miracles, no water becoming wine. Yet to say there are no miracles at all would be to disregard one of the central themes of the work. Early on, the bishop says that “where there is great love there are always miracles.” Indeed, that “one might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love.”
The whole moral core of Death Comes for the Archbishop is in encouraging readers to see the little miracles already present in life, rather than sitting around waiting for a parting of the waves that may never come. The novel primes us for such a view on the level of language. The desolately beautiful New Mexican landscape is perfect for seeing the divine, with its mesas “resembling vast cathedrals”, and its gardens “miraculously endowed with the power to burst into delicate foliage and flowers”, to give two examples. Indeed, it is a work where we are never far from something that we could call miraculous, even if it is small – a good deed, an unexpected reconciliation.
Another way that the novel infuses its language with a sense of the divine is through its use of tenses. God is a being outside of time, who sees it all as a whole, rather than broken into now and then and what lies ahead. Death comes for the Archbishop gives us such a godly view of time by flattening the distinctions between the narrated and the future:
“The wiry little priest whose life was to be a succession of mountain ranges, pathless deserts, yawning canyons and swollen rivers, who was to carry the Cross into territories yet unknown and unnamed, who would wear down mules and horses and scouts and stage-drivers, to-night looked apprehensively at his superior and repeated, “No more, Jean. This is far enough.”
The narration here looks forward, adopting the pose of a benevolent, all-knowing being with its “to be” and “would” phrases. It is comforting, again in the way that the life of a saint is – we know that all will turn out right, because all is known by our narrator from the start. Such a mode does have its problems, though. If the transition from Mexican rule to a hostile American and then ultimately benevolent American rule has a sense of fatedness as it takes place here, the novel seems to be accepting injustice rather than preaching real action of the sort that, say, Liberation Theology would. Bad things now are not as bad as they seem, because one day things really will be good – such seems the argument.
Through the episodic structure we are given the highlights of a life that emphasise such a positive vision of time and history. We see Kit Carson, a brilliant hunter, primarily as a family man and noble American, with his slaughter of native Americans pushed into the background within the text. In a similar way, we hear about moments of illness among the two priests, but only at the end must we actually confront their weakness and the idea of them feeling any doubt. While there is plenty of criticism of American treatment of native Americans in the text, this too is in the background – such a critique is not the point of the book, whose concern is with individuals. The poverty of native Americans is less important in Death Comes for the Archbishop than individual native Americans’ kindness and their respect for nature.
Two novels came to mind as I read, for different reasons. Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory is set in nearby Mexico, but it differs significantly in its treatment of religious morality compared to Cather’s work. I also thought of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, which are to me a better source of a religious view of the world than any other work of fiction or non-fiction that I know.
It has been some time since I read the Greene, but what I remember was being challenged by the way it presented action, one that was inconsistent or could easily be subjected to criticism by one who did not share the underlying Catholic, or Christian, beliefs. In Greene’s novel a priest, during a time of antireligious persecution in Mexico, chooses to remain in that country and try to save individual souls, even as his presence in the lives of others puts them in great danger by drawing onto them the searchlight of state violence. On a strict utilitarian reading, it’s impossible to read the work as anything other than the story of a foolish man whose hope to save others’ souls leads to the early deaths of several people. The religious and the humanist are simply incompatible here, which forces the serious reader to acknowledge that fence-sitting will not work – one must choose the hard religious path or the humanist one.
Death Comes for the Archbishop does not challenge or shape one’s faith in the same way. The work’s stories show, in muted, pleasant tones, the challenges of mission for the priests – their exile from their French homeland, then eventually from one another. The novel does not, however, present their travails as things we readers should expect to encounter for ourselves. These are personal challenges, not challenges of faith.
Elsewhere, the morality of the work is too simple to stand alongside Greene. The priests do good wherever they go, and even when evil is encountered, as is the case with the murderer they almost stay with, it is handled swiftly and without contradictions. The case of the murderer could have been a time to question the whether and how a church that expressly forbids killing can be so comfortable with a state which hangs its criminals. Instead, it fits neatly into the text’s general thematic optimism – things can only get better, guided by God’s hand.
Any comparison with Robinson’s novels, meanwhile, must begin with the way that both authors turn the earth into a place of wonder and miracle. They share a common vision, where life and landscape become beautiful under the gaze of a believing observer. But for me the similarities end there because the works are differ quite fundamentally on the topic of doubt. The two priests of Cather’s novel are almost too simple for doubt. Bishop Latour, we learn, has a single worldly ambition – to build a Cathedral. Hardly the worst of sins. He tries, though he knows he should not, to keep Father Vaillant from his missionary work further afield, owing to his great affection for his friend. Again, a rather human matter. Cather writes: “It was the discipline of his life to break ties; to say farewell and move on into the unknown”. This is beautiful, but its resignation is the resignation of fate – such an outcome was inevitable. In the section “December Night” the bishop has a few paragraphs of doubt, where he feels that his efforts have been useless, “a house built upon sands”. But this mood passes as quickly as it came on when he is saved by another miracle, a chance to help a poor old woman.
Compare this to John Ames in Gilead. How boring this other work appears at first glance – an old man writing a letter to his son. But it gains its power first through its illuminating vision, and then through Ames’ doubt over his own personality. Specifically, he must come to terms with his dislike of a friend’s prodigal son, Jack Boughton, which he senses is interfering with his ability to act effectively as a servant of God. Where Bishop Latour feels his actions may have been for nought, Ames has to look into his own soul and consider whether it was living rightly. Ames’s doubt and self-reflection are therefore far deeper, and his victory over them far more moving, than that of Latour here.
My problem with Death Comes for the Archbishop is that there is something too easy about it. It is edifying but never challenging. With the simplicity of a Saint’s Life it shows two men who live well, working everyday miracles, and can die knowing they have left the world a better place. In the background, the rumblings of history – whether on slavery, or the conquest of northern Mexico, or the changing treatment of native Americans – all seem designed to present a picture that anyone can look at and nod sagely over. Like God, like the narrator, we can encompass the whole thing in a single vision, and see it as a story of progress. But these days such a simple vision seems naivety, or wilful ignorance – certainly not a strength.
I have seen many accounts and opinions that differ from my own. That the novel is beautiful is certain, and there’s a biblical clarity and charm to its tales. Yet underneath all that it seems a naive work, totally unwilling to engage in any serious way with the Catholic tradition besides a little bit of anti-Protestantism towards the end. The overall impression is that the Christianity is simply so much window-dressing. It’s Cather’s wishful thinking about faith, rather than faith seriously considered. The same story could easily have been told about anyone else, and nothing would have been lost. For that reason, perhaps, it appeals to us, and seems scented with immortality and hope. But these are only the scents of a work that ask of us nothing except that we read it and pat ourselves on the back. This is very far, I think, from St Anthony hearing he must give all he had to the poor, and getting up and doing just that.