Mary Gordon and the New Gospel

Mary Gordon’s use of the most eloquent passage in St. Paul’s writings as her epigraph for Men and Angels (Random House, 1985) seems to suggest a sea change in her attitude toward religion. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity. I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” But this is not the case. Understanding what St. Paul means by charity, she deliberately rejects it, as she did in the two preceding novels. Charity is the love of God before all things and the love of neighbor because of one’s love of God. Charity is the will’s choice of God based on one’s ‘limited knowledge of Him. St. Paul’s words resonate, of course, with those of Christ in Mark’s gospel (12:28-34).

The first commandment, and the greatest, is that we must love the Lord our God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. The second is that we must love our neighbor as ourselves. Christ was the first to bring the two together, establishing in unity a clear priority. The most important characteristic of modernism is the reversal of the priority established by Christ. Since the Renaissance, the thrust of liberal Christianity has been toward ethical humanism with man at the center of the universe. Miss Gordon seems to resent the wonderful complexity of the two Christian commandments so intricately joined into the mystery which explains all. James Hitchcock has recently called attention to Max Scheler’s use of ressentiment to describe the person who cannot accept God because His existence is an unwarranted intrusion on the self. Child of her age, Miss Gordon’s tutor might have been Leigh Hunt, the 19th-century romantic who wrote “Abou Ben Adhem” with its message of the triumph of humanism. The Lord’s angel is writing in his golden book the names of those who love the Lord, and Abou’s name is not among them. He instructs the angel to “write me as one who loves his fellow men.” Returning the next night, the angel shows Abou the names of those whom “the love of God has blessed,” and “lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.”

“If I were a Christian,” says the witty, cynical Sutter in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman, “I shouldn’t hesitate to identify the anti-Christ. Leigh Hunt.” Abou Ben Adhem typifies the person who is pleased with himself for serving man for man’s sake and leaving God out of it; “by heaven, says [God], here is a stout fellow when you come to think of it to serve his fellow man with no thanks to me, and so God swallows his pride and packs off the angel to give Abou the good news—the new Gospel.” It is this new Gospel which is at the center of Miss Gordon’s novels. When the commandments are reversed, the first commandment put mistakenly in second place ceases to have any meaning at all.

Final Payments (1978): “Christ had died, but it was not death I wanted. It was life and the body…”

The Company of Women (1980): “I will not accept the blandishments of the religious life; I will not look to God for comfort, or for succor, or for sweetness.”

Men and Angels: “The only sane thing was to say that God was not within the Universe.”

She works the new Gospel into her narratives by dramatizing the perennial debate between flesh and spirit within the context provided by religion. The imperative tone of the debate is caused by the face (and fear) of death. Says a character in Final Payments: “My love had not kept him from death.” Gordon’s first novel opens with a funeral; her third ends with one. With respect to the flesh/spirit debate Miss Gordon is essentially puritanical, that is to say, not incarnational at all. The dread war between immanence and transcendence goes on without relief until one chooses a side; the Incarnation did not repair the wound, did not make the tension fruitful. The Catholic agrees with Gabriel Marcel that to love a being is to say, “Thou shalt not die.” Mary Gordon writes, “Everyone I knew and loved would die.”

Final Payments and The Company of Women deal with the flesh/spirit problem in the context of their heroines, idiocratic Catholicism—a kind of Jansenism mistaken for the real thing. “We must hate the world to love God,” since the human condition is radically corrupt. A temperament which regularly surfaces in the long history of Catholicism is made into a dogma identified as Catholicism, and a sad misunderstanding of the meaning of suffering is the result. In Final Payments Isabel learns this kind of religion from her father, the most powerful influence on her and a symbol for the Church. Victorian prudery is a virtue and sex inherently evil. Trapped by Calvinistic Catholicism, Isabel must cease believing in such a God and must break away to discover “ordinary human happiness,” a key phrase in Miss Gordon’s lexicon. After her father’s death, she buys some fashionable clothes, gets a job and has two affairs to prove how comfortable she can be with her body. Since Isabel is so attached to her father/Church, however, she is not let off so easily. Ashamed of her irresponsible conduct, she wills herself into a life of penance by taking responsibility for the person in the world by whom she is most repelled, Margaret, her family’s former housekeeper: yellow skin, a gray and dangerous face, full of damp ignorant pieties. It was to be “a pure act like the choice of a martyr’s death, a guarantee of salvation.” If she could truly love Margaret, “I would have conquered myself.”

Ironically, the resolution to her problem comes during the Passion Week liturgies. Christ suffered in His body; she had astonishing pleasures with hers. His friends betrayed him; hers stood beside her in “a miracle of love.” Christ died; she wanted life and her body, which was given to her for pleasure. The miracle is not death and resurrection; the miracle is life itself bravely testing death. It is enough to have been born once. Her “final payment” to Margaret is all of her money in calculated defiance of St. Paul’s injunction, “If I distribute all my goods to feed the poor… yet do not have charity, it profits me nothing.” Having discovered the wonders of the flesh and knowing how terrible it is to be deprived of it, she puts herself “in the center of the universe.” She could give up her money, but she did not have “to give up my life.” She wants “the rewards of a reasonable life.” Acting sentimentally, she is “sure she is doing the right thing” when she encourages the suicide of an old woman whose body is failing her. Even her father, in a puzzling break from his character, teaches her the new Gospel. “I love you more than I love God. I love you more than God loves you.” Isabel consciously sets up a rival good to God’s and chooses it.

Although there is nothing to replace the Church, and although Isabel misses the certainty the Church gave its believers, she does not miss the people or what Catholicism has done to them. The standard WASP is the norm by which Catholics are found wanting: “… it is best to have been born Protestant, for… all those Protestant virtues my father never talked about: discipline, and quiet, and a deep unstated sympathy. And wonderful bones that Catholics never have.” The Protestant who represents these values most clearly is Jane in Men and Angels. She is cool, poised, surrounded by elegance and knows how to set a table properly. (Can it be that Miss Gordon is a bit of a snob?)

Catholics, on the other hand, are overweight or underweight, with bad taste in shoes and bad complexions. They are not glamorous, do not spend money and do not care about clothes. They are made uncomfortable by smart, tall women and well-dressed men. Catholicism is a pretty mindless thing associated with the American Legion and the V.F.W. and somehow or other implicated in the war in Vietnam. Catholics are for Senator Joe McCarthy and against Social Security because it violates the spirit of poverty. The working-class Irish, especially, are always defending indefensible things like “the virginity of Mary, the C.I.A.” Donations are “typical Catholic blood money. You starve your family to keep alive some lunatic in Canada who thinks he has the stigmata.” Catholics have outdoor statues of the Virgin Mary bathed in iridescent light; they drink Lourdes water for miraculous cures. They are taught that great literature is harmless but a waste of time. Catholic girls have the miraculous medal pinned to their bras, and are marked by energetic cleanliness and a desperate lack of fashion. They wear glasses and are bosomless. Grace Kelly is their ideal.

The above is admittedly a collage, but it represents fairly the anti-Catholic rhetoric in the two novels in which Catholicism is the central subject. There are the gratuitous insults as well: “No one in a Catholic college would have been allowed to have an [untidy] office like this; some nun would have seen it, throwing out perhaps a half century’s research wrapped in old newspapers, for the love of Our Lord.” Nuns, like this preternaturally tidy one, never sweat because they didn’t want sex. Having God, Catholics do not need nature.

Yet, the women in The Company of Women, all but one passionately admired by the author, are dedicated Catholics and remarkable each in her own way. “When they all came together they were something.” The company of women gather around Father Cyprian, who, like Isabel’s father, is a symbol of the Church, “the chosen and appointed one” who sustains their lives through his teaching and ministry. The message of Fr. Cyprian (like that of Isabel’s father) is that “You must hate the world and love God.” Like Isabel’s father, too, he questions this idea at the end of his life.

Felicitas, the daughter of the company of women, is destined for great things, probably in the Church. Cyprian is her principal teacher; their closeness is remarkable. “I will never love anyone,” she says, “as I love you.” The comparison with Isabel and her father is again obvious. But her name is already a foreshadowing of her rebellion; she was called after “the one virgin martyr whose name contained some hope for ordinary human happiness.” The extraordinary gift Cyprian offers her—heroism—must be rejected. Although Cyprian would die for her, “he won’t let me live.” What Felicitas wants, like Isabel, is “an ordinary life… I want to do normal things.”

Cyprian defines the terms within which her choice must be made.

This beauty all around us modern man mistakes for God. Pantheism. Natural beauty is only a reflection of divine beauty. It has no meaning in itself. We love it only in that it is a foretaste of the beauty of God. It is a particularly American error, the love of nature for its own sake…. But nature is not like God; it is capricious, it is amoral, it does not partake of divine reason. It has nothing to teach us.

Part of this statement is Catholic dogma and part of it is simply an expression of temperament. Felicitas understands all of it as dogma and rejects it. For Felicitas, the body is part of nature; her rebellion takes the form of a live-in-and-with arrangement, caricatured beyond credibility. After the birth of her daughter, she rejects that irresponsible chaos. However, her goal—happiness on earth—has not changed. While Fr. Cyprian remains the most powerful person in her life, she rejects the two central ideas of his Catholicism—original sin and the authority of the Church. I think she also finally rejects God, because in the Calvinistic Catholic view she has learned from Cyprian, the spirit and flesh can never be reconciled; this world offers nothing. But love, she concludes, is strictly a thing of the flesh and is satisfied only in a human way. The following passage, otherwise garbled, is clear on this point.

I cannot talk about God…. I alone have no spiritual life. It is Cyprian’s fault; he trained me too well, trained me against the sentimental, the susceptibility of the heart…. God will have to meet me on the high ground of reason, and there He’s a poor contender.

As a result, Felicitas turns into a romantic sentimentalist with a vengeance. If she could see the face of God not as a necessity but as a reward for her personal agonizing search, then she would look for Him. There is, however, no room for Him in her heart, which is occupied by her daughter, her mother, Cyprian and the women she loves. “I will not submit myself.” All such non serviams have been, I suspect, the result of sentimentality; Gordon’s is no exception. Even Cyprian (like Isabel’s father) falters into sentimentality at the end. In a very uncharacteristic monologue he fears that because of his love of Felicitas, he has betrayed the priestly love he vowed to live by. “I am doomed like the rest of my kind to the terrible ringed accident of human love. I am pulled down by the irresistible gravity of affection and regard. These are the people I love.” Earthly happiness is the true end of mankind. The love of man is the ultimate good insofar as ultimates have any meaning at all.

After completing this novel, Miss Gordon said in an interview that she has “real religious life in a framework which I think of as Catholic. But I don’t think John Paul II would be real pleased with it.” Even the casual reader will perceive that Catholicism provides the framework of values for Final Payments and The Company of Women. One must wonder, however, what she means by the first sentence in light of her second. Michael Novak’s definition of the new gnosticism comes to mind: “a make-it-yourself faith of heartfelt reinterpretations.” I think it applies to Miss Gordon’s “Catholicism.” Max Scheler’s ressentiment finds its expression not only in apostasy but, perhaps even more troubling, in those who consider themselves Catholic, as Miss Gordon did, but whose roots are no longer in orthodoxy. The components of their make-it-yourself faith have been cataloged by James Hitchcock. Such ressentiment, he has noted, is connected with the growth of “therapeutic Christianity” manifested now by the “denial or evasion” of absolute moral standards, the encouragement of concern for self, and the “assumption that religion has as one of its main purposes to encourage the self-fulfillment of individuals.”

In Men and Angels religion is associated with the character of Laura who resonates temperamentally with Isabel’s father and Fr. Cyprian. Each stands for the denial of the body in order to enhance the spirit. Described as looking puritanical, Laura has none of their attractiveness nor their Catholicism. Her religion is self-discovered from an obsessive reading of the Bible in an effort to compensate for her unhappy life. One of the elect, she must not only leave mother and father, she must convince herself that all human love is unimportant. Unless one is elected, he drowns in his evil flesh. If elected, one is spirit, “chosen, favored of the Lord.” Interestingly, there is no hint from the author that Laura’s Bible reading is highly selective, concentrated only on special texts taken out of context. She makes no reference, for instance, to the parable of the prodigal son, the ur-text of parental love.

Anne, the protagonist, has much in common with Laura. Both feel rejected by their mothers and both dislike their sisters. Laura prefers Anne’s house to her mother’s as Anne prefers Jane’s house to her mother’s. They instinctively buy the right presents for each other. Even though Anne thoroughly dislikes Laura, she is the side of Anne that would have developed if Anne had embraced the spirit—”a religious life.” In rejecting Laura, Anne rejects the spirit. The insanity (or wickedness) of the life of spirit is supposed to become evident to the reader when the spirit counsels suicide, a bloody cleansing for Laura after Anne has rejected her. (Isabel, however, had also counseled suicide.)

Anne does not understand the religious life. Religion is “an alien land, and one she had no inclination to explore.” Her mother, having had all she could take of Catholicism, brought up Anne without religion. She knows only this world, is only of this world. She has seemingly found the “ordinary human happiness” for which Isabel and Felicitas sought. In Anne’s world Laura is a sign of the failure of transcendent love, as Margaret is such a sign for Isabel in Final Payments. “She had to admit it; she didn’t like Laura. Liking—you couldn’t will it; it wasn’t a quality like courage or fair-mindedness that you could work for.” Anne confuses the love we feel for individuals with the love we are enjoined to have for our fellow man because of the love of God. For Anne, only the love of this world counted. Looking at Laura’s remains, she muses, “Ash and bone. Nothing that could come to life. The spirit could breathe and breathe over it, but there would be no quickening.” She remembered a woman who lost her senses of taste and smell and could no longer feel anything for her family, even though she said she loved them. A year later the senses came back and only then could she feel love for her family. Even goodness is not enough to win love without “the grease of accident”—looks or wit—to start the “machinery” of affection. Even though human love is abundant it is won only by chance in a “monstrous game of luck. Fate was too honorable a name for it. You were born, and you were laid open to the world. And the world raised its whip against the child, or sheltered it with its soft wing, and waited, always waited, to bring down the whip.”

Jane, Anne’s standard of conduct, contends that Laura missed the whole point of the Gospels, which is that the love of God “is always insufficient for the human heart. It can’t keep us from despair as well as the most ordinary human kindness from a stranger. The love of God means nothing to a heart that is starved of human love.” It is toward this very economical statement of the new Gospel that Miss Gordon’s novels have been heading. Psalm 121 is read at Laura’s funeral: “My help cometh from the Lord Who made heav4n and earth.” So beautiful “and such a lie” is Anne’s comment. “The only sane thing was to say that God was not within the universe. Or it was God who held the razor to Laura’s wrists.” As Isabel gave Margaret merely money because she could not love her, Anne, offering Laura’s ashes to the wind, promises to mourn her because she could not love her. And so we are back to the words of St. Paul, “If I distribute all my goods to the poor, and if I deliver my body to be burned, yet do not have charity, it profits me nothing.”

Surely Miss Gordon knows this passage as well as the lines that precede it, her epigraph for this novel. Her position, consequently, seems quite clear. Like Robert Frost, she holds that earth is the best place for love; nowhere is it likely to go better. And yet, also like Frost, the earth is the comprehensive sign of mutability. Even the greatest love cannot hold back death. “This is life. What shall we make of it? For it is terrible, and shining, and our hearts are sore. Something dreadful has happened to us; more will happen: terrible, beautiful, there is no way of telling. And anything might lie and then uncoil and strike, in silence, in the darkness.” “Darkness” is the final word; no one knows what kills or saves. “There is no guarantee.”

Christ’s sweetest promise was that He would not leave us orphans, but in Mary Gordon’s work all of the prominent characters are orphan-like. They turn away from the love of God for the love of man; they give up an enduring blessing for a temporary one which has only, at best, accidental success. The love of parent for child fails Isabel in Final Payments. In The Company of Women, Felicitas rejects what her “father” and her multiple mothers have to offer her. In Men and Angels the parents of Anne, Laura, Jane, Caroline, Stephen, Michael, Ben and Betty fail them. One is forced to consider what Linda, her daughter, will say of Felicitas one day when she grows up. And what will Peter and Sarah say of their mother, Anne? Linda may exclaim that “We are not dying,” but our condition is in fact only a momentary stay against death. “Everyone is old… Soon they will die.” Darkness is indeed the final word.

Author

  • Joseph Shwartz

    At the time this article was written, Joseph Schwartz was Professor of English at Marquette University, where he was also editor of Renascence, a quarterly journal of literary criticism.

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