by John Updike
The tone, too, is transformed; in Another Country Greene is very much the exasperated tourist, hating Mexican food, manners, hotels, rats, mosquitoes, mule rides, souvenirs, and ruins. He even inveighs against the “hideous inexpressiveness of brown eyes.” In the novel, as it shows a Mexican moving among Mexicans, and these generally the most lowly and impoverished, all querulousness has vanished, swallowed by matters of life and death and beyond. There are hints of a redeeming mood even in Another Country: “What had exhausted me in Chiapas was simply physical exertion, unfriendliness, boredom; life among the dark groves of leaning crosses was at any rate concerned with eternal values.” The whisky priest, who before The Power and the Glory opens has been stripped of his livelihood and the flattery of the pious, in the course of the novel loses his attaché case and suit; he is stripped down to his eternal value, or valuelessness. Greene, at a low ebb in his Chiapas travels, took shelter in a roadside hut, “a storehouse for corn, but it contained what you seldom find in Mexico, the feel of human goodness.” The old man living there gave up his bed—“a dais of earth covered with a straw mat set against the mound of corn where the rats were burrowing”—to Greene, who wrote of the moment, “All that was left was an old man on the verge of starvation living in a hut with the rats, welcoming the strangers without a word of payment, gossiping gently in the dark. I felt myself back with the population of heaven.” Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Graham Greene’s sympathy with the poor in spirit, with the world’s underdogs, preceded his religious conversion and survives it, apparently: he doubted to Norman Sherry that he still believes in God and in A Sort of Life says, “Many of us abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens.” His religious faith always included a conviction that, as he put it in an essay on Eric Gill in 1941, “Conservatism and Catholicism should be … impossible bedfellows.” In 1980, reflecting upon Mexico in Ways of Escape (where he describes how The Power and the Glory was written, back in London, in the afternoons, slowly, on Benzedrine, after mornings of racing through The Confidential Agent), Greene complains that the contemporary Mexican government is not left-wing enough, compared with Cuba’s. His sympathies have led him into a stout postwar anti-Americanism and a rather awkward pleading for the likes of Castro and Kim Philby. But the energy and grandeur of his finest novel derive from the same will toward compassion, an ideal Communism more Christian than Communist. Its unit is the individual, not any class. The priest sees in the dark prison cell that “When you visualised a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it.”
To Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
by Karl Barth
KARL BARTH’S INSISTENCE upon the otherness of God seemed to free him to be exceptionally (for a theologian) appreciative and indulgent of this world, the world at hand. His humor and love of combat, his capacity for friendship even with his ideological opponents, his fondness for his tobacco and other physical comforts, his tastes in art and entertainment were heartily worldly, worldly not in the fashion of those who treat this life as a way-station and testing-ground but of those who embrace it as a piece of Creation. The night of his death, he was composing a lecture in which he wrote, in a tremulous but even hand, that “God is not a God of the dead but of the living.” Not long before this, Barth made notes foreseeing his death and the manifestation before “the judgment seat of Christ” of his “whole ‘being’ ”—his being “with all the real good and the real evil that I have thought, said and done, with all the bitterness that I have suffered and all the beauty that I have enjoyed.” Foremost for him in the ranks of beauty stood the music of Mozart, music which he placed, famously and almost notoriously, above the music of Bach and all others as a sounding out of God’s glory. He began each day with the playing of a Mozart record, partook of Mozart celebrations and festivals, and conscientiously served as a member of the Swiss Mozart Committee, which included the government minister Carl Burkhardt and the conductor Paul Sacher. “If I ever get to heaven,” he said, in the first tribute printed in this posthumous collection, “I would first of all seek out Mozart.”
It is good to have together, in this slim volume, Barth’s formal pronouncements upon his—so to speak—idol, not only for the charm and ardor with which he addresses the subject but for what light his praise sheds upon that question which, despite all the voluminous dogmatics and the superabundance of lectures, sermons, and incidental utterances that Barth’s long and industrious life produced, remains a bit obscure in his version of Christianity: the question What are we to do?b Granted that the situation of the world and of the individual life is as desperate as Barth paints it, and granted that the message of the Bible, and of the Pauline epistles in particular, is just as he explicates it, amid these radical truths how shall we conduct our daily lives? Does not God’s absolute otherness diminish to zero the significance of our petty activity and relative morality?
Yet Mozart’s activity, his playing, is regarded by Barth as exemplary, and the intensity and the freedom of his playing exonerate, it would seem, Mozart’s narrowness, his ignorance of his era’s science, politics, and philosophy, and the disastrous naïveté with which he conducted his practical affairs. Barth’s attitude toward Mozart puts me in mind, incongruously, of Walt Whitman’s praise, in “Song of Myself,” of animals:
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
Like those beautiful and guiltless animals, Mozart’s music says Yea; hearing it, Barth tells us, “one can live.” By focusing so purely, so simply, upon the making of music, Mozart, like Whitman’s panther who “walks to and fro on a limb overhead,” gives us an example of tending to business, of channelling and reflecting, within the specialized talent, divine energy. Mozart, superb creature, “never knew doubt.” His “ever present lightness” exalts him above all other composers; Barth marvels at “how this man, while truly mastering his craft and always striving toward greater refinement, nevertheless manages never to burden his listeners—especially not with his creative labors!”
And yet a Yea, to have weight and significance for us, must overpower and contain a Nay, and so in Mozart’s limpid outpouring Barth also hears “something very demanding, disturbing, almost provocative, even in the most radiant, most childlike, most joyful movements.” “What he translated into music was real life in all its discord.” His music reflects the conflicts and passions of his time as fully as the omnivorous mind of Goethe. A tireless absorber of the musical currents around him, Mozart “moved freely within the limits of the musical laws of his time, and then later ever more freely. But he did not revolt against these laws; he did not break them.” It is in his consideration of Mozart’s freedom that Barth becomes most theological, most instructive, and even most musicological: this ideal man, Mozart, carrying the full baggage of human woe and of temporal convention and restraint, possesses his freedom through a “triumphant turn” out of Nay into Yea. This turn is construed as more admirable than Goethe’s sovereign humanism or Schleiermacher’s location of a neutral center whereon balance can be achieved: “What occurs in Mozart is rather a glorious upsetting of the balance, a turning in which the light rises and the shadows fall, though without disappearing, in which joy overtakes sorrow without extinguishing it, in which the Yea rings louder than the ever-present Nay.”
“Though without disappearing”—thus the theologian acknowledges the inextinguishable problem of evil. He implies a cosmic paradigm in the way in which Mozart sweeps into his magnificent lightness everything problematical, painful, and dark. Mozart’s music, for Barth, has the exact texture of God’s world, of divine comedy. Hearing it, he is “transported to the threshold of a world which in sunlight and storm, by day and by night, is
a good and ordered world.” The order is, in Mozart, deeply assimilated and not a kind of exoskeleton, a message, as in Bach. Nor is Mozart engaged in personal confession, like Beethoven. Between the creedal and the personal, he embodies the vital, the “living God” so recurrent in Barth’s phraseology: Mozart’s music, like the teeming drama of the Bible and like good crisis theology, gives us permission to live. “With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live”: thus Barth speaks directly to Mozart, in a tone of profound gratitude. Those who have not felt the difficulty of living have no need of Barthian theology; but, then, perhaps they also have no ear for music.
* The single exception is “The Stoker,” published as Der Heizer, Ein Fragment in 1913 but now incorporated, in German and in English, as the first chapter of Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika.
† His application for employment at the Assicurazioni Generali gives his height as 1.81 meters, or over five foot eleven.
‡ The full text of her description is preserved as an introduction to the Modern Library edition of Seven Gothic Tales.
§ She takes sex most seriously, and writes about it with a searchingness few fiction writers can match. The young hero of “The Roads Round Pisa,” Count Augustus von Schimmelmann, poses something like Freud’s deplored question “What does a woman want?” Having newly met an arresting young woman, he expresses distress at her low opinion of men, and tells her, “It has happened to me many times that a lady has told me that I was making her unhappy, and that she wished that she and I were dead, at a time when I have tried hardest to make her happy. It is so many years now since Adam and Eve … were first together in the garden, that it seems a great pity that we have not learned better how to please one another.”
The girl ponders and answers that God, when He created Adam and Eve, “arranged it so that man takes, in these matters, the part of a guest, and woman that of hostess. Therefore man takes love lightly, for the honor and dignity of his house is not involved therein.” She goes on, “Now, tell me, Count, what does a guest want?”
He ventures that a guest wants “first of all to be diverted,” then “to shine, to expand himself and impress his own personality upon his surroundings,” and, lastly, perhaps “to find some justification for his existence altogether.” Then he asks in turn, “What does a hostess want?”
“The hostess,” said the young lady, “wants to be thanked.”
‖ He bore some animus as well, an informant from Pottsville wrote me, against the Irish of the town; the O’Haras evidently felt snubbed by the Irish elite, headed by the McQuails, and Harry Reilly was supposedly modelled on Billy McQuail.
a “It was a Ralph Barton drawing, a lot of shoppers, all with horribly angry or stern faces, hating each other and themselves and their packages, and above the figures of the shoppers was a wreath and the legend: Merry Xmas.” The date of the cover—the artist’s only one—is December 13, 1930. Barton had committed suicide between then and the writing of this book, and perhaps this mention is O’Hara’s tribute to a fallen fellow convivialist.
b “I hardly dare and yet I do dare to hope that no one will come to me now and say, Well, then, what shall we do about it?” Barth told the auditors of his brilliant exposé of Christian perplexity in “The Word of God and the Task of the Ministry.” “If the situation is as I have described it,” he goes on, “it seems to me that it is out of place to speak of what we ought to do. The question is simply or not whether we recognize this to be the situation.”
MORALISTS
The Gospel According to St. Matthew
MATTHEW might be described as the workhorse of the four Gospel writers, the establishment man. His version of the story of Jesus traditionally begins the New Testament and continues to be placed first among the canonical four Gospels, even though Mark’s has been recognized since the 1830s as most probably the earliest composed, and therefore (presumably) the most authentic and the least overlaid by wishful thinking and concealed doctrinal pleading. Mark has his electric compactness and swiftness of narrative, Luke has those tender human episodes (the annunciation, the birth of John, the nativity in the manger, the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple at Jerusalem, the story of Mary and Martha, the parables of the prodigal son and the pearl of great price, the good criminal on the cross, the appearances of the risen Jesus at Emmaus and Jerusalem) absent from the other Gospels, and John has his animated dialogues and Platonic outbursts. Compared with these writers, Matthew is a drab and not entirely appealing “safe man” who manfully handles Christian belief’s awkward lumber—the threats of hellfire and outer darkness and the, to a modern reader, irksome insistence upon Christ’s life as a detailed fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. But one cannot speak of any of the Gospels as the exclusive product of a writer’s personality and inspiration, for all drew upon the same body of oral tradition and contain numerous parallel if not identical passages.
Aside from a few glancing and problematical references in Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus, the biography related in the Gospels left no trace in contemporary non-Christian annals. However, Paul’s epistles, which predate even Mark, and the Acts of the Apostles, composed by the author of Luke, verify that there was a historical Jesus, whose life and death exerted a transforming influence upon, first, an inner circle of disciples and followers and, within a generation of his death, groups of worshippers throughout Palestine and, by the next generation, much of the Roman world. The Gospel writers belong, it is likely, to the second generation of Christians after the apostles, though early church tradition claims Mark to have been dictated by Peter, and John to have been the actual work of one of the twelve, John son of Zebedee, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” recalling these events as a very old man in Ephesus around the year 100 A.D.
No other texts have suffered such a weight of analysis, yet there is still opportunity for scholars to disagree over such basics as the date, place, and order of their composition, and for significant flaws to be found in every theory. Nevertheless, venerable scholarly consensus dates Mark at about 65 A.D., and places Matthew ten or fifteen years later—certainly after the destruction of the Temple in 70, an event to which Jesus is made to allude in 23:38. Matthew follows, with some deviations and improvements of Greek, Mark’s narrative, adding to it a wealth of sayings and teaching present also in Luke: the body of material in common constitutes the well-known hypothetical document Q, named from the German Quelle for “source.” While Matthew and Luke did not have exactly the same Q in front of them, and small discrepancies abound, it is roughly true that Matthew = Mark + Q and that Luke = Mark + Q + the considerable body of narrative and preachment present only in Luke, called by some scholars S. And if these three “synoptic” gospels are thought of as thus progressively sedimentary, then the Gospel of John is like a metamorphic rock in which these strata have been violently annealed but in which recognizable veins remain. Nineteenth-century scholars, in working upon the Gospels, naturally thought in terms of men manipulating written texts. Many of the puzzles they formulated, concerning the inconsistencies and variations among the texts, disappear if we imagine the Gospel writers as independently drawing upon a lively body of oral history—a body that threatened, as the Christian community became more scattered and diverse, to become ever more distorted and open to inauthentic, notably Gnostic, incursions. By the last quarter of the first Christian century, a written testament was necessary if the movement was to remain coherent. Luke’s dedication of his Gospel to Theophilus evokes a scene of growing confusion wherein “many have undertaken to arrange in narrative form such accounts of the momentous happenings in our midst as have been handed down to us by the original eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word.”*
Those of us who call ourselves Christians, then, look through the Gospels that did emerge from the first century as through a cloudy glass toward a brilliant light. But the Gospel writers, whether rememberers or editors
of others’ memories, themselves were looking through accretions of written and oral history toward events as distant from them as World War II is from us. Their thumbprints, as it were, cannot be rubbed off the glass; at the outset of this century Albert Schweitzer demonstrated in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus that no pleasingly liberal Jesus—no purely political revolutionary stripped of superstitious accretions, no sweet Jesus who is all beatitude—can be extracted from the Gospel record, which is supernatural to its core. Yet Mark, by itself, is a rather cryptic storm of parable and miracle, which begins when Jesus appears, fully grown, “coming from Nazareth in Galilee,” to be baptized, and which ends at the point where three of his female followers come to the tomb in search of his crucified body and are greeted by “a young man in a white robe” who tells them that Jesus “has risen: he is not here.” Though he also tells the women, “Do not be afraid,” the text of Mark judged to be authentic ends with the sentence “They said not a word to anyone, because they feared.” The triumphant and redeeming end of the story, Christ’s miraculous resurrection, is mysteriously muted in this ending, and a writer of the second century, in a style of Greek plainly not Mark’s, appended twelve verses outlining some of Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances to the apostles and containing his charge to them to “Go into every part of the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation.” These added verses, included in all Bibles, are canonical but not Marcan; in what survives of echt Mark, Jesus disappears from the tomb as casually as he appears at the Jordan to be baptized by John. There is no nativity story, and no follow-up of the empty tomb. Nor is there much explanation of Jesus’s announcement, “The time has come, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and put your trust in the Good News.” The news we are given concerns a young man, a paragon of vitality and poetic assertion, who after an indeterminate period of itinerant preaching and miraculous healing in Palestine is taken prisoner in Jerusalem by the Roman authorities at the request of the Jewish priesthood and ignominiously put to death, crying out on the cross, in his language of Aramaic, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani—My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”