Spendthrift mercy: Christianity & the 'psychopathic saint.' (Cover Story)

Kenneth Burke used to talk about "perspective by incongruity": cocking one's head a different angle, taking a quirky (even cranky) look at some subject in order to see it anew, relieved of one's normal perspective with its accumulated associations. A kind of phenomenological gambit. I'm going to make some observations about an odd moral ambivalence in the Christian mechanics of mercy: a certain imaginative relation between criminality and grace. This will require a somewhat serpentine process of thought--and I appreciate the irony of that adjective.

Recall the scene in William Styron's Sophie's Choice when the choice is forced. Auschwitz. Prisoners to left or right; sorted for death now or later. SS doctor "Jemand yon Niemand," finding that Sophie Zawistowska is neither Jewish nor Communist but Catholic, grants a dispensation to one of Sophie' s children but not to both, if she will choose which. Styron then provides a motive for this Dr. Somebody McNobody: What he "lusted to do" was inflict upon someone "a totally unpardonable sin," a lusting which showed that "his strivings were essentially religious." Pursuing with sullen mechanical monotony his bestial offices in a place where every sin is possible, so much so that sin itself has vanished with the loss of distinction and meaning, the doctor had begun to wonder "Wo, wo ist der lebende Gott?" and had come to "his own realization that the absence of sin and the absence of God were inseparably intertwined." So, "while his soul thirsted for beatitude," he recreated God by recreating sin through Sophie's choice.

A great deal of Styron' s novel gave me trouble, but, odd to say, this grotesque parody of religiosity did not. Not that one finds the "holy sin," even in less repulsive forms than Dr. Jemand yon Niemand's, endorsed by Christian doctrine as a mode of religious striving---of course not. Not even Kierkegaard's notion that the greatest sinners are often the most profoundly religious is a prescription for attaining salvation; it's only an undeniable observation. And in his passionate meditation on faith, Fear and Trembling, the "teleological suspension of the ethical" is not something recommended to the reader: he is only challenged to admire the "knight of faith" like Abraham, who, with dread in his heart, not certainty in his mind, would slay his son at the Lord's command. "No one is so great as Abraham! Who is capable of understanding him?" And the reader is allowed to sigh relief that few are called upon to imitate Abraham. The modern reader, on meeting today such a knight of faith who claimed to be acting on instructions from the Lord, would say "he's simply quite mad," and I doubt that one would find very easily a priest who would disagree.

But even so, the Abraham and Isaac story is of a man who would obey the Lord and kill if commanded, and that is a different thing from commanding life and death by one's own will as a surreal and chillingly inane (however poetic!) way of attaining beatitude. There is no prescription for this nonsense in Christian doctrine. But the matter is just not that simple.

Although the holy sinner remains outside Christian doctrine, the holy sinner has long fascinated those broadly or closely within the Christian tradition: that figure of obscure and crippled "election" reaching back as far as Judas Iscariot, whom some Christians are startled to find at the pit of Dante' s Inferno, having unthinkingly assumed he was somehow yet saved, such is, in Graham Greene' s phrase with the pregnant ellipsis, "the...appalling...strangeness of the mercy of God."

Thomas Mann's near-priest Naphta in The Magic Mountain, whose idea of Christian charity translates into totalitarian terror; his Adrian Leverktihn in Doctor Faustus, whose pact with the devil is conceived as an "irresistible challenge [for salvation] to the Everlasting Goodness"; Melville's Captain Ahab, whose spiritual size increases with his monomania, whose hatred of creation seems a poetic equivalent of prayer: call them "psychopathic saints," as are some figures who stride through Dostoevsky's "grotesque, apocalyptic realm of suffering," as Mann called it. I settle on Greene for the sake of his Pinkie Brown, "the Boy," the seventeen-year-old killer of Brighton Rock: emotionally impotent except for rage, culturally illiterate but for a certainty of hell' s existence, a maybe toward heaven, and a flickering memory of childhood lessons on mercy--"Between the stirrup and the ground, something he sought and something found." When he falls from cliff to death we don't know whether he sought and found or not, but he is the occasion for the priest's speculation on the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God. It would be false to suggest that Greene says the Boy is a saint of psychopathic variety. But the Boy' s nemesis, Ida Arnold, above (or below) complexities because she knows that Right is Right and Wrong is Wrong, is made into a kind of avenging angel of petit-bourgeois morality, and in comparison with her the Boy is made to seem fate-struck and singed with terrible grace. It's all so vague, evocative. But that's the point with the superior fascination of the blessed-damned over the plodding moralist who does good and even enjoys it.

Were the Boy literate he might have appreciated Flaubert's novella, The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitaller, the story of a boy-huntsman who massacres animals not for food but to sate a blood lust almost ascetic in its intensity, becomes a great soldier, eventually kills his own parents, does penance as a hermit-ferryman, and ultimately attains salvation. He warms the body of an apparent dying leper with his naked flesh in a parody of lovemaking, "mouth to mouth and chest to chest," until "the roof flew off, the firmament unrolled, and Julian rose towards the blue spaces, face to face with Our Lord Jesus, who carried him to heaven." On the surface, as it was on the stainedglass window of Rouen Cathedral where Flaubert found it: a legend of redemption through penance. But in the story' s logic: the legend of a figure so worthy of special grace because made so strange by his crimes. They are the prerequisites--such are irony, paradox, the mysteries!---of his salvation.

It's time to confess that for all my fascination with the psychopathic saint I am not truly as interested in him, member of a frail minority probably more literary than historical, as in what he tells us about the tradition that makes him even conceivable. "The church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from mercy," the priest in Greene's novel says. I find that a moving statement in its compassion. But, ironically, I also find it unsettling precisely in the liberality of its compassion. Whence the liberality?

In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels has tried to explain why in the pitched battle for the early church between gnosticism and what became orthodoxy, the orthodox won. Gnosticism with its claims to gnosis--"special knowledge" of the few beyond the essentials set down in Scripture--was really a form of spiritual elitism, and, in its intolerance of the human weakness for basic worldly comforts, a form of ascetic elitism. Had the gnostics won, the church would have been an anarchic collection of saints, each going wherever his gnosis led him. The bishops appreciated the danger and created a church more inclusive. As Pagels puts it, "Whoever confessed the creed, accepted the ritual of baptism, participated in worship, and obeyed the clergy was accepted as a fellow Christian. Seeking to unify the diverse churches...the bishops eliminated qualitative criteria for church membership." To evaluate each candidate for "spiritual maturity," as the gnostics would do, would exclude too many. "To become truly catholics--universal--the church rejected all forms of elitism," priesthood excepted, "attempting to include as many as possible within its embrace." It followed in effect the reasoning of Origen, the third-century church father, that (Pagels's words), "God would not have offered a way of salvation accessible only to an intellectual or spiritual elite. What the church teaches...must be simple, unanimous, accessible to all."

This inclusiveness is reasonable enough; indeed, I think it noble. But it's also an adjustment of religious requirements to those of human nature: not exactly the profound transformation of human nature on which the gnostics would have risked everything. So, on the one hand, with qualitative considerations compromised, you have a church which preaches against sin but is going to have to be rather tolerant of the sinner. Mercy isn't license, but it isn't a whip either. And on the other hand, while the orthodox won and created a church irrevocably inclusive, a community of the worthy and the unworthy (the church of Augustine, one might say, who had been both) with differences mediated by the function of mercy, gnosticism did not exactly lose, surviving (transformed) as a submerged presence in the Christian tradition. This is essential. Let me try to get it right.

Orthodoxy would forgive so much. Gnosticism, demanding so much, would seem a counterurge to the liberality. That's not the case, however, for gnosticism effectively did what it had no interest in doing: it indirectly seconded the liberality. The point is that the demands of gnosticism were seldom ethical. While ethics demands a certain modest, minimal clarity, the gnostic devoted his energies to a kind of blinding obscurity, as if tendering an invitation to be astonished at his brave grasp of the precarious rhythms of the ineffable. Rather than an ethics, gnosticism was a psychological assertiveness, a fevered epistemology: not a movement for correct behavior (although, shun the worldly!) but for special knowledge not constrained by canonical Scripture and morals. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Now, Saint Paul's elevation of faith over good works was surely not meant as a denigration of the latter--this in spite of the fact that Paul, in his revolutionary urgency, indulged an often violent rhetoric (in Romans especially) by which we are discharged from the law, dead to it, no longer its captives. But subsequent generations don't always read us as we would wish to be read. And if ours is a large world view, rich and paradoxical as Paul's was, it will assuredly be read in ways we don't conceive. (There seems to be some historical law governing here.) Those gnostic urges to special condition removed from biblical commands lived on in a kind of too-literal "Pauline" imagination, the unorthodox tradition of "antinomianism": the belief that since the elect receive salvation through the faith which is the free gift of grace and not through any personal moral effort, it follows that, first, the Mosaic Law has been superseded or rendered irrelevant, and, second, that the saved are free of mundane moral obligation.

The second-century radical, Marcion (a pure Paulist in his own eyes), would have rid Christianity of all Jewish "impurities," including the so-called Old Testament in its entirety. The sixteenth-century reformer, Johannes Agricola, proposed the extreme antinomian position as clearly as possible: "Art thou steeped in sin? [No matter.] If thou believest, thou art in salvation. And all who follow Moses must go to the devil. To the gallows with Moses." Martin Luther was often charged with antinomianism, even though he disputed with Agricola. Because of its emphasis on works, the Epistle of James was "an epistle of straw." As for the Mosaic, "We don't wish to see or hear Moses... .They wish to make Jews of us through Moses, but we shall not." Or, as Luther' s follower, Philip Melanchthon, put it in an amazing marriage of circumspect tone and revolutionary utterance, "It must be admitted that the Decalogue is abrogated." While not suggesting that Luther was an antinomian, I grasp the nature of the suspicion.

Is my psychopathic saint, then, an antinomian? Well, not quite; but it really doesn't matter. For the distance between formal antinomianism (good works not binding upon those of true gnosis and exaggerated spiritual status) and the psychopathic saint (who shows true spiritual worth through abomination, practicing a perversion of anti-pauline doctrine as it were, eaming salvation through bad works!) is a mark of their proximity. Ethical behavior, OK for hoi polloi, is not binding on them: perish the crude thought. And although neither antinomian nor holy sinner is endorsed by doctrine, they are, no matter how offensive the thought, within the tradition. But even so, they would have shriveled unto death without nourishment. And the nourishment lay in the great "good news" itself of Christianity: Mercy, in the dispensing of which, according to Greene's priest, God is appallingly strange.

But I don't want to rest upon a "genealogy" of sons, for I suspect that even had gnosticism not survived its death as heresy, the psychopathic saint would still have been imagined by someone responsive to what I can only call a rich and perilously fertile atmosphere in Christianity. How to put it?

Consider the hoary question of theodicy: Why evil in the creation of a benevolent Creator? Rather than ascribe to evil an autonomous and competitive essence (as the Manichees would), we should see, said Augustine, that apparently discrete evils have a place in the "splendor of the providential order" and "contribute to our benefit, if we make wise and appropriate use of them. Even poisons, which are disastrous when improperly used, are turned into wholesome medicine by their proper application" (City of God, XI, 22). Granted, in this particular passage Augustine speaks specifically of mundane distresses of the mortal flesh, it is nonetheless hard to avoid suspicions that such apparently innocent good sense is actually nothing less than an ambitious effort, in defense of doctrines of divine omnipotence, to incorporate the enemy as paradoxical agent in order to have it all. Probably no question has exercised the perplexed so much as "Why does God allow it?" no matter how often the theological intellect answers "It' s part of the divine plan." And some excited souls might be expected to fix upon "Even poisons...."

But even without such heady questions, Christianity is fantastically rich in possibilities, ambiguities, poetic resonances; appeals to blind faith (Take the leap!); violations of it; dismissals of reason (Murder the Whore Intellect ! ); dependence on it. For some, it is a faith which, although posterior to Judaism, seems somehow the elder--Sumerian, Eleusinian, Egyptian, almost-- with its sacrificial God and eucharistic mysteries. Candor compels an appeal to memories: a church at night is a spooky sight to a child, and the child is right. There can be something unnerving, given the receptive mood, about a faith whose central symbol is not a scroll but a figure nailed to a cross.

For some, Christianity is an endless source of the astonishing, sometimes a great deal less comforting than it is supposed to be, more obscure, disturbing, dark, and dangerous...and/but for all that, oddly compelling and intoxicating. (Does this sound confessional?) It is, for one thing, an elaborate celebration of mystery (not only The Mystery), a recognition that things are not necessarily what they appear, a conviction that paradox is not only a rhetorical strategy but an ontological condition. Even without its theodicean tendencies, Christianity is the most ambilious faith them ever has been--which isn't to belittle the Hebraic visions of the Old Testament, for the accomplishment of monotheism was an enormous task, as was the establishment of a law "unto all the nations." But Christian ambition! Its catholicity: by which I don't mean only its horizontal universalism. Trinitarianism is a catholicism much more encompassing than geography. God a father, a spiritual essence, and a son: the heavenly reaches, the numinous, the mundane, all enclosed within one concept. The totaliter aliter or Wholly Other mixed with the familiar. Sometimes it seems to me Christianity says to the world: Give me your tired and huddled masses of certainties, ambiguities, clarities, contradictions yearning to be One.

How these evocations of an atmosphere are meant to attest to an explosive potency in Christianity far beyond the worship of God and the necessities of the soul--but the explosive can't always be kept within the boundaries meant to contain it, no more than it could be in Paul's unique but considerable corner of Christianity. Perhaps if Christianity had managed to be a small world view, say roughly the size (and interestingness) of pragmatism, there would be no problem; but such is not the case. This rich atmosphere matters enormously to some minds. And in some of those to which it matters there's a sort of "fermentation." The literary imagination is a tictive one, of course: it makes things up. It's also a responsive imagination: it picks things up. Such as--as I put it upon beginning--"an odd moral ambivaience in the Christian mechanics of mercy." And if it interprets that oddity as "a certain imaginative relation between criminality and grace," that need not be a scandalous attempt to shock the faithful and entertain the profane. It is, I think, the artist's employment of perspective by incongruity, so much braver than the critic's, to reveal the darker possibilities in the good news of revelation.

But for all the fevered bravery of imagination, Christianity remains the religion of Mercy. Those theologians who presume to an economical regulation of mercy's currents remain something of an embarrassment John Calvin, for instance, whom even Presbyterians don't like to mention too often, least of all during missionary campaigns. At the other extreme: Rose, the enamored of Greene' s Pinkie Brown, would rather be damned than saved if Pinkie is not to be saved. The priest likens her to a "holy man [who] lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn't bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation....This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too....I don't know, my child, but some people think he was--well, a saint." And then: "You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone--the...appalling... strangeness of the mercy of God." And then: "The church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from salvation."

I am appropriately moved. But at the same time, I am resistant. For while I don't doubt the saintliness of the man the priest speaks of, I have a hard time with a faith so spendthrift of mercy that it cannot assure us that "Dr. Jemand yon Niemand," with his peers and masters, is of a certainty roasting in hell.