Theology Today - Vol 23, No. 4 - January 1967 - ARTICLE

538 - God's Fools: Biblical and Modern

God's Fools: Biblical and Modern
By William R. Mueller

"The purpose of this essay is to suggest the indebtedness of a certain segment of modern fiction to the biblical comic tradition. Such fiction is marked by its evocation of a 'thoughtful laughter,' its compassionate and extensive treatment of man's follies and weaknesses, and its emphasis on redemptive action ...the protagonists are, more often than not, unconcerned with the ethical codes fashioning the norms of behavior in their societies. As they function outside such norms, seeking God's unmediated will rather than conforming to the ways and expectations of their societies, they are, in the eyes of men, deemed fools. They are, to quote Paul, 'fools for Christ's sake' (I Cor. 4: 10). And thus they are not 'good' men so much as they are 'holy' men, not conformed to this world, but transformed by God."

IN the beginning was Oedipus Rex. The statement is a literary, if lot a theological, truth. For thanks to Sophocles and to Aristotle-on-Sophocles, Oedipus Rex is a good point of departure for an exploration of the "whatness" of literature. Aristotle defines both epic and comedy in terms of their relationship to tragedy, especially to what remains the great prototype of tragedy, Oedipus Rex. And in this present examination of one particular and peculiar form of comedy, recourse to Sophocles' play provides an appropriate introduction.

This is a revision of an address originally Prepared for The Institute for Religious and Social Studies, New York, and entitled "The Existential Comedians." We acknowledge the kind permission of Miss Jessica Feingold of the Institute in permitting us to print this article; any additional request for reprinting should be addressed to her. William R. Mueller is Professor of English Literature at Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of The Prophetic Voice in Modern Fiction (1959), and co-author (with Josephine Jacobsen) of The Testament of Samuel Beckett (1964).

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Oedipus Rex, like virtually any great work of literature, is the story of a man's coming to self-knowledge. The Oedipus of the beginning of the play, the mighty savior and ruler of Thebes, does not know himself; but the blind and powerless figure at the end of the play knows himself full well. The fullness of his knowledge is the fullness of his victory-and of our victory as well. For we learn from Oedipus' action and passion what it is to be a heroic man. We learn that, in dramatic tragedy at least, man at his best is one who seeks the truth, whatever it and its consequences may be, and one who is able to meet it with dignity and courage. If Oedipus is a man, we say to ourselves, we are proud to be men. And I suspect that if I had read every dramatic tragedy that has ever been written, I would still be at one with Aristotle in the view that King Oedipus is the tragic protagonist.

And what is a tragic protagonist? He is a man among men who moves inevitably from a position of prosperity and authority to one of poverty and powerlessness, and yet one who evokes from us greater admiration when we leave him impoverished than when we found him prosperous. The movement-usually called the "fall"-is, in great tragedy, inevitable; the protagonist's end is contained in his beginning. There is no disputing fate or destiny or whatever we may choose to call the force which determines the protagonist's situation at the end of the play. Whether it be the oracles of Delphi, the fortuitous crossing of the stars, the inherent flaw springing from a defect of birth or a cancerous growth-whatever origin we give it, we recognize the inexorability of a force which decrees the protagonist's end. But, paradoxically, inevitable as his fate is, the tragic hero has a wide freedom of action and choice. Though it is beyond his power to determine what his end will be, it is within his power to choose what path he will take toward his destiny and, of equal importance, how he will respond to it. The tragic protagonist, once his fate has been decreed, is more a person who acts than one who is acted upon. Oedipus makes the decisions, one by one, which impel his horrible self-exposure. He moves unhesitatingly toward self-recognition, even though each self-initiated step increases his suspicion of the hideous truth. And the truth-whatever its nature-is more important to him than whatever bliss he may eke out of a

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partial ignorance. In the nature of his response to the truth lies his greatness, and, in turn, our elation. Many men may be successful kings, and we may wish to be of the same stuff as they. But how exultant we are to feel some identity with a man who has endured the very worst that may befall him and who yet remains unbroken. The Greek tragic vision of life is to see man as a creature overpowered by forces beyond his control and losing everything but what is most important to him-his manhood, his heroic dignity.

For the prototypes of the greatest tragedies we look to one brief century in one small city, fifth-century Athens. The prototypes of the greatest comedies are most generally sought in Aristophanes and Menander, in Plautus and Terence. But there is another rich vein and source of comedy-the Bible, written by many hands over many centuries in many places, I speak here not primarily of a genre one of whose main aims is to provoke laughter, the kind so brilliantly analyzed by Bergson, but of a genre whose protagonist, by nature as well as by dramatic movement or change, is the polar opposite of the tragic hero. In this discussion of literary genres, my indebtedness to various critics-particularly Northrop Frye and Suzanne Langer -is considerable.

To enter the Bible is to encounter protagonists quite different from those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. The biblical protagonist, when we meet him at the beginning of his crucial dramatic action, is not a man among men and not a person at the height of his prosperity. He is lacking in the majestic willfulness of a Prometheus, the authoritative monarchy of an Oedipus, the official power of a Creon. And when we leave him at the end of his drama, be has not fallen in his society's esteem, is not alone and excluded from his people, as are the Greek tragic heroes. Quite the contrary, he finds himself at last in providential circumstances, now an integral part of the society which is his ideal. In many secular comedies-those of Shakespeare, for example-the protagonist, as well as most of his young friends, achieves his long-time ambition of marriage to the loveliest of maidens and the promise of happiness ever after. In biblical comedy and the comedy of its tradition, he is redeemed into the society of God, sometimes enduring martyrdom as a step toward the Kingdom of Heaven. In one sense, then.

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the tragic and comic protagonists reverse positions, with the latter being transformed from low estate to high, and the former falling from high to low.

There is still another paramount distinction, namely, the way in which the change is effected. The Greek tragic hero seems more in control of his dramatic movement, seems to exert more choice in his step-by-step action, seems to act more than he is acted upon. Whatever the Greek view of the inevitability of destiny may be, we remain impressed in viewing a Greek tragedy that the protagonist makes his own way, generating his own action and leaving no room for authorial manipulation, for the deus ex machina, Quite the opposite is true of comedy. In most secular comedy, the author is manipulator, the characters resembling marionettes-happy ones, of course-who are led to some kind of triumph. In biblical drama the characters are under the benevolent control of God, whose most extreme controlling action is the miracle, a divine action in no way inevitable. The biblical protagonist, then, is a man of less majesty than the tragic, one who begins in a condition of alienation or low estate and is moved, in ways by no means inevitable, to some form of acceptance or reconciliation.

Let us look briefly at three biblical protagonists who, like Dante, play their roles in a divine comedy in which all's well that ends well. Moses, job, and St. Paul may be viewed in the comic form of reluctant lovers, of foolish mortals who kick against the pricks until they grow weary and, joyfully, capitulate. Moses at the burning bush; job, sitting sorely on his ash heap, bereft of family, servants, and beasts; Saul as persecutor of Christians-all are reluctant to bend themselves to God's will.

Moses was not well born-not of Titans, as was Prometheus, and not of a king and a queen, as was Oedipus-but of an unidentified man and woman of the house of Levi. As a young man he killed an Egyptian, fled in terror, and was later tending his father-in-law's sheep when Yahweh, on one of his frequent excursions into history, shattered his repose. The ensuing discourse is in the comic mode, with Moses initially wondering if this could be a case of mistaken identity. Who is he, a poor shepherd, to lead the sons of Israel out of Egypt? How can he persuade them that he has the proper credentials, that he has been sent by a responsible and respected being? How can he expect them to believe such a seemingly tall tale when

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he identifies his commander as "I am who I am"? And has Yahweh not noticed his infelicity of tongue? But the reluctant and unpromising Moses is caught in Yahweh's net. He does not, it is true, set foot in Canaan, but he is, under Yahweh's constant insistence, finally prevailed upon to choose life over death.

Job's reluctance to capitulate to Yahweh is also cast in a comic mode. A man covered with sores and sitting among the ashes (a tragic hero seldom, if ever, sits) can have little tragic or heroic dignity. And job is less foolish only than his three self-appointed comforters and the pompous Elihu. Before the latter's appearance we have, in part, a comedy of manners, a kind of school for scandal. The impression is of three ladies seeking to persuade the fourth of the error of her ways. And the symposium is feminine-in Old Testament imagery the sons of God are frequently cast in the role of the wives of God who have gone a whoring after false gods. To Job's counselors, such is his sin. But when the voice comes rushing out of the whirlwind, the hitherto stubborn Job simultaneously is convicted of his foolishness and utter dependence, sees his right relationship to his Creator, and becomes the son of God that he should be.

The accounts, biographical and autobiographical, of Saul of Tarsus, later Paul, bear strands of the same tradition, particularly in respect to Saul's transformation. Saul had, in his conscientious persecution of Christians, kicked against the pricks long enough when, on the road to Damascus, he was intercepted by God, who reveals himself in light from heaven as well as in a burning bush or whirlwind. The converted Paul, throughout his missionary journeys, is never clothed in the tragic grandeur of an Oedipus but retains a fullness of humanity. One can hardly imagine Oedipus being lowered from a high wall in a basket to escape his enemies. And if Paul is found in this charmingly undignified incident, he is also, on occasion, not above ranting like a madman in his writing, losing the thread of a sentence and lapsing into bombast. But most significantly, Paul is in the tradition of Moses and job especially in his being radically acted upon by God and converted to a new way of thought and action. He becomes persuaded that he is God's fool, a man possessed and borne on his way solely by the grace of God.

The drama of the Bible, then, is a form of the genre of comedy.

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Its dialogue and situations do not, of course, call forth the side-holding, thigh-slapping guffaw of farcical comedy, though they do frequently evoke what George Meredith called "thoughtful laughter." Biblical comedy exposes man's weaknesses and follies, but always With compassion; it makes clear the wide gap between the human and the divine, sometimes arousing its protagonists from apathy, sometimes purging incipient builders of Babellian towers of the pride that kills. Its protagonists do not, like Oedipus, move from high repute to lonely, if noble, exile; rather they are moved by God's coaxing and saving power to wholeness and to the joy of knowing and dwelling with their Redeemer.

III

The purpose of this essay is to suggest the indebtedness of a certain segment of modern fiction to the biblical comic tradition. Such fiction is marked by its evocation of a "thoughtful laughter," its compassionate and extensive treatment of man's follies and weaknesses, and its emphasis on redemptive action. It is also frequently characterized by What Sören Kierkegaard defined as a teleological suspension of the ethical, whereby the protagonists are, more often than not, unconcerned With the ethical codes fashioning the norms of behavior in their societies. As they function outside such norms, seeking God's unmediated will rather than conforming to the ways and expectations of their societies, they are, in the eyes of men, deemed fools. They are, to quote Paul, "fools for Christ's sake" (I Cor. 4: 10). And thus they are not "good" men so much as they are "holy" men, not conformed to this world, but transformed by God. Among the modern novels Which exemplify this tradition are Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine (1937), Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1940), and William Golding's The Spire (1964).¹ And, as we shall see, these novels of Silone, Greene, and Golding, respectively, exemplify the tradition in an ascending scale.

Pietro Spina, protagonist of Bread and Wine, is a thirty-three-year-old Italian revolutionary living under Mussolini's oppressive regime

¹ I have used the following editions of the three novels: Bread and Wine-the Signet Book edition of the New American Library first issued in 1946 (I have not used Silone's revision of this novel, published in Italian in 1955 and appearing as a Signet Book in 1963); The Power and the Glory-the Compass Book edition of the Viking Press, first issued in 1958; Tile Spire -the Harvest Book edition of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., a reprint of the original hardcover. All page references are to these editions. To the publishers I wish to express my gratitude.

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in 1935 and vigorously sought and pursued by the Fascists. In order that he may carry on his liberal political activities with least chance of detection, he assumes the disguise of a priest and the name of Don Paolo Spada. The novel has its share of comic, almost farcical, incidents: the disguised Don Paolo's delicate problem of finding suitably private lavatory facilities; his being mistaken for a saint, then for Jesus himself; Spina's awkward and amusing presence in the seraglio of Signor Fleetfooted Achilles, the Don Juan of Rome.

The novel's action is a quest for sainthood, which Spina had at eighteen defined as not living "according to circumstances, environment, and material expediency, but ...ignoring the consequences, in every hour of my life to live and struggle for that which seems to me to be right and good" (p. 20). This ideal Spina pursued to his death, but not through the customary channels of the Church. Convinced that the Italian Catholic Church of the 1930's, with a great gulf fixed between its teaching and its practice, was in fact a spawning ground for cowards and temporizers; and convinced that the priesthood, serving the state, not the Church, and the rich, not the poor, lived in full and unholy accord with "circumstances, environment, and material expediency"-persuaded of these unhappy conditions, Spina left the Church at the age of nineteen. He then sought to realize his ideals through other organized channels, first the Socialists and then the Marxists, but he came to know, as Kierkegaard had before him, that organizations are self-corrupting, invariably falling from the high ideals which gave them birth. As one of the novel's characters puts it: "Every revolution, every single one, without any exception whatever, started as a movement for liberation and finished as a tyranny ...every new idea invariably ends by becoming fixed, inflexible, parasitical, and reactionary" (p. 142).

In the course of the novel Spina discovers that his break with the Church and with the political parties does not lead to alienation from God or humanity. From his former teacher, the priest Don Benedetto, whose saintliness had won for him the disdain of the Church, Spina learns that it is not those who say "Lord, Lord" who serve God, but those who, seeing that God's spirit is no longer within the Church, serve the Lord outside the bounds of his own institution.

Bread and Wine works toward a definition of sainthood which Silone finds most appropriate to his time and place. Spina is the prophetic figure for whom sainthood lies in the dedication of one's

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spiritual riches to the collective, though not the institutionalized life. Such dedication leads to a martyrdom outside the walls of the Church. "I do not believe," Spina affirms, "there is any other way of saving one's soul today... He is saved who frees his own spirit from the idea of resignation to the existing disorder. Spiritual life has always meant a capacity for dedication and self-sacrifice. In a society like ours a spiritual life can only be a revolutionary life" (p. 232). It is in pursuit of such an ideal that death and-the novel implies-new life comes to Spina.

Whereas Bread and Wine is in the prophetic tradition with its emphasis on social justice, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory is in the priestly tradition, stressing the saving power of the sacraments. Its protagonist, a Catholic priest weak in every respect except the most important, his faith, is an exemplary fool of God.² He is, in the defining terms of this essay, more a comic figure than Spina, for he is more self-effacing and less imbued with an ethical impulse. Spina, while serving the Lord, has a deeper persuasion of man's inherent power of action than does the priest; aware of God's sovereignty, he nevertheless has confidence in man's intrinsic ability to cooperate with God's will. The priest, on the other hand, sees himself as simple and unworthy clay in the bands of the potter.

Few religiously oriented writers have equaled Greene's faith in the comic potentialities of man. It is not simply that the protagonist-the "whisky priest," as he is called-is comic in the sense of being laughable: that he has "a buffoon's face, good enough for mild jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar rail" (p. 82); that he once, in his drunkenness, baptized a boy who was to be named Pedro by the name of Carlota; or that he carries with him a silly giggle. He is in the comic religious genre primarily in his human weakness and foolishness which are used by God to accomplish his saving purposes. If ever there was a literary protagonist who had his "treasure in [an] earthen ...[vessel], to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to ...[himself]" (II Cor. 4: 7), it is the whisky priest.

Paradoxically, the priest finds in his falling from every letter of the law something of its spirit. For it is only as he fathers a child in his priestly loneliness, and again and again fortifies himself with

² The priest is a type of the picaresque saint treated in R. W. B. Lewis's excellent study, The Picaresque Saint, Philadelphia, 1959.

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alcohol, that he comes to know the meaning of love. It is his moving from the self-righteousness of his early priesthood to the unrighteousness of his later life which brings him to a knowledge and love of God and his creatures. The Power and the Glory, like all of Greene's major novels, is a concerted attack on what is to him the one absolutely damning condition-self-righteousness or piety. Thus the priest comes to believe, as he ministers to both the wicked and the pious, that "salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but [that] the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand" (p. 228).

The priest expects less of men than did the more prophetic, more ethically and socially minded Spina. Yet he never forgets that man at his most sinful and obscene limits is still God's image. Even in two persons engaged in public copulation in a crowded and stench-filled prison does the priest find beauty, more beauty than in the pious woman who finds the couple beastly and revolting. Greene would tell us that it is not for any human being to judge another and find him wanting, nor for any human being to judge himself and find therein the means of salvation. Salvation is through God alone, offered materially and spiritually through the flesh and blood of Christ. It is this conviction alone which sustains the whisky priest in his suffering and terror, and which drives him on in constant peril of his life (the Church and priesthood have been outlawed by the secular political powers), until he finally goes knowingly to his death trap to administer last rites to a murderer and thief, who even then refuses the sacrament.

Hunted down by the State and cut off from the Church, the priest's life is a lonely one, with no institution to serve or follow. His motivating impulse, much like that of Spina, is the unmediated Lord. And when he is finally captured and executed, the crumpled body of the once weak and foolish whisky priest is, Greene would affirm, elevated by God to take its place with other martyrs in the Kingdom of Heaven.

William Golding's The Spire is the celebration of a miracle. It is the story of Jocelin, Dean of the Cathedral Church of the Virgin Mary, who, inspired by a vision and enabled by his aunt's wealth.

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oversees construction of a four-hundred-foot spire on a cathedral whose earthly foundation will in no physical sense bear its weight. In this highly symbolic novel the cathedral is, at once, God's gift to man and man's offering to God. As God's gift it is a kind of Jacob's ladder; as man's offering it is an utter surrender of self to the glory of God.

It all began with the vision of Jocelin, a medieval Isaiah whose six-winged guardian angel commanded him to build. From that moment Jocelin was absorbed, so he fervently believed, into the divine presence. And when God commands, the faithful man obeys, no matter what the cost. Jocelin was caught in God's net, which could not be escaped until the vision became reality, until the spire, built not on the earth's foundation but on God's, reached four hundred feet into the air. The cost of the spire was incalculable, certainly not to be measured in money. It involved not merely the cessation of cathedral worship services and the Dean's intercessory prayers for his people, not merely the bringing together on sacred ground the builders-"Murderers, cutthroats, rowdies, brawlers, rapers, notorious fornicators, sodomites, atheists, or worse" (p. 161). It involved also the sacrifice of dignity and sanity, of purity and life. Shame and indignity, alcoholism and madness, fornication and adultery, death and murder-all were the building blocks of the spire.

If God encompasses Jocelin in a net, he also gives to Jocelin a net for the ensnaring of four unwilling and unhappy accomplices. It is of them that Jocelin says, "I traded a stone hammer for four people" (p. 214). And in that the spire could not have been erected without them, they are appropriately likened to "four pillars at the crossways of the building" (p. 57). There is, first, the sexually impotent Pangall, sweeper of the cathedral, whose marriage to Goody is arranged by Jocelin to cover his own sexual indiscretions with her. Pangall-derided, mocked, and abused by the builders-is finally driven in shame from his mean lodgings and errant wife. There is also Goody, whose presence at the cathedral, once the master builder becomes adulterously enraptured by her, is indispensable in its magnetic assurance that the builder will not flee his work. She succumbs to a ghastly death in premature childbirth. There is Roger Mason, the master builder, driven by Jocelin's insistence and Goody's attraction to continue the foolish erecting of a spire on insufficient physical foundations. His work accomplished, he

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is undone by excessive drink. Finally, there is Roger's wife, Rachel, who is reduced to rage and shame through the knowledge that another woman nurtures her husband's seed. All of this, it is made clear, must go on in order that Jocelin's vision, God's command to build the spire, may be accomplished.

The theological assertion would seem to be that not only human foolishness, but human depravity as well, is necessary to the effecting of God's will. Such a conclusion may be reached through a study not only of the novel's action but of its imagery. Note, for example, that the features of Jocelin, a man who can achieve his divinely inspired purpose only through the nurturing of every conceivable sin, are to be immortalized in some of the cathedral's gargoyles, and that the gargoyles are described as bursting "out of the stone like bolls or pimples, purging the body of sickness, ensuring by their self-damnation, the purity of the whole" (p. 62). Jocelin's comparison to a flower is also appropriate to the mode of accomplishment of his given task: "I am like a flower that is bearing fruit. There is a preoccupation about the flower as the fruit swells and the petals wither; a preoccupation about the whole plant, leaves dropping, everything dying but the swelling fruit" (p. 92). His work, he later observes, is like "growth of a plant with strange flowers and fruit, complex, twining, engulfing, destroying, strangling" (p. 187).

Jocelin's determination to follow his vision and carry out a construction which defies physical law becomes known as Jocelin's folly. He builds solely on the conviction that God has chosen him and called him to implement the miracle. Nor does the folly end there. To Jocelin it seems compounded when he is told by his aunt, whose wealth is an enabling factor of the construction, that his very ecclesiastical preferment came not through God's call, but through her casual request to the king whose mistress she was. And in his final madness and pain-racking illness Jocelin comes to wonder if he is indeed God's chosen, or simply a fatuously proud man placed in authority by means of his aunt's debauchery.

We may ask if Jocelin was inspired by God or by Satan, or if perhaps he was simply a proud man seeking to justify his grandiose ambitions. The novel is ambiguous, the extent and direction of its irony difficult to determine. Golding leaves speculative a matter which is beyond human knowledge and certainty. But I would

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infer that Jocelin is God's fool, not Satan's or his own. For a miracle is accomplished, since the spire does remain standing, and the miraculous is properly the domain of God. And if we would question either God's wisdom or his morality, would question how God could use a Pangall's terror, a Goody's death, a Roger's adultery, a Rachel's shame, and a Jocelin's madness to accomplish his end, we may assert, with Jocelin, that folly is not foreign to God either. Thus Jocelin explains his vision to Roger: " 'It's God's Folly. Even in the old days He never asked men to do what was reasonable. Men can do that for themselves. They can buy and sell, heal and govern. But then out of some deep place comes the command to do what makes no sense at all-to build a ship on dry land; to sit among the dunghills; to marry a whore; to set their son on the altar of sacrifice. Then' if men have faith, a new thing comes' " (p. 116). Out of evil, the argument goes, good does come, and the spire, God's gift to man and man's offering to God, stands, a high tribute by receiver and giver to giver and receiver.

The whole fabric of the Bible is, to borrow a phrase from Paul, "unto the Greeks foolishness." The Greek imagination, seeing life at its best as heroic, as pitting strong men against overpowering forces, preferred heroes to fools, tragedy to comedy. In the Bible and in literature inspired by its view, protagonists are framed in the comic vision. They bear all the weaknesses and follies of humanity, and arc not heroic men overpowered by cosmic fate so much as they are weak men empowered by God's grace. Their action initiated by God, as their wills are swept up by his and they are guided step by step under the shelter of his constant presence. God is perpetually at their shoulder, and the most extreme strategem in his ways with them is the miracle, whether in celebration of the Eucharist or in the causing of a spire to stand on a watery foundation. And a miracle, over which the protagonist has absolutely no control, is an act congenial to comedy, not tragedy.

Pietro Spina, the whisky priest, and Dean Jocelin form an ascending scale in their degrees of foolishness. Silone endows Spina with a stronger will, a greater independence of action, than that possessed by the other two protagonists. Bread and Wine, of the three novels, depends least on the supernatural, most on man's inherent powers, here used to try to effect God's Kingdom on earth. The whisky priest, who continues to live only to bring to others the divine gift

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and miracle of the Mass, sees himself as one in whom there is no health, and is even unaware that he is being borne by God to martyrdom. And Jocelin, a victim of divine madness and a most extreme example of one who effects a teleological suspension of the ethical, defies the very law of gravity in order that, through God's grace, the Lord may be glorified. The biblical vision is the predominant impulse for a literary genre which celebrates and exalts man's foolishness and endows us with one of the forms of comedy.