James E Hartley

Dante’s Road Trip: Purgatory

If you mention Dante, most people who recognize the name instantly associate him with Inferno. It is actually quite surprising how few people even know that Inferno is just the first part of a larger work, The Divine Comedy.

(I know this because we had a dog named Dante, so I had many occasions to discover that when people heard the name of the dog, they instantly mentioned Inferno, having no idea there was more to Dante. Proof by anecdote!)

Dante tours Hell in part 1, but then in part 2 he wanders up the mountain of Purgatory, before getting to Heaven in Part 3. It isn’t hard to see why Inferno is the most well-known part. It gets the dual benefit of being the start of the story, so people would naturally read it first, and being full of gruesome punishments for sins. Why nobody has taken advantage of the gory details of the Inferno to make some modern horror blockbuster is totally beyond me.

The structure of Purgatory is interesting. In the Inferno, the sins are organized along Aristotelian lines and the punishments are the literal extensions of the sins. The message: you chose to live like this in life and so now you can live like this for all eternity.

Purgatory is organized on Christian lines, with levels representing the Seven Deadly Sins. The sins are all variations on loving wrong. The three lower levels (Pride, Envy, Wrath) are love of the wrong thing—varieties of love of self. The three upper levels (Avarice and Prodigality, Gluttony, Lust) are love in the right general direction, but lacking appropriate moderation. The middle level (Sloth) is just a deficiency of love. Then add in two levels before you get to Purgatory Proper—the excommunicated and the late repentant; people in these circles have to spend a lot of time hanging around before they are let into Purgatory Itself. Then, at the very top of the mountain is Eden, the last stop before being purged of all sin and heading off to Paradise.

While the punishments in the Inferno are all logical extensions of the sin stripped to its essence, the punishments in Purgatory force the soul to stop engaging in the sin. So, for example, in the circle of Pride, the souls are forced to carry large weights on their backs, causing the souls to look down at the ground, remembering that they are not God, but rather grounded beings created by God. In the circle of Lust, the souls constantly give one anther chaste kisses, showing love without carnality.

In the Inferno, souls were confined to a particular level forever; in Purgatory, the souls go from one level to the next as they purge themselves of sin after sin. The amount of time a soul spends on each level is proportional to how prevalent the sin was in the person’s life. This leads to one of my favorite bits in the entire Divine Comedy.

When he is talking with people in the circle of Envy, Dante says he won’t spend much time there, but he will spend a lot of time in the circle of Pride. It’s not only funny, but it is deep: the reason Dante does not Envy is because he is so full of Pride. Indeed, even saying how little time he will spend in the circle of Envy is an example of his Pride. Then later in the circle, Dante is chastised because his eyes are still looking on the ground instead of upward. Looking at the ground is exactly what the souls are doing in the circle of Pride. Dante falters because being in the circle of Envy increased his Pride. But here is the really interesting part; Dante’s pride is seen as he constantly talks about himself in this work as if he is the greatest poet of all time. This very poem is why he is so proud. But, 700 years later one thing is pretty obvious; Dante is, in fact, the greatest poet of all time. (OK, maybe Shakespeare beats him.)

Throughout Purgatory, Dante does a masterful job weaving in Biblical imagery and making it his own. For example, early on, Dante gets to the gate of Purgatory and encounters angels. What follows morphs the story from Genesis of the angel being posted at the gate of Eden to keep the humans out. Dante sees the angels and then suddenly a serpent shows up and Dante is terrified. It seems a bit frightening, but that is because Dante forgot about the angels, who easily beat back the serpent; there was actually never any danger from the serpent. Here in Dante the angels are posted at the gate of Purgatory (within which is Eden itself) not to keep humans out, but to keep the serpent out.

There are lots of things like that. At one point, we hear a reciting of something a whole lot like the Lord’s Prayer, but Dante rewrote it to make it more artful. As Dante says in another place:
Reader, you surely understand that I am raising
the level of my subject here. Do not wonder,
therefore, if I sustain it with more artifice.

(That is the Hollanders’ translation, far and away the best translation of Dante. Both the translation itself and the notes are outstanding.)

When Dante gets to Eden, there is a masterpiece of taking the visions of John, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Daniel and working out a new vision with exactly the same sort of poetic metaphor inherent in every part. It feels like reading the Biblical authors, but it is a unique picture. In what may be the most brilliant thing in the whole story, Dante wades into a discussion on whether the angelic beings have four or six wings. Any normal person would have noted that John (who said six) and Ezekiel (who said four) needed an independent observer to decide and now that Dante has seen them, John was right. Instead, the narrative says that Dante and Ezekiel disagree and notes that John has said that Dante was right. Dante’s vision is thus not just in the style of the Biblical visions; Dante’s vision is more credible and accurate than those visions. The Biblical writers are imitating Dante!

Then there is another vision at the very end that seems like a mash-up of the book of Daniel and Virgil’s Aeneid. Both Daniel and Virgil provide visions of the sweep of human history. Daniel’s vision, according to Christian commentaries, ends at the time of Christ. Virgil’s vision-narrative happens when Aeneas is in Hades and ends with the time of Augustine. Dante’s vision ends with the harlot and the beast, which is ripped right out of John’s Revelation and is the very last thing in Revelation before heading off to an eternal heaven. So, once again Dante is ripping off all the source texts and making something shockingly original.

Speaking of Virgil, he also plays a fascinating role in Purgatory. Dante had him as a guide through Inferno, but Virgil keeps plodding along with Dante through Purgatory. Since Virgil is a permanent resident of Limbo in the Inferno, why is he Dante’s guide? Why doesn’t Dante get a Christian guide? It is only in the Canto XXII of Purgatory (over half-way through the entire Divine Comedy) that we get an answer. Dante and Virgil have met Statius, an Italian poet of some note. Statius explains that he found Christianity by reading Virgil, who is described as a guy who has the light behind his back which does no good for Virgil, but much good for those who came after. Dante was playing a long game in setting this up. Just as Virgil led Statius, he now leads Dante…but only Virgil’s followers benefit from the light Virgil provides.

I suspect, by the way, that Dante drops Statius in here to draw a flattering comparison to himself. Suddenly there is another poet who used Virgil as a muse who is traveling through Purgatory…but Statius is acknowledging his inferiority to Virgil, whereas Dante in a million ways keeps pointing out how much better he is than Virgil.

When they get to Eden, Virgil explains that the journey is done. That is odd. We know there is a whole part remaining. But from Virgil’s perspective, there are just the two journeys. Once you hit the end of the climb up the mountain of Purgatory, Paradise awaits…journey is done. And now Virgil gets to head back down to the Inferno.

We the Readers, however, get to keep traveling with Dante as he journeys up toward Paradise. But before doing so, it is well worth pausing to admire the masterpiece that is Purgatory. It is a perfect bridge; as we find out in the next part, there is a massive difference between Heaven and Hell (obviously not the most shocking revelation), but Dante with supreme art blends the characteristics of the Inferno and Paradise in crafting Purgatory. The Inferno is marked by literally hellish landscapes. Purgatory is full of descriptions of exquisite beauty. By the time we get to the overwhelming beauty of Eden, it is jarring to think back to the horrors of the Inferno.

Harold Bloom declared that Purgatory was his favorite section of The Divine Comedy because it was the only section on earth itself. Presumably he said this for the shock value (Bloom was like that), but nevertheless, he was pointing to something real. The Inferno is the worst of humanity; Paradise is the best. Purgatory is the muddled mess of life, the lives we are all actually living. Things aren’t perfect yet, but if you look around, you’ll notice those hints of paradise lurking in the landscape. Notice the beauty of the steps leading into Purgatory which gives hints of heaven. Then notice that such glimpses are all around you right now.

Related Posts
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, “Dante’s Road Trip: Inferno”
George MacDonald, The Light Princess, “The Gravity of Love”

Follow Me

I have decided to follow Jesus.
I have decided to follow Jesus
I have decided to follow Jesus
No turning back, no turning back.

That hymn (originally written by an Indian missionary) was a staple of the Billy Graham Crusades. Come forward, accept Jesus, no turning back.

Then what? While nobody ever quite articulated it thus, there was a time in American evangelicalism when the entire gospel message seemed to be reduced to “Say the magic prayer and receive your Get Out of Hell Free card.”

Enter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A German Lutheran pastor in the early 20^th century, he is best known for being hung after participating in a plot to kill Hitler. His book, The Cost of Discipleship became one of the staples in Popular Books of 20^th Century Christianity.

The most famous part of the book is Bonhoeffer’s discussion of the bankruptcy of “Cheap Grace.” The phrase is indeed arresting. Grace, by definition, is free. If I show you grace, I can’t send you a bill afterwards and still call my action “grace.” As the Apostle Paul notes, Christ’s death has the same property: “But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many” (Romans 5:1, ESV).

So, if grace is free, what is cheap grace? This is not an idle question for Bonhoeffer. He begins the book: “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace.” Cheap grace is very much epitomized by the “All you need to do is accept Jesus into your heart” message.

It is what follows that opening statement, though, that is a bit surprising. After that opening, if you are expecting a bracing book full of fire and a fighting spirit you will be shocked as you settle in for that wild ride that never quite materializes. Instead, Bonhoeffer launches into a lengthy series of meditations on the Sermon on the Mount. What is most surprising about it is how thoroughly conventional it is. If you have been around church for a while, it is hard to escape the feeling as you read that you have heard this all before. Many, many times. After all, the Sermon on the Mount is one of the Greatest Hits in the Bible, endlessly played on the Sermon Top 40.

The fact that the book seems so pedestrian, however, is another product of Cheap Grace. As Bonhoeffer thinks of it, cheap grace is not solely confined to people who assert that all that matters is a brief moment of decision and a quick prayer. Most Christians follow that up with feeling the need to follow what we can think of as the Handbook of Christian Life. Once you become a Christian, you get a set of rules or practices you should follow. “Don’t drink or chew, or go with girls that do.” Go to church. Read your Bible. Stay away from sinful places. Be good. Be nice. You know the list.

If you think of the Christian Life as a series of things you are supposed to do or to avoid, you are living under Cheap Grace. The problem with that way of thinking is that it treats the Christian Life as an external checklist. Do these things. If you don’t do them, however, don’t worry, you are still loved by God. The result is often that we look at the list of things we should and should not do, think to ourselves, we are doing pretty well when we can check off most of the items, feel bad about not being quite perfect in a few others, and then, of course, there are all those we aren’t really trying to meet. Maybe later. As Augustine put it, “Lord, make me chaste. But not yet.”

Bonhoeffer says repeatedly that thinking about the Christian walk like this is all wrong, totally and completely wrong. It treats grace like it is this thing you got and then there are no real implications other than maybe begin thinking you should do a few more things on the Christian checklist if you have a spare moment.

Costly grace is realizing that grace is not just that thing that happened once upon a time.

When we are called to follow Christ, we are summoned to an exclusive attachment to his person. The grace of his call bursts all the bonds of legalism….Discipleship means adherence to Christ, and, because Christ is the object of adherence, it must take the form of discipleship.

Jesus said to people over and over, “Follow me.” He could have said, but didn’t, “Acknowledge me and then follow this list of activities.” The difference between those two commands is really large. It is the difference between costly grace and cheap grace. What does following Jesus mean? What does discipleship mean?

It means an exclusive adherence to him, and that implies first, that the disciple looks only to his Lord and follows him. If he looked only at the extraordinary quality of the Christian life, he would no longer be following Christ. For the disciple this extraordinary quality consists solely in the will of the Lord, and when he seeks to do that will he knows that there is no other alternative, and that what he does is the only natural thing to do.

The cost in costly grace is the abandonment of your independent will. You follow Jesus not in the sense of putting bumper sticker on your car saying you do so, but in the sense that you actually follow Jesus. You do what He would do in the way He would do it. Take an example from the Sermon on the Mount:

“Be not anxious for the morrow.” This is not to be taken as a philosophy of life or a moral law; it is the gospel of Jesus Christ, and only so can it be understood. Only those who follow him and know him can receive this word as a promise of the love of his Father and as a deliverance from the thralldom of material things.

Do Not Be Anxious is not a command we should follow. It is not an item on a checklist of Christian Life. It is not something we work to be better at. Do not be anxious is rather a description of what life is like for someone who follows Jesus. If you are following Jesus, you won’t be anxious. What possible reason is there to be anxious if you are following Christ Himself? If you feel anxiety, then you are not following Christ. Period. Full stop. The solution is not to try to be less anxious. The solution is: remember whom you are following and then follow Him.

So, yes, The Cost of Discipleship seems at one level like a bunch of things you have heard a zillion times. But the message underneath it is something with which we all struggle. Following Christ is hard. Following Christ is costly. But, by the grace of God, the free grace of God, following Christ is possible. Grace is both free and costly. When that no longer seems like a contradiction in terms, then you have learned what Bonhoeffer is trying to teach us.

Related Posts
Augustine Confessions “Cheap Repentance”
Greene, Graham A Burnt-Out Case “Faith of the Unchurched”

The Shelter of this Red Rock

“During those last weeks of the Bishop’s life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself.”

Death Comes for the Archbishop does not have a surprise ending. It has long been my favorite Willa Cather novel. Having just been to Santa Fe, it seemed like a good time to reread it.

A note on the location. Willa Cather is a novelist who immediately evokes a location; she seems like a novelist of a place. That place is the Great Plains. My Antonia, O Pioneers! and many other novels and stories conjure up images of life in the cornfields of Nebraska. So, what is this novel set in New Mexico doing in her oeuvre?

Thinking about the idea of a frontier, it is not really that much of a change. Father Latour, a Roman Catholic Bishop, takes up office in New Mexico shortly after it stopped being a part of Old Mexico. The scene is indeed every bit as much a frontier as the Great Plains had been before. America is marching west, and both My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop chronicle the early movers.

There is, however something striking about the change in location. This is a novel that could only have been written about the location in which the novel is set. I never noticed this before visiting the area, but having been there, suddenly passages like this take on a clarity I would have never imagined:

In all his travels the Bishop had seen no country like this. From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between. This plain might once have been an enormous city, all the smaller quarters destroyed by time, only the public buildings left,—piles of architecture that were like mountains. The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush,—that olive-coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds.

That is indeed exactly not only what it looks like, but what it feels like. Then in the next paragraph, Cather adds this, ostensibly just a continuation of the description of the landscape in the previous paragraph, but really a description of the novel itself:

This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is an episodic story; chapter by chapter, we drop in on events in the bishop’s career and his relationship with a priest who works with him. At one level, it is just an achingly beautiful tale of two priests in a sparsely populated land. But, these set pieces do indeed sit just on the verge of being brought together, and as you look at each piece in turn, you notice the similarity—they all have the appearance of great antiquity.

First we have the fact that this is a story about Catholic priests in New Mexico. These are not Protestant missionaries, cattle ranchers, homesteaders, or any other product of the past 500 years. Catholic priests, tracing their lineage back 1800 years. The novel begins in what seems like an odd way; this novel about New Mexico begins in Rome; the origin of this story is the old world. Both of the priests in the story were born in France, again reminding us of the old. The land may seem new, but the religion is old.

Second, as Father Latour moves into the area, he is not founding a church; the church is there before him, brought in by the Spaniards long before. Many of the problems Latour faces in the early part of the novel are shaking off the legacy of the Spanish past, finding ways to correct the bad habits from the past while preserving what was good.

As the novel stretches on, the delving into the past gets deeper as we slowly realize that the legacies of those who were there before the Spanish arrived linger on in tribal cultures. Latour literally finds himself in the deep prehistorical past, where people build fires in mysterious hidden caves to keep the Great Serpent at bay. Priests of a religion older than Catholicism have their own mysteries, and those mysteries have been passed down generation to generation since before recorded time began.

There is still one more level down. The land itself. That country which is still waiting to be made into a landscape. Those ageless piles of rocks who barely note our passing there.

Slowly the realization dawns. This seemed like a novel about the frontier, a novel in which the questions are about the future. But the real frontier here is not between the present and the unknowable future; the frontier is between the present and the past. The future will take care of itself. It is the Past we are leaving when we die; the Past is what remains.

He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible.

We are obsessed with the future. We think about the past as a litany of errors, things that need to be changed to make the future even better. Or the past is the place for which one is nostalgic, things that have vanished and we wish had been preserved. In either case, the past is there to be used.

The Past, however cannot be used. It does not care how you want to use it. It does not change because we want it to change. It neither gets better nor worse as we dream about it. The past can neither be altered nor preserved. The Past is there, complete and inviolable. That is the message of Death Comes for the Archbishop. An enterprising young Catholic priest comes to the Past, hoping to build a future upon it and slowly discovers the Past laughs at us. Its legacies run deep. We are all products of that past, and we cannot escape it. You may hate the fact that some things in the past persist; you may hate that fact that some things in the Past went away; but the one thing you cannot do is change the facts about the Past.

The trader told him he might make good Catholics among the Indians, but he would never separate them from their own beliefs. “Their priests have their own kind of mysteries. I don’t know how much of it is real and how much is made up. I remember something that happened when I was a little fellow. One night a Pecos girl, with her baby in her arms, ran into the kitchen here and begged my mother to hide her until after the festival, for she’d seen signs between the caciques, and was sure they were going to feed her baby to the snake. Whether it was true or not, she certainly believed it, poor thing, and Mother let her stay. It made a great impression on me at the time.”

Thinking of the Past like that is humbling. We can’t change the Past. It is immune to our judgments, good or bad. Death comes for the Archbishop. Death comes for you, for me. The Past Abides, and it cares not if we admire or condemn it for doing so.

Does God Want Religious Liberty?

Religious liberty is under assault. There was probably never a time when that statement was not true. But these days there is a new front in the war over religious liberty coming from unexpected quarters. The rise of what we can call the neointegralists has been rapid.

To take the most well-known example, look at Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed, the title of which tips off the agenda. The Liberalism that failed is not the policies of the modern Democratic Party, but the entire Enlightenment project, including the protection of religious liberty. As Brian Smith has detailed, arguments like Deneen’s lead easily to arguments in favor of a more explicitly Christian State. It isn’t just the Roman Catholics making this argument, however. Greg Forster has found the same themes in evangelical Christian nationalism. Faced with these trends, it is useful to think anew about the argument in favor of religious liberty. Andrew Walker’s recent Liberty for All: Defending Everyone’s Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age is a useful contribution to this endeavor.

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

Understanding God through Faith and Science

“This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being….He rules all things, not as the world soul but as the lord of all. And because of his dominion he is called Lord God Pantokrator [“universal ruler”]….to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of ‘natural’ philosophy.”

The thing that surprises people the most about that quotation is its source. If you don’t recognize it, you undoubtedly think it is from some religious figure. Instead, it is from Isaac Newton’s Principia, the single most important work of science in the history of the world.

It is common folklore that there is a war between science and faith. Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist at Rice University, has done extensive surveys of both scientists and religious communities about their views on one another. In Why Science and Faith Need Each Other, she attempts to bridge the gap by writing to Christians explaining, as her subtitle says, Eight Shared Values that Move Us Beyond Fear.

The fact that a book like this needs to be written at all is itself rather curious. Why do people believe there is a divide between science and faith? Why do many Christians struggle with the idea of exposing their children to the work of secular scientists? Why is there a suspicion about the study of the world designed, as Newton claims, by the universal ruler?

In large part the impression of the divide is fueled by people with a vested interest in perpetuating it. A mass media constantly seeking explosive content, will happily give airtime to people willing to wage a war between science and faith. With lucrative book contracts and speaking fees in sight, there is no lack of volunteers to play in this battle.

As Ecklund’s surveys show, however, the majority of both scientists and religious people do not believe that science and faith are incompatible. This is, without a doubt, the most important thing in the book. If you, like Isaac Newton, think science and faith can happily cohabitate, but you thought you were alone in thinking that, you will find a great deal of comfort in Ecklund’s work.

Ecklund wants to do more than simply note the range of views within religious and scientific communities, though. She wants to demonstrate that these two communities need each other. Ecklund explains her approach: “I see science and faith not just as sets of ideas but as groups of people.” This, then is not a theoretical exercise showing there is no incompatibility; it is more akin to trying to get the cliques in the school to mingle with one another.

Ecklund’s method is akin to standing at a flip chart and asking each group to toss out “values” which are important to the group. She gets eight of them and then proceeds to show that both groups share this value, or at least both groups should share this value. The values: Curiosity, Doubt, Humility, Creativity, Healing, Awe, Shalom, Gratitude. At its best, the method does provide some common ground. The universe is indeed jaw-droppingly amazing, and this fact breeds awe in both scientists who study it and Christians who worship the Creator of it. Both the scientific community and the religious communities could use a lot more humility when it comes to engaging in debate. We all could use more gratitude for both science and faith.

It is when the Ecklund’s method doesn’t work, though, that we being to see why the integration of science and faith really needs a firmer place on which to stand. The chapter on Creativity was jarring to say the least. It begins by noting that many churches have a hard time discussing infertility; if a church constantly emphasizes that children are a blessing from God, this can leave infertile couples feeling left out. The chapter then morphs into a discussion of how IVF (in-vitro fertilization) is a tool created by science to allow infertile couple to conceive. Many Christians find the methods used in IVF to be morally problematic since such procedures often result in the destruction of embryos.

This is a fantastic example of where science and faith meet. How does Ecklund address the matter? She explains her own struggles with infertility and then casually notes that her daughter, who has been frequently mentioned in the preceding pages, was born thanks to IVF. Now that she has personalized the issue, she leaves the reader is the odd situation of needing to feel churlish in order to argue there is a problem with IVF. Ecklund solves the problem by pointing to her survey evidence. Not all Christians think IVF is morally problematic. This is, to put it mildly, not a persuasive argument.

The IVF discussion should not have been surprising, though. Back in chapter 3, Ecklund directly addressed the most obvious point of tension between science and faith: the theory of evolution. If there is anything that needs to be addressed before we can hope to bridge the perceived divide between science and faith, this is it. Ecklund’s approach? She shows that many Christians believe that evolutionary theory contradicts the Bible. But, many Christians do not see such a conflict. That is the extent of Ecklund’s argument.

For whom is this book written? There is nothing in this book that would convince anyone who believes in the incompatibly of science and faith that the two things can be reconciled. Such an argument can be made, it just isn’t made here. Ecklund’s surveys turn up a number of people who attend churches where the war between science and faith is almost an article of faith. To think otherwise in a church like that can feel very lonely. Ecklund book is best seen as an encouraging word to a person like that, saying, “You are not alone.”

Not being alone, however, is not the same thing as being right. After all, if Christians disagree on whether science and faith can be integrated, they can’t all be right. Science and faith need each other for reasons far beyond the fact that both inspire awe and gratitude. Science and faith need each other because it is only through both that we have any hope of understanding the world. Faith needs science because there aren’t any religious texts out there that explain DNA or microorganisms or the properties of hydrogen. Science needs faith both to give it a moral grounding (is it OK to clone humans?) and, more importantly, to give us a basis for accepting that the world is indeed a rational and predictable place. Science and faith need each other because our minds have been constructed in a way that the search for Truth involves both. For that, we can thank the Lord God Pantokrator.

When Civilization Cracks

“And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone, but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats.”

Not exactly a subtle metaphor.

King Rat, by James Clavell.

This was Clavell’s first novel and if you have read Clavell’s other, more famous novels (e.g. Shogun), you will be surprised that it is absolutely nothing like them. All his other novels are Big—big in both page count and scope. They are novels that take in the wide scope of Japan in the 1600s and then in the 1860s, Hong Kong in the 1840s and then the 1960s, Iran in 1979. All societies in the midst of massive change.

Then there is King Rat, set in a POW camp in Singapore during the Second World War. It is a claustrophobic novel in comparison, fitting because living in a POW camp is, to put it mildly, claustrophobic. It is also a semi-autobiographical novel; Clavell drops a version of himself into the novel and minutely conveys what life was like in a semi-barbaric world where finding ways to get more food is the primary intellectual activity.

Clavell’s prose is that type that just flows along, never too flashy but never cringe-inducing. There is never that moment of literary flair that will make you think you are reading a Great Book; but there is also never that moment when you want to just toss the book aside because you cannot stand how ham-handed the last paragraph was.

Clavell was one of the first grown-up novelists I discovered back in high school. I loved his books, but King Rat was far and away my least favorite. As noted above, not what I was expecting. I wanted another Shogun, and instead I got the British Clavell stand-in Peter Marlowe and the scrappy American known only as the King and the British MP Grey who deeply resents both of the other two. All three of them are fixed in an intricate dance about a fundamental moral question. Suffice it to say that my high school self had nothing even remotely resembling the awareness necessary to grasp what was going on in this novel.

To get at the question, think about your own life for a moment. You live in civilized society and you have all manner of rules of conduct which you would never think about breaking. Indeed, you are proud of yourself for the way you never break any of these cultural rules. You are not a barbarian, after all. Perhaps you also hold your fork in your right hand or always wear shoes at work or never swear out loud or bathe regularly. Perhaps you never tell a lie, never steal, follow the law, or never deliberately cheat anyone. There is a whole list of things like that. You do them instinctually because they are the right thing to do. You never sit around and wonder if you should brush your teeth, you just brush them because you are not, and never will be, a barbarian.

Now place yourself in a POW camp in Singapore in WWII. How many of those cultural rules do you break? Some of them you will have to break whether you like it or not; you won’t get to regularly bathe or brush your teeth, for example. But, do you still always use the proper hand for eating? Probably. Or at least you will most of the time.

What about the higher order moral habits? This is where King Rat comes in. Marlowe is faced with a crisis. On the one hand, he is a cultured member of the British upper class. There are rules, you see. You follow the rules. On the other hand, he starts to build a relationship with the King. What is the King like? Imagine every stereotype about Americans which a member of the British Upper Class would have, and there you have the King. A crass, money-grubbing, swindling, con-man who breaks every rule in sight to make a quick buck in the black market. Then on the other side, you have Grey, the epitome of a resentful member of the British lower class who cannot stand seeing the King get away with having nice things.

Marlowe’s problem: how involved should he become in the King’s underground enterprise? How many rules of civilized behavior is it OK to break? Once you cross the line, can you go back to being respectable? As Marlowe ruminates: “A man’s life is always at a crossroads. And not his life alone, not if he’s a man. Always others in the balance.”

The “others” add to the complexity. In the camp, if you want to survive, you form a pod, a small group of three which shares everything. If someone in your pod is sick or needs food or whatever, do you break all your moral rules to get it? That is the crossroads. It is not a pleasant place to be.

He found a small promontory overlooking the wire and wished himself into his Spitfire soaring the sky alone, up, up, up in the sky, where all is clean and pure, where there are no lousy people—like me—where life is simple and you can talk to God and be of God, without shame.

Why is it worth thinking about things like this? Why is King Rat more than just a pleasant way to spend a few hours reading a war story? When you are in your nice little cultured world following all your nice cultured rules it is easy to forget that you have such rules at all. King Rat puts you in a place where you realize a lot of those rules will go whether you like it or not. But, what are the cultural codes of conduct to which you would cling no matter what? You (presumably) don’t have plans to swindle someone tomorrow, but if you are living in a desperate situation, does it become OK to break that rule? Is stealing OK in a POW camp? Do you have any obligation to follow the rules? Does it matter if the rules are the implicit rules made by the people living in the camp or the ones made by the Japanese guards?

As you read King Rat it becomes obvious that Civilization is a very fragile thing. It doesn’t take much to imagine breaking all sorts of rules. And once those rules are gone, what is life like? Well, it is like being a rat. Kill or be killed. Cunning and Luck and Strength are the only rules left. Are you just a glorified rat?

There is the choice: Civilization or the Kingdom of Rats? Maybe this civilization thing is worth preserving after all. Maybe it is worth doing everything we can to teach children the norms of civilized behavior. Maybe if we see the culture crumbling, we ought to do something about it.

Related Posts
Achebe, Chinua No Longer at Ease “No Longer at Ease”
Kipling, Rudyard Kim “The Way or the Great Game”