Public Discourse

Cormac McCarthy and the Possibility of Faith

Cormac McCarthy, who passed away today, ranks among the most important writers of fiction American society has ever produced. There is ample agreement on this point.

When it comes to interpreting the meaning of his work, though, there is much less consensus.

McCarthy handled big themes in his work, and that is true in his most recent novels: The Passenger and Stella Maris. These two books form a single narrative of siblings Alicia and Bobby Western’s extraordinary lives. We find here meditations on meaning and meaninglessness, human knowledge, death, spirituality, and the nature of the material world. Truth and beauty, reason and faith, love and sex: it’s all here. Mingled with these themes is obsessively detailed description of machines and contraptions of all sorts (especially guns and cars)—another perennial McCarthy interest.

Many critics read McCarthy’s novels the way they do so many other art forms: devoid of the possibility of hope, transcendence, and a living God. But this often glosses over the genuinely conflicted character of the art. The Passenger and Stella Maris offer more than just an artistic representation of reality’s inescapable brutality. They forcefully struggle with the greatest questions of human existence. Like any good work of art, these books don’t allow any reader—religious, atheist, materialist, Christian—to walk away feeling perfectly comfortable in their understanding of the world.

 

The Passenger’s plot involves a plane crash with a missing corpse, and one of the main characters, Bobby, is pursued by shadowy and sinister figures who seem to suggest he played a role in that body’s disappearance. But this plot serves as a frame on which McCarthy hangs his reflections on deeper questions. The mystery of the plane crash is never resolved, and readers are left wondering if this is McCarthy’s way of suggesting that the world’s meaning is elusive and ultimately nonexistent. But, as is always the case with McCarthy’s books, put too much stock in tidy conclusions and you will be disappointed.

Slate’s Laura Miller interprets these novels as many other readers will. She wonders why McCarthy would have bothered this late in life to write two more books with a view of life as “brutal and meaningless.”

These books do contain brutality, and meaninglessness haunts their pages. But they offer much more than the total bleakness that professional critics often perceive in them. To be fair, Alicia Western, whose account of reality is detailed in Stella Maris, provides evidence to support Miller’s reading. She is a solipsist who, when a young girl, read George Berkeley on the physiology of vision and concluded that the world existed only in her youthful head. Alicia often appears unrelentingly pessimistic. She has a disturbing—and incestuous—obsession with her brother.

Yet McCarthy gives Alicia much more complexity than most of the critics have noted. She fiercely struggles with the fallen aspects of her character. A first-rate violinist, she lovingly describes music as sacred. She especially admires Bach, and she knows what (or Who) motivated the great German composer’s music. When she describes having spent her inheritance on a rare Amati violin, she recalls weeping when she played it for the first time. Tears come also when she recalls her pure bliss at the sound of Bach’s Chaconne emerging from her violin. The instrument must have originated in the mind of God, she insinuates, so perfect is its construction.

Amid this discourse on music, Alicia tells Cohen, her psychologist and interlocutor through the entirety of Stella Maris, what she believes to be “the one indispensable gift”: faith.

This question of faith is powerfully demonstrated in Alicia’s account of her father’s final days. This man, a resolute materialist throughout his life, developed cancer almost certainly because of his work with radioactive material in developing the atomic bomb. He was told by physicians in the United States that there was no chance of recovery. His materialism gave him no resources for contending with his mortality, and so he embarks on a futile search to extend his life with alternative treatment in Mexico. He asks his son to accompany him, but Bobby refuses—a decision he regrets for the rest of his life.

How do McCarthy’s characters respond to mortality? Eternal life is “unlikely,” Alicia tells Cohen, yet the “probability is not zero.” In the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal formalized the rationality of religious belief in just these terms. Given the non-zero probability of God’s existence, one follows reason in betting on the infinite gain (eternal life with God) from a life of belief against the limited benefits (unrestricted pleasures during a finite existence) from a life of disbelief.

 

McCarthy is too clever a writer to have Alicia straightforwardly take up Pascal’s wager. Instead, he puts into her mouth these words: “[I]t may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems. … The spiritual nature of reality has been the principal preoccupation of mankind since forever and it’s not going away anytime soon. The notion that everything is just stuff doesn’t seem to do it for us.”

Cohen asks if that’s true for her. She responds: “That’s the rub, isn’t it?”

We don’t learn from Alicia her answer to that question, but her reflection on the incompleteness of science and mathematics and their compatibility with faith suggests much. Acceptance of some version of God is, she relates, “a lot more common among mathematicians than is generally supposed.” Kurt Gödel, the figure in math she most admires, “became something akin to a Deist. … [He] never says outright that there is a covenant to which all of mathematics subscribes but you get a clear sense that the hope is there. I know the allure. Some shimmering palimpsest of eternal abidement.”

McCarthy critiques Alicia’s coldly logical worldview (which eventually leads her to self-destruction) through a character she calls the “Thalidomide Kid.” He appears to exist only in her mind, though, inexplicably, the Kid visits Alicia’s brother Bobby after her death to reveal to him her final verdict of the world: “She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.” (The missing apostrophes are an element of McCarthy’s style.)

The Kid’s name, Thalidomide, is a drug that was briefly considered a miracle cure in the West during the mid-twentieth century. It eliminated the nausea accompanying pregnancy, one of the oldest maladies of human existence but one that actually helps ensure the health of both child and mother. Thalidomide’s safety in pregnancy was not evaluated during the drug’s testing. Scientists thereby failed to discover the catastrophic birth defects it produced in human infants. The Kid’s complicated character, which includes evident concern for Alicia’s well-being despite his caustic personality, might be explained as her emotional core, the more intuitively aware part of herself, speaking back subconsciously to her rational self, which, like Thalidomide, promised balm and delivered misery.

Alicia herself labors toward the complex understanding of the world represented by the Kid, who shows an awareness of the limits of logic and reason. She sees intelligence—defined as mastery of mathematics, the purest form of knowledge—as bestowing a certain superiority over others. Yet she also knows that it “is a basic component of evil.” The unintelligent are typically understood as harmless, while ingeniousness is often associated with the diabolical: “What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.” Throughout the books, the Manhattan Project on which their father worked is recognized by both Alicia and Bobby as the moral equivalent to eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Alicia’s perspective on religious faith doesn’t arrive in full view until the conclusion of The Passenger, when her brother Bobby makes the most profound discoveries on this topic.

After her suicide, he goes to see Alicia’s friend Jeffrey in Stella Maris, the psychiatric hospital where Alicia had admitted herself. Her friend tells Bobby that he had asked her how she could believe in the Kid but not in Jesus. “Everyone is born with the faculty to see the miraculous. You have to choose not to,” he tells Bobby. Jeffrey reveals that Alicia had noted an odd discolor in the eye of another woman in the institution and told doctors, who detected a cancer and saved her life by removing the eye. Subsequently, however, the woman grew depressed and took her own life. Bobby realizes that the death of this woman, whom Alicia had intended to save, led his sister to her own demise. The name of this suffering woman was Mary, and she and Alicia were housed in an institution bearing the Latin name “Star of the Sea.” This is an ancient title for the Mother of God, which originated in a transcription error linked to an etymology of the Hebrew name for Mary. The title designates the Virgin Mother’s protection of sailors and others who travel at sea.

Through the novel’s symbolic language, Alicia is thus connected intimately with the Madonna, who comforts her suffering child and suffers herself. Alicia’s mathematical genius cannot extinguish her emotional need to alleviate the pain of others (Mary of Stella Maris who suffered eye cancer), and after her troubled life’s voyage she seeks healing in the bosom of the Mother (Stella Maris hospital). That she takes her own life is no certain indication she is lost. There is more than enough evidence of her grappling toward a spiritual solution to suffering, enough to suggest that she hoped she might yet find solace.

At the end of The Passenger, Bobby lives in a lighthouse in Spain, looking over the sea that is protected by Stella Maris. He meets an unnamed individual. This could be the ghost of his deceased friend John Sheddan, who left a deathbed letter bidding Bobby in unabashed Christian language to “Be of good cheer.” The friend asks Bobby what he’s doing there, which leads to this exchange:

I live in a windmill. I light candles for the dead and I’m trying to learn how to pray.

What do you pray for?

I don’t pray for anything. I just pray.

Why does he pray? Perhaps for the good reason that his grandmother, Granellen, told him to. Granellen might be overlooked by readers, especially those determined to find no hope in these works. She represents the rootedness in the traditional world that McCarthy has described in detail elsewhere, for example, in Sheriff Bell’s wife Loretta of No Country for Old Men.

“Do you believe in God, Bobby?” Granellen asks. “I don’t know, Granellen. … The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions.” She advises him: “You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life.”

Bobby has by the end of the two novels suffered much loss. He didn’t save his sister from her demons. He comprehends the legacy he inherited from his father, who helped bring an unprecedented destructive power into the world.

But McCarthy has given us reason to believe that this is not the whole tale. These books hint that we might do well, when we face what Alicia named as “the horror beneath the surface of the world,” to emulate the practice of our ancestors. For they trusted that there would always be protection from that horror, so long as we do not lose faith. Alicia’s commitment to compassion and Bobby’s prayerful penitence give the reader reason to suspect that McCarthy did not shut the door on God before his life ended.

Public Discourse

Who Is Vladimir Putin?

When, in 2001, George W. Bush looked Vladimir Putin in the eye, he found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Nearly two decades later, the former president amended his account, saying that Russian oil riches had “changed” Putin. Another possibility does not seem to have occurred to Bush. Perhaps, in 2001, he looked into the eyes of someone consummately well-trained at dissimulation.

One might make a strong case that deep insight into Putin’s character requires profound knowledge of the social system from which he emerged, that is, the totalitarian police-state that was the USSR. In Gaila Ackerman and Stéphane Courtois’s 2022 Le Livre noir de Vladimir Poutine (which translated is “The Black Book of Vladimir Putin”), we find a considerable quantity of such insight.

This book, a collection of essays from scholarly experts on Russia and the former Soviet Union, comes at an especially important moment, as many on the religious right have become enamored of Putin’s supposedly Christian leadership of Russia. The Black Book of Vladimir Putin hews close to the facts and shows that any pretense to reality cannot deny that Putin’s regime is brutal, deceitful, corrupt, and unworthy of even mild admiration.

 

Putin: Homo Sovieticus

One of the two co-editors, Stéphane Courtois, is perhaps the world’s foremost historian of the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet communism. He is the main editor of the international bestseller, the title of which is played on in this current book, The Black Book of Communism. He is also the author of perhaps the finest biography of Lenin produced to date.

One of the central contributions Courtois has made to our understanding of Soviet society is the breathtaking scale of its moral corruption and the human costs that were a consequence of that condition. The Black Book details the gruesome quantitative data representing athe tens of millions of innocent human beings the Soviet machine-plowed into the ground.

This scholarly expertise makes Courtois an extraordinary analyst of Putin. The several chapters in this book that he authors or co-authors with co-editor Galia Ackerman are full of brilliant insights into the complicated business of understanding Putin, based on studying the forces that produced him. In Courtois’s view, the Russian strongman must be understood as an example of “Homo sovieticus,” a political personality irrevocably formed by his decade-and-a-half career, begun as a young man, in the stupendously brutal and amoral bureaucracy of the KGB.

The Soviet regime is formally gone, but the legacy of its formidable security apparatus lives on. There was never a “decommunization” process in the wake of the USSR’s collapse. The vast majority of those who had participated in its structures and atrocities escaped punishment, and many of them created political careers in the post-communist era. One sees this with clarity in people like Putin who were deeply marked by their socialization within that apparatus. One of the Ackerman/Courtois chapters is aptly titled “The KGB returns to power,” and another “Vladimir Putin’s headlong rush to the past.”

 

Putin’s post-Soviet political career accelerated markedly in the wake of his response, during his first stint as prime minister, to the bombings of several Russian apartment buildings in September 1999. The bombings were attributed by the Russian regime to the same Chechen Islamist forces that had invaded Dagestan in August, but the latter never claimed responsibility. An independent investigatory commission was created, but the Russian regime refused to cooperate with it. Several of its members were subsequently assassinated. Alexander Litvinenko, an agent with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet incarnation of the KGB (which was suspected by some critics of the government’s statement on the bombings as the real agents behind them), defected to the UK and wrote a book detailing the FSB’s responsibility. He was subsequently fatally poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 administered in a cup of tea. British intelligence sources determined that Putin’s fingerprints were almost certainly all over Litvinenko’s assassination.

Months after the bombings and a subsequent land invasion of Chechen territory, Putin rode the wave of horror and nationalist emotion to the Russian presidency for the first time. This was the series of events that provided the crucial backdrop for Putin’s rise to political power.

Putin’s Neo-Imperialism

The Black Book of Vladimir Putin works through much of the history of Putin’s aggression toward former Soviet republics. Putin has worked assiduously and ruthlessly to bring them into subordinate relations with Russia. Such efforts have included the overt subversion of political process in those countries, the crushing of political movements inside them hostile to his administration, and outright war, occupation, and annexation. Ukraine is merely the latest example of the neo-imperialism of the Putin regime, which is closely modeled on the expansionism of the Stalin years. Putin’s use of a friendly dictatorial regime in Belarus to arrange the delivery of tactical nuclear weapons to a country with an almost 700-mile border with Ukraine is but the latest example of Putin’s merciless and militaristic politics with respect to his neighbors.

In addition to Courtois’s formidable contributions, the volume offers many useful chapters on Putin’s imperialist ambition. Two chapters by Andrei Kozovoi, a historian of Russia at the University of Lille, expand on his insights into the secret police history and mentality of Putin. Mairbek Vatchagaev, a Chechen historian who was a member of the Chechen republic that fell during the Second Chechen War, provides an insider’s account of Putin’s successful effort to install Ramzan Khadyrov, a hardline despot sympathetic to the Russian regime, as political chief in Chechnya. The entire history of Putin’s action in the region is reasonably understood as an effort to reassemble the political monolith that was the former Soviet Union, the fracturing of which Putin described as “a major humanitarian tragedy” and the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century.

The Orthodox Church: Putin’s Ally

Antoine Arjakovsky, a French-born historian of Crimean ancestry, contributes a revealing chapter on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in providing crucial cultural support to the Putin regime. Patriarch Kirill gets much attention here. Many know of the scandal of the disappearing $30,000 watch on Kirill’s wrist, but Arjakovsky gives many more troubling examples of the moral compromise of a church hierarchy that has been solidly propagandizing for the Putin regime for years now. Kirill’s aggressive support of the war in Ukraine, and his framing of it in “metaphysical” terms, is deeply morally troubling. This is especially so given a leader in Moscow who flippantly speaks of nuclear exchange with the West, in an apocalyptic language of religious martyrdom that previously was heard only from Islamist suicide bombers. Kirill’s aggressive mobilization of the “Moscow as Third Rome” ideology provides more ground for the church’s warm relationship with the Putin regime.

Arjakovsky also discusses the Mitrokhine archive, which consists of notes compiled by Vassily Mitrokhine, a former KGB archivist who defected to the United Kingdom. These documents provide information on the re-creation of the Moscow Patriarchate under Stalin in 1943 and on the dictator’s efforts to exert control over the church. It was the NKVD, and later the KGB, that controlled the nominations to leadership positions in the church hierarchy and formulated plans to use the church’s relations with international religious and peace organizations for Soviet espionage.

This book offers a healthy corrective for the portion of the American right that’s become frustrated with liberalism and has turned to Putin’s Russia as a viable alternative—many of whom believe truly amazing things about Putin and the society over which he rules. The idea that Russia is a profoundly authentic Christian state is roundly debunked by straightforward social facts. What kind of Christian social utopia has the massive violent crime, murder, suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and divorce rates of Russia? None of this is consistent with a society in which Orthodox Christian culture and belief are deeply entrenched and practiced. On the contrary, it is all quite consistent with the low levels of real practical religiosity in Russia reported in reliable survey data. Research on how Russians behave in religious terms shows that they are in fact not entirely unlike Americans. That is, survey responses show high levels of religious belief, and much lower numbers of church attendance at services. Indeed, Americans have significantly higher levels of regular church attendance. This is evidence that those eager to emulate Russia are hard pressed to explain, when they can even be bothered to acknowledge its existence.

Limits of Liberal Critiques of Putin

Many, though not all, of the contributors to the book are evidently liberal democrats in their politics, and this has significant consequences on a few topics. Complicated aspects of the cultural and political debates between liberals, national conservatives, and religious traditionalists simply disappear under this lens. The fierce cultural struggle over, for example, the sexual political revolution of modernity is often caricatured in these pages as the illegitimate reactionary effort to destroy the pure and wholly positive sexual freedom of the ever-expanding LGBTQI+ community. Co-editor Ackerman, for example, in the chapter “A pseudo-conservative society that walks backwards,” presents as obvious atrocities the Putin regime’s support for the biological family, natalist policies, the reestablishment of sex-segregated primary and secondary education, and the reintroduction of school uniforms. She also cheers the efforts of George Soros’s Open Society to move the Russian cultural thermometer closer to the temperature of the Western democracies. But one scarcely needs to be pro-Putin to find that some of the things his regime advocates are not wholly inconsistent with reasonable cultural conservatism, as articulated by many sources outside Putin’s Russia.

 

Another example that shows up in several of the chapters is the facile way in which Russian nationalist and conservative philosophers with large and complicated bodies of writing behind them, such as Alexander Dugin and Ivan Ilyin, are flatly characterized as “fascists” and “Nazis” without any systematic effort to show how the entire body of their work would justify such a classification. Dugin’s idiotic online pronouncements on the Ukrainian War (“The Ukrainians should be killed, killed, killed. No more discussions.”) are mobilized by several different chapter authors as a definitive reason to dismiss everything he has ever thought or written. But both Dugin and Ilyin have produced some work nuanced enough to require a more intellectually serious critique than this crude effort to demonize. So while the book’s collection of data offers a strong repudiation of Putin’s regime, its dismissals of Russia’s social conservatism on liberal grounds are less persuasive.

Dealing with Putin

Even with its shortcomings, how can Courtois’s and Ackerman’s volume guide America’s response to the most pressing matter regarding Russia today, the war in Ukraine? As modern wars often are, the Russia–Ukraine affair is complicated, especially in its international implications. There is evidence of strong bipartisan American disapproval of Russia in the wake of the Ukrainian invasion. However, distinctions along partisan lines emerge over the practical question of what the United States should do. On the American right, this dispute is particularly rancorous. In the most recent Claremont Review of Books, Mark Helprin and Michael Anton argue the positions from the right on, respectively, the necessity to vigorously defend Ukraine and the wisdom of American refusal to get strongly entangled in the conflict.

It goes without saying that crucial to any responsible position in this debate is understanding the character of Vladimir Putin and the nature of his regime. The Ackerman–Courtois volume will not definitively put an end to these debates, but it does dispel any illusions that Putin’s leadership is anything more morally sophisticated than an effort to resurrect the spirit of Soviet Russia.