Willa Cather’s Death Comes For The Archbishop

I enjoyed Willa Cather’s My Antonia so much, I immediately started reading her Death Comes For The Archbishop. They are completely unrelated to each other, except they are both concerned with how people lived on the frontier of nineteenth century America. Death Comes For The Archbishop is set in the mid-1800s in the new territory of New Mexico. A young Roman Catholic priest, Jean Marie Latour, has been named bishop to this enormous, wild, and mostly lawless area of the southwest. He sets up his base in the small settlement of Santa Fe. 

From the title, one might think this is a mystery novel, but it is not that at all! Rather, it is the story of how two Roman Catholic missionaries from France serve various peoples with grace, sensitivity, and love. Latour’s best friend, Father Joseph Vaillant, accompanies him in his new placement. They first met in seminary in Clermont, France, and became fast friends, even though they are almost polar opposites. Physically, Fr. Vaillant is short, unattractive, and full of restless energy. Fr. Latour is tall, handsome, graceful and intellectual. Where there is a spiritual need, Vaillant wants to rush in to address it, while Latour tends to observe, take stock of the situation, and consider the long game.

Cather makes the point that these two approaches complement each other, and both are necessary for effective ministry (I owe this insight to Joel Miller’s excellent review of Death Comes For The Archbishop on his Substack, Miller’s Book Reviews.) The ministry Latour and Vaillant are assigned is daunting to say the least: a huge territory that encompasses most of what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. There are villages of Catholics that have not seen a priest in years. Men and women have paired up, without being married. Their children have not been baptized. 

Another pressing issue is Father Martinez of Taos, a very powerful and corrupt priest who refuses to recognize the authority of Bishop Latour. When Latour visits him, he flaunts his women and children and asserts that celibacy can no longer be enforced. He is also responsible for inciting a raid on the new American authorities where several men and women were brutally slaughtered by natives. As the famous Kit Carson relates to Latour, 

Our Padre Martinez at Taos is an old scapegrace, if ever there was one; he’s got children  and grandchildren in almost every settlement around here.
(Location 855, Standard ebooks edition)

Martinez tries to set up a schismatic church, but rather than force the issue, as Vaillant urges, Latour chooses to let Martinez slowly lose influence and followers as the true Church reasserts itself in the region.

While reading Death Comes For The Archbishop, I was impressed with the efforts these French Catholics take to serve their parishioners. They traveled literally thousands of miles on horseback through some of the most inhospitable land on earth. Often, there were no roads, let alone any maps, and every trip was life-threatening. And yet, Latour’s and Vaillant’s love for their flock enabled them to effectively administer to a diocese that was thousands of square miles in size.

One of Latour’s most impressive qualities is his ability to connect with wildly different groups of people. He relates to the lowliest Mexicans in his diocese, the wealthy landowners, and the various indigenous peoples like the Hopis and the Navajo. He forges deep friendships with members of all these constituencies. As far as the Native Americans go, he respects their traditions and doesn’t try to make them “European”. There is one fascinating chapter where he and his Indian guide, Jacinto, get caught in a deadly snowstorm. Jacinto manages to reach shelter in a cave. There is something about the cave that immediately causes Latour much discomfort. Jacinto tells Latour he must never reveal that he has been in this cave. He sees Jacinto carefully fill in a hole in the wall from which a stench is issuing. Latour is aware of tales that Jacinto’s tribe has offered human sacrifices to a “giant serpent” who lives in the mountain. However, once again, Latour doesn’t press the issue, and we never learn just what it is that causes Latour his distress.

Vaillant feels called to go to believers in Arizona, and there is constant tension between Latour’s desire to have his best friend nearby and allowing him to satisfy his calling. As the novel progresses, both men see the hand of God in the decisions they make. Early on, there’s an interesting conversation between them about the Virgin of Guadalupe:

“Where there is great love there are always miracles,” he [Latour] said at length. “One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph, I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
(Location 572, Standard Ebooks edition)

Just like in My Antonia, Cather does a masterful job of describing the beauty of the southwest desert. She truly is a visual artist whose medium is words:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still – and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!
(Location 224, Standard Ebooks edition)

As the title says, death does eventually come for Archbishop Latour, but not before we have an opportunity to reflect on a life well-lived. He served God and the Church to the best of his ability, and he left an extraordinary legacy in the wild expanse of southwest America. I’m not a Roman Catholic, but this book made me profoundly grateful for the unsung heroes of that Church who risked everything to bring the Faith to the most inaccessible areas of the world. Cather’s novel is a beautiful tribute to them.

Rod Dreher: Living In Wonder

Book number 54 of 2024

I have enjoyed Rod Dreher’s writing since the bygone days of his Crunchy Cons book, published in 2006. He followed that with The Benedict Option – which a lot of people mistook as a call for a complete withdrawal from society to preserve civilization – and then Live Not By Lies, which he wrote after coming into contact with brave resisters of Communist oppression in Hungary. Live Not By Lies is a stirring call to simply tell the truth, even when it can cost one everything.

Dreher has been open about his personal search for meaning. It has entailed countercultural lifestyles and some personal cul de sacs. He has been an Orthodox Christian since 2006, and he lives in Budapest, Hungary. I was sad to learn in the first few pages of Living In Wonder that he has gone through a divorce. It was obviously a traumatic event, and he appears to have come out of it stronger, but still seeking.

The thesis of Living In Wonder can be summed up with its first sentence, “The world is not what we think it is.” In the West, we have become so used to the scientific/materialist way of looking at the universe that we literally cannot see the world around us in the same way other cultures do. For most Westerners (or those of us who are WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) if we can’t measure something, it doesn’t exist. Even believing Christians, by and large, look at the practice of their religion as following a moral code exemplified by Jesus, and not as a way to perceive a higher, spiritual reality.

Early on, Dreher explains how we need to use both sides of our brains to fully comprehend the world:

It’s an exaggeration to say that the left brain is analytical and the right brain emotional. Nevertheless, it is true that the most important difference between the sides of the brain is how they attend to the world. The left brain picks things apart to analyze them, and the right brain puts them together again. Both cerebral hemispheres are necessary for the healthy functioning of the brain – but the left must never dominate the right, because the left brain makes a good servant but a poor master. This is in part because the left hemisphere is domineering by nature and doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. The left brain is intelligent, but it is not wise.

In the modern world – that is, during the past five hundred years – we in the West have privileged the left-brain way of knowing. (page 44)

Our desire to control nature has left us unable to resonate with it.

According to Dreher, the problem with a societal loss of enchantment is that people will not become atheist, but rather seek re-enchantment in any way they can. Unfortunately, some choose to do so via spiritually harmful ways. Chapter 5, The Dark Enchantment of the Occult is truly disturbing. In it, Dreher interviews several people who have experienced the demonic, whether through overtly occult practices, use of psychedelic drugs, or a combination of both. Dreher warns that there is a spiritual battle going on, and Western churches are woefully unprepared to fight it. As one priest Dreher spoke with put it,

The devil frightens me. I mean, he’s a fallen angel. I’m not going gung ho and stupid about these things. I know he’s ultimately only allowed to operate within the boundaries the Lord has set, but as a human being, I’m frightened of this supernatural intelligence far beyond our capacities.” (page 106)

In the next chapter, Aliens and the Sacred Machine, Dreher discusses the phenomena of UFOs as a modern manifestation of demonic forces that have been bedeviling humanity for millennia. According to many experts, UFOs are not visitors from another planet, but rather beings who have come from a different dimension.

Dreher also writes about the desires of many tech gurus to achieve “transhumanism” – the merging of humans with machines. AI is a rapidly developing technology that we really don’t know what will do to our spiritual health. There are already signs of people succumbing to the temptation to make an “idol” of AI, preferring virtual relationships to real ones. We are living in an age of “liquid modernity”, as coined by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, which is characterized by a rate of technological change that is so fast we cannot properly evaluate it.

Could technology really hasten the end of orthodox religion?

In the digital era, we face an enormous religious temptation. “Digital technology is spiritual technology,” says philosopher Anton Barba-Kay. Why? Because “the digital era thus marks the point at which our concern will be mainly the control of human nature through our control of what we are aware of and how we attend to it.” The temptation is to believe that we can extend control over human nature by merging ourselves with our own machines. (page 128-129)

At this point, I have to say that Dreher is making a pretty good case, but then he quotes Martin Heidegger, whom he describes as “arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century”. I know next to nothing about philosophy, but I do know Heidegger was a member of the German Nazi party, and they used his philosophy to justify their policies. Why Dreher thought it was appropriate to quote this man out of so many other tech-sceptic thinkers is inexplicable and undermines his argument.

After spending the first six chapters describing and diagnosing the problem of disenchantment, Dreher offers the cure in the final five. in chapter 7, he explains how important it is to cultivate attention to the ways God is communicating His presence. This is a difficult process of emptying oneself of distractions, being still, and waiting. Dreher recounts how he struggled with this, but through perseverance and practice slowly got better. He suffered from a stress-related chronic illness, and his priest assigned him a rule of prayer that healed him. It took him months, but he managed to successfully “get out of his own head”.

The prayer he prayed is one that Christians have prayed for centuries – the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Chapter 8 is Learning To See. If we can learn to properly perceive and appreciate true beauty, we are drawn closer to God.

How, then, will beauty save the world? By piercing the hard hearts and closed minds of men with the truth that delivers them from despair and calls them out of themselves. (page 168)

Chapter 9, Signs and Wonders, is a recounting of several modern-day miracles. They have happened to people from all walks of life, and were usually completely unexpected. One common thread is that they occurred during a personal struggle or crisis. It’s as if the recipient has to see how far they could fall before he or she could discern that a true miracle is happening.

Chapter 10, Three Prophets of the Real, is just that: portraits of three people who could be considered prophets. All of them are Orthodox Christians, but they did not start out that way. Martin Shaw is an English writer and scholar of myths and the truths they reveal. At a particularly difficult period of his life, he was granted a vision one evening that changed him forever. He now spends his time warning Western Christians that they must brace themselves for a struggle. In his theory of myth, there are three stages: red, black, and white. Red represents youth and passion. Black is failure and suffering, while white is the wisdom gained from the black stage: elderhood. He says Christianity is about to enter a “black” phase.

The second prophet is the English novelist Paul Kingsnorth, who lives in Ireland. His passion is reconnecting Christians with their patristic heritage that celebrated God’s creation.

His writing comes across as apocalyptic, which Kingsnorth readily concedes. But we are living through an apocalypse, from the Greek word meaning “unveiling”. What is being unveiled? that we are using our advanced technology to build new new life-fors to become our gods – and, in so doing, we are destroying our humanity and the good earth. …

Kingsnorth calls the emerging enemy of God and man “the Machine.” It’s a metaphor for the technological society manifesting around us, seizing control of our lives and rendering us all as little more than data. (pages 224 – 225)

The third prophet is Jonathan Pageau, who carves icons out of wood, and hosts a site called The Symbolic World.

“Materialism has played itself out,” Pageau tells me [Dreher]. “After World War II, the philosophical materialists and reductionists claimed they could explain everything in terms of purely material reasons. But you can’t do that with consciousness. People have begun to see that there is a necessary patterning to reality, a patterning that seems to have something to do with our capacity to perceive reality and to participate in it consciously.” (page 232-233)

The concluding chapter is The Urgency of the Mystical, in which Dreher relates several personal experiences that helped him survive some personal crises. He uses them to urge the reader to be open to miracles, and to resist the disenchantment that is accelerating in the West.

Living In Wonder  is a challenging book – not in the way it’s written; Dreher is very readable and engaging, but in his call to the West to wake up and not accept every technological advance as beneficial for the human race. Rather, he urges us to channel the longing for enchantment into healthy and time-honored practices, and avoid the darkness of the occult. It will be interesting to see what kind of reception his book receives.