Cormac McCarthy’s Attack on Roman Catholicism in Suttree
Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint . . . It is . . . necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. The “greatness” of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.
T.S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature” (1935)
At the macabre river-burial of a rotting corpse that a man named Leonard had long kept hidden so his father’s pension could be collected as if he were still alive, the son asks Cornelius Suttree to say a prayer. “The only words I know are the Catholic ones,” he replies, repeating the word “Catholic” (251). If Suttree had received this same request in Russia, he might well have answered, “The only words I know are the English ones. English.” It is a matter of diction, I will argue, not conviction.
Yet this statement, among the novel’s many other Catholic allusions, have led numerous critics to read Suttree as philo-Catholic and even confessionally Catholic, but never as anti-Catholic. I will seek to show—as to my knowledge no one else has done—the ways wherein the novel is relentlessly anti-Catholic. Cornelius Suttree makes, in fact, a sustained attack on Roman Catholicism as the chief miscreant in denying that the world is the realm of Demiurgic death rather than Christic life.
To argue this thesis, I will (1) salute the many virtues of Suttree, especially its memorable depiction of hard-scrabble life along the Tennessee River in early 1950s Knoxville, including its splendid humor; (2) recount McCarthy’s depiction of Cornelius Suttree as a man of shame but not guilt; (3) mark the Demiurgic death that Suttree everywhere encounters along his path; and finally (4) examine several scenes wherein McCarthy offers, rather than an implied critique, a full-fledged approval of Suttree’s uncompromised negative regard for all things Christian, and especially his outright scorn for Roman Catholicism.
The Many Virtues of Cornelius Suttree and His Friends
In ancient Gnosticism, the Demiurge is the being who created the world. The Gnostics identified him with the god of the Old Testament. The Gnostic scriptures portray him as arrogant, ignorant, malicious. From his lonely position where his madness and conceit could go unchecked, the Demiurge gave birth to the seven archons (“rulers”). These beings are like him and help him administer the material world which, like all creations, reflects the personality of its creator.
Cornelius Suttree has us confront him in the novel’s opening “Dear Reader” section:
Where hunters and woodcutter once slept in the boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and then went on, old teutonic forebears with dyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean Aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing but dark’s total restitution could appease. . . .
The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing’s inside and can you guess his shape? Where he’s kept or what’s the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a timewarp, a carder of souls from the world’s nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bonehorses draw his dead cart through the streets and does he call his trade to each? Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is just by suchwise that he’s invited in. (4-5).
Already from the outset, Suttree warns against staring into the Abyss. As Nietzsche said, it may stare back. To dwell upon the Demiurge is to be devoured by him.
Although Suttree was published in 1979, McCarthy had worked on it for nearly twenty years. Set in Knoxville during 1950-54, with many of the sites still recognizable, it is the most autobiographical of McCarthy’s many prize-winning works. Growing up in Knoxville as the son of a prosperous TVA lawyer, McCarthy was confirmed in the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church and educated at Catholic High. It is natural that the novel should contain many references to Catholic faith and tradition. Yet its prime focus is on the sordid underbelly of Knoxville life in the early 1950s.
As a college-educated man apparently in his mid-thirties, Cornelius Suttree has rejected his privileged past to work as a fisherman living in a shanty boat on the Tennessee River. We follow his meandering adventures—including his time in a workhouse for criminals—as he encounters and often befriends people whom, at our peril, we may be tempted to dismiss as worthless trash. Instead, McCarthy immerses us in the existence of people who often do desperate and outrageous things just to keep alive.
Suttree’s story is plotless, meandering, thoroughly picaresque. From the outset, it poses ultimate questions: Do our lives constitute a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? If so, why go forward with them? An implicit answer lies in the novel’s third-person limited point of view, as the protagonist-narrator stands outside the story yet gives it shape and significance in rehearsing it, often recounting scenes where he is not present, via free indirect discourse. Suttree’s mastery of dialogue is splendid, including its witty profanity, where he is free from his word-wizardry.
Not everyone has been convinced by Suttree’s sumptuous rhetoric. James Wood, for example, describes McCarthy in his
. . . afflatus mode [as] magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. The words stagger around their meanings, intoxicated by the grandiloquence of their gesturing: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.”
Wood much prefers the “deflatus mode” of the later McCarthy: “The new and welcome thing in The Passenger and Stella Maris is the lucidity of [their] bitter metaphysics. McCarthy’s earlier books were so shrouded in obscurity, rang with so much hieratic shrieking and waving, that it was perfectly possible to extract five contradictory theological ideas at once from their fiery depths.”
Though Suttree’s world is filled with little else than stench and rot—almost always saturated in alcohol—it is far from nihilistic. Sut and his friends constitute an unorganized multiracial community built on respect and care. They look out for each other, provide mutual aid when trouble comes, joke and have fun and (above all) drink together. A black man, Abednego Jones, becomes one of Suttree’s closest friends after he and his wife Doll rescue him from a drinking spree that left him in a wretched (and retching) stupor. Though the Joneses run a thriving illegal tavern in their houseboat, they have no hope of rising above their lowly estate. In fact, Ab reminds Sut that “They don’t like no nigger walkin’ round like he was a white man” (203). So solid is their friendship that Suttree holds fast to Jones all the way through his epic battle with the police, until he is finally beaten to death in jail.
We never learn the nature of Suttree’s own crime, though he perhaps provides a veiled account of it when two policemen stop him and Joyce, his drunken prostitute, on Cumberland Avenue. In her sobbing rage, Joyce has kicked out the windshield after Sut had called her “a dizzy cunt.” The cops do not arrest or charge Suttree with a crime, even though he wishes “a fissure to open beneath them and swallow all” (410). It is worth noting—to account for this episode—Augusta Britt’s recent revelation that, when she was 17 and 42-year-old McCarthy was still married to Annie DeLisle, they a met at a motel swimming pool in Tucson. Despite the quarter-century dividing them in age, they fled to Mexico believing (or at least fearing) that the FBI was seeking to arrest McCarthy on charges of statutory rape and human trafficking. The point here is not to make an ad hominem smear of Cormac McCarthy, but to note that, when writers render personal experience into fiction, they are seldom trustworthy.
Despite the seriousness of this scene, the novel is often hilariously funny. The most outrageously comic figure is Gene Harrogate. At age 18, he sneaks into a farmer’s produce patch at night, slices open his melons, then kneels and mounts them. Eventually he is caught and the farmer shoots the pathetic sex-crazed boy. Discerning what is more pitiable than contemptible in Gene, the owner later visits the wounded youth in the hospital, bringing him ice cream. For his crime, Harrogate is sent to a workhouse where Suttree first meets him as his fellow law-breaker. He sees Harrogate as having eyes “bright with a kind of animal cognizance, with incipient good will” (42). There is not a whit of meanness in Gene.
Harrogate’s hare-brained ingenuity is not limited to melon-humping. Believing that he will be happy if he can get rich, he laces dead birds with strychnine, tosses them into the air, so that bats will gobble them up and fall dead to the ground, enabling Gene to collect them. He hopes to reap a windfall since an epidemic of rabies has been spread by bats, causing a bounty to be put on them. But for only one or two, not forty-two! The official at the city hospital thus turns away poor Gene with empty pockets, alas. The final and worst of Harrogate’s nut-case schemes is to tunnel beneath a bank and dynamite its vault. He in fact manages to create an explosion that was at first mistaken as an earthquake. Yet he succeeds only in setting loose a sewer main, almost drowning in the flooding feces.
These outrageous escapades are not extraneous. From being simply Suttree’s foil, Gene Harrogate is one of us. Few desires are more powerful than sex and money. Harrogate thus serves as a parody of the American gospel of success and happiness won by worshipping the gods Eros and Plutus.
Cornelius Suttree as Man of Shame but not Guilt
“Am I a monster, are there monsters in me?” (366). This is as close as Suttree comes to confessing his sinfulness. Even if he had done so, he would remain a man of sorrows, seeming to be more sinned against than sinning. This becomes keenly evident when his mother Grace visits him in jail. He is riven with shame for having failed to become not a worthy son of Grace but a demonic disappointment instead. He depicts her in unmistakably Marian terms, another grieving Dolorosa, when she pleads with him not to weep:
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bubbly. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child’s heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of’s come to pass.
Suttree began to cry nor could he stop . . . Hot salt strangled him. He wheeled away. (61)
Again, at the burial of his young son, Suttree is depicted as a pitiable figure, even though he had abandoned his wife and left her to raise the boy. Furious at seeing that a machine will be used to dump dirt on the little coffin, he insists on doing the spadework himself. Yet the child’s death prompts neither reverence nor regret but a familiar evocation of the Void: “How surely the dead are beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it” (153). Nor can Suttree avoid assaulting the Demiurgic hand that snatched the child: “Pale manchild were there last agonies? Could you feel the claw that claimed you . . . And what could a child know of the darkness of God’s plan?” (154, emphasis added). Rather than regarding his son’s death as resulting from the natural operation of secondary causes, Suttree sees it as the work of a maleficent Deity jerking innocent goodness out of this world into nothingness.
Back at their homeplace prior to the funeral, Suttree encounters his sorrowing mother-in-law. Rather than embracing her in their mutual grief, he calls her a “ghastly bitch” (151) and kicks her in the head, knocking her to the ground. He has only a slightly better regard for the wife whom he had abandoned. Yet he refuses to see her as the woman he ruined; instead, he escapes into the idealizing amber of memory: She is the girl who had taken him “as the son of light,” her virtual savior. He recalls his young bride’s “hair in the morning before it was pinned back, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm” (153).
The sheriff at the scene, a friend of Suttree’s father-in-law, is far more realistic in calling Suttree “a fourteen carat gold plated son of a bitch” (146), while warning him against the cynical notion that nothing on earth is truly important:
That’s where you’re wrong my friend. Everything’s important. A man lives his life, he has to make that important. Whether he’s a small-town county sheriff or the president. Or a busted-out bum. You might even understand that some day. You might. (157)
Sut ignores the sheriff; instead, he collapses in drunken sorrow: “He began to cry harder and harder until he was sitting there in the grass with the bottle between his knees, wailing aloud.” Seeking shelter from the cold in a church basement, “he started to cry again, lying there in the dark of the church cellar under old newspapers” (159).
When he actually confronts his former wife’s grief, Suttree is “consumed in shame like a torch” (150). But while shame and guilt are closely connected, they are not the same. Shame is triggered mainly by a sense of regret, failure, humiliation, even worthlessness over injury one has caused to others. It is almost entirely centered on oneself. Sut experiences it in abundance, both powerfully for himself and poignantly for his readers. Guilt, by contrast, comes not only with the recognition that one has harmed either oneself or others, but also with a sense of responsibility for the hurt one has caused. It issues in repentance, seeks to rectify the damage, and pleads for forgiveness—if not from God, then from the injured. At no time does Suttree experience guilt of this sort. Hence, the legitimate question: How does his shame-filled weeping differ from self-pity?
The Demiurgic Negativity of Suttree’s World
If Suttree’s sorrow is self-indulgent, so perhaps is his relish of the rot along the river. He seems almost to delight in the detritus, stink, and decay that constitute his world:
The viaduct spanned a jungly gut filled with rubble and wreckage and a few packingcrate shacks inhabited by transient blacks and down through this puling waste the dark and leprous waters of First Creek threaded the sumac and poison ivy. Highwater marks of oil and sewage and condoms dangling in the branches like stranded leeches . . . Here some bones. Broken glass. A few stray dogturds. (116)
The city’s neon lights are reflected “in the water like discolored sores” (212), as Suttree crisscrosses “a landscape of old tires and castoff watertanks rusting in the weeds” (64). The river itself is “Cloaca Maxima” (13), the city’s foul latrine, awash with “gouts of sewage faintly working, gray clots of nameless waste and yellow condoms.” Its junkyard is the site of “ruined household artifacts” together with “beached and stinking forms of foetal humans.”
Bearing along garbage and rafted trash . . . A dead sow pink and bloated and jars and crates and shapes of wood washed into rigid homologues of viscera and empty oilcans locked in eyes of dishing slime where the spectra wink guiltily.
One day a dead baby. Bloated, pulpy rotted eyes in a bulbous skull and little rags of flesh trailing in the water like tissuepaper. (360)
That Suttree witnessed such horrors is not to be denied; rather it is his focus on the rot that becomes so wearisome that readers have cause to plead for relief.
Death pervades the novel from start to finish. Near the end, Suttree seeks out an old ragman on whom he has kept a watchful eye. He finds him dead (perhaps a suicide), his shack robbed, his body looted. Filled with rage at the ragpicker’s welcoming of death, Sut denounces him for capitulating to his misery: “You have no right to represent people this way . . . A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness” (422). For Cornelius Suttree, the only over-arching good is to stay alive, regardless of conditions. As we shall see, he is himself determined not to die.
Suttree’s monomaniacal obsession with death is accompanied by unremittingly negative portrayals of Christianity as a death-dealing religion. In a feverish dream near the end, Suttree imagines a battle-axe nun accusing him (albeit armed with his own word-hoard) of having kept bad company:
Mr. Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.
I was drunk (457).
It is altogether predictable that we are not given the sister’s likely response to Suttree’s excuse, which of course is no mea culpa. She would probably have told him to cut back on the alcohol, to straighten up and fly right. He would likely have dismissed her as a moralistic shrew, preferring to remain in perpetual vagrancy and flight.
As if such a Catholic accuser were not meant to be sufficiently reprehensible, her Protestant counterpart is even more so. A self-castrated eunuch—and thus a preacher proclaiming a sterile message—he is a “vituperous evangelist” with “a goggling visage misshapen with hatred.” He stands at his window shouting down bitter fundamentalist imprecations at such anonymous passers-by as Gene Harrogate: “Child of darkness . . . See him. Does he not offend thee? Does not such iniquity rise to the very heavens? . . . Die! he screamed. Perish a miserable death with thy bowels blown open and black blood boiling from thy nether eye” (105-6).
Though he knew her work well, McCarthy’s anti-Christian spleen would not permit him to have Harrogate confronted by such an evangelist as Bevel Summers, the youth preacher in Flannery O’Connor’s “The River,” especially since his sermon is laden with river references:
Then he lifted his head and arms and shouted. “Listen to what I got to say, you people! There ain’t but one river and that’s the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ Blood. That’s the river you have to lay your pain in. in the River of Faith, in the River of Life, in the River of Love, in the rich red river of Jesus Blood, you people!”
His voice grew soft and musical. “All the rivers come from that one River and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it because that’s the River that was made to carry sin. It’s a River full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old red river water round my feet.”
Cornelius Suttree’s Gnostic Attack on Roman Catholicism
The novel is littered with Demiurgic anathemas, as when Suttree is examining his grandmother’s decaying photo album of their ancestors:
He closed the cover on this picturebook of the afflicted. A soft yellow dust bloomed. Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle. (130)
Later, when Suttree sits at his old desk in the Catholic school he had attended as a boy, he calls it “a derelict school for lechers,” perhaps hinting at sexual abuse. There he had been “taught a sort of Christian witchcraft.” And when a priest enters the room, Cornelius describes him as a “catatonic shaman” (304).
Yet the novel’s most salient Demiurgic passages are found in Suttree’s two visits to the Church of the Immaculate Conception. It was erected by Irish immigrants in 1856, just two years after the dogma was officially promulgated by Pope Pius IX, in the conviction that Mary was sexually conceived but without the taint of original sin, thus making her a fit vessel to bear the Son of God. Despite Cormac McCarthy’s own Irish ancestry, he refuses to have his hero honor a possible debt to his poor Irish forebears.
Instead, he provides drunken Suttree with nothing but negative memories. Sut calls the church a “kingdom of fear and ashes.” He remembers himself as “the child that sat in these selfsame bones so many black Fridays in terror of his sins. Viceridden child, heart rotten with fear.” He also recalls the parish priests as:
Black clad keepers, with their neat little boots, their spectacles, the deathreek of the dark and half scorched muslin that they wore. Grim and tireless in their orthopedic moralizing. Filled with tales of sin and unrepentant deaths and visions of hell and stories of levitation and possession and dogmas of semitic damnation for the tacking up of the paraclete. After eight years a few of their charges could read and write in primitive fashion and that was all (254).
Then follows what is surely Suttree’s most Demiurgic display of his anti-Catholic animus:
A thousand hours or more he’s spent in this sad chapel. Spurious acolyte, dreamer impenitent. Before this tabernacle where the wise high God himself is sleeping in his golden cup . . . Here a sallow plaster Christ. Agonized below a muricate crown. Spiked palms and riven belly, there beneath the stark belly the cleanlipped spear-wound. His caved haunches loosely girdled, feet crossed and fastened by a single nail. Mater alchimia in skyblue robes, she treads a snake with her chipped and naked feet. (253)
Why should this sanctuary be sad rather than reverence-invoking, even to Suttree the Gnostic? Why is the Reserved Host the sign of a somnolent God, a deity too drowsy even to say, “Father, forgive Cornelius, for he knows not what he does”? What Suttree does, is to commit the vilest of his blasphemies by referring not to Mater Dolorosa but to Mater Alchimia. Far from being the Virgin Mary who stood by her dying Son amid her own agony, she is the Mother Alchemist. Just as alchemy is an ancient pseudo-science that sought to transform base metals into gold or else to produce an elixir for curing diseases and extending life, so is this Mary a pseudo-Theotokos, a fraudulent alchemical intercessor and redemptrix. No wonder, then, that when a priest awakens sleeping Suttree to remind him that “God’s house is not exactly the place to take a nap,” Suttree snaps at him not once but twice: “It’s not God’s house” (255). He is right, of course, for the Demiurge is embodied only in his evil archons, unlike the God who incarnates himself in the crucified and risen Christ, his Church and its sacraments, especially the Eucharist, where he is still present.
Suttree credits none of this. On the contrary, he seems to be undertaking his own resurrection when, near the novel’s end, he repairs his shanty boat and puts new drums beneath it. There he finds himself in a calm contemplative mood on a clear Knoxville night, posing questions to the lamplight on the ceiling. It is his virtual catechism:
Suppose there be any soul to listen and you dead tonight.
They’d listen to my death.
No final word?
Last words are only words.
You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell.
I’d say I was not unhappy.
You have nothing.
It may be the last shall be first.
Do you believe that?
No.
What do you believe?
I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.
Equally?
It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. (414)
Suttree spends the final fifty-seven pages of the novel attempting to defeat “the dark of death.” For if Death rather than Life is the first and final reality, the only way to beat it is not to die—though Sut declares his readiness to enter the Void:
Suttree said I am going out of the world, a long silent scream on rails down the dark nether slope of the hemisphere that is death’s prelude. Attended by ponderous and mercurial figures composed of colored gas and wrenching themselves slowly apart, pale green cerise and bottle blue butyljawed fools that galloped softly and cried out Powww and Boyyy, exulting into the breach with boneless cartoon mouths puckered and wapsy galligaskins, lumbering eternally toward the edge of all. (452)
Yet Cornelius cannot make his final exit before offering yet another blast at Yahweh, the Old Testament deity who was much reviled by Gnostics. He envisions the God worshipped by Jews and Christians as populating his world with the denizens of Hell:
Seized in a vision of the archetypical patriarch himself unlocking with enormous keys the gates of Hades. A floodtide of screaming fiends and assassins and thieves and hirsute buggers pours forth into the universe, tipping it slightly on its galactic axes. The stars go rolling down the void like redhot marbles. These simmering sinners with their cloaks smoking carry the Logos itself from the tabernacle and bear it through the streets while the absolute prebarbaric mathematick of the western world howls them down and shrouds their ragged biblical forms in oblivion. (457-8)
We last hear from Suttree as he is fleeing the hospital where he had been confined with typhoid fever. He is yet again on the lam, leaving Knoxville and heading west, rather like Huck Finn lighting out for the territories. Thus is Suttree’s death never narrated, though he is described as ridding himself of all human accoutrements:
He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would never be found in his lifetime and he’d taken for talisman the simple human heart within him. Walking down little street for the last time he felt everything fall away from him. Until there was nothing left of him to shed. It was all gone. No trail, no track. The spoor petered out down there on Front Street where things he’d been lay like paper shadows, a few here, they thin out. After that nothing. A few rumors. Idle word on the wind. Old news years in traveling that you could not put stock in (468-9).
Concerning protagonists of narrative fiction, the question is whether and to what extent they undergo change, for either good or evil. Suttree seems not to have been significantly altered: “I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only” (461). This confession need not be read as arrant solipsism, but as an affirmation of the unique dignity and worth of every human being. This is perhaps what he also means when on two occasions he declares, “I am. I am” (80, 129). Yet there are considerable grounds for doubt. Suttree may be announcing his god-like status, echoing the words of Isaiah 46:9: “I am God, and there is none like me.” Perhaps he is also parroting Yahweh’s unelaborated words to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3:14: “I am who I am.”
As if to affirm his quasi-divine powers while lying on what seems to be his deathbed, Suttree boasts of his all-conquering hairy pubis. Unlike Freud, he is possessed only by Eros, not also by Thanatos, the death-desire. When a nurse comes to catheterize him, he calls her “Catheterina,” telling her he “never saw a lovelier ass” (462). He even makes a pass at the uncomprehending nun who attends him: “Pussy, sweet pussy, said Suttree . . . Weet pussy. Sweet giggling ensued. His penis arose enormous from between his legs, a delicious spasm and there unfolded from the end of it a little colored flag on a wooden stem, who knows what country?” (458).
After a priest arrives to give Suttree Extreme Unction while chanting the Miserere (“Have mercy on me, O God”), he receives the chrism as if he were annealed “like a rapevictim,” silently calling the cleric “praetor to a pederastic deity” (460). A second priest later arrives to hear Sut’s final confession. He even offers dying Cornelius a few sips of consecrated wine, though Sut has shown no contrition. He savors them, not in the hope that these sacramental drops might yet save him, but to assuage his physical thirst. When this merciful man of God assures the almost-dead Suttree that “God must have been watching over you,” Suttree replies, “You would not believe what watches . . . He is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving” (461). The Demiurge is indeed not a thing; he is the man-hating and Catholic-despising Monster who is ever on the prowl, seeking whom he may rape.
The God who rapes is the Gnostic Demiurge. How much more truly, therefore, might Cornelius Suttree have named his authentic tongue, both early and late: “The only words I know are the Gnostic ones. Gnostic.”