The Ultimate Journey in Two Novels by Walker Percy
In an important essay composed around the time he was writing Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy declared his interest in writing a sort of “prophecy in reverse,” a novel of the future warning readers about his “ultimate concern with the nature of man and the nature of reality” in the America of the 1960s. Admitting that a novelist with such concerns could be called “philosophical” or “eschatological,” he went on to declare: “It is fitting that he should shock and therefore warn his readers by speaking of last things—if not of the Last Day of the Gospels, then of a possible coming destruction, of a laying waste of cities, of vineyards reverting to the wilderness” (The Message in the Bottle 104). As he called attention to the “profoundly disquieting” fact that “the triumphant secular society of the Western world, the nicest of all worlds, killed more people in the first half of this century than have been killed in all history,” he announced his concern as a novelist with “the radical questions of man’s identity and his relation to God or to God’s absence.” He went on to acknowledge his explicitly Christian background: “It is probably an advantage to subscribe to a world view which is incarnational, historical, and predicamental . . . to see man as by his very nature an exile and wanderer . . . And if it is true that we are living in eschatological times, times of enormous danger and commensurate hope, of possible end and possible renewal, the prophetic-eschatological character of Christianity is no doubt peculiarly apposite” for a novelist (Message 111). Since he finds that Christendom has worn out its vocabulary and lost its moral leadership (especially by its mistreatment of African Americans), the Christian novelist, in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor, must “call on every ounce of cunning, craft and guile . . . [by making] fictional use of violence, shock, comedy, insult, the bizarre” (118).
Walker Percy’s craft as an apocalyptic novelist has been studied by several critics, most thoroughly by Gary M. Ciuba in Walker Percy’s Books of Revelation, but none has explicitly linked his two apocalyptic novels to recent eschatological thought. Ciuba finds that all “Percy’s fiction retells the ancient story of biblical apocalypse in which judgment and destruction culminate in re-creation” (2). He discerns a narrative pattern in the novels which begins with a moment of revelation, which “at first frees his blind outcasts from their solitary self-absorption so that they are no longer objectified or abstracted but are aware of themselves and attentive to the world” (4). As we shall see in measuring Percy’s vision against Davenport’s categories of eschatology, Ciuba is correct in affirming that “Percy’s apocalypticism rejects a totally transcendent eschatology by continually affirming that salvation is found not out of time but in and through it” (7). Ciuba concludes that “the Apocalypse of John is the story of all of Percy’s stories. Each novel explores ever-varying reverberations of this fundamental pattern in its image of time and in its fictional artistry” (9). For Ciuba, Percy’s main characters are flawed wayfarers trying to read the “signs not so much for the end of the world but for the mystery of their own eschatological identities” (11). Most of them are divided persons in a divided society with a fragmented philosophy, most fundamentally caught in a schism of spirit and body. Their dividedness is revealed to them by prophetic guides and by disasters that “perform the apocalyptic task of unveiling by breaking down the ‘absolute partitioning of reality’ that screens the disheartened traveler from the city, his fellow commuters, even his own body” (15). The ending of these end-time novels is usually some sort of “spiritual conversion” to “a rediscovery of community and reconciliation” (Percy, Message 112). As Ciuba summarizes Percy’s thematic patterns: “Percy’s apocalypticism has . . . challenged him to reconceive such genres as the comedy of manners, picaresque narrative, utopian fantasy, mystery, romance, and thriller by discovering in all of these forms a common story about revelation, ruin, and renewal” (25).
Love in the Ruins
In the light of our summary of eschatology, let us examine this most cosmic of Percy’s comic novels with regard to (a) Davenport’s four types of eschatology; (b) defining apocalyptic traits; and (c) narrative patterns related to the Bible and to Kierkegaard. A close reading of this novel shows that Percy incorporates all four types of eschatology in his novel, two as objects of satire and two as means of revelation. The example of prehistorical protohistorical eschatology in Love in the Ruins is the lifestyle of the hippies living in the Louisiana swamp outside of Paradise Estates. The “love couple” of Chuck (son of a golf pro in the estates) and Ethel (a thin, moody graduate of Smith College) live in “a chickee of loblolly chinked with blue bayou clay,” but call on the hero, Dr. Tom More, to cure their dehydrated baby. Here the couple has tried to escape history by returning to a primitive, pantheistic way of life, where they claim to find “god every minute” in themselves, in nature, in drugs, and in unrestrained sex. They have found what Ciuba calls a “pastoral apocalypse reminiscent of Charles Reich’s greening of America” (148). The most extreme case within this pastoral idyll is Hester, who has reverted back to “shepherd girl piping a tune on a Greek vase,” living without history or consciousness or a last name in a “world of dreamy beatitude” (Ciuba 148).
The example of ahistorical soteriological eschatology of escape in the novel is the life of More’s wife, Doris, and her mentor of Eastern thought, Alistair Fuchs-Forbes. Unable to forgive her husband or God for the death of their daughter, Samantha, Doris escapes to a purely spiritual quest that her husband calls “Gnostic pride.” Following Alistair and his sect to Mexico and giving up on marriage, family, and her history, she seeks what Davenport calls “an irreversible release from the evil of profane existence into the sacred reality” beyond time and space. She leaves Tom behind to pursue, after her death, a new woman, but he finds himself torn by three impulses, one spiritual, one sensual, the other ambiguous, each embodied in a different woman: Lola, Moira, and Ellen.
Most of the novel combines the fully apocalyptic eschatology of linear time within meaningful history and radically historical eschatology with its transcendent destiny. As we shall see in our study of the various apocalyptic traits, the hero is caught in an apocalyptic split between a secular and areligious pseudoparadise, along with a third possibility, a transcendent eschatological goal that requires present engagement in history. The first two are two types of “love in the ruins,” the third is ultimate “love.” This latter is embodied in a sacramental Christianity to which Tom More is drawn but from which he continually lapses. Let us follow the science fiction adventures “of this bad Catholic at a time near the end of the world” in his quest for wholeness and transcendence.
The novel begins on July 4 with the hero waiting for an imminent end of his Southern world. Caught at the crossroads of time and place on an interstate cloverleaf, he describes his split self and situation: “Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?” (Love 3). Expressing the central divided consciousness (“I came to myself”), the narrator sums up the predicament of the South, the world, and the self in a “now” time of “waiting for the end of the world” (3). His human desire for “paradise” has been reduced by his neighbors to the luxurious leisurely life of a segregated suburb, Paradise Estates, where he lives alone after the loss of his daughter and the departure of his wife. Around him he feels history moving on relentlessly in its cause-and-effect “historical machinery” like a roller-coaster carrying him “toward the brink” (3). In this apocalyptic situation he recounts the cosmic catastrophe embodied in the disasters that have occurred during the past four days, disasters that make up the major part of the novel’s setting. Signs of the catastrophe appear in the recurrent imagery of vines breaking through pavement and circling human arms, making the paradise into a decadent version of the hanging gardens of the fallen city of Babylon in the book of Revelation. These signs will be joined by other apocalyptic menaces, such as deadly gunshots, fiery houses and cities, brimstone sand traps on the golf course, and a self-destructing paradise. As events get out of control in the novel, Tom hides out with his three women in a motel, telling them in “grave, articulate, apocalyptic” tones, “There is a good chance of a catastrophe this afternoon, of national, perhaps even world proportions” (302).
In this apocalyptic situation, the plot portrays the dichotomies within individuals, families, politics, and the Church. Dr. More has discovered within himself and others a fatal split between soul and body, leaving individuals a prey to an “angelism” that lives on an abstract mental level cut off from their bodily, historical reality, thus causing them to fall into recurrent “bestialism,” shown in violence, alcoholism, and sexual license (26). Such inner dividedness has torn apart most of the families in the novel, and has found its political parallel in the split between the right-wing Knothead Party and the new Left Party, its racial expression in the conflict between whites and black Bantus, and its religious analogue in the split within the Catholic Church between the conservative American Catholic Church and the Dutch Schismatics (leaving only a small Roman Catholic remnant, led locally by Fr. Rinaldo Smith, who has become a part-time apocalyptic fire-watcher). Thus the recurrent theme of the novel is echoed in the line from Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” “The center cannot hold” (Love 18, 131, 196). These splits are made even more explicitly apocalyptic by the introduction of the running apocalyptic battle between Dr. More, who tries to be the savior to heal these dichotomies, and Art Immelman, a diabolical conman who appears and offers to help More expand his scientific salvation to gain power and money. More has discovered a machine (a “lapsometer”) that measures brain tensions reflecting the psychic and moral splits within the individual, but then tries to use it to heal such splits. Unfortunately, the presence of “heavy sodium” in the ground around Paradise Estates distorts the effects of the machine, thus precipitating even greater splits between “angel” and “beast” in the inhabitants.
The central scenes in the novel begin with the entrapment by the Mephistophelian Art Immelman of Dr. More, forcing him to sign a contract to promote his machine, in response to an offer to expand More’s “musical erotic” love as a power that is “abstractive and godlike,” making one “like a god in one’s freedom and omniscience” (202). This Faustian bargain seems to give More the salvific power that he desires, for he immediately defeats his rival, Dr. Buddy Brown, in a debate in the medical Pit concerning the treatment of a patient who refuses to speak and is scheduled for forced retirement and euthanasia. In this apocalyptic battle between cosmic good and evil, Dr. More cures the patient by revealing his solid inner self, but Art Immelman passes out the lapsometers to the medical students, who immediately give one another overdoses and create violent sexual behavior. As Ciuba summarizes Dr. More’s own lapse:
Tempted by Art to become the savior, Tom More becomes a messiah in ruins, the very image of himself that he unknowingly glimpses in the Little Napoleon [tavern] just before his first visit from Art . . . The holy picture represents “the new Christ, the spotted Christ, the maculate Christ, the sinful Christ.” Whereas the old Christ died to save the world from sin, Tom imagines that the “new Christ shall reconcile man with his sins” . . . thus the alcoholic doctor envisions himself as a boozy send-up of a savior. (145)
After winning but losing this cosmic battle because of his hubristic desires, More retires to the motel, where he tries to keep happy the three women whom he wants to satisfy his “musical-erotic” longings. One of them, Moira, appeals to his bestial sensuality; another, Lola, appeals to his musical angelic impulses; the third, Ellen, a nonbelieving Presbyterian, provides both moral and bodily happiness. While protecting these women, More decides to sneak out to find the source of the snipers, and discovers larger plots, in this case, of the Bantu revolutionaries, who promptly capture and imprison him in St. Michael’s, his old Catholic Church named for the archangel who defeated Lucifer in the book of Daniel 10 and 13, and again in Revelation 12:7ff. More escapes by being “reborn” through the air duct into the “hot bright perilous world” outside (295). After learning of various explosions of violence in the cities and suburbs, exacerbated by Art Immelman’s use of the lapsometer, More finally breaks himself away from the sensual Moira and the musical Lola with the help of Ellen, who reminds him of his dead daughter, Samantha, and inspires him to use his new vision to confront the devil once again.
In the final battle scene, in a sort of Last Judgment amid the brimstone bunkers of the Paradise golf course, Dr. More is tempted by Art Immelman to go to Honey Island with the hippies and Bantus, where he can live in his “musical erotic” paradise. With the help of Ellen and the memory of Samantha’s warning about sinning “against grace,” More suddenly comes awake and resists in time to save Ellen from the touch of the devil, who has taken on the figure of an Antichrist. More prays, “Sir Thomas More, kinsman, saint, best dearest merriest of Englishmen, pray for us and drive this son of a bitch hence” (355). The apocalyptic battles end comically with Art disappearing into the smoke and Ellen inviting Tom to come home.
In the final section of the novel, five years have passed and Dr. More is once again “waiting and listening,” but he now recognizes one big “difference between this age and the last. Now while you work, you also watch and listen and wait” (359). But in this new age beyond the false apocalypse of Art and the revolutions, he is content to live in vigilance, aware that the eschatological age begins in this world of conflicts but looks ahead to a transformed world. He has learned from the Christmas hymns that played while he was being reborn from the church to let Christ be the savior and to build his kingdom now but without making himself into a utopian savior. He still hopes to use his skills as a psychiatrist and an inventor to help heal the human dividedness, but he will not expect to create a perfect human, only a “sovereign wanderer, a lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher” (361). Married to Ellen and living in the old slave quarters (because the Bantus have won the class and racial war by discovering oil and moving into the new Paradise Estates), More has learned to think “of Christ coming again at the end of the world and how it is that in every age there is the temptation to see signs of the end” (365). He ends his own end-time battles by going to Christmas Eve Mass after confessing his shame for his sins and hearing from Father Smith how he must simply do his job by “being a better doctor,” “showing a bit of ordinary kindness to people,” and “doing what we can for our poor unhappy country” (376). The novel ends with his receiving the Eucharist (“I eat Christ, drink his blood”), returning home to his new family, and going with his wife “to bed where all good folk belong” (379).
Throughout the apocalyptic novel, Percy plays with various revelationary forms of apocalyptic symbolism. For example, the number three weaves throughout the conflicts: More’s three women (suggesting his three aspects of the abstract Woman), the three parts of the Church, the three Bantus, the three temptations of Art, the three battles between More and Art, and three parts of the human brain (triangulation). The imagery of the final days appears in the organic overgrowth of vines in cities, the brimstone in the bunkers, the clarion bells sounding the final battles, and so forth. Although much of this is done in comic and satiric fashion, beneath the caricatures and wisecracks is woven a serious theological web. All the absurdities of the villains and satiric objects are in contrast with the fundamental norms of the Christian Gospel. The true Christ figure who responds to the Antichrist of Art Immelman is the dead daughter, Samantha, whose name recalls the Good Samaritan, who is ultimately Christ and all who care for others in Christ’s name. One of these is Fr. Rinaldo Smith, who has found it difficult to preach the overused words of the Gospel but who keeps watch and provides Word and Sacrament to Dr. More. Ciuba has summed up the sacramental center of More’s final answer to human and cosmic dividedness.
He found the symbol and source of this coherence in the Eucharist, which gave this American Adam life by his own admission. . . . The Eucharist once united the transcendent and the mundane worlds which have become so fragmented and corrupted in Love in the Ruins. After sharing in such food, Tom could return to Doris’ rosy flesh, as if the body of Christ made possible a wonderful appreciation of his own wife’s body. . . . Communion once brought the union whose loss causes Tom and the world to be in ruins. (Ciuba 156)
Thus, the overall pattern of this novel follows the general pattern of the Bible. It begins in a sort of earthly paradise with More and his family, centered on Samantha. With the death of his daughter, he and his wife cannot forgive each other and begin the division that splits them both within and without, mirroring the fall of the country into its diabolical dividedness. From this fall, More wanders in the desert where he confronts three temptations of the evil Art Immelman and the three women for whom he longs to find a new paradise. After several battles, he is saved from the personal and cosmic splits by the healing power of a woman’s love, by prayer, and by a rebirth and return to sacramental life and work. The novel ends with an eschatological home that includes building the kingdom and waiting for the Second Coming. Ciuba notes that Percy uses much more explicitly Christian language and symbolism in this novel than in his earlier and later works:
Tom realizes that his wayfaring is a passionate pilgrimage to an endearing Lord. God is Tom’s beginning; his presence is mediated through Samantha, first in seemingly paradisal splendor, then in the love of her wracked body. Tom creates his own wreckage by loving the world and women in place of God, not the Creator through his creation. After remembering his ardent daughter’s advice, he is returned in the end to the love of God in all things by the nighttime nurse who had inspired his lust last Christmas, Ellen Oglethorpe (158–59).
Throughout the novel, Percy also makes use of the Kierkegaardian pattern of the three types of human beings. The novel can be read as a movement of Dr. More from being an aesthetic man (whose desire for pleasure and the “musical-erotic” in Lola ceases to lead him beyond himself ), to an ethical man (whose desire to reform the world through mechanical means leads him to become a false messiah, but who is rescued from this diabolical temptation by the ethical love of Ellen), to a religious man (whose final state is mediated by the Christ-like suffering and words remembered of his daughter, Samantha, who leads him to a sacramental life of work and waiting). A devotee of Kierkegaard, Percy subtly uses this pattern, along with that of the biblical history of salvation, to provide a basis for the hope in the novel that counteracts the comic excesses of the satire and sentimentality of the surface narrative.
The Thanatos Syndrome
In his final novel, written sixteen years after Love in the Ruins, Percy resurrects Dr. Tom More and places him in a new but less dramatically apocalyptic predicament. In this cautionary tale written in a less flippant and ironic voice, More is more subdued and sober, having spent two years in a federal prison in Alabama for providing drugs to keep truck drivers awake. Although this crime seems to have been a quieter version of his efforts with the medical salvific lapsometer from his previous novel (in that it keeps wayfarers awake on their journey), More learns his lesson in prison and returns with no Faustian ambitions. On a first reading, The Thanatos Syndrome exhibits fewer explicit signs of the apocalypse. There are no representatives of prehistorical eschatology and only some secular analogues to ahistorical eschatology, such as the drug culture. But apocalyptic eschatology is embodied most dramatically in the central figure of Thanatos, the god of death, who in Greek mythology guides the souls of the dead to heaven or hell. In this final novel, the main struggle will be between the advocate of Thanatos (Van Dorn and followers) and the advocate of eternal life (Father Smith). The plot will take the form of a mystery story, with Dr. More and his cousin Lucy Lipscomb searching for the causes of the dehumanizing symptoms in More’s patients. As the villains emerge, the signs of apocalypse become more apparent.
The first sign, as in the preceding Dr. More story, is that of the imminent end, in this case the threat of a plague of dehumanization. More notices in his patients a strange series of symptoms that vaguely resemble those of the split characters of his previous tale in the ruins: lack of affectivity, savantlike mental abilities, the use of short computerized speech, loss of a sense of historical context, a sort of sexual devolution—in short, a loss of a central consciousness of the “self.” These same symptoms appear in his wife, Ellen, who has become a genius at bridge and has begun to speak in short sentences and to throw off any sexual inhibitions. More considers these patterns the signs of a plague: “This is not to suggest that I have stumbled onto another black plague. But if I am right, I have stumbled onto something. It is both a good deal more mysterious and perhaps even more ominous” (Thanatos 4). In examining his patients, with the help of his cousin Dr. Lucy Lipscomb, More eventually tracks down the external causes of this plague: the secret infusion of chemicals into the water supply of the Feliciana region where all his patients live. But who is causing this apocalyptic cosmic catastrophe?
The answer to this question leads him and Lucy to the central cosmic battle of this second novel of the end-times. The enemy here is not a devil figure in an allegorical morality play, but a group of scientists who have found a way to produce an apparent utopia through the manipulation of human brains by secret drugs. Behind the behavior of his patients, Dr. More discovers Project Blue Boy, sponsored by John Van Dorn and Robert Comeaux, the first the tutor of his wife and founder of the Belle Ame Academy where she has sent their children, the second a colleague of Dr. More’s who has been trying to convince him to join their project. Although lacking the overt diabolical imagery of Art Immelman, these two are associated with the image of Azazel, an evil spirit of the Syrian desert in ancient mythology, who must be sent victims as scapegoats in a place “where even God’s life-giving force was in short supply” (64). In Islamic belief, Azazel is a fallen angel whose second name means “despair,” and whom the poet Milton named a rebel against God. In The Thanatos Syndrome, this fallen angel who fights against “God’s life-giving forces” becomes associated with the central struggle of the cosmic battle between the divine and demonic—the struggle between Dr. More and the Blue Boy Project. For the latter turns out to be a utopian scheme to control human behavior by means not only of secret drugs that destroy the fully conscious self but also of deadly centers where the killing of infants, the aged, and the disabled becomes commonplace.
Having learned in prison how not to be “grandiose, even Faustian,” as he admits, Dr. More resists this megalomaniacal “pact with the Devil to save the world” (67). But only after he has uncovered a secondary plot by Van Dorn does he fully realize the insidiousness of the false utopia. For Van Dorn not only wants to use his own superior mental powers to control human beings by devolving them to subhuman levels of consciousness, he also wants to enjoy his own sexual perversions without restraint. This plot is uncovered by More with the help of Dr. Lipscomb when they seek out the source of the sexual abuse of several children in the area. In detective-story style, Dr. More sneaks into the Belle Ame Academy and confronts Van Dorn and the faculty with evidence of pornographic films of their sexual abuse of their students.
But then Dr. More uncovers something more lethal than misguided utopian scientific schemes or perverted sexual ambitions. For, as we have noted in the use of apocalyptic Azazel imagery, the novel centers on the ultimate struggle between the forces of Thanatos and eternal life. In this novel, Dr. More refuses to become the messiah but seeks out the counsel of the major prophet of his area, the unstable but visionary Fr. Rinaldo Smith. Living like St. Simon Stylites on a watchtower where he uses “triangulation” to discover forest fires, Father Smith has escaped from preaching the overused language of modern churches and has been forced out of his job of running a hospice for the dying. When Dr. More visits him in the latter part of the novel, Father Smith is fasting in silence, benumbed by a waking dream of a past experience that he has never confronted. Reversing their roles, Father Smith confesses to More that he had once traveled to Germany in the 1930s and seen the power of Nazism in a family he visited. More importantly, Father Smith admits that he was attracted by the alleged utopian goals of the movement and the sense of its power. But he never faced up to his earlier experiences until he became a lieutenant in the Allied army that liberated a hospital near Munich and later visited Dachau. There he finally realized the full extent of the Nazi fascination with death, not only in the millions who died in the Holocaust but especially the children killed by doctors for reasons of “mercy.” In fact, the doctor whom he had admired in the 1930s turned out to be one of the worst secret destroyers of children. Father Smith concludes his confession by answering More’s question about his motive for becoming a priest: “In the end one must choose—given the chance . . . Life or death. What else?” (257). This final statement lies at the ultimate center of the novel and of Dr. More’s concluding challenge.
This revelation by Father Smith takes on apocalyptic significance, first because of its association with the diabolical fascination with power over life and death, and because of its association with the Jews. For earlier in the novel, he had taught Dr. More that the Jews were ultimately significant, both because of the prophecy in the works of St. Paul of their unending covenant (Rom 11:25-33), and because of their special place in the final vision of the book of Revelation. Father Smith goes on to explain their uniqueness by noting that Jews cannot be reduced to simply being a part of the human race. They are the “only sign of God which has not been evacuated by an evacuator”—that is, they are an unending proof of God’s presence and covenant with the human race in the face of death (122ff.).
This confession of Father Smith gives Dr. More the strength to withstand the forces of death in the Blue Boy Project. He realizes, as Ciuba summarizes, that “the Third Reich was a political version of the thanatos syndrome that is being dangerously repeated in the rationale for Project Blue Boy” (281). Mindful of the famous verse in the book of Revelation that “death shall have no more dominion,” Dr. More refuses to cooperate with the project and forces the Antichrist Van Dorn to give up in the face of his conviction of child abuse and secret drug control of the population. In recompense, the project must close its death centers and send its personnel and resources to support the former hospices of Father Smith. When the priest proves unable to direct the hospices, Dr. More takes over this life-giving task of helping people who are dying to prepare for their eschatological journey.
In addition to this final way of living generously in the face of death, More also learns how to revitalize his marriage to Ellen and to begin to recover his faith. By traveling as a family on a pilgrimage to Florida in their spaceship motor home, the Bluebird (earlier in the novel a symbol of care for others), they learn to love each other in spite of their personal and religious differences. Ellen recovers from the deadly symptoms of her drinking the waters of Thanatos and learns to live in the Spirit. Tom More once again ends his story by serving Father Smith at a Eucharist, this time on the feast of the Epiphany, using the ancient psalm as the opening prayer: “I will go up to the altar of God / To God who gives joy to my youth” (363). After the Mass, Father Smith provides More with his final apocalyptic message: “You must not lose hope . . . Because if you keep hope and have a loving heart and do not secretly wish for the death of others, the Great Prince Satan will not succeed in destroying the world. In a few years this dread century will be over. Perhaps the world will end in fire and the Lord will come—it is not for us to say. But it is for us to say . . . whether hope and faith will come back into the world” (365).
The novel ends with the recovery of a patient who had lost most of her human traits in the beginning and later had performed the deadly action of killing her horses. She has accepted the violent part of herself and become integrated within, even exhibiting a sign of affection. Her interview ends with a triple phrase by Dr. More, “well, well, well”—not merely the thoughts of a psychiatrist noting the movement toward health, but also an echo of the words of Julian of Norwich in the face of sin and death: “All manner of things will be well.” This final note also echoes the thoughts of Kierkegaard with regard to the person of faith. For, just as he had echoed Kierkegaardian patterns in his earlier story of Dr. More, here in The Thanatos Syndrome Percy once again calls on this same mentor. At the crucial decision when he rejects the offer to join the lethal Blue Boy Project, More had thought to himself that his life-or-death choice is a Kierkegaardian “I must tell him either/or” (366). He has chosen against Thanatos and in favor of life, both historical and eternal. All manner of things will be well.
What might be the implied philosophy of ultimate reality in these two apocalyptic novels of Walker Percy? It is no surprise that his implicit framework is closer to the eschatology of the Catholic theologian Zachary Hayes than that of Jürgen Moltmann (see: Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction for a more detailed comparison of these two thinkers). For instance, Percy’s portrait of the human person is closer to the existentialist philosophy of the person as including a built-in “transcendence”—that is, an orientation to the Absolute within the whole person as an embodied spirit. This orientation, however, is not merely otherworldly but sacramental and historical, an orientation that includes freedom and responsibility for oneself in relationship to other persons and to the earth through concrete actions of human community. In particular, sexual life in marriage, communal life in prayer and Eucharist, and civic life in city or suburb are all part of the sacramental norm for Percy’s wayfarers. As we have seen, however, many of the secondary characters lack a holistic center of unified embodied spirit, thus becoming prey to the split of angelism and bestialism which leads to a disregard of individual human life. Dr. More, by contrast, although a lapsed Catholic, still believes in and struggles toward an integral quest for meaning and life in the light of a transcendent human destiny.
As for his eschatology, Percy uses satire and comedy to critique various forms of static and ahistorical eschatology, but simultaneously uses his main character’s quest to express the importance of living and dying as an encounter with the Absolute in history and beyond. Unlike the controlling scientists of both novels, he sees death not as a nuisance to be avoided or a eugenic opportunity to snuff out the weak, but as a struggle (because of sin) and a way of transformation to a new type of life chosen in freedom and self-surrender based on the way of Christ. Percy lacks a fully developed eschatology of history but does imply the need for all persons to work for harmony among the races and classes, a harmony based primarily on personal virtues like compassion and patience. History, of course, includes the challenge of social sin, the absurd pattern that comes about because of splits within the person and society, as shown in the breakdown of historical progress in modern American society, and most clearly in the “culture of death” in the world wars, the Holocaust, and contemporary disregard for the weak.
With regard to the “end of history,” Percy’s apocalyptic novels agree with Hayes that all apocalyptic events are the “final breaking through of the victorious presence of divine grace that has been present throughout history . . . since the death and resurrection of Christ” (Hayes 162). Thus Percy has Dr. More at the end of Love in the Ruins thinking “of Christ coming again at the end of the world and how it is that in every age there is the temptation to see signs of the end ” (365). All the exaggerated apocalyptic signs throughout the novel are thereby placed within the category of perennial signs rather than specifically “end-time” signs. Likewise, Percy’s sacramental view of human love and community, especially emphasized in More’s nostalgia for the Eucharist and marriage, suggests that he is in accord with Hayes’s affirmation that the final resurrection will include a continuity of person and grace, along with a transformation of the person and the world in the final encounter with God. The key virtue for both Hayes and Percy is vigilance, the ability to wait with faith and hope in the ongoing struggle to love without conditions. Finally, the symbols that Catholic tradition emphasizes in pointing to the eschatological union with the divine are also those at the heart of Percy’s two apocalyptic novels: the wedding feast, the fullness of life, and final reconciliation. These appear throughout the novels in the struggle for sexual union and the protection of human life, and are emphasized at the end of both by the Eucharistic and Christmas imagery, as well as by the reconciliation of estranged lovers or embattled opponents. Unlike the theology of Moltmann, Percy’s eschatology focuses not so much on the “coming of God” in transcendence as on the coming together of the human and divine in sacramental vigilance on the ultimate journey.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.