Mr. Sammler and the God of Our Fathers

I am not primarily a reader of modern literature. I am a would-be Miltonist (or if that sounds too pretentious, a lover of English Renaissance literature) who, having read Milton, Shakespeare, and the numerous excellent minor writers of that era, now looks around in his own age among his own generation for such breadth of spirit, such depth of Christian understanding, such profound love of human life in its cosmic setting.

Coming from the literary world of giant Christians who were giant writers, I feel like a citizen from the fruitful country of Really Real who has lost his way in the desert lands of Cheap and Tawdry. In the words of Thomas Howard, I have come from a world in which everything means everything to one where nothing means anything. Or worse—where that which seems to mean something vanishes under close scrutiny.

Let me explain what I mean. The literary landscape of our age—let’s say since World War II—is not barren. There are magnificent writers, men who express with great clarity what they see and who manifest in their writing both creativity and formal excellence. It is what they see that is disappointing, for it seems to me that they see with eyes shaded by false preconceptions. When they look at man they see a being who cannot understand hinself—a lost and wandering, sentient and self-conscious seeker who wants to know but can’t. Samuel Beckett’s characters come to know only that there’s nothing at all at the heart of them or the universe. Mankind merely waits stupidly for a God who never comes. For Beckett, man has no meaning.

For Camus, and here I am thinking primarily of the superb novel The Plague, man makes his own meaning by affirming—for no good reason, really—the value of other men’s lives. Christianity is explicitly examined, misunderstood, and rejected. The context of man’s significance is determined solely between birth and death, for death is extinction. As a humanist, Camus cannot be bettered; but his humanism has only a subjective, private base.

For Joseph Heller in Catch-22 the sane world of work-a-day experience is madness. Only the insane Yossarian finds a solution—escape. The novel ends with his refusal to participate any longer in society’s life. In the title words of another piece of modernity, Yossarian screams, “Stop the world, I want to get off.” Perhaps Camus in The Myth of Sysiphus is right: the only truly serious philosophic problem is that of suicide.

But something is wrong here. Something is wrong with the vision that sees one-dimensional man caught within the net of a one-dimensional world. The writers of the Renaissance, every one I’m aware of, saw no such trap for man. And the reason is that they saw man in cosmic terms: he was a creation of God, fallen and hence subject to spiritual death in separation from God (note: not extinction; men in hell have the dignity of God’s created, though distorted, image to bear forever), but redeemable and hence worthy to participate in God’s cosmic celebration. Every man was held to be significant “far down into the reaches of foreverness” (to borrow a phrase from Francis Schaeffer).

Now that the world has turned round and Christianity is no longer present in cultural terms, there is much confusion about what makes a novel Christian. Surely, however, a Christian novel is more than a story of Christian Milquetoast going about “spreading the Gospel” and in some simple way getting some non-Christian—a drunk, a dope addict, an adulterer (or some such genuine sinner)—to become like him!

First, a Christian novel is a novel, a work of literary art. As T. S. Eliot once said, before one can decide whether a piece of literature is Christian or not, one must determine whether it is “literature” at all. But assuming that a novel is a novel, what makes it Christian? A Christian novel is a novel in which man is seen as a fallen creature of God, significant because God made him in his image and thus gave him freedom to be and to choose. He not only lives among other men, beasts, and things; he is the midpoint in a vertical framework of angels and devils, of God and Satan. It is not just “soul” that is important; his body too, and what he does, how he responds to the vertical dimension, how he chooses to live in this life, is forever and ever of crucial importance, for he never becomes extinct. God is and God made man ever to be.

One may add, much more, of course—the standard doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. But these are simply pillars within the framework; they may or may not become a visible part of the Christian novel. Perhaps in most Christian novels they will be detectable through a glass darkly, but they need not be made explicit.

It is in this sense that the plays of Shakespeare (which, in general, do not concern themselves with “theological” themes) are distinctly Christian. And it is in this sense that we need Christian novels today. In such novels the whole fictional world makes no sense apart from its Christian framework. Men may be shown to see themselves as merely machines, for in fact some men see themselves this way; but the novel—not necessarily by explicit comment but by the course of the action—will show that these are the deluded of our world. In such novels, evil (like Iago or Lady Macbeth) may stalk the pages in vivid and graphic detail, but good will be behind all, above all, and in control of all. The novel may end with Christians in doubt, with a church going apostate, or with a character cursing the God of our fathers—because life in this world is like that. But the framework in which the novel’s vision is cast will place the end of one poor Christian, one poor lost man, one wretched church, in the total eschatological perspective of God’s sovereignty.

A writer honest to God must also be a writer honest to the life of men. Such a writer need not fear the consequences of the revelation of his vision.

My trek through the foreign land of modern novels has, I am delighted to say, not been without some reward. There are giants about, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy are well known—and on newsstands! Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Charles Williams’s seven striking novels of the occult are available too. One can make a good case for considering John Updike’s novels and stories as Christian in the sense defined above, and Graham Greene is not to be forgotten.

But as novelists, Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams deal largely in fantasy. The Christian novels of stature are extremely rare.

There is one novelist, who, while not a Christian, has written an almost Christian novel. Because his achievement is magnificent and because he shows—albeit unwittingly—what some Christian writer could (and, I believe, should) do, his work demands a close examination. The writer is Saul Bellow; the novel is Mr. Sammler’s Planet, winner of the 1971 National Book Award for Fiction.

The story concentrates on a few days in the life of Artur Sammler, who is seventy years old. The time is now, the place New York City. Around Sammler are a handful of skillfully portrayed minor characters, each of whom takes Sammler as a point of reference.

The plot is slight, for the action follows Sammler as he tries to comfort his dying nephew, Dr. Elya Gruner, a man about his own age. The story ends with Dr. Gruner’s death and Sammler’s final prayer for Gruner’s soul.

The real heart of the story, however, is not what Sammler does in these few days; it is rather who Sammler is and what he has done (much of this comes by means of stream-of-consciousness flashback as Sammler thinks about himself, his past, and his present New York circle of friends and relatives). In themes and symbols the novel is incredibly rich and complex, for Sammler’s life is an analog of seventy years of Jewish consciousness. My discussion can only hint at the riches that await the reader.

Born in Poland, Sammler worked as an intellectual journalist, living in England during the 1920s and 30s and supplying articles for Warsaw papers. He was acquainted with Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey and was an intimate friend of H. G. Wells (a memoir of whom he is now supposedly writing). Back on the Continent in 1940, he, his wife, and other Polish Jews were lined up, shot, and left for dead in a mass grave. But Sammler escaped, hid in a tomb, and was eventually brought by Dr. Gruner to New York as a displaced person. Here he and his daughter, who had escaped earlier, continue to live supported by the generosity of his nephew and benefactor.

What makes the novel so significant is Sammler’s intellectual and spiritual depth. It is a depth recognized by everyone who comes in more than a casual contact with him. His friend Bruch, for example, confesses to him his strange sexual longings (he falls in love with women’s arms); Angela Gruner, Dr. Gruner’s daughter, confesses her gross sexual liaisons; Feffer, a young radical student, treats him as a guru, a voice from the prechaotic past; his daughter, a lost soul who wanders between intense interest in Judaism and Christianity, looks to him to provide the great work on H. G. Wells; Wallace, Dr. Gruner’s son, wants Sammler to help him locate money that his father has stashed away for performing illegal Mafia-connected abortions. Bellow comments: “His friends and family had made him a judge and a priest” (Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Fawcett, 1970, p. 86).

All around Sammler the world is disintegrating; old ideas of goodness and honor and duty to God and high principles are seeping through the cracks of a crumbling civilization. As Bellow puts it, “Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice” (p. 34). In this context—a dying friend, a dying culture, a chaotic and turbulent social setting—Sammler reflects, ponders, and refuses to lose hope. For he refuses to see humanity either as a large impersonal machine or as a wart of self-consciousness on the smooth skin of the impersonal. For him man is yet man under God. And though Sammler’s God is not the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ, he still resembles the God of our fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So rather than giving in to the debasing requests of Wallace or Angela (to help them salvage a good place in their father’s will), rather than securing for himself and his own daughter a stipend for their life after the death of their benefactor, Sammler maintains the dignity of honesty and truth and honor. He is, in fact, one of the noblest creations in modern fiction; here is the old style hero treading the pages of a novel that refuses to be peopled only with anti-heroes.

Dozens of passages from the novel cry out for quotation. Bellow is a great story-teller, a master of English prose. Sammler’s feeling about radical students (pp. 36, 37), for example, culminates in these two sentences: “In their revulsion from authority they would respect no persons. Not even their own persons.” His thoughts on death (a major theme in the novel): “No one made sober decent terms with death.… Wherever you looked, or tried to look, there were the late. It took some getting used to” (p. 11). The passage in which Sammler detects why so many people looked to him for meaning and significance is fraught with power, for here he sees (though not explicitly) how like and unlike Christ’s is his own return from death: “It seldom occurred to him to consider it an achievement. Where was the achievement?… There was no special merit, there was no special wizardry” (p. 249). True. But how much more significant, therefore, we cry out as Christian readers, was one whose return from death signaled the potential life with God for all men!

Sammler’s whole life had been devoted to permeating the crust of hard-core reality, of seeing more than the science of fact could show, of understanding more than H. G. Wells, whose scientific optimism turned so horribly sour before his death in despair. That, in fact, is one reason Sammler is not all that interested in finishing his “great life work”—a memoir of H. G. Wells. For Wells’s life was just one big “explanation,” as Bellow reflects:

Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly [p. 7].

Throughout the novel, Sammler illustrates vividly what Francis Schaeffer has called the escape from reason. Men, knowing where post-Enlightenment rationalism has led them, refuse to be satisfied with the result, crave the realm of mystery, and escape into mystical affirmation.

This is no more clearly illustrated than in the passage that describes Sammler in a New York library, “reading, as always Meister Eckhart,” this time a meditation on the Beatitudes: “Mr. Sammler could not say that he literally believed what he was reading. He could, however, say that he cared to read nothing but this” (p. 230). Again the Christian reader exclaims: Would that the Sammlers of this world could see and know that the God of our fathers has spoken so that what we read is really true—really so! If Sammler could know that the poor in spirit are really blessed, he would know that he is one of them. How close Bellow comes here to a fully Christian framework for the novel, yet how far he misses the mark by refusing to take that last step!

On the one hand, Sammler says, “I am extremely skeptical of explanations, rationalistic practices,” and thus he rejects the scientific optimism of an H. G. Wells. But he immediately adds, “I dislike the modern religion of empty categories, and people who make the motions of knowledge” (p. 206). That is, he rejects the truncated modern theologies of a Bultmann (not actually mentioned in the novel) who speaks of a resurrection without serious substance. Sammler needs the historical God of our fathers, who fills religious categories with spiritual content and lends to the work-a-day ethical words (honor, truth, human dignity) a genuine specific meaning, a historical base.

The best Sammler can do is make do. His supreme statement, encapsulating his fullest expression of what is for him the good and true, comes in the final paragraph of the novel. Here Sammler prays for his good friend and benefactor, Dr. Elya Gruner, whose body lies before him on a stretcher in the post-mortem room in the labyrinthine depths of the hospital. It is a request that God will “remember” Elya’s soul, for:

[Elya] was aware that he must meet, and he did meet—through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding—he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know [p. 285].

But what do we know? For each man it is private, apparently. Without the revealed expression of the God of our fathers, that is all that is left for Sammler. Each and every man (note the universalism) knows beyond reason, beyond words. Sammler himself is caught in an escape from reason and a religion of almost empty categories.

So Mr. Sammler’s Planet, then, is an almost Christian novel—much more Christian than many that pass for such, that spell out in coarse detail, or even precision, the plan of salvation or depict the conversion of a sinner. For this novel plumbs the depths of the human heart and soul and mind, setting an honest man both in the arena of world wars and city madness and in the framework of eternity. But what could such a novel be in the hands of a giant Christian writer? I would like to see the answer to that question, for it, like Mr. Sammler’s Planet, could well be on the New York Times’s best-seller list for four months—and in the minds of readers for eternity.

Wayside Adjustments

Anxious theologians have fallen into a lamentable scramble to adjust to a passing fashion of thought. Why such surrender? A few catch-cries, those ancient substitutes for reason, have had something to do with it. The first century had the same malady. The slogans varied from Galatia to Colossae, from the Nicolaitans to Cerinthus. A longer, closer look will reveal their common hollowness. To say in Corinth, “There is no Resurrection,” neither rolled the stone back into place nor proved Peter a liar. To yell for two hours that Artemis was great did not bring the lump of stone in Ephesus’ temple to life.

Likewise, to write a paperback on man’s coming of age neither kills God nor makes the ruthless, fallen predator of this tormented planet into a new Adam or a Superman. It is an old illusion that some new philosophy can engender a new race. The stoics thought that they had made the “Sapiens,” their “Wise Man.” Today’s delusion is “Homo Maturus,” “man come of age,” no longer needing God, unable to think old Christian thoughts.

Add “religionless Christianity” to the sorry list. Christianity, of course, is religion’s highest expression. On that issue Stalin would second Mao Tse-tung. If the forms of religion are rites of the jungle to be cast off by a now completed man, Christianity will go too.

And consider the delusions that cluster round the awesome word science. Human knowledge does not invalidate intelligent faith. There are Christians in all branches of science who see no clash between the practices and convictions of their religion and the processes by which, with inspired insight and confidence in ultimate law, they move along the paths of their research. A myth has arisen that it is by a certain closed system of logic that all discovery is made, and, dazzled by the assumption, there are those who conclude that it is impossible for a Supreme Being to be involved in human life, indeed to exist at all, much less intrude into history. It is worth observing that the same constricted logic must lead directly to the conclusion that man himself is an automaton, committed to all he is and does by a predestination more stern than any Calvinism. It follows that verbs are largely nonsense.

And what shall I more say? For time would fail me to talk of Tillich and Bultmann, John Robinson and the rest, who allegedly speak the language of today, but often end in speaking no intelligible language at all, if communication, honest and clear, is the criterion of speech.

The tragedy is the easy victory this small band of iconoclasts has won over churchmen of feeble faith—the Munich School of theologians who, in Austin Farrer’s phrase, are always ready to sell the pass in the weak belief that they can stop somewhere in the foothills, people talked easily out of all firm conviction and too busy learning from their enemies to be of any use to those who hoped to be their friends.

Surely it is time to have done with the delusions of the sixties. The weird by-paths have vanished in the wilderness. The Way, and the first Christians were called “the people of the Way,” remains. We must return to the Great Commission. Our only future is in a revival of real Christianity—no secular adaptation, no adjusted shadow, but true biblical Christianity.—E. M. BLAIKLOCK, emeritus professor of classics, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

James W. Sire is editor of Inter-Varsity Press. He received the Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. He is coauthor with Robert Beum of a recent textbook on writing entitled “Papers on Literature: Models and Methods.”

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