Bryce

The Second Semester

Chapter 40 - Friday

            On Friday morning Bryce arrived at his class in French literature expecting to meet cynical opposition from Marc Rimbault.  Marc had strongly supported the outlooks of the two previous authors they studied, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, outlooks with which Bryce found little sympathy.  To him, they seemed unnecessarily complicated, complications brought about by the contradictory desires for freedom and dignity on one hand, and a world without God on the other.  But now they were scheduled to discuss the work of François Mauriac (1885-1970), and in particular his award winning novel Le Noeud de Vipères, first published in 1932, and translated into English in 1933 as Vipers’ Tangle.  Of course, being in an advanced class in French, they were not supposed to be reading translations, but Bryce had his suspicions about a few of his fellow students.

            Mauriac, a native of Bordeaux, was a professional writer, being quite successful in his chosen career.  In the year following the publication of Le Noeud de Vipères he was admitted to L’Académie française, the summit of literary achievement in France since its establishment in 1635 by the famed Cardinal Richelieu under a charter from King Louis XIII.  Of more recent vintage, he was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952, when he was cited for “the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life.”  In 1958 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d’honneur.  Following the liberation of France from the Nazi occupation in 1944, he strove to further national reconciliation.  In consequence, he was accused of being himself a Nazi sympathizer by his enemies.  This despite the fact that he encouraged Elie Wiesel to write about his experiences, and wrote the introduction to the latter’s French version of his originally Yiddish memoirs, La Nuit (1958).  In Le Noeud de Vipères, long before the atrocities of World War II caused a reaction to the pervasive anti-Semitism of the earlier twentieth century, a character asks the parish priest whether it is permitted to hate the Jews because they killed Christ.  The priest answers, “each of us has the right to hate one of Christ’s butchers, and one only – himself, but no one else.”   During the 1950s, Mauriac also opposed French colonial rule in Vietnam and the use of torture in Algeria, yet his enemies on the left continued to abuse him, accusing him of dictatorial tendencies, primarily, one suspects, because of his ardent Catholicism.

            The novel Le Noeud de Vipères is essentially an examination of conscience of a man preparing to die.  As a lawyer, Louis, the protagonist, attempts to arrange his brief to justify his life and his attitudes, but as an honest man, he finds it increasingly difficult.  Turning his legal expertise onto his own life, he increasingly finds his life wasted and his opinions inadequate.  Attempting to justify a life devoted to satisfying his own ego and his greed, he is unable to do so.  He finds that his despised wife and children are not the ignorant monsters he painted them to justify his coldness towards them.  Louis confesses, “My passion for possession, and for using and abusing what I possess, extends to human beings.”  Bryce found in that an echo of his own conviction that using another person as though that person were a thing is the real crime against humanity.

            When Louis comes to accept his own condition, and the necessity of God’s grace to find meaning in existence, Bryce was reminded of the deathbed return to the sacraments of Lord Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945 and made into a television series in 1981 and a movie in 2008.  When he made the comparison in class, he found that none of his classmates had read Waugh’s novel or seen the PBS series, and only two had seen the movie.  Interestingly, Waugh definitely had homosexual tendencies, and Mauriac was accused of such by his enemies, although there was no definite evidence to support that accusation.  Both also sired several children.  In both novels, the argument is made that choices in this life have repercussions in the next, and honesty is essential on one’s deathbed.  Bryce wondered whether Waugh was influenced by Mauriac’s novel, but that was a question to be pursued in comparative literature, not in his current class.

            Predictably, the old accusations against Mauriac were aired in class.  He was a Nazi sympathizer, he was an authoritarian, he was an obscurantist, he was opposed to enlightened trends, he was anti-rational.  What it all boiled down to was Mauriac was Catholic, and therefore could not be a positive figure.  No one in the class, with the exception of Marc, would admit to being prejudiced against Catholics, but that prejudice was blatant in their assessment of Mauriac.  Some students had little to say, but some of the more outspoken were unrelenting in their attacks.  They seemed willing to believe every negative comment about him, and none of the positive.  Even the Nobel Prize committee was dismissed as irrelevant or misled.  But of course they were not prejudiced.  Oh, no!  By the end of the period, Bryce had long since given up trying to defend Mauriac, and actually appreciated Marc’s honest anti-Catholicism.

            As the class broke up, Marc said to Bryce, “You gave up defending your boy in there.”

            “I saw that no one was listening when I spoke, so why should I continue speaking?” Bryce replied.  “It seems that at least some of our fellow students already had their minds made up before they even opened the book.”

            Uneasily, Marc replied, “I did notice a certain lack of evidence behind some of what was said.”

            Bryce sighed.  “Another case of pas d’ennemis à gauche.  Mauriac’s enemies must be right, as they are ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive,’ and he must be wrong because he is ‘conservative’ and ‘obscurantist,’ regardless of the facts.  I hate labels.  They only lead to knee-jerk reactions.”

            “Don’t get too depressed,” Marc urged.

            “At least you’re honest, Marc.  Wrong, but honest,” Bryce replied with a grin.  “I sometimes wonder where we’re headed, when education seems to have little to do with reason, and a lot to do with jumping on bandwagons.”

            “Now you’re sounding as cynical as me,” Marc returned.  “Don’t go there.”  With that, they parted, each to his next class.

            In his last class of the day, Bryce found Dr. Dickinson again discoursing on Edmund Burke.  In 1789 revolution broke out in France, across the Channel.  Most Englishmen were at first favorably disposed towards the revolution, seeing the absolute monarchy of the Bourbon kings as despotism.  It did not take long, however, before public sentiment shifted.  Burke’s last great work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), was very definitely a contributing factor in that shift.  First published on 1 November, by the end of the year it had sold 17,500 copies in only two months, and been translated into French, where it sold 2,500 copies within days of its publication.  Burke commented that he was immediately wary of the French revolutionary government when he noticed that the largest segment of the National Assembly was made up of lawyers.  They tended to argue abstract and impersonal ideas, but allowed the mobs to implement them.  As a result, all restraint was abandoned, as seen in the bloody events associated with the fall of the Bastille and the Great Fear of the summer of 1789.  With balance and respect for tradition abandoned, France has become a threat to every civilized nation.  Like Pandora opening the box of woes, the French Revolution would release conflict and warfare on Europe, Burke predicted, and would end in a military dictatorship more oppressive than the monarchy it replaced.  Burke died in 1797, five years after the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars he foresaw, but too soon to witness his other predictions come true with the seizure of power by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799.  Britain became the most consistent foe of Revolutionary France for an entire generation, with warfare lasting from 1792 to 1815, with only two brief truces, until Napoleon was finally defeated.  At Waterloo in June of 1815, Bonaparte met his match in the Duke of Wellington. When Wellington died at the age of 83 in 1852, the Poet Laureate of England, Alfred Lord Tennyson, called him “the great world conqueror’s conqueror.”

            Bryce considered the lessons to be learned from a consideration of Edmund Burke and the French Revolution.  He could not remember who first said it, or whether it was in reference to Jesus or to Karl Marx, but he remembered reading that all the greatest ideals are betrayed in their implementation.  Ideals may be pure and perfect, but human beings are not.  Even the most dedicated ideologue fails to be the perfect embodiment of his ideals, and human error, along with human imperfection, often leads to the most beautiful ideals resulting in great human misery.  Better to stick with something imperfect which actually works than to toss it all out in a vain quest for paradise on earth.  That was illustrated by the Inquisition as much as by Stalin’s gulags.

            These thoughts reminded Bryce of one of the concluding scenes in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940).  After many episodes, the idealistic young lieutenant, upholder of the persecution of the Church by the revolutionary regime in 1920s Mexico, finally captures the failed whiskey priest.  In an exchange between them while waiting out a tropical storm, they exchange comments about their respective ideals.  The priest says:

“There’s another difference between us.  It’s no good your working for

your end unless you’re a good man yourself.  And there won’t always

be good men in your party.  Then you’ll have all the old starvation,

beating, get-rich-anyhow.  But it doesn’t matter so much my being a

coward – and all the rest.  I can put God into a man’s mouth just the

same – and I can give him God’s pardon.  It wouldn’t make any

difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me.”

We cannot trust humans alone to implement ideals, no matter how beautiful the ideals may be.  It takes something more.  It takes God’s grace, the same grace which saved that old reprobate Louis on his deathbed, and Lord Marchmain on his.  The grace which allowed the whiskey priest to face the firing squad with dignity.  Human ideals without God’s grace lead to the Reign of Terror, Auschwitz, the gulag, the killing fields.

            Such serious thoughts were interrupted by preparations for the party at the fraternity house scheduled for that evening.  Bryce and Damon both showed up early to help with any last minute preparations.  Before the time for the actual beginning of the party, both guys departed to collect their dates.  As in the past, Bryce asked Caroline Koehler to accompany him, while Damon would escort Kitty Jansen.  Jason Todd, clearly unreconciled to the decisions made with respect to him on Monday, asked whether Bryce was not acting hypocritically in escorting a female to the party.

            “No, I don’t think so,” Bryce replied.  “I’m asking Caroline to a party, not to become my life partner.  I’m intending to dance with her, not take her to bed.  Most of the guys in the fraternity know I’m gay, and as far as anybody else is concerned, it’s none of their business.  Anyone who is interested knows that my partner is Damon.  He’s bringing Kitty because they like to dance together.  I can’t do that.”

            “You sure can’t,” Damon commented.  “You’re too stiff to do a decent job on the dance floor.  I think if you tried to do what Kitty and I do, you’d snap in two.”

            “Besides,” Bryce added, “I like Caroline.  She’s kind of quirky, which makes talking with her interesting.  I find I can be friends with a pretty wide variety of people, even when I don’t always agree with them.  In fact, I don’t know anyone I agree with 100% of the time.  Why does everything have to be a confrontation? ... about being gay, or about anything else?  What do you expect to achieve by being in-your-face with people?  I am aware that not every brother in the fraternity approves of my relationship with Damon, but the great majority of them came down on our side when it mattered.  They have a basic sense of decency, even when the application makes them uncomfortable.  Why should I make things more uncomfortable for them by making out with Damon in public, or ostentatiously avoiding females?  That just makes enemies.”

            “It seems to me you show a lack of commitment to the gay cause,” Jason sneered.

            “I don’t see it that way,” Bryce replied.  “In my opinion, by being in-your-face, always creating confrontation, you’re actually delaying acceptance of gays by the general public.  You’re setting up an us verses them situation.  And remember, there are a lot more of them than of us.  We want to be accepted by society as a whole, not withdrawn into isolated gay communities with battlements to protect us.  That’s just another kind of segregation, another kind of closet.”

            “Yeah,” Damon contributed.  “Back in the ‘60s or thereabouts, there were black brothers who demanded something like that.  I read about a demand that the entire state of Alabama be restricted to blacks only.  I don’t think I would like living in that kind of armed camp.  For one thing, Bryce couldn’t be there with me.”

            “You guys are impossible,” Jason declared, and stalked off.  Jason obviously did not like comparisons between gays and blacks for some reason.

            Later in the evening, as he had done at just about every party, Damon put on an exhibition of street dancing along with his partner Kitty.  This was always an impressive gymnastic feat.  Watching his partner, Bryce agreed that he would most likely never be able to carry out such gyrations, even if he wanted.  Maybe not snap in two, but end up with painful back problems, he decided.  “I just don’t bend that way,” he commented to Caroline.

            She laughed and replied, “You’re becoming more flexible as a result of your karate exercises.  Maybe someday you’ll make it.”

            “By the time I get that flexible, I’ll be eighty years old,” Bryce decided.

            As Damon and Kitty came off the dance floor, as expected, they demanded something liquid.  Their kind of dancing resulted in major loss of liquids through sweating.  Swilling a glass of water, Damon commented, “Ah!  Adam’s ale!”  He then asked, “Who was it who coined that phrase, anyhow?”

            “Emerson, I think,” Bryce replied.  “Probably better for you than any other kind of ale.  Fewer calories.”

            “And non-alcoholic,” Damon noted.  “You know, I don’t think I’ve been drunk since before mid-term last semester.”

            “For which I’m very grateful,” Bryce replied.  “You were a handful when soused.”

            “You should be satisfied, as you’re mostly responsible for the change,” Damon declared.

            “You could have done it without my lectures,” Bryce insisted.

            “Yeah, could have.  But would I have?  Where was the incentive before you came along?  From my past experience, and from what I saw with a lot of guys here on campus, getting blotto every weekend was perfectly acceptable.  Now I don’t need it anymore.”

            “That’s the key,” Bryce insisted.  “You know I have nothing against beer, nor against hard liquor, although I just don’t like some of it.  But when someone needs the drink, that’s when it’s a problem.  I think people who need to drink are covering up for something.  There are problems in their life they don’t want to face.  It could be family problems, or problems in school here, or, with guys like us, problems in accepting our sexual orientation and deciding what to do about it.  But, instead of doing something about the problem, some people just want to avoid the responsibility, and forget about it for a while.  Hence, the drinking to excess, and hence the drug abuse as well.”

            “Yes, Professor,” Damon kidded his partner.  “Now that I’ve slaked my basic thirst, I’m headed over to collect one of those beers you mentioned, entirely without feeling pangs of guilt for avoiding any problems.”

            “You are so good for me,” Bryce admitted, as he nonetheless poked his friend in the side as he accompanied him to the keg.

            At the keg, while getting their beers, Bryce encountered Scott Huong, his friend from the GLBT Club and fellow member of the Executive Committee.  Bryce reminded Damon and Scott that they had met at a previous GLBT meeting.

            “You should have heard Scott defending the ROTC program at the meeting on Wednesday,” Bryce told Damon.

            “Oh, yeah.  Bryce told me about that.  That guy who wanted to ban ROTC is another example of extremists making things hard for the rest of us.”

            “I’m glad you agree,” Scott said.  “As Bryce can tell you, I feel pretty strongly about this issue.”

            “I get it from two sides.  In addition to being gay, I’m also black, in case you haven’t noticed,” Damon joked.

            “No, really?  I would never have guessed,” Scott clowned.

            “My secret is out,” Damon continued, “but the point is, while the basic cause is valid, some guys get hung up on side issues and cause more trouble than they’re worth.  Like the attempt last semester of the BSO to change the name of the dorm where Bryce and I live.  A lot of nonsense and wasted energy.”

            “Too true,” Scott sighed.  “I don’t have as many problems as I suspect you do, as the biases against Vietnamese is not as widespread as that against blacks, but I do remember from my history classes panics abut a yellow peril.  Seems a lot of folks just don’t like anyone who’s different.”

            “Sometimes I think it is a shame the Indians didn’t have stricter anti-immigration laws back a few centuries ago,” Bryce commented.

            “What’s he on about?” Scott asked.

            “Just ignore him when he gets like that,” Damon advised.

            As they were exchanging insults in this manner, Jack Datillo walked up, also wanting to replenish his supply of the sudsy.

            “What are you reprobates up to?” Jack asked.

            “Just trying to get Bryce to loosen up some,” Damon declared.

            “Bryce?  Loosen up?  The Catholic fanatic?  You sure don’t like easy jobs, do you?’ Jack responded.

            “Oh, come on, Jack,” Bryce objected.  “I admit to being ... well, a little stiff at times.  But fanatic?  I don’t think so.”

            “Let’s just say you’ve managed to bring your religion into just about every conversation I’ve been part of,” Jack replied.  “I mean, I guess I’m Catholic, too, but I don’t talk about it all the time.”

            “You are?  I don’t think I knew that,” Bryce said.  “Where do you go to Mass?”

            “When I make it, I go to the Newman Center,” Jack replied.

            “From what you just said ... you ‘guess’ you’re Catholic, and ‘when you make it,’ I assume you’re not very regular,” Bryce assessed his fraternity brother.

            “No.  I don’t let it dominate my life, like someone I could name,” Jack tried to pass it off as a joke.  “After all, it’s not all that important, is it?  I mean, all religions are pretty much the same, and you just have to find one that suits you, right?”

            “Not the way I see it,” Bryce replied.  “But, since you say I’m the one always talking about my religion, tell me something about your understanding of the Catholic Faith.”

            “Let’s find a seat.  I have a feeling this may take a while,” Damon suggested, so the guys moved away from the beer, at least temporarily.

            Seated off to one side, where the noise level was bearable, Jack began.  “I was raised Catholic mostly because my folks are Italian.  Datillo, you know.  I was sent to Catholic grade school and high school.  I made my First Communion in second grade, with all the other kids.  But we never regularly attended church as a family.  We’d always get to Mass on Christmas and Easter, you know, and sometimes on an ordinary Sunday.  It kind of depended on how my folks felt when they got up on Sunday morning, I guess.  I don’t remember any discussions at home where religion made any real difference about what we did, like who my parents voted for, or stands on any issues, or anything.  I do remember one discussion, when I was about ten, I guess, when we moved from one town to another in connection with my dad’s job, when my mom told my dad I should be sent to a particular parish school because that’s where all the important Catholics went, including the children of the guy who was my dad’s boss at the time.  I remember that because the boss had a son who was in my grade, and he was a real shithead.  Sorry, Bryce, but he was.  He did everything to make my life miserable, from picking on me on the playground, to telling the teacher I did stuff I never did, to refusing to invite me to his birthday party.  That’s the thing that got my mom ticked off, not at him, but at me because I was not getting along with him.”

            “Jack, I don’t mean to interrupt, but when I asked about your understanding of the Catholic Faith, this is not what I had in mind.  I mean the system of beliefs, and what we might call Catholic culture,” Bryce inserted.

            “Sorry.  I kind of knew that, but I got distracted.  Before running into you this year, I might not even know what that question means.  You see, I never quite realized there was such a thing as a specifically Catholic set of beliefs or culture.  I mean, the schools I attended were just like other private schools in the community.  I’ve seen old movies about schools run by nuns, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually met a nun.  There was someone at one of my grade schools called Sister Somebody, but she looked and talked just like all the other teachers.  The only thing different was she dressed all dowdy, which made my mom mad.  We were taught to be quiet in church, and to call the priest ‘Father.’  We had religion classes, but all I remember is something like God loves everyone, and it’s wrong to discriminate against someone because he’s black or poor, and we should all get along regardless of where anyone went to church.  There was a lot of talk about the Council, and how everything was wrong before the Council, but it was never very clear just what the Council was, or why it was important.  That’s pretty much it.”

            “From what you just said, I can understand why you say you guess you’re Catholic.  Evidently, you were never taught what it means to be Catholic, or why it’s important,” Bryce said.

            “What about that stuff about God loving everyone?” Jack asked.

            “Well, I certainly don’t disagree with that.  Who could?  But there’s nothing specifically Catholic about it.  You could be a Methodist, like Curtis, or a Jew, or a Moslem, nor nothing at all, and still agree with that.  As nearly as I can make out from what you said, no one taught you anything which would cause you to look to the Church for guidance when you’re going through a rough spell, and no one taught you anything which would make you decide to remain Catholic when a problem arose between the Church and something else you though important.”

            “You’re right about that.  I mean, as I understand it, all religions are just an attempt to deal with the unknown, with the spiritual side of reality.  It really does not matter which church anyone goes to.  Isn’t that what it means to be ecumenical?” Jack asked.

            “Not as I understand it.  Ecumenical has different meanings in different contexts, I guess, but I don’t think all religions are the same.  That makes no sense, especially as they clearly contradict each other on some pretty serious points,” Bryce replied.

            “That’s why I think they are all just different attempts to deal with the great unknown,” Jack insisted.

            “In the eighteenth century there was a German literary figure named Lessing.  Somewhere he wrote that all revealed religions are equally false,” Bryce offered.

            “Yeah.  That’s what I mean.  All just inadequate human efforts,” Jack nodded.

            “Well, I disagree,” Bryce stated.

            “You do?”

            “Yes.  The founder of Christianity, Jesus, was not just another prophet, or mystic, or philosopher, or lawgiver.  He was divine, the Son of God.  God himself in human form.  That’s clear from the Gospels, like where, at the baptism of Christ, the heavens opened and God proclaimed, This is my beloved son.  Or like when Jesus healed the paralytic at Capharnaum by forgiving his sins, after the Jewish leaders made it clear that only God can forgive sins,” Bryce argued.

            “I thought that idea that Jesus was God developed later,” Jack protested.  “In fact, I’m sure I read that in a best-selling work a few years ago.”

            “Oh, gee,” Bryce sighed.  “Dan Brown has a lot to answer for.  I guess you’re referring to The Da Vinci Code.”

            “Yeah, that’s it.”

            “Well, all I can say is Brown is a terrible historian and a worse theologian.  Somehow he got it in his head that, because Athanasius and Arius argued over just how Jesus was related to God the Father, that Arius and his followers did not regard him as divine.  In fact, both sides agreed that the Christ was divine, but the Arians thought he was in some way less divine than God the Father.  Eventually, reason triumphed, and it was decided that you can’t have someone who is less divine.  That’s like having a woman who is only a little pregnant.  Either you’re divine or not.  None of that got into Brown’s work.  He tried to make it out as a purely political thing imposed on the Church by Constantine, which is a lot of nonsense.  If you believe that, you’re not Christian at all, and we’re back to having just another inadequate human religion.  But I believe Jesus is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, equal to God the Father, as stated in the Nicene Creed, and consequently the religion he founded is different than any other.  It was directly established by God, and is definitely not just another inadequate human invention,” Bryce insisted.

            “That’s not very accepting of other religions,” Jack objected.

            “I don’t accept any other religion.  I accept only the Catholic religion,” Bryce agreed.

            “Then I don’t guess there’s any sense in arguing about it,” Jack said, as he got up to replenish his supply of beer.