Third in a series
I HEARD a lecture by a prominent Catholic theologian who confessed that when she started teaching theology she used novels to stimulate the interest and the imagination of her students. Because I teach a philosophy course at St. John’s University that is based on Catholic novels, I was not surprised when she confessed that her course was a success. I have often found philosophical and theological insights in novels, plays and films.
Recently I re-read sections of two plays that I think present profound visions of the mystery of the human person, and at least indirectly, profound visions of the mystery of God’s involvement in our lives. The plays were Gabriel Marcel’s “The Displaced Person” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party.”
After Thomas Aquinas, Gabriel Marcel is my favorite philosopher. When I was a young priest-professor, I thought about trying to re-write some of Marcel’s essays. Though a brilliant thinker, Marcel wrote as though the ideas were coming from a stream of consciousness. The insights are magnificent, but to grasp them seems to involve unnecessary work.
I have never seen “The Displaced Person,” but in his excellent little book, “Gabriel Marcel” (South Bend, Indiana: Regnery/ Gateway, Inc., 1963, pp. 128, $3.95) Seymour Cain describes the play as centering around a woman, charming, but leading an aimless life. Aware of how empty her life is, she tries to build solid relations. In the play she says the following:
“Don’t you sometimes have the impression that we are living…If that can be called living…in a broken world? Yes, broken as a broken watch. The spring does not work anymore. In appearance nothing has changed. Everything is in its proper place. But if one puts the watch to one’s ear…one no longer hears anything. You understand, the world, what we call the world, the world of men…formerly it must have had a heart. But it’s as if the heart has ceased to beat.” (p. 60)
Cain notes that in such a world there is no community, there is no real meeting. Persons cannot develop and grow as persons in such a world. Love seems to be absent and if love is absent, is God absent?
In “The Cocktail Party,” Eliot dramatizes the absence of God in someone’s life. A young woman has terminated an adulterous affair with a married man and goes to a psychiatrist to try to make sense of her life. The psychiatrist, as sketched by Eliot, seems to be like a father-confessor. In speaking with the psychiatrist, the woman, Celia, confesses that she has a strange feeling that she has let someone down and feels the need of atonement. She describes her search for love as entering a forest and indicates that she feels both nostalgia and hope for the love she glimpsed. She says the following:
“But even if I find my way out of the forest
I shall be left with the inconsolable memory
Of the treasure I went into the forest to find
And never found, and which was not there
And perhaps is not anywhere? But if not anywhere
Why do I feel guilty at not having found it?
But what, or whom I loved,
Or what in me was loving, I do not know.”
As much as I love theatre and film, I find that I have to work overtime to find plays that speak directly to my religious faith. I also have to be careful not to read into plays and films religious themes that are not really there.
My understanding of the character in “The Displaced Person” is that she is experiencing what can happen to a person living in a death-of-God culture. Her experience is that nothing matters. I believe that anyone, who seriously believes that God does not exist and lives under the shadow of that belief, will experience human existence as radically meaningless. My interpretation of Celia’s experience is that, searching for God, she caught a glimpse of love through her adulterous relationship, but it was only a glimpse and so she wants to continue the search.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, and author of “Pope Francis’ Profound Personalism and Poverty” (Resurrection Press).