Mary McCarthy's Collected Memoirs: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, How I Grew, and Intellectual Memoirs (15 page)

At that time, I did not know that this problem had been treated by Aquinas, and with a child’s pertinacity, I mined away at the foundations of the Fortress Rock. Elation had replaced fear. I could hardly wait now to meet Father Dennis and confront him with these doubts, so remarkable in one of my years. Parallels with the young Jesus, discoursing with the scribes and doctors, bounded through my head: “And all that heard Him were astonished at His Wisdom and His answers.” No one now, I felt certain, would dare accuse me of faking. I strolled along proudly with the messenger who had come to fetch me; just as her knock sounded, I had reached the stage of doubting the divinity of Christ. I could see in the wondering looks this Iris was shedding on me that already I was a credit to the milieu.

In the dark parlor, the priest was waiting, still in his cassock—a wrinkled, elderly man with a hairless face and brown, dead curly hair that looked like a wig. He had a weary, abstracted air as he turned away from the window, as though he had spent his life in the confessional box. His voice was hollow; everything about him was colorless and dry. As chaplain to Madame MacIllvra, he must have become a sort of spiritual factotum, like an upper servant in an apron, and there was despondency in his manner, as though his
Nunc Dimittis
would never be pronounced. It was clear that he did not have the resilience of our clever nuns.

“You have doubts, Mother says,” he began in a low, listless voice, pointing me to a straight chair opposite him and then seating himself in an armchair, with half-averted face, as priests do in the confessional. I nodded self-importantly. “Yes, Father,” I recited. “I doubt the divinity of Christ and the Resurrection of the Body and the real existence of Heaven and Hell.” The priest raised his scanty eyebrows, like two little wigs, and sighed. “You have been reading atheistic literature?” I shook my head. “No Father. The doubts came all by themselves.” The priest cupped his chin in his hand. “So,” he murmured. “Let us have them then.”

I was hurt when he interrupted me right in the middle of the cannibals. “These are scholastic questions,” he said curtly. “Beyond the reach of your years. Believe me, the Church has an answer for them.” A feeling of disappointment came over me; it seemed to me that I had a right to know the answer to the cannibal question, since I had thought it up all by myself, but my “Why can’t I know nows” were brushed aside, just as though I had been asking about how babies were born. “No,” said Father Dennis, with finality. My first excitement was punctured and I began to be suspicious of him, in the manner of adolescents. What, I asked myself shrewdly, was the Church trying to hide from me?

“Let us come to more important matters.” He leaned forward in his chair, with the first sign of interest he had given. “You doubt the divinity of Our Lord?” I felt a peculiar avidity in his question that made me wish to hold back. A touch of fear returned to me. “I
think
so,” I said dubiously, half ready to abandon my ground.
“Think!
Don’t you know?” he demanded, raising his voice like a frail thunderbolt. Quailing, I produced my doubt—I was one of those cowards who are afraid not to be brave. Nevertheless, I spoke hurriedly, in gulps, as if swallowing medicine. We are supposed to know that He was God because He rose from the dead—that was His sign to us that He was more than man. But you can’t prove that He rose from the dead. That’s only what the Apostles said. How do we know they were telling the truth? They were very ignorant, superstitious men—just fishermen, weren’t they? People like that nowadays believe in fairies and spirits.” I looked appealingly up at him, half begging recognition for my doubt and half waiting for him to settle it.

The priest passed a hand across his forehead. “You consider Our Lord a liar, then?” he said in a sepulchral tone. “You think He deceived the poor, ignorant Apostles by pretending to be the Son of God. That is what you are saying, my child, though you do not know it yourself. You are calling Our Blessed Saviour a liar and a cheat.” “He might have been mistaken,” I objected, feeling rather cross. “He might have
thought
He was God.” Father Dennis closed his eyes. “You must have faith, my child,” he said abruptly, rising from his chair and taking a few quick steps, his cassock bobbing.

I gazed at him in humble perplexity. For the first time, he seemed to me rather holy, as if the word “faith” had elicited something sweet and sanctified from his soul, but by the same token he seemed very remote from me, as if he were feeling something that I was unable to feel. Yet he was not answering my arguments; in fact, he was looking down at me with a grave, troubled expression, as if he, too, were suddenly conscious of a gulf between us, a gulf that could not be bridged by words. The awesome thought struck me that perhaps I
had
lost my faith. Could it have slipped away without my knowing it? “Help me, Father,” I implored meekly, aware that this was the right thing to say but meaning it nevertheless.

I seemed to have divided into two people, one slyly watching as the priest sank back into the armchair, the other anxious and aghast at the turn the interview was taking. “The wisdom and goodness of Jesus,” Father Dennis said slowly, “as we find it in His life and teachings—do you think mere man was capable of
this?”
I pondered. “Why not?” I queried, soberly. But the priest glanced at me with reproach, as if I were being fresh. “You don’t know your history, I see. Among the prophets and the pagans, among the kings and philosophers, among the saints and scholars, was there ever such a One?” A little smile glinted in the corners of his mouth. “No,” I admitted. The priest nodded. “There, you see, my child. Such a departure from our ordinary human nature signifies the Divine intervention. If we had only Christ’s teaching, we could know that He was God. But in addition we have His miracles, the firm assurance of tradition, and the Living Church, the Rock on which He built and which survived the buffets of the ages, where the false religions foundered and were lost to the mind of man.”

He took out his watch and peered at it in the dusk. My pride, again, was offended. “It’s not only good things that survive,” I said boldly. “There’s sin, for instance.” “The devil is eternal,” said Father Dennis, sighing, with a quick glance at me.

“But then the Church could be the instrument of the devil, couldn’t it?” Father Dennis swooped. “Then the teachings of Jesus, which it guards, are of diabolical origin?” I flushed. “Other religions have lasted,” I said, retreating. “The Jewish religion and Mohammedanism. Is that because they are diabolic?” I spoke with an air of ingenuousness, but I knew I had him in a corner; there were Jewish girls in the convent. “They have a partial truth,” Father Dennis murmured. “Hence they have been preserved.” I became impatient with this sparring, which was taking me away from a real point I had glimpsed. “Yes, Father,” I said. “But still I don’t see that the fact that Christ was an exception proves that He was God.” “There are no exceptions in nature,” retorted Father Dennis. “Oh, Father!” I cried. “I can think of lots.”

I was burning to pursue this subject, for it had come to me, slowly, that Christ really
could
have been a man. The idea of Christ as simply man had something extraordinary and joyous about it that was different, I perceived, from the condescension of God to the flesh. I was glad I had started this discussion, for I was learning something new every second. All fear had left me and all sense of mere willful antagonism. I was intent on showing Father Dennis the new possibilities that opened; my feeling for him was comradely.

But once more he shut me off. “You must accept what I tell you,” he said, almost sharply. “You are too young to understand these things. You must have faith.” “But you’re supposed to give me faith, Father,” I protested. “Only God can do that,” he answered. “Pray, and He will grant it.” “I can’t pray,” I said automatically. “You know your prayers,” he said. “Say them.” He rose, and I made my curtsy. “Father!” I cried out suddenly, in desperation at the way he was leaving me. “There’s something else!”

He turned back, fatiguedly, but the wild look on my face must have alarmed him. “What is it, my child?” He came a little nearer, peering at me with a concerned, kindly expression. “My child,” he said gravely, “do you doubt the existence of God?” “Yes,” I breathed, in exultant agony, knowing that it was true.

He sat down with me again and took my hand. Very gently, seeing that this was what I seemed to want of him, he recited for me the five
a posteriori
proofs of God’s existence: the argument of the unmoved Mover, the argument of efficient causes, the argument of the Necessary Being implied by contingent beings, the argument of graduated perfections, the argument of the wonderful order and design in the universe. Most of what he said I did not understand, but the gist was clear to me. It was that every effect must have a cause and the cause was, of course, God. The universe could not exist unless some self-sufficient Being had created it and put it in motion. I listened earnestly, trying to test what he said, almost convinced and yet not quite. It was as though the spirit of doubt had wormed its way into the very tissue of my thinking, so that axioms that had seemed simple and clear only an hour or so before now became perplexing and murky. “Why, Father,” I asked finally, “does everything
have
to have a cause? Why couldn’t the universe just be there, causing itself?”

Father Dennis lit the lamp on the table beside him; the bell rang for
goûter,
a girl poked her head in and hurriedly withdrew. “Because,” he said patiently, “I have just explained to you, every effect must have a proportionate cause.” I turned this over in my head, reminding myself that I was a child and that he probably thought I did not comprehend him. “Except God,” I repeated helpfully. The priest nodded. “But Father,” I cried, with a sudden start of discovery, “why can’t the universe be self-sufficient if God can? Why can’t something in matter be the uncaused cause? Like electricity?”

The priest shook his head sorrowfully. “I cannot tell you, my child.” He dropped into a different tone, caustic and reproachful. “I cannot open eyes that blindly refuse to see. Can inert matter give birth to spirit? Did inert matter give you your conscience? Who deny causal necessity make the world a chaos where vice and anarchy reign!” His hollow voice reverberated as if he were addressing a whole dockful of secular philosophers, arraigned in a corner of the room. “Oh, my child,” he concluded, rising, “give up reading that atheistic filth. Pray to God for faith and make a good confession.” He left the room swiftly, his cassock swelling behind him.

Father Dennis’s failure made a great impression on the convent. Wherever I went, eyes regarded me respectfully: there went the girl that a Jesuit had failed to convince. The day girls and five day boarders, returning on Monday, quickly heard the news. Little queens who had never noticed my existence gathered round me at recess and put me whispered questions, for we were not supposed to talk during the retreat. The coincidence of the holy fervor of the retreat with my unsanctified state heightened the sense of the prodigious. It was thought that Father Heeney, the curly-haired, bronzed missionary who had got such results among the Eskimos, was pitting his oratory against me. In her office, at a second interview, Madame MacIllvra wiped the corners of her eyes with her plain cambric handkerchief. She felt that she had betrayed a trust reposed in her, from Heaven, by my dead mother. Tears came readily to her, as to most pretty lady principals, especially when she felt that the
convent
might be open to criticism. By Wednesday, the third time she saw me, we had come to a serious pass. My deskmate, Louise, had bet me that I would not get my faith back by Wednesday; as one fiery sermon followed another and I remained unswayed, a sort of uneasiness settled down over the convent. It was clear to everyone, including me, that I would
have
to get my faith back to put an end to this terrible uncertainty.

I was as much concerned now as Madame MacIllvra herself. I was trying, with all my power, to feel faith, if only as a public duty, but the more I tapped and tested myself, the more I was forced to recognize that there was no belief inside me. My very soul had fled, as far as I could make out. Curiously enough, for the first time, seeing what I had wrought, I had a sense of obligation to others and not to my own soul or to God, which was a proof in itself that I had lost God, for our chief obligation in life was supposed to be to please Him. God (if there was a God) would certainly not be pleased if I
pretended
to regain my faith to satisfy Madame MacIllvra and Madame Barclay and my new friend and double, Louise, who was mischievous but a good Catholic. Yet this was the decision I came to after a second unfruitful session in the parlor, this time with Father Heeney, who could convert me, I felt leadenly, if anybody could. He had said all the same things that Father Dennis had said, though calling me by my first name and laughing when I told him that my father and grandfather were lawyers, as though my serious doubts were part of what he called the gift of gab. He, too, seemed convinced that I had been reading atheistic literature and warned me, jestingly, of the confessional when I denied it. These priests, I thought bitterly, seemed to imagine that you could do nothing for yourself, that everything was from inheritance and reading, just as they imagined that Christ could not have been a “mere man,” and just, for that matter, as they kept saying that you must have “faith,” a word that had become more and more irritating to me during the past few days. “Natural reason, Mary,” expatiated Father Heeney, “will not take you the whole way today. There’s a little gap that we have to fill with faith.” I looked up at him measuringly. So there
was
a gap, then. How was it that they had never mentioned this interesting fact to us before?

As I left the parlor, I decided to hold Father Heeney personally responsible for the deception he was forcing me into. “I’ll see you in the confessional,” he called after me in his full, warm voice, but it was not me, I promised myself, that he was going to see but a mere pious effigy of myself. By failing to convert me and treating my case so lightly—calling me Thomasina, for instance, in a would-be funny reference to doubting Thomas—he was driving me straight into fraud. Thanks to his incompetence, the only thing left for me to do was to enact a simulated conversion. But I had no intention of giving him the credit. I was going to pretend to be converted in the night, by a dream.