Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 7

This is my seventh post on Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. 

Part1 was on the landscape theme. 

Part2 a photo essay of the New Mexican landscape.  

Part3 a photo essay of the actual Cathedral referred to in the novel.  

Part4 on the civilizing effect of Catholicism.  

Part 5 on the reform of the Church from the old order.  

Part 6 on the relationship with the indigenous people.  

In wrapping up Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop I would like to explore the significance of its final and dominating image, the Cathedral that Latour has built over the course of his lifetime.  The Cathedral is there throughout the novel, either in directly after it has been built, in desire to be built once Latour conceptualizes it, and perhaps in allusion prior to its being conceived.  It may be helpful to go to Part 3, the photo essay on the Cathedral (see link above) as you read this post.

We see only see the Cathedral fully built late in the novel.  It occurs on Latour’s last entry into Sante Fe, and he contemplates its beauty as the sun sets upon it.

Father Latour made his last entry into Santa Fé at the end of a brilliant February afternoon; Bernard stopped the horses at the foot of the long street to await the sunset.

Wrapped in his Indian blankets, the old Archbishop sat for a long while, looking at the open, golden face of his Cathedral.  How exactly young Molny, his French architect, had done what he wanted!  Nothing sensational, simply honest building and good stone- cutting,--good Midi Romanesque of the plainest.  And even now, in winter, when the acacia trees before the door were bare, how it was of the South, that church, how it sounded the note of the South!  (p. 269)

The significance of the architectural style—“Midi Romanesque”—is given right there in Latour’s thoughts: simplicity.  I couldn’t find anything on “midi” but Romanesque refers to a style of late antiquity which absorbed many of the pagan Roman simple geometric forms.  Midi I suppose refers to a revival of Romanesque during the middle ages.  What it most certainly is not is Gothic, with hard lines and abundant—perhaps overly abundant to the point of garish—embellishments.  Latour is proud that this style is most fitting to the “South,” and here I think he means the Southwest.  Latour then contemplates the Cathedral in its setting.

No one but Molny and the Bishop had ever seemed to enjoy the beautiful site of that building,--perhaps no one ever would.  But these two had spent many an hour admiring it.  The steep carnelian hills drew up so close behind the church that the individual pine trees thinly wooding their slopes were clearly visible.  From the end of the street where the Bishop's buggy stood, the tawny church seemed to start directly out of those rose-coloured hills--with a purpose so strong that it was like action.  Seen from this distance, the Cathedral lay against the pine-splashed slopes as against a curtain.  When Bernard drove slowly nearer, the backbone of the hills sank gradually, and the towers rose clear into the blue air, while the body of the church still lay against the mountain. (p. 269-270)

The Cathedral is set against the hills and slopes of the mountains that are the terrain of the New Mexican landscape that has been so crucial to the novel.  It is as if the church building grows out of the mountainside, “to start directly out of those rose-coloured hills.”  And here is the significant qualifier: “with a purpose so strong that it was like action.”  The church building may stem from nature, but it has power over nature.  We see this even more so in the next paragraph.

The young architect used to tell the Bishop that only in Italy, or in the opera, did churches leap out of mountains and black pines like that.  More than once Molny had called the Bishop from his study to look at the unfinished building when a storm was coming up; then the sky above the mountain grew black, and the carnelian rocks became an intense lavender, all their pine trees strokes of dark purple; the hills drew nearer, the whole background approached like a dark threat. 

Despite storm or hills that have an ominous “dark threat,” the church stands calmly and with strength in opposition to the dangers that nature presents.  It is planted in place and stands strong against the dark forces of the world.  It recalls Matthew 16:18, “upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”

But the Cathedral doesn’t just emerge from the mountain; it is part of the mountain.  The very stone of the Cathedral came from one of the mountains in the area.  We get a little vignette of Latour showing Vaillant one day as they passed that particular mountain.

The two priests left Santa Fé a little after midday, riding west.  The Bishop did not disclose his objective, and the Vicar asked no questions.  Soon they left the wagon road and took a trail running straight south, through an empty greasewood country sloping gradually in the direction of the naked blue Sandia mountains.

At about four o'clock they came out upon a ridge high over the Rio Grande valley.  The trail dropped down a long decline at this point and wound about the foot of the Sandias into Albuquerque, some sixty miles away.  This ridge was covered with cone-shaped, rocky hills, thinly clad with piñons, and the rock was a curious shade of green, something between sea-green and olive.  The thin, pebbly earth, which was merely the rock pulverized by weather, had the same green tint.  Father Latour rode to an isolated hill that beetled over the western edge of the ridge, just where the trail descended.  This hill stood up high and quite alone, boldly facing the declining sun and the blue Sandias.  As they drew close to it, Father Vaillant noticed that on the western face the earth had been scooped away, exposing a rugged wall of rock--not green like the surrounding hills, but yellow, a strong golden ochre, very much like the gold of the sunlight that was now beating upon it.  Picks and crowbars lay about, and fragments of stone, freshly broken off.

"It is curious, is it not, to find one yellow hill among all these green ones?" remarked the Bishop, stooping to pick up a piece of the stone.  "I have ridden over these hills in every direction, but this is the only one of its kind."  He stood regarding the chip of yellow rock that lay in his palm.  As he had a very special way of handling objects that were sacred, he extended that manner to things which he considered beautiful.  After a moment of silence he looked up at the rugged wall, gleaming gold above them.  "That hill, Blanchet, is my Cathedral."  (p. 238-239)

Deep into the heart of the landscape is where the very rock that will be used to build the Cathedral resides.  The stone is of a distinct color, unlike the stone in the entire region.  It is part of the mountain itself.  One supposes that all stone that go into buildings must come from nature, but given the importance of landscape to this novel, seeing the virgin stone in the mountain, seeing the picks and crowbars that will cut the stone out, and holding sample stone in a character’s hand allows the reader to fuse the Cathedral with the landscape.  But it is more.  It is not just from the landscape; in being transformed into a Cathedral it has been transfigured into the holy.  It is akin to transubstantiation, where the simple elements of bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.  Through the simple elements of mountain rock, a holy tabernacle is formed.

There are several churches that either prefigure or contrast against the Latour’s cathedral.  First in contrast was the mission church at Ácoma, an “old warlike church.”  “Gaunt, grim, grey, its nave rising some seventy feet to a sagging, half-ruined roof, it was more like a fortress than a place of worship.” When Latour served Mass there,

he felt as if he were celebrating Mass at the bottom of the sea, for antediluvian creatures; for types of life so old, so hardened, so shut within their shells, that the sacrifice on Calvary could hardly reach back so far. Those shell-like backs behind him might be saved by baptism and divine grace, as undeveloped infants are, but hardly through any experience of their own, he thought. When he blessed them and sent them away, it was with a sense of inadequacy and spiritual defeat.”  (p. 100)

The church at Ácoma represents the spirituality of the old order, the Spanish missionaries of the latter generations that maintained a power relationship over the population, and that had fallen into corruption and heresy. 

There was also the “Gothic chapel” of the cavern where Jacinto and Latour took refuge from the winter storm.  Here was a pagan structure where dark ceremonies were performed and an underground river flowed untamed, “far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power” (p. 130).  Here the forces of nature threaten existence itself.  These are the very forces that Latour’s Cathedral stand against.

And there are the churches that prefigure the Cathedral.  We get a glimpse in the Prologue of the dome of the Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica, set against the hills of Rome.  Here too at one time the hills of Rome were pagan and “antediluvian,” encompassing a savage culture.  Latour’s Cathedral is clearly an allusion to what St. Peter’s achieved, the taming of the savage culture not by war as the Church at Ácoma projected but by assimilation.  The Catholic Church didn’t conquer pagan Rome; it assimilated it. 

Finally there is another prefiguring of the Cathedral early in the novel, when Latour is on his first journey in New Mexico and lost comes upon the simple and devout Mexicans.  There he performs baptisms and marriages and a Mass.  He performs the sacraments in a house, which in essence becomes a House Church.  Near this idyllic community is also a stream,

 a spring overhung by the sharp-leafed variety of cottonwood called water willow. All about it crowded the oven-shaped hills--nothing to hint of water until it rose miraculously out of the parched and thirsty sea of sand. Some subterranean stream found an outlet here, was released from darkness. The result was grass and trees and flowers and human life; household order and hearths from which the smoke of burning piñon logs rose like incense to heaven.  (p. 31)

Here we see that same stream that was below the “Gothic chapel,” which threatened with its dark powers, now “released from darkness” and graces the landscape in a sort of benediction.  Bishop Latour sat by that river and contemplated its existence.

This spot had been a refuge for humanity long before these Mexicans had come upon it. It was older than history, like those well-heads in his own country where the Roman settlers had set up the image of a river goddess, and later the Christian priests had planted a cross. This settlement was his bishopric in miniature; hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert, then a spring, a village, old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren. The faith planted by the Spanish friars and watered with their blood was not dead; it awaited only the toil of the husbandman.  (p. 31)

Here the Christian priests had planted a cross as well.  Here that cross had tamed the subterranean river.  That cross serves as the Cathedral in place.  The cross may be local, but the Cathedral will stand as that cross for the entire archdiocese. 

And so, the Cathedral encapsulates all four of the themes: the landscape as defining the life of the region, the civilizing effect of Catholicism, the reform of the Church from the accumulated heresies, and the assimilation of the indigenous culture.  The novel itself can be seen as the building of the Cathedral.

Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi, Sante Fe