Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 4

This is my fourth 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.  

The second major theme, and perhaps the central theme of the entire novel, is the civilizing effect that Catholicism brings to the region.  We see this right in the Prologue where the reason for selecting Latour for the Bishopric is that he is a man who needs to bring “order” to a place where “savagery and ignorance” rule the day.  (p. 8).  As I mentioned previously, the landscape of Rome is a tamed version of the landscape we see in New Mexico.  It has become tamed, symbolized by the dome of the Vatican over a land and people who were one time also savage and ignorant.  Rome is a projection of what New Mexico needs to become.  The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica projects the future Cathedral in Sante Fe.

And early on we get a sense of this mission from Latour and Vaillant as they administer the sacraments, evangelize the indigenous people, and shape the existing New Mexican culture.  “The Church can do more than the Fort to make these poor Mexicans ‘good Americans’ Latour writes in a letter to back home to France (p. 35-36).  We see Vaillant cooking refined dishes and teaching the housekeepers his recipes.  Fr. Latour comments on Vaillant’s onion soup.

“Think of it, Blanchet; in all this vast country between the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean, there is probably not another human being who could make a soup like this.”

“Not unless he is a Frenchman,” said Father Joseph. He had tucked a napkin over the front of his cassock and was losing no time in reflection.

“I am not deprecating your individual talent, Joseph,” the Bishop continued, “but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.”

(p. 38)

The priest’s mission is to bring that two thousand year tradition of Christ’s Church to a people who lack it.  New Mexico, as it turns out, is the second assignment where these two priest friends have worked.  Their first mission was in Ohio where at the least they planted a garden.  Vaillant reflects back at that garden they had to leave for other people.

“And salad, Jean,” he continued as he began to carve. “Are we to eat dried beans and roots for the rest of our lives? Surely we must find time to make a garden. Ah, my garden at Sandusky! And you could snatch me away from it! You will admit that you never ate

better lettuces in France. And my vineyard; a natural habitat for the vine, that. I tell you, the shores of Lake Erie will be covered with vineyards one day. I envy the man who is drinking my wine. Ah well, that is a missionary’s life; to plant where another shall reap.”  (p. 39)

The garden here represents control over wild nature.  The missionary, then, is a person who makes a place for controlled vegetation for the refinement of life.  The two priests are just small elements of a bigger picture that will span lifetimes.  Latour goes on to explain what the Church is there to do.  His explanation stems from learning about the visitation of Our Lady of Guadelupe and of the miracle of the mantle of her image. 

“What a priceless thing for the poor converts of a savage country!” he exclaimed, wiping his glasses, which were clouded by his strong feeling. “All these poor Catholics who have been so long without instruction have at least the reassurance of that visitation. It is a household word with them that their Blessed Mother revealed Herself in their own country, to a poor convert. Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love.”

Father Vaillant began pacing restlessly up and down as he spoke, and the Bishop watched him, musing. It was just this in his friend that was dear to him. “Where there is great love there are always miracles,” he said at length. “One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

(p. 49-50)

The beautiful image of the Blessed Mother brings a refinement to the “savage country,” Vaillant observes.  And Latour responds that the miracles come not so much to heal but to make perceptions “finer,” so that they can see and hear “what is there about us always.”  That to me is the central thesis of the novel, and its guiding aesthetic principle.  The Church refines the culture so that the people can hear and see the divine in this amazing and savage landscape. 

The novel is a sort of collage of imagery and episodes that run through time.  There is no driving narrative except for the time that passes as the priests perform their functions.  We see Vaillant stipulating order and cleanliness as he performs his priestly duties at the Lujon ranch.

“Take me to a place where I can wash and change my clothes, and I will be ready before you can get them here. No, I tell you, Lujon, the marriages first, the baptisms afterward; that order is but Christian. I will baptize the children tomorrow morning, and their parent will at least have been married over night.” (p.55)

We see Latour bring in the Sister of Loretto from France to set up a school in his diocese.  We see devout Madame Olivares sing and play the harp.  We see Fr. Vaillant riding thirty miles a day to the Hopi Indians, “marrying, baptizing, confessing as he went, making camp in the sand-hills at night” (p. 202).  We learn that Vaillant likes to leave “some little token” in every house he visits, “a rosary or a religious picture,” going away “feeling that I have conferred immeasurable happiness, and have released faithful souls that were shut away from God by neglect” (p. 206).  That is the refinement, the civilizing process, that the Church brings in the novel. 

And of course there is the Cathedral, but let us hold off the discussion of its construction for another place.

So we see the Church’s mission of civilizing and we see the process, but we also get a glimpse of the fruits of that labor.  One occasion comes early on in the novel.  Latour is lost in the desert and suffering of thirst.  Suddenly his mare senses water nearby and leads him to it. 

Running water, clover fields, cottonwoods, acacias, little adobe houses with brilhant gardens, a boy driving a flock of white goats toward the stream,—that was what the young Bishop saw. A few moments later, when he was struggling with his horses, trying to keep them from overdrinking, a young girl with a black shawl over her head came running toward him. He thought he had never seen a kindlier face. Her greeting was tha of a Christian.

“Ave Maria Purissima, Senor. Whence do you come?”

“Blessed child,” he replied in Spanish, “I am a priest who has lost his way. I am famished for water.”

“A priest?” she cried, “that is not possible! Yet 1 look at you, and it is true. Such a thing has never happened to us before; it must be in answer to my father’s prayers. Run, Pedro, and tell father and Salvatore.  (p. 24)

The shepherd boy, the little stream, the kind and innocent young girl, the little hamlet who are filled with simple and devout Catholics, what Fr. Latour finds is an isolated community that is living the faith, beautiful in their kindness, a little garden of paradise in the midst of a savage country.  He finds a microcosm of what he hopes to transform all of New Mexico.  In this instance, Latour is reaping the benefits of someone else’s plantings.  But creating this Edenic community across his diocese is his mission and at the center of the novel.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 3 (Photo Essay #2)

Last time I posted on Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, I provided a photo essay of the landscape.  As it turned out I had a return trip to New Mexico, and having an afternoon to myself I went to Santa Fe to check out the Cathedral the Archbishop had built.  While the novel is fictional, it is a fictional recreation of real people and events. So the Cathedral truly exists.  While the Bishop is named Jean-Marie Latour in the novel, his real life name was Jean-Baptiste Lamy.  Lamy became the first archbishop of New Mexico and had the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi built in Santa Fe. 

The novel describes the cathedral in the style of “Midi Romanesque,” having simple geometric shapes and the beautiful stone from one of the local mountains. Here is the front face of the cathedral. 

In the front courtyard you will see three statues.  Framing the portal on the left is a statue of St. Francis of Assisi and on the right is that of Lamy.  Behind the statue of St. Francis is that of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American to be canonized.  Here are close ups of the three statues.

Looking down the nave toward the apse from the rear, the interior is very Romanesque..

The baptismal font with a little pool is located a third of the way down the nave and creates a sort of passage way across the nave.  Here is a picture of that, which captures some the windows, columns, and floor pattern, as well as a picture of a side aisle.

Looking rearward toward the narthex and porch, one can see the baptismal font and rose window.

Here is the altar and the apse.  Those are saints from the New World except for the one in the middle slightly obscured by the hanging San Dimiano Crucifix.

Here is a zoom in of the St. Francis of Assisi, which is an actual statue while the other saints are paintings.

The Cathedral has some side chapels, and I don’t have space for all those pictures, but here is a St. Anthony of Padua.  Clearly the Cathedral has a Franciscan theme.

The Cathedral boasts having the first Madonna brought to the United States.  She is called La Conquistadora (Our Lady of the Conquest), or today referred to as Our Lady of Conquering love.  It was brought to New Mexico in 1625.  

A close up of the Cathedral front doors. 

A close up of the north bell tower.

I hope you took note of the beautiful stone used.  There is a plaque commemorating the stone cutters, who came from Italy.

The cathedral had several alcoves and courtyards and gardens.  Some of the beautiful garden statues.  

One of the gardens had a modern sculpture of the Stations of the Cross by a certain artist named Gib Singleton.  I can’t post every statue, but here are Station 11, The Nailing, Station 12 The Crucifixion, and Station 14, The Entombment. 

Let me end with one more taken from about a block away.  The novel describes the Cathedral as being set against the Santa Fe Mountains.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get an angle of the building against mountains.  Perhaps you can get a slight glimpse of them above the church over to the left.

A truly magnificent visit and highly recommended if one visits northern New Mexico.  By the way, if you’re not aware, you can click any of the pictures and they should come up full screen size.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 2 (Photo Essay)

As it so happened, the very week I started reading Death Comes for the Archbishop, I had a business trip into central New Mexico.  Was that a coincidence or providential?  Whichever, I decided to take plenty of pictures, something I don’t usually have time to do on business trips.  I flew into Albuquerque and then traveled south about an hour to an hour and a half.  While the novel is mostly set in the Sante Fe area, which is an hour north of Albuquerque, Fr. Latour does travel south in the opening scenes.  I am told north of Albuquerque is even more mountainous than central New Mexico, but I picture the landscape to be very much as you see in these pictures.

Let’s start with some of the pictures I took from my plane seat, which luckily was a window seat.  I would say these pictures were taken a quarter of an hour from arriving at Albuquerque.  This photo shows the “horny backbones of mountains” (p. 64).

Also from the plane you can see the series of “fissures in the earth” (p. 7) that cut across the landscape.

The rest of the pictures are taken on the ground.  All about are “monotonous red sand-hills” (p. 17) and “petrified sand dunes” (p. 89).

From what I saw, they seemed more orange than red.  Of course there is the desert plain, a “country of dry ashes (p.88).

Above the desert, above the mountains is a “hard empty blue sky, very monotonous to the eyes” (p. 95).

The desert was naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees (p. 17-18).

Amazingly I came across that plant with “big white blossoms like Easter lilies” (p. 98).

This plant was not very common, so it was a special blessing to come across one.  There were many mesas, but here is one as described as “two great mesas…almost square in shape” (p. 96).

Here is a picture of a “great rock mesa…resembling a vast cathedral” (p. 94).

Finally, in just such a mesa, Fr. Latour and Jacinto find a cave formed by bulging rocks that resemble two lips.

Now I don’t think there is a cave opening in those rock formations, but I think you can imagine how one might be formed and concealed.

That’s my photo essay.  I hope it helps you envision the scenes and landscapes set in Cather’s novel.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 1

I’m going to have a series of posts here dedicated to our reading of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.  The novel is a fictional account of the establishment of a dioceses in mid 19^th century New Mexico based on the life of two real life priests, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the Archbishop, and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, his primary vicar.  In the novel, Lamy is known as Father Jean Marie Latour and Machebeuf is known as Father Joseph Vaillant.  Both are Jesuits and both originally come from France, though they have been working as priests in the American Midwest before being appointed to New Mexico. 

Here is the opening situation of the novel.  The United States has recently won their war with Mexico and absorbed a good portion of the western territories, including what is called New Mexico.  A new Catholic diocese needs to be formed and a new Bishop appointed.  In a break with the past several centuries, the Catholic hierarchy decides not to put a Spanish bishop to run the mostly Spanish clergy but a French Jesuit.  It becomes clear why the need for this change in direction.  The Spanish clergy have devolved into heresy and rapacious enrichment off the native population.  Fr. Latour needs to bring reform and, above all, order to the region, the clergy, and the faithful.

There are several major themes that govern the novel, but first among them is how the hard landscape shapes the lives of all those who live there, especially the indigenous population.  The landscape is distinct.  We see this in the very opening scene in the novel proper, not the prologue, where Latour traveling down into central New Mexico finds himself lost in the desert.

As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills. He had been riding among them since early morning, and the look of the country had no more changed than if he had stood still. He must have traveled through thirty miles of these conical red hills, winding his way in the narrow cracks between them, and he had begun to think that he would never see anything else. They were so exactly like one another that he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare; flattened cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks — yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens, red as brick-dust, and naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees. And the junipers, too, were the shape of Mexican ovens. Every conical hill was spotted with smaller cones of juniper, a uniform yellowish green, as the hills were a uniform red. The hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over.  (p. 17)

The desert is a “geometrical nightmare” where the hills “seemed to be pushing each other,” and if they are pushing each other then they could be an overwhelming threat to a mere human.  We also get an immense scale of the land.  It is common in the story to travel thousands of miles.  And the weather often shapes their travels across boundless region.  At another instance we see the two priests riding across vast territory

The priests were riding across high mountain meadows, which in a few weeks would be green, though just now they were slate-coloured.  On every side lay ridges covered with blue-green fir trees; above them rose the horny backbone of mountains.  The sky was low; purplish lead-coloured clouds let down curtains of mist into the valleys between the pine ridges.  There was not a glimmer of white light in the dark vapours working overhead—rather, they took on the cold green of the evergreens.  Even the white mules, their coats wet and matted into tufts, had turned a slaty hue, and the faces of the two priests were purple and spotted in the singular light.  (p.64)

Look at what the landscape and the natural elements have done to the mules and priests.  It shapes them, their activities and their lives.  There are many such scenes and descriptions throughout the novel.  The landscape is central to the novel, and perhaps even more than just as it impacts travel and lives.  The landscape has shaped the native people.  It has shaped their culture, their language, their child rearing, and their myths.  I’ll develop that theme another time, but I want to end with another quote on the landscape, this one showing how deep into history the landscape originates.  The description below is of the surrounding landscape of the town of Ácoma. 

The mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau.  The country was still waiting to be made into landscape. (p. 95)

The landscape here is connected to creation, not just creation by natural process, but back to the Creator’s initiating acts.  Cather provides a depth of history rooted in the landscape that is fathomless, mystifying, primeval.  And her point is that it’s incomplete.  The Creator didn’t finish, and so the culture isn’t finished either.  Just as the landscape are “waiting” to be completed, so are the people.

###

To do the landscape theme full justice, I should also point out how the seeds of the theme are planted even as the novel opens in the Prologue.  The Prologue does not open with Fr. Latour or even in New Mexico.  It opens with a dinner in Rome by three Cardinals and a different Bishop at a villa to discuss the appointment of a bishop to this just created New Mexican episcopate.

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.  The villa was famous for the fine view from its terrace.  The hidden garden in which the four men sat at a table lay some twenty feet below the south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of a rock, overhanging a steep declivity planted with vineyards.  A flight of stone steps connected it with the promenade above.  The table stood in a sanded square, among potted orange and oleander trees, shaded by spreading ilex oaks that grew out of the rocks overhead.  Beyond the balustrade was the drop into thin air, and far below the landscape stretched soft and undulating; there was nothing to arrest the eye until it reached Rome itself.

If you parse carefully the language of this opening passage, the landscape in Rome is actually a microcosm of the landscape we will see in New Mexico.  The four dignitaries are sitting on a terrace, “a mere shelf of a rock, overhanging a steep declivity.”  That is exactly what the plateaus are that we see in New Mexico.  Several of the mesas had ad hoc steps as passageways up.  Surrounding the villa are hills—the Sabine hills—which correspond to the surrounding mountains in the New Mexican landscape.  The table at the villa stands on sand, echoing the desert sand of the “monotonous red sand-hills” of the American territory, and the various trees offer European versions of the American junipers and fir trees that we will come across later.  The landscape in Rome undulates, simulating that in New Mexico are fissures.  The drop from the villa is apparently very high, just as we see the drops from the mesas. 

But, if the landscape in Rome is a microcosm of the landscape we will see in New Mexico, it is but a tamed version, a landscape that has undergone a civilizing process.  The sand on which the table sits is a controlled square, not a vast desert.  The passage leading up to the villa are cut steps, not natural formed rock, and those steps lead to a “promenade,” not to indigenous cliff dwellings.  The trees about them are potted or forced to grow out of rocks instead of the random and uncontrolled sprouting.  The undulations are soft in the Roman landscape, not “oven-baked” cracks in the earth or even canyons.  While there are echoes of the New Mexican landscape in Rome, there is also contrast.  Indeed, the four dignitaries at dinner in Rome seem to echo and contrast with the four priests at dinner on the Ácoma mesa in the story of Fr. Baltazar with very different outcomes.  The Sabine hills recall a brutal pagan Roman past, echoing the Indian native dark pagan culture.  But the Roman landscape leads to the dome of St. Peter, not the “gothic cathedral” of a cave where Indian fire and snake ceremonies take place.

We have in Willa Cather a writer of immense skill, one who can simultaneously echo and contrast with imagery at will.