A person cannot confess if from the very beginning he sees a chasm between himself and sin. He must be completely and truly convinced that he belongs to the realm of sin.
—Adrienne von Speyr, Confession
With a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 34 percent “fresh,” Ridley Scott’s 2013 production of Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor has, it is fair to say, failed to win many admirers. Dismissed by reviewers as “boilerplate pulp” (Buckwalter), this adaptation of McCarthy’s original screenplay floundered at the American box office. But it was not just the film that failed to find favor; McCarthy’s script, published in the lead-up to the theatrical release, was also widely reviled. For Ellis, it represents “a great author’s aesthetic nadir” (“Science” 189), while for Josyph, “it is not merely the worst thing Cormac McCarthy has done, it’s one of the worst things anybody has done” (“What’s Wrong” 203). Josyph scorns the text as “a story that is ethically and aesthetically bereft” (203). Yet I contend that such an assessment, certainly as regards the work’s ethics, constitutes a profound misreading of The Counselor. In line with Hillier’s insistence that the screenplay is “didactic and fiercely moralistic to the core” (Morality 162), I maintain that it reveals McCarthy at his most morally austere and that this austerity betrays, in its decidedly Catholic cast, the extent to which the author’s childhood faith remains an ethical lodestone even in his latest work. As such, it serves as fitting prelude to the strikingly different texts that followed it in late 2022, namely the novelistic duology formed by The Passenger and Stella Maris.
First, as regards The Counselor, I take issue with Peebles’s claim that the screenplay’s treatment of the Roman Catholic confessional is “a joke that’s largely incidental to the plot” (178). Instead, I argue that this tale of the twenty-first century drug trade, like Outer Dark, Child of God, and Blood Meridian before it, makes the sacrament of Penance central to a critique both of the modern market’s reification of the person and of America’s persistent understanding of itself as an innocent world actor. Emphasizing the script’s stark dramatization of American responsibility for the sins of the cross-border drug trade, sacramental confession figures in this work as an alternative to the morally corrosive character of both the American economy’s traffic in human lives and Americans’ presumption that such traffic incurs for them no moral cost. By situating the scene of Malkina’s visit to the confessional at the very heart of his tale, McCarthy underscores the moral depravity of the film’s casually self-seeking investors and presents the radical possibility of conversion for even the blackest of its sinners. By so establishing the relevance of Catholic confession to its critique of American consumerism, The Counselor, I conclude, proffers the figure of the penitent as the proper American hero of our time.
It is in their similar foregrounding of modernity’s need for contrition that McCarthy’s final novels serve as apt sequels to this generically distinct precursor. For if this diptych’s protagonists—lapsed Catholic children of a nuclear physicist—embody science’s impact on the postwar world, they do so problematically. Bobby Western acknowledges himself a child of “Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West” (P 165). As so fraught a pedigree suggests, the science pursued by Bobby’s father on the Manhattan Project is cast here as something dangerous, as corrosive to the soul as threatening to the planet. Following in the footsteps of The Counselor’s meditations on the proper response to the potentially murderous works of modernity, The Passenger and Stella Maris offer, I argue, two alternative moral models to orient the post-Hiroshima West that Enlightenment science has wrought: one centered on a zero-sum game of knowledge/power, the other on the need to own an inescapable ignorance and guilt. Alicia Western, aiming, like Judge Holden, to “wrest the secrets of creation from the gods” (114), sees this quest for absolute knowledge as an attaining of Enlightenment sovereignty over nature’s secrets. Imagining her probing of reality as a contest ending in either final mastery or utter futility, she ultimately chooses suicide over the humiliating defeat of unknowing. Bobby’s different response to the tragic limits of Western epistemes hints at a less despairing conclusion, one that conforms rather to The Counselor’s call for an American penance. Burdened by grief and guilt, Bobby accepts, as Alicia will not, that “in the end you really cant know” (279). On this basis, he pursues, unlike his sister, a penitent’s path. Accepting ignorance, he works at practicing forgiveness and prayer so as to offer penance for himself, his Western kin, and their common Enlightenment hubris. As such, his example serves as McCarthy’s final, still rather Catholic, word on his culture’s need to make that admission of fault and surrender of autonomy von Speyr’s confessional demands.
Centered on the twin cities of Juarez and El Paso, The Counselor does not shrink from portraying the human costs of transactional relations in the form of illicit cross-border commerce. Nor does it balk at indicating which of two populations—American or Mexican—bears the bulk of such costs. A tale of the illegal drug trade, the script also signals early on its interest in the contemporary traffic in people. As the septic-tank truck bearing the drug shipment that will be the undoing of most of McCarthy’s cast winds its way north, its driver watches “a line of stragglers crossing through the chapparal, men and women, carrying suitcases, carrying laundrybags over their shoulders” (C 13). Goods and services make their way daily across this contentious border, but the flow of such migrants, crossing with all they have, establishes from the outset whose profit such commerce serves. Such everyday desperation makes no impact on the consciousness of those who travel in the circles of McCarthy’s counselor, but there remains nonetheless a demand for these exploitable laborers in America that keeps this trade in suffering profitable. The gruesome reality of America’s morally indifferent market is only underscored by the discovery, upon the truck’s arrival in Chicago, of a “free rider” (154), a dead body shipped in sewage across several international borders for “no reason. It is convenient” (155).
If this nameless victim evokes the many casualties of people-smuggling, he also indicates the cost of America’s taste for recreational narcotics. However high the American street price for cocaine, this is a check largely paid by others. While the go-between Westray implies that any number of ostensibly respectable Americans profit from this trade—“You’d be surprised at the people who are in this business,” he says (54)—he also insists on what such safely anonymous investors and their customers can largely afford to ignore: namely, that theirs is a business that feeds on Mexican misery. Westray informs the Counselor that Juarez reported three thousand, mostly cartel-related, murders the previous year (58), a testimony to the brutalization of that Mexican city that the Counselor himself corroborates when he crosses the border in search of his kidnapped fiancée, Laura. There he finds a war zone of bullet-riddled streets, police-taped crime scenes, and processional mourners carrying “crosses of raw wood and crosses with wreaths” for their disappeared, victims of the drug trade (153). That trade, for which America supplies the market, fosters violence visited disproportionately on those south of the border, those easily disregarded by American purchasers. The end toward which it tends is the destruction of human lives and the radical dehumanization of persons. This trafficking in drugs has become, as the free rider proves, a commerce in disposable human bodies. Among Juárez’s three thousand, Westray reports, are girls bought and sold by cartel lords to be raped, murdered, and further commodified in snuff films (59). The logic of this business that peddles a deadly product to its consumers is to treat people themselves as fungible commodities, a point brought home to the viewer when Laura’s decapitated body is sighted at the Juarez dump (174), and to the Counselor when he receives a DVD we understand records her violation and murder (165).
Cooper is correct, then, when she writes that The Counselor “critiques the ethical failures of late capitalism” (Cormac 62). Indeed, contrary to Josyph’s claim that the film “begs sympathy for investors in the cartel” (“What’s Wrong” 209), its focus on American culpability leads to a merciless indictment of the presumption and guilt of its frivolous protagonists. The script is at pains to demonstrate, as Agner insists, how McCarthy’s protagonist “cannot see past his American privilege” (207). For the Counselor, this privilege equates to moral untouchability. He may indulge his tastes, consume what pleases, even break the law to these ends, but none of this can involve him in any moral responsibility or negatively impact his essential goodness. So convinced is he of his own untaintability that evil itself is, for him, but a titillating make-believe, something with which one may play because one knows it is merely myth. Hence the bedroom scene with which the film opens has him teasing Laura for her naughtiness. “How did you get to be such a bad girl?” he asks (C 7), before complimenting her on having “reached a whole new level of depravity” (9). A joke to add piquancy to their foreplay, “depravity” can serve such a role only because they are certain that it doesn’t exist or, if it does, that it can never actually touch them or their choices.
Yet depravity is palpably real in this text and indeed fostered by the Counselor’s faith in his own immunity to it. Though he is aware of the cartels’ calling card—“Where’s all this beheading shit come from?” he asks partner-in-crime Reiner (39)—he is convinced he can, for an easy payday, guiltlessly do business with these suppliers. This is, for him, a “one-time deal” (35), and he is confident that it can neither impact his moral character nor imperil anything he values. That the deal he sets in motion ultimately claims at least nine lives, including Laura’s, suggests otherwise, but the text has been plain on this score throughout. McCarthy’s protagonist does not want for warnings, but as Agner notes, “The central irony of the counselor is his inability to be counseled” (206). Reiner himself preaches caution: “You pursue this road that you’ve embarked upon and you will eventually come to moral decisions that will take you completely by surprise” (C 34). Yet the Counselor affirms he is all in, even after Westray details the evils of his “one-time” partners, men capable of buying, raping, and killing girls to expand their video library (59). He is in because, at root, he does not believe in such things and is certain that his easy life could never be impacted, its goodness never tainted, by them. This becomes clear when Westray discusses snuff films not just as a crime his new partners commit, but as a metaphor for the drug trade itself. Westray insists that the purchaser of such a commodity is as guilty as the murderous producer, “because the consumer of the product is essential to its production. You cant watch without being implicated in a murder” (112). Likewise, the buyer of narcotics cannot use or traffic without being implicated in the evils that attend their production and sale. To this, the Counselor replies, “I dont do drugs” (113), asserting that as a purveyor he can maintain both his innocence of the cartels’ crimes and his superiority to stateside users.
This disastrous moral blindness is no idiosyncratic flaw of the Counselor’s. As Malkina indicates when one of her operatives balks at payment after learning the man she has just betrayed may now, on account of her actions, be murdered, this moral prevarication operates in The Counselor as a national brand. “You know what I like about Americans?,” Malkina asks: “You can depend on them” (164). What is dependable is their dishonest insistence upon their own uprightness, even as they profit from others’ misery. This brand of self-deception extends even to the script’s ostensibly good Catholic girl, Laura. Though dubbed “wholesome” by Cooper (Cormac 129), Laura, too, mistakes a morally suspect ignorance for innocence. Noting Malkina judges her worldview naïve, Laura asks, “Is that so bad?” (C 97). McCarthy’s answer is an emphatic yes, for that naïveté is a form of culpable unknowing that allows her to sidestep moral maturity and to profit from evils to which she remains willfully blind. Keen on a church wedding, Laura insists her faith is important to her (46). Yet it’s clear what she seeks from her Catholicism is simply that presumption of innocence that characterizes her betrothed. She is demonstrably ignorant of the faith whose value she affirms, erroneously informing Malkina that the Counselor’s previous divorce is no obstacle to their wedding because “the Church doesnt recognize other marriages” (46), and falsely stating that the damnation of non-Catholics is “pretty much what the Church teaches” (48). Apart from indicating the unseriousness of her faith, such errors demonstrate that what she seeks from the Church is not mature moral reflection, but an affirmation of her own inalienable goodness. Confession, she admits, is “maybe not so much” her thing (46), and though she confirms that a resolution not to recommit sins confessed is central to the sacrament, she concedes that she does, “[u]sually” (48), recommit them. As the Counselor does with the drug trade, Laura embraces only those parts of Church teaching that serve her convenience and vanity, not those that would accuse her.
Thus, while Knepper identifies the grieving Counselor as “a sort of penitent” (44), it is rather the case that neither he nor the beloved whose death his acts precipitate ever engages in penitential self-scrutiny. Even when he reaches out to the cartel Jefe in hopes of bargaining for Laura’s life, even when he declares he would swap places with her, he never acknowledges that his own heedless pursuit of profit has led to her torture and death. Yet as Laura’s discussion of confession indicates, the question of penitence, of redemption through admission of guilt, is central to this text. Indeed, the question of penance is broached in just the Counselor’s second scene. In Amsterdam to purchase a trophy diamond for his wife-to-be, he meets, in his jeweler, a character who foregrounds the perspective that empowers the film’s critical scrutiny of America’s moral obliviousness. Professing that “the heart of any culture is to be found in the nature of the hero” it promulgates (C 19), this merchant observes that if, in classical antiquity, this hero was “the warrior” (19), in the later West “it is the man of God. . . . The prophet. The penitent” (19), a figure “unimaginable” to the ancient Greeks (19). Yet if this is true, then The Counselor serves to illustrate that, in America, even among those, like Laura, who confess the living Christ, this Western hero has been displaced.
However, if McCarthy’s characters shy away from the penitent’s acceptance of evil and admission of fault, the text itself, in dwelling on confession, works to expose such evasions. Strikingly, the Catholic sacrament takes up—in Laura’s description of confession and Malkina’s subsequent visit to the confessional—eleven pages of the script. Placed next to the cold-blooded malice and moral dishonesty that abound in The Counselor, this emphasis indicates precisely the perspective that might oppose rather than facilitate the carnage the film’s hijacked drug deal unleashes. According to the Catechism, Penance involves a turning away from one’s sin and toward God, in a confession of guilt and a resolution to abjure the sins confessed (399). The sacrament thus requires of the penitent three things none of McCarthy’s American innocents ever commits to: “contrition, confession, and satisfaction” (404). Chief among these is the first. In order properly to confess and be absolved, one must sorrowfully accuse and acknowledge oneself as a sinner. As von Speyr puts it, the penitent must first identify himself with sin. The sinner confesses so as to be absolved of guilt, but he first “binds himself to this guilt so that he will be released from it” (30). For forgiveness to be granted, he must not hold to that presumption of innocence to which both the Counselor and Laura, quintessential American consumers, cling. Sorrow over sin, the Church teaches, not certainty as to one’s moral worthiness, permits the redemption confession affords. As von Speyr insists, the true confessant “does not anticipate absolution. It comes to him like a bolt of lightning” (68). Yet if the sacrament demands of sinners that they frankly acknowledge their own participation in evil, it also offers a promise of pardon at no higher cost. As Knox writes, the Church has always opposed sects that posited unpardonable sins (Belief 187); for it, “sorrow for sin combined with a purpose . . . of avoiding it in the future” is all that is required for absolution of the gravest crimes (188). In confession, innocence may be attained if one surrenders the illusion of one’s impeccability; as von Speyr explains, it is “a completely new beginning, a divine pardon that takes everything away” (223).
Certain of their lack of responsibility for the crimes committed to serve their appetites, however, the Counselor and Laura never achieve such innocence. In fact, the film offers but one character genuinely attracted to the confessional’s offer of renewal, and she is the gravest sinner of all. Malkina, whose initial theft of the shipment exposes all other partners to the cartel’s murderous wrath, is also the character who best sees her own and others’ corruption, and who seemingly experiences longing for an innocence she knows she has forfeited. To be sure, she is, as Monk has noted (207), a villain on par with Blood Meridian’s notorious Judge Holden himself. She betrays her lover Reiner, leaving him to the drug lords’ vengeance, and arranges the hit on Westray, also a lover and implied father of the son she now carries. Indeed, while Hillier suggests she is motivated by her own desire for vengeance on Westray’s fugitive attentions (Morality 242), the text suggests she seeks a more monstrously comprehensive revenge. “When the world itself is the source of your torment,” she tells her escort at film’s end, “then you are free to exact vengeance upon any least part of it” (C 182), going on to suggest that she has disrupted the drug deal precisely for the ramifying scope of harm, of vengeance, this act afforded.
Yet, however malign her own deeds and motives, Malkina is the text’s most clear-eyed moral judge. While Hillier maintains that she is drawn to Laura’s exemplification of purity and faith (Morality 243), it is rather true that she sees their vacuity; in response to Laura’s complacent description of the certainty of absolution, Malkina can only marvel, “What a world” (C 49). Indeed, it is possible that it is Laura’s presumption to innocence that is the real target of Malkina’s crimes. The deal the Counselor enters into so as to pamper Laura is undone in such a way as to deny her not just the fairy-tale marriage to which she feels entitled, but her life itself. Further, Malkina’s behavior in the confessional reveals a desire to expose the spuriousness of this sacrament that has provided consolation to a woman she despises. While there, she urges the priest to break the seal, taunts him with questions as to his sexual experience with girls or boys, and seeks to shock him with tales of sibling incest, finally driving him from the scene (C 82–86). In this rout, she may see further proof of the moral cowardice that she deems definitive of the American epoch. This age of carefree consumption is one exemplified by just that willed flight from implicating moral ugliness that has typified the Counselor’s ruin. The Counselor and Laura certainly, the retreating priest arguably, wish in Malkina’s words, “to draw a veil over all that blood and terror” upon which their own lifestyles rest (183); yet, she notes, willed ignorance does not dispel such terror but only “makes of it our destiny” (184).
However, McCarthy’s priest never betrays the dignity of his office or the sacrament, refusing to rise to Malkina’s taunts, break his vows, or dishonor the confessional. Similarly, whatever her own rage at embodiments of innocence true or false, Malkina evinces a genuine attraction to the sacrament’s promise. It is she who first brings the topic up in conversations with Laura (46), and the fact that she then bothers on her own to investigate suggests motives less than altogether blasphemous. In the confessional, she is particularly interested in the priest’s claim that, once she has taken Catholic instruction, she can indeed confess and have her sins forgiven. She asks, “What if they’re unforgivable?” (82), and on hearing no sin is unpardonable, presses the point, asking whether this might extend even to murder, a crime she will soon commit, if she has not already done so (83). Before the scene closes, a seeming desperation creeps into her request that he hear her sins: “All you would have to do is listen. To the sins. You could even pretend I was lying. If you didnt like what you were hearing” (85). Again, all of this might still be counted further evidence of Malkina’s wickedness. But the hunger for a hearing, the hope that her transgressions can be pardoned, suggests a sense of her sinfulness alien to the Americans she disdains and a longing for an honest path to a world more innocent than the bloody marketplace she inhabits.
Ultimately, the script’s conclusion reveals this longing to be both real and repudiated. Reflecting on her few desires, Malkina lists one that indicates a moral self-knowledge that works to vindicate the perspective of the confessional as a moral counter to the American cult of innocence The Counselor ruthlessly dissects. Asked what it is she wants, Malkina replies, “There are times when I imagine that I would like my innocence back. . . . But I would never pay the price which it now commands on the market” (181–82). Though this essentially rehearses her earlier lashing out at priest and sacrament, it also, I submit, concedes their authority. Unlike McCarthy’s protagonist, Malkina accuses herself, acknowledges her guilt, and confesses a longing for absolution. Yet what such pardon requires of her is that she become the penitent and submit to another’s authority in faith; as von Speyr emphasizes, the confession that absolves is not simply a matter of self-expression, but of obedience (20). This, for Malkina, is too high a cost, and in her telling economic idiom, she confirms both her allegiance to the ethos that has damned her victims and the text’s use of confession to highlight the dehumanizing power of that outlook. Thus, while Knepper insists that The Counselor deems “any prospect of redemption . . . chimeric” (48), the film instead asks its audience if they are ready to pursue a penitential path to renewal.
Strikingly, it is just this path—of contrition, confession, and attempted satisfaction—that is finally followed by Bobby Western in The Passenger. Yet his tale, too, begins with a rather darker portrait of the Enlightenment’s fruit. McCarthy’s 2022 diptych opens with the discovery of polymath prodigy Alicia Western dead by her own hand. One of the novels’ two sibling inheritors of revolutionary science, she is found hanging from a tree, “her eyes . . . frozen cold and hard as stones” (P 3). If the end to which her pursuit of scientific inquiry has brought her is thus a grim one, it is not uniquely hers. Her mother and father before her, brought together by the Manhattan Project, both succumb to cancer, victims of their radioactive work (176). However, the threat constituted by Western science extends beyond the fates of the Westerns alone. As Bobby is acutely aware, breakthroughs in the physics he once studied have done more terrifying harm to people altogether ignorant of particle theory. As his foil, John Sheddan, explains, Western’s own father collaborated in “the design and fabrication of enormous bombs for the purpose of incinerating whole citiesful of innocent people” (30). Himself haunted by visions of “burning people crawl[ing] among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium” (116), Bobby sees this Enlightenment nightmare still ramifying to effect a civilizational demise. Ending up in the Mediterranean, he sees in this locale a Western culture nearing its end: “Cradle of the west. A frail candle tottering in the darkness. All of history a rehearsal for its own extinction” (369). As his own family history so clearly testifies, this imminent apocalypse is something Enlightenment progress has itself helped realize.
Such historical judgments point back to The Counselor’s treatment of the question of the West’s proper ethical stance in a postwar world. Specifically, the discourse of the screenplay’s diamond merchant, I argue, articulates Bobby and Alicia’s divergent responses to that challenge. His division of Western culture between the warrior and the penitent, I hold, maps neatly onto the Westerns’ tale but in some perhaps counterintuitive ways. For by the criteria the jeweler lays out, the Enlightenment science that has shaped and imperiled the modern West is scarcely western at all. As embodied by Alicia, that modernity is classical and martial in its temperament. By contrast, the penitential path of Bobby, who ultimately rejects both physics and self-destruction, offers a measure of living heroism and hope. Suicidal Alicia openly identifies herself as a hero of antiquity. As she tells the Thalidomide Kid, “I wanted to be a warrior. . . . I was a born classicist and my heroes were never saints but killers” (SM 127). Like the physicists of the Manhattan Project, she pursues science as warfare, a struggle with the world aimed at isolating and grasping foundational truths. Her quest for knowledge establishes science as an all-or-nothing contest in which the heroic knower either prevails or is vanquished. As the idiom of war suggests, the wages of defeat here are death. Epistemological victory alone stands between the knower and nothingness. As she taunts her psychiatrist’s attempts to solve her, “Devise a theory. The enemy of your undertaking is despair. Death” (52). Yet for all her warrior’s confidence, she confesses that she “came to see the world as pretty much proof against any comprehensive description of it” (37). Committed to a science that demands conquest or annihilation, however, she deems such enduring unknowing to be untenable. It feeds in her a warrior’s fury, the belief that the world that has humbled her attempt at omniscience is hateful. Thus, as her faith in the possibility of mastery through science falters, she becomes convinced that there is “an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world” (152). It is just this distillation of certainty from mystery that leads her, in her classical quest for mastery, to parallel the suicidal course upon which her culture itself seems set. As Alicia admits, rage at one’s own failure cannot last, and “sorrow is what is left when rage is expended and found to be impotent” (164). From this sorrow at her epistemic defeat, emerges the death wish that grows in her from her early teens and finds its fulfillment in wintry Wisconsin woods.
Former physicist and child of the atomic age, Bobby inherits the same legacy of world-threatening scientific discovery as does his sister; what’s more, in his search for knowledge he, too, achieves only incomprehension. More plainly than Alicia’s, his is a story of unsolved puzzles. The Passenger’s mysteries abound. Who is the missing passenger? Why is Bobby hunted by government agents? Who has stolen his father’s papers and why? Such questions and others go unanswered. Yet as my comments on Alicia should indicate, this is no matter of writerly oversight. Rather, such flamboyantly unresolved riddles underscore what Bobby’s own abandoned career in physics has already taught him: namely, that no scientific model will decode reality’s enduring enigma. Asked if he still believes in physics, Bobby replies, “I dont know that it actually explains anything” (P 156). But his response to this defeat differs from Alicia’s and enables him to offer a less deadly response to the precipice to which Enlightenment science has brought modernity. For if Bobby is well aware of his epistemic failure, he is even more certain of his ethical shortcomings. When asked if he has faith in a Catholic God, Bobby replies agnostically to the ontological question, but more affirmatively to the implied moral one: “The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions” (180). By the measure of such moral sentiments, too, he judges himself a failure. As he confesses to Kline, “I’ve failed everyone who ever came to me for help” (309). He is moved more by the problem of guilt—his own, which he must expiate, his father’s, which he must forgive—than by the puzzles of science. Thus, on hearing of a friend’s death, he takes his grief to St. Louis Cathedral, where he sits in silence, “bent forward like any other penitent” (116).
Though Bobby later comes to imagine himself “the last pagan on earth” (383), earlier descriptions of him as “liv[ing] like a monk” and roving New Orleans “like some wandering mendicant” are nonetheless significant (86, 210), for his response to the crimes committed in the name of an impossibly absolute Enlightenment mastery of nature is increasingly a spiritual one. Twice he retreats from pursuers into ascetic stateside isolation, the second time, crucially, after having finally abandoned his attempts to unravel the mystery of their persecution: “I dont know what they’re up to and I never will. And now I dont care” (285). This surrender of the imperative to know helps enable a last retreat, not into his sister’s nothingness, but into a strikingly monastic discipline. Installed on the Spanish island of Formentera, sleeping on “a sheet of plywood . . . laid over with a straw tick” (365), Bobby lives out his days in humble devotion, not importunate investigation. Through such means, he begins to find some measure of peace in and with the world, and to move beyond his sister’s fatal rejection of a reality that will not submit to her Enlightenment ambitions. Sitting “sometimes in the little church at San Javier” (368), Bobby presumes to no certainty and avows no doctrine. He refuses even the title of atheist on such grounds; as he corrects a visitor, “I dont have any religion” (374). What he has in place of settled doctrine or the self-destructive sorrow of his warrior sister is a practice of appeal and atonement: “I light candles for the dead and I’m trying to learn how to pray” (374). His tale concludes, then, not in a commitment to those Enlightenment paths that lead to Hiroshima or Alicia’s ghastly tree, but in the penitent’s uncertain search for absolution. Bobby’s rituals target forgiveness, not knowledge or power, forgiveness for his own sins and forgiveness in his heart for those, like his physicist father, who have done great harm in knowledge’s name. Contrite, he tentatively schools himself in practices, not theorems, aimed not at comprehension, but mercy. This, he realizes, is a life’s task. “Mercy,” he reflects, “is the province of the person alone . . . there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you” (381). But by surrendering the Enlightenment commandment to achieve lordship through knowledge, mercy becomes a task that can foster life, communion, even peace. As such, it offers the diptych’s, and McCarthy’s, final, unsure, but still resonantly Catholic answer to the maelstrom unleashed by the Enlightenment’s too certain science.
These final three works, then, confess the darkness of America’s enlightened culture, both in its commonly dehumanizing transactional norms and in the deadly threats established by its weaponized science. More than this, however, and despite their differences in genre, mode, cast, and plot, these works all proffer the path of the penitent as the surest start toward the light. Indeed, their elaboration of the character of, and need for, a decidedly unmodern contrition becomes a chief means by which they reveal the spuriousness of a self-interested modernity’s righteousness and the brutalizing potential of its scientific progress. By so advocating for an American examination of conscience, these works of the past decade confirm, as have others reaching back some sixty years, the ongoing relevance to McCarthy’s thought and art of the sacramental faith in which he was raised.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted with permission from Professing Darkness: Cormac McCarthy’s Catholic Critique of American Enlightenment (Louisiana State University Press, 2024).
