“Sometime the wolf”: On the apocalyptic imagination of Cormac McCarthy

Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption.— St John Paul II, Letter to Artists

In Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, a father and son make their way through a bitterly cold, ash-covered wasteland after a disaster has wiped out most of humanity. Many of those who survive do so by enslaving and cannibalizing others. The novel is bleak and brutally violent. The sole glimmer of light and grace in the howling darkness is the desperate love and vulnerability of a father’s heart as he tries to keep a child alive in the midst of Hell.

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. — Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The world has ended but the father’s responsibility has not. As he looks at his son, this wildly improbable miracle, the sole goodness and beauty left in the world, the man knows that if this child is not spoken into being by God, then there is no God.

If he is not the word of God God never spoke. — Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Christ, is Himself the Incarnate Word of God. But God has spoken other, lesser, words as well, and we can see Him revealed in these things of creation. Mist rising off a lake at dawn. Sunlight on golden larch trees in autumn. If the beauties of nature are not God’s words, then He never spoke.

In the last few years, I have tried to practice more aspirations. While the Jesus Prayer (inhale: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God exhale: have mercy on me, a sinner) is the most well-known example, there are many others. Recently, I have found myself breathing paraphrased words of McCarthy’s in thanksgiving and praise whenever I am struck with awe and gratitude, especially in the face of some natural beauty. Inhale: If this is not the word of God. Exhale: then God never spoke.

McCarthy may not be a conventional source for aspirational prayer, but he intuited the same truth as fourth century bishop and Church Father St Gregory of Nyssa:

That God should have clothed Himself with our nature is a fact that should not seem strange or extravagant to minds that do not form too paltry an idea of reality. Who, looking at the universe, would be so feeble-minded as not to believe that God is all in all; that He clothes Himself with the universe, and at the same time contains it and dwells in it? What exists depends on Him Who exists, and nothing can exist except in the bosom of Him Who is.¹

God clothed Himself in human nature as the Incarnate Word. But He clothes Himself with lesser things in the universe as well. “What exists depends on Him Who exists, and nothing can exist except in the bosom of Him Who is.” If these things are not the word of God, then God never spoke.

God speaks in the least of creatures. The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the ex-priest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice. The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. I ain’t heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life. — Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

It can be hard to discern the word of God in the things of this world. Fallen creation and fallen man are often hard to love. We can be frightening, dangerous, selfish, murderous.

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf. — Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Simone Weil wrote of a temptation Christians may experience to disengage from the culture, from the world we live in, in favour of the hereafter. If this world is too heartbreaking and evil, we can comfort ourselves that we will be happy in Paradise someday. The hope of Heaven and the Beatific Vision is, and should be, a comfort and the supreme goal of our lives. However, writes Weil, this hope cannot turn us away from the sacred duty to live in, and love, the here and now. “Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that it should be difficult yet possible to love it.”²

Many works of art reflect this tension. We might appreciate Francisco Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings, while being repulsed by them at the same time. Cormac McCarthy’s work is notoriously violent, disturbing, and dark. Harold Bloom confessed that he tried to read McCarthy’s Blood Meridian twice before finally getting through its “overwhelming carnage” on the third attempt.³ Bloom eventually found that he had a “fierce” passion for McCarthy’s novel, comparing the writer to Melville and Shakespeare.⁴

Love, hope, goodness: all do exist in McCarthy’s novels, although admittedly in a few of his works, the reader must search closely for them. There are many writers that affirm that the world–and people–are worth loving. Few writers do such a brilliant job as McCarthy of showing just how hard it is to love this world and how important it is to love it anyway.

Just as God is often veiled and mysterious in His creation and we must, like Jacob, wrestle with Him to find Him, Cormac McCarthy’s writing needs to be contended with. These are not simple or even necessarily enjoyable (in any conventional sense) novels. The author raises difficult moral and philosophical questions on the nature of good and evil, virtue, sacrifice, nihilism, the meaning of life and death.

Some might protest: his work is simply too dark, too graphically violent. It is a fair objection. McCarthy, like Goya, is not for everyone. Of course, this accusation of too much violence, of the cost being too high could be thrown against the universe as well. McCarthy himself throws it against the world:

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. — Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

For a lot of us, there is more pain than beauty in this world. Our sins and selfishness do exact an unimaginably high cost to redeem: the death of God Himself. In the Christian ethos, suffering leads to redemption. The total surrender of our will to God, our death to self, leads – not just to the vision of a single flower – but to salvation. And the cost is everything: nothing less than our very selves.

I become very dissatisfied about my lot in this world. The peculiar thing was that the very thing that brought me to that pass was what led me out of it and since that time I’ve come to see that more often than not that’s how the Lord works. — Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason, Act II Scene III

McCarthy’s imagination is so dark because it is apocalyptic. While his works do not all deal with the end of the world, as The Road does, they all deal with the end of a world: a society, a way of life, hopes and dreams for the future, a culture and a civilization. This eschatological view is haunted and horrific.

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. — Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

The landscapes of his novels are peopled with serial killers and cannibals. Because the author is unflinching in his portrayal of evil in all its sadistic perversity, the glimmers of goodness and love in McCarthy’s writing are hard-won and unsentimental. One of his most memorable characters is Sheriff Bell, the lawman in No Country for Old Men. Bell has seen the worst of the worst over the years and recognizes that society is only plunging deeper into hellishness. The criminals of his youth didn’t have the cold psychopathy of those he sees after decades of law enforcement work. When the Sheriff muses on good and evil in the world and whether he himself is a good man, he comes to no easy answers. The world as he knew it has changed, and is changing, irrevocably for the worse. Musing on how his own life is different from his father’s, Bell shares a dream he had about riding a horse through the mountains at night. It is freezing cold, and his father comes up on horseback and passes him.

Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up. — Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Violence and sadism still exist. There are no easy answers. Yet evil does not have the last word. Fire is carried through cold mountain passes. This is what Cormac McCarthy’s artistic vision helps us hold to. The fictional landscapes he created are filled with perversities: necrophilia, infanticide, demonic death cults. As we look at our own society in the West, at the murder of children in the womb, at the chaos and confusion attacking the family, at the economy and culture declining at a breathless rate, and at the rise of Satanism and witchcraft in popular culture, it can be a temptation to reject and hide from the world.

But this is the world we have been given to serve in, to grow in virtue in. God has willed that it is difficult, yet possible, to love in this broken world.

The arc of the moral universe is indeed long but it does bend toward justice. — Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason, Act I Scene IV

A year after his death on July 13, 2023, Cormac McCarthy’s work is more pertinent than ever. He affirms that even in a hellscape where demons stalk seemingly unopposed, beauty and grace is still possible. We see through a glass darkly and are often disheartened and afraid, but God still speaks His word in this world. It is still possible to hear His still, small voice calling to the human heart. It is still possible—and necessary–to be virtuous. To carry fire through the night. To love others sacrificially. To hold on to hope in a bleak apocalyptic world.

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