Religious Discovery in Hawthorne’s “The Marble Faun”

In “The Marble Faun,” we sense Nathaniel Hawthorne, descendent of Puritans, coming to terms with what some call the “Catholic Thing,” transcending the assumptions of his own culture and society in an open-minded reflection on history and art.

Nathaniel Hawthorne classed The Marble Faun, his last novel, among his “romances,” works of fiction blending fantasy with moral allegory. We know Hawthorne best as a psychologist of sin who looked at his Puritan heritage from an oblique and critical angle. While in The Marble Faun he remains very much the moralist, he travels far afield from his New England roots to Rome, to other towns and countryside of Italy, and into the world of art and Catholic Christianity. The novel’s characters include three expatriate American artists and their Italian friend, “Donatello,” who resembles the mythical faun in an ancient statue. The book is a feast of sensory imagery, attaining a sacramental significance at times and at others simply basking in an aestheticism reminiscent of the world of the Pre-Raphaelites. A far cry from The Scarlet Letter, perhaps, yet Hawthorne’s allegorizing purpose remains strong as ever. “Donatello” is established early on as a prototype of innocent and happy prelapsarian man. At a crucial moment he commits a murder that causes him to reexperience Adam’s fall from grace.

In the “Faun’s” subsequent moral regeneration following his “penance” for the murder, we see Hawthorne exploring the classical Christian idea of the felix culpa or happy fall. God’s providence allowed evil to occur so as to transform it into a greater good, raising man from a natural to a supernatural level. But Hawthorne’s final comment on penance and sin, and his reaction to the whole world-picture of Italy, comes in an extraordinary sequence of chapters in the novel’s second part.

One can sense Hawthorne the American grappling with the heritage of European Christendom from the standpoint of a man of the New World, like his American protagonists. In Rome he finds many things: a reminder of a great civilization and mighty empire, surely. But as well he finds the headquarters of an international religion with powerful influence over human souls and minds.

This quest is charted in the chapters “Altars and Incense” and “The World’s Cathedral” (a title that could almost have come from Chesterton). The novel’s secondary female character, Hilda, feels tragically burdened with the knowledge of the murder committed by Donatello on behalf of her best friend, Miriam, and longs for someone with whom to share the secret. Hilda is a symbol of womanly purity and virtue—in fact all the characters in the novel are conceived symbolically. Hilda goes to St. Peter’s Basilica and what she finds there is nothing less than the heart of Christianity. She finds what Chesterton did, speaking of Christianity in general: “this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the center.”

Hawthorne presents a mixture of his own narration and Hilda’s thoughts and reactions, such that the two are almost indistinguishable. What he sees at St. Peter’s is evidence of a “mighty machinery” working for the service of man’s spiritual needs:

“To do it justice, Catholicism is such a miracle of fitness for its own ends…that it is difficult to imagine it a contrivance of mere man. Its mighty machinery was forged and put together, not on middle earth, but either above or below. If there were but angels to work it, instead of the very different class of engineers who now manage its cranks and safety valves, the system would soon vindicate the dignity and holiness of its origin…It supplies a multitude of external forms, in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested; it has many painted windows, as it were, through which the celestial sunshine, else disregarded, may make itself gloriously perceptible in visions of beauty and splendor….There is no one want or weakness of human nature for which Catholicism will own itself without a remedy; cordials, certainly, it possesses in abundance, and sedatives in inexhaustible variety, and what may once have been genuine medicaments, though a little the worse for long keeping.”

Hawthorne here gets just the right tone for his purposes. He is after all writing for a largely Protestant audience, many members of which have had suspicion of the Catholic Church imbued in them. Such is the subtext of the beginning of the chapter; see how Hawthorne begins by emphasizing the “peril” Hilda faces in facing the attractions of St. Peter’s, alluding to the wily Jesuits and even mixing in the old smear word “popish.” (Incidentally, it’s curious to me that many Catholics probably spend whole days, weeks, months without ever once thinking of the pope, whereas to listen to those outside, Catholicism is nothing but the pope.)

Even taking all this into account, the two chapters seem an out-and-out apologetic for Catholic Christianity, extraordinary for its time and place. How Hawthorne managed to slip this by is more than I have the knowledge to answer; we know that one of his daughters became a Catholic, then a nun, and is now a candidate for sainthood, but these things happened long after her father’s death.

Hilda wanders among the various altars and icons of St. Peter’s and marvels at the sight of people of all classes and walks of life visiting and communing with God, directly or through the saints. She sees that Catholicism possesses cathartic features like intercessory prayer and confession. She beholds icons of the Virgin Mary and is struck with the thought that here is a compassionate confidant: “Ah, why should not there be a woman to listen to the prayers of women? A mother in heaven for all motherless girls like me?”

Everywhere she sees evidence of a religious scheme that combines the divine and the human and thus brings the things of heaven down to earth:

“The roof! The dome! Rich, gorgeous, filled with sunshine, cheerfully sublime, and fadeless after centuries, those lofty depths seemed to translate the heavens to mortal comprehension, and help the spirit upward to a yet higher and wider sphere. Must not the faith, that built this matchless edifice, and warmed, illuminated, and overflowed from it, include whatever can satisfy human aspirations at the loftiest, or minister to human necessity at the sorest? If Religion had a material home, was it not here?”

Hilda in a sense transcends the provincial and parochial in her own background and finds an expression of the Christian faith that is universal, not walled off by tribe or nationality or narrow theological perspective. Walking among the confessionals, she sees them arranged and labeled by language: Pro Hispanica Lingua, Pro Flandrica Lingua, Pro Polonica Lingua, Pro Anglica Lingua. Here is truly a church for all people, and this universality is rooted in Rome as the symbolic center of Western civilization, the place where sin and grace, the profane and the sacred met.

Much like Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad, Hawthorne confronts the Old World with a mixture of bewilderment, skepticism, and awe. He admires Rome as the center of a mighty civilization albeit one with a strong intermixture of blood, violence, and corruption; yet it was out of the ashes of this civilization that Christianity rose. For Hawthorne history has a twofold aspect. History, the past, is a glorious and instructive thing, but it can also become a wearisome burden. Hawthorne seems to share the view of many Americans of his era that Europe is burdened by its history—indeed, condemned to repeat its more sordid aspects—while Americans are free from this weight and can make a fresh start.

Catholicism (the term only dates from after the Protestant Reformation) emerges for Hawthorne as the mother religion of Western Europe, with which anyone interested in European art, history and culture must grapple; a religion for the people, not a gnostic sect or a debating club for academics, a society for the healing of all souls, adapting itself to them and their needs. Hilda discovers here the wholeness of the original Christian tradition, beyond parochial and sectarian concerns. On this view, the Reformation forms of Christianity are like chips from the block; they are reduced portions of what was once whole. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton described the varied and contradictory charges hurled at the church from all sides and concluded that it was the church that was normal and the critics who were biased and extreme.

It’s true that Hawthorne’s commentary seems affected by a view of Catholicism as clever spiritual machinery. But he shows that this in itself is no small thing:

“But here, whenever the hunger for divine nutriment came upon the soul, it could on the instant be appeased. At one or another altar, the incense was forever ascending; the mass always being performed, and carrying upward with it the devotion of such as had not words for their own prayer. And yet, if the worshipper had his individual petition to offer, his own heart-secret to whisper below his breath, there were divine auditors ever ready to receive it from his lips; and what encouraged him still more, these auditors had not always been divine, but kept within their heavenly memories, the tender humility of a human experience. Now a saint in heaven, but once a man on earth.”

Hilda has a great breakthrough: “Do not these inestimable advantages, or some of them at least, belong to Christianity itself?” The breakthrough consists of her realization that Catholicism is simply Christianity, and not the sinister aberration it was portrayed to her growing up. This realization is itself folded into a deeply aesthetic apprehension—Hilda too is an artist—as she beholds a painting of St. Michael by Guido Reni:

“She felt, while gazing at it, that the artist had done a great thing, not merely for the Church of Rome, but for the cause of Good. The moral of the picture, the immortal youth and loveliness of virtue, and its irresistible might against ugly Evil, appealed as much to Puritans as Catholics.

Thus does Hilda find her Christian intuitions as a Puritan not denied but affirmed in St. Peter’s. The climax of her experience comes when she enters an English-language confessional and confides in the priest there. He turns out to be a native of New England, like her, and presumably a convert to the faith. Hilda feels unburdened and rejuvenated by her experience of confession:

“And, ah, what a relief! When the hysteric gasp, the strife between words and sobs, had subsided, what a torture had passed away from her soul! It was all gone; her bosom was as pure now as in her childhood.”

An opposite reaction is given by Hilda’s friend and admirer, Kenyon, who is dismayed to find Hilda confessing in St. Peter’s. Kenyon is something of a paradox: a sculptor who loves historic Italian art yet despises the religious system that inspired it: “that mass of unspeakable corruption, the Roman Church.” His character is clearly intended as an exaggerated version of an anti-Catholic type of American Protestant. But how much sense does it make to despise the spiritual source of the art that one loves? And how much is that scorn based in reasonable objections and how much in blind bigotry?

Sadly, since the age of the Reformations discussions about religion have been vitiated by chauvinism, tribalism, and sociocultural biases of various kinds. All too often we are not speaking about purely theological matters when we think we are talking about religion. For an historical example, one only has to look at the Wars of Religion, which were as much about politics and territory—temporal matters—as about religion as such. Hawthorne leads us to wonder, are we really speaking about religion when we think we are, or is it only our cultural biases talking?

Hilda, for her part, defends her spiritual evolution to Kenyon:

“I have a great deal of faith, and Catholicism seems to have a great deal of good. Why should I not be a Catholic, if I find there what I need, and what I cannot find elsewhere? … If its ministers were but a little more than human, above all error, pure from all iniquity, what a religion would it be?”

This last comment reveals Hilda’s spiritual flaw, a kind of angelism: she is herself so pure that she is unable to conceive of the existence and reality of evil. Perhaps it’s not surprising that she is shocked by and rejects the vision of the “happy fall” proposed by Kenyon. For her, good and evil are eternally separate and cannot have anything to do with each other; it’s a slippery slope from believing in a “happy fall” to believing that we may “do evil that good may come of it.” Yet perhaps Kenyon’s spiritual blind spot is greater, for he fails to grasp an essential insight about how in the church the divine and the human meet and intermingle. He is blinkered by cultural prejudices and, unlike Hilda, cannot harmonize his artistic and spiritual life.

Hilda’s epiphany in St. Peter’s is a powerful episode in a rich and stimulating book. We sense Hawthorne, descendent of Puritans, coming to terms with what some call the “Catholic Thing” and, like Hilda, transcending the assumptions of his own culture and society in an open-minded reflection on history and art. We are more than willing to forgive the Victorian melodramatics, the overly flowery dialogue, the languid and meandering pace of the novel in the face of these meditations on the good, the true, and the beautiful.

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The featured image is “Hilda and the Doves,” an illustration from Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Marble Faun (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888: vol. 2., p. 2.) This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.