The Forerunner in the Catholic Imagination

With some "director's commentary" on The Good Death of Kate Montclair

“But I remembered, also, the villa on another dawn. No party this time. Someone escorted me into to a small bedroom tucked away in a corner upstairs. Brought me a cup of tea, then left and shut the door. There was a single painting on the wall at the end of the single bed. A Dalí. A Study for the Madonna of Port Lligat. I was in that bedroom a long time. It was very quiet. There was tumult downstairs, but it was whispered tumult. I must have been in shock because I did not remember thinking or feeling anything. It was as if my thoughts and emotions were in a perfect state of mindfulness. I sipped my tea, rapt by The Madonna of Port Lligat. Everything in the painting was splitting apart. The great blocks and arch of the Madonna’s throne. The Madonna herself with a fissure breaking through her head. Her chest and womb opened like a window to the sea, revealing the Christ Child floating like a fetus in amniotic fluid, holding a tiny cross. All the gravity in the frame was giving way; the eternal was breaking through, absorbing into itself the Madonna and her Child.”

Something terrible has occurred. Michael Cody, the young man with whom Kate Montclair has been having an affair, has been accidentally killed, struck by an automobile driven (ironically) by his own mentally disturbed wife, Veronica.

In the passage above Kate remembers the morning of the accident, the very morning that she and Michael, with Michael’s young daughter Miranda, were hoping to board a plane for London and their new life. After Michael is killed, someone escorts Kate into a small bedroom of the villa where Kate’s friend Adele, just an hour earlier, had helped her and Michael Cody prepare their escape.

Kate is in shock, but, even in the midst of her trauma, a painting on the wall succeeds in drawing her out of herself: Salvador Dalí’s A Study for the Madonna of Port Lligat.

Salvador Dalí, The Madonna of Port Lligat, 1949, Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI, USA. Detail.

The imagery of the painting is deeply symbolic, yet plainly Christological. The tiny cross in the Christ Child’s hand indicates the reason why the Word was made flesh, why the eternal has broken into time even as it absorbs into itself the Madonna and her Child and all in unity with them.

Gazing at the painting Kate further reflects:

“How I would have liked to be absorbed with them. And how I would have liked to find everything neatly put together again on the other side. But earlier that morning, I had held Mr. Cody in the crossing of my arms and, looking up into the rosy-fingered dawn, seen gravity holding the earth and sun in perfect tension, with absolutely nothing breaking through.”

Kate’s loss of her lover is not, just in itself, the kind of suffering by which gravity gives way and the eternal breaks through. Kate is not a believer. She does not identify human suffering with the suffering of Christ. She wishes, vaguely, obscurely, for a sense of fulfillment, of wholeness (“And how I would have liked to find everything neatly put together again on the other side.”). She recalls but misses the significance of the way she held the dead body of Michael Cody “in the crossing” of her arms. But when she looks up at the sky, she sees, unlike what she sees in the world of the painting, “gravity holding the earth and sun in perfect tension, with absolutely nothing breaking through.” For Kate in her suffering, the eternal does not break through.

Seeing with the Catholic Imagination: Four Senses, or Levels, of Meaning

And yet, this episode of suffering is, for Kate, a forerunner, a type or prefiguring, of even more momentous suffering to come.

The notion of the forerunner or type (what we might also call the allegory) is central to the Catholic imagination.

In a famous passage in his dedicatory letter to his patron, Can Grande della Scala, Dante explains the levels of meaning to be found in his Commedia and in all great art:

“be it known that the sense of this work is not simple, but on the contrary it may be called polysemous, that is to say, ‘of more senses than one’….”

Four senses, to be precise: one being literal, and the other three being “allegorical or mystic” (or what I prefer to call “symbolic”).

Dante gives an example from Psalm 114:

“When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech. Judaea became his sancitifcation, Israel his power” (Psalm 114:1-2).

1.     According to its literal sense, this passage is about “the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses.”

But there are three deeper, symbolic senses of the passage:

2.     An allegorical sense, which has to do with the way in which the episode depicted in the passage is a forerunner or type (allegory) of “our redemption wrought by Christ.” The terminology is tricky here, because Dante also calls the three levels of meaning other than the literal as “allegorical or mystic.” But here Dante is using “allegorical” as a special kind of mystical or symbolic meaning, namely, in the sense of an image or action or event being a forerunner or type of “our redemption wrought by Christ.” (To avoid terminological confusion, I prefer to call the three levels of meaning other than the literal “symbolic” levels of meaning.) So, according to the specific allegorical sense, the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt is a type of Christ’s saving sacrifice. The cross of his suffering frees us from the slavery of sin, just as Moses freed the Israelites from their oppression under Pharoah.

The other two layers of symbolic meaning are

3.     The moral sense, which has to do with the way in which an image or action or event like the departure of the Israelites from Egypt shows “the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace.”   

4.     The anagogical sense, which has to do with “the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory.” The anagogical sense points to the soul’s ultimate destiny in paradise. The Israelites’ flight from Egypt, Dante explains, is an image of the soul’s flight from this world to the next.    

We can imagine Christ talking with the disciples on the road to Emmaus explaining the Scriptures to them in this fourfold way. “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:27).

But it’s not just Scripture that has these fourfold levels of meaning. Every work of the Catholic imagination can be read in this way as well.

Let’s focus today, however, on Sense #2, the allegorical sense in which an artistic image can be seen as a forerunner or type (allegory) of “our redemption wrought by Christ.”

I like to think of St. John the Baptist, being the forerunner of Christ (John 1:19-34), as the patron saint of the allegorical sense.

Charm as Forerunner in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited

Beautiful examples of the allegorical sense can be found in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. As Thomas Prufer has shown (“The Death of Charm and the Advent of Grace: Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited”), in Waugh’s novel the charm of the Flyte family (Sebastian and Julia, in particular) is, for Charles Ryder, a type or forerunner of grace (“our redemption wrought by Christ”).

Prufer observes: “Charm is not illusion without substance, but forerunner.”  

“Through his involvement with that household of the faith he [Charles Ryder], drawn by charm as forerunner, comes to grace; he is converted, but that conversion does not make up for the loss of the natural life he loses when he loses first Sebastian and then Julia.”

It seems that being a forerunner is essentially bound up with the idea of mortification and suffering. This is because the forerunner must be superseded. Even the greatest of forerunners must yield to the Son of God (“He must increase, but I must decrease,” John 3:30).

A precision, however, is needed here. Prufer says that Charles Ryder’s conversion does not make up for the loss of the natural life he loses when he loses first Sebastian and then Julia. But Charles’ “loves” for Sebastian and Julia are illicit and unnatural loves, so in finally forsaking what is illicit and unnatural Charles in no way “loses” anything worth saving in his natural life.

However, insofar as there existed friendship in a good and natural sense with Sebastian and Julia, insofar as what was charming about them was truly charming, Charles does lose something when he turns from these forerunners to the Exemplar.

Still, an illicit and unnatural “love” can be thought of as a forerunner if it is thought of as a distorted and confused instance of a genuine love.  

Waugh’s novel teaches us that forerunners or allegories are found everywhere in life and in art. They are not confined to the Old Testament, as Dante’s explanation might lead us to believe. Because Christ’s redeeming sacrifice is operative at every moment of time—at John 1:5 the Greek verb phainei is in the present tense: “The light shines in the darkness” as a perpetual gift—so too the forerunners of our redemption can be found even in this new dispensation, 2,000 years after the Light definitively defeated the darkness.

Suffering as Forerunner in The Good Death of Kate Montclair

The death of Michael Cody is, for Kate Montclair, a forerunner, a type or allegory, of our redemption wrought by Christ.

Just as with Charles Ryder’s “loves” for Sebastian and Julia, Kate experiences an illicit and unnatural “love” for Michael Cody. This illicit love is a forerunner in the sense of a confused and distorted version of the real thing.

But it is not Kate’s illicit love for Michael Cody itself that is the forerunner with which I am most interested in my novel. Rather, the forerunner I want to highlight is the suffering Kate experiences in losing Michael Cody. Her suffering is that which points elsewhere, to another and better kind of suffering, a suffering that embodies the genuine love of Christ’s own suffering that will complete Kate’s desire for wholeness.

Kate does not initially see her suffering as a forerunner of a different and better kind of suffering, any more than Charles Ryder initially sees the charm of Sebastian and Julia as a forerunner of grace. That new kind of seeing—seeing with a Catholic imagination—is a vision that Kate must struggle to achieve, and that struggle is the novel.

For decades, in fact, Kate understands her suffering to be meaningless. What ultimately affords her a new insight is the suffering of the woman to whom she was once grossly unjust: Michael Cody’s wife, Veronica. When Kate learns how bravely Veronica Cody fought her own final battle with cancer, how she forgave Kate and even lifted up her sufferings to God for the benefit of Kate’s soul, Kate is moved and challenged to metanoia: a “change of mind” and heart that will allow her to embrace her own death in a new way.

Am I saying that Kate’s loss of Michael Cody was a kind of “preview” of her later, redemptive suffering? I suppose, but only, again, in the most confused and distorted way.

Ultimately, however, Kate’s loss of Michael Cody becomes a richer forerunner when Kate learns to see it as the loss of something illicit; when she sees it as the cross of sin that she must be fastened to; when she sees it as the catastrophe that can only be redeemed by Christ.

In other words, Kate’s suffering the loss of Michael Cody becomes a “type” or prefiguring of Christ’s suffering when Kate’s sin “becomes” Christ’s suffering, in the sense of 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”  

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What are you reading or watching this summer?

I’m looking for some good suggestions—please leave them in the comments.

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And if you haven’t yet read The Good Death of Kate Montclair, you can pick up your copy here on Amazon or here at Chrism Press.

Reviews on Amazon always most welcome.