There’s a story passed down through sacred tradition about St. Peter fleeing Rome during the Church’s persecution. In his flight, he encounters the risen Christ, weary and forlorn, going in the opposite direction. Back towards certain death.
Surprised by this, Peter asks, Quo vadis? (“Where are you going?”). While he posed the question, it was really Peter who was being asked.
Every man—and every disciple—must answer that same difficult question when confronted with suffering. Few modern novelists pursued that problem more relentlessly than Cormac McCarthy.
McCarthy’s Laboratories of the Human Heart
Though little is known about McCarthy’s faith, other than his Catholic upbringing, his novels are saturated with Christian symbolism. Even so, some critics have read McCarthy’s work, particularly Blood Meridian, as nihilistic. True, the worlds he creates are desolate and savage. However, his stories are not celebrations of violence. Rather, they function as laboratories of the human heart in the most extreme circumstances.
In Blood Meridian, the setting is the American frontier. The novel opens with a character known only as “the kid” who escapes a brutal childhood and ends up riding with the Glanton Gang, a group of some-time bounty hunters and full-time marauders.
It is a world beyond civilization. There is no goodness. Force is the only law. In between acts of violence are soliloquies by the novel’s most formidable character, Judge Holden, who sums up his philosophy most succinctly as, “War is god.” At first glance, it can be easy to read McCarthy’s critics as right.
But 20 years later, McCarthy wrote a very different book. The Road is set in a modern, post-apocalyptic America. Civilization is wiped out. Decency is nonexistent. God appears silent.
In an ashen wasteland, a father (“the man”) and son (“the boy”) wander. As they travel through this hopeless land, the father repeatedly assures his son they are “carrying the fire.”
These two books, when read together, provide three very different responses to that fundamental question.
Judge Holden: The Will to Dominate
The Judge is tall and strong, self-possessed and charming, scholarly and utterly ruthless. He is both acolyte and incarnation of one philosophy for navigating a violent world. It has taken innumerable forms, from ancient tyrants to modern totalitarianism, but it is as old as the Fall itself.
The Judge is presented as a kind of naturalist. He keeps a notebook, meticulously cataloguing people, animals, and artifacts the gang encounters. When asked why he proclaims, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent…only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”
The Judge’s answer to suffering is domination. His answer to evil is to become it. In this philosophy there is no room for grace. Knowledge begets mastery. Creation itself is meant to be subjugated. It is the promise of the ancient enemy, “you will be like God” (Gen. 3:5).
Repeatedly, the men of the gang question the Judge’s worldview. But time and again their actions assent to his creed. At the altar of war, they worship and are ultimately consumed.
The Wife and Eli: Surrender to the Darkness
The setting of The Road is no less violent. It is a merciless world of loners, bandits, and cannibalistic cults. In many ways, it is the Judge’s philosophy made manifest.
As McCarthy describes, “The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true.”
Here, the man’s wife presents an alternative. While the Judge pursues dominance, she seeks escape. She declares, “as for me my only hope is eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.”
McCarthy presents her decision not as an impulsive collapse but as the terrible conclusion of a worldview: if suffering has erased all meaning, then oblivion is the only rational choice.
In their travels, the father and son also encounter Eli, an old wanderer, who holds a related view. Unlike the wife, who embraces nothingness, Eli utterly resigns himself to it. Like an upturned John the Baptist, he preaches an age of nonexistence, declaring, “there is no God and we are his prophets.”
The Father: Steadfast Love
McCarthy gives a third response in The Road through the father (“the man”). When confronted by evil and suffering, the father presents no arguments. He can articulate no rationale for hope.
Not unlike McCarthy’s, the father’s faith remains difficult to define. It is anguished, like Job’s laments or the Psalmist’s cries from the pit. Yet, it lacks their underlying certainty that God still hears. His is more a painful question than a settled answer. Though unresolved, it never entirely stops reaching outward.
C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, writes from the perspective of a demon: “our cause is never more in jeopardy than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe in which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
While the man verbalizes no answer to suffering, he does give a response. St. Paul writes, “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). When his faith falters, when hope is lost, and when the logic of the world cries out against it, the father simply continues to love his son.
He comforts him when he’s frightened. He gives him the last of their food. He holds him close through many long, cold nights. The father never explains what it means to “carry the fire.” He lives it.
Like a shepherd guarding a lamb, the father protects his son from every danger—even with violence when necessary. More importantly, he guards him against the death of goodness in his soul. And he will spend every breath to keep that ember burning.
At the end of their journey, the father lays dying. The boy, in his sorrow and fear, asks what will happen next: how can he go on to confront the darkness alone?
With his final words, the father tenderly assures him, “Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”
Carrying the Fire, Taking up the Cross
While McCarthy explored these responses through literature, Viktor Frankl witnessed them in a Nazi concentration camp. In his memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes, “man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
St. Maximilian Kolbe was one such upright man. Arrested by the Nazis, Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz, a historical embodiment of the Judge’s world. Kolbe was confronted with that same question as Peter. The same question we all face:
Quo vadis? Where are you going?
Ten men were chosen to die because of the escape of one. When one of the condemned men cried out for his wife and children, Kolbe quietly stepped forward and took his place. His response to suffering was to follow Christ to the very foot of the Cross.
Ultimately, Peter gave that same answer. There on the Appian Way, Our Lord replied, “I am going back to Rome to be crucified again.”
Peter then turned around, took up his cross, and followed.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
