Bridge of San Louis Rey by Thorton Wilder REVIEW
“The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.”
Click HERE to hear Thorton Wilder read the first pages of The Bridge of San Louis Rey.
"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below."
Brother Juniper, who happened to be there that day, determines to use the calamity as a laboratory for proving the goodness and justice of God. “Surely,” Juniper thinks, “researching the lives of these five victims will uncover reasons why all of us suffer calamity at the hands of God.”
“By a series of coincidences so extraordinary that one almost suspects the presence of some Intention,” says Wilder in the introduction,
“this little red-haired Franciscan from Northern Italy happened to be in Peru converting the Indians and happened to witness the accident.”
And thus begins a story about someone who believes implicitly in the providence of God by a man who can only “almost suspect” such Providence. The great irony is that in the end, brother Juniper will be burned at the stake by the church he seeks to serve for trying to find evidence for that which the church asserts must simply be believed without it. And brother Juniper, as we read in the last chapter, spends his last evening on this earth awaiting his execution trying to uncover the meaning in his own calamity.
“He sat in his cell that last night trying to seek in his own life the pattern that had escaped him in five others.”
That is, he had not been able to ascertain why these five people had died and now he can't figure out what he had done to deserve the death he was facing. It did not make sense. One senses that Brother Juniper sees it as his job to convert people to faith. His study of the San Louis Rey bridge victims is to be a tool in pursuing conversions. But we do not get the sense that he grieves their loss or loves either the victims or his converts. To him, people are “specimens.” He is the sort that deals with people and loves ideas (I know such men all too well.)
“Anyone else would have said to himself with secret joy: 'Within ten minutes myself ... !' But it was another thought that visited Brother Juniper: 'Why did this happen to 'those five?' If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surmise the reason of their taking off.”
“It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences and he had long intended putting it there. What he had lacked hitherto was a laboratory. Oh, there had never been any lack of specimens; any number of his charges had met calamity, — spiders had stung them; their lungs had been touched; their houses had burned down and things had happened to their children from which one averts the mind. But these occasions of human woe had never been quite fit for scientific examination. They had lacked what our good savants were later to call 'proper control.' The accidents had been dependent upon human error, for example, or had contained elements of probability. But this collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey was a sheer Act of God. It afforded a perfect laboratory. Here at last one could surmrise His intentions in a pure state.”
“You and I can see that coming from anyone but Brother Juniper this plan would be the flower of a perfect skepticism. It resembled the effort of those presumptuous souls who wanted to walk on the pavements of Heaven and built the Tower of Babel to get there. But to our Franciscan there was no element of doubt in the experiment. He knew the answer. He merely wanted to prove it, historically, mathematically, to his converts, — poor obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good. People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.”
Thorton Wilder’s Bridge of San Louis Rey is a novel about faith. But more, it is a novel about the greater importance of love. Indeed, one might sum up the theme by reference to Paul’s assertion in 2 Corinthians 13.
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
We never get to actually see Brother Juniper’s conclusions. We are only told in the final chapter that he tried to make the case from all that he gathered on the lives of the dead that there was perfect justice in their deaths. “I shall spare you Brother Juniper's generalizations,” says the narrator,
“They are always with us. He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven.”
But, according to the narrator, his account was in error. There was much that he, despite his years of researches, never knew. And there was much, not being omniscient, that he could have never known. The stories of the victim’s lives that the narrator gives us show us this. And the narrator says so explicitly. As omniscient as the narrator is, he confesses that not even he could use these lives as proof of some formula.
“Yet for all his diligence Brother Juniper never knew the central passion of Doña Maria’s life; nor of Uncle Pio’s, not even of Esteban’s. And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?”
“The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed,” the author tells us. No human life ever perfectly demonstrates the application of a formula for perfect justice. If one reads the Hebrew books of Kings and Chronicles, one will find that even in the confines of one sacred text, the two historians differ as to why good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Time after time, the two writers look at the same events and see a different divine formula at work. As Wilder puts it in his novel,
“Some say we shall never know and that to gods we are like flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God”
I suspect that the church’s beef with brother Juniper is his arrogant assumption that what the church teaches must be accepted by faith must needs be proven with evidence.
But I am wandering from my central theme. What is Thorton Wilder saying about faith and what is he saying about love? About faith, I think he is saying that the world as we will always experience it is too complicated, too mysterious, and too unknowable to ever hope that a scientific approach will ever lead us to existential conviction. “There are a hundred ways of wondering at circumstance,” Wilder tells us.
We will never see deep enough into what is or far enough into what will be or clearly enough into what was for us to make dependable inferences. Unlike the stage manager in Wilder’s play, Our Town, our sight is too limited for a scientific understanding of the metaphysical world. Double or triple our sacred peripheral vision and give us the power of a trustworthy narrator and we may well still be missing “the spring within the spring.” “The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed,” Wilder reminds us.
But love is a different matter. That we can see. That we can feel. It’s effects, we can study.
What we learn about the victims of the San Louis Rey bridge collapse is that they all loved and were loved. They all knew what it was to love someone who would not reciprocate in kind exactly. What we learn is that death could not stop that love, frustrated as it was, from changing the world. Marquesa De Montemayor loves her daughter in Spain who does not love her back. Estaban loves his brother who has just died. Uncle Pio loves Camilla Perichole who thinks that love is just a theatrical illusion. Pepita loves the abbess, Maria Del Pilar, who seems to care more for the future of her enterprise than Pepita herself. Don Jaime loves his mother who is willing to send him away to gain an aristocratic education.
What is interesting to me about these characters is that their faith can wax and wane, but their attachment to the people they love cannot seem to do so. "At times, after a day's frantic resort to such invocations, a revulsion would sweep over her,” we read of the Marquesa, “Nature is deaf. God is indifferent.” “He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure,” we read of Estaban’s brother Manuel.
“Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love. . . . When he said over to himself that she was beautiful and rich and fatiguingly witty and the Viceroy's mistress none of these attributes that made her less attainable had the power to quench his curious and tender excitement. So he leaned against the trees in the dark, his knuckles between his teeth, and listened to his loud heart-beats.”
“To Uncle Pio nothing else mattered,” we read of Uncle Pio’s affection for Camilla,
“What was there in the world more lovely than a beautiful woman doing justice to a Spanish masterpiece?”
Brother Juniper wants to divide the world into those who believe in purpose and those who do not. “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” The sheep say “plan!” The goats say “accident!”
“It was by dint of hearing a great many such sneers at faith that Brother Juniper became convinced that the world's time had come for proof, tabulated proof, of the conviction that was so bright and exciting within him.”
“When the pestilence visited his dear village of Puerto and carried off a large number of peasants, he secretly drew up a diagram of the characteristics of fifteen victims and fifteen survivors, the statistics of their value sub specie aeternitatis. Each soul was rated upon a basis of ten as regards its goodness, its diligence in religious observance, and its importance to its family group.”
Brother Juniper chops the world up into categories of faith. Uncle Pio divides the world into different categories.
“He divided the inhabitants of this world into two groups, into those who had loved and those who had not. It was a horrible aristocracy, apparently, for those who had no capacity for love (or rather for suffering in love) could not be said to be alive and certainly would not live again after their death. . . . He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.”
After the funerals are over, the abbess undergoes a transformation whereby she no longer cares about the immortality of her institution so much as the quality of life of the souls she cares for. After the funeral, having lost her son and her uncle, Camilla Perichole visits the abbess.
"Mother, what shall I do? I am all alone. I have nothing in the world. I love them. What shall I do?"
The abbess explains to her that the great thing about love is that we can share it with anyone. We can, as the song puts it, “love the one we’re with.”
“One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love -- I scarcely dare say it -- but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long.”
We do not need the person we failed to love to be there to receive it. We do not need the person we love to reciprocate it. It may not be within us to believe all the time but it is always within us to love someone who needs that love all the time.
It is with this thought that the novel closes.
“Even now,’ she thought, ‘almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary of love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
In the end, what the world needed, Wilder is saying, is not brother Juniper’s iron clad case that suffering is purposeful but the abbess’ inclination to love those that love us, that need our love, and that suffer without the love of someone.
“How absurd you are," Camilla Perichole had told her uncle Pio, in response to his confession of love for her,
"You said that as boys say it. You don't seem to learn as you grow older, Uncle Pio. There is no such thing as that kind of love and that kind of island. It is in the theater you find such things.”
Thanks to the collapse of the San Louis Rey bridge, by the end of the story, she will be making that same love a reality to the orphans of Lima. Who knows? Maybe that is why it broke or was broken.
Questions for Comment: Is it possible to express the love one feels for one person to another? Is it possible to take the love we might feel for someone who has died or who might as well have, and give it to others who may need it? Would you agree with Paul and Wilder that love is of greater importance than faith in life? Why?
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