Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE SIN OF FATHER AMARO” by Eca de Queiroz (“O Crime do Padre Amaro” first published in 1875, but later twice revised by the author; first published in English translation by Nan Flanagan as “The Sin of Father Amaro” in 1962; later translation by Margaret Jull Costa as “The Crime of Father Amaro”)

            Anti-clerical novels come in many varieties. At the very lowest level there is pornography (the orgies-in-the-convent variety). A step up from these is crude secularist propaganda (Diderot’s La Religieuse, for example, or that old warhorse Ethel Voynich’s The Gadfly, which was much-reprinted in the old Soviet Union). Then there are the ones produced by authors with real literary talent, but written when they were in a propagandistic mood. On this blog you will find critiques of two such – Emile Zola’s La Conquete de Plassans (an attack on the church’s political influence in France) and his La Faute del’Abbe Mouret (celibate priest discovers erotic love).

Finally, at the top, there are the ones with great literary merit in their own right. The best I had so far encountered was George Moore’s TheLake, a relatively subtle account of an Irish priest losing faith in the church.

Now, however, I believe I have found a much better anti-clerical novel and certainly the best to come my way. This is The Sin of Father Amaro (also known as The Crime of Father Amaro), which I read as part of my ongoing project of reading my way through the novels of the Portuguese Jose Maria Eca de Queiroz (1845-1900). So far on this blog you may have encountered what I have had to say about his Cousin Bazilio, The Relic, The City and the Mountains and TheIllustrious House of Ramires. It is odd that I have taken my time in getting to The Sin of Father Amaro as, a step or two behind Cousin Bazilio, it is probably one of Eca de Queiroz’s best-known novels in his native country. Cousin Bazilio had been filmed and turned into a TV drama many times in both Portugal and Brazil, while The Sin of Father Amaro has been filmed at least twice. Why I was reluctant to read it I will explain at the end of this review.

Both The Sin of Father Amaro and Cousin Bazilio were written near the beginning of Eca de Queiroz’s writing career, and are far more piquant in their satire than the more mellow novels he wrote later. Coincidentally, The Sin of Father Amaro was first published in the same year (1875) as Zola’s La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret. Eca de Queiroz was a Francophile (and an Anglophile) who knew modern French literature well, and some Lucophone critics accused him of having simply plagiarised Zola’s work, especially when Eca de Queiroz revised his novel a number of times for later publications. (It is the last revised version that we now have). He was also charged with having plagiarised Cousin Bazilio from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Neither charge stands real scrutiny, but it is true that La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret does deal with the same general theme as The Sin of Father Amaro – the disaster that follows when a celibate priest acts out his sexual desires.

The fat-gutted and unlovely priest of the cathedral town of Lieira has died. In his place comes young, handsome and relatively naïve Father Amaro Vieira. In flashback we learn of his repressed sexual impulses when he was a seminarian and we learn that his very first appointment was to an isolated, woebegone, mountain parish where he had virtually no congregation. But he had made such a good impression at the seminary that when he tells the bishop of his plight, he is transferred to the cushier parish of Lieira.

It is arranged for him to board at the house of a pious mass-going woman Senhore Johanneira. But Johanneira has a beautful adolescent daughter Amelia. We know trouble is on the way when Father Amaro first hears the creaking of Amelia’s bed in the next room and harbours erotic thoughts about her. Matters are not helped when Amaro attempts to distract himself by reading a popular prayerbook: “It was a pious little work written in an ambiguous lyrical style, almost obscene, which gave to the prayer the language of lust. Jesus was invoked in the terms of the avid, eager desires of sexual appetite: ‘Oh! come, beloved of my heart, adorable body, my impatient soul desires Thee! I love Thee passionately, madly! Embrace me! Inflame me! Come! Crush me!’ ” (Chapter 5) This is one of many times that the novel notes how much religious desires and ecstasy can be just a step away from (or a substitute for) sexual desires and ecstasy.

It is not my intention to recount the whole plot of this novel. It is too well-wrought to be subjected to my clumsy reductionism and besides, you might enjoy reading it and discovering it for yourself. But a few general points can be made. Obviously Amaro’s carnal longings are going to lead to tragedy, especially when Amelia responds to them willingly and when (about halfway through the novel) she becomes pregnant. Amaro gives in to his desires in part because he finds that a canon – his immediate ecclesiastical superior – is having a long-running affair with his pious landlady, Amelia’s mother Johanneira. Indeed a number of priests in the area are sexually active.

Amaro has a rival in the young clerk Joao Eduardo, who was engaged to be married to Amelia and was approved of by Amelia’s mother because he seemed a steady and polite churchgoer. But in private Joao Eduardo is a secularist and sceptic. When he suspects that Amaro has seduced his fiancee, he heads for the local liberal and anti-clerical newspaper and writes (anonymously) an article damning the immorality of Lieira’s clergy. A good part of the novel concerns the intrigues of the local clergy to find out who the anonymous author was and to devise ways of punishing him. Meanwhile, events get more and more out of control for Amaro. Without spiking the plot, I can mention that abortion is mentioned as are “baby farmers” with lethal intentions. Indeed The Sin of Father Amaro is far more frank about sexual matters than most (mainstream) novels written in the nineteenth century and it is little surprise that it didn’t receive its first English translation until 1962, fully 87 years after it appeared in Portuguese.

Why is this much superior to purely propagandistic anti-clerical works? Among much else, it is because, as he always does, Eca de Queiroz sets his story in a credible community which he carefully delineates – a smallish town where people tend to know too much of one another’s business, where there are rival secular and clerical cliques (neither of which is idealised), where the church-going women too often idolise priests or see them as saints but are only too willing to gossip about one another’s faults, and where it is clear that social tensions have much to do with a major shift in power in the country. Eca de Queiroz was writing at the time when the Catholic Church still had much power in Portugal, but its power was waning and it was no longer unchallenged. Although its early democracy was still weak, the country was officially a constitutional monarchy, not an absolute one, and there were liberal, sceptical and anti-clerical newspapers as well as clerical and conservative ones. We are convinced that Eca de Queiroz is writing about a real time and place and we note the close detail he deploys in sequences such as the ones where groups of priests settle comfortably into homes and enjoy the hospitality and good food they are offered.

Contrast this with Zola’s La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret. In order to set the strictures of the church against the impulse to carnal love, Zola creates a story in which his priest couples with the woman he loves in what amounts to a Garden of Eden setting, idyllic and separated from the modern world. Despite Zola’s documented naturalism, this borders on fantasy. More damagingly to his purpose, Zola would have us believe that his naïve (and, arguably, feeble-minded) Abbe Mouret is a complete innocent and pure of soul before carnal love touches him. Eca de Queiroz, perhaps more aware of the reality of original sin than Zola was, shows us a priest who is already very flawed before he arrives in Lieira and whose affair with Amelia is not romantic love but in part opportunistic and merely lustful. (It is rather a shock, and perhaps a flaw in the novel, when we are suddenly told in Chapter 16 that before he was ordained, Amaro virtually raped a young woman.) The circumstances in which Amaro and Amelia conduct their affair are also sordid and far from the Garden of Eden. They hold their rendezvous in a house where Amelia is supposed to be offering elementary education to a mentally-impaired paralytic, “Toto”, who turns out to be perceptive enough to understand what is going on and whose accusatory cries counterpoint the couple’s hasty lovemaking.

Eca de Queiroz, near the beginning of the novel, characterises Amelia thus:

 “She already knew her catechism and her doctrine; and by her teacher, and in the house, for the least trifle, she was threatened with the punishments of the heavens; so much so that God appeared to her as a Being who only knew how to deal out suffering and death, whom it was necessary to appease with prayers and fasting, reciting novenas and fawning to the priests. Because of this, if when she went to bed she forgot a Hail Mary, she did penance the next day, as she feared that God would send her malaria or cause her to fall down stairs.” (Chapter 4)

She is genuinely pious and innocent and, in that confusion of the sacred with the erotic, she is genuinely confused and psychologically tormented when she starts coupling with Amaro. By contrast, as soon as he is in a jam, Amaro starts calculating how quickly he can disentagle from Amelia. In this respect, Amelia and Amaro are very much like the bored wife who thinks she has found true love and the cynical rake (Bazilio) who seduces her in Cousin Bazilio.

The most cutting satire in the novel, however, is the way Eca de Queiroz, bit by bit, exposes the weakness of Amaro’s position and his psychological disposition. Eca de Queiroz is aware that in his time, many delinquent priests were made by being sent to seminaries when they were still too young and immature (and in some cases pre-pubescent) to fully understand what they were taking on in vowing themselves to celibacy. Amaro entered the seminary at the age of fifteen, under the influence of a wealthy marqueza who was his patron. The novelist comments:

“No one consulted either his inclination or his vocation. They pushed him into a surplice, and with his passive, easily dominated nature, he accepted it as one accepts a uniform. On the other hand he didn’t find the idea of being a priest a disagreeable one. He had given up the perpetual praying practised in Carcavelos; but he kept his fear of hell, though he lost his fervour for the saints. However, he thought of the priests who came to the senhora marqueza’s house as clean, fine people, well treated, who ate with the gentry and took snuff from gold snuff-boxes; and that profession would suit him, in which one spoke softly to the women and received presents from them on silver trays.” (Chapter 3)

The matter of self-deceit is plumbed.  Apart from his worldy pride in excercising power, Amaro persuades himself that he is doing a pardonable deed in pursuing Amelia. When first responding to Joao Eduardo’s anti-clerical article, Amaro reasons thus when he plots to break up her relationship with her fiance: “[it] wasn’t an intrigue to separate her from her sweetheart: his motives (he said this aloud, in order to convince himself better) were very honest, very pure: it was a holy work to save her from the devil: he didn’t want her for himself, he wanted her for God! Incidentally, yes, his interests as a lover coincided with his duty as a priest. But if she were squint-eyed, ugly and a fool, he would go just the same to the Rua da Misericordia, in the service of heaven, to tear the mask from Senhor Joao Eduardo, that defamer and atheist!” (Chapter 10)

The worst of Amaro’s self-justifications comes when he perverts theology to make his case to himself. As a guard against any congregation’s confusing a priest with a magician or a god, the church has long taught that sacraments, properly performed, depend on God’s grace, not on the moral character of the priest. In pursuing his sex life, Amaro interprets such teaching as a free pass to transgress, and argues thus:

“He was a priest, it was true. But for that he had his great argument; it was that the conduct of the priest, as long as it didn’t cause scandal among the faithful, in no way prejudiced the utility, the efficacy, the dignity of religion. All the theologians taught that the office of the priesthood was instituted to administer the sacraments, and that the essential thing is that the people receive the interior supernatural holiness which the sacraments contain; and providing the sacraments were dispensed according to the sacred formulas, what does it matter whether the priest be a sinner or a saint? In both cases the sacrament gives the same grace. It is not through the merits of the priest that they operate, but through the merits of Jesus Christ.” (Chapter 16)

What is really being built up here is a convincing case against hypocrisy, and the main thrust of this novel is a protest against a corrupt, complacent, over-powerful church.

It takes nothing away from this to point out that, not being a Utopian, Eca de Queiroz does not believe that radical change to the existing order would necessarily be an improvement. The novel shows its anti-clerical and radical characters to be about as devious as the clergy. Joao, the aggrieved fiance of Amelia, earns our sympathy but is clearly a bit of a sneak. When Joao consults an atheist doctor looking for help, the doctor gives this cynical advice:

“ ‘Ah!’ said the doctor,’what a beautiful and wonderful thing is love! Love is one of the greatest forces of civilization. Well directed it could lift up the whole world and be sufficient to cause a moral revolution.’ Then changing his tone: ‘But listen. Be well aware that sometimes this is not love, this is not in the heart. The heart is a term which usually serves us, for decency’s sake, to designate another organ. It is precisely this other organ which is the only one interested, in the majority of cases, in affairs of sentiment. In those cases the grief doesn’t last. Goodbye, I hope it is so with you!’ ” (Chapter 12)

In the very last chapter, the year is 1871 and people are reacting to news of the revolutionary commune in Paris, which is attacking the church. One character remarks that “…a torpid set of people hope with the help of a few police, to keep back a social revolution; and some youths with a smattering of learning decided, with a few sheets of foolscap, to destroy a social system of eighteen hundred years.” (Chapter 25) This impartial and somewhat sceptical opinion appears to be Eca de Queiroz’s own. I might also note that, to balance things a little, the novelist gives us late in this work the character of a tolerant and charitable priest, Abbot Ferrao, who observes his vows fully and tries to lead Amelia to a more loving, forgiving image of God than the vengeful and punishing God she entertains.

Having noted this, though, The Sin of Father Amaro remains a real classic of anti-clerical literature.

Footnote: Now why, as I said early in this review, was I reluctant to read this novel and why did I delay reading it until I had read most of the rest of Eca de Queiroz’s oeuvre? It is because, some years ago at a film festival, I saw the Mexican, Spanish-language film adaptation of this novel (El Crimen del Padre Amaro) made in 2002. Updated to modern day Mexico, it had very few of the nuances and subtleties of the novel and was, understandably, disliked intensely by reviewers in Portugal. They said it completely betrayed Eca de Queiroz’s intentions, and had nothing to do with the novel’s specific time, place and social commentary. It was, in effect, very crude anti-church propaganda, not helped by the decidedly wimpy performance of the lead actor, Gael Garcia Bernal. His Padre Amaro was nothing but an innocent and almost admirable figure discovering the delights of sex. Fearing the novel was the same sort of product, I put off reading it. I am glad that my fears were misconceived.