A Terrible Beauty
A Terrible Beauty
Stephen Kamm
In the corner of my office is a white cardboard box filled with my grandfather’s academic papers. Samuel Richey Kamm taught political science at Wheaton College from 1940 to 1973. Soon after retirement he died of a heart attack on his way to guest teach at Westmont College, where I began my undergraduate studies in 1984. Buried deep in the box is a picture of him standing at a chalkboard: short and slender, silver grey hair, kind eyes and a half smile. “He was one of God’s gentlemen,” a friend said at his funeral, “a rare Christian who fused graciousness and scholarship in a beautiful way.”
I did not know Grandfather Kamm well, which is to say that I knew him more as an ideal than an individual. There was a weight to his presence in my life, an unspoken expectation not entirely unwelcome. Academic achievement was a piece of it, but not the whole. He was called to a bigger vision—blending the Christian faith with excellence in scholarship—a vision that required obedience and goodness to achieve. When I think of him now, I am reminded of Digory in The Magician’s Nephew, deaf to all distraction, dutifully returning the apple of academic inquiry to Aslan, hoping for a simple, “Well done.”
I was no Digory. Poor choices and the subsequent demands of life kept me from following my grandfather’s path. But the call—blending faith and learning—reverberates as an echo in my life. What do the baby in a Bethlehem manger and the crucified Galilean say to “the best which has been thought and said”? I began asking that question at Westmont, and I look for answers still.
Which is why Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning caught my attention. Heroes is a play about fictional Transfiguration College, an institution very much like Wheaton and Westmont, though in the Catholic tradition. A Pulitzer Finalist, and widely praised by critics, the New York Times called it a “red state unicorn,” by which I believe they meant that Arbery created a work of brilliance from a tradition mostly foreign (if not inimical) to the blue state viewer. Arbery knows the tradition well. Raised Catholic, both of his parents are professors of Wyoming Catholic College, a small, liberal arts college in Lander, Wyoming, population 7,555.
“Write what you know,” Mark Twain suggests, and Arbery sets Heroes around a campfire in front of a secluded home in Wyoming not too far from fictional Transfiguration College. Teresa, Justin, Kevin and Emily, graduates of the college, have reunited to celebrate the inauguration of a new president. Fraught personal history, a bit of alcohol: the play has a Big Chill feel about it, with dialogue devoted almost exclusively to religion, sex and politics, that trifecta generally forbid- den at dinner parties. But these topics are constellation issues, subsets of the larger question that animates the play: What does it mean to be true to the Christian faith in a world that seems at odds with that faith? Each friend answers differently.
Teresa is a conservative political columnist, primed for battle in the culture wars. She is a holy warrior; sword always at the ready, she will “give no quarter” to those who challenge her in the public square. Justin, an older former Marine, is not so combative. He reveled in the world for a season and then, divorced and flailing, entered Transfiguration: “I was poisoned. The school was my antidote.” He will be the holy ascetic, withdrawing from the world to protect the faith and himself.
Kevin, a Catholic textbook editor, is drunk and desperate. He wants to be a “holy fool”—to go into the world as a fool and reveal the foolishness of the world’s ways—but he is crippled by in- security and longs to anchor his faith. “I never feel anything,” he wails. He aches for affirmation from the others, and for a girlfriend. Emily is a fool as well, but a kenotic fool. She gave herself to the world, as a counselor at a pregnancy center and absorbed its pain. And now, sickly, glowing with goodness and perhaps true holiness, she has returned home, seeking healing and wholeness.
“What we need to do,” Kevin slurs as the play opens, “is have a big conversation. Like we used to do. With our feet in the pool... Having a big conversation with our feet in the pool is one of my favorite things in this life.”
Teresa: “Whenever we have a big conversation, it’s really nice for awhile, but it always ends with you saying you should become a priest, and then crying about how much you want a girlfriend.”
After a bit of back and forth, Kevin persists, “Okay: okay: Why the heck do we have to love the Virgin Mary?... Why do I feel... why do you think I feel anger against the blessed, blessed Virgin Mary?”
To which Teresa replies, “You’re afraid of the scandal of the particular... The scandal of this particular person getting this particular revelation. This carpenter. This shepherd, this stutterer, this virgin. And grace— grace always accompanying the grotesque. Sometimes the moments that are the most grotesque are the closest to transcendent grace.” She follows with one of the plays more memorable monologues, weaving together this (well articulated) theological insight with American exceptionalism and the homogenizing thrust of modern liberalism.
Albert Salim
Heroes is this, a big, raucous conversation, a cauldron of theology, political ideology, personal history and wounded, yearning personalities. Moreover, references to theology (the scandal of the particular), writers (Flannery O’Connor) and doctrine (begotten not made)—all situated within conservative Catholic thought—are not ancillary to the conversation, but central to it. These references, and indeed the entire debate, will also be familiar to those educated in the Protestant liberal arts tradition. Heroes is, on the sur- face, a “family conversation” and those not born of (or converted into) the family should find the conversation dull, if not offensive.
Yet of a 2020 run at the Wilma Theater, the Wall Street Journal said, “This is a play you must see, right now,” and the New York Times called it “unmissable.” Some of the expansive appeal is surely due to the skill with which Arbery draws the characters. They may be types—Teresa the fighter, Justin the monk, Kevin the fool, Emily the saint—but they are also well developed as characters with believable stories. And each story is an enfleshed answer to the question: How, then, shall we live faithfully? We do not simply hear about what it might mean to fight in the culture wars as a Catholic traditionalist. We see it (or at least Arbery’s version of it) in the life of Teresa, a Steve Bannon follower who mentions, quite a few times, that she lives near “where the battle of Brooklyn was fought.” Vicarious suffering motivated by love is not an abstract theological idea. It is lived, with devastating consequence, by Emily who is now “a prairie of pain,” and, for this reunion, only briefly out of bed.
As we watch each answer in these lives, we begin to see that, in isolation, each answer is incomplete. Teresa the warrior confesses to a gnawing fear that “my wedding won’t be beautiful,” that as a fighter she has only hard edges. Justin withdraws to protect the faith, but throughout the play a loud screeching noise cripples him; withdrawal will never silence the “noise” of life. Kevin, the holy fool, is unmoored and appears merely the fool. Emily’s attempt to love those most hurting has crippled her. None of the characters get it quite right. Their lives, and their answers, are incomplete. They seek something that remains, always, just out of reach.
Perhaps this is why, soon after Heroes ended, I walked down the hall in my home and found myself weeping. It was, I am sure, in part a response to the near constant poignancy of the play, poignancy given full force (and fury) in the final scene. Emily, desperate for Justin’s strength and companionship, has a moment alone with him. She has waited patiently and in pain. Their playful banter throughout suggests intimacy and, on her part, hope for more. Instead of a profession of love, Justin informs her that he will enter a monastery. Her response— the rage and anguish she reveals— is breathtaking in its intensity. “I’m just so tired of talking,” she screams, “there’s nothing to figure out. We just eat each other up and die one by one... there’s no one there, there’s no one there.” Her long cry of despair gives voice not only to her own suffering, but also to the suffering she absorbed while working in the counseling clinic—and the belief that none of it, in the end, means anything. Her outburst is raw and honest, poignancy sharpened to a deadly point and wielded wildly, many jabs striking home. In response, Justin is stunned. Crumpled on the ground, he says, “I didn’t know.” Emily replies, “You do know.”
But the play doesn’t end there. Rather, Justin and Emily return, at Emily’s instigation, to a word game they played in lighter moments earlier in the play.
Justin: Emily...
Emily: Ah. ok. Doopy-doo Come on. We’re ok. Doopy-doo. Doopy-doo
Justin: Doopy-doo. Yup.
Emily: Simple as a doopy-doo.
Justin: Just a simple hoopy-hoo.
Emily: Yuppy-yoo
And the play ends there.
What to do with the ending? Is it a retreat from reality, a mere glossing over of Emily’s suffering? Possibly. But it’s also possible to hear, in the playful, tender and child-like exchange, a hint of the goodness that animated Emily’s hope.
Buried deep within the anguish is the promise of completion, a yearning toward consummation. It is poignant because it is a hope forgone—Justin will not commit to Emily—but we are reminded that the hope was good and we ache, with her and for her, at its loss.
I heard something of a similar hope when I was a student at Westmont. I remember sitting at a rectangular, wood table in the sun-filled room of Reynolds Hall reading William Faulkner with ten other students. With prose-like poetry, Faulkner created a tapestry of story and setting in fictional Yoknapatawpha County and of this world he would say; “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” In Faulkner’s world, motives were opaque—always, at best, opaque. I began to see what the Christian doctrine of depravity might mean. Not the simple lusts of a twenty year old, but layers of self-lies and falsehoods that cloud vision, disorder loves, and bend us always inward.
This experience, and others like it, were part of a dance into which I was invited as a student. The dance partners were a simple faith and an inquisitive mind. Dogma twirled with literature; creed waltzed with poetry.
Yes, it made for an awkward pairing at times. One party could leave the floor with bruised toes and the dance might feel forced. Yet the process was charged with the sense that something critical was at stake. Getting things right—dancing well—was not merely a matter of good scholarship. It was more; it had eternal import. In its ideal form, the dance was incarnation.
We read and studied and wrote in the belief that, in some way mysterious, the infinite was breathing some small life into the finite. In this dance, learning became a sacrament.
I wouldn’t have understood it quite that way back then. All I heard (or wanted to hear) was the promise of completion. I was doing God’s work, mapping out Truth, teaching my childhood faith to walk and, I hoped, run. I didn’t yet know that the horizon of completion always recedes into the distance, that the marriage of faith and learning is never consummated in this life. I hadn’t yet learned that the reality of depravity might take me down different paths in life, paths that, though rich and fulfilling in the end, might also be occasions for lasting regret.
Yet all earthly hopes, no matter how shaded by sin, contain something of the good, the true and the beautiful. We seek the eternal in and through the temporal. We experience this as curiosity, wonder and, most acutely, as longing. At Westmont, whatever small spark of longing I already possessed was fanned into a smolder, and that smolder burns still. Arbery’s characters reflect this longing too. They are devoid of the hermeneutic of suspicion, or any reflexive irony that keeps them removed from the inquiry. They are the inquiry. Far more than the substance of the debates, it is this transparency, an almost child-like yearning, that makes Heroes so deeply moving.
In the written preface to the play, Arbery thanks his parents, who “never stop nudging me toward ‘that terrible beauty which sustains us.’” Heroes is, at many points, an unlovely play—raw, gritty, profane and gripping for all those reasons. Yet beauty animates it. Not the beauty of a sunset or any momentary love, but the beauty found in Dante’s stunning final vision of “the love that moves the sun and the others stars.”
The characters in Heroes strain toward that beauty—the flawless dance, the words “well done”—and they come up short. Their answers, their lives, are incomplete. But in their striving we glimpse another end, a time when the warrior need not fight, the ascetic can walk the land without fear, the fool is truly holy and all the wounded healers are, finally, healed. With them, we live in the gap, the long wait between hope and completion.
But it’s a beautiful hope, one that gives sight to the blind and a voice to the mute. It is a hope that can sustain us and, perhaps, allow a dropped apple to be carried, a few faltering steps, down a familiar path.
Stephen Kamm
Writer & Church Volunteer
Stephen has been published in Fathom Magazine & The Englewood Review of Books
Photography by Philipp Pilz