In the same week that Pope Francis went to hospital, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former Prime Minister, Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber, and famed American writer Cormac McCarthy died.

What a strange collage of legacies. I don’t know much about Berlusconi, but when I was on an 8th grade field trip to Washington DC I got the news that my uncle, who was a timber industry lobbyist in northern California, had been killed by a bomb addressed to his boss. Ted Kaczynski, an anarchist/primitivist living in a remote cabin was terrorizing the forces of ecological evil. He was arrested in 1996 and spent the rest of his live in prison.

I remember hearing about Cormac McCarthy in university. He had just published The Road (2006). He was beginning to be known as one of the greatest living American writers.

I didn’t get around to reading McCarthy until a few years ago, when I finally picked up The Road I couldn’t put it down. His stainless steel prose and the exploration of human purpose stripped to its most elemental struck a deep chord. The book is heartbreaking and horrific. But it somehow still touched something like the holy in me. Perhaps that is a predictable response from a privileged first worlder to post-apocalyptic simplicity, but still.

Last year, while teaching a course on death, disease and disaster in the humanities, McCarthy’s novel seemed an obvious choice for exploring the possible ruin of earth the coming age of the so-called Anthropocene may bring. At the end of the novel he writes:

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” (Pg. 287).

The Road makes clear that we have a lot to lose, and that enduring that loss may cost more than some of us can muster.

I have read most of McCarthy’s major works. I can’t say I love it all, but something that keeps coming up in my experience of McCarthy is an abiding encounter with the holy, or to put it another way, grace. By grace in this instance I mean an unspoken wholeness that seems to be shot through it all, or as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it “the dearest freshness deep down things.”

Now don’t get me wrong, McCarthy’s stories, characters and plots don’t directly speak to this. McCarthy’s world is a world of fallen, wounded, and downright evil human beings. McCarthy liked to show humanity at its worst. But each story is set in a richly alive world bursting with fecundity. In his first novel, the Orchard Keeper (1965), a hermit figure lives deep in the Tennessee woods. He is a kind of Appalachian Adam, before the fall that surely comes.

“Curled in a low peach limb the old man watched the midmorning sun blinding on the squat metal tank that topped the mountain. He had found some peaches, although the orchard went to ruin twenty years before when the fruit had come so thick and no one to pick it that at night the overborne branches cracking sounded in the valley like distant storms raging. The old man remembered it that way, for he was a lover of storms.” (pg. 51).

Lush prose for a lush landscape.

In Blood Meridian (1985), where the huge, pale, erudite and depraved “Judge” seems to be a personification of a simultaneously civilizing and terrorizing Manifest Destiny, the pools of blood and monstrosity are somehow poulticed by the beauty of McCarthy’s language and vast western landscapes.

“He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall swagged walls with their faded frescoes. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in the chancel.” (pg. 27-28).

“Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.” (pg. 57).

“It grew cold in the night and it blew stormy with wind and rain and soon all the wild menagerie of that country grew mute. A horse put its long wet face in at the door and Glanton looked up and spoke to it and it lifted its head and curled its lip and withdrew into the rain and the night.” (pg. 124).

McCarthy’s landscape is not moral, enchanted or invested in his characters’ lives. But somehow the spaciousness of the land allows for the possibility that another path might have been chosen. And that for all the terror, small moments of peace are never to be squandered.

I am not a literary critic, so maybe some has already said all this, but in my experience, there is something holy about a beauty that includes darkness. McCarthy doesn’t try to persuade the reader to see the beauty in bad things, he simply zooms out far enough so that even humanity’s most sinister acts are humbled by a grandeur not of our own making.

The Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor has been credited with writing to a similar effect—invoking a sense of grace through stories of violence. Her two novels and many short stories contain characters blinded by their own selfishness, greed and hatred. There is supposed to be a kind of path not chosen in O’Connor that points toward grace.

I have read many of O’Connor’s stories and her novels with this in mind. But personally, I just don’t experience it. I find O’Connor’s characters’ evil deeds so sticky and unflinchingly proximate that I never get to see another path or a bigger world. I leave the reading feeling closed in on and the wider world cut off. There doesn’t seem to be any cosmos, just dark, eccentric human foibles on colorful display like wax models in a museum. The trouble being that no matter how lifelike the museum pieces, their backdrops are only a hasty two dimensional painting under dim lighting.

O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood (1952) in particular felt this way. Hazel Motes, an ex-army man, starts to preach the Church of Christ without Christ. The philosophical premise is promising but the delivery is a string of nasty interactions that left me feeling sad and existentially disappointed. Displaced even.

Again, McCarthy’s characters are not better people, they don’t come around. But somehow when I read McCarthy, a dull melancholy throb transfigures into grace, not disappointment.

So the Catholic writer (O’Connor) feels more like a nihilist than whatever McCarthy might be called in his raw portrayals of human evil and the yawning void of an apathetic cosmos. Personally, over and over as I have read and reread McCarthy, I was surprised by grace. Thank you, rest in peace.