The other night I watched one of the Miss Marple programmes with Joan Hickson as Agatha Christie's old lady detective. The programme was made in the late 1980s and it occured to me while watching that here was someone who was good in a very pure and clean way, a natural honest and unselfconscious way, and that this simply would not be possible nowadays. Miss Marple is a saintly kind of person. She really is. God and religion are not mentioned in the films but an awareness of them is everywhere in her character and her attitude to life. She acts and thinks in perfect knowledge of the reality of the divine and this is so absorbed in her heart that it informs her behaviour all the way from thought to emotion to action. She is not a Pharisee obeying the law because it is the law. She has moved beyond law to love. But note that her goodness does not sentimentalise her. She is unbending in her concern for truth which is what makes her such an excellent sleuth.
You might think this is a bit over the top but Joan Hickson's portrayal of Miss Marple shows a person who is good because she has identified herself with the source of goodness and that self is sufficiently softened so that it can receive the imprint of goodness as wax does a seal. She has become permeated by goodness because of her receptivity to it. This is all we can do. Goodness is not ours. It is God's. Our task is to soften the self, the heart, so that it can receive and hold the image of God within itself. Miss Marple demonstrates someone with the stamp of God on her heart.
I say this is not possible now. I mean it is very unlikely. It's always possible but the point is where do we take our idea of goodness from? Increasingly, it is not the idea of God, our Creator, the source of love and truth. It is state-sanctioned ideology. We cannot be transformed by this as we can be by opening ourselves up to the higher reality of God. We can only conform to it or obey it. Therefore, there is no real goodness. There is only the imitation and display of it. As I've said so often on this blog, true goodness can only be found in God. Miss Marple knows this even if she doesn't make a fuss about it.
7 comments:
Just a side note: when the Catholic Church committed public suicide in 1970 by the vicious repression of its former, immemorial Latin Mass, England was to some extent spared the brutality of the campaign for complete extinction of the traditional rite due to what became known as the "Agatha Christie Indult." She was among some notable signatories to a petition submitted to Pope Paul VI that asked that the Latin Mass be allowed to continue in England where it was wanted. Paul VI was an avid reader of Agatha Christie and, so the anecdote goes, when he saw her name his face changed and he spoke her name. The indult was granted. Christie was not Catholic, but like Miss Marple, she had a sense of truth and beauty and knew that something good would be lost from the world were the Latin Mass to be banned.
That's interesting. Thanks for pointing it out, edwin. Both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, especially when played to perfection by David Suchet who was born Jewish but converted to Christianity, are intensely moral people with a strong sense of good and evil. Agatha Christie must have had that herself.
I recall the story of "Agatha Christie Indult" too. It was remarkable, but the story also says something about Pope Paul VI that he paid more attention to the name of a (wonderful) fiction writer than he did to the concerns and objections of his clergy.
It seems crazy to me how everyone can regard state-enforced goodness as good - yet our society sees this as the way forward as people cannot be trusted to be good, and the state is sure it knows what is best for us.
Prof Charlton recently blogged about agency - although I am still attempting to distinguish my understanding of agency from liberty - and it seems to me that agency must be essential for goodness.
Real goodness must be rooted in something beyond this world and to be good ourselves we have to open ourselves to that, almost be possessed by it. But we allow this possession in the knowledge that it is what gives us true spiritual life.
Yes, it's not easy to distinguish between agency and liberty. Perhaps liberty is the opportunity and agency is the active engagement with that opportunity.
What a good illustration of a timeless truth that Goodness must be rooted in the transcendent. Because the left denies the transcendent, we see false goodness--the "goodness" of bureaucratic rule-following--promoted everywhere instead. Interesting that even simple goodness--a father-led household with many children--promotes howls of anger from leftists (note that advertising has radically changed to satiate leftist sympathies here). I used to get angry at such outbursts, but now I feel sad for people who cut themselves off from God (just look at the mugshots of recent antifa in Portland). Such anger and destruction ultimately springs from nihilism. There's no materialistic fix to fill the God-shaped hole.
You've put your finger on the root of the problem. Lack of a sense of transcendence which must lead to nihilism even if that isn't acknowledged.
Just a note: David Suchet was not technically born Jewish; all of his grandparents were Jewish except the one that counts -- his mother's mother.
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