SOURCE: Burbidge, John W. “Religion in Morley Callaghan's Such Is My Beloved.” Journal of Canadian Studies 27, no. 3 (fall 1992): 105-14.

[In the following essay, Burbidge elucidates Callaghan's treatment of religion in Such Is My Beloved, viewing the novel as a commentary on the “Song of Songs.”]

In his seminal work, The Meaning and End of Religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith challenged a common assumption, one which holds that religion is an entity that can be isolated, defined and studied like other topics of scholarly inquiry. Only in periods when pluralism reigns do people talk about religions in the plural, and distinguish them by such names as Buddhism, Protestantism and Judaism. Naming implies that there is something referred to by those names, and scholars struggle to define what that something is.¹

Over most of its history, however, the word “religion” referred not to a thing but to a stance, a characteristic of human beings. It described the relation humans have with transcendent reality. So Smith advocates a new terminology for those who want to study religion. In the first place, there is the “faith” of individuals; that is, their encounter with transcendence. Secondly, there is the “cumulative tradition” that develops as faith finds expression in such things as architecture, child-rearing, shared worship and political organizations. The cumulative tradition provides the context in which faith emerges and is itself moulded by the ways faith becomes incarnate in public life.²

The study of cumulative tradition is fairly straightforward. One has the public artifacts, and one can trace the way those have altered and affected human behaviour. Thus, for example, Smith can talk about how the story of Siddartha Gautama migrated from its native India by way of muslim Persia into the Christian West, where the Bodhisattva became St. Joshophat.³

It is not so easy to identify faith, for the encounter with transcendence is perhaps the most profoundly personal of all human encounters. The full dynamic of that interaction is often so subtle and so delicate that the person of faith is loath to talk about it. Some will not appreciate its intricate shading and will quickly categorize it with bastard explanations or phony caricatures that demean and betray the sacred. The move from faith to its expression is thus not direct; typically, it avoids the straightforward way we articulate our intellectual insights or make our emotions public. It is deliberately indirect. A public medium is chosen that will both veil and reveal the faith to be expressed, so that the ordinary person will notice only the surface, while the more perceptive will respond to intimations of eternity.

The discontinuity between faith and its expression poses problems for the student of religion in human life. He or she has only public artifacts at hand—the lives of children nurtured at a believing mother's knee, the worn steps that lead to a shrine, a fragment of poetry, a charitable organization. The significance of those artifacts has been moulded as much by the reception they have had at the hands of others as by the faith that initiated and inspired them. How, then, can a student of religion discern the faith that has found such expression?

The interpreter comes with an individual sense of what is ultimate and significant. He or she is part of the public that is prone to misread the subtleties of faith. The individual must learn how to take public artifacts as imperfect indicators of a faith that nonetheless remains hidden. In doing so, the individual has to be as sensitive to what is not expressed as to what is revealed.

That, however, only increases the dilemma, for there are no hard and fast rules to ensure success. Hence, the creativity that searches for an adequate public expression of faith on the part of the believer needs to be matched on the part of the interpreter by a sensitivity to connections and distinctions never before noticed. But too much sensitivity can create a fantasy-world of unreality, reading into an expression of faith dimensions of meaning that are simply figments of the interpreter's imagination; conversely, too little sensitivity can categorize the profound in terms of the trite preoccupations of ordinary life.

There is no easy solution to this dilemma. If anything, the student must start by recognizing that it will always bedevil the path, that one must always navigate between the Scylla of over-interpretation and the Charybdis of banality. Nonetheless, the challenge must be faced. To talk about religion as cumulative tradition while ignoring the moment of personal faith is to distort both faith and the phenomena of religion itself.

When one considers the role religion has played in Canadian life, the expressions of faith are many and diverse: the educational institutions of Quebec before 1960; the delicate harmonies of a Healey Willan motet; the astounding victory of Social Credit in Alberta in 1935; a Hutterite colony in Saskatchewan; the self-confidence of the Dene people before the Berger Commission on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline; the persistence of the Jehovah's Witnesses in establishing the rights of assembly, press and religion; the impact of Henry Alline on post-revolutionary Nova Scotian society; the symbolism of William Kurelek's art. In one sense it may seem arbitrary to select Morley Callaghan's Such Is My Beloved to illustrate how one might draw out the faith that inspired it. It can be argued, however, that the novel encapsulates not only Catholic but Canadian religion generally.⁴

The novel was written in 1933, only four years after Callaghan's famous summer in Paris. Many years later, Callaghan recalled the end of that summer:

“It's a kind of other worldliness,” I said, laughing, yet meaning it. And indeed it was my conviction now that for most men there had to be some kind of another more satisfactory world. (The primrose had to be anything but a primrose.) The saints, tormented by the anguish of the flesh, wanted to reject the human condition, the world they lived in. But whether saints or café friends there in Paris, weren't they all involved in a flight from the pain of life—a pain they would feel more acutely at home? It struck me then too that the French literature we had so much admired from Mallarmé to the surrealists was simply a rejection of this world and the stuff of daily life. The French writers stayed at home and exiled themselves in their own dreams. Then what would my own fantasy be? Loretto asked, lightheartedly. And rather grandly, to mask my doubt and wonder, I said I might have to forge my own vision in secret spiritual isolation in my native city. Joyce in exile has gone deeply, too deeply, into himself. But what if he had stayed in Dublin?⁵

Callaghan's grand statement—“I might have to forge my own vision in secret spiritual isolation in my native city”—masks his doubt and wonder. Out of the spiritual isolation he experienced, what vision emerged? Such Is My Beloved gives us a clue. “I always had a happy feeling about that book—that it was right—because I wrote it so quickly, so moved was I by the story.”⁶

It is a simple story of a priest who befriends two prostitutes. Yet its simplicity is belying. It signifies more than appears on the surface. At the basic level there is the outline of a priest's life, with his mind wandering during confession, conversing with parishioners at the church door, chiding fellow priests in the rectory, visiting the sick and the dying, playing cards with the leisured elite, on occasion escaping to a non-Catholic friend who espouses Marxian sociological theories. Because Callaghan does not wax eloquent about primroses, these activities are presented in matter-of-fact language, leading the unwary to suspect that he is caricaturing the church: showing that it is not all that it is cracked up to be and that its teaching on birth-control, for example, leads to the Canzanos' misery.

What is the import that lies under this surface? Both Marx and Freud, who offer sophisticated ways of reading a text for its hidden meanings, leave traces within the pages of the novel. Callaghan himself weaves in explicit references to Marxism and class consciousness, not only by introducing Charlie Stewart, but also by including the specific content of Father Dowling's sermons “on the inevitable separation between Christianity and the bourgeois world” (3). Toronto in the 1930s was in the midst of the Depression, and the contrast between the threadbare prostitutes, Midge and Ronnie, and the affluent Robisons suggests that the poverty of the working class is the immediate cause of the girls' prostitution. If the Marxists of Callaghan's generation identified ultimate reality primarily with the economics of class conflict, Freudians found it in basic sexual drives. It is tempting from this viewpoint to see Father Dowling not only as a socialist sympathizer but also as a repressed celibate, whose natural desire for sexual gratification drives him to initiate and maintain contact with the prostitutes, so that he can have a salacious second-hand delight in their nightly activity.⁷

While Marx and Freud articulated convincing versions of ultimate reality to many who were searching in the early 1930s for “another more satisfactory world” (and it is clear from Callaghan's text that he was well aware of such ideas and their appeal), a careful reading of the novel makes us aware that Callaghan plays down such deliberately systematic ideological interpretations. In his conversation with the priest, Charlie argued that the girls' occupation posed an economic, not a religious problem. In reply, Dowling admits that Charlie is right “in a way”; it is a point of view. But when he leaves his friend and enters the deserted church he prays a “most silent prayer” that “was more intense than any he had ever made.” The sacrifice the girls made of their souls every day was interwoven with his meditation on the mystery of Mary's virginity (128). Callaghan does not allow Charlie's Marxist point of view to have the last word.

Nor does Callaghan open even a crack that would admit a Freudian reading. When Annie, one of the prostitutes' friends, flaunts her dark breast at the priest it triggers “a man's passion … But then his forehead began to perspire, his whole body relaxed and he trembled and felt ashamed.” A relaxed release from temptation runs counter to the Freudian myth of repressed desire. On another occasion, a night-time ejaculation leaves him feeling wretched, yet he realizes that to stay away from the girls for such a reason “would be an act of weakness and lack of faith” (49). The way Callaghan introduces the temptations of sexual desire, makes it clear that the motivations inspiring Father Dowling are not those of libidinal love. That is not the reality signified by the story, nor is it the faith that seeks expression.

When we look more closely at the novel, we find evidence that Callaghan wants to explore the influence of a quite distinctive kind of reality. Indications are found in the occasional references to emotions, looks and thoughts that are unfamiliar and unknown. The first time Father Dowling visited Midge and Ronnie in their hotel room, they noticed “somehow an expression of love in his eyes they had never seen before” (12). In turn, when he stroked Midge's hair, “in him was a joy he had never known before.” He felt “a curious new love that gave him a strange contentment” (13). Even James Robison found a surprising eagerness and love in the priest's face, so much so that he grew curious because the eagerness did not seem like any emotion he had ever felt (84).

The imponderable or unfamiliar emerges as well when the Bishop prepares for his confession. “He couldn't help feeling that he, judging the priest, might not have been without some kind of sin in the matter. … A feeling stronger than his reason was urging him that his doubt and perplexity [were] a matter for his spiritual adviser” (134-5). For all that the Bishop's reason seeks to justify his action, his thoughts move on in an uncontrolled manner, betraying the fact that something more ultimate is involved. Indeed, Callaghan is suggesting that there is some unknown and unfamiliar agency at work—neither Marx's economic forces nor Freud's libidinal unconscious—but a love that was like nothing else in the world, which many waters cannot quench, nor floods drown.⁸ This becomes fully explicit in Chapter 5.

The day after the priest's second visit to the prostitutes (from information in the novel, it was probably the day after the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin⁹), he goes into the darkened church to meditate before the Blessed Sacrament on love: “on human love, divine love, and the love of man for God.” In the previous two chapters, Callaghan presented a detailed description of the girls working the streets. At that moment in the church, Dowling feels that his love was growing “so that he might try and love them in his way as God must love everybody in the world” (37). That he is successful is clarified towards the end of the story, after the police have raided the prostitutes' hotel. Fresh from his encounter with Mrs. Canzano, whose twelfth child has brought her husband to despair, his horizon expands. “Then he began to feel that his love for Midge and Ronnie made much more comprehensive his sympathy for all the wretched people he had ever known” (124).

There are several features of Dowling's love for the girls that are distinctive, that challenge any analogy with our more conventional experiences. His love stands helpless before the free will of the beloved: “It was this helplessness, so much deeper than his anger, that he could not understand, and bit by bit this helplessness possessed him till soon his anger was completely submerged” (18). To the practical people of the world, Dowling's love has the innocence of a child (41). It is hesitant to judge: “If he properly understood the lives of these girls, he thought, he might realize that they were not free but strongly fettered and he would not be so sure of judging them” (23). It is patient and long-suffering: “‘Was I to become impatient or weary,’ Dowling asked his bishop, ‘or abandon them, out of disappointment?’” Love for the loveless provides no material aid, but means “helping them with my presence” (130). In characterizing Dowling's complex feelings, Callaghan has probed deeply into the nature of divine love.

Unlike class conflict and libidinal drives, the alternative secularized candidates in Callaghan's vision for the position of ultimate reality—that which grounds and explains all human behaviour—divine love does not subvert human initiatives. Thus, its activity is always ambivalent. There is a constant dialogue between the human and the divine. We have already noted how lust rises, only to disappear in release and relaxation, and how anger is submerged by a divine helplessness. With the bishop the struggle is left unresolved, although his final decision on Dowling's fate indicates that the bothered conscience has been anaesthetized. On a larger canvas, the same struggle emerges between Mrs. Robison's outraged concern for respectability together with the bishop's fears about the charity campaign on the one hand, and the priest's helpless, self-abandoning love on the other. This conflict comes to a head in Dowling's thoughts as he leaves the bishop's palace. Obedience was necessary, he recognized, yet “he knew that in his thoughts he could not obey the Bishop” (133).

That unresolved tension culminates in Dowling's final insanity. Divine love cannot block the determined actions of the Robisons, the courts and the bishop. Confronted by their intransigence Dowling goes mad, refusing to give up despite all that militates against him. He is left with incompatibles—obedience to the bishop, and love for the girls—both of which are to him inescapable. Abandoning himself completely to divine love, he remains subject to the human decisions of his church. This paradox is both his downfall and his salvation.

There are, of course, more obvious evocations of the Christian tradition. Sandwiches in a white napkin and wine poured with “a special graciousness” (109) mark the first—and last—time the priest eats with Ronnie and Midge. During Easter Mass, it is the bodies of Midge and Ronnie that are sacrificed. For them “it was still the hard dark time of the Good Friday passion” (137). Such subtle touches only serve to confirm this reading: the reality signified by this story is divine love as celebrated and experienced in Callaghan's particular Catholicism.

The erotic poetry of the “Song of Songs” has been read time and again by poets and theologians as a type of that divine-human relation. It is no accident, then, that the title and epigraph of the novel are taken from its pages. Father Dowling himself recognizes the connection between his love for the girls and the sacred text. As he read the “Song of Songs,” it seemed “that he understood some of the secret rich feeling of this love song, sung so marvellously that it transcended human love and became divine.” Later, as he prepared his final sermon, it seemed “that he understood this love song as it had never been understood before, that each verse had a special, fresh new meaning for him.” It is as if the commentary that Dowling intended to complete on the novel's last page has been transubstantiated into the novel that Callaghan wrote.

Any commentary is itself a work of interpretation. Its task is to unfold the meaning inherent in a text. Over the ages, students of the Bible have recognized that the written words are to be taken not only literally but also as signs of spiritual truth—signs that hide as much as they reveal. To capture this, the fathers of the church developed a four-fold interpretative schema. On one level a passage can be taken in its historical sense; the story represents something that actually took place. But since the text is inspired, each part has in addition a three-fold spiritual sense. It can be read allegorically, with its meaning transferred to a different subject; it can be read tropologically, to identify the moral injunctions inherent in the text; and it can be read anagogically, so that profound spiritual depths are unveiled.

In our attempt to discern the particular faith finding expression in Callaghan's novel, we would be delinquent if we did not explore how the four-fold schema of textual interpretation throws light on his intention. This approach is especially appropriate in that Callaghan is not averse to self-reflexively embodying in the structure of the novel what the novel itself discusses.¹⁰

At the historical level of interpretation, there are episodes in Such Is My Beloved that seem to transcribe verses from the “Song of Songs.” For example, we hear echoes of verse 2:8:

The voice of my beloved!
                    Behold he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
                    bounding over the hills(11)

as we read the following:

When he was dressed and out on the street, he felt a peculiar exhilaration and joy in life and his work in the parish. … It seemed to him now, going along the street with a long swinging stride and his hands in his pockets, that his prayers for these girls would never be unheeded. He smiled very happily to himself.

(17)

To show that this parallelism is not unique, I offer two further prose renderings of the “Song of Songs”:

He brought me to the banqueting house,
                    and his banner over me was love

(“Song of Songs” 2:4)

Compared to:

And they used the coffee cups for the wine, too, and he poured the wine for them with a special graciousness, as if he were a host at a banquet.

(109)

And:

Upon my bed by night
          I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
                    I called him, but he gave no answer.
‘I will rise now and go about the city,
                    in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves.’
                    I sought him, but found him not.

(“Song of Songs” 3:1-2)

Compared to:

He went up to his own room. He took off his shoes and put them together on the floor and stared at them thoughtfully. “I'll go to the city hall tomorrow. I'll find out something.” He got undressed and lay wide awake in bed. “They needed me very much. Who will help them now? What is there for them to do?” he was thinking.

(119)

Beyond such parallelisms, Callaghan's novel as a whole can also be taken as a spiritual commentary. It suggests allegorical, tropological and anagogic readings of the “Song of Songs.” First, the allegorical level. From earliest times, the church, relying on Ephesians 5:26, has read the “Song of Songs” as an allegory for the relation between Christ and his church. So the beloved of Callaghan's title refers not only to the girls who are the objects of Dowling's love, it refers just as much to the church, embodied in the worldly wisdom of Father Anglin and the rational calculations of the Bishop, but containing as well the incarnate innocence of Father Dowling. This is the kind of institution the church, as God's beloved, really is. Callaghan extends the allegory so that Father Dowling, inspired by feelings he cannot understand, loves Midge and Ronnie, and through them loves all the wretched people he had ever known or imagined. In his concern and compassion he signifies God himself. The story opens up new perspectives on the way in which divine love, while helpless before human freedom, nevertheless remains constant. Here is a “vision of another more satisfactory world” located in the “secret spiritual isolation” of Callaghan's native city. At the same time, the girls, responding tentatively to the priest's initiative even as they continue with their normal lives, not only signify the world that is loved by God, but also the church, which continues to live by human values despite the grace offered in the sacraments. As an allegory, Such Is My Beloved represents the relation between Christ and his church, offering to faith a new understanding of divine love.

The novel also calls for a tropological reading, one that makes a moral demand on the reader. Such a reading emerges from the ambiguity of the church's role. On the one hand it is to be the human bride of Christ; on the other, the incarnate agent of God's love. Formally, the church is embodied in the authority of the bishop, which is transferred to the parish priest. It is buttressed by the conventional respectability of well-placed laymen and women. Such Is My Beloved plots ways in which that institutional structure can become so concerned with status and public esteem that it represses the stirrings of divine conscience within the heart. Yet the same church ordained Dowling as a priest and empowered him with sacramental authority. In its sanctuary he renews his faith and love as he meditates on the blessed sacrament or on the mystery of Mary's virginity. The sacraments he administers—penance, extreme unction and the eucharist—communicate grace, even when, as in the prostitutes' room that last evening, they do not follow the prescribed ritual. The discrepancy between the innocent love of Dowling, and the self-conscious deliberations of those entrusted with institutional responsibility, focuses the moral challenge for the reader and uncovers a moral command inherent in the “Song of Songs.” In the real world, love does not flow as many waters; it is utterly contemned.¹²Such Is My Beloved exposes this ambiguity. Yet divine love, powerless and apparently ineffective, is the kind of love to which the church and the committed Christian should always aspire.

While the allegorical reading focuses on faith, and the tropological on love, the anagogic or mystical reading nurtures hope. Traditionally, the “Song of Songs” offers a foretaste of the heavenly wedding banquet when the faithful will be overwhelmed by divine love. It is difficult to persist in such a hope when the reader reaches the end of Callaghan's novel. For Dowling, caught between his vow of obedience to the Bishop and the fountain of love that wells up from unknown springs, disappears into insanity, a state that he offers up as a sacrifice to God. The girls have not been saved. We are not told whether, in their new, more desperate life, they will experience any consolation from the memory of the priest's affection and innocence. There appears to be little hope at the end. Yet, even with such a conclusion Callaghan provides an anagogic interpretation of the “Song of Songs.” For, while the allegorical reading brings out similarities between human and divine love, there are also profound differences—discontinuities that run counter to all human expectations and to all reasonable judgment. These discontinuities, which in their extreme form find expression in insanity, are the points of revelation of divine mystery. Such discontinuities emerge early in the novel: in the discrepancy between the carnal expectations of the young prostitutes and the simple concern of the priest; in the gap between the economic analyses of Dowling's constructed sermons and the direct inspiration of his encounters with the girls; and in the personal insight he gains into their prostitution as he meditates on Mary's virginity. An anagogic reading of the novel, which is driven by the contradictions of ordinary discourse to an awareness of that which transcends all human capacity, finds several intimations of the divine mystery, and suggests as well a mystical understanding of the “Song of Songs.”

The evidence presented suggests that Morley Callaghan was deliberately writing a commentary on the “Song of Songs,” using the traditional modes of figurative interpretation. All such modes are indirect. When, therefore, one reads his novel as an expression of faith and attempts to discern the faith being expressed, one finds oneself led into echoing halls that recede into infinity, as each sign signifies what is in turn a sign. In the end, a definitive statement of Callaghan's faith cannot be set down in clear prose. The unnamed is both hidden and unveiled in the pages of the novel. Moreover, in other novels,¹³ he explores other dimensions of life—profane as well as sacred—and the interpreter is hard pressed to identify where, in any particular narrative, he stands (if indeed he ever stood anywhere). Moreover, faith itself is not a static entity, and is subtly transformed with the passing of time. But, read through the lenses of the four traditional modes of interpretation, Such Is My Beloved provides a glimpse into one moment in Callaghan's spiritual pilgrimage. In 1929 he had returned to Toronto from Paris to feel the pain of life more acutely, and to forge his own vision. “Joyce in exile had gone deeply, too deeply, into himself. But what if he had stayed in Dublin?” Such Is My Beloved tells us that Callaghan, in the years immediately after he had returned to his Dublin, went deeply, not into himself, but into a reality that we can, however hesitantly, identify as the transcendent, which faith encounters. This intimate connection between living in Toronto and writing a story about the mystery of divine love makes this novel a significant expression of religion in Canada.

Notes

1. W. C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1962), particularly Chapter 5.

2. Ibid., Chapters 6 and 7.

3. See W. C. Smith, Towards a World Theology (London: Macmillan, 1981), 7-9.

4. M. Callaghan, Such Is My Beloved (New Canadian Library) (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1960).

5. M. Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (New York: Dell, 1964), 228-29.

6. M. Callaghan, letter to J. W. Burbidge, dated December 13, 1989.

7. So that it becomes a variation on the theme of Somerset Maugham's short story, “Rain.”

8. These phrases of the epigraph for the novel on page 2 echo “Song of Songs” 8:7.

9. On p. 16, Callaghan says that the second visit was on the evening of the first Thursday in February; Chapters 3 and 4 describe Midge's and Ronnie's activities on “the next night” (25). Since Chapter 5 opens with “That first Friday in February” (36), it describes what Dowling was doing at the very time that Midge and Ronnie were plying their trade. In 1933 (note the date in Callaghan's dedication) the first Thursday in February was the 2nd.

10. He does this most noticeably in A Fine and Private Place, where one character in the novel is evidently himself as author.

11. Biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of 1952.

12. Once again, we are evoking Callaghan's epigraph.

13. Such as More Joy in Heaven, A Passion in Rome, and A Time for Judas.

Thanks to my colleague, Michèle Lacombe, who not only encouraged this venture into literary analysis, but saved me from some of the pitfalls into which the unwary inevitably fall.