Summary
First published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952
Genre(s): Novel
Subgenre(s): Biblical fiction; Catholic fiction; historical fiction (first century)
Core issue(s): Friendship; Holy Spirit; Jesus Christ; sacrifice
Principal characters
Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent, wealthy Jew who is one of the chief backers of the early Christians
Peter, the leading apostle of Christ, leader of the early Church
Luke, a physician, an apostle of Christ and author of the third Gospel
Basil, a Greek slave and craftsperson from a formerly aristocratic background
Deborra, Joseph of Arimathea’s granddaughter and Basil’s wife
Simon Magus, a magician who seeks to employ Christianity for his own showy ends
Nero, a Roman emperor who persecutes the Christians
Helena, Basil’s first love
Overview
Thomas B. Costain, a Canadian who spent his adult life in the United States, was a late bloomer as far as literature was concerned. While pursuing a successful publishing career that ultimately led to him to become a senior editor at the New York firm of Doubleday, Costain began, in his fifties, to write historical novels. Featuring copious background and strong, humanistic characterization, Costain’s style as well as his outlook is roughly similar to that of his friend and fellow Canadian historical novelist, Nova Scotian Thomas H. Raddall. Unlike Raddall, however, Costain focused most of his attention on the medieval period. In The Silver Chalice, he went back further and wrote of the period immediately after the Gospels. The Silver Chalice was the best-selling book in 1953 and was made into a movie in 1954, starring Paul Newman in his first leading role.
The Silver Chalice begins in Judea. Basil, a young Greek slave, is asked to craft a silver chalice to hold the cup used by Jesus and his followers at the Last Supper. Basil is the son of Ignatius of Antioch, a man of stature in his community. However, he had been tricked out of his inheritance and sold into slavery. Apprenticing himself to a silversmith, he has made the best out of his situation and learned the skills of sculpture and engraving. Basil is a skilled sculptor and soon creates a beautiful silver chalice to hold the cup.
Basil becomes educated in the beliefs of the early Christians as well as in the Jewish lore that lies behind these beliefs. Luke, one of the most stalwart of Jesus’ apostles, instructs Basil in the wide disparity between the ideals Jesus exemplifies and the realities of life. Luke teaches that the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, seeks to propagate the message of Christ amid the sordid ways of the world. Luke suggests that the beauty of the cup amid the degradation of the world is a figure for the peril Christians must successfully face to be untainted by the stain of sin. Furthering his involvement with Christianity, Basil falls in love with Deborra, the imaginative and resourceful granddaughter of Joseph of Arimathea, the wealthy Jew who had arranged for Jesus’s burial, whom he marries even as her grandfather dies. He encounters a wide range of characters, from role models such as the leading Christian apostle Peter to the irresponsible magician Simon Magus, who perverts Christianity into mere self-display and entertainment, and Mijamin, the unscrupulous Bedouin bandit who is always looking for an opportunity for himself. Basil becomes a wealthy man and owns property, including slaves.
Made unhappy by Peter’s spurning of him and his views, Simon Magus presents himself to Rome’s decadent and malevolently self-centered emperor, Nero. The magician tries to carve out a third position between Christianity and paganism, claiming that he...
(This entire section contains 1408 words.)
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is Jesus’ true successor as magician and wonder worker. Helena is an assistant to Simon Magus who insinuates herself into Basil’s life. Though tempted by Helena’s beauty and even more by the love potions she has clandestinely given him, Basil forswears this invitation to infidelity, politely dismisses Helena, and dedicates himself to a lifetime of companionship with Deborra.
In a vainglorious effort to show his magical powers, Simon Magus jumps from a tower, thinking he will be able to fly, but instead plummets to his death. Nero, pleased by Simon’s failure, seeks to make the Christians scapegoats for his death. However, many of the leading Christians manage to escape and hide themselves. Nero also searches for the chalice; however, the Christian elders have craftily hidden it.
The chalice has been hidden in a humble kitchen, covered with sugar, and ignored by the Roman search parties because of its unlikely place of sequestering. While celebrating this victory, Basil remembers his own years as a slave and, in a flush of generosity, frees all his slaves. At this moment, though, the chalice is stolen by a bunch of thieves, most likely led by Mijamin. Basil and Deborra, chastened by the loss of the chalice and now impoverished by Basil’s dispensing of his slaves, nonetheless vow to lead a Christian life together in the future. The book ends with the predication of an apocalyptic return of the chalice in contemporary times.
Christian Themes
In many ways, The Silver Chalice is a retelling of basic themes in the Christian story in an entertaining and inspirational mode, which appealed to many people in the 1950’s. However, Costain’s narrative has certain particular preoccupations that distinguish it from similar historical novels that seek to retell the narratives contained in the canonical Gospels and the book of Acts. One difference lies in the idea of the chalice itself, and its importance as a symbolic motif of Christian truth.
The pleasing shape of the cup exemplifies the role of aesthetic beauty in Christianity. The stress on the role of the chalice in preserving the Christian legacy and its association with artistic creativity has thematic similarities to Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, though Costain’s materials and his perspectives are vastly more orthodox.
Women play a considerable role in The Silver Chalice. Deborra is a strong female character who is not just the meek ancillary to her husband, Basil, or the male elders of her community. Many of the readers who made The Silver Chalice such a financial success in the early 1950’s were women, and the novel presents enough of an inclusive depiction of early Christian life to avoid becoming confined to a male-oriented action-adventure genre.
Whereas a previous North American novel of Christian beginnings, Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe (1942), depicted the Roman Empire as a potential vehicle, if reformed, of Christian ideals, Costain paints a negative portrait of not only the hedonist Emperor Nero but also his adviser Petronius, who in history was the author of the acclaimed Satyricon (c. 60 c.e.; The Satyricon, 1694) as well as someone who died at the hand of Nero’s persecution. There is no room for virtuous Romans in Costain’s vision. Jews, however, are treated with respect and understanding, and the Jewish contribution to Christianity is given full recognition. This element of The Silver Chalice is cognate with the emergence in the 1950’s of “the Judeo-Christian tradition” as a concept of Western civilization, particularly its spiritual components, that assimilated Jews and Roman Catholics in the United States could embrace as readily as the more established Protestant communities.
The anti-Roman viewpoint of the novel bears another message: a determination not to succumb to the things of this world, not to capitulate to Mammon. The disappearance of the chalice at the end is mandated by the fact that readers know there is no extant silver chalice. However, Costain uses the disappearance as a reminder that, for a Christian, it might be better, at least in the short term, to do without material possessions and rely on one’s own emotional resources and moral values.
Sources for Further Study
- Frederick, John T. “Costain and Company: The Historical Novel Today.” College English, 15 (April, 1954): 373-379. Still the only extant scholarly article on Costain; puts him in the context of the American and European historical novel as a genre.
- Fuller, Edmund. “Which Held the Blood.” Review of The Silver Chalice. Saturday Review 35 (August 2, 1952): 18. The most thorough of the contemporary reviews of the best-selling book.
- Noonan, Peggy. Introduction to The Silver Chalice. Reprint. New York: Loyola Classics, 2006. Enthusiastic overview of the work by the well-known conservative and Roman Catholic commentator.
- Nuzzo, Lucia J. “Thomas B. Costain.” In American Novelists, 1910-1945, edited by James J. Martine. Columbia, Mo.: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1981. Basic facts about the life and work of Costain.
