Wisdom Has Built Her House
The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
& Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth
Why would one dare to exalt the cross?
It has always been a particular gripe of Christianity’s detractors that the celebration of death that seems to lie at its center is not only morbid, but inhuman. That millions around the world take the time to reverence one of the cruelest devices of torture ever conceived boggles the critic’s mind and leaves a bad taste in the back of his mouth.
So, why do it?
Obviously, to put things in these terms is to oversimplify the situation—we do not venerate death so much as He Who Defeated Death and the means of his victory. But to simplify the matter even to this is an impoverishment. Saint Paul himself did not hesitate to confirm that something challenging lies at the heart of Christian faith, something mysterious and paradoxical: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ”[1]
How can death claim a role as the Power of God?
I considered this proposition quite closely as I worked through one of the books on my “You Have to Read…” List: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.
The tragedy of Lily Bart is well-recognized as a slicing-sharp criticism of New York society at the turn of the twentieth century, offered by one of its own. Wharton, born and raised among the New York elite, had much to say about the idle excesses of the new American rich because she had experienced no end of them herself. In the downfall of her beautiful but (upsettingly) impoverished heroine, she catalogued the ruthless indifference of a culture built not on the dignity of the human being, but on a relentless indulgence of an unchecked instinct for status.
But is that all that is happening in The House of Mirth?
It is hard not to think that the true soul of the novel is less the stinging critique, and more the cry of a soul starved for depth within it. For all the glitz of the New York scene, the glimmers of real delight are those we see off the bow of Lily’s truest conversations, when we see the emergence of a yearning in this ornamental socialite for something true. The closer she gets to realizing an answer to that yearning—no matter what other horror surrounds her—the closer the reader comes to closure and a sense of tangible achievement. What bubbles underneath all the social bloodletting is a quest not for status, but for wisdom, and the cost for Lily Bart is as dear as it was for Socrates. For the ancient Greek philosopher of Plato’s Dialogues, the quest for wisdom is met in this violent world by the crushing of the seeker, and the wiser the seeker, the more likely he or she will be forced into a situation in which the drinking of hemlock seems the only honest way out.
Then, Lily Bart is hardly a Socrates. Her quest is ill-defined and infinitely smaller in scale: a simple but desperate hope of eking out the barest sliver of reality in amongst all the baubled illusion. If Socrates faced his death with the sovereign nobility of a Man in the Right, Lily must be said to have limped her way backwards into the open maw of hers. To some, the comparison of her to the Wise Man is laughable, since—to put it gently—her innocence regarding the cruel intentions of others and the frank difficulties of real life is almost comical. She appears indubitably stupid to the socially astute, and irreparably naïve to the sympathetic: guilelessness is not a virtue in a snake pit.
No, Lily Bart is not a hero in the grand scheme. Even her ‘noble end’ comes to her unwittingly.
And yet, if she is not the strongest character in the novel—that honor must go to the steel virtues of young Gerty Farish—she is, at least, the most enlightened of her ‘set’ by the time the final page arrives. In the savagely melancholic scene of her last visit to Lawrence Selden, who is the one who feigns to rise above the crass values of the pack, it is not Lily who learns the most. While her self-awareness and authenticity find their full blossoming in this moment, the revelation is not primarily for herself, and it is not until the next morning, when it is far too late, that Selden understands what he has been taught.
Lily’s fall from status is bare, pitiless, and relentlessly humiliating: she stumbles from step to lower step until things the reader thought unconscionable on page one seem like Divine Intervention by page fifty. One almost wishes Lily would just debase herself to save the trauma of having to read yet another fumbling failure.
In short, it is excruciating. Which is exactly the point.
“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth” reads the King James Version of Ecclesiastes (or Qoheleth in most Catholic translations), and in it we find the source of the novel’s title. The wisdom quest is plain in it, as well as the salient fact that wisdom and mourning seem to go hand in hand. Nothing brings clarity to the world like the loss of all that obscures it. That Wharton chose this biblical text to set the quest for wisdom off against the leap into folly she saw in her lush surroundings, suggests that the influence of Christianity on her world was still virile—despite a sad dismissal of cultural Christianity in the early setting of the novel. Indeed, as she drew near to her deathbed, many believed that Wharton might become a Catholic, and her attendance at Mass, support for Catholic charities, and genuine esteem for the Church in her late correspondence, seem to support this belief, despite the fact that Wharton died before she could make the leap.
As such, I would argue that the redemption arc at the center of The House of Mirth is, at least, grace-haunted if not a conscious nod at a Christian (and certainly a biblical) understanding of the Source of that redemption. What, for philosophical antiquity, was the wise man’s agony for the attainment of true wisdom, is, for the Christian, God’s mysterious Will for our Salvation in the Cross. The former finds its origin in the wise man’s virtues, the latter in the gratuitous Love of God revealed in the obedience of Jesus Christ—the One who gave absolutely everything in love of the Father. For Lily, the price of wisdom is her very self, but though her end seems pitiless, it is ordered—as the image of the baby in her arms attests—to the birth of a new life, and this new life is no strategy of Lily’s, but seemingly the mysterious workings of some other driving force. Even her death, though argued about since it first appeared in print, is crowded about with an ambiguity that leaves little room to suspect that it was intentional. No, something else seems to move her, something that always directs her feet at just the right moment so that she can avoid the shimmering of her gilded cage and step, finally, into the Truth.
This is the via Crucis, the Way of the Cross.
As Christians, we do not simply respect the cross, we need it. By it, God has not only transfigured death, He has made of it the very means of our salvation, and it is by walking in this way that we come to the Truth of ourselves, and of our world. It is no morbid pre-occupation, but the very action of God in our lives, His power at work in us for good.
That is why the cross is always worthy of our exaltation.
[1] 1 Corinthians 1:18
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