A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy by Petra Mundik (review)

Petra Mundik’s bold new study A Bloody and Barbarous God is, as far as I am aware, the first sustained, book-length inquiry into the metaphysics and spirituality of Cormac McCarthy’s fictional universe. A monograph on this subject has been a long time coming. Mundik’s launching point is McCarthy’s statement in Gary Wallace’s interview with the author, “Meeting McCarthy,” on the authenticity of “spiritual experience” and the truth of “Truth,” and McCarthy’s proposition “that the mystical experience is a direct apprehension of reality.” According to Mundik, McCarthy’s works operate within an esoteric tradition and to “the initiated reader” (6) his novels yield up concealed meanings glimmering beneath the literal surface of the narrative. To understand McCarthy, the interpretive key to the window, the right handle with which to take hold of the bundle, is here Philosophia Perennis, or “the Perennial Philosophy,” a phrase minted by Leibniz but expanded upon by Aldous Huxley as “the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds” (2). In Mundik’s terms, the Perennial Philosophy that informs McCarthy’s worldview is primarily Gnosticism, which she defines as a mélange of Jewish, Christian, Hellenic, Babylonian, and Iranian traditions, as well as the Eastern philosophies of Buddhism and Hinduism. (The possible influence of Eastern philosophy upon Gnosticism is a more contentious bone, although it is a position held by some contemporary scholars, perhaps most prominently by Princeton’s religious historian Elaine Pagels). The expositions of Gnosticism and Buddhism by Hans Jonas, Kurt Rudolph, and Edward Conze largely provide the conceptual platform for Mundik’s comprehension of Gnostic tradition.

A concise summary of the Gnostic view and some of its more recondite terminology may prove helpful. At the core of this radically dualistic, Manichean metaphysical model is the idea that a transcendent, good God, the Absolute, has become alien and that the manifest material cosmos is the evil creation of a malevolent entity named the demiurge. Human beings are creatures containing precious sparks of the divine, a portion of divine substance called the pneuma. The demiurge and his archons, presiding demonic angels, keep these divine sparks immured within this terribly flawed prison-world. The ideal goal of all humans entrapped within this corrupt material cosmos is Gnostic striving, the attainment of saving knowledge or gnosis, which would release their inner nature and restore the pneuma to the Absolute and the realm of light. Mundik’s yoking of McCarthy’s fiction to Gnostic thought is, of course, not original. Lee Graham was probably the first scholar to make this connection in her Masters dissertation. After Graham, Leo Daugherty wrote his now seminal essay, in which he posits Blood Meridian as a Gnostic tragedy, and since then other scholars have also recognized the presence of Gnostic influence in McCarthy, notable among them Rick Wallach, Harold Bloom, and Dianne Luce. Mundik’s contribution is to press this insight to its logical, most complete conclusion by demonstrating and elaborating upon the importance of Gnosticism as the hermeneutic framework for reading McCarthy’s six later novels Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Mundik focuses on these later novels because she regards them as “more metaphysically complex and spiritually affirmative” (5) than his other works.

After a pithy five-and-a-half-page introduction and a minimum of throat-clearing, Mundik embarks upon literary analysis. The neatly arranged opening four chapters are dedicated to four major aspects of Blood Meridian. The first chapter explores the novel’s unrelentingly hellish landscapes, which, Mundik holds, reflect McCarthy’s “consistently anti-cosmic or world-rejecting attitude toward existence and creation” (7). The second chapter unpacks the representation of the judge as “a composite of the Great Evil in all its guises, drawing on the traditions of the...