Faith and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan

5. Each Man's Son

38 Faith and Fiction Americans are more optimistic, both about themselves and about their country, than Canadians are. The reason for this may be partly climatic, but most of it is historical. The United States was formed as the result of a successful revolution. Since that time it has never lost a war. Most of its great projects have been successful. (CC 53) 5. Each Man's Son Each Man's Son (1951) recapitulates most of the author's previous criticisms of Calvinism, both as a theology and as a crippling psychological complex, and he again probes the existential meaninglessness that accompanies a renunciation of religion. This time he offers a solution, based not on abstract dogma nor religious rhetoric, but on the dramatically satisfying resolution of human relationships. For the most part, MacLennan has confined his authorial didacticism in this novel to the Prologue. (According to his biographer, he was relieved that he need no longer be "a geographer, an historian and a sociologist" and could turn to "universal" themes, but his publishers required him to provide a preface explaining Cape Breton and Calvinism, and he reluctantly agreed to this "introductory stuff [E. Cameron, Life230­31]). In it he introduces the beautiful but blighted world of Cape Breton Island, and the curse that dwells within the noble, exiled Highlanders: [A]n ancient curse, intensified by John Calvin and branded upon their souls by John Knox and his successors — the belief that man has inherited from Adam a nature so sinful there is no hope for him and that, furthermore, he lives and dies under the wrath of an arbitrary God who will forgive only a handful of His elect on the Day of Judgement.(EMx) MacLennan goes on to analyze his protagonist before the fact. The Highlanders' response to this "curse upon their souls" is escape into "drink," "knowledge," or exile. Dr. Daniel Ainsley (who has chosen the second option at the beginning of the novel and the third by the end) is "a freethinker . . . proud because he had neither run away nor sought a new belief in himself through hard liquor." He has attempted to escape the "sense of sin, a legacy of the ancient curse . . . by denying God's existence." But "when he displayed his knowledge and intelligence as a priest displays his beads, he felt guilty because he knew so little and was not intelligent enough" (EMx­xi). In Tillich's terms, his works and empty autonomy cannot free him from existential guilt or yield the divine justification he seeks. So "each man's son" is driven by "the daemon which has made him what he is and the other daemon which gives him hope of becoming more than any man can ever be" (EM xi). In the theological pattern of this book the hero is trapped between the guilt of the past, the vengeful Father Jehovah, and the impossible ambition of the future, self­justification and salvation. Only through self­sacrificing Hugh MacLennan 39 love, identified with Christ and, as in The Precipice, symbolized by mother­ figures, can the tragic trap be broken and Ainslie redeemed. In his Cape Breton setting MacLennan vividly portrays this legacy of "Scotch Presbyterianism": in the superstitions of Jimmie MacGillivray who believes his stomachache is a "punishment for sin" (EM 41); and the intolerance of Mollie MacNeil's father who was an elder of the church but never spoke to her after her shotgun marriage (EM 34); and the hypocrisy of the miners who dutifully attend church after drinking and brawling the night before (EM 80). It is clear that their religion offers no consolation for the "blasphemy" of "fighting clans going into the blackness of the earth to dig coal" (EM 67), because it is based on a theology of fear. It denies "the promises of the New Testament" in deference to the Old: "For if God was love, what was to be done about Jehovah?" (EM 41}. MacLennan's picture of the archetypal Calvinist, Mrs. MacCuish (EM 152­53), burns with "indignation at self­righteous puritans who would make little children feel guilty for their human nature, while at the same time withholding from them the release of confession and absolution" (CC 139). Daniel Ainslie, despite his education (a symbolic escape from the evil of the mines) and his brilliance as a surgeon, has returned to Cape Breton and is, therefore, symbolically bound by the Calvinist paradox taught him by his father: The old Calvinist had preached that...