Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

Second Thoughts on Detective Stories

SecondThoughts on Detective Stories The May  issue of The Chesterton Review contains an essay of Professor John Wren-Lewis at the University of Sydney entitled , “Adam, Eve, and Agatha Christie.” Professor Wren-Lewis as a young man in London happened to be present when Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap was first performed in London some forty years ago. As that famous play is still going strong, WrenLewis began to wonder just why such a thing as a perfect detective story might prove so popular and enduring. Wren-Lewis’s reflections took him back to the account of the Fall, to modern man’s need to account for evil. The detective represents a kind of savior figure. In The Mousetrap, the detective turns out to be the murderer.“And here I find a clear echo of a theme expressed in different ways in many of the world’s ancient stories about the Fall,”Wren-Lewis wrote, but most clearly in the one which, more than any other, has exercised emotional appeal across many different cultures, the biblical story in which the loss of Eden comes about because of a “snaky” temptation to assume a divine role of moral guardianship,“knowing good and evil.”1 One should note here that not all stories of the Fall are the same. Indeed, the story of the Fall itself was designed to counteract another story in which the origin of good and evil was located in a god of good and a god of evil.The Genesis story was designed to deny that proposition.There was no god of evil.All creation was good.Therefore, evil is located in what is good but not God. Wren-Lewis tells us that he “interprets” this account to mean that 97 the responsibility for humanity’s unnatural destructiveness lies within the very element of the psyche that purports to aim at harmony, the moral impulse—not that it is too weak, as conventional society wisdom assumes, but that it usurps power and tries to control all other impulses by judging and repressing.2 Again, though pride is the great vice, I am bothered by locating the disorder in an element of “the human psyche.”The source of evil is essentially located in the human (or angelic) free will.The whole point is that human nature in all its parts, including the will, remains good as created even with the Fall. If the problem is located in the “human psyche” and this does not implicitly mean free will, as I am not at all sure it does here, then there is a confusion . As such the “human psyche” is good. But what bothered me most in Wren-Lewis’s account was what followed. He refers toWilliam Blake as someone who sheds further light on this topic. The “essence of Christianity,” for Blake, was that “the punisher alone is the criminal of Providence .” I find this a very strange “essence of Christianity.” In classical thought, punishment is something with a moral justification . It is redemptive. It restores justice. But notice that the subject here is Christianity, not Plato. Wren-Lewis explains his position by referring to the findings of psychology and sociology.According to these scholarly gentlemen , “behind all really violent and destructive human behavior .l.l. there lies a screaming protest on the part of some much more limited desire that has been repressed by an overweening morality .”3 Destructive behavior comes from morality somehow, albeit “overweening.” If these are the “findings” of psychology and sociology , I worry about these disciplines. This passage appears to maintain that the cause of the horrible things we do to one another lies in this “overweening morality” against which some limited, but also good, desire protests. This situation becomes worse by righteous indignation on the part of 98 SecondThoughts on Detective Stories morality.The Inquisition is brought up as an example. So are nuclear war and holy war.These dire things are said to result from a mentality of “better dead than red” or better to “have nuclear holocaust than to submit to the Great Satan of American Capitalism .”4 It was this passage, I confess, that first raised my eyebrows, for it reminded me of the cant of the s and s.We have here, I fear, a radical underestimation of evil.We have evidently found a method, perhaps unnoticed, grounded ultimately in Hobbes, to justify our compromises...