Theological reflections on Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.

Mitchell, Mark T.

ROBERT PENN WARREN'S novel of southern politics is far more than a political novel. It is a profound meditation on human nature. It is a novel populated by seekers, each with a longing, each with a desire for significance, each struggling to forge meaning in a world in which meaning does not immediately disclose itself. Warren frequently recurs to Christian themes and images to bring into relief the difficulties faced by modern man in a world in which traditional beliefs seem impossible. In what follows, I attempt to point out some of the Christian themes, images, and categories that appear in the novel and show how in many instances these categories are inverted. This discussion will occur as a way of tracing the ideological struggle of the narrator, Jack Burden, who begins as a self-described "brass-bound idealist," but in the course of the novel moves, in a sort of two-tiered conversion, to embracing mechanistic determinism and finally finds a sort of resolution as an a genuine seeker. In the end, Jack's openness to the traditional Christian position reveals that the inversions have been overcome but not without significant personal cost.

Jack Burden, the political hatchet man for Governor Willie Stark, seeks to avoid responsibility for his (often unpleasant) actions by convincing himself that "what you don't know don't hurt you, for it ain't real"(30). (1) This "brass-bound Idealism" is a theory Jack learned about in college, and "I had hung on to it for grim death. I owed my success in life to that principle" (30). Jack appears to have embraced a form of Idealism made famous by Bishop Berkeley whose position may be summarized as esse is percipi, or to be is to be perceived. In other words, all existing things exist by virtue of their being perceived. Jack seeks to apply this rather complex metaphysical position to his own comportment with the world and in so doing constricts the world to a single point, to a single knower. That is, "If I, Jack Burden, don't perceive something, then it doesn't exist, at least not as far as I'm concerned." Jack tries to avoid responsibility for his existence in the world by retreating into a form of epistemological solipsism. The obvious difficulty, a difficulty that Jack repeatedly faces, is that his theory is simply unlivable. His actions do affect those around him, and as the novel progresses, the implications of his actions force him to abandon this impossible position.

Despite himself, Willie Stark is instrumental, indeed central, to both of Jack's conversions. As such, Willie is the spiritual father of Jack--he is the motivating force that compels Jack in desperation from his brass-bound Idealism to determinism and, upon reflection, from determinism to that of a seeker. Unlike Jack, Willie is a man of action who seeks to dominate his world and the people within his orbit. Because Jack attempts to avoid meaningful contact with the world, he necessarily absorbs much of what Willie is, for Jack's inaction makes him an empty vessel into which Willie can pour his will--Jack's passivity makes him an extension of Willie as he carries out the desires of his boss. Because Willie is the actor and Jack the reactor, it is important to consider the person of Willie Stark.

Willie's meteoric rise to power begins with a tragedy. A school was shoddily built because the corrupt county government gave the job to a corrupt contractor. At the time Willie protested, but he was ignored. Several years later when a fire escape collapses killing and maiming several children, the people remember the truth that Willie had spoken. Some big time operatives see their chance to split their opponent's vote by recruiting this newly redeemed man who some people even claim was chosen by God--his divine election having been validated by the collapse of the fire escape. Willie becomes intoxicated with the notion that he is God's man, and his destiny begins to take shape in his imagination. He was called by God, and "He was not only bemused by the voice he heard. He was bemused by the very grandeur of the position to which he aspired. The blaze of light hitting him in the eyes blinded him"(69). Just as Paul was blinded on the way to Damascus, just as Plato's cave-dweller is struck blind when he emerges from the cave, so too Willie is struck blind by the nobility of his aspiration. Willie experiences a conversion in which his personal desire for power is validated by God through the voice of the people.

Though originally enamored with the thought that books contain important knowledge, Willie grows to despise the written word and relies on his intuition about human nature to guide his actions. Many years into his relationship with Jack, Willie contemptuously stabs a finger at a history book remarking, "And the fellow that wrote it didn't know a God-damned thing. About how things were. He didn't know a thing. I bet things were just like they are now. A lot of folks wrassling round"(67). He shows Jack a notebook, "a big cloth-bound ledger, in which he wrote the fine sayings and the fine ideas he got out of the books." In it Jack finds quotations from Emerson and Franklin and Shakespeare, but Willie points to it with the same contempt he used when speaking of the history book. "'Gee, back in those days I figured those fellows who wrote the books knew all there was. And I figured I was going to get me a chunk of it. Yeah, I figured I would sweat for me a chunk of it.' He laughed. And added, 'Yeah, I thought I was the nuts"'(67).

This contempt for the written word reveals itself early in Willie's career when, during his first campaign for governor, he finally realizes he has been duped by the big city politicians. Jack describes what he saw: "I looked back and there was Willie flinging the sheets of his manuscript from him so they swirled about his feet and beating on his chest and shouting how the truth was there and didn't need writing down"(94). Later, after he becomes governor, the legislature tries to impeach him. Willie tours the state and speaks directly to the people: "'Have I disappointed you? Have I?' Then, leaning sharply, he would lift up his right hand while the question was still ringing in the air, and say, 'Stop! Don't answer until you look into the depth of your heart to see the truth. For there is where truth is. Not in a book. Not in a lawyer's book. Not on any scrap of paper. In your heart'"(146). This is not to say that Willie does not find the written word useful, for his favored way of changing the minds of stubborn opponents is to have Jack deliver an envelope containing information that, if made public, would ruin the recipient. Thus, for Willie the written word is useful as a tool to further his ends, and as such it is something that he delivers to others. In the same way that he flings the sheets of his manuscript out from him, so too, he sends the damning words away to work their influence upon his enemies.

As Willie's assistant, Jack carries a little black book with him. He uses it to take notes, to jot down information, to record damning facts. He writes things in his black book "because I had got in the habit. You can build up an awful lot of habits in six years, and you can fill an awful lot of little black books in that time and put them in a safety deposit box when they get full because they aren't something to leave around and because they would be worth their weight in gold to some parties to get their hands on" (20). Thus, Jack, like his boss, attempts to harness the written word for political use. Its usefulness is its truth, and Jack employs the written word to further Willie's chosen ends.

But Jack's problematic relationship with the written word precedes his association with Willie. As a graduate student in history, Jack focuses on Cass Mastern, a relative of Jack's, who left a detailed written account of his life, which Jack attempts to edit for his dissertation. But Jack walks away from his dissertation because "in the midst of the process I tried to discover the truth and not the facts. Then, when the truth was not to be discovered, or discovered could not be understood by me, I could not bear to live with the cold-eyed reproach of the facts"(157). This failure to find the truth in the words is a failure to understand that words point to a reality beyond themselves. Jack Burden could read those words, but how could he be expected to understand them? They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret. Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else (189).

Perhaps, though, the problem was deeper. Perhaps Jack simply could not understand. Perhaps he simply did not want to understand the truth: "Perhaps he laid aside the journal of Cass Mastern not because he could not understand, but because he was afraid to understand for what might be understood there was a reproach to him"(189). In any event, Jack walks away from Cass Mastern's journal along with the partially completed dissertation. Several weeks later, he receives a package from his landlady. It contains the journal and the unfinished dissertation. Jack does not open the package but carries it around with him for years, "a big squarish parcel with the brown paper turning yellow and the cords sagging, and the name Mr. Jack Burden fading slowly"(190). Jack's continuing refusal to engage the truth conveyed in the words of Cass Mastern results in the gradual fading of his name on the package. Jack's identity fades as he refuses to confront the truth.

Once he becomes governor, Willie, unlike Jack, never seems unsure of himself or of his place in the word. Jack attributes Willie's success to his self-absorption. When someone asks Jack what Willie is interested in, Jack's reply is straightforward: "He's interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius"(126). A person so self-absorbed, so self-motivated, would not turn to books as a source of truth; instead, such a person would look inward, to himself. And that is what Willie quite unapologetically does.

For Willie, knowledge is located in the heart; it is an intuition that one accesses viscerally and to appeal to the authority of the written word is to invite error. This understanding of the nature of the word and its relationship to truth is the converse of what we see in the Gospel of John where we are told that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"(John 1:1). When Willie casts his manuscript away from him and appeals to the hearts of the people, he is asserting the primacy of intuition as the location of truth. But the writer of the Gospel claims precisely the opposite, for the Word is the logos, and the logos is primary, for "Through him [the logos] all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made"(John 1:3). As such, in the Gospel of John, truth is primary and is located in the logos. It is not visceral, for it is spoken and spoken most clearly in the mouth of God when He says in Genesis, "Let there be ..."

By alluding to the creation of the cosmos, we can move to another important inversion. Repeatedly throughout the novel Willie reveals his deep understanding of human nature. His view becomes a mantra: "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something"(49, 157, 191). This view of the fallenness of man is consistent with traditional Christianity, and finds particular resonance in the thought of St. Augustine. But Willie's position goes deeper than a mere fall, however destructive that might have been. For Willie, Badness is prior to Goodness. In attempting to get Adam Stanton to direct the new hospital, Willie argues that if you want Goodness "You got to make it out of Badness.... And you know why? Because there isn't anything else to make it out of" (257).

On first blush one might imagine that Willie is simply voicing a severe notion of the Fall in which all of creation is so thoroughly corrupted that there is nothing but Badness. But this seems implausible, for he denies any transcendent source of Goodness, and Adam pushes him on this point: "'If, as you say, there is only the bad to start with, and the good must be made from the bad, then how do you recognize the good? Assuming you have made it from the bad. Answer me that.'" Willie, of course, has no recourse to the written word, which he rejects. He answers in the only way he has left open: "'You just make it up as you go along'"(257). As such, Badness exists prior to the Good and Goodness is merely that which men of action create in the process of striving toward their particular ends.

This notion of the primacy of Badness turns the Augustinian solution to the problem of evil on its head. Augustine argues that evil has no ontological status; it is merely a defect, an absence of Good. But for Willie, Badness is ontologically prior, and Goodness, being that which is created out of Badness as a sheer act of human will, has nothing more than a provisional and pragmatic claim on us. Goodness, then, is merely that which the strong create to accomplish the ends that they will. Thus, Augustine's solution to the problem of evil is inverted into the problem of good. This, of course, relates directly to the issue of the primacy of the Word, for in Christian ontology, the logos is not only ontologically primary but it is normatively primary. The Good and the Real converge in the logos. But in Willie's account the Real and the Bad are primary and morality is a construct of human will. This is, quite clearly, incompatible with a Christian metaphysics.

The theme of Genesis and the Gospel of John appears later in Jack's haunting recollection of the summer he and Anne Stanton fall in love. The creation theme is clear when Jack recalls what Anne's love had meant. "What she had succeeded in creating out of that unpromising lump of clay [himself] scooped up from the general earth, nobody was ever to know"(282). Something had been created, but by the end of the summer things begin slowly to unravel. As Anne makes preparations to return to Miss Pound's School in Boston, Jack seeks desperately to reassure himself of her love for him. I went up to her, not even saying hello, and took her hand, feeling a kind of unfortunate desperation and urgency. She looked at me with an expression of mild surprise. "Don't you love me?" I demanded angrily.

Anne responds with laughter and flippantly assures him of her love. Jack, unsatisfied, again demands, "Don't you love me?" And again she assures him with a casual tone. Finally he asks the third time. "'God damn it,' I said, 'don't you love me?'"(290). This exchange is an inversion of the scene in the final chapter of John's Gospel in which Peter, who had denied Jesus three times, walks along the shore of the Sea of Galilee with the risen Lord. Three times Jesus asks Peter "Do you love me?" and three times Peter says he does. Jesus then commands him to "Feed my sheep." The restoration of the fractured relationship is made complete. In the Gospel, the Creator inquires of the creature whether or not he loves, and the created answers in the affirmative and in so doing is redeemed. Precisely the opposite occurs in the novel. Jack, who had been created by Anne's love, demands of the creator whether she loves him, and although she answers in the affirmative, her flippancy belies the shallowness of her concern for him. And because his search for redemption is purely an immanent one, there is no possibility for real redemption. Jack is left feeling empty and angry. Indeed, Jack later muses that perhaps she hadn't loved him at all "but had merely had a mysterious itch in the blood and he was handy and the word love was a word for the mysterious itch" (309). His insecurity about her love ultimately leads him to deny its reality. But if she was the creator who created him by her love, what becomes of him if there had actually been no love at all but only a mysterious itch? Again, Jack's identity is called into question as a result of his conception of truth and reality.

Jack's solipsistic brass-bound Idealism cracks under the weight of his association with Willie. When Jack discovers that Anne has become Willie's most recent conquest, he gets into his car and heads west, "because when you don't like it where you are you always go west. We have always gone west"(309). Jack drives to California and finds himself in a hotel room in Long Beach. "I lay there, having drowned in the West, my body having drifted down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze of the sea floor of History"(309). West is a symbol of death, and Jack drowns in the West and is resurrected (or baptized) to a new view of the world: his brass-bound Idealism is replaced by the Cosmic Twitch. In order to avoid the terrifying thought that in some way he is responsible for Anne turning to Willie, Jack "discovered the dream" that the truth of human existence is that all is determined, that the universe--man included--is nothing but a vast and complex machine. That all of life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve. When you flee as far as you can flee, you will always find that dream, which is the dream of our age. At first, it is always a nightmare and horrible, but in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic. At least it was for me for a certain time.... At that time, when I discovered that view of things--really discovered, in my own way and not from any book--I felt I had discovered the secret source of all strength and all endurance. That dream solves all problems (311, italics added).

The implications of this new-found knowledge are profound, for if it is true, "nothing was your fault or anybody's fault, for things are always as they are." As a result, "you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West after all"(311).

Jack comes to his discovery not "from any book" but through a mystical experience. He considers the obvious problem that arises from any form of mechanistic determinism: if everything is mechanistically determined, how can one know that this is the case? "If I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all?" Jack concludes that this is all part of the mystery. "That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to California to have a mystical experience to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great Twitch"(314).

Through a mystical experience that did not depend on knowledge found in books, Jack has a sort of a conversion experience after which he feels "clean and free" and "at one with the Great Twitch." Again this seems to represent an inversion of a central Christian theme. In the Gospel of John, Jesus declares "He who the Son sets free is free indeed" (John 8:36). Unlike the Cosmic Twitch, which is completely impersonal and whose freedom is only the temporary psychological relief gained from believing that one is completely absolved from responsibility for one's actions, Christ is a person who claims that people can be most profoundly free only in His loving embrace. Where the Cosmic Twitch absolves one from responsibility, Christ absolves one from sin, and sin is only a meaningful category if human agency is real. Thus, the Cosmic Twitch destroys what is human by destroying the concept of responsibility, while the Christian vision affirms humanity by redeeming it.

This traditional Christian alternative is represented by two tragic figures: Cass Mastern and the Scholarly Attorney, whom Jack believes is his father until Judge Irwin kills himself and Jack finds that the judge was his true father. Both are men of the written word, and both men represent a problem for Jack. Cass Mastern was the subject of Jack's aborted dissertation. He was born in 1835 and in addition to the usual subjects, was educated in "a great deal of Presbyterian theology" (163). Cass is tempted and succumbs to an affair with Annabelle Trice, the wife of Cass's friend, Duncan Trice. Describing their first meeting, Cass calls Annabelle "the true goddess as revealed in her movement, and [she] was, but for Divine Grace, if such be granted to a parcel of corruption such as I, my true dam-nation"(165). When Duncan eventually discovers the deception, he kills himself, but not before placing his wedding ring, a ring he never removed, onto the pillow of his unfaithful wife. With that, Annabelle realizes that he knew of her unfaithfulness and that her act had prompted his suicide. Upon confronting the enormity of her sin, she lashes out both at Cass and her slave, Phebe, who saw the ring on the bed and discerned the truth. She sells Phebe into the worst sort of slavery because "she would stay right here, she wouldn't go away, she would stay right here and look at me" (176). When Cass declares his intention to find Phebe and liberate her, Annabelle tells Cass that if he goes after Phebe, she will never speak to him again. Cass defies Annabelle, seeks to redeem Phebe, and he gives himself over to a life of humility and sacrifice. In reflecting upon the shambles of his life, Cass takes full responsibility for all the terrible consequences of his actions: "The death of my friend, the betrayal of Phebe, the suffering and rage and great change of the woman I had loved--all had come from my single act of sin and perfidy"(178). He eventually enlists in the Confederate Army where he refuses an officer's commission and instead marches with the enlisted men. But although he marches with the soldiers and carries a musket on his shoulder, he refuses to take the life of another man. "How can I who have taken the life of my friend, take the life of an enemy, for I have used up my right to blood"(186). Cass is mortally wounded outside Atlanta. As he lies dying in the hospital, he writes about human depravity, the sovereignty of God, and His inscrutable ways, central Presbyterian themes: "I do not question the Justice of God, that others have suffered for my sin." Cass recognizes that although the war is over many men would still die. "Men shall come together yet and die in the common guilt of man and in the guilt that sent them hither from far places and distant firesides. But God in His Mercy has spared me the end. Blessed be His Name"(187-8). Cass confronts the depths of his own sinful actions and puts his hope in the mercy of the sovereign God--he hopes for grace despite his sin.

The novel reaches a climax with the assassination of Willie by Jack's friend Dr. Adam Stanton, who in turn is killed by Willie's body-guard. Jack leaves politics and has the time to reflect on all that has occurred. This reflection brings about another conversion. Jack originally thought of himself as a brass-bound Idealist, but circumstances led him to conceive of the world as governed by the Cosmic Twitch. But again circumstances--that is, reality--force him to reconsider. As Jack writes about himself, "But later, much later, he woke up one morning to discover that he did not believe in the Cosmic Twitch any more. He did not believe in it because he had seen too many people live and die" (436).

Willie's final words to Jack subvert the comfortable world of Jack's determinism. As Willie lies dying in the hospital, he calls for Jack. The eyes turned toward me again, very slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painful creak of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again. He said, "It might have been all different, Jack." I nodded again. He roused himself more. He even seemed to be straining to lift his head from the pillow. "You got to believe that," he said hoarsely (400).

Willie, with his dying words, insists that human actions are contingent and not determined--things could have been different than the way they were if people had chosen to act differently. Willie's words, and the tragic life and death of so many around him, force Jack to abandon his fidelity to the Cosmic Twitch, but he is no longer able to return to the warm cocoon of brass-bound Idealism. He visits Lucy Stark, Willie's long-suffering wife, who has lost her husband and her only son and finds herself caring for the infant fathered by her deceased son. She shows Jack the baby boy and informs him that the child's name is Willie Stark. "You know," she said, "I named him Willie because--" She was still scrutinizing my face. "because," she continued, "because Willie was a great man." I nodded, "I suppose." Lucy is insistent. "He was a great man," she affirmed again, in a voice nearly a whisper. Then she looked again at me, calmly. "You see, Jack," she said, "I have to believe that" (426-7).

At first Jack simply attributes Lucy's claim about her late husband to her own psychological need. She needed to affirm his greatness in order to go on living. But eventually Jack, himself, comes to believe that Lucy is correct, that Willie was, indeed, a great man. "And believing that Willie Stark was a great man, I could think better of all other people, and of myself. At the same time that I could more surely condemn myself" (427).

On his deathbed Willie affirms that human actions determine history and not some cosmic force that impels men to act. Willie insists that Jack must believe that. And Lucy Stark insists that Willie was a great man, that she must believe that is true. But greatness is only meaningful in a world of choice, where greatness is not inevitable and pettiness is not required. Only in such a world can one take satisfaction in the good choices one makes; only in such a world can one condemn oneself for wrong actions. Thus, by taking Willie's dying words to heart, Jack is forced out of the security of his Cosmic Twitch theology and into a world where human action is a matter of human choice, a world where human action has consequences, a world in which to truly live, one must accept responsibility for one's past.

Jack marries Anne. He also takes the Scholarly Attorney--the man he had thought was his father--into his home. The Scholarly Attorney is, along with Cass Mastern, a man who, despite his pathetic life, embraces the Christian faith and seeks to articulate the truths of the faith in the religious tracts he writes. He is now very feeble. "He can read his Bible a little. He is not strong enough to write any more, but occasionally he dictates something to me or Anne for a tract he is writing"(437). Jack quotes from the most recent tract: The creation of man whom God in His foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God's omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God's glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man's glory and power. But by God's help. By His help and in His wisdom (437).

When he finishes dictating, the Scholarly Attorney looks at Jack and speaks "with sudden violence."

"'It is true. I know it is true. Do you know it?'

"I nodded my head and said yes. (I did so to keep his mind untroubled, but later I was not certain but that in my own way I did believe what he had said" (437).

Here we witness the full magnitude of Jack's spiritual journey. He finds himself affirming "in his own way" that man is the creation of an omnipotent and perfect God and that man can do good only by God's help and wisdom. By God's grace.

Jack's subsequent action indicates the full measure of the change he has undergone. He determines to finish the book he once started but then abandoned. He returns to the life of Cass Mastern, "whom once I could not understand but whom, perhaps, I now may come to under-stand"(438). He returns as a seeker: as one who hopes that the truth can be found in the word, the logos. He returns with a tentative faith, one that is unformed and unorthodox, but faith nevertheless. And he returns with love. Love for Anne, whom he never stopped loving; love demonstrated in caring for the feeble Scholarly Attorney; and perhaps even love for himself. Equipped with these nascent theological virtues, he embraces his past and the uncertainties of the future, and with a seriousness of purpose born of a recognition that human action is both inevitable and meaningful, he turns to face the "convulsion of the world" and "the awful responsibility of time" (438).

1. Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (NewYork, 1996).

MARK T. MITCHELL is Assistant Professor of Government at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. He is the author of Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing (ISI Books, 2006).