Javier Cercas in the Vatican and Ulan Bator
An Atheist With Missionary Zeal Encounters Men and Women of Faith
Javier Cercas is a Spanish writer whose novels straddle the bestseller lists and serious literary fiction. He has a regular column in El País and, as a fluent Catalan speaker, raised his voice against the ill-advised secession campaign here in the previous decade. These days he’s one of the country’s major public intellectuals with an opinion at the ready for every controversy.
I’ve read his “Soldiers of Salamis” and “The Anatomy of an Instant” and they are both works of high literary quality and great political intelligence.
He’s just published a lengthy account of a visit to the Vatican followed by a trip to Mongolia as part of the late Pope’s delegation there.
It’s being widely praised and I can understand why, it’s very well written and draws the reader in. The conversations he recounts are speckled with precise observations of his interlocutors’ expressions and the surroundings, the effect of verisimilitude is strong. All his novelist’s skills are fully deployed and that’s great.
But….
There’s no militant atheist like a Spanish militant atheist and Cercas is very much one. We’re not talking about the faddish Dawkins and Dennett style New Atheism that had its moment a few years ago but rather a phenomenon as deeply rooted in Spanish culture as the Catholic Church itself. It reached its most extreme expression in the heady early days of the Spanish Civil War when anarchist militias murdered hundreds of priests, nuns and citizens suspected of being too loyal to Rome.
The first part of the book, where he debates with a theologian and a cardinal, seems unsatisfactory to me. He’s certain he’s right and offers all the arguments that you could imagine against the existence of God and eternal life and that they have probably heard a thousand times before. The reader can imagine them thinking, “Thanks a lot for sending this guy to talk to us, Holy Father”.
He couldn’t move them a millimetre. A real surprise.
It’s all done in a very friendly and civilized manner, of course, and he gets on great with Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, apparently a major figure in modern poetry in Portuguese.
Cercas doesn’t understand that his own rational, evidence based views, although probably correct, are also undergirded by passion and faith, just like those of his religious interlocutors. He doesn’t even consider that they might be.
It’s a part of being human that no one can slough off.
The very polish of the writing, along with the skill with which the various episodes are connected and the narrative propelled forward suggests he was no more open to his clerical interlocutors’ views than they were to his.
The section where he goes to Mongolia with the papal delegation is much more interesting and in spite of himself he admires the Italian missionaries who have immersed themselves in the local culture and language and founded the Catholic Church there from nothing.
The book was published on the first of April and just three weeks later Pope Francis died. Massive sales are even more guaranteed for it than previously.