Last week I had the pleasure of accompanying my eldest daughter to see Les Miserables in The West End. I am not a big musicals fan so I can't really comment on it as a work of art. My primary interest is in it as a work of philosophy and theology. And there is so much in there!
I should confess that Victor Hugo's novel, on which the musical is based, was the second novel I read as an adult, after many years of not reading novels at all. Early teens: 2000AD and Action comics. Then nothing. It upsets Anna that I only completed two of my four set texts for O Level English Literature. All that is by way of saying that when I read Les Miserables as a 20-year-old, while house-sitting in Karachi, it had a huge impact on me. I didn't know enough about French history to understand the political elements of the book, but for me the central struggle encapsulated for me the struggle for the soul of Christianity.
It's believed that the two main characters, Valjean and Javert, are both based on one man, Eugène François Vidocq, a former criminal who was involved in setting up one of the first detective agencies in France. Vidocq had apparently broken his parole so was technically on the run his whole life, even while he was establishing what became the police. Vidocq was still alive when Les Miserables was published, and his only objection to the portrayal of the legalistic Javert was that he, Vidocq, had never arrested anyone for stealing bread (the reason Valjean is imprisoned in the early part of the book).
It's over 30 years since I read the novel, but what has stayed with me all this time (and what I bring to the musical) is a sense that Hugo believed that there was a good form of Christianity out there somewhere, one based on love and mercy rather than law and puishment. The novel starts with around 50 pages of description of the life of a Bishop, a Bishop so humble and caring that - sorry, Bishops - one can only imagine that he was read at the time as a sarcastic commentary on the church heirarchy. This Bishop intervenes miraculously in the recently released Valjean's life, such that Valjean breaks his parole and moves to a different part of France in order to start a new life. There he becomes a successful businessman and politician, with a reputation for kindness.
But Valjean has broken his parole, which means that the implacable Javert must hunt him down and put him back in the labour camp. In my reading, Javert represents the totally immovable justice of God, such that there is nothing Valjean can do to escape his punishment. It doesn't matter what good he does in this life, because he has broken the law by skipping his parole he is deserving of punishment.
Valjean, meanwhile, has become as saintly as his episcopal benefactor. The reader can't believe that such a good person should spend the rest of their life in prison, yet of course the church at the time taught that each of us must be subject to punishment, either in a temporary purgatory, or forever in hell.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, mainly because in my hearing, the musical production, while brimming with theology (both the main characters believe they are following God, while both the evil and downtrodden characters all comment on God's absence) the question about whether Valjean should be punished has been turned from a theological one to a philosophical one.
Javert is not (just) portrayed as a believer in the absolute authority of the law, but in the philosophy known as essentialism. At least twice he comments that Valjean is a criminal, and always will be. This isn't just a comment on his legal status, but on his essence. Who he is has been defined by God, or fate, and can't be changed. When we say 'Women do this, black people do that...' we are being sexist and racist respectively, but we are part of a long philosophical tradition in which it was believed that people, along with all other things, had essential characteristics that could never change. You are what you are. In that light, the terrifying verse from All Things Bright and Beautiful makes perfect sense:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate;
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
God sets everything in its right place and we are fools to try to change any of it. The tragic student-led rebellion that overshadows the second half of the book might even be considered a confirmation of that belief.
That rebellion takes place in Paris in the early 19th century, where a century later a philosophical revolution shook the world. Existentialism says you aren't any thing in particular, you just are. End of story. There is no particular meaning to you or your life - any meaning has to be made by you and the choices you make. And even then, most of us won't make much of our lives anyway. “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards," said Jean-Paul Sartre in a lecture in 1946. "If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing”.
If that sounds incredibly hope-less, it did to me too, when I first read about it at university. Existentialist theologians recast God as the 'Ground of Being', a kind of divine guarantor of existence, but it was a fairly paltry god compared to the one who made every thing and determined its place in the universe. But not even Sartre, one of the early thinkers of existentialism, was really as hopeless as all that. He once wrote, “As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”
Ah. Becoming.
Les Miserables, written decades before Sartre was born, is concerned with who Jean Valjean has become and is becoming. Valjean is neither a thing determined for all time - a criminal - but nor is he without form or purpose, seeking to discover his identity in his choices as if those choices have neither rhyme nor reason until they are made.
Jean Valjean is a partner with God in an emerging world.
The theologian N T Wright describes the Bible as like the first four acts of an unfinished five act play, plus a (let's face it, very sketchy) outline of how the play will end. We are the actors, called on to improvise the fifth act, ensuring continuity with what has come before, but open to new and amazing plot twists. The analogy falls down a little, because actually the playwright-director is there in the theatre, smiling and saying, 'No, this play is unfinished on purpose, we're going to write this together.'
I don't think my view of dynamic actors in a story that is developing in partnership with God is either essentialist or existentialist. It's not strictly teleological either, because the telos to which we're being drawn is changing and growing as we are. It's not purely process-based, because in some way that I can't define (yet?) the unknown future is speaking to us nonetheless, calling us into a prophetic life. I'll be coming back to how an unknown future might speak to us in the present at a later date.
I find all this pretty exciting. I realise that this might be my temperament, that I am just well disposed to seeing myself as part of an emerging stoty, whereas others lean more towards wanting the world to be clear and easily defined, and others reject any kind of overarching purpose. I'm happy to be critiqued, but please be gentle - my brain is flexing muscles that haven't been used for a while, so I'm bound to be a bit wobbly.
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