McCarthy the Gnostic?

What sort of religious vision animates the novels of Cormac McCarthy? That’s the question Todd Edmonson examines in a comparative study of McCarthy and Wendell Berry, Priest, Prophet, Pilgrim.

It’s not an easy question to answer, given McCarthy’s famous reticence about himself and his beliefs. The man won’t even give Oprah a straight answer. When she asked about the “God thing,” McCarthy answered, “Well, it depends on what day you ask me. Who or what to pray . . . doesn’t really matter. You can be quite dumb about the whole business and still ask for help” (quoted p. 104). Not what you’d call revealing.

Edmondson wisely focuses on the works, and concludes that, whatever McCarthy believes, “the perspectives of some of his most prominent characters are very clearly shaped by gnostic and dualistic understandings of the flesh, of community, and of the created world. His characters do not seek reconciliation or integration with the realities from which they are estranged – the flesh, human community, and the natural world. Rather, they either flee from these things or else attempt to subdue and control them, to bend them to their purposes” (230). This produces an often violent sort of gnosticism.

Edmondson doesn’t take depiction for advocacy. Though McCarthy’s characters are “anti-priests, anti-prophets, and anti-pilgrims,” the novels ultimately demonstrate “the dangerous and destructive consequences of embracing such was of life and thus might serve to warn readers against a quest to transcend their humanity” (230). McCarthy’s novels are cautionary tales about modern gnosticism.

Gnostic, Manichean, yes. But I wonder about the use to which McCarthy puts his nightmares. Are they parables of anti-dualism, or grim warnings that an evil is abroad that goodness is incapable of stopping?