Building: How You Can, While You Can

Parallel Visions of Our Work in Willa Cather’s Classic ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop’

It’s an ominous title, no? Menacing. Immediate. There’s Death, the Grim Reaper, with his bony fingers extended toward the old cleric in the black cassock, ready to stop his heart and snatch away his very life.

But no. Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop isn’t that kind of book. Set in the American Southwest in the recently annexed territory of New Mexico, there’s a fair share of death on the frontier: The murderous Buck Scales is hanged; an enraged Fray Baltazar Montoya kills an Ácoma Indian boy and is hurled from a mesa for his crime; Padre Martinez incites the Taos Indians to revolt, and an American governor and a dozen attendants lose their scalps.

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (Penguin, 2023).

Most of this Cather tells us in passing, and the titular archbishop is involved in very little of the violence. Instead, Cather offers an extended meditation on work and the diversity of skills we individually bring to our labors in the time we have allotted to accomplish them.

Action vs. Contemplation

An age-old tension exists between a life of action and one of contemplation. In their book Action Versus Contemplation, Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule note the rivalry goes back to the classical age with philosophers pitting one against the other. The unresolved argument then ricochets down through the centuries, pinging this way and that.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” says Blaise Pascal. “You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house,” answers Walt Whitman.

Death Comes for the Archbishop offers Cather’s solution to the dilemma. Through her two primary characters, the eventual archbishop Jean Marie Latour and his righthand man Fr. Joseph Vaillant, she suggests the vita activa and vita contemplativa are parallel, complementary, and mutually reinforcing.

Cather presents Latour as a tall, handsome, and elegant man, an intellectual with a deep appreciation for the nuances of culture. He approaches his work with reserve, determination, and a settled vision of his mission. Meanwhile, Vaillant strides into the picture short, homely, and bow legged from too much time in the saddle. He’s zealous, generous, and practical. He loves people and forms quick and enduring bonds. His motto? “Rest in action.”

Latour’s faith is quiet, interior. Vaillant’s is passionate, expressive. Latour moves patiently and methodically to build up his diocese. Vaillant lunges into action with an eye toward immediate needs.

And one could never succeed without the other. A few episodes demonstrate the point.

What Is a Miracle?

Consider the pair’s differing responses to an account of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Upon hearing the story of the appearance, Vaillant’s glasses fog up and his heart explodes with emotion. “What a priceless thing for the poor converts of a savage country!” he blurts.

All these poor Catholics who have been so long without instruction have at least the reassurance of that visitation. It is a household word with them that their Blessed Mother revealed Herself in their own country, to a poor convert. Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love.

One assumes Latour agrees, but he doesn’t bother saying so. Instead, he steps back and reflects on the nature of miracles themselves. “Where there is great love there are always miracles,” he says after a moment’s pause.

One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. . . . The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

As readers, we can take the moment from either a religious or secular perspective, both if we’re flexible. In the first, Vaillant’s faith responds to the visceral, the practical, while Latour’s is informed by the larger, abstract laws under which any sort of spiritual occurrence might manifest.

In the second, Vaillant takes a phenomenon on first report, while Latour’s slower appraisal provides enough skeptical distance to develop a rationale to examine the phenomenon more thoroughly. He’s willing to trust, but not without knowing what’s he’s agreeing to. That said, Cather informs us that Latour loves his friend’s impetuosity: “It was just this in his friend that was dear to him.”

Neither approach is superior to the other.

Vaillant at Work

Cather gives us several episodes to observe both men in operation, such as when Vaillant arrives at a ranch to regularize marriages and baptize children. Owing to the massive geographical spread of the original diocese, countless underserved Catholics populate Latour’s new region; without a priest, men and women have been coupling without marriage and their children have had no one to baptize them.

Vaillant shows up to administer the sacraments and rectify the situation—late. His horse is poor, and Vaillant arrives behind schedule. When his host tells him the men are off working in the fields and offers to give him a moment’s rest—“a little wine, a little bread, coffee, repose . . . wash the dust from your sainted brow”—Vaillant turns him down or, rather, holds him off.

“A little wine, very willingly, and bread, too,” he says. “But not until afterward.” He means to marry the couples immediately and tells his host to fetch the men from the fields. “A man can stop work to be married.”

But why the rush? His host suggests Vaillant leave the men alone and baptize the children first. “No,” Vaillant objects, “the marriages first, the baptisms afterward; that order is but Christian. I will baptize the children tomorrow morning, and their parents will at least have been married over night.” Nothing will deter Vaillant from his mission, not even his own weariness. He swings down from the saddle and steps up to his work. Rest in action.

Contrast that with an episcopal visit Latour makes to confer with the scandalous Padre Martinez in his parish in Taos—the same priest blamed for stirring the revolt that cost the governor his scalp.

Latour at Work

Martinez rules his parish with charismatic and domineering influence, following his own whims instead of the church’s norms. Bishop and priest argue about clerical celibacy; Martinez opposes it. But Latour doesn’t rise to the fight. Instead, he tells Martinez “quietly” that they’ll discuss the matter at a later date while insisting he will reform such practices as quickly as possible. “I hope it will be but a short time until there is not a priest left who does not keep all the vows he took. . . .”

Martinez objects, claims the local clergy are more devout than European clergy, says Rome has no real authority there, and threatens to start his own church if Latour interferes. But rather than butting heads, as Vaillant would likely do, Latour retreats.

When he returns to Santa Fé, Latour tells Vaillant how the meeting went and why he chose not to discipline Martinez. “It is not expedient to interfere,” he explains. “The church is strong, the people are devout.”

Vaillant presses, wondering if Martinez can be disciplined at all. “The man's life is an open scandal,” he says, “one hears of it everywhere.”

“There is no question of discipline!” Latour insists. But it must be strategic. “He has been a little potentate too long. His people would assuredly support him against a French Bishop.” He doesn’t want to “lose the parish of Taos in order to punish its priest.” No, says Latour, “for the present I shall be blind to what I do not like there.”

Latour is principled but measured. He wishes to maintain the stability of his diocese and knows he can only fight so many battles at once and only with certain tactics. He plays the long game—and wins that way.

Both Approaches Essential

Rather than pit one approach against the other, in scene after scene, passage after passage Cather shows how they harmonize—how the two approaches don’t compete, but rather complete each other. We might be given to one or the other, but we operate imbalanced without them both.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is remarkable for a dozen different reasons, all of them beyond the present scope. Still, I can’t help but mention two: Cather clearly loves her characters and draws them with affection. What’s more, Cather is America’s most underrated landscape artist, though she used neither oils nor watercolors but ink and typewriter ribbons; an example:

Beside the river was a grove of tall, naked cottonwoods—trees of great antiquity and enormous size—so large that they seemed to belong to a bygone age. They grew far apart, and their strange twisted shapes must have come about from the ceaseless winds that bent them to the east and scoured them with sand, and from the fact that they lived with very little water—the river was nearly dry here for most of the year. The trees rose out of the ground at a slant, and forty or fifty feet above the earth all these white, dry trunks changed their direction, grew back over their base line. Some split into great forks which arched down almost to the ground; some did not fork at all, but the main trunk dipped downward in a strong curve, as if drawn by a bowstring; and some terminated in a thick coruscation of growth, like a crooked palm tree. They were all living trees, yet they seemed to be of old, dead, dry wood, and had very scant foliage. High up in the forks, or at the end of a preposterous length of twisted bough, would burst a faint bouquet of delicate green leaves—out of all keeping with the great lengths of seasoned white trunk and branches.

And then back to the title and the message I take from this excellent novel: Death indeed comes. He’s always coming. But he’s a long way off, and there’s work to do in the meantime. How will we go about it? We need a mix of both Latour and Vaillant to succeed.

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Before Death comes for you, check out my review of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia:

The Endless Possibility of Renewal