Hemingway: The Writer as Synoptic Commentator

By Joseph Frankovic

(May 2008)

This paper is dedicated to

Professor Joseph Faulds of Northeastern State University.
 

Prior to composing The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Miller Hemingway had been reflecting on great personalities of the Christian Church, including its founder Jesus of Nazareth.  His biographer, Carlos Baker, once remarked, “Hemingway had interested himself in the proposition that there must be a resemblance, in the nature of things, between Jesus Christ” and the many and often nameless contributors to Christian history who belonged “to the category of ‘good men.’”  Baker also noted Hemingway’s conclusion that these good men “may therefore be seen as disciples of Our Lord, whatever the professed degree of their Christian commitment.”[1]  When writing his Noble Prize winning novella, Hemingway sculpted Santiago’s character to fit squarely within the category of good men.  Being a good man, the worn fisherman embodied four of the major characteristics associated with discipleship, as it is portrayed in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  Hemingway articulated his proposition so successfully that The Old Man and the Sea should be treated as a de facto commentary on Synoptic discipleship.

Dr. Robert L. Lindsey, the former pastor of the Narkis Street Baptist Congregation in Jerusalem, Israel, noted that “Jesus’ way appears to have been to find men . . . who would be willing to ‘leave all and follow him.’  He was to make out of them a Kingdom—a movement—which . . . would eventually burst the bonds of locality and nationality.”[2]  Lindsey implied that “to enter the kingdom of heaven” and “to leave all and follow” refer to the same decisive moment.  In other words, to enter this “Kingdom” constitutes the first step of becoming a disciple.[3]  A person who became a disciple of Jesus can be assumed to have entered the kingdom of heaven.  For the purpose of this paper, the current writer will distinguish between entering the kingdom of heaven and inheriting eternal life.  Confusion stems from the temporal relationship of these two Synoptic concepts.  The kingdom of heaven inheres the present; but never ending, it reaches into the future.  To inherit eternal life refers to the future.  A person’s deeds among the quick will influence the decision to grant or withhold that inheritance.

Hemingway was an astute observer of the human condition.  His novels contained no lack of hard realism.  Countenancing the wholeness of life, he recoiled from none of its facets.  He had little tolerance for fictions that obscured contradiction, assuaged horror, or mitigated depravity.  While striving to remain true, he regarded his writing as a transcendent act.  For example, when describing how he sometimes started a new story, Hemingway explained:

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry.  You have always written before and you will write now.  All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.’  So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.  It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.[4] 

These qualities and his approach to writing probably helped Hemingway to detect what may have been the earliest themes of the Synoptic Gospels’ thematic polyphony.  By the time Hemingway sat to write The Old Man and the Sea, he knew many true sentences and some of them were associated with Jesus of Nazareth.  In fashioning Santiago’s character, Hemingway imparted four salient traits to the story’s protagonist: 1) humility, 2) material poverty, 3) tolerance to risk, and 4) celibacy.  These same traits typically accompanied those who responded to Jesus’ first-century call to leave and follow.[5]

In The Beatitudes (51), one finds the famous verse, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  Later in Jesus Blesses the Children (253), one encounters a similar saying, “Do not hinder [the children]; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”[6]  The Greek genitive in both of these verses causes difficulties for translators.  Professor David Flusser, a former New Testament and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar who taught at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, treated the genitive of both verses as partitive.[7]  Following his lead, one ends up with translations indicating that the “poor in spirit” and child-like people constitute the kingdom of heaven (i.e., Jesus’ redemptive movement).[8]  In the Saint Joseph Edition of The New American Bible, the “poor in spirit” are characterized as recognizing “their complete dependence on God.”[9]

In the Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway crafted a touching dialogue about baits involving the boy Manolin and Santiago.  The old man agreed to accept only one, because “his hope and his confidence had never gone.”  Manolin objected, and the worn fisherman immediately agreed.  At that point the narrator spoke: “He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility.  But he knew that he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.”[10]  Later in the story, the narrator described Santiago’s pride as being “long gone.”[11]  Once the great fish had started circling, Santiago addressed God with the simple plea, “help me endure.”[12]  He knew that his strength, resolution, and tricks were useful, but insufficient for subduing the huge creature.[13]

Santiago also possessed a child-like quality.  He often dreamed of lions on an African shoreline.  “He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor his wife.”  His fantastic lions “played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them.”[14]  He also embraced a child-like mythos.  He spoke of the stars and sea creatures as friends and brothers.  Moreover, his relationship with Manolin was horizontal.  What verticalness it contained stemmed from Manolin’s looking up to the legendary angler.[15]

In a few passages of the Synoptic Tradition, material poverty is associated with discipleship.  In On Anxiety (67), Jesus exhorted his auditors to “seek first [God’s] kingdom and his righteousness.”  A big obstacle to such a pursuit apparently was anxiety--worrying about food and clothing.  Jesus pointed out that neither birds nor lilies sowed, reaped, gathered, or spun.[16]  In another pericope, The Rich Young Man (254), a young man approached Jesus with a question: “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”  Jesus’ answer centered on the Ten Commandments, to which the questioner replied, “All of these I have observed from my youth.”  At that moment, Jesus changed the subject of their conversation to becoming a disciple.  “Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”  When the man declined, Jesus remarked, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of [heaven].”[17]  This passage establishes direct links between liquidating one’s material wealth and becoming a disciple and becoming a disciple and entering the kingdom of heaven.  More than any other story in the Synoptic Gospels, The Rich Young Man allows students of the New Testament to see that inheriting eternal life and entering the kingdom of heaven require different things of a person.

In The Old Man and the Sea, when Santiago ate, his food came from Martin, the boy, or he simply tossed a line over the side of his skiff or snagged a patch of shrimp-laden seaweed with a gaff at the moment of need.[18]  In the story, Santiago did think about the money that the great fish would bring at market.[19]  Yet no where in it did he successfully earn money.  He fished, because something had predestined him to do so.  He was “born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish.”[20]

In the beginning of the story, the narrator described Santiago’s furled sail as looking like “the flag of permanent defeat.”  Several pages later the same voice remarked that the boy and the old man regularly acted out fictions.  “There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. . . . There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the boy knew this too.”[21]  Santiago lived in a budshield (guano) shack.  It contained “a bed, a table, one chair, and a place on the dirt floor to cook with charcoal.”[22]  When he went to sleep, the tired fisherman “rolled his trousers up to make a pillow, putting the newspaper inside them.  He rolled himself in the blanket and slept on the other old newspapers that covered the springs of the bed.”[23]  When “there was nothing more” for the sharks to eat, Santiago “sailed lightly” and “had no thoughts nor any feelings of any kind.”  He “was past everything” and “noticed how lightly and how well the skiff sailed now there was no great weight beside her.”  Hemingway probably intended the “great weight” to serve in part as a metaphor for the burden of self-reliance accompanying material gain.  At market the meat would have brought Santiago a handsome price; but all he had left now was the long spinal column, head, and bill of the fish.[24]

According to the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus expected his disciples to be risk takers.  The Parable of the Pounds (266) centers on this theme.[25]  Editorial activity seems to have infused the Lukan version of the parable with historical details associated with Herod Archelaus, a son of Herod the Great.[26]  In the Matthean version, the servant who had received one talent buried it for safekeeping, whereas the other two servants traded with their talents.  They increased the master’s gold by one hundred percent!  As economists know well, yield and risk tend to be directly proportional.  Yet the man who went on the journey punished the fiscally cautious servant and rewarded the two risk takers.  In another place, The Conditions of Discipleship (217),[27] Jesus warned potential followers to consider the cost.  “What king, going to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?”  The implied odds against the would-be disciple can be calculated at two to one.

Hemingway often took risks.  For sport he enjoyed boxing, deep sea fishing, and hunting big game.  He hunted Nazi U-boats in the Caribbean on his private fishing boat.  War attracted Hemingway.  In a letter he disclosed to the New York journalist Lillian Ross, “I wish we could go to war (shoot-shoot war) sometime with Buck Lanham and Chink Dorman-Smith. . . . It is supposed to be a terrible sin to have fun in war.  But we commit it and the three of us are very light-hearted people when the chips are down.”[28]  Apparently his risk-seeking sometimes got him into serious trouble.  On another occasion he remarked to Ross, “Some Africans when they decide to die, just die. . . . [I] have always been playing on the other team and engaged in deciding to live when it is actually impossible.”[29]

Hemingway modeled Santiago after himself in this respect.  When conversing with the boy, Santiago remarked, “If you were my boy I’d take you out and gamble.”[30]  Santiago was thinking about going to the deep water which the largest marlins inhabited.  He followed through with his intentions, and piloted the small skiff to “the deep dark water far out beyond all snares and traps and treacheries . . . beyond all people in the world.”[31]  He went there alone.

None of the Four Gospels indicates that Jesus engaged in sexual activity.  In On Divorce and Celibacy (252), one finds a single-tradition verse in Matthew about eunuchs.  “For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven”[32]  In On Riches and the Rewards of Discipleship (255), Luke implied that a certain tension existed between the demands of discipleship and family obligations.  “There is no man who has left . . . wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of [heaven], who will not receive manifold more in this time and in the age to come.”[33]  This declaration suggests that some voluntarily separated from family members--including spouses--in order to dedicate themselves to the immediate demands of the kingdom of heaven.

As noted above, Santiago no longer dreamed of women, including his wife.[34]  He was a widower and apparently had lost her some time ago.  What visibly remained from the marriage were the relics, “a picture in color of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and another of the Virgin of Cobre.”  He had removed the photograph of her from the wall, because “it made him too lonely.”[35]  Hemingway neither indicated her name nor offered even a hint that their union had produced offspring.  Santiago’s life now revolved around Manolin, fishing, and the playful lions.[36]

Hemingway succeeded in weaving key synoptic themes associated with discipleship and the kingdom of heaven into The Old Man and the Sea.  He molded Santiago’s character around a thematic quartet of humility, material poverty, risk taking, and celibacy.  There are, however, two synoptic themes that he excluded from his novella, and both of these require a plenary metaphysical reality.

In John the Baptist’s Question and Jesus’ Answer (106), John sent two disciples to Jesus with a question about his identity.  He received the following reply: “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the good news preached to them.”[37]  Another pericope, On Collusion with Satan (117), includes a verse making a thaumaturgic connection between Jesus and the kingdom of heaven.  When some spectators slandered Jesus for colluding with Beelzebul, he replied, “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of [heaven] has come upon you.”[38]  This verse clearly identifies Jesus with casting out demons.  Furthermore, the kingdom of heaven’s proximity seems to have supplied the power for dislodging them.  According to another passage, Commissioning the Seventy (177), Jesus selected disciples and sent them in pairs ahead of him.  He gave them instructions.  “Whenever you enter a town and they receive you . . . heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The kingdom of [heaven] has come near to you.’”[39]  This verse indicates that the disciples functioned as healers.  Not only Jesus, but also his disciples were portrayed as healing the sick.  Eight verses later, after they had finished the practicum, the young men gave an assessment to Jesus.  “Even the demons are subject to us in your name!”[40]

The association of miracles with later disciples of Jesus continues into the twenty-first century.  For example, Father Richard M. Thomas, S. J., who labored in Juarez, Mexico acquired a reputation among the poor people whom he served as a healer.[41]  Mother Teresa of Calcutta established Prem Nivas, a center for leprosy patients, Prem Dan, a home for tuberculosis sufferers, and Nirmal Hriday, a home for the destitute and dying.[42]

The second theme missing from Hemingway’s novella involves mysteries of the kingdom and their disclosure to disciples.  In The Reason for Speaking in Parables (123), Jesus informed his disciples that to them “it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven.”[43]  The Synoptic Gospels and Acts of the Apostles further indicate that after the crucifixion, Jesus appeared to a number of his followers.  According to Acts, he revealed himself to the apostles “and gave ample proof that he was alive: he was seen by them over a period of forty days and spoke to them about the kingdom of [heaven].”[44]

Contemporary examples of a similar pattern involving discipleship and epiphanies can be seen in the lives of Mother Teresa and William W. Tomes, a Catholic lay worker who served in Chicago’s housing projects, including Cabrini-Green.  Tomes told a Time magazine reporter that in 1983 he heard the “voice of Christ.”  The voice gave him instructions regarding a mid-life vocational change and told him to follow and trust without fear.[45]  On September 10, 1946, while riding a train, Mother Teresa heard a voice that instructed her to leave the convent and live among the poor.[46]

Hemingway read voraciously.  He applied himself to knowing and to understanding.[47]  He searched for the true sentences of life.  These pursuits sometimes put him in harm’s way.  He went to serve in World War I, to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and to report on World War II.  He enjoyed dangerous sports with big animals—bullfighting, African safaris, and deep sea fishing.  He acquired a familiarity with death.  These habits, traits, and experiences made him a sensitive reader of Christian literature.  He accurately modeled Santiago after patterns that he saw in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Yet he opted to construct Santiago’s character without two key synoptic elements associated with discipleship, namely miracles of healing and revelation.  Hemingway was too good a reader to have missed them in the text and too good an observer to have overlooked them in life.  On a literary level, they simply may not have complemented the storyline of his novella.  On the other hand, their absence could indicate something about Hemingway’s mythos.  He did embrace a transcendent view of creativity and death.  He implied such a view in remarks about how he composed his stories.  He also expressed it through other fictional characters like Anselmo and Pilar of his acclaimed For Whom the Bell Tolls.  That mythos, however, may have accommodated only inchoate soteriological notions.  In addition to being humble, poor, risk-tolerant, and celibate, the worn fisherman inhabited a world with which he was highly integrated; but he possessed no coherent metaphysical vision for mending its frayed elements.  In the language of the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus called his redemptive vision the kingdom of heaven.  Those who joined him to seek it typically possessed from the start (or acquired soon thereafter) Santiago’s four qualities—but they acquired something more, as well.