W I N T E R 2011
THE COVENANT OF SLOTH ]lust0to0annihilate} R.J. Snell
I
know of no depictions of violence more horrifying than those given by the novelist Cormac McCarthy, now most famous for No Country for Old Men and The Road. And of all his terrors, I know of none more awful than the depravity unveiled in Blood Meridian through the character of Judge Holden, one of the most satanic figures ever concocted. Accurately understood as a type for strife and war, I find the judge guilty also of a vice the Christian tradition labels acedia, or sloth. What’s most disturbing is how com‐ pellingly a character of fiction exposes our current cultural reality. The basic underlying disease of the judge—revolt against the grace of creation—infects the West deeply now. Not just a mythic character of American fiction, the judge, i.e., sloth, tries to embrace us all, seeking to place each of us under his terrible covenant. As we become like him, rejecting the thickness of the created order, our freedom be‐ comes unbearably light and we bleach out the dignity of the real in a fit of violence; we embrace a culture of death. In Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West McCarthy re‐ counts the episodes of John Joel Glanton’s nihilistic and overwhelm‐ ingly violent gang of bounty‐hunters as they slaughter, rape, scalp, maim, and desecrate their way across the Southwest. Just reading the book leaves one feeling assaulted, so relentless are the depictions of meaningless violence played out in an equally endless and harsh desert. Brutality pervades as any hope for salvation is quickly extin‐ guished. “War endures,” and any other pattern or order is ground into dust before that “ultimate trade.” Looking to Blood Meridian helps us grasp a particular trajectory of our culture; fiction puts us in stark relief, perhaps fully recognizable for the first time. 83