The Catholic Novel of the Year—Michael D. O'Brien's Theophilos

©2010, Randall A. Beeler

The Shroud is an icon written in blood; the blood of man who has been whipped, crowned with thorns, crucified and wounded in the right side. The image on the Shroud is that of a dead man, but the blood speaks of his life. Each trace of blood speaks of love and of life.
(Pope Benedict XVI on the Shroud of Turin)

Then did old words of defeat arise in my heart again … I could not face my broken heart, and beneath it my dismay, and still deeper I saw waiting for me my despair over the fate of man that I keep ever within its urn.
—The Character, Theophilos, from Michael D. O'Brien's, Theophilos

At first glance, Theophilos appears to be a work of historical fiction—yet, in a much more profound sense, it is an examination of conscience for the present age: an examen of original sin and salvo of original grace.

The protagonist is Theophilos, the correspondent whom Luke mentions at the beginning of Luke's Gospel and Acts. The Greek-born son of a man freed from slavery, Theophilos seems free of both the slavery his father endured and the delusions imposed by the world and the excesses of passion.

A practicing physician on the Isle of Crete, Theophilos is every bit the modern rationalist—but with the soul of a virtuous pagan. In fact, Theophilos is an archetype of the best that the world and human effort, intellect, and technos have to offer. A fitting Virgil to lead us through the ancient world in the decades immediately following the Death and Resurrection of Iesous the Christos, he guides us pilgrim readers through the follies and glories of humankind in a journey that stretches beyond a particular age. The suspense of the plot is evoked in our—and Theophilos'—haunting doubt as to whether ours is the path to Inferno or Purgatorio.

Rescuing Loukas (Luke) from a plague that has wasted Loukas' mother (Theophilos' sister), father, and city (Thessalonika), Theophilos takes the boy to his home on Crete, raising the child as his own and training him in medicine, a labor and science that Theophilos again and again heroically and vainly wields against the forces of chaos.

For, outside Theophilos' well-stocked library and even the walls of his home town lurks man's capacity for evil. Repeatedly, the good physician struggles to snatch a few more years of life for one of his patients, only to witness humanity's thirst for death. In a defining scene, Theophilos confronts the reality of human evil, encapsulated in the pax Romana's enforcement of crucifixion:

Before my eyes hung eight men in hell. They were naked, their skin burned by the sun, covered in wounds, their mouths gaping, lips cracked, tongues hanging out. All fluids or matter that could escape such bodies had already been poured out, and what blood remained within them cruelly prolonged the slow ticking of their hearts … The feet of the dying were nailed to the posts near the ground, and I … might have put pain-deadening oils onto their wounds, had I any with me, but a full amphora of oil would not have covered their bodies, such was their condition. I had nothing to give them. (69)

Theophilos' surgically precise description merely underlines the conclusion that Theophilos cannot himself see—that no amount of human intellect or achievement can salve evil. The rest of the book is a meditation on the physician who cannot heal himself and the worldly agonies that tear open his heart.

His adopted Loukas follows a certain Christos, one anointed with something more than an amphora of healing oil. Worried about the delusion his protege has fallen under, Theophilos embarks on an odyssey to rescue Loukas from the clutches of superstition and to clasp to what dignity he can in the face of the great finality, death.

A master of the philosophic, scientific, and technological achievements of his day, Theophilos admirably displays the classical virtues in his crusade to forestall the decay of all that is noble—a nobility that his merely human virtues do not equip him to see in those whose physical and moral depravities offer a typology of his own gaping spiritual wounds:

"This shameless ape does not deserve our services," I growled … Loukas knelt beside the pallet and took the hand of Balbus in one of his own … To my amazement, he stroked [the hideous man's] forehead gently … What remains in my memory is the look Loukas gave to the man as he awoke, and the answering look—first surprise, then disbelief, followed by tears of gratitude or shame, I do not know which. (57-58)

Like Aeneas carrying his father from burning Troy, Theophilos is Antique pagan man—and the best of contemporary man—struggling to save from the burning ruins of human civilization something that marks our dignity and purpose in the cosmos. Theophilos dialogues with the young Loukas upon the latter's interpretation of the Aeneid, both physicians assenting to the vanity of human effort, even that of the greatest empire in history:

"the dream of noble Rome, the forgiving and just Rome, is an illusion … the sword is always thrust into those whom she conquers." (47)

But Loukas adds an important coda that foreshadows his—and the pagan world's—embracing an unforeseen hope: the resurrected Christos, who carries us out of the flames:

"There is a scene I love most of all … when Troy is burning and Aeneas … escapes carrying his aged father on his back—and with his little son clinging to his hand." (47-48)

I will not tell you here whether Theophilos is saved from the burning ruins of the City of Man … for that story is our own story—the story of our age, which is yet in the telling. In the meantime, O'Brien invites our age to dare believe that we are not "shameless apes" deserving to die in our burning cities.

Read Theophilos to discover why.

In that "time-beyond-time" Jesus Christ "descended to Hades" ... God-made-man reached the point of entering into the extreme and absolute solitude of man, where no ray of love reaches, where total abandonment reigns, where there is no word of comfort: "Hades." Jesus Christ, by dwelling in death, crossed the threshold of this ultimate solitude in order to lead us to cross it with Him ... Human beings live because they are loved and can love. And if love has penetrated even into the place of death, then life has arrived there too. In the hour of extreme solitude we will never be alone: "Passio Christi—Passio hominis." (Pope Benedict XVI on the Shroud of Turin)