The Thanatos Syndrome
Thanatos Syndrome is a 1987 novel by Walker Percy, set in Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. I first read it a few years after it was published, and — like Malachi Martin’s 1990 book The Keys of This Blood — I read it because my father gave me a copy.
In Greek Mythology, Thanatos is the personification of death.
I’ve re-read the novel a couple of times since then, loaned or lost my copy, bought another copy last week and read it again.
Percy was a Southern writer. He was born in 1916, converted to the Catholic faith in 1947 and died in 1990.
The protagonist, who tells the story in the first-person, is a psychiatrist named after St. Thomas More: lawyer, judge, statesman, husband, father, and writer of Utopia.
Dr. Tom More’s Catholic priest friend is Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, whose patron saint is St. Simeon the Stylite: the monk and hermit who spent decades living and praying in the desert atop pillars.
In the novel, Father Smith lives for awhile in a fire tower.
Thanatos Syndrome was timely, as I understand even more deeply putting together the series on Congressional enabling statutes from 1983 to the present.
And it was more than a little prophetic, addressing scientific hubris and corruption, technocracy and civic decay, family disruption, abortion, AIDS, euthanasia, and mass murder shrouded in platitudes about the common good and normalized through mass media and other forms of behavioral manipulation, encapsulated in a haunting phrase Father Smith repeats to Tom from time to time: “Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.”
Toward the end of the story, Father Smith speaks to Tom about the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who appeared to six Croatian teenagers starting on June 24, 1981, in the village of Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
…The hospice opens and down he comes from the fire tower in his right mind and very much in charge. Very much his old wiry, vigorous self, he jokes with the children, listens to the endless stories of the senile, talks at great length with the dying. He calls on me only when the depression and terrors of his AIDS patients are more than he can handle. We do little more than visit with them, these haggard young men, listen, speak openly, we to them, they to us, and we to each other in front of them, about them and about our own troubles, we being two old drunks and addled besides. They advise us about alcohol, diet, and suchlike. It seems to help them and us. At least they laugh at us.
But when he invited me to serve Mass routinely, because I was visiting the hospice early every morning, I refused. It is easy to say no at the hospice, because honesty is valued above all. I told him the truth: that since I no longer was sure what I believe, didn’t think much about religion, participation in Mass would seem to be deceitful.
He nodded cheerfully, as if he already knew.
“Don’t worry,” he said, doing a few isometrics in the hall, pushing and pulling with his hands. “It is to be expected. It is only necessary to wait and to be of good heart. It is not your fault.”
“How is that, Father?” I ask him curiously.
“You have been deprived of the faith. All of us have. It is part of the times…
The story of the apparitions is well known. Of course, no one knows for certain whether the Virgin appeared to them. The Church does not know. Many pious people believe that she did. That is not what interests me.
It is one small detail which they related about one of the many apparitions which seemed so outlandish that no one could make sense of it and either laid it to childish fantasy or overlooked it altogether.
You recall that though she identified herself as the Mother of God, one of the children related that she appeared not as the Queen of Heaven with a serpent under one foot and a cloud under the other, crowned with stars and so on — but as an ordinary-looking young red-cheeked Jewish girl, which of course she probably was.
But what she told them on this one occasion and which they related without seeming to understand what they were saying was this: Do you know why this century has seen such terrible events happen? The Turks killing two million Armenians, the Holocaust, Hitler killing most of the Jews in Europe, Stalin killing fifteen million Ukrainians, nuclear destruction unleashed, the final war apparently inevitable?
It is because God agreed to let the Great Prince Satan have his way with men for a hundred years — this one hundred years, the twentieth century.
And he has. How did he do it? No great evil scenes, no demons — he’s too smart for that. All he had to do was leave us alone. We did it. Reason warred with faith. Science triumphed. The upshot? One hundred million dead.
Could it be a test like Job’s? Then one must not lose hope even though the final war seems inevitable as this terrible century draws to a close. Because almost everyone has lost hope. Christians speak of the end time. Jews of the hopelessness of the mounting Arab terror. Even unbelievers, atheists, humanists, TV anchormen have lost hope — you’ve heard how these commentators speak in their grave style, which conceals a certain Ed Murrow delectation of doom. Do you think that there is a secret desire for it?
But you must not lose hope, she told the children. Because if you keep hope and have a loving heart and do not secretly wish for the death of others, the Great Prince Satan will not succeed in destroying the world.
In a few years this dread century will be over. Perhaps the world will end in fire and the Lord will come — it is not for us to say.
But it is for us to say, she said, whether hope and faith will come back into the world. What do you think?”
“What? Oh. Do you mean about Yugo— about the ah predictions. Very interesting. Well, Father, I really must be—”
“So don’t worry about it,” says the priest…
“And to be specific in your case, Tom… Do what you are doing. You are on the right track. Continue with the analysis and treatment of your patients…I have watched you. Carry on. Keep a good heart.”
"Tenderness leads to the gas chamber." - That needs to be my new mantra.
More of those roots to draw from!