On Hemingway’s birthday, a look at his journey of faith
Shutterstock | Kristina Tsvenger
Ernest Hemingway is an American treasure for the gift of literature he bequeathed us starting some 100 years ago in, among other works, The Sun Also Rises, his debut novel.
Known for pioneering the first great writing style of the 20th century, where journalism meets the King James Bible, this larger-than-life figure loved chasing marlin off the Florida Keys, sharing a round (or four) of drinks with friends, and, of course, writing — his most important endeavor.
Yet what is less well known about this legend is that foundational to his life and writing was a deep faith and spirituality — hidden iceberg-like.
Hemingway’s story is a quintessentially American. It is one about which I write in Hemingway’s Faith — “the most revealing portrait of the inner-Hemingway since A Moveable Feast,” wrote Charles Scribner III, scion of the publishing family that gave us, among other great writers, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Happy birthday
He was born 126 years ago today in Oak Park, Illinois, where the saloons stopped and the church steeples began.
The First Congregational Church in Oak Park, steeped in fire and brimstone, is where his father’s family worshiped, counterbalanced by Grace Episcopal Church, attended by his maternal grandfather, Ernest Miller Hall, who imbued his young grandson Ernie with a palpable sense of “his friend” God’s enveloping love.
Completed in 1898, its architecture emphasized Catholic spirituality eschewed by the Protestant Reformation, and was soon followed by St. Edmond’s Catholic Church, built in 1907, as the Victorian era, one of high social and moral codes and standards, was giving way, with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, to a laxer Edwardian era.
Growing up, Hemingway was keenly aware of and bothered by what he perceived as the disconnect between what was preached and what was practiced. So it was, when he arrived in Italy as a Red Cross ambulance driver in the summer of 1918, that he was immediately drawn to the richness of Catholicism and its healing grace.
The story he tells in A Farewell to Arms parallels his own, down to the dress of the priest, who befriended him in the officer’s mess hall, Don Guiseppi Bianchi, and who anointed him with viaticum after Hemingway was mortally wounded on the Italian front in World War I, not knowing if he would live or die, praying “with almost tribal faith” for the intercession of “Our Lady and various saints.”
Prayers answered, Mary was his go-to intercessor all his life as he struggled to maintain the Catholic faith to which he converted that summer, attending Mass at the Milan Duomo, though he fell away twice — after he married his first wife, who was a Protestant, and not too fond of Catholicism; then again when he married his third wife. That marriage was not built on a spiritual foundation and that was that.
An admittedly “dumb Catholic,” Hemingway could have easily straightened out his marriages. Notwithstanding his failure to do so, by which he lost the state of grace, he struggled spiritually and understood that work and writing — sport, too, especially bullfighting, he enthused to Ralph Withington Church in Paris — was a source of actual grace.
Years of hard living — and a hereditary imprint leading to depression, plus therapeutics and treatments that failed him — resulted in a life cut short. Yet God is the judge of his final days when he was so sick, and God’s grace so abundant.
Loving Mary
He knew the spiritual score and quietly practiced his Catholic faith through the years, showing his devotion to Mary — notably donating his 1954 gold Nobel medal to the Virgin of El Cobre — Our Lady of Charity — Cuba’s national saint.
Two years earlier, in The Old Man and the Sea, a story of chasing a marlin devoured by sharks, his protagonist, Santiago, though “not religious,” said, “I will say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Mary’s that I should catch this fish, and I promise to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of El Cobre if I catch him. That is a promise.”
A promise kept.
As his friend George Herter affirmed, Hemingway’s faith was real, rooted in his love of Mary, whom he considered God’s “listening post” on earth.
“Hemingway was a strong Catholic,” Herter told H. R. Stoneback, the premier scholar of Hemingway’s Catholicism. “His religion came mainly from the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. He told me several times that if there was no Bible, was no manmade Church laws, the apparitions proved beyond any doubt that the Catholic Church was the true church.”
A story whose time has come.
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