ARTICLES

From Vampires to Jesus

Anne Rice's Return to the Faith

BY MATTHEW LICKONA

"Today, I'm a packer," says Anne Rice's assistant as we wait for the author to arrive in the living room of her La Jolla home. The assistant is packing for a move -- only a year after leaving Louisiana for the Pacific, Rice is moving again, this time to the desert. But before she leaves, she is happy to discuss her book "with anybody who really wants to take the trouble to ask."

As of February 2006, novelist Anne Rice's first-person account of Jesus' boyhood, entitled Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, had sold some 300,000 copies. The numbers aren't unusual for Rice; it's the way they got there that's new. Usually, she says, sales are strong at the outset, "or sustained for a while and then gradually tapering off." This time, sales started more slowly -- not surprising, given the shift in theme from Rice's earlier work, which included darkly-themed tales of vampires and witches. This time, sales are building as they go; this time, word is spreading. Rice herself has frequented a number of blogs that have mentioned the book and has even engaged in debates in the comments boxes. It's more than marketing. Rice has a message she wants to share with the world.

"There are a lot of new readers, coming from different places, and that's what's amazing. Many just say, 'I truly never thought about it before; this made it real.' Or, 'I'm going back to the Church.' And that's terrific, to read something like that."

It's not the first time Rice's fiction has helped draw people to religion. "After I wrote Memnoch the Devil, there were people who wrote and said that the description of heaven in that book caused them to go back to the Church. I was amazed; I was staggered. I didn't expect that to happen -- it hadn't made me go back. I was on the way, though."

Rice left the Catholic faith of her childhood once she got to college, over 40 years ago. "It was a very repressive, puritanical Catholicism," she recalls. "It was worlds away from the kind of theology we talk about today. It seemed, on the surface, to be very anti-humanist. I'm not totally sure what 'Jansenist' means, but the word came up at the time with regard to certain elements. I'm pro-body. I've always believed in the idea that wisdom comes from the physical, but that was very much against the way I was brought up."

Whatever its character, her faith wasn't enough to stand up to her encounters with college's combination of ideas and experience -- let alone the death of her daughter Michele from leukemia at age five, a trauma which brought her up against despair.

Michele died in 1972; four years later, Rice published Interview with the Vampire, the book that sparked her ascent into the ranks of best-selling authors. It's usually wise to avoid reading an author's life into a novel, but Rice grants that her vampire protagonists were not chosen arbitrarily. "Louis, Lestat, Armand -- they all felt as though they were damned. That they couldn't find God again, that God didn't exist for them. But they never stopped looking. They constantly searched for other ports of salvation and transcendence. That's the way I felt. The very act of writing the book was an attempt to be saved," even if the salvation was woefully incomplete. "Their being made into vampires" -- victims, arbitrarily cast into a darkness from which there was no redemption -- "was an accurate mirror of the way I felt about being human."

But however much she despaired about the possibility of belief, Rice never forgot that there were "wonderful things" about her childhood faith -- devotional art among them. "I started collecting that art in the 1980s. I was really finding my way back. It was part of a search, part of wanting to come back. I went to Israel, just to visit all the holy sites, telling myself the whole time that I was really an atheist, that it didn't mean anything to me, but I wanted to study it to see why it meant so much to other people.

"In New Orleans, I collected a lot of devotional art -- not priceless art, not museum collectibles, but just local parish art. I had many, many religious statues that were rescues from junk shops and antique stores. It started on Magazine Street, which is sort of the lower-priced second string of antique stores -- the French Quarter is the first string. There was a wonderful wooden statue of Saint Anthony in one of those shops, and I bought it, and that's where it sort of started."

(A pious soul might be tempted to murmur here, "St. Anthony, finder of lost things....")

"Then I began to see others, and people began to call me: 'I have a set of stations of the cross that came out of your parish church from 1850.' I bought all these different things; it was more preservation than anything else. To save these things, and put them together where people could see them. I owned this great big old 1880s convent-orphanage," and the art went on display throughout. "The chapel was preserved. We had statues throughout the chapel, and we also had these beautiful stations of the cross that had come from a country French church. We had another set that went up the stairs, and yet another set."

Rice holds that "all Christian art is evangelical. Maybe Michelangelo wasn't thinking evangelically when he did the Pieta, but the effect is evangelical."

It's tempting to speculate about Rice's relation to her religious art -- the impulse to collect, the decision to display, the effect of all those images -- especially when Rice notes that after her return to the Catholic Church in 1998, "probably, the artifacts ceased to matter so much."

Having recovered faith, she was free of the reminders. Before she left New Orleans for a brief residence in the Louisiana suburbs and her subsequent sojourn in La Jolla, she "placed them all with different parishes and priests. They all went back into active duty."*

But according to the essay included at the end of Christ the Lord, it was history more than aesthetics that finally started her on the road back. In the course of historical research, she writes, "I stumbled on a mystery without a solution, a mystery so immense that I gave up trying to find an explanation because the whole mystery defied belief. The mystery was the survival of the Jews.... It was this mystery that drew me back to God. It set into motion the idea that there may in fact be God."

That idea eventually led to a conclusion about a particular Jew and the religion His followers founded: "Christianity achieved what it did because Jesus rose from the dead." This is why she won't write any more vampire novels: "They were what I wrote when I felt like that. The world that I see now and feel now is a world in which redemption is a crucial part."

By 1998, Rice found herself longing for Communion. "I don't know why; I just know it drew me back. But then, the blood in the vampire novels is obviously a Eucharistic symbol. So there is clearly some obsession on my part with Eucharistic symbolism. I think it runs through everything I write -- not just the vampire chronicles. The whole mystery of the Incarnation -- what it means that Christ came down. It was that that drew me back: I wanted to go to Communion. I thought, 'The rest of the theological questions can wait.'"

And she did have theological questions. She still does. Nearly every profile of Rice that has run in the months surrounding the release of Christ the Lord has mentioned that her son Christopher is gay and that she hopes the Church's position on homosexual sex -- the Catechism states that "tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered'" -- will one day change. However, she notes that she is "not sure that the impression some interviews give is the accurate impression. I have personal dreams, but I don't speak for the Catholic Church, and I don't speak for a group of Catholics. I'm not stridently against my Church at all. I'm troubled. Conscience is very, very important. It's our conscience that tells us to be Catholic, and my conscience tells me to love gay people. I can't back off from that. I know how badly gay persons want to be part of the Church."

If the change did come, she does not think it would mean the repudiation of Catholic teaching. "I think the problem is how we interpret Scripture and how we interpret the law of God. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that this does change over time. There were people in this country 150 years ago who believed slavery was based on Scripture. They believed women shouldn't be given anesthesia in childbirth because Genesis said they were to bear their children in sorrow. We do change; it seems theologically impossible right now, but that doesn't mean it is impossible. I hope that we will continue to study this subject and listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit."

Still, she does acknowledge that a reversal of the teaching "would be a huge revolution, because it really would be a divorce of sex and procreation. I don't know the answer. I'm just beginning to study the theology that pertains to this, and it's awe-inspiring."

She understands that the body matters, not least because Christ took one at the Incarnation. "Jesus had a body; He came and lived in a body, and died in a body."

Pondering that, meditating on that, trying to give that some meaning, "is something that you can do all your life." It's also what Rice is about in Christ the Lord. "Obviously, Jesus came here to have something to do with our experience. Why did he come for 30 years? He could have come for five minutes. It has something to do with experience. There are passages in Scripture that clearly indicate that he wanted to go through things in a human way." For one thing, "he grew up." For another, in Rice's account, he had to figure out what he was doing here. In the book, the young Jesus has an epiphany: "I was sent here to be alive" -- with death as an integral part of the experience. With Christ the Lord, Rice is imagining what it must have been like for the second person of the Trinity to live as a boy, and to discover His own history.

She got help from an ocean of research -- the book drips with historical detail -- and from Scripture, which she regards as the primary source -- or at least, one not to be contradicted. Yes, she draws from apocryphal Gospels -- among them the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. But when the boy Jesus shouts, "You'll never get where you're going" to a bully and so kills him, Rice borrows from Mark's formulation: "and the power went out of him." It slips out, without conscious thought. (Jesus restores the boy to life.)

The young Jesus is often afraid -- "violence and mayhem" often figure in the days after his family's return to Palestine. In such cases, "you're bound to feel fear," says Rice. Because Jesus got Himself mixed up with human experience, Rice felt free to draw upon her own.

Dealing with His consciousness -- a problem all but necessitated by the first-person format -- was trickier. "What do you know when you're seven years old?" asks Jesus at the book's outset. Says Rice, "I believe He was God and man, but it seems to me from Scripture that He chose not to access all that knowledge all the time. He wanted certain knowledge to come to Him through experience. That was a choice. I was walking a fine line there in the book," a line that gives rise to Jesus saying things such as this during a vision of angels: "you come, but you don't know what I know, do you? No, you don't know. And how do I know that?" Or again, during a vision of Satan: "Oh, I see now ... I didn't before. When you're with me like this, you don't know what's going to happen, do you? You don't know what's to come!.... That's your doom that you don't know how it will end."

Eventually, Satan makes his case against Jesus, and Jesus, sensing his omniscience, is tempted to answer. "I looked at him. I knew that if I wanted to, I could answer him. The words would come easily and they would tell me things I didn't know now; they would draw this knowledge out of my mind.... But no, it wasn't to happen. No, not this way or any other way." Of course, this vision occurs during a fevered dream, which, notes Rice, means that "you're working with this idea of altered or expanded consciousness.... Losing conscious control; He slips into an altered state. I think, as I go on into the second book, that I'll be clearer about what pushes Him to access omniscience. There's an enormous amount of meditative thinking before something is written -- a lot of insights for the book came to me right while I was saying the Rosary. At this point, I only want to write His life," to put flesh on the bones of the old story.

TOP