Morality: Law, Mercy and Love
“God so loved the world that He gave his only Son” [John 3:16].
Portrait of “Cosette” from the original edition of Les Misérables (1862)
The musical, Les Misérables, is based on the 1862 novel of the same name by French author Victor Hugo. Widely esteemed as one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, it follows the intertwining stories of a cast of French characters as they struggle for redemption and revolution in the early 19th century. The story begins in 1815, the year of Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. The ensemble of characters includes prostitutes, student revolutionaries, factory workers, and others. This powerfully moving play is a rich pot of themes, some of which can pull at the heart strings even as they incite theological interest.
On social justice
From the outset, when good, innocent people turned into beggars and criminals, what is at once exposed for condemnation is the unjust class-based structure of nineteenth-century French society. In particular, viewers sense that three areas are in serious need of reform: education, criminal justice, and the treatment of women. It is easy for the audience to see that even in a different space and time from the life context portrayed in the musical, these three problems continue to play out in different ways in our twenty-first century community, including the Church.
Fantine, who appears early in the play, symbolises the many good but impoverished women driven to despair and death by a cruel society. Abandoned by her aristocratic lover, her reputation is in ruin for bearing an illegitimate child. Her lack of education leaves her in the mercy of the scribe to whom she dictates her letters. When he opens his mouth, the whole town knows her secret. And when the factory where she works fires her for immorality, her last resort is prostitution to earn the money to pay for her daughter to stay at an extortionate foster home. In her suffering, the author exposes the hypocrisy of a society that fails to educate girls and ostracizes women while encouraging deplorable behaviour by heartless men.
Also in the French society of Les Misérables, justice is clumsy at best. It barely punishes the worst criminals so that robbers and murderers may receive short prison sentences while it tears apart the lives of people who commit petty crimes, incarcerating them for decades and turning them into hardened criminals. Jean Valjean, the main character in the story, is just one of the countless victims of the system. Convicted for stealing a loaf of bread to feed her sister’s dying child, he went to prison for five years plus an additional fourteen years for attempting to escape. Faced with the impersonal prison system, the refrain in his fellow-prisoners’ work song is:
Look down, look down
Don’t look ’em in the eye.
Look down look down
You’re here until you die.
When Valjean is released on parole after nineteen years on the chain gang, the French criminal-justice system has done two things to him. First, it has transformed a simple, poverty-stricken, one-time-only bread-thief into a hardened career criminal – sneaky and bitter. Second, the yellow ticket-of-leave he must, by law, display has practically condemned him to be an outcast, never to be gainfully employed again. The unforgiving society adds a third, making sure he will forever be plagued by a small mistake he made in his past. His lament is sung thus:
Now every door is closed to me.
Another jail. Another key. Another chain.
For when I come to any town
They check my papers
And they find the mark of Cain.
In their eyes
I see their fear:
‘We do not want you here.’
If Valjean commits crimes again, the viewers struggle with the nagging question: Ostracised and un-employable, what do you expect him to do to survive and to go on living? Since no inn would let him stay the night, he sleeps on the street. He is no St Joseph, yet he knows how Joseph must have felt when “there was no place for them in the inn” (Lk 2:7). He is no Jesus of Nazareth, yet he can resonate well with Jesus who said: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20).
On the redeeming power of love and mercy
Only the saintly Bishop Myriel, a provincial Bishop of Digne, treats him kindly, providing him a meal and a bed. But Valjean, embittered by years of hardship, repays him by stealing his silverware before sneaking away in the night. Caught and brought back by the police, Valjean is astonished when the Bishop lies to the police to save him, stating that what is in his possession was given to him, and presenting him with two additional silver candlesticks. The bishop’s words, in ways open to deep reflections, recall the father’s words to the servants upon the return of the young prodigal in the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15):
That is right,
But my friend, you left so early
Something surely slipped your mind.
You forgot I gave these also
Would you leave the best behind?
So, messieurs, you may release him
For this man has spoken true.
I commend you for your duty
And God’s blessing goes with you.
And remember this, my brother
See in this some higher plan.
You must use this precious silver
To become an honest man.
By the witness of the martyrs
By the Passion and the Blood
God has raised you out of darkness
I have bought your soul for God!
This is an over-the-top generosity. This is mercy beyond description. The hardened criminal is free to laugh himself silly afterwards. But, face-to-face with compassion and mercy, Valjean is stunned to his senses and experiences a profound change inside. Never before in his life has anyone treated him in this way. Never before has he experienced such love and mercy. He vows to start his life anew, to be a force for good.
What have I done,
Sweet Jesus, what have I done?….
He told me that I have a soul.
How could he know?
What spirit comes to move my life?
Is there another way to go?
I am reaching but I fall,
And the night is closing in,
And I stare into the void
To the whirlpool of my sin.
I’ll escape now from the world
From the world of Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean is nothing now.
Another story must begin.
When Valjean appears on stage holding his hat in one hand and another hand placed over his heart, the director suggests a gesture of reverence and respect. As the character goes down on one knee as in genuflection, he draws out the spiritual and religious dimension. In all this, the director brings out Hugo’s vision on the reality of human redemption, despite everything. In the depth of desolation, the prodigal son is able to “come to his senses” (Luke 15:17) and says, “I will arise and return to my father.” Valjean too, despite all that he has gone through and what he has become, he still has his most fundamental principle – his fundamental option to do good – intact.
On life and morality
Here too is Hugo’s critique against law enforcement. The only effect of Valjean’s nineteen years of mistreatment on the chain gang is that he becomes sneaky and vicious – a sharp contrast to the effect of the bishop’s kindness, which sets Valjean on the right path overnight. Readers of John’s Gospel would recall how Jesus treats the woman caught in adultery, approaching her with compassion and saving her from the murderous mob, in sharp contrast to the religious leaders who threw the law books at her and demanding her death. The woman in John 8 does not really need Jesus’ gentle reminder, “Go and sin no more”. Like Valjean who encountered the saintly bishop, her encounter with Jesus is life-changing enough! No, she did not need it; but we do. The story was written for our instructions – for we, St John may be read as suggesting, need Jesus’ reminder more than she did.
Over the years, Valjean rises to become a businessman and mayor of a town, a man reputed for his wisdom and charity. But Valjean’s turnaround in life does not satisfy everyone. Javert, a policeman, strongly upholds the letter of the law and rigidly lives by the code. To him, Valjean remains a criminal and must return to prison from where he escaped, just to fulfill his duties to the State. All his good works benefiting the whole spectrum of society as mayor counts for nothing, and his love and care for his adopted daughter Corsett promised to the dying Fontaine matters naught. In Javert’s eyes, Valjean, once a law-breaker is always a law-breaker, to be brought to justice, to keep society ‘safe’.
Life has a way of writing strange twists. Valjean saves Javert from the hands of the students in the thick of civil rebellion who want to put him to death. In turn, Javert feels compelled not to arrest Valjean. But the lives of people with Javert’s vision of life and morality are held together only by legal threads where every “i” is dotted and every ‘t’ crossed. Thus, they have sent men to their death on those principles. Now, if life and morality are guided along the principles of mercy and love, what has he done by sending men and women to their peril and long-suffering for stealing a mere morsel of bread? But if life is about the rigorous upholding of the legal code, must he not now die for breaking the law in letting Valjean go? The one who breaks the law, does not deserve life. Javert is all confused: with a heart hardened on the law, he knows not what it is like to forgive or to be forgiven.
How can I now allow this man
to hold dominion over me?
This desp’rate man that I have hunted…
He gave me my life. He gave me freedom.
should have perished by his hand
It was his right.
It was my right to die as well.
Instead I live – but live in hell.
And my thoughts fly apart.
Can this man be believed?
Shall his sins be forgiven?
Shall his crimes be reprieved?
And must I now begin to doubt ,
who never doubted all those years?
My heart is stone and still it trembles.
The world I have known is lost in shadow.
Is he from heaven or from hell?
And does he know
that, granting me my life today,
this man has killed me even so?
Here, Hugo links Judas Iscariot clutching his pieces of silver to Javert clutching his vision of justice, choosing death, and drowning himself in the River Seine. In both Judas and Javert, covetousness and legalism eclipse life, contrasting sharply with Jesus’ vision where people are more important than principles and structures. Jesus said: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Viewers regret that Javert, like Judas, chooses suicide over confronting mercy. Christian hope turns to Jean Valjean, who embraces forgiveness and goes on to live the way of Christ.
In all this, we see the inherent danger of ecclesial legalism. Truly, followers of Christ should endeavour to steer themselves away from becoming modern day scribes and Pharisees, big on enforcing the letters of the law, but hypocritically neglecting the very spirit – the true essence – of the law. While laws and rules are necessary for the smooth functioning of community life, we always have to be mindful of the danger of becoming overly generous in prescribing rules and laws for the faithful to follow. The words of the venerable Yves Congar, an influential theologian during the Second Vatican Council, made a cardinal just before his death, are useful anywhere anytime: “…the Church is not walls, or barriers either, but people, the faithful.”
Christianity is neither about rules nor about dogmas, but it is first and foremost about helping people to become the best human persons they possibly can – the children of God. Put people first, not rules and structures. Help people, like the way Bishop Myriel helped Valjean, by writing the moral laws not in a book, but in the hearts of men and women. Applied to life in the Catholic Church, we have here the big lesson that the power of a Catechism or a Code of Canon Law lies not in its length, nor in the people obeying strictly every detail written in it, but in the faithful living of the Christian messages it embodies. Les Miserables teaches that if you change someone’s heart, you change the person’s vision and conduct, not the other way around. Spirit-inspired Christians live the Catechism, not obey it – that is a fundamental lesson taught by Jesus in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In this light, we can appreciate the depth of the beauty in these words from the “The Theology of Work” by the great Dominican theologian Chenu: “The more complete is the mystery of love the more freedom it confers.”
On Christian Symbols
Like John the evangelist, Hugo too uses the symbol of light and darkness. While the bishop is a compassionate and upstanding citizen, Valjean is a dark and brooding criminal, seemingly incapable of love. Against a background of dark poverty and cold eyes in society, the bishop represents the Church and his silverwares represent physical symbols of Christian love and warmth. And when he gives Valjean his silver candlesticks, he is literally passing on this light and warmth as he tells Valjean he must promise to become an honest man. Whenever the candlesticks reappear, they will remind Valjean of his duty.
The thorough transformation in Valjean’s life signifies the shift from darkness to light, which manifests itself concretely in a life of complete turnaround from self-serving preservation to self-giving sacrifice, thus bearing supreme witness to the power of the light who is Jesus Christ.
In the end, when Valjean dies, the candlesticks shine brightly across his face, a symbolic affirmation that he has attained his goal of love and compassion.
On the innate human search for freedom
The first chapter of the first book of the Bible (Genesis 1) points to human freedom as a fundamental gift from the Creator. We are born free and intelligent, the twin dimensions of what it means to be made in the image of God. We have an innate search for freedom wherever we may be.
A prevalent theme in Hugo’s drama is each character’s search for freedom, an indication of a society gone awry. Whether it is Fantine seeking to free herself and her child Cosette from a life of destitution and poverty, or Valjean concealing his identity to preserve his own freedom and avoid being imprisoned, or the students and the workers fighting for freedom in the streets, each character rebels in their own way to protect their lives. Causes for the search for freedom may differ, but the underlying rebellion is the same. It’s a rebellion against moral authority in the light of Hugo’s unspoken thesis – that power corrupts, a thesis enacted in authoritative figures who are both corrupt and incompetent, under whom the people suffer.
Interlocking with personal stories of fall and salvation, is the great story of the French students and workers fighting for freedom against oppression. “Do you hear the people sing?” is sung like a chorus reverberating in our hearts long after we have left the theater:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There’s a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
On the demands of love
The sacrificial love Valjean has for his adopted daughter Corsett occupies another key thread in the drama.
The audience is drawn into the question: What is family? Isn’t a family where one enjoys unconditional love, not for what one has achieved, but simply because one is an accepted, indispensable part? A family is a shield, a shelter, a habour, from the cruel treatments one is liable to be dealt with in the outside world. A family is a place of warm acceptance against the cruel reality of cold rejection outside. If all that begins to correctly describe a family, then the age-old slogan that “blood is thicker than water” may need some richer orientations. Society everywhere has many stories to tell of people, outside of blood-ties, demonstrating immense love, who are capable of and do make incredible sacrifices for their loved ones, often beyond and even defying the logic of kinship.
In Hugo’s choice of words, Valjean is a “sentient being” – one who knows himself, and is capable of vast and deep feelings. To the very end, Valjean dotted and adored Corsett and would die for the welfare of this girl whom he has brought up as a little child.
A final note. Fr. Howard James, a former theology classmate of ours in Leuven, Belgium, is now the parish priest at St John the Evangelist at Islington, London. He said if one flew to London and the only thing one did was to watch the musical Les Misérables at the Queen’s Theatre at West End, it would be worth the trip. After celebrating the musical’s silver jubilee this year – the longest running musical in the world – the producers are said to be planning to drop the curtain for good. One just wonders how they can do that when attendance is still so good. It is reported that Susan Boyle, a “Britain’s Got Talent” star, may sign up to play the role of Fantine and sing her signature tune, “I Dreamed a Dream”, in the 25th anniversary version of the production.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, August 2010. All rights reserved.
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