The Truth and Beauty by Andrew Klavan

Author:Andrew Klavan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2022-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

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Now, to take this another step, we return to the movie Bride of Frankenstein.

The monster in the picture is, we remember, not the thoughtful Milton-reading wanderer of Mary Shelley’s novel but a hulking, grunting brute played by the English actor Boris Karloff in a performance of compassionate genius, one of the greatest performances ever captured on film.

In a famous scene—a scene that is not in the novel—the creature, despised and rejected for his ugliness, comes upon a blind old peasant. The peasant can’t see the monster’s fearsome appearance, so he welcomes him into his home with kindness. When the peasant realizes his guest has neither language nor any knowledge of civilized life, he begins to teach him. As they share a simple meal, he gives him a lesson.

“This is bread,” says the old man, handing a loaf to the monster.

“Bread,” repeats the creature. Then he tears into the bread with hilarious animal gusto.

“And this is wine—to drink!” says the peasant.

“Drink,” says the monster. And having taken a big sloppy gulp of the wine, he growls, “Good! Good!”

Next, the peasant extends a hand to this reviled and hideous outcast. “We are friends, you and I,” the old man says with poignant generosity.

Man and monster happily shake hands, laughing with pleasure. They repeat the words together: “Friend! Good!”

It is a profound moment, a poem of a scene. It illustrates the full chain of cocreation as I think Coleridge understood it.

The scene is filled with biblical echoes. The repetition of the word good is meant to remind us of God’s creation of the world in Genesis, when he surveys each new wonder he brings into being—light, the sea, the living creatures—and “saw that it was good.”16

At the same time, we see man and monster collaborating with that creation. They start with one level of collaboration. Like the listener hearing the tree fall and transforming it into sound, the peasant and the creature transform the bread and wine from elements of taste into taste itself. Of the taste their bodies create pleasure and, like God in the days of creation, they declare their pleasure good.

They now move to the next level of collaboration, the spiritual sort that occurs when we see a sunset and call it beautiful, or an act of cruelty and call it evil. The shared meal, the shared company, and the clasped hands become the concept “friendship,” and they connect the quality of friendship with the quality of bread and wine: it is a pleasure, it is good. This too is a human creation in collaboration with God’s creation. We know this because God declared it is “not good” for a man to be alone.

Finally, of course, we are reminded of another time when the elements of bread and wine are cocreated by human experience from a physical goodness into spiritual goodness—the spiritual goodness of the Logos, the structure of God’s creation that God declared was good. This is the rite of the Christian mass, where bread and wine become the flesh and blood of the Logos incarnate, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

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