John Finlay was the Charles Baudelaire of the 20th century American South, a poet of sin and suffering whose examination of his own failings reminds us of our fallen condition and the need for grace. Baudelaire, as many will remember, was the first of the French symbolist poets whose volume of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), depicted in verse the Parisian demi-monde with all its sordid figures. Baudelaire depicted sin for what it was: sin. He was as certain of the reality of the devil as he was of God. What he could not bring himself to do was repent, and so many of his poems speak of his own inexorable damnation. For some of the poets who followed him, Baudelaire was an inspiration to depict the seamy side of modern urban life, but for others he was a poet of disillusioned moral seriousness and his vision moved them—as it could not move him—to repentance and into the Church.
Finlay also knew the abysmal life of sin. While much of his life was consumed with religion, philosophy, and literature, and while he read his way into the Church through his admiration of Thomas Aquinas, he also secretly indulged in the homosexual subculture of New Orleans. Thomas Aquinas provided a vision of the ordered life of faith and reason, of nature redeemed and completed—not destroyed—by supernatural grace. Finlay sought that life for himself, but he was ever haunted by the ‘demon’ of his desires.
In 1980, Finlay was received into the Catholic Church. In that same year, news began to appear about the AIDS virus, and Finlay early on suspected that he had already contracted the disease. He was soon proven correct. For the decade of life that remained to him, he worked through the night in his bedroom, on the family farm in Enterprise, Alabama, writing poems and essays that explored the fissures that ran through his soul. Drawing on Aquinas and the treasury of the Church, he sought to heal them in himself and to demonstrate the sound wisdom of Aquinas for others. For all the impressive work of that last, terrible decade, the most impressive single work is one he composed on his deathbed.
Finlay’s Catholicism was shaped by his respect for the cool rational figures of Aquinas and Aristotle, specifically in their affirmation of the capacity of natural reason to know being and truth and to govern itself in conformity with reality. Only Aquinas seemed to capture that body and soul alike are naturally good and lovable by God. The evil of nature is not intrinsic, but a consequence of the historical calamity of the fall. The salvation of Christ does not liberate the soul from the flesh; he comes to redeem both.
At the time of his conversion, his literary executor, David Middleton, tells us, Finlay seemed far more devoted to the knowledge of God than to the love of Him. His poems typically express his preference for ‘salt,’ for dry wit, and, when they are emotionally pitched, are so in remorse for the ‘demon’ that sometimes possessed him. But as he lay in bed, in the living room of the family home, now unable to write or even to see, Finlay dictated his single best poem to his sister, entitled A Prayer to the Father. “Death is not far from me,” he begins,
At times I crave
The peace I think that it will bring. Be brave,
I tell myself, for soon your pain will cease.
The poem is composed in open heroic couplets. The brief, punctuated sentences and the enjambment across the first two lines gives the impression of plain speech rather than verse, the candor of interior speech. Finlay would not live long enough to much revise the poem and the next two lines contain two weaknesses, one a cliché and one metrical, but lead us nonetheless to the Thomistic vision of the soul as the form of the body:
But terror still obtains when our long lease
On life ends at last. Body and soul,
Which fused together should make up one whole,
Suffer deprived as they are wrenched apart.
We are composite beings. We are not our souls alone, but “one whole.” The “lease,” however, should have been qualified as “short” (“long” is the cliché) and the line that follows is missing an unstressed syllable before “ends.” The marred quality of these two lines is an incidental reminder that its author lay on the brink of death and did not have time enough for a poet’s endless revisions.
From the precipice of fear and the studied affirmation of the wholeness of the ‘composite’ human being, Finlay’s words now turn entirely to God. He petitions that his suffering may be overcome and that his natural reason, which can only know God discursively, may come to contemplate the light of the divine essence at last through the unmediated vision of the intellect:
O God of love and power, hold still my heart
When death, that ancient, awful fact appears;
Preserve my mind from all deranging fears,
And let me offer up my reason free
And where I thought, there see Thee perfectly.
The allusion to the last books of Augustine’s Confessions, where the saint begs God to hold his heart steady so that he may understand the natures of time and eternity, is here rendered an expression of agony and a plea for mercy rather than curiosity. The final two lines, with reason’s transformation from a mere act of thinking to one of perfect seeing, are a stylistic and theological masterstroke. Aquinas’ extended meditations in the Summa Contra Gentiles on the character of perfect happiness and on the human good as nothing else than the contemplation of God are voiced in a simple offering of the poet’s life to God. After a hard decade of thought about the truth of God, Finlay prepares to see Truth itself face-to-face. Baudelaire lived and died in misery and sin. Finlay died of a disease bred out of his own sins, but he used what time he had to repent and to prepare himself for that everlasting vision.
