Is The Three Musketeers an anti-Catholic book? At first blush, some might think so.
Its most famous villain is a man of the Church, Cardinal Richelieu; Alexandre Dumas, the book's author, had a rather irregular private life; and the idea of cavaliers having mistresses is taken for granted.
But for a Catholic to deny himself The Three Musketeers would be an enormous mistake, for it is one of the greatest adventure yarns ever written, one that hasn't dated a bit. That's almost recommendation enough, for Catholics should remember their heritage. Catholics are not Puritan bluenoses, inherently suspicious of art or narrow-minded in intellect. While one might never find books with such titles as A Treasury of Presbyterian Art or Great Baptist Intellectuals on library bookshelves, replace Presbyterian and Baptist with Catholic, and such titles seem perfectly reasonable, necessary even. The Catholic faith affirms everything that is good, and in the great Catholic theologian Karl Adam's words, "Art is native to Catholicism."
The Three Musketeers is a fine example of popular literary art, and if one approaches it without puritanical fear, one will be rewarded not only with excitement and joy but also with a few theological surprises.
With regard to Cardinal Richelieu, we need not be shocked, if we have the remotest gleanings of Catholic history or have paid attention to Catholic news over the last year, by the idea that clerics are not immune from original sin. Indeed, Catholics are required to believe that they are not. The commander of the musketeers himself reminds the king, in a rather admirable ultramontane way, that "His Eminence [the cardinal] is not His Holiness, sire. … It is only the pope who is infallible, and … this infallibility does not extend to cardinals." And, of course, even the pope has his confessor. So if Cardinal Richelieu, as a cleric-statesman, falls short of sanctity or even of good judgment, I don't see that we need to be scandalized by this fact.
This is especially so when one discovers that our heroes, the musketeers, though hostile to the cardinal and jealously and belligerently the king's men, (or really the queen's, as the story centers on their gallant defense of her interests), are also Catholic men. The dashing Aramis not only toys – to his colleagues' amusement, given his susceptibility to romance and adventure – with the idea of a priestly vocation, at the end of the book he takes up a monk's cowl. Athos, the hard-fighting, hard-drinking musketeer of few words, who keeps his own counsel on principle and has nothing to do with mistresses or romantic folly, is a man of unimpeachable integrity. "This quality was specially praiseworthy in that lax age," Dumas writes, "in which soldiers readily compromised their consciences, lovers fell far short of the standards of honor which prevail nowadays and poor men often failed to observe the seventh commandment. Athos at his best was, in fact, a paragon of knowledge and virtue."
If the large-framed dandy Porthos is a comic character and d'Artagnan has the awkwardness and ardent excesses – but also ardent courage – of a young man, it is the virtuous Athos who in the second half of the book leads the musketeers. And it is Athos who says during the siege against the Huguenots (Protestants) of La Rochelle, "Silly asses! Why won't they see that Catholicism's the best and pleasantest religion in the world? Never mind, they're a gallant lot" – which makes Athos both Catholically orthodox and magnanimous at the same time.
The real villain of The Three Musketeers is not Cardinal Richelieu – who always admires the musketeers and actually commissions d'Artagnan as a lieutenant at the novel's finale – but "Milady," a feminine fiend of a type instantly recognizable to any who today toil in the environs of Washington, D.C.
How does Milady begin (at least so far as we're told) her sordid career of crime? "She was a nun at the Benedictine convent at Templemar. There was a young priest, a simple, honest fellow, who officiated in the convent chapel. This woman made up her mind to seduce him and succeeded. She'd have seduced a saint. Both of them, priest and nun, had taken vows which were sacred and irrevocable."
Breaking these vows to God and man leads next to thievery and eventually, on his part to remorseful suicide and on her part to remorseless murder. The ultimate villain is thus an anti-Catholic renegade, who even feigns a passionate Puritanism at one point in the story, to seduce her Puritan jailer to assassinate the Duke of Buckingham.
The assassin, the duke, Cardinal Richelieu, the king, the queen, and much else besides, perhaps even the musketeers themselves, are based on actual history – touched up a bit, of course. If one is looking for a further "it's good for you" excuse to pick up this classic tale, one might add that it is also, like most good writing, strewn with biblical and classical allusions. A few are even of a wryly provocative kind, as witness Aramis' theological view of ghosts: "The Bible makes our belief in them a law; the ghost of Samuel appeared to Saul, and it is an article of faith that I should be very sorry to see any doubt thrown upon."
But that is all by the way; pick up the book for the sheer pleasure it will give you. If you are such a one – as I am – who believes with d'Artagnan that "There's room in heaven for soldiers as well as priests," you won't be disappointed.
January 10, 2003
