Scenes of war — or rather scenes of everything but war — in Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms are a far cry from the valor and glory of the Homeric novel. They are mundane, arbitrary, and fixated on the nonessential. As readers, we know more about the way in which a stale cheese is cut than we know about the fighting that goes on in the meantime. The deaths we encounter feel independent of any broader cause, and the smallest acts of valor or bravery stick out as odd. “Don't be a bloody hero” (Hemingway, 50), an English ambulance driver tells Lieutenant Henry (although the term “hero” is not the first word that comes to mind). Henry is a foreigner, fighting in a war for a country that he has no affiliation to, and his experience is dominated by drinking in hospital wards and conversations headed nowhere. He tends to get along with everyone he encounters and is immediately susceptible to their worldviews. The company in question is that of the priest and Rinaldi, who each represent opposite ideas of the modern man, one dedicated to faith and God, the other committed to the pursuit of pleasure and the honing of his surgical craft. Religion in general occupies a strange role in this world. Jokes have punchlines that are variations on “bless me father, for I have sinned” (8), but “dio te salve, Maria” (47) is uttered moments before death. But these inconsistencies are exactly the point. Faith is the only way to make it through the war psychologically sound, but it is impossible to find it in the moment. In general, the war cannot be survived by the modern faithless man, nor is it possible to become religious in its wake.
The priest is the modern, faithful man, accepted by others only once he is individuated from the religion that he represents. In the early days at the mess, he is nothing more than a point of sexual humor, and at dinner soldiers yell out, “priest never with girls… priest every night five against one” (7). People see him as a spokesperson for his religion, his presence representative of the papal body itself. It compels the major to announce, “the pope wants the Austrians to win the war… I am an atheist” (7). But as the war progresses, the priest undergoes a gradual secularization in the eyes of the rest. In later dinners, a similar remark of “priest not happy. Priest wants Austrians to win the war” is shut down by the major, who says, “Leave him alone… he's alright”, and the captain, who muses that “he can’t do anything about it anyway” (12). When Henry returns to the front, Rinaldi struggles to resume the former banter, wondering, “Do I have to bait this priest alone without support?” (152). People’s perceptions of the priest undergo a shift – fueled in part by the priest’s own religious tolerance of their blatant debauchery – and they begin to see him as increasingly independent of the religion that they are dismissive of. The priest’s trajectory mirrors that of religion’s new place in 20th century society: a necessary but secondary presence, increasingly accepting of the hedonism and vices of the modern day.
Rinaldi on the other hand is the pinnacle of the modern faithless man; deriving pleasure from the sensual and meaning in the professional, he represents everything that the priest is so tolerant of. As introduced to us by Lieutenant Henry, “he was good-looking, was my age, and he came from Amalfi. He loved being a surgeon and we were great friends” (11). He frequents brothels and his self-worth depends on his work. He makes sure to tell the injured Henry in a brief conversation before a long parting, “Oh you should see what I did in the removal of three meters of small intestine and better now than ever. It is one for The Lancet” (55). His experience of the world around him revolves around his abilities as a surgeon, and his attitude is relentlessly forward looking. “I never hurt anybody. I learn how to do it. Every day I learn to do things smoother and better” (56), he says. He occupies himself with questions of honor and valor, going through a sludge of bureaucracy to get Henry his medals, even considering notifying the English for additional accolades. His sense of family and community come from the present moment, his most frequent refrain to Henry being a reminder of their being “war brothers” (58). In fact, we never hear about his family or upbringing beyond the detail of his being from Amalfi because his sense of the world beyond is a hyper-individual one. It depends solely on the moment he is living in and the company he surrounds himself with.
These differences between the priest and Rinaldi are made more evident because the two are always pulling Lieutenant Henry between their two modes of existence. Conversations with Rinaldi are followed by conversations with the priest and cover similar topics and patterns. Both inquire about Henry’s travels when he goes on leave (9-11) and visit him after he is injured, bringing liquor to drink together (54-63). Both talk to him when he returns to the front, musing over the progress of war and their own personal aspirations (145-157). They are also more aware of these influences than Henry seems to be. Rinaldi recognizes the pull that he has on Henry, telling him, “You are better with [Catherine] without me. You are purer and sweeter” (57). The priest also understands why this is the case, and Henry notes this recognition, saying, “We were still friends with many tastes, alike, but with the difference between us. He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget” (12). The priest also sees through the distractions that Henry builds up, telling him, “When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve… I know you will. Then you will be happy” (62), predicting Henry’s eventual commitment to Catherine. This sentiment is not lost on Rinaldi, who draws a different conclusion. “With your priest and your English girl, and really you are just like me underneath” (153), he warns Henry. The two not only see their own influence, but also recognize Henry’s inclinations in the other direction, remarkably aware of his emotional incongruencies.
But Henry soon finds that war is not so kind to the faithless: it destroys the aspects of the self that are essential to Rinaldi’s personhood, stripping him of his masculinity and rendering his profession meaningless. After several months at the front, the surgeon is no longer the forward-looking young professional who asks Henry, “Would I do right to marry Miss Barkley – after the war of course?” (11) for whom there exists a future after the battle is over. “The war is killing me”, he tells Henry, “I work all the time. I do everybody’s work. All the hard ones they leave to me. By God, baby. I am becoming a lovely surgeon” (147). This is a completely different man from the one who talked about medals, valor, glory, and beautiful girls in brothels. Indeed, his very masculinity is what infects him with syphilis, a death sentence that sets his life an implicit expiration date. Stripped of everything essential to his personality beyond his work, he finds that other forms of pleasure, namely drinking and sex, are increasingly unsustainable. “Already I am only happy when I am working” (149), he complains. Most importantly, war collapses his reality into the present moment. “I never think. No, by God, I don’t think; I operate” (148), he tells Henry. He is effectively a dead-man walking, with no future to look forward to and a present that is too painful to endure.
The priest undergoes a very different fate, a transformation that is possible largely because he is not the isolated individual that Henry and the others misinterpret him to be. He has a faith and rootedness in the world that precede the war and has loved God “ever since [he] was a little boy” (63). Hating the war doesn’t result in a rejection of everything else around him. “I believe and I pray that something will happen. I have felt it very close” (156), he says about his intuiting that an end is in sight. It is a cynicism coupled with hope, which allows him to retain a perspective on life beyond the scope of the battle, and even gain strength as it wears on. Others notice this too, and Henry finds that the priest “was surer of himself now than when [he] had gone away” (155), a description that goes in stark contrast to the drunken and embittered Rinaldi he encounters moments prior. Although, like Rinaldi, the priest looks towards a future of dedicating himself to his passion, it is a future that is rooted in a place and a community. He is the only one who looks forward to returning to a home after the war, a thought which makes him say, “I would be too happy. If I could live there and love God and serve Him” (62). Even Hemingway’s choice to never name the priest by surname is an intentional one: as individuated as the priest becomes in the eyes of the soldiers, his primary identifier to us is one that remains definitively affiliated with his religion.
Seeing the effect that the war has on Rinaldi and the priest, Henry builds a surrogate form of faith that lets him temporarily delay a similar fate. Unable to find a love for God, Henry instead clings to Catherine with a religious fervor that the priest foresaw months before. The two lovers effectively become each other’s religions, forming a union in which they feel like they are one and the same. Catherine voices this, telling Henry, “You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got” (100). Henry pushes back against Rinaldi’s view of the world, saying, “You are an ignorant foul-mouthed dago,” and seeing that he strikes a chord, he continues, “You are ignorant. Stupid… uninformed. Inexperienced. Stupid from inexperience” (57). This is a sudden move for the lieutenant, who throughout the book is largely conflict averse and primarily a reactive personality. It is also an outburst that notably happens after Rinaldi tries to talk about Catherine in the same way that the two have talked about girls in the past, Henry’s touchiness akin to breaching a sacred subject. Rinaldi, too, senses this shift. He recognizes the difference that it forms between them, admitting, “I am jealous maybe” (149), realizing that in doing so Henry can delay the fate that Rinaldi is trapped in.
However, war is not a generative experience, and all modes of understanding are futile. Henry cannot reason through it nor come up with a meaningful explanation for its origins, wondering, “what was the matter with this war? … I wanted to go to Austria without war. I wanted to go to the black forest. I wanted to go to the Hartz mountains” (31). Indeed, he uses times of crisis to relentlessly address God in search of meaning, only to find that meaning never comes. His moment of revelation after he is bombed is punctured by a return to reality: “I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back” (47), he tells us, resuming a strictly functional mode of operation, counting men and taking note of the wounded. Indeed, he is unequipped to process the atrocities of war in a meaningful or sensible way. “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain,” he tells us, continuing, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it” (161). His fixation on plain descriptions, hard numbers, and the food being consumed stem from an inability to process what visually takes place in front of him, an increasing hysteria over the fact that he cannot make any sense of it all.
Unable to find a greater meaning to the experience of war, Henry’s attempts of emulating the priest end in failure and he finds that he is unable to escape from Rinaldi’s faithless worldview. The meal he procures for his soldiers during the attack, saying, “Put it on the floor. We’ll all eat” (45-46) evokes the image of Christ breaking bread with his disciples. However, a symbol of peace and friendship in the Christian cannon is instead followed by the jolting reality of siege and bombing. He similarly fails to bring salvation onto others, his attempt of helping the injured deserter only causing further harm (31). The conclusions he draws from Catherine’s death, that “you never had time to learn” and that “they threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you” (279-280) echo Rinaldi’s own jaded outlook that “we never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We start complete” (149). Like Rinaldi, he cannot tolerate any thoughts about his present reality, and he admits to the priest that “I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking” (155), horrified at his own admittances. His inability to grasp onto faith and the nonsensical return to the nihilistic is perhaps most poignant in his story about the ants, in which he remembers thinking that this is his opportunity to be “a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground”, in which he instead “[does] not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that [he] would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before [he adds] water to it”, musing that “the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants” (280). War makes it impossible to find faith or a sense of purpose as it goes on, and the loss of lives that surrounds Henry feels arbitrary and nonsensical. All of his attempts to do good are not only foiled but result in harsher consequences than if he had chosen to abstain, and his commitment to Catherine, which initially feels like a solution to the lack of faith problem, is only a brief delay of an inevitable descent into Rinaldi’s reality.
The relentless need to assign meaning to the arbitrary is what makes us fundamentally human. Perhaps the tragedy of the modern man, as shown to us through Lieutenant Henry, is that he fails to accept an idea of faith that extends farther than just the individual, and in doing so is never able to grasp onto faith in its truest form. He sees both the strengthening of the priest and the unraveling of Rinaldi, and sensing that he is stuck between their two modes of being, builds a surrogate faith for himself in the form of Catherine. The priest’s saving grace is not simply his commitment to God, but a pre-existing faith and rootedness in society that enable him to remain hopeful and even improve as the war wears on. He makes it through not only because he is part of something larger than himself, but because this affiliation predates the war and will continue long after the war is over. This narrative is a warning of the dangers that come with the hyper-individualism of the modern day, and how ill equipped we are with processing the atrocities that the modern day produces. Those of us who, like Henry, have the awareness to recognize the necessity of faith are simply left grasping after a God who never saves and a belief that never comes, a futile endeavor that we nevertheless cannot help undertaking.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929.