The Holy Sinner

A Late Comedy

Mann published The Holy Sinner in 1951, when he was seventy-five years old, and it stands apart from his other major work in almost every respect. Where The Magic Mountain is discursive, Doctor Faustus is anguished, and Buddenbrooks is panoramic, The Holy Sinner is playful — a retelling of a medieval legend in a mannered, tongue-in-cheek prose that seems designed to give pleasure rather than to instruct or diagnose. It is the work of a very old man who has earned the right to be funny.

The source is a thirteenth-century German poem, Gregorius by Hartmann von Aue, which Mann discovered and fell in love with late in his life. The legend: a nobleman and his sister commit incest; their child is set adrift in a small boat and raised by fishermen; he grows to become a knight of exceptional virtue; he unknowingly marries his own mother; when the truth is discovered he atones by chaining himself to a rock in the middle of a lake for seventeen years; at the end of this penance he is found and elected Pope. It is, as Mann clearly recognised, the most extreme version of the Christian doctrine of redemption available in medieval literature: that no sin is so great that it cannot be the condition for an equally great sanctity.

The novel is narrated by an Irish monk named Clemens, who writes with a combination of scholastic pedantry, genuine theological engagement, and barely suppressed delight in the story he is telling. This voice is one of Mann’s most successful inventions: it allows him to maintain ironic distance from the medieval material while simultaneously taking its theological substance seriously. Clemens believes in the doctrine he is illustrating; Mann uses Clemens to illustrate it without necessarily endorsing it; the reader is free to enjoy both the comedy and the theology.

Grace Through Extremity

What makes The Holy Sinner more than a literary exercise is Mann’s evident conviction that the legend’s central insight is genuine. The argument of the novel — embedded in its narrative rather than stated — is that the doctrine of grace is not diminished but intensified by extremity: that Gregorius’s triple experience of sin (incest by birth, inadvertent incest by marriage) places him, paradoxically, in the best possible position to become the supreme pastor of Christian souls. He has been to the bottom. He knows what he is talking about.

This is a serious theological position rendered in the most unserious possible way, and the tension between subject matter and treatment is what gives the novel its distinctive flavour. Mann is not mocking the legend; he is enjoying it, which is a different thing. The pleasure he takes in the medieval convention — in the providential machinery, the coincidences arranged by God, the chivalric formulas — is the pleasure of a very sophisticated reader who has loved this material long enough to be comfortable playing with it.

The Holy Sinner is the least-read of Mann’s major works and probably the least demanding. It is also, in its own quiet way, one of the most charming — a reminder that the novelist who produced The Magic Mountain was also capable of a comedy, and that at seventy-five he could still find something new to do.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Mann’s most playful novel and his most underrated — a late comedy of grace and extremity that deserves readers beyond the devoted.