Tom Hooper’s 2012 cinematic adaptation of the musical, Les Misérables by Claude-Michel Schönberg— itself adapted from Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel — provides a stunning example of the tension between a legalistic existential orientation and an engraced orientation animated by agape — rival perspectives that are embodied, respectively, by Inspector Javier (portrayed by Russell Crowe) and Jean Valjean (portrayed by Hugh Jackman).
Javier is a law-and-order police inspector who withholds sympathy from all criminals, including the poor and destitute who resort to illegal activities in order to eat and survive. In his soliloquy, “Stars,” Javier gives expression to his moralistic and legalistic conception of faith and salvation:
Mine is the way of the Lord
Those who follow the path of the righteous
Shall have their reward
And if they fall
As Lucifer fell
The flames
The sword!¹
Importantly, for Javier, “the path of the righteous” is absolute obedience to the law. Any violation is a deviation that must be met, in this world, with swift justice, and in the next with damnation:
And so it must be, and so it is written
On the doorway to paradise
That those who falter and those who fall
Must pay the price!²
Life outside the law is disordered, chaotic, and demonic. In his mind, a breach of the law, even when done from love or beneficence, is equivalent to Lucifer’s rebellion.
Jean Valjean was imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread with which to feed a starving child. For his crime, he was sentenced to five years of imprisonment and forced labor, though he served an additional fourteen years for trying to escape.
His prison guard, Javier, releases him on parole for the rest of his life. Finding that he cannot find work or shelter as a parolee, Valjean begs and scrapes by, becoming increasingly bitter and angry by the injustices and humiliations he faces.
One night, a bishop provides him with shelter and food. During the night, Valjean steals the silver from the bishop’s house and attempts to sneak away. He is apprehended by the police and brought back to the bishop. To the surprise of the officers, the bishop willfully lies by confirming Valjean’s claim that he, the bishop, gave Valjean the silver. The bishop then says the following, privately, to Valjean:
But remember this, my brother
See in this some high plan
You must use this precious silver
To become an honest man
By the witness of the martyrs
By the passion and the blood
God has raised you out of darkness
I have saved your soul for God³
In lying to the police, the bishop himself violated the law, a fact that does not go unnoticed by Valjean, for it was an act of extraordinary grace. This leads to a crisis of conscience and ultimately an existential “death” of self on the part of Valjean.
In his soliloquy, Valjean explains that he had hitherto only known an “eye for an eye” morality, under which he stood condemned as a thief and sinner.
Yet why did I allow that man
To touch my soul and teach me love?
He treated me like any other
He gave me his trust
He called me brother
My life he claims for God above
Can such things be?
For I had come to hate the world
This world that always hated me⁴
The bishop’s act of grace does not comport with the understanding of justice and life that Valjean had known. He thus undergoes an existential death and rebirth:
I am reaching, but I fall
And the night is closing in
As I stare into the void
To the whirlpool of my sin
I’ll escape now from that world
From the world of Jean Valjean
Jean Valjean is nothing now
Another story must begin!⁵
Indeed, this must be understood, effectively, as an act of passive existential suicide. Valjean willingly lets his old self die and accepts the bishop’s invitation to a new life, defined by grace and love.
In the ensuing years, Valjean becomes a reputable businessman and mayor using the pseudonym Monsieur Madeleine. Meanwhile, we are to understand that Javier has been attempting to find him, even as his career advances.
Soon after being stationed in Madeleine’s town, Javier recognizes Valjean and reports him to his superiors. He is informed that another man, presumed to be Valjean, has been arrested and is to be executed. True to his legalistic conscience, Javier thus thinks that he has filed a false report, and he confesses to “Mayor Madeleine,” expecting and inviting him to remove him from his post and file charges of his own. Valjean indicates that he will not press charges and asks Javier to continue serving as the police inspector for his town. However, upon retiring to his private quarters, Valjean experiences another crisis of conscience, for a man is about to be executed for his own crimes. Once again, Valjean undergoes an existential transformation. This time, driven by a sense of justice and concern for the innocent man’s life, he reaffirms his identity and pleads the court to send Javier to arrest him.
During the interim, Valjean learns that Fantine, a woman who was wrongly fired from his shop and was forced into prostitution, is now about to die. Cognizant of how his own failure to properly oversee his shop led to her misfortune and moved by sympathy for her and her child, Cosette, Valjean promises Fantine that he will see to it that her daughter is looked after. This requires that he elude Javier and once again become a fugitive.
For years, Valjean lives in this manner, raising Cosette, Fantine’s daughter. However, Javier eventually once again discovers him. Valjean could kill Javier during a pivotal scene, but he doesn’t, instead letting him go free.
Later, as Valjean is rescuing a young man, Javier has an opportunity to kill him. However, Valjean’s act of grace haunts him and he hesitates, letting Valjean once again escape.
In this moment, Javier experiences a crisis of conscience that parallels that which Valjean experienced upon receiving the bishop’s blessing. Unlike Valjean, though, Javier cannot accept that life is not structured by law.
[…] must I now begin to doubt
What I never doubted all those years?
My heart is stone but still it trembles
The world I have known
Is lost in shadow
Is he from heaven or from hell?
And does he know
That granting me my life today?
This man has killed me, even so⁶
Whereas Valjean committed a merely psychological, existential suicide in response to the grace bestowed upon him, Javier commits bodily suicide. As he explains before casting himself off a bridge, he cannot live in a world where a criminal like Valjean is saved. Such a world is topsy-turvy, chaotic, and disordered. In such a world, the legalistic Javier has no bearings.
Les Misérables explores the tension between law and grace — especially the contradiction between legalistic obedience, on the one hand, and the benevolent suspension of the law for the sake of love, on the other. Like St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans, the contradiction is resolved in favor of love without invalidating the law in its own right.⁷
Javier’s mistake, as it were, was to assume that the law is sufficient for a life well-lived. He has no room for love since opening space for it to operate would introduce ambiguity, and ambiguity, for Javier, is intolerable: the world must be orderly, clearly bounded, and aesthetically and morally pure.
Valjean is not opposed to the law as such. He recognizes that Javier is discharging his duty when he pursues him. When Javier confesses to Mayor Madeleine (Valjean) that he has filed what he believes is a false report, Valjean rejects his resignation and asks him to resume his post, indicating that he values the diligent execution of the law, even though he has violated it.
Although he is not opposed to the law, Valjean nevertheless recognizes that it is subordinate to love and grace. Each time he violates the law, he does so for the sake of, and out of, love.
In identifying with Valjean and viewing his actions as noble, we find ourselves occupying a position very similar to the one St. Paul is drawing our attention to. Love and grace do not invalidate the law, but they do subordinate it. This is something testified to by our hearts, for we understand and feel moved by the fact that love and grace can be transformative, whereas law is characteristically only informative and punitive.
Allegoresis is an interpretative act, in which a work that is arguably non-allegorical (or not allegorical in a proposed sense) is nevertheless interpreted as an allegory (in that sense).⁸
I wish to engage in an act of allegoresis and propose that Valjean’s initial existential orientation, delivered at the beginning of the film and musical, can be taken as an allegory for the existential position of Israel, as St. Paul conceived it when it was under the law. The transformations that Valjean undergoes throughout the film similarly can be taken as symbolic of the growth that the early Christian community underwent as it grappled with the revelation disclosed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Like Valjean, Paul understands Israel to be a “body of death,”⁹ a nation or people that operates within death and condemnation as the horizon of their being and meaning. The covenant established between Yahweh and the Israelites was to secure them, providing them with a “land of milk and honey,”¹⁰ free from oppression. But it was a law with an infinite demand, and as finite mortals, the Israelites found themselves perpetually failing. Rather than being free of oppression in a land of their own, they were assaulted, abused, and evicted. In response, they became ever more legalistic, supposing that the problem was that they were failing to live up to God’s infinite demand for perfection.
As in Valjean’s case, this bred hostility, schism, and a sense that this life “hated” the Israelites; the deck was stacked against them.
Saul, who would become Paul, was, himself, a zealous persecutor of his fellow Jews, intent on meting out punishment to those who had the gall to violate the purity laws.¹¹ In this regard, Saul embodied a conception of life not unlike that of Javier. And he understood and expected wayward Jews to develop a consciousness of sin similar to that exhibited by Valjean prior to his first transformation: they should recognize that they were, in the eyes of the Lord, like a “thief in the night” and a “dog on the run,”¹² reflecting on their misdeeds as if staring into a “whirlpool” of their sin.¹³ Indeed, through a modification of the lyrics used in Valjean’s first soliloquy, we might adequately express the existential position of Israel, as conceived by Paul:
Have[we] fallen so far
And is the hour so late
That nothing remains but the cry of [our] hate
The cries in the dark that nobody hears
Here where [we] stand at the turning of the years?¹⁴
Like Valjean, Saul could be imagined to say:
Take an eye for an eye
Turn your heart into stone
This is all [we] have lived for
This is all [we] have known.¹⁵
But like Valjean who is subjected to the bishop’s act of grace, Israel (in Paul’s understanding) had been bestowed a gift: God, like the bishop, took on the weight of the other’s sin. Through this act, Valjean broke free from his sense of condemnation and sense that he deserved bodily death. It remained true that he did deserve death under the law, but it would not be forthcoming. His sins had been reprieved.¹⁶ Likewise, Israel did, indeed, deserve death, for “the wages of sin are death,” but that was no longer demanded. Instead, what was demanded was an existential death — a reorientation that would result in a newfound ground for meaning and vitality: namely, love. As the bishop gratuitously loved Valjean and invited him to transform himself, so too, Paul says, God gratuitously loves all who have sinned and invites them to transform themselves.¹⁷
This does not, of course, entail that one should engage in licentiousness. Valjean responds to gratuitous love showered upon him by the bishop by becoming “a better man,”¹⁸ not only following the law, but becoming a mayor and a respected, fair employer. But when the law demands that he reject a plea to engage in loving action, Valjean always opts to love.
The concluding song of Les Misérables expresses the theological insight disclosed in the story of the final judgment from Matthew: “to love another person,” Fantine counsels Valjean (and us) is to “see the face of God.”¹⁹ And the communion of saints — those “beyond the barricade”²⁰ — are all those who loved and fought for love, justice, and fairness.
In his preface to Les Misérables, Victor Hugo explained his purpose in writing the novel:
So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.²¹
Likewise, so long as the “powers and principalities” issue decrees of damnation and the wretched of the Earth cry out for justice — until all is in the God that is love and the God that is love is in all²² — the topsy-turvy kingdom of God²³ is not yet consummated.
“Stars” lyrics.
Ibid.
“The Bishop”
“Valjean’s Soliloquy” lyrics.
Ibid.
“Javier’s Suicide” lyrics.
St. Paul, Letter to the Romans
Berek, “Interpretation, Allegory, and Allegoresis,” 1978.
Letter to the Romans
Numbers 14:8
Acts 9:1-19, 22:6-21 and 26:12-18.
“Valjean’s Soliloquy” lyrics.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Letter to the Romans
“Valjean’s Soliloquy” lyrics.
“Epilogue” lyrics.
“Do you Hear the People Sing” lyrics.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (Preface).
A gloss on 1 Corinthians 15:28
This is a phrase that John Caputo uses to describe the kingdom of God in his book, The Weakness of God.