The Fecundity of the Good in Amadeus and The Fisher King

Maybe my favorite film scene is from Milos Forman’s period drama, Amadeus (1984).

The film begins with the elderly Antonio Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham) living in an insane asylum. He confesses the tragic story of his encounters with the celebrated Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (played by Tom Hulce). In the scene, the composer Salieri first sees the written pieces of Mozart. He is in his office, sitting at a table with Mozart’s wife, Constanze. Salieri holds a folder of Mozart’s new music in his hands. Constanze says, “Wolfgang would be frantic if he found those were missing. You see they are all originals.” The intrigued Salieri repeats, “Originals?” Constanze replies, “Yes, sir. He doesn’t make copies.” He asks again, opening the folder and even more perplexed, “These are originals?” Constanze answers again affirmatively.

Salieri walks up from the table as he begins to listen to the written music play in his head. He eyes turn to page after page of different pieces by the young Mozart. As the film flashes between the older Salieri narrating and the younger Salieri listening, in the narrative flash-forward the elderly Salieri tells the priest:

Astounding. It was actually beyond belief. These were first and only drafts of music. But they showed no corrections of any kind. Not one. He had simply written down music already finished in his head—page after page as if he were just taking dictation. And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note, and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase, and the structure would fall. It was clear to me that sound I had heard in the archbishop’s palace had been no accident. Here again was the very voice of God. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.

With his eyes closed and in an ecstasy of the music before him, Salieri drops the sheets. Mozart’s wife asks concernedly, “Is it not good?” He turns with a look as if he were astonished that someone could ask that very question. Salieri replies, “It is miraculous.”

Unfortunately, as anyone who has seen the film knows, Salieri grew jealous at Mozart’s gift to compose music already in his head and write it as if he were dictating the “the very voice of God.” At a young age, Salieri had asked God to give him the talent to write beautiful music, and he would dedicate it to God in return. But witnessing an arrogant and rambunctious other being given a gift that, quoting Karl Bath, the angels sing when in unison, Salieri designed to destroy God’s songbird. While himself a modestly good composer, Salieri’s jealously can easily be traced to his contractual relationship with God. A covenantal relationship is different from a contractual relationship as much as a marriage vow is different from a legal “marriage” contract. And one cannot make a contractual relationship with God—only a covenantal relationship, when one abandons preconditions for love and simply accepts the gift of being and gives it away.

As the demon Screwtape wrote to his nephew Wormwood, the Enemy “would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one.” It is better to forget oneself and any of one’s gifts than mourn what one covets since, Screwtape writes, mankind “did not create themselves, that their talents were given them, and that they might as well be proud of the colour of their hair.” Salieri should be as proud to brag about whatever gifts he has and whatever goods are in his life as much as he should brag about the color of his hair. No one’s talent is ever one’s doing. Our lives are completely contingent on the goods and being we receive from realities external to us. Mozart’s talent for music is as much an unconditional gift as Salieri’s is.

Recall the Parable of the Talents—the servant with one talent may be jealous that the master gave more to the two other servants, like Salieri is jealous that the Master has given more talent to Mozart. While one may think that this parable concerns talents in the common English sense of the word, such as the talent to compose music, it alludes rather (as Fr. Robert Barron has recently pointed out) to the weightiness of the things given. It would especially remind ancient Jewish readers, Fr. Barron writes, “the heaviest weight of all, which was kabod of Yahweh … kabod Yahweh was to be found in the Jerusalem Temple, resting upon the mercy seat within the Holy of Holies.” Fr. Barron continues that the talents given to the three servants are not “so much monetary gifts or personal capacities” but a “share in the mercy of God.” Since mercy cannot be kept to oneself, the servant was cast away by the master outside into the darkness because he refused to share his gift:

The divine mercy—received as a pure gift—is meant to be given to others as a pure gift. Buried in the ground, that is to say, hugged tightly to oneself as one’s own possession, such a talent necessarily evanesces … the master’s seemingly harsh words … [are] an expression of spiritual physics: the divine mercy will grow in you only inasmuch as you give it to others.

Salieri would not share in Mozart’s gift, and since he was contractual with God, and could not see what God gave both him and Mozart in different amounts. God does not act as a venture capitalist. Before they are formed, God establishes no conditions to covenants other than conversion of heart, and the actions that ensue from that conversion.

St. Augustine spoke of this fecundity of the Good as dependent on the measure of how much a person shares that good. In The City of God (trans. Henry Bettenson, 1984), Augustine reminds his readers that Rome began with the fratricide of Remus by Romulus. Rather than share with his brother, Romulus’s lust for domination ruled his will. Augustine argues that this pattern is the archetype of the City of Man at war with itself: We lose our goods since we will to not share them. Yet the very act of allowing others to participate in one’s good makes one’s participation in the good more enjoyable. Augustine writes,

A man’s possession of the good is in no way diminished by the arrival, or the countenance, of a sharer in it; indeed, goodness is a possession enjoyed more widely by the united affection of partners in that possession in proportion to the harmony that exists among them. In fact, anyone who refuses to enjoy this possession in partnership will not enjoy it at all; and he will find that he possesses it in ampler measure in proportion to his ability to love his partner in it (601).

Fr. Barron’s commentary on the Parable of Talents directly channels Augustine in observing that the good increases only as much other people are able to sow and reap from it, and it diminishes in the exact proportion to how much others cannot participate in it.

A film that illustrates this principle of the unconditional fecundity of divine mercy is Terry Gilliam’s fantasy, The Fisher King (1991). Starring the crazed but romantic homeless Parry (played by the late Robin Williams) and the fallen-from-grace former disc jockey Jack (played by Jeff Bridges), the film covers how Jack realizes that his own self-absorbed behavior on air inadvertently caused the ruin of Parry’s life, and how Jack finds redemption in helping Parry (who thereby is an instrument for Jack’s salvation). The film’s title alludes to the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King. While it has many variations, the version recounted in the film—when Jack and Parry lay in Central Park at night looking at the stars—is by far my favorite. Matthew Annis relates the tale as told by Parry:

It begins with the Fisher King as a boy having to spend the night alone in the forest to prove his courage so he can become king. And while he’s spending the night alone, he’s visited by a sacred vision: out of the fire appears the Holy Grail, the symbol of God’s divine grace, and a voice said to the boy: “You shall be keeper of the Grail so that it may heal the hearts of men.” But the boy was blinded by greater visions of a life filled with power and glory and beauty, and in this state of radical amazement, he felt, for a brief moment, not like a boy, but invincible, like God. So he reached in the fire to take the Grail and the Grail vanished, leaving him with his hand in the fire, to be terribly wounded. Now, as this boy grew older, his wound grew deeper, until one day, life for him lost its reason. He had no faith in any man, not even himself; he couldn’t love or feel loved; he was sick with experience—he began to die. One day a fool wandered into the castle and found the king alone. Now, being a fool, he was simple-minded. He didn’t see a king—he only saw a man alone and in pain. And he asked the king, “what ails you, friend?” The king replied, “I’m thirsty. I need some water to cool my throat.” So the fool took a cup from beside his bed, filled it with water, and handed it to the king. As the king began to drink he realized that his wound was healed. He looked in his hands and there was the Holy Grail—that which he had sought all of his life. He turned to the fool and said with amazement, “How could you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?” The fool replied, “I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty.”

In The Fisher King, Gilliam is the true artist when he sees that the heart of human reality is an Augustinian participation in each other’s healing love, which ultimately derives from participation in the infinite good of God. Because they shared, Jack and Parry participated in the fecundity of the good; refusing to do the same, Salieri lost his talent.