He discovered the wealthy lady in a small house near the river, furnished in the style of the last century, which is to say that everything was uncomfortable. She received the archdeacon in her library, in which there still remained a few books.
I approached Robert Nathan’s The Bishop’s Wife with some hesitation. Fond as I am of Nathan, he was a Jewish writer, and I wasn’t looking forward to finding out how he dealt with the Christian church. In the event, it was indeed a little awkward, but that wasn’t the only awkwardness I experienced with this story.
The Bishop’s Wife was made into a movie in 1947, starring David Niven (as the bishop), Cary Grant (as the angel), and Loretta Young. It’s a minor Christmas classic, not as popular as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but like the Capra movie it features Christmas and an angel. The movie isn’t bad; I was surprised to discover how far it veers from the book at the end.
Bishop Henry Brougham is a dignified, earnest churchman (one assumes he’s Episcopalian, but references to Luther and the Augsburg Confession suggest to me he might be Lutheran). His great vision is to promote the Christian home, but he believes (for some reason) that the way to nurture good homes is to build a cathedral. The challenge of raising funds is daunting to him, so he prays to God for an archdeacon gifted in fundraising. That’s when Michael appears. He informs Henry that he’s an angel, and that he’s here to do that job. Henry accepts him, but they keep the angel part to themselves.
Henry introduces Michael to his wife Julia, and Michael immediately falls in love with her. It’s a novel experience for an angel, except that it reminds him of the world before the Fall, when all was innocence and love. Julia is a frustrated wife – there’s no passion in her marriage, and she pours her affections out on her daughter Juliette. (I did not like Juliette much – her dialogue seemed very artificial to me.)
Both Michael and Julia are strongly tempted, but (spoiler alert) nothing more than a kiss happens between them. Unlike in the movie, where the angel (called Dudley there) helps the bishop to understand his deeper ministry and to appreciate his wife, the book ends with nothing much changed in that regard. Michael completes his assignment and returns whence he came, with a deep and tragic and new understanding he never had before. Julia gains one thing in her life, but her marriage is left pretty much the same.
It’s hard to know what to say about The Bishop’s Wife. My orthodox Christianity made me an argumentative reader. The overarching theme seems to be that the joy and love of Heaven, which permeate Michael, are so much higher than Christian theology and morality that they render them rather irrelevant. (I’m sure that’s true in a sense, but it’s hard for a Christian to conceive of an angel being indifferent to the Son of God.) Henry is both a bad churchman and a bad husband, I think – he overspiritualizes his marriage and overmaterializes his ministry. It’s disappointing that he leaves the stage as clueless as he was before.
The Bishop’s Wife left this reader oddly flat. It’s remarkable to me that it’s one of Nathan’s most famous works.