The Literary Uses of a Proverb

Abstract

TEN years ago there was a brief flurry of notes on the provenience of the proverb 'Deus escreve direito por linhas tortas,' rendered in English as 'God writes straight with crooked lines.' Tradition attributes this proverb to the Portuguese, but discussion of it at the time centred on the possibility that its ultimate source was St Augustine. The controversy ended inconclusively. The suggestion that the proverb derives from Augustine was based on a puzzling entry in Burton Stevenson's Home Book ofProverbs, Maxims and Familiar Phrases (Macmillan: New York, 1948; p. 969). Stevenson misleads by associating the proverb with Augustine: 'St. Augustine, Apothegm (C. AD 400) [-] A Portuguese proverb, quoted by Paul Claudel as the theme of his play, The Satin Slipper (1931).' Stevenson's error appears to have sprouted from a rather careless reading of Claudel's epigraphic use in Le Soulier de Satin of the proverb, which he clearly labels as Portuguese, in tandem with a quotation-'Etiam peccata' ('Even sins')-which he just as clearly attributes to Augustine. Claudel's application of the proverb remains its best known literary use. Virtually unknown, however, are two contemporary American uses. Interestingly enough, the Americans are, like Claudel, Roman Catholics, and both of them employ the proverb to illustrate and to support accounts of spiritual conversion-one in a series of closely related autobiographical poems, the other in a novel about a Catholic cleric. The writers in question are J. F. Powers (1917) and William O. Everson (1912); the latter, a one-time lay brother in the Dominican Order, is better known as Brother Antoninus.2 Fifteen years ago Brother Antoninus published a collection of poems written in a five-year period, beginning in 1949. Published as The Crooked Lines of God (University of Detroit Press, 1959), these poems are organized into three discrete series, each of which records, in the author's words, 'a particular phase of spiritual development'. The book bears as its epigraph the Portuguese proverb that provided his title. How much this proverb meant to Brother Antoninus and just how essential it was to his understanding of the purpose of his spiritual odyssey is revealed in a thematic foreword. 'These Crooked Lines,' as he calls it, opens with this paragraph: