Literary Apologetics

[Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers for Intruder in the Dust.]

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 49, number 02 (2026).

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Of Christianity’s many metaphysical insights, the profoundest is that being (existence) is relational. The source of this insight is the doctrine of the Trinity, by which we understand God as one being existing eternally as a loving relationship of three persons or subjects — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. According to Greek Orthodox theologian John D. Zizioulas, the doctrine of the Trinity leads to the conclusion that “To be and to be in relation [are] identical”¹ (emphasis in original). Furthermore, the personhood — the unique, specific, identity — of each member of the Trinity derives from His relationship to the other members. “The only way,” continues Zizioulas, “for a true person to exist is for being and communion to coincide. The triune God offers in Himself the only possibility for such an identification of being with communion; He is the revelation of true personhood.”² In sum, the Father is the Father because He begets the Son; the Son is the Son because He is the express image begotten of the Father; and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit because He proceeds from the Father and is manifested through the Son — the eternal life of divine communion, and love itself.

The relational structure of being is reflected in human beings who are persons by way of their relationship to other human beings and to God. Consequently, insists Zizioulas, “A human being left to himself cannot be a person.”³ As the voice of the creating God in Genesis declares, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18 ESV). Irreducibly, then, humans are relational, communal creatures, made for and by communion, our individual identities developing by way of our relationship, first with God our creator and second with our fellow humans, even though our relationship to our fellow humans is the first of which we are conscious.

Because we exist as a dual-axis relational structure of being, we experience considerable tension when the horizontal axis (our human community) and the vertical axis (God) seem to want different things. This problem is complicated by the fact that most of what we know of God and morality is learned from our human community. Indeed, much of this teaching is indirect, stemming more from the structure of our culture and the behaviors of those around us than from any didactic teaching or careful reasoning. From infancy through our minority, much of what we conceive to be true, or good, or beautiful is absorbed uncritically from the milieu we inhabit.

At some point, however, we become responsible for ourselves such that we can no longer rely uncritically on what our culture has taught us. To become morally and spiritually mature, we must attain a measure of moral independence, becoming conscious of our community’s flaws, its errors, falsehoods, deceptions, and injustices. At which point, we become acutely accountable, both to our fellow man and to God for how we live as members of that community. But the relationship to God takes precedence. His call to righteousness supersedes our community’s otherwise reasonable expectations that we support its ways. As St. Peter speaking to the high priest who prohibited his preaching says, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29 ESV). Nor is this hierarchy of responsibility unique to Christianity. It is presumed, for example, in many of Plato’s dialogues and is expressly declared by Socrates in his famous Apology before the Athenian court: “Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you.”⁴ Socrates understands that his responsibility to what is good and true takes precedence over any responsibility to his community’s comfort. Thus does he wisely describe himself as a gadfly whose philosophical sting disturbs the moral slumber of the Athenian state, pressing it toward the justice it is reluctant to practice.⁵

Moral Dissonance and Awakening in Intruder in the Dust

In his 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner depicts the moral awakening of Charles Mallison, the sixteen-year-old protagonist, who faces a significant moral test when he discovers the gap between what his community has taught him and what he knows to be true. The son of a prominent professional family in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi (circa 1947), he has absorbed, more or less uncritically, their genteel notion of noblesse oblige, which presumes the superiority of upper-class Southern whites to poor, working-class whites and to Black people. This superiority is neither ontological nor necessarily moral. It is, rather, an assumed superiority of mind, culture, habit, and deportment, qualities which are thought to make moral superiority more likely. Thus, Charles considers himself both heir and guardian of high Southern ways as well as the vanguard of moral reform. Concerned to treat Black people well, to keep the more rapacious members of the white community from overtly abusing them, he still regards them as having a propensity to low behavior, thus requiring the paternal overwatch of high-minded whites.⁶ However, the view of his family is also that Black people are equal to whites in their humanity and deserve (eventually) to be recognized as such in the social and political order. Thus, he holds two dissonant moral positions: he accepts the equality of all humans yet conducts himself in ways that presume his own superiority.

This unflattering truth comes clear during a minor mishap in Charles’s childhood. On a winter hunting trip when he is twelve years old, Charles falls into a creek while trying to cross it on a log. As he emerges from the water, he encounters Lucas Beauchamp, a Black man who lives on the plantation where Charles is hunting. Taking charge of Charles’s recovery, Lucas commands him and his two Black assistants to come to his house where he dries Charles’s clothes and feeds him lunch. By the terms of life as Charles understands them, he (a white boy) must pay Lucas (a Black man) for his lunch, preserving thereby the essential superiority of his class. As a Black man, Lucas is presumed incapable, both financially and morally, of a simple act of charity. Rather than expect him to act as any other responsible adult who would help a child in distress, Charles assumes that Lucas requires compensation. He also believes himself superior to uncompensated charity from a Black man. So he tries to pay Lucas for his lunch, something he would never have tried had Lucas been white.⁷

But Lucas refuses Charles’s money and thus disorients the boy. By offering aid to a child in need, he behaves as any decent man should. By refusing to be treated as an inferior, he upends Charles’s sense of his own superiority and thus makes him feel inferior to the view of himself with which he arrived at the plantation. Because he fears he has “debased not merely his manhood but his whole race too,” Charles undertakes a project “to survive what had looked out…from the man’s face.”⁸ This what that looked out was Lucas’s full-fledged humanity.

For the next four years, Charles obsesses over this moment, trying various (often comical) ways to reclaim his superiority by sending Lucas a series of gifts purchased with his own money, each of which Lucas answers with a gift of equal or greater value. The worst of it is that Lucas is not even consciously trying to assert his equality. This he takes for granted — a stance that consistently irritates and angers many white men in Jefferson.⁹ He is simply responding to Charles as any decent man would, exercising the primary agency and authority in the relationship. And Charles becomes, thereby, responsible to respect and honor Lucas as any child is responsible to respect and honor an adult who provides him kindness and care. This reciprocity of equals Charles does not like. At the end of four years, however, the sting of the event is fading as Charles, hoping Lucas has forgotten him, prepares to take his place among the educated, white gentry as a guardian and protector of his town.¹⁰

Then Lucas Beauchamp kills Vinson Gowrie, a white man — or so it appears when he is found standing over the body of the dead man with a recently fired pistol. Even Charles’s Uncle Gavin — Charles’s moral guide, a source of deep human insight, who acknowledges the guilt of the South in its practice of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, who considers himself responsible to prevent such atrocities as the lynching of Black men and to work for their eventual enjoyment of equal rights — even he assumes Lucas is guilty, that he has finally behaved as Black men are prone to behave. Gavin, in fact, avails himself of the standard racial pejorative — the “n-word” — to describe such behavior. Moreover, he insists that the best he can do is protect Lucas from a lynching and provide him with strong legal representation so that he can avoid the death penalty.¹¹ No one, for even the briefest moment, considers that Lucas might be innocent. And though Lucas denies the crime, insisting it was not his gun that killed Vinson, no one is willing to put forth effort to investigate whether appearances square with reality, especially since doing so would require them to exhume the hastily buried body of the murdered man. In the town of Jefferson, the dead body of a white man matters more than the life of a Black one.¹²

Except that Charles feels responsible (though afraid) to do exactly what Lucas has requested and what everyone else has refused to do — dig up Vinson’s body. He bears such responsibility not because he is the white protector of Lucas but because Lucas is morally and ontologically his brother — a brotherhood that makes Charles uncomfortable but whose implications he cannot shake. He must, therefore, act. For if he fails to do so, he will abet “the death by shameful violence of a man who would die not because he was a murderer but because his skin was black.”¹³

In a comical turn of events, Charles, his Black friend Aleck Sander, and an old spinster named Ms. Habersham form a party and sneak into the countryside under cover of night to dig up Vinson Gowrie’s body only to discover the body of another man, Jake Montgomery, in the grave where Vinson is supposed to be. Apparently, someone has already moved Vinson’s body and buried another man in his place. Baffled, disconcerted, and fearful, they re-bury Montgomery and report the situation to the sheriff who returns to the grave to exhume Montgomery’s body only to discover that it too has been moved. At this point, the plot gets circuitous, but they locate both bodies rather quickly and discover that neither was shot with Lucas’s gun. As the story unfolds, we learn that Vinson’s brother Crawford, to avoid the discovery that he had been stealing lumber from Vinson, killed both Vinson and Jake — to whom he had been selling the stolen lumber — and framed Lucas Beauchamp.¹⁴

But many things about this situation disturb Charles. First, practically the entire white population of the county — himself and his uncle, from whom he had expected clear moral guidance, included — had immediately presumed that Lucas was guilty, a presumption that would not have held such sway had Lucas been white. At the very least, his claim — that the bullet which killed Vinson had not come from his gun — would have been taken more seriously. In short, the white population of Jefferson County consider Lucas prone to murder simply because he is Black. Indeed, they seem to need him to be so, as too much virtue on his part threatens their sense of superiority.¹⁵ To make matters worse, Lucas has, his whole life, refused to display the deferential behaviors toward white men and women that the people of Jefferson expect of Black men. This is why so many of them find him infuriating, not that he acts superior to them but that he refuses to act inferior. He even claims the ancestral dignity associated with his white grandfather, Carothers McCaslin, a wealthy plantation owner and slaveholder who fathered bi-racial children with his female slaves.

Thus, large swaths of the white population of Jefferson County seem willing to accept Lucas’s lynching and, in some sense, to want it. Indeed, for most of them, it is a foregone conclusion. They expect the Gowries, a clan of poor whites who lived in the hill country outside of Jefferson, to be violent and vengeful.¹⁶ According to Charles, those who had come to watch had done so “not to see what they called justice done nor even retribution exacted but to see that Beat Four [where the Gowrie’s live] should not fail its white man’s high estate.”¹⁷ Many loitered about town to see it happen; a few were even willing to help. Most merely presumed it was inevitable and that it was Lucas’s fault.

And those who oppose a lynching are as upset with Lucas for making one likely as they are with him for (supposedly) murdering a white man. They would rather it not be manifest that lynching is a root threat that protects the racial hierarchy of their county. Better for everyone if Black men like Lucas would simply play by the rules, so that the violence and injustice upon which their privilege depends would remain unseen. Few of these citizens like the Gowries or their ilk, and most presume themselves superior to these ‘white trash’ citizens of their county. Their greatest fear, though, is that the violence of a lynching will reveal the dark truth about life in Jefferson.¹⁸

Still, Charles has seen this truth. He knows that neither he, nor his uncle, nor his community are innocent. And he hates the guilt they carry with “that fierce desire that they should be perfect because they were his and he was theirs, that furious intolerance of any one single jot or tittle less than absolute perfection.”¹⁹After all, it was Crawford Gowrie’s intuitive understanding of racial attitudes that led him to believe he could successfully frame Lucas for a murder he did not commit, that the white community would not investigate too carefully the murder of a white man when a Black man was standing next to the body with a recently fired pistol. Indeed, had Charles and Aleck Sander and Ms. Habersham not intervened, Crawford would have succeeded. Had Charles not received the unexpected glimpse of Lucas Beauchamp, the human being, when he was twelve years old, he would not have intervened. Had Lucas not shown himself to be the full-fledged, unapologetic equal that he is, Charles could never have received the troubling, life-altering glimpse of humanity that his community had trained him to ignore. It is, therefore, Lucas in his strength of character who reorients Charles in his moral understanding.²⁰

The Light Within and the Demands of Justice

But Charles must be willing to act upon his deepened moral vision. Because he is still a boy, he is distant enough from the center of cultural power to be more easily committed than most to justice, willing to challenge his community’s standards by opening the grave of a dead white man to save the life of a living Black one. In doing so, he invites “into the light and glare of day something shocking and shameful out of the whole white foundation of the county which he himself must partake of too since he too was part of it.”²¹ As he shares his county’s shame, however, Charles unearths a paradox: his community has also formed him for this moment of truth, “since it had also integrated into him whatever it was that had compelled him to stop and listen to [Lucas].”²² Thus, Charles has inherited two other incompatible tendencies:

(1.) to regard any Black man as a priori prone to violence,

(2.) to seek and demand justice from himself and his community.

He cannot follow both, so he must choose between them by some measure which will show him which is true and which is false.

St. Augustine called this standard “reason,” a divine light by which humans both see and desire what is true and good. In his dialogue The Teacher, he describes the process by which humans discern the true from the false, the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, observing that “students consider within themselves whether truths have been stated….by looking upon the inner Truth, according to their abilities”²³ (emphasis added). This inner Truth is not the subjective monologue of individual self-interest, but an objective standard to which the individual is accountable, something like what St. Paul calls “the law of God written on our hearts” (Romans 2:15 KJV). In True Religion, Augustine reflects further upon the relationship between the inner self and Truth, observing, “It is in the inner self that Truth dwells….So then, direct your course to what the light of reason gets its light from….Since Truth…is herself what reasoners are aiming at, see there the concord which cannot be surpassed, and put yourself in accord with her.”²⁴ Because humans are made to the image of God, we have, in the structure of our mind’s activity, a mirror (often obscured by vice) of the mind of God. This image is the inner Truth of which Augustine speaks, the light by which we put our own hearts in an accord with His, an accord perfectly realized only in the person of Christ. Truth, then, is both the divine light by which human reason operates and that for which it seeks. Thus, when not clouded by vice, reason is one way we hear God’s voice.

Hearing and following that voice, however, is neither simple nor easy; for, as noted earlier, our individual sense of right and wrong is always bound up with our community’s sense. Furthermore, we inherit — primarily on authority — the very traditions which form our capacity to discern what is true and good, without which we could hardly begin to reason. Nevertheless, to reach moral and spiritual maturity, we must become capable of honoring the good of our community while opposing its injustices. In Antiqua et Nova, a document concerned to distinguish between artificial and human intelligence, the Vatican insists that “At the heart of the Christian understanding of intelligence is the integration of truth into the moral and spiritual life of the person, guiding his or her actions in light of God’s goodness and truth. According to God’s plan, intelligence, in its fullest sense, also includes the ability to savor what is true, good, and beautiful.”²⁵ Though not exactly savoring his situation, since his pursuit of the truth is quite uncomfortable, Charles Mallison determines to follow truth as it leads him to justice, against the grain of what is worst in his community and with the grain of what is best. In choosing what is right over what is expected, he achieves moral and spiritual maturity, establishing himself as a moral adult who, in doing right by Lucas, does so also by himself and his community. His actions expose even the moral tardiness of his uncle Gavin who responds to the revelation of his own bigotry by advising Charles to remain a lover of his community and, therefore, never to stop in his quest to do what is just.²⁶

Because humans are ontologically relational, we are members, by nature, of communities, shaped by our community’s narrative, oriented by it to see the world in particular ways. Such membership is more a gift to be honored than a limit to be overcome. Because, however, our communities are comprised of sinful souls prone to error and vice, they are always and inevitably imperfect. Thus, we cannot accept uncritically the moral or spiritual cues of the milieu in which we find ourselves. In fact, when our community would encourage us to see ourselves as particularly virtuous and those not like us as particularly vicious, we should be especially wary, because the human capacity for self-delusion is tremendous. “There is,” observes Augustine in Confessions, “but a dim light in men; let them walk, let them walk, lest darkness overtake them.”²⁷ Some members of any human community will sometimes speak or act in ways that justify the mistreatment of our fellow human beings, especially of those whom we perceive as, in some sense, strangers to us. Indeed, self-serving, self-aggrandizing disdain for the stranger is a perennial and ugly human temptation. When such behaviors appear in our communities, we need not, in a fruitless quest for purity, abandon those communities. Neither, however, can we acquiesce. Instead, as the struggle of Charles Mallison shows, we serve both the stranger and our community best when we witness, by word and deed, to that justice which is due every person.

Stephen Mitchell holds a PhD in humanities from Faulkner University. He teaches English at Covenant Day School and Covenant College.

NOTES

1. John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 88.
2. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 107.
3. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 107. Note: This claim should not be taken as supporting contemporary pro-abortion arguments that question or deny the personhood of a human fetus. For an excellent analysis of the Christian concept of personhood and its relationship to abortion, see Robert Spaeman’s Persons: The Difference Between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’ (Oxford, 1996).
4. Plato, The Apology, 29d–30a, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Global Grey, 2017).
5. Plato, The Apology, 29d–31a.
6. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (originally published 1948), in Novels 1942–1954, ed. Noel Polk (Library of America, 1994), 330–44, 398–402.
7. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 285–95.
8. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 293 and 299.
9. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 297–98.
10. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 296–303.
11. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 319–20; 332.
12. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 343.
13. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 338.
14. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 339–62 and 402–19.
15. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 296.
16. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 303–304 and 313.
17. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 387.
18. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 420–39.
19. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 442.
20. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 434.
21. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 388.
22. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 398.
23. Augustine, The Teacher, 14.5, trans. Peter King (Hackett Publishing Company, 1995).
24. Augustine, True Religion, 39.72, in On Christian Belief, in The Works of Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, trans. Edmund Hill, O. P., ed. Boniface Ramsey, O.P. (New City Press, 2005), 77–78.
25. Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, January 28, 2025, Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education, Vatican website, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20250128_antiqua-et-nova_en.html.
26. Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 464–68.
27. Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), 190.