When Thornton Wilder, the lauded novelist and playwright of the early 1900’s, wanted an opportunity to explore questions of meaning and providence, he chose to write about a bridge collapse. It’s the central (fictional) event of his 1927 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in which a friar named Brother Juniper investigates the lives of five travelers who died from a perilous bridge collapse. Juniper’s hope is that his investigation will uncover the hidden and providential reasons why this terrible accident happened, and perhaps unlock the secret as to why bad things happen in general.
Wilder’s novel is prescient, to say the least, as we study the recent collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore. The two bridges collapsing, and our investigations into them, display a lot of overlap. Whether it’s Brother Juniper or the FBI, both seek a solution to keep the tragedy from happening again. The direction of our modern investigation is certainly different from Brother Juniper’s emphasis, but the goals are not different. What kind of life must we live, and what kind of legal framework needs to be enforced, to keep future bridges from collapsing and killing those walking across it?
Whose sins have been blamed for the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge? At first the suggestion of terrorism was made, but that was quickly ruled out. Many on the disingenuous right claimed that Baltimore was “too woke” in its DEI program focus to care about basic infrastructure needs. Many on the disingenuous left blamed an obsession with car culture and fossil fuels and the need for public transportation alternatives to roads and bridges. As of this article’s publication, there seem to be concerns that inspections revealed major electrical issues in the colliding cargo ship that weren’t fixed before leaving port. These electrical issues caused the ship to lose power and drift into the support pylon of the bridge. Are there inspectors, crewmen, supervisors, port employees, or big businesses to blame? Is it immigrant workers cutting corners, or evil capitalists needing to stay on delivery schedule? Time will, perhaps, tell, but will it be enough to allay our fears that other bridges, perhaps even one we drive with regularity, could one day collapse with us on it?
Brother Juniper’s investigation, the core of Wilder’s novel, outlines the lives of the five people who plummeted into the San Luis river. We, the reader, follow his investigation, watching over his shoulder and learning what he learns. The friar, we learn, is the sort of person who wishes to justify God to the world, going so far as to judge the victims of providence through eighteenth century spreadsheets that scale and rank their goodness, piety, and usefulness. His conclusions are so full of philosophical and theological errors, his superiors in the church ban them as heresy and condemn him to burn at the stake. Perhaps we readers don’t agree with their punishment, but we are nonetheless inclined to admit that Brother Juniper’s quest is folly.
Instead, we discover how each life that plummeted from the collapse of the San Luis Rey bridge is defined by love. The common heartbeat of those who died on the bridge was not that they were good or bad, but that love drove each of them to that bridge on that most unfortunate day. Love unrequited, love driven away, love lost, loving service. Parent love, sibling love, romantic love. It is not their holiness or hedonism that sends them into the precipice. Their one commonality across class, nationality, job, income level, and family origin is the desire to love and be loved.
Wilder offers no answers as to why providence and tragedy remain a mystery, but he offers a balm nonetheless. “Soon we shall die,” concludes Wilder at the end of his novel, “and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them.” Wilder offers us no solutions to the question of providence, but suggests that a life of love is enough to weather the unknown nonetheless. St. Paul agrees. “If I have prophetic powers,” he writes to the church in Corinth, “and understand all mysteries and all knowledge … but have not love, I am nothing.”
In our own time, we can and should discern the full cause of the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse. It is a matter of practicality that we do so, but it is not an act of providence. But we should not live our lives in fear of bridge collapses, nor should we think that we can prevent all bridges from collapsing. Wilder’s insight is that such irrational fears and unmerited pride just aren’t worth it. Go find someone to love instead. It is a much better use of your time.
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I would humbly suggest that it makes more sense to compare Wilder’s book to the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007. That collapse occurred from a sudden failure of the bridge itself, like San Luis Rey, and happened to occur during a busy rush hour. It was perhaps foreseeable but not predictable. The Key Bridge collapse is a lot less theological in that sense: it didn’t fail out of nowhere; a giant ship ran into it and it fell over. End of story. The Key investigation is really about what happened onboard the ship.