Phil Brennan
Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2002

"The Sopranos" as a morality play? Have the last four seasons of the hit HBO series been preparing us for the realization that all that whacking and fornicating and unalloyed viciousness was leading us toward a moral truth?

That's pretty much the conclusion of Washington writer Matt Feeney. Feeney's piece, "A Reckoning Tony Soprano, his conscience, and other inconveniences" in National Review Online, takes a very different view of Tony Soprano, who he suggests is not the sociopath pop psychologists see, but simply a bad man slowly strangling on his badness.

Through the run of the series, Feeney writes, "Tony seemed ferociously adept at suppressing moral doubts. His conscience never gained a foothold, and, when challenged about his actions, by his wife or his daughter (or, sometimes, his therapist), he was always ready with facile, but apparently adequate, rationalizations and evasions."

All that changed this season, which ended Sunday night: "... the deeper meaning of Tony's quirks became much clearer in a way that changed our understanding of the show," Feeney notes. "From the beginning, critics have referred to Tony as a sociopath, suggesting that he simply lacks the psychological armature to be a moral person – that he lacks human sympathy, is numb to conscience."

Feeney disputes the diagnosis, citing numerous instances where sparks of humanity and kindness showed through the mobster exterior. "Real sociopaths don't have to try that hard," Feeney writes. "Second, Tony is capable of sympathy – for his children, his wife, his therapist, various people who are already dead, and, revealingly, animals," (remember what price Ralph paid for killing Tony's horse?).

"Tony, in other words, is not a sociopath. He is a bad person. He recognizes at several levels the claims that morality makes on him. He has simply bought into a way of life that forces him to reject those claims – although this rejection takes a great deal of work, and it requires certain weird compensations, such as his thing for animals."

The portrait Feeney paints of Tony Soprano is of a man caught in the most common of all dilemmas – the struggle between the beast and the divine within all men. "Man without God is a beast," somebody once wrote (I can't find the source).

In Tony's case, he's not an atheist or a non-believer in the Catholicism into which he was born and which his wife practices to the extent possible under the circumstances. Rather, his choice of the other creed into which he was born – the brutal creed of Cosa Nostra – demands that he forsake all but the trappings of Roman Catholicism. A mob boss can't function under the strictures of the Ten Commandments or those of the Church. Honoring the commandment "Thou Shalt not Kill" would put a capo, who derives a large part of his power from the ability to inspire stark, fear out of business.

And once he forsakes his allegiance to his Creator, all the other taboos – adultery, betrayal, banditry – fall aside. He is now free of everything but what's left of his conscience – and that remains to bedevil him, because along with the beast is the spirit of the Divine, which constantly struggles to reawaken the better angels of his nature – mordant but still present, as they are in all men.

St. Augustan put it this way: "God made us for Himself, and we will never rest until we rest in Him." The beast within all of us knows this, and combats it fiercely. And when it succeeds, it banishes peace.

If Feeney is right, "The Sopranos" is trying to teach us that man who abandons God embraces the beast – and when he gives into his beasthood he not only abandons his humanity, he also foregoes all inner peace. It is what Feeney calls "Tony's festering bad conscience" at work.

Feeney puts it this way: "But just because Tony has turned his back on morality, that doesn't mean that morality is finished with Tony. A surprising feature in the moral landscape of this season's "Sopranos" is the stubborn persistence of the Good: Tony's rationalizations do not suffice after all, at least not fully," Feeney explains.

"By the end of Season Four, he is beginning to be truly haunted by his sins, and he is finally paying for them directly."

What remains? Only two outcomes are possible – Tony's salvation, a final conquest of the beast, or his destruction when the beast devours him.

There's a lesson here, and it appears to have been well taught in the only way it could be in these times – subtly fed through the gospel of the tube.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute.

He can be reached at phil@newsmax.com

Editor's note:
Now we know: "Why the Left Hates America"