by Ian Wallace
“It is also your way,” he thrust, “to test every notion of truth. But you confuse proof with demonstration. You demand to put your hands into the wounds: if the Redempteur withdraws out of your reach, you doubt. That is fine scientific procedure, I follow it myself; but as the proofs multiply until the probability favors the truth of the wounds, it is your doubt that needs controlling and not your credulity. I shall prove my truth, but only you can furnish the demonstration: you will not recognize the demonstration, because no wounds will have been touched, and so you will hang me. Yet you will be shaken by the proof. You are Pontius Pilate, twentieth-century vintage. Admit it!”
My mouth remained open for several seconds. Then I gulped back some assurance. I groped for a formal question—how does one examine a redemptionist?
“Is it true,” I demanded sternly, “that you declare yourself equal to the Führer?”
“I do not have his worldly power.”
“Don’t evade. They say you are trying to organize a universal church which will subordinate the political state, creating a world theocracy. If you are the head of that theocracy, where does that put the Führer?”
“The Führer will be long dead when that church comes.”
I was not amused. “Then,” I persisted, trying to be patient, “suppose for the argument that your church should come in your time and in the Führer’s time. Would you be superior to the Führer? Would you be his equal? Give me a direct answer.”
“Von Eltz, Von Eltz, there is no direct answer to these too-precise and therefore artificial questions. How can I enter into your comprehension? If my church should come in our time, it would depend on the Führer and it would depend on me whether we would be equals, who would be superior and who subordinate. Didn’t the Führer make himself chief in all Europa? Cannot any determined house painter make himself chief in all the world under any system, merely by changing the system as he rises? Perhaps I prepare the way for the Führer, perhaps he prepares it for me. In the original future there are all possibilities; but when any part of the future is past, many states of affairs have come to pass, and many others have not come to pass and are no longer possible in any future evolving from this past. The Führer’s way is wrong; he may change, he may perish; but he has made me possible.”
I was nettled. A more specific question might be tried. “Did you or did you not repudiate the Occupation currency?”
“No money is more than indirectly relevant to concerns of the soul.”
“Oh, my God!” I fumed. Coming over to my desk, I exhumed the Guyon brief and leafed through it until I found the place. “It is charged that you publicly made the following statement, quote: The Führer's money is false money, and you shall not use it.’ Unquote. I’d call that clear enough.”
Guyon meditated the charge. Then he replied: “Even in this twentieth century they are reporting me as badly as they reported Jesu. What I said was about like this: The Führer's money is no better than any money, and in the Kingdom of Heaven you won’t be using it or any other.’ I don’t think even the Führer would find fault with that basic idea, do you? although he might substitute Valhalla for Heaven—”
Brushing that aside, I charged in: “Do you or do you not advocate civil rebellion?”
He smiled again. “The priests are confounding me with the underground leader Père Abbé. That doesn’t surprise me. No, I don’t advocate rebellion. I do insist on passive resistance by every man to orders that he considers unjust. But that applies equally to orders by the Church, the civil authorities, the Führer, one’s own landlord: there is no difference. And while a man is passively resisting, he must listen to reason and to his inner voice—”
“What happens then to the principle of law?”
“If a man has a voice in deciding what the laws are, he should obey the law that he considers unjust until he can get it changed. But, Von Eltz—what law in the Führer's expanded Reich has been passed by the people or by elected representatives of the people?”
I could see the point, all right. I could disagree with it, too. “I must classify you as an anarchist. There is no in-between. Either that, or you are a fence straddler.”
“No in-between”; but “either that, or…”It was really sad. Guyon brooded on the gauleiter…
Guyon demanded: “Must you classify everything?” He appended: “Yes, I suppose you must.”
“And your hedging piddling anarchical preachments—these are what you call truths?”
“Not necessarily. They may be false. But I thoroughly believe they are true.”
It threw me off balance. “Yet you claim to represent the truth! If you believe that, how can you permit a shadow of doubt to enter your mind that your preaching is true?” Ending the demand, internally I panicked: I had inadvertently opened up the real reason why I had brought Guyon in behind closed doors for private questioning.
Guyon laughed. “How absurd that I should be prosecuted on grounds that have so little to do with the cere of my teaching! All these charges have to do with my publicly voiced ethics as a man and as a leader. But ethical views are judgments which not even God can make perfectly for all time. Some are better than others, and I am convinced that mine are the best so far, and I will fight for them—but bloodlessly, unless it be my own blood. Yet I admit the possibility that there may be some error in my judgments; only, nobody has yet convinced me of such error. Gauleiter, it is not those propositions that are my truth: they are only what, in my life, emerges as the expression of my truth.”
“A handsome distinction, Guyon.” I was fighting for superiority, even for stability. “Beyond doubt you have coined this distinction to hide from yourself your own inconsistency. Before you try to redeem the world from error, don’t you think you ought to redeem yourself from confusion?”
Guyon took a deep breath and chanced it…
“Truth is necessarily confusing, Gauleiter. And I am the truth. And I am not seeking to redeem the world from Error with E-majuscule; instead, I am patiently chipping away at certain very old errors which just now are fundamental. When they are gone, there will be new fundamental errors. That happened two thousand years ago; it is happening now; it will happen again, in a superficial appearance of repetition, whenever the world comes to some stalemate.”
“I don’t follow you,” I objected—and waited.
Guyon saw that the gauleiter was abandoning his forced role of inquisitor and opening himself up for what he really wanted: to be taught. Guyon decided to try the parable way. Although he was convinced that the way of Von Eltz was tragedy, he had to extend himself to redeem the gauleiter…
“There was a farmer who owned a cherry orchard,” Guyon told me, “and his cherries were infested with worms. So he induced a number of robins to nest in his orchard and eat the worms. During several seasons his cherry crops were rich and wormless. But the robins throve and multiplied until there were not enough worms to feed them; and so they began to eat the cherries. The farmer thereupon imported starlings to drive out the robins. But the starlings, having performed their function, multiplied and began to steal grain from his granary. Now the farmer persuaded some hawks to attack the starlings; this worked well until the starlings were gone, whereupon—”
“—the hawks began killing his chickens,” I interrupted. “All of which goes to show that error is eternally conserved in one form or another. Very fine; but I am a city dweller from the capital of Brunilda, and I am not impressed.”
“There was a certain Good Burgomeister,” then said Guyon, “who was distressed by the inhumanity prevalent in his city. Whereupon he persuaded the Town Council to pass a series of Social Uplift Laws. Hospitals were established for chronic invalids; schools were set up for special training of the feebleminded; a dole was provided for unemployable paupers. As a result, crime diminished, the economic welfare of the city was improved, and the level of civic happiness was raised. The Good Burgomeister died content. One hundred years later, crime was worse, econom
ic welfare lower, and discontent more prevalent than it had been before the Good Burgomeister came; and this was because the chronically unfit had been encouraged to multiply without restraint. The New Burgomeister went to the Town Council and pleaded with them to pass laws requiring sterilization of the genetically unfit: ’For,’ he urged, ‘we have tampered with nature by introducing an artificial imbalance, and we are now committed to restoring balance with artificial countermeasures. Our garden of democracy needs weeding.’
‘No!’ they cried. ’For every human soul has the unalienable right to reproduce his kind; and besides, we would be unseated at the next elections!’ ’Then,’ the New Burgomeister begged in desperation,’re peal the Poor Laws, before we all go to Hell!’ At that the Town Council rose up in wrath, impeached the New Burgomeister, found him guilty of irreverence for the sacred memory of the Good Burgomeister, and banished him from the county. Ten years later the city fell into factious bankruptcy and was nationalized and placed under martial law.”
The second tale interested me, but still I held critical. “The story confuses me,” I commented, “because it appears to me that your so-called Good Burgomeister was stupid not to introduce the counterbalance of sterilization in the first place.”
“You are judging after the fact,” Guyon reminded me. “Would you have thought of that a century ago, even if sterilization had been surgically safe?”
“You are right; but on the other hand, I would not have thought of establishing special schools for the dull a century ago; and as for the chronic invalids, they ought to have been simply exterminated.”
Guyon seized on a chance. “Would you have liquidated them? Would you?”
“What a question!” I ejaculated. “Of course—” I paused. I tried: “The Führer has clearly established that—” My voice dropped as I added: “Of course, we must bear in mind that conditions change, from era to era—”
He sharply halted my compulsive floundering. “We must also bear in mind that Gauleiter Von Eltz has picked on technical details in both parables to keep from having to admit the truth that is in both of them.” My jaw dropped; and he added, leaning forward: “And the gauleiter clings to the letter of Nazi dogma because he dares not think for himself!”
Sinking into the little chair, hastily I lit another cigarette. Suddenly I turned to Dubois. “You’re excused,” I told him. Dubois shrugged and left.
I studied my cigarette.
I murmured: “How can you read my soul?”
Guyon didn’t answer; and I continued to examine the cigarette, letting the smoke play through my fingers.
I inquired: “Are you a priest?”
“They call me Teacher.”
“Teach me, then.”
“There was once a horse whom men led to water—”
I shrugged. “You said that everyone who is of the truth hears your voice. I am of the truth; that should make me ready for your teaching.”
“How are you of the truth?”
“For twenty years,” I told him, measuring my diction, “I have sought leisure to pursue truth, but—I am not wealthy. To seek truth, I need leisure; to find leisure, I need position; to gain position, I have to work. I am well born—you know that? But my family fell on hard times under the Weimar Republic, and their influence was almost obliterated under the Third Reich. To work—and to succeed, there’s the rub: to succeed, I have had to develop techniques, to be efficient, to make despicable friends at intolerable receptions. I thought when I arrived here in Vimy that it was all done, that my position was established, that away from the capital I could forget society and study. Instead your contentious Maon Gallians keep me changing my political position until my head whirls. On one side is that brigand Père Abbé raping the Maon peace and most of the Maon women. On the other side are you, Guyon the Redeemer, with the poor flocking wild-eyed after you; they haven’t, it seems, heard your parable about them. And I am in the middle always, with the clergy pulling me this way and that about every petty social issue and orders coming from the Führer to keep the district happy; and there is no peace, and no leisure, and still no truth.” My cigarette had burned to a long ash during my monody; I kept my eyes fixed upon the ash…
.…His voice is nearly inaudible, Guyon mused. Vimy is the world’s worst place for him, and the epoch of Guyon and Abbe the world’s worst time.
What one needs here is a decisive tough small-brained super-Schutzstaffel like Dubois; what one has is a wavering down-at-the-heels aristocratic intellectual named Von Eltz.
Yet now that his dam is breaking, the deluge of freed emotion that is bursting forth somehow holds its discipline, channels its own course, carves with relentless violence a deep definite gorge of intellectually despairing meaning…
“You, Guyon!” I barked. “They say you claim to be an avatar of Jesus. And I am Pilate. Who then is Père Abbé? Barabbas? So then the bishop is Caiphas, and the Führer is Caesar, it all fits pat; and Pilate-Von Eltz demands recurrently, What is truth? and Guyon can answer no better than Jesus could. Jesus claimed to be the unique Son of God, and taught a mangled potpourri of Sinism and Tammuz-worship, while three generations later John added a dash of Plato to the mixture. Still later Muhammad rearranged the same ingredients spiced with zealot-pepper and jelled in the forms of Bedouin fatalism sired by the shifting sands that now are Saudi Erebi. Comes Martin Luther to transfer the burden of sin from the church to the man, and Ignatius Loyola to shift it back again, and later still the enlightened Protestant pulpit proves that God is a social projection. One would think that Truth was a masked god who sardonically changed masks whenever somebody was on the verge of naming his name! On the sidelines Copernicus blasphemes against Erth, and Galileo turns traitor to his own scientific brand of truth; and Newton orders time to discipline itself, whereafter Einstein sets time free in order to absorb it into the erratics of relative motion, while Rutherford abolishes matter. Berkeley soberly sucks the marrow of reality out of existence; Hume’s mockery banishes the bone; and with what is left Kant subjectively categorizes, and Hegel builds hierarchies of glittering zero oscillating eternally upward toward a mentalistic absolute. Until, in a final feat of liberating legerdemain, James and Schiller and Dewey establish that truth is a function of the way you specify the consequences of believing it. These three, I suppose, together were the Antichrist; so the nations of Erth join in the fantastic Armageddon of World War II, and the circle is rounded off by the recurrence of Jesus in the body of Leroy Guyon. But Guyon comes not as the majestic King of Kings in the prophecy: rather, he comes eating and drinking like the pauper-fanatic Jesus himself, with no place to lay his head. I ask you what truth may be, and you say nothing, but the way of your coming is my answer: the truth is eternal recurrence, the truth is Karma. What Jesus baited what Pilate in the twentieth century before Christ, Guyon? What new Jesus will come in the fortieth century, and what sort of crucifixion will I be arranging for him? Aha, but there is perhaps an out: Brunilda will split the atom—we are not far from that, you know: Man will not be able to keep his hands off that toy, either: Erth will blow to Hell while the Second Law of Thermodynamics ticks away the celestial hours in one outbound time-direction; the sun and the stars slip away into universal disintegration, and presently there is nothing anywhere but a colossal fugue of Hertzian waves. The wheel is shattered: done, done! your truth is no truth, Guyon, there can be a cataclysmic end to recurrence! Unless. …For what if the curve of expansion were to prove in the long run logarithmic instead of linear? then, as it rounds off toward the exhaustion of diminishing increments, gravitation may take hold, the expansion will go over into contraction: the law of universal entropy is reversed, and in a little we are all of us playing our roles backward like a crazy cinema, with the horses galloping madly tail-first toward the starting post. We back into Erth’s beginning and crowd ourselves into the intension of another primordial atom: it explodes and radiates outward, and we are off again, and in another few billions of years Pilate re
crucifies Jesus, and again in two millennia Von Eltz—why, he makes this very speech to you, Guyon, ending by saying, as I do now: You are right, Guyon—the truth is Karma, exactly as you maintain!”
I, Pan, kept half-splitting from Von Eltz: at this perilous point, he became momentarily objective to me. Von Eltz had been pacing rapidly, making wide gestures; he slipped into Brunildic as he came to the part about splitting the atom; he barked and spluttered excited polysyllables rich with consonants and umlauts. He paused now in the middle of the floor, breathless and uncertain. He stared at Guyon. Once more he shrugged…
I had nudged once: I must not nudge again. Sighing, I required myself to slip back into the subjectivity of the gauleiter.
“Both of us need wine,” I said, and poured it—concentrating on the pouring, saying my name to myself: Von Eltz, Von Eltz.
.…Then I sat in my little chair, eying my wine glass as I had eyed my cigarette. I was no ordinary compulsive, yet compulsive I knew I was: every morning at breakfast I counted the segments in my grapefruit.
Guyon inquired mildly: “Then you think I maintain that Karma is truth?”
I gaped, then laughed. “Well,” I hedged, “you didn’t say that, I admit; but you represent it by posing as the Redeemer Reborn. I should think, if you were logical, you would advocate the passive adjustment of original Buddhism: you would claim to be an avatar of Gautama, not of Jesus.”
“No,” Guyon corrected, “you are wrong on two counts. Incredible as it may appear to your precise mind, I am not a logician, though I try never to ignore logic. Using your terms, though, I could say that your major premise is false, and so your consequence fails. I do not claim to be the Redeemer Reborn, any more than Jesu claimed to be Elijah or Moses Reborn: in the transfiguration story, he was only flanked by them; they did not fuse with him. I am only trying to meet modem situations as I think he might have met them in the light of my modern education; and since the situations are highly similar, necessarily I fall into his pattern. And so, not claiming to be the Redeemer Reborn, I do not represent that Karma is truth.”