Three Cheers for the Paraclete

by Thomas Keneally

  And like a practised canon lawyer to whom time-limits are the expected thing, Egan speculated with some assurance, and the lips trembled on a number – but did not say it. He frowned.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I thought cathedral sermons had to be scrutinized by the monsignor.’

  ‘No,’ Egan said, putting an explanatory hand on the table. ‘It would be a sad day when they weren’t able to trust the preaching of a member of this staff. Even one under house arrest.’

  Maitland saw that until then his guest had kept both hands clasped on the left hip and that now, as a pernicious silence grew, they fled back there defenceless as sheep. This disposed Maitland to suspect a number of things, among them that Egan might sometimes find his quarters immaculate with the same dismay as Maitland found his own to be a shambles.

  Egan chirped suddenly, ‘Speaking of censorship, James, have you ever heard of a book called The Meanings of God? Its author is a man called Quinlan, a Catholic priest, according to the publishers.’

  ‘You are the complete canon lawyer,’ Maitland said after a silence. He stood again. ‘The Meanings of God. So they’ve found out about that?’

  He could remember meeting a cerebral young English publisher nearly three years before in Ghent. As people do to friendly publishers, he had shown the man a very ragged manuscript. He had said, ‘It’s a history of the idea of God since the eighteenth century. If Tillich speaks of a God beyond God, this is a history of the God who is somewhat this side of the unknown God. It is a history of the God of the institutions, pulpits, political parties and wreath-laying generals. It is a history of the abuse of the notion of God and of its place in the motives of modern man.’ He could remember the publisher arriving in Louvain by Volkswagen and running up the stairs to his, Maitland’s room, shouting praise and royalty percentages. He had wanted to publish under a pseudonym, using his mother’s maiden name. His motive was stage-fright, not fear of a dimly remembered Church law by which priests were meant to submit whatever they published to censorship by their superiors. Just the same, he thought that the spirit of the law would be satisfied by a pseudonym. Apart from that, his was intended to be a historical study, even if it did not permit the same type of ordered treatment as would a life of Garibaldi or Lola Montez. If there was a difference between what God was and what man, at this or that stage, thought God was, then this was a work of history and not of theology.

  He published it. It went into two editions. Historians were diverted by it although, as they all said, it was not, could not hope to be, definitive. Most theologians enjoyed it. The young publisher had not been able to afford a third edition, but he had sold it into paperbacks, and Maitland had received the cheque for this sale a month after coming to the House of Studies.

  Now he walked without anger to the balcony door. Like every writer who ever published, he said, ‘What else can a person expect in a country like this?’ He added, ‘In a Church like this?’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘Did Nolan send you to see me?’

  ‘Monsignor Nolan is not my keeper.’

  ‘You found out yourself.’

  ‘No. The Grand President of the Knights of Saint Patrick drew my attention to it, and we thought you might be willing to study the book. Being a historian, you see.’

  From the balcony door Maitland watched car lights blink and shift behind the beach in pin-points and beams and smudged radiances that brought the message home to him. Egan was not exposing him, but merely talking about books.

  He turned back to the defensor.

  ‘Forgive me, doctor. I misunderstood you … I don’t think we’re speaking about the same thing.’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  Egan offered Maitland a page of Sunday paper which had come from his pocket. Maitland saw Miss Associated Canneries abundant in a two-piece and ‘90 Year Old Sires Twins’.

  ‘The other page.’

  The other page asked ‘God: Is He A Political Hoax?’ Among the normal Sabbath melange of misquotes, Maitland saw the names Mark Quinlan and The Meanings of God honoured in italics. A publisher’s agent had seen that the book, filleted for the press, had that same appeal which, at first sight, only Miss Associated Canneries and potent ancients possessed.

  ‘The secretary of the Knights,’ Egan explained, ‘who fancies himself as an apologist, bought a copy of this book, took some of his sick-leave, read it in two days, and then wrote a letter to the morning papers. Now it appears he used the name of the Knights without authorization. The next day a ferocious letter appeared in the press, written by a university man who admired the book.’ Maitland raised his eyebrows. ‘This man cited the letter from the Knight as an example of the general anti-humanist tendencies of the Church. It was at that stage that the president of the Knights telephoned and asked for help in the dialogue between the Knights and the scholar. You see, the secretary was silly enough to reply to the scholar on the third day.’

  ‘Armed with quotes from such high sources as the Sacred Heart Recorder, no doubt.’

  ‘Perhaps. Now it’s a very scholarly book and a dangerous one, mainly because the public won’t be able to see that when Quinlan says God he doesn’t mean exactly God in any pure sense.’

  Maitland smiled, too proprietorily. On one level, it was impossible not to be as gratified as a schoolboy.

  ‘What did you have in mind for me to do?’

  ‘The Knights have voted to print a pamphlet refuting both the don and, if possible, the book. I want to know whether you would consider reading the book, as an expert, and advising the Knights?’

  Maitland became immediately afraid of the farcical possibilities of the affair. ‘But I have already read it, Maurice,’ he said, and eliminated from the words all irony of the type that comes home to roost. ‘I own a copy, in fact. The hard-cover edition.’ His eyes hunted the shelves, and he could have been simply looking for yet another book worth keeping. Not that he did know exactly where it stood; still, it held the essence of the freest years of his life, it was a young man’s book written happily, and the memory of having produced it was a vintage one. ‘I can’t find it,’ he said. ‘But I have to be honest, I suppose. Maurice, I found very little to challenge in it on the level of history; and on the level of theology, well, it simply doesn’t make direct judgments. Perhaps it is a dangerous book for the general public, but it was not written for them, and if they buy it, they won’t read it. As for the Knights, I’d advise them to lick their wounds and forget the business. I think Miss –’ he squinted at the paper – ‘Associated Canneries is a far more meet matter for the secretary to take his sick-leave over.’

  ‘You wouldn’t consider re-reading it? I know it’s an imposition. But the Knights do so much good. And I feel a responsibility. I’m their chaplain, you see.’

  ‘You do move in powerful circles, Maurice.’

  Maurice shielded his eyes from the irrelevancy.

  Maitland repented. ‘I’ll read it again, certainly.’

  ‘Only if you have the time.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘If there’s anything I could do in return …’ Egan glanced shyly around at Maitland’s pylons of books with the look of noncommittal pain peculiar to his plump cheeks. And though he might have meant that he would be willing to put Maitland’s suite in order, it was more likely this implication was an accident arising from a discomfort that remained no matter how easy their talk became.

  ‘That’s very kind of you. I’m fairly well settled in now.’

  ‘It’s a good place to live,’ Egan told him, a man reciting a creed quickly as a substitute for belief. ‘So close to other priests.’

  Outside, the big loveless corridors creaked and headed for that deep midnight when even those nominal lights now shining would be out. Every hour or so, a priest or a student walked down the waste of hallway under those myopic bulbs that give each figure in black a meaning close to symbolic. So close to other priests …


  Maitland told Egan, ‘I hope you’ll call in whenever you’d like a talk. I mean the invitation.’

  Egan seemed very pleased for a moment. His bright man-of-commerce face made Maitland think of commercial analogies, this time of a records clerk with a chance of burning the invoice file.

  ‘That would be pleasant some evenings,’ he said humbly. ‘There’s very little of that sort of thing, here.’

  Outside, bound for his room, Egan passed a student called Hurst who was returning from another absolution. They said good night. The corridors being so allegorical, and the mean light pretending to possess dimensions not its own, the passing of these two pale men was like the passing of the Rachel and the Pequod. Within a second Hurst had Egan quartered with a panic-stricken glance, then shrugged on his customary pelts of guilt and went upstairs to take a tablet Costello had given him.

  An hour or so after Egan left, Maitland came to the end of redrafting the second-last chapter of his thesis. The idea of the last chapter lay idle and pliant in the bottom of his mind. Five thousand words were implicit in it, two or three days’ work if he were allowed to do it. The task of writing a cathedral sermon frightened him more, and he would not be able to begin it until the Thursday at the earliest. He knew what was required. In his case in particular, something fit, grammatic and vapid would be the ticket, something to assure the citizen, chancing an eye towards the sermon section of Monday’s paper, that God, like Jupiter and Mars, like abstract art, the United Nations and bank interest, had not swung loose from His established path. He was brooding on rhythmic boredom and how well it went in cathedral sermons, and was promising himself aggressively that it was the one thing of which he was incapable, when he remembered his night meditation and came to the prie-dieu.

  His rule was an hour’s meditation each night, his aim the scalding sight of God which disrupts the network of senses and rearranges them on a higher level. His chances were small, this proved by his having to time himself. One could no more travel the distances involved by making oneself available for an hour, timed by travelling-clock on the mantelpiece, than one could write a sonnet taking sixty-divided-by-fourteen minutes for each line. Sometimes by emptying himself of impressions, seeing himself an island eroded by a black surf of nothing, he became aware of the underlying astringency of an Other’s existence, you could call it. At your peril. Words were the trap, for the same words that fakers used of psychic indigestion, fakirs used of God.

  The Other’s sting was never strong enough to clear his resentments or even to keep him from dozing. Often he was distracted by vanity at some of the better passages in The Meanings of God. He no more remembered these word for word than the salmon knows the fall drop for drop. But he remembered with pleasure the colour of its ideas, the contours of its language. They recurred of their own accord, as if their place were threatened by the Other, as it may have been.

  This night he fell asleep, and Egan and Nolan, the publisher and God-as-a-trolley moved like crayfish in the shallow doze. When he woke, it was past the hour. His token siege of the citadel had ended.

  5

  MAITLAND ENTERED THE refectory five or ten minutes after the beginning of breakfast. The students ate at long tables either side of the aisle. They were silent and appeared to be listening to a reader on a rostrum above the steaming teapots. At the top table Nolan ate and did listen to the reading, taking that funny care that worried over broad vowels and misreadings yet allowed Hurst, watching demons flicker down the quicksilver length of a bread-knife, to go to hell unsupervised. Costello ate, Egan merely sat. There was no other priest at table. As Maitland sat down, Egan rose and said a Grace to himself. His small white flippers worked throughout the prayer to rid the front of his soutane of suspected crumbs. Then Maitland could hear him breathing fervidly at his elbow.

  ‘More letters in this morning’s paper. About the Quinlan book. Some nasty things about the Knights and about the Church, by implication.’

  Egan stopped, for the reader had lost his place and was too new to the House of Studies to know that he could safely have begun again anywhere in the book. When he did find his place and began again, so did Egan.

  ‘They’ve had all the scholarship so far, all the scholarly jargon. If you could see your way, you’d be the man to alter that.’

  Before Maitland a breakfast of devilled kidneys waited, the same breakfast that stood that morning before most commercial travellers and resident schoolmasters throughout the land. Yet, in his discomfort, he stared at it with a notable air of discovery.

  He said at length, ‘It’s very difficult.’

  Egan inhaled in a way that left the floor still open.

  ‘It’s no use fault-finding just for the sake of fault-finding,’ Maitland explained. ‘The Knights would do better to forget it.’

  ‘The Knights may, but no one else is willing to. The book and the dilemma of the Knights and the rantings of the history department of the university are all given extensive treatment in this week’s issue of Forum.’

  Despite years of practice in the confessional, Egan reached such a pitch on this last whisper that Nolan threw a glance of warning down the table.

  Maitland turned his listless fork in the kidney gravy. ‘I’ll come to your room in about ten minutes.’

  He found little Egan behind a cedar door in the same corridor that held Costello’s suite.

  Within, the study had just been visited by the nun who did the bed-making and dusting. Pines shone beyond the windows as if someone’s solicitude extended to them also. All was properly aloof from all else – the bed moored in the corner by a sheepskin mat; the prie-dieu hung with purple stole; the desk on an isle of carpet in the mists of polished floorboards; the bookcases with a crucifix, centrally placed, consecrating all the dull suburbs of Egan’s learning; in one corner, a Latin Quarter of paperbacks with scenes from the recent film on their covers.

  Egan came to the door carrying Forum.

  ‘Did you know that this Mark Quinlan unequivocally claims to be a priest. Or rather, the publisher claims it.’ Egan was all elation and no anger.

  ‘So you told me. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be, Maurice. He’s no heretic.’

  Egan thrust the journal into Maitland’s hands and conducted him to a chair.

  ‘But the things he says about Pius the Ninth …’

  ‘He says nothing against Pius as a man of good faith. But there have been such things as disastrous papacies.’

  ‘Yes, but poor old Pius the Ninth!’

  The defensor sat at the desk, which seemed too big for him. He may have been five and a half feet tall, but his schoolboy build seemed to take inches off him.

  ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘the book carries no bishop’s imprimatur and that means that if Quinlan is a priest the book was published without his bishop’s approval. And it’s not likely that even the most radical priest would do that. I’m more than toying with the idea, James, of writing to the editor of Forum and outlining the canons regarding permission to publish and, then, censorship – canons which every priest in union with his bishop knows and respects.’

  Maitland had not read beyond the first line of the article. He had been frowning at the line drawings that decorated it, a rusty knight bearing a standard with a triple-tiara and poking a mailed fist towards a ferocious young humanist. Now he transferred to Egan some of his chagrin at them.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, Maurice. You shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that all priests remember their canon law. There may even be places where restrictive canons like that are treated as a dead letter.’

  ‘Never without perilous results, James. Vide Father Mark Quinlan, if he is Father Mark Quinlan.’

  ‘Perilous results,’ Maitland said, condemning the term.

  There was a small hiss of embarrassed laughter from Egan. ‘Yes, perilous results,’ he contended. ‘Where is the sense in maintaining purity of doctrine for all these centuries, keeping a strict watch on heresy, if we let
the entire system slip in these latter days for the sake of the Quinlans?’

  ‘But Quinlan’s book does nothing to anyone’s ancient purity. As I told you last night, it’s an historical study, using historical methods.’

  Egan’s hand advanced for the journal. There was an incisiveness about him arising from his affinity to the law, the Pope’s law that had once made emperors truckle. He kept eyes on Maitland that were going to make a point. They made Maitland very angry.

  Egan read from the article, ‘“While the book deals directly with the crucial meanings God has had for some of the most prominent men and institutions of the past two hundred years, it raises by implication the question of whether God can be known in any of the traditional ways.” Even the heathen hack can see it.’

  ‘Then the heathen hack is bloody-well up a tree.’ Yet he was shaken. He said, ‘Look, Maurice, maybe the book does of necessity make a few theological judgments, but they aren’t the point of the thing.’

  Downstairs a bell was rung, the type still rung in schools that cannot afford an electric one.

  ‘Twenty to,’ Egan said as it lulled.

  ‘Court this morning?’

  ‘Some paperwork. Also, I intend to recommend to His Grace –’

  ‘If you recommend anything to do with this Meanings of God affair, well, you put me in a position of extreme embarrassment to begin with. I’d prefer not to have to argue it out with a prelate, thank you.’

  Egan’s face formed itself in invincible areas of plumpness around a tiny tight mouth. Somehow Maitland felt vindicated, thinking, ‘As soon as I saw him I knew he had it in him to look like that.’

  ‘Extreme embarrassment,’ the defensor quoted. ‘Because you agree with Quinlan? I find it hard to see how you could.’

  ‘A person isn’t necessarily brought into the world to be seen through by canon lawyers.’

  Maitland excused himself and went. Ten minutes later, dressed in street clothes, Egan knocked on Maitland’s door. He stood improperly childlike, his contrite hands held before him. This, anyhow, was the way he was discovered by Maitland. A second later he coughed, and veils of adult and discrete flesh seemed to overlay the child’s face.