by Gustave Kahn
“When we were able to bury him, his body was still oozing drops of blood; I collected them and am bringing them to you, in accordance with the imperious order of my conscience, the voice that proclaims verity in dreams, and the exigencies of my footfalls on my route. I’m old; it’s time to bring you the precious deposit. Receive it from the proud hands of one of those who perceived a slight ray of his truth; receive it from hands washed by contact with him—and now that my task of transmitting it to you is fulfilled, deign to let me spend the few minutes of my life in your shadow, for those faithful to the verity of Jesus no longer have a homeland. Your guest is no longer the envoy of eternal forces; he is poor Joseph of Arimathea.
“The vessel in which I collected the Incarnate’s drops of blood in enclosed in this primitive casket; it’s a vessel of coarse wood. It’s as simple as the truth. Just as the Incarnate contained in the poverty of his body and soul the immense piers and desperate towers of the truth, so this coarse vessel contains the memory and testimony of his existence. Only men like those who detect in the son of man a power superior to that of the forces of nature, of which forms of metal are the effigy, will be able to experience the consolation that this vessel will bring, and deduce the eternal truth from such a legend of a single moment in time. It is to you, for my strength is failing, to you the old contemplator isolated in the face of the Profound Rationale of Silence, that the responsibility now belongs of conserving it, of testing its strengths, and of explaining the details to them of what they must discover in essence alone.”
Then King Balthazar summoned the black slave in order that he might take the guest away for a few hours’ rest. He gazed pensively at the vessel, and the profound sea, and the superhuman frescoes, still absorbed in the auroras of a new verity that was about to enlighten his eyes.
Chapter Two
THE DOCTOR OF KINDNESS
Joseph of Arimathea lived in the castle of King Balthazar. One day, on the terrace constructed to overlook the gardens, King Balthazar and Joseph watched the noisy activity of the birds and butterflies. In the cheerful gardens there were palm-trees whose fronds became silvery in the sunlight, pomegranate-trees whose flowers burst forth scarlet, delicate and slender olive-trees and a heavy brown curtain of cedars barring the horizon. Beneath the vertical sunlight, veils of gauze sown with powdered gold seemed to extend into the distance, the soft and aromatic vapors of the warm earth.
Joseph asked Balthazar what he knew about the Doctor of Kindness. Joseph knew him by reflection, through tales and a few words of Rabbi Hillel,9 who had quite recently ornamented Jerusalem with the glare of his virtues.
“I knew him,” the King said. “He was a child-like and profound soul. Hillel could have given an idea of him; at least, he echoed a part of his lustral benevolence, over the harsh city where gold is overly prized. But the Doctor of Kindness had entered long before Hillel into the knowledge of verities—or, if you prefer, plausible symbols. In reaching that point of intellectuality, Hillel had been hindered by the ardor with which the contemplation of his traditional God warmed him. A scribe may accumulate virtues, but he will nevertheless only become the best of scribes. The gifts that one perfects in the shade of temples never blossom into extraordinary flowers. It was in the book of life that the Master of Kindness had stammered, spelled and then read.
“His name was Nehemiah; his father was a rich merchant, one of those that are escorted around markets in order that small item of advice might be obtained from him, a man of strict justice whom neighbors sometimes took for an arbiter. That man as eminent among the common run of the sages of Israel.
“In his early youth, Nehemiah was noted for the stocks of knowledge that he brought to school every day. He had a very pure upbringing in close proximity with his mother, and yet he confounded the doctors, for he studied the holy texts, he knew the songs, the glosses of the humble and the plaints of transients, fresh flowers in the golden meadows around the Book.
“Before he was fifteen years old he conceived a great disgust for what he knew and a bleak apprehension before the unknowns, only too well-traced and well-defined, that he still had to cover. He no longer studied the holy texts; he dreamed. He abandoned Hellenic philosophy, all decorated by lucid imaginations, the dances of bees, a shady quarry from which half-sculpted marble-clad white statues emerged, because he did not find there what he sought above all: a truth that might contain a happiness.
“He dreamed beside torrents, beside cedars, and lay down in the shade of fig-trees to see the scarlet of the Sun melt away and master the troubled face of the Moon. Then love, with which his heart was impregnated, became focused. Young people, when they love, repeat aubades to the aurora of desire and he morning of the flesh. He gave rhythm to his dolors, issue of the disparity between the desires of life and the facts of life, in numerous melancholies as broad as the sumptuous evenings of autumn.
“Then, weary of science and song, he set forth into the world. Already, his family no longer recognized him; he did not like to count gold; he did not like to run a careful and prideful eye over the lands over which his herds passed; he did not seek the ostentation of dignities, having bought them too easily. So he set forth into the world.
“And yet, there was great mourning that day in a palace in Jerusalem; a mother suffered all the torture and heartbreak, for the flesh of her flesh was going away, her son had changed into someone else, a stranger. And a father said nothing, for what could he say? The child that had been familiar to him had been transformed into some enigmatic judge—and that father, on seeing the numerous servants hand him their keys that evening and render him their accounts, suffered as if he were henceforth performing a futile formality. And the house was enclosed sooner by the darkness, for the lamp in the upper room where Nehemiah worked was not lit, and the two old people preferred that night hid their faces from one another, which grew older that evening.
“At first, Nehemiah followed military leaders. Often, during halts in the shadowless plain, lying down to refresh his limbs, his helmet unbuckled, he followed in the sky, sparkling with promise, dreams other than that of human grandeur. An ingenuous conqueror, he pursued the pillagers, with the attention that the timid pay to fawns, and one day, he found blood repugnant, and the dream of trumpets and lictors seemed stupid.
“Then free, he visited numerous cities, without conforming with the custom of ancient sages who headed first toward the temples, toward initiation, toward the maintainers of new truths, or those who dryly retain a creed powdered by the centuries. Instead, he listened in the marketplaces, the circuses, the theaters, the tribunals and the brothels—and an entire popular clamor roe up toward him; cries of suffering escaped from broad and low faces, and plaints from tragic masks, and the gesture of a dancing-girl was imploring—and in its ant-like swarming, amid the songs and torches, humankind bumped its head into walls as hard as they could be.
“He sought out thaumaturges, did not laugh at tales of the primitive miracles of sorcerers, and lent a willing ear to the fable of metempsychosis. He did not always disdain dice and his virtue never claimed that abstinence shone upon him, as a certain sign. He was later accustomed to say that he had gained more insight into the human soul during nights of orgiastic religious festivity than in conversations with theologians. He listened to them avidly, however, and also to the rhetors, for, knowing from the thaumaturges how base and puerile the desires of the human soul really are, he learned from the latter with what external appearances one may decorate the sterile agitation toward unreal goods. Finally, weary of ports of call, mimes and philosophies, he returned to his own land.
“He was even less recognizable than before; his indifference to everything that agitated his city was too entire. The people of his home town only had clear ideas about commerce, clear passions for the construction of enormous palaces with cupolas of precious metal. The few minutes that remained free to them, the minutes of luxury, the minutes of meditation, they occupied in turning over from ever
y angle the external idea of God, in order to discover a more ostentatious fashion of marking the extent to which they were penetrated by it. Some simplified the rites, which became slow and grave gestures; others complicated them with sudden appeals and repetitions of florid and theatrical celebrations; a few—the most profound—argued as to whether God was a force, an essence or a power; and on the terraces and the benches of shady gardens, in the evening, white-beards let slip gentle and headstrong axioms. But no one cared about his own soul.
“When everyone saw that Nehemiah definitely did not want to be a merchant, a judge, a pontiff or an army leader, he was disdained. He would have been scorned, if it had not been evident that his father would leave him considerable wealth. In the town, he was the unexpected specter of Inactivity.
“As Nehemiah felt this muted reprobation, without being afflicted by it, he often went away on brief journeys. This time, he did not go to the sumptuous cities of the horizon, to the great smoky intersections of the confluences of rivers. He sought out empty river-banks, bare plains or isolated mountains. Sometimes he stopped at nomads’ encampments and conversed with them. He loved discovering how the legends of the past had been fashioned in those simple minds on which a magnificent pomp descends every evening: the sentiment of the extent and the impersonal, the sentiment of a brief conclusion before the perpetual recommencement.
“More often, however, he wandered alone, and his march sometimes hesitated in meditative halts. The rumor spread quickly that, slightly mad, he conversed with the void and imagined singular apparitions. In truth, during these peregrinations, he was seeking a comfortable place to dwell. He found it on Mount Liban.
“There was a house on an elevated but narrow plateau, like a straight bar on the horizon, tall and spacious, ringed by strong walls, flanked by a high tower. Behind those broad walls and bronze gates, one could defend oneself against an enemy. From the top of the tower, the Mediterranean mists were visible in the far distance, beyond the fields of Judea and the sands—the endless sands.
“To the right of the castle yawned an abrupt ravine; on descending into it by means of a goat-track one soon lost sight of the castle entirely, in spite of is proximity. It was a vast blue hole; there, the walls of luxuriant vegetation reduced the appearance of the world to a sort of funnel, above which nothing could be seen but the play of the clouds and beating wings.
“To the left of the castle was another ravine, much broader, also descending abruptly. Within it there was the debris of a temple dedicated to some unknown faith. The capitals of columns still offered a few lotus petals, the walls stripped of their cladding were primitive and devoid of memorial signs. A profound crypt opened therein, and there, by torchlight, one could see very ancient frescoes similar to those placed on this terrace, facing the sea, by one of my ancestors.
“The Master of Kindness settled there; he had found his place. The alternating curse of life and death having instituted him as master of his wealth, he transported it there and surrounded himself, in order to protect them and protect himself, with a company of slaves, whom he liberated, and bound them to him more firmly by his generosity. The nomads who knew him, who had recourse to his science as a physician and his arbitration in quarrels, often came to deploy their bronzed complexions at the foot of his hill, to wash their dazzling linen beside the springs and to count the new-born kids. Their chiefs came to the tower to gaze at the blue plaque of the sea and the blond powder of the sand—and the Doctor of Kindness lived like the master of those powerful tribes.
“He reigned over that corner of the Earth by virtue of science and wealth, consequent with one of his ideas, which was that supreme power over humans is the only thing that ought to be bought, that being the universal explanation for the existence of gold, but that it is then necessary to know how to use the power acquired by ordinary means, and that science is the sole means of conserving and preserving it.
“The causes required to fix a man in one location of the world or another—which are all as similar as sectors of shadow—are often very slight. These are a few of the reasons that decided him. Firstly, the crypt and its decoration led him to believe that someone had already lived there whose rare and little-divulged ideas were in accord with the results of his own enquiries regarding the world. Secondly, he was glad that the house was defendable, for a sage, once he has refused to admit the vital collaboration of towns and their conditions, needs to arm himself for his defense. Thirdly, the deserted ravine, a quiet brushwood-lines hollow beneath the naked sky appeared to him to be a salutary refuge for meditation. There, he had the symbol of the human house, a fortress, an ancient temple and a retreat.
“When he was powerful, his renown for wisdom, denied by the pontiffs and magistrates, grew among the young dreamers and those who studied the arcane of reasons for being. He welcomed visitors. The majority remained with him in his fortress. Others only stayed there for a few months, and departed graver and wiser, with greater certainty written in their faces.
“He often taught by means of parables. I will give you an example.”
I. THE ARK
On the evening of the day when David, full of the delight of glory, danced before the ark, after which Michal had reproached him for the vulgarity of his triumph and he had replied to him,10 he consulted the sage Eliah, whose advice he often sought. Eliah was clever and prudent, brave enough and vigorous enough to be counted among the king’s peers, and the monarch valued him in the council, for Eliah had often understood his maneuvers clearly, and deduced his objectives and the motives for some of his actions. The word of Eliah was precise and rare; if he has not left a famous name beside those of Jacob, Abishai, Asahel and Benaiah, it is because he was primarily a friend of the king in difficult days, and subsequently set aside the pomp of his triumphs.
Eliah admitted that he had not understood. “The love,” he said, “that you have for the people, after having spread benefits so wide, preserving their savings, and protecting their harvests against foreign invaders, leads you to prefer a simple glory and a mere passage through the loving crowd, to the splendors of a despot enclosed in his palace, whose face is sometimes glimpsed through the fissures in the wall of the lances and golden shields of his guards—but I cannot see, Sire, any other motive for your behavior today.”
And David said: “Eliah, the trumpets with the slow and gilded fanfares, the drums whose grave tone marks the fall of the instant into the past and the music of harps extend like the necks of joyous birds, stretching a spring-like smile, a music adequate to our brief felicities, the processions of guards who are the assertion of our power, and that crowd of dignitaries, the incarnation of the multiple facets of the people, and my own presence, which is the clarified mind of the race, are not too much to accompany the universal symbol along the roads. Know that the ark is the universal symbol because, entirely constructed as it is of the most precious wood, which so much piety has encrusted with so many gems, and never opened, it is empty.
“The profound sense of our first legislator forbade its ornamentation with figures and forms designed to reveal that. It is in our minds, by virtue of example and instruction, that the verities that our ancestors judged best for us are inscribed. The shining and empty ark signifies the miser’s casket, whether, after loading it for a lifetime, he finds it open and empty one evening, or, full and resonant with metal, it remains no less futile and sterile. It also signifies what the temple ought to be, a bare enclosure without idols.
“The temple ought not to be the abode of God, the temple is the place where one seeks him; priests and saints ought ask for him in their conscience, and the resemblance they extract therefrom they ought to show to everyone; but God has no complete form or description. Just as he is, so he constructs himself at every moment, and by virtue of that his will changes; it cannot, therefore, be codified. The law of the passing moment is not that of the moment to come.
“The ever-closed ark also symbolizes the closed aspect of the night, t
he profound night that hides its stars in a mantle of cloud. Night is not the hymn of silence, it is merely the moment of silence. It is necessary that, under the fatigue that the Sun pours out every day, weary of earning bread, men sleep, or at least fall silent in their dreams, in order that the thoughts of the discoverers of God can rise up toward him. They can only configure his essence when their eyes are enveloped by the invisible.
“The ark also symbolizes, by its form, the white tombs that stand in the plains. What would you see if you penetrated their sealed vaults? From oblivion, rusty weapons, blades engraved with old characters, the dust of laws, orders and powers. If the ark contained anything, would it not also be a tomb of dead desire? That is why the ark is empty.
“One day, years from now, the temple of the Israelites will stand on the highest hill. It will be like the ark made of wood, clad in precious stone and rich metals; it will be ornamented with immobilized wealth, a tax levied on the ambitions of believers. The likeness of God will not be represented there, but representations of hopeful anticipation will be seen; they will be patient oxen, the image of the contemplative oxen that will support the bowl that ought one day to be filled with divine benediction, the pure wave, contact with which gives purity. Statues will also represent the form we attribute to cherubim; they will be there to represent our desire for the ideal and our hopes.
“That temple will only be commenced in years to come, because it will require years for the conscience of Israel, relieved of the memory of murderous battles, defensive struggles and civil wars, to recover.
“A people can only contemplate itself in souls that have become limpid again, just as one can only see one’s face in a pool without ripples. Then only, with my consent, will the tribes build that temple and the figures of anticipation and hope with it; they will line the walls with long golden palms, solid and symmetrical, which will be the affirmation of their belief—a belief that is a hope solidified, and nothing more.