by Gustave Kahn
GOD AND GODDESSES
“All that,” said Joseph of Arimathea, “In the murmur of human beings; personally, I have seen the dawn of the divine.”
“A dawn of kindness,” the king continued, “but a human dawn”
“The angels of marvel predicted the birth; harps resounded on the eve of the annunciation.”
“In the parvis of the temple the angels of light manifested themselves to the wife of Manoah.14 The celestial promise flared up before the eyes of Hannah,15 and both of them remained in prayer throughout their quiet lives before the miraculous guests of their wombs. That was also, at the time, the dawn of the divine. The man of the promise has often come, Incarnated, only to die without having spoken. Delilah killed the strong, and when Samuel got to his feet in the dwelling of the Pythoness, it was to harsh exile that he returned, not the tomb.”
“In your thinking, Sire, your science, which is your cult, why do feminine forms rose up immortal and almost divine, and why are the men of the past no more, in your eyes, than sages?”
“The divine,” the king replied, “is a cult accumulated by long prayer and long contemplation. Since the world of thought resides in men and woman alike, why has humankind not embodied itself in its goddesses? Is not beauty the immediately sensible form of the divine, and does not womanhood contain as many of the possibilities of suffering that complete it? The same moment, relived since the world has existed, has been recounted for as long as there has been speech. The same facts never tire of being. The entire network of joy, pain, hatred and love that passes, in the eyes of mere mortals, for the profound contemplation of the world, is contained in women as much as in men, more intensely and more rapidly. They hear the fanfares of victory and the lugubrious moans of mourning at the same moment; they think and they act, wholly given to impulsion. They draw nearer to the way through existence. They determine with a word the orientation of the road that is often so hard to fix in the sands. In the physical word, men act and women listen. In the moral world, women act and men contemplate.
“To primitive humankind, therefore, the forms of goddesses were necessary. The god of men, the announced Messiah, has never come; he has been constructed slowly from those who arrive and die, leaving behind a babble more profound than those previously heard. It is in them and in those of us in whom their brief lives multiply by meditation and study—which is to say, the mental beauty of men—that God has been constructed. To the amiable seers, destined to a hard death, he remains a sign, and we are the ones who open our souls entirely to their essence.
“Thousands of tabernacles are waiting with an empty pedestal for the statue, a tabula rasa for the book, and festivals have already been ready for a long time for the rustle of the truth—but who has seen anything there but a reflection? And the conquest of the truth is so infinitely arduous that the great emissaries of consciousness have let it filter through our fingers like droplets of pale water.
“The man from the banks of the Jordan, whose voice thundered over Palestine, the lustral prophet who only remained on the frontiers of the world to lead more disciples to poverty and toward the silence of the desert, whose head was cut off—what remains of his thought? And what of Jesus, who remains, in addition to the tears of women, our sadness and consciousness of forgiveness? The Son of Man stirs the universe, like a shower of rain. Drops shine momentarily on all the leaves and flowers, then everything dries out and the same appearance as before returns. Many drops have designed mobile and temporary spheres on lakes, rivers and the ocean. A fine cloud passé over, full of blessed forbearance; the Earth is refreshed; then the ardent Sun becomes master again: a golden disk, a disk of glory and ostentation, a disk flamboyant with passion, with its lesson of violent and daily desire.”
“What are we to do, then?” asked Joseph of Arimathea.
“Wait. If you keep your eyes fixed on the future, without looking at anything but the appearance of the enigma, the life of the Earth and human beings will seem motionless to you, and you will become sad because the not-yet belied effort of humans on Earth has no other end but watching the same ray of sunlight cut out the same expanse of shadow on the same wall. If you look behind you, hope will come to you by roads traveled.
“Oh, if only days of audacity were not followed by years of exhaustion, if humans did not hesitate so frequently before the tall grass of unexplored heaths! The wooden vessel that you have brought me takes its place among the elements of our cult, since it represents a prescience and a dolor, and it will doubtless long be its most precious object, since it is the most recent and signifies so many accumulated ideas—also because it emanates from the most instinctive of the heroes of virtue, and also because everything leads to the belief, by the very reason of his recent existence, that for a long time, no other will rise up in the radiance of life that we will be able to touch our thought.
“But Joseph, it is like the ark—a casket, a sign—and you can only explain it to me in terms of the beautiful melancholy that grips you when you contemplate it.”
Dares came in.
“Sire, a traveler has come by way of the sands to present himself at the castle. He is very weary, very poor in appearance; his eyes are hollow, his long black hair is mingled with silvery undergrowth.”
“We will see him,” said the king.
And to the presence of the ser and the saint that they were, Dares introduced a man. At that moment a ray of sunlight penetrated the high-ceilinged gallery, so intense and charged with celestial vigor that Joseph of Arimathea’s wooden vessel, deposited on the pedestal on an altar, seemed to catch fire, with a fixed and powdery blaze.
Chapter Five
AHASVERUS
“Be welcome,” said the king. “Stranger, you can tell us your name or not, as you like. Our will and our law merely demand that you leave the castle, when it pleases you, less sad and better endowed with good fortune than when you entered it.”
“I am Ahasverus,” the man replied, “a poor artisan from Jerusalem.”
“And how do you come to be here?”
“I was banished.”
“Where have you come from more recently?”
“The broad desert.”
“And where are you going?”
“I don’t know and I hardly care.”
“I didn’t know you in Jerusalem. I’m Joseph of Arimathea.”
“It’s hardly likely that someone as powerful as you would remember having seen a poor wretch like me.”
“Drink,” said Balthazar. He held out a cup to the man, who emptied it in a single draught. His aquiline features brightened beneath his thick hair, and his hand trembled slightly, as if with pleasure, and his temples throbbed with the flow of the source of life. His hands were large, bony and hard, and when he put the metal goblet down his entire frame seemed tall and strong. His face was the color of raw copper, and his feet were bare. A long brown tunic and old cloak covered him.
“I’ve seen you often, Lord Joseph, and your palace in the vines. I’ve seen you going hunting on your handsome white horse with brass harness, with your white falcon on your wrist, and your retinue of servants, more magnificent than you in their costumes and weaponry. I’ve seen you come back joyful when, wearied by work, I was about to watch the Sun set, as red as blood, over the city.”
“Where did you live?”
“You hardly even passed that way: in the street that leads to the charnel-house, the rubbish dump and the site of public executions, a street soiled by the neighborhood of the kennels of the poor and miserable courtesans, on stony ground where trees don’t grow, where the dregs of the city went to chat by the fountain in the evening.”
“What was your work?” asked Balthazar.
“Anything and everything. I helped masons, I was something of a carpenter, something of a smith—any work that brought me a windfall that would give me a few handfuls of flour or a little bottle of wine. It’s not good to be poor in Israel.”
“Why were you banishe
d?”
“Don’t you know, Lord Joseph? I heard talk, in fact, that Caiaphas had imprisoned you. Who knows anything, though, about a nobody like me? Or perhaps Pilate had already opened your cell-door. I was banished without being told the reason. I was threatened with torture if I stayed—which, to tell the truth, I had no desire to do. What does it matter, when one’s unfortunate? I believe that it was for not opening my door to Jesus, who was going up to Calvary, or not having offered him a place on my bench. I didn’t act out of harshness, but all the condensed pass in front of my house and when one must die, it’s as well to make haste…it lessens the misery.”
“I would have thought,” said Joseph, “that the priests would have congratulated you.”
“Yes, some of them—they’re quite hard. With all my heart, I’d trade the years of misery that remain to me not to have done it. Why did I refuse…at the first impulse? I was hard man in a hard city…and then, it all happened, in spite of its apparent slowness, so quickly…and remember, among all that howling...
“‘He wants to be king of the Jews, he wants to be Caesar’s slave…oh, the descendant of David…call your gibborim,16 son of David…protégé of God, bring down angels to flagellate us and open our skulls with the hooves of their winged horses…that’s what it would take for us to believe you…where are your miracles, you who brought Lazarus back to life, when the tempting opportunity for a resurrection presented itself for you to…Lazarus was a nonentity…it’s the Magdalen who...’ And cries, a storm of cries, as there is every time someone is led to death.”
“You didn’t recognize him?”
“Who, Jesus?”
“Yes, Jesus, the gentle savior.”
“No! The hatred unleashed on him by the dogs that escort all those passing funerals is always the same, and I’d seen so many, and heard the great voices of the poor. It was in the ditches of the palace that they were buried in the thick mortal sand, or in the depths of that well-trodden cave to which free men are dragged in obscure wood after death and washed. There are poisons...
“We were hardly ever shown heroes in our street being led to the cross, or we were told that they were thieves. Yes, I’ve seen brave men captured on the far side of the Jordan, sold by Arab guides, deceived by Herod’s emissaries, whom God confuses with putrid murderers, but when they were led to Jerusalem, wounded, tied to camels like split bales because their blood was running, there was talk, above all, of their thefts and depredations. Many had left because the publican ruined them, some of who had robbed the publican—or had done even worse.”
“Ahasverus, you weren’t astonished to hear Joseph of Arimathea call Jesus the gentle savior?”
“No, he was his friend—and then, perhaps I’ve seen something.”
“Thanks to what?”
“To the shadow of death over the city, and to not having understood anything, not having seen anything, known anything, to having rested that day, and doubtless many days before, in the company of souls more frail and more profound than my own, tormented and harshly chastised, without my being able to do anything—and it was nothing—but let him rest on my step. That’s my concern in my new distress, no worse than the old, my only distress.
“I saw those who were weeping beside his body, desolate in their hearts, and the women who were with him were beautiful in nobility and filial suffering; the Pharisees mocking him were fertile in anecdotes, but they looked like ferrets—those whom the little people met, at least—by comparison with Jesus’ friends. They carried his body away piously. As for Iscariot, I think they killed him. A short time after that death, people were saying—they were Galileans who were talking—that the death of Jesus was a crime greater than any before it, that because of that crime we’d see the old misfortunes again, and that the Hebrews would be dispersed, as before, by the conqueror’s scourge—and many poor folk came to pay their respects and weep at the site of the torture...
“The priests began to talk differently; to hear them, they had been deceived, and only ought to have banished Jesus, the gentle, who had only made one mistake, that of consorting with the meanest inhabitants of the city, being otherwise a learned man, sometimes favored with divine communications. They no longer feared him, but they feared the Galileans who had made so many friends by their kindness, and promises of eternal ecstasy for anyone who followed their teachings. I was harshly reproached for having refused him my bench, for having closed my door on him. I was already unhappy about it.
“Ultimately, as you can imagine, nobody reproached Caiaphas or the powerful men of the Sanhedrin; none of those who had committed the murder were caused any anxiety, but they were happy to aim their hatred at me and banish me, as they were able to banish the carpenter who cut the wood for the cross, the metalworkers who had fabricated the nails and the fathers of the Roman soldiers who mounted guard on the torture-victims, as they did every day. And exile pleased me, because I had already banished my city and my race from my soul.
“I was too unhappy to love a city; traveling harshly now, not wanting to stop anywhere for long, anxious no longer to belong to any homeland, no longer to act collectively, no longer to be deceive collectively, I’m going in search of new distresses, all less injurious than the sight of the white lie of a city. Would you care to give me another cup? I’m weary, in spite of my strength.”
As he drank, he continued: “Lord, this wine is the happy current of life; it’s warm and it’s brief; the pleasure it gives is as short as that of a glad thought, or the hope of a pleasant dream. Wine is almost as impalpable as the truth that flees from us, leaving us with a pulpy sensation in our fingers. One has seized it entirely, as a hope, and also abandoned it entirely, but one doesn’t detest it, any more than the hope, and one wants to seize the charmer once again who sings in a palace beneath the skull, even one as hard as mine—that of Ahasverus, the poor workman of Jerusalem. And I’ve walked so far, for so many days, Lord, that I beg you to give me leave for a little rest. I’ll leave tomorrow, and you’ll have finished with the sight of a poor wretch.”
“Ahasverus,” said Balthazar, “Since you have come so far from Jerusalem, have you encountered any Jews on your route?”
“Yes, Lord, a few. They’re preaching the new faith, and the new incarnation of Javeh. To listen to them, Moses was nothing but a small boy; they’re beginning again. A Hebrew is a man who preaches the new faith. They’ve never done anything but that, and when their faith in Javeh seemed too ancient, they were sometimes idolaters. In my time, I too have sculpted Baals, crudely, for rich amateurs to put in the corner of their garden. But you can hear them chirping the new faith at every crossroads in the world, until the time when the gentiles reduced them to silence, until their bodies and the pyres evaporate with the firewood in golden flames in a puff of smoke. They always require a puff of smoke. They preach courageously, and heaps of stones serve at the same time as their tombs and as indicators to recognize the road. But they preach very courageously. They’re beginning again—it’s the sign of the race.”
SOLOMON’S SHIP
Ahasverus did not leave the castle as soon as he had said he would, for the king’s ingenious hospitality retained him for some time under the pretext of small tasks involving wood or iron. For the greater part of the day Ahasverus worked doggedly; then, in the evening, he sat up late talking to Dares. The black slave liked the wanderer and he had wanted to get to know him better in order to be surer of curing his sadness—because, for the worthy slave, not to be entirely happy was to suffer from the most profound pain.
To distract him, he told him his most marvelous stories. “Do you know,” he said to him one day, “the story of King Solomon’s ship?” And when Ahasverus, laughing, admitted to being unaware of it, Dares said to him: “For someone—someone like you—who intends to extend his life over long and multiple roads, it’s necessary to know it. It’s true, and useful.
“When Solomon had constructed the immense temple of which his son David had dreamed,
in which thirteen thousand pillars of cedar sustained the domes whose golden strips presented in their curves all the noble words inspired by the Elohim, and where the marvelous lamp was suspended under which the simplest priest, transfigured by the light, seemed an omnipotent king, he wondered whether he had done enough for the praise of his God to be proclaimed over the entire Earth.
“He walked around the temple and was satisfied. The joy of the faithful filled the parvis with their admiring cries and their greatest respect when, through the forest of cedar pillars, they glimpsed the pontiff’s massive silver chair facing the king’s golden throne, and the marvelous carpet that was unrolled toward the sanctuary so that the king and the pontiff might kneel before the doors of the tabernacle before it opened contented him. He gazed at the palms on the walls, the bronze wings that seemed to be bearing prayers away, the large brazen oxen that sustained the vessels of purification; he went along the exterior terraces and climbed up the towers; he saw with pleasure all the familiar birds for which nests had been constructed, in order that their fluttering and calling might appear to continue in the infinite Heavens the enthusiastic words of women happy in their piety. He saw the pool consecrated to water so clear that, in spite of its depth, one could decipher on the bed of marble brightly-colored mosaics that were the names of God the Creator—and yet, when he went back to the palace at the slow pace of his chariot, he was worried, and felt that his homage to the Most High was incomplete.
“Nothing, however, was missing from the superb temple, and its hill surpassed the highest in the land of faith. Choirs sang the praises of Javeh with a voice so melodious that the captive kings and the hosts of Solomon dedicated to other religions felt the God of Israel embracing them in the silvery flow of loving sound, and some were converted when, to the most gentle rhythm, as tender as a bride’s response, the doors slid open before the bright white gleam—like frozen lightning—of the sanctuary.