by W. E. Gutman
Tugging at the old rabbi’s soul as no prophecy had done before was the fear that other forces were now at play. No, the threat came not from the slumbering peaks of Moab where his anxious gaze had rested. It would descend instead, like a stream of crazed scorpions and asps fleeing a fire, from Jerusalem, a day’s journey to the northwest. So far, the Roman occupation of Judea had been uneventful. Roman rulers were as fair as they were rapacious and scarcely greedier than the native Jewish kings. Yet, tension between Jews and Romans was high. With hundreds of fabulous deities orchestrating their lives, the Romans had regarded monotheism as an aberration. For their part, the Jews could not tolerate the blasphemy of idolatry. Jew was disdainful of Roman, Roman was contemptuous of Jew. Pontius Pilate was outraged by the Jews' defiance of Roman might. Charges of paganism bewildered him. Caligula, his sanguinary successor, ordered that his effigy be erected in Solomon's Temple, in Jerusalem. His assassination prevented the desecration from taking place.
As calamity followed calamity, the men in Qumran were now certain that the End of Days, was at hand, that the Anointed One, the spiritual savior prophesied by Isaiah and longed for by the Jews, the Messiah of lore and prayer, was drawing near. The moon had not yet “turned to blood,” nor had the stars tumbled from their heavenly perch, but destruction was upon the “evil ones” who had cowed Israel, and it was time for Yahweh to lead the Sons of Light in their final assault against the Sons of Darkness.
In preparation for this fateful contest, animated by its urgency, the scribes had worked from dawn to dusk, from sunset to the cock's earliest crow in the windowless scriptorium. There, they had recopied old manuscripts, mended sacred scrolls and sealed them in earthen jars that the younger men would hide in the caves dotting the surrounding cliffs. One day, the covenanters would return and retrieve their beloved Torah, manuals and commentaries. By then, the old sage mused, the Teacher of Righteousness would have defeated Belial, and the emissary of Aaron and Israel would preside over the sacred meal, and divine ordinance would rule the land. But first he and his brothers would have to disperse. The exodus, yet another in a succession of hasty retreats and lengthy exiles, would take some south to Masada and the wilderness beyond, perhaps as far as Goshen where the patriarchs once dwelt. Others would cross the Jordan and join caravans up to the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Others yet, roused by a newfangled apostolic fervor, would trek back to western Judea and Samaria, to spread the word and gain new converts.
The year was 3828 (68 C.E.) and, unbeknownst to these ascetic Jews, descendants of over fifteen generations of a pious, fiercely independent Hasidic sect known as the Essenes, this would be the last time they would ever see Qumran. It would take nearly two thousand years -- and a fortuitous act of curiosity by a young Bedouin in 1947 -- to exhume the Essenes from the cinders of history. Ironically but to no one's surprise, their resurrection would cause great consternation in some circles and set off a cascade of stormy debates fed by ego and religious fundamentalism at the expense of scholarship.
Sixty-two years after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Montvert, the globe-trotting scholar and incorrigible iconoclast, had triggered a similar tidal wave of controversy and unease. But this time the uproar had less to do with academic disputes than with the politics of conflicting ideologies. In resurrecting Hieronymus Bosch, he had opened a Pandora’s Box of acrimony, resentment and vengeance that further radicalized a phalanx of vindictive zealots and claimed two lives.
The inane letter to the editor had irked Montvert, prompting him, as was his custom when irked, to strike back. Published in Le Monde, measured and controlled, his all-purpose riposte mentioned neither Bosch nor Albeniz or Lelouch but it contained verities that were as irrefutable as they were apt to reignite the odium he and his late friends and Brothers had inspired.
There was a pattern to these spontaneous rejoinders. Gadfly-extraordinaire, bewitched by art, cursed with an urge to write, no, to indict, lured by controversy, Montvert had reinvented himself over the years: part activist, part rabble-rouser. He was less interested in explicating than in exposing, debunking, in finding the tiniest of stains in the purest driven snow. The pleasure he derived from such commerce far exceeded any possible urge to inform. He treated fact as a prop. It was the mood, the emotions, the color his words conveyed, the consternation or the outrage they were apt to engender, that made him reach for a pen, not reverence for the fourth estate, nor a fondness for the reader. When not engaged in scholarly discourse, he was busy causing unease and discomfiture -- reminding the forgetful and the smug that the emperor has no clothes, keeping the son of a bitch stripped long enough for all to see him bare-assed and trembling, stinging and confounding men blinded by their own self-induced myopia.
Montvert had paid dearly for indulging his vice -- it cost him promotions and friendships, it isolated him and earned him threats -- but he would remain habituated, less for the fleeting high it produced than out of regard for all the unpopular causes he had espoused, some out of conviction, others out of spite.
Another piece he drafted for publication, this time in L’Humanité, posited that if lies imprison the mind, then the truth sets it free, adding that what people who disagree with this truism loudly proclaim is that “certain inconvenient truths,” like sleeping dogs, are best left undisturbed. He had further proposed that any attempt to entomb the truth, however wrenching, embarrassing or dangerous it might be, is the essence of evil; that silence in the face of misdeeds invites more self-censorship and more misdeeds. He had then itemized what he openly professed to be his core beliefs:
- Morality predates religion.
- The subconscious is susceptible to manipulation.
- Nationalism, chauvinism and religiosity are attitudes forcibly nailed into unpolluted psyches then hammered through repetition and the discipline of fear.
- Killers are made, not sired.
- Faith and reason are mutually exclusive.
- Ignorance and intellectual sloth keep alive the conflict between secular humanism and religion, between sanity and psychosis.
- Those who seek the truth are infinitely closer to it than those who claim to have found it.
- None is as ignorant as he who chooses not to know. Willful myopia subverts good judgment and defiles the truth.
- Everybody has opinions. Much of our mental constructs are erected on a vast scaffolding of dogmas -- generally someone else’s. We adopt these beliefs and attitudes, we cling to them because they encourage us not to think, because they shield us from what we fear most -- the cold, naked truth -- because they keep us warm and cozy in our self-created doctrinal cocoons.
- There are more opinions than facts and we are enamored of them. Opinions blithely disregard, defy and, if need be, corrupt the truth. Tainted fruits of ignorance and self-delusion, opinions often overlook faulty data or perpetuate arguments riddled with ideological monstrosities. Opinions, like inflexible beliefs, shield us from the risks of personal experience. Every time we inhale a wisp of fact, we exhale a gust of inferences.
- In the mouths of demagogues, personal convictions assume dangerous dimensions: They are not what can be borne out by observation or logical deduction but what suits ingrained doctrines. Regurgitated by imbeciles, they are promptly espoused by other imbeciles.
- Only those willing to question the validity of “conventional wisdom” can ever get closer to the truth. Fallacious reasoning, licit as it might be, is a greater enemy of truth than an outright lie. It is the prison in which we lock ourselves to feign a clear conscience. As someone once remarked, a clear conscience is usually the sign of a very bad memory.
- Troublesome facts, computed by rational minds, are more useful than myths peddled by uninformed crusaders. When flock mentality is at play, it is the myths, alas, that capture the imagination of the majority. Inflexible convictions render men blind, arrogant and, carried to the extreme, mad.
And, in an oblique reference to Hieronymus Bosch, he had pu
t forward that --
- True art is experimental. When it ceases to reinvent itself, to enchant, amuse or scandalize, or when it veers from the truth, it is no longer art.
In a rare moment of self-restraint, Montvert shelved the piece. It needed more work. He would never get a chance to submit it.
Montvert turned instead to a quatrain he had penned a fortnight earlier -- he called it his “overture” to a short essay on the role of art in the portrayal and interpretation of psychosis:
What have his weary eyes seen?
Why this pallor upon his face?
He dipped his brush in the bowels of Hell
and unmasked the human race.
What Hieronymus Bosch’s weary eyes beheld is preamble and afterthought, prelude and climax in an age of nascent reason and persistent folly. Tried and convicted for heresy, Jacques de Mollay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, and Joan of Arc had long since been burned at the stake. More witch-hunts would follow. Barely concluded, the One Hundred-Year War would keep alive the political and religious conflict between England and France. It would take nearly four hundred years for the enmity to cease. The plague, cholera, dysentery and a host of venereal diseases would claim untold thousands in their wake.
Religious friction, many elements of which resulted from an attempt by some to oxygenate the Church and by others to further fossilize it, threatened to destroy the very fabric of Christianity. The armies of King Francis the First, in a campaign billed as a “crusade to the glory of Christ,” exterminated nearly all the members of a Calvinist sect in northern Italy. Light prevailed for a time and its radiance guided the uncommon man. But the light vacillated anew, fanned by doctrinal discord and greed and cultural narcissism. Dedicated to validating Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, Galileo would be charged with blasphemy and forced to recant. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre would destroy an entire generation of Huguenot leadership. Fearing for his throne (and his head), French King Henri IV, a Protestant, would cravenly abjures his faith and convert to Catholicism.
In that 60-year period that bridges the Middle Ages and early Renaissance was born, lived and died a remarkable man, an astute observer of human folly, an incomparable artist, the undisputed father of Surrealism and, as the subtle clues that season his eerie renditions suggest, a visionary of uncommon perspicacity.
What Bosch recorded and foretold in his haunting work is the recurring death of reason. In the thousand faces of human bestiality his brush enlivens can be glimpsed the ferocity and injustices of future nightmares: Colonialism. Slavery. Famine. Pestilence. Wars of “liberation.” Wars of subjugation. Wars of territorial expansion. Fratricide. “Holy” wars. Wars to end all wars. Genocide. Weapons of mass destruction. Death squads. Intolerance. Segregation. Sectarian strife. Foreign domination. The rise and radicalization of theocracy. Terrorism in the service of God. The Torah and occupation and expulsion and dispossession. The cross and the sword. The Koran and the scimitar.
On September 27, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI urges a crowd of 120,000 worshippers at an open-air Mass in the Czech Republic, one of Europe’s most secular nations, to remain faithful to religious tradition.
“History has demonstrated the absurdities to which man descends when he excludes God for the horizon of his choices and actions.”
The pope does not bother to enumerate the absurdities and the horrors to which man descends in the service of God.
The day before, as he addressed politicians and diplomats in Prague, a large arachnid cruised on the pope’s white robes. When it reached his ear, Benedict gave it a swat but it didn’t go away; it reappeared on his left shoulder and scampered down his robe. As the pontiff left the medieval Prague Castle’s ornate Spanish Hall, the spider could be seen hanging from a stand of web.
Spiders, like men, are often feared and scorned. Unlike popes, they do serve a purpose. Spiders are not parasites. They work hard for their dinner.
On October 1st, Montvert receives an undated, unsigned letter. Scribbled to simulate a child’s scrawl, it quotes from one of the New Testament’s most anti-Judaic rants:
Ye are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own for he is a liar, and the father of it. (John, 8:44).
The missive then plucks a paragraph from Romans (2:5):
But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath for yourselves in the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment is revealed.
It ends on an ominous note:
And the Lord smote Albeniz and Lelouch. In the name of Almighty God, thou shalt be next.
Montvert smiles. Barbarism and absurdity are not mutually exclusive. He also reminds himself that whistle-blowers are not spurned, persecuted or marked for death because they enjoy the blood sport of exhuming the truth but because they fling it, like excrement, in the eyes of those who fear it most.
Two days later, in celebration of Armed Forces Day, the Virgin of Suyapa, Honduras’s most sacred religious icon, is paraded in the streets of Tegucigalpa. This obnoxious spectacle, following the military coup that ousted, at gunpoint and in his pajamas, the constitutionally elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, epitomizes the servility of the Church vis-à-vis a de facto, illegal and crooked minority regime that usurped power with the help of one of the most oppressive and ruthless military establishments in Central America.
On that same day, as dusk wraps Paris in a chilly embrace, Montvert is assassinated. Laying in wait on Place Du Tertre, where Montvert often dined, Hubert de Ravaillac, dressed in civilian attire, lunges at Lelouch as he is about to enter the Au Clairon des Chasseurs restaurant and stabs him repeatedly in the heart with a large Masonic ceremonial compass. He flees on foot but is quickly apprehended. Narrowly escaping lynching by horrified passersby, he is whisked away by police and taken to the nearest commissariat.
Agitated and haughty, licking his blood-stained hands, de Ravaillac tells interrogators that the Virgin Mary had instructed him to kill Lelouch, a heretic, a Jew and a Freemason.
As Montvert lay dying in a widening pool of his own blood, a priest who happened to be passing by administers the last rites, unaware that Montvert is a Jew and an atheist. With life slowly ebbing, like an apparition emerging from the fog, a singular moment lived in the antiquity of his childhood materializes before his eyes.
Attacks on German soldiers during the occupation of France were swiftly countered with public executions. Staged to set an example and deter further aggression against the occupier, these grisly pageants also palliated the enemy’s frustration while satisfying its thirst for vengeance. One morning, ten men, eight of them veterans of the First World War, were dragged to the village square, lined up against the church wall and shot to avenge the murder of a German officer who had been screwing the baker’s daughter. Montvert saw them crumple, lifeless, on the cobbled sidewalk. Their mission accomplished, ten pink-faced young men placed their rifles on their shoulders, spun on their heels and marched away, single file, expressionless, robot-like in their mustard-brown uniforms. Montvert had stared at the pitiful mass of inert, crumpled bodies, blood oozing from their open mouths, their eyes staring in the void, like the eyes of a doll. He also remembered saying to himself over and over that he’d been treated to a grotesque but otherwise meaningless spectacle, a dramatization of unimaginable realism, something akin to cinema. It began to rain and a steady downpour washed away the blood as onlookers scattered and dissolved in a gray sulfur-laden mist. Framed in the doorway of the old stone Gothic church, a priest crossed himself three times then sanctified the scene of the carnage with a few drops of “holy” water.
Montvert was five.
A lifetime later, a black-robed man kneels by Montvert’s side and offers him the viaticum, “provisions for the journey beyond.” A vague grin parts Montvert’s lips.
“S
atis,” he murmurs in Latin before expiring. “Enough.”
Bishop Touvier intercedes and on advice of court-appointed psychiatrists, Hubert de Ravaillac is transferred to Esquirol Hospital, outside Paris, site of the famous 350-year-old insane asylum also known as Charenton.
Montvert’s violent death, as had that of Grand Master Lelouch, receives discreet coverage. The media, to prevent possible violence against innocent clerics, refrain from identifying his assassin. Terse news reports characterize the incident as “a senseless homicide” and describe the perpetrator as a “drifter, a raving and incurable lunatic destined to die in confinement.”
In time, the clamor subsides and the matter is forgotten. France, its passions briefly stirred, regains its urbane and bon-vivant bearing. Esteemed in life, mourned in death, Jacques Lelouch, Manuel Albeniz and Michel Montvert fade from memory, their names and legacy displaced and eclipsed by the fad or the bugaboo of the hour.
Masonic lodges continue to initiate neophytes who will labor on behalf of peace and social justice. The Church, its delicate ego bruised, lays low. Seminarians enter the priesthood in diminishing numbers. Some retreat to monasteries where they while away the hours praying for unattainable ideals. Some leave the orders, get married and have children who will serve the state and die on distant battlefields. Some, throbbing with religious fervor, will wage holy wars of their own. Freethinkers will defy them and expose their hideous schemes.