by Неизвестный
As the car moved off and the sound died away, someone spoke for the first time. “Who was that?”
Hilda's father, his eyes filled with tears, watched the station wagon as it disappeared down the road. “Father David,” he muttered. “Father David M. Everything is going to be all right now.” He shook his head, as if freeing his mind from an uncomfortable thought. “He was right all along.”
At the time he led Jonathan stumbling away from the aborted seashore marriage in 1970, Father David M. (“Bones,” as his students liked to call him) was a forty-eight-year-old priest, member of an East Coast diocese, professor of anthropology at a major seminary, and official exorcist for his diocese. He had already conducted four exorcisms himself and he had been assistant at five others. The first had been in Paris, where he had been assistant to an older priest; the others had been in his home diocese.
When David M. started his professional life as an anthropologist in 1956, he could not have dreamed that within ten years his knowledge of anthropology and his enthusiasm for prehistory would be the major reasons for his role as exorcist and later for his involvement in the bizarre case of Father Jonathan. Nor could he have dreamed even in that March of 1970, as the exorcism began, that it would lead him, first, to the most harrowing personal crisis of his life, and then to abandon anthropology as a study and a profession.
When David was born in Coos, New Hampshire's northernmost county, in 1922, the state, with a population of nearly half a million, was still a rustic farming community, very far removed from the sophisticated centers south in Boston and New York. Coos County in particular was still permeated with the Yankee traditions of hard work, thrift, sobriety; and it hearkened to the preaching of the evils of alcohol, the wisdom of paying cash for what you bought, of self-reliance, individual responsibility, and—as rock-bottom foundation of right living—the infallible, all-sufficient guidance and enlightenment of the Bible. Even today, when the central and southern tiers of the state have suffered from the malice of change, the land itself still carries for the mind the atmosphere of an ancient and undisturbed kingdom. In mountain, lake, cliff, and forest there is a repose as awesome as the naked weight of the Himalayas and the volcanic face of the Sinai Mountains.
David M. was the only child born of affluent Yankee Roman Catholic parents on both sides. He spent his early years on his father's farm, occasionally visiting the nearby town and, once in a while, traveling down to Portsmouth with his parents for a brief vacation.
The most abiding images David has of the world in his youth are of lakes, mountains, forests, cliffs, rock formations, valleys shaded by trees and crags, and the great, still stretches of land that surrounded his home. His ears still retain the harmonies riding in the place names of his home ground-Ammonoosuc River, Saco River, Franconia range, Merrimack Valley, and the lingering magic of Lake Winni-pesaukee, whose 20 miles of length were clad in foliage, and the names of whose 274 islands he once learned to repeat by heart.
The Roman Catholicism of his parents was of a conservative kind and an intimate part of daily life. Both parents had been to college; his father had studied in Cambridge, England. Both had traveled in Europe. And their home was centered around the library and its large open fireplace, where they gathered after meals and where David spent long hours browsing through his parents' books.
Many of David's relatives lived in the surrounding countryside. His playmates were normally his cousins. His earliest memories of any intellectual awakening he traces to the influence of an uncle who, having taught history in Boston for 37 years, finally retired to live on the farm with his brother and sister-in-law, David's parents.
Old Edward, as they called him, personified for David the stability and permanence of his home; and he deeply influenced David's mental development. Edward spent most of his days reading. He stirred out of the house ritually twice a day; once, in the morning, to walk around the farm-rain, hail, or snow; a second time, after dinner, when he walked up and down in the shade of a little copse at the west end of the house, smoking his pipe and talking to himself.
David remembers going with Old Edward again and again to view the Great Stone Face, “The Old Man of the Mountain,” high up on its perch above Franconia Notch. “No one knows how it came there, son,” Edward used to remark. “It just happened. Man emerging from raw nature.” It became a symbol in David's mind, and a preview of how he later came to think of man's origin.
Whenever David and his Uncle Edward visited the Great Stone Face, the ritual was always the same. Once in view of the “Old Man,” they would sit down and eat lunch over a fire. Afterward, Edward would light his pipe and, staring at the pockmarked profile, start dawdling through the same conversational piece.
“Now, lad! Who do you think made it?”
“It just seems to come out of the earth and rock, sir,” would be David's reply.
Sometimes Edward would bring a work of his favorite author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Having read an episode to David, he would discuss it with his nephew. The Scarlet Letter was his most frequent text.
“Why did Arthur die on the scaffold, lad, and with a smile on his lips?” he would ask.
After a while, David knew the expected answer: “Because, sir, he knew he had to pay for his sins.”
And then: “Why did he sin, lad?”
“Because of Adam's Original Sin, sir,” would be David's answer.
Once David ventured a question himself. “Why did Hester put the scarlet letter back again in her dress pocket, if it was a bad letter, sir?” The answer came with unerring relish: “She wanted to be romantic, lad. Romantic. That's what they called it.” It was David's first introduction to romanticism, an issue that took very tangible and painful form for him later on. The evil spirit he exorcised in Jonathan had possessed Jonathan under the guise of pure romanticism.
When David was fourteen, he was sent to a prep school in New England but his vacations were all spent on the family farm in Coos County. His uncle still lived there; and together they went on several trips to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Montreal.
It was, however, a trip to Salem, Massachusetts—made at his own request—that became of prime importance in David's mind. He was sixteen then. His uncle wanted to see the John Turner house, which had been immortalized by Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables. But David had been delving into a copy of Cotton Mather's Ecclesiastical History of New England that he had found in his father's library; and he was more interested in people such as Elizabeth Knapp, Anne Hibbins, Ann Cole, and other “witches” and “warlocks” of seventeenth-century Salem. So when they had visited the Peabody Museum and the Turner house, they spent an hour and a half in the “witch house” where Judge Corwin had examined the 19 men and women condemned and executed for witchcraft in 1692.
David realized later that his stay in and around the “witch house” had a special significance. As they moved around inside and outside the house, his uncle provided him with a running commentary on the 1692 trials.
All the while, David had a striking but not uncomfortable sensation or instinct that “invisible eyes,” as he put it then to his uncle, or “spirits,” as he puts it now, were present to him and communicating in an odd way. They seemed to be asking something. It was as if one part of his mind listened and recorded his uncle's commentary and the sights around him, while another part was preoccupied with other, intangible “words” and “sights.”
Striking as the experience was at the time, it did not in any way obsess his thoughts in ensuing years. In fact, he never vividly recalled this Salem experience until 32 years later at Old Edward's death and again during the exorcism of Father Jonathan.
No one in David's circle of family and friends was surprised when he decided to enter the seminary in 1940. His father would have preferred an Army career for him; his mother had nourished a secret hope of grandchildren. But David had made up his mind.
After seven years, when he was ordained in 1947 at the age of tw
enty-five, the bishop asked whether he would be willing to go through some extra years of study. The diocese needed a professor of anthropology and ancient history. If he agreed, he would first earn a doctorate in theology: Roman authorities were chary of letting any young cleric loose in scientific fields without a special grounding in doctrine. It might not be easy or pleasant, because Rome did not think highly of American theologates. The whole program would take about seven more years of David's life.
In spite of the possible difficulties, David consented. The following autumn he started to follow theological courses in Rome; and then, in the autumn of 1950, he proceeded to the Sorbonne in Paris.
Like many others of that time, he had heard much about a French Jesuit named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but he had never been exposed to his thought. In Paris he fell under the direct influence of the ideas which Teilhard had generated. For postwar Catholic, intellectuals, Teilhard was something of a phenomenon; and from the mid-igsos and on he enjoyed the reputation of a twentieth-century Aquinas, and evoked the type of personal devotion that only a Bonaventure and a Ramon Llul had attracted in earlier centuries.
French of the French, intellectual, ascetic, World War I hero, brilliant student, innovative teacher, mystic, discoverer of Pekin Man (Sinanthropos), pioneer excavator in Sinkiang, the Gobi Desert, Burma, Java, Kashmir, South Africa, Teilhard set out to make it intellectually possible for a Christian to accept the theories of Darwinian evolution and still retain his religious faith.
All matter, said Teilhard, is and always has been transfused with “consciousness,” however primitive. Through billions of years and through all the forms of chemical substance, plant, animal, and finally human life, this “consciousness” had blossomed. It is still blossoming; and now, in this final stage of its development, it is about to burst forth in a final culmination: the Omega Point, when all humans and all matter will be elevated to a unity only dreamed by the visionaries and saints of the past. The key character of the Omega Point will be Jesus, asserted Teilhard. And so all will be gathered into all, and all will be one in the love and permanent being of achieved salvation.
By 1950, when David arrived in Paris, Teilhard and his doctrines had become too much for the Roman authorities with their long memories. Teilhard's critical eyes, his ready flow of language, his Gallic logic, his constant ability to answer inquisitorial questions with a flood of professional and technical details, his refusal to kowtow intellectually, and his very daring attempt to synthesize modern science with the ancient faith—all this frightened ecclesiastical minds. It was not only Teilhard's aquiline nose that reminded the authorities of his eighteenth-century ancestor, Descartes, whose ideas they still considered anathema. It was as well, and chiefly, Teilhard's attempt to rationalize the mysteries of Catholic belief, to “scientize” the Divine and make the truths of revelation totally explicable in terms of test tubes and fossil remains.
Teilhard: dedicated to the “clear and distinct ideas” of Descartes, the father of all modern scientific reasoning; fired inwardly by the personal ideals of Ignatius, father not only of all Jesuits but of all the lone and the brave; lured onward by the mystical darkness of wisdom celebrated by his favorite author, John of the Cross, whose pains he shared but whose ecstasy ever escaped him; honed and refined in intellect by the best scientific training of his day; Teilhard was the custom-built answer, the ready-made darling for the bankrupt Catholic intellectuals of his century and for thousands of Protestants caught in the heel of the hunt by the vicious clamps of that merciless reason they had championed as man's glory some four centuries previously. Teilhard was, at one and the same time, their trailblazer and their martyred hero. For the tired and besieged French and Belgians he produced shining shibboleths to cry and a new pride to wear. He fanned into a blaze the cold fire that slowly burned in the brains of innovation-hungry Dutch and Germans. He nourished the ever-latent emotionalism of Anglican divines, who by then were floating free of traditional shackles.
His new terminology (he was the author of many current neologisms), his daring thought, his scientific panoply, his international reputation, his refusal to revolt when silenced by chicanery, his long vigil, his obscure death, and finally the flashing wonder of his posthumous fame and publication, all this conferred on him, on his name, and on his ideas the efficacy once enjoyed by a Joan of Arc, a Francis Xavier, and a Simone Weil. When Rome would never canonize him, he was canonized by a new “voice of the people.” He was a marvelous source of esoteric words and intricate thoughts for American pop theologians.
Very few realized that Teilhard's vision had ceased long before his death. He had provided Christians with only a respite between the long autumn of the nineteenth century and the winter that enshrouded everything in the late twentieth century. Teilhard was neither strong food to satisfy real hunger nor heavenly manna for a new Pentecost. He was merely a stirrup cup of heady wine.
Under Pius XII, the Roman Catholic Church of the post-World War II period was being constantly purged of “dangerous ideas.” And Teilhard fell foul of the censors. He was silenced and exiled, forbidden to publish or lecture. Nevertheless, his ideas ran through the intellectual milieu of Europe and America like mercury. David with many others drank deeply of this wine of ideas and believed that they were on their way to a new dawn.
Of course, David knew from the start that he was destined for anthropology later on. Therefore, in Rome he concentrated on those theological questions which had a direct bearing on anthropology. He studied, in particular, the divine creation of the material world and of man, the Adam and Eve doctrine and that of Original Sin. He found that Church teaching was explicit: God had created the world, if not exactly in seven days, at least directly and out of nothing. There had been a first man, Adam, and a first woman, Eve. Both had sinned. Because of their sin, all other men and women—for all men and women who ever existed were descended from Adam and Eve—were deprived of a divine quality called grace. They were born with Original Sin. And this condition was only changed by the sacrament of Baptism.
David was troubled that doctrines stated in this way, even including all the refinements and modifications allowed, were extremely difficult to explain in the light of the theories of paleontology current in his time. And the greater the impact of science on the mind, the more dramatic the difficulty.
When the full weight of anthropological and cross-cultural studies was brought to bear on the question of human origins, a human being seemed to have a long and remote ancestry during which not merely his body was formed but what was called his mind and higher instincts were fashioned. And, of course, if you once admitted these beliefs and assumptions of “scientific” theory to be “facts,” or even highly probable, the idea of God creating the human condition and sending his son, Jesus, to save it from its dire predicament, this central theme of all Christianity was up for auction to the highest bidder.
The genius of Teilhard was that his bid was as high as that of any non-Catholic or non-Christian in the field, to construct a bridge across such an impassable and impossible gap. And it was in view of this promise that David, along with a whole generation of men and women, adopted Teilhard's formulation.
But the fatal flaw was quick and sure. The creating god of Christians was no longer taken as divine. He became internal to the world in a mysterious and essential way. Jesus, as savior, was no longer the conquering hero irrupting into the human universe and standing history on its head. He was reduced to the peak of that universe's evolution, as natural an element in the universe as amino acids. The thrust that would finally bring forth Jesus in the sight of all men was an evolutionary accident—a kind of cosmic joke—that started over five billion years ago in helium, hydrogen gases, and amino acids of protean space. That thrust had no choice but to keep on thrusting until it gave birth to the refined and culminating flower of “full human consciousness” in the “latter days.”
Like the Great Stone Face on Franconia Notch that David remembered s
o vividly from his visits with his uncle, Jesus now simply emerged from nature. The Omega Point. Only this would be the final hour of glory, the Last Day.
Neither David nor many others who spoke of the “greatest biological adventure of all time”—meaning human history—were alerted to the fact that, once the ancient beliefs of Christianity were interpreted in this fashion, it was a matter of time before other fundamental issues were affected, and very hard-nosed conclusion would have to be drawn. But present euphoria often beclouds later issues. Intellectual freedom has its own chains, its own brand of myopia. And a triumph of mere logic seems always to carry with it a neglect both of the human and of the essence of spirit.
In this ferment, David's mentality matured.
From those years spent in doctoral studies, David has two deeply personal memories. Both took place on the occasion of his Uncle Edward's death. It was during David's second last year at the Sorbonne that the old man, in his eighties by then, started to die. David had just arrived back in Paris from a field trip in southern France when he received a telegram from his father: Old Edward had not much time; he had asked for David repeatedly.
David caught a flight that evening. By the following evening he was back in Coos County on the family farm. Edward was sinking gradually, coming out of semicomatose states and lapsing back again.
Toward midnight of David's second day at home, he was sitting in Edward's room reading. His family had retired for the night. The room's only light came from the reading lamp on the desk where David sat. Outside all was quiet. A late wind sighed softly in the trees. Occasionally a very distant cry would echo from the surrounding countryside.
At a certain moment David raised his head and looked at Edward. He thought he had heard the sound of a voice. But the old man was lying still, breathing with difficulty. David went over, dipped a hand towel in a bowl of water, and mopped the perspiration from Edward's forehead. He was about to return to his chair when he again heard, or thought he heard, a voice—or voices—he was not sure. He looked at Edward: he was unchanged. Then he lifted his head and listened.