City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  —Pem’s Remarks to the Bishop’s Examiners

  The sensation of God in us is a total sensation given to the whole being, revelatory, inspired. That is the usual answer to the questioning intellect, which by itself cannot realize sacred truth. But is the intellect not subsumed? Does the whole being not include the intellect? Why wouldn’t the glory of God shine through to the human mind?

  I take the position that true faith is not a supersessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect. It cannot answer the intellect with a patronizing smile. I look for parity here. I will not claim that your access to the numinous is a delusion if you will not tell me my intellect is irrelevant. . .

  The biblical stories, the Gospel stories, were the original understandings, they were science and religion, they were everything, they were all anyone had. But they didn’t write themselves. We have to acknowledge the storytellers’ work.

  If not in all stories, certainly in all mystery stories, the writer works backward. The ending is known and the story is designed to arrive at the ending. If you know the people of the world speak many languages, that is the ending: The story of the Tower of Babel gets you there. The known ending of life is death: The story of Adam and Eve arrives at that ending. Why do we suffer, why must we die? Well, you see, there was this Garden. . .

  The ending of the story implies that there might have been a different ending. That’s the little ten-cent trick. You allow as how since things worked out this way, they could have worked out another way. You create conflict and suspense where there wasn’t any. You’ve turned the human condition into a sequential narrative of how it came to be.

  Well, the way I read it, God dealt from a stacked deck. Adam and Eve never had a chance. The story of the Fall is a parable of the glory and torment of human consciousness. But that’s all it is. . .

  Migod, there is no one more dangerous than the storyteller. No, I’ll amend that, than the storyteller’s editor. Augustine, who edits Genesis 2–4 into original sin. What a nifty little act of deconstruction—passing it on to the children, like HIV. As the doctrine of universal damnation, the Fall becomes an instrument of social control. God appoints his agents plenipotentiaries to dispense salvation or withhold it. I don’t know about you, dear colleagues, but history has a way of turning a harsh light on my faith. We are bound to a theology hard-pressed to hold the line against incredulous common sense. So for instance newborn babies who die unbaptized as Catholics are condemned to the limboic upper reaches of hell? I mean. . . but in all its denominations, punitive fantasies of original sin have begotten and still beget generations of terrorized children and haunted adults, and give those Calvinist graveyards in New England a particular poignancy as they call to mind the witch burnings, scourgings, and self-denials of the ordinary joy and wonder of life on earth to which the unindoctrinated mind is naturally heir. . .

  How, given the mournful history of this nonsense, can we presume to exalt our religious vision over the ordinary pursuits of our rational minds?

  The old tailor tended to deal with me as if I were an adult boarder who could take care of himself. Nevertheless, as I grew out of my clothes, he let them out or found me others. When I began limping because my shoes had become too tight, he bartered for a pair of wooden shoes. He cooked our potato soup or cut our bread and pointed to the table and we sat down to eat in silence. All of this I accepted as the best that could be. In truth I was a boarder. The old man and I were not really related, and I never came to feel that this was anything but a temporary arrangement.

  Living undercover, I could no longer see my friends from before or have my music lesson with Mrs. Levin or see that little Sarah, who was so crazy about me. From time to time the woman from the council who had given me my new name came to visit, to look around, to see that everything was all right. She would bring Srebnitsky a few cigarettes, or schnapps in a small jar. He accepted these things as his due. She would have for Yehoshua Mendelssohn a pocket comb or a pencil and notebook. But the best thing she ever brought, my most valued treasure, was an American funny paper, a sheet of color comics from an American newspaper used as inner wrapping in a package that had miraculously found its way to the ghetto. I smoothed out the wrinkled page and read it over and over, trying to work out the English words above the heads of the characters. One story was about a medieval knight in armor riding through the countryside on a white horse. Another showed a police detective in a yellow coat running along the top of a railroad car with a gun in his hand. It did not bother me that I could not take each story further than the six or eight panels in the paper, it was enough for me to know of these heroes and imagine for myself the kinds of adventures they had. Different periods of history were suggested, people were born into different times, each of which brought its own dangers. This was more or less the same thought delivered by a rabbi in a secret gathering of children for Chanukah. “The Holy One, blessed be His name, gave us the Torah, gave us compassion, humility, and the strength to stand up to all who would deny us our faith. And we are tested even as the Maccabees were tested, who recaptured the Temple from the wicked ones and lit the lamp that had just the oil for one day’s burning but which, thanks to the Holy One, blessed be He, lasted for eight days. And we will break out of our chains and defeat the oppressors as the Maccabees did.”

  Each morning when I arose, I looked out across the street at the vegetable garden that my father had laid out for the community. Even in the cold, harsh weather, with the ground bare but for the dried-up stalks of plant stubble, I could see the furrows that outlined different sections and imagine his thoughts as he worked out what should be planted and where. In the afternoons I liked to walk there when it was dark enough. Nobody bothered me. Those soldiers posted to guard duty tended to be less vigilant, more concerned with keeping warm than guarding anything. But then the snows came like a burial shroud laid over the field. All the configurations of the ground were gone, there was just this mound of glaring cold whiteness. It was blinding, it wouldn’t let me look, and for the first time since I had lost my parents I cried. There had come to me from that whiteness a terrible realization that my memory of them had begun to fade. . . their physical appearances, their voices.

  Eventually, try as I might, all I could recover of them were flashes of their moral natures in the habits of my own thinking.

  I came back one day from my wandering and found Srebnitsky at work cutting patterns from a thick bolt of luxurious material of a rich charcoal color and remarkable pliancy. Where had it come from? I would have asked had there not been in the tailor’s attitude of concentration a demand for silence. His lips were moving as if he were talking to himself. He seemed angry. Yet he went about his work quickly and with precision. I sat to the side and watched his hands. Eventually they lifted the sections of cloth they had cut and tacked and slipped them over the wire male, who in that instant became an S.S. officer in the process of realization.

  He stepped back to regard his work. “You see how famous your grandfather has become. News of his art has reached His Eminence S.S. Major Schmitz. Is it wrong of me to accept this honor?” he said, pointing at the dummy.

  “You had to,” I said with a youth’s directness.

  “Yes. I suppose so. I tell myself also that it is a hopeful sign, the first stirrings in their evolution that one of these thugs can actually be party to an ordinary business deal.”

  Here he uncovered a sewing machine with a treadle. “So I have it back now. So? Do I hear you saying something?” I shook my head, but he went on with his argument with himself as if I were disputing him. “If not for his skills, Srebnitsky would not be here. Just remember that. These hands you’re always looking at with admiration—for I know that about you, although you are too high-and-mighty to become a tailor yourself—it’s these old hands of his that have kept him alive. And if you don’t think that’s worth a damn, they’ve kept you alive too, Yehoshua Mendelssohn! Yehoshua Mendelssohn,” he said again, muttering, as he turned
to his work.

  For of course, as I realized at this moment, just as he was a stranger to me, I was not his grandson. You understood that, didn’t you, that I had been given the name of the tailor’s dead grandson? He never told me what had happened, it was at the council later that I learned. Before there was a ghetto, when the war came to our city, the Russians pulled back to the east. Our Lithuanian neighbors took the opportunity to have themselves a little pogrom. Srebnitsky lived with his daughter and son-in-law and grandson Yehoshua in an apartment on Vytauto Street. While he was at work in his shop in another part of town, a mob broke down the door of the apartment and rushed his family out into the street and clubbed them to death. All around, others were doing the same, killing Jewish people and looting their houses of furniture, rugs, dishes, radios, everything. Srebnitsky ran home and found the bodies of his daughter and her husband and son on the sidewalk. When the Germans occupied the city, they restored order by evicting all Jews and resettling them in the ramshackle slum on the other side of the river that became our ghetto. This was done not for our protection, of course, but to save us for forced labor in the war factories. I remembered that time myself, hiding in our own apartment, on a high floor, luckily, with the bureau lodged against the front door. And I remembered our own trek, with my parents pushing a cart of belongings and pieces of furniture we had been allowed to take with us across the bridge. Srebnitsky, bereft of all his living relations, had made the trip alone.

  Of course the tailor’s experience was not exceptional in any way, but years later, when I considered the act that brought about his death, I concluded that while anyone could be driven to the point of forswearing life, in cases like Srebnitsky’s it was not the simple desire to die, it was the desire for self-transcendence which once realized brings one to the end of life. That is something different, not the same thing at all. And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

  —Pem’s Remarks to the Bishop’s Examiners

  Burkert, perhaps our pre-eminent scholar of ancient religions—do you know his work? He investigates the origins of the sacred, itself a heretical pursuit. He gives us the picture of the lizard who leaves his tail in the mouth of the predator. The fox who chews off his foot to escape the trap. You ask what that has to do with God. In that programmed biological response is the idea of the sacrifice. You give up a part to save the whole. Ancient myths abound in which human beings flee monsters and escape only by sacrificing pieces of themselves to divert or slow down the pursuit. Orestes gives up a finger, and so does Odysseus. Finger sacrifice was very big in ancient Greece. But for the most part, over time the sacrifices have been ritualized, symbolized. You no longer mutilate yourself, you leave a ring on the altar in lieu of your finger. You slaughter a lamb. You leave a scapegoat in the desert. But when the fate of a community is involved, one man is chosen to jump into the abyss so that it will not swallow the community. One virgin is given to the bottomless lake. One person on the sled is thrown to the pursuing wolves. Jonah is thrown into the sea to save the ship and its crew. And just as the herd grazes in safety for a time after the lions cut one of them out and devour him, so does humanity feel safer from the nameless formless terrors if one of their number is sacrificed, if for the sake of all one must pay as the part for the whole, as the fox’s foot is left in the trap.

  Think about it. We are talking the intellectual’s talk. We are finding the possible biological origin of the sacred, of what is most holy to us, our grand figuration of the incarnate God who dies over and over, from one Sunday to the next, so that the rest of us may find salvation.

  Is all of this irrelevant?. . .

  Pagels, working from the scrolls discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, finds that the early Christians were profoundly divided between those who proposed a church according to apostolic succession based on a literal interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection and those who rejected resurrection except as a spiritual metaphor for gnosis emotionally, mystically achieved, as knowledge beyond ordinary knowledge, a perception beneath or above the everyday truth.. . . So there was a power struggle. Gnostic and synoptic contested with competing gospels. The gnostics, who said no church was needed, no priest, no episcopate, were routed, inevitably, having no organization, given their views. While the institutionalist Christians were understandably concerned that their persecuted sect needed a network to survive, with rules of order and common strategies for survival, the concept of martyrdom, for example, being created to make something positive from their terrible persecution, it is also true that the struggle for Jesus was a struggle for power, that the idea of an actual resurrection, which the institutionalists put forth and the gnostics ridiculed, provided authority for church office, and that the struggle to define Jesus and canonize his words, or interpretations of his words by others, was pure politics, as passionate or worshipful as it may have been, and that with the desire to perpetuate the authority of Jesus continuing in the Reformation and the creation of Protestant sects, in which a kind of residual gnosis was being proposed in protest against the sacramental accumulations of a churchly bureaucracy, what is now Christianity, with all the resonance that it has as a belief and a rich and complex culture, is a political creation with a political history. It was a politically triumphant Jesus created from the conflicts of early Christianity, and it has been a political Jesus ever since, from the time of the emperor Constantine’s conversion in the fourth century through the long history of European Christianity, as we consider the history of the Catholic Church, its Crusades, its Inquisition, its contests and/or alliances with kings and emperors, and with the rise of the Reformation, the history of Christianity’s active participation, in all its forms, in the wars among states and the rule of populations. It is the story of power. . .

  I’m sorry. You have questions for me and here I’ve been running on about these elemental things you well know. But I’m beginning to feel their weight. The higher criticism has gone on now for a hundred and fifty years. We must look again at what is staring us in the face. Our difference is in how we value these. . . distractions of the intellect. You regard them as irrelevant. I wish you saw them as a challenge. Our tradition has great latitude. What unifies us is the sacraments, but there is division among us when it comes to doctrinal issues and I think we must acknowledge that. All these miracles we affirm are a burden to me. Yet I think of myself as a good Christian. This is a profession of faith. I hope you will not use it to expunge from the ranks someone of my generation who you feel has brought the 1960s along with him. Thank you.

  —The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

  STAR DUST

  Sometimes I wonder why

  I spend the lonely night

  dreaming of a song?

  The melody haunts my reverie,

  And I am once again with you

  When our love was new,

  and each kiss an inspiration,

  But that was long ago: now my consolation

  is in the stardust of a song.

  Beside a garden wall, when stars are bright,

  you are in my arms

  The nightingale tells his fairy tale

  of paradise, where roses grew.

  Tho’ I dream in vain

  In my heart it will remain:

  My stardust melody,

  The memory of love’s refrain.

  The singer asks why he is wasting his nights longing for his lost love

  Whom he dreams of as a song. Of course he knows why—

  He is obsessed, he can’t help himself he is in a mawkish self-pitying frame of mind.

  She must have shone for him like a star if the song he hears is no more than its dust.

  How peculiar to invoke in the name of lost love the cinderous products of a nuclear conflagration.

  This is his problem, his metaphorical desperation.

  One wonders at his sentimentality

  —to
have even pretended he was in paradise, the Garden of Eden

  where everything lasted forever and the roses never stopped blooming

  and his sweetheart sang duets in the evening

  with a perching bird cherished by Chinese royalty—

  As if no ancestor of his ever ate the fruit from the famous tree,

  As if love were eternal, life death-free.

  ( weak applause)

  If what you’re singing to yourself is not a song

  but the dream of what a song should be,

  Of course it’s all wrong,

  The song breaks down as dreams do

  And everything you thought you knew is gone

  Each note a lamentation.

  That’s the real problem of the heart:

  The mind’s in disarray

  and night and day can’t be told apart.

  As if God in consternation has set the world back to its start.

  And where the lover stands in all of this as dream, as song, it surely is no Garden.

  There is lightning, there is rain,

  celestial fires, worlds in collision