by Morris West
The moment the words were out he was ashamed of his brutality. Jean Marie was silent for a long moment, staring down at the backs of his hands. Finally he answered with wintry restraint.
“You ask me why I abdicated.… The conflict between me and the Curia was more desperate than you can imagine. If I had decided to stay in office, there would almost certainly have been a schism. The Sacred College would have deposed me and elected a rival. Our claims would have been disputed for half a century. Popes and anti-popes are an old story, which could have been repeated in this case. But, to live and die with that on my conscience—no!… Just now you used a savage metaphor: ‘Jean Marie, playing hide-and-seek with God in a monastery garden.’”
“I’m sorry, Jean. I didn’t mean…”
“On the contrary, Carl, you meant exactly what you said; but you missed the point. I am not playing hide-and-seek. I am sitting very still, waiting for the Lord to speak again and tell me what I must do. I know the need for a legitimizing sign—but I can’t give that sign myself. Again, I wait.… We talked about miracles, Carl—signs and wonders! You asked whether I had ever prayed for them. Oh, yes! When the Cardinals came to argue with me, day after day, when the doctors came, all grave and clinical, I prayed then: ‘Give me something to show them I am not crazy, not a liar!’ Before you came, I begged and begged: ‘At least make my Carl believe me.’ Well!…” He smiled and gave a very Gallic shrug. “It seems I must wait longer to be legitimized.… Shall we read Compline now?”
“Before we do, Jean, let me say one thing. I came as a friend. I want to leave as a friend.”
“And so you shall. What do we pray for?”
“The last wish of Goethe—Mehr Licht, more light!”
“Amen!”
Jean Marie reached for his breviary. Mendelius sat beside him on the narrow bed and, together, they recited the psalms for the last canonical hour of the day.
In the morning it was easier to talk. The hardest words had been said. There was no ground of contention, no fear of misunderstanding. In the garden of the vision, the gardener swung his mattock. The father sacristan cut new roses for the altar bowls; while Jean Marie Barette, lately a Pope, tossed bread crumbs to the strutting pigeons and Carl Mendelius stated his own position.
“… In the matter of your private revelation, Jean, I am agnostic. I do not know. Therefore I cannot act. But in the matter of us—old friends of the heart!—if I have little faith, I still have much love. Believe that, please!”
“I believe it.”
“I cannot accept a mission in which I do not believe—and on which you have no authority to send me. But I can do something to test your ideas on an international audience.”
“And how would you propose to do that, Carl?”
“Two ways. First, I could arrange with a Georg Rainer, a journalist of authority, to publish an accurate account of your abdication. Second, I myself would write, for the international press, a personal memoir on my friend the former Gregory the Seventeenth. In this memoir I should draw attention to the ideas expressed in your encyclical. Finally, I could ensure that the two pieces were brought to the notice of the people on your diplomatic list.… Understand what I am offering, Jean. It is not an advocacy, not a crusade, but an honest history, a sympathetic portrait, a clear exposition of your ideas as I have understood them… with a chance for total disclaimer if you don’t like whatever is written.”
“It’s a generous offer, Carl.” Jean Marie was touched.
Mendelius cautioned him. “It falls far short of what you asked. It will also expose the gaps and weaknesses in your position. For instance, even to me in this meeting you have explained very little of your spiritual state.…”
“What can I tell you, Carl?” The implied challenge seemed to surprise him. “Sometimes I am in a darkness so deep, so threatening, that it seems I have been stripped of all human form and damned to an eternal solitude. At other times I am bathed in a luminous calm, totally at peace, yet harmoniously active, like an instrument in the hands of a great master.… I cannot read the score; I have no urge to interpret it, only a serene confidence that the dream of the composer is realized in me at every moment.… The problem is, my dear Carl, that the terror and the calm both take me unaware. They go as suddenly as they come, and they leave my days as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. Sometimes, I find myself in the garden, or in chapel or in the library, with no idea how I came there. If that is mysticism, Carl, then God help me! I’d rather plod along in the purgative way like ordinary mortals!… How you explain that to your readers is your affair.”
“Then you do agree to the kind of publication I suggest?”
“Let’s be very precise about it.” There was a mischief in his eyes. “Let’s be very Roman and diplomatic. A journalist does not require my permission to speculate about current history. If you, my learned friend, choose to memorialize me or my opinions, I cannot prevent your doing so.… Let’s leave it like that, shall we?”
“With pleasure!” Mendelius chuckled with genuine amusement. “Now, one more question. Could you, would you, consider coming to me for a vacation in Tübingen? Lotte would love to have you. For me, it would be like having a brother in the house.”
“Thank you, dear friend; but no! If I asked, the Abbot would be embarrassed. The diplomatic problems would be far too delicate to handle.… Besides, we can never be closer than we are at this moment.… You see, Carl, when I was in the Vatican, I saw the world in panorama—a vast planet with its teeming millions, labouring and fearful, under the threat of the mushroom cloud. Here, I perceive everything in little. All the love and the longing and the caring that I have is concentrated on the nearest human face. At this moment it is your face, Carl; you in all and all in you. It is not easy to express—but that was the agony I experienced in the vision: the stark simplicity of things, the splendid, terrifying oneness of the Almighty—and His designs.”
Mendelius frowned and shook his head.
“I wish I could share that vision, Jean. I can’t. I think we have enough terrors without the God of the final holocaust. I have met good people who would prefer eternal blackness to the vision of Siva the Destroyer.”
“Is that how you see Him, Carl?”
“Back in Rome,” said Mendelius quietly, “there are assassins waiting to kill me. I am less afraid of them than of a God who can slam the lid on His own toy box and toss it into the fire. That’s why I can’t preach your millennial catastrophe, Jean… not if it is inevitable, a horror decreed from eternity.”
“It is not God who is the assassin, Carl—not God who will press the red button.”
Carl Mendelius was silent for a long moment. He took the bread crumbs from Jean Marie’s hands and began pitching them to the birds. When, finally, he spoke again it was to utter a banality.
“Cardinal Drexel asked me to call him after this visit. What do you want me to say?”
“That I am content; that I bear no one any ill will; that I pray for them all each day.”
“Pray for me, too, Jean. I am an arid man in a darkling desert.”
“The darkness will pass. Afterwards you will see the day-spring and the well of sweet water.”
“I hope so.” Mendelius stood up and stretched out a hand to lift Jean Marie to his feet. “Let’s not linger on the farewells.”
“Write to me sometimes, Carl.”
“Every week. I promise.”
“God keep you, my friend.”
They held to each other in a last silent embrace. Then Jean Marie walked away, a frail dark figure whose footsteps rang hollowly on the pavement of the cloister.
“You asked me a question, Professor.” The Father Abbot was walking him to the monastery gate. “I told you I would give you my answer today.”
“I am curious to hear it, Father Abbot.”
“I do believe that our friend was granted a vision of the Parousia.”
“Another question then. Do you feel obliged to do anything about i
t?”
“Nothing special,” said the Abbot mildly. “After all, a monastery is a place where men come to terms with the last things. We watch; we pray; we hold ourselves ready, according to the commandment; we dispense charity to the community and to the voyager.”
“You make it sound very simple.” Mendelius was unimpressed.
“Too simple, too bland.” The Abbot gave him a quick sidelong look. “That’s what you really mean, isn’t it? What would you suggest I do, my friend? Send my monks out into the mountain villages to preach the Apocalypse? How many do you think would listen? They’ll still be watching Lazio play football when the last trumpet sounds!… What will you do now?”
“Finish the vacation with my wife. Go back and prepare for next year’s lectures.… Look after Jean for me.”
“I promise.”
“With your permission I’ll write to him regularly.”
“Let me assure you your correspondence will be private.”
“Thank you. May I leave an offering with the guest-master?”
“It would be appreciated.”
“I’m grateful for your hospitality.”
“A word of advice, my friend.”
“Yes?”
“You cannot wrestle with God. He is too large an adversary. You cannot manage His universe either, only the small garden He has given you. Enjoy it while you can.…”
“This has been a very painful episode for you.”
Drexel poured the dregs of the coffee into Mendelius’ cup and handed him the last sweet biscuit.
“Yes, it has, Eminence.”
“And now that it is ended… ?”
“That’s the problem.” Mendelius heaved himself out of the chair and walked to the window. “It isn’t ended at all. For Jean Marie, yes! He has made the final acts of a believer: an act of submission to his own mortality, an act of faith in the continued beneficent working of the Spirit in human affairs. I have not come to that yet. God knows if I ever shall. I hated coming back to the Vatican today. I hated the pomp and the power, the historic impedimenta of Congregations and Tribunals and Secretariats, all dedicated to what? The most elusive abstraction: man’s relationship to an unknowable Creator! I am glad Jean is quit of it all.…”
“And you, my friend.” The Cardinal’s tone was very gentle. “Do you want to be quit of it, too?”
“Oh, yes!” Mendelius swung round to face him. “But I cannot, any more than I be quit of my mother or my father or my furthest ancestors. I cannot dispense with the traditions that have shaped me. I cannot adopt another man’s history or fabricate a new mythos for myself. I loathe what this family does, often, to its children; but I cannot leave it and I will not traduce it. So I wait.…”
He made a shrugging gesture of defeat, and then stood, bowed and silent, staring out at the placid garden.
“You wait…” Drexel pressed him, “for what, Mendelius?”
“God knows! The last day-spring before the holocaust. The fiery finger writing on the wall. I wait, that’s all! Did I tell you—no, I must have forgotten—Jean Marie made a prophecy about me, too?”
“What did he say?”
“He said,” Mendelius quoted the words in a flat voice, “… ‘The mission you refuse now, you will one day accept. The light you cannot see will be shown to you. One day you will feel God’s hand on your shoulder, and you will walk wherever it leads you.’”
“And did you believe him?”
“I wanted to. I could not.”
“I believe him,” said Drexel quietly.
Mendelius’ control snapped and he challenged Drexel harshly. “Then why in God’s name didn’t you believe the rest of it? Why did you let the others destroy him?”
“Because I could not risk him.” There was an infinite pathos in his voice. “Like you—more than you perhaps—I needed the reassurance of being what I am, a high man in an old system that has stood the test of centuries. I was afraid of the dark. I needed the calm cool light of tradition. I wanted no mysteries, only a God I could cope with, an authority to which, in good conscience, I could bend. When the moment came I was unready. I could neither repeal the past nor abdicate my function in the present.… Don’t judge me too curtly, Mendelius! Don’t judge any of us. You are more free and more fortunate.”
Mendelius bowed to the reproof and said, with bleak humility, “I was rude and unjust, Eminence. I had no right to…”
“Please! No apologies!” Drexel stayed him with a gesture. “At least we have managed to be open with each other. Let me explain something more. In ancient days when the world was full of mystery, it was easy to be a believer—in the spirits who haunted the grove, in the god who cast the thunderbolts. In this age we are all conditioned to the visual illusion. What you see is what exists. Remove the visible symbols of an established organization—the cathedrals, the parish church, the bishop in his miter—and the Christian assembly, for many, ceases to exist. You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the abiding Spirit and Mystical Body; but even among the clergy, you’ll be talking to the deaf. Subconsciously they associate these things with the cultists and the charismatics. Discipline is the safe word—discipline, doctrinal authority and the Cardinal’s High Mass on Sunday! There’s no place anymore for wandering saints.… Most people prefer a simple religion. You make your offering in the temple and carry away salvation in a package. Do you think any cleric in his right mind is going to preach a charismatic church or a Christian diaspora?”
“Probably not.” Mendelius gave a small reluctant smile. “But they do have to come to terms with one fact.”
“Which is?”
“We all belong to an endangered species: millennium man!”
Drexel pondered the phrase for a moment and then nodded approval. “A sobering thought, Mendelius. It merits a meditation.”
“I’m glad you think so, Eminence. I propose to include it in my essay on Gregory the Seventeenth.”
Drexel showed no surprise. He asked, almost as if it were a matter of academic interest, “Do you think such an essay is opportune at this moment?”
“Even if it were not, Eminence, I believe it is a matter of simple justice. The meanest functionary is memorialized on his retirement, even if only by five lines in the Government Gazette.… I hope I may be free to consult Your Eminence on matters of fact—perhaps even coax you into an expression of opinion on certain aspects of recent history.”
“On matters of fact,” said Drexel calmly, “I am happy to assist, by directing you to appropriate sources. As for my opinions—I’m afraid they are not for publication. My present master would hardly approve.… But thank you for the invitation. And good luck with your essay.”
“I’m glad you like the idea.” Mendelius was bland as honey.
“I didn’t say I liked it.” Drexel’s craggy face was lit by a fleeting smile. “I recognize it as an act of piety, which, morally, I am bound to commend.…”
“Thank you, Eminence,” said Carl Mendelius. “And thank you for the protection you have afforded me and my wife in this place.”
“I wish I could extend it,” said Drexel gravely. “But where you are going my writ does not run. Go with God, Professor!”
It was five in the afternoon when Francone dropped him off at the apartment. Lotte and Hilde were at the hairdresser; Herman had not yet returned from the Academy; so he had time and privacy to bathe, rest and set his thoughts in order before reporting to the others his experiences at Monte Cassino. He was happy about one thing: he was no longer bound to secrecy. He could discuss the issues involved; test his opinions against those of devotees and cynics alike, talk out his puzzlements in the language of simple folk, instead of the loaded dialect of the theologians.
He was still far from satisfied by the explanations Jean Marie had given him. The description of his mystical states, which obviously others had witnessed, seemed too bland, too familiar, too—he groped for the word—too derivative from the vast body of devotional writ
ing. Jean Marie was precise about the possibilities of catastrophic conflict. He was, even in visionary terms, vague about the nature of the Parousia itself. Most apocalyptic writings were vivid and detailed. The revelation of Jean Marie Barette was too open and general for credence.
In psychological terms there was a contradiction also, between Jean Marie’s view of himself as a natural careerist and his tragic failure to exercise power in a crisis. His willingness, not to say his eagerness, to accept even a partial defense in the popular press was sad, if not faintly sinister in a man who claimed a private dialogue with Omnipotence.
And yet, and yet… as he stepped out into the sunset glow on the terrace Mendelius was forced to admit that Jean Marie Barette was easier to damn in absence than to demean face to face. He had not retreated one pace from his claim of a disclosure experience or from his calm conviction that the legitimizing sign would be given. Beside him, Carl Mendelius was the small man, the courier who carried secrets of state in his body belt, but had no personal convictions beyond the state of the beds and the cost of the wine in the posthouses.…
All this and more Mendelius talked out eagerly with Lotte and the Franks over cocktails. He was surprised that they all put him under rigid inquisition. Herman Frank was the most anxious questioner.
“Aren’t you really saying, Carl, that you believe half the story at least? Discount the vision, discount the Second Coming, which is a primitive myth anyway; but the catastrophe of global war is very close to us.”
“That’s about the size of it, Herman.”
“I don’t think it is.” Hilde’s smile carried more than a hint of irony. “You’re still a believer, Carl. So you’re still plagued by the presence of a God in every proposition. You’ve been like that as long as I’ve known you—half rationalist, half poet. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” Mendelius reached for his drink. “But the rationalist says all the evidence isn’t in yet and the poet says there’s no time for versifying when the assassins are at the gates.”