by Tom Bissell
“There are two opinions on the catacombs,” Yuri said, with a growingly professorial mien. “One view is that they belong to the ancient monastery. The other view is that they were dug by the Russian brothers in the nineteenth century. The scientists who went there found something, but they didn’t find any shrine. Did you hear they’d found a shrine?”
“I did,” I said.
He shook his head. “A lot of people who ‘find’ things at Svetly Mys are looking to start their careers. Much of what has been ‘found’ at Svetly Mys is, in my opinion, fabricated.”
“So no Matthew reliquary,” I said.
“Probably no,” he said. “Probably it’s not true. Probably it’s a mistake.” But he had heard strange things about Svetly Mys all the same. “Some people claim to have seen the spirits of the Russian monks killed by bandits. A journalist, for instance, a nonreligious woman, who stayed out near the lake, told me she saw some ghostly monks pass by in front of her, near the seashore, at night. Others claim to have seen a big glowing cross over the water, where the monastery had once been.”
I asked Yuri if he believed any of that.
He smiled. “I myself have never seen such things.”
Andrei asked Yuri if maybe the catacombs were older than the Russian monastery; I could tell he wanted our trip to have been based on something less pathetic than a misunderstanding.
“Those tunnels,” Yuri said, “you’ve been inside, yes? Then you see they are already collapsing. It’s very rainy in Svetly Mys. The winds meet there, additionally. There is no way any catacombs from the eighth century would have endured in that place. So Russian monks dug them, probably in the late nineteenth century. Any information that says otherwise is from archaeologists and scientists who are tainted by their need for money and sensation. That is my opinion. You see, I am interested in history, in what’s true, not in what I would like to be true.”
The Kyrgyz woman he had been speaking to when we arrived used this opportunity to introduce herself. She spoke English and told us she was a trained psychologist; she was also a Muslim who attended mosque and prayed daily. Nevertheless, she came to this cathedral several times a week because of the “spiritual openness” of the men and women she met here. She thanked Allah for guiding her toward such people as Yuri. “Look around,” she said, looking around. “Isn’t this a pleasant place to sit and think?”
“Yes,” I said. “It certainly seems like it.”
Andrei asked her how long she had been coming here.
“Years,” she said. “Today I was bringing Yuri some poems that I like.” She turned to me. “As a writer, you should appreciate that.”
At this, I reached out, my hand over my heart, and shook hands with her. “I do appreciate that,” I said.
She looked at me. “Are you an American?”
“I am.”
“I love Americans,” she said. “Do you want to know why?”
I did, if only because the number of times a Muslim had asked me if I wanted to know why she loved Americans had just increased by 100 percent.
“Because Americans can be many things, many ethnicities, and many religions, just like the Kyrgyz people. Because Americans, like Kyrgyz, are free people.” Then she took my hand. “You are looking for Matthew?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am. Or I was.”
“May God let you find him,” she said. I tried to retrieve my hand, but she was not yet done: her fingers warmly tightened. “May God straighten your road. May God put the wind at your back. May God allow the rain to come down softly. And may God bring us together again.”
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*1 At least since the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, the tsarist secret police drew many of its members from Orthodox monasteries. The ease with which state-sponsored monks could conflate the enemies of the state with the enemies of Bog would have dreadful consequences throughout subsequent Russian history.
*2 These evangelistic symbols, known as the Tetramorph, were standardized by Jerome around the turn of the fifth century. Jerome’s source for the Tetramorph was difficult imagery in Ezekiel: “As for the appearance of their faces: the four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle” (all of which was later used by the author of Revelation to describe the “four living creatures” that attend the throne of Jesus). Jerome assigned the lion to Mark because his gospel opens with John the Baptist, which reminded Jerome of a “lion roaring in the wilderness.” John was assigned the eagle due to the gospel’s soaring nature. Luke was assigned the ox because his gospel opens with Zechariah offering incense in the sanctuary of the Lord, and the ox was a sacrificial animal. Matthew was assigned the human being—Jerome symbolically upgraded this figure to an angel—because his gospel opens with Joseph’s angelic visitation.
*3 The weirdest moment in Matthew—possibly the weirdest moment in the entire gospel tradition—is described in Matthew 27:53. As Jesus dies on the cross, we are told, nearby “tombs…were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.” In other words, an unspecified but large number of unnamed prophets and holy figures from the traditions of Judaism sprang to life and zombied their way through Jerusalem. The astonishing so-called Risen Ones never come up again in the New Testament, which rattled Christian cages for generations. Various attempts were made to explain the passage, the most popular—supported by Tertullian, Augustine, and John Chrysostom, among others—being that Matthew described not a literal raising but a spiritual one. The likeliest source of this strange passage? Of course, Jewish scripture. Ezekiel 37:12: “Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.”
*4 Tacitus believed the Roman Empire had become too inclusive for its own moral good, a place where “all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world meet and become popular.” Celsus’s more explicit argument against Christianity sounds not unlike the conservative American argument against, say, immigrants not learning English: “We are citizens of a particular empire with a particular set of laws, and it behooves the Christians to at least recognize their duties within the present context.”
*5 A revealing example concerns Jewish dietary law. In Mark, Jesus claims, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.” According to Mark, Jesus thus declared all foods clean. Matthew, who was clearly working off a similar tradition concerning eating and defilement, has Jesus claim that “evil intentions” are what defile a person; “to eat with unwashed hands,” Jesus goes on, “does not defile.” Jewish dietary law remains in effect for the Jesus of Matthew.
JAMES SON OF ZEBEDEE
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Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela: Santiago, Spain
NO SENSE • BLISTERS • A BAROQUE TRAIN STATION • STORIES & FOOTPRINTS
I.
What Christianity promises, I do not understand. What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine, not even when I was a Christian. Augustine once wrote of wanting to “comprehend my comprehender,” and this was the boldly searching Christianity I have always been drawn to. It was easy to mock certain strains of modern American Christianity, which had become, at their emotional core, white-person Rastafarianism—a way for an aggrieved and self-conscious subculture to barricade itself in righteous anger. If nothing else, such Christians were reminders of the bio-evolutionary basis of the roughly ten-thousand-year-old phenomenon of moralistic monotheism, the genetic development of which is traceable to the rise of agriculture, the relaxation of nomadism, and the resultant fears of cultural contamination. Our primitive propensity toward faith begins as the tribal impulse to exclude, as the amplifier of genetically encoded fears. Yet anyone who derived meaning from art has no business claiming not to understand meaning derived from religion. Stories are par
t-time religions; readers are temporary fundamentalists. My religion makes no sense and does not help me. Therefore I pursue it.
My friend Gideon and I walked five hundred miles across Spain along the oldest Christian pilgrimage route in Europe. Our destination was the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Santiago, Spain. To become a pilgrim is to live at the speed of thought, to transform movement into ritual, to sacralize the very space through which one walks. When we set out, both of us had vague hopes of something transformative happening. All I learned was walking fifteen-mile days locks one deep within oneself. To avoid any solitary confinement, Gideon and I talked about writing, about our careers, about blisters; about women we loved, women we wanted to love, and women we wished had loved us. In our five weeks of spending literally twenty-four hours a day in sweaty proximity, Gideon and I got into three arguments. One was about money. Two were about religion, the only subject capable of taking two young men who loved each other, two young men who agreed on almost everything, and turning them into silent, cold-eyed strangers eating bocadillos on either side of a path in the loneliest middle of the Spanish Meseta.
Gideon rightly wanted me to know that it should not be so easy to brush aside any area of human inquiry, especially one that many intelligent people had let consume them. But I knew Christians are not and never have been one thing. There have been Jesus Christians, Paul Christians, Origen Christians, and Augustine Christians; law-and-order Christians, sensualist Christians, bloodthirsty Christians, and godly Christians. The most attractive thing about Christianity has always been its ability to provide a spiritual roof over so many different heads. I knew, too, that most Christians longed only for reassurance that the last room into which we all walk would be filled with a great and motionless light. It was so simple and yet for many so complicated: needing this reassurance did not necessitate denying another his.
I knew I would not take medical, legal, family, or hygienic advice from anyone who lived two thousand years ago. And yet I live in a world in which billions of people regard the cosmologies of our intellectual ancestors as plausible, even true. Men and women who did not know whether the moon was a dragon’s eye or a piece of frozen water determined the nature and identity of a being who both is telepathically privy to our most intimate sins and superintends the distant collapse of black holes. Putting one’s faith in such primitivism was obvious madness. Yet Shakespeare knew nothing of developmental psychology, political theory, economics, or the genome, and I gladly put a different kind of faith in him. Storytelling has and always will have a corrective power less fragile than that of faith—less fragile because it is not vulnerable to mere fact. This was, I am afraid, my walk through Spain: thirty-six days of arduously yes-but thoughts. Nothing is more predictable, more unpredictable, more agelessly, familiarly alien, than the human mind. We want. We long. We imagine. We fight. We gather. We love. We hate. We lie. We believe.
II.
We have arrived at Santiago de Compostela, which Gideon thinks looks like a baroque train station. Every five minutes, a new group of pilgrims enters the plaza and collapses on the rough paving stones in front of the cathedral. They arrive wearing knee braces and bandages; some are on crutches; everyone limps. I am limping, as is Gideon. Our fellow pilgrims unshoulder their backpacks and drop their walking sticks. They are sweating and tired, and almost all of them are crying. Gideon and I cried, too, on the way in, because we knew we were grasping the same dirty laundry we had when we first set out. We know we are the same but do not want to be the same.
The faces of those around me are slack with dumb, incommunicable wonder. No pilgrim has much to say in her collapse moment. Everyone is looking at the cathedral, and it is quite a cathedral. Huge, several magnitudes larger than anything else around it. In the Vatican complex, Saint Peter’s is like Everest. Santiago de Compostela is different; it is freestanding and solitary; it is Kilimanjaro. Its mothy, dun-colored facade is covered in yellowy moss. In the central spot of pedestaled glory, which most basilicas and cathedrals reserve for Jesus, stands James son of Zebedee, brother of John, the first of the Twelve to be martyred. Known as Matamoros, or Saint James the Moor Slayer—a Galilean Jew resurrected as a medieval Christian knight—who helped rid Spain of infidel Muslims. Symbolized by the pilgrim staff, the floppy sun hat, the seashell. According to tradition, and tradition alone, James preached in Spain in the first century, but a Spanish vision of Mary the mother of Jesus sent him back to Roman Palestine, back to Jerusalem, and to this: “About that time King Herod laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword.” So says Acts 12:1. “King Herod” must have been Herod Agrippa, because he was the only Herodian ruler to have had jurisdiction over Jerusalem in the early 40s. Somehow James’s remains found their way back to his flock in Galicia, in western Spain, whose native pre-Christian religions believed the living sun nightly expired in the waters of the Atlantic. The location of James’s tomb was eventually, and improbably, forgotten. When the tomb was rediscovered in the ninth century, by yet another ambitious Christian bishop, Santiago de Compostela* was built in James’s honor.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul mentions wanting to go to Spain, seeing that his “ambition” is to “proclaim the good news” in places where word of Jesus has not yet spread, “so that I do not build on someone else’s foundation.” If one of the Twelve Apostles was preaching Christ Jesus resurrected among Spaniards, Paul was unaware of it. As to whether Paul himself reached Spain, no one knows—how little we know, really, about any of this—but there is no record of Christian activity in Spain until more than a century after Paul and James had left this earth. No record, but stories.
I do not regard the stories about James son of Zebedee, or any stories about any apostle, as merely stories. All beliefs have moral insinuations, and all representations have political repercussions. James the infidel slayer was adapted for propagandistic use by the Franco regime, after all. I do not believe a discernible form of “good” or acceptable or authentic Christianity stands behind these stories. Christianity, like Judaism before it and Islam after it, has always been and will always be a less than ideal way to understand the world and our place within it. At the same time, I know there is no purely rational way of understanding the world. A thousand irrational spasms daily derange us all. God is part of the same formless reality as thought, as real as all bits of data that float invisibly through this world, somehow creating output. In this sense, all that moves through us is real. To explain the realness of that which we cannot see, we turn to stories left behind by evangelistic writers, working behind their complicated veils of anonymity. The footprints they left behind lead us to places we long to be led.
High above me, on a colonnaded veranda on the right side of the cathedral, a police officer slowly stalks, carrying what appears to be a sniper rifle. I move closer to the church, ant-like in its presence, moving toward it in ant time. The closer I get, the more majestically eroded it seems. The overgrown yellow moss all over its facade feels cool and lush and soft. I place my hand flush against the marble.
Nothing in this world suggests our overtures toward God are either wanted or needed. Someday this building will fall and the civilization around it. It is only our stories that lay balms across our impermanence. I have a longer story to tell about Gideon’s and my walk and suddenly wonder what would happen if I chose not to tell it, to transform it. What if a story was enough for a thing to be?
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* The name, a Latin corruption, means “field of the star.”
Glossary of People and Terms
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Apocrypha: A collection of anonymous Christian writings from the first five hundred years of the faith. Most survive due to happenstance, because many apocryphal writings were condemned and destroyed by the early church.
Athanasius (ca. 298–373 CE): Alexandrian bishop. Instrumental in defending the concept of the Trinity.
Augustine
of Hippo (354–430 CE): Greatest theologian and philosopher of the Western church. Pioneer of the memoir.
Celsus (ca. 2nd century CE): Philosopher and pagan critic of Christianity.
Christology: Field of theological inquiry concerned with the relationship of Jesus to his divinity.
Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215 CE): Theologian and educator. Helped accommodate Christian thinking to concepts drawn from Hellenistic philosophy. Influenced Origen, early Christianity’s greatest theologian.
Clement of Rome (?–ca. 100 CE): Roman bishop. Purportedly wrote 1 Clement, one of the earliest surviving examples of noncanonical Christian literature.
Epiphanius of Salamis (ca. 315–403 CE): Theologian and heresiologist.
Essenes: Ascetic Jewish sect active from the second century BCE to the first century CE. Wiped out by the Romans during the Jewish War.
Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–ca. 340 CE): Historian. Wrote the earliest surviving history of the Christian church.
Hasmonaean Dynasty: Autonomous Jewish dynasty. Founded after the Maccabaean revolt against the Seleucids. Ruled Judaea and parts beyond from 140 BCE to 37 BCE.
Hegesippus (ca. 110–ca. 190 CE): Chronicler and historian responsible for a five-volume work of Christian history, which survives only in a handful of outside citations. Thought to have had strong historical connection to the traditions of Jewish Christianity.
Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 40–ca. 110 CE): Bishop and martyr.
Irenaeus of Lyon (?–ca. 200 CE): Bishop, heresiologist, and polemicist.
Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1230–1298): Archbishop of Genoa and medieval Christian chronicler.