I enjoyed my investigations into the history of the Church; I did not enjoy discovering the truth about it. The astonishing success of bumpkins and ignoramuses who defeated all the knowledge and genius of antiquity. Was it their success or the even more astonishing failure of the vanquished? In an era of universal ennui and no ultimate purpose, it seems that the ancients would have prostrated themselves before any who could promise a swift end to the world. But those others—mild and quiet-hearted, believing fervently in the ever unfulfilled prophecy of a second coming, by and by—carried a punitive sword up their sleeve. I dare say that very few before our own times have had so much cause to ponder the disgust the first Christians felt for the open iniquities and boastful crimes, the murders in the arena for public entertainment, and the lewd public rituals. Yet when Saint Augustine invoked Plato in De Civitate Dei, it was the Plato who had desired in the name of moral principles to impose prohibitions, establish tyranny, and banish poets from the republic. The very same Augustine dismissed the gods as devils, thus populating the wilds and forests of Europe with them for centuries, where, in exile, they terrorized and tempted traveling monks, or received veneration from the hidden enemies of the new order at witches’ Sabbaths. No, I never allied myself with the liquidators of our estate, who, simply because the Church had lost its power, began to bemoan its earlier severity and intolerance. It was all too easy for them to beat their breasts and drape themselves with the robes of lovers of harmless benevolence, while secretly thinking that, if the Church had not used the stake and the sword of obedient monarchs in the critical thirteenth century, little would have remained of Christianity, while Europe would surely have met the fate of stagnant India, with its own form of Buddhism—the Cathars. My position was always clear. I was not ashamed of the game the Church had played with a certain personage bearing little resemblance to Jupiter or Venus, Juno or Priapus, or perhaps only insofar as they were all worldly gods, while he bore the name of the Prince of This World. I certainly do not mean to suggest that either overtly or behind the mask of an atheist sympathizer I ever defended the last doomed positions, declaring myself in favor of our now impossible worldly power. Yet today, when the edifice of two millennia has crumbled, we may see the consequences of the shame that induced us to reject the relative good simply because it was only relative.
Naught but dust—dust the sumptuous draperies, gilding, and marbles, and behind them the power and money of kings, princes, owners of the human flock, slave traders, pious tormentors of peasants. Dust the miters and thrones, and baldachins, and sweet figurines of a pink baby Jesus, and Madonnas clad in roses, and collators’ pews, and carved altars, and all the countless Sundays, when the sound of military trumpets rang out for the Elevation, and the cannons answered with a salvo from the walls. Ever at the gates of hell, choosing one thing or another from what was permitted: celebrate the holy day, do no harm to widows and orphans, perform penance for murder and adultery. And tithes, and fiefs, and grand buildings, and saving the souls of heretics by breaking their arms and legs on the wheel. Yet I took solace in what the Church had once been, since no purely human institution similarly depraved could have survived. And if history is so opaque and ambiguous that we can never establish the facts of the past, if everything that happened long ago stretches and contracts in the testimony as if in a multitude of distorted mirrors, then at least here we might find the one and only continuity in the vast archive gathered over the centuries, the one and only thread accessible to our understanding. And had it not been for the Church, then where would they have crawled on the stumps of their limbs, where would they have hobbled on their staffs and crutches, where would they have wept tears to release them from silent torment, certain, absolutely certain that every last day and hour would be weighed upon the scale, and that, for the saints on the icons, for the Jesus of wood and plaster, for the crowned Virgin, they were more than merely a kneeling crowd, but rather individual men and women, known by name from the days of their birth? While collaborating—yes, without doubt—in their oppression, the mother Ecclesia guaranteed them there before the altar more than mere equality with the rich and powerful, but the majesty of a call addressed to them, the lowly.
The dust of form. In truth, over my long life, only on a few occasions did I participate in the repeated rite of the Last Supper as I felt it should be repeated. And even the hoarse brass trumpets and baroque opera on the balconies of the choir met only with forbearance in me, since in ritual we always yearn to reach beyond form, and yet this is never possible. A gesture intended to be the purest and most sincere expression of the spirit petrifies into form, retreating into it and surrendering to it. I am guilty of consenting to this, though ultimately nothing but consent was possible; I am guilty of the sermons that I recall now with bitterness, when instead of staying silent after the reading of the Gospel, hiding my face in my hands and awaiting the gift of tongues, I heard the wooden tone of my own words. People are right to parody priestly prayers, chants, aspergillums, processions of portly capons in sweeping women’s gowns, for the priest parodies himself like an actor who has performed the same play too many times. And the reform of the liturgy, though it was supposed to extract him from this theater and bring him closer to the congregation of previously passive viewers, only resulted in panic, adding to the general panic that seized Christians when it was announced that the immutable and sacred had always been conventional and historical, and that now they would have to derive a newly conventional sacred from themselves.
So it had to be that a house eaten from within by termites, still covered in external splendor, lost its roof and walls, which collapsed in the attempt to replace a single beam, though it was not immediately apparent in the cloud of dust that the walls had gone. Nobody will ever know what John XXIII was really thinking when he announced his aggiornamento, whether he really intended only to adapt the Church to the new demands of the time. But adapt to what, if they who placed their votive candles before the images of saints no longer believed in immortality, not because they did not want to believe—indeed, they wanted very much to believe, even stubbornly pretending to themselves that they did believe—but because their imagination had been incapacitated, and could no longer hold a Heaven, a Purgatory, or a Hell to receive them? Could one hope for adaptation when the will to faith had replaced faith itself, bringing the suspicion of falsity to every choral song and every prayerful joining of hands, while religious art—which, like every form of art, both attempts to lie and is unable to lie—had demonstrated its own impossibility? Perhaps John XXIII had other, hidden intentions, preparing the distant future through the fall of that which was destined to fall. Perhaps he foresaw the new epoch, when a name inflected by the phonetics of barbarian languages—Yesu, Giêsu, Isos—would cease to be a protective incantation or a curse, as it would simply have been forgotten, when it would be impossible to turn to the Virgin goddess with entreaties for a happy marriage, and no patron saint could help a person find his lost keys. Only then, he might have thought to himself, would certain people, a precious few, stumble upon the old track in their homelessness, for it was not for man to flee from God.
I witnessed it all, though—I confess—not without stifled laughter. They were so ashamed of their centuries of hypocrisy, of their alliances with monarchs and the rich, of their babble to the injured and humiliated about the prize awaiting them in the afterlife, that now they swore to turn Christianity into action, incarnating it in social morality and working for the coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth. Oh, original sin is reactionary indeed, weakening any enthusiasm for marches in the vanguard or the ardent defense of noble public causes, and so they even corrected Freud wherever he was too pessimistic in his appraisal of the possibility of the natural man’s triumph. Original sin embarrassed them, so they served it up in their catechisms as a kind of biblical legend. Angels and demons embarrassed them, so they happily sent this invisible host off into the land of metaphor. After all, they assured people in the
ir sermons, we have always praised the goodness and beauty of creation, so let us love one another, and the Earth will become a paradise. Unfortunately, much better specialists in the organization of universal happiness already existed, managing perfectly well without the Old and New Testaments, and, before long, they—so ardent and eager—would find themselves in the role of condescendingly tolerated helpers. One cannot deny the strength of character of all those seminarians and young priests who justified their work as activists by appealing to scripture, only to renounce it later for political doctrine when they saw how it departed from the correct way of thinking. At least they were more consistent than those who remained torn, while still prepared in their own sermonizing way to glorify the religion of man, which was now finally alluring enough to replace the religion of the stern Judge.
The gates of hell were far away . . . They did not deign to recall what Montesquieu had foretold, and what would soon come to pass: that Protestantism would disappear, and that what Protestantism had been, Catholicism would become. They themselves labored over the fulfillment of his prophecy, not by imposing morality, but by dissolving faith in morality, turning faith into a concession from the prince. Called into being by collective desires, this prince was supposed to be good, though certain doubts about his virtues could not save the concessioners who worked for him. When an individual is delighted neither by reasons of State nor by the rhetoric of social norms, he will find meager consolation in a choice between lessons in civic morality and the Church as a troop of boy scouts trained in an additional politeness useful to the authorities. For what is he to choose when one way or the other he will be equally homeless? And so was this new Catholicism not also doomed to meet the fate of the Protestant sects?
They wished to redeem themselves and find forgiveness, and nothing inclined them to remorse more than the image of a devil with a pitchfork driving souls down into a fiery cauldron, and so there was no end to their sniggering at this character to ingratiate themselves with progress. Their clientele no longer believed in eternal flames, the apple from the tree of knowledge, or—let us be frank—in the resurrection of the body, so how could they teach them of the dragon, the serpent, or the horned monster lurking in the darkness and waiting for somebody to devour? The traders in the marketplace knew how to sell their merchandise, offering religion in humanitarian packaging and assuring the flock that if Jesus had been crucified, it was because he had been a pacifist, a social worker, and a leader of the oppressed. There was no role here for the diabolos—the slanderer, the informer, the falsifier—and it could not have been he who had tempted Jesus in the desert, as he was merely a figure of speech.
They amazed me, because right next door, right behind the building in which the rhythmical clapping of hands reinforced their smiling and progressive good sense, the possessed—those whom the Bible calls daimonizomenoi—were babbling and thrashing about in convulsions. In fact, never before had their number been so great, even taking general population growth into account; and never before had their voices, electronically amplified, carried so far, reaching the ears of all. Practical proof of the energy of the Evil One was plain to see, but they, fearful Christians, would regard the acceptance of this proof as an embarrassment to their modernity. Yet somebody’s malevolent presence was unmistakably imposing itself, for it was difficult to imagine that such perverse powers could have emerged from the people themselves, or that Christians were now the mainstays of a sheeplike cheerfulness of spirit, nibbling the green grass in the valley of the best of all possible worlds. Their contemporaries without faith in God were more inclined to believe in a malicious and omnipotent demiurge, the signs of whose prowess the Earth had supplied in abundance. There were even those who prayed to him, hoping to gain his favor, celebrating black masses openly or under some other name.
I did my duty as much as I could, and perhaps it will be recorded in my favor that I wished to contribute as little as possible to the turmoil in their minds. Yet I knew that it was not for me or a few other like-minded souls to reverse a course of events ordained since before the beginning of time. The apostles had not been mistaken when they carried around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea the news that the hour was late; they had only been mistaken when they reckoned that hour in the years of a human life, for the late hour of history is indifferent to our measure of centuries and millennia. “Nevertheless, when the son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” Luke conveyed the son of man’s question, but did he understand it? Everything has unfolded as it was meant to unfold, and every tree is known by its fruits. I have not looked for signs in the Church of domesticated humanitarianism and hygienic obsequiousness, and neither will they who come after me look for signs in a Church that will doubtless lose even the memory of the Last Supper, replacing agape with the warmth of animal passions. Once again, He—the judge of the living and the dead—will choose whomsoever He wishes, confounding all human calculations: not from among those who carry the symbol of reconciliation with Him, but from among apostates and pagans, and they will not be able to comprehend whence and why an unknown force seizes them against their will, and whither it carries them.
Now I am weary, and I reflect with relief that I shall not have to look at the misfortunes fashioned by people with their own hands, or rather with their own minds, or resist the temptation to brush it all off with a shrug, saying simply that they get what they deserve. I can dare only to hope that my contempt has been directed against them as a collective (after all, surely the collective, so completely, so radically different from Man, deserves contempt), and not against them as individual beings. The Church was not merely a collective—for this always stands at the gates of hell—but also a community of beings transformed in that which was unique in each of them. I shall not have to look. I am a desiccated insect that has frozen on a leaf, and now warms itself in the last rays of the sun before the coming of winter. When I am gone, the long winter will have its share of sunny days, its joy, and levity, and laughter, though always accompanied by a piercing chill. It is not so bad to have nothing, as I have nothing—neither this bodily shell, which will soon be taken away, nor the glory of immortal works, nor the treasures stored up for a brief time in fading memory—nothing but the Promise.
An Astronaut’s Tale
My real name is Lino Martinez. As I’ve already mentioned, I was a member of the Union for a long time, and I took part in the expedition to Sardion. But just in case, and irrespective of what might still happen, I want to tell the story of how things were with me, and why I’m here. It won’t be easy, so I’ll try to start from the beginning.
I don’t come from the kind of family where you get to go to a Union school as a child, benefiting from the privileges of your parents. I was selected and trained up because my tests were exceptionally good, but it all started rather late. As a child, I was raised by my mother; I never knew my father. At school, I didn’t get along too badly, since I had a strong physique, a love for games, and even some talent for learning. Still, I didn’t escape without the odd complication. At the time, there were still plenty of Christians in my native region of the Andes, and my mother belonged to a church. I say “at the time,” and I should explain that my age is quite different from what you might imagine from my appearance. My mother attached great significance to Christian practices; she forced me into them, with some success, so that for a certain time I believed sincerely—or so it seems to me now—and prayed every day. But the crisis soon came, and it was painful, probably triggered by my aversion for our priest when I discovered that his robes were only a disguise, that he was pretending not to be what he really was. In truth, he was an officer of the Welfare Bureau, overseeing the faithful on the orders of his superiors. The crisis would have come sooner or later, but it’s worth mentioning this detail. Apart from this, I exhibited a morbid timidity entirely unexpected in such a healthy and cheerful young boy, less toward my contemporaries than toward my elders, so that when my mother sent me t
o the shops I would fight battles with myself, my heart beating violently until I almost fainted, blushing and blanching, before I could even muster up the courage to cross the threshold of the store. This timidity gradually subsided, but it disappeared for good only when the Astronauts took me away to their unit, though I wouldn’t swear that it wasn’t precisely for this reason that they took me in the first place, since this symptom, with the right other factors, can be a variant—in other words, such people can acquire exceptional courage through therapy.
I was a mature adolescent, almost a young man, when my mother died in an accident, and then I lived for a while with distant relatives. This was to be a very important period for me, but I’ll return to it shortly. For now, I want to talk about the training I received from the Astronauts, though only in very general terms. It’s not that I’m worried about breaking the prohibition—I couldn’t care less—but I was trained in such a way that the prohibition is still buried deeper than my will. In short, I would describe it as follows: war offered the highest test of human energy drawn into oneness, into a single node, and so our training was modeled on military discipline, instilling all the soldierly virtues in us. It goes without saying that this didn’t mean the methods of armies, with their tin soldier drills, uniforms, and blind obedience. We were the conscious and faithful soldiers of humanity, and the emphasis was always on consciousness and faith in the goal. But also on self-consciousness. There were plenty of solitary sessions in front of screens to check how our brains were behaving. We were supposed to attain the greatest possible harmony between being and thinking. Naturally, it was impossible to achieve total calm—the even, barely wavering line of Alpha current, as when we put a cat in front of the oscillograph. But the violent peaks and troughs of Beta current as it recorded restless thought could be subdued with practice, so that the bright line began to undulate slowly and evenly, the Beta acquiring something of the equilibrium and softness of Alpha current.
The Mountains of Parnassus Page 5