The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  Sometimes patience is called for, I reminded myself. And I loved Paul. I must allow for him to stumble, as I must stumble as well.

  “We shall go to Corinth in the morning,” Paul said.

  This shift of plans came abruptly, and he rarely mentioned Athens in later years.

  Chapter Fourteen

  PAUL

  We left Athens unhappily. It had not gone as well as I hoped, and I could see no point in remaining. The Athenians had only a limited understanding of the workings of the spirit, and their cynicism had overwhelmed their intelligence. Perhaps I would go back there one day, if the Almighty Lord pushed me in this direction, although I worried that the time drew short and that little would change in this city before the end of history. It occurred to me that Luke, however resilient, had no interest in rhetoric or inquiry. My sense of Athens as a place of high argument and philosophic inquisition failed to move him. He had not been schooled in Plato, in the Attic poets and playwrights, as I had. And he held a low opinion of the young men who gathered in the olive grove to walk where Plato had walked and taught. Wealth and position, he said, had blinded them to truth.

  Now the prospect of Corinth—a gaudy jewel in the diadem of the Achaean world—brightened on the horizon. It was our next destination, and we moved forward without regret. I was learning this hard lesson, how to leave what must be left, how to accept failures, to adjust to them, and to face the days ahead unhampered, unbowed.

  We stopped at Eleusis at my insistence, though Luke dismissed it as “a cesspool of superstition.” I knew something of the parades that arrived twice yearly by torchlight, descending on Eleusis with hope as well as trepidation. And I admired the compulsion of these pilgrims to understand the mysteries of the site, whatever the cost. I thought of them as we walked along the Sacred Way, which led out of Athens to this holy place and its cypress grove.

  Throughout the year, seekers engaged with the priests here, learning about resurrection, as taught through the tale of Demeter and Persephone. Musa had possessed a knowledge of these mysteries, and he didn’t dismiss the truth of what lay behind this Greek story of death and rebirth, with its rites of initiation. “All truth comes to us obliquely,” he told me, “through stories. A myth is a story that isn’t just true; it’s more than true. It marks a tear in the fabric of reality.”

  Musa insisted that resurrection must occur each day, if not several times each day. Once I asked him about death, and he said, “Life comes, at birth, as a glorious sunrise. I have no reason to expect anything less of death.” He spoke often of Demeter, the goddess of nature, and her beautiful young daughter, Kore, with her curly auburn hair, who had been kidnapped by Hades, the master of the underworld. Demeter searched in vain for the missing girl, coming to rest in Eleusis, full of despair. In the guise of an old crone, she looked after the queen’s son, dipping him in cool liquid fires that made him immortal. He became a splendid princeling, devoted to the cultivation of crops and the seasonal rounds of agriculture. But in sympathy the crops failed as Demeter’s grief for her daughter increased year by agonizing year. Seeing this pain, the prince asked the gods to intervene, and Zeus obliged him, persuading Hades, the dark master, to allow Kore—now renamed Persephone—to return to the world of light, although she had been tricked into eating deadly pomegranate seeds, which meant she must spend half of each year in the land of the dead.

  The story embodied a great mystery: the dying of the natural world in the autumn, its revival in springtime. Eleusis taught the truth of this mystery, and transmogrified all who understood its message and thereby lost their fear of death, becoming aware that death is simply part of life. But Jesus, as I knew, signaled the end of this cycle. He put death to death, by his own death and resurrection. Just thinking of this truth, its ferocity and wonder, I felt emboldened. I would bring Corinth to the foot of the cross. We would excite and transmogrify the Greeks, this wise and spirit-filled people, who would join us in our efforts to create the world again, once and for all.

  I had planted seeds in Athens, that much I knew, and these seeds would drift toward Corinth, perhaps would populate the whole of Greece one day.

  Several votaries stood outside the Hall of the Mysteries, a formidable temple erected to shelter those devoted to the spirit of this place. As many as three thousand worshippers came in the autumn and spring at appointed times to celebrate the story of Demeter and Persephone. Those who dared to brave the mysteries would be led by a priest into a dark cave, descending with him into the underworld, where they encountered in that twilight world the ghosts who lived there. The goal of this descent was to reemerge in daylight, coming back to life from a kind of death.

  “It’s not unlike baptism,” Luke said, when I explained this.

  “How strange to see a parallel there,” I said.

  He didn’t mind when I mocked him. Indeed, I liked Luke because of his infinite capacity for humiliation. (And tried very hard not to take advantage of this.) That he would make occasional jokes at my expense didn’t matter; my resilience overrode this. I indulged him, appreciating his loyalty and the fact that I could throw ideas against the wall of his mind, see them scatter and reassemble. At times he drew me toward the earth. His clarity had a calming effect, prompting me to think of those lines of Horace: “Reason and sense promote tranquility, / Not villas that look out upon the sea.”

  We sat in the pooling shade with a number of intelligent young men, and I found in them fertile ground for persuasion: Greek minds eager to understand the mysteries of life. They took a keen interest in our stories of Jesus, and one of them, seized by the spirit of God quite unexpectedly, asked me to baptize him in a nearby stream.

  “He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Luke said to me.

  “Let the spirit do its work. Don’t interfere!”

  To be frank, I wished for more like this young man, and for a violence of conversion, for masses awakening to the call of God through the voice of Jesus. It was not always necessary for a man or woman fully to comprehend what I said. Understanding might come slowly, in time—if time was allowed. To rest in God mattered more than anything else.

  The journey from Eleusis to Corinth took us southwest along a coastline of sheer cliffs, where we stopped in tiny villages and sat with the Greek fishermen, who fed us sardines wrapped in fig leaves and steamed over hot coals. They had no interest in hearing about Jesus but politely listened to our stories. At Megara, with its beach like a half-moon of sand, I watched long-legged boys with spears who waded up to their thighs in green surf and stabbed the fish that swam close.

  “Call me a fisher of men,” I said.

  “One of the best lines of our Lord,” Luke said. “It will go into my story.” As ever he gathered quotations for his life of Jesus and regularly sent versions of this book to Rome by messenger for safekeeping. Our travels were such that we could never depend upon arrival, but we could count on dear Patrobas, who had collected written material for the Way for some years, welcoming everything that Luke would send.

  And yet I wondered if Luke’s work would ever see daylight. His meticulous nature might impede his ability to finish a final version of this life of Jesus. (Already other accounts circulated in various drafts, and I had read two or three of them, frustrated by their apparent contradictions and lack of focus.) That Luke planned to write a narrative of our missionary journeys did worry me, as he saw everything strictly in his terms, believing in his own truth as the universal reality, always proceeding along the most logical lines. This was, perhaps, a consequence of his medical training.

  On the other hand, I felt lucky to have Luke walk beside me.

  * * *

  We arrived in Corinth on a brilliant afternoon. It had none of the stuffy and self-congratulatory atmosphere of Athens, and I was relieved to enter this swarming and abundant city. From its ports at Cenchreae or Lechaeum sailors arrived in vessels from the world over, and th
e markets pulsed with a variety of hucksters who had things to sell: leather goods, silks, woolen blankets, baskets, jewelry, bronze and clay pots, glassware, paintings, silver platters, and exquisite pieces of marble sculpture. Everything opened to the eyes and ears: temples and monuments, bathhouses, public fountains, an amphitheater for games, and a capacious odeum for the recitation of poetry and song. Statues of one goddess or another rose in nooks and crannies, some gilded or cloaked in scarlet masks. There were porticoes and long colonnades on the main streets. The massive bronze figure of Helios, the sun god, took dominion over the principle gate to the city, with its big brass doors. Helios rode in a chariot with his son Phaëthon, and this seemed fitting, as the sun flooded Corinth, which had become a prized colony of Rome.

  We stopped to gaze at the city from a nearby hill, with a view of the Gulf of Corinth and the surrounding mountains. A golden river slipped past Corinth, then emptied into the harbor below. It rippled by the Temple of Priapus, that rustic god of fertility, whose obscenely swollen member adorned statuary throughout the city. One could feel diverse erotic energies at work here.

  The Temple of Aphrodite crowned the Acrocorinth, where alabaster columns suggested a purity it did not possess. The structure—really a sequence of buildings and open spaces between them—swarmed with more than a thousand whores, “priestesses” who offered their wares to sailors who made a point of stopping at this port. And this sordid aspect of Corinth reached back many centuries: Plato had referred to a whore when he used the phrase “a Corinthian girl.” I mentioned this to Luke, who recalled a lurid Greek epigram of unknown origin: “The lively girls of Corinth never slack. / One finds them in the temple, on their back.”

  It surprised me that Luke, of all people, should allow such a fragment to stick in memory.

  I had seen promiscuity and fornication before, often in grotesque incarnations, as in Cyprus at the governor’s palace, where the most insolent acts took place in public view. But Corinth seethed on another level. Commerce ruled here, and the Corinthians brought carnality to a feverish level, as any physical desire could find fulfillment for a price. Anything or (nearly) anyone could be bought or sold in this city.

  I knew something of their history. The original Corinthians had fled two centuries ago to the island of Delos, chased out by marauding armies. In recent times they had returned, eager to compete with Greeks from elsewhere, outwitting Syrians, Egyptians, and Jews from the farthest corners of the empire. The Jews had a pervasive presence here, and one or two of the prominent synagogues attracted Godfearers, ever the most receptive audience for our message.

  As always, Luke and I sought out the Jews, and I did my best to capture their attention by proclaiming myself “a Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin, trained under Gamaliel.” It was my opening pitch in most synagogues, but here it drew only sighs of indifference. I did manage to read from the scrolls on the Sabbath, as they had few enough readers who could actually read aloud in Hebrew or Aramaic; but my reflections on Rabbi Jesus attracted neither rebuttal nor assent. One elder at the synagogue on Melus Street said, “I believe that many new voices have arisen, and your rabbi is one among them.” He told me that Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew, had quite a following. And Apollos had apparently been baptized by John himself in the Jordan.

  Luke said, “We should meet this Apollos.”

  I was skeptical: Our world teemed with wandering mystics and mountebanks, healers and tricksters. It seemed unlikely that Apollos would interest me, except in that he had won admirers throughout the eastern empire.

  It wasn’t a month before we met Prisca and Aquila. They had been among the Jews expelled from Rome by the emperor, who now and then took against those who refused to acknowledge his divinity. They worked in leather and made a handy living in the repair of tents and sails in the western district of Corinth, where craftsmen labored in small workshops, and attended a synagogue led by Crispus, a kind and receptive rabbi who would prove an advocate for our circle in Corinth. I quickly liked this young couple. Prisca was shockingly clever, with an ardent manner and blazing tongue. But I never was afraid of her. Aquila, her husband, was by contrast laconic, offering only a few words on any occasion. But I trusted him and understood that Prisca thrived in his presence. They were devoted to God and had come into contact with the Way in Rome.

  I wasted no time in telling them about my encounter with the Christ on the Damascus Road, my subsequent years in the desert with Musa, and my travels among Jews and Godfearers throughout Asia, Macedonia, and Greece, where many of those I met had opened their hearts to the energies of the spirit, all in preparation for the establishment of the kingdom. I mentioned the gatherings, too.

  “We’ve been to such gatherings in Rome,” said Prisca.

  She didn’t say more, as if she didn’t yet trust me.

  Prisca was taller than Aquila by half a foot, lean and lithe. Luke said (to my annoyance) that she “looked like a young man.” She certainly wore her hair shorter than women commonly did and carried herself in a confident way. Her eyes lit up when she talked. When she sang, she did so in a sonorous, lovely, low-pitched voice. She liked people, and her long fingers often reached out to those around her.

  It surprised me, pleasantly, that when we held our first gathering at Corinth, Prisca spoke so eloquently about the Kingdom of God and “the New Covenant of the Christ.” Her grasp of the Way impressed me, as did her reflections on the scriptures. I had not imagined I would meet such a follower of the Way in Greece, one with such knowledge and aplomb. Her father, she told me, had been a rabbi, and he had taught his beloved daughter to read the Torah in Hebrew. Most women never actually learned to read, and few gatherings of Jews admitted them to their inner circle. Her way of talking mirrored my own, and she often echoed my words as well, giving back what I said in clarified form, shaped in her own way. I loved her peculiar energies, the way she brought life into a room. I admired, even envied, Aquila for his connection to Prisca and his own wise silences.

  Had I been younger, and Prisca not married, I might have wished for a closer friendship. That I could imagine myself married to her quite shocked me—I had never had such a thought before. It made no sense to me. But perhaps life makes less sense than I would have preferred, and I must accept this as one of its limitations.

  To my dismay, I was unable to expel fantasies of sexual relations in Corinth, as hardly a day passed without a whore approaching me. Beautiful young men, too, winked at me, asking if I wished to walk away with them, for a price. I never knew what to say to these steadfast workers in the flesh, whom I did not disdain or rebuke. Had not Jesus been willing to talk with whores?

  One night, as I walked alone in a public garden, a young woman, not unlike Prisca in outline, with long legs and arms, with a sloping neck and short hair, approached me, stepping from the shadows of an umbrella pine in the burning moonlight. Her eyes sank their hooks into my heart.

  “You would like to spend a little time with me?” she asked.

  Her voice was like a boy’s, fluting and steely, as were her thin hips, her lanky form.

  “I have very little money,” I said.

  “Whatever you have is fine,” she said, drawing close to me, putting her arms around me.

  Her honeyed breath lured me toward her, and I kissed her mouth, then touched her breasts with my tongue. The salty sweetness appealed to me, and I let myself kiss her belly as well. Her arms pulled me toward her with such force. And I lay with her that evening on the grass under a million stars, in a shower of comets, allowing her to press herself against me, letting the length of her inform me, becoming a part of me as I became a part of her. I touched her in ways I had only imagined in the years before this, savoring each moment as she pressed upon me, her body rising above me, enveloping my manhood as I held my hands against her tight buttocks and let myself go.

  I walked home in the dawn light in a state of minglin
g excitement, confusion, and remorse.

  I wept, then prayed desperately on my knees the next morning: Lord, forgive me for what I have done. I have not listened to your voice. I have turned my back on you. I am sorry. And I will turn away from this. I promise now with every fiber of my being. I promise!

  Luke appeared behind me and stood with a hand on my shoulder.

  “Is something wrong, Paul? You didn’t come home last night, and I was afraid for you. I almost went out looking. The darkness is unsafe.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You look well enough,” he said. “But I don’t think you are fine. No.”

  “Do you believe—deeply in your heart—that God forgives us, again and again? No matter what we do?”

  “Have you done something in need of forgiveness?”

  I broke into tears and revealed everything to Luke. I could not hold back, not now, and not with him. That would have been pointless. In deep sympathy, he sat beside me on a divan, with an arm around me. “You have only been human,” he said, “and God asks no more of us than our brokenness.”

  It was a kind thing for him to say in this circumstance, and useful as well. Suddenly I understood in a most visceral way the crooked timber from which God had fashioned us, and knew it was impossible to live in the purity to which I aspired. That had been a fantasy of mine.

  “I’m broken,” I said.

  “You can’t understand God’s forgiveness if you can’t forgive yourself. Have pity, my friend, on your own heart.”

  I never loved dear Luke more than on that quiet morning in Corinth. I felt truly human for perhaps the first time in my life, and utterly exposed as well, knowing at last that God had forgiven me, as he forgave everyone. As I forgave myself, and I did.