by Iris Murdoch
‘Father—’
‘Hello.’
‘You were expecting me?’
‘Yes.’
Cato went back to sit upon the bed his legs giving way. The boy pulled up a chair and sat near, smiling compulsively. This was Joseph Beckett, known to his friends and enemies as Beautiful Joe. He was very thin and at first sight looked odd rather than beautiful. He wore hexagonal rimless glasses which slightly enlarged his light hazel eyes. His blond hair was very straight and fine, quite long, cut in a neat bob with a side parting and always recently and carefully combed. He had a short straight nose and a long thin mouth with sensitive humorous lips. His cheeks were smooth and rosy, and with his bright attentive slightly quizzing air he looked like a young American scholar or perhaps a very clever school-girl.
‘You’re all wet,’ said Cato.
The boy had no coat and his jeans and shirt clung in wrinkles to his body. His hair, darkened now by rain, clung to his head like a cap.
‘Been wet all day. Soon dry. Got a towel?’
‘Here.’
‘Got a drink?’
‘Have you taken anything?’ (This meant drugs.)
‘No, course not, that’s all over with.’
Cato sat watching as the boy first carefully dried his glasses and set them on his knee, then dried his face and neck and rubbed his hair vigorously, resumed his glasses and, with a steel comb, combed his hair down in a neat lacquered curve, all the time keeping his bright quizzical gaze fixed upon Cato.
‘Got a drink?’
‘Later.’ What the hell, thought Cato, I need a drink myself. He reached for the neck of the whisky bottle and fetched two tumblers from the washstand. ‘Here.’ He stubbed out his cigarette in a mound of ash and lit another one. Joe did not smoke.
Joe was smoothing his damp hair down with his fingers, patting out the sleek curves across his cheeks, still watching the priest with an air of affectionate amusement.
‘Father—’
‘Yes.’
‘I haven’t told anyone.’
‘Told anyone what?’
‘That you’re still here. No one knows but me. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ said Cato. That seemed to be the theme of the present moment. He added. ‘I’m going away. You’d better give me back the door key.’
Joe gave him the key. ‘That’s sort of sad, Father, you trusted me, it was a sort of symbol, wasn’t it, Father?’
‘I still trust you. This isn’t my house.’
‘Where will you be then, where will I see you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you going to Rome?’
‘No. What makes you think I’m going to Rome?’
‘Every priest goes there. I’d like to see Rome. I’d like to see His Holiness. When will you be Pope, Father?’
‘Not for a while yet!’
‘Where will I see you?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll—I’ll write to you.’
‘I haven’t an address. I’ll come to you. You want me to, don’t you?’
Joe was smiling and swinging his hair about, transforming the lank locks into a golden fuzz by teasing them between his fingers. He twitched his shoulders, then drew his damp shirt out of his jeans and unbuttoned it a little so as to pull it free of his back.
Cato was not looking at him. Cato had imagined that after the ordeal of Easter everything would become simpler and certain moves at least would just have to be made. But it seemed that there was still nothing compulsory in his life and the horror of choice which by now should have passed from him was still there, the awful superimposition of quite different problems producing more and more glimpses and vistas, more and more superfluous possibilities, the longer he gazed.
If only, thought Cato, instinctively forming his thought as a prayer, everything were not happening to me all at once. Is this an accident, can it be? One thing at a time, oh Lord, and I can manage. I cannot deal with such different things at the same moment. Yet are they different things? They were beginning to seem inextricably connected. But that was impossible. What was the connection, what could it be? He had to solve the problems separately, he had to, and he had to solve one after the other. Perhaps the problem was how to separate them.
The period of Cato’s conversion now seemed inconceivably remote, a prehistory, a mythical time of creation out of chaos which did not cease to be, even now in his life, a centre of authority and power. He had been invaded by Christ. That he had been ‘armed’ by a strictly rationalist atheist upbringing was nothing. Such arms were exceedingly ambiguous. A reaction was ‘to be expected’ some people said. But Cato had his own deep resistance against sudden emotional religion. He had, as it were, quite early inoculated himself against falling in love with that mystical beauty: the ritual, the intellectual delight, the drama, the power. As a budding historian he had gone into it all and probed in himself the weakness that made him vulnerable to what was after all, in the end, a vast vulgarity. Christ himself of course was untouchably pure and had never put a foot wrong, though this was true also of Socrates. No vulgarity there, no vanity, not a shadow of trickery or falsehood, but what this showed was how vastly perfectible human beings were after all. This Jesus was an old friend, a great saint whom he had often discussed with his father, as between them they had dissected Christianity, sorting out good from bad, truth from illusion. Christ was a good man. But the superstition, the symbolism, the hoax: Cato had perfectly understood, had studied it all with sympathy, had seen exactly why it happened and why it appealed to him and why it could never really attract him or even, profoundly, interest him. As a historian he was more interested in Islam.
Then suddenly, with no warning and with a sense of immense barriers dissolving in the mind, he had tripped and stumbled into reality. Suddenly, with faculties which he had not been aware of, he experienced God. All that he had ‘known’ before now seemed a shadow land through which he had passed into the real world, into a form of being which indeed he did not ‘know’ because he lived it and was one with it. He entered quite quietly into a sort of white joy, as if he had not only emerged from the cave, but was looking at the Sun and finding that it was easy to look at, and that all was white and pure and not dazzling, not extreme, but gentle and complete, and that everything was there, kept safe and pulsating silently inside the circle of the Sun.
And what was so strange too was that this new grasp of being came to him quite clearly identified as an experience of the Trinity, the Trinity was the Sun, so white and complete and when you looked straight at it so thrillingly alive and gentle. Of course Cato knew all about this strange doctrine, he had many times discussed it spiritedly and jocularly. Now it was present to him not as an idea but as reality, as the whole of reality, with an invasion of spirit which seemed totally alien to his ‘personality’ as he had known it before, but which became the very selfness of his self. This selfness partook of the Oneness of Christ with Father and with Spirit. How the Trinity was One, and how this Oneness was the law of all being, the law of nature, the electrical universal expression of love, he now saw with the opened eyes of the soul, and resting as he had never rested before he let this indubitable vision gather him into its silent power.
In retrospect Cato found it difficult to connect these revelations with the ordinary history of times and places. He was doing some post-graduate work, writing a thesis on some aspects of eighteenth-century Russian history, at the provincial university where he had been a student, and looking out for a job. He had been at home that summer, staying amicably with his father, playing tennis with Colette. He had been tepidly in love and had had two tepid love affairs, now fortunately over. He was perfectly happy and unanxious and unafraid. Why then this visitation? Perhaps this animal happiness had led him to lay down the weapons of sharp egoism which protect the soul against God? Or perhaps it was itself a first automatic gleam reflected from the joy to come. His ‘conversion’ did not arise
out of spiritual anguish, misery, extremity or any pressing need for transcendent consolation. He had been alone a great deal, walking in the summer heat, sitting beside rivers and watching dragon-flies, swimming naked in lonely flower-girt pools. He had been happy with the happiness of youth and innocence and intellectual self-satisfaction and infinite possibility. He was healthy, active, robust, successful in mind and body. And then—he had found, breathless with wonder and almost a spectator of himself, that this earthly joy was being steadily and entirely and quite independently of his will transformed into a heavenly joy.
Cato never, at that time or later, dignified these happenings with any grand name, such as ‘mystical experiences’. What he had learnt was that all was mystical. He did not need any spectacular ‘vision’ of Christ. He was with Christ, he was Christ. He was invaded, taken over, and it all happened so quietly and with such a sense of perfect reality. Cato said nothing to his father, nothing to Colette. He waited to be told, and he was told. It was not a headlong rush into a new life of self-sacrifice and strenuous devotion. It was like a river, like a growing plant. The will did nothing, there was no will. That nothing less than the gift of his entire being would be adequate to this reality was from the first clear, he was already given, indeed possessed. What exactly he had to do emerged more slowly. He must become a priest, his whole life must be a showing of what he now knew. And he did not even think that it would be easy, he did not even feel himself in any danger of being deluded, since with his new cleansed vision he also saw, still existing, still there as part of the world, his old self, unchanged and perhaps (and this was one of the most remarkable teachings of all) unchangeable.
After a while he visited a Roman priest (the idea of entering the Protestant Communion somehow never seriously occurred to him), not at Laxlinden, where there was no Catholic community, but in a nearby village. The priest turned out to be very unwilling to have anything to do with Cato and his new certainties. He told him to go away for six months and see what he felt like then. Cato could not wait six months. By now he was back at his university continuing his studies. Here he remembered a Catholic lecturer, Brendan Craddock, a man a few years older than himself, whom he had known slightly in his student days, and who was now a priest in a religious house in the city and went to him. Craddock treated him with the same cool suspicious detachment and passed him to Father Sidney Bell, who later became his godfather. About a year afterwards he entered the order of which Father Craddock and Father Bell were members, and a few years after that he was ordained.
Of course the glow of those early experiences faded a little with the years, as he perfectly expected them to do, although that joy was renewed for him at intervals as he penetrated into the complex simplicity of the mass and began to make his home inside the everyday life of the church. He thought that he would faint with happiness when he celebrated his first mass, and he did indeed nearly faint. His new mentors taught him to fear exaltation, but as he lived and grew in Christ he quite sufficiently felt in every day of his life that magnetic bond that joined him to the ground of being. He lived close to, and very often inside, a perfect happiness. Yet ordinary pains and anxieties did not disappear; and the gravest of these was the extreme anger and bitterness of his father. His father met his announcements with absolute incredulity. He thought that his son almost literally had gone mad, and could scarcely have been more stunned and amazed if Cato had declared that Peter the Great was risen from the grave and was now his constant companion. For a short time John Forbes behaved with the energy of desperation, behaved as he might have done if he had seen his child drowning before his eyes. He begged, he threatened, he went and stormed at Father Craddock and Father Bell and practically accused them of sorcery, he talked wildly of going to law, he even (in a frenzy, although he despised psychiatrists) besought Cato to admit himself to be mentally ill and enter a hospital. Cato went quietly and steadily on with his plans, never arguing, constantly begging his father’s pardon for the pain he had to cause him. At last John Forbes gave up and retired into a bitter contemptuous coldness which had lasted ever since. Cato wrote to his father and visited him at slightly increasing intervals. The letters received no reply, the visits passed off politely, with no discussion of anything of importance. His sister Colette was upset by the family quarrel but she loved her brother dearly and though she considered his beliefs absurd she never for a second regarded them as a barrier between them.
Cato, for a time absorbed in the busy rhythmical life of the Church and serenely obedient to his superiors, continued to work as a scholar, dividing his time between theology and Byzantine history. He lived in a community house, first in Manchester, then in London, and did his share, first as an ordinand, then as a priest, in counselling students, talking to (as he then thought) all kinds of people, addressing meetings, dispensing comfort and instruction to believers and unbelievers alike. He sometimes, with wry self-observation, felt himself in danger of becoming a ‘popular figure’. Charisma Forbes: the swinging priest he once saw written beside a ludicrous drawing on a lavatory wall. Cato was not afraid. A cool sense of the tough old Adam in him had never left him. He knew how much he loved a certain kind of power, the power of the authoritative teacher, the power of the wise confessor. To be able to release a man from the burden of sin in the confessional filled him with an almost too exultant pleasure; and the precious jewel of the priesthood, the mass itself, was to him sometimes almost a temptation. He was too happy.
He had of course his irrelevant desires. He found it ridiculously hard to give up smoking, which he felt himself bound to do. He would have liked to travel, particularly to go to Rome, but this in their wisdom his superiors still denied him; and he took this as an admonition, an attempt perhaps to ‘cool it’, to lower the temperature of his still too devotional Christianity by prescribing the most humdrum possible routine. He went at the prescribed intervals into retreat, preferring the more austere traditional practices which some of his fellow priests regarded as so emotive and old-fashioned. There was a sort of painful awkwardness about this discipline which seemed itself to figure the counter-natural demand of perfection. He had, on the other hand, always felt perfectly at home in his body, there was an athletic suppleness which was always a part of his worship, and his youthful strength moved naturally into adoration. Ever since those first ‘showings’ he had felt that God and he occupied the same space, and he found nothing difficult or quaint in imagining, even in detail, when required to do so, Our Lord, His Mother, the moment by moment reality of the Passion and the historical eventfulness of the Incarnation. Hell he could not imagine; it was for him an intellectual idea. Damnation if it existed was God’s affair.
When he meditated upon his own sins he often thought about his father and about the grim and high necessity which had led him to become a bane of suffering to one whom he so much loved; and he lodged this pattern deep in God’s wisdom. He revered every austerity that was required of him and adored the strange and almost invisible tenderness that lurked inside it. At the same time he was without illusion about his ability to change. Perhaps sometimes, if he looked away from the world, if he looked only at God, there might be a little change, an atom of it. In a way that did not concern him. Only God concerned him, only God was his business, only God interested him, and man and his doings simply by extension. He did not find it difficult to listen patiently to dull confused people, to resist physical tiredness and boredom, to do without, when it was necessary, the intellectual joys which were also a communion with God. The vow of chastity and the practice of that virtue never caused him trouble. He had no major temptations except the deep subtle temptation afforded by the power itself which came from his givenness to God. He had friends in the order, especially Brendan Craddock, who had been his confessor since he came to London. He had friends outside the order and outside the Church. But these friendships had never disturbed him with dramas of any degree of intensity.
At a certain time his superiors decided to
give Cato a change of scene, and he, in the harmony of his mind with his priesthood, found himself wanting exactly what they were now proposing. Without yet leaving the shelter of the community house where he had lived hitherto, Cato took up a visiting role in a poor east end district of London upon the confines of Limehouse and Poplar. ‘You’ll be shocked, you know’, Brendan had told him. ‘Nothing can shock me’, said Cato. But he had been shocked. He had been frightened, frightened of his penitents, frightened of the dumb failure of his authority, and at a world where news of Christ had never come and, as it often seemed, could never come. ‘I was in prison and you visited me’ had lost its charm. Cato could sometimes discern no light at all in those whom he devoutly attempted to love. He saw for the first time the wilfulness of vice as a part of everyday life, and the way in which despair and vice were one. Just beyond the confines of ordinariness there were places where love could not enter; it was as if the concept broke. Cato knew perfectly well that the power of God could pass through the broken concept, and that this was the lesson which it most behoved him to learn. He measured now how cloistered he had been by his father’s clean idealism. Perhaps it was this very breaking point that he had been seeking when he fled away into Christ. He prayed ceaselessly and hoped to find some blinded understanding in his prayer as he brought it with him into scenes where he knew himself to be powerless, detested, or even (worst of all) a figure of fun! Yet in the midst of it there were families, especially Irish families, who took him absolutely for granted. ‘Ah, here’s Father come. Sit down now, Father, will you have some tea?’
In the course of those adventures he made only one friend, a local secular priest called Father Milsom, an old man who had lived for many years in the east end, and who regarded Cato as an innocent child. Cato was glad of this new paternity, and soon told Father Milsom all about his own father and the quarrel and his hopes in Christ that it would end one day. Father Milsom was not very optimistic, but even his realism was to Cato like a kind of hope. Sometimes in the late evenings he met Brendan and told his ‘day’. Brendan had worked in the slums of Manchester and Cato found it impossible to astonish him. He talked to his friend and confessor about his discoveries and his fears. ‘All the same, one has such great power in the confessional’. ‘You have no power.’ ‘Confession becomes a kind of collusion.’ ‘Of course it does. Just try to leave one little unassimilable grain of truth behind.’ ‘They confess, and carry on, in fact they confess to carry on!’ ‘Who can say what draws them to confession. God’s grace is everywhere.’ ‘Christ is with these people, he is in these people, in the most violent, most criminal ones, but sometimes it’s impossible to see Him there.’ ‘Just see Him, look at Him. He will give you the light.’ ‘You said I’d be shocked. The misery doesn’t shock, it’s the vice that shocks. I thought I’d seen it all already in myself, but I hadn’t. And do you know—Father Bell used to say that wickedness was dull, but it isn’t, it’s rather exciting.’ ‘It seems exciting. The place where one can see it as it is is above our level.’