Antiochus was, at that time, the leading representative in that region of what we would have to call Western civilization: of Homer and Hesiod; of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; of Herodotus and Thucydides; of Pericles and Alexander. The Phoenicians who learned Greek, shaved their beards, and exercised naked in the gymnasium were not far removed from modern business-suited Japanese salarymen who drink scotch and play golf for relaxation. They were hellenized, as so much of the world today is Westernized.
And what of the Jews?
Throughout the Hellenistic age, the Jews and the Greeks didn’t understand each other. Neither side tried very hard, either. Alexander went out of his way to talk to the philosophers of India. He never visited Jerusalem, which to him had to seem a backwoods hill fortress of no particular importance.
By Antiochus’ time, there was a faction of the Jews living in Palestine that favored assimilation to the Greek way of life, and another faction that resisted. The crisis was precipitated when Antiochus, seeking to unify his own kingdom, tried to institute a single religion within his borders. Most of the kingdom conformed.
In Palestine, he forbade circumcision (which the Greeks thought a repugnant mutilation, viewing it much as the modern West views what is called female circumcision), sacrifices, and the observance of the sabbath, and he installed a statue of Baal in the Temple in Jerusalem. Perhaps this was Baal-Shamen, a Syrian god; perhaps it was Zeus Olympios, with whom Antiochus was closely identified. (Antiochus styled himself Theos Epiphanes—the god made manifest—another vivid illustration of the mental gap between the Greeks, for whom the boundary between the human and the divine was shifting, evanescent, uncertain, and the Jews, for whom it was anything but.)
The Hellenizers in Jerusalem reverenced this image. But rebellion followed, headed by Mattathias and his sons, who fled to the hills and began a guerrilla war. Their first encounter with Antiochus’ soldiers was on the sabbath. They let themselves be killed rather than break God’s law and defend themselves. After that disaster, Mattathias ordered that they fight, no matter what day it happened to be.
But I want to look at that first massacre. Yes, Antiochus’ Greeks won themselves an easy victory. Still, what must they have thought as they slaughtered men who would not resist, who placed obedience to what they saw as God’s law above saving their own lives? I have no doubt many of the soldiers laughed as they wielded spear and sword.
But were some of them troubled at the terrible, unyielding purpose those Jews displayed, clinging to their beliefs to death and beyond? Could that spectacle have been as dismaying to them as the spectacle of the fighters in Kunduz who would sooner kill themselves and their comrades than surrender? They grasped the minds of their foes no more than we grasp the minds of ours.
Later in the fight between Jews and Greeks, Judah Maccabee faced an army of Antiochus’ under the command of a certain Seron at a place called Beth-horon. Judah’s men asked how they could hope to beat the Greeks, who badly outnumbered them. He answered, “It is easy for many to be put in trouble at the hands of a few, and there is no difference in the sight of Heaven between saving the many and the few. Victory in battle lies not in the size of a host, but comes from the strength of Heaven. Those in the host come against us with insolence and lawlessness, to kill us and our wives and children and to plunder us. We fight for our souls and our laws, and He will shatter them before our eyes. Do not fear them.” They fought—and they won.
Set in the mouth of a hero twenty-one centuries dead, this sounds noble and inspiring. Set it in a modern man’s mouth … and one has to wonder who in today’s world would be likely to say such a thing.
The truth—and it’s a truth the victory of the Maccabees obscures for us—is that my own ancestors in Palestine were as much the Other to the dominant culture of the day, a culture in so many ways ancestral to my own, as the terrorists and suicide bombers of the Muslim world are to inhabitants of today’s West. The Greeks in the Hellenistic age were largely blind to Jewish culture and to Jewish literature, which was written in a language they did not know, in an alphabet they could not read, and which ran the wrong way on the page. Can we doubt that most of us in the West are similarly blind to Islam today?
To the Greeks, the Jews’ fundamental flaw was their stubborn adherence to their own customs, their refusal to be assimilated into the broader currents of the Hellenistic world, and their even more obstinate devotion to what they believed God expected of them. The Greeks perceived this as fear and hatred of foreigners. True, it was not absolute. By the time of the Jewish revolt from which the story of Chanukah comes, the Old Testament had been translated into Greek for Jews no longer familiar with Hebrew and Aramaic, and there was, as we have seen, a hellenizing party even in Jerusalem. But what happened to the hellenizers after Judah Maccabee’s victory? Should we look to the fate of Westernized intellectuals in Teheran after the Ayatollah supplanted the Shah? I would not be surprised.
Absolute or not, however, the rejection of most of Hellenistic culture by most of the Jews was their chief characteristic in Greek eyes. Judaizing elements did not—could not—enter the wider culture of the ancient world until several centuries after the Maccabees defeated Antiochus. Christianity, Judaism’s hardy offshoot, flourished and triumphed not least because it proved more receptive to Hellenistic ways of thought than did its parent religion, and made Jewish modes of thought and belief more palatable to what we might call the mass audience of the Roman Empire.
We view the past through the lens of the present. We can’t help that; it’s the only lens we have. Twenty years ago, the Cold War seemed eternal. Now we know better. Now we have new—and different—problems. But knowledge of the past can also broaden our perspective of the present. I am not always comfortable remembering that Mattathias and Judah Maccabee and their followers were religious zealots along with being freedom fighters, and that Antiochus, like them, was also doing what he thought right and proper. But these truths, no matter how unpalatable, remind me that life, then and now, is not so simple as it seems in stories, and that no man is a villain in his own eyes. And that, it seems to me, is something worth remembering.
UNDER ST. PETER’S
I mostly don’t do secret histories, the kind of stories where, though everything works out the way we all remember, the forces creating the working are altogether different from and stranger than the ones we think we understand. I usually prefer to leave the forces and to change the result they produce—another way of saying I write a lot of alternate history. But usually isn’t always, and, just as someone who mostly drinks scotch will take a knock of bourbon every once in a while, I did try my hand at one secret history. Here it is. Go ahead, prove me wrong—I dare you.
Incense in the air, even down here behind the doors. Frankincense and myrrh, the scents he remembered from days gone by, days when he could face the sun. Somber Latin chants. He recognized them even now, though the chanters didn’t pronounce Latin the way the legionaries had back in those bright days.
And the hunger. Always the hunger.
Would he finally feed? It had been a long time, such a very long time. He could hardly remember the last time he’d had to wait so long.
He wouldn’t die of starvation. He couldn’t die of starvation. His laughter sent wild echoes chasing one another in his chamber. No, he couldn’t very well die, not when he was already dead. But he could wish himself extinguished. He could, and he did, every waking moment—and every moment, from now to forever or the sun’s next kiss, was a waking moment.
Much good wishing did him.
He waited, and he remembered. What else did he have to do? Nothing. They made sure of it. His memory since his death and resurrection was perfect. He could bring back any day, any instant, with absolute clarity, absolute accuracy.
Much good that did him, too.
He preferred recalling the days before, the days when
he was only a man. (Was he ever only a man? He knew how many would say no. Maybe they were right, but he remembered himself as man and man alone. But his memories of those days blurred and shifted—as a man’s would—so he might have been wrong. Maybe he was something else, something different, right from the start.)
He’d packed a lot into thirty-odd years. Refugee, carpenter, reformer, rebel … convict. He could still hear the thud of the hammer that drove in the spikes. He could still hear his own screams as those spikes pierced him. He’d never thought, down deep in his heart, that it would come to that—which only just went to show how much he knew.
He’d never thought, down deep in his heart, that it would come to this, either. Which, again, just went to show how much he knew.
If he were everything people said he was, would he have let it come to this? He could examine that portion of his—not of his life, no, but of his existence, with the perfect recall so very distant from mortality. He could examine it, and he had, time and again. Try as he would, he couldn’t see anything he might have done differently.
And even if he did see something like that, it was much too late to matter now.
“Habemus papam!”
When you heard the Latin acclamation, when you knew it was for you … Was there any feeling to match that, any in all the world? People said a new Orthodox Patriarch once fell over dead with joy at learning he was chosen. That had never happened on this trunk of the tree that split in 1054, but seeing how it might wasn’t hard. A lifetime of hopes, of dreams, of work, of prayer, of patience … and then, at last, you had to try to fill the Fisherman’s sandals.
They will remember me forever, was the first thought that went through his mind. For a man who, by the nature of his office, had better not have children, it was the only kind of immortality he would ever get. A cardinal could run things behind the scenes for years, could be the greatest power in the oldest continually functioning institution in the world—and, five minutes after he was dead, even the scholars in the Curia would have trouble coming up with his name.
But once you heard “Habemus papam!” …
He would have to deal with Italians for the rest of his life. He would have to smell garlic for the rest of his life. Part of him had wanted to retire when his friend, his patron, passed at last: to go back north of the Alps, to rusticate.
That was only part of him, though. The rest … He had been running things behind the scenes for years. Getting his chance to come out and do it in the open, to be noted for it, to be noticed for it, was sweet. And his fellow cardinals hadn’t waited long before they chose him, either. What greater honor was there than the approval of your own? More than anyone else, they understood what this meant. Some of them wanted it, too. Most of them wanted it, no doubt, but most of the ones who did also understood they had no chance of gaining it.
Coming out of the shadows, becoming the public face of the Church, wasn’t easy for a man who’d spent so long in the background. But he’d shown what he could do when he was chosen to eulogize his predecessor. He wrote the farewell in his own tongue, then translated it into Italian. That wasn’t the churchly lingua franca Latin had been, but still, no one who wasn’t fluent in it could reasonably hope to occupy Peter’s seat.
If he spoke slowly, if he showed Italian wasn’t his native tongue—well, so what? It gave translators around the world the chance to stay up with him. And delivering the eulogy meant people around the world saw him and learned who he was. When the College of Cardinals convened to deliberate, that had to be in the back of some minds.
He wouldn’t have a reign to match the one that had gone before, not unless he lived well past the century mark. But Achilles said glory mattered more than length of days. And John XXIII showed you didn’t need a long reign to make your mark.
Vatican II cleared away centuries of deadwood from the Church. Even the Latin of the Mass went. Well, there was reason behind that. Who spoke Latin nowadays? This wasn’t the Roman Empire any more, even if cardinals’ vestments came straight out of Byzantine court regalia.
But change always spawned a cry for more change. Female priests? Married priests? Homosexuality? Contraception? Abortion? When? Ever? The world shouted for all those things. The world, though, was a weather vane, turning now this way, now that, changeable as the breeze. The Church was supposed to stand for what was right … whatever that turned out to be.
If changes come, they’ll come because of me. If they don’t, that will also be because of me, the new Holy Father thought. Which way more than a billion people go depends on me.
Why anyone would want a job like this made him scratch his head. That he wanted it himself, or that most of him did … was true, no matter how strange it seemed. So much to decide, to do. So little time.
A tavern in the late afternoon. They were all worried. Even the publican was worried; he hadn’t looked for such a big crowd so late in the day. They were all eating and drinking and talking. They showed no signs of getting up and leaving. If they kept hanging around, he would have to light the lamps, and olive oil wasn’t cheap.
But they kept digging their right hands into the bowl of chickpeas and mashed garlic he’d set out, and eating more bread, and calling for wine. One of them had already drunk himself into quite a state.
Looking back from down here, understanding why was easy. Hindsight was always easy. Foresight? They’d called it prophecy in those days. Had he had the gift? His human memory wasn’t sure. But then, his human memory wasn’t sure about a lot of things. That was what made trying to trace the different threads twisting through the fabric so eternally fascinating.
He wished he hadn’t used that word, even to himself. He kept hoping it wasn’t so. He’d been down here a long, long, long time, but not forever. He wouldn’t stay down here forever, either. He couldn’t.
Could he?
He was so hungry.
The tavern. He’d been looking back at the tavern again. He wasn’t hungry then. He’d eaten his fill, and he’d drunk plenty of wine, wine red as blood.
What did wine taste like? He remembered it was sweet, and he remembered it could mount to your head … almost the way any food did these days. But the taste? The taste, now, was a memory of a memory of a memory—and thus so blurred, it was no memory at all. He’d lost the taste of wine, just as he’d lost the tastes of bread and chickpeas. Garlic, though, garlic he still knew.
He remembered the sensation of chewing, of reducing the resistive mass in his mouth—whatever it tasted like—to something that easily went down the throat. He almost smiled, there in the darkness. He hadn’t needed to worry about that in a while.
Where was he? So easy to let your thoughts wander down here. What else did they have to do? Oh, yes. The tavern. The wine. The feel of the cup in his hands. The smell of the stuff wafting upwards, nearly as intoxicating as … But if his thoughts wandered there, they wouldn’t come back. He was so hungry.
The tavern, then. The wine. The cup. The last cup. He remembered saying, “And I tell you, I won’t drink from the fruit of the vine any more till that day when I drink it anew with you in my father’s kingdom.”
They’d nodded. He wasn’t sure how much attention they paid, or whether they even took him seriously. How long could anybody go without drinking wine? What would you use instead? Water? Milk? You were asking for a flux of the bowels if you did.
But he’d kept that promise. He’d kept it longer than he dreamt he would, longer than he dreamt he could. He was still keeping it now, after all these years.
Soon, though, soon, he would have something else to drink.
If you paid attention to the television, you would think he was the first Pope ever installed. His predecessor had had a long reign, so long that none of the reporters remembered the last succession. For them, it was as if nothing that came before this moment really happened. One innocent—an American, of cou
rse—even remarked, “The new Pope is named after a previous one.”
He was not a mirthful man, but he had to laugh at that. What did the fool think the Roman numeral after his name stood for? He wasn’t named after just one previous Pope. He was named after fifteen!
One of these days, he would have to try to figure out what to do about the United Sates. So many people there thought they could stay good Catholics while turning their backs on any teachings they didn’t happen to like. If they did that, how were they any different from Protestants? How could he tell them they couldn’t do that without turning them into Protestants? Well, he didn’t have to decide right away, Deo gratias.
So much had happened, this first day of his new reign. If this wasn’t enough to overwhelm a man, nothing ever would be. Pretty soon, he thought, he would get around to actually being Pope. Pretty soon, yes, but not quite yet.
As if to prove as much, a tubby little Italian—not even a priest but a deacon—came up to him and waited to be noticed. The new Pope had seen the fellow around for as long as he could remember. Actually, he didn’t really remember seeing him around—the deacon was about as nondescript as any man ever born. But the odor of strong, garlicky sausages always clung to him.
When it became obvious the man wouldn’t go away, the Pope sighed a small, discreet sigh. “What is it, Giuseppe?”
“Please to excuse me, Holy Father, but there’s one more thing each new Keeper of the Keys has to do,” the deacon said.
“Ah?” Now the Pope made a small, interested noise. “I thought I knew all the rituals.” He was, in fact, sure he knew all the rituals—or he had been sure, till this moment.
We Install Page 29
