The Golden Fleece

by Muriel Spark

What puts people off Christianity, he says, has nothing to do with historical or theological difficulties. It is a fear that their possible levels of attainment may be diminished if they follow the Gospel teaching. Even among Christians, he says, nine out of ten feel that man’s work is always at the level of a ‘spiritual encumbrance’, worldly success makes them feel guilty. And this is a false idea of Christianity.

  We live in a divine milieu or context. God is everywhere and fills all things whether we know it or not; but it is better to know it so that we can act with confidence and detachment. Man must give himself to God but he must first exist, that is develop and fulfil himself; he must possess the world before he can transfigure it by his detachment. There should be no tension in the Christian between God and the world; the two are inseparable. ‘The man with a passionate sense of the divine milieu cannot bear to find things about him obscure, tepid and empty which should be full and vibrant with God.’ Lacking this sense, we have lost our sense of the Second Coming. The Christian affirms it, but ‘in reality we should have to admit, if we were sincere, that we no longer expect anything. The flame must be revived at all costs.’

  This will probably be opposed by theologians, not for what it says but for what it omits. An Anglican bishop, reviewing the book, has already asked, ‘What about Original Sin?’ My own first reading gave rise to the speculation that some of the worst tyrants and arch-criminals of history have done their deeds in the belief that they were acting in a ‘divine context’. But, says Father Teilhard, your intentions must be pure. Yes, we know, all their intentions were pure. A dualistic conception of God and the World (of which the Devil is the Prince) at least ensures that we are never quite certain which side our actions fall on; this way of looking at things is a normal safeguard that we are born with, it somewhat deters the strong from oppressing the weak, and is a natural defect of vision which has perhaps assisted our survival as much as our having eyes only in the front of our heads. Too much range and unity of vision in an imperfect world, and only the Supermen would be left standing.

  Which objections, of course, are altogether irrelevant to Le Milieu Divin. It is not a moral treatise, nor a theological one. It is a meditation on the psychological development of the Christian. The first parts of the book, which reaffirm the more neglected Christian doctrines, predominantly that of Immanence, are comparatively simple in that they refer to man as he is at present, and only in relation to what he is destined to be. Part III, which deals with the Divine Milieu and its attributes, describes a more ideal state of being, an advanced spiritual condition. To me, the difficulties here are not rational ones, it is all clearly reasoned; they are imaginative difficulties. My mind understands, indeed believes, the proposition: ‘The only subject ultimately capable of mystical transfiguration is the whole group of mankind forming a single body and a single soul in charity’, but my imagination pictures a revolting great monster. The author insists that personal individuality is retained in a state of completion within this mystical union. It is difficult to imagine. These last pages are for readers more conceptually advanced and less pictorially beset.

  Father Teilhard has not, in fact, overlooked the problem of evil, nor the possible objections to his book on this charge. But he is interested in the psychological development of the soul, he speaks of ‘growth’ and ‘diminishment’ instead of good and evil. ‘Passivities of growth and diminishment’ are the universal forces outside our control and knowledge which make for our fulfilment or failure. Sin ‘only interests us here in so far as it is a weakening, a deviation caused by our personal faults’; it comes under the same heading as suffering. In diminishment as well as growth, God is to be found.

  One is left with the impression that this is an intensely personal book. More than it is, as he claims, addressed to waverers it is the history of the soul of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, scientist and Jesuit, gifted with a foretaste of eternity and a vast curiosity about the universe.

  [1960]

  Kierkegaard

  Few scholars have done better service to Kierkegaard than Dr T.H. Croxall, who is one of the minority of writers on the subject with a knowledge of both the Danish language and the philosophical environment to which Kierkegaard’s Christianity was a corrective. In Meditations from Kierkegaard Dr Croxall assembles from his vast writings a number of meditations on the Scriptures and Scriptural personalities. Most of this material is translated by Dr Croxall into English for the first time. As was Kierkegaard’s way, partly his intention, these meditations provoke resistance, reservations, qualifications, as well as assent or mere admiration; the main thing is that they do not leave the reader indifferent unless he is indifferent to religion. It is to establish Kierkegaard’s religious, and especially Christian, thought as the central factor in his life and writings that Dr Croxall presents his admirable Kierkegaard Commentary, covering the whole of Kierkegaard’s work. It is questionable whether Kierkegaard in his entirety – i.e., the sum total of his ‘message’ – is as relevant to the present day as are certain isolated but luminous fragments. Nevertheless, this is a serviceable summary and exegesis for students of Kierkegaard and of Christian existential philosophy.

  [1956]

  Karl Heim: Two Important Works

  There has been a remarkably wide area of response to the recently translated works of the Lutheran theologian, Professor Heim; the intellectual interior of these islands is rarely penetrated by continental thought within the space of months, and that this has happened in the case of Dr Heim is a testimony to the success of his intentions. Perceiving that most of the modern evangelistic literature which addresses the unbelieving public does not reach any but the believing public, on however popular, distinguished or learned a level it is pitched, Dr Heim starts from the recognition that all such discussion ‘is not a dialogue between the Church and the World. It is never more than a monologue of the Church within itself.’ The word ‘Church’ in this connection is used in a sense which includes ‘all those who are still within the field of force of any sort of belief’. (One senses behind his mature benign style, Dr Heim’s tactful reluctance to use the suggestively pharisaical phrase ‘Church and World’ at all.)

  To reach the unbelieving world, Dr Heim suggests, it is no use theologians proclaiming the Sacraments, the Episcopacy, the Bible, ritual, morals and so on, as the centre of the Faith. God is the point at issue. Furthermore, he observes that the question of God’s existence no longer oppresses the majority of intelligent agnostics; the nineteenth-century atheist was a profoundly troubled man, he was essentially religious, and was infinitely vexed by a sense of God’s absence from the universal scheme. The modern agnostic has acquired an empirical view of the world, takes life as he finds it, and is content to observe the phenomena of life without the need of positing even so remote a concept as a First Cause. Dr Heim, supporting his assertion with examples from modern writings, and facing the situation without deprecation or moralising, traces its source in a scientific world-view. The top levels of scientific thought have perforce relinquished the Cause principle, and are devoted entirely to Effect.

  True missionary fashion, Dr Heim deals with this problem by himself entering the ‘scientific’ world – the world, that is, which embraces the sciences, literature, and every kind of human creativity within the folds of that empirical attitude to life, that happy indifference to the supernatural (though with the unhappy tendencies of modern neuroses) which he sees stemming from the justifiable methods of physical science. It is the purpose of the present books, as well as further promised works in the series, to expound the Faith to this entire area, in its own terms. Learned in natural science and in modern agnostic literature, in the psychological writings and the philosophies which inform our age, Dr Heim possesses the rare twin merits of a far-ranging vision and a grasp of his single appointed task of introducing God into the scheme of things before him. Many writers in recent years have attempted to tie up this or that scientific discovery or philosophy with this o
r that doctrine. St Thomas Aquinas may have anticipated Jung, St Augustine may have been ahead of Bergson; but this is no compelling idea to the modern unbeliever. Dr Heim, surveying the landscape of the ‘scientific world view’, demonstrates that science has now reached a point at which it is necessary, for practical purposes, to presuppose a perpetually unknowable factor; before it can pursue its aim of discovering the unknown, physical science needs must acknowledge a factor which it is incapable of knowing. This is supported by abundant quotation from authoritative scientific sources, and Dr Heim, in St Paul’s fashion, locates the unknown God in the vacant ‘unknowable’ of the scientific world.

  For the reader who is neither scientist nor theologian, Dr Heim is not easy reading, but that is only to say he makes slow reading. The language, where it is technical, is not beyond the lay reader, for its framework is essentially humane. Drawing upon a vast field of scholarship and creative literature, the books constitute what our forbears were wont to call ‘an education in themselves’.

  [1954]

  Letter from Rome: The Elder Statesmen

  ‘It was an historic occasion,’ said Mrs Golda Meir, and this, too, was the definition given to the encounter by Pope Paul VI when he received her in audience on 15th January 1973. It was a moment of history surrounded with historic misunderstandings, informed by a rather atavistic echo of ancestral voices and unaccountably not what it was intended to be. ‘It was an application of Murphy’s Law,’ said one Vatican dignitary in a resigned voice. What was Murphy’s Law? ‘Murphy’s Law,’ said the dignitary, ‘is that everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong.’ The main reason for the meeting between the Pope and the Prime Minister of Israel, was of course to take a step towards peace in the Middle East. But no sooner had Mrs Meir driven away from the Vatican than a different kind of question took over: what is the Church’s present attitude to the Jews?

  The Pope was seventy-five, some months older than Golda Meir. He was born into a pious Catholic professional family in a provincial town north of Milan. She was born in Kiev at the south-west of Tsarist Russia into a family of poor Jews and was taken on an immigrant ship to the United States. At the age of twenty-three Golda Meir, already an active Zionist, went to Palestine. At the same age young Montini in Italy was ordained priest. The confrontation at the Vatican was between two tenacious characters, each thoroughly formed by a long lifetime’s dedication to causes and cultures vastly different and yet somehow akin: basically, both the Vatican State and the State of Israel owe their conception and territorial existence to the doctrine that God says so. It is always an unarguable claim: you have to take it or leave it.

  In Rome, the announcement late on 14th January that Golda Meir was to visit the Pope the next day was not treated with much comment or any special surprise. Every celebrity who makes a progress through Europe, from Yugoslavian pop singers to the daughters of United States Presidents, stops off to see the Pope. Nobody expected the material for a Verdi opera that in fact came out of it.

  What happened was only to be pieced together two weeks later after the Vatican spokesmen, pestered tenderly day by day by the press and other nosey-parkers, finally came round to admitting all the points of the Israeli version. ‘You see,’ remarked the Israeli Ambassador to Italy, ‘our form of Machiavellianism is to speak the truth.’

  The Italians took exceptional security precautions for Golda Meir’s visit to Rome from 14th to 16th January. It was only a few weeks after the terrorist attempt on the Israeli Embassy at Bangkok. Her plan to visit the Pope on the 15th had evidently not been made known to any of the Arab states who have diplomatic relations with the Vatican and it was not until late on Sunday, 14th, that the Arabs heard of it. Israel, who has no diplomatic ground in the Vatican, had prepared the visit through its Ambassador to Italy, Amiel Najar. The Vatican had left the Israelis free to announce the forthcoming meeting at their own time. For security reasons the Israelis chose to hold over the announcement until the preceding day.

  Informal talks between Israel and Vatican representatives have been going on since 1967. Abba Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister, was received by the Pope in 1969. A former Governor of Jerusalem, Dr Chaim Herzog, had an audience with the Pope in 1971. The Israeli Ambassador to Italy was present on both occasions. The idea of arranging a meeting between Mrs Meir and the Pope at some opportune moment had often been discussed and was well prepared for. When Golda Meir’s visit to Paris in January of 1973 was known, the Ambassador ascertained that a request for an audience would receive a positive reply. (This is the rule of protocol: one always formally applies for an audience with the Pope, although, says the Vatican, a certain amount of diplomatic ‘ascertaining’ and ‘indicating’ on one or the other side usually precedes a papal audience with a head of government.) Anyway, as Golda Meir pointed out later, there’s no shame involved in asking the Pope to receive the Prime Minister of Israel any more than there’s a loss of honour in asking to meet President Nixon or any other political personality.

  As it happened, the Ambassador took the opportunity of asking, first Mrs Meir if she was agreeable to the meeting, then his friends in the Vatican. He was told by telephone on 10th January that the Pope would be agreeable. Then the day and the hour were arranged. A statement intended for release after the audience by the Vatican Press Office was negotiated first in draft then finally agreed between Najar for the Israeli government and the appropriate Vatican office.

  On 12th January an official invitation to Mrs Golda Meir arrived at the Israeli Embassy, from the Prefecture of the Vatican. So far, every step of the ceremonial dance, in perfect order.

  This agreed statement, later headed Bulletin No. 12, reads as follows (translated from the Italian):

  A communiqué on Mrs Golda Meir’s visit

  This morning, 15th January 1973, at 12.15, His Holiness, Pope Paul VI received in audience Her Excellency, Mrs Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, who was accompanied by the Israeli Ambassador to Italy, His Excellency, Mr Amiel E. Najar.

  The themes of the talk, which lasted about an hour, were the Middle East situation and the particular problems concerning the Holy Land.

  His Holiness, after recalling the history and the sufferings of the Jewish people, put forward the Holy See’s point of view on matters which primarily have close connections with its humanitarian mission, such as the problem of the refugees and the situation of the various communities living in the Holy Land, and those matters concerning more specifically its religious mission, so far as that concerns the Holy Places and the sacred and universal character of the city of Jerusalem.

  The Prime Minister emphasized Israel’s will for peace and amply explained the Israeli position on the possibility of reaching a peaceful solution of the Middle East conflict through negotiations between the parties concerned; and on the above-mentioned topics she touched not only on the phenomenon of terrorism but also on particular situations concerning Jewish communities in certain parts of the world.

  His Holiness ended by expressing his fervent wishes that justice and right should establish peace and coexistence amongst all the peoples of the Middle East, and he once again expressed the Holy See’s intention to do everything it possibly could to achieve this end.

  Mrs Meir arrived for the audience at 12.15 p.m. Full preparation had been made; the courtyards were clear; the guards of honour lined the way.

  Mrs Meir left the Vatican at 1.30. The Pope had presented her with a silver dove, suitably inscribed. As she drove away under heavy escort the reporters rushed to the press room for the hand-out.

  Here, the Vatican Press Officer, Federico Alessandrini, a lay man, read a statement which was then handed out to the world press. It goes as follows (translated from the Italian):

  Verbal Statement by the Director of the Press Office on the Audience of Mrs Golda Meir

  Concerning the visit of Mrs Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, to the Holy Father, I want to point out that it is not an exclusive or preferential
gesture. In fact Paul VI has received King Hussein of Jordan and other high officials of the world and of the Arab countries; and the Holy See, as is known, has cordial relations with Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, in the same way that it has diplomatic relations with various other Arab countries, such as Tunisia, Algeria, Kuwait and Iraq.

  The audience was requested by Mrs Golda Meir, taking advantage of her trip to Paris, and it was not the object of prior agreements or ‘programizations’ [previous talks or ‘programmes’].

  This audience neither signifies nor implies the least change – and in fact there has been no change, nor, moreover, are there any grounds for one – in the attitude of the Holy See concerning the problems of the Holy Land; an attitude that was confirmed by His Holiness in his address to the Cardinals on 22nd December, 1972 [an unprovocative and not widely publicised plea for the rights of Palestinians in the Middle East to be realised in harmony with the rights of other peoples there]. Even with regard to Israel this attitude is unchanged.

  The Pope granted Mrs Golda Meir’s request because he believes it to be his duty not to miss any opportunity to act in favour of peace, in defence of the rights of the human individual and of communities, in defence of the religious interests of all and especially in aid of the weakest and most defenceless, primarily the Palestinian refugees. As for the defence and protection of religious interests, one need not mention that in this specific case it is a question of the native and inalienable rights of the three monotheistic religions, connected with the universal and pluralistic character special to Jerusalem.

  The previously negotiated bulletin was later put out in Italian, only over Radio Vatican and in the Osservatore Romano.