Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  "And yet you bring it to me?"

  "You're different. You have nobody to blab to. Or rather it will not be worth your while to blab." He seemed to have taken a fancy to the word. "Blabbing about religion is not in your province. What is there to drink?"

  He knew what there was to drink, for the bottles were all set out on the little bar, but few of the labels meant much to him. Southern Comfort, Old Grandad, Malone's Sour Mash. I had taken to native American beverages. There was now, of course, no Prohibition: all those deaths in vain, including Raffaele's. He found a bottle of Old Mortality, a rare scotch, and poured himself a slug. "Ice in the icebox," I said, pleonastically. He took his Old Mortality straight. "This is not," I said, flicking the typescript through, "really my cup of tea, is it?"

  He had forgotten, or had perhaps never known, the idiom. He stared at me an instant as though perhaps I had become suffused with Alice in Wonderland through working on a film treatment of it. Then he saw. "It has to be published," he said. "It has to be a lay publication, anonymous or pseudonymous. No question of a nihil obstat or imprimatur. Perhaps you could publish it under your own name. The name doesn't matter. You have a known name and your publisher will publish it. You can keep the money or give it to the poor. The important thing is to sow the ideas. You could even make a kind of novel out of it, people sitting round a table in a garden discussing religion. I don't mind what you do with it so long as the ideas are sown. Sitting round a table, drinking a cup of tea," he added, "which will make it more of your cup of tea."

  I put the kettle on. It was getting on for five o'clock. "Gallons and gallons of tea," I said, flipping through the opus: there must, I reckoned, be about a hundred and fifty thousand words here. It was, contrary to professional convention, singlespaced. It was fastened together, rather like a film script, in blue covers with no spine, three paper fasteners of a length I had never before seen, forked golden stilettos, perhaps a Holy See speciality, brochetting the margins. I spooned Orange Pekoe into the warmed pot. "The Bishop of Bombay quondam Gibraltar would be in on this."

  "He became somewhat unreliable. I speak confidentially. He grew obsessed with the interpretation of the Athanasian Creed, an aspect of his Anglicanism. But some of his terminology is there. Dr. MacKendrick, a Calvinist who, now I come to remember, liked to drink his tea very black and with no sugar or lemon, was helpful with the structuring of the work. Like an engineer almost. Many people collaborated. None of them will blab. In the present state of affairs they dare not. They would be in trouble with their own sectarian leaders. With, so to say, their Duci." His eyes softened as in the nostalgia of battle.

  "Under my name?"

  "It will do your reputation no harm. It will gain you a new reputation for seriousness. This evening you can start reading. I shall spend the evening quietly with Domenico and Hortense and my, our, dear nephew and niece. They grow big, though no longer in the same proportions because of sex. There's a radio program I like to listen to about two black men called Amos and Andy. They are not really black but they put on a black maquillage even for this radio program. That is a kind of seriousness."

  "Have you already been round there?" I meant 151 South Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills, where Domenico and Hortense and the twins lived. "Because tonight there's this party on in Bel Air, we're all going, perhaps you might like to--" Tea was ready. I poured for myself. Carlo frowned to show he preferred scotch.

  "They were not at home. The children at riding lessons and the parents working." Hortense had gotten the job of providing a bust in multiplicate, or rather in progressive phases of completion, for the new Marlene Dietrich film, which was about a sculptor falling in love with his model. "There was only this black servant of theirs who is a Baptist. I dropped my grip there. Grip because you grip it, a good word. A party? What kind of party? Film stars?" He had seen Hollywood films about Hollywood parties: that incest had started early; was narcissism a kind of incest?

  "Oh yes, lots of film stars. It's the birthday of Daisy Apfelbaum, whom you'll know better as Astrid Storm."

  "Ah." He tongued moist lips. "She was in Ocean Bear."

  "She loves religion of all kinds. You can talk to her about religion." I sipped tea and sighed. As for that thing thereE"As for this thing here," I said, "you know you're asking the impossible."

  "Pooh," shooing at me, "I have never known the impossible to be much trouble. You start off with the impossible, and that is a blank sheet on which the possible may be written. When people talk of things being easy or even difficult, it's then you have trouble. This is so impossible that you'll do it."

  "Under my own name?" I said again.

  "Any name. No name. It is the thing itself that counts." Like my biblical buggery piece. "But when there is no name readers will start guessing. My own Duce in Washington may start guessing that it is myself. A pseudonym, like of this film star we're seeing tonight? I never knew that, by the way. That might start guessing too. Your own name is perhaps best, and you can prefix a preface saying that in the present state of the world you've been forced to give much thought to these questions and here humbly as a layman you proffer the tentative results of your thinking. Something like that. The True Reformation by Kenneth M. Toomey. I can see it," he said, seeing it, another one harmlessly corrupted by America, "on the bestseller lists. A burning cross perhaps on the cover."

  "Like the Ku Klux Klan? No, let's have a pretty frowning woman in decolletage, perhaps Daisy Apfelbaum would do it, and for a title something like Give Me God. Or God Help Us."

  "Now you're going too far. Now I think you're joking. But I can see you are ready to think about it. What time is this birthday party?"

  "Any time after eight."

  "I go as I am? I brought no other clothes." I surveyed Carlo, who had gone to the bar for more neat Old Mortality. He was in, so far as I could judge, the same clerical suit he had worn at the time of his brother's death. It bagged, it was stained, it was terrible, a triumph of the deformation squad of the wardrobe department. It fitted his ugliness, which would be specially appreciated here in Hollywood and environs. This was cinematically C, othic, a skilled work of special makeup men long in the business.

  "You look fine," I said.

  He nodded, sat heavily, swallowed whisky raw with no grimace, then looked troubled. He said, "Mother."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Have you received word from our mother?" The our was certainly meant to include myself.

  "A couple of postcards," I said. "One from Salzburg. One from Chiasso to show she was back there from Paris. She increasingly regards my Paris apartment as her home, but she seems to feel guilty at finding Paris so enjoyable. Chiasso is her penance."

  "She has the money," Carlo said with satisfied gloom. "There is Cartier. There is Maxim. The fleshpots of Egypt. She visits Luigia from Chiasso. A short train journey only. Luigia writes to me in her sharp way, she will be in charge of that convent soon, you will see, that Mother is losing her faith."

  "Ah."

  "She has this idea that the fascists are really Catholic. She has read that this Hitler is an Austrian Catholic persecuting the Lutherans as well as the Jews. She says that Christianity is a kind of Jewish heresy. She has become friendly with her bank manager in Chiasso, and he is a Jew. She is reading the Old Testament."

  "Is that wrong?"

  "She says the reality of the relationship between God and man is to be found in the Old Testament. And that the New Testament is very dull reading. Of course, the Scriptures should never be entrusted to the laity. That's how all the trouble began, letting untrained minds feed on the Bible."

  "Your mother has a very good mind. I shouldn't worry about her."

  "I pray. I pray for you too." He drank off his Old Mortality. "I pray for the whole damned world. Can I lie down somewhere?"

  "Do you pray lying down?"

  "I pray in all positions. God has no interest in our physical postures. Now I want to sleep for an hour. Where?"

&n
bsp; "There." And I pointed to the second bedroom. He lumbered toward it. He closed the door. I heard his bulk meet the bed. Then his snores began like a shofar.

  I had for at least two months been working, with the unnecessary assistance of a young screenwriter named Al Greenfield, on the scenario of Singapore! I had reached a phase of onomastic deadlock with the producer and the head of the studio. They wanted me to change the name of the founder of Singapore. This was because there was another Raffles, far better known, a gentleman crook, and a film on this Raffles was being prepared by a rival studio. Why not Sir Thomas Stamford? But good God man, I said, you can't falsify history like that. It would be like, say, changing the name of Jefferson or Ben Franklin because a Franklin or Jefferson was in the news as a kidnapper or fornicator. It's not false what you said, Ken, it's the same guy but you just cut the ass end off of his name. But good God man. I would not yield. Riffles would be okay, it sounds like a kinda limey way of saying it anyways, said a brutal man with a cigar frayed at the mouth end. Refile Roffle Riffold. Riffold Schmiffold, nothing doing. Raffles or nothing. The project had to be shelved for a while, no matter really, since Loretta Young was not yet available to play Lady Raffles, Riffles what the hell. I could foresee that the thing was going to be taken out of my hands, me get no screen credit, but what the hell, this was not my trade, I could buy and sell any one of the bastards. I was put on to King Arthur and his Knights. My employers were vague about the subject but knew it was a swell one for a costume movie. Now I was going to cause trouble again, because I didn't want any of this Lancelot and Guinevere crap, I wanted an embattled Celtic Christian dux vainly defending the faith against the brutal Teutonic invaders. I wanted it to be made in England amid the smell of wet evergreens. In the West. Faith. Duty. At this time my eyes began to prick at these words: the script, I foreknew, would be full of them. I was reading Geoffrey of Monmouth from the Los Angeles Public Library, not Idylls of the King. I was not in the Writers' Building today; I was not writing, though I had been told solemnly that my job was writing, wear down one whole pencil to the butt every day prompt by five, okay? I had been setting up the whole thing in the projection room of my head, seeing it, hearing faith and duty.

  But now the ram's horn of Carlo's snores called me to at least the skimming of his typescript, not really irrelevant to the job for which I was being paid, embattled Christianity. It seemed a curious work that, attempting impersonality, was yet full of various voices, as from a body set upon by demons whose name was Legion. There was a German theologian there going on about the Abendmahl or evening meal, cosy sauerkrautish name for the Eucharist. The Bishop of Bombay quondam Gibraltar juggled with terms like substantiation, consubstantiation, insubstantiation. There was a dour struggle with free will and predestination, Carlo himself confronting somebody Scotch or Swiss. What seemed to me at the time, me the renegade, heterodox and shocking, nobody more shockable than the renegade, was to become the orthodox and bland. Here was the terrible ecumenical strategy set out in clumsy singlespace typing, and I, who considered myself to have lost my faith, was appalled.

  The Pope of Rome was, in this scheme, to be more of an elder brother than a father, an amiable chairman of the interdenominational committee of the faith, holding office by historical right but asserting no divine authority. The faith was to be both broadened and loosened, and there seemed to be proposed a technique of what I could only call semantic jiggerypokery whereby age-old fundamental diversities of belief could be united. The doctrine of the Abendmahl or Lord's Supper or Eucharist, for instance, with some believing in the Real Presence, others in a sort of realish presence, yet others in a mere act of commemoration. Remember, said some voice or other, that Christ, Son of the Father, is not bound of necessity to descend to take possession of the bread and wine at the moment of consecration, despite his promise on the eve of his execution, and despite the fact that the consecrating priest has mystically assumed the office of Christ himself. The free will of the godhead is unpredictable, being free. Moreover, in what manner is Christ, according to the belief of the Unreformed Church, really present in the accidents of the ceremony? Not in the sense of susceptibility of physical analysis, not in the sense of spatial and temporal containment. The ceremony of the Eucharist, in whichever of its sectarian interpretations, is concerned with conjuring the presence of Christ in an essentially physical context, bread and wine being, as common and humble gifts of the God of Nature, physical elements which will serve well as analogues of human flesh and blood, as the ordainer of the sacrament implied when he, following his practice of divinely poetic utterance, asserted not analogy but identity. A personal contact with the divinely human essence of the Lord is effected when certain entities come together: the officiating priest, the worshiper, and the physical elements which connect them. With the utterance of the words "This is my body, this is my blood," the recipient of those elements undergoes an experience of a kind too overwhelming to be more than temporary and perhaps merely instantaneous: an imaginative, and hence spiritually valid, communion with the personality of Christ. Hence this sacrament is adjudged excellent and perhaps necessary for salvation.

  The ceremony of supper with the Lord is the kernel of a larger ceremony (so I read on), but a ceremony of little meaning unless that kernel be there. What Catholics call the mass and others the communion service is a ritual extensible or reducible according to aesthetic or devotional taste: the sacramental nucleus of the ritual remains its unassailable essence. The outer, or decorative, elements should follow no central prescriptive ordinance and should, in fact, be freely developed out of the cultural traditions, or serve the cultural needs, of the community at worship. Then there was a good deal about, as an instance of this free adaptation, the African mass, in which dancing and chanting would be more appropriate, and probably far more pleasing to the Lord, than the imposition of organ voluntaries or Western hymns.

  The ceremonies of the Truly Reformed Church should be, it followed, closer to the needs of the people than had been possible in the hieratic forms developed and imposed at a high level of authority. It went without saying that the vernacular should replace Latin, and, moreover, not solely at the level of a national language but down, so far as was feasible, to the level of a regional language or dialect. This would be a matter for diocesan decision, where applicable, or even parochial consensus, the form of the mass or Sacrament of Christ's Coming being, ultimately, except for that central and sacred kernel, a genuine emanation of local culture and the will of the people.

  And so on. There was as yet no index, but I riffled through looking for the True Reformed view of sin. There seemed less emphasis on what was wrong than on what was right, or good, or holy. The big theme was Love or Charity. Homosexual love? Nonsense, love was above sex. Marriage and children? The sexual act, when sanctified by matrimony, was what it had always been--a source of pleasure made holy by its purpose: the peopling of God's kingdom with souls. Everybody seemed agreed on that, there seemed to be no resolution in compromise on sectarian dissonance. Birth control? Abortion? Abortion was murder, but there were highly exceptional cases where decisions might be made, after intense examination of conscience and ample prayer, at the episcopal level or its equivalent. Birth control was, since it diverted the copulatory act from its biological and spiritual purpose, always reprehensible. The intention in emitting semen must always be the act of conception, though frustration of this intention through the vagaries of Nature was beyond human will and therefore was beyond the sphere of moral judgment. The spending of semen to a purely pleasurable end was an abomination.

  Carlo emitted, at the point of my reading that, a snore of particular vehemence. I looked bitterly at his closed door.

  Despite the stern prohibitions, the treatise emphasised again and again the principle of liberum arbitrium. Man was defined by his capacity for moral choice, and the existence of evil in opposition to good was a guarantee of that capacity for free election. But if good, as one of the attributes
of the Creator, was built into man as the crowning work of the Creator, evil was essentially external. It was when, through the wiles of a destructive force which it was logical to personify as the Evil One, an eternal being whom God could himself destroy only at the expense of denying the right of all his creatures to act through free will (for, with the rejection of the Manichean heresy, the Evil One must be accepted as God's creation), evil was presented, as it always was, as good, that man fell into sin. The responsibility for sin could not be placed wholly on the shoulders of the human sinner, and God, knowing the strength of his enemy, was infinitely merciful to the dupes of that enemy, but man was not free of the necessity to develop judgment, the capacity to recognize evil even when it masqueraded as the highest good. Why did God allow evil to exist? A question not to be asked. Without evil there could be no freedom of choice. But so pervasive is that original good, that it can even inhere in evil as a potential consequence. Dangerous words, dangerous, dangerous.

  Dangerous this denial of original sin, though it was not expressed in so many words. You could blame yourself for lack of moral judgment, but not for the dynamic which animated your acts of evil. Original sin was original weakness, not being sufficiently clever, or Godlike, to spot the machinations of the fiend. I was not surprised to find, in one of the numerous appendices, a rehabilitation of the heretic Pelagius.

  Somebody, probably Carlo himself, that expert in ecclesiastical history, set out the whole story. Pelagius, a British monk in Rome in the early fifth century, was deeply disturbed when he heard a bishop quote from Augustine's Confessions: "Thou commandest continence; grant what thou commandest and command what thou wilt." This seemed to Pelagius to be a denial of moral responsibility. At the same time a commentator on the epistles of Saint Paul, usually named Ambrosiaster, seemed to affirm that the transmission of Adam's sin was effected biologically, human souls being derived, like human bodies, from the parents. "In Adam all sinned as in one lump." Pelagius, upset by this, wrote his own Pauline commentary and asserted that there was no hereditary transmission of sin, since this would be a denial of free will. Man sinned by an elected imitation of Adam's sin, not through an inherent fault of human nature. In all sin, said Pelagius, there had to be personal assent. The consequence of Adam's sin was a mere bad example which his successors voluntarily embraced. Infants had to be baptised into the faith, but the baptism was not a device of absolution from inherited sin. All this caused a hell of a row. Jerome called Pelagius a fat dog weighed down with Scotch porridge, his brains thick and muddled, a stupid rather than sinful denier of elementary truths--the necessity of infant baptism as an expunger of hereditary sin, the saving power of God's grace, the comparative impotence of man as a free agent thinking himself capable, without that grace, of voluntarily embracing the good. Augustine, expectedly, went wild.