The Wave Theory of Angels

by Alison Macleod

  7

  It was like a wild root. When I took it in my mouth, I sucked as I had once sucked at my mother’s nipple, drawing you to life. Afterwards, you pressed me to you, so hard I thought you’d crush me.

  I didn’t know you would. I didn’t know you’d leave me for dead. That’s how it was. A wild root, and my mouth, my maidenhead, the bloom of you. A fragile pairing.

  Without me now, you know only the dark and cold of leaf mould and stale earth again. You know only to hide. Poor tuber. Poor burrowing thing.

  Hear me. I wish for the days when I didn’t know that a life can break.

  ‘O King of virgins, who lovest the chaste of heart and undefiled, do thou with the dew of thy heavenly grace quench in my body all flames of unlawful feeling that I may evermore abide before thee in innocency of body and of soul. Mortify in my members the sting of the flesh and repress in me every dangerous passion.’

  Who’s there?

  Christina was taken from the home of l’Ymagier on Sunday night, the eve of her funeral, before the curfew. She was carried to the new cathedral’s Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre and laid upon the bier her father himself had once hewn. Three priests attended her. They assured l’Ymagier that a vigil would be kept; that she would not be deprived of the Office of the Dead and its petitions. For yea, was not a single day in Purgatory an entire year of mortal time?

  Before she was taken, father and sister were permitted to kiss her. Marguerite was surprised by the sensation of wax against her lips – moist to the touch, like a cold sweat on her sister’s brow. She wanted to run from the house. But run where? Her grandparents were long dead. And while her father was admired in the town, he kept himself – he kept the three of them – aloof from it. People smelled pride.

  Only she and Christina knew. Their father was not easy enough within himself to be easy among others. It was their mother who had completed him. It was their mother’s death that had left him broken, fragmentary, like some cast-off piece under sheets in his own atelier.

  Now there was talk. And only that morning something on the threshold. A large amulet stuffed with faeces, black fur and blood. She threw it into the river and said nothing to her father.

  Would he have heard in any case? He’d hardly left his atelier since the day before. Once – to see Athalie. The Egyptian, he sometimes called her, as if it were a title, while in the town she and her overgrown son were spat at as gypsies.

  Then, that evening, he’d come into the house from the atelier, still in his leather apron, and found her keeping vigil at her sister’s side. She looked up, surprised, unused to him suddenly. He said he needed something. She expected him to say supper. Or a jar of beer. Or candles, better light. Maybe a hole to be mended in the sleeve of his tunic, for the mass. Not a volume. Not a stolen volume.

  He wasn’t making sense. She must find it, he said. In the scriptorium at St Germer. Before her sister’s mass tomorrow. Avicenna’s Philosophia Orientalis – or any of its parts. She must go before first light. Before the monks rose for matins. Marguerite noticed his hands, bruised and nicked; the leather thimble still on his thumb. And when was it – late Friday afternoon? – that the door of his atelier was ajar? Inside, the huge rough-out of ash clamped on the carving horse. Was there a commission?

  ‘I saw it once,’ he continued. ‘I read from it. By the university walls, where the prostitutes leaned. Priceless, the stranger said. One of those unexpected moments. My hands trembled, as they did when I held Christina and then you for the first time. It was made from vellum, uterine vellum, which is the most dear. Calfskin plucked early from the womb. It was a bound copy, itself of fragments, for the original was plundered in Avicenna’s own time. The copy was the only one that escaped the purge at the university. It’s said to be in fragments again. A surer means of its preservation, I suppose. Even so, the monks will have got their hands on something of it. His commentary on De Anima, I am certain. Perhaps the ‘‘Epistle on the Angels’’. Probably. Do you see? Here, Marguerite. Not at Paris. Not near the university. What they have will be here.’

  ‘Find it?’ Marguerite felt her mind sway. ‘Find it how?’ She wanted her father to be still, to stop. She wished her sister finally dead. At rest. She yearned for the tranquillity of convention.

  ‘O God, grant that no flame of guilt lay waste the souls of thy servants.’

  Who is it? Who’s there?

  8

  Happiness, a new idea in Christendom, began to take hold in the thirteenth century.

  Perhaps it was a lone Turkish jingler at the town gates. Or a renegade musician plucking a psaltery with a goose quill at the hour of mass.

  Soon it was a troupe of flute players, accordionists, tumblers, actors and dancing bears making their camp on the wild fringes of town. So the idea of happiness spread. In Beauvais, behind high walls, pleasure gardens came to life with topiary beasts, gushing fountains and ornamental trees. Through chinks in those walls, boys spied on lovers, bright and foolish, in love with love, and the notion of happiness could not be contained.

  A restlessness of spirit burgeoned in coloured breads; parakeet stalls; mechanical dragons; magicians with mirrors, boxes and scarves; glaziers dazzled by colour; pilgrims dizzied by spires; boys with wounded kites; old men with skittering dice; girls who sweetened their breath with wild honey; crowned and drooling Fools; Mayday poles, green-garlanded; feasts of twelve to one hundred and twenty courses; glorious peacocks, roasted and refeathered, their claws and beaks painted with gold; life-size elephants born of pastry; and galloping hobbyhorses, no mere toys but ushers, rather, of festive marvels to come. So the notion of contemptus mundi, official ideology of a Church now in trouble, began to falter.

  Yet do not mistake happiness for merry liberality. In Beauvais in 1284 there were nine hangings, three public draggings and two live burials. In court, a man convicted of the theft of a falcon was ordered to surrender six ounces of meat to the beak of said falcon, from his own breast or head.

  There was, too, a fever for angels.

  If the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had found that bread and wine could be transfigured, in the hands of the supplicating priest, into the living body of Christ, what other incarnations might yet be among us? What other acts of faith might yet be generative of fact? What, after all, was the power of the heart?

  In every blade of grass, an angel. At the birth of every child, an angel. An angel to spin each planet; an angel to cast each star trembling into the night.

  As the bell for matins tolled, just before first light on the Friday morning Christina would fail to wake, did an angel take a single perilous step?

  Thomas Aquinas, writing in 1264, the year of Christina’s birth, would have overruled the question. Angels, he pronounced, were incorporeal creatures who only assumed bodies, including wings, in times of mortal need. Moreover, to assume a body with ears, nose, mouth and all the parts a human is heir to, was not, Thomas was clear, to take on a body’s vital functions or its passions. Angels, he would have us know, are without anger, lust or bodily joy. While Augustine, several centuries earlier, permitted angels ‘a sensitive faculty’, that is to say, a means of perception through the senses, Thomas could not agree.

  Furthermore, while some, including the theologian Dionysius, claimed for demons – those fallen relations of angels – the power of perverted phantasy, and therefore, by implication, the power of elevated phantasy for angels, Thomas again is sure: ‘The angel has no imagination.’ The angel was officially, in 1284, a being of pure reason and will, and angelic will, if it need be said, was a will without appetite or desire.

  Yet while Thomas, chief among the scholastics, was clear about the nature of angels, and above all about the essential incorporeality of angels, the Church knew that seeing was indeed believing if the faithful were to remain convinced. If Christianity were to compete with happiness.

  ‘There is a difficulty,’ l’Ymagier once replied to the bishop himself.

  ‘There is no di
fficulty.’

  ‘Am I to understand that the angel’s body will have hands and feet and hair? Its wings, I gather, will be capable of flight?’

  The bishop had paused, looking up from his knuckles, suddenly no longer bored. He sensed a peculiar stubbornness in the artisan who stood before him. A resistance behind the man’s words. Perhaps a carefully veiled passion for cosmology. ‘I say nothing, Monsieur l’Ymagier. I merely ask you this. If a hissing swan on the Avelon river is capable of flight, do you think an angel of His glorious ranks might not also demonstrate some aptitude?’

  So l’Ymagier carved the stuff of heaven. He worked in ash, oak and white birch – timber lifted from the forest floor of Beauvais. He laid his hands on the coolness of marble and granite, and felt for the seams of life within. He imagined the uprush of thermals in terracotta and clay.

  Yet how was ether made matter? How could the body of an angel be rendered mortal? Should it be covered? Was its nakedness not beautiful? An angel was not, after all, born into the original sin of scripture. Yet to deliver a naked angel to the bishop would be an affront even he dared not attempt. He wished he had the courage – not merely to risk the raw energy of muscle and bone; not only to hew the longing of flesh – but to carve in stone life-force itself.

  Blasphemy. Without doubt.

  Yet might not that which bridged two bodies also bridge two worlds, the mortal and the divine?

  The question was futile, for there was no reputation that could survive the charge.

  He occupied himself with the dream of wings. He cast the wings of apocalypse outspread in the uplift of God’s unending breath. He lifted tentative wings from raw matter and sent them, shuddering, into flight. He laboured over the broken wing of an angel, eternally falling from a rung on Jacob’s ladder.

  Yet each time he was frustrated by technicality. How should the drapery fall? Should the wings push through, like arms through sleeves? Or should they tremble beneath, a brooding potential for flight?

  And too the question of construction. Are the wings of angels taut and segmented, like those of the bat scurrying at twilight, or gauzy as the wings of a bee? He contemplated all, including diverse wings on the ankles, like those of the pagan gods, until it occurred to him to change the dimensions of the angel himself. A stronger frame alone could support the demand of wings. So he altered trunk and sternum. He deformed clavicle and neck. And his angels grew to monstrosity.

  This dream of wings was l’Ymagier’s final and most painful struggle to believe – to see heaven in the Holy and Apostolic Church, to see God in Thomas’s static Creation.

  But pain is initiatory. After dumping the gutted swan at the door of the bishop’s palace, l’Ymagier gave himself to the singing materiality of stone; to the animate grain of wood. He mocked the Church’s covert distaste for the world with an egregious delight in all its detail. His serpents, his apples, his grinning demons and fork-tailed mermaids, his burgeoning Trees of Life and memento mori – all rendered the hereafter, by comparison, a pallid dream.

  His celebrity grew. He was known in Paris and beyond for his effigies of the noble dead and for his wildly decorative work in pleasure gardens. It was said he’d sculpted a fountain-head for an anonymous patron, a pink marble bouquet of gushing phalluses; that the locals could hardly keep the thing in buffalo’s milk. It was said, too, that a crowd in Lombardy had tried, one after another, to break off a minor prince’s dead finger, a usual sought-after relic; that they’d been amazed when it had at last come away – wax flesh and knuckle – in a small boy’s hands. The child had dropped it, terrified, and run.

  L’Ymagier had a talent for bringing things to life.

  So the Church found him unavoidably indispensable. It could not afford not to employ him. Yet he did not make it easy. He did not mask his contempt. While every other craftsman in the Île-de-France converged on Beauvais in the hope of employment, he made the chapter request his services. He spoke his mind. He appeared bemused by the hierarchy of halo shapes and the designation of colours for robes. He laughed at a prelate’s argument that the ox was more sacred than the ass. And he made the bishop himself wait. For fifteen years he made him wait.

  It didn’t take the bishop that long, of course, to realize that he was dealing with a one-time Arabist, a university heretic, a radical Avicennan who’d only just escaped the authorities at Paris all those years ago. L’Ymagier had flaunted it. What else was that old allegation – ‘Fear of the Angel’ – but a bold snub of a reference to the Tenth Angel controversy? The bishop still remembered the stink of the swan. His servants had refused to touch it. They’d feared the words, scrawled in blood, they could not read.

  Of course he’d sent for the records. He’d read the lengthy transcripts of the tribunal at Paris, often observed by Aquinas himself – still master of theology in that year and not yet struck mute by the fearful will of God. He’d located the relevant testimony. In 1259, a twenty-one-year-old student called Giles of Beauvais had confessed himself an Avicennan.

  The testimony was flagrant. He condemned their adoption of Aquinas’s own translations of Aristotle over those of Avicenna. (‘And the man without a word of Greek,’ he was reported to have said to a fellow student.) He went on to assert the existence and power of the outlawed Tenth Angel. He admitted a belief in Avicenna’s twofold soul – the intellectus passivus and the intellectus possibilitus; that is to say, the temporal mortal persona, or character, of a man, and what Avicenna described as the eternal, envisioning mind within each of us.

  When generously encouraged to admit confusion, to say that he had merely mistaken Avicenna’s twofold soul for Aristotle’s doctrine of the practical and theoretical intelligences – that he meant nothing more than this, that the Avicennan translation had, of course, been poor – he refused to yield.

  Instead, unbelievably, he elaborated. While the mortal persona would die, he dared to remind those gathered that the intellectus possibilitus was, of its self, immortal because it participated in the stuff of Creation – through communion with the Tenth Angel – whether we were aware or not.

  He admitted he spoke in full knowledge of William of Auvergne’s express injunctions against such outlandish Arabianism. ‘But what are such injunctions?’ he dared. ‘In the interests of truth and knowledge, this university flouts even the papal ban on studies of Aristotle, for where would we be otherwise?’

  He informed the university authorities, including Thomas, that the intellectus possibilitus alone could ‘achieve’ salvation, not solely through the grace of Our Father, but through an ardent desire for the angel from whom it had emanated and with whom it was intimately bound. (It was duly noted that the heretic espoused emanationism against the express instruction of the Fourth Lateran Council.) Furthermore, Giles of Beauvais confessed that he did indeed ‘deplore’ the Church’s ‘erasure’ of the alam al-mithal, or the Imaginal World, as he termed it.

  The interest of the tribunal was unexpectedly whetted. Would the student care to explain the gravity of their so-called offence – this ostensible conspiracy – of which they and the Church Fathers stood accused?

  He hedged. He said he did not believe a group of men as learned and informed as they were in need of explanation. He was in over his head.

  Turning over the cracked and confidential papers of testament, the bishop knew Giles of Beauvais had been given little choice but to continue. His speech began tentatively: ‘There is a creative cause that moves the universe.’ He was prompted. Twice. He asked for the question to be repeated. They toyed with him, naturally. Yet had he confined himself to embarrassing generalities, he would have been permitted to slip the noose of his interrogator. It was the way of these things, the bishop reflected. Heresy could not be tolerated, but a heretic’s righteousness would never be drawn where it might, more usefully, spend itself. The student-fool, however, grew bolder.

  ‘Desire moves all. By this I mean an inner necessity not merely to be but to become. It moves planets. It mo
ves the angelic ranks. It moves the feeble soul of man. It is a faculty of the heart which carries all life towards that which is not yet realized in it. We evolve, the cosmos evolves, even the angels evolve, in longing.

  ‘What is hitherto innate is lifted from the fabric of reality by the act of ardent imagining; by the force of the desiring mind. And the metamorphosis, quiet or large, happens firstly on this plain of the Imaginal World, the intermediate world between matter and spirit of which Avicenna speaks.

  ‘It is a real place. A peninsula between worlds. It is also man’s only bridge to his own deification.’

  He had, the bishop observed, helpfully walked into a trap of his own making.

  ‘Giles of Beauvais, do you believe Christ was born the Son of God?’

  The copyist’s oblique stroke marked his silence.

  ‘You will answer the question. Giles of Beauvais, do you believe Jesus Christ was born the Son of God?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is it you believe?’

  ‘I have stated what I believe.’

  ‘Be very clear. Many of us here are gum-toothed old men,

  are we not? Our minds fail us. You do not believe Christ was born the Son of God. Is that correct?’

  Again. The stylus stroke.

  ‘It is a straightforward question.’

  ‘And I have answered it.’

  ‘Then you will expand. For the third time, do you, Giles of Beauvais, believe Christ was born the Son of God?’

  ‘I believe he became the Son of God.’

  Even the bishop, twenty-five years later, in the quiet of his rooms, felt the blood in his temples flare.

  ‘Then you cannot believe that man’s hopeful redemption lies in the grace of the miracle of the Holy Incarnation.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell us, Giles of Beauvais. Wherein lies our salvation?’

  ‘I believe we are saved by Christ.’

  ‘You contradict yourself.’

  ‘I believe we are saved by the example of Christ’s becoming.’