The Clowns of God

by Morris West

  I understood what he was telling me, but I still could not accept so trenchant a solution. We talked all day, examining every possible option. I prayed alone far into the night. Finally, in utter weariness, I surrendered. At nine the next morning I summoned Drexel and told him I was prepared to abdicate.

  That, my dear Carl, was how it happened. The why will take much longer to tell; then you, too, will be forced to sit in judgment on me. Even as I write these words I fear lest your verdict may be against me. So much for human frailty! I have not yet learned to trust the Lord whose gospel I proclaim!…

  The poignant appeal moved Mendelius deeply. The script blurred before his aching eyes. He leaned back in his chair and surrendered himself to memory. They had met in Rome more than two decades ago, when Jean Marie Barette was Cardinal Deacon, the youngest member of the Curia, and Father Carl Mendelius, S.J., was teaching his first course on the elements of scriptural interpretation at the Gregorian University. The young Cardinal had been a guest at his lecture on Judaic communities in the early Church. Afterwards, they had dined together and talked, long into the night. When they parted they were already friends.

  In the bad days, after Mendelius had been delated on suspicion of heresy to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Jean Marie Barette had supported him through long months of inquisition. When his priestly vocation no longer satisfied him he had asked to be laicized and dispensed to marry. Barette had pleaded his cause with a reluctant and irascible Pontiff. When he applied for the chair at Tübingen, the most glowing recommendation had been signed “Gregorius XVII, Pont. Max.”

  Now, their positions were reversed. Jean Marie Barette was in exile, while Carl Mendelius flourished in the free zone of a happy marriage and a full professional life. Whatever the cost, he must discharge the debts of friendship. He bent again to the study of the letter.

  … You know the circumstances of my election. My predecessor, our populist Pope, had fulfilled his mission. He had centralized the Church again. He had tightened discipline. He had restated the traditional dogmatic line. His enormous personal charm—the charm of a great actor—had masked for a long time his essentially rigorist attitudes. In his old age he had become more intolerant, less and less open to argument. He saw himself as the Hammer of God, smiting the forces of the ungodly. It was hard to convince him that, unless a miracle happened, there might be no men left at all—godly or ungodly. We were in the last decade of the century and only a stride away from global war. When I assumed office, a compromise choice after a six-day conclave, I was terrified.

  I do not need to read you the whole apocalyptic text; the plight of the Third World thrust to the brink of starvation, the daily risk of economic collapse in the West, the soaring cost of energy, the wild armament race, the temptation for the militarists to make their last mad gamble while they could still calculate the atomic odds. For me the most frightening phenomenon was the atmosphere of creeping despair among world leaders, the sense of official impotence, the strange atavistic regression to a magical view of the universe.

  You and I had discussed many times the proliferation of new cults and their manipulation for profit and power. Fanaticism was exploding in the old religions as well. Some of our own fanatics wanted me to proclaim a Marian year, call for vast pilgrimages to all the shrines of the Virgin throughout the world. I told them I would have none of it. A panic of devotees was the last thing we needed.

  I believed the best service the Church could offer was that of mediation with reason and with charity for all. It was also the task which I, as Pontiff, was best fitted to perform. I let it be known that I would go anywhere, receive anyone, in the cause of peace. I tried to make it clear that I had no magical formulae, no illusions of power. I knew too well the deadly inertia of institutions, the mathematical madness that makes men fight to the death over the simplest equation of compromise. I told myself, I tried to convince the leaders of nations, that even one year’s deferment of Armageddon would be a victory. Nevertheless, the fear of an impending holocaust haunted me day and night, sapped my reserves of courage and confidence.

  Finally, I decided that, to keep any sense of perspective, I must rest awhile and rebuild my spiritual resources. So I went into retreat for two weeks at the Monastery of Monte Cassino. You know the place well. It was founded by St. Benedict in the sixth century. Paul the Deacon wrote his histories there. My namesake, Gregory IX, made there his peace with Frederick von Hohenstaufen. More than all, it was isolated and serene. Abbot Andrew was a man of singular discernment and piety. I would place myself under his spiritual direction and dedicate myself to a brief period of silence, meditation and inner renewal.

  So I planned it, my dear Carl. So I began to do it I had been there three days when the event took place.

  The sentence ended at the bottom of a page. Mendelius hesitated before he turned it over. He felt a faint shiver of distaste as though he were being asked to witness an intimate bodily act. He had to force himself to continue the reading.

  … I call it an event, because I do not wish to colour your appraisal of it, and also because, for me, it remains a fact of physical dimension. It happened. I did not imagine it. The experience was as real as the breakfast I had just eaten in the refectory.

  It was nine in the morning, a clear sunny day. I was sitting on a stone bench in the cloister garden. A few yards away, one of the monks was hoeing a flower plot. I felt very placid, very relaxed. I began to read the fourteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, which the Abbot had proposed for that day’s meditation. You remember how it begins, with the discourse of Christ at his Last Supper: “Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me.…” The text itself, full of comfort and reassurance, matched my mood. When I reached the verse “And he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father…” I closed the book and looked up.

  Everything about me had changed. There was no monastery, no garden, no labouring monk. I was alone, on a high, barren peak. All about me were jagged mountains, black against a lurid sky. The place was still and silent as the grave. I felt no fear, only a terrible bleak emptiness, as if the kernel of me had been scooped out and only the husk remained. I knew what I was seeing, the aftermath of man’s ultimate folly—a dead planet. For what happened next I can find no adequate words. It was as if I were suddenly filled with flame, caught up in a fiery whirlwind, hurtled out of every human dimension into the center of a vast unendurable light. The light was a voice and the voice was a light, and it was as if I were being impregnated with its message. I was at the end of all, the beginning of all; the omega point of time, the alpha point of eternity. There were no symbols anymore, only the single simple Reality. Prophecy was fulfilled. Order was completed out of chaos, ultimate truth made manifest. In a moment of exquisite agony I understood that I must announce this event, prepare the world for it. I was called to proclaim that the Last Days were very near and that mankind should prepare for the Parousia: the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus.

  Just when it seemed the agony would explode me into extinction it was over. I was back again in the cloister garden. The monk was hoeing his roses. The New Testament was on my lap, open now at the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew: “For as the lightning cometh out of the east and appeareth even into the west… so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.” Accident or omen? It did not seem to matter anymore.

  And there you have it, Carl, as close as I can come to it in words, with the closest friend of my heart. When I tried to explain it to my colleagues back in Rome, I could see the shock in their faces: a Pope with a private revelation, a precursor of the Second Coming? Madness! The final explosive unreason! I was a walking time-bomb that must be defused as quickly as possible. And yet I could no more conceal what had happened to me than I could change the colour of my eyes. It was imprinted on every fiber of my being, like the genetic patterns of my parents. I was compelled to talk about it, doomed to announce it to a world rushing, heedless, towards extinction.r />
  I began work on an encyclical, a letter to the Universal Church. It opened with the words: “In his ultimis annis fatalibus… In these last fateful years of the millennium…” My secretary found the draft on my desk, photographed it in secret and distributed copies to the Curia. They were horrified. Separately and in concert, they urged me to suppress the document. When I refused, they put my apartments under virtual siege, and blocked all my communications with the outside world. Then they summoned an emergency meeting of the Sacred College, brought in a team of physicians and psychiatrists to report on my mental state, and thus set in train the events which led to my abdication.

  Now, in my extremity, I turn to you, not only because you are my friend, but because you, too, have been under inquisition and you understand how reason rocks under the relentless pressure of questioning. If you judge that I am insane, then I absolve you in advance from any blame and thank you for the friendship we have been privileged to share.

  If you can go halfway to believing that I have told you a simple, terrible truth, then study the two documents appended to this letter: a copy of my unpublished encyclical to the Universal Church and a list of people in various countries with whom I established friendly relations during my pontificate and who may still be prepared to trust me or a messenger from me. Try to contact them, make them aware of what they can still do in these last fateful years. I do not believe we can hold back the inevitable cataclysm, but I am commanded to continue to the end the proclamation of the good news of love and salvation.

  If you accept to do this, you will be at great risk—perhaps even of your life. Remember the Gospel of Matthew: “Then they shall deliver you up to be afflicted and shall put you to death… and many shall be scandalized and betray one another and hate one another.”

  I shall soon leave this place for the solitude of Monte Cassino. I trust I may arrive safely. If not, I commend myself as I commend you and your family, to God’s loving care.

  It is very late. The mercy of sleep has long been denied me, but now that this letter is written, perhaps it will be granted.

  I am, yours always in Christ,

  Jean Marie Barette

  Under the signature was scrawled a brief ironic addendum: “Feu le Pape.” Lately the Pope.

  Carl Mendelius was numb with shock and fatigue. He could not bring himself to read the close-written text of the encyclical. The long list of names and countries might have been written in Sanskrit. He folded the letter and the documents together, then locked them in the old black safe where he kept the deeds of his house, his insurance policies and the most precious portions of his research material.

  Lotte would be waiting for him downstairs, knitting placidly at the fireside. He could not face her until he had composed himself and framed some kind of answer to her inevitable questions: “What did the letter say, Carl? What really happened to our dear Jean Marie?”

  What indeed… ? Whatever else Carl Mendelius might be—failed priest, doting husband, puzzled father, skeptical believer—he was a scholarly historian, rigid in his application of the rules of internal and external evidence. He could smell a textual interpolation a mile away, trace it with meticulous accuracy back to its source, Gnostic, Manichean or Essene.

  He knew that the doctrine of the Parousia—the Second Coming of the Redeemer which would mark the end of all temporal things—was the oldest and most authentic in tradition. It was recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, enshrined in the Creed, recalled every day in the liturgy: “Christ died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” It represented the deepest hope of the believer for the final justification of the divine plan, the ultimate victory of order over chaos, of good over evil. That Jean Marie Barette, lately a Pope, should believe it, preach it as an article of faith, was as natural and necessary as breathing.

  But that he should be committed to the narrowest, most primitive form of the belief—an imminent universal cataclysm, followed by a universal judgment, for which the elect must prepare themselves—was, to say the least, disquieting. The millenarian tradition took many forms, not all of them religious. It was implicit in Hitler’s idea of the thousand-year Reich, in the Marxist promise that capitalism would wither away and give place to the universal brotherhood of socialism. Jean Marie Barette had needed no vision to shape his version of the millennium. He could have plucked it ready-made out of a hundred sources, from the Book of Daniel to the Cévenol prophets of the seventeenth century.

  Even his purported vision was a familiar and disturbing element in the pattern. The minister of an organized religion was called and ordained to expound, under authority, a doctrine fixed and agreed long since. If he exceeded his commission he could be silenced or excommunicated by the same authority that called him.

  The prophet was another kind of creature altogether. He claimed a direct communication with the Almighty. Therefore, his commission could not be withdrawn by any human agent. He could challenge the most sacred past with the classic phrase, used by Jesus himself: “It is written thus… but I tell thus and thus.” So the prophet was always the alien, the herald of change, the challenger of existing order.

  The problem of the Cardinals was not the madness of Jean Marie Barette, but that he had accepted the official function of high priest and supreme teacher, and then assumed another, possibly a contradictory, role.

  In theory, of course, there need be no contradiction. The doctrine of private revelation, of a direct personal communication between Creator and creature, was as ancient as that of the Parousia. The Spirit descending on the apostles at Pentecost, Saul struck down on the road to Damascus, John caught up to apocalyptic revelation on Patmos—all these were events hallowed in tradition. Was it so unthinkable that in this last fateful decade of the millennium, when the possibility of planetary destruction was a proven fact and a vivid danger, God might choose a new prophet to renew His call to repentance and salvation?

  In theological terms it was, at least, an orthodox proposition. To Carl Mendelius, the historian, called to sit in judgment on the sanity of a friend, it was a highly dangerous speculation. However, he was too tired now to trust his judgment on the simplest matter; so he locked the door of his study and went downstairs.

  Lotte, blond, plump, affectionate and contented as a cat in her role as mother of two and Frau Professor Mendelius, smiled up at him and lifted her face to be kissed. Caught in a sudden surge of passion he drew her to him and held her for a long moment.

  She gave him a quizzical look and said, “What was that for?”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  “I can’t go yet. Johann telephoned to say he’s forgotten his key. I said I’d wait up for him. Would you like a brandy?”

  “Well, it’s the next best thing.”

  As she poured the liquor she asked exactly the questions he had dreaded. He knew he could not fence with her. She was too intelligent for half-truths, so he told her flatly:

  “The Cardinals forced him to abdicate, because they thought he was mad.”

  “Mad? Dear God! I should have said no one was more sane.”

  She handed him his drink and sat on the mat beside him, resting her head on his knees. They toasted each other. Mendelius stroked her forehead and her hair. She asked again:

  “Why did they think he was mad?”

  “Because he claimed to them—as he has to me—that he had a private revelation that the end of the world was near and that he was the precursor of the Second Coming!”

  “What?” She gagged on the liquor. Mendelius passed her his handkerchief to mop her blouse.

  “It’s true, liebchen. He describes the experience in his letter. He believes it absolutely. Now that he is silenced he wants me to help spread the news.”

  “I still can’t believe it. He was always so—so French and practical. Perhaps he has gone crazy.”

  “A crazy man could not have written the letter he wrote to me. A
delusion, a fixed idea—that I could accept. It can happen, as a result of stress, or even as a result of a defective exercise in logic. Sane men once believed the world was flat. Sane people run their lives by the horoscopes in the evening papers.… Millions, like you and me, believe in a God they can’t prove.”

  “But we don’t go round saying the world’s going to end tomorrow!”

  “No, liebchen, we don’t. But we do know it could, if the Russians and the Americans press the red button. We all live under the shadow of that reality. Our children are as aware of it as we are.”

  “Don’t, Carl, please!”

  “I’m sorry.” He bent and kissed the top of her hair and then she pressed his hand against her cheek.

  A few moments later she asked, quietly, “Are you going to do what Jean Marie wants?”

  “I don’t know, Lotte. Truly I don’t. I’ll have to think about it carefully. I’ll need to talk to people who were close to him. Afterwards I’ll want to see him… I owe him that much. We both owe it to him.”

  “That means you’ll have to go away.”

  “Only for a little while.”

  “I hate it when you’re away. I miss you so much.”

  “Come with me then. It’s ages since you’ve been to Rome. You’d have lots of people to see.”

  “I can’t, Carl. You know that. The children need me. This is a big year for Johann and I like to keep an eye on Katrin and her young man.”

  It was the small familiar contention between them: Lotte’s constant clucking over her grown children, and his own middle-aged jealousy of her attention. But tonight he was too tired for argument, so he deferred the issue.