The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  He went daily to the Agora, a kind of marketplace west of the Acropolis, where he met Stoics and Epicureans. They did not deny that there might be a God or world soul, but this being was too lofty to concern himself with the affairs of men. The Stoics went in for morality and duty without eschatological sanctions, the Epicureans believed in pleasure and tranquillity and the conquest of the fear of death. ‘But,’ Paul said, ‘there is nothing to fear in death. Death is the gateway to the fuller life. Duty and the moral life have their reward, and terms like pleasure and tranquillity hardly suffice to describe the eternal elation of unity with God.’ How do you know this? Who told you? Where is the evidence? ‘In the appearance of God made flesh in the world, in the resurrection of his fleshly Son after death.’ Many misheard the name Jesus as iasis, meaning healing, and Ieso, the name of the goddess of healing in the Ionic dialect. They interpreted anastasis, which signifies resurrection, as a restoration of health, and soter, meaning saviour, as the physician who so restores. They were not impressed. Nothing new here. No rationality in it. They called Paul a spermologos or seed picker, a pecking gutter sparrow, a purveyor of scraps and trifles.

  ‘But look here,’ said a serious teacher of rhetoric named Cratippus, whose homonymous father the peripatetic philosopher had obtained a professorial post in Athens through the influence of Cicero and was less inclined than many to scoff at what was not Athenian, ‘this Cilician Jew has come a long way, he’s evidently intelligent and learned in his own theology, and his Greek isn’t bad. He’s wasting his time here in the Agora. He ought to go before the Areopagus.’

  ‘The Areopagus?’ Paul repeated. ‘But I haven’t committed any crime that I know of.’

  ‘Oh, they’re not justices in the Roman way. They’re supposed to look after our religion and morals. The best way of getting these ideas of yours over to Athens is to speak to the Areopagus. They’ll listen. They’re not like the Romans, who won’t listen to anybody, as my father always used to say. And they’ll pronounce on what you tell them. They’ll let you know whether there’s anything in it or not.’

  ‘But I don’t need this Areopagus to confirm what I know to be true in my very blood and bones and guts.’

  ‘There speaks the Jew. You’re a very physical people. We go in more for the soul. Prepare your brief carefully. I’ll arrange things for you. Shall we say this time tomorrow?’

  The Areopagus had used formerly to meet on the hill of Ares, which is what Areopagus means, but now they met in the Royal Portico north-east of the Agora. Paul, brought thither by Cratippus, found a number of grave men, some very old, all of magisterial appearance. Cratippus said: ‘I bring before you one Paul, who has come all the way from Palestine to propound the principles of a new religion very active in that province and, indeed, well beyond it. Athens has still to hear of it. Here is the man who bids you hear.’

  So, in a clean Greek free of the pollutions of Cilicia, Paul spoke. He said: ‘Citizens of Athens, in my brief stay in your noble city I have observed your concern with matters of religion, even though it may be termed a negative concern, for I have seen many altars inscribed toan unknown god. This implies a willingness to worship a negativity, which neither grammar nor theology will properly permit. Now I would ask you to consider a singular and unique God, not one of many but the only one, who created the world and all things in it, who, having made man as well as the earth and the heavens, is much concerned with the ways of man. He is especially concerned that men seek him. He is not remote from us, he is easily found. Why, even one of your own poets, Epimenides the Cretan, says that in him we live and move and have our being. We are the offspring of God, creatures made of his substance, and it is absurd to think of him as a mere thing, an object of silver or gold or stone, which occurs when his unity is split into mere personifications of human needs and motives. For a personified quality is no more than a lump of metal. Now, God has been tolerant towards human ignorance of him, but now he commands that men repent of this ignorance. That this ignorance be no longer excused by the sense of his remoteness, which encouraged his conversion on the part of men either to a thought or to a thing, he came to earth himself, and that recently, to a particular place, Palestine, and in a particular time, that of my own generation, in the form of a human being. We may use the metaphor of the father sending down to the son, so long as we regard this as a mere similitude. So the Son of God taught the way of righteousness, showing human goodness as an aspect of eternal goodness enshrined in the godhead, and taught also that righteousness would lead men to dwell eternally with the fountain of righteousness, or, to change the metaphor, that human water should at the last be shown to be part of the divine ocean. I teach anastasis, which signifies not the survival of the soul, which any of your Platonists could demonstrate at least as a logical possibility, but as the survival of the sensorium also, though in a transfigured form. For God the Son himself rose from the dead and, in that filial or human aspect, returned to the eternal home of the Father. This, learned men of Athens, is the gist of my message.’

  There was a kind of rumbling and squeaking silence. Then a very old man squeaked: ‘You quote a minor poet, or rather you make a very doubtful attribution to a minor poet. I would quote a major poet, our own Aeschylus, who, in his Eumenides, says there is no anastasis. The man dies, he says, and the earth drinks his blood, and there is an end of things. Words attributed to the god Apollo himself, alleged to have been spoken when this very Areopagus was founded by our patroness Athene. The Epicureans, true, speak of the indestructibility of the atoms of which we are made, along with all things in the universe, but the notion of physical human survival is a mere undemonstrable supposition.’ Another, younger, man boomed out boredly:

  ‘We require that a proposition be reduced to its first principles. We Athenians do not take things on trust.’

  ‘The first premise of a logical statement,’ Paul said, ‘has always to be taken on trust. We all have to begin with the evidence of our senses.’

  ‘You actually saw this man rise from the dead?’ a man so emaciated as fancifully to seem pared down to pure thought said.

  ‘I have lived with those who did and are still living to recount the experience,’ Paul said.

  ‘Well, then, send them to us. Not that their testimony would necessarily be credible. The world is full of madmen and liars. I think we have heard enough.’

  The president of the Areopagus, a discreet legal-looking man in late middle age named Demetrios, said: ‘We will hear you again, if you wish. Not tomorrow, nor the next day, but sometime. It interests us to know what new fantasies are being entertained in the great world outside Athens.’ He lightly hammered great with irony. ‘For the moment, thank you for your attendance and the evident sincerity of your discourse.’ Then the Areopagus rose, leaving Paul alone save for an old man who announced his name as Dionysius. Dionysius said:

  ‘Interesting. And it has the charm of the exotic. Are there books on the subject?’

  ‘Not yet, alas. It is too new to have settled itself into books.’

  ‘Yes, a novelty. Well, you must come to dinner and tell me more.’

  The invitation was vague, but Paul, sensing that he was about to drown in a thalassa of unconcern, determined to hold on to this flotsam of possible persuasibility and persuaded Dionysius to fix a date and a time. Thus, three days later, Silas and Timothy not yet having arrived, Paul dined with him, very frugally, and met at the table a hetœra as he took her to be, named Damaris. She was a little too enthusiastic about the new doctrines, and Paul’s heart sank into his stomach, where it met a wave of acidity induced by the resinous urine. Athens, he knew, was a failure. He received a message the next day from Silas and Timothy, brought by a travelling Beroean, which said they were staying in Macedonia a little longer, pursuing the good work already initiated. He was very much alone.

  On his journey to Corinth he pondered the problem of spreading the word to the rational and educated. The Jews, most of them, oppose
d it because they were satisfied with what they had, and the pagans drank deep of it because they had nothing else. First principles. Credibility. Seeing, on the outskirts of Corinth, a temple with a many-breasted goddess transfixed on its façade, he felt the resurgence of hope. Eros once more to be transformed into agape. He greeted Astarte or whoever she was almost as an old friend. He went, after a light meal bought with his remaining coins of the Empire (he must find work soon), to a corner of the marketplace where, like any cheerful mountebank, he offered the secret of eternal life. It cost nothing, he eventually said, except everything. One man at the front of the crowd, loaded with larder provisions, maintained a faint smile of appreciation for the clarity and rhetoric but said nothing. Paul said he would say more at the synagogue in two days’ time, where pagans would be welcome to usurp the seats of the regular attenders, and, as he had no money for a night’s lodging, he slept in a public park, under a bronze effigy of the goddess, who held a detached phallus over him in, he thought he might fancifully think, a gesture of protection. This goddess must have put erotic images into his sleeping mind, for he woke polluted with a nocturnal emission. Not his fault, though he prayed that God might protect even the untracked regions of his brain in this city so well known for its erotism that it had given the verb korinthiazo as a synonym for I fornicate to the Greek language. For breakfast he drank fountain water and, without shame, begged a bit of bread from one of the gardeners. Then he walked towards the marketplace again. On the main street, however, a voice hailed him with a welcome. It was the faintly smiling man he had seen yesterday, sitting before a shop in the morning sun and stitching at what seemed to be a tent. Paul stopped and, with a nostalgia for that work, sat down next to him. The man said:

  ‘I heard you yesterday. I look forward to hearing you on the Sabbath. Not that I’ll be easy to convince. This is my wife, Priscilla.’ A smiling woman with a superior air about her, rinsing a cloth on to the pavement. ‘This is Paul, who preaches the Nazarene gospel. Oh, my name’s Aquila. That means eagle. The nose, see. Some wine, or is it too early?’

  ‘Some water, if I may. This is thirsty weather.’

  ‘And you’re off to do that thirsty business again?’

  ‘Corinth seems promising.’

  ‘A very fleshly lot, if you catch my meaning.’

  ‘I catch it. Korinthiazo – I fornicate.’

  Aquila looked shocked. ‘Surely not.’

  ‘No, no, the word. As though fornication had been invented in Corinth.’ He looked at some women passing, perhaps temple prostitutes off duty; they seemed specially bred in some erotic stable that their rotundities of seduction should painfully provoke. But there was no pain in it save for Paul: they provoked only that they might satisfy. And the walk: undulant, the buttocks awag, the breasts thrust upward by some ingenuity of corsetage. The mouths very red, the hair crackling black from recent washing. Paul sighed, recognising that the impulse in himself could not be evil, not unless one admitted the dualism of John Mark’s Zoroastrians. What did one do about it? One turned Christ into one’s bride, which produced its own complications; one married. He, the preaching tentmaker, married. It was not possible. His groin whimpered resentment. But Aquila was saying something about the stress of work, the city full and rich, partly because of the inflow of Jews exiled from Rome, though some were going back. A trading town this, big port, rival to Athens. Paul did not want to hear the name Athens. He said, looking at Aquila’s stitching fingers: ‘I don’t think I ever saw that double-over lock in Tarsus.’

  ‘It’s the Roman way. Though it’s more awnings and bed hangers in Italy. You seem to know about the trade, knowing the double-over.’

  ‘It’s mine. My only living, except for charity. A man has to make a living somehow.’

  ‘You plan to stay long in Corinth?’

  ‘There’s a lot to do.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t mind practising the trade here?’

  ‘Making tents? Are you offering me something?’

  ‘There’s enough work for two. And there’s a little room at the back of the shop. Very little.’

  ‘I’m grateful.’

  ‘Of course, we shan’t be staying here for ever. My wife’s of a better class than I am. A good Jewish girl but a true Roman. She wants to get back. So do I, for that matter. But we thought of training some grown men, not young apprentices, and putting a manager in charge. Both here and in Ephesus. There’s money in the east. But Rome’s the place for spending it. You don’t know Rome, do you?’

  ‘No, but I will.’

  So, fortified by good meals from Priscilla, Paul smote vigorously at Corinthian fornication, grew visibly elated in his invocation of the new faith, angered the Jews, baptised the pagans, and opened a chapel which was a kind of rival synagogue. A certain Titus or Titius Justus, an Italian who had been in the trade of exporting dried raisins, called currants after Corinth, and now a retired widower, owned a large house quite near to the synagogue, too large for his own use, and offered it to Paul for his preaching and the ceremony of the supper of the Lord. The Church is the body of the faithful, but a church is where the faithful may meet. This was the first of the brick-and-mortar churches. To it one day came the Jew who was in charge of the synagogue, much troubled. His name was Crispus. He said to Paul:

  ‘I’m convinced. God help me. I say that because it puts me in dire peril. Physical, that is. My former fellows – what are they going to think, do? My own feet have started to take charge. I walk towards the synagogue and then they make me bear left and I finish here. For God’s sake, what am I going to do?’

  ‘Some of us Christians remain Jewish,’ Paul said. ‘It’s only the bigots who insist on the schisma. Take your baptism in secret – it can be done here in that kind of fountain in the back garden – continue your synagogue duties. I’m still a good enough Jew to wish to go to Jerusalem for Passover – this year, next. The new faith is only the fulfilment of the old.’

  ‘I wish to God I could make some of the others see that.’

  ‘I’ve tried. You know I’ve tried. One can’t try forever. Life is short and there’s the whole known world to cover. Will you be blessed now with the baptismal water?’

  ‘Yes, God help me.’

  Paul sat in the evenings in the living room of Aquila and Priscilla. She sewed delicate fabrics; he drank wine, his due after a hard day, and chewed currants out of a silver dish. Paul recounted his adventures. Priscilla laughed at some of them, and he could not see why. He was saying one evening: ‘Silas and I were at Lystra – Silas should be here soon, by the way – and a man in our congregation was a cripple more in mind than in body. His limbs were unshrivelled, they looked sound enough to me. He was not difficult to cure. The people were ecstatic, they said it was divine magic, and then – ah, they insisted on identifying Silas and myself with two of the pagan demons – he was Jupiter and I was Mercury. They even brought in a couple of white oxen garlanded with flowers. Of course, Lystra is the centre of the Zeus and Hermes cult – why are you laughing? You find this blasphemy comic? I work in the Lord’s name and they hail me in the name of Mercury—’

  ‘The god of thieves,’ Priscilla said with wet eyes, ‘but also of fine speech. I find the story has humour in it. Like the other one you told – of being put in prison and then having an earthquake open the door for you. I always knew that God had a fine sense of the comic.’

  ‘I don’t see it,’ said Paul.

  ‘Perhaps you will when the stories are written down. They mustn’t be lost to the future, they’re too good.’

  ‘Precisely the words of Luke,’ Paul said grimly.

  ‘Who’s Luke?’

  ‘A Greek physician I converted in Antioch. He has a taste for writing. And also for what you would call the comic. I see. I become a character in a Greek tale.’

  ‘But who,’ Aquila said, ‘is more real than some of the Greek heroes? Why should the pagans have the best heroes for themselves?’

  ‘The Paulia
d.’ Priscilla laughed again.

  ‘No, no, no, no.’ Then there was a thunder of knocking at the shop door.

  ‘They’re here again,’ Aquila sighed. ‘I wish they’d leave us alone.’

  ‘My apologies,’ Paul said. ‘It isn’t you they’re after. It never is, I’ll go.’ He went and unbolted. Three Jewish elders were there, frowning in the mild light of early evening. The chief of them, Amoz, said:

  ‘Saul or Paul or whatever your name is, the governor is ready to see you.’

  ‘But I,’ Paul answered, ‘am not ready to see the governor. Can the matter not wait, whatever it is? A man has a right to rest after a long day.’

  ‘A teacher of blasphemies has no right to rest. Gallio is just come from Achaia and is anxious to try your case.’