by A. S. Byatt
It was, the boy had thought, not Joshua’s God, but he himself, who was evil, who could not see clearly, who read wrongly. The Church was a cool, kind refuge from the storm. He himself brought the storm in from outside. The ghostly enemy sang in his ears that Joshua’s God was evil. He needed sustaining, sustenance, a rite, an offering.
He presented himself for his first communion. A voice cried in the church, a clear, golden, strong voice, “Don’t eat flesh. Don’t drink blood. This is the wrong way.”
And what was being held out to him was, he saw, a morsel of bloody muscle and fat, a cup of stinking, gravy-thick blood.
He pitched forward on to Denis Little’s feet. He was ill for quite a long time, that time, it was his first time in the hospital. His memory of it was largely lost. He felt pity, terrible pity, for a child who had become a cosmic battlefield. He also felt an energetic ironic contempt for the church life, in which all children were said to be, were, cosmic battlefields, and yet one who heard and saw the horrible forces on the other side of the pane, pain, membrane, brain, that separated him from their full impact, could only be hustled away into a hospital ward, where madmen hummed, and caught at imaginary flies, and hid under their beds, and made missiles of their food.
A bull is weakened, he had read, for the coup de grâce with the sword, by the repeated blows of the picador, by the banderillas which lodge in his muscle, and send his warm blood streaming down his living flanks. The man saw that the boy had been weakened into “normality” in the hospital, had been shocked, and argued, and drugged into shambling slowness—and half-starved too, for he knew for certain that much of the “food” he was offered was poison, he remembered the clear, golden prohibition of flesh and blood, he subsisted on boiled vegetables and apple-tart, worrying sickly about the possibility of lard and the permissibility of milk. But in those days he had no idea whose the golden voice was. It was not time to learn. It was possible that the slow sleepwalker who left the hospital had been weakened by destiny enough to be able to die a little more (pretend to be “normal” a little more) so that he was able to take communion (saying in his head, this is bread, this is bread, this is flour and water, is bread) and present himself, a pale simulacrum of a man called by some divinity, to study theology.
For even in his dead days, when he felt his inner flame quiescent and damped inside a kind of rubbery suit of the numb and withered matter of his body, he knew that he was his father’s son, and must go in for the dangerous vocation of confronting the demons and the dark.
Durham was stony. The stone cathedral and the stone castle of the Prince Bishops rose on a stony promontory in the river, visible from everywhere in the compact city. The stone did not soar or aspire, though it had grace, in an immensely heavy way. The streets were cobbled, leading up to the cobbled paths leading to the Palace Green. Joshua Lamb, who connected everything increasingly with everything, and forgot those things which could not be connected, imagined holding those worn cobbles in his hand to stone sinners. He imagined them, reasonably enough, running with blood when Cromwell’s soldiers were billeted in the great Nave. Nave, nave, navis, ship. The Ark on Ararat. Grounded. The stony city had two male populations, the cathedral and the miners. The university students were predominantly male, too. The cathedral, the theological colleges, the Deanery, had their own orderly life among the stones. The miners came up out of the earth, once a year, with bright banners, gathered in the cold dawn and swarmed down over the cobbles to the racecourse for their Gala.
The theologians did not go to the gala, and did not eat or drink in the dark, smoky public houses in the town. They gathered in their own common rooms and refectory. Some, Joshua Lamb saw, had a pallid spirituality in them. Some were dutiful and some were anxious. The young man had moments of what he believed was happiness, and these distracted and overthrew him. He remembered sitting in his small study-bedroom on the Bailey, and taking stock of the fact that he was not—for the first time since his Evacuation—oppressed by his aunt’s disgust with him. He felt cleaner. He felt less fleshy, less obscene. He ate very little, to increase this feeling of lightness. Voices spoke to him, and told him not to touch flesh and blood. Walking to a lecture, he passed a fishmonger’s shop. He saw the glittering flame-ringed eyes of the fresh herring, he saw the slate and peridot ripples, on lead and mercury sheen, of the gleaming mackerel.
His stomach turned. He imagined milk, issuing from the warm, squeezed, handled teats under the odorous cow-belly, and he drank water. He felt lightened by these decisions. The voices sang now, curving past him like bird-flight down staircases, humming like power-lines between the great pillars of the cathedral.
He had not expected to be able ever to have friends. He had had a friend whose living mother had smiled as she closed the door in his last moment of dailiness. He had known, as he stared out of the dark window with the bed and the bodies behind him, that here was the end of friendship. He had set himself to go on grimly, on his own, always on his own.
But the other young men in his college did not know that, and did not see him, as his aunt did, as a crawling thing. They were Christian young men, they included him as a matter of course in walks to see Hadrian’s Wall, or visit Mithraic temples. They asked him to drink after-dinner cups of coffee or cocoa, and then asked his opinion on moral matters—the celibacy of the clergy (there were several High Church aspirants), the nature of sin, the truth of the resurrection. He discovered a strange circumstance. He spoke little, but when he spoke, the babble of voices always hushed, faces turned towards him like opening flowers, eyes widened. He could hear the silence of their attention, and he liked to hear it, he existed as a force, in the connection between his mind, his voice, and their listening. This airy electricity was his first dangerous happiness.
The second was his reading. For some time—at least a year, his broken memory could not reconstruct an image of those vanished orderly days—he was a good student, an exceptional student. He sat in the library, amongst the books inherited from monks and divines, and read proudly in Latin, as well as in English. He wrote thoughtful essays on points of doctrine and the history of Christian belief—essays which he was later commanded to burn and disperse to the winds, but which gave him, he remembered as a chill warning, such a sense of order, of belonging to a community, of voices rising to gather in a choir of language and harmonious sound. His pen travelled over the paper of his notebooks, and inside the library and outside it seemed to be balanced, to be part of a divine and human order. He read the Venerable Bede, in those days. There was a romantic piety amongst his fellow-students about the great men who had worked, or died, or been buried, in this sacred place. Bede’s tomb, black and plain, stood in the Galilee Chapel. Haec sunt in fossa, Bedae venerabilis ossa. He read Bede’s image of the sparrow, flying from the dark into the lighted room, and out again into the night. He found it touching.
The voices sang, Adeodatus.
Given by God. He thought it meant himself, the gift of God, chosen to be a priest.
He discovered it was the name of St. Augustine’s dead son, dead at fifteen, with whom the saint had written the Dialogue of the Master. The man in the Cedar Mount hospital kept two heavily marked books under his bed. They were Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and St. Augustine’s Confessions. Both were interleaved with pages of his own writing. Both were, as he saw it, then and now, riddling messages addressed to him personally, ambivalently designated for his rescue and his perdition. Both had been recommended to him by his tutor and instructor, Dr. John Burgess, who liked to be known as Father Burgess.
This man had the charisma of Mr. Shepherd and Miss Manson, but more formidably, for his training had led him to be aware of it, to know how to use it, and most delicately to refrain from using it when necessary. He was dark and ascetic, buttoned into black clothes; he wore a wide-brimmed black hat, and had a neatly trimmed squared black beard. He sensed Josh Lamb’s trouble, without knowing anything of its cause, and set himself to finding out the
secrets of Lamb’s soul, by methods often quiet and negative, by not asking, by not insisting, by listening to every word. Now and then—sparsely, and therefore memorably—he would say definite things. “Men, like you, with an undeniable vocation ...” or “I know that your spiritual life is a strong current, with much turbulence.” Or “You will make a good priest. I have noticed that others confide in you, because you have a proper reticence, you keep confidences.”
Until Father Burgess said this, Josh Lamb had not supposed he was peculiarly favoured with the trust of others. It was true that one fellow-student had asked him to spend an evening listening to his doubts, and another, walking beside the River Weir, had laid his hand on Josh Lamb’s arm and asked whether nightly visions of the bodies of young men was in itself evil? It was true also that his fellow-supervisee, a cricket-player called Reggie Booth, read aloud to Josh Lamb his letters from his fiancée, a student in Reading, who took pleasure in recounting advances made by other men, and in making frantic attacks on the hypocrisy of the Church. Josh listened, and turned round all these problems in a clear vacant space that hung inside him, where he isolated them and imagined them through.
It was not “sympathy” he felt, since nothing in his body stirred in response to these problems, nothing in his single self put out a metaphorical finger to touch the hurt. He spoke truthfully from his absence to his interlocutors. He told the first that he must let himself hear his doubts, not stifle them, or they would become demons. He told the second that he must know the difference between real and imaginary young men. He threaded his way like an embroidery needle through the tangle of expostulation of the fiancée in Reading, “This bit says she is really worried,” “This bit is designed to hurt you . Don’t answer it.” How do you know? asked Reggie Booth. I simply listen to the feel of the words, said Josh Lamb.
But he was not going to bare his own soul for Father Burgess to listen to. It was swaddled and wadded from human prying. From somewhere inside his thick insulation he offered tantalising clues, or frantic fragments—he himself did not know which. He came back again and again to Abraham and Isaac. Why should a good God tempt his chosen servant to murder?
Father Burgess suggested he read Fear and Trembling, in which Kierkegaard examined the story of Abraham and Isaac, and presented the patriarch as the knight of Faith, to be praised not for his resignation to the will of God, but for the leap of complete trust, which in the ordinary human would come close to madness.
The pity the man in the hospital felt for the thigh of the fat boy which trembled as he stood and stared at the bed, was the same pity as he felt for the young student in the cathedral library who was writing his paper, Credo quia absurdum, to please Father Burgess. The student, because of his sparing eating habits, had become thin, though not broomstick-skeletal as he was later to be. (Lamb-Ramsden always had the uneasy capacity to see himself from outside, from some far place.)
Kierkegaard’s speaker recognises that faith and madness are close, like two sides of a membrane, the thin student wrote. He quoted “I can put up with everything, even if that demon, more horrifying than the skull and bones that put terror into men’s hearts—even if madness itself were to hold up the fool’s costume before my eyes and I could tell from its look that it was I who was to put it on; I can still save my soul so long as it is more important for me that my love of God should triumph in me than my worldly happiness ... But by my own strength I cannot get the least little thing of what belongs to finitude; for I am continually using up my energy to renounce everything.”
The thin young man, in a cautious ecstasy of understanding, explained in his paper, which he later read to a gathered audience, the difference according to Kierkegaard between the tragic hero, the knights of infinite resignation, and the knights of faith who, like Abraham, are content to rest, narrow-minded, trusting, on the mystery, ready equally to lose Isaac or to receive him back again.
He explained Kierkegaard’s horror at Abraham’s faith.
“He knows it is beautiful to be born as the particular with the universal as his home, his friendly abode, which receives him straight away with open arms when he wishes to stay there. But he also knows that higher up there winds a lonely path, narrow and steep; he knows it is terrible to be born in solitude outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveller. He knows very well where he is and how he is related to men. Humanly speaking he is insane and cannot make himself understood to anyone. And yet, “insane” is the mildest expression for him. If he isn’t viewed thus, he is a hypocrite, and the higher up the path he climbs, the more dreadful a hypocrite he becomes.”
The most daring thing about Fear and Trembling, the thin, white-haired young man said to his listeners, was the sudden likening of the knight of faith to the philistine bourgeois. This satisfied person “takes pleasure, takes part, in everything.” He looks just like a tax-gatherer. He minds his affairs. He goes to church as a matter of course and sings “lustily” for the pleasure of using his lungs. “In the afternoon he takes a walk in the woods. He delights in everything he sees, in the crowd of people, in the new omnibuses, in the seashore ...”
Consider, said Josh Lamb, who had lived more than half of his short life out in the whistling waste, how unusual in fact it is that a human being should look at the world with such pleasure, like God on the working-days of the Creation. And then consider Kierkegaard’s next cunning joke. He goes on describing this unpoetic, untragic, finite person.
“Towards evening he goes home, his step tireless as a postman’s. On the way it occurs to him that his wife will surely have some special little warm dish for his return, for example roast head of lamb with vegetables ... As it happens, he hasn’t a penny, and yet he firmly believes his wife has that delicacy waiting for him. If she has, to see him eat it would be a sight for superior people to envy and for plain folk to be inspired by, for his appetite is greater than Esau’s. If his wife doesn’t have the dish, curiously enough he is exactly the same.”
The young man paused, his hands held up, like the paintings of Cuthbert and Oswald in the cathedral, palms out to his hearers. As he remembered the fat thigh, so he now remembered, or thought he remembered, the almost-transparency of those bony hands. You could see red light around the fingers, between the webs. He felt pity for the raw knuckles. The young man, in his sermon, repeated the sentence. “If his wife doesn’t have the dish, curiously enough he is exactly the same.”
The cheerful bourgeois is to eat what. Roast lamb. Not only lamb, lamb’s head. How can this not recall the ram in the thicket who is the substitute for the slaughtered son, but might never have materialised at all? There is the banal tasty head-on-a-platter with vegetables, and there is a man salivating at the thought of eating it who is “exactly the same” if it doesn’t materialise.
Here is the mystery of this text, said Josh Lamb. The closeness of the unthinking cheerfulness to the unthinking, unanxious calm faith, which does not question and takes no thought for the morrow. Consider the lilies and the sparrows falling. It is appallingly difficult. Tragedy is easier, as Kierkegaard knew.
“The tragic hero, the darling of ethics, is a purely human being, and he is someone I can understand, someone all of whose undertakings are in the open. If I go further I always run up against the paradox, the divine and the demonic, for silence is both of these. It is the demon’s lure, and the more silent one keeps the more terrible the demon becomes; but silence is also divinity’s communion with the individual.”
And there the suddenly eloquent young man became silent himself. (E + loquor, speaking out of.) He was aware that he had caused a trembling in his hearers, that he had stirred them, that his words, and Kierkegaard’s, had lodged in their flesh and blood. Father Burgess said to him
“Well said. But always remember that one map of another man’s thought always runs the risk of becoming a string of shortcuts between arbitrary landmarks.”
He had not understood at the time. But later, he had realised
that “his” Kierkegaard was made up of the lamb’s head, the jester’s costume, the demons, the winding path. He tried to reread, to reremember. They went on destroying his memory. A man cannot even read well, whose memory functions intermittently only.
There was a time, long or short, when he believed he had faith. What a gap, in cold fact, between the verb, believed, in the quotidian world, and the gold girdle, faith, which shimmered and dissolved. He walked and walked, in the cathedral, along the river, touching the stones of the great pillars in an ecstasy of sensing that his faith was solid. He saw the Sanctuary knocker, on the North Door, with its bronze face of fiery beast or demon, and laughed aloud at the meaningful coincidence that he, Joshua, was here, where someone had built a stone hiding-place for those running for dear life from the avenger of blood, to whom respite could be given, and a way out.
He was writing a required essay on St. Augustine’s concept of the nature and origin of evil. Augustine believed that an infinitely good, infinitely powerful Father had made the universe, and that some flaw in human will, some terrible perversity in human desire, had let in the forces of darkness. The human will was infected. “There is indeed, some light in men; but let them walk fast, walk fast, lest the shadows come.” Augustine’s spirit inhabited “a limitless forest, full of unexpected dangers.” The saint was a man caught in the toils of the net of his own memory, to which he had imperfect access. “This memory of mine is a great force, a vertiginous mystery, my God, a hidden depth of infinite complexity; and this is my soul, and this is what I am. What then am I, my God? What is my true nature? A living thing, taking innumerable forms, quite limitless ... For there is in me a lamentable darkness ...” Habit, infected memory, make virtue impossible. Nevertheless, the all-powerful God knows who will have faith and who will not, who will ascend to heaven and who will burn eternally.
