Henry and Cato

by Iris Murdoch

‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t believe any more. It’s pretty crucial. Of course I don’t want to go. But I just don’t believe.’

  ‘What don’t you believe?’

  ‘I don’t believe in God the Father or God the Son.’

  ‘What about the other fellow?’

  ‘Without them he’s either non-existent or non-Christian.’

  Brendan laughed. His eyes were open now, but he continued in his relaxed position, his hands behind his head. ‘Well, let’s stick to them. What’s the absolutely radical central thing which you once believed and now think you don’t? What’s gone?’

  Cato reflected. What had gone? ‘The person. The person has gone. There’s no one there.’

  ‘Christ?’

  ‘A holy man. A marvellous religious symbol. But not God. Not the Redeemer. Not the kingpin of history. There is no kingpin, there is no redemption.’

  ‘It isn’t just the odiousness of Mother Church?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When did you last say Mass?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Well, let’s leave that for the moment. I wonder how you know what you believe and what you don’t believe. You were bound to have a crisis in your faith.’

  ‘I know. You saw it coming!’

  ‘I saw it coming. We all did.’

  ‘Bloody convert.’

  ‘Bloody convert. This sort of infantile disorder—’

  ‘Of course you think my faith was born in a drama and never recovered!’

  ‘How well you put it. Yes, it is something to be got over. You’ve been living on that drama. Now it’s simply exhausted. You were in love, you know.’

  ‘In love?’

  ‘With Him.’

  ‘Oh—Him—yes, I suppose I was. He invaded my life. Everything dissolved everything fell. Oh God, Brendan, I’m so bloody unhappy.’ Cato had not intended to say this. The sudden turn of the conversation confused him. He saw the face of Christ as he was accustomed to picture it. Then the face of Beautiful Joe.

  ‘What about that boy?’ said Brendan.

  ‘You’re telepathic.’

  ‘I’m just trying to see the context.’

  ‘There isn’t a context.’

  ‘There must be a context. Your doubts and your speculations live in time. They’re not metaphysical entities hanging in the void.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting it’s all caused by—’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just fishing around.’

  ‘If you think my motives—’

  ‘Oh, hang your motives—any theory you have about your motives is likely to be humbug anyway.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t interested in the boy.’

  ‘I was, I am.’

  ‘Well what can I tell you. I love this child, I’m mad about him, I can’t think about anything else.’

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Cato. ‘No, I don’t think so. Did he know?’

  ‘You haven’t, then, grabbed him or anything?’

  ‘Grabbed him? No, of course not!’

  ‘I was just asking. But you have high-minded emotional conversations about his future and so on?’

  ‘Well—yes—’

  ‘Constructive?’

  ‘Not very. But I just can’t stop seeing him. It’s as if . . . there isn’t any love … anywhere else …’

  ‘I understand that.’

  ‘But, Brendan, don’t get this wrong. My doubts, the way it’s all—gone blank and gone dead—that was happening before. It’s nothing to do with Joe.’

  ‘O.K. Let’s leave the boy. You say you feel now there’s no one there. Is this a sense of dereliction or an intellectual conclusion or—’

  ‘There is an intellectual conclusion. There must be.’

  ‘Why must there be?’

  ‘Because I’m an intellectual being. And because it’s a matter of truth. If Christ be not risen then is our faith vain. I mean, it’s either A or not-A.’

  ‘Of course you are an Aristotelian. Aristotle was the beginning of the end. We’ve had to spend all the time until now undoing the damage.’

  ‘I’m not a philosopher,’ said Cato impatiently. ‘And I’m not a Buddhist either, like Reggie Poole! I accept that Christ is the stumbling block and I stumble.’

  ‘We all stumble.’

  ‘And please, Brendan, don’t do that old thing of trying to persuade me that faith is doubt and doubt is faith and where faith ends faith begins and so on! I know all that.’

  ‘Don’t be so peevish, my dear. I’m simply trying to see where you are. The priesthood is a long job. It’s a marriage. One doesn’t rush out instantly when things are dull and the rewards fail.’

  ‘I’m not doing that! It’s a matter of truth, I tell you!’

  ‘Truth is very complex here,’ said Brendan. He swung his legs off the sofa and sat up, looking at Cato with his blue eyes which showed their colour even in the dim room.

  ‘When people start saying truth is complex they are usually starting to tell lies. The dogma—’

  ‘There are worlds and worlds beyond the dogma.’

  ‘How far can Christianity go beyond the dogma and still remain a religion?’

  ‘As far as the human soul extends.’

  ‘That’s no answer. Anyway, for you there’s no problem. You swim inside the dogma like a fish in water and have done ever since you could talk!’

  ‘Wait a moment, and don’t get cross with me. You say that Christ invaded your life.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something happened.’

  ‘Yes. Now you will say it was all emotion—’

  ‘It seems to me that’s what you’re saying. Something happened. All right. But shouldn’t you let it go on happening? Christ isn’t a sort of once-and-for-all pill that you take. He’s a principle of change in human life. And a human life takes a good deal of changing. “Not I but Christ!” Your complaints seem to be all I and no Christ.’

  ‘I’m not complaining.’

  ‘You said you were unhappy.’

  ‘We’re not meeting. You’re saying let Christ work and I’m saying there is no Christ.’

  ‘I think you should wait. Inhibit this state of certainty. And pray.’

  ‘I can’t pray. I try to, but it’s a lie, a level of myself that’s a lie.’

  ‘Pray all the same. Damn it, you’re a priest not a schoolgirl.’

  ‘You speak of efficacy. I speak of truth. No meeting.’

  ‘Being a priest, being a Christian, is a long long task of unselfing. You are just at the very beginning, Cato, you are now meeting the very first real difficulties. You dress these difficulties up in a certain terminology. I think you should wait a while and consider whether this is the right terminology.’

  Cato was silent. He sat down opposite Brendan, staring at him.

  ‘I am not saying,’ Brendan went on, ‘that you are necessarily wrong in wanting to leave the priesthood. I am saying that you should wait. The spiritual life is a long strange business and you’ve got to be quiet and docile enough to go on learning. You’re doing the strong man wrestling act, you’re still at the heroic stage, you want to do everything yourself. And now that you’ve got an inkling of what’s really involved you’re appalled, or the ego in you is appalled. It’s like a death sentence. It is a death sentence. Not pain, not mortification, but death. That’s what chills you. That’s what you experience when you say there is no one there. Up till now you have seen Christ as a reflection of yourself. It has been a comfortable arrangement.’

  ‘Really—!’

  ‘You are in a dream state. Ordinary human consciousness is a tissue of illusion. Our chief illusion is our conception of ourselves, of our importance which must not be violated, our dignity which must not be mocked. All our resentment flows from this illusion, all our desire to do violence, to avenge insults, to assert ourselves. We are all mocked, Christ was mocked, nothing can be more important than tha
t. We are absurdities, comic characters in the dream of life, and this is true even if we die in a concentration camp, even if we die upon the cross. But in reality there are no insults because there is nobody to be insulted. And when you say “there is no one there” perhaps you are upon the brink of an important truth.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Cato.

  ‘You say there is no one there but the point to be grasped is that there is no one here. You say the person is gone. But is not the removal of the person just what your own discipline as a priest has always been aiming at?’

  ‘Well—the human person—’

  ‘And if the human person is the image of the divine?’

  ‘This is philosophy!’

  ‘It’s theology, my dear fellow. And you were boasting just now about being an intellectual.’

  ‘I can’t think—’ said Cato, covering his face with his hands.

  ‘Don’t try to for a while. I’m not saying anything very odd. Humility is what matters, humility is the key. All this connects with things you were told when you were an ordinand.’

  ‘Oh if only I could get back there.’

  ‘When it was all so simple. It will be simple again later.’

  ‘Truth must be simple. You’re muddling me with all this talk of illusion. Of course a lot of our goals are illusory goals, illusory goods. But I am not all illusion and I have to judge as best I can with what is best in me.’

  ‘Not I but Christ.’

  ‘That begs the whole question! Some of the things I do are real—loving people for example.’

  ‘Loving people,’ said Brendan, ‘is often the most illusory thing of all.’

  Cato was silent again.

  ‘We’re tired,’ said Brendan. ‘Let’s sleep on it. Come on. Bed.’

  Cato said, ‘Have you told them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you will now?’

  ‘Maybe. Probably.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘And Cato—’

  ‘Yes?’

  They had risen and were standing by the door.

  ‘I’ve got one other piece of advice for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stop seeing that boy.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Cato. He gripped the edge of the door. ‘I can’t abandon him—’

  ‘You mean you can’t surrender this pleasure. Are you doing him good? Is he doing you good?’

  ‘I’m the only person who can save him.’

  ‘I doubt that. There is hope for him of which you do not dream, because you insist that you and only you must be the vehicle. Let someone else have a try. Give this to God. Make a hole in your world, you may see something through it.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Give him up absolutely. Don’t see him any more at all. You know this is good advice, you know I’m not just being—’

  ‘Yes, I know. But I can’t.’

  ‘Write to him if you like. But don’t see him again. Then go into retreat. I won’t say anything.’

  ‘Brendan, I can’t.’

  ‘You talk about truth—but it seems to me you are being totally frivolous and self-indulgent. It’s a dream, Cato, you are only saving him in a dream. In reality—’

  ‘Stop,’ said Cato. He pushed out of the room and without saying anything more went into his own bedroom and shut the door. He expected Brendan to follow him but Brendan did not and could be heard a moment later going into the bathroom, then into his own bedroom.

  Cato sat for a while on his bed beside his half unpacked suitcase. He thought, Brendan is praying for me. Can I not pray for myself? He did not kneel, but closed his eyes and in the darkness called out silently, as he had done when he was younger. And he gazed into the darkness and the darkness was not dead but terribly alive, seething and boiling with life. And in the midst of it all he saw, smiling at him, the radiant face of Beautiful Joe. This is love, thought Cato, and it is not an illusion and I must be faithful to it and undergo it. And everything to do with his belief and his faith seemed to him at that moment flimsy and boiled and seethed up in this darkness which was his love for Beautiful Joe; and he felt himself confronted with an ineluctable choice between an evident truth and a fable. He opened his eyes and saw the bed, still tousled from his afternoon sleep, and his suitcase with his crucifix lying there on the top. Cato took the crucifix and laid it on the pillow, as he had done on the previous night after Joe had taken it down from the wall and handed it to him, and he recalled the feeling of joy which had come to him then. Why did I feel joy then, he wondered. Was it because of Him, because of some moment of divine tenderness when love was suddenly innocent? Or was it because, somehow, confidently, I knew that I would not lose Joe, that I could not lose him, that I had to stay with him and love him, and that everything, Christ Himself, was as nothing, mattered not a straw, compared with that certainty and that future? The joy of yesterday had been quiet, veiled. But now a fiercer joy, a flood, a fire, composed of fear and yet consuming fear, rose up inside him so that he gasped. There is no other path, thought Cato. And if this is what destroys me, then so be it. All is one, there are not two problems, only one. And if there is God He is on the other side of this.

  He quietly repacked his suitcase, leaving the crucifix lying on the pillow. Then, after having listened for a while to the silence of the house, he rose, put on his coat, and very quietly opened his door and emerged into the hall.

  Brendan, in his dressing-gown, was sitting on a chair beside the front door. He looked very tired.

  ‘I thought you might try and bolt.’

  ‘You don’t imagine you can stop me?’

  ‘You’re a bloody nuisance. I’ve got a class on the Timaeus at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Well, this morning. It’s three.’

  ‘I’m sorry, go to bed then.’

  ‘Don’t go, Cato. It’s important that you shouldn’t go. I said everything wrong. I was tired. I should have waited. Nothing I said matters, not the details I mean. Maybe I’m wrong about the boy, I don’t know enough, maybe everything I said was phoney. But don’t go away from this. Wait, stay, rest. Forget about retreats. I won’t say anything to anyone. Just stay here.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m being selfish. I just want you to be here. Not somewhere else.’

  ‘You think I’m going off to some sort of perdition?’

  ‘Nothing so dramatic. Please stay here. So that I can sleep. Because of my class on Plato. Because I’m a priest, and because you’re a priest. Because of anything.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Cato. ‘I’m very sorry.’ He opened the front door. They looked at each other. Cato said again, ‘I’m sorry.’

  He went away down the stairs and heard the door close softly behind him.

  It took him forty minutes to walk back to the Mission.

  Henry was standing on the terrace. Sunlight and shadow were moving steadily across the slope below the big trees, making it seem rather like Francis Towne’s picture. Up above a sky of cold brilliant blue was striped with moving layers of café-au-lait clouds. The sun was now touching the light grey tower of Dimmerstone church, visible over the woodland trees. The sun was lighting up the tops of the trees and picking out each tree individually. Dimmerstone tower glowed, then was extinguished. On a clear day it was possible, from beside the obelisk, to see both Dimmerstone and the slim spire of Laxlinden church. A damp cold east wind was blowing. Henry had his overcoat on.

  Henry’s mind was in a gay wild turmoil. He felt as if he were seated on the sail of windmill, rising and falling, gazing about him, strongly and rhythmically carried, conveyed. He had not intended what had so beautifully happened with Stephanie. Or had he intended it? It was hard to say. He knew that, as far as it lay in him to do so, he had come to her humbly, honestly, willing her good, determined not to take advantage of the strange relationship in which he stood to her. Had he taken advantage of it? With a kind of glee he went over and over the events of those preci
ous hours in his mind. What had happened was extraordinary, wonderful. And really, he felt, it simply could not not have happened. Never had love-making been, for Henry, so inevitable and so perfect. And so silent. It occurred to Henry that all his previous mistresses had been Americans, and they had never stopped talking. Especially Bella. Going to bed had been accompanied by a ceaseless running commentary, a stream of jokes. In a way Henry had liked this, though he sometimes had an uneasy feeling that it was designed to reassure him. Before, he had always felt, even with the youngest of the bright young things, that he was the junior partner. They were all so experienced and competent and efficient. They set the pace. Bella even called him ‘Junior’. But with Stephanie he had felt, had perfectly been made to feel, that the world surrendered to his will.

  Of course Stephanie too was ‘experienced’. Whatever had it been like for her with all those men? He thought, with a strangely satisfying pity, of her life as a victim. No wonder she did not talk. He felt, when he thought of her, which he now did nearly all the time, a warm frenzy of compassion, a desire to hold her, to protect her, to save her. When he had said to her with such sincerity ‘There is no earthly reason why you should not meet my mother’ he had felt the pattern of their relationship obscurely change, as if everything were being quietly lifted to a higher level. No, he had not taken advantage of her. He had been right to put off seeing her, to reflect seriously, to attempt to be worthy of what he had discerned as a prime responsibility. He had not failed the test and this made him now stronger, more able, more free, for the next business of his life. He felt intense gratitude to Stephanie. He felt happily securely obsessed. He did not exactly feel himself, as yet, in love with her, but he conceived that he loved her in a pure way and that was new to him.

  The love-making had been good. She had been, with him, curiously awkward, and that had touched his heart. Perhaps a prostitute, not used to tenderness, would be awkward? It had not occurred to him before. He wondered what it had been like with Sandy, and at first the mere idea was horrible. But, with an odd sense of duty, he kept his attention upon it, determined not to be appalled; and gradually this too was transformed for him by the power of transformation which seemed to be emanating from this woman. And Henry felt gentle, humble. He pitied her, he pitied Sandy. He felt that they, and he, were all of them victims together, all of them somehow shifted, separated, juxtaposed by the necessary movements of a relentless fate. And this thought comforted him much.