City of God (13 page)

Of course the tailor's experience was not exceptional in any way, but years later, when I considered the act that brought about his death, I concluded that while anyone could be driven to the point of forswearing life, in cases like Srebnitsky's it was not the simple desire to die, it was the desire for self-transcendence which once realized brings one to the end of life. That is something different, not the same thing at all. And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

—Pem's Remarks to the Bishop's Examiners

Burkert, perhaps our pre-eminent scholar of ancient religions—do you know his work? He investigates the origins of the sacred, itself a heretical pursuit. He gives us the picture of the lizard who leaves his tail in the mouth of the predator. The fox who chews off his foot to escape the trap. You ask what that has to do with God. In that programmed biological response is the idea of the sacrifice. You give up a part to save the whole. Ancient myths abound in which human beings flee monsters and escape only by sacrificing pieces of themselves to divert or slow down the pursuit. Orestes gives up a finger,
and so does Odysseus. Finger sacrifice was very big in ancient Greece. But for the most part, over time the sacrifices have been ritualized, symbolized. You no longer mutilate yourself, you leave a ring on the altar in lieu of your finger. You slaughter a lamb. You leave a scapegoat in the desert. But when the fate of a community is involved, one man is chosen to jump into the abyss so that it will not swallow the community. One virgin is given to the bottomless lake. One person on the sled is thrown to the pursuing wolves. Jonah is thrown into the sea to save the ship and its crew. And just as the herd grazes in safety for a time after the lions cut one of them out and devour him, so does humanity feel safer from the nameless formless terrors if one of their number is sacrificed, if for the sake of all one must pay as the part for the whole, as the fox's foot is left in the trap.

Think about it. We are talking the intellectual's talk. We are finding the possible biological origin of the sacred, of what is most holy to us, our grand figuration of the incarnate God who dies over and over, from one Sunday to the next, so that the rest of us may find salvation.

Is all of this irrelevant?. . .

Pagels, working from the scrolls discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, finds that the early Christians were profoundly divided between those who proposed a church according to apostolic succession based on a literal interpretation of Jesus' resurrection and those who rejected resurrection except as a spiritual metaphor for gnosis emotionally, mystically achieved, as knowledge beyond ordinary knowledge, a perception beneath or above the everyday truth.. . . So there was a power struggle. Gnostic and synoptic contested with competing gospels. The gnostics, who said no church was needed, no priest, no episcopate, were routed, inevitably, having no organization, given their views. While the institutionalist Christians were understandably concerned that their persecuted sect needed a network to survive, with rules of order and common strategies for survival, the concept of martyrdom, for example, being created to make something positive from their terrible persecution, it is also true that the struggle for Jesus was a struggle for power, that the idea of an actual resurrection, which the institutionalists put forth and the gnostics ridiculed, provided authority for church office, and that the struggle to define Jesus and canonize his words, or interpretations of his words by others, was pure politics, as passionate or worshipful as it may have been, and that with
the desire to perpetuate the authority of Jesus continuing in the Reformation and the creation of Protestant sects, in which a kind of residual gnosis was being proposed in protest against the sacramental accumulations of a churchly bureaucracy, what is now Christianity, with all the resonance that it has as a belief and a rich and complex culture, is a political creation with a political history. It was a politically triumphant Jesus created from the conflicts of early Christianity, and it has been a political Jesus ever since, from the time of the emperor Constantine's conversion in the fourth century through the long history of European Christianity, as we consider the history of the Catholic Church, its Crusades, its Inquisition, its contests and/or alliances with kings and emperors, and with the rise of the Reformation, the history of Christianity's active participation, in all its forms, in the wars among states and the rule of populations. It is the story of power. . .

I'm sorry. You have questions for me and here I've been running on about these elemental things you well know. But I'm beginning to feel their weight. The higher criticism has gone on now for a hundred and fifty years. We must look again at what is staring us in the face. Our difference is in how we value these. . . distractions of the intellect. You regard them as irrelevant. I wish you saw them as a challenge. Our tradition has great latitude. What unifies us is the sacraments, but there is division among us when it comes to doctrinal issues and I think we must acknowledge that. All these miracles we affirm are a burden to me. Yet I think of myself as a good Christian. This is a profession of faith. I hope you will not use it to expunge from the ranks someone of my generation who you feel has brought the 1960s along with him. Thank you.

—The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

STAR DUST

Sometimes I wonder why

I spend the lonely night

dreaming of a song?

The melody haunts my reverie,

And I am once again with you

When our love was new,

and each kiss an inspiration,

But that was long ago: now my consolation

is in the stardust of a song.

Beside a garden wall, when stars are bright,

you are in my arms

The nightingale tells his fairy tale

of paradise, where roses grew.

Tho' I dream in vain

In my heart it will remain:

My stardust melody,

The memory of love's refrain.

The singer asks why he is wasting his nights longing for his lost love

Whom he dreams of as a song. Of course he knows why—

He is obsessed, he can't help himself he is in a mawkish self-pitying frame of mind.

She must have shone for him like a star if the song he hears is no more than its dust.

How peculiar to invoke in the name of lost love the cinderous products of a nuclear conflagration.

This is his problem, his metaphorical desperation.

One wonders at his sentimentality

—to have even pretended he was in paradise, the Garden of Eden

where everything lasted forever and the roses never stopped blooming

and his sweetheart sang duets in the evening

with a perching bird cherished by Chinese royalty—

As if no ancestor of his ever ate the fruit from the famous tree,

As if love were eternal, life death-free.

(
weak applause
)

If what you're singing to yourself is not a song

but the dream of what a song should be,

Of course it's all wrong,

The song breaks down as dreams do

And everything you thought you knew is gone

Each note a lamentation.

That's the real problem of the heart:

The mind's in disarray

and night and day can't be told apart.

As if God in consternation has set the world back to its start.

And where the lover stands in all of this as dream, as song, it surely is no Garden.

There is lightning, there is rain,

celestial fires, worlds in collision

And the song of love's recision

is the music of the spheres.

(
indifferent applause
)

What's worst of all is when he's alone in the night but she's there, she hasn't gone.

He recalls the time they were one

Which is the only paradise we can presume to try for

Though of short duration

lasting not as long as a rose in bloom.

So now they're not in the Garden anymore

Like he was the only boy in the world and she was the only girl

but sitting in opposite chairs in the living room

And maybe he's reading the paper or pretending to

and she has a book or a Bible

and between them they have nothing to say to each other

Except to try to coordinate their doctors' appointments.

If he took her in his arms now

She would flinch and pull away

Totally flustered by this bizarre behavior

And perhaps in his reverie he gazes out the window

And sees some lovely slender young girls passing by

and thinks in the words of the poet,

“Once I knew one lovelier than any of you.”

Which is not much consolation.

No more than the sight

of the stars of night

which shine big and brightly enough

but are dying embers

in the ashes of his lethargy.

(
very scattered applause
)

We sing the blues, Make up words
To imitate
The singing birds

In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd
She's not in his arms,
They're looking for God

A nightful of stars,
Is turned to dust
And here I am,
In Paradise lost.

—The singer dreams up a song

—each note a lamentation

—as we sit in our living room chairs

—here in Paradise lost.

Sometimes I wonder why

I spend the lonely night

dreaming of a song?

The melody haunts my reverie,

And I am once again with you

When our love was new,

and each kiss an inspiration. . .

(
grateful applause
)

—One morning in the winter, just minutes after Srebnitsky had sewn the military insignia on the shoulders and the piping on the lapels, a car pulled up by the front door and the S.S. officer who'd commissioned the work arrived. It was S.S. Major Schmitz, the commandant and executive of all terror. I ran into the back room and slipped out the door. This enterprise of the tailor's had bothered me from the beginning, because it violated the rule to remain anonymous as possible, to do nothing to stand out. If his skill with the needle had made him useful and kept him, and me, alive, it also raised the possibility of death. The logic of our wretched circumstances ensured that there was no simple proposition that did not contain its opposite.

I positioned myself by the vegetable garden fence some distance down the block. It was a cold, cloudy morning. In the drabness of winter and amid the shabby dwellings of this street, with wisps of smoke coming from the chimneys, the commandant's staff car stood out, the awesome luxury of another world. It was a black Mercedes sedan with a squarish cab and a long, low-slung engine hood with a chrome radiator grille for a prow. It had huge silver headlights. It shone brilliantly, apparently untouched by slush and snow and soot. The driver occupied himself by going around with a rag and rubbing away the most recent affronts. I knew from the way he glanced at me that I could come as close as I wished, so that I, a Jew boy, could see what German civilization was capable of, the glory of this machine, and the casual magnificence of its driver. He wore the enlisted man's S.S. uniform with a holstered pistol.