The Towers of Trebizond (27 page)

The Article about the fall from righteousness was really St. Augustine's fault. St. Paul got the idea from somewhere, no one seems quite to know where, but it was not from Genesis, which does not mention that Adam and Eve were ever righteous, and in point of fact they were not, and it was not from the Gospels, as Christ made no reference at all to the affair. Augustine took it up and nailed it on to the Church, as he did Predestination and Election, which come in Article 17, but only very neutrally, and not as Augustine would have wished, for, though the first half of the Article says how nice this doctrine of election is for the elect, and how much it elevates and improves them, it does not recommend it to the reprobate, because for curious and carnal persons to have continually before their eyes the sentence of Goďs Predestination is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them down either into desperation or into wretchedness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation. So, though this doctrine makes the good better, it makes the bad worse, and, as there are always more of the bad than of the good, it does not break even, but does more harm than good, and on the whole Article 17 does not seem to advise it. This Article ends very sensibly, saying that we must all follow the will of God in our doings, and washing its hands of election and reprobation, which the translators must have seen looked pretty silly in English and in print, so there is really not much harm in Article 17, though it does not seem to mean anything in particular, and any one except Calvinists would feel rather foolish saying it; as Sir Thomas Browne said, that terrible term Predestination hath troubled so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain. But St. Augustine, being so intellectual and dominating, managed to put it across in a large way, and got the better of Pelagius, who was right, but much less intellectual and dominating, not being Carthaginian but only Welsh, and later Aquinas, who was intellectual and dominating too, took it up and spread it about, and Duns Scotus, who was Semi-Pelagian, never had so much influence as he did, so that, owing to all this, Predestination, in spite of being the sort of idea really only suitable for lunatics (who have often had it, and it has made them worse, like poor Cowper) took a firm hold on the Christian religion, and was always waiting like a wild jungle animal to spring on this or that schoolman or divine and drive them mad. It sprang powerfully on Zwingli and on Calvin. Erasmus and Colet and More hated it, and if they had been allowed to go on with their reforming of the Church, and if this reforming had not instead fallen into the hands of Augustinians, it would have been quite a different reformation, and very much better, and both Protestants and Catholics would have a better Church now, one they had reformed between them. But the Augustinians were got down in the end, and the Arminians and the Pelagians, or perhaps they are Semi-Pelagians, now have it all their own way, and it is the Predestinators not the Pelagians who, as it says in the 9th Article, do vainly talk.

"But there are plenty
of
them," said the Roman Catholic, who meets them on account of going to Scotland and sometimes Wales for fishing purposes. "They are by no means an extinct species. They flourish on Celtic mountains, like wild goats."

"But not now in my Church or yours," I said. "So we ought not to keep that article about them, because articles about dissenters ought not to be bound up with the Church of England Prayer Book. Nor the one saying that the Athanasian Creed can be proved by Scripture. My aunt Dot, who is the most devout Anglican, always sits down when they say the Athanasian Creed, because of hell fire and without doubt perishing everlastingly on account of not thus thinking of the Trinity."

The Roman Catholic, who was a very thoughtful, truthful man, considered for a moment, then said that he could thus think, and every one applauded him, in the way we applaud Roman Catholics, because they can thus think about so many things, and it is a great feat.

I said, "So can aunt Dot," in order to keep up the Anglican end, but I did not actually know whether aunt Dot could or not.

"Well," said one of our hosts, who is not a religious man, "these Churches are really the most extraordinary contraptions. Where did they
get
it all from? I mean, the way they've built it all up, tier on tier, pinnacle on pinnacle, without any apparent relation to its base? Of course it's a wonderful artifact, and very magnificent, but what's it all
about
?
"

The Roman Catholic and I started to explain the relation of the edifice to its base, which always does need some explaining. After all, I said, the Christian Church is the tabernacle and shrine of a God, as the pre-Christian temples had been shrines of gods, and these tabernacles and shrines have always been as elaborate and imposing and highly organized as their builders could make them, and have had hierarchies of priests and prophets and rulers to preside and to mediate with the gods. Look at Delphi, I said, and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. People don't want to worship God in a barn with no liturgy and no rites, unless they are Quakers. So of course the Christian Church, once it had got out of the catacombs, grew and grew till it towered like a Christmas tree, hung with glittering things and shining lights, because it is the shrine of a God, and all its walls and doors and roofs were carved and sculptured and painted and mosaicked, because human beings are artists, and like to build their shrines like that. That is partly what draws people to the shrine; then, once in it, they discover what it is all about. But of course if you like, I said, you can have it penny plain and no nonsense, as the predestinating Calvinists in the Celtic mountains do. Their rites are probably more like what the apostles did.

"They have such ghastly hymns," the Roman Catholic said. "The words, I mean. I saw one of their hymn books once."

I said, "All churches have a lot of ghastly hymns. Mine has; yours has. Most people have ghastly taste, and always have written bad religious verses and painted bad religious pictures, and had tiresome thoughts about religion. That doesn't interfere with the structure. Nor does the nonsense people talk about it. Nor does all the quarrelling and the wickedness, and the frightful damned things the Church has done since it got power to do them. Human beings have always done frightful damned things. But they are improving, and so is the Church. It's working its way through."

"Well, through to what exactly? I mean, to what more than all the well-meaning people outside it are working their way to?"

I said, "Oh, it's so obvious," but I thought they had better work it out for themselves, as I couldn't begin on it.

The Roman Catholic thought it was time he took a hand, so he said that the point about the Church was that it was a supernatural body, not man-made. He looked polite and reserved, and we could see that he was referring to his own Church, which he knew was the only Catholic part of the Christian Church, and he was remembering that no other Church has priests or orders or sacraments or Mass, or could rate as supernatural in any at all high-grade way. I did not start to argue about this, as I did not want to vex him or tire myself or bore the others, and the Pope had said once for all that Anglicans do not have orders, so for him it could not be an open question, and it vexed him to know that Anglicans even thought they had such things, which were quite above their station. I once heard an argument between him and aunt Dot on this matter, and it lasted quite a long time, though both are by nature eirenical, but they did not get anywhere, though they each thought they had won. Aunt Dot ended by saying that even if we had no altars and no Blessed Sacrament on them, it would be only polite of outsiders to bow to where we thought we had them, especially at requiem and nuptial Masses, also to join in the Creed and the Lord's Prayer at christenings instead of shutting the mouth tight as if afraid of infection, which looked so unchristian and stuck up.

"I suppose," said aunt Dot, "you would walk into a mosque with your shoes on," which was not really fair, as Roman Catholics do take off their hats in Anglican churches, and even, I think, in dissenting ones.

"And I suppose
you
," said the Roman Catholic, "would, if you had been an early Christian, have offered a pinch of incense to Diana, out of politeness to the pagans."

So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancour.

Anyhow, I did not take up the question of the Anglican Church with this papist now, but while he was talking I thought how the Church was meant to be a shrine of the decencies, of friendship, integrity, love, of the poetry of conduct, of the flickering, guttering candles of conscience. And, above all this, it seems to be playing some tremendous symphony; the music drifts singing about the arches and vaults, only faintly and partly apprehended by us, the ignorant armies that clash by night in perpetual assault and rout, defeated by the very nature of their unending war, for ever on the run, for ever returning to the charge, then on the run again, like the surging of the waves of the sea.

Then I thought, the Church is like a great empire on its way out, that holds its subjects by poetic force, its fantastic beauty heightened by insecurity; one sees it at times like a Desiderio fantasy of pinnacles and towers, luminous with unearthly light, rocking on their foundations as if about to crash ruining in decadence and disaster into the dark sea that steals up, already lapping and whispering at the marble quays. Yet, though for ever reeling, the towers do not fall: they seem held in some strong enchantment, some luminous spell, fixed for ever in the imagination, the gleaming, infrangible, so improbable as to be all but impossible, walled kingdom of the infrangible God.

Such to me, I thought, is the Christian Church. The fact that at present I cannot find my way into it does not lessen, but rather heightens, its spell; a magic castle, it changes down the ages its protean form, but on its battlements the
splendor lucis aeternae
inextinguishably down all the ages lies.

When I had done thinking all this, and the Roman Catholic had done his piece about his Church, we all felt that we had had the Church, and we passed on to the affairs of the people we knew, who were, as usual, behaving in a great number of strange ways. Some of them had lately returned from Turkey or the Levant, as I had, and some had been there last year or the year before that and had had time to get on with their travel books, which were now cheeping and chipping at the shell, almost ready to hatch out. There was a little friction because some of the ones about the same part of Turkey, or the same bit of the Levant, seemed likely to hatch round about the same week or month, and authors do not like this, though it may be a good thing, as it shows they are in the fashion; you get a Cilician season, or an Ionian season, or a month when the books about Istanbul or the Lebanon or the Dead Sea hatch out, and they have a modish air, like fashions in clothes, but still it annoys authors, though reviewers rather like it, as they can get several books, or anyhow two, into one article, and make invidious comparisons between them, which pleases one author but vexes another, or several others. "Mr. So and So's is the best of this Cilician batch," they will say; or "It is a far cry from Mr. Flatfoot's rather pedestrian description of the Syrian scene to the fireworks of Mr. Pyrotechnic," and they find it is easier to utter this far cry than merely to plod with Mr. Flatfoot about the Syrian sands of which they know so little themselves.

So there is always some intriguing and arrangement and protesting between authors and their various publishers in the matter of publication dates, but it is not always successful. The only safe thing for travel writers to do would be to invent some remote piece of some remote country, very inaccessible and expensive, and people it with Bedouins of the forbidding, old-world breed, and with various discouraging animals, and travel all about it alone and write one of those questionable travelogues like Plato's on Atlantis, and Sir John Mandeville's, and some of the bits in Marco Polo, and others about the Polar regions and darkest Africa, and many more. Then there would be nothing else on the same subject till at least a year later, when people had got round to thinking they had gone there themselves. Some reviewers would think this at once, and would write learned criticisms and corrections and say how nostalgic for this fascinating country, which they had seen from the air during the war, Mr——'s vivid account made them feel. Others might review it more sceptically, as the Greeks used to review the travelogues of Pytheas, that great Marseilles liar (which were actually much more accurate than they thought), but at least it would be the only book on that bit of country and there would be no rivals. This Sunday evening conversation then took an unfortunate turn, for David's articles, of which one had appeared in the paper that morning, were mentioned. How had David, someone said, come to write so well, never having done so before? It must have been Charles's influence, and indeed he had taken to writing very like Charles, almost as if poor Charles's spirit had passed into him after Charles had been devoured by the shark.

"You saw something of him in Turkey, Laurie, didn't you?" someone said, and I said, "Yes, quite a bit. I saw Charles too."

"Both telling you the story of their quarrel, no doubt. What was Charles's?"

"Oh, it's too difficult. I was half asleep in a café garden in Çanak, and didn't follow. You know what they both are—were.
All
their rows were complicated."

"All rows are. Well, did you ask David why he had taken to writing like Charles?"

"No. I knew. Charles's spirit had passed into him. He had all Charles's papers, and he thought, why shouldn't he use them?" I had been drinking rather too much, and spoke under the influence.

"Use them? Oh, as a model, you mean. Well, he certainly did. But what's he going to do with Charles's own stuff, if he has it?"