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– My vocation is enquiry and action, not literature.
– You’re sadly inexperienced. You cannot conceive the age I lived in, its customs, or judge of that African sun.
– The heat, hah? I’ve read a lot about the Eskimoes. The poor bastards are perished throughout their lives, covered with chilblains and icicles but when they catch a seal – ah, good luck to them! They make warm clothes out of the hide, perform gluttonly feats with the meat and then bring the oil home to the igloo where they light lamps and stoves. Then the fun begins. Nanook of the North is certainly partial to his nookie.
– I reprobate concupiscence, whether fortuitous or contrived.
– You do now, you post-gnostic! You must have a red face to recall your earlier nasty gymnastiness, considering you’re now a Father of the Church.
– Rubbish. I invented obscene feats out of bravado, lest I be thought innocent or cowardly. I walked the streets of Babylon with low companions, sweating from the fires of lust. When I was in Carthage I carried about with me a cauldron of unrealized debauchery. God in his majesty was tempting me. But Book Two of my Confessions is all shocking exaggeration. I lived within my rough time. And I kept the faith, unlike a lot more of my people in Algeria who are now Arab nincompoops and slaves of Islam.
– Look at all the time you squandered in the maw of your sexual fantasies which otherwise could have been devoted to Scriptural studies. Lolling loathsome libertine!
– I was weak at the time but I find your condescension offensive. You talk of the Fathers. How about that ante-Nicene thoolera-mawn, Origen of Alexandria? What did he do when he found that lusting after women distracted him from his sacred scrive-nery? I’ll tell you. He stood up, hurried out to the kitchen, grabbed a carving knife and – pwitch! – in one swipe deprived himself of his personality! Ah?
– Yes. Let us call it heroic impetuosity.
– How could Origen be the Father of Anything and he with no knackers on him? Answer me that one.
– We must assume that his spiritual testicles remained intact. Do you know him?
– I can’t say I ever met him in our place.
– But, dammit is he there? Don’t you know everything?
– I do not. I can, but the first wisdom is sometimes not to know. I suppose I could ask the Polyarch.
– Who on earth is the Polyarch?
– He’s not on earth, and again I don’t know. I think he’s Christ’s Vicar in Heaven.
– Are there any other strange denizens?
– Far too many if you ask me. Look at that gobhawk they call Francis Xavier. Hobnobbing and womanizing in the slums of Paris with Calvin and Ignatius Loyola in warrens full of rats, vermin, sycophants, and syphilis. Xavier was a great travelling man, messing about in Ethiopia and Japan, consorting with Buddhist monkeys and planning to convert China single-handed. And Loyola? You talk about me but a lot of that chap’s early saintliness was next to bedliness. He made himself the field-marshal of a holy army of mendicants but maybe merchandizers would be more like it. Didn’t Pope Clement XIV suppress the Order for its addiction to commerce, and for political wire-pulling? Jesuits are the wiliest, cutest and most mendacious ruffians who ever lay in wait for simple Christians. The Inquisition was on the track of Ignatius. Did you know that? Pity they didn’t get him. But one party who wouldn’t hear of the Pope’s Brief of Suppression was the Empress of Rooshia. Look at that now!
– Interesting that your father’s name was Patrick. Is he a saint?
– That reminds me. You have a Professor Binchy in your university outfit in Dublin and that poor man has been writing and preaching since he was a boy that the story about Saint Patrick is all wrong and that there were really two Saint Patricks. Binchy has his hash and parsley.
– Why?
– Two Saint Patricks? We have four of the buggers in our place and they’d make you sick with their shamrocks and shenanigans and bullshit.
Who else? What about Saint Peter?
– Oh he’s safe and sound all right. A bit of a slob to tell you the truth. He often encorpifies himself.
– What was that?
– Encorpifies himself. Takes on a body, as I’ve done now for your convenience. How could the like of you make anything out of an infinity of gases? Peter’s just out to show off the keys, bluster about and make himself a bloody nuisance. Oh there have been a few complaints to the Polyarch about him.
– Answer me this question. The Redeemer said ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall found my Church’. Is there any justification for the jeer that He founded his Church upon a pun, since Petros means ‘rock’?
– Not easy to say. The name Petros does not occur in classical, mythological or biblical Greek apart from your man the apostle and his successor and later namesakes – except for a freedman of Berenice (mother of Herod Agrippa) mentioned in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18, 6, 3, in a passage relating to the later years of Tiberius’s reign, that is, the thirties A.D. Petro occurs as a Roman surname in Suetonius’s Vespasiae 1, and Petra as a woman’s name in Tacitus, Annals 11, 4.
– And you don’t care a lot about him?
– The lads in our place, when he barges around encorpified and flashing the keys, can’t resist taking a rise out of him and pursue him with the cackles of a rooster, cock-adoodle-doo.
– I see. Who else? Is Judas with you?
– That’s another conundrum for the Polyarch. Peter stopped me one time and tried to feed me a cock-and-bull story about Judas coming to the Gate. You get my joke? Cock-and-bull story?
– Very funny. Is your mother Monica there?
– Wait now! Don’t try and get a dig at me that way. Don’t blame me. She was here before me.
– To lower the temperature of your steaming stewpot of lust and depravity, you married or took as concubine a decent poor young African girl, and the little boy you had by her you named Adeodatus. But even yet nobody knows your wife’s name.
– That secret is safe with me still.
– Why should you give such a name to your son while you were yourself still a debauched pagan, not even baptized?
– Put that day’s work down to the mammy – Monica.
– Later, you put your little wife away and she shambled off to the wilderness, probably back into slavery, but swearing to remain faithful to you forever. Does the shame of that come back to you?
– Never mind what comes back to me, I done what the mammy said, and everybody – you too – has to do what the mammy says.
– And straightaway, as you relate in Book Six of your Confessions, you took another wife, simultaneously committing bigamy and adultery. And you kicked her out after your Tolle Lege conjuring tricks in the garden when you ate a handful of stolen pears. Eve herself wasn’t accused in respect of more than one apple. In all this disgraceful behaviour do we see Monica at work again?
– Certainly. God also.
– Does Monica know that you’re being so unprecedentedly candid with me?
– Know? She’s probably here unencorpified.
– You betrayed and destroyed two decent women, implicated God in giving a jeering name to a bastard, and you blame all this outrage on your mother. Would it be seemly to call you callous humbug?
– It would not. Call me a holy humbug.
– Who else is in your kingdom? Is Judas?
– Paul is in our place, often encorpified and always attended by his physician Luke, putting poultices on his patient’s sore neck. When Paul shows too much consate in himself, the great blatherskite with his epistles in bad Greek, the chronic two-timer, I sometimes roar after him ‘You’re not on the road to Damascus now!’ Puts him in his place. All the same that Tolle Lege incident was no conjuring trick. It was a miracle. The first book I picked up was by Paul and the lines that struck my eyes were these: ‘Not in rioting or drunkenness, nor in chambering or wantonness, nor in strife or envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in the lust thereof.’ But do you know, I think the greatest dog’s breakfast of the lot is St Vianney.
– I never heard of him.
– ’Course you have. Jean-Baptiste. You’d know him better as the curé of Ars.
– Oh yes. A French holy man.
– A holy fright, you mean. Takes a notion when he’s young to be a priest, as ignorant as the back of a cab, couldn’t make head nor tail of Latin or sums, dodges the column when Napoleon is looking for French lads to be slaughtered in Rooshia, and at the heel of the hunt spends sixteen to eighteen hours a day in the confessional – hearing, not telling – and takes to performing miracles, getting money from nowhere and taking on hand to tell the future. Don’t be talking. A diabolical wizard of a man.
– Your household abounds in oddities.
– He performs his miracles still in our place. Gives life to bogus corpses and thinks nothing of raising from the dead a dummy mummy.
– I repeat a question I’ve already asked: is Judas a member of your household?
– I don’t think the Polyarch would like me to say much about Judas.
– He particularly interests me. The Gospel extols love and justice. Peter denied his Master out of pride, vanity and perhaps fear. Judas did something similar but from a comprehensible motive. But Peter’s home and dried. Is Judas?
– Judas, being dead, is eternal.
– But where is he?
– The dead do not have whereness. They have condition.
– Did Judas earn paradise?
– Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova sero amavit.
– You are shifty and you prevaricate. Say yes or no to this question: did you suffer from hœmorrhoids?
– Yes. That is one reason that I encorpify myself with reluctance.
– Did Judas have any physical affliction?
– You have not read my works. I did not build the City of God. At most I have been an humble urban district councillor, never the Town Clerk. Whether Judas is dead in the Lord is a question notice of which would require to be given to the Polyarch.
– De Quincey held that Judas enacted his betrayal to provoke his Master into proclaiming his divinity by deed. What do you think of that?
– De Quincey also consumed narcotics.
– Nearly everything you have taught or written lacks the precision of Descartes.
– Descartes was a recitalist, or formulist, of what he took, often mistakenly, to be true knowledge. He himself established nothing new, nor even a system of pursuing knowledge that was novel. You are fond of quoting his Cogito Ergo Sum. Read my works. He stole that. See my dialogue with Evodius in De Libero Arbitrio, or the Question of Free Choice. Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.
– I have read all the philosophy of the Fathers, before and after Nicaea: Chrysostom, Ambrose, Athanasius.
– If you have read Athanasius you have not understood him. The result of your studies might be termed a corpus of patristic paddeology.
– Thank you.
– You are welcome.
– The prime things – existence, time, the godhead, death, paradise and the satanic pit, these are abstractions. Your pronouncements on them are meaningless, and within itself the meaninglessness does not cohere.
– Discourse must be in words, and it is possible to give a name to that which is not understood nor cognoscible by human reason. It is our duty to strive towards God by thought and word. But it is our final duty to believe, to have and to nourish faith.
– I perceive some of your pronouncements to be heretical and evil. Of sin, you said it was necessary for the perfection of the universe and to make good shine all the more brightly in contrast. You said God is not the cause of our doing evil but that free will is the cause. From God’s omniscience and foreknowledge He knows that men will sin. How then could free will exist?
– God has not foreknowledge. He is, and has knowledge.
– Man’s acts are all subject to predestination and he cannot therefore have free will. God created Judas. Saw to it that he was reared, educated, and should prosper in trade. He also ordained that Judas should betray His Divine Son. How then could Judas have guilt?
– God, in knowing the outcome of free will, did not thereby attenuate or extirpate free will.
– That light-and-shade gentleman you once admired so much, Mani, held that Cain and Abel were not the sons of Adam and Eve but the sons of Eve and Satan. However that may be, the sin in the garden of Eden was committed in an unimaginably remote age, eons of centuries ago, according to the mundane system of computing time. According to the same system the doctrine of the Incarnation and the Redemption is now not even two thousand years old. Are all the millions and millions of uncountable people born between the Creation and the Redemption to be accounted lost, dying in original sin though themselves personally guiltless, and to be considered condemned to hell?
– If you would know God, you must know time. God is time. God is the substance of eternity. God is not distinct from what we regard as years. God has no past, no future, no presence in the sense of man’s fugitive tenure. The interval you mention between the Creation and the Redemption was ineffably unexistent.
– That is the sort of disputation that I dub ‘flannel’ but granted that the soul of man is immortal, the geometry of a soul must be circular and, like God, it cannot have had a beginning. Do you agree with that?
– In piety it could thus be argued.
– Then our souls existed before joining our bodies?
– That could be said.
– Well, where were they.
– None but the Polyarch would say that.
– Are we to assume there is in existence somewhere a boundless reservoir of souls not yet encorpified?
– Time does not enter into an act of divine creation. God can create something which has the quality of having always existed.
– Is there any point in my questioning you on your one-time devotion to the works of Plotinus and Porphyry?
– No. But far preferable to the Manichœan dualism of light and darkness, good and evil, was Plotinus’s dualism of mind and matter. In his doctrine of emanation Plotinus was only slightly misled. Plotinus was a good man.
– About 372, when you were eighteen, you adopted Manichæanism and did not discard the strange creed until ten years later. What do you think now that jumble of Babylonian cosmology, Buddhism and ghostly theories about light and darkness, the Elect and the Hearers, the commands to abstain from fleshmeat, manual labour and intercourse with women? Or Mani’s own claim that he was himself the Paraclete?
– Why ask me now when you can read the treatise against this heresy which I wrote in 394? So far as Mani himself is concerned, my attitude maybe be likened to that of the King of Persia in 376. He had Mani skinned alive and then crucified.
– We must be going very soon.
– Yes. Your air is nearly gone.
– There is one more question on a matter that has always baffled me and on which nothing written about you by yourself or others gives any illumination. Are you a Nigger?
– I am a Roman.
– I suspect your Roman name is an affectation or a disguise. You are of Berber stock, born in Numidia. Those people were non-white. You are far more aligned with Carthage than Rome, and there are Punic corruptions even in your Latin.
– Civis Romanus sum.
