Collected Fictions

The Theologians

The gardens ravaged, the altars and chalices profaned, the Huns rode their horses into the monastery library and mangled the incomprehensible books and reviled and burned them—fearful perhaps that the letters of the books might harbor blasphemies against their god, which was a scimitar of iron. They burned palimpsests and codices, but in the heart of the bonfire, among the ashes, there lay, virtually untouched by the flames, the twelfth book of the Civitas Dei, which says that in Athens Plato once taught that at the end of time all things will return again to where they once were—that he, in Athens, before the same circle of listeners, will one day teach that doctrine once again. That text spared by the flames came to enjoy a special veneration; those who read and reread it in that remote province came to forget that the author put forth the doctrine only in order more roundly to refute it. A hundred years later, Aurelian, bishop-coadjutor of Aquileia, learned that on the banks of the Danube the newborn sect called the Monotoni (also the Annulari) was claiming that history is a circle, and that all things that exist have existed before and will exist again. In the mountains, the Wheel and the Serpent had supplanted the Cross. Fear gripped all men's hearts, yet all were comforted by the rumor that John of Pannonia, who had distinguished himself by a treatise on the seventh attribute of God, was preparing to refute this abominable heresy.

Aurelian deplored the entire situation—especially this last report. He knew that in theology, there is no novelty without danger; then he reflected that the notion of circular time was too strange, too shocking, for the danger to be very serious. (The heresies we ought to fear are those that can be confused with orthodoxy.) He was pained most of all by the intervention— the intrusion—of John of Pannonia. Two years before, John's verbose treatise De séptima affectione Dei sive de ceternitate had trespassed upon Aurelian's own field of expertise; now, as though the problem of time were his alone, John promised to set the Annulari right (no doubt with arguments befitting Procrustes, and remedies more terrible than the Serpent itself).... That night, Aurelian turned the pages of Plutarch's ancient dialogue on the ceasing of the oracles; in paragraph twenty-nine, he read a gibe against the Stoics, who defended the idea of an infinite cycle of worlds, with infinite suns, moons, Apollos, Artemisias, and Poseidons. His coming upon this passage was a good omen; he resolved to steal a march on John of Pannonia and refute the heretics of the Wheel himself.

There are those who seek the love of a woman in order to stop thinking of her, to put her out of their mind; similarly, Aurelian wanted to outstrip John of Pannonia not because he wished to do him any harm, but in order to cure himself of the grudge he held for the man. His temper cooled by mere labor, by the crafting of syllogisms and the invention of contumely, by the nego's and autem's and nequaquam's, the rancor dropped away. He constructed vast labyrinthine periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses—clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.

He crafted an instrument from cacophony. He foresaw that John would thunder down on the Annulari with the gravity of a prophet; resolved to come at the problem from a different tack, he himself chose derision. Augustine had written that Jesus was the straight path that leads men out of the circular labyrinth in which the impious wander; Aurelian, in his painstakingly trivial way, compared the impious with Ixion, with Prometheus' liver, with Sisyphus, with that king of Thebes who saw two suns, with stuttering, with parrots, mirrors, echoes, mules chained to tread-mills, and two-horned syllogisms. (The heathen fables had managed to endure, though reduced now to decoration.) Like all those who possess libraries, Aurelian felt a nagging sense of guilt at not being acquainted with every volume in his; this controversy allowed him to read many of the books that had seemed to reproach his neglect. Thus it was that he inserted into his text a passage from Origen's De principii* in which Origen denies that Judas Iscariot will sell the Lord again, that Paul will once more witness Stephen's martyrdom in Jerusalem, and another passage from Cicero's Académica priora in which Cicero mocks those who dream that while Cicero is speaking with Lucullus, other Luculluses and other Ciceros, infinite in number, speak precisely the same words in infinite identical worlds. He also scourged the Monotoni with that text from Plutarch on the obsolescence of the oracles, and decried the scandalous fact that the lumen natures should mean more to an idolater than the word of God to the Monotoni. The labor of composition took Aurelian nine days; on the tenth, he received a copy of the refutation written by John of Pannonia.

It was almost ludicrously brief; Aurelian looked at it with contempt, and then with foreboding. The first section glossed the closing verses of the ninth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which say that Jesus has not suffered many times since the foundation of the world, but has been sacrificed now, once, "in the end of the world." The second section cited the biblical injunction concerning the "vain repetitions" of the heathens (Matthew 6:7) and that passage from the seventh book of Pliny which praises the fact that in all the wide universe there are no two faces that are the same. John of Pannonia declared that no two souls were the same, either, and that the basest sinner is as precious as the blood shed for him by Jesus Christ.

The act of a single man, he said, weighs more than the nine concentric heavens, and to think, erroneously, that it can be lost and then return again is naught but spectacular foolishness. Time does not restore what we lose; eternity holds it for glory, and also for the fire. John's treatise was limpid, universal; it seemed written not by a particular person, but by any man—or perhaps all men.

Aurelian felt an almost physical sense of humiliation. He considered destroying or reworking his own manuscript; then, with grudging honesty, he sent it off to Rome without changing a letter. Months later, when the Council of Pergamo was convened, the theologian entrusted with refuting the errors of the Monotoni was (predictably) John of Pannonia; his learned, measured refutation was the argument that condemned the heresiarch Euphorbus to the stake. This has occurred once, and will occur again, said Euphorbus. It is not one pyre you are lighting, it is a labyrinth of fire. If all the fires on which I have been burned were brought together here, the earth would be too small for them, and the angels would be blinded. These words I have spoken many times. Then he screamed, for the flames had engulfed him.

The Wheel fell to the Cross,[1] but the secret battle between John and Aurelian continued. The two men were soldiers in the same army, strove for the same prize, fought against the same Enemy, yet Aurelian wrote not a word that was not aimed, however unconfessably, at besting John. Their duel was an invisible one; if I may trust the swollen indices of Migne's Patrology, not once does the other man's name figure in the many volumes of Aurelian's works collected therein for posterity. (Of John's writings, only twenty words have survived.) Both men deplored the anathemas of the second Council of Constantinople; both persecuted the Arians, who denied the eternal generation of the Son; both attested to the orthodoxy of Cosmas' Topographia Christiana, which taught that the earth is foursquare, like the Jewish tabernacle. Then, unfortunately, another tempestuous heresy spread to those four corners of the earth. Spawned in Egypt or in Asia (for accounts differ, and Bousset refuses to accept Harnack's arguments), the sect soon infested the eastern provinces, and sanctuaries were built in Macedonia, Carthage, and Trêves. It seemed to be everywhere; people said that in the diocese of Britain crucifixes had been turned upside down and in Cassaria the image of the Lord had been supplanted by a mirror. The mirror and the obolus were the emblems of these new schismatics.

History knows them by many names (Speculari, Abysmali, Cainitœ), but the most widely accepted is Histrioni, the name that Aurelian gave them and that they defiantly adopted for themselves. In Phrygia, they were called the Simulacra, and in Dardania as well. John of Damascus called them "Forms"; it seems only right to point out that Erfjord thinks the passage apocryphal. There is no heresiologue who does not express shock as he recounts their wild customs. Many Histrioni professed ascetism; some mutilated themselves, like Origen; others lived underground, in the sewers; others put out their own eyes; still others (the Nebuchadnezzars of Nitria)"grazed on grasses like the oxen, and their hair grew like the eagle's." From mortification and severity, they sometimes graduated to crime; certain communities tolerated theft; others, homicide; others, sodomy, incest, and bestiality. All were blasphemous; they cursed not only the Christian God, but even the arcane deities of their own pantheon. They plotted together to write sacred texts, whose disappearance is a great loss to scholars. In 1658, Sir Thomas Browne wrote the following: "Time has annihilated the ambitious Histrionic Gospels, although not so the Insultes with which their Impiousness was scourged"; Erfjord has suggested that those "insultes" (preserved in a Greek codex) are themselves the lost gospels. Unless we recall the Histrionic cosmology, such a suggestion is incomprehensible.

In the hermetic books, it is written that "things below are as things above, and things above as things below"; the Zohar tells us that the lower world is a reflection of the higher. The Histrioni founded their doctrine on a perversion of this idea. They invoked Matthew 6:12 ("forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors") and 11:12 ("the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence") to prove that the earth influences heaven; they cited I Corinthians 13:12 ("For now we see through a glass, darkly") to prove that all things we see are false. Contaminated perhaps by the Monotoni, they imagined that every man is two men, and that the real one is the other one, the one in heaven. They also imagined that our acts cast an inverted reflection, so that if we are awake, the other man is asleep; if we fornicate, the other man is chaste; if we steal, the other man is generous. When we die, they believed, we shall join him and be him. (Some echo of these doctrines continues to be heard in Bloy.) Other Histrioni believed that the world would end when the number of its possibilities was exhausted; since there can be no repetitions, the righteous are duty-bound to eliminate (commit) the most abominable acts so that those acts will not sully the future and so that the coming of the kingdom of Jesus may be hastened.

That particular article of faith was denied by other sects, which rejoined that the history of the world must be acted out in every man. Most men, like Pythagoras, will have to transmigrate through many bodies before obtaining their liberation; some, the Proteans, "within the period of a single life are lions, dragons, wild boars, are water and are a tree." Demosthenes tells of the purification by mud to which initiates were subjected as part of the Orphic mysteries; analogously, the Proteans sought purification through evil. It was their belief, as it was Carpocrates', that no one shall emerge from the prison until the last obolus is paid (Luke 12:59: "I tell thee, thou shalt not depart thence, till thou hast paid the very last mite"), and they often hornswoggled penitents with this other verse: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). They also said that not to be an evildoer was an act of Satanic arrogance. ... The Histrioni wove many, and diverse, mythologies; some preached asceticism, others license—all preached confusion. Theopompus, a Histrion from Berenice, denied all fables; he said that every man is an organ projected by the deity in order to perceive the world.

The heretics in Aurelian's diocese were not those who claimed that every act is reflected in heaven but rather those who claimed that time does not tolerate repetitions. The circumstance was peculiar; in a report to the authorities at Rome, Aurelian mentioned it. The prelate who received the report was the empress's confessor; everyone knew that this demanding minister forbade her the private delectations of speculative theology. His secretary—formerly one of John of Pannonia's collaborators, now fallen out with him—was famed as a most diligent inquisitor of heterodoxies; Aurelian added an explanation of the Histrionic heresy, as it was contained in the conventicles of Genoa and Aquileia. He wrote a few paragraphs; when he tried to write the horrible thesis that no two moments are the same, his pen halted.

He could not find the necessary words; the admonitions of the new doctrine were too affected and metaphorical to be transcribed. ("Wouldst thou see what no human eyes have seen? Look upon the moon. Wouldst thou hear what no ears have heard? Hearken to the cry of the bird. Wouldst thou touch what no hands have touched? Put thy hand to the earth. Truly I say unto thee, that the moment of God's creation of the world is yet to come.") Then suddenly a sentence of twenty words came to his spirit.

With joy he wrote it on the page; immediately afterward, he was disturbed by the sense that it was someone else's. The next day, he remembered: he had read it many years ago in the Adversus Annulares, composed by John of Pannonia. He ferreted out the quotation—there it was. He was torn by uncertainty. To alter or omit those words was to weaken the force of the statement; to let them stand was to plagiarize a man he detested; to indicate the source was to denounce him. He pleaded for divine aid. Toward the coming of the second twilight, his guardian angel suggested a middle way. Aurelian kept the words, but set this disclaimer before it: That which the heresiarchs howl today, to the confusion of the faith, was said during this century, with more levity than blameworthiness, by a most learned doctor of the church. Then there occurred the thing he had feared, the thing he had hoped for, the thing that was inevitable. Aurelian was required to declare the identity of that doctor of the church; John of Pannonia was accused of professing heretical opinions.

Four months later, a blacksmith on the Aventinus, driven to delusions by the misrepresentations of the Histrioni, set a great iron ball upon the shoulders of his little son so that the child's double might fly. The man's child died; the horror engendered by the crime obliged John's judges to be irreproachably severe with him. The accused would not retract; time and again he repeated that to deny his proposition was to fall into the pestilential heresy of the Monotoni. He did not realize (perhaps refused to realize) that to speak of the Monotoni was to speak of a thing now forgotten. With somehow senile insistence, he poured forth the most brilliant periods of his old jeremiads; the judges did not even listen to what had once so shocked them. Rather than try to purify himself of the slightest stain of Histrionism, he redoubled his efforts to prove that the proposition of which he was accused was in fact utterly orthodox. He argued with the men upon whose verdict his very life depended, and he committed the supreme faux pas of doing so with genius and with sarcasm. On October 26, after a debate that had lasted three days and three nights, he was condemned to be burned at the stake.

Aurelian witnessed the execution, because to have avoided it would have been to confess himself responsible for it. The place of execution was a hill on whose summit stood a stake pounded deep into the ground; all around it, bundles of firewood had been gathered. A priest read the tribunal's verdict.

Under the midday sun, John of Pannonia lay with his face in the dust, howling like a beast. He clawed at the ground, but the executioners seized him, stripped him, and tied him to the stake. On his head they put a crown of straw sprinkled with sulfur; beside him, a copy of the pestilential Adversus Annulâtes. It had rained the night before, and the wood burned smokily. John of Pannonia prayed in Greek, and then in an unknown language. The pyre was about to consume him, when Aurelian screwed up his courage to raise his eyes. The fiery gusts fell still; Aurelian saw for the first and last time the face of the man he hated. It reminded him of someone, but he couldn't quite remember whom. Then, the flames swallowed him; he screamed and it was as though the fire itself were screaming.

Plutarch reports that Julius Caesar wept at the death of Pompey; Aurelian did not weep at the death of John, but he did feel what a man cured of an incurable disease that had become a part of his life might feel. In Aquileia, in Ephesus, in Macedonia, he let the years pass over him. He sought out the hard ends of the empire, the floundering swamps and the contemplative deserts, so that solitude might help him understand his life. In a Mauritanian cell, in the night laden with lions, he rethought the complex accusation against John of Pannonia and for the millionth time he justified the verdict. It was harder for him to justify his tortuous denunciation. In Rusaddir he preached that anachronistic sermon titled The Light of Lights Lighted in the Flesh of a Reprobate. In Hibernia, in one of the huts of a monastery besieged by forest, he was surprised one night, toward dawn, by the sound of rain. He recalled a Roman night when that same punctilious sound had surprised him. At high noon, a lighting bolt set the trees afire, and Aurelian died as John had.

The end of the story can only be told in metaphors, since it takes place in the kingdom of heaven, where time does not exist. One might say that Aurelian spoke with God and found that God takes so little interest in religious differences that He took him for John of Pannonia. That, however, would be to impute confusion to the divine intelligence. It is more correct to say that in paradise, Aurelian discovered that in the eyes of the unfathomable deity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the abominator and the abominated, the accuser and the victim) were a single person.

[1] In Runic crosses the two enemy emblems coexist, intertwined.