Great Lion of God (87 page)

“I will have no part of this!” exclaimed Mark, and without taking leave of Saul he left for Jerusalem, there to complain of the arrogant Pharisee to Peter. (It was not for many years that Mark finally knew that Saul was just and admitted, in his Gospel, that the mission was to the Gentiles also, without restriction.) He told Peter that Saul was perverting the Message of the Messias, that he was destroying the holy faith and adulterating it, that, as he was a cosmopolitan, he was admitting alien influences into the Church and condoning strange practices and preaching strange doctrines, to the scandal of the faithful.

“Let him flaunt what he calls his authority,” said the elders in Jerusalem, while Peter listened in perturbed silence. “He has put aside the Law, he has flouted Jerusalem, he appoints his own elders, he has put himself outside the pale. This Pharisee, this hunter of the innocent and the mild! He says he has been appointed by God and the Messias: Let him continue! God will not be mocked, but will destroy this prideful, boastful man.”

Mark enlarged on the subject. Barnabas was his uncle. Saul of Tarshish had perverted that gentle uncle’s faith, and had endangered his soul. He was bringing hordes of ill-informed and casual and idolatrous Gentiles into the Church merely to enlarge his authority and impress by numbers. He did not search a man’s soul diligently and sedulously to be certain that that man had indeed been given the gift of faith. He baptized that man on a mere and hasty profession! He was the new Jeroboam, and no doubt an apostate, if ever he were a Nazarene, which was open to doubt. “He will be our death!” cried Mark, in all sincerity. “He will delay the Coming of the Messias, and plunge us all into darkness and despair! We shall not, because of our tolerance, share in the Kingdom. Woe to us!”

Others, listening to Mark and nodding in distress, again recalled Saul’s former persecution of the Nazarenes. Was it possible that he had become a Christian only with the intention of destroying the Faith?

Peter said, in a low and hesitant voice, “I, too, doubted him for many reasons. But I visited him in Antioch, and found nothing wrong there. The Gentiles he had converted—they astonished and edified me with their faith and their joy. I have told you of this before. He convinced me. I saw the shadow of the light of the Spirit on his countenance. You must believe me. Once I was like you, but I had a vision. Saul has his message; I have mine. Each of us is commissioned to do his part. Let there be no dissension. If Saul is ever in error, Our Lord will correct him, or cast him out. True, he is a proud man and at ease among the Gentiles, but do not those very qualities give him power among them?”

But one of the elders said, “We Jews stand in a glorified place with the Messias, for we have been taught the Commandments and the Covenant was given to our people. We are a holy nation, indeed. Our Lord was an Israelite and He obeyed the Laws of our fathers, and was circumcised. Therefore, those who would join us must become as He.”

The old argument continued, Peter observed to himself with a sigh. Would the young Church survive these heated dissensions? He said to the others, “I trust Saul, so you must trust him also. What is not of God will be cast out. Had they not all questioned Saul before, in Jerusalem, and had been convinced by him? True, he had antagonized them with his barely concealed arrogance and impatience at their lack of formal learning. But he had denied the accusation that he was forming a new faith. He was only bringing the Gentiles into Israel, as he had said, himself. Israel was God’s chosen nation; he had acknowledged this to the elders. But the Messianic community included all peoples. Had not the Lord so declared, Himself, and Isaias, and all the prophets? What man dared say to one eager to believe and join the Messianic community: ‘You shall not enter, for you are uncircumcised and unclean?’ That would be an offense to God, who loved all men and would have them join Him in Heaven. Should man arrogate to himself the decision who should be saved and who shall not? That was truly Phariseeism.” At this, Peter smiled gently at the heated elders.

He said, “If Saul of Tarshish were a man more like ourselves, more obscure, more temperate, more humble, born where we were born, having lived as we have lived, and not a Pharisee of great and “worldly learning, not a man of the cosmopolitan community—in short, a he were of our features and our status and our speech—then we should not so resent him and dispute with him. For he was not born in Israel, and is a Roman citizen and a lawyer of Rome, and was taught by a Greek, so we consider him an upstart and an alien and resent his teachings to our brethren. This is a human error, to suspect the stranger even when he comes to us in good will and sincerity. We prefer our own. But God prefers no man over another.” He added that the prophet Hosea had said that God would number the Gentiles among His people in the latter days. “Look now toward Heaven and tell the stars, if you be able to number them.” (Gen. 15:5-6) So, added Peter, all men were the seed of the Messias.

The elders subsided, but they did not love Saul though they trusted in the words of Peter, for had not the Lord founded His Church upon him, and could the Church be in error? No. The plan of casting Saul out of the Messianic community was abandoned.

James rose up and said that in his judgment those among the Gentiles who turned to God were not to be molested or thrown out of the Messianic community and Message, but that henceforth they were to abstain from idols, from adultery and fornication, from eating strangled animals, and from bloodshed. The Gentiles were but to obey the primal laws as given by Moses, and if they wished to adhere to the Law more fervently they would be joyously accepted as part of the Israelite community, and the Elect.

Saul heard of this meeting, and again he was inflamed. He accepted the judgment of the elders, but he burned in his heart. The Jewish Christians called the Gentile converts “brethren,” but still to them they were only Gentiles. They were not truly Israelites, as the Lord was an Israelite. They were tolerated, only. Saul said to them, “He who accepts the Messias is in the most holy way an Israelite, and he who rejects the Messias is not an Israelite.”

Having fully established the Church in Corinth Saul was anxious to move on to the wilderness where the Name of the Messias had not yet been proclaimed, and into Christian communities which were still weak. Barnabas, in his gentle fashion, suggested to Saul that Mark be invited to join them. Saul looked at him with angrily sparkling blue eyes.

“No,” he said. “He has caused me enough trouble, and has raised up dissension in the Church, where all should be harmony.”

“If he did,” said Barnabas, almost in tears, “he did it out of zeal.

“I have no patience with zealots,” said Saul, that most zealous man. He despised Mark that he had attempted to interfere with him. Had not Mark’s quiet contentions brought about seizures in Saul, which enfeebled him? He who enfeebled a messenger flouted God. Barnabas argued, but in vain. Saul was adamantly opposed to Mark, not only out of conviction but out of human incompatibility.

So when Mark arrived Saul refused to see him, remembering offenses. Barnabas, torn between the love he had for his nephew, and the love he had for Saul, his friend, finally departed with Mark for Cyprus. Saul, proud and unyielding as always, eager to give love yet seemingly rejecting it, made other plans.

His first emotion against Barnabas was that his friend had deserted him, had abandoned him for his nephew, considering Saul of less moment. But as Saul was a rational man in spite of his temper and his harsh speech he finally said to himself: I drive away what I would embrace. I stir anger in what I would love. I lie down with rage when I would desire to consummate my greatest passions. I would tolerate stupidity if it were not so authoritative! Alas, I am a venal man.

He sorely missed Barnabas, that soft voice of temperance and kindness and charity. He missed the concerned brown eyes, the touch of the consoling hand. But he could not ask Barnabas to return as yet. One day he would beg that return, though not as yet, he told himself. In the meantime, in a gesture of reconciliation, he agreed to certain terms of the Jerusalem community, advanced to him by Peter who was growing in his esteem.

Now his desire was to advance into Europe after a visit to Athens, and to Athens he journeyed, that seat of Western wisdom and poesy and profound philosophy, that throne of beauty, that crown of ethics and subtle reasoning.

Chapter 45

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silvery dust and silvery hills of Athens entranced Saul. All was iridescent in the rays of the most ardent sun and under that deep blue and incredibly brilliant sky. He would walk through the Agora, scanning the shops, the merchants. He would pause before the temple of music to listen to the musicians practicing. He visited academies and law courts, where the disputations of lawyers excited and amused him and the wry magistrates made him laugh in sympathy. He visited libraries, established by Marcus Tullius Cicero long ago, and paused to glance through books. He would stand upon a hill to look at the purple water of the port of Pireus and watch the ships at anchor. Here, in this light, this vivacity, this humorous and sparkling atmosphere even the Romans seemed to him more amiable and enlightened Above all, the Acropolis fascinated him and the giant statue of Athena Parthenos before the Parthenon, and he climbed to the ton to wander the marble floors between temples and fountains and colonnades and to look down on the white city below. He marveled and was reverent. For the first time he thought, “How noble the mind and soul of man when delivered of grossness and materialism and expediency! How fateful, how portentous, his very shadow on marble when he surmounts his nature! Here beauty has set her monumental foot on stone, and the beauty was evoked from man’s own spirit. I have often considered him mean and filthy, malicious and cruel, foul and deceitful, wicked and lustful, traitorous and vicious, and in truth he is all these things. But I know also—and how deeply I know—that he is also divine in the Divinity of God and that immortality echoes in the chambers of his brain, and that nothing can be denied him if he surrenders to the Most Holy and becomes one with Him. Only God can set man free to be himself, if he desires that freedom, for captivity is self-ordained and all its ugliness and vileness.”

The statues on the Acropolis did not vex him as once they might have done; he delighted in their loveliness, was entranced by the unbelievable majesty and detail of them. They were like gods to him, and he could understand how it was that men often worshiped what they had made with their own hands, recognizing in the mysterious dark and mystic places in them that what they had created had been inspired in them and was not wholly their own. The God of Light and Beauty had smiled on this steep hill and Phidias had been His tongue in stone to speak to that in man which craves, unendingly, perfection and excellence. Socrates who spoke only in words was less than Phidias, who doubtless had had angels at his elbow and as architects. Worship struck at Saul’s vulnerable heart. He stood and looked through the immense white colonnades at the passionate blue of the sky, and at the flaming air, and he thought that not even in the Temple of Jerusalem had he felt such reverence, such awe, such overwhelming joy, such ecstatic comprehension.

Greece would pass away as all nations pass, but the memory of her wisdom and her glory and her beauty would linger forever as long as one man remained to celebrate them. A poet was greater than a king; a wise man transcended the rich; an empire could be immortal only in the quality of men she had conceived and brought forth. Greece, in poetry and wisdom and texture of mind, surpassed all other nations. There were more beautiful countries than this, Saul had heard, and larger and grander. Yet, out of Greece, by a mysterious dispensation, had emerged the uttermost form of Beauty in marble and in word.

But the Christian community in Athens, both Jewish and Gentile did not, alas, share his excitement and joy over the city. The Jews thought the mighty spectacle of the Acropolis “snares of the devil,” to divert the eye and spirit of man from the everlasting verities, and Saul, about to rebuke them with his lashing tongue, recalled that in his youth he, too, had voiced such sentiments to Aristo. The Gentiles were poor men, former freedmen or laborers or peasants, heavy with dust and toil, and though Greeks they had no pride in their heritage nor could their eyes encompass what Saul saw. They looked at him with dull and wondering surprise. What had this to do with their present or future existence? The works of man, however splendid though they did not see the splendor—were dust and ashes and unworthy of a Christian whose thoughts should be fixed only on eternity.

The Jewish Christians were men of more substance than their Gentile fellows, being merchants and shopkeepers and bankers as they were in Corinth. They could not understand Saul, though he was of their own heritage and blood and bone. They were good men, and they believed that as Christians it was their sole duty on earth to alleviate the lot of the poor, to elevate the distressed, to feed the hungry and the homeless, to rectify injustice, to proclaim freedom and to denounce slavery, to clamor in the courts of law—there were lawyers amongst them also—for compassion for the criminal and mercy for the wrongdoer. Their emotions and beliefs, they assured Saul earnestly, were liberal and kind and they suffered for the sufferers. Saul shook his head with his old impatience. Of a certainty a man should love his neighbor and assist him, for was that not God’s own Commandment? But that love for neighbor and that assistance bloomed naturally out of faith and the duties of faith, as a rose naturally blooms from the root-stem of its being. Without faith and worship and the truth of God all service to neighbor was a mere self-righteous prattling.

Saul quoted Isaias to them: “The vile person shall no more be called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful, for the vile liberal will speak villainy and his heart will work iniquity, to practice hypocrisy, and to utter error against the Lord, to make empty the soul of the hungry. He will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. The instruments of the churl are evil and he devises wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words. The liberal devises liberal things, and by liberal things shall he stand!” (Isa. 32:5-8)