The Brazen Head (29 page)

“And as for his Brazen Head, I have tried myself in my own blundering and amateurish way to invent a machine that can use what we have come to call the
agens intellectus
, or the mental driving-force, that exists in the ultimate substance of things and which we are told in the scriptures is the Spirit of God. But I seem to be saying things contrary to what you are feeling about all this, my dear son, and I beg you to tell me at once where your difficulty lies; for I can see that many of our friends here are interested in this point, and I shall perhaps have more to tell you when I have spent a night under your betrothed’s roof and in company with your Friar’s Brazen Head.”

Raymond de Laon looked round at the faces about him, and he was forced to admit to himself that they did indeed look surprisingly interested as to what he would say in reply to all this. He made up his mind to blurt out the precise truth.

“You are quite right, master,” he said, making a peculiar gurgling noise in his throat before each word he uttered, as if it had been projected out of him by squeezing his wind-pipe. “There is a thing that I really must ask you, master, while I have a chance, for there is no telling how long my destiny will enable me to remain at Cone Castle where already I am by no means, as my friends here could tell you, what at Oxford they call a
persona grata
with everybody. But what I want to ask you is this, for my betrothed’s younger brother, whose name is John, and whose quickness in learning things has been a tremendous help to the Friar, has recently, in his talk
anyway
, shown a tendency to follow some of the more satirical Latin poets and to grow sceptical about our holy faith and I am not clever enough, nor is my betrothed, to refute young John’s arguments; but I certainly think he goes much further in the direction of unbelief than the Friar himself does, who indeed, from what I’ve been able to pick up, remains an entirely orthodox Christian. My question, great doctor, is simply this:
Where
, in a world composed of matter possessed of this
energeia-akinesis
, does God come in? What place in fact is left, in a world of such self-creative energy as you describe, for any sort of Creator?”

The moment was a singularly intense one for that small group of about a dozen men. The average intelligence among the retainers of the Lord of Cone was a good deal higher than it was at the Fortress; and ever since Raymond’s official betrothal to Lil-Umbra, whose young brother was known to be a reckless supporter of the Friar, there had been lively discussions in the ground-floor reception-hall, as well as in the kitchen, as to whether the Friar was inspired by God or by the Devil.

Not for nothing had Albertus been an active bishop for a couple of years. By his use-and-wont contacts under such conditions with all sorts of people he had developed, to a degree unusual in such a speculative thinker, an awareness of
the thoughts and feelings of the people that surrounded him, or that at any moment accompanied him, or that happened to be listening to him.

From boyhood he had been a naturalist, and by this time he knew much more about birds and beasts and insects than any other thinker of that epoch who was proficient in Greek and Latin.

At this moment as he encountered the earnest faces round him and noted the almost distressed look in the long thin countenance of Raymond de Laon, a countenance that already bore more wrinkles between the eyebrows than seemed natural for so handsome and diplomatic a youth, he suddenly caught sight of a butterfly he had come to name a “Wood Argus” because of the markings on its wings, that now had settled, since this group of two-legged monsters seemed inclined to be quiescent, on a little poplar-twig just above a regular bed of bluebells.

A particularly brilliant ray of June sunshine was at that second turning into a shining little arrow-head of gleaming silver the white stalk of one of these flowers, and as he watched it, Albert of Cologne couldn’t help wondering whether this particular “Wood-Argus” came regularly at this particular hour to this particular spot.

In a small leafy grove just outside Cologne he had frequently constituted himself a patient and watchful sentinel of whatever light-winged butterfly-emperor ruled that forest-glade, a sentinel big enough to ward off any feathered freebooter, who might come sweeping down through the fragrant air-gulfs of the noon-heat, with the deliberate intention of snapping up so divine a mouthful.

He now had the experience and the wit to see clearly that by his reference to the self-creative energy of the “Hulee”, or “raw-material” or “formless timber”, as Homer might have called it, out of which the world is made, he had touched an extremely ticklish subject, in fact the subject of all subjects, he now told himself, about which, in connection with Friar Roger, the intelligent minority was most hotly divided.

“I
must
be careful,” he thought. “O how mixed up, how cruelly mixed up with our personal prejudices, is every exciting topic we touch!”

And then, when it must have been clear to them all that he was longing to say something that was very important to himself, but found it hard to get the right words for it, his eyes were caught by the largest of a few dark holes in the ground in front of him, obviously caused by the cloven hooves of some wandering steer or heifer, and which had been filled with water by last night’s rain. Upon this small black pool, in his effort to decide what it would be best to say, he was now fixedly staring. As he stared, he suddenly grew aware that the mid-day Sun was also busy with this hand’s-breadth of dark water, and that he was now staring into his own reflected visage, above which his complicated head-wear had already become among the bluebells a portentously hovering shadow.

“
What place is left for a Creator
?” was now the question which the mind behind that bulging forehead, those quivering nostrils, those small deep-set tearful eyes, had to answer; and as, aware of that attentive group of men, and of that more than attentive young lover, the great teacher from Cologne struggled with the riddle of existence, he felt as if this floating “something” that was himself, now confronted by this
likeness
of a not very striking human face in the wet hoof-print of an animal, was being carried, just as that reflected face looked as if it were being carried, up, up, up, through all Space and all Time, searching for the thrice-blessed gulf of absolute nothingness that is beyond all that has a name.

At last the words came. “There are some of us,” he said, speaking slowly, and beneath and against and under, so it felt to him, the warm breath of every star in the firmament, “who hold that all the ideal words that we philosophers use, such as ‘matter’ and ‘substance’ and ‘form’ and ‘essence’ and ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ and ‘transitory’ and ‘eternal’ and ‘nature’ and ‘super-nature’ are only so many names, sounding syllables that signify nothing. Others hold that these words represent ultimate and basic realities by the use of which we recognize and interpret the
Entelecheia
of existence, that would be just meaningless smoke without them!

“Now what I hold, my dear friends, is especially difficult to make clear because it partakes of the opposite opinions of both those two camps of thought. I do hold, as strongly and as
absolutely as it is possible to hold anything, that behind all the visible and intelligible phenomena of the cosmos there exists the invisible and unintelligible reality which we call God.

“According to the philosophy of the greatest of all
philosophers
—I speak of Aristotle—the material stuff of which the Cosmos is composed is eternal, and contains within itself the creative energy that builds the world and produces all the innumerable lives around us, such as we know and such as we are. But we Christians have been given a—a—a——”

Here he hesitated and a very queer sound came from his body as he stood there before them, like a great black rook come down from a nest that a quarter of a year ago has served its purpose to the limit and now awaits its dissolution, a sound that might have been an explosion of wind, either from mouth or from anus, but a sound that resembled the cry of an unborn child, that with the permission of nature had been engendered in the duodenum of an elderly man by deliberate impregnation from a superhuman minotaur—“have been given a—a
Revelation
that alters from top to bottom the whole situation.”

Here his voice rose just as used to rise the voice of each of the Homeric heroes at some special crisis in the Trojan War. “We cannot, we dare not, we must not, lest we become the murderers of the truth that is in us, deny the integrity of our own reason. And if we accept our reason we must recognize that the deepest, wisest, completest embodiment of it, so far, and until this moment, is to be found in the works of Aristotle; and Aristotle maintains that since matter is eternal in its inherent essence and is capable, in itself and by its own secret energy, of renewing the universe, and of bringing into
existence
an everlasting recurrence of the multiple forms we see around us, we are driven by our reason to assume that the cosmos is eternal. But this whole assumption, this whole implication, this whole conclusion is surpassed and
transcended
”—Albert’s voice became the voice of a trumpet—“by the
Revelation
brought by Christ, the revelation of Christ Himself and the revelation of the Holy Spirit!”

The warrior-retainers from Cone Castle were so accustomed to associate any reference, in any formal service of worship, to the Holy Ghost, as a sign that this same service had reached
its termination, that now they all solemnly and mechanically, just as in some ordinary daily ceremonial, lowered one knee to the earth, and then, standing erect, murmured the word “amen”.

Albert of Cologne would never have become what
undoubtedly
he had, by the pure power of his intrinsic
personality
, quite deservedly become, the best philosophical teacher in Europe, if he hadn’t long ago acquired the power of not losing his temper, or the thread of his discourse, or even his own zest for the subject, when the bulk of his audience missed the whole point, as they certainly did now.

The grand trick he had acquired was a very daring one, and one whose nature would have been extremely shocking to many pious souls, namely the device of treating the words of Jesus, on almost all the well-known occasions when the Master uttered decisive and pregnant announcements, as if they contained in them, however tragic they might be, a peculiar element of sheer humour.

And the psychic trick Albertus used on this occasion was the wisest possible one he
could
have used, namely the trick of appropriating to himself and to his own feelings at such moments the bold and perhaps scandalous assumption that the Son of God was humorously aware of the sublime stupidity of the race of mortals, whose flesh he had submissively adopted for some unknown and secret purpose of his Divine Parent.

Raymond de Laon however had not bowed the knee at the reference to the Paraclete, nor had he stiffened himself in preparation for entering the Fortress. His face had indeed taken on a look of infinite relief. He had in fact been terribly afraid that Albert would at this juncture try to do what so many of the so-called Averroists did—namely, slur over the Athenian thinker’s conviction as to the eternity of “Matter” or “Hulee”, and insert into this unconscionable substance a nebulous and vaporous wedge of divine providence.

To Raymond it was a turning point in his whole mental life, this frank and free admission, by Albertus of Cologne, that, if a student honestly followed Aristotle, he couldn’t, with any integrity of mind or any consent of reason, refuse to accept the Aristotelian conclusion as to the eternity of the world.

It was therefore with the abysmal craving of his deepest
nature that Raymond now awaited from Albert some notion of what he actually meant by the word Revelation.

“What we must do as Christians,” Albert of Cologne announced slowly, “is just to accept by a pure and simple act of faith the Revelation of Jesus that He was, and is, the Son of God, and that God in the beginning created the world. There are therefore,” Albert went on quietly, “two accounts of the origin of all things: first the view offered us by the greatest of all human thinkers that the world never had a beginning, but has always existed, and secondly the revelation of Jesus that He and He only is the true Son of God, and that in the beginning God created the world.

“The first of these opinions is the one we hold when we follow our human reason. The second is the one we hold when we accept the view that Jesus is the Son of God, and what He tells us about the universe is the truth. Which of these two views about the beginning of things we as individuals accept will therefore depend upon how far we are ready to follow Faith, when it goes beyond Reason and even when it flatly contradicts the view derived from Reason.

“If Matter is eternal, why then the world we live in is
likewise
eternal, for it is made of Matter or what the Greeks called “hulee”; and, if our world is eternal, it has not been created by anyone. When Jesus talked of ‘His Father in Heaven’, it is quite clear that he spoke as a Jew, and that he was
thinking
of the God of the Jews. By the Divinity within Him on the strength of which He spoke, He was Himself convinced that He was the Son of God, and it was in the Power of this
conviction
that He enlarged his Father’s Godhead till it went far beyond the Jewish race. The God of the Jews, though
nameless
, we call Jehovah; but the God whom Jesus called Father was the God of the whole world, who existed before he created all that is, and who will go on existing when all that is has ceased to exist.”

Raymond de Laon had missed no syllable of this
pronouncement
; nor had he failed to notice how easily, naturally, and unofficially this tremendous Credo had been declared.

“Will Lady Val,” he thought, “let me take Lil-Umbra for a short ride after their visitor has been properly welcomed and has gone to the armoury to rest? Will they find the old
bailiff still there? Or will they have moved him elsewhere so that this man can sleep alone, as he clearly wants to do, with that awful Brazen Head? God in Heaven! I wouldn’t sleep with that Thing in the room, though by so doing I were to be crowned King of Poland! What if the Thing Inside
came out
and stood by the head of my bed? I verily believe I’d go crazy with terror! O I do so long to talk to Lil-Umbra about all these things. She’s got all young John’s cleverness and all Tilton’s soundness and good sense.”