The Clowns of God (3 page)

Even his purported vision was a familiar and disturbing element in the pattern. The minister of an organised religion was called and ordained to expound, under authority, a doctrine fixed and agreed long since. If he exceeded his commission he could be silenced or excommunicated by the same authority that called him.

The prophet was another kind of creature altogether. He claimed a direct communication with the Almighty. Therefore, his commission could not be withdrawn by any human agent. He could challenge the most sacred past with the classic phrase, used by Jesus himself: “It is written thus…

but I tell thus and thus.” So the prophet was always the alien, the herald of change, the challenger of existing order.

The problem of the Cardinals was not the madness of Jean Marie Barette, but that he had accepted the official function of High Priest and Supreme Teacher and then assumed another, possibly a contradictory, role.

In theory, of course, there need be no contradiction. The doctrine of private revelation, of a direct personal communication between Creator and Creature, was as ancient as that of the Parousia. the Spirit descending on the apostles at Pentecost, Saul struck down on the road to Damascus, John caught up to apocalyptic revelation on Patmos all these were events hallowed in tradition. Was it so unthinkable that in this last fateful decade of the millennium, when the possibility of planetary destruction was a proven fact and a vivid danger, God might choose a new prophet to renew His call to repentance and salvation?

In theological terms it was, at least, an orthodox proposition. To Carl Mendelius, the historian, called to sit in judgment on the sanity of a friend, it was a highly dangerous speculation. However, he was too tired now to trust his judgment on the simplest matter; so he locked the door of his study and went downstairs.

Lotte, blonde, plump, affectionate and contented as a cat in her role as mother of two and Frau Professor Mendelius, smiled up at him and lifted her face to be kissed. Caught in a sudden surge of passion he drew her to him and held her for a long moment. She gave him a quizzical look and said:

“What was that for?”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Let’s go to bed.”

“I can’t go yet. Johann telephoned to say he’s forgotten his key. I said I’d wait up for him. Would you like a brandy?”

“Well, it’s the next best thing.”

As she poured the drink she asked exactly the questions he had dreaded. He knew he could not fence with her. She was too intelligent for half truths, so he told her flatly:

“The Cardinals forced him to abdicate, because they thought he was mad.”

“Mad? Dear God! I should have said no one was more sane.”

She handed him his drink and sat on the mat beside him, resting her head on his knees. They toasted each other.

Mendelius stroked her forehead and her hair. She asked again:

“Why did they think he was mad?”

“Because he claimed to them as he has to me that he had a private revelation that the end of the world was near and that he was the precursor of the Second Coming!”

“What?” She gagged on the liquid. Mendelius passed her his handkerchief to mop her blouse.

“It’s true, dear. He describes the experience in his letter.

He believes it absolutely. Now that he is silenced he wants me to help spread the news.”

“I still can’t believe it. He was always so so French and practical. Perhaps he has gone crazy.”

“A crazy man could not have written the letter he wrote to me. A delusion, a fixed idea that I could accept. It can happen, as a result of stress, or even as a result of a defective exercise in logic. Sane men once believed the world was flat.

Sane people run their lives by the horoscopes in the evening papers. Millions, like you and me, believe in a God they can’t prove.”

“But we don’t go round saying the world’s going to end tomorrow!”

“No, we don’t. But we do know it could, if the Russians and the Americans press the red button. We all live under the shadow of that reality. Our children are as aware of it as we are.”

“Don’t, Carl, please!”

“I’m sorry.”

He bent and kissed the top of her hair and then she pressed his hand against her cheek.

A few moments later she asked, quietly: “Are you going to do what Jean Marie wants?”

“I don’t know, Lotte. Truly I don’t. I’ll have to think about it carefully. I’ll need to talk to people who were close to him. Afterwards I’ll want to see him. I owe him that much.

We both owe it to him.”

“That means you’ll have to go away.”

“Only for a little while.”

“I hate it when you’re away. I miss you so much.”

“Come with me then. It’s ages since you’ve been to Rome.

You’d have lots of people to see.”

“I can’t, Carl. You know that. The children need me. This is a big year for Johann and I like to keep an eye on Katrin and her young man.”

It was the small familiar contention between them: Lotte’s constant clucking over her grown children, and his own middle-aged jealousy of her attentions. But tonight he was too tired for argument, so he deferred the issue.

“We’ll talk about it another time, darling. I need some professional counsel before I move a step out of Tubingen.”

At fifty-three, Anneliese Meissner had achieved a variety of academic distinctions the most notable of which was to be voted unanimously the ugliest woman in any faculty of the University. She was squat, fat and sallow, with a frog mouth and eyes scarcely visible behind thick myopic lenses. Her hair was a Medusa-mess of faded yellow and her voice a hoarse rasp. Her dress was mannish and always ruinously untidy.

Add to all that a sardonic wit and a merciless contempt for mediocrity and you had, as one colleague put it, ‘the perfect profile of a personality doomed to alienation’.

Yet, by some miracle, she had escaped the doom and established herself as a kind of tutelary goddess in the shadow of the old castle of Hohentubingen. Her apartment on the Burgsteige was more like a club than a dwelling place, where students and faculty perched on stools and boxes to drink wine and make fierce debate until the small hours. Her lectures in clinical psychology were packed and her papers were published in learned journals in a dozen languages. She was even credited in student myth with a lover, a troll-like creature who lived in the Harz mountains and who came to visit her in secret on Sundays and the greater holidays of the University calendar.

The day after he received Jean Marie’s letter, Carl Mendelius invited her to lunch in a private booth at the Weinstube Forelle. Anneliese Meissner ate and drank copiously, yet still managed to deliver waspish monologues on the administration of University funds, the local politics of Land BadenWurttemberg, a colleague’s paper on endogenous depression, which she dismissed as ‘puerile rubbish’, and the sexual lives of Turkish labourers in the local paper industry. They were already at the coffee before Mendelius judged it wise to ask his question.

“If I were to show you a letter, would you be able to offer a clinical opinion on the person who wrote it?”

She fixed him with a myopic stare and smiled. The smile was terrifying. It was as if she were about to gobble him up with the crumbs of her strudel.

“Are you going to show me the letter, Carl?”

“If you’ll accept it as a professional and privileged communication. ” “From you, Carl, yes. But before you give it to me, you’d better understand a few axioms in my discipline. I don’t want you to communicate a document that’s obviously important to you and then complain because my commentary’s inadequate. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“First then: handwriting, in serial specimens, is a fairly reliable indicator to cerebral states. Even simple hypoxia the inadequate oxygen supply to the brain will produce rapid deterioration of the script. Second: even in the gravest psychotic illnesses, the subject may have lucid periods in which his writings or utterances are completely rational. Holderlin died in this town of ours a hopeless schizophrenic. But would you guess it from reading Bread and Wine or Empedocles on Etna! Nietzsche died of general paralysis of the insane, probably due to syphilitic infection. Could you diagnose that, solely on the evidence of Thus Spake Zarathustrat Third point: any personal letter contains indications of emotional states or even psychic propensities; but they are indicators only. The states may be shallow, the propensities well within the confines of normality. Do I make myself clear?”

“Admirably, Professor!” Carl Mendelius made a comical gesture of surrender.

“I place my letter in safe hands.” He passed it to her across the table.

“There are other documents as well, but I have not yet had time to study them. The author is Pope Gregory XVII who abdicated last week.”

Anneliese Meissner pursed her thick lips in a whistle of surprise but said nothing. She read the letter slowly, without comment, while Mendelius sipped his coffee and munched petits fours bad for the waistline but better than the cigarette habit which he was trying desperately to abandon.

Finally Anneliese finished her reading. She laid the letter on the table in front of her and covered it with her big pudgy hands. She chose her first words with clinical care.

“I am not sure, Carl, that I am the right person to comment on this. I am not a believer, never have been. Whatever may be the faculty that enables one to make the leap from reason to faith, I have never had it. Some people are tone-deaf;

others are colour-blind. I am incurably atheist. I have often regretted it. In clinical work I have sometimes felt handicapped when dealing with patients who have strong religious beliefs. You see, Carl,” she gave a long, wheezing chuckle, “according to my lights, you and all your kind live in a fixed delusional state, which is, by definition, insanity. On the other hand, since I can’t disprove your delusions, I have to accept that I may be the sick one.”

Mendelius grinned at her and popped the last petit four into her mouth.

“We’ve already agreed that your conclusions will be subject to large qualification. Your reputation will be safe with me.”

“So, the evidence as I read it.” She picked up the letter and began her annotation.

“Handwriting: no evidence of disturbance. It’s a beautiful regular script. The letter itself is precise and logical. The narrative sections are classically simple. The emotions of the writer are under control. Even when he speaks of being under surveillance, there is no over-emphasis to indicate a paranoid state. The section dealing with the visionary experience is, within its limits, clear. There are no pathological images, with either a violent or a sexual connotation. Prima facie, therefore, the man who wrote the letter was sane when he wrote it.”

“But he does express doubts about his own sanity.”

“In fact he does not. He recognises that others may have doubts about it. He is absolutely convinced of the reality of his visionary experience.”

“And what do you think of that experience?”

“I am convinced that he had it. How I would interpret it is another matter. In the same fashion I am convinced that Martin Luther believed he saw the Devil in his cell and pitched an inkwell at him. That doesn’t mean I believe in the Devil, only in the reality of the experience to Luther.” She laughed again, and went on in a more relaxed fashion.

“You’re an old Jesuit, Carl. You know what I’m talking about. I deal with delusional patients all the time. I have to start with the premise that their delusions are real to them.”

“So you’re saying Jean Marie is a delusional subject?”

“Don’t put the words in my mouth, Carl!” Her reproof was instant and sharp. She thrust the letter towards him.

“Take another look at the vision passage again, and the pieces before and after. It falls exactly into a daydream structure. He is reading and meditating in a sunny garden. All meditation involves some degree of auto-hypnosis. He dreams in two parts: the aftermath of the cataclysm on an empty earth, and then the whirling fiery passage to outer space. Both these images are vivid but essentially banal. They could have been culled from any good science fiction film. He has cerebrated them many times before. Now he daydreams them. When he wakes he is back in the garden. It’s a common phenomenon.”

“But he believes it is a supernatural intervention.”

“He says he does.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Anneliese Meissner flatly, “he could be lying!”

“No! It’s impossible! I know this man. We’re as close as brothers.”

“An unfortunate analogy,” said Anneliese Meissner mildly.

“Sibling relationships can be infernally complicated. Simmer down, Carl! You wanted a professional opinion: you’re getting it. At least take time to examine a reasonable hypothesis.”

“This one is pure fantasy!”

“Is it? You’re an historian. Think back. How many convenient miracles can you name? How many most timely revelations? Every sect in the world has to provide them for its devotees. The Mormons have Joseph Smith and his fabulous golden plates; the Reverend Sun Myung Moon made himself the Lord of the Second Advent, even Jesus bowed down to worship him. So suppose, Carl just suppose! your Gregory XVII decided that this was crisis time for the institution and that the moment was ripe for some new manifestation of Divine involvement.”

“Then he was taking a hell of a gamble.”

“And he lost it. Might he not now be seeking to recover something out of the wreckage, and using you to do it?”

“It’s a monstrous idea!”

“Not to me. Why are you choking on it? I’ll tell you.

Because, though you like to believe you’re a liberal thinker, you’re still a member of the Roman Catholic family. For your own sake you have to protect the mythos. I noticed you didn’t wince when I mentioned the Mormons and the Moonies. Come on, my friend! Where’s your mind?”

“It seems I’ve mislaid it.” Carl Mendelius was grim.

“If you take my advice, you’ll drop the whole affair.”

“Why?”

“You’re a scholar with an international reputation. You want no truck with madness or folk-magic.”