John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

“They called us heretics and schismatics, but they were the ones who strayed from the true path. A splinter group which rebelled against the Greek Church grew to power amidst the decayed and corrupted remnants of the Western Empire. These are the ones you call the Catholics, who were rebels against the Metropolitan authority of the Greek Church. Those of us in North Africa who remained pure in our faith were persecuted again and again. Then a time came when the Paynims from Arabia swept over the land.

“And that was the end of us.”

She was silent for a while, lost in sad thought.

She said: “Nothing of the true teachings now remains. Our books are lost. The Gospels of Thomas and Simon are gone, the Letters of Instruction, the writings of Symmeticus, Antonius Thaumaturgos the Elder, Antonius Pius, and the Epistles of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, and the Book of Tubalcaine from before the Flood, are all lost.

“When a council was called by our enemies, to gather together the many sacred writings and the books which preserved the memory of Christ and His apostles, we were banned. Our gospels and epistles were not included in their books; and those gospels that they did include were voted upon to include or exclude by a show of hands. The Greeks drove away dissenters from the council, and so their hands were the ones most numerous.

“And what did they vote into their Bible? Fables and nonsense. To this were added letters and boasts by Paul, who never met Christ, but had a dream of Him, and who invented, out of the speculations of the Greeks, a washed-down version of Platonic and Neoplatonic theogeny.

“And forgeries not by Paul, but bearing his name, were added; as were letters written by several Greeks later said to be the writings of John and Luke, who were illiterate fishermen.”

I said, “Are you talking about the Bible? I mean, our Bible?”

She looked at me sidelong. “You yourself delivered a four-page paper on the Pauline and Pseudo-Pauline epistles, including an analysis of First Timothy, when we were discussing the Markian Hypothesis and the possibility of the Q document in seminar last year.”

“Um… sure.”

“You did not write that paper, did you?”

“I wrote… part of it…”

“You wrote your name at the top.”

“Vanity sort of helped out with some of the wording. And Quentin, uh, checked my spelling, and… Well, what does it matter if I cheated on one little tiny paper! I am just going to be killed, or sold into slavery!”

“You will not be killed, child. And an education is always important.”

“It’s not doing me much good right now. You people have me locked up in a cell buried underground!”

“Since you slept through our study of the Bible, you still have the pagan authors to comfort you. You have the solace of having read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. You have read the Crito, and you know from Gibbon the dignity with which Julian the Apostate met his fate. Epictetus was a slave, and he knew how to bear his lot with dignity…” And now she looked quite sad again, and her eyes turned back to the horizon.

I said, “What’s it like, being the last Donatist?”

“Being the only one who knows the truth in the world full of lies? Every teenager knows something of the feeling.”

“Miss Daw…? I’ve been wondering. How can you be a Christian if you are a pagan goddess?”

“I am not a goddess. That word is reserved properly for the Olympians, who can influence the motions of the Fates, which I cannot.”

“But how can you have faith in Christ? Is he one of you folk?”

She looked uncomfortable. “The matter is complex. There are those among us who claim that some upstart merely wished to steal the worship due to Jove; and that Baphomet, a child of Phorcys and Ceto, was the man crucified at Calvary; or else Simon the Magician, one of the Gray Sisters’ sons. Still others say it was merely a man who died on Golgotha; still others say no one died, and that Christ is an invention of priestcraft. There are many of us who could make ourselves seem to die, and rise again from the grave; for that matter, there are humans who could perform some slight-of-hand, or swap a living body for a dead; and anyone can forge a document, or tell a lie. But none of us could raise a human being from the dead, or promise truly to raise all men; and none of us can forgive sins, or wipe the stain of wrong away.”

“Why would one of you want to steal another person’s worship? Do you eat it?”

She smiled. “Something like that. The Olympians receive their power from the moral order of the universe, but also from the laws of men, and the guilt of those who break those laws.”

“Then how can you be a Christian, if you suspect Christ was one of you?”

She shook her head. “I suspect no such thing; I merely report what some among the immortals say. But even their opinion betrays the deeper truth. If the Redeemer was a fraud, Miss Windrose, my question is this: Who was he impersonating? Whose worship, as you put it, was he trying to eat? If Baphomet was a thief, there must have been real gold he was trying to steal.

“I am above humanity in the chain of being. The mere fact that there is a chain of being proves that there must be a top, a first link or Uncaused Cause from which all else emanates. Everyone fears and worships the thing that sets the circumstances and limits of his fate, as a hound might worship the master who owns him. Only something that is entirely without restricting circumstances, unlimited, infinite, can be called Divine. Unhindered, it would be motionless. With no wants and no lacks, it would be entirely serene.”

I said, “That could be any god of any religion. What makes you a Christian?”

She said, “In my youth I swam along the coasts of Carthage, and lured mortal sailors to their wretched deaths, promising them sweet kisses, and I laughed gaily as they drowned. A time came when the dying men called upon a strange and nameless God to save them, who was, at once, himself and his own son, and one of these forgave me as he died, though I was his murderess. Angered by the conceit, I determined to slay the next holy man of this new faith I came upon.

“I spied one who walked along the cliff overlooking the sea. He was dressed as a beggar, and leaned upon a staff as he walked, and he praised his God with every weary step of his long road. I swam ahead of him and scaled the rock, so that he found me combing my hair with a comb of shell, dressed only in my beauty. I tempted him with kisses, and he rebuked me sternly, and had no fear of me.

“It is our custom not to kill men until they fail to answer one of our riddles, because that failure shows their mortality and imperfection. So I asked the Holy Man if I had a soul, and if I could know salvation: this was a riddle to which I knew he knew no answer, since I did not know the answer myself.

“He raised his staff, and said it was no more likely that the dead wood in his hand could put forth bloom again, than that a mermaid could have a soul.

“No sooner did the words leave his lips, than the dry stick in his hand turned green, and flowers of unearthly beauty budded and bloomed all along the staff. I knew then that I was in the presence of a superior power: I dove from the cliff to flee from the saint.

“Like you, I can see the many dimensions of the world, and so I knew what it was that reached down through higher space to touch that old man’s walking stick. It was a power above Saturn, older than Time, able to restore the dead and recover the innocence I had once and lost. Many a day I huddled in the darkness far below the wave, wondering and grieving.

“And now I know that Eternity is beyond even the gods of Olympus. There is a shadow, a hint, of what Eternity is like within this world of time and death and decay: for if there were not, we would have no notion of perfection, no idea of beauty, no love, no hope. We would all be Dr. Fell.”