Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

After that single hour, I did not meet him again until he went to Cambridge. It was only by chance that his outburst had affected my circle, and, in the large town where we were both born, our paths were not likely to cross. I lived in the shabby genteel fringe of the lower middle class, while his father had made a considerable fortune and moved among such society as the town could give. His career and way of life were, as a matter of fact, fairly typical of the rich manufacturers of that day. His father, Roy’s grandfather, had risen from the artisan class, and made enough money out of boots to send his son to a minor public school: then Roy’s father, a man of obstinate inarticulate ability with an obsessional passion for detail, expanded the business and took his chance in the 1914–1918 war. He became really rich, much richer than many of my London friends who were thought wealthy and lived in greater style: by 1934 he cannot have been worth less than £300,000. He did very little with it, except buy a local newspaper and a large house on the outskirts of the town, and take every opportunity of spending money on his only son. He idolised Roy, in a speechless, embarrassed, puzzled fashion; he sent him to the most fashionable preparatory and public schools (it was only by a personal accident that he came to the college, which was not particularly fashionable; his house master, whom Roy liked, happened to be a loyal old member); from the time Roy was twenty-one, his father allowed him £1,500 a year, and settled a substantial sum on him as well.

When I ran across him in his undergraduate days, he was more outwardly eccentric than he later seemed — not in dress, for he was always elegant, but in actions which at the time I thought were only a very young man’s whims. I found him one night sleeping on a seat on the embankment. He did not explain himself, although he was, as usual, polite, easy-mannered, affectionate and direct. He went in for bouts of hard drinking which seemed more abandoned than an undergraduate’s blinds, more deliberately an attempt to escape. And he started his love affairs quite early. Yet each examination was a triumph for him, and he was the outstanding classic of his day.

After taking his degree, he was at a loss. He felt vaguely drawn to some kind of scholarly research, but he did not make any determined start. He drank more, went into more dissipated company, felt a despondency overcome him of which previously he had only known the shadow’s edge. This was the first time that he was forced, without any help or protection at all, to know the burden of self.

In a few weeks that darkness left him, and he tried to forget it. The Master, whose subject was comparative religion, suggested that he should apply himself to oriental languages. To help himself forget the period of melancholy not long past, Roy threw all his attention into Syriac and Aramaic: and then, partly by sheer chance, came the offer of the research which was to occupy so much of his working life.

It was an odd story, how this ever reached him.

Of all the Christian heresies, one spread the furthest, touched imaginations most deeply, and had the richest meaning. Perhaps it should have been called a new religion. It was the heresy of Mani. It began towards the end of the third century ad in the pleasure city of Antioch and the decadent luxurious towns of Syria; it swept through them as a new religion might sweep through California today.

It was a new religion, but it drew its strength from something as old and deep as human feeling; for, just as the sexual impulse is ineluctably strong, so can the hate of it be; the flesh is seductive, beyond one’s power to resist — and one hates the flesh as an enemy, one prays that it will leave one in peace. The religion of the Manichees tried to give men peace against the flesh. In its cosmology, the whole of creation is a battle of the light against the dark. Man’s spirit is part of the light, and his flesh of the dark. The battle sways from side to side, and men are taking part in it, here and now. The religion was the most subtle and complex representation of sexual guilt.

Such a subtle and complex religion must have drawn its believers from the comfortable classes. There was none of the quick simple appeal that helped Christianity to spark from man to man among the hopeless dispossessed of the Roman slums. Manichæism must have been chiefly the religion of those with time to think — and probably of a comfortable leisured class in a dying society, a class with little to do except pursue its sensual pleasures and be tormented by their guilt.

Anyway, through the third and fourth centuries the religion spread. The Manichæan missionaries followed the trade routes, into Egypt, the African coastal fringe, Persia; churches were founded, psalmbooks and liturgies and statements of faith were translated from their original Syriac. And very soon the Manichees were being systematically and ruthlessly persecuted. For some reason, this subtle and gentle faith, or anything resembling it, like that of the Albigenses in Provence or the Bogomils in Bulgaria, always excited the savage hatred of the orthodox. Before long the Manichæan congregations had been exterminated in the Levant and round the Mediterranean; others were driven out of Persia and found a home for a while in what is now Chinese Turkestan. Then they too were finished off by the Moslems.

It is an error, of course, to think that persecution is never successful. More often than not, it has been extremely so. For hundreds of years, this religion, which once had rich churches in the most civilised towns in the world, which attracted to its membership such men as Saint Augustine (for whom Roy had a special and personal veneration), would not have been known to exist except for the writings of its enemies. It was as though communism had been extirpated in Europe in the nineteen twenties, and was only known through what is said of it in Mein Kampf . No words of the Manichees themselves were left to be read.

During the twentieth century, however, the technique and scale of archaeological expeditions were each developed, and there were one or two Manichæan finds. A psalm book and a hymnal, translated into a Coptic dialect, were discovered in upper Egypt; and one of the expeditions to Turkestan brought back what was recognised to be a complete liturgy. But it was written in an unknown variety of Middle Persian called Early Soghdian; and for a year the liturgy stayed unread.

The committee who had charge of it intended to ask an Oxford scholar to make an edition but, just at that time, he fell ill. Quite by accident, Sir Oulstone Lyall and Colonel Foulkes happened to be consulting the Master about other business. He mentioned Roy to them and introduced him. They thought he was intelligent, they knew that he had picked up Syriac at an astonishing speed; it was possible that Colonel Foulkes’ devotion to cricket disposed him to take a favourable view of Roy’s character. There was an amateur flavour about all this esoteric scholarship — anyway, they asked if he would like to have a shot.

Only a man of means could have risked it. If he did not get the language out, he had wasted critical years. Something caught in Roy’s imagination, perhaps the religion itself, and he said yes.

That was over two years before, in the January of 1932. Within eighteen months he had worked out the language, so precisely that no one need touch it again. His Soghdian grammar and lexicon were just in proof, and were to be published during 1934. He had already transcribed part of the liturgy, and he was working faster than ever. It was a remarkable record, unbelievable to those who knew a little of his life, the loves, the drinking, the games and parties. But to me, who saw more of him, the miracle disappeared like a conjuring trick which is explained. I knew how, even in the blackest melancholy, he could throw himself with clear precise attention into his work for seven or eight hours a day. I had seen him drink himself into stupor, sleep it off, recover over breakfast, and be back at work by nine o’clock.