John Powys - The Brazen Head

“Now this is what I propose to do on your behalf, my dear friends, and it is extremely simple. I had thought that the conclave of cardinals intended — at least that is what I imagined my angel of revelation hinted to me — to elect me Pope; but I no longer think that this is their intention. What I believe now to be the purpose of God is that I am to watch very carefully the whole array of ecclesiastical leaders, and when I have decided which particular one would make the ablest Pope, that I should pray night and day for the welfare of that good and wise man; and then, when the present Pope dies, I can name as his successor the man I have been observing and praying for all these days.

“Yes, I can name him at the conclave of cardinals; and I think, without serious opposition, get him elected Pope. And this is what I can do for you, my friends of Lost Towers, in return for your kindness to me. When I and God — I mean of course when God and I — have appointed the next Pope, and he is firmly seated in the Chair of Saint Peter, he will naturally wish to reward his heavenly Helper who is God, as well as his earthly Helper who is I.

“It is then that I shall make it clear to the Holy Father how he can reward us both at the same time . I shall tell him how he may spend on behalf of Lost Towers a good round sum of Saint Peter’s shekels. I shall tell him that Lost Towers has been for centuries like those cities in Palestine that God told Moses to build for the runaways from justice, who wanted to cling to the horns of the altars of the Levites and there to escape being slain by the avengers of blood. I shall tell him that he had better build an Aims-House for the aged of both sexes, in the immediate vicinity of Lost Towers, with six small independent houses for women, and a larger house of two stories for the Master of the establishment. I shall tell the Pope that the inmates had better be called ‘Tower Canons’ and ‘Tower Canonesses’, and that he had better pay the Master of the place a good large income yearly, so as to render him completely independent of all influence from outside. The name of the Holy Father, whether that name be Leo or Pius or Gregory or Martin or Nicholas or Clement or Urban, shall be, I shall assure him, inscribed over the gateway to the Master’s Lodge, where it shall remain forever and forever.

“And now there remains only one thing more I must ask of you all, namely, that none of you will conceal from the world, but rather will reveal to the world in all directions, that it is purely and simply by the sudden appearance among you of me and God — I mean of course of God and me — that you have all been so absolutely and entirely turned from the error of your ways as to call upon the Pope and God — I mean of course upon God and the Pope — to raise up in your midst such a monument of your conversion as this Lost Towers Aims-House for aged runaways from the justice of the kingdoms of subsequent generations. This having been built, your remotest descendants will fall upon their knees on this spot, and tap the very ground where Lost Towers stands, in reverence and worship for evermore!

“And do you ask me, my lovely Daughter of the house — and do you ask me, my gracious Lady of the house — and do you ask me, O great Baron of Lost Towers! — what your evermore loyal and devoted pair of friends, I and God, are going to do next, when you have escorted us to the Fortress of Roque and have left us with the Gate-Keeper of Roque and have returned in peace to your own place?

“Well, I will tell you in a moment what I and God intend to do next. But, before telling you, I must let you know that the instinct in me which orders every smallest move I make, and half-creates everything I hear, see, touch, feel, or even smell, compels me to insist once again, as I always do, and always must do, wherever I go upon the surface of this earth, that the whole secret of the ultimate mystery of life is contained in those precious, holy, sweet, delectable, celestial, angelic, cherubic, seraphic, ineffable four letters composing the word Love!

“Love is simply all there is! And it is more than that. It is all there was and all there will ever be! Love is like water and air and fire; and it goes flowing, floating, flaming, round the earth, penetrating the earth, proliferating the earth, perforating the earth, and one day swallowing up the earth!

“And yet you ask what I and God are going to do next, when you, my loving friends, have left me at Roque. I will tell you in simple language. We, that is to say the All-powerful whose essence is Love, and I his humble, his negligible, his self-obliterating, self-negating, self-annihilating servant, whose essence is obedience and who has made his will my will to a degree bewildering to the whole human race, have decided that the Devil has incarnated Himself in the personality of this notorious magician, Roger Bacon, who devotes his time, his money, his leisure, his learning, wholly, entirely, and absolutely to inventing and constructing a Head of Brass that shall think as a man, and speak as a man, and even utter opinions on how the country should be ruled, like a man.

“Well, my dear friends, you who are now announcing to the entire world that you yourselves, by the mediation of his less than nothing servant, who is your do-nothing, tittle-nothing, scrap-nothing, flip-nothing, pip-nothing of a beggarly Bonaventura, are about to accept the pardon and peace of a stately Aims-House from the Holy Father, may now learn that the great God of Love and I, his disciple in Love, are about to punish, punish, punish, punish this thrice-accurst Roger Bacon, till not only his Brazen Head but his own worse than brazen skull will split into atoms.

“Yes, my beloved friends, who have today begun telling the whole world how dearly I, who am His most loving lover since the time when John of Love his very self lay in His bosom, do verily and utterly love you and how I have shown it with regard to the Holy Father, I am going to tell you now how God through me and I through God will punish this abomination of desolation who calls himself Friar Bacon!”

Here he paused to observe the effect of his words upon his hearers, and it was clear to Lilith, who by this time had stolen round to the bottom of the table with a long black mantle wrapt hastily round her and was gazing intently at him with quivering lips and ghastly-white cheeks, that he was well-satisfied with the depth, the gulf, the abyss of silence into which his audience had been precipitated. “No,” he proceeded, in a very curious voice, the sort of voice a vulture might use who was holding in its claws, before the hungry beaks of its young, a dying lamb, from whose body, at each gasp of its breath, that is to say from each place where a claw entered its flesh, there ran a stream of blood, “no! no!” he went on, “and I am sure you will all understand exactly what I mean. For a man like this, who knows enough Greek to read the heathen philosophers, and enough Hebrew to pervert and twist the words of Jehovah to Moses, there is only one punishment. What I and God, I mean what God and I, have decided to do with him is to keep him in prison on bread and water, and take all his books and all the paraphernalia he uses in his inventions away from him, and thus compel him to live the life of a real Grey Friar — in other words compel this archdevil to live the life of a saint! His work is an open insult to the Order to which I who speak to you belong. What made him join us then, do you ask? Purely and simply to support himself while he went on with his devilish inventions! His family were ruined. He was without the means of subsistence. And so he became a Franciscan Friar. He must have said to himself: ‘I will go on with the inventions with which I shall eventually destroy both their worship and themselves,’—do you catch the devilry of his idea, beloved friends? — ’And meanwhile I shall live at their expense.’”