In the cathedral precinct at Ciudad three men sat round a table in a room that opened on to a sea of roof tiles and a row of worn gargoyles with eroded grotesque faces. An odour of incense filled the room, which was above a side door into the organ loft of the cathedral nave. On the table were a bowl of figs, a bowl of almonds, a flask of wine and two glasses. One would have thought the three were friends, pleasantly talking. But the third man was Palinor.
‘It makes a great deal of difference,’ Beneditx said to him, ‘whether you call yourself unbeliever or atheist. An unbeliever, one who is simply uncertain whether there be a God or no, is in principle convincible; one more day’s experience, one better argument encountered, may overpower his doubt and bring him down on the side of belief. If my friend were an unbeliever, I would both argue with him and pray for him, and though he were to continue long in his state of doubt, I would remember, in hope, that to doubt something is to admit its possibility.’
‘I am not in principle convincible,’ said Palinor. ‘I do not doubt.’
‘You do not recognize yourself in my definition of an unbeliever? Then let us try the definition of an atheist. There might be two kinds. An atheist might be one who is against God; who knowing his existence has willingly enlisted in the service of the devil and acts to thwart whatever seems to him to be God’s will . . .’
‘That sounds to me more like a form of madness than the position in a disputation of a reasonable man,’ said Palinor.
‘I have known it,’ said Severo. ‘It was long ago, and I was newly in office here. And it did not occur to me at the time that the man was mad, though perhaps it should have. He had murdered a child, and he raged and cursed God, and uttered dreadful blasphemies all the way to the gallows.’
Severo spoke softly, concealing his consternation at Palinor. What had he expected the atheist to be like? Not like this, certainly. Brought to a private chamber to pursue his appeal, finding Severo seated with Beneditx, instead of standing, rigid with apprehension, just inside the door, he had advanced immediately to the table and confidently awaited the invitation to sit down. Severo noticed that there was no third plate on the table with a twinge of inappropriate embarrassment, as though Palinor had been an invited guest.
‘I am not a murderer,’ said Palinor. ‘And I do not see how I could blaspheme, exactly, though I can curse mildly in my native tongue. As for being against God, that would simply be a negative state of belief, I think. Offer me your other kind of atheist.’
Severo, while carefully peeling a fig, was closely observing the man. He addressed himself courteously to Beneditx, but with some just discernible difference of manner he made clear that he knew where worldly authority lay.
‘The other kind of atheist would be one who has convinced himself by false reasoning that there is no God.’
‘That would come nearer,’ said Palinor. ‘What is the difference in the treatment you accord these different kinds?’
Beneditx was appalled. It had not occurred to him that the stranger, offered the familiar distinction between unbeliever and atheist, could possibly answer as atheist. Nobody in Beneditx’s long experience of disputation had ever done so before. He caught Severo’s eye.
‘Tell us about Aclar,’ said Severo, interrupting.
‘Gladly,’ Palinor said. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘How is it governed?’
‘It has a council, chosen by lot from the adult citizenry.’
‘You told the Consistory Court that there were many religions in Aclar, and all were permitted. Does that not lead to faction and disorder? To insubordination among the commonalty?’
‘Occasionally. But I think . . . of course, I have not been at liberty to wander freely in Grandinsula and observe your ways here, but I think religion is much less important among us. We hold it to be a private matter.’
‘So how, in Aclar, is an atheist dealt with?’
‘Not dealt with at all, unless he breaks the law. As far as I know, atheists are no more likely to be thieves or drunkards than believers are.’
‘Surely an atheist, moved neither by hope of heaven nor fear of hell, would feel free to defy laws and run amok?’
‘No doubt for a believer, desire to please God is a strong motive,’ said Palinor. ‘But a rational man may have sufficient reasons in this world to concede the necessity for laws and the benefits of obeying them. I think for most people in Aclar, a desire to stand well in the eyes of the neighbours is reason enough.’
‘So an atheist is allowed to proselytize and overthrow the belief of others?’
‘If he wishes. I don’t think it happens much. In private conversation, perhaps. I am by now more than a little curious to know what happens to atheists of each kind on Grandinsula.’
‘We burn them,’ said Beneditx.
Palinor flinched visibly. ‘I suggest that it would be less trouble to let me leave. Since I came here only by accident.’
‘There is no such thing as an accident,’ said Severo.
‘Are you saying that nothing is ever lost? That jars are never broken without malice? That neither friend nor stranger is ever met by chance upon the road? That I must deliberately have thrown myself into the sea?’
‘You are seeing accident in terms of human purposes,’ said Beneditx. ‘But we mean that there are no accidents in the mind of God. Before all ages and until the end of time he purposes all things. Nothing befalls outside his providence, and all that is, is as he wills it. What seems chance to us serves him. You fell into the sea and are delivered into our charge for a reason, friend. The most likely reason is that we should enlighten your darkness, and convince you that there exists your God and your Redeemer.’
‘I should have swum the other way,’ said Palinor.
High Mass intervened to postpone further conversation. But Severo could only with difficulty bend his thoughts to attend to his duty. Weaving and doubling like a hare pursued by hunters, overleaping obstacles . . . swiftly, from every point to which he directed them, his thoughts returned to Palinor. Many years since, during the reign of Severo’s father, Severo had been sent on a foreign mission. First to Rome, of course, and then to the Low Countries. If, during the yearning plaintive notes of the Kyrie, he kept seeing in his mind’s eye the narrow, bronze-brown hook-nosed visage of the atheist, the dark beard and tender mouth, the fingernails paler than the skin of the broad hands, the calm and alert demeanour of the man, well, it was an ordinary thing to find the concern of the hour before the service lingering and impinging on prayer. But why, when the great choir from the gallery began full-voiced upon the Gloria, should Severo be wandering along a waterside, on a land so lush, so fully watered that the grass seemed burning green, so flat that the magnificent sweep of the sky above seemed curved, like an overturned dish, since it could not otherwise touch the horizons of the vast level land, flat as a marble floor and veined with brimming courses of standing waters? If they flowed, it was not visible to the eyes. Great brown-sailed barges moved solemnly through the fields; and though he had been walking away from the city for several hours, it lay behind him in full view: churches, windmills, walls, the distance visible only in its diminished size, the time needed to retrace his steps inestimable. It should have been dark, he remembered, but the light lingered, and lingered in a prolonged soft and declining radiance; the sun set behind him, and yet the darkness did not come. When he re-entered the city, there were children playing along the street, along the banks of the canal, under the dusky trees, below the windows just now being lit by indoor candles, and there was light enough to follow the trajectory of their soaring ball.
Uninvited, his mind returned to him the feeling he had then experienced. Not pleasure – something far sharper and more challenging – joy, rather. And not in the least any wish that anything about this remote and astonishing land might be shared by his own island, for it was the difference in and for itself that so struck him. How the loss of familiarity in everything had woken him up and sharpened his senses! It had been like taking off one’s outer garments in a cold wind and being immersed in the sting of chill air over the entire surface of one’s skin. How intensely he had lived his few weeks in the northern summer! How vividly, how acutely sensible had the qualities of the island appeared to him, seen in contrast for the first few weeks after his return! Dulled again only too soon – the world not known because too well known. But while it had lasted how vivid had been his joy in strangeness!
He had been shown a curious thing, while he stayed in Utrecht. They were hanging a new peal of bells in the Ouderkerk; the old ones, dismounted, were slung from beams in the bell-tower, waiting for the rigging of ropes and pulleys to lower them safely to the square. The clerk of the works took him to the top of the tower to see the new peal, and showed him how if you struck the new tenor bell smartly with a piece of wood and then quenched the chime at once with the damper, you heard the old one, unmoving, still as death, giving voice, very faintly, a just discernible deep resonance on the quiet air. ‘Touch it,’ the clerk had said. Severo had reached out and touched the dull bronze of the dusty bell and felt it tingle at his fingertips.
By the time the service moved to its magnificent climax, while the choir sang the Sanctus, Severo had realized the meaning of his rebellious and drifting thoughts. Talking to the atheist had offered to his intellect, what the Low Country had offered to his senses – the exhilaration of strangeness. He was hungry for more; he wanted to walk in that chill and unsheltered country. Something in his soul was ringing with an answering resonance to a note struck by Palinor. He was tingling with gladness at what should have appalled him – that such a thing as an atheist could exist. He knew no name for such a feeling. He would not have called it love.
‘Well?’ Severo asked Beneditx. ‘What do you think? He is a conundrum, isn’t he? Counsel me.’
‘A difficulty, certainly. What puzzles you about him?’
‘Now you have seen him, do you still say he cannot be in good faith?’
‘I did not need to see him to know that. However plausible he is, the truth is that he was born like everyone else with knowledge of God. One has to ask what he has done with it.’
‘It does not come with baptism?’
‘No. Baptism confers grace, and dispels sin. We are talking now of neither grace nor sin, but knowledge.’
‘But, Beneditx, on the face of it, the intellect depends on the senses for the origin of knowledge, and knowledge gathered from sensible things cannot lead the human intellect to the point of seeing the divine substance . . . A babe hasn’t the means . . .’
‘You speak of evening knowledge – knowledge of things as they are and have been in the visible world. I speak of morning knowledge – knowledge of things as they were created, things as they are meant to be. The knowledge of angels is of both these kinds at once, but in mankind there is a difference. Inborn knowledge of God is morning knowledge.’
‘So you would say that even that poor creature locked up in the yard there, knows of God?’
‘Yes. Even such a thing as that.’
‘She seems to know only what a wolf knows.’
‘But knowledge of God is the precise difference between a human being and an animal.’
‘So in the mountains, in the dark cave, in the bitter snows, with no tenderness but that of a wolf for a whelp and not a word spoken to her, you say that child knew God?’
‘If she could speak and answer questioning, she would tell you that she did. That she knew of an immanence all around her, sustaining all things, though she knew it nameless.’
‘Could she be taught to speak, I wonder?’ Severo was thinking aloud, but Beneditx at once said, his face lit with eagerness, ‘It would have to be in seclusion; her teachers would have to vow to make no mention of God and to refrain from teaching religion. Then when she spoke it would prove beyond doubt what has often been in dispute. Nobody has been able to make trial of this before; it would involve a deliberate cruelty to a human child. But this child having been raised apart from all society by accident . . .’
‘There is no such thing as an accident, Brother,’ said Severo gently. ‘Not even falling in the sea.’
‘An accident as far as human purpose is concerned. The cruelty is that of the wild beast which stole the child. But out of it good may come; we may find proof absolute that every soul knows God. Who is to say whether perhaps in the providence of God this is the reason why he allowed such a thing to happen to the child? And I have no doubt that the proof would force you to do what I see that you are reluctant to do, and condemn the atheist.’
Severo considered his friend’s words. It seemed to him that Beneditx’s mind had not wholly caught up with his body – that he was still engrossed in his books and had not recovered the knack of attending to the material world. That would be why Palinor seemed to him less of a conundrum than he seemed to Severo, why Beneditx could encompass him so easily in a statement of principle.
‘Beneditx, are you not struck by his courage?’ Severo asked. ‘When it would be so easy simply to lie, and evince opinions which would lead us to free him? When you come to think of it, a man who believes in God might expect punishment for lying about his inner state of mind; God knows the secrets of all hearts. But one who does not believe in God should feel free to lie with impunity and say anything we want to hear. He told the adjudicators that such a lie would demean him. Are you not impressed?’
‘Like you, I cannot see why he should be honest. And it does him credit, I admit.’
‘And Beneditx, should we not be able to convince him by argument?’
Beneditx said, ‘It is difficult to proceed against the errors of one single individual. Firstly, because the remarks of individual sacrilegious men are not so well known to us that we may use what they say as the basis for proceeding to a refutation of their errors. The fathers of the church refuted the errors of the gentiles when they had lived amongst gentiles and knew well what positions such men were inclined to take. Whereas we know nothing of Aclar.’
‘He is willing enough to tell us about it. What you need to know about the beliefs of Aclar in order to refute them can be obtained from him by question.’
‘Well. But further, Severo, remember that this man does not agree with us in accepting the authority of any scripture by which he might be convinced of his error. Against Jews we can argue by means of the Old Testament, and against heretics by means of the New, but against this man . . .’
‘We must therefore have recourse to natural reason, to which all men are forced to give their assent. Did you not teach, Beneditx, that although some truths about God exceed all the ability of human reason, others, like the fact of his existence, can be reached by it?’
‘Yes. All the doctors hold that the existence of God lies within the scope of proof.’
‘Then this is what I shall do,’ said Severo. The power that he held was like a sword, seldom taken from the wall, but always wielded in earnest. He had considered carefully, he had listened to the scholarly advice of his mentor and friend. But decision fell to him, and now he had decided. ‘I will see if the wolf-child can be taught to speak and discover to us if she knows of God without instruction. And I will detain the atheist to await the outcome. But it will take some time and may not be possible at all. Therefore, meanwhile, you will argue with Palinor and by the light of reason prove God to him. He has a soul worth saving. Save him for me, Beneditx.’