The Faith of a Heretic

Trilogue on Heaven, Love, and Peace

IRENE: Have you found peace, Bruno?

CHRISTOPHER: What matters is not finding peace on earth but to attain the peace that passeth understanding, after death.

BRUNO: I don’t want either.

CHRISTOPHER: What, then, do you want after death?

BRUNO: Nothing.

CHRISTOPHER: But if there were nothing after death, life would be altogether meaningless. Why go on living if there is no aim, no goal, no final bliss?

BRUNO: There are aims and goals enough in this life.

CHRISTOPHER: But they don’t give life meaning; they can’t.

IRENE: Hypocrite!

CHRISTOPHER: What do you mean?

IRENE: You talk as if the only thing that gave your life some meaning were your hope to enter heaven after death; but in fact your life is full of projects, purposes, and expectations that bear absolutely no relation to such hopes. It is surely these this-worldly aims and goals on which you count to give your life some meaning—at the very least, six and a half days of the week. At most you hedge your bet by making a minute investment that requires nothing but a few hours a week; but to say that this marginal speculation alone gives your life meaning is hypocrisy.

CHRISTOPHER: Your name calling depends on the slanderous assumption that I don’t believe what I profess. But I do believe, and without faith, life makes no sense.

BRUNO: It wasn’t nice of her to charge you with hypocrisy; but she is right, you know.

CHRISTOPHER: I know nothing of the sort and find your supercilious tone still more annoying than her lack of manners.

BRUNO: You claim your hope for bliss gives your life meaning.

CHRISTOPHER: I don’t just claim that: it does. And I dare say that if you do not have a hope like that, you, no doubt, find life meaningless, whether you care to admit it or not.

BRUNO: There is a sense in which life is meaningless and another in which it is not.

CHRISTOPHER: Before you drown in evasions, sophistries, and plain equivocation, I wish you would withdraw your insult.

BRUNO: But you are hypocritical when you profess to care so much about what happens to you after death. A man who is seriously involved in his speculation investigates the company before investing. In the field with which you claim to be so seriously concerned there are a multitude of companies, and you know hardly anything about the lot, have not compared their merits and their weaknesses, but simply acted on a tip without checking on it.

IRENE: Bruno, you have no principles; you stole my metaphor.

CHRISTOPHER: I have the utmost confidence in the man who gave me what you call, disgustingly, a tip. In fact, it was not just one man but several men and women of the very highest quality. Moreover, they are associated with an old firm that is thoroughly respectable. Even if I gave the matter three whole days a week, I could not possibly come up with anything half as reliable as this fine team of specialists. I simply lack their expert qualifications. There are other things of which I have a firsthand knowledge. In this case I need none because my case could hardly be in better hands.

IRENE: So you admit that you do not put very much time into this little speculation.

BRUNO: Your metaphor does not stand up, Christopher.

CHRISTOPHER: My metaphor? Mine? What will you say next? It’s yours, Bruno, not mine.

IRENE: His? It is mine.

BRUNO: All right, all right! Irene started it all, and all of us have used it now. But the way she and I employed it, it stood up, while your use of it doesn’t. Suppose you were thinking of getting married.

CHRISTOPHER: Now you are changing the metaphor.

IRENE: He wants one of his own.

BRUNO: I am getting sick of all this talk about metaphor and which is whose. If you contemplated marriage you would not go to an old, established firm and seek advice; you would pick your own girl.

IRENE: What makes you so sure he would?

CHRISTOPHER: What does that prove?

BRUNO: In matters that are really important to you, you don’t pass the buck.

CHRISTOPHER: Another vulgarism—designed, I suppose, to cover up your want of logic. When it comes to marriage, I know better whom I love, with whom I get along—

IRENE: Where the shoe pinches, or will pinch, if you don’t mind the vulgarism—

CHRISTOPHER: I do mind; but I trust you get the point. There is no need to defer to experts. In this matter every one of us is the best expert there could be. Or, if not every one of us, most of us. I, at any rate, am satisfied with my own qualifications.

IRENE: He’s got you there.

BRUNO: If you don’t start to argue which metaphor is whose, you are sure to get off on another tangent. Perhaps my example of marriage was unfortunate; yes, I am sure it was.

IRENE: You see, you’d better stick to my examples.

BRUNO: Suppose you had to make a really important choice between several alternatives. Now you knew of an old, highly respected firm and of several good people who served it with pride. And they gave you some straightforward advice.

IRENE: Bruno is leaning over backward to be fair to you. As if the kind of outfit that he has in mind were in the habit of giving straightforward advice!

BRUNO: Now suppose that someone pointed out to you that some of your best friends were dealing with a great variety of other firms, some possibly not quite as old as yours, others considerably older—all widely respected. Suppose you were also shown that in your own firm there had been, and still were, some unscrupulous and even some downright dishonest characters, occasionally even in positions of responsibility and influence. And that in some of the other firms there had been, and were even now, people in no way inferior to the best in yours. For the moment, let’s not weigh their merits closely, but suppose that they were rather even.

CHRISTOPHER: But that supposition begs the question.

IRENE: On the contrary. I should have said that he is still leaning over backward to be fair. Your firm has a reputation for intolerance and for waging wars and crusades while it talks of peace.

BRUNO: If my supposition begged the question, if the issue really depended on the merits of the firms and of the men associated with them, especially at the policy-making level—

CHRISTOPHER: Of course, it does; that’s what I said before.

BRUNO: Then nothing, absolutely nothing, could excuse you from a careful study of the various firms, their members past and present, and the way their policies were formulated centuries ago.

IRENE: YOU would find that the policies were, as often as not, the result of cutthroat competition, wars, wily diplomacy, and very earthy compromises.

CHRISTOPHER: She is rude, rude, rude; and you say constantly: suppose, suppose, suppose. Suppose I don’t suppose. Suppose I do not care to play your little game. Suppose I’d rather stick to facts.

BRUNO: The fact is that Irene called you a hypocrite; and I admitted that was rude of her, though she was right. What I have tried to show you, without being rude, is how she is right. You do not do what you would clearly do if you considered what you claim to be so terribly important one tenth as important as you say you do.

CHRISTOPHER: You are every bit as rude as she is. I only pray that both of you may find forgiveness. But I am hardly suprised. Without faith there is no charity, but only nastiness and—

IRENE: Honesty. When honesty is not particularly flattering, you call it rudeness. But I’ll admit there is another kind of rudeness: the rudeness of faith lacking honesty—that kills, charitably, of course, to prevent the disastrous effects of honesty. And when no longer able to kill, it imposes censorship; and deprived of that weapon too, one tries to prevent the truth from being stated—for example, by appealing to good manners and discrediting devotion to the truth as rudeness. I only wish you might admit that what you really mind is not rudeness: you are as rude as anybody when you say, for example, that all other firms are far inferior to your own; that their executives lack the fine qualities of yours; and, in short, that it so happens you are right and everybody who does not agree with you is wrong. And that our lives are meaningless, while yours is meaningful. No, what you mind is not rudeness; what you mind is honesty. You may call it insulting, uncivil, or say it is in bad taste. All those are subterfuges. What you cannot stand is honesty—except, of course, in trivial matters, where it does not hurt.

CHRISTOPHER: There is nothing greater than charity; and in the name of charity I oppose hurting people.

IRENE: You see, it is not rudeness that you mind. You even said yourself a while ago that you found Bruno’s polite superciliousness much worse than my straightforward rudeness.

CHRISTOPHER: I don’t make a fetish of manners. What I object to is hurting people. Surely that makes sense.

IRENE: Not altogether. When a man named Bruno was burned as a heretic in 1600, 1 suppose that did not hurt.

CHRISTOPHER: In the first place, he was burned to save his soul from eternal fire after death. In the second place, he was burned lest his heretic teachings should infect his fellow men and lead them to endure eternal fire. So a little hurt was inflicted to prevent a bigger, far bigger one.

IRENE: I like that: “a little hurt.”

CHRISTOPHER: It is like a vaccination.

IRENE: And you are so squeamish about rudeness, because it hurts. Poor dear! If torturing and burning heretics alive is like a vaccination, rudeness should not even itch.

CHRISTOPHER: I have no desire whatsoever to defend the Catholics for their cruel persecutions of heretics.

IRENE: Of course not. Only the Protestants. Only Calvin’s burning of Servetus—and, after all, Calvin only burned the man himself after first betraying him to the Inquisition, hoping that the Catholics would take care of him. And the Salem witch-hunters. They were Protestant and clean and full of charity.

BRUNO: You are really unfair to Christopher. He has no wish to defend that sort of thing.

IRENE: Doesn’t he? Didn’t he defend it only a moment ago?

CHRISTOPHER: I did not defend it. I merely mentioned the reasons these deluded people had for doing what they did.

IRENE: Now I am more confused than ever. Then you don’t think that heretics and those “infected” by their doctrines suffer in eternity?

CHRISTOPHER: I never said I did.

IRENE: Then our beliefs do not affect what happens to us after death.

CHRISTOPHER: I didn’t say that.

BRUNO: Of course you didn’t. But it would be interesting to find out what you do think about this.

CHRISTOPHER: The fact is that I don’t know what happens after death. I don’t know if our beliefs make a difference.

BRUNO: If you don’t know what happens after death, nor what makes and what does not make a difference, your initial statement has become almost empty of meaning.

CHRISTOPHER: What initial statement?

BRUNO: That your belief in some bliss after death gave your life meaning, and that this alone gave your life meaning.

CHRISTOPHER: So? I believe in bliss, or heaven, or whatever you prefer to call it.

IRENE: Do you think we all go there?

CHRISTOPHER: I don’t know.

BRUNO: Do you think it likely?

CHRISTOPHER: I should not be surprised if, in the end, we should all find ourselves where some of us will be surprised to find ourselves.

IRENE: How clear! How neat! How unambiguously stated!

BRUNO: You mean, I suppose, in heaven.

CHRISTOPHER: If you want to put it that way.

BRUNO: I don’t, particularly. I am just trying to find out what precisely you were saying.

CHRISTOPHER: Say, near God.

IRENE: He has jumped from the mist into the fog. That’s what the theologians call “the leap.”

BRUNO: You seem to be saying, Christopher, that you would not be surprised if all that we believed and did during out lives turned out to make no difference whatsoever after death.

IRENE: He put on his broad-minded hat. He is being charitable. He would not be surprised if the heretics rubbed elbows in eternity with those who burned them. Anyway, it’s an improvement over the old Christian idea that the burners would divert themselves in heaven with the spectacle of seeing all the unregenerate broiling in hell.

CHRISTOPHER: Why—would you reverse that dreadful notion and allow the heretics to look upon the tortures of their persecutors?

BRUNO: Of course not. Why should consciousness survive death? Let them all find peace—but not peace surpassing understanding. Simply peace and quiet and uninterrupted sleep. Or call it disintegration, or extinction. But the odd thing, Christopher, is that we two agree.

CHRISTOPHER: We certainly do not.

BRUNO: You agree with me that our lives are meaningless in an important sense. They make no difference whatsoever to what happens to us after death. Their significance is strictly limited to this life, allowing for some small effect on the lives of others after our death.

CHRISTOPHER: I am not so sure about that.

IRENE: But you only just said it.

CHRISTOPHER: I said it was possible. I should not be surprised.

BRUNO: You see, we do agree. I don’t expect to be surprised either.

CHRISTOPHER: But I think you will be.

IRENE: I see it all now. According to Christopher, what happens to people after death is the same for all of them. Everybody finds himself in the unutterable vicinity, in close company with everybody else. But those who are charitable, sociable, and not demanding intellectually enjoy this endless occasion and find it nothing less than heavenly. Those, on the other hand, who have enough intelligence and sensitivity to appreciate the frightful boredom of this party find it hell. Going to church suddenly assumes a vast importance: there is no better way of training oneself to find boredom heavenly, not to let on what one thinks, and eventually to stop thinking. It is all so clear and so ingenious: by cultivating honesty we deprive ourselves of eternal bliss; while dishonesty pays, forever and ever.

CHRISTOPHER: How nasty can you be?

BRUNO: Now you have hurt his feelings. Why are you always so sarcastic?

IRENE: Poor, poor dear! I’ve hurt his darling feelings. And he told us that he doesn’t like to get hurt. He doesn’t think honesty is worth getting hurt for. Poor, poor dear! I am so terribly, terribly sorry.

CHRISTOPHER: You aren’t content to be nasty. You misrepresent me constantly. I didn’t say any of those dreadful things.

IRENE: Of course not, poor dear. You lack the wit.

CHRISTOPHER: Honesty is one thing, and hurting people another.

IRENE: Yes, dear. And courage is one thing, and getting hurt another. And endurance is one thing, and getting tired another. And loving is one thing, and suffering another.

CHRISTOPHER: What on earth does she mean?

IRENE: Poor, poor dear! He doesn’t get the point. I am so terribly, terribly sorry.

BRUNO: She obviously means that you have to pay a price for virtue: no price, no virtue.

IRENE: Our poor dear is all for courage, as long as he does not get hurt. Running the risk of getting hurt is carrying courage too far. And he likes endurance. He merely hates getting tired. Poor dear! And he loves to love; there is nothing he likes better. He merely hates suffering.

BRUNO: Nasty, nasty, nasty.

IRENE: That’s me.

BRUNO: Up to a point, I see your point. Honesty involves hurt so often that anyone who says he prizes honesty—but not to the point of hurting people—is rather like a man who claims to prize courage, short of getting hurt. I not only see that, I agree. But is your point that anyone who prizes love ought to accept suffering too—and that we ought to prize both?

IRENE: Yes and no.

CHRISTOPHER: Now you are equivocating. Not that I am blaming you. When Bruno begins to cross-question, one simply can’t always give straightforward answers.

IRENE: He asked me two questions, and I answered yes to the first and no to the second.

CHRISTOPHER: Now you have lost me.

IRENE: Poor dear! I do think that anyone who prizes love ought to realize that it entails suffering; and if he really considers love as wonderful as many people claim to find it, he ought to be willing to pay that price. But as for myself, I’m not.

CHRISTOPHER: You mean you admit openly and callously that you are against love? Your nastiness is not just weakness of the quarter-pound of flesh that wiggles wickedly in your foul mouth; your spirit isn’t even willing. You are evil through and through. Serpent! May you find forgiveness!

BRUNO: If you are right, she needs no special dispensation: we’ll all be forgiven. Prayer is pointless. Love does not pay.

CHRISTOPHER: Must it pay to be worthwhile?

BRUNO: I don’t think so, but I thought you did. I am willing to love without rewards after death. But you said that without some such reward, life was meaningless.

IRENE: The point to grasp is that love involves suffering, not just occasionally, accidentally, avoidably. Love is not a happy feeling, a form of euphoria: those are epiphenomena. Love means assuming responsibility for another human being. Love involves a decision: not to be indifferent to the sufferings, sicknesses, and failures, to the false hopes, the mistakes, the disappointments, to the terrifying limitations and the final death of someone else. Love is not infatuation, not attraction, and not lust, though all these may precede love and at times accompany it. At other times, love is free of them. There is no need to call one kind of love better, one worse, praising love of a son above love of a husband, or vice versa. Love of its very nature involves suffering: sharing the sufferings of the loved one and, besides, suffering over the limitations of the other human being, not excluding those of which the loved one is not even conscious. Love is the antithesis of peace.

CHRISTOPHER: Up to that last remark, what you said was beautiful. I even thought you might change your mind and become a preacher. Really, it was a very fine sermon. But that final diatribe, of course, is something that no preacher would say.

IRENE: They are such hypocrites and favor everything that is really popular. If it is popular, trust them to say that it was their idea. Imagine a preacher saying something against such “okay” ideas as peace or love. Of course, they are for both, and we are lucky if they do not claim to have a monopoly on both. And honesty is held in such low esteem, partly owing to their influence, that nobody tells them, at least publicly, what any lover knows: that love entails unprecedented suffering. Also joy, of course. But by no means only that.

CHRISTOPHER: Now you are speaking of the love of the flesh. That is not the sort of love the preachers mean.

BRUNO: That’s not fair, Christopher. Remember her analysis of love? She did show how love, even in the highest sense—especially in that—involves suffering.

IRENE: So you have to decide for either peace or love, not both. I have found peace by renouncing love.

CHRISTOPHER: Poor dear, yourself! You poor unloving heart! What wretchedness! I am so sorry for you, truly sorry—not just in the mocking sense in which you say that you are sorry.

IRENE: I have found peace. Have you?

CHRISTOPHER: No, I don’t expect peace in this life. I expect it beyond.

IRENE: There, if you are right, we shall both enjoy peace. And if Bruno is right, we shall also both enjoy peace, if of a different sort. But here and now I enjoy peace, and you do not. And you profess to be sorry for me!

CHRISTOPHER: If you had really found peace, you would not be so nasty. Your serpent’s tongue mocks your smooth claims. You delight in hurting people. You need to assert your superiority by shamelessly humiliating others. I am sure that you are deeply insecure and restless, that you have no peace.

IRENE: Poor gullible Christopher! He is taken in not only by the preachers but also, like so many modern preachers, by the cant of social psychology.

BRUNO: What sort of a potlatch is this? Each of you trying to shame the other by feeling sorrier for him than he for her. One has found peace, the other not; but both behave alike.

CHRISTOPHER: I am not nasty as she is.

IRENE: Of course not: you are holier than I am.

CHRISTOPHER: Nasty again! And I still say, your nastiness betrays a profound insecurity and lack of peace.

BRUNO: I associate peace in this life with the Buddha—seated, smiling, permeated with serenity. He was not sarcastic but compassionate. You, Irene, puzzle me.

CHRISTOPHER: The Buddha, of course, was a sham too. He claimed to be detached and compassionate. He was deeply inconsistent.

BRUNO: The Buddha was not inconsistent. He was as detached and as compassionate as you might be when you see children playing, and one falls and cries. You would not take the hurt as seriously as the little boy does: you would realize that in three minutes he will not even remember it. For all that, you would feel some compassion—not enough to suffer yourself, not enough to keep you from smiling gently. To the Buddha, the girl disappointed in her lover is not very different from that little boy: she too thinks she will never smile again, and it takes her more than three minutes to get over it, but almost certainly much less than three years; maybe not even three months. His detachment and compassion are born of maturity, and he smiles at the immaturity of most men.

IRENE: So you think that if I had really found peace, I should smile with serene compassion at people like Christopher instead of mocking him and taking pleasure in that.

BRUNO: I am not saying you should. I am merely surprised.

IRENE: Because I am not a field, meadow, and woods variety like Christopher, the likes of whom are a nickel a dozen, but a little more unusual, you are surprised. Blessed be those who are surprising, for at least they are not dull.

CHRISTOPHER: “Surprising” is a euphemism for you. Neither are you blessed. What you are is damned annoying.

IRENE: That is just what Socrates’ contemporaries thought of him.

CHRISTOPHER: At least you don’t pretend to be modest.

IRENE: I don’t claim to be like Socrates. But you have to admit that he was nasty, and that he had a reputation for it too. He was ironical, sarcastic, enjoyed making fools of people, and took great delight in making people squirm in argument.

CHRISTOPHER: Yes, and he also sometimes slept; and so do you; and that makes you like Socrates.

IRENE: Poor dear! He never gets the point.

CHRISTOPHER: She wants to excuse her bad manners by finding a great man who shared some of her failings. One can always do that. But it proves nothing. What you ought to imitate is the fine qualities of great men, not their shortcomings.

BRUNO: Her point is that Socrates is also famed for his serenity. In his Apology he was as sarcastic as ever, but few would say that he betrayed a basic insecurity or want of peace. When Socrates talked his judges into sentencing him to death, and in the way in which he subsequently faced his death, he seemed, and still seems, a marvel of peace and security.

IRENE: Thank you, scholar. Where would I be without you? Beyond Christopher.

CHRISTOPHER: Then you think that the social psychologists are wrong?

IRENE: Some social psychologists are preachers manqués. They picture love as a panacea rather than a source of suffering, and peace as the twin of insipidity. But peace is really delightful.

CHRISTOPHER: Nonsense. Nastiness is rooted in frustration, and you cannot attain peace without developing the art of loving.

IRENE: See what I mean, Bruno! As soon as anyone affects a homiletic tone, he believes the message.

CHRISTOPHER: It’s not the tone that matters, but psychology.

IRENE: People who like preachers accept only what those psychologists say who agree with preachers. Then they make a great fuss about the authority of psychology. But as soon as a psychologist says something that does not fit their conviction—“It’s only psychology, which isn’t really a science yet, you know.”

BRUNO: Still I am wondering if Socrates is the only example on your side. That one example would suffice to make one think. And yet, is he the only one?

IRENE: The trouble is that there are so few famous people—men whose characters are well known to us—of whom one could say that they had found peace.

CHRISTOPHER: Jesus above all men.

IRENE: There you have another illustration of my point.

CHRISTOPHER: What do you mean?

IRENE: Was Jesus gentle, or did He Give any marks of gentility?

CHRISTOPHER: Can’t we stop short of blasphemy?

BRUNO: She is quoting William Blake, you know: The Everlasting Gospel.

IRENE: Was Jesus humble? or did He

Give any proofs of humility?

CHRISTOPHER: Blake or no, it’s blasphemy.

IRENE: The Vision of Christ that thou dost see

Is my vision’s greatest enemy.

Thine has a great hook nose like thine;

Mine has a snub nose like to mine.

Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;

Mine speaks in parables to the blind.

CHRISTOPHER: Well now, this Blake, he was a famous poet; and this, of course, is poetry.

IRENE: Sure, sure, poor dear! It’s only poetry. And it was written around 1810. And that, of course, makes it all right. In any case, it would be foolish not to be broad-minded about famous poets, wouldn’t it? Blake is all right; or, if he isn’t, at least we do not make a point of that. And Socrates is also far too much admired to condemn him outright. What matters is that we don’t want to have people like Socrates and Blake around today. Because they are nasty. Or, if anybody has got to be nasty, at least it should be in poetry, because nobody reads that. Or anyway, the people who read it are probably past corrupting.

CHRISTOPHER: You are so wrong. There have been great religious poets.

IRENE: Like Dante, for example, and like Milton. And we all know that there was not a drop of nastiness in either of them. They oozed charity.

BRUNO: I’d still like to return to the point about peace. You are right that qualities resented in contemporaries are forgiven, and not even seen, in great men of the past.

IRENE: They should be forgiven, as you say so archly; even admired. What is damnable is the hypocrisy of being so broad-minded about men safely enshrined in history when the same traits are denounced today and held against the people who possess them. Still, that happens all the time. There is no surer way of finding out if a broad mind is truly broad, or merely supposed to be, because it offers no resistance to the wind and follows fashion, than to see how it reacts to its contemporaries; especially to younger people who are not yet fashionable and, with luck, never will be.

BRUNO: Socrates was a fine illustration of the fusion of peace and—all right—nastiness. Jesus I am not so sure about, because we do not know enough about the historical Jesus.

IRENE: It should count for something that the literary portrait in the Gospels is a prime example of both qualities. Naturally, here we do not speak of nastiness but of prophetic wrath, impassioned honesty—

CHRISTOPHER: He was not witty. I mean—I mean—he did not try to be.

IRENE: You mean, you mean, he did not have a sense of humor. I mean, I mean, he did not try to have one.

CHRISTOPHER: He was not glib and playful and superficial.

IRENE: Yes, dear, it wasn’t nastiness; only prophetic wrath and honesty. He called people vipers, and blind fools, and, according to John, said the devil was the father of the Jews, but he was very careful about hurting people; and when he called people hypocrites, it did not hurt.

CHRISTOPHER: But he was right: they were.

IRENE: While I am wrong, and you are not. Oh, my poor self-righteous friend!

BRUNO: Couldn’t you forget about Jesus for a moment—

CHRISTOPHER: Forget about Jesus?

BRUNO: Irene, you understand me, don’t you? Let us at least forget about Christopher for a moment. I am still wondering whether there are other examples besides Socrates and possibly Jesus.

IRENE: As I said before, it is so difficult to agree who found peace. Take St. John Chrysostom, whose byname means the Golden-Mouthed. A contemporary Catholic historian, Malcolm Hay, in Europe and the Jews, calls him “one of the greatest of the Church Fathers.” He quotes a Protestant divine who called this saint “one of the most eloquent of the preachers who, ever since apostolic times, have brought to men the Divine tidings of truth and love.” Cardinal Newman called him, “A bright cheerful gentle soul, a sensitive heart … elevated, refined, transformed by the touch of heaven.” But, says Hay, “The violence of the language used by St. John Chrysostom in his homilies against the Jews has never been exceeded by any preacher whose sermons have been recorded.” By quoting a great many other saints, Hay leaves no doubt about how much this means. These homilies, he tells us, “filled the minds of Christian congregations with a hatred which was transmitted to their children, and to their children’s children.” The homilies “were used for centuries, in schools and seminaries where priests were taught to preach, with St. John Chrysostom as their model—where priests were taught to hate, with St. John Chrysostom as their model.” He called the synagogue, “worse than a brothel … the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts … the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults … and the cavern of devils.” Hay quotes more than that, not only from this saint. St. Ambrose preached that the synagogue was “a house of impiety, a receptacle of folly, which God himself has condemned.” When his listeners set fire to a synagogue, he said, “I declare that I set fire to the synagogue, or at least that I ordered those who did it, that there might not be a place where Christ was denied.” St. Simeon Stylites, an “ascetic who achieved distinction by living for thirty-six years on top of a pillar fifty feet high, had given up … ‘all worldly luxuries except Jew-hatred.’”

CHRISTOPHER: I don’t think social psychologists would consider a man who lived on top of a pillar so long a really healthy person. He was, no doubt, sick and needed help.

IRENE: My quotations come from a mere three or four pages of a long book that shows how many saints and other great Christians resembled the three I mentioned. I very much doubt that they all needed an analyst to find peace. I consider it entirely possible that they had found peace.

BRUNO: A frightening thought.

CHRISTOPHER: It would be so much more pleasant to believe the psychologists.

IRENE: You talk all the time as if psychologists were agreed on what you find so pleasant. Actually your pleasant doctrine represents a minority view. Freud did not agree with it; he did not think that all aggression came out of frustration.

CHRISTOPHER: He was an atheist, I think.

IRENE: So much for him. Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Stylites were not. And what we need is more men of strong faith like these blessed souls, and fewer men like Freud.

BRUNO: What you have shown is not quite what you meant to show. You wanted to defend peace without love. But your examples only show how terrible a thing peace without love can be. Freud may not have found peace. He surely suffered. But he was not without love.

IRENE: Dreadful people are found in all camps. Mine is not immune. Needless to say, I loathe some of my bedfellows as much as you do.

BRUNO: There is something selfish—frankly selfish—about disavowing love to escape suffering and find peace.

CHRISTOPHER: I have been thinking—

IRENE: That’s a pleasant change.

CHRISTOPHER: I do not even think it works.

IRENE: If you mean that thinking does not work, speak for yourself.

CHRISTOPHER: I mean—

IRENE: Yes, poor dear, you mean. We know, you mean.

BRUNO: You’re mean, really mean.

CHRISTOPHER: I don’t think that disavowing love makes you immune to suffering. Even if the Buddha said it did.

IRENE: Yes, yes, we know, the Buddha was a heathen; in fact, he was an atheist. So we need not listen to him.

CHRISTOPHER: The point is, he was wrong. Even if you do not love anyone, hunger and thirst, torture and sickness still cause pain.

BRUNO: Of course, the Buddha did not just teach men to fall out of love with each other, but to detach themselves from everything. You can reach the point where thirst and hunger do not hurt much any more. But have you, Irene?

CHRISTOPHER: And if I hit you, that would hurt. Not that I would. And cancer would still hurt. And lack of love itself hurts. You must feel so pitifully empty.

IRENE: Like your poor head. Of course, some things still hurt a little even after you have found peace; but those little hurts, even painful diseases, do not matter so much any more. And as for lack of love, that does not hurt. I don’t feel empty. Socrates did not feel empty. The Stoics did not. There is just a feeling of freedom.

BRUNO: But Socrates loved philosophy. He cared. He was not completely detached. And whether Socrates did or not, and whatever the Buddha said, I do not want the kind of peace where I am altogether past caring. I often feel ashamed at caring about this or that and try to rise above humiliating concerns. There are many things I do not want to care about. Still, I do not want your peace. I want to love. I like your analysis of love. It does involve suffering, even a deliberate choice to accept suffering. But I make that choice with open eyes.

IRENE: IS it worth it?

BRUNO: You talk as if there were scales somewhere to measure that. There is no way of telling if it’s worth it. The question makes no sense. I choose to love.

CHRISTOPHER: That sounds fantastic. Love is the gift of heaven. You cannot choose to love. And if you did, it would be irresponsible.

BRUNO: I do choose to love. I have searched my heart more than once whether to love or not to love. I have pondered Irene’s alternative, felt its attraction, and resisted it. After deliberation, after exposing myself to the rival prospects, after considering what can be said for each and what against each, I made my choice. And if going about it that way is not responsible, then I don’t know what it means to be responsible. What’s more, to decide to love is to resolve to accept responsibility.

IRENE: Poor dear Bruno, I feel sorry for you too.

BRUNO: Your potlatch bores me utterly. I do not feel sorry for you. You have made your choice, I mine.

IRENE: But you can’t help feeling sorry for Christopher. Poor, poor Christopher. He is so sweet.

BRUNO: That is one thing you are not. And your nastiness is rather tiresome, you know. Sometimes your wit redeems it, sometimes not. In any case, I can’t always agree with you.

CHRISTOPHER: There is more hope for you, Bruno, than for that damnable woman. I feel sorry for both of you, but you may yet see the light.

BRUNO: That is the worst of it. Unless one is as nasty as she is, people like you will say that sort of thing. One really has to be nasty in self-defense.