A Lonely and Curious Country (31 page)

              “Well, for one thing, this noble ‘experiment in ecumenism’ is nothing but a last ditch effort to save the school financially. A cheap stunt to widen the student base. As such, it’ll never work. But the better it
does
work, the more the Christian presence here will shrink. And in either case, the Miskatonic Divinity School the founders envisioned will be gone.”

              “Your facts are correct, Ben, I know. They always are. But why
not
make virtue of necessity? Maybe a genuinely new thing can emerge under the sun. Other schools have tried it. Maybe an interfaith seminary here will help bring Christianity into a new future in a new millennium. ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing.’ It’s exciting, no?”

              “But there’s my other hesitation,” Oldstone said, aiming his pin at the other’s balloon. “This Innsmouth cult hasn’t got any connection to scripture, even if I could take you seriously when you try to make it look like Philistinism was no more heathen than Presbyterianism. These Innsmouth kids, God bless ‘em, and I mean the real God, the God of Israel, their religion is just some South Sea Islander paganism. They worship a big fish or something. It’s an old-time totem cult. They pray to some idol to get a lot of fish in their nets and to find buried treasure. They just dress it up with a name or two plucked from the Bible by the old Innsmouth sea traders who brought them to our shores. That’s what I was trying to get that student to admit in class this afternoon when he started insisting I give equal time to his own faith. But he suddenly got pretty quiet. Just quoted scripture to me. Said that soon enough I would know his faith by his works.”

2.
Logocentrism

“Jesus Christ is the Logos, the Word spoken of by the pre-Socratic Heraclitus. That Word was conceived as the principle of proportion in change, the principle by which change was kept from becoming chaos, by which stability was kept from becoming sterility. The Stoics learned it from Heraclitus, then Philo from the Stoics. From thence the secret of the Logos passed on into nascent Christianity. The hero cult of Jesus of Nazareth seized hold of the idea, and Christianity grew to be about something beyond a man. The Word became incarnate the moment Christian thinkers decided that a man, Jesus Christ, embodied this principle. Over the centuries Christianity has purified itself, and the Western world, from one degree after another of superstition. It had to, by nature, because at its heart was the very principle of rationality itself. When the Unitarians separated off from our Congregationalist forefathers, it was this that they understood: the Word came to us through Jesus Christ, but it transcends him. This is how Christianity gave birth to science, and why science eventually turned on its parent, discarding Christian faith as a butterfly supercedes its chrysalis. Some of us do not believe such a departure, such a total break, was necessary. There is more to faith than reason, and, rightly understood, the two do not collide. As theologians we want never to forget that. We hold faith in the one hand, reason in the other. We should never have to find ourselves forced to yield up one or the other.”

              A hand shot up. It was the talkative student from Innsmouth, a Mr. Wasserman. Oldstone felt mildly conflicted. He groaned a tiny groan, surmising rough weather ahead. But at the same time he smiled, because it always delighted him when students, of whatever opinion, wanted to join the fray. “Yes, Mr. Wasserman?”

              “Sir, don’t you think reason is a little, well, over-rated? I don’t know what you think about Nietzsche, but…”

              Oldstone replied reflexively, “He bears a mighty name! Christianity’s critics are its greatest friends. It owes them the greatest debt. And much is owed to Nietzsche. Continue.”

              “I have to admit I’m surprised, Professor Oldstone! Nietzsche means a lot to us, too. To the Order of Dagon, I mean. The transvaluation of values, and all that. And the Superman who is to make Homo Sapiens a relic of the past. Nietzsche seems to think that the way of Dionysus is at least as worthy as that of Apollo. Ecstasy and the will to power!”

              “Mr. Wasserman, do you mean to say this is the creed of Dagonism? To tell you the truth, I’m as surprised at your interest in Nietzsche as you are at mine! How on earth does he fit into your tradition? Educate me, and us, Mr. Wasserman.”

              The man rose to his feet. Sitting down, his face and figure had seemed almost indistinguishable amid the slouching mass of perpetually drowsy students, but now he could be seen clearly enough. Wasserman had baby-pink skin, hinting at youth, but he was nearly bald, suggesting simultaneously the newborn and the old man. His eyes bulged comically, so much so that Oldstone immediately found it difficult to take seriously what the ridiculous-looking figure was saying. But he listened as his singular student spoke.

              “Actually, it’s
Reverend
Wasserman. I’m Order of Dagon chaplain for Miskatonic, but I’m enrolled as a student in the Div School, too. I’ve had the training the Order provides, but in view of the new situation here at Miskatonic, we all agreed it would be best for me to learn more about the Christian churches, too. They haven’t been open in Innsmouth for decades, you know. But we live in a wider world now. I’m sure you agree.”

              It made sense. He was no mere student, then.

              “Then it’s a special honor to have you with us, Reverend Wasserman! I hope you’ll feel free throughout the semester to ask any question that occurs to you. And to enlighten us with your own point of view. Will you do that?”

              “It’s good to know you’re so open-minded, Professor. But for the present, I’d mainly rather listen and learn. If you don’t mind.” His lips were flabby and wide, and it was difficult to read their subtleties, but Oldstone thought he caught a hint of a grin, even a smirk. He continued with his lecture.

              “Nietzsche,” the Professor said, “denied the centrality of reason. That’s essentially what he meant by the so-called Death of God. There is no objective truth, never was. All so-called truth is metaphor. In our day, this insight, if you want to call it that, has been taken much further than Nietzsche would ever have expected. In our day we have reached an epistemological stalemate in which all viewpoints are deemed equally valid--or
in
valid--since each can be judged only by criteria internal to itself. There seems to be no common ground for us to occupy to look objectively at the claims of opposing views. The result is what you see in this school: a kind of Affirmative Action of competing beliefs. Equal time for every sect and opinion. Knowledge has become politicized, which is to say knowledge has become power. Not that knowledge makes one powerful over the ignorant. Rather I mean that in our day the orthodox opinion seems to be that “knowledge”
reduces
to power. Any claim to knowledge, we are told, amounts simply to a bid for power. Nietzsche would have understood that. Maybe he was the prophet who spoke the truth before his time, after all.”

              Another hand went up, this time one of the younger seminarians. “Pardon me, Professor Oldstone, but did you say this Nietzsche guy said God was dead? I thought that was a joke. I read it on a T-shirt once, and on the back it said…”

              “‘Nietzsche is dead.’ Yes, I heard the same joke. But Nietzsche meant it quite seriously.”

              “But what did he mean? How could he dare to say it? How could a mere human know that?”

              “Good question, my young friend. Certainly no mortal mind can fathom God. It is going too far for us even to affirm that God exists as a being like ourselves. As far as we can know, there is no being out there named God who observes our theological debates and is quietly cheering for his favorite side in the argument. That’s idolatry. You have to grasp that God-language is what we call a ‘language game,’ a system of expression appropriate to the discussion of certain questions of morals and meaning, to be employed like numbers in math. Beyond that, it just doesn’t make sense to say much.”

              Reverend Wasserman, the Order of Dagon chaplain, just could not resist a comment. “Maybe we can speak of a God really being dead, Professor. Some of us think you can. And such a God may not stay dead forever.”

3.
Phallocentrism

As the semester proceeded, Professor Oldstone heard less and less from Reverend Wasserman and precious little from the other Innsmouth students, of whom he eventually realized he had surprisingly many. They were all quite bright and tested quite well, though of course it would be their term papers that told the tale. For non-Christians, so far, they seemed to understand the basic doctrines of the faith pretty well. They hadn’t been reared with Christian catechism, and it was interesting to see them trying to make sense of difficult chestnuts like the divine trinity. Their own faith, the little he understood of it, seemed to lean more toward polytheism. No surprise there. Such was true, after all, even of many Western-educated Hindus.

              But the thing that puzzled him the most was the fact that several of the Innsmouth seminarians were also on the Miskatonic football team! This was possible only because the Div School, traditionally an ivory tower exclusively set aside for graduate students, had been combined with the undergraduate Department of Religion as another in a series of Draconian cost-cutting maneuvers. It meant that his classes harbored many undergraduates, and it was a challenge to teach effectively to both levels at once. But he had learned. In any case, you did not often think of ministerial students as gridiron aficionados. Would they not have to spend most of their precious weekends on church fieldwork assignments, acting as youth directors or pulpit supply in dying country churches? How then to squeeze in the pigskin and its time-consuming demands? Well, maybe it was just his age that made him cringe to imagine the effort required.

              Dr. Oldstone had never been one for spectator sports, or for sports of any kind, but he began to attend some of the home football games with other Ivy League schools, just to get a look at some of his ostensibly pious students in action, slamming against their padded and helmeted rivals. There were several Innsmouth students on the team who were majoring in other fields, too, but how odd that their religion students should be among the most natural and powerful athletes! True, circumnavigating the campus, they possessed an odd and ungainly gait. But there was no sign of it when they began to dash with lightning speed among and between their opponents on the field. And when they took their helmets off for a cool breeze in stray moments, it was interesting to see how their sparkling pates possessed not even the stubble of hair the other students, with their buzz-cuts, still possessed. By now Oldstone had come to feel a sense of reluctant pride in these students of his, heathen though they might be. None had given him any reason to dislike them. The peculiar ecumenicity of the situation ill-pleased his traditional tastes, but that was the doing of the administration, not that of the students. And it didn’t appear to be going badly in any case. Maybe it was a good idea, the trend of the future after all. The only mildly discordant note in all this was that the Reverend Wasserman had stopped attending class. Perhaps his parish duties were too demanding, or maybe he judged that he had learned as much as he needed to know. He was still occasionally to be seen about campus, though, and Oldstone would wave to him.

              It was, then, with a note of displeasure that he noticed one chilly Friday night in early November, on his way to the Hoag Library for some late research, that the lights in the gym were ablaze and the music blaring, and the large-lettered sign out front proclaimed MIXER WELCOME FOOTBALL TEAM. No real syntactical structure there, but the banner implied the involvement of some of his religion students in what he deemed untoward activities. He swerved aside in his course and made a detour into the brightly festooned building. No one seemed in charge, and there seemed to be no program. There was recorded music blasting from the speakers, and a suspicious odor of beer mingled with the pungent reek of drugs was everywhere. The lights were shifting colors, all focused on a central dance floor, surrounded by a perimeter of shadows. And the shadows were in constant, wriggling motion, almost as if some creature of unimaginable dimensions writhed beneath a black veil. But it was no such thing. Here, too, Professor Oldstone ventured cautiously and, as his eyes adjusted, he witnessed just what he feared he would see. Suffice it to say he realized that there was as little separating the pious from the sinners as there was separating the male from the female forms huddling on the floors of the gym, the locker room, and the showers. After a quick circuit of the place, Oldstone turned and left the place without a word. Nor did he ever say anything about it to a soul. But he remembered what the Reverend Wasserman had said, some weeks before, about the Dionysian ways which his religious denomination seemed to advocate. It was none of his business. No one had appointed him campus morality policeman. But he was beginning to think maybe retirement would not be so bad after all.

              The holidays passed, and, as he listened to familiar carols and watched favorite Christmas movies on television, Professor Oldstone indeed wondered once or twice whether the Innsmouth sect celebrated any version of the Nativity and concluded he would rather not know. But once he returned to campus with the New Year, he saw that perhaps they did. For it turned out a number of the Miskatonic women students were pregnant and had in fact made a covenant to have their babies together and to raise them together as far as possible. This was odd, though not unprecedented, but Oldstone somehow knew there was another shoe waiting to drop. It fell once it became known that these mothers-to-be were all new converts to the Innsmouth Dagon sect. An odd means of evangelism, the Professor thought. And he knew good and well it all stemmed from the Football Mixer a couple of months before. And then it emerged that similar pregnancy covenants were popping up on several New England college campuses, in every case one of the schools where the Miskatonic team, filled with agile Innsmouthers, had visited to play.