In the Beauty of the Lilies (3 page)

It had given Clarence as a divinity student a soaring sense of being a trapeze artist to look down into these depths of dubiousness and facticity—Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, ends in air in the best manuscripts, at verse 16:8, with the tomb simply empty and the women bearing sweet spices for the corpse confused and
afraid!
—and then to return from the daze of the library to the firm and reassuring ground of Gothic, semi-bucolic Princeton, where his eminent instructors radiated an undisturbed piety and his fellow students, though festively disputatious, appeared uniformly stout in their vocations, vigorously proof against disabling spiritual wounds. Melodious bells would toll six o’clock; dinner would be served. Now, while yet another dinner in his life’s long but finite chain of meals was being prepared, the spines of his books formed a comfortless wall, as opaque and inexorable as a tidal wave. The two volumes of Strauss’s
Das Leben Jesu
stood out as a square of fusty darkness, a blot almost absorbing their slimmer companion, the crimson-bound
Vie de Jésus
, by Renan. There was a tide behind these books that crested in mad Nietzsche and sickly Darwin and boil-plagued Marx.
For all its muscular missions to the heathen and fallen women and lost souls of the city slums, the nineteenth century had been a long erosion, and the books of this century that a conscientious clergyman collected—the sermons of Henry Sloane Coffin and the apologetics of George William Knox, the fervent mission reports of Robert Speer and the ponderous Biblical dictionaries of Hastings, Selbie, and Lambert—Clarence now saw as so much flotsam and rubble, perishing and adrift, pathetic testimony to belief’s flailing attempt not to drown.
New Light on the New Testament. Life on God’s Plan. From Fact to Faith. Our New Edens. The Principles of Jesus Applied to Some Questions of Today. Calvin, Twisse and Edwards on the Universal Salvation of Those Dying in Infancy
. Clarence had groped his way around his desk, in his study’s perpetual twilight, and stood reading the titles, looking for one he might take hold of in his terrible sinking, his descent through the shadows of this stifling afternoon into the bottomless, featureless depths of Godlessness. The stout old books—Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
and
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
, Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitation of Christ
, and the forty-four volumes of Calvin’s
Commentaries
, with uniform spines a bright ivory like that of unplayed piano keys—were ignorant but not pathetic in the way of the attempts of the century just now departed to cope with God’s inexorable recession: the gallant poems of Tennyson and Longfellow, phrasing doubt in the lingering hymnal music; the blustering historical novels
Quo Vadis
? and
Ben Hur;
the cunning pseudo-affirmations of Emerson and his hyperactive spiritual descendant Theodore Roosevelt, after whom Stella had insisted on naming their youngest child, as if to infuse into their progeny a vitality from above. Clarence’s spectral white hand floated past his copy of
The Strenuous Life
and tugged out
The Origin of Species
,
its cover stained and warped by his frequent if discontinuous readings—blood-chilling dips into the placid flow of calm, close, inarguable natural evidence, collected from stag beetles and starfishes. As if by Providential guidance but in truth owing to the binding’s having absorbed the effect of his recurrent reference to the passage, the pages fell open to a paragraph which had more than once made him smile with its hypocritical benignity. Darwin, a clergyman’s son, reaches out to the dismayed reader with reassurance:

But how little, Darwin could not have but noticed, he had left “Him” to do. “His” laws as elicited by the great naturalist’s patient observation were so invariable, as well as so impersonal and cruel, as to need no executor. Leibnitz had not been wrong; Newton had led to Deism, from which it was but a brief step to Diderot, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the horrific, but authentic, philosophy of the Marquis de Sade.
Was it in here, or in
The Descent of Man
, where Darwin offered the missionary Livingston’s numbness while in the mouth of a lion as a possible consolation for all the slaughter tirelessly exerting its sway over the world? Clarence flipped about in hopes of recovering the passage, gave up this hope, slipped the volume back into its place on the shelf, and permitted himself a deep inhalation and exhalation of breath. Life’s mechanisms persist in the condemned man even as he mounts the steps of the gallows.
There is no God
.

The fault was in himself. Not Darwin or Nietzsche or Ingersoll or scientific materialism with all its thousandfold modern persuasive corroborations was to blame for this collapse, this invasion of his soul by the void: the failure was his own, an effeminate yielding where virile strength was required. Faith is a force of will whereby a Christian defines himself against the temptations of an age. Each age presents its own competing philosophies, the equivalents of Godless stoicism and hedonism, of Mithraism and astrology, of ecstatic and murderous and obscene cults such as still rampage through Asia and Africa. The body suffers its pain and seeks its pleasure; what more, without revelation, is there to know than this? Skepticism and mockery surrounded the first apostles and wrought their deaths and tortures. Christ risen was no more easily embraced by Paul and his listeners than by modern skeptics. The stumbling blocks have never dissolved. The scandal has never lessened. Even in the age of the cathedrals, Vikings razed the coastal monasteries and Saracens slaughtered armies of the faithful, calling them infidels. Sweeping negations lurked in the reasonings of Abelard and Duns Scotus. Luther’s terror and bile flavored the Reformation; Calvin could not reason his way around preordained, eternal damnation, an eternal burning fuelled by a tirelessly
vengeful and perfectly remorseless God. The Puritans likened men to spiders suspended above a roaring hearth fire; election cleaves the starry universe with iron walls infinitely high, as pitiless as the iron walls of a sinking battleship to the writhing, screaming damned trapped within. The rational alternative to absolute pre-election, it was painstakingly demonstrated by more than one lecturer, was a God somehow imperfect, maimed, enfeebled, confined to a quarantined corner of things. What all the genteel professors at Princeton Seminary had smilingly concealed, Warfield and Green and the erect, pedantic rest, and the embowering trees and Gothic buildings had in their gracious silence masked, was the possibility that this was all about nothing, all these texts and rites and volumes and exegeses and doctrinal splits (within Scots Presbyterianism alone, the Cameronians, the Burghers and Antiburghers, the Auld Lichts and New, the Relief Church and the United Secession Church, the United Free Church and the Free Church and the further seceding “Wee Frees”)—that all these real-enough historical entities might be twigs of an utterly dead tree, ramifications of no more objective validity than the creeds of the Mayan and Pharaonic and Polynesian priesthoods, and Presbyterianism right back to its Biblical roots one more self-promoting, self-protective tangle of wishful fancy and conscious lies. Jesus the Son of God? The Son of Man? What could either mean? The church fathers who had thrashed through their epic distinctions had been centuries ago reduced to rat-gnawed bones and scraps of brown skin in their catacombs: clots of dust circling about a non-existent sun. Two copies of
The Presbyterian
on his desk, folded open to the “Books and Book News” pages, testified in every phrase to the problematic, euphemized absence at the heart of all this cheerful church activity:

In another issue, Clarence had marked, for possible purchase, in his tidy blue pen—marks left as if by an extinct creature, the believing clergyman, looking to bridge the unbridgeable—
The Next Step in Evolution:

Below this,
Judge West’s Opinion, Reported by a Neighbor:

What sad pap, Clarence thought.
Cheerful optimist, substantial faith, goodness of God, excellence of his creation
. Paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth. With its fantastic doctrines and preposterous rationalizations the church ministers to life—credulous, pathetic human life. Hope is our sap, our warm blood. Clarence had lost his sap—not suddenly but over the nearly twenty years since seminary, when he and his cohorts, like soldiers training to brave the terrors and shadows that beset Christendom, had brimmed with the jolly, noisy juices of militant, masculine faith. It had been his vow, his vocation, to keep the faith, and he felt his failure within him as an extensive sore place, which rendered all his actions at his desk stiff and careful.

Mechanically in his pale steady hand he wrote a few letters, one to an enterprising salesman of church supplies who had attended service and now was offering at reasonable rates a whole range of padded kneeling cushions, with rolled or fringed seams, to replace Fourth Presbyterian’s tattered, compressed, faded array, and another to a former parishioner, now moved to Paramus, who wished him to perform a memorial service for his father, who had died in Leghorn, Italy, and whom Clarence had never met. In both letters, he politely regretted his inability to oblige. He marvelled that his handwriting still flowed, with a light evenness of pressure and studied care of letter formation, much as it had before his soul had been upended and emptied. The envelopes licked and stamped with George Washington’s pigtailed violet profile, Clarence looked over the financial figures preparatory to tonight’s meeting of the Building Requirements Committee, and satisfied himself that the church could by no means afford the new addition, to accommodate church socials and an expanded Sunday school, which some of its
headstrong and overzealous members were proposing. Pearls before swine, good money after bad. Why add to all the echoing, underused ecclesiastical structures in Christendom when Irish and Polish immigrants slept six to a room a few blocks distant?

Stealthily, not wishing to bring upon himself, in his weakened, shamed condition, the attention of the women, Clarence left his study, passed through the double-doored vestibule, and darted his body for a moment into the oppressively hot outdoor air in order to retrieve the copy of the Paterson
Evening Times
from where it was thrown, cleverly folded, onto the front porch each afternoon at about four o’clock. With this prize he retreated back into his study, to his leather sofa, comfortingly marred with permanent creases and missing buttons, where he read with his head up on two large cross-stitched pillows as compressed by his habitual head as the church’s kneeling cushions were by generations of knees. The dominant headline was
BOARD OF EDUCATION TO BE ELECTIVE
. The long-agitated issue of whether the people or the mayor should control the Board of Education was coming to a head among the aldermen. Another local story told of a number of “Paterson citizens, who hail from the so-called highest respectability of the town,” whose uproarious behavior on a trolley car—“It was on the return trip to Paterson from Palisade Park, in the early hours of the morn, and the way they whooped things up was a caution”—reached its climax when

Elsewhere and equally unedifyingly on the page were
JAMES MENOW IS SHOT AND IS IN A SERIOUS CONDITION
and
FOUND THE OPIUM IN BLACK MAN’S POCKET
, this second item concerning “Fon Fen, a Chinaman, of No. 326 Market Street,” two of whose customers, one colored and one white, were detained by the police as “suspicious characters,” a jar of opium being found in the colored man’s coat pocket. Other items were the marital troubles of one Samuel Barrmore, a résumé of the terrible damage done by last Saturday’s whirlwind of a storm, the renovation of the Broadway baths, and the cancellation of a performance of an opera at the Lyceum “on account of the small audience that was present.” The weather column promised “decidedly high temperatures.” On the global side, Clarence skimmingly read of the devastating record floods that had peaked recently in Germany, Austria, and Serbia. In Mexico, President Díaz had proclaimed martial law and arrested hundreds who had been plotting his downfall, and in New York, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was marrying Miss Eleanor B. Alexander at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Clarence looked through the list of ushers—Francis Roche, John W. Cutler, Hamilton Fish, Jr., E. Morgan Gilbert, Fulton Cutting, Eliot Cutter, Grafton Chapman, George Roosevelt, Monroe Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt—for a familiar name, perhaps the son of a Princeton acquaintance, and found none. The happy event gave the
Evening Times
excuse to recount another, the triumphant return of the
former President from his world travels two days ago, on Saturday, June 18: