The Price of Altruism (33 page)

C. S. Lewis’s
The Problem of Pain
and
Miracles
contained some interesting ideas bearing on these matters; why shouldn’t Bill have a read? After all, he had followed George’s covariance selection math “better than any one else I know,” so maybe he could also follow his theology. Hamilton was unaware of it, but George had chosen him as his prime target for conversion. Part of the Lord’s plan in “handing” him the covariance equation had been to help Hamilton see the light.

Back in New York City, Edison was deep into Iyengar yoga. “I suspect he is very far from Christ,” George wrote to Caroline Doherety, “and heading straight toward destruction.” Would she please pray for him? He was one of those who most needed it. Edison, for his part, remained characteristically staid. If Christ brought George happiness, so be it. Any attempts to convert him, however, would be useless. He recommended his brother a book on the lotus position instead.
³³

George’s Christianity was growing stronger all the while, and increasingly adopting a tone of its own.

Back at the end of 1968, at a public talk at the London Zoological Society, he’d met a fetching young woman with shoulder-length dark hair. They spoke a bit, she smiled, he took her number, they had lunch; finally he decided against seeing her again. But now, almost two years later, sipping his tea across from her with the knowledge that although not particularly religious she’d been born a Roman Catholic—in fact her father had been England’s leading lay Roman Catholic—George was convinced that Rosemarie was part of God’s design. After all, she had been born on Ascension Day, and he had been born to a Jewish father. Clearly this couldn’t have been a mere “coincidence.” Everyone but her, it seemed, was in on the plan. To Julia he wrote asking for copies of their divorce decree, and to Al and his instrument-maker friend, Ludwig Luft, he disclosed his agenda: George was going to marry Rosemarie.
³⁴

He took her out to a few more teas, and then he laid it on. “I urge you and beg you to pray for guidance even if the Devil tries to make you think it’s silly.” Rosemarie wasn’t amused. Her religious convictions were her own private affair, and George was insulting and presumptuous. “Be sober, be watchful,” he replied, ignoring her firm request that he not contact her again. “Your adversary the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Couldn’t Rosemarie see that if the Devil could mislead Saint Peter when he was in the presence of Christ then he could mislead anyone? They were meant for each other, and being able to see this was her test. It was the Devil who was keeping her away from him.
³⁵

The Devil, too, could explain little Dominique’s flu, back in California. It was He, after all, who had pointed Kathleen to the Women’s Lib Cooperative Baby Sitting Establishment, where, George was certain, “you automatically get a selection of anti-Christian women.” “Resist the Devil and he will flee from you,” he quoted from James, explaining to his part-baffled, part-amused daughters the real cause behind Dom’s fever. “Resist him!”
³⁶

He was sorry that he hadn’t told the girls the family secret about William Edison being a Jew when they were visiting him in London, but, again, this was not just some “coincidence.”

God was sending him messages, everywhere and always. Nothing in this world was without meaning, not even the tiniest, least significant detail.

In fact, the more he read the Bible, the more George found that he was seeing things that no one had seen before him. Generations of scholars, for example, in working out his ancestry, linked Jesus to King David via his father, Joseph. But Joseph had only been Jesus’ legal father, not his biological one. And the figures in the New Testament who had referred to him as “Son of David” had been some blind men, a Canaanite woman (not a Jew), and the same Jerusalem crowds who later shouted, “Release Barabbas! Crucify Jesus!” This was not without significance. For hadn’t Jesus himself warned against “blind guides” and “the blind leading the blind”? Clearly Scripture was hinting that what mattered was not Joseph’s but
Mary
’s ancestry, and with the help of hitherto unrecognized clues (the Bible stating three times that Rachel was buried on the way to Ephrat, among others), George was now able, Sherlock Holmes–like, to do what generation of exegetes had triumphantly failed to accomplish, linking the Virgin, and hence Jesus, to the Old Testament Joseph’s son Ephraim. Among other things He had revealed to him the true meaning of 666 as well—a piece of information he now offered the increasingly freaked-out Rosemarie as a “bribe” if she’d be willing to meet with him. Clearly God was showing George things He had shown no mortal before.
³⁸

Most important, he now believed, He had helped him to solve “one of the great puzzles of all time, which during 18 centuries has received the attention of many famous and brilliant men beginning with Tatian of Assyria about 170 A.D.” To Christians he offered it as the long-sought solution to the problem of the contradictions in the four Gospels, to Jews as a fascinating matter of ancient history, and to agnostics as an entertaining story of “puzzle-solving.” He’d cracked it sometime in January 1971, and had now committed it to a fifty-two-page treatise that he sought to publish in one of the Easter Sunday papers. Nearly two thousand years of tradition and practice notwithstanding, George Price had news for the world: The conventional Passion chronology was wrong.
³⁹

Not only were the eight days of Holy Week plus Easter actually twelve; not only had Jesus been crucified for a full twenty hours overnight instead of just six or seven; not only had early Christian groups mistakenly followed a lunar calendar, against the expressed dictate of Christ—the very date of Easter was entirely mistaken. In actuality it had almost certainly been April 13, A.D. 27. “Th is means that the date for Easter that is favored by the majority of your member Churches (the Sunday following the second Saturday in April),” George wrote to the director of the Commission and Department on Faith and Order at the World Council of Churches, “will exactly agree with the Apostolic date about half the time, and be fairly close to the Apostolic date in other years—and thus this change would be an enormous improvement over the present tradition of dating Easter by the moon.” In letters to countless clergymen and biblical and New Testament scholars, George had embarked on a mission. It made no difference that he was getting no positive feedback. Changing the date of Easter was the true will of God, for it followed the true meaning of the Gospels. The Devil would make everyone think it was blasphemy, but it simply had to be done.
⁴⁰

Once again he enlisted Hamilton to look over his theology; hadn’t he been the only one to “get” covariance, when all was said and done? “After reading your absolutely fascinating article on the chronology of the First Holy Week,” Hamilton replied, “…I thought I had better retaliate by sending you some Easter reading.” There were two stories by Chekhov, a book of poems by A. E. Housman, and Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. George’s chronology seemed convincing, but Hamilton was really no kind of judge.
⁴¹

George was thankful, but had some reservations about Housman’s “Easter Hymn”:

70/0 =
or 70/
= 0

No, a Christian who didn’t believe in Heaven and Hell was no true Christian at all. But even though enjoyment and success in earthly life were of no consequence, what man did during his fleeting time on earth was still of great importance. Life was an examination, set for man by God. Far from being a strike against Christianity as Hamilton had surely wished to hint, Vladimir’s hopeless confusion in
Waiting for Godot
over the events in the New Testament only went to show that figuring out what God meant in the Bible was another of His examinations. “If the Bible presented no difficulties,” George explained, “but revealed clearly a superhuman logic and intelligence…then much of the examination would be negated.”

What quality, above all, was God really testing for? Without a doubt it was
agape
, commonly translated as “love” or “charity.” But there were other qualities that could enable one to pass the examination. Abraham’s test when ordered to sacrifice his son, Isaac, had been a test of faith and obedience, rather than
agape
. And there was also meekness, the kind with which Moses had been blessed. George interpreted this to mean a kind of “intellectual receptiveness, approachableness, of being willing to accept evidence and listen to reason.” It was a good thing that there was more than one way to pass God’s examination, he wrote candidly to Hamilton, for “it doesn’t look as though I can pass purely on the basis of
agape
.” He was aware of his limitations: George was no kind of altruist. In obedience and intellectual openness, however, he was clearly proving his mettle.

Hamilton resisted. There was a story about an Irishman, he told George, who was asked whether he liked oysters and he replied, No, he didn’t like oysters and he was glad he didn’t like them because if he did he’d be eating them all the time when he hated the damned things. The message was clear: Hamilton was not about to embrace Jesus. “Is the story of the crossing of the Red Sea literal truth or myth?” he challenged George. “If it’s literal truth why should we respect Moses if he was just a puppet carrying out maneuvers to fore-shadow the crucifixion, and why respect Jesus for following a course that he was bound to follow anyway? A plot so elaborate would make life meaningless if we believed it—and ugly too.”
⁴³

“What difference does it make whether you approve of it or not?” George fired back. “Do you think that it is something that I wanted to believe in?” Just like C. S. Lewis, he had been forced to become a believer based on evidence. It had been a necessary scientific deduction, not a personal moral choice. Predictability and free will were not alternatives; George’s childhood had taught him that much: