The Rebel Angels

 -_eae 

“[’'m getting on with the work that will eventually make me a Doctor of Philosophy.” 

“Ah, that blessed degree that stamps us for life as creatures of guaranteed intellectual worth. But what’s your special study?” 

“That’s rather complicated. I come under the general umbrella of Comparative Literature, but that’s a house of many mansions. Working with Professor Hollier I shall certainly do my thesis on something in his line.” 

“Which isn’t just what I’d call Comparative Literature. Rooting about in the kitchen-middens and trash-heaps of the Middle Ages. What was it he made his name with?” 

“A definitive study of the establishment of the Church Calendar, by Dionysius Exiguus. A lot of it had been done before, but it was Hollier who showed why Dionysius reached his conclusions-the popular belief and ancient custom that lay behind the finished work, and all that. It was what established him as a really great paleo-psychologist.” 

“Have mercy, God! Is that some new kind of shrink?” “You know it isn’t. It’s really digging into what people thought, 

in times when their thinking was a muddle of religion and folk. belief and rags of misunderstood classical learning, instead of being what it is coday, which I suppose you’d have to call a muddle of materialism, and folk-belief, and rags of misunderstood scientific learning. Comp. Lit. gets mixed up with it because you have to know a lot of languages, but it spills over into the Centre for the Study of the History of Science and Technology. Hollier is cross-appointed there, you know.” 

“No, I didn’t know.” “There’s a lot of talk about establishing an Institute of Advanced Studies; he’d be very important there. It will come as soon as the university can get its hands on some money.” 

“That may not be soon. Our fatherly government is growing restless about the big sums universities consume. It’s the people's money, dear Maria, and don’t you ever forget it. And the people, those infallible judges of value, must have what they want...

And

“A stunner, isn’t she?” said Urky to Arthur, but with his eye on Hollier. “Tell me just as a matter of interest, where would you place her in the Rushton Scale?” 

We all looked blank at this. 

“Surely you know it? Devised by W. A. H. Rushton, the great Cambridge mathematician? Well, it’s this way: Helen of Troy is accepted as the absolute in female beauty, and we have it ona poet’s authority that her face launched a thousand ships. But clearly ‘face’ implies the whole woman. Therefore let us call a face that launches a thousand ships a Helen. But what is a face that launches only one ship? Obviously a millihelen. There must be a rating for all other faces between those two that have any pretension whatever to beauty. Consider Garbo; probably 750 millihelens, because although the face is exquisite, the figure is spare and the feet are big. Now Maria seems to me to be a wonder in every respect that I have had the pleasure of examining, and her clothes are plainly not meant to conceal defects. So what do we say? I’d say 850 millthelens for Maria. Anybody bid higher? What do you say, Arthur?” 

“I'd say she’s a friend of mine, and I don’t rate friends by mathematical computation,” said Arthur. 

And

“Civilization rests on two things,” said Hitzig; “the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?” 

“Fermentation is undoubtedly science,” said Gyllenborg; “but voluntary inhibition must be psychology, and if anybody suggests that psychology is a science I shall scream.” 

“No, no; you are on my ground now,” said Stromwell; “inhibition of defecation is in essence a theological matter, and unquestionably one of the effects of the Fall of Man. And that, as everybody now recognizes, means the dawn of personal consciousness, the separation of the individual from the tribe, or mass. Animals have no such power of inhibition, as every stage manager who has to get a horse on and off stage without a mishap will assure you. Animals know themselves but dimly-even more dimly than we, the masters of the world. When Man ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge he became aware of himself as something other than a portion of his surroundings, and he dropped his last, carefree turd, as he, with wandering steps and slow, from Eden took his solitary way. After that he had, literally, to mind his step, not to speak of his Ps and Qs.” 

" ‘His solitary way’,” said Penny Raven. “Just like Milton, the Old sour-belly! What about Eve?” 

“Every child repeats the experience of recognizing himself as unique,” said Hitzig, ignoring the feminist outburst. 

“Every child repeats the whole history of life, beginning as a fish, before he begins to experience inhibition,” said Gyllenborg, 

“Every child repeats the Fall of Man, quits the Paradise of the womb, and is launched into the painful world,” said Stromwell, “Sub-Warden, have those people up the way completely forgotten that decanters are supposed to be passed?” 

I tore myself away from a disquisition by Arthur Cornish on loan-sharking-of which of course he disapproved, although it fascinated him-and made another tour of the table to see that everyone was all right, and speed the decanters on their way, They had come to rest in front of Professor Mukadassi, who did not drink wine, and seemed absorbed in the talk of Hollier. | was glad Clem was enjoying himself, because he is not really a clubbable man. 

“What I call culrural fossils,” he was saying, “are parts of human belief or behaviour that have become so imbedded in the sur. rounding life that nobody questions them. I remember going to church with some English relatives when I was a boy, and noticing that a lot of the country women, as they came in, made a tiny curtsy to a blank wall. When I asked why, nobody knew, but my cousin inquired of the vicar, and he said that before the Reformation a statue of the Virgin had stood there, and although Cromwell’s men had destroyed it, they could not destroy the local habit, as evinced in the women’s behaviour. Years ago I paid a brief call at Pitcairn Island, and it was like stepping back into the earliest days of the nineteenth century; the last immigrants to that island were soldiers from Wellington’s troops, and their descendants still spoke the authentic speech of Sam Weller, and said ‘Vell, sir’, and ‘Werry good’. When my Father was a boy every wellbrought-up Canadian child learned that ‘herb’ was pronounced without the ‘h’; you still hear it now and again, and modern Englishmen think it’s ignorance, though it’s really cultural history. These things are trifles, but among races that keep much to themselves, like some of the nomads of the East, or our surviving real Gypsies, all kinds of ideas persist, that are worth investigating. We tend to think of human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible-that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways. 

Which throws a new light on the whole business of mythology; the myths are not dead, just different in understanding and application. Perhaps superstition is just myth, dimly perceived and unthinkingly revered. If you chink superstition is dead, visit one of our examination halls, and count the fetishes and ju-jus that che students bring in with them.” 

“You don’t take that seriously,” said Boys. 

“Quite seriously,” said Hollier. 

“You speak of one of the great gaps in understanding between East and West,” said Mukadassi. “In India we know that men every bit as good as we believed things that the advanced members of society look on as absurdities. But I agree with you, Professor; our task is not to scorn them but to try to discover what they meant and where they thought they were going. The pride of Science encourages us to this terrible folly and darkness of scorning the past. But we in the East take much more account of Nature in our daily life than you do. Perhaps it is because we are able to be out-of-doors more than you. But if I may say it-and you must not think I would wound your susceptibilities, Professorno, no, not for the world-but your Christianity is not helpful about Nature. None the less, Nature will have her say, and even that Human Nature that Christianity so often deplores. I hope I do not give offence?” 

Hollier was not offended; Mukadassi exaggerated the hold Christianity had on him. “One of my favourite cultural fossils,” said he, “is the garden gnome. You have observed them? Very cute objects; very cute indeed. But do people want them simply for cuteness? I don’t believe it. The gnomes provide some of that Sugar in the drink of belief that Western religion no longer offers, and which the watered-down humanitarianism that passes with so many people for religion offers even less. The gnomes speak of a longing, unrecognized but all the stronger for its invisibility, for the garden-god, the image of the earth-spirit, the kobold, the kabir, the guardian of the household. Dreadful as they are, they have a truth you won’t find in the bird-bath and the sundial.” 

And

“Not at all, Warden. Every senior person in the University world knows how much thieving, for instance, goes on in that world, and everybody conspires to keep quiet about it. Probably the conspiracy is a wise one, because there would be a row if it ever became a matter of public knowledge. But what are. you to expect? A university like this is a community of fifty thousand people; if you lived in a town of fifty thousand, wouldn’t you expect some of them to be thieves? What is stolen? Everything from trifles to costly equipment, from knives and forks to whole sets of Communion vessels from the chapels, which are whisked off to South America, I happen to know. It is stupid to pretend that students have no part in it, and probably members of faculty, if we knew. There are explanations: all institutions arouse the larceny in the human heart, and pinching something from the Alma Mater is a revenge taken on behalf of some unacknowledged part of the human spirit, for the Bounteous Mother’s superiority of pretension. Not for nothing were students known to our ancestors as St. Nicholas’s clerks-learned and thievish alike. Good God, Warden, have you forgotten that only three years ago a Visiting professor who stayed in this College tried to get away with the curtains off his windows? He was a learned man, but he was also in the grip of the universal desire to steal.

And

I left parish work and became a scholar-priest because I wante, to dig deep in mines of old belief that were related, as I hav, Said, to those texts which the compilers of the Bible had no, thought suitable for inclusion in the reputed Word of God. Tha was what I had done and my work had attracted some favourable attention. But he who troubles his head with apocryphal texts will not do so long before he peeps into heretical texts, and without any intention of becoming a Gnostic I found myself greatly taken up with the Gnostics because of the appeal of so much that they had to say. Their notion of Sophia seized upon my mind because it suited some ideas that | had tentatively and fearfully developed of my own accord. 

I like women, and the lack of a feminine presence in Christianity has long troubled me. Oh, I am familiar with all the apologies that are offered on that point: I know that Christ had women among his followers, that he liked to talk to women, and that the faithful who remained with him at the foot of his Cross were chiefly women. But whatever Christ may have thought, the elaborate edifice of doctrine we call his church offers no woman in authority-only a Trinity made up, to put it profanely, of two men and a bird-and even the belated amends offered to Mary by the Church of Rome does not undo the mischief. The Gnostics did better than that; they offered their followers Sophia. 

Sophia, the feminine personification of God’s Wisdom: ‘With you is Wisdom, she who knows your works, she who was presen! when you made the world; she understands what is pleasing 1? your eyes, and what agrees with your commandments.’ Sophia; through whom God became conscious of himself. Sophia, by whose agency the universe was brought to completion, a partnef jn Creation. Sophia-in my eyes at least-through whom the chill glory of the patriarchal God becomes the embracing splendour of a completed World Soul. 

And

 It was not a place I would have chosen to provide tender, loving care. It was one of those houses stiff with Good Taste, and Mrs. Hollier, whom I had never met, was stiff with Good Taste too. I was left in the drawing-room-positively the palest, most devitalized room I have ever been in-while the men and Mrs. Hollier lugged the invalid upstairs; after a while an elderly housekeeper toiled upward with what looked like a cup of bouillon; after an even longer while Darcourt, and Dr. Greene, and Mrs. Hollier returned and I was introduced as a student of the professor’s, and Mrs. Hollier gave me a look that could have etched glass, and nodded but did not speak. The doctor was talking reassuringly about a drop in blood pressure that was dramatic but not really alarming, and the necessity for rest, light diet, and detective stories when the patient seemed ready for them. He would keep in touch. 

I felt very much out of things. Darcourt and Dr. Greene were the kind of Canadians who understood and could cope with such refrigerated souls as Mrs. Hollier. A Northern land and its Northern people can be brisk and bracing when faced with a metaphysical ill, bue I was not of their kind. I had a disquieting feeling that, when Hollier was ill, this was the place where he belonged. However much an intellectual adventurer he might be, this cold home was his home.