The Ghosts of Athens (40 page)

From here, worse luck, it would be straight up to where every association – however old the stones might be – would be relentlessly modern.

I looked sideways at Martin. His face had taken on an abstracted look. ‘Would you mind telling me,’ I asked in Latin, ‘what Sveta meant earlier about a
witch
?’

The answer I got was a tightening of his face and a deep blush. But I repeated the question. We still had a hundred yards to go, and there could be no escaping my direct question.

He swallowed and looked down at the dried mud of the street. ‘Oh, you know what Sveta can be like,’ he said. ‘She’s taken it into her head that the Lady Euphemia is the demon who’s always lived in the residency. She’s frightened for Theodore – and for you.’ He trailed off with a mumbled apology.

I smiled. Yes, I knew Sveta very well. As for Euphemia, if those wild couplings did eventually kill me, I’d be in no mood to complain. ‘Dearest Martin,’ I said in a condescending voice, ‘we both know that Euphemia came here three years ago with Theodore. You really should keep your wife under better control.’

Some hope of that, however! We walked on in silence.

The Bishop of Athens had finished preaching a sermon of the most astonishing perversity. Two of the Asiatic Greek bishops had even dared to walk out. The other Greek delegates had looked at each other and murmured with rising disgust. I could be glad that Martin had made it into something merely banal in Latin. But that was long over, and I was now deep into my opening speech. This was, I could see, going even better than I’d hoped. There had been no time for prior composition. But, if the real ancients – those, that is, for whom Greek wasn’t essentially a foreign language to be got by rule, and never spoken without notes or fear of going wrong – could speak extempore, the learned young Alaric wouldn’t be seen glancing down at a text. Though I had answers to every question that might be raised, it would be for the best if no one thought of these questions until after he was back home. And so I’d begun with lush flattery of all present, and had then moved to a passage that I’d intended to be of terrifying complexity, and that was running fast out of control.

I found myself straying into a morass of qualifying hypotheses. But, though stretched tighter than I’d ever have dared pen in hand, the thread of the whole sentence still hadn’t snapped. So long as he kept the main subject of the whole period in mind, no one should have lost me in either language. But I was coming close to an embarrassing descent into chaos. Much more elaboration, and I’d lose sight myself of the structure I was raising, or I’d lose much of the audience. Each of the subordinate clauses still open, I made my decision and went straight into my descent. I glanced upward at the windows of the domed ceiling and imagined a blind coming down as I made one closure. Another blind came down in my head as, the sentence rhythm moving ever closer to its final upward lunge, I closed another. As I closed the third, and then the fourth, I could feel the tension in the room. I heard the strain in Martin’s voice as he followed me in Latin and willed me not to fall over myself – not now, when a single slip would ruin the effect of the whole. I looked quickly about the room. The Bishop of Ephesus had given up his expression of sour disapproval, and was sitting with his mouth open. Martin was doing brilliantly in Latin, and had brought the same look to the face of the Bishop of Milan. Would I get there?

And I did. I closed the last subordination, and passed without drawing breath into the last half-dozen words to round off the whole. As I finished, fifty bishops and assorted clerics got off their wooden benches and cheered themselves black in the face. Between where I stood and the semicircle of delegates, the minute clerk threw down his stylus and waved a waxed tablet the size of a gaming board over his head. I smiled and bowed and took the waves of applause. Men cheered and touched their foreheads. They turned and hugged each other. Martin’s hands shook as he lifted his cup of water. I allowed myself a brief and complacent look at my silver inkstand of office. Thirty pounds of pure silver it weighed. I’d paid for it myself when appointed to the Imperial Council, and specified that, between its three lion feet and its bowl in the shape of an old drinking cup, its long stem should imitate in small scale the serpent column set up in Delphi to commemorate the Persian defeat, and now moved to the Circus in Constantinople. I’d never yet fallen below its promise. I might now have exceeded a promise that perhaps only I could understand.

But the council was returning to order. I raised my arms for attention, and was straight back to business. ‘It may be legitimate,’ I allowed, ‘to say that denying a Human Will to our Lord and Saviour will imply that He had not a complete Human as well as Divine Nature, so that He was not truly both man and God. Thus, to preserve the integrity of the Human Nature, it is possible that belief in a Double Will is orthodox of necessity. Now, it may be granted that such concern for the true humanity of Christ incarnate cannot be other than praised. The orthodox position is that we must take Christ to be both Human and Divine. At the same time, it can be asked if the possibility of a Single Will be inconsistent with a Human Nature.’

I looked round again. Everyone was still glowing with the recollection of my long and wonderful sentence – and pleased at his own ability to follow it in either language. Until that passed entirely, I could get away with this mass of gibberish. I smiled and raised my hands in pious supplication. ‘Yet it may also seem to be doubted,’ I took up in a tone of utter reasonableness, ‘if the faculty of will belongs properly to a being’s nature rather than to his person. A failure to conceive this doubt is surely why some of the most learned men of the past age could assert that the lack of any faculty of will to the Human Nature of Christ deprived him of a complete Human Nature. By contrast, however, it may be said that the will is a faculty of person, not of nature. It is persons who have free will and exercise it to choose this or that. If the Human Nature of Christ had its own proper will, so that Our Lord had literally two wills, then there would surely be two Persons, one Human and one Divine. But to assert this is to fall into the most damnable heresy of Nestorius, who divided Our Lord’s Person into two. And can it be understood that the Human Nature of Christ could have its own Will, distinct from the Will of the Second Person of the Trinity, and not be a person?’

I paused for the ritual denunciations of Nestorius to echo round the hall. This gave me time to pull my thoughts together for the next and rather tricky point. ‘The question, then,’ I went smoothly on, ‘is whether Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ can have one Will and yet two Natures. Or is it that a Single Will might imply the damnable heresy of the Monophysites – that He has but a Single Nature?’ I stopped for Martin to catch up, and for the further cries of ‘Anathema be upon them all!’ Then I brought out what might be seen as a verbal trick, or as an escape from the whole circle in which men had been scurrying for ages past: ‘The orthodox position, settled for once and all at the Council of Chalcedon, is that Christ has two Natures, Human and Divine. There can, of course, be no retreat from that position. Yet, while the doctrine of a Single Will follows necessarily from the heretical doctrine of a Single Nature – for, if there were but a Single Person and a Single Nature, how could men speak of a Second Will? – does the doctrine of a Single Nature itself follow necessarily from the doctrine of a Single Will? This is the question that we have been called here to consider.’

I stopped again, now for a sip of water and for a look about the hall. This penultimate sentence had been the critical one. I’d established that we could probably get enough of the Monophysites to agree that a Single Will was nothing more than a development from their notion of a Single Nature. But could we, at the same time, persuade the Greeks and Westerners to accept that a Single Will might follow from a Single Person, and not lead straight into the notion of a Single Nature? Get agreement on that, and we could square the circle. Priscus had put the whole thing more crudely over his stewed river frog: ‘a flattening of two opposed formulations beneath a third on which both sides could agree’. But that was essentially what I was about.

There was no need, however, to let it sink in fully. I was here at the moment more to impress than to persuade. Suddenly aware of the water clock that was gurgling away beside the minute clerk, I stared down at the quotation from Pope Gregory of sainted memory. From a technical point of view, I’d have done better to quote Sophronius of Miletus. But, after all the foregoing, I needed something in Latin. Before we could reach out to the Syrians and Egyptians, we’d have to pull Greeks and Latins much closer together than they’d been in over a century.

Martin’s voice had for a while been grating slightly from the strain of interpreting a message that had to be perfectly rendered in both substance and form from Greek into Latin. It would have been better for him if I had prepared a text in advance and let him work on it. But he’d get through my speech without serious trouble. We’d have to trust the local interpreters not to bugger up the rest of the council. It was a rest for both of us to do Gregory in Latin. It was simple work for Martin to put Latin into Greek. The mechanical act of reading gave me time to think of the next long sentence I had in mind. This one, I’d decided on the spot, would have a double subject, and I’d give each of them three levels of subordination.

And that’s what I now brought out. It was not a total success in my own view. The idea had been to bring out two subjects that, like the Nature of Christ, would be both fused and distinct. Sadly, I threw in an adverbial phrase that I discovered almost too late was properly attached to neither subject. I rescued the slip with a separate clause that broke the iambic rhythm and had a rather alliterative and even a trashy sound. But Martin corrected this in his Latin version. The Greeks either didn’t notice, or didn’t feel inclined to notice. They went instead into another controlled riot of applause and led me into my final passage: ‘And so, My Lords, I have, to the best of my ability, covered the issues that we have been called here to discuss. I must emphasise again that this is a
preparatory
council – in which the finest minds of the Church have been brought together not to reach a full conclusion, but instead to decide if these issues are worth putting before an ecumenical council to which the heretics will be invited. Of course, the Emperor has empowered you to reach a full conclusion in the negative sense. If you decide that there are no issues to discuss, years of theological speculation, directed by Caesar himself, must come to a sudden halt.’

My voice faltered slightly here. This hadn’t been intended. I fought at first to control the slight break to the smooth flow of words. Then I realised what a good rhetorical device this would be. It might bring home to everyone the possible consequence of using the free judgement I was allowing them to reach an unwelcome decision. I stole a look at one of the Asiatic Greeks. Though he’d never been advanced beyond a decayed see in the middle of nowhere, he was probably the most brilliant living theologian in the Church as a whole. If he wanted, he could turn this council into a screaming mob. But he was looking back at me with courtly politeness. I made a note to offer him preferment to Halicarnassus. With his frenzied asceticism, the present Bishop there couldn’t last much longer.

I took another deep breath and continued: ‘But if it is your considered opinion that these issues deserve a full hearing, they will eventually be put to an ecumenical council . . .’ I was now reaching the end. What I had to avoid was the clear implication that a ‘yes’ here would turn any main council into a formality. Everyone must have realised that this was the intention: after all, why call ‘the finest minds’ together simply to decide if the main question was fit to be picked over by all and sundry? But I wanted the option both of a done deal and of plausible deniability should our needs suddenly alter.

And now I was definitely finished. I sat down to another storm of applause. Men ran forward to embrace my knees. I nodded grandly at the shouted acclamations. Slumped over his own lectern, Martin had the look of a man who’s just been acquitted in court of something horrid. Well he might. Well he might, indeed. His public duties could now be far gentler. A slave had come in to the room to reset the water clock. I glanced at the list of agreed speakers. Some of these had picked up enough of the superior gossip in Constantinople to have had some inkling of what I was about. For most of them, what I’d just said must have come like a thunderclap. What anyone would say between now and the final session was a mystery. But the main consult could now begin.

Thinking of Diogenes on my way here had called to mind one of those possible, if slightly improbable, stories of the old days. Apparently, Plato had set all his acolytes in a twitter with his definition of man as an ‘unfeathered biped’. He was still basking at his next lecture at the applause this had got him when the naked and half-crazed cynic burst into the lecturing area with a plucked chicken. ‘Look, Plato,’ he called in a loud voice, waving the chicken over his head, ‘look, I’ve found you a man!’ Doubtless, he’d got himself straight on to the list of those who’d have to be clubbed to death in a cellar if ever Plato got his perfect society. The only public response, though, was an amendment of the definition of man to an ‘unfeathered biped with broad toenails’.