The Wild Gospel (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

This book is the mid point on a journey of discovery. It began a quarter of a century ago, when as a 16-year-old faced with the prospect of trying to map a path through the tangled growth of the adult world looming up before me, I first set out to acquire the tools that would make my journey possible. I began then with a question, and the question was this: What is truth? It seemed to me that if I could find the answer to this question, I would be standing on some kind of basic platform from which it would be possible to try and build the building that would be my life. And so, not knowing where else to begin, I took myself to the philosophy section of the school library and got out everything I could find on truth. Some of these books I took to Italy on the first of what were to become many trips there; and as I walked by black lava shores and surveyed the horizons of this new world, I learned the difference between contingent truth and absolute truth, despaired of ever reaching out into the latter, if indeed there was such a thing as absolute truth, and settled for the prospect of constructing my platform on a foundation of contingent truth. Contingent truth doesn’t bother itself with the absolutes of the universe; contingent truth is man-made truth, and it can be managed. Contingent truth declares that the 9:15 train for Sheffield will leave from Platform 1, and that when I sit on my chair it will hold my weight. Contingent truth offers a framework for life, a framework of predictability. You can build with contingent truth.

Back in England, I did two things. Because it seemed to me that to believe any contingent truth was an act of faith, and because I remembered from going to church parade as a Brownie that faith was what Christianity was supposed to be about, I went out and bought myself a Bible. The problem was that I couldn’t understand it. Chairs and trains I was familiar with, but this book didn’t seem to speak my language. So I returned to the philosophy section of the school library, and discovered Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism. And I found that Sartre did speak my language. In fact he offered precisely what I was looking for: the suggestion that in the absence of the existence of any absolute truth the only way to make sense of life was to create one’s own meaning.

So I did just that. I began the task of forming the world around me into the shape I wanted it to take. I set myself aims and targets and achieved them. I got a place at Cambridge to read modern languages, and embraced the opportunities of university life. My horizons broadened, and what had seemed to be the forbidding tangled growth of the adult world became, once parted with the tools of my new philosophy, not just manageable but exciting. Released from the confines of home and school, I flung myself into new activities. I cycled through the mist of frosty mornings to row on the River Cam. I took the little orange tent of my childhood into the fens, and spent summer weekends amongst the hum of mosquitoes and the grating of sedge warblers. I discovered 2,000 years of literature, and explored new modes of thought and expression. I spent a year in Florence, studying in shuttered libraries with curved wooden seats, watching shafts of sunlight slant through the darkened air, specks of dust dancing in their beam, and intruded upon by the hum of different sounding buses and the hooting of motorcycles hot in the world outside. I wandered through the flower-specked olive groves of Tuscany in spring, and watched the solid yellow light of the afternoon sun spread itself like butter on the thick clods of the freshly ploughed fields in autumn. I stayed in the snow-blanketed valleys of Romansch-speaking Switzerland with one friend, surrounded by white peaks and enjoying the silence of crackling icicles and the warm breath of domestic cattle sheltered in wooden winter chalets; and I drove through the undulating vines of Bordeaux with another, pausing to taste the round oak warmth of the red and the laundry-crisp freshness of the white wines offered us at the end of tree-lined drives by sun-smiling viticultors. I returned to Cambridge victorious in my conquering of this new world, fluent in Italian and confident in my abilities to ride the wave of the challenges I had embraced. A year later, and with a First to my name, I decided to stay on in this wonderful world of stimulus and opportunity, building on my platform of existentialism, creating my own meaning, making my own decisions, achieving my ambitions. I chose as the subject of my research the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, foremost writer of the Italian Middle Ages and one of the greatest poets who has ever lived, and set out on a voyage through 2,000 years of painting and writing in the attempt to discover why Dante had portrayed the other world as he had.

Then my friend died. Her name was Ruth, and she had been my director of studies as an undergraduate. They told me one day, as I walked from the library back to my college for lunch, that the cancer had returned. She was 41, dark-haired, intelligent and vivacious, with everything to live for. She inhabited a square, chaos-filled room with a big window overlooking the sunlit grass of the college quadrangle, pictures by her school-age children pinned crookedly to the walls, books and papers piled high on the desk, stimulus and encouragement oozing out of the brickwork for those who reached the mark of her high standards. I had spent many hours there breathing it all in, and she had changed me. Over the next few months, I was to spend many hours with her again, shorter visits this time, sharing the jokes I’d picked up from my fellow-researchers at lunchtime, and watching her die. And as I found myself forced to face the fact that that was what was going to happen, the universe that I had so carefully arranged around me fell apart. As the cancer consumed her body and dimmed her spirit, an earthquake rumbled beneath my platform of contingent truth, and the bricks of my self-constructed meaning began to totter and slide. Fresh back from Italy, I felt like the tower of Pisa: a magnificent edifice, the source of endless satisfaction to those who had built it, and the object of wonder and envy to the lesser buildings around it, now lurching over because it turned out to have been built on an unstable foundation. Ruth herself, by contrast, was more worried about the lectures she was supposed to be writing than about the prospect of impending death. She was a Christian. She didn’t want to die; but she knew where she was going, and she felt quite capable of going there. We talked about it. The strength of Christianity, she said, lay for her in the fact that it had been found to make sense in many different cultures. It had a universality about it; it was not subject to history or geography. And so she took me back to the Middle Ages we’d spent so many hours discussing in that sun-filled room three years previously, and asked me a simple question: Could I imagine existentialism making sense in the thirteenth century? And almost before she’d got the words out, dynamite exploded beneath my unsteady marble tower and blew it to smithereens. Of course I couldn’t. I left the house that day drained and empty. You cannot construct your own reality. There are absolute truths, and one of them is death. Build what you like, but you’re building it in a bubble. And sooner or later the bubble will meet a pin. Mine just had.

Ruth died on 31 March 1983. I saw her the evening before she died. She wished me a happy Easter, and I think those were the last coherent words she spoke. A week before, she’d given me a book. It was a beautiful copy of the Visconti Hours, a fifteenth-century Italian illuminated prayer book, and in it she had written, in Latin, the following words: “I know two masters: Christ and letters”. So as I boarded the train to Florence a few days after her funeral, I knew it was back to the drawing board. What is truth? Well, I’d watched Ruth die, unperturbed and in peace, a peace that had contrasted so sharply with my own turmoil, and I knew that her building had stood on a platform which had not subsided when faced with the intrusion of death into our seemingly immortal lives. “Two masters: Christ and letters”, she’d written. I remembered my attempt years previously to look at the Bible, and it occurred to me that perhaps I should look at it again. Back in my familiar Florence, I went one day into Santa Croce, the big thirteenth-century Franciscan church that stands near the river, just up the road from my old student digs, and round the corner from the National Library where I had watched the dust dance in the sunbeams. E M Forster compared it to a barn, and it offers a strange impression of emptiness, the footsteps of visitors clattering on the stone floor and echoing up to the high wooden roof, and frescoes of the saints glowing on the walls in the chapels at the east end when you put 200 lire into the little slot machine that provides measured seconds of light. In the thirteenth century, before the days of the university, Santa Croce was a centre of learning, and Dante probably studied there – Dante, the poet who told the tale of his own journey from the tangled wood of confusion to faith in God, and in whose quest I was beginning to see my own. So as I gazed at the simple solidity of Giotto’s...