He was, however, touched and even a little flattered by the first work to be drawn from his device, though not nearly as pleased as Julia herself, as she inscribed, and presented it to him. “To Pierre, blacksmith extraordinaire, with thanks.” It was the sketch she had done while she watched him work, which she etched in the acid that Julien had found in a chemist’s shop in Avignon and brought to her one weekend, and then engraved with a dry-point to add fine detail to the face and arms. Not one of her most experimental works, almost traditional in honor of his calling. But still too abstracted and free for his wife, Elizabeth. “All that effort for such a thing,” she said sourly as they looked at it on the kitchen table.
He laughed. “I like it,” he replied. “I’ve even started to like her. A strange woman. Special, if you know what I mean. Educated. Intelligent. Accomplished. All the sort of things a woman would need if she was to keep Julien Barneuve. Permanently, that is.”
This said with an edge to his voice, a hardness as he put the print down. He had it framed and hung on the wall to act as a constant reminder to his wife of the difference between an ordinary woman and a special one. She tried to take it down, or move it, but every time he put it back again, and would comment on how much he was growing to like it. He said it many times.
A sought-after work, now, for those who collect French prints. Only six were ever drawn off the plate before Julia erased it for more dangerous work later on. And few of those found buyers. She sold little; the dealer who had previously taken her paintings was in Paris, and inaccessible. And initially no one else would stock her work. She was now unknown, after all. Most were too considerate, or too dishonest, to say why they refused her. It was only when one looked closely at her, studied her face, then stared at the ceiling and said, “I just don’t think I can sell
cosmopolitan
art at the moment, you see,” that she understood. For some reason, she never thought it would touch her; not there, not in her painting. She almost said, “But I’m not Jewish,” when she stopped, sensing that she had said those words too often already.
MANLIUS SET OUT the day after his discussion with Sophia and went north. He knew there was little time. Somewhere in Italy was Felix, spending money he did not have to raise an army that would never come; it would, in his imagination, march in an ordered fashion along the coast, then strike north, hurling itself against Euric’s army, raising the siege of Clermont. Felix would establish his family’s dominion over the whole of the province, the gentle balm of Roman life would return, and a peace of Augustan dimensions would fall over a contented land.
It was not to counter his friend and rival’s ambition that Manlius left. It was because he knew, as his friend should have known, that Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. For any army of barbarians marching under the Roman standard would accomplish nothing except looting, and the wrath of Euric would be the greater for the attempt to block him. In trying to save everything, everything would be lost.
So Manlius reasoned, and in order to accomplish his aims he made haste, as much as the roads and baggage would allow. He rode on a donkey—or rather, he took a donkey with him so that he could transfer to it when they neared the Burgundian encampment. A little detail, but an important one nonetheless. He was going as a bishop, not as a politician or a landowner, and needed to make this clear.
For the first time he gave a task to his adopted son when he left; it was time that his family assisted him, he considered. “Go into Vaison, Syagrius. Keep watch on the mood of the people there,” he said. “Do nothing but listen; find out who is the most afraid, who is most on my side. I will need this information when I return.”
Syagrius nodded eagerly; he had been waiting for such a commission, was desperate to show his worth. But Manlius took no leave of him as a father should of a son. Instead, he turned, mounted his horse, and began talking to the estate manager. Then he wheeled the beast around and rode off.
He talked little on the way; there was no one he wished to talk to. Of the thirty people traveling with him, not one had enough to say to tempt him out of his silence. Going through a valley toward the end of a day, after a hard drive that lasted ten hours, he saw the sunset, framed between the body of the hill and a decayed fruit orchard, long abandoned. The noise of wasps and bees gorging themselves on the fruit that had fallen unwanted to the ground was so loud they could hear it a full half hour before they passed by.
A bittersweet reference to Hesiod would have begun an exchange with more cultivated travelers, the theme developing into a discussion of the idea of descent, from the age of gold into the brute age of iron. Could the process be reversed? Could the age of iron be made to give way to a new age of peace and prosperity? What a pleasure to have such a discussion, to swim in the comfort of shared ideas and shared memories, to prepare for the encounter to come. Manlius instead had to have the conversation in his head, and later wrote it down (in edited form) as what became ff23-25 of Olivier’s copy of
The Dream of Scipio.
He dwelt there on the divine and inevitability, a subtle (if inevitably sketchy) discussion of free will, pleased with himself for avoiding any reference whatsoever to the ponderous Christian contributions on the topic.
Are we fated or not? Can we individually alter what is to come? Are civilizations as a whole, mankind as a race, doomed to rise, then decline, from gold to silver to the brutality of iron? Was he—for this was the essence of the conversation he never had—fighting against the gods in trying to fend off disaster?
No, says Sophia. Polite but sure in her correctness, deriving the logic from Plato, but refined by near eight centuries of consideration into a form he would scarcely have recognized. You cannot change fate; even the gods (a reference here to Lucian, unspotted by Gersonides but picked up by Julien) are subject to the whim of Lachesis. She and her sister fates alone know what is to be, but they do not care.
The question is a false one, for the concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. There is no reward for good behavior, as the Christians suppose, no judge to decide. The more nearly our soul resembles the divine, the closer it is able to approach the model from which it was formed and which it ceased resembling when it became tainted by the material on falling to earth. Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. Faith means nothing, for we are too corrupted to apprehend the truth.
Rephrase the question, then: Can Manlius Hippomanes, trudging northward with his small entourage, reverse the decline and restore tranquillity to the land? Possibly not, nor does it matter. The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; success or failure is secondary. The good man, the philosopher—the terms to Manlius were the same—would strive to act rightly and discount the opinion of the world. Only other philosophers could judge a philosopher, for only they can grasp what lies beyond the world.
DID MANLIUS DISPLAY a sense of humor in the
Dream,
of a sort utterly undetectable in any of his other writings? Certainly, there was a touch of the whimsical about it that added to the difficulty of its comprehension. For his
Scipio
was modeled in form but not in nature on the more famous work written nearly half a millennium previously by Cicero; the modifications look backward and forward simultaneously, bringing the past of Rome’s golden age into association with a future that was dark and uncertain.
Cicero’s great work—much commented on for nearly two millennia—was a part of his
Republica,
a final survey of the problem of civic virtue conducted through the mouth of Scipio Africanus, the most noble Roman of them all. In it the younger Scipio dreams he meets the older one and is shown the marvels of the universe, and has explained to him the way in which the actions of great men in society are part of the universal harmony, required by the divine.
Manlius re-angled the work and gave it a more melancholic, less optimistic twist. This time it is Manlius who is in reverie: The title refers to a dream about Scipio, not a dream by him, and it is occasioned by the prologue in which he discusses philosophy with Sophia. She mentions the famous remarks by Scipio when he sees Carthage ruined, and weeps lest the same fate befall Rome in its turn.
A pregnant moment; the sentence also inspired Saint Augustine to write
The City of God
after the sack of 410 brought Scipio’s terrible vision to pass. Internal evidence suggests that Manlius must have read Augustine’s great work; his treatise was the last pagan response to it, before the unstoppable momentum of Christianity extinguished all dissent. In his hands the sack of Rome by Alaric becomes the symbol of the end of civilization, the final extinction of anything of value. Manlius begins his journey of exploration in darkness, and is only slowly led by Sophia to a new light. Not the light of Christianity, that barbarian religion; civilization cannot be destroyed so easily.
Sophia takes him to the Capitoline and shows him Rome, burning and destroyed, and reassures him when he begins to weep: “Rome has fallen from its glory, yet in its decrepitude is still more magnificent than the mind of man can easily imagine. Stand on this sacred spot and turn around; see the city stretch before you, so vast you cannot see its end.” And suddenly, from his vantage point, Manlius can see the whole world in the finest detail, can see men of goodwill rebuilding, stone by stone. He sees libraries reconstructed, and men discussing philosophy once more, and walking in fine gardens. “Philosophy cannot be extinguished, though men will try,” she tells him. “The spirit seeks the light, that is its nature. It wishes to return to its origin, and must try forever to reach enlightenment.”
“Most are unaware of the need,” Manlius objects. “They prefer the foolish belief and the passions of the earth. They believe the absurd and shrink from the truth.”
“No, they do not. They are afraid, that is all. And they must remain on earth until they come to the way of leaving it.”
“And how do they leave? How is the ascent made? Must one learn virtue?”
Here she laughs. “You have read too much, and learned too little. Virtue is a road, not a destination. Man cannot be virtuous. Understanding is the goal. When that is achieved, the soul can take wing.”
And so on; at every level, the Bishop of Vaison, Saint Manlius, launches attack after attack on Christianity, contradicting it at every turn. The soul is general, not individual; eternal, not specific in time. The body is a prison, not something meriting resurrection. Faith is corruption, Hope is deception, Charity illusion; all must be surpassed.
“But how must we live?” Manlius asks. “If man cannot be virtuous, can there be no good man?”
“Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.”
A remarkable sentence, which struck Julien when he read it, for Manlius completely overturns orthodoxy, whether Platonic or Christian. The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place. Only a man who realized civilization might not continue could have reformulated classical ideas in such a way; only a man contemplating drastic action could have penned such a self-justification. Only with such an aim could the pagan pretend to be a Christian, the friend abandon his friends.
As a piece of philosophy, it was not of the highest order; Manlius abandoned the syllogistic form and scarcely argues at all. Through the mouth of Sophia, he instructs merely. His style was as elliptical as usual, perhaps because it was hastily written. References and allusions peppered the pages but appeared to have been inserted unconsciously; Julien had to summon all his knowledge to track down the quotations from Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Alcinous, Proclus, references from lost works to which he could give only tentative attributions; then he had to analyze the mistakes and decide whether they were deliberate or accidental. And finally, he had to come to some conclusion—had Manlius made a genuine contribution to later Neoplatonism, or was it a semi-digested rehash of old ideas? Was the manuscript more use as philosophy or as a historical document?
It was so much easier for Gersonides, and easier still for Olivier, for the rabbi was largely, the Christian totally, innocent of the scholarly apparatus that revealed the complexity of the document.
THROUGHOUT THE SPRING and summer of 1943, Julia spent much of her time studying the chapel—often taking blankets and food with her so she could sleep outside on the broad mossy steps without losing any time. That, at least, was her reasoning; in fact she lived this life because it made her perfectly at peace with the world, and she could not bear any greater engagement with reality. The worse the news became, the more all around her were convinced that, sooner or later, war would erupt physically into their lives, the more she sought to separate herself from what she could not control or face. The idea, always in the back of her mind, that the tranquillity she enjoyed might soon come to an end made every breath of warm air, every scent of wildflowers, and every buzz of an insect many times more pleasurable and intense. Her senses were more alive than at any time she could remember, and she felt that she was, in her way, doing a service. For that sort of peacefulness was valuable; it was rare and endangered. She wished to store it up in her mind so that she might remember when the darkness fell.