like of you make anything out of an infinity of gases? Peter’s just out to show off the keys, bluster about and make himself a bloody nuisance. Oh there have been a few complaints to the Polyarch about him.
– Answer me this question. The Redeemer said ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall found my Church’. Is there any justification for the jeer that He founded his Church upon a pun, since Petros means ‘rock’?
– Not easy to say. The name Petros does not occur in classical, mythological or biblical Greek apart from your man the apostle and his successor and later namesakes – except for a freedman of Berenice (mother of Herod Agrippa) mentioned in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18, 6, 3, in a passage relating to the later years of Tiberius’s reign, that is, the thirties A.D. Petro occurs as a Roman surname in Suetonius’s Vespasiae 1, and Petra as a woman’s name in Tacitus, Annals 11, 4.
– And you don’t care a lot about him?
– The lads in our place, when he barges around encorpified and flashing the keys, can’t resist taking a rise out of him and pursue him with the cackles of a rooster, cock-adoodle-doo.
– I see. Who else? Is Judas with you?
– That’s another conundrum for the Polyarch. Peter stopped me one time and tried to feed me a cock-and-bull story about Judas coming to the Gate. You get my joke? Cock-and-bull story?
– Very funny. Is your mother Monica there?
– Wait now! Don’t try and get a dig at me that way. Don’t blame me. She was here before me.
– To lower the temperature of your steaming stewpot of lust and depravity, you married or took as concubine a decent poor young African girl, and the little boy you had by her you named Adeodatus. But even yet nobody knows your wife’s name.
– That secret is safe with me still.
– Why should you give such a name to your son while you were yourself still a debauched pagan, not even baptized?
– Put that day’s work down to the mammy – Monica.
– Later, you put your little wife away and she shambled off to the wilderness, probably back into slavery, but swearing to remain faithful to you forever. Does the shame of that come back to you?
– Never mind what comes back to me, I done what the mammy said, and everybody – you too – has to do what the mammy says.
– And straightaway, as you relate in Book Six of your Confessions, you took another wife, simultaneously committing bigamy and adultery. And you kicked her out after your Tolle Lege conjuring tricks in the garden when you ate a handful of stolen pears. Eve herself wasn’t accused in respect of more than one apple. In all this disgraceful behaviour do we see Monica at work again?
– Certainly. God also.
– Does Monica know that you’re being so unprecedentedly candid with me?
– Know? She’s probably here unencorpified.
– You betrayed and destroyed two decent women, implicated God in giving a jeering name to a bastard, and you blame all this outrage on your mother. Would it be seemly to call you callous humbug?
– It would not. Call me a holy humbug.
– Who else is in your kingdom? Is Judas?
– Paul is in our place, often encorpified and always attended by his physician Luke, putting poultices on his patient’s sore neck. When Paul shows too much consate in himself, the great blatherskite with his epistles in bad Greek, the chronic two-timer, I sometimes roar after him ‘You’re not on the road to Damascus now!’ Puts him in his place. All the same that Tolle Lege incident was no conjuring trick. It was a miracle. The first book I picked up was by Paul and the lines that struck my eyes were these: ‘Not in rioting or drunkenness, nor in chambering or wantonness, nor in strife or envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in the lust thereof.’ But do you know, I think the greatest dog’s breakfast of the lot is St Vianney.
– I never heard of him.
– ’Course you have. Jean-Baptiste. You’d know him better as the curé of Ars.
– Oh yes. A French holy man.
– A holy fright, you mean. Takes a notion when he’s young to be a priest, as ignorant as the back of a cab, couldn’t make head nor tail of Latin or sums, dodges the column when Napoleon is looking for French lads to be slaughtered in Rooshia, and at the heel of the hunt spends sixteen to eighteen hours a day in the confessional – hearing, not telling – and takes to performing miracles, getting money from nowhere and taking on hand to tell the future. Don’t be talking. A diabolical wizard of a man.
– Your household abounds in oddities.
– He performs his miracles still in our place. Gives life to bogus corpses and thinks nothing of raising from the dead a dummy mummy.
– I repeat a question I’ve already asked: is Judas a member of your household?
– I don’t think the Polyarch would like me to say much about Judas.
– He particularly interests me. The Gospel extols love and justice. Peter denied his Master out of pride, vanity and perhaps fear. Judas did something similar but from a comprehensible motive. But Peter’s home and dried. Is Judas?
– Judas, being dead, is eternal.
– But where is he?
– The dead do not have whereness. They have condition.
– Did Judas earn paradise?
– Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova sero amavit.
– You are shifty and you prevaricate. Say yes or no to this question: did you suffer from hœmorrhoids?
– Yes. That is one reason that I encorpify myself with reluctance.
– Did Judas have any physical affliction?
– You have not read my works. I did not build the City of God. At most I have been an humble urban district councillor, never the Town Clerk. Whether Judas is dead in the Lord is a question notice of which would require to be given to the Polyarch.
– De Quincey held that Judas enacted his betrayal to provoke his Master into proclaiming his divinity by deed. What do you think of that?
– De Quincey also consumed narcotics.
– Nearly everything you have taught or written lacks the precision of Descartes.
– Descartes was a recitalist, or formulist, of what he took, often mistakenly, to be true knowledge. He himself established nothing new, nor even a system of pursuing knowledge that was novel. You are fond of quoting his Cogito Ergo Sum. Read my works. He stole that. See my dialogue with Evodius in De Libero Arbitrio, or the Question of Free Choice. Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.
– I have read all the philosophy of the Fathers, before and after Nicaea: Chrysostom, Ambrose, Athanasius.
– If you have read Athanasius you have not understood him. The result of your studies might be termed a corpus of patristic paddeology.
– Thank you.
– You are welcome.
– The prime things – existence, time, the godhead, death, paradise and the satanic pit, these are abstractions. Your pronouncements on them are meaningless, and within itself the meaninglessness does not cohere.
– Discourse must be in words, and it is possible to give a name to that which is not understood nor cognoscible by human reason. It is our duty to strive towards God by