‘If you believe with your whole heart nothing hinders.’
‘I believe the Son of God to be Jesus Christ.’
Philip baptised by aspersion not immersion, murmuring the words of the ceremony. Then the Ethiopian, now a Nazarene, resumed his journey towards the first cataract of the Nile and Philip walked towards Gaza. It was fitting, both felt, that they part now. They did not wish an anticlimax of either talk or prayer or exegesis of Isaiah. Both hearts were full. But that night in a wretched inn in Gaza Philip awoke from deep sleep clutching a pain in his side. Had he done the right thing? This stoneless man was uncircumcised, unacceptable on two counts, said Deuteronomy (and both centred on the genitalia), in the company of the faithful. Christ had come to redeem Israel, not Ethiopia. And yet to assume circumcision before baptism – was not that a manner of grim joke to play on one who had known the knife of a more demanding if less spiritual covenant? Come, cut all off while your hand is in. And why had God decreed that the snipping of the foreskin, and not say the tip of an earlobe, should be the condition of entry into the army of the chosen? Because the foreskin capped the tree of generation, human procreation being the moon that reflected divine creation’s solar light. This eunuch born in Meroe and travelling to Napata (and Philip had already forgotten the name he had murmured in the ceremony of baptism) possessed no tree of procreation, only a limp conduit for the discharge of bodily waste, unworthy of the blade of the covenant. Uncircumcised, uncircumcisable, hence unbaptisable? As he trudged from town to town northward on his mission, Philip half expected some gesture of displeasure from God, a bolt for the blasphemer (for to conduct a surely empty ceremony was – surely – blasphemy?), yet God did no more than he usually did, that is hauled the sun to the zenith and then let it slide slowly down, let grass grow at the rate of the growth of a fingernail (which he also let grow), killed some and allowed others to live.
When Philip arrived in Caesarea, he was half inclined to vow never to set foot in Jerusalem again, except muffled and anonymous for Passover, for he did not dare put the question to the leader of the Nazarenes. He did not know that the baptising of an uncircumcised Ethiopian eunuch would later be seen by some as God’s first intake of breath for a gust of silent laughter. For the sons of Ham and Japhet were to partake of the patrimony of the sons of Shem, and many of the sons of Shem were to be excluded. It was not by coincidence that Saul was, a day or so after Philip’s chance-seeming encounter with a black eunuch, to suffer an epileptic revelation and, a month or so after, Peter have a shocking dream about food.
Philip married one of his converts in Caesarea, a handsome girl named Deborah whose father was a ship’s chandler. Philip entered the trade and preached the word now only in his spare time. God denied him sons but granted him four daughters with black married brows, all of whom became most talkative proponents of the new way.
About three miles from Damascus, one of Saul’s escort, a glum wiry man named Esra, had a vivid dream in which an angel of the Lord told him that his wife and daughter were to be ravished by Syrian troops of the Roman procurator and that he had better hurry back to Jerusalem to forestall the outrage. In agitation he recounted this dream to Saul, who nodded and nodded impatiently over the morning breaking of bread in a frowsty inn. He said:
‘Your heart doesn’t seem to be in this mission.’
‘They should have given us horses. Or camels,’ one of the other men said, Enoch, who had limped ostentatiously all the previous day. ‘It’s not a question of heart, it’s a matter of feet.’
‘I heard the voice clear as the chirp of a grasshopper. Go back, for the heathen will shoot seed straight as an arrow into the vessels of election.’
Saul said: ‘You three have grumbled ever since we left Jerusalem. Doubtless Seth and I will find honest Jews enough in Damascus. Men whose hearts will be in the holy work of persecution. You three may go back, though it baffles me why you should wish to go back now when you have come so far.’
‘We were told we had to get you to Damascus free from harm, since you have enemies who might be lurking in the bushes, not that we see many bushes. Well, Damascus is there ahead, quivering in the haze of the heat. We have performed our mission.’ This was Jethro, a long-faced man whom the flies got at.
‘That was not the way your mission was put to me,’ Saul said. ‘Nevertheless, go back. Enoch will limp but Jethro will support him. You, Jethro, have had a face that would turn milk sour all through our journey. You, Esra, had better run.’ And he and Seth turned their backs on the three and proceeded in good heart to Damascus.
Neither had ever visited the city before, but the priest Zerah had briefed Saul sketchily on its history and present condition. It was a very ancient city, having been the capital of the fierce Aramaean kingdom until its overthrow by the Assyrians some eight centuries back. It had been part of the Roman province of Syria since Julius Caesar’s time, but the Romans more or less left the rule of the city to the king of the Nabataean Arabs, whose realm stretched from the Gulf of Akaba to the outskirts of Damascus but who insisted, because of the large number of Nabataean nationals within the city walls, that he possessed full rights of dominion there. The Romans did not seriously contest this claim, but they showed a fresh polished eagle occasionally and demanded friendly tribute. This was sometimes the Roman way. Zerah had emphasised to Saul that it was by God-given right that he, Saul, was going to harry and torture the Nazarene heretics among the Damascene Jews, he being an agent of the high priest, but in truth it was by virtue of a treaty made by the Romans with the Jews in the ancient Hasmonean times that the high priest in Jerusalem could claim the right of extradition in respect of Palestinian breakers of the laws who had sought refuge in other Roman territories. The Romans, well over a century and a third thereof before the birth of Jesus, had given instructions to Ptolemy Euergetes II of Egypt and other allies in Asia to hand over to the jurisdiction of the high priest, Simon as he was then, all such offenders, and this privilege had been freshly ratified by Julius Caeeeeeeeeee—
Seth was shocked nearly out of his skin by the high scream, the sudden eruption of froth at the mouth, the going down of Saul on to the dusty road at high noon. The falling sickness. He saw that the open mouth would soon close and the teeth bite off the blade of the tongue, so he fell to his knees and placed lengthwise in Saul’s mouth the thin staff he had been carrying, so that Saul now had the ludicrous appearance of a dog struck with hydrophobia while fetching the thrown stick of his master. Saul tossed to and fro as in desperately uneasy sleep, but the ends of the staff set a limit to his rolling. Soon he was still, eyes closed, staff gripped in strong teeth, snoring and when not snoring groaning. God help us, Seth kept muttering over and over in distress but also in a kind of relief, for Saul might take this when he came to as a sign from heaven that he had better intermit his persecutory activities, of which Seth had always had a qualified approval. He went too far too often, and there was, when you came to think of it, something a little unseemly about haling dissident Jews out of their beds in a strange city where one could claim no right of residence nor even possessed a minimal knowledge of topography, custom, or secular law. To Seth it was an embarrassing commission, but his admiration of the energy of Saul, let alone his devoutness, had led him to a vaguely reluctant acceptance of an invitation (which, if unaccepted, might soon have turned into an order) to help him haul back Jewish Nazarenes from Damascus to Jerusalem, there to consider their crime in an already crammed camp of other wailing defectors.
When Saul came to he said nothing: all his attention was being given to an aftermath of the attack that he evidently could scarcely believe. His eyes were dead as stones. They rolled about as though sight had been snatched from him only to be playfully hidden in one quarter or another of the fierce noon sky, thence to be with ease retrieved. Seth said: ‘Saul, Saul, how are you?’ The staff fell from Saul’s mouth.
‘You heard? He has brought the night on me. Help me to rise.’ On his feet he turned and t
urned clumsily as though, in some game, the withholder of vision were ever slyly at his back. ‘You saw nothing? Heard nothing?’
‘I heard you scream and saw you fall. It was an attack of the falling sickness.’
‘There was thunder and lightning and a voice said Sha’ulSha’ul ma’att radephinni?’
‘It spoke Aramaic?’
‘And in Aramaic it said something about a horse and a rider. God has the reins and he dug the spurs in. You must lead me, Seth.’
‘Back to Jerusalem?’
‘To Damascus.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘The voice said Damascus.’
‘Well, then, if I tie this girdle of my robe to yours—’ Seth did it with trembling hands. ‘Perhaps the blindness will not last. Perhaps it’s just part of the falling sickness.’
In total blackness Saul, led by the tautness of a cord, a dog on a leash, saw, as in a preternatural sunlight, the rooms and corridors of his own brain. It was the same brain as before, though the voice still echoed in it. The knowledge was the same, as also the banked ferocity, but the knowledge was presented as it were from a new angle of vision, which cast light and shadow not seen before. The ferocity was still in the service of destruction of great wrongs, but the wrongs had changed. He was everything he had ever been, except that now he must promote where formerly he had persecuted (the voice had thundered the accusation with a kind of glee), and yet he recognised now that the fury of persecution had always been the fury of belief. He had always known that no compromise was possible, and he had been the chief agent of Stephen’s bloody witness against compromise. He was the same man that he had always been, and he recognised that the blindness was the bandage of some game in which he was turned about and about, finally emerging sighted as before to confront the world from a new angle. The same world and he who viewed it the same, but the light different. The God of the new faith wanted the zealot of the old but, with a flick of divine thumb and finger, the cause had been transformed. Yet in a way it remained the same cause, for between the old and the new there was no true division, one flowed into the other.
So, pulled like a placid beast, he was led through the southern gateway of the city. He heard its noise – wheels, the cries of vendors, the snort of a horse and the roar of a camel, girls giggling at the blind man, a bird twittering in a cage close to his right side. ‘What is the city like?’
‘Like any other city.’
‘We must go to the house of Judas. On the Street that is Straight. You will have to ask where that is.’
‘This one seems straight enough. He expects us?’
‘A Jerusalem man. With lodgings for Jerusalem men.’
Saul stumbled. A cat, or other small beast, had darted between him and his leader. There was childish laughter as he stumbled. Seth seemed to shorten the cord, for Saul was aware of his bulk and warmth as much closer before him.
‘Let’s walk side by side,’ Saul said, and he himself in a confident voice called to the darkness: ‘The house of Judas on the Street that is Straight.’ Judas the cobbler? someone wanted to know. He might well be a cobbler. And so soon Saul felt heat and noise exchanged for coolness and quiet, except for the distant hammering of, it could be, an apprentice making a sandal and the quiet introduction Seth was making to, it had to be, Judas of himself and his blind companion, the quietness being appropriate to a sickroom. But Saul was not sick, merely blind and very tired. He was led gently to, he could tell from the bounce of the voices against its walls, a small cell of a room and lowered to a hard pallet. There, foreknowing that sleep was a part of the act of transformation, he had a few seconds of drowsiness before being lowered into sleep’s deep pit.
I can only guess at Saul’s dreams, which must have been manifold and complex. Let us say that he saw the Temple, its main door blinding to his inner sight in the dawn, and that it dissolved gracefully, its angles softening to the arcs of the human form, and that the human form was that of a woman, naked and comely. The face was not clear, but the voluptuous contours of limbs and breasts aroused in him a lust which, though unsanctified by any legal contract of betrothal, seemed altogether wholesome, nay holy. He knew in his dream that his own body, formerly made tense by a zealous hatred, was relaxing to an acceptance of its functions, unbound by that fear of the body which had characterised his former comportment. The falling sickness, his dream told him, would not recur, and that disease had been the body’s protest against rigidity of muscle and faith alike. What God had made was good. The human form was a miracle of workmanship and the whole of the human sensibility too precious an achievement to cast to the dust. God had accepted to be housed in it and return to the world of the pure spirit to will it to be modified by the nerves and blood. God had ascended to heaven as man, his human sensibility purified, true, but with that sensibility exalted to a new order that was not nameable under the terms of the ancient hierarchy. As man God had gone homeland man as man would follow him, not angelic, for angels were pure spirit, but in flesh transfigured to—a new word was needful. Sainthood?
The word love – amor, agape, houb, ahavah, ai, upendo – filled the fierce blue over the dissolved Temple, which now ran as liquid gold and ivory through the gutters of a transformed Jerusalem. Some of the languages in which the word was rendered he did not know, but meaning transcended the accidents of the tongue and teeth. Love was the proclamation of the unity of the divine creation, in which man was altogether at home, if only he could will it so. But, seen anew as a figure of God’s cosmos, home in its humblest sense was holy and demanded a love that was more than mere comfortable habituation. The ants on the stone floor marching off with a fragment of bread smeared with honey, the slant of light from the casement and the motes in the shaft of sun, the old streetsinger with the cracked voice who passed his sister’s house daily, the grey mouse that peered out from its cranny – all were part of the unity. Hearing the word one – ena, wahid, echad – he saw the gold and ivory that sang in the gutters flow back and the Temple fill the space that it had deserted, reconstituted in all its former beauty and strength. Nothing was to be destroyed or desecrated, since all was part of the unity of the Godhead. He heard various voices trying to call him, but their owners did not seem to know his name. Saul, he replied, but he was no longer Saul.
He woke and felt the raising of eyelids still heavy with sleep, but to his surprise and all too human disappointment he still could not see. He was aware of the groan of someone sitting by his bed, a man much disturbed. ‘Seth?’
‘Can you tell me yet?’
‘You heard the voice?’
‘I heard nothing save your cry when you fell.’
‘It was his voice. He asked why I persecuted him. I will persecute no longer. You may go back to Jerusalem, Seth.’
‘You mean – our work’s over?’
‘My work. You are your own man.’
‘I stay with you. No more – of what we did to the Nazarenes?’
‘I am to become a Nazarene. You may do what you wish.’
He heard a deep groan of pain and bewilderment.
‘You’re to join the Nazarenes – just like that?’
‘I was fighting all along against what I had to be. I was trying to prove to myself that the old way was fixed, immutable. Soon I must go back to Jerusalem – to put things right. Meanwhile – you remember the name of the chief of the Nazarenes here?’
‘Ananias, the son of Ananias.’
‘Find him. Bring him to me. Tell him of a change of heart.’
‘He may not believe me.’
‘He has to believe. I must put myself into his hands.’
‘Very well. Will you take some food before you see him? You’ve fasted a long time.’
‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘Almost three days.’
Saul, as we must still call him, pondered on that. It had seemed no more than an hour. ‘I can’t eat,’ he said. ‘I must take water first.’
‘I’
ll bring you water,’ Seth’s voice said eagerly.
‘No. No. I meant in another sense.’
He was led, two hours later, to a stream called Mayim, which name, like the names of many streams and rivers, means no more than water. He could not see Ananias, the son of the Ananias dead of shame for his lying, but he could hear the gentle voice of a decent young man. He shuddered with the shock of his immersion. ‘I baptise you, Saul, to the remission of your sins and in the plenitude of the grace of the Most High—’
‘Saul no longer. Saul is the name of another man. Now dead.’ He was becoming slowly aware of the remission of darkness as well as sin. He saw a dim vista of trees he could not yet name, a sheet of what must be water. He turned to take in the face of his baptiser, but he saw only a vague form with a raised arm, a generality called man. That generality would soon sharpen to the particular: soon he would be dealing with men. ‘I am Paul,’ he said.
So Paul, as we must now call him, sat later at the table of Ananias, eating with appetite. New bread, mutton somewhat overroasted, the tang of the wine of Damascus. A young woman, sister of one of the as yet nameless Nazarenes who sat at the table, poured him more of it. He felt the tingle of life in his groin as he saw the curve of her forearm, lightly flued. He said: ‘I see now what should have been all too obvious but was not. What did Jesus say? “Because you are neither hot nor cold but are lukewarm I will vomit you out of my mouth.” I was chosen for zeal, not for virtue.’
‘And so,’ Ananias said, ‘you take over the work here?’
‘Knowledge preceded hate. That same knowledge preceded love. But the knowledge is insufficient. May I learn more by teaching?’ Seth sat at the table, but as far away from Paul as he could. His bewilderment still showed; he did not know at all what was best for him to do.