I am on the road again. Life is so strange! It is nothing I have ever been able to take for granted, just simply being alive with the world in front of my eyes and looking out through those eyes at the world. And when the eyes are closed, the colours, the patterns, the flashes and flickers; pictures even. How can it be that pictures can be seen with the eyes closed? Dreams! Maybe there were dreams before there was anything else; maybe there were dreams before there were people to dream them. Maybe dream life is the real living and our waking life is just the necessary exercising of our bodily functions in the time between dreams.
I am on the road again, trying to remember the last thing Jesus said to me. ‘From me came the seed that gave me life,’ he said.
He may be right. Look at what he does with stone, it sets time at naught completely; give him any stone and any stonecarver whatever and he can make it happen, he can make his living and his dying be Now, for ever this very moment. He has no need of flesh and blood, he can live in stone as others live in flesh and blood. Partly I understand it: what one thinks of as the hardness of stone is actually its memory, its retention, its capability of holding images and thoughts. That’s why Christ has always been so easy with stone, he comes to it so willingly because it goes with him so willingly; he likes to be long in stone, short in stone, likes to live out his story large and small in shapes of stone. Christ comes for any stonecarver who calls him with his chisel, calls him with his iron to the stone. He has no vanity, does not push himself forward, he takes his place modestly with the other figures, acting out his story as bidden. Because of this the stone is eager to please him, it’s always thinking of new little touches that will put something more into the story. In my drift through what is called time I have my favourites here and there, and as often as not they are after my own time. What an odd thing to say: my own time! That time during which I lived is what I mean, and that sounds equally odd because I have always been somewhere in one form or another; precision with words is impossible.
But I wanted to say something about a particular stone Christ-story, the one in Naumburg Cathedral in the west rood-loft. I believe that it was done in the twelfth or thirteenth century, I don’t know who the sculptor was. There are seven scenes in it: the first is the Last Supper, perhaps it is that moment when Christ is saying, in the Gospel of Mark, Take ye; this is the body of me.’ As Christ speaks these stone words — they are not cut into the stone but they are there in the air of that stone scene — he puts into the mouth of Judas a piece of bread while Judas still dips with his own hand in the dish. The stone and the carver are good with this scene as they are throughout: as Christ with his right hand puts the bread into the mouth of Judas he draws back with his left hand his right sleeve to keep it out of the gravy and in this way the eye is led from the bread to the hand, wrist, and arm of Christ that extend the bread, showing the oneness of the bread with the self of him who gives it. Or it may be — and I rather believe it is — that the moment shown is that one in the Gospel of John when Jesus, having been asked who will be the betrayer, answers, ‘That one it is to whom I shall dip the morsel and shall give him.’ And John goes on to say, ‘And after the morsel then entered into that one Satan.’ Yes, that for me is what is happening in that stone moment. Because all eucharists are double — this is what I know now, this is why I am easy now between the grinding of eden and gehinnom in the mill of the universe. When God was a he he never told us everything; where is it written that he told us all there was to tell? Nowhere. Nor did Jesus tell us everything. He never told — did he, is it written somewhere? I think not — that all eucharists are double; but they are. ‘Take ye; this is the body of me.’ ‘And after the morsel then entered into that one Satan.’
What chance has Judas? He eats the bread of Christ as would a dog given a crust by his master, and with the bread comes Satan. There sits Christ, stolid and stocky in the Naumburg stone, solid as the stone itself. There is no fault to be found in him, he will betray no one. Ay! Judas, Adam and Eve, the Jews — what was to be expected of them? What did God as He, God as Logos, God as Christ, want of any or all of them? How were Adam and Eve to resist the fruit that God had created irresistible? How were the Jews to be other than imperfect and deviant from the will of that same God who created them imperfect and deviant from his will? How were they not to make a golden calf in the shadow of that holy, that terrifying and untouchable mountain of the Law? How was Judas not to betray Jesus after Satan had entered him in that double eucharist? Jesus was the one who could withstand Satan, he was the strong one; he required of Judas that betrayal that Judas, powerless to do otherwise, already a dead man and Satan-entered; enacted as his necessary part of the story.
What are we but creatures of the God who made us as we are? Either God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent or he isn’t. If he isn’t then he must take his chance with the rest of us and not demand special treatment; if he is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present then he has nothing to complain of except that the universe would come to a halt without the dynamic asymmetry of Adam and Eve’s original sin, of the Jews’ whoring after false gods, of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, of Pilgermann’s adultery and every other act of wrongdoing since the human race first took upon itself the task of maintaining universal spin and motion according to the will of God. Try to conceive of things as other than they are — it can’t be done. While humankind exists there can only be the rotation of God’s impossible requirements and humankind’s repeated failures. Indeed, what is God but an impossible requirement? Any possible requirement would not be God.
So. Stone Judas, fed by his stone master, eats his stone bread while dipping his hand into the stone meats of the last supper. The stone, friend and brother to Christ and stonecarver and all of us alike, remembers this because the iron has told it to remember and it obeys.
In the next scene of the Naumburg stone story Judas gets his thirty pieces of silver from the high priest. Here we see the full power of that stone memory, that stone retention. This stone knows what it knows: Judas, his face that of a stunned brute, is not his own master, and this is not forgotten by the stone. But if Judas is thus sold even as he sells Jesus, what of this high priest through whose listless fingers slide the clinking silver coins into the fold of the cloak Judas holds out to catch them. Is this Caiaphas? It must be he. And what is in his face, this face that seems of all of them to be the most thoughtfully observed? Does Caiaphas choose to be Caiaphas? Why does he look out at us like this from the stone? Such a tired face. There is left to me only this!’ says that face.
Why? Why only this? What words of Caiaphas does John give us, what has Caiaphas to say of Jesus? ‘If we leave him thus, all men will believe in him, and will come the Romans and will take away both the place and the nation.’ What else does Caiaphas say to the council of the chief priests and the Pharisees? ‘Ye know not anything, nor reckon that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people and not all the nation perish.’ And this, John tells us, Caiaphas ‘from himself he said not, but being high priest of that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but that the children of God having been scattered he might gather into one From that day therefore they took counsel that they might kill him.’