At last the words came. “There are some of us,” he said, speaking slowly, and beneath and against and under, so it felt to him, the warm breath of every star in the firmament, “who hold that all the ideal words that we philosophers use, such as ‘matter’ and ‘substance’ and ‘form’ and ‘essence’ and ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ and ‘transitory’ and ‘eternal’ and ‘nature’ and ‘super-nature’ are only so many names, sounding syllables that signify nothing. Others hold that these words represent ultimate and basic realities by the use of which we recognize and interpret the Entelecheia of existence, that would be just meaningless smoke without them!
“Now what I hold, my dear friends, is especially difficult to make clear because it partakes of the opposite opinions of both those two camps of thought. I do hold, as strongly and as absolutely as it is possible to hold anything, that behind all the visible and intelligible phenomena of the cosmos there exists the invisible and unintelligible reality which we call God.
“According to the philosophy of the greatest of all philosophers — I speak of Aristotle — the material stuff of which the Cosmos is composed is eternal, and contains within itself the creative energy that builds the world and produces all the innumerable lives around us, such as we know and such as we are. But we Christians have been given a — a—a—”
Here he hesitated and a very queer sound came from his body as he stood there before them, like a great black rook come down from a nest that a quarter of a year ago has served its purpose to the limit and now awaits its dissolution, a sound that might have been an explosion of wind, either from mouth or from anus, but a sound that resembled the cry of an unborn child, that with the permission of nature had been engendered in the duodenum of an elderly man by deliberate impregnation from a superhuman minotaur—“have been given a — a Revelation that alters from top to bottom the whole situation.”
Here his voice rose just as used to rise the voice of each of the Homeric heroes at some special crisis in the Trojan War. “We cannot, we dare not, we must not, lest we become the murderers of the truth that is in us, deny the integrity of our own reason. And if we accept our reason we must recognize that the deepest, wisest, completest embodiment of it, so far, and until this moment, is to be found in the works of Aristotle; and Aristotle maintains that since matter is eternal in its inherent essence and is capable, in itself and by its own secret energy, of renewing the universe, and of bringing into existence an everlasting recurrence of the multiple forms we see around us, we are driven by our reason to assume that the cosmos is eternal. But this whole assumption, this whole implication, this whole conclusion is surpassed and transcended”—Albert’s voice became the voice of a trumpet—“by the Revelation brought by Christ, the revelation of Christ Himself and the revelation of the Holy Spirit!”
The warrior-retainers from Cone Castle were so accustomed to associate any reference, in any formal service of worship, to the Holy Ghost, as a sign that this same service had reached its termination, that now they all solemnly and mechanically, just as in some ordinary daily ceremonial, lowered one knee to the earth, and then, standing erect, murmured the word “amen”.
Albert of Cologne would never have become what undoubtedly he had, by the pure power of his intrinsic personality, quite deservedly become, the best philosophical teacher in Europe, if he hadn’t long ago acquired the power of not losing his temper, or the thread of his discourse, or even his own zest for the subject, when the bulk of his audience missed the whole point, as they certainly did now.
The grand trick he had acquired was a very daring one, and one whose nature would have been extremely shocking to many pious souls, namely the device of treating the words of Jesus, on almost all the well-known occasions when the Master uttered decisive and pregnant announcements, as if they contained in them, however tragic they might be, a peculiar element of sheer humour.
And the psychic trick Albertus used on this occasion was the wisest possible one he could have used, namely the trick of appropriating to himself and to his own feelings at such moments the bold and perhaps scandalous assumption that the Son of God was humorously aware of the sublime stupidity of the race of mortals, whose flesh he had submissively adopted for some unknown and secret purpose of his Divine Parent.
Raymond de Laon however had not bowed the knee at the reference to the Paraclete, nor had he stiffened himself in preparation for entering the Fortress. His face had indeed taken on a look of infinite relief. He had in fact been terribly afraid that Albert would at this juncture try to do what so many of the so-called Averroists did — namely, slur over the Athenian thinker’s conviction as to the eternity of “Matter” or “Hulee”, and insert into this unconscionable substance a nebulous and vaporous wedge of divine providence.
To Raymond it was a turning point in his whole mental life, this frank and free admission, by Albertus of Cologne, that, if a student honestly followed Aristotle, he couldn’t, with any integrity of mind or any consent of reason, refuse to accept the Aristotelian conclusion as to the eternity of the world.
It was therefore with the abysmal craving of his deepest nature that Raymond now awaited from Albert some notion of what he actually meant by the word Revelation.
“What we must do as Christians,” Albert of Cologne announced slowly, “is just to accept by a pure and simple act of faith the Revelation of Jesus that He was, and is, the Son of God, and that God in the beginning created the world. There are therefore,” Albert went on quietly, “two accounts of the origin of all things: first the view offered us by the greatest of all human thinkers that the world never had a beginning, but has always existed, and secondly the revelation of Jesus that He and He only is the true Son of God, and that in the beginning God created the world.
“The first of these opinions is the one we hold when we follow our human reason. The second is the one we hold when we accept the view that Jesus is the Son of God, and what He tells us about the universe is the truth. Which of these two views about the beginning of things we as individuals accept will therefore depend upon how far we are ready to follow Faith, when it goes beyond Reason and even when it flatly contradicts the view derived from Reason.
“If Matter is eternal, why then the world we live in is likewise eternal, for it is made of Matter or what the Greeks called “hulee”; and, if our world is eternal, it has not been created by anyone. When Jesus talked of ‘His Father in Heaven’, it is quite clear that he spoke as a Jew, and that he was thinking of the God of the Jews. By the Divinity within Him on the strength of which He spoke, He was Himself convinced that He was the Son of God, and it was in the Power of this conviction that He enlarged his Father’s Godhead till it went far beyond the Jewish race. The God of the Jews, though nameless, we call Jehovah; but the God whom Jesus called Father was the God of the whole world, who existed before he created all that is, and who will go on existing when all that is has ceased to exist.”
Raymond de Laon had missed no syllable of this pronouncement; nor had he failed to notice how easily, naturally, and unofficially this tremendous Credo had been declared.
“Will Lady Val,” he thought, “let me take Lil-Umbra for a short ride after their visitor has been properly welcomed and has gone to the armoury to rest? Will they find the old bailiff still there? Or will they have moved him elsewhere so that this man can sleep alone, as he clearly wants to do, with that awful Brazen Head? God in Heaven! I wouldn’t sleep with that Thing in the room, though by so doing I were to be crowned King of Poland! What if the Thing Inside came out and stood by the head of my bed? I verily believe I’d go crazy with terror! O I do so long to talk to Lil-Umbra about all these things. She’s got all young John’s cleverness and all Tilton’s soundness and good sense.”