The Fifth Gospel 9780761863953, 9780761863946

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THE FIFTH GOSPEL

Mario Pomilio

Introduction by Umberto C. Mariani Translated by Umberto C. Mariani and Alice J. Mariani

Hamilton Books an imprint of

University Press of America,@ Inc. Lanham

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Boulder

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New York

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Toronto

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Plymouth, UK

This book was originally published in Italian as

Il Quinto Evangelio-Romanzo, Terza Edizione, by Rusconi © 1975.

Copyright © 2014 by Hamilton Books 450 I Forbes Boulevard Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 Hamilton Books Acquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 10 Thornbury Road Plymouth PL6 7PP United Kingdom All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938405

ISBN: 978-0-7618-6394-6 (cloth: alk. paper) eISBN: 978-0-7618-6395-3

8T>1.The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction A Letter The Vivario Manuscript The Chart of Heaven The Legends The Greek Monk The Reappearances The Green Branch The Gospel of the Popes The Story of Friar Michele, A Minorite The Banquet of Lyons The Christ of Guardia The Profession of Faith of Pierre D' Artois The Life of the Chevalier Du Breuil The Justification of the Priest Domenico De Lellis Letters from My Former Students A Reply to a Replay The Fifth Evangelist

v 1 37 62 66 72 88 95 1 04 1 12 1 22 1 27 1 54 1 57 1 86 218 229 234

INTRODUCTION

Mario Pomilio was born in 1 92 1 in Orsogna, a small town in Abruzzo. His father was a militant socialist, his mother a fervent Catholic, and therein, possibly, lie the contrasting sources of the writer' s inspiration and the oppositions of his very soul. His family eventually moved to Avezzano, a larger town in the region, where Pomilio received the typical classical education of students preparing for the difficult university entrance examination. He completed his university studies in the humanities during the difficult years of World War Two, 1 93 9- 1 945 , and taught for a time in Abruzzo, while actively engaged in socialist politics. Moving to Naples in 1 949 to accept a teaching post, he soon received a grant to study in Brussels and Paris for two years. Thereafter Pomilio continued to teach only intermittently; writing was to be his major occupation. His first novel, L 'uccello nella cupola ( 1 954) received the Marzotto Prize, the first of many in an illustrious career. His second novel was Il testimone ( 1 956), followed by Il nuovo corso in 1 959. Another major novel, La compromissione ( 1 965) won the prestigious Campiello Prize. In 1 969 Il cimitero cinese brought together in a single volume the first three novels and the long short story of the title, first published in 1958. Il quinto evangelio ( 1 975) was the result of a major creative effort , and earned the author a series of literary awards including the Napoli Prize, the Quenau Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Warsaw Pax Prize. Three years later Il cane sull'Etna appeared, a volume of stories written during the long gestation of The Fifth Gospel. The author's last book, Il Natale del 1833, was published in 1 983 and received the prestigious Strega Prize. Pomilio ' s works have been translated into several languages. The present volume is not the first to appear in English; Archibald Colquhoun translated The Witness [Il testimone] in 1 959 and The New Line [II nuovo corso] in 1 96 1 for the London publisher Hutchinson &Co. who published them in association with Harper & Brothers of New York.

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Pomilio was also a fine editor and literary critic, who produced very valuable essays on Cellini, Verga, and Pirandello, and discussed literary theory with vigor and authority: in an extremely interesting volume of essays, Contestazioni ( 1 967), he gave final shape to ideas developed earlier in Le ragioni narrative, a literary journal he and a group of other prominent Neapolitan writers founded and collaborated on in the 1 960s. Scritti cristiani ( 1 979), another volume of essays, brings together reflections occasioned by the writing of The Fifth Gospel. I have chosen The Fifth Gospel to re-introduce Pomilio to the English­ reading public because, while not necessarily most representative of his entire opus, it is certainly his most important book. It also marks the culmination of the complex thematic evolution of his work as a whole. All the preceding works deal with problems that face humanity today: the paradox of our inexorably increasing frustration and alienation, and the negation of our ideals, the more the spread of technological progress and of education increases our aspirations toward those ideals ; the tension and insecurity caused by the rapidity of the changes taking place in all aspects of human life, including the disintegration of all absolutes, ethical as well as epistemological ; the increasing hunger for political, economic, and religious freedoms in a world still very loathe to concede them. Pomilio ' s stories had always centered on the development of an inner crisis in contemporary people, judges and the accused before them, priests and their most troubled parishioners, intellectuals and political activists struggling with their intellectual and practical frustrations. The essential condition of man in the twentieth century, for Pomilio, is markedly our solitude, our alienation, our sense of having lost control of both the physical universe and of human history (even as science and technology assure us we are gaining it), our confrontation of a world from which the absence of God is predicated by modern science as absolutely as ancient religions proclaimed His constant presence. The Fifth Gospel develops previous themes, but it is also a breakaway, for it tells the story of a search for a message of hope and sal vation which is presented as realizable. Although the search almost always ends tragically, it is constantly reborn; if its unsuccess can be cause for alienation and despair, its constant revival throughout the centuries is a harbinger of hope, for it must have its roots in a connection between the human and the divine, in a metaphysical presence in the human spirit and in the world itself. In this perspective, the alienation and loneliness of contemporary man yields to a message of hope and the evangelical call to human solidarity. The figure of Christ as the aspect of God that changes His "infinite distance" into "infinite closeness," that replaces the innumerable prescriptions of the Law with the individual' s freely chosen dedication to human well-being, is at the center of the narration' s adventure of discovery; in the end Christ turns out to be the fifth evangelist, but as a hidden figure, hidden like the evangelist by his

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hood in the last chapter. For what symbolizes Him and His message throughout the story is the Word, which in turn is symbolized by the book, the elusive fifth gospel. And the book is in turn the symbol for the call to freedom, to a perennial involvement with the message, to a renewal of the spirit of hope and love; a symbol of the presence of the divine Spirit in the world and particularly in the human soul, calling each individual to live an exhilarating adventure of knowledge and action: not the passive acceptance of a set of truths, but the exploration of truth. The spring of the work' s timeless adventure is the inexhaustibility of the Word on the one hand and the inexhaustibility of man's thirst for truth on the other. The timeless adventure is actually a series of adventures, all the same and all different, from the early Christian era to our time. The first one, hidden, underlying all the others and on which they are modeled, is Christ's, who experienced the solitude, the doubts, the suffering unto death, but also the search, the hope, the giving of hope and healing. The adventures of all His followers, touched by the same Spirit, trace the same pattern though all in different ways, in accord with the modes of their time and their chosen form of rebellion against its mores, in accord with their fidelity to their call-down to an unlikely present-day searcher after fifth gospels, an ex G.I. and his students and collaborators who at the end choose to continue the search at which their teacher has seemingly failed. But the failure, like Christ's, is only apparent, external, for it is not the visible results that count, but the adventure itself, which exists more in the searching than in the finding; its reward lies in the spiritual intensity, in the hope, faith, and love the experience engenders. The search for the Word, for the essence of the Christian message, ultimately for Christ, becomes also a search for oneself from a richly rewarding perspective, a questioning of one ' s origins and final end, and of one ' s contribution t o the events o f history, even a n inquiry into whether man may be the only agent of the realization of a possible divine plan for human history. Clearly writing was for Pomilio from the very beginning of his career an exercise in inner exploration and clarification. Of this process The Fifth Gospel constitutes a remarkable instance, especially as it explores the human striving for the metaphysical, the absolute, and reaches not so much certitudes as insights into the possibilities offered by the evangelical message, favoring an open vision of the message and of its meaning over an institutional dogmatization of it, seeing it as a message of liberation, particularly from the feeling of exclusion, isolation, and helplessness that plagues humanity today, as well as from the terrors of religious ideologies of the past, like the doctrine of predestination, of a grudging God who is difficult to reach, and then only by the chosen few. The Fifth Gospel thus also represents the final formulation and clarification of the inquiry that underlies Pomilio ' s entire creative career. But with regard to its narrative techniques and structure, the work represents a completely new departure. The author had not before created a work of such thematic richness

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and chronological scope. However in his previous works he had been a successful narrator, an explorer of intricate psychologies, an essayist, a polemicist, a creator of rich metaphors, a student of complex contemporary and classical literary figures. The complexity of The Fifth Gospel called for a composite narrative approach for which Pomilio had more than adequately trained. He chose a pluralistic, polyphonic approach and created a freely experimental form: linear, logical, even chronological, in structure, it is also circular and cyclical, and at the same time open-ended and free in its suggestion of a future. Each block of experience in The Fifth Gospel logically connects with the previous and the following one; each section makes use of the literary form that was most prevalent in its era and best serves its narrative purpose, from the epistolary exchange of "The Vivario Manuscript" and "The Greek Monk," to the documentary chronicles of "The Minorite" and "The Christ of Guardia," the moral apologues of the Renaissance period, the biographical and autobiographical writings of the period of the proliferation of memoirs for Du Breuil and De Lellis ; each section presents a cycle that rekindles and renews a previous one; two long letters, one by Peter Bergin at the beginning and another by his secretary at the end, serve as a "frame" for the many "stories" inside the book; the final play brings the reader back to the Cologne priest who started it all in the first chapter, recapitulates the issues and problems debated throughout the work, and ends with a repetition of the arrest of the fifth evangelist-Christ. At the same time the story is open-ended. The ambiguity regarding the nature of the central symbol, the fifth gospel-a real book or a meaningful myth-remains unresolved; the meaning of the fifth gospel, its openness to multiple interpretations remains unresolved; the search, which Peter Bergin' s disciples promise to continue, in spite of the apparent failure of their teacher and their skepticism about the existence of the book as a real object, remains unfinished. The fifth evangelist of the final section, while recapitulating the nodes of the discussion, also reshuffles the deck and reopens every question with his proclamation of the freedom of the individual conscience. The re-arrest of Christ twenty centuries later implies that the arrest of all those Christ figures throughout the centuries was a cyclical recurrence of a historical event that is going to continue: thus, each section ends with a conclusive defeat that looks like a final checkmate for the cause, leaves a kind of expectant atmosphere which translates into the resurgence of the cause at the beginning of the next section; thus, the message that aroused the spirit of so many different personalities throughout the centuries, at once persistent yet flexible, available to so many different interpreters , with so many different perspectives, will not be repressed because the fifth evangelist has been put behind barbed wire. Among the many elements that make up the richness of Pomilio ' s work is certainly its language, which is also pluralistic and polyphonic as it moves through the centuries, attempting to capture the tone and a general sense of the

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literary modes particular to each century: not archeologically reconstructing the written or spoken language of each, but suggesting in contemporary Italian the flavor, the spirit of the language of the time and the mentality of those who used it. This aspect of the language of The Fifth Gospel presents the greatest challenge to the translator and may well be the reason it has not been translated earlier. "Commercial" translators perceive these difficulties at first glance and set the book aside as unsuitable for their hurried occupation. I hope our translation has been able to suggest the subtle differences of each section, from the old Latin rhetorician trying religiously, though not very successfully, to curb his old flair for eloquence, to the perfectly modern prose of Peter Bergin and his followers. Another interesting feature of the book' s narrative technique is the adaption of the narrative strategies of the detective story to a historical and philological search, and the focus on the "scientific" reconstruction of historical events or l iterary texts, instead of a crime: following up every possible clue yielded by a careful examination of a remark (rather than a fingerprint), casually left behind in one text, in order to get to the next one; collating, comparing, evaluating different sources in the effort to reach a final conclusion. This aspect of the book must have been the one that fascinated most an avowed enthusiast of detective stories like Umberto Eco, whose immensely popular The Name of the Rose ( 1978) took many clues from this book. A voracious reader of detective stories, according to his own repeated statements, Eco frequently analyzed the structure, aims, and nature of the detective novel, a type of story in which the hypotheses of the protagonist regarding a possible reality are usually proved right in the end. True, William' s hypotheses do not always turn out to be correct; and neither do Peter Bergin's. Eco might have found the best model for a detective story structure with a denouement very foreign to the genre, in one of Pirandello ' s best known plays, Right You A re, if You Think You Are, where the searchers who believe in the existence of an objective reality and therefore in the existence of one absolute truth, are befuddled in the end when two different views of reality are found to be equally true, and truth itself, therefore, subjective, relative, multiple. ("William in my novel [is not rational but reasonable. That is why he] believes in no single truth," Stefano Rosso, "Correspondence with Umberto Eco," Boundary, 2, 12 [Fall 1983] : 4). But the detective story structure with an uncharacteristic ending, where the hypotheses of the searchers remain unproven in the end, was a vital element of The Fifth Gospel, which Eco had read more recently and had evidently been impressed by. In addition, at the center of the search in Pomilio' s work is a book, a mysterious volume or manuscript pursued with the focussed intelligence and the dogged persistence of an ideal sleuth. And in some of the stories (Friar Albert of "The Reappearances," Section 7; De Lellis) , the search is frustrated by a librarian who acts as a Cerberus, jealous custodian of his treasures, especially

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those he considers "dangerous." Some stories, like the Minorite' s and Du Breuil ' s, may have suggested to Eco the idea of using a minor character, a follower, a spectator, a survivor, as a narrator, a historiographer in the aftermath of the tragic conclusion of the story. Pomilio ' s text may also have given him the idea of patterning the story on an archetype, like the passion of Christ, or on a cycle of liturgical celebrations or religious practices, like the hours of the holy office. But above all Eco appears to follow Pomilio in recreating a fictional but historically accurate world, medieval or otherwise, peopled by fictional but historically correct characters, immersing the reader in the atmosphere of that world, not least by a language subtly suggestive of the style and mannerisms of that age, and in setting the action in a context of religious disputes and contentions, of enmities, rivalries, partisan strife among different religious orders and factions, including the more or less formal argumentations in trials and inquisitions focused on religious concepts and beliefs. Other writers as well have been influenced by Pomilio' s extraordinary work. Giuseppe Berto' s La gloria (1978) was directly inspired by the concluding chapter, "The Fifth Evangelist," in which Judas, during a mock retrial of Jesus, mounts a strenuous defense of his innocence of his master' s death on the grounds that he could not have eluded his role as Christ' s betrayer, because he had been destined to play it ab aeterno. Berto ' s La Gloria is a long defense by Judas of his despairing vision of reality and of his actions from when he first met Christ to when he ran from Calvary to hang himself, and a condemnation of the vision of Christ patterned on the one presented in Pomilio by his fifth evangelist. Pomilio himself was to build on the philosophical premises of The Fifth Gospel in his next work, which unfortunately was to be his last major one, Il Natale del J 833 (1983). Here he explores a question not directly confronted in The Fifth Gospel nor in previous works like L'uccello nella cupola and Il testimone, all of which had dramatized many instances of it: the theme of human suffering. As The Fifth Gospel had implied the need for the Christian' s continuous interrogation o f the message o f Christ, here a prominent Catholic writer of the nineteenth century is driven by the subject matter of his own works and the events of his life to search for an explanation for the suffering of the j ust and the innocent despite the passion of Christ, which evidently had not eliminated evil from human history or suffering from the world; if anything, it has drawn Christ' s most faithful followers into the same tragedy. Although his protagonist searches persistently and passionately for an answer, Pomilio essentially leaves us without one. Rutgers University

UMBERTO MARIANI

A LETTER

Rev. M. G., Secretary, Vatican Commission for B iblical Studies, Rome. Dear Sir: Probably the best way to introduce myself (my name, for what it is worth, can be found at the end of this letter) is to tell you my story from the beginning. Of course, a man's story may begin in various ways: it may begin in any small town on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, where an American boy, neither acquiescent nor rebellious, diligent enough and lively enough, earnestly devotes himself to study and play. It may begin when a young man falls in love for the first time and experiences for the first time his own introverted nature and the bitter sense of feeling different, cut off (it is a common experience, I believe-it was stronger in me) ; or the day in which a war he knows nothing about uproots him from the university where he is peacefully working in the hope of getting a professorship in history and throws him on a torn and darkened Europe. My story, however-the one that really counts-began a few short months before the end of the war, when suddenly I was pulled from the small unit I had commanded till then and called to Cologne, where they needed an officer capable of handling German, and able therefore to deal with our relations with the Germans. I arrived in Cologne toward evening, one of those northern evenings that are suggestive of old age. But imagine how my feelings of depression, and the sense of unreality we feel when we are once again severed from our attachments (I had just bidden my oid comrades farewell), were intensified by the sight of what had been a city, and was now I ittle more than a pile of torn walls, bathed in a deserted light, giving off a sort of disinterred sadness.

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A Letter

Well : after the customary formalities at headquarters and the usual instructions from a headquarters officer (it is incredible how punctilious behind­ the-lines officers can be), they walked me over-since it was nearby-to what was to be my office and my lodgings. They told me on the way that it was a place that must be kept in good order. They also told me that it was a good place to do anything in, except make love, and laughed when they saw that I did not catch on. It was night; and a night in wartime always means darkness in its purest state. Thus, only after I was inside, and the dim, lifeless light produced by a generator gave things relief and outline, did I begin to realize how odd, or rather, how different the place was. Only the next day was I to become sure that I was in a rectory. B ut please try to imagine the wonder I still felt: expecting nothing more than a pallet, I found myself in two rooms with vaults curving upward and converging to create a cross, and adorned with windows which were no ordinary ones, but ogival, mullioned windows of graceful design. And everywhere a sense of things intact or undisturbed, as if they had been arranged there not to be used but to last. This much, at least, I remember feeling. And I also remember feeling curiously intrusive, with my duffle bag, my uniform, my person, next to the huge wardrobes with their thick, locked doors, to the shelves, the lectern, the brief Latin motto, "Peace abideth here," that I was able to decipher among the carving of the lectern. B ut I also remember that I did not dwell on that thought. In the second of the two rooms there was a bed, a real bed, and I was too young, and, that night, too tired. A short time later I was again dreaming that I was sleeping under a truck, at the edge of a night crisscrossed by dark fears, a dream I had been having for months. The next day I woke up soon after dawn and right away, in spite of the hesitations of the previous night, I moved around cheerfully exploring my new lodgings. Soon after I was already busy getting acquainted with the books-an old vice of mine-and even leafing through that vaguely taboo object, a priest's breviary. I opened one of the wardrobes and found it full of church vestments. In another there was a cassock, some underwear, shoes. Some pencils and a pen were lying on the desk. And everywhere in the two rooms there were signs of a life just interrupted, as if the owner had left them quietly one morning, a few days earlier, and I was to expect his return at any moment. But I was not thinking of him in those moments; rather, I was intent on savoring the novelty of my impressions. I liked the place, with its archaic look and hard to define mixture of austerity and intimacy. I was discovering, among other things, the patience of things, their ability to be submissive to us, and indifferent. But above all there was the imprint of a collective way of being, as in some ancient or noble home which, more than projecting the image of an individual, seems the quintessence of a social condition. Instinctively one thought of a sequence of lives flowing one into the other and settling there as in a shell, without altering it. The funny thing was that I was not overwhelmed by it; on the contrary, I was

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taking possession of it in a very natural way, with the feeling of one who enjoys, rather idl y, the idea of entering that shell, or even of being allowed to enjoy (temporarily, of course, and only in order to take a vacation from one's usual mode of existence) a small, unexpected inheritance. Then something intervened to change my response or, rather, thinking of it now, to determine it once and for all. There was, in a comer, a small door, partly hidden by a wardrobe. Forcing it slightly I suddenly found myself in what undoubtedly had been a sacristy and now was just a repository of scorched choir stalls, broken window panes and slabs of marble, decapitated statues, hacked pieces of wood. And further on, beyond the partially collapsed arch of another door, lay a church, with the vault open to the sky like a wound, and only the columns lifting upward the remains of their ravished beauty. I no longer remember whether I stopped on the threshold or moved a few steps in the direction of the altar. I do remember that I reflected with an intensity I had never experienced before on the meaning of death. For I was well acquainted by now, through experience, with the death of men and the anguish that accompanies it, but I was not as well acquainted with the anguish and the loss of things made by men (or rather, things they believe were created by them once and for all and were intended to survive), for in that case it is not just the anguish and the bereavement of a loss, it is the bewilderment of being in the world without the things that are meant to protect us. And I also remember the relief I felt as I reentered the two rooms of the rectory: beautiful, of course, not just because of the way I saw them and felt at the moment, but because among all the ruins they were the only things that revealed the remnants of a certain harmony, or at least suggested the idea that something had survived. I shall not tal k about my work as an officer, especially since back then, not only did we not yet have a German policy, we did not even know what to do with the Germans. The few times I had to talk to one of them, we instinctively avoided looking into each other's eyes, knowing that if we were to try to do it, we would find ourselves staring at each other from an unbridgeable distance. It was, after all, the thankless season of hatred and reprisal, when the news of the extermination camps made us more reluctant to fraternize, and when even the women who sold us their love preserved something stubbornly hostile, undefeated, arrogant, in the depths of their captured eyes. I suppose you would even less be interested in reading about my poor pastimes: our meeting-places were what they were-smoky cellars where we took refuge to drown loneliness and homesickness by drinking. After we drank, both doubled. Later, in the streets, some of my comrades would try to get a song or a laugh going. B ut I looked at the city the way one looks at a corpse. I was young. And I was inexperienced. I had never been taught that one can laugh at a wake. So it happened that the rectory, to which I had been assigned by chance, became for me a small, separate universe, jealously guarded, where I was

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A Letter

allowed not only to be shielded from the sadness of war, but, after years of barracks and tents, of forced life in common with so many comrades, to be restored to my quiet and retiring nature and to my oid love of books and reading. And, as I said, there were enough books there to satisfy at least my curiosity. In fact, I cannot say how often I spent entire evenings reading a work of some ascetic or a treatise on dogma, maybe just because the Latin they were written in attracted me, or climbing to the top shelves to explore the old volumes I saw lined up there. Bewildered, of course: who could imagine that so much had been written on the theme of the Trinity, or that to define a need so immediate, to my mind, as that of believing or not in God, thousand-page manuals had been composed? To me, almost agnostic in matters of religion, and brought up, after all, in a largely Protestant world, it was like finding myself holding a railway schedule of a hundred years earlier and thinking that there were still people that claimed to travel by it; or like watching a play in a dead language, where, instead of characters, abstractions like soul, faith, grace, charity, were acting, and discovering that there was someone still willing to let himself be moved by it. Yet they attracted me, if only through that element of the exotic that is always present in an anachronism. It was a whole cultural landscape, still unexplored, coming my way unexpectedly; and I was moving to explore it with the caution and the reservations of the casual visitor, but also with the impression of having crossed it a few times before, maybe in a dream; or with the impression that a previous life was awakening in me, stirring certain heretofore slumbering zones of my conscience. No dramatics, of course, not endangering my agnosticism, just restricting its borders slightly, to the point, for instance, of making myself available to consider worthy of reflection the fact that there were still men convinced that God continues to look at us from his inaccessible heavens. I must say that undoubtedly the priest who had lived before me in those rooms-my priest, as I have been in the habit of calling him since-contributed to my new willingness too. Apart from his name, I never came to know anything about him, not even how he died-or was killed. Yet I ended up, I believe, knowing him much better than many persons with whom I lived. For one thing, we somehow survive in our possessions, and a man does not leave the house where he has lived practically intact without leaving impressed on it a thousand marks of his temperament, even of his moral character. Even of his looks I have a sufficiently precise idea, thanks to the pictures that I found in a small album. In one he appeared wearing knee-length knickers, as was the fashion for children at the turn of the century, on his face the wonder children of that time experienced when they were dressed up and made to pose for their first portrait. In another I found the boy again, at the center of a high school group, in the second row, and his face stood out because of a different kind of intensity, characteristic of young men whose personality has already developed, not just the features of their faces. In a third one he wore the cassock of a theology student; here his personality appeared already defined, with a sort of inner

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resoluteness that mysteriously marked an adolescent smile still open to the quiet arrogance of joy. If he had decided to wear that habit, he must have done it not because he connected any idea of escape or renunciation with it, but on the contrary to satisfy a secret vitality, and because of something that I would call the instinct of courage, the need for a choice and for risk in the choice. There were also some of those pictures that serve to safeguard our affections and yet tell so much about the kind of person one is. In one he appeared, still in a seminarian's cassock, in the company of his parents; his way of smiling was striking, like that of a person returning from a distance or an absence and rousing himself for a while with furtive joy to feelings that he has neglected or even restrained. In another, already a priest, he was standing next to an officer, who, from the resemblance, could have been his brother: same forehead, same lips, same gaze. And yet, upon further scrutiny of their young faces, I seemed to recognize-thanks to whatever distinguishes courage from energy and bravery from spiritual strength-the effect of two different vocations, the stamp, that is, of two disciplines and two different types of obedience. And finally there were various other, more recent pictures. And it was as if, lining them up properly, I would be able to trace, through imperceptible mutations, the entire curve of a life story: the evolution of spiritual strength into patience of will, while the face is etched and comes to know its first wrinkles; the transformation of intelligence into intellectual sharpness, while one's smile fades and is more often withheld; the passage from resoluteness to an inner steadiness; the experience of human beings which matures into irony and perhaps by that route achieves compassion. His must have been an intense nature, but not really a serene one, given to meditation, yet impelled by strong drives, one of those natures that achieve their balance not by repressing their exuberance, but by working to recognize it in order to keep better watch over it. If his "giving oneself a goal each day," which I was to find later in one of his notebooks, had had any meaning, it must have had something to do, in part at least with the efforts he had made to impress a direction on his own enthusiasm and perhaps a corrective on his own vitality. A priest, let us remember, is always suspect. And he can become even more so if a sketch of his character begins to reveal that touch of commonplace idealizing that seems to be the inevitable rule when one speaks of priests. But you must remember that I had special means at my disposal to get to know him, surrounded as I was by what had belonged to him: beginning with some objects cherished, one could see, with that sort of jealous possessiveness which is usually united with lasting affections and faithfulness to one's inclinations. A violin, for instance, that lay in an armoire together with a heap of scores variously worn and very often well-marked in the margins, told me, I believe, a lot about him and his tastes, if it is true, after all, that love for music can be the recipient and beneficiary of many other passions. And perhaps a small collection of minerals, certainly begun in high school, told me as much about him: and not

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A Letter

only because it seemed to me indicative of his feeling for order and his love for things-of that tendency to love oneself in things to which I would later see allusions in his notebooks-but also because the things on which he has exercised the gentle patience of his hands tell us a great deal about a man. It must have been, after all-that patience, I mean-his innermost, or most strongly cultivated virtue, if I found it even in his way of annotating books in the margins or of inserting, between pages, strips full of notes that, from the way they were compiled, with a meticulousness worthy of an ancient scribe, implicitly revealed another tendency of his, which I would often see emerge from his notebooks: something like an avocation to remain in the shade, and a penchant for the anachronistic. I told you that I had a thousand leads to get to know him. But above all I had his library: and you know how much the books he has owned help us to understand a man. There you find his choices and the criteria of his choices, his tastes as a reader and his human passions themselves. There are the books he acquired, but then leafed through indifferently, and there are the indications of those persistent, daily visitations that are established with a text loved or strongly contested. In his library there was, moreover, a section of old and even antique volumes which certainly belonged to his predecessors and which he had inherited together with the furnishings of the rectory: various bibles, many classics of Christian thought, manuals of ethics, of sacred history, of sacred eloquence, handbooks of catechesis and even casuistry, in a word the typical paraphernalia of the well-informed priest of the past, that I would later find in half the ecclesiastical bookshelves of Europe. But perhaps not so typical was the use he made of it; according to whether they had the air of having been uses or left curled up in their dust, they signalled the line of his interests and his rejections. He did not like certain books and he did not understand them, that was certain, while he ventured forth with fervor to the discovery of others. In fact, studying the way he had annotated them, I could see the difficult, troubled situation of a priest who, without rejecting tradition, avoided the kind of conformity of assent that especially in those years was very common among priests. On the contrary, to judge from the other books in his possession, the section of the library that had been exclusively his own, he had, I discovered, a zone of curiosity and restlessness allowed to ferment rather freely in contact with not quite orthodox texts, often of either Protestant or lay inspiration. But it is understandable: in a city that with respect to its religious profile was virtually a frontier, how could one simply plant oneself in one ' s orthodoxy and avoid confrontation, risk, exploration? It was the usual dilemma, greatly increased for him by the fact that he lived it in that region of trouble and moral darkness that was Germany during the period after W.W.I and the time of Nazism. I could even, within limits, distinguish the phases of his struggle by seeing how his collection had grown: as if he had been searching for an enduring balance between the duty to doubt and the vigilance over doubt, between the temptations

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of a culture in which the divine was no longer present, not even as nostalgia, and an immovable inner steadiness that impelled him to a constant scrutiny of his faith, to the denial of denial, to the verification, at all costs, as it is written in his notebooks, of "the presence of an absent God." He must have done it (but this I was to understand much better later on) starting his journey again from the beginning, at the source, Gospel in hand, judging from the volumes of New Testament exegesis and discussion of the sources lined up on his shelves: two entire shelves, a library within a library that had all the signs of having been for years a point of reference and almost a daily preoccupation. To these I was myself by now turning more and more frequently, attracted not least by the annotations I found everywhere in them. I was certainly not tempted to push myself into the tangle of his problems, and even less into the trap of faith, but I was already willing to consider his beliefs an anachronism entirely worthy of respect, and even a system of subtruths, emblems, so to speak, of rather noble values, that unfortunately had fallen out of use. I was establishing my distance. I was protecting myself, of course. But I dreamed a lot at night. The letters I wrote then are full of dreams, and my priest's books were in those dreams too. As you see, I was living with him in many ways. I went out into a city abandoned to its destruction, where men walked alone among the stones averting their eyes from each other out of a kind of shame, and coming home I found the singular peace of the rectory and that comer of concentration that had been his working place, with the old-fashioned chair and the walnut desk­ heavy, spacious, with a good feel to it, maybe a little too monumental for my taste-behind which I holed up for long hours of reading. Those hours were marked by the surprise of discovering the extent to which objects condition us, since, even while I found the desk highly reassuring, with its solid sides close to my legs, it imposed on me a composure I was not accustomed to, and in the long run intimidated me, making me very hesitant, for instance, to rummage through the papers I knew were piled up in its drawers. Those papers were to be so important for me! They were in fact to be at the origin of the long adventure of my life. Yet for quite a while I delayed getting involved in them; from reserve, as I said, and also because of the little Gennan I knew, after all, which at my first attempt had given me the impression that those papers were even more retiring and inaccessible than some archeological finds that stare at us from the depth of their fossil eyes. But even more, as I think back now, because it had to occur at the right time. First, I mean, I had to become familiar with the cultural background of the man who had written them, and with his problems, his soul, even his handwriting. And in fact, when it happened, it happened almost naturally, following up on a note found in a book, that sent me back to one of his notebooks. Thus a new phase of our life together began, the exploration of his notebooks, my moving from one to the other, impressed first of all by what they were not: because they were not, even in draft form, a diary, a confession, or any

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of those typical journals of the soul through which the Christian self weighs, probes, scrutinizes, studies, even fictionalizes itself. There was, 1 mean, no trace of any of the usual rituals of conscience which form such a great part of Christian writings and which, among mystical tensions and mythologies of the inner self, so often evolve into complacency and narcissism. On the contrary the "I" was almost banned, and certainly all that usually accompanies it was banished: the taste for introverted and exacting reflection, the casuistry of doubt, the moralistic tone, the tendency to feel oneself at the center of a drama, and the cautious, subtle tendency to exhibit it. Yet 1 was all the same entering the territory of a conscience, reading its dry and somehow impersonal notes, and, more than notes, signs or emblems of a secret, jealously guarded life, where, even if something autobiographical was present, it was present as a sediment rather than as new growth, it surfaced, that is, distanced and spent, as if it had been lived in another time by somebody else. He too, in fact, seemed to have sensed it: "Among the most frequent temptations of a Christian," he wrote, "is that of thinking he is the protagonist of a privileged experience. We must instead reject any connivance with, and any submission to, the self, in order to know of ourselves not what distinguishes us as individuals, but what defines us as persons." The person; it was one of the words that recurred most often in his notebooks; and it was a way of designating the individual in his relationship to the transcendent and in his moral and metaphysical aspects. But to him it represented also a node, a convergence, a dimension, that is, that included man as an individual and as being rooted in a community and in solidarity with other men. His need for a church-and to enter the Church-must have originated from this, his need not to distinguish himself but to belong, his vocation as a parish priest who accepts immersing himself in a community and spending himself for it. 1 said that a priest is always suspect. Everyone expects to find him conforming to a role, and wants to ask him if he is what he is supposed to be and if he believes in what he says. Everyone wants him to be in accord with the idea he has of him, in constant contact with the absolute and the sublime. Everyone is awed by the courage of a choice that by its irreversibility has transformed itself into a destiny. But, indifferent as 1 was then to matters of religion, as far as 1 was concerned 1 had nothing specific to ask him. Thus 1 was in no position to be surprised by anything, not even by the absence of that certain dose of "literature" that is usually present in the writings of priests; nor by a certain dangerous skirting of what 1 think are the borders of orthodoxy ("For us," he wrote, "a creating God is less incomprehensible than a crucified Christ; and perhaps the fundamental paradox for the Christian lies in the fact that the absolute distance between us and God is better brought home to us by the love of Christ the man than by the unfolding of God's omnipotence"); nor by certain outbursts, half bitter, half sarcastic, incised on the paper the way a seismograph

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registers, in a few lines, an underground earthquake. Look at this sentence, for instance: "Start anew from humble truths and be wary of the beggars of absolutes." Or: "We are at the farthest level from God, at the extreme limit: at the point where we should ask ourselves whether it is still possible to go back to Him. Yet they say the State is an ethical being conscious of itself. Yet they say the State is the living Spirit." Or these thoughts, probably written during the war years: "In threatening times, in a nation where nobody any longer dares to be a conscience, you must feel guilty yourself and in need of remorse. But, in the end, among the many dead that you see around you, don't you think it is irrelevant to waste your time on just one little soul'?" Or, finally, these, marshalled with such peremptory sadness: "I come back to visit myself; I am not expected anywhere else. And to think that I have always tried to figure out how one lives in an abandoned home !" Just words, of course, but words whose meaning went beyond the connections they established or the spiritual heights they outlined for me. Their strength-attraction even-was due, for me at least, to their being posthumous words, messages from beyond the grave. They were reaching me like the tolling of a bell, from death' s farther shore, so that I could detect only their necessity. Of course, this was not all; there was more in his notebooks. And I kept reading, and became involved, partly because, while en entire generation was burying its dead along half the roads of Europe, his pages not only compelled me to ask myself why people die, but in a kind of proud anachronism, they posed for me the theme of survival. That is, in a time when the earth seemed to have become exclusively our grave, they summoned me to learn the alphabet of the stars. However, neither the lines I have quoted so far, nor others that I could have quoted, can render the tone of the entire series of notebooks. Because although they were not an autobiography, as I said, they did form a design, they were, in sum, if not a long act of faith, the proof of a long sodality with hope. I have often reflected, afterwards, on that complex fact which feeling and thinking in terms of hope is for the Christian: on that kind of subtle double play that he establishes between working in the world and for the world and not considering himself of this world; between expecting the fulfillment of the Promise beyond life and the will to make this earth the place of the Promise; between thinking that salvation is an individual destiny and working in the meantime to make it a collective event; between judging the history made by man senseless and absurd and yet toiling to find a direction and a purpose in it; between considering truth as something entirely known and revealed and treating it like an active account, to be constantly balanced. For him, at least, it had been all these things together, in a constant alternation of apprehensions and illusions that now, for instance, led him to ask himself not whether God exists, but whether in today's world there is any room left for God; now to write, instead, that "it is not the religious act that makes a Christian, nor his escape into the transcendent and metaphysical, but his participation in the history of God as it is manifested in the

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A Letter

history of the world"; and again to write that "no matter how one probes within our time, there is no sign that reveals the presence of the absent God" and that "a reading of the world around us can be made only in the negative, as if God had withdrawn to the reverse of things," and then again that on the contrary "faith in God-hence the presence of God-is the positive infinite within the negative infinite of history." Paradoxically, I mean, he established a contradiction at the very moment he was trying to resolve it. Or rather, if he was somehow restoring God to our world, he did it only by burdening Christians with an extraordinary responsibility. And he himself ended up by admitting it: "In any case, and in spite of everything, we must work in the sense of an exacting God: because it is possible that today, in the absence of God, we Christians are delegated to witness for him immensely more than we were once required to. And in reality in the past," he would immediately add, "we have oscillated too much between God as distance and God as collusion, a God who prescribes from the height of an inscrutable power and a God who can be known only in the most inward zones of the private, forgetting that he makes Himself present only through our witnessing." Hence the duty of the Christian to "become a sign in these times without signs," because" the Word becomes embodied in the contingent and looks for validation," he repeated, "in our witnessing." This because, he added a few pages later, "God has spoken to us once and for all through the Gospels. After which we must consider the persistence of His silence as a deliberate taciturnity. Or, more probably, as a permanent delegating of the Word. It is up to us now to speak of Him, and if possible in His name. The scope of our freedom lies in this choice: between a definitive resignation to His silence, and the need to break it by filling it with our voice. But it is also the scope of our responsibility at the present time, the indication of the tasks that are ours here and now." The last lines I have quoted were already a prelude to the writing of his last years, they had the same deliberate tone, the same timbre. In fact, beginning with the advent of Nazism, and then with the approach of a historic tragedy whose scope he painfully foresaw, a watershed was established in the dilemmas he posed, and in any case, together with a passionate refusal of Nazism, a surer, if more difficult conception of hope had unexpectedly matured. "The Christian can be recognized by his propensity to situate himself within his own time, bringing to it a disposition toward hope," I found written at the beginning of one of the last notebooks. And the "alternative of hope" and the "refusal of despair" in a moment when everything seemed "to dissuade one from looking at the future," became one with the "duty to dissent" and the "horror of certain fateful identifications: the equating of History with necessity, with the absolute, the equating of the State with the good, with morality." Of course, they were vague words; or at least today, years later, they may seem so. His statement, for instance, that "dissent is, in these times, the only

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duty compatible with the conscience of a Christian," may after all mean everything and nothing to our ears. Rediscovering today in his papers this kind of bloodless cry: "Gennany, Gennany, you have not been able to rise above yourself!" we would probably have the same feeling as if by chance we were to exhume a crumbling leaf left to dry among the pages of a notebook. But please take into consideration the years in which those things were written, the courage which in reality it took to write them; consider also the price a priest paid to himself who had to admit: "The man of ideology finds himself naturally justified by the success of his ideology, the Christian only by the thought-not very reassuring and essentially laughable-that the failure of God only testifies to the scandal of God." But above all read them in the light of these others: "I have the impression that we are living one of those decisive moments when, once the ambiguous semidarkness that the historical situation usually spreads over good and evil is dissipated, dissent ceases to be a mere option and assumes the rank of a mandate. Because," he added, "if this HistDlY is evil, if it resembles a withdrawal from God, if this State is evil, if it looks like the opposite of God, it does not mean that God does not exist, it only means that God is on the other side." Being on the other side, and thus intending to work "exclusively in the sense of an exacting God," even accepting "the scandal of speaking about His Kingdom as if it were something actually still awaited," because "only assuming the point of view of an absolute hope will we know the extent of the present despair," had somehow become his motto. Or better, the reason for a refusal that was more intransigent the more, in a way I find strange, he purposely derived his argument exclusively from the area of religion and metaphysics; and this was because-he wrote as to justify himself-"in a time like the one we are living in, it is no longer sufficient to place oneself at the proper height: we must instead place ourselves so high that the words of dissent and those of hope appear to be spoken from the farthest heavens." Let us make it clear, his were notes, ideas rapidly committed to paper at the moment they started to fennent, and left there without development. They were ideas, however, or, if you prefer, gleams of light that in any case illuminated his unyielding conscience for me. Although unable to descend from the region of abstraction where it had been fixed by education, his conscience had started asking whether "today," in his time, in Nazi Germany, one could be both a citizen and a Christian; if instead disobedience had not become an absolute value and, properly, a Christian one, and whether, therefore, to strive to save one' s soul did not mean "to stress the duty to dissent to the point of resisting the unjust Order. Because," he added almost brusquely, "the State that makes itself God and imposes an unjust Order on us does not actually exempt us from sinning; it only exempts us from feeling responsible, by changing the sin into an act of obedience."

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In general, there is always a moment in which a man touches bottom: when, that is, after retreating so far, he is either tempted to surrender or faces despair. For my priest, surely, it must have coincided with the moment when he wrote these reflections. He himself must have felt, that is, in spite of his efforts not to conform, the powerful attraction and the implicit near-blackmail that a system, with its successes, exercises on a man who is alone and is compelled to look for the source of his energy wholly within himself, in the incunabula of a conscience left to itself and reduced to crying out: "It is intolerable to think that good can be condemned by events; intolerable to think that history today is evolving in the absence of God." Intolerable, yes; but conscience runs in neutral and becomes a value exposed to wear-this he must have realized-when the idea of the absence of God is accepted as a kind of postulate, endured, anyhow, to the point that it becomes a second truth. And in any case, in a historical context in which injustice was sowing its victories, could the summons to the Christian to remain "a sign in these signless times," exploring his solitude in search of support, be enough? In sum, could it sound to him, to a Christian, anything but willful, to go on stubbornly repeating: "Is it possible that today, in the absence of God, the Christian has been delegated to witness Him more than he has ever been required to in the past?" We can imagine at this point what might have happened: a man, in fact a priest, comes back one day to his rectory overwhelmed by the sensation of "not being expected anywhere," of being only "a life left to itself," a "home not lived in." He whispers to himself, in a moment of either extreme anguish or extreme faith, "Beyond the stormy violence of History we must look at all costs for a sign of the opposite. We are left with the Gospel. It is not much, probably, but we have nothing else." Then he happens to pick up the Gospels, and as he reads them he realizes with growing amazement that he had lived until then an "imperfect vocation," content with the "sediments of grace" only, because he had forgotten, having read the Gospels seldom and badly (catechetically, he wrote), that the "infinite distance of God becomes in them, through Christ, infinite proximity." It must have been his turning point, the beginning of a climb back, the advent of a surer concept of hope, if a short time later he could

exclaim: "We become resigned to the idea of the absence of God only by forgetting, as I did, that he was able to put on our death." And a few pages later, in large, dark characters: "A great part of the failure of a Christian, and his despair-the despair at the distance, the silence of God-are due to his having too often repeated with St. Paul, 'The Gospel which was preached of me is not after man. ' Hence the tendency to remember the divinity of Christ much more than his humanity; hence the propensity to consider his Word as the field of impossible absolutes, not applicable to the world of history. On the contrary, it becomes the utopia of the possible as soon as one remembers that it was spoken by a man."

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Thus the Gospels, i n his eye, in his words, became "the utopia of the possible," and as he added, "the great mediation, the finish line where God allows us to meet Him"; but above all they became the brace that supported his intransigencies: in his words, they were "the tabernacle of firmness." "Until now," he confessed, "I read the Gospels only as a book of devotion. Now I discover in them a proposal of different values." The expression "as a Christian," he specified a little later, "no longer designates a relevant or anyhow meaningful disposition, if the Christian does not stop thinking of the Gospels as a book of devotion instead of as a source of antagonistic virtues." "Timidity," he also wrote, "that makes us vulnerable as Christians and in many cases even cowardly, comes from forgetting that for Christ, as the Gospels describe him, love describes a virtue that is quite different from docility." And in this light he began to isolate words and phrases (in the Gospels) that were well-known, even worn out by the misuse made of them through twenty centuries, but which, however, according to his new reading, were an outcry, a prayer, a warning, a protest; they became again, that is, the Word, with its solidity, its ability to become an event for one's conscience. And with its vigor. There was a page, for instance, that began this way: "At the roots of any consent and of any possible dissent..." Then, after a blank line, in a kind of sequence put together with joyous-and angry-fury: "Blessed are the meek, blessed are they that mourn, blessed are the merciful, blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, blessed are the peacemakers. Ye have heard that it hath been said, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. ' But I say unto you, ' Love your enemies. ' For naturally ye have been called unto liberty. For the fruit of the Spirit is love and peace." He skipped another line and then went on: "In order not to give up, not to turn back, to go on hoping, to find alternatives to all laws that stand opposed to love, not to resign yourself to repeating, as if all were lost: 'This is your hour, and the power of darkness'." He went on in this way, fervently, feverishly, whenever a Gospel phrase struck him, whenever a word he encountered in his reading seemed to him to evoke what he called the antagonistic power of the Spirit. As for me, of course, I was not converted. I was still pretty much as agnostic as ever, with my reserves of indifference, and a tendency to conceive of God as a private affair or at most as a dilemma with no solution, a kind of double entry between belief and disbelief, an account left inactive, and in my case not to be drawn on. Yet, as I told you, I was moved, I was involved. Reading, I was present at the adventure of my priest in his confrontation with History and God; and I could be put off by his abstractions and even inclined to irony (I read "Spirit," for instance, and immediately thought of something like "the Spirit of the Germany of old," stressing this particular meaning of the word, of course), and yet I allowed myself to be drawn in, and instinctively I repeated to myself that as long as one soul remained (excuse my emphasis) the world could be saved. Above all, I was discovering the Gospel myself: maybe with the reservations of one of those

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soldiers who were moving in the darkness around the cross, at most asking themselves for what reason, for what absurd passion, the man up there had died; but in the meantime I was already, without knowing it, the centurion compelled to exclaim, "Certainly. This was a righteous man." Even so, nothing would have changed; my personal history, my destiny as a man would have remained more or less what I had planned. After all, ambitions are themselves a habit, and mine, in spite of the war, had not changed: to get back as soon as possible to my university, to pick up my interrupted work, to publish a bit, to get a professorship. The rest, all that had happened to me in the meantime, I wanted only to put in parenthesis soon, including my priest, his home, his books, the interest I was now taking in his writings, the metaphysical temptations that were stirring in the depths of my mind. I would never become a New Testament scholar, that was certain. On the contrary, if my thoughts ever wandered beyond the war, I saw myself returning to my oid studies as to a world of empirical, verifiable certainties, where History was simply a sequel of occurrences, and the Gospel was a fact, at most and event, and certainly not what my priest was saying: the symbol of opposition, the great absurdity, the infinite positive infused into History to change it into an unending drift toward God. But it was foreordained, apparently, that things should not tum out that way. And perhaps, beyond the comfortable, warm shell of my agnosticism, beyond my horror of general ideas and of all that did not deal with the ascertainable and the concrete, something was surviving, in the most remote and ancestral dwellings of my soul, that predisposed me to spend my existence with my eyes riveted on a myth, and probably a mirage. I still remember the evening on which I was dazzled by it for the first time, how I sat snug at my usual desk, the lamp that at that time was giving only intermittent light (it was the hour when our generator always went berserk), and that expression, das fU11:fte Evangelium, that caught me unawares, diverting me from my train of thought. "Rethink the 'Render unto Caesar' ," my priest had written, "in light of and against the ' We have no king but Caesar,' where alone it finds its true meaning and its negation at the same time; and in effect, from the moment we begin to say 'We have no king but Caesar,' any crime becomes possible, because nothing will seem evil, except for disobedience. Rethink it also in the light of this verse of the fifth gospel: "Blessed are they who are free with regard to the Law, and woe to them who are good only with regard to the Law'." He had written these words. But although I felt I was at the very heart of his problems, my mind was elsewhere, after those three words-das funfie Evangelium, the fifth gospel-which I read and reread, not sure I had understood them properly. Yet to some extent I should have been prepared for it. A collection of apocrypha printed in Tubingen in 1 924 was full of inserts with notes of his like these: "If the Gospels have not remained books like many others, finished and concluded within the confines of their time, this has

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happened because, among other reasons, the way in which the message of Christ was transmitted to us has predisposed us to be drawn toward the apocryphal, or, in other words, to await a supplementary revelation. This is a kind of answer to the question: 'What else might Christ have said which we do not know? ' and justifies the burgeoning of apocrypha as an attempt by us, a poor one to be sure, to integrate His Word. It also explains in some way the legend of the apocryphal work par excellence, the Gospel of Gospels underlying the others or hidden, and to be found-or even recreated-by us." In another place my priest quoted this verse: "There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known," and commented on it this way: "The attraction toward the apocryphal is actually born of this reaching toward the unknown or awaited text, destined to integrate the truth of the Message. Thus, it does not simply answer a natural need for fable; on the contrary, it is emblematic of our condition. And actually, every time Christianity faces one of its many turning points or is preparing itself for a resurgence, the mirage resurfaces of a gospel that was lost, in which the Christian translates in concrete terms the unsatisfied yearning for a body of truth still to be discovered-or, more properly, of values still to be realized-a yearning that springs from the promise of a supplementary revelation. " So, as I said, I should have been prepared for it. Instead those three words rained down on me suddenly, flooding my consciousness with the suggestiveness of impossible ideas, but also with the strength of one of those pieces of evidence one has never thought of before. It is true, however, that they were followed by some of the typical meditations of my priest, as if with him too, once it had evidenced itself, that intuition widened in its rippling circles. "The belief in and search for a fifth unpublished gospel," he once wrote, for instance, "probably translates, in mythic terms, not only the expectation of the Spirit that runs through the background of the entire history of Christianity, but the very idea of a permanent delegation of the Word. And in reality the words of John, 1 6: 1 3 , 'When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth, ' or of Paul, 'The Word is without end,' have radically changed our attitudes, authorizing us to interpret the delegating of the Word as if the canonical Gospels had not told us the whole truth, and we, as Christians, were in fact obliged to become the seekers-or the authors, in some measure-of a gospel that has not been transmitted to us." "Myth," he had written, almost to put me on guard. Nor for the moment did I go in imagination beyond the limits that he set down with that term. The fifth gospel remained for me a beautiful fable, a mirage that struck me only by its vague beauty, as, say, a poetic image or metaphor does. But already I was introducing something resembling a new standard of judgment into my spirit, endangering the entire vision of Christianity I had had up to then. From a closed and static religion (as I had always thought it) of a few, meager, remote, rather absurd truths, established once and for all, never rectified and remaining to float

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by some paradox on the foaming, troubled sea of history, it suddenly seemed, by virtue of that myth, totally pervaded by a ferment of underlying tensions. I was fascinated. And through that little bit of imagination that even a historian possesses, for a few minutes of unusual intellectual fever, I even came to dream of composing an essay, perhaps a work of history (my way of dreaming !), maybe a kind of broad synthesis-if somewhat visionary-in which I would present the history of Christianity anew, from the perspective suggested by my priest. But he had not yet finished disconcerting me; he had just persuaded me that that fifth gospel of his was only a myth, a metaphor, a beautiful idea and nothing else, useful only to dream about and to project historical revisions impossible to realize, when, 10 and behold, a moment later, he began to speak of it as if he really believed in its existence. He even quoted it on the same plain as the others, extracting verses from it that left me speechless. Strangely, even his precise references to it as to a real text, one he had nearby at hand for consultation, did not perplex me. Up to now I could very well have thought of it as a trick, or, say, a literary expedient, a kind of innocent coquetry of anonymity. I had often before come to grips, in my past as a scholar, with a taste for expressing oneself through an interposed person, as if to cover what one wants to say with the seal and the authority of the quotation. With a priest, I was telling myself, it must have been even less unusual; the need to lean on an authority, however, can quickly change into a mental habit. Yet, by their timbre, their tone, the way they stood out, those quotes were d(fJerent; they gleamed from his pages like fragments of asteroids rained down from other skies. His handwriting too, in contact with them, changed: it lost its staccato and controlled rhythm and became more flowing, more sprawling, less guarded, less contained. Some passages, the most characteristic, I copied word for word. Here is one: "I knew only the outer shell of truth. A few formulae, badly learned, were my whole Gospel. I had forgotten: 'I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves,' and I did not know yet what the fifth gospel says: ' And stormy shall be the sea you shall cross' ." Here is another: "What is the meaning of what Christ said in the fifth gospel, 'I am your desert' ? What does ' Whosoever is near me is near the fire' mean? Or do you really expect-you, a Christian, you, a priest-your life to pass without any suffering?" Nor did he ever in any sense demonstrate that his interest was philological, the instinct of the erudite. Like many other seekers after the gospels whom I was to meet later, he was only impelled by the thirst for the Word, the illusion of tapping a still intact reservoir of truth. To snatch new, unpublished fragments from silence, restoring the unknown kerigma and /ogion, served only to comfort him in his certitude, even disposed him to flares of mysticism. He would write, for instance: "Even if everything tells you, No, no, you must answer, Yes, yes: I did not come to deny, I came to affirm"; and this seemed to him sufficient authorization to invent a hope for himself. He would write: "The kingdom of the Father is spread all over the earth, but men do

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not see it," like one who has found an answer to his doubts, his uneasiness, his present worries. In one case he addressed a question of authenticity, but he did it like a believer, not a philologist-and this too disconcerted me; it seemed incomprehensible, to my way of thinking at that time: "The 'Father, I saved them all ' that the fifth gospel attributes to Jesus on the cross would change, if it were authentic, the very plan of salvation. But what improbable measure of charity would be needed today for it to be accepted! The very idea that what is being done today would be justified and in the end forgiven could mean the failure of Christ." But my surprises were not over yet. This last passage was followed by an addition in smaller characters, a kind of correction: "Or the contrary is true: that the victory of Christ implies a plan of salvation extended to all men. In this regard keep in mind the 'No one shall lack forgiveness, ' as the quotation from my material relating to the fifth goes." "My material," he said, and the reference was clear. So you can imagine how I looked for it and how, when I found it, in a folder identical to the one in which he kept his correspondence, and where therefore until then I had refrained from searching (I have had some such scruples, believe me), I finally felt close to solving every enigma. Instead, it was to make me discover that he too was a dreamer, at most a seeker after gospels which were only conjectural. Later I was to know many such visionaries who could build themselves a universe from a fragment or see a whole sky reflected in a drop of water. And I must have been one of them, if in the end I behaved exactly like him ... The entire "material," as he called it, consisted of two parts: the first included two documents, no more, the second a group of literary or, to be more severe, semiliterary efforts. Now, the latter were perhaps suggestive, but they did not add much to what I already knew. The writer, the budding artist is always lurking in us; and dwelling so long on his fifth gospel, my priest allowed himself to be inspired to do some creative work, of which the most notable was the outline of a religious play called The F�fth Evangelist. The two documents, on the other hand, were of a sort to increase my curiosity, if possible. I read once that the Holy Shroud must be seen in the negative, that looking at it as it appears to the unaided eye may be disappointing. Something very faintly similar happened to me with those pages; as if they could be read only against the light, or as if their message consisted of implications only and I had to look for it on the reverse, or, as in a palimpsest, in the white spaces between the characters. And yet to me, apart from the fact that I was looking for confirmations rather than denials, they could not, except for a joke, have been counterfeited; they had surely been copied from some library collection, or from the archives, as I thought then, of that Maulbronn where they were said to have been written (I later learned that it was an abbey in the Stuttgart region, between the Rhine and the Neckar). Too many elements concurred in making them appear irrefutable to me, beginning with the language, that typically literary Medieval Latin in which

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A Letter

ideas seemed constricted as in clothes that are too tight. And their tone, their innocence. There was a time when people believed that a lie was a lie and a truth a truth, and that the latter was too serious a thing to dare to falsify. In short, only a prejudice could have induced me to consider false those simple texts which were suddenly revealing to me that in the past there had been other dreamers for whom the fifth gospel was something more than a need of the imagination or a literary fiction. And here is the beginning, and only the beginning, of the most convincing of those texts. I will spare you for the moment the thirty three fragments they mention; you will come across practically all of them, in very similar versions (and this too should make us ponder), as you peruse the many other texts I am sending you. "Last October, as I was returning to Maulbronn, which I had left a month earlier to carry a letter from our abbot to Reichenau, I stopped in an old monastery of our order in the vicinity of Augsburg. And compelled to remain a few days longer, I decided to ask for some books to read, so as not to distance myself any further from my beloved studies. Among others I asked for the fourth book of St. Gregory's MaraNa, and since the librarian had some difficulty finding it, I myself approached the shelf as I talked to him. And there, by chance or God's will, a small book fell to the floor, bound in black leather, written in the most ancient characters, almost Beneventan, the capitals faded, the gilding almost completely gone. Even the introduction was illuminated, with great simplicity, with the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove descending from the firmament proclaiming these seven words: Initium Sancti Evangelii Jesu Christi Filii Dei. I thought it was the Gospel of Mark, which in fact begins thus, but when I saw and read what followed, I realized that it was different, that it did not belong to the book of the second evangelist, nor to the other three. Turning to the librarian, I told him to stop searching, the book I had in my hands would be enough for that day. I saw him hesitate, and when I asked why, he answered that he could not let me have it without the permission of the abbot. Only the two of us were in the room at that moment; fearing a denial from the abbot and seeing that the librarian was very courteous, I insisted that he let me peruse it for a few hours, promising that I would read it without attempting to copy it. Worried, but finally won over by my entreaties, he consented. And I, who thought I had found merely an apocryphal work, false like the others, realized that the book I was reading was veracious, and so rich in lofty reasoning and unusual meanings, that I would readily call it a fifth gospel, and, if I may say so, a direct manifestation of the Spirit. But since I felt that one reading was not enough, and the librarian, fearful, began to beg me not to get him into trouble, I said nothing and went to seek out the abbot, whom I knew to be a lover of rare things with which to embellish his church, and as affably as I could I offered him a very beautiful silver cross, in filigree, in exchange for letting me copy that strange book. Smiling, he said no. But he was progressively more tempted, and finally moved by my entreaties and reassured by my promise to use it prudently. I told him I

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expected new grace, not new facts, from a new Gospel. And I added, the better to convince him, that if Christ had revealed everything it would have been tantamount to abolishing our freedom; that is why he announced the coming of the Spirit, that is why he delegated to us the search for the Word. In the end he gave me permission to copy some parts that he himself would indicate to me the next day. The next day I found that he had chosen thirty passages in all, and very short ones, from among those that strayed the least from the canonical Gospels. And as I complained about their brevity, and asked how I could be expected to grasp their meaning, if from a whole Gospel he gave me only fragments, he answered that his conscience and prudence allowed him to concede only that much, and that on the other hand, if I thought it through, the canonical Gospels themselves actually resemble a collection of fragments, the meaning of which we are forever engaged in trying to establish. But since I kept insisting, he added three more passages, to make them number, as he said, as many as the years of Christ's life. And I have transcribed them here, with accompanying notes in which I have tried to convey the meaning of that Gospel." So at last I began to see the thing clearly: a priest finds out that in the past a gospel was believed to exist, quite different from the common apocryphal ones, and even, perhaps, authentic; on one hand he uses the fragments he finds as a kind of spiritual handbook, on the other he falls in love with it as with an idea beautiful in itself, to the point not only of creating a religious play around it, but even of mistaking a hypothesis for reality and of dreaming that he is really on the track of an unpublished gospel. In hindsight, it looked like a very likely situation: the story of a soul squeezed in the j aws of a raw and ungrateful age, who had tried to escape it by pursuing a myth. Fundamentally, I told myself, it was an idea for a novel. Had I been a writer, I could have tried to write it. Had I been a believer, I could have continued his work and tried to discover other proofs of the existence of that gospel, and maybe other fragments. This way instead I was left high and dry. But it is understandable: he was looking for a truth, I only for documents, at most for evidence, and what I found only resembled evidence. His faith allowed him to live on two levels: now pursuing an illusion to reinforce his certainties, now leaning on his certainties in order to believe in the illusion. I was a scholar capable only of conjectures, and everything led me to think that I had no part to play here. After all, a life is just one opportunity, and I could not waste mine getting involved with unpublished fifth gospels. At most, when I was sent home, if I wanted to, I could take home a copy of those papers and one day I would ask a journal to publish them, with a foreword and some notes; I would thus have paid my debt to my priest for the hours of escape-of peace-he had helped me spend; I would have published documents that could perhaps induce some scholar to lose himself courageously in the thick of sacred history in search of other documents inspired by the belief in an unknown gospel, or even to hope that one day or another that text would miraculously tum up. As for me, if such an idea occurred to me, it did not really

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A Letter

tempt me-it did not seem to tempt me. I felt like someone who has been handed an inheritance and is trying to pass it on to the designated heir. It was not my business, I told myself; I was not cut out for it; I did not know a thing about ancient manuscripts and apocrypha. Nor was I a man in search of goals; my entire future was already well outlined, and one does not throw a career out of the window for a conjecture. Nor did I feel that I had the quixotic disposition needed to plunge myself into such research, chasing a shadow. Besides, what for? To find, if anything, just another apocryphal work? But evidently my priest had conveyed his contagion to me. I could not stop thinking about it. In the kind of idleness I had fallen into after concluding my investigation of my priest's writings, the notebooks ceased to attract me, and the research I did not want to undertake became increasingly attractive. Of course, it was not for me, definitely. But more and more, in the freedom our imagination grants us, I indulged in a series of foolish dreams. Like having two lives, and one all for me to risk as I pleased, as in a game with no stakes, a life suspended outside of time, to be considered a simple rehearsal for the real one, in which I would find intact, awaiting me, the objectives, the duties, the obligations, the ambitions I was assigning myself now; then it would be nice, I thought, to enter the labyrinth holding the thread of Ariadne that my priest was handing me, to snatch papers from archives and words of faith from silence. Even if I did not stumble into any fifth gospel, would not reconstructing the history of that myth have been, had I succeeded, like achieving the synthesis I had conceived of a few nights before? In some moments I imagined the results of my work: a series of collected, ordered, faithfully reconstructed documents, reproduced without embellishment, and a brief, pithy, sober, final note in which I would outline my personal conclusions. I even went so far as to draft a few lines: "The fifth gospel," I wrote on one occasion, "is the hidden book that underlies the known Scriptures and forever modifies and amplifies their meaning, changing their truth into a sort of mobile goalpost. The entire history of Christianity and its philosophies, its mystical peaks, even its heresies, cannot be explained without such a presence, since this, even as simply a myth, has transformed Revelation into a perpetual event, and the problem of fidelity to the four historical Gospels

into that of their continuous realization." Another evening I wrote: "In the legend of a fifth gospel to be discovered-or invented-the double tension of the Christian is very well expressed, always in balance between the certitude that the whole truth has already been written down, offered in its plenitude, completely witnessed, and the tendency to consider the Gospels as something resembling an open book and almost a first outline of a complex of truths that await their completion from us." And now I find a third note: "In the persistence of the myth of an unpublished fifth gospel lies the basic emblem of the condition of the Christian and even the very meaning of the history of Christianity: the metaphor, I mean, of that delegating of the Word by virtue of which each generation seems to be awaiting a supplemental revelation, and not only rereads

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the Gospels differently, but, in the way in which it accepts and interprets their message, it is as if it were writing a gospel of its own." This is what is left to me of the fantasies of those nights: a few lines in which after all I aped my priest. Rereading them, I recalled the beginning of a short story of mine, the only one I ever tried to write: "When he woke up he realized he had the wrong soul." And really that project had picked the wrong soul: to attempt it, I should have had not mine but his soul, with his faith, his apprehensions, his cult of the Word, his Christian passions, not my soul, with my doubts and my unrealized impulses. Trying to knit my life into his was useless. In the meantime, however, almost without admitting it to myself, I was gaining familiarity with the topic of the apocrypha. It was the usual thing: you'd have thought that my priest had prearranged everything to tempt me and not let go of me, since his library had numberless editions of apocrypha and various works about them. Without meaning to bury myself in them-on the contrary with a thousand reservations and a thousand prudent admonitions to myself-I picked up this or that volume, mostly letting myself be led by the strips of paper my priest had left in them. But it was enough to hook me. The classic way to be hooked by a book is to find things in it that one has never thought about. And among other things I had never thought that so many pseudogospels had been written, nor that so much had been written on them. And I was not struck by the mass of studies that had flourished-is that the term?-during the last century: that's what the chairs of philology are for. I was surprised, instead, by the quality of the commentaries that had been written on the apocrypha previously, the full awareness of their fraudulence there had been since the beginning, when rejecting the apocryphal already meant opting for reality, discarding the fabulous, the nebulous, the fantastic, the miracle-ridden; the "deliramenta apocryphorum" did not fool the Christians of the early centuries at all. Thus my perspective was again modified: in times that according to my previous concepts I had always assumed were weak in critical ability, influenced only by the legendary, the sea of apocryphal assertion had indeed grown, but so too had the dikes built to contain it. The saint who considered them the creation of mere inventors of fables, the pope who defined them as a seedbed of falsehood, the monks who compiled inventories of the errors and contradictions contained in them, the bishops and patriarchs who analyzed their language to demonstrate that in them there was "no trace of the language in which the evangelic word found its form," the pious canons who were so innocently sure that something edifying was to be found in them too, were they purged "of whatever rottenness had also been spread there"-these had already done, in their own way, the work of philologists, had established criteria for accepting and rejecting, popularized the problem to the point that the humblest believer could know what to expect of them. Yet the apocrypha were circulated, read, copied. Reading them was discouraged, not made clandestine,

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not forbidden to, say, minors; the texts were neither unknown nor lost: suspected and rejected, yes, but no less tolerated for that, nor, above all, less popular, since, with the usual licence granted to artists, painters were allowed to draw inspiration from them for entire cycles, poets for their hymns, for the sweetest Sequences of the mass. The strength of the Message continued to erupt through them, as a volcano finds its outlet through its lateral cones. But it was an established belief that the main flow issued elsewhere. As you may have guessed, therefore, this solved at least one problem for me, or at any rate helped me to pose it correctly. The fifth gospel mentioned in the documents that had come into my hands might very well have been an apocryphal work; but those who spoke of it alluded to something different from the apocrypha. One does not express such trepidation over something that can be found effortlessly around the corner. One does not expect an addition to truth from a book which one knows, or can imagine at the start, all it can offer-that is, a supplement to the legend. And when the author of the document I quoted above defined the text, perhaps somewhat grandly, as "a testament of the Spirit," adding that he expected new grace from it, not new facts, not only was he rejecting the entire apocryphal tradition, he was saying, unmistakably, what kind of book he knew he had not found. Whether his conviction was in turn the reflection of a legend, the projection of an inner need, an allegory of his hope, was another problem, and an irresoluble one. His very ambiguity only added to the tangle. What did he mean, for instance, by saying that "If Christ had told us everything, it would have been tantamount to abolishing our freedom; that is why he announced the coming of the Spirit, that is why he delegated to us the search for his Word"? Was it the usual mystical expectation of the Christian, nourished first by the promise of a second coming and transferred gradually, through underground channels, to the anticipation of and the need for a gospel still unpublished? Was it the perennial questioning of the Christian, translated into a symbol, a metaphor, a myth? Was it the phrase, "When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth," that was fermenting in the idea, obscurely intuited, of a truth that becomes one only if we search for it? But seemingly he was referring to something which could be found, something certain, tangible, concrete, not abstract, actual, not potential. It was the same contradiction in which my priest was groping: on one hand he could write in his notebook that "in the search for the fifth gospel somehow an itinerary of salvation was plotted, if not the story of salvation itself'; on the other he could preserve fragments of an evangelical flavor, of obscure origin, as if they were holy relics, as if he had really nourished the hope of creating that mysterious text or, at least, of getting closer to the authentic word of Christ and even to the sources of the revealed word. As if an original Scripture had existed! As if Christ had not written only once, and in the sand! At this point, I realized, I could have said: enough! Getting further into that sort of problem meant, in the end, getting caught up in it. Still, many things kept

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it before me, prevented me from getting away from it. And first of all, the war itself. I went out, walked the dead streets of Cologne, smelled the sterile and lifeless odor of the ruins, observed stumps of trees that were struggling to bloom (I never saw a later Spring than that year), and an unmistakable, powerful sense of being extraneous descended upon me from everything hostile and deformed I saw around me; together with the need of being somewhere else, both in place and time. It was a kind of dreamy nostalgia for the reading I had been doing, the questions I was posing to myself, that strange region of anachronism I had been given by chance, where men still searched for God's words and where, among unaccustomed objects and problems, I could even forget that there had been disasters, massacres, blood rituals, a thousand horrors, a war. I could understand those poets who wrote of love under the arch of a bombed bridge or in a trench. I also understood those Christians who, while the barbarians invaded the West, spent their time discussing the unity and trinity of God. I understood, that is, why in certain ages men feel the need to read their destiny on another calendar. And I understood my priest, his love for his relics, and, in spite of all my reservation, I continued to follow him, to respond to his summons. The end of the war diverted me, saved me, at least momentarily. For months I had been left alone, ignored, almost forgotten. Immediately after the armistice they remembered me, as if I were capital held in an account that suddenly must be invested. Understandably a man is not kept in uniform to grow flowers-or read the Gospels. They began sending me around on all kinds of missions, and upon my return I was too out of phase to apply myself to my reading with the same spirit. At most I tried to put the two rooms in order, to restore them to their original appearance. In a word, I was in the process of gradually liquidating my experience, and consigning it to my past, and without great regrets. The years of war had taught me well how transient feelings are, teaching me to accept separations and farewells. Besides, travelling led me to the discovery of other shattered cities, other ruins, other sources of sadness. I was almost used to those of Cologne; even a hell can become familiar, if we have found a way to carve out a niche for ourselves in it. Now, the more I came to know the extent of the war's destruction, not only did I begin to experience a kind of delayed reaction to the extraordinary months just passed-as if I had lived through them in another existence-but I even began to ask myself, half incredulous, half ashamed, where I had been all that time, what I had done. This can be one of the ugly results of war: that those who survive may feel like deserters. Without arriving at this extreme, I was waking up to reality with an uneasy feeling: as if I had stayed on an island collecting shells, unaware that the life rafts of a shipwreck were scudding all around it. What totally detached, if not quite disenchanted me, was my visit to Maulbronn. Yet I had looked forward to it as if anticipating confirmation; I had even maneuvered to be sent on a mission to that region. Before my departure I already knew what I would find: "One of the first Cistercian institutions in

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Germany, a vast abbey complex, with its original structures, outer walls, and outbuildings intact," the guide book in my possession said. But I was not approaching that trip in the spirit of a tourist. More than a place, I must have expected a paradigm, the ideogram of a spiritual condition, a moral archetype. I was not envisioning buildings, cells, a church. At most, if my imagination wished to anchor itself in something concrete, it conjured up a writing room peopled by scribes, a convent library, manuscripts, display cases, the desk behind which, in alabaster light, the authors of the writings I had discovered at Cologne had dreamed of a fifth, unpublished gospel. Instead I found a real place, and its unpeopled silence. Of course, Maulbronn was perfect in itself. But perfect as fossil remains are, that preserve only the external imprint of the living organisms; or embalmed corpses, that remain intact only if the vital organs are removed. There were the cloisters, the church, the refectory, the kitchen; and the granary, the mill, the cellars, the cells, the white, unadorned cells where solitary monks consumed their days in converse, presumably with God. And there were also the walls of what had once been the library. But only the walls. You went from room to room with the sensation of moving inside a petrified shell, trying vainly to decipher, on the bare walls, the traces of the life that had gone on there. Only the monk who guided me was able to conjure up a shadow of it, by his intimately subdued voice, which, particularly when we went out into the cloisters or the courtyards, rose timidly, reedy, thrown off its course as if by the wind. Yet, in spite of his age (he must have been sixty), he was imposing in the way certain German monks can be-you instinctively ask yourself whether they might not have been born warriors. Involuntarily you thought of the power that discipline and an orderly way of life exerts on the character of a man, of the Christian graft that buds out as meekness and perhaps even charity. And this aroused a certain tenderness; it drew me into a subtle sort of emotion, vaguely esthetic. But that was all: my feelings stopped there. When I looked into the blue of his eyes, a blue washed out by innocence, I searched in vain for the darker depths that 1then-thought inherent in the Christian condition, in vain I looked for the apprehension of the monks who had once dreamed of new forms of the Message. On my way back I asked myself ironically what I had actually gone to look for at Maulbronn, what I had expected to find there, after all. I should have known that the abbeys had decayed, that they were by now a lifeless replica. But all the same I felt cheated of a hope. For the first time, back in Cologne, I did not touch my priest's papers. If I looked at them, I did it with the feeling of one who examines archeological exhibits from a tomb. And with sudden indifference. All the same, I must have realized that it was not all over yet. In an army like ours, a model of perfection, there was room for all kinds of bright ideas, for all sorts of improvisations. For example there could be a gathering of experts in Verona to discuss the repatriation of German prisoners, and an obscure officer

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could be flown from Cologne to Verona, one who, according to his file, was versed in the matter of relationships with the Germans. Actually, for the entire time I was there, we considered a series of inessential projects that had some potential, modified constantly by second thoughts and counterorders. As I said, we had no policy on the Germans yet, and the problem of what Germany would become after Nazism, of the rehabilitation of the Germans, and hence this question of the prisoners' repatriation remained the object of a prudently dilatory, almost academic discussion. Even the room where our discussions were held was the least suited to that kind of work. We had requisitioned one of the rooms of the municipal library, and among those shelves, heavy with old books that seemed to watch over us, our talk sounded out of place to us, as if we were inhibited by silent witnesses. To make up for it there was the unmistakable smell of libraries, which, for me at least, was full of associations and memories. And there was the tender light that, filtered through the shutters, laid greenish stripes of dustmotes on our table. Then there was Verona, with its morning freshness, the somewhat shabby sweetness of her sunsets along the Adige. After the great width, the severe vastness of the Rhine, I was discovering a domestic river that wrapped a city round. After the long exile suffered in Cologne, I could let myself go in the streets of Verona, tasting their intimacy, and enjoying their protection. Of course, here too the wounds of the war were everywhere. But there were also ample skies laid gently over the hills and on every face there seemed to be the prelude to a smile. Of the tiny director of the library, who every morning waited for us to open the door of our room (evidently he thought us out of place there, and that was his way of making us notice it), I remember now, so many years later, the smile especially: the smile and a light ripple of irony over his watchful face, in the eyes that watched over us. Between him and me a sort of understanding was established after he noticed my interest in books. Talking of books, we moved away from the others, like conspirators. And I began to like him more and more. There was a certain detachment about him, yes, even a touch of loftiness, but sweetened and softened by the ineluctable innocence of his nature. And besides, I have always loved these people of great dignity, whom you recognize by their modest reluctance to say "I." He decided to show me the rest of the library, including the storerooms and other rooms that were usually inaccessible. He was rearranging them, in those first post-war months; whole piles of volumes lay about, even on the floor, in an airy disorder that pleased and excited me. The windows were thrown open on the red-tiled roofs and the skies crisscrossed by pigeons, and in the air was the sweetness of a ripening September, the still, turquoise color of the slow days that are a prelude to autumn. I was reawakening to the enjoyment of forgotten things and wanted to start immediately to gather books and fill my file cards. And while he talked to me in a stilted, faultless English, I, eager and cheerful as I had not been for a long time, ventured, smiling, my first Italian words. It was thus that we became friends, and I went

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back to visit him. And thus one day, when he was showing me a small acephalous manuscript containing a version of St. Mark ' s Gospel in old Venetian, I allowed myself to tell him about my discoveries at Cologne. If I had intended to surprise him, I was to be disappointed. He nodded, waiting for me to finish, then asked if I could accompany him some afternoon soon. I said yes; and that same afternoon he guided me through the narrow streets of medieval Verona, into a small brown brick church and through it to its tiny, remote cloister. And there he showed me a tombstone, now set together with other stones into a wall. The epitaph, he said, of Archdeacon Pacificus. "It used to be," he added, "part of the floor of the church. Then some priest, a century ago, had it put here. It seems the idea of a dead person clutching the ankles of his visitors was too much." He was smiling; but when he realized that apart from the date-860 A.D.-I was not able, because of the characters, to make out even one syllable, he did it, line by line, and right after he wrote it down for me: Archidiaconus quiescit hic vero Pacificus sapientia preclarus et forma prefulgida. Nullus talis est inventus nostris in temporibus: quod nec ullum ad venire unquam talem credimus. Ecclesiarum fundator, renovator optimus, Zenonis, Proculi, Viti, Petri et Laurentii. Horologium nocturnum null us ante viderat: en invenit argumentum et primum fundaverat. B is centenos terque senos codices fecerat, glosam Veteris et Novi Testamenti posuit. Quintum illud Evangelium optime recensuit, Verbum nostri Salvatoris dilatavit insuper. Lugent eum sacerdotes et ministri optimi, eius morte nempe do let infinitus populus. Vestros pedes quasi tenens vosque precor cernuus, o lectores, exorare, queso, pro Pacifico. [Archdeacon Pacificus rests here, in truth, Most famous for wisdom and handsome in body. None like him can be found in our time, Nor will any, we think, come again. The founder of churches or their restorer: Saint Zeno 's, Saint Procul 's, Saint Vitus ' , Saint Peter's, Saint Lawrence' s. None before him had heard of a night clock: He invented the dial and first devised it. He authored two hundred and eighteen manuscripts, He set down the Old and New Testament glossaries.

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He established the text of the famous fifth Gospel, Expanding thereby the word of our Savior. The priests and the ministers all weep for him, The people as well are all saddened by his death. Kneeling and almost embracing your feet, I beg you, 0 readers, to pray for Pacificus.] Probably these brief, awkward verses arouse little or no feeling in you. It is natural; today I myself can read them without any emotion: I have discovered so much since then. But I have never felt such contrasting feelings at once: surprise, and joy, mixed with a kind of disappointment. One actually feels like smothering reality with laughter for being so excessively close to our hypotheses: our respect for premonitions, if it is part of our expectations, turns to mockery when it turns out to have been too well-founded. One would prefer difficulties, a laborious search, the discovery reached at the end of one's rope, after incalculable troubles. But apart from this, try to imagine what I felt, in finding myself before an actual, a tangible new proof of faith in a fifth gospel­ or a new indication of its existence-(and no longer in Cologne, through the questionable transcription of somebody else). And not only this, but in tasting for the first time in my life the unique joy of the discovery of the unpublished. And although, to be honest, no merit of mine was involved, I was very excited all the same; I had never thought that philology could tum into an adventure. Then there was the text, with its genuine flavor, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the ineptitude of the writer, with that illud, stuck in there like a pillar to assure the reader that it was a widely read, well-known book,-"the famous Fifth Gospel," one would have to translate it-which, according to the words of the author of the epitaph, had been edited, that is, corrected, that is, restored to its exact wording by comparing it with two or three other existing texts (the more I dared formulate my hypothesis the more I warmed to the task) by that honest scholar of sacred scriptures Archdeacon Pacificus seemed to have been. A man who writes this way, I told myself, does not mean to lie; he shares the mythologizing tendency of his time, to be sure, but inside he believes too deeply in the objective value of truth to become, consciously, capable of deception. And even if he were-an imposture is almost always nothing but a distorted truth. This was the opinion of my new friend also, though he was somewhat more cautious. And although the dilatavit of the second verse made him suspicious (he was right: it created the same irritating ambiguity as the Cologne text), the epitaph, in his opinion, demonstrated, if nothing else, that the myth of a fifth, unknown gospel was not only a Maulbronn phenomenon, it had appeared in other places too, and in much earlier times; and that a search as wide as possible and as scrupulous as possible would at least serve to reconstruct a climate of expectation, a disposition, a condition-the history, perhaps, of an idea or, more

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probably, of a hope. His was, of course, a prudent hypothesis, a minimal kind of project. Even so, it was enough to make me occupy the last days I had to spend in Verona in a different way. As soon as I was free from the committee meetings, I went to the upper rooms of the library, and immersed myself in the card catalog in search of a title, an indication, a reference, a suggestion. Or I would walk into the dark rooms of the collection exploring bound volumes and loose papers at random, in the hope, who knows, that the unexpected would help me and that an accidental and fortunate gesture of mine would as if by magic pull out the document, the letter, the list of papers made to order for me, the revealing manuscript, the book I was dreaming of. Of course I did not find anything. But all the same it was useful to me-if nothing else, it made me understand what not to do: going that route I could take inventory of the whole universe to no purpose. Above all, it made me familiar with the mysteries of a European library, with its illogical order, its unmapped collections, and its immemorial smell of fossils and moss, that gave me a sense of a kind of escape from time, an obliteration of the everyday. I felt as if I were engaged in an excavation, where objects thousands of years old come to light. I exhumed volumes, now mute and still, that long ago had been read, annotated, illuminated; I was moving like a geologist among petrified ideas and passions, and I saw that history was like a flowing river that deposits sediments on its banks. And somehow this pleased rather than disturbed me, overturned my mental perspectives and habits. It was almost as if I saw myself no longer on a peak looking down on the centuries, but in the valley; it made the thought of the passing of time, of the precarious nature of human life, of death itself a little less grating, less abrupt, less pressing. I also liked the lettering of the old documents very much, the gothic or italic or late carolingian script, the ornate capitals of some rich manuscript or monumental hymnal. But precisely because it was almost impossible for me to decipher them, they ceased to be mere letters of the alphabet for me, and acquired the mysterious significance of an emblem. They were the signs of mysticism, the visible flowering of impenetrable mental worlds, and contemplating them (at the time I did not know how to do anything else), I thought instinctively about the spirit of those who had written them: because they wrote to communicate something to other men, yes, but they did it as if they were in the presence of God. I thought too of the miracle of human hands, agile and ready, practiced and patient. And in the old sense of inconsequence to which those encounters inclined me, I even thought of the great innocence there is in a man, basically, in the moments when he is intent on his work. And at times, with the skeptic 's correct dose of irony, I thought of the wisdom of those who employed men in copying books to keep them from sinning. And yet I always emerged from these experiences totally defeated. Nor were the help and counsel of my friend the librarian sufficient to comfort me. Among those worlds of papers, many not even catalogued, I measured the

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immensity of the task I would be perfonning, if I really undertook to pursue my mirage. In reality I was totally ignorant, or better, whatever I did know would have been of no use to me. I knew I would have to go back to the beginning. Otherwise, totally ignorant of paleography and textual criticism as I was, and knowing almost nothing of sacred history and New Testament literature, it would have been like trying to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat. Besides, I had to learn patience, prepare myself for any setback, protect myself from the danger of working from imagination, and in any case to set out not only without knowing where I would land, but whether there would be a place to land. And the more I took stock of the difficulties of the search, the more convinced I became that a man's whole life would be needed; and, I repeated to myself, I was neither a monk nor an apostle, to turn mine into a mission. But perhaps it is true that we are made for the ports of call and the stopovers, and yet at the same time we carry a nostalgia for remote and impassable seas in our sedentary hearts. In comparison my previous work faded, seemed insipid; I realized that, if I had wanted to pursue it, I would have felt dissatisfied with myself, defrauded of something. Ironically, the more I repeated that the fifth gospel was none of my business, the more I felt I had to answer a call; the more I insisted that my choices had already been made, the less I succeeded in overcoming the feeling that I had been chosen, almost without knowing it. Leaving Verona I was prey to both confused daydreams and discouragement, deeply torn and divided. Back in Cologne I found two surprises: my repatriation orders, and the notice that my lodgings were to be taken over by somebody else; and the second came so soon after the first that it dimmed, almost extinguished its joy. The fact is, I had never given any thought to such an eventuality; at most, knowing of course that I had to leave it, I imagined the rectory restored to its old order, sealed in its silence, protected, forever intact, the way certain remains are lovingly guarded, or certain enduring values are instinctively thought of as pennanent. Suddenly I was compelled to imagine it at the mercy of god knows whom, the books dispersed, perhaps, the papers tampered with. That was just it: beyond the possessive jealousy for a place I had used so respectfully, it was those few papers that were most on my mind; for the first time I had to really reflect on the sequence of circumstances that had saved them and brought them to me, no one else but me. Without me they would probably have incurred the fate of messages mailed without the name of the addressee, of words shouted into a desert. And this, in the strange mood of those final days, laid a responsibility on me that I had rejected until then; as if it made me feel seriously like the final heir to a legacy, if not the recipient-and the executor-of a last request. I employed the time I had left in copying as much as I could, feeling like someone engaged in a rescue effort or in stowing his dearest possessions in a boat against the approach of a flood.

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A Letter

At sea, on the ship, among unknown companions, each of whom had a story to tell, one of the thousand individual experiences of which collective memories are made, I realized that I was the only one unable to talk about myself. And in fact, the only living things I was carrYing within me-two friends, one dead, one alive, and a philosophical problem-were better pondered in private. It was reserve, of course; who would understand? and for me the joy of coming home was rather more complex: on a ship of survivors still amazed they were alive, and longing only for the moment of landing, I was the only one in whom happy anticipation was mixed with a vague sense of incompletion, as if I felt I was evading a vocation. And it made me seem to myself uprooted, unnatural: a suspicious case. Of course, America's vastness and diversity were enough to make the memory of my experience fade: what relevance could there be in pursuing the fantastic ideas of a few men of faith gone for centuries, in a world that burned its memories at the end of each day, a world before which the Gospel itself appeared an inessential fable? As a colleague in whom I had confided exclaimed: "We have been moved by that old story for two thousand years !" Yet I found it hard to take up my former life, as if, instead of at home, I had landed in exile, to rot away there in idleness. And the day in which I tried to look at my old notes, it was as if I was regaining contact with the remains of myself. I told my friend in Verona something of the sort when I wrote to tell him how I was. A brief note, as if to discharge an obligation, and I was certainly not expecting an immediate answer. Instead I got an answer in less than a month. "Dear Peter," it started, "in a passage of Senio, one of our eighteenth-century polymaths, I found, a few days ago, these precise words: Like the Arabian Phoenix that rises from its ashes, like the F(fth Gospel that is said to manifest itself every time men need it, but can be read by them only when they are worthy of it, so . . . (I spare you the rest). Note, however, that Senio is not only a mediocre writer and maybe a rhetorician, what I would call a dangerous amplifier; he is also, in his way, a scrupulous author who would respect a rare piece of information as he would a rare phrase. Therefore he has indicated his source in a note: Ita memini legisse. iuvenis adhuc, in charta quadam antiquissima quae custoditur apud archivium municipii Vergati. patriae meae [This I remember reading as a young man in a very old document kept in the municipal archive of my town, Vergato] . Now, while the text is very literary, the note gives every indication of being factual; among other things it is in Latin, and one no longer lied in Latin in the eighteenth century. As you see, there' s something t o g o o n here, i f b y any chance the topic still interests you. Then too, if you are fond of recurrences, or if you are a little superstitious like me, remember that you discovered your first document in Cologne, on the Rhine [ltal. : Reno] , and Vergato is a town in the Emilian Appennines, on the bank of our Rhine [Reno] .

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I must have been waiting for something of the sort, because the news was enough to resolve all my doubts. And rather strangely, it was not so much its authenticity that inspired me, as its messianic and even soteriological aspect: that myth of a fifth gospel that reveals itself every time men need it could be, yes, mere literature; but to the extent that it established a somehow mysterious relationship with my topic, thus taking me back to my early Cologne dreams, it attracted me more, for instance, than the fact that in Vergato another document might exist, or that, searching further, I might find more such documents. I remember that in those days of by then feverish determination, when I had already resolved to change my destiny and was only in search of practical expedients to get me back to Europe, I caught myself constantly examining and questioning myself, astounded at the surfacing in me of such a propensity for the fantastic, the utopian, for symbological prospecting, for the lure of the imagination. In fact, what most impressed me, of all the circumstances that had brought me to such a grave decision, was their inner logic, their mysterious fatality, the chain of coincidences, the summons, almost, that had turned me from the cool scholar I thought I was, into the lover of legend, inclined to conjure up mystic-eschatological syntheses, new views of the history of Christianity, even to ask myself, with imperfect irony, if this were not the most apt time for the revelation of a fifth gospel, since men, although unworthy to read it, seemed to need it most; and whether I were not the one chosen-if not ordained-to bring it to light. For, I must confess, I really meant to do so. It had to exist, hidden, forgotten, somewhere; so I dreamed. In the meantime I abandoned all my other work to begin my training all over, with the awareness that what was essential would be long in coming and I would have to learn it as I went along, case by case. But this did not bother me. I was much more worried, for now, about the problem of returning to Europe. To begin with, my university showed no inclination to let me go. Secondly, I had no money, and nobody to ask for it. I had only a conjecture, a hypothesis to demonstrate, and I could not present myself as the depository of a beautiful idea and expect to be taken seriously. But perhaps it is true that every life ultimately has its own destiny, and what seems to happen by chance, day in, day out, ends up by assuming a necessity of its own. I still remember being in the university dining hall, seated before my tray, experiencing the slight revulsion one feels looking at the remains of one's own meal. Still I was lingering, torpid and listless, letting the buzz of the room wash over me. You know what happens in such situation: everything becomes indistinct. That is why I think it was strange that I became aware of a conversation that was taking place behind me: two whispering, or maybe only slightly modulated voices, which reached me, however, as if they were isolated from the rest, as if traveling on a different wave length. Thus I started listening, out of pure indolence. And thus for the first time I heard about a program later to be called V.S.LS.: teachers and intellectuals willing to live in Europe were needed, but few of the young people

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A Letter

who had just sailed home wanted to go back. The next day I was running to get information, and after a couple of years of waiting (things moved slowly) I left everything behind and boarded a ship to go in search of unpublished fifth gospels. This I actually did-and for the rest of my life. A complicated life. Looking back from a distance, in these days when death thickens around me (I say this without shuddering), I see it as a kind of perennial expatriation: everywhere without roots, everywhere in search of new expedients to remain in Europe, or, when I was there, to be able to move freely, always with the impression of not being in the right place, and worse still, of working in vain. If at the beginning I had meant to proceed methodically, exploring the field with thoroughness, to the point of exhaustion-private collections, old holdings, archives, libraries-in practice I had to realize (but alas how much later) that philology, much like the novel, is actually nothing, in the end, but an exegesis of the possible; it presupposes a goodly contribution of the imagination. I had to go after flimsy clues instead, let myself be led by the unforeseen, follow my intuition and impulses freely. But this only complicated things for me. A certain lead, for instance, would send me from France to Tuscany, while I was stuck at Montpellier, waiting for a reasonably long vacation or the summer. Another lead would demand that I stay a day or a week longer in Cortona, but my duties called me back immediately. It was terrible; an exasperating sequel of half­ discoveries and failures, and, in sum, a long checkmate. Nor did things go any better when I succeeded in getting a lectureship at some university. I had more freedom, of course, but still it was granted only grudgingly and intermittently, so my work was uneven and full of interruptions. It is not pleasant to have to find pretexts all the time. Nor is it easy, among down-to-earth people who speak in terms of production and careers, to profess oneself a pilgrim in quest of dreams, or, as a colleague once defined me, a luster after myths. I have known need, if not indigence; I have known much discouragement and solitude. For years, considering my poor haul, I thought It had all been a big mistake. I have often despaired. At times I have even despaired of the sudden, intuitive, effortless discovery. Add to this the feeling of irritation-what else can I call it?-by which I was assailed when I realized that I was accumulating one by one the pieces of a mosaic whose center-dwelt upon in conjecture, so often half­ glimpsed-was always escaping me. I could, no doubt, have rejoiced in each new discovery. I could have considered myself satisfied at the thought that I was reconstructing the history of a many-sided, complex, revelatory, even poetical tradition. And I knew that this was enough to establish the reputation of a scholar. I could also have been moved by the fact that the pieces of evidence I was gradually exhuming were beginning to fall into line according to mysterious analogies and almost to answer one another, like signals beaming from different parts of the sky. I saw, too, that my Cologne project, a history of Christianity completely rewritten from the ground up in the light of the belief in a fifth

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unpublished gospel, was much less visionary than I had thought back then. But in the meantime, the more the documentation accumulated-or perhaps because of it,-the less resigned I was to the idea that such a text, so omnipresent, underlying the whole history of Christianity, could be considered simply a symbol, or a chimera. It must exist, I kept saying, and one day or another I will find it. And thinking of the circumstances that had put me on its trail, it did not seem probable to me (I say so with modesty) that only chance had directed and spurred me on; on the contrary, I recognized something intentional, as if something or somebody had labored to make me, if not a martyr, or one of the elect, something like a disbeliever obsessed by a vocation. You may laugh at this fancy of mine; but how often, without it, I would have given up ! And besides, we owe what we become to so many things. For instance, when I was young, these words, possibly my own, that I had written in the front of a notebook-"Perhaps it is true that our paths are full of signs"-were always in my mind, together with the image of a path winding upward through the woods. For years it was my escape path, a track forgotten under an interlacing of thick branches, where the grass had grown back to erase all human footprints. For years I returned to it with the certainty that someone had just passed by there and had gone on just ahead of me. I called him the old man, and imagined him as such: an old man with a white face and hands numbed by cold, like the old folks in my family, who always had cold hands. But I knew nothing else about him. I had seen only his tracks. Or such I considered, in my childish need for a fable, the hint of a footprint or the supposition of one, a displaced branch, a disheveled tuft of grass. They could have been anything, but to me they were signs, even messages addressed to make me want to follow. Thus I kept going, from one tum to the next, sure each time that after the next tum I would ketch up with him. Instead, after the next tum, I found only more signs. But it was enough for me to go on: the essential thing was that they were there. As a game, as a kind of bet with myself, I went on until the dark compelled me to tum back. But I was not disappointed; he must be there. Tomorrow I might explore another stretch. And one day, when I had climbed high enough, or he had decided to let himself be caught up with, I would see him, leaning against a tree, or near a hut, waiting for me. It had been, I repeat, just a childhood fantasy, but its memory must have become part of the magic weave of my personality, if now it surfaced with the peremptory impact of unverifiable certitudes to sustain me in my moments of greatest discouragement. At the same time, I also came to feel, very gradually, that I was changing. Not that I was what one would call a convert. After all, who can really understand anything in this tangled question of belief? But, there you are, I was no longer a hunter of documents, I was, rather, someone on the track of a truth. Or better, by living so long with those who had searched for fifth gospels, I ended up by adopting not only their problem but their feelings, their fears, their anticipation, their naive expectation of the millennium, and,

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conceivably, their faith. For instance, the day I discovered the legend which says that when the fifth gospel is found, nothing will be able to stand between man and God any more, I remember I was startled as if I suddenly saw the idea I had absorbed in Cologne reversed (you remember the idea of history as a moving away from God, so frequent in the notebooks of my priest?), and I was finally able to conceive of our confused future and the history of the world itself in terms of hope. In short, my research, once a purely philological experience, was assuming the character of a religious one. During my research I experienced something similar to the need for God, and the ability to look at things from what I believe they call metaphysical distance. And I have known various levels and degrees of joy, and not only the joy of discovering, beyond the common landscape of the soul, the irrational-or the unmeasurable-that may lodge in man, but also the easy joy of life expended for a specific goal, and the even more immediate joy of the discovery of certain places, the old monasteries with mossy walls, the strange hermitages among the rocks of Calabria, the steep paths climbed on foot, guided by a legend, and the chance lodgings. But I will try to cut this story short. I do not want to write the romance of a philologist. Suffice it to say that from a certain point on, things went much better for me. Around 1 960, at the suggestion of a friend, I decided to publish a synthesis of the results I had achieved up to then in a specialized journal, and the publication had two unexpected results: a post to teach history of Christianity at the university I had left years earlier, and the passing of my contagion to the director of one of those formidable foundations of ours, capable, if they wish, of organizing an expedition to dig up a few fragments in Anatolia or collect madrepore near a Pacific atoll. Since then I have been freer and, above all, less alone: I was able, as soon as the academic year was over, to catch a plane for Europe and follow my inspiration without obligations or restraints; but beyond that, I began to have disciples, some terrific kids who took my courses and who, reluctant at first, as I had been myself, let themselves be dazzled by the same illusion. Gradually, I saw around me a small group of young people, not only expert in my kind of work, but ready to pick up my dream and make it their own. Now we divided the tasks, copying, interpreting, filing everything on cards. And in the summer, with the scholarships I was able to obtain for them, they too crossed the Atlantic to attempt the same adventure. We met in the fall, each one with his findings, and busied ourselves cataloguing, interpreting, discussing. Those findings in fact became the topic of our courses. Those were the best years, the most fruitful as far as results were concerned, during which I saw the brief outline I had traced filled in, and my incipient weariness-maybe it is my age, or the beginning of a sense of surfeit and loss of confidence, or the first indication of the illness that is now all too clearly manifest-found remedy and corrective in the fervor of my disciples. In fact, if I felt the first stirrings of frustration at the idea that despite my lifelong dedication, my fifth gospel, so long sought after, remained undiscovered, my faith in its existence, and the same

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eschatological and mythical inclination that had prevented me so many times from giving up, had passed from me to them. For their sake, so as not to disappoint them, I myself found enthusiasm and strength, and I saw right there before me, with a mixture of anxiety and tenderness, the recurrence of what my priest would have called the miracle of the Word: the thread that did not break, the search that continued, the inheritance I had received and had now passed on to them. It was necessary, I suppose, for me to tell you all this, before I try to explain why I am writing to you. I am sending you a selection of the material I have collected in the course of many years; it is only a small selection of what we have put together; but the rest is either less representative, or is still being worked on. On the other hand, even if I were to send you our entire archive, my documentation would still be incomplete; and not only because I am aware of lacunae, shadowy areas, mistakes, and misreadings, but because the book I was looking for is missing: my great disappointment. Every life, I know, is an unfinished project, but still I am leaving mine with a bitter feeling of incompletion. In spite of this, please read everything: they are words wrestled from silence. If nothing else, you will be able to recognize in them, if you look at them as a whole, one of the constants of the Christian soul, its continual wavering between a revealed truth and a truth that is still to manifest itself; or, if you prefer, between fidelity to the source of the revealed Word and the impulse by which every return to the sources becomes, in some strange way, a step forward, an extension of the Message. For the fifth gospel, legend or reality, has always represented the side of hope, has been the Word that renews itself, the truth in an expanding phase, the need each generation fyels to rediscover-or work out-its own gospel; as my priest used to say, it is the Spirit in search of itself. But precisely: is it possible that such a tradition, so solid and well­ documented, is based entirely on an illusion, or adumbrates only an age-old heresy? And that a text which has surfaced so often, which was discussed so often by men of good faith who had no reason to lie, is nothing in the end but a symbol, a legend, at most a prophecy that does not reveal its enigma? I keep telling myself that if I did not find it, it must be because I did not know how to search for it properly. Often one digs in vain where the dowser says, and perhaps the stream is rushing only a few feet away. But you, I believe, can help me. I know the work you have done on the texts of the Gospels, I know also of your discovery of rare manuscripts with unexpected variants, and that you have published some apocryphal fragments; I have read them. In sum, without knowing each other, we have moved on parallel roads, looking for almost the same thing. So, perhaps, reading one of the documents I am submitting to you might arouse in you the memory of a passing idea, of a doubt you might have had, of a hint that found you skeptical or

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unprepared, even of a text you glanced at and left there without paying much attention; whereas now, in the light of my discoveries, it might seem to you like the one I have hoped to find. We know what happens in our kind of work. Usually we have eyes only for what we are looking for. I myself have given up reading extremely interesting apocrypha, as soon as I judged them useless to me. Furthermore, yours is a privileged observation post: a man who governs, so to speak, the Vatican Commission for Biblical Studies, besides having at his disposal tools far superior to ours, has free access, I suppose, to libraries that have been closed to us, knows collections that have remained inaccessible to us. Besides, you are in Rome. And despite the polemics of all centuries against Rome, something in my heart tells me that if the fifth gospel exists, it cannot be anywhere but in Rome-even if forgotten, or hidden in a coffer of the type referred to, as you will see, in some of the texts of my selection. Please help me. Above all, answer me soon. You must have realized that I speak to you from the brink of the pit. Resigned, of course. To quote a famous line, I know the time has come to loosen the moorings. If something detains me, it is the hope that the message I am awaiting from you might still bring me good news. Otherwise, I will have acted like a man who walks among dunes continually believing that he discerns a pond. Only, the more I think of it, the less probable it seems that the Lord could have created such a mirage only to attract to Him one little soul. Sincerely, Peter Bergin

THE VIV ARlO MANUSCRIPT

The earliest hint of this story-a story which sent me on a journey from England all the way to Calabria, and which even now amazes me in its persistent diffusion-came to me from a letter from Oxford, the next to the last documents collected here. But the hint was so faint, that for years I paid no mind to it. It was only on looking through the letters of Florus Diaconus that-after smiling at the misreading of "pinnas " for "pineas, " at the gift of twelve pine cones sent him instead of the quills he had asked for-I had my first real jolt. Since then, discoveries have come one after another, through a curious sequence of references and from the most unlikely directions, until the picture you see outlined here took shape. Of course I am not claiming that it is complete: there must have been other instances, passing allusions, other voices, at least, asking for information about the gospel which was once at Vivario and later found its way to Bobbio. What is important is that the story has every sign of credibility: seven centuries are too long a span of time even for an illusion. But even apart from that, I cannot convince myself that it could have been just a belief Paulus Septimius Secundus, who saw the manuscript, held it in his hands, examined it, wrote about it to his teacher with so much anxiety and caution-but with as much emotion-was not just a converted pagan, with only a neophyte 's enthusiasm and nai"vete. Before humbling himself to the task of amanuensis, he had been a writer, and indeed a scholar, in fact the last scholar of late Latinity; he had studied the Neoplatonists, annotated the grammarians of previous centuries, written extensive commentaries on Seneca, an abridgment of Macrobius. Is it likely, I ask, that a man of so much experience and, after his conversion, of so much faith, could be deceived, or wish to deceive ? 1. Paulus

Septimius

Secundus,

a

monk

in

the

V ivario Monastery in Calabria, to Theodatus, a

37

38

The Vivaria Manuscript monk in the Benedictine M onastery of St. Paul in Rome (c. 600 A.D.)

You inquire as to the present state of my soul, and immediately I gauge the inadequacy of my words, that subtle imperfection whereby that which I say seems to me defective and insufficient to express that which I feel. Or perhaps I am suddenly experiencing a certain modesty with respect to words. I who in the past abused them to such an extent, as you know, I who indeed asked so much of the beauty of form, as if a word well chosen and placed, or a well-wrought phrase were enough to capture a truth, now feel rising in me a kind of internal prohibition, almost a fear of yielding to a former vice, if so much as catch myself enjoying a pleasing cadence, or seeking, as I write, a more elegant word. Thus, as you can imagine, the very act of writing has become impossible for me. And often, I confess, I find myself asking, with a certain vague disapproval, whether this too might not be a sign of my as yet unconquered presumption as an old rhetorician. I mean this reticence which ensnares, or restrains, the overflow of the heart and my by now secure apprehension of the truth. A feeling so secure, mind you, indeed so vigilant and exclusive, that I often ask myself whether it would not be possible to succeed in expressing it with just one word-but a word which would comprehend everything: affirmation and invocation, daring fervor and thirst for humility, certitude of and pride in having attained truth and anxious, humble supplication that I may be allowed to persevere in it. A word, that is, capable of expressing, by itself, gathered into one sound, and free of any ambiguity or subtle allusions, the constancy of a faith that "brooks no change nor the slightest wavering"; and this kind of plenitude that grips and exalts me at the thought of being wholly of Christ and for Christ; and the fact that he is everything, and I am nothing; and my joy in professing that I am his, and my humility in speaking his name. A word, that is, that may seem born of silence, yet is capable, like silence, of reverberating in endless echoes. But this too, you would most likely say, is an old rhetorician's presumption, my still unvanquished faith in words, the hope that they might succeed in expressing the inexpressible. And you would be right; I too detect in it a sign of imperfection. Yet, allow me to proceed, if only for a short while. You must remember what I was like at the time of our first encounters, when you began to work toward my conversion. Lost for so many years in the books of the pagans, in love with their philosophers, I admired their language and was proud to imitate it, pursuing with pleasure the verbal irresolution, as it were, in which I thought the essence of their style consisted. You do remember the way I wrote then: multiplying, subdividing, reiterating ideas, gathering a thousand meanings around the one I wished to express, not satisfied with an idea unless I succeeded in complicating it, nor with a truth until I succeeded in suggesting it vaguely. Now I understand my mistake: that was not the truth. It made no difference, in fact, whether I

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stated that one or another. That is why I would now like to have at my disposal a term capable of expressing everything, indeed a single sound that would succeed in expressing the whole. You will have guessed it: the Word. Which was there, and I found it. Astonished that the achievement was so easy, after all; regretful, looking back at the entire course of my life, that I had lost so many years before I succeeded in discovering it. Were you to come here, you would see it written everywhere, on the walls of my cell and wherever my eyes rest daily, and you would hear how often I repeat it aloud. At this point I feel that I have already answered your question. I am happy, if that is what you would like to know. I live like one who experiences truth after having experienced the thousand enslavements of the soul, and I understand better and better what you told me once, that he who surrenders himself conquers himself and he who does not value his life gains Life. And if I then compare the anxieties of my former worldly condition to my present serenity, harsh, to be sure, but impregnable, my former doubts to this sort of boldness that makes me certain of what I believe in and believe in what is certain, I ask myself what foolishness and weakness and obfuscation and poverty and blindness of my intellect made me persist for so long in a condition different from the one I enjoy at present. Mind you, this causes me more amazement than grief. In fact, I have learned to endure remorse as well. This is indeed the wonder of enjoying God's grace: that aspiring to perfection is already a beginning of perfection. And for myself I have learned not only to master, but to redirect my affections. Detached from the world, I no longer detest it. It would be sad if regret for what one has been were to obscure the joy of not being so any more. This is only one of the advantages of the kind of life we lead here, where all that is not necessary is lacking, but what we really need is provided abundantly. The very way in which our time and our tasks are divided, according to the wisdom of a Rule that unites the advantages of a hermitage with those of a monastery, fosters our serenity a great deal. There is time to pray, to meditate, to work, and in the hours we are allowed to rest, our life flows along its pebbled bed and pools in shoals of rushes. I am not saying that it is easy, of course: that would be foolish. It would be contrary, after all, to the merit we strive to earn, if our trials were to cost us no effort, if we were not constrained to counter the impulses of nature that continues (why should we deny it?) to lure, to tempt us. Fortunately I am not alone, I do not live by my own whims, and every brother has something to teach me: from one I learn patience, from another humility; one can teach me how to pray, the other renunciation, or the virtue of silence. And the example we set each other, joined with the firmness of a paternal authority able to demand from each what is most suitable to each, lead to this sense of harsh docility, this kind of joyful discipline of the spirit which makes the most difficult act of obedience

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seem like freedom. I let myself be guided; I take pleasure in not asserting my will, and in willing not to assert my will. Here is proof, of the most persuasive kind. Because of my studies and my expertise regarding books, I am assigned, as you know, to copying the texts of the Holy Scriptures. But you also know that, if there was one thing I used to detest, it was precisely the task of copying. I found it too humble, manual, menial. Such in fact were my impatience and the rapidity of my thought, and so sluggish in comparison did my hand seem, that I disdained not only copying my own things, but even writing them: I used to dictate, rather, growing irritated not only if the pen of my secretaries ran too slowly, but even if the slowness of words-the time it takes to pronounce words-hindered the rush of my thoughts. Most of the time I did not even care to read the text over, as if I were pursuing truths in perpetual flight, truths changing even as I intuited them, or as if what moved me was merely the pride of running ahead of myself, and the new ideas demanding expression made those just expressed seem already faded. You can gauge the quality of my conversion and the difference between the man I was and the new man within me from the fact that what before seemed humble now exalts me. My present pride, if I must call it that, is that I have done such an excellent violence to my nature, that I have become the most patient and careful of copyists. I who once considered writing with my own hands a servile task, now take pleasure in compelling my hands to serve. I who once marshalled and impatiently altered words as if to force them to express truths not yet spoken, take pleasure in patiently copying the only words of the only truth. I who abhorred repeating myself, take pleasure in repeating assiduously, and rejoice in my meticulous scruples as a faithful copyist, careful not to betray the text, not to change a single syllable. Poverty I consider my richness: to say nothing, to add nothing of my own is all I desire. While before, the perpetual restlessness of my spirit sent me scurrying from author to author and from book to book, curious and dissatisfied, like one ever eager for new loves, now dedicating myself solely to the daily reading of the Gospels gives me the same sense of fulfillment that I get from singing the same prayer every day and celebrating only the name of the Lord every moment. And here I would have made an end, were it not that I in tum have a question for you. You know that the intent of the venerable Cassiodorus in establishing this monastery of ours was to found, far from the wars and the evils of our dissipated age, a community wholly dedicated to the preservation and transmission of the revealed word in its utmost purity. Hence our main activity, as copyists of Scriptures; hence also the authorization given us to consult the old manuscripts of our library when those more recent, which we normally use, do not seem wholly plausible or correct. I must say that we exercise this authority rarely and wisely. Cassiodorus himself did it so carefully, that very little has been left to our doubts-and to our own decisions. So very rarely do we feel the need to pass from the manuscript he had prepared to the more difficult and less

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readable ones h e used for collation. Even I , who at first had gone inquisitively from one cabinet to the other, lured or seduced (as you can imagine) by my love for books, especially ancient ones, even I had ceased to do so. Yet, there you are, some time ago something happened that I think is worth mentioning to you. I was transcribing from the Gospel of St. John the verse where it is said that not Jesus personally but his disciples were baptizing. You know how certain phrases take us by surprise. And since I did not remember having ever read it in the other Gospels, I was lingering over it, deep in thought, my copying halted, when I thought I detected the traces of an abrasion, as if some words had been erased. This, although infrequent, is a normal occurrence: a copyist can be distracted and make an error. However, the erasure of a number of words is less normal. Could it be that two different versions existed, and that Cassiodorus, while dictating (he used to dictate while comparing various manuscripts), had first chosen one version and then changed his mind? And if so, what did the rejected version say? And was its meaning and intent more explicit? Why would not Christ himself baptize? Did not John the Baptist state that He would do it? And was Cassiodorus' final choice the wisest? When we write, we write on sand, one word is worth the same as another; but in a book where everything is directed to one aim, is it right to put one ' s trust in what is merely a conjecture, allowing what perhaps should be preserved to be lost? You see that if this were daring, I had already gone far in my daring. Divided thus between my oid vice of doubting and the new virtue of trusting and accepting, for that day I put an end to my distraction and went back to my work with greater determination. But the very next day I was again troubled. I remembered that Cassiodorus himself had advised us not to limit ourselves to one text alone, because what turns out to be dubious or altered in one place may be found elsewhere in a less obscure form; I remembered, besides, having heard him confess that he too had had, in collating the Scriptures, his indecisions, and sometimes his daring decisions. In short, I had grown curious, humanly curious, not j ust to check the verse I mentioned, but to become more familiar with the criteria of Cassiodorus, and with his daring decisions. Needless to say, in the beginning I could discover nothing. I hurried from one of our old manuscripts to the other, but wherever I looked, there was no doubt: the verse was as I had read it originally. I rummaged around, coming away with my hands covered with dust and deriding myself and my talent for discovery. Then one day, in the lower part of a cabinet, two doors hid a drawer that nobody bothered to open any more. We knew that our teacher had used it, but since his writings are now on display elsewhere, we thought it would be empty, or contain notes of no value. And that is how it was, mostly: fragments, brief notes, the crumbs, that is, of that highly creative mind. But note: under all this I discovered something which I definitely did not expect, and which has kept me in a state of anxiety and perplexity all this time. It was a small book which, while it looked very old, was otherwise different from the many we have

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here. At fIrst glance, I must confess, I did not think it interesting, and knowing Cassiodorus' love for books and his eagerness to catalogue and arrange them properly, I thought it must be a duplicate of little value. Besides, it was written in Greek, and I was looking for something else. So I would have left it there without even examining it, if a small sheet of paper barely sticking out of the cover had not fIrst attracted my attention and then made me uneasy. Written in Latin in Cassiodorus' own handwriting, with which I am very familiar, its character were much clearer than those of the other notes, as if it had been written for a precise purpose. You will not believe what I read: "A Greek monk," it began, "who came years ago from Ephesus to live with us, and whom we loved very much, made me a gift of this manuscript when he died. It contains, if we are to believe his words, the text of a Gospel that John wrote before he had the vision he describes in the Apocalypse. In his later years he used it to compose the Gospel we know, though omitting many things which did not suit his intention of impressing a more sublime meaning on his subject matter. Too often I have heard," Cassiodorus goes on, "of books not written under divine inspiration which, on the pretext of relating unknown facts and saying of Jesus, do nothing but spread absurdities and vain fables. In this case, however, I do not know whether I should yield to an imprudent impulse or maintain my usual prudence. From the little I have been able to read, old and tired as I am, I would hesitate to condemn this book as false, although I doubt very much that it could be John's, whose fervid and unyielding style is rarely detectable here." At this point, I suppose, you are imagining me totally immersed in the reading of a work that has come into my hands in such an unpredictable manner, and aroused my passion for unpublished things. You will be surprised to hear that it is not so. I have already mentioned, I believe, that it is written in Greek, in a kind of cursive that I have never seen before, and can be deciphered only with great difficulty. But this has surely not been the reason, as you can well imagine, that has kept me from examining it. Who would be held back by such diffIculties, in view of so great and unexpected a reward as that of learning new and unknown things about the life of our Savior? What made me hesitate, and even discouraged me from communicating my discovery to my own brethren, was what the venerable Cassiodorus says in the rest of the note I have mentioned. Allow me to quote it in its entirety for I would like you, in your great wisdom, to judge of it as well. "If I were strong enough," Cassiodorus goes on, "if I were less infIrm and my vision not fading, I would like to dedicate the short time that is left to me solely to the study of this manuscript, which in many ways reveals a sense of truth and at times, if I am not mistaken, divine inspiration. And would that in the end I might-whoever its author may be-recognize in it a fIfth gospel; would that it were granted to my poor understanding to recognize it as truly dictated by the Spirit. Instead, in the impotence to which my age confInes me, I remain

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greatly perplexed and, I cannot deny it, alarmed. One thing that is typical of the four Gospels we recognize as authentic is that they complete without contradicting each other, and this fifth one is no exception. But at the same time it contains daring, even excessively daring things, a clear and human, even excessively human voice-truths, I say, not at all unworthy of our Savior, but which might become dangerous if wrongly interpreted. And I ask myself whether as far as daring goes, what we find in our reading of the other Gospels is not sufficient already. Have we not always found there what our faith requires? Besides, we are just emerging from so many battles, from so much discord, evilly fomented by incautious readings of one Gospel or another, or of a passage in a Gospel, and do we wish, by introducing new stimuli to arbitrary judgments, to incautiously disturb a truth by now established? Uncertain, therefore, as to whether I should destroy this manuscript or bring it to light, I entrust it to the hands of divine Providence, praying that it do, in the wisdom of its judgment, what I feel inadequate to do in the poverty of mine." Now I think you can better understand the reason for my reluctance, and why the man whom you knew as such an eager reader is almost overcome with fear at the idea of having to decide such a weighty matter. I remember Cassiodorus in the last years of his life: true he got around with difficulty, and his voice was tremulous, but his mind was still very fertile and his memory very vivid! I, fresh from the world, inconspicuous among the novices, in awe compared my erudition with his, admiring without envy-but yes, with some humility-his knowledge of the sacred texts. He had not only read them, he had studied them exhaustively; and to his way of resolving certain doubts, of deciding which variant was the most probable, he brought the correct balance between restraint and freedom that is born only of persistent study and long familiarity. And if he, in spite of his vast experience, did not dare confront the problem posed by a text like this, what shall I do in my inexperience? It is the question I put to you, desirous of your advice. Chance has burdened me (but do we still believe in chance?) with too great a charge, and I have been asking myself somewhat incredulously whether I am really the man Providence has chosen (laugh, do, you have good reason) to decide what to do; or whether I should imitate my teacher Cassiodorus and avoid making any decision. My scruples would dissuade me from the entire undertaking; my courage would urge it upon me. For instance: if this fifth is not different in substance from the other four, why should we not remain content with the others? And if it were to contradict them, why should we allow it to come and disturb our truth? And was it not by providential design that the Christian faith, in spite of so many adversities, has advanced so far and replaced the old errors, without this alleged and never­ before-seen fifth gospel? In sum, I ask myself whether, having found what is necessary for the true faith in the four Gospels we call canonical, it is right for

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us to behave as if that faith were incomplete and to go in search of new confirmations-or new incentives for our doubts. But on the other hand, if a truth is truthful does it not benefit from all testimonies, even though some might be discordant? If it was, as we must believe, the will of God himself that the message of our Savior be entrusted to four distinct voices supporting and strengthening each other, why would we hesitate to make use of a fifth one, if divine inspiration were clearly felt there? And further, since the Holy Scriptures have often veiled and obscured their meanings, as if they feared to dazzle with excessive light, why should we not hope to discover in other texts something which might help us penetrate and better understand them? Is it not peculiar to our truth that the more we appreciate it, the more we wish it to be intelligible, that the more it captures our soul, the more we wish it to be accessible to our mind? Furthermore, you know that our failures regarding the Gospels are always failures of ignorance; that in order to claim that we have read them we must have reread them; that even at the tenth reading we keep finding new things. Something similar happened to me not long ago, when, rereading the Gospel of John from beginning to end (you must have understood why: I wanted to prepare myself for the examination of the book I am speaking of), I noticed many things that had escaped me before: among other things, the passage at the end of the epilogue, in which our fourth Evangelist hints at the thousand things Jesus did that are not reported in his Gospel. I must confess that, though I knew it, I had never paid particular attention to that passage. Now, instead, because it came at the end of a careful and troubled rereading, during which I was amazed to discover in John a mode of narrating so different from that of the other Evangelists, suddenly it made me ask myself instinctively: what if what he wanted us to understand was not that he had renounced telling us many things he could have, but that he did it because he had already narrated them in a previous Gospel? You might see this as too audacious, excessive, I know. But all the same, have you ever noticed that in John Jesus speaks at greater length, and more sublimely, than in the other Gospels? While his actions, on the contrary, are narrated with the utmost succintness. Why should we then not consider the version we have a more condensed one, more intent on synthesis, more sublime, probably, but less rich in facts than a previous work which was never widely known? That John, in short, might have done what one does when one rewrites a book entirely: in one place he cuts and condenses, in another arranges or develops his material differently, in another presumes that his readers are already familiar with certain events, in another tries to confer harmony and proportion on what had been more loosely composed earlier. To make a clean breast of it: rereading John I was reminded that as a young man I read a book, one of the many we have rejected as heretical, in which not only the belief of the presence of Jesus in the consecrated host was derided, but the Gospels and what they state about the Eucharist-would you believe it?-

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were called into question. It stated, I remember, that they disagree not only on the meaning of the words used by Jesus, but even in the way they report them. It said that what the first three Evangelists write is not enough to give the rite of the bread the value of a sacrament. It also said that since John does not mention it, either John must not be deemed truthful, or the rite of the bread must be deemed secondary and the sacrament of no importance. And this much is true: in the last supper, as it is narrated by John, there is no institution of the Eucharist. Now (you will pardon me if I told you otherwise a while ago), my curiosity was too strong, so I opened the manuscript I told you of, looking for the last supper. Well, it is similar to that in the Gospel of John, with the washing of the feet that is not in the others, and the rejection of Judas, which the others relate differently. Here, however, soon after Judas' departure and a short discourse by Jesus which I had never come upon before, the rite of the bread and wine and the words of the Eucharist follow: as if only then, after the son of perdition had departed, did the Son of God feel up to sharing with us the sacrament that sanctifies us. You see now if my perplexity is justified; and how, while many things are urging me towards the decision not to act, more numerous are those that seem to incite me to act. Answer me then, I beg you, and soon; on your answer depends whether the little book remains where chance led me to it, or whether I will dedicate the remainder of my life to the work to which Providence will have called me. Of course, I can already see the irony in your smile at my putting you, so to speak, in the place of divine Providence. Nevertheless, forget your modesty and come quickly to the aid of mine. An agnostic as I was until yesterday, I came from a culture where opinions took the place of certitudes, where a penchant for probabilities and hypotheses, a passion for contradiction, a relish for doubt were favored. And whoever has known doubt lives in fear of a new doubt, of advancing on unexplored ground without the comfort of a friendly and authoritative voice to reassure him. 2. Petronax, restorer and abbot of Montecassino, to Hi lari us, abbot of the Benedictine Monastery of St.

Paul, in

Rome (about 7 1 7 A.D.

When

Montecassino was destroyed, around 585, the community had moved to Rome).

As Paul says, "Open your hearts unto us," so did your envoy say, through whom we were "in every thing enriched, in all utterance and in all knowledge." And how else might we salute the return to us of the manuscript of our holy Rule, how else salute the arrival, in this blessed place where for so many years only the harsh wilderness dwelled, of the volumes containing the Holy Scriptures,

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and of the many other books of which you deprived yourselves, so that we might restock our library? For one hundred and thirty years we have lived as if in exile, though in that Rome of yours which protected us so well; now we have not only returned to our Jerusalem, if I may call it so, to rebuild our temple, but we also have with us again the tablets of our obedience and all that makes this repossession of the site of our origins seem the fulfillment of a divine plan. I cannot tell you what a great celebration there was, nor how many consolations added savor to our joy. The Duke of the Langobards himself, the descendant of those who barbarously destroyed our monastery, was not only present but a participant in our joyous celebration. While we carried your gifts up the mountain in procession through flowering paths of yellow broom, he and his men followed us with heads bowed, wearing no finery, and not even the weapons they always carry, as if better to proclaim their conversion. At the end we baptized them according to our rite. Divine Grace could not have offered us a better omen. And to this one you may add a thousand other signs of his grace, beginning with the flocking in of the nearby population and the great increase in vocations. So that I do not know whether, in a moment in which all is joyful and everything around us has the flavor of a rebirth "to new life and more perfect devotion," I should also number among such signs a strange, unexpected discovery, of which, I confess, I now hesitate to speak to you. I am well aware of your rational nature and I am very much afraid that on reading this you will judge me a man too prone to dreams. It is probably true: for days I have been living in a kind of exalted state, seeing things we did not dream we could dream of again suddenly happen, and happen all at once. So should this not be seen as another proof that nothing happens by chance, that everything is driven by a will-or a plan? We were busy arranging the books you presented us with, and were working eagerly, desirous to see them in their places, but not so intent as not to open a page now and then, now happy to recognize the fresh words of the Scriptures, food we have been deprived of for so long, now surprised by one of those maxims, frequent in the Scriptures, that say more than they say, and are always opening up to new meanings. I tell you of one here, because it does not seem to me mere chance that we were commenting on it at the very moment that one of our brothers, deeply moved, came up to us to announce his discovery. It is from St. Paul: "Behold I lay in Sion a stumbling stone and rock of offense: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed." As I said, we were reflecting on it, rather frightened, as if we had been shaken by some obscure and forgotten warning, when a brother named John, whom I had assigned to arrange the old papers of our Order-which you sent us in a jumbled heap covered by the dust they had gathered during those long years-ran up to show us a letter which I have had copied for you so that you may examine it carefully. It was written by a disciple of that very Cassiodorus who lived, if I am not mistaken, at the time of our founder, and it is addressed to one of our brothers named Theodatus, in

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Rome. And since, if I remember correctly, a monk bearing that name is listed among the forty monks sent to Britain, about a century ago, by the blessed Pope Gregory to convert the Angles to our faith, all circumstances seem to point to him as the one. I wonder whether he received it before leaving, and if he ever answered; and why such an extraordinary letter ended up among documents of such a different nature, and lay there ignored and forgotten. These questions I now direct to you. Perhaps there, in our Roman monastery, you may find a trace of the answer that was sent, or some indication by which we may learn the fate of the manuscript mentioned in the letter I am sending you. And who can say that some trace, if not a copy of this alleged gospel of John, perhaps sent to Rome at the request of Theodatus, may not lie hidden or neglected in your library. Furthermore, have we had any news of the monks of Cassiodorus lately? Does their Order still flourish, or has it died out? In the latter case, where do you think their papers have ended up? And particularly this fifth gospel, the thought of which has kept me in a state of agitation for days? I know, I know, and I keep repeating it to myself: we live outside the world, but the world lives in us. And among the many temptations which attract and lure us on there is this intellectual curiosity, this kind of worldly attraction to knowledge, and the need to offer new stimuli to our thirst for knowledge. But are not these also the call of the Spirit? And, above all, at a time when everything speaks to us of rebirth, if I may believe in the sweetness of the days we just passed, and in the fervor with which the people of the region, dejected, discouraged, dispersed till now, gather round this restored monastery, shall we reject the opportunity that perhaps is offered us here, to know more of the acts and the words of Jesus and be further renewed by his nearness? Such is in fact one of the gifts of the divine word, that the more we have, the more we desire: in the same way that the more one feels he has attained truth, the more he seeks opportunities to confirm that truth for himself. And not because it seems to us improbable or imperfect, but because it becomes more beautiful the more deeply one delves into it. Thus renewed in hope, we might also gain new courage, and regard the hesitation of Cassiodorus' monk with different eyes. He probably became afraid, afraid of doubt, and acted like one who on his path, safe and even until then, found a stumbling stone, a rock of offense. But there you are, the verse we were reading when the discovery of his letter was announced to us comes to mind again, and now I ask you, as well as myself, whether it was not a signal, a secret invitation, a guarantee that somehow, with the help of divine grace and the support of faith firmly held, we may dare more than he did, without the fear of being left in confusion. Of course I recognize the dangers. But are we to act like those who, whenever they glimpse a sign, eagerly search it out, or like those who, when they encountered the Messiah, were unable to recognize him?

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Hilarius, abbot of St. Paul, i n Rome, t o Petronax of Montecassino (Same date as above).

I am sending you, as an additional endowment to your library, a copy of the twenty books of Etymologies by St. Isidorus, in the order established by his friend St. Braulius: not sufficiently free of errors, to tell the truth (haste prevented me from correcting the mistakes), but as such it should satisfy both your love of knowledge, and your hunger for philological exercises, if you would like to try to correct them while you copy them. I am also sending you the three books of St. Gregory's Homilies, as proof of how much progress one can make in one's faith with the help of only the canonical Gospels. Finally I am sending you the five books of Sayings into which Thaio, the blessed Spanish bishop, poured his wisdom. Reading him just lately, I was impressed by one of his sayings in particular: the one about the wild ass who neglects the green and well watered places in favor of fallow ground! I remember this other saying as well, as proof of how useful reading his book may be: the child who ingests more food than his mother puts in front of him gets sick. Both, I must confess, make me think of you, and, to be frank, of the Vivario monk as well; I have admired above all the prudence which kept him from undertaking such adventurous reading without the support of another and more experienced authority. I have, of course, found here no trace of an answer by Theodatus to that letter, much less of the volume mentioned therein. Were I not afraid of completely destroying your holy enthusiasm, I would say that this whole story resembles a fable. In any case, why search? and where? The Vivario Monastery, as far as we know, was abandoned not long after the death of its founder. The books that were there are said to have been transferred to the Bobbio monastery of St. Columba, who went to Vivario as a pilgrim. It is possible therefore that this alleged first gospel of John went with the other books. However, had it deserved to exist and be widely known, divine wisdom would have provided for it by now. Do you not think, instead, that divine wisdom may have preferred that it remain either where it was, or nowhere at all? 4. Martin o f Wells, Archbishop o f Canterbury, to Theodorus of Rossano, Bishop of Stilo (9th century).

The letter you will find copied below this was written many, many years ago by the venerable Theodatus, one of the forty saintly monks who followed the

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blessed Augustine of Rome, when he was sent by Pope Gregory to convert us. The courier who was charged to take it to Italy died during the trip in the vicinity of Dijon, in a Benedictine monastery where he had sought shelter; it remained there, unknown, it seems, until some time ago when the abbot of that monastery, in the course of moving his archives in order to enlarge the refectory, found it by chance and sent it back here. It is addressed, as you will see, to a monastery in Vivario, and it speaks of the text of an unknown gospel which supposedly existed in that library. The tenor of the letter has greatly excited my curiosity and makes me eager to know more about it; however, the way in which it first was lost and then came back here may appear ordained by Providence one way or another: that is, either it was not supposed to reach its destination or it is now to resume its interrupted journey. It is a doubt I do not wish to resolve, although I am convinced both of the wisdom of the person who wrote it, and of the goodness of the impulse that made him ask to see a copy of that gospel. I am now sharing my doubts with you, confiding myself wholly to your judgment. The close resemblance between us Christians, as clerics, as bishops, should make us both trust the signs and deal with them prudently, both yield to our enthusiasm and know how to check it, in a like manner. I have been told that the Vivario community died out long ago. I was also told that your Stilo is not far from that locality. It would not be surprising, then, if the books that had been gathered there, and even the gospel given Cassiodorus as a gift, were brought to Stilo to preserve them. I would therefore beg you to search for it, without being shocked by my curiosity and without considering it either frivolous or excessive. It is not proper to try to know what is right, at least until it is revealed to be wrong? And is a truth that has remained hidden by that very fact less truthful, or is it perhaps just waiting for the right time to manifest itself? And, at the risk of appearing bent on justifying myself, does our scrupulous fidelity to the transmitted Word usually produce an excessive vigilance that leads us more often to passivity than activity? And, worse, does our conviction that we know it as well as needs be keep us from meditating upon it and even, in many cases, lead us to ignore it? Some time ago, during one of my pastoral trips, I sought refuge for a night

in a small monastery surrounded by an extensive forest. It was almost dark when we reached it, journeying down a narrow path and over short wooden bridges that swayed over brooks, hearing no voice but that of the wind through the trees. In short, I could not imagine a more isolated place. Yet even there the false philosophers had made disciples. The few monks who live there certainly lead a pious life, with much prayer and penance, much singing of hymns in the choir, a few edifying books to nourish their spirit. But would you believe, not a single copy of the Gospels. To hear them talk about Jesus, you would think that he never lived in any place-or time. But they engage in abstract and fearful talk of God and his mysteries: of Him, they claim, one can say only what he is not. That is, regarding a God who became man and came to live and work among us, they

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have developed a kind of philosophy of absence, so that, they maintain, he knows Him best who gives up all pretensions to know him and adopts ignorance as a principle of wisdom. And they mistake all of this for the imitation of Christ. But Christ was not like that at all. I formed two resolutions from this experience immediately: not only did I start a school of copyists who would from now on practice St. Paul's precept, "0 Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust," but I myself have begun to reread the New Testament. I cannot begin to tell you of the flow of new ideas in me, nor the extraordinary plenitude of feeling that has grown within me. Of course, it is not that I did not know the Word before; only I realized that I had ceased to know it. All too aware of its infinite distance, I had forgotten its ' infinite nearness. Accustomed since my early years at school to conceive of it as a source of ineffable mysteries, I discovered in it, to my surprise, a wholly intelligible truth. Resigned until now to believe in a kind of inviolable seclusion of God, suddenly I find in the Scriptures a world hospitable and accessible to reason, and in some measure practicable. Above all, convinced as I was that the Word had already been proclaimed in its entirety, I had not realized that the more one delves into it, the more it speaks to us, the more it reveals itself, the more it goes on revealing itself, so that it satisfies indefinitely both our satiety and our hunger. You will have understood by now the reason for this long discourse of mine. Often, lately, I have compared the Gospels with one another. And while admiring the way they integrate, respond to, authenticate, each other, but also noting certain silences our piety can hardly accept, I have asked myself: "Have they really passed everything on to us? How many other things may Jesus have said, which, were we given the good fortune to come to know, were they manifested to us, would make his Word still more familiar, or at least nearer to us?" Now if we could hope to trace even just one phrase of Jesus, omitted or forgotten by the other Evangelists, in the gospel of the Greek monk preserved in Vivario, should we behave like the farmer who in order not to disturb his field refrains from seeking the treasure hidden therein, or like the one who turns his field upside down with all the energy he has?

5. Theodorus of Rossano, Bishop of Stilo, t o Martin of

Wells,

Archbishop

of

Canterbury

(9th

century).

I did not think that Stilo could be known at so great a distance, nor that letters-and what letters!-could arrive here from so great a distance; I might even find it barely credible, were it not for the thought of the unity of our faith,

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which makes us all leaves of the same tree and allows us to correspond without ever having seen each other, you of Angle or Saxon, we of Italian, birth. Similarly, I might find barely credible the vicissitudes of a letter written and sent almost three hundred years ago, and arriving finally in these remote places to arouse, if not agitate my spirit. I am aware that you will find it difficult to understand my emotions: besieged by the Saracens who destroy our houses and churches and devastate the coast of a once Christian sea, it is as if we felt our hopes wavering, and far from living in anticipation of a new beginning, a new advent, we were experiencing the imminence of an end. Do you know what Stilo is? Only one rock standing upon another, under a relentless sun that darts its flames straight down and infuses our days with a sense of the ineluctable. Every morning our eyes search the sea to ascertain that it is not crowded with Saracen ships; every evening we marvel that we are still alive. Do not be surprised then if the letters you sent me have moved me so much. Reading them made me reflect that we come from afar and we are destined for far distances. Are not these voices that answer each other from century to century as if they were alive, without changing inflection, a confirmation that we endure? Of course, there is cause for perplexity all the same: too many times, we know, wolves in saintly clothing have attempted to confound the gospel. And they are more numerous among us here, where the immensity of the forest attracts the solitary and multiplies the visionaries; where signs of false or misguided piety abound; where as soon as someone withdraws to a cave to live outside society and fast, if he does not immediately pose as a mystic or a prophet, he becomes at least a bearer of a message in which you cannot decide whether candor or imposture or ignorance of divine Scriptures is most prevalent. I suspect that this region must be full of Greek monks and alleged new gospels. And I cannot tell you how often I myself must rise to the defense of those borders beyond which our doctrine would risk crumbling into the arbitrary and the fabulous. In our case, however, I have not given free rein to my suspicions, except to make myself exercise all due caution in my inquiry: for even the almost excessive marvel of the story of a letter lost, forgotten for three centuries and unexpectedly found, may be a sign that nothing that is good is wholly lost. I read and reread it avidly, I confess, amazed at my ignorance of even the name of Vivario and knowing nothing of the monks who lived there. You must not be surprised: the miseries we have undergone since the Saracens began to devastate our coast have altered these places and scattered many remains. We ourselves who lived within sight of the sea, took refuge inland fifty years ago, amid chasms and impenetrable forests, taking only a few things with us. And of the books we have saved, none resembles the one you seek. Of course, I did not stop there; I had inquiries made at churches and monasteries, and I went myself as far as it was possible. I found other things, of course, memoirs and books by hermits, the life stories of anchorites filled to excess with miracles, hymnals, missals in large characters, some of them illuminated, gospel texts in Greek

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which made my heart leap at first, only to leave me disappointed when I read them. I have had good fortune in only one thing: I was able to find out where Vivario was, or, more precisely, is thought to have been, and I went one morning in the company of a young cleric along poorly marked, long untrodden paths. I was excited, I admit: one may be old, yet feel a sort of spiritual youth at the thought of yielding to the sway of the Spirit. One may be convinced he knows enough, yet discovers in himself the fresh joy of longing to know more. Besides, the journey was beautiful, almost always within sight of a blazing sea, sometimes along beaches shining in the sun, at times lost among olive groves: a surprise for me, recognizing from place to place images not seen since childhood, feeling that I was in truth moving toward a discovery which no longer involved my curiosity alone, but my entire soul. I tell you all this that you may understand my disappointment. Of Vivario only crumbling walls remain, a few cells without roofs, and, lower down, a few graves on a thorny slope within sight of an empty sea. I do not know whether it was all due to natural neglect or the cruelty of the invaders. But if I ever wanted to show you a place that is living proof of how all that is human decays, that is where I would bring you, to that deserted silence. I searched all the same, pushing aside stones and brambles. Forcing my way among the thorns that have invaded what once were arches and doorways, I was able to recognize the places where once the altar and probably the library stood. But not a trace of books; and nothing to indicate whether they had been burned or otherwise destroyed, carried off or rescued. Were it not for a stone lectern I glimpsed, lying on the ground, the primary activity of the monastery would have seemed legendary to me. P.S. I forgot to mention a local belief and custom. They say in these parts that every hundred years a monk comes from the East, bringing a book and some fish. And it is the custom of a town not far from here, located half-way between here and Vivario, to decorate a little boat with flowers and rich drapery, every year, in the spring, so simulate his landing. Behind the man who plays the monk a procession forms which climbs a path to an ancient church very dear to the fishermen and dedicated to St. Andrew, Christ's disciple, who, as the legend goes, was sent to Calabria to convert our people. At the end, the fish and the book are placed on the altar. The former are to remind us that it was Andrew who showed Jesus, when the people were hungry, the boy holding the fish and the bread of the miracle. As for the book, an old manuscript of the Gospel, I remember hearing that St. Andrew was the one who persuaded St. John to write his Gospel.

53

The Vivaria Manuscript 6. Servatus

Lupus,

Abbot of the Monastery of

Ferrieres to Florus Diaconus of the Church of Clermont ( l Oth century).

Bede ' s commentary on the epistles of St. Paul is too large to fit into a shoulder sack, much less under one ' s clothes. Therefore I have decided not to send it this time. Frankly, it is better so : the thieves who frequent our highways have become so shrewd and, it seems, so fond of our parchments, that they would not have spared such a beautiful book. Nor at this time can I have it copied for you. You are aware of the losses that we have suffered lately. Because of them we are reduced to such a state of poverty, that we have wheat enough for only two months and almost nothing to wear. Under these conditions the monks whom I had earlier assigned to copying books have now been assigned to field labor and even humbler tasks. Some have chosen to flee (and I am afraid they may be among those thieves); our scriptorium is deserted and I almost avoid going in there so as not to be overcome by grief. I sent the pinecones you asked me for-a dozen, not more, because our messenger cannot carry more. It was with a certain hesitation and wonder that I decided to satisfy your request: a request so strange that perhaps I have not understood it correctly. With them I am sending you four long new poems I composed lately to comfort my spirit, finding both subject and inspiration in the four Holy Gospels. I do not know which you will find them-more useless or more pretentious. But even where you may find my exameters pleasing, consider them as a mere exercise in piety, intended both to comfort my spirit, as I said, and to arouse new love for the Scriptures. If, indeed, it is proper to comment on them to elicit the meaning they conceal, it must also be proper, I suppose, to embellish them with meter, the better to reveal the beauty they do not disclose. In composing them, in fact, I discovered something: that I had been reading the Scriptures with blind eyes. I mean that I had ceased to be moved by them, and I almost disparaged them for their lack of elegance. The same, I am afraid, had been happening to my monks, for more than one, after listening to my verses, felt the need to read the Gospels again. Now (you may laugh at my poetic fervor) I am intent on composing a fifth long poem, in which I would abandon paraphrase and, if I may put it so, allow my voice to celebrate not this or that existing gospel, but the truth that runs through them all, and does not exist in its entirety in any single one: as if, I mean to say, an unwritten gospel existed which contained the quintessence of the other four. You find it surprising, no doubt. But let me explain. Years ago, when I was teaching catechism to our lay brothers, a small, very simple and enjoyable book came into my hands-or, rather than a book, a fragment of one of those gospels

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The Viva rio Manuscript

we usually call apochryphal. Since in it the events of Jesus ' childhood were embellished by those inventions that are so pleasing to naive mind, I tried, albeit with every caution, reading it to my audience. The effect was exactly what I hoped for: that way of telling the story was not only attractive to them, it seemed to draw them more meekly toward the faith. And to myself as well, something unusual was happening: as if those legends were no longer legends, but fresh and as yet undivulged details of what is said in the Gospels; better, as if far from mere fanciful inventions, they were an overflow of the fullness of our truth, and in this sense somewhat like the grass, which grows not only in the fields but also along the ditches, and even among the stones. At one point I found this sentence, which I am citing as proof of how stirring even an apochryphal text can be, if wisely used: "He spoke in the spirit of the living God as if a torrent of water were flowing from a spring which remained forever full." And then I realized: if even a text written by a naive hand, which limits itself to expanding what has already been said in the Gospels, is capable of causing this fresh expansion of the spirit, which, to my mind, comes only from God ' s grace, it means that the source is still full and flowing and that the Evangelists themselves have drunk their fill of it without diminishing it. More properly, an unwritten truth exists, or one which no Scripture has succeeded in expressing in its totality; and, like yeast, which ferments in every new batch of dough, it continues to reveal itself in forms forever new, in order to make itself available to our changing ability to understand it. This is the idea I would like to express in the long poem I mentioned, if strength and boldness do not desert me. And, to tell all, a brother to whom I have read some fragments has suggested that I call it "The Fifth Gospel." A title that does not seem to me unseemly, after all, since five are the fingers of the hand, five our senses, five the words that teach us, as St. Paul says; not to mention that the ancient spoke of a fifth element that is the foundation and source of the other four. 7. Florus Diaconus to Servatus Lupus (same period)

I do not know if it is the exaltation of finding yourself in the role of the fifth evangelist that makes you, like Providence which gives her gifts without taking into account our wishes, send me poems instead of commentaries and pinecones instead of quills. This of course does not in the least dampen my joy in learning that the members of your community have quite so much in common. Though I understand but little of hexameters, I sincerely hope that your pinecones turn out to be less wooden than your verses. And in your place I would not trust the opinion of your brethren too much. In all candor, I wonder if they might not

The Vi va rio Manuscript

55

have asked you to let them read the Gospels again as an escape from your metrical exploits. I am harsh, I know; but I do not like to see what has been said so divinely once and for all subjected to the dubious artifice of rhetoric, or worse, to the exercise of your vanity. I like the rest of your letter even less. Apart from my fears that your new metrical feat may result in no more than another pinecone, your idea that revelation is still going on, manifesting itself in ever new forms to our changing ability to understand it, sounds excessively rash to me, even bordering on heresy. I do grant you are right in saying that each time we reread the Gospels, if we have been intent in perceiving every sign they give us, it is as if we have discovered another one which we had never read before. Then, full of wonder, we might exclaim (you see that I too can quote the apochrypha): "As the Lord my God is alive, I do not know whence came what I feel in me. " B ut just so, it was already there; it is we who had been reading with blind eyes, but it was already there beyond our blindness. It is equally true that the source of which you speak is still ful l and flowing, but only in the sense that the Gospels never cease to send forth their meanings. Before them the generations of men are like a row of thirsty people along the banks of a mighty river: each draws as much as his thirst requires, yet the river flows on, vast and full . But that you may better understand how your gospel should b e written, let me tell you this. At Bobbio there is already a book that the monks there say is the fifth gospel. It is said that their founder St. Columba brought it there on his return from a trip to Calabria, and perhaps judging it to be divinely inspired, he ordered his monks to guard and revere it. However, their abbot does not say no to those who ask whether they should read it. He answers only: "Endeavor to find Christ and you will find the fifth gospel." 8. From the Chronicon Bobiense (compiled by various hands for about two hundred years, from the 1 0th to the 1 2th century).

During the same year [ 1 027] Emperor Conrad, on his way to Rome where he was to be crowned, stopped for a few days at our monastery. Among other things shown to him was a book called the five gospels. And because he was curious and expressed the wish to have it, the abbot had some pages copied from the fifth and gave them to him as a gift, together with a gold cross. When he read the saying: "Seek ye great things and the small ones shall be added unto you, seek the heavenly things and the things of the earth shall be given you as well," he decided to make it his motto. *

*

*

56

The Vivaria Manuscript

At that same time [about 1 070] Lanfranco of Pavia, archbishop of Canterbury, sent a courier with a letter asking our abbot for a copy of the book called the fifth gospel. He had read in some old documents that it had once belonged to the Vivario library and he thought it had come to our library together with the other books. He had also read that it contains a certain passage regarding the institution of the Eucharist omitted from the narration of the last supper in St. John. The courier lived with us for two months, copying some manuscripts, but left without that book. Questioned about it, the abbot explained that Lanfranco hoped to be able to draw new arguments from it for his dispute with Berengar of Tours, who denies the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Therefore, our abbot sent him this answer: "During this period, prompted by your request, I too reread the Gospel of John, and among the other maxims I especially noted this: 'A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. ' And if you read the rest of this speech carefully, you will find that the same commandment is repeated three more times. Will you pardon me if I tell you what I think? Your letter exudes anger, it lacks charity. And though your soul has a good end in view, it reveals too little of the love we owe one another. I was present among the others in Rome when Berengar was condemned. Yet at the end we were all weeping, and Berengar more than us all. As for me, I confess, I was suddenly deeply upset, because his tears were of the sort one cannot forget, the miserable tears of a man obscurely divided (one imagined) between humility and humiliation, between a sincere need to make amends and do penance and that dreadful vilification, that first instinctive impulse to retaliate that always rises in those who feel mortified beyond measure. Believe me: it was not a victory of truth over error, only of our pride over his. We prevailed, yes: and perhaps we should have. But we totally ignored the difference between converting with love and overwhelming a man's mind. That is why from a new gospel I would hope for a new wellspring of charity, and a spur that drives us closer to the Word, a summons recalling us to that spirit of peace from whic h di sagree ing divi ded , sp lintere d we have strayed too far. There is another verse in the Gospel of John, in which the Son prays for us to the Father, "that they may be one." This too he repeats three times, if you read attentively, and the third time he adds a few more words: 'that they also may be one in us. ' Will this verse be found in the gospel you are looking for? If so, then your attempt to find it will have been justified." -

,

-

9. Addressed t o a certain Hulderic, a monk at Bobbio, by an otherwise unidentified Friar Roger (Rogerius, if we have deciphered the faded

The Vivaria Manuscript

57

signature correctly), this letter, preserved in London, is almost certainly a typical expression of the anti-rationalist climate of reaction to Scholasticism, prevailing at the beginning of the 1 4th century in the Oxford School, the only place where colleges of the sort described here existed.

Do you remember what we were like in our youth? I remember that you had chosen a precept, a kind of motto as a knight of Jesus : "Never go beyond the Scriptures as long as the Scriptures suffice; that for which the Scriptures do not suffice cannot be important." As for me, less clever but no less fervent, I appropriated this other saying: "the Word would cease to appear divine if it were entirely accessible to human rationality, and belief would cease to be meritorious if it required proofs from either intelligence or experience." Was it our innocence? Was it an insistence on faith for its own sake? Certainly something is imperceptibly changing: it is as if, instead of eagerly reaching out toward God, imploring him to sustain our intellect with his charismatic gifts, we were in need of proofs to demonstrate his existence, and were searching for them not in Him, but in things, not in the fact that it was He who freely manifested Himself to us, but in the fact that our intellect deems it demonstrable. You are surprised, I imagine, by this preamble and are asking yourself whence it comes and whither it is heading. It is the consequence of an event that took place here a few days ago, and I believe you will easily understand the rest if you recall the practices of our college and the method we employ: of posing a question and discussing it for a whole day in the company of our students. We had decided to meditate on St. Paul ' s maxim: "The word of God is not bound," and you can imagine, I hope, the tenor of our discussion, its heat, especially among the students, and how insistently some of the old teachers would invite them to consider the dangers of posing no limits to our search into divine mysteries. There is no science of God, they warned: and this is true. It is also true that the Spirit, in calling us to its charismatic gifts, does not make the mystery intelligible or accessible to us, in fact it limits itself to suggesting its existence. Meanwhile, however, pressed and pressured by the fervor of some of their students, not only did they do what old people, grown intolerant of any disagreement with their opinions, usually do, but, too anxious to distinguish the truths of faith from those our mind can attain through its own powers, they spoke as if only the latter concerned us, while the former had been harshly forbidden by the envy of a God who hemmed in our understanding with fears and prohibitions. But the thing that disturbed me most took place somewhat later, when a young student got up to ask: "Can a God who is infinite wisdom put limits to our desire for knowledge?" And to this my colleagues either were unable to react fairly, or perhaps were antagonized by his way of smiling, half-timid, half-

58

The Vivario Manuscript

awkward, yet stubborn, as if driven by some unconscious need for irony. The fact is that soon the question shifted, and instead of trying to discuss the question he was essentially posing, the charismatic gifts we have received in abundance, they began to reproach him for that impudent can, as if by saying that he had meant to ask whether God can do everything or not. Here in brief are some of the things I had to listen to, from both the student and the teachers by now, as if they had all been seized by the same fever of deduction and the need to surpass each other in acuity. If by definition God is He who is, He cannot not be; and by the same token cannot be born, perish, change. Furthermore God cannot err, cannot lie, cannot sin, because He cannot, as St. Paul says, negate himself. Also He cannot not love, since He is love, and cannot commit injustice, since He is justice. If God is knowledge, He cannot not know, if He is foreknowledge, He cannot not foresee. Furthermore (see how many more things God cannot do, if He is supreme will, He cannot not will, if He is omnipotence, He cannot be impotent. In sum, all God's attributes had suddenly become His limits and prohibitions. As for me, while I listened, I was so much scandalized as seeking refuge in the image of the living God and in the warm bosom of His love. Meanwhile I watched the most impassioned participants in that dispute, and seeing in their faces a certain obstinacy, and in their tone a kind of deadly arrogance, I asked myself whether it is really the same God we worship. Then I understood: they have ceased to understand the Scriptures. That is why, instead of running eagerly toward the Word, sure that the Word is enough to establish us in the truth, they needed to analyze, to define, to syllogize, almost as if they were searching for reasons to believe rather than support for certitudes already possessed. At this point, as if to counteract them, I recalled the power of the Spirit that enlightens us, of the wisdom given as an infinite gift to those who believe, and continued to repeat to myself this verse from John: "When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth," and Matthew's "It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you," and I repeated: "Whosoever shall tell you that the Spirit gives itself within limits, answer him that the Spirit gives itself limitlessly and at every moment converts us, multiplying its gifts." This last saying is one I heard quoted some time ago. And certainly it will sound, if not audacious, new or at least unusual to you, unless another gospel attributed to John really does exist, as some say-an ancient copy of which should be in your monastery. From this the words I just quoted are said to come, not out of harmony with others in the canonical Scriptures and such therefore that they may without temerity be deemed, like the others, divinely inspired. It would be most unfortunate were it so, and were the difficult truths of the four Evangelists, with the aid of a text less inaccessible and possibly earlier, by the same hand, made closer to us, and, so to speak, more practicable.

59

The Vivaria Manuscript

I am dreaming, you will probably say; and above all I am mistaken: who could assure us that such a book would actually be John's? But does it not seem to you that we should reveal a timidity in our belief, were we to be fearful or hesitant in our inquiry? And ultimately very poorly assisted by the Spirit, if in it we were unable to recognize the presence of the Spirit? I know, I know quite well: for more than a thousand years we have nourished our faith on the same books; for more than a thousand years the patience of Divine Grace has reproposed them lovingly to our impatience; and do we now wish to deem them insufficient and look for other testimony? And yet, would you not think it a stroke of Providence if a new book from which the teaching of Christ transpires, though imperfectly, should appear, to renew interest in his Word, just now, in an age like ours, when the closeness to the Scriptures has diminished and we have become excessively attentive to the voices of the philosophers, as if we needed to prop up our clear certitudes with their doubts?

1 0. Andre Triolet to Jean de la Salle. (This letter can be dated at around

1 340, during the long

aftennath of the War of the Vespers, when Andre Triolet, wandering teacher and poet, the author of, among other things, the comic Complaint de

Verite, was living in Naples as tutor to one of King Robert' s grandchildren).

If my calculations are correct and my hopes do not deceive me, this letter should reach you in the vicinity of Crotone. Otherwise it will follow you wherever you go, to Squillace, to Gerace, if necessary to the very slopes of the Aspromonte, should your zeal carry you all the way to the wolves of the Aspromonte. See what a poor poet gains when his letters travel together with those of our King? To the captain to whom I entrusted this (secretly, of course, to impress him the more) I gave the impression that it is wonderfully important and full of great secrets. I also begged him to deliver it to you privately, when no one can see you, as a highly confidential thing that you alone may read. This way I am sure that he will take good care of it, and that you will be tempted to read it even if you do not want to. It is important to me, you understand-if only because, for once, your old admiration for the merits of my pen will find serious justification. Several days ago, in fact, while eavesdropping behind a door (tell me how else a poor poet turned courtier should spend his time?), I heard very good news about you. To put it briefly, they are planning to make you a bishop on your return; because, as the decree which I have heard (and wrote up myself) says, we

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The Vivaria Manuscript

have greatly appreciated the services rendered by you to Our Majesty and have finally decided to reward them properly. You will therefore be assigned, with the consent of the Holy Father, to the diocesis of Nimes, which, it seems, is eagerly expecting a virtuous successor, and, as if that were not enough, you will be given in fee a couple of abbeys left without a shepherd, and some rich estates left without an owner. 0 famous and most fortunate canon! But still more fortunate your horses, which you will finally cease to wear out, and unfortunate, on the contrary, the mules of your diocesis, unless you resort to walking like the Apostles, which is what the King would like and which would be only just. As for me, if you invite me to your table occasionally, remember I am entitled to the most golden wines of our Rhone, not so much for the part I had in this decision, but at least for having rendered it in such beautiful prose, as you will see. Of course, much depends on the success of your mission: whether the barons, that is, will be convinced that they have everything to gain by taking Robert's side, and the people will think that they will be better protected against the barons, and the clergy will understand the disadvantages of siding with an excommunicated king and a few dissip�ted, unruly barons. The bishop of Gerace has already informed us that he wants to become our ally again. Make good use of him. Be generous with promises: the process is going to be long, and from now until the time they have to be kept plenty of time will have passed. Now while this is the main one, be careful not to neglect the other goals of your mission, and do not believe that the King has forgotten them. Ever since he began to write his treatise in defense of the doctrine of the poverty of the Apostles, and lend his ear to the Franciscans and even the Minorites, he does nothing but dream of returning the Church to its Gospel. And he thinks that this end would be served even by that Greek Gospel of the time of Cassiodorus of which he heard stories when he went to Calabria, and of which he knows nothing except for one saying from it: "Piety is the treasure of the poor." But even if it were true, what would change? Is that not written all through the Gospels? And he, who wants the ministers of Jesus to be poor (including you, as you have noticed), is he not working to make them rich and more powerful? Anyway, try to do all you can. Of course, as you are not fond of reading, I cannot see you rummaging around old library shelves, among old books. But at least ask, get people to ask around, and promise some reward: who knows? that gospel might really exist. Or the right kind of reward might succeed in calling it into existence. If any real news comes up, I may write to you again. Make sure you leave a record of your passage, even if it means marking every wall with charcoal, or every woman in Calabria with your embrace. They are half Greek; women whose embraces are passionate, therefore; and you, I suspect, need to store up some love in view of the abstinence awaiting you as a bishop.

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Remember me; and if you still love me a little, pity me sometimes for the idleness I live in, while waiting for the education of the young prince to be entrusted to me. And for what is in store for me when I am entrusted with it. Imagine, for the King it is not enough to make a learned man out of him; he expects-from me, no less!-that he be made a wise one too.

THE CHART OF HEAVEN

I do not believe that up to now I have spoken to you of Anne; Anne Lee, my secretary, and more importantly, the person who for the last six years has been coordinating all the work of our group. I do not dare do so this time either (I know she would not like it), except to say that Anne is perhaps the only one among us who does not believe that we will ever discover the book, and feels that our search somehow resembles acting in a mystery play, or simply a human adventure, or, as she says, an existential one, to be accepted as such and to be lived for the sake of its own beauty. This leads her to delight in everything that suggests the symbolic, in the allusive, the mysterious, the figural, the metaphorical, the most emblematic aspect of our material; those leaps of the imagination, those passionate voices, those fragments that seem to gaze at us (to use her words) from a kind of gleaming stellar distance. For this reason, while earlier I had decided to rigorously expunge them from the collection I am sending you, at the last moment I have not only resigned myself to changing my mind but I have left the choice and ordering of the material up to her, with the single condition that she keep the list as short as possible. The result is this section, fortunately very brief, within which, however, Anne has moved in a kind of free zone, choosing at her will, ordering at her will, without regard for any logical or chronological sequence, aiming rather at composing a kind of sequence in which the fragments would be ordered according to hidden analogies. The chart of heaven: the title is hers too. Of course I know it is not a good method, not in any philological sense. But this interests Anne very little. To her the pieces in this section (and not only these) are not documents: they are at most asteroids orbiting around a remote, spent sun, which, in spite of our eagerness, we will never succeed in locating.

1. From the fragments of Gradus in perfectionem [Steps to Perfection] by Philo of Carpathia (5th century). 62

The Chart of Heaven

63

After every fruit of the soul has been consecrated in the fourth Gospel, in the fifth we shall have their enjoyment and fruition, just as it was said: in the fifth year ye shall eat the fruit. 2. From The Jewel of the Soul b y Phi l ippos Presbyteros (Eastern ascetic text of the 8th century).

As the wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ were five, and the fifth was in his breast, closest to his heart, so five are the gospels, and the fifth is the most sublime. 3. From the Emolumenta Fidei [The Rewards of Faith] by Justin of Poitiers (8th century).

It is said that it is as if within the four known Gospels there were one still unknown; but every time there is a rebirth of faith, it is a sign that someone has caught a glimpse of that gospel. 4.

Ancient Armenian legend (an analogous Indian legend has been recorded by 1. L. Borges).

They say in those parts that in each generation there are four just men who guard the fifth gospel. However, each possesses only a fourth of it and knows only that, with no knowledge of the other parts. It is also said that when the book has been recomposed, all shall be justified and charity will be perfect. Thus they never cease to travel from place to place. But how can they ever find each other, if they do not even know that they are searching for each other? 5. From the Book of Fables b y Gerardo of S iena ( 1 5th century).

A certain pagan used to laugh at the Christians because they live by only one book. But a saintly bishop who heard of it told him this story: "Once a scholar met with Jesus Christ: 'Lord, I know well that you are the Messiah and what you said is full of wisdom. But can one book alone be sufficient for so many different people forever?' Jesus answered, 'What you say is true. But you do not know that my people rewrite it every day. '"

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The Chart of Heaven 6. A Prayer to the Crucifix by an anonymous Flemish author of the 1 5th century.

Christ has hands no longer, he has only our hands to accomplish his work today. Christ has feet no longer, he has only our feet to go toward men today. Christ has a voice no longer, he has only our voice to speak now for himself. Christ has strength no longer, he has only our strength to guide men to himsel f. Christ has Gospels no longer, which men still read. B ut our words and our deeds are the gospel that is being written. 7. From the Homilies o f S t . Procul o f Aquitaine ( 1 1 th century)

Churches are built in the shape of a cross to remind us of the sacrifice of Jesus. But you should also notice that they have as many arms as the Gospels that witness his Word. Remember also that the crypt, which means a hidden place, is like an emblem of the fifth Evangel ist, from which the roots of all the others come and from which all draw their nourishment. 8. From a Guide to the Mosaic Floor of Otranto (anonymous, but dated 1 890).

Four headless figures-a l ion, a bull, a human being, an eagle-are joined to form a human face at the center. A dragon trampled by the l ion ' s paws lies on its back, wounded or dead. Around the face the words appear: Evangelium peifectionis [The Gospel of Perfection] . The symbol is clear: the four headless figures are the four evangelists; the dragon is evil, the great tempter; the face of Christ, beginning and end of the Gospels ; and the words around him can signify only what the Christians of old used to call "the gospel that is being written. "

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9. From the History of the Church by Eusebius of Caesarea (4th century).

At one time the sect of the Vigilants flourished in Anatolia. They believed that when the fifth gospel was discovered, nothing would stand between man and God any more. They also believed that Christ would become man again to perfect his revelation, and they used to pray to him with these verses: Open, 0 Lord, the still hidden channel of your springs And let the water flow to quench our thirst. 1 0. From the Book of Sidrac, a didactic text of the 1 4th century, in which the king plays the questioner and S idrac the teacher.

The king asks: "What does the fifth gospel resemble?" Sidrac answers: "It resembles the air, which is felt everywhere but is not seen." He answers again: "It resembles water, which turns everything green. You can see how water that comes from the air turns the mountain grass green." The king asks: "How does one recognize the fifth gospel?" Sidrac answers: "The symbols of the fifth gospel are written in the chart of heaven." 11.

From the Liber imaginum [Book of Images], a 1 3th century illustrated paraphrase (at the head of each page there is an i l lumination, with a commentary below) of the so-called "Visions" of Gioacchino da Fiore.

And now, my reader, gaze with wonder upon the mystery of the fifth page, which I also call the page of the two roses. On this side you see in their ranks the prophets of old, alluded to by the five petals of the white rose, and facing them the saints of the New Testament, beginning with the five petals of the red rose. For indeed everything has been arranged harmoniously, and so, as the books of the Pentateuch that began the age of the prophets are five, so the books of the Gospel that began the era of our saints must be as many. And if you then ask me which one is the fifth gospel, I answer that it is the eternal Gospel which they are writing now and which will continue to be written until the last man is saved. Only then will the fifth petal of the rose which you see above all the others, about to open, be completely unfolded, and every mystery be solved.

THE LEGENDS

In the De fabulis antiquorum [TaLes of the Ancients] by Hieronimus Haspe, a Late (and mediocre) humanist of the Rhine region, this passage appears on p. 1 12: "In ancient illustrations the four Evangelists were represented as four rivers flowing toward a singLe mouth. Hence there sprang the Legend of a fifth evangelist who not onLy summarizes them all, but aLso compLetes and perfects them. Others expLain this belief in another way. But there were aLso those who did not refrain from telling the naive that Christ himself brought back one of the apostLes to new Life so that in that book the truth of truths might be toLd. And some minds are so creduLous, that I have heard it said that he is still writing it. " More striking than the passage itself, which I discovered after returning from Verona, during my Last short, hurried days in CoLogne, was a note at the foot of the page, where Haspe affirmed that such beliefs were still alive in his time among the peopLe. Hence my idea of extending my research to the fieLd of the oraL tradition, at the popuLar LeveL; and hence the recording of a series of Legends often similar but appearing mysteriousLy in the most distant pLaces, as if they had moved through underground channeLs to resurface onLy slightLy modified, Like certain trees which change their coLor according to the soil from which they grew. I am sending you only a few, representing three distinct currents (this seLection too has been made by Anne), with the caveat that this is only a minimal sampling of a tradition that emerges everywhere, from Spain to the Slavic world. One might say that everywhere the Gospels have reached, in every era, the expectation of a fifth book, a book waiting to manifest itself in order to perfect the revealed Word, has caught fire in the popular imagination; or, conversely, that the popular imagination in every epoch has been fired by the idea of the real, and not only imagined, existence of such a fifth book. Given all you know about me, I need not tell you which thesis I lean toward.

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THE LEGENDS OF THE BOOK

1 . St. Peter was cast in jail and, knowing he must die, had pen and paper brought to him to write his gospel. Then he called a guard who had become his disciple and asked him to keep it safe: "But do not open it for now. Show it to no one. The time for my truths is not yet come." The disciple intended to obey, but the devil tempted him: "What are you doing, fool ish one, why do you not open this book? Do you not know that the first to open it will hold the keys of truth?" The disciple believed him; but no sooner had he opened the book than darkness came over his eyes and he was as if blind. In a dream St. Peter appeared to him: "So then, you disobeyed and God punished you. Henceforth, instead of dying, you will wander from land to land until I give you the sign that you may open my gospel." "When," the disciple asked, "will you give me the sign?" "When there is light enough to understand its truth." And that is why the disciple still wanders from land to land, leaning on a staff and carrying a book. And that is why every year, the night of the feast of St. Peter, people keep watch, pray, and light fires, so that, should St. Peter give the sign, there will be light enough to read his gospel . 2. St. Peter the Apostle died, and his best-loved disciple started to write the gospel of Jesus as he had heard it from the living voice of his teacher. But Satan was afraid of it and had him abducted to a mountain in the Aspromonte, far from all men. Since then that disciple lives lost in the forest, feeds on berries, drinks from springs, and has no ink to write with, no paper to write upon. Yet all the same he tears thorns from blackberry bushes and writes with them on the backs of leaves. Many fall to the ground and the sun dries them, Many fall into water which rots them. B ut some, when the wind blows strongest from sea to sea, are carried afar before they fall , and if one picks them up and reads what is written thereon, he runs full of hope to repeat them to other men and joy or fear seizes their hearts. 3. After he had touched Jesus ' wounds, St. Thomas felt ashamed: "Lord, I know, I have sinned. But you must help me make amends. Allow me too to write your gospel." "How can I, if you believed only after you had seen?" "Lord, why punish me thus? You know that now there is more faith in me than in any other." "Do you see?" Jesus said, "now you sin in pride as well . But since you wish it, do write your gospel, and one that is no less truthful than the other four. But know that it will remain unknown to all ; many will look for it but few will find it; and even when they find it they will not believe it to be truthful." "Will none believe me? Yet I wish to write so that men will have faith in you." He departed in sadness. But Christ called him back: "You have spoken well," he

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said. "Know this, however: it will be held truthful but it will not be recognized. It will pass from hand to hand and no man will know that he has it." 4. You must know that St. Bartholomew, who was the sixth of the apostles, and converted many nations, wrote his gospel too. And, knowing that he was about to die, he sent the book to the Seventy, who are the seventy priests who guard the Scriptures. As soon as they read his gospel they began to complain: "What will we do if this gospel becomes known? Here it is written that we must do penance, renounce worldly goods, and share with those who have not the goods we have." They took the book to a cave, therefore, and hid it there. But Jesus saw them and called them back: "What have you done with my truths? Display them on high, rather, so that all may see them." They were abashed, but the oldest suggested: "Let us take the book up on high as we have been ordered." So they went to the top of Sinai and displayed it on a rock, so that it could be read, but only by holding on to the rock. That is why the gospel of St. Bartholomew has remained unknown and no one ever speaks of it. But once in a while, when the wind blows strongest on top of the mountain, a leaf comes away and falls among men. And those who pick it up look at it filled with wonder and go about shouting out the truths that are written there. But the Seventy, who are shrewd, ask that those leaves be shown to them, and on the pretext of having them copied, they have them scraped clean. Thus among us there is a saying that as St. Bartholomew was skinned alive, so too is he flayed when he is dead.

5. When St. John was a prisoner on the island, he was lifted up in spirit, on the day of the Lord, and a powerful voice cried behind him: "Make a book of all my deeds and words you remember and send it to the Seven Churches." John began to write, and when he finished he summoned a young servant he had recently converted: "Take this book beyond the sea and deliver it secretly to the Elders of the Seven Churches. Be careful not to lose it, however, and not to let it be stolen from you, for no treasure in the world is worth the treasure contained herein." The servant truly believed that it was a treasure, and as soon as he reached Ephesus he went straight to the market to sell it. But no one would buy it, and they laughed at him when they heard the price he asked for it. A Christian came by and asked: "Who gave you this book?" The unfaithful servant ran away and was never seen again; thus that gospel was never found and later St. John had to write another. But by then he was old and in a hurry to finish, and his memory had weakened somewhat, so he omitted or forgot to write many things that were in the book that was lost. Every hundred years, however, on the day of St. John, the servant reappears, dressed as a penitent monk, and sows the pages of that gospel about the world. But Satan, who is afraid of them, hastens to set them on fire, and they reach to ground as little flames. That is why our people tremble at least once in their lives, and hope to see the fires of St. John. And that

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is also why the feast of St. John Evangelist comes in the heart of winter, when the earth is wet, otherwise his words might set the world aflame.

THE LEGEND OF THE WORD 1 . When the Christians had built their churches in Rome, St. John realized that the Word was without a church and went to inform Jesus. "You are right," Jesus said. And he called Simon Peter, who was a great builder, and ordered him to begin. Peter rejoiced, but then was seized with fear, because he realized he did not know what to build it with. So he called St. Matthew and St. Matthew brought him stones. "Ask St. Mark for the rest," he told Peter. St. Mark brought him lime. "Have you nothing else to give me?" "Ask St. Luke and St. John for the rest." St. Luke brought him pillars for the aisles and St. John marble for the altar and gold for the tabernacle. Seeing that he had the best materials ever seen in this world, Simon Peter set to work cheerfully. But time went by, his strength was giving way, and he had only laid the foundation. So he turned to Jesus Christ: "Lord, give me life that I may go on." "You may leave everything as it is and come up to join me," Jesus answered. "Every man who comes by this church will add his stone to the wall and his trowel of mortar, and each generation of men will raise their pillar." 2. When the Christians had built their churches in Rome, Jesus realized that the Word was without a church, and informed Simon Peter. Simon Peter, who was a great builder, was discomfited and immediately set to work to make redress. But he made a mistake in his calculations. His project was too large and soon he realized that he had not material enough. So he called upon Jesus to come to his aid. "Simon, Simon, when will you learn? Did I not order you to build a church for the Word?" "Yes, Lord, that was your order." "Then why do you worry that you have made it too large? Do you not know that each man will come bearing his stone, and each generation marble for the altar?" 3. When the Christians had built their churches in Rome, St. John realized that the Word was without a church and went to notify Jesus. "You are right," Jesus said, "but how do you wish it to be?" St. John thought, and then answered: "I want it to be like unto your Word, Lord." Jesus smiled and called Simon Peter, - who was a great builder, and spoke to him thus: "Simon, now make a church that will be like unto my Word." With good cheer Simon set to work, but as time passed, he began to lose his strength and realized that he would not be able to complete it. So he begged Jesus: "Let me live until I fmish the church you ordered me to build." "Simon, Simon, when will you learn? Did I not order

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you to build a church that would be like unto my Word? And do you not know that my word is without end?"

THE LEGEND OF NICODEMUS 1 . Nicodemus, the secret disciple, heard that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead, and that same night he went up to the sepulcher carrying a lamp. When he lit it, he was filled with amazement, unable to understand how the sepulcher could be empty. Jesus then appeared to him and Nicodemus fell at His feet: "Master, it is as they say, then, that you have risen?" Jesus smiled: "Now you believe, then?" Nicodemus felt ashamed, and said: "Lord, now allow me too to write your gospel." "So be it," Jesus answered. "You too may write my gospel. However, since you looked for me at night, so you will be able to write it only at night." "Lord, how may I see at night?" Jesus smiled: "Do you not have your lamp?" Nicodemus started writing, but his oil was soon used up. So he turned again to Jesus: "Lord, how may I go on in the dark? Give me oil enough to finish your gospel." Jesus appeared to him: "You asked me to let you write. But did you ask me for oil enough for your lamp?" Since that time, however, the Lord has felt compassion for him, and, every time He sends a new saint into the world, He asks him to pass by Nicodemus and pour some oil into his lamp and light it again. Therefore it is said in our land that every time a saint is born, another verse is added to the Gospel of Nicodemus. And that is why every year on the night after Easter we go up to the mountain carrying our lamps, hoping that the light may reach as far as Nicodemus and that he may soon finish his gospel. 2. When Jesus had risen, He gathered his disciples together to assign to each the task He wanted him to perform. He saw Nicodemus standing apart: "You have come too?" "Lord, I pray you, assign a task to me also." "What would you like to do?" Nicodemus considered: "Allow me too to write your gospel." "How may I? You have been my imperfect disciple." "Lord, it is true. But you also know how much I loved you." "So be it," Jesus answered. "Write my gospel, then, but let it be commensurate to the love you bore me." When he finished writing, Nicodemus gave out his book to be read, but he realized that nobody thought it was truthful. He then called upon Jesus: "Lord, how may this be? I wrote your gospel as you asked me to, yet no one accepts my witness." "How can you expect them to accept your witness, when you have been so lukewarm in accepting my witness?" This is why it is said that that gospel remains concealed just as Nicodemus was a concealed disciple. And whoever reads it

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also says that it i s truthful, but imperfect, just as his love for Jesus was shallow and imperfect. 3. Nicodemus went by night to Jesus: "Master, give me a sign by which I may recognize the truth and, having recognized it, may write your gospel too." "Can one who looks for me in the dark recognize the truth?" "You are right, Master. But give me a sign." "You are here and you ask for a sign?" Jesus answered. But Nicodemus did not understand Him and that same night he departed. Later, as He climbed Calvary with His cross, Jesus realized that Nicodemus was following Him. "Have you come by day too?" "You see I have. Give me a sign by which I may recognize the truth and may write your gospel too." Jesus moved His lips to answer, but the crowd cried out and Nicodemus did not hear the answer. Since then Nicodemus has done nothing but write his gospel, but he cannot finish it because he did not hear the answer. They also say that the other disciples feel pity for him and beg the Lord to be allowed to help him. Thus, when it is night on earth and the silence is deeper, they shout to Nicodemus the words he is to write. And if perchance the wind is blowing, it sometimes gathers them and carries them to the ears of those who are awake. They hear them and know not where they came from and are frightened and say that it was the wind. All the same they are excited and run from house to house knocking at the doors to make those who are sleeping listen. Thus the words awaken the world even though the world does not understand them, nor does it know that they are the words of a gospel that is being written.

THE GREEK MONK

At the top of the page relating the events of the year 1065, the Chronicon Casauriense, the renowned chronicle of the monastery of St. Clement in Casauria, reports the flight of some restless monks-indeed, lost souls (in the words of the text)-who had left the monastery at night "to live like wayfarers, like Christ, and according to what they believe to be the true gospel. " In the same year, almost at the bottom of the same page, the arrival of a letter from St. Peter Damian is recorded, concerned at the news that some brothers of the monastery are recklessly stirring up the people "with the example of a wandering Jesus and the proclamation of a gospel. " This was my first encounter with the phenomenon of the Wayfarers in Christ, which, however, I must confess, I would never have connected with the myth-or the existence-of a fifth unpublished gospel. Rather I would have taken it to be one of the many popular upheavals that shook the life of the Church in the Middle Ages, if, looking through the letters of Pope Alexander II, I had not found a reference to a "Greek monk " and "an unknown gospel of his. " The reference, of course, was only in passing. But, apart from the fact that the memory of the Greek monk of the Vivario manuscript charged it, to my eyes, with much underlying significance, the letter offered me a precise trail, since it was addressed to the bishop of Todi. If nothing else, taken with the other things I knew, it outlined an area where I should look, between Todi and San Clemente, that is between Umbria and the heart of Abruzzo. Thereafter I proceeded backward, as it were, step by step, to the archive of the collegiate church of Pescocostanzo, where the ingenuous author of the first of these letters watched the nocturnal comings and goings of his brothers. I do not know whether this detail will render the events that I believe I have reconstructed here more suggestive, for our purposes, but one may still make out, in the lunette of a side chapel of the collegiate church, the image of a man holding a book: a figure which, of course, may represent any saint, but which at Pescocostanzo-and I do not see how this could be mere chance-is still called the Greek monk.

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1.

Ludovico of Casoli, Prior of the Augustinians of Pescocostanzo, to Nicolo of Sui mona, Abbot of the Benedictines of San Clemente at Casauria. Of the two monks who will bring you this letter of mine, one you already know, that same Landolfo who a year ago left your monastery and, after long wandering, arrived among us. Please receive him without harshness or acrimony, not like a brother who has gone astray, but like a son who has been found. And in fact I do not think he deserves any further pain than that of having to discover, and to feel mortified by, the breadth of your charity, and to feel how absurd, in the face of it, are both his fear of not deserving it and the shame that until now has kept him from "returning to his father" and hoping for his indulgence. B ut "now he has been found." When I accepted him here, his spirit was unsettled, his soul restless and troubled. Not full of doubts, however, nor of that anguished and aimless arrogance that leads many of our monks to abandon our houses and become, as they say, the Lord' s wayfarers . And if perhaps he lacked that incisiveness, that vigorous meekness, that disciplined charity which distinguish those who are formed by your Rule, it was not so much a poverty of faith that unsettled him, as it was the overwhelming feeling of an abundant faith which made him seek different challenges and an asceticism perhaps less docile and cautious, but no less severe, than that sought in your monastery. We are acquainted with such moments, such wavering, when a soul believes it is hearing a call from the desert and claims it can discover God through God alone, and mistakes its own temptations for a vocation. These are experiences that generally breed disappointment. But this too, I believe, is an element of God's plan, since one usually emerges better disposed toward authority, and less inclined to think of oneself as the repository of a vocation out of the ordinary and in some way privileged. This is exactly what happened to our young Landolfo. During the months he has been living here, I have observed and examined him: and if at the beginning I could discern in him the traces of his error and, so to speak, the roots of his old intemperance, beginning with that kind of ostentatious charity, that underlying pride of the penitent without pride which are always signs of a discontented soul, the man I am sending back to you now seems to me disposed to total obedience, and especially intent on not squandering his vocation. Be boldly forgiving of him, then. And put him to the test, of course, but with the mildness which he who has laid down any shadow of pride deserves. You will be surprised to find in his company another monk, only slightly older (do not let his beard deceive you, he is not yet thirty), one of those strange wandering monks who every now and then pass through our region. His name is Athanasios. B ut let me first convey the little I know about him and explain why I am sending him to you.

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You know how our brotherhood is constituted and how we live: far from adhering, like yours, to a fixed and uniform Rule that requires of all indiscriminately a long established discipline and a mature vocation, ours accepts freely, as if to test him-or allow him to test himself-any person, as long as he is in good faith. It is a custom that existed before 1 came and which 1 have encouraged. And thus the most diverse sorts of people pass through our convent now. 1 might say the most diverse beggars of the Spirit-lay people tired of or disappointed by the seductions of the world, hermits to whom suddenly solitude becomes unbearable, unsettled or exhausted souls seeking comfort, and especially those curious monks, attached to no order, excessively neglected in their appearance, often said to be visionaries, who often knock at our door either moved by the desire to know us and talk to us--even to convert us to their way of life-or because they hope, in contact with the peace they find here and by virtue of a more disciplined devotion, to set in order their slovenly inner lives. When 1 saw Athanasios the first time, 1 thought he was that kind of person. But since as a rule we do not ask questions, and because he struck me at once as too docile and devout to disquiet by my curiosity, 1 simply assigned him a cell and a place among us. And in truth 1 had no reason to have any doubts about him. Silent and self contained most of the time (besides, he stammers rather than speaks our language), ever inclined to prayer and humble obedience, he was, 1 considered, a good example of those Greek monks who, tempered by solitude and long abstinence, have taken renunciation and patience as their rule and seem to await from within their silence the word that shall speak and the joy that shall manifest itself. However, after a while 1 began to notice a far too frequent coming and going in the environs of his cell, and a lingering there even during the night, which 1 did not like and which, 1 confess, made me suspect the worse. Unfortunately, even among us, there are cases of unimaginable vices and abominable relations to truncate which neither censure nor vigilance is sufficient; and all of a sudden 1 was unable to remain tranquil. 1 seemed to detect something deceitful and sly in every action of Athanasios, affectation in the very submissiveness of his devotion, and even worse, a corrupt insincerity. In short, suspicious as I had become, I decided to find out, not only trying, as covertly as possible, to get some information about him, but also spying on him any way 1 could, even eavesdropping (I blush as I write this) at night at his door, and compelling poor old brother Bernardo too (you must know him, I once sent him to you) to lose some of his sleep. There were surprises, but not the ones I feared. In fact, to call them surprises is to put it mildly. Can you imagine the astonishment of a poor prior, huddled in the cold behind a cell door, who hears from the other side, in the depths of the night, while an entire monastery is lost in its silence "and the declining stars invite sleep," voices arguing-in tones now fervent, now subdued-about Christ, his message, the correct understanding of His Word, or the ripeness of the times, the eventual ity of His return, the coming of the

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Kingdom, and what the Kingdom actually is; voices l ingering on endless distinctions between the letter and the spirit of the Scriptures, between the way the speeches and sayings of Jesus sound in the Latin Gospels we have and how differently they sound if read in the Greek in which they were written. And all this not in the tone that we usually adopt, we who perhaps because of our excessive familiarity with the Scriptures (or maybe, on the contrary, because we have read them badly) think we have clarified them and are familiar with their every meaning and intention, but with the emphasis and the passion of men who are discovering them for the first time and think they are finding in them truths still untouched. And although I was disturbed, little as I could understand, there outside the door, by their excessive freedom, even daring, still, I confess, I was pleased, ultimately, sensing in their talk a fresh and fearless exultation of the soul that sheds its sluggishness and eagerly seeks truth. Frankly we are too little accustomed to this: our friars, most of them, even when they appear pious, do not particularly care for these studies, nor are they greatly interested in even the Gospels, which they read, when they read them, inattentively, in a kind of superficial and, I would say, lukewarm way, as a text good to draw some maxims from to apply to everyday life, but not as a text to discover day by day, and almost to rewrite, from the soul, day by day. This was the result of my first inquiry. And I would have been naively reassured, even joyful-at most observant at a distance of those comings and goings and that innocent evangelical conspiracy-had other news not reached me from the outside, some in bits and pieces, from people in transit, most of it from a hermit whom I had contacted after hearing that Athanasios had spent some time with him. It seems, then, that Athanasios has not always been the quiet, obedient monk I accepted into my convent, but hides, under his meekness, an intrepid, not to say fiery spirit. It seems that, landing in Taranto about twenty months ago, he aroused the suspicion of the local bishop and clergy. It seems that, driven away from there, he resurfaced in the vicinity of Lecce and soon after in the towns of the opposite shore; and that from then on, in the places he visited as he progressed toward us along the coast, he tried again and again to preach and prophesy, most often outside the churches, stirring the conscience of listeners, creating followers, persuading them to do penance and keep strange expiatory vigils, arousing wild expectations everywhere he went, and even provoking some disturbances. It seems that, pursued again and even threatened with death, he took refuge with the hermit I mentioned above, spent an irreproachable period in the hermitage, his humility fervent and above suspicion, then came among us to do what 1 have told you of. So far, you will certainly say (I can see the patient impatience of your smile), nothing really new or very surprising: we are all too familiar, you will say, with these excessively saintly saints, with their open souls and indiscreet faith, who live under the illusion that they are answering a call of the Spirit by going around preaching unusual reforms and Second Comings. And the earth is vast enough both to receive and to disperse their voices: in the same way that the Church can silence them, or share their expectations without fear, indeed turning

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them to a good end. Yet, among the news the hermit sent me there was one point which, though brief and unclear, merits a different kind of concern: the reference, I mean, to an unknown gospel which Athanasios is supposed to have brought with him from the east, and by which his preaching is supposedly inspired. As if, in the hermit's words, he had taken upon himself the mission of making it known and spreading its message throughout our land. Now you can imagine how troubled I was by this, how I began to connect the various things: the events in Puglia, the nigh-long discussions, the restlessness of my monks, my na"ive spying; how I regretted my inclination to trust, this foolish vice of mine which continues to ensnare me in spite of my age and my efforts to change. Well, what would you have done at this point? As for me, I summoned Athanasios in the frame of mind of one who is about to extinguish a fire or annihilate a foe who has entered his walls. I was angry, my pride was wounded, I felt betrayed, unj ustly deceived. Well, would you believe it? He did not convert me, no ; but it is as if he had, against my will, disarmed me; perhaps because he possesses, in a measure I do not, the authority and the fire of the meek in Christ, the relentless meekness of those of whom it has been said that they go through life with their feet on the ground but their eyes and their souls trained on heaven. Above all, he is not one of those who feed on doctrine, but of those poor in spirit, nourished only by the teachings of Jesus, and intent only on reminding us that one is not "born again" unless he is reborn through His Word. And we may feel disturbed or pursued by them, we may find them difficult, obstinate, intrusive. Yet, tell me: what would we be without these fire-bearers, able to rekindle the torch at every turn, to recall us to the Gospel if perchance we wander? You see, I can be the worst of priors; and actually I experience every day, to my cost, the difference between governing my monks and guiding their souls. Yet, by Jove, I think I have had enough experience in the guidance of souls to be able to recognize bad faith beneath the shell of sincerity, and impUdence, and perhaps calculation, behind the face of enthusiasm. All this is to prepare you, and, if I can, to prevail upon you not to lock yourself immediately into suspicion and denial, and mistake his frankness-and innocence-for arrogance. And anyway, how can we charge with bad faith or impudence a man who lives so intensely by the Gospels and with the Gospels as to make us feel like pagans in comparison? That is, a man whom you ask why he goes wandering about the way he does, and if it would not be better to live in a monastery as we do, and first he murmurs a phrase I never heard before (you will soon understand where it comes from) : "Be wayfarers, not sit-at-homes." Then, seeing my wonder, he simply adds, "You know He told them: 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel ' ." I ask him what the good news consists in, and he answers : "As ye go, preach, saying, the kingdom of heaven is at hand." I tell him that it is one thing to preach the good news, but quite another to disturb people's souls and cause disorder, and he, keeping his composure and barely raising his eyes : "We found this fellow perverting the nation." Disconcerted and perhaps rather clumsy (but I had reason to be), I object to his unorthodox ways

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of preaching in the streets and on country roads instead of in churches, and there he is, ready again with the words of Jesus: "Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also." I remind him, then, of the many places he had been driven from and the many enemies he had left in his wake, and what does he do? He recites this verse from John: "And the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take him," and the one that begins: "Then they took up stones to cast at him." I object that the saintly bishop of Taranto found himself obliged to pursue and banish him, and he, with the same irreproachable meekness: "For neither did his brethren believe in him." Mind you, he showed no trace of the presumption of one who poses as a new Christ, or a new prophet of His, nor that vestige of unction, or excessively contrite contrition our monks reveal on the rare occasions they happen to quote the Gospels. Rather, if anything, a kind of courageous charity joined, somehow, to a quiet irony that in the end won me over and even amused me; to the point where, adopting his tactics, and smiling, I asked in the words of Luke: "Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?" At which point he looked at me and smiled faintly, disarming me completely. Soon after he said something which, as I was to understand later, would be in the gospel he carries with him: "He whom ye were awaiting has already come, but ye knew him not." Do not believe, however, that I was too gentle with him, nor that I showed myself to be totally unprepared. On the contrary, we had a long discussion, we even quarreled. When he accused us of having ceased to believe in the Kingdom and of doing nothing to prepare ourselves for its advent (this is, it seems, the thing he reproaches us most for, and, I believe, the essence of the message he has been preaching), first I reminded him quite plainly: "But we have been getting ready for it for a thousand years ! " and soon after, seeing that he remained silent, I reminded him that Jesus also said: "Take heed ye be not deceived: for many shall come in my name saying, I am Christ; and the time draweth near: go ye not therefore after them." All this is to acquaint you, rather lamely, with the tenor of an exchange I issued from with very uncertain and divided feelings : even more divided after the little I heard about the manuscript Athanasios carries with him. Mind, I am very ignorant of these matters. Nor am l one of those who seem to be forever expecting a new revelation or a final coming. Even less do I dare judge a book written in a language which, alas, I do not know. And yet I ask: can temptation act and move in a manner so akin to love? I asked Athanasios to show me his book and I held it in my hands, a worn, ancient book of which he keeps saying that, far from contradicting the four canonical Gospels, it only completes them and here and there perfects them. And, sensing a faint shiver in myself, and almost wishing it were truly authentic, in vain I appealed to the evidence of reason, which warned me that a thousand years later it is absurd to even dare hope that a fifth gospel, as true as the other four, assuming it had ever been written, could have survived. And while on the one hand I repeated to myself, with one of our saints: "Lord, teach us to understand, enabling us to distinguish what comes from nature and what is sent directly by the Spirit," on the other my

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mind was repeating a phrase that Athanasios had spoken a moment earlier, which, according to him, is written in that gospel : "Raise up the stone, and there you will find me� break the seals and I will be there." Why am I telling you this? Why, because this sudden and uncontrollable disquiet of my soul is probably the only excuse I have and the only reason I may be pardoned for believing-or being tempted to believe-in the authenticity of a gospel of which I know nothing except what I hear from Athanasios. According to him, before it was turned into Greek, it was written in the language of Jesus himself� later, for a long time, it was in the hands of a community, or sect, that called itself "of the poor," either because they had decided to live in poverty, according to the custom of Christ and his disciples, or because they read Matthew' s Gospel as "Blessed are the poor," instead of "the poor in spirit" (although I pointed out to him that Luke also puts it that way. Then, he adds, because they fell under suspicion, they chose to hide it rather than have it condemned, intending to preach it only at the right time and when the right signs should be revealed. I asked him about the manner of his coming into possession of it, and he was reticent. I asked him whether he had had a sign that this was the right time, and at first he tried again to hide behind a reticent smile, then, upon my insistence, he finally answered: "We live amid a thousand signs� who knows which are the right ones?" I then asked him to translate some passages for me, but his Latin was too uncertain and tentative for me to be able to establish whether the phrases he was stammering, whose meaning was not different from those of the Scriptures, sounded different merely because of him and his uncertainty and ineffectiveness as a translator. But the most curious thing was his attempt to show me that the gospel in his possession, beside being genuine, is even closer to the word of Jesus, and he quoted me a verse that sounds like: "Whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment," while in Matthew (whom he knows only in Greek) it is supposed to have been reported much more imperfectly: "Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the j udgment." At the beginning I kept silent and agreed with him in my heart. But then, somewhat unconvinced, I sent for the Vulgate, and since "without a cause" is not there in the Latin, he felt confused. And something very similar happened a little later, when he stated that in the parable of the hundred sheep Matthew omitted the saying of Jesus: "For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost," and I showed him Matthew saying exactly that in Jerome' s Vulgate. You can understand in what sense everything, at this point, became doubtful, and it may even be legitimate to consider-excluding the possibility that it may be apocryphal (from the passages I have read I do not think it is apocryphal)-either that this presumably new and unknown gospel does not differ much from the four we already have, and the monk thinks he finds them different only because he has read our four in some error-laden manuscript, or that at most we have here one of those Harmonies which in the past, as you know, were often composed by blending the canonical Gospels into one. Unless, given certain concordances with Matthew and what Athanasios says about its

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origin (but the very hypothesis makes me tremble), the book contains the text, turned into Greek, of that first Gospel of Matthew which Saint Jerome says was written in the Hebrew language. Or, perhaps, the truth is yet another: that is, that Athanasios very simply proclaims as new the old Gospel. In the sense that no, there are no new or unknown gospels, but there are, rather, new souls-those, Jesus says, who are born of the Spirit and understand its voice without knowing whence it comes. And they may seem to us lunatics or impostors; they may have the illusion that they are bearing as unknown gospels what we know is there in the four known ones. Yet it is enough for them to repeat those words for us to find ourselves bewildered and incredulous as we listen, as if they really were unknown or unfamiliar and came from a gospel never heard before. But I repeat, I am totally ignorant of these things and I do not wish to pass j udgment on a question which, if anything, has only allowed me to fathom the depths of my ignorance. This is the reason, you realize, why I am sending Athanasios to you. Ours is a poor community, we are uncouth and ignorant, and our very mysticism, which gives such fervor to our prayers, renders us all too easily deceived when we venture into things of this sort. Among your brethren-apart from the fact that your own personal knowledge of the Scriptures has made your name virtually proverbial-there are scholars, copyists abound, emissaries from Byzantium, I am told, sometimes come by. And who knows-I asked myself-whether one of you who knows Greek might not be able to establish the truth about Athanasios and his manuscript. He seems to me loyal and good, and willing to face examination as long as it is not conducted in a humiliating way. And even should he seem to you intractable or unruly, take into account the fact that ultimately it all springs from righteous zeal and from that jealous, obstinate persistence in love from which fanatics do come-but so may saints. Explore his mind, then, but do it without animosity and tempering the keenness, that I know is characteristic of you, with the kindness a brother owes to a brother. Do we not live on this earth as pilgrims, and feel ourselves to be friends of all wayfarers? But above all study his book, and, please, do not dispose of it too quickly. It may be nothing, an ordinary patchwork, a poor counterfeit deserving only to be destroyed, perhaps the work of a deluded mind or a diabolical one sent to mislead us and to sow heresy among us. But "can we know the light as long as we remain in the cave" as Athanasios ' gospel says at one point? Can we determine what it is by shutting ourselves up in our suspicion, quick to pronounce it false and dangerous? As for me, you will have realized, I am very hesitant to believe it is so, especially after the l ittle Athanasios has translated for me. And in any case, should anyone lead us to even suspect that one single unknown saying of Christ has been buried in the heart of a mountain, would we not go tunneling into that mountain even at the risk of uncovering, in the process, nests of vipers?

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Nicolo of Sulmona, abbot of the Benedictines of San Clemente in Casauria, to Ludovico of Casoli, prior of the Augustinians of Pescocostanzo. Lord, are we then so vulnerable? or do You expressly humble us, to show us once again our insignificance and thus spur us on to a higher perfection? I speak of myself, not you, of course; because until now, I must confess, I have misjudged you; I was ignorant of your knowledge of Scripture and had serious doubts about your abilities as a prior. By good fortune your letter corrects my error: and I am now deeply convinced that your brothers could not have made a better choice when they chose you. Who could have hoped or imagined that a mere prior would have carried out an inquiry so perfectly and been so aware of the duties and dignity of his station as to risk his life listening behind doors? And so endowed with faith-or good faith-as to credit a vagabond posing as a seer, and to expect that from an ordinary patchwork of old pages a heretofore unknown gospel would appear? And, moreover, so full of prudence and foresight as to send me a Landolfo in the company of an Athanasios, as if one should put, in the same container, oil and fire? Indeed, I am still astounded. And were I not to remember how ingenuous your goodness is, I might think that, in an access of subtle cunning, and even a kind of malicious irony, you had decided to divert fire from your convent in order to cause mine to burn, and put me to the test. Unless in all seriousness, with your inspired letter, your intention was to induce me to make a mistake and demonstrate to me then that the order we live by is no better, after all, than your disorder. Yes, it is true: you improvise your religious life, while we probably regulate it too much; you trust a great deal in natural goodness, and for the rest behave like those who believe that the Spirit with its gifts is always about to knock at your door. Be convinced, however: we are not good. At best we are born in innocence or perhaps in fear, and did we not labor to correct nature through constant obedience and observance of rules, we should be lost. The fact is that Landolfo was already what he was: a warped spirit, impatient with discipline and unable to subject himself to the asperities of the narrow path. His origins did the rest (did you know his people are counts of Fara?), giving his restlessness the stamp of pride. These past months have not changed him, nor was he at all improved (I see it now, you do not believe me) by your kindness. If anything it has given new fuel to his pose as a visionary and to his need to act the mystic, or, worse, the reformer. No wonder then, if it took so little-a journey, that is, in the company of Athanasios-to transform him into a new apostle of this sort of new Christ? So that, as if one Athanasios were not enough, we now have two, and the second more fiery than the first. And if the first alone, with a poor command of our language, was able to sow his confusion through half of Puglia, can you imagine what he will be able to do now with the help of such a fearless and indomitably eloquent companion?

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In short, neither one of them is here with me anymore. Instead, taking with them some of my monks and many of our neighbors, they are wandering from place to place preaching the new gospel. Along the way they convert people, and, it seems, even heal some. At first they seemed to be heading for Rome: now, the Count of Celano having driven them from his j urisdiction, they are advancing more cautiously in the direction of Spoleto. Still they proselytize, call themselves Wayfarers in Christ, send missives to bishops and monasteries, incite the monks and the lower clergy, and to those who show any willingness to listen they usually say: "Be wayfarers, not sit-at-homes," because this was supposedly the way of Christ and of his disciples, and because only by changing your life may it come to pass that (they use a phrase from the Acts of the Apostles, I think) "your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come." As to the essence of their reform, we stand accused-you, I, everybody-of corruption, laxity, and want of those virtues the Gospels teach, both because, according to them, we do not live poorly enough (and to think that until now we had to worry only about those monks who rebelled out of a craving for luxuries ! ) and because we are allied with the princes and the powerful and love the visible Church rather than the invisible one. And in this regard they repeat other words they have taken from the Acts, changing a few words : "The kings of the earth stood up and the priests were gathered together against the Lord and against his Gospel." As for the practices and the rites they perform, those who have seen them say that they move in procession reciting verses of that alleged fifth gospel, often chanting them in unison, like hymns. And in between they insert, as a refrain, now this verse from the Apocalypse: "Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his j udgment is come," now this one from a letter of St. Paul : "Then cometh the end when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule, and all authority and power." Usually at this point a single loud voice calls out: "That we be members of one another, and all may be one." 3.

Andrea, a priest at the Church of St. Stephen in Antrodoco, to Mauro of Casale, B ishop of Spoleto. Years ago, I remember, I heard it said by a teacher of mine, that every time the expectation of a new advent flares up, it means that the Church is about to experience a renewal. And I heard him add that in such circumstances it is always as if a dream of a new gospel were kindled: not in the sense that the old one is to be abandoned, but that suddenly we begin to read it with freshened eyes, almost as if we were discovering it for the first time. No, I do not believe that these so-called Wayfarers in Christ actually proclaim an unknown gospel. My impression, when they came by here, was that they proclaim the same gospel as we: only they read it differently from the way

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we do. And also in what you have been told about them and their practices, and in their wish for a Church renewed in a kind of universal priesthood of all believers, I detected no sign of heresy, only evidence of a new religious life. Does their fervor concern you? Does it seem to you dangerous? B ut is our God not a "consuming fire?" Are you amazed that they still dream of a new advent? As for me, I do not fear it, for I remember that it was written: "Yet once more I shake . . . the earth." Are you amazed at their tendency to express themselves in prophetic language, do you suspect deceit, even witchcraft? But do you then not remember what we all have read: "I would that ye all spake with tongues, but rather that ye prophesied"? And as for the women they bring along with them, I hesitate to believe the abominations you have been told; on the contrary, when I think of this newborn community that draws together people of such disparate origins, I think of fools, of course, but of those "fools for Christ' s sake," for whom "there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." As you see, everything can be found in the Scriptures, even the source of this new scandal, even the explanation of what is alarming in these new pilgrims. Thus, even the words they chant in unison, and which have seemed so suspicious to you: "Whosoever is near me, is near the fire, but whoever is far from me is far from the Kingdom," are not to be found in any Gospel, certainly, but it is as if they were there. 4. POp'e Alexander II to Romualdo, B ishop of Tooi. We are greatly worried by the news that has reached us about the new sect called the Wayfarers in Christ. It is led by a Greek monk, who seems to have landed in Puglia carrying with him an unknown gospel; he has traveled, stage by stage, the entire length of Italy and should now be at the border of your diocese. The news we have received is very contradictory: some speak of him as a devil to be persecuted and banished, some as a truly Christian soul and almost a saint. The fact is that he goes by like a flame, igniting hopes here, boundless hatred there, and dividing our most beloved flock of the faithful and even the shepherds, so that especially among the clergy, and the lower clergy in particular, he has found help and even encouragement. However, because our charity, and experience gained in similar situations, advise us to be at the same time prudent and imprudent, and because the clergy itself is so divided, we urge, indeed order you to proceed thus : if the intentions of this sect truly seem to you good; if, in other words, you see in their preaching the signs of that revived Christian love which we have made one of the goals of our own pontificate, proceed with great wisdom so that your intervention may not lead to tragic results, and so that these Wayfarers in Christ are carefully protected by you against people who are too eager to be rid of them.

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If such a man, instead, threatens to stir up scandals and deadly divisions within our Church, then you should put in motion every legitimate means to make him either accept silence and submission, or turn around and go back where he came from. .

5. Romualdo, B ishop Alexander II.

o f Todi,

to

Pope

I have been able to make the acquaintance of those you call Wayfarers in Christ, who go through Italy preaching, as you state, a gospel never heard before; they were moving toward Todi when they were dispersed at Acquasparta by the men of the Duke of Spoleto; it seems they are now moving in the direction of either Gualdo or Gubbio. They were said to have numbered a thousand or more, but now they are reduced to fewer than two hundred, counting some women. The others are scattered, and if most of them do not return to their fields, it would be only because they fear their lords ' retribution. A fugitive who used to live with them told me that they conduct themselves by the highest principles and are wholly inspired by charity. They do not steal or pillage, they eschew any violence, they sleep on straw or on the bare ground, their faces always express joy even when they have nothing to eat, and the little they have is shared between them. When attacked they put up no resistance even if they are more numerous: no wonder then that more than a thousand people could be dispersed by no more than thirty armed horsemen. The castle folk are against them; the bond servants and serfs desirous of freedom are for them; even if they do not follow them, they help them secretly; many priests and our village folk do the same. They make a distinction between the visible and the invisible Church; they call the former Babylon, and the latter Jerusalem; they await a new pope they call the Lamb, who will destroy the former and regain the latter. They pity those who seek the comforts of this world and rebuke in their sermons Christians who are excessively rich and whoever demonstrates a desire for honors and power, including us priests, who should instead follow the example set by the apostles and relieve the misery of the poor and the wretched. Thus they call themselves "apostle-like" and us "un-gospellike." And in this connection they love to repeat sayings, one a reproach, one a command, which they attribute to Jesus and most likely have derived from that mysterious gospel of theirs: "And I saw in their midst not one that was thirsty," and "Remember I send you not to command, but to serve." I have been told that they actually call us the new Pharisees, and quote Matthew to support their statement, though they change it to read: "The Scribes and the Pharisees have set themsel ves in the chair of Peter." In other matters too they use the Gospel against us, as if Jesus had not spoken against the church of the Jews, but against the Church of today. Yet, mind you, they do not refuse to enter the holy places; on the contrary, if they are not kept out, they all take the Sacrament with a devotion even greater than ours. And they do not consider

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themselves rebels against the Holy Church: they desire simply that it be better. And as if to reproach us they often raise the cry: "Not everyone that saith, Lord, Lord ! And not those who have but those who give." Finally they state that they wander about in order to bear witness, so that whoever is thirsty for goodness and truth can join them in desiring the same things, begging God to hasten his j ustice. And to those who hesitate or are alarmed by their practices, they answer by quoting the Acts of the Apostles: "And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and one soul: neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things in common . . . for as many were possessors of lands or houses sold them . . . and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need." And to those who accused them of upsetting the laws and of inviting people to rebel against them and find human j ustice unjust, they answer with reference to this phrase of St. Paul: "If ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." In brief, they leave me perplexed in every way, yet I find in them nothing unorthodox or truly condemnable. That is, I do not think that they are spreading the seeds of heresy, only of a novel and more truthful form of piety. And if they really believe in unknown fifth gospels brought from Greece by the monk who leads them (but the person with whom I talked confuses them with our own), theirs reveals itself to be an innocent belief, since it does not in the least lead them away from the Scriptures; the only concern it may raise is due to the effect it may have on the discipline of those monks and priests who are eager for new things. Many already, as you know, have left their office and the regular exercise of their duties and are the most tenacious and fervent members of the new sect. In fact it seems that it is one of these, a certain Landolfo, of the monastery of San Clemente, who writes the strange appeals that are received, I am told, by the faithful of our churches, in accord with an idea suggested to him, I believe, by the messages to the Seven Churches spoken of in the Apocalypse. I have not seen them myself, and I am curious to see them. Only then could I be sure of what I begin to suspect, that essentially these Wayfarers are following our own Gospel, but they follow it so faithfully, as to render it unrecognizable.

6.

Gualberto, a canon of the capitular church of Gualdo, to Romualdo, B ishop of Todi. In accord with your wishes, I have inquired as far as I could into those who call themselves Wayfarers in Christ, and here briefly is what I have been able to gather. As you probably already know, they were on their way toward Gualdo, but were attacked again and some were taken; some are still scattered through our woods, surviving by petty theft and quick robberies. The Greek monk, who

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carries with him an unknown gospel and has aroused so much alarm, has disappeared with them, and with him his gospel. However, among those we have in custody here awaiting orders on how to deal with them, are two escaped monks, Venanzio and that Landolfo who was his first follower and who, when arrested, was leading the rearguard. Of the two he is the less untutored. It was he in fact, by his own admission, who wrote the strange appeals to our faithful as the sedition passed through our region. Of these no trace remains, as was to be expected; those who received them hastened, I think, to destroy them. We were unable to gather much about the two monks, either: both fervent, both unwilling to repent and return to their monasteries, they even refuse to admit that they have preached a heretical gospel . And even the papers we found on them, a few pages which seemed at first glance to contain nothing but odd fragments, are not sufficient to frame an idea of the aims of the new sect. In fact, I confess that I would not even have examined them carefully, since I consider them merely the ravings of errant and overexcited minds, had I not realized, looking at them more closely, that what had seemed to me only unfinished sentences, were in reality verses, albeit rough ones, composed according to no rule, as Landolfo said, who is their author (he told me he improvised them when they stopped to rest, beside the fire. Could you have imagined he was also a poet?), but all the more effective with credulous, ignorant people: the source, as I finally realized, of that sort of responsorial chant that this so-called Wayfarers in Christ used to sing as they moved in procession from village to village, and by means of which they stirred up our people. Since, however, a great many of them are still fragmentary and unpolished, practically no more than street-cries and vulgar rhymes, I have copied out for you here only those passages which seem more understandable to me and give a clearer idea of the aims of the Greek monk and his followers: This is a lament over the deplorable conditions of our time: The heavens have no rain and men no shepherd. Princes are mad dogs and the people scattered lambs. These are accusations against the rich: The Lord left the seas open that they might meet and ye have built walls between one field and the next. These are reproaches against us priests: Ye have seized the keys of truth, but enter not nor let others in. Ye have filled your convents with monks, but not your streets with love. Ye repeat that the Kingdom is not of this world, yet your lips repeat only words of this world. This might be a call to turn to their unknown gospel : Reading this book ye know not what it says,

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yet the book which ye read was written for you. These are gospel-like precepts, probably derived from that book: He who has killed one man is as if he had killed all men, and he who has saved one man is as if he had saved all men. Speak of the truth to those who thirst for it, and speak of love to those who hunger for it. Share your own with those who have nothing, help the suffering, lift up those who are down, awake the sleeping to God. Do good not only among your own or for yourself alone, nor turn your desire for perfection into ambition. Keep not for yourself what is revealed to you, because the Word has come and shown itself to all. As you can see, so far these are innocent matters that we might easily have adopted. But here are some other verses which, arranged in sequence as I have tried to do, not only reveal the secret aims of the sect, but, I believe, explains better than anything else the restlessness that has suddenly spread among our people: Because ye have despoiled the people, because ye have despoiled the country, because ye have dishonored our homes, ye have built your nests in high places. But this too must come from God, that men so soon grow weary, and the arrogant perish and so too the unj ust, while the righteous live still for their faith? Woe unto you, destroyer who are not destroyed, and unto you, predator who are not become prey. And woe unto you who let them oppress you and ask not for j ustice in the name of the Lord. Wake up, wake up, cast off your chains. Bought with no money, ye shall be freed without ransom. Why are ye as grass, trampled and making no sound? When the time of our mercy has come, he shall help us, when the day of salvation has come, he shall save us. He shall say to the prisoner: Come out, and to those cast in darkness: Issue unto the light. For he came to proclaim the good news to the poor, and to bind up the wounds of the spirits in pain,

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to console those who live in injustice, to lift up their hearts from dismay. If ye continue in his Promise, then are ye his disciples indeed. And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. See ye not that the grass can take root upon stone?

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l. From the Liber glossarum et expositionum sup er quattuor evangelia [A Book of G losses and Explications of the Four Gospels] , a ninth century manuscript preserved at Verviers. It is crammed with quotations from non-canonical gospels from which we have chosen only those which both include an explicit reference to the fifth gospel and contain things not to be found in apocryp ha heretofore known. We have applie d the same criteria to the rest of this section, which we wish to be composed as far as possible of direct quotations. In the fifth gospel, to those who asked Him when the Kingdom He was preaching would come, Christ would answer: "When 'This is mine' and 'This is yours ' are no longer heard." At other times he would answer: "When you and I are no longer heard." And people were frightened when they heard Him say these things (Annotation to Mark, I : 15). In place of the words about the sins against the Holy Ghost, the fifth gospel has these words : "And I say unto you that all will be forgiven, except the aridity of the heart, the sin against love. If indeed ye speak with the tongues of angels and have faith enough to move mountains, if ye spend all ye have to buy food for the poor, but have not love, ye are nothing" (Annotation to Mark, 3: 28-29). After He resurrects the daughter of Jairus, in the fifth gospel Jesus says these words : "Where do pigeons die? Have you ever seen the body of a pigeon in the streets of the city? Even so it shall be with you. Ye shall die, but none shall see your death" (Annotation to Mark, 5: 42). After He says: "Every one that exalteth himself shall be abased, etc.," Jesus in the fifth gospel exhorts us: "Therefore, when thou art bidden to a dinner, sit not down in the highest seats, that thou mayest not be told to give place to

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another man. Go, rather, and sit down in the lowest, so that the host may say unto thee, Friend, draw nearer to me" (Annotation to Luke, 18: 14). 2. From the Descriptio of the convent of Sigena, Catalonia, now destroyed ( l i th century). In the chapter room, next to the fresco of the summoning of the apostles, the abbess had another painted with Judas grim and reluctant, and Jesus who, as it is written in the fifth gospel, looks at him tenderly and exhorts him thus: "Follow me all the same. Dost thou not know that there is love enough in me for both of us?" And this is the motto of our convent. 3. From the Facetiae o f an anonymous Spanish author ( 1 3th century). The abbess of Santa Maria de Tarrasa asked the prior of San Saturnino in the vicinity of Gerona to lend her a commentary of St. John' s Apocalypse. But because he refused to lend it and asked the messenger how it was that in their convent they even found time to read commentaries, she sent him an illumination depicting this saying from the fifth gospel: "Woe unto you, ye doctors of the law, who are like a dog lying in the manger who neither eats nor lets the oxen eat." But she had the prior' s head painted in place of the dog ' s head. 4. From The Rules of Piety by Alonso Campana (Madrid, 16 8'3 ) . I t i s said i n the fifth gospel that, hearing that the Magi were bringing gifts to Jesus, Herod was frightened, because it was the first time that the rich brought gifts to the poor. In the same gospel it is said that Jesus saw a poor man who stretched out his begging hand to a Pharisee. B ut the latter was absorbed in prayer and walked on. Jesus asked him how it happened that he had not helped the poor man. The Pharisee answered that he was so occupied in serving God, that he had very little time to be good.

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From Mirabilia Angliae [The Wonders of England] by an unknown author ( 1 0th- I I th century). Much holier is another order, the order of the Grandmountesians, also called by the common folk the order of the poor brothers, that came from France and was founded by St. Stephen, who when he composed its rules, they say, drew inspiration from the saying in the last gospel : "If ye leave not yourself also, ye have done nothing yet." Which is written, in fact, above the entrance to their monastery. None among them is called prior, but the oldest is obliged to govern according to the maxim: "Whoever wishes to be first among you, must be the servant of all the others." And since he need not rule over possessions, of which they have none, but only care for the souls of his brethren, he truly acts like one who feels responsible to God, and goes about exhorting them with the following saying from that gospel of theirs: "Be not satisfied until ye are able to look at one another with love," because, "ye shall be measured according to your love." They live in seclusion and do not leave it except in pairs, because "woe unto him who is alone: who shall raise him up if he falls?" They live only on donations, not on tithings or taxation, and what they receive they also give away gratefully, "opening their hands to whoever asks," because, they say, "it is sweeter to give than to receive." And if they have no leftover food "they give a beggar what is on their own plate"-and not just "what is extra," as do those who misread the Gospel-and for a day or more they are content to fast. They keep no animals except for bees, both because they "do not deplete the pastures of their neighbors," and, they say, because, "sharing everything as they do" and rejoicing merrily in the meadows among the flowers, they "remove sorrow" (Sirach, 30: 23) and "are a sign of brotherly love." They gather three times a day and once at night to pray together, and before each reading of the office they meditate the saying on which their Rule is based, and then this other one, taken from the last of the gospels, the fifth: "Lord, if I can offer you nothing else, I offer you my sins." In a similar vein, among their hymns there is one that begins: "Lord, grant me to know with what love I should love you." And among the maxims they meditate upon most often, from the gospel they have, there are the words of Jesus to his disciples: "To those who ask you what signs ye bring with you, answer thus: 'It is peace we bring' . " Except for the sick, they always take food together, and on the walls of their dining hall, in perpetual warning, this verse from their last gospel is written: "Ye followed me as far as the cenacle, but not as far as the cross."

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6.

From a graffito on the cliffside church of the Good News, at Massafra, near Taranto ( 1 1 th century). Jesus said that sanctity is a tree that has its crown in heaven and its roots in the desert. And Jesus said in the fifth gospel: "Blessed are ye who looked for me in the desert." 7. This i s the second o f the two documents I found in Cologne, among the papers in the rectory . It lacks the name of die writer' s or the addressee, but has a note in my priest's handwriting: "From Maulbronn, end of the 1 4th century." Do you remember Friar Albert, our old librarian, for whom lending us a book was l ike tearing away a piece of his own soul? He hovered over them with a kind of possessive jealousy, preventing us from even getting close to the shelves, as if just brushing against them would contaminate them. Now that he is dead, his job has fallen to me. And you can imagine how I took advantage of it to finally get to know our library and go rooting about even where we were forbidden to go before. You can also imagine that I have discovered things we no longer knew we had: among other things, many old texts of Scholasticism and even an Aristotle in Latin, quite accurate, which I could have copied for you, knowing how much it would interest you. The greatest surprise, however, were some books which he kept hidden in a second row behind the others. Nobody knew about it, but we possess a real collection of scriptures not accepted in the Catholic canon: among others, a copy of the Acts of Pilate, and of a so called Infantia Salvatoris [Our Savior ' s Childhood] , s o popular and widely read that I need not describe i t to you. But look: appended to this same volume, I found something which was, frankly, disconcerting to me: a long piece entitled The Wisdom of Jesus, which at first sight seemed to me the translation into our vernacular of some of the discourses of Jesus, but later, after a careful comparison with the Gospels, I was convinced that it too was derived from a book not included in the Catholic canon. Yet I hesitate to call it simply apocryphal : the Pseudoevangelists knew Christ in His humanity not in His divinity, and through legends, not doctrines. This work, instead, seems full of wonderful teachings so very similar to those of Jesus that, ever since I read it, I have been asking myself whether it might not spring from the same root from which the Gospels of the Scriptures came. I have asked myself, that is, and I still do, whether it is a fabrication, a mere counterfeit, concealed by the language it is written in better than it would be by

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Latin. But there is something, in the words spoken by Jesus, which seems beyond human language and allows for no counterfeiting: whoever has tried it has only come up with awkward stammering, as the apocrypha show. I have also asked myself whether it is permitted to presume that the four Evangelists have not transmitted everything to us. But does it not happen to you too, to sense in the Scriptures silences unbearable to our devotion, and to desire something more, that would enlarge and refine the testimony we are given? Once I heard that there exists an unpublished gospel which reveals itself anew when men need it. And the master who spoke of it to me-in my longing for something certain and tangible-insisted that it means only that "the Word is without end" and never ceases to seem new to us. You be the judge as to whether the few verses I send you do not justify both theories. 1 . Jesus said: "Love builds." 2. Jesus said: "Be not satisfied until we may look upon each other with love." 3 . "Ye shall be measured according to your love." 4. "Love says not: 'This is mine,' it says: 'This is yours. ' " 5 . He said: "To give i s more blessed than to receive, and no feeling is more impious than self-interest." 6. He said: "Faith is the beginning, but love is the completion. Do good and hope, despairing of nothing." 7 . "My life is my sign and charity is my footprint. I have not come to set down rules, I have come to set an example." 8. Jesus said: "None shall go unpardoned. " 9. That same day, seeing one who wept: "Man," he said, "ye weep, yet I am here ! " 1 0 . Jesus said: "We live o n the opposite shore." 1 1 . "But there shall be a storm on the sea where you pass." 1 2. "Go and preach until someone listens to you; only stones belong in the desert." 1 3. "Ye were in the desert and I called you, I brought you back to life from your solitude." 1 4. "Did I bring you out of the desert to send you into a forest? I said to you only, Draw nearer to me." 1 5 . He said: "Who has made of me one who divides?" 1 6. "What has been destroyed shall be born again through me,

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and what has been sick shall live again." 8.

With the title "The Four Words of St. John of the Cross," this letter (if it is a letter) appeared for the first time in the posthumous edItion of the Cartas espirituales [Spiritual Writing s] , printed in 1 6 1 9, about thirty years after the death of the Saint. However, the four "words" had already figured among the maxims of the Avisos y sentencias [Sp iritual Precepts espirituales and Sayin g s], although without any ind ication as to theIr source. You have been my teacher and my confessor for too long not to know my soul, my impulses, my faith. You also know my vices, my sins, my faults. To whom, then, if not to you, should I open my heart sincerely? I am reproached for having used as a basis for my lectures the so-called fifth gospel, known to very few and commonly considered apocryphal. Now, I do not deny that I have read and meditated upon it, nor have I any difficulty confessing to you that, in all good faith, I still consider it authentic. You know that an apocryphal work gives itself away immediately for what it is: something that picks up only the most important truths of the Gospels. In spite of which, the apocryphal work always says too much. What instead has always impressed me most, in the Gospels, is the use they make of silence. However, for the instruction of my students and the conduct of my life, I have drawn from that book only two maxims, which I consider very beautiful. The first says: "Ye shall follow me as far as the cenac1e. But will ye follow me as far as the cross?" These are words addressed by Christ to his disciples while they walk toward Jerusalem, and they follow immediately the words reported by the other Evangelists as well: "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?" Do you not find that, besides being words that the Lord may very well have said, they express the essence of the experience of every Christian, called upon always to complete the walk from the cenac1e to the cross? Meditating on them we understand what it is that urges us on and what, as Christians, defines our limits and saddens us; we understand how it is that no matter how righteous, no matter how pure and holy our life may be, we feel we are missing something, we are inwardly dissatisfied; and we understand the source of this ever-present yearning which, though we are sinners, makes us desirous to imitate Christ by walking with him that stretch of road to the cross. The other maxim, which is to be found after the verses dealing with the Law, says: "I have not come to set down rules, I have come to set an example. " And i t reminds m e o f what you wrote at the beginning o f one o f your early works: that Christ did not leave us precepts to follow, but a life to imitate. I also

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remember reading, or hearing you contend, that we have made bad use of the Gospels by drawing from them rules, prohibitions, a law, in the observance of which we believe all our merit consists, forgetting what is written in the Letter to the Hebrews about the Law: "The law made nothing perfect." But that you may better appreciate that book, here are two more maxims which, I am sure, you will deem divinely inspired once you have read them. The first says : "We live on the opposite shore," and expresses very clearly, I think, our condition and the basis of our path to perfection, our living in the world without belonging to the world. Through the second I have at last understood what that waiting for the Kingdom, which is mentioned so often in the Gospel, truly means : the waiting for Love to take the place of the Law. It is to be found in a place where Christ explains that the essence of His gospel consists in Love, and it goes this way (I find it very beautiful) : "Ye shall be without the Law, but not without me."

THE GREEN BRANCH

1. Teodoro of Tortona, Abbot of Bobbio, to Benedetto of Monforte, B ishop of Vercell i . (The whole event took place between 1 2 1 9, the year in which the building of the cathedral of Sant' Andrea in Vercell i began, and M arch 9, 1 224, the date of the interrogation of Pierre o f Narbonne. I was led to the discovery of the entire set of letters, which i s n o w in the State Archives in M il an, by a n entry i n M uratori ' s Annals, according t o which in those years a man was arrested and tried in Pavia who, having first been mistaken for a fanatic follower of the heretical sect of the Cathars, was later accused of spreading word of a non­ canonical gospel. Muratori adds that in the end the man was set free, "no actual heresy having been found in h im.")

Do you wish to know what we think of the whole affair you have acquainted us with concerning the so-called Pseudoapostles? Just a little while ago Friar Eligio, the head, indeed the father of our copyists, after another morning spent working on their papers, exclaimed: "And if we cut off the green branch, what shall we do with the withered one?" No, we do not think that the pages you sent us belong to a heretical gospel . Even where we have seen something that might belong to an unknown book, it is primarily a matter of words taking on a different tone, becoming more intense. For instance, where it says: "There, I have set fire to the world," which sounds so strange and so dangerous to you, do you not recall that it is already written in Luke, though less concisely and more plausibly? And even the words: "The poor are my voice," should recall to you in their meaning, if not in their sound, many other, similar sayings of Jesus . And do you think that as such, by their meaning, they can authenticate an unpublished gospel, should such a thing really exist? We have gotten the impression, however, from the little that your pages reveal, that the book you allude to must be, rather, a kind of compendium that 95

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brings together one Evangelist and another with what we might call a more earthly intent. To mention one instance, if you look at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, you realize immediately that he has borrowed from both Luke and Matthew, but in combining them he has confused them in this way: "Blessed be ye poor, for yours is this Kingdom. Blessed be ye meek, for yours is the earth. Blessed are ye that hunger, for now ye shall be filled." But what primarily makes these pages different certainly lies in the way they have been translated. Whoever did it either is not an expert at that kind of work, or is inclined to do it in a tendentious way; that is, he is either not sophisticated enough, or too biased. For instance (and I am intentionally choosing a very insignificant example) where he says: "Woe unto you, hypocritical priests and shepherds," you need only read: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! " and we are back to a familiar Matthew and to a language that is used less loosely-and in any event sounds less grating. Try it yourself and you will see how often a slight modification is enough to make you feel you are on familiar ground. Still, as you get to the end of this compendium of inaccuracies, you get a rather unpleasant impression and a feeling, I would venture to say, akin to uneasiness . As if those pages were more or less familiar as to the letter, yet different as to the spirit, more daring, more disturbing, more stinging and disconcerting, and, one might say, woven of more inflexible fibers. To the point that for several days now I have been asking myself: "What on earth is there about the Gospels, that it is enough to read them in a slightly different translation, or just to hear them read in a different tone, and they suddenly sound seditious?" 2. Adalberto of Chieri, B i shop of Saluzzo, to Benedetto of Monforte, Bishop of Vercell i .

W e learned from your letter that some disciples o f that fellow Pierre, come from Provence to preach new gospels and new advents, were lately approaching our town, so we arrested about ten of them and are keeping them in custody, awaiting word from you on how to proceed. To tell you the truth, I feel perplexed: not so much because such a form of heresy has never been seen in our region, but because, if it is a heresy, it re sembles those fevers that burn the body without a trace of other symptoms. In other words, in these people you call Pseudoapostles, though they themselves use no other names than Apostolics, there is something hard to define, slippery, unsettling, that makes it difficult for me to proceed with justice. To all appearances they profess no other dogmas than ours. Yet they claim that with all our dogmatizing we have made a remote God out of a Christ close to us. They try to behave according to the Gospels in everything, and their wish

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to live the way the apostles did does not seem to me, frankly, deserving of suspicion, except for the fact that we have abandoned that way of l iving. Meanwhile not only do they consider us worldly, but they dream of a universal priesthood of all believers, in which everyone could go about preaching, wherever they happen to be, even in a stable; and they remind those who object that the only time Christ was worshipped while he was alive was in a stable. Furthermore, is it a sin in itself to dream of a new advent? Is it not written of in the Scriptures? And what would we, the disciples of Christ, become, were we not to work daily to allow Him to manifest Himself, and were we without this kind of constant dissatisfaction that does not allow us to rest on the things we have already accomplished? Yet how should we not feel offended when we hear the reproach that in order to found a Church we have lost the Kingdom? And in particular, how should we give credence to these visionaries who not only think it imminent, a Kingdom in which Love will replace the Law (as they say), but claim that, since the Gospels we have have not been sufficient "to make everything new," it is necessary for the good news to manifest itself again? Which is where their ambiguity becomes more evident, because sometimes they say that it is necessary to preach the gospel anew, sometimes they state that it is necessary to preach a new gospel ; sometimes, that is, they give the impression of speaking about the ones we already have, sometimes they seem to refer to a totally new one. And if we compel them to explain what the novelty consists in, they answer that our gospels converted us to Christ, but were not enough to make us change our l ives. And if we object that in our Gospels to convert means to change one' s life, they answer that if it were really so, the kingdom we are waiting for would already be here. Nor do they add anything else, nor do they show any knowledge of the unpublished gospel you speak of, and only once did they use a phrase that they believe to be evangelical, but is not in the Scriptures: "Be as the birds and the beasts of the field, who are happy in this: in what they do not own." This is more or less the essence of what I have heard them say. And before this sum of incongruities and truths, and of justice which becomes injustice for the sake of jus t ice, I find myself, as I told you, perplexed as to how to pass j udgment on them, and I even tell myself that, were we to declare them heretics, we would not be far from declaring the Gospels themselves heretical . 3. Benedetto o f Monforte, B i shop o f Vercel l i , t o Brother Teobaldo of Cremona, representative of the Inquisition for the province of Lombardy.

Among the papers I am sending to you there is an opinion written by Teodoro, the saintly abbot of the Benedictines of Bobbio, about some pages of the supposed fifth gospel which the so-called Apostolics had been disseminating. I

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had sent them to him because I thought I had heard that an old copy of that gospel was in his convent. It is extraordinary that his answer contains no mention of it. In any case his impressions wholly coincide with mine. But since he has not yet returned those pages (I suppose he wants to examine them further), you must content yourself for now with his and my opinion. Besides, I do not believe that your knowing them would be of much use to you: they contain short pieces, mostly fragmentary, sometimes like exercises in translation or a rough draft of one. They could at most have been used as a point of departure for prayer or meditation, as we do with a Gospel passage, while they guarded them jealously (and this is what is most disconcerting and makes them most liable to suspicion), carrying them under their clothes and even upon their breast, as if they were amulets. I am sending you in addition a letter from Adalberto, the saintly bishop of Saluzzo, and in this case too, as you shall see, his opinion agrees with mine in great part. From what I have said so far, you must realize that I do not have the book, nor was I ever able to trace its whereabouts. At the time I made my first move, at your request, that Friar Pierre who you said had come from Provence to disseminate and preach it, had fled, I was informed. And the few followers who are still together state they know nothing about his whereabouts. And I am not surprised, after the night raid by the Marquis of Monferrato and the bloody massacre. When I found them, on the banks of the Sesia, in an abandoned monastery, they were a few human larvae tormented by hunger. Yet even so they preserved a spark of courage that still mystifies me, and reaffirmed their principles, and their fidelity to their principles, with a sort of fearless humility, or indomitable meekness, which at times approached obstinacy and pride. Mind you, I would not like to create misunderstanding in their regard. They are not fanatics, let alone violent men. Nor do they question a single one of our dogmas. All the same, in their attitude you sense an inflexibility that resembles insubordination, as if from the depth of their innocent eyes, in the words they say, in the way they say them, there shone the even-tempered, tranquil, inviolable intransigence of those of whom St. Paul says that they do not feel themselves to be "under the law, but led by the Spirit," and this fact led them to consider themselves the only "sons of God without rebuke in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation." You probably detect in my words a lingering perplexity: as if I were at the same time hesitant to accuse them of pride, and inclined to do so. And in reality, it is so: because I agree with them in so far as they summon us to a j ustice that "exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees," and I grow irritated when they call us the new Pharisees. I approve them in my heart and thinking of them I say to myself: "Should we deplore that very evangelical love of poverty that we praise so much in our priests when it is these people who show it to us? and detest them because they call upon us to live according to the Gospel and not only to

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speak according to the Gospel?" Yet at the same time, I know not how, the suspicion creeps into me that evangelism itself can become a temptation and degenerate into stubbornness and ambitious rebellion. In short, I find them too fearless, and, so to speak, unyielding; I find in their words far more strength than resignation, and above all a tendency to consider the Gospels a book of impatience far more than patience. Because, it is curious, but, spoken, quoted by them, the Gospels cease to be a gentle book, inspiring meekness, it becomes a vigorous book, a source of dissidence. Yet, I confess, as soon as I have said this, I am seized by the fear of having gone too far, and having presented them in a false light. Indeed, I tried to reread the Gospels and, perhaps because of my conversation with these men, I found them quite different from the way I remembered them. How? you might ask. Well, up to now I had always thought of the Gospels as a book of devotion, and now I have discovered that they are a source of antagonistic virtues. I have nothing to add, and I await your word as to what I should do with the men we have arrested. They are almost all peasants, and if we are not going to prosecute them, we should send them back to their land. For the moment, however, since they consider themselves freedmen and have no desire whatsoever to go back to being serfs, especially in the territories of the Marquis of Monferrato, I have found them employment among the builders of Sanl' Andrea, the new church that is rising in our city. 4. Antoine, of the chapter of S. Justine, in Narbonne to Teobaldo of Cremona, rep resentative of the Inquisition for the province of Lombardy. Yes, I knew this Friar Pierre of Narbonne whom you are preparing to try as a heretic. Yes, in many ways he seemed to me an unusual friar, but I never had the impression that he belonged to the sect we sometimes call Cathars, sometimes Albigensians, which we have lately destroyed. From what I know of him, and have heard about him, I do not even believe that he preaches an unusual gospel: only the way he preaches it is unusual, actually claiming that it should be put into practice because, as he maintains, and as he has insisted every time we talked together (you know I was his confessor), Christ did not leave us doctrines to follow, but a life to imitate. Here is another of his maxims; you be the judge of it: "Know ye that ours is not a religion, but a service." And, although he does not claim that it is in the Gospels, he does claim that it is as if it were there.

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5. Proceedings o f the interrogation o f Pierre o f Narbonne, recorded by the notary Ambrogio Parisi, dated March 9,

1 224.

Brother Pierre of Narbonne, as he wishes to be called although he does not belong to any regular order, brought to judgment before Friar Teobaldo of Cremona, Representative of the Inquisition for the Province of Lombardy, after having refused to swear, because of the injunction in the Gospel of St. Matthew, promised to tell the pure and naked truth about himself alone, not wishing to inform against or reveal the name of any person who either was a follower of the same sect or offered him food or shelter during his peregrinations. Questioned by the same inquisitor as to why he wished to be called brother, he admitted not being a member of any order, but added that all Christians should call each other brothers in Christ, as they did in the and Acts of the Apostles. Questioned as to why he and his brothers designated themselves the New Apostles and proselytized under that name, he answered that it was others who so designated them because of the kind of life they lived, but for themselves they only accepted the name Apostolics. Questioned as to why they had also wished to be called Little Ones, he answered that the disciples of Jesus had been called thus by Him, according to what we read in Matthew 1 0:42. Questioned as to whether he considered the Apostolics more perfect than those who remained obedient to Holy Church, he answered that he considered them friends of God and obedient to what is enjoined by Jesus when He says : "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another." Questioned as to how he considered those who fed and sheltered them, he answered with this verse: "Whosoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no way lose his reward." Questioned as to what he thought of the authority of Holy Church and whether he would be ready to obey the prohibition against the new sect, he did not wish to give a direct answer, only a conditional one, stating that he j udged the Church holy only in what she does in obedience to the Gospel . Questioned then as to whether he faithfully kept the precepts of Holy Church, he answered that Jesus did not leave precepts to follow, but a life to imitate. Questioned as to whether he intended to change his way of life, he answered that walking the world as a pilgrim, dressing simply, and preferring poverty, was not contrary to the example of Christ and the ways to which his Apostles and disciples held.

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Questioned a s to whether the present pope has a s much authority a s St. Peter, he answered affirmatively as to his right to authority, but indicated doubt as to the actual exercise of it: that is, that he would have the same authority as Peter were he a saint l ike Peter. But he added that if he were a saint he would renounce all authority. Questioned as to whether he would agree to live in another manner were St. Peter himself to impose it upon him, he answered that surely St. Peter would never make such an imposition, both because he had lived in the same manner and because he had never imposed anything on anybody. Questioned as to whether he considered his way more perfect than that of St. Ambrose, St. Gregory, and many other saints and doctors of Holy Church, he answered that he would not be able nor would he wish to compare himself to them. but that St. Gregory, St. Ambrose, and the other saints, if they were truly saints and judged as saints, would consider his way a saintly one, inasmuch as it was the way of the early Church, which surely existed in a state of sanctity up to the papacy of st. Sylvester. Questioned again on the same point, he answered that the Church of the early Christians was good, chaste, poor, and persecuted, and from St. Sylvester on it had been good, rich, and honored, but today it was rich and depraved. While the Church of the Apostolics or Little Ones was again good, chaste, poor, persecuted, and maligned, as in early times. Questioned as to whether he considered it lawful to preach, thus usurping the office of the shepherds, he answered that there were neither shepherds nor faithful, as there were none in the early Church, but all are permitted to bear witness, as long as they are faithful to the Scriptures. Questioned as to whether he believed in a universal priesthood of the faithful, he answered affirmatively under the above condition. Invited to specify that condition, he said: "To live according to Christ and draw inspiration from the Scriptures." Questioned as to whether the Apostolics considered themselves free form the authority of Holy Church and the precept of obedience, he answered that the Church was the universal assembly of the faithful united only by the bonds of inner obedience. Questioned again as to whether the Apostolics are willing to conform to the mandates of the S upreme Pontiff and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, he answered that Christ in His time had found a High Priest and a priestly hierarchy, but having refused to conform He had been put to death. He also answered that obedience had been a necessary thing in order to preserve Christian unity, but that many things that had been done out of fear would soon be done out of love. Questioned as to whether he hoped for a renewal of the Church, he answered yes. Questioned as to what a renewed Church would be, he answered that it would be made up of living men and not of stones. Questioned again as to what it would be like, he answered that it would be like the Church of the early

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Christians, when all were part of the faithful and all were priests, and all things were held in common, and Christ was all in all . Questioned a s t o when such a Church would begin, h e answered that i t had already started with the Apostolics. Questioned as to which are the visible signs: "The poor have the gospel preached to them." Questioned as to whether in such a renewed Church a different gospel from ours would be professed, he answered affirmatively but conditionally, in the sense that the four Gospels presently used would be read with new eyes. Questioned then as to whether the Apostolics considered themselves free to interpret the Gospels outside the j urisdiction of the Church hierarchy, he answered by quoting from the Gospel of St. John: "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Questioned again on this point, he answered that the faithful of the renewed Church would have grace and charity sufficient to bring the gospel to perfection. Questioned as to whether he thought the Gospel was perfectible, he answered affirmatively but conditionally: in the sense that it was imperfect only in so far as those who profess it are unfaithful to it. Questioned as to whether such a new gospel would reveal new things, he answered with the saying from the Acts of the Apostles: "The word of God increased" and with that of St. Paul : "The word is without end." Questioned again on this point, he answered that the truths only potentially present in the Gospel give fruit in the soil of human souls. And the more charity increases in these, the more the truths of the Gospel are revealed. Questioned as to whether he was a follower of an unknown fifth gospel, he answered he followed and professed only the four Gospels of the New Testament. These, however, j Udging from how the Christians of our time profess them, are for all practical purposes still unknown. When some verses of such an unknown gospel were read to him, he answered that they can also be found in the four Gospels of the New Testament. However, the Christians of today have forgotten them and cannot recognize them, because they do not read them. Reread the same and other verses found upon the people of his sect, he admitted that they had interpreted them somewhat freely, that is, according to the spirit and not the letter, and in accord with the aims of a renewed Church. Questioned as to whether this was the fifth gospel they were accused of spreading, he answered that he could not say anything regarding its title; as for the substance he did not think it was sinful, since its intention was to acquaint us more intimately with the Scriptures and as it were to reveal to us the truth of truth. Questioned again on the same point and having been shown how in the book they preach they had not only changed the Gospel, but had also added things that were not in it, he answered that the Word being without end, as He

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who dictated it is without end, it is not enough to read the Gospels, we ought to interrogate them, converse with them, to make them answer us. And when they do, they not only tell us things we had not understood before, but it is as if they were adding truth to truth, as every Christian knows who has truly meditated upon them. When answered that in that way the word would be full of fifth gospels, he answered that that was exactly so, because each time the Gospels are read without prejudices and with love, their meaning turns green again and truth renews itself. Questioned again as to whether the Apostolics considered themselves free to interpret Scriptures outside the authority of the Church hierarchy, he answered quoting this other saying: "The word of God is not bound." Questioned then as to whether he was willing to admit that only to Holy Church has the keeping and guardianship of the Holy Scriptures and the patrimony of the faith been entrusted, he answered affirmatively, provided one added that that patrimony must be made to bear fruit (as Christ taught in one of his parables), which the Church of today does not do. Questioned as to his greatest expectation, he answered that he was awaiting a Council and a renewed Church. Questioned as to whether he knew what punishment he could expect, he answered that he did, but that Christ too had said: "Whosoever is near me is near the fire, and whosoever is far from me is far from the Kingdom." Questioned as to where he had found such a saying, which is not in the canonical Gospels, he admitted that it was written in the new gospel which the members of his sect were preaching.

THE GOSPEL OF THE POPES

At the close of my introductory letter, I told you that, if the fifth gospel exists, it can only be in Rome. At the moment this may have seemed to you just a catchy phrase; instead, it was said with good reason, because there is an impressive tradition that locates in Rome, either hidden or forgotten, a gospel brought there by St. Peter and left in the safekeeping of his successors. The Christian writers of the first centuries speak of it, and many medieval texts mention it in various ways. Only in the fifteenth century, as you will soon see when you read The Meeting at Lyons, does the tradition crumble and become a source of derision. I have put together for you the most representative and essential selection I could of such a sequence of voices: that of a naive traveller and collector of legends, of a chronicler, of a cynical priest, and of a Franciscan, Friar Eligio, who states that he has seen the gospel with his own eyes, and whose testimony, dictated, it seems, by perfectly good faith (and why doubt a man who, for the sake of such certitude, ruined the rest of his life ?), also, in my opinion, authenticates the others. It too, I admit, might have seemed dubious to me-the 14th century is full of prophetic and visionary friars-had I not gone back to the handwritten inventory that Friar Eligio says he helped compile, which the anonymous author of the text that concerns him limited himself to consulting only in printed form. While for the first one hundred nine boxes the inventory is extremely neat, when one gets to the last one notices a sort of erasure that practically blanks out the equivalent of an entire line. Could it be then, that after much indecision, they finally agreed not to mention the book, "and prevent the present pope from selling it too " ?

I. From the Itinera [Travels] by Euchery of Lyons (9th century).

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At Angers, on a reliquary, among the four evangelists, Christ is represented as the fifth evangelist. Christ, in higher relief, looks straight ahead, holding in his right hand a book titled: "The Eternal Gospel." When I questioned the abbot as to the meaning of that symbol, he answered that true Christians meditate upon and follow faithfully the four Gospels that were handed down to us, but pray to Christ meanwhile that the fifth gospel may be completed; he said so not because this really exists, but to signify that truth is so great that only Christ himself can present it fully. During my visit to Corbie, I was shown an illumination that depicts a spring flowing downward into four rivers. On the banks of each river people are seen bending down to drink, but at the source the inscription appears: "Here begins the Eternal Gospel." And the monk who made that illumination informed me that near Rome there exists a spring with four mouths called the spring of the Gospels. But it dries up if each pope, upon his election, does not betake himself as a pilgrim to drink the water of that spring. And in Rome, they say, there is a book called the Eternal Gospel, kept in a box which opens with four keys. And every time a pope opens and reads that Gospel, they say in Rome, Christ rises again. And they say that our faith will not wane as long as there is a pope who uses those keys. Here too, in the vicinity of Lyons, I have heard tell of an Eternal Gospel. Because, they say here, the Gospels are really five, and the fifth is a book that the Lord has left open. All of us write it with our deeds, and each generation adds a word to it. 2. From the Historia B . Gregorii VII Papae [ Life o f the Blessed Pope Gregory V I I ] by Beroald of St. Blaise. (The election of Gregory V 11 took place in 1 073).

In those very days the Libel' Pontificalis was rediscovered, which most thought had been destroyed, since for so many years the memory of it had lapsed. And to make the beginning of the pontificate more memorable, the rumor spread that the gospel brought to Rome by St. Peter and left in the safekeeping of his successors had also been found. And since it is said that it disappears when the Church becomes corrupt, and reappears whenever it corrects and renews itself, the discovery was also numbered among the omens of the times. 3.

From De nugis curialium [ Witty Anecdotes o f the Curia] of Walter M ap. (The episode took place during the Lateran Council of 1 1 79).

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There were at the Council some Waldensians, uncouth, ignorant people, thus named after their leader, Waldo. They presented a book in the Gallic tongue containing, according to them, the translation of the Gospels, and insisted on being granted licence to preach it. I, although the humblest among those present, grew impatient at seeing their petition discussed so seriously, until, with the help of a good prelate, I was allowed to interrogate them publicly and had two of them brought before me. I started with very simple questions, knowing them to be like those birds which hop around fearlessly because they do not see the nets close by: "Do you believe in God the Father?" "We do." "And in the Son?" "We do." "And in the Holy Spirit?" "We do." "And in the four holy Gospels?" "We do." At this point loud laughter exploded all around us. The fools did not know that the term "to believe" applies only to the articles of faith, and that the Gospels are not included among the articles in the Credo. They go about two by two, barefooted, wearing rough tunics, poor followers of a poor Christ. They have no fixed home, nor churches for worship, because according to them Jesus is supposed to have said: "Never had I a house to live in" and "My harvest grows not before the temple." And their naIve followers are sure that a Kingdom is near in which Love will replace the Law. They are almost entirely ignorant of our dogmas and the rules by which they live are reduced to two lines in a foreign tongue: Autra ley d' aqui enant prus non deven haver rna ensegre Jeshu Christ e far 10 sio plager. [Henceforth no other law have they but follow Jesus Christ, his will obey] . Certainly, they could have no humbler start: they barely know how to walk! But we cannot let them in-we would have to get out! I was charged by my prelate to examine the gospel they profess to preach, and in it, in my opinion, ignorance is conjoined with malice: it insinuates many things that the Canonical Gospels do not state, other things are translated so dangerously that to condemn it would not be enough: one would have to abolish it. I told my good prelate so, but he laughed at me and asked whether I did not mistake it for that fifth gospel that the popes decided-so they say in Rome-to keep hidden, so as not to cause an upheaval in the Christian world. 4. An article entitled "L' inventario di Assisi," [The Assisi I nventory] which appeared in Studi Francescani. I, 4 ( 1 962), signed S. F.

Of Eligio Regaldi of Cortona, the dissident Franciscan who dared publish a bull of excommunication against a pope, we have the said bull, two letters, and a portrait. Of the letters, the first, in good 1 4th century Latin, was written from Assisi when he was still a novice in the convent of St. Francis; the second, in the

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vernacular, was written upon his return from Avignon, where he had tried in vain to dispute the decretal in which John XXII ("James called John the Pope," the friar calls him slyly) refused to bind the Church to the precept of poverty and definitely condemned the Franciscan who strictly observed it. This letter is quite harsh and in places beautiful as well; in any case it gives us an adequate notion of the ideas of Friar Eligio ("And I say that Christ and his apostles, in following the preaching of Christ, practiced such great and deep poverty, that they were neither proprietors nor lords of one single thing: and this I believe to be the apostolic life. And I saw that Christ, who was a peaceful king and made his disciples apostles of peace, set them apart from any exercise of power and from all civil and worldly matters; and this I believe to be evangelical doctrine"). As for the portrait, it is in the smaller cloister of St. Claire, near Fermo, where, in a Last Judgment badly damaged by humidity, a Franciscan in the clutches of a devil catches the eye. The devil is struggling to bring him down to hell, and the friar stands there motionless, fearless, not to say abstracted. And although the painter was intent on portraying his pride, the true temper of our friar is nevertheless visible: a dry, bone face, full of inner vigor, which, if it does not entirely belie the pride, does express something different. In this portrait Friar Eligio appears to be around forty. Six years, then, after he convened the so-called Council of Fermo, a gathering of dissidents of various creeds who were in accord with his bull of excommunication. The latter is very succinct and may disappoint at first sight: the pope and the Curia are said to stand "excommunicated" because they are simoniac, corrupt, and "in sin of fornication," and above all because they countervene the Gospel, maintaining that the poverty of Christ and his disciples "was an example and not a command," and therefore cannot be made into a doctrine applicable to the Church of today. The text, I repeat, is rather colorless and may be disappointing. Even on the topics of poverty and secular power-Friar Eligio's fixations-the fiery tone of the Avignon letter is absent. And one might even doubt that it was written by him, did not one remark, one brief parenthetical statement, guarantee its authenticity. The statement, which reads, "The popes of Avignon are without the gifts of the Spirit because in leaving Rome they left the Gospel behind," is, on the other hand, so toned down as to seem insignificant, unless one has read the earlier of the two letters. This was written when Friar Eligio was about twenty. Very probably he was about to be ordained and almost surely he was one of the amanuenses in charge of copying manuscripts and running the library; this explains, I believe, not only the clarity of his handwriting, but also the fact that, while still a novice, he could have been chosen for the job we will soon see him involved in. Otherwise his life runs smoothly. Because of his peasant origins, and because of his education in an order that was losing its original lustre and vigor, Friar Eligio would not seem to have been destined for dissent. He could have remained in the shade

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indefinitely, practtcmg that ordinary asceticism that the majority of the Franciscans seemed to be settling into: he could even, by acting judiciously, have pursued one of those slow careers which in two or three decades made of a mildly ambitious friar a fine head of a convent. Instead here he is (says a defamatory pamphlet on him that mingles invective with an odd poetic touch) acting like those Sardinian sparrows, attracted to the masts of passing boats, which let themselves be carried so far away that they no longer dare to attempt a return. This is an image, of course: reality is as usual more humble and more complex; and in order to understand it we need to go back a bit. When the Popes left Rome in 1 305, the treasures of the Roman Church, that is, the possessions of the Holy See-books, documents, gems, seals, vestments-were left abandoned in the Lateran palaces. Only a couple of years later was provision made for their safety; they were hastily transferred by mule to Assisi and put in the hands of the Prior of St. Francis for safekeeping. He had them stored in one of the sacristies of the basilica, duly sealed, of course, with all proper formalities. For fifteen years they lay there and no one gave them a thought. Then Pope John XXII got wind of them (after so many years of indifference ! ), and wanted to have an inventory at least. He delegated two persons who enjoyed his trust to carry out the task, Guglielmo Dultini of Faenza, a Dominican friar, and Angelo Carici, a canon in Forli, who arrived in Assisi together on September 3 , 1 322; during the evening meal, from his place in the refectory, Friar Eligio saw them sitting on either side of the Prior, though for the moment he regarded them with no special curiosity, as any two of the many guests who usually came through the convent. But now let the friar speak for himself: "The following morning, soon after I had attended mass in the lower church, the rector summoned me and ordered me to go to the sacristy of the upper church, where until that day I had never been allowed to go. At the entry, where three young friars later joined us, I met the two persons I had noticed the night before, with Friar Giovanni Clavelli, Prior of our monastery; Sir Pietro Crispolti of Gubbio, governor of the Duchy of Spoleto by order of the Pontiff; Sir Conturzio Mattei of Macerata, imperial notary; and the Reverend Father Bernardo Segneri, Abbot of the Benedictines of Perugia. Having sworn us to secrecy as to what we would be doing and seeing, the notary read a brief in which the Pope ordered that an inventory be taken of the treasure of the Roman Church (which, I learned only then, had been in our safekeeping) and requested a l ist of all the things that were there, indicating their condition and their value, which were worth preserving, which should be sold, and at what price. After the brief was read, and our prior Friar Giovanni had again bid us keep the secret, Sir Pietro Crispolti and Father Bernardo Segneri, who had had them in their custody since the time of Pope Clemens, gave the notary the keys to the sacristy, which had in fact two separate locks.

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After entering and opening the windows to air the rooms and disperse the mustiness and heat, we saw a great number of chests (they turned out to be 1 1 0 at our count), each numbered and tied with ropes. Lying here and there and even heaped on top of the chests, as the haste of their transport had dictated, there were in addition thirty-one episcopal thrones, paintings, tabernacles, footrests, prayer benches, and ecclesiastical furnishings of other sorts, many worm-eaten, most often spoiled; the papal throne itself stood covered with dust, a stole and a staff abandoned on the armrests. Having divided our tasks so as to proceed more quickly (I was asked to assist the notary in taking down the list), we first examined the various furnishings one by one, writing down everything and assigning a price to each, even to the papal throne, which to me at that point seemed the image of the Church itself, as it has become today. Having heaped all of them in a comer and swept from the spaces now free the great quantity of dust that had accumulated through the years, we began to open the chests in the order in which they appeared to have been numbered. In the first, very beautiful with its jeweled and enameled ornaments-in spite of its having been damaged in transport-we found diplomata and documents granting both papal and imperial privileges, messages sent to the pope by kings, emperors, and minor princes, besides a great number of secret documents of the Holy See, like all the rest bearing seals of gold. In the following chest, besides less important documents, we found linens, silk cloth, dalmatics, copes, stoles, sacred vestments woven with gold, finely embroidered altar cloths. We were greatly disturbed and saddened to see them fall to pieces, so that often we listed them without setting down a price. After the sixth chest, we again found things of great value, silver crosses, chalices, pyxes, seals, candelabra: I remember in . particular a reliquary in high relief, given to Pope Innocent by the Duke of Aquitaine, which the Reverend Angelo Carici valued at one hundred florins, and Father Segneri said was worth much more. From the tenth chest on we began to find exclusively books and, not knowing how to arrive at an estimate of their value we decided to judge by their size, state of preservation, ornaments, lettering, covers, illuminations-in short, by whatever the exterior decoration was, paying no attention to their content. It followed then that a New Testament, since the pages were loose, was judged of no value, and St. Bonaventure 's De Scientia Christi [Knowledge of Christ] was valued at just one florin, which caused Father Dultini to remark to our Prior, laughing, that things must truly be going badly for our order, if such a great saint was being sold for a florin (our Prior answered that things were truly going bad for Our Lord, if the "knowledge of Christ" sold so cheap). But apart from this, astonishment and desolation were on all our faces, and our Prior, seeing how many volumes were being readied for destruction-and indeed they were to him more than books, but precious sources and dwelling places of the Spirit-asked

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Father Dultini what the Pontiff would read and meditate upon, if indeed there were any place for meditation in Avignon. It was about evening when by God' s grace we got to the last chest, which we opened, despite our fatigue, with curiosity and trepidation, because the red velvet that lined it and the papal seal upon it suggested something rare and wonderful. And in fact it was filled to the brim with very precious relics, which we looked at with reverence and love; especially a small cross without ornament of any sort, made of the real wood of the cross of our Lord; a crystal reliquary wrapped in white linen, containing some relics of the Blessed Virgin; and a small casket which held some fragments of the cross of St. Peter. Father Segneri, deeply moved, exclaimed that it was not a chest but a sanctuary. While we gazed at each other, in awe, the Reverend Prior bent down to pick up from the bottom of the chest a small book bound in brown leather, to which we had paid no attention previously, and showing us the title, which was The Fifth Gospel or the Doctrine of the Apostles, murmured that, if it was proper to call that chest a sanctuary, that book surely was its tabernacle, because it contained, he had heard, the true and eternal deposit of the faith, as it had been entrusted by the Apostles to the Church. Seeing our amazement, he added that he had often heard (although up to now he had thought it a mere legend, since he had not believed in the existence of the book) that as long as the book remained in the hands of the Supreme Pontiff, our faith could not decline. And he said further that in Rome it is said that every time a Pontiff opens and reads that book, the Lord in His grace causes a new saint to arise in the world: which means that love is born again and the Church is renewed. Thus, of the many treasures we had seen that day, this was the most precious, the one the Church of Avignon and the present Pope needed the most. Then, as he detected a smile of incredulity on the face of Father Dultini, instead of being intimidated by it, but on the contrary flaring up, he first read aloud some passages to show him, as he put it, how solid its tenor was, how full of substance, and holy, and properly evangelical; then, when he came to the verse, "Therefore, I say unto you: be as the birds and the beasts of the field, who are happy in this, in what they do not own," he exclaimed that he no longer marvelled that the A vignon Popes, in their ignorance of this book, had abandoned the Gospel in favor of the triple pontifical crown. And, having added many other things about the decadence of our times and the defilement of the Church and the almost total disappearance of charity (to which Father Dultini and the Reverend Carici could voice no objection), he proposed that we not include the book in the inventory, to prevent the present pope from putting it too up for sale. After much discussion it was decided to do j ust that for the time being, and wait for the Lord to advise us. Having handed the notary the inventory for safekeeping and postponed the reading and approval of it to the next day, we went into the church to pray together for the Lord to enlighten us."

The Gospel of the Popes

III

This decision was never changed, evidently, since the book is missing from the text of the inventory sent to Avignon (it was discovered by Denifle and published in his A rchiv), which largely confirms the narrative of Friar Eligio. As for the friar, however, as we have seen, the affair did not end there. In fact we are only at the beginning of his restless and troubled existence. The letter he wrote, contravening the promise of secrecy, became widely known in a couple of years, and cost him first a reprimand, then a kind of exile at Greccio; later (but much later, because in the meantime pe was reconciled with his Prior and followed him to Avignon as his secretary on the occasion of the memorable clash between the Prior and Pope John) it became the reason, the official one at least, for his expulsion from the Franciscan Order. From this the step was a short one to his contact with the dissident groups, and to his convocation of the Council of Fermo. After which his life becomes that of a fugitive, and in effect that of a defeated man. If the outcome of the Council was the height of his prestige, it also signaled his decline. For a time he was in Naples, protected by King Robert of Anjou, who for a moment was quite taken by his fervor and his ideas, to the point of echoing them in a treatise on poverty he wrote. But the long reach of the Inquisition compelled him to leave, and the Historia Tribulationum Fratrum Minorum, of which many pages are dedicated to him, presents him to us as a wandering fugitive until his death. However, both the Historia and the documents of the Inquisition point to a strange phenomenon which began to evolve even before his death. In the former it is said, though incidentally, that he went from place to place "quia alterum evangelium volebat reperire" [because he wished to find another gospel], and in the records of the trial instituted against him, his desire to "revive the Gospel in the Church" (as he had expressed himself in the Avignon letter) became his "ambition to spread an unknown gospel." The remote episode of his youth in Assisi was already becoming a legend, and the friar himself must have become legendary quite soon, if about thirty years after his death Romualdo Dominici, that candid and dauntless collector of oral traditions, was able to record a very nice one concerning him. Friar Eligio, Dominici narrates, had vowed to find "that Gospel without which the Church is devoid of its charismatic gifts," intending, once he found it, to go to Avignon and return it to the pontiff, and ask him to return to Rome in exchange. Thus he wandered in vain all his life. But feeling old and close to death, he decided to obtain an audience with the pope all the same and with many tears confessed his aim and his failure. The pope was moved by his story and his tears and, embracing him, told him "to be not disheartened, for his faith was the true fifth gospel, which our Holy Church perennially proclaims." Thereupon the pope decided to return to Rome.

THE STORY OF FRIAR MICHELE, A MINORITE

Besides the 14th century version of the Story of Friar Michele, published in Bologna by Francesco Zambrini in 1 864, there also exists the following version, which revolves almost entirely around the theme of the fifth gospel; the manuscript is preserved in the Laurentian Ubrary in Florence and was probably written by a follower of Savonarola after the latter 's death. The itinerary that led me to this manuscript is somewhat roundabout and worth retracing. A round 1 550 an Italian heretic, Girolamo Usio, arrived in Geneva from Florence carrying with him a Latin version of the Story-bad Latin, to tell the truth-with the intention of publishing it. However, a disagreement arose between him and Calvin, perhaps because of the Story itself (this was the period when Calvin too had turned to bookburning), and Usio was compelled to flee, leaving the manuscript in the hands of the printer. A colleague in Basel came across it a few years ago and notified me. In the margin I found a note that led me to the original text.

1 . As was their custom, the Observant Friars of St. Francis, who were so bitterly persecuted for their strict observance of his Rule, sent Friar Michele, a Minorite, and with him a young companion named Friar Pietro, from the Marche, for the comfort and the instruction of the Christian Faithful of Florence. They arrived there soon after the beginning of Lent in the year of our Lord 1 389, and on Palm Sunday the said Friar Michele, having ministered to the needs of our souls and blessed the olive branches, said that he was now disposed to leave. We begged him to stay longer and he consented. But on Easter morning, having given his sermon and heard the confession of some of the newly converted who had come secretly, he repeated that he would depart the next day and took leave of every one in great humility, saying that he did not see that there was anything more for him to do except ask that we forgive him, if he had erred in some way. The next day, however, as he prepared to depart, he said

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that he had not the heart to leave that way and began to inquire of us if he might do anything else. More than half of that day had by then gone by. And toward nones, as if what then took place had been preordained, some daughters of Judas (in all three spinsters and four widows who lived in seclusion much as penitents do), instigated by the devil, sent word that they sought the salvation of their souls and would willingly listen to him preach if he came to visit them. Joyfully Friar Michele left with his companion. Upon entering, wasting no time with salutations as the women seemed inclined to do, he at once propounded the Gospel text, "Beware of false prophets," and talked to them at length concerning the truth of today's Church. Then he spoke of poverty according to the precept of St. Francis and added: "If not in us, believe in the Scriptures, where it says: 'Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purse' ." And he spoke at great length to test their resolve; so that, making a show of their great dismay, only two of them were willing to come to confession, while the others seemed still to be doubtful and full of hesitation and kept asking whether it was a sin to own the house they lived in and a piece of land outside the city that gave them sustenance. While they were occupied in these discussions it grew dark, And those daughters of Judas, feigning great devotion, lured the friar and his companion to remain with them for the evening, because there were still many things they wished to inquire of. And when they had dined, they prompted them to speak of God and the Scriptures, and holy baptism, and when it is proper to administer it, and whether the sacraments shall avail the rich, so that the two friars, tired and overcome by sleep, did not perceive their tricks. When morning came, those daughters of Judas, feigning that they yet struggled mightily to understand and were still too distressed to come to confession, begged to be excused and hastened their departure. And one of them, having looked out through a peephole, opened the door with a great noise. And when the two had walked out, at the break of day, a crowd of guards and the rogues who accompanied them leaped upon the friars, tied their hands, led them to the bishopric, and with many insults threw them in jail, while Friar Michele begged them in vain to leave him at least his breviary. 2 . Toward the hour of vespers, Bartolomeo--called bishop, but in fact the prince, in Florence, of the new pharisees-sent for Friar Michele and began to interrogate him: "What sort of people are you, what law do you observe, what doctrine have you been sowing, to what do you bear witness?" The Inquisitor was present, a certain Master Luca, of the Dominican Order, and with him the vicar of the bishop and some other learned men. And Friar Michele responded humbly and truthfully that he was among the faithful of the true Rule of St. Francis. Then the bishop, turning with feigned surprise to those who surrounded him: "So then, your idle chatter is not true, you who accused him of preaching a gospel different from ours!" And the friar responded that this was a calumnious

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falsehood, because all those things he and his fellows preached were in the Gospels, if one but wished to find them. And when the bishop, with a show of patience, remarked: "If that be so, how does it happen that those who follow and believe in you are so few?" he answered in the words of the Gospel of St. John: "Lord, who hath believed our report?" And the bishop, growing indignant: "So then, you think you alone are in the right against all of us, popes and bishops together?" "Thou hast said," the friar answered. "So we are heretics?" "A heretic," the friar said, "was Pope John XXII who repudiated the Gospel concerning the matter of poverty, and heretical were his successors who could have annulled his decrees and did not." Then the prince of the new pharisees said: "What further need have we of witnesses? behold, now you have heard his blasphemy." 3. The next day the Inquisitor and the notary went to the prison with some witnesses to extract from him a confession. First they propounded to him one already prepared by themselves, and as they read each passage they asked him: "What do you say to this?" To which the friar continued to replay that it was not so, and asked that they write down only what he had to say. And so greatly insistent was he upon this point, that the notary, though sorely discontented, agreed to write it down. The friar then spoke with great boldness, saying that Christ, as a man and a mortal wayfarer, had not been a temporal king; and that He and his apostles, pursuing the path of perfection, had ownership or lordship of nothing, either individually or in common, but chose to live as poor men without civil or worldly power; and that to say this was not heresy but profession of sound and faithful Catholic doctrine. And in his defense he mentioned Rules sanctioned by the Church, especially that of St. Francis, and added that Jesus had began His preaching saying: "Blessed are the poor" and "woe unto the rich." As he spoke thus, the others grimaced, because they could find no objection. Then the Inquisitor said: "We know that you preach against obedience to our law." And the friar answered that he knew no other law than that written in the Gospels, which is, the imitation of the life of Christ, who came to foster not observance of the Law, but charity, and to announce His Kingdom. And further questioned as to whether he considered himself obedient to Holy Church: "Know you that insofar as she guards and follows the Gospels I obey her and consider her holy, but in so far as she possesses and rules, and holds courts of justice and civil and worldly power, I consider her heretical and compromised with the world. And were I ever to say otherwise, write down that I should do so only for fear of death." 4. The next day, the bishop assembled in concistory the college of the pharisees, among whom were many learned men. Friar Michele was taken from jail and brought before them. After much abuse had been rained upon him, his confession was read, to which many false conclusions had been joined. And so he said in reply: "Why have you written what is false, for which you will be responsible on the day of judgment?" And one of them: "Do you see how proud

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and obstinate he is?" And another: "The more you beat them the more fervent they become." And they laughed, and inquired of him why he would not accept as truth what so many learned men and all Christian people accepted? And another said, with false charity: "My son, do you not see that whether Christ was rich or poor is not an article of faith, and that on this matter each man can think as he wishes?" And he propounded the words of the Old Testament: "If ye obey the Law truly, the Lord will give you abundance of all good things." And Friar Michele: "Do you not know the words of St. Paul, that the passions make use of the Law 'to bring forth fruit unto death"'? And seeing their amazement, he said: "You see, you know the Old Testament, but Christ's New One you have forgotten." And he added that he desired to keep no law but this law of Christ, which is written in His Gospel: "Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." And when one among them said that Christ had said this for His disciples, he replied undaunted: "And what are you?" Then the chief of the new pharisees: "Do you then deny the Old Testament?" "I do not deny it, but I think that wheresoever it disagrees with our new one, we must condemn and reject it." The bishop, then, turning angrily to the notary: "Write this down also, and let it be the seal of the heresy he preaches." But Friar Michele, seeing among those present some who professed the Rule of St. Francis: "Are you not aware that you are denying what you have professed? Or have you forgotten what our Saint said?" And one of them, in great confusion, began to say, "Truly I would not deny our Rule," when impetuously the bishop interrupted him, in great rage: "Tell him, rather, to recant his heresy." And he had him thrown in j ail again with his feet bound. There the pharisees and their followers came often to beg them to recant. But the friar paid them no heed; indeed, having heard that the danger of apostasy is great in prison, like a good shepherd he comforted his young companion, saying: "How came we to deserve this great honor, to be thus beaten and abused? Let us pray God to give us the strength to practice what we have so long preached." At other times instead it seemed that all was coming unraveled: "A people so blameworthy! Truly I cannot believe that I have to bear ultimate witness to the truth of Christ Jesus." 5 . When the fourth day came, the council of the new pharisees assembled in the church of San Salvatore, in the presence of the people. And as soon as the friar stood before them, two accusations were read: the first concerned a few things he had done, the second his confession, all twisted and full of errors, that the people might be blinded. And thus, while the notary read, the friar continually interrupted him; and he requested so often to be allowed to repeat his confession, that they had to concede, for the populace began to murmur against them. Then the friar, his soul kindled, turned to the multitude which had pressed close to listen to him and began to say that there existed among Christians two families: the people of the one live according to the present city; the people of the other live according to the promise of the future city. The

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The Story of Friar Michele

former is the family of those who say without hope: "Oh where then is the Kingdom He promised?"; the latter is the family of those who have not resigned themselves and still await the realization of the Promise according to the word of Christ to his disciples: "Behold, the kingdom of God is within you and it is for you to make it come to pass." In this fashion he had begun, but was at once interrupted and a dispute ensued, for one of the learned men shouted: "This which you call a precept uttered by Christ is not written in any of the Gospels, I am certain"; and the bishop: "Surely it must be in the new one he is preaching," and turning to the notary: "Record this also as a proof and seal of his heresy." And Friar Michele, raising his voice to be heard by the crowd, responded that he knew no other Gospels but the four. However, if by that they meant that the precept of poverty was not written in the Gospels, and that nothing was there written against those who heap up treasure, dress like kings, enjoy the foremost seats in the churches and public squares, and trade in secret things, then indeed let them say that he was the follower of an unknown gospel, for surely he could not recognize theirs. And he added that he believed that the word of Jesus, though complete and perfect in itself, was incomplete and imperfect in respect to the use man made of it, considering the many injustices and abominations that were to be seen, and that the poor were even poorer, the rich richer, that there were wars and violence instead of peace and charity, and that you bishops and priests were more shameful than the rest, you who have made Christ one who divides, and that no one tries to live in imitation of Christ. And if one should tell me that to remind Christians of this and to invite them to await the realization of the Promise means that I bear witness to a fifth, unknown gospel, then, let them indeed say it, since the opinion of evil and excommunicated people does not concern me. And the prince of the pharisees, his face white, hearing this: "Write down this also, since he confesses it." Soon after he was ordered to repeat his confession in an orderly fashion; and he began to say that he desired a renewal of the Church, a poor, pure, peaceful Church, and that he awaited the time when Christ would live among men. "Has he not come already?" they interrupted him, laughing. "Yes, and you crucified Him." "Answerest thou the high priest so?" And one walked up to him and slapped him in the face. And Friar Michele: "Why smitest thou me?" And he almost burst into tears. Then again, rousing himself: "Truly we must work for the complete and timely renewal of the Church. For God cannot sit by, seeing the leaders of the Church wallow in crime, the just persecuted, violent men ruling the world, obstinate sinners desiring not to emend their lives, indeed heretics sitting in judgment upon those who exhort them to change their ways, and beating and deriding them. And you, Rome, you too are set in your obstinacy. See how full of pride is Rome, how her sins multiply in her; go and see what men do in the churches, how devoutly they behave, and if the Gospels are read there."

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And he would have added more, but they stopped him and, showering him with abuse, sent him back to jail. And some of the crowd said as they departed: "He seems to have the devil within him." And others: "I see not these things of which they accuse him. Indeed he speaks not but by the Gospels." And as the friar passed, one shouted: "Blessed are ye when men shall persecute you for my sake." 6. Soon after, the notary brought him paper, pen and ink, telling him to write his own confession within three days, since he did not accept what they had written. If by then he had confessed his guilt, he would be pardoned; otherwise he would be handed over to the secular power to be burned. And when he asked for books, and especially the Gospels, they answered: "Do you not know them by heart?" and would not give them. And they did so in order to gain more ground to condemn him, as shall be seen. Thus the friar put down his thoughts about the precept of poverty and the decrees of Pope John, and to these he joined many other things in due order, saying that a Christian finds example to follow only in Christ, and that therefore there is no other law for him than the one promulgated by Christ's own words, and in primis and especially in the Sermon on the Mount, and then passim in other passages and parables of the Gospels: according to which not only does a Christian embrace poverty and share what is his with those who have not, and refuse to lend what money he has for usury, but solum to those from whom he knows he will not regain it, but he is also poor in spirit, as St. Matthew says, meaning he is humble of heart and looks to the Lord to provide. And further, he cares not for civil or worldly power, nor sides with the powerful, but with the weak and powerless, nor holds office to render justice according to the laws and regulations of the world, which, being made by men, make injustice just, and as for war, at all costs he takes no part in it even when others call it holy or just. And it is true that the sword cannot be used even to resist an evil person, because the weapons of true Christians are not force and violence, but prayer and meekness, in order to overcome evil through good. And to those who may ask how I would reconcile all these things with the natural law and the demands of the world, I reply that a Christian cares not to be in accord with the world, nor to find agreement with the laws of the world, but to change the ways of the world is his only care, and this is properly and specialiter Christian. And to whomsoever may say that this is not in accord with human nature, I would reply with St. Paul: "But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me was not after man." And let them not think they can frighten him by calling him a follower of an unknown gospel; on the contrary, let them say so, since falsehood is often the companion of truth. The notary came for the document and with him came the Inquisitor, who, having read it, said: "Mind that many things you say are in the Gospels, I know are not written thus in any place in the Gospels." And the friar: "I see that you

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The Story ofFriar Michele

know the Gospels well. Would that you practiced them thus!" And he, in great anger: "Truly you desire to die!" When the third day came, at about the hour of compline, the prince of the pharisees, who was strolling on his terrace, had them brought up from the prison where they were and told them: "I do not wish to be accused of your death before God. Do you wish to repent of these your errors?" And Friar Michele: "They are not errors, but Catholic truths, which I have written down so that you too might change your ways." The bishop, then, turned to his young companion: "Is it possible, that you, so young, would willingly die to adhere to the obstinacy of this madman?" And Friar Pietro, boldly: "You may say what you wish, I would not deny him for any price." At this the bishop, choking with anger: "I have not come here to argue further. Take them down." But soon after, as they were praying, certain men came with the order to free friar Pietro. And he objected: "Why cannot I follow you? I feel I am disowning you." But Friar Michele told him he must go, all the while gazing at him sadly, as if to say: "My son, my son." But he did not say it, and said instead: "You see, I am praying for you, that you may keep steady in your faith." Then he embraced him and pushed him gently toward the door. Left alone, he passed long hours in prayer, saying: "Lord, I am ready. Let it be according to Thy will." And all through the night he suffered. 7. When the next day came, the pharisees convened to decide how they should put him to death. To this purpose, reading his confession, they compiled all the words he had quoted from the Gospels, which, as he had done so from memory, were not in perfect agreement with the letter of the Gospels. And these they presented in the formal accusation, together with the conclusions he had drawn from them, in such a way as to make them appear as if they were from a fifth gospel, of which they declared him a follower. When this was done they sent for him, but they had him clothed with all the sacred vestments before he appeared before the concistory. They first asked him if he wished to repent; he refused; they read him the final charge, to which he listened in silence. Only when the fifth, unknown gospel was mentioned, he said he did not know of what fifth gospel they were accusing him. However, if by this they meant that he was a follower of a gospel different from the one they practiced who were sitting in judgment on him, it must be true, considering their calumnies and lack of charity, which made them similar to pagans. "Do you then state that you do not follow the same Gospel we follow?" "Even were I to say no, you would not write it down." Then he was forced to kneel, with his head down to the ground. And as they read from certain books, they took now one, now another vestment from him, until he was left with an undergarment only. After which, they shaved his head, and, with his hands tied behind, they sent him, amid a crowd of guards and rogues who insulted him, before the proconsul at the palace, who inquired as to the charge. "We have found that this man subverts the Gospels and we have

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proof of other things he says against our laws." And the proconsul, without further inquiry, himself put the friar's legs in irons, and ordered his guards to take him to the dungeons.

8.

The next morning he had the friar brought before him in the great hall,

and the accusation brought by the pharisees was read. The friar defended himself against every accusation, saying: "A sinner, yes, but a Catholic; I am not a heretic . You mislead the people by what you write as well as by what you say." And as they ordered him to be silent: "Let me speak, for my life is at stake. " And he repeated all the things he had said and written, one by one, with great fervor and eloquence. A large crowd was present, and many who at first were cheerful grew troubled at his words. And some were heard to murmur. And the proconsul himself, who had taken the bishop ' s vicar aside, was heard to say: "I have found no fault in this man touching those things of which you accuse him." And the vicar: "We have a law, and by our law he ought to die." The proconsul said: "Why, what evil has he done?" "You see how he stirreth up the people and mocks our beliefs." Then the proconsul went back to the friar and his face was dark as he said: "Why then do you wish to die, instead of believing what the others believe?" And the friar said to him, bold in his meekness: "I have told you, my life is at stake, but I prefer to die rather than deny the truth. " The proconsul replied: "What is truth? ! " But he took the vicar aside again: "Do with him what you will, for I find in him no fault at all." "We have examined him and found him guilty of heresy. But you know that it is not lawful for us to put any man to death." "Why, what evil has he done?" And the vicar said to him: "Do you wish it said that you have no regard for the bishop and the opinions of the learned men who tried him?" The proconsul became frightened, and, turning to Friar Michele: "Then you do not retract?" "I have told you," the friar answered. "Truly you wish to die. But let all here bear witness that I am innocent of your blood."

9.

The next day Friar Michele was brought forth for his martyrdom. And

taken to the courtyard of the palace he stood; his head bowed, between the crowd and the men at arms, praying. It was the morning of Friday, the 30th day of April, and it rained hard; and the friar wore nothing but a loincloth with which he tried to protect himself. Finally the proconsul came and took his seat, and the notary of the palace read the charge, and the proconsul said to the friar: "Answerest thou nothing? Behold how many things they witness against thee." But Friar Michele yet answered nothing, so that the proconsul marveled. When the reading was over, the proconsul went inside without pronouncing sentence, and carried out none of the procedures that are followed in such cases; he did thus to show that he was innocent of the death of the man, as he had said. When he was gone, the men at arms violently dragged the friar outside the palace gate; he was all alone among the horsemen, barefoot, wearing only his undergarment, with some of the buttons undone; he walked along slowly, his head bowed, saying his office, so that truly he seemed one of the martyrs.

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The crowd was so thick, one could hardly see him. Some would say: "Go not to your death." And one of the Christian Faithful, mingled in the crowd: "Friar Michele, pray to God for us." Near the church of Santa Liberata, one shouted: "You fool, say you believe in the pope ! " And he raised his head: "You have made a god of this pope of yours. Beware of the leaven of the pharisees." In the Piazza dei Priori, he was greatly troubled by one who told him: "You are the devil ' s martyr. Do you believe you know more than so many learned men, before whose knowledge you are as one who can barely read?" And when he was in the Piazza del Grano, another said to him: "So, you claim that we are neither baptized nor Christian." And the friar: "No, I say you are baptized, but you live not as a Christian should. Repent you of usury and fraudulent trade, repent your sins, change your life." When he reached San Romeo, another of the Christian Faithful called him by name, asking him to think of the passion of Jesus Christ. And he: "0 Christian Faithful, pray to God to give me strength." Before Santa Croce he raised his eyes to the heavens: "St. Francis, my father, pray to Christ on my behalf." Then turning to the friars who were standing on the church steps: "Our Rule, which you have sworn to keep, has been condemned, and you do this to those who wish to keep it?" And some among them shrugged their shoulders, others hid their faces in their hoods. Only one replied: "The voice of the people is the voice of God." And the friar, loudly: "The voice of the people called for Christ to be crucified." Soon after, when he was near the Porta alIa Giustizia, they said to him: "Recant, do not die." And he answered: "Did not Christ die for us?" "You are not Christ, that you must die for us." While he was thus walking, that young Friar Pietro, who had been his companion, came up to him and comforted him saying: "Be strong." And seeing that he was wet, he handed him a handkerchief. One of the guards saw this and asked him: "Art thou not also one of this man' s disciples?" And he said: "I am not." And another: "Surely thou art. Did I not see thee walking with him?" And again Friar Pietro denied having known him, and left him and lost himself in the crowd.

1 0.

When they had passed out of the gate, they approached the small hut

which had been prepared to burn the friar. The noise of the crowd was great. The crier shouted for the people to stand back and the horsemen made a circle. When he reached the small hut, Friar Michele entered courageously and his wrists were tied to the pole. And some put their heads inside, saying: "Recant, do not die"; others, to frighten him, pretended to set fire to the hut. But the saint was firm, and to one who showed him the fire, he said: "Is this what you are come here to do?" and to another: "May you be forgiven, for you know not what you do." He was also shown a young man with ten infantrymen sent by the proconsul to take

him

back unharmed if he recanted.

And one of the

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infantrymen, seeing how firm he was: "How is it, that he seems to have the devil in him?" And the young man: "Perhaps he has Christ in him . " Finally the little hut was set ablaze, and Friar Michele, having recited the Credo, began to sing the Te Deum. He sang about eight verses, then lifting up his face and eyes, he said: [Father, into thy hands

I

"In manus tuas Domine commendo spiritum meum"

commend my spirit] . When the ropes had burned, he

fell to the ground on his knees, his face to the sky and his mouth wide open, dead. Some asked the leader of the men at arms for permission to bury him. And having written down the declaration of death, he gave them permission and left with his men. And they placed the body in a sheet and buried him not far from the small hut. And many on their way home were troubled, and said: "He is a martyr. " And others: "He is a saint." And some argued the contrary. That same night, without any prearrangements, many of the Christian Faithful gathered where he had been buried and secretly took him away. So that on Saturday morning, he was not found. And as the news spread through Florence, some preachers said from the pulpit: "We should have put guards there, for now they will canonize him, and consider him a saint."

THE BANQUET OF LYONS

This is the title given to the Italian version (preserved in the municipal library of Lucca) of a tale which in French was called, instead, The Gospel of St. Peter. One might say that it followed the itinerary of the noble ambassador who appears in it, moving step by step from Spain to Italy and growing as it traveled: in fact there is a Spanish version that includes only two legends (the ones narrated by Diego Alvarez de Castro), a French one with three legends, and an Italian one comprising all six. I too discovered them in the same succession, though at long intervals, in the course of a twenty year search. Regarding its date, the presence of Diego Alvarez de Castro in it allows us to place the French version in the middle of the 15th century, while the allusion to Lodovico Vartomanno moves the Italian version, at least in the final rewriting of it, to the first decades of the 1 6th century.

Messer Arrigo della Marca was one of the best-known people of his time in Lyons. Having risen from poverty very rapidly, he owned stores of merchandise and had business dealing with many merchants not only in France, but in Italy and Spain as well. He was a generous man, and very eager for new things, so that in his house there gathered liberally not only those with whom he had business, b ut often men illustrious with respect to either their virtue or their ancestry. Now it so fell out that one day Monsignor Diego Alvarez de Castro, procurator and envoy of the king of Castile, passed through Lyons on his way to Italy on some official business. Messer Arrigo wished to honor him in accord with his dignity. On the pretext that he wanted his agent in Florence to remunerate him for some letters of exchange, he was able to invite the envoy to his table with other noble gentlemen and officials of the city. The talk at the table was varied and profuse and cheerful� but at the end they touched on the wars that were then wasting the States of the King, and which, were they to last longer, would plague all of Christendom� thus one of the guests 1 22

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1 23

said that truly it were time Christ were made flesh again, since one time had not been enough to change mankind. Messer Arrigo countered in jest that he truly showed a great love for Christ in wishing that he be crucified again. Whence the question arose as to why Christ chose to manifest himself to us only once, and a priest who was present, a canon of the Lyons chapter who was reputed a good theologian, was questioned on the matter. He at first demurred, saying he knew not how to respond, then he added that Messer Arrigo ' s words had reminded him of a story he had heard in Paris from a renowned doctor, his teacher, and, having asked their permission to retell it, he did so briefly: "You must know that the saints in heaven, indignant to see men unfaithful and dissolute, decided one day to convene a council to see in what manner they might be changed. And there, after much discussion, one of them proposed that since it had not been enough for the Son of God to be made flesh and die, the saints must move to the conquest of the earth and lead men to virtue and truth by force. The idea was very well received: the saints, taking action fearlessly, formed a great legion, and quickly, and with little fighting, they conquered the entire earth, whose government they entrusted to the few just men they were able to find. The evil ones and those slow to repent were gathered in a great valley, where, having prepared great pyres, they were preparing to exterminate them, so that the world would no longer be infected by them. To this end everything was prepared, when they saw a man advancing in the midst of the others carrying a cross on his shoulders, asking, it appeared, to be put to death upon it. The saints deemed it a great scandal that a common sinner ask to be granted the same death as our Savior. So they bound him and led him to St. Peter who, having known him during his life, recognized him as Jesus Christ Himself, and expressed amazement at the fact that the Son of God should mingle with the lowest dregs of humanity. Jesus answered that, if he well remembered the words He had spoken on another occasion, the Son of Man had come to save not the just, but the sinners. And He added that, if it were enough for Peter that just one man die for all humanity as before it had been enough for our Father in heaven, He was determined to die again for them, seeing that nothing else in the world could save them from the saints. The saints halted in shame, abandoned their enterprise, took Jesus in their midst and brought Him back to heaven, where, however, they continue to keep Him in bonds so that He may not return to earth and be cause for scandal. " The meaning of this story was discussed a t length b y all the dinner guests. To some it appeared we must conclude from it (as the priest later demonstrated by means of theological arguments) that Christ had the power to make us perfect, but preferred to make us free. Others instead concluded that Christ so loved our humanity, having known it by assuming our flesh and indeed preferring to be called the Son of Man, that He wanted us the way we are, men rather than saints.

1 24

The Banquet of Lyons Having listened to all this gravely, Monsignor Diego Alvarez de Castro,

who, as a Spaniard, was a very severe person and disapproved of laughter at the expense of the saints, yet did not wish to appear discourteous toward the man who had so liberally wished to honor him, asked to be allowed to tell a story also, which, he said, was current among the people of his land.

"You all know that the

Gospels are full of the things that Christ did and said

until the day He died. They are silent, however, as if it were inexpressible, concerning all He taught from the day He rose to the day He ascended to heaven. Now, it is said in my country that of the truths he revealed during the forty days He remained on earth His disciples composed an apocryphal gospel, that is, a hidden one. Jesus having read it and highly approved of it, charged St. John that he not die, but remain in the world and go about revealing it to all who seemed to him worthy of knowing it, until the day of His return. John said: ' Lord, how may I recognize them? ' Jesus replied: 'Then show it to all, for only those who seek me in spirit of true love will be able to see it. ' Since then St. John wanders from land to land showing that gospel to all he chances to meet. Most go by without seeing it, like blind people. But when one stops, opens it, and begins to read, it is a sure sign that he is about to become a saint." The hidden reproach contained in the story was well understood by the company present and particularly by the priest, who begged pardon for the laughter he had elicited earlier, and added that the story rightly meant that Christ by returning to heaven had not abandoned us but continues to reveal Himself to us through His saints. Messer Arrigo then observed that what Monsignor had said about the apocryphal gospel is also true of the Gospels we have, since it is they that really inspire the saints. A Montpellier merchant who on his way to Italy had j oined the Monsignor on the road and had been invited with him to Messer Arrigo ' s dinner, said that the story of the apocryphal gospel had reminded him that, while traveling in Syria during his youth, he had various times been shown a gospel that is highly revered there and is considered a fifth gospel no less authentic than our four. He then proposed to tell a parable from that gospel that he thought very appropriate to the topic of their discussion, which was, if he were not mistaken, whether Christ had manifested Himself once and for all, after which He waits to see if we are able to work toward our salvation by ourselves, or whether on the contrary He is ready to help us in all the things we ask for. The parable went like this: "His disciples having asked Him when he would come back among them as He had promised, Jesus began: A dying man left his possessions and his house to some poor relatives, on the condition that they retain like a member of the family an old servant of his who had been very faithful. The heirs willingly accepted the condition and in the beginning honored the servant greatly, and not only allowed him to eat at their table, but regarded him as almost a father and turned to him for advice in all important matters. He reciprocated with great love, giving wise counsel, and, with his knowledge of the state of their

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possessions, showed them the best way to administer them. Not long afterward, however, they grew tired of this sort of dependence, and wishing to feel free of it, they began to munnur: 'Who is this fellow who presumes to govern us as a master, as if we were not capable ourselves? ' And gradually, first by not asking his advice, then by not even speaking to him, so reduced him that, saddened, the servant withdrew to his room and did not even present himself at their dinner table. The others felt happy and free and set about managing their affairs by themselves. But soon they realized that there were too many things they did not know regarding their inheritance to be able to administer it wisely, without his experience, and repentantly they sent for him, begging him to assist them once again with his advice. Having listened to them at length, the servant revealed himself, saying he was not a servant, as he had given them to believe, but the owner himself, who had wished to test them in that manner to see whether they deserved to be made heirs to all his possessions. And seeing their shame, he added generously that he would surely have detennined to disinherit them, not because of their errors but because of their pride, had they not today shown themselves willing once again to accept him as a father." The company was greatly pleased by the parable, understanding it to mean that Christ, far from leaving us, is still in our midst and is ready to show Himself each time we implore Him to. And it is we in our pride who keep Him away and prevent Him from treating us as His children, as He would like to. The first question having thus been

exhausted and another having

meanwhile arisen about the belief in an unknown gospel, which seemed to most of them foolishness and a mere fable, the merchant said he would not be able to make a judgment, were it not that he had actually seen it. Messer Arrigo, who was a great lover of books, said that he had found and read in Lodovico Vartomanno, who had also traveled through the lands of the east, that many there believe that such a book really exists, and consider it true, and were accustomed to say of it, that it never remains in the same place, but constantly moves from one people to another. They also believe that when faith is on the wane in a people, it means that they no longer possess the book; And if on the contrary a people shows fidelity to Christ and gives proof that it properly knows His commandments, they say that in that moment the fifth gospel dwells among them. Hearing this, the priest again asked to be allowed to speak, as he knew another story that he would have liked to tell not to ridicule the Holy Roman Church, of which he on the contrary considered himself a very reverent son, but .

to show how widespread was the belief in a true and unknown gospel. And since all were disposed to listen, he thus began: "After St. Peter had preached in the lands of the east for a long time and converted many there, Jesus appeared to him telling him it was time he should betake himself to Rome as His apostle. But as Jesus knew that its inhabitants were more corrupt and loath to change than any other, and as He wanted to

The Banquet of Lyons

1 26

make them the most Christian of people that he might the better found His church upon them, He had thought of providing Peter with a gospel that was more perfect than the four that had been used heretofore for the other peoples, so that with its help he might lead them to a more sincere conversion. And having told him this, he entrusted to him the large and beautifully illuminated book, showing him in how many ways it was more wonderful than the other four. Happily St. Peter busied himself to equip his small vessel, and having brought on board all that was necessary he left for Rome with no further delay. But hardly had he been at sea two days when a strong wind was seen to rise, which swelled the sea greatly and struck the bark so that it listed badly. Extremely frightened by this, St. Peter tried in vain to right it, and realized that his vessel was too heavily laden, which was the case. And searching in a great rush for whatever might lighten it, there came into his hands the trunk in which he had placed the gospel entrusted to him, and blindly he threw it too over board. And good came of it, for at once the bark was able to master the sea again, and sailing on with no further trouble it reached Rome. Whence it is said that the bark of St. Peter has become light and easily weathers storms, but the gospel entrusted to her by Christ has been lost and can no longer be found. And it is also said that in Rome St. Peter worked the greatest of his miracles, by converting it without the help of a gospel. " In spite of the priest ' s opening remarks, a good deal of laughter followed the story. Not from Monsignor, however, who, turning grave once again, said he had ready another story to tell of St. John, which was quite different from the previous one. So all fell silent and he began to tell it, gazing fixedly, the other thought, at the priest: "As He was preparing to ascend to heaven, Christ summoned St. John, and, entrusting to him a gospel containing what He had been revealing to his disciples during the forty days since His resurrection, He told him he would not die and be received into heaven among the other saints until he found a worthy person to entrust it to. St. John thought that only among priests would he find a person

worthy of guarding

such

a

gospel,

or

in

any

case

capable

of

understanding what a great treasure he would be entrusted with, and so for many years he continued to search among them in vain. Finally St. James, who was his brother, taking pity upon him for that he was so old and tired, decided to appear to him in a dream, and in the dream he told him that so long as he continued to search among the priests, he would not find whom to entrust with the gospel Christ had committed to him."

THE CHRIST OF GUARDIA

This work by Ferdinando Derosa was published in Rassegna delle province meridionali, III ( 1 92 1 ), 4. It is probable that, although I was looking for something connected with the Gospel of the Waldensians (the story by Walter Mapp had triggered my interest), I would never have gone as far back as Derosa, were it not that the persistent tradition connected with the Book in Calabria, beginning with the Vivario manuscript, led me to want to know as much as possible of Calabrian religious history. L 'Inquisizione e i Calabro-Valdesi [The Inquisition and the Waldensians of Calabria] by Filippo De Boni, published in Milan in 1 864, has as its inscription a verse attributed to St. Luke (9,56): "I came not to scatter, I came to summon," which at once sounded to me incorrect, if not apocryphal. And in fact it is missing from the Greek text of that Gospel, and in St. Jerome' s Vulgate its wording and meaning are quite different. There is another inscription as well, a maxim by Paolo Sarpi: "I do not believe that a change in the State can occur unless there is a change in religion." And this says enough, I believe, of the tone of the entire work. The story it narrates is sufficiently well-known, I think. It is the story of the Waldensians of Guardia Piemontese, drawn to Calabria by the Marqueses of Fuscaldo, of Lombard origin and perhaps Waldensians themselves, who were able to live there undisturbed and practically ignored until the middle of the 1 6th century: three centuries, a long history of patient accommodations, of involuntary Nicodemism, which, however, left behind only a few brief documents. "Simple, honest folk, occupied entirely with farming, forgotten by the world which they had forgotten, they were able to survive," writes De Boni, "maintaining their own beliefs, their own dialect, their own customs. It is true 1 27

1 28

The Christ of Guardia

that at the beginning local priests became alarmed, seeing that they did not attend services. However, in order not to make needless enemies, they paid their tithes to the clergy regularly, and the memory and fear of the old persecution persuaded them to keep their cult hidden as much as possible." It is the Protestant Reformation that comes to upset their way of life. From Piedmont here comes Giovanni Negrino, a vigorous agitator, perhaps a disciple of Calvin, who not only quickly convinces them "to abandon any dissimulating prudence," but devotes himself to preaching the Reformation in the surrounding area. Of course, the Inquisition is immediately alarmed, and the Marquis of Fuscaldo, to avoid personal involvement, abandons his old tradition of tolerance; his guards capture Negrino and put him to death. A companion of his, however, a young disciple, Giosue Borgogno, whom he had discovered among the natives of Guardia and had tried to educate according to his principles, will inherit his mission: a few years later, De Boni writes, "he resumes and expands his teacher' s mission, soon finding many dedicated followers and evading his persecutors for a long time." Finally, caught in a trap, he dies after the usual trial for heresy, not in Cosenza, where the sentence was issued, but in Naples, where the civil authorities moved the execution for reasons of prudence. The most curious thing about his trial is the persistent interrogation concerning a book found on him when he was captured. "The Gospel," Borgogno kept insisting. "A spurious gospel," his judges answered, quoting, in fact, passages that are not in the Gospels, including, among others, the verse in De Boni' s inscription. The following year, late in

1 56 1 ,

Guardia Piemontese was

besieged and carnage ensued. The Waldensians of Calabria were tortured and decimated, and the few survivors were forced to convert. *

*

*

So goes the historical episode narrated in De Boni's little book with many digressions and cries of indignation. Filippo De Boni, however, is not simply a proud Ghibelline writer, as he used to be thought of, he is also, as a good romantic, a lover of folk traditions, one of which he relates in the appendix to his work. He says he picked it up first hand from the people of Guardia "when, coming up through Calabria with Garibaldi ' s Army of One Thousand," he climbed, "with a few others, the arduous path up to the village." If we read it as he related it, we will detect both its biblical flavor-almost a Joseph of Egypt story-and again the mention of "the book." "Giuseppe Borgogno, a young Waldensian, had a disagreement with his brethren and, leaving the Alpine valley where he had lived with them, went to Pavia looking for work. After trying for a time to make a living as a weaver, he entered, as a guard, the service of the lord of Monforte, a captain of Emperor Frederick II, followed him in his expeditions and was very faithful to him. In fact, once, when the captain was wounded during a skirmish, Giuseppe went to his aid and succeeded in saving him. For this the lord of Monforte held him very

The Christ of Guardia

1 29

dear and made him his squire. Later, when he obtained the marquisate of Fuscaldo in fiefdom from Frederick, he sent him there as his deputy, with full powers. Giuseppe found a land almost uninhabited, but rich in mountain springs, excellent for olive groves, pastures and vineyards. While he was pondering how he might make the land bear fruit, he heard that his brethren were being persecuted again, and were living as fugitives, with virtually no means of survival. Ashamed at having abandoned them, he sent a messenger to inform them of his status and to tell them that to as many as wished to join him he offered a land where food would not be wanting and where they could live freely according to their beliefs. Seventy of them came with their wives and children, bringing with them the book of their faith. Giuseppe settled them in the district of Guardia and soon after, having concluded all his lord's affairs, asked his permission to live among them. When the lord of Monforte died, however, his successor knew nothing of Giuseppe, and forbade the people of Guardia to practice their cult. Fear persuaded them to learn to conceal it, but they entrusted the book to Giuseppe' s descendants with the responsibility of guarding it and preserving them in the old faith. With time, however, they forgot about it, and knew neither what was in it nor where it was hidden. Since then the people of Guardia await one born of the Borgognos who might discover where the book is, learn to read it again, and awaken them once more to the Gospel." *

*

*

De Boni concludes his work saying this is the only nostalgic memory of their earlier religious condition that has survived among the Waldensians of Calabria. But Filiberto Vernieri, a scholar from Cosenza, published, in 1 902, a short work entitled

The Christ of Guardia, the transcription, he says, "in our

language" of a legend that is still in circulation in Guardia Piemontese, which he himself heard from an old weaver "in a dialect that still retains some Provem;al and French." But it is not exactly what is usually called a legend. Though the circumstances are altered, it is still the story of Giovanni Negrino and Giosue Borgogno, made more adventurous, or, if you like, more hagiographic. I do not believe all of that was the work of Vernieri; it is true he likes certain effects we look down on, and his approach is that of the rather inept amplifier uncertain whether to sound like a folk narrator or a writer of historical romances, but I do not think that on his own initiative he took the liberty of making the life of Borgogno into a kind of duplicate of the life of Jesus. Anyway, let us follow his story, or better, paraphrase it. Giovanni Negrino, young, bold, harshly energetic (Vernieri has a long description of him) came, as we know, with a mission. He had been educated in Geneva, and came with the purpose not only of bringing the Waldensians of Calabria back to their original faith, but of spreading the new ideas of the Protestant Reformation. However, only incomprehension and disappointment awaited him. He did find, certainly, at Guardia, this remote village, "a native goodness, but simple, uninspired, a sincere

devotion, but timid,

without

The Christ of Guardia

1 30

expansive energy: in brief, an impoverished faith, almost more habit than belief." His preaching, more Pauline than evangelical, the themes he developed in his sennons, colored with Calvinistic asperities-justification through faith, predestination, divine grace-seem far above the religious needs of these people. His intransigence only frightened them. Besides, intransigence in itself is an arrogant choice, if it is not infonned by charity in everything it attempts; and if Giovanni was possessed of the severity of John the Baptist, he did not join with it the persuasiveness of Jesus. In one of his sennons, inspired in fact by the words of the Baptist: "The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord," he proposed to the people of Guardia a period of expiation. They went along with it with a docility not devoid of irony. And one of the elders asked him, using, unwittingly, another expression from the Gospels: "Art thou he that should come, or art thou sent before him?" But the real conflict flared up, as is almost always the case, on a question of ritual: Giovanni considered the baptism perfonned by Catholic priests (which, as we know, the people of Guardia had often accepted) invalid, and put forward the idea of a solemn collective ceremony during which he would re-baptize them all . For the people, however, the question was subtler, and had to do not only with the living but also with the dead: accepting Giovanni ' s belief meant recognizing that their dear ones had died in original sin. Giovanni thundered, . called them lax, Sadducean; the elders' assembly finally denied him the keys to the church. He left Guardia and went to live in solitude on the banks of a stream, to do penance and pray the Lord to enlighten his recalcitrant brethren. A few, deeply affected, dared to visit him; among them, one morning, a thirteen year old boy came with his mother. Giovanni re-baptized him. He was Giosue Borgogno. Giosue ' s story is a very special one. His grandfather, Giuseppe, the only heir to a family, that, as we have seen, had been the most prominent in town, was now living in poverty, as a carpenter. But he was a just man, Vernieri writes, and still occupied the family' s old seat in the assembly. "Now, it so happened," (I am quoting Vernieri again), "that his daughter was made pregnant by an unknown man, and Giuseppe Borgogno, who loved her dearly, wished to save her from shame in the eyes of his people, and took her to a Catholic region, near Scalea, to give birth. There they stayed in an abandoned hovel, where later the woman gave birth to a boy who was brought to the local parish priest for baptism and was given the name Giosue. They lived among the Catholics at length, Giuseppe working as a carpenter and his daughter weaving cloth for the local women.

Secretly they remained faithful to Waldensian beliefs, but

outwardly they attended mass and observed the other rituals. As Giosue grew, he distinguished himself from other boys of his age. And the priest, seeing that he was keener than the others, not only began to teach him the catechism, but soon he also had him taught the rudiments of Latin. And seeing that the boy was

The Christ of Guardia

131

religiously inclined, he used to say to his mother: 'God' s hand surely is upon him. ' " Things had, i n fact, come t o the point where one day Giosue left home to join the groups which were going on a pilgrimage to the Madonna delle Spighe, and it was there that, after looking for him anxiously for two days, his mother and grandfather found him, sitting serenely in a circle of monks amused and astonished at his precociousness. The two of them saw it as a sign; they took the boy and decided to bring him back to the land of the Waldensians. Here they found their old house just as they had left it, and when Giovanni began his mission, they were among the few who were touched by it and among the first to heed his call, bringing Giosue to him to be re-baptized. The encounter with Giosue represented a turning point in Giovanni' s short l ife. He recognized the boy' s spiritual affinity with himself and drew him close, dreaming of making him the man who would continue his work; he perfected his reading and writing, and devoted himself to his religious development, trying to erase all traces of Catholicism. We shall never know how. Beyond the implausible dialogues reported by Vernieri, we can imagine that Giovanni Negrino took the road most congenial to him, fighting dogma with dogma and bewildering the boy with doctrinal questions he was not capable of unders tand ing. Here, however, the unexpected happened, something which was to decide the religious destiny of Giosue: one day while rummaging about in the new house he had recently come to live in, he found a forgotten book in a chink in a wall , the Proven9al Gospel entrusted many years earlier to the Borgogno family. ! Naturally he brought it to his teacher, and from that day forward it became the center of their discussion and in actuality the only instrument of Giosue' s religious development. Thus it came to pass that his initiation by Giovanni ( which in any case lasted a very short time), whatever small effect it had, did not weaken his spirit with theological abstractions, tempered as it was by fresh contact with a text that represented a discovery for both men; and while the one, through a book he had never known in that version, returned almost unwittingly to the sources of his faith, the boy learned to love it and instinctively modeled himself upon it. There is one phrase, among the many that Vernieri reported, which reveals the kind of relationship established between the two: in a tone that deeply impresses his pupil, the teacher confides that he has understood that Christ did not leave us a doctrine to follow, but a life to imitate. Filiberto Vernieri is right to emphasize it: it contains the most important thing Giovanni passed on to Giosue. He also passed on to the boy his restlessness, his love for, his delight in wandering. Disappointed by the people of Guardia, Giovanni took to the road, preaching wherever he could, penetrating the inland valleys, where the last small Waldensian settlements bordered Catholic villages. Giovanni visited both, accompanied by Giosue, who mentally recorded everything. What struck him

The Christ of Guardia

1 32

most was the people 's ignorance of the Gospel. It was as if the land still needed evangelizing and the Word, for the moment, were still unknown. This was for Giosue a decisive experience: when later he too moved toward the inland regions, he did so as an apostle moving into missionary territory, bringing word of the Gospel. Giovanni ' s adventure did not last four months: the nearby priests were alanned, suspicion spread, the authorities of Cosenza pressured the Marquis of Fuscaldo. Often the two were the targets of stones, put to flight by peasants alanned by that sort of prophet with a foreign accent and incomprehensible ideas. Until one day some guards lay in wait for Giovanni, tied him with a rope and dragged him on foot to Fuscaldo. The boy followed his teacher from afar until he saw him disappear inside the house of the marquises. He waited for him for two days, then, overcome by hunger, he returned alone to Guardia Piemontese, only to learn that Giovanni had been smothered to death; they had not even troubled to interrogate him. *

*

*

There are events that mark the life of a man forever. The death of Giovanni was one of them, that solitary death which caused no great lamentation, but only fearful comments among the people of Guardia. It crystallized still latent tendencies in the soul of Giosue. It turned them into a vocation. Until then he had been a boy playing the part of a disciple, or perhaps more accurately, an awed follower. All at once he became the heir to a mission. We know almost nothing of the rest of his religious development, but everything suggests that he lived it like a vigil, and when a few years later he came out of obscurity again, his spirit and his voice were those of one who has been called to complete a task. As I said, his biography indicates a gap of a few years. Nor was Vernieri, with the best will in the world, able to fill it in. His observation that "the child grew and waxed strong in spirit" is hagiography pure and simple, a quotation from the Gospels.

His description of the young man working with his

grandfather the carpenter may also be hagiography. Still, one thing is certain: from about twenty on, to the people of Guardia Giosue was not just another youth, but "he who found the book," as they said. Hidden or lost, in either case unknown, the mythical book entrusted to the Borgognos, everyone knew, had come to light again and he was reading it. This disquieted his brethren, however, rather than exalting them; it made Giosue seem suspicious, different, it marked the beginning of his solitude, the destiny of solitude of those who are marked out, or of the saints. And he himself felt he was different. Everything suggests that the Gospel was the only book Giosue had read, and one must imagine what such a fact may have meant in the soul of a mere boy. What else, really, could have turned him into the ingenuous bearer of the Gospel that he was? From where else, in any case, could there have come to him the inclination to live

The Christ of Guardia

1 33

according to a special kind of imitation of Christ, if not from the assiduous, exclusive reflection on a text which was everything for him, fable and truth, nourishment for his faith and food for the needs of his imagination? Giosue certainly had neither philosophy nor theology, he was no innovator as Giovanni was, in fact he knew nothing of the whole Protestant Reformation; but his program was always clear: to bring everywhere he could the offering of the Gospel. And from the first moment of his public life (in Vemieri' s words), he presented himself with the book in his hands. He begins (it is Easter,

1 559)

by reading and discussing in the church at

Guardia the words: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel of the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised." And his discourse, V emieri writes, is an invitation to a proclamation, a program and a message, it is a call to the Waldensians to tear themselves from their inertia and return to their old missionary impulse. With the typical folly of men of his type, even as he propounds the essence of the Word, his dream is to make of each of them a bold bearer of the Gospel. Two phrases, in fact, stand out in his discourse: "Be wayfarers, not sit-at-homes," and "We live on the opposite shore," which V emieri lays special stress upon, and which, as we shall see, we can assume were actually spoken. The rest of the scene also recalls very closely that of Christ preaching in Nazareth, as in Luke

4, 1 6-30, the one where he

says, "no prophet is accepted in

his own country"; the disagreements and disputes that gradually arise, the confusion and fear among the people of Guardia, the irony, even, the sarcasm of souls aroused, yet doubtful and reluctant. There is, in other words, the usual clash between the bearer of the faith who always disturbs the peace and the community accustomed to an old order and satisfied with it. Some smile, or shrug their shoulders; some tum to a neighbor asking: "Is not this Mary's son, the grandson of the carpenter?" Until Giosue, indignant, leaves his town, determined to take his mission elsewhere. This may simply be hagiography, of course, the result of Vemieri ' s tendency to model Giosue ' s life on that of Jesus. But it may also be true. If we think of it: on one side the Waldensians of Calabria who had fled south in search of peace and now for centuries had been entrenched in a small, tolerant, secluded, substantially Nicodemian church, and in any case devoid by now of any missionary impulse; on the other a sort of prophet who, like all visionaries formed by the Gospel, ignores all ambiguities, practical difficulties, and contingencies, and whose preaching totally rejects fear and prudence, and invites his followers to tread once again the wayfaring paths of the missionary. Hence the repudiation of this improvident agitator who seems to be proposing only new risks and a sort of new exodus. And hence Giosue' s indignation and the impetuous words pronounced on the occasion o f his

The Christ of Guardia

1 34

departure, which also signal a turning point in his mission, outlining his future program: to leave the tiny Waldensian Israel in order to bring the words of the Gospel to its neighbors. But if the decision has been taken, his spirit is still shaken and, perhaps, not yet ready. He has withdrawn to total solitude (even grandfather and mother have left him), and passes days of irresolution and even temptation. It is easy to imagine: memories of a household still warm with his presence, of such a peaceful existence; remnants of faintheartedness, of self-doubt, doubt whether he is truly ready for a mission in which he has seen his teacher fail; everything rushes to his mind and seems to make him tum back, or at least hesitate. But one morning two young brothers (Vernieri gives us their names in passing: they are Andrea and Simone Orsello) come to him asking to become disciples. The next day two more. Giosue is more than shaken, he sees the sign he has been waiting for. Soon after we find him outside the borders of the Waldensians, in the vicinity of Rota Greca, where he preaches, Vernieri says, "with words of power, amazing the people." The following Sunday he is at Cerzeto, where he makes some converts. At Malvito he begins without fanfare his long denunciation of the corrupt Catholic clergy of the time, so far removed from the Gospel, as he comments upon the strange, probably apocryphal verse (we shall see its source) : "And I have found in their midst not one that was thirsty." *

*

*

We shall not follow Giosue and his disciples through all their wanderings. But to explain their successes and the fact that for such a long time they could proceed undisturbed in their mission, one must have an idea of the place and people they moved among. For this we can find no better guide than our author, who is as accurate concerning the external elements as he is deplorably sterile concerning the internal ones. He writes: "Between the districts inhabited by the Waldensians of Calabria and the plain of the Crati, the only stream that in Calabria could be called a river, there is a mountain range, all crags and crevices, steep rises broken by crumbling slopes, and short valleys where the beds of the torrents lie like skeletons. The roads are very few and hard to travel; the fields are few, and lie on steep, arid slopes; and few and poor even today are the villages, most of them built in the shelter of mountain spurs, in flat clearings which conceal rather than reveal them. And to be sure they were all built as refuges for fugitives: the . Latins fleeing the coast attacked by pirates, the Greeks and Albanians fleeing before the Turks and crossing the sea in search of a new country, all searched for shelter there more than a home, totally indifferent to comfort and happy only to survive. The most remarkable thing, however, is the variety of the inhabitants. Even today if one observes their customs, their speech, their clothing, one finds unexpected differences from village to village. They were greater still at the

1 35

The Christ oj Guardia time of our story, when Latins,

Greeks,

Albanians (not to speak of the

Waldensians, and the usual gypsies, present everywhere) lived beside each other without any contact, when the Christians of the Latin rite lived beside those of the Greek Orthodox rite, and the cult of a saint, a relic, a special icon of one group, possibly saved during their flight, divided people and villages much more than their common religious background brought them together." It is an ideal region, then, for Giosue ' s success, with its ill-defined and complex features, its uncertain religious borders, barely Christian, inhabited by ethnic minorities neglected by bishops and ignored by civil authorities, where everything

is

confused

as

far

as

rites

and beliefs

are

concerned,

and

Constatinople still has almost as much authority as Rome, and the Catholic priest who is celibate (although he often keeps a mistress) lives next to the Orthodox priest who marries, and the patron saint is the object of a cult verging on superstition, and there is just one step, if any, between religion and idolatry. It is also a region of credulous expectations, open to every new proclamation. The tradition of hermits and monks belonging to no order, so ancient in Calabria and so common at that time, helps whoever withdraws to solitude or starts wandering about preaching penance to find credence soon enough, or at least tolerance: if anything from the Gospel is impressed in the minds of these people, it is the figure of St. John dwelling in the desert, and of Christ wandering in the company of his followers. Had Giosue foreseen all that? Clearly he seems to find his way from the very beginning with a fantastic sense of certainty, as if he were encountering people, places, situations, not for the first time, but already known once before, or in another time. But it is natural: he has known them in the Gospels. Through one of the powerful anachronisms common to all visionaries molded by that book, he forces reality to fit his own imagination; better still, by virtue of an imagination wholly and solely nourished on the Gospels, he discards the differences and grasps only the similarities. No wonder then that the land he is crossing seems wholly similar to that of Jesus. And so do the people. The only difference is that instead of Samaritans they call themselves (or are called) Albanians, instead of Galileans or Judeans are called now Orthodox now Catholics. He tells the parable of the good Samaritan in exactly such terms, and the priest and Levite of that narrative become two priests, one Catholic, one Orthodox. But this power of illusion is an element of concreteness. From the little Vernieri (or his sources) have preserved of his sermons, his are not traditional ones, with the usual parenetic apparatus and doctrinal baggage. They are, rather, evocations, direct readings, quotations. He breaks the shell of Latin (or Greek) and the scholastic frame of the sermon to propound the Gospel, almost like a wandering storyteller, as if it were a kind of great folk narrative speaking for itself, with the evidence of a real event, the power of an everyday example close

1 36

The Christ o/Guardia

to home, and of a familiar, proverbial language, by virtue of which the poor are actually the poor, the rich actually the rich, characters of everyday reality, not remote symbols. And so is the shepherd, the sower, the widow who offers what she has, the disobedient son, people seen, met in the streets, known concretely in their behavior. It thus happens that for the first time Christ appears to these people as a person who felt as they feel and pronounced maxims of eternal life using everyday words. And if any term seems incomprehensible, Giosue quickly translates it into familiar language and relates it to current reality: and the pharisee becomes the local priest, the publican the tax collector, and if perchance he says "Woe unto you who have had your fill," he makes one think immediately, by the way he says it, of the barons of the region, and this is enough to enliven the text of the Gospel and make it accessible, timely, biting. *

*

*

However, he does not simply give the Gospel back its original mordancy. He relives it. The life of Jesus is made the object, as we have indicated, of a continuous imitation thanks to which it is difficult to know whether he is living, here and now, a life of his own, or, like the actor in a sacred play, is lending his face and voice to the character of Jesus. One phrase, just one: "The just man shall live for his faith," he seems to have retained from Negrino 's teaching, but if he remembers it, he has modified it in this way: "The just man shall live according to Christ." He repeats it often, sometimes associating it with another he has found in the book, in "his" Gospel: "I came not to set down rules, I came to set an example." Once he even adds: "My life is my sign." Put together, they are more than a program, they are a life proj ect sustained (and made possible) by the usual power of illusion. In the company of his followers, who have by now grown in number, Giosue stops in public squares and in fields, frequents fairs and j oins pilgrimages, watches processions, even enters churches, enters their homes to comfort the sick, goes to the farmyards (it is summer), where he helps the threshers; everywhere he converses with men of all conditions, talks with the women, smiles and j okes with the children (and they become the colorful cortege of his every arrival and departure from a village), stops to chat on the threshold of homes where, a winning actor unaware he is acting, he listens to the old, takes interest in them, comforts the invalids and the paralytics abandoned like sacks on a chair, in the sun. And wherever he passes there is rej oicing, because, among other gifts, Giosue possesses in the highest degree the ability to spread happiness and even j oy. Filiberto Vernieri has a few beautiful pages describing his arrival at San Donato di Ninea, the curiosity the unusual fairness of his hair arouses, the surprise at the sight of his strange cortege, mistaken at first for a company of tumblers, the whispering from house to house, the running toward the square, the sudden sense of festivity, the reading of the Gospel transformed, for these morose people with their dark, narrow destiny, into a sort of sunny holiday of the spirit. And other beautiful pages demonstrate his double

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power of persuasion and suggestion, his affable nature, his influence. There is, for instance, the description of an evening in a threshing yard, with the horses resting in a comer, heads down (once in a while the stamping of their shoes on the cobblestone is heard), the air still filled with chaff and the pungent smell of the threshing, and Giosue who, drinking happily from the common flask, keeps his spellbound listeners awake explaining the passage about the harvester who "reaps fruits of eternal life." And we note in particular, described perhaps in too idillic a tone, another night scene, this time on top of a mountain, with the sheep crowded silently in the pens and the dogs running and barking in the moonlight, with Giosue lying in the grass among a group of shepherds narrating many episodes of Jesus' life like fables, and one shepherd exclaiming: "It is good for us to be here with you. Stay and tomorrow we shall put up two tents, one for you, one for your disciples." But at dawn two of them see him against the light, absorbed in prayer, and so transfigured from the man they had seen the day before that going out to him they say to him uneasily: "Master, you have not yet told us who you are." The most delicate episode, however, is that of the harlots of Acquaformosa. Harlots, they call them, poor women without a future, perhaps seduced in their youth in a quick, lustful encounter behind a hedge or under a bridge, or grown up in the house of the richest both as servants and lovers until, their bloom lost, they were thrown out like worn out brooms. And now avoided by everyone, almost chased from the villages, they have taken refuge in the little hell of Acquaformosa (the irony of certain names ! ) , a few filthy houses in the vicinity of a well where they work at surviving, grow heavy and sad, yet dreaming of, and sometime expecting, a man' s step crossing their nights. Chancing to come by, then (his companions have stayed behind) Giosue sees the well and walks up to it. It is summer, all around there is the great thirst of the noon heat, but there is shade and coolness rising from the damp soil and Giosue sits on a stone in need of rest. A woman comes to get water, and when the squeaking bucket has come up, the young man, smiling, asks for a drink. S ilently the woman gives him her full pitcher and examines him, half tenderly, half maternally, while he drinks. Encouraged by his smile she asks timidly: "How is it that you ask a drink from a woman like me?" Giosue says: "Hast thou not a husband?" The woman answers: "I have had no husband." "Thou hast well said: thou hast had many but they were not thy husbands." Uneasily now the woman stares at him: "Were you really sent to know our sins?" Giosue shakes his head: "I have come for those who have loving souls." Does the woman misunderstand the meaning of a word which to her, in her language, evokes only one feeling? Or are depths still untouched being stirred up here, as, coming a step closer and reaching her hands around her pitcher so as to touch his hands, she stares at him awkwardly and perhaps with the sad smile of her old seduction on her face? His disciples catch up to him and are surprised to find Giosue with

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such a woman. But he, looking at them with undaunted innocence: "Who is so spotless among us as to wish to judge her?" Later the group is joined by the woman, still moved and determined to change her life. And shortly after, a few other women to whom she has spoken come. And this too, of course, will become in good time a source of scandal. But one cannot understand the success of Giosue unless one also considers certain legends then widespread in Calabria, which explain, even better than the things we have narrated, the trepidation that seizes the crowd as he passes. In S an Basile it is said that Christ did not reveal himself to man once and for all, but appears once to each generation and those who recognize him readily go to heaven. At Trebisacce they say that Christ has not yet arrived in Calabria, and each Christmas night they light fires along the coast for him to see clearly where he should land; and the town takes its name from the three satchels full of gifts prepared for him in case he should arrive. At Firmo they worship the Christ of the Poor, and near the sanctuary there is a grotto which is, they say, to receive Christ, should he wish to be born for the poor as well. There is also the legend, perhaps filtered down from the Waldensian region, of the lost book, and of the wait for the one who can find it. There is, in sum, a whole background of ancient expectations that is stirred up by the passage of this young fair-haired pilgrim who wanders from place to place, it is not known why, but he speaks to the people with the book in his hands. *

*

*

Not everything is so serene in Giosue ' s mission, however. In the early days, baffled, but sometimes moved as well, a good part of both the Latin and the Greek clergy watched him pass without real apprehension, giving him at most an ironic smile ("Has anyone ever seen a prophet from Guardia?" was the comment of the parish priest of Lungro, and the expression became popular, it immediately made the rounds). Perhaps the wandering nature of Giosue itself makes him seem to them a passing gust of wind (and we can imagine the relief of some priests as they see him abandoning their territory so soon). But soon the truce is broken; the challenge is declared. The first to launch it is Giosue. He is asked right in the square, at San Marco Argentario, which was Jesus' greatest miracle: "Converting the heart of a priest." People laugh. Momentarily the chief priest of the town laughs too, invites him to his table to talk (and to observe him closely). If anything, the talk quiets his fears. This uneducated youth, virtually ignorant of Latin, able to quote the Scriptures almost by heart, but totally ignorant of the Reformation, seems not much more than a poor lunatic to the bland skepticism of the old priest, more expert in the classics than in the sacred texts. Why worry about a bearer of the Gospel? But twenty-four hours have not gone by before he must change his mind: the discourse Giosue delivers to the crowd the next day is a paraphrase of the "Woe unto you, pharisees," presented by a man who has learned a great deal

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The Christ of Guardia from that

talk with

the

chief priest.

Read

and

explained

anew,

made

contemporary and biting through accessible examples close-at-hand, the passage becomes an exposure of the present vices of the clergy, of their deviousness, of the poverty of their faith. When, Vemieri says, Giosue comments on the words: "Woe unto you, for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God," a shudder runs through the crowd, not only of wonder. And when a moment later he says: "Woe unto you, ye blind guides, for ye say and do not, and love the chief seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets, for ye bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men ' s shoulders; but ye yourselves will not move them with one of your fingers," again, Vemieri adds, the clarity of the allusion prints on the faces of his apprehensive listeners something other than wonder. And we might mistrust Vernieri, as usual, if this time we did not have confirmation of his testimony in a document left among the records of Giosue ' s trial : the chief priest of the town, who the previous day had laughed at Giosue, now quickly writes a letter to his bishop succinctly describing the episode and using the term ' Lutheran,' the sinister label that for thirty years had been causing division among the faithful and fear among the hierarchy. Presumably the letter found the bishop occupied with other things, because for the time being it produced no consequences. It is also probable that, thanks to the laziness that distinguishes the man, basically an agnostic, more of a humanist than a Christian, who rose to his position only because of his name (he is a Carafa), there is still a leaning toward caution and delay. However, the alarm is spreading: in the eyes of the clergy and of the powerful families frightened by the influence he has on the peasants, Giosue ceases to be a saint one can laugh at and becomes definitively an emissary of the Reformation. *

*

*

In spite of, or perhaps because of the excessive additions by Vemieri, the portrait of Giosue (the reader must have guessed it) is not properly in focus, his real face can hardly be seen clearly. And even of his plan, if he had a plan, we can hardly grasp the essentials. However, we know that the accusation made against him is wrong: Borgogno was not an emissary of the Reformation, of which he probably did not even know the name. Nor was he in any way a new prophet of the Millennium, of the sort which Calabria produced in such numbers. In Giosue ' s view, History is not a divine plan in the making, it is the Word manifesting itself: the Kingdom is already here, fully present in the Gospel, it is a message to be made into reality, not an end to be awaited. And accordingly (it must be stated simply) he is nothing more nor less than a bearer of the Gospel; and outwardly one who acts, or rather acts out, a sacred mystery, holding that text in his hand, as a script; and inwardly-that is, as far as the essence of his thought goes-a man with only a few great principles, and perhaps none of them original. Even his polemical stance against the clergy is

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The Christ of Guardia

only, as we have clearly seen, an explication of motifs found in the Gospels . And when h e dreams (as i t would seem) o f a faith o f the poor, the downtrodden, the afflicted, and, obscurely perhaps, of a popular movement that undermines (or transforms?) a Church grown impure and too entrenched in her privileges, he is essentially only going back to the letter of the Gospels. He has enough spirit to accept it whole, and no conscious ambition to alter it: so that even some of his maxims (I quote only two : "The worker is greater than his pay" and "The Kingdom of God is the future of the afflicted") which are apparently tendentious, and definitely non-canonical, remain within the Gospels' true meaning. And so does this other maxim he often repeats in his discourses-the boldest in the way he explains it, the most impressive in its effect on his audience-"Sanctity is the wealth of the poor." The question that arises here is a different one; it is the one that surfaced in De Boni, and can here be briefly restated thus: did Giosue know the Gospel in the version we know? Or, more properly, was the Proven