Szentkuthy Miklós
1908
From St. Orpheus’ Breviary
Sylvester’s Second Coming
(Excerpt)
On the twelfth day of May in the year of Our Lord one thousand and three, Pope Sylvester II died. His body was embalmed by a fellow scholar, a Moor, from Spain; long ago, the Arabs and the Jews had brought over from Egypt the science, sometimes praised as angelic and at other times condemned as devilry, chemia theologica, or diabolica. The Pope himself had practised this craft, though he was wont to remark, with smiling humour, that he was neither so naive nor so overweening as to wish to push himself forward as an eager apprentice into God’s competent handling of the Resurrection. This light-hearted mummy-sculpture was merely a sign of respect for the body’s earthly substance, for after all, the body was God’s first invention. He first created and shaped matter, and only afterwards did it occur to him to invest it with soul. Indeed the Pope, himself so sensitive to the dictates of the body, often sighed (though with a kind of innocent blasphemy) that he felt that his foolish soul (his brain, his feelings) were only a worthless addition to his body-a piece of coloured paper drifting from somewhere, stuck by the wind against the face of a beautiful Greek statue, to bring laughter to the populace and tears to the marble.
A corpse is a replica of Adam’s body before God gave it soul; the innate beauty of matter still blooms in it, in spite of all its so-called ugliness and stinking distortions. And if it were indeed ugly, let us feel that we are God’s associates in creativity. Let us paint, let us carve, let us cleanse and polish, scent and decorate, let us dress it as a bride for the first dance of Eternity. It is well known that on account of his deep learning in the natural sciences Sylvester was decried as a devil, a wizard, a heretic and an Antichrist on more than one occasion and in more than one place. First, while still in Spain, he was nearly arraigned before the ecclesiastic court for his “magic dealings” on the occasion of a performance of a mystery play which represented the three Magi visiting Bethlehem. The then young scientist (later Pope) sacked one of the monastic players who was supposed to be one of the Magi and took his place in the last minute, with a jar of myrrh ointment in his hand; and kneeling before the Child Jesus he delivered his own defence, the defence of Chemistry, listing the uses and benefits of the ointments of myrrh and frankincense. After all, what ecclesiastic court would dare to challenge one of the Three Wise Men of the East? It must be added that it was part of Sylvester’s philosophy that if he became passionately imbued with the part he played it ceased to be a part and became reality; thus as far as theology was concerned, he was a Magus; for in the soul of God, imagination has the value of reality; imagination being, in Paradise and Elysium, the truth.
The Pope’s old friend had gained possession of those motley volumes which were concerned with the sixty-six methods of embalming, and it is not without interest to note at this juncture that the Pope had adorned the various “fashions in mummies” (the Pope’s authentic terminology from his university days) with various flower-names and with floral title-pages to express God’s primaeval joy in the creation of matter, as if, in the moment of the Creation, He was fed up to the teeth with His pure, spiritual monotony.
For this reason, Sylvester’s pleasure was all the greater in noting the strange coincidence that the bells of Rome, from the frailest tinkle at Mass to the siren of St. Peter’s great Medusa-toll were nicknamed by the people of Rome after beasts and flowers. And now, on the twelfth of May, the “bluebells” and “harebells” garlanded, illuminative and illustrative, the illustrious body awaiting the embalmer. For philological reasons it may seem important to some of my readers to note the sources of those passages in San Orfeo’s breviary which refer to these religious practices. One was the book of the afore-mentioned Arab scholar, the Balsamum Phantasma Logikon, that is, the balsam of imagination and truth. The other is a far older work by a Spanish rabbi, called Anachronistikon, a philosophical history of anachronisms, according to which it is impossible to write any creditable historic work without the knowledge of the most complex methodology of anachronism-the historian regarding world events from the viewpoint of God as the dramaturg.
The Balsamum is a compendium, a huge tome not unlike the collections of plainchant which need tall Gothic lecterns for the seraphim to sing them out aloud from elbow-high frivolous pink clouds, as if the pages were there freshly ironed nightgowns of the Madonna, pressed carefully between two rusty Roman breastplates to keep them clean during the flight to Egypt. Everyone has seen those modern copes whose decorations are modelled on these Romanesque musical notes.
So much for the appearance of the book. As for its contents, it was divided into two parts; the first described the techniques of embalming and the second (and from our point of view, the more important) listed in order Pope Sylvester’s skull, eyes, ears, nose, all the way down to his rosary of pearly corns. (The literary skill involved in this will be analyzed later.) To each anatomical intonation was attached some story from the religious and historicist adventures of Pope Sylvester II. It enables the reader to work out, in the course of meditative reading (of the pocket edition) what are virtually arabesques of salvation. After all, an Arab had written it.
In the large book, from which the dust rose as pages were turned, as it does at the opening of holy tombs, or like incence from the Magi’s shell-shaped caskets-in this great book there were more pictures than text.
Sylvester II, who really had no need to stand shivering in Italy until the arrival of the official and recognized Renaissance, often said that every embalmed body should be lovely as Venus; after all, during the great experiment of Creation (the world being still in an experimental Stage, the Creator not having made any final decision about it so far, the Lord also played about a little with aesthetics. Sylvester regarded the body of Adam, and the soul breathed into it, as not too successful a preliminary sketch; God had tried to improve it somewhat by adding Eve, the female, and with Venus, and with waxen lilies. The command: “Let your dead be beautiful like Venus, like a golden rosebud for the Resurrection”, rang in the ears of the Moorish scholar, the Pope’s faithful friend, and he took the corpse as the text, which was to be embellished, like a manuscript with miniatures, depicting the pleasures of life.
“Leaf through these pictures, but not for the sake of mere enjoyment: let them remind you always of Pope Sylvester II.”
The liquid chemicals required for the preservation of the body had to be stored in containers of rigidly specified shapes. The nectar and ambrosia stolen from the gods of antiquity had to be kept in thin, long-nosed, shell-shaped transparent glass vases; the shell being the emblem of Saint James, who had wandered all over this world and the next. It was he who had persuaded the Olympians to take up the most amusing of all carnival pastimes, conversion.For this, by way of a reward, they gave him ambrosia and nectar. The salt, the salicilic acid and the Egyptian nitrate would have to be kept in a barrel-shaped salt-cellar, such as was used by Our Lady when she surreptitiously added more salt to the fish served as the first course at the wedding of Canaa, to make the guests thirsty sooner, so they would drink more and enable Our Lady to show off her Son’s very instructive Kosher-Bacchus miracle.
However, the older books on the subject differentiated between embalming the rich, the middle-class, and the tradesmen and servants, and this wrought a great biblical anger upon Pope Sylvester; it was then that like a raging lion he began to compose his very favourite Bull according to which, if Caesars and plebeians are to have different cook-books and recipes for their interment, then the golden masks of the Pharaohs should be accorded to the slaves and the dog-faced tin masks to the impostors. After all, do we have a New Testament or do we not? he’d ask, shrugging his shoulders and hiding his hands under his surplice like the angry begging friar who kicked over a whole bakery at the fair when they tried to shortchange him with stale meat.
It was characteristic of the Pope, anyhow, that the sort of thing his predecessors delivered from the Holy See as dogma datur christianis with great pomp and ceremony, was uttered by Sylvester in passing, as though he were not the Holy Father enthroned in his College of Cardinals but some Levantine thief spitting at an overpriced basket of fish in a Venetian market.
The author of the Balsamum followed the principles of the Shepherd of shepherds and Servant of servants, though naturally with contemporary restrictions hanging round his neck like a privy-shaped stock; the Anachronistikon was of no use heres.
Then came the other vessels-palm wine in curlicued triton-horns, wood-vinegar in goblets with agate trails of smoke and rainbows. The last-named fluid had to be injected through the navel of the disembowelled stomach through a thin Pandean pipe-reed. The airy, weightless plates floating on the curved limbs of heraldic lions held the salted honey, to be poured in place of the stupid brain removed earlier: at last, some good stuff in place of those clumsy syllogisms! The mercuric chloride dissolved in alcohol was kept in a stylized, bird-shaped vessel with a wide base, a long and carefully wrought curving neck, a mouth like an open beak, like a snake’s mouth or the female labials.
Earlier, we hinted at Pope Sylvester’s stylish, superior relationship with the “Renaissance”,and in connection with that, and now, with this allusion to the glass flower’s feminine intimacy, we should like to recount a very characteristic anecdote. The Pope was a collector of Greek and Roman sarcophagi. He liked to think of each as the tomb of the Holy Mother, filled with flowers at the time of her ascension (she had dropped her girdle over it as a souvenir and its thousand S-shaped twists were imitated on the decorations of the last-mentioned glass vessel).
On one of these hunting trips (to hunt down the relief-carved larvas of the Resurrection) to the excavated cellar of a Roman villa, he found the dead body of a girl floating in salty brine within a lidded porphyry bath, dating from the time of Cicero. The body was in a perect state: it could have been a gold filigree ornament on the tip of Emperor Otto’s sceptre. The Pope had exclaimed: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think you must all admit without exception that in this girl, the question of the so-called Renaissance will be settled for once and for all, historically and artistically. This is a pledge from Christianity and Paganism, of Eros and the martyrs of the catacombs, the golden touch of true knowledge, past and future, masquerade and corpus Domini … Everything else is merely renaissance-mongering; daft and dilettante hair-splitting!”
So when the author of the Balsamus prepared himself to embalm Pope Sylvester II, we can imagine that this light-hearted papal utterance, addressed to the world’s intellectual snobs, more like a birdsong than a bull’s roar, was never far from his thoughts.
But understandably, he was thinking even more often about a cynical, poetic yet regretful utterance almost immediately following the end of the Renaissance a few years earlier, when the Pope had sent his Moorish friend to the land of Judea in search of the hidden Scriptural Scrolls (new, older, or heretic scrolls). It was then, by the shores of the Dead Sea, that he had watched the girls bathing. They too swam in salt water, like Cicero’s maiden, and in his sun-drenched, mild melancholy the Pope’s Arab friend himself added an apocryphal text on the subject of Susannah and the Elders; and the Pope himself wrote the preface to the first edition, in the following strains: “It would have to be a very naive little lamb from my flock, under my pontifical care, who could see in my excellent pupil’s book only a monotone pictorial souvenir of his adventures by the Dead Sea. In fact, he displays a laudable theology throughout, for he makes the closest possible connection between the original phenomena of the Creation, the primaeval beasts and communities, and the fantastic fashions worn by modern sea-bathers. His aim is to make us see the new in the ancient, to recall us to the ancient in the new; just as I am High Pontiff and Shepherd for all times and all places. If a fold belongs to me, then within that fold, according to the principle and the most important command of our Faith, the Neanderthal caveman and the most poetic inventions of Vogue’s fashion-page should co-exist in sweetness and peace. Our Lord has appointed our material world to sustain change and poetic development. In this book, this is logically manifest: there can be no question of it being a ragtag montage, or the surrealist dance of the dead, or even a parchment-flavoured pseudo Baroque tendency. I have issued a separate encyclical about the literary metaphor and simile, proving that the simile is, in the final analysis, the source and the result of love. It is born of the desire to enfold in a single charitable embrace every material aspect of the world. Yes, indeed, our universities should study my learned friend’s microscopic analysis of these Susannahs of the Dead Sea; for only such an analysis, and others similar to it, can start off our thousand-year struggle for the acquisition of true knowledge, both of thought and matter. Verily I say unto you that these prayers of observation, even in his occasional exaggerations, will more speedily lead to the truth than misguided ascetic visions. The myth of Orpheus, the sculptures of Giacometti, the letters of Saint Jerome- may you all live together in warm, humane friendship, side by side, not like the puppets of some carnival tomfoolery but in the sweet concourse of the brotherhood of man.
(I shall expound on the problems of lack of faith elsewhere; in our present religious state, this is not yet a sensational turn in Satan’s show.)
These feminine portraits do not turn my noble and reverend friend into a self-seeking beach-photographer. They may at first appear as subjectivist, to the silly; but he is not trying to depict the confusion of the world with manierist eccentricity. What then? Only its harmoniously interdependent riches. Didn’t he go on my own advice in perceiving the Annunciation and biology as identical thing in the hand of God? Isn’t his interest in worldliness justified, as long as he can see the artistic in it, seeing that art is the natural continuation of Creation, from the natural materials of the earth? In every word he writes, we can sense that he is not blind to the myriad stupidities and social blasphemies of worldliness, of Godless Babylon. On this kind of moral basis, from the crystalline shapes of perfume jars he may safely progress towards the coming of a Paracelsus in the future. He creates Eve, and he looks at the up-to-date Eves by the Dead Sea with the pious eyes of Adam. For the time being, I naturally cannot state ex cathedra that our author is not and never will be blasphemous in seeing a tempting cloud-ladder to Heaven in the lacework of a petticoat; all I can say is that all those who cannot see the realissima, the most real, connection between a lovely article of feminine apparel and the loveliness of God are restricted by-their own neurotic complexes, which derive from mistaken idealism, and the hysterics of so-called spirituality. For thousands of years to come the question of the erotic will be given many beastly, even rabid answers within my fold; one of the demented answers is obsessional asceticism, another the equally insane craze for orgiastic gratification. But in this book, I can see a beautiful (and distant) future attitude to sex: the brave, young shoots of the beauty, goodness, unique love and even art which is born of Eve.
So, gather round, historic past and future, let us see in something small (a zip, the gesture of lighting a cigarette) the Ultimate Essence, since the earthly beauty which gives birth to heavenly love, the reality of matter and the most up-to-date perception of it, are all essential to the modest kitchen of a tenth-century Shepherd.
Translated by Mari Kuttna