“Actually, it all began because the Poet’s blood was hot. He couldn’t go on without a woman, though even poor Colandrino could remain chaste, but then he was an angel from heaven, like his poor sister. Our eyes had really become accustomed to that place, I realized, when the Poet began to rave about a panotian beauty. He was attracted by those flapping ears, he was aroused by the whiteness of her skin, he found her supple, with well-shaped lips. He had seen two panotians coupling in a field and had sensed that the experience must have been delightful: each enfolded the other with the ears and they copulated as if they were inside a shell, or as if they were the minced meat wrapped in vine leaves that we had savored in Armenia.
It must be splendid, he said. Then, receiving a shy reaction from the panotian he had tried to approach, he took a fancy to a blemmy female. He found that, apart from the lack of a head, she had a slender waist, an inviting vagina, and furthermore it would be great to kiss a woman on the mouth as if he were kissing her womb. So he tried to associate with those people. One evening he took us to a meeting of theirs. The blemmyae, like all the monsters of the province, would never have admitted any of the other races to their discussions of sacred matters, but we were different; they didn’t think that we thought wrong; indeed each race was convinced that we thought the same as they did.
The only one who would have liked to show his dismay at this familiarity of ours with the blemmyae was Gavagai, but by now this faithful skiapod adored us, and whatever we did could only be right. A bit out of naiveté and a bit out of love, he had convinced himself that we went to the blemmyae rites to teach them that Jesus was the adoptive son of God.”
The blemmyae church was at ground level, a single façade with two columns and a tympanum, and the rest went deep into the cliff. Their priest summoned the faithful by striking a hammer against a slab of stone enveloped in ropes, which gave off the sound of a cracked bell. Inside, only the altar could be seen, illuminated by lamps that, judging from the smell, burned not oil but butter, perhaps made from goat’s milk.
There were no crucifixes, or any other images, because, as the blemmy acting as guide explained, they (the only ones who thought right) considered that the Word had not been made flesh, so they could not worship the image of an image. Nor, for the same reasons, could they take seriously the Eucharist, and therefore theirs was a Mass without any kind of consecration. They couldn’t even read the Gospel, because it was a tale of deceit.
Baudolino asked at this point what sort of Mass they could celebrate, and the guide said that, in fact, they gathered to pray, then they discussed together the great mystery of the false incarnation, which they had not yet managed to comprehend fully. And, indeed, after the blemmyae had knelt down and devoted half an hour to their strange vocalizing, the priest began what he called the sacred conversation.
One of the faithful rose, to remind all that perhaps the Jesus of the Passion was not an outright ghost, in which case he would have been teasing the apostles, but rather a superior power emanated by the Father, an Eon who had entered the body of an ordinary, existing carpenter of Galilee.
Another pointed out that perhaps, as others had suggested, Mary had actually given birth to a human being, but the Son, who could not be made flesh, had passed through her like water through a pipe, or perhaps had entered her through an ear. Then a chorus of protests arose, with many shouting “Paulician! Bogomil!,” meaning that the speaker had uttered a heretical doctrine—and indeed he was driven from the temple. A third ventured to say that he who had suffered on the cross was the Cyrenian, who had replaced Jesus at the last moment, but the others indicated that, in order to replace someone, that particular someone had truly to be there.
No, the first worshiper rebutted, the someone who was replaced was in fact Jesus as ghost, who as ghost could not have suffered, and without the Passion there would be no redemption. Another chorus of protests, because he was thus declaring that mankind had been redeemed by that wretched Cyrenian. A fourth reminded them that the Word had descended into the body of Christ in the form of a dove at the moment of the baptism in the Jordan, but surely in such a way that the Word was confused with the Holy Spirit, and that possessed body was not a ghost—so why would the blemmyae be, and rightly, fantasists?
Caught up in the debate, the Poet asked: “But if the Son, not incarnated, was only a ghost, then why in the Garden of Olives does he utter words of desperation and moan on the cross? What would a divine ghost care if they drove nails into a body that is pure apparition? Was he only putting on an act, like a mummer?” He said this, thinking to seduce—displaying acumen and desire for knowledge—the blemmy female he had his eye on, but he achieved the opposite effect. The whole assembly started shouting: “Anathema! Anathema!” and our friends realized this was the moment to leave that Sanhedrin.
And so it was that the Poet, through an excess of theological refinement, was unable to satisfy his coarse carnal passion. While Baudolino and the other Christians devoted themselves to these experiences, Solomon was questioning the inhabitants of Pndapetzim one by one, to learn something about the lost tribes. Gavagai’s mention of rabbis, the first day, told him he was on the right track. But, whether because the monsters of the various races really knew nothing or because the subject was taboo, Solomon got nowhere. Finally one of the eunuchs told him that, true, tradition had it that through the kingdom of Prester John some communities of Jews had passed, and this many centuries ago, and they had then decided to resume their traveling, perhaps fearing the threatened invasion of the White Huns would oblige them to face a new diaspora, and God only knows where they had gone.
Solomon decided that the eunuch was lying, and he continued to await the moment when he and his friends would enter the kingdom, where he would surely find his coreligionists.
Sometimes Gavagai tried to convert them to right thinking. The Father is the most perfect and the most distant from us that can exist in the universe, no? And therefore how could he have generated a Son?
Men generate sons in order to prolong themselves through offspring and to live in them also in the time they themselves will never see because they will have been gathered by death. But a God who has to generate a son would not be perfect from the beginning of centuries.
And if the Son had existed from the beginning together with the Father, being of his same divine substance or nature, whatever you may call it (here Gavagai became confused, using Greek terms like ousia, hyposthasis, physis, and hyposopon, which not even Baudolino managed to decipher), we would have the incredible case of a God, by definition not generated, who has been generated from the beginning of time.
Therefore the Word, which the Father generates because he must concern himself with the redemption of the human race, is not of the same substance as the Father, is generated later, surely before the world, and is superior to every other creature, but just as surely inferior to the Father. Christ is not the power of God, Gavagai insisted, and is certainly not a commonplace power like the locust; he is, rather, a great power, but is the primogenitory and not the ingenitory. “So, for you,” Baudolino asked him, “the Son was only adopted by God and is not then God?”
“No, but is very holy all the same, as deacon is very holy and is adoptive son of Priest. If it functions with Priest, why not with God? I knows that Poet asking blemmyae why, if Jesus is ghost, he afraid in Garden of Olives and weeps on cross. Blemmyae, who think wrong, can’t answer. Jesus not ghost. Jesus adoptive Son, and adoptive Son not know everything like his Father. You understand? Son not homoousios, same substance as Father, but instead homoiousios, similar but not same substance. We not heretics like Anomoeans; they believe Word not even similar to Father, all different. But luckily in Pndapetzim no Anomoeans. They think most wrong of all.”
Since Baudolino, in repeating this story, also said that they continued to ask what difference there was between homoousios and homoiousios, and if the Lord God could be reduced to two little words, Niketas smiled and said:
“There’s a difference, yes, a difference. Perhaps in the Occident you people have forgotten these diatribes, but in the Roman empire they raged for a long time, and there were people who were excommunicated, banished, or even killed, for such nuances. What amazes me is that these arguments, which in our land were repressed long ago, survive still in that land you are telling me about.”
And then he thought: I always suspect this Baudolino is telling me tall tales, but a semibarbarian like him, having lived among Alamans and Milanese, who can barely distinguish
