“I’m very grateful to you.”
“When in doubt,” said Dr. Robert, “always act on the assumption that people are more honorable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are. That was the advice the Old Raja gave me when I was a young man.” Turning to Susila, “Let’s see,” he said, “how old were you when the Old Raja died?”
“Just eight.”
“So you remember him pretty well.”
Susila laughed. “Could anyone ever forget the way he used to talk about himself. ‘Quote “I” (unquote) like sugar in my tea.’ What a darling man.”
“And what a great one!”
Dr. MacPhail got up and, crossing to the bookcase that stood between the door and the wardrobe, pulled out of its lowest shelf a thick red album, much the worse for tropical weather and fish insects. “There’s a picture of him somewhere,” he said as he turned over the pages. “Here we are.”
Will found himself looking at the faded snapshot of a little old Hindu in spectacles and a loincloth, engaged in emptying the contents of an extremely ornate silver sauceboat over a small squat pillar.
“What is he doing?” he asked.
“Anointing a phallic symbol with melted butter,” the doctor answered. “It was a habit my poor father could never break him of.”
“Did your father disapprove of phalluses?”
“No, no,” said Dr. MacPhail. “My father was all for them. It was the symbol that he disapproved of.”
“Why the symbol?”
“Because he thought that people ought to take their religion warm from the cow, if you see what I mean. Not skimmed or pasteurized or homogenized. Above all not canned in any kind of theological or liturgical container.”
“And the Raja had a weakness for containers?”
“Not for containers in general. Just this one particular tin can. He’d always felt a special attachment to the family lingam. It was made of black basalt, and was at least eight hundred years old.”
“I see,” said Will Farnaby.
“Buttering the family lingam—it was an act of piety, it expressed a beautiful sentiment about a sublime idea. But even the sublimest of ideas is totally different from the cosmic mystery it’s supposed to stand for. And the beautiful sentiments connected with the sublime idea—what do they have in common with the direct experience of the mystery? Nothing whatsoever. Needless to say, the Old Raja knew all this perfectly well. Better than my father. He’d drunk the milk as it came from the cow, he’d actually been the milk. But the buttering of lingams was a devotional practice he just couldn’t bear to give up. And, I don’t have to tell you, he should never have been asked to give it up. But where symbols were concerned, my father was a puritan. He’d amended Goethe—Alles vergängliche ist NICHT ein Gleichnis. His ideal was pure experimental science at one end of the spectrum and pure experimental mysticism at the other. Direct experience on every level and then clear, rational statements about those experiences. Lingams and crosses, butter and holy water, sutras, gospels, images, chanting—he’d have liked to abolish them all.”
“Where would the arts have come in?” Will questioned.
“They wouldn’t have come in at all,” Dr. MacPhail answered. “And that was my father’s blindest spot—poetry. He said he liked it; but in fact he didn’t. Poetry for its own sake, poetry as an autonomous universe, out there, in the space between direct experience and the symbols of science—that was something he simply couldn’t understand. Let’s find his picture.”
Dr. MacPhail turned back the pages of the album and pointed to a craggy profile with enormous eyebrows.
“What a Scotsman!” Will commented.
“And yet his mother and his grandmother were Palanese.”
“One doesn’t see a trace of them.”
“Whereas his grandfather, who hailed from Perth, might almost have passed for a Rajput.”
Will peered into the ancient photograph of a young man with an oval face and black side-whiskers, leaning his elbow on a marble pedestal on which, bottom upwards, stood his inordinately tall top hat.
“Your great-grandfather?”
“The first MacPhail of Pala. Dr. Andrew. Born 1822, in the Royal Burgh, where his father, James MacPhail, owned a rope mill. Which was properly symbolical; for James was a devout Calvinist, and being convinced that he himself was one of the elect, derived a deep and glowing satisfaction from the thought of all those millions of his fellow men going through life with the noose of predestination about their necks, and Old Nobodaddy Aloft counting the minutes to spring the trap.”
Will laughed.
“Yes,” Dr. Robert agreed, “it does seem pretty comic. But it didn’t then. Then it was serious—much more serious than the H-bomb is today. It was known for certain that ninety-nine point nine percent of the human race were condemned to everlasting brimstone. Why? Either because they’d never heard of Jesus; or, if they had, because they couldn’t believe sufficiently strongly that Jesus had delivered them from the brimstone. And the proof that they didn’t believe sufficiently strongly was the empirical, observable fact that their souls were not at peace. Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith. Therefore practically everybody is predestined to eternal punishment. Quod erat demonstrandum.”
“One wonders,” said Susila, “why they didn’t all go mad.”
“Fortunately most of them believed only with the tops of their heads. Up here.” Dr. MacPhail tapped his bald spot. “With the tops of their heads they were convinced it was the Truth with the largest possible T. But their glands and their guts knew better—knew that it was all sheer bosh. For most of them, Truth was true only on Sundays, and then only in a strictly Pickwickian sense. James MacPhail knew all this and was determined that his children should not be mere Sabbath-day believers. They were to believe every word of the sacred nonsense even on Mondays, even on half-holiday afternoons; and they were to believe with their whole being, not merely up there, in the attic. Perfect faith and the perfect peace that goes with it were to be forced into them. How? By giving them hell now and threatening them with hell hereafter. And if, in their devilish perversity, they refused to have perfect faith, and be at peace, give them more hell and threaten hotter fires. And meanwhile tell them that good works are as filthy rags in the sight of God; but punish them ferociously for every misdemeanor. Tell them that by nature they’re totally depraved, then beat them for being what they inescapably are.”
Will Farnaby turned back to the album.
“Do you have a picture of this delightful ancestor of yours?”
“We had an oil painting,” said Dr. MacPhail. “But the dampness was too much for the canvas, and then the fish insects got into it. He was a splendid specimen. Like a High Renaissance picture of Jeremiah. You know—majestic, with an inspired eye and the kind of prophetic beard that covers such a multitude of physiognomic sins. The only relic of him that remains is a pencil drawing of his house.”
He turned back another page and there it was.
“Solid granite,” he went on, “with bars on all the windows. And, inside that cozy little family Bastille, what systematic inhumanity! Systematic inhumanity in the name, needless to say, of Christ and for righteousness’ sake. Dr. Andrew left an unfinished autobiography, so we know all about it.”
“Didn’t the children get any help from their mother?”
Dr. MacPhail shook his head.
“Janet MacPhail was a Cameron and as good a Calvinist as James himself. Maybe an even better Calvinist than he was. Being a woman, she had further to go, she had more instinctive decencies to overcome. But she did overcome them—heroically. Far from restraining her husband, she urged him on, she backed him up. There were homilies before breakfast and at the midday dinner; there was the catechism on Sundays and learning the Epistles by heart; and every evening, when the day’s delinquencies had been added up and assessed, methodical whipping, with a whalebone riding switch on the bare buttocks, for all six children, girls as well as boys, in order of seniority.”
“It always makes me feel slightly sick,” said Susila. “Pure sadism.”
“No, not pure,” said Dr. MacPhail. “Applied sadism. Sadism with an ulterior motive, sadism in the service of an ideal, as the expression of a religious conviction. And that’s a subject,” he added, turning to Will, “that somebody ought to make a historical study of—the relation between theology and corporal punishment in childhood. I have a theory that, wherever little boys and girls are systematically flagellated, the victims grow up to think of God as ‘Wholly Other’—isn’t that the fashionable argot in your part of the world? Wherever, on the contrary, children are brought up without being subjected to physical violence, God is immanent.
A people’s theology reflects the state of its children’s bottoms. Look at the Hebrews—enthusiastic child-beaters. And so were all good Christians in the Ages of Faith. Hence Jehovah, hence Original Sin and the infinitely offended Father of Roman and Protestant orthodoxy. Whereas among Buddhists and Hindus education has always been nonviolent. No laceration of little buttocks—therefore tat tvam asi, thou art That, mind from Mind is not divided. And look at the Quakers. They were heretical enough to believe in the Inner Light, and what happened? They gave up beating their children and were the first Christian denomination to protest against the institution of slavery.”
“But child-beating,” Will objected, “has quite gone out of fashion nowadays. And yet it’s precisely at this moment that it has become modish to hold forth about the Wholly Other.”
Dr. MacPhail waved
