The movement was well under way in William James’s day, and it’s been gathering momentum ever since. But thesis always invites antithesis and in due course the heresies begat Neo-Orthodoxy. Down with the Wholly Identical and back to the Wholly Other! Back to Augustine, back to Martin Luther—back, in a word, to the two most relentlessly flagellated bottoms in the whole history of Christian thought. Read the Confessions, read the Table Talk. Augustine was beaten by his schoolmaster and laughed at by his parents when he complained. Luther was systematically flogged not only by his teachers and his father, but even by his loving mother. The world has been paying for the scars on his buttocks ever since. Prussianism and the Third Reich—without Luther and his flagellation theology these monstrosities could never have come into existence.
Or take the flagellation theology of Augustine, as carried to its logical conclusions by Calvin and swallowed whole by pious folk like James MacPhail and Janet Cameron. Major premise: God is Wholly Other. Minor premise: man is totally depraved. Conclusion: Do to your children’s bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the Fall: whip, whip, whip!”
There was a silence. Will Farnaby looked again at the drawing of the granite person in the rope walk, and thought of all the grotesque and ugly phantasies promoted to the rank of supernatural facts, all the obscene cruelties inspired by those phantasies, all the pain inflicted and the miseries endured because of them. And when it wasn’t Augustine with his “benignant asperity,” it was Robespierre, it was Stalin; when it wasn’t Luther exhorting the princes to kill the peasants, it was a genial Mao reducing them to slavery.
“Don’t you sometimes despair?” he asked.
Dr. MacPhail shook his head. “We don’t despair,” he said, “because we know that things don’t necessarily have to be as bad as in fact they’ve always been.”
“We know that they can be a great deal better,” Susila added. “Know it because they already are a great deal better, here and now, on this absurd little island.”
“But whether we shall be able to persuade you people to follow our example, or whether we shall even be able to preserve our tiny oasis of humanity in the midst of your worldwide wilderness of monkeys—that, alas,” said Dr. MacPhail, “is another question. One’s justified in feeling extremely pessimistic about the current situation. But despair, radical despair—no, I can’t see any justification for that.”
“Not even when you read history?”
“Not even when I read history.”
“I envy you. How do you manage to do it?”
“By remembering what history is—the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma.”
He turned again to the album. “Let’s get back to the house in the Royal Burgh, back to James and Janet, and the six children whom Calvin’s God, in His inscrutable malevolence, had condemned to their tender mercies. ‘The rod and reproof bring wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.’ Indoctrination reinforced by psychological stress and physical torture—the perfect Pavlovian setup. But, unfortunately for organized religion and political dictatorship, human beings are much less reliable as laboratory animals than dogs. On Tom, Mary and Jean the conditioning worked as it was meant to work. Tom became a minister, and Mary married a minister and duly died in childbirth. Jean stayed at home, nursed her mother through a long grim cancer and for the next twenty years was slowly sacrificed to the aging and finally senile and driveling patriarch. So far, so good. But with Annie, the fourth child, the pattern changed. Annie was pretty. At eighteen she was proposed to by a captain of dragoons.
But the captain was an Anglican and his views on total depravity and God’s good pleasure were criminally incorrect. The marriage was forbidden. It looked as though Annie were predestined to share the fate of Jean. She stuck it out for ten years; then, at twenty-eight, she got herself seduced by the second mate of an East Indiaman. There were seven weeks of almost frantic happiness—the first she had ever known. Her face was transfigured by a kind of supernatural beauty, her body glowed with life. Then the Indiaman sailed for a two-year voyage for Madras and Macao. Four months later, pregnant, friendless and despairing, Annie threw herself into the Tay. Meanwhile Alexander, the next in line, had run away from school and joined a company of actors. In the house by the rope walk nobody, thenceforward, was ever allowed to refer to his existence.
And finally there was Andrew, the youngest, the Benjamin. What a model child! He was obedient, he loved his lessons, he learned the Epistles by heart faster and more accurately than any of the other children had done. Then, just in time to restore her faith in human wickedness, his mother caught him one evening playing with his genitals. He was whipped till the blood came; was caught again a few weeks later and again whipped, sentenced to solitary confinement on bread and water, told that he had almost certainly committed the sin against the Holy Ghost and that it was undoubtedly on account of that sin that his mother had been afflicted with cancer. For the rest of his childhood Andrew was haunted by recurrent nightmares of hell. Haunted, too, by recurrent temptations and, when he succumbed to them—which of course he did, but always in the privacy of the latrine at the bottom of the garden—by yet more terrifying visions of the punishments in store for him.”
“And to think,” Will Farnaby commented, “to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.”
“Agreed,” said Dr. MacPhail. “But mightn’t there be a third possibility? Mightn’t there be a tale told by somebody who is neither an imbecile nor a paranoiac?”
“Somebody, for a change, completely sane,” said Susila.
“Yes, for a change,” Dr. MacPhail repeated. “For a blessed change. And luckily, even under the old dispensation, there were always plenty of people whom even the most diabolic upbringing couldn’t ruin. By all the rules of the Freudian and Pavlovian games, my great-grandfather ought to have grown up to be a mental cripple. In fact, he grew up to be a mental athlete. Which only shows,” Dr. Robert added parenthetically, “how hopelessly inadequate your two highly touted systems of psychology really are. Freudism and behaviorism—poles apart but in complete agreement when it comes to the facts of the built-in, congenital differences between individuals. How do your pet psychologists deal with these facts? Very simply.
They ignore them. They blandly pretend that the facts aren’t there. Hence their complete inability to cope with the human situation as it really exists, or even to explain it theoretically. Look at what happened, for example, in this particular case. Andrew’s brothers and sisters were either tamed by their conditioning or destroyed. Andrew was neither destroyed nor tamed. Why? Because the roulette wheel of heredity had stopped turning at a lucky number. He had a more resilient constitution than the others, a different anatomy, different biochemistry and different temperament. His parents did their worst, as they had done with all the rest of their unfortunate brood. Andrew came through with flying colors, almost without a scar.”
“In spite of the sin against the Holy Ghost?”
“That, happily, was something he got rid of during his first year of medical studies at Edinburgh. He was only a boy—just over seventeen. (They started young in those days.) In the dissecting room the boy found himself listening to the extravagant obscenities and blasphemies with which his fellow students kept up their spirits among the slowly rotting cadavers. Listening at first with horror, with a sickening fear that God would surely take vengeance. But nothing happened. The blasphemers flourished, the loud-mouthed fornicators escaped with nothing worse than a dose, every now and then, of the clap. Fear gave place in Andrew’s mind to a wonderful sense of relief and deliverance. Greatly daring, he began to risk a few ribald jokes of his own. His first utterance of a four-letter word—what a liberation, what a genuinely religious experience! And meanwhile, in his spare time, he read Tom Jones, he read Hume’s ‘Essay on Miracles,’ he read the infidel Gibbon.
Putting the French he had learned at school to good account, he read La Mettrie, he read Dr. Cabanis. Man is a machine, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. How simple it all was, how luminously obvious! With all the fervor of a convert at a revival meeting, he decided for atheism. In the circumstances it was only to be expected. You can’t stomach St. Augustine any more, you can’t go on repeating the Athanasian rigmarole. So you pull the plug and send them down the drain. What bliss! But not for very long. Something,
