A Man From The Country
Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter. Zu diesem Türhüter kommt ein Mann vom Lande und bittet um Eintritt in das Gesetz.
Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper comes a man from the country and asks for entry into the Law.
— Franz Kafka, ‘Vor dem Gesetz‘ (1915)
Twice in two days I have failed to walk through an open door. There is a standing invitation to enter into communion with that which more than anything else, so I am told, almost tauntingly, can give me what I, as a secular European, desperately want or need. On both occasions I hesitated at the threshold, and then diverted towards more familiar forms of comfort.
Yesterday, for instance, I found myself in a café preparing my approach to that portal, and I had this sudden sense that I was in the presence of something I was not ready for, or no longer knew how to receive. As if some ancient fountainhead had dried up and I were being asked to celebrate running water. The message was one of peace and truth arising out of strife and deceit. I was reading an order of service for Evensong in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. It was Saturday, 10 October.
The celebratory Introit, the fourth in Aaron Copland’s Four Motets, ‘Sing ye praises to our King’ (1921), recalls Psalm 47, a hymn exalting God’s lordship over the earth and all the nations, and His choice of Israel.
Sing ye praises to our King, / O sing ye praises to our King and Ruler. / Come and hear all ye men. / Come and hear my praises.
It is vibrant, jubilant. I have since learned that Copland, a Brooklyn-born Jew from Lithuanian parents, is renowned for his spacious and melodic clarity. I try now to imagine what I missed yesterday: the soaring celebration beneath the fan-like grace of the chapel’s famous vaulted ceiling, its resonant luminosity heightened by the cobalt magnificence of the chapel’s enormous stained-glass windows. It’s not that we don’t see or hear the beauty anymore: we fear what really lies behind it, what makes it possible.
The parable of strife that follows is terrible. The psalm that comes after the Preces, 55:1–15 in the Book of Common Prayer, is a lament about the betrayal of a friend and the impiety of a city. King David calls upon God to hear him in his fear and his pain, but the recital stops short of the curse he calls down upon his enemies – which, so I read, is customary in modern Anglicanism.
But I tend to think that a regular dose of brimstone is healthy, and anyway I had accursed cities on my mind.
Let death come hastily upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.
This is hell. It just so happens that earlier in the day I strayed into the third ring of the seventh circle of Hell, where Dante meets three great Florentine leaders from just before his time, men who had achieved great renown protecting the city from both without and within, but privately had sinned against nature. Their conversation is a commentary on the complacency and corruption that gripped Florence in Dante’s own time.
As I sat there with my tea, reflecting on Psalm 55, a chasm of dread opened up in me. I felt I was reading a representation of what I am seeing in the world today. The prospect of attending the service suddenly seemed overwhelming. Have I ever even experienced the City of Humankind, this Nineveh or Babylon, as a virtuous place?
A modern European, especially one who is humanistically educated, tends to view such narrative arcs as primitive, superstitious. But what happens when he suddenly starts to perceive them as real, when events, gate-crashers that they are, start happening? When primitive suddenly becomes primal, superstitious undeniable?
The recital of the psalm is answered in the service by Zechariah 8, the First Lesson, in which a vision of a new Jerusalem where the streets are filled with old people with their walking-sticks and children playing, where the four fasts of mourning become four feasts of celebration. The reading starts at verse 14:
14 For thus saith the Lord of hosts; As I thought to punish you, when your fathers provoked me to wrath, saith the Lord of hosts, and I repented not: 15 So again have I thought in these days to do well unto Jerusalem and to the house of Judah: fear ye not. 16 These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates: 17 And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the Lord.
Then comes the arresting image of ten men ‘out of all languages of the nations’ who take hold of the corner of the garment of a Jewish man, saying, ‘We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you.’ A message of vindication for a pluralistic Israel that attracts by virtue of its spiritual force, and does not repel.
This is the necessary counterpoint to the notion presented by Alana Newhouse in Tablet in March of this year. Extrapolating only slightly, it shows Westerners who target Zionism either because it represents what they desperately want and can’t attain, or because it represents what they most fear and wish to destroy. Zion — the idea, the nation and the state — exerts tremendous centripetal force on all who witness it. You don’t need to be against Zion to feel it.
The service juxtaposes Jewish and Christian texts typologically in a way that resolves the significance of the Old Testament in the teaching of the New. In this case, the promise set up in Zechariah is fulfilled in John 20 with Christ’s resurrection and the parable of Doubting Thomas.
But this is just something I know about how such a sequence of readings is often understood in the Anglican tradition: it does not reflect what I see. One thing I see is that the New Testament could not exist without the Old, that Christian civilization, down to the very turrets and ogee caps at the four corners of this glorious chapel in the heart of Cambridge, could not exist without Judaism.
Somewhere in the churn of history that understanding has been lost. It urgently needs to be recovered, because its loss, I fear, is a result of arrogant complacency, not some kind of inspired, forward-thinking secularism.
This morning, 11 October, I arrived in time for Matins, the morning service. I was early, in fact, so I stopped for a coffee. My intentions were clear, but as I sat in the terse, chill sunshine, basking in the radiance of the chapel’s iconic façade, I started to notice my resolve shifting again. This time I didn’t spend my time agonizing over the order of service. I moved on because I wanted to write this article, and because I was cold.
For today, at least, I remain Kafka’s man from the country.