Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [75]
Certain ideas were accepted, sometimes for decades or centuries, dominating archeology; suddenly they were doubted. That “Greece was the mother of Western civilization and Rome its daddy” directed archeology and excavation for a long time—yet he, Frederick, would be able to make out a case that the Arabs, Moors and Saracens were parents to “Western” civilisation, sources of its ideas, its literature, its science, a case based on the same kind of evidence that made us legitimate heirs to Greece and Rome … this case wouldn’t necessarily be more true, but its bases would be as powerful.
Throughout the summer he amused himself by concocting, one after another, papers describing the civilisation he was unearthing from the point of view of civilisations not ours—Roman, Greek, Aztec, etc., and so on. With his tongue in his cheek he framed various versions of the paper that he would probably publish about his work of the summer.
This paper would begin, or end, with the ritual sentence that of course the conclusions drawn were tentative due to lack of knowledge, lack of money, lack of time, and because only a fraction of this level of the site had been excavated, let alone all the levels beneath. But this bone having been tossed to the dogs of doubt, all else would be assertion and statement. The paper would draw the fire of opposing professors schools and theories. Textbooks for universities and schools would result. These would contain statements like: Writing was not discovered in the Middle East until 2,000 B.C. The Sumerians believed so and so. The astronomers of the Akkadians believed such and such. The Egyptians mummified their priest-kings because they wanted the corpses to last a long time. The world was created by God 4000 years ago. That African civilisations prior to the coming of the white man were nonexistent/barbaric/plentiful/backward/sparse/or whatever was the current notion. And so on. Frederick left Turkey in a disturbed frame of mind which he associated with his previous state of mind after his African visit. It so happened that he chanced on a book describing a Victorian clergyman’s crisis of Doubt over the existence of God. The clergyman’s character struck Frederick as being similar to his own: energetic, and confident. The man had been upset by Doubts about the exact date of the creation of the world by God. His state of mind was very like Frederick’s as he read. He was on the point of deciding that it was his moral duty to leave the Church, as he could not with honesty remain in it, when his tenth child, a girl, became engaged to a clergyman. This was a very good and by then despaired-of match, as the girl was an old maid, being nearly thirty. The father knew the girl would not keep this man, if he, the father, aired his Doubts and left the Church. For if he left the Church there would be a family-engulfing scandal and the daughter’s fiancé was a conventional man with a future to guard. The father’s crisis now became a nice exercise in balancing responsibilities: his conscience, or his daughter’s future. With much anguish, he put off his leaving the Church until his daughter was wed. This meant he had to go through marrying (personally officiating) his daughter to the clergyman son-in-law with his mind full of Doubts. But when he examined his conscience after the ceremony he found his Doubts much less. As if the act of going through the ceremony had relieved them. “It was my love for my poor Daughter; my fears for her comfortless future; my anguish of mind that my own misery and confusion should poison Others—it was these that had caused me to act, as I then believed, Dishonestly. Thanks be to God in His Great Mercy that he led me, through my Valley of the Shadow, back to Himself …”
In short, that Victorian crisis was over. Frederick was left with two thoughts. One, that this frightful, painful, and very real conflict had taken place about a hundred years ago, which was nothing at all, even in human time. It had been a very common conflict indeed. Some of the best Victorian minds had suffered torment,