The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [327]
“Oh, is there?” Fleury’s mind was still lovingly reviewing the birthday party which had just taken place; he was trying to remember all the charming and intelligent remarks he had just made in Louise’s presence; he had done rather well, he thought...“I wonder what she thought when I said such-and-such and everyone laughed? I wonder what she thought when Harry was telling everyone about us spiking the guns? I wonder...”
“Yes,” went on the Padre, making a superhuman effort to maintain his conversational tone. “It is being studied as if it were not a sacred text, by the method of philological and linguistic investigation.”
“Oh yes, I think I may have heard something along those lines.”
Louise, Fleury had noticed, had a way, while seated of shifting her position slightly with a thoughtful look. There was something so feminine about it.
“A great variety of opinion has been advanced,” continued the Padre impartially, breaking into a sweat. “Now people think one thing, now another.”
“You mean like ‘the dancing clergy’...Some people think it’s all right for them to do so, some don’t?”
“I suppose the question of the ‘dancing clergy’ might be so considered,” agreed the Padre mildly, but thinking: ‘Surely the Devil is putting words on this young man’s tongue!’ “But I was thinking more of another much-debated question...whether the Bible is literally true or not?”
The Padre had uttered these final words as casually as his exhausted state and impassioned convictions would allow. He had stopped digging. In his excitement he had dug one end of the grave to a tremendous depth, the other hardly at all, so that the body lying beside it would have to be buried at a peculiar angle...But he was not thinking of this, he was waiting for Fleury’s reply.
“Will the Padre never cease from these inquisitions?” wondered the Collector irritably. “Haven’t we enough to worry about already?” He still felt displeased because the Padre had so selfishly snatched the smaller body.
The Padre was waiting for Fleury to reveal the thoughts in his mind about the Bible, but Fleury was having trouble seeing them against the radiance shed by Louise. What was it that he was supposed to be thinking about? Oh yes, the Bible, literally true or not?
“Frankly,” he said in a mature and condescending way, “I tend to agree with Coleridge that it doesn’t particularly matter...”
“Not matter !”
“...that the important thing about the Bible is not that it tells us that Moses did this or that...he may or may not have, for all I know, but I don’t think it’s important whether these German wallahs manage to prove it one way or another...in other words not whether it’s literally true, but whether...” Fleury’s voice took on a more solemn note, “...whether it’s morally true, whether it appeals to and satisfies our inner spiritual needs. That, if I may say so, is the important question.” After a moment he added, more condescendingly than ever: “I dare say our positions differ a trifle, eh, Padre?” This additional comment was designed to put an end to the argument...his thoughts wanted to hasten back to the consideration of Louise.
“The Bible is the word of God, Mr Fleury,” exclaimed the Padre gesturing in the darkness with his spade. “How will you interpret the spirit precisely, man? How will you say it is this and not that? Every man will set to work subjecting the Bible to his own limited intelligence and end up floundering in apostasy. You will have men like this misguided Schleiermacher who pick and choose among the doctrines of the Church and who decide, puffed up by confidence in their own powers of reason, that the Fall is not a moral teaching or that the Atonement is distasteful to them.”
“But if it seems clear that certain parts of the Bible are not, hm, moral according to our latest nineteenth-century conceptions of morality...”
“Fallen man is not able to understand the purposes of God,” interrupted the Padre, who had thrown away his spade and was trying to ram the small, shrouded corpse into the hole he had dug in such a way that the feet