Status Updates From Prowansja

‘[…] It is something of a paradox that it was the scriptures which first conferred a new theological freedom on woman—one which she was no slow to accept. When St Paul remarked, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female,” he was making place for the new concept of human “persona”, a word which up to then had indicated simply a mask used in stageplays.’

‘[…] The Roman Empire with its colourful tapestry of nymphs and gods, while poetically satisfying, did nothing to offer woman even a nominal equality of status before the law. The Roman world was completely masculine-inclined and such civic rights as existed were male-dominated in their conception. […]

‘[…] though the Church father went on execrating her, calling her “sovereign pest”, “gateway to hell”, “arm of the devil”, “advance guard of hell”, “larva of the demon”: the baleful voice of St John Chrysostom, St Anthony, St Jerome and other Christians of the same outlook. […]

‘We can see how through such apparent games [as the Courts of Love] the great lady of the day was busy trying to insist on a style, a code, within which love, that rarest of sentiments, could find its own values. She was pleading for a new sportsmanship in love, something worthy of her new status, for with the death of Rome she found herself declared nominally free by the scriptures; […]

‘[…] The early tombs reveal the new trend with ghastly clarity. The expression in these figures reveals an intensity of conviction which makes you forget their enormous hands, unwieldy heads and pitiful, disproportionate limbs and bodies.’

‘[…] But once Christianity sets in, all the slender grace of these plastic conceptions vanishes to be replaced by subject matter which is as rueful as it is lugubrious: hairy saints and bowed mourners, sanctimonious goblins from a world of guilt and repentance whose very salvation hovers over them as a sort of threat: castration, fear, repression. […]

‘[…] Or they gave a frank and free expression to the best at they considered appropriate to his memory. For them the dead could still be cherished thus in memory. […]

‘[…] The pagans approached death so cheerfully. Their monuments exhale a smiling guileless happiness almost worthy of Chinese sages.
‘The so-called pagans carved upon a dead man’s tomb only an agreeable recollection of the happiest scenes of everyday life: the vine-gatherings, the olive-plantings, the picnics, the hunting excursions, the story-tellings or recitations. […]

‘The most striking difference, both in treatment and subject matter, is to be found in the early Christian monuments which form the most riveting part of the unparalleled collection of Roman sarcophagi held by the city today, and which are on view to the public. A brief visit cannot help but render a modern visiter thoughtful. [I can attest to that.] […]

Durrell quoting Aldo: ‘“[…] But as philosophers we have a right to deplore the predisposition towards monotheism that set in and coaxed our thinkers through pragmatism to a final scientific determinism which is responsible for many of our ills.”’

‘But what is so striking about these sculpted Roman caps [chiselled on the graves of rich Romans indicating how many of his slaves he had freed on his death] is that they indicate something which we did not believe formed part of the Roman consciousness: namely, any idea of freedom whatsoever, or any real admission that Rome, for all its virtues and splendours, was founded completely on slave labour.’

‘[…] Nevertheless if the new beliefs took time to acclimatize themselves, the new atmosphere of qualified beliefs or downright doubts went far towards sapping the foundations of civil life, for to the Roman mind civic order and belief were by origin religious predispositions.’

‘[…] These new intransigents were seen as profoundly objectionable for they were dogmatic and quite uncritical, and unwilling to submit their beliefs to philosophic examination. The implicit monotheism they propounded was also profoundly distasteful to the Roman mind, which had been forged by a classical poetry and a polytheistic latitude towards nature and man … […]

‘[…] Even a superficial examination of Galen’s writing shows us that to the thinkers of his time Christian and Jewish thought was profoundly at odds with the classical Greek conception of the relation of man to God, and God to the world. Galen makes no bones about it. […]

‘Whether you take the writing of a major thinker of scientific genius like Galen, or the simpler historic talent of an ex-governor like Pliny, you cannot escape the conviction that a steady drift into scepticism and doubt had set in, and the new faith, Christianity, was only one of several beliefs seeking to allay it. […]

And on the subject of archaic beliefs and theurgy, and the break Christianity made with the old system of religion:

‘But once the circle of initiation closes
A death-begotten insight rules,
Rough harness of the old anxieties,
Offer their trivial psychoses,
Models for human fools.’

‘[…] One was adventuring into the world of archetypal symbols and forms where secrecy is the law, not for any other reason than that the transcendental vision or experience simply outstrips the resources of language to do justice to it, far less to describe it. In this domain of true alchemy poetry is the only resource!’

‘[…] One way of effecting union with the divinity was by animating statues in order to extract oracles from them. By the use of incense, herbs, scents and special chants and prayers, the devotee sought to induce a statue to smile or nod or in some other way respond to one’s entreaty with a sign. And each god had his sympathetic representation in the animal, vegetable or mineral world. […]

‘[…] Iamblichus the philosopher was quite explicit that “it was not thinking which linked men with the divinity but the efficacy of the unspeakable acts performed in the appropriate manner, acts beyond comprehension and powerful because of the potency of the unutterable symbols which are clear only to the divinity …” […]

‘[…] Theurgy is the word which best sums it up, standing for the belief that the divine can be approached through “magical” acts, such as the use of salves and ointments, herbs and roots, garlic and hellebore. […]

‘What was beginning to drift up through the fissures and rents in the ancient polytheistic systems were fragments of archaic beliefs, chunks of animism left over from the detritus of the old version of civic habit centred in primitive doctrine. […]

And then quoting the ‘book’: ‘“She hugged the idea of death to her like his body, imagining how it must be to pass through gravity’s rainbow into the treasury of inorganic matter, present and future mingled and combined with the inhuman silence of all time, trodden like grapes in the presses of wishing.”’

‘But it was now, says Euxinus [a fictional ‘gossipy Roman historian’ invented by Durrell's friend Aldo] in his The Secret Memorials [quoted a few times in this narrative], that the omens turned clearly against them so that all counter-effort seemed vain.’