The 45th, page 26
“Islam controls everything, every aspect of the lives of believers. Everything, even the hand you use to perform certain bodily functions. We look at this, we read the Koran, and see a kind of regimentation that seems the very antithesis of the freedom we all claim to prize. A Muslim looks at America, or looks at France, and what does he see? What is the result of our much vaunted freedom, the freedom we insist he should want as much as we do, and, more than that, insist it is what he really wants, deep down inside, if he were only free to express himself? What arrogance! What does a Muslim see? - A people devoted to mindless entertainment, to violence, to sexual exploitation, a people without religion, without faith, without the ability, or even the desire, to distinguish good and evil, a people who in the name of toleration proclaim sodomy a legitimate alternative to the natural relation between men and women. We say we believe in freedom. They ask, freedom for what?
“But leave all that aside. What really is the nature of our complaint? That they engage in acts of terrorism. We bomb them, destroy their countries, kill hundreds of thousands, and then, when their governing class has been eliminated, hundreds of thousands more are killed in civil wars that inevitably follow. And then we think that if only they were democratic….Do you know how ignorant we are? We refuse to believe that democracy isn’t what everyone wants to have. It is beyond our comprehension that there can be no democracy in a Muslim country. The law is not, and can never be, what a majority might happen to want; the law is what the Koran - the word of God - says it is. So we attack them, overthrow their governments, insist that they believe, like we do, in the rights of the individual, insist, in effect, that they stop believing in what they have believed for more than a thousand years, and call them barbarians when they take up arms, or try to take up arms, when we go after them with planes and tanks and all the advanced weaponry of our more civilized way of life!”
Julian had listened with an intense interest. He disagreed with nothing that Marcel Dubose had said. The question was not whether it was true, whether the West continued to misjudge Islam and what it meant; the question was what could be done about it.
“DeGaulle gave Kennedy advice that Kennedy did not follow. And Vietnam ended up exactly as DeGaulle had said it would. But DeGaulle did something himself that we should probably do now. He ended the French control of Algeria, did he not? And that, if I remember what I have read, almost started a civil war at home.”
“You’re wondering if the same thing would happen in America? Algeria was considered part of France. Generations of French settlers had made it their home. You have nothing like that kind of connection with the Middle East, except, in a sense, Israel. That isn’t the problem you face. The problem is -”
“That I’ll be accused of running from a fight, accused of letting the terrorists win, accused of inviting an attack.”
“You may well be preventing one. Why do they hate America, why do they hate the West, if it isn’t because we refuse to leave them alone? But,” he added, with a shrewd look in his eyes, “you’re not worried about what anyone is going to think about what you’ve done. You didn’t get elected president because you wanted applause. You are going to try to do something no one else would even think of, much less attempt. And it wouldn’t stop you - it won’t stop you - if you knew you were almost certain to fail. You have to convince a country that what it most prizes isn’t worth having, that wealth isn’t an end in itself, that….I read some of the things you said. You’re right of course - human excellence is the only thing worth pursuing. But most people still think that means the ability to make money.”
“It won’t be that difficult,” replied Julian. He seemed to dismiss the objection as a matter of at most minor importance. He glanced around the small dimly lit room, laughing quietly at the contrast with the stunning luminosity of Marcel Dubose’s remarkable mind. “Remember the discussions we had, just last year, about the French Revolution and all the things that brought it about,” he remarked, as he got up and walked over to the window.
Through the slow falling snow, across the sharp sloping green metal roofs of the buildings that stretched a tangled mass down to the Seine, he watched the way the ground lights bathed the cathedral, built nearly a thousand years before, in a golden haze, while he watched in his mind the generous and inept Louis XVI and the faded remnants of the aristocracy of France play their appointed parts in a drama that, once it started, nothing in now more than two hundred years had been able to stop. He turned back to Marcel Dubose sitting quietly in his chair.
“Everyone now thinks it was the greatest thing that ever happened. No one remembers what was lost. A well-intentioned, dull-minded king, a stupid, greedy and utterly useless aristocracy, taxing the poor to starvation and death, and a new voice in the world, an echo of Rousseau, preaching the new religion of human brotherhood and equality; a religion that destroyed every sentiment of respect for the differences between what is better and what is worse, that destroyed every belief in order and authority, that brought into being mass democracy and then, because someone had to govern, Napoleon, and after him, the constant back and forth between anarchy and tyranny.”
“But, Julian - do you really think we can go back? Remember what we studied, remember what Plato and Aristotle wrote. City-states in which everyone knew, at least by second-hand report, everyone else, ten thousand citizens. Athens, when Socrates was alive and Pericles controlled things, had a population of more than three hundred thousand, but that included slaves and foreigners who were allowed to stay for a limited period of time and without civic rights. That would be considered today nothing more than a large town or small sized city. Everything has changed. It doesn’t affect the truth of what the nature of a human being is, but the conditions under which we live are so different, the enormous volume and density, all the people who have to have some means of existence. Someone could give a speech in an assembly in Athens and change what Athens was going to do; even in Rome, with its empire, someone like Cicero could make a speech and the world, if I can put it like this, would listen. But now….?” He started to laugh. “But I forget, that is exactly what you did, isn’t it? - Gave a speech that changed everything. Still, you understand my point. The world has changed; we cannot go back.”
A smile like the triumph of duplicity, a smile like an open secret, slipped across Julian’s mouth.
“It depends on what you want to restore, what you want to preserve, what you want people to remember. And, besides, if everything moves in circles, going forward is going back. It is one of the things you helped me see, years ago, when I first came to Paris and we began our long conversation. Phaedrus, that dialogue in which Plato writes about writing, that anything well-written can be started, and ended, anywhere, that perfect writing is like a perfect sphere.”
“Yes, but he understood by that the necessity to read things more than once. You cannot know what the beginning really means until you have read something all the way through.”
“And even then,” remarked Julian, with laughter in his eyes, “if it is one of Plato’s dialogues you would not yet have understood very much. Every night, for a few hours, I put everything else aside, and concentrate on trying to grasp more firmly, to see more clearly, the real meaning of what he wrote.”
Marcel Dubose looked down at his small hands with their thin white parchment fingers. His mouth trembled, twitching at the corners with the eagerness of his thought. He looked up with a strange, pensive stare.
“Like a second Julian. Just three blocks from here, the place where Julian spent winters when he was with the army -”
“Almost seventeen hundred years ago…”
“When the army made him emperor.”
“When Julian managed things so that the army would force him to do what he could not appear to do on his own.”
“Yes, precisely,” agreed Marcel Dubose, “if you read between the lines of what our historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, wrote almost that long ago. It was a perfect life.”
“Killed when he was - what? - thirty-two or thirty-three?”
“But did more, understood more, than almost anyone ever has.”
“Agreed, but only to a point. Because had he lived, think what he might have achieved, how much would have changed. Instead of Christianity and the fall of Rome, the restoration of the ancient gods and a world that believed in life instead of death. If Julian had lived neither Christianity, nor any other religion that taught weakness instead of strength, would have survived. Instead of slavery to the delusion of a false equality before God, there would still be respect for the freedom of the human mind. I don’t flatter myself that I can be a second Julian, but I have tried to live the way he did, trying to learn more about the world - the way the world is ordered and the way in which we, as human beings, have our place in it. And that, really, is the reason I was so desperate to see you again. There isn’t anyone else I can talk to, no one else would have any idea what I was talking about, no one who would think an interest, a serious interest, in ancient thought more than a strange eccentricity. Don’t misunderstand. I won’t hide the fact that instead of playing golf, or watching sports on television, like most of our recent presidents, I study the serious works of the human mind, but I have to do it in a way that makes it sound like something everyone would like, if not to do themselves, then to have their children grow up wanting to try.”
“In other words, you plan to be ironic - not the way most people think the meaning of the word. Ironic in the sense of saving others from the embarrassment, or the anger, of their own limitations; saying things that nearly everyone will believe means something of which they readily approve. The way Socrates always spoke, or, more to the point, what Winston Churchill once said to Stalin: ‘The truth is too precious not to be attended by an accompaniment of lies.’”
“Yes…, ironic, if you will, but not with you. I will write you letters. Only when I write do I find I can really think. Sequential thought comes only at the point of a pen. Keep what I write, show it to no one. Never mention to anyone that I have written anything at all. When I am finally done with politics, give the letters back, but if something happens to me do with them what you think best. Burn them, or pass them on to someone, if there is anyone, who might benefit from them. More important than any of that, when you get a letter from me, write back to me, if you would, keep this conversation of ours alive. There is nothing more important than keeping alive the best thought we have. Here,” he added, reaching inside his jacket for his pen. “This is how to address things so that no one but me will ever read them.”
Marcel Dubose took the sheet of paper on which Julian had scribbled down the private address he could use. Nodding his agreement that he would do exactly as he had been asked, he folded she sheet in half and placed it inside his own pocket.
“We began talking about Islam and the way we have failed to understand it,” he said, never doubting that Julian would want him to go back to the central thread of the conversation. “Machiavelli was a great admirer of Islam, the discipline it imposed, the willingness to use force, the way in which every aspect of life was controlled by a single, undivided authority. Christianity had no chance against that kind of organized militancy. Constantinople had just recently fallen. The rescue of the all but forgotten works of Plato and other Greek writers made possible by the Medici and their money was the beginning of the Renaissance. Islam was triumphant; the Church, under Pope Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, and his son, Cesare, had become through treachery and murder utterly corrupt. Machiavelli understood - and no one remembers this - that Christianity was in its death throes. A new religion was needed. If it had not been for the Reformation, if it had not been for Luther, the Church might have been transformed, turned into an agency of encouragement for the life we have instead of an imaginary kingdom of heaven.
“Machiavelli writes somewhere that a religion lasts between 1667 and 3000 years. He wrote in the early years of the l6th century, which means that Christianity had only a hundred years or so left. Machiavelli wanted to establish a new religion, and, in a way, he did - a religion in which everyone worships the acquisition of power. It has been a great success. Look at how many have abandoned Christianity. What has been the result? We have no religion, in the traditional sense of the word. Religion is dead. Nietzsche understood this. God is dead, everything is permitted. Julian wanted to restore the ancient gods of Rome, because without that belief the Roman people would never feel the necessity to sacrifice themselves and what they owned for the greatness of Rome. But Nietzsche - which means all of us in the modern world, in the West - had nothing he could restore. You know - I remember we discussed that line, so awful in its significance, that Karl Lowith wrote: ‘Nietzsche sought by a new beginning to retrieve antiquity from the emptiness of modernity and, with this experiment, vanished in the darkness of insanity.’ That line still haunts me. It puts a stop to every hope, it confirms every feeling of despair, about our future. Modern science has become the only thing we take seriously, and modern science, and the technology it has created, seems destined to destroy not only whatever we have left of civilization, but what it means to be a human being. And so, my friend,” he added with a gentle, benevolent smile, “now that you are about to become President of the United States, what do you intend to do about it?”
There was a long silence, a profound quiet in the room, expressive of a cheerful confidence, a self-assurance that had nothing to do with any estimate of the chances that success would follow the attempt, whatever that attempt might be. It was instead the certainty that the attempt itself was what was important, that it was not what you were able to do that counted, but what you were able to be.
“I remember Lowith’s line,” said Julian, as he began to move around the room.
His words had the distant sound of someone speaking to himself. There were times when Marcel Dubose could not quite hear, which did not mean that he did not understand what Julian was saying. He could imagine easily enough what he missed.
“Not that long ago I repeated it to someone, repeated it with the suggestion that it might end up my own fate, driven mad by the world’s insanity, the doubt I sometimes have about whether the ancient thought I think so valid, so important, has any meaning, whether it might be only a delusion, proof of my own disordered mind that what everyone finds so obvious, so clear and convincing, is to me in every respect entirely false.”
Marcel Dubose laughed. His eyes, dazzling in their brilliance, seemed to move in a dozen different directions at once. His small, perfectly shaped head bobbed from side to side with a child’s eager delight.
“Yes, precisely; that is the choice we have left: either the world is insane or we are; or, rather, the world is completely insane and we are not entirely crazy. It is the strange fate of human beings, the reason why we are sometimes said to be the playthings of the gods. No one possesses wisdom; the best of us, the very few of us, Plato, Aristotle, a handful of others, who alone warrant the name philosopher, that is to say lovers of wisdom, love what they do not have. Philosophy is not the possession of wisdom, it is the quest, the constant, unending search for it. Only God has perfect wisdom, but God, as Plato understood, is nothing more than another name for Reason.”
Julian cocked an eyebrow. “Yes, precisely,” he said, repeating, quite on purpose, the phrase Marcel DuBose had used. “God is reason, the world has an order, and we are all somehow a part of it, part of the order, a participant in reason. Yes, precisely,” he said with a quick, eager smile. “It all seems obvious: there is a nature, an order, if you will, that defines what each of us should be. The question is why it isn’t obvious anymore.”
“It was never obvious to everyone. Remember what Plato wrote in the Laws: ‘We do not hold, as the many do, that preservation and mere existence are what is most honorable for human beings; what is most honorable is for them to become as excellent as possible and to remain so for as long a time as they may exist.’”
“I know the place; I understand what you mean,” said Julian, stopping in front of the window to look again at Notre Dame in the middle distance. “And I know the danger implicit in what he says, what can happen to someone who doesn’t seem to agree with whatever those who have power happen to believe. Just a few lines earlier, he writes that what all human beings have in common is the desire ‘To have things happen in accordance with the commands of their own soul - preferably all things, but if not that, then at least the human things.’” Julian glanced over his shoulder at his old friend and teacher. “What a ridiculous race we are, wanting power over everyone and everything - as if we knew what to do if we had it!”
