The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) Read Online Free PDF

his mentor’s scalp to his collection as guaranty), the missionary assured him that he would. But the tall men around him would have none of his ephemeral, guilt-ridden prospects, and continued to beatify trees, tempests, and other natural prodigies. In solemn convocation, called in alarm, his superiors decided that Gwyon was too young. He was certainly too interested in what he saw about him. He was called back to the Seminary for a refresher course, and it was at that time that he developed a taste for schnapps, and started the course of mithridatism which was to serve him so well in his later years.
    As a youth in college he had also got interested in the worldly indulgence of the theater (though it was not true, as some had it years later when he was locked up, defenseless, that he had made pocket money while in Divinity School playing the anonymous end of a horse in a bawdy Scollay Square playhouse). As he observed, no theater can prosper without popular subscription; which may well have been why the sincere theatricals of religions more histrionic than his own appealed to him. It was why he donated a resplendent chasuble, black with gold-embroidered skulls-and-bones rampant down the back, to the priest at San Zwingli in Spain (whom he would have costumed like an archbishop had the poor fellow dared let him). It was why he had given money for a new plaster representation of the canonized wraith (though, as the priest said, what they dearly needed was a legitimate locally spawned patron saint) who watched over the interests of the multitude: to them he gave Camilla’s clothes, and an assortment of tambourines. And that was why, in Christian turn, they reciprocated with the festival which committed the body he had shared to rest on earth, and cajoled the only soul he had ever sought toward heaven.
    In the next few months, various reports were received at home concerning the pastor’s sabbatical: rococo tales, adorned with every element but truth. It was not true that, to exercise the humility struck through him by this act of God (in later years he was heard to refer to the “unswerving punctuality of chance”), he had dressed himself in rags, rented three pitiful children, and was to be encountered daily by footloose tourists in a state of mendicant collapse before the Ritz hotel in Madrid; it was not true that he had stood the entire population of Málaga to drinks for three days and then conducted them on an experimental hike across the sea toward Africa, intending that the One he sought should manage it dry-shod; it was not true that he had married a hoary crone with bangles in her ears, proclaimed himself rightful heir to the throne of Abd-er-Rahman, and led an insurrection of the Moors on Córdoba. It was not even true that he had entered a Carthusian monastery as a novice.
    He had entered a Franciscan monastery as a guest, in a cathartic measure which almost purged him of his life.
    The Real Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Otra Vez had been finished in the fourteenth century by an order since extinguished. Its sense of guilt was so great, and measures of atonement so stringent, that those who came through alive were a source of embarrassment to lax groups of religious who coddled themselves with occasional food and sleep. When the great monastery was finished, with turreted walls, parapets, crenelations, machicolations, bartizans, a harrowing variety of domes and spires in staggering Romanesque, Byzantine effulgence, and Gothic run riot in mullioned windows, window tracings, and an immense rose window whose foliations were so elaborate that it was never furnished with glass, the brothers were brought forth and tried for heresy.
Homoiousian
, or
Homoousian
, that was the question. It had been settled one thousand years before when, at Nicæa, the fate of the Christian church hung on a diphthong: Homoousian, meaning of
one
substance. The brothers in faraway Estremadura had missed the Nicæan Creed, busy out of