God's Curse & Grace

THE SIBYL (154 pp.)--Paer Lagerkvist --Random House ($3).

Ahasuerus is the usual name ascribed to the man who denied Christ a moment's rest on his way to Calvary. According to medieval legend (but not Christian doctrine), Ahasuerus thereupon was denied--under Christ's curse--either death or mercy, and was condemned to walk the face of the earth forever. The man cursed with the burden of perpetual life on earth has haunted enough imaginations to produce scores of folk tales, dramas and novels. He now reappears in Paer Lagerkvist's latest book. Those who know the other works (Barabbas, The Eternal Smile) of Sweden's 1951 Nobel Prizewinner will find what they expect--psychological and mystical insights, told in nursery-plain prose and seeking to justify the ways of God to man.

The Real & Unreal. The story of the Wanderer (Lagerkvist names no names) begins with his lack of, charity toward a felon who is being led to a place of execution. The felon, staggering under his cross, says: "You shall suffer greater punishment than mine; you shall never die." Later, whispers reach the Wanderer that the cross-bearer was God's son, and he soon finds out the terror of being immortal on earth: where there is no death, there is no love, at least not in the human sense. The Wanderer leaves his city.--and his age--to take his problem to that renowned religio-psychological clinic, the Delphic oracle.

In Delphi he finds a creature like himself--a being cursed by the old gods as he has been cursed by the new. She is an aged Pythian priestess who lives on a mountainside with only goats and her idiot son for company. The Wanderer asks the priestess for guidance, and her narrative is the main part of the book. Like most allegories, the story suffers from the sometimes near-ludicrous clash of the concrete and the symbolic. It is a measure of Novelist Lagerkvist's great narrative powers that he manages to keep his story alive in the strange twilight glow between reality and unreality.

Footprints in the Snow. The old woman's story runs thus: she was once a simple, pious country girl who was groomed for the role of prophetess at Delphi's prosperous temple. There she was clothed in a bridal robe, learned to get along with the temple snakes, eat the sacred laurel and become the ecstatic "bride" of the god who emanated from the cleft of a rock in the depth of the earth. As a Pythia she was alone, a social outcast, feared and avoided by the plain people of Delphi. She was totally filled with the love of her dark, subterranean god, and yet at times she was rebellious. "For what else was there," she asked sullenly, "in this dirty world to love but him?"

One day, wandering outside the temple precincts, she found the answer--a human lover in the guise of a one-armed soldier. But the god tolerated no mortal rival. Her lover died in a mysterious accident, and a temple goat, sacred symbol of the god himself, ravished her during one of her ecstasies. Pregnant, she was stoned out of the temple, to bear her child on a mountainside, midwifed only by sympathetic goats. The years did not answer her agonizing question: How was her gentle idiot son begotten--by the one-armed soldier or in that capric caprice?

She tells the Wanderer her story, and when it is done her witless godchild (or was it a goat-child?) has disappeared. The outcast Pythia and the outcast Jew follow his footprints up the mountainside. They grow fainter and fainter, finally disappear altogether. Then she knows. "The father has fetched him home."

Signs & Wonders. Those adept at deciphering the message in a parable will be happy to wrest their own truth from The Sibyl. The supporting cast of human symbols is not hard to identify: there are the Pythia's pious, humble parents; the lowly, kindly oracle servant ("little friend of god and man"); the mean old spy who cares nothing for god but only for his temple. These are, for good or ill, like unto other men. But the Pythia and the Wanderer are set apart because they have been touched by God; he works on them not merely "signs and wonders" but the miracle of possession. To the priestess and the Wanderer (and this is the book's message), God is not peace or security; he is agony, conflict--and yet ineffable sweetness as well. "The divine is not human," says the priestess. "It is something quite different. And it is not noble or sublime or spiritualized, as one likes to believe. It is alien and repellent and sometimes it is madness."

What of the Wanderer and the advice he seeks? Perhaps despair might be the beginning of his salvation, suggests the old priestess. "God is your destiny. Your soul is filled with him; through his curse you live a life with god . . . Perhaps one day he will bless you instead of cursing you. I don't know. Perhaps one day you will let him lean his head against your house. Perhaps you won't. But whatever you may do, your fate will be forever bound up with god, your soul forever filled with god."

Readers may reject this message, along with the violent pre-Christian trances of its telling, but few will deny its capacity for troubling the imagination. For to Lagerkvist, God's curse and God's grace are very nearly the same--blows from one awesome hand.

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