“I don’t know,” Lars-Goren said, surprised by the bishop’s sudden shift, “as kingdoms go—”
“Yes, I should have guessed,” the bishop said. “You have great hopes for our dear little Sweden. Why not? Why should we ever lose our innocence, like the French, the Italians, the English? We’re a race of commoners. We always were, but now especially thanks to Kristian’s bloodbath. We’re farmers, peasant villagers, priests in frayed cuffs. We have the miners, of course; an unruly crowd. But even they have a certain love of order, as we see in their meetings, if there’s nothing out there frightening them. Perhaps little Sweden will become a model for all the world, you think. The basis of a universal ethic.”
“You have reason enough to speak ironically,” Lars-Goren said, just a trifle stern. He crossed his hands on the pommel and looked down in the direction of the dog. “Your own life has not turned out exactly as you might have wished, or so I gather, and you’ve witnessed many other failures of vision. King Gustav, perhaps. He was once the kind of innocent you describe, yet now—” He sucked in his lips and mused for a moment, then nodded as if to himself. “No, on second thought, even now a part of him believes in open-heartedness and reason, I think. Why else this rage to see the Devil gotten rid of?”
Bishop Brask laughed, youthful for an instant. “He does even now believe in reason, that’s true! You’ve heard, I take it, that he’s ordered that public debates be held between the Lutherans and the Church? There’s faith in reason for you!”
“You think the dice are loaded?”
“Not at all — at least not by Gustav! The fittest will survive — naturally.” He smiled, wry and indifferent.
“The Lutherans, you think?”
“The Lutherans, yes. And after the Lutherans—” He shrugged. “A man could build a great many huts with the stones and leaded glass of Chartres Cathedral. Now that we have the printing press, and paper, and tawdry bindings, how vast the potential for, so to speak, ‘literature’!”
“Nevertheless,” Lars-Goren said, “if the Devil were out of it, and people could quietly argue things out, apply the Golden Rule with an appropriate measure of self-love, if you follow me—”
“Oh, I follow you all right,” said the bishop, and tipped his head back, looking up at the darkness above them, an empty sky made darker by the blood red glow on the horizon. “Your views are very clear, and even if they weren’t, any sensible child could construct them. It’s easy to see what you think of as good, here in the country, surrounded by your family, your faithful dog, your well-cared-for peasants: openness of heart, the willingness to tell a man frankly what you think. A man could build a whole ethic of that, as indeed the Old Testament Jews did: evil as the closing of the heart, refusal to communicate. What was Adam’s fall but a turning toward secrecy, self-interest?”
“I’ve heard worse definitions of good,” Lars-Goren said.
“Of course you have” said the bishop warmly, leaning forward in his saddle as if trying to see into his vision more clearly. “It’s an excellent theory, or so it seems at first glance. I could argue it myself! Say a mother is beating a child before my eyes. What should I do? Should I use force against the mother? But what is the evil in the beating I am witnessing? That the child feels pain, or that the mother feels the torments of malice instead of the joy of love? Surely it’s both, by the theory we’ve just advanced. A man on his own can do no evil; evil is lack of communication between people. If I want to act, then, I should act to restore communication between the mother and the child. If I use force on the mother, do I get rid of the lack of communication? No, I introduce a new lack of communication, between the mother and myself. I must reason with her, then. But suppose that, in her fury, the mother is screaming as she beats her child, and the child is also screaming. How do I get their attention?” Quickly, to prevent Lars-Goren’s interrupting, he raised his hand. “I know, I anticipate your answer: I use force, but only such force as is needed to stop the ruckus and make the two pay attention. I use measured response. Then we sit and rea-on.
“It may be inconsistent,” Lars-Goren said, “but it’s reasonable enough. One must be sure of one’s motives, needless to say. But it seems to me a man knows when he’s acting for justice, not out of personal fury — that is, when he’s acting by the Golden Rule and when he’s not.” His tone had an edge, as if he suspected the bishop of hair-splitting.
Bishop Brask stretched his arm out, conciliatory. “Say that’s true,” he said, “though of course I’m not as sure as you are that we always know our motives. But say it’s true! You must surely see the problem it raises for me, a city man. Say there are four mothers, all beating their children at the same time, each for a different reason. Say there is also a small group of cannibals, over on a street corner off Ostengräd, not far away, preparing to put a priest in their boiling pot, and just beyond them there’s an Arab who, misunderstanding the language, believes he has just purchased some fisherman’s wife. What am I to do in this case? Whip the various offenders to submission and tie them to cartwheels till I can get to them, one by one, and argue them to reason? Suppose I do this and then you come along just as I’m tying up the last of the offenders — you come along, that is, and see me tyrannizing these innocent strangers, as it seems to you. Do you knock me unconscious to get my attention and run around untying the people I meant to reason with? My example annoys you; I’m making things more complex than they are, you think. I admit the examples are a little facetious, but life in the city may be even more complex than I’ve suggested. What is one to do to get open communication where Swedes, Germans, Frenchmen, Poles, Russians, Finns, and even an occasional Lapp are mixed together like leftover herring sauces, each with his own way of thinking, his own old codes?
“That’s why I said earlier that it’s unreal, this Eden you live in, this Platonic Form of right behavior. It’s refreshing, I don’t deny it! It fills a man with hope and good sense, rejuvenates his spirit. But what if it’s all snare and illusion? I don’t mean to offend you, I hope you understand! No one could be more grateful than I am for the numerous kindnesses you’ve shown me, this glimpse you’ve given me of the pastoral life. No one could be more worthy of love than your wife is — I’m honored to have met her! But you see my reservation. We like to say gloomy, grim cities are the haunt of the Devil, but tradition is against us: it places his home in the unpopulated North — perhaps some such pastoral scene as that valley there below us, shining like a garden.”
Lars-Goren smiled oddly, an expression Bishop Brask could not penetrate — perhaps annoyance, perhaps rueful acknowledgement that it might be as he claimed. With anyone else, Bishop Brask knew, he would at this point have fallen silent, withdrawing to his familiar hopelessness, for clearly he had won; but Lars-Goren had, and had had for some time, a queer effect on him, a way of forcing him — or inspiring him — to say more than he’d intended, as if arguments that only made him weary at other times took on interest when advanced against Lars-Goren. However certain Lars-Goren might be about the motives of his actions, for the bishop there was always some doubt, and never more than now. Whether he continued in the desperate hope of corrupting Lars-Goren, smashing his ill-considered optimism, or in the hope that Lars-Goren might somehow, by his stubborn innocence, “save Brask’s soul”—a distasteful phrase, to the bishop — he had no idea. It was perhaps both at once. Whatever the case, he found himself arguing on, urgently, gesturing like a man selling relics to a man with no faith in them. The dog looked up at him in alarm, and he lowered his voice.