At the end of the pre-Christian era (although people, whether they are warned about the coming Messiah or about the impending holocaust, do not count their time backward) Alexandria was a marketplace of creeds and ideologies, among them Judaism, local Coptic cults, Neo- platonism, and, of course, newly arrived Christianity. Polytheism and monotheism were familiar issues in this city, site of the first real academy in the history of our civilization—Mouseion. By juxtaposing one faith with another we certainly take them out of their context, and the context was precisely what mattered to the Alexandrians, until the day came when they were told that what mattered was choosing one of them. They didn't like doing so, and neither does Cavafy. When Cavafy uses the words "paganism" and "Christianity" we should keep in mind, as he did, that they are approximations, conventions, common denominators, and that numerators are what civilization is all about.
In his historical poems Cavafy uses what Keeley calls "common" metaphors, i.e., metaphors based on political symbolism (as in the poems "Darius" and "Waiting for the Barbarians"); and this is another reason why Cavafy almost gains in translation. Politics itself is a kind of meta-language, a mental uniform, and unlike most modern poets, Cavafy is very good at unbuttoning it. The "canon" contains seven poems about Julian the Apostate—quite a few considering the brevity (three years) of Julian's reign as emperor. There must be some reason for Cavafy's interest in Julian, and Keeley's interpretation does not seem adequate. Julian was brought up as a Christian, but when he took the throne he tried to re-establish paganism as the state religion. Although the very idea of a state religion suggests Julian's Christian streak, he went about the matter in a quite different fashion: he did not persecute the Christians, nor did he try to convert them. He merely deprived Christianity of state support and sent his sages to dispute publicly with Christian priests.
In these verbal sparring matches, the priests were often losers, partly because of dogmatic contradictions in the teachings of that time and partly because the priests were usually less prepared for a debate than their opponents, since they simply assumed their Christian dogma to be superior. At any rate, Julian was tolerant of what he called "Galileanism," whose Trinity he regarded as a backward blend of Greek polytheism and Judaic monotheism. The only thing Julian did which could be viewed as persecution was to demand the return of certain pagan temples seized by Christians during the rule of Julian's predecessors and to forbid Christian proselytizing in the schools. "Those who vilify the gods should not be allowed to teach youths and interpret the works of Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Thu- cydides and Herodotus, who worshipped those gods. Let them, in their own Galilean churches, interpret Matthew and Luke."
Not yet having their own literature and, on the whole, not having much with which to counter Julian's arguments, the Christians attacked him for the very tolerance with which he treated them, calling him Herod, a carnivorous scarecrow, an arch-liar who, with devilish cunning, does not persecute openly and so deceives the simpleminded. Whatever it was that Julian was really after, Cavafy evidently was interested in the way this Roman emperor handled the problem. Cavafy, it seems, saw Julian as a man who tried to preserve the two metaphysical possibilities, not by making a choice, but by creating links between them that would make the best of both. This is surely a rational attihide for one to take on spiritual issues, but Julian was after all a politician. His attempt was a heroic one, considering both the scope of the problem and its possible outcomes. Risking the charge of idealization, one is tempted to call Julian a great soul obsessed with the recognition that neither paganism nor Christianity is sufficient by itself and that, taken separately, neither can exercise man's spiritual capacity to the fullest. There are always tonnenting leftovers, always the sense of a certain partial vacuum, causing, at best, a sense of sin. The fact is that man's spiritual restlessness is not satisfied by either font, and there is no doctrine which, without incurring condemnation, one may speak of as combining both, except, perhaps, stoicism or existentialism (which might be viewed as a form of stoicism, sponsored by Christianity).
A sensual and, by implication, a spiritual extremist cannot be satisfied by this solution, but he can resign himself to it. What matters in any resignation, however, is not so much to what as from what one is resigning. It adds greater scope to Cavafy's poetry to realize that he did not choose between paganism and Christianity but was swinging between them like a pendulum. Sooner or later, though, a pendulum realizes the limitations imposed upon it by its box. Unable to reach beyond its waUs, the pendulum nevertheless gets some glimpses of the outer realm and recognizes that it is subservient and that the directions in which it is forced to swing are preordained, that they are governed by time in— if not for—its progress.
Hence that implacable note of ennui which makes Cavafy's voice with its hedonistic-stoic tremolo sound so haunting. What makes it even more haunting is our realization that we are on this man's side, that we recognize his situation, even if it is only in a poem that deals with the assimilation of a pagan into a pious Christian regime. I have in mind the poem "If Actually Dead" about Apollo- nius of Tyana, the pagan prophet who lived only thirty years later than Christ, was kno^ for miracles, cured people, left no record of his death, and, unlike Christ, could write.
1975
A Guide to a Renamed City
To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to reexperience the unreality and remoteness of the real.
Susan Sontag, On Photography
In front of the Finland Station, one of five railroad terminals through whiA a traveler may enter or leave this city, on the very bank of the Neva River, there stands a monument to a man whose name this city presently bears. In fact, every station in Leningrad has a monument to this man, either a full-scale statue in front of or a massive bust inside the building. But the monument before the Finland Station is unique. It's not the statue itself that matters here, because Comrade Lenin is depicted in the usual quasi-romantic fashion, with his hand poking into the air, supposedly addressing the masses; what matters is the pedestal. For Comrade Lenin delivers his oration standing on the top of an ^raored car. It's done in the style of early Constructivism, so popular nowadays in the West, and in general the very idea of carving an armored car out of stone smacks of a certain psychological acceleration, of the sculptor being a bit ahead of his time. As far as I know, this is the only monument to a man on an armored car that exists in the world. In this respect alone, it is a symbol of a new society. The old society used to be represented by men on horseback.
And appropriately enough, a couple of miles downstream, on the opposite bank of the river, there stands a monument to a man whose name this city bore from the day of its foundation: to Peter the Great. This monument is known universally as the "Bronze Horseman," and its immobility matches only the frequency with which it has been photographed. It's an impressive monument, some twenty feet tall, the best work of Etienne-Maurice Falconet, who was recommended by both Diderot and Voltaire to Catherine the Great, its sponsor. Atop the huge granite rock dragged here from the Karelian Isthmus, Peter the Great looms on high, restraining with his left hand the rearing horse that symbolizes Russia, and stretching his right hand to the north.
Since both men are responsible for the name of the place, it's quite tempting to compare not their monuments alone but their immediate surroundings, too. On his left, the man on the armored car has the quasi-classicistic building of the local Party Committee and the infamous "Crosses"—the biggest penitentiary in Russia. On his right, there is the Artillery Academy; and, if you follow the direction in which his hand points, the tallest post-revolutionary building on the left bank of the river—Leningrad's KGB headquarters. As for the "Bronze Horseman," he too has a military institution on his right—the Admiralty; on his left, however, there is the Senate, now the State Historical Archive, and his hand points across the river to the university which he built and where the man on the armored car later got some of his education.