Q, Luther Blissett [children's ebooks online .txt] 📗
- Author: Luther Blissett
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I stop in front of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, panting for breath, my heart in my throat.
I take a deep breath.
A game for two players. Two men who’ve been fighting the same battle.
One old score to settle.
I can flush you out.
*
What would happen if The Benefit of Christ Crucified became a much more dangerous book than it is? What would happen if someone started going around rebaptising people, holding a copy of the Benefit in his hand?
Carafa and his sleuths would set off after him. But above all Cardinal Reginald Pole and all the Spirituali would have to take to the fray and fight to defend themselves against an attack from the zelanti. It would be better if that happened before an intransigent, a zealot, a friend of Carafa’s, or — even worse — Carafa himself was appointed Pope. Better to start settling scores right away, before the black prince’s spies and informers got honest Pole and his na�ve followers penned in.
Speed up the conflict. Force Pole to fight back rather than being defeated in silence. Forcing that fine English mind to take up arms. He must be the next Pope. He’s got to get rid of the old Theatine.
The mirror reflects the years all at once, but there’s still a quickness in the eyes. Something that must have flashed on the barricades of M�nster, or among the peasant armies of Thuringia. Something that wasn’t lost along the journey, because the journey couldn’t kill it. Madness? No, but as Perna put it: the desire to see how things will end.
The man in the mirror has longer hair. His beard’s going to get longer too. The clothes won’t be so elegant, not Venetian fabrics but old German rags.
The scarred face is pressed right up against the glass, a keen, piercing eye,� glancing up every now and again to consult the Lord above. ‘Yesterday I asked a five-year-old child who Jesus was. And he replied: a statue…’
The old madman grins in amusement.
I have found the Anabaptist.
Letter sent to Trent from the papal city of Viterbo, addressed to Gianpietro Carafa, dated 1st January 1547.
To my most illustrious lord and master Giovanni Pietro Carafa in Trent.
My most honourable lord, the strange fact that I am about to report to you demands proper consideration.
I know for certain that The Benefit of Christ Crucified has begun circulating again in various markets. Over the past few months copies have been bought in Ravenna, Ancona, Pescara, and even further south, along the Adriatic coast. This means that they are travelling by sea, on boats capable of transporting considerable quantities of books. And we can’t be talking about a few hundred copies, my lord, but thousands, so many that it is difficult to believe that this is the work of a single press. Given the range of distribution we must be talking about a printer in Venice or Ferrara, certainly a resident of the territories of those states most fiercely opposed to the entry of the Roman Inquisition.
I know that Your Lordship’s authority does not extend to the territory of La Serenissima, but nonetheless it might be useful to raise the suspicions of the Venetian inquisitors and Duke Ercole II d’Este. I am not actually of the opinion that they will want to be seen as the kind of people who would allow publication of a book excommunicated by the Council.
The strange thing is that here in Viterbo no one seems to know anything about the people who might be responsible for this new distribution. Indeed it would appear that Cardinal Pole and his friends have nothing to do with it this time. One might have cause to suspect that this is a vast operation, directed by a brilliant mind, but someone outside the circle of the Spirituali.
Well, as my lord knows, many radical crypto-Lutherans have found refuge in Venice. So it might be useful to collect more information about their activities, without raising the suspicions of the Venetians, who, as we know, are rather sensitive about the Holy See interfering in their affairs.
Kissing Your Lordship’s hands, I implore Your continued favour,
Viterbo, the first day of the year 1547
Your Lordship’s faithful servant
Q.
Q’s diary
Viterbo, 14th January 1547
On the Council
The Emperor wasted no time. The old lion still has his claws. He has brought his landsknechts down to the Trentino. And with them the plague, which has always come with them.
The message is clear: after the defeat of his champion in the Council, the cardinals have to be careful. That fool the Pope has started sending signals of intent to the French. But Charles is always Charles, ruler of the Holy Roman Emperor, and no one’s going to try and plot behind his back.
The Council has been suspended, it’s going to be transferred to Bologna, far from the pestilential breath of the landsknechts. They say.
On Carafa
Carafa’s going to have to be careful: the Emperor isn’t a man to be walked all over, as he has just demonstrated. Maybe that’s why he’s taking so long to set the Inquisition on the trail of The Benefit of Christ Crucified, on anyone who owns it and on the man who wrote it. Reginald Pole is still the favourite in many people’s hearts, the Pope likes him and the Emperor likes him even more.
Or perhaps it’s merely a studied delay. Perhaps the old man thinks that the time is not yet ripe, that many more fish still have to fall into the net, and the book will have to go on circulating. But he’s playing with fire, because it isn’t just the book that’s spreading: ideas are, too.
On the new distribution of the book
In whose interest can it be to risk so much just to print and sell The Benefit of Christ Crucified?
If Pole and the Spirituali aren’t involved, who’s responsible?
A merchant, a man, or several men, with business sense. But why? There are other ways of making money by printing books, there’s no need to risk prison or your life for a vulgar compendium of Calvinism.
There’s something I haven’t yet understood. I’ve got to follow my instincts.�
Titian
Padua, 22nd January 1547
‘Yesterday I asked a five-year-old child who Jesus was. You know what he replied? A statue.’
Curious faces barely illuminated by the candle. About a dozen students huddled around the light, the only ones challenging sleep and the strict rules of the college. I met some of them this afternoon in the anatomy room, after the theology lecture. A little chat in the corridor was all it took for them to suggest that I follow them to the Benedictine college and spend the night there.
‘What is Christ to a simple mind? A statue. Is that a blasphemy? No, because there is no intent to offend. So is it the lie of an ignorant person, then? It isn’t that, either. I tell you: this child was not lying, in fact, he told the truth twice. First because before his eyes, as he was being trained to kneel, there was a stone crucifix. What instils life in that stone? What makes it different from the others? Knowledge of what it represents. Knowledge: that which gives a meaning to things, to the world, and also to statues. Hence, in order to bring that statue to life we must know Christ. Can we say in a few simple words who Christ is? Yes: He is love and grace. He is God, who, for the love of men, is sacrificed on the cross, redeeming them of their sins, saving them from darkness. And faith in that one act justifies men before God: that is the benefit that Christ brings us. The Benefit of Christ Crucified.
‘So if it is knowledge and love that bring that statue to life, our task is to cultivate those two things as the most precious gifts, and to shun, indeed to do battle with, anyone who attempts to remove them from us.
‘Which brings us to the child’s second truth. Now we are really witnessing Christ’s agony. Not with love or with knowledge does the Church bring to life the Christ to which children turn. Christ becomes unconditional obedience to secular authority, to the corrupt hierarchy of Rome, to the simoniac Pope, He becomes the fear of divine punishment as dramatised by the Holy Office. None of this is the living God: it really is an arid, silent statue.
‘So we ourselves must become children again, we must reacquire the simple mind of that child so full of wisdom, and reaffirm the descent of grace within us. A new baptism, which makes us participants once more in the benefit of Christ crucified.
‘With this renewed certainty we cannot be afraid to profess the true faith, even in the face of the hypocrisy of the courts and the corrupt men of the Church. Therefore I say to you, if anyone ever asks who has talked to you in this way, do not be afraid to tell them that it was I, Titian the Baptist.’
Rovigo, 30th January 1547
‘Just yesterday, leaving a church, I met a five-year-old child and asked him who Jesus was. Do you know what he replied? A statue.’
Brother Vittorio shrugs his shoulders and allows a smile to flicker briefly under his ample beard. ‘If it’s any consolation there’s a man from our village, a carpenter who must be about forty years old, he goes to church three times every day, recites a Paternoster facing the crucifix and then goes back to work. I asked him how it was that he had become so assiduous in his visits to the Lord, and he told me it was I who had told him that if he prayed to Jesus three times every day He would cure his back pain. This is the nearest place I know where I can find Jesus, he added. I can’t describe his face when I tried to explain to him that Jesus can be everywhere: in women and children, in the air and in the stream, in the grass and the trees.’
I clap my hands together and open them with resignation. The gesture attracts the attention of two other friars. They come over to find out what’s going on.
‘Your example gives me no consolation, brother. If a forty-year-old man believes that Jesus is a statue, just like a five-year-old child, it means that thirty-five years of norms and precepts, dogmas and punishments do not increase the Christian’s faith by one iota. I ask you, how can a child be forced to receive the sacraments, to kneel down before what to his simple mind is nothing but a statue, to listen to the Gospel, when as far as he’s concerned it’s a fairy-story no better than the ones told to him by the fireside? Does any of that seem reasonable to you? I say to you: it isn’t only absurd, brothers, it’s actually dangerous. What sort of believer are we really bringing up? What kind of sincere devotion to Christ can we hope to see maturing in that little creature if we make him accustomed, from the tenderest age, to passive acceptance things that he does not understand? If we get him used to kneeling down before statues? I tell you, my brothers, that Christ can only be a deliberate and reasoned choice, not a fairy-tale told to the na�ve. But today that is precisely what we are asked to do. We are asked to believe without understanding, to obey in silence, even to fear, living in the terror
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