Gore Vidal says the old gods will rise again. Who needs politicians or emperors?
Let the old gods arise
Imposing order on chaos is an age-old obsession. As we enter the third millennium, it will be religion, rather than emperors or politicians, that imposes that order
The Millennium: special report
Gore Vidal
Sunday January 2, 2000
At millennium's end, I kept thinking of how it all began in Europe with Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II. They are an attractive couple - a boy emperor and his old teacher, the intellectual pope. Together they decided to bring back the Christian empire that Charlemagne had tried to create among the warring tribes of Western Europe.
If Charlemagne was the Jean Monnet of the 800s, Otto III was the Romano Prodi of the 900s. Otto was only 14 when he became king of Germany. From boyhood, he took very seriously the idea of a united Christendom, a Holy Roman Empire. Like so many over-active, over-educated boys of that period, he was a natural general, winning battles in a Germany that rather resembled the China of Confucius's era, a time known as that of 'the warring duchies'.
By 16, King Otto was crowned Emperor of the West. An intellectual snob, he despised what he called 'Saxon rusticity' and he favoured what he termed Greek or Byzantine 'subtlety'. He even dreamed of sailing to Byzantium to bring together all Christendom under his rule, which was, in turn, under that of God. In this sublime enterprise, he was guided by his old tutor, a French scholar named Gerbert.
As a sign of solidarity - not to mention morbidity - Otto even opened up the tomb of Charlemagne and paid his great predecessor a visit. The dead emperor was seated on a throne. According to an eyewitness, only a bit of his nose had fallen off but his fingernails had grown through his gloves and so, reverently, Otto pared them and otherwise tidied him up. Can one imagine Prodi - or even Schr”der - doing as much for the corpse of Monnet?
Now we approach the fateful year 999. Otto is 19. He is obsessed with Italy. With Rome. With empire. In that year, he sees to it that Gerbert is elected pope, taking the name Sylvester. Now emperor and pope move south to the decaying small town of Rome, where Otto builds himself a palace on the Aventine, a bad luck hill, as Cicero could have testified.
Together, Otto and Sylvester lavished their love and their ambition upon the Romans, who hated both of them with a passion. In the year that our millennium properly began, 1001, the Romans drove emperor and pope out of the city. Otto died at 22, near Viterbo, of smallpox. A year later, Sylvester was dead, having first, it is said, invented the organ. Thus, the dream of a European union ended in disaster for the two dreamers.
I will not go so far as to say that the 1,000 years since Otto's death have been a total waste of time. Certainly, other dreamers have had similar centripetal dreams. But those centrifugal forces that hold us in permanent thrall invariably undo the various confederacies, leagues, empires, 1,000-year reichs that the centripetalists would impose upon us from the top down.
Recently, the literary critic Harold Bloom, in the somewhat quixotic course of trying to establish a Western literary canon, divided human history into phases that cyclically repeat. First, he says, there is a theocratic age, next an aristocratic age, followed by a democratic age, which degenerates into chaos, out of which some new idea of divinity will emerge to unite us all in a new theocratic age, and the cycle begins again.
Bloom rather dreads the coming theocratic age, but since he - and I - will never see it, we can settle comfortably into the current chaos where the meaning of meaning is an endlessly cozy subject and Heisenberg's principle is the undisputed law of the land, at least from where each of us is situated.
As we ponder the adventures of Otto and Sylvester, we must note the cyclic nature of the way human society evolves as originally posited by Plato in the eighth book of the Republic and further developed by Giovanni Battista Vico in his Scienza Nuova. Professor Bloom goes straight to Vico, an early-eighteenth-century Neapolitan scholar who became interested in the origins of Roman law.
The deeper Vico got into the subject, the further back in time he was obliged to go, specifically, to Greece. Then he got interested in how the human race was able to create an image of itself for itself. At the beginning, there appears to have been an animistic belief in the magic of places and in the personification of the elements as gods. To Vico, these legends, rooted in prehistory, were innate wisdom. But then the age of the gods was challenged by the rise of individual men. Suddenly, kings and heroes are on the scene. They give birth to oligarchies, to an aristocratic society where patricians battle for first place in the state.
In time, the always exciting game of who will be king of the castle creates a tyranny that will inspire the people at large to rebel against the tyrants and establish republics that, thanks to man's nature, tend to imperial acquisitiveness. In due course, these empire-republics meet their natural terminus in, let us say, the jungles of Vietnam.
What happens next? Vico calls the next stage Chaos, to be followed by a new theocratic age. This process is, of course, pure Hinduism, which was never to stop leaking into Greek thought from Pythagoras to the Neo-Platonists and even now into the collective consciousness of California surfers and ceramicists as well as disciples of the good Allen Ginsberg. Birth, death, chaos, then rebirth and so on and on and on.
But though Vico's mind was brilliant and intuitive, the history that he had to deal with necessarily left out science as we know it and he did not. Now we must ponder how chaos may yet organise itself through technology as the means of ultimate control over everyone, even as it seems, currently, to serve China's lively millions as a step toward liberation. Chaos - our current condition - may prove to be too interesting to make order of.
Will the next god be a computer? In which case, a tyrant god for those of us who dwell in computer-challenged darkness. A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from East to West, from South to North. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open for those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. In the case of the United States, the acquisition of new citizens from all the tribes of Earth has always been thought to be a very good thing. But with so many billions of people on the move, even the great-hearted may well become edgy once we have gobbled up all the computer-proficient immigrants.
As we start the third millennium of what we in our Western section of the globe are amused to call the Christian era, we should be aware that most of the world's tribes are, happily for them, not Christian at all. Also, most of us who are classified as Christians and live in nations where this form of monotheism was once all-powerful now live in a secular world.
So chaos does have its pleasures. But then as Christian presuppositions do not mean anything to others (as Buddhists reminded the current pope when on holiday in Sri Lanka), so, too, finally, Plato and his perennially interesting worldview don't make much sense when applied to societies such as ours. Great centrifugal forces are now at work in nearly every nation-state and why resist them? For the centripetally minded - theocratic or imperial or both - the mosaic of different tribes that will occupy Europe, let us say, from homely Bantry to glittering Vladivostok, are eventually bound to come together in the interest of mundane trade. Is not that quite enough? At least in the absence of a new god.
Nevertheless, as the curtain falls on our dismal century and ungraspable millennium, one sees on every side, to the East, West, North and South of Tiananmen Square, signs of religious revival. Everywhere, gods are rising from their musty tombs, plucking stakes from their black hearts, awful eyes aglitter in every land as they commence their war on that old night and chaos which has given such comforting shelter to shy diversity. One also recalls, in the last century, a speaker of the American House of Representatives who was so reactionary that it was said of him: 'If he had been consulted by God about creation, he would have voted for chaos.' Considering the alternatives, for now at least, who would not?
This is an edited version of an article which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books.
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