Knowledge of Angels

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This is the first conversation between these three characters.  Conversation is an important word: although their views are absolutely opposed – and much is at stake – there is no animus between them: quite the contrary.  The author sets up the scene with a picture:

The point of the ‘picture’ is that if you didn’t know what was going on, this is what the scene would appear: three friends, pleasantly talking.  But, of course that is what it is (Severo later in the chapter will be unable to name his feeling – which we would call ‘love’) – or rather what it should and could be – if there were not the demands of oppressive orthodoxy coming into the ‘picture’ from outside. 

Atheism

The book wants us to take this as neither obstinacy nor arrogance; the intellectual arguments behind this statement are only filled out in .  At the moment Palinor is merely answering questions on his belief, not the principles for it – and he does not willingly proselytise.
  Palinor rejects the two categories offered by Beneditx to cover the term ‘atheist’: one, someone who deliberately goes against God, while knowing of His existence; the other, someone who has convinced himself by false reasoning that there is no God.  These categories are assumed by Beneditx and Severo, and the whole of their culture, as the only possible – so Palinor, in himself, is already testing the limits of their assumptions.  Palinor, of course, has his assumptions; one operative here is that he had never foreseen how people in the culture he finds himself can be killed for their beliefs.  Things are ordered very differently in Aclar:

He is visibly surprised by what he now learns of the practice in Grandinsula:

Of course, Palinor’s reactions/assumptions are meant to be ours.  He registers something like the ‘shock’ that Jill Paton Walsh no doubt felt when the fatwah was declared against Salman Rushdie, albeit Palinor’s ‘flinch’ will be stronger since it is personally threatening.  If Palinor is a ‘20^th century liberal strayed into the Middle Ages, to some the fatwah was like a piece of the Middle Ages strayed into the 20^th century. 

The social/ethical reason for a belief in God

The book advances or imagines several ‘pragmatic’ reasons why belief in God might be ‘pragmatically’ necessary to believers.  (‘Pragmatic’ here means useful – so that a pragmatic argument about a belief does not address the issue of whether or not that belief is correct – ie is a true assertion about a fact – but whether it helps towards some separate, desired outcome: here, the maintenance of Law and, underlying this, a belief in the possibility of Morality.  Palinor, the other side of the disappearance of a single, universally held religious belief, sees no problem.

The somewhat complacent tone here – expressive of seeing no real problem – no doubt hides the continuing, serious philosophical arguments about whether a secular morality has adequate ‘grounding’ – but it is no doubt close to what might be called the ‘common sense’ view which most people in a modern, secular Western society would hold to, if asked to justify why they behaved as morally as they do.

There is no such thing as an accident

When Palinor makes a ‘common sense’ objection to this statement of Severo’s, Beneditx answers him:

Severo will quote the line back to Beneditx later in the chapter when they are discussing Amara and the idea of the ‘experiment’ first occurs to Severo.  Variations on it will recur throughout the book.  As a belief it is taken by the book as a fundamental consequence of a belief in a single, all-powerful God, a central part of the medieval religious view of the world, related to Beneditx’s vision of a world governed in all its details by angels, God’s ministers (p55).
  Questioning this belief allows the book one of its major principles in terms of form and effect: irony.   The reader, having the knowledge of angels but without their effect, in overlooking this fictional ‘world’ sees a string of good intentions with unintended effects and harmful coincidences, which will produce what nobody intended – the killing of Palinor and the ultimate destruction of Grandinsula.

  Palinor’s comment already is a dry irony in response to the enthusiastic care of the two Christians:

Severo, Palinor and the Low Countries

Palinor attends High Mass, but his thoughts, rather than responding to the religious ritual remain fixed on Palinor.  This whole passage shows Severo’s mind becoming a mystery to himself.  It is easy to understand in general terms why: just as Palinor is not really coverable by the terms available to Severo and Beneditx to define an atheist, so Severo, more personally, finds himself responding to Palinor with emotions not defined, certainly not accepted, within his existing world-view.

There is an apparent acceptance in this –it’s just being distracted by business, thinks Severo – but the language of the passage is already taking Severo beyond this.  It lingers on the man, not the case; his mind focuses on the ‘tender mouth’, the pale fingernails, ‘the calm and alert demeanour’.  The sensuous particularity of Palinor is what is most present to Severo – the description approaches the phrasing of a description of someone falling in love – which is where this passage will end.  (There’s no necessary reason to think that there is anything sexual in this in any simple way).  His mind, even more strangely to Severo, (the sentence introducing this ends on a question) carries him to recollections of a trip to the Low Countries (what we would know now as Holland and Belgium).
  The passage continues to match the process of Severo’s thought.  He ‘discovers what the link, the association, is between Severo and the Low Countries: a shared response, a common emotional experience within Severo:

This last phrase I would take to be important to the book: this self-discovery which the passage enacts, this response and emotion only available because something different, another world, exists, is what would be denied by a repressive ‘orthodoxy’.
  Bit it isn’t only the ‘bracing’ response to ‘difference’ that is at issue.  Severo remembers his experience of the strange resonance between bells.  The bells in Utrecht become a sort of parable for his response to Palinor.  There is an answering response to that strangeness.

The ‘chill and unsheltered country’ now is not just his recollection of Holland – it is his sense of atheism: a world without a God.  Severo feels not what he ‘should’ feel at being confronted by an atheist – horror- but an attraction.

He would not – the implication is that we would.

The reader’s relation to Severo

It is worth thinking at this point what is the reader’s relation to Severo.  The passage has made us inward to Severo’s mind – not just its contents, but also its semi-physical responses: the ‘sharp and challenging’ feeling of joy, the ‘tingling of gladness’.  We are thus given a privileged intimacy with him.  But also we are allowed to recognise his feelings in a way that he cannot; we see him have to struggle to discover what he feels, and still not be able to finally define it - ‘he would not have called it love’- because his ‘world-view’ does not recognise such feelings: the words, the labels, are unavailable.  So, we are both with him – and beyond him.  This should make the reader both identify with him and feel concerned for him – in a way that Palinor’s assurance and the predominantly outside view of his character in the book makes difficult for us in relation to him, even though Palinor is more obviously threatened.

Severo and Beneditx

Severo and Beneditx have a ‘philosophical’ discussion about Palinor, the nature of knowledge, what defines a human being, what human beings are born knowing.  The conversation is philosophical (and some of the philosophical issues will be outlined below) – but, as with any ‘novel of ideas’, the criterion for its success is how well the ideas are integrated with plot and the broader motivations and temperaments of the characters.  Their discussion will be informed by a sense of their different feelings, personalities and pressures.

Morning Knowledge and Evening Knowledge

For Beneditx it is obvious that everyone is born with knowledge of God.  This is not an unimportant issue – as, if this were true, then Palinor’s atheism is wilful and therefore condemnable.  (Beneditx, throughout the whole conversation at this point is more ‘distant’ from Palinor than Severo – less personally involved.  The issue for him is intellectual; he has no need to worry about the consequences of these statements – for Palinor or anyone else: he merely states what he believes is the case.  Severo has no such distance.  He is concerned about Palinor’s fate for two reasons: one, as the secular authority on the island, he will be involved in any punishment, and two, the growing personal concern (as we have seen in this chapter) for Palinor.) 

The issue here is broadly epistemological – that is, a concern with how we know what we know.  Severo takes a ‘common sense’ position (perhaps among philosophers best associated with John Locke in the 17^th century) – that is, what we know derives ultimately only from experiences coming into the mind via our senses.  Beneditx labels such knowledge (which obviously exists) as evening knowledge – the result of experience.  But there is also morning knowledge: what human beings are born knowing

The existence of ‘morning knowledge’ –innate knowledge- allows an essentialist definition of what constitutes a human being:

There’s an irony here – in that current intellectual positions, in Psychology, Linguistics, Genetics and even some parts of Sociology are closer to Beneditx than Severo.  All point to the importance of innate knowledge – we do not begin with a blank slate.  Of course, there is a crucial difference; we are likely to replace Beneditx’s knowledge of God by the innate predisposition to learn language (what Noam Chomsky referred to at one time as the possession of a ‘Language Acquisition Device’).  How much of language is an innate predisposition, the theoretical problems involved in understanding its acquisition, inform the debate around Genie – the radically deprived child discovered in California in 1970, whose story informs the novelist’s depiction of Amara.

  Severo’s mind does indeed jump to the case of Amara – which he is ‘coincidentally’ concerned about.  Beneditx picks it up eagerly.  The text refers to ‘his face lit with eagerness’, his hope that

He refers casually to

There is a clear difference between Severo and Beneditx’s thoughts:

This has, I think, more than a local importance in the book.  The ‘knack of attending to the material world’ is what Palinor - an engineer, a sexual technician (chapter 22!) – has easily available to him, whereas all the Christian characters – ascetic, otherworldly – have, at best, to struggle to find this.  Severo is the intermediate character: we see him ascetically denying himself several times, but we are also made aware of his responsive feelings to what is in front of him.  He is capable of responding to Palinor, to Holland:

The writing here is insistent on Severo’s almost physical response to novelty.  As a character Severo is made available to us both in mind but also physically – which is why he perhaps is the most sympathetic character in the novel.

  It is a mystery to both Severo and Beneditx that Palinor, not constrained by a belief in God, does not lie about his beliefs.  This is a return to the earlier point that for them only a belief in God can underpin morality:

There is no understanding here of the idea of a self-sustaining integrity – a personal, not an external, pressure to behave well.  (Palinor as a character is obliged by the novel to be somewhat idealised in his strong sense of personal integrity perhaps, so that this idea about a moral code freed of theological underpinning can be made.  Perhaps this is one of the places where the ideas of the novel determine the characterisation, rather than as in most convincing novels appearing to be the other way round.)

Setting up the experiment with Amara

  Severo decides on a twin-track approach to the problem of Palinor.  Beneditx will try to convince Palinor of the existence of God by using only natural reason (that is, without recourse of appeal to revelation: ie the authority of the Bible); secondly, Amara will be used as an experiment – ‘taught to speak and [so] discover to us if she knows of God without instruction.’  The book insists on how carefully Severo makes his decision:

But this(over?)insistence is then compromised by two other notes – which imply a less disinterested, less formal, more personal motive.  Firstly

We might already suspect, as the book in time will make clear, that already Severo is hoping for a negative result to the experiment.  (But, importantly, the ‘hypocrisy’ involved here is not conscious.)
  There is also the last note of the chapter:

The safely Christian motive slides into the last sentence into a much more personal aim (and the authority with which the paragraph began has also slid into a simple personal appeal, like a desperate favour.