#john moriarty

No bloodless myth will hold –

“How impoverished I used to feel travelling by London Underground train from the Classical in the British Museum to the Cretaceous in the Natural History Museum. Above me behind me and above me in front of me was a frieze of hoardings advertising sun holidays, Hovis bread, Bass beer, Silk Cut cigarettes, the Zoo, the Planetarium, Wall’s Ice-Cream, things like that. The carriage itself, give or take a few feet, as long as a brontosaurus, its girth the girth of his belly; and Yeats telling us that modern naturalistic literature leaves us helpless before the contents of our own minds; and Conrad telling us that ‘the mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future’ … My destitution was in not having a myth that could hyphenate, could compound, or better, could com-pose, could composit, the Classical and the Cretaceous. The question was, in what way and ways must the Classical grow in order to be able to accommodate the Cretaceous? … Could the Classical include this underground journey to the very red roar of the tyrannosaurus? And the roar itself, could it include that?”

Seeking it, whatever it was, Moriarty crashed into a devastating personal crisis. One day, walking in the mountains, he suddenly had a mystical vision that broke his world apart. “In an instant,” he wrote, “I was ruined.” He seemed to see into a great abyss in which all of his stories were dust: “I had been let through not to a heaven but to a void that was starless and fatherless.” For years, he wrote, he had been engaged in “a genuine search for the truth, not merely a speakable truth, but a truth I would surrender to.” Now he realized, with a terrible inevitability, that there was only one story that could hold what he had seen, only “one prayer that was big enough.”

He had, he wrote, been “shattered into seeing.”

Whether he liked it or not, he had become a Christian.

A truth I would surrender to. I put the book down. I didn’t know quite why, but Moriarty’s story had shaken me. I realized that I had been searching for years for a truth like that. “How strange!” he had written. “Christianity making sense to me!” Somehow, the way he was telling the story—interweaving the Gospels with the Book of Job, the ­Mahabharata, the Pali Canon of the Buddha, the folk tales of ­Ireland, the poems of Wallace Stevens—was making sense to me too. What was going on?

“The story of Christianity,” wrote Moriarty, “is the story of humanity’s rebellion against God.” I had never thought of that ancient, tired religion in this way before, never had reason to, but as I did now I could feel something happening—some inner shift, some coming together of previously scattered parts designed to fit, though I had never known it, into a quiet, unbreakable whole.

A truth I would surrender to. What was this abyss inside me, this space that had been empty for years, that I had tried to fill with everything from sex to fame to politics to kenshō, and why was something chiming in it now like a distant Angelus across the western sea?

-- Paul Kingsnorth, The Cross & The Machine.