The Holy Sinner

Thomas Mann

Description

The Holy Sinner explores a subject that fascinated Thomas Mann to the end of his life - the origins of evil and evil's connection with magic. Here Mann uses a medieval legend about "the exceeding mercy of God and the birth of the blessed Pope Gregory" - illuminating the notion of original sin and transcendence of evil.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Metaphysical
• Visionary

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 11 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774644508
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Holy Sinner
by Thomas Mann, tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter

First published in 1952
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
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The Holy Sinner




by THOMAS MANN

This story is based in the mainon the verse epic Gregoriusvom Stein by the Middle HighGerman poet Hartmann vonAue (c. 1165-1210) who tookhis legend of chivalry from theFrench .
Who Rings?
The ringing of bells, the surging and swelling of bells supraurbem , above the whole city, in its airs overfilled with sound. Bells,bells, they swing and sway, they wag and weave through theirwhole arc on their beams, in their seats, hundred-voiced, inBabylonish confusion. Slow and swift, blaring and booming—thereis neither measure nor harmony, they talk all at once and alltogether, they break in even on themselves; on clang the clappersand leave no time for the excited metal to din itself out, for like apendulum they are already back at the other edge, droning intoits own droning; so that when echo still resounds: ‘ In te Dominesperavi ,’ it is uttering already ‘ Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata ’ intoits own midst; not only so, but lesser bells tinkle clear fromsmaller shrines, as though the mass-boy might be touching thelittle bell of the Host.
Ringing from the height and ringing from the depths; from theseven arch-holy places of pilgrimage and all the churches of theseven parishes on both sides of the twice-rounding Tiber. Fromthe Aventine ringing; from the holy places of the Palatine andfrom St John of the Lateran; above the grave of him who bearsthe keys, in the Vatican Hill, from Santa Maria Maggiore, SantaMaria in Foro, in Domnica, in Cosmedin, and in Trastevere;from Ara-Coeli, St Paul’s outside the Walls, St Peter in Chains,and from the basilica of the Most Holy Cross in Jerusalem. Andfrom the chapels in the cemeteries, from the roofs of the basilicasand oratories in the narrow streets come the sounds as well. Whonames their names and knows their titles? As when the wind,when the tempest rakes the strings of the aeolian harp and rousesthe whole world of sound, the far apart and the close at hand, inwhirring, sweeping harmony; such, translated in bronze, are thesounds that split the air, for here everything that is rings for thegreat feast and high procession.
Who is ringing the bells? Not the bell-ringers. They have runinto the streets like all the folk, to list the uncanny ringing. Convinceyourselves: the bell-chambers are empty. Lax hang theropes, and yet the bells rock and the clappers clang. Shall one saythat nobody rings them?—No, only an ungrammatical head, withoutlogic, would be capable of the utterance. ‘The bells areringing’: that means they are rung, and let the bell-chambers benever so empty.—So who is ringing the bells of Rome?—It is the spirit of story-telling .—Then can he be everywhere, hic etubique , for instance at once on the Tower of St George in Velabroand up in Santa Sabina, which preserves columns from theabominable Temple of Diana? At a hundred consecrate seats atonce?—Of a certainty, that he can. He is as air, bodiless, ubiquitous,not subject to distinctions of here and there. He it is thatsays: ‘All the bells were ringing’; and, in consequence, it is hewho rings them. So spiritual is this spirit and so abstract thatgrammatically he can be talked of only in the third person andsimply referred to as ‘It is he’. And yet he can gather himself intoa person, namely into the first person, and be incarnate in somebodywho speaks in him and says: ‘I am he. I am the spirit of story-telling,who, sitting in his time-place, namely in the library of thecloister of St Gall in Alemannenland, where once Notker theStammerer sat, tells this story for entertainment and exceptionaledification; in that I begin with its grace-abounding end and ringthe bells of Rome: id est , report that on that day of processionalentry they all together began to ring of themselves.’
But also, in order that the second grammatical person shouldcome into its own, the question runs: Who art thou then, whosaying I sits at Notker’s desk and embodies the spirit of narrative?—Iam Clemens the Irishman, ordinis divi Benedicti , visiting hereas Brother, accepted guest, and envoy from my Abbot Kilian ofthe cloister of Clonmacnoise, my house in Ireland, that I mayfoster the ancient relations which since the days of St Gall andSt Columbanus obtain between my house and this strong citadelof Christ. I have on my journey visited a great many seats of piouslearning and abodes of the Muses, such as Fulda, Reichenau, andGandersheim, St Emeran in Regensburg, Lorsch, Echternach,and Corvey. But here, where the eye laves itself in evangeliariesand psalters with such priceless illumination in gold and in silverset on purple, with decoration in vermilion, green, and blue;where the Brothers under their choirmaster intone more sweetlythan ever elsewhere heard; where the bodily refection is excellent,not forgetting the cordial little wine which is poured outwith it, and after table in the cloisters one can exercise so agreeablyround the fountain; here I have made my station for a somewhatmore spacious time, occupying one of the always readyguest-cells into which the highly estimable Abbot, Gozbert ofhis name, had thoughtfully put an Irish cross, whereon one seesfigured a lamb in the coils of snakes, the arbor vitae , a dragon’shead with the cross in his jaws, and the ecclesia catching the bloodof Christ in a chalice, whilst the devil tries to snap up a bite and supof it. The piece witnesses the early high standard of our Irish arts.
I am deeply attached to my home, St Patric’s nook-shotten isle,its meadows, heaths, and moors. Its airs blow damp and mild,and mild too is the air in our cloister of Clonmacnoise, given asit is to training disciplined by a measured asceticism. With ourAbbot Killian I am of the well-tried view that the religion ofJesus and the practice of ancient studies must go hand in hand incombating rude ways; that it is the same ignorance which knowsnothing of the one and of the other, and that where the first tookroot the other also flourished. In fact the height of culture reachedby our brotherhood in my experience quite considerably surpassedthat of the Roman clerus itself, which is often all too littletouched by the wisdom of antiquity and among whose membersat times a truly lamentable Latin is written—if also none so badas among German monks, one of whom, to be sure an Augustinian,lately wrote to me: ‘ Habes tibi aliqua secreta dicere. Robustissimusin corpore sum et saepe propterea temptationibus Diabolisuccumbo. ’ That is indeed scarcely tolerable, stylistically as wellas also in other ways, and probably such peasantly rubbish couldnever flow from a Roman pen. Altogether it would be mistakento believe I would speak ill of Rome and its supremacy, whoseloyal adherent on the contrary I profess myself. It may be that weIrish monks, who have always held to independent dealings and inmany regions of the Continent have first preached Christianity,have also acquired extraordinary merit in that everywhere, inBurgundy and Friesland, Thuringia and Alemannia, we erectedcloisters as bastions of the faith and of our mission. That doesnot mean that we have not since early times recognized the Bishopin the Lateran as head of the Christian Church and seen in him abeing of almost divine nature, in that we consider at most onlythe site of the divine resurrection as holier than St Peter’s. Onemay say without untruth that the churches of Jerusalem, Ephesus,and Antioch are older than the Roman, and if Peter, atwhose unassailable name one does not gladly think of certaincockcrows, founded the bishopric of Rome (he did found it), thesame is indisputably true of the community of Antioch. Butthese matters can only play the role of fugitive comments at themargin of truth: that, firstly, our Lord and Saviour (as it standsin Matthew and may be read there, though indeed only in him)summoned Peter to be his vicar here below, but the latter transferredthe vicariate to the Roman bishop and conferred on himthe precedence over all the episcopates of the world. We evenread indeed in decretals and protocols of early time the veryspeech which the apostle himself held at the ordination of hisfirst successor, Pope Linus, which I regard as a real trial of faithand a challenge to the spirit to manifest its power and show whatall it succeeds in believing.
In my so much more humble quality as incarnation of thespirit of story-telling, I have every interest that others like meshall regard the call to the sella gestatoria as the highest and mostblessed of elections. And it is at once a sign of my devotion toRome that I bear the name of Clemens. For natively I am namedMorhold. But I have never liked the name, it strikes me as wildand heathenish, and with the cowl I put on that of the third successorof Peter, so that it is no longer the vulgar Morhold who movesin the girded tunic and scapular but a more refined Clemens,who has consummated what St Paul to the Ephesians so happilycalled the ‘putting on a new man’. Yes, it is no longer at all thebody of flesh which went about in the doublet of that Morhold,but rather a spiritual one which the cingulum girds—accordingly,a body which makes not quite worthy of sanction my earlierstatement: id est , that I am the ‘incarnate spirit of story-telling’,namely that it is ‘embodied’ in me. I do not care for this word‘embodiment’ so much, since (of course) it derives from thebody an