GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

We drove to Ohio last week, to visit Pamela’s ninety-year-old mother. While we were there, we took her with us to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. Not exactly the sort of place for a nonagenarian, but she took it in stride. I’m not sure I did. Hearing all those songs again got me thinking not only about my youth, but also about what I would say this morning in church. One song in particular kept haunting my thoughts, Jerry Lee Lewis’s "Great Balls of Fire":

No doubt I still love the song because it reminds me of my youth, but that isn’t all. The passage of time has added something, perhaps not as good as what it has taken away. I pause now, as I didn’t forty years ago, to notice that a struggle of some kind has preceded the singer’s surrender, a struggle, evidently, against powers mightier than himself. Feelings versus thoughts, lower instincts versus higher purposes: this is the very stuff of philosophy. Thankfully, for Jerry Lee Lewis the struggle doesn’t last too long. Losing the battle ("You broke my will"), he wins the war ("But what a thrill").

You may be wondering by now what has shaken my nerves and rattled my brain, to get me talking like this. It’s an obsession, all right, though not the kind you’re likely to hear about in a rock and roll song. I’m not certain of the exact origin of the phrase "great balls of fire," but over a year ago I stumbled on an ancient occurrence of it, in a most unlikely place, and it stayed at the back of my mind until last week in Cleveland, when I not only heard the song again but saw Jerry Lee Lewis as a young man singing it in video on the big screen. "Great balls of fire" sounds an apocalyptic note. Maybe I had always heard it, maybe not, but thinking about it eventually brought me to my subject this morning. It reminded me of something I’ve been noticing a lot lately, the tendency of religion to get confused with history.

One of the most interesting and familiar examples of the kind of confusion I am talking about occurs in prophecy. Any religious leader worth his salt must have the gift of prophecy in some measure. In particular, he needs to be able to envision the most spectacular future event of all, the end of the world. Jesus was second to none in this regard. Each of the three synoptic gospels portrays him predicting the end of days in dire tones. The warnings uttered in these and other passages lie behind the magnificent medieval hymn whose words we have just heard set to music by Faure and sung so beautifully by our own choir:

"Day of wrath! That day the world will dissolve in ashes. David and the Sibyl are our witnesses." David and the Sibyl stand for the Bible and the classical tradition, equally authoritative. They are in harmony here; we shall see them in conflict in a moment. Right now, I’d like to draw attention to a feature shared by the three New Testament passages in which Jesus depicts the terrors of the dies irae. Each opens with the same item in the list of things to be destroyed. Jesus, accompanied by some of his disciples, has just paid a visit to the great temple in Jerusalem. The disciples are impressed by the majesty of the building itself. Jesus is not. Here is the relevant excerpt from Mark’s version, generally considered to be the earliest (13.1-2):

The exact date at which this was written is not known. We do know that the Romans destroyed the temple in the year 70. We also know that the destruction of the temple, in apparent fulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus, was a matter of considerable importance to the early church. It was held to demonstrate the genuineness of the lord’s ministry. His prophecies came true. And it had another meaning, even more momentous. What clearer sign could God devise to indicate his abandonment of the old religion in favor of the new? The disappearance from the face of the earth of the most sacred monument of Judaism meant the end of the ancient practice of sacrifice, for Jews could offer sacrifices to God only in the temple, and the temple was no more. When we remember that sacrifice was, for ancient peoples generally, the religious act par excellence, the inability of Jews to sacrifice would have made their religion seem severely handicapped, if not to themselves then to the rest of the world. At this particular moment in history, when Christianity was parting company with Judaism and launching its appeal to the pagan world around it, the fact that Jesus saw the temple destroyed even before the Romans destroyed it was propagandistic dynamite.

For that very reason the Roman Emperor Julian (also known as "The Apostate") took it seriously. He attempted to nullify the prophecy by having the temple rebuilt. If the temple were to rise again, if the Jews, as of old, were once more to go there and sacrifice to their god, Julian could say to the Christians "Where now are your savior’s predictions? The world that he said would pass away is still here. The temple he said would be destroyed forever has risen again. The religion you say he meant to replace has its sacred building again, its adherents sacrifice to their god in the ancient manner. So much for his mission and his prophetic powers!"

The rebuilding of the temple was Julian’s grandest gesture in the struggle to turn the tide against Christianity, to resuscitate and restore the old religions of Greece and Rome. He gave the orders and found the funds to have them carried out, but what was the result? You guessed it: great balls of fire. According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus (23.1.3), "great balls of fire" exploded near the foundations of the temple and burned the construction workers. Christian writers of the time mention crosses appearing in the sky, on people’s clothes, on buildings, even on books. They speak of fire from heaven too—fantastic accounts of what was probably an all-too-human episode of sabotage. Whoever was responsible, the reconstruction was abandoned sometime before 363 A.D., when Julian left Antioch at the head of his army and went on to die in battle against the Persians. The Christians, predictably, took his death as an obvious sign of God’s disapproval of his religious reforms. That is the way people thought in those days (and, if I may say so, it’s the way they think in these days too).

In the end, then, Julian’s "argument" was refuted by events. He would have done better to suggest that the recording of Jesus’ prophecy in the gospels (as with most prophecies that turn out to have been true) obviously postdates the events predicted. But arguments, unlike construction workers, do not need great balls of fire to refute them.

I can’t help sympathizing with Julian, though Gibbon, Cavafy, and, most recently, Glenn Bowersock accuse him of being just as much a fanatic as the Christians he opposed. I prefer the heroic, doomed figure imagined by Gore Vidal in his novel entitled Julian, though I know that historical probability is on the other side. After all, the anecdote I have just told shows Julian no less befuddled at the crossroads of religion and history than any of his opponents. He suffers from the same tendency to take religion straight—that is, to take it literally, and so to look for proof of its genuineness or falsity in the world itself, in historical time.

What happens to history in consequence can be bizarre. Half a century after Julian’s death, the Christian writer Orosius set out to refute the pagan claim that the arrival of Christianity had been a disaster for the world. I won’t go into the arguments Orosius presented; it will be enough merely to point out that the arrival of Christianity itself, not to mention the blessings or the curses it entailed, was already posing problems. When exactly did it occur? Orosius dated the birth of Christ in the seven-hundred-fifty-second year since the founding of Rome. This would mean that Christ was born two years before Christ; or, in our way of speaking, in 2 B.C. If Orosius got it right, the turn from the second to the third millennium took place about a year and a half ago! While that might disappoint some people, it is not as interesting as the way Orosius went about proving that his calculation was correct. What did he know about the time in which the savior was born? Among other things, he knew that it had to be a time of "peace on earth," for that is what the angels sang of on that first Christmas Eve. Now "peace on earth" had in fact been officially declared on several occasions not too distant from the beginning of the Christian era. The emperor Augustus in his final summation of his career boasted that he had closed the temple of Janus at Rome three times; the temple of Janus was closed only when the Romans were not at war, or at least not seriously engaged anywhere. We can date two of Augustus’ closings securely, but the third remains uncertain to this day. Into that uncertainty leaped Orosius and his angels: if there was "peace on earth" on the first Christmas Eve, then Augustus must have closed the temple of Janus just before or soon after. It makes perfect sense, until we consult the evidence. According to that, the Romans were not at peace in 2 B.C. and wouldn’t be at peace for more than a decade. The truth is that Orosius needed a Pax Romana at that date, and so he created one.

I don’t suppose that the quest initiated by those "great balls of fire" has ended for me yet, but it is time to end my remarks this morning. I’ll do so by reverting to the song with which I began. "Too much love drives a man insane," said Jerry Lee Lewis, excusing, ahead of time, his loss of self-control. The same can be said of too much religion. It too unhinges the mind, but it does so, it seems to me, more thoroughly than love or sex. The lover, after all, knows that he is out of control. Not so the true believer, whose certainty as to the mind of God enables him to ignore the deeds of men.

Frank Nisetich