Free A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess

it was
the one word that sprang from the heaven of release and
he must regard it with the care he had given to the abstruse
terms of the schoolmen. Love was the lyric cry of desire and
then release and gratitude for release; should it not rather be
the expression in frigid sobriety of the awareness of mingling
of souls, and yet what of soul did Tom Walsingham possess?
True, being human he had a soul that theology would say was
there for divine salvation or damnation, but that was a formal
attribute of the same manner as pure being. But what of soul
with extension and properties? Was there substance deserving
of a lover’s homage? He thought not. Had this wholly blissful
encounter of singing nerves been but of the order of the blind
thrusting on the bank of the Cam or in the dusty London dark
of the haunts of prostitute boys? Was it trussing up and then the
fingers to the lips in goodbye, we shall lie so in pleasure again (not most like)? Did he now possess a friend or lover who would
give and take eternal avowals (eternity invoked with lying lips,
since eternity was God’s province)? Kit felt as it were steel hoops
of self-committal in compress of his ribs. Did the term fidelity
apply? It was not of the covenant of man and woman who must
hold the nest of their progeny together. Infidelity, he had heard
of in such instances, was the knife-sharpener. He, Kit, carried no
knife, but he sensed that there could be knives here too. He had
heard of one in London who had carried the knife to his faithless
boy paramour. The morality, if there was morality, was encased
in the narrow world that two built. Of exterior morality there was
none save what Church, reformed or unreformed, delivered. He
had an itch of merely scholarly import to learn of the nature of
and punishment allotted to such love, if love it was.

    The lecture he attended, already begun, was (he twitched
sourly amused lips at it) of God’s love and the reconciliation of
that with God’s punishment. There were thirty or so black-clad
students in the College hall, with, like a random scattering of
flowers, visitors in gaudier dress. The lecturer was a Father
Pryor, a lined and croaking man from Lancashire, where the
old faith had held out longest. Love, so he said, was graced
with the limitless power of forgiveness, but there came in God’s
eternal time the moment when justice supervened thereon. How
is it possible that forgiveness without limit, he asked, can be so
reconciled with punishment that seems to our frail sublunary
sense of a truly monstrous order? No earthly judge or ruler could
conceive of pains as severe as those of hell for acts of a limited evil,
since man is not the devil. And yet God, who loves his creation, is
ready to cast sinning fragments of it into eternal fire. A mystery,
brethren, that may be resolved by taking thought that love has
no categorical substance, that it is itself a facet of justice. It is just
that we love the lovable, and it is unjust that we love what is not
to be loved. Must we love the devil, contrive a forgiveness for evil
whereof God himself has no capability? One of our fathers once
heard a child pray that Satan might be made good and happy,
but the child was in the dreadful state of innocence and the notion
was at once whipped away. Our first parents too, you will say, were innocent and were blessed because of it, but theirs was a
primordial innocence untouched by knowledge of evil until the
fatal fruit was devoured. God may not love sin, though he may
love the sinner in the expectation of his becoming cognisant of
the sin and ready for lustration and repentance. If there be, to
the all-knowing, no hint of such future cognisance, then the
sinner has already joined the ranks of the damned. I call, at
this point, for questions.

    Well, Kit thought, it is better here than at Cambridge, where
hunks of doctrine are imposed like deadweights and the crushed
hearer granted