Lit from Another

by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I

The candles in the north aisle of Paul's were not the verger's to light. That belonged to the sacrist's boy, who did it with a long brass rod and a wax taper on the end, and who was paid for it. The verger's part was the other end of the day: to take the snuffer round when the church emptied, to count what was left of each candle against the sacrist's tally, to carry the stubs in a leather bag to the chandler's man at the Little North Door, and to bar that door behind him. For this he had eight pence a week, a gown, the rod of his office, and a bed in a room above the chapter house stairs that smelled of the river when the wind came from the south.

He answered to John Leman. He had answered to it for three years and four months.

In Advent the dean asked Master Grocyn to read on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Saint Dionysius, and the readings were given in the afternoons, in the nave, after nones, when the light was already going grey behind the windows of the west front. Forty or fifty men came: canons in their furs, the young men from the dean's household, two or three lawyers from the Temple who stood at the back with their arms folded, a Lombard merchant who came every time and never once sat down. The verger was there because candles were lit for the reading, and somebody had to put them out after.

So he heard it all, from the beginning.

Master Grocyn was a big man near his sixtieth year, heavy in the shoulder, with a voice made for a large church and kept low out of courtesy. He read the Latin from a book, and when the Latin was not good enough he read the Greek from another book, and then he said what both meant. On the first afternoon he did not begin with the saint. He began with the men who doubted him.

There were such men, he said. There had been one in Rome, a clever and quarrelsome man, now dead, who had put it about that the writings of the Areopagite were not the Areopagite's — that they were the work of some later Greek who had borrowed the name of Paul's convert as a man borrows a better coat to go to court in. Master Grocyn named this man, and spoke of him for the length of a long candle, and there was nothing left of him at the end. He spoke of Athens and of the hill of Ares where Paul had stood and said to the Greeks that he had seen their altar to the unknown god; and how a judge of that court, Dionysius, had heard him and believed. Here, said Master Grocyn, laying his hand flat on the book, is what that judge came to know. A man who would take this from him would take the coat off a corpse.

The lawyers at the back laughed, briefly. The Lombard did not.

The verger went round afterwards with the snuffer. Eleven candles. He held the cone over each until the flame went into it and the smoke came out at the side in a grey thread that bent toward the door. He counted the stubs into the bag. Seven inches, five, five, six. He wrote nothing down; he could not write. He kept it in his head and gave it to the sacrist in the morning, and the sacrist wrote it.

On the stairs, in the dark, he said the name once, under his breath, the way a man feels in his purse for a coin he knows is there.

II

The letter had been addressed to John Leman, son of Richard Leman of Ware, and it had come from a canon of Paul's who had once lodged at the Saracen's Head in Ware and been well served by a boy there who could carry four pots in each hand and never spill. The canon remembered the boy. There was a place, he wrote, for an honest servant of the church, a verger's place, and if John would come up to London by Michaelmas it should be his.

John had a quartan fever that summer. It took him every fourth day and left him the three between, and on the three between he walked about the inn yard and said he would be well for Michaelmas. He died on a Thursday in the second week of September, on one of the good days, sitting on the mounting-block with a cup of small beer. His brother Hugh, who was two years younger and could carry five pots in each hand, buried him on the Saturday, took the letter out of the box under the bed, and walked to London along the north road with it inside his shirt.

The canon who had written it had gone into Kent for his health. The sub-dean read the letter, looked at the man in front of him, and said: you are John Leman. And Hugh said that he was.

That was all. There was no oath. Nobody in London had ever seen John Leman, and nobody in Ware had ever written to London. The canon came back from Kent in the spring, looked at him across the choir, and nodded, a little vaguely, as old men nod at faces they are told they know.

He was a good verger. He was better than John would have been, John having been slow in the mornings. He knew which canons wanted the door held and which wanted it not held, which of the chantry priests drank, how long a pound candle of the dean's wax would burn against a pound of the cheaper tallow-mixed stuff from the chandler in Bread Street. He had learned enough of the Latin of the offices to know where he was in them. He had stood in the procession on the great feasts, in his gown, with the rod, and walked before the bishop up the length of the nave, and the people in Paul's Walk had stopped their business and taken their hats off — not to him; he knew that; to what came behind him. The rod went first. That was what the rod was for.

He thought, sometimes, of John on the mounting-block with the cup.

In the second week of the readings Master Grocyn came to the chapter in which the saint describes the bishop with the censer. The verger knew this part because he had seen it done. The bishop, said Master Grocyn, begins at the altar and goes out from it, censing, round the whole of the sacred place, and comes back again to the altar where he began. And the saint says that this is a figure of how the divine goodness goes out to all things, and is not lessened by going out, and returns into itself and is not changed by returning. The fragrance fills the church and the censer is not emptier. The light is given down the orders — from the bishop to the priests, from the priests to the ministers, from the ministers to the people at the doors — and it is the same light at the door as at the altar, only received according to what each can bear.

He spoke more quietly that afternoon. He did not mention the man in Rome.

The Lombard asked a question, in a Latin with a lot of Italian in it. He asked what church in the days of Saint Paul had had a bishop with a censer going round it, and orders of ministers standing at the doors, and monks — for the saint wrote of monks too, did he not, an order of them, with their own rite of consecration? Master Grocyn said yes, the saint wrote of monks. The Lombard asked where, in Athens, in the year of Our Lord fifty, the monks had been.

Master Grocyn said that was a good question. He said it in a way that ended the reading.

The verger snuffed twelve candles that night, because the dean had come and the dean liked a light by him. One of the twelve would not go out under the cone. He lifted the snuffer and the flame stood up again at once, small and blue at the root, as if it had only been waiting. He put the cone over it a second time and held it longer, and counted to thirty, and when he lifted it there was the grey thread, bending toward the door.

III

It was not the last reading. There were three more, and the verger heard them all, and he could have told nobody what was in them, except that Master Grocyn read more of the Greek and said less of what it meant, and that on two afternoons he stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked at the page as a man looks at a road he has been walking for a mile and only now sees is not the road he set out on.

After the second of those, he did not leave. The men went out, and the verger worked his way along from the west end with the snuffer, and when he reached the bench, where the last candle was, Master Grocyn was still at it with both books open, the Latin and the Greek, and a third, smaller book on his knee that he had brought with him from St Lawrence's.

Bring that here, he said, without looking up. The verger looked about him for what was meant. The candle, said Master Grocyn. Bring the candle.

The verger lifted it off its pricket — it was the dean's wax, and hot down one side where it had guttered — and held it where the old man pointed, low over the page, his hand cupped round the far side of the flame to keep the draught from the door off it. The Greek letters stood up out of the paper with their little hooks and tails, like a hedge seen in frost. He could make nothing of them. Master Grocyn's finger went along a line, and back, and along the same line again, and then crossed to the small book on his knee and went down its margin, where somebody long ago had written in a brown ink that had gone the colour of a bruise.

How long will that burn? said Master Grocyn.

The verger looked at it. An hour, master. A little under.

And a pound of it costs?

The verger told him. The dean's wax was dear.

Master Grocyn made a noise that was nearly a laugh. Then hold it still, he said, for the dean's sake.

So he held it still. The wax ran down over his knuckle and set there, white, and he did not move his hand. Master Grocyn read for the better part of the hour without speaking, turning the leaves of the three books in order, one and then the next and then the next, and once he shut his eyes and sat so for the space of a paternoster, and then opened them and read the same leaf again. When the candle was down to the width of two fingers he closed the books and said: that is enough. The verger set the candle back on its pricket and put the cone over it, and the dark came up out of the floor of the nave all at once, as it always did, and then the door of the north porch let in its oblong of grey from the churchyard, and the old man went out through that.

The verger peeled the wax off his knuckle on the stairs. It came away in one piece, the shape of the joint, and he kept it on the sill of his window, and did not know why.

The last afternoon was the Wednesday of Ember week. It had rained since the morning, and the nave was dark by the end of nones, and the sacrist's boy lit fourteen candles because the dean had said the light should be good. More men came than had come before. Somebody had been talking. The lawyers were there, and others of their sort, and a pair of friars, and the Lombard, standing.

Master Grocyn did not open the book.

He said that he had come to these readings to defend the Areopagite. He had spoken against those who denied him, and had spoken in heat. He had now read the saint with more care than he had ever read him, from the Greek, the whole of the Hierarchy, and the letters, and he had read also those Fathers of the first ages who ought to have known these writings if they had been written — and they did not know them. No one knew them. For more than four hundred years after the death of Paul no doctor of the Church names them, and then all at once they are everywhere, as if they had been found under a stone. And in them the Church is already old: her rites are long, her orders are many, she has monks with their own consecration. These, said Master Grocyn, are not the writings of a man who had heard Paul on the hill of Ares. They are the writings of a man who lived long after, and who took that name.

He said: I was wrong. I spoke against men who were right, and I wish to unsay it, here, where I said it.

Nobody spoke. The rain could be heard against the lead of the roof, and under it, faintly, the noise of Paul's Walk at the far end of the nave, the carriers and the serving-men looking for masters and the boys who sold ballads, going on as it always did.

One of the friars said, loudly, then whose are they?

Master Grocyn said he did not know. He said: a Syrian, perhaps. A Greek. A monk. A man who had read the Platonists. He did not know his name, and he did not think anyone would ever know it. He opened his hands. That was all he did with them; he opened them, and left them open, and then he put them on the closed book.

And the light he wrote of? said the friar.

Master Grocyn said that he had read it for thirty years, and it had given him light for thirty years, and he had not known the name of the man who held it. He supposed he would go on reading it.

The lawyers left first. The friars left quarrelling. The canons went in a body by the south door, and the dean went with Master Grocyn as far as the steps, talking low, and then the dean went too. The Lombard stood a while longer by the pillar, looking at nothing, and then he crossed himself — which the verger had not seen him do before — and went out into the rain by the west door without his hat on.

Master Grocyn came back in. He had left his books.

The verger was halfway along the north side with the snuffer. Six candles out, eight still burning, the stubs of the six in the bag. He did not stop when the old man came in; it was not his place to stop. He went on to the seventh and put the cone over it and lifted it and moved to the eighth.

Master Grocyn did not take up his books. He sat down on the bench where the canons had sat and watched the verger work along the aisle. After the tenth candle he said, in English: what is your name?

The verger had the snuffer raised over the eleventh. The flame stood up under the brass, quite still; the church was very still now. He could feel the weight of the bag on his wrist, and the weight of the rod hung at his belt, and the old man waiting.

He thought of the inn yard, and the mounting-block, and the cup of small beer.

Leman, he said. John Leman, master.

Master Grocyn nodded, slowly, as if he had heard more in it than the name, or less, and did not mean to ask which.

Leave me one, John, he said.

So the verger snuffed the eleventh, and the twelfth, and the thirteenth, and counted the stubs into the bag, and left the fourteenth burning on its pricket by the old man's bench. He went down the aisle to the Little North Door and gave the bag to the chandler's man, who was waiting under the porch with his hood up against the rain. When he came back, the nave was dark from end to end, the whole length of it, the dark so close and so great that it seemed to press against his eyes like cloth; and at the far end of it there was the one candle, and the old man sitting by it with his hands on the closed book.

He stood at the door a long time without barring it. Then he went back up the aisle, not to the light but toward it, and sat down on the end of the bench, and waited with Master Grocyn until it burned down.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Pseudo-Dionysiō Areopagītā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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