Half of Nothing

A voice of one crying in the desert. Jerome, who put those words into the Latin that the West would pray for a thousand years, knew the desert as a place and not a figure. He had gone out into Chalcis, east of Antioch, to a cell among scorpions, and found that the dances of Roman girls followed him there, into a body burnt black by the sun and a mind that would not stop quoting Cicero. He did not pretend the wilderness was pleasant. He said it was true. And he knew, as every man knows who has sat in it, that the voice which comes out of it is the only kind of voice a palace cannot manufacture, because a palace has a roof, and the voice is the sound a man makes when there is nothing over his head but God.

Set against that voice a particular man, because Scripture does, and because every age has him. His name was Herod Antipas, and the first thing to know about him is what he was not. He was not Caesar. Caesar, whatever else he was, carried an empire, and the weight of it gave even his crimes a kind of gravity. Antipas carried nothing. He was a tetrarch, a word that means the ruler of a quarter, and the quarter was Galilee and a strip across the Jordan, held on sufferance from Rome, which could and eventually did take it back with a letter. His father had been a real tyrant, who killed his own sons and the infants of Bethlehem, and of whom Augustus said that it was better to be his pig than his son. The son was a smaller thing. He was a man who ruled a quarter and wished to be told he ruled the world.

Consider what he built. He built a city on the shore of the lake and named it for the emperor, Tiberias, to be seen naming it, and he built it on a graveyard. Josephus records that the ground was full of tombs, so that no observant Jew would live there, and the tetrarch filled it with the landless and the freed and whoever could be paid or compelled, and gilded it, and called it a capital. That is the first mark of the type. A great tyrant builds on rock, for his heirs. The Herodian builds on the dead, for the view, and populates it with people who had no choice, and is surprised to find that nobody who could choose wants to come.

Consider what he desired. He took his brother’s wife while his brother was alive, which the Law forbade in words a child could read, and to do it he put away a wife whose father was a king across the desert with an army. That is the second mark. The appetite is not grand. It is not Antony’s for Cleopatra, which at least cost him the world. It is the appetite of a man at a dinner who wants what is on his brother’s plate, and takes it, and does not think about the father-in-law until the father-in-law arrives with cavalry.

And consider what he feared. Mark is exact about this, and the exactness is terrible. Herod feared John, knowing him to be a just and holy man, and kept him safe, and when he heard him he was greatly perplexed, and yet he heard him gladly. There is the whole pathology in a sentence. The man with the gilded hall and the brother’s wife and the foreign cavalry on the border was afraid of one person in his dominions, a man in camel hair who ate insects and owned nothing and had told him, to his face, that the marriage was unlawful. He could have killed him at once. He did not, because he was afraid of the crowd, who held John for a prophet, and because, underneath the fear of the crowd, there was a worse fear, which was that the man in the wilderness was right. So he kept him in the fortress at Machaerus and went down from time to time to listen. Jerome’s Latin for the perplexity is that he hesitated. He hesitated for a year. The Herodian always hesitates before the holy man, because the holy man is the one audience he cannot buy, and the one review he actually believes.

Then the birthday. I want the scene set with the detail the evangelists give it, because the detail is the indictment. A banquet, for the great men of Galilee, the officers and the first families, lying on couches. The girl, his wife’s daughter, comes in and dances, and it pleases Herod and the guests. He swears, before them all, to give her whatever she asks, up to half his kingdom. Mark the oath. He had no kingdom. He was a tetrarch. He swore away half of nothing, in front of his dinner guests, because the dance had pleased him and he wished to be seen to be a man who could give kingdoms. The girl goes out to her mother and comes back and asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, here, now. And the king, Mark says, was exceedingly sorry; yet for the sake of his oath, and of those who sat at table with him, he would not refuse her.

For the sake of those who sat at table with him. Not for the empire. Not for the succession, nor the border, nor any reason that a historian would dignify with a chapter. He had an innocent man beheaded in a dungeon, in the middle of a party, because he had made a boast in front of his guests and could not bear to be seen taking it back. The head was brought in on a dish, past the couches, and given to the girl, who gave it to her mother. Jerome preserves the tradition that Herodias, when she had it, took a pin from her hair and pierced the tongue that had rebuked her. The great Caesars had their enemies killed for reasons. The Herodian has the prophet killed for an embarrassment, and the woman mutilates the corpse for a grievance, and the guests go on with the dinner.

That is the type, and it has been with us since, and it is with us now, and I need not name a country. You will know him in whatever country you find him, because he is in all of them. He builds a hall and gilds it and has himself photographed in it. He is not interested in power as Caesar was interested in it, as a thing to be used; he is interested in the noise that power makes, the applause, the roar from the couches, and he mistakes the noise for the thing. He rules by grievance, which is Herodias’s instrument, the pin in the tongue. He cannot be governed by argument, because he does not hear arguments, but he can be governed entirely by the fear of being laughed at, and whoever learns this governs him. His transactions are all of the kind made at the banquet: a boast, a dance, a promise of half of what he does not own, and then a man’s head on a plate to make the arithmetic come out. And he is afraid, under all of it, of exactly one thing, which is the person who is not at the dinner, who does not want anything he has, who sits in the wasteland and says the plain sentence.

Jesus called him a fox. It is the only epithet he gave to any ruler, and it was not meant kindly; a fox is the animal that is cunning without being strong, that kills more than it eats, and that is hunted by gentlemen for sport. When Antipas finally had Jesus in front of him, on the morning of the Passion, Luke says that he was exceedingly glad, for he had long desired to see him, because he hoped to see some sign done by him. Some sign. The tetrarch wanted a show. He questioned him at length, and Jesus answered him nothing, not one word, the only man in the Gospels to whom he gave total silence; and so Herod, with his soldiers, dressed him in a gorgeous robe and mocked him and sent him back. And Pilate and Herod, Luke adds, became friends that day, who had been enemies before. The one sure friendship of the Herodian is with another man who has just helped him avoid a decision.

Now the people, since the subject of all this is not the fox but the nation that chose him. The voice in the wilderness had said one thing to them: repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand; and already the axe is laid to the root of the trees. The kingdom was coming. It was not Tiberias. It was not the banquet. The whole temptation of a client people under a vulgar prince is to mistake the lights of his hall for the dawn, to go up to the gilded city because it is the only bright thing in a dark country, and to say of the man who built it on tombs that at least he builds. They did say it. Within a generation they had said it of Rome itself: we have no king but Caesar. And the man in the camel hair, who had told them the truth for nothing, had his head on a plate, and they had chosen, and the choosing was the judgment, because a people that prefers the fox in the palace to the voice in the wasteland has already decided what kind of kingdom it wants, and will get it.

The reckoning came, and it came in the shape of the small man’s own smallness. The father-in-law’s cavalry destroyed his army, and Josephus says the Jews took the defeat for God’s vengeance for John. Then Herodias, who could not bear that her brother had been made a king while her husband was a tetrarch, drove him to Rome to ask for the crown, and the emperor, who had the letters, took the quarter away and sent them both to Gaul, to a provincial town, to die of nothing in particular. There was no tragedy in it. There was no fall, because there had been no height. There was a man who had sworn half a kingdom at a dinner, and had been given, at the end, exactly what he had sworn.

And the greater reckoning, the one for the nation, came forty years after, when the city that had cried out for Caesar got him, and the temple went up in the fire, and the voice from the wasteland was found to have been the only accurate forecast of the century. Jerome lived to see the pattern repeat at the other end of the empire. When Rome fell to Alaric, he wrote from his cave at Bethlehem that the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken, and that his voice stuck in his throat and sobs cut off his dictation. He did not say that the barbarians had done it. He said, in letter after letter, that the gilded ceilings had done it, the silk and the banquets and the matrons who painted their faces to go to church, the whole gaudy theatre of a civilisation that had mistaken its own twilight for noon. The barbarians only arrived when the play was over.

So I end where the Baptist began, in the desert, with the sentence. The fox is in the palace; he has always been in the palace; there is always a girl dancing and always a boast and always a head to be sent for. None of that is new and none of it is the point. The point is the platter, and who is on it, and whether, when it is carried in past the couches, anyone at the table puts down his cup. The voice does not need the palace. It said so: he must increase, and I must decrease. It is the palace that needs the voice, and kills it, and then discovers, in a provincial town in Gaul, with the lights out, that it had killed the only thing in the kingdom that had ever told it the truth.