The Sybil by Par Lagerkvist

God is merciless. Those who say he is good do not know him. He is the most inhuman thing there is. He is wild and incalculable as lightning. Like lightning out of a cloud which one did not know contained lightning. Suddenly it strikes, suddenly he strikes down on one, revealing all his cruelty. Or his love--his cruel love. With him anything may happen. He reveals himself at any time and in anything. The thunderstorm that drove me into the cave, the goat that were sent to take care of me, the scorching summer, charged with unparalleled heat, the birth in the goat cave while heaven hurled its lightning at the earth, the queer behavior of the goats, their eager interest in the birth and the baby, the vile, repugnant, inhuman events in the goat cave--what lay behind all that? Something divine? Something cruelly, savagely divine?

A traveler climbs the high, rocky cliff above the Temple at Delphi, looking for a woman he has been told can tell him his destiny. He finds her, aged and isolated, but living with her son, a mute who seems to neither speak nor understand. He is the Wandering Jew, a figure cursed to walk the earth for all eternity for refusing to let Jesus, en route to the crucifixion, rest his head against the side of his home. She is the former Sibyl, once a young virgin and priestess. He tells his story, and then she tells hers, about how she was cast out of the Temple and chased into the mountains after an affair with a young man, who impregnated her. The mute man is his offspring, or at least she once thought so--perhaps, she tells the wanderer, the father is really God, who took possession of her body over and over.

It's interesting, the way Lagerkvist brings together these figures from two different religious traditions: Greek paganism and esoteric Christianity. Both the Wanderer and the Sibyl understand that they are, in a since, like each other, cast out from God's favor, punished by providence. (It's a little funny that the tradition of the near-immortal Sibyl, aged and shrunk so badly she hangs from a jar, doesn't make it into the book--though I suppose that is a different Sibyl and a different Temple. ) The Sibyl may no longer have the gift of prognostication and cannot tell the Wanderer whether he'll ever be free of his curse. Nonetheless, she seems to have lived with her curse much longer than the Wanderer, and she shares with him a kind of wisdom from her experience: to be cursed by God, she explains, is a way of being loved by God, because it bounds one's life up with His irrevocably. The Wanderer may never be free of his curse, but he'll never be free of God, either.

"His cruel love," the Sibyl calls it. The Sibyl brings to mind Lagerkvist's Barabbas, who has no love for or loyalty to Christ, and yet who finds himself impressed into Christ's service the moment Barabbas' life is traded for his. Barabbas calls himself "God's slave," and the Sibyl and the Wanderer are, in their way, God's slaves, with all the accompanying connotations of violence and malice. But the Sibyl has learned that it does no good to hate God for his love, as the Wanderer declares he will forever, because you can't hate "the most inhuman thing there is." For Lagerkvist, God is all-powerful but beyond knowing, and this is alternatingly terrifying and enlivening. The metaphor of the sudden thunderbolt is good, because God is as surprising as he is powerful. I loved the ending of The Sibyl, in which the mute, insensible son--a kind of Christ figure who has no Christian love or interest in redeeming anyone, a Christ as moveable as a clump of earth--disappears from the cave and is taken up, perhaps into God's right hand. Is the Sibyl free? Or has she lost her only companion, God's presence in her life, no matter how inscrutable? Yes, and yes.