Finger-nails, weaklings of seedtime, scratched the soil
till by iron nails the toil was finished in the time of our need,
the sublime circle of the cone's bottom, the seed-springing surrender:
hands of incantation changed to hands of adoration,
the quintuple psalm, the pointing of Lateran:
active and passive in a single mystery,
a single sudden flash of identity,
the heart-breaking manual acts of the Pope.
From Charles Williams, "The Vision of the Empire," in Taliessin Through Logres. This is one of my favorite examples of the complexity of poetic language. To understand the above selection one must understand the general context. The world-empire, which is an earthly reflection of Heaven, is pictured in this poem as an androgynous human body. Thus, the head is at Logres where Arthur sits; students drink the milk of learning from the breasts of intelligo and credo in Gaul; the womb is at Byzantium, where the Emperor is found; the penis is at Jerusalem; the feet are at P'o-lu in Indonesia, beyond which is antipodean Byzantium, where rules the octopus-like headless Emperor, the perversion of all that is good. Tha hands come together at Rome, or, more precisely, at the Lateran hill. The quintuple psalm is the five fingers of the hand. They come together, of course, in prayer. Now, work with the hands is called manual labor; prayer is work with the hands; therefore poetically prayer is manual labor. The old Latin name for priest is Pontifex; 'pontifex' literally means 'bridge-builder'; one of the Pope's titles is Pontifex Maximus; this title is a conversion to Christian use of an old pagan title. Williams has just finished introducing this theme. All roads lead to Rome, where the Pope prays, his hands together, with contrite heart. A contrite heart is a broken heart. Thus the Pope in Lateran engages in heart-breaking manual acts, building the bridges that are the roads to Rome so that the logothetes of the Emperor can move throghout the Empire. The Emperor, of course, is a reflection of God; prayer builds bridges to God through its heart-breaking work. It is thus both passive and active; by simply putting one's hands together in prayer one engages in building the most difficult bridge of them all, the bridge to God.
