The Concordance Country and the Mirage of Parallels

Past the Cross the road ran down into a country that made Analogy laugh out loud.

It was a gentle land of small villages, and every village was laid out in a peculiar way. The houses didn’t stand about at random the way houses mostly do. They stood in groups, like families, and each group shared a name. In one village every house on one street had a sign over the door with a verse about shepherds: The Lord is my shepherd, and I am the good shepherd, and Feed my sheep, and Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered, and the chief Shepherd shall appear. The next street was all bread: manna in the wilderness, the bread of the Presence, the loaves and fishes, I am the bread of life, This is my body. Another was all temples, another all covenants, another all Abraham.

Little paths and bridges ran between the houses, so a man could walk from any house to every other house that talked about the same thing.

“The Concordance Country,” said Analogy, his eyes shining. “I was born here. Did I never tell you? My father kept a house on Righteousness Street. I left when I was young, to go and bind Books in the town of the Exchange.” He looked round at the villages with something close to tears. “I haven’t been back in fifty years.”

His father’s house was still standing, a tall, narrow, crooked house at the end of a long street with words carved over its door: The Just Shall Live By His Faith.

The old man who opened the door wasn’t Analogy’s father, who had died long since, but a cousin. His name was Canon, and he was very like Analogy, only older and thinner, with the same half-moon spectacles. He hugged Analogy and cried a little and took them all in and gave them supper.

After supper Canon showed them round the house. It was full of doors. Every room had five or six, each one leading into another room. He took them through one.

“Here’s the first room. Habakkuk. A prophet in a terrible time, with Babylon coming to destroy Judah. He asks God how He can let it happen, and God tells him to wait. Trust Me. The just shall live by his faith. It’s a word about trusting God’s faithfulness right through disaster.”

He opened a second door and they went through into another room, airier and roomier.

“Romans one, seventeen. Paul quotes the same words, The just shall live by faith, and puts them right at the front of his greatest letter as the text for the whole Gospel. Righteousness from God, received by faith, from first to last.”

A third door. “Galatians three, eleven. Paul again, the same words. This time against people who want to be justified by keeping the Law. Faith, not works of law.”

A fourth. “Hebrews ten, thirty-eight. The same words again! But here the writer’s using them to encourage Christians who are tempted to give up under persecution. Live by faith. Don’t shrink back. Hold on.”

They stood in the fourth room looking back through the open doors at the other three.

“Four rooms,” said Inquirer slowly. “One sentence. And each room uses it a bit differently.”

“Yes,” said Canon, delighted. “But they don’t contradict each other, do you see? It’s the same truth looked at from four sides. Habakkuk: in disaster, trust God. Romans: righteousness comes by faith. Galatians: not by law. Hebrews: so hold on. Each writer’s drawing out something that was really there in the first room, in Habakkuk’s word, and each one shows you more of it. That’s what this country is. It’s the whole Book read together, so every passage sits next to its neighbors. Canonical context, the scholars call it. The Book is one book by one Author, so the best commentary on any passage is the rest of the Book.”

“Scripture interprets Scripture,” said Analogy happily. “The room in the Lighthouse, with the two windows.”

Next day Canon took them to see the four gardens.

They lay side by side on a hillside outside the village, four walled gardens of very nearly the same size, each with its own gate, and over the gates four names: Matthew. Mark. Luke. John.

“The same Lord,” said Canon. “The same life. Four gardens planted by four gardeners. Go and walk through them and tell me what you see.”

They walked through all four. Inquirer saw that the gardens were very much alike, the first three especially. The same great trees grew in each of them: the baptism, the temptation, the feeding of the five thousand, the transfiguration, the cross, the empty tomb. But the trees weren’t always in the same place. In one garden a tree stood near the gate and in another near the back wall. One garden had flowers the others hadn’t. In one the path wound three times round a particular tree, and in another it went past it once. And the fourth garden, John’s, was so different from the other three it hardly seemed the same garden at all. It had fewer trees and taller ones, and between them long quiet pools where the Lord talked for chapters on end.

“Why are they different?” said Plain-Sense when they came out.

“Because four men planted them for four purposes. Matthew wrote for Jews, to show that Jesus is the King the prophets promised, so he quotes the prophets everywhere and lays out the teaching in five great blocks, like a new Moses. Mark wrote fast and sharp, for Romans perhaps, all action, straightway, straightway. Luke was a careful historian writing for a Gentile friend called Theophilus; he tells you so at the start. He loves the poor and the outcast and the women. John wrote last, to show that Jesus is the Son of God so his readers might believe and have life; he tells you that at the end. So he picks fewer signs and goes deeper into each.”

“So when the gardens differ, one of them isn’t wrong?”

“No more than four men describing the same battle from four hills are wrong. Each of them saw it, and each tells it for a reason. Put them side by side and you see far more than any one of them shows you. That’s why we’ve got four. When you read a passage in one garden, always walk across and look at the same tree in the others, and ask why this gardener planted it here and shaped it this way. That’s half of understanding him.”

They met the first of the troublemakers outside the gardens on the way back. He was a thin, sour man in a grey coat sitting on the wall between the gardens of Mark and Luke, with a ledger open on his knees, writing in it with relish.

“Ah. Visitors. Allow me to save you some time. My name is Mr. Contradiction. I’ve been cataloguing the errors in these gardens for thirty years. Look.” He turned the ledger round. It was all columns. “In this garden the Lord heals one blind man leaving Jericho. In that one it’s two blind men. In the other He’s going into Jericho. Contradiction! In this garden the sign over the cross says The King Of The Jews. In that one, This Is Jesus The King Of The Jews. In the other, Jesus Of Nazareth The King Of The Jews. Contradiction! And over there,” he waved his pen toward the village, “on Righteousness Street, Paul says a man’s justified by faith without works, and James says a man’s justified by works and not by faith only. Flat contradiction! The Book can’t even agree with itself!”

Canon sighed. He had plainly met Mr. Contradiction before.

“Let’s take the last one first, since it’s the biggest. Paul and James. Come with me.”

He took them back into the village, to a corner where two houses faced each other across a narrow lane. Over one door was carved: Therefore We Conclude That A Man Is Justified By Faith Without The Deeds Of The Law. Over the other: Ye See Then How That By Works A Man Is Justified, And Not By Faith Only.

“There,” said Mr. Contradiction, who had followed them. “Face to face. Read ‘em and weep.”

“Go into both houses,” said Canon. “Read the whole of each one, not just the door.”

They went in. Inquirer read his way through Paul’s house, Romans three and four, and Plain-Sense through James’s, James two. Then they came out into the lane and compared notes.

“They’re asking different questions,” said Plain-Sense slowly. “Paul’s asking how does a sinner get right with God? How does a man who deserves condemnation come to be counted righteous? And he says, not by doing the works of the Law, but by trusting God, who justifies the ungodly. That’s the ground of it. That’s what God looks at.”

“And James is asking what does real faith look like?” said Inquirer. “He’s arguing with people who say they’ve got faith but don’t do anything. Faith without works is dead. He means the faith that saves is never on its own. It always shows. He only calls a bare head-belief faith to say it isn’t faith at all. Even the devils believe that much.”

“And they use the same example!” said Plain-Sense. “Abraham. But Paul uses Genesis fifteen, when Abraham believed and was counted righteous, and James uses Genesis twenty-two, years later, when Abraham offered up Isaac. James is showing what Abraham’s faith did, how it was proved real. They’re not fighting. Paul gives you the root and James gives you the fruit.”

Canon beamed at them. “Faith alone justifies, but the faith that justifies is never alone. That’s how the old Reformers put it. Paul guards the root and James guards the fruit. Read just one and you’ll go wrong. Read both and each will keep you from twisting the other.”

Mr. Contradiction’s pen had stopped. He was looking down at his ledger.

“And the blind men?” he said, a good deal more quietly. “And the sign on the cross?”

“Four gardeners. If one says a blind man and another says two, the first hasn’t said only one. Mark names Bartimaeus because his readers knew him, and Matthew gives you both. The sign on the cross was written in three languages, John tells us, and not one of the gardeners claims to give you every word of it. Each gives you the part that mattered. The King Of The Jews is in all four, and that’s the point of it. When honest witnesses tell the same story they never tell it in the same words. If they did, you’d suspect they’d rehearsed.”

He laid a gentle hand on the ledger.

“You’ve spent thirty years setting one passage against another. Have you ever spent a single day setting them beside each other? Asking how they fit before deciding they don’t?”

Mr. Contradiction didn’t answer. But he shut his ledger.

The second troublemaker came by that same evening while they were sitting outside Canon’s house in the dusk, a big, bustling, red-faced man in a leather apron with a great welding-torch over his shoulder, very sweaty and very cheerful.

“Forced-Harmony,” he said, shaking hands all round with a grip like a vice. “Heard you’d seen off old Contradiction! Good for you! I’m the other side of the coin, I am. Where he finds a split, I weld it! Never met two passages yet I couldn’t make agree one way or another.” He patted the torch fondly. “Look here. You know how Peter denied the Lord three times before the cock crew? Well, in one garden the cock crows once, and in another it crows twice. So! Peter must have denied Him six times! Three before the first crow and three before the second. Welded! Fits perfectly!”

Inquirer stared at him. “Six times?”

“Six!” said Forced-Harmony proudly. “Only way to make every detail fit exactly!”

“But every one of the four gardens says three,” said Plain-Sense. “The Lord said thou shalt deny me thrice, and Peter remembered He’d said three. If you make it six, you’ve made all four of them wrong so as to make them all agree.”

Forced-Harmony’s jolly face clouded a little. “Well. Well, I’ve harmonized them.”

“You’ve welded them into something none of them says,” said Canon gently. “Honest harmony is good. Very good. It’s asking how might these accounts fit together, as true reports of real events? Often there’s a simple, natural answer. Sometimes we don’t know it, and we wait. But when your weld turns out a story that none of the witnesses told, you’ve stopped listening to them. You’re trusting your torch more than their testimony.”

Forced-Harmony looked down at his torch for a long moment. Then he gave a big, slightly sheepish laugh. “I suppose it is a bit much. Six times.”

“It’s a bit much,” Canon agreed.

“Mind you,” said Forced-Harmony, cheering up, “it’s better than old Contradiction. At least I want them to fit.”

“You do. And that’s the right wanting. Just let them fit the way they fit, not the way your torch does.”

That night, sitting late over the fire, Canon told them about the Mirage.

“Past our country the road goes east across a desert. It’s three days’ walk, and there’s no other way to the Citadel. The desert’s called the Mirage of Parallels. It’s the shadow of this country. Everything good here has its twisted twin out there.”

“What’s in it?”

“Heat. Heat and shimmer. And words. In the Mirage any two verses that share a word seem to be joined. You’ll see bridges shimmering between them in the air, thousands of them, glittering, every one going somewhere. And they’re all made of heat-haze. Pilgrims crossing the Mirage start following the bridges, word to word and verse to verse, and they never come out. They die of thirst in the middle of it, still drawing connections.”

He looked at Analogy.

“You especially, cousin. You love cross-references. You’ve spent your life making them. Out there you’ll see more of them than you ever dreamed of, and most of them will be lies.”

Analogy laughed, a little uneasily. “I’ve been making cross-references fifty years, Canon. I think I know a real one from a false one.”

Canon didn’t laugh.

“So did our grandfather.”

They set out at dawn with water-skins Canon had filled for them. The last village of the Concordance Country petered out within the hour, and then it was sand, pale and glittering and burning, running away east under a white sky, with the road across it no more than a faint track marked by cairns.

By noon the heat was terrible. The air over the sand trembled and swam. And the bridges started to appear.

They were exactly as Canon had said. Between one cairn and the next the air would shimmer and a bridge would be standing there, a slender arch of glittering light going up from one side of the road and coming down somewhere far off across the sand, with a word at each end.

Inquirer looked at the first one he came to. At the near end, glowing in the air, was a verse: The Lord is my shepherd. And at the far end, shimmering in the haze miles off, he could just make out another: Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered.

“There’s a connection,” said a voice beside him. “Isn’t there? Shepherd. Both verses. So the Twenty-third Psalm must be about the shepherd being smitten. It’s really about the crucifixion. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death: that’s Christ on the cross!”

Inquirer turned. There was a man walking beside him he hadn’t noticed before, slim and well-dressed, with a pleasant, eager face, pointing up at the bridge.

“I’m Mr. Parallel. I live out here. I’ve mapped every bridge in the Mirage. Wonderful, aren’t they? Every word in the Book joined to every other! Come on, follow this one with me. It goes all the way to the cross!”

Inquirer stood looking at the bridge. It was beautiful. And there was something in it. The Lord was the Shepherd, in both places. Wasn’t He?

But he remembered the room in the Lighthouse. The rule is that a clear passage lights the same subject in a dim one. It does not mean any two verses that look alike can be glued together.

“The Psalm’s about the Lord leading His sheep,” he said slowly. “Through danger, to His house. It’s David trusting God. Zechariah’s about a shepherd struck down so the flock scatters, and the Lord Himself says that’s about Him and His disciples, the night He was taken. They’re both about shepherds. But they’re not saying the same thing. They share a word. They don’t share a meaning.”

The bridge between the two verses flickered and went thin. For a moment it was only heat-haze.

Mr. Parallel smiled, not at all bothered. “There are thousands more. Look.”

He was right. There were thousands more, and as the afternoon went on they multiplied, until the whole desert was laced with shimmering arches running every which way, from every verse to every other verse that shared a word, any word at all: water, fire, seven, mountain, door, light, wine. The air was so thick with glittering bridges it was hard to see the cairns.

And Analogy was enchanted.

Inquirer saw it happening and at first couldn’t stop it. The old bookbinder walked slower and slower, turning his head this way and that with his eyes bright, stopping again and again to look up at a bridge and murmur the verses at either end. Water: the waters of creation, the flood, the Red Sea, the water from the rock, the Jordan, the well in Samaria, the pool of Bethesda. Seven: seven days, seven lamps, seven seals. Mountain: Ararat, Moriah, Sinai, Carmel, Zion, the Mount of Olives. His fingers kept twitching toward his red pen.

“It’s all joined,” he whispered. “All of it. Fifty years of cross-references and I only found a fraction. Look, Inquirer. Look at it all.”

“Analogy, they’re heat-haze. Canon said so.”

“Some of them. Some of them. But look at that one.” He pointed to a great shining arch. “Seven. From the seven days of creation to the seven churches of Revelation. It has to mean something. Seven’s God’s number. I must follow it and see.”

And before either of them could grab him, the old bookbinder had stepped off the road and onto the bridge of light.

It held him. That was the dreadful part. The bridges were made of heat-haze, but they held. He walked up the shimmering arch and away across the desert, high over the sand, with Mr. Parallel strolling beside him chattering.

Inquirer and Plain-Sense went after him, but not on the bridges. They had that much sense, at least: they kept their feet on the sand. They ran along underneath the arch, following its line across the desert and shouting up at him. He didn’t seem to hear. He was walking along the bridge bent over his great Book of cross-references, writing furiously in the margins.

The bridge came down at last, miles off, on a big flat rock in the middle of the desert, and when they got there they found the rock covered in other pilgrims. There were dozens of them sitting on the hot stone, bent over their Books and writing in the margins, so thin and sunburnt and dried out they looked like old leather. Not one looked up. They were drawing lines from verse to verse, word to word, number to number, until their Books were black with ink and the lines went everywhere and meant nothing.

Analogy was sitting among them. He’d started a clean page with Seven written at the top and was listing underneath every seven in the Book, from Genesis to Revelation.

“Analogy,” said Inquirer, kneeling down beside him.

Analogy looked up with bright, faraway eyes. “Isn’t it wonderful? I’ve found forty already. Seven days, seven years of plenty, seven times round Jericho, seven times Naaman dipped in the Jordan, seventy times seven. They must all be connected. They must all mean the same thing. I’ve just got to work out what.”

“Do they mean the same thing?” said Plain-Sense quietly.

“They must. They’re all seven.”

Inquirer took the Book gently out of the old man’s hands, and Analogy let him. He only blinked, like somebody waking up.

“Analogy, who was it taught me that Scripture interprets Scripture? You did. You and the room in the Lighthouse. And you taught me how. You find the passages that talk about the same thing. Not the passages that use the same word. Remember Mrs. Usage? A word means what it means here, in its own sentence. Seven days of creation and seventy times seven forgiveness aren’t the same thing because they’ve both got a seven in them. Naaman dipped seven times because the prophet told him to. It doesn’t mean what the seven seals mean. You told the traders at the Exchange that a reading that contradicts the rest of the Book is false. But these readings don’t contradict anything. They don’t say anything. They just join things up.”

He held up the bookbinder’s red pen.

“You’ve spent fifty years making real cross-references. Ones that help a reader hear what the Book is saying. That’s what you’re for. Not this.”

Analogy looked at the pen. He looked at the page in front of him, Seven at the top and forty references underneath tangled in a web of lines. He looked at the other pilgrims on the rock, bent over and parched and scribbling.

Then he put his face in his hands.

“Grandfather. Canon said grandfather.”

They got him down off the rock between them. It was evening by then and the heat was starting to go, and as it went the bridges went with it, one shimmering arch after another thinning and wavering and going out, like candles at the end of a feast. The desert lay plain and grey under the first stars, and there, not half a mile off, was the line of cairns that marked the road.

They gave Analogy water, and he drank like a man dying of thirst, which perhaps he had been.

Mr. Parallel was gone. Inquirer never saw him leave.

The other pilgrims on the rock didn’t come. Plain-Sense went back and tried. He knelt beside them one after another and talked to them, but they only looked up blankly from their black-inked Books and went on drawing lines. When the sun came up, Inquirer thought, the bridges would be back, and they’d follow them again.

“How do you help someone like that?” said Plain-Sense when he came back, grim-faced.

“I don’t know,” said Analogy quietly. “I don’t know. I was very nearly one of them. All I know is I’d never have come down by myself.” He looked at the two younger men. “Thank you. Both of you. I’ve spent my whole life telling people the Book interprets itself. I forgot that it does it by meaning, not by matching letters.”

They walked all night in the cool under the stars, keeping to the cairns, and next day when the sun came up and the bridges began shimmering again they kept their eyes on the road and didn’t look up.

On the third day they reached the eastern edge of the desert. The sand gave way to stony ground and then to grass, and the land rose ahead of them in a long slope, and on top of it stood a great grey fortress.

It was the most massive building Inquirer had ever seen. Its walls were huge squared blocks fitted together without any mortar, so tight you couldn’t have slipped a knife-blade between them, with towers at every corner and a keep in the middle that went up to an enormous height. Every stone of it seemed to fit every other stone, so that the whole fortress was one structure and not a heap of parts.

“The Citadel of Doctrine,” said Analogy. He had his Book of cross-references under his arm again, but he held it differently now. More humbly, Inquirer thought. “That’s where the Book’s teaching is gathered into one whole. Every doctrine fitted to every other. Systematic theology, they call it.” He was quiet a moment. “It’s built of the same stones as Righteousness Street. They’re just laid differently. In the Concordance Country they’re laid by where they turn up. In the Citadel they’re laid by what they teach.”

Inquirer looked up at the grey walls and the great gate in them and the banners on the towers.

And under the walls, along the slope that went up to the gate, he saw something odd. A crowd of knights in armor was drawn up in ranks with banners and lances and their visors down, and they seemed to be guarding the way up. On their shields were painted strange devices: a fork in a road, a man looking at only one half of a pair of scales, a broken chain.

“Who are they?” said Plain-Sense.

Analogy shaded his eyes and looked, and his face went grave.

“The Knights of Fallacy. I’ve heard of them. They lay siege to the Citadel every generation. They can’t take it by force, the walls are too strong, so they wait on the road and challenge every pilgrim who comes. They don’t go after the Book. They go after how you reason about it.”

Inquirer looked at the knights in their ranks, and the long slope, and the grey gate at the top.

“Then we’ll have to reason well,” he said.