The Woman Sho Believed Simon Magus

An essay concerning Simon Magus, Oxford, and a lady whose name I shall not mention

There are certain people whom one meets only once, and remembers for twenty years.

There are others whom one meets for years, and remembers only when something quite irrelevant brings them back: the smell of rain on stone, perhaps; a particular piece of music; the sight of a blue-bound book in a second-hand shop; a woman's handwriting upon the margin of an ancient text; or, in my own case, the peculiar irritation produced by somebody who has put a question in the wrong place in an otherwise perfectly respectable book.

I have never been particularly good at forgetting.

This may have something to do with my profession, if one may call philology a profession when it more often resembles a hereditary affliction. Words have memories. So do churches. So do stamps. So do cricket grounds. The mind, too, is an incorrigible archivist. It preserves what one has no wish to preserve and mislays what one would give a great deal to recover.

There is, therefore, one woman whom I shall not name.

Not because her name was remarkable. It was not. Her Christian name was perfectly ordinary, although, being a Christian name, it possessed the curious distinction of meaning more than she herself would have admitted. I shall leave its etymology alone. There are some names which become dangerous once subjected to a philologist.

I shall not give her surname either.

Nor shall I say precisely when she was born, although she was sufficiently young to make me conscious of the grey in my beard and sufficiently old to know that youth is not a synonym for foolishness.

I shall merely say that I met her in Oxford.

And that she believed in Simon Magus.

This is not, I assure you, the sort of sentence with which one expects an acquaintance to begin.

I had left unfinished a perfectly respectable tax matter concerning my naval transport company, and gone instead to Oxford for a reason which, in retrospect, was perfectly characteristic of me and therefore slightly embarrassing. I was pursuing a question which had begun with a passage in Acts and wandered, as these things do, into Greek, Syriac, patristics, apocrypha, heresiology, the history of magic, the theology of revelation, and finally into that dangerous territory where one begins reading books which nobody has asked one to read.

The subject was Simon Magus.

Simon appears briefly in the eighth chapter of Acts, where he is introduced as a man who had previously practised magic and had astonished the people of Samaria, giving himself out to be "some great one." Philip preached Christ there. Simon believed, was baptised, and continued with Philip.

So far, everything is sufficiently manageable.

Then Peter and John arrive.

The Samaritans receive the Holy Spirit. Simon sees this. He offers money for the apostolic power.

Peter rebukes him.

"Thy money perish with thee," says the apostle, "because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money."

Peter tells him to repent.

Simon asks the apostles to pray for him. Whether he did so in genuine repentance or with a measure of irony, however, we are not told; and from this silence we cannot know whether Simon's repentance was sincere or merely another performance.

Because, rather inconveniently for anyone attempting to write a biography of Simon Magus, the Bible stops telling us what happened to him next.

That silence has been filled by centuries.

Justin Martyr gives us Simon in Rome. Irenaeus gives us Simon as the father of a great heresy. Hippolytus gives us cosmological speculations. The later literature supplies Helena, Ennoia, rival revelations, magic, demons, flying, Rome, Peter, Paul, Nero, a fall from the sky, broken legs, physicians, and finally death.

The Simon of Acts becomes the Simon of Christian imagination.

I had been thinking about precisely this transformation when I first saw her.

She was sitting almost opposite me—or, more precisely, slightly to one side, at an angle that nevertheless allowed us to maintain eye contact.

There are occasions upon which one notices a person because she is beautiful.

There are other occasions upon which one notices a person because she is reading a book one has been trying to find for three years.

The latter is considerably more dangerous.

She had before her an edition of Irenaeus.

Beside it lay the Acts of Peter.

There was a Greek New Testament, heavily annotated.

I noticed, with some alarm, that she had marked Acts 8:9–24.

I noticed something else.

In the margin beside Simon's request to Peter she had written:

According to Peter's party.

I looked at it for rather longer than was strictly polite, so astonished was I by the almost miraculous coincidence of our interests.

She noticed.

"Do you disagree?" she said suddenly, breaking the silence of the room. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere beyond it—unnaturally calm, almost disembodied, as though the words had travelled to me from another room, or perhaps another world.

"M'am, I am considering whether to."

"With the handwriting?"

"With the impertinence."

She smiled.

I now took the chair directly opposite her.

That was the beginning.

I did not know it at the time, but I had just sat down opposite the only person I had ever met who could make Simon Magus seem almost sympathetic.

Almost.

Let me be clear.

I do not sympathise with Simon Magus.

I am an Anglican.

There are certain statements which a man ought to make plainly before embarking upon an account which may otherwise be mistaken for theological instability. I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord. I believe in the Holy Ghost. I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. I believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

I have no intention of exchanging the Creed for a Samaritan magician.

Nevertheless, Christianity has always possessed enough confidence in its own truth to permit the existence of difficult questions.

Simon was one of them.

She thought he was something rather more.

She did not initially tell me that she was a Simonian.

Indeed, for several weeks I assumed she was simply an exceptionally well-read historian of religion with an unfortunate taste for heresiarchs.

That would have been much easier.

She was not an occultist in the vulgar sense. She did not wear mysterious jewellery, speak in theatrical whispers, or decorate her flat with the sort of candles which make one suspect that the electricity has been disconnected for non-payment.

She was scholarly.

That was worse.

She knew Greek.

She knew the Fathers.

She knew the distinction between what Irenaeus says Simon taught and what Irenaeus says the Simonians believed.

She knew that we possess no securely authentic work by Simon himself.

She knew that the Simonian tradition developed.

She knew that Justin's famous identification of Simon's statue with Semo Sancus was almost certainly a mistake.

She knew, in short, all the things which a person ought to know if she intends to believe something which historians have considerable difficulty proving.

One afternoon we were discussing Helena.

I had remarked upon the extraordinary development of the tradition in which Simon's Helena is identified with Ennoia, the divine Thought.

She closed her book.

"You don't understand her."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Helena."

"I am not certain there is a Helena to understand," I murmured almost ironically.

"There is always a Helena," she rebuked me.

I smiled.

"That sounds rather like something out of a French novel."

"I am serious."

"I know."

She looked at me.

"That's why you're smiling."

I had no satisfactory answer.

She told me then that she was not merely studying Simonianism.

She believed it.

I remember the silence.

Oxford has many silences. There is the silence of libraries, which is professional. There is the silence of chapels, which is devotional. There is the silence of snow, which is meteorological. And there is the silence which occurs when someone tells you something so unexpected that your mind is briefly unable to decide which category of reality it belongs to.

This was the fourth kind.

"You mean," I said eventually, "that you are a Simonian?"

"Yes."

"An actual Simonian?"

"There aren't many."

"I had gathered that."

She smiled.

"Do you think that makes me mad?"

"No."

"Good."

"I think it makes you troublesome."

She seemed pleased.

That was unfortunate.

I should perhaps explain what she meant by Simonianism.

She did not imagine that she belonged to a secret ecclesiastical institution stretching uninterruptedly from first-century Samaria to modern Oxford. She was not claiming apostolic succession from Simon. She knew perfectly well that such a claim would be historically indefensible.

Her Simonianism was an intellectual and spiritual reconstruction.

She believed that Simon represented a stream of religious thought which Christianity had defeated, condemned, and then partially absorbed.

She believed in a transcendent divine Power beyond ordinary human categories.

She regarded Ennoia—the divine Thought—as a profoundly important symbol, perhaps even a manifestation of the divine feminine.

She believed that the visible world could not be understood simply as the complete and transparent expression of the highest divine reality.

She believed that humanity possessed within itself a capacity to awaken to a higher truth.

And she believed that Simon had understood something which Peter had not.

This last proposition was the one I found most irritating.

Peter, after all, had been there.

"Peter knew Christ," I said.

"So did many people who misunderstood him," was her reply.

"You place Simon among the interpreters of Christ?"

"I place him among those who encountered the Christian proclamation and understood it differently."

"That is a remarkably charitable way of describing heresy."

"Perhaps heresy is sometimes simply the name the victorious interpretation gives to the defeated one."

I disliked this sentence.

It was therefore memorable.

I have since heard variations of it from people who know considerably less than she did.

She never used it cheaply.

That was one of the reasons I respected her.

She did not pretend that history was simple.

Nor did she believe that being persecuted made one right.

This was important.

She was not a romantic rebel.

She knew perfectly well that some strange beliefs are simply strange because they are wrong.

Her claim was more precise.

She wanted to know what had been lost.

That question became the centre of our conversations.

We argued about Simon.

Then about Peter.

Then about Paul.

Then about Christ.

Then about the nature of revelation.

Then, inevitably, about the nature of God.

One evening she asked me what I thought of the plural in Genesis:

"Let us make man in our image."

I explained the possibilities.

The divine council.

The heavenly court.

The royal plural.

The later Christian reading as an anticipation of the Trinity.

She listened.

"And which do you believe?"

"That God created man."

"That wasn't my question," she complained.

"It is the answer I prefer."

She laughed.

There were times when I suspected she had discovered that the quickest way to disarm me was to laugh at exactly the point where I expected to be taken seriously.

She wanted to know whether I thought the divine council implied lesser beings participating in creation.

I said that Genesis did not say that.

God says, "Let us make."

Then Genesis says, "So God created."

The distinction matters.

She agreed.

But she did not concede.

"Perhaps," she said, "the biblical text is preserving something older than the theology later imposed upon it."

"Perhaps."

"And perhaps Simon's descendants recognised something in that older language."

"Perhaps."

She smiled.

"You have said perhaps twice in a row."

"I am an Anglican."

She laughed again.

And that was becoming a problem.

Not her laughter.

My anticipation of it.

I began noticing when she would be in Oxford.

I began arranging my visits so that there was a reasonable possibility of seeing her.

I told myself that I was continuing an important intellectual conversation.

This was not entirely untrue.

It was simply incomplete.

There are moments in a man's life when he discovers that an argument has become an attachment.

He does not necessarily notice the transition.

There is no trumpet.

No angel descends.

No theological proposition changes its tense.

One simply discovers that the other person's absence has acquired a weight which one's own dignity finds inconvenient.

I had become accustomed to her.

That is one of the most dangerous forms of love.

Not the thunderbolt.

The habit.

The cup of tea left untouched because the conversation has become too interesting.

The book one brings because one knows she will object to a particular paragraph.

The walk taken by the longer route because there is another ten minutes before one must say goodnight.

The message sent because one has discovered an inscription in a manuscript and knows precisely one person who will understand why it matters.

She became the person to whom I wanted to show things.

That, in the end, was how I knew.

I had spent my life collecting.

Stamps.

Words.

Books.

Facts.

Places.

Stories.

Oddities.

She became the first thing I wanted to share rather than merely possess.

And yet the great obstacle remained.

She was a Simonian.

I was a Christian.

Not nominally.

Not culturally.

Not as one adopts a church because one's grandparents happened to have been buried there.

I believed.

And she believed.

That distinction made our affection both possible and impossible.

If she had merely been sceptical, I could have attempted persuasion.

If I had merely been eccentric, she could have tolerated me.

If either of us had treated religion as an accessory, there would have been no difficulty.

But neither did.

Our disagreements mattered.

They mattered because we mattered to one another.

I once asked her whether she thought Simon was a Christian.

She thought about it.

"No."

The answer surprised me.

"Then what was he?"

"Someone who passed through the Christian world and claimed to understand its source better than its apostles did."

"That sounds remarkably like a heretic," I grumbled.

"Perhaps."

Then, she looked at me.

"Does a heretic have to be stupid?"

"No."

"Does he have to be wicked?"

"No."

"Does he have to be wrong?"

I hesitated.

She smiled.

"You see?"

"I see that you have arranged the questions."

"And you have failed the examination."

"I was never good at examinations."

"You have three degrees."

"Well, I was good at examinations. I merely disliked them."

That evening we walked along the Cherwell.

It was raining lightly.

Oxford is extraordinarily beautiful in rain, which is one of its more effective methods of preventing people from noticing that they are cold.

She asked me whether I thought Peter hated Simon.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because Peter tells him to repent."

"And?"

"That implies that Peter believes he can repent."

She was quiet.

I continued.

"The most terrible thing Peter could have said would have been that Simon was beyond redemption."

She looked at me then.

"Would you say that about me?"

I stopped walking.

She had not asked the question dramatically.

That made it worse.

"No."

"Even though I believe what you consider heresy?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I am a Christian."

She looked away.

I had not intended the sentence to sound as profound as it apparently did.

After a while she said:

"That is a rather inconvenient religion."

"Yes."

"I thought Christianity was supposed to be about certainty."

"Sometimes, it is not."

She raised an eyebrow at my reply.

"It is about Christ."

She smiled.

"That's different."

"Yes."

I have often wondered whether that was the moment she began to love me.

Perhaps it was the moment I began to love her.

Perhaps both of us had already crossed the boundary and were merely discovering that we had done so.

Only once we spoke of marriage.

That may sound strange.

It was not.

She asked me:

"Would you marry a heretic?"

I considered this for an uncomfortably long time.

"I should have to consult the Prayer Book."

She smiled.

"And?"

"It contains prayers for practically everything."

She laughed.

Then, more seriously, she insisted:

"But would you?"

"I already have rather more difficulty imagining Oxford without you than I do imagining heaven without an argument."

But Marriage would have required a resolution neither of us could honestly offer.

She could not become Anglican merely to make my life tidier.

I could not become Simonian merely to make hers more harmonious.

And neither of us wanted the other as a convert.

There is a peculiar violence in demanding that the person one loves cease to be the person one loves.

She once put it very well.

"If you changed my faith," she said, "you would eventually discover that you had fallen in love with someone who no longer existed."

I told her that she was being melodramatic.

She said:

"You are the one who collects ghosts."

I found no answer for that.

We continued as we were.

That was our mistake.

Or perhaps it was our salvation.

I never knew.

There were evenings when she would come to my room and we would discuss manuscripts until midnight.

There were other evenings when we did not discuss theology at all.

She would sit by the window.

I would make tea.

She would tell me about something that had happened to her during the day.

I would tell her about cricket.

She claimed not to understand cricket.

This was one of her most serious defects.

I attempted to educate her.

She said that the rules appeared to have been designed by someone who wished to make the concept of time itself controversial.

I told her that this was one of the game's principal virtues.

She asked whether the batsman could simply refuse to run.

I said yes.

She stared at me.

"That is absurd."

"It is cricket."

Eventually, she agreed to accompany me to a match in Bristol.

She did not understand the scoring.

She did, however, understand tea.

This was the beginning of her moral improvement.

There were moments when I thought that perhaps our differences were not so large.

Then we would return to Simon.

She believed that the later stories of Simon's flight should not simply be dismissed.

I thought them legendary.

She agreed they were legendary.

This was another of the things I admired about her.

She did not claim certainty where the evidence did not permit it.

She simply refused to assume that legendary meant meaningless.

We discussed the Acts of Peter.

Simon flies above Rome.

Peter prays.

Simon falls.

His legs are broken.

The crowd turns against him.

The previously non-hostile mob him.

He is carried away.

He is treated by physicians.

He dies.

She thought the story was extraordinary.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it is almost too perfect."

"Perfect?"

"The magician ascends."

"Yes."

"He claims divine status."

"Yes."

"Peter prays."

"Yes."

"God brings him down."

"Yes."

"And then Simon dies through the ordinary instruments of medicine."

I considered it.

"You think it is symbolic."

"I think it is literary."

"That isn't the same thing."

"No. It is more interesting."

She closed the book.

"The Christian author takes the man who claims to possess supernatural power and makes him dependent upon ordinary human beings carrying him from Rome."

I nodded.

"He becomes helpless," I added.

"Exactly."

"And you think this was deliberate?"

"Of course."

That was when I asked her whether she believed Simon actually flew.

She looked at me.

"I believe that somebody believed something happened."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only honest answer."

"You are becoming an historian."

"Don't insult me."

I laughed.

She smiled.

Then she became serious.

"But Tim, what if he did?"

"What if he did what?"

"Fly."

I stared at her.

She continued.

"You believe Christ rose from the dead, don't you?"

"Yes."

"You believe He ascended into heaven, don't you?"

"Yes."

"You believe Peter and Paul performed miracles."

"Yes."

"You believe angels appeared to men."

"Yes."

"You believe God can suspend the ordinary operation of nature."

"Yes."

"And yet when Simon is said to have flown, you suddenly become a materialist."

"I do not."

"You do."

"No. I become an historian."

She smiled.

"Ah."

"What?"

"So you have a hierarchy of miracles," she said, with the faintest hint of mockery.

"I have a hierarchy of evidence."

"That is almost the same thing."

It was an excellent objection.

I did not tell her that.

There are certain concessions one makes in love which one would never make in debate.

There were also things about her which I could not understand.

She believed in Ennoia as divine Thought.

I found the idea both beautiful and dangerous.

She believed that the feminine could be a mode of divine manifestation.

I believed that Christianity had no difficulty with the dignity of women, although it had enormous difficulty with the dignity of modern people who wished to prove that Christianity had no difficulty with anything.

She would accuse me of Anglican evasiveness.

I would accuse her of Simonian extravagance.

We would laugh.

Then we would argue.

Then we would be quiet.

Then, sometimes, we would kiss.

I mention this only because it is part of the truth.

There was nothing theatrical about it.

No demonic chariot.

No Roman Forum, either, with some magician flying over our heads.

No crowds.

No miraculous ascent.

Only two human beings in a room, neither certain what the next day would bring.

I discovered that physical intimacy is not necessarily the opposite of intellectual intimacy.

Sometimes it is its most dangerous consequence.

You allow someone to know you without your arguments.

That is more frightening than allowing her to defeat you in Greek.

She knew my vanity.

Perhaps, she knew my melancholy.

Perhaps, she knew that my cultivated eccentricity concealed a rather ordinary fear of being forgotten.

She knew that I liked to pretend that I lived alone because I preferred solitude.

This was not entirely true.

One can become very accomplished at turning loneliness into a lifestyle.

She saw through it.

I saw through her too.

She spoke confidently about Simon.

But there were moments when she was afraid.

Afraid that she had chosen the wrong faith.

Afraid that the whole thing was an elaborate intellectual rebellion.

Afraid that she had fallen in love with a man whose God would eventually demand that he leave her.

I never told her that I had the same fear.

I feared that loving her might become a kind of betrayal.

Not of Anglicanism.

Of truth.

I had always believed that love should not require one to lie.

So I did not tell her that I thought Simon was right.

Because I did not.

And she never told me that she thought Christ was wrong.

Because she did not.

We lived for a while in that strange country between disagreement and tenderness.

It was beautiful.

It was also doomed.

Not because one of us betrayed the other.

Not because there was another man or another woman.

Not because of some vulgar quarrel.

It was doomed because the world eventually demands names for things.

Friend.

Lover.

Fiancée.

Wife.

Husband.

Partner.

Mistress.

Beloved.

We had no satisfactory word.

Perhaps that is why I shall not name her.

A name would make her too definite.

And she was never definite.

She remained, in my memory, partly woman and partly question.

There came a time when she had to leave Oxford.

I shall not say where she went.

I know.

That is enough.

We continued to write.

At first frequently.

Then less frequently.

The letters became longer and the intervals between them increased.

This is one of the paradoxes of correspondence.

When people live near one another, they speak in fragments.

When distance intervenes, they begin composing.

Her letters were remarkable.

She wrote about Simon.

She wrote about Ennoia.

She wrote about a book she had found.

She wrote about places she had visited.

Sometimes she wrote about God.

Sometimes she wrote about nothing.

The letters about nothing were the ones I kept.

One Christmas she sent me a small parcel.

Inside was a book.

It was an old edition of Irenaeus.

Inside the front cover she had written:

For the man who insists upon reading Simon against himself.

I laughed.

Then I cried.

I am not ashamed of this.

Age has very little patience with the masculine pretence that tears are somehow a failure of theology.

I wrote to her.

I told her I had received the book.

I told her it was an excellent edition.

I told her the binding was beautiful.

I told her the weather was dreadful.

I told her Gloucestershire had suffered another unfortunate defeat.

I did not tell her that I loved her.

I had told her before.

That was enough.

Years later I found a loose sheet of paper inside that book.

I had forgotten it was there.

It was in her handwriting.

I had apparently put it there myself and then forgotten.

The note was very short.

It said:

"You have spent your life defending the Church against Simon Magus. I wondered whether you would have permitted Simon's disciple to defend you against loneliness."

And it finally read:

"You were the only Christian I ever met who made me wish Peter had not been wrong."

I have read that paragraph many times.

I still do not know whether it was a compliment.

Perhaps it was.

Perhaps it was the nearest thing she could offer to a confession.

I sometimes imagine that if I had been braver, I might have summoned her to Cumbria.

I did not.

This is not because I was noble.

It is because I knew that asking her to come would have meant asking her to return to a life in which neither of us could pretend that the fundamental question had disappeared.

I could not ask her to become someone else.

She could not ask me to cease being myself.

So we allowed the distance to become permanent.

I continued my life.

Tea.

Books.

Cricket.

Stamps.

Church.

The fells.

The occasional ghost.

The usual procession of eccentricities with which I have decorated what might otherwise have been an ordinary existence.

Some female friends sometimes ask whether I regret it.

This is an unfair question.

Regret assumes that one can identify the correct alternative.

I cannot.

Perhaps if we had married, we would eventually have discovered that our great intellectual romance was merely a prolonged disagreement conducted with unusually attractive stationery.

Perhaps we would have been happy.

Perhaps miserable.

Perhaps both.

Perhaps we would have become one of those elderly couples who argue over the newspaper and secretly enjoy the fact that somebody is still there to argue.

Perhaps.

But I know this:

I would not exchange what happened for nothing.

There are people who pass through one's life and leave it unchanged.

There are others who leave one unable to return to the person one was before.

She was the latter.

She taught me something about heresy.

Not that heresy is true.

Not that orthodoxy is false.

Something more difficult.

She taught me that a person can be wrong and still possess a profound hunger for truth.

She taught me that a theological opponent need not be an enemy.

She taught me that historical losers are still human beings.

She taught me that hostile sources may preserve genuine memories.

She taught me that legends can be false and nevertheless reveal something true about those who created them.

And she taught me, rather painfully, that love does not always culminate in possession.

Perhaps this is why I have returned so often to Simon Magus.

The subject appears, on the surface, to be about power.

Simon wants power.

Peter possesses power.

Simon attempts to buy what cannot be bought.

Peter condemns him.

Later generations make Simon fly.

Then they make him fall.

It is a splendid Christian story.

But I have come to think that there is another theme underneath it.

Recognition.

Simon wants to be recognised.

Peter refuses.

Simon claims divine identity.

The Church says no.

Simon ascends.

Peter prays.

Simon falls.

The whole story is an argument over who has the right to say what God is doing.

Perhaps all theology is partly this.

We speak.

We interpret.

We claim.

We defend.

We condemn.

And somewhere beyond our arguments stands God, who has the irritating habit of not consulting us before being God.

My friend would have liked that sentence.

She would have told me it sounded Simonian.

I would have told her it sounded Cranmerian.

She would have laughed.

I miss that laughter.

There is one further thing I should say about the flying.

I no longer dismiss the story quite as quickly as I once did.

No, I have not become a believer in Simon's levitation.

I remain an historian in that respect.

But I have become suspicious of my own certainty.

Perhaps the story grew because people needed Simon to fall.

Perhaps Christians found it satisfying to imagine the great magician suspended above the Forum, claiming divinity, only to be brought crashing down by the prayers of Peter.

Perhaps the story is pure invention.

Perhaps some unknown incident lies behind it.

Perhaps somebody saw a trick.

Perhaps somebody saw a man carried by a contraption.

Perhaps somebody saw something he could not explain.

Perhaps Simon never flew at all.

History cannot presently tell us.

But the story has survived because it is too perfect.

The man who wished to ascend is brought down.

Eventually, the man who claimed to possess divine power becomes dependent upon physicians.

The magician becomes helpless.

The heresiarch becomes a patient.

The supposed god becomes a corpse.

And Peter remains standing.

That is Christianity's Simon.

My friend saw something else.

She saw a man who had attempted to reach the heavens and been remembered forever because his enemies needed him to fall.

I still think she was wrong.

But I no longer think her wrongness makes her insignificant.

That distinction has become important to me.

There are people whose errors deserve correction.

There are people whose errors deserve ridicule.

There are people whose errors deserve prosecution.

And there are people whose errors deserve to be understood.

The last category is the most dangerous because understanding another person's error sometimes reveals how near it is to one's own.

I have wondered, more than once, whether she changed my theology.

The answer is no.

Not in the obvious sense.

I remain an Anglican.

I remain persuaded by the Creeds.

I remain suspicious of fashionable revisions of ancient Christian language.

I remain fond of the King James Bible and the 1611 Prayer Book tradition.

I still believe that Christ is not merely one manifestation among many of an anonymous divine Power.

I do not believe Simon Magus was the manifestation of God.

I do not believe Ennoia is a forgotten Person of the Trinity.

I do not believe the material world is a prison from which the Christian must escape through secret knowledge.

I believe creation is God's creation.

I believe matter matters.

I believe resurrection is not escape from creation but its redemption.

I believe that the Word became flesh.

And yet she changed my theology in another sense.

She taught me to distinguish between defending one's faith and defending oneself.

They are not the same.

I had sometimes thought that when someone attacked Christianity, I had to answer immediately.

She taught me that I could listen.

She taught me that an objection could be allowed to remain an objection overnight.

She taught me that I could say:

"I don't know."

This is an astonishingly liberating phrase.

I recommend it to theologians.

I recommend it particularly to young theologians.

I recommend it to old theologians even more strongly.

There are questions to which the honest Christian answer is not a sentence but a prayer.

Perhaps this is why Peter's final words to Simon have remained with me.

Peter tells him to repent.

Simon asks the apostles to pray for him.

The Bible does not tell us whether Simon truly repented.

It does not tell us whether he was forgiven.

It does not tell us whether he became reconciled to Christianity.

It does not give us the ending later Christians invented for him.

There is only the request:

Pray for me.

I have come to think that this is one of the most haunting lines in the whole Simonian story.

The magician, the controversialist, the man who claimed great things, the supposed possessor of supernatural power, finally asks another human being to pray.

Whatever Simon ultimately believed, there is something profoundly human in that.

And perhaps that is why I cannot entirely despise him.

Not because I accept his doctrine.

Because I recognise the request.

We all reach moments when our arguments become insufficient.

We all discover that intellect cannot carry us through every door.

We all, eventually, need someone to pray for us.

Even Simon Magus.

Even Timothy Monday.

Especially Timothy Monday.

I have sometimes wondered whether she ever prayed for me.

She probably did not.

She would have considered prayer a rather different operation from the one I intended.

But I like to imagine that somewhere, once, she did.

Perhaps in some unfamiliar room.

Perhaps beside a window.

Perhaps with one of her books open.

Perhaps she looked at the page and remembered an irritating Anglican with a grey beard who had spent too many afternoons arguing about Greek.

Perhaps she smiled.

Perhaps she said nothing.

Perhaps she simply thought of me.

I shall never know.

And there are things one must learn to leave unknown.

The world is full of people who wish to close every question.

The theologian wants the doctrine.

The historian wants the date.

The philologist wants the etymology.

The archaeologist wants the object.

The lover wants the answer.

But some things remain.

A manuscript missing its final leaf.

A prayer whose response is never recorded.

A letter without its reply.

A woman whose name one chooses not to write.

A love which was real but never became a marriage.

A heretic whose repentance the Bible does not record.

A magician who may or may not have flown.

A God who, inconveniently, remains beyond our filing systems.

I have spent much of my life believing that confusion was an intellectual defect.

I now think that some confusion is simply the shadow cast by things too large to fit comfortably into the mind.

My motto, as some readers will know, is PROUD TO BE CONFUSED.

People occasionally assume that this means I do not care about truth.

It means the opposite.

One must care enormously about truth before one can admit that one has not yet found it.

Simon Magus thought he knew.

Peter thought he knew.

The Fathers thought they knew.

The Simonians thought they knew.

The Church thought it knew.

My friend thought she knew.

I thought I knew.

Perhaps some of us were right.

Perhaps some were wrong.

God knows.

That is not an evasion.

It is, at times, the most precise statement available.

I have not seen her for many years.

I know she is alive.

I know where she has been.

I know she continued her work.

I know she still believes what she believed.

I have no intention of revealing anything more.

People deserve the dignity of remaining partly mysterious.

Especially those whom one has loved.

Sometimes I take the old edition of Irenaeus from the shelf.

I open it.

The binding is worn now.

The pages have acquired the yellowish colour which librarians politely call patina and booksellers call character.

Her handwriting is still there.

I can see the slight impatience of the pen.

I can almost hear her voice.

According to Peter's party.

I smile.

Then I turn the page.

I read about Simon.

I read about Ennoia.

I read about the great Power.

I read about the fall.

And, inevitably, I think of her.

Not as a heretic.

Not as a Simonian.

Not as an opponent.

Not even, principally, as the woman I loved.

I think of her as the person who once sat opposite me in Oxford and made me realise that the most dangerous question in theology is not:

"What if I am wrong?"

It is:

"What if the person I love is wrong?"

For the first question concerns one's intellect.

The second concerns one's heart.

And the heart, unlike the intellect, has no footnotes.

That is why I shall not tell you her name.

That is why I shall not tell you where she lives.

That is why I shall not tell you whether I still write to her.

And that is why, when I speak of Simon Magus, I sometimes find myself thinking less about the man who supposedly flew above Rome than about the woman who once asked me whether I would still love her if I believed her wrong.

I told her yes.

I hope she believed me.

I believe I meant it.

And if there is any lesson I have retained from all those years of arguing about Simon, Peter, Paul, Christ, Ennoia, magic, revelation, heresy and truth, it is perhaps this:

One need not agree with a person in order to love her.

Indeed, sometimes love begins precisely where agreement ends.

The trick is not to turn that love into a doctrine.

I suspect Simon would have understood the temptation.

Peter certainly would have.

And as for me—

I remain, as ever,

PROUD TO BE CONFUSED.