Apostles & Authoritarians

MY STUDIES OF the past put “apostolic” people, images, and themes before me.

My “St. Jerome reading,” after (and with apologies to) Rembrandt van Rijn, St. Jerome reading in the wilderness. 1634. See below.

While the cultural present that surrounds me encourages the notion of an “apostle” either to fade (from its older, Judeao-Christian understandings and associations),

or to become highly elastic.

Historical interpreter of early modern times meets twenty-first-century person. Again.

Popular imaginative constructions of “apostle,” like broader usages of “apostolic,” have changed. They suggest but aren’t bound by ideas of arriving prophecy,

of a messenger bearing, embodying, the one true word.¹

Whether suffused with a supernaturalism simmering in a distant past, or re-purposed in more recent times as a crisp harbinger of this or that, of progress or doom,

the would-be apostle’s convictions and consequences have grown safe, then safer, for speculation (in the public as well as the academic realms).

Not so with “authoritarians.”

While such figures, have existed at least as long —and in as many forms— as apostles, the people who might be referred to as “authoritarian,” today, feel terrifyingly near.

While in popular parlance, the authoritarian might even be a work-place bully,

there are far more dangerous and influential offenders afoot.

One loses count of the “dictators,” even within our lifetimes. Of the different kinds of havoc they have wreaked. And of the present perpetrators’ murders in the here and now.

When one “authoritarian" after another is assuming centre stage, any curiosity about such persons, any messing with their menace is, as it should be, a delicate business.

ARE THEY AT opposite ends of the associational spectrum, the herald and the tyrant? Is one endowed with conviction, while the other revels in cynicism?

Or are they more proximal, more inclined to fuse? And if so, just who makes or pretends them to be thus?

Apostles and dictators seem to rise by a range of paths and means. One draws on a rare, charismatic wherewithal,

another a breathtakingly smarmy mundanity

Apostles and dictators compel, and wield stories. Stories about them. Told during and long after their moments in the sun.

These are stories about their origins. Stories about predecessors who, like so many obstacles, exist to be learned from, uprooted, or otherwise surmounted. Tellings that star their narrated “I”s, on paths to vision and dominion, and, not infrequently, rebirth.

It isn't a pleasant question to entertain: but who can take their eye off these creatures? These various extirpator-transformers, these devastator-creators, these human reinvention-machines? They repel and attract.

ONE KEY TO why one keeps looking might be anticipatory. Their hubris is human, only in the extreme, and so it is captivating.

How frequently and variously the apostle or the authoritarian sparks a conflagration, touching off far more than they bargained for.

We grow capable of studying these figures because of an expectation, an ingrained hope, that they are deluded and bound to over-reach.

Many do not fall as —or as quickly, as— we wish. But their journeys often turn out to be slow-motion invitations, engineerings, of their own demise. (Even when, especially when, they and the pens [of hagiographers, of apologists] that succeed them scramble to describe things differently.)

Another key to why apostles and dictators fascinate may be found in how the two merge, whether consciously or otherwise.

Some apostles seek an early retreat: a prayerful, studious, but still masterly solitude. In fleeing the clamour of the world, the holy person might be said to depart from the very arena in which the rest of humanity struggles on. One or another lion, a sentinel who knows the score as well as the threat, stands guard.

Rembrandt van Rijn, St Jerome reading in the wilderness. 1634. Etching on laid paper. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England, UK.

Still others break away dogmatically, even despotically.

But it is the authoritarians’ special talent —to look past the suffering, and the horrific prices others have paid, and— to take matters the other way. To cast themselves as apostles.

As the bearers of restored dignity, identity, and empire. As the bringers of vengeful justice. As the messengers of one thing or another, including dependence on fossil fuels.

These creatures.

If we are lucky, they end up defined not by majesty but by frailty. By boastful insecurity, by the isolating grandiloquence García Márquez found in Bolívar, and Conrad in Kurtz.

By being that figure who has himself filmed, in command, at the end of a long lonesome table.

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*watercolours, drawings in black ink and in charcoal by Kenneth Mills

**my thanks to Aldous Mills and Joey Udrea for hosting me in Leiden, The Netherlands, in 2019 (with whom I experienced “Jonge Rembrandt" in the Museum De Lakenhal), and to Heidi Victoria Scott for counsel.

1. I'm less persuaded than Raymond Williams was about a securely “post-Christian" mindset in the present (see, for instance, his treatment of “Myth" in the following title). But, on the particular and relational development of certain words and their meanings (and those of their interconnecting “clusters” of terms and references), Williams’s Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society ([1976] 1983) remains hard to beat; myth: 110-112.