Lupelius - The School for Gods

“Even orders centuries old can forget” and the eyes of the old man became moist at thethought of the warrior spirit who had inspired him to become a monk – and forgetfulnessweakens the warrior in every man –Once we Dominicans were vegetarians, we ate just once aday; we cultivated the body and the spirit as one entity…The message of Christ and ourMission was very clear to us: the victory of life over physical death.”Only unceasing work on himself allows a man to overcome death.I detected in his voice a nostalgia for the discipline of times past, for the memory of theburied brilliance of the School. I admired him and was happy. I did not think that men likeFather S. could still to be found in the bosom of the Christian faith, crusaders dedicated to theholiest of wars: the putting to death of death.“Schools and churches, religious orders and government institutions stopped trainingresponsible individuals years ago. Today they only produce polluted minds and bodies” saidFather S.He finished covering the page before him with crabbed handwriting. Then he folded itseveral times and handed it to me without saying a word. Symbolically this gesture seemedto me like the passing of the baton in a never‐ending relay across the centuries. He wasentrusting me with a piece of the race that mankind had been running for centuries, in searchof an escape route from its prison.When we parted at the door of his tiny study he gave me a smile and winked, infecting mewith that joyful and inviolable complicity that I had only ever found amongst the littlewarriors, the bright Neapolitan street urchins of my neighbourhood. I asked him to tell mewhich of Lupelius’ commandments best represented the sum of his research, the secretformula for defeating physical death.“It is forbidden to kill your inner self!” – said Father S. without hesitation –It is thethousand psychological deaths that undermine us every day that lead to physicaldeath…Believing death to be invincible is what kills us. The belief in its inevitability is thetrue killer.”9 The School for GodsI had climbed the steep slopes of the plateau as far as the peak of its imposing volcanoes.Through the clear, dry air, across the vast expanse, my eyes swept over the vegetation of thesteppes, a landscape without trees. Once I reached Everan, I left the statue of Mashtots behindme and crossed the square towards a bunker‐like structure of grey basalt which was at thetop of a bare hill. I was in the heart of Armenia. I had arrived here faithfully following FatherS.’s instructions and I was now heading towards a severe looking building which housed theancient library. Here, in thousands of books, was stored the memory of a people who hadlived for centuries on the verge of extinction. Here, where copyists and translators werevenerated like saints, from the second half of the fifth century until the present day,thousands of classical, Christian but also pagan works had been conserved or copied. Seminaltexts and masterpieces now considered lost forever had been saved by being faithfully18