How many things there are which we think we know, but do not. What, for instance, are the “Grapes of Wrath” mentioned in Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and also used as the title of John Steinbeck’s mighty novel? I know bits and pieces of scripture and idly supposed it must be in the Bible somewhere. I just did not know where. It never occurred to me to find out until a few weeks ago when I stood, with my mouth open in surprise and wonder, in the majestic Cathedral of Troyes in France, which lies between the wine-growing regions of Champagne and Burgundy. I was gazing at a seventeenth century window, on the north side of that superb church, at something entirely new to me.
I love old stained glass. I have written elsewhere of the overpowering force of the windows at Chartres, one of the loveliest works of art and devotion on the planet. But there is so much more such beauty, scattered over England and France. I have seen a substantial part of the Bible depicted in glowing old windows: crucifixions, resurrections, depositions, the Supper at Emmaus, Trees of Jesse, Last Judgements (some still terrifying, especially the diabolical monsters at Fairford in Gloucestershire), miracles, Nativities, Flights into Egypt, Epiphanies, Lives of Christ, all manner of martyrdoms, parables (particularly the Prodigal Son and the Foolish Virgins). I have seen Jonah swallowed by the whale in University College, Oxford, and the shocking anti-Semitic windows in Brussels Cathedral. I have seen the monkeys which mysteriously appear among the saints and legends at York Minster and the tiny, furious wren attacking a tinier spider, in a window of a miniature side chapel of that great cathedral. On the many expeditions I have made to such places I realize just how fortunate I am to have been educated in this most astonishing profusion of moving, disturbing, inspiring stories.
But I had never before seen Christ crushed in a wine press, the blood streaming from his side into a chalice. His hands are upturned in acceptance of his suffering, and his face in a state of what I can only call noble repose. It is extraordinarily powerful, especially if, like me, you were not expecting it. It is, we know, comparatively recent, that is to say a mere four hundred years old. It is the work of a master glazier called Linard Gontier and dates from 1625. It refers to an idea known as “le pressoir mystique” (“the mystic winepress”) once common in Christian thought, but largely unknown in England, a country where (until recently) grapes were small and tart, and wine was seldom made from them. (We Englishmen drank beer instead, but there is no beer in the Bible, as far as I have ever been able to discover.) The cathedral’s own guide to its glass states that the window refers to a passage from Isaiah 63, rendered in Latin as Torcular calcavi solus (“I have trodden the winepress alone”).
In context it runs:
Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat?
I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.
For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come.
And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me; and my fury, it upheld me.
And I will tread down the people in mine anger, and make them drunk in my fury, and I will bring down their strength to the earth.
There is, I know, another possible origin of the idea of Grapes of Wrath, in Revelation 14, culminating in these words: “And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.”
And, for all I know, you may have it either way, though I have always found Isaiah a more potent and disturbing text than the Apocalypse. Neither possible origin is especially reassuring. Both are full of anger. What interests me is what it means. For it comes out of a far more fearful and severe scripture than the one I usually hear in church in these times. It is not surprising that political idealists have since seized upon it. Miss Ward Howe and John Steinbeck both had strong political allegiances, founded on justified outrage at the mistreatment of the weak by the strong. The Civil War and what followed were viewed by many as divine vengeance for slavery. Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address was plainly written by a man who read the King James Bible keenly even if he was not a believer, perhaps because he was not a believer. His withering remark that “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces” could surely not have been written or spoken by anyone unfamiliar with the grimmer prophets, and the same goes for “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
These days we discreetly recoil from Julia Ward Howe’s original 1862 words “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” When I have sung this hymn, usually at commemorations of death and suffering in war, the line has been quietly amended to “As he died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.” And this of course defangs the whole rather bloodthirsty poem, with its terrible swift sword, its righteous sentence, its burnished rows of steel, its crushed serpent, and its sifted hearts of men. During my post-1945 upbringing, all that sort of thing was now to be toned down. The Old Testament was placed reverently on a shelf and left largely unread. The world was peaceful, the great warriors had hung their swords and battle axes on the wall and their tattered, stained war banners were laid up in the quiet, dusky side-aisles and chapels of somnolent churches.
We might read Chesterton’s “Lepanto,” where this process was reversed and “Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, / The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,” but we knew it was a fairytale. And so, for many years, it was. European man, sick of blood and wrath, became a creature of committees and negotiations in a boring suit, and some of us secretly yearned for a more exciting world, with swifter swords and bloodier justice in the world. We were like the silly frogs in the fable. They reject tedious King Log, who does nothing at all, and are instead sent exciting King Stork, who busily devours them.
Hence my continuing memory of a night in January 1991 when I, having experienced almost forty years of dull old peace, found myself in the city of Vilnius in Lithuania. I can be a bit like the Ancient Mariner on this subject, as in
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
I know how the Mariner felt. I still cannot believe that these events are so little known. The bloodshed in Vilnius on the eleventh through thirteenth of January 1991 was, as it now seems to me, the true end of the long, unfair Peace of Yalta and of the mild world it had created for people like me. I’d seen some minor violence during the fall of Communism, but here I witnessed or heard powerful explosions, enormous fiery glows on the horizon, racing tanks swinging their guns towards the car in which I was following them, and actual bullets whizzing close by while I wisely lay on my back in the mucky snow. And, after all that, in the end, I saw hideous corpses in a badly-lit morgue, with holes where their faces ought to have been. Glory Hallelujah? Not exactly. The dying Soviet Union was tearing and slashing, with its still-vicious claws, at those who wanted to escape from it. Nobody really knew how this process might end (and it has not ended since). Yet most people in the world were that night distracted by events in Kuwait and Iraq, as the first Gulf War got seriously under way.
To try to get my account of this bloodletting back to London, I had to go into the Vilnius Parliament building, defended by men holding hoses connected to tanks full of gasoline. There I could telephone my wife in Moscow, who would take down my perhaps slightly hysterical story and pass it on to my newspaper’s London office, using a primitive version of the internet. Given the fairly strong possibility that the K.G.B. could have attacked the building while I telephoned, so causing me and everyone in it to be burned to death, it has always annoyed me a bit that it got less attention than it should, and I sympathize strongly with all foreign correspondents in the same plight, which they often are.
These events actually made me less keen on bloodshed, however justified, than I had been during all the years of peace, though they also made me almost biblically furious with Russians, all Russians without exception, for many irrational months afterwards. But I remember one other thing about them. The Lithuanians were determined to fight the Soviets to the death, having failed to do so fifty years before. So they had robbed every construction site in the city to build rough fortifications, of concrete blocks and anything else they could find, around the major public buildings of Vilnius. In the freezing January night, they camped in these makeshift castles, not knowing what might come out of the dark to assail them. It was Kevin Connolly, a fine journalist then reporting for the B.B.C., who looked out on the desolate scene of tiny fires amid crude barricades, and huddled civilians clutching what weapons they could find, and quoted the words “I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.” I think all of us there knew what he was talking about.
