BY TORSTEN SCHWANKE
FIRST PART
I
The modern critic, clothed in science's pride,
Views early man with distance as his guide;
He paints a savage, missing all the grace,
A brutal link within a bestial race.
But let us walk into the hollow stone,
Where ancient hunters dwelt and ruled alone.
Upon the wall, where darkest shadows press,
We find no mark of blind, brute helplessness;
For there the mammoth walks in charcoal line,
And leaping stags in vivid colors shine.
The creature who once drew upon the wall
Was not an ape, but master of them all.
The bird may build a neat and perfect nest,
The bee may work with never-ending zest,
Yet never did a bee or bird essay
To paint the landscape at the break of day.
No horse has ever drawn a horse in flight,
No dog has sketched his master in the night.
A chasm deep divides the beast from man,
As wide today as when the stars began.
Man is a revolution, strange and new,
Who brings the silent rock to spark and view;
He stands within the cave, no beast of prey,
But God's own image at the dawn of day.
II
The learned don, from academic height,
Constructs a phantom in the modern light;
With cautious words and prehistoric lore,
He creates a monster that he can adore.
He takes a broken jaw, a shattered bone,
And builds a creature from the dust alone,
Then writes a thesis on the phantom’s life,
And how he beat his prehistoric wife.
They paint the savage with a heavy club,
Dragged from the thicket or the thorny shrub,
And claim that love was born of brutal force,
A savage custom from a savage source.
Yet all this heavy, scientific state
Is but a guess to fit a modern debate;
They find a stick, and straightway they surmise
A thousand laws before the sun could rise.
They turn the past into a mirror clear,
To reflect the doubts and dogmas they hold dear.
But silent lies the ancient, buried clay;
It tells no tales of how they used to pray,
Nor does it prove that man was once a beast
Who viewed his brother as a bloody feast.
The professor dreams of wars that never were,
And wraps the past in academic fur;
But simple truth remains beneath the span:
The oldest records show a modern man.
III
The critics claim that simple, savage ways
Endured through long and unrecorded days,
That man was slow to build, to sow, to reap,
And spent whole ages in a tribal sleep.
They draw a line from cave to shining dome,
From nomad tent to monuments of Rome,
And call it progress, linear and grand,
Spreading its light across the waking land.
But history does not run in polished tracks;
It leaves its shards, its ruins, and its axe.
Turn back the dirt, and sudden giants rise—
Great Babylon beneath the desert skies,
And Egypt standing fully formed and old,
With complex laws and towers built of gold.
No slow ascent from darkness to the day,
But empires springing from the silent clay;
They possessed arts we cannot now restore,
And sailed their ships to many a distant shore.
The savage is not man in infancy,
But man decayed, from ancient order free;
A ruin, not a seed that failed to grow,
Washed by the tides of time that ebb and flow.
High culture is as old as human breath,
Defying time, and ignorance, and death.
IV
The student of religion loves to scan
The varied creeds that mystify old man,
And treats the highest faith as just a growth
From tribal fear or polytheistic sloth.
He groups the gods in one chaotic mass,
And analyzes faith through tinted glass.
Yet in the deepest heart of ancient space,
Before the local idols took their place,
There lived a memory, sublime and high,
Of one great God who ruled the silent sky.
The savage knew, before his mind grew dim,
The True God stood apart, remote from him;
Too vast for temples and too great for speech,
A distant power that he could not reach.
Then lesser spirits filled the woods and streams,
And took the shape of half-forgotten dreams;
The sky grew crowded with a phantom throng
Of gods of war, of harvest, and of song.
But polytheism is a tangled weed,
A shifting myth and not a lasting creed;
Beneath the many masks that men designed,
The ghost of Monotheism stayed behind—
A true foundation that they could not shake,
A sleeping truth they could not quite awake.
V
The student dreams of myths as heavy things,
Of ancient faiths where cruel terror clings;
He blends the poet with the painted priest,
And views the ritual as a bloody feast.
But look with open eyes at ancient lands,
Where classic Greece in sunlit beauty stands:
The myth was not a dark, dogmatic law,
But closer to a dream the poet saw.
The shepherd heard a music in the breeze,
And imagined dryads dancing in the trees;
The sailor saw the foam break clean and white,
And shaped a goddess from the sea and light.
These tales were lovely, delicate, and fleeting,
Like music at a joyous summer meeting;
They were the literature of early days,
A search for beauty in a thousand ways.
Yet built on fancy, changing like the wind,
They could not heal the soul or save the mind;
They were but plays enacted on a stage,
To ease the sorrows of a weary age.
For no man went to Pan to clear his sin,
Or sought a myth to find the truth within;
The myths were beautiful, but thin as air—
A brilliant dream, but not an answered prayer.
VI
As myths grew faint, two separate paths appeared
To face the hidden things that mankind feared.
The first was Thought, where cold, inquiring minds
Sought for the laws that rule the shifting winds;
The sage, beneath the quiet eastern skies,
Looked inward with detached and peaceful eyes.
From Buddha’s stillness to the Stoic’s pride,
They sought a peace the pantheons denied,
Yet found a void, abstract and icy cold,
That could not warm the weary or the old.
But down the darker road, the second path,
Awoke the spirits of despair and wrath.
For when the soul is empty, dry, and bare,
The ancient demons enter unaware.
Not simple gods of harvest or of sun,
But darker things, whose rites in secret run;
Where men, by cruel sorcery possessed,
Would put their human mercy to the test.
In Tyre and Carthage did this shadow fall,
Where Moloch cried for blood behind the wall,
And parents gave their children to the flame
To buy success, or save a city's name.
Thus stood the world: the sage's lonely mind,
And demon gods that tortured humankind;
The cold philosophy that could not save,
And dark perversions hastening to the grave.
VII
Two mighty powers met to test their might,
And lock the world in long, titanic fight:
Great Rome, the home of columns and of law,
And Carthage, whom the cruel Moloch saw.
It was no simple war of state and line,
But of the human soul and the divine.
For Carthage was a dark and wealthy land,
Where commerce ruled with cold, iron hand,
And in the shadows of her golden towers,
The hungry demons held their ancient powers.
There children fell in Moloch’s burning grate,
To buy the merchants safety in the state;
A highly civilized and polished place,
Yet rotten at the core, without a grace.
Against this horror stood the Roman plow,
With simple honor on the soldier's brow;
They fought for hearth, for rooftop, and for vine,
Unknowing that they served a high design.
Had Carthage won, the world had drowned in night,
And cruel gods had choked the rising light.
But Carthage fell, her stones to ruin hurled,
And Roman order cleansed the weary world;
The crossroads of the earth were swept and bare,
To wait for something that was promised there.
VIII
The world was still, the Roman peace was wide,
From burning sands to Tiber's rushing tide;
The sages pondered in their lonely halls,
And sentries watched the long, imperial walls.
Then, far away, within a dusty land,
A story rose no earthly mind had planned;
It did not break from emperors or kings,
But in a cave, among the humblest things.
The hands that shaped the stars were small and weak,
And lay in straw, too innocent to speak,
While beasts looked on, and simple shepherds prayed,
Before the mystery that God had made.
Here met the two great paths that men had trod:
The mythic dream, now verified by God,
And cold philosophy, which found at last
The living truth that anchored all the past.
The kings of wisdom traveled from afar,
Following the motion of a single star;
They brought their learning to the stable floor,
And bowed their crowns before the cavern door.
The ancient chasm was bridged, the curse undone,
For God Himself had walked into the sun;
No longer hidden in the starry height,
He entered time to turn the world to light.
SECOND PART
I
The world stood still beneath the Roman peace,
And watched the ancient wars and factions cease;
Yet through the quiet streets and crowded marts,
A strange suspension gripped all human hearts.
It was an hour of endings and of old,
When all the songs were sung, the stories told;
The pagan world had reached its highest peak,
Yet stood bewildered, hollowed-out, and weak.
They looked for something new to break the seal,
Some god to turn the slow, exhausted wheel.
The poets sang of some mysterious birth,
A child to bring the golden age to earth;
The East was stirring with a restless sigh,
And Western eagles scanned the empty sky.
Yet when the answer broke upon the land,
It was a thing no pagan mind had planned.
They looked for myths to wear a crown of gold,
Or cold philosophers, detached and old;
They never dreamed the great, revolving sky
Would bring a Man to live, to change, to die—
Not as a ghost or symbol in a cloud,
But walking real among the dusty crowd.
The old world waited for a cosmic sign,
Unknowing they had crossed the border line.
II
Whoever reads the Gospel with an eye
Unblanched by custom or by theory high,
Will find no meek philosopher of peace,
Who merely bids the troubled spirit cease.
He is a riddle, striking like a sword,
Whose lightest phrase confounds the scribal lord;
Too strange for modern critics to confine,
He shatters every neat and human line.
They call Him gentle, yet He speaks of fire,
And casts His lightning at the proud desire;
He talks to outcasts with a tender grace,
Then turns a terrifying, hidden face
Upon the crowded courts of law and pride,
Where cold hypocrisies and virtues hide.
He speaks of keys that lock the heavy sky,
And flags that wave where eagle spirits fly.
No simple teacher spinning moral threads,
He walks above our dogmas and our heads;
His words are paradox, His actions deep,
Awaking nations from their ancient sleep.
He leaves the self-styled wise in dark dismay,
And turns the human calculus away.
The text remains a wild and startling spring,
The biography of an alarming King.
III
We hear it said by those who judge from far,
That Christ was like some pure and distant star—
A gentle visionary, sweet and mild,
Who walked the earth as simple as a child.
But read the text, and see the giant stride
Of One who cast all human soft aside.
He was no stoic, locked in icy peace,
Who bade all human tears and passions cease;
He wept for friendship, sorrowed for the city,
Yet struck the proud without a drop of pity.
There runs a strange, supernatural thread
Through every word the Galilean said;
An awful gravity, a sudden height,
That fills the landscape with a blinding light.
He speaks of judgment with a quiet breath,
As one who rules the gates of life and death,
And claims a lonely majesty of place
Before the very dawn of time and space.
Yet mixed with grandeur is a human touch,
That loves the poor and broken-hearted much;
He sits with sinners, shares the simple bread,
Then heals the sick and raises up the dead.
He stands alone, a character sublime,
Too sharp and vivid for the rust of time;
A multi-faceted and burning stone,
The strangest man the world has ever known.
IV
The critics try to tear the Creed apart,
And slice away the Church’s living heart;
They claim the early faith was split and torn,
Before the orthodox decrees were born.
They point to sects that rose in ancient days,
Departing from the traditional, narrow ways—
The Arian who denied the youth divine,
The Gnostic building many a phantom line.
Yet look closer at these ancient battles won,
And see what these wild heresies have done:
Each took a single fragment of the light,
And turned it to a fierce and blinding night.
One made Him nothing but a ghost in air,
Too high to feel our sorrow or despair;
Another made Him just a mortal sage,
A better teacher for a peaceful age.
But by their very fury they confess
A truth too vast for human wilderness;
They fought like tigers over word and name,
Because they felt the terror of the flame.
They could not leave the central myth alone,
But broke their teeth upon the corner-stone.
The heretics themselves bear witness clear:
A strange, world-shaking power had landed here,
A multi-sided truth, so fierce and grand,
No single human brain could understand.
V
The pagan world was dying from within,
Entangled in its own exhausting sin;
It was not punished by a sudden flash,
But slowly turned to gray and hollow ash.
The old mythologies had lost their power,
And philosophy had reached its final hour;
A weary sadness sat upon the earth,
That mocked all human labor and all mirth.
Man had grown tired of every sunlit lawn,
And looked with heavy eyes upon the dawn;
The virtues of the Roman and the Greek
Had left the soul unsatisfied and weak.
Then through this twilight came the Christian cry,
Like morning breaking in a midnight sky;
It did not offer just a better school,
Or some reformed and planetary rule,
But brought the news of an immense release,
A clean, white washing and a sudden peace.
It pulled the modern world from out the grave,
And broke the spells that made the spirit slave;
The gods of nature fled the holy light,
And all the ancient demons took their flight.
Man stood erect, delivered from his chain,
To look upon the shining grass again;
The world was young once more, its sins forgiven,
Beneath the open, unpolluted heaven.
VI
The critics cry that holy Faith must die,
And vanish like a cloud across the sky;
Five times within the rolling wheel of time,
The world has tolled the Church’s final chime.
It seemed the Creed was withered to the root,
A dying tree that bore no further fruit.
First came the Arian wave with princely might,
To choke the truth and turn the day to night;
But when the world was sleeping in the shade,
The Church awoke, unvanquished, unafraid.
Then came the dark and wild Islamic sword,
To sweep the ancient lands of Christ the Lord;
Yet from the dust, the armored knights arose,
And struck the heavy gates of western foes.
Then came the renaissance of pagan pride,
When skepticism rose on every side;
And then the cold, enlightened, modern age,
That swore to rip the Creed from history's page.
Each time the foxes dug the Savior's grave,
And laughed above the Church they could not save;
Each time they rolled the heavy stone away,
Expecting nothing but a corpse’s clay.
But heavenly things possess a secret breath,
That passes through the very gates of death;
The Church goes down to ruin and decay,
Only to rise and meet a brighter day.
The mockers die, their bones to powder turn,
While on the hill, the ancient altars burn.
VII
Thus ends the double tale of earth and sky,
Of man the creature, and of God on high.
The first part showed that man stands quite alone,
No beast of prey upon a savage throne,
But a strange revolution, wild and bright,
Who brought to silent stone the spark of light.
The second part revealed a stranger sight:
A Man who walked in overwhelming light,
No mere philosopher or moral sage,
But God Himself arriving on the stage.
The world is like a lock of patterns deep,
Where ancient spirits wander, doubt, and weep;
A thousand false keys try to turn the grate,
To open up the heavy doors of fate.
But only one strange key of jagged art
Can fit the intricate and human heart;
It matches every curve of joy and sin,
And turns the bolt to let the morning in.
Let science mock or skeptics drift away,
The Everlasting Man is here to stay;
The story stands, defying dust and grave,
The truth that entered through the stable cave.