The new paradigm of 'Depth Theology' - by Adam Carlton

Claude (left) talking with me yesterday

---

I hadn’t seen Claude in months - and hadn’t much thought about him either to be honest. The Parisian summer, though drawing to a close, still hangs oppressively in the air. The city remains hollowed out: the smart set have yet to return from their retreats in more temperate latitudes while the tourists have already sloped back to their suburban fastnesses. Only the locals, with nowhere else to go, remain: still glistening and always irritable.

Claude, needless to say, has never been fashionable.

Party work and the usual bureaucratic tangle had kept me in town. So it was with mild surprise that I saw him yesterday, drifting along the Rue Mouffetard in the midday blaze. I steered him quickly into a shaded café, away from the sun and the street.

Claude, as I’ve mentioned in earlier pieces here, is a lapsed Communist and a hesitant Catholic, though at times I suspect he’s not entirely sure which is which. He’s long been a man bewitched by doctrines, and by their betrayals.

But something was off. He looked agitated, twitchy, his gaze flickering like someone convinced he was being watched. I knew the feeling.

“I’ve found something,” he said.

I suspect my face betrayed the weariness of habitual low expectations.

“No, really,” he pressed. “I was in a secondhand bookshop this morning - been working through the early Church Fathers - and I picked up this slim volume on Origen of Alexandria. And inside it, shoved between the pages, was this manuscript. Typed. Old. Not a bookmark. Far too big.”

He reached into his jacket and drew out a yellowed sheaf, stapled at the corner. It looked fragile, as if it might disintegrate if handled too briskly.

“What is it?” I asked. “A treasure map? The final heresy that will at last dislodge your tenuous grip on belief?”

He didn’t answer, just handed it to me across the table.

“Read it,” he said. “I think I might just agree with it.”

And that would worry him? I took the document and began to read.