WHEN I first heard that Ian Paisley had been rushed to hospital, I had a very odd instantaneous reaction.
For some reason, I thought of Patrick Kavanagh's beautiful tribute poem to Jim Larkin, On the Death of Jim Larkin: an elegy written in March 1947.
This isn't as well known as it should be, and it ends with the image of Larkin, 'the mob orator,/Whose flashing fiery sword merely was witness to/The sun rising' standing on a Dublin balcony. Wings suddenly fly over his bawling head, 'And they eat the loaf that nourishes great kings.'
I suppose I must have made a mental note years ago about how this imagery would have worked well in the Free Presbyterian Church. This rhetorical intersection between a Dublin poet and the blackguard faction of Ulster evangelicalism also makes sense at a broader level.
Paisley is a very Irish figure in many ways, one with the most intimate links to our rural Catholic hinterland.
His zany political trajectory over the years took him from public opposition to internment at one point via a qualified endorsement of the possibility of a united Ireland through an Enoch Powell Ulster-is-as-British-as-Finchley phase, before ending his career as First Minister of a political entity that was co-guaranteed by the Irish Taoiseach.
I know only one phrase that captures a mind like this, and that is William Carleton's idea of 'woeful ingenuity', his way of rendering the deviousness of the early Victorian Irish-speaking Catholic peasantry with whom he spent his formative youth.
In his Traits and Stories, Carleton referred to the Irish-speaking poor as 'smugglers in morality'. That'll work well for Paisley because behind the manic rhetoric and the midnight press scuffles and the fake Catholic masses he liked to stage, we find a curious void in his politics. Having spent so much of his life firing arrow after arrow into institutions built by others, he was never quite minded to spell out a positive programme.
He threw snowballs at Taoisigh Sean Lemass and Jack Lynch, something that might have landed him in Martin Corry's special IRA 'vault' in Knockraha near Cork city had he tried that on Lemass in his leonine prime.
And he answered Garret FitzGerald's naive invitation to parley in Garret's Towards a New Ireland (1972) by boycotting the New Ireland Forum.
He showed even more contempt for Northern leaders like Terence O'Neill and Brian Faulkner, and for British prime ministers Heath, Wilson and Thatcher.
Knowing he was facing the most domestically powerful British prime minister since Attlee in Blair after 1997, he hedged his bets with him and his fixer Jonathan Powell, but the edge remained.
How do we make sense of his career, so?
Behind the obvious points to be made about his kinship with Carson and the great UVF mutiny against Asquith and Redmond in 1912, I think the key to Paisley's psychology was St Paul, the killer turned convert. Remember that when he was jailed for the first time in the Sixties, he wrote a big book on Paul.
Paul of Tarsus wrote two major essays in the Christian tradition, one was the Epistle to the Romans and the other the Letter to the Corinthians. Epistle to the Romans is a statement of defiance against almost overwhelming spiritual odds, a statement that climaxes with the question, 'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?' And Letter to the Corinthians closes the circle of defiance by proclaiming the existence of a kind of spiritual aristocracy, one based on unbreakable sectarian solidarity, come what may.
The authentic voice of Paisley's brand of defiance, that sounded, for example, when he turned out to greet Taoiseach Charles Haughey during his trip as EC President to Belfast in 1990, can be savoured in Romans.
Paul paid tribute there to the idea of tribal strength, and assured believers that from 'one spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jew or Gentile, bond or free, and have all been made to drink into one spirit'.
This kind of inner cosmos was, of course, the secret of his success. Anyone who thinks like this is proof against parody because they do not operate according to the normal rules of the political game.
In his contempt for blander styles of politics, Paisley always resembled the more hard-nosed faction within Irish nationalism. He would have known precisely the feeling the UCC scholar Daniel Corkery was trying to give expression to when he once described a world without nationalist myths as little more than a 'death in life'.
These kinds of people possess what Milton once called internal sight, a strange gift that robs them of self-awareness while simultaneously augmenting their destructive capacities.
Paisley wrecked Sunningdale and David Trimble's more pluralist concept of unionism.
He saw off Haughey's vague notions of a federal united Ireland with a permanent unionist provincial veto, though he was briefly tempted at one point in the Seventies by the prospect of a deal that would annihilate his great Satan, Bunreacht na h-Eireann.
In November 1971, he said the cancer in Irish lives "is not the 1920 Act and not the partition of the country but the cancer is the 1937 Constitution and the domination of the Catholic Church through it. I would like to see the whole thing thrown out".
Paul's pilgrim never quite claimed that scalp, but we may finish that job ourselves in the near future.