THIS BOOK is a drama in which the leading character is the Infinite. Mankind takes second place.
That being so, since a convent lay upon our path we were obliged to enter it. Why? Because the convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.
This is not the place to pursue at unreasonable length certain lines of thought; nevertheless, while wholly reserving our own views, our reservations and even our resentments, we are bound to assert that whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming – the echo of God on the human wall!
In the eyes of history, reason, and truth, monasticism stands condemned. Monasteries, when they are numerous in a country, are clots in its circulatory system; they are encumbrances, centres of indolence where there should be centres of labour. Monastic communities are to the social community as a whole what mistletoe is to the oak or a verruca to the human body. Their prosperity and well-being are the country’s impoverishment. The monkish regime, which was of value in the early stages of civilization, useful in replacing brutality by spirituality, is harmful to the virility of a nation. Moreover, when the discipline relaxes and enters upon its stage of disorder, since it still sets an example it becomes harmful for all the reasons that in its pure stage made it salutary.
Close confinement has had its day. The cloisters, useful for the early education of modern civilization, have hindered its growth and delayed its development. Considered as an institution and a means of education, the monasteries, which were good in the tenth century and of questionable value in the fifteenth, are deplorable in the nineteenth. The leprosy of monasticism has over the centuries devoured two great nations almost to the bone, Italy and Spain, one the light of Europe and the other its splendour, and at the present time those illustrious peoples are only beginning to recover, thanks to the sane and vigorous purification of 1789.
The convent, and in particular the ancient women’s convent such as still existed at the beginning of the present century in Italy, Austria, and Spain, was one of the most sombre creations of the Middle Ages. Cloisters of that kind were the meeting-place of terrors. The Catholic convent, in the strict sense, was filled with the dark light of death.
The Spanish convent is especially funereal. Tower-like altars, high as cathedrals, rise up under gloomy vaults and domes scarcely visible in the shadowed light; huge white crucifixes hang on chains; ivory Christs stretch naked against ebony, bleeding rather than bloodstained, hideous and magnificent, elbows and knee-caps thrusting through the skin and flesh protruding from open wounds, figures crowned with thorns of silver and nailed with nails of gold, with drops of blood that are rubies on their foreheads and tears that are diamonds in their eyes. The diamonds and rubies seem to be liquid and cause weeping in the veiled forms in the darkness below, their bodies ravaged by sackcloth and the whip, their breasts crushed in wicker corsets, their knees bruised with prayer. They are women who believe themselves to be wives; ghosts who think themselves seraphim. Do they think, these women? Do they desire or love or live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone, and their bones to rock. Their veils are woven night, and the breath within them is like the breathing of death. The abbess, a spectral figure, both sanctifies and terrifies them. Immaculacy resides there, purity gone mad. Such are the old Spanish convents, haunts of a terrifying devotion, refuges of virgins, places without pity.
Catholic Spain was more Roman than Rome herself, and the Spanish convent was the Catholic convent par excellence. The archbishop, the chief eunuch of Heaven, imprisoned and spied upon that seraglio of souls set apart for God. The nun was the odalisque, the priest the eunuch. The rapt adōrers were selected in dreams and possessed by Christ, the beautiful youth who came down from the cross at night and filled the cell with ecstasy. High walls protected from all distractions the mystical Sultana whose Sultan had been crucified. Even a glance beyond the walls was an act of infidelity. The in pace replaced the leather sack. What in the East was flung into the sea, in the West was buried in the earth. The women on both sides wrung their hands, these destined for the waves, those for the grave; one lot was drowned, the other buried – a monstrous parallelism.
Worshippers of the past in the present day, being unable to deny these things, elect to smile at them. A strange and comfortable fashion has sprung up of obliterating the revelations of history, disparaging the commentaries of philosophy and evading all awkward facts and disturbing questions. ‘Mere propaganda,’ the wise men say, and the fools repeat it after them. Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, all were propagandists. I do not know who it was who recently discovered that Tacitus was a propagandist and Nero his victim, greatly to be pitied.
But facts are not so easily disposed of. The author of these lines has with his own eyes seen a relic of the Middle Ages some eight leagues from Brussels, easily visited by anyone: this is the entrance to the oubliettes of the Abbaye de Villers in the middle of a lawn which was the courtyard of the Abbey, and, at the edge of the river Dyle, four stone cells half in and half out of the water. They were in pace cells, each with the remains of an iron door, a latrine and a barred window, two feet above the level of the river on the outside and six feet above ground level inside. The river beyond the wall is four feet deep. The earth is always wet, and this wet earth was the in pace victim’s bed. In one of these dungeons there is part of an iron collar fixed to the wall; in another there is a sort of square box composed of four slabs of granite, too short for anyone to lie down in it and too low for him to stand upright. The victim was put in it with a slab of stone on top. This thing exists. It can be seen and touched. But all this, the iron door, the barred window, the collar, the stone box, the flowing river, all is merely propaganda!
Monasticism, as it existed in Spain and still exists in Tibet, is a wasting disease of civilization. It puts a stop to life. Quite simply, it depopulates. Claustration is castration. It has been the scourge of Europe. Add to this the violence so often inflicted on the conscience, the enforced vocations, feudalism depending on the monastery for its support, the older generation getting rid of surplus progeny in the cloister; and the savagery of which we have spoken, the in pace, the closed mouths and minds, so much intelligence condemned to the imprisonment of vows for life, the burial of living souls. No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.
Nevertheless there are still places where, in spite of philosophy and progress, the cloistral spirit persists even in the nineteenth century, and a weird recrudescence of asceticism is even now astonishing the civilized world. This obstinate determination of old institutions to perpetuate themselves resembles the rancid scent which clings to your hair, the rotten fish which demands to be eaten, the tyranny of children’s garments presuming to clothe a grown man, or the tenderness of corpses returning to embrace the living.
‘Ingrate!’ says the garment. ‘I protected you in bad weather. Why do you now discard me?’ …’ I come from the open sea,’ says the fish … ‘I was once a rose,’ says the scent … ‘I loved you,’ says the corpse … ‘I civilized you,’ says the monastery. And to all this there is only one reply – ‘Once upon a time.’
It seems strange that anyone should dream of the indefinite prolongation of institutions that have outlived their usefulness, of restoring dogmas now grown hollow, refurbishing shrines, restoring monasteries, reviving old superstitions and fanaticisms – in a word, of reviving monasticism and militarism, saving society by the multiplication of parasites and imposing the past on the present. Nevertheless there are those who advocate such procedures. These theorists, among them persons of intelligence, have a simple method: they cover the past with a veneer which they term social order, divine right, morality, the family, ancestral respect, ancient authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, and religion; and this they ask honest men to accept. It is an argument well known to the ancients. They covered a black sacrificial heifer with chalk and called it white – Bos cretatus.
For our own part, we respect certain things belonging to the past and forgive all of it, provided it consents to stay dead. But if it tries to come alive we attack and seek to kill it.
Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed.
A monastery in France, in the middle of the nineteenth century, is like a school of owls blinking in the sunlight. The practice of rigid asceticism in the Paris of 1789,1830 or 1848 – Rome flowering in the modern city – is an anachronism. In normal times one can dispel an anachronism merely by recalling the date; but these are not normal times.
We have to fight. We must fight, but at the same time we must distinguish. It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive. Why should it exaggerate? There is that which should be destroyed and that which should be simply illuminated and studied. How great is the force of benevolent and searching examination! We must not resort to the flame where only light is required.
Therefore, given the fact of the nineteenth century, we are opposed in principle to ascetic seclusion, whether in Asia or in Europe, in India or in Turkey. To speak of a monastery is to speak of a swamp. The tendency to putrescence is apparent, the stagnation is unhealthy, the fermentation renders the people feverish so that they waste away; and the spreading of such swamps becomes a plague of Egypt. We cannot think without horror of those countries where fakirs and bonzes, gurus, marabouts and dervishes swarm like the inmates of an ant-heap.
But when all this has been said there remains the question of religion. It is a matter possessing mysterious, almost terrifying aspects at which we may venture to look steadily.
Men join together and live together. They do so by virtue of the right of association. They shut themselves away by virtue of the right of every man to open or close his door. They do not go beyond the door by virtue of the right of all men to come and go as they please, which implies the right to stay at home.
And what do they do in this home? They talk in low voices and with lowered eyes, and they work. They renounce the world and the town, all sensuality, all pleasure, all vanity, all pride, all self-interest. They are clad in rough garments. Not one possesses any article of personal property. The man who was rich when he entered makes himself a pauper by giving all he has to the community. The man who was once a nobleman is the equal of the man who was once a peasant. All the cells are identical. All their occupants wear the same tonsure and the same clothes, eat the same food, sleep on the same straw, and die on the same ashes. The same sack on their body, the same cord round their waists. If it is decided to go barefoot, all go barefoot. There may be a prince among them, but he is a shadow like the others. There are no more titles, even family names have disappeared. There are no Christian names. All submit to the equality of their baptismal names. They have dissolved the family of the flesh and constructed within their community the family of the spirit. They have no relations other than this assembly of men. They assist the poor and care for the sick. They elect those to whom they owe obedience. They call each other ‘brother’.
At this point you may interject: ‘But that is the ideal monastery!’ It is sufficient that it should be a possible monastery for me to take it into account.
That is why in previous chapters I have talked of these establishments with respect. Disregarding the Middle Ages and Asia, and setting aside all historical and political considerations, I shall always consider the cloistered community, provided it is wholly voluntary and composed of those who freely consent, with a certain earnest attention and, in some respects, with deference. Where there is a community there is a commune, and where there is a commune there is the rule of law. The monastery is the outcome of the formula, Equality and Fraternity. But how splendid a thing is Liberty, and how great the transformation it effects! Only Liberty is needed to transform the monastery into a republic.
To proceed. The men or women enclosed within those walls are clad in the same fashion, are equals, and address each other as brother or sister. Very well; but do they do more than this?
Yes. They gaze into the gloom and kneel with clasped hands. What does this signify?
They pray.
To whom?
To God.
To pray to God – what does it mean?
Does there exist an Infinity outside ourselves? Is that infinity One, immanent and permanent, necessarily having substance, since He is infinite and if He lacked matter He would be limited, necessarily possessing intelligence since He is infinite and, lacking intelligence, He would be in that sense finite. Does this Infinity inspire in us the idea of essence, while to ourselves we can only attribute the idea of existence? In other words, is He not the whole of which we are but the part?
At the same time, if there is infinity outside us is there not infinity within us? Are not these two infinities (a horrifying plural!) superimposed one upon the other, and is not the second infinity so to speak subjugated to the first, its mirror and its echo, an abyss that is concentric with another abyss? Is it not also intelligent? Does it not think, love and desire? If both infinities are intelligent, then each has in principle a Will, and there is an I the higher infinity just as there is in the lower. That lower I is the soul, and the higher I is God. To establish in the mind a contact between the higher and the lower Infinities, this is to pray.
Nothing must be withdrawn from the human spirit; suppression is bad. We have to reform and transform. Certain of man’s faculties are directed towards the Unknown – thought, reverie, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean; but what is conscience if not an ocean? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, reverie, prayer, these are great, mysterious radiations which we must respect. Whither do they penetrate, these majestic radiations of the soul? Into the darkness; that is to say, into the night
It is the greatness of democracy that it denies and rejects nothing in humanity. Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
To crush fanaticism and revere the Infinite, that is the law. It is not enough for us to prostrate ourselves under the tree which is Creation, and to contemplate its tremendous branches filled with stars. We have a duty to perform, to work upon the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to worship the incomprehensible while rejecting the absurd; to accept, in the inexplicable, only what is necessary; to dispel the superstitions that surround religion – to rid God of His maggots.
As to the methods of praying, all are good provided they are sincere. Read the book backwards, but strive towards the Infinite.
There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the Infinite. There is also a pathological state which denies the existence of the sun: it is known as blindness. To treat a sense we lack as a source of truth is a truly blind effrontery. What is curious is the lofty and complacent air with which this groping philosophy disdains the philosophy which sees God. It is as though a mole were to exclaim, ‘Really I’m sorry for them with their sun!’
As we know, there are illustrious and powerful atheists. These, brought to the truth by the power of their minds, are not quite convinced in their atheism; with them, it is little more than a matter of definition, and in any case, even if they do not believe in God, they are a proof of His existence, being themselves great spirits. We salute them as philosophers while wholly rejecting their philosophy.
What is also interesting is the use made of words. There is a school of metaphysics in the north, somewhat misty in its thinking, which thought to cause a revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the word Will. But to say ‘the plant wills’ instead of ‘the plant grows’ would indeed be meaningful if one added ‘the universe wills’. Why? Because it would follow that if the plant wills it has an ego; and if the Universe wills it must have a God.
For our part, although in contradistinction to this school of thought we reject nothing a priori, we find it more difficult to accept, as they do, the view that the plant has a will of its own than the view that the Universe has a will of its own, which they deny. To deny the will of the Infinite, that is to say, of God, is only possible if we deny the Infinite itself. We have demonstrated this.
The denial of the Infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything becomes ‘an idea conceived in the mind’. And with nihilism no discussion is possible, for the nihilist doubts the existence of the person he is talking to and is not even sure of his own existence. Even he may be no more than an idea conceived in his own mind. But what he does not realize is that he accepts the existence of everything he denies simply by uttering the word ‘mind’.
In short, all roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word ‘no’. To ‘no’ there is only one answer and that is ‘yes’. Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.
Merely to see and show is not enough. Philosophy must have an impetus, and its aim must be the improvement of man. Socrates must enter into Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius; in other words, cause the wise man to emerge from the happy man, and change Eden into a Lyceum. Knowledge should be a stimulus. What a sorry aim and sickly ambition it is merely to enjoy! The animal enjoys. To think, that is the real triumph of the spirit! To offer thought to slake the thirst of mankind, to give all men as an elixir the notion of God, to cause conscience to fraternize with knowledge and by this mysterious union render men just, that is the function of real philosophy. Morality is a flowering of truths. Contemplation leads to action. The Absolute must be practicable. The ideal must be practicable, capable of being eaten and drunk by the human spirit. It is the ideal which has the right to say: ‘Take this which is my flesh and blood.’ Wisdom is a holy communion; only if this is understood does it cease to be a sterile love of knowledge and become instead the one sovereign impulse of human brotherhood, while philosophy is raised to the status of religion.
Philosophy should not be merely a package composed of mystery so that it may be studied in comfort, a convenience for the satisfaction of the curious. For our part, deferring the development of our thought to another occasion, we will only say that we do not think of man as a starting point, nor our progress as the aim except in conjunction with the two forces of faith and love.
Progress is the aim: the ideal is the concept. And the Ideal is God.
Ideal, Absolute, Perfection, Infinite – all these words have the same meaning.
History and philosophy have certain duties to perform which are at the same time perpetual and quite simple; these are to combat the High Priest Caiaphas, in whose reign Christ was condemned to death, Dracon the judge, Trimalchio, who figures in the Satiricon of Petronius, and the Emperor Tiberius. This is clear and straightforward and presents no obscurity. But the right to live apart, even with all its discomforts and abuses, needs to be affirmed and tolerated. Monkishness is a human problem.
When we speak of monasteries, those resorts of error but of innocence, of misconception but of goodwill, of ignorance but of devotion, of torment but of martyrdom, we are bound nearly always to say both yes and no.
The monastery is a contradiction. Its aim is salvation, its method is sacrifice. It is the supreme egotism, and its outcome is supreme abnegation. One might indeed say that ‘Abdicate that you may rule’ is its motto.
The inmates of monasteries suffer to enjoy. They draw a bill of exchange on death, discounting the light of Heaven for darkness upon earth. They accept Hell as an advance upon their inheritance of Paradise. The taking of the veil or the frock is an act of suicide rewarded with eternity. It does not appear to us that this is a suitable subject for derision. Everything about it is serious, the good as well as the bad. The fair-minded man frowns but does not smile in mockery. Anger may be accepted, but not malice.
A few last words.
We condemn the Church when she is saturated with intrigue, we despise the spiritual life that is soured by the temporal, but we honour the thoughtful man wherever we find him. We salute those who kneel. Faith is necessary to man; woe to him who believes in nothing!
One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labour. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation. Thales remained immobile for four years.* He was the founder of philosophy. In our view cenobites are not idlers, nor are solitaries sluggards. To think of the Unknown is a serious matter. Without retracting anything that we have previously said, we believe that the thought of the grave should be constantly in the mind of the living. The Abbé de la Trappe, founder of the Trappist Order, furnished the reply to Horace–‘We all must die.’
To pervade one’s life with a certain consciousness of its ending is the law of the wise man and also of the ascetic. It is here that these two come together. There is material growth, which we desire, and there is also moral grandeur, to which we cling. Thoughtless, hasty thinkers may ask;
‘What is the use of those motionless figures crouched in the shadow of mystery? What purpose do they serve? What do they do?’
Alas, faced by the darkness that surrounds us all, and not knowing what the immense dispersal may make of us, we reply: ‘There is perhaps no more sublime work than that performed by those motionless figures.’ To which we add: ‘And perhaps none more useful.’ We need those who pray constantly to compensate for those who do not pray at all.
The whole question, for us, resides in the quantity of thought that is mingled with the prayer. It is a great thing that Leibnitz should pray; and that Voltaire should worship is wonderful. Deo erexit Voltaire–‘Voltaire built this to the glory of God’– is carved on the façade of the church at Ferney.
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer. For the rest, in the times in which we live - a moment in time which happily will not characterize the whole of the nineteenth century – this time when so many men have earthbowed heads and spirits scarcely loftier, when so many have no purpose other than pleasure and are wholly concerned with the shortlived, shapeless, material objects of life, anyone who cuts himself off from all this seems to us deserving of respect. The monastery is renunciation. The sacrifice which follows the wrong path is none the less a sacrifice. To make a duty of a stern error, this has its own greatness.
Considered of itself, in its ideal form, and surveying the truth impartially to embrace all its aspects, the monastery, and above all the women’s convent – for in our society it is the women who suffer most, and in that exiled life of the cloister there is protestation – in the women’s convent there is undeniably a certain majesty. That grey and dismal cloistered life of which we have given some outline is not in the true sense life at all, for it is not liberty; it is not the grave, for it is not completion; it is a strange place where, as from a mountain-peak, we contemplate on one side the limbo in which we dwell and on the other the limbo into which we shall enter: a narrow, misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminated and shadowed by both at once, where the enfeebled light of the world is mingled with the unknown light of death, a foreshadowing of the tomb.
For our own part, not believing in what those women believe, but living by faith as they do, we have never been able to contemplate, without a kind of tender religious awe, a sort of pity filled with envy, those devoted, trembling, and confiding creatures, humble and noble souls who dare to live at the very edge of mystery, to live suspended between a world which is closed to them and a Heaven which is not yet open, their faces turned towards a light which they cannot see, possessing simply the happiness of believing that they know where it is, yearning for the unknown, their eyes intent upon obscurity, kneeling motionless, lost, stupefied, and trembling, but at certain moments half exalted by the deep breathing of eternity.