بخش 2 کتاب 7

BOOK SEVEN

A PARENTHESIS

THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA

THIS BOOK IS a tragedy in which infinity plays the lead.

Man plays a supporting role.

This being so, as a convent turned up on our path, we simply had to go in. Why? Because the convent, which belongs to the East as to the West, to antiquity as to modern times, to paganism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism as to Christianity, is one of the optical devices man trains on infinity.

This is not the place to delve deeply into certain ideas; yet, while absolutely maintaining our reserve, our reservations, and even our feelings of outrage, we must say that, every time we come across the infinite1 in man, whether properly or badly understood, we feel seized with respect. There is in the synagogue, in the mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side that we execrate and a sublime side2 that we revere. What an object of contemplation for the mind, and what a source of endless reverie! The reflection of God on the human wall.

THE CONVENT AS HISTORICAL FACT

FROM THE POINT of view of history, reason, and truth, monasticism is doomed.

When monasteries abound within a nation, they are bottlenecks blocking the free flow of traffic, encumbrances, roadblocks, centres of indolence where centres of industry are needed. Monastic communities are to the broader social community what mistletoe is to the oak,1 what warts are to the human body. Their prosperity and their corpulence mean bleeding the country dry. The monastic regime, good at the dawn of civilization, useful in reining in brutality through spirituality, is bad for the world in its maturity. On top of this, when it slackens and enters into a period of deregulation, it nonetheless goes on setting an example and in doing so becomes bad for all the reasons that made it salutary in its period of purity.

All this shutting oneself away in cloisters has had its day. Cloisters were useful in the preliminary education of modern civilization, but they have since cramped its growth and are harmful to its development. As an institution and a mode of training for man, monasteries were good in the tenth century, debatable in the fifteenth, and detestable in the nineteenth. The leprosy of monasticism has gnawed to the bone two wonderful nations, Italy and Spain, one the light, the other the splendour of Europe for centuries, and in our day these two illustrious peoples are only just beginning to heal, thanks to the wholesome and vigorous hygiene of 1789.

The convent, the age-old convent of women in particular, as it still appeared at the threshold of this century in Italy, Austria, and Spain, is one of the most sombre sedimentations of the Middle Ages. That cloister, that particular cloister, is the point of intersection of unutterable horrors. The Catholic cloister, properly so called, is completely filled with the black radiance of death.

The Spanish convent is especially deadly. In it, massive Babel-like altars, as tall as cathedrals, rise in the darkness beneath vaults full of fog, beneath domes dim with dense shadow; in it, immense white crucifixes hang on chains in the gloom; great big ivory Christs spread out, naked on ebony, not just bloody but bleeding, hideous and magnificent, the elbows showing the bones, the kneecaps showing the cartilage, the wounds showing the raw flesh, crowned with thorns of silver, nailed with nails of gold, with drops of blood in rubies on the forehead and tears of diamonds in the eyes. The diamonds and rubies look wet and make the veiled ones cry, below in the shadows, veiled ones whose flanks are torn and bruised black-and-blue by cilices and by scourges with iron tips, whose breasts are crushed by wicker racks, whose knees are skinned by prayer; women who believe themselves to be brides of Christ, spectres who believe themselves to be seraphim.2 Do these women think? No. Do they desire? No. Do they love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have ossified; their bones have petrified. Their veils are knitted with night. Their breath beneath their veils is like some weird tragic exhalation of death. The abbess, a ghoul, sanctifies them and terrifies them. The immaculate is there, fierce. Such are the old monasteries of Spain. Lairs of terrible devoutness, caverns for virgins, savage places.

Catholic Spain was more Roman than Rome itself. The Spanish convent was the Catholic convent par excellence. You got a whiff of the East3 there. There, the archbishop, aga khan of heaven,4 locked up and spied on this seraglio5 of souls reserved for God. The nun was the odalisque, the priest the eunuch. In their dreams, the fervent females were chosen by and possessed Christ. At night, the gorgeous naked young man came down from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cell. High walls protected from any living distraction the mystical sultaness who had the crucified one for a sultan. A glance outside was an act of infidelity. The in pace replaced the leather bag.6 What was hurled into the sea in the East was hurled into the ground in the West. On both sides, women flailed about madly; the waves for one lot, the pit for the others; there, they drowned, here, they were buried alive. Monstrous parallelism.

Today the defenders of the past, not being able to deny these things, have adopted the position of laughing at them. It has become the fashion, a convenient and strange fashion, to suppress the revelations of history, to invalidate the commentaries of philosophy, and to dodge all the embarrassing facts and all the sombre questions. “The stuff of ranting,” say the clever. Ranting, repeat the inane. Jean-Jacques,7 a ranter; Diderot,8 a ranter; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven,9 a ranter. I can’t remember who it was who recently found that Tacitus, too, was a ranter, that Nero was a victim, and that one really had to feel sorry for “that poor Holofernes.”10 The facts, however, are not so easily thrown off, and they persist. The author of this book has seen, with his own eyes, at about twenty miles from Brussels, a slice of the Middle Ages within everyone’s reach, at the abbey of Villers, the hole of the oubliettes11 in the middle of the meadow that was the cloister courtyard, and, on the banks of the Dyle, four solitary stone cells, half-underground, half-underwater. These were in pace. Every one of these cells has the remains of an iron door, a latrine, and a grated skylight, which is two feet above the river outside and six feet above the ground inside. Four feet deep, the river flows outside along the wall. The ground is always wet. The inhabitant of the dungeon had this wet ground for a bed. In one of the cells, there is the stump of a collar shackle bolted to the wall; in another, you can see a kind of square box made out of four slabs of granite, too short to lie down in, too low to stand up in. They used to put a living being in there, and then put a stone lid over it. It exists. You can see it. You can touch it. These in pace, these solitary cells, these iron hinges, these collar shackles, this high skylight on a level with the flowing river, this stone box sealed with a granite lid like a tomb, with this difference that here death was living, this floor that is mud, this shit-hole, these oozing walls—how they rant!

ON WHAT CONDITIONS WE CAN RESPECT THE PAST

MONASTICISM, AS IT existed in Spain and as it exists in Tibet, is a kind of consumption of civilization. It cuts life short. It depopulates, to put it simply. Claustration, castration. It has been the scourge of Europe. Add to that the violence so often done to conscience, forced vocations, the feudalism that props up the cloister, primogeniture pouring into the monastery the surplus of the family, the ferocities we have just been talking about, the in pace, the sealed lips, the walled-in minds, so many unlucky intellects placed in the solitary confinement of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, the burying of souls still very much alive. Add the individual tortures to the national degradations and no matter who you are, you will feel yourself shudder before the habit and the veil, those two shrouds of human invention.

And yet, on certain points and in certain places, despite philosophy and despite progress, the claustral spirit lives on, right into the middle of the nineteenth century, and a bizarre recrudescence in asceticism is stunning the civilized world at this very moment. The stubborn determination of old institutions to perpetuate themselves is like the obstinacy of rancid perfume in clinging to your hair, the claims of rotten fish to be eaten, harassment by children’s clothes wanting grown-ups to wear them again, or the tenderness of corpses coming back to embrace the living.

“Ungrateful bastards!” say the children’s clothes. “I protected you in bad weather. Why won’t you have anything to do with me anymore?” “I come from the deep sea,” says the fish. “I was a rose,” says the perfume. “I loved you,” says the corpse. “I civilized you,” says the convent.

To that, there is only one response: Once.

To dream of the indefinite extension of defunct things and of the governing of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in bad condition, to regild the shrines, replaster the cloisters, reconsecrate the reliquaries, revamp the superstitions, refuel the fanaticisms, put the handles back on the aspersoria and the sabres,1 reconstitute monasticism and militarism, believe in the salvation of society through the proliferation of parasites, impose the past on the present, seems strange. Yet there are theorists for those very theories. These theorists, smart people in other respects, have a very simple method. They apply to the past a coat of what they call social order, divine right, morality, family values, respect for one’s ancestors, time-honoured authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion, and so on; and they go around shouting: “Here! Take this, you respectable people.” This tactic was known to the ancients. Haruspices2 practised it. They would rub a black heifer with chalk and say: She is white. Bos cretatus.3 As for us, we respect the past here and there and spare it everywhere, provided it consents to be dead. Wherever it tries to be alive, we attack it and do our level best to kill it.

Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these spectres, as spectral as they are, cling to life, they have teeth and nails in their smoky trails; and they have to be grappled in hand-to-hand, head-to-head combat, in a war that must be waged without letup, for this is one of the things to which humankind is doomed—to be forever having to fight off phantoms. A shadow is difficult to grab by the throat and dash on the ground.

A convent in France, smack in the middle of the nineteenth century, is a college of owls peering out at daylight. A cloister, caught in the act of asceticism right in the heart of the city of 1789, of 1830, of 1848,4 Rome flourishing in Paris—now, that is what I call an anachronism. In normal times, to dissolve an anachronism and make it vanish, you only have to get it to spell out the year of our Lord. But we are not living in normal times.

Let’s fight.

Let’s fight, but let’s make distinctions. The thing about truth is never to overdo it. Why should it be exaggerated? There is what has to be destroyed and there is what simply has to be clarified and looked at. A benevolent and grave examination—what force! Let’s not bring flame where light is enough.

And so, given that we are in the nineteenth century, as a general rule, and no matter what people are concerned, in Asia as in Europe, in India as in Turkey, we are against the seclusion of ascetics. When you say convent, you say swamp. Their tendency toward putrescence is obvious, their stagnation is unhealthy, their fermentation makes people feverish and enfeebles them; their proliferation turns into a biblical plague. We can only think with horror of those countries where fakirs, bonzes, santons, caloyers, marabouts, talapoins, and dervishes5 pullulate like swarms of vermin.

That said, the religious issue abides. This issue has certain mysterious, almost formidable aspects; allow us to stare it straight in the face.

THE CONVENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PRINCIPLES

MEN GATHER TOGETHER and live in common. By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right of association.

They shut themselves up at home. By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right that every man enjoys of opening or shutting his door.

They don’t go out. By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right to come and go, which implies the right to remain at home.

There, at home, what do they do?

They talk softly, they keep their heads down; they work. They turn their back on the world, the city, sensuality, pleasure, vanity, pride, interests. They are dressed in coarse wool and coarse cotton. Not one of them owns any property whatever. Once he enters there, he who was rich makes himself poor. Whatever he has, he gives to all. He who was what we call noble, a gentleman and a lord, is the equal of he who was a peasant. The cell is the same for all. All suffer the same tonsure, wear the same robe, eat the same black bread, sleep on the same straw, die on the same ash. With the same sack on the back, the same cord around the waist. If it is the rule to go barefoot, all go barefoot. There may well be a prince in there, but this prince is the same shadow as the rest. No more titles. Even family names have disappeared. They bear only Christian names. All buckle under the equality of baptismal names. They have dissolved the family of the flesh and set up the spiritual family within their community. They no longer have any relatives other than all mankind. They succour the poor, they tend the sick. They elect those they obey. They call each other: my brother.

You stop me and you cry out: But what you’re talking about is the ideal convent!

It is enough that it is a potential convent for me to have to take it into account.

This is why, in the preceding book, I spoke of a convent in a tone of respect. The Middle Ages aside, Asia aside, the historic and political question left open, from a purely philosophical point of view, beyond the requirements of some militant polemics, on the condition that the monastery be absolutely voluntary and shut in only consenting adults, I will always look upon the cloistered community with a certain attentive and, in some respects, deferential gravity. Wherever there is a community, there is a commune; wherever there is a commune, there is law. The monastery is the outcome of the formula: Equality, Fraternity. Oh, how great Liberty is! And what a splendid transfiguration! Liberty is enough to transform the monastery into a republic.

Let’s go on.

But these men, or these women, who are behind those four walls, dress in homespun, are equal, call themselves brothers or sisters. Which is all very well, but do they do anything else?

Yes.

What?

They stare at the dark, they get down on their knees and bring their hands together.

What does that mean?

PRAYER

THEY PRAY.

Who to?

God.

To pray to God, what does that mean?

Is there an infinite outside ourselves? This infinite, is it one, immanent, permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite and since, if it were devoid of matter, it would in that respect be limited; necessarily intelligent, since it is infinite and since, if it were devoid of intelligence, it would be in that respect finite? Does this infinite arouse in us the idea of an essence, whereas we can only attribute to ourselves the idea of existence? In other words, is it not the absolute of which we are the relative?

At the same time that there is an infinite outside us, isn’t there also an infinite inside us? These two infinities (what a frightening plural!), do they not sit one on top of the other? Isn’t the second infinite subjacent, so to speak, to the first? Isn’t it the mirror of it, the reflection, the echo, a void concentric to another void? Is this second infinite also intelligent? Does it think? Does it love? Does it desire? If the two infinites are intelligent, each one of them has a desiring principle, and there is a self in the infinite above, just as there is a self in the infinite below. This self below is the soul; the self above is God.

To put the infinite below in touch with the infinite above, in thought—this is what we call prayer.

Let’s not detract from the human mind; to repress is bad. We need to reform and transform. Certain of man’s faculties are directed toward the Unknown: thought, meditation, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, meditation, prayer: These are great radiant mysteries. Let’s respect them. Where do these majestic rays of the soul go? Into the shadows; that is, into the light.

The greatness of democracy is that it denies nothing and renounces nothing for humanity. Next to the Rights of Man, or at least alongside them, there are the Rights of the Soul.

To crush fanaticisms and venerate the infinite, that is the rule. Let’s not restrict ourselves to prostrating ourselves under the tree of Creation and to contemplating the immense branches full of stars. We have a duty: to work on the human soul, to defend mystery as opposed to miracle, to worship the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to accept of the inexplicable only what is necessary, to clean up faith, to remove superstition from on top of religion; to rid God of worms.

ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF PRAYER

AS FOR METHODS of praying, all of them are good as long as they are sincere. Turn your book face down and be in the infinite.

There is, as we know, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classified as pathological, that denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness.

To set up a sense that we lack as a source of truth is a real blind man’s ploy.

And what is truly curious is the haughty, superior, and sympathetic airs that this groping philosophy gives itself in relation to the philosophy that sees God. It makes you think of a mole crying out: I pity them, with their sun!

There are, as we know, illustrious and powerful atheists. When all’s said and done, these people are brought back to the truth by their very power, are not really sure of being atheists; the whole thing is little more than a matter of definitions to them, and, in any case, even if they don’t believe in God, being great minds, they prove God’s existence.

We salute the philosopher in them, while at the same time inexorably qualifying their philosophy.

Let’s move along.

What’s wonderful, too, is the ease with which people spout hot air. A northern metaphysical school, somewhat impregnated with fog, thought it was causing a revolution in human understanding by replacing the word force by the word will.

To say “the plant wills” instead of “the plant grows” would, in fact, be fruitful if you added: “the universe wills.” Why? Because this would flow from that: The plant wills, so it has a self; the universe wills, so there is a God.

As far as we’re concerned, though unlike this school we reject nothing a priori, the idea of a will in a plant, which this school promotes, seems harder to accept than a will in the universe, which the school denies.

To deny the will of the infinite, that is, God, can happen only on condition of denying the infinite. This we have shown.

The negation of the infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything becomes “a figment of the imagination.”

With nihilism no discussion is possible. For the logical nihilist doubts that his interlocutor exists and is not all that sure of existing himself.

From his point of view, it is possible that he himself is only “a figment of the imagination.”

Only, he does not see that everything that he has denied, he admits as a whole just by pronouncing that word imagination.

In sum, no window is opened for thought by a philosophy that makes everything end in the monosyllable “No.”

To “No” there is only one answer: “Yes.”

Nihilism has nowhere to go.

There is no nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Man lives on affirmation even more than on bread.

To see and to show—even this is not enough. Philosophy has to be an energy, with the aim and effect of improving man. Socrates has to enter Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius.1 In other words, make the man of wisdom emerge from the man of felicity bliss. Change Eden into a lyceum.2 Science should be a tonic. Pleasure—what a sad goal, what a puny ambition! The brute feels pleasure. To think—that’s the real triumph of the soul. To hold out thought to quench people’s thirst, to hand everyone the notion of God as an elixir, to cause conscience and science to fraternize inside them, make them more just through such a mysterious confrontation—that is the purpose of real philosophy. Morality is the blossoming of sundry truths. To contemplate leads to action. The absolute has to be put into practice. What is ideal has to be breathable, drinkable, edible to the human mind. It is the ideal that has the right to say: “Take of this, this is my body, this is my blood.” Wisdom is Holy Communion. It is on this condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of science and becomes the one, almighty method of human rallying, and is promoted from philosophy to religion.

Philosophy should not be a simple ivory tower built over mystery so that it can gaze at it at its leisure, with no other consequence than being at curiosity’s beck and call.

For us, postponing the development of our thinking for some other occasion, we will just say here that we do not understand either man as a starting point, nor progress as an end, without these two forces that are the two engines: faith and love.

Progress is the end; the ideal is the model.

What is the ideal? God.

Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity—these are all words for the same thing.

PRECAUTIONS TO TAKE IN LAYING BLAME

HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY have eternal duties that are at the same time simple duties: to oppose Caiaphas as bishop, Draco as judge, Trimalcion as lawmaker, Tiberius as emperor;1 this is clear, direct, and transparent and presents no obscurity whatsoever. But the right to live apart, even with its drawbacks and its abuses, needs to be noted and carefully handled. Cenobitism2 is a human problem.

When we speak of convents, those seats of error, but also of innocence; of befuddlement, but also of good intentions; of ignorance, but also of devotion; of torture, but also of martyrdom, you almost always have to say “yes and no.” A convent is a contradiction. As a goal, salvation; as a means, sacrifice. The convent is supreme selfishness resulting in supreme self-abnegation.

To abdicate in order to reign seems to be the motto of monasticism.

In the cloister, you suffer to achieve pleasure. You take out a mortgage on death. You bank terrestrial night on celestial light. In the cloister, hell is accepted as advance payment on paradise.

The taking of the veil or the habit is suicide reimbursed by eternity.

It seems to us that such a subject should not be treated with mockery. Everything about it is serious, the good along with the bad.

The just man frowns, but never sneers. We can understand anger, but not malevolence.

FAITH, LAW

BEAR WITH ME a bit longer.

We blame the Church when it is riddled with intrigue, we scorn the spiritual when it is hard on the temporal; but we honour the meditative man wherever he appears.

We bow to anyone on their knees.

A faith is for man a necessity. Woe betide the person who believes in nothing!

You are not idle because you are absorbed. There is visible labour and invisible labour.

To contemplate is to toil; to think is to act. Crossed arms are at work, joined hands are doing something. Raising eyes to heaven is an opus.

Thales1 did not move for four years. He founded philosophy.

To our mind, cenobites are not loafers, recluses are not slobs.

To think about the Dark is a serious thing.

Without undermining in any way what we have just said, we believe that a perpetual remembrance of the grave is only right for the living. On this score, the priest and the philosopher are in agreement. “We have to die.” The abbé of La Trappe goes through Horace’s lines with him.2 To mix a bit of the sepulchre into your life is the law of the sage; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this regard, the ascetic and the sage converge.

There is such a thing as material growth; we want that. There is also such a thing as moral greatness; we cling to it.

People who rush in without thinking say: “What’s the good of these immobile figures who side with mystery? What purpose do they serve? What are they doing?” Alas! Faced with the darkness that surrounds us, that awaits us, not knowing what the vast scattering will do to us, we reply: There is, perhaps, no work more sublime than the work these souls do. And we would add: There is, perhaps, no travail more useful.

We need those who forever pray for those who never pray.

For us, the whole question lies in the amount of thought that gets mixed in with the prayer.

Leibniz at prayer is a great thing; Voltaire at worship3 is beautiful. Deo erexit Voltaire.4

We are for religion as opposed to religions.

We are of those who believe in the paltriness of sermons and the sublimeness of prayer.

Besides, in the times we are living through, times that hopefully won’t leave their mark on the nineteenth century, at this hour when so many men have low brows and souls almost as low, among so many living beings who have pleasure as their morality and who are busy with the short term and the mangled things of matter, anyone going into exile strikes us as venerable. The monastery is a renunciation. Sacrifice that is misdirected is still sacrifice. There is something grand about making a serious mistake a duty.

Taken in itself, ideally—to circle around the truth to the point of impartially exhausting every aspect of it—the monastery, and the convent of women especially, for in our society it is women who suffer the most and their protest is evident in this exile of the cloister, the convent of women has, incontestably, a certain majesty.

This cloistered existence, so austere and so mournful, a few features of which we have just outlined, is not life, for it is not liberty; it is not the grave, for it is not fullness; it is a strange place from which you see, as though you were on a high mountaintop, the abyss where we are on one side and, on the other, the abyss where we will be; it is a thin and hazy border dividing two worlds, at once illuminated and obscured by both, where the feeble light of life mingles with the dim light of death; it is the half-light of the grave.

As for us, who do not believe what these women believe but live, like them, through faith, we have never been able to consider, without a kind of tender religious terror, without a sort of pity full of envy, those devout, quivering, and trusting creatures, those humble and august souls who dare to live on the very brink of mystery, waiting there between the world that is closed and the sky that is not yet open, turned toward the light you can’t see, having only the happiness of thinking they know where it is, aspiring to the void and the unknown, their eye fixed on the unmoving darkness, on their knees, overcome, stunned, shivering, half lifted up at certain moments by the deep breaths of eternity.