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ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST
Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it
still exists in Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization.
It stops life short.
It simply depopulates.
Claustration, castration. It has been the scourge of Europe.
Add to this the violence so often done to the conscience,
the forced vocations, feudalism bolstered up by the cloister,
the right of the first-born pouring the excess of the family into
monasticism, the ferocities of which we have just spoken, the
in pace, the closed mouths, the walled-up brains, so many unfortunate
minds placed in the dungeon of eternal vows, the taking of the
habit, the interment of living souls. Add individual tortures
to national degradations, and, whoever you may be, you will shudder
before the frock and the veil,--those two winding-sheets of human
devising.
Nevertheless, at certain points and in certain places, in
spite of philosophy, in spite of progress, the spirit of the cloister
persists in the midst of the nineteenth century, and a singular
ascetic recrudescence is, at this moment, astonishing the civilized
world.
The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves
resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume which should
claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which should
persist in being eaten, the persecution of the child's garment
which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses
which should return to embrace the living.
"Ingrates!" says the garment, "I protected
you in inclement weather. Why will you have nothing to do with
me?"
"I have just come from the deep sea," says the fish.
"I have been a rose," says the perfume. "I
have loved you," says the corpse.
"I have civilized you," says the convent.
To this there is but one reply:
"In former days."
To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things,
and of the government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in
a bad condition, to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to
rebless reliquaries, to refurnish superstitions, to revictual
fanaticisms, to put new handles on holy water brushes and militarism,
to reconstitute monasticism and militarism, to believe in the
salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites, to force
the past on the present,-- this seems strange.
Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists,
who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very
simple process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call
social order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders,
antique authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and
they go about shouting, "Look! take this, honest people."
This logic was known to the ancients.
The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer over
with chalk, and said, "She is white, Bos cretatus."
As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare
it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead.
If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to
kill it.
Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those
forms all forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have
teeth and nails in their smoke, and they must be clasped close,
body to body, and war must be made on them, and that without truce;
for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to
eternal combat with phantoms.
It is difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl
it to the earth.
A convent in France, in the broad daylight of the nineteenth
century, is a college of owls facing the light.
A cloister, caught in the very act of asceticism, in the very
heart of the city of '89 and of 1830 and of 1848, Rome blossoming
out in Paris, is an anachronism. In ordinary times, in order to
dissolve an anachronism and to cause it to vanish, one has only
to make it spell out the date. But we are not in ordinary times.
Let us fight.
Let us fight, but let us make a distinction.
The peculiar property of truth is never to commit excesses.
What need has it of exaggeration?
There is that which it is necessary to destroy, and there
is that which it is simply necessary to elucidate and examine.
What a force is kindly and serious examination! Let us not
apply a flame where only a light is required.
So, given the nineteenth century, we are opposed, as a general
proposition, and among all peoples, in Asia as well as in Europe,
in India as well as in Turkey, to ascetic claustration. Whoever
says cloister, says marsh.
Their putrescence is evident, their stagnation is unhealthy,
their fermentation infects people with fever, and etiolates them;
their multiplication becomes a plague of Egypt.
We cannot think without affright of those lands where fakirs,
bonzes, santons, Greek monks, marabouts, talapoins, and dervishes
multiply even like swarms of vermin.
This said, the religious question remains.
This question has certain mysterious, almost formidable sides;
may we be permitted to look at it fixedly.
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