





This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.

Man is the second.

Such being the case, and a convent having happened to be on our road,
it has been our duty to enter it. Why? Because the convent, which is
common to the Orient as well as to the Occident, to antiquity as well
as to modern times, to paganism, to Buddhism, to Mahometanism, as well
as to Christianity, is one of the optical apparatuses applied by man to
the Infinite.

This is not the place for enlarging disproportionately on certain
ideas; nevertheless, while absolutely maintaining our reserves, our
restrictions, and even our indignations, we must say that every time we
encounter man in the Infinite, either well or ill understood, we feel
ourselves overpowered with respect. There is, in the synagogue, in the
mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side which we execrate,
and a sublime side, which we adore. What a contemplation for the mind,
and what endless food for thought, is the reverberation of God upon the
human wall!






From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism
is condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in
its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where
centres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the great
social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to
the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the
impoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at the
beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the
spiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood. Moreover,
when it becomes relaxed, and when it enters into its period of
disorder, it becomes bad for the very reasons which rendered it
salutary in its period of purity, because it still continues to set the
example.

Claustration has had its day. Cloisters, useful in the early education
of modern civilization, have embarrassed its growth, and are injurious
to its development. So far as institution and formation with relation
to man are concerned, monasteries, which were good in the tenth
century, questionable in the fifteenth, are detestable in the
nineteenth. The leprosy of monasticism has gnawed nearly to a skeleton
two wonderful nations, Italy and Spain; the one the light, the other
the splendor of Europe for centuries; and, at the present day, these
two illustrious peoples are but just beginning to convalesce, thanks to
the healthy and vigorous hygiene of 1789 alone.

The convent—the ancient female convent in particular, such as it still
presents itself on the threshold of this century, in Italy, in Austria,
in Spain—is one of the most sombre concretions of the Middle Ages. The
cloister, that cloister, is the point of intersection of horrors. The
Catholic cloister, properly speaking, is wholly filled with the black
radiance of death.

The Spanish convent is the most funereal of all. There rise, in
obscurity, beneath vaults filled with gloom, beneath domes vague with
shadow, massive altars of Babel, as high as cathedrals; there immense
white crucifixes hang from chains in the dark; there are extended, all
nude on the ebony, great Christs of ivory; more than bleeding,—bloody;
hideous and magnificent, with their elbows displaying the bones, their
knee-pans showing their integuments, their wounds showing their flesh,
crowned with silver thorns, nailed with nails of gold, with blood drops
of rubies on their brows, and diamond tears in their eyes. The diamonds
and rubies seem wet, and make veiled beings in the shadow below weep,
their sides bruised with the hair shirt and their iron-tipped scourges,
their breasts crushed with wicker hurdles, their knees excoriated with
prayer; women who think themselves wives, spectres who think themselves
seraphim. Do these women think? No. Have they any will? No. Do they
love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone; their
bones have turned to stone. Their veil is of woven night. Their breath
under their veil resembles the indescribably tragic respiration of
death. The abbess, a spectre, sanctifies them and terrifies them. The
immaculate one is there, and very fierce. Such are the ancient
monasteries of Spain. Liars of terrible devotion, caverns of virgins,
ferocious places.

Catholic Spain is more Roman than Rome herself. The Spanish convent
was, above all others, the Catholic convent. There was a flavor of the
Orient about it. The archbishop, the kislar-aga of heaven, locked up
and kept watch over this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun
was the odalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The fervent were chosen
in dreams and possessed Christ. At night, the beautiful, nude young man
descended from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cloistered one.
Lofty walls guarded the mystic sultana, who had the crucified for her
sultan, from all living distraction. A glance on the outer world was
infidelity. The _in pace_ replaced the leather sack. That which was
cast into the sea in the East was thrown into the ground in the West.
In both quarters, women wrung their hands; the waves for the first, the
grave for the last; here the drowned, there the buried. Monstrous
parallel.

To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, have
adopted the expedient of smiling at them. There has come into fashion a
strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of
invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all
embarrassing facts and all gloomy questions. _A matter for
declamations_, say the clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish.
Jean-Jacques a declaimer; Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas,
Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers. I know not who has recently discovered
that Tacitus was a declaimer, that Nero was a victim, and that pity is
decidedly due to “that poor Holofernes.”


Facts, however, are awkward things to disconcert, and they are
obstinate. The author of this book has seen, with his own eyes, eight
leagues distant from Brussels,—there are relics of the Middle Ages
there which are attainable for everybody,—at the Abbey of Villers, the
hole of the oubliettes, in the middle of the field which was formerly
the courtyard of the cloister, and on the banks of the Thil, four stone
dungeons, half under ground, half under the water. They were _in pace_.
Each of these dungeons has the remains of an iron door, a vault, and a
grated opening which, on the outside, is two feet above the level of
the river, and on the inside, six feet above the level of the ground.
Four feet of river flow past along the outside wall. The ground is
always soaked. The occupant of the _in pace_ had this wet soil for his
bed. In one of these dungeons, there is a fragment of an iron necklet
riveted to the wall; in another, there can be seen a square box made of
four slabs of granite, too short for a person to lie down in, too low
for him to stand upright in. A human being was put inside, with a
coverlid of stone on top. This exists. It can be seen. It can be
touched. These _in pace_, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these
necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river’s current,
that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this
difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which
is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls,—what declaimers!






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.






Men unite themselves and dwell in communities. 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 which every man has to open or shut his door.

They do not come forth. By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right
to go and come, which implies the right to remain at home.

There, at home, what do they do?

They speak in low tones; they drop their eyes; they toil. They renounce
the world, towns, sensualities, pleasures, vanities, pride, interests.
They are clothed in coarse woollen or coarse linen. Not one of them
possesses in his own right anything whatever. On entering there, each
one who was rich makes himself poor. What he has, he gives to all. He
who was what is called noble, a gentleman and a lord, is the equal of
him who was a peasant. The cell is identical for all. All undergo the
same tonsure, wear the same frock, eat the same black bread, sleep on
the same straw, die on the same ashes. The same sack on their backs,
the same rope around their loins. If the decision has been to go
barefoot, all go barefoot. There may be a prince among them; that
prince is the same shadow as the rest. No titles. Even family names
have disappeared. They bear only first names. All are bowed beneath the
equality of baptismal names. They have dissolved the carnal family, and
constituted in their community a spiritual family. They have no other
relatives than all men. They succor the poor, they care for the sick.
They elect those whom they obey. They call each other “my brother.”


You stop me and exclaim, “But that is the ideal convent!”


It is sufficient that it may be the possible convent, that I should
take notice of it.

Thence it results that, in the preceding book, I have spoken of a
convent with respectful accents. The Middle Ages cast aside, Asia cast
aside, the historical and political question held in reserve, from the
purely philosophical point of view, outside the requirements of
militant policy, on condition that the monastery shall be absolutely a
voluntary matter and shall contain only consenting parties, I shall
always consider a cloistered community with a certain attentive, and,
in some respects, a deferential gravity.

Wherever there is a community, there is a commune; where there is a
commune, there is right. The monastery is the product of the formula:
Equality, Fraternity. Oh! how grand is liberty! And what a splendid
transfiguration! Liberty suffices to transform the monastery into a
republic.

Let us continue.

But these men, or these women who are behind these four walls. They
dress themselves in coarse woollen, they are equals, they call each
other brothers, that is well; but they do something else?

Yes.

What?

They gaze on the darkness, they kneel, and they clasp their hands.

What does this signify?






They pray.

To whom?

To God.

To pray to God,—what is the meaning of these words?

Is there an infinite beyond us? Is that infinite there, inherent,
permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite; and because,
if it lacked matter it would be bounded; necessarily intelligent, since
it is infinite, and because, if it lacked intelligence, it would end
there? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we
can attribute to ourselves only the idea of existence? In other terms,
is it not the absolute, of which we are only the relative?

At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not an
infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming
plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second
infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter’s
mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another
abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does it
love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of
them has a will principle, and there is an _I_ in the upper infinity as
there is an _I_ in the lower infinity. The _I_ below is the soul; the
_I_ on high is God.

To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought,
with the infinity on high, is called praying.

Let us take nothing from the human mind; to suppress is bad. We must
reform and transform. Certain faculties in man are directed towards the
Unknown; thought, reverie, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What is
conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, reverie,
prayer,—these are great and mysterious radiations. Let us respect them.
Whither go these majestic irradiations of the soul? Into the shadow;
that is to say, to the light.

The grandeur of democracy is to disown nothing and to deny nothing of
humanity. Close to the right of the man, beside it, at the least, there
exists the right of the soul.

To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let
us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of
creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We
have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against
the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to
admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify
belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of
caterpillars.






With regard to the modes of prayer, all are good, provided that they
are sincere. Turn your book upside down and be in the infinite.

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

To erect a sense which we lack into a source of truth, is a fine blind
man’s self-sufficiency.

The curious thing is the haughty, superior, and compassionate airs
which this groping philosophy assumes towards the philosophy which
beholds God. One fancies he hears a mole crying, “I pity them with
their sun!”


There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom,
led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure
that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition,
and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they
prove God.

We salute them as philosophers, while inexorably denouncing their
philosophy.

Let us go on.

The remarkable thing about it is, also, their facility in paying
themselves off with words. A metaphysical school of the North,
impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a
revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the
word Will.

To say: “the plant wills,” instead of: “the plant grows”: this would be
fecund in results, indeed, if we were to add: “the universe wills.”
Why? Because it would come to this: the plant wills, therefore it has
an _I_; the universe wills, therefore it has a God.

As for us, who, however, in contradistinction to this school, reject
nothing _a priori_, a will in the plant, accepted by this school,
appears to us more difficult to admit than a will in the universe
denied by it.

To deny the will of the infinite, that is to say, God, is impossible on
any other conditions than a denial of the infinite. We have
demonstrated this.

The negation of the infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything
becomes “a mental conception.”


With nihilism, no discussion is possible; for the nihilist logic doubts
the existence of its interlocutor, and is not quite sure that it exists
itself.

From its point of view, it is possible that it may be for itself, only
“a mental conception.”


Only, it does not perceive that all which it has denied it admits in
the lump, simply by the utterance of the word, mind.

In short, no way is open to the thought by a philosophy which makes all
end in the monosyllable, No.

To No there is only one reply, Yes.

Nihilism has no point.

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

Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.

Even to see and to show does not suffice. Philosophy should be an
energy; it should have for effort and effect to ameliorate the
condition of man. Socrates should enter into Adam and produce Marcus
Aurelius; in other words, the man of wisdom should be made to emerge
from the man of felicity. Eden should be changed into a Lyceum. Science
should be a cordial. To enjoy,—what a sad aim, and what a paltry
ambition! The brute enjoys. To offer thought to the thirst of men, to
give them all as an elixir the notion of God, to make conscience and
science fraternize in them, to render them just by this mysterious
confrontation; such is the function of real philosophy. Morality is a
blossoming out of truths. Contemplation leads to action. The absolute
should be practicable. It is necessary that the ideal should be
breathable, drinkable, and eatable to the human mind. It is the ideal
which has the right to say: _Take, 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 and sovereign mode of
human rallying, and that philosophy herself is promoted to religion.

Philosophy should not be a corbel erected on mystery to gaze upon it at
its ease, without any other result than that of being convenient to
curiosity.

For our part, adjourning the development of our thought to another
occasion, we will confine ourselves to saying that we neither
understand man as a point of departure nor progress as an end, without
those two forces which are their two motors: faith and love.

Progress is the goal, the ideal is the type.

What is this ideal? It is God.

Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity: identical words.






History and philosophy have eternal duties, which are, at the same
time, simple duties; to combat Caiphas the High-priest, Draco the
Lawgiver, Trimalcion the Legislator, Tiberius the Emperor; this is
clear, direct, and limpid, and offers no obscurity.

But the right to live apart, even with its inconveniences and its
abuses, insists on being stated and taken into account. Cenobitism is a
human problem.

When one speaks of convents, those abodes of error, but of innocence,
of aberration but of good-will, of ignorance but of devotion, of
torture but of martyrdom, it always becomes necessary to say either yes
or no.

A convent is a contradiction. Its object, salvation; its means thereto,
sacrifice. The convent is supreme egoism having for its result supreme
abnegation.

To abdicate with the object of reigning seems to be the device of
monasticism.

In the cloister, one suffers in order to enjoy. One draws a bill of
exchange on death. One discounts in terrestrial gloom celestial light.
In the cloister, hell is accepted in advance as a post obit on
paradise.

The taking of the veil or the frock is a suicide paid for with
eternity.

It does not seem to us, that on such a subject mockery is permissible.
All about it is serious, the good as well as the bad.

The just man frowns, but never smiles with a malicious sneer. We
understand wrath, but not malice.






A few words more.

We blame the church when she is saturated with intrigues, we despise
the spiritual which is harsh toward the temporal; but we everywhere
honor the thoughtful man.

We salute the man who kneels.

A faith; this is a necessity for man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor
and invisible labor.

To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.

Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.

Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.

In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not
idlers.

To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing.

Without invalidating anything that we have just said, we believe that a
perpetual memory of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point,
the priest and the philosopher agree. _We must die_. The Abbé de la
Trappe replies to Horace.

To mingle with one’s life a certain presence of the sepulchre,—this is
the law of the sage; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this respect,
the ascetic and the sage converge. There is a material growth; we admit
it. There is a moral grandeur; we hold to that. Thoughtless and
vivacious spirits say:—

“What is the good of those motionless figures on the side of mystery?
What purpose do they serve? What do they do?”


Alas! In the presence of the darkness which environs us, and which
awaits us, in our ignorance of what the immense dispersion will make of
us, we reply: “There is probably no work more divine than that
performed by these souls.” And we add: “There is probably no work which
is more useful.”


There certainly must be some who pray constantly for those who never
pray at all.

In our opinion the whole question lies in the amount of thought that is
mingled with prayer.

Leibnitz praying is grand, Voltaire adoring is fine. _Deo erexit
Voltaire_.

We are for religion as against religions.

We are of the number who believe in the wretchedness of orisons, and
the sublimity of prayer.

Moreover, at this minute which we are now traversing,—a minute which
will not, fortunately, leave its impress on the nineteenth century,—at
this hour, when so many men have low brows and souls but little
elevated, among so many mortals whose morality consists in enjoyment,
and who are busied with the brief and misshapen things of matter,
whoever exiles himself seems worthy of veneration to us.

The monastery is a renunciation. Sacrifice wrongly directed is still
sacrifice. To mistake a grave error for a duty has a grandeur of its
own.

Taken by itself, and ideally, and in order to examine the truth on all
sides until all aspects have been impartially exhausted, the monastery,
the female convent in particular,—for in our century it is woman who
suffers the most, and in this exile of the cloister there is something
of protestation,—the female convent has incontestably a certain
majesty.

This cloistered existence which is so austere, so depressing, a few of
whose features we have just traced, is not life, for it is not liberty;
it is not the tomb, for it is not plenitude; it is the strange place
whence one beholds, as from the crest of a lofty mountain, on one side
the abyss where we are, on the other, the abyss whither we shall go; it
is the narrow and misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminated and
obscured by both at the same time, where the ray of life which has
become enfeebled is mingled with the vague ray of death; it is the half
obscurity of the tomb.

We, who do not believe what these women believe, but who, like them,
live by faith,—we have never been able to think without a sort of
tender and religious terror, without a sort of pity, that is full of
envy, of those devoted, trembling and trusting creatures, of these
humble and august souls, who dare to dwell on the very brink of the
mystery, waiting between the world which is closed and heaven which is
not yet open, turned towards the light which one cannot see, possessing
the sole happiness of thinking that they know where it is, aspiring
towards the gulf, and the unknown, their eyes fixed motionless on the
darkness, kneeling, bewildered, stupefied, shuddering, half lifted, at
times, by the deep breaths of eternity.




