1.C.7.2. THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT
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!