1.C.7.3. 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.