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.