บทที่ บทที่ 132 · 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!