บทที่ บทที่ 133 · 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.