Chương Chương 138 · FAITH, LAW

A few words more.

We blame the church when she is saturated with intrigues, we despise

the spiritual which is harsh toward the temporal; but we everywhere

honor the thoughtful man.

We salute the man who kneels.

A faith; this is a necessity for man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor

and invisible labor.

To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.

Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.

Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.

In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not

idlers.

To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing.

Without invalidating anything that we have just said, we believe that a

perpetual memory of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point,

the priest and the philosopher agree. _We must die_. The Abbé de la

Trappe replies to Horace.

To mingle with one’s life a certain presence of the sepulchre,—this is

the law of the sage; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this respect,

the ascetic and the sage converge. There is a material growth; we admit

it. There is a moral grandeur; we hold to that. Thoughtless and

vivacious spirits say:—

“What is the good of those motionless figures on the side of mystery?

What purpose do they serve? What do they do?”

Alas! In the presence of the darkness which environs us, and which

awaits us, in our ignorance of what the immense dispersion will make of

us, we reply: “There is probably no work more divine than that

performed by these souls.” And we add: “There is probably no work which

is more useful.”

There certainly must be some who pray constantly for those who never

pray at all.

In our opinion the whole question lies in the amount of thought that is

mingled with prayer.

Leibnitz praying is grand, Voltaire adoring is fine. _Deo erexit

Voltaire_.

We are for religion as against religions.

We are of the number who believe in the wretchedness of orisons, and

the sublimity of prayer.

Moreover, at this minute which we are now traversing,—a minute which

will not, fortunately, leave its impress on the nineteenth century,—at

this hour, when so many men have low brows and souls but little

elevated, among so many mortals whose morality consists in enjoyment,

and who are busied with the brief and misshapen things of matter,

whoever exiles himself seems worthy of veneration to us.

The monastery is a renunciation. Sacrifice wrongly directed is still

sacrifice. To mistake a grave error for a duty has a grandeur of its

own.

Taken by itself, and ideally, and in order to examine the truth on all

sides until all aspects have been impartially exhausted, the monastery,

the female convent in particular,—for in our century it is woman who

suffers the most, and in this exile of the cloister there is something

of protestation,—the female convent has incontestably a certain

majesty.

This cloistered existence which is so austere, so depressing, a few of

whose features we have just traced, is not life, for it is not liberty;

it is not the tomb, for it is not plenitude; it is the strange place

whence one beholds, as from the crest of a lofty mountain, on one side

the abyss where we are, on the other, the abyss whither we shall go; it

is the narrow and misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminated and

obscured by both at the same time, where the ray of life which has

become enfeebled is mingled with the vague ray of death; it is the half

obscurity of the tomb.

We, who do not believe what these women believe, but who, like them,

live by faith,—we have never been able to think without a sort of

tender and religious terror, without a sort of pity, that is full of

envy, of those devoted, trembling and trusting creatures, of these

humble and august souls, who dare to dwell on the very brink of the

mystery, waiting between the world which is closed and heaven which is

not yet open, turned towards the light which one cannot see, possessing

the sole happiness of thinking that they know where it is, aspiring

towards the gulf, and the unknown, their eyes fixed motionless on the

darkness, kneeling, bewildered, stupefied, shuddering, half lifted, at

times, by the deep breaths of eternity.

BOOK EIGHTH—CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM