Will it be said that, in the preceding chapter, being seduced by a sweeter subject, I have lost sight of the whole subject in dispute hitherto pursued in my book?
I think I have, on the contrary, thrown much light upon the question. Maternal love (that miracle of God) and maternal education enable us to understand what every education, direction, or initiation ought to be.
The singular advantage which the mother has in education is, that, being more than all others devoted and disinterested, she respects infantine personality in the fragile little thing which is becoming a person. She is, for the child, the defender of his original individuality. She wishes, even at the expense of her own feelings, that he should act according to his genius, and that he may grow up andrise. What can education and true direction require? What love desires in its highest and most disinterested idea—that the young creature mayrise. Take this word in both its acceptations. She wishes the child may rise above herself, up to the level of him who helps her, and even above him, if he can. The stronger party, far from absorbing the weaker, wishes to make him strong, and put him on an equal footing. She endeavours to do this by developing in him not only whatever is similar in their natures, but even whatever is characteristically distinctive between them, by exciting his free originality, provoking activity in this being born for action, and by appealing to the person, and what is most personal in the person, his will. The dearest wish of love is to excite the will, and the moral force of the person loved, to its highest degree, to heroism!
The ideal of every mother, and it is the true one in education, is to make a hero, a man powerful in actions and fruitful in works, who may be endowed with will, power, and a creative genius. Let us compare with this ideal that of ecclesiastical education and direction.
The latter wishes to make a saint, andnota hero; it believes these two words to be diametrically opposite. It is mistaken also in its idea of sanctity, in making it consist not in being in harmony with God, but in absorption in God.
All this priestly theology, as soon as we provoke it a little, and do not allow it to remain in inconsistency, falls headlong down the irresistible declivity, right into this abyss. There it ended, as it was obliged to end, in the seventeenth century. The great directors of that time, who, by being the last, had the advantage of analysing the thing, show us perfectly well the bottom of it, which is annihilation, the art of annihilating activity, the will, and personality. "Annihilate? Yes, but in God." But does God wish it? His active and creating spirit must wish us to resemble Him, to act and to create. You have a wrong idea of God the Father.
This false theory is convicted in practice. By following it closely we have seen that it arrives at quite an opposite goal. It promises to absorb man in God; and it consoles him for this absorption, by promising him that he shall participate in the infinite existence which he is entering. But, in reality, it does nothing more than absorb man in man, in infinite littleness. The person directed being annihilated in the director, of two persons there remains but one; the other, as a person, has perished; and become a thing.
Devout direction, noticed in our first part among the most loyal directors, and among very pious women, gives me two results, which I state thus:—
1st. A saint who discourses for a long time with a female saint on the love of God, infallibly converts her to love.
2nd. If this love remain pure, it is a chance; it is because the man is a saint; for the person directed, losing gradually all her own will, must, in course of time, be at his mercy. We must suppose, also, that he who may do everything will take no advantage of it, and that this miracle of abstinence will be renewed every day. The priest has always thought himself, in his interior strength, to be a great master in matters of love. Accustomed to control his own passions, to be deceitful, and to beat about the bush, he believes he is the exclusive possessor of the real secret how passions are to be managed. He advances under cover of ambiguous expressions, and he advances in safety; for he is patient, and waits till he has gained a footing in habits and in customs. He laughs in his sleeve at our impassioned vivacity, imprudent frankness, and ungoverned impetuosity, which cause us to pass wide of the mark.
If love was the art of surprising the soul, of subjugating it by authority and insinuation, and of conquering it by fear, in order to gain it by indulgence, so that, when wearied and drowsy with exertion, it may allow itself to be enveloped and caught in an invisible net; if this were love, then certainly the priest would be its great teacher.
Clever masters! learn from ignorant and unskilful men, that with all your little arts, you have never known what is this sacred thing. It requires a sincere heart, and loyalty in the means, as its first condition; the second is, that generosity which does not wish to enslave, but rather to set at liberty and fortify what it loves; to love it in liberty, leaving it free to love or not to love.
Come, my saints! and listen to worldly men on this subject: to dramatists, to Molière, and to Shakspeare. These have known more about it than you. The lover is asked who is the loved object? of what name? of what figure? and of what shape? "Just as high as my heart."
A noble standard, which is that of love, as well as that of education, and of every kind of initiation: a sincerely wished-for equality, the desire of raising the other person to one's own height, and of making her one's equal, "Just as high as one's heart." Shakspeare has said so; Molière has done so. The latter was, in the highest degree, "the educating genius;" one who wishes to raise and set free, and who loves in equality, liberty, and intelligence. He has denounced as a crime that unworthy love which surprises the soul by keeping it apart in ignorance, and holding it as a slave and captive.
In his life, conformable to his works, he gave the noble example of that generous love, which wishes that the person loved should behis equal, and as much as himself, which strengthens her, and gives her arms even against himself. This is love, and this is faith. It is the belief that sooner or later the emancipated being must return to the most worthy. And who is the most worthy? Is it not he who wished to be loved with liberty?
Nevertheless, let us well weigh the meaning of this important wordhis equal, and all the dangers it may contain. It is as if this creator said to the creature, whom he has made and is now emancipating, "Thou art free; the power under which thou hast grown up holds thee no more: being away from me, and attached to me now only by the heart and memory, thou mayest act and think elsewhere, nay against me if thou wilt!"
This is what is so sublime in love; and the reason why God pardons it so many weaknesses! It is because in this unlimited disinterestedness, wishing to make a free being and to be loved freely by it, it creates its own peril. The saying, "You may act elsewhere," contains also "to love elsewhere," and the chance of losing the object. That hand, so weak before, but now strengthened and made bold by all the cares of affection, receives the sword from love: even would she turn it against him, she can; there is nothing to hinder her, for he has reserved nothing for himself.
Pray let us exalt this idea, and extend it from the love of woman to universal love, to that which makes the life both of the world and of civil society.
In the world, it calls incessantly from kingdom to kingdom the ever-quickening life, which receives the flame, and goes on rising. It raises from unknown depths beings which it emancipates, and arms with liberty, with the power of acting well or ill, and even of acting against him, who creates them, and makes them free.
In the civil world, does love (charity, patriotism, or whatever they call it) do anything but this? Its work is to call to social life and political power whatever is yet without life in the city. It raises up the weak and poor in their rough path, where they crawl on their hands and feet against destiny, and bestows upon them equality and liberty.
The inferior degree of love is a desire to absorb life. Its superior degree is to wish to exalt life in energy and fruitfulness. It rejoices in raising, augmenting, and creating what it loves. Its happiness is to see a new creature of God rise under its influence, and to contribute its aid to the creation, whether it be for good or for ill.
"But is not love, with this disinterestedness, an uncommon miracle? One of those very short instances when the night of our egotism is illumined by a ray from God?"
No, the miracle is permanent. You see it, you have it before your eyes, but you turn away your head. Uncommon, perhaps, in the lover, it is everywhere visible in the mother. Mortal, you seek God in heaven and under the earth, but he is in your own domestic circle.
Man, woman, and child, the unity of the three persons, and their mutual mediation—this is the mystery of mysteries. The divine idea of Christianity is thus to have put the family upon the altar. It placed it there, and there it has left it, for fifteen hundred years. My poor monk, in the middle ages, contemplated it there in vain. He could never understand the mother as initiation. He exhausted his energies by taking the sterile side; he pursued the Virgin, and left us Our Lady.
Man of modern times! thou shalt do what he could not. This shall be thy work. Mayest thou only, in the height of thy abstract genius, not disdain women and children, who will teach thee life! Instruct them in science and the world, and they will speak to thee of God.
Let the family-hearth become firm and strong, then the tottering edifice of religion, political religion, will quietly settle down. Let it never be forgotten, that humble stone, in which we see only our good old domestic Lares, is the corner-stone of the Temple, and the foundation-stone of the City.
I have finished, yet my heart has not. Therefore, one word more.
One word to the priests. I handled them gently, yet they have attacked me. Well! even now, it is not them that I attack. This book is not against them.
It attacks their own slavish state, the unnatural position in which they are kept, and the strange conditions which make them at once unhappy and dangerous: if it has any effect, it will prepare for them the period of deliverance, personal and mental freedom.
Let them say and do what they please, they will not prevent me from being interested in their fate. I impute nothing to them. They are not free to be just, or to love or to hate, they receive the words they are to say, their sentiments and thoughts, from higher powers. They who set them on against me are the same men who are, at this moment, preparing against them the most cruel inquisition. The more insulated and miserable they are made, the greater will be the advantage derived from their restless activity; let them have neither home, family, country, nor heart, if it be possible: to serve a dead system, none but dead men are wanted—wandering and troubled spirits, without a sepulchre and without repose.
By means of the wordsunityanduniversal Church, they have made them quit the ways of the Church of France. They now enjoy the fruits of this change! They well know what Rome is, and what a Jesuitical bishop is. If the universality of mind (which is the only true one) was ever possessed by Rome, she lost it a long time ago; it is to be met with again, in modern times, and it is in France. For two centuries past, we may say, morally speaking, that France is the pope. The authority is here, under one form or another; it is here by Louis XIV., by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, by theConstituante, the Code and Napoleon. Europe has always its centre, every other nation is on the outside.
The world goes on, and flies away, far, very far from the middle ages. Most people think of them no more; but I shall not forget them. The shameful parade made of them by any one before my eyes, will not induce me to turn my heart from those dark and mournful ages, with which I have been so long acquainted, suffering when they have suffered. The sympathy I retain for that by-gone age, whose ashes I have warmed again, prevents me from being indifferent to its most faithless representatives. I do not hate, but I make comparisons, and am sad. I cannot pass the front of the church-porch without saying to Nôtre Dame, in the words of the ancient, "O miseram domum, quàm dispari dominaris domino!" Alas! poor house, thou hast made a sad change of masters!
I have never been insensible either to the humiliation of the Church, or to the sufferings of the priest. I have them all present, both before my imagination and in my heart. I have followed this unfortunate man in the career of privations, and in the miserable life into which he is dragged by the hand of a hypocritical authority. And in his loneliness, on his cold and melancholy hearth, where he sometimes weeps at night, let him remember that a man has often wept with him, and that I am that man.
Who would not pity this victim of social contradictions? The laws tell him things diametrically opposite to one another, as if to sport with him. They will and they will not have him obey nature. The canon law says No, and the civil law says Yes. If he take the latter to be serious, the man of the civil law, the judge, whose protection he expects, acts like a priest, seizes him by the robe, and hands him over degraded to the yoke of the canon law. Agree together, then, O laws! and let us be able to find authority somewhere. If this be law, and the other one directly contrary be also law, what will he do, who believes them both to be sacred?
Oh how my heart swells for all these unfortunate men! How many prayers have I made that they may be permitted to abandon a condition, which gives so rude a contradiction to nature and to the progress of the world! Oh! that I might with my hands build up and cheer the domestic hearth of the poor priest, give him the first rights of man, re-establish him in truth and life, and say to him, "Come and sit with us, leave that deadly shadow, and take thy place, O brother, in the sunshine of God!"
Two men have always deeply touched my heart, two solitary beings, two monks—the soldier and the priest. I have seen, often in my thoughts, and always with sadness, these two great sterile armies, to whom intellectual food is refused, or measured out with so niggardly a hand. They whose hearts have been weaned would require to be nourished with the vivifying food of the mind.
What will be the ameliorations and the remedies for these serious evils? We shall not attempt to tell them now. Either means and contrivances are found out by time, or it manages to do without them.
What we may safely say is, that one day or other, these termspriestandsoldierwill indicate two ages, rather than two conditions. The wordpriest, in its origin, meantold man; a young priest is a nonsensical contradiction.
The soldier is the youth who, after the school of childhood, and that of work, comes to be proved in the great national school of the army, and to gain strength, before he settles down to the quiet state of matrimony and the family table. Military life, when the state has made it what it ought to be, will be the last education, varied with studies, voyages, and perils, the experience of which will be of advantage to the new family which the man will form on his return.
The priest, on the contrary, in the highest acceptation of the term, ought to be an old man, as he was at first, or at least a man of a mature age, who, having passed through the cares of this world, and being well acquainted with family life, has been taught by his experience to understand the sense of the Great Family of the Universe. Seated among the old men, like the elders of Israel, he would communicate to the young the treasures of his experience; he would be the man for all parties; the man who belongs to the poor, the conciliating umpire to prevent lawsuits, and the physician of health to prevent diseases. To be all that, something more is required than an excitable, hot-headed young man. It ought to be a man who has seen, learned, and suffered much, and who has at last found in his own heart the kind words which may comfort us on our way to the world to come.