Les Misérables, page 140
CHAPTER III--ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST
Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists inThibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization. It stops life short. Itsimply depopulates. Claustration, castration. It has been the scourgeof Europe. Add to this the violence so often done to the conscience, theforced vocations, feudalism bolstered up by the cloister, the right ofthe first-born pouring the excess of the family into monasticism, theferocities of which we have just spoken, the _in pace_, the closedmouths, the walled-up brains, so many unfortunate minds placed in thedungeon of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, the interment ofliving souls. Add individual tortures to national degradations,and, whoever you may be, you will shudder before the frock and theveil,--those two winding-sheets of human devising. Nevertheless, atcertain points and in certain places, in spite of philosophy, in spiteof progress, the spirit of the cloister persists in the midst of thenineteenth century, and a singular ascetic recrudescence is, at thismoment, astonishing the civilized world. The obstinacy of antiquatedinstitutions in perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness ofthe rancid perfume which should claim our hair, the pretensions of thespoiled fish which should persist in being eaten, the persecution of thechild's garment which should insist on clothing the man, the tendernessof corpses which should return to embrace the living.
"Ingrates!" says the garment, "I protected you in inclement weather. Whywill you have nothing to do with me?" "I have just come from the deepsea," says the fish. "I have been a rose," says the perfume. "I haveloved 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 thegovernment of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition,to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, torefurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handleson holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism andmilitarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplicationof 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 simpleprocess; they apply to the past a glazing which they call socialorder, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antiqueauthority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go aboutshouting, "Look! take this, honest people." This logic was known to theancients. The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer overwith chalk, and said, "She is white, _Bos cretatus_."
As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, aboveall, 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 nailsin their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and warmust be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of thefatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms.It is difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to theearth.
A convent in France, in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, isa college of owls facing the light. A cloister, caught in the very actof asceticism, in the very heart of the city of '89 and of 1830 andof 1848, Rome blossoming out in Paris, is an anachronism. In ordinarytimes, 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 ordinarytimes.
Let us fight.
Let us fight, but let us make a distinction. The peculiar property oftruth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration?There is that which it is necessary to destroy, and there is that whichit is simply necessary to elucidate and examine. What a force is kindlyand serious examination! Let us not apply a flame where only a light isrequired.
So, given the nineteenth century, we are opposed, as a generalproposition, and among all peoples, in Asia as well as in Europe,in India as well as in Turkey, to ascetic claustration. Whoever sayscloister, says marsh. Their putrescence is evident, their stagnation isunhealthy, their fermentation infects people with fever, and etiolatesthem; their multiplication becomes a plague of Egypt. We cannot thinkwithout affright of those lands where fakirs, bonzes, santons, Greekmonks, marabouts, talapoins, and dervishes multiply even like swarms ofvermin.
This said, the religious question remains. This question has certainmysterious, almost formidable sides; may we be permitted to look at itfixedly.
