Priests, Women, and Families Part 13

Mental distinction and good education are not so necessary, as is generally thought, for enslaving souls that are willing to be ruled.

Authority, character, position, and costume fortify the _Priest_, and make good in him what was wanting in the _Man_. He gains his ascendency less by his skill than by time and perseverance. If his mind is but little cultivated, it is also less taken up with a variety of new ideas, which incessantly come crowding upon us moderns, amusing and fatiguing us. With fewer ideas, views, and projects, but with an interest, an aim, and ever the same end invariably kept in view--this is the way to succeed.

Must we take it for granted, because you are clownish, you are less cunning on that account? Peasants are circ.u.mspect, often full of cunning, and endued with an indefatigable constancy in following up any petty interest. How many long years, what different means, and often indirect ones, will such a one employ, in order to add two feet of land to his field. Do you think that his son, _Monsieur le Cure_, will be less patient or less ardent in his endeavours to get possession of a soul, to govern this woman, or to enter that family?

These peasant families have often much vigour, a certain sap, belonging to the blood and const.i.tution, which either gives wit, or supplies the place of it. Those in the South especially, where the clergy raise their princ.i.p.al recruits, furnish them with intrepid speakers, who do not need to know anything; and who, by their very ignorance, are, perhaps, only in a more direct communication with the simple persons, to whom they address themselves. They speak out loudly, with energy and a.s.surance; educated persons would be more reserved, and less proper to fascinate the weak; they would not dare to attempt so audaciously a clownish _Mesmerism_ in spiritual things.

In this, I must confess, there is a serious difference between our own century and the seventeenth, when the clergy of all parties were so learned. That culture, those vast studies, that great theological and literary activity were, for the priest of that time, the most powerful diversion in the midst of temptations. Science, or, at the very least, controversy and disputation, created for him, in a position that was often very worldly, a sort of solitude, an _alibi_, as one may say, that effectually preserved him. But ours, who have nothing of the sort, who, moreover, spring from a hardy and material race, and do not know how to employ this embarra.s.sing vigour, must indeed require a fund of virtue!

The great men from whom we have drawn our examples, had a wonderful defence against spiritual and carnal desires; better than a defence, they had wings that raised them from the earth, at the critical moment, above temptation. By these wings, I mean the love of G.o.d, the love of genius for itself, its natural effort to remain on high and ascend, its abhorrence of degradation.

Being chiefs of the clergy of France, the only clergy then flourishing, and responsible to the world for whatever subsisted by their faith, they kept their hearts exalted to the level of the great part they had to perform. One thought was the guardian of their lives--a thought which they repressed, but which did not the less sustain them in delicate trials: it was this, "In them resided the Church."

Their great experience of the world and domestic life, their tact and skilful management of men and things, far from weakening morality, as one might believe, rather defended it in them, enabling them to perceive, and have a presentiment of perils, to see the enemy coming, not to allow him the advantage of unexpected attacks; or, at least, to know how to elude him.

We have seen how Bossuet stopped the soft confidence of a weak nun at the very first word. The little we have said of Fenelon's _direction_ shows sufficiently how the dangerous director evaded the dangers.

Those eminently spiritual persons could keep up for years between heaven and earth this tender dialectic of the love of G.o.d. But is it the same in these days with men who have no wings, who crawl and cannot fly? Incapable of those ingenious turnings and windings by which pa.s.sion went on sportively, and eluding itself, do they not run the risk of stumbling at the first step?

I know well that this absence of early education, and vulgarity or clownishness, may often put an insurmountable barrier between priests and well-bred women. Many things, however, that would not be tolerated in another man are reckoned in them as merits. Stiffness is austerity, and awkwardness is accounted the simplicity of a saint, who has ever lived in a desert. They are measured by a different and more indulgent rule than the laity. The priest takes advantage of everything that is calculated to make him be considered as a man apart, of his dress, his position, his mysterious church, that invests the most vulgar with a poetical gleam.

Who gave them this last advantage? Ourselves. We, who have reinstated, rebuilt, as one may say, those very churches they had disregarded. The priests were building up their Saint-Sulpices, and other heaps of stones, when the laity retrieved Notre-Dame and Saint Ouen. We pointed out to them the Christian spirit of these living stones,[1] but they did not see it; we taught it them, but they could not understand. And how long did the misconception last? Not less than forty years, ever since the appearance of the _Genie de Christianisme_. The priests would not believe us, when we explained to them this sublime edifice; they did not recognise it; but who can wonder? It belongs only to those who understood it.

At length, however, they have changed their opinion. They have found it to be political and clever to speak as we do, and extol Christian architecture. They have decked themselves out with their churches, again invested themselves with this glorious cloak, and a.s.sumed in them a triumphant posture. The crowd comes, looks, and admires. Truly, if we are to judge of a well-dressed man by his coat, he who is invested with the splendour of a Notre-Dame of Paris, or a Cologne cathedral, is apparently the giant of the spiritual world. Alexander, on his departure from India, wishing to deceive posterity as to the size of his Macedonians, had a camp traced out on the ground in which a s.p.a.ce of ten feet was allotted to each of his soldiers. What an immense place is this church, and what an immense host must inhabit this wonderful dwelling! Optical delusion adds still more to the effect.

Every proportion changes. The eye is deceived and deceives itself, at the same time, with these sublime lights and deepening shades, all calculated to increase the illusion. The man whom in the street you judged, by his surly look, to be a village schoolmaster, is here a prophet. He is transformed by this majestic framework; his heaviness becomes strength and majesty; his voice has formidable echoes. Women and children tremble and are afraid.

When a woman returns home, she finds everything prosy and paltry. Had she even Pierre Corneille for a husband, she would think him pitiful, if he lived in the dull house they still show us. Intellectual grandeur in a low apartment does not affect her. The comparison makes her sad, bitterly quiet. The husband puts up with it, and smiles, or pretends to do so; "Her director has turned her brain," says he aloud, and adds, aside, "After all, she only sees him at church." But what place, I ask, is more powerful over the imagination, richer in illusions, and more fascinating than the church? It is precisely the church that enn.o.bles, raises, exaggerates, and sheds a poetical ray upon this otherwise vulgar man.

Do you see that solemn figure, adorned with all the gold and purple of his pontifical dress, ascending with the thought, the prayer of a mult.i.tude of ten thousand men, the triumphal steps in the choir of St.

Denis? Do you see him still, above all that kneeling ma.s.s, hovering as high as the vaulted roofs, his head reaching the capitals, and lost among the winged heads of the angels, whence he hurls his thunder?

Well, it is the same man, this terrible archangel himself, who presently descends for her, and now, mild and gentle, goes yonder into that dark chapel, to listen to her in the languid hours of the afternoon! Delightful hour of tumultuous, but tender sensations! (Why does the heart palpitate so strongly here?) How dark the church becomes! Yet it is not late. The great rose-window over the portal glitters with the setting sun. But it is quite another thing in the choir; dark shadows envelope it, and beyond is obscurity. One thing astounds and almost frightens us, however far we may be, which is the mysterious old painted gla.s.s at the farthest end of the church, on which the design is no longer distinguishable, twinkling in the shade, like an illegible magic scroll of unknown characters. The chapel is not less dark on that account; you can no longer discern the ornaments and delicate moulding entwined in the vaulted roof; the shadow deepening blends and confounds the outlines. But, as if this chapel were not yet dark enough, it contains, in a retired corner, a narrow recess of dark oak, where that man, all emotion, and that trembling woman, so close to each other, are whispering together about the love of G.o.d.

[1] See my History of France (1833), the last chapter of Vol. II., and particularly the last ten pages. In this same volume I have made a serious mistake which I wish to rectify. In speaking of ecclesiastical celibacy (temp. Gregory VII.), I have said that married men could never have raised those sublime monuments, the spire of Strasbourg, &c. I find, on the contrary, that the architects of the Gothic churches were laymen, and generally married. Erwin de Steinbach, who built Strasbourg, had a celebrated daughter, Sabina, who was herself an artist.

CHAPTER II.

CONFESSION.--PRESENT EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG CONFESSOR.--THE CONFESSOR IN THE MIDDLE AGES:--FIRST, BELIEVED; SECONDLY, MORTIFIED HIMSELF; THIRDLY, WAS SUPERIOR BY CULTURE; FOURTHLY, USED TO INTERROGATE LESS.--THE CASUISTS WROTE FOR THEIR TIME.--THE DANGERS OF THE YOUNG CONFESSOR.--HOW HE STRENGTHENS HIS TOTTERING POSITION.

A worthy parish priest has often told me that the sore part of his profession, that which filled him with despair, and his life with torment, was the _Confessional_.

The studies, with which they prepare for it in the seminaries, are such as entirely ruin the disposition, weaken the body, and enervate and defile the soul.

Lay education, without making any pretension to an extraordinary degree of purity, and though the pupils it forms will, one day, enjoy public life, takes, however, especial care to keep from the eyes of youth the glowing descriptions that excite the pa.s.sions.

Ecclesiastical education, on the contrary, which pretends to form men superior to man, pure virgin minds, angels, fixes precisely the attention of its pupils upon things that are to be for ever forbidden them, and gives them for subjects of study terrible temptations, such as would make all the saints run the risk of d.a.m.nation. Their printed books have been quoted, but not so their copy-books, by which they complete the two last years of seminary education. These copy-books contain things that the most audacious have never dared to publish.

I dare not quote here what has been revealed to me about this idiotic education by those who have been its martyrs, and narrowly escaped destruction from it. No one can imagine the condition of a poor young man, still a believer, and very sincere, struggling between the terrors and temptations with which they surround him, at pleasure, with two unknown subjects, either one of which might drive him mad, _Woman!

h.e.l.l!_--and yet obliged to look incessantly at the abyss, blinded, through these impure books, with his sanguine youthful const.i.tution.

This surprising imprudence proceeded originally from the very scholastic supposition, that the body and soul could be perfectly well kept apart. They had imagined they could lead them like two coursers of different tempers, the one to the right and the other to the left.

They did not reflect that, in this case, man would be in the predicament of the chariot sculptured upon the tablet of the Louvre, which, pulled both ways, must inevitably be dashed to pieces.

However different these two substances may be in nature, it is but too manifest that they are mingled in action. Not a motion of the soul but acts upon the body, which re-acts in the same manner. The most cruel discipline inflicted upon the body will destroy it rather than prevent its action upon the soul. To believe that a vow, a few prayers, and a black robe, will deliver you from the flesh, and make you a pure spirit--is perfect childishness.

They will refer me to the middle ages, and to the mult.i.tudes who have lived mortified lives.

For this I have not one answer, but twenty, which admit of no reply.

It is too easy to show that priests in general, and especially the confessor, were then totally different from what they have been for the two last centuries.

I. The first answer will seem, perhaps, harsh--_Then the priest believed_. "What! the priest no longer believes? Do you mean to say that in speaking of his faith with so much energy, he is a hypocrite and a liar?" No, I will allow him to be sincere. But there are two manners of believing, there are many degrees in faith. We are told that Lope de Vega (who, as it is known, was a priest) could not officiate: at the moment of the sacrifice, his fancy pictured the Pa.s.sion too strongly, he would burst into tears and faint. Compare this with the coquettish pantomine of the Jesuit, who acts ma.s.s at Fribourg, or with the prelate whom I have seen at the altar showing to advantage his delicate small hand. The priest believed, and _his penitent believed_. Unheard-of terrors, miracles, devils, and h.e.l.l, filled the church. The motto, "G.o.d hears you," was engraven not only in the wood, but in the heart. It was not a plank that part.i.tioned off the confessional, but the sword of the archangel, the thought of the last judgment.

II. If the priest spoke in the name of the _spirit_, he was partly justified in doing so, having purchased spiritual power by the _suicide of the body_. His long prayers at night would have sufficed to wear him out; but they found more direct means in excessive fasts. Fasting was the diet of those poor schools of Beggars and Cappets, whose scanty meal was composed of arguments. Half dead before the age of manhood, they cooled their blood with herbs producing a deadly chill, and exhausted it by frequent bleedings. The number of bleedings, to which the monks had to submit, was provided in their rules. Their stomachs were soon destroyed, and their strength impaired. Bernard and Theresa were weakened by continual vomitings, even the sense of taste was lost: the Saint, says his biographer, took blood for b.u.t.ter. _Mortification_ was not then an idle word, it was not a separation of the body and soul, but a genuine and honest suppression of the body.

III. The priest believed himself to be, in this sense, the man of the spirit, and he really was so, by the _superiority of culture_. _He_ knew everything, the layman nothing. Even when the priest was young, he was truly the father, the other the child. In our days it is just the contrary; the layman, in cities at least, is generally more learned than the priest. Even the peasant, if he be a father of a family, with business and interests, or has served in the army, has more experience than his cure, and more real knowledge; his speaking more ungrammatically is of no consequence. But the contrast is still more striking, when this inexperienced priest, who has known nothing but his own seminary, sees at his knees a fashionable, intriguing, impa.s.sioned woman, who now, perhaps, at the close of her seventh l.u.s.trum, has pa.s.sed through everything sentimental and ideal. What! _she_ ask his advice? _she_ call him _father_? Why, every word she utters is a revelation for him--astonishment and fear take possession of his soul.

If he is not wise enough to hold his tongue, he will be ridiculous.

His penitent, who came to him all trembling, will depart laughing.

IV. There is another difference which will strike only those who are acquainted with the middle ages--_the language was not developed_ as it now is. No one being then acquainted with our habits of a.n.a.lysing and developing, confession was naturally reduced to a simple declaration of sin, without any detail of circ.u.mstances. Still less could they deduce the phenomena which accompany pa.s.sion--the desires, doubts, and fears which give it the power of illusion, and make it contagious. There was, if you will, confession; but the woman could not express herself, nor could the priest have understood her; she was not able to reveal the depth of her thought, nor could he have reached it if she had done so. Confession on one side, and sentence on the other, nothing more; there was neither dialogue, confidence, nor disclosing of the heart.

If the priest has not enough imagination and wit to put the questions from the store of his own mind, he has had in his hands for the last two centuries ready-made questions, which he may ask in due order, and by which he will force his fair penitent to dive into her own thoughts, sift her own secrets to deliver them over to him, open her heart's fibres, as one may say, thread by thread, and wind off before him the complete skein, which he henceforth holds in his hands.

This terrible instrument of inquiry, which in unskilful hands may corrupt the soul by its injudicious probing, must necessarily be modified when morals change. Morality does not vary, but morals do, according to the lapse of time; yet this very simple truth never once entered their heads. They have adhered to the morals of the period, when the intellectual movement ceased, as far as they were concerned.

The manuals they put into the hands of the young confessor are grounded upon the authority of the casuists, whom Pascal annihilated long ago.

Even if the immorality of their solutions had not been demonstrated, remember that Escobar and Sanchez made their questions for a horribly corrupt period, from which, thank G.o.d, we are far removed. Their casuistry was from the first addressed to the corrupt and disordered state of society occasioned by long religious warfare. You will find among them crimes that were perhaps never perpetrated, except by the brutal soldiers of the Duke of Alva, or by the exiled, lawless, and G.o.dless band that Wallenstein drew after him, a wandering ma.s.s of iniquity which would have been abhorred by ancient Sodom.

We know not how to qualify this culpable routine. These books, composed for a barbarous age, unparalleled in crimes, are the same that you give to your pupils in our own civilised age. And this young priest, who, according to your instructions, believes that the world is still that dreadful world, who enters the Confessional with all this villanous science, and his imagination full of monstrous cases, you, imprudent men! (what shall I call you?) you confront him with a child who has never left her mother's side, who knows nothing, has nothing to say, and whose greatest crime is that she has not learned her catechism properly, or has hurt a b.u.t.terfly!

I shudder at the interrogatories to which he will subject her, and at what he will teach her in his _conscientious brutality_. But he questions her in vain. She knows nothing, and says nothing. He scolds her, and she weeps. Her tears will be soon dried, but it will be long before she ceases to reflect.

A volume might be composed on the first start of the young priest, and his imprudent steps, all fatal either to himself or others. The penitent is occasionally more circ.u.mspect than the confessor. She is amused at his proceedings, and looks at him coldly when he becomes animated and goes too far. Sometimes, forgetting himself in his impa.s.sioned dream, he is suddenly and roughly awakened by a lesson from an intelligent and satirical woman kneeling before him.

This cruel lesson has given him an icy chill. Confessors do not suffer such a repulse, without remaining a long time bitter, sometimes spiteful for ever. The young priest knew well that he was the victim, the disinherited of this world, but it had not been forced home upon him. Gall drowns his heart. He prays to G.o.d (if he can still pray) that the world may perish!

Then returning to his senses, and seeing himself irremediably limed in that black winding-sheet, that death-robe that he will wear to the grave, he shrouds himself within it as he curses it, and muses how he may make the best of his torment.

The only thing he can do, is to strengthen his position as a priest.

He has two way of succeeding, either by an understanding with the Jesuits, or by paying a servile court to _Monseigneur_ the bishop. I recommend him especially to be violent against the philosophers, and to bark at _pantheism_. Let him also blacken his fellow-priests, and he will appear so much the purer himself. Let him prove himself a thorough hater, and they will forgive him his love.

The Brotherhood will henceforth protect, defend, and cover him. What would have ruined the solitary priest, becomes sanct.i.ty itself when he becomes one of a party. Before, he would have been suspended, and sent perhaps for six months to _La Trappe_--now he is made Vicar-general.

Only let him be prudent in the delicate business which the fraternity wishes to conceal; let him learn the arts of priests--to feign, to wait, to know when and how to be satisfied; to advance but slowly, openly, and above ground sometimes, but more often secretly, underneath.