Les Misérables
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.
CHAPTER IV—THE CONVENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PRINCIPLES
Men unite themselves and dwell in communities. By virtue of what right?
By virtue of the right of association.
They shut themselves up at home. By virtue of what right? By virtue of
the right which every man has to open or shut his door.
They do not come forth. By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right
to go and come, which implies the right to remain at home.
There, at home, what do they do?
They speak in low tones; they drop their eyes; they toil. They renounce
the world, towns, sensualities, pleasures, vanities, pride, interests.
They are clothed in coarse woollen or coarse linen. Not one of them
possesses in his own right anything whatever. On entering there, each
one who was rich makes himself poor. What he has, he gives to all. He
who was what is called noble, a gentleman and a lord, is the equal of
him who was a peasant. The cell is identical for all. All undergo the
same tonsure, wear the same frock, eat the same black bread, sleep on
the same straw, die on the same ashes. The same sack on their backs,
the same rope around their loins. If the decision has been to go
barefoot, all go barefoot. There may be a prince among them; that
prince is the same shadow as the rest. No titles. Even family names
have disappeared. They bear only first names. All are bowed beneath the
equality of baptismal names. They have dissolved the carnal family, and
constituted in their community a spiritual family. They have no other
relatives than all men. They succor the poor, they care for the sick.
They elect those whom they obey. They call each other “my brother.”
You stop me and exclaim, “But that is the ideal convent!”
It is sufficient that it may be the possible convent, that I should
take notice of it.
Thence it results that, in the preceding book, I have spoken of a
convent with respectful accents. The Middle Ages cast aside, Asia cast
aside, the historical and political question held in reserve, from the
purely philosophical point of view, outside the requirements of
militant policy, on condition that the monastery shall be absolutely a
voluntary matter and shall contain only consenting parties, I shall
always consider a cloistered community with a certain attentive, and,
in some respects, a deferential gravity.
Wherever there is a community, there is a commune; where there is a
commune, there is right. The monastery is the product of the formula:
Equality, Fraternity. Oh! how grand is liberty! And what a splendid
transfiguration! Liberty suffices to transform the monastery into a
republic.
Let us continue.
But these men, or these women who are behind these four walls. They
dress themselves in coarse woollen, they are equals, they call each
other brothers, that is well; but they do something else?
Yes.
What?
They gaze on the darkness, they kneel, and they clasp their hands.
What does this signify?
CHAPTER V—PRAYER
They pray.
To whom?
To God.
To pray to God,—what is the meaning of these words?
Is there an infinite beyond us? Is that infinite there, inherent,
permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite; and because,
if it lacked matter it would be bounded; necessarily intelligent, since
it is infinite, and because, if it lacked intelligence, it would end
there? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we
can attribute to ourselves only the idea of existence? In other terms,
is it not the absolute, of which we are only the relative?
At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not an
infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming
plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second
infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter’s
mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another
abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does it
love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of
them has a will principle, and there is an _I_ in the upper infinity as
there is an _I_ in the lower infinity. The _I_ below is the soul; the
_I_ on high is God.
To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought,
with the infinity on high, is called praying.
Let us take nothing from the human mind; to suppress is bad. We must
reform and transform. Certain faculties in man are directed towards the
Unknown; thought, reverie, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What is
conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, reverie,
prayer,—these are great and mysterious radiations. Let us respect them.
Whither go these majestic irradiations of the soul? Into the shadow;
that is to say, to the light.
The grandeur of democracy is to disown nothing and to deny nothing of
humanity. Close to the right of the man, beside it, at the least, there
exists the right of the soul.
To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let
us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of
creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We
have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against
the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to
admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify
belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of
caterpillars.
CHAPTER VI—THE ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF PRAYER
With regard to the modes of prayer, all are good, provided that they
are sincere. Turn your book upside down and be in the infinite.
There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the infinite. There is
also a philosophy, pathologically classified, which denies the sun;
this philosophy is called blindness.
To erect a sense which we lack into a source of truth, is a fine blind
man’s self-sufficiency.
The curious thing is the haughty, superior, and compassionate airs
which this groping philosophy assumes towards the philosophy which
beholds God. One fancies he hears a mole crying, “I pity them with
their sun!”
There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom,
led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure
that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition,
and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they
prove God.
We salute them as philosophers, while inexorably denouncing their
philosophy.
Let us go on.
The remarkable thing about it is, also, their facility in paying
themselves off with words. A metaphysical school of the North,
impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a
revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the
word Will.
To say: “the plant wills,” instead of: “the plant grows”: this would be
fecund in results, indeed, if we were to add: “the universe wills.”
Why? Because it would come to this: the plant wills, therefore it has
an _I_; the universe wills, therefore it has a God.
As for us, who, however, in contradistinction to this school, reject
nothing _a priori_, a will in the plant, accepted by this school,
appears to us more difficult to admit than a will in the universe
denied by it.
To deny the will of the infinite, that is to say, God, is impossible on
any other conditions than a denial of the infinite. We have
demonstrated this.
The negation of the infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything
becomes “a mental conception.”
With nihilism, no discussion is possible; for the nihilist logic doubts
the existence of its interlocutor, and is not quite sure that it exists
itself.
From its point of view, it is possible that it may be for itself, only
“a mental conception.”
Only, it does not perceive that all which it has denied it admits in
the lump, simply by the utterance of the word, mind.
In short, no way is open to the thought by a philosophy which makes all
end in the monosyllable, No.
To No there is only one reply, Yes.
Nihilism has no point.
There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything
is something. Nothing is nothing.
Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.
Even to see and to show does not suffice. Philosophy should be an
energy; it should have for effort and effect to ameliorate the
condition of man. Socrates should enter into Adam and produce Marcus
Aurelius; in other words, the man of wisdom should be made to emerge
from the man of felicity. Eden should be changed into a Lyceum. Science
should be a cordial. To enjoy,—what a sad aim, and what a paltry
ambition! The brute enjoys. To offer thought to the thirst of men, to
give them all as an elixir the notion of God, to make conscience and
science fraternize in them, to render them just by this mysterious
confrontation; such is the function of real philosophy. Morality is a