Les Misérables, v. 1/5: Fantine
Page 16
CHAPTER XIV.
WHAT HE THOUGHT.
One last word.
As these details might, especially at the present day, and to employ anexpression which is now fashionable, give the Bishop of D---- a certain"Pantheistic" physiognomy, and cause it to be believed, either to hispraise or blame, that he had in him one of those personal philosophiespeculiar to our age, which germinate sometimes in solitary minds, andgrow until they take the place of religion, we must lay stress on thefact that not one of the persons who knew Monseigneur Welcome believedhimself authorized in thinking anything of the sort. What enlightenedthis man was his heart, and his wisdom was the product of the lightwhich emanates from it.
He had no systems, but abundance of deeds. Abstruse speculationscontain vertigo, and nothing indicates that he ventured his mind amidthe Apocalypses. The apostle may be bold, but the bishop must betimid. He probably refrained from going too deep into certain problemsreserved to some extent for great and terrible minds. There is a sacredhorror beneath the portals of the enigma; the dark chasms gape beforeyou, but something tells you that you must not enter: woe to him whopenetrates. Geniuses, in the profundities of abstraction and purespeculation, being situated, so to speak, above dogmas, propose theirideas to God; their prayer audaciously offers a discussion, and theiradoration interrogates. This is direct religion, full of anxiety andresponsibility for the man who attempts to carry the escarpment bystorm.
Human meditation has no limits; at its own risk and peril it analyzesand produces its own bedazzlement; we might almost say that, through aspecies of splendid reaction, it dazzles nature with it. The mysteriousworld around us gives back what it receives, and it is probable thatthe contemplators are contemplated. However this may be, there are inthe world men--are they men?--who distinctly perceive on the horizon ofdreamland the heights of the Absolute, and have the terrible vision ofthe mountain of the Infinite. Monseigneur Welcome was not one of thesemen, for he was not a genius. He would have feared these sublimities,on which even very great men, like Swedenborg and Pascal, fell in theirinsanity. Assuredly, such powerful reveries have their utility, andby these arduous routes ideal perfection is approached, but he took ashort-cut,--the Gospel. He did not attempt to convert his chasuble intoElijah's cloak, he cast no beam of the future over the gloomy heavingof events; there was nothing of the prophet or the Magus about him.This humble soul loved, that was all.
It is probable that he expanded prayer into a superhuman aspiration;but a man can no more pray too much than he can love too much, andif it were a heresy to pray further than the text, St Theresa and StJ?r?me would be heretics. He bent down over all that groaned and allthat expiated; the universe appeared to him an immense malady; he felta fever everywhere; he heard the panting of suffering all around him,and without trying to solve the enigma, he sought to heal the wound.The formidable spectacle of created things developed tenderness in him;he was solely engaged in finding for himself and arousing in others thebest way of pitying and relieving. Existence was to this good and rarepriest a permanent subject of sorrow seeking for consolation.
There are some men who toil to extract gold, but he labored to extractpity; the universal wretchedness was his mine. Sorrow all around wasonly an opportunity for constant kindness. "Love one another" hedeclared to be complete; he wished for nothing more, and that washis entire doctrine. One day the Senator, who believed himself a"philosopher," said to the Bishop: "Just look at the spectacle of theworld; all are fighting, and the strongest man is the cleverest. Your'love one another' is nonsense." "Well," Monseigneur Welcome replied,without discussion, "if it be nonsense, the soul must shut itself upin it like the pearl in the oyster." He consequently shut himselfup in it, lived in it, was absolutely satisfied with it, leavingon one side those prodigious questions which attract and terrify,the unfathomable perspectives of the abstract, the precipices ofmetaphysics, all those depths which for the apostle converge in God,for the atheist in nothingness: destiny, good, and evil, the war ofbeing against being, human consciousness, the pensive somnambulismof the animal, transformation through death, the recapitulation ofexistences which the grave contains, the incomprehensible grafting ofsuccessive loves on the enduring Me, essence, substance, the Nil andEns nature, liberty, necessity; in a word, he avoided all the gloomyprecipices over which the gigantic archangels of the human mind bend,the formidable abysses which Lucretius, Manou, St. Paul, and Dantecontemplate with that flashing eye which seems, in regarding Infinity,to make stars sparkle in it.
Monseigneur Welcome was simply a man who accepted mysterious questionswithout scrutinizing, disturbing them, or troubling his own mind, andwho had in his soul a grave respect for the shadow.
BOOK II.
THE FALL.