by Greil Marcus
MICHEL EMBARKED
Michel embarked on his first obsession. Looking over his shoulder, he searched the bookstores for Maurras’ banned tracts; in a great coup, he found a twenty-five volume set. With France surrendering to a soulless materialism, to the survivalist mentality of food rationing and the mindless craze for gadgets and conveniences, the now-illegal AF was the new underground, the new resistance; Michel sought it out. Joining secret gatherings in the postwar 1940s, Michel and other acolytes tried to relive the heroic prewar 1930s.
At a royalist meeting, Michel encountered “Jacques,” the young man who would become his best friend. For Jacques fascism was merely the least corrupt part of a wholly corrupt modern world: he lived for true salvation, for a Church Militant unafraid of stakes and fires, for the wonders of an epoch close to heaven, innocent of the rationalism that had brought life down to earth. He introduced Michel to the notion of faith: the goal was surrender and the spark was authority, but there was no authority to be found in France. The Spanish Civil War, Jacques told Michel, was the first true crusade in seven hundred years, and France turned away from it. Michel’s father burned his picture of La Pasionaria; no matter what the torture, Michel knew Jacques would never disavow Franco.
The two linked up with the far-right but legal Republican Freedom Party. Thrown together with demobilized Free French fighters, former Resistance partisans, self-proclaimed Nietzscheans, would-be poets, petty criminals, unemployed workers, French Nazis, homosexuals, and certifiable lunatics, the whole lumpen petite bourgeoisie of postwar France, Michel and Jacques became RFP goons. Like most of the rest, they were recruited out of Latin Quarter cafes—as, more than three decades later, punks and skinheads would be drawn out of British pubs by agents of the neo-Nazi National Front. Promised travel, free meals, and excitement, the gang disrupted opposition meetings and served as an RFP bodyguard. They learned the techniques of ambush; when leftists arrived at their own cafes, Michel and his comrades rose from the tables and beat them up. What they were trying to kill, Mourre would explain, was the dullness of the peace.
Michel was dispatched across France to convert workers in thrall to Marxist ideology—in thrall, the Marxists said in turn, to the sort of businessmen who were standing as RFP candidates. Listening to the laborers, Michel understood one thing: whoever their masters, he could never free them. For that matter the RFP was going nowhere; one by one, the most admirable of Michel’s fellows were heading back to the church. He approached a priest and received instruction; on 14 August 1946 he was baptized.
Nothing happened. He sought a bolt of lightning and gained the right to light a candle. Back in Paris he and Jacques determined to start their own fascist magazine; a government license was required, none could be forthcoming, and so they made common cause with a moribund royalist sheet. Michel floundered; he quit going to mass. He pressed for rigorous narrowness rather than narrow rigorousness, deciding that if lust was the human flaw, Original Sin, for any son of God even marriage was filth. To keep their magazine going, he and Jacques organized lectures on the Left Bank; for a treatise on Socrates, he found himself quoting Nietzsche, stumbled into the arms of Zarathustra, and came face to face with “the fearful, bloody blasphemy: ‘God is dead.’ ”
Today we call such a moment an identity crisis; in those days psychology yielded to politics. For Michel it was a social crisis, world-historical. He had the ability to go straight to the heart of a doctrine, to travel through epochs in an instant. He understood that Original Sin was the beginning of the will; as God’s curse it was man’s blessing. God offered man salvation along with a Master, but along with damnation Original Sin made every man his own master, master of the kingdom of no. With Michel’s ravings, the owners of the royalist magazine began to worry; they accused their editors of fanaticism. “We argued,” Mourre wrote,
that the world had a great burning need of fanatics and madmen, men who would sacrifice themselves entirely for a faith, a belief or a creed. Faced with an East transformed by Communism and Communist loyalties and bursting with fresh confidence, our worn-out West was frightened of losing its material and moral riches which it had not even the courage to defend. To counteract Communist faith on earth and Communist ambitions to appropriate the world, it was necessary to establish absolute faith in Eternity, to create fanatics about Eternity and prove that the craze for Eternity was not yet dead among the people of the West.
They were losing their grip; the kingdom of no turned into the kingdom of yes. Michel reveled in the awful freedoms of Original Sin; Jacques became fixated on Don Quixote. Together they attacked the cafes with rants on the greatness of folly, the folly of greatness, the bottomless pit of sex, the sexless pit of bottomlessness, the splendor of holy martyrs, the marvels of the Inquisition. Imagine! Once, only yards from where we stand, men and women were burned alive for the glory of God! My friends, the choice is yours to make!
It was 1947. The young men and women in the cafes smiled and turned away. You saw all kinds on the Left Bank. To Michel everything became clear: “it was not a change in the social system that was needed, but a change in one’s inner life.” He decided to become a monk.
In a speech last weekend to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland, Thatcher quoted from scripture to demonstrate what she said was a biblical injunction to “work and use our talents to create wealth.”
Illustrating her belief that the exercise of “individual responsibility” is more beneficial to society than the collective action of the welfare state, Thatcher noted that Jesus Christ’s decision to die for the sins of others was a matter of personal choice.
—San Francisco Chronicle, 26 May 1988
Being under age, Michel met with his father to get permission; relieved that his son was not about to join the army, he granted it. Michel visited a Dominican monk to profess his wish to surrender his worldly existence to the order; overcome by a sense of unworthiness, he fled. Ultimately, on the advice of his father—shockingly, the old church-hater was himself on the verge of conversion—Michel found his way to the Dominican monastery of Saint-Maximin in Toulouse. There he contrived a remarkable fantasy: someday soon, he would administer his father’s first communion. And then he would go forth, herald of a great revival, transforming the “whole world into one vast church,” remaining forever unsatisfied until God was “worshipped and glorified at every minute in the life of every man.” Within two weeks Michel was back in Paris; on Christmas Day 1947 he enlisted in the army for a three-year hitch.
He was sent to Germany, part of the occupation forces. He became a clerk, no less a joke than his first government job. He learned to despise the Germans, people he once thought fit to rule the world, but now so craven they ate French dirt for a glass of cheap champagne; he mastered the art of goldbricking. Sitting at his desk, bored and full of hate, he got fat and dreamed of Paris. Two-and-a-half years of nothing to go.
Misery brought illness, which revealed a heart condition. In January 1949 Michel received indefinite leave and a disability pension pending a full discharge. He made straight for the Left Bank and Jacques, but Jacques was in Nice, sunk in decadence and luxuria; on his own, Michel was sickened by the degeneracy of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Everywhere he looked he saw pederasts and prostitutes. Once more he journeyed to Saint-Maximin, and this time stuck it out. In June he received his habit and began his novitiate.
LIFE
“Life,” Mourre wrote, “was no longer ‘historical.’ At first I was amazed at the contempt for history shown by the Dominicans of Saint-Maximin. History no longer counted for them; it had no more secrets to disclose. Everything was already a thing of the past, an accomplished fact, for the ultimate meaning of history had been revealed two thousand years before, when the final triumph of Christ was assured. The historical sufferings of our time never penetrated the walls of the cloisters.” To Michel the gift of nothing-new-under-the-sun was absolute freedom, freedom from himself.
The world receded into
an impenetrable past, a never-ending present, a preordained future. Spurning all vices, abandoning all possessions, Michel touched peace of mind. Discipline was everywhere; he felt showered with love. In the wonders of obedience and fellowship, he took eternity into his mouth.
The food was generally good. Life became a struggle between grand hopes and petty faults; Michel fought his desires. The novitiate exposed every one of them.
The fathers lived in perfect harmony; Michel and his fellows had to create it. That was their testing. In brutal meetings every gesture, every word, was scrutinized. Life was broken down into tiny moments; as if ruled by a great magnet, each one was drawn back to a standard of piety no man could match.
The monk would get up and accuse himself of his faults. Then he performed another venia [abasement] and remained lying on the floor while one by one the other monks would get up and accuse the penitent: “I accuse Brother G. of failing to keep a modest expression on his face while out walking, and of glancing at people he meets with too much interest!”. . . Or: “I accuse Brother B. of talking to Brother F. who was seeing to his tonsure and of showing too much concern on that score!” . . . Or: “I accuse Brother A. of showing too much pleasure in accusing himself and of performing the gestures of humility in an ostentatious manner!”
To hold his own each new pledge sought a scapegoat; each became one. Michel found his whipping boy; another novice found him. Michel placed one foot in front of the other in fear of what someone else might make of the movement. There was nothing new under the sun, but the world began anew with every instant, and could end there. The world of freedom, Michel decided, was a world of terrorism.
As always, he looked for an escape. He met with the master of the monastery and spoke his mind. Master, we cannot stay here, cloistered within our walls—there is a world to win! We must go into the world to preach, we must preach like the old Dominicans, in the streets, in the doorways of houses, in the cafes—in nightclubs! The other novices were country bumpkins and city virgins; Michel had seen it all. He felt free, ready to act. But the rules of Saint-Maximin insisted that he was already acting, with every curl of the lip, every raising of a hand—and that his acts fell short of a very close mark. Tied to eternity, Michel was a nobody.
For that matter he wasn’t free—free of himself. Joining Sunday vespers with the nuns of Saint-Maximin, he knelt, gazed upon the Passion, heard the women praying, and got an erection. No one noticed, Michel did not confess at the sessions of autocritique, and so the moment festered. Michel tried to channel his lust for women back into his first lust: books.
There were few. The novitiate library was strictly controlled. Saint-Maximin was a Thomist institution, the purest of the pure; what was acceptable to the Dominicans of Paris was heresy in Toulouse. Of all the authors of Christendom one might read only Aquinas himself, Saint John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena, Saint Theresa of Avila, and “the blessed Suso.” Michel read them all, and it is inescapable that he came across what, today, are Suso’s most famous words.
HEINRICH SUSO
Heinrich Suso (1300?–1366) is variously described as a disciple of the great German mystic Meister Eckhart and, given the accusations of heresy Eckhart suffered, as a dissenter from his doctrines. Suso’s works were two: Das Büchlein der Wahrheit (The Little Book of the Truth) and Das Büchlein der Ewigen Weisheit (The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom).
He spent twenty-two years as a flagellant; then God told him to throw down his scourge, shake the stones from his shoes, and unclasp the studded belts from his ruined flesh. For seventeen years he wandered through the German province of Swabia as a homeless preacher, begging alms and eating garbage. He was in the realm of a mystical underground: the Brethren of the Free Spirit.
The church administered Europe by means of its monopoly over the meaning of life. The meaning of life was found in the Christian mysteries, which moved back and forth between the two poles of Original Sin, the fact of innate depravity, and the Resurrection, the promise of salvation. Both were principles of authority, for both signified that no one’s fate was one’s own work. Always containing seeds of antinomianism, mysticism inevitably undermined that authority, but because the church’s hegemony rested on mystery, mysticism could not be altogether prohibited. The common will to reach God was too strong, and the church was political before it was anything else. Mysticism was permitted up to a point, and the point was precisely the margin where the absolute authority of the church over an individual’s apprehension of the meaning of life could be maintained. This was the epiphany—where, on earth, for a moment, one achieved union with God. In that mini-miracle, which could not last, one glimpsed the reality of salvation; one returned with a tale of the truth that, the church wagered, would only buttress its claim to be beyond history. Thus the church sanctioned the brotherhoods of the Franciscans and the Dominicans; in imitation of Jesus, the brothers set out in the twelfth century to live in poverty, to abjure all finery and clothe themselves in dulled and hooded robes, to feel hunger and thirst, to sleep if necessary outside of roofs and walls, to practice mortification of the flesh: to make the desert in which each man might find his temptation and overcome it. Writ large for the populace to whom the brothers preached, this was the meaning of life in acts. It was a play: a dramatization of God’s promise to allow those who were worthy to exchange the misery of human existence for the perfection of heaven.
The Brethren of the Free Spirit were the first “false dominicans.” As they walked through the towns of Europe their dress was the same, save for subtle variations meant to alert those who knew the signs: colored patches on the hoods of their habits, a split in the trailing cloth. Like the real Dominicans, they begged—but where the Dominicans did not work because they sought privation, the adepts of the Free Spirit refused to work because they placed themselves above it, convinced that the enjoyment of every luxury was theirs by right. The Dominicans affirmed the base nature they shared with all humanity by incarnating the consequence of sin, which was suffering; at the same time, they affirmed that humanity could be delivered from its nature and changed into a race of angels. Free spirits sought paradise with the claim that only through the affirmation of sin could one negate it.
The partisan of the Free Spirit did not incarnate sin. He—or she, since within the cult complete spiritual power was within the reach of women as well as men—incarnated God. God could not sin; God was perfect; God created men and women; therefore men and women were perfect. What appeared as free will—the practice of sin—was God’s will. Searching the Bible for the clues God had left for those capable of recognizing them (“I love him who has a free spirit,” Jesus said), the brothers and sisters returned to the pantheistic forests of pre-Christian Europe: “Whatever is, is God.” The only question was to know it, the only paradise to live it, the only task to tell it. Thus the Free Spirit set out across Christendom to free humanity from the Antichrist: the Church. Certainly, the world was to be destroyed—but from that fire the Free Spirit and those who understood its message would step forward into a new life.
It was to be a life of eternal pleasure; under torture by the pope’s inquisitors, the Free Spirit gave up its wisdom. As collected in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium: “He who recognizes that God does all things in him, he shall not sin.” “He who attributes to himself anything that he does, and does not attribute it to God, is in ignorance, which is hell . . . Nothing in a man’s works is his own.” “A man who has a conscience is himself Devil and hell and purgatory, tormenting himself. He who is free in spirit escapes from all these things.” “Nothing is sin but what is thought of as sin.” “One can be so united with God that whatever one may do one cannot sin.” The conclusion followed: “It would be better that the whole world should be destroyed and perish utterly than that a ‘free man’ should refrain from one act to which his nature moves him.” Half a millennium later, Nietzsche, speaking through Zarathustra, exchanged the language of negation for the language of
affirmation, but only to give the same claim more force: “What is the greatest experience you can have? It is . . . the hour when you say, ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.’ ”
The goal was to achieve union with God not for the officially sanctioned moment but in permanence. It was a great struggle—it might take years. Once finished it was the opening of one’s front door. As the door opened, time became eternity, every momentary lust God’s eternal commandment, every transitory desire a first principle of existence. It was the most extreme anarchism ever devised, driven by the incorporation of the single, all-knowing, ever-present God—the most powerful authority ever dreamed up.
THOUGH
Though in some ways as old as Christianity, or even older than that, as an identifiable cult the heresy of the Free Spirit came to light not long after the founding of the orthodox orders. Emerging out of the University of Paris, near what would be known as Saint-Germain-des-Prés, early Free Spirit illuminati were exposed and burned in about 1210. Marguerite Porete, whose La Mirouer des simples ames (The Mirror of Simple Souls) is one of a handful of surviving Free Spirit texts not brought forth by torture, was put to the stake in Paris a hundred years later; her book reached England a century after that. The Free Spirit grew in strength and numbers when the Franciscans and the Dominicans began to slide into wealth and bureaucracy, leaving their roads for monasteries; from the mid-thirteenth century the heresy spread across Central Europe and rooted itself there. Traveling under different names, it was never an organized, let alone hierarchical sect, though Free Spirit houses remained in place for generations. If one moves forward to the full-blown revival of the Free Spirit that Norman Cohn identifies in England in the revolutionary 1650s—if one returns to the Ranters, to the sermons and tracts of Abiezer Coppe and Joseph Salmon—the heresy maintained itself whole for more than four hundred years. It was, Cohn writes, “an invisible empire.”
