Returning to his self-examination, he was able to discover a kind of cosmic and metaphysical justification for his schemes in the thought that what seemed bad from a merely human viewpoint might really and actually be good. ‘Il faut aimer Dieu vengeur,’ he told his nuns, ‘aussi bien que Dieu misericordieux.’ God, the avenger, might have his reasons for wishing to destroy large numbers of Central Europeans. Indeed, since history was assumed by Father Joseph to be an expression of the intentions of divine providence, and since, as a matter of historical fact, large numbers of Central Europeans were in process of being starved and slaughtered, it was manifest that God, the avenger, did desire their destruction. Therefore, the policy of prolonging the war was not wrong.
Here, his vicarious ambition for France made him forget what had been said in the Gospels to the effect that scandals will always arise, but woe unto those through whom they come. There is an observable correlation between certain undesirable modes of thought and courses of action on the one hand and, on the other, certain catastrophes, such as the Thirty Years’ War. But it most certainly does not follow that, because in this sense, a war may be described as the will of God, the individual who labours to prolong it is doing God’s will. Threading the mazes of his own voluntary ignorance, it was thus, explicitly or by implication, that Father Joseph reasoned to himself, as he knelt each night and morning before his crucifix. From justificatory argument, his mind would slip into meditation on the Passion of the Saviour, whose tortured body hung there in image before his eyes. And sometimes, this meditation would give place in its turn to a timeless and ecstatic contemplation of divine suffering -contemplation profound to the verge of trance. Father Joseph had been rapt away to that place which had been, ever since he was a tiny boy, the home of his strange spirit; he was on Calvary, at the foot of the cross, with the beloved disciple and the holy women.
One would imagine, a priori, that those whose religious life is centred upon the sufferings of a divine Saviour would be peculiarly compassionate, scrupulous beyond all others in the avoidance of actions calculated to give or prolong pain. ‘But no a priori principles determine or limit the possibilities of experience. Experience is determined only by experience.’ As a matter of historical fact, those whose religious life is centred upon the sufferings of a divine Saviour have not been preeminently compassionate, have not been more careful than all others to avoid the infliction of pain. As a matter of historical fact, the record of Buddhism is, in this respect, a good deal better than that of Christianity. Let us examine some of the reasons for the positive cruelty on the one hand and, on the other, the negative indifference to suffering, which have too often characterized the actions of ardent Christians.
Considered merely as an account of the way in which a good man was trapped, tortured and unjustly put to death, the story of the Passion is already sufficiently moving; and, for those who accept them as true, its theological overtones enrich it with a much profounder significance. The good Christian’s emotional reactions to this story are always intense, but, unfortunately, not always desirable. Consider, first of all, that common type of reaction so vividly illustrated by the anecdote about Father Joseph’s older contemporary, Louis de Crillon, surnamed Le Brave. In his retirement at Avignon, the aged warrior was listening one day to a sermon. The theme was the Passion of Christ, the preitcher, full of fire and eloquence. Suddenly, in the middle of a pathetic description of the crucifixion, the old man sprang to his feet, drew the sword he had used so peroically at Lepanto and against the Huguenots, and, brandishing it above his head, with the gesture of one springing to defence of persecuted innocence, shouted: ‘Ou etais-tu, Crillon?’
Movingly told, the story of a cruel injustice has power to drive men forth to commit retaliatory injustices either against. the original authors of the crime, or, if these should be dead or distant, upon the men and women who, by means of some fatally common abuse of language, are temporarily identified with the criminals. The motives actuating anti-Semites, crusaders, inquisitors and other Christian persecutors have been many and various ; but among them there has almost invariably figured a desire to take vengeance, in some entirely symbolic and Pickwickian way, for the wrong committed on Calvary. Emotional Christianity is two-sided. On the obverse of the medal are stamped the cross and the types of compassionate adoration; all too often in the course of history, its reverse face had displayed the hideous emblems of war and cold-blooded cruelty.
The idea of vicarious suffering is closely associated with the story of the Passion, and in the minds of Christians has produced effects no less ambivalent. Gratitude to a God who assumed humanity and suffered that men might be saved from their merited doom carries with it, as a kind of illegitimate corollary, the thesis that suffering is good in itself and that, because voluntary self-sacrifice is meritorious and ennobling, there must be something splendid even about involuntary self-sacrifice imposed from without. The following lines are taken from a letter addressed to a west-country newspaper by a clergyman of the Church of England, and published in the spring of 1936. ‘The principle of vicarious suffering pervades history, some suffering and dying for the sake of others.
The mother for her sick child, the doctor in his laboratory, the missionary among the heathen, the soldier on the battlefield-these suffer and sometimes die, that others may live and be happy and well. Is it not in accordance with this great principle that animals should play their part by sometimes suffering and dying to help in keeping Britons hardy, healthy and brave?’ From which it follows, of course, that fox-hunting is something entirely admirable and Christ-like.
That such lines could have been penned in all seriousness by a minister of religion may seem to many almost unbelievable. But the fact that they actually were penned is of the deepest significance; for it shows how dangerous the idea of vicarious suffering can become, what iniquities it can be made, in all good faith, to justify. God took upon himself the sins of humanity and died that men might be saved. Therefore (so runs the implied argument) we can make war, exploit the poor, enslave the coloured races, and all without the smallest qualm of conscience; for our victims are illustrating the great principle of vicarious suffering and, so far from wronging them, we are actually doing them a service by making it possible for them to ‘suffer and die,’ that others (by a happy coincidence, ourselves) may live and be happy and well.’
Another point: the sufferings of mere humans and, a fortiori, of animals are as nothing compared with the sufferings of a God who has assumed human form, taken upon himself the sins of the world and chosen to expiate them all in a single act of self-sacrifice. This being so, the sufferings of human beings and animals are not really of much account. A constant dwelling on the sufferings of Christ and of the martyrs may produce in the emotional Christian an altogether admirable indifference to his own pains; but unless he is very careful to cultivate a compassion commensurate with his courage, he may end by becoming indifferent to the pains of others. The child who had sobbed so bitterly because they had hurt and killed poor Jesus was father of the man who, fifty years later, did everything in his power to prolong a war which had already caused the death of hundreds of thousands of his fellow-creatures and was reducing the survivors to cannibalism.
CHAPTER IX Nothing Fails Like Success
The ‘Day of Dupes’ had left Richelieu in a position of undisputed authority. He was now permanently the King first minister, and Father Joseph, who about this time was given an official place on the Council of State, was his permanent foreign secretary and, from 1634 onwards, his designated sucessor in the event of the Cardinal’s death. Of the friar’s mode of life during these years of his greater political power, we have the most detailed information. He had his cell at the Capuchin convent of the rue Saint-Honoré and a room assigned to him at the Louvre. But for the convenience of the Cardinal, who liked to consult with his old friar on all important matters, Father Joseph passed most of his time in the apartments reserved for him at Richelieu’s country house of Rueil, six miles west of Paris, or in Paris itself, at the Palace Cardinal, now the Palais Royal. Here amid the more than regular splendours of Richelieu’s Court, he lived as though in the convent, a life of the austerest simplicity and regularity.
Every morning, summer and winter alike, he rose at four. The first hour of his day was given to mental prayer-acts, the intention, self-abasement, adoration, followed by periods, fit of discursive meditation on some divine perfection, then the passive annihilation in the suffering Christ and the Godhead that he incarnated. Rising from before his crucifix, Father Joseph rejoined his secretary and, since 1619, his constant companion Father Angelus of Mortagne, and together they read the breviaries. The day’s work began at six. Father
