It was one of those overwhelming passions of adolescence -passions which it is the stupid custom of adults to deride under the name of ‘calf love,’ but which are often more violent, more agonizingly intense than anything experienced in later life. When Juliet loved and died, she was no older than François Leclerc at the time of his first and final excruciation of the heart-just fourteen. ‘Her whole face,’ wrote the Capuchin novice in his Discourse in the form of an Exclamation, ‘her whole face shone, her looks darted lightning.’ In a little while François ‘had no eyes but for her; his ears were deaf to every utterance but hers; he had given her all his heart, and except in her he could find no rest.’
From the first, it was an uneasy passion, troubled with the sense of guilt. Those Plutarchian heroes were there to remind him that love is the enemy of high ambition; those hermits proclaimed the vanity of human wishes; and when he prayed, the old facility of communication between his soul and its God and Saviour was lost. That transfigured face, that young voluptuous body, the smell of her hair, the wild beating of his own heart -these stood in the way of his prayers, ‘filling the whole field of inward vision, eclipsing God. Then one day something happened. He was playing at cards with the whole troop of them, half a dozen jeunes filles en fleur, his own beloved among them, ‘laughing and joking, open mouthed,’ when suddenly, without apparent cause, he became aware of what he was doing, and with a fearful lucidity perceived its utter senselessness. He was appalled. Most of us, I suppose, have had a similar experience have woken up all of a sudden from the sleep of everyday living into momentary awareness of the nature of ourselves and our surroundings.
It is a party in a parlour,
Crammed just as they on earth were crammed,
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
And all as silent as could be,
All silent and all damned.
Suddenly to realize that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned-it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting that most of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for the time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge. François was one of those to whom such a course is impossible. The devastating consciousness of what he was doing was succeeded almost immediately by a sense of the presence of God -a sense which gave him such extraordinary joy, that there, at the card table, he almost fainted. His companions noticed his sudden pallor and insisted on taking him out into the open air. The bells were ringing for Vespers as they came out into the garden. François at once suggested that they should all go to church.
Kneeling there, before the altar, he felt within him the pull of two conflicting loves, profane and sacred. Beside him knelt the girl whose pretty little face his own passion had transfigured till it shone for him, like the face of one who had seen God; before him, above the altar, was the figure of the crucified Saviour. There was a struggle that ended finally in François seeing nothing but’ Christ’s feet nailed to the cross and seemingly awaiting him, Christ’s arms outspread to receive him.’ To that image of suffering he made a vow consecrating himself definitively to the service of God.
Returning to the house, he immediately began his preparations for running away to Paris. He would creep out at night, he would exchange clothes with the first poor boy he met on the road; he would walk the twenty miles to the city and ask to be taken in at that Carthusian monastery, which he had often visited as a child, five or six years before. It was a mad scheme, and the servant to whom he confided it that evening lost no time in telling him as much. François, whose native impetuosity was always held in check by excellent judgment, saw that it would he wrong for him to fullfil his vow in this surreptitious way, and decided not to go. Next day he was given an opportunity to fight God’s battle against his inclinations. A great feast was being given in the neighbourhood, and all the young people were invited.
There would be dancing, no doubt, and music, and wine, and lights-festive excitements all the more intoxicating for being so rare in the lives of these country-bred children. And, of course, at night, on the way home, languid with excess of gaiety, what opportunities, in the lurching coach, for secret whispers in the dark, for hand-holding and surreptitious contacts ! For the lover, it was an occasion not to be missed at any cost; that was why, even at the risk of seeming discourteous and a prig, young François resolved to miss it. He prayed much that day for strength, and when the girls were dressed in all their finery and the coach was at the door, he was able to say no to all entreaties, even those of the beloved. In the end they had to drive away without him. It was a victory-but a victory that was succeeded a day or two later by defeat. For before the week was out, he was as much the slave of his passion as he had ever been. The only difference was that he suffered more acutely than in the past from the reproaches of his conscience.
This painful state of things lasted for four months. At the end of this time two events occurred, two accidents which the Capuchin novice could only regard as providential. Playing with his arquebus, François came very near to killing his own mother. (Mme Leclerc had returned and they were living again at Le Tremblay.) And almost at the same time a band of marauding soldiers passed near the house and unloaded from their packs, among other unwanted articles of plunder, a tattered volume, called Barlaam and Josaphat.
In his intense thankfulness for the preservation of his mother’s life from the effects of his own negligence, François renewed his vows. — This time there was no going back on them. So violently did he break away from the bondage of the preceding months that he could ‘scarcely bear even to look at’ the girl whose caresses he had so ardently desired only a short time before. At the same time he conceived a real horror of women in general and of the love of the sexes. This horror was to remain with him all his life. He could forget it, of course, in the contemplation of God; but when he was out in the world, separated from the divine presence, the old aversion continued to haunt him. In later life, Father Joseph shrank from too close and direct contact even with his own sister.
‘I do not care,’ he used to say, ‘I do not care to see the sex’ (that curious seventeenth-century name for women must have given him a peculiar satisfaction) ‘except shut up and curtained from sight, like so many mysteries not to be regarded save with a kind of horror.’ In other words, the only satisfactory woman was a cloistered woman, and the only tolerable way to enjoy female company was through the wicket of a confessional or the bars of a convent parlour. Otherwise, ‘they should only be visited like wild beasts, whom one is content to see without approaching.’ The intensity of Father Joseph’s aversion was proportionate, no doubt, to the intensity of his early passion and the amount and violence of the force he had to use against himself in order to master it.
And now for that old book, which the soldiers threw aside as they passed Le Tremblay. François picked it up, read it, and at once, as he says,’ fell in love with it.’ It was as though the voice of God were speaking from its pages, confirming him in his resolution and, for his consolation, expatiating upon the peace and happiness of the spiritual life. In modern times a whole literature has sprung up around the pious tale which finally determined the future Father Joseph’s vocation. Barlaam and Josaphat is a major historical curiosity.
For this medieval romance about an Indian prince who leaves the life of pleasure, to which his too solicitous father has condemned him, and who embraces the contemplative life under the direction of a hermit, is nothing more nor less than a Christianized biography of Gautama Buddha. Not only in its main lines, but in detail and actually in phrasing, Barlaam and Josaphat follows the Sanskrit of the Lalita Vistara. Nor is this all. The very name of the prince reveals his identity. The story had been originally translated into Greek from an Arabic version, and the Arabic letters for Y and B are easily confused. Josaphat is the corruption of Bodisat. Barlaam’s disciple is the Bodisatva or future Buddha. It is one of the tragedies of history that Christendom should never have known anything of Buddhism beyond this garbled version of the semi-legendary biography of its founder.
In the teachings of primitive, southern Buddhism, Catholicism would have found the most salutary correctives for its strangely arbitrary theology,
