And finally there is bovarism in religion—and we have at one end of the scale the saint who wholeheartedly imitates Christ and, at the other, the hypocrite who tries to look like a saint in order the more effectively to pursue his own unholy ends. In the middle ground, somewhere between the two extremes of Tartufe and St. John of the Cross, there exists a third, hybrid variety of religious bovarists. These, the absurd but often touching comedians of the spiritual life, are neither consciously wicked nor resolutely holy. Their all too human desire is to make the best of both worlds. They aspire to be saved—but without going to too much trouble; they hope to be rewarded—but only for looking like heroes, only for talking like contemplatives, not for doing or being. The faith which sustains them is the illusion, half recognized as such, half earnestly believed in, that by saying “Lord, Lord” sufficiently often they will contrive, somehow or other, to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Without “Lord, Lord,” or some more elaborate doctrinal or devotional equivalent, the process of religious bovarization would be difficult, in some cases all but impossible. The pen is mightier than the sword in this sense; that it is by means of verbalized thought that we direct and maintain our efforts. But it is possible to make use of words as a substitute for effort, to live in a purely verbal universe and not in the given world of immediate experience. To change a vocabulary is easy; to change external circumstances or our own ingrained habits is hard and tiresome. The religious bovarist who is not prepared to undertake a wholehearted imitation of Christ contents himself with the acquisition of a new vocabulary. But a new vocabulary is not the same thing as a new environment or a new character. The letter kills, or merely leaves inert; it is the spirit, it is the reality underlying verbal signs, which gives new life. Phrases which, at their first formulation, expressed significant experiences, tend (such is the nature of human beings and their religious organizations) to become a mere jargon, a pious slang, by means of which the hypocrite disguises his conscious wickedness and the more or less harmless comedian tries to deceive himself and impress his fellows. As we should expect, Tartufe speaks and teaches others to speak the language of the sons and servants of God.
De toutes amitiés il détache mon âme,
Et je verrai mourir frère, enfants, mère et femme
Que je m’en soucierais autant que de cela.
We recognize a distorted echo of the Gospels, a parody of the Ignatian and Salesian doctrine of holy indifference. And how movingly, when at last he is unmasked, does the hypocrite confess his total depravity! All the saints have always believed themselves to be enormous sinners, and Tartufe is no exception to the rule.
Oui, mon frère, je suis un méchant, un coupable,
Un malheureux pécheur, tout plein d’iniquité,
Le plus grand scélérat qui jamais ait été.
It is the language of St. Catherine of Siena—and the language, when she remembers to speak it, of Sœur Jeanne des Anges in her Autobiography.
Even when he is making passes at Elmire, Tartufe employs the phraseology of the devout. “De vos regards divins l’ineffable douceur”—applied to God or to Christ, the words are to be found in the writings of every Christian mystic. “C’en est fait,” cries the indignant Orgon, when at last he discovers the truth,
C’en est fait, je renonce à tous les gens de bien;
J’en aurai désormais une horreur effroyable,
Et m’en vais devenir pour eux pire qu’un diable.
His more sensible brother has to give him a little lecture on semantics. Because some gens de bien are not what they seem to be, it does not follow that all are villains or comedians. Every case must be considered on its own merits.
In the course of the seventeenth century several eminent directors of souls—Cardinal Bona was one of them, the Jesuit, Father Guilloré was another—published exhaustive treatises on the problems of distinguishing false spirituality from the genuine article, mere words from living substance, fraud and phantasy from “extraordinary graces.” Subjected to tests of the kind proposed by these writers, it seems most improbable that Sœur Jeanne would for long have succeeded in “getting away with it.” Unhappily, her directors were only too uncritically anxious to give her the benefit of every doubt. Sane or hysterical, but in either condition the consummate actress, Sœur Jeanne had the misfortune to be taken seriously on every occasion except, as we shall see, the one when she was doing her best to tell the plain unvarnished truth.
If her directors took her seriously, it was either because they had their own, not too creditable reasons for believing in her extraordinary graces, or else because they were committed by temperament and Weltanschauung to this kind of illusion. How seriously, we may now ask, did she take herself? How seriously was she taken by her fellow nuns? We can only guess at the answers to these questions.
There must be times when, however word-perfect in their impressive roles, the comedians of the spiritual life become uneasily conscious that something is not quite right, that perhaps, after all, God is not mocked and that even human beings may not (appalling thought!) be quite so dumb as one might be led to suppose.
This last truth seems to have dawned upon Sœur Jeanne at a fairly early stage in her long-drawn impersonation of St. Teresa. “God,” she writes, “very often permitted that things should happen to me at the hands of creatures, which gave me much pain.” Through the obscuring veils of this odd jargon we divine the ironic shrug with which Sister X received some specially eloquent discourse on the Spiritual Marriage, the hard-boiled comment made by Sister Y on Jeanne’s new trick, in church, of rolling up her eyes and pressing her hands, like some saint in a baroque picture, over a bosom wildly palpitating with extraordinary graces. We all imagine ourselves to be simultaneously clear-sighted and impenetrable; but, except when blinded by some infatuation, other people can see through us just as easily as we can see through them. The discovery of this fact is apt to be exceedingly disconcerting.
Fortunately for Sœur Jeanne—or perhaps very unfortunately—the first Prioress of the Loudun house was less perspicacious than those other creatures, whose ironic skepticism had given her so much pain. Deeply impressed by her young pupil’s holy conversation and exemplary behavior, the good mother had felt no hesitation in recommending Jeanne’s appointment as Prioress. And now the appointment had been made, and here she was—only twenty-five and the head of a house, the queen of a tiny empire, whose seventeen subjects were bound by Holy Obedience to take her orders and listen to her advice.
Now that victory had been won, now that the fruits of a long and arduous campaign were securely in her grasp, Sœur Jeanne felt that she was entitled to a holiday. She went on with her mystical reading, she continued, on occasion, to talk very learnedly about Christian perfection; but in the intervals she permitted herself—indeed, as Superior, she actually commanded herself—to take it easy. In the parlor, where she was now free to spend as much time as she liked, the new Prioress indulged in interminable conversations with her friends and acquaintances of the uncloistered world. Years later she piously expressed the wish that she might be permitted to set forth “all the faults I committed and caused to be committed in the course of conversations which were not strictly necessary; for then it would be seen how dangerous it is to expose young nuns with such facility at the grilles of their convent parlors, even though their talk may seem to be wholly spiritual.” Yes, even the most spiritual discourses, as the Prioress knew only too well, had a curious way of winding up as something very different. One started out with a series of edifying remarks about the devotion to St. Joseph, about meditation and the precise moment when it might be allowed to give place to the prayer of simple regard, about holy indifference and the practice of the presence of God—one started with these things and then, before one knew where one was or how precisely one had got there, one was discussing, yet again, the exploits of the fascinating and abominable M. Grandier.
“That shameless creature in the Rue du Lion d’Or. . . . That young hussy who was M. Hervé’s housekeeper before he got married. . . . That cobbler’s daughter who was now in the service of Her Majesty, the Queen Mother, and who kept him posted about all that went on at court. . . . And his penitents. . . . One shudders to think. . . . Yes, in the sacristy, Reverend Mother, in the sacristy—not fifteen paces from the Blessed Sacrament. . . . And that poor little Trincant, seduced, you might say, under her father’s nose, in his own library. And now it was Mlle. de Brou. Yes, that prude, that precisian. So much attached to virginity that she would never marry. So devout that, when her mother died, she talked of turning Carmelite. Instead of which. . . .”
Instead of which. . . . In her own case, the Prioress reflected, there had been no “instead.” A novice at nineteen, a nun when she was barely of age. And yet, after the death of her sisters and her two brothers, her parents had begged her to come home and get
