CHAPTER II.
CONFESSION.—PRESENT EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG CONFESSOR.—THE CONFESSOR IN THE MIDDLE AGES:—FIRST, BELIEVED; SECONDLY, MORTIFIED HIMSELF; THIRDLY, WAS SUPERIOR BY CULTURE; FOURTHLY, USED TO INTERROGATE LESS.—THE CASUISTS WROTE FOR THEIR TIME.—THE DANGERS OF THE YOUNG CONFESSOR.—HOW HE STRENGTHENS HIS TOTTERING POSITION.
A worthy parish priest has often told me that the sore part of his profession, that which filled him with despair, and his life with torment, was the Confessional.
The studies, with which they prepare for it in the seminaries, are such as entirely ruin the disposition, weaken the body, and enervate and defile the soul.
Lay education, without making any pretension to an extraordinary degree of purity, and though the pupils it forms will, one day, enjoy public life, takes, however, especial care to keep from the eyes of youth the glowing descriptions that excite the passions.
Ecclesiastical education, on the contrary, which pretends to form men superior to man, pure virgin minds, angels, fixes precisely the attention of its pupils upon things that are to be for ever forbidden them, and gives them for subjects of study terrible temptations, such as would make all the saints run the risk of damnation. Their printed books have been quoted, but not so their copy-books, by which they complete the two last years of seminary education. These copy-books contain things that the most audacious have never dared to publish.
I dare not quote here what has been revealed to me about this idiotic education by those who have been its martyrs, and narrowly escaped destruction from it. No one can imagine the condition of a poor young man, still a believer, and very sincere, struggling between the terrors and temptations with which they surround him, at pleasure, with two unknown subjects, either one of which might drive him mad, Woman! Hell!—and yet obliged to look incessantly at the abyss, blinded, through these impure books, with his sanguine youthful constitution.
This surprising imprudence proceeded originally from the very scholastic supposition, that the body and soul could be perfectly well kept apart. They had imagined they could lead them like two coursers of different tempers, the one to the right and the other to the left. They did not reflect that, in this case, man would be in the predicament of the chariot sculptured upon the tablet of the Louvre, which, pulled both ways, must inevitably be dashed to pieces.
However different these two substances may be in nature, it is but too manifest that they are mingled in action. Not a motion of the soul but acts upon the body, which re-acts in the same manner. The most cruel discipline inflicted upon the body will destroy it rather than prevent its action upon the soul. To believe that a vow, a few prayers, and a black robe, will deliver you from the flesh, and make you a pure spirit—is perfect childishness.
They will refer me to the middle ages, and to the multitudes who have lived mortified lives.
For this I have not one answer, but twenty, which admit of no reply. It is too easy to show that priests in general, and especially the confessor, were then totally different from what they have been for the two last centuries.
I. The first answer will seem, perhaps, harsh—Then the priest believed. "What! the priest no longer believes? Do you mean to say that in speaking of his faith with so much energy, he is a hypocrite and a liar?" No, I will allow him to be sincere. But there are two manners of believing, there are many degrees in faith. We are told that Lope de Vega (who, as it is known, was a priest) could not officiate: at the moment of the sacrifice, his fancy pictured the Passion too strongly, he would burst into tears and faint. Compare this with the coquettish pantomine of the Jesuit, who acts mass at Fribourg, or with the prelate whom I have seen at the altar showing to advantage his delicate small hand. The priest believed, and his penitent believed. Unheard-of terrors, miracles, devils, and hell, filled the church. The motto, "God hears you," was engraven not only in the wood, but in the heart. It was not a plank that partitioned off the confessional, but the sword of the archangel, the thought of the last judgment.
II. If the priest spoke in the name of the spirit, he was partly justified in doing so, having purchased spiritual power by the suicide of the body. His long prayers at night would have sufficed to wear him out; but they found more direct means in excessive fasts. Fasting was the diet of those poor schools of Beggars and Cappets, whose scanty meal was composed of arguments. Half dead before the age of manhood, they cooled their blood with herbs producing a deadly chill, and exhausted it by frequent bleedings. The number of bleedings, to which the monks had to submit, was provided in their rules. Their stomachs were soon destroyed, and their strength impaired. Bernard and Theresa were weakened by continual vomitings, even the sense of taste was lost: the Saint, says his biographer, took blood for butter. Mortification was not then an idle word, it was not a separation of the body and soul, but a genuine and honest suppression of the body.
III. The priest believed himself to be, in this sense, the man of the spirit, and he really was so, by the superiority of culture. He knew everything, the layman nothing. Even when the priest was young, he was truly the father, the other the child. In our days it is just the contrary; the layman, in cities at least, is generally more learned than the priest. Even the peasant, if he be a father of a family, with business and interests, or has served in the army, has more experience than his curé, and more real knowledge; his speaking more ungrammatically is of no consequence. But the contrast is still more striking, when this inexperienced priest, who has known nothing but his own seminary, sees at his knees a fashionable, intriguing, impassioned woman, who now, perhaps, at the close of her seventh lustrum, has passed through everything sentimental and ideal. What! she ask his advice? she call him father? Why, every word she utters is a revelation for him—astonishment and fear take possession of his soul. If he is not wise enough to hold his tongue, he will be ridiculous. His penitent, who came to him all trembling, will depart laughing.
IV. There is another difference which will strike only those who are acquainted with the middle ages—the language was not developed as it now is. No one being then acquainted with our habits of analysing and developing, confession was naturally reduced to a simple declaration of sin, without any detail of circumstances. Still less could they deduce the phenomena which accompany passion—the desires, doubts, and fears which give it the power of illusion, and make it contagious. There was, if you will, confession; but the woman could not express herself, nor could the priest have understood her; she was not able to reveal the depth of her thought, nor could he have reached it if she had done so. Confession on one side, and sentence on the other, nothing more; there was neither dialogue, confidence, nor disclosing of the heart.
If the priest has not enough imagination and wit to put the questions from the store of his own mind, he has had in his hands for the last two centuries ready-made questions, which he may ask in due order, and by which he will force his fair penitent to dive into her own thoughts, sift her own secrets to deliver them over to him, open her heart's fibres, as one may say, thread by thread, and wind off before him the complete skein, which he henceforth holds in his hands.
This terrible instrument of inquiry, which in unskilful hands may corrupt the soul by its injudicious probing, must necessarily be modified when morals change. Morality does not vary, but morals do, according to the lapse of time; yet this very simple truth never once entered their heads. They have adhered to the morals of the period, when the intellectual movement ceased, as far as they were concerned. The manuals they put into the hands of the young confessor are grounded upon the authority of the casuists, whom Pascal annihilated long ago. Even if the immorality of their solutions had not been demonstrated, remember that Escobar and Sanchez made their questions for a horribly corrupt period, from which, thank God, we are far removed. Their casuistry was from the first addressed to the corrupt and disordered state of society occasioned by long religious warfare. You will find among them crimes that were perhaps never perpetrated, except by the brutal soldiers of the Duke of Alva, or by the exiled, lawless, and godless band that Wallenstein drew after him, a wandering mass of iniquity which would have been abhorred by ancient Sodom.
We know not how to qualify this culpable routine. These books, composed for a barbarous age, unparalleled in crimes, are the same that you give to your pupils in our own civilised age. And this young priest, who, according to your instructions, believes that the world is still that dreadful world, who enters the Confessional with all this villanous science, and his imagination full of monstrous cases, you, imprudent men! (what shall I call you?) you confront him with a child who has never left her mother's side, who knows nothing, has nothing to say, and whose greatest crime is that she has not learned her catechism properly, or has hurt a butterfly!
I shudder at the interrogatories to which he will subject her, and at what he will teach her in his conscientious brutality. But he questions her in vain. She knows nothing, and says nothing. He scolds her, and she weeps. Her tears will be soon dried, but it will be long before she ceases to reflect.
A volume might be composed on the first start of the young priest, and his imprudent steps, all fatal either to himself or others. The penitent is occasionally more circumspect than the confessor. She is amused at his proceedings, and looks at him coldly when he becomes animated and goes too far. Sometimes, forgetting himself in his impassioned dream, he is suddenly and roughly awakened by a lesson from an intelligent and satirical woman kneeling before him.
This cruel lesson has given him an icy chill. Confessors do not suffer such a repulse, without remaining a long time bitter, sometimes spiteful for ever. The young priest knew well that he was the victim, the disinherited of this world, but it had not been forced home upon him. Gall drowns his heart. He prays to God (if he can still pray) that the world may perish!
Then returning to his senses, and seeing himself irremediably limed in that black winding-sheet, that death-robe that he will wear to the grave, he shrouds himself within it as he curses it, and muses how he may make the best of his torment.
The only thing he can do, is to strengthen his position as a priest. He has two way of succeeding, either by an understanding with the Jesuits, or by paying a servile court to Monseigneur the bishop. I recommend him especially to be violent against the philosophers, and to bark at pantheism. Let him also blacken his fellow-priests, and he will appear so much the purer himself. Let him prove himself a thorough hater, and they will forgive him his love.
The Brotherhood will henceforth protect, defend, and cover him. What would have ruined the solitary priest, becomes sanctity itself when he becomes one of a party. Before, he would have been suspended, and sent perhaps for six months to La Trappe—now he is made Vicar-general.
Only let him be prudent in the delicate business which the fraternity wishes to conceal; let him learn the arts of priests—to feign, to wait, to know when and how to be satisfied; to advance but slowly, openly, and above ground sometimes, but more often secretly, underneath.