Priests, Women, and Families

by Jules Michelet

A great suffering is connected with this great enjoyment of being the god of another soul: all that is wanting to complete this divinity causes horrible pangs. You cannot be surprised if this man pursues with an insatiable ardour the absorption of a soul which he hopes to assimilate. You may easily understand the real and profound cause of this strange avidity, which wants to see and know everything, both the trivial and the important, the principal and the accessory, the essential and the indifferent, and which, not satisfied with enveloping it outwardly, tries to reach the bottom, and probing lower and lower in the very depth, would attain the essence. Suppose even this to be reached, still it will cry out for—more! Alas! it may ever acquire more, and again more; but something will ever remain beyond. Who can measure a soul? It preserves in its recesses, unknown to itself (and to you also), both space and depth. That soul which seemed to you already acquired, and which you thought in your entire possession, hides behind it, perhaps, a world of liberty which you can never reach.

This is humiliating, gloomy, nay, almost despair. Horrible suffering! not to have all, is, for a god, to have nothing.

Then, even then, in their very pride, an ironical voice is heard, scoffing at their pride; it is the voice of desire, which it had silenced till now: "Poor god," says she, "you are no god; it is your own fault; I told you so before. Come, leave off your school-divinity, and your distinguo of the corporeal and spiritual natures. To possess, is to have all. He alone has possession who can both use and abuse. For the soul to be really thine, one thing is still wanting—the body."

[[1]] "Origen thinks that the priest must be a little God, to do an act that is beyond the power of angels." Father Fichet (a Jesuit), "Life of Madame de Chantal." p. 615. If you require a more serious Jesuit than Fichet, here is Bourdaloue: "Though the priest be in this sacrifice only the substitute of Jesus Christ, it is nevertheless certain, that Jesus Christ submits to him, that He becomes his subject, and renders him, every day upon our altars, the most prompt and exact obedience. If faith did not teach us these truths, could we think that a man could ever attain to such an elevation, and be invested with a character that enables him, if I may say so, to command his sovereign Lord, and make Him descend from heaven?"

[[2]] One of the new priests, under the orders of St. François de Sales often saw his guardian angel. Having arrived at the church-door, he stopped. They asked him the reason: he answered ingenuously, that "he was accustomed to see his guardian angel walk before him, and that this prince of heaven had then stopped and stood aside, out of respect for his character, giving him the precedence."—Maupas du Tour, Life of St. François de Sales, p. 199.

CHAPTER VII.

DESIRE.—ABSORPTION AND ASSIMILATION CONTINUED.—TERRORS OF THE OTHER WORLD.—THE PHYSICIAN AND THE PATIENT.—ALTERNATIVES.—POSTPONEMENTS.—THE EFFECTS OF FEAR IN LOVE.—TO BE ALL-POWERFUL AND ABSTAIN.—STRUGGLES BETWEEN THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH.—MORAL DEATH MORE POTENT THAN PHYSICAL LIFE.—IT CANNOT REVIVE.

Let us a pause a moment at the brink of the abyss that we have just had a glimpse of, and before we descend into it, let us know well where we are.

The unlimited dominion, of which we spoke just now, could never be sufficiently explained by the power of habit, strengthened by all the arts of seduction and captation; it would be especially impossible to understand how so many inferior men succeed in obtaining their ends. We must repeat here what we have said elsewhere: If this power of death has so much hold upon the soul, the reason is, that it generally attacks it in its dying state; when weakened by worldly passions, and crushing it more and more by the ebb and flow of religious passions, it finds at last that it has neither strength, nor nerve, nor anything that can offer resistance.