The Shadow of the Cathedral

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

For the time being Gabriel abandoned the tranquil atmosphere of the religious library. His reputation as a humanist had reached the ears of an editor living near the Sorbonne, so, without leaving the left bank of the Seine, he moved into the Latin quarter to undertake the correction of proofs in Latin and Greek. He earned in this way twelve francs a day—far more than those canons of Toledo, who formerly had appeared to him as great dukes. He lived in a small inn for students near to the School of Medicine, and his vehement discussions at night with his fellow-lodgers over the smoke of their pipes taught him as much as the books of that hated science. Those students who lent him books, or who told him of those he should search for in his free hours in the library on the hill of Saint Genevieve, laughed like pagans at the exalted ideas of the former seminarist.

For two years young Luna did little else but read; now and again he accompanied his friends in some escapade, throwing himself into the free and joyous life of the Quartier, wearing out the elbows of his sleeves on the tables of the beershops. The Mimi of Murger often passed before him, but less melancholy than the creation of the poet, and the ex-seminarist found his Sunday evening idylls in the woods surrounding Paris. But Gabriel was not of an amorous temperament; curiosity and the thirst for knowledge mastered him, and after these escapades from which he returned fresher, and with his brain keener, he threw himself with greater ardour into his studies.

History, true history, whose cold clearness contrasted so strongly with that intricate morass of miracles in the chronicles that he had read in his childhood, beat down the greater part of his beliefs. Catholicism was no longer for him the only religion, neither could he any longer divide the history of humanity into two periods, that before and that after the appearance in Judea of a handful of obscure men, who, spreading themselves over the world, preached a cosmopolitan morality drawn from the maxims of Orientals, and from the teachings of Greek philosophy.

Religions were for him human inventions, subject to the conditions of existence belonging to all organisms, its generous infancy capable of blind sacrifices, its self-contained and masterful manhood, in which the early sweetness was changed by the authoritative imposition of its power, and its inevitable age, with a long agony, in which the sick man, guessing his speedy end, clings to life with all the energy of desperation.

His faith in Catholicism as the only religion disappeared completely; losing his belief in dogmas he lost also, by inevitable logic, that belief in the monarchy which had driven him to fight in the mountains, and he understood clearly now the history of his country without prejudices of race. The foreign historians showed him the sad fate of Spain, arrested in the most critical period of her development, when she was emerging young and strong during the most fertile period of the Middle Ages, by the fanaticism of priests and inquisitors, and the folly of some of her kings, who, with utterly inadequate means, wished to revive the empire of the Caesars, draining the country for this mad enterprise. Those people who had broken with the Papacy, turning their backs for ever on Rome, were far happier and more prosperous than that Spain, which slept like a beggar at the door of the Church.

At this period of his intellectual development Gabriel had an ideal, and often of an evening he would leave his work to go and listen to him for an hour at the College of France: this was Ernest Renan; Gabriel admired him for a double reason, for his talent and for his history. The great man had also passed through a seminary, and even now had a priestly look as though he had suffered deeply from the pressure of the ecclesiastical yoke; he was a rebel, and Gabriel felt as though he belonged to his own family. "Truly the hammers to destroy the temple are forged within the temple," and the law fatal to all religions was being accomplished, when faith vanishes, and the multitude no longer feel the fervour of early days.

Gabriel was astonished to hear how the teacher could penetrate the intellectual development of the Hebrew people, which had served as the basis of Christianity, as he heard him demolish bit by bit the immense altarpiece, before which humanity had knelt for over nineteen centuries. The Spanish seminarist revolted against his old faith with all the impetuosity of his vehement temperament. How could he have believed all that and have considered it the height of human wisdom! Certainly Christianity had exercised a beneficial influence at one period of the infancy of humanity, it had filled men's lives in the Middle Ages when there was little to think of beyond religion, and, in a land desolated by strife, there was no other refuge for intellectual thought but the cathedral in the towns and the monastery in the country. "The fairs—the assemblies for business and pleasure," said the master, "were religious feasts; the scenic representations were mysteries, the journeys were pilgrimages and the wars crusades." After this the ways of life divided—religious life took one way and human life the other. Art placed nature above the ideal, and men thought more of earth than of heaven. Reason was born, and every advance that it made was one step backward for faith, and at last the time arrived when the clear-sighted, those who were anxious about the future, began to ask themselves what the new belief was likely to be which would replace the moribund religion. Luna had no doubts on the point—it was science, and science alone, which could fill the vacuum caused by that religion now dead for ever.

Influenced by the Hellenism of his master, which he assimilated easily, being accustomed to daily intercourse with the Greek authors, he dreamed that the humanity of the future would be an immense Athens, an artistic and learned democracy governed by great thinkers, with no strifes but those of the mind, with no ambition but that of cultivating the intellect, of gentle manners, and devoted to the joys of the mind and the culture of reason.

Of all his old beliefs, Gabriel only retained that of a creative God from a certain superstitious scruple. His ideas were rather disconcerted by astronomy, which he had taken up with an almost childish eagerness, attracted by the charm of the marvellous. That infinite space in which in olden days legions of angels had manoeuvred, and which had served the Virgin as a pathway in her terrestrial descents, he suddenly found to be peopled with thousands of millions of worlds, and the more powerful men's instruments became the more numerous they seemed to be, the distances being infinitely prolonged to immensities that were inconceivable. Bodies were attracted to one another travelling in space at the rate of millions of miles a minute, and all this cloud of worlds revolved without ever passing twice over the same spot in this immensity of silence, in which fresh stars, and again others and others, were continually being discovered as the instruments of observation became more perfect.

This God of Gabriel's having lost the corporeal form given to Him by religion, and as divulged in the history of the creation, lost at once all His attributes, and being magnified to fill the infinite and being absorbed into it, became so impalpable and subtle to the intellect as to appear a phantasm.