More Mauriac

“Claude, Claude,” said Edward, “you are guilty of an error which may bring you much unhappiness. You believe that some things in life are really important!”

Claude replied that he regarded everything in life as important, because each one of our most trivial gestures, each one of our most secret thoughts, is revealed to the eyes of God

Just a bit more. Didn’t want to make the last post too discursive and stray from the main point. Which was….? Who knows.

Anyway. As I said in the other post, the three main characters in relationship and tension are Claude, a Catholic ex-seminarian, and two Protestant-raised siblings, May and Edward. Edward is an agnostic aesthete, May is more open minded, although culturally Protestant and suspicious of The Catholics.

What I want to share with you is an excerpt from a conversation between the, and I’m doing so for one reason: to show that these conversations don’t change much. There are fundamental issues and differences which people saw in the past, and which we still see today. So…looking to the past expands our sense of the present, if we allow it to.

Claude critiques the Protestant approach:

“You people can only ‘feel’ either a presence or an absence. Your clergymen-deprived of the Sacraments, and of the one essential Sacrament-try, by means of endless sermons, which they do their best to make white-hot, to induce in their flock a succession of states of feeling.”

….

Edward took up the challenge.

“Doesn’t your own Pascal say that God is known in the heart, and not the brain?”

Red-faced, bristling, and looking now like the seminarist who, not so long ago, had paced the school-yard with Monsieur de Floirac, Claude gave blow for blow, Yes, he said, God was known as the result of a move ment of the soul, in a word, by love. Grace sets its seal upon the Christian. But once that inner knowledge is acquired, the faithful find outside themselves the source and origin of love. Someone exists, and that Someone is distinct from the creature, who knows where to find Him, and can eat of His flesh and drink of His blood.

Edward was still smiling. He was so utterly indifferent to the point at issue, that he made no attempt to pursue the argument. May, on the other hand, put a question :

“If you were trying t o convert me, Claude, how would you go about it?”

“I would first ask whether you were not conscious of something lacking in your Church. You Protestants stand face to face with God, but from you to Him there is no direct road of access. Sermons and community prayers may be emotionally stirring, and can certainly give you the sensation of His presence, but except in those moments of collective fervour, He remains inaccessible.”

At these words May, like all women at grips with abstract formulae, hesitated.

“It may be true that our weakness lies in our never knowing for certain whether we have proof: all the same, I quite honestly believe that your dogmas are childish, and the whole business of Catholicism just idolatry pure and simple.”

Claude’s back was up; and he forgot the deference due to Monsieur Dupont-Gunther’s daughter.

“You are talking of things you know nothing about!”

The seminarist’s contempt for this piece of female reasoning sounded only too obviously in his voice. But the girl seemed not to be aware of it. As though speaking to herself, she said:

“If I were a Catholic, I should love a rule of belief which has nothing to do with what I may feel or not feel : with the sense of tranquility which must come of believing what one is told to believe : but what would most satisfy me would be the certainty of divine forgiveness.” Claude clasped his hands : an exclamation was forced from him : “Oh! Mademoiselle, what faults can you ever have committed?”

Edward burst out laughing.

Of course, we might argue with much, from the assertion that there is not “direct road of access” between the Protestant believer and God to Mauriac’s characterization of the Poor Little Woman Struggling With Abstractions, but there’s enough truth in there to make it worth mulling over, at least for me.

Finally, a glimpse at the other side of what makes Mauriac interesting and entertaining – laying out the darkness in the human heart that is what it is, no apologies:

A torrent of foul words followed . . . . They might have been two tramps quarrelling in the gutter. But Madame Gonzales continued to drink her coffee, with her little finger raised. She watched Bertie’s face becoming increasingly purple. There was a very good chance, she thought, that he might have a stroke, and the prospect was pleasing.