Sigrid Undset

Sigrid Undset: «If 2 + 2 = 5» (póstumo)

(En AA.VV. Sigrid Undset on Saints and Sinners. New Translations and Studies. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993, pp. 206-212. Texto traducido del noruego)

If every single convert who returned to the Catholic Church were to tell his story, not two of these stories would be the same. It should not surprise us who have accepted the Church’s invitation to man that the ways which lead to it are as many as there are kinds of men, and that all these ways meet at one point–since truth is one, and illusions are endlessly varying. This is probably one of the reasons why men cling energetically to the hope that there is no absolute truth. We convince ourselves that life would be monotonous and freedom would be lost if there really were one Truth and if that truth were one. […]

One group of converts reveals that they felt drawn to the Church long before they came to belong to her–for all that time they thought that the Church could provide their inmost necessities of life. And this attraction for the Church may have been awakened because they came into contact with some particular aspect of the Catholic system–perhaps they experienced a Catholic liturgy and were impressed by the atmosphere of it–or it is the thought that a Catholic really is able to address Jesus’ mother; or the Catholic teaching of our relation to the dead takes hold of them at a time when it seems to them unendurable that death descends like and iron curtain between them and their beloved. (If these impressions are only purely aesthetic or are sentimental, naturally they seldom lead to conversion; in any case, I have never seen people become Catholics because they “admire the beauty of the Catholic Church” or think that there is merit in the fact that Catholicism “permits us to worship the feminine also” –despite the fact that I continually meet people who say such things. On the other hand, when a contact with one thing or another in the Catholic world wakes a suspicion of the spiritual reality which lies beneath these things, it can bring a person into the way which leads to conversion. But this is completely different from a catholicizing aestheticism or sentimentality which causes some soul to wander around and around the Catholic Church for years and look at her in the manner of tourists.

In this group above all one will find converts from the different forms of Protestant Christianity; they are Christians who return to Mother Church to find Christianity in all its original fullness.

There is another group of converts–and perhaps it is rather large today–who have come to the Catholic Church because they have been convinced that she can tell them the truth about human origins and being and duty in the world. But they were convinced before they were converted–they have studied, not only to be converted, but also what is the meaning of conversion and why conversion is necessary after they have become members of the Church.

[…] The fault with the Protestant teaching about Christianity was that each preacher had his own “personal conviction” and his “subjective understanding”. So that we came to be convinced that faith was a minor matter: they who spoke to us in the name of Christianity had in reality given up the historic Christianity as a teaching no longer maintainable, but, purely on emotional grounds, they would not give up a view of life which was colored by Christianity. […]

The modern heathenism is a new thing–a declaration of war against a God who has spoken, where the old heathenism was a love song to a God who hid himself, or an attempt to live with the divine whose power men felt around them. […] In the old heathenism men believed that they were descended from gods. In the new heathenism, men try to believe that god descends from men. […]

And we, who had smiled overbearingly at out old teachers’ opinion on the God who had created humanity–because each of our teachers came only with a crazed photography of himself and supposed that this was the genuine, real pictorial resemblance–perhaps we openly laughed, enlightened by the new teachers who supposed that they could create God and gods. […]

So it was that we discovered that there was a power in the world that taught human solidarity in one single great case–the fall into sin; solidarity as joint heirs to his gift which paid our debt. We discovered that all those who try to encapsulate themselves in their own self-created illusion were united in fearing, hating, and trying to avoid this power. If they were not united about anything else, they were united on one thing: opposition to the Catholic Church.

G. K. Chesterton en 1934

Gilbert Keith Chesterton: “The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic” (1929)

(En G. K. Chesterton: The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. III. Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990, pp. 127-132).

A leading article in a daily paper was recently devoted to the New Prayer Book; without having anything very new to say about it. For it mostly consisted in repeating for the nine-hundredth-and-ninety-nine-thousandth time that what the ordinary Englishman wants is a religion without dogma (whatever that may be), and that the disputes about Church matters were idle and barren on both sides. Only, suddenly remembering that this equalisation of both sides might possibly involve some slight concession or consideration for our side, the writer hastily corrected himself. He proceeded to suggest that though it is wrong to be dogmatic, it is essential to be dogmatically Protestant. He suggested that the ordinary Englishman (that useful character) was quite convinced, in spite of his aversion to all religious differences, that it was vital to religion to go on differing from Catholicism. He is convinced (we were told) that «Britain is as Protestant as the sea is salt.» Gazing reverently at the profound Protestantism of Mr. Michael Arlen or Mr. Noel Coward, or the latest jazz dance in Mayfair, we might be tempted to ask: If the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? But since we may rightly deduce from this passage that Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. James Douglas and Mr. Hannen Swaffer, and all their following, are indeed stern and unbending Protestants (and as we know that Protestants are famous for the close and passionate study of the Scriptures, unhindered by Pope or priest), we might even take the liberty of interpreting the saying in the light of a less familiar text. Is it possible that in comparing Protestantism to the salt of the sea they were haunted with some faint memory of another passage, in which the same Authority spoke of one single and sacred fountain that is of living water, because it is of life-giving water, and really quenches the thirst of men; while all other pools and puddles are distinguished from it by the fact that those who drink of them will thirst again. It is a thing that does occasionally happen to people who prefer to drink salt water.

This is perhaps a somewhat provocative way of opening the statement of my strongest conviction; but I would respectfully plead that the provocation came from the Protestant. When Protestantism calmly claims to rule all the souls in the tone of Britannia ruling all the seas, it is permissible to retort that the very quintessence of such salt can be found thickest in the stagnation of the Dead Sea. But it is still more permissible to retort that Protestantism is claiming what no religion at this moment can possibly claim. It is calmly claiming the allegiance of millions of agnostics, atheists, hedonistic pagans, independent mystics, psychic investigators, theists, theosophists, followers of Eastern cults and jolly fellows living like the beasts that perish. To pretend that all these are Protestants is considerably to lower the prestige and significance of Protestantism. It is to make it merely negative; and salt is not negative.

Taking this as a text and test of the present problem of religious choice, we find ourselves faced from the first with a dilemma about the traditional religion of our fathers. Protestantism as here named is either a negative or a positive thing. If Protestantism is a positive thing, there is no doubt whatever that it is dead. In so far as it really was a set of special spiritual beliefs it is no longer believed. The genuine Protestant creed is now hardly held by anybody–least of all by the Protestants. So completely have they lost faith in it, that they have mostly forgotten what it was. If almost any modern man be asked whether we save our souls solely through our theology, or whether doing good (to the poor, for instance) will help us on the road to God, he would answer without hesitation that good works are probably more pleasing to God than theology. It would probably come as quite a surprise to him to learn that, for three hundred years, the faith in faith alone was the badge of a Protestant, the faith in good works the rather shameful badge of a disreputable Papist. The ordinary Englishman (to bring in our old friend once more) would now be in no doubt whatever on the merits of the long quarrel between Catholicism and Calvinism. And that was the most important and intellectual quarrel between Catholicism and Protestantism. If he believes in a God at all, or even if he does not, he would quite certainly prefer a God who has made all men for joy, and desires to save them all, to a God who deliberately made some for involuntary sin and immortal misery. But that was the quarrel; and it was the Catholic who held the first and the Protestant who held the second. The modern man not only does not share, he does not even understand, the unnatural aversion of the Puritans to all art and beauty in relation to religion. Yet that was the real Protestant protest; and right into the Mid-Victorian time Protestant matrons were shocked at a white gown, let alone a coloured vestment. On practically every essential count on which the Reformation actually put Rome in the dock, Rome has since been acquitted by the jury of the whole world.

It Is perfectly true that we can find real wrongs, provoking rebellion, in the Roman Church just before the Reformation. What we cannot find is one ot those real wrongs that the Reformation reformed. For instance, it was an abominable abuse that the corruption of the monasteries sometimes permitted a rich noble to play the patron and even play at being the Abbot, or draw on the revenues supposed to belong to a brotherhood of poverty and charity. But all that the Reformation did was to allow the same rich noble to take over ALL the revenue, to seize the whole house and turn it into a palace or a pig-sty, and utterly stamp out the last legend of the poor brotherhood. The worst things in worldly Catholicism were made worse by Protestantism. But the best things remained somehow through the era of corruption; nay, they survived even the era of reform. They survive to-day in all Catholic countries, not only in the colour and poetry and popularity of religion, but in the deepest lessons of practical psychology. And so completely are they justified, after the judgment of four centuries, that every one of them is now being copied, even by those who condemned it; only it is often caricatured. Psycho-analysis is the Confessional without the safeguards of the Confessional; Communism is the Franciscan movement without the moderating balance of the Church; and American sects, having howled for three centuries at the Popish theatricality and mere appeal to the senses, now «brighten» their services by super-theatrical films and rays of rose-red light falling on the head of the minister. If we had a ray of light to throw about, we should not throw it on the minister.

Next, Protestantism may be a negative thing. In other words, it may be a new and totally different list of charges against Rome; and only in continuity because it is still against Rome. That is very largely what it is; and that is presumably what the DAILY EXPRESS really meant, when it said that our country and our countrymen are soaked in Protestantism as in salt. In other words, the legend that Rome is wrong anyhow, is still a living thing, though all the features of the monster are now entirely altered in the caricature. Even this is an exaggeration, as applied to the England of to-day; but there is still a truth in it. Only the truth, when truly realised, can hardly be very satisfactory to honest and genuine Protestants. For, after all, what sort of a tradition is this, that tells a different story every day or every decade, and is content so long as all the contradictory tales are told against one man or one institution? What sort of holy cause is it to inherit from our ancestors, that we should go on hating something and being consistent only in hatred; being fickle and false in everything else, even in our reason for hating it? Are we really to settle down seriously to make up a new set of stories against the bulk of our fellow-Christians? Is that Protestantism; and is that worth comparing to patriotism or the sea?

Anyhow, that was the situation I found myself facing when I began to think of these things, the child of a purely Protestant ancestry and, in the ordinary sense, of a Protestant household. But as a fact my family, having become Liberal, was no longer Protestant. I was brought up a sort of Universalist and Unitarian; at the feet of that admirable man, Stopford Brooke. It was not Protestantism save in a very negative sense. Often it was the flat contrary of Protestantism, even in that sense. For instance, the Universalist did not believe in hell; and he was emphatic in saying that heaven was a happy state of mind–«a temper.» But he had the sense to see that most men do not live or die in a state of mind so happy that it will alone ensure them a heaven. If heaven is a temper, it is certainly not a universal temper; and a good many people pass through this life in a devil of a temper. If all these were to have heaven, solely through happiness, it seemed clear that something must happen to them first. The Universalist therefore believed in a progress after death, at once punishment and enlightenment. In other words, he believed in Purgatory; though he did not believe in Hell. Right or wrong, he obviously and flatly contradicted the Protestant, who believed in Hell but not in Purgatory. Protestantism, through its whole history, had waged ceaseless war on this one idea of Purgatory or Progress beyond the grave. I have come to see in the complete Catholic view much deeper truths on all three ideas; truths concerned with will and creation and God’s most glorious love of liberty. But even at the start, though I had no thought of Catholicism, I could not see why I should have any concern with Protestantism; which had always said the very opposite of what a Liberal is now expected to say.

I found, in plain words, that there was no longer any question of clinging to the Protestant faith. It was simply a question of whether I should cling to the Protestant feud. And to my enormous astonishment, I found a large number of my fellow Liberals eager to go on with the Protestant feud, though they no longer held the Protestant faith. I have no title to judge them; but to me, I confess, it seemed like a rather ugly breach of honour. To find out that you have been slandering somebody about something, to refuse to apologise, and to make up another more plausible story against him, so that you can carry on the spirit of the slander, seemed to me at the start a rather poor way of behaving. I resolved at least to consider the original slandered institution on its own merits and the first and most obvious question was: Why were Liberals so very illiberal about it? What was the meaning of the feud, so constant and so inconsistent? That question took a long time to answer and would now take much too long a time to record. But it led me at last to the only logical answer, which every fact of life now confirms; that the thing is hated, as nothing else is hated, simply because it is, in the exact sense of the popular phrase, like nothing on earth.

There is barely space here to indicate this one thing out of the thousand things that confirm the same fact and confirm each other. I would undertake to pick up any topic at random, from pork to pyrotechnics, and show that it illustrates the truth of the only true philosophy; so realistic is the remark that all roads lead to Rome. Out of all these I have here only taken one fact; that the thing is pursued age after age by an unreasonable hatred that is perpetually changing its reason. Now of nearly all the dead heresies it may be said that they are not only dead, but damned; that is, they are condemned or would be condemned by common sense, even outside the Church, when once the mood and mania of them is passed. Nobody now wants to revive the Divine Right of Kings which the first Anglicans advanced against the Pope. Nobody now wants to revive the Calvinism which the first Puritans advanced against the King. Nobody now is sorry that the Iconoclasts were prevented from smashing all the statues of Italy. Nobody now is sorry that the Jansenists failed to destroy all the dramas of France. Nobody who knows anything about the Albigensians regrets that they did not convert the world to pessimism and perversion. Nobody who really understands the logic of the Lollards (a much more sympathetic set of people) really wishes that they had succeeded in taking away all political rights and privileges from everybody who was not in a state of grace. «Dominion founded on Grace» was a devout ideal, but considered as a plan for disregarding an Irish policeman controlling the traffic in Piccadilly, until we have discovered whether he has confessed recently to his Irish priest, it is wanting in actuality. In nine cases out of ten the Church simply stood for sanity and social balance against heretics who were sometimes very like lunatics. Yet at each separate moment the pressure of the prevalent error was very strong; the exaggerated error of a whole generation, like the strength of the Manchester School in the ‘fifties, or of Fabian Socialism as a fashion in my own youth. A study of the true historical cases commonly shows us the spirit of the age going wrong, and the Catholics at least relatively going right. It is a mind surviving a hundred moods.

As I say, this is only one aspect; but it was the first that affected me and it leads on to others. When a hammer has hit the right nail on the head a hundred times, there comes a time when we think it was not altogether by accident. But these historical proofs would be nothing without the human and personal proofs, which would need quite a different sort of description. It is enough to say that those who know the Catholic practice find it not only right, but always right when everything else is wrong; making the Confessional the very throne of candour where the world outside talks nonsense about it as a sort of conspiracy; upholding humility when everybody is praising pride; charged with sentimental charity when the world is talking a brutal utilitarianism; charged with dogmatic harshness when the world is loud and loose with vulgar sentimentalism–as it is to-day. At the place where the roads meet there is no doubt of the convergence. A man may think all sorts of things, most of them honest and many of them true, about the right way to turn in the maze at Hampton Court. But he does not think he is in the centre; he knows.

G. K. Chesterton en 1926

Gilbert Keith Chesterton: “Why I Am a Catholic” (1926)

(G. K. Chesterton: Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds, 1926. En G. K. Chesterton: The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. III. Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990, pp. 127-132).

The difficulty of explaining “why I am a Catholic” is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, “It is the only thing that…” As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.

Or I might treat the matter personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really is. Numbers of much better men have been sincerely converted to much worse religions. I would much prefer to attempt to say here of the Catholic Church precisely the things that cannot be said even of its very respectable rivals. In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity of a guardian of the truth.

The other day a well-known writer, otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea. Indeed, those who complain that Catholicism cannot say anything new, seldom think it necessary to say anything new about Catholicism. As a matter of fact, a real study of history will show it to be curiously contrary to the fact. In so far as the ideas really are ideas, and in so far as any such ideas can be new, Catholics have continually suffered through supporting them when they were really new; when they were much too new to find any other support. The Catholic was not only first in the field but alone in the field; and there was as yet nobody to understand what he had found there.

Thus, for instance, nearly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, in an age devoted to the pride and praise of princes, Cardinal Bellarmine and Suarez the Spaniard laid down lucidly the whole theory of real democracy. But in that age of Divine Right they only produced the impression of being sophistical and sanguinary Jesuits, creeping about with daggers to effect the murder of kings. So, again, the Casuists of the Catholic schools said all that can really be said for the problem plays and problem novels of our own time, two hundred years before they were written. They said that there really are problems of moral conduct; but they had the misfortune to say it two hundred years too soon. In a time of tub-thumping fanaticism and free and easy vituperation, they merely got themselves called liars and shufflers for being psychologists before psychology was the fashion. It would be easy to give any number of other examples down to the present day, and the case of ideas that are still too new to be understood. There are passages in Pope Leo’s Encyclical on Labor[also known as Rerum Novarum], released in 1891] which are only now beginning to be used as hints for social movements much newer than socialism. And when Mr. Belloc wrote about the Servile State, he advanced an economic theory so original that hardly anybody has yet realized what it is. A few centuries hence, other people will probably repeat it, and repeat it wrong. And then, if Catholics object, their protest will be easily explained by the well-known fact that Catholics never care for new ideas.

Nevertheless, the man who made that remark about Catholics meant something; and it is only fair to him to understand it rather more clearly than he stated it. What he meant was that, in the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential fashions; most of which still claim to be new, though many of them are beginning to be a little stale. In other words, in so far as he meant that the Church often attacks what the world at any given moment supports, he was perfectly right . The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this world that passes away; and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly it does pass away. But to understand exactly what is involved, it is necessary to take a rather larger view and consider the ultimate nature of the ideas in question, to consider, so to speak, the idea of the idea.

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude towards heresy, or as some would say, towards liberty, can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge which, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel.

There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them.

On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not to mention any number of intellectual battle-fields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice. By this means, it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past, but which might otherwise entrap travelers again and again in the future. The Church does make herself responsible for warning her people against these; and upon these the real issue of the case depends. She does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes, those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the old mistakes. Now all these false issues have a way of looking quite fresh, especially to a fresh generation. Their first statement always sounds harmless and plausible. I will give only two examples. It sounds harmless to say, as most modern people have said: “Actions are only wrong if they are bad for society.” Follow it out, and sooner or later you will have the inhumanity of a hive or a heathen city, establishing slavery as the cheapest and most certain means of production, torturing the slaves for evidence because the individual is nothing to the State, declaring that an innocent man must die for the people, as did the murderers of Christ. Then, perhaps, you will go back to Catholic definitions, and find that the Church, while she also says it is our duty to work for society, says other things also which forbid individual injustice. Or again, it sounds quite pious to say, “Our moral conflict should end with a victory of the spiritual over the material.” Follow it out, and you may end in the madness of the Manicheans, saying that a suicide is good because it is a sacrifice, that a sexual perversion is good because it produces no life, that the devil made the sun and moon because they are material. Then you may begin to guess why Catholicism insists that there are evil spirits as well as good; and that materials also may be sacred, as in the Incarnation or the Mass, in the sacrament of marriage or the resurrection of the body.

Now there is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong. The policeman comes too late, when he tries to prevent men from going wrong. The doctor comes too late, for he only comes to lock up a madman, not to advise a sane man on how not to go mad. And all other sects and schools are inadequate for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but precisely because each of them does contain a truth; and is content to contain a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once. The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present. Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. Thus, when the world went Puritan in the seventeenth century, the Church was charged with pushing charity to the point of sophistry, with making everything easy with the laxity of the confessional. Now that the world is not going Puritan but Pagan, it is the Church that is everywhere protesting against a Pagan laxity in dress or manners. It is doing what the Puritans wanted done when it is really wanted. In all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all Puritans are Pagans.

Thus, for instance, Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.

Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments or build our Utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality. Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether, and trampling on all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride. We must have the truisms everywhere recognized as true. We must prevent mere reaction and the dreary repetition of the old mistakes. We must make the intellectual world safe for democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.

Paul Claudel en 1929

Paul Claudel: «Ma Conversion», 1913 

(En Paul Claudel: Œuvres en prose. Gallimard, París, 1965, pp. 1008-1014)

Je suis né le 6 août 1868. Ma conver­sion s’est produite le 25 décembre 1886. J’avais donc dix-huit ans. Mais le développement de mon caractère était déjà, à ce moment, très avancé. Bien que rattachée des deux côtés à des lignées de croyants qui ont donné plusieurs prêtres à l’Église, ma famille était indifférente et, après notre arrivée à Paris, devint nettement étrangère aux cho­ses de la Foi.

Auparavant, j’avais fait une bonne pre­mière communion qui, comme pour la plu­part des jeunes garçons, fut à la fois le cou­ronnement et le terme de mes pratiques religieuses. J’ai été élevé, ou plutôt instruit, d’abord par un professeur libre, dans des collèges (laïcs) de province, puis enfin au lycée Louis-le-Grand. Dès mon entrée dans cet établissement, j’avais perdu la foi, qui me semblait inconciliable avec la pluralité des mondes. La lecture de la Vie de Jésus de Renan fournit de nouveau prétextes à ce changement de convictions que tout, d’aillers, autour de moi, facilitait ou encourageait.

Que l’on se rappelle ces tristes années quatre-vingts, l’époque du plein épanouissement de la littérature naturaliste. Jamais le joug de la matière ne parut mieux affermi. Tout ce qui avait un nom dans l’art, dans la science et dans la littérature, était irréligieux. Tous les soi-disant grands hommes de ce siècle finissant s’étaient distingués par leur hostilité à l’Église. Renan régnait. Il prési­dait la dernière distribution de prix du lycée Louis-le-Grand à laquelle j’assistai et il me semble que je fus couronné de ses mains. Victor Hugo venait de disparaître dans une apothéose.

À dix-huit ans, je croyais donc ce que croyaient la plupart des gens dits cultivés de ce temps. La forte idée de l’individuel et du concret était obscurcie en moi. J’acceptais l’hypothèse moniste et mécaniste dans toute sa rigueur; je croyais que tout était soumis aux » lois «, et que ce monde était un enchaînement dur d’effets et de causes que la science allait arriver après-demain à débrouiller parfaitement. Tout cela me semblait d’ailleurs fort triste et fort en­nuyeux. Quant à l’idée du devoir kantien que nous présentait mon professeur de philo­sophie, M. Burdeau, ja­mais il ne me fut pos­sible de la digérer.

Je vivais d’ailleurs dans l’immoralité et, peu à peu, je tombai dans un état de désespoir. La mort de mon grand-père, que j’avais vu de longs mois rongé par un cancer à l’estomac, m’avait inspiré une profonde terreur et la pensée de la mort ne me quittait pas. J’avais complètement oublié la religion et j’étais à son égard d’une ignorance sau­vage. La première lueur de vérité me fut donnée par la rencontre des livres d’un grand poète, à qui je dois une éternelle re­connaissance, et qui a eu dans la formation de ma pensée une part prépondérante : Arthur Rimbaud. La lecture des Illuminations, puis, quelques mois après, d’Une Sai­son en Enfer, fut pour moi un événement capital. Pour la première fois, ces livres ou­vraient une fissure dans mon bagne matéria­liste et me donnait l’impression vivante et presque physique du surnaturel. Mais mon état habituel d’asphyxie et de désespoir res­tait le même.

Tel était le malheureux enfant qui, le 25 décembre 1886, se rendit à Notre-Dame de Paris pour y suivre les offices de Noël. Je commençais alors à écrire et il me semblait que, dans les cérémonies catholiques, considérées avec un dilettan­tisme supérieur, je trouverais un excitant ap­proprié et la matière de quelques exercices décadents. C’est dans ces dispositions que, cou­doyé et bousculé par la foule, j’assistai, avec un plaisir médiocre, à la grand-messe. Puis, n’ayant rien de mieux à faire, je revins aux vêpres. Les enfants de la maîtrise en robes blan­ches et les élèves du pe­tit séminaire de Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet qui les assistaient, étaient en train de chanter ce que je sus plus tard être le Magnificat. J’étais moi-même debout dans la foule, près du second pilier à l’entrée du chœur, à droite du côté de la sacristie. Et c’est alors que se produisit l’événement qui domine toute ma vie.

En un instant, mon cœur fut touché et je crus. Je crus, d’une telle force d’adhésion, d’un tel soulèvement de tout mon être, d’une conviction si puissante, d’une telle certitude ne laissant place à aucune espèce de doute que, depuis, tous les livres, tous les raisonnements, tous les hasards d’une vie agitée, n’ont pu ébranler ma foi, ni, à vrai dire, la toucher. J’avais eu tout à coup le sentiment déchirant de l’innocence, de l’éternelle enfance de Dieu, une révélation ineffable.

En essayant, comme je l’ai fait souvent, de reconstituer les minutes qui suivirent cet instant extraordinaire, je retrouve les éléments suivants qui, cependant, ne formaient qu’un seul éclair, une seule arme, dont la Providence divine se servait pour atteindre et s’ouvrir enfin le cœur d’un pauvre enfant désespéré : » Que les gens qui croient sont heureux ! Si c’était vrai, pourtant ? C’est vrai ! Dieu existe, Il est là. C’est quelqu’un, c’est un être aussi personnel que moi ! Il m’aime, Il m’appelle. » Les larmes et les san­glots étaient venus et le chant si tendre de l’Adeste ajoutait encore à mon émotion.

Émotion bien douce où se mêlait cepen­dant un sentiment d’épouvante et presque d’horreur ! Car mes convictions philosophiques étaient entières. Dieu les avait laissées dédaigneusement où elles étaient, je ne voyais rien à y changer, la religion catho­lique me semblait toujours le même trésor d’anecdotes absurdes, ses prêtres et les fidèles m’inspiraient la même aversion qui allait jusqu’à la haine et jusqu’au dégoût. L’édifice de mes opinions et de mes connaissan­ces restait debout et je n’y voyais aucun défaut. Il était seulement arrivé que j’en étais sorti.

Un Être nouveau et formidable, avec de terribles exigences pour le jeune homme et l’artiste que j’étais, s’était révélé que je ne savais concilier avec rien de ce qui m’entou­rait. L’état d’un homme qu’on arracherait d’un seul coup de sa peau pour le planter dans un corps étranger au milieu d’un monde inconnu est la seule comparaison que je puisse trouver pour exprimer cet état de désarroi complet. Ce qui était le plus répugnant, à mes opinions et à mes goûts, c’est cela pourtant qui était vrai, c’est cela dont il fallait bon gré, mal gré, que je m’accommodasse. Ah ! Ce ne serait pas, du moins, sans avoir essayé tout ce qu’il m’était possible pour résister.

Cette résistance a duré quatre ans. J’ose dire que je fis une belle défense et que la lutte fut loyale et complète. Rien ne fut omis. J’usai de tous les moyens de résis­tance et je dus abandonner l’une après l’autre des armes qui ne me servaient à rien. Ce fut la grande crise de mon existence, cette agonie de la pensée dont Arthur Rimbaud a écrit : » Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d’hommes. Dure nuit ! le sang séché fume sur ma face ! » Les jeunes gens qui abandonnent si facilement la foi ne savent pas ce qu’il en coûte pour la recou­vrer et de quelles tortures elle devient le prix. La pensée de l’enfer, la pensée aussi de tou­tes les beautés et de toutes les joies, dont, à ce qu’il me paraissait, mon retour à la vérité, devait m’imposer le sacrifice, étaient surtout ce qui me retirait en arrière.

Mais enfin, dès le soir même de ce mémorable jour à Notre-Dame, après que je fus rentré chez moi par les rues pluvieuses qui me semblaient maintenant si étranges, j’avais pris une bible protestante qu’une amie allemande avait donnée autrefois à ma sœur Camille et, pour la première fois, j’avais entendu l’accent de cette voix si douce et si inflexible qui n’a cessé de retentir dans mon cœur.

Je ne connaissais que par Renan l’histoire de Jésus et, sur la foi de cet imposteur, j’ignorais même qu’Il se fût jamais dit le Fils de Dieu. Chaque mot, chaque ligne démen­tait, avec une simplicité majestueuse, les impudentes affirmations de l’apostat et me dessillait les yeux. C’est vrai, je l’avouais avec le centurion, oui, Jésus était le Fils de Dieu. C’est à moi, Paul, entre tous, qu’Il s’adressait et Il me promettait Son amour. Mais, en même temps, si je ne Le suivais, Il ne me laissait d’autre alternative que la damnation. Ah ! de n’avais pas besoin qu’on m’expliquât ce qu’était l’enfer et j’y avais fait ma » Saison «. Ces quelques heures m’avaient suffi pour me montrer que l’enfer est partout où n’est pas Jésus-Christ. Et que m’importait le reste du monde auprès de cet Être nouveau et prodigieux qui venait de m’être révélé ?

C’était l’homme nouveau en moi qui par­lait ainsi, mais l’ancien résistait de toutes ses forces et ne voulait rien abandonner de cette vie qui s’ouvrait à lui. L’avouerai-je ? Au fond, le sentiment le plus fort qui m’empêchait de déclarer mes convictions était le res­pect humain. La pensée d’annoncer à tous ma conversion, de dire à mes parents que je vou­lais faire maigre le ven­dredi, de me proclamer moi-même un de ces catholiques tant raillés, me donnait des sueurs froides et, par mo­ments, la violence qui m’était faite me causait une véritable indignation. Mais je sentais sur moi une main ferme. Je ne connaissais pas un prêtre. Je n’avais pas un ami catholique.

L’étude de la religion était devenue mon intérêt dominant. Chose curieuse ! l’éveil de l’âme et celui des facultés poétiques se fai­sait chez moi en même temps, démentant mes préjugés et mes terreurs enfantines. C’est à ce moment que j’écrivis les premières versions de mes drames : Tête d’Or et La Ville. Quoique étranger encore aux sacrements, déjà je participais à la vie de l’Église, je respirais enfin et la vie pénétrait en moi par tous les pores. Les livres qui m’ont le plus aidé à cette époque sont d’abord les Pensées de Pascal, ouvrage inestimable pour ceux qui cherchent la foi, bien que son influence ait souvent été funeste; les Élévations sur les Mystères et les Méditations sur les Évangiles de Bossuet, et ses autres traités philosophiques; le Poème de Dante, et les admirables récits de la Sœur Emmerich. La Métaphysique d’Aristote m’avait nettoyé l’esprit et m’intro­duisait dans les domaines de la véritable rai­son. L’Imitation appartenait à une sphère trop élevée pour moi et ses deux premiers li­vres m’avaient paru d’une dureté terrible.

Mais le grand livre qui m’était ouvert et où je fis mes classes, c’était l’Église. Louée soit à jamais cette grande mère majes­tueuse aux genoux de qui j’ai tout appris ! Je passais tous mes dimanches à Notre-Dame et j’y allais le plus sou­vent possible en se­maine. J’étais alors aussi ignorant de ma religion qu’on peut l’être du bouddhisme, et voilà que le drame sacré se déployait de­vant moi avec une magni­ficence qui surpassait toutes mes imaginations. Ah ! ce n’était plus le pauvre langage des livres de dévotion ! C’était la plus pro­fonde et la plus grandiose poésie, les gestes les plus augustes qui aient jamais été confiés à des êtres humains.

Je ne pouvais me rassasier du spectacle de la messe et chaque mouvement du prêtre s’inscrivait profondément dans mon esprit et dans mon cœur. La lecture de l’office des Morts, de celui de Noël, le spectacle des jours de la Semaine Sainte, le sublime chant de l’Exultat auprès duquel les accents les plus enivrés de Sophocle et de Pindare me paraissaient fades, tout cela m’écrasait de respect et de joie, de reconnaissance, de re­pentir et d’adoration ! Peu à peu, lentement et péniblement, se faisait jour dans mon cœur cette idée que l’art et la poésie aussi sont des choses divines, et que les plaisirs de la chair, loin de leur être indispensables, leur sont au contraires un détriment. Combien j’enviais les heureux chrétiens que je voyais communier ! Quant à moi, j’osais à peine me glisser parmi ceux qui, à chaque vendredi de Carême, venaient baiser la couronne d’épines.

Cependant les années passaient et ma situation devenait intolérable. Je priais Dieu avec larmes en secret et cependant je n’osais ouvrir la bouche. Pourtant, chaque jour, mes objections devenaient plus faibles et l’exigence de Dieu plus dure. Ah ! que je Le connaissais bien à ce moment, et que Ses tou­ches sur mon âme étaient fortes ! Comment ai-je trouvé le courage d’y résister ?

La troisième année, je lus les Écritures posthumes de Baudelaire, et je vis qu’un poète que je préférais à tous les Français avait trouvé la foi dans les dernières années de sa vie et s’était débattu dans les mêmes angoisses et dans les mêmes remords que moi. Je réunis mon courage et j’entrai un après-midi dans un confessionnal de Saint-Médard, ma paroisse. Les minutes où j’attendis le prêtre sont les plus amères de ma vie. Je trouvai un vieil homme qui me parut fort peu ému d’une histoire qui, à moi, semblait si intéressante ; il me parla des ‘ souvenirs de ma première communion ‘ (à ma pro­fonde vexation) et m’ordonna avant toute absolu­tion de déclarer ma conversion à ma famille : en quoi aujourd’hui je ne puis lui donner tort. Je sortis de la boîte humilié et courroucé, et n’y revins que l’année suivante, lorsque je fus décidément forcé, réduit et poussé à bout. Là dans cette même église Saint-Médard, je trouvai un jeune prêtre miséricor­dieux et fraternel, M. l’abbé Ménard, qui me réconcilia, et plus tard, le saint et vénérable ecclésias­tique, l’abbé Villaume, qui fut mon directeur et mon père bien-aimé, et dont, du ciel où il est maintenant, je ne cesse de sentir sur moi la protection. Je fis ma seconde communion en ce même jour de Noël, le 25 décembre 1890, à Notre-Dame.

Evelyn Waugh en 1930 (año de su conversión)

Evelyn Waugh: «Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me» 

(Daily Express, 20/10/1930, p. 8)

Three popular errors reappear with depressing regularity in any discussion about a convert to the Roman Catholic Church. It may be useful to mention these before going on to a more positive explanation of my position. They are:

1. The Jesuits have got hold of him. I have heard this often the last few days, and have come to realise that are still a great number of English people who regard this pious and erudite body as a kind of spiritual pressgang, out for head-money; millionaires and great noblemen are the real quarry, but if, in the course of the hunt, they can bag a novelist or two, so much the better. This is very far from the truth. Instruction is, of course, necessary for anyone who wants to join the Roman Church, and Jesuits, like other priests, are ready to give help to those who need it. There is no coaxing or tricking people into acquiescence. They state or explain their doctrine, and the proselyte decides for himself whether it is true.

2. He is captivated by the ritual. This is certainly arranged to a great extent as an aid to devotion, but it would be a very superficial person who would accept a whole theological and moral system on these grounds alone. Indeed, it seems to me that in this country, where all the finest ecclesiastical buildings are in the hands of the Anglican Church, and where the liturgy is written in prose of unexampled beauty, the purely aesthetic appeal is, on the whole, rather against the Roman Church.

3. He wants to have his mind made up for him. The suggestion here is that the convert cannot face the responsibility of thinking problems out for himself, but finds it convenient to swallow whole a complete explanation of the universe.

The answer to this is that if he has a lazy mind it is easy enough to stagnate without supernatural assistance, and if he has an active mind, the Roman system can and does form a basis for the most vigorous intellectual and artistic activity.

I think one has to look deeper before one will find the reason why in England to-day the Roman Church is recruiting so many men and women who are not notably gullible, dull-witted, or eccentric.

It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos.

It is much the same situation as existed in the early Middle Ages. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, conflicting social and political forces rendered irreconcilable the division between two great groups of Christian thought.

* * * *

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the choice before any educated European was between Christianity, in whatever form it was presented to him in the circumstances of his upbringing, and, on the other side, a polite and highly attractive scepticism.

So great, indeed, was the inherited, subconscious power of Christianity that it was nearly two centuries before the real nature of this loss of faith become apparent.

Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilisation –and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organisation of Europe– has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance.

The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequent lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanised State, already existent in Russia and rapidly spreading south and west.

It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilisation and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests. As the issues become cleared, the polite sceptic and with him that purely fictitious figure, the happy hedonist, will disappear.

That is the first discovery, that Christianity is essential to civilisation, and that it is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.

The second discovery is that Christianity exists in its most complete and vital form in the Roman Catholic Church. I do not mean any impertinence to the many devout Anglicans and Protestants who are leading lives of great devotion and benevolence: I do find, however, that other religious bodies, however fine the example of certain individual members, show unmistakable signs that they are not fitted for the conflict in which Christianity is engaged.

* * * *

For instance, it seems to me a necessary sign of completeness and vitality in a religious body that its teaching shall be coherent and consistent. If its own mind is not made up, it can hardly hope to withstand disorder from outside.

In the Anglican Church today matters of supreme importance in faith and morals are still discussed indecisively, while the holders of high office are able to make public assertions which do violence to the deepest feelings of many of their people.

Another essential sign one looks for is competent organisation and discipline. Obedience to superiors and the habit of submitting personal idiosyncrasies to the demands of office seem to be sure signs of a real priesthood. Any kind of “crankiness” or individual self-assertion in the ministers of a religious body shakes one’s confidence in them.

Most important of all, it seems to me that any religious body which is not by nature universal cannot claim to represent complete Christianity. I mean this as a difference in kind, not in extent.

The Church in the first century, when its membership was numerically negligible, was by nature as universal as in the time of the Crusaders; but many religious sects seem to pride themselves upon exclusiveness, regarding themselves as a peculiar people set aside for salvation. Others claim a regional loyalty. Those who regard conversion to Roman Catholicism as an unpatriotic defection –a surrender to Italian domination– seem to miss the whole idea of universality.

* * * *

There are few of the signs by which in its public affairs one would recognise the Church one is seeking. There also remain the devotional needs of the individual member, for, however imposing the organisation of the Church, it would be worthless if it did not rest upon the faith of its members. No one visiting a Roman Catholic country can fail to be struck by the fact that the people do use their churches. It is not a matter of going to a service on Sunday: all classes at all hours of the day can be seen dropping in on their way to and from their work.

Roman Catholic people are notable for this ability to pray without any feeling of affectation, and the explanation of it seems to me that prayer is not associated in their minds with any assertion of moral superiority. You never see in Roman Catholics going to Mass, as one sees on the faces of many people going to chapel, that look of being rather better than their neighbours.

The Protestant attitude seems often to be, «I am good: therefore I go to church», while the Catholic is, «I am very far from good; therefore I go to church».

Artículo original en pdf: Waugh. Daily Express

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«Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly».

(Palabras de Evelyn Waugh a un amigo, en 1930. En J. Pearce: Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief. Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2006, p. 164).