Lipstick Traces (41 page)

He was sent to Germany, part of the occupation forces. He became a clerk, no less a joke than his first government job. He learned to despise the Germans, people he once thought fit to rule the world, but now so craven they ate French dirt for a glass of cheap champagne; he mastered the art of goldbricking. Sitting at his desk, bored and full of hate, he got fat and dreamed of Paris. Two-and-a-half years of nothing to go.

Misery brought illness, which revealed a heart condition. In January 1949 Michel received indefinite leave and a disability pension pending a full discharge. He made straight for the Left Bank and Jacques, but Jacques was
in Nice, sunk in decadence and luxuria; on his own, Michel was sickened by the degeneracy of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Everywhere he looked he saw pederasts and prostitutes. Once more he journeyed to Saint-Maximin, and this time stuck it out. In June he received his habit and began his novitiate.

“Life,” Mourre wrote, “was no longer ‘historical.’ At first I was amazed at the contempt for history shown by the Dominicans of Saint-Maximin. History no longer counted for them; it had no more secrets to disclose.
Everything
was already a thing of the past, an accomplished fact, for the ultimate meaning of history had been revealed two thousand years before, when the final triumph of Christ was assured. The historical sufferings of our time never penetrated the walls of the cloisters.” To Michel the gift of nothing-new-under-the-sun was absolute freedom, freedom from himself.

The world receded into an impenetrable past, a never-ending present, a preordained future. Spurning all vices, abandoning all possessions, Michel touched peace of mind. Discipline was everywhere; he felt showered with love. In the wonders of obedience and fellowship, he took eternity into his mouth.

The food was generally good. Life became a struggle between grand hopes and petty faults; Michel fought his desires. The novitiate exposed every one of them.

The fathers lived in perfect harmony; Michel and his fellows had to create it. That was their testing. In brutal meetings every gesture, every word, was scrutinized. Life was broken down into tiny moments; as if ruled by a great magnet, each one was drawn back to a standard of piety no man could match.

The monk would get up and accuse himself of his faults. Then he performed another
venia
[abasement] and remained lying on the floor while one by one the other monks would get up and accuse the penitent: “I accuse Brother G. of failing to keep a modest expression on his face while out walking, and of glancing at people he meets with too much interest!”. . . Or: “I accuse Brother B. of talking to Brother F. who was seeing to his tonsure and of showing too much concern on that score!” . . . Or: “I accuse
Brother A. of showing too much pleasure in accusing himself and of performing the gestures of humility in an ostentatious manner!”

To hold his own each new pledge sought a scapegoat; each became one. Michel found his whipping boy; another novice found him. Michel placed one foot in front of the other in fear of what someone else might make of the movement. There was nothing new under the sun, but the world began anew with every instant, and could end there. The world of freedom, Michel decided, was a world of terrorism.

As always, he looked for an escape. He met with the master of the monastery and spoke his mind.
Master, we cannot stay here, cloistered within our walls
—
there is a world to win! We must go into the world to preach, we must preach like the old Dominicans, in the streets, in the doorways of houses, in the cafes
—
in nightclubs!
The other novices were country bumpkins and city virgins; Michel had seen it all. He felt free, ready to act. But the rules of Saint-Maximin insisted that he was already acting, with every curl of the lip, every raising of a hand—and that his acts fell short of a very close mark. Tied to eternity, Michel was a nobody.

For that matter he wasn’t free—free of himself. Joining Sunday vespers with the nuns of Saint-Maximin, he knelt, gazed upon the Passion, heard the women praying, and got an erection. No one noticed, Michel did not confess at the sessions of autocritique, and so the moment festered. Michel tried to channel his lust for women back into his first lust: books.

There were few. The novitiate library was strictly controlled. Saint-Maximin was a Thomist institution, the purest of the pure; what was acceptable to the Dominicans of Paris was heresy in Toulouse. Of all the authors of Christendom one might read only Aquinas himself, Saint John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena, Saint Theresa of Avila, and “the blessed Suso.” Michel read them all, and it is inescapable that he came across what, today, are Suso’s most famous words.

Heinrich Suso (1300?–1366) is variously described as a disciple of the great German mystic Meister Eckhart and, given the accusations of heresy Eckhart
suffered, as a dissenter from his doctrines. Suso’s works were two:
Das Büchlein der Wahrheit
(The Little Book of the Truth) and
Das Büchlein der Ewigen Weisheit
(The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom).

He spent twenty-two years as a flagellant; then God told him to throw down his scourge, shake the stones from his shoes, and unclasp the studded belts from his ruined flesh. For seventeen years he wandered through the German province of Swabia as a homeless preacher, begging alms and eating garbage. He was in the realm of a mystical underground: the Brethren of the Free Spirit.

The church administered Europe by means of its monopoly over the meaning of life. The meaning of life was found in the Christian mysteries, which moved back and forth between the two poles of Original Sin, the fact of innate depravity, and the Resurrection, the promise of salvation. Both were principles of authority, for both signified that no one’s fate was one’s own work. Always containing seeds of antinomianism, mysticism inevitably undermined that authority, but because the church’s hegemony rested on mystery, mysticism could not be altogether prohibited. The common will to reach God was too strong, and the church was political before it was anything else. Mysticism was permitted up to a point, and the point was precisely the margin where the absolute authority of the church over an individual’s apprehension of the meaning of life could be maintained. This was the epiphany—where, on earth, for a moment, one achieved union with God. In that mini-miracle, which could not last, one glimpsed the reality of salvation; one returned with a tale of the truth that, the church wagered, would only buttress its claim to be beyond history. Thus the church sanctioned the brotherhoods of the Franciscans and the Dominicans; in imitation of Jesus, the brothers set out in the twelfth century to live in poverty, to abjure all finery and clothe themselves in dulled and hooded robes, to feel hunger and thirst, to sleep if necessary outside of roofs and walls, to practice mortification of the flesh: to make the desert in which each man might find his temptation and overcome it. Writ large for the populace to whom the brothers preached, this was the meaning of life in acts. It was a play: a dramatization of God’s promise to allow those who were worthy to exchange the misery of human existence for the perfection of heaven.

The Brethren of the Free Spirit were the first “false dominicans.” As they
walked through the towns of Europe their dress was the same, save for subtle variations meant to alert those who knew the signs: colored patches on the hoods of their habits, a split in the trailing cloth. Like the real Dominicans, they begged—but where the Dominicans did not work because they sought privation, the adepts of the Free Spirit refused to work because they placed themselves above it, convinced that the enjoyment of every luxury was theirs by right. The Dominicans affirmed the base nature they shared with all humanity by incarnating the consequence of sin, which was suffering; at the same time, they affirmed that humanity could be delivered from its nature and changed into a race of angels. Free spirits sought paradise with the claim that only through the affirmation of sin could one negate it.

The partisan of the Free Spirit did not incarnate sin. He—or she, since within the cult complete spiritual power was within the reach of women as well as men—incarnated God. God could not sin; God was perfect; God created men and women; therefore men and women were perfect. What appeared as free will—the practice of sin—was God’s will. Searching the Bible for the clues God had left for those capable of recognizing them (“I love him who has a free spirit,” Jesus said), the brothers and sisters returned to the pantheistic forests of pre-Christian Europe: “Whatever is, is God.” The only question was to know it, the only paradise to live it, the only task to tell it. Thus the Free Spirit set out across Christendom to free humanity from the Antichrist: the Church. Certainly, the world was to be destroyed—but from that fire the Free Spirit and those who understood its message would step forward into a new life.

It was to be a life of eternal pleasure; under torture by the pope’s inquisitors, the Free Spirit gave up its wisdom. As collected in Norman Cohn’s
The Pursuit of the Millennium:
“He who recognizes that God does all things in him, he shall not sin.” “He who attributes to himself anything that he does, and does not attribute it to God, is in ignorance, which is hell . . . Nothing in a man’s works is his own.” “A man who has a conscience is himself Devil and hell and purgatory, tormenting himself. He who is free in spirit escapes from all these things.” “Nothing is sin but what is thought of as sin.” “One can be so united with God that whatever one may do one cannot sin.” The conclusion followed: “It would be better that the whole world should be
destroyed and perish utterly than that a ‘free man’ should refrain from one act to which his nature moves him.” Half a millennium later, Nietzsche, speaking through Zarathustra, exchanged the language of negation for the language of affirmation, but only to give the same claim more force: “What is the greatest experience you can have? It is . . . the hour when you say, ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.’ ”

The goal was to achieve union with God not for the officially sanctioned moment but in permanence. It was a great struggle—it might take years. Once finished it was the opening of one’s front door. As the door opened, time became eternity, every momentary lust God’s eternal commandment, every transitory desire a first principle of existence. It was the most extreme anarchism ever devised, driven by the incorporation of the single, all-knowing, ever-present God—the most powerful authority ever dreamed up.

Though in some ways as old as Christianity, or even older than that, as an identifiable cult the heresy of the Free Spirit came to light not long after the founding of the orthodox orders. Emerging out of the University of Paris, near what would be known as Saint-Germain-des-Prés, early Free Spirit illuminati were exposed and burned in about 1210. Marguerite Porete, whose
La Mirouer des simples ames
(The Mirror of Simple Souls) is one of a handful of surviving Free Spirit texts not brought forth by torture, was put to the stake in Paris a hundred years later; her book reached England a century after that. The Free Spirit grew in strength and numbers when the Franciscans and the Dominicans began to slide into wealth and bureaucracy, leaving their roads for monasteries; from the mid-thirteenth century the heresy spread across Central Europe and rooted itself there. Traveling under different names, it was never an organized, let alone hierarchical sect, though Free Spirit houses remained in place for generations. If one moves forward to the full-blown revival of the Free Spirit that Norman Cohn identifies in England in the revolutionary 1650s—if one returns to the Ranters, to the sermons and tracts of Abiezer Coppe and Joseph Salmon—the heresy
maintained itself whole for more than four hundred years. It was, Cohn writes, “an invisible empire.”

The house of the Free Spirit had many mansions. As the adepts believed that sin was a fraud, they believed that property—the result of work, humanity’s punishment for Original Sin—was a falsehood. Thus all things were to be held in common, and work to be understood as hell, which was ignorance—only fools worked. Work was a sin against perfect nature: “Whatever the eye sees and covets,” ran a Free Spirit maxim, “let the hand grasp it.” Those who understood this phrase back to its first principle could steal and kill to realize it, because all things belonged to them.

If Original Sin was traced to lust, lust had to be pursued in all of its forms. One destroyed the lie of Original Sin by refuting it in acts. In Erfurt, Germany, in 1367, Robert E. Lerner says, free spirit Johann Hartmann testified that “he could have intercourse with his sister or his mother in any place, even on the altar, and . . . it would be ‘more natural’ to have sex with one’s sister than with any other woman. Nor would a young girl lose her virginity after sexual intercourse, but if she had already been robbed of it she would regain it after having relations with one free in spirit. Even if a girl had successive intercourse with ten men, if the last of them was a free spirit she would receive her virginity back.”

The mansion of the Free Spirit held a labyrinth of corridors and rooms. If most converts were enticed by the promise that sin was an illusion, only those who followed the staircases to the top were capable of understanding what existed to be understood: that just as a man or a woman could achieve permanent union with God, one could become God. This was not the petty free will of Original Sin, the freedom to say no that Michel discovered long before he entered Saint-Maximin, but something more.

The heresy overreached creation: one could go beyond God. If God created the world, it was only because a free spirit had given his or her assent, which could be withdrawn. Beyond this last door, it was plain not only that one’s happiness should justify existence, it did; that not only should the world be destroyed if a free spirit refrained from one act to which his or her nature moved him, it would be.