The Thibaults (120 page)

“Without evidence!”

“… and that we must dispense with any notion of immutable truth, since nothing should be considered ‘true’ except conditionally,

until the contrary is proved. Yes, I continue to shock you! But, if you’ll allow me to say so (in fact it’s what I’ve been driving at all the time), I’m that unusual thing—that freak of nature, if you like—a natural, congenital sceptic. Yes, I’m built that way. I’m in sound health and, so far as I can judge, pretty levelheaded. I’ve an active mind, and I’ve always got on perfectly well without a spark of mysticism. Nothing of what I know, nothing I’ve observed, warrants my believing that my childhood’s God exists; and so far, I must confess, I’ve found I can do admirably without Him.

“My atheism and my mind developed side by side, so I’ve never had any allegiance to renounce. No, don’t imagine for a moment that I’m one of those believers who have lost their faith, and in their hearts are always craving after God; one of those uneasy souls who make desperate gestures towards the heaven they have found empty. No, desperate gestures aren’t in my line at all! There’s nothing about a godless world that disturbs me; indeed, as you see, I’m perfectly at home in it.”

The Abbé’s hand waved a mild disclaimer.

Antoine repeated: “Perfectly at home. And that’s been so for fifteen years.”

He expected the priest’s indignation to blaze up at once. But the Abbé said nothing for some moments, and merely shook his head composedly. At last he spoke.

“But, my dear man, that’s pure materialism. Are you still at that stage? To listen to you, one would think you believe only in your body. It’s as if you believed in only half—and what a half!—of your self. Happily, all that is merely on the surface; an outer shell, so to speak. You yourself don’t realize that deep down in you is something vital and enduring, the influence of your Christian education. You may deny that influence; but it’s the directive force of your existence.”

“What can I reply? I can only answer you that I owe nothing to the Church. My temperament, ambitions, intellect, took form outside the pale of religion—I might even say in opposition to it. I feel as remote from Catholic mythology as from pagan mythology. I make no distinction between religion and superstition. To speak quite candidly, what remains to me of my Christian education is precisely—
nil
!”

“What blindness!” the Abbé’ exclaimed, with a quick uplift of his arms. “Can’t you see that your whole scheme of life—your conscientiousness, your sense of du:y, your devotion to the service of your fellow-men—gives your materialism the lie direct? Few lives imply more clearly the existence of God. No one has more strongly than you the feeling of a.mission to fulfill. No one has a better sense than you of his responsibilities in this world. Well, isn’t all that a tacit admission that you’re under orders from above? To whom, if not to God, can you feel yourself responsible?”

Antoine did not reply at once, and for a moment the Abbé could think his argument had told. In point of fact, on Antoine’s view, it was the merest moonshine. His scrupulous performance of his work did not necessarily imply the existence of God, or the value of Christian teachings, or any metaphysical truth. Was he not the living proof of it? Nevertheless he could help recognizing, yet once again, that there was a baffling incompatibility between the extreme conscientiousness that inspired his conduct and his repudiation of any moral code. A man must love his work. Why that “must”? he wondered. Because man is a social animal, and it’s up to him to do his best for the smooth running of society, for progress. “Up to him!” A gratuitous assumption, that; a question-begging postulate. Again there rose in his mind the query which he had put to himself so often, to which he had never found a satisfactory answer: What, then, is this authority that I obey?

“Oh, well,” he murmured, “shall we call it conscience? The hallmark left on everyone of us by nineteen centuries of Christendom. Perhaps I was over-hasty just now when I set down at
nil
the factor of my upbringing, or, rather, my heredity.”

“No, my friend, what has survived in you is the holy leaven to which I was referring. Some day it will become active once more—till the whole is leavened! And then your moral life, which now is following its own course more or less against your wish, will find its proper sphere, its true meaning. No man can understand God when he is rejecting Him, or even while he is searching for Him. You’ll see! One day you’ll discover that, without wanting it, you’ve entered port. And then at last you’ll know that it’s enough to believe in God for everything to become clear, everything to fall into place.”

“I grant you that,” Antoine smiled, “readily enough. I’m aware that, oftener than not, our ailments create their own remedies; and I’m quite prepared to agree that the majority of people have such an instinctive, urgent craving to believe that they don’t give much thought to whether what they believe deserves belief. They label ‘truth’ whatever their need for faith impels them to accept. In any case,” he added in the tone of an aside, “I’m not easily to be convinced that most intelligent Catholics, and particularly priests who are men of learning, aren’t pragmatists more or less, without their knowing it. What I find unacceptable in Christian dogma should be equally unacceptable to other cultivated men who think on modern lines. The trouble is, believers cling to their faith and, to avoid imperilling it, refrain from thinking things out. They take their stand on the emotional and ethical aspects of religion. And of course they’ve had it drummed into their heads so effectively that the Church has given an answer once for all to every possible objection, that they never think of looking into it for themselves. But excuse me—that’s only by the way. What I wanted to say was that, however universal the craving to believe may be, that’s not a sufficient justification for the Christian faith, cluttered up as it is with ancient myths and abstrusities… .”

“When one is aware of God,” the priest said, “there’s no need to ‘justify’ Him.” For the first time his tone brooked no reply. Then leaning towards Antoine, with a friendly gesture, he went on: “The amazing thing is that it should be you, Antoine Thibault, of all people, who speak thus. In many Christian homes, alas, the children see their parents behaving, life going on, almost as if the God about whom they hear so much did not exist. But you—why, from your earliest childhood you could feel God’s presence in your home, at every instant! You saw your late lamented father guided by God in everything he did.”

There was a pause. Antoine gazed at the Abbé fixedly, as if he were trying to keep himself from speech. At last, through close-set lips, he muttered:

“Yes. And that’s the trouble. I’ve never seen God except through the medium of my father.” His attitude and tone expressed what he had left unsaid. Then, to cut short, he added: “But this is no day to dwell on that subject.”

He pressed his forehead to the pane. “We’re coming into Creil,” he said.

The train slowed down, stopped. The lamp in the car came on brighter. Antoine hoped some passenger would enter; his presence would break off their conversation. But the platform seemed quite empty.

The train drew out.

After a longish silence, during which each man seemed lost in his private meditations, Antoine turned again towards the Abbé.

“The truth is there are at least two things that will always prevent me from returning to the Catholic fold. One is the matter of sin; I’m incapable, it seems, of feeling any horror of sin. The other is the question of Providence; I shall never be able to accept the notion of a personal God.”

The Abbé said nothing.

“Yes,” Antoine went on, “all that you Catholics call sin is, on my view, precisely all that is strong and vital—instinctive and … instructive! It’s what enables us (how shall I put it?) to lay our hands on things. And to go ahead. No progress—oh, I’m not unduly hypnotized by that blessed word ‘progress,’ but it comes in handy—no progress would have been feasible had men always, in blind obedience, kept from sin. But that subject would lead us too far afield,” he added, countering the priest’s deprecatory gesture with an ironic smile. “As for the theory of a Divine Providence—no, I can’t swallow it! If there’s one theory that strikes me as absolutely indefeasible, it’s that of the utter indifference of the universe.”

The priest gave a start. “But surely even that science of yours, whether it wants to or not, has to take its stand on universal order. (I deliberately avoid using the more correct term: a Divine Purpose.) Don’t you see that if we ventured to deny that higher Intelligence which controls phenomena and whose signature is visible on all things here below; if we refused to admit that everything in nature has its purpose and all has been created to fit into a harmonious whole— don’t you see it would be impossible to make sense of anything at all?”

“Well, why not admit it? The universe is incomprehensible for us. I accept that as a premise.”

“That ‘incomprehensible,’ my friend, is God.”

“Not as I see it. I haven’t yet succumbed to the temptation of labelling all I can’t understand as ‘God.’ ”

He smiled and fell silent for some moments. The Abbé watched his face, on the defensive. Still smiling, Antoine spoke again:

“In any case, for the majority of Catholics, their idea of the Divine resolves itself into the rather puerile conception of a paternal God, a small private deity who has his eye on each of us, who follows with sympathetic interest each flicker of the tiny flame of individual conscience, and whom each of us can perpetually consult in prayers beginning: ‘Enlighten me, O Lord,’ or: ‘Merciful God, grant me Thy aid,’ and the like.

“Please don’t mistake me. I haven’t the least wish to wound your feelings by cheap sneers at religion. But I can’t bring myself to imagine how anyone can seriously think there is the slightest mental intercourse, the least exchange of question and answer, between any given man—a tiny by-product of universal life—or even this Earth of ours, a speck of dust amid how many myriad others, and the great Whole, the Scheme of Things. How can we ascribe to it such anthropomorphic emotions as paternal love and kindliness of heart? How can we take seriously the functions of the sacraments, the rosary, and—only think of it!—a mass paid for and celebrated for the special benefit of a soul provisionally interned in Purgatory? When you come to think of it, there’s little real difference between these rites, these practices of Catholicism, and those of any primitive religion, the sacrifices and the offerings made by savages to their gods.”

The Abbé was on the point of replying that there certainly existed a
natural
religion common to mankind; a fact which, as it happened, was an article of faith. But once more he held his peace. Huddled in his corner, his arms folded, his fingers tucked inside his sleeves, he was a figure of sage, mildly ironic patience, as he waited for the young man to conclude his tirade.

Moreover, they were approaching Paris; the train was already swaying upon the switches of the suburban lines. Across the misted panes the darkness glittered with pinpoint lights.

Antoine, who had still something to say, made haste to continue:

“By the way, sir, I hope you won’t misconstrue certain terms I employed. I admit that I’m a mere amateur in metaphysics and I’m not in the least qualified to discuss such matters; still, I’d rather speak my mind out frankly. I talked ^just now about Universal Order and a Scheme of Things; but that was merely to talk like everyone else. Actually it seems to me that we’ve as many reasons to question the existence of a Scheme of Things as to take it for granted. From his actual viewpoint the human animal I am observes an immense tangle of conflicting forces. But do these forces obey a universal law outside themselves, distinct from them?l Or do they, rather, obey—so to speak— internal laws, each atom being a law unto itself, that compels it to work out a kind of ‘personal’ destiny? I see these forces obeying laws which do not control them from outside, but join up with them, which do nothing more than in some way stimulate them… . And anyhow, what a jumble it is, the course of natural phenomena! I’d just as soon believe that causes spring from each other
ad infinitum
, each cause being the effect of another cause, and each effect the cause of other effects. Why should one want to assume at all costs a Scheme of Things? It’s only another bait for our logic-ridden minds. Why try to find a common ‘purpose in the movements of atoms endlessly clashing and glancing off each other? Personally, I’ve often told myself that everything happens just a^ if nothing led to anything, as if nothing had a meaning.”

The priest looked silently at Antoine, then lowered his eyes and remarked with an icy smile:

“That said, I doubt if it’s possible for a man to sink lower.”

Rising, he began to button his overcoat.

Antoine was feeling genuinely remorseful. “I hope you’ll forgive me, sir, for telling you all this. This sort of conversation never leads to anything, and I can’t think what came over me this evening.”

They were standing side by side. The Abbé gazed sadly at the young man.

“You’ve spoken to me frankly, as a man speaks to his friend. For that, at least, I’m grateful.”

He seemed on the brink of adding something. But the train was stopping.

“May I take you to your place?” Antoine suggested in a different tone.

“Thanks, that would be kind of you.”

In the taxi Antoine said little; his mind was once again engrossed by the difficult problems of the immediate future. And his companion, who seemed in a brown study, was equally taciturn. When, however, they had crossed the Seine, the priest bent towards Antoine.

“You’re—how old exactly? Thirty?”

“Nearly thirty-three.”

“You are still a young man. Wait and see! Others have ended by understanding. Your turn will come. There are hours in every life when a man can’t dispense with God; one hour especially, the most terrible of all, the last… .”

“Yes,” Antoine mused. “That dread of death, how heavily it weighs on every civilized European! So much so that it more or less ruins his zest for life.”