The Shadow of the Cathedral. Blasco Ibáñez Vicente
a new planet. Accustomed to the monotonous life in the seminary, and to the nomadic existence during that mountainous and inglorious war, he was astonished at the material progress, the refinement of civilisation, the culture and the well-being of the people in France. He remembered now with shame his Spanish ignorance, all that Castilian phantasmagoria, fed by lying literature, that had made him believe that Spain was the first country in the world, and its people the noblest and bravest, and that all the other nations were a sort of wretched mob, created by God to be victims of heresy, and to receive overwhelming punishment each time that they ventured to interfere with this privileged country, which, though it eats little and drinks less, has yet produced the holiest saints and the greatest captains of Christendom.
When Gabriel could express himself fluently in French and had contrived to save a few francs for his journey, he went to Paris. A friendly abbé had procured him employment as corrector of proofs in a religious library close to Saint Sulpice. In this priestly quarter of Paris, with its hostels for the clergy and for religious families, as gloomy as convents, with its shops full of pious images, which flood the globe with varnished and smiling saints, was accomplished the great transformation of Gabriel.
This quarter of Saint Sulpice with its streets almost Spanish in their silence and peacefulness, with the sisters in black veils gliding by the walls of the seminary, drawn by the sound of the bells, was for the Spanish seminarist what the road to Damascus had been for the Apostle. The French Catholicism, cultivated, reasoning and respectful to human progress, bewildered Gabriel, whose fierce Spanish bigotry had taught him to despise all profane science. There was only one true learning in the world, and that was theology. The other sciences were only toys, only fit to amuse the eternal infancy of humanity. To know God and to meditate on the greatness of His power, this was the only serious study to which men could devote themselves; machinery, the discoveries of the positive sciences, in fact everything which did not treat of divinity and the future life, was only a bagatelle for the amusement of fools and people of no faith.
The former seminarist, who from his earliest childhood had despised all human progress, was stupefied when he perceived how earnestly all French Catholicism spoke of it. In correcting the proofs of so many religious works he could not but notice the profound respect which this despised science inspired in the good French priests, men of such far superior culture to that of the canons down there. And moreover he noticed a certain humble shrinking in the representatives of religion when they came face to face with science—a desire to please, not to be censorious, to help on with their sympathy any conciliatory solutions, so that dogma should not fall to the ground, finding no place in the rapid march of events that was hurrying humanity into the future with the whirl of its new discoveries. Entire books were written by eminent priests with the view of adjusting and bringing into line the revelations of the holy books and the discoveries of modern science, even at the risk of doing some violence to the former. The ancient and venerable Church that Gabriel had seen in his own country, immovable in its antiquated majesty, unwilling to move a single fold of its mantle for fear of losing some of the dust of ages, was stirring in France, endeavouring to renew itself, throwing on one side the ancient garments of tradition, like old rags that would turn it into ridicule, and stretching out its hands with almost despairing strength to catch hold of the modern achievements of science; the great enemy of yesterday, whose appearance had been ushered in with bonfires and shameful abjurations was triumphant to-day.
What had that fatal apple of Paradise contained, that after six thousand years of malediction that same Church had begun to venerate it, striving to make it forget its ancient persecutions? Why was religion, firm as a rock throughout the centuries, which had defied persecutions, schisms and wars, beginning to dissolve before the discoveries of a few men, and entering into that wild current which sought for the cause and explanation of everything? If it had the secular support of faith, why should it seek the assistance of reason to maintain its traditions and to justify its dogmas?
Gabriel felt the same fever of curiosity which had obliged him as a child to bend his back over the old volumes, bound in parchment, in the library of the seminary; he wished to be acquainted with the mysterious perfume of that hated science which had so disturbed God's priests, and had made them indirectly deny the beliefs of nineteen centuries. He wished to know why the sacred books were being dislocated and tortured in order to explain by geological periods the creation which God had accomplished in six days. What danger did they hope to avoid by making the divinity appear before science in order to explain its acts and fit them into the decisions of the latter? Whence came the instinctive fear of the religious authors of roundly affirming miracles? attempting instead to justify them by intricate and tentative reasonings, without daring to adduce as the decisive proof the incomprehensibility of supernatural prodigies.
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.
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