Seraphita

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Seraphita


"Do for God what you do for your ambitious projects, what you do in
consecrating yourself to Art, what you have done when you loved a
human creature or sought some secret of human science. Is not God the
whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry? Surely His
riches are worthy of being coveted! His treasure is inexhaustible, His
poem infinite, His love immutable, His science sure and darkened by no
mysteries. Be anxious for nothing, He will give you all. Yes, in His
heart are treasures with which the petty joys you lose on earth are
not to be compared. What I tell you is true; you shall possess His
power; you may use it as you would use the gifts of lover or mistress.
Alas! men doubt, they lack faith, and will, and persistence. If some
set their feet in the path, they look behind them and presently turn
back. Few decide between the two extremes,--to go or stay, heaven or
the mire. All hesitate. Weakness leads astray, passion allures into
dangerous paths, vice becomes habitual, man flounders in the mud and
makes no progress towards a better state.

"All human beings go through a previous life in the sphere of
Instinct, where they are brought to see the worthlessness of earthly
treasures, to amass which they gave themselves such untold pains! Who
can tell how many times the human being lives in the sphere of
Instinct before he is prepared to enter the sphere of Abstractions,
where thought expends itself on erring science, where mind wearies at
last of human language? for, when Matter is exhausted, Spirit enters.
Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he
can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude
whose starry plains are but the vestibule of Spiritual Worlds? He
feels his way amid the void, makes trial of nothingness, and then at
last his eyes revert upon the Path. Then follow other existences,--all
to be lived to reach the place where Light effulgent shines. Death is
the post-house of the journey. A lifetime may be needed merely to gain
the virtues which annul the errors of man's preceding life. First
comes the life of suffering, whose tortures create a thirst for love.
Next the life of love and devotion to the creature, teaching devotion
to the Creator,--a life where the virtues of love, its martyrdoms, its
joys followed by sorrows, its angelic hopes, its patience, its
resignation, excite an appetite for things divine. Then follows the
life which seeks in silence the traces of the Word; in which the soul
grows humble and charitable. Next the life of longing; and lastly, the
life of prayer. In that is the noonday sun; there are the flowers,
there the harvest!

"The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the
invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others,
--existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory
for spiritual things. Thought alone holds the tradition of the bygone
life. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret
source of human genius. Some receive the gift of form, some the gift
of numbers, others the gift of harmony. All these gifts are steps of
progress in the Path of Light. Yes, he who possesses a single one of
them touches at that point the Infinite. Earth has divided the Word
--of which I here reveal some syllables--into particles, she has reduced
it to dust and has scattered it through her works, her dogmas, her
poems. If some impalpable grain shines like a diamond in a human work,
men cry: 'How grand! how true! how glorious!' That fragment vibrates
in their souls and wakes a presentiment of heaven: to some, a melody
that weans from earth; to others, the solitude that draws to God. To
all, whatsoever sends us back upon ourselves, whatsoever strikes us
down and crushes us, lifts or abases us,--_that_ is but a syllable of
the Divine Word.

"When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will
follow surely. One thought borne inward, one prayer uplifted, one
suffering endured, one echo of the Word within us, and our souls are
forever changed. All ends in God; and many are the ways to find Him by
walking straight before us. When the happy day arrives in which you
set your feet upon the Path and begin your pilgrimage, the world will
know nothing of it; earth no longer understands you; you no longer
understand each other. Men who attain a knowledge of these things, who
lisp a few syllables of the Word, often have not where to lay their
head; hunted like beasts they perish on the scaffold, to the joy of
assembled peoples, while Angels open to them the gates of heaven.
Therefore, your destiny is a secret between yourself and God, just as
love is a secret between two hearts. You may be the buried treasure,
trodden under the feet of men thirsting for gold yet all-unknowing
that you are there beneath them.

"Henceforth your existence becomes a thing of ceaseless activity; each
act has a meaning which connects you with God, just as in love your
actions and your thoughts are filled with the loved one. But love and
its joys, love and its pleasures limited by the senses, are but the
imperfect image of the love which unites you to your celestial Spouse.
All earthly joy is mixed with anguish, with discontent. If love ought
not to pall then death should end it while its flame is high, so that
we see no ashes. But in God our wretchedness becomes delight, joy
lives upon itself and multiplies, and grows, and has no limit. In the
Earthly life our fleeting love is ended by tribulation; in the
Spiritual life the tribulations of a day end in joys unending. The
soul is ceaselessly joyful. We feel God with us, in us; He gives a
sacred savor to all things; He shines in the soul; He imparts to us
His sweetness; He stills our interest in the world viewed for
ourselves; He quickens our interest in it viewed for His sake, and
grants us the exercise of His power upon it. In His name we do the
works which He inspires, we act for Him, we have no self except in
Him, we love His creatures with undying love, we dry their tears and
long to bring them unto Him, as a loving woman longs to see the
inhabitants of earth obey her well-beloved.

"The final life, the fruition of all other lives, to which the powers
of the soul have tended, and whose merits open the Sacred Portals to
perfected man, is the life of Prayer. Who can make you comprehend the
grandeur, the majesty, the might of Prayer? May my voice, these words
of mine, ring in your hearts and change them. Be now, here, what you
may be after cruel trial! There are privileged beings, Prophets,
Seers, Messengers, and Martyrs, all those who suffer for the Word and
who proclaim it; such souls spring at a bound across the human sphere
and rise at once to Prayer. So, too, with those whose souls receive
the fire of Faith. Be one of those brave souls! God welcomes boldness.
He loves to be taken by violence; He will never reject those who force
their way to Him. Know this! desire, the torrent of your will, is so
all-powerful that a single emission of it, made with force, can obtain
all; a single cry, uttered under the pressure of Faith, suffices. Be
one of such beings, full of force, of will, of love! Be conquerors on
the earth! Let the hunger and thirst of God possess you. Fly to Him as
the hart panting for the water-brooks. Desire shall lend you its
wings; tears, those blossoms of repentance, shall be the celestial
baptism from which your nature will issue purified. Cast yourself on
the breast of the stream in Prayer! Silence and meditation are the
means of following the Way. God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the
solitary, thoughtful seeker.

"It is thus that the separation takes place between Matter, which so
long has wrapped its darkness round you, and Spirit, which was in you
from the beginning, the light which lighted you and now brings
noon-day to your soul. Yes, your broken heart shall receive the light;
the light shall bathe it. Then you will no longer feel convictions,
they will have changed to certainties. The Poet utters; the Thinker
meditates; the Righteous acts; but he who stands upon the borders of
the Divine World prays; and his prayer is word, thought, action, in
one! Yes, prayer includes all, contains all; it completes nature, for
it reveals to you the mind within it and its progression. White and
shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth
and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of
the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and
pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this
glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world;
she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of
light. The universe belongs to him who wills, who knows, who prays;
but he must will, he must know, he must pray; in a word, he must
possess force, wisdom, and faith.

"Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of
all truths, all powers, all feelings. Fruit of the laborious,
progressive, continued development of natural properties and faculties
vitalized anew by the divine breath of the Word, Prayer has occult
activity; it is the final worship--not the material worship of images,
nor the spiritual worship of formulas, but the worship of the Divine
World. We say no prayers,--prayer forms within us; it is a faculty
which acts of itself; it has attained a way of action which lifts it
outside of forms; it links the soul to God, with whom we unite as the
root of the tree unites with the soil; our veins draw life from the
principle of life, and we live by the life of the universe. Prayer
bestows external conviction by making us penetrate the Material World
through the cohesion of all our faculties with the elementary
substances; it bestows internal conviction by developing our essence
and mingling it with that of the Spiritual Worlds. To be able to pray
thus, you must attain to an utter abandonment of flesh; you must
acquire through the fires of the furnace the purity of the diamond;
for this complete communion with the Divine is obtained only in
absolute repose, where storms and conflicts are at rest.

"Yes, Prayer--the aspiration of the soul freed absolutely from the
body--bears all forces within it, and applies them to the constant and
perseverant union of the Visible and the Invisible. When you possess
the faculty of praying without weariness, with love, with force, with
certainty, with intelligence, your spiritualized nature will presently
be invested with power. Like a rushing wind, like a thunderbolt, it
cuts its way through all things and shares the power of God. The
quickness of the Spirit becomes yours; in an instant you may pass from
region to region; like the Word itself, you are transported from the
ends of the world to other worlds. Harmony exists, and you are part of
it! Light is there and your eyes possess it! Melody is heard and you
echo it! Under such conditions, you feel your perceptions developing,
widening; the eyes of your mind reach to vast distances. There is, in
truth, neither time nor place to the Spirit; space and duration are
proportions created for Matter; spirit and matter have naught in
common.

"Though these things take place in stillness, in silence, without
agitation, without external movement, yet Prayer is all action; but it
is spiritual action, stripped of substantiality, and reduced, like the
motion of the worlds, to an invisible pure force. It penetrates
everywhere like light; it gives vitality to souls that come beneath
its rays, as Nature beneath the sun. It resuscitates virtue, purifies
and sanctifies all actions, peoples solitude, and gives a foretaste of
eternal joys. When you have once felt the delights of the divine
intoxication which comes of this internal travail, then all is yours!
once take the lute on which we sing to God within your hands, and you
will never part with it. Hence the solitude in which Angelic Spirits
live; hence their disdain of human joys. They are withdrawn from those
who must die to live; they hear the language of such beings, but they
no longer understand their ideas; they wonder at their movements, at
what the world terms policies, material laws, societies. For them all
mysteries are over; truth, and truth alone, is theirs. They who have
reached the point where their eyes discern the Sacred Portals, who,
not looking back, not uttering one regret, contemplate worlds and
comprehend their destinies, such as they keep silence, wait, and bear
their final struggles. The worst of all those struggles is the last;
at the zenith of all virtue is Resignation,--to be an exile and not
lament, no longer to delight in earthly things and yet to smile, to
belong to God and yet to stay with men! You hear the voice that cries
to you, 'Advance!' Often celestial visions of descending Angels
compass you about with songs of praise; then, tearless, uncomplaining,
must you watch them as they reascent the skies! To murmur is to
forfeit all. Resignation is a fruit that ripens at the gates of
heaven. How powerful, how glorious the calm smile, the pure brow of
the resigned human creature. Radiant is the light of that brow. They
who live in its atmosphere grow purer. That calm glance penetrates and
softens. More eloquent by silence than the prophet by speech, such
beings triumph by their simple presence. Their ears are quick to hear
as a faithful dog listening for his master. Brighter than hope,
stronger than love, higher than faith, that creature of resignation is
the virgin standing on the earth, who holds for a moment the conquered
palm, then, rising heavenward, leaves behind her the imprint of her
white, pure feet. When she has passed away men flock around and cry,
'See! See!' Sometimes God holds her still in sight,--a figure to whose
feet creep Forms and Species of Animality to be shown their way. She
wafts the light exhaling from her hair, and they see; she speaks, and
they hear. 'A miracle!' they cry. Often she triumphs in the name of
God; frightened men deny her and put her to death; smiling, she lays
down her sword and goes to the stake, having saved the Peoples. How
many a pardoned Angel has passed from martyrdom to heaven! Sinai,
Golgotha are not in this place nor in that; Angels are crucified in
every place, in every sphere. Sighs pierce to God from the whole
universe. This earth on which we live is but a single sheaf of the
great harvest; humanity is but a species in the vast garden where the
flowers of heaven are cultivated. Everywhere God is like unto Himself,
and everywhere, by prayer, it is easy to reach Him."

With these words, which fell from the lips of another Hagar in the
wilderness, burning the souls of the hearers as the live coal of the
word inflamed Isaiah, this mysterious being paused as though to gather
some remaining strength. Wilfrid and Minna dared not speak. Suddenly
HE lifted himself up to die:--

"Soul of all things, oh my God, thou whom I love for Thyself! Thou,
Judge and Father, receive a love which has no limit. Give me of thine
essence and thy faculties that I be wholly thine! Take me, that I no
longer be myself! Am I not purified? then cast me back into the
furnace! If I be not yet proved in the fire, make me some nurturing
ploughshare, or the Sword of victory! Grant me a glorious martyrdom in
which to proclaim thy Word! Rejected, I will bless thy justice. But if
excess of love may win in a moment that which hard and patient labor
cannot attain, then bear me upward in thy chariot of fire! Grant me
triumph, or further trial, still will I bless thee! To suffer for
thee, is not that to triumph? Take me, seize me, bear me away! nay, if
thou wilt, reject me! Thou art He who can do no evil. Ah!" he cried,
after a pause, "the bonds are breaking.

"Spirits of the pure, ye sacred flock, come forth from the hidden
places, come on the surface of the luminous waves! The hour now is;
come, assemble! Let us sing at the gates of the Sanctuary; our songs
shall drive away the final clouds. With one accord let us hail the
Dawn of the Eternal Day. Behold the rising of the one True Light! Ah,
why may I not take with me these my friends! Farewell, poor earth,
Farewell!"



CHAPTER VII

THE ASSUMPTION

The last psalm was uttered neither by word, look, nor gesture, nor by
any of those signs which men employ to communicate their thoughts, but
as the soul speaks to itself; for at the moment when Seraphita
revealed herself in her true nature, her thoughts were no longer
enslaved by human words. The violence of that last prayer had burst
her bonds. Her soul, like a white dove, remained for an instant poised
above the body whose exhausted substances were about to be
annihilated.

The aspiration of the Soul toward heaven was so contagious that
Wilfrid and Minna, beholding those radiant scintillations of Life,
perceived not Death.

They had fallen on their knees when _he_ had turned toward his Orient,
and they shared his ecstasy.

The fear of the Lord, which creates man a second time, purging away
his dross, mastered their hearts.

Their eyes, veiled to the things of Earth, were opened to the
Brightness of Heaven.

Though, like the Seers of old called Prophets by men, they were filled
with the terror of the Most High, yet like them they continued firm
when they found themselves within the radiance where the Glory of the
_Spirit_ shone.

The veil of flesh, which, until now, had hidden that glory from their
eyes, dissolved imperceptibly away, and left them free to behold the
Divine substance.

They stood in the twilight of the Coming Dawn, whose feeble rays
prepared them to look upon the True Light, to hear the Living Word,
and yet not die.

In this state they began to perceive the immeasurable differences
which separate the things of earth from the things of Heaven.

_Life_, on the borders of which they stood, leaning upon each other,
trembling and illuminated, like two children standing under shelter in
presence of a conflagration, That Life offered no lodgment to the
senses.

The ideas they used to interpret their vision to themselves were to
the things seen what the visible senses of a man are to his soul, the
material covering of a divine essence.

The departing _spirit_ was above them, shedding incense without odor,
melody without sound. About them, where they stood, were neither
surfaces, nor angles, nor atmosphere.

They dared neither question him nor contemplate him; they stood in the
shadow of that Presence as beneath the burning rays of a tropical sun,
fearing to raise their eyes lest the light should blast them.

They knew they were beside him, without being able to perceive how it
was that they stood, as in a dream, on the confines of the Visible and
the Invisible, nor how they had lost sight of the Visible and how they
beheld the Invisible.

To each other they said: "If he touches us, we can die!" But the
_spirit_ was now within the Infinite, and they knew not that neither
time, nor space, nor death, existed there, and that a great gulf lay
between them, although they thought themselves beside him.

Their souls were not prepared to receive in its fulness a knowledge of
the faculties of that Life; they could have only faint and confused
perceptions of it, suited to their weakness.

Were it not so, the thunder of the _Living Word_, whose far-off tones
now reached their ears, and whose meaning entered their souls as life
unites with body,--one echo of that Word would have consumed their
being as a whirlwind of fire laps up a fragile straw.

Therefore they saw only that which their nature, sustained by the
strength of the _spirit_, permitted them to see; they heard that only
which they were able to hear.

And yet, though thus protected, they shuddered when the Voice of the
anguished soul broke forth above them--the prayer of the _Spirit_
awaiting Life and imploring it with a cry.

That cry froze them to the very marrow of their bones.

The _Spirit_ knocked at the _sacred portal_. "What wilt thou?" answered
a _choir_, whose question echoed among the worlds. "To go to God." "Hast
thou conquered?" "I have conquered the flesh through abstinence, I
have conquered false knowledge by humility, I have conquered pride by
charity, I have conquered the earth by love; I have paid my dues by
suffering, I am purified in the fires of faith, I have longed for Life
by prayer: I wait in adoration, and I am resigned."

No answer came.

"God's will be done!" answered the _Spirit_, believing that he was about
to be rejected.

His tears flowed and fell like dew upon the heads of the two kneeling
witnesses, who trembled before the justice of God.

Suddenly the trumpets sounded,--the last trumpets of Victory won by
the _Angel_ in this last trial. The reverberation passed through space
as sound through its echo, filling it, and shaking the universe which
Wilfrid and Minna felt like an atom beneath their feet. They trembled
under an anguish caused by the dread of the mystery about to be
accomplished.

A great movement took place, as though the Eternal Legions, putting
themselves in motion, were passing upward in spiral columns. The
worlds revolved like clouds driven by a furious wind. It was all
rapid.

Suddenly the veils were rent away. They saw on high as it were a star,
incomparably more lustrous than the most luminous of material stars,
which detached itself, and fell like a thunderbolt, dazzling as
lightning. Its passage paled the faces of the pair, who thought it to
be _the Light_ Itself.

It was the Messenger of good tidings, the plume of whose helmet was a
flame of Life.

Behind him lay the swath of his way gleaming with a flood of the
lights through which he passed.

He bore a palm and a sword. He touched the _Spirit_ with the palm, and
the _Spirit_ was transfigured. Its white wings noiselessly unfolded.

This communication of _the Light_, changing the _Spirit_ into a _Seraph_
and clothing it with a glorious form, a celestial armor, poured down
such effulgent rays that the two Seers were paralyzed.

Like the three apostles to whom Jesus showed himself, they felt the
dead weight of their bodies which denied them a complete and cloudless
intuition of _the Word_ and _the True Life_.

They comprehended the nakedness of their souls; they were able to
measure the poverty of their light by comparing it--a humbling task
--with the halo of the _Seraph_.

A passionate desire to plunge back into the mire of earth and suffer
trial took possession of them,--trial through which they might
victoriously utter at the _sacred gates_ the words of that radiant
_Seraph_.

The _Seraph_ knelt before the _Sanctuary_, beholding it, at last, face
to face; and he said, raising his hands thitherward, "Grant that these
two may have further sight; they will love the Lord and proclaim His
word."

At this prayer a veil fell. Whether it were that the hidden force
which held the Seers had momentarily annihilated their physical
bodies, or that it raised their spirits above those bodies, certain it
is that they felt within them a rending of the pure from the impure.

The tears of the _Seraph_ rose about them like a vapor, which hid the
lower worlds from their knowledge, held them in its folds, bore them
upwards, gave them forgetfulness of earthly meanings and the power of
comprehending the meanings of things divine.

The True Light shone; it illumined the Creations, which seemed to them
barren when they saw the source from which all worlds--Terrestrial,
Spiritual, and Divine-derived their Motion.

Each world possessed a centre to which converged all points of its
circumference. These worlds were themselves the points which moved
toward the centre of their system. Each system had its centre in great
celestial regions which communicated with the flaming and quenchless
_motor of all that is_.

Thus, from the greatest to the smallest of the worlds, and from the
smallest of the worlds to the smallest portion of the beings who
compose it, all was individual, and all was, nevertheless, One and
indivisible.

What was the design of the Being, fixed in His essence and in His
faculties, who transmitted that essence and those faculties without
losing them? who manifested them outside of Himself without separating
them from Himself? who rendered his creations outside of Himself fixed
in their essence and mutable in their form? The pair thus called to
the celestial festival could only see the order and arrangement of
created beings and admire the immediate result. The Angels alone see
more. They know the means; they comprehend the final end.

But what the two Elect were granted power to contemplate, what they
were able to bring back as a testimony which enlightened their minds
forever after, was the proof of the action of the Worlds and of
Beings; the consciousness of the effort with which they all converge
to the Result.

They heard the divers parts of the Infinite forming one living melody;
and each time that the accord made itself felt like a mighty
respiration, the Worlds drawn by the concordant movement inclined
themselves toward the Supreme Being who, from His impenetrable centre,
issued all things and recalled all things to Himself.