Seraphita

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Seraphita


"Suppose I add that Motion and Number are engendered by the Word,
namely the supreme Reason of Seers and Prophets who in the olden time
heard the Breath of God beneath which Saul fell to the earth. That
Word, you scoff at it, you men, although you well know that all
visible works, societies, monuments, deeds, passions, proceed from the
breath of your own feeble word, and that without that word you would
resemble the African gorilla, the nearest approach to man, the Negro.
You believe firmly in Number and in Motion, a force and a result both
inexplicable, incomprehensible, to the existence of which I may apply
the logical dilemma which, as we have seen, prevents you from
believing in God. Powerful reasoner that you are, you do not need that
I should prove to you that the Infinite must everywhere be like unto
Itself, and that, necessarily, it is One. God alone is Infinite, for
surely there cannot be two Infinities, two Ones. If, to make use of
human terms, anything demonstrated to you here below seems to you
infinite, be sure that within it you will find some one aspect of God.
But to continue.

"You have appropriated to yourself a place in the Infinite of Number;
you have fitted it to your own proportions by creating (if indeed you
did create) arithmetic, the basis on which all things rest, even your
societies. Just as Number--the only thing in which your self-styled
atheists believe--organized physical creations, so arithmetic, in the
employ of Number, organized the moral world. This numeration must be
absolute, like all else that is true in itself; but it is purely
relative, it does not exist absolutely, and no proof can be given of
its reality. In the first place, though Numeration is able to take
account of organized substances, it is powerless in relation to
unorganized forces, the ones being finite and the others infinite. The
man who can conceive the Infinite by his intelligence cannot deal with
it in its entirety; if he could, he would be God. Your Numeration,
applying to things finite and not to the Infinite, is therefore true
in relation to the details which you are able to perceive, and false
in relation to the Whole, which you are unable to perceive. Though
Nature is like unto herself in the organizing force or in her
principles which are infinite, she is not so in her finite effects.
Thus you will never find in Nature two objects identically alike. In
the Natural Order two and two never make four; to do so, four exactly
similar units must be had, and you know how impossible it is to find
two leaves alike on the same tree, or two trees alike of the same
species. This axiom of your numeration, false in visible nature, is
equally false in the invisible universe of your abstractions, where
the same variance takes place in your ideas, which are the things of
the visible world extended by means of their relations; so that the
variations here are even more marked than elsewhere. In fact, all
being relative to the temperament, strength, habits, and customs of
individuals, who never resemble each other, the smallest objects take
the color of personal feelings. For instance, man has been able to
create units and to give an equal weight and value to bits of gold.
Well, take the ducat of the rich man and the ducat of the poor man to
a money-changer and they are rated exactly equal, but to the mind of
the thinker one is of greater importance than the other; one
represents a month of comfort, the other an ephemeral caprice. Two and
two, therefore, only make four through a false conception.

"Again: fraction does not exist in Nature, where what you call a
fragment is a finished whole. Does it not often happen (have you not
many proofs of it?) that the hundredth part of a substance is stronger
than what you term the whole of it? If fraction does not exist in the
Natural Order, still less shall we find it in the Moral Order, where
ideas and sentiments may be as varied as the species of the Vegetable
kingdom and yet be always whole. The theory of fractions is therefore
another signal instance of the servility of your mind.

"Thus Number, with its infinite minuteness and its infinite expansion,
is a power whose weakest side is known to you, but whose real import
escapes your perception. You have built yourself a hut in the Infinite
of numbers, you have adorned it with hieroglyphics scientifically
arranged and painted, and you cry out, 'All is here!'

"Let us pass from pure, unmingled Number to corporate Number. Your
geometry establishes that a straight line is the shortest way from one
point to another, but your astronomy proves that God has proceeded by
curves. Here, then, we find two truths equally proved by the same
science,--one by the testimony of your senses reinforced by the
telescope, the other by the testimony of your mind; and yet the one
contradicts the other. Man, liable to err, affirms one, and the Maker
of the worlds, whom, so far, you have not detected in error,
contradicts it. Who shall decide between rectalinear and curvilinear
geometry? between the theory of the straight line and that of the
curve? If, in His vast work, the mysterious Artificer, who knows how
to reach His ends miraculously fast, never employs a straight line
except to cut off an angle and so obtain a curve, neither does man
himself always rely upon it. The bullet which he aims direct proceeds
by a curve, and when you wish to strike a certain point in space, you
impel your bombshell along its cruel parabola. None of your men of
science have drawn from this fact the simple deduction that the Curve
is the law of the material worlds and the Straight line that of the
Spiritual worlds; one is the theory of finite creations, the other the
theory of the infinite. Man, who alone in the world has a knowledge of
the Infinite, can alone know the straight line; he alone has the sense
of verticality placed in a special organ. A fondness for the creations
of the curve would seem to be in certain men an indication of the
impurity of their nature still conjoined to the material substances
which engender us; and the love of great souls for the straight line
seems to show in them an intuition of heaven. Between these two lines
there is a gulf fixed like that between the finite and the infinite,
between matter and spirit, between man and the idea, between motion
and the object moved, between the creature and God. Ask Love the
Divine to grant you his wings and you can cross that gulf. Beyond it
begins the revelation of the Word.

"No part of those things which you call material is without its own
meaning; lines are the boundaries of solid parts and imply a force of
action which you suppress in your formulas,--thus rendering those
formulas false in relation to substances taken as a whole. Hence the
constant destruction of the monuments of human labor, which you
supply, unknown to yourselves, with acting properties. Nature has
substances; your science combines only their appearances. At every
step Nature gives the lie to all your laws. Can you find a single one
that is not disproved by a fact? Your Static laws are at the mercy of
a thousand accidents; a fluid can overthrow a solid mountain and prove
that the heaviest substances may be lifted by one that is
imponderable.

"Your laws on Acoustics and Optics are defied by the sounds which you
hear within yourselves in sleep, and by the light of an electric sun
whose rays often overcome you. You know no more how light makes itself
seen within you, than you know the simple and natural process which
changes it on the throats of tropic birds to rubies, sapphires,
emeralds, and opals, or keeps it gray and brown on the breasts of the
same birds under the cloudy skies of Europe, or whitens it here in the
bosom of our polar Nature. You know not how to decide whether color is
a faculty with which all substances are endowed, or an effect produced
by an effluence of light. You admit the saltness of the sea without
being able to prove that the water is salt at its greatest depth. You
recognize the existence of various substances which span what you
think to be the void,--substances which are not tangible under any of
the forms assumed by Matter, although they put themselves in harmony
with Matter in spite of every obstacle.

"All this being so, you believe in the results of Chemistry, although
that science still knows no way of gauging the changes produced by the
flux and reflux of substances which come and go across your crystals
and your instruments on the impalpable filaments of heat or light
conducted and projected by the affinities of metal or vitrified flint.
You obtain none but dead substances, from which you have driven the
unknown force that holds in check the decomposition of all things here
below, and of which cohesion, attraction, vibration, and polarity are
but phenomena. Life is the thought of substances; bodies are only the
means of fixing life and holding it to its way. If bodies were beings
living of themselves they would be Cause itself, and could not die.

"When a man discovers the results of the general movement, which is
shared by all creations according to their faculty of absorption, you
proclaim him mighty in science, as though genius consisted in
explaining a thing that is! Genius ought to cast its eyes beyond
effects. Your men of science would laugh if you said to them: 'There
exist such positive relations between two human beings, one of whom
may be here, and the other in Java, that they can at the same instant
feel the same sensation, and be conscious of so doing; they can
question each other and reply without mistake'; and yet there are
mineral substances which exhibit sympathies as far off from each other
as those of which I speak. You believe in the power of the electricity
which you find in the magnet and you deny that which emanates from the
soul! According to you, the moon, whose influence upon the tides you
think fixed, has none whatever upon the winds, nor upon navigation,
nor upon men; she moves the sea, but she must not affect the sick
folk; she has undeniable relations with one half of humanity, and
nothing at all to do with the other half. These are your vaunted
certainties!

"Let us go a step further. You believe in physics. But your physics
begin, like the Catholic religion, with an _act of faith_. Do they not
pre-suppose some external force distinct from substance to which it
communicates motion? You see its effects, but what is it? where is it?
what is the essence of its nature, its life? has it any limits?--and
yet, you deny God!

"Thus, the majority of your scientific axioms, true to their relation
to man, are false in relation to the Great Whole. Science is One, but
you have divided it. To know the real meaning of the laws of phenomena
must we not know the correlations which exist between phenomena and
the law of the Whole? There is, in all things, an appearance which
strikes your senses; under that appearance stirs a soul; a body is
there and a faculty is there. Where do you teach the study of the
relations which bind things to each other? Nowhere. Consequently you
have nothing positive. Your strongest certainties rest upon the
analysis of material forms whose essence you persistently ignore.

"There is a Higher Knowledge of which, too late, some men obtain a
glimpse, though they dare not avow it. Such men comprehend the
necessity of considering substances not merely in their mathematical
properties but also in their entirety, in their occult relations and
affinities. The greatest man among you divined, in his latter days,
that all was reciprocally cause and effect; that the visible worlds
were co-ordinated among themselves and subject to worlds invisible. He
groaned at the recollection of having tried to establish fixed
precepts. Counting up his worlds, like grape-seeds scattered through
ether, he had explained their coherence by the laws of planetary and
molecular attraction. You bowed before that man of science--well! I
tell you that he died in despair. By supposing that the centrifugal
and centripetal forces, which he had invented to explain to himself
the universe, were equal, he stopped the universe; yet he admitted
motion in an indeterminate sense; but supposing those forces unequal,
then utter confusion of the planetary system ensued. His laws
therefore were not absolute; some higher problem existed than the
principle on which his false glory rested. The connection of the stars
with one another and the centripetal action of their internal motion
did not deter him from seeking the parent stalk on which his clusters
hung. Alas, poor man! the more he widened space the heavier his burden
grew. He told you how there came to be equilibrium among the parts,
but whither went the whole? His mind contemplated the vast extent,
illimitable to human eyes, filled with those groups of worlds a mere
fraction of which is all our telescopes can reach, but whose immensity
is revealed by the rapidity of light. This sublime contemplation
enabled him to perceive myriads of worlds, planted in space like
flowers in a field, which are born like infants, grow like men, die as
the aged die, and live by assimilating from their atmosphere the
substances suitable for their nourishment,--having a centre and a
principal of life, guaranteeing to each other their circuits, absorbed
and absorbing like plants, and forming a vast Whole endowed with life
and possessing a destiny.

"At that sight your man of science trembled! He knew that life is
produced by the union of the thing and its principle, that death or
inertia or gravity is produced by a rupture between a thing and the
movement which appertains to it. Then it was that he foresaw the
crumbling of the worlds and their destruction if God should withdraw
the Breath of His Word. He searched the Apocalypse for the traces of
that Word. You thought him mad. Understand him better! He was seeking
pardon for the work of his genius.

"Wilfrid, you have come here hoping to make me solve equations, or
rise upon a rain-cloud, or plunge into the fiord and reappear a swan.
If science or miracles were the end and object of humanity, Moses
would have bequeathed to you the law of fluxions; Jesus Christ would
have lightened the darkness of your sciences; his apostles would have
told you whence come those vast trains of gas and melted metals,
attached to cores which revolve and solidify as they dart through
ether, or violently enter some system and combine with a star,
jostling and displacing it by the shock, or destroying it by the
infiltration of their deadly gases; Saint Paul, instead of telling you
to live in God, would have explained why food is the secret bond among
all creations and the evident tie between all living Species. In these
days the greatest miracle of all would be the discovery of the
squaring of the circle,--a problem which you hold to be insoluble, but
which is doubtless solved in the march of worlds by the intersection
of some mathematical lines whose course is visible to the eye of
spirits who have reached the higher spheres. Believe me, miracles are
in us, not without us. Here natural facts occur which men call
supernatural. God would have been strangely unjust had he confined the
testimony of his power to certain generations and peoples and denied
them to others. The brazen rod belongs to all. Neither Moses, nor
Jacob, nor Zoroaster, nor Paul, nor Pythagoras, nor Swedenborg, not
the humblest Messenger nor the loftiest Prophet of the Most High are
greater than you are capable of being. Only, there come to nations as
to men certain periods when Faith is theirs.

"If material sciences be the end and object of human effort, tell me,
both of you, would societies,--those great centres where men
congregate,--would they perpetually be dispersed? If civilization were
the object of our Species, would intelligence perish? would it
continue purely individual? The grandeur of all nations that were
truly great was based on exceptions; when the exception ceased their
power died. If such were the End-all, Prophets, Seers, and Messengers
of God would have lent their hand to Science rather than have given it
to Belief. Surely they would have quickened your brains sooner than
have touched your hearts! But no; one and all they came to lead the
nations back to God; they proclaimed the sacred Path in simple words
that showed the way to heaven; all were wrapped in love and faith, all
were inspired by that _word_ which hovers above the inhabitants of
earth, enfolding them, inspiriting them, uplifting them; none were
prompted by any human interest. Your great geniuses, your poets, your
kings, your learned men are engulfed with their cities; while the
names of these good pastors of humanity, ever blessed, have survived
all cataclysms.

"Alas! we cannot understand each other on any point. We are separated
by an abyss. You are on the side of darkness, while I--I live in the
light, the true Light! Is this the word that you ask of me? I say it
with joy; it may change you. Know this: there are sciences of matter
and sciences of spirit. There, where you see substances, I see forces
that stretch one toward another with generating power. To me, the
character of bodies is the indication of their principles and the sign
of their properties. Those principles beget affinities which escape
your knowledge, and which are linked to centres. The different species
among which life is distributed are unfailing streams which correspond
unfailingly among themselves. Each has his own vocation. Man is effect
and cause. He is fed, but he feeds in turn. When you call God a
Creator, you dwarf Him. He did not create, as you think He did, plants
or animals or stars. Could He proceed by a variety of means? Must He
not act by unity of composition? Moreover, He gave forth principles to
be developed, according to His universal law, at the will of the
surroundings in which they were placed. Hence a single substance and
motion, a single plant, a single animal, but correlations everywhere.
In fact, all affinities are linked together by contiguous similitudes;
the life of the worlds is drawn toward the centres by famished
aspiration, as you are drawn by hunger to seek food.

"To give you an example of affinities linked to similitudes (a
secondary law on which the creations of your thought are based),
music, that celestial art, is the working out of this principle; for
is it not a complement of sounds harmonized by number? Is not sound a
modification of air, compressed, dilated, echoed? You know the
composition of air,--oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. As you cannot
obtain sound from the void, it is plain that music and the human voice
are the result of organized chemical substances, which put themselves
in unison with the same substances prepared within you by your
thought, co-ordinated by means of light, the great nourisher of your
globe. Have you ever meditated on the masses of nitre deposited by the
snow, have you ever observed a thunderstorm and seen the plants
breathing in from the air about them the metal it contains, without
concluding that the sun has fused and distributed the subtle essence
which nourishes all things here below? Swedenborg has said, 'The earth
is a man.'

"Your Science, which makes you great in your own eyes, is paltry
indeed beside the light which bathes a Seer. Cease, cease to question
me; our languages are different. For a moment I have used yours to
cast, if it be possible, a ray of faith into your soul; to give you,
as it were, the hem of my garment and draw you up into the regions of
Prayer. Can God abase Himself to you? Is it not for you to rise to
Him? If human reason finds the ladder of its own strength too weak to
bring God down to it, is it not evident that you must find some other
path to reach Him? That Path is in ourselves. The Seer and the
Believer find eyes within their souls more piercing far than eyes that
probe the things of earth,--they see the Dawn. Hear this truth: Your
science, let it be never so exact, your meditations, however bold,
your noblest lights are Clouds. Above, above is the Sanctuary whence
the true Light flows."

She sat down and remained silent; her calm face bore no sign of the
agitation which orators betray after their least fervid
improvisations.

Wilfrid bent toward Monsieur Becker and said in a low voice, "Who
taught her that?"

"I do not know," he answered.

"He was gentler on the Falberg," Minna whispered to herself.

Seraphita passed her hand across her eyes and then she said,
smiling:--

"You are very thoughtful to-night, gentlemen. You treat Minna and me
as though we were men to whom you must talk politics or commerce;
whereas we are young girls, and you ought to tell us tales while you
drink your tea. That is what we do, Monsieur Wilfrid, in our long
Norwegian evenings. Come, dear pastor, tell me some Saga that I have
not heard,--that of Frithiof, the chronicle that you believe and have
so often promised me. Tell us the story of the peasant lad who owned
the ship that talked and had a soul. Come! I dream of the frigate
Ellida, the fairy with the sails young girls should navigate!"

"Since we have returned to the regions of Jarvis," said Wilfrid, whose
eyes were fastened on Seraphita as those of a robber, lurking in the
darkness, fasten on the spot where he knows the jewels lie, "tell me
why you do not marry?"

"You are all born widows and widowers," she replied; "but my marriage
was arranged at my birth. I am betrothed."

"To whom?" they cried.

"Ask not my secret," she said; "I will promise, if our father permits
it, to invite you to these mysterious nuptials."

"Will they be soon?"

"I think so."

A long silence followed these words.

"The spring has come!" said Seraphita, suddenly. "The noise of the
waters and the breaking of the ice begins. Come, let us welcome the
first spring of the new century."

She rose, followed by Wilfrid, and together they went to a window
which David had opened. After the long silence of winter, the waters
stirred beneath the ice and resounded through the fiord like music,
--for there are sounds which space refines, so that they reach the
ear in waves of light and freshness.

"Wilfrid, cease to nourish evil thoughts whose triumph would be hard
to bear. Your desires are easily read in the fire of your eyes. Be
kind; take one step forward in well-doing. Advance beyond the love of
man and sacrifice yourself completely to the happiness of her you
love. Obey me; I will lead you in a path where you shall obtain the
distinctions which you crave, and where Love is infinite indeed."

She left him thoughtful.

"That soft creature!" he said within himself; "is she indeed the
prophetess whose eyes have just flashed lightnings, whose voice has
rung through worlds, whose hand has wielded the axe of doubt against
our sciences? Have we been dreaming? Am I awake?"

"Minna," said Seraphita, returning to the young girl, "the eagle
swoops where the carrion lies, but the dove seeks the mountain spring
beneath the peaceful greenery of the glades. The eagle soars to
heaven, the dove descends from it. Cease to venture into regions where
thou canst find no spring of waters, no umbrageous shade. If on the
Falberg thou couldst not gaze into the abyss and live, keep all thy
strength for him who will love thee. Go, poor girl; thou knowest, I am
betrothed."

Minna rose and followed Seraphita to the window where Wilfrid stood.
All three listened to the Sieg bounding out the rush of the upper
waters, which brought down trees uprooted by the ice; the fiord had
regained its voice; all illusions were dispelled! They rejoiced in
Nature as she burst her bonds and seemed to answer with sublime accord
to the Spirit whose breath had wakened her.

When the three guests of this mysterious being left the house, they
were filled with the vague sensation which is neither sleep, nor
torpor, nor astonishment, but partakes of the nature of each,--a state
that is neither dusk nor dawn, but which creates a thirst for light.
All three were thinking.

"I begin to believe that she is indeed a Spirit hidden in human form,"
said Monsieur Becker.

Wilfrid, re-entering his own apartments, calm and convinced, was
unable to struggle against that influence so divinely majestic.

Minna said in her heart, "Why will he not let me love him!"



CHAPTER V

FAREWELL

There is in man an almost hopeless phenomenon for thoughtful minds who
seek a meaning in the march of civilization, and who endeavor to give
laws of progression to the movement of intelligence. However
portentous a fact may be, or even supernatural,--if such facts exist,
--however solemnly a miracle may be done in sight of all, the
lightning of that fact, the thunderbolt of that miracle is quickly
swallowed up in the ocean of life, whose surface, scarcely stirred by
the brief convulsion, returns to the level of its habitual flow.

A Voice is heard from the jaws of an Animal; a Hand writes on the wall
before a feasting Court; an Eye gleams in the slumber of a king, and a
Prophet explains the dream; Death, evoked, rises on the confines of
the luminous sphere were faculties revive; Spirit annihilates Matter
at the foot of that mystic ladder of the Seven Spiritual Worlds, one
resting upon another in space and revealing themselves in shining
waves that break in light upon the steps of the celestial Tabernacle.
But however solemn the inward Revelation, however clear the visible
outward Sign, be sure that on the morrow Balaam doubts both himself
and his ass, Belshazzar and Pharoah call Moses and Daniel to qualify
the Word. The Spirit, descending, bears man above this earth, opens
the seas and lets him see their depths, shows him lost species, wakens
dry bones whose dust is the soil of valleys; the Apostle writes the
Apocalypse, and twenty centuries later human science ratifies his
words and turns his visions into maxims. And what comes of it all? Why
this,--that the peoples live as they have ever lived, as they lived in
the first Olympiad, as they lived on the morrow of Creation, and on
the eve of the great cataclysm. The waves of Doubt have covered all
things. The same floods surge with the same measured motion on the
human granite which serves as a boundary to the ocean of intelligence.
When man has inquired of himself whether he has seen that which he has
seen, whether he has heard the words that entered his ears, whether
the facts were facts and the idea is indeed an idea, then he resumes
his wonted bearing, thinks of his worldly interests, obeys some envoy
of death and of oblivion whose dusky mantle covers like a pall an
ancient Humanity of which the moderns retain no memory. Man never
pauses; he goes his round, he vegetates until the appointed day when
his Axe falls. If this wave force, this pressure of bitter waters
prevents all progress, no doubt it also warns of death. Spirits
prepared by faith among the higher souls of earth can alone perceive
the mystic ladder of Jacob.