His tone was such that the priest could not help exclaiming:
“Ah, I’m sorry for you indeed, Antoine! You’re one of the victims of our times—a rationalist!”
“I’m … well, it’s always hard to say just what one is. Still I admit I stand by the satisfactions of the intellect.”
The priest’s hands fluttered. “And by the blandishments of doubt, as well. It’s a survival of the romantic era; that sense of glorious audacity—and Byronic anguish—tickles the vanity, of course.”
“No,” Antoine cried, “you’re absolutely wrong there! I haven’t the least sense of audacity or anguish, and I’ve no use for those muzzy states of mind you’re thinking of. Nobody could be less romantic than I. And I don’t suffer from ‘soul-searchings,’ as they call them.” No sooner had he made the statement than he realized it was no longer strictly true. Doubtless he had no soul-searchings such as the Abbé Vécard had in mind—on the score of religion. But during the past three or four years he too had been apt to ponder, not without anguish, on the problem of man’s place and function in the universe. After a while he added: “What’s more, it would be wrong to say I’ve lost my faith; I rather think I never had it.”
“Oh, come now!” the Abbé exclaimed. “Have you forgotten, Antoine, what a religious little boy you used to be?”
“Religious? No. Docile; serious and obedient, nothing more. I was naturally amenable to discipline, and I performed my religious duties like the good little boy I was! That’s all.”
“No, no! You’re deliberately understating your faith in early years.”
“It wasn’t faith, but a religious upbringing, which is a very different thing.”
Antoine was trying less to startle the Abbé than to be sincere. His weariness had given place, to a mild exhilaration, which urged him to hold his own in the argument. And now he launched out into a sort of stock-taking, such as he had rarely made before, of his early life.
“Yes, it’s a question of upbringing. And, Abbé, just consider how neatly it all links up together. From when he’s four, his mother, his nurse, all the grown-ups on whom a child relies, keep dinning into his ears, on every pretext: ‘God is in heaven; God made you, and He watches you; God loves you, sees you, judges you; God will punish you if you’re naughty, reward you if you’re good.’ What next? When he’s eight he’s taken to mass and sees all the grown-up people round him bowing and kneeling; a beautiful gold monstrance is pointed out to him, gleaming amongst flowers and lights, across a haze of incense and music—and it’s the same God who’s present there, in the white Host. Right! What next? When he’s eleven he is told about the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, Redemption, Resurrection, Immaculate Conception, and all the rest of it—in a tone that carries conviction, from the august eminence of a pulpit. He listens, and believes all he is told. How should he not believe? How could he feel the least doubt about beliefs publicly avowed by his parents, school-fellows, masters, and by all the congregation in the church? How could a little boy like him question these holy mysteries? From the day he was born he’s been coming up against equally bewildering phenomena; he is a small, lost waif in a mysterious universe. That, sir, in my opinion is a point of vital importance; in fact, it’s the key to the whole problem. For a child everything is equally incomprehensible. The earth, which looks so flat, is round; it doesn’t seem to move, yet it’s spinning like a top. The sun makes seeds germinate; a live chick comes out of an egg. The Son of God came down from heaven, and died on the cross to redeem us from our sins. Why not? God was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. … It may mean something, or it may not. No matter! The trick has worked.”
The train had just stopped. A voice in the darkness bawled the name of a station. Supposing the car empty, somebody opened the door hastily and slammed it to again, with a curse. A blast of icy wind buffeted their faces.
Antoine turned again towards the Abbé, but the light had grown still feebler and he could make little of his expression.
As the priest made no remark, Antoine continued, in a calmer tone: “Well, can that childish credulity be described as ‘faith’? Certainly not. Faith is something that comes later. It springs from different roots. And, personally, I can assure you I have never had it.”
“It would be truer to say that, though the soil was well prepared for it, you never gave it a chance of springing up in your soul.” The Abbé’s voice was vibrant with indignation. “Faith is a gift from God— like the faculty of memory; and like memory, like all God’s gifts, it requires cultivation. But you—you, like so many others, yielded to pride, to the spirit of contradiction, to the lures of ‘free thinking,’ to the temptation of rebelling against established order.”
No sooner made, than the priest regretted his outburst, justified though it was. He was firmly resolved not to be drawn into a prolonged discussion of religion.
Moreover, the Abbé misinterpreted Antoine’s tone. Struck by its incisiveness, its ardour, and the gay truculence which gave the young man’s words an air of rather forced bravado, he preferred to question the speaker’s absolute sincerity!. He still entertained the utmost respect for Antoine, and behind it lurked a hope—more than a hope, a firm conviction—that M. Thibault’s elder son would not long persist in such lamentable, indefensible opinions.
Antoine was pondering.
“No,” he said composedly. “You’re wrong there. It came about quite naturally; neither pride nor a rebellious spirit played any part. Why, I didn’t even have to give it a thought. As far as I remember, I began, at the time of my first communion, to have a vague feeling that there was—how shall I put it?—that there was a catch somewhere in what we were taught about ‘religion; a sort of murkiness, not only for us but for everyone, for the grown-ups as well. Even for our priests!”
The Abbé could not withhold a flutter of his hands.
“Don’t imagine,” Antoine explained, “that I doubted then, or have the least doubt now, as to the sincerity of the priests I’ve known, or their zeal—perhaps I should say, their need for zeal. But they certainly gave me the impression of men uneasily groping in the dark, uncertain of their bearings, and turning round and round those abstruse doctrines I’ve mentioned with an unconscious diffidence. They made assertions, yes. But what did they assert? What had been asserted to them. Of course, they had no actual doubts about those doctrines of which they were the mouthpiece. But deep down in their hearts did they feel quite so sure as their dogmatic tone implied? Well, somehow I couldn’t convince myself they were so sure as all that. Do I shock you? We had, you see, another set of men to match them with—our masters. Those laymen, I confess, seemed to me much more at ease in their special field of learning, much more sure of their ground. Whether they expounded history, grammar, or geometry, they always gave us the impression that they knew their subjects from A to Z!”
The Abbé pursed his lips. “Before making a comparison, one must be sure the things compared are comparable.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking of the subject-matter of their teaching; I have in mind only the angle from which those specialists approached their subjects. There was never anything evasive about their attitude, even when their knowledge happened to fall short; they made no secret of their doubts, or even of the blind spots in their learning. And that, believe me, inspired confidence; it ruled out the least suspicion of … of humbug. No, humbug isn’t what I meant. Still I must admit that, in the next phase of my education, the more I came in contact with the priests at the Ecole, the less they inspired in me the feeling of security I had got from my lay teachers.”
“If the priests under whom you studied had been true theologians, you’d have got an impression of perfect security from your intercourse with them.” The Abbé was thinking of the professors of his seminary, of his studious youth unruffled by the faintest doubt.
Antoine did not seem to hear him. “Just think,” he exclaimed, “what it means to a youngster, when he’s turned loose, by gradual stages, on
mathematics, physics, chemistry! Suddenly he discovers that he has all space, the universe, for his playground. And after that, religion strikes him as not only cramped, but false, illogical. Untrustworthy.”
This time the Abbé drew back and stretched forth his arm. “Illogical? Can you seriously apply that term to it: illogical?”
“Yes!” Antoine retorted vehemently. “And I’ve just hit on something I hadn’t realized before. You upholders of religion start out with a firm belief, and to shore up that belief you call in logic; whereas people like myself begin with doubt, indifference, and we take reason for our guide, not knowing where it will lead us.
“Of course,” he went on at once with a smile, before the priest had time to put in a retort, “if you set to arguing it out with me, it will be child’s play for you to prove I don’t know the first word on the subject. I admit that right away. I’ve given very little thought to such matters; perhaps never so much as tonight. So you see I’m not trying to set up as a thoroughgoing rationalist. I’m only trying to explain why a Catholic upbringing has not prevented me from coming to my present state—a state of total unbelief.”
“My dear fellow,” the Abbé put in, with a slightly forced geniality, “your plain speaking doesn’t shock me in the least. For I’m sure you’re very far from being so black ^s you paint yourself! But go on; I’m listening.”
“Well, I continued—like so many others—observing my religious duties all the same. With an indifference which I wouldn’t acknowledge even to myself; a polite indifference. Even in later years I never settled down to a serious stock-taking of my beliefs. Most likely because at bottom I didn’t attach enough importance to them. Yes, I was very far from the state of mind of one of my fellow-students who was taking the Applied Arts course; he said to me one day, after he’d been through a phase of soul-searching: ‘I’ve given the whole bag of tricks a thorough look-over; take my word for it, boy, there’s far too many loose ends, it doesn’t hang together.’ At that time I was just starting my medical course, and the break—or, rather, estrangement—had already come about. I hadn’t waited for the semi-scientific studies of my first year to discover that one can’t believe without evidence …”
“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, c
luttered 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.”
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