“Why isn’t it hard for the Jesuits?”
“Well, because we have this nutty little concept of eternal life,” he deadpanned. “And I’m so grateful to have it. Obviously there’s no way you can prove the existence of heaven. On the other hand, you look around and see all the tribes, all the nations, all of today’s sophisticated people, and they all still need to believe. The idea of immortality is still such a huge thing.”
His cell was roomy enough for a bed, a large television, a desk, and a couple of bookshelves filled with tomes on cinematic history, deconstructionism, and aesthetics. An array of suits hung neatly in the closet. He grabbed a copy of his Bergman book from the top shelf, cracked its spine, and sat down to inscribe it for me. His armchair faced a large window looking over a forested ravine. I walked around the room, peering at the framed photographs on the wall. One was of François Truffaut, on set, looking young and handsome. “Can you tell that’s me?” Gervais joked.
“Who’s that?” I asked, indicating a black-and-white shot of him deep in conversation with Bergman, on Fårö.
“He was nice to me,” Gervais said, putting down the book. “At the end, you know, Bergman went Christian. He didn’t want it in the papers, but when he died, he had a Lutheran priest there. And I was pleased to hear that. He didn’t want people to know, just as he didn’t want any religious affirmations there in his last films. After all, a man has to preserve his dignity. But Christians would say it was a good ending.”
Gervais turned to an image of John the Baptist on the wall. “Were you ever baptized?” he asked me.
“Yes, at a Hungarian church in Montreal, actually. My dad’s parents insisted, and my mother didn’t object.”
“Lutheran, hmmm? Like Bergman. And are you practicing?”
I shook my head.
“Talk about an idiot!” he cried. “What are you doing here, then? Maids! Take him away!”
“But how does one even become a practicing believer in this day and age?”
He looked at me warily, then said he didn’t know.
“So why did you become a Jesuit?”
“I was twenty, I was drunk, I didn’t know what I was doing.” He took a gulp of Coca-Cola.
“Come on, I’m being serious, I want to know.”
“That babe”—he pointed at a photo on the wall—“was my mother. Silvia Mullens, more Catholic than the pope. So I grew up with the religious imagination. As a child, I’d go for walks in the evening, in the countryside, when I stayed with my grandparents. Out in the fields, I’d look up at the stars in the night sky, or when the sun was just setting, and I’d say to myself, ‘That’s the truth.’ On those walks, when I looked up, I knew I’d become a priest. . . . But how did we get onto this topic?” he asked, suddenly confused, pushing his silver, side-parted hair behind his ear. He seemed perplexed that I was in the room. “I must confess, I often forget things. My gray cells aren’t what they used to be. Soft pillows, you know.”
“I asked you about becoming a believer.”
“Oh, yes, that. For me, it was the sky at night. Did I already say that? Well, the sky, the stars. That was enough. I knew my vocation was to be a priest. Later on, girls appeared on the horizon, but I weathered through. Now here I am, eighty-one and ready to go. As far as practicing goes, the best time is always when I’m seeing a good movie. Or listening to Beethoven. I always felt the immensity of God when listening to him.”
The Jesuit motto, ad majorem Dei gloriam, means “to the greater glory of God.” It refers to the idea that anything done with pure intentions can be meritorious for spiritual life, even activities not of a directly religious nature. Watching films, for example, or writing, even making food or cleaning the apartment. Gervais’s version of God didn’t seem like the usual Old Prude in the Sky. Then again, Gervais wasn’t a typical Jesuit. And Jesuits themselves aren’t the most straight-ahead Catholics.
The Society of Jesus can be traced back to a vision experienced in 1522 by Saint Ignatius of Loyola. While sitting on the banks of Spain’s Cardener River, gazing at the water’s cavorting shapes and sinuous foamings, the eyes of his mind were opened. All our surroundings, he realized, down to the smallest details, are emanations of the divine, “streams of water leaping from the spring well.” Loyola wrote The Spiritual Exercises to help others attain a level of receptivity in which God can be perceived in everything. But if I’d learned anything in film class, the means of perceiving God isn’t at all rational.
“As Saint Gregory put it,” Gervais continued, “‘Then only is there truth in what we know concerning God when we are made sensible that we cannot know anything concerning Him.’”
“But doesn’t the life force have something to do with it?”
“It’s not my word, it’s their word.” He shrugged. “I use it to not alienate nonbelievers. But the life force is more than something to believe in. It’s something felt, something quite concrete—even though it’s something we can’t calculate or capture.”
“Is the life force the same thing as grace?”
“Perhaps. It could be. I use the term life force for lack of a better word.”
That might be true, or perhaps Gervais knew not to speak too much about that which cannot be spoken about. In his list of “Rules for Thinking with the Church,” Ignatius insisted on the need to “be very cautious” when discussing grace with others. Rule seventeen explicitly prohibits talking of grace at length and with any insistence.
Gervais walked over to the shelf and pulled down an old tome called Mystical Theology. He opened it and put his finger at the beginning of a paragraph and told me to read. These things are not to be disclosed to the uninitiated, by whom I mean those attached to the objects of human thought, and who believe there is no superessential Reality beyond, and who imagine that by their own understanding they know Him who has made Darkness His secret place.
“So . . . we can’t talk about this?” I asked.
“Nobody can talk about this,” he said, lying down in bed, still wearing his suit. “There are no words for ‘this.’ All we can say of the infinite is indefinite. Keep reading.”
The mystic is plunged into the Darkness of Unknowing, whence all perfection of understanding is excluded, and he is enwrapped in that which is altogether intangible and noumenal . . . and through the inactivity of all his reasoning powers is united by his highest faculty to Him who is wholly unknowable; thus by knowing nothing he knows That which is beyond his knowledge.
“Therein lies the problematic,” Gervais intoned, as I transcribed the excerpt in my notebook. “‘A saintly, rather pathetic old man,’” he suggested I write, to describe him. “‘And then he smiled. . . .’ Look, you came here and asked a simple question about immortality. That’ll teach you! Never speak to a Jesuit.”
* * *
Mysticism is the quest for the divine source, to tap into its infinite impulsion, to feel “truth flowing into our soul from its fountainhead like an active force,” as Henri Bergson described it. We do so intuitively. Bergson defined intuition as an inner fluidity made from the essence of life and therefore ready, at any time, to be reabsorbed into those living waters without. The vague nebulosity of intuition forms an indistinct fringe surrounding our rational mind. Only through this encircling fluidity can we fuse into the vital impetus, l’élan vital, or the life force.
The term intuition is apt. Intuitive activity takes place on a mental—but not conscious—level. Picking up where intelligence falls off, intuition is how the nonthinking mind approaches the metaphysical. It leads to the within of things. Intuition is a spark that plugs us into the current of life itself. Our mind can’t wrap itself around the life force, but intuition taps into that wave of unceasing creation. The aim of mysticism is to realize our identity with this energy, to realize that we, too, are a continuation of this outpouring.
“We’re dealing here with deep, deep things,” Gervais reiterated. “Spontaneities.”
“Spontaneities?”
“Things we can only understand through intuition, or the imagination. Spontaneities are things embedded in the human matrix, things all cultures have always spontaneously resonated to—like love, and the life force.”
He was trying to speak about something that teases us out of thought, something we can only know by not knowing. Whether it’s called God, or the Absolute, Eternity, or Truth, it’s a heightened reality that cannot be analyzed, understood, or taken in. It is inaccessible. It is in the hiddenness.
The life force is a way of speaking about it. This vitalist hypothesis has been forwarded by everyone from Heracleitus (who saw the life force as celestial lightning transforming into water) to Schopenhauer (who viewed “the will to live” as in irrational, unintelligible urge). It’s a fundamental principle in spiritual philosophy—whether or not we agree with it.
According to Bergson, life bears within itself an explosive, elemental force that propels growth. This innate momentum is why plants stretch their tendrils to the sun. It’s what causes an embryo to grow. It’s the breath behind the sails of evolution. It’s the reason eggs, flowers, and minds came to be. No one can prove it, but it can be felt in love, in visionary moments. It’s the aviditas vitae, the wanting to live. It’s what makes the wind blow.
Bernard Shaw spoke of it as the inner will of the world. He felt that humans are in the hands of an external, separate force—not God as an anthropomorphic personality, but as a kind of electrical current. At first, Shaw believed the main aim of this energy was as a galvanizer of genetic immortality, as it brings people together to make babies. He later came to see it as an inchoate power trying to self-actualize through us, constantly striving to attain the ability to understand itself. The organ that best performs this function in nature is the human brain, which struggles with its impossible task. Eventually, Shaw felt, the life force will push evolution to replace our bodies with better thinking organisms. Our destiny is to become immortal vortices of pure thought.
The Romantic poets described the life force as a basic energy “that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.” This tremendous internal push is always seeking to transcend itself. Incapable of ever achieving its desired result (variously described as understanding itself or creating immortality), it keeps on blasting its way through inertia, Bergson wrote, “like the fiery path torn by the last rocket of a fireworks display through the black cinders of the spent rockets that are falling dead.”
* * *
“We can’t understand, so stop trying,” Gervais continued, going on about the life force. “Bergman too was so intent on trying to comprehend it. But it can’t be demystified. That’s why we have mass. It’s a poetic repetition of Christ giving himself up and we followers share in what he did on the eve.”
As he spoke, lying in bed, his hand wavered in the air, trembling, fingers splayed. “The life force is such an interesting way of talking about it. When in the grips of the life force we feel what a gift it is to be alive. A beneficent fluid rains down upon us, whence we draw the resources to labor on. What is the sacrifice that each of us makes in our own life? Sacrifice means doing things for others, but in giving we can ourselves feel love. Our travails give us purpose. Sacrifice leads to the life force; in a mysterious way, they flow one into the other.”
“And the life force has something to do with water?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Why does Jesus bring ‘living water’? As he said, ‘I am the life.’ Baptism uses water, the life symbol. It cleanses you. For the desert people of the Old Testament, the Hebrews and the Palestinians, water really was life. Without it, you’d just dry up and that’s it. Finding water meant staying alive. You can imagine their happiness, their gratitude. Somehow a benign God became linked to a stream of water. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end,’ you know, ‘I will give to him that thirsts of the fountain of the water of life.’”
Gervais gave examples of how the mystic faculty is often likened to water in its different states. Wordsworth heard infinity speaking to him in watery words. In the Bible, God’s voice is heard as the sound of many waters. Plotinus, the Neoplatonist, experienced visions of the fountain from which everything emanates, a spring that has no commencement whose streams overflow into our hearts.
“So there’s an everyday sense in which we knew we needed water in order to stay alive,” I asked him, “and then a miraculous sense in which the soul connects with the living waters of faith?”
“It’s water, it’s life, it’s love.” He was making a slow, wavelike motion with his hand. “It’s vague, I know, I’m sorry.”
“That vagueness is what I’m trying to understand, and I’m struggling because it’s all so intangible.”
“It is tangible,” he replied firmly. “When that priest comes and gives you the wafer and the wine—it’s very tangible. When you believe and receive it, you’re eating the body of Christ. It’s not just a symbol. You wash away your shortcomings and feel a love for others. It’s hopeful. And you can help others. Water into wine. It’s vague, and it’s poetic, but it really works, you know. Sometimes.”
“And you find it at mass?”
“Depends, if it’s a good day. If your conscience is clean, then yes. I believe very much in confession. It forces you to face up to things you shouldn’t be doing. It’s a very positive thing. It cleans things out. Lord knows the number of friends and great people—atheists, artists, and that sort of thing—I’ve met. But, no, I wouldn’t change places with any of them. . . . Now how did we get to speaking about this again?”
“We were speaking about the life force.”
“Oh, yes, immortality. I think about it often.” He looked up at a laminated poster on the wall, of Christ on the crucifix, blood weeping from his wounds. Gervais turned back to me, bewildered not only that I happened to be in his room, but that I was taking notes. “What on earth are you doing? Why are you writing this stuff down?”
“For my book, remember?”
“Really? Oh.”
“Who else’ll document all of this?”
“Posthumously!” he stated.
“Or at least humorously,” I countered.
We both laughed.
“That’s right: we were on immortality.” He nodded. “Have you heard about scientists trying to make us physically immortal?”
“Yes, of course. How does that strike you?”
“It seems to me that people who want to live forever through science are in effect saying the same thing Catholics are saying. They’re asking what we’re asking—in a slightly different way. Us believers, we have our beliefs. Limitless, of course, unprovable, but still . . . And scientists also have their beliefs. They’re speaking of immortality with the jargon of their particular approach. Somewhere along the line, however, they’re arriving at conclusions that science, by its very nature, cannot consider. They’re mythologizing.”
“But they don’t see it that way.”
“The difference is that we of faith say our myths are true, whereas they don’t even admit that they have myths. But they, too, believe their respective path will lead to the truth, right?”
“I suppose.”
“Yet science, as they insist, only deals with proof. Do they have the data to prove that man can be immortal? Scientists have their foundational assumptions, whereas the religious thing, it’s a whole different heartbeat. We from the start act in faith. We don’t deal in data or proof. Our terrain is immaterial. This a priori of faith is rejected by scientists, who claim to contend only with material things.”
“And they’re speaking about material immortality.”
“Whatever that is! They’ve cleverly taken it for granted that if believers can do it, then so can they. But any terrain in science can only take you so far. The scientist reaches a point where they can’t go any further. His system can’t do it. In pursuing knowledge, we always come to a realization that we cannot understand. After tha
t comes the leap. Of faith. Can data make that leap? As we say in Swedish, förlåt mig. It means ‘forgive me.’ The scientist can’t make that leap, the leap that we make at the very beginning. The need to prove never concerns those of faith.”
There came a knock on the door. “Father?” queried a woman’s voice.
“I’m not here,” he groaned.
“Father, it’s time for your dental appointment.”
“What?”
The door opened, and the nurse walked in. “Father, remember, I told you this morning: you have to be at the dentist’s office by two o’clock. Now, let’s get up and go.”
“Well,” he exhaled, completely puzzled, “I wish I’d known.”
The nurse rolled her eyes and took his hat and overcoat from the closet. She said they’d be back in an hour or so, and that I could wait for him if I wanted.
“I’m very sorry about this,” he offered. “I really had no idea.”
“That’s okay.” I smiled. “I’ll read your book while you’re gone.”
“You have my book? What? Did you bring it with you? How did you find it?”
“You gave me a copy, remember?”
“I gave you a copy of my book?”
There it was, on the desk, next to him. He opened the front cover and saw that he’d half-inscribed it to me: To Adam, surely one of the finest—he had no recollection of starting to dedicate it, but he picked up another pen and continued—of my best . . .!?! Come back and I’ll try to give you something else.
* * *
In the parking lot, an elderly Jesuit in a wheelchair rolled up and said something in French to Father Gervais, who responded with a Quebecois witticism. The man turned to me, disregarding what he called Gervais’s “nimble but ineffective patois.” He proffered his hand, introducing himself as an atmospheric scientist. “I specialize in fog,” he added.
The Book of Immortality Page 9