FRENCH NUNNERIES.
IT is not difficult to understand why the publication of "La Religieuse" has so profoundly irritated the Ultramontanes of France. The book is not in a literary sense very able, not so able, we think, as "Le Maudit," and is singularly deficient alike in incident =din analysis of character. Asa story, indeed, it might be pronounced dull, very dull, duller than it is at all usual for any story written by a Frenchman to be. The force of the attack consists in the fact that it is not libellous, that the author though French, and consequently addicted to what seems to English ears exaggeration of expression, has carefully refrained from anything approaching to exaggeration of statement. The popular kind of attack once so general in England, and at this moment frequent in Italy, which represents the monastic life as utterly evil and dissolute, nunneries as harems, and slightly imbecile confessors as crafty and astute profligates, only makes the priests smile. The devout do not read such stories, the devotional do not believe -them, and with "the world" the natural recoil from such extra- • vagances does the priests more good than the extravagances them- selves do harm. The lad brought up to believe that a priest is necessarily a scoundrel is very apt when he finds him an average man to think him a great deal more. People who inquire at all know that the sinking of a monastery in France, or even in Germany, into the condition in which some English monasteries were reported by the Visitors to be, and which has been found to exist in some religious establishments in Italy, is excessively improbable, and people are prettysure to inquire a little before they embrace the religious life. The author of "La Religieuse " is a much more dangerous adversary. He expressly repudiates all the grosser forms of libel, and gives but one horrible story of personal suffering, and though he severely censures the questions put in the confessional still the subject to whom they are put is not innocent, and the attack is rather one upon the practice of confes- sion itself, or on the exercise of the priestly power by unmarried men, than on the monastic system. The charge so current among the prejudiced and the uneducated both in England and France he declares to be an anachronism, a confusion between the results of a system in its infancy, as monasticism now is, and its decay as it was during the middle ages :—" Those who in the world invariably suspect libertinism in the connection between the clergy and the women in religious houses are strangely mistaken. Disorder in moral conduct is seldom to be met with in the early period of these establishments. The hive is then forming itself. The swarm is too much occupied by its new task for laxity to come and poison souls. History affirms that the religious orders are pure at their origin ; but it informs us that evil quickly penetrates into them. The contact of spirits in the long ran is fatal, like the too great agglomeration of bodies ; it creates miasma, and decay soon -commences. There comes a time when the spirit of religion is completely displaced by a spirit of licentiousness difficult to describe. It is well known how far monastic decay had gone ender the ancient regime; and it may be remembered that when the convents were suppressed fifty nuns of Fontevrault _married fifty monks of their order. Such things are cer- tainly not seen nowadays. There are among nuns and monks doubtless vulgar natures, vocations of caprice or chance ; but propriety in manners is strictly observed." He disbelieves, too, the stories of the violation of the secrecy of the confessional, stories which if exceptionally true in some great cases, as in that of Maria Theresa, whose confession was shown her by Raunitz in order to procure the expulsion of the Jesuits, are in general we believe utterly false, based upon a totally different matter, the submission of difficult "cases of consetence " to the ultimate judge at Rome. The author of "La Religieuse " makes even an evil priest, a coarsely bad Carmelite, incapable of men- tioning things heard in confession until he has received the peni- tent's incautious but still willing consent. He even goes slightly out of his way to justify very cleverly the excessive repetition of "services" common to every convent male and female throughout the world :—" Our long offices, our prayers, become a habit. The days would not be tolerable, if they were not thus divided between prayer and those exercises of the lips which ask nothing from the mind. The people of the world go to concerts. Our chaunts, our psalmody, notwithstanding the nasal tones imposed by the rules, form our concerts." Nor as regards postulants at least does he repeat the common stories of coercion. Nuns he evidently believes will where it is possible be restrained from quitting their profes- sion, and he makes one frightful statement as to the use which in such cases may be made of an accusation of lunacy; but his heroine Therese wanders from convent to convent, uses her property at her own discretion, and finally settles herself in Paris without any resistance except by remonstrance on the part of the priests. Even in the frightful story alluded to, that of a nun imprisoned as a lunatic in a secluded room and frequently whipped, the superior shrinks at once before the threat of the civil power and the scandal which an appeal to it would cause,—a scandal at least as great in France as in England. The attack is not of this coarse kind, not directed against the practices of the monastic houses, but against monasticism itself, and the mystical piety upon which it is based,--against an ideal which the writer shows to be as un- attainable as it is inconsistent with the duties and pursuits of life.
The idea which the priests and above all the Jesuits strive to spread abroad in France and Belgium is not so much that to immure oneself in a convent is virtue, as that it leads to virtue. Starting from the cardinal idea at once of Catholicism and Cal- vinism that the first duty of man is not "love to God and his neighbour," but the security of his own soul, they endeavour to prove that the most certain road to security is the monastic life, the life which while avoiding all external influences enables the soul to contemplate in peace itself and God, to meditate itself as it were into a closer and more intimate communion with Christ than is possible to one immersed in the duties and cares of earth. To people of the Teutonic stock this habit of introversion is by nature so repugnant that the monastic life only tempts them when associated with acts of mercy and beneficence, when the nun in fact leads a life, though it is one of bene- volence instead of care. The ideal of the English girls who now and then fancy themselves ready for the renunciation of the world, is not the life of the Carmelite with her dirt and her self-communion, but of the cleanly and useful Sister of Mercy, of the one order which Protestants as well as Catholics exempt from censure or criticism. It is not the career of the Trappist which Brother Ignatius thinks of, but of a Benedictine who studies, and teaches, and .guides, and cures, and who if he rose to his ideal would be Christ in all but charity and cleanliness. The Southern mind, however, as Gautama the Buddhist teacher knew ages before Benedict, is strangely tempted by the idea of a life of contemplation, of passive but devoted piety in which the devotee abandons all other objects in order to raise his own nature nearer to that of his Creator, to purify himself of that tendency to evil which Catholicism and Buddhism alike hold to be inherent in all material things. The utter selfishness of this theory, a 4elffshness just as great as if the object of seclusion were bodily health instead of spiritual good, never affected the Buddhist, to whom as to other Asiatics the duty of benevolence seemed an abstract notion, and the Catholic Church by pleading its supernatural authority has contrived to override the direct contradiction of the idea contained in Christ's summary of the Law. The road therefore is open to the priests, but another step remains. It is necessary not only to show that the life of contemplation is good, but that the convent is the right place to lead it in, that the conventual life produces results greater than could be obtained by a life pervaded by the spirit of devotion, but passed at home and occupied with home duties. The view of the nun therefore put forward by priests is not that of a person who has adopted a good career with the ordinary risks of all careers, but of a pure and holy being who has superseded earthly affection by a strong love for Christ, whose life apart alike from duty and from temptation is as serene as the Church hopes will be the life of the next world, who is above all fears and passions and pettinesses, and who, if she does not live the life Christ lei on earth, does lead one nearly approaching to that which the angels are presumed in all Christian mythologies to enjoy in fieaven,—a passive life without work, or suffering, or exertion of the intellect save to praise the Deity, whose irradiating presence is the equivalent of happiness and the substitute for self denying exertion. It seems to Anglo-Saxons a terribly lazy life—their pet angel being Abdiel, who resisted tempta- tion, their patron saint SC George who removed a sanitary nuisance—but to the Southern mind, to the girl of France. or Italy, or Spain, the figure of the true nun, the bride of Christ, the being all white robes and love for God, seems indescribably glorious. The object of La Religieuse is simply to show that it is not glorious :at all, that a nun is not a hypocrite, or an evil being, or a slave to some confessor, but only an ordinary woman devoted to a very dull and useless career, vain or humble as she would have been in the world, given to ambition like any mistress of a salon, addicted in the absence of duties to intrigue for the benefit of the Church, and, from passing her life amidst a limited circle, exceptionally liable to fits of malig- nant jealousy. Mademoiselle de St. Trelody or Montmorency does not commit murder in a convent any more than at home, but she hates sister A who outshines her, and loves Father B who is kind to her, and fights sister C who won't obey quite readily enough, and courts Sister D who has wealth which might be useful, and traduces Sister E who voted against her in the election for Abbess, just as she would at home. She may also be and often is as good as she would be at home, only the rules of the convent are not favourable to any form of goodness except the passive. Obedience is a great virtue, but obeying a sister tries the human temper rather more than obeying a husband ; vanity is an evil, but ugly dress worries even conventual acquiescence ; love is a temptation, but then one can be as jealous for the liking of the saintly and honest Director as:for that of the last new Guardsman. The life in fact leaves human nature very much where it was, with its objects modified but its foibles and weaknesses just as much in the way of perfection as ever. Is it worth while to give up for this all the associations of life, the duties one owes to parents, the hope of seeing children around one's knees, the struggle and the excitement, the victories and the defeats which make the earth • endurable, and bury oneself alive by vows from which there is no release? For real though passive holiness, for a close though self- absorbed communion with spiritual things, for release, if only by flight, from the causes of remorse, and for a quiet if useless seclu- sion the Southern mind will give up all. But not to obtain any of these things, to find that instead of quitting the great world for Heaven we have only quitted it for a little one, to be anxious still and for slighter sins, to be jealous still and of trivial rivalries, to be ambitious still and of the pettiest successes, this is not -is prospect which can tempt even the girl who has just been jilted, and therefore retires from a " hateful " world, far less the woman who really seeks to realize upon earth the life she has been taught to believe universal in Heaven. It is this which the author of La Religieuse sets with a cruel realism before his readers, and for this, for stripping away the romance which surrounds the career in all Continental Catholic minds, that he has been denounced as the enemy of the Christianity which he openly inculcates, and in which every page of his work shows that he really believes. The priests, we suspect, are in the right. If their influence in this direc- tion is ever destroyed it will not be by wild libels like "Maria Monk," but by the autobiography honestly told of a good and clearsighted nun.
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