Lallemant’s hostility to nature was directed outwards as well as inwards. For him, the fallen world was full of snares and riddled with pitfalls. To take pleasure in creatures, to love their beauty, to inquire overmuch into the mysteries of mind and life and matter—these, to him, were dangerous distractions from the proper study of mankind, which is not man, not nature, but God and the way to a knowledge of God. For a Jesuit the problem of achieving Christian perfection was peculiarly difficult. The Society was not a contemplative order, whose members lived in seclusion and devoted their lives only to prayer. It was an active order, an order of apostles, dedicated to the saving of souls and pledged to fight the battles of the Church in the world. Lallemant’s conception of the ideal Jesuit is summed up in the notes in which Surin recorded his master’s teaching. The essence, the whole point of the Society, consists in this: that it “joins together things which in appearance are contrary, such as learning and humility, youth and chastity, diversity of nations and a perfect charity…. In our life we must mingle a deep love of heavenly things with scientific studies and other natural occupations. Now, it is very easy to rush to one extreme or the other. One may have too great a passion for the sciences and neglect prayer and spiritual things. Or, if one aspires to become a spiritual man, one may neglect to cultivate, as one should, such natural talents as doctrinal knowledge, eloquence and prudence.” The excellence of the Jesuit spirit consists in this, “that it honours and imitates the manner in which the divine was united with all that was human in Jesus Christ, with the faculties of his soul, with the members of his body, with his blood, and it deified all…. But this alliance is difficult. That is why those among us who do not realize the perfection of our spirit, tend to cling to natural and human advantages, being destitute of the supernatural and the divine.” The Jesuit who fails to live up to the spirit of the Society turns into the Jesuit of popular imagination, and not infrequently of historical fact—worldly, ambitious, intriguing. “The man who fails to apply himself wholeheartedly to the inner life falls inevitably into these defects; for the poverty-stricken and starving soul must needs cling to something in the hope of satisfying its hunger.”[13]
For Lallemant, the life of perfection is a life simultaneously active and contemplative, a life lived at the same time in the infinite and the finite, in time and in eternity. This ideal is the highest which a rational being can conceive—the highest and at the same time the most realistic, the most conformable to the given facts of human and divine nature. But when they discussed the practical problems involved in the realization of this ideal, Lallemant and his disciples displayed a narrow and self-stultifying rigorism. The ‘nature’ which is to be united with the divine is not nature in its totality, but a strictly limited segment of human nature—a talent for study or for preaching, for business or for organization. Non-human nature finds no place in Surin’s summary and is only passingly referred to in the longer account of Lallemant’s teaching given by Rigoleuc. And yet Christ told His followers to consider the lilies—and to consider them, be it noted, in an almost Taoist spirit, not as emblems of something all too human, but as blessedly other, as autonomous creatures living according to the law of their own being and in union (perfect except for its unconsciousness) with the Order of Things. The author of Proverbs bids the sluggard consider the ways of the prudent ant. But Christ delights in the lilies precisely because they are not prudent, because they neither toil nor spin and yet are incomparably lovelier than the most gorgeous of Hebrew kings. Like Walt Whitman’s ‘Animals’
Christ’s lilies are worlds apart from the flowers with which St. François de Sales opens his chapter on the purification of the soul. These flowers, he tells Philothea, are the good desires of the heart. The Introduction abounds in references to nature—but to nature as seen through the eyes of Pliny and the authors of the Bestiaries, to nature as emblematic of man, nature as consistently the schoolmarm and the moralist. But the lilies of the field enjoy a glory which has this in common with the Order of the Garter—that “there’s no damned merit about it.” That, precisely, is their point; that is why, for us human beings, they are so refreshing and, on a level much deeper than that of morality, so profoundly instructive. “The Great Way,” says the Third Patriarch of Zen,
As always in real life, we are in the midst of paradoxes and antinomies—bound to choose the good rather than the evil, but bound at the same time, if we wish to realize our union with the divine Ground of all being, to choose without craving and aversion, without imposing upon the universe our own notions of utility or morality.
In so far as they ignore non-human nature, or treat it as merely symbolic of human nature, as merely instrumental and subordinate to man, the teachings of Lallemant and Surin are characteristic of their time and country. French literature of the seventeenth century is astonishingly poor in expressions of any but a strictly utilitarian or symbolic interest in birds, flowers, animals, landscape. In the whole of Tartufe, for example, there is only one reference to non-human nature—a single line, and that most marvellously unpoetical.
13
“The Jesuits have tried to combine God and the world, and have gained only the contempt of both.” (Pascal.)