7. OF THE SALUTARY POWER OF HIS PREACHING
Thereafter the Abbot found that Messire de Puysange had indeed spoken the truth. Abbot Odo was denied the consolations of religion. No more visions came to him from out of Paradise. He was counselled and instructed by no more saints.
He understood that all these had been vicarious illusions provided by the loving arts of dark and withered Gui de Puysange. The Abbot comprehended that he was not immortal; that there was no Heaven and no Hell; that there would be no auditing of human accounts; and that he travelled, instead, toward annihilation. His biliousness left him, his digestion became perfect, now that he perceived men perish as the beasts perish, and now that he knew every form of religion was a cordial which sustained people through the tedium and discomfort of their stay upon earth.
For he could well perceive the value of human faith now that he had lost it. He spoke everywhere of God’s love for all men and of how gloriously Heaven was to be won through repentance and a putting away of disreputable habits. He inflicted few tortures nowadays, because in Abbot Odo had awakened the fervor of the elect artist who respects the medium of his craft. . . . Dear Gui had been an artist of sorts, the Abbot would reflect, in the great-hearted poor fellow’s limited field, with his peculiarly small audience of one. Yes, Gui de Puysange had created wholly creditable saints, who were finished to the last detail. . . . But the art of a self-respecting clergyman was more general and more noble in its scope, for it appealed to the dull-witted and the unhappy everywhere.
With gaping hundreds to attend him, Abbot Odo swayed the minds of his congregation at will, and he awakened joy and faith, not with the tricks of black magic, not any longer with heated irons and tweezers, but with very lovely words. Since he knew there was no Hell, he hardly ever threatened people with Hell’s pains: instead, he turned from realism to romance, and he improvised brilliantly as to the unfathomable love and the eternal bliss of Heaven, which was the heritage of mankind and awaited every communicant just beyond the tomb. His talking aroused his auditors to the best and purest emotions.
His fame spread. He was summoned to court. The King was greatly moved by the Abbot’s fine sermons, and swore by the belly of St. Gris that this holy man had fire in his belly. The ladies of the court did not approve of this metaphor, but they all found the Abbot of St. Hoprig adorable.
“Especially,” said one of them, “when one’s husband, alas—!”
“But, darling,” cried her friend, “do you mean that you also—?”
“I mean only that if only other men—”
“Yet only a clergyman, my pet, can give you absolution—”
“—Like a digestant tablet—”
“Ah, but one dines so heartily with the dear Abbot—”
Thus did these ladies chatter under their little ermine bonnets and their three-cornered lattice caps and their glittering cauls of silver net wire. So the Abbot of St. Hoprig was a vast social success; he had the entree everywhere; and he made converts right and left.
The Queen herself confessed to him: and after he had gone thoroughly into the personal affairs of this daughter of the Medici and had lovingly absolved her, she saw to it forthwith that this wonderful man was appointed Bishop of Valneres.
8. OF THE KINDLY IMPULSES OF HIS PIETY
In the episcopal palace the blessed Odo lived at his ease very happily. He did not miss the company of his saints now that so many of the parish needed to be consoled and comforted by a bishop who, after all, was aging; and the loss of his own faith was a great aid to him now that it was his métier to awaken faith in so many others. It was a loss which made for unfailing tact without dogmatism. It was a loss which had ridded him forever of those doubts which sometimes trouble the clergy.
For Odo of Valneres lived as an artist. His contentment was here, rather than in any perhaps unattainable places or in any contingently oncoming times. And he made sure of it by creating contentment in every person about him.
Throughout all Naimousin and Piemontais he cherished his little flock as the father cherishes his children, and the artist his audience. He saw to their bodily comforts, he saw above all to their faith. For the plight of the lower orders of mankind, he knew, demanded just this faith which was, for a being of a peasant’s or a shopkeeper’s far from admirable nature, at once a narcotic and a beneficial restraint.
An altruist would dissuade therefore the evilly inclined from all incivic vices like murder and rape and theft and arson which, even when practised upon an international scale and under the direct patronage of the Church, tended always to upset the comfort of society. An altruist would endeavor, to the untrammeled extent of his imaginative gifts, to sustain the cowardly and the feeble-minded, and the aged and the ill and the poverty-stricken, and all other persons who were unbearably afflicted by the normal workings of the laws of life and of human polity. An altruist would hearten all these luckless beings with the appropriate kind of romances about an oncoming heritage which made the dear poor wretches’ present transitory discomforts—from any really considerate point of view—quite unimportant.
It was therefore, to the now aging Bishop, whensoever he put on his mitre and the white linen robe of his office, a privilege and a delight to preach of faith and hope and charity to his little flock. These frightened, foolish, and yet rather lovable men and women did need so dreadfully, in their cheerless and thwarted living, the ever-present threat and the ever-present promise of true religious faith to keep them sane or, for that matter, to keep them at all endurable associates. So the Bishop served his art lovingly; he delighted in the exercise of his art: for he saw that religious faith was highly necessary to the well-being of the lower classes, and was serviceable and comforting to the gentry also as one got on in life.
He had few regrets. He regretted Ettarre, the lost witch-woman, because no Christian whom he had ever known, howsoever charitable and zealous, had approached the charm of that little darling when she was pretending to be a saint come out of Paradise. He regretted that it no longer amused him to run abroad in his wolf’s skin. Once in a while, of course, that was necessary as a professional duty—after loving kindness and the customary dole of soup and blankets had failed,—in order to dispose of some open case of irreligion and ill-living which afforded a really dangerous example to the diocese: but such sinners were, almost always, so anaemic and stringy that the Bishop had come honestly to dislike this branch of his church-work. In fine, he conceded, willingly enough, that Odo of Valneres was approaching the end of his middle age; and that his main delights must be henceforward in his art.
And sometimes he regretted, too, that his art could not extend to yet other mythologies. He admired the clearer character drawing of the gods whom he found in these other mythologies. There were fine themes for a creative artist in the exalted doings of Zeus, the Cloud-collecting, the Thunder-hurler, who was called also Muscarius, because he drove away flies: and in the zoological amours of Zeus you would have had an opportunity for much rich, bold, romantic coloring, with the flesh tints handsomely rendered.
Then the heroic conception of Ragnarok, that final and most great of all battles between good and evil—wherein the Norse gods, and the entire Scandinavian church militant along with them, were to perish intrepidly for the right’s sake,—was a theme which, in view of its sublime possibilities in the pulpit of a sincere artist, thrilled the reflective Bishop like a trumpet music.