The Devils of Loudun (38 page)

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Authors: Aldous Huxley

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“When, under the impulsion of one of these two souls, I try to make the sign of the cross on my mouth, the other soul turns my hand aside, or takes the finger between the teeth and savagely bites it. I find that mental prayer is never easier or more tranquil than in the midst of these agitations, while the body is rolling on the ground and the ministers of the Church are speaking to me as though to a devil, loading me with maledictions. I cannot describe to you the joy I feel in thus finding myself turned into a devil, not by rebellion against God, but by a calamity which plainly symbolizes the state to which sin has reduced me. . . .
“When the other demoniacs see me in this state, it is a joy to see how they exult, to hear how the devils make sport of me! ‘Physician, heal thyself! Now’s the time to get up in the pulpit! A pretty sight to see
that
thing preaching!’ . . . What a favour this is—to know by experience the state from which Jesus Christ has drawn me, to realize the greatness of His redemption, not by hearsay, but by the actual feeling of the state from which we have been redeemed! . . .
“This is where I now stand, this is how I am almost every day. I have become a subject of dispute. Is there true possession? Is it possible for ministers of the Church to fall into such troubles? Some say that all this is God’s chastisement upon me, a punishment for some illusion; others say something else. As for me, I hold my peace and have no wish to change my fate, being firmly convinced that nothing is better than to be reduced to the utmost extremity. . . .”
(In his later writings Surin developed this theme more fully. There are, he insisted, many cases in which God makes use of possession as a part of the purgative process which must precede illumination. “It is one of God’s more ordinary leadings in the ways of grace to permit the devil to possess or obsess souls which He wishes to raise to a high degree of holiness.” Devils cannot possess the will, and cannot force their victims into sin. Diabolic inspirations of blasphemy, impurity and hatred of God leave the soul unstained. Indeed, they actually do good, inasmuch as they cause the soul to feel as much humiliation as it would do if such horrors were committed voluntarily. These humiliations and the agonies and apprehensions with which the demons fill the mind are “the crucible which burns away, down to the quick of the heart, down to the very marrow of the bones, all self-love.” And meanwhile, God Himself is at work on the suffering soul, and His operations are “so strong, so insinuating and ravishing, that one can say of this soul that it is one of the loveliest works of His mercy.”)
Surin concluded his letter to Father d’Attichy with a plea for secrecy and discretion. “Except for my confessor and my superiors, you are the only person to whom I have confided these things.” The confidence was sadly misplaced. Father d’Attichy showed the letter to all and sundry. Numerous copies of it were made and circulated, and within a few months it had got into print, as a broadsheet. Along with the condemned murderers and the six-legged calves, Surin took his place as a news item for the amusement of the groundlings.
From now on, Leviathan and Isacaaron were never far away. But between their assaults on his body, and actually during their obsession of his soul, Surin was able to proceed with his mission—the sanctification of Sœur Jeanne. When she ran away he followed. Cornered, she turned and raged at him. He paid no attention. Kneeling at her feet, he prayed for her; sitting beside her, he whispered the spiritual doctrine of Father Lallemant into her unwilling ears. “Interior perfection, docility to the Holy Spirit, purification of the heart, conversion of the will to God. . . .” Her devils writhed and gibbered; but he went on—went on even though, within his own mind, he could hear the sneering of Leviathan, the obscene promptings of Isacaaron, the demon of impurity.
Surin had more than the devils to contend with. Even in her hours of sanity—above all, perhaps, in her hours of sanity—the Prioress still disliked him. She disliked him because she feared him, because she was afraid of being exposed by his perspicacity as what, in her lucid intervals, she knew herself to be—half actress, half unrepentant sinner, wholly hysterical. He begged her to be frank with him. The answer was either a howling of fiends, or a declaration by the nun that there was nothing to confide.
The relations between the energumen and her exorcist were complicated by the fact that, during Easter week, Sœur Jeanne was suddenly overcome by “very evil desires and a sentiment of most lawless affection” for the man she so much feared and detested. She could not bring herself to confess her secret, and it was Surin himself who, after three hours of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, first referred to these “infamous temptations.” “If anyone,” writes Sœur Jeanne, “was ever dumbfounded, it was I on this occasion.” The hour was late, and he left her to ruminate her astonishment. In the end, she decided, yet once more, to change not merely her behaviour towards Surin, but her whole way of life. It was a resolution of the surface will. Down below, in the subconscious, the demons had other views. She tried to read; her mind became a blank. She tried to think of God, to hold her soul in His presence; at once she developed a splitting headache, together with “strange obfuscations and weaknesses.” For all these symptoms Surin had one sovereign remedy: mental prayer. She agreed to try it. The devils redoubled their fury. At the first mention of interior perfection, they threw her body into convulsions. Surin made her lie on a table and bound her securely with ropes, so that she could not move. Then he kneeled beside her and, whispering in her ear, put into words a model meditation. “I took as my subject the conversion of the heart to God and its desire to consecrate itself completely to Him. I made three separate points, which I explained in an affective manner, making all the acts on behalf of the Mother.” Day after day this ceremony was repeated. Tied down, as though she were to undergo a surgical operation, the Prioress was at God’s mercy. She struggled, she shouted; but through all the noise she could still hear the voice of her implacable well-wisher. Sometimes Leviathan would turn his attention to the exorcist, and suddenly Father Surin would find himself unable to speak. From the Prioress came whoops of fiendish laughter. Then the current was turned on again; the prayers, the whispered teaching continued from the point where they had been interrupted.
When the devils became too violent, Surin would reach for a silver box containing a consecrated wafer and apply it to the Prioress’s heart or forehead. After the first agonized convulsion, “she was moved to great devotion, all the more so as I whispered in her ear all that it pleased God to inspire me with. She became very attentive to what I said, and was plunged in a profound recollectedness. The effect upon her heart was so great . . . that the tears streamed from her eyes.”
It was a conversion—but a conversion in the context of hysteria, a conversion on the stage of an imaginary theatre. Eight years before, as a young nun trying to curry favour with her Superior, Sœur Jeanne had briefly flaunted the ambition to become a second St. Teresa. Except for the old lady, nobody had been impressed. Then she was appointed Prioress, she had the run of the parlour; mysticism began to seem less interesting. After that, almost suddenly, had come her obsession with the erotic dream to which she gave the name of Grandier. Her neurosis deepened. Canon Mignon talked of devils, practised exorcisms, lent her his own copy of Michaelis’s book on the Gauffridy case. She read it and forthwith saw herself as the queen of the demoniacs. Her ambition at this time was to outdo them all in everything—in blasphemy, in grunting, in filthy language, in acrobatics. She knew, of course, that “all the disorders of her soul were founded on her own character” and that “she ought to blame herself for these disorders, without invoking extraneous causes.” Under the influence of Michaelis and Mignon, these native defects had been crystallized into seven devils. And now the devils had their own autonomous life and were her masters. To get rid of them, she would have to get rid of her bad habits and her ugly tendencies. And to do that, as her new director kept telling her, she would have to pray, to expose herself to the divine light. Surin’s ardour was infectious; she was touched by the man’s sincerity, was aware, behind the symptoms of his obsession, that he knew, by profound experience, what he was talking about. After listening to him, she longed to go to God; but she longed to go in the most spectacular way possible, before a large and admiring audience. She had been the queen of the demoniacs; now she desired to be a saint—or, rather, she desired to be known as a saint, to be canonized here and now, to work miracles, to be invoked in prayer. . . .
She threw herself into the new rôle with all her usual energy. From thirty minutes a day, the quota of mental prayer was raised to three or four hours, and to make herself fit for illumination she undertook a course of the harshest physical austerities. She exchanged her feather bed for uncushioned boards; she made decoctions of wormwood to be poured, in lieu of sauce, over her food; she wore a hair shirt and a belt spiked with nails; she beat herself with a whip at least three times a day, and sometimes, so she assures us, for as much as seven hours in a single twenty-four-hour period. Surin, who was a great believer in the discipline, encouraged her to persevere. He had noticed that devils who merely laughed at the rites of the Church were often put to flight in a few minutes by a good whipping. And the whip was as good for natural melancholy as for supernatural possession. St. Teresa had made the same discovery. “I say it again (for I have seen and have had much to do with many persons troubled with this disease of melancholy) that there is no other remedy, but to conquer them by every means in our power. . . . If words be not enough, have recourse to penances, and let them be heavy, if light penances will not do. It seems unjust,” the saint adds, “to punish the sick sister, who cannot help herself, as though she were well.” But, first of all, let it be remembered that these neurotics do enormous harm to the souls of others. Moreover, “I really believe that the mischief comes very often from a spirit undisciplined, wanting in humility and badly trained. . . . Under the pretence of this temper (of melancholy) Satan seeks to gain many souls. It is more common in our day than it used to be; the reason is that all self-will and licence are now called melancholy.” Among persons who took for granted the absolute freedom of the will and the total depravity of nature, this short way with neurotics was apparently very effective. Would it work today? In some cases, perhaps. For the rest, ‘talking it out’ is likely, in the present intellectual climate, to have better results than self-inflicted shock treatment.
What with the exorcisms and the coming and going of the tourists, the convent chapel was becoming too noisy for the whispered colloquies between Sœur Jeanne and her director. In the early summer of 1635 they began to meet more privately in an attic under the tiles. A makeshift grille was set up. Through the bars Surin gave his instructions or expounded mystical theology. And through the bars, the Prioress told him of her temptations, her combats with the demons, her experiences (already marvellous) in the course of mental prayer. Then in silence they would meditate together, and the attic became, in Surin’s words, “a house of angels and a paradise of delights,” in which both were favoured with extraordinary graces. One day, while meditating on the contempt to which Jesus had been exposed during His Passion, Sœur Jeanne went into an ecstasy. When it was over, she reported, through the grating, “that she had come so near to God that she had received, as it were, a kiss from His mouth.”
And meanwhile what did the other exorcists think about all this? What were the opinions of the good folk of Loudun? Surin tells us that he “heard people murmuring: What can this Jesuit be doing every day with a possessed nun? I answered inwardly: You do not know the importance of the affair I am engaged on. I seemed to see heaven and hell all on fire for this soul, the one in love, the other in fury, each of them straining to carry her off.” But what he saw was not seen by anyone else. All that the others knew was that, instead of subjecting his penitent to the full rigour of the exorcisms, Surin was spending hours in private conversation, trying to teach her (in spite of her devils) to lead the life of Christian perfection. To his colleagues, the attempt seemed merely foolish, all the more so as Surin was himself obsessed and in frequent need of exorcism on his own account. (In May, when Gaston d’Orléans, the King’s brother, came to see the devils, he had been publicly possessed by Isacaaron, who passed out of Sœur Jeanne’s body into Surin’s. While the demoniac sat calm, sane and ironically smiling, her exorcist rolled on the floor. The Prince, of course, was delighted; but for Jean-Joseph it had been another in the long series of humiliations to which an inscrutable Providence was subjecting him.) Nobody questioned the purity of Surin’s intentions or actions; but all regarded his conduct as indiscreet, and all deplored the gossip to which, inevitably, it gave rise. By the end of the summer the Provincial was being advised to recall him to Bordeaux.
Meanwhile the Prioress had had her full share of trials. In her new part, as the great contemplative saint, she was giving a performance which ought to have brought the house down. Instead of that, “Our Lord permitted that I should have much to suffer in my conversations with my sisters, through the workings of the devils, who tormented them; for most of them conceived a great aversion for me, on account of the change in my behaviour and way of life, which they recognized in me. The demons persuaded them that it was the devil who had wrought this change, so that I might be in a position to pass judgment on their character and behaviour. Whenever I was with them, the demons induced some of them to jeer at me and make fun of all I said and did, a thing which was most painful to me.” During their exorcisms, the nuns used to refer to their Superior as
le diable dévot
, the devout devil. Their opinion was shared by the exorcists. Except for Surin, all the attendant fathers were sceptical. It was in vain that Sœur Jeanne assured them that the great St. Joseph had obtained for her the gift of mental prayer, in vain that she modestly claimed to have been “raised by the Divine Majesty to the degree of contemplation, by means of which I received great illuminations, and Our Lord communicated Himself to my soul in a special and private manner.” Instead of prostrating themselves before this walking fount of divine wisdom, the exorcists merely told her that this was the kind of illusion to which the possessed were peculiarly subject. Confronted by so much hardness of heart, the Prioress could only retreat, either into madness, or into the attic, with her dear, good, credulous Father Surin.

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