The Desperate Man by Léon Bloy

Author:Léon Bloy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781645250319
Publisher: Snuggly Books
Published: 2021-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

We realized one day, three hundred years ago, that the Bloody Cross had too long obscured the earth. The unpacking of lust that we wanted to call the Renaissance had just started, a few Germanic or Cisalpine pawns having disclosed that it was no longer necessary to suffer. The thousand years of resigned ecstasy of the Middle Ages receded before the croup of Galatea.

The 16th century was a historical equinox, when the ideal scorned by the showers of sensualism finally fell, roots in the air. Spiritual Christianity, scuttled in its brain, bled in the trunk of the carotids, emptied of its most intimate substance, did not die, alas! He grew foolish and deliquescent in his breakthrough glory.

It was a terrible convulsion for a hundred years, accompanied by an infinitely unnecessary and lamentable recall of souls. Our circulating sphere seemed to roll through the other planets like a watering can of blood. But the martyrdom itself having lost its virtue, the old original mud was triumphantly reinstated, all the stable doors were torn off their hinges and the universal modern pigsty began its brénant exodus.

Christianity, which had known neither to conquer nor to die, then did like all the conquered. He received the law and paid the tax. To survive, he made himself pleasant, oily and warm. Silently, it slipped through the keyhole, infiltrated the woodwork, obtained to be used as a creamy essence to give play to institutions and thus became a subordinate condiment, which any political cook could use or reject at his convenience.. We had the spectacle, unexpected and delicious, of a Christianity converted to pagan idolatry, a respectful slave of the Poor's conculators, and a smiling acolyte of the phallophores.

Miraculously watered down, the ancient asceticism assimilated all the sugars and all the ointments to be forgiven for not being precisely the pleasure, and became, in a religion of tolerance, that plausible thing that one could call the catinism of piety. Saint Francis de Sales appeared in those days, just at the right time, to smear everything. From head to toe, the Church was glued with its honey, flavored with its seraphic ointments. The Society of Jesus, exhausted by its three or four first great men and already giving only an emetic resurrection of its apostolic beginnings, welcomed with joy this theological perfumery, where the glory of God, definitively, was gathered. The spiritual bouquets of the Prince of Geneva were offered by caressing priestly hands to the explorers of Tendre, who immediately expanded their geography to bring in such a charming Catholicism… And the heroic Middle Ages were buried at ten thousand feet!…

We are forced to admit that Christian spiritualism is completely over now, since, for three centuries, nothing has been able to restore a semblance of greenness to the charred stump of old beliefs. Some sentimental formulas still give the illusion of life, but we are actually dead, really dead. Jansenism, that infamous backgrass of Calvinist emunctory, did it not end up licking itself, with a

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