Saint Margaret of Cortona by François Mauriac

Author:François Mauriac [Mauriac, Francois]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Philosophical Library
Published: 2013-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXII

Holiness, Source of All Joy

AND YET, THIS OPPOSITION BETWEEN THE CROSS and the “simple and normal” life exists only in our lust; it does not appear in reality. The cross opposes the voluptuous, triumphant life, as we dream it to be, as we think we taste it at certain times, but the cross is not opposed to life as it is. The saints do not introduce the cross to their destiny; they find it there all set up. Instead of diverting themselves from it, in the Pascalian sense, by pleasures and games, or, fleeing it through the thousand loopholes which men have discovered (from tobacco and alcohol to drugs and all the disguised forms of suicide) they question it, they snatch its secret of love and joy. We are free to believe that they give in to a comforting illusion, but not that they add a worse horror to the human condition than it already allows, for the deniers of the cross, the worshippers of pleasure are not less crucified than the saints.

The latter have never believed that sadness was a good in itself. They know that it is the evil attached to the original sin. Neither do they deny that human life, especially in its beginnings, knows serene hours nor that happy hours are given to the most unhappy. They themselves have often tasted its delights.

“Farewell to the gaiety of my youth, to careless folly, to the free and joyous life at the foot of Vesuvius! Farewell to gay meals, to evening chats, to serenades beneath the gilded balconies! Farewell to Naples and its women, to masquerades by torchlight, to long suppers in the forest shadows. Farewell to love and friendship.”

The young Francis, prince of the youth of Assisi would not have been at all shocked by this farewell to the sweetness of living that the romantic Octave gives vent to in Marianne’s Whims. For Francis of Assisi, and our Margaret too, knew wild masqerades, passions of the heart, the tenderness of an enchanted heart. Perhaps they even attached more importance to these earthly joys than we ourselves do because they were destined for sainthood. Everything that can be said about the days that follow drunkenness, about the nothingness of pleasure, about death and sickness which prowl about, about the intermittent character of human love, its fierceness, its betrayals, its impurities, nothing in all that has diverted them from being mindful of the meaning of that hunger and thirst for happiness, for happiness through the love which they reveal in us. They know that there are infinite moments in the most wretched attachments. Human art in its finest flower gives us this same lesson. Mozart reveals to those who love him the mystery of a ravishing happiness, quite near and, at the same time, inaccessible. The Saints who began by sinning were mistaken in the object of their desire. They do not deny this desire of their heart, but in order to crush it they have learned to substitute being for nothingness.

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