The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, Post 1

Back in May, the Catholic Thought Book Club read The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis This and subsequent posts are my end of the conversation and constitute my thoughts.  The book is divided into four parts each called a “Book.”  I did not make any comments on the last book. 

This is my second reading of this famous work.  Back in April of 2014 I posted on my first read.

As a short introduction, The Imitation of Christ is a devotional book composed in the early 15^th century by a group of German/Dutch Augustinian monks, of which Thomas à Kempis is one.  The book is usually attributed to à Kempis, but more than one monk had a hand in the writing.  It was written prior to the Protestant Reformation and the book is the most widely read Christian devotional other than the Bible.

I'm using the Dover Thrift Edition which I must have bought a number of years ago for a dollar or two. The translators are Croft and Bolton.  You can find this edition online, here 

From Book 1, "Thoughts Helpful in the Life of the Soul":

Comment 1:

Good comments Nikita. You conveyed well. I echo your concerns. I'm going to wait a little longer before I give some less favorable comments. I don't think you're going to be alone in the criticism.

But I agree, there are wonderful nuggets everywhere in the book.

One of the fundamental questions in reading the book, and you touched on it, is who is the author writing for? We in the general population read it today, and the general population derives all sorts of spiritual wisdom from it. But it does strike me the author's intent was toward a very specific readership. For instance, take the second sentence in Book 1, Chapter 8:

"Do not keep company with young people and strangers."

What an odd recommendation. How can one actually observe that, or is it even wise to do it? Obviously this could not be recommended for the general secular population. It certainly could not be intended for priests either. It certainly can't be intended for people who are to evangelize. I share your Dominican ethos. I think this is a problematic book for we who want to engage the world.

Comment 2:

Yes, Augustinian monks, which I don't know that much about. I'm trying to research it as I take breaks from work...lol. Interestingly, Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk.

Comment 3:

Chapter 16, “Bearing the Faults of Others” is absolutely perfect and one that hits home for me. It’s just four paragraphs long. First, he a person bearing faults may be there to test your patience. Correct them and then pray for them. Second, if that person does not amend, one has to bear it patiently. God will eventually turn that problem (a Kempis calls it an evil, but I think that might be too harsh) into a good. Then he advises to bear patiently the faults of others because you have faults too that others must endure. It reminds me of the passage in Matthew where Christ says “"Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” (Matt 7:3).

Then in the third paragraph he comes to the heart of the problem.

“If you cannot make yourself what you would wish to be, how can you bend others to your will? We want them to be perfect, yet we do not correct our own faults. We wish them to be severely corrected, yet we will not correct ourselves.”

The question is of will, conforming your will to God’s and the impossibility of trying to conform another person’s will.

Then in the final paragraph a Kempis draws a more philosophical conclusion:

“If all were perfect, what should we have to suffer from others for God's sake? But God has so ordained, that we may learn to bear with one another's burdens, for there is no man without fault, no man without burden, no man sufficient to himself nor wise enough. Hence we must support one another, console one another, mutually help, counsel, and advise, for the measure of every man's virtue is best revealed in time of adversity -- adversity that does not weaken a man but rather shows what he is.”

We are here on earth to interact and love one another. These irritations are actually here for a divine purpose.

Comment 4:

The Eighteenth Chapter, “The Example Set Us By The Holy Fathers” is so beautifully written I want to quote the first three paragraphs, which almost the entire chapter.

Consider the lively examples set us by the saints, who possessed the light of true perfection and religion, and you will see how little, how nearly nothing, we do. What, alas, is our life, compared with theirs? The saints and friends of Christ served the Lord in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness, in work and fatigue, in vigils and fasts, in prayers and holy meditations, in persecutions and many afflictions. How many and severe were the trials they suffered -- the Apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins, and all the rest who willed to follow in the footsteps of Christ! They hated their lives on earth that they might have life in eternity.

How strict and detached were the lives the holy hermits led in the desert! What long and grave temptations they suffered! How often were they beset by the enemy! What frequent and ardent prayers they offered to God! What rigorous fasts they observed! How great their zeal and their love for spiritual perfection! How brave the fight they waged to master their evil habits! What pure and straightforward purpose they showed toward God! By day they labored and by night they spent themselves in long prayers. Even at work they did not cease from mental prayer. They used all their time profitably; every hour seemed too short for serving God, and in the great sweetness of contemplation, they forgot even their bodily needs.

They renounced all riches, dignities, honors, friends, and associates. They desired nothing of the world. They scarcely allowed themselves the necessities of life, and the service of the body, even when necessary, was irksome to them. They were poor in earthly things but rich in grace and virtue. Outwardly destitute, inwardly they were full of grace and divine consolation. Strangers to the world, they were close and intimate friends of God. To themselves they seemed as nothing, and they were despised by the world, but in the eyes of God they were precious and beloved. They lived in true humility and simple obedience; they walked in charity and patience, making progress daily on the pathway of spiritual life and obtaining great favor with God.

One of the strengths of the Kempis’ work is the beautiful prose.  Look at how rhythmic is that first paragraph.  “The saints and friends of Christ served the Lord in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness, in work and fatigue, in vigils and fasts, in prayers and holy meditations, in persecutions and many afflictions.”  Listing always makes for wonderful prose, but listing in doublets creates a wonderful see saw rhythm: saints and friends, hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness, and so on.  And he continues it on in the following paragraphs: strict and detached, long and grave, pure and straightforward, precious and beloved, humility and simple, charity and patience.  It really creates a unified prose.

As to the content of theme of this chapter, it provides a connection to earliest followers of Christ and those that followed his example best.  We call them saints but really they are imitators of Christ.  But à Kempis selects the most ascetic elements of saintliness to idealize.  The value he highlights is “renouncing” things of the body or perhaps better stated, things that do not gratify the body.  He even mentions the desert fathers by name as the models to emulate, those that may have been the most ascetic of saints.

But I do think one sentence is telling of à Kempis’s inclinations, and I have to say while the advice throughout is sound, this one sentence takes thigs too far.  It’s the last sentence of that first paragraph: “They hated their lives on earth that they might have life in eternity.” 

Is that really what we’re supposed to do, hate our lives on earth?  I just got finished reading Dante and he glorifies the body.  Certainly not glorifying it at the expense of sin, but in concert with goodness.  Dante makes the point in heaven we will eventually be rejoined with our bodies, and that is the ultimate glorification.  Our bodies are good things in themselves.  Yes, we are supposed to tame our urges, but be repulsed by our physical nature.  I don’t think we’re supposed to “hate” our lives on earth.  If this asceticism is adhered to in despising our lives, then we are acting in opposition to the Creator who created us in love. 

Finally I’m reminded of a wonderful quote by St. Catherine of Siena, who was known to perform such extreme mortifications herself.  Her quote is, “Every step on the way to heaven is heaven.”  For Catherine, there is joy in her asceticism.  I never sense that joy in à Kempis.

Comment 5:

I think to answer some of the questions brought up, we should look at the historical context the work was written.  The actual dates The Imitation of Christ was composed are from 1418-1427.  This is the late middle ages and already a number of social pressures are causing the nature of society to change.  While the plague that came to be called The Black Death had peaked about fifty years before in Europe, taking over a third to half of the population, it still resurged every so often.  More importantly it had left its cultural stamp in the European consciousness.  Some of the cultural changes were a more cynical outlook, a loss of faith, and those that maintained faith emphasized the importance of the spiritual over the physical.  Ideally in Christianity (and in Judaism, I suppose as well) there is a balance between the spiritual and the physical.  Remember we are to regain our bodies at the end of time, so there is nothing per se wrong with our physical beings.  But in the second century there grew the gnostic heresy which uncompromisingly maintained that the physical was evil and the spiritual was good.  While the gnostic heresy was eventually stamped out, this type of heresy returns to varying degrees, rebounding and retreating, many times in western culture.  Because of the horrid physical nature of the Black Plague’s disease, European culture at the end of the Middle Ages were in a period of rejection of the physical.  The Protestant Reformation, which would come in a few generations, I think picked up on this and carried it into the modern world. 

The other great historical event that had been going on the previous fifty years was the Great Schism in the Catholic Church.  From 1378 to 1417 the Church was in a severe crises where at first two men claimed the legal right to be Pope, and Europe divided herself over loyalty to one of these “Popes.”  And still at another point in that span of time a third man claimed as having the legitimate claim to the papacy.  Yes it reached a point of three factions were fighting over the head of the church.  You’ll have to read the disgraceful details because it gets complicated, but the effect on the general population was a loss faith in the church and further cynicism for institutions as a whole.  It really set the stage for the Protestant Reformation.  Add famine, wars, and political in-fighting, and you can see the times not conducive to harmony.  It’s in this context that Machiavelli writes his political works. 

The writers of The Imitation of Christ also had a reaction to the times around them, but instead of the Machiavellian reaction, à Kempis and company had a different sort of reaction.  Many of you may have heard of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option as a strategy for Christians to retreat from the toxic culture of the 21^st century.  The Imitation of Christ is the 15^th century version of the Benedictine Option.  It’s a retreat from the chaos of the late middle ages.  Our views of the Middle ages are skewed by the struggles to eke out a life in the period from the collapse of Rome to about 1000 and this chaos of the late middle ages I’ve described above.  But the High Middle Ages (1000 to 1300) were actually a period where European civilization flourished and prospered.  à Kempis and company were looking back to a better time, a time where monasteries provided stability.  

But monasteries had been declining by the end of the Middle Ages.  The Franciscans and Dominicans had been pulling the religious out into the culture, not separating itself away.  The writers of The Imitation of Christ may have looked at this as part of the problem.  And so, given the chaos and the cynicism of the times, they called for a monastic resurgence to withdraw from the culture.  But along with it, they brought with them the semi-gnostic emphasis of the spiritual over the physical.  They now saw the physical as part of the problem of its contemporary times.  Christ is just as much physical in the Gospels as spiritual.  Everyone reads the Gospels with their own biases.  I think à Kempis and company brought their spiritual biases as to what aspect of Christ’s life we are to imitate.

Now this is all my perception, and I’m no historical scholar, so take it with a grain of salt.  But if you think I’m off in any of this, speak up.  I’m open for discussion.  But surely the historical context of which these writers were generating these thoughts had to have some bearing on their world view.

2019 Reads, Update #3

Here is my third quarter update on my reads.  You’ve seen the first and second quarters already, but include them again to see my annual reads to date.

Completed First Quarter:

“The Background,” a short story by Saki (H. H. Munro).

“How to Mark a Book,” an essay by Mortimer J. Adler.

“In the Snow,” a short story by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anathea Bell.

“Poldi,” a short story by Carson McCullers.

Book of Jeremiah, a book of the Old Testament, NIV Translation.

"Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine," a short story by James Lee Burke.

Paradisio, 3rd part of the epic poem, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated and annotated by Robert and Jean Hollander.

Paradisio, 3rd part of the epic poem, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated and annotated by Anthony Esolen.

Completed Second Quarter:

The Life of Saint Dominic, a biography by Augusta Theodosia Drane.

The Fathers of the Church: An Introduction to the First Christian Teachers, 3^rd Edition, a non-fiction work by Mike Aquilina.

"Thunder and Roses" a short story by Theodore Sturgeon.

"A House on the Plains" a short story by E.L. Doctorow.

Book of Jeremiah, a book of the Old Testament, KJV Translation.

Book of Lamentations, a book of the Old Testament, KJV Translation.

Book of Lamentations, a book of the Old Testament, NIV Translation.

The First Letter of John, an epistle from the New Testament, NIV Translation.

The First Letter of John, an epistle from the New Testament, KJV Translation.

The Imitation of Christ, a non-fiction devotional by Thomas à Kempis.

The Second Letter of John, an epistle from the New Testament, NIV Translation.

The Second Letter of John, an epistle from the New Testament, KJV Translation.

The Third Letter of John, an epistle from the New Testament, NIV Translation.

The Third Letter of John, an epistle from the New Testament, KJV Translation.

Completed Third Quarter:

Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel by Willa Cather.

“Social Error,” a short story Damon Runyan.

In the Image of St. Dominic: Nine Portraits of Dominican Life, a collection of short biographies by Guy Bedouelle, O.P.

Mariette in Ecstasy, a novel by Ron Hansen.

“The Sin of Jesus,” a short story Isaac Babel. 

Completed in October:

Vol 5 of Les Misérables, “Jean Valjean” a novel by Victor Hugo.

“The Worst You Ever Feel,” a short story by Rebecca Makkai.

“The Light of the World,” a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

“The Salvation of the Hearer the Motive of the Preacher,” a discourse by St. John Henry Newman.

Currently Reading:

The Horse and His Boy, a novel from the The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis.

How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem, a confessional memoir by Rod Dreher.

Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen, an autobiography of Bishop Fulton Sheen.

Pascendi Dominici Gregis, a papal encyclical by Pope Pius X.

As you can see I’ve read three books and two short stories in the third quarter, which technically ended at the end of September.  I’ve included a list of those completed in October, which will eventually be put into “Completed in the Fourth Quarter.”  I included them here because they may have actually been started and partially read in the third quarter.  I know Vol 5 of Les Misérables was mostly read in the third quarter.

I’m hoping to finish the “currently reading” by the end of the year, and read the epistles from Peter, James, and Jude in both the NIV and KJV.  Perhaps I can squeeze in something else too. 

Mariette in Ecstasy, Post 6

This is my final post on Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy.  It will amount to some noted excerpts from the novel and my final review I posted on Goodreads.

The first post can be found here.  

The second post here. 

The third post here.  

The fourth post here.    

The fifth post here.  

Excerpts:

In a note to Père Marriott, 14 September 1906:

I have so much to tell you of Christ’s kindnesses and promises to me, but before reading further I plead to you: Do not believe anything I say.  Writing you gives me such consolation, but as I begin to put words on paper a great fear overwhelms me.  I have such fantastic and foreign things to report that it seems highly likely that I have dreamed them.  I shall say it frankly here that my head is a bit strange, for I have seen and heard impossible things, and whenever before has Christ appeared to souls as sinful as mine?  (p. 58)

When the pains started in September, I had no idea what they truly meant. And then I persuaded myself that all sisters espoused to Christ by their vows would have experienced his wounds. You can’t know how stupid and innocent I was! (p. 130)

Mariette walks a toweled broom along a hallway by Sister Virginie’s cell and then kneels below a horrid crucifix that she hates, Christ’s flesh-painted head like a block of woe, his black hair sleek as enamel and his black beard like ironweed, his round eyes bleary with pity and failure, and his frail form softly breasted and feminine and redly willowed in blood.  And yet she prays, as she always does, We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.  And just then, she’ll later tell Père Marriott, she is veiled in Christ’s blessing and tenderness, she feels it flow down from her head like holy oil and thrill her skin like terror.  Everything she has ever wished for seems to have been, in a hidden way, this.  Entire years of her life are instantly there as if she could touch any hour of them, but she now sees Jesus present in her history as she hadn’t before, kindness itself and everlasting loyal, good father and friend and husband to her, hurting just as she hurt at times, pleased by her tiniest pleasures, wholly loving her common humanness, and her essential uniqueness, so that the treacheries and sins and affronts of her past seem hideous to her and whatever good she’s done seems as nothing compared to the shame she feels for her fecklessness and indifference to him.  And she is kneeling there in misery and sorrow when she opens her hands like a book and sees an intrusion of blood on both palms, pennies of skin turning redder and slowly rising up in blisters that in two or three minutes tear with terrible pain of hammered nails, and then the hand flesh jerks with the fierce sudden weight of Christ’s body and she feels the hot burn in both wrists.  She feels her feet twisted behind her as both are transfixed with nails and the agony in both soles is as though she’s stood in the rage of orange, glowing embers.  She is breathless, she thirsts, she chills with loss of blood, and she hears Sister Dominique from a great distance, asking “Are you ill?” when she feels an iron point rammed hard against her heart and she faints.  (p. 157-158)

Mass of the Conversion of Saint Paul, Apostle, 1933.

She kneels just inside the church of Our Lady of Sorrows, behind the pews of holy old women half sitting with their rosaries, their heads hooded in black scarves.  High Mass has ended.  Externs are putting out the candles and vacuuming the carpets.  And then there is silence, and she opens to Saint Paul: “We are afflicted in every way possible, but we are not crushed; full of doubts, we never despair.  We are persecuted but never abandoned; we are struck down but never destroyed.  Continually we carry about in our bodies the dying of Jesus, so that in our bodies the life of Jesus may also be revealed.”  (p.178)

###

Review Posted at Goodreads

The complexity of this novel belies its simplicity.  We are inside a Benedictine class of monastery, and a new novice, Mariette, has been taken in, a young woman of seventeen, passionately devout but filled with all the other fervors a young woman would have.  In the course of a few months, Mariette starts having extreme religious experiences (or perhaps the continuation of such experiences from before she entered the priory), climaxing with physically formed stigmata followed by a coma-like ecstasy.  Is this real, faked, or a psychosomatic induced phenomena? 

For much of the novel the reader is in a state of ambiguity and suspense.    To understand the novel, the key I think is to understand why the novel is set in 1906 going into 1907.  By 1906 medicine has developed to an understanding of germs, vaccines, and x-rays.  By 1906, psychology was the rage; Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905.  By 1906 religious experiences were being located inside the mind; William James published The Varieties of Religious Experiences in 1902.  And perhaps more importantly, in 1907 Pope Pius X published, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, the encyclical refuting modernism.  You the reader are placed inside the world of the novel to discern a supernatural phenomenon with a modernist worldview.  But mind you, if you believe the author leaves it at the end for the reader to decide the nature of the phenomena as some reviewers have stated, you have misread the novel. Hansen is quite clear.

There are several major themes that stem out of the novel: the ambiguity of religious experience, the shift to a worldview based on empiricism, the unwillingness of people to change their habitual lives even if Christ has entered it.  But for me I think the most profound theme in the novel is the theme of achieving holiness through humiliation.  For Mariette, the stigmata and ecstasy are not the culmination of holiness but steps on the way to reaching a fuller holiness.  We see at the end her pride extinguished, and the death of the old self into a new creation. 

This is a novel of high craft, fine prose, even poetic prose, complex characters, especially Mariette the central character, profound ideas, and the beautiful creation of an original world.  In short Mariette in Ecstasy is a work of art and Ron Hansen's masterpiece.

Matthew Monday: Sipping Ice Cream From A Straw

Just a cute picture.  We were at a NY style Jewish Deli, one of those places where one meal feeds at least six.  It’s ridiculous, really.  It’s a NYC thing, and if you haven’t experienced it it’s probably not comprehensible.  You go to one of these places with a dozen people and share about three or four entrees and everyone is full. 

We ordered an ice cream and whipped cream contraption that was supposed to feed four, but only if it were four elephants.  It probably fed ten.  We still didn’t finish it, so Matthew was tasked to finish what he could.  So he took his straw and just started sucking up melted ice cream.  It’s not very couth, but it makes for a good picture.

Kind of brilliant if you ask me.  ;)

Lines I Wished I’d Written: In the Sewers of Paris, from Les Misérables

One of the great extended scenes from the novel is Jean Valjean’s saving of Marius by carrying him through the sewers of Paris, from section of the Barracades, which are being destroyed and where Marius’ companions are being annihilated, to somewhere downstream of the Seine, to freedom.  Neither the play nor the last movie really develops the sewer scene.  For the play, they set up the barricade defeat as the climax, but the story is far from over then.  That traveling through the sewers carries several metaphors.  It’s certainly the leveling of humanity, where it makes no difference if you’re an aristocrat or a slave.  It’s also a traveling into the underworld, a trip into hell.  It’s no coincidence that at the end an Jean Valjean, who is unrecognizable from all the mud, mire, and slime, separately meets Thernadier and Javert, the former the personification of greedy evil and the latter the personification of evil through the over scrupulous adherence to the law.

I’m going to present two scenes.  The first is when Valjean first enters the sewer.  From Volume Seven, Jean Valjean, Book Third, Mud but the Soul, chapter 1, “The Sewer and Its Surprises.”

It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.

Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea. As in the ocean, the diver may disappear there.

The transition was an unheard-of one. In the very heart of the city, Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute obscurity.

An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant. He remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening, stupefied. The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him. Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery. Adorable ambuscades of providence!

Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or a dead corpse.

His first sensation was one of blindness. All of a sudden, he could see nothing. It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become deaf. He no longer heard anything. The frantic storm of murder which had been let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said, otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all; but that was enough. He extended one arm and then the other, touched the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered that the paving continued. A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he stood.

After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind. A little light fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his eyes became accustomed to this cavern. He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he had burrowed--no other word can better express the situation--was walled in behind him. It was one of those blind alleys, which the special jargon terms branches. In front of him there was another wall, a wall like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer. Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed horrible, an entrance into it appeared like an engulfment. A man could, however, plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to do. Haste was even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this chance. They also might descend into that well and search it. There was not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,-- that is the real word for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set out. He plunged resolutely into the gloom.

The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them, perchance. After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of hell into another.

When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt. A problem presented itself. The passage terminated in another gut which he encountered across his path. There two ways presented themselves. Which should he take? Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to which we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue, which is its slope. To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.

This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.

He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he would make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled spot in Paris. Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection of streets. Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a call to arms of the neighboring post of guards. Thus they would be seized before they had even got out. It would be better to plunge into that labyrinth, to confide themselves to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence for the outcome.

He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.

When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more, and he became blind again. Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as possible. Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's feet dragged behind him. He held both these arms with one hand, and groped along the wall with the other. Marius' cheek touched his, and clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes. But a humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched, indicated respiration, and consequently, life. The passage along which Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall in order not to have his feet in the water.

Thus he proceeded in the gloom. He resembled the beings of the night groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.

Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing. The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends by finding God there.

Excerpttaken from The Literature Network.  

Now only Victor Hugo could have a character find God in the bowels of a sewer!  The second passage is also from Volume Five, Book Third, but from Chapter VI, “The Fontis.”  Here we see the epic strength of Jean Valjean.  He has been walking through the sewer unknown amount of time, perhaps a day, carrying the unconscious body of Marius on his shoulders.  Valjean is close to eighty years in age, so not a youth, and carrying a lifeless body is no small feat even for twenty minutes.

Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.

This sort of quagmire was common at that period in the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees, difficult to handle in the hydraulic works and a bad preservative of the subterranean constructions, on account of its excessive fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be conquered by a stone construction on a concrete foundation, and the clayey strata, infected with gas, of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid that the only way in which a passage was effected under the gallery des Martyrs was by means of a cast-iron pipe. When, in 1836, the old stone sewer beneath the Faubourg Saint-Honore, in which we now see Jean Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees as far as the Seine, presented such an obstacle, that the operation lasted nearly six months, to the great clamor of the dwellers on the riverside, particularly those who had hotels and carriages. The work was more than unhealthy; it was dangerous. It is true that they had four months and a half of rain, and three floods of the Seine.

The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the downpour of the preceding day. The pavement, badly sustained by the subjacent sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage of the water. Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed. The dislocated bottom had sunk into the ooze. To what extent? Impossible to say. The obscurity was more dense there than elsewhere. It was a pit of mire in a cavern of night.

Jean Valjean felt the pavement vanishing beneath his feet. He entered this slime. There was water on the surface, slime at the bottom. He must pass it. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was dying, and Jean Valjean exhausted. Besides, where was he to go? Jean Valjean advanced. Moreover, the pit seemed, for the first few steps, not to be very deep. But in proportion as he advanced, his feet plunged deeper. Soon he had the slime up to his calves and water above his knees. He walked on, raising Marius in his arms, as far above the water as he could. The mire now reached to his knees, and the water to his waist. He could no longer retreat. This mud, dense enough for one man, could not, obviously, uphold two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have stood a chance of extricating themselves singly. Jean Valjean continued to advance, supporting the dying man, who was, perhaps, a corpse.

The water came up to his arm-pits; he felt that he was sinking; it was only with difficulty that he could move in the depth of ooze which he had now reached. The density, which was his support, was also an obstacle. He still held Marius on high, and with an unheard-of expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking. He had only his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius. In the old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child thus.

He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape the water, and in order that he might be able to breathe; anyone who had seen him in that gloom would have thought that what he beheld was a mask floating on the shadows; he caught a faint glimpse above him of the drooping head and livid face of Marius; he made a desperate effort and launched his foot forward; his foot struck something solid; a point of support. It was high time.

He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point of support with a sort of fury. This produced upon him the effect of the first step in a staircase leading back to life.

The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme moment, was the beginning of the other water-shed of the pavement, which had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under the water like a plank and in a single piece. Well built pavements form a vault and possess this sort of firmness. This fragment of the vaulting, partly submerged, but solid, was a veritable inclined plane, and, once on this plane, he was safe. Jean Valjean mounted this inclined plane and reached the other side of the quagmire.

As he emerged from the water, he came in contact with a stone and fell upon his knees. He reflected that this was but just, and he remained there for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.

He rose to his feet, shivering, chilled, foul-smelling, bowed beneath the dying man whom he was dragging after him, all dripping with slime, and his soul filled with a strange light.

Excerpt taken from The Literature Network.

The heroic carrying of Marius is emulating the passion of Christ to the cross.  The water spewing wall that Valjean comes to a metaphor for a baptismal font, where he and Marius are reborn before God.

Lines I Wished I’d Written: Jean Valjean Takes His Revenge, from Les Misérables

I’m nearing the end of Les Misérables and there are a number of scenes that are so rich I really have to post them.  Here is one.  There will be more.  Let me set this up.  The revolutionaries are at the barricades and the fighting is not going well.  Jean Valjean is there just to watch and protect Marius and his hated nemesis, Javert is a prisoner.  Since the battle is about to begin, there is an order to execute the prisoner, since he could no longer be guarded, and Jean Valjean volunteers.  This is from Volume Five, Jean Valjean, Book First, The War Between Four Walls, Chapter XIX, “Jean Valjean Takes His Revenge.”

 

When Jean Valjean was left alone with Javert, he untied the rope which fastened the prisoner across the middle of the body, and the knot of which was under the table. After this he made him a sign to rise.

Javert obeyed with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy of enchained authority is condensed.

Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale, as one would take a beast of burden by the breast-band, and, dragging the latter after him, emerged from the wine-shop slowly, because Javert, with his impeded limbs, could take only very short steps.

Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.

In this manner they crossed the inner trapezium of the barricade. The insurgents, all intent on the attack, which was imminent, had their backs turned to these two.

Marius alone, stationed on one side, at the extreme left of the barricade, saw them pass. This group of victim and executioner was illuminated by the sepulchral light which he bore in his own soul.

Jean Valjean with some difficulty, but without relaxing his hold for a single instant, made Javert, pinioned as he was, scale the little entrenchment in the Mondetour lane.

When they had crossed this barrier, they found themselves alone in the lane. No one saw them. Among the heap they could distinguish a livid face, streaming hair, a pierced hand and the half nude breast of a woman. It was Eponine. The corner of the houses hid them from the insurgents. The corpses carried away from the barricade formed a terrible pile a few paces distant.

Javert gazed askance at this body, and, profoundly calm, said in a low tone:

"It strikes me that I know that girl."

Then he turned to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean thrust the pistol under his arm and fixed on Javert a look which it required no words to interpret: "Javert, it is I."

Javert replied:

"Take your revenge."

Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened it.

"A clasp-knife!" exclaimed Javert, "you are right. That suits you better."

Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck, then he cut the cords on his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut the cord on his feet; and, straightening himself up, he said to him:

"You are free."

Javert was not easily astonished. Still, master of himself though he was, he could not repress a start. He remained open-mouthed and motionless.

Jean Valjean continued:

"I do not think that I shall escape from this place. But if, by chance, I do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

Javert snarled like a tiger, which made him half open one corner of his mouth, and he muttered between his teeth:

"Have a care."

"Go," said Jean Valjean.

Javert began again:

"Thou saidst Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Arme?"

"Number 7."

Javert repeated in a low voice:--"Number 7."

He buttoned up his coat once more, resumed the military stiffness between his shoulders, made a half turn, folded his arms and, supporting his chin on one of his hands, he set out in the direction of the Halles. Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes:

A few minutes later, Javert turned round and shouted to Jean Valjean:

"You annoy me. Kill me, rather."

Javert himself did not notice that he no longer addressed Jean Valjean as "thou."

"Be off with you," said Jean Valjean.

Javert retreated slowly. A moment later he turned the corner of the Rue des Precheurs.

When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired his pistol in the air.

Then he returned to the barricade and said:

"It is done."

Excerpt taken from The Literature Network.  

As we will see, allowing him to live becomes a devastating blow to Javert.  Such an act of kindness from a person he had tortured many times in life pierces his heart and disturbs his conscience.  He cannot live with such an act of love.