The Academy

23 June 1901

St. Lydwine de Schiedam. Par J. K. Huysmans. (Paris: P. V. Stock).

Reviews.

Mysticism and Miracle.

M. Huysmans’ new book is less interesting as literature than as a document — using the word in its original sense of an instance — of at once the strength and weakness of Romanism. As we had occasion to show in a review of his work three years ago (see ACADEMY of Feb. 19, 1898), the author began his career with romances so daringly realistic as to shock the not over squeamish conscience of the Parisian publishers, but after some fifteen years spent in this sort of writing, saw the error of his ways and was converted, or perhaps we should say returned, to Catholicism. In the three books that he has published since this event — viz., La Bas, En Route, and La Cathédrale — he has described the mental struggles of a Parisian journalist on his passage from nearly the lowest depths of sensual vice to the heights of Catholic mysticism, and the truth and vigour of the description has raised. M. Huysmans to the position of one of the most popular writers in France. Whether the life of his hero is drawn from his experience or his imagination he has never stated, but his public has apparently agreed to consider it as an autobiography, and some colour is given to this view by the undoubted fact that M. Huysmans has lately resigned his place in the Ministry of the Marine, and has taken the vows as an oblate in a Benedictine monastery. It is from this retreat that the present volume is sent forth, and it is not surprising that it should smell in some degree of its place of origin.

St. Lydwine, whose life is here chronicled, was born near the end of the fourteenth century. She was of noble ancestry, say the old chroniclers, from whom M. Huysmans quotes freely; but the family must have come down in the world, for her father occupied no more exalted position than that of night watchman in the little Dutch town of which she afterwards became the patron saint. Her life does not seem to have differed materially from that of other girls in her position until her fifteenth year; although it is reported of her that she suffered greatly from gravel, which seems hardly an infantile disease, and refused all offers of marriage. In that year, however, she was attacked by a malady which seems to have been the chlorosis, or "green sickness," so often deplored by our Elizabethan poets, and while under the influence of this met with a skating accident which resulted in a broken rib. From that moment she took to her bed, never to quit it until her death, fifty-three years later, and disease after disease began to accumulate upon her. We spare our readers the revolting description of these, on which M. Huysmans, after his manner, lavishes pages, and will merely say that they reduced her to such a condition that she was unable to move any part of her but her right arm without assistance, that her eyes bled when she saw the light, and that she rapidly became an object which left little resemblance to a human being. M. Huysmans sums up her state by saying that she was attacked by every disease known to the Middle Ages, including the terrible Black Death, but excluding leprosy, which he thinks was spared her lest she should be removed to a Iazar house and thus cease to edify the faithful.

Then began a drama which we fancy is nowadays more likely to be repeated in India than in Europe. At first Lydwine seems to have looked upon her afflictions as merely earthly maladies and to have repined under them, until it was pointed out to her by a priest, who came to give her the Eucharist, that she should seek relief by meditating on the Passion of Christ, and offer them to Him as an expiation for the sins of the world, and particularly of her native town. This, after some difficulties, she succeeded in doing, even praying God to bestow upon her additional tortures, and was finally rewarded by ecstatic visions, in which she believed herself to experience the joys of Paradise and to have the power of visiting Purgatory at will. She also thought herself to be in almost daily communication with an angel specially detailed to watch over her, and, in consequence, was able to inform many persons, mostly dissolute priests, of sins that they supposed to be hidden, and to pronounce on the salvation or otherwise of those lately dead. The result seems to have been that the sick-bed of Lydwine became at length one of the sights of the town, that she was consulted by the great ones of the earth upon all manner of spiritual questions, and that when she died her life was entrusted to no less a person than Thomas ` Kempis, to whose mystical school she was, says M. Huysmans, much attached. Long before her death her relations had all passed away, and she was supported during the latter years of her life by the alms of her poorer neighbours, though amid surroundings that, partly of her own choosing, would have inflicted hardships upon an Indian fakir.

On the spiritual benefit of these sufferings, not only for the sufferer, but for humanity in general, M. Huysmans has no doubts whatever. According to the doctrine of "mystic substitution," which he here lays down, "each of us is, up to a certain point, responsible for the faults of others, and ought, up to a certain point, to make expiation of them; and each of us can, if it please God, attribute in a certain degree the merits which he possesses or acquires, to those who have none or who do not wish to reap them." This doctrine, he says, explains the mystery of the Atonement; but now that the Saviour has returned to the skies, "if He still wishes to suffer here below, it can only be in His Church, in the members of His mystic body." Hence it is, he says through the mouth of Lydwine’s confessor, that souls like Lydwine’s,

who begin again the agonies of Calvary, who nail themselves to Jesus’s empty place upon the Cross, are, in some sort, the doubles of the Son. They exhibit, in a bleeding mirror, His poor face; they do more: they alone give to this Almighty God something which is lacking in Him — the possibility of still suffering for us. They appease this desire, which has survived His death, for it is as infinite as the love which engenders it; they dispense to this marvellous Pauper an alms of tears; they plunge Him again into the joy of holocausts which He has forbidden to Himself.

Such doctrines we desire to treat with the reverence that should be extended in all religious beliefs sincerely held; and as it is quite certain that our views upon them could not fail to displease one or other part of our readers, we think it best to state them without commentary.

The case is different with the marvels with which M. Huysmans evidently thinks they can be supported. It is (in Macaulay’s phrase) with a pitying smile that we read that a quarter of salt beef, which St. Lydwine caused to be cooked and distributed among thirty poor families, remained as intact after the distribution as before it; that a purse which she handed to a relative, from which to discharge the debts of her dead brother, remained, after paying them, as full as before, and up to the day of her death continued to be miraculously replenished; and that an angel, during the great fire of Schiedam, brought her, instead of her bed staff, a stick of celestial wood of extraordinary hardness, which proved, when cut, to be of the colour of fresh wax, endowed with a heavenly perfume, and of a particular sort of cypress peculiar to the Garden of Eden. If M. Huysmans really believes that Heaven is a place containing storehouses of salted meat, of Dutch coins of the fifteenth century, and of sticks of perfumed wood, there would seem to be little difference between his conceptions of it and that of the lowest savages. But we know perfectly well that he does not give his mental assent to these propositions, and that they are only included in the book from the desire — natural, perhaps, in a convert — to show that his faith is stout enough to stick at no trifles. To the same feeling do we attribute the reiterated assertion in this book of the existence in Europe of a fully organised church for the worship of Satan, and his statement that St. Lydwine lived during the greater part of her life without food or sleep, while her wounds and sores never ceased to diffuse an odour of entrancing sweetness. The "Credo quia impossibile," into which centuries of misquotation have twisted Tertullian’s theory that the private judgement of Christians should be silent on questions which the traditions of the Church and the words of Scripture agreed, has come for other people than M. Huysmans to mean that everything that is incredible must necessarily be of faith. As St. Lydwine’s grandfather, according to Thomas à Kempis, was haunted by the devil, and she herself suffered among other things from epilepsy, her story would present no difficulties to a student at the Salpetrière; while it is evident from an incident mentioned by M. Huysmans that some, at any rate, of her contemporaries did not believe that she existed without food. That in the twentieth century after Christ the Church should have sufficient power over a man of M. Huysmans’ mental calibre to induce him to immure himself in a monastery,and at the same time should allow him to publish such a book as this, is a phenomenon twice as wonderful as any of those he records.