Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

“In no century and with no nation have religious opinions been the basis of national morals. The gods adored by the ancient Greeks and Romans, the most virtuous of people, were the merest scum: a Jupiter who should have been burnt alive: a Venus fit for a reformatory: a Mercury who ought to be in a jail.”

But while you shared Freud’s abrasive unbelief, you feared that delusion could not be so easily eradicated. “Do you think man can get along without superstition?” asks the Maréchale de—. “I do not entertain this hope, because desire for it has not blinded me to its hollowness: but I take it away from no one else.” At the same time you doubted that the Christian message had been heard: “But are there any Christians? I have never seen one.”²⁴ Echoing Hobbes, you rightly contended that religion is a superstition that is allowed, and superstition a religion that is not allowed.²⁵ Being a reasonable fellow, more influenced by your English contemporaries than by the Hebrews of yore, you felt that religious abuses are best remedied by sound legislation, devised in the public interest. It is impossible, you tell the Maréchale, to subject

a nation to a rule which suits only a few melancholiacs, who have imposed it on their characters. It is with religious as with monastic institutions; they relax with time. They are lunacies which cannot hold out against the constant impulse of nature, which brings us back under her law. See to it that private good be so closely united to public good that a citizen can hardly harm society without harming himself. Promise virtue its reward, as you have promised wickedness its punishment. Let virtue lead to high offices of state, without distinction of faith, wherever virtue is to be found. Then you need only count on a small number of wicked men, who are involved in vice by a perversity of nature which nothing can correct. No. Temptation is too near: hell too far off. Look for nothing worth the attention of a wise law-giver.²⁶

But your affinity with religious — and with Freud’s — experience is never more glaring than when you equate the Creator and His Laws with the good father and his selective authority. With feigned ingenuousness you remind the Maréchale of the story of the young Mexican and the old man. The Mexican (yourself, perhaps?) doesn’t believe that anybody lives across the sea, until one day, blown by a storm, he lands there and finds to his relief a venerable old man on the beach. He falls to his knees. “‘Get up,’ said the old man; ‘you have denied my existence?’” Of course, he pardons the Mexican for his ignorance. This allows you to make a point to the Maréchale to the effect that fatherly forgiveness trumps the punishment that “real” religion metes out — according to her (surely un-Christian) preconceptions.

Law or mercy? To this intra-Hebraic crossroads where the God question leads, you will return very analytically, dear Denis Diderot, with regard to yourself and your father. We know that as an impudent thirty-something you went to your father’s house to ask for his permission to marry Anne-Toinette Champion, a modest lace vendor. He refused and had you locked up in a monastery, you escaped, laid low in Paris and married your sweetheart — only to find her a bore. Well, it was in that same family home at Place Chambeau, in Langres, that the prodigal son, having disobeyed the paternal injunction to become a churchman, mused with his father over the need for a Law and how to become free of it. You attributed to this father, the underwriter of the Law, not so much the authorization to defy it as the shrewdness to be wisely unconventional. I am thinking of your “Conversation of a Father with His Children”: “When it was my turn to bid him goodnight, I embraced him and said into his ear: ‘Strictly speaking, Father, there is no law for the wise.’ ‘Pray keep your voice down.’ ‘All laws being subject to exceptions, it is for the sage to judge in which cases to bow to them and in which to ignore them.’ ‘I should not mind,’ said he, ‘if there were one or two citizens like yourself in the town; but I should not live there were they all to think likewise.’”²⁷

I rather fear, Sage of the ideal polis whose citizens do not all think likewise, that your philosophy has not been followed to the letter. I’m afraid your unconditional fans tend not to know or to forget about your writings and your tears, this time at the death of the cutler, a paragon of piety and justice: “I feel an infinite sadness,” wrote the inconsolable son who was not by his father’s side when the time came.