The Inferno, August Strindberg [classic english novels TXT] 📗

gives us a ground for surmising that it is on account of sins committed by them before their birth. Let us rejoice in our torments, as though they were the paying off of so many debts, and let us count it a mercy that we do not know the real reason why we are punished. XV Whither?

Six months have passed, and I still go daily walking on the city wall and survey the lunatic asylum, and catch glimpses of the blue sea in the distance. Thence will the new epoch, the new religion, come of which the world is dreaming.

Gloomy winter is buried, the meadows are green, the trees are in blossom, the nightingale sings in the garden of the observatory, but a wintry sadness still weighs upon our spirits, for so many weird and inexplicable things have happened, that even the most incredulous waver. The general sleeplessness increases, nervous breakdowns are common, apparitions are matters of every day, and real miracles happen. People are expecting something.

A young man pays me a visit, and asks, “What must one do in order to sleep quietly at night?”

“Why?”

“Upon my word, I cannot say, but my bedroom has become a terror to me, and I give it up tomorrow.”

“Young man, atheist, naturalist, why?”

“The Devil must be in it! When I open the door of my room at night and enter, someone seizes me by the arms and shakes me.”

“Then there is someone in your room?”

“No, when I light a candle there is no one to be seen.”

“Young man, there is someone who cannot be seen by candlelight!”

“Who is that?”

“The invisible, young man! Have you taken sulphonal, bromkali, morphium, chloral?”

“I have tried all.”

“And the invisible does not quit the field. Very well! You want to sleep at night, and wish me to tell you how. Listen, young man, I am neither a physician nor a prophet, I am an old sinner, who does penance. Demand therefore neither preaching nor prophecy from an old gallows-bird, who wants all his leisure time to preach to himself. I have also suffered from sleeplessness and paralysis of the arms; I have wrestled eye to eye with the invisible, and finally recovered sleep and health. Do you know how? Guess!”

The young man guesses my meaning, and casts his eyes down. “You guess it! Go in peace, and sleep well!”

Yes! I must be silent and let my meaning be guessed, for if I began to play the preaching monk, they would turn their backs on me at once.

A friend asks me, “Whither are we going?”

“I cannot say, but as regards myself personally, it seems that the way of the Cross leads me back to the faith of my fathers.”

“To Catholicism?”

It appears so. Occultism has played its part, by giving a scientific explanation of miracles and demonology. Theosophy, the forerunner of religion, has fulfilled its function, when it has revived belief in a world-order which punishes and rewards, Karma will be replaced by God, and the Mahatmas will be revealed as the newborn powers, the chastising and instructing spirits. Buddhism in Young France has preached renunciation of the world and the worship of sorrow, which leads direct to Golgotha.

As regards the homesick longing I feel for the bosom of the Mother Church, that is a long story, which I may summarise as follows:

When Swedenborg taught me that it is unlawful to quit the religion of one’s ancestors, he said that with reference to Protestantism, which is treason against the Mother Church. Or, to put it better, Protestantism is a punishment inflicted on the barbarians of the North. Protestantism is the Exile, the Babylonish Captivity, but the Return seems near, the Return to the promised land. The immense progress which Catholicism makes in America, England, and Scandinavia seems to point towards a great reconciliation, in which the Greek Church, which has already stretched out her hand towards the West, is not to be forgotten.

That is the dream of the socialists regarding the restoration of the United States of the West, but taken in a spiritual sense. But I beg you not to think that it is a political theory which takes me back to the Roman Church. I have not sought Catholicism; it has found a place in me, after following me for years. My child, who became a Catholic against my will, has shown me the beauty of a cult which has maintained itself unaltered from the first, and I have always preferred the original to the copy. The considerable time I spent in my child’s native country gave me opportunity to observe and admire the sincerity of the religious life there. I have been also influenced by my stay in the St. Louis Hospital, and finally by the occurrences of the last few weeks. After contemplating my life, which has whirled me round like some of the damned in Dante’s hell, and after discovering that my existence in general had no other object but to humble and to defile me, I determined to anticipate my executioner, and take in hand my own torture. I determined to live in the midst of sufferings, dirt, and death-agonies, and with this object I prepared to seek a post as attendant on the sick in the Hôpital des Frères St. Jean de Dieu in Paris. This idea occurred to me on the morning of April 29th, after I had met an old woman with a head resembling a skull. When I return home, I find Séraphita lying open on my table, and on the right page a splinter of wood, which points to the following sentence: “Do for God what you would do for your own ambitious plans, what you do when you devote yourself to your art, what you have done when you love someone more than Him, or when you have investigated a secret of science! Is God not Science Itself?⁠ ⁠…”

In the afternoon the newspaper L’Éclair arrived, and, strange to say, the Hôpital