THE MYSTERY OF SPACE.
He flies under Antony's body, extended like a swimmer; his two great
wings, outspread, entirely concealing him, resemble a cloud.
_Antony_--"Where am I going? Just now I caught a glimpse of the form of
the Accursed One. No! a cloud is carrying me away. Perhaps I am dead,
and am mounting up to God? ...
"Ah! how well I breathe! The untainted air inflates my soul. No more
heaviness! no more suffering!
"Beneath me, the thunderbolt darts forth, the horizon widens, rivers
cross one another. That light spot is the desert; that pool of water the
ocean. And other oceans appear--immense regions of which I had no
knowledge. There are black lands that smoke like live embers, a belt of
snow ever obscured by the mists. I am trying to discover the mountains
where each evening the sun goes to sleep."
_The Devil_--"The sun never goes to sleep!"
Antony is not startled by this voice. It appears to him an echo of his
thought--a response of his memory.
Meanwhile, the earth takes the form of a ball, and he perceives it in
the midst of the azure turning on its poles while it winds around the
sun.
_The Devil_--"So, then, it is not the centre of the world? Pride of man,
humble thyself!"
_Antony_--"I can scarcely distinguish it now. It is intermingled with
the other fires. The firmament is but a tissue of stars."
They continue to ascend.
"No noise! not even the crying of the eagles! Nothing! ... and I bend
down to listen to the music of the spheres."
_The Devil_--"You cannot hear them! No longer will you see the
antichthon of Plato, the focus of Philolaues, the spheres of Aristotle,
or the seven heavens of the Jews with the great waters above the vault
of crystal!"
_Antony_--"From below it appeared as solid as a wall. But now, on the
contrary, I am penetrating it; I am plunging into it!"
And he arrives in front of the moon--which is like a piece of ice, quite
round, filled with a motionless light.
_The Devil_--"This was formerly the abode of souls. The good Pythagoras
had even supplied it with birds and magnificent flowers."
_Antony_--"I see nothing there save desolate plains, with extinct
craters, under a black sky.
"Come towards those stars with a softer radiance, so that we may gaze
upon the angels who hold them with the ends of their arms, like
torches!"
The Devil carries him into the midst of the stars.
"They attract one another at the same time that they repel one another.
The action of each has an effect on the others, and helps to produce
their movements--and all this without the medium of an auxiliary, by the
force of a law, by the virtue simply of order."
_Antony_--"Yes ... yes! my intelligence grasps it! It is a joy greater
than the sweetness of affection! I pant with stupefaction before the
immensity of God!"
_The Devil_--"Like the firmament, which rises in proportion as you
ascend, He will become greater according as your imagination mounts
higher; and you will feel your joy increase in proportion to the
unfolding of the universe, in this enlargement of the Infinite."
_Antony_--"Ah! higher! ever higher!"
The stars multiply and shed around their scintillations. The Milky Way
at the zenith spreads out like an immense belt, with gaps here and
there; in these clefts, amid its brightness, dark tracts reveal
themselves. There are showers of stars, trains of golden dust, luminous
vapours which float and then dissolve.
Sometimes a comet sweeps by suddenly; then the tranquillity of the
countless lights is renewed.
Antony, with open arms, leans on the Devil's two horns, thus occupying
the entire space covered by his wings. He recalls with disdain the
ignorance of former days, the limitation of his ideas. Here, then, close
beside him, were those luminous globes which he used to gaze at from
below. He traces the crossing of their paths, the complexity of their
directions. He sees them coming from afar, and, suspended like stones in
a sling, describing their orbits and pushing forward their parabolas.
He perceives, with a single glance, the Southern Cross and the Great
Bear, the Lynx and the Centaur, the nebulae of the Gold-fish, the six
suns in the constellation of Orion, Jupiter with his four satellites,
and the triple ring of the monstrous Saturn! all the planets, all the
stars which men should, in future days, discover! He fills his eyes with
their light; he overloads his mind with a calculation of their
distances;--then he lets his head fall once more.
"What is the object of all this?"
_The Devil_--"There is no object!
"How could God have had an object? What experience could have
enlightened Him, what reflection enabled Him to judge? Before the
beginning of things, it would not have operated, and now it would be
useless."
_Antony_--"Nevertheless, He created the world, at one period of time, by
His mere word!"
_The Devil_--"But the beings who inhabit the earth came there
successively. In the same way, in the sky, new stars arise--different
effects from various causes."
_Antony_--"The variety of causes is the will of God!"
_The Devil_--"But to admit in God several acts of will is to admit
several causes, and thus to destroy His unity!
"His will is not separable from His essence. He cannot have a second
will, inasmuch as He cannot have a second essence--and, since He exists
eternally, He acts eternally.
"Look at the sun! From its borders escape great flames emitting sparks
which scatter themselves to become new worlds; and, further than the
last, beyond those depths where only night is visible, other suns whirl
round, and behind these others again, and others still, to infinity ..."
_Antony_--"Enough! enough! I am terrified! I am about to fall into the
abyss."
_The Devil_ stops, and gently balancing himself--
"There is no such thing as nothingness! There is no vacuum! Everywhere
there are bodies moving over the unchangeable realms of space--and, as
if it had any bounds it would not be space but a body, it consequently
has no limits!"
_Antony_, open-mouthed--"No limits!"
_The Devil_--"Ascend into the sky forever and ever, and you will never
reach the top! Descend beneath the earth for millions upon millions of
centuries, and you will never get to the bottom--inasmuch as there is no
bottom, no top, no end, above or below; and space is, in fact, comprised
in God, who is not a part of space, of a magnitude that can be measured,
but immensity!"
_Antony_, slowly--"Matter, in that case, would be part of God?"
_The Devil_--"Why not? Can you tell where He comes to an end?"
_Antony_--"On the contrary, I prostrate myself, I efface myself before
His power!"
_The Devil_--"And you pretend to move Him! You speak to Him, you even
adorn Him with virtues--goodness, justice, clemency,--in place of
recognising the fact that He possesses all perfections!
"To conceive anything beyond is to conceive God outside of God. Being
outside of Being. But then He is the only Being, the only Substance.
"If substance could be divided, it would lose its nature--it would not
be itself; God would no longer exist. He is, therefore, indivisible as
well as infinite, and if He had a body, He would be made up of parts. He
would no longer be one; He would no longer be infinite. Therefore, He is
not a person!"
_Antony_--"What? My prayers, my sobs, the sufferings of my flesh, the
transports of my zeal, all these things would be no better than a lie
... in space ... uselessly--like a bird's cry, like a whirlwind of dead
leaves!"
He weeps.
"Oh! no! There is above everything some One, a Great Spirit, a Lord, a
Father, whom my heart adores, and who must love me!"
_The Devil_--"You desire that God should not be God; for, if He
experienced love, anger, or pity, He would pass from His perfection to a
greater or less perfection. He cannot descend to a sentiment, or be
contained under a form."
_Antony_--"One day, however, I shall see Him!"
_The Devil_--"With the Blessed, is it not? When the finite shall enjoy
the Infinite, enclosing the Absolute in a limited space!"
_Antony_--"No matter! There must be a Paradise for the good, as well as
a Hell for the wicked!"
_The Devil_--"Does the exigency of your reason constitute the law of
things? Without doubt, evil is a matter of indifference to God, seeing
that the earth is covered with it!
"Is it from impotence that He endures it, or from cruelty that He
preserves it?
"Do you think that He can be continually putting the world in order like
an imperfect work, and that He watches over all the movements of all
beings, from the flight of the butterfly to the thought of man?
"If He created the universe His providence is superfluous. If Providence
exists, creation is defective.
"But good and evil only concern you--like day and night, pleasure and
pain, death and birth, which have relationship merely to a corner of
space, to a special medium, to a particular interest. Inasmuch as what
is infinite alone is permanent, the Infinite exists; and that is all!"
The Devil has gradually extended his huge wings, and now they cover
space.
Antony can no longer see. He is on the point of fainting:
"A horrible chill freezes me to the bottom of my soul. This exceeds the
utmost pitch of pain. It is, as it were, a death more profound than
death. I wheel through the immensity of darkness. It enters into me. My
consciousness is shivered to atoms under this expansion of nothingness."
_The Devil_--"But things happen only through the medium of your mind.
Like a concave mirror, it distorts objects, and you need every resource
in order to verify facts.
"Never shall you understand the universe in its full extent;
consequently you cannot form an idea as to its cause, so as to have a
just notion of God, or even say that the universe is infinite, for you
should first comprehend the Infinite!
"Form is perhaps an error of your senses, substance an illusion of your
intellect. Unless it be that the world, being a perpetual flux of
things, appearances, by a sort of contradiction, would not be a test of
truth, and illusion would be the only reality.
"But are you sure that you see? Are you sure that you live? Perhaps
nothing at all exists!"
The Devil has seized Antony, and, holding him by the extremities of his
arms, stares at him with open jaws ready to swallow him up.
"Come, adore me! and curse the phantom that you call God!"
Antony raises his eyes with a last movement of lingering hope.
The Devil quits him.