The Well of Saint Clare

 Anatole France is well known as an anticlerical writer of the Left. But it is intriguing to see what a nuanced attitude to religion he takes in his largely forgotten and seldom-read 1895 work, The Well of Saint Clare—a book plainly inspired by the medieval Golden Legend (a work that held great personal meaning for France). 

To be sure, there are many traces in the volume of France's skepticism. His attitudes to religion range from the Epicurean and Lucretian (characters repeatedly denounce the fear of death as a delusion brought about by the false belief in personal immortality) to the Swinburnean. 

When a character meets a holy satyr who explains that he is fading out of existence because the Christian god replaced the pagan ones ("time spares neither men nor gods," he says) one feels one is in the presence of a Swinburnean obsession. The "pale Galilean" has triumphed once again. 

And when another character says—of death—"I have learned by much pondering how peaceful and secure it is to slumber on her bosom"—one is again reminded of Algernon Charles: "We thank [...] Whatever gods may be [...] that even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea." 

At the same time—though—many of France's heroes in these tales are Christian saints. Catherine of Sienna emerges entirely unscathed from his sardonic treatment. France offers an essentially traditional portrait of her goodness and self-sacrifice. 

Napoleon comes off the worse, in one of the stories, in his head-to-head combat with the Church. ("Bonaparte [...] told himself the Papacy was a more enduring institution than ever the Constitution of the Year III was likely to be," France writes (Allinson trans. throughout). And it's true—it will outlast Trump too!). 

And far and away the most endearing character in the tales is the Franciscan brother Fra Giovanni—whom France presents as a holy fool in the medieval tradition, who shames the wise and the powerful of the world through faithfully applying the Gospel lessons of humility, poverty, and peace. 

Through the figure of Giovanni, to be sure, France explores his own interest in socialism and makes a well-justified attack on the property system. "Surely men must be mad to believe they own a mountain," Brother Giovanni cries—when it is explained to him that because ownership of capital rests in some hands, the law grants them the privilege to live off the sweat of others. 

I am reminded of the scene in Penguin Island—which portrays the origin of property as lying in an act of violence and plunder. 

But France also never stopped short with a simple ideological embrace of socialism. Beyond doubts, there are always more doubts, in France. Beyond rebellions there are rebellions. And if Fra Giovanni's rejection of the property system is the beginning of wisdom for him—and therefore, of suffering and rebellion—it is not the end. 

Fra Giovanni must also go on from there to learn that merely because the distribution of property is unjust—that does not mean the would-be reformers or revolutionists who propose to fix it are any better. 

To the reformers, Giovanni replies: "Say not, 'We will establish just laws, and we will render to every man what is his due.' For no one is just, and we know not what is meet for men. We are no less ignorant what is good for them and what is evil. [...]

"So long as men shall be covetous and cruel, will they make the most merciful laws cruel, and will rob their brethren with words of love on their lips. This is why it is vain to reveal to them the words of love and the laws of gentleness."

One is tempted today to hurl the same words at our local DSA candidates and "abundance" reformers alike. 

To the revolutionists, meanwhile, Giovanni points out an obvious contradiction in using violence to defeat violence: "you have shed the blood of the unjust judge and the brutal soldier, and lo! you are become like the soldier and the judge yourself. Like them you bear on your hands the indelible stain [...] never strike the wicked, for fear we make ourselves like them."

One is likewise tempted to hurl this rebuke today as well—at the admirers of "Luigi" and the people who throw molotov cocktails at the homes of tech executives. 

France knows, like Shelley, that nothing is more fatal than to taste of "Cobbett's snuff, revenge."

Ultimately, then, France is no more a doctrinaire believer in the pieties of socialism than he is in the bourgeois property system or the dogmas of the Catholic Church. His attitude toward all is that of the ironist—but not the sort of cruel-minded, sardonic ironist who mocks them all equally, but rather that of the urbane skeptic who honors them all equally for the element of truth they contain. 

Indeed, there is a reason why—in The Gods Are Athirst—both the believing friar and the infidel shopkeeper, on the run from the authorities, befriend one another and receive top billing, ultimately, as the most unpretentiously decent and humane people in France's novel. 

Rebellion would be a simple enough thing if there were all truth on one side and all falsehood on the other. If one could reject religion and capitalism and opt for socialism and atheism, the rebellion could take place only once. 

But as Fra Giovanni discovers, the doubts that are sowed against capitalism and property eventually spread doubts as to the proposed remedies for these ills as well. 

So it was in my youth too. When I saw through the lies of capitalism, I became a true believer in its opposite: communism. It was some time further after that before I began to dream that communism might also have its share of lies; and at that point—one is left in the same condition Richard Wright describes, in his contribution to The God that Failed: "I knew in my heart that I [...] should never again express such passionate hope, should never again make so total a commitment of faith."

Eventually, one is left as a liberal "ironist," trying to make the best of the world—aiming for what Isaiah Berlin would call an "uneasy equilibrium" between competing values, since this is roughly the best we can do in a world where there is more than one valid truth—and these ever in tension with one another. 

This, too, is France's attitude: "Behold that same white Truth you were fain to contemplate. And know it is built up of the divers contradictory truths, in the same fashion as all colours go to make up white. [...] Now in every one of the devices was a portion of the Truth, and all together make up the true and veritable device."

But these words, in France's tale, proceed from the lips of Satan. For indeed—though they are the beginning of wisdom—they are also the death of innocence and faith. (As Brecht one wrote in an unguarded moment—despite his pose all his life as a true believer in the dogmas of Marxism: "when all the errors have been used up—there, facing us, sits nothingness.")

It is in this way, France writes, that the Serpent in the Garden in truth never did lie. He gave humanity precisely what he promised. He kept his word. 

As Giovanni says to Lucifer, the light-bringer, in the final section of his tale: 

"Through you it is I suffer, and I love you. I love you because you are my misery and my pride, my joy and my sorrow, the splendour and the cruelty of things created, because you are desire and speculation, and because you have made me like unto yourself. For verily your promise in the Garden, in the dawn of this world's days, was not vain, and I have tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, O Satan." [...]

And, leaning on the Archangel's shoulder, the man wept bitterly.