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PARTISAN REV I E_W
unbroken tremor of human revolt runs through several centuries of
moral oppression, unbroken and increasing, whose waves today lap
furiously the unlit skies of the catechisms.
Rebels just as much as the insurgents of Spartacus were the
heroic Manicheans, massacred in hundreds of thousands during eight
hundred years, and whose torment was to rise again in the admirable
civilization of the troubadours, to burst into brightest flame during
the catharist quest for the Grail.
If
they wanted to remain christian
(and they had not yet the moral temerity to brave their century to
the point of declaring themselves atheists), the sole resource of the
Albigenses and Vaudois was to identify Gold and the Corruption of
the World with the devil, to drown their precious metals in lakes, and
to preach the extinction of the human race.
As
the only heroic and
logical attempt to reduce to absurdity the absurd christian dualism,
the catharist heresy still exercises its fascination on all rebels pledged
to man's emancipation.
And even when a mathematical genius- passing from the theory
of probability to the Jansenist postulate of grace-peters out with
the illusion of one among so many other sort'> of christian rationalism,
Pascal's revolt is neither more significant nor more moving than de
Sade's. Leaving behind them the tinsel of their century, in the seclu–
sion of illness or of prison, both drank at the same spring, then each
went on his different way, bound to the same moral equation.
Since Pascal, who attempted to reconcile man with god, the
attenuated voice of the great heresies reaches us only through the
lineage of the Jansenist convulsionaries of Saint-Medard, the Bon–
jourists eating their bread-and-excrement, and the disquieting hysterics
created out of nothing by Charcot.
8
Sade:'s voice has echoed louder
and louder through the vaults where roams the genius of the splendid
nineteenth century. Quivering balls on the mental billiard-table,
Shelley, Lautreamont, Marx, Nerval, Rimbaud, Swinburne, Freud,
Lenin, transmit to us the shock of the only heresy likely to endure,
the great modern heresy of liberation, the heresy of atheism. Man
. tears off in shreds the christian tunic of Nessus, not without tearing
painfully
his
own skin. Mere than one gives up halfway; millions of
others lose themselves in new mystical labyrinths. Naked at last, face
3. The persecuted Jansenists claimed that miracles' took place at the tomb
of the Jansenist deacon,
Fran~ois
de Paris, in the cemetery of Saint-Medard. The
crowd assembled there went into convulsions, some of them prophesied, women
leaped about, barked, miaowed, had themselves crucified, etc.
The Bonjour brothers, founders of a small heretical sect at the end of the
eighteenth century.
(Translator's note.)
