The Nun of Hell

The Nun of Hell

Mankind is just at its primitive beginnings. It is hardly extricated from its original dirt... For if it is still barbaric and cruel, that is because men have just left prehistory.
Huge bloodshed and deadly dictatorships are no less than youngster straying, trials of a child groping his way along his own reality, in the darkness of relativism ; he lets himself be attracted by shiny ideologies – sometimes generous but often deadly; yet, little by little, he trains to improve himself for having learned from them.

Because the advent of a life without clashes and the decline of physical violence in our fine countries herald a still distant but certain age of bliss.

This faith in progress honours you...

" What is that silly nonsense ?! " the Nun sharply interrupts.

" So the long blood mark left by history as well as the sight of your own disabilities never opened your eyes ? "

Her words sting your naked reason like whip cracks.

History isn't the ascending way towards the best and friendliest world, but the desert without a horizon where, disorientated, man may go in hundred thousand directions, the one having no more sense than the other.

Bravely consented pain as well as cowardice and quest for peace and quiet are aspirations under-strained by conformity to predominant values, she says.

No one can claim that one is more developed than the other. For the absence of pain can never be a higher value. Of course, in your useful and conformist point of view, suffering as well as harming are pointless. Where is progress ? Is it when, no longer than 70 years ago, you would expose your fragile life in some acreage to a sword or a pistol in order to clear an affront to honour ?		Which of these two attitudes is worthier ?

		" Don't you also think that obscurantism is still the same as yesterday ? Isn't the most persistent ideology to believe that we are now liberated from it ? "
	Or is it today, when your weakness of character and the fear of death prevent you from being man enough to stand up for yourself when you are humiliated ?	Yet you attempt an objection : the democratic West still has gained its freedom. Her reply is not to be expected : " Blinkers prevent you from seeing wider than the route that social ethic has drawn for you. Today we receive communion like apathetic spectators – and this, we wouldn't even call an opinion – at the News at 8, Big Dill and Red Nose mass while convincing ourselves that we behave in an individual, self-guided and responsible way. "
As a symptom of this, modern life has retained only the revolutionary contribution of Galileo to science although he denied himself. Whereas Giordano Bruno has been forgotten although he was burned alive for having refused to deny the very same belief.

Conformity is the rule whereas everyone believes in his freedom of movements.

However we have no more freedom today than in the past. We just think so.
If we may repeat with the philosopher that freedom consists in choosing our own chains, isn't it right that true servitude consists in thinking we are free from any chain ?

Man will always remain the same, she concludes. Forever hybrid, endlessly divided between the sad animal snuggled in his habits, in the timid enjoyment of his daily feeding, and nature's monster capable of works leading to the sublime extremes of good and evil.

Just like the goat-like god with uncontrolled instincts, he may jump on a nymph with all his wild fervour. Then, sullen and ashamed of his deformity, experiencing an inconsolable grief, he transmutes his pain on four reed finger bones into a celestial melody – an ecstasy for the gods.

Demoralised, you listen to the sermon the temptress hits you with. Hell is really not a place where you can delude yourself with sweet illusions !

Here you find the values you took for granted in pieces... All the same, we still can not sweep away all the experience accumulated from the 20th century Enlightenment, Human Rights and the immense hope allowed by science progress.

We are no more tolerant today than in the past. We are just less resolute in our convictions and less worried about justice than material and psychological comfort.

And why not, after all ? Mankind has generated a real overgrowth of arts, culture and techniques; it is indisputable.


		Why all these efforts, you say, since instead of improving man, they basically make him even more dangerous to his own kind ? You may just as well live quietly like a vegetable with no other project than surviving until the next day without being concerned about better futures anymore. You choose a warm niche and you huddle up in it.

		This is not a good reason for giving up. The fact that there is nothing to be done to improve mankind does not allow you to give up the fight for certain values. Enough humiliation already ! You throw your goatskin on the ground and move naked towards the future...