Spiridion

by George Sand, Patricia J.F. Worth (Translation), Patricia Worth (Translator)

Both Gothic and philosophical, Spiridion tells the story of a young novice, Angel, who finds himself cruelly ostracized by his monastic superiors and terrified by the ghostly visits of his monastery's founder, the abbot Spiridion. Though he founded the monastery on the search for truth, Spiridion watched his once intelligent and virtuous monks degenerate into a cruel, mindless community. Turning away from the Church and withdrawing into his cell, he poured his energy into a manuscript that tells the "truth" about Roman Catholic doctrine and monastic life and provides a vision of a new and eternal gospel. The manuscript was buried with him, and his spirit now searches for a monk who is intelligent enough to exhume it from his crypt, which is guarded by hellish spirits, and share its vision with the world.

Translated into English for the first time in more than 160 years, Spiridion offers a fierce critique of Catholic doctrine as well as solutions for living with the Church's teachings. Although Sand had broken with the Church several years earlier, she nevertheless continued to believe in an omnipotent God, and her novel makes the distinction, as Angel's protector, Father Alexis, puts it, "between the authority of faith and the application of this authority in the hands of men." As translator Patricia J. F. Worth argues in her introduction, the novel's emphasis on freedom of inquiry, benevolence, and moral reform inspired other nineteenth-century writers, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Matthew Arnold, and Henry James, and the novel is also relevant to twenty-first-century discussions of religious authority and rigid adherence to doctrine.

Genres: French Literature, Classics, Gothic

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1839

About the author

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, best known by her pen name George Sand, was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. One of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era. She wrote more than 50 volumes of various works to her credit, including tales, plays and political texts, alongside her 70 novels.
Like her great-grandmother, Louise Dupin, whom she admired, George Sand advocated for women's rights and passion, criticized the institution of marriage, and fought against the prejudices of a conservative society. She was considered scandalous because of her turbulent love life, her adoption of masculine clothing, and her masculine pseudonym.

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“But it wasn’t enough to have forsaken the error; he still needed to find the truth.”

This is a tale apparently centered around the pantheistic theological ideas of Pierre Leroux, to whom George Sand dedicates this novel. From these ideas, she created a philosophical horror story. Something evil is afoot, and the evil is us—our own hypocrisy.

Basically, a spiritually searching monk founds a monastery and spawns a series of relationships between older, intellectually curious monks and their younger, idealistic novices--protégés. We explore spiritual possibilities with Hebronius, Fulgence and Alexis, and finally get to the narrator Angel. Until the end, the teacher’s voice is that of a troubled seeker, and therefore feels very relatable.

I doubt it would have broad appeal. There are no divisions at all in the text, and it consists entirely of a history of thought as told to a novice by his teacher, sprinkled with doses of supernatural and religious visions and revelations. But the writing sparkles with a simple clarity that is captivating.

“I listened to the sounds of summer’s breath slipping furtively through the slit of a shutter.”

The contrast of her realistic style with the gothic atmosphere makes it more believable. Since this is my first George Sand, I don’t know whether it's just the way she writes or due to the talents of the translator Patricia Worth. Most likely both.

For anyone who is interested in theological ideas, or who has struggled with their beliefs, this is a uniquely fascinating read.

“These few pages … will teach you nothing, but they will make you think …”
George Sand, in a letter to a friend after the publication of Spiridion, from the Introduction

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Father Alexis (distant disciple of Abbot Spiridion and teacher to Angel) worked to strike a balance between religon and science. He saw the good in both: love in religion, freedom in science; and the evil in the over-indulgence of both: mental atrophy in religion, lack of compassion in science. His goal was to move through the world with a philosopher's wisdom and a child's confidence,

I wondered what good there was in loving an insensitive God who leaves man with a desire for heaven in order to make him feel all the horror of his captivity

Lost in his pursuit of Truth, Father Alexis isolated himself. Lost in isolation, he found philosophy. Lost in philosophy, he found boredom which he called, "the worst fatigue of all." Lost in boredom, he found presence. Lost in presence, he found charity. Lost in charity, he found hope. Lost in hope, he searched for purpose. Lost in purpose, he found true immortality: our ideas, feelings, works, merits and sufferings.

your brain…is like a book unaware that it carries life within itself. This is how, for thirty years, I made a parchment of my own intelligence.

With an understanding of immortality in hand, Father Alexis looked to rebuild his world by passing on what he had learned to his student, named Angel, and in doing so Alexis found his calling:

ALEXIS: As Plato was the successor of the other enlighteners whom we revere, and whose disciples we are.
ANGEL: But what is our mandate then?
ALEXIS: It’s to have come after them.
Filling our present days with study, meditation and a continual striving toward perfection…we will succeed…the goal of life is to transmit life.

Alexis went from thinking his goal was to be completed in his lifetime, to realizing his lifetime was a part of a bigger goal. If, in this book, Donatien symbolized corruption and Abbot Spiridion symbolized hope, then we are all on the hero's journey as told by Father Alexis.

I love characters that reveal how authors see the best of this world; as Dostoevsky did with Zosima, Kafka with Joseph K's chaplain, DFW with Mario Incandenza, Cervantes with Don Quixote, and George Sand with Father Alexis.

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Alexis’ Truth (as told by Angel):
He said, firstly, that the grandeur and beauty of the universe accessible to the calculations and observations of human knowledge, showed us, in the Creator, order, wisdom and omnipotent knowledge;
Secondly, that the need which men feel, in society and among themselves, to form and establish relationships based on sympathy, on common religion and mutual protection, proved the spirit of sovereign justice in the universal lawmaker;
Thirdly, that the continual surges of man’s heart toward the ideal proved the infinite love of the father for men, washing in great waves over the great human family, and manifested individually in each soul in the sanctuary of its conscience.
From that he concluded three types of duties for man.
The first applied to the external nature: the duty to educate himself in the sciences so as to modify and perfect the physical world around him.
The second applied to his life in society: the duty to respect or establish institutions freely accepted by the human family and favorable to its development.
The third can be applied to the individual’s inner life: the duty to perfect himself with divine perfection in mind, and, for himself and for others, to unceasingly search for paths of truth, wisdom and virtue.

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(Bacco lives!)

[Reuben Woolley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting book! It's been a while since I've read anything gothic which is always a fun set of tropes and usually has a funky narrative structure, which this does. I read it primarily as context/precursor for The Karamazov Brothers, which is a fascinating angle into the book, and meant I probably got a great deal more out of this than I would have done otherwise –– the discussion of whether or not a monk should leave the monastery and the critique of the catholic church are both incredibly similar, and you get more from the relationship between Alyosha and Zosima in 'Karamazov' if you see it as a continuation of/reflection on the themes set out here. I was never going to be able to entirely follow the theological debates, but I think it helped that the argument built out directly from Luther, and that at least part of the central dilemma was whether organised religion held value for someone seeking truth at all –– this steered clear of the minor details in church procedure and minute word choice debates over the bible that leave my head spinning in most 19th century religious discussions. As an atheist, the critique of the church obviously seems to hold water to me –– but I doubt 'a theological argument that an atheist would like' is what a Christian writer would consider glowing praise. I'll have to come back to George Sand in more detail at a later point, but for now I'll be recommending this as a cool piece of gothic lit off the beaten track to anyone I know who's into that